“Every­body talks about the weather. We don’t.” This 1968 poster was a response by the Ger­man Social­ist Stu­dent Union to an ad cam­paign for weath­er­proof trains. The stu­dents were sug­gest­ing that like the fig­ures pic­tured above, they had more impor­tant con­cerns than every­day things like the weather. The next year, jour­nal­ist and future Red Army Fac­tion ter­ror­ist Ulrike Mein­hof would use the slo­gan to argue that rad­i­cals should talk about every­day life, since “the per­sonal is political.”

For us, it just means that we should talk about the weather. It’s going to start snow­ing on the occu­pa­tions, and the author­i­ties want to use the weather as a weapon. They’re hop­ing that win­ter will kill the move­ment off, and it’s hard to deny that camp­ing out in the mid­dle of Jan­u­ary would be a poor tactic.

But the weather rep­re­sents a much big­ger ques­tion: what will it take to make this move­ment last? There is great poten­tial in what has been achieved, but there are also sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cles, which present them­selves both inside and out­side the move­ment. With an eye towards advanc­ing this strug­gle, let’s start by try­ing to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing: who is protest­ing, and what does it mean?

In a reflec­tion on the riots in Lon­don this past sum­mer, “The Prince and the Pau­per,” we argued that the com­po­si­tion of the riot­ers reflected the blurred bound­aries between a pre­car­i­ous and hyper­ex­ploited “lumpen­pro­le­tariat” and the main­stream work­ing class. What was impor­tant above all was that the spon­ta­neous vio­lence of the riots took place at the same time as a strike by Ver­i­zon work­ers across the pond, within the very indus­try that pro­vided the riot­ers with means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And though strug­gles were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each other across the world, these two polit­i­cal com­po­si­tions – one reflect­ing a dis­or­ga­nized pop­u­la­tion usu­ally sub­jected to the worst state repres­sion, the other reflect­ing the clas­si­cal mode of trade-union pol­i­tics – did not encounter one another.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd seems to be an in-between ele­ment, both tech­ni­cally and polit­i­cally. Much of the energy behind it comes from the activist milieu that char­ac­ter­ized the Seat­tle “anti-globalization” protests, but it also clearly draws from a wide base of work­ing peo­ple who are now see­ing the dis­in­te­gra­tion of clas­si­cal forms of work along­side the social fab­ric that once sup­ported them. So the Occupy move­ment is simul­ta­ne­ously the space where encoun­ters can take place, as well as a form of strug­gle with the implicit objec­tive of cre­at­ing con­di­tions in which these encoun­ters can take hold. But who exactly is in this space?

The best infor­ma­tion we have now is about Occupy Wall Street; though other occu­pa­tions may have unique ele­ments, this serves as a use­ful start­ing point. The com­po­si­tion of Occupy Wall Street is unsur­pris­ingly het­ero­ge­neous. Age, wealth, and expe­ri­ence vary widely; some par­tic­i­pants are vet­er­ans from for­mer strug­gles, oth­ers are join­ing in for the first time; there’s a large con­cen­tra­tion of youth, but more than 28% are over 40. You’ll find the home­less, doc­toral stu­dents, and pro­fes­sion­als of var­i­ous stripes all camp­ing out together. Despite these sharp dif­fer­ences, how­ever, some com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics stand out. First, the vast major­ity is highly edu­cated: a study by CUNY soci­ol­o­gist Hec­tor R. Cordéro-Guzmán observed that over 90% reported “some col­lege, a col­lege degree, or a grad­u­ate degree.” Sec­ond, the great major­ity does not sup­port either of the polit­i­cal par­ties. Third, and per­haps most impor­tant, the move­ment as a whole is over­whelm­ingly com­posed of the unem­ployed, under­em­ployed, or pre­car­i­ously employed.

In many impor­tant ways, it’s no coin­ci­dence that this par­tic­u­lar tech­ni­cal com­po­si­tion would choose the Occupy move­ment as its form of strug­gle. By fir­ing work­ers, putting them on fur­lough, demand­ing that they work part-time, or sim­ply forc­ing them to accept an early retire­ment, the cap­i­tal­ists gave them all free time. Instead of sit­ting at home, these work­ers are using this imposed free time against those cap­i­tal­ists who forced it upon them in the first place. The Occupy move­ment demon­strates how work­ers can cre­atively turn their sit­u­a­tion against their bosses, how they can trans­form an imposed form of pro­duc­tion into a weapon. It’s not so much a kind of pro­longed march as it is a trans­formed strike, work stop­page, or col­lec­tive slow­down. It’s a form of strug­gle that has emerged directly from the par­tic­u­lar eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion that cap­i­tal has led us into. But not only is it a form of strug­gle, it’s a bridge between a mul­ti­plic­ity of forms, where already exist­ing move­ments can cross-pollinate and new ones can be tested for the first time.

This bridg­ing is inter­na­tional in char­ac­ter. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the strug­gles in Greece, and the Span­ish indig­na­dos, Occupy Wall Street first emerged as yet another moment in this broader cycle of strug­gle. It’s sig­nif­i­cant, how­ever, that after becom­ing a real move­ment by spread­ing itself across Amer­ica, this form of strug­gle then found its way back into the hands of those who had inspired it in the first place. There is no greater illus­tra­tion of the cir­cu­la­tion of strug­gles today: from Puerta del Sol square in May, to the occu­pa­tion of Zuc­cotti Park, and back to Madrid in Octo­ber. But it’s not as though the same coin has passed through thou­sands of new hands just to return to its owner unchanged. The cir­cu­la­tion of this strug­gle has added some­thing; it returns with more expe­ri­ences, a sharper per­spec­tive, a more rad­i­cal edge.

But we’re not deal­ing with the same strug­gle. There’s a plu­ral­ity of almost bewil­der­ingly diverse forms of con­tes­ta­tion. Before Occupy Wall Street, there were lit­er­ally thou­sands of dis­tinct strug­gles from Greece to the Mid­dle East to China. What the Occupy move­ment has done is strate­gi­cally sub­sume many of these pre­ex­ist­ing strug­gles into a shared dis­cur­sive space – pro­vid­ing them with a com­mon lan­guage. In China, demon­stra­tors have held up ban­ners read­ing: “Res­olutely sup­port the Amer­i­can people’s mighty Wall Street Revolution!”

On Octo­ber 15, protests erupted in 900 cities across the globe. Though many had already wit­nessed their fair share of dis­tur­bances over the past few years, it was the bold syn­chronic­ity of it all that was so unprece­dented. This could have only been accom­plished through a recod­ing of each par­tic­u­lar strug­gle into a more gen­eral ver­nac­u­lar. Of course, all of these strug­gles were already implic­itly – and in some cases explic­itly – in touch with one another. But now, they speak the same lan­guage. Slo­gans reap­pear, sym­bols are shared, and prac­tices are recy­cled on dif­fer­ent con­ti­nents. Strug­gles all over the world are begin­ning to recode them­selves in this idiom.

The dilemma is that while unions have expressed their sup­port, orga­ni­za­tions like Occupy the Hood are attempt­ing to pri­or­i­tize the sec­tors of the work­ing class that are racially mar­gin­al­ized, and inter­na­tional strug­gles are tak­ing up occu­pa­tions as their ban­ners, no con­crete and insti­tu­tional con­nec­tion has been made. It could very well be that the dura­bil­ity and rad­i­cal­iza­tion of this move­ment will rely on its poten­tial as a medi­at­ing ele­ment between the the var­i­ous seg­ments of the class, their par­tic­u­lar inter­ests, and their tra­di­tional forms of strug­gle. Achiev­ing this means going beyond a spon­ta­neous reflec­tion of changes in our work­ing lives. It has to start by under­stand­ing the sys­tem under­ly­ing them.

We Are the Wage Relation

We all know how the protest rep­re­sents itself. “We are the 99%,” said Occupy Wall Street, and this sin­gle slo­gan has spread like a prairie fire.

Only a philis­tine would dis­miss the move­ment based on objec­tions to this slo­gan. A quick glance at the now-famous web­site wearethe99percent.tumblr.com shows what it has achieved. In a soci­ety that is sup­posed to be hope­lessly atom­ized, made up of alien­ated zom­bies star­ing at indi­vid­ual TV screens, ordi­nary peo­ple are show­ing sol­i­dar­ity with each other. The prob­lems peo­ple describe on this web­site might once have been thought of as per­sonal issues, of no con­cern to any­one but your spouse and your land­lord. Occupy Wall Street has given us the lan­guage to under­stand our per­sonal prob­lems as a col­lec­tive polit­i­cal strug­gle against the 1% who got rich from our misfortune.

At the same time, the slo­gan advances no analy­sis about how things got this way. Social inequal­ity is shame­ful, to be sure, and it’s been grow­ing steadily. But does this hap­pen because there are bad eggs at the top? Because the good guys in gov­ern­ment aren’t strong enough? Or is it because there’s an under­ly­ing rela­tion­ship in our soci­ety that pro­duces this inequal­ity and ensures that it con­stantly increases?

It would be no improve­ment to quib­ble about per­cent­ages. (“We are the 87.3%! Down with the 5.2% and their 7.5% run­ning dogs!”) The fig­ures which actu­ally demon­strate the fun­da­men­tal changes in our econ­omy lead­ing to today’s dis­con­tent­ment are shown in the fol­low­ing graph, cov­er­ing the period from 1947 to 2010, from the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics:

The top line rep­re­sents worker pro­duc­tiv­ity, mea­sured by out­put per hour. The line lag­ging behind is their hourly com­pen­sa­tion, which means wages plus ben­e­fits, adjusted for infla­tion. The grow­ing “wage gap” between the two lines essen­tially mea­sures the change in the rate of exploita­tion, and it shows that exploita­tion has been steadily increas­ing. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t exploita­tion before the 1970s, it just means that social inequal­ity wasn’t grow­ing; now big­ger and big­ger por­tions of wealth are being trans­ferred from labor to capital.

In 1865, Karl Marx engaged in a debate in the First Inter­na­tional Work­ing Men’s Asso­ci­a­tion against a utopian social­ist named John Weston. Weston argued that the wave of strikes across Europe demand­ing higher wages was dan­ger­ous, since if wages were increased, cap­i­tal­ists would sim­ply raise com­mod­ity prices to com­pen­sate and make life more expen­sive for work­ers. Marx argued in his speeches, later pub­lished as Value, Price and Profit, that this posi­tion was based on a totally incor­rect under­stand­ing of the wage. Cap­i­tal­ists pay a wage that ensures the worker will show up to work the next day, equiv­a­lent to the socially aver­age col­lec­tion of neces­si­ties (food, hous­ing, enter­tain­ment) required to repro­duce labor-power, or the abil­ity to work. They don’t pay for each indi­vid­ual com­mod­ity the worker pro­duces, because the cen­tral fact of cap­i­tal­ism is that work­ers pro­duce more than the value of their daily neces­si­ties. The dif­fer­ence between their wages and the value of the com­modi­ties they pro­duce is the “sur­plus value” that belongs to the cap­i­tal­ist. No other input of the pro­duc­tion process gen­er­ates more value than it costs; the exploita­tion of labor is the source of profit.

What Marx pointed out is that if there is an increase in the pro­duc­tiv­ity of labor, but wages stay the same, strug­gles for higher wages have to be under­stood as “reac­tions of labour against the pre­vi­ous action of cap­i­tal.” If cap­i­tal can’t pay work­ers less, or work them longer hours, it has to increase the pro­duc­tiv­ity of labor by dis­ci­plin­ing work­ers and intro­duc­ing tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions. This has two dra­matic effects. First of all, it reduces the demand for labor, which means unem­ploy­ment. Sec­ond, it means cap­i­tal­ists are invest­ing more in expen­sive machin­ery than in their source of profit.

If pro­duc­tiv­ity has dra­mat­i­cally increased, and indus­tries across the board pro­duce many more com­modi­ties, they need peo­ple to buy them – but that’s dif­fi­cult to pull off when wages have been so low for so long. The result of ris­ing social inequal­ity is that cap­i­tal­ists are sit­ting on vast amounts of money, or chan­nel­ing it into a lux­ury econ­omy, and banks are run­ning out of prof­itable invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties. Work­ers, on the other hand, need money just to live. The solu­tion to these prob­lems is well known. The wide­spread reliance on con­sumer credit – a risky invest­ment for the banks and poten­tially life­long debt for the con­sumer – increases pur­chas­ing power beyond the wage.

Along­side the use of home equity loans and credit cards to shore up con­sump­tion is the mas­sive stu­dent loan indus­try, which lends future work­ers the resources to develop their pro­duc­tive pow­ers. In the­ory, these debts would be paid off by future income, assum­ing some kind of immi­nent recov­ery. The prob­lem is that peo­ple grad­u­at­ing with enor­mous and unrea­son­able loans are not get­ting jobs, and as we’ve already noted, cap­i­tal­ism is tend­ing towards unem­ploy­ment. With the clas­si­cal sys­tem of exploita­tion by the wage under­min­ing itself, cap­i­tal is forced to find ways to use debts to extract wealth. Ever paid an over­draft fee?

There’s also a dra­matic polit­i­cal effect of debt: it pre­vents peo­ple from desert­ing the sink­ing ship of the wage sys­tem. In spite of the fact that nobody expects a job to become a life­long career any­more, which used to be work’s way of jus­ti­fy­ing itself, they’re still forced to accept pre­car­i­ous work – rush­ing between mul­ti­ple part-time jobs unre­lated to their edu­ca­tion, if they have jobs at all, and cut­ting every pos­si­ble expense to pay off their loans.

This is just an exten­sion of the bru­tal strat­egy of expro­pri­a­tion already imposed on the poor­est sec­tors of the work­ing class, the preda­tory lend­ing that specif­i­cally tar­geted black and Latino women. Just as stu­dent debt estab­lished a sup­ple­men­tary form of exploita­tion, by com­pelling peo­ple to pay for the rest of their lives to acquire a com­pe­tence they may be unable to cash in on the job, sub­prime mort­gages prac­ticed exploita­tion at the site of repro­duc­tion. Low-income work­ers who needed an address, a place to main­tain their abil­i­ties to work and to insti­tu­tion­al­ize their social exis­tence, found them­selves strug­gling to pay an unman­age­able debt until the bank sim­ply took the house back to sell it again, pock­et­ing the already-extracted payments.

It should be clear that these very vis­i­ble actions by finance can’t be reduced to the greed of indi­vid­ual crim­i­nals. They are the vio­lent and reck­less attempts by cap­i­tal­ists to defend and rad­i­cal­ize the exploita­tion that took place in the wage sys­tem, in spite of the grow­ing con­tra­dic­tions of that sys­tem. So we have to decou­ple our rhetoric from notions of cor­po­rate power and law­less bankers. It’s a rela­tion­ship we’re fight­ing, not a bunch of guys in expen­sive suits.

What the 99% slo­gan moves us towards is a con­cept of class. It’s the lad­der that we’re using to climb up to a class analy­sis. But to really develop that analy­sis, we’ll have to leave the lad­der behind. “We are the wage rela­tion” is not a very good slo­gan. It’s a shift in per­spec­tive that indi­cates the need for new slogans.

The 99% is a coali­tion built upon many dif­fer­ent ten­den­cies, inter­ests, and projects. While it helps us unify our sep­a­rate strug­gles, dis­cover the social in the per­sonal, and forge our dif­fer­ent demands into a com­mon dis­course, it ulti­mately con­ceals more than it reveals. The dan­ger is most appar­ent when we con­sider that some of the ten­den­cies within the Occupy Move­ment hope to use the momen­tum of the strug­gle to enter into a prof­itable alliance with finance. The “professional-managerial sec­tor,” or what has been com­monly though erro­neously labeled “the mid­dle class,” is cer­tainly part of this 99%. But it’s a pecu­liar part of this per­cent­age: although it is exploited by cap­i­tal like every­one else, it nev­er­the­less occa­sion­ally prof­its from its own exploita­tion. As that layer which embod­ies the inter­ests of both labor and cap­i­tal, the “mid­dle class” stands as a vari­able and poten­tially dan­ger­ous ele­ment within the move­ment as a whole.

The “mid­dle class” is, in its own way, tor­mented by wage labor – we think of what Ric­cardo Bellofiore and Mas­si­m­il­iano Tomba describe as “the lack of social life, the end­less cig­a­rettes, the psy­chic dis­tur­bances and the hem­or­rhoids of our ultra-modern knowl­edge work­ers.” But this layer also has a ten­dency to look for a way out – not by abol­ish­ing exploita­tion in gen­eral, but by tak­ing a cut of the exploita­tion of lower-income work­ers. The professional-managerial lib­er­als want to make finance work for them; their gam­ble is to co-opt the more exploited sec­tors of the pro­le­tariat, to claim to speak for the whole work­ing class, to use reform as a means of sta­bi­liz­ing the wage rela­tion rather than putting it into question.

In many ways, it’s an old strat­egy that goes at least as far back as the French Rev­o­lu­tion. The Third Estate united its het­ero­ge­neous com­po­nents by recon­sti­tut­ing itself as the nation. Every­one else – the upper clergy and the nobil­ity – was regarded as a mere par­a­site idly leech­ing off the labors of the over­whelm­ing major­ity. The dom­i­nant fig­ures of the Third Estate – the busi­ness­men, lawyers, and aspir­ing politi­cians – at first hoped to use the strength of the move­ment to advance their own dis­tinct inter­ests rather than those of the masses. Even some aris­to­crats threw in their lot with the masses in the hopes that they too could domes­ti­cate it. This was all in 1789.

But now we’re in the twenty-first cen­tury – we don’t need another French Rev­o­lu­tion. So we have to ques­tion the strange resur­gence of the lan­guage of par­a­sitism. It’s a con­ve­nient way to reduce the objec­tives of the move­ment to noth­ing other than cast­ing off the par­a­sites in order to pre­serve the body. And the rhetoric of the 99% helps dis­sem­ble the very real con­tra­dic­tions slowly tear­ing apart that pur­port­edly coher­ent body. The dan­ger is all the more severe when we remem­ber that this body is not so much Amer­i­can as it is international.

Beyond the divi­sions within the Amer­i­can “99%” there are global divi­sions. Inequal­ity of wealth extends to the inequal­ity between nations and sug­gests that the sit­u­a­tion of the work­ing class varies with national bound­aries. In many nations work­ers are caught between the increas­ing impov­er­ish­ment of agri­cul­ture and an unsta­ble slum life struc­tured around con­tin­gent or infor­mal work. Farmer sui­cides in India are echoed by iPhone fac­tory worker sui­cides in China.

The Amer­i­can inflec­tion of the slo­gans now cir­cu­lat­ing glob­ally is sig­nif­i­cant. It sig­nals the deci­sive reen­try of the United States into this inter­na­tional cycle of strug­gle; the dom­i­nant pole of cap­i­tal­ist accu­mu­la­tion can no longer dis­tance itself from the strug­gles rend­ing the rest of the world. But there is a dan­ger that the grow­ing sig­nif­i­cance of the Amer­i­can strug­gle will begin to blind us to the dis­tinct char­ac­ter of other strug­gles and the spe­cific his­tor­i­cal form of the wage rela­tion in which they have found them­selves. The Israelis began with a hous­ing cri­sis, the Chileans attacked edu­ca­tion, the Greeks aimed at aus­ter­ity, and the Fil­ipinos united against Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism. Move­ments in the coun­tries of the “Third World” will have to take on a dis­tinct set of inter­ests and strate­gies pre­cisely because their com­po­si­tion is already so dif­fer­ent. So while the Occupy move­ment has allowed these dialects to trans­late, it will have to avoid the risk of oblit­er­at­ing its par­tic­u­lar­i­ties. The con­tra­dic­tion is not between a homo­ge­neous inter­na­tional major­ity against an equally homo­ge­neous inter­na­tional minor­ity, but between the dif­fer­ent poles of a global wage rela­tion that nec­es­sar­ily assumes dif­fer­ent forms in dif­fer­ent places.

Enemy of the State?

The media like to sug­gest that the Occupy move­ment is the Tea Party of the left. And maybe there are some sim­i­lar­i­ties: both are socially het­ere­oge­nous, both have brought together indi­vid­u­als from across the coun­try, and both have sev­eral decen­tral­ized griev­ances, some of which may even be the same. Where they dif­fer most strongly, how­ever, is their rela­tion­ship to the state. While the Tea Party has strate­gi­cally insin­u­ated itself with the Repub­li­can Party in the hopes of reori­ent­ing the state itself, the Occupy move­ment has con­sis­tently refused to do the same with the Demo­c­ra­tic Party. The Democ­rats are too polit­i­cally impo­tent to effec­tively co-opt the move­ment, and even the unof­fi­cial demands of the occu­pa­tion are well beyond any­thing the Democ­rats will ever be will­ing to get behind. Most sig­nif­i­cantly, the move­ment rejects the entire party sys­tem. The Cordéro-Guzmán sur­vey dis­cov­ered that the vast major­ity of those involved in Occupy Wall Street – some 70% of the respon­dents – iden­tify as polit­i­cally independent.

This sig­nals a major shift in the polit­i­cal cul­ture. While just a few years ago the Democ­rats were able to rebrand them­selves as a party of oppo­si­tion, change, and new hopes, they’re now widely regarded as oppor­tunists with noth­ing to offer. This legit­i­ma­tion cri­sis forced open a wide vac­uum on the left of the polit­i­cal spec­trum that has been filled by the Occupy move­ment. But while the move­ment has clearly aban­doned the Demo­c­ra­tic Party, it has not yet defin­i­tively aban­doned the state.

There are two ten­den­cies that fetishize the state. The first is the typ­i­cal lib­eral call for finan­cial reg­u­la­tion – if it was the unreg­u­lated avarice of the cor­po­ra­tions that got us into this mess, then we can resolve it by pres­sur­ing the state into reg­u­lat­ing them more tightly. The sec­ond, para­dox­i­cally, is the oppo­site end of the spec­trum, the “End the Fed” Ron Paul fanat­ics who believe that fiat cur­rency is the root of all evil. The shared ide­o­log­i­cal assump­tion of both these ten­den­cies is that the state and the mar­ket are some­how totally dis­tinct actors with con­trary interests.

So the com­par­i­son with the Tea Party should lead us to an unex­pect­edly impor­tant ques­tion: why is the only anti-government rhetoric to be found on the right? The para­noid notion that “big gov­ern­ment” seeks to take away the pri­vate prop­erty of indi­vid­u­als is a mys­ti­fied under­stand­ing of the real­ity that wealth really has been trans­ferred away from middle-income Amer­i­cans, and it accu­rately intu­its that this process has been over­seen by the state. We don’t have to spend a lot of time empha­siz­ing the fact that the state not only rep­re­sents the inter­ests of the wealthy, it’s actu­ally com­posed of them. Every­body knows this.

Add to this that all these processes of finan­cial­iza­tion have been admin­is­trated by the state. The bail-out was no aber­ra­tion; it just con­firmed who the state is here to sup­port. Con­sider the telling exam­ple of stu­dent loans. Since 1965 the gov­ern­ment has under­writ­ten pri­vate lenders who facil­i­tate an increas­ingly expen­sive col­lege edu­ca­tion, as part of the Fed­eral Fam­ily Edu­ca­tion Loan Pro­gram. What this means is that the abil­ity of uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing for-profit col­leges, to rad­i­cally increase tuition, and of pri­vate lenders to prey on more stu­dents, has been enabled by the gov­ern­ment. The pol­icy was ended in 2010, but not before mak­ing it absolutely clear in 2005 that the gov­ern­ment was not inter­ested in extend­ing any sup­port to the bor­row­ers: stu­dent loans have become nondis­charge­able, leav­ing a gen­er­a­tion of unem­ployed grad­u­ates with­out the option of declar­ing bank­ruptcy. The only win­ners are the finan­cial cor­po­ra­tions, which have been pack­ag­ing stu­dent loans into lucra­tive finan­cial prod­ucts called stu­dent loan asset-backed secu­ri­ties. Even the most recent mea­sures announced by the White House only make it eas­ier for peo­ple to get into debt; they do noth­ing to coun­ter­act the 8.3% increase in tuition at pub­lic colleges.

In spite of the government’s vis­i­ble defense of the cap­i­tal­ist class, the ten­dency on the left is to imag­ine that we can some­how just nego­ti­ate with the state. It’s not the first time this has been attempted. A mil­i­tant labor move­ment con­fronted cap­i­tal on the shop-floor dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s. Cap­i­tal and the state were forced to find a way to sub­sume and con­trol this threat; that strat­egy was called the New Deal. Under the pres­sure of World War II, the Com­mu­nist Party entered into an alliance with the Democ­rats and threw in its lot with the New Deal, sup­press­ing rank-and-file activ­ity in the name of the “no-strike pledge.” The sit­u­a­tion estab­lished had seri­ous con­se­quences after the war. The labor bureau­cracy set the stage for its com­ing decline; they strength­ened cap­i­tal and paved the way not only for the Smith and Taft-Hartley Acts, the legal foun­da­tions for the purg­ing of com­mu­nists from the unions, but also for the dev­as­tat­ing sep­a­ra­tion of the work­ing class from the labor movement.

Rec­og­niz­ing that the state is an adver­sary, how­ever, doesn’t mean moral­is­ti­cally ignor­ing it. It won’t wither away if we just refuse to engage with it out of prin­ci­ple. The les­son from our labor his­tory is not only that alliance with polit­i­cal par­ties is treach­er­ous, but also that mean­ing­ful reforms were won by the labor move­ment as a result of mil­i­tant and antag­o­nis­tic strate­gies, extend­ing from the 1919 Seat­tle gen­eral strike to the 1934 San Fran­cisco gen­eral strike. It would be the worst sec­tar­i­an­ism to reject reforms; they alle­vi­ate suf­fer­ing and advance the posi­tion of the work­ing class. But the ques­tion is whether mean­ing­ful reforms can be achieved within the polit­i­cal lim­its of cap­i­tal­ism. If the polit­i­cal appa­ra­tus is con­trolled by the cap­i­tal­ist class, this means that those lim­its are not exter­nal lim­its that can be over­come by a stronger pro­gram. Instead, they are inter­nal to the strat­egy of reform. The only way to force the cap­i­tal­ist class to con­cede reforms is to con­front it with an antag­o­nis­tic agent, a uni­fied work­ing class. Let’s not delude our­selves into think­ing we can con­vince them with our bet­ter ideas.

Today the imme­di­ate tac­ti­cal ques­tions of the move­ment also pose the ques­tion of the state. In a telling inter­na­tional exchange between the var­i­ous occu­pa­tions across the world, a New Yorker ques­tioned occu­piers in Frank­furt about their deci­sion to request a per­mit from the police. Not­ing that Lib­erty Plaza was occu­pied with­out a per­mit, she asked why the Ger­mans had asked for one, won­der­ing if such col­lab­o­ra­tion with class ene­mies could have been the result of a “cul­tural dif­fer­ence.” But why not be flex­i­ble, on the look­out for open­ings that can be strate­gi­cally exploited? Some com­pro­mises may advance the class posi­tion, allow­ing a move­ment to con­front the state on a dif­fer­ent plane. If the state is will­ing to give us a per­mit, let them make that deci­sion and live to regret it.

The ques­tion of police per­mits touches more gen­er­ally on the police force itself. Are they, as some pro­test­ers have chanted, part of the 99%? From the start there has been a clear ten­sion with the police. They have made arrests, have begun infil­trat­ing the var­i­ous occu­pa­tions, and will cer­tainly be called in, as they have been in Berlin and Oak­land, to vio­lently crush the movement.

But the chal­lenge of the police is that they gen­uinely are work­ers, and their work is to repress pro­le­tar­ian antag­o­nism. This para­dox is not to be taken lightly. Nei­ther blindly defend­ing them as fel­low work­ers nor blindly attack­ing them as hated pigs will help us now. Any fail­ure to under­stand their spe­cific func­tion is either a reformist dan­ger or an adven­tur­ist error.

The real prob­lem was posed in 1968 by Pier Paolo Pasolini, after the Bat­tle of Valle Giu­lia, in which police and stu­dent rad­i­cals clashed vio­lently. Pasolini, the com­mu­nist film­maker, would later write a poem declar­ing sol­i­dar­ity with the police:

At Valle Giu­lia, yes­ter­day, there was a frag­ment
of class strug­gle: you, my friends, (although
in the right) were the rich,
and the police­men (although in the wrong)
were the poor…

The impor­tant point in Pasolini’s poem is not his roman­ti­ciza­tion of the police’s pur­ported pro­le­tar­ian iden­tity, but instead the ques­tion of the com­po­si­tion of the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. The prob­lem this poses is that the repres­sive state appa­ra­tus has greater con­tact with many more lay­ers of the pro­le­tariat than the polit­i­cal move­ment. In many spec­tac­u­lar street con­fronta­tions the police have seemed to be the only rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the “tra­di­tional” work­ing class, includ­ing peo­ple of color, allow­ing the reac­tionary media to rep­re­sent the pro­test­ers as enti­tled col­lege stu­dents. And there can be no doubt that the police force recruits from the under­class; it offers one of the last careers avail­able. Though in the abstract it is pos­si­ble to bring the police over to our side – the pro­test­ers in Wis­con­sin suc­cess­fully won the sup­port of the police – this strat­egy can’t be assumed as some kind of utopian reflex. The Oak­land Police Depart­ment gave us a cru­cial reminder of the insta­bil­ity of Pasolini’s per­spec­tive, when the vicious and obscene vio­lence used for years against the black com­mu­nity was brought down upon Occupy Oak­land. The real goal of the move­ment should be to move past the fetishiza­tion of the police, and to forge deeper con­nec­tions with excluded seg­ments of the pro­le­tariat, sur­round­ing the police with their neigh­bors along­side col­lege students.

What­ever the com­po­si­tion of the police, they remain an index of the state’s expe­ri­ence of protest. Remem­ber the wise words of William S. Bur­roughs: “a func­tion­ing police state needs no police.” The Wall Street occu­pa­tion was taken far more seri­ously when the pep­per spray came out; even more when 700 were arrested on the Brook­lyn Bridge. The acts of vio­lence per­pe­trated by police have served as indi­ca­tion that the protest is a threat to the state’s func­tion­ing. Deter­min­ing the next steps will require care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, and lead­er­ship by peo­ple of color, who have the most expe­ri­ence deal­ing with police violence.

The Roof is on Fire

Some squea­mish left-liberals com­plain that the Occupy move­ment lacks orga­ni­za­tion. This is obvi­ously ridicu­lous. How can the sim­ple occu­pa­tion of a park spon­ta­neously ignite sim­i­lar occu­pa­tions in well over 50 Amer­i­can cities, incite a global protest in nearly 900 cities across the globe, and suc­cess­fully link together a series of het­ero­ge­neous strug­gles with­out any form of orga­ni­za­tion? The Occupy move­ment is per­haps one of the most orga­nized move­ments in history.

An accom­pa­ny­ing com­plaint is that the occu­pa­tions have not put forth demands. But it’s not at all clear that demands are a suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for social trans­for­ma­tion. To a cer­tain extent, as we wrote about the Lon­don riots, the refusal to make demands is a protest against the idea that the exist­ing order could make our lives bet­ter, a refusal to speak in capital’s lan­guage. At the same time, the absence of “offi­cial,” insti­tu­tional demands coex­ists with an incred­i­ble mul­ti­plic­ity of demands made by indi­vid­ual pro­test­ers, as the list of griev­ances in the first offi­cial state­ment indicates.

The impor­tant ques­tion is whether this orga­ni­za­tion is durable, and whether the movement’s demands put the social struc­ture into ques­tion. No spon­ta­neous col­lec­tiv­ity could come together with­out at least an abstract set of com­mon demands, and it would be unable repro­duce itself with­out some kind of orga­ni­za­tional form. But can these forms rad­i­cal­ize the demands so that they are ori­ented towards the trans­for­ma­tion of the social real­ity out­side of them?

The mean­ing and polit­i­cal effect of demands will depend ulti­mately on the orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture that makes them. It’s pos­si­ble, for exam­ple, that even a highly desir­able demand, like free health­care, could be posed by a fac­tion of the pro­tes­tors who will make it pos­si­ble to dis­solve the move­ment into the Demo­c­ra­tic Party. But this dynamic could just as eas­ily work in the other direc­tion. Take, for exam­ple, this poster pro­duced by the Ital­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ary group Potere Operaio (Work­ers’ Power).

The text reads, “Reforms don’t pro­tect wages from ris­ing prices, from the rob­bery of deduc­tions. Com­rades, let’s take the offen­sive for our objec­tives. Trans­porta­tion, rent, school, meals – free. No taxes.” The police fig­ure wields the scale like a baton, show­ing how the deduc­tions out­weigh the wage. The base of the fig­ure is labelled: “par­ties – bosses – unions.”

The analy­sis offered by these demands is clear. Like debt today, the prices of daily neces­si­ties is a deduc­tion from the wage, a wage which already rep­re­sents exploita­tion. But the Amer­i­can reader will find two things very strange about this poster. The first is the idea of com­mu­nist par­ties and bosses in alliance with unions; while Italy in the 1960s and 1970s had large and pow­er­ful bureau­cratic unions and a reformist com­mu­nist party, we have no influ­en­tial left par­ties and our unions have barely any social power. Where it says “par­ties – bosses – unions,” we should write “liberals.”

The other puz­zle is the final demand: “no taxes.” Isn’t this the core plat­form of the right, of free-market extrem­ists? It is, of course, but this demand is a plat­form of the right because it is embed­ded in class, in the orga­nized struc­ture of the rul­ing class. No taxes for whom? The cap­i­tal­ist class tries to escape from taxes, to con­tinue to redis­trib­ute wealth towards the top, and to give the state an excuse to dis­man­tle the social gains made by labor. But if the cap­i­tal­ist class was sub­jected to a tax that even began to approach the per­cent­age it expro­pri­ates from work­ers, this would ren­der taxes on work­ers obsolete.

Since the tax is expe­ri­enced by work­ers as yet another deduc­tion from the wage, while the pub­lic pro­grams that ben­e­fit them are on the chop­ping block, it seems unnec­es­sary to allow the right to monop­o­lize the attack on taxes. If an anti-tax plat­form is put for­ward by work­ers as a class, it rep­re­sents a pro­gram of elim­i­nat­ing one deduc­tion from the wage while charg­ing cap­i­tal­ists for the main­te­nance of the state. The demand to tax the rich is, of course, accepted by many left-liberals. While it’s def­i­nitely a good idea to charge the cap­i­tal­ists, tax­ing the rich as the max­i­mum pro­gram sets us up for social devel­op­ment by the state. The occu­pa­tion move­ment gives us the poten­tial to inde­pen­dently develop the class.

Other demands may be more appro­pri­ate for our sit­u­a­tion. But they will have to be put for­ward by an orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture that rep­re­sents a uni­tary class power. And the con­struc­tion of such a form of orga­ni­za­tion will have to emerge from strate­gies of action that pro­duce class solidarity.

A con­crete exam­ple of this kind of strat­egy took place in La Puente, Cal­i­for­nia. Rose Gudiel, who was about to be evicted from her fore­closed home, dis­cussed her sit­u­a­tion at Occupy LA. Her seem­ingly per­sonal story turned out to be a social one; oth­ers there had suf­fered a sim­i­lar fate. Many of the occu­piers fol­lowed her back to her home in sup­port. A few days later over two hun­dred joined her as she protested in front of the man­sion of OneWest’s CEO; the next day they staged a sit-in at the Pasadena branch of Fan­nie Mae. Faced with such wide­spread oppo­si­tion the bank gave in and decided to mod­ify her loan.

This was a strat­egy, how­ever spon­ta­neous, that united par­tic­i­pants in the move­ment who were hit by fore­clo­sures. It pro­vided a con­cep­tual lan­guage in which indi­vid­u­als began to rec­og­nize that their own prob­lems are closely related to other seem­ingly dis­tinct prob­lems. Not every­one who sup­ported Gudiel was fac­ing evic­tion; they joined her in part because they rec­og­nized that their own dif­fi­cul­ties – unem­ploy­ment, debt, ris­ing cost of liv­ing – were con­nected to hers. The woman who loses her home is not so dif­fer­ent from the neigh­bor that lost his job. The power of this strat­egy emerged from a unique kind of sol­i­dar­ity. For the banks to fight Guidel, they had to fight the whole movement.

A fore­closed home is an inter­est­ing site for an occu­pa­tion. Among the many dif­fer­ences between a house and Zuc­cotti Park is the fact that a house has a roof. And this brings us back to the weather. Everybody’s talk­ing about it; every­body knows that win­ter will force the move­ment to rethink its tac­tics. This is the pol­i­tics of weather: it’s not some neu­tral phe­nom­e­non, but a weapon like any other. We will have to use it to our advan­tage before cap­i­tal enlists it to crush our movement.

This won’t be the first time weather has fig­ured promi­nently in a strug­gle. A reform ban­quet was sched­uled by the mod­er­ate oppo­si­tion to take place in Paris on Feb­ru­ary 22, 1848. Fear­ing an esca­la­tion of the already exist­ing con­flict, hop­ing to break the sol­i­dar­ity of the oppo­si­tion, and know­ing full well that the dis­trict where the meet­ing was to be held was a real hotbed of rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­ity, the forces of order can­celled the ban­quet the night before, undoubt­edly hop­ing that the week’s hor­ri­ble weather would work to keep the demon­stra­tors away.

