Lacking the simple military and class power to enforce such radical demands, the Levellers, and their even more radical cousins the Diggers – among whom the famous anarchist theorist Gerrard Winstanley – nonetheless made up for their lack of power with great rhetorical skill and agitational zeal. While the Diggers fought hard to undo the fait accompli of the first round of the enclosure movement by changing the ‘facts on the ground’, the Levellers agitated for a democratic system with all power vested in a House of Commons based upon universal suffrage. It was none other than Rainsborough who expressed this democratic viewpoint in one of the more famous radical speeches of English history:

For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under…

Against this was arrayed the power of the Parliamentarist gentry, those who had a quarrel with the absolutism of the Monarch and the threat of Catholicism, but did not seek a more thoroughgoing democratic reform. For them, such as the revolutionary leaders Cromwell and Ireton, the vote could not be but based on property in land, based on the old aristocratic argument of the ‘permanent fixed interest’ represented in that landownership. When the King fled and arrayed forces against the New Model Army, the exigencies of the Civil War put an end to the period of democratic demand – it would not be the last time that the effect of the war waged by the counterrevolution would be a militarization of the revolutionary forces that would, in time, ever more constrain the space for the revolutionary process itself and repress many of the original aims of the revolt. Nonetheless, Leveller demands remained strong among the yeomen farmers and common people that made up much of the New Model Army, such that Cromwell had to repress several mutinies against his and his colleague Fairfax’s command. Characteristic here was the fight between the Agitators, the radical soldiery, and the Grandees, the higher officers drawn from the gentry classes. The radical Leveller, John Lilburne, represented (if you will) the far left wing of the organized revolutionaries, with Rainsborough being ‘moderate among the radicals’.

The English Civil War, and its ideological expression in the Putney Debates, have often played a significant role in radical history-writing. In much Marxist scholarship on the topic – of which there is a considerable amount – the English Civil War up to the period of the Glorious Revolution is often seen as the first example of the classic ‘bourgeois revolution’, or sometimes the second after the Dutch revolt against the Spanish monarchy. The emphasis within this interpretation has often been on the radicalism of the Levellers, inspired by the religious or even millenarian traditions of the Reformation and its Christian egalitarianism. Of course, this being the 17th century, such a radical movement necessarily would have been inchoate and unable to formulate any clear break through existing social relations, fixed as these still were within the bounds of aristocratic rule, mercantilism, and enclosing agriculture. The necessary outcome of such a process could only be the leadership and ultimate victory on the side of the emerging coalition of improving gentry, larger farmers, and city merchants, ultimately accepting the compromise of a monarchical restoration yet on the basis of a much reduced power for the old nobility and crown.

Yet, the Levellers also took much inspiration from other traditions, such as the influence of classical Republicanism and the equality of the virtuous citizens ancient Rome was seen to exemplify, no doubt appealing to the yeomen, small merchants, and other ‘free men’ of (small) independent means that formed the basis of the Leveller movement. The fully dependent classes, such as labourers, domestic servants, agricultural labour and so forth could not be included in such a vision, as they could not be in the classical world.(2) We must therefore not overstate the radicalism of the Leveller cause – too often the importance of establishing a revolutionary tradition, and with it the legitimacy of revolution as a popular movement for political and social change in the 20th century, has led Marxists to overenthusiastically enlist various movements into a proto-socialist cause that they could not have identified with. That is not to deny the reality of such a revolutionary tradition – indeed, virtually any country will have its share of radicals who at times moved beyond the confines of the ‘normal’ and saw a vision of a more radically free and democratic future than the economic and political relations of their time permitted.

The point of this is to establish, in Mao’s words, that “it’s right to rebel”. But the dangers of presentism are real, beyond mere historiographical ones: there is a considerable history of attempts to enlist English or French revolutionary traditions into a social-democratic chauvinism, and equally Trotskyist historiography has tended to criticize such appropriations as contributing to ‘Popular Frontism’, i.e. deprioritizing the interests of working people in favor of a radicalism that appeals to many middle class radicals as well. Whatever the merits of this last critique – which seems to me rather a stereotype of the actual Popular Fronts – it is worth being cautious. Yet, the relatively strong focus on the English Civil War period among radical historians of the past century or so is not a mere hobby of English crypto-patriots. Indeed, Christopher Hill already noted as early as the 1930s the strong interest among Soviet historians in the ‘English Interregnum’ as a struggle of nascent bourgeoisie, small masters and small peasants against large landowners and the Church.

The religious questions of the day, much emphasized against the Marxist interpretations by the liberal and conservative historians, were given great emphasis by the Soviet interpreters as well: the split between Presbyterians and Independents appears as a split between the old, mercantilist, commercial capital – with its monopolies and organized guild privileges – and the new capital operating outside the traditional economic and cultural confines of the post-feudal order.(3) The case of the English Civil War certainly establishes, therefore, the rich possibilities offered by Marxist interpretation of dealing with religious questions as well; although here too we should be cautious of simplistic ‘representational’ schemes. But on the whole, such a model, while itself perhaps more an ideal type than unvarnished truth, is the archetype of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ and the enduring relevance of this concept for understanding our present world has been well re-established by Neil Davidson.

What then is the enduring significance of Thomas Rainsborough and the Levellers? It is perhaps this, as one reviewer summarized the radical history of the period provided by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redeker: “The resistance of those whom the earliest capitalists would tolerate only as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”… On the eve of the English revolution of 1640, the Herculean victories [sic] of expropriation and exploitation of the commoners and the masterless (defined globally to include the slave trade and the New World colonies) were neither inevitable nor fully secured.” Indeed, one significant link that connects the Leveller struggle in the person of Rainsborough himself with the larger struggles of exploited people is the question of the slave trade and colonization: Rainsborough was an early and ardent opponent of slavery.(4) As so many radical movements before their time, they made a revolution only to be defeated by it, but that does not mean their example should be forgotten. It is not just a question of memory and morale: history is not a book whose twists and turns of plot and overarching narrative are known in advance. Rather, it is in and through such moments of revolt that the boundaries of what the structure of our world can contain become known.

1) http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/leveller-thomas-rainsborough-plaque.html
2) Samuel Dennis Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular versus Élitist Republicanism”. Past & Present 164 (1999), p. 47-80.
3) Christopher Hill, “Soviet Interpretations of the English Interregnum”. The Economic History Review 8:2 (May 1938), p. 159-167.
4) “Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Review by: Kathleen J. Higgins”. The American Historical Review 107:5 (Dec 2002), p. 1529.

For this reason, it is interesting to see something quite rare: a work of literary criticism, explicitly with an economic mode of interpretation, written from the political-economic right. It is rare enough to have economists who read anything, as is easily revealed by the profound lack of humane imagination that prevails in the charmed circles of neoclassical economics disputes (as for example Philip Mirowski has observed). It may be for this reason that such a book has been written by a series of economically informed literary critics: all but one of the contributors to Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty, are professors of English lit. It also seems suitable that they are not, in fact, writing from a neoclassical point of view, but explicitly with the purpose of promoting the Austrian School of economics in and through their analysis of literature. This school distinguishes itself in several respects from neoclassical economics, and is properly considered heterodox: mainly because, while it is even much more strongly free trade in orientation, its epistemology and methods are vastly different. It rejects modelling, econometrics, and quantification as the guiding principles of economic theory, and rejects equilibrium ideas, preferring instead to understand markets as inherent results of human activity, naturally created heuristics for the discovery of information under conditions of uncertainty. It sustains such an approach through some strong axiomatic notions of human nature, and much of the Austrian School literature is a working out of the philosophical consequences of this view of human nature: the Smithian person – with the natural tendency to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’ – writ large. All the accoutrements of modern capitalism are merely the result of letting this natural habitus of humanity do its thing, and therefore the more free the markets, the more free the people.

It should not come as a surprise to the reader that my views are quite diametrically opposite to these, and if any doubt remained, this review should help dispel them. That said, this book is an intriguing approach to the discussion of economic theory. There is no question about it that that is its purpose: literary criticism is important, but it is clearly presented as a means to an end. The main target of the criticism, as often with Austrian School thinkers, is Marxism, which in some respects is that school’s mirror image and its perpetual object of hostility. The introduction by Paul Cantor, who holds the chair in English Literature at the University of Virginia, is from the get go addressed at the perceived dominance – far past its prime, of course – of Marxism in academe. The suggestion is that while the economics and literature approach rightly puts economic ideas central, it, and by implication cultural studies generally, could be much improved if everyone jettisoned the old baggage of Marxism and adopted the favored principles of Austrian economics instead. As Cantor and Cox write: “His materialistic, deterministic, and mechanistic view of reality stamps him as very much a man of the mid-nineteenth century. A great deal has been discovered in the sciences since Marx’s day, including the science of economics…”(1) This science, we are to understand, is that of the Austrian School, not that of any of its rivals. We should choose the latter over the others because of its emphasis on spontaneous order by the interaction of chaotic micro-elements, something fitting the modern age of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. “Austrian economics, with its emphasis on chance, uncertainty, and unpredictability in human life, is far more in tune than Marxism with these trends in modern science.”(2)

In fact, something can be said for this. It is true that what has often been lacking in the apparatus of Marxist economic thought is a substantive understanding of systems theory, in particular organizational theory and the generation of various ordered systems through the random or arbitrary interaction of different elements, allowing for various possible equilibria. Neoclassical economics has much made use of this, through (evolutionary) game theory and developments in microeconomics, and it has formed a major theoretical bulwark for the development during the Cold War of what became known as the ‘military-industrial complex’ underpinning the postwar liberal order, as Adam Curtis has argued in his documentary reconstruction.(3) However, it remains to be seen whether these ideas, or concepts of evolutionary economics, will prove incompatible with Marxist ideas altogether, and to the degree that the latter must be abandoned. The epistemological notion of spontaneous order may not play the role Austrian economists think it does. It is all the more a shame therefore that in their engagement with Marxism on this basis, the Austrian-inspired thinkers make such a hash of their representation of Marxist ideas and approaches themselves. Instead of informing themselves about their opponent, they consistently prefer to knock down straw men, and their criticisms are therefore often quite beside the mark. That the discourse is laden with references to ‘freedom’, the ‘individual’, and the supposedly humane nature of Austrian thought serves no more than a decorative purpose, a way to keep up the morale of the fans. In this way, an opportunity for fruitful engagement on the relatively neutral terrain of literature was missed.

Austrian economics seems to rest mainly on strong assumptions. Not just about human nature, and what this may imply – in which it indeed differs strongly from Marxism – but also about its opponents’ views. In his introduction, Cantor and Cox outline what they perceive the prevailing Marxist approach to literary criticism to be: “Marxist critics often practice what is known as the hermeneutics of suspicion—that is, they question the motives of authors and seek to explain why some would ever choose to support capitalism.” Against this, this collection is supposed to offer the opposite viewpoint, that is to analyze whether particular authors were socialists and if so, why that may be. But I venture that few Marxist literary critics would recognize themselves in this description in the first place, making the contrary enterprise appear spiteful. Another major target of the Austrians is to depict Marxism as ‘reductive’ and ‘collectivist’, making economic analysis about the operation of macro-level forces on the interests of individuals. In contrast to this, Austrian economics supposedly offers a more contingent and humane vision of individual freedom. No doubt this has a strong romantic appeal. But if this boils down to the statement that “our analyses are based on detailed, careful readings of individual texts treated in their integrity—in sharp contrast to the Marxist tendency to disregard authorial intention and, in the style of Fredric Jameson, to seek to ferret out the “political unconscious” in literary works”, Jameson as well as other literary critics of a Marxist bent (such as, say, Raymond Williams or Aijaz Ahmad) may rightly protest that this depiction of their views will make the present collection stand out a little bit too easily couleur de rose. The authors would have done better to actually read some Marxist literary criticism, beginning with Marx himself, in order to understand what it is they want to argue against, and to do so with the same care and as “worthy of being taken seriously and treated with respect” as they claim is appropriate for the literary authors themselves.(4)

Paul Cantor’s first chapter continues in this vein. Here, the general notion of Marxism seems to be derived from the most skeptical works in the early Frankfurt School, as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s wariness of ‘the mass’ in the wake of fascism. Counter to this, he suggests taking the wishes and demands of consumers seriously, and opposes the Frankfurter picture of a mass culture artificially imposed as a vehicle for false consciousness, preferring to see cultural production as responding to legitimate market demands. Hayek already remarked that one cannot meaningfully distinguish ‘real’ from artificial tastes, and the implication is that attempting to do so in the name of Marxist theory risks being condescending and misunderstanding the popular culture itself. This criticism, again, has some genuine merit, and I share its wariness of the elitism that is the consequence of especially Adorno’s distancing from mass activity and interests (Marcuse, for all his faults, at least did not report the 1968 student movement to the police.)

But again, the sneering tone and the triumphal assaults on straw opponents Cantor indulges in weaken my ability to take this seriously as an Austrian critique. Marxism is accused of “crudeness”, of having “lost prestige” everywhere, of having “done damage to our understanding of literature.” Yet what is this based on? A number of total misreadings of Marxist economic theory, just as the rest of the collection tends to misread Marxist cultural criticism. This is surely a serious flaw in a work of literary scholarship. Cantor, for example, offers the following argument: “It is one of the many ironies of literary criticism today that postmodernists, who deny all objectivity, have linked up with Marxism, a form of economics rooted in the labor theory of value, which seeks to determine value on the basis of an objective factor. The fact that Austrian economics clearly acknowledges that all economic value is purely subjective is one reason why it should be more attractive to literary critics than Marxism as an economic theory.”(5) One does not have to know very much about Marxist economic ideas to see the spuriousness of this line of reasoning. The use of ‘value’ in the sense of value theory in classical economics is by no means wholly the same as its colloquial meaning (or else no notion of labor value could possibly be entertained); conflating the two to argue that Austrian economics, supposedly having a ‘subjective theory of value’, is more amenable to (postmodern) literary criticism because postmodernism prefers subjectivity is surely a triple equivocation of terms! Similarly, we are invited to prefer Austrian approaches because Michel Foucault, at the end of his life, recommended his students at the Collège de France to read Hayek and Von Mises as examples of the ‘will not to be governed’. This is surely an odd kind of argument. One cannot escape the impression that many of the attacks on Marxism, and the elevated language of ‘freedom’ and ‘individualism’ used throughout the book, are designed to emotionally appeal to academics to gain their approval the Austrian thinkers desperately crave more than it is to seriously argue against Marxist conceptions.

The first chapter also contains the only serious attempt at explaining the prevalence of Marxist approaches in cultural studies, surely important if it is so evidently wrong. “[The] materialist approach to culture is the distinctive Marxist contribution to the understanding of human history”, Cantor tells us. “Contemporary literary critics carry on the Marxist polemic against the “great man” theory of history, the supposed bourgeois propensity to overrate the importance of individuals in historical developments.”(6) In practice, this means that “In classic Marxist literary criticism, authors operating in a market system are routinely portrayed as captives of capitalist ideology.”(7) One may doubt whether there is much truth to this last statement – it certainly does once again little justice to the nuanced, detailed, and closely read interpretations of literature and its authors offered by figures such as Terry Eagleton, who himself defines the Marxist approach as “to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history”.(8) This, of course, must be rejected. Marxism, we are told by our editor, “involves a fundamental category error—it tries to understand economic and social phenomena on the model of events in the physical world, that is to say, human events on the model of non-human events.” Moreover, “Marxism compounds the error by trying to understand cultural phenomena in terms of economic, and thus it becomes doubly reductionist in its treatment of art. In short, in the longstanding conflict between the natural sciences and the humanities, Marxism leans toward the former…”(9)

If this seems a strangely philosophical, perhaps even ethical critique, this is less odd than it may seem – this is precisely the mode of criticism most favored by Austrian thinkers. “As a form of historical determinism, Marxism undercuts the idea that the artist is free as a creator… [it] works to efface the distinction between the great author and the ordinary run of humanity.” And this, of course, the Austrian school cannot countenance. The cardinal assumptions of this school rest in its view of human nature and its unflinching commitment to methodological individualism, to the point of absurdity. Indeed, it emphasizes the axiom of ‘consumer sovereignty’, by which is meant taking the individual with her preferences, values, views, and actions as something of an uncaused cause: any attempt to inquire as to what forces determine or shape human values and preferences is explicitly forbidden. Only on this basis can the ethical-philosophical critique of Marxism as ‘collectivist’ (because concerned with macro-level phenomena) and ‘reductive’ be sustained. Reduction to classes is bad; reduction to individuals good. Promoting the historical is bad; promoting individual genius, independent or contingent with respect to time, is good.

The unstated assumption throughout all Austrian critiques of Marxism, including in this book, is then that Marxism is really just a stalking horse for the denial of the ethical significance of the individual versus the state, and of the value of freedom. Literature seems a clear terrain to illustrate the significance of both these phenomena, so Cantor et al. cannot be blamed for exploring it (indeed, it is testament to the narrow economic theory emphasis of most Austrian thinkers that it has not much been done before). But neither assumption is true, and therefore such critiques fall flat. Marxism is, in fact, not dedicated to the proposition that the state is more ethically important or superior to the individual, nor is Marxist economics a study in the achievement of total state control – as the final contributor, LSE political theorist Chandran Kukathas, better recognizes. Marxism is also before everything else a philosophy of freedom, seeking the direct social control over the total productive forces of society in a cooperative manner as the fulfilment of freedom: in other words, freedom as self-determination. This is not so far from the Austrian idea of the individual as the basis of freedom, except it is not oriented towards the private, but the fully social determination of freedom. This is the basis of its critique of private property in means of production, not the notion of “equality of wealth” as the ultimate socialist principle, as Cantor suggests in his essay on Shelley.(10)

These misconceptions pervade the discussion of the literature itself as well, which I will consider somewhat more briefly. A typical case is Dario Fernández-Morera’s discussion of Cervantes, whom he argues, supposedly against the grain, was a defender of free trade and ‘free markets’ against feudal and mercantilist impositions. This is possible, he reminds us: the Salamanca School of Spanish economic thinkers – considerably predating even the Physiocrats, let alone the classical economists like Smith – already established canonical arguments for free trade in commodities, abolition of high imposts and restrictive licenses, and so forth. Moreover, Cervantes’ own active involvement in state activities (as a tax collector, for example) and his military adventures that saw him enslaved by North Africans for several years may have given him a strong sense of liberty, which for the Austrians naturally tends towards the market.

This is explicitly presented as a literary reading contrasting with the Marxist: Fernández-Morera “[wants] to examine Cervantes not so much as a capitalist avant la lettre but as a writer whose works present situations, statements, and ideas that illuminate sympathetically important aspects of the market economy, while providing material for a critique of collectivism, statism, and redistributionism.” Not a word is breathed of the fact that Marx himself considered Cervantes one of his favorite writers; that he read him in the original Spanish; and that in Marx’s own literary interpretation, he explicitly considered Don Quixote to be a satire on feudalism and mercantilism on the part of the newly rising bourgeoisie, showing the foolishness and outdatedness of the old feudal holdovers and mentality.(11) Indeed, this fact was used profitably by Graham Greene in his contrasting of Catholic and Communist ideas and values in Monsignor Quixote, proving Greene a more astute reader of Catholic literature than Fernández-Morera.