But despite the heavy clouds, cold wind, and bit­ing rain, the pro­test­ers took to the streets any­way, enraged by this provo­ca­tion, and quickly set about build­ing bar­ri­cades, loot­ing gun shops, and throw­ing stones at the National Guard. While order was restored in some of the more pub­lic places, the demon­stra­tors strate­gi­cally regrouped in their labyrinthine neigh­bor­hoods. Already a chal­lenge for the army, the wind­ing streets, tor­tu­ous alley­ways, and bewil­der­ing ter­rain became even more dan­ger­ous to out­siders now that it was pour­ing rain. So the forces of order hoped to use the weather to dis­suade pro­test­ers from com­ing out; the pro­test­ers ended up strate­gi­cally using the weather to bol­ster their pri­mary points of resis­tance and esca­late the strug­gle. So began the rev­o­lu­tion of 1848 in France.

We can also use the weather to our advan­tage. The forces of order are hop­ing that win­ter will kill off the move­ment by forc­ing us to retreat back to our homes. We should do just that. We should strate­gi­cally regroup by reoc­cu­py­ing fore­closed homes, squat­ting aban­doned apart­ments, occu­py­ing var­i­ous other build­ings, trans­form­ing each and every one of these into the cells of an esca­lat­ing move­ment. From the occu­pa­tion of a pub­lic park we can shift towards reoc­cu­py­ing those spaces from which we have been forcibly ejected by mount­ing debt, unem­ploy­ment, aus­ter­ity mea­sures, and cuts to social ser­vices. We can take back the pub­lic libraries, schools, lost homes, com­mu­nity cen­ters, and more. The point is to con­stantly think of cre­ative ways to use the weapons of our ene­mies against them. Let’s start with the barometers.

On the morn­ing of Octo­ber 14, one week into Occupy Philadelphia’s encamp­ment beside City Hall, some­one emp­tied the con­tents of a paint can on the building’s south­west­ern entrance. The unknown painter fled the scene, leav­ing behind a decid­edly unsym­bolic smear. Not of angry black or bloody red, but a smear of bland mint green. Police cor­doned off the entrance, dis­miss­ing eager Occupy vol­un­teers offer­ing their assis­tance. A pres­sure cleaner quickly removed all traces of the deed.

This bizarre inci­dent sug­gests much about Philadelphia’s iter­a­tion of the Occupy phe­nom­e­non. Like other occu­pa­tions, its porous bound­aries inte­grate the protest site with the flows of the city. Par­tic­i­pants, passers-by, police, and provo­ca­teurs move freely through­out, with the pos­si­bil­ity of enrich­ing or desta­bi­liz­ing the action; was our painter a police provo­ca­teur or a well-intentioned but strate­gi­cally chal­lenged par­tic­i­pant? Both were con­sid­ered in the aftermath.

This inci­dent also sug­gests the ambi­gu­ity and con­tra­dic­tion in the polit­i­cal imag­i­na­tion of Occupy Philadel­phia (OP). What con­sti­tutes mean­ing­ful action – a spec­tac­u­lar act of van­dal­ism, the peace­ful occu­pa­tion of pub­lic prop­erty, or direct action on the hori­zon more con­fronta­tional and rad­i­cal? There has been no short­age of activ­ity – daily marches strike out to the usual tar­gets – but as of yet no dra­matic con­fronta­tions like those of Occupy Wall Street have occurred. This is the real sig­nif­i­cance of the green paint inci­dent. That such a bla­tant act of van­dal­ism against the seat of munic­i­pal power was shrugged off so quickly by occu­piers and police alike indi­cates both the power and impo­tence of OP. On the one hand, there was no police advance under the pre­text of this or any other num­ber of small provo­ca­tions – surely an index of our power. On the other hand, the inci­dent is an index of the lim­ited threat to capital’s power that OP poses, which is, as of yet, not enough to move the heavy hand of the state, a hand whose ruth­less power has been amply shown in recent Philadel­phia his­tory, from the 1985 bomb­ing of the MOVE house to the repres­sion of protests against the 2000 Repub­li­can National Convention.

To use two famil­iar polit­i­cal con­cepts, Occupy Philadel­phia is at once ani­mated by both the spirit of the com­mons and of the strike. I do not wish to argue for the pri­macy of either approach or assert their incom­pat­i­bil­ity, but rather to frame the young his­tory of OP as a state of ten­sion between these two poles. As a par­tic­i­pant in the occu­pa­tion, I hope to describe from both expe­ri­ence and analy­sis the dis­tinct char­ac­ter of the Occupy X move­ment in post-industrial, working-class Philadel­phia, and its sig­nif­i­cance for the con­tem­po­rary class struggle.

Fight­ing City Hall

Occupy Philadel­phia feels like a march, a strike, a com­mune, and a car­ni­val. This vari­ety of forms derives from the pecu­liar­ity of the tac­tic. One can par­tic­i­pate in OP just by mov­ing ordi­nary human activ­i­ties – like sleep­ing, eat­ing, social­iz­ing – to the occu­pa­tion site. But “extra­or­di­nary” human activ­i­ties – demon­stra­tions, assem­blies, teach-ins, movie screen­ings – have taken place there as well, cre­at­ing a charged but uneven topog­ra­phy. The per­sonal and the polit­i­cal do not yet coin­cide here, but they rub shoul­ders. A read­ing group on Mari­arosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Sub­ver­sion of Com­mu­nity next to campers dry­ing their soggy socks on a clothes line; a col­lege dude test­ing out pickup lines in earshot of the peo­ple of color caucus.

Philly’s unique Occupy iden­tity has devel­oped in large part due to a détente with the city and its police. Over 1,000 peo­ple attended a rau­cous plan­ning meet­ing two days before the occupation’s inau­gu­ra­tion, a siz­able show of force well cov­ered by the local press. Of the two options avail­able to the Philadel­phia police – mas­sive and very pub­lic repres­sion or tacit coop­er­a­tion – they opted for the lat­ter. At 9 AM on Octo­ber 6, hun­dreds assem­bled on the west side of City Hall and began con­struct­ing an encamp­ment with rel­a­tively lit­tle inter­fer­ence. Although police are sta­tioned vis­i­bly around the occu­pa­tion and con­duct walk-throughs both uni­formed and plain-clothed, so far they’ve acted with restraint.

Activ­ity in vio­la­tion of city codes, includ­ing the con­struc­tion of pal­let struc­tures for the home­less, has been per­mit­ted, embold­en­ing some occu­piers but cre­at­ing an acri­mo­nious inter­nal debate. The hands-off approach thus far by the police con­firms the lib­eral naiveté of some who, using the movement’s vocab­u­lary, iden­tify the police and city brass as part of “the 99%,” and there­fore our allies. Indeed, Mayor Michael Nut­ter and Chief of Police Charles Ram­sey made very pub­lic, very genial appear­ances at OP in its first days. Oth­ers, from polit­i­cal acu­men or per­sonal expe­ri­ence, view the city’s over­tures with skep­ti­cism or overt antag­o­nism. This debate came to a head with the early ques­tion posed to the gen­eral assem­bly of acquir­ing a per­mit, and has per­sisted to cur­rent dis­cus­sions on how to respond to the city’s evolv­ing posi­tion. The GA voted for a per­mit after much dis­cus­sion. Although unprece­dented in mod­ern Philadel­phia his­tory for the lib­er­ties and exemp­tions it grants to the occu­pa­tion, the per­mit does bind OP in a legal­is­tic sta­sis – offi­cial, even granted a wel­come by the pow­ers that be, but neutered of antag­o­nism. To the out­law, rela­tions of power are crys­tal clear.

This Philly com­pro­mise dis­tin­guishes OP from its Occupy Wall Street (OWS) tem­plate. Freed from both the glare of the inter­na­tional media and the men­ace of overt police activ­ity, OP turns inward. Free­dom from repres­sion in a far larger phys­i­cal space than OWS offers oppor­tu­ni­ties to strengthen our posi­tion but also deep­ens the con­tra­dic­tions latent within the Occupy move­ment. And although the police aren’t yet using pepper-spray and batons as they have against our New York com­rades, this doesn’t indi­cate a lack of police tac­tics to crush OP. Two strate­gies must be antic­i­pated from our ene­mies in City Hall. One, the strat­egy of patience, in which the police bide their time and wait for either win­ter weather or the “tragedy of the com­mons” to dis­perse OP. Two, the exploita­tion of inci­dents of non-passivity at OP-associated direct actions to crack down on the encamp­ment. Both approaches can be antic­i­pated, and, with proper fore­sight, made to back­fire as the attempts at repres­sion in New York have.

Strike and Commons

Philadel­phia City Hall is mon­u­men­tal, the sym­bolic and geo­graph­i­cal cen­ter of a bat­tered but tena­cious city. It is the second-tallest masonry build­ing in the world, and in its hey­day was a won­der of archi­tec­tural achieve­ment. The city’s two sub­way lines inter­sect under­neath it, send­ing con­tin­u­ous rum­blings up to its cold stone plazas. Along its west side is Dil­worth Plaza, a two block long con­crete plaza cast in the aus­tere style of 60s urban renewal. It is the habit­ual dwelling of a large home­less pop­u­la­tion, and is sched­uled to be handed over shortly to a pri­vate devel­op­ment group for the build­ing of a cafe, skat­ing rink, and con­cep­tual foun­tains. In autumn, the plaza is per­pet­u­ally in the shadow of City Hall and the sur­round­ing office build­ings, and whipped by intense winds.

OP has adapted many orga­ni­za­tional fea­tures of the Occupy move­ment. The gen­eral assem­bly, which meets daily at 7 PM, is the pri­mary forum for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and decision-making. Work­ing groups assure the daily repro­duc­tion of the occu­pa­tion (food, medic, edu­ca­tion, safety, facil­i­ta­tion, etc.) and its strate­gic thrust (direct action, media, mes­sag­ing, etc.). Over 300 tents have been erected across Dil­worth Plaza, pop­u­lated by var­i­ous “tribes” of the polit­i­cal and non-political (“do you go to the gen­eral assem­bly?”), young and old, white and black, counter-cultural and normies. Things are typ­i­cally quiet before noon, and after­wards through the evening swell with part-time par­tic­i­pants who sleep at home, curiosity-seekers, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of var­i­ous polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions, cops, passers-by, and the media. OP ben­e­fits greatly from its loca­tion lit­er­ally on top of the city’s busiest tran­sit hub. High school stu­dents and com­muters con­tribute to its open vital­ity; there is strength in num­bers, even if they are anony­mous and tem­po­rary. Despite its prox­im­ity to Philadelphia’s cen­tral busi­ness dis­trict, OP does not have the belly-of-the-beast feel of OWS; this is not a global city, and a pro­le­tar­ian mien con­t­a­m­i­nates even those quar­ters fash­ioned in the mold of neolib­eral finance capital.

OP, like its peers, strives for hor­i­zon­tal orga­ni­za­tion – ide­ally all par­tic­i­pants have an equal right to deter­mine the course of the occu­pa­tion. The space cre­ated at OP for exper­i­men­ta­tion in egal­i­tar­ian decision-making should be applauded; the pro­lif­er­a­tion of such spaces is essen­tial for the project of pro­le­tar­ian auton­omy. How­ever, since thus far par­tic­i­pa­tion in decision-making and exe­cu­tion is encour­aged but not com­pul­sory, I would sug­gest that in prac­tice, power at OP is func­tion­ing along the lines of a kind of prim­i­tive syn­di­cal­ism. Pro­pos­als sub­mit­ted for approval at the gen­eral assem­bly must first pass through a daily co-committee meet­ing (“co-co”), com­posed of rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the var­i­ous work­ing groups. In effect, access to power at OP is stream­lined by par­tic­i­pa­tion in a work­ing group: in the micro-society of OP, the work­ers in the work­ing groups that con­sti­tute its infra­struc­ture con­sti­tute its sov­er­eign power. Is this a pos­i­tive model to acknowl­edge and prop­a­gate, or a model that will tend to pro­duce a divi­sion among occu­piers between more active par­tic­i­pants and those who par­tic­i­pate by sim­ply show­ing up and remain­ing in the encamp­ment? It should be noted that groups such as cau­cuses of anar­chists and peo­ple of color, by dint of their orga­ni­za­tional capac­ity or moral power, read­ily move to the cen­ter of OP’s sov­er­eign power at par­ity with the work­ing groups. The ambi­gu­ity of the sit­u­a­tion lies in the ques­tion of access to power: should this be deter­mined by capac­ity for orga­ni­za­tion or objec­tive posi­tion within exist­ing social hier­ar­chies? How can the repro­duc­tion of these hier­ar­chies be actively com­bated within the occupations?

Con­fu­sion, over­lap, and frus­tra­tion are tol­er­ated out of neces­sity at OP by the pro­lif­er­at­ing work­ing groups. Good faith and move­ment momen­tum – for the time – paper over the con­sid­er­able chal­lenges of con­sti­tut­ing a micro-society from a milieu of strangers with vary­ing expe­ri­ences and back­grounds, except­ing the occa­sional raised voices and scuffles.

How long can the momen­tum last? OP has passed through three over­lap­ping stages: spec­ta­cle, orga­ni­za­tion, and critique/action. In the early days in which spec­ta­cle dom­i­nated, every­one seemed to be film­ing every­one else with cell­phone cam­eras, and the media swarmed over it all. When peo­ple gath­ered on the morn­ing of Octo­ber 6, they seemed uncer­tain what to do, which protest rit­u­als to fol­low – who do I show my sign to? Is this a rally, a sit-in, or what? Who’ll be the first to set up their tent, and where? The pro­lif­er­a­tion of image pro­duc­tion coin­cided with a ner­vous amor­phous mass, only vaguely aware of its com­mon­al­ity and power.

In the sec­ond stage, orga­ni­za­tion, the encampment’s infra­struc­ture was estab­lished. With the for­ma­tion of work­ing groups and pro­ce­dures for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and decision-making, the poten­tial of the mass was har­nessed. Dil­worth Plaza was spa­tially delin­eated and mapped. Sub-groups such as the peo­ple of color cau­cus and the wheelchair-dependent self-organized to iden­tify and cor­rect pat­terns of exclu­sion. Brief strug­gles for con­trol of media and out­reach efforts finally expelled a nar­cis­sis­tic indi­vid­ual who treated OP’s Face­book page as a per­sonal fief­dom. Inter­nal orga­ni­za­tion is an ongo­ing process involv­ing con­sid­er­able exper­i­men­ta­tion, but the day to day repro­duc­tion of OP is secured for now, clear­ing the way for a deep­en­ing focus on cri­tique and action.

In this cur­rent stage of cri­tique and action, the con­cep­tual para­me­ters of com­mons and strike assume their power. Two ques­tions, of demands and of accept­able direct action, pre­dom­i­nate. It is widely accepted that OP can only main­tain its momen­tum with a con­stant sched­ule of marches, teach-ins, and speak­ers. In this lab­o­ra­tory of praxis, in which the tac­tic of main­tain­ing the occu­pa­tion and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of col­lec­tive cri­tique are mutu­ally rein­forc­ing, the only thing lack­ing is a cat­a­lyst of true resis­tance. Marches have set out from OP to harass banks, visit preda­tory stu­dent loan sharks, tour shitty hos­pi­tals, and, arguably most suc­cess­fully, chase Eric Can­tor from a speak­ing engage­ment at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia. Philadel­phia PD duti­fully block off inter­sec­tions and escort the marchers to their tar­get and back to the occu­pa­tion. OP now iron­i­cally pos­sesses the power to march unob­structed any­where in the city it chooses, but seems to be run­ning out of sym­bol­i­cally potent des­ti­na­tions. All dressed up with nowhere to go, obscure polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences take on a new impor­tance. What if the police are our ene­mies pre­cisely by act­ing like our most oblig­ing friends? If the “1%” can so eas­ily neu­tral­ize our efforts, why will they bother lis­ten­ing to our demands?

OP recasts Dil­worth Plaza as a com­mons, shift­ing it from a nom­i­nally pub­lic space to an actively com­mon one, col­lec­tively owned by those who rule to the extent that they actively par­tic­i­pate. It is a space striv­ing towards decom­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, where human rela­tion­ships have more value than the exchange of money. Yet it also bears a resem­blance to a strike, a col­lec­tive sus­pen­sion of nor­mal activ­ity lead­ing to a con­fronta­tional moment of deci­sion. As the weather turns, the quo­tid­ian qual­ity of OP tends towards the grim resolve of a picket line in the dead of win­ter. The two forms are not mutu­ally exclu­sive; every com­mons must be defended, and every strike relies on a shared ter­ri­tory of expe­ri­ence, spa­tial or oth­er­wise. The ten­den­cies towards com­mons or strike do not neatly coin­cide with reformist or rev­o­lu­tion­ary per­spec­tives. Yet the inter­sec­tion of the forms makes for an unhappy ten­sion, unable to develop with con­fi­dence in either direc­tion. To expand and deepen the com­mons would be to hit too deeply and rad­i­cally at the rela­tions of pri­vate prop­erty and social repro­duc­tion for some par­tic­i­pants. To adopt the antag­o­nis­tic sol­i­dar­ity of the strike would be to aban­don all pre­tenses of coop­er­a­tion with the state and its agents, unac­cept­able for some. The project of OP, and the Occupy move­ment more broadly, is to syn­the­size the com­mons and the strike in a form appro­pri­ate to cur­rent rela­tions of power and production.

Recom­po­si­tion

Pro­le­tar­ian com­bat­ive­ness in Philadel­phia, the site of many proud clashes in the his­tory of Amer­i­can class strug­gle, still exists, evi­denced by a vari­ety of expres­sions rang­ing from the vic­to­ri­ous PASNAP strike at Tem­ple Hos­pi­tal in 2010 to the auto-reduction action orga­nized by teens at a local Sears store this past sum­mer. OP is poten­tially a site of encounter and recom­po­si­tion for a met­ro­pol­i­tan work­ing class changed by decades of dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, a swelling pop­u­la­tion of recent immi­grants, and the com­bat­ive youth sub­cul­tures of the flash mob and debt-ridden col­lege grad vari­ety. Although the process remains vague and pre­lim­i­nary, the occu­pa­tion move­ment in Philly is a promis­ing indi­ca­tor of the work­ing class’s polit­i­cal recomposition.

Two of the largest pop­u­la­tions in the OP encamp­ment are the long-term home­less and the col­lege stu­dent milieu. That they sleep will­ingly side by side for weeks at a time speaks to the nov­elty of the Occupy move­ment. The close, extended con­tact of occu­piers tends to cut through prej­u­dice and ide­o­log­i­cal mys­ti­fi­ca­tion, even though the egal­i­tar­ian ideal of the move­ment remains dis­tant. Indi­vid­u­als and groups who may never have oth­er­wise encoun­tered each other in the huge city now find them­selves shar­ing both an eco­nomic cri­tique and a tent. Should a major work stop­page occur in the city soon – both the Ver­i­zon nego­ti­a­tions and a num­ber of pub­lic sec­tor con­tract nego­ti­a­tions remain unset­tled – encounter on a far larger scale is pos­si­ble. The city’s major unions have issued state­ments of sup­port for the occu­pa­tion, but a mate­r­ial min­gling has the poten­tial to change the con­sti­tu­tion of both move­ments for the bet­ter and expand momen­tum beyond the focal encamp­ment. OP, how­ever, may in the long run be a bet­ter pro­ducer of sub­jec­tiv­i­ties then of con­crete demands, and this would not be a fault.

An impor­tant sub­jec­tiv­ity crys­tal­liz­ing in the Occupy move­ment is sim­i­lar to the dri­ving force behind the global orig­i­na­tors of the occu­pa­tion con­cept in Spain, Egypt, and Tunisia: young, edu­cated, and down­wardly mobile work­ers. Many recent grad­u­ates or dropouts of local uni­ver­si­ties like Tem­ple and the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia pro­vide a motive force behind OP’s work­ing groups, expe­ri­enc­ing a mode of col­lec­tive strug­gle quite dif­fer­ent from man­aged, pre­dictable cam­pus “activism.” As com­rades in Cal­i­for­nia noted dur­ing the uni­ver­sity occu­pa­tions there in fall 2009, the prac­tice of occu­py­ing tends to dis­solve out­dated dis­tinc­tions like that between “work­ers” and “stu­dents.” A tan­ta­liz­ing pos­si­bil­ity beg­ging more research is the con­nec­tion between OP’s site above a tran­sit hub, and the highly mobile nature of this sec­tor, mov­ing around the city at odd hours between mul­ti­ple part-time jobs, casual work, and classes. Ear­lier cycles of strug­gles in Philly, from the post-New Left Move­ment for a New Soci­ety in the 1970s to the clashes at the 2000 RNC, bequeathed long-lasting infra­struc­tures of rad­i­cal insti­tu­tions and expe­ri­ence. Will OP be the coming-out party for a new cycle or just a flash in the pan?

Think Locally?

OP clearly owes its inspi­ra­tion to Occupy Wall Street, encamped just two hours up the New Jer­sey Turn­pike. The prox­im­ity of the two cities allowed many Philly orga­niz­ers to visit OWS before launch­ing OP, tak­ing note of its orga­ni­za­tional model and learn­ing from its mis­cues. As one of the largest occu­pa­tions in the coun­try as of yet spared overt police repres­sion, OP is both a sig­nif­i­cant model for the national move­ment and some­thing of an aber­ra­tion. Among occu­piers, the rela­tion­ship of OP to the move­ment remains uncer­tain, bespeak­ing a larger ambi­gu­ity towards the global, national, and local con­texts of the cri­sis. Mate­r­ial efforts have been made to share resources with OWS, and sol­i­dar­ity actions with com­rades attacked by police in Oak­land and Atlanta are under discussion.

The polit­i­cal imag­i­nary of OP remains largely stuck at the national level. Rhetoric of the 99%, Wall Street, and cor­po­rate taxes implic­itly locates the cur­rent social and eco­nomic crises within national bor­ders. Yet these crises have inter­na­tional causes and impli­ca­tions, and resis­tance in the form of occu­pa­tions has like­wise been a global phe­nom­e­non. As the calls for uni­fied Occupy X demands increases, a real dan­ger exists both in ignor­ing the global char­ac­ter of cap­i­tal and our strug­gles, and in fail­ing to con­nect Occupy’s cri­tiques with local con­di­tions and local grievances.

A fac­tion within OP seized an early oppor­tu­nity to advance long-standing local griev­ances and make demands of the city. After receiv­ing a let­ter from the city gov­ern­ment which made sev­eral demands of OP (dis­man­tle fire haz­ards, con­trol open uri­na­tion, etc.), they refused a pater­nal­is­tic rela­tion­ship and in turn advanced sev­eral demands at the GA that OP should make in response. One of these included a repeal of Philadelphia’s racist youth cur­few law. Con­ve­niently up for a vote of exten­sion steps away in City Hall, the law was ini­tially passed to kill off the flash mobs that once rocked the city. Fight­ing a law that inten­tion­ally seeks to frac­ture, dis­ci­pline, and man­age spe­cific lay­ers of the work­ing class would go a long way to recon­nect­ing with those sec­tors that are still under­rep­re­sented at OP.

This gen­eral effort was accom­pa­nied by dis­tri­b­u­tion of an excel­lent sum­mary of recent local strug­gles, enti­tled “The Mayor and Police Are not Our Friends!” Spear­headed largely by anar­chists (who have been the con­ve­nient tar­gets of an ongo­ing red-baiting cam­paign), this effort has bril­liantly changed the inflec­tion of OP, focus­ing atten­tion on local com­mu­ni­ties already in strug­gle. A pre­dictable back­lash fol­lowed, with many claim­ing that link­ing the occu­pa­tion with strug­gles around the cur­few and police bru­tal­ity diluted our mes­sage and weak­ened pub­lic support.

This back­lash esca­lated when 15 occu­piers were arrested in front of Philadel­phia PD head­quar­ters on the national Octo­ber 22 day of protest against police bru­tal­ity. Although the effi­cacy of their non-violent civil dis­obe­di­ence tac­tics is debat­able (all blocked a street overnight, refus­ing repeated police orders to dis­perse), the real­ity of police bru­tal­ity in Philly is not. The first arrests of OP were denounced by many who sought to dis­tance the activ­i­ties at City Hall from those which, pushed out­ward by the occupation’s momen­tum, occurred else­where in the city. Should this fail­ure of sol­i­dar­ity and cen­trifu­gal polit­i­cal imag­i­na­tion con­tinue, OP will likely die a win­try death shiv­er­ing in the shad­ows of Cen­ter City.

The Octo­ber 22 arrests and the emer­gence of a new ulti­ma­tum from the city throw the future of OP into ques­tion. After grant­ing an open-ended per­mit to the occu­pa­tion, with no stated end date, the city announced Novem­ber 15 as the first day of the ren­o­va­tion of Dil­worth Plaza. This ren­o­va­tion includes the total recon­struc­tion of the plaza by a pri­vate com­pany bear­ing a 30-year lease, which will install an ice-skating rink and chic cafe, obvi­ously inspired by Man­hat­tan tourist geo­gra­phies. Of course, the ren­o­va­tion will entail fenc­ing off the plaza, expelling not only the occu­pa­tion, but also the home­less who use it as a long-term home. So the date has been set for con­fronta­tion. Whether the city backs down, OP relo­cates, or is forcibly expelled, is uncer­tain. How OP decides to act against this threat will be a major indi­ca­tor of the movement’s resolve and potential.

A far larger chal­lenge, how­ever, is the win­ter weather. The last two Philadel­phia win­ters have been among the harsh­est on record. Sim­ply put, OP can­not with­stand a north­east­ern win­ter at its cur­rent size, and should not try to. Dis­cour­aged dis­per­sion when the tem­per­a­ture dips is the worst pos­si­ble out­come, and pro­vid­ing a spec­ta­cle of per­sonal suf­fer­ing to the media through it all is a ter­ri­ble tac­tic. Occu­pa­tions have cap­tured the imag­i­na­tion of the world, but fetishiz­ing the tac­tic is a strate­gic blun­der. The only limit to con­tin­u­ing and grow­ing this nascent move­ment is our imag­i­na­tion. Our con­ver­sa­tions and GAs must move, and quickly, to the dis­cus­sion of new tac­tics – occu­py­ing aban­doned build­ings (of no short sup­ply in Philly), sub­ver­sive orga­niz­ing in our schools and work­places, strength­en­ing of the local strug­gles our anar­chist com­rades have drawn atten­tion to – action, edu­ca­tion, and the­o­riz­ing with­out a cen­tral encamp­ment if need be. GAs can con­tinue indoors, marches and direct action can expand through­out the city, and of course hard­core occu­piers can con­tinue out­side if they wish. This strate­gic retreat is actu­ally an advance across the entirety of the social ter­rain – but one that will require defy­ing the logic of media rep­re­sen­ta­tion and the spec­ta­cle of con­tem­po­rary politics.

In one form or the other, we can be opti­mistic that Occupy Philadel­phia will inspire a win­ter of dis­con­tent in the City of Broth­erly Love. Come spring, we can reoc­cupy not only Dil­worth Plaza, but Rit­ten­house Square, Love Park, Franklin Park­way, and – why not – Inde­pen­dence Hall and the Lib­erty Bell, too.

For­mer Egypt­ian pres­i­dent Hosni Mubarak had already stepped down, fol­low­ing a pop­u­lar move­ment that estab­lished a micro-republic, the Gumhuriyyah el-Tahrir (Repub­lic of Lib­erty), which con­tra­dicted the per­vad­ing logic of the inter­na­tional eco­nomic sys­tem. And now pro­test­ers in Wis­con­sin were occu­py­ing the state house to pre­vent the pass­ing of leg­is­la­tion that would effec­tively sus­pend bar­gain­ing rights for pub­lic work­ers. Sit­ting in a Wash­ing­ton news­room, we needed a head­line. I very quickly sug­gested some­thing along these lines: “Mid­dle East unrest spreads to the Mid­west.” I got a side eye. After all, how could a free and open soci­ety, the demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety, be tak­ing its cues from, of all places, Egypt, an antique land with back­ward ways, Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists, and Arab dic­ta­tors? The edi­tors went with a more mod­est title.

How­ever, for many in the Arab world, the con­nec­tion was not lost for a minute. They saw in the occu­pa­tion of the Wis­con­sin State Capi­tol the same spirit that was present in Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation: the refusal to accept the finan­cial order’s demand to oblit­er­ate decades of pro­gres­sive strug­gle and negotiation.

Maybe my own time in Cairo made me see the easy con­nec­tion that my edi­tors missed. I lived there for a almost a year and a half on the largess of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. The con­di­tions of my pres­ence were a reminder of the struc­tural inequal­i­ties of the global sys­tem. Any old Amer­i­can can arrive to the air­port with­out a visa, lit­tle train­ing in any use­ful domain and quickly find gain­ful employ­ment and a life of com­fort. An Egypt­ian, how­ever, even with years of edu­ca­tion, has to strug­gle to make a living.

As many set out today to occupy every­thing, let us take a moment to remem­ber the real ori­gins of this global move­ment and allow it to guide our ongo­ing politics.

Deep in the land of Han­ni­bal the Carthagin­ian, who once chal­lenged the power of another global empire, Bouaz­izi was born to a con­struc­tion worker, liv­ing his entire life in Sidi Bouzid, an agrar­ian town. The 26-year-old scraped together an exis­tence for him­self and a large fam­ily by sell­ing fruit. Rel­a­tively speak­ing, he did well to have even that hus­tle, as the New York Times reported that unem­ploy­ment reaches as high as 30% in his area. There was a nearby fac­tory, but that only pays around $50 a month. Even the col­lege edu­cated were head­ing to the coast, where they too strug­gled with underemployment.

A vet­eran fruit ven­dor, Bouaz­izi was used to the author­i­ties that policed the fruit stands. Some­times he paid a fine, other times a bribe. But on the morn­ing of Decem­ber 17, Bouaz­izi refused to do either. He also refused an attempted con­fis­ca­tion of his fruit, com­modi­ties that are often bought on credit by the para-legal ven­dors. The rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the state even­tu­ally won the first bat­tle. Beaten and humil­i­ated, Bouaz­izi quickly tried redress­ing his griev­ances at the governor’s office, request­ing that, at the least, his scale be returned. Ignored at the governor’s, he was reported to ask, “how do you expect me to make a liv­ing?” He set him­self ablaze and ignited a global movement.

Protests started hours after the inci­dent. Bouazizi’s fam­ily and friends threw coins at the governor’s gate. “Here is your bribe,” they yelled. As the unrest grew, police started to beat pro­test­ers, fir­ing tear gas and even­tu­ally bul­lets. But the spirit wouldn’t be sti­fled. Orga­nized labor joined in the strug­gle, iden­ti­fy­ing the cen­tral prob­lem as eco­nomic. After all, it was global cap­i­tal that had denied Bouaz­izi and his sup­port­ers their dig­nity; it extracted sur­plus value from human objects down to the last drop of blood.

For­mer colo­nial power France offered to lend a hand with its secu­rity savoir-faire. Or maybe they would have just hired a pri­vate firm to han­dle the con­tract. Later acknowl­edg­ing the mis­step, Sarkozy tried to jus­tify his government’s sup­port of the author­i­tar­ian regime with reveal­ing, if trite, argu­ments. “Behind the eman­ci­pa­tion of women, the drive for edu­ca­tion and train­ing, the eco­nomic dynamism, the emer­gence of a mid­dle class, there was a despair, a suf­fer­ing, a sense of suf­fo­ca­tion. We have to recog­nise that we under­es­ti­mated it,” Sarkozy said in a press con­fer­ence.

Sarkozy under­es­ti­mated the effect that the “eco­nomic dynamism” of the rul­ing elite had on the major­ity of the coun­try. He under­es­ti­mated the dimin­ished eco­nomic prospects that resulted from Tunisia’s decreased agri­cul­tural and man­u­fac­tur­ing exports to Europe. He under­es­ti­mated the Tunisian people’s reac­tion in the face of poten­tial anni­hi­la­tion by eco­nomic violence.

The move­ment quickly spread to nearby Egypt, where con­di­tions have been even worse, the socio-economic divide between the top 1% and the rest even more dra­matic. Sev­eral self-immolations occurred through­out the coun­try, prompt­ing the Cheikh of al Azhar, the most respected insti­tu­tion in the Sunni Islamic world, to issue a fatwa against the prac­tice. Youth with degrees but with­out jobs started to occupy Tahrir Square, to call for the dig­nity that global neolib­eral poli­cies had denied them. They took the recent tac­tics of Egypt’s young but grow­ing labor move­ment and added others.

When Mubarak, whose 30-year reign had been marked by the open­ing of the coun­try to West­ern busi­ness inter­ests, started to crack down on the pro­test­ers as the empire’s strong man, the peo­ple said he had to go. The pub­lic began to protest against dic­ta­tor­ship, but only inso­far as they were protest­ing the global eco­nomic empire.

Some­how a pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive has emerged in our media that the Arab spring protested against dic­ta­tor­ship, against mur­der­ous regimes. These pop­u­lar strug­gles have been reduced to rebel­lions against the vil­lainies of a Qaddafi, an Assad, a Saleh.

But the Arab Spring started as a protest against global finance and its hench­men. Almost across the board, pro­test­ers claim­ing pub­lic space were demand­ing mostly eco­nomic reforms. It was only after Arab dic­ta­tors, whose decen­nial rules offered up their coun­tries to the jaws of the global mar­ket, started to repress this pop­u­lar strug­gle with vio­lence, that dic­ta­tor­ship became the tar­get of regime change.

Occupy Wall Street and the sub­se­quent Occupy move­ment were ini­ti­ated in the same spirit of eco­nomic jus­tice. Zuc­cotti Park, iron­i­cally taken and renamed Lib­erty Plaza by its occu­piers, is a micro-republic where the logic of empire doesn’t work. Peo­ple take pride in dis­com­fort, in being arrested and work­ing for free. Altru­ism has become nor­ma­tive and hier­ar­chy repug­nant. To be sure, there is inner dis­sent and strug­gle within the body politic of the micro-republic. Nev­er­the­less, the audac­ity to live a utopian prac­tice has become lib­er­at­ing in itself.

Yet this move­ment can’t con­tent itself with grant­ing young peo­ple the right to take on more debt to live the lives the world can’t sus­tain, or reform­ing the way can­di­dates fund their cam­paigns. The despo­tism that west­ern pow­ers decry in the name of human rights is a symp­tom of a wider sys­tem of eco­nomic exploita­tion, which at home man­i­fests itself in the attack on the Amer­i­can work­ing and mid­dle class. They are connected.

The repres­sive mea­sures states use against their own pop­u­la­tions has also been imported from the Mid­dle East. A recent post by Max Blu­men­thal con­nects the dots behind recent alarm­ing exam­ples of social con­trol and police militarization:

The police repres­sion on dis­play in Oak­land reminded me of tac­tics I wit­nessed the Israeli army employ against Pales­tin­ian pop­u­lar strug­gle demon­stra­tions in occu­pied West Bank vil­lages like Nabi Saleh, Ni’lin and Bilin. So I was not sur­prised when I learned that the same com­pany that sup­plies the Israeli army with tear­gas rounds and other weapons of mass sup­pres­sion is sell­ing its dan­ger­ous wares to the Oak­land police. The com­pany is Defense Tech­nol­ogy, a Casper, Wyoming based arms firm that claims to “spe­cial­ize in less lethal tech­nol­ogy” and other “crowd man­age­ment prod­ucts.” Defense Tech sells every­thing from rub­ber coated tear­gas rounds that bounce in order to max­i­mize gas dis­per­sal to 40 mil­lime­ter “direct impact” sponge rounds to “spe­cialty impact” 12 gauge rub­ber bullets.

One vet­eran of the war in Iraq knows the effects of the police-sponsored vio­lence first­hand. After being hit by a tear gas can­is­ter launched by the Oak­land Police Depart­ment, Scott Olsen suf­fered a frac­tured skull and a swollen brain. As though that were not enough, video footage shows a police offi­cer throw­ing a flash bang grenade next to the blood­ied man to dis­perse the crowd of peo­ple com­ing to his aid. But such police bru­tal­ity is noth­ing new in Oak­land, home of a rad­i­cal black pol­i­tics that has strug­gled against struc­tural eco­nomic and phys­i­cal vio­lence against the work­ing class, the poor, and minorities.

We should remem­ber that the pol­i­tics forged by the Black Pan­ther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s made deep ties with the anti-imperial projects of North Africa, the hotbed of today’s van­guard move­ment. Alge­ria made the Pan­ther head­quar­ters in Oak­land their embassy, pro­vid­ing a sort of diplo­matic shield against police sur­veil­lance. When Eldridge Cleaver went into exile, Alge­ria hosted him and the inter­na­tional sec­tion of the party. A chap­ter was also cre­ated in Cairo, then, a nerve cen­ter for the world wide free­dom struggle.

Much is rid­ing on the direc­tion of the Occupy move­ment in Amer­ica. While vis­it­ing the Wall Street occu­piers, two of Tahrir’s lead­ing activists empha­sized the impor­tance of the Occupy move­ment for the renewal of the Arab Spring. To Amer­i­cans who asked how they could help the ongo­ing Egypt­ian strug­gle, Asmaa Mah­fouz replied, “get your rev­o­lu­tion done. That’s the biggest help you can give us.” What Mah­fouz was count­ing on was the pos­si­bil­ity that strug­gles in the United States could pres­sure the gov­ern­ment to cut off the $1.3 bil­lion yearly pay­ments that sus­tain Egypt’s military.