Paul Cantor’s essay on Shelley is more interesting. Here, Cantor makes a plausible and intriguing reading of Shelley, whose radicalism of political and economic views was notorious in his own day and whose reputation as a left-wing figure has persisted since. Cantor suggests that rather than being a forerunner of socialism, as is often suggested, Shelley’s overriding concern was actually with combating the mercantilist economic structure of absolutism. In particular, his works after the early Queen Mab (which Cantor admits as more socialistic) are aimed at the aggrandizement of the public debt caused by the warmongering of the ruling class, and its consequences in the middle class support for aristocratic rule – in exchange for interest – and the heavy taxation of the ‘productive’ population. Cantor ascribes this to the influence of William Cobbett; in particular his obsession with the gold standard as a friend of working people rather than its later perception as an imposition by a ruling class, as with W.J. Bryan’s ‘cross of gold’. The Austrian viewpoint is also in favor of metallic currencies, generally, as this prevents government power over banking, which they see as an illegitimate monopoly. For this reason, Cantor’s case would make Shelley appear more favorable to the Austrian viewpoint rather than the socialist.

But here again, a misreading of the Marxist idea of socialism mars the analysis. Far from being a question of opposing pure equality to capitalism, as Cantor seems to suggest, Marxists would readily recognize in figures such as Shelley the type of the ‘bourgeois radical’, aimed at the furthest extension of liberal principles against the ancien régime, wherever it may be – not dissimilar to the Jacobins in the French Revolution. The latter, too, preached revolution and yet emphasized free trade. It is that tradition that Shelley works in via Cobbett, and it is no strike against Marxism. Marx was a fan of Cobbett and recommended his Rural Rides to his correspondents. It also does not establish that Shelley’s radical liberalism could not have extended in a socialist direction, given his associations and ideas of the ‘productive’. Indeed, Michael Scrivener has shown the mutual influence between Shelley and “radical artisan poetry”, the work of self-taught craftsmen whose political radicalism tended towards ideas of freedom as increase of leisure and an opposition to the coercion to labor the market generates.(12) By the end of the 19th century, this early radical liberalism – satirizing monarchism, religion, and poverty – would morph into the anarchism of Swiss watchmakers as well as the Marxist idea of the reduction of necessary labor time.

Another essay of Cantor’s considers H.G. Wells, in particular his successful novel The Invisible Man (1897). One can tell that Cantor’s abilities as a literary critic are greater than the others in this collection, in terms of style, engagement with alternative readings, and empathetic understanding of the potentialities of meaning within the book. Indeed, perhaps even more so than the Shelley article, this piece is worth reading quite aside from the question of the right economic interpretation of literature. The interpretation of Wells’ book is based on a very Marxist-like reading of the relationship between Wells’ own position and intentions and the final product of the work, examining the contradictions produced in the book as reflections of those in Wells’ own social and economic ideas. If this seems contrary to the spirit of romantic individualism promised early on, it makes the critique all the better for it, perhaps inadvertently proving the opposition right. Indeed, with reason Cantor in the introduction is said to “turn Marxist ideology critique back on itself”.(13) This essay is perhaps the most successful of the critiques, as it demonstrates serious problems with Wells’ conception of his socialism, as revealed in The Invisible Man. As Cantor describes it, the book operates at two levels: the titular invisible man is the force of capital itself, pervading everything and disturbing all social order without being accountable to anyone or even directly visible as a force, and in this form Wells depicts him as the enemy of society. But the invisible man is also the lone hero-scientist who is neglected and unrecognized, despite being smarter than all others, and whose role is to prove his superiority through some invention (invisibility) that will force the urban crowds of modern life to recognize his individuality and genius.

This Nietzschean streak, and Wells’ positive depictions of the powers of the state and police in pursuing the invisible man, give an elitist and authoritarian streak to his ‘socialism’, one that makes it at times sound more fascist than socialist. Cantor notes Wells opposed fascism, but sees in his interest in Stalin’s USSR a reflection of the same ideals. Whatever that historical judgement may be, there is something striking about Cantor’s depiction of Wells’ interest in socialism mainly as a mechanism for the elevation of the underappreciated intelligentsia over the power of money – the parallels with G.B. Shaw and similar figures are strong, as is supported by various quotes by Wells to that effect. As Cantor writes: “If, then, I seem to have given a contradictory account of The Invisible Man, the reason is that a fundamental contradiction lies at the core of Wells’s thinking. He upheld a socialist ideal of community, and yet at the same time he saw a form of heroic individualism as the only way to bring about socialism… Wells’s socialism is ultimately aesthetic and aristocratic in nature; it is rooted in his conviction that, as an artistic visionary, he is superior to the ordinary mass of humanity.”(14) As a critique of the common aesthetic defenses of socialism, often so eerily similar to the aesthetic appreciations of fascism (say, by Pound), this is good stuff, and something many socialists can in fact find agreement with. Indeed, Wells’ and Shaw’s socialism seem quite akin to the ‘feudal socialism’ or ‘true socialism’ Marx and Engels already decried as ineffective or outright reactionary in the Communist Manifesto.

The last essay I will consider is the final chapter of the book, a reading of Ben Okri’s classic The Famished Road by Chandran Kukathas. This in some sense illustrates the book. Kukathas is, of all the authors, by far the best informed about Marx’s own writings and ideas, and avoids some of the silly interpretations of Marxism that Cantor and others maintain (such as the role of freedom in Marx’s work). As a Professor of Political Theory at the LSE, one would expect this of him. Yet his reading of Okri seems weak proportional to the degree that he attempts to establish the correctness of Austrian economic thought through it. Indeed, for those who complain of Marxism as an overly reductive reading fitting literature into a socialist scheme, the readings in this book, especially of Okri, are themselves sometimes remarkably simplistic. What’s more, any notion of chaos, contingency, or individual diversity in literature is immediately enlisted in the service of the concept of ‘spontaneous order’, underpinning the free market. Markets play a major role in Okri’s book, as Kukathas rightly notes, and the general tendency of the work is to outline the chaos of the market and the chaos of the political world as related phenomena. Indeed, since the protagonist is a teenage boy, it is no surprise chaos should reign. Much of the stuff of maturity consists in coming to comprehend the structures, regularities, and expectations of life, patterns which seem radically contingent when one is a teenager.

But there is more to it than that. As the protagonist, Azaro, is a spirit child, he is granted the ability to perceive the elements of this chaos – this-worldly and otherworldly – transparently in a manner normal people cannot, and it is through this lens that the world of the market, the world of consumption, the world of labor, and the world of politics are described. For Kukathas, the defining point of the book is to illustrate that these are all separate realms, with no necessary connection, and characterized by conflict emerging from human nature – therefore no historical materialism can make sense, and no socialism can work. It is a shame therefore that this collection was published in 2009, as in 2011 David McNally in his Monsters of the Market – itself a major work of contemporary Marxist literary scholarship – provided a lengthy reading of the same work by Ben Okri. Contra Kukathas, for McNally the very ghostly essence of the market, the place where Azaro repeatedly is swept away into the otherworld by the powers of the normally Unseen, and the unfolding reality of the this-worldly through his growing awareness of his father’s exploitation by back-breaking labor both combine to form a radical reading of the power of capital as money to subvert the settled patterns of life and to operate behind the backs of individuals.

As with Wells, the otherworldly power of capital is precisely that it does not depend on individuals, but acts as a social relation between them, into which they are born and which determines their incentives, behavior, and indeed whether they live or die. As Kukathas does not seem to be aware of, such Gothic novel elements in capitalism are already identified by Marx, when he writes about the process of commodification that makes money seem to command objects: “[a] table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”(15) In Okri’s context, this power of what Marx called ‘exchange value’ and the related fetishism of commodities expresses itself supernaturally in the market: “The market is a night-space, a world of violence and danger. The daylight world of ordinary perception obscures the true nature of the forces that inhabit the market. But, for those able to see in the dark, the market emerges as what it truly is, a forest world dominated by malevolent spirits of the night.”(16)

I leave it to the reader to judge which of these rival interpretations of markets in literature best reflects the reality of these social institutions.

1) p. x.
2) p. xi.
3) Adam Curtis, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (2011).
4) p. xvi.
5) p. 9.
6) p. 13, 15-16.
7) p. 17.
8) Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London 1976), p. 2.
9) p. 17.
10) p. 250.
11) See: Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, Ch. 1, n34. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
12) Michael Scrivener, “Shelley and Radical Artisan Poetry”. Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993), p. 22-36.
13) p. xvii.
14) p. 321-322.
15) Marx, op. cit., Ch. 1, section 4.
16) David McNally, Monsters of the Market (Leiden 2011), p. 239.

- Gwendolyn Brooks, “Still Do I Keep My Looks, My Identity…” (1944)

The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

- Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B” (1951)

Introduction

In this article I want to make some critical comments about what has been called the politics of identity and of privilege. I am certainly quite sympathetic to many of the emancipatory projects that are undertaken in its name, and have taken part in a fair number of them myself. At the same time, I have some theoretical as well as personal issues with it, at least in the ways I have often encountered it. This is – one might say ironically – a purely personal experience and reflection on the subject, both in its theoretical and its personal dimensions. It’s driven by both some very bad experiences I have had with the socially corrosive and psychologically destructive effects that ‘privilegetalk’ can have, as well as some theoretical concerns with how it seems to be a somewhat undertheorized kind of language – something that sounds like a theory but is not really a theory.

I may be wrong about this, and to some extent this will no doubt remain a matter of dispute, but my strong feeling is still that the potential universality of its language is the absolute premise of any emancipatory project that goes beyond the subjective, the personal, and its limitations in time and space. It is not a hankering for science in the masculinist-positivist sense of the 19th century (although that amuses me somewhat in Jules Verne and similar books), but it is an Enlightenment desire to go beyond the personal and the particular, however justified one’s ideas are in personal experience, toward the universal and the general as the prerequisite for emancipation. (Of course, this is only one side of the Enlightenment legacy, but it’s the one I think is good.) Without this, I fear, one is forever bound to one or another form of parochialism, solipsism, or a culturally relativist paralysis, which ultimately proves to be much more harmful to real emancipatory causes of all kinds than the alternative.

The history of the impositions of universalizing narratives on others is perhaps a history of oppression, but as such critics as Aijaz Ahmad, Vivek Chibber, and others who have critically engaged with postcolonialism and poststructuralism have pointed out, the history of the ‘local’, the strong normativity of the ‘cultural’, and the essentializing of individual identities is not necessarily a better one in terms of emancipatory outcomes, and it risks giving up on the possibility of universal theory, which is a loss that the oppressed people of this world cannot afford. No social phenomena are without their contradictions; I have done my utmost here to show my recognition that the politics of identity, for me and at least as much for many others, has been something of a liberation. I have been wary of writing this precisely to avoid appearing dismissive or finding academic or ‘left’ reasons to attack something that keeps many people going through their struggles – I am well aware of the risks of ‘Marxsplaining’. I hope this will be taken in a spirit of charitable reading.

Since a lot of different things are going on at the intersection between language, personal experience, and politics, I felt compelled to begin with a rather abstract theoretical analysis of what I take the politics of identity to be and how it relates to social structures. This will probably appear rather dull and formal, but it serves an important purpose. Precisely to avoid the classic kind of academic, patriarchal dismissal of identity politics as not dealing with ‘real’ things or not being objective, it is necessary to deal at least implicitly with what is really meant by objectivity and reality in this sense. Underlying my analysis here is a pragmatist idea of truth as formed at the collective level by the social relations between people mediated through language, where the criterion of objectivity becomes its conformity with certain already-existing and collectively held rules of language, and truth is the successful use of ‘objective’ language in this sense towards an individual or collective purpose. This is grounded in the ideas of Wittgenstein on the impossibility both of ‘founding’ truth, as a form of human language, in anything outside humanity, as well as the equal impossibility of a ‘private language’, i.e. of deciding for yourself what the rules of the language game and thereby of objectivity and truth will be.

This matters for identity because identity, as I will argue, is a way of linguistically expressing experience peculiar to our time and place. The abstract argument of the first half or so of this essay therefore serves to establish that while the politics of identity are not ‘objective’ in the scientific sense, this sense is itself a higher-order form of a sense in which identity is ‘objective’, and therefore it cannot be dismissed so easily. However, identity also contains an irreducibly individual and subjective component that differs between every human being. Because this component is an essential part of it, this ultimately creates serious problems for the universalizability of identity as a locus of emancipatory politics, and it shows that it can as much be a tool of division and mutual destruction as it can be one of collective action and liberation. Both of these are possible, but since much has been written on the strengths of identity politics, in particular in the form of ‘intersectionality’, I will focus somewhat more on the negatives. Much has been written, and rightly and necessarily, about the way the ‘universalizing left’ has contributed to silencing and oppressing particular people, and the politics of identity is historically perhaps a response to that. This essay tries not to acquit them, but to show that the politics of identity and privilege as an alternative has, no less, contradictions of its own. As this essay is absurdly long, I have divided it into sections.

Subjectivity and objectivity of identity

Like all linguistic descriptions involving people (or anything with intentionality), identity in the sense of the politics of identity contains both a subjective and an objective element. The subjective element is clear enough – this concerns whether a given person themselves identify in a particular way. The objective element is objective because it is externally given, but not necessarily objective in the scientific sense described above. Rather, it is externally given because an important part of one’s identity in a given society is what that society itself considers you to be, not just what you are. There is a causal element to identity in this sense that extends beyond the subjective component: you are queer not just when you say you are, but at least as much because other people say you are. Same for being a particular gender, race, and so forth. These descriptions of others in turn are not merely the products of some pure act of will by the individuals of a given society, but are themselves the results of the positions and functions the people so described have in the given society.

This produces the sensation of reality to identity that it does not have in a scientific sense: the sense that ‘everyone knows’ someone is black when they ‘are’ a particular way, or that someone is gay, or a woman, and so forth. This is strongly persistent despite the familiarity of the idea that that these are provably historical and cultural products, subject to considerable contingencies and changes over time (even within fairly short periods of time, in fact), and thereby in no way universalizable in the sense required for the larger sense of objectivity.

Before I can say more about this, it may be necessary to unpack this larger sense of objectivity first, so as to forestall ideas about what I mean by ‘objectivity’. Of course, fundamentally even scientific description is a use of language for a purpose, and thereby subject to the same social construction of reality as identity is – one cannot escape in any way whatever from a language game, and there is no possibility of a private language or an ‘outside’ language, as Wittgenstein demonstrated. But there is a substantial difference nonetheless, which impinges on our understanding of identity as a socially subjective and objective, but nonscientific, category. Within scientific descriptions, there is the criterion of universalizability, as mentioned: the idea that the rules of evidence are in principle accessible to all and their application in a given case could be shown to follow from them in any society and by any person. This is more a striving than a reality in many cases, as the fraught history of anthropology for example reminds us, but it is nonetheless a very important legacy of Enlightenment thought that operates within the language of science, and that constitutes science (within or without academia) as a community of language.

The other criterion is the practical criterion, which is another major distinction, and one relevant in this case as well. This is what I tend to think of as the bridge argument: as the Dutch novelist and polemicist W.F. Hermans used to say, “either the bridge stands, or the bridge falls down. There can be no social construction of this.” He used this as an argument against the claims of the social sciences, but I understand this differently. For me, this is the necessary corollary of the kind of pragmatist ideas of epistemology I have alluded to above. While we need not be concerned with the ‘truth’ of our descriptions outside human language communities – and can thereby do away with a tremendous amount of useless bickering about how realism ‘works’ – the real test of a particular theory must come in the practical application of this for human purposes, in the achieving of human aims. In some cases this is as simple as the bridge test: whether or not it is ‘true’, for human purposes we want to be able to cross the bridge, and if one idea about physics and engineering permits it to stand, whereas with another it falls, we are going to consider the former ‘true’ and the latter not.

However, for most theories it is not as simple as that – as philosophy of science has extensively shown, it is generally not possible even within natural sciences to prove or disprove a theory on the basis of any given single experiment, and there are complex interrelations between data and theory in any given research program or theoretical conception that require longer term interactions to sift the ‘true’ from the ‘false’ in this sense. In the realm of social science and politics this is even more so, since they inherently allow little to no room for experimentation and isolation, the main weapons of the natural scientist. For this reason, the power of abstraction must replace both, and this brings with it an even greater degree of remoteness of theory from the actual cases that would test it, a greater degree of generality and nonspecificity. In order to overcome this problem, one requires a corresponding practical criterion. Ultimately, these social and political theories must prove themselves in the practice of their application for human ends, but on the basis of universality. As Marx stated in the Theses on Feuerbach: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”

This, then, is the sense in which I use ‘objective’ to refer to abstractions of and about the social realm. Of course, whether a given practice disproves such a conception or not is a hotly debated question, and is one that is often not resolved, leading to the various schools of thought one finds in any social science. But they share within a given discipline an agreed upon set of rules of evidence and a common understanding of the boundaries of application of these, a kind of ‘overlapping consensus’ (to take a term from Rawls out of context) about the universalizable principles underlying given classifications, even if there is little agreement on which case should be classified as what. This sense of objectivity is not true for the more immediately social applications of language, even as abstract descriptions, such as identity is. To recap, the social construction of identity is such that it retains the subjective and objective elements described above, but this objectivity is not one of the universalism of language, but an objectivity of social causality. What I mean by this is that the practical criterion for its application operates at a level more immediate than that of the social sciences: it is given immediately by the political, social, and economic constellation of a given society and its most immediate ideological representation of these, rather than mediated by the language community of scientific universality, which abstracts from the immediate experience of place and time.

Identity and social relations

All of this no doubt sounds tremendously abstract, and does not seem to help us any further. I think the abstraction can’t wholly be helped; it is not because this topic is not important in people’s lived experience, but rather on the contrary, precisely because it affects our language so directly. This means a rather ‘meta’ approach is inevitable for reflecting on it. But here I can become (slightly) more concrete in analyzing the nature of the subjective and the objective in identity, if (as I argue) they are not constructs of a scientific descriptive nature. The two elements, subjective and objective, are mutually interrelated and mutually constituting (dialectical, if you like that term). One identifies in a particular way because one feels a particular way of processing the stuff of personal life experience in social interaction, as well as within the mind itself, is a better way than others. This way of recapitulating experience in a manner that achieves self-understanding and the ability to translate experience into a practical, ‘this-sided’ relationship with the given world in the time and place you are in is what forms the sense of a coherent, more or less singular personality.

Identity is a peculiar aspect of this personality, a particular moment (in the philosophical sense), or element, of this personality that is brought to the fore by the interaction between this element and the outside world. But what brings this particular element to the fore? This is the objective part of identity, the constituting of identity of the individual by the society they are a part of. One’s experiences are themselves a function of the position one has in the given society, determined by the economic, social, political, and representational processes present in that society. More simply put: the notion of race becomes part of one’s experience because one is born into a society that is already divided into races in each of these dimensions of social relations. It is in this sense that being white is constituted by experience. The position you enter into that society is such that your experiences are ‘white’ experiences. The interaction between whiteness and the economic, social, political etc. dimensions of practical life reproduces this whiteness on an ongoing basis as a socially objective and causal category.

I say causal, because it is clear that this is not purely a question of an act of will. The subjective element of identification is a personal recapitulation of the experiences of life, and in this sense personal and undetermined as all intentionality is. But it is not wholly arbitrary for those identities that I have called ‘salient’, and this distinguishes them, I would provisionally argue, from the identities that are. For the salient identities, there is a strong causal element: not only are they already given in that society as identity categories (race, gender, etc), but they significantly causally affect, if you will co-determine, your reproduction as an individual within that society. This can be very fundamentally the case. For example in cases of racial segregation or discrimination, whole swathes of the realms of social relations (spatially and socially) exclude you because you are understood to be of a particular racial identity. This in turn directly affects what economic positions you will have, whom you will meet and therefore have relationships with, what your social network is including your backup in case something disastrous happens in your life, and even such immediate aspects of social reproduction of the self as education and healthcare, whether you live or whether you die.