Long-time activist Ahmad Maher reminded the crowd of the immense task the Arab Spring con­fronted, and which activists around the world still con­front. An Amer­i­can asked him the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: “how do you over­throw a sys­tem?” Speak­ing as a grass­roots polit­i­cal orga­nizer who has been on the Egypt­ian street for years, Maher replied, “It’s eas­ier to over­throw a dic­ta­tor than an entire system.”

There is a rea­son that the Occupy move­ment does not have a sin­gu­lar mes­sage, tied to one polit­i­cal body; its suc­cess or fail­ure will lie in the degree to which it changes everything.

This is an unfin­ished work – a snap­shot of his­tory as it occurred, expe­ri­enced by me, reported on social media, or retold by trusted com­rades. It will lack the final­ity of hind­sight. Con­tained within is my account of the Oak­land Insur­rec­tion, as it has unfolded over the past days and weeks. Both the insur­rec­tion and this essay are works of hope. I hope that we push for­ward on the streets of Oak­land, the Bay Area, and every­where else, to the limit of what is pos­si­ble – beyond occu­pa­tion and the pro­posed gen­eral strike to “total free­dom” for us all.1

#Occu­pyOak­land

Inspired by the upris­ings across the world and fueled by the increas­ingly pre­car­i­ous eco­nomic con­di­tions across the United States, a call­out was made for an occu­pa­tion of Wall Street. On Sep­tem­ber 17, 1000 peo­ple occu­pied the finan­cial hub of the United States and arguably global cap­i­tal­ism. Within days, dozens of towns and cities had their own ver­sion of the #Occupy move­ment – with vary­ing degrees of encamp­ment, protest, and orga­niz­ing space; within weeks, hun­dreds of cities were occu­pied; within a month, over a thou­sand world­wide.

Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by many Bay Area res­i­dents, was occu­pied on Octo­ber 10. Logis­ti­cal plan­ning started a week before the occu­pa­tion date, with #Occu­pyOak­land field­ing a fully func­tional can­teen, child­care, medic, sound, and gen­eral assem­bly area on day one, with per­son of color (POC), gen­der, and queer safe spaces soon to fol­low. #Occu­pyOak­land had the same pop­ulist rhetoric regard­ing the prob­lem­atic “homo­ge­neous” nature of “#Occupy…”, but pushed the “99%” cri­tique in a decid­edly anti-capitalist direc­tion. Cou­pled with this was a dis­tinctly anti-police and anti-state tone that also trans­lated into anti-oppression orga­ni­za­tional forms.

On Octo­ber 21 the city of Oak­land pre­sented the gen­eral assem­bly, the offi­cial orga­niz­ing body of #Occu­pyOak­land, with a let­ter of evic­tion, cit­ing “pub­lic safety.” The words of Oak­land­Com­mune, posted Octo­ber 19 on the Bay of Rage web­site, beau­ti­fully fore­shadow what tran­spired on Octo­ber 25 and 26when the police made good on their threats:

Social rebels from around Oak­land have descended upon Oscar Grant Plaza and have cre­ated a gen­uine, autonomous space free of police and unwel­com­ing to politi­cians. Whereas other occu­pa­tions have invited the police and politi­cians, or have nego­ti­ated with them, Occupy Oak­land has carved a line in the cement. That line of demar­ca­tion says: if you pass this, if you try and break up or over shadow this autonomous space, you are well aware, as observed over the last cou­ple of years, what we are capa­ble of.

His­tory

The Bay Area’s his­tory of social resis­tance is well doc­u­mented, and it’s impor­tant to remem­ber the con­text behind the mil­i­tancy seen around #Occu­pyOak­land. The gen­eral events these social rebels are refer­ring to are the upris­ings and demon­stra­tions that have occurred over the past three years in the Bay Area, respond­ing to police vio­lence and “aus­ter­ity.”2 To under­stand the events of the past week, one must under­stand the atmos­phere in which these actions took place. The most rel­e­vant of these demon­stra­tions revolve around three sets of riots that fol­lowed the mur­der of Oscar Grant III on Jan­u­ary 1, 2009.3

One week after Oscar’s mur­der by police, Jan­u­ary 7, 2009, a rally at the Fruit­vale BART sta­tion tran­si­tioned into a march that even­tu­ally evolved into a riot, with run­ning street fights against police. The action resulted in 100 arrests and hun­dreds of thou­sands in polic­ing costs and prop­erty destruc­tion. Johannes Mehserle, the offi­cer who killed Grant, was arrested one week later – a day before thou­sands marched through Oak­land, serv­ing notice to the police that their actions had consequences.

A series of low and mid-intensity direct actions and marches occurred over the next 18 months until the ver­dict day, July 8, 2010, when Mehserle was osten­si­bly acquit­ted for mur­der and found guilty of invol­un­tary manslaugh­ter for shoot­ing an unarmed and prone Oscar Grant in the back. Police prepa­ra­tions, dubbed “Oper­a­tion Ver­dict,” were one of the largest local buildups of state and fed­eral police forces in recent his­tory.4 The buildup actu­ally seemed to inten­sify pop­u­lar opin­ion against the police. Oper­a­tion Ver­dict not only failed to stop another riot, where hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars worth of prop­erty was destroyed, but also failed to arrest as many demon­stra­tors as the riots of a year before. Sen­tenc­ing day, Novem­ber 5. 2010, saw an evo­lu­tion of police tac­tics that stopped the march before it mor­phed into some­thing greater. The march was ket­tled and every­one was arrested in mass, all later to be released with­out charges.

Oscar Grant’s Legacy

I would like to rec­og­nize that Oscar Grant was a real per­son; with a daugh­ter, fam­ily, and friends. I would like to rec­og­nize this because the human ele­ment can get lost when we make mar­tyrs out of casu­al­ties. The actions around his death were liv­ing lab­o­ra­to­ries for many Bay Area res­i­dents, specif­i­cally youth and polit­i­cal rad­i­cals – anar­chists, anti-authoritarians, and anti-capitalists. For some, this was the first time they had tasted tear gas or felt the sting of a rub­ber bul­let. The Jan­u­ary 7 riot was a hur­ried affair, with peo­ple quickly learn­ing how to stay together, erect makeshift bar­ri­cades, or set fires to neces­si­tate getaways.

July 8 saw the forces of the state pre­pared and still unable to stop scores of “crews” smash­ing shop win­dows.5 Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coor­di­na­tion appeared to improve between the var­i­ous demon­stra­tion par­tic­i­pants. Masks were worn and code names used. It was appar­ent that even just a few “bat­tle hours” dra­mat­i­cally increased a collectivity’s “street” effec­tive­ness, i.e. the abil­ity to cre­ate social unrest and get away with it. Through these events, it was revealed that street demon­stra­tions, with riots in par­tic­u­lar, did have an effect on, if not pub­lic pol­icy, then at least civic discourse.

There were fail­ures as well. Media and state forces con­spired to cre­ate the con­cept of the “out­side agi­ta­tor” – the anar­chist from afar whose only pur­pose was to smash. The actions of prop­erty destruc­tion seemed to over­shadow the con­text in which they were used. The tac­tic itself was the per­fect expres­sion of the pow­er­less­ness that peo­ple felt in demand­ing, from an unjust state, some sort of “jus­tice.” It was an action of tantrum, say­ing, “in this protest zone, in this space of social rup­ture, I only have the abil­ity to destroy.” A state­ment like that, while uni­fy­ing for the par­tic­i­pants within that instant of “social rup­ture,” has lit­tle to no orga­niz­ing poten­tial. And so the move­ment went from active con­flict to his­tory. Its steam and momen­tum were lost. How­ever, with its pass­ing came a time of tac­ti­cal and strate­gic reflec­tion, the results of which were prac­ticed on the streets of Oak­land under the ban­ner of #Occupy only a week ago.

Anar­chists

The efforts and effects of the anar­chist tra­di­tion in the Bay Area can­not be ignored, nei­ther in the case of Oscar Grant nor #Occu­pyOak­land. There are hun­dreds of anar­chists active in “street level” actions; hun­dreds more work­ing in var­i­ous cor­po­rate, non-profit, alter­na­tive, and other indus­tries that bring money, logis­ti­cal sup­port, and expe­ri­ence when needed; and hun­dreds still who are engaged in their own projects, com­mu­ni­ties, and build­ing families.

The pres­ence of such a high con­cen­tra­tion of anar­chists at rad­i­cal or poten­tially explo­sive demon­stra­tions has influ­enced how peo­ple protest. To be sure, not every per­son at a demo is an anar­chist, far from it, but many have adopted anar­chist prac­tice. Mask­ing up, wear­ing black, and work­ing in teams has cre­ated a safer and more dis­ci­plined force. The atten­dance of anar­chist street medics, pro­pa­gan­dists, and expe­ri­enced street fight­ers adds a level of infra­struc­tural and logis­ti­cal sup­port that makes actions on the streets feel sup­ported and embold­ened. Tra­di­tion­ally orga­niz­ing on egal­i­tar­ian and non-hierarchical planes, as well as a famil­iar­ity with con­sen­sus process, have facil­i­tated the cre­ation of a strong gen­eral assem­bly. The cre­ation of sol­i­dar­ity groups for those arrested at actions, and access to the legal net­work that years of Bay Area activism cre­ated has been key in move­ment progress. In both social move­ments the anar­chist pres­ence has been an impor­tant, though by far not the only, ele­ment to any success.

This is not to say that an anar­chist pres­ence in the Bay Area has not had its trou­bles in recent years. The attempt by the state to brand anar­chists as “out­siders” failed in the buildup of Oper­a­tion Ver­dict, but did high­light racial and class issues that peo­ple are still con­fronting. Fur­ther­more there was a suc­cess­ful attempt to brand anar­chists has vio­lent, although this was just one more step in a process dat­ing back hun­dreds of years to rede­fine “anar­chism” in the neg­a­tive. Still, the only con­tact that many peo­ple have had with anar­chists is the images pre­sented by the media of “black-clad hooli­gans destroy­ing things.” The insur­rec­tionary anar­chist cur­rent that is alive within the Bay has showed itself as a trend of attack, secu­rity cul­ture, and tightknit net­works. In the past it was inward focus­ing and only sur­faced in times of action, although the pres­ence of many insur­rec­tion­ists at the gen­eral assem­blies and their use of vio­lence in a form dif­fer­ent from that of prop­erty destruc­tion does give cre­dence to the idea that this trend is maturing.

Insur­rec­tion and Strike

Through­out the week, prepa­ra­tions were made within the #Occu­pyOak­land space for arrival of police enforc­ing the evic­tion notices. The plan was to con­struct and defend bar­ri­cades to keep the Oak­land Police Depart­ment (OPD) out for as long as pos­si­ble. Over the past two weeks, the police made only a hand­ful of incur­sions into the autonomous space. The response by those camped was always force­ful yet dis­ci­plined, with the dis­tilled mes­sage being: “get out!” As a result there was lit­tle worry about the ques­tion of “when” “they” would come. “They will come when they do,” one camper told me with a shrug the night before the evic­tion. On Tues­day Octo­ber 25, at 4:30 AM, hun­dreds of riot police from over a dozen dif­fer­ent agen­cies descended upon the camp. After call­ing a dis­per­sal order, police waited for five min­utes before throw­ing con­cus­sion grenades, launch­ing tear gas, fir­ing pep­per and rub­ber bul­lets, and hit­ting peo­ple with batons. The night con­cluded with around 80 arrests and some seri­ous injuries.

A call out was made for 4 PM the same day to meet at the Oak­land Library for a march to Oscar Grant (OG) Plaza. A diverse crowd of over 1500 peo­ple arrived. They marched around Oak­land, swelling in num­bers as peo­ple came into the streets. The police attacked with gas, less-than-lethal rounds, and batons. Demon­stra­tors responded with bot­tles and paint bal­loons. Police snatch squads grabbed and beat pro­tes­tors in full view of the crowd, with a hand­ful hav­ing to be taken to the emer­gency room.6 The march con­tin­ued to OG Plaza where lines of riot police stood behind metal bar­ri­cades block­ing all pos­si­ble entrances. A stand­off ensued.

At roughly 8:30 PM a crowd of 500 assem­bled at 14 and Broad­way. After repeated warn­ings the police attacked. The gas attack was the worst of the day. Injured pro­test­ers lit­tered the inter­sec­tion, includ­ing Scott Olson, two-tour Marine vet­eran, who took a tear­gas can­is­ter to the head. Oth­ers were blinded and chok­ing on the gas. Numer­ous burn vic­tims from the gas can­is­ters ran for cover; at least one of them needed plas­tic surgery on her foot. The crowd recom­posed within min­utes, play­ing cat and mouse with the police, ral­ly­ing and tak­ing the streets out­side the bar­ri­cades, flee­ing from police attacks only to form again.

The chat­ter of excite­ment and anger was easy to under­stand. Groups of peo­ple were swap­ping sto­ries from the days events. The gas was loos­ing its fear effect; these crowds were not dis­pers­ing. Teenagers were laugh­ing at each other’s snot and tear-soaked faces. Older peo­ple were talk­ing about the 1960s; “gas nowa­days seems more potent,” they said. Anar­chist and other rad­i­cal medics were help­ing gas vic­tims. By about 10 PM it was obvi­ous that even though the group had failed to retake the plaza, they had in fact won two impor­tant vic­to­ries. #Occu­pyOak­land was effec­tively in con­trol of all of down­town Oak­land save OG Plaza. Or, to put it dif­fer­ently, the police had lost the ini­tia­tive: they had lost their mobil­ity and the abil­ity to dic­tate terms out­side the range of their weapons. By con­trol­ling the plaza they abdi­cated con­trol of the rest of down­town Oak­land to the occu­piers. Declar­ing vic­tory on the ground, the hun­dreds of occu­piers began to dis­perse to ready them­selves for the next day.

The sec­ond vic­tory was not seen until the next day, when media out­lets had no choice but to broad­cast images of the night’s insur­rec­tion. Grab­bing the media’s atten­tion as well was the griev­ous injury to Scott Olson. Sur­viv­ing two tours in Iraq to come home and be shot by OPD sealed the police’s fate in the realm of pub­lic opin­ion. Not only had #Occu­pyOak­land suc­ceeded in con­trol­ling the streets, they had also won over hearts and minds. As of this writ­ing it looks as though Scott will recover and not become a mar­tyr for any cause, just another vic­tim of police brutality.

A gen­eral assem­bly was called for 6 PM on Octo­ber 26. The police were nowhere in sight, but some reported that they were mass­ing at a nearby park­ing garage. They were never to mobi­lize in any show of force. Bike patrols were pass­ing back infor­ma­tion, and a gen­eral feel­ing of safety per­me­ated the camp. The metal fence that had been set up by the city was taken down, and once again the plaza was in the hands of #Occu­pyOak­land. A pro­posal was sub­mit­ted for a gen­eral strike in Oak­land on Novem­ber 2. The pro­posal passed by 96.9%; 1484 votes for to 77 against, with 47 absten­tions, more than enough in Oakland’s mod­i­fied con­sen­sus of 90% for the pro­posal to pass.

After the vote, 2000 peo­ple attempted to march for the down­town Oak­land BART sta­tion to travel to San Fran­cisco, where it was reported that the SF occu­pa­tion was to be attacked by SFPD. The sta­tion was closed by BART offi­cials, so the 2000-strong group marched through Oak­land, stop­ping once at the OPD head­quar­ters to yell at the police, once at the Oak­land jail chant­ing in sup­port of those incar­cer­ated, and once under a free­way over­pass, to dis­cuss whether the group should cross the Oakland/Bay bridge to sup­port #Occu­pySF. The march decided to retake OG Plaza instead.

A truly star­tling real­iza­tion emerged among many of the anar­chists present at the gen­eral assem­bly. As thou­sands of peo­ple dis­cussed the gen­eral strike pro­posal, oth­ers were cir­cu­lat­ing and inter­min­gling, talk­ing about the vic­tory of the night before. A major theme of the dis­cus­sion was the fact that so much had been gained with­out resort­ing to prop­erty destruc­tion. A tacit under­stand­ing devel­oped amongst many of the rad­i­cals that no one was going to phys­i­cally stop any of the “wreck­ing crews” from smash­ing win­dows, but peo­ple under­stood that much of the pre­vi­ous night’s vic­tory could be attrib­uted to the images of police vio­lence against pro­tes­tors and the counter-violence of pro­tes­tors against the police. If there is an insur­rec­tionary imper­a­tive to attack the state, that idea seemed to gain sup­port, at least among those in the gen­eral pub­lic who watched the live stream. The march on Octo­ber 25 showed how the pro­tes­tors had done due dili­gence in their attempt to remain “peace­ful”; they responded to police vio­lence with defen­sive force, instead of the less under­stood (and less direct) tac­tic of attack­ing prop­erty. A vio­lence of low-intensity self-defense actu­ally gained #Occu­pyOak­land inter­na­tional support.

Lessons Learned

In the OG Plaza riots, the impo­tent vio­lence that resulted in Mehserle’s arrest also doomed the move­ment to remain mar­ginal. Peo­ple have many unre­solved issues with prop­erty destruc­tion. It is my pre­sump­tion that those in com­mand of the police forces on the night of the Octo­ber 25 expected to see protester-initiated prop­erty destruc­tion. Bro­ken win­dows have the power to retroac­tively ratio­nal­ize the use of police vio­lence. The destruc­tion of the camp and the attack on the march would sud­denly seem under­stand­able once the nightly news flashed images of bro­ken glass. Unfor­tu­nately for police com­mand, the rad­i­cal and urban #Occu­pyOak­lan­ders did not fall into their trap. There was no need; con­fronting OPD and Alameda Sheriff’s Depart­ment was enough.

There was a very real feel­ing that if the OPD had changed its tac­tics on the night of Octo­ber 25, and – instead of hold­ing posi­tions and gassing pro­tes­tors – went in for arrests, the police might have started a fight that they were not pre­pared to win. There were roughly equal num­ber of police and #Occu­pyOak­lan­ders, around 500 each, but the police were spread out, cov­er­ing the perime­ter of OG Plaza, while the demon­stra­tors were able to focus all their num­bers in one loca­tion. Even more impres­sive is that on the night of Octo­ber 26, with the police lack­ing the author­ity to act in response to #OccupyOakland’s retak­ing of OG Plaza, the occu­piers were able to push the police out of their autonomous zone and defend it. This cohe­sion and the strength of will it pro­duced is a direct result of the reflec­tions, lessons, and tac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions that grew from the OG riots. Those ini­ti­at­ing con­fronta­tions with police did so with dis­ci­pline, and, dare I say it, style.

There has been a lot of talk about a lack of demands as a weak­ness of the #Occupy move­ments. I hear their demands loud and clear. The cri­tique of cap­i­tal­ism, oppo­si­tion to state power, clear revul­sion towards the police, rede­f­i­n­i­tion of social and power rela­tions, inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tion, coop­er­a­tion, and the attempt to recon­fig­ure our exist­ing world into one that is healthy for all; these are demands that are being made by those occu­py­ing. The idea from the begin­ning was to cre­ate. In acts of cre­ation power is returned. We have held our ground, defended a space that is our own. Now we are orga­niz­ing not just for our­selves but also for oth­ers. A gen­eral strike will occur. The next ques­tion is clear: what other cities will follow?

See you in the streets.

Matthew Edwards is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz, and an organizer in the Bay Area. A native Californian, he has been involved in radical politics since refusing deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002. Comments can be sent to anewhope AT riseup.net

• 1This phrase appeared on a mas­sive ban­ner by a con­tin­gent of Greek anar­chists at the 2009 G-20 in Ger­many. While not explic­itly Insur­rec­tion­ist, the Greek anar­chist ten­dency of spec­tac­u­lar street bat­tles has become syn­ony­mous with the Insur­rec­tionary Anar­chist milieu that has dom­i­nated North Amer­i­can dis­course in recent years.
• 2For an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of news sto­ries dat­ing back over 10 years, see indybay.org.
• 3The first mur­der of 2009 was com­mit­ted by a police offi­cer against an unarmed per­son of color.
• 4It is also impor­tant to note that the National Guard was mobilized.
• 5One could also use the term “affin­ity group,” but an affin­ity group is an expressly polit­i­cal form of self orga­ni­za­tion that may not nec­es­sar­ily apply to all those who ran together that night.
• 6It is impor­tant to point out that the police were not the only per­pe­tra­tors of vio­lence that evening. One arrestee was punched, elbowed and pushed to the ground by an Oak­land fire depart­ment mem­ber who also made deroga­tory sex­ual and racial com­ments towards him. Later in sher­iff cus­tody at the county jail he was beaten by at least four cor­rec­tional officers.

Dismantling a public education system in a country with strong background of political struggles requires a mitigated form of neoliberal strategy. Shutting down a whole language department, which is happening at SUNY Albany, is something you can do in certain areas of the United States. But it is a whole different story in a hot and participatory place like Italy. In a situation where active unions and a strong popular movement still have a say in public policies, one cannot launch a blitzkreig. What is needed is a longer and murky war of position. Thus various center-right governments, with the complicity of the center-left, embarked since the 1990s in a long-term project that aimed at progressively cutting off key resources from public education (while financing the private Catholic sector) so that the whole edifice would eventually crumble under the weight of its own (apparent) contradictions. At that point, they simply need to suggest that the public system is inefficient and ultimately unproductive and voilà! Who could deny the crude reality of the fact?

If the Italian peninsula displays the last stage of this drama, a similar – yet perhaps more rapid – operation has been carried out in Puerto Rico in the last three years. Between 2009 and 2010, I observed this operation as a new professor at the University of Puerto Rico. The new right-wing governor, Luis Fortuño, initiated the process I had already seen completed in Italy by frontally attacking the lower classes, the true source of his opposition. This happened through the infamous Ley 7 that fired about twenty thousand public employees in a matter of a few months. In 2010, the time was ripe to begin grinding down the public university system, one of the largest public sectors on the island and the last stronghold of a once fertile tradition of pro-independence and socialist thought. With the drastic reduction of state support for the university budget, the true revenue for higher education in Puerto Rico, the newly appointed bureaucrats (all political nominees) enforced draconian measures that crippled the institution. Tenure-track promotions were frozen, funds for research eliminated, contributions from the employer to pension funds were slashed away. After the technocrats sampled the weak response of their opponents – the professors – they hit the toughest contingents: the university maintenance workers, and students.

Employees of the university responded with a series of limited mobilizations. In the spring of 2010, students instead opted for an indefinite strike.1 The most controversial point, a matter that unified students in their fight, was a proposal to levy an additional yearly tax of eight hundred dollars for enrollment (the so-called cuota). The measure was presented by the president as the essential step to save the university from bankruptcy, but while the budget kept on shrinking in the following academic year, the university also refused to open its books and show how and where it was using the remaining funds graciously made available by the state. The reactions to these unfair and discriminatory actions were immediate. The strength of the response was especially noticed in a traditionally conservative campus like Mayagüez – the technological pole of the University of Puerto Rico. Ignoring the most politicized wing of the student body, who boycotted the referendum in fear of manipulations by the administration, the majority of students cast their ballot in favor of the strike three consecutive times.2 A felicitous case of popular outflanking of one’s own political avant-garde, the one-month-long occupation of the Mayagüez campus left a permanent memory in those who participated in it. Pickets were organized so that ongoing activities were taking place at all time during the hot days of the protest. Participants caught a glimpse the true meaning of a general strike, the moment when social norms and masked forms of oppression break down, making room for new modes of conviviality, where a gratuitous kind of social unity proliferates.

And yet, in the best Italian tradition, during that summer the university administration staged a treacherous coup de théâtre: it accepted the conditions of the Student National Negotiation Committee, declaring the rejection of its increase in tuition, only to enforce it a few weeks later when students had returned to the classroom.3 It was a perfect maneuver, which used trickery to spread a sense of impotence among the movement. Only in the main campus of San Juan did students deploy a vigorous and continuous opposition. But as the university – notwithstanding the opposition of the president, José Ramón de la Torre, who on this account later resigned – militarized the campus the movement lost that widespread mobilization that affected the whole island only few months before.4

Meanwhile, the ones who could have replaced the students, keeping alive the hope for an opposition against the destruction of higher education in Puerto Rico – the professors – remained silent. During the occupation, a minority of professors with ties to the union (APPU) actively supported the student movement. But as students were defeated, they had gained no consensus among the rest of the faculty. And yet the latter had every reason to protest, for beyond the serious impact these policies had on instruction, the faculty could also notice how former colleagues were rapidly disappearing while classrooms began to overflow. Those who had a market fled the island, but others, mostly holding temporary positions, vanished as the 2010-2011 academic year began. In the following months, the next most vulnerable component of the teachers’ workforce, international professors, was targeted as the usual procedures for working permits became almost impossible to complete. Here the most astonishing confirmation of the power of ideology took place. Although the large majority of the teachers, independently from their political affiliation, were affected in one way or the other, they kept silent and went about their business as usual.

The background of the teaching body at the University of Puerto Rico is significant. We could divide up faculty in three large sets. The first one is composed of Puerto Rican nationals, as well as Latin Americans and Europeans, who obtained a PhD. in the United States. Here is where the students enjoyed the strongest support. A consistent number of these intellectuals infused the body of theoretical knowledge accumulated in the best North American institutions with the praxis of the decades of struggle at home. Obviously, not all of them were so devoted to the cause. A consistent part of this group was also either cynically refusing any form of alliance with the students on account of some higher and more intellectual superiority, or was implicitly supporting the government. Among these individuals the new cadres of the university bureaucracy were selected; they zealously followed the prescriptions of the administration, opting out of what was left alive in the university.

The second ensemble groups US professors who were catapulted into an unfamiliar reality that remained foreign to them – although they usually operated in it quite effectively, at least from an educational point of view. Though the majority felt like they were living in another country, they usually denied that this territory is in fact a colony with specific tensions and responses in and to social fights. Moreover, accustomed as they were to the costs of education at home, these professors saw no problem in the imposition of the cuota. Overlooking at the disparity in incomes between Puerto Rico and the US, they at best adopted a classic defensive corporatist position tacitly supporting increases in tuition in the interest of the institution. This form of ideological preclusion prevented them from reading the complexity of the issues at stake, which also affected them as part of that community. They channeled their discontent into the usual reproach of Puerto Rico as just another Latin country, where corruption, bureaucracy and protest culture jam the whole social system and make it inefficient and chaotic. Only a few of them, those who knew their history and possibly lived through similar colonial dynamics in the US, avoided this ideological blockage and joined forces with the student movement.

The last group is formed by personnel trained in the former motherland: Spain. Although the Puerto Rican political elite holds the precious fruits of the Spanish academia in high regard, it recently had to realize that Spanish universities no longer produce the highly conformist generations of graduates they used to hurl out under Franco. Support came also from this new and energetic guard of professors, but it was not strong and pervasive enough to win a majority among the faculty.

To be sure, the rigid university hierarchy is very resistant to change, and has so far neutralized any reactions to the current situation. Divided by national differences and stubborn ideological occlusions, the majority of the teaching faculty is unlikely to take any collective step to protect their institution. As the administration rapidly saws away at the branch they are sitting on, along with any future safety net – the employees’ retirement plan recently came under government’s attention as well – they passively wait for a new election. Little do they know that freedom is something you gain, and that you have to defend day by day. It will not be an illuminated sovereign who will reestablishes peace and prosperity. It will be up to the students, instead, to rise again, and, if not defeat the government neo-liberal agenda, at least establish firm conditions for the new government (whatever it will be) to preserve the common good of their university.

Andrea Righi is the author of Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri (Palgrave, 2011). He is assistant professor of Italian at Colorado College. Between 2009 and 2011 he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.

Originally posted at Viewpoint Magazine

• 1The strike was supported by the Professor’s Association (APPU), the so-called Hermandad (university maintenance workers) and other unions such as Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration and the independent union of the authority of public buildings (UIAEP).
• 2Following the no-confrontation policy that is enforced in the university system after the bloody confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Puerto Rico grants that if one of the major three branches (the faculty, the student body or the employees) calls for a strike, campuses shut down and classes resume only at the end of the strike.
• 3See Leysa Caro González, “Reafirman que la cuota va en enero próximo,” Primera Hora, December 14, 2010. http://www.primerahora.com/reafirmanquelacuotavaeneneroproximo-452820.html
• 4See Cynthia López Cabán, “De la Torre exorciza sus demonios,” El Nuevo Día, May 25, 2011. http://www.elnuevodia.com/delatorreexorcizasusdemonios-974789.html

In the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans migrated from the Deep South to Harlem. Racist white residents fled to the outer boroughs and the suburbs, and landlords began to double and triple Harlem rents, capitalizing on the limited geographic options presented to new black New Yorkers. Families crammed into single rooms, but when the first of the month neared, they still had to search for supplementary sources of income to make their rent payments. Inspired by the tradition of Southern Saturday night fish fries and “breakdowns,” Harlemites began to roll up their rugs, push the furniture aside, and print tickets to promote their “Parlor Socials,” or “Too Terrible Parties.” Hosts invited dueling pianists such as Fats Waller to turn on the heat with “cutting contests,” which sparked unrestrained dancing and revelry, the likes of which working-class blacks could never access in exclusive neighborhood joints that denied admission to black people, such as Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. The party hosts charged admission, typically a quarter, and made extra rent money from the sale of bathtub gin, corn whiskey, and soul food. The rent party scene served as an incubator for several notable jazz pianists, and it began to play a vital economic and social role in the life of Harlem’s working-class community.

Though some recent media accounts depict rent parties as a novel practice of the alternative white twenty-somethings who gentrify black communities, they began as a dynamic and autonomous response to exploitation, and warrant careful study as a traditional practice of occupation. Although the concept was not widely addressed in mainstream U.S. media prior to the seizing of Zuccotti Park and various other public and private spaces in American cities, the act of occupying has a rich and complex history. Critical participants have emphasized that the United States is occupied land, and have called for the movement to use the word with acknowledgement of its destructive history for indigenous populations. Those with a global perspective have pointed to the occupation of Tahrir Square, and similar popular movements throughout the world over the past many years. For those anchored in labor history, the term brings to mind the tradition of worker occupations of factories – as a strike technique used to prevent lockouts, and in some cases, to “recover” the factories under worker control. Finally, those who have inhabited abandoned buildings, by choice or necessity, clearly draw links between their life’s work and the habitation of major cities’ parks and plazas over the past several months.

But in spite of this attention to occupation, some vibrant and essential forms of the practice have been overlooked. It is these forms to which we should be looking as the winter months near and the movement begins to realize the need to diversify its tactics.

Throughout the summer of 2011, Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and the local media whipped up a frenzy, threading together a diverse array of gatherings of black teenagers in predominantly white, affluent areas of the city over the past three years under the umbrella of “flash mobs,” “teen mob attacks,” and even “riots.” A closer look at the eleven incidents identified as flash mob attacks and used as a justification for the enactment of a racist curfew law, which the Philadelphia City Council recently extended across the city for the next two years, reveals that these events have little in common other than the presence of black youth transgressing the boundaries of their neighborhoods to occupy the city’s white economic center.

Several of the incidents can be completely discounted, according to the widely accepted definition of a flash mob, “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse.” Six friends punching a man in the head on the way home from summer school hardly seems to constitute a mob of strangers engaging in a premeditated, pointless act, and anyone who has spent a day in a dysfunctional Philadelphia public school or one of its equally deranged charter counterparts could easily sympathize with the students’ sense of outrage and misdirected aggression.

Even if we set aside incidents in which a small group of people attack an individual, the collection of events identified as flash mobs is complex and ranges from exercises in auto-reduction to what many Philly teens would just describe as “breakin’ it down.” The news and gossip site Gawker investigated the conspiratorial social media exchanges that led up to a March 20, 2011 flash mob on South Street in Philadelphia and discovered links to Team Nike, a neighborhood dance crew that promotes their weekend parties through public dance performances. But while Gawker snidely concludes that Philly flash mobs and party crews such as Team Nike “might be nothing more sinister and revolutionary than a few street performances that got out of hand,” the Occupy movement can learn a lot from young people’s libidinal disruptions of the street.

While Philadelphia’s white elite spent their summer cowering indoors, bracing themselves for “roving gangs” of black teenagers who might “terrorize” their neighborhoods, the rest of the city embraced the heat and the streets, hosting outdoor parties on every block. Like the flash mob, the block party has much to teach today’s occupiers about taking back colonized spaces, and infusing them with a sense of joyful resistance. Black and Latino teenagers living in the Bronx in the early 1970s began organizing parties, inspired by Jamaican yard dances and sound system culture. They were looking for alternatives to the gang culture that had resulted in the deaths of their friends and brothers, and they were pushing back against the crushing force of “urban renewal,” a state-sponsored movement to destroy communities of people of color in major American cities. Young people organized block parties to make money for school clothes, to push their sound systems to the limits, and to demonstrate their vernacular dance expertise. They stacked up speakers in the parks and siphoned power from street lights, and they danced until daybreak.

The youthful founders of hip-hop, who literally rose from the ashes of their burnt, abandoned communities, followed in the footsteps of the Civil Rights activists who came a half generation before them by dancing in the street; but at the same time, they created a new form of occupation and defined new relationships with each other and their city by breaking away from the limited political paths presented. They created what hip-hop historian Jeff Chang describes as a celebratory “space of possibility,” and the tradition lives on in many communities of color each summer.

Party crews, groups of teens who have been loosely linked with flash mobs and described as “junior varsity street gangs,” have appropriated rent parties and block parties and applied them to the temporary occupation of vacant homes and commercial buildings. Coverage of party crew activities has been centered in Arizona and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where swathes of vacant or foreclosed tract homes stand empty, inviting teenagers to claim the spaces as their own. The activities of young party crews echo the West Coast rave scene of the 1990s. Although many electronic music events are widely promoted and generously funded today, this widespread acceptance bloomed from a culture in which warehouses, malls, and large fields were secretly taken over, essential party infrastructure was put in place, and participants followed a trail of breadcrumbs and map clues to various locations before reaching the actual event. Once there, ravers had the chance to reinvent the spaces of everyday life, to encounter new bodies and sounds, and create strange new forms of community. In the morning, the occupation would end, the space would return to its mundane state of disuse, and the participants would begin planning their next intervention.

Dancing, in its many forms and contexts, from rent parties and block parties to raves and riots, often involves the active and intentional occupation of spaces that are highly regulated and controlled, and not intended for popping, locking, or any similar kind of social relation. Young people from marginalized communities have long politicized this everyday practice simply by insisting on doing it wherever they want, whenever they want. As the frigid weather sets in, the Occupy movement must look beyond its own borders and consult the annals of history to develop a broader repertoire of effective techniques, and the ephemeral occupation of city spaces by dancing collectivities might be just what this movement needs to increase its momentum.

As the movement consults this history, it must also recognize that there are communities who continue to occupy urban American spaces out of necessity and resilience, and that their tactical knowledge should put them in positions of leadership. I work with 18 to 21-year-old youth who have dropped out or been pushed out of traditional public schools. One of my students, a 20-year-old intermittently homeless black mother who is working towards obtaining her high school diploma and securing a job as a home health care aide, issued a demand to me after presenting her research on homelessness. “Y’all need to do something about this,” she explained. “There are so many houses in North Philly with nobody in ‘em, and then there are so many homeless people with no houses. Y’all need to fix that.” But it’s clear that we’ll only be able to fix it by organizing together.

“Turn on the heat.” The phrase refers to the heat generated by bodies dancing in spaces that we have temporarily reclaimed, but it also refers to the concrete concern of paying for heating as winter approaches. While the occupiers at City Hall in Philadelphia and around the Northeast confront cold weather this winter, many families struggle to stay warm every year because they can’t pay the heating bill. The participants of the contemporary Occupy movement need people of color, poor people, and young people to lead us into new forms of struggle. In order to sustain and expand the movement, their issues must be at the forefront; we have to understand that the cost of utilities is a major political issue. But let’s not think of people from marginalized communities as helpless victims. Instead, let’s learn from their history of resistance in everyday life.

Julie McIntyre is an educator who has worked with children and youth in schools, libraries, art organizations, and residential detention centers. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

The Occupy Wall Street phe­nom­e­non has achieved a stature and longevity unri­valed by recent demon­stra­tions in the United States, and has under­stand­ably struck a chord with a wide range of peo­ple dis­mayed by the bar­baric level of inequal­ity that is the defin­ing fea­ture of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can soci­ety. As the small encamp­ment in lower Man­hat­tan has swelled and spread to cities across the coun­try, the ral­ly­ing cry of the “99%” has at least momen­tar­ily intro­duced the main­stream dis­course to a con­cep­tion of class, which is usu­ally miss­ing from the polit­i­cal the­ater show­cased on cor­po­rate news out­lets. The risks posed by an over-reliance on mass media cov­er­age notwith­stand­ing, the orga­niz­ers’ abil­ity to attract the pub­lic eye has been impres­sive and is an encour­ag­ing reminder that most peo­ple are yearn­ing for a polit­i­cal vision that res­onates with the mate­r­ial anx­i­eties they feel. As the most bru­tal eco­nomic cri­sis in over a gen­er­a­tion grinds on for the third con­sec­u­tive year, per­haps most sur­pris­ing is that it has taken so long for such an upsurge to occur.