For this reason, the salient identities are ones where the subjective element is not clearly the dominant one. As the rather doubtful experiences of Tim Wise can illustrate, you cannot just opt out of being white because you don’t want to be white any more, nor do societies tend to permit the subjective identification of people of a racial identity low on the racial ladder to identify ‘upwards’. Obama is a prime example of this: someone who would, if whiteness and blackness were scientifically objective categories, be as much white as he is black will in the US always be considered black. On the other hand, one can conceive of various identities which have the same linguistic structure as the salient ones (“as a X, I am/do/want…”), but that are not, or very little, causally reproduced by the social relations of the given society. One could identify as a ‘gamer’, or as a ‘nerd’, or as a ‘wine buff’, or a ‘outdoorsman’ or what have you, never mind being a ‘belieber’ or a ‘secret reincarnation of an Egyptian princess’; but if one subjectively redescribed one’s inward and outward experiences into other terms, this would not much change your position in society, and it is not reinforced causally by pre-existing mental representations that order the economic, social, and political dimensions of that society.

What I mean then is to suggest that there is a universal level at which in every society, at least since the rise of class society if not even before, collective agents have had a particular place in the reproduction of that society in the most material and concrete terms. These collective agents then generate ideological, social, and political forces that either reinforce or weaken their position in the division of labor, and whose agency in this way shapes the experiences of people born into that society. These experiences are strongly or weakly determined by that position, but in any case always suffice to make it clear to someone where in that division of labor they belong. In the post-1968 West, this has taken on the peculiar form of ‘identity’, around which an explicitly political language has arisen that talks about the effects of experience in this way on the formation of identity, and which replaces the analysis of society as a collective totality with the language of the various identities of individuals in their experiences and struggles within this totality. This I call the politics of identity. This politics of identity is then in its usual formulations opposed to the language of larger ‘objectivity’ in the sense of universalization that characterizes the social sciences when talking about the same subject – and yet, this political language describes ‘real’ phenomena in the sense that they are causally structured by the actions and reproduction of those same collective agents.

The politics of identity and privilege

The so-called politics of identity, and its corollary in the politics of privilege, relates as I understand them precisely to this interaction between the objective element in identity formation for salient identities and the problematic of the proliferation of (any) identities in the subjective sphere. Privilege, in this interpretation, is a way of talking about the socially causal forces that operate to form the salient identities. Here, one has privilege if the objective element of one’s identity is caused by one’s incorporation (often from birth) into a position at the top of this particular dimension of social life, whereas one is not privileged, or oppressed, if the same causal forces have experientially put one in the bottom of that dimension. (I may be mixing metaphors here.) At the same time, there are many subjective identities that may not be salient, and in those cases questions of privilege do not apply so much.

In this sense, privilege and identity theory are not really ‘theories’ in a social science sense, and this is somewhat of a misnomer: they are more attempts to generalize the experience of how the subjective element of salient identities is formed by the objective element, and this also makes them so often highly personal and deeply felt, even when applied to people other than oneself, in a way that is not true of (say) the ideas of Durkheim, Weber, or Marx. They concern the subjective and objective elements of identity, but not objectivity in the scientific sense as described above, and it would be mistaken either to praise or critique them as theories in this domain.

The politics of identity and privilege are further often confusedly interpreted because they become, by being linguistic (re)descriptions of others, part of the same representational part of social causality. In other words, by talking about other people having an identity or not, and thereby having particular privilege or not, and all the political and normative claims that come with these, one takes part in a process of normative descriptions of others and the correct behavior and position in social relations that comes with this. This can have powerful effects – precisely because the very construction of the identities that the politics of identity is about has itself come about in this way. Not to say that this resides merely in language: as mentioned, the salience of such identities is generated in practice through social and material relations that are collectively constituted.

Language is the vehicle through which the idea of identity can be expressed, so that even if powerful economic and social forces cause a particular set of experiences, it is only through language of identity and representation that these are collated into a particular self-description, and in turn a (re)description of others. Therefore, the power of such normativity is not to be underestimated, because it is essentially telling other people what their experiences amount to in social practice, for them as well as for everyone. Now often the impetus of doing so in the politics of identity and privilege is explicitly against the prevailing language of representation and the forces of social and material power that operate through them: going against the idea of the self-evident role of white men as spokesmen and theorists, or that being disabled means that it is natural one cannot access whole spatial parts of society, or that an ‘objectively’ given gender is a doom from birth that must be accepted for the stability of society, and so forth. Here, the language of redescription is used to powerful effect against the prevailing ways in which experience has already been translated or formulated linguistically, and for the better.

But however sympathetic to such an undertaking I am, I nonetheless think there is room for some critical remarks. The first is that redescriptions of others are often a painful and humiliating process. This is true for the way in which the salient identities mediate the experiences of those that have them (and then I am talking about those whose salient identities are of the oppressed ranks, so to speak), and equally true for when those are in turn extended and applied to others. A clash can easily occur between the way one subjectively translates experience into identity, including all its political implications, and how others describe one. For both the one and all the others, it will be an intensely personal question: each has the whole ensemble of mental and social experience to back up their ideas about identity and what it means, and the result is often enough that arguments about identity and privilege become extremely hostile, personal, and painful for all involved.

Sometimes, this argument is countered with the observation that the humiliation that may be experienced by someone in the privileged ranks of the salient identity in question is not really significant, as it is merely a reflection of the humiliation felt by those in the oppressed ranks of that identity. In a certain sense this is precisely true, because the linguistic process of redescribing the experiences of others that imposed this oppressed identity upon them, and the linguistic process of redescribing the experiences of the person with the privileged identity (often in constructing them as privileged, or as naturalizing their social position) are indeed identical. However, the proliferation of ways in which experiences can be translated into identity, and the very political nature of the struggle of what counts as a salient identity and what does not, and the dependence of these interpretations themselves on particular wider social scientific ideas (the larger objectivity) of how society works and how representations are made true or false in them, creates an almost infinite regress of argument. It becomes profoundly circular as well as being profoundly personal. The risk is here of a vicious cycle of offense and hurt.

A more concrete way of talking about this is by observing that almost anyone can be both privileged and oppressed along some kinds of identities, and that therefore the painful process of redescription can be extended by anyone on anyone virtually ad infinitum. This can lead to struggle session type situations in which all participants, over time, are able and justified, through the language of identity, to destroy each other’s interpretations of their personal experience. They can proceed by dismissing these as the experiences constituting the privileged identity rather than the oppressed one, and ignoring the pain caused by this dismissal on those grounds. The net result tends to be that very little is achieved except a tremendous degree of personal hurt and confusion. (I will provide an anonymized example of this below.)

Is identity the best locus for political action?

It is a cliché to say that no two people are ever the same, but this speaks a powerful truth about the difficulty of using identity as the springboard for political action. There are very many cases one could mention where arguments in the nature of identity and privilege inadvertently redescribe others in ways that do not match their personal experience, and which they subjectively reject despite a presumed commonality of identity. A very clear example of this is the debate about Rachel Rostad’s slam poetry against the depictions of Asian women in Harry Potter, which in turn led to equally personal rejections of it by other Asian women whose life experiences translated into their same salient identity in a different way. Obviously I don’t want to comment on the merits or demerits of Rostad’s point, but just to note that such cases happen; probably a great number of times.

In a certain sense, I feel language inherently inclines towards the universalizing over time, if the technological and social conditions allow it, as surely they do now more than ever before. (Perhaps there is an analogy here with the idea of ‘information wants to be free’.) For some, for this reason, literature and writing have been expressions of freedom, precisely a freedom from having an identity and the struggle based upon it. The poet Reginald Shepherd has described this in his essay “Against Identity Poetics”:

“The identity card school of poetry is very popular in our current era, when rhetorical fantasies of democracy and equality in cultural life have become tin-pot substitutes for the real things in social, political and economic life. But literature is one of the few areas of life in which I do not feel oppressed, in which I have experienced true freedom. In the literary realm one is not bound by social constructions of identity, or required to flash one’s assigned identity card: one can be anyone, everyone, or no one at all. This is one of literature’s most precious qualities, the access it allows us to otherness (including otherness to ourselves)…”

(1)

Identity politics – I suspect inherently – risks committing two political errors at once: both being too individualistic, by taking the individual’s life experience as the locus of politics, and being too generalising, by moving directly from such personal experiences as translated into identity to the assumption that such identity for everyone will have the same political implications. As if it were not the case that so many queer people, and so many women, and so many black people, and so many trans people, and so forth disagree on any imaginable number of topics, political and scientific included. One can do great hurt by using redescriptions of identity to mobilize politically, and immediately dismissing all objections as arising from the experiences of those in the privileged rank of a particular identity dimension, without realizing what this can do both to the very many people who will be non-privileged along some dimension or another as well as to the very possibility of an emancipatory politics that is more than personal.

The drive for universality can here actually serve the emancipatory cause of identity, as the narratives of identity are so often based in the recognition of their counterparts: one is queer because most are straight, one is identified as a woman in relation to the power of men, and so forth. It seems then that this is a case not unlike Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic, which can only be overcome by the abolition of both positions. As Robert Brandom puts it: “Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of the Master and Slave is an attempt to show that asymmetric recognitive (sic) relations are metaphysically defective, that the norms they institute aren’t the right kind to help us think and act with–to make it possible for us to think and act.” Put less abstractly: the achievement even of the fullest, most equal recognition on the basis of the potentially infinite variety of identities would still not transcend the same oppressive social forces that constitute these identities in the first place. This is not to dismiss the possibility and necessity of reforms. It is rather to recognize, as in so many other spheres, that the conceptual basis for reform is often the same thing that makes the reforms necessary in the first place, creating a struggle that can never be won.

This relates to another major risk: which is that in making the political nature of the personal the source of political critique, one takes away the potential of the larger objectivity, that is of universalizing language, to form the basis of such a critique. The nature of much activism in Western societies since the 1960s or so has been that of ad hoc coalitions of ever increasing groups mobilizing on the basis of such identities, and making their political critiques on the basis of this shared experience. Again, this is not a bad thing given the way socially causal forces make that identity ‘true’. Nonetheless, it seems a phenomenon that is both local and fairly recent, from a historical perspective, and especially strong in the highly individualized societies of the wealthy West, and that should at least give us pause with regards to the political power and applicability of such ideas across the board. It may be, as my inclination is to think, that the politics of identity and privilege can do its work as part of a larger political narrative, but cannot overcome its contradictions its own.

The historical story of how many of the first generation of identity-based political activists in the 1960s and 1970s were easily co-opted by the individuating drive of neoliberalism is another reason for at least strategic caution. Under capitalism, expressions of individuality and identity can very easily be accommodated through the mechanisms of market competition and choice; something well understood by the critics of those who seek to overcome its effects by buying fair trade and so forth. The risk is that the result of an intersectional understanding of privilege is precisely a permanent competition between identities about their relative significance, which is likely to come at great personal emotional and psychological cost while being relatively little effective in the wider sphere of politics. Not to say that nothing has or can be achieved by an identity-based approach, far from it; but again, the preponderance of the evidence seems to indicate it is not enough on its own, and that its costs are quite high ought to be recognized.

Already, George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have written a work called Identity Economics incorporating identity quite tidily into the neoclassical microeconomic analysis of personal choices to maximize utility. Indeed, identity, not unlike the notion of ‘institutions’, can end up supplanting a more substantively theorized social analysis and reducing them to the interaction between essentially arbitrarily constituted or given individuals, robbing political critique both of its macro-level social understanding as well as of its historical dimension. For Akerlof and Kranton, politics then ends up being described as follows, in a paragraph at the end of their book:

“Politics, too, is often a battle over identity. Rather than take voters’ preferences as given, political leaders and activists often try to change identity or norms. Some of the most dramatic examples of regime change involve changes in norms regarding who is an insider and who is an outsider. Fascist and populist leaders foster racial and ethnic divisions. Symbolic acts and transformed identities spur revolutions. Mohandas Gandhi’s Salt March sparked the Indian independence movement and a new national identity. The French Revolution changed subjects into citizens. The Russian Revolution turned them into comrades.”

(2) It may be clear what an impoverished idea this is of what politics and political change are about, and how it comes to reinforce a particular liberal view of how society works. Not that I suspect most people interested in the politics of identity to be in any way like the myopic neoclassical economists in their treatment of social relations, but I am worried by the ease in which such an individuating perspective can be incorporated into such a framework, and end up perhaps crowding out, politically and psychologically, a more politically powerful perspective.

Intersectionality

Often, the answer to this is sought in the concept of intersectionality; in my language here, this is basically the interrelationship of various salient identity dimensions by their rootedness in one and the same personal experience. Again, intersectionality is not so much a theory in the larger objective sense as it is objective in the more immediate sense: a generalisation of lived experience. The problematics of class-blind feminism or race-blind Marxism and so forth are avoided by an awareness of how one and the same lived experience for a person can feature dimensions in which that person is privileged as well as in which that person is oppressed, and it demands awareness of both. This is good as far as it goes. But I am not convinced it can wholly solve the circularity of identity as a political language. Even intersectionality does not necessarily overcome the kind of Mutually Assured Destruction described above.

Some of the language of intersectionality has recognized some of the pitfalls of the politics of identity described above very well, and is consciously aimed at the co-optation of particular forms of identity based struggle into a larger capitalist logic. This idea of intersectionality seems to have received a much wider circulation through Flavia Dzodan’s now famous article “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit”. Here, as I understand it, she makes the essential point that any mobilizing on the basis of identity can indeed become a question of competition, or divide and rule, between given identities constructed on the basis of nothing more than the particularity of the experiences that constitute that identity; in other words, that feminists only care about women, anti-racist campaigners only care about racial identity, and so forth. In such a situation, the interconnectedness at the collective level of the various forces generating oppression in terms of ‘salient identities’ is obscured, and the result is the failure of such movements to truly become emancipatory to the degree required to overthrow these forces. This is a very important point, and goes in my view a considerable way towards the integration of the identitarian politics that allows for a more universalizing perspective.

But in and of itself, it is not clear that intersectionality can go beyond the recognition of the plurality of identities. It can oppose the oppression of the one in terms of the emancipation of the other, and thereby the inherent contradictions stemming from the different experiences of individuals. But this does not itself amount to an actual theory of their integration. Dzodan has just now written another good piece exposing certain feminist language as being framed entirely within the neoliberal perspective of the marketplace of identities and ideas, in which competition between the individual experiences and identities is inherent and in which success is therefore a matter of mobilizing oneself for the purpose of selling one’s identity as a commodity (not ncessarily directly, but certainly politically). This, again, is a point well worth making, and in fact exposes a problem with the politics of identity similar to my argument above: the inherent individualism and competitive element of it easily reproduces the same socially causal forces of capitalism that generate or strengthen much of the oppression they are designed to address. Identity itself is, or can be, a pre-eminently liberal construct, taken as the locus of political action. All the more so when the emancipation on the basis of a given identity, or even the mutual recognition of a plurality of identities of all kinds, is expressed in terms of an abstract freedom to enjoy these identities. If intersectionality is merely a mutual cease-fire between the different groups agitating for recognition, it is ultimately quite compatible with the abstract freedom and noninterference of the capitalist market, where everyone encounters each other as individuals on the basis of formal equality.

This points to the larger problem: the language of personal experience can make a political struggle against the effects of social power into an unintended war of all against all, and to divide and atomize people according to a multiplicity of identities, rather than attempting to find ways in which the social forces that generate these experiences can be collectively overcome. The recognition of the diversity of human wants and the ways in which they can be thwarted can give great insight, but if it does not transcend the (inter)personal, it may dissolve either in the very same liberalism it was designed to combat, or into an empty pluralism of ‘communities’ – a pluralism desired by the new conservative communitarian theorists like Charles Taylor and Amitai Etzioni, whose ideas underlie the policies of the ‘Big Society’. This is then the conservative counterpart to the ultimately liberal revolution of the politics of identity: again, I would suggest its very possibility should give us pause as to the limits of the emancipatory potential of the language of identity.

Vivek Chibber puts this as follows, responding to postcolonial theory’s turn towards the subjective and the relativist, which shows remarkable analogies with the question of identity politics domestically: “It’s perfectly fine to say that people draw on local cultures and practices when they resist capitalism, or when they resist various agents of capital. But it’s quite another to say that there are no universal aspirations, or no universal interests, that people might have… For two hundred years, anybody who called herself progressive embraced this kind of universalism. It was simply understood that the reason workers or peasants could unite across national boundaries is because they shared certain material interests. This is now being called into question by subaltern studies, and it’s quite remarkable that so many people on the Left have accepted it. It’s even more remarkable that it’s still accepted when over the last fifteen or twenty years we’ve seen global movements across cultures and national boundaries against neoliberalism, against capitalism. Yet in the university, to dare to say that people share common concerns across cultures is somehow seen as being Eurocentric. This shows how far the political and intellectual culture has fallen in the last twenty years.”(3)

This potential is not a mere hypothetical. Already, the language of identity and identity politics is being used for avowedly reactionary ends: right-wing and fascist movements in various countries of Europe are presenting themselves as ‘identitarian’ in order to use the language of identity oppression against the forces of emancipation. A work of the French ‘new right’ like Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight is explicitly presented in ‘identitarian’ terms. The same phenomenon can be found outside the Western sphere, where similar language has been co-opted by the powerful fascistoid Bharatiya Janata Party in India. Other examples can be found such as the recasting of the Canadian identity by the Reform Party in Canada and Pauline Hanson’s politics in Australia.(4) The identity language used by these groups is more generally a language of a clash of cultures, not of privilege and oppression, for obvious reasons, and I am in no way suggesting that the politics of identity and privilege used on the left is equivalent. But what I do want to suggest is that it reveals something about the category of ‘identity’ itself and its role in the contemporary global political economy: one that combines in neoliberalism an imposed individualism and atomization with an ever-increasing sense of competition and an ethos of personal advancement. This is a society where increasing insecurity and fear of one’s position go hand in hand with the idea that it is ultimately up to your own ability to sell your personality that determines whether you survive in this competition. In this way, the ‘cultural turn’ meshes well with the false agency offered to the atomized individual of capitalist modernity.

The politics of identity can be a destructive force

This, then, is the core of my criticism. Behind all these abstractions lurk the following concerns. Identities are ‘real’ or ‘objective’ in the sense that, insofar as they make a political-economic difference, they are more than just subjective. Even purely subjective identifications in terms of taste and so forth are not arbitrary, for they are attempts to understand the variety of human experiences (social and mental), but what I have called ‘salient identities’ are even less so, because one’s experiences are the result of particular social forces that ‘put you in your place’ either high or low on the political-economic ladder, and their translation into an identity is therefore as much given from the outside as from the inside. But the politics of identity risks reducing this to a question of individuality. Of course, such identities are contingent on the particular social forces that created them, and are bound in place and time. But that’s not the most important thing. What is more important is that they are from the very start ‘always-already’ irreducibly social, and the result of the agency of particular social actors at the collective level in reproducing the society in which those identities matter.