How­ever, while an inner-core of par­tic­i­pants may remain for months, with time the size of the direct occu­pa­tions will likely wane and media atten­tion will slowly grav­i­tate to more prof­itable ven­tures. The trav­esty that unfolded in Wis­con­sin over the past ten months should serve as a painful reminder of that inevitabil­ity. And though the moment’s polit­i­cal salience may briefly per­sist, it will be fleet­ing unless anchored in some­thing more durable than a demon­stra­tion, throw­ing into sharp relief the need for a level of orga­ni­za­tion that can sus­tain and expand upon the Occupy energy. The slo­gan of the “99%” may have tremen­dous rhetor­i­cal cur­rency, but his­tory shows that there is no short­cut to the long-term, painstak­ing task of gen­er­at­ing a real move­ment: meet­ing peo­ple where they are, build­ing trust and strug­gling with them over the issues they’re wor­ried about, con­nect­ing those anx­i­eties to a coher­ent polit­i­cal pro­gram, and con­sol­i­dat­ing those efforts into a force to be reck­oned with. While many of the Occupy work­ing groups may be begin­ning this project, most of the mil­lions who con­sti­tute the “99%” have been unable or unwill­ing to par­tic­i­pate and need to be reached by some other means. OWS can be an oppor­tu­nity to start this process, but it is not a spark that will spread on its own.

Here the civil rights move­ment, which is often invoked in rela­tion to OWS, is instruc­tive. Unmen­tioned in most grade school lore on the sub­ject, the strug­gle for racial jus­tice grew out of a deeply rooted orga­ni­za­tional appa­ra­tus that had been con­structed through decades of dili­gent labor and com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing. Rosa Parks was a sea­soned activist who had been trained at the leg­endary left­ist orga­niz­ing acad­emy, the High­lander Folk School, and Mar­tin Luther King Jr. owes his begin­nings to vet­eran trade union­ists who recruited him. No mir­a­cles ini­ti­ated this his­toric fight; it was planned and exe­cuted by indi­vid­u­als and their orga­ni­za­tions who through years of strug­gle in pur­suit of con­crete demands had cul­ti­vated pow­er­ful bases of sup­port in spe­cific communities.

Only through fol­low­ing this long-term orga­niz­ing approach can OWS begin to har­ness the anger and energy it has made vis­i­ble and trans­late it in into a dynamic, class-conscious move­ment. And only the labor move­ment has the expe­ri­ence and orga­ni­za­tional capac­ity to take on the chal­lenge. Weak­ened though they may be, and with all the lim­i­ta­tions of their seden­tary bureau­cra­cies, unions are still the most demo­c­ra­tic mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tions in the United States, with estab­lished activists and infra­struc­tures in cities across the coun­try that pos­sess the prac­ti­cal skills and resources nec­es­sary to carry on the fight, par­tic­u­larly when it becomes less vis­i­bly excit­ing. Though union den­sity has pre­cip­i­tously declined in recent decades, still today mil­lions of peo­ple have expe­ri­enced real improve­ments in their lives through work­place strug­gles led by exist­ing labor unions, a much larger and more rep­re­sen­ta­tive cross-section of the pop­u­la­tion than is likely to turn out at any “Occupy” event.

It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that his­tor­i­cally, orga­nized labor has been the most effec­tive vehi­cle for chal­leng­ing eco­nomic inequal­ity; it is an empir­i­cal real­ity that when unions are weak wealth con­cen­trates in the hands of the few, and when they’re strong it is at least a bit more evenly dis­trib­uted. A recent study demon­strated that between 1973 and 2007 pri­vate sec­tor union­iza­tion decreased by over 75% and inequal­ity increased by 40%. In this spirit, OWS might best be con­sid­ered as an oppor­tu­nity to push the main­stream labor move­ment toward a more aggres­sive orga­niz­ing strat­egy and, hope­fully, an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal vision. Rank-and-file mil­i­tants in a vari­ety of unions have engaged in this gru­el­ing project for decades, with some suc­cesses and many set­backs, and per­haps the most encour­ag­ing fea­ture of OWS is the space it might cre­ate for more work of this sort. How­ever, an oppor­tu­nity is only as valu­able as the con­crete steps taken to cap­i­tal­ize on it, and unless the strate­gic think­ing needed to ori­ent and ini­ti­ate that process begins in earnest, this wave of activism will likely join the recent anti-globalization and immi­grants’ rights demon­stra­tions in the annals of mod­ern left his­tory while neolib­er­al­ism con­tin­ues its plun­der unscathed.

A num­ber of unions have taken up the OWS man­tle and some inspir­ing labor-community part­ner­ships have grown out of it. The New York City Trans­port Work­ers Union (TWU) Local 100 was an early sup­porter, and even went to court to pre­vent police from order­ing union dri­vers to bus arrested demon­stra­tors to jail. The National Nurses United (NNU), one of the most pro­gres­sive and mil­i­tant unions, has been present at occu­pa­tions around the coun­try admin­is­ter­ing flu shots and pro­vid­ing basic med­ical assis­tance. And the coura­geous art han­dlers of Team­sters Local 814 who have been locked-out of Sotheby’s auc­tion house – a quin­tes­sen­tial sym­bol of the “1%” – have cul­ti­vated a remark­able level of sol­i­dar­ity with the New York occu­pa­tion, turn­ing out bus loads to their ral­lies and gain­ing inter­na­tional atten­tion in the process. These three exam­ples rep­re­sent ele­ments of the most dynamic and forward-looking wing of an oth­er­wise rather glacial labor estab­lish­ment that always seems to be on the defen­sive. The best chance OWS has to become the kind of force nec­es­sary to win a more just soci­ety lies in fol­low­ing their lead.

Samir Sonti is a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. He has worked for SEIU.

In early 1953 Cajo Bren­del, a Dutch coun­cil com­mu­nist affil­i­ated with a group known as Spar­ta­cus, vis­ited the mem­bers of Social­isme ou Bar­barie (Social­ism or Bar­barism) in Paris. As mem­bers of a mil­i­tant orga­ni­za­tion harshly mar­gin­al­ized by the most blis­ter­ing win­ters of the cold war, Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, Claude Lefort, and their com­rades under­stand­ably hoped to make con­tact with other com­mu­nist ten­den­cies crit­i­cal of the offi­cial cur­rents. Delighted to dis­cover that Anton Pan­nekoek, that vet­eran com­mu­nist whose dis­sent­ing tracts had drawn the ire of none other than Lenin him­self, was quite close to Spar­ta­cus, the group decided to sup­ply Bren­del with a copy of every issue of the jour­nal, eleven in all, to pass along to the revered the­o­rist. Pan­nekoek, who read them with excite­ment, wrote later to Bren­del the French group showed much promise despite its ques­tion­able posi­tion on the party ques­tion. On Novem­ber 8, 1953, he wrote a let­ter to Cas­to­ri­adis, which was later pub­lished, along with a response, in num­ber 14 (April-June 1954) of the journal.

Span­ning an entire gen­er­a­tion, a lin­guis­tic divide, and a geo­graph­i­cal shift, the epis­to­lary encounter between Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis in many ways marks the inter­nal trans­for­ma­tion of the ultra-left. But the ultra-left, far from a his­tor­i­cal relic, is mak­ing head­lines again. The appear­ance of a mys­te­ri­ous lit­tle book called The Com­ing Insur­rec­tion on book­shelves across the coun­try in 2009 piqued an already grow­ing inter­est. Not only did Michael Moore name the “left­ist call-to-arms man­i­festo” as his most recent read in an inter­view with the Hol­ly­wood Reporter, the tract even climbed to the top of Ama­zon best­seller list after Glenn Beck told Fox News view­ers it was “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time.” But this pam­phlet was only, if we may lapse into pop soci­ol­ogy, the tip­ping point for a resur­gence of for­got­ten ten­den­cies, obscure jour­nals, and pre­vi­ously unheard of milieus, which are sud­denly being dis­cussed every­where from aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ences to national broad­cast­ing chan­nels. It’s likely that the “Invis­i­ble Com­mit­tee” that wrote The Com­ing Insur­rec­tion grew out of Tiqqun, a French group that offi­cially dis­banded in 2001 after releas­ing two issues of its epony­mous jour­nal. Tiqqun itself has been redis­cov­ered after the infa­mous Tarnac affair in 2008, when for­mer mem­bers of the group were arrested for sab­o­tag­ing train lines.

The appear­ance of new works and trans­la­tions by groups like Tiqqun, includ­ing Tro­ploin, Théorie Com­mu­niste, Aufheben, and Echanges et Mou­ve­ment, reflect the close engage­ment of the ultra-left with the ten­den­cies and sen­si­bil­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary activist move­ments. An arti­cle in The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion traced the “intel­lec­tual roots” of Occupy Wall Street to the anar­chist David Grae­ber, who invoked the lan­guage of the ultra-left in his descrip­tion of the polit­i­cal impor­tance of the gen­eral assem­bly: “One of the things that rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies have learned over the course of the 20th cen­tury is that the idea of the ends jus­ti­fy­ing the means is deeply prob­lem­atic… You can’t cre­ate a just soci­ety through vio­lence, or free­dom through a tight rev­o­lu­tion­ary cadre. You can’t estab­lish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.“1

But this par­a­digm, though it is thor­oughly grounded in the present, nev­er­the­less has deep roots in the past. All of the jour­nals cir­cu­lat­ing today would deny such a strong link to their own ances­tors; they admit the influ­ence of the ultra-left, but none describe them­selves as ultra-leftists. Most believe they have made a clean break with this his­tory, and usu­ally only employ the term as an epi­thet for those still thought to be trapped in anti­quated pol­i­tics. They are on poor terms with each other, and almost cer­tainly would not con­sider them­selves to be part of the same con­stel­la­tion of theories.

Although they have their dis­agree­ments, this dis­sen­sion only con­ceals a shared unity that unsur­pris­ingly orig­i­nates from the com­mon her­itage they all seem intent on repress­ing. Many of the defin­ing prin­ci­ples of the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left per­sist, and their pecu­liar com­bi­na­tion of blind­ness and insight bears the marks of their prog­en­i­tors. Their shared empha­sis on pro­le­tar­ian self-activity, their will­ing­ness to delib­er­ately con­flate means and ends, their ten­dency to elide the moment of strat­egy, their demand for the abo­li­tion of a tran­si­tion period, and their ten­dency towards fatal­ism, are all age-old his­tor­i­cal debates. And just as before, the ultra-left ten­den­cies of con­tem­po­rary move­ments have pro­voked a back­lash from those who call for a return to the fun­da­men­tals of polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, usu­ally rep­re­sented by the fig­ure of “the party.”

What is now com­monly called the ultra-left emerged as an oppo­si­tional ten­dency within the inter­na­tional com­mu­nist move­ment in the early nineteen-twenties. Though crit­i­cal of the right, per­son­i­fied by Eduard Bern­stein, the cen­ter, rep­re­sented by Karl Kaut­sky, and even the left, dom­i­nated by Lenin, its mem­bers never orga­nized them­selves into a coher­ent cur­rent: its the­o­rists were spread across sev­eral coun­tries, dis­agreed sharply with one another, and were only grouped together when Lenin crit­i­cized them all in his infa­mous pam­phlet, Left-Wing Com­mu­nism: An Infan­tile Dis­or­der. Some, like Amadeo Bor­diga, fetishized the van­guard party; oth­ers, like Otto Rühle, saw work­ers’ coun­cils as the only organ of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary process; still oth­ers like Paul Mattick turned to cri­sis the­ory. But what­ever their dif­fer­ences, their shared refusal to par­tic­i­pate in par­lia­men­tary elec­tions, work with trade unions, or make any com­pro­mises with any kind of reformism, unex­pect­edly brought them all together. It was this under­ly­ing stub­born­ness that allowed Lenin to trans­form them into a sin­gle tendency.

It should be remem­bered, how­ever, that the ultra-left, despite what it would later become, was actu­ally not a minor­ity ten­dency in its hey­day. Its spokes­men were all major fig­ures in the his­tory of Euro­pean com­mu­nism: Bor­diga was the first gen­eral sec­re­tary of the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Party (PCI), Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the most respected com­mu­nists in Eng­land, and Pan­nekoek was cau­tiously praised in Lenin’s State and Rev­o­lu­tion as a bul­wark against reformism. Even more impor­tantly, the ultra-leftists had such a sig­nif­i­cant fol­low­ing in the early twen­ties that they could right­fully claim to be the dom­i­nant com­mu­nist ten­dency of the time. When the PCI was finally formed in Jan­u­ary 1921, it was Bor­diga who com­manded the major­ity. And when the Ger­man Com­mu­nist Party (KPD) split in 1920, the vast major­ity fol­lowed the ultra-leftists in form­ing the Com­mu­nist Work­ers’ Party of Ger­many (KAPD). The Com­mu­nist Party, ini­tially led by Rosa Lux­em­burg and Karl Liebknecht, had itself bro­ken from reformist groups like the Social Demo­c­ra­tic Party (SPD) at the end of Decem­ber 1918. But the KPD, despite its rev­o­lu­tion­ary stance, was pulled in sev­eral direc­tions. Dis­agree­ments over the unions, par­lia­ment, and com­pro­mise in gen­eral, ulti­mately led to another break. It’s been sug­gested, how­ever, that the new party, the KAPD, “embraced almost the entire mem­ber­ship of the for­mer KPD.”2 The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of the ultra-left – Bor­diga, for exam­ple, offi­cially lost con­trol of his party to Gram­sci in 1926 – only set in after the defeat of the rev­o­lu­tions to which they were almost organ­i­cally connected.

With their rev­o­lu­tions crushed, and now harassed by cap­i­tal on the one side and Com­intern on the other, the ten­dency itself began to eat itself apart from within as ultra-leftists fought each other over the most triv­ial mat­ters, and by the thir­ties this once vibrant milieu was reduced to a jum­ble of sequestered groups. The onset of the Cold War proved to be an espe­cially deci­sive time for the ultra-left: mar­gin­al­ized more than ever, jour­nals lost much of their already lim­ited read­er­ship, orga­ni­za­tions dis­in­te­grated, and iso­lated groups ossi­fied into myopic sects. It was in this inhos­pitable con­text that two of the most promi­nent the­o­rists of the ten­dency made contact.

Cas­to­ri­adis Meets Pannekoek

The inter­sec­tion of two lives rep­re­sents the col­li­sion of two worlds. First and fore­most, there is the gen­er­a­tional divide: Anton Pan­nekoek was born in 1873, after the defeat of the Paris Com­mune, and Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis in 1922, just as the Ger­man Rev­o­lu­tion, in which Pan­nekoek had played a part, was painfully com­ing to accept its own defeat. Then there is the implicit geo­graphic shift: Pan­nekoek, born in the Nether­lands, played a con­sti­tu­tive role in the devel­op­ment of cen­tral Euro­pean com­mu­nism, while Cas­to­ri­adis, Greek by birth, made per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the emerg­ing French scene that was made famous in May 1968. Their exchange shows the cen­ter of grav­ity of the com­mu­nist move­ment mov­ing from Ger­many back to France, while French the­ory made increas­ing ref­er­ence to Ger­man history.

And last, the pecu­liar con­ver­gence of two dis­tinct forms of ultra-leftism: one that defined itself against Lenin and another that actu­ally made a con­sti­tu­tive detour through him. Though always aware of his great achieve­ments, most of the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left, from Sylvia Pankhurst to Her­man Gorter, even­tu­ally grew quite crit­i­cal of the Bol­she­vik leader’s the­o­ret­i­cal doc­trines. Pan­nekoek stands as per­haps the great­est exam­ple of a ten­dency that crit­i­cized all that Lenin rep­re­sented, from his philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions to his polit­i­cal prac­tice. Shortly after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, Pan­nekoek devoted much of his writ­ing to refut­ing the uni­ver­sal applic­a­bil­ity of Bol­she­vik tac­tics. His famous book Work­ers’ Coun­cils sought to defin­i­tively dis­credit the the­ory of the van­guard party by demon­strat­ing the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the coun­cils as the only real form of pro­le­tar­ian eman­ci­pa­tion. Against both reformists and Lenin­ists, he claimed that “the new ori­en­ta­tion of social­ism is self-direction of pro­duc­tion, self-direction of the class-struggle, by means of work­ers’ coun­cils.”3

Cas­to­ri­adis, in con­trast to Pan­nekoek, had fought in the Greek resis­tance as a Com­mu­nist, later join­ing the Trot­sky­ists in France. Beyond the many pos­i­tive ref­er­ences to Lenin in his writ­ings of the time, it’s quite clear from his the­o­ret­i­cal works and his prac­ti­cal posi­tions that Lenin had left an indeli­ble stamp on him. His ultra-leftism is an unusual case: he entered it through Trot­sky­ism, but broke with that tra­di­tion when he argued that “the con­tent of social­ism” went beyond the abo­li­tion of pri­vate prop­erty to “work­ers’ man­age­ment of soci­ety,” down to the orga­ni­za­tion of work on the shop floor – a his­tor­i­cal task whose terms were estab­lished by the expan­sion and inte­gra­tion of man­age­r­ial labor in post­war cap­i­tal­ism.4 He spent a good decade furi­ously pro­duc­ing a body of work so impor­tant that it would effec­tively define the far left in France, lead­ing Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Euro­pean Green par­lia­men­tar­ian who was the most vis­i­ble stu­dent rev­o­lu­tion­ary of May 1968, to frankly admit in Obso­lete Com­mu­nism: The Left-Wing Alter­na­tive that he had pla­gia­rized Castoriadis’s work. But then Cas­to­ri­adis turned his pen against Marx­ism him­self; hav­ing already grounded self-management in the cri­tique of alien­ation in the young Marx, he con­cluded that the late Marx of Cap­i­tal had capit­u­lated com­pletely to bour­geois sci­en­tism, and brazenly declared that the only way to remain rev­o­lu­tion­ary was to break from Marxism.

The let­ters of these fig­ures not only give us a glimpse into the his­tory of the ultra-left, they also speak to our own time. True, our con­junc­ture is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent: we no longer face the real­i­ties of the Cold War, the role of the Soviet Union, the influ­ence of the Com­mu­nist Par­ties, or the uncer­tain­ties of decol­o­niza­tion. But there are nev­er­the­less ways in which the present resem­bles the con­junc­ture in which these let­ters were writ­ten. We are begin­ning to glimpse the end of a long period of pro­le­tar­ian defeat, just as Cas­to­ri­adis and Pan­nekoek were. They had the courage and insight to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­i­ties of rev­o­lu­tion, reaf­firm the value of autonomous activ­ity, and empha­size the role of the pro­le­tariat at a time when intel­lec­tu­als of the left and right were loudly declar­ing the inte­gra­tion of the work­ing class, the defin­i­tive sta­bi­liza­tion of cap­i­tal, and the impos­si­bil­ity of rev­o­lu­tion­ary rupture.

But Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis were vin­di­cated a few years after their exchange. Hun­gary and Poland erupted in rev­o­lu­tion. Coun­cils dot­ted the social ter­rain, autonomous activ­ity was the order of the day, and sud­denly cap­i­tal did not seem so secure. If their mode of thought was in align­ment with the poten­tial and the lim­its of these nascent strug­gles, it seems that today’s ultra-left has a sim­i­lar align­ment with the erup­tions of Greece, Spain, France, and England.

Read­ing through these let­ters makes it clear that what­ever their agree­ments – and there were many – Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis dif­fered on the very two ques­tions that had defined the his­tor­i­cal ultra-left from the begin­ning: the nature of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion and the party form. Though both clearly parted ways with the offi­cial com­mu­nist move­ment, their dif­fer­ences were nev­er­the­less irreconcilable.

Although the exchange cir­cu­lated around what may appear to be a pedan­tic rehash­ing of these two seem­ingly irrel­e­vant top­ics, both were using them to think through the key con­cepts of polit­i­cal prac­tice. Beneath Pannekoek’s ques­tion­ing of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion or Castoriadis’s con­sid­er­a­tion of the pos­si­ble degen­er­a­tion of the party lies a shared attempt to ascer­tain the con­tent of the com­mu­nism of their time. With suf­fi­cient his­tor­i­cal dis­tance from every­thing that tran­spired between the storm­ing of the Win­ter Palace and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have begun to ask how the con­tent of com­mu­nism can be reimag­ined beyond sec­tar­ian cliches. For our moment, these let­ters are remark­ably con­tem­po­rary. To grasp their rel­e­vance, we will have to trace the geneal­ogy of these two major questions.

The Russ­ian Revolution

Every com­mu­nist cur­rent that sought to pose an alter­na­tive to the prac­tices, poli­cies, and pro­grams of the Soviet Union first had to explain what kind of soci­ety it really was – an attempt to under­stand the mean­ing of com­mu­nism as well as cap­i­tal­ism. The dom­i­nant expla­na­tions in the West for the nature of the USSR were vari­ants of the Trot­sky­ist analy­sis. How­ever, Lenin had acknowl­edged, before Stalin’s ascent, that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment was not only a pro­le­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ship, but either a “work­ers’ and peas­ants’ state” or a “work­ers’ state with bureau­cratic dis­tor­tions.”5 Dur­ing the years of “War Com­mu­nism,” from 1918 to 1921, when req­ui­si­tion of peas­ant land and nation­al­iza­tion of indus­try pro­ceeded along­side the intro­duc­tion of Tay­lorism and one-man man­age­ment in fac­to­ries, it was actu­ally Trot­sky who had called for exten­sion of mil­i­ta­riza­tion to the total con­trol of trade unions by the state, as an appa­ra­tus of indus­trial man­age­ment. Lenin insisted that more inde­pen­dent par­tic­i­pa­tion would train work­ers to ulti­mately take on the task of man­age­ment them­selves, argu­ing against Trot­sky that the “sum and sub­stance of his pol­icy is bureau­cratic harass­ment of the trade unions.“6

Begin­ning in 1921 with the “New Eco­nomic Pol­icy” (NEP), Lenin argued for the replace­ment of the state’s “surplus-grain appro­pri­a­tion” with a mod­er­ate “tax in kind,” which would per­mit peas­ant pro­duc­ers to sell the remain­der of their sur­plus in order to obtain man­u­fac­tured goods at a more equi­table rate. In spite of the rein­tro­duc­tion of mar­ket rela­tions this rep­re­sented, it was a tran­si­tion to “reg­u­lar social­ist exchange of prod­ucts,” and indeed an anti-bureaucratic mea­sure, intended to avoid fur­ther devel­op­ment of the state bureau­cracy that had grown in com­pen­sa­tion for “the atom­ised and scat­tered state of the small pro­ducer with his poverty, illit­er­acy, lack of cul­ture, the absence of roads and exchange between agri­cul­ture and indus­try.” If NEP rep­re­sented a move­ment towards the free mar­ket and cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions, this was a nec­es­sary step, since it per­mit­ted the peas­antry to develop social power instead of sub­ju­gat­ing it to the inter­ests of the urban and indus­trial pro­le­tariat.7

Lenin had already argued as early as 1918, in a polemic against Russ­ian left com­mu­nists, that “state cap­i­tal­ism would be a step for­ward,” even “a sure guar­an­tee that within a year social­ism will have gained a per­ma­nently firm hold.” Since the tran­si­tion period con­tained ele­ments of dif­fer­ent eco­nomic cat­e­gories, the direc­tion of large enter­prises by the state would be a “pro­le­tar­ian weapon,” since “it is not state cap­i­tal­ism that is at war with social­ism, but the petty bour­geoisie plus pri­vate cap­i­tal­ism fight­ing together against both state cap­i­tal­ism and social­ism.”8 Now, three years later, he reit­er­ated that the fact that the pro­le­tariat, rep­re­sented by the party, held power in the state, was the pri­mary defense against the “restora­tion of cap­i­tal­ism.”9 Recall­ing his ear­lier inter­ven­tion on behalf of inde­pen­dent trade unions, Lenin empha­sized that in a social­ist tran­si­tion there would still be classes, and there­fore “the class strug­gle is inevitable” – the pro­le­tariat would have to use unions to com­bat bureau­cracy and “sur­vivals of the old cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem” in the gov­ern­ment.10 The com­bi­na­tion of an anti-bureaucratic atti­tude and the con­tin­ued belief in shared work­ers’ and peas­ants’ power coex­isted with the some­what con­tra­dic­tory project of indus­tri­al­iz­ing agri­cul­ture, to develop the pro­duc­tive forces to the level of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, and NEP man­i­fested these contradictions.

After Lenin’s death, the con­tin­u­a­tion of NEP was advo­cated by both Joseph Stalin and Niko­lai Bukharin, who were part of a hege­monic bloc within the Com­mu­nist Party. Bukharin, in spite of his ear­lier left­ist enthu­si­asm for imme­di­ate nation­al­iza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion, came to believe in the grad­ual enrich­ment of the peas­ants, which would lead to their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the com­mu­nist project. This found sup­port in Stalin’s insis­tence on con­tin­u­ing Lenin’s line on the “work­ers’ and peas­ants’ gov­ern­ment,” defend­ing “the worker-peasant alliance as a car­di­nal means of achiev­ing the social­ist class objec­tives of the pro­le­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ship in our peas­ant coun­try.“11

How­ever, the enthu­si­asm for NEP was by no means uni­ver­sal; the Left Oppo­si­tion, which included Trot­sky and Bukharin’s for­mer left­ist coau­thor Yvgeni Pre­o­brazhen­sky, had warned that agri­cul­tural mar­ket rela­tions would per­mit the devel­op­ment of a nascent cap­i­tal­ist class in the coun­try­side. Their fears were con­firmed in the rise of the kulaks, the land­hold­ing peas­ants who hired waged labor­ers and hoarded grain to coun­ter­act the drop in agri­cul­tural prices. In the 1927 plat­form of the left, Trot­sky described a grow­ing “class dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion among the peas­ants,” the slave-like exploita­tion of farmhands, and a gap between indus­trial and agri­cul­tural prices that threat­ened to sever the “alliance between town and coun­try.”12

The next year Stalin went to Siberia, to address party mem­bers who he accused not only of coop­er­at­ing with the kulaks, but also liv­ing in their homes. He con­trasted “social­ist con­struc­tion in the coun­try­side, in agri­cul­ture” with the dan­ger of cap­i­tal­ist restora­tion.13 Later that year, after return­ing to Moscow, he would rage in party plenums against the “Right devi­a­tion” which made restora­tion pos­si­ble, since in spite of the dic­ta­tor­ship of the pro­le­tariat, the roots of cap­i­tal­ism, of cap­i­tal and cap­i­tal­ists, were still embed­ded “in com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, in small pro­duc­tion in the towns and, espe­cially, the coun­try­side.”14 The threat of regen­er­at­ing cap­i­tal­ism resulted from the con­tra­dic­tion between two foun­da­tions of pro­duc­tion in the USSR: “the foun­da­tion of the most large-scale and united social­ist indus­try and the foun­da­tion of the most scat­tered and back­ward, small com­mod­ity econ­omy of the peas­ants.” To suc­ceed, social­ist con­struc­tion would have to place “agri­cul­ture on a new tech­ni­cal basis, the basis of large-scale pro­duc­tion, and bring it up to the level of social­ist indus­try.”15 With the end of NEP and the elab­o­ra­tion of the first Five Year Plan, Stalin put into place an eco­nomic pro­gram based on the col­lec­tiviza­tion of peas­ant land, aim­ing at the rapid indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the countryside.

Writ­ing in The Rev­o­lu­tion Betrayed, Trot­sky stepped into the mid­dle of these “zig-zags” in pol­icy by paint­ing a pic­ture of the USSR as a “degen­er­ated work­ers’ state.” The work­ers had taken state power, but it had been usurped by the Stal­in­ist bureau­cracy. The dif­fi­culty of this view is that the his­tory of the bureau­cracy in the USSR could by no means be lim­ited to Stalin – Trot­sky had him­self con­tributed to bureau­cra­ti­za­tion. Fur­ther­more, Lenin had already described a close rela­tion­ship between bureau­cra­ti­za­tion and eco­nomic devel­op­ment. “Social­ism has demon­strated its right to vic­tory,” Trot­sky famously wrote in a cel­e­bra­tion of Russia’s pro­duc­tive forces, “in the lan­guage of steel, cement and elec­tric­ity”; and he made a point of not­ing that the blame for Stalin’s ter­ror “lies not upon col­lec­tiviza­tion, but upon the blind, vio­lent, gam­bling meth­ods with which it was car­ried through.”16 But next to Lenin’s acknowl­edge­ment that the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of peas­ant agri­cul­ture by indus­trial state cap­i­tal­ism forced a com­plex bureau­cratic struc­ture, the com­pat­i­bil­ity of these two posi­tions seems unclear.

An unortho­dox Trot­sky­ist shoe sales­man named Bruno Rizzi began to cir­cu­late an analy­sis, cul­mi­nat­ing in 1939’s The Bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of the World, which claimed that if the bureau­cracy had indeed usurped state power, it was impos­si­ble to retain the idea of a “work­ers’ state,” degen­er­ated or oth­er­wise. The orig­i­nal, some­what ultra-left con­cept he advanced was “bureau­cratic col­lec­tivism,” which led Trot­sky to con­clude that Rizzi had “obvi­ously lost his bal­ance.”17 Accord­ing to this the­ory, the man­age­r­ial bureau­cracy was a rul­ing class that extracted a sur­plus for its own enrich­ment, and orches­trated through a total­i­tar­ian state a highly devel­oped monop­oly cap­i­tal­ism indis­tin­guish­able from fas­cism and the New Deal.

Cas­to­ri­adis may have had Rizzi’s account in mind when he under­scored the pri­mary impor­tance of the bureau­cracy as rul­ing class, but he rejected the ear­lier empha­sis on col­lec­tivism. After all, far from a term of Marx­ist the­ory, “col­lec­tivism” is a quasi-ethical term of soci­o­log­i­cal descrip­tion – it says noth­ing about the polit­i­cal econ­omy of the USSR. For Cas­to­ri­adis, cap­i­tal­ism as a sys­tem was defined by exploita­tion – the extrac­tion of a sur­plus from labor by a non-producing class who dom­i­nated the pro­duc­tion process – and not by mar­ket rela­tions, which were essen­tially epiphe­nom­ena. The fact that the rul­ing class of the USSR oper­ated col­lec­tively, rather than com­pet­i­tively, was irrel­e­vant – the soci­ety could only be described as bureau­cratic capitalism.

When Pan­nekoek first wrote to Cas­to­ri­adis, he reminded his younger com­rade that the the­ory of a non-socialist mode of pro­duc­tion in the Soviet Union was by no means a devel­op­ment inter­nal to Trot­sky­ism. In fact, the left com­mu­nists had made the case, arguably even before the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, that the poli­cies of Lenin and Trot­sky were not con­sis­tent with the strug­gle for a work­ers’ state and its accom­pa­ny­ing social­ist mode of pro­duc­tion. This was a the­ory of “state cap­i­tal­ism,” dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent from the later Trot­sky­ist ver­sion made famous by Tony Cliff. It held that the dis­place­ment of the “sovi­ets” or “work­ers’ coun­cils” that defined the explo­sions of 1905 and 1917 by the rule of the party rep­re­sented the defeat of social­ism. In this regard they antic­i­pated the cri­tique of Social­isme ou Bar­barie.

How­ever, there was a pri­mary dif­fer­ence. Con­vinced of the cap­i­tal­ist nature of the Soviet Union, Pan­nekoek went on to denounce root and branch the very rev­o­lu­tion that brought it into being. He called the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion “the last bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion, though car­ried out by the work­ing class,” in the tra­di­tion of the Eng­lish Rev­o­lu­tion of 1647 and the French Rev­o­lu­tion in 1789. By “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion,” he meant specif­i­cally “a rev­o­lu­tion that destroys feu­dal­ism and opens the way to indus­tri­al­iza­tion.” He pointed out that even the his­toric bour­geois rev­o­lu­tions had been enabled by the revolt of “the arti­sans, the peas­ants and the work­ers,” but since “work­ing class was not yet mature enough to gov­ern itself,” a “minor­ity of func­tionar­ies and politi­cians” emerged as the dom­i­nant class. This was inevitable in Rus­sia, “the labor­ing class being a small minor­ity among the peas­ant population.”

The para­dox­i­cal ele­ment of this ultra-left the­ory, ulti­mately shared by Rühle and Gorter, was that it swung back around to the par­a­digm of reformism. Karl Kaut­sky vehe­mently denounced the Bol­she­viks, before Stalin’s dom­i­nance and in oppo­si­tion to Trot­sky, for their notion that a social­ist rev­o­lu­tion was pos­si­ble in a Rus­sia that had not yet passed through the cap­i­tal­ist stage of his­tory. As early as 1919, Kaut­sky wrote that the objec­tive con­di­tions in Rus­sia “were not ripe for the abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal­ism,” and that the “imma­tu­rity of the exist­ing rela­tions” led the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion to pro­duce “the most oppres­sive of all forms of despo­tism that Rus­sia has ever had.”18

Castoriadis’s response was twofold. He first called atten­tion to the log­i­cal prob­lem behind Pannekoek’s purism: the ulti­mate fate of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion does not alter the fact that within it, the pro­le­tariat strug­gled for its own inter­ests, even insti­tut­ing work­ers’ self-management in the fac­to­ries, rather than sub­sum­ing its strug­gle into the pro­gram of the bour­geoisie. The fact that these inde­pen­dent demands were artic­u­lated by work­ers in Rus­sia “made the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion for­ever a pro­le­tar­ian rev­o­lu­tion.” His sec­ond point was that the con­cept of the bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion ignored a fun­da­men­tal devel­op­ment in the mode of pro­duc­tion of the 20th cen­tury: it was the bureau­cracy, rather than the bour­geoisie, which ruled in Rus­sia, and it was this same new class that was emerg­ing as a dom­i­nat­ing force through­out the world, includ­ing the cap­i­tal­ist world.

Through­out the whole ultra-left, these con­cepts of “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion” and the “bourgeois-democratic tasks” were never put into ques­tion. In spite of Pannekoek’s knowl­edge that Rus­sia was pre­dom­i­nantly peas­ant, that pre-capitalist con­di­tions altered the sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment of the work­ing class, and that his own the­ory was devel­oped within the spe­cific con­di­tions of polit­i­cal strikes in urban Europe, he never met the chal­lenge posed by the Bol­she­viks of the­o­riz­ing com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in a peas­ant soci­ety. And though Trot­sky did accept the Bol­she­vik chal­lenge in 1917, the approach to indus­trial devel­op­ment and “per­ma­nent rev­o­lu­tion” that would pre­dom­i­nate among Trot­sky­ists took as its start­ing premise the sub­or­di­na­tion of peas­ant demands to the indus­trial proletariat.

But it was pre­cisely the peas­ant prob­lem that was cen­tral to the the­o­ries of eco­nomic devel­op­ment within the USSR. Just before Pan­nekoek and Castoriadis’s exchange, in 1951, Stalin wrote a final reflec­tion called Eco­nomic Prob­lems of Social­ism in the USSR. There he pre­empted the entire dis­cus­sion of state or bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism in Rus­sia by frankly acknowl­edg­ing, even after the col­lec­tiviza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion advo­cated in his ear­lier speeches, that the law of value “does exist and does oper­ate,” along­side com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, in the Russ­ian econ­omy. While the goods pro­duced by state-owned indus­try were dis­trib­uted pub­licly by the state, agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion, even in the form of the kolkhoz, the col­lec­tive farm, “will not rec­og­nize any other eco­nomic rela­tion with the town except the com­mod­ity rela­tion – exchange through pur­chase and sale.”19

It is over­all an unset­tling col­li­sion of terms, which recalls Lenin’s argu­ment against the left com­mu­nists. The attrib­utes ascribed by the left to state cap­i­tal­ism were sim­ply the con­tra­dic­tions of the social­ist tran­si­tion, the per­sis­tence of ele­ments of dif­fer­ent modes of pro­duc­tion within the same econ­omy – includ­ing the sur­vivals of cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions. These con­tra­dic­tions within the USSR became clear when, after denounc­ing Stalin in the 20th Party Con­gress and call­ing for peace­ful coex­is­tence with the cap­i­tal­ist world, Nikita Khrushchev orga­nized the sale of the state-owned “Machine and Trac­tor Sta­tions” to the col­lec­tive farms – which, Stalin had warned in Eco­nomic Prob­lems, meant that the agri­cul­tural enter­prises would pri­vately own their means of pro­duc­tion, a step back­wards away from communism.

Only one ultra-leftist seri­ously engaged with this mode of analy­sis. Bor­diga argued con­sis­tently that the cen­tral dynamic of the Soviet econ­omy was the “agrar­ian rev­o­lu­tion” – the con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity for cap­i­tal­ism. Bor­diga had sup­ported the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion as pro­le­tar­ian, which he reit­er­ated in a 1926 let­ter to Korsch, who had taken the state cap­i­tal­ist line; but the same year he per­son­ally butted heads with Stalin when he called for the Soviet Union to be gov­erned by the inter­na­tional com­mu­nist par­ties that made up the Com­intern. While Bor­diga sup­ported Trot­sky and the Left Oppo­si­tion in the 1920s, by 1945 he began to argue for an analy­sis of the Soviet Union that brought him far closer to Bukharin and the right.

The year before Cas­to­ri­adis and Pannekoek’s exchange, Bor­diga wrote a response to Stalin’s Eco­nomic Prob­lems called Dia­logue with Stalin. His assess­ment of the Soviet econ­omy was broadly sim­i­lar, but with an added his­tor­i­cal dimen­sion. Not only did the law of value oper­ate in the USSR, so did all the laws of cap­i­tal­ism, since it was impos­si­ble to develop the pro­duc­tive forces “with­out pro­le­tar­i­an­iz­ing peo­ple.” This meant a rep­e­ti­tion of the “fero­cious” process of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion that Marx described in Cap­i­tal:

It is the kolkhozians who find them­selves deprived of their cow, the nomadic shep­herds of Asia torn away from the con­tem­pla­tion of the beau­ti­ful stars of the Great Bear, or the feu­dal serfs of Mon­go­lia, uprooted from their soil of a thou­sand years. It is cer­tain that the orders demand more goods for pro­duc­tion, more work­ers, a longer labor time with a greater inten­sity of effort, which is to say, an accu­mu­la­tion and expanded repro­duc­tion of cap­i­tal to the rhythm of hell.20

The agrar­ian rev­o­lu­tion, car­ried out in the process of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion, was the vio­lent refash­ion­ing of peas­ants into land­less pro­le­tar­i­ans, the same process that occurred in 17th cen­tury Eng­land. Unsur­pris­ingly, this returns to Preobrazhensky’s descrip­tion of the coex­is­tence of plan­ning and the law of value in “social­ist prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion.” While Pre­o­brazhen­sky had called for a gen­tle process of accu­mu­la­tion based in pro­gres­sive taxes, he had ulti­mately sup­ported Stalin’s left­ward turn.

The next step for Bor­diga was to describe the eco­nomic char­ac­ter­is­tics of cap­i­tal­ism in Rus­sia. For him, the accu­mu­la­tion of profit was epiphe­nom­e­nal. What counted instead was the exis­tence of enter­prises that engaged in account­ing on the basis of a gen­eral equiv­a­lent, the law of value, and main­tained the exis­tence of prop­erty. Even though pro­duc­tion in Rus­sia was cen­trally planned by the state, it was car­ried out by indi­vid­ual enter­prises, which meant that prop­erty was not social and col­lec­tive, but restricted to pri­vate bod­ies. The rul­ing class in Rus­sia were not bureau­crats, but entre­pre­neurs – con­sis­tent with a the­ory of com­mu­nism that opposed “human com­mu­nity,” grounded in the human essence described by the young Marx, to com­merce, rather than pro­le­tariat to cap­i­tal. For this rea­son the exis­tence of sovi­ets or coun­cils was essen­tially irrel­e­vant to Bor­diga; if the work­ers man­aged enter­prises, they were sim­ply man­ag­ing the cap­i­tal relation.

So Stalin and Bor­diga dif­fered mainly in definitions. Stalin viewed social­ism as a con­tra­dic­tory process of con­struc­tion, while Bor­diga argued for a total con­cep­tion of com­mu­nism incom­pat­i­ble with sur­vivals from the old regime. But the trick is that Bordiga’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, while it led him to con­demn the cap­i­tal­ist nature of the USSR, also con­strained him to see it as pro­gres­sive, as he wrote in his Dia­logue:

The homage which, in spite of a band of suck­ers, we ren­der to “Great Stalin” responds pre­cisely to this process of ini­tial cap­i­tal­ist accu­mu­la­tion. If this really reaches the provinces of immense China, mys­te­ri­ous Tibet, and that fab­u­lous Cen­tral Asia that the Euro­pean stock came from, that will be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary fact, a fact that will move for­ward the wheel of his­tory, but which, far from being social­ist, will be on the con­trary a cap­i­tal­ist fact. The ele­va­tion of the level of the pro­duc­tive forces in this immense part of the globe is nec­es­sary: but Stalin is right when he says that the credit will not go to him, but to the eco­nomic laws which have imposed this pol­icy upon him. His whole enter­prise con­sists in a fal­si­fi­ca­tion of labels which makes the cap­i­tal­ist com­mod­ity pass under the name of social­ism and which is, itself, a clas­sic expe­di­ent of the agents of prim­i­tive accumulation.

In other words, the whole of the ultra-left returned to Kaut­sky and his stages, which is why Bor­diga described Rus­sia as under­go­ing the tran­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism. Indeed, with only entre­pre­neurs man­ag­ing pro­duc­tion, it had not yet pro­duced a prop­erly cap­i­tal­ist class.

Though Pan­nekoek and Cas­to­ri­adis did not directly address these issues, their exchange offers the­o­ret­i­cal advances that put the prob­lem of stages in new con­texts. On the one hand, the skilled indus­trial work­ing class who could orga­nize coun­cils on Pannekoek’s model were a such a minor­ity in Rus­sia that is very dif­fi­cult to under­stand how this model of orga­ni­za­tion could lead the nation on a mass scale – and it gives no way of deter­min­ing how the mem­bers of these coun­cils will be fed.

On the other hand, Pannekoek’s the­ory of a “bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion,” though it did not address Bordiga’s agrar­ian ques­tion, did step away from Kaut­skyan com­mit­ment to the fixed pro­gres­sion of stages. While Rühle and Korsch ulti­mately con­cluded along with Kaut­sky that Rus­sia was too back­wards, Pan­nekoek empha­sized the sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment of the class, rather than the objec­tive devel­op­ment of the pro­duc­tive forces. He argued that if state cap­i­tal­ism led to rev­o­lu­tion, this “would not be the result of eco­nomic crises but of the class strug­gle” – a polit­i­cal rather than eco­nomic change.21 The Russ­ian work­ers, he wrote in the third let­ter, were “not yet capa­ble of tak­ing pro­duc­tion into their own hands”; and when the party bureau­cracy assumed this role in place of the pro­le­tariat, it became, ipso facto, the bourgeoisie.

But Pannekoek’s analy­sis had no way of deter­min­ing whether the class was ready, par­tic­u­larly if it was spread into dis­tinct forms of pro­duc­tion. Castoriadis’s work had focused with greater atten­tion on this prob­lem. He had described the sit­u­a­tion of the peas­antry as “feu­dal exploita­tion” by the bureaucracy, and dis­puted the clas­sic Bol­she­vik claim that the “small pro­ducer” would serve as the basis of cap­i­tal­ist restora­tion, instead argu­ing that only the bureau­cracy could play such a role.22 Though he still assumed peas­ant pro­duc­tion should be sub­mit­ted to urban pro­le­tar­ian lead­er­ship, he went on to call for a form of peas­ant auton­omy in “rural com­munes” anal­o­gous to the work­ers’ coun­cil.23 But because in Rus­sia there was no auto­matic pro­gres­sion towards rev­o­lu­tion, and no auto­matic way to unify the class, Cas­to­ri­adis con­tin­ued to insist on the form of the party – our next theme.

The Party

The his­tor­i­cal ultra-left was always some­what divided about the party form. Some, led by Bor­diga, defended the notion of a dis­ci­plined party even more fer­vently than Lenin him­self. Com­bin­ing the intran­si­gence of the Ger­man left com­mu­nists with Lenin’s cen­tral focus on the party led Bor­diga to pro­duce a pecu­liar breed of van­guardist sec­tar­i­an­ism. He soon went from reduc­ing the class to the party to reduc­ing com­mu­nism itself to lit­tle more than the real­iza­tion of an allegedly coher­ent, pure, and for­ever invari­ant pro­gram that was said to stretch back unchanged to the founders them­selves. Oth­ers, like Karl Korsch, remained ambigu­ous. Although a mem­ber of the KPD, Com­mu­nist Min­is­ter of Jus­tice in the regional Thuringian gov­ern­ment, and even a Riech­stag deputy until 1928, he even­tu­ally broke entirely with the offi­cial com­mu­nist move­ment and drew very close to Pan­nekoek, Rühle, and Mattick’s crit­i­cisms of the party, ulti­mately becom­ing some­thing of an anarchist.

It was the Ger­man and Dutch left com­mu­nists, how­ever, who were the most uncom­pro­mis­ing crit­ics of the party form. They effec­tively offered three dis­tinct, though inter­re­lated, crit­i­cisms. The first, which was often shared by the anar­chists, was a kind of moral denun­ci­a­tion of the author­i­tar­ian, unde­mo­c­ra­tic, and hier­ar­chi­cal char­ac­ter of par­ties in gen­eral. The sec­ond argued that the party, espe­cially in its van­guardist con­fig­u­ra­tion, was largely inap­plic­a­ble to West­ern Europe, since its mate­r­ial con­di­tions dif­fered so vastly from those that engen­dered it in Rus­sia. The third claimed that the pro­le­tariat had to pre­fig­ure the very world it was try­ing to cre­ate by invent­ing its own forms of strug­gle, rather than mir­ror­ing those that were firmly entrenched in the old world. Pan­nekoek sum­ma­rized this sen­ti­ment in his sec­ond let­ter to Cas­to­ri­adis, describ­ing the need to oppose the estab­lished com­mu­nist par­ties: “we can­not beat them by fol­low­ing their meth­ods. That is only pos­si­ble by prac­tic­ing our own meth­ods.” In terms of actual prac­tice, this trans­lated to a refusal of all bour­geois forms, from the trade unions to par­lia­ments. Otto Rühle cap­tured this sen­ti­ment in an essay auda­ciously titled “The Rev­o­lu­tion is Not a Party Affair.”

Even when they did pre­serve the party as a form of strug­gle, the left­ists severely restricted its role. Indeed, Lenin would at one point exclaim that they had essen­tially reduced the party of the class to a cir­cle of intel­lec­tu­als. Accord­ing to Pan­nekoek, the party could only play the ancil­lary role of clar­i­fy­ing, through dis­cus­sion, debate, and exchange, what the pro­le­tariat was already doing. As “organs of self-clarification,” such par­ties – and Pan­nekoek always imag­ined that there would be many – would have to con­tent them­selves with doing lit­tle more than offer­ing sug­ges­tions to the work­ers, cir­cu­lat­ing infor­ma­tion, and calmly debat­ing their dif­fer­ing points of view.24 They would serve as the inves­tiga­tive sub­com­mit­tees of a coun­cil, from which their des­tiny would ulti­mately be indistinguishable.

For both Cas­to­ri­adis and Pan­nekoek, there was a pri­mary log­i­cal con­se­quence of the Marx­ist premise that the eman­ci­pa­tion of the pro­le­tariat could only be the task of the pro­le­tariat itself: the coun­cil would be the prin­ci­pal organ of pro­le­tar­ian eman­ci­pa­tion. By regard­ing the coun­cil as both that which would destroy the old and cre­ate the new, both were echo­ing a char­ac­ter­is­tic trait of the ultra-left: the delib­er­ate con­fla­tion of means and ends.

But in con­trast to the sea­soned coun­cilist, Cas­to­ri­adis refused to accept that coun­cil would be the only organ of eman­ci­pa­tion. He believed that the party could con­sti­tute a sep­a­rate form of strug­gle, sub­or­di­nated to, but ulti­mately dis­tinct from the coun­cil: “the party is an organ whose form and sub­stance are unique.”25 Its tasks could not be pre­de­ter­mined, as Pan­nekoek implied, but would have to vary depend­ing on the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the strug­gle at hand. If the rev­o­lu­tion did indeed lead to the emer­gence of a net­work of decen­tral­ized coun­cils in which unob­structed dis­cus­sion could unfold, as Pan­nekoek sug­gested in his first let­ter, then Cas­to­ri­adis agreed that the party would limit its role. But, Cas­to­ri­adis quickly added, since the coun­cils would likely become the very sites of class strug­gle rather than peace­ful oases stand­ing out­side of it, the party, as some­thing other than the coun­cil, could not limit itself to “appear­ing like the owl of Min­erva at night­fall” but would have to set the stage for this struggle:

To be rev­o­lu­tion­ary sig­ni­fies both to think that only the masses in strug­gle can resolve the prob­lem of social­ism and not to fold one’s arms for all that; it means to think that the essen­tial con­tent of the rev­o­lu­tion will be given by the masses’ cre­ative, orig­i­nal, and unfore­see­able activ­ity, and to act one­self, begin­ning with a ratio­nal analy­sis of the present with a per­spec­tive that antic­i­pates the future.26

Expe­ri­enced as he was with the dirty pol­i­tics of work­place strug­gles in an envi­ron­ment dom­i­nated by Stal­in­ists on the one hand and reformists on the other, Cas­to­ri­adis poured some cold water on his friend’s naive faith in ratio­nal dis­cus­sion. He insisted that the party would have to actively pre­vent counter-revolutionaries from co-opting the strug­gle, and there­fore began to force a dis­junc­ture between means and ends. Unlike the coun­cil, the party would not be an end in itself, but could only be a means. The destruc­tion of the old world would have to be some­thing related to but ulti­mately other than the con­sti­tu­tion of a new one. Indeed, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies would have to resort to cer­tain unsightly means in order to bring about cer­tain desired ends. This could even mean a mil­i­tant, even unde­mo­c­ra­tic, inter­ven­tion on behalf the councils.

Pannekoek’s sub­se­quent response was envi­ably sim­ple: some­times the class is just not ready to make a rev­o­lu­tion. No amount of party inter­ven­tion, no mat­ter how mil­i­tant, orga­nized, or dis­ci­plined can force that class to mature – and in fact, such inter­ven­tion would actu­ally under­mine the strug­gles of the class, by forc­ing it into a sit­u­a­tion which it did not itself will­ingly cre­ate. The result, what­ever the inten­tions of the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, would have to be a new form of oppression.

A famous strug­gle just after these let­ters serves as an exam­ple. From Decem­ber 1960 to Jan­u­ary 1961 Bel­gium was rocked by an unex­pect­edly mil­i­tant strike wave that ulti­mately involved some one mil­lion work­ers. Cas­to­ri­adis called it the most impor­tant event, after the upris­ngs of 1956, of the entire post­war period; Mau­rice Brin­ton, the guid­ing spirit of Sol­i­dar­ity, took part in them; and Guy Debord arrived the fol­low­ing year as part of a team sent by Social­isme ou Bar­barie to research the after­math of the strikes. The pecu­liar thing about these strikes, how­ever, was that despite their strength they com­pletely failed to exhibit any autonomous polit­i­cal ini­tia­tive. Cas­to­ri­adis put it as follows:

We thus find our­selves faced with a strik­ing con­tra­dic­tion between the com­bat­iv­ity of the work­ing class, its sol­i­dar­ity, its aware­ness of its oppo­si­tion as a class to the cap­i­tal­ist class and to the cap­i­tal­ist State, its dis­trust of bureau­cracy, on the one hand; and, on the other, the at-present insur­mount­able dif­fi­culty it encoun­ters as it tries to free itself from this bureaucracy’s grasp, to take on in a pos­i­tive way the direc­tion of its own affairs, to cre­ate its own insti­tu­tions, to for­mu­late explic­itly its own objec­tives.27

Castoriadis’s solu­tion was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion. But imag­ine, Pan­nekoek seemed to say, if this orga­ni­za­tion, which claimed to rep­re­sent the pro­le­tariat, had hastily inter­vened by seiz­ing the state, appro­pri­at­ing cer­tain points of pro­duc­tion, and dis­patch­ing red guards out into the streets to fight the Bel­gian police. Even if their inter­ven­tion had some­how pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion, the con­se­quences would have been dis­as­trous. Nei­ther the pro­le­tariat, nor those other class for­ma­tions which it would have to lead down the road of rev­o­lu­tion, were pre­pared for such a sit­u­a­tion. Rather than eman­ci­pat­ing them­selves, they would only enter a dif­fer­ent kind of class society.

Cas­to­ri­adis never wrote a direct reply. But he had already elab­o­rated the basic premises of his posi­tion. Just as we can never really know if our actions will turn us into bureau­crats, we can also never know whether the pro­le­tariat is mature or not; there is sim­ply no way to sci­en­tif­i­cally mea­sure whether a class is ripe for power. In some cases, as with the Bel­gian strikes, there is some clar­ity. But in oth­ers, such as the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion of 1905, it is sim­ply impos­si­ble to tell. When the first work­ers went on strike, no one expected the whole coun­try to explode in insur­rec­tion. Even the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who had stud­ied the con­tours of the class strug­gle for decades were caught off guard, and had to deter­mine what to do in this new sit­u­a­tion. As it turns out, rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies chose to inter­vene and the class was defeated – but we can only imag­ine the out­come if, after a sober assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion, the pro­fes­sional rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies had decided not to inter­vene because the class was not ripe for power. What would have been the result if the party had cho­sen to fold its arms, take a step back­ward, and sit on the side­lines? Who is to say that it was not the very inter­ven­tion of these rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, their very attempt to esca­late a strug­gle pos­si­bly doomed to defeat, that later pre­pared the mate­r­ial con­di­tions for vic­tory less than a decade later?

The messi­ness of his­tory demon­strates the dif­fi­culty of trans­lat­ing Pannekoek’s thoughts on class imma­tu­rity into con­crete prac­tice. But as we have already seen, this ambigu­ous posi­tion also con­tains an orig­i­nal answer to an old ques­tion: what are the nec­es­sary objec­tive con­di­tions for a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion? For Pan­nekoek, imma­ture objec­tive con­di­tions are not the result of under­de­vel­oped indus­trial pro­duc­tion. In fact, objec­tive con­di­tions are really noth­ing other than the gen­eral level of the class strug­gle itself. Because cap­i­tal is an antag­o­nis­tic rela­tion­ship between two classes, its matu­rity or imma­tu­rity can only be under­stood with ref­er­ence to the con­flict between these classes. So when Pan­nekoek speaks of unripe objec­tive con­di­tions, he is actu­ally refer­ring to the under­de­vel­oped sub­jec­tive con­di­tions of the class strug­gle itself. Claim­ing that Rus­sia was unripe for rev­o­lu­tion did not mean it was eco­nom­i­cally back­ward, only that the pro­le­tariat was not devel­oped enough to take power on its own.

But here, as Cas­to­ri­adis inti­mates, Pan­nekoek ulti­mately reveals his fail­ure to under­stand the spe­cific class dynam­ics of Rus­sia on the eve of the rev­o­lu­tion. For him, it is enough to claim that the class was not ready to take power sim­ply because, at the end of the day, the party had to step in. His logic is con­sis­tent only if one assumes that com­mu­nism will adopt the same form at all times: the grad­ual spread of coun­cils over the total­ity of the social fab­ric. If this fails to hap­pen, then the rev­o­lu­tion was bour­geois; if it does, which, one might add, it never has, then it was com­mu­nist. It is this sta­tic con­cep­tion of com­mu­nism, this refusal to accept that com­mu­nism may appear dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions, that it may have to be pro­duced by a diver­sity of means, that led him to mis­read the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of the Russ­ian struggle.

Now the two ques­tions, the nature of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the role of the party on the other, inter­sect dra­mat­i­cally. If Pan­nekoek had paid seri­ous atten­tion to the his­tory of class rela­tions in Rus­sia, he would have seen that the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pro­le­tariat at that his­tor­i­cal moment – its tech­ni­cal makeup, its polit­i­cal forms, its rela­tion­ship to the other classes – made it impos­si­ble for the class to take power with­out party inter­ven­tion. Because Rus­sia was so riven by class divi­sions, a rev­o­lu­tion with any chance of suc­cess would have to find some way to forge an alliance between pro­le­tar­ian van­guards and peas­ant masses in a way that could tran­scend these sep­a­ra­tions. Pan­nekeok would have seen that the class was, at that con­junc­ture, actu­ally quite ready. It just had to assume a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal form, one dis­tinct from the sovi­ets, in order to make the revolution.

This gap goes a long way in explain­ing Pannekoek’s some­what con­fus­ing belief that the party can never actu­ally be a part of the class itself. In his let­ters, he seems to argue that any enlarged con­cep­tion of the party would nec­es­sar­ily trans­form it into a spe­cial forces team, which would be called in to bash heads when the class runs into trou­ble. He refused to enter­tain the pos­si­bil­ity that the party, as was the case in Rus­sia, may itself be a nec­es­sary ele­ment of the class. Unlike Cas­to­ri­adis, who tried to cap­ture the sig­nif­i­cance of the French Com­mu­nist Party by study­ing its pos­si­ble social bases, its par­tic­u­lar his­tory, and its broader rela­tion­ship to the class strug­gle itself, Pan­nekoek con­tented him­self with sim­ply argu­ing that it was on the side of cap­i­tal. For Cas­to­ri­adis, this was not good enough; the task was to metic­u­lously ana­lyze the pecu­liar, and rather unprece­dented, com­po­si­tion of a reformist party work­ing in the ser­vice of a for­eign coun­try, to “explain patiently the com­plete work­ings and mate­r­ial roots of Stalinism’s betrayal” in order to defin­i­tively out­flank it.28

Pan­nekoek delib­er­ately ignored these kinds of ques­tions – ques­tions, he would say, that have been posed in “an entirely prac­ti­cal way” – because his vision of rev­o­lu­tion, despite its numer­ous mer­its, was still largely informed by a kind of fatal­ism. Pro­le­tar­i­ans will nat­u­rally fig­ure every­thing out based on their imme­di­ate expe­ri­ences, as though they pos­sess some kind of innate knowl­edge organ­i­cally dri­ving them to a spec­i­fied goal, like an acorn grow­ing into an oak tree. They will spon­ta­neously become polit­i­cal sub­jects, like the log­i­cal result of an equa­tion, and make their rev­o­lu­tion on their own. If they run into any set­backs, it’s only because they still don’t have enough expe­ri­ence; if they suf­fer a defeat, it’s only because they weren’t ready. For the Pan­nekoek of these let­ters, there is no gap between imme­di­ate needs and the eman­ci­pa­tion of the class through rev­o­lu­tion. The two seam­lessly blend into one another in such a way as to entirely cover up the moment of strategy.

But in order to explore these themes fur­ther we have to take a step back­ward. Though many of the prob­lems above – the con­fla­tion of means and ends, the eli­sion of strat­egy, the sup­pres­sion of class het­ero­gene­ity, and the rever­sion to fatal­ism – per­sist within today’s ultra-left, the best way to under­stand and even­tu­ally super­sede them is to go back to their gen­e­sis. This means return­ing to another famous encounter, that between the ultra-left and Lenin him­self. It was Lenin, after all, who united a set of rad­i­cally dis­tinct groups under the umbrella of the “ultra-left.” Our forth­com­ing inves­ti­ga­tion, there­fore, will move back­wards to Lenin and his adversaries.

Until then, we present the let­ters. The first entry in this exchange, from Pan­nekoek to Cas­to­ri­adis, has been avail­able on the inter­net, and we repro­duce that ver­sion here. Pan­nekoek indi­cates that he wrote the let­ter in Eng­lish, but it was ulti­mately trans­lated into French for pub­li­ca­tion in Social­isme ou Bar­barie. It is not clear whether this ver­sion is a trans­la­tion or the orig­i­nal Eng­lish text. Castoriadis’s response, writ­ten under the pen name Pierre Chaulieu, and a final response by Pan­nekoek, have only been avail­able in French. The ver­sions avail­able here are our trans­la­tions from the orig­i­nals reprinted at mondialisme.org.

• 1Dan Berrett, “Intel­lec­tual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Acad­eme,” The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion, Octo­ber 16, 2011.
• 2Denis Authier and Jean Bar­rot (Gilles Dauvé), La gauche com­mu­niste en Alle­magne. 1918-1921 (Paris: Payot, 1976), p. 159; Eng­lish ver­sion at marxists.org.
• 3Anton Pan­nekoek, Work­ers’ Coun­cils (Edin­burgh: AK Press, 2003), p. 206.
• 4Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “On the Con­tent of Social­ism, I” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings, Vol­ume 1, 1946-1955: From the Cri­tique of Bureau­cracy to the Pos­i­tive Con­tent of Social­ism (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1988), 298.
• 5VI Lenin, “The Party Cri­sis” in Col­lected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Pub­lish­ers, 1965), p. 48.
• 6Lenin, “The Trade Unions and Trotsky’s Mis­takes” in , p. 42.
• 7Lenin, “The Tax in Kind” in Col­lected Works, vol. 32, pp. 342, 351.
• 8Lenin, “Left-Wing Child­ish­ness and the Petty-Bourgeois Men­tal­ity” in Col­lected Works, vol. 27, pp. 335, 349, 336.
• 9Lenin, “The New Eco­nomic Pol­icy and the Tasks of the Polit­i­cal Edu­ca­tion Depart­ments” in Col­lected Works, vol. 33, p. 66.
• 10Lenin, “The Role and Func­tions of the Trade Unions Under the New Eco­nomic Pol­icy” in Col­lected Works, vol. 33, p. 186-7.
• 11JV Stalin, “Con­cern­ing the Ques­tion of a Work­ers’ and Peasants’ Government” in Works, vol. 9 (Moscow: For­eign Lan­guages Pub­lish­ing House, 1954), p. 189.
• 12Leon Trot­sky, Plat­form of the Joint Oppo­si­tion, chs. 1 and 3, reprinted at marxists.org.
• 13Stalin, “Grain Pro­cure­ments and the Prospects for the Devel­op­ment of Agri­cul­ture” in Works, vol. 11, p. 8.
• 14Stalin, “The Right Dan­ger in the CPSU(B)” in Works, vol. 11, p. 313.
• 15Stalin, “Indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the Coun­try and the Right Devi­a­tion in the CPSU(B)” in Works, vol. 11, p. 263.
• 16Trot­sky, The Rev­o­lu­tion Betrayed (Min­neola: Dover Pub­li­ca­tions, 2004), pp. 7, 31.
• 17Trot­sky, “The USSR in War” in In Defense of Marx­ism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995), p. 55.
• 18Karl Kaut­sky, Ter­ror­ism and Com­mu­nism, ch. 8, reprinted at marxists.org.
• 19Stalin, Eco­nomic Prob­lems of Social­ism in the USSR (Peking: For­eign Lan­guages Press, 1972), pp. 10, 15.
• 20Amadeo Bor­diga, Dia­logue avec Staline, “Deux­ième journée,” reprinted at sinistra.net. All quo­ta­tions are our trans­la­tions from French.
• 21Pan­nekoek, “State Cap­i­tal­ism and Dic­ta­tor­ship,” reprinted at marxists.org.
• 22Cas­to­ri­adis, “The Peas­antry Under Bureau­cratic Cap­i­tal­ism” in 1, pp. 162.
• 23Cas­to­ri­adis, “On the Con­tent of Social­ism, II” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings, Vol­ume 2, 1955-1960: From the Work­ers’ Strug­gle Against Bureau­cracy to Rev­o­lu­tion in the Age of Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism(Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1988), pp. 134, 149.
• 24Pan­nekoek, “Party and Work­ing Class,” 1936, reprinted at marxists.org.
• 25Cas­to­ri­adis, “Pro­le­tar­ian Lead­er­ship” in PASW 1, p. 203.
• 26Cas­to­ri­adis, “On the Con­tent of Social­ism, I” in PASW 1, p. 298.
• 27Cas­to­ri­adis, “The Sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of the Bel­gian Strikes” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings, Vol­ume 3, 1961-1979: Recom­menc­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion: From Social­ism to the Autonomous Soci­ety (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1993), p. 4.
• 28Cas­to­ri­adis, “Stal­in­ism in France” in PASW 1, p. 65.

Your letter has provided a great satisfaction to all the comrades of the group; satisfaction of seeing our work appreciated by a comrade honored as you are and who has devoted an entire life to the proletariat and to socialism; satisfaction of seeing confirmed our idea of a profound agreement between you and us on the fundamental points; satisfaction finally of being able to discuss with you and of enriching our review with this discussion.

Before discussing the two points to which your letter is devoted (nature of the Russian Revolution, conception and role of the party), I would like to underline the points on which we agree: autonomy of the working class as both means and end of its historical action, total power of the proletariat at the economic and political level as the sole concrete content of socialism. I would furthermore like on this point to to clear up a misunderstanding. It is not correct that we restrict “the activity of these organisms to the organization of labor in factories after the taking of social power.” We think that the activity of these soviet – or workers’ council – organisms after the taking of power extends itself to the total organization of social life, which is to say that as long as there is need for an organism of power, its role will be fulfilled by the workers’ councils. Neither is it correct that we would only think of such a role for the councils in the period following the “taking of power.” At the same time, historical experience and reflection show that the councils could not be the organisms truly expressing the class if they were created to thus decree the future of a victorious revolution, that they will be nothing unless they are created spontaneously by a profound movement of the class, therefore before the “taking of power”; and if it is thus, it is evident that they will play a primordial role during the entire revolutionary period, whose beginning is precisely marked (as I said in my text on the party in number 10) by the constitution of the autonomous organisms of the masses.

Where in contrast there is, in fact, a real difference of opinion between us, is on the question of knowing if, during this revolutionary period, these councils will be the sole organism which plays an effective role in conducting the revolution, and, to a lesser extent, what the role and task is of the revolutionary militants in the meantime. That is, the “question of the party.”

You say “in the conquest of power we have no interest in a ‘revolutionary party’ that will take the leadership of the proletarian revolution.” And even further, after having quite rightly recalled that there are, beside us, a half-dozen other parties or groups that claim to represent the working class, you add: “in order for them (the masses in their councils) to decide in the best way possible they must be enlightened by well-considered advice coming from the greatest number of people possible.” I fear that this view of things has no correspondence with both the most glaring and the most hidden traits of the current and prospective situation of the working class. Since these other parties and groups of which you speak do not simply represent different opinions on the best way to make revolution, and the sessions of the councils will not be calm gatherings of reflection where, according the opinions of these diverse counselors (the representatives of the groups and parties), the working class will decide to follow one path rather than another. From the very moment that these organisms of the working class have been constituted, the class struggle will have been transposed to the very heart of these organisms; it will be transposed there by the representatives of the majority of these “groups or parties” which claim to represent the working class but who, in the majority of cases, represent the interests and the ideology of the classes hostile to the proletariat, like the reformists and the Stalinists. Even if they don’t exist there in their current form, they will exist in another, let us be sure. In all likelihood, they will start with a predominant position. And the whole experience of the last twenty years – of the Spanish war, the occupation, and up to and including the experience of any current union meeting – we learn that the militants who have our opinion must conquer by struggle even the right to speak within these organisms.

The intensification of the class struggle during the revolutionary period will inevitably take the form of the intensification of the struggle of diverse factions within the mass organisms. In these conditions, to say that a vanguard revolutionary organization will limit itself to “enlightening with well-considered advice” is, I believe, what in English is called an “understatement.” After all, if the councils of the revolutionary period prove to be this assembly of wise men where nobody comes to disturb the calm necessary for a well-considered reflection, we will be the first to congratulate ourselves; we feel sure, in fact, that our advice would prevail if things happened this way. But it is only in this case that the “party or group” could limit itself to the tasks that you assign it. And this case is by far the most improbable. The working class which will form the councils will not be a different class from the one that exists today; it will have made an enormous step forwards, but, to use a famous expression, it will still be stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. It will be at the surface dominated by profoundly hostile influences, to which it can initially oppose only its still-confused revolutionary will and a minority vanguard. This will be by all means compatible with our fundamental idea of the autonomy of the working class extending and deepening its influence on the councils, winning the majority to its program. It may even have to act before; what can it do if, representing 45% of the councils, it learns that some neo-Stalinist party prepares to take power for the future? Will it not have to try to seize power immediately?

I do not think that you will disagree with all that; I believe that what you aim for above all in your criticisms is the idea of the revolutionary leadership of the party. I have however tried to explain that the party cannot be the leadership of the class, neither before, nor after the revolution; not before, because the class does not follow it and it would only know how to lead at most a minority (and again, “lead” it in a totally relative sense: influence it with its ideas and its exemplary action); not after, since proletarian power cannot be the power of the party, but the power of the class in its autonomous mass organisms. The only moment when the party can approach the role of effective leadership, of the corps which can try to impose its revolutionary will with violence, may be a certain phase of the revolutionary period immediately preceding its conclusion; important practical decisions may need to be taken outside the councils if the representatives of actually counter-revolutionary organizations participate, the party may, under the pressure of circumstances, commit itself to a decisive action even if it is not, in votes, followed by the majority of the class. The fact that in acting thus, the party will not act as a bureaucratic body aiming to impose its will on the class, but as the historical expression of the class itself, depends on a series of factors, which we can discuss in the abstract today, but which will only be appreciated at this moment: what proportion of the class is in agreement with the program of the party, what is the ideological state of the rest of the class, where is the struggle against the counterrevolutionary tendencies within the councils, what are the ulterior perspectives, etc. To draw up, as of now, a series of rules of conduct for the various possible cases would doubtless be puerile; one can be sure that the only cases that will present themselves will be the unforeseen cases.

There are comrades who say: to trace this perspective is to leave the path open to a possible degeneration of the party in the bureaucratic sense. The response is: not tracing it means accepting the defeat of the revolution or the bureaucratic degeneration of the councils from the very start, and this not as a possibility, but as a certitude. Ultimately, to refuse to act in fear that one will transform into a bureaucrat, seems to me as absurd as refusing to think in fear of being wrong. Just as the only “guarantee” against error consists in the exercise of thought itself, the only “guarantee” against bureaucratization consists in permanent action in an anti-bureaucratic direction, in struggling against the bureaucracy and in practically showing that a non-bureaucratic organization of the vanguard is possible, and that it can organize non-bureaucratic relations with the class. Since the bureaucracy is not born of false ideas, but of necessities proper to worker action at a certain stage, and in action it is about showing that the proletariat can do without the bureaucracy. Ultimately, to remain above all preoccupied with the fear of bureaucratization is to forget that in current conditions an organization would only know how to acquire a noteworthy influence with the masses on the condition of expressing and realizing their anti-bureaucratic aspirations; it is to forget that a vanguard group will only be able to reach a real existence by perpetually modeling itself on these aspirations of the masses; it is to forget that there is no longer room for the appearance of a new bureaucratic organization. The permanent failure of Trotskyist attempts to purely and simply recreate a “Bolshevik” organization finds its deepest cause there.

To close these reflections, I do not think either that one could say that in the current period (and hence the revolution) the task of a vanguard group would be a “theoretical” task. I believe that this task is also and above all the task of struggle and organization. For the class struggle is permanent, through its highs and lows, and the ideological maturation of the working class makes itself through this struggle. But the proletariat and its struggles are currently dominated by bureaucratic organizations (unions and parties), which has the result of rendering struggle impossible, of deviating them from the class goal or conducting them to defeat. A vanguard organization cannot indifferently attend this show, neither can it content itself with appearing as the owl of Minerva at dusk, letting the sound of its beak fall with tracts explaining to the workers the reasons for their defeat. It must be capable of intervening in these struggles, combating the influence of bureaucratic organizations, proposing forms of action and organization to the workers; it must even at times be capable of imposing them. Fifteen resolute vanguard workers can, in certain cases, put a factory of 5,000 into strike, if they are willing to knock out some Stalinist bureaucrats, which is neither theoretical, nor even democratic, these bureaucrats having always been elected in comfortable majorities by the workers themselves.

I would like, before ending this response, to say a couple things about our second divergence, which at first glance has only a theoretical character: that of the nature of the Russian Revolution. We think that characterizing the Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution does violence to the facts, to ideas, and to language. That in the Russian Revolution there were several elements of a bourgeois revolution – in particular, the “realization of the bourgeois-democratic tasks” – has always been recognized, and, long before the revolution itself, Lenin and Trotsky had made it the base of their strategy and tactics. But these tasks, in the given stage of historical development and the configuration of social forces in Russia, could not be dealt with by the working class who, in the same blow, could not pose itself essentially socialist tasks.

You say: the participation of workers does not suffice. Of course; as soon as a battle becomes a mass battle the workers are there, since they are the masses. But the criterion is not that: it is to know if the workers find themselves the pure and simple infantry of the bourgeoisie or if they fight for their own goals. In a revolution in which the workers battle for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – whatever meaning they subjectively give to these watchwords – they are the infantry of the bourgeoisie. When they fight for “All power to the soviets,” they fight for socialism. What makes the Russian Revolution a proletarian revolution is that the proletariat intervened in it as a dominant force with its own flag, its face, its demands, its means of struggle, its own forms of organization; it is not only that it constituted mass organisms aiming to appropriate all power but that this itself went past the expropriation of the capitalists and began to realize workers’ management of the factories. All this made the Russian Revolution forever a proletarian revolution, whatever its subsequent fate – just as neither the weakness, nor the confusions, nor the final defeat of the Paris Commune prevents it from having been a proletarian revolution.

This divergence may appear at first glance to be theoretical: I think however that it has a practical important insofar as it translates par excellence a methodological difference into a contemporary problem: the problem of the bureaucracy. The fact that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution has not given way to the restoration of the bourgeoisie but to the the formation of a new exploitative layer, the bureaucracy; that the regime that carries this layer, despite its profound identity with capitalism (as the domination of dead labor over living labor), differs in many aspects that cannot be neglected without refusing to understand anything; that this same layer, since 1945, is in the process of extending its domination over the world; that it is represented in the countries of Western Europe by parties deeply rooted in the working class – all this makes us think that contenting ourselves with saying that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution is equivalent to voluntarily closing our eyes to the most important aspects of the global situation today.

I hope that this discussion can be pursued and deepened, and I believe it is not necessary to repeat to you that we welcome with joy in Socialisme ou Barbarie all that you would like to send us.

I noticed with great pleasure that you have published in your review Socialisme ou Barbarie a translation of my letter annotated with critical remarks in such a way that involves your readers in a discussion on fundamental questions. Since you express the desire to continue the discussion, I am sending you several remarks on your response. Naturally, there are still differences of opinion that could appear in the discussion with a greater clarity. Such differences are normally the result of a different assessment of what one considers as the most important points, which in turn is related to our practical experiences or the milieu in which we find ourselves. For me, this was the study of the political strikes in Belgium (1893), in Russia (1905 and 1917), and in Germany (1918 to 1919), a study by which I attempted to reach a clear understanding of the fundamental character of these actions. Your group lives and works among the turmoil of the working class of a great industrial city; consequently, your attention is completely concentrated on a practical problem: how could the methods of effective struggle develop beyond the inefficient struggle of parties and partial strikes of today?