To cite one of my friends: “When politics proceeds by people recognizing a category they have been placed in, and then identifying with that category, this can be a powerful means of building solidarity, situating oneself, establishing a launchpad for concerted action. But often this identification is ordered such as to be a ratification of the system whereby an individual has attribute x, belonging-to-category x, and a reification of that attribute as a quality of their being. at the risk of repetitive excess: the dominant ideology says there are individuals who are white, black, gay, men etc as indwelling qualities and it is a radical departure to instead say there is whiteness, blackness, and so on, that these are real (objective even if not scientific) formations which people are placed in, and that while these formations are real they do not exist in the same way as dark skin, male genitalia, etc, that their origin is not within but without, from society and socialization.”

If one does not live under capitalism, the identity of ‘working class’ has no meaning or significance. If one does not live in a society in which a racial division is a historically grown part of the division of labor, the identity of black or white has no meaning or significance. It seems therefore that in the same way in which the overcoming of capitalism entails the overcoming, not the victory, of the identity of ‘working class’, so too the emancipation of identities ultimately should strive to overcome the language of identity. If not, it is strategically reduced to comprehending a totality of society as a mere adding-up of its individual identities in their plurality, in a language of mutual respect and recognition, but not in a language of collective action and the striving for universalism. As Dzodan’s second piece perhaps implicitly points to, there is no possibility of achieving equality of recognition, nor is it clear whether such a thing would even be desirable for any sense of the ‘normal’.

In this sense, it is identity itself that must be overcome to solve this contradiction. It remains subjective, individualistic, and thereby ultimately self-defeating. Nobody’s experiences will ever quite be the same as another’s, and nobody will have quite the same combination of subjective and objective elements create one’s personhood the same way as another’s. This is a good thing: the diversity of people is one of the greatest aspects of humanity. But such intersubjectivity will ultimately always be partially impossible to communicate. The language of identity and privilege is designed to overcome this, but it retains too much of its rooting in the particular individual experience that grounds identity to be able to allow an at least potentially universal narrative of emancipation between one person and another.

This, I suspect, is at the root of much of the deeply personal, painful, and wrenching arguments that a thorough application of the politics of identity gives rise to. In my own personal experience, which I will now briefly come to, I have seen the language of identity help many people (including myself) in becoming stronger, more vocal, more able to deal with their experiences and to turn them into a force for good. But whether one believes me or not, I have just as often seen the destructive side of the language of identity and privilege. I have seen people, virtually all of whom were in one way or another themselves unprivileged, tear each other apart in an atmosphere of personal wounding, paranoia, and psychological breakdown that has quite literally traumatized all those who were involved, including myself. This was possible because the politics of identity was both intensely personal, a deep part of one’s personhood, and at the same time political, affecting everyone potentially. Whatever anyone said, they could always be attacked on the basis of their identity as privileged in some respect, and thereby failing their political commitments because of their failure of identity.

But (as intersectionality points out) everyone is potentially in one way or another both oppressor and oppressed within the framework of individual struggle. In this way, the politics of privilege risks ultimately becoming a question of what you are rather than what you do, and in a context of everyone ‘being’ both good and bad in this viewpoint, anyone at all can at any time be silenced, deemed in bad faith, or personally attacked on the basis of their identity in some respect; and this appears as justified, because those identities are ‘real’ in the sense of causally shaped as I have analyzed above. But this has had devastating results on everyone involved, since anyone could at any time be told that their very personhood was a political obstacle, and their very language tainted with their oppressive identity. Whatever that is, that is not an emancipatory politics I want to be part of, ever again, and unless this potential is addressed I remain sympathetic but wary of those who present the politics of identity and privilege as an undiminished good thing, without addressing its contradictions. I am not suggesting it is always like that, but if we are to consider individual experience as decisive for political questions, then my personal experience militates against it.

The effect of this war of mutual hurt has best been summarized by Shakespeare:

For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace.
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss.
The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offense’s cross.

(5)

1) Reginald Shepherd, Orpheus in the Bronx (Ann Arbor, MI 2007), p 51.
2) Akerlof and Scranton, Identity Economics (Princeton, NJ 2010), p. 125. Internal references omitted.
3) http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/
4) Johnson, Patten and Betz, “Identitarian Politics and Populism in Canada and the Antipodes”, in: Jens Rydgren (ed.), Movements of Exclusion (Hauppage, NY 2005), p. 85-94.
5) William Shakespeare, “Sonnets”, 34.

The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 is a systematic historical overview of the major theories and theorists in international relations and their relationship to Eurocentrism. Hobson’s thesis is essentially aimed against the prevailing smug quasi-positivism of IR theory today and its blindness to the reality of Eurocentrism both in present and past practice. Where IR theorists today like to present themselves as being value-free scholars, concerned exclusively with descriptive depictions of the real interactions between state actors and questions of sovereignty and anarchy, Hobson charges them with a great deal of Eurocentric baggage smuggled in through ostensibly neutral terminology. What’s more, Hobson also shows that their reading of their own discipline’s history is one that conveniently erases or elides the roots of the various schools of IR thought in explicitly Eurocentric narratives. To expose this, the book presents a chronological overview of all the major IR theorists, from Kant, Hegel and Montesquieu through Marx and Mill onward to such diverse figures as Karl Pearson, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Adolf Hitler and Woodrow Wilson, and finally onto the present day with the Kagans, Huntingtons, Friedmans and Boots of our time. In each and every case Hobson demonstrates the Eurocentric content of their thought and how it explicitly shaped the development of their theories of state power, sovereignty, and interaction of states, not least as concerns the legitimacy of cultural or economic imperialism and the expansion of Western power. Hobson’s ultimate thesis is to demonstrate that despite its self-conception, almost all of IR theory has, in the final instance, been dedicated in one way or another to one cause: “defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics” (p.345).

Hobson spends hundreds of pages of intelligent, critical, and dense close reading of a considerable number of greater and lesser authors to establish this fact. There is no purpose in recapitulating all his arguments; for that I would heartily recommend reading this excellent critical book. What is worth pointing out is that this work constitutes not just an argument within IR theory about its origins and purpose, but at the same time also takes position in a certain debate regarding the position of liberal, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought in a global perspective. This critical re-reading of the history of ideas, often associated with ‘postcolonial thought’ although not really rightly limited to that, is an important development in the struggle against European/Western chauvinism masquerading as high theory.

But Hobson’s approach to this question in this book is subtle and in many ways better than that of many of his fellow critics. In The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, he makes a number of important distinctions that help us understand the different types or categories of Eurocentric thought prevalent in 18th, 19th, and 20th century political theory. Crucially, Hobson distinguishes basically three axes of viewpoint: racism vs nonracism, imperialism vs anti-imperialism, and paternalism vs anti-paternalism (the last one concerning the need for Europeans to support or intervene peacefully to help achieve Western levels of civilization). As Hobson shows throughout the book, taking up a position along one of these axes by no means implies a given position on the others, nor are they reducible to each other. Contrary to critics such as Thomas McCarthy, Hobson rightly notes that to reduce Eurocentrism and various kinds of imperialist thought to purely a question of ‘veiled racism’ actually allows the Eurocentric, chauvinist thinkers far too much leeway. Someone like Samuel Huntington never writes about race, biology, or heredity anywhere, yet his work is evidently strongly Eurocentric. Equally, one can have out-and-out ‘scientific racist’ thinkers of the fin-de-siècle such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, who were nonetheless generally opposed to Western imperialist ventures (for example because they would lead to white degeneration, or would stir up dangerous native activity). Hobson’s care to distinguish these different positions, presented in various helpful diagrams and classifications, not only sharpens and improves the political critique of Eurocentrism, but also generally aids in the process of a better understanding of post-Enlightenment thought and attitudes towards questions of empire, race, and political power.

Another important axis of analysis is the question of agency. Hobson includes many authors that would often be considered anti-Eurocentric into his Eurocentric panorama based on this crucial point. Rightly, he judges the various thinkers on Eurocentrism not just by their perception of the correct Western attitudes and actions towards the ‘East’, but also on the degree of agency they accord to the Eastern peoples in their analysis of world politics. Often authors will give full agency only to Europeans, and present the Eastern peoples as fundamentally stagnant, responding only to Western initiatives and changing only insofar as Western activity causes them to do so. They either have no independent agency at all – as in the myth of the eternal, stagnant East – or have only what Hobson calls ‘conditional agency’, that is, they can achieve independent activity only insofar as they become like the West.

Some versions of Eurocentrism, in particular the ones Hobson describes as ‘defensive racism’ or ‘defensive Eurocentrism’ do accord great agency to the East, but only a purely negative and predatory agency. These are the theories of the ‘yellow peril’ type, often presented in terms of the fear of Eastern power, mass migration, and the need to man the Western fortress. One finds this in racist forms in Stoddard, for example, and in nonracist form in Huntington and Lind. In all these cases, sovereignty, the obsession of IR theory, becomes the formal vehicle through which these ideas of agency tend to express themselves. Full sovereignty is only granted Western states; others have either no sovereignty, or gradated sovereignty, depending on their degree of conforming to Western demands and expectations of other states. Even for anti-paternalist anti-imperialist thinkers such as Kant (in his political works) and Smith, this gradation of sovereignty and agency still operated, and for this reason Hobson qualifies them as Eurocentric nonetheless.

What is interesting for the purposes of this blog is how he also shares a great number of Marxist analyses of international relations under this banner. In a lengthy reading of Lenin’s classic work on imperialism, he describes Lenin as Eurocentric despite his strong opposition to either imperialism or paternalistic activities of the West. For, as Hobson points out, despite Lenin’s disapproval of Western imperialism and its rapacious power and destructive effects, he accords virtually no independent ability to resist to the Eastern powers or peoples, let alone any independent initiative or serious interactive role in the process of globalisation. This goes also, in Hobson’s view, for many of the ‘Gramscian’ and ‘world systems’ neo-Marxist theorists of IR, such as Cox and Wallerstein, who are inclined to dismiss the independent Eastern contributions to the development and maintenance of capitalism as a system or are unwilling to grant the subjects of imperialism any other substantial role than as victims. While this depiction as ‘subliminally Eurocentric’, in Hobson’s terms, may be politically hard to swallow for many Marxists, it is difficult to deny that many Marxist theories of global capitalism do develop their ideas from a fundamentally Eurocentric ‘world outlook’ (as the Soviets used to say) in terms of agency, however much they may wish the downfall of Western imperialism and of the capitalist world order itself.

This brings me, however, to some residual problems with John Hobson’s framework. This book is a deeply impressive work of scholarship and critical reading in its own right, and the clear and cogent framework for a more subtle and thorough set of criteria for analyzing Eurocentrism is a great contribution in addition to that. Nonetheless, there remain in my view two problems. The first comes to the fore in his reading of Marx as Eurocentric. There is certainly no doubt that the Marx and Engels of the 1840s and 1850s were Eurocentric and saw imperialism, though they opposed it, as a fundamentally historically progressive force; they believed all nations would have to become part of the unfolding European logic of capitalism, and the sooner it was done with, the better. Hobson does not seem to note any of the vast literature on Marx and Engels’ change in position from the late 1860s or so onwards on these questions, instead taking the Marx of the early journalism on India as canonical for all of Marxism. He not only ignores the work of people such as Kevin B. Anderson on the ideas of the ‘anthropological’ Marx, but uses some dubious sources on his and other works. He takes the work of Bernal on 19th century interpretations of the classical world without criticism, despite these having been refuted at length, and his main source on Marx’s views appears to be an obscure Cold War tract, rather than any of the established scholarship on the question of Marxism’s relationship to the non-European world. This is not fatal just in one or two cases, but it makes one wonder how well he actually knows the scholarly debates around some of the material he references – a (minor) problem I also noted in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.

However, lest that seem mere pedantry, I would argue the case of Marxism points to a deeper problem. I am wholly sympathetic to Hobson’s critique of Eurocentrism and also his useful revisions of the content of that classification. But there remains one element that is not satisfactory. While Hobson is surely right to critique as Eurocentric not just those who explicitly proclaim (in one way or another) the superiority of the West, or of Western institutions per se, there is a problematic that he does not fully explore. Hobson foresees the common counterargument to critiques of Eurocentrism, namely the old refrain that ‘it is Eurocentric because Europe really did become more important’ or ‘because Western values really are better’, etc. Hobson and many other people have shown that these are wrong in empirical terms, as Western history has not been the unfolding of its own immanent logic, Europe has not always been ahead of the East by any criterion imaginable and often only became so through imperialism (and even there with the collaboration of Eastern powers), and so forth. Much of these ideas are based on a thoroughly discredited Eurocentric empirical narrative. But Hobson does not wholly address the problem emerging from the use of Western criteria for historical analysis tout court. He seems to suggest in the book that the use of criteria from the West as universals is itself inherently Eurocentric, and here I would dissent.

It is undoubtedly Eurocentric to conveniently present the world as an opposition between ‘Western’ moral ideas, decent and civilized, versus the barbarism and sadism of the East, and similar tropes. But what to do with ideas that explicitly criticize the West itself according to their criteria also, and that do not present an opposition between the good West and the bad East? Many ideas have been developed in the West, or become globally influential through Western-dominated channels, that are nonetheless not inherently in the service of Western supremacy. Marxism could well be an example of one set such ideas, but there may be various, even perhaps certain liberal ideas. Hobson is right to oppose the empirical narratives of Western hyper-significance as unfounded. But certain ideas may develop universality despite originating or becoming popularized in the West, without thereby necessarily being Eurocentric, and this complicates his schema slightly – though I do not believe it invalidates any of his critiques per se.

This in turn leads to the second problem: Hobson’s understated alternative. In opposition to Eurocentrism, Hobson does not offer us any clear vision of what type of theoretical development, seeing the above contradictions, he would consider non-Eurocentric. He speaks at some length, for example, about the IR tropes of sovereignty and balance of powers as universalizing certain aspects of European experience, and offers as single counterexample the Chinese warring states and their development of a tributary (thereby apparently non-imperialist) empire. This seems a little meagre. More seriously, in the theoretical or methodological sphere he opposes nothing theorized to the Eurocentric flaws: running throughout the book is the counterpart of Eurocentrism in ‘cultural pluralism’ or ‘cultural tolerance’, once described as a substantive equality of sovereignty. But what is cultural pluralism? It seems Hobson wishes to steer us to the familiar Charybdis of an undertheorized ‘cultural relativism’ to avoid the Scylla of Eurocentrism, but this will not do as a substantive proposition. One very easily here falls into the postcolonial trap described by Aijaz Ahmad, where one takes the ‘cultures’ or nations of the ‘East’ as essential givens, and in the name of tolerating and supporting them against the chauvinism of the West, elides the many conflicts and (class) struggles that operate within them. A cultural turn of this sort can quickly turn to a form of quietism or bad faith that does not do the cause of emancipation any good.

Of course, one cannot expect an author to do everything in one book, and Hobson’s other books have provided substantial support for his empirical-historical views on the interaction between East and West as well as some of his ideas on the function and origins of concepts like ‘sovereignty’, the ‘Westphalian order’, etc. To provide a brilliant and learned critique of the type demonstrated in The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics is a work on par with James Blaut’s brilliant critiques of Eurocentric historiography and the readings of political theory as in the service of power by Corey Robin and Domenico Losurdo, among others. It should be required reading in any Politics or IR course, and is a fundamental corrective and warning to the many who believe that IR is a positive science uninfected by the legacy of Eurocentrism, racism, and imperialism that underpin it. It also implies a subtle and perhaps more interesting critique of ‘Eurocentric institutionalism’ and the way institutions and culture become core categories replacing race and civilization after WWII, while fulfilling the same functions in the narrative of Western triumph. Maintaining clarity and structure with such a huge number of authors and such complicated theoretical oppositions is no mean feat, either. It is therefore wholeheartedly recommended.

But there is more to it. The book is also an intervention in Marxist political and historical debate, and clearly intended as such. In discussing the bourgeois revolution and its uses, Davidson (often rather obliquely) makes a number of essential suggestions as to its use and purpose, and connects these with Trotskyist thought and historical interpretation. The book is so rich in insights and reflections that one can no doubt draw various lessons and conclusions from it. In my reading, in any case, Davidson’s core contribution is to emphasize the significance of the distinction between two types of ‘bourgeois revolution’, and by extension, revolution generally: social revolution and political revolution. As Davidson sees it, the former involves the latter, but is not limited to it. Where political revolution involves some major change in the composition and policy of the ruling class or government in a society, with the attendant shift in the political ‘color’ of the country and the dominant group(s) in it, it operates still within the confines of a particular system of social relations. Social revolution, however, is a revolution which involves not just a political shift, but an overthrow of previously existing social relations and a decisive shift, or at least a serious attempt at transformation, into new ones.

The purpose in Marx and Engels of the idea of bourgeois revolution, as Neil Davidson describes it, is therefore precisely to understand it as a social revolution, not as a political one. Davidson persuasively argues this, and sticks to it himself throughout the work for the purposes of his own political-historical intervention. This leads to the second important conclusion of the book, namely that bourgeois revolution does not equal a revolution made by the bourgeoisie, and in fact the active, conscious leadership of the bourgeoisie as a distinct class is neither sufficient nor necessary for the achievement of bourgeois revolution. This is a major strand in How Revolutionary Were The Bourgeois Revolutions?, and to some extent can be seen as answering the question posed in the title. Davidson expends tremendous effort and space to arguing with many historians, radical and liberal, on this issue, and to my mind makes plausible and perhaps even convincing the proposition that the idea of bourgeois revolution as a social revolution from precapitalist formations to a fully-fledged and self-sustaining capitalism can only be practically useful and understandable if it does not necessarily involve bourgeois leadership.

In fact, as he rightly points out, in Marx and Engels themselves as well as in liberal commentaries from the 19th century one can find the realization that the bourgeoisie, whatever its historical ‘purpose’ may have been thought to be, was in practice much more often conservative or even outright reactionary than it was revolutionary. Much of Marx and Engels’ works in the third quarter of the 19th century deal with their growing frustration over the fact that whenever faced with the choice of a revolution with participation of working class and peasant elements or accepting the overlordship of a military-landlordist aristocracy, the really existing bourgeoisies systematically chose the latter. Later history, a Davidson shows, has shown much the same pattern, and the bourgeois revolutions in other countries have more often than not taken the more gradual and politically retrograde form of adaptation to capitalist conditions while maintaining the political forms of precapitalist autocracy and hierarchical inequality.

This leads to Neil Davidson’s third major concern: the concept of ‘permanent revolution’, most generally associated with Trotsky, although found in other writers as well (including Marx and Engels). Here, Davidson more closely hews to the Trotskyist political line, in particular that of the so-called ‘International Socialist tradition’, i.e. those Trotskyists inclined to not take Trotsky’s own historical and political judgements as decisive for their analysis, but who otherwise share the more general assumptions and presuppositions characterizing Trotskyism as a political mode of interpretation. For Davidson, the central point is to contrast permanent revolution as an idea with the notion of ‘stageism’, which he consistently and somewhat unfairly associates with Trotskyism’s eternal bogeyman opponent, the ‘Stalinist’ tradition. Now to my mind the whole idea of a ‘Stalinist tradition’ with an identifiable political and historical ideology which lies at the root of all the errors of socialist practice in the 20th century is a complete fiction, simply a mirror of Trotskyism itself in which it sees its own dark reflection. I do not think one can meaningfully analyze 20th century Marxism’s successes and failures along the axis of the Trotsky/Stalin dichotomy, regardless of how popular and influential this mode of thought has been; and for that reason, the second half of this book deserves as much criticism as the first half deserves my praise.

Nonetheless, Davidson does have some interesting things to say about permanent revolution. Most importantly, he establishes the idea that for Marx and Engels, and much of Marxist thought of the Second International generation, the idea of bourgeois revolution came to mean the development of capitalism as a precondition for the possibility of socialist revolution, by whatever means either was achieved in political terms. Davidson rightly notes, as have Kevin B. Anderson, Lawrence Krader and many others, that Marx and Engels shifted their own views on the meaning of this ‘precondition’ over time. In the 1840s and early 1850s they maintained that, despite awareness of the horrendous costs, the development of capitalism in every country and the disappearance of ‘non-historic nations’ was a historically progressive development because it constituted a step towards socialism. This Jacob’s ladder model of reaching to socialism in a linear way was soon abandoned, however, notwithstanding the persistence even up to this day of ‘critiques’ of Marxism based on the assumption that all of Marx and Engels’ thought follows this idea.

As Davidson notes, and this is a crucial point to his argument, the later conception required capitalism to come to dominance as prerequisite for socialism (because of its development of productivity, technology, and its own ‘revolutionary’ characteristics), but is quite ambiguous on the question whether this is a necessary ‘stage’ for each country or more subtly a requirement operating at the level of what one would now call the world-system. In the latter case, and Davidson makes it plausible that this is the better reading, there is no inherent requirement for each country to follow the same processes of bourgeois revolution and consolidation as long as capitalism has already become the dominant mode of production in the world. And indeed, one may well say that after the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and the colonization of Africa in the 1880s, this state of affairs was undeniably achieved; making the perspective for the requirements of socialist revolution very different after the fact.

This is where permanent revolution plays its role in Neil Davidson’s argument. He suggests effectively that ‘Stalinism’ misled Marxists into thinking that the older, linear stages model was a necessity for each and every country, despite (and Davidson gives much useful evidence on this) the reality of bourgeois revolution being already achieved in almost all countries – either through political revolution, often in fact imposed by modernizing segments of the precapitalist ruling class (as in Italy, Germany, and Japan, the future roots of fascism) or by gradual development enforced by the subjugation to the capitalist global logic, as with Latin America, or through the process of colonialism, as in much of Asia and Africa. (Here one would have liked Davidson to make room for the specific settler form of bourgeois revolution and imposition of capitalism, but the significance of the settler dynamic in places like the US, Australia, and Israel eludes him.)

For Trotsky, on the other hand, the concept of ‘permanent revolution’ suggested that with global capitalist rule already a reality – however deep and pervasive the feudal holdovers in specific places – the fulfilment of the bourgeois revolution as a political revolution could only be achieved by the revolutionary working class, which would then move directly forward into socialism (hence the ‘permanent’ aspect). He quite generalized this to all cases of non-metropolitan countries: “In backward nations, such immediate tasks have a democratic character: the national liberation from imperialist subjugation and the agrarian revolution, as in China; the agrarian revolution and the liberation of the oppressed nationalities, as in Russia. We see the same thing at present in Spain, even though in a different combination… But after the working class has seized power, the democratic tasks of the proletarian regime inevitably grow over into socialist tasks.” (Cited on p. 305.)

Davidson spends some time discussing the vicissitudes of this understanding of bourgeois revolution, as a process rather than an event, and the ways in which it has been watered down or led to confusion. Being unable to understand it as a process but with a specific historical delineation in time and political meaning, many have abandoned the idea altogether, or have gone over into calling neoliberalism a ‘permanent revolution’ and the like. Davidson rightly opposes such confusion of terms. But he himself suggests a change in the term from Trotsky’s use is necessary, or rather, that we must rethink the purpose of the term. For Davidson, the stage of bourgeois revolution is now over, as the dominance of capitalist social relations is certain and the system has achieved, as it were, its autogestion in every part of the globe. This raises the question then whether it makes sense to talk of permanent revolution, as any revolutionary movement from such a situation onward would imply a direct, socialist revolution, or else constitute ‘merely’ a political revolution changing the ruling class constellation and its organization of capitalism. In the latter case, no real social revolution would be either intended or possible at all, whereas in the former case, there is no real question of ‘permanence’. In this, he actually argues against much of contemporary Trotskyist political thought, which tends to read permanent revolutions into every political upheaval, whether the election of Morales or the Arab Spring, by arguing that such movements can only consummate themselves (to use Davidson’s term) by moving to socialism. Davidson is right to note that however devoutly to be wished, such consummation is not necessary, and the assumption questionable.

But here is also where my criticism comes in. For Davidson, developments such as Stalin’s rule in the USSR, the Maoist revolution in China, and more or less every left-nationalist or politically revolutionary movement in the Third World (not least in Vietnam and Cuba) are ‘merely’ examples of political revolution either consummating (as in the former case) the bourgeois revolution, or achieving it (as in his reading of China). Here Davidson is at his most uselessly Trotskyist: not only are all these movements and revolts seen through the sole prism of an artificial concept, namely the idea that they were not ‘led by the revolutionary working class’ and therefore not ‘really socialist’, but they are also explicitly politically rejected on this basis as attempts at revolution, however unsuccessful, beyond the bourgeois. Indeed, Davidson is willing to acknowledge that subjectively Mao, Ho, e tutti quanti did not see themselves as fulfilling any bourgeois project whatever, but he does not consider this of decisive importance: does not Marx say that one should not take people at their word when it comes to their historical role?

In this characteristic Trotskyist hackneyed view of history, all the subtleties of the analysis of bourgeois revolution suddenly disappear. Davidson spends 600+ pages describing rightly how bourgeois revolution can be a meaningful concept and an identifiable process whether or not it takes the form of a preconceived ‘ideal type’, even whether or not it is actually led and consciously acted out primarily by bourgeois class forces, but takes its color and meaning from the material historical necessities that propel it forward (certainly identifiable after capitalism has established itself in a few major countries and in the technological sphere). But no such subtleties are permitted the socialist revolution: this must take the form precisely of nothing other than a conscious, organized social revolution, constituted by the working class as a class conscious group and led by it, and achieving nothing short of the full social revolution towards the ‘society of associated producers’, perhaps even waving a red flag and storming the palaces: else it is not ‘real socialist revolution’, but merely an appendix to the history of capitalism. This will not do, and does not convince. In fact, the Trotskyists would do well to learn from Lenin himself, who responded to those who dismissed the Easter Rising in Ireland as ‘merely’ left-nationalist as follows: “So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism,” and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism,” and that will be a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a ‘putsch.’ Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is….”(1)

How then to explain the ‘failures’, in a certain sense, of the socialist movements of the 20th century? I do not think that the Trotskyist-Davidson approach, to explain this by defeating the socialist credentials of all movements after 1917, is convincing. But an explanation is nonetheless owed. The great and fundamental mistake of the Trotskyist reading of history underlying Davidson’s vision is its fundamental concession to idealism. In the Trotskyist view, ultimately the origins of the failures of 20th century Marxism rest in a conceptual error: either the error of ‘stageism’, leading to the much-maligned popular front policy and the idea that potential revolutions were suppressed in the name of the bourgeois revolution, which Davidson’s book serves as a polemic for; or the error of ‘socialism in one country’, the putative abandonment of the goal of international revolution and the subordination of all revolutionary activity to the national, chauvinist interests of the USSR as a nation-state.

I do not think either of these critiques are without merit in the history of 20th century socialism. Indeed, too often Communist Parties have presented themselves simply as ‘nationalists for another country’, making them isolated and strategically weak and inflexible despite their support vastly outnumbering that of any other Marxist group. The ease of the destruction of communism in countries like Iraq, Iran, and Indonesia owes much to this. Stageism, too, has sometimes been simply an excuse to adopt a wait-and-see attitude and to relegate revolution purely to rhetorical statements, combining revolutionary talk with practice that is social-democratic at best. Davidson makes much of the case of the South African Communist Party within the ANC in this, as well as Garcia Linera in Bolivia, and these criticisms are not unjustified. But they are not fundamental. ‘Socialism in one country’ was simply a consideration of the reality of things after the defeat of the German, Italian, and English revolutionary waves in the late 1910s and early 1920s; one was faced with the options of either going it alone, or giving up entirely, and the Soviets cannot be blamed for choosing the former. Trotsky himself quite sensibly for this reason always maintained the importance of defending the USSR as a project, whatever its limitations. So too the stageism and the conservatism of official Communism: much of this was a response to Cold War conditions, preferring a certain strong stability without success to a chance of success and a chance of world war and utter defeat.

But however charitably or uncharitably one reads the motivations of the actors involved, what one cannot consistently do is make these motivations into the defining cause of the failures of 20th century Marxism, while at the same time ignoring entirely the socialist motivations of various revolutionary movements in the name of historical materialist causality, as Davidson and many Trotskyists do. I would submit that a more thoroughgoingly causal analysis is required, one that does not give up on the relevance of political and historical interpretation in shaping action, but one that recognizes the causal significance of global, macro-level economic historical forces as superceding the causal power of the motives of individuals and leaders in all cases, whether China or the USSR. Indeed, I have myself written on the errors in the self-conception of the Soviet economic policy, in two respects: its flaw in promoting working class rule as a substitute for the abolition of class society, and its flaw in developing the productive forces in a programme of ‘socialist accumulation’ without a clear plan or ability to make the final ‘shift’ to production for use in association, a shift which never came and whose absence doomed the communism of the USSR and its satellites to blatant incoherence.

But I must insist that these are not merely conceptual mistakes. Contrary to Davidson and most Trotskyist historiography, and also contrary to other re-imaginings of Marxist history such as those of the fans of Makhno, of Kronstadt, or even Platypus, I do not believe that there is much room for ‘what ifs’, nor that alternative histories of the 20th century will get us far in understanding its structural determinants. When every single case of revolution, whether subjectively imagined as political or social, that originates in the ideas of Marxism and the left takes on the same form, this is not a question of failed leadership or incorrect strategy. When we properly historicize, 20th century Marxism itself must be subject to the same historical materialist forces as any other ideology or self-conception, no less than liberalism. One of Marxism’s great strengths has always been its reflectiveness, its ability to comprehend – unlike other ideologies – its own origins and social base. What we see then, in my view, is that 20th century Marxism in its popular forms has taken the role of a developmental Marxism. It is part and parcel of a wider political economy of the 20th century centered around the consummation, to adopt that term, of the globalizing power of capitalism, and the promise of the development of the productive forces it contains.

This, the ethos and politics of development, is the central category of 20th century political history, and it has been the dominant economic pattern of ‘really existing socialism’, but also of various anti-communist left nationalisms (e.g. pan-Arabism), of Marshall Plan and World Bank liberalism, and even during those periods that countries were ruled by figures of the outermost right. After WWII in particular, when capitalism entered the only boom period it has ever known and the globalisation of the Edwardian age was surpassed by the true world market and world culture of today, every country has been forced by the logic of capitalist accumulation and nation-state competition to develop the productive forces. But also, every revolutionary movement and leadership has recognized the fundamental reality, emphasized by Marx and Engels throughout the development of the idea of bourgeois revolution, that the development of the productive forces is inherently the development of the preconditions of socialism. This was the point where the pressures of the logic of capital and the pressures of the logic of the immanent socialism have overlapped, and it is therefore no surprise, seen from this vantage point, that this point of synthesis has been the strongest driving force throughout the century and still is today.

It will therefore not do to dismiss events like the Soviet central planning programme or the Maoist revolutions (and there really were multiple) as merely consummations of bourgeois rule, or to judge them by an arbitrary, Archimedean standpoint outside history as insufficiently corresponding to the ‘self-emancipation of the working class’. This does not mean that we should not learn the political lessons from this, and not seek to overcome the dichotomy between socialist revolution and developmentalism: we have no reason to doubt Marx and Engels’ judgement that the combination of both is the prerequisite for abolishing class society and freeing our life’s time from necessary labor. But it does behoove us to understand the achievements of the Marxist form of developmentalism as its most emancipatory and most developed form, however limited by its ‘standing on one leg’, and I must therefore dissent from the political judgements implied in the idealism of Davidson’s Trotskyist reading of the past century. Even such ideas as the self-emancipation of the working class, and indeed all of Marxism itself, are subject to the forces historical materialism identifies, and if anything the failure of 20th century Marxism is a great victory for historical materialism as method. It is a pity that, despite the tremendous value and erudition of this book, Davidson has not seen this.

1) http://www.themilitant.com/1996/6016/6016_14.html

For this reason, it has been a disturbing and disappointing trend to notice Dawkins’ increasing indulgence of lazy, narrow-minded, and often outright racist and imperialist thought, fitting the worst traditions of Oxford contempt. On his Twitter account, he has made numerous absurd statements, often (as many people have pointed out) following a pattern of purposefully insulting and ridiculous rhetorical questions, in order to respond to the ensuing outrage and irritation with a smug dismissal of the public’s inability to understand the rhetorical uses of analogy. Such Oxford debating tactics are elitist and unproductive enough in their own sphere, but with the considerable public audience and scientific prestige Dawkins commands, they are all the more unacceptable. Suggesting (be it rhetorically) that one support Christian missionary activity in Africa because “Islam is such an unmitigated evil” compared to it is not only endorsing imperialism, but also totally inconsistent. His repeated inability to understand the significance of sexism, including within atheist debate and campaigning organizations, is disturbing. He makes profoundly silly comments on abortion and women’s bodies, purposely choosing annoying analogies in the Oxonian style thereby further obfuscating a point intended to discuss late-term abortions in moralistic terms. He continuously engages in equivocation about Islam and Muslims which can serve no useful or scientific purpose. He associates himself systematically with figures like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, who share not just a desire to put atheism forward as a political subject, but also immediately integrate this idea into a greater project of ‘reasoned’ Western imperialism. Similar is his coalition with neo-sociobiologists such as the Viscount Ridley, a former director of the failed Northern Rock bank who now pontificates on social darwinist views of the natural liberty of the market, and so forth. All this serves but to reinforce, as many of his political comments generally do, what James Blaut has called ‘the colonizers’ model of the world’.

For many people, this has led them not just to wish to disassociate themselves from the label ‘atheist’, seen as now too wrapped up in the patriarchal, imperialist mindset of Dawkins cum suis. Some blame it more generally on the desire to make what I’d call a campaigning issue out of atheism, the idea of atheism itself as a substantive question of progressive politics, and see anything operating on that basis as inherently tainted with this particular mentality described above. Yet others go even further, and see this as the product of a more thoroughgoing scientism, the raising of science as a social undertaking to the level of an authority it should not have or as ‘disembedded’ from social and political processes and contexts. In this view, it is not just Dawkins’ campaigning atheism that leads to imperialist conclusions, but it is the very idea of promoting scientific thought itself over and against other forms of thinking that is at least likely to cause more harm than good, and gives science a status it does not deserve. I do not agree with any of these views, however. I think Dawkins himself is here a mere exponent or representative of a deeper problem of the Enlightenment, the old contradiction inherent in its legacy.

By this I mean: the premise of the Enlightenment is, above all else, the possibility of the emancipation of humanity qua humanity, i.e. not primarily as subjects of divine will, by means of knowledge. I would still hold to this view. Of course, as we know, mere knowledge, reasoning powers, and scientific accomplishments are not sufficient. The late Enlightenment generation of Kant and later Hegel encountered the brute fact of the ability of absolutist rulers to clothe themselves in the language and technologies of science without in the least thereby promoting human freedom and power. In response to this, Hegel and later Marx refined the Enlightenment ideas by historicizing them: the emancipation of humanity through understanding must, to be fully humanistic, be a process of the coming into being of self-understanding, and as Marx pointed out, this can only happen in and through the process of historical practice, not by the teachings of scientists or philosophes alone, however radical. This is the import of Marx’s ‘Third Thesis on Feuerbach’, where he writes: “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” The practical activity, in the broadest spheres of politics and the social relations, involved in achieving human emancipation from all forms of alienation without exception is the way in which the Enlightenment promise is to be fulfilled. Humanity emancipates itself by coming to know itself, but it can only do so by seizing the powers inherent in its own potential, not by waiting to be taught its truths by a ‘part superior to society’.

It is this latter aspect that not only invites the charge of scientism often levelled against the Enlightenment, but also the charge of imperialism. Very often, the Enlightenment is depicted by radicals today as being the domain of ‘dead white men’ who, upon having freed themselves from ancient limitations and prejudices, impose upon the rest of the world a set of quasi-scientific classifications, methods, and political structures which also conveniently happen to reinforce their own rule. Everything from colonialism to Foucault’s nightmare of the prison society is seen to stem from this. Horkheimer and Adorno argued in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and many have shared this sense with them, that the original sin lies precisely in the claim to a superior ‘rationality’ on the part of Enlightenment thought and its political-social praxis. Whether this involves atheism as an emancipation from religious alienation or the domination of nature as an emancipation from the restraints of scarcity, or even the idea of scientific knowledge with its immanent rules of evidence and procedure as the only road making emancipatory knowledge possible, in this narrative all these ideas appear as forerunners or elements of an ‘instrumental rationality’ which led straight to the Holocaust. Many thinkers and activists originating in peoples long oppressed by imperialism, often in the name of scientific classifications of cultures or races have shared this sentiment.

The likes of Dawkins, Harris and so forth then appear as merely another iteration of this phenomenon, and indeed probably are. But here I think the contradictions of Enlightenment go deeper than is supposed in this critique. As Sankar Muthu has detailed at length in his excellent Enlightenment Against Empire, there is an equally long and profound tradition of identifiably Enlightenment thought explicitly aimed against the ideas underpinning ‘the colonizers’ model of the world’ and all of its accoutrements. From Diderot through Mark Twain to the Marxist critiques of colonialism and capitalism, Enlightenment ideas have lent themselves very strongly to making the case for the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world. And here lies, in my view, a potential and a problematic at the same time that is too easily dismissed by the above type critiques. For fundamentally, emancipation from alienating and oppressive structures requires two things: a recognition of what these structures are and how they work, and a practical knowledge of how to overcome them. And these two questions cannot but be profoundly scientific questions: they concern our knowledge of the world, how to apply this knowledge in practice, and how to validate and justify this knowledge against other claims. “The weapon of critique cannot replace the criticism of the weapons”, but only the search for knowledge can give us those weapons.

In the sphere of morality or culture alone, it is the word of one person against another, an indeterminate struggle which in the end will always be won by those with the greatest existing power to apply repression and violence. It is not sufficient to say that racism is wrong, that colonialism is bad, that women are not inferior, and so forth. For the powers of patriarchy and capitalism stand arrayed with all possible hegemony, with all possible force of arms, with all possible voice to drown out and repress these emancipatory ideas. So how would we be able to say that we were right and they were wrong? Only by immediately using our very knowledge of the world itself, a greater, more powerful and more practically and politically instrumental knowledge, can we give ourselves a ‘weapon of the weak’. Only a systematic, self-reflective, and historical knowledge of our societies and the causal forces that operate within it has the ability to not just make emancipatory statements, but to allow us to know them to be true, to make them practical, and to universalize our experience. Some have said it is sufficient to ‘first do no harm’; but this can just as easily be the motto of any Hayekian free trader, or pious Jesuit, and who then is to say they are wrong?

The last point is not to be underestimated: nobody who has been oppressed or exploited on one basis or another needs to be explained by any theorist what that is like, what it amounts to. But an aggregation of individual, subjective experiences of oppression is not by itself a potential for emancipation from those oppressions. For this reason precisely there are often long periods in history when oppressed people appear to ‘put up with their lot’. The coming to self-knowledge of humanity is precisely an essential prerequisite because it allows us to see patterns, understand causes, and thereby link one person’s experience of oppression with those of another – an idea feminist theorists have often seen better than anyone else, as in the idea of ‘intersectionality’. To my mind, therefore, the Enlightenment project itself is not just an essential part of a specific emancipatory theory like Marxism, but an almost Kantian epistemological and practical necessity for any emancipatory project at all. This is so even if one maintains, as I am inclined to do, a pragmatist view of the nature of ‘truth’, not requiring any strong statements as to its ahistorical, transcendent reality.