Naturally, I do not claim that the revolutionary actions of the working class will all unfold in an atmosphere of peaceful discussion. What I claim is that the result of the struggle, often violent, is not determined by accidental circumstances, but by what is alive in the thoughts of the workers, as the basis of a solid consciousness acquired by experience, study, or their discussions. If the personnel of a factory must decide whether or not to go on strike, the decision is not taken by smashing fists on the table, but normally by discussions.

You pose the problem in an entirely practical way: what would the party do if it had 45% of the members of the councils behind it and if it expected another party (neo-Stalinists that strive to conquer the regime) to attempt a seizure of power by force? Your response is: we would have to preempt it by doing that which we fear it will do. What will be the definitive result of such an action? Look at what happened in Russia. There existed a party, with good revolutionary principles, influenced by Marxism; and assured, moreover, of the support of the councils already formed by the workers; however, it was obliged to seize power, and the result was totalitarian Stalinism (if I say “it was obliged” that means that the circumstances were not ripe enough for a real proletarian revolution. In the western world in which capitalism is more developed, the conditions certainly are more ripe; the measure of it is given by the development of the class struggle). Thus, one must pose the question: could the struggle of the party that you propose save the proletarian revolution? It seems to me that it would be instead one step towards a new oppression.

Certainly, there will always be difficulties. If the French, or global, situation required a mass struggle of the workers, the communist parties would try immediately to transform the action into a pro-Russian demonstration within the boundaries of the party. We must lead an energetic struggle against these parties. But we cannot beat them by following their methods. That is only possible by practicing our own methods. The true form of action of a class in struggle is the force of arguments, based on the fundamental principle of the autonomy of decisions! The workers can only prevent the communist party’s repression by the development and reinforcement of their own class power; that means their unanimous will to take the means of production under their control and manage them.

The principal condition for the conquest of freedom for the working class is that the conception of self-government and self-management of the apparatuses of production is rooted in the consciousness of the masses. That agrees, to a certain degree, with what Jaurès wrote on the Constituent Assembly, in his Socialist History of the French Revolution:

“This assembly, brand new, discussing political subjects, knew, barely convened, to thwart all the maneuvers of the Court. Why? Because it held several grand abstract ideas, seriously and lengthily ripened and which gave them a clear view of the situation.”

Of course, the two cases are not identical. Instead of the grand political ideas of the French Revolution, it is a question of the grand socialist ideas of the workers, which is to say: the management of production by organized cooperation. Instead of 500 deputies armed with their abstract ideas acquired through study, the workers will be millions guided by the experience of an entire life of exploitation in a productive job. This is why I see these things in the following way:

The most noble and useful task of a revolutionary party is, by its propaganda in thousands of small journals, brochures, etc., to enrich the knowledge of the masses in the process of a consciousness always more clear and more vast.

Now, several words on the character of the Russian revolution. Translating the English word “middle class revolution” into “révolution bourgeoise” does not exactly express its meaning. When in England the so-called middle classes seized power, they were composed of a large party of small capitalists, or businessmen, owners of the industrial apparatuses of production. The struggle of the masses was necessary to drive the aristocracy from power; but in spite of this fact, this mass was itself not yet capable of seizing the instruments of production; the workers could only achieve the spiritual, moral, and organizational capacity to do that by means of class struggle in a sufficiently developed capitalism. In Russia, there did not exist a bourgeoisie of certain importance; the consequence was that the vanguard of the revolution gave birth to a new “middle class” as ruling class of productive work, managing the apparatus of production, and not as an ensemble of individual owners each possessing a certain part of the apparatus of production, but as collective owners of the apparatus of production in its totality.

In general, we could say: if the laboring masses (because they are the product of pre-capitalist conditions) are not yet capable of taking production into their own hands, inevitably that will lead to new leading class becoming master of production. It is this concordance that makes me say that the Russian revolution (in its essential and permanent character) was a bourgeois revolution. Certainly the mass power of the proletariat was necessary to destroy the former system (and it was in this a lesson for the workers of the entire world). But a social revolution can obtain nothing more than what corresponds to the character of the revolutionary classes, and if the greatest radicalism possible was necessary to conquer all resistances, later on, it would have to fall behind.

This appears to be general rule of all revolutions up to the present day: up to 1793, the French Revolution became more and more radical, until the peasants definitively became the free masters of the soil, and until the foreign armies were pushed back; at that moment, the Jacobins were massacred and capitalism made its entrance as the new master. When one sees things this way, the course of the Russian revolution would be the same as those preceding revolutions that all conquered power, in England, in France, in Germany. The Russian revolution was not at all a premature proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution belongs to the future.

I hope that this explanation, even though it does not contain any new arguments, will help to clarify several divergences in our points of view.

In 2001, Argentina suffered an economic crisis, similar to the one that much of the world is experiencing today. After more than a decade of IMF-mandated structural adjustment, which only deepened poverty and unemployment, the government was forced to default on over $100 billion of public debt and declared a state of emergency in an attempt to calm public unrest. Despite a military-imposed curfew, thousands of people rushed to the streets and forced the president and other politicians out of office with the chant “que se vayan todos/ni se quede uno solo” (they all must go/not one can stay). These protests were the culmination of years of organizing in response to increasing unemployment and simultaneous reductions in welfare programs as part of neoliberal policies. Workers were taking over factories, the unemployed blocking highways, migrants occupying unused land. When joined by the spontaneous protests of the middle class in December, the mobilizations were able to overthrow the government as the president fled Buenos Aires in a helicopter. The movements were not only the largest mass mobilization in Argentina since the 1970s, but also qualitatively different from earlier movements: not interested in taking state power, nor in working more jobs and longer hours, they struggled to create new forms of life, including new forms of socio-spatial organization and the production and distribution of wealth. In the ten years following the crisis, the strongest of the movements, the Movements of Unemployed Workers (Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados, MTDs), has continued on this path, even as the country has recovered economically and has so far been able to resist the effects of the global crisis.

Here I’ll examine the history and practices of the MTDs, drawing on research I’ve conducted since 2003 with the MTDs La Matanza and Solano, and current research in Buenos Aires on the organization of the unemployed. The movements of the unemployed, which first emerged in Argentina in the mid-1990s, challenge traditional representations of the unemployed as lacking political agency and revolutionary potential. While many Marxists and labor organizers have maintained the latter position, Argentina’s recent history paints a different picture: the militant organization of the unemployed across the country was instrumental in overthrowing the neoliberal government in 2001 and steering the course the country would take following the economic crisis. Movements of the unemployed in Argentina are redefining work through their organizational practice, discourses around labor, and active creation of different forms of production and reproduction. This will necessarily be a very partial description of a complex, fragmented, and diverse movement, which has existed for over fifteen years.

Organizing the Unemployed

By the mid-1990s, unemployment in Argentina had reached nearly 20% (with even higher levels of underemployment), due to rapid deindustrialization and privatization, alongside a working class weakened from the earlier military dictatorship. New laws had stripped workers of remaining rights and led to the increasing “flexibilization” of labor, allowing employers to hire workers under short-term contracts and provide less benefits, making it easier to fire workers and unnecessary to compensate them upon doing so. Different forms of informal and precarious labor were already the norm for women and youth, and became increasingly so for adult men as well. President Carlos Menem had effectively cut social spending so that only certain sectors received unemployment benefits, and the jobless could not reliably depend on any support from the state. The main, officially recognized labor movement, headed by the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), was politically in ruins as it continued to support Menem because of its Peronist party affiliation, while these changes in the organization of work made the traditional forms of labor organizing increasingly difficult. Without stable employment, the poor increasingly relied on different forms of informal labor, illegal activity, and the political parties’ systems of patronage, as well as strengthened networks of mutual aid and support within communities.

It was in this context that the unemployed began to organize themselves, first in the interior of Argentina and soon after in the country’s major urban centers. Their first public actions were roadblocks, using barricades and burning tires to block major highways, sometimes for weeks at a time. The roadblocks were organized without any support from the major trade unions or leftist political parties, but rather through the already existing networks of support of the poor and unemployed. In the interior of the country, laid-off workers of the recently privatized oil company were the first to protest in 1996, demanding unemployment benefits and/or their jobs back. In the urban areas, however, the protests were of a more heterogeneous composition, including many who had never participated in the formal labor market. In the urban periphery of Buenos Aires, the first actions were centered around the question of food, with large public collective meals and protests demanding food assistance from the state. Other early protests focused on the rising costs of electricity and gas, the poor living conditions in working-class neighborhoods, and the lack of state support for the unemployed.

While different organizations of the unemployed emerged during this time in Argentina, the MTDs were generally the most independent and innovative. The MTDs are organized by neighborhood, instead of around a specific workplace or sector, taking the name of the neighborhood or region where they are based. Although the different MTDs sometimes come together in specific campaigns or actions, and have formed coalitions or blocks, there has never been a national organization uniting all the different groups of unemployed across the country. The MTDs are engaged in a constantly shifting constellation of alliances and networks with each other, different sectors of the labor movement, and other social movements. Thus each group is unique, not only in its geographic location, but in terms of its internal organization, political activity and ideological affiliations as well. Yet there are several elements the MTDs have in common, including the tactic of the roadblocks, a form of organization that emphasizes autonomy and a critique of hierarchy, and an emphasis on territorial organization and forming their own productive enterprises.

The MTDs first came into the public eye for their confrontational roadblocks, or piquetes. The roadblock’s immediate purpose is to stop the normal circulation of goods and services, and to make people’s demands visible. It has been widely remarked that the piquetes are the unemployed’s version of the strike or work stoppage, the only available tactic once denied access to this privileged form of workers’ revolt. However, the decision to block roads does not necessarily start from the assumption of lack: the piqueteros took their protests not to the factory doors, but rather to the streets of the city, understanding the city as the crucial site of capitalist production. For this reason, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri exemplify this tactic as a “wildcat strike against the metropolis.”1 In Buenos Aires, the roadblocks were particularly effective because they often took place at the major bridges or other entry points to the city from the suburbs, and as the crisis worsened and the government’s power weakened, at major intersections within the city itself. The roadblocks were essential in giving the piqueteros a sense of agency many felt they lacked without access to employment or the work site as a place to organize and proved to be an extremely powerful and effective tactic. The piquetes were successful in forcing the state to provide unemployment benefits and food baskets to the poor, and for the organizations winning control over the distribution of the subsidies. This control was important, as it allowed the movements to remain independent of the political parties, which would generally distribute benefits in turn for votes and political support, and because it allowed the movements to choose how to reinvest the funds in community organization.

The roadblocks were also important in that they served as a space of encounter, bringing together the different unemployed and forming new social relations and communal values. More than just protests, the piquetes were encampments in the middle of the street, where people took care of each other, and shared food and other responsibilities for maintaining the space.

Horizontality & Autonomy

While different organizations of the unemployed, and later other movements across the country, use the tactic of the roadblock, the MTDs can be further differentiated by their internal organization and commitment to autonomy. The MTDs’ internal organization emphasizes direct democracy, generally using a moderated consensus process in assemblies which are open to everyone in the movement. While the MTDs differ in their exact practices of internal democracy, with some committed to complete horizontalism while others have different leadership structures, they agree upon a critique of unions and parties for their top-down, hierarchical, and bureaucratic structures and practices, and are dedicated to enacting different forms of internal organization. This differentiates them from other organizations of the unemployed that are organized more bureaucratically, or that have come to rely on charismatic leaders.

The MTDs were formed from self-convened and organized groups of neighbors and remained autonomous from trade unions, leftist and national-popular political parties, and the parties’ patronage networks. They have resisted being incorporated into these institutions although at times they make strategic alliances with the more independent unions or leftist political parties. Since the election of Nestor Kirchner in 2003, many social movements in the country, including organizations of the unemployed with a more national-popular/Peronist political leaning, declared their support for the government, and, in some cases, became officially integrated into its ranks. Several of the MTDs, including those that make up the Frente Popular Dario Santillan, and the MTDs La Matanza and Solano, have remained independent from the government, choosing instead to focus on territorial organizing and creating new productive practices, which continue to this day.

The commitment to horizontality and autonomy are accompanied by a critique of representation. It is recognized that the movement is internally very heterogeneous and there is no ideal figure of the unemployed worker. Additionally, these movements emerged at the time of a complete breakdown of representational democracy, as seen in the neoliberal government of the 1990s and its eventual overthrow. It was clear that the politicians in power did not represent the people, not even of their own parties. Nor did the union, which continued to support Menem, represent the workers. The loss of faith in representational politics led to the cries that “they all must go,” and the adoption of popular neighborhood assemblies across the city of Buenos Aires. This skepticism toward representational politics is countered by a commitment to territorial organizing, to creating new ways of life and social-spatial organization in the neighborhoods where the poor live.

Territorial Organization

The territorial organization is another element that distinguishes the organizations of the unemployed, especially those in urban settings, from other social movements in Argentina and elsewhere. “The neighborhood is the new factory” was one of the principal slogans of the MTDs and other organizations of the unemployed. This slogan carries a double significance: production is no longer centered in the factory but dispersed throughout the territory and, in parallel, labor organizing must be dispersed throughout the neighborhood as well. Many of the MTDs, especially in southern reaches of Greater Buenos Aires, emerged from settlements in the urban periphery that had been illegally occupied in the 1980s. In these settlements, the neighborhood was already the key site of political organization, as the settlements were largely collectively controlled by their inhabitants and sites of constant struggles to maintain their land and for access to services. The neighborhood was also the obvious site for political organization for the large numbers of women and youth that had never been included in the formal labor movement and had always been excluded from other political organizations. Thus, they were the ones to take the lead as these movements emerged, a stark contrast to the many forms of political activity dominated by men.

The struggle against capital must also be the struggle to produce a different type of space and different social relations within the space.2 That is precisely what the MTDs seek to do in their territories, by establishing a physical presence in the neighborhood and seeking to collectively manage as many of the elements of daily life as possible. Territorial organization as practiced by the MTDs includes creating schools, soup kitchens, health clinics, daycares, community gardens, social centers and productive enterprises within a given territory. It means organizing around the basic needs of community residents, food, clean water, housing, education and the desire to form community in neighborhoods that are socially and ethnically fragmented. Territorial organization implies opening up all the spaces of daily activity to critique and as possible sites of organization. These movements recognize and more fully value the different types of labor that go into producing a territory. Ultimately, territorial organization seeks to build on the self-activity of the working class as expressed through the practices of everyday life and social organization in the neighborhoods.

Labor

The MTDs differ from what is traditionally conceived of as the labor movement because of their decentering of waged labor and explicit organizing of unemployed people. The MTDs have explicitly taken on the challenge of organizing the unemployed, as well as partially-employed, informal, and domestic workers. Through the positive identity of the piquetero and continuing to identify as workers, the MTDs have moved beyond a definition of the unemployed that is based on lack, on what they don’t have (employment), to one that values the political organization of the class. Thus, this discourse no longer privileges wage labor as the norm, recognizing that this is no longer a possibility for much of the country’s working class. Yet, the MTDs continue identifying as “workers,” as the working class, even without employment or even the possibility of employment. Rather, the movement recognizes that there are many types of work, and that they are organized in many different ways.

The MTDs decenter the experience of waged labor and instead put the spaces of everyday life in the center of their struggle. In this way, they are able to challenge distinctions between waged and unwaged labor, or formal and informal employment, to create a space for the majority of urban residents who survive on some combination of precarious work along with state subsidies, illegal activities, and support from family and friends. Residents of the urban periphery often work part-time in domestic labor or construction, are self-employed through micro-enterprises run out of their homes, and are involved in the constant labor of care in their own homes and communities. This labor lacks the rights and security that have helped other workers to organize, as well as geographic stability. This makes workplace organizing extremely difficult, if not impossible, meaning that there is generally little place for these workers within labor unions. The piquetero movement, however, is one of the few movements that has managed to successfully bring together these different type of workers without reproducing the hierarchies and divisions of the labor market.

Within the piquetero movement there are differing analyses of work and diagnostics of the economic situation, which are manifest in the organizations’ demands and practices. One sector of the movement calls for “genuine work” and demands their old jobs back: real, legitimate, authentic jobs. These were opposed to the demands for subsidies and unemployment benefits, which they considered to reproduce patterns of laziness and dependency. While certainly politicians’ use of these these subsidies to pacifty and co-opt movements must be criticized, it is easy to see how the simple critique of subsidies-as-dependency risks reproducing the logic of neoliberal capital and its ideology of individual responsibility. The demand for “genuine work” makes another mistake by labeling certain forms of labor as legitimate and authentic as opposed to others, devaluing women’s work in the household and community, as well as many other types of labor. It fails to take into account structural changes that make its premise worthless: there is no more genuine work.

Another sector of the piquetero movement, mostly adhering to a nationalist-populist ideology, has centered their actions around demanding unemployment subsidies from the state. Thanks to their success in winning these benefits and the right to distribute them, these organizations grew rapidly in the late 1990s, yet were unable to provide a real alternative to the corrupt and hierarchical forms of politics already taking place in working class neighborhoods. A politics based on making demands of the state means that most of these organizations now support the Kirchner administration and many have officially integrated into the government apparatus, thus losing most of their oppositional potential.

The independent MTDs, on the other hand, have taken a different approach from those either demanding “genuine work” or only demanding subsidies. While these MTDs decenter waged labor, work remains at the center of their practice and analysis. The MTDs do not just demand jobs, however. Instead, they ask: “what kind of work do we want?” and answer: “work with dignity.” Work with dignity is not so much a demand as a statement of intent, for it is precisely what the movements are putting into practice, creating new forms of work that spill over into new ways of living and organizing the urban territory.

Alternatives

Starting in the late 1990s, at the same time as some workers began taking over their factories, a number of MTDs started their own productive enterprises as a way to provide an income for some of their members and to regain a sense of control over their lives, which they had lost with unemployment. These efforts multiplied after 2001, as the crisis hit its peak and the lack of a stable government made it clear that solutions would not come from the state. During this time, the MTDs also participated in organizing barter markets and alternative currency networks, creating new economic systems based on mutual aid and support. Recognizing that full employment was no longer an option, or perhaps even a desire, for everyone, these groups decided to create their own ways of reproducing life in their territories, outside of the capitalist market.

There are different ways of interpreting “work with dignity,” and different ways of putting it into practice. We can, however, identify some common threads: (1) self-management/workers’ control/no boss, (2) workplace democracy and horizontality, (3) communal values over market values. These alternatives sometimes take the form of worker-owned cooperatives, but go beyond obviously productive enterprises as well. As part of their territorial organization, the MTDs seek to collectively manage other spaces and activities of life, from healthcare to education to the food they eat. There is a dimension of autonomy to these projects as well: although most are funded at least partially through state subsidies, the MTDs aim to be self-sufficient in order to no longer rely on the state. This is mostly a practical concern, since it is expected that the state will one day take away the subsidies or enforce certain requirements the movements are not prepared to meet. The subsidies are considered useful, however, inasmuch as they provide a material base from which to further strengthen the movement and people’s self-organization.

The alternatives that the MTDs construct are not limited to workplace alternatives, to working without bosses and democratically controlling the workplace. They aim to create different ways of working, questioning what counts as work and how that work is valued, how that work is carried out and organized, and the relationship between that work and other parts of life. This means going beyond the productive enterprises to focus on activities that create new social relations within the neighborhoods, relationships that are not based on competition or profit but on solidarity and mutual aid.

The productive enterprises the MTDs set up are usually small-scale workshops making food or textiles, or providing services. Bakeries and pizzerias are some of the most common. These enterprises are democratically controlled by the workers themselves and ultimately by the movement as whole, making the needs of the community more important than just turning a profit. They attempt to provide an alternative to the hierarchical discipline of most capitalist workplaces, as well as divisions between manual and intellectual labor, by including all workers in decision-making and rotating roles. Profit is generally invested into the organization as a whole or distributed to members most in need.

In many ways, the cooperatives run by the MTDs are similar to the “recuperated factories” that emerged in Argentina around the same time. In hundreds of sites around the country, workers took over and restarted production in factories, rather than submit to owners’ decisions to close the factories and leave workers unemployed. These range from small printing presses to large metal factories. There is a wide range of diversity in how the recuperated factories operate: in some, workers radically transform the relations of production, instituting non-hierarchical relations between workers and equally sharing responsibilities and tasks, decision-making power, and surplus, while others largely reproduce the relations and practices of the factory under its former boss. Yet in many ways the recuperated factories remain limited, because, after all, they are still creating work, which, instead of relying on a boss to instill the factory discipline, relies on collective self-exploitation. Overall, the recuperated factories do little to challenge the overall system of capital, especially as many continue to fill the same contracts with capitalist corporations as when they were run by a boss. The recuperated factories that are doing the most for political change are those that have been able to create networks with other worker-controlled enterprises, recreating the whole supply chain, and those that build ties with other movements and the wider community.

One of the central focuses of all these movements has been education, which can perhaps best be seen in the bachilleratos populares. The bachilleratos populares are high school degree programs for adults run by social movements, but with state funding and accreditation. The schools emerged out of the movements, both the recuperated factories and the MTDs, first without any outside funding or state recognition, as a way to provide education to their members and the public. They arose out of a double acknowledgment: the lack of quality educational opportunities for much of the city’s poor, and the power of education for political empowerment. After years of fighting, the degrees earned in these schools were formally recognized by the state (in 2007 in the province of Buenos Aires and 2008 in the city). The state provides additional resources as well, and in some localities provides small salaries for the teachers. However, the movements control the curriculum, and are responsible for organizing the school and teaching the classes. Teachers are generally movement activists and/or politically committed university students; some work as teachers in other schools. The MTDs put a great deal of emphasis on knowledge production in general, in some cases even operating their own publishing houses, through which they edit and publish their own research.3

Additionally, some of the MTDs operate health clinics, providing an alternative to the overcrowded and underfunded public health system and taking more holistic approaches to health, as opposed to only treating sickness. Alongside the clinics, the MTDs tend to offer classes about nutrition and wellness, seeking to integrate these elements of their activities into the daily lives of their members. The organizations offer a wide range of cultural and educational programming, from painting classes to readings groups on Marx, provide legal aid for migrants seeking to legalize their status, and facilitate women’s empowerment groups.

Participation in these activities, whether a worker-run bakery or a movement-controlled high school, creates new subjectivities and social relations, produces new territories and new forms of life. The participants go from seeing themselves as helpless victims of global capitalism, solely defined by their lack of employment, to identifying as active agents of social and political change, with the power to confront the state and capital and produce different ways of living. The MTDs challenge dominant narratives about the centrality and desirability of waged labor and instead seek to create alternative forms of production and social organization.

Today the MTDs are not as publicly visible as they were ten years ago, with much less open confrontation with the state and piquetes no longer a daily occurrence. The movement, which was never unified, is perhaps even more fragmented today: some piquetero organizations have been integrated into the Kirchner apparatus, receiving subsidies and other resources from the state, and others are increasingly critical of these new forms of co-optation. The lack of unified action poses an important problem as the government tries to divide “good protesters” from “bad protesters,” determining access to subsidies, and the cooperatives discover it is hard to sustain themselves without building larger networks of trade and support. Certain groups, most notably the Popular Front Darío Santillán, are attempting to counter this fragmentation through the construction of new alliances bringing together the unemployed, low-wage and precarious workers, and students, along with indigenous and campesino groups from other parts of the country. Despite these challenges, however, the MTDs remain committed to the day-to-day work of territorial organizing. There are now around 100 popular high school programs offering degrees around the country, dozens of cooperatives, social centers, and other activities, working to directly improve people’s lives while strengthening the self-organization of neighborhood residents and building their autonomy from the state and capital.

Liz Mason-Deese is a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and the Edu-Factory Collective, and is a graduate student in the geography program at UNC Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Buenos Aires, where she is conducting her dissertation research.

Originally posted: September 22, 2012 at Viewpoint Magazine

• 1Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
• 2See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991) for a theoretical analysis on the relationship between space and capital. For more on how social movements across Latin America struggle to produce new types of spaces, see Raúl Zibechi, Territorios En Resistencia: Cartografía Política De Las Periferias Urbanas Latinoamericanas, (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Lavaca editora, 2008). This book has recently been released in English as Territories in Resistance, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).
• 3The MTD La Matanza has self-published two books: De la culpa a la autogestión: un recorrido del Movimiento de Trabajadores de La Matanza (2005) and Cuando con otros somos nosotros: la experiencia asociativa del Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de La Matanza (2007).The Popular Front Darío Santillán operates a publishing house which has published over 50 books since 2007. The MTD Solano has collaborated with Colectivo Situaciones on various projects, including the book Hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes.

A stan­dard fea­ture of the hand-wringing asso­ci­ated with the cri­sis of the uni­ver­sity is a fix­a­tion on the human­i­ties. After all, for those of us in the so-called cre­ative and crit­i­cal fields, illus­trat­ing, visu­al­iz­ing and – dare we say it – brand­ing the cri­sis is a new and unique oppor­tu­nity to show off. This is what we went to school for, isn’t it? Take a recent event at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, which dra­ma­tized the ques­tion with the fol­low­ing thought exper­i­ment: after some sort of mar­itime dis­as­ter (details are scarce), a group of under­grad­u­ates com­man­deers a life raft. As luck would have it, they have a bit of space left – but, tragic twist of fate, the only peo­ple left to save are pro­fes­sors. Instead of giv­ing up the seats to their elders, our clever young nar­cis­sists make the pro­fes­sors present a case as to why they deserve the remain­ing spot on the life raft. One physics pro­fes­sor and four from the human­i­ties are gra­ciously granted 10 min­utes, dur­ing which stu­dents are edu­cated on the abil­ity of lit­er­a­ture to help us under­stand each other, Homer’s exten­sive insights on rafts in the Illiad, and the power of the­ater pro­fes­sors abroad to impart the “knowl­edge that Ugan­dans could solve many of their own prob­lems” with a firm belief in them­selves – more effec­tive, appar­ently, than “fresh water or a new AIDS vac­cine.” Physics offered elec­tric­ity, fire, and, per­haps most impor­tant of all, dis­tilled alco­hol. While the clas­sics and physics tied, every­one was root­ing for the human­i­ties as a whole by the end.

These cre­ative defenses come with an under­ly­ing sub­text: it has been the pro­grams in the human­i­ties, and to a lesser extent the social sci­ences, that bear the brunt of bud­get cuts, because some depart­ments lack the imme­di­ate abil­ity to par­lay their knowl­edge into con­tracts with sur­round­ing busi­nesses. Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tions, only mod­er­ately adept at the art of triage, cut those pro­grams that are unable to find out­side sources to bol­ster their exis­tence. This has become a human tragedy – after all, the way we know our­selves is through the com­mon cul­ture that the human­i­ties in the uni­ver­sity are sup­posed to facil­i­tate. For the defend­ers of the human­i­ties, the 1926 words of Har­vard grad­u­ate and clas­si­cal scholar Paul Shorey echo through now-profane halls. From his speech “Can an Amer­i­can be an Optimist?”:

Who shall resist the fierce, unremit­ting pres­sure of the pub­lic, the press, the lec­ture plat­form, the lit­er­ary crit­ics, the school boards and schools of edu­ca­tion to reduce every­thing to the level of the taste and under­stand­ing of the aver­age pupil, the gen­eral reader, the ordi­nary audi­ence, and to sup­press every word, allu­sion, or quo­ta­tion, every dif­fi­culty, every refine­ment and qual­i­fi­ca­tion, every touch of schol­ar­ship in foot­note or appen­dix that may baf­fle or offend the illit­er­ate lit­er­acy of those who have learned to read easy head-line and best-seller Eng­lish and do not wish to learn more? And yet if we can­not estab­lish and main­tain some dike and se-wall of resis­tance to these ten­den­cies, the ris­ing tide of medi­oc­rity will sub­merge us even while we are count­ing our uni­ver­si­ties by the score and our stu­dents by myriads.

When the scalpels are about to be deployed, the nat­ural response of intel­lec­tu­als is to assume defen­sive pos­tures and recite the usual lita­nies of praise for our own pro­fes­sion: the human­i­ties teach democ­racy; they teach a shared sense of self; they teach how to play­fully and intel­li­gently inter­act with the world, and some­times even pro­duce the world; they are the sole patch of life beyond the scope of mar­ket rela­tions. Those who teach in and take classes in the human­i­ties make the prin­ci­pal claim that with­out the noble voca­tion of the pro­fes­sor we’d all be stu­pider, less capa­ble of mak­ing informed deci­sions, and left to the cold cal­cu­la­tions of science.

For those out­side of the defen­sive pos­ture, many of these argu­ments might seem ludi­crous, arro­gant, and insult­ing. Barely muted is the claim that only those who have attended col­lege – the right classes at col­lege – and have sub­se­quently absorbed the req­ui­site cul­tural learn­ing have the capac­ity to make soci­ety thrive. This was pre­cisely the argu­ment used by the emerg­ing intel­lec­tual elite at the end of the 19th cen­tury – the lib­eral sons of the New Eng­land rul­ing class who helped cre­ate the human­i­ties from the rub­ble of the clas­si­cal stud­ies. The argu­ment under­ly­ing their think­ing was that civ­i­liza­tion was essen­tially a frag­ile machine, which must be oper­ated by a small, though hope­fully grow­ing, group of men – a “demo­c­ra­tic aris­toc­racy” whose posi­tion was granted by virtue of their edu­ca­tion and judg­ment, who could incul­cate right ideas in both the busi­ness titans (who they mis­trusted) and the work­ing class (who they feared). In a 1926 speech deliv­ered to the Phi Beta Kappa club at William and Mary, for­mer Prince­ton pro­fes­sor Henry Van Dyke summed it up well:

[democracy’s] high pur­pose should be to develop an aris­toc­racy of its own beget­ting, after its own heart, and ded­i­cated to its ser­vice. Unless it can do this, democ­racy spells con­fu­sion of mind, fick­le­ness and fee­ble­ness of action, and final decay has­tened by the increase of mate­r­ial wealth. The fat­ter it grows the more it degenerates.

The advent of cap­i­tal­ist higher edu­ca­tion by the lat­ter half of the 19th cen­tury meant that uni­ver­si­ties would no longer serve just the small cohort of legal and reli­gious minds who were to influ­ence the tenor of towns and cities through their exem­plary action and mate­r­ial suc­cess. The trans­for­ma­tion was a direct result of the cap­i­tal­ist class usurp­ing hege­mony from the colo­nial patri­cians, and sub­se­quently ignor­ing those insti­tu­tions of higher edu­ca­tion; this forced the cash-strapped uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges (whose num­bers far out­stripped demand) to des­per­ately search for a way to seduce the fledg­ling cap­i­tal­ists, the stub­born farm­ers, and the recal­ci­trant work­ing class.

John William Draper, pres­i­dent of NYU in 1835, com­plained that “mere lit­er­ary acu­men is becom­ing utterly pow­er­less against pro­found sci­en­tific attain­ment.” He asked, “To what are the great advances of civ­i­liza­tion for the last fifty years due – to lit­er­a­ture or sci­ence? Which of the two is it that is shap­ing the thought of the world?” Accord­ing to the his­to­rian Christo­pher Lucas, the super­in­ten­dent of Cal­i­for­nia schools in 1858 declared the grad­u­ates of the old col­leges to be use­less indi­vid­u­als. And Henry Tap­pan, NYU pro­fes­sor and later Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan Pres­i­dent, usu­ally cred­ited as the father of the mod­ern US uni­ver­sity, declared that “the com­mer­cial spirit of our coun­try, and the many avenues of wealth which are opened before enter­prise, cre­ate a dis­taste for study deeply inim­i­cal to edu­ca­tion… The man­u­fac­turer, the mer­chant, and the gold-digger, will not pause in their career to gain intel­lec­tual accom­plish­ments. While gain­ing knowl­edge, they are los­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties to gain money.” Engi­neer­ing, phys­i­cal sci­ence, and other prac­ti­cal knowl­edges were the prin­ci­pal means of this courtship (and sports, of course, though these had appeal beyond the bour­geoisie and helped knit uni­ver­si­ties into the urban fab­ric of the indus­trial era). There was not a tremen­dous enthu­si­asm for either clas­si­cal stud­ies or the human­i­ties out­side of a small cohort of aver­age stu­dents, who enjoyed the the­atri­cal­ity of lec­tures, or the scions of the wealthy.

Clas­si­cal stud­ies gave up the ghost as advo­cates of the human­i­ties – a com­pos­ite of clas­si­cal stud­ies and the con­tem­pla­tive ele­ments of the newly splin­tered sphere of polit­i­cal econ­omy, from which emerged the dis­ci­plines of eco­nom­ics, anthro­pol­ogy, his­tory, social sci­ence, and psy­chol­ogy – seized con­trol of uni­ver­sity depart­ments in phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture, and the arts. The cap­i­tal­ist uni­ver­sity would not just pro­duce the legal, juridi­cal, and tech­ni­cal minds required for indus­trial cap­i­tal­ism, it would also pro­duce its soul. As Lau­rence Vey­sey recounts in The Emer­gence of the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity, the Har­vard philoso­pher Josiah Royce helped pro­vide the core of the new human­i­ties: to encounter the thought behind the sci­en­tific method, not just the method. The human­ists would be the self-described con­science of the uni­ver­sity, the some­times con­ser­v­a­tive, some­times rad­i­cal gad­fly that would pre­serve capitalism’s human­ity in the face of the vul­gar util­i­tar­i­ans who prized pecu­niary gain and spe­cial­iza­tion above all. By the early 20th cen­tury, the human­i­ties had become assured of their place in the uni­ver­sity, allow­ing Paul Shorey to breathe a sigh of relief: “Nei­ther do I fear direct hos­til­ity, sup­pres­sion, or neglect for the so-called human­i­ties. We have out­grown that stage of controversy.”

When those of us who are edu­ca­tors in the human­i­ties reflect on what exactly it is that “we” do, it is easy to dis­so­ci­ate our indi­vid­ual work from that of the total­ity of the insti­tu­tion – and from the ways that stu­dents use or ignore our work. Sure, says our thought­ful pro­fes­sor, the human­i­ties have been partly respon­si­ble for the sta­tus quo over the last cen­tury. But my col­leagues and I sub­vert, decon­struct, trans­form these spa­tial, intel­lec­tual, dis­ci­pli­nary bound­aries and help stu­dents actu­al­ize them­selves, con­front inequal­ity, and learn meth­ods for speak­ing truth to power in defi­ance of a cul­ture that seeks to reduce all mat­ter to mar­ket calculations.

This atti­tude will no doubt con­tinue to per­sist because very few of us want to believe that we are par­tic­i­pat­ing in alien­at­ing insti­tu­tions – whether we are bankers, edu­ca­tors, or urban gen­tri­fiers. And of course, the work that some in the human­i­ties do is inter­est­ing, reveals much that is not yet known, and pro­vides tools by which to bet­ter under­stand the social struc­ture. But the truth is that the human­i­ties actively hide and mys­tify the strug­gles that underly the “com­mon culture.”

Hav­ing long prized vir­tu­oso per­for­mances, and the abil­ity of the pen and podium to beat back the sword, the human­i­ties fos­ter a spe­cial­ized tool, abstract intel­li­gence, that can be most pow­er­fully wielded by elites. Writ­ing in The Nation, Christo­pher Hayes gives a fine descrip­tion of the social role of this intelligence:

Of all the sta­tus obses­sions that pre­oc­cupy our elites, none is quite so promi­nent as the obses­sion with smart­ness. Intel­li­gence is the core value of the mer­i­toc­racy, one that stretches back to the early years of stan­dard­ized test­ing, when the modern-day SAT descended from early IQ tests. To call a mem­ber of the elite “bril­liant” is to pay that per­son the high­est compliment.

Hayes describes intel­li­gence like some sort of jewel encrusted dag­ger: “Smart­ness daz­zles and mes­mer­izes. More impor­tant, it intim­i­dates.” This type of val­u­a­tion is rife through­out aca­d­e­mic depart­ments, espe­cially the human­i­ties. The con­tempt with which many fac­ulty and TAs regard their own stu­dents illus­trates just how deeply this atti­tude runs.

What Hayes misses is that this mer­i­to­cratic elit­ism isn’t just a gen­eral risk of orga­ni­za­tion that could be cor­rected by a “rad­i­cal­ized upper mid­dle class”– it’s part of a wider social process. A cohort of prop­erly demo­c­ra­tic elites, long the cen­tral fan­tasy of the human­i­ties, would still fail to step out­side the under­ly­ing dynamic, which is that cap­i­tal­ism requires expan­sion and move­ment. There is no repro­duc­tion of mar­ket soci­ety with­out the con­quest of new mar­kets, and the open­ing of new spaces to mar­ket mech­a­nisms. We would do well to keep this in mind when we dis­cuss the “cri­sis of the uni­ver­sity.” There can be no doubt that the uni­ver­sity is in cri­sis. But the met­rics in vogue to describe the cri­sis seem wrong.

A pecu­liar insight raised by Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser is that the uni­ver­sity as such is not actu­ally in cri­sis, when mea­sured by the only really impor­tant index of our soci­ety: investor return. It would be a mis­take to imag­ine that pri­va­ti­za­tion, cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion, or mer­i­toc­racy are dri­ving the cri­sis of the uni­ver­sity, when in fact the inter­nal dynam­ics of cap­i­tal­ism itself lay at its cen­ter. Higher edu­ca­tion today is sim­ply unable to remain in any kind of sta­sis, and the sta­sis urged by the defend­ers of the uni­ver­sity in gen­eral, and the human­i­ties in par­tic­u­lar, is a weak lib­eral utopia.