What does all of this mean for my subject? Simply this: I want to suggest, at least, that the concessions to the ‘colonizers model of the world’ common to Dawkins and others, and indeed to many of the canonical ‘Great Men of Science’ before him, are not the necessary consequence of Enlightenment thought and political commitments, but rather are a betrayal of them when properly understood. Nothing precisely upholds the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment, and thereby the very purpose of scientific endeavour, more than to combat ‘scientific racism’, to combat ahistorical and snide putdowns of oppressed people, to combat neo-colonialist and imperialist ideas, to combat patriarchal thoughts and actions, and to combat everything that enslaves humans to structures and concepts of their own making. It is to my mind of the utmost important that people committed to a progressive politics in this sense do not fear science – and here as always in the broad sense of Wissenschaft. We should critique and historicize and sociologize and otherwise analyze the workings and realities of scientific organizations and individuals, as we should do with all aspects of our real, historical societies. But science in the sense of its commitments to universalization, to a system of rules of evidence, argument, and discovery that permit in principle anyone to overthrow all existing understandings and to confront society with its own ignorance in any domain, and to make such positions potentially accessible to anyone anywhere in the world rather than the mere insistence of a particular group or province – this science is not a haughty colossus, but a social institution of tremendous revolutionary potency.

The history of specific Enlightenment ideas shows their use both to support and to overthrow systems of oppression and exploitation, this is well-known. But what I am arguing is for the revolutionary potential inherent in the concept of Enlightenment itself, and thereby in the processes that incorporate it, whatever they are. A good example, although just that, is atheism itself as a campaigning issue: the liberation of humanity from those hopes and expectations concentrated on illusions that are the result of human activity itself, thereby impeding the self-understanding that will actually enable the achievements of those hopes and expectations. This is an idea that need not and should not be reduced to the immature sneers of an Oxford professor who is as incompetent in the social realm of science as he is brilliant in the natural. After all, such critiques have existed since antiquity at the earliest, and are no idea newly discovered by the individual merits of this or that white man.

Even if we were to limit ourselves to such, then one can do much worse than the understanding of Marx, for whom “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. But only the beginning of criticism, therefore; not its end or ultimate purpose, a license to be a fool in all other questions of human activity, and express contempt for real human suffering. As he added: “The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” This is a true Enlightenment approach to atheism: not to simply provide a counter-theology but, as I have argued before, atheism that can only justify itself insofar as it is part and parcel of a general Enlightenment idea of emancipation through self-knowledge. To me, these are compatible ideas; but people may disagree on this. What’s more important for my purposes is that this debate be held with this understanding of Enlightenment thought, that it is more Marx than Dawkins, more Audre Lorde than Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so forth.

The contradictions of Enlightenment have always been the struggle between the bearers of ‘truth’ and their ‘instrumental rationality’, where Enlightenment transforms into its opposite as justification for oppressive power; and those opposing the Enlightenment altogether as itself an oppressive power, which has as often been the position of patriarchal and reactionary forces as it has been the final consequence of the ‘imperialism of science’ described by so many critics from Mary Shelley to Edward Said. But neither of these are necessary. It is my hope and profound conviction, my own religion if you will, that truth, being in the ultimate instance a reality for humans and meaningful in human society only, cannot be harmful or oppressive to the alienated and oppressed human. Rather, if it appears so, it must be because it is not ‘truth’ in this, pragmatist and Romantic, sense: that is not truth which does not ultimately enable human freedom, most importantly the practical control over our conditions of life and our self-development. These are the great insights romanticism contributed after the first Enlightenment generation ran aground on the contradictions described by Marx in his Third Thesis. It is this union of Romantic thought, with its understanding of subjectivity, identity, and creativity, and Enlightenment thought, with its understanding of the role of knowledge and reason – to use that word for good – that has the potential to overcome the original contradictions of Enlightenment, and contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer’s war-darkened pessimism, lead us not to fascism, but to the beginning of the ‘real history of humanity’, the history of our free development.

Third Worldism

The background to the debates over the Third Worldist thesis must be summed up for any of this to be meaningful. In essence, the issue is as follows: there has been an in many respects ever-widening gap between the countries subject to imperialism and the countries undertaking the imperialism, mainly European and ex-European settler states, since 1750-1800 or so. In the days of Marx and Engels, this was not itself much subject of attention of communist writers and theorists, as they opposed colonialism – especially from the 1860s onwards Marx and Engels became much more systematic critics of it, unlike their ambiguous interpretation of the 1850s, as detailed in e.g. Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins. For them, and the generation after them, the evil of colonialism was simply the political oppression and forced subjection to capitalist social relations suffered by the many peoples outside Europe, and to be opposed as part of the wider class struggle against the ruling classes and the capitalist system which had spawned such colonial activity. But it was not seen as a theoretical problem in this way. It became such only in the 20th century, when other than in Russia the European working classes systematically failed to take any opportunity offered for preparing and attempting a serious anticapitalist revolution. There were close calls, such as in Germany (twice) and in Italy, but in all of these cases it was the organized social-democracy, the reformist wing of the working class, which betrayed and opposed the revolution in its crucial hour.

Not coincidentally, this reformist, legalist turn was the most pronounced and visible the earliest in Britain, the most developed imperialist country – to such a degree that Engels already despaired of the British working class. As he wrote, and I quoted in my review of Cope:

Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the case. The elements at present active may become important since they have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the workers and they succeed in getting control of it. Till then they will remain individual minds, with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the great movement of the ‘forties, standing behind them and nothing more. And–apart from the unexpected–a really general workers’ movement will only come into existence here when the workers are made to feel the fact that England’s world monopoly is broken.
Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis of the political nullity of the English workers. The tail of the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly but nevertheless sharing in its advantages, politically they are naturally the tail of the “great Liberal Party,” which for its part pays them small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has given the mass of better placed workers the vote. But once America and the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a decent breach in this monopoly (and in iron this is coming rapidly, in cotton unfortunately not as yet) you will see something here.

Lenin, too, reacted to the first great social-democratic betrayal, the war of 1914, by seeking its origins in imperialism, leading him to write (on the basis of the works of the bourgeois radical Hobson) his classic work on that topic. This book was not just a theoretical analysis of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism”, as Lenin saw it (rightly or wrongly), but as all of Lenin’s works also a major political intervention: a critique of the origins of reformism itself, and its betrayal of real revolutionary aspirations. However, all this is just one thing. Until the Second World War, it could still be maintained that imperialism was ultimately an extension of the power of the capitalist classes of Europe over other countries, a way of realizing value or extending capitalist markets to solve the contradictions of capitalism at home and to diffuse the natural militancy of the working classes. While a theoretically rather incoherent medley of political economic elements, it was in one form or another the standard narrative of the period and still is for many more ‘orthodox’ Marxists today.

However, everything changed with the defeat of fascism and the triumph of social-democracy in the West, and the victories of the anticolonial forces in most of the world. Now, for the first time, it became clear that the general trend was not one of the natural militancy of the European/American/ANZAC working classes, but rather of their decisive loyalty to reformism, one that for the first and only time in the history of capitalism seemed to promise not just full employment and a welfare state, but also continually rising living standards for those same working people. The natural militancy, it was proven in the 1960s, rested first and foremost with the anticolonial forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and with racially oppressed groups; emphatically not with the solid vanguard of the unionized working classes, largely male, in Europe and the US who were expected to be the font of revolution. In every situation where these groups were confronted with a decision between social-democracy with imperialism and revolution without it, they chose the former. The marches for Enoch Powell and the military coup of the pieds noirs were just a faint impression of this tendency, which also showed itself in the United States with the desperate support of the so-called ‘poor whites’ for the racial system in that country. The empires of the French and British had long made the idea that the metropole working classes had ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ a fantasy – and as became more and more clear over the course of the 20th century, the chains were not so much on them, but on people oppressed on their behalf, and the loss of such chains was keenly felt in the imperialist nations. The solidarity and internationalism of the working people of the West failed every time it was put to the test, with even the devastating defeat of the Vietnam War not sufficiently distinguishable from the experience of World War I in this regard.

It is in response to this that within Maoism originated the current of ‘Third Worldism’. Maoism was always most oriented toward the formerly colonized countries of all forms of Marxism, and with its often agrarian outlook it therefore followed a natural course in that direction. The Third Worldists developed out of the comments on the British oppression of Ireland and the creation of a reformist, pro-imperialist labor aristocracy through its spoils a more general thesis. Using the ideas of unequal exchange formulated by dissident Marxist economists such as Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel, the Third Worldist thesis has posited that given a worldwide law of value (also the title of one of Amin’s books), flows of value from the Third World to the First, part of unequal exchange enforced by imperialism, account for the political aspects of the story of divergence. ‘The Great Divergence’, the ever-widening gap between The West and The Rest since 1800 or so, has been noted by many economists, strangely enough much more so in the liberal mainstream than in Marxism. It has been one of the driving forces of research in economic history, mainly by means of orthodox economic theory, and it has also led to the development of a non-Marxist long-term analysis of changes in structural patterns of global trade, known as World Systems Theory. There is a great and burgeoning economic historical literature on the Great Divergence, beginning with its coining by Kenneth Pomeranz, and much of it has remained entirely unused by all but a handful of the most innovative Marxist thinkers. Rarely for the social sciences, Marxist theory actually lags behind the liberal mainstream in this field in some respects.

What greatly strengthens the hand of the Third Worldist interpretation here is the systematic neglect of this phenomenon by most Marxist interpreters; there has been much Marxist writing on imperialism, the slave trade, and so forth, but rarely in the longer run histories is it presented as the central question of our time. Only for the economic historians and the Third Worldists is this so. With the 1950s-1970s showing the world’s only capitalist boom period, and this period leading to vast increases in the living standards of the West without corresponding improvements elsewhere, and this period inaugurating the definite defeat of the last waves of revolutionary activity among working people in the West (with the movements of 1968, the Hungarian and Czechoslovak revolts, the Italian uprisings, etc.), this seems more than an unpleasant coincidence. For all the talk of the interests of working people everywhere being in socialism and revolution worldwide, in revolution in permanence or whatever form else, this has fallen systematically on deaf ears among the ‘Actually Existing Working Class’ since the oil crisis. If anything, when confronted with major crisis, as it is today, the Western working class instinctively chooses the populist right or outright fascist movements. This is the pattern one expects of those benefiting from exploitation, not those suffering from it. It is not just a matter of a merely contingent ‘downturn’, as often presented in Trotskyist understandings, nor of a betrayal, as the ‘anti-revisionist’ crowd would have it. Only the Third Worldist viewpoint, it seems, even understands the fundamental significance of this phenomenon, and moreover provides a plausible explanation: this gives it a great theoretical value.

Revolution and the Death of Social-Democracy

All this having been said, I now turn to comrade Hamerquist’s concerns. Hamerquist raises a number of major objections, which I want to deal with in a provisional but serious way. As always, these are matters of ongoing theoretical concern to me and increasing numbers of young Marxist thinkers, and therefore serious, non-kneejerk exchanges of views and information are essential to moving forward. Nothing here is set in stone. But to get to the point: the first major problem comrade Hamerquist identifies is the seeming contradiction in my article, and perhaps in Third Worldism generally, between economic divergence and political convergence. This is an important point. I have strongly praised Cope’s analysis of the history of the emergence of the labor aristocracy, and its natural political form of social-democracy, through the colonization of Ireland, the genocidal settlerism of America, Canada and Australia, the conquest of India and China, the subjugation of Africa; none of which could fail to leave its mark on the inhabitants of the glorious empires of this short century, living on a small rock, third from the Sun. In my original review, I said that “the Western working class currently is not revolutionary, and in fact cannot be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism.” As a generalization, I believe this to be true, on the basis of the above. But what could this mean? Is then all activity fruitless? Or was the Rote Armee Fraktion right, and is a manner of ‘propaganda of the deed’ in order to demoralize the Western ruling class the only possibility, however minute its impact?

To clarify this, I wish to draw together the Third Worldist strand of analysis summarized above with another viewpoint I have developed, in particular in my article on the death of social-democracy. That is to say, I think the Third Worldist view as described by Cope and others identifies a real and currently dominant trend in the political economy of the Western world, in fact it is what makes speaking of ‘the West’ meaningful in the first place. This involves a rejection of the viewpoint that the Western working class is simply deluded en masse, or held in thrall by false consciousness or the culture industry or media propaganda, which are arguments in bad faith to defend a failed theory; and it also involves a rejection of the idea that they must be revolutionary because they are the most ‘productive’ workers, or are most proletarianized as divorced from the means of production and massed into factories, both of which are simply empirically untrue.

However, that is not all. Simultaneously, there is another major political economic trend, a more recent one. The postwar world has seen the rise of what William I. Robinson has called the ‘transnational capitalist class’. Indeed, much of the recent economic history often summarized under the name of ‘globalization’ is merely a fulfillment of the Marxist promise of a true worldwide law of value, a world in which “the bourgeoisie makes the world in its own image”. This entails a worldwide labor competition and a worldwide capital competition, with that caveat that the former is infinitely more warped and superexploited by restrictions on immigration and labor movement than prevailed before. One consequence of this has been the export of the actual sites of the production of surplus value from the First World to the Third World. A successful planning strategy of development and hitching oneself politically and economically to this increasingly global wagon of the capitalist class allowed Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan a high level of living standards, comparable for the first time since the 1800s with that of Europe. Not all countries will be able to succeed in this way; as the ‘Asian Tigers’ discovered, competition is always, everywhere, a zero sum game. But what this does mean is this: as production of value happens more and more elsewhere, and the Western economies are more and more engaged in production that is not – from the point of view of accumulation of value – ‘productive’, both the ability and willingness of the ruling class to undertake the grand social-democratic bargain between capital and labor in the metropole will decline. With every case of ‘outsourcing’ and every case of autonomous development of Third World nations, the basis of social-democracy in the West is undermined, and its politics dies a slow death.

In this then I disagree somewhat with many of the Third Worldist theorists. As Hamerquist has rightly noted, there is a contradiction in the view that on the one hand, the Third World is the real locus of value-productive activity, and on the other hand, the idea that divergence can only extend further and further, and imperialism only become stronger and stronger. In fact, imperialism is a highly contradictory system. While Cope’s analysis to my mind rightly identifies the divergence tendency of political economy, dominant in roughly the century from 1880 to 1980, my attempt has been to simultaneously theorize the counter-tendency that I believe is slowly but surely gaining the upper hand since the 1980s. This corresponds to the flattening out of real compensation for the Western working classes, and to the rise of the new regional powers such as China, India, Brazil, and so forth. This corresponds also, not coincidentally, with the fall in the rate of profit for the major Western countries identified by Kliman (at least for the US) and others. Finally, that in turn corresponds to the subsequent explosion of financial speculation, ‘leveraging’, and debt, which is without historical precedent in its scope and scale. Not even the United Provinces’ ultimate collapse in speculative bubbles compares to what has been seen before the current depression, and what is still going on.

This then is, for now, my answer to Hamerquist’s query on this point: it is both true that the Western working class, organized in social-democracy, is nonrevolutionary and a labor aristocracy and that this same social-democracy is historically in its declining phase, undermined by global trends not of its own making and which it is unable to control. The first response to this will be either general fury and a sense of betrayal, as we see everywhere today, or a reliance on fascism and Poujadist phenomena, as we see in Greece and Italy. But it does not need to end there, and that means that there may actually be considerably more potential for real revolutionary activity in the West, soon, than has been the case in a long time. Comrade Hamerquist is confused with my presentation because I failed to emphasize sufficiently the temporal dimension of this, the contradiction between a long and a medium-term trend in time, contrary to each other.

Faith in Nation?

However, comrade Hamerquist raises another important point: the question of the nation-state. As I understand his critique, he argues that one major weakness of the Third Worldist viewpoint, and by extension mine, is its continuing reliance on the nation-state as the core political unit of relevance. Using the works of Arrighi, a world systems theorist, and Antonio Negri in an innovative and creative way, Hamerquist argues that the traditional Maoist view of the countryside/periphery waging prolongued war ‘from the outside’ against the city/center is out of date, and that the central contradictions are no longer between nations, but between different groups of the working class both inside and outside of the metropole. Here Hamerquist points to the gender dimension of labor in the Third World, as well as the withering away of the territorial nation-state logic of capitalism under the pressure of American decline, as the last great empire (the way Arrighi sees it). I am sympathetic to these critiques, and they deserve serious examination.

I would first set out that my view is decidedly not just one of nation-against-nation, or of the classic argument that “the working classes must first deal with their own bourgeoisie”. As we can learn from Aijaz Ahmad and other writers, it is highly dangerous to speak undifferentiatedly about nations, including ones subject to imperialism, as if they have no class and gender contradictions of their own. Arguably, much of the unreflective ‘anti-imperialism’ of Third Worldists stems from this mistake, often leading to dishonest endorsements of petty tyrants in foreign countries in the kind of parody of Orientalism that gave so much munition to critics like Christopher Hitchens. Instead, I would venture that the right view is precisely to recognize that the realization of ‘globalization’, a trend always latently inherent in capitalism, creates a transnational capitalist class, and thereby creates new class oppositions. There is not just the struggle between the workers and their national bourgeoisies, nor just the struggle between the workers of the East against the workers and capitalists of the West; there is also the struggles of the national bourgeoisies against the transnational ruling classes, insofar as these increasingly come into competitive contradiction with each other, which in turn creates new opportunities for transnational working class internationalism. The gender aspect, too, is not just a coloration of events – patriarchal structures predate capitalism in (almost) all parts of the world, and it is no coincidence that the working class’ most revolutionary and oppressed elements are increasingly women. It is interesting to note that here, too, transnational capitalism and the decay of social-democracy both have caused a convergence of sorts, more than a divergence: the average militant unionist in the West today is quite likely to be a woman, often an ethnic or ‘racial’ minority at that.

However, as Robinson and others have hasted to point out, all this does not mean the decline of the significance of the nation-state. It means its transformation into a new role in global capitalism. As the United States as hegemon declines, its role as policeman of the interests of capital, its role as global state in the sense of “the executive committee of the whole bourgeoisie” declines with it. This means a vacuum of power. It not only gives rise to regional powers and potentially a new balance of powers system (though still under American overlordship, as once it was under British rule); it also means that the practical enforcement of capitalist rule revolves more and more on the various state and regional actors, which cluster together in order to effectively create the new ‘concert of nations’ required to impose and reproduce capitalism in their own spheres. Transnational capitalism does not yet have its own bodies of armed men, yet requires a global competition and therefore a global Gleichschaltung of economic and social relations. This creates a need for increasing, rather than decreasing, state power. This is strengthened further by the need for national bourgeoisies to destroy the weakened social-democratic and anti-colonial compromises to an ever greater degree, whether in Europe or in China, if they are to keep up competition with one another and survive the rule of the transnational capitalist class. All in all, this means the need for an arrangement of strong states and regional forces, which can enforce the Thomas Friedmanite ‘flat world’ in their own domains, while simultaneously having the ability to destroy the old social-democratic order and impose new markets and commodifications in every sphere in order to equalize capital accumulation. This is the reality of neoliberalism, not its own rhetoric of empowerment, small government, and the soft death of the nation-state.