But the utopia isn’t just a weak form of oppo­si­tion – it’s been part of the ide­o­log­i­cal foun­da­tion of the uni­ver­sity from the begin­ning. Echo­ing the ear­lier gad­flies, Eng­lish pro­fes­sor James Mull­hol­land argues in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion: “We suc­ceed within a cor­po­ra­tized uni­ver­sity because we offer ways to reflect on it, rein­vent it, and eval­u­ate it. We are the self-consciousness of the cor­po­rate uni­ver­sity.” When this self-consciousness is uni­ver­sal and “human,” ques­tions of social strug­gle can be evaded. And once this eva­sion is com­plete, the fine-tuning of cap­i­tal­ism can commence.

For the ascen­dant lib­er­als of the early 20th cen­tury, a broad frame­work embed­ded in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences was a mech­a­nism by which to absorb local con­flict into the realm of the inter­ven­tion­ist state. With the pass­ing of laissez-faire cap­i­tal­ism her­alded by the arrival of the rail­roads, big busi­ness and the emer­gence of an orga­nized work­ing class in the US, the intel­lec­tual and busi­ness lead­ers saw only two paths: a strong cen­tral­ized state anchored through cen­tral­iza­tion of power at the national level, or social­ism. Stephen Skowronek’s Build­ing a New Amer­i­can State shows how this cen­tral­iza­tion of bureau­cratic func­tions within the civil admin­is­tra­tion, the mil­i­tary, and busi­ness reg­u­la­tion was accom­plished, with the help of the National Civic Fed­er­a­tion (NCF), as a response to the accu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal by large busi­nesses in the 1870s and the con­comi­tant labor strikes that sub­se­quently shook the US. “The con­struc­tion of a cen­tral bureau­cratic appa­ra­tus,” Skowronek writes, “was cham­pi­oned as the best way to main­tain order dur­ing this period of upheaval in eco­nomic social, and inter­na­tional affairs.”

Edward Silva and Sheila Slaugh­ter have traced a par­al­lel his­tory in Serv­ing Power, which tells of the cru­cial role aca­d­e­mics from the newly cre­ated social sci­ences had to play in this trans­for­ma­tion. As “dis­in­ter­ested experts,” they had the dis­tance and author­ity to expound local prob­lems in ways that those involved did not; they could see the whole pic­ture. Through the NCF, “the most influ­en­tial business-sponsored political-economic forum group oper­at­ing dur­ing the Pro­gres­sive Period,” aca­d­e­mics, bankers, man­u­fac­tur­ers, and con­ser­v­a­tive labor lead­ers – AFL pres­i­dent Samuel Gom­pers was a found­ing mem­ber – part­nered together with the goal of “increas­ing the over­all effi­ciency of cap­i­tal­is­tic enter­prise and solv­ing the many prob­lems of rapid indus­tri­al­iza­tion” – mean­ing, labor mil­i­tancy and revolution.

Call­ing on will­ing lead­ers in the newly formed divi­sions of the social sci­ences, aca­d­e­mics wrote model leg­is­la­tion, con­ducted stud­ies on work­ing con­di­tions and pub­lic opin­ion, and offered the­o­ries of social change that placed true agency only with the bureau­cratic cen­tral­ized state. Even the orga­ni­za­tions of these new divi­sions – the Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ics Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can Social Sci­ence Asso­ci­a­tion, and Mod­ern Lan­guage Asso­ci­a­tion – formed, Silva and Slaugh­ter note, as aca­d­e­mics sought to atom­ize and spe­cial­ize the dis­ci­pline of polit­i­cal econ­omy, seen to have fos­tered Marxism.

Through the social sci­ences the uni­ver­sity offered a strat­egy for social change that coun­tered Marx­ist polit­i­cal econ­omy, to entrench both pri­vate prop­erty and an inter­ven­tion­ist state. Through the human­i­ties the uni­ver­sity offered a uni­ver­sal the­ory that saw human­ity as some­thing to be imposed upon those too stu­pid or too obsti­nate to sub­li­mate their own desires and needs to those of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. For this rea­son, writes Richard Altenbaugh in Edu­ca­tion for Strug­gle, the mil­i­tant work­ing class dis­trusted for­mal edu­ca­tion at every level. Altenbaugh cites a 1921 remark by Alexan­der Fich­land, direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Ladies’ Gar­ment Work­ers’ Union’s “Work­ers Uni­ver­sity,” to this effect:

Work­ers feel that they can­not obtain in non-workers’ edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions cor­rect infor­ma­tion on sub­jects affect­ing their own inter­ests. They feel that they are fre­quently deceived and are fur­nished with inter­pre­ta­tions of life which are intended to keep them docile and sub­mis­sive. They feel that the truth will be told to them only by those of their own choos­ing, whose out­look on life is their out­look on life, whose sym­pa­thies are their sym­pa­thies, whose inter­ests are their interests.

By abstract­ing from class strug­gle in all of its guises, the uni­ver­sity weaponized the knowl­edge of the emerg­ing dis­ci­plines and turned them on the work­ing class. All knowl­edge and all edu­ca­tion are his­tor­i­cally sit­u­ated, devel­oped out of par­tic­u­lar his­to­ries and cul­tures, and are depen­dent on vast social struc­tures in order to sur­vive. The thought pro­duced in uni­ver­si­ties has, for rea­sons deeply embed­ded in their his­tory, been used to attack and under­mine class strug­gle in the name of a pro­gres­sive utopia that appears more impos­si­ble now than ever.

And this is pre­cisely why the peans to to knowl­edge and higher edu­ca­tion – espe­cially to the human­i­ties – grow more weari­some every year. Even in The New Yorker, the hal­lowed claims of edu­cated self-consciousness, the crown jewel of the human­i­ties, have been ques­tioned. A recent arti­cle on the research of Prince­ton psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Kah­ne­man con­cludes that we are nearly inca­pable of ratio­nal thought regard­ing our own actions, but revel in crit­i­ciz­ing the actions of oth­ers along sup­pos­edly ratio­nal lines. “Edu­ca­tion,” it acknowl­edges, “isn’t a sav­ior.” In fact, “intro­spec­tion can actu­ally com­pound the error, blind­ing us to those pri­mal processes respon­si­ble for many of our every­day fail­ings. We spin elo­quent sto­ries, but these sto­ries miss the point. The more we attempt to know our­selves, the less we actu­ally under­stand.” Research shows that the smarter – and bet­ter edu­cated – are more prone to these “mis­takes.” A case in point is the author of these words, Jonah Lehrer, who was unable to resist the “pri­mal process” of mak­ing up quotes and no longer has a job with The New Yorker.

Some­thing other than defense of the uni­ver­sity, and some­thing other than the human­i­ties, are nec­es­sary today. And this “some­thing other” must take be con­structed both within and out­side of the uni­ver­sity. Within, because as Gigi Rog­gero has pointed out, the uni­ver­sity is a dynamic site of strug­gle and cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion. Out­side, because knowl­edge is a par­tic­u­lar kind of power, cul­tur­ally and his­tor­i­cally depen­dent. The human­i­ties and uni­ver­sity aca­d­e­mics are an out­stand­ing exam­ple of this: they were cre­ated as an ide­o­log­i­cal offen­sive against both the mil­i­tant working-class strug­gles that threat­ened Europe and Amer­i­cas and the resid­ual patri­cian elites that threat­ened to hold back cap­i­tal­ist expan­sion. Instead of defend­ing this kind of knowl­edge, we would do bet­ter to heed the words of Gilles Deleuze: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Our task is to develop new weapons, and that will require leav­ing the uni­ver­sity and aban­don­ing the humanities.

Mark Paschal has written for Reclamations Journal, and is a member of University Research Group Experiment (URGE). He is also a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz.

If TED took a turn to left­ist (or any) cri­tique, Žižek, the pro­fes­sor of “toi­lets and ide­ol­ogy,” would be the keynote speaker. The irony of the ani­mated lec­ture, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” is that a dia­tribe on “global cap­i­tal­ism with a human face” would get over 900,000 views on YouTube. “It’s not just what you’re buy­ing, but what you’re buy­ing into” seems to apply not only to Star­bucks’ “cof­fee ethics” and TOMS Shoes’ 1-for-1 African phil­an­thropy, but also to the avail­abil­ity of 10-minute Lacan­ian Marx­ist “soft apoc­a­lyp­tism” at a Google sub­sidiary with per­son­al­ized ads.

With YouTube’s help, the acad­emy where Žižek’s per­sona was born is an increas­ingly vis­i­ble ter­rain of so-called “cul­tural cap­i­tal­ism.” The last decade has wit­nessed a rev­o­lu­tion in open course­ware, a source of short-circuit con­sump­tion in which any­one with a com­puter can drink elite uni­ver­sity Kool-Aid with­out earn­ing credit. The move­ment has been so explo­sive – the Hewlett Foun­da­tion, which pro­vides the mother lode of fund­ing for uni­ver­sity ini­tia­tives, sup­ported a whole book on it, Tay­lor Walsh’s 2011 Unlock­ing the Gates – that one won­ders how long the polit­i­cal econ­omy of edu­ca­tion that it anchors, con­tra Žižek’s hipster-friendly fan­tasies of con­sumerist dystopia, will last.

To date, the most suc­cess­ful, or at least most promi­nent, ini­tia­tive is MIT’s Open­Course­Ware. In 2001, MIT unveiled a plan to offer most of its courses online for free – read­ing lists, lec­ture notes, exams, and all. In its first five weeks of exis­tence, the OCW site got 361,000 unique vis­i­tors from 177 coun­tries and all 7 con­ti­nents. In response to OCW, UNESCO held a “Forum on the Impact of Open Course­ware for Higher Edu­ca­tion in Devel­op­ing Coun­tries.” MIT was the new Bill Gates. As uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent Charles Vest wrote in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion in 2004:

a fac­ulty mem­ber at a new engi­neer­ing uni­ver­sity in Ghana, a pre­co­cious high-school biol­ogy stu­dent in sub­ur­ban Chicago, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist in Poland, a lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor in upstate New York, or an exec­u­tive in a man­age­ment sem­i­nar down the hall at MIT will be able to use the mate­ri­als our pro­fes­sors rely on in teach­ing our full-time students.

Open Yale Courses, which drafted off MIT’s suc­cess, is now a com­peti­tor in the techno hype-space, only with dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing para­me­ters. The OYC site hosts 42 courses, most of which are intro­duc­tory lec­tures in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences. Yale gives OYC pro­fes­sors a small hon­o­rar­ium in exchange for let­ting video­g­ra­phers sit in the back of the room and record every lecture.

Occa­sion­ally, there will be an awk­ward moment when the pro­fes­sor asks stu­dents not to walk in front of the class lest they get on cam­era, or apol­o­gizes for hav­ing to fix their mic. It’s the self-assurance of Yale’s hand-picked all-stars which makes OYC dif­fer­en­tiable from TED talks, in which some speak­ers, per­haps get­ting to con­dense their wis­dom into 20-minute nuggets of opti­mism for the first time, repeat phrases or give clumsy post­scripts. Oth­er­wise, Yale qual­i­fies, in the words of Evgeny Moro­zov, as a TED-esque “inter­na­tional meme laun­derer.” Open Yale Courses are the ivory tower of uni­ver­sity TED­i­fi­ca­tion. At the same time that Yale con­tin­ues its 20-year stomp on grad stu­dent union­ism and ’juncts its aca­d­e­mic work­force, it parades pop­u­lar tenured pro­fes­sors – “I keep my eyes open for peo­ple in the news,” direc­tor and OYC par­tic­i­pant Diane Kleiner has said – with few offer­ings in crit­i­cal or polit­i­cally charged dis­ci­plines that pro­duce less mar­ketable research.

Yale isn’t the only uni­ver­sity that picks the best and bright­est for the world screen. Fathom, a failed for-profit ini­tia­tive at Colum­bia that pre-dated OCW at MIT, mar­keted over 600 courses but focused on star fac­ulty. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive, which offers 15 courses in its core com­pe­ten­cies of sci­ence, math, and for­eign lan­guage, demands sig­nif­i­cant time for course devel­op­ment and thus draws mostly from tenured fac­ulty. The whole open course­ware enter­prise was born of rela­tion­ships among big-name uni­ver­sity lead­ers. Yale pres­i­dent Richard Levin had been on the board of the Hewlett Foun­da­tion since 1998. All­Learn, another failed for-profit ven­ture from the dot-com era, was a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Levin and his friends at Oxford, Prince­ton, and Stan­ford. After All­Learn, Yale’s liai­son went on to be pres­i­dent of TIAA-CREF.

The elite ori­gins of open course­ware, put together with the aca­d­e­mic hyper­re­al­ity of its all-star offer­ings, are noth­ing com­pared to the back­room power play that is 2011’s “Great Big Ideas,” a course offered to stu­dents at Yale, Har­vard, and Bard Col­lege and any­one else will­ing to shell out $199 to watch twelve hour-long lec­tures online. The course, “an intro­duc­tion to the world’s most impor­tant ideas and dis­ci­plines,” is the pilot offer­ing of the for-profit Float­ing Uni­ver­sity, a joint ven­ture between Yale-bred busi­ness­man Adam Glick and online forum Big Think. Though it isn’t free like OYC, the con­ceits of open course­ware lie within FU’s glossy syl­labus: Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom (Nor­ton authors); Larry Sum­mers; William Ackman’s “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” which explains “the logis­tics of the mod­ern port­fo­lio the­ory of invest­ment, hand­ing stu­dents the tools to become the savvy investors of tomor­row”; and a TED-friendly smor­gas­bord of hard sci­ence, eco­nom­ics, and dis­course on human nature—to be sure, the world’s most impor­tant ideas and dis­ci­plines.1

In Shake­speare, Ein­stein, and the Bot­tom Line, Stephen Kirp writes that open course­ware gives elite uni­ver­si­ties the sym­bolic cap­i­tal “to keep their exclu­siv­ity intact.” For schools like Yale that can only drop within exist­ing hier­ar­chies of exchange value – U.S. News & World Report rank­ings, for one – the open course­ware rev­o­lu­tion rep­re­sents a new lat­tice of use value that for­ti­fies the gates against dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion from other high-tech knowl­edge ven­tures as well as com­peti­tors from below. (“I don’t want to wake up one morn­ing and find out that Har­vard and Microsoft have put $5 mil­lion on the table,” piped Colum­bia trustee and NBA com­mis­sioner David Stern at the advent of Fathom.) Under this new regime, uni­ver­si­ties accrue a sort of sec­ondary rent on what they already own.

Like the Uni­ver­sity of Phoenix, elite uni­ver­si­ties have heeded Bank of Amer­ica ana­lyst Howard Block’s admo­ni­tion to embrace their role as con­tent providers – or, as David Brooks noted opti­misti­cally in a May col­umn, to bank on the trans­for­ma­tion of “knowl­edge into a com­mod­ity that is cheap and glob­ally avail­able.” Famous Berke­ley chan­cel­lor Clark Kerr’s pre­ferred use of the uni­ver­sity is upon us: “Knowl­edge is durable. It is also trans­fer­able. It only pays to pro­duce knowl­edge if through pro­duc­tion it can be put into use bet­ter and faster.” Or, if we take Carnegie Mellon’s fine-tuned, web-specific courses as the model – as Pres­i­dent Obama has, in hail­ing a future for com­mu­nity col­lege expan­sion that doesn’t require more class­rooms – BF Skinner’s “teach­ing machine,” which rewarded stu­dents for cor­rect answers fol­low­ing pre-programmed instruc­tion, is the new motor of the dig­i­tal superhighway.

Open course­ware is a way for uni­ver­si­ties to get by as busi­nesses and as uni­ver­si­ties, with all the atten­dant con­tra­dic­tions. On the one hand, as Walsh recounts in Unlock­ing the Gates, Yale’s direc­tor of mar­ket­ing and trade­mark licens­ing claims that OYC “was dri­ven from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive, because every time some­one views some­thing we made, they’re con­sum­ing Yale, and the qual­ity of their expe­ri­ence reflects how they think of us and the brand.” Indeed, the OYC site is laced with Yale’s name, logo, and col­ors, and every YouTube video has a Yale imprint. On the other hand, as Kleiner has it, “This isn’t a num­bers game, since we’re not mak­ing money off this; this is a gift we’re giv­ing to the world, so we want to see if we can bring that to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble.” In a 2000 lec­ture at Oxford, Mel­lon Foun­da­tion pres­i­dent William Bowen waxed that uni­ver­si­ties shouldn’t sell open course­ware for fear of sac­ri­fic­ing their pro-bono pur­pose. The pro­pri­etors of webcast.berkeley con­sider online lec­tures sig­nals to state leg­is­la­tors that the pur­vey­ors of tech trans­fer and pri­vately sup­ported research also teach – for the pub­lic good.

At Yale and else­where, the old boys club has become a gen­der­less, fric­tion­less, sur­fa­ble ocean of phil­an­thropy; and yet these same uni­ver­si­ties remain cor­po­rately man­aged austerity-mongers. Stan­dard cri­tiques of cyber­netic utopi­anism apply. In Data Trash: The The­ory of the Vir­tual Class, Arthur Kro­ker and Michael Wein­stein define the “will to vir­tu­al­ity” as the “dream of being the god of cyber­space – pub­lic ide­ol­ogy as the fan­tasy drive of pre-pubescent males.” In the glob­al­ized acad­emy, a new pan­theon rises.

TED and Twit­ter have two things in com­mon: they pack­age knowl­edge into per­sonal brands; and they dis­sem­i­nate it faster and more widely than the aver­age aca­d­e­mic jour­nal. Any­one can watch a TED talk; hardware-willing, any­one can tweet. Twitter’s mass appeal has as its elite coun­ter­part the slushy mar­ket­ing pitch of the TED talker.

Today’s par­a­dig­matic intel­lec­tual com­modi­ties, like intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights granted to authors but absorbed into the cap­i­tal cir­cuitry of the pub­lish­ing world of 18th cen­tury West­ern Europe, come with new forms of exploita­tion. The labor-power embed­ded in these com­modi­ties is lost not only in the buyer’s fetish but in mega-networks that rede­fine cog­ni­tive labor and reroute it to prof­itable ends. In the Twitter-sphere, The New Inquiry’s Rob Horn­ing put it in a 2011 essay, “we can be aware of our­selves only inso­far as we see our­selves as prof­it­ing or not… We sell out sim­ply by choos­ing to have sub­jec­tiv­ity on social media’s terms.” This alien­ation, one of the “quin­tes­sen­tial aspects of the con­tem­po­rary expe­ri­ence of pre­car­ity,” rep­re­sents “the total break­down of the pos­si­bil­ity of col­lec­tive iden­tity… the trans­for­ma­tional poten­tial of the enhanced social coop­er­a­tion on which the econ­omy depends is neu­tral­ized, frit­tered away in osten­ta­tious narcissism.”

In “The Ide­ol­ogy of Free Cul­ture and the Gram­mar of Sab­o­tage,” Mat­teo Pasquinelli describes this set-up as a regime of exploita­tion, while also point­ing to a cer­tain kind of resis­tance to it. Respond­ing to high-utopian “dig­i­tal­ism” and selec­tively per­me­able net­works like the Cre­ative Com­mons, he writes, “There is noth­ing dig­i­tal in any dig­i­tal dream. Merged with a global econ­omy, each bit of ‘free’ infor­ma­tion car­ries its microslave like a for­got­ten twin.” Akin to cre­ative pro­duc­tion sub­sumed by urban growth machines or media monop­o­lies, “open cul­ture” becomes a kind of multitude-for-rent. For Pasquinelli, sub­ver­sion lies with the likes of Dmytri Kleiner’s copy­far­left, in which the com­mons are open to com­mer­cial use by sin­gle work­ers or worker coop­er­a­tives that till them, but not agents that exist out­side. Over and against the flat world of open cul­tur­ists, Pasquinelli posits a com­mons that runs on both coop­er­a­tion and uncoop­er­a­tion, in which the mul­ti­tude strug­gles within itself.

Sab­o­tage of the copy­far­left sort is an impor­tant plank of resis­tance, but a kind of van­guardist one; cul­ture jam­mers and con­spir­a­to­r­ial dig­i­tal cabals draw on highly politi­cized sub­jec­tiv­i­ties lodged in a world that relies on the acad­emy no mat­ter how much it may dis­avow its ori­gins. By com­par­i­son, strong asser­tions about the impos­si­bil­ity of col­lec­tive iden­tity aban­don all attempts to unravel the con­tra­dic­tions and chang­ing class com­po­si­tion of the so-called knowl­edge econ­omy. While it’s pre­dictable for the pro­fes­sional intel­lec­tual to decry the crass­ness of the newest brave new world, tweets and free lec­tures rep­re­sent a redis­tri­b­u­tion of knowl­edge whose latent promise must be taken as seri­ously as its run­away promises. To be sure, it’s easy to crit­i­cize techno-babblers like Wired – which in 2003 wrote of MIT’s OCW, “no insti­tu­tion of higher learn­ing had ever pro­posed any­thing as rev­o­lu­tion­ary” – or, for that mat­ter, MIT’s mar­ket­ing team. The oper­a­tive ques­tion here is whether the tweet­ers or open course­ware con­sumers who aren’tprofessional intel­lec­tu­als can speak. Just as Wired’s take on Occupy Wall Street, a Decem­ber arti­cle enti­tled “#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts,” treats pro­test­ers as mind­less iron fil­ings, Andy Merrifield’s “Crowd Pol­i­tics” in the September/October 2011 New Left Review fore­grounds the “inten­sity of the encounter” while ignor­ing the vari­able sub­jec­tiv­i­ties and lived expe­ri­ences that pro­test­ers carry with them to protest. Who is Horning’s “we”?

For those who never went to a top school or, finan­cial aid notwith­stand­ing, couldn’t take on the debt, open edu­ca­tion rep­re­sents a utopia cap­tured by uni­ver­sity growth machines. Bas­tard sim­u­lacrum of acad­e­mia that it can be, it calls nei­ther for knee-jerk defense of the tra­di­tional acad­emy nor blithe cel­e­bra­tion from those whose depart­ments or job prospects are safe from the chop­ping block, but mea­sured con­sid­er­a­tion of new pos­si­bil­i­ties for reap­pro­pri­at­ing the cri­sis of the university.

As America’s uni­ver­sity sys­tem grew and mod­ern­ized in the post­war era, stu­dents and fac­ulty col­lab­o­rated on sig­nif­i­cant reforms to Yale’s grad­ing sys­tem, grad­u­a­tion cred­its, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for inde­pen­dent study. In the post­mod­ern acad­emy, ideas for appro­pri­at­ing sys­temic trans­for­ma­tion for rad­i­cal ends run wild. At the Open Edu­ca­tion Con­fer­ence in 2009, Christo­pher Mackie offered a “Model Pro­posal for Utterly Trans­form­ing Higher Edu­ca­tion Ped­a­gogy and Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Gen­er­a­tion,” involv­ing course credit for stu­dents who gen­er­ate online con­tent – ele­vat­ing stu­dents’ con­sump­tion of open course­ware, par­tic­u­larly oper­a­tive at MIT, to a co-creative art. As a res­o­lu­tion to the sky­rock­et­ing cost of uni­ver­sity degrees, n+1’s edi­tors make the less mod­est, if more spec­u­la­tive, pitch for “the cre­den­tialed to join the uncre­den­tialed in shred­ding the diplo­mas that paper over the unde­mo­c­ra­tic infra­struc­ture of Amer­i­can life.”

Break­ing down this infra­struc­ture demands recog­ni­tion that knowl­edge com­modi­ties are objects con­sumed by a het­ero­ge­neous mul­ti­tude rather than a mono­lithic mass trapped within an imposed “con­sumerism.” As Yale’s Michael Den­ning con­tends in Cul­ture in the Age of Three Worlds, “cul­tural forms do not have a nec­es­sary polit­i­cal mean­ing, and may be appro­pri­ated and reap­pro­pri­ated by a vari­ety of social move­ments seek­ing to lead a soci­ety.” For Den­ning, cul­tural prac­tices are not “quick sales” but sites of class con­tes­ta­tion and vari­able mate­r­ial invest­ment. Within this par­a­digm, the masses of peo­ple to whom sim­u­lated aca­d­e­mic knowl­edge is dis­trib­uted are an inte­gral part of any pro­gram that pur­ports to redi­rect the polit­i­cal econ­omy of higher education.

As the acad­emy broad­casts itself to the world, it opens itself to dis­rup­tion from this audi­ence – Ghana­ian stu­dents seek­ing an MIT degree in exchange for all the course­work, high school­ers who love the free lec­tures but can’t access highly ranked uni­ver­sity edu­ca­tion because of race or class, let alone adjuncts who see the lies of tenure exposed on cam­era. The onus is on the rest of us to meet them at the gates.

* I’ve ben­e­fited from the per­sonal guid­ance and gen­eros­ity of sev­eral instruc­tors from this course. My state­ments here are directed toward the course and not the pro­fes­sors themselves.

James Cersonsky (@cersonsky) is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. His writing can be found at Dissent, In These Times, AlterNet, and elsewhere. Read about his work on community-centered pedagogy here.

• 1I’ve ben­e­fited from the per­sonal guid­ance and gen­eros­ity of sev­eral instruc­tors from this course. My state­ments here are directed toward the course and not the pro­fes­sors themselves.

Asad Haider: You write within a Marx­ist frame­work, but often focus on clas­si­cal polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, prior to or out­side of the Marx­ist tra­di­tion. What’s the rel­e­vance of this kind of study?

Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan: I would say that just as we clearly see that Marx’s eco­nomic think­ing arises out of a cri­tique of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, and that in turn was made pos­si­ble by a prior cri­tique of ide­al­ist phi­los­o­phy, we also have to see the prob­lems of rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics that Marx is address­ing as a crit­i­cal engage­ment with the past his­tory of polit­i­cal thought. There are spe­cific cat­e­gory prob­lems, as well as inter­twined his­tor­i­cal sub­ject mat­ter in an engage­ment with that side of Marx, and Marx’s own engage­ment with this lin­eage of thinkers – Hegel as a legal and polit­i­cal thinker, clearly, but Hegel’s thought as a cul­mi­na­tion of a tra­di­tion of legal and polit­i­cal think­ing going back to Aris­to­tle. That’s some­thing which has been under­scored by oth­ers in the Marx­ist tra­di­tion, you could think of Althusser and Col­letti, who also had works which were explic­itly about the polit­i­cal writ­ers before Marx, who in some way intro­duce or delin­eate the prob­lems of pol­i­tics and his­tory that Marx will sub­se­quently take up in his accounts of the class strug­gles and civil wars of the times that he was liv­ing in.

I want to ask about two polit­i­cal thinkers, and what we can learn from them. The first is Carl Schmitt, the sub­ject of your first book, The Enemy.

Well, you know, it’s not always obvi­ous to peo­ple why it’s nec­es­sary to read fig­ures like Schmitt, a fig­ure who was com­pro­mised by his inti­mate asso­ci­a­tions with fas­cism and National Social­ism. So this is an ini­tial obsta­cle to a crit­i­cal engage­ment – it was even for me. Schmitt, from the other side of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, was approach­ing the prob­lems of the forms of pol­i­tics that arose in a period of the his­tor­i­cal and struc­tural cri­sis of the state-form, man­i­fest­ing itself in the inde­ter­mi­nacy around the basic cat­e­gories and con­cep­tual dis­tinc­tions that orga­nized legal and polit­i­cal think­ing from an ear­lier period. His bench­mark is the period of clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism, so the con­cepts and cat­e­gory dis­tinc­tions that orga­nized legal and polit­i­cal think­ing for clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism and before are enter­ing into cri­sis in this new era, in which the oppo­si­tion of state and soci­ety, the fun­da­men­tal sep­a­ra­tion of the eco­nomic from the polit­i­cal – which is of course one of the ways Marx under­stands what’s spe­cific to mod­ern bour­geois or cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety – is under threat. Schmitt is address­ing the same prob­lem as Marx, except he’s doing it in a period when the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, medi­ated by the inter­state sys­tem into a pat­tern of com­bined an uneven devel­op­ment, and fur­ther medi­ated by rev­o­lu­tion­ary and coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ary rup­tures, is bring­ing about a recon­nec­tion of these pre­vi­ously sep­a­rated spheres or domains of the polit­i­cal and the eco­nomic. The actual sub­se­quent devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal­ism is recon­nect­ing them in var­i­ous ways, although main­tain­ing fun­da­men­tally the sep­a­ra­tion inso­far as we’re still speak­ing of cap­i­tal­ism. So I think in that sense Schmitt is deal­ing with a prob­lem – indi­rectly, some­times, but some­times directly – a deep prob­lem that arose in Marx’s own thinking.

Now Marx, even though he posited this sep­a­ra­tion of the polit­i­cal from the eco­nomic, did not on that basis attempt to elab­o­rate on con­crete forms of mod­ern state­hood and their poten­tial his­tor­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions within later phases of cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment. While he iden­ti­fied the social rela­tions behind the long-term dynamic of cap­i­tal accu­mu­la­tion, he devel­oped a more rudi­men­tary account of the basic struc­ture of the state that arises from this sep­a­ra­tion. His accounts of class strug­gles and civil wars of the 19th cen­tury present some gen­eral out­lines of the mod­ern bour­geois state, but not much as far as the­o­riz­ing its con­crete ten­den­cies of devel­op­ment. Unlike cap­i­tal, the state is a very sim­ple cat­e­gory in Marx’s writ­ings. There isn’t really a sys­tem­atic his­tor­i­cal cri­tique of the polit­i­cal order that arises from this con­sti­tu­tive sep­a­ra­tion of the polit­i­cal from the eco­nomic, or of con­tem­po­rary rela­tion between state and the devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal­ism, although he has much to say about how this played out in the period of the for­ma­tion of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. In the early works, when he’s engag­ing with Hegel’s Phi­los­o­phy of Right, he addresses the spe­cific delin­eated forms of the Euro­pean state aris­ing out of this process of sep­a­ra­tion, but its of course still in a rudi­men­tary philo­soph­i­cal form.

Get­ting back to Schmitt: there are of course seri­ous lim­its to his think­ing, to the extent that he only approached these prob­lems through the medi­a­tion of his con­cep­tion of the state in the tra­di­tion of con­sti­tu­tional law and its premises, so his under­stand­ing of the trans­for­ma­tions of cap­i­tal­ism in this period are approached through this medi­a­tion. But what he has to say about the cri­sis of the legal forms of state­hood, pri­vate prop­erty, and war is inter­est­ing in its own right, and often goes well beyond what Marx­ists at the time wrote on these mat­ters. The Weimar Repub­lic was, after all, the epi­cen­ter of a larger his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion of an intense inter­war struc­tural cri­sis of cap­i­tal­ism and the inter-state sys­tem within which it had evolved. The Weimar state-form, and the con­sti­tu­tional con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing it, was a stag­ing ground for the larger the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tions around the char­ac­ter of the period, in terms of the fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tions in the rela­tion­ship of the state to cap­i­tal­ism, of the polit­i­cal to the eco­nomic, that should be of inter­est to any Marx­ist. Of course, many of his stu­dents were Marx­ists, and he was often able to appro­pri­ate ideas from oth­ers across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. This is appar­ent from the very begin­ning of the Weimar Repub­lic, when he wrote on the con­cept of the dic­ta­tor­ship of the pro­le­tariat within a wider intel­lec­tual his­tory of emer­gency pow­ers and states of excep­tion, all the way to its end when he addressed the prob­lem of the com­pat­i­bil­ity of the cri­sis man­age­ment of post-laissez-faire cap­i­tal­ism with exist­ing forms of democracy.

The sec­ond thinker is Machi­avelli. Both Gram­sci and Althusser wrote about Machi­avelli, and you returned to some of this mate­r­ial in Antag­o­nis­tics.

I would say that one of the ways to think about the sig­nif­i­cance of Machi­avelli is the con­text in which think­ing about the present through a read­ing of Machi­avelli emerged, from the 19th cen­tury to the inter­war period, and per­haps closer to the present con­text as well. If you think about it that way, you can see that there are a num­ber of episodes in the story of the recep­tion with Machi­avelli. In the early 19th cen­tury you have Fichte and Hegel respond­ing to the cri­sis of the Ger­man state, and try­ing to think about the con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­ity of the recon­sti­tu­tion of a national state, by look­ing at Machiavelli’s writ­ings on the prob­lem of Ital­ian national unity. They saw Machi­avelli as address­ing the prob­lem of the con­di­tions of the gen­e­sis of a state, par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of what appeared as cat­a­strophic defeat in the form of for­eign occu­pa­tion. So that’s their his­tor­i­cal link to Machiavelli’s situation.

Keep­ing that in mind, the renewed inter­est in Machi­avelli dur­ing the inter­war period, and this is man­i­fested by writ­ings on him across the polit­i­cal spec­trum – you men­tioned Gram­sci, there’s also Leo Strauss, Wyn­d­ham Lewis, Ray­mond Aron, and many oth­ers. Gram­sci, whether he was deal­ing with the prob­lem of rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal strat­egy in the West, the rise of Fas­cism or even the onset of Amer­i­can hege­mony, raised Machi­avel­lian ques­tions about the nexus between the foun­da­tion of new states and the con­di­tions of their per­pet­u­a­tion. This is the prob­lem that Machi­avelli is deal­ing with in the Dis­courses, the need for an inter­lude or found­ing episode of ter­ror to estab­lish a new state, and the mode by which that ori­gin can be super­seded through the estab­lish­ment of polit­i­cal forms that are capa­ble of per­pet­u­at­ing them­selves on the basis of the mul­ti­tude, the not yet fully inde­pen­dent pop­u­lar foun­da­tion of the new order. So, these episodes of read­ing Machi­avelli are all about the ori­gins and foun­da­tions of new orders, as expe­ri­enced in the after­math of defeat.

So we’re see­ing the res­o­nance of these themes across his­tor­i­cal peri­ods. Crises in state-forms, and crises which are truly global, with cat­a­strophic defeats, sit­u­a­tions in which the shape of a new order can’t be clearly seen. We’re now expe­ri­enc­ing what seems to be an inter­minable eco­nomic cri­sis; how do these clas­si­cal themes play into under­stand­ing the cur­rent period?

The abil­ity of some of these older lega­cies of thought to address the present was called into ques­tion by the resta­bi­liza­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem in the post­war period. For that rea­son those who have remained inter­ested in those older lega­cies of rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal thought, think­ing about a pol­i­tics that could bring them back, have found it dif­fi­cult to find its points of appli­ca­tion to the world of cap­i­tal that arose in the post­war West­ern sec­tor. There were a vari­ety of attempts to keep alive, in some way, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal change, but often this took the form of try­ing to look for other agen­cies out­side the work­ing class, and other sites of strug­gle. For a very a long period of time we’ve expe­ri­enced the devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal­ism which is in some respects no longer capa­ble of con­tin­u­ing and repro­duc­ing the suc­cesses of the post­war period.

An ade­quate under­stand­ing of the so-called period of neolib­er­al­ism involves under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ent lev­els, some of which seemed to indi­cate that the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem was reach­ing new heights, as the entire world was incor­po­rated into it, while other lev­els of its evo­lu­tion exhib­ited char­ac­ter­is­tics which sug­gested that the fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic prob­lems of the 1970s, in terms of a slow­down in the growth of income, were never really super­seded. What I sug­gest in my piece “Spec­u­la­tions on the Sta­tion­ary State” is that these con­junc­tural prob­lems car­ried over from the 1970s are con­verg­ing with the struc­tural lim­its of cap­i­tal­ism itself, which make it less real­is­tic to assume that this renewal process is going to hap­pen.

It was often thought, until recently, that the last thirty years, after the post­war “Golden Age,” were the great­est period of cap­i­tal­ism ever. Devel­op­ing a com­pre­hen­sive objec­tive account of what hap­pened in this period has been dif­fi­cult, since there are so many dif­fer­ent lev­els at which what hap­pened unfolded. There’s been a long term period of struc­tural trans­for­ma­tions and adjust­ments with so many new char­ac­ter­is­tics intro­duced into the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, it would seem at least ini­tially para­dox­i­cal that this has not in some way bro­ken forth into a new period of accu­mu­la­tion. So in order to address that prob­lem, its now impor­tant to recon­sider some the­o­riza­tions of longer-term lim­its of cap­i­tal­ism. I didn’t really go into the var­i­ous Marx­ist ver­sions of that, which I would do more of now, but I think that the core of it arises out of the Bren­ner account and some unre­solved prob­lems and ques­tions in that account regard­ing the long term, draw­ing the polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal prob­lems out.

Let’s talk about Robert Brenner’s analy­sis of what he calls the long down­turn, which started in the 1970s. His account is con­tro­ver­sial for a num­ber of rea­sons, includ­ing among Marx­ists. He doesn’t make use of the Marx­ian ter­mi­nol­ogy of value, and doesn’t explic­itly refer to Marx’s texts on eco­nomic crisis.