It is in response to this new political constellation that there arise two new trends: on the one hand, new regional nationalisms and separatisms, from the Welsh to the Basque, and regional militant movements, such as the Naxalites, all of whom resist the deeply felt hijacking of their nation-state identity by the interests of transnational capital – in other words, a response to the undermining of the nation-building process the 18th and 19th centuries constituted. On the other hand, the creation of powerful regional and international blocs in the style of the European Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, ASEAN, OPEC, and so forth, which not only intend to represent the interests of transnational capitals where American power no longer suffices to guarantee it, but which also create new competitions between each other along the lines of the old states system. The contradictory attitudes to the European Union within the UK’s political system are clear examples of this: many elements of the right despise the European Union as they feel Britain’s own capitalist interests are best served outside it, whereas at the same time the sections of the British ruling class attuned to the transnational capitalism, via global financial capital, are strongly in favor of it as it can enforce the (re)imposition of fully capitalist social relations within all of Europe, and form a much safer sphere of operations than a single country’s capital would on its own. These groups only agree within the Conservative and Liberal-Democratic parties (and some of the Labour right) when the EU seeks to impose restraints on Britain’s pre-eminent position as speculator-in-chief; but outside this, they have ever less in common. Similar phenomena, including confusion and divisions within the ranks of the social-democrats, are visible throughout Europe and mutatis mutandis even in the United States.

For these reasons then, the nation-state is not on its way out, but it is gaining a new role and becoming considerably more contradictory as a state form – in the full sense of the locus of physical power – than it has perhaps been since 1648. I am sympathetic to Hamerquist’s use of Arrighi and Negri to point to the transnational and sub-national contradictions, but I do not believe these are separate phenomena over and against the ones at the level of (groups of) nation states. Rather, they are one. Therefore when I speak of a rule of the West, rather than the United States – something my critic objects to – it is in the context of the first great tendency of contemporary political economy, the one analyzed by Cope. Within the other tendency, a rule of the West is much more contingent and subject to many uncertainties and internal fractures. The West maintains itself, for now, at least as an identifiable military alliance and political bloc, as it was hammered out by American power in order to resist the Soviet Union – not much unlike the ‘friendly alliance’ of city-states the Athenians forced against the Spartans, which included the famous sacking of Melos. From this viewpoint, as opposed to the Cope one, it is no more an organic entity than the Delian League, and no more likely to last.

That comrade Hamerquist forces us to think about the interaction between the status of the nation-state under globalized capitalism and the interpretations of the Great Divergence is, notwithstanding all this, a valuable impetus. His use of Arrighi and Negri here is telling, because it is precisely the world systems theorists as well as Negri and Hardt who have, fairly uniquely among radicals, attempted to theorize precisely this interaction. The Third Worldist thesis has done much for our understanding of the latter, more (to my mind) than Negri and most Marxist thinkers, but not much for the former. Moreover, there is still much empirical material to be integrated. The world systems theorists have as their weakness an understanding of political economy that is ultimately inferior to the Marxist, as it is unduly focused on exchange rather than production, and fails to comprehend capitalism as its own self-expanding system of social relations. At the same time, they have integrated the empirical knowledge provided by many mainstream economic historians, including radical liberals like the contemporary John Hobson (grandson of Lenin’s inspiration) and anthropologists such as Sir Jack Goody; this is a task I suspect has not been adequately taken up by Marxist thinkers yet. With the Third Worldist critique of the lazy, hand-waving dogmatism of much Marxist understandings of the ‘downturn’ understood, we can move on to a new phase of synthesizing and integrating these different strands into our theoretical comprehension of reality. With the majority of the world for the first time ever being urban workers; with fascism once more on the rise and the social-democratic consensus disintegrating; with new powers and regional rivalries threatening the world with nuclear annihilation; with religious reaction sweeping the globe in response to the disintegration of the developmental state model; and with economic divergence and political convergence in ever-increasing contradiction, there is a great amount to be done for Marxism today.

The world is a vampire. That is to say: the world as it appears today, the capitalist world, is a kind of society uniquely oriented towards the accumulation of labor time for its own sake, and the production and exchange of commodities is the means through which this is achieved. In the classical economics of the 19th century and even more so in the neoclassical economics of today, much effort has been expended on naturalizing this type of society, that is, on making it seem like the inevitable structure of human society once a certain level of technological advance or social sophistication has been reached. Economic history has often been derivative of this view, that it is mankind’s lot, in Adam Smith’s words, to “truck, barter and exchange”. The transformation of all goods into commodities produced for and sold in the market appears then as a natural outcome of the progress of society, and history of the economic in turn appears as merely a casting off of those restrictions on natural liberty which prevent the full flourishing of the market pur sang.

Now it is well-known that this view was strongly contested in the thought of Karl Marx, whose critique of political economy was devoted to the denaturalization of capitalist society. For Marx, it was of the utmost importance to show that capitalist society had its own logic, with a historical origin, and therefore also, at least potentially, a historical end. That which has originated at a definite point in history as the result of conscious and unconscious political and economic transformations is something which can also end by such means. Marx’s theory of value, often called the ‘labor theory of value’ (although Marx did not call it that), is often and rightly understood to have served the purpose of describing the logic of capitalism as its own unique system in this light. Although the classical economists had theories of value, at least for capitalism, and although arguably neoclassical economics has a hidden value theory as well, the idea is most generally associated with Marxist thought. For this reason I will start there, with its historical and ontological status. Then I will talk about the possible meaning of this concept of value for precapitalist societies, how we could define it, and what this might mean for our understanding of economic history as a discipline.

Now there is much to Marx’s theory of value, his theory of crisis and so forth, but these I do not want to go into – my purpose here is not to elucidate what Marx’s theory of value is, nor to defend it as correct. It has often been criticized and from many different political angles, and while I personally think it stands up very well in the latest economic theory literature, that is not what this lecture is about. For many, Marx’s theory of value often seems to be the sticking point keeping them from accepting his general analysis: people just can’t wrap their heads around what it is supposed to be, what purpose it is supposed to serve. It is clear Marx found it important, and tried to make political points with it, but it seems too elaborate and abstract a system to be merely a cover for a number of moral and political criticisms of capitalism – after all, many have been formulated that had no need to refer to a theory of value. In the Marxist economic literature, there is an extensive amount written on defending, elucidating, improving, and applying his theory of value. However, my feeling is that this literature is lacking in one significant dimension: there is very little explanation or defense of the theory of value itself. By this I mean, not even just Marx’s theory of value, but the need for any theory of value at all: what kind of thing a theory of value is, and why economic historians, in particular, might need one. This is what I want to analyze today. My remarks on this are preliminary, and should be taken as such: I am merely attempting to explore some, to my mind, fairly unexamined ground here.

So what kind of beast is a theory of value? Is it really merely a rhetorical device, a mere metaphysics, as so many critics from the economic mainstream have suggested throughout the years? To my mind, if Marx’s theory of value is to work as a theory, it should not just have a certain explanatory or political value right now, but it should also be understandable and applicable in a historical context. At the same time, this requires a careful examination of what aspects of economic history should be taken as specific to capitalism, and which as transhistorical, and therefore also a necessary part of the logic of other economic formations.

It was highly important for Marx to differentiate capitalism from pre-capitalist societies. The theory of value of capitalism he outlines in his famous work Capital applies to capitalism only, for this reason, and takes as premise the development of, in Marx’s terminology, “generalized commodity production” as well as the predominance of “free wage labour”. The resulting universal commensurability of commodities, and of the labour power which makes them, is where Marx starts his analysis of capitalism in Capital. This is what makes capitalism what it is. The expression of this universal commensurability is the all-pervasiveness of money in the process of exchange. It is this attribute of money that makes ‘the economy’ seem a separate thing, operating on its own strength entirely separate from the ‘thick’ substance of the rest of society – the clearest example of this being the ability of financial capital to induce crises in the whole of society by its activities. It was for this reason that Karl Polanyi and other economic historians have suggested that capitalism is unique precisely in having the economic logic be divorced, or disembedded, from wider society.

But what could this practically mean? We know now that Polanyi was wrong to think markets and money exchange were nonexistent in precapitalist societies. It is not as simple as that. We must seek something more fundamental to all forms of production and exchange in our recorded history. Marx himself attempted to do so: in the Communist Manifesto as well as in later works, capitalism itself as a mode of production is placed in a larger economic history context, as succeeding other economic formations such as feudalism, slavery, the so-called Asiatic mode of production, and so forth. What characterizes all these modes of production? It is that all these were societies in their own way producing and distributing goods in order to reproduce their existing social relations. To cite the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, this means that society exists as “an articulated ensemble of relations and functions, all of which are simultaneously necessary for its existence as such, but whose importance for its reproduction is variable. (…) There exists a hierarchy of social relations depending on the function each assumes in this process.” Moreover, each of these societies in its reproduction is capable of generating a surplus sufficient to allow the existence of a state and their own ruling classes, whatever they were.

We need not accept all Marx and Engels’ precise classifications today to understand that the significance of this is to suggest that precapitalist societies were sufficiently different from the capitalist one to have their own logic, their own social relations reproducing that kind of society through the production of material goods, and what’s more, that we can understand this logic through the lens of reproduction. It has been said that Marxism inaugurated the discipline of economic history by this idea, and indeed, the very premise of economic history must be that the material reproduction of past societies, in whatever way they worked, must be intelligible to us today. I want to argue then that from a historical comparative perspective, a theory of value such as Marx developed for capitalism appears as a way to describe the logics of present and past economic formations in a way that makes intelligible to us how they reproduce themselves materially, that is to say, according to what logic a given society produces and distributes the goods necessary not just to reproduce that society in its existing form, but also to permit, where applicable, the surplus that allows the existence of people who do not work, of leisure, of war, of arts and culture, and so forth.

This approach to the ontological question of what a theory of value is suggests to me strong commonalities with the methodologies of anthropology, in particular the subdiscipline known as economic anthropology. Whereas Marxists and non-Marxist economic historians have made great contributions to our understanding of the empirical details of the historical production and exchange of particular goods, of the economic institutions and organizations of the past, and so forth, few have put this in the context of the need to understand the value logics of these societies. Even the Marxist debates about the transition from one ‘mode of production’ to another have by and large focused on at what point and in what historical societies we’re allowed to use the word ‘capitalism’; but this is not what I mean. What I intend is to suggest an economic anthropological approach to the value question. It is, or should be, I believe, no coincidence that the word value (wert) was chosen by Marx as the core term for the thing that capitalist society eternally seeks to accumulate and that organizes its reproduction. Many people have found this, too, confusing: after all, doesn’t value suggest a moral judgement? Aren’t values things more similar to judgements about virtues, priorities , and what a society is about socially and culturally, rather than economically? Using a term like that in what purports to be an objective, scientific analysis of capitalism seems fallacious, or a way to smuggle in moral judgement through the back door. But for me, this makes sense when understood in an anthropological manner (and I must admit here, I am not a trained anthropologist).

What thinking about present and past social formations in terms of value helps us do is to overcome precisely this separation between ‘the economic’ and ‘the social’, or in the economic history literature, ‘the cultural’; where the latter tends to function as the remainder category for everything that could not be explained in terms of the former. As I have mentioned before, this division is itself a product of the appearance of our own society, and therefore risks anachronism as well as superficiality. Both Marxist and non-Marxist economists and economic historians have often been accused of economic reductionism, of wishing to explain and reduce everything to terms of material production and gain. This may be unfair to some extent, but this division between the economic and the sociocultural in economic history lends reason to this criticism, especially as the division is always made in favor, in scientific terms, of the ‘economic dimension of life’. I think if we are to understand economic history properly, we cannot so easily divorce whatever elements the discipline has determined as its own terrain from the wider societies they are and were part of, as is too commonly the practice now.

What this requires is a level of abstraction that can accommodate, when analyzing the social relations of past economic formations, both the processes of production and distribution of goods themselves, as well as the ideas that people have about these processes and these goods that are constitutive of the relations themselves. Put in clearer terms, what this means is that when people make or distribute certain goods, they have a view of themselves, their role in society, and the role of other people and goods in that society, which determine which goods are made, who obtains them, whether and under what conditions they are exchanged, and so forth. As Maurice Godelier has emphasized in his underappreciated work of economic anthropology, The Mental and the Material, the mistake has hitherto often been to see the processes of production and distribution as one thing and their mental representation and content as another, similar to Marx’s so abused metaphor of the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’. Both in Marxist and non-Marxist economic history, it has tended to be production and distribution themselves that count, through analyses of guilds, price lists, trading depots, land markets, and so forth, and the question of people’s values, beliefs, and representations of society are left to the cultural and social historians. Or where they are examined, they are examined precisely as a superstructure – they are not understood as constituting part of the way a society organizes its production and distribution itself, except as a mere reflection.

But in the real experience of society, these two domains cannot be separated. The mental perception of society (what Godelier calls ‘idéel‘), at least insofar as it concerns the processes of production and distribution of goods (the matériel), is an integral part of these processes themselves. They are what allows these societies to exist as they do. Without this understanding, even if we can explain in purely technical terms how exchange and production worked in a particular society, we cannot explain why it worked like that and no other way, and more importantly still, why people put up with it. As Godelier wrote: “What we need to be able to explain… is how social groups and individuals can in some measure co-operate in the production and reproduction of their own subordination, even exploitation. (…) We must therefore seek to use our theoretical imagination to penetrate the black box of those mechanisms which goven the distribution of the same representations among social groups with partially or profoundly opposed interests.”

If we want to take such an analysis beyond a Voltairian ‘bad priests’ sort of explanation, where ideology is simply a layer imposed on top of society by a ruling class to deceive everyone to their own benefit, we must see such representations as constitutive of people’s self-perception in the reproduction of society. In other words, the question is not just what goods people make and who gets them, but what these goods mean to them, and why certain people are considered entitled to them. This cannot be separated from the processes themselves. As Godelier emphasizes: “There exists in every social relation a mental part that is both one of the actual conditions for the birth and reproduction of this relation, and at the same time its internal organizational schema.” This goes beyond Marx’s own theory of value itself, and into areas I think generally left unexamined by approaches relying entirely on it.

Economic anthropology furnishes us with a great number of different systems of production and exchange, both with and without money, with or without commodity production, using gifts, potlatches, hereditary and ancestral power, magic and taboo of all sorts; unfortunately I simply do not have the time to go into these in detail, so I must speak in fairly abstract terms. What is decisive here is to understand that societies are rarely, if ever, constituted explicitly in terms of the ‘economic’. As Durkheim and others have observed, the imaginary constitution of society is usually in terms of some divine order and dispensation, something justified and constituted by the gods and requiring the constant placating of the gods to maintain; but even in modern societies, the elaborate apparatus of political theory and philosophy has served to find justification for society in terms often not immediately economic, such as in the work of the social contract theorists, old and new. The Athenian polis was, despite its advanced and almost modern-seeming political and economic activities, first and foremost a covenant with the gods for the perpetuation of society on the basis of a complicated system of heredity, obligations towards the gods as well as their institutions, and the relations to other Greek city-states.

In ancient Egypt, the rule of the Pharaoh was based on his ability to control the Nile floods (by communicating with the gods) and thereby make possible the harvest, for which in return he was to be placated with tribute in the form of goods or labor, and so on. An economic historian might reduce this to speaking merely of a geographically encaged peasantry captured by a “hydraulic state”, as Karl Wittfogel did, but this is to miss the significance of the view of the Pharaoh. This was not merely a ruling class legitimation of the extortion of the Egyptian peasants, but for the Egyptian peasants, the reproduction of Egyptian society actually did depend on distributing a certain amount of surplus goods and labor to the Pharaoh and his retainers; without this, the very logic of Egyptian society would not have been possible, and therefore there would not have been an Egyptian society in the first place. This is not a conservative argument to justify all forms of class rule, but it is to understand the significance of the particular social relations of Egyptian society – social relations which, as Godelier says, “dominate when they function simultaneously as social relations of production, as the social framework and support for the material process of the appropriation of nature.”

What I want to suggest then is that this is the first aspect of value that is essential for comparative economic history: value in the sense of the values people hold about society, their representation of their society’s purpose and their role within it, and the obligations and debts this places upon them. As David Graeber has described at length in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, relations of exchange have throughout history often taken the form of a debt relation, not least the eternal and irreducable debt owed to the gods and/or divine rulers for the constitution and perpetuation of society itself. Debt, as we know, is in and of itself merely a claim on distribution of goods; but if it comes to dominate the value system and representation of a society in the minds of those producing goods, it becomes part of the system of production and exchange itself. It is what the production and distribution of goods is seen as being ultimately for, and it is this, not the mere day-to-day political needs of a ruling class or the technical requirements of factories and markets, that determines the form and nature of the processes of production and exchange. As Graeber suggests in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, it is this ability of value theory to (I paraphrase) “suggest the possibility of overcoming the difference between theories that start from social structure and theories that start from individual motivation” that constitutes what economic anthropology could be seen as contributing as a discipline. Certainly within economic history this seems of enormous importance.

The second aspect I want to suggest is a closely related one, which I have alluded to before: commensurability. I think an important part of Marx’s need to explain capitalism as a historically unique social logic is his observation, not understood by the classical economists, that capitalism is a society in which there is a generalized commensurability of goods and labor. In the vast majority of historically existing societies, various goods and various kinds of labor have been sometimes commensurable, sometimes not. Often certain objects are sacred, or hereditary, and cannot be traded for or compared with other objects; certain kinds of production are intrinsic to themselves for their ritual meaning or their political purpose; and divisions of gender, caste, age, and so forth can be so strong as to make any comparison not just impossible to express in market terms, but in fact altogether inconceivable. Moreover, there are always a number of goods that are commonplace and for common purposes, and do not have any higher social or cultural status, and these are for that reason often interchangeable in a market sense, allowing measurements of simple accumulation in that sense. Such mental, representational systems create or oppose commensurability between goods, which in turn determines the nature and processes of production and exchange; they are an essential part of the value logic of a given society’s economy.

Yet every society needs to reproduce itself and its social relations, and therefore must have a yardstick, or perhaps multiple, by which it measures its success or failure at doing so – a yardstick that is expressed within these mental representations of what society is about. These could conceivably be expressed in terms of divine favor, political success, territorial expansion, or other things, but there must be some way in which this yardstick relates to the material production and exchange of goods by whatever means – for example whether the size of the chief’s potlatch is sufficient to feed the tribe and more impressive than that of the rival people. I would venture that it is only in this sense that it makes sense for Marx to say that the social relations, including their mental content, can come into conflict with the development of technology. This yardstick (and of course there can be more than one, and more or less conscious) is what I would call value in the analysis of that society.

Having made these two observations about the significance of value for economic history, I want to draw this argument to a close. As I have said, a theory of value like that of Marx has often been discussed purely in terms of its significance in economic theory or in politics, but it has not often been asked what value itself could mean and what kind of historical-ontological status it has. My argument is that the idea of theories of value, applied to past societies, is or could be a tremendously useful concept for economic historians. It allows us to talk about mental representations, ideas, and religious and cultural logics if and when they become a functional part of the social relations of production. By this I mean that these mental conceptions become material and part of economic history when they, at least in part, determine the nature of the production of goods and their distribution in a given society. From economic anthropology we can learn not just a great deal about the different ways in which precapitalist societies have organized these processes, but we can also fruitfully apply the rich body of theory on social facts, obligation and debt, and commensurability to economic history itself. This, in turn, I hope will allow economic historians more generally, whether Marxist or otherwise, to overcome the dichotomy between the economic and the sociocultural in examining past and present societies, and thereby remove some major obstacles for a more holistic and integrated understanding of how societies actually work.

Also understandable is Ackerman’s negative response to models of a post-capitalist economy along the lines of some form of direct democracy, such as Albert and Hahnel’s “Parecon” approach. For Albert and Hahnel, democratic councils would gather data from individuals regarding their preferences, debate these according to socialist and ecological norms, and process them into a planning system, which would regularly update its information according to the same political processes; all this in order to regulate production for human need. Ackerman is justifiably skeptical of the workability of this proposal, as it would require millions of political debates about millions of input-output processes from wildly divergent sources and for wildly divergent ends. If every aspect of the planning system would have to be truly democratic – in the sense of being up for immediate political input ‘from below’ – any system with more than a rudimentary division of labor would quickly come to a shuddering halt.

For Ackerman, this is proof of the validity of the so-called calculation problem, an old argument from liberal critics of Marxism (in particular the Austrian school of economics), alleging that it is a priori impossible for centrally planned economies of any kind to operate: only prices, the argument runs, are accurately able to convey the necessary decentralized and distributed information that makes up the relative exchange value of goods. Therefore, in any system seeking to replace prices (and by implication, profits) with some form of central management, there necessarily follows a shortage of information in the decision-making process in production and exchange, with the familiar results of shortages, gluts, famines, and failures of supply.

For the liberal critics, and especially the Austrian school, this argument against central planning has often been generalized against any attempt to interfere with the market process: after all, if this argument holds, any interference at all will prevent ‘getting the prices right’, and thereby move the economy away from optimal allocation of goods and services. However, even the mainstream economic literature abounds with debate as to the accuracy of this proposition, with much of the debate revolving around the significance and extent of the presence of externalities, that is, costs not internalized into the price system but nonetheless real from a social or ecological viewpoint. But even taking the pervasiveness of externalities for granted, the critique of government intervention allows the left little substantial political room for maneouvre – at most mere management of market failures. This does not satisfy Ackerman, who is committed to superseding capitalism as a social system, and therefore he is faced with a plausible economic answer to this critique.

Ackerman’s solution is to propose a market socialist alternative, which would have prices (and thereby evade the calculation problem), but not profits – a handy solution if ever there was one, having one’s cake and eating it too. In this, he follows some of the market socialist critics from Eastern Europe, who responded to what they saw as the political-economic failures of their countries under Soviet-oriented rule by formulating a happy middle between a planned economy and the ‘anarchy’ of market capitalism. This proposal boils down to leaving intact the free market in the sphere of production and exchange, with autonomy of firms and competition between them, but by socializing the commanding heights of the economy in the sphere of finance and credit, in particular the banks: “A constellation of autonomous firms, financed by a multiplicity of autonomous banks or investment funds, all competing and interacting in a market — yet all nevertheless socially owned.”

Of course, if one has this, but permits profits to be pocketed by the capitalist class, one would simply have a kind of social-democratic capitalism with nationalized banks – perhaps radical, but not necessarily anything novel. Ackerman realizes this and confronts the problem of profit under market socialism with admirable clarity. His proposal is a compulsory purchase of all private financial assets – stocks, bonds, investments, and so forth – and to deposit them into a “multiplicity of socialized banks and investment funds owning and allocating capital among the means of production”. Any surplus firms would generate would then (presumably as dividend) be allocated towards this socialized fund, and thereby the capitalist class would be eliminated from the social division of labour – the euthanasia of the rentier interest, at least, as Ackerman notes. Now, this would still leave the tremendous inequalities generated by the buying, rather than expropriating, of the capitalists’ financial assets. But here Ackerman has a simple solution as well, a classic left social-democratic measure: one simply caps the total assets an individual (or family) may have. Socialism in two steps!

Is it really so easy? I would argue it is not. It falls to me to defend the currently very unfashionable proposition that a socialist mode of production, recognizable to the Marxist tradition as well as to non-Marxist opponents of capitalism, actually requires a system of central planning and cannot permit any kind of market socialism to exist in the scale and manner Ackerman suggests. To do so, I must also analyze the significance of the central planning efforts of the Soviet Union, seen by friend and foe alike in these debates as the prototype of such a system, and access to what extent it really did ‘fail’ (as Ackerman takes as decisively proven), and what this might imply. It is no small task, and I will necessarily have to be somewhat summary in my arguments, but the significance of this debate makes it essential to get this right. I do not wish to make a virtue of orthodoxy, but market socialist critiques such as those of Seth Ackerman have been a dime a dozen in the history of the communist movement, and they have never been convincing nor been able to make themselves practical within actual anti-capitalist revolutionary movements. I would argue this is no coincidence, for they contain a number of fundamental flaws that Marx and his immediate successors already identified. In this reply to Ackerman, I will argue two things. Firstly, that market socialism cannot overcome the limitations of capitalism, and secondly, that the failure of Soviet central planning does not condemn the idea of central planning. In fact, I will argue that the flaws in Ackerman’s design and the Soviet model of central planning are remarkably similar: both are rooted in the failure to overcome capitalist production, as opposed to distribution.

***

The most significant shortcoming of almost all market socialisms, including that of Ackerman, is that they share with neoclassical economics and the liberal tradition generally the exclusive focus on the process of exchange. This stands in stark contrast to Marx’s primary interest, the process of production. It is not for nothing that Marx considered the classical economists’ emphasis on exchange to be a powerful ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie. As long as distribution and exchange are the central categories of social relations, the market will seem to be the natural, self-evident form in which one-off exchange between individuals takes place, at least in societies with an advanced division of labor. But, for Marx, it is precisely this fetishism of commodities, this exclusive focus on the sphere of exchange and distribution, that hides the essential nature of capitalist society. In Capital, after discussing exchange value, he then famously writes: “Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face – ‘No admittance except on business.’ Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.”

This secret, the core of capitalist social relations that must be overcome to overcome capitalist society altogether, is the process of capitalist production. It is there that capitalist social relations are reproduced on an ever-expanding scale through the repeated separation of workers from the means of production, and the generation of surplus value that results from this separation. Whatever value is produced in capitalist society can only be distributed within the market, but is never generated in it: whatever you gain in exchange, I lose. Marx for this reason distinguished between the labor in capitalist society that immediately produces surplus value, and the manifold kinds of labor that are involved in exchange, transport, marketing, and so forth. The latter do not reproduce capitalist social relations, and therefore fall in the sphere of distribution. This is not to say distribution in this sense is not important: indeed, it forms by far the largest part of the everyday experience of capitalism in contemporary Western societies. But this is exactly what leads to mistaking all the economic activities of the market for the reproduction of capitalism itself. This is why Marx considered it a form of fetishism. The process of production under capitalist conditions is what reproduces capitalist society – the actual application of labor and technology that allows modern-day society and its accumulative drive to exist. The everyday significance of the sphere of distribution – with its apparent equality of buyer and seller and the smooth machinery of the price system – give rise to the appearance that this is what capitalism is all about, not what happens behind the doors of the factories, sweatshops, and mines. If market socialism does not address the sphere of production, it does not address the fundamental conditions of capitalist society, and therefore does not succeed in overcoming it.

So it’s no surprise that in Ackerman’s example, nothing at all is said about the production process itself. In his concern to evade the calculation debate’s critique of central planning, he permits the central conditions of capitalism to perpetuate themselves: the separation of workers from the means of production, which are not the banks and other distributional institutions, but the factories, mines, sewing machines, and tractors. If nationalizing banks and investment itself had the power to create socialist conditions by themselves, the Royal Bank of Scotland would now be in the vanguard of socialism – which is sadly not the case. Even if all banks were nationalized, and a good deal else besides, as was de facto the case under total war conditions in various capitalist societies during WWII, there would still be a capitalist mode of production. Private appropriation of surplus is not the central feature of capitalism, although this permits a capitalist class to exist independently in political terms. Rather, its central feature is coercing working people to work on means of production not held in common, means that are used for the purposes of accumulation for its own sake. Even if one were to have a 100% tax on profit, and nationalization of banks, hedge funds, and pension funds, as Ackerman’s proposals seem to reduce to, this would be a left social-democratic version of capitalism, perhaps a radically egalitarian capitalism: but a capitalism nonetheless. It would be nothing to sneeze at, but not achieve his aim of an actually socialist society; with capitalist production left intact, so is exploitation, the alienation of working people, and the politics of growth for its own sake.

The reason for this is that, as Marx pointed out, the root of exploitation under capitalism is not insufficient wages per se, or the depredations of finance, but the theft of alien labor time. Not only is labor under capitalism alienated from the means of production and is the worker alienated from society’s general interests, but more importantly, the process of exploitation under capitalism necessarily implies that for accumulation to take place on one end, the worker must be paid less than the value of her labor-time on the other. The more capitalist production expands, the less time the worker has for herself. This is why so much of the history of socialist activism does not revolve around higher taxes on the wealthy or the nationalization of the commanding heights, but about reducing the share of their total lifetime workers are forced to produce for the reproduction and expansion of capitalist society – for example through pensions and social security, or overtime laws.

The struggle over exploitation is fundamentally the question of whether the worker has the time to fully develop her intellectual, social, and creative powers, or must devote this time instead to the reproduction of a hostile, alien, and benumbing society, with no time to call her own. Here central planning comes back into view. The aim of central planning, what Marx calls “the society of associated producers”, is therefore not just to socialize the process of exchange and distribution of goods – though as Ackerman rightly notes, this is a ‘bread and butter’ question in its own right – but to develop the productive forces to the degree that the necessary labor-time for all workers can be reduced to a minimum. This leaves maximum time for playing, singing, socializing, sports, art, music, writing, debating, and all those things that have been considered the good things in life and the birthright of humanity since the classical age.

There is no known process of the market that can achieve this aim, for the logic of the market is blind to the process of production, and concerns itself exclusively with private accumulation and consumption. Just as we do not care, in practice, about the appalling conditions under which our clothing and our food is made, in Ackerman’s market socialism the condition and work of the producers is of no significance. Their alienation is not abolished by the mere phrase ‘socializing finance’; as long as they are subject to the coercive pressure of competition and accumulation, each other’s eternal counterparts, they cannot fully realize their talents and potential as individuals and can therefore society is a hostile force for them.

Ackerman’s society, in short, would socialize capital, but not abolish it. It would socialize exploitation, but not abolish it. It would not work towards the fullest development of the creative, intellectual, and social capacities of the majority, and would not apply technology, the embodiment of reduction of necessary labor-time, to this end. As Marx wrote: “economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.” This applies to market socialism as much as any society, and Ackerman’s proposal keeps at arm’s length “the very possibility of defetishizing economic life”, to borrow from David McNally’s critique of market socialism, Against the Market. “To reject this possibility is to embrace the inevitability of alienated labor, of exploitation, and the unplanned and anarchic drive towards competitive accumulation”.(1)

***

Seth Ackerman also confronts us with a new problem, however – a historical one. Doesn’t the Eastern European experience under ‘really existing socialism’ disprove the possibility of central planning? Is central planning really necessary to overcome the limitations of market socialism outlined above? The Soviet (and Soviet-dependent) experience plays a central role in Ackerman’s argument against the very possibility of a centrally planned society. For Ackerman, Soviet-type central planning was simply too radical; by ignoring the centrality of the market it represented a kind of bureaucratic utopianism whose only result was a shortage of toilet paper at crucial moments. Ackerman only barely acknowledges the very real accomplishments of Soviet society: “when Communism came to poor, rural countries like Bulgaria or Romania they were able to industrialize quickly, wipe out illiteracy, raise education levels, modernize gender roles, and eventually ensure that most people had basic housing and health care”. But this is not enough for him. Central planning seems to be unable to go beyond the point of the achievement of mere basic provisions. It can achieve no more than a mid-table economy in GDP per capita terms, with shoddy cars and insufficient toothpaste. This will not do, for the aim of socialism cannot be universal equal poverty, but the possibility of abundance for the widest possible share of society. If central planning cannot achieve this, then we must reject it. But is that true?

I argue that the conventional narrative of central planning’s failure must be radically revisited. Ackerman himself already notes that the central planning system performed not much less efficiently than most actually existing capitalisms of today. The Soviet strategy was based on a classic model of high investment rates, financed by the artificial repression of living standards and the (forcible) distribution of the surplus population unproductive in agriculture into the cities as an industrial working class, generating an enormous increase in the productivity of labor. The idea is that such productivity gains are then reinvested into heavy industry, further generating productive capacity, and so forth. This model was followed not just by the USSR, but in a different way also by China, Japan, South Korea, and other nations.

Using mainstream productivity and growth models, the liberal economic historian Robert C. Allen compared the central planning and collectivization of the Stalin period to various alternative approaches. In his book Farm to Factory, Allen astounded orthodox economic historians by finding that the ‘Stalinist’ approach (albeit credited to Preobrazhensky) was the best possible result among the alternatives(2). But, the narrative goes, Soviet planning could undertake labor-intensive industry well, but not capital-intensive industry. While the USSR could compete in sheer quantities of steel and coal and cars produced, as their propaganda often boasted, it couldn’t compete in spheres of production requiring substantial R&D and rapid technological upgrading of goods. Robert Allen’s account, for example, uses this as the explanation of Soviet failure. However, I believe evidence points to a very different conclusion.

William Easterly and Stanley Fischer’s World Bank study of the ‘Soviet climacteric’ argues that Soviet R&D on civilian production actually increased substantially between 1959 and 1984, rejecting the common notion that the Soviet arms race combined with the inflexibility of Soviet production caused the consumer economy to come to a standstill.(3) Moreover, Brendan Beare’s correction of the Easterly and Fischer paper has demonstrated that due to statistical mistakes in the reconstruction of the data, the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the Soviet economy was much higher than is commonly believed.(4) In other words: previous scholars claimed that when the Soviet surplus population ran out, the USSR was unable to efficiently replace labor with machinery, leading to an inability to make the leap from labor-intensive to capital-intensive production. But Beare’s data show that the ratio of this replacement of labor by capital may not have been as bad as previously thought, but in fact may have been quite high, as it was in Japan, which did not experience such stagnation. Nor did investment itself falter: even as late as 1989 the Soviet investment share of GDP was a staggering 35%. In short, Soviet central planning did not fail due to its inability to develop or implement labor-saving technology.

Why do I mention all these technicalities? Simply to make the important point that the traditional narrative, in which the Soviet central planning model collapsed due to the inherent flaws in such a system’s ability to expand and deliver the goods, is untrue. The failure of Soviet and Eastern European planning is no less real than it was before, but it must be understood as a contingent, political failure, located not in the concept of central planning itself, but in the limitations of the Soviet version. By most statistical measures, even those of outright foes of the Soviet Union, their central planning system was an overwhelming success in terms of growth, increases in productivity, and raising the potential living standards. It is not a coincidence that the USSR was the only state ever to make the American ruling class tremble – no mean achievement. Contrary to Ackerman however, I would argue its ultimate failure rested not so much in these categories. It failed for reasons not dissimilar to the flaws of Ackerman’s market socialism. The Soviet Union failed not because it was too socialist, but because it was not socialist enough.

The one weakness of the Soviet model was that it was still a form of the 20th century ‘developmental state’, that is, part of the general push of the past century of poor and underdeveloped countries to develop the productive forces (as Marxists would say) and to modernize at all costs. In so doing, it achieved tremendous things, but it was still subject to the logic of accumulation characteristic of all the negative aspects of capitalism. The workers of the USSR never saw the ‘switch’ from the development of heavy industry to the point in which the enormous productive capacities so generated would actually be used in their favour: when production would no longer be for exchange or reinvestment, but for general use. Their working days were long and intense, and as illustrated by the propaganda of Stakhanovism, they were ever exhorted to work harder and longer for the accumulation of a socialized surplus.

This brings me to the similarities between the failure of the Soviet model and the problems with Ackerman’s plan. Since the USSR arguably lacked a capitalist class, the surplus so accumulated was socialized, but not used for the purpose of general needs. The technology developed was socialized, but applied to further generate surplus, not to reduce the necessary labor-time to a minimum. Finally, the ultimate yardstick of the USSR was its military-industrial competition with the USA, not the fullest development of all. In short, just like Ackerman’s market socialism, Soviet society fell short of true socialism. Soviet society, and the Eastern European states dependent on them, asked its working class to postpone the move to a recognizably socialist form of production as long as the country, isolated and surrounded, needed to develop. Investment, the distribution of goods, housing and healthcare: all these were socialized, but there was no ‘society of the associated producers’ sought by Marx. The result was that competitive production would lead to the preservation of exploitation. This is exactly the same flaw I outlined in Ackerman’s plan: a failure to overcome capitalist production means a failure to overcome capitalism itself. In this sense, the Soviet economy is actually closer to Ackerman’s ideal than he realizes.

I would argue then, contrary to Ackerman, that the failure of actually existing central planning is not one of its potential, but historically one of its politics. The drive for accumulation for its own sake makes sense, when productivity in poor countries must be developed so that socialism can mean general abundance, not general poverty. I completely agree with Ackerman when he points to the importance of whether the supermarkets are full or empty. But there can be no market-based socialism, because capitalism ultimately does not reproduce itself in the market, but in production. Soviet central planning is in this respect a step up from that, as it socializes not only all spheres of distribution and surplus, but also consciously aims for developing productivity so that ultimately the ‘switch’ can be made towards a general needs-based society. However, it failed this test. The working class resisted this accumulation, as it represented the perpetual postponement of their personal development in the name of the general interest. This resistance took the form of a resistance to work, since this and this only was the remaining locus of capitalist logic in the Soviet system: hence the endless thefts from the workplace, the low quality of production, the shoddiness of the finished goods, the sullen, passive noncompliance with the state apparatus and its designs, and finally the fruitless attempts by the Soviet state to remedy these by draconian measures and moral exhortations. The problem with Soviet-type central planning was therefore a political, not a technical one.

Central planning is simply not the problem Ackerman makes it out to be. In fact, we see it at work even in ‘normal’ capitalism all the time. As soon as push comes to shove, and the liberal-democratic societies are threatened by total war, they approximate central planning in their production methods as closely as their political systems allow. Capitalist firms rely on high-level central planning all the time in the modern economy. Just-in-time distribution, Amazon’s on-demand system, modern supermarket provisioning, international cargo shipping, air traffic coordination: all these are examples of sophisticated and accurate central planning in the contemporary world. Our computing techniques and capacity have improved by several factors since the Cuban Missile Crisis: there is nothing technical stopping us from applying this technology in the benefit of socialist humanity rather than a small elite of owners and investors. But if we do not want to repeat the mistakes of market socialism and of Soviet planning both, we must put the conditions of production at the forefront of our transition to socialism. Let us learn all we can about logistics, about organizational theory, about planning models. Let us take the enormous technological capacities and productivity of capitalist society, “which has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”, and use it to reduce to a minimum the work expected from everyone; especially dirty, unpleasant, and degrading work. Our unprecedented expansion of free time will see not just a flourishing of culture and the intellect, but also of many more ideas to perfect the process of production and distribution to the benefit of all. Then the realm of freedom will truly begin, and with it a new, socialist, history of humanity.

1) David McNally, Against the Market (London/New York, NY 1993), p. 184.
2) Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory (Princeton, NJ 2009).
3) Easterly, William and Stanley Fischer. 1995. “The Soviet Economic Decline”, in: World Bank Economic Review vol. 9, p. 341-371.
4) Beare, Brendan K. 2008. “The Soviet Economic Decline Revisited”. Econ Journal Watch 5:2 (May 2008), p. 135-144.