It’s nei­ther framed in terms of Marx’s own char­ac­ter­is­tic ter­mi­nol­ogy, nor is it framed as a gen­eral the­ory of cap­i­tal­ist cri­sis. Though some gen­eral prin­ci­ples might come out of it, Bren­ner doesn’t advance this as an expla­na­tion of the inter­war eco­nomic cri­sis, the so-called Great Depres­sion, nor of the cri­sis of the last decades of the 19th cen­tury. So although there’s a gen­eral char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the social prop­erty rela­tions of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, and there’s an account of some of the long-term dynam­ics and trends, every par­tic­u­lar phase of accu­mu­la­tion is a his­tor­i­cal topic unto itself, call­ing into ques­tion the idea of Marx’s eco­nomic thought as a cri­sis the­ory. That’s good, in my view.

As a sec­ondary issue, on Brenner’s rela­tion to Marx, despite the ter­mi­no­log­i­cal dis­tance, I think actu­ally the account that Bren­ner pro­vides gives a con­crete mean­ing to var­i­ous con­cepts that are the foun­da­tion of Marx’s own account of the value form. I think that there’s still some­thing more to be said on this sub­ject, since Bren­ner him­self doesn’t use the ter­mi­nol­ogy and more or less frames his own account of cap­i­tal­ism and of its accu­mu­la­tion process in terms of a cost-price the­ory, explic­itly avoid­ing the prob­lem­atic that Marx opened up with his under­stand­ing of the social rela­tions which give rise to pro­duc­tion in a value form, that there’s a sig­nif­i­cant dimen­sion of what Marx was try­ing to get at in his the­ory of cap­i­tal­ism that is not brought into sharp relief in Brenner’s account.

You’re actu­ally in the midst of research­ing and writ­ing a book on Marx, focus­ing on Marx’s eco­nomic writ­ings. One of the major prob­lems for the entire his­tory of what was called West­ern Marx­ism was that Marx never actu­ally wrote what his method was in works like Cap­i­tal.

From begin­ning to end, Marx’s own the­ory arises out of a crit­i­cal analy­sis of the cat­e­gory prob­lems that arose within clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, that it was unable to solve. Marx’s own account of “the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion” takes the form of a solu­tion to these prob­lems, from the mys­tery of why the value of com­modi­ties must appear in a mon­e­tary form to why the social rela­tions of pro­duc­tion appear in the form of sep­a­rate fac­tors of pro­duc­tion con­tribut­ing to the value of the com­mod­ity, with each appear­ing as a sep­a­rate source of rev­enue to their owner. One of the premises of my work on Marx’s eco­nomic thought is that we have gen­er­ally lost sight of the fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic prob­lems that Marx was address­ing, that came out of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy. These were in part still liv­ing prob­lems at the time that Marx was work­ing through them, but even dur­ing the course of Marx’s own writ­ings on these top­ics, from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, this tra­di­tion of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, and the liv­ing his­tor­i­cal con­tent of the prob­lems it was address­ing, began to fall out of view, became in some way occluded, so I would argue there’s a kind of opac­ity to the fun­da­men­tal under­ly­ing prob­lems of Marx’s eco­nomic thought. The mean­ings of many of the terms he’s using, and more seri­ously the sys­tem­atic char­ac­ter of his eco­nomic thought, are not appar­ent. Of course, there have always been dog­matic under­stand­ings of the sys­tem­atic char­ac­ter of Marx’s writ­ings, but putting those aside, inter­pre­ta­tions of his the­ory of cap­i­tal­ism have always been medi­ated by the ini­tial attempts to make sense of it, which took shape in the after­math of the decline of the intel­lec­tual tra­di­tions out of which Marx him­self for­mu­lated his cri­tique of polit­i­cal econ­omy. These ini­tial attempts estab­lished the points of entry, top­ics and prob­lems that have dom­i­nated much of the com­men­tary since.

That being said, Marx’s own under­stand­ing of cap­i­tal­ism has many char­ac­ter­is­tics of the par­tic­u­lar socio-historical world of 19th cen­tury Eng­lish cap­i­tal­ism embed­ded within it. Although it’s a gen­eral the­ory, and arises as a cri­tique of the fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic cat­e­gories of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, and the solu­tion of the fun­da­men­tal cat­e­gory prob­lems and with them obvi­ously the real under­ly­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of a cap­i­tal­ist econ­omy, with the work­ing through of the prob­lems and impasses of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, Marx arrived at a gen­eral the­ory, but this gen­eral the­ory is in some way con­joined to the spe­cific socio-historical con­text of the cap­i­tal­ism of his time. Not just of course the factory-industrial order that emerged in Eng­land, which is the locus clas­si­cus for the gen­eral the­ory, but also the var­i­ous regions of the larger world-system, from declin­ing Asi­atic empires to the still-intact world of Euro­pean feu­dal­ism in the East, in Rus­sia, in the period of its demise, the emer­gence of white set­tler states, the end of the large plan­ta­tion slavery-based economies. These con­di­tions are spe­cific to the clas­si­cal period of cap­i­tal­ism that Marx is the­o­riz­ing, and not all of them are in some uni­form way sub­sumed under one sin­gle form of cap­i­tal­ism. Many of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of his age of cap­i­tal­ism belong to another world: cap­i­tal­ist land­lordism based on agri­cul­tural rent, gold stan­dard money, and con­di­tions of work­ing class life that were uprooted with the advent of mod­ern med­i­cine and the wel­fare state – although, of course, this lat­ter devel­op­ment has only taken place in more advanced economies. So there’s a num­ber of ways in which Marx’s world is dis­con­tin­u­ous with our own, though the gen­eral the­ory allows us to make the bridge, to under­stand what in the sub­se­quent peri­ods of cap­i­tal­ism, although they break and depart with the char­ac­ter­is­tics of Marx’s own time, are nonethe­less intel­li­gi­ble in terms of the account that Marx does provide.

What you’re point­ing to is the fun­da­men­tal rela­tion between the log­i­cal expo­si­tion in Cap­i­tal and the his­tor­i­cal chap­ters, which are some­times seen as exist­ing in an entirely dif­fer­ent reg­is­ter.

There is a ten­dency to iso­late the value the­ory, or the “the­ory” part of Marx’s eco­nomic writ­ings from the his­tor­i­cal parts, to put it crudely. That has to do with pre­vail­ing con­cep­tions of what the­ory is. I’d like to demon­strate what kind of the­ory Marx is build­ing by pre­sent­ing it in a sys­tem­at­i­cally uni­fied, recon­structed form. Clearly, Marx does not mean by mean by the­ory, gen­er­al­iza­tions applied to some­thing called “his­tory.” But there is another sense of the term “the­ory” asso­ci­ated with Marx which is also not exactly the one Marx him­self had: so-called “Crit­i­cal The­ory.” Marx’s con­cep­tion of the­ory was not merely neg­a­tive in this sense, but aspired to be sci­en­tific and sys­tem­at­i­cally inte­grated with his­tor­i­cal con­tent, that is, with the artic­u­la­tion and solu­tion of real his­tor­i­cal problems.

Many of the attempts now to get to a new read­ing of Cap­i­tal set up as their adver­sary some­thing called “tra­di­tional” Marx­ism or “world­view” Marx­ism, which is con­nected to the polit­i­cal projects of the work­ers’ move­ment. Now, if we do a read­ing of the the­o­ret­i­cal texts that were pro­duced by the work­ers’ move­ment, we find a remark­able het­ero­gene­ity, of per­spec­tives, prob­lem­at­ics, ques­tions. How can we begin to reread this tra­di­tion as well?

I think there are a cou­ple of ques­tions there, some of which pre­sup­pose a par­tic­u­lar answer. I would say that, con­trary to my own incli­na­tions, inso­far as I’m sym­pa­thetic to some of the tra­di­tions of so-called “world­view Marx­ism,” there really isn’t much in Marx’s eco­nomic writ­ings to war­rant the idea that it had some imme­di­ate or direct rela­tion­ship to an under­stand­ing of the con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­ity of the pur­suit of class strug­gles, or imme­di­ately ori­ented towards the prob­lems of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary praxis of the work­ing class. That was an attempt made at a later point, based in the fact that Marx’s writ­ings are not just eco­nomic, but also on the pol­i­tics and his­tory of his time, some of them part of a series of writ­ings on the great upheavals, the rev­o­lu­tions and coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tions from 1848 to 1871. So obvi­ously it was not sim­ply culled out of noth­ing, that so-called “world­view Marx­ists” would try to estab­lish the con­nec­tion. But aside from some dis­cus­sions of the work­ers’ move­ment in the form of the strug­gle to limit the work­day, and to estab­lish nor­mal con­di­tions of labor within the fac­tory sys­tem, and the sig­nif­i­cance of the suc­cess of that in induc­ing struc­tural changes within cap­i­tal­ism, as opposed to break­ing with it and over­throw­ing it, there isn’t really that much in the eco­nomic writ­ings which either explic­itly puts the class strug­gle at the cen­ter of the unfold­ing evo­lu­tion of these social rela­tions. There’s much more on the vio­lence of the class strug­gles that char­ac­ter­ized the period of the “prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion” of cap­i­tal than on any sub­se­quent episodes of it. It’s not even clear whether the the­ory which he presents, and this is a trib­ute to his sci­en­tific integrity, really iden­ti­fies the con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­ity for a work­ers’ move­ment, in the sense of a dynamic by which the work­ing class might develop out of the process of the accu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal into a force of eman­ci­pa­tion and recon­struc­tion. It’s not entirely clear that this is his under­stand­ing of what hap­pens to the work­ing class under capitalism.

Nev­er­the­less he described Cap­i­tal as a weapon in the hands of the work­ing class.

Sci­en­tific the­ory is a weapon, it’s ulti­mately ben­e­fi­cial to the work­ers and the down­trod­den of soci­ety because they have the most inter­est in under­stand­ing the world with­out illu­sions. It’s in that respect that I think it’s a weapon for the work­ing class, and it’s not really clear that it can be directly, in the form that Marx wrote it, turned into an instru­ment of the class strug­gle. But that’s not what Marx is try­ing to do, either. He’s try­ing to set up a frame­work for con­crete inves­ti­ga­tions of the evo­lu­tion of this form of soci­ety and the polit­i­cal and other forms of strug­gle that result from its under­ly­ing con­tra­dic­tions. The­ory – in some ways I think this is what Althusser was good at point­ing out – is not there for us, in the sense of some­thing which is imme­di­ately even mean­ing­ful for us, and the ques­tions that we’re ask­ing. It’s not meant to do that. It’s meant to maybe take us away from the ques­tions we’re ask­ing. So we can’t really think of the­ory in an instru­men­tal way, because of that rela­tion­ship, true the­o­ries don’t serve our pur­poses so eas­ily. But they bet­ter serve our pur­poses for all that, because they are ulti­mately about true things and a knowl­edge of them. In that sense I think you could say that the scientific-critical under­stand­ing of the­ory, as opposed to a polit­i­cal world­view under­stand­ing, is really what the clas­si­cal con­cep­tion ulti­mately sub­scribed to. Let me qual­ify that: I think that Gram­sci is maybe, in the after­math of defeat, more attuned to the way a scientific-critical under­stand­ing of his­tory and pol­i­tics leads to a cer­tain, let’s say, dis­abused rela­tion­ship to the imme­di­ate prospects of the con­di­tions of strug­gle for work­ing and sub­al­tern classes. It’s really a dif­fi­cult thing to sci­en­tif­i­cally and crit­i­cally explore these prob­lems. We pre­fer to have our ques­tions result in answers which are enabling to us in some way. There are totally good rea­sons we ask the­ory to do this for us. But it best served even that pur­pose when it did this indirectly.

Now, there are moments in Marx, even in Cap­i­tal, which describe a kind of inex­orable process of his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment which will result in communism.

Where would you say that is?

The “His­tor­i­cal Ten­dency of Cap­i­tal­ist Accu­mu­la­tion,” in con­ti­nu­ity with ear­lier works.

I would dis­agree with that, I would say that there’s often a kind of pecu­liar dialec­ti­cal form to the way Marx estab­lishes the con­di­tions of the nega­tion of exist­ing con­di­tions. So although he very strik­ingly sug­gests the dialec­ti­cal form of the devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal­ism as a process of the expro­pri­a­tion of labor, which will in turn cap­size over into an expro­pri­a­tion of the expro­pri­a­tors, that formal-dialectical struc­ture shouldn’t deceive us. I think this is where we might take a cue from some of the crit­i­cism of dialec­ti­cal thought that came out of cur­rents in the, let’s say, Althusser­ian tra­di­tion. The way the logic of devel­op­ment is under­stood as a way of fol­low­ing the logic of nega­tion, can lead to assump­tions about the course of his­tory which ulti­mately turn out to be dialec­ti­cal illu­sions. I’m not advo­cat­ing step­ping back away from the dialec­ti­cal devel­op­ment of laws and ten­den­cies. Much of what is great in Marx’s think­ing takes this form, and any ver­sion of Marx which strips that out of it, really strips out the guts of it. Briefly in the penul­ti­mate chap­ter of vol­ume 1 he speaks of this “expro­pri­a­tion of the expro­pri­a­tors,” it seems as if this is cul­mi­na­tion of the analy­sis, at least in that vol­ume of the text. We might be tempted to see vol­ume 1 as cul­mi­nat­ing in this under­stand­ing of the expro­pri­a­tion of the expro­pri­a­tors. Cap­i­tal is often read today as the story of the for­ma­tion of the work­ing class and, let’s call it, before the let­ter, “the mul­ti­tude.” The basic idea is that as we approach the final chap­ter of the expro­pri­a­tion of the mul­ti­tude, the con­di­tions are emerg­ing for a great rever­sal. This is the enabling ide­o­log­i­cal for­mula of the rad­i­cal left today. There is a ratio­nal core to this. Lib­er­als, social-democrats and rem­nant lega­cies of an older far-left often snicker at such illu­sions, but since they were com­pletely blind­sided by the con­tem­po­rary cri­sis of cap­i­tal­ism, and failed to pre­dict it, and now offer only hind­sight and stick to what­ever it is they were say­ing before, they’re hardly cred­i­ble either.

It seems to me the rea­son Marx places such an empha­sis on vio­lence, as you men­tioned before, in the chap­ters on prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion is to break from the idea – which is there in clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy, but can also be repeated in a mod­i­fied form in a Marx­ism which relies on a tran­shis­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive of the forces of pro­duc­tion, the devel­op­ment of the forces of pro­duc­tion – the idea that the “social-property rela­tions” of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion are the real­iza­tion of some­thing nascent in the pre­vi­ous mode of pro­duc­tion, whereas he is describ­ing a process which isn’t a sim­ple real­iza­tion, but which involves dis­con­ti­nu­ity, and which engages every level of the social for­ma­tion. He empha­sizes the role of the state, the inter­ac­tion of var­i­ous ele­ments which don’t con­tain cap­i­tal­ism within them.

I’m not sure if you’re describ­ing Marx here, I think that his thoughts on the sub­ject of the emer­gence or tran­si­tion to some­thing like a “social” mode of pro­duc­tion, are scat­tered, as every­one knows, and really take the form of either this dialectical-overturning, or, more mod­estly, of a con­sid­er­a­tion of the way aspects of social repro­duc­tion which assume a par­tic­u­lar form because of cap­i­tal­ist social-property rela­tions would be sus­pended, given a social mode of pro­duc­tion. In this lat­ter vein his basic point is that what are assumed to be mate­r­ial neces­si­ties of pro­duc­tion are really only such because of these par­tic­u­lar social forms.

You’ve described the story of prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion as the for­ma­tion of the work­ing class as a kind of ide­o­log­i­cal nar­ra­tive, with util­ity for the social moment. What would be a sci­en­tific analy­sis of the for­ma­tion of the pro­le­tariat? Not Marx’s?

Well, he explic­itly says in that chap­ter, that he is not going to look at the eco­nomic causes of the for­ma­tion of the pro­le­tariat, that he is just going to look at the role that vio­lence played in this process. That’s an explicit admis­sion that this is not really a the­o­riza­tion, or his­tor­i­cally grounded account of the whole process of the orig­i­nal accu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal, but a counter-myth to the bour­geois story of enter­pris­ing Lock­ean fore­fa­thers scrap­ing together, out of their labors, sums which they are then able to use to employ those who were unable, or didn’t want to do that. That story is basi­cally an ide­o­log­i­cal account of why peo­ple today are divided into classes, and so Marx is coun­ter­ing it with another one unfold­ing within a dialec­ti­cal form, with this kind of reversal.

So he’s laps­ing out of sci­ence? Because you’ve described the sys­tem­atic­ity of this entire work.

I have said that there is a logico-historical sys­tem­atic­ity. I haven’t described it though.

Okay. But your char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the chap­ters on prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion seems to sug­gest that they are not part of this.

I think that there’s a con­cep­tual devel­op­ment run­ning through­out Marx’s works, includ­ing the texts on prim­i­tive accumulation.

The­o­riza­tions of his­tory and pol­i­tics are always in some way con­nected to a con­crete his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, an existential-historical sit­u­a­tion. Every exam­ple we have of even the artic­u­la­tion of sweep­ing accounts of basic polit­i­cal forms, whether that’s done in a way that his­tori­cizes them or not, arose in that con­junc­ture and encounter with a par­tic­u­lar set­ting. That’s going back to Aristotle’s Pol­i­tics, and that’s cer­tainly true of early mod­ern polit­i­cal thought. It’s also true of Marx. So this dual­ity of the­ory and, let’s call it ide­ol­ogy, is inside of the­ory. The ques­tions we’re ask­ing of pol­i­tics and his­tory are ques­tions for us, not like when we’re ask­ing ques­tions about other kinds of objects, with the under­stand­ing and com­pre­hen­sion of non-human real­ity, the sep­a­ra­tion of what is and what is for us can in some way be made com­pletely, and that’s obvi­ously not true when we’re talk­ing about pol­i­tics and his­tory. So there is in some way this inter­nal mutual impli­ca­tion of the ide­o­log­i­cal and the the­o­ret­i­cal. The­ory takes the form of the dis­so­lu­tion and cri­tique of our ide­o­log­i­cally formed ques­tions. It doesn’t ever sever itself com­pletely from our ide­o­log­i­cally formed ques­tions. Ide­ol­ogy in the Althusser­ian sense is ris­ing out of social expe­ri­ence, right? The spon­ta­neous ways things appear, and even the­o­ries can become encrusted with ide­ol­ogy, and become a kind of obscu­ran­tist naivete. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it’s not the case that we have the­ory on the one hand and spon­ta­neous and direct social expe­ri­ence in its naive form on the other. That social expe­ri­ence is medi­ated by a whole gar­bled set of ter­mi­nolo­gies and half-formed ques­tions and prob­lems, which then it’s the busi­ness of crit­i­cal the­o­ret­i­cal under­stand­ing to break apart and to gen­er­ate tracks and paths for analy­sis and inves­ti­ga­tion. The­o­ries and prob­lems within any tra­di­tion can become ide­ol­o­gized. This is true of Marx­ism, this is true of every tra­di­tion. There’s a moment in which the­ory emerges in some liv­ing rela­tion to scientific-critical prob­lems and does so per­haps in some con­junc­tion with the polit­i­cal moment, and then there are moments when that is left behind, and we only have ossi­fied ter­mi­nolo­gies and poorly-understood ques­tions and problems.

For Althusser, I would argue, the really core char­ac­ter­is­tic of ide­ol­ogy is that it posits the trans­parency of social rela­tions. And this is guar­an­teed by an under­stand­ing of his­tory as a process with a sub­ject and a goal, which is the real­iza­tion of this trans­parency. The pri­mary exam­ple of this is the tele­ol­ogy of the Sec­ond Inter­na­tional, and for him this is repeated in the human­ist, his­tori­cist the­o­ret­i­cal revolt against the cat­e­gories of the Sec­ond Inter­na­tional. The way this maps out onto Marx’s works is, for exam­ple, that dialec­ti­cal account that you described in that chap­ter in Cap­i­tal, that would be the ide­o­log­i­cal moment, while prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion is an attempt to break with that.

Cer­tainly within Marx’s work is the pos­si­bil­ity of devel­op­ing an ade­quate account of the actual prim­i­tive, or orig­i­nal accu­mu­la­tion of cap­i­tal. There’s plenty of mate­r­ial in Marx which is about this process of the for­ma­tion of wealth in a new social form dur­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing period. That’s the real mate­r­ial on prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion. Whether it’s wholly cor­rect is another matter.

So while I am sug­gest­ing, along with Althusser, that the chap­ter on the expro­pri­a­tion of the expro­pri­a­tors and the chap­ters on prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion are in a ten­sion, because one describes a his­tor­i­cal dialec­tic with a goal, the other describes a process of rup­ture which is fig­ured in vio­lence, you’re sug­gest­ing that they’re part of the same ide­o­log­i­cal mold.

Like I said before, I’m not say­ing that Marx him­self was unable to break with this. I’m say­ing that he explic­itly says that in this chap­ter he is only look­ing at the polit­i­cal side, the role that vio­lence played in this process. That’s a pretty direct state­ment to the effect that this is not a com­pre­hen­sive account of the whole process. The process of social and his­tor­i­cal change, the emer­gence of a new mode of pro­duc­tion, can’t be explained ade­quately by a “force the­ory of his­tory.” Although Marx once referred to force as the mid­wife of such changes, Engels had to launch an attack on exag­ger­ated reac­tionary ver­sions of this view. By the late 19th cen­tury there’s an increas­ing wide­spread rejec­tion of the older peace­ful account of the ori­gins of civ­i­liza­tion, and Bis­mar­ck­ian blood and iron is replac­ing Lock­ean labor as the dom­i­nant ide­ol­ogy of the ori­gins of soci­ety. Marx­ism as a result devel­oped not just a cri­tique of the story of the peace­ful rise of civ­i­liza­tion that you get from the clas­sics, it also devel­ops as a cri­tique of the bour­geois reac­tionary accounts of blood and iron as the motor of his­tory, and in this respect Marx was a Marxist.

It never really suf­fices to say “it’s more com­pli­cated than that,” but social and his­tor­i­cal change is, to put it gen­er­ally, a multi-dimensional process. In some way Althusser tried to con­vey this with his under­stand­ing of the dis­con­ti­nu­ities between lev­els of a social total­ity, that they were not capa­ble of coher­ing into a sin­gle sub­ject, because they all had their own rel­a­tively autonomous ten­den­cies and his­to­ries. So in this sense there were his­tories, but there is no sub­ject from which one could speak of a his­tory. This was the point of con­tention with Sartre and Lukács. The for­ma­tion of his­tory was not an auto­matic and given process, it was a com­plex one in which the medi­ated and rel­a­tively autonomous social and his­tor­i­cal exis­tence could be given a uni­fy­ing account which would become the basis for a process of their sociopo­lit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion. The idea of a sub­ject of his­tory, and I think Althusser came to this under­stand­ing later, is some­how implicit within our pol­i­tics of his­tor­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion. One of the rea­sons why I think he’s wrestling with the prob­lem of the­ory and ide­ol­ogy later on, is that he real­izes that these are not sep­a­ra­ble things, in pre­cisely the man­ner in which this was thought to be pos­si­ble in the ear­lier writings.

Some­times the cri­tique of “tra­di­tional” or “world­view” Marx­ism extends as far as the claim that cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment required a work­ers’ move­ment in order to com­plete itself. So the end of the work­ers’ move­ment was essen­tially inscribed in its ori­gins. To me it seems we’re back at what Althusser cheek­ily described as “poor man’s Hegelian­ism,” repro­duc­ing the Sec­ond International’s tele­ol­ogy in what claims to be a cri­tique of the very deep­est cat­e­gories of Sec­ond Inter­na­tional Marx­ism. The same struc­ture of his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment is now applied to the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment itself.

If by this you mean the idea that we can under­stand his­tor­i­cal processes through gen­eral inter­re­la­tion­ships between cat­e­gories of analy­sis, this is truly to be avoided. This is some­thing that Marx him­self had things to say about. So the idea that one can, instead of actu­ally doing his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion in the mold that Marx does him­self, which he is in some sense cre­at­ing the foun­da­tion of, if one thinks that we can instead of that do a kind of under­stand­ing of the world-historical dynam­ics that arise out of the inter­nal rela­tion­ships between cat­e­gories, then that is not some­thing which fol­lows Marx. It might be that some things of intel­lec­tual inter­est arise out of this way of fram­ing things, I don’t want to say that there’s noth­ing to that, but it should never be con­ceived of as a sub­sti­tute for real his­tor­i­cal understanding.

The social rela­tions that Marx devel­ops out of an analy­sis of cat­e­gories and the cat­e­gory prob­lems of polit­i­cal econ­omy are always being devel­oped through real his­tor­i­cal con­tent. This real his­tor­i­cal con­tent takes the form of prob­lems that can­not be resolved by appre­hend­ing their con­cep­tual form. They don’t exist inde­pen­dently, the idea that there’s a kind of purely log­i­cal mode of the inter­con­nec­tion of these cat­e­gories to one another is sim­ply to have a mys­ti­fied and fetishis­tic con­cep­tion of what the­o­ret­i­cal cat­e­gories are.

I want to return to these two themes of polit­i­cal thought that you iden­ti­fied ear­lier. One was cri­sis, which we’ve dis­cussed. The other was defeat. The major defeat which frames our period is pre­cisely the defeat of the work­ers’ move­ment, across the end of the 1970s through the 1980s. As the ambiva­lence towards “tra­di­tional” Marx­ism demon­strates, this defeat poses con­sid­er­able prob­lems for peo­ple inter­ested in mass move­ments and polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion today.

On the one hand we seem to be in a period in which more and more peo­ple are com­ing around to the view that the eco­nomic prob­lems of the day speak to a deep struc­tural cri­sis of cap­i­tal­ism. Even a few years ago when I wrote the piece on the sta­tion­ary state this wasn’t widely held to be the case, but it’s now increas­ingly accepted. On the other hand, as you point out, we’re con­fronted with the absence of any large-scale agen­cies of social and polit­i­cal change that might open up the ques­tion of a new social eco­nomic order beyond cap­i­tal­ism. The way the cri­sis has unfolded so far is pri­mar­ily to raise ques­tions about how to sus­tain and prop up the sta­tus quo, and even forms of oppo­si­tion to aus­ter­ity have not really been able to break out of a set of purely defen­sive demands, to roll back some of the dam­age of the finan­cial cri­sis and think about resta­bi­liz­ing the econ­omy by restor­ing a pre­vi­ously exist­ing level of eco­nomic equal­ity and job secu­rity, which is thought to be per­haps attain­able. Some peo­ple are draw­ing the con­clu­sion that the prob­lems are so deep that those kind of solu­tions aren’t going to work any­more, but the fun­da­men­tal struc­tural trans­for­ma­tions that would have to hap­pen for these prob­lems of unem­ploy­ment, declin­ing wages, and mass poverty around the world, to be over­come are so daunt­ing, that the fall­back posi­tion is under­stand­ably one or another of these forms of left-wing pop­ulism. I don’t have any prob­lem with that being the form that strug­gles assumes, it’s inevitable for that to be the case. But the rea­son the rea­son why this can­not ulti­mately suc­ceed even as a strat­egy of defense is because there’s no new track that cap­i­tal­ism seems to be able to go to. Var­i­ous types of left-wing reformism have been depen­dent on the abil­ity of cap­i­tal­ism to deliver employ­ment and ris­ing liv­ing stan­dards. So even though cap­i­tal­ism is in this deep and sys­temic cri­sis, the cri­sis is simul­ta­ne­ously man­i­fest­ing itself in under­min­ing the con­di­tions of social and polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. That hasn’t just been a mat­ter of defeat of rev­o­lu­tion­ary chal­lenges to the sys­tem, but has also in this period taken the form of a roll­back of the reformist accom­plish­ments of the work­ing class within the advanced cap­i­tal­ist coun­tries, and else­where the var­i­ous mixed lega­cies of the attempt to pro­mote eco­nomic devel­op­ment in some vision of progress in more eco­nom­i­cally “back­wards” zones of the world-system. That’s the con­text in which we operate.

Gopal Balakrishnan is an editor at New Left Review, and the author of The Enemy and Antagonistics. He is a professor in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz.

The sound and image of a drum cir­cle may be one of the most easily-mocked moments asso­ci­ated with the Occupy move­ments. But the role of music in the move­ment, and its rela­tion to protests and polit­i­cal action in gen­eral, bears closer inves­ti­ga­tion, beyond the drum circle.

Music at Occupy events has been as diverse as the peo­ple and loca­tions involved, from Bay Area rap stal­wart Mis­tah FAB’s freestyle at Occupy Oak­land to Tom Morello’s Gui­tarmy, indige­nous dancers and singers in Min­neapo­lis, polit­i­cal march­ing bands like the Rude Mechan­i­cal Orches­tra or the Hun­gry March Bands in New York, the Mil­wau­kee Molo­tov Marchers, Pittsburgh’s Riff Raff, and the leg­endary Infer­nal Noise Brigade of Seat­tle. Videos and albums have been launched, and many have called for a new era of protest music to arise.

These musi­cal actions them­selves are often char­ac­ter­ized as “protest music.” In fact, march­ing bands serve vital tac­ti­cal pur­poses at street protests (and beyond): sur­round­ing police vans, iden­ti­fy­ing and fol­low­ing under­cover police, de-escalating ten­sion, and help­ing facil­i­tate the flow and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of the crowd. But the con­cept of “protest music” can obscure some of music’s most pow­er­ful aspects as a social force. For many involved in Occupy, the spe­cific rela­tion­ship between the music being played and the peo­ple who hear it has not been thought through very care­fully – and this weak­ness can rein­force polit­i­cal weak­nesses. Indeed, when even Salon.com can call 100 tracks of Occupy-themed music “shape­less and safe,” we might ask our­selves what this protest music is missing.

Har­sha Walia has pointed out that many of the most pow­er­ful aspects of Occupy spaces were not about “protest­ing,” but about enact­ing exist­ing con­nec­tions: what hap­pened in the kitchens, the medic tents, the libraries, the teach-ins and work­shops. These were places where peo­ple brought their exist­ing skills to bear in self-organized con­fig­u­ra­tions, pro­vid­ing for them­selves and each other along a met­ric that was nei­ther char­ity nor busi­ness, but a com­mon inter­est. The most promis­ing polit­i­cal actions were those that con­nected to exist­ing com­mu­nity strug­gles around police vio­lence, home fore­clo­sure, and home­less­ness, where activists, res­i­dents, and even the home­less them­selves, engaged directly with the lived real­i­ties of peo­ple fac­ing sys­temic violence.

Music con­structs sim­i­lar pos­si­bil­i­ties for social rela­tions. The kind of social rela­tions evoked by “protest­ing” are not very fer­tile – a protest can get voices “out there,” some­where – but doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily affect how peo­ple deal with each other. While music, on the other hand, can have a “mes­sage” to com­mu­ni­cate, it can be so much more – it can be a social activ­ity rather than just a prod­uct, what the musi­col­o­gist Christo­pher Small has called musick­ing: a way for peo­ple to per­form con­nec­tions with each other and with exist­ing com­mu­ni­ties, through shared cul­tural expression.

There is a com­plex rela­tion­ship between music and cul­ture that makes music polit­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant – and mobi­liz­ing – in ways that go beyond words, and the par­tic­u­lar moment of “protest.” Music can be a lived nego­ti­a­tion and per­for­mance of com­mu­nity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. A bet­ter under­stand­ing of how music does this, as well as more seri­ous atten­tion to its dif­fer­ent cul­tur­ally and his­tor­i­cally spe­cific tra­di­tions, would help forge a more rad­i­cal rela­tion­ship between the het­ero­ge­neous com­mu­ni­ties and inter­ests that par­tic­i­pate in resis­tance movements.

In my own expe­ri­ence as a DJ, dancer, party orga­nizer, and researcher, I’ve engaged in-depth with the every­day prac­tices of Jamaican musick­ing. In Jamaica, even though the cul­ture of the urban poor is offi­cially vil­i­fied and excluded, that cul­ture still sets main­stream trends, and is under­stood to be authen­ti­cally Jamaican. This cul­tural author­ity has per­sisted despite its exclu­sion from mass media tech­nolo­gies like radio and tele­vi­sion, from their ear­li­est incep­tion. Both under­writ­ten by the gov­ern­ment until rel­a­tively recently, these media out­lets have con­sis­tently sup­ported for­eign and British-identified cul­tural expres­sion over pop­u­lar culture.

This same hos­til­ity has lim­ited poor people’s abil­ity to par­tic­i­pate in both for­mal employ­ment and pres­ti­gious artis­tic per­for­mance. Such bod­ily restraints oper­ate at the lev­els of both race and class: skin color tracks poverty even more dra­mat­i­cally in Jamaica than in the US, so the phys­i­cal and ver­bal traits asso­ci­ated with poverty are also gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with dark-skinned Jamaicans. In the face of colo­nial rejec­tion and hos­til­ity at tra­di­tional sites of “mass cul­ture,” poor Jamaicans began, in the 1930s and 1940s, to carve out their own sites of cre­ative expres­sion, espe­cially through nightlife – music and danc­ing at night, usu­ally around home-built sound sys­tem. These dances, espe­cially the free out­door events usu­ally known as “street dances” – became places where poor Jamaicans pro­duced a degree of cul­tural auton­omy from the colo­nial tastes of the rul­ing class.

These par­ties weren’t utopias of free­dom and equal­ity, but the per­for­mances of gen­der, sex­u­al­ity, dom­i­nance, and plea­sure that were enacted there rep­re­sented a col­lec­tive resis­tance to dom­i­na­tion. After Jamaican inde­pen­dence, offi­cial media chan­nels remained dom­i­nated by colo­nial tastes, and poor neigh­bor­hood nightlife became cen­ters of an alter­na­tive voice for the majority.

This alter­na­tive voice speaks in terms that tra­di­tional pol­i­tics usu­ally don’t hear. For exam­ple, sex­u­al­ized dance moves have been con­tin­u­ally pop­u­lar in Jamaica from the 1930s to the present, and crit­ics of nightlife are often unable to hide their dis­com­fort with these erotic social inter­ac­tions. But sweaty moments can have polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Jamaican schol­ars such as Car­olyn Cooper have empha­sized the con­text of these moves: invented by descen­dants of enslaved Africans, such dances were a way to express tra­di­tions and rela­tions denied to them by dom­i­nant soci­ety. Cooper sug­gests that that dance­hall cul­ture is “an eroge­nous zone in which the cel­e­bra­tion of female sex­u­al­ity and fer­til­ity is rit­u­al­ized.” Tak­ing this point more broadly, for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties – espe­cially those with a his­tory of enslave­ment – sex­ual auton­omy is a seri­ous issue. Secur­ing this auton­omy fre­quently requires trans­gres­sion of reli­gious, sex­ual, and even eco­nomic rela­tions val­ued by dom­i­nant society.

These issues are still alive. Jamaican elites, and the gov­ern­ment itself, have been so hos­tile to local pop­u­lar music that to this day there is no large music venue in the cap­i­tal city – so the abil­ity of pop­u­lar spaces to redraw and resist dom­i­nant cul­tural hier­ar­chies remains rel­e­vant. As Son­jah Stanley-Niaah puts it, these can be spaces where peo­ple “revaloriz[e] aspects of the body that are cen­sored in the wider social sphere.” Con­sider, for exam­ple, the 2010 vic­tory in a Jamaican “Dance­hall Queen” com­pe­ti­tion by Kristal Ander­son, a viva­cious and tal­ented per­former who was both dark-skinned and weighed over 200 pounds. Anderson’s glo­ri­ous skills and tal­ents, honed in the dances that occur in what Obika Gray calls “exilic spaces,” drew enthu­si­as­tic pop­u­lar sup­port. The judges, whose ties to the local music scene require that they respect the audience’s taste, had to rep­re­sent that audience’s sub­ver­sive val­ues. It would be a mis­take to under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of street dances, and the cul­ture cen­tered on them, in chal­leng­ing dom­i­nant standards.

Valid crit­i­cisms can be made of these prac­tices. Sex­u­al­ized per­for­mances can par­tic­i­pate in the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of bod­ies along gen­dered and racial lines, and many sub­cul­tures are not free of the homo­pho­bia and sex­ism that also dom­i­nates main­stream soci­ety. How­ever, ignor­ing the spe­cific con­text in which such inequal­i­ties take place risks mis­in­ter­pret­ing their ori­gins, and per­pet­u­at­ing hier­ar­chies of race and class. The Jamaican dance­floor, while echo­ing with the sound of many an explic­itly anti-gay lyric, is simul­ta­ne­ously a place where per­form­ers chal­lenge stan­dard def­i­n­i­tions of gen­der and sex­u­al­ity – con­sis­tent with a cul­tural shift, even in main­stream Jamaican pol­i­tics, towards a less homo­pho­bic stance than many pop­u­lar elected offi­cials in the US. Under­stand­ing how dance­floor pol­i­tics reflects and pos­si­bly pushes towards these changes requires a cri­tique informed by the subject-positions and expe­ri­ences within the com­mu­ni­ties being dis­cussed. Unfor­tu­nately, white-dominated “activist com­mu­ni­ties” have not demon­strated a hum­ble com­mit­ment to under­stand­ing mar­gin­al­ized cul­tures. This is a great loss for many rea­sons. For one thing, it’s clear that so many com­mu­ni­ties care about music, and use it as a basis for sol­i­dar­ity and plea­sure – which ought to make any good orga­nizer sit up and pay attention.

My own obser­va­tion of (and par­tic­i­pa­tion in) white-dominated activist scenes sug­gests that the abil­ity to col­lab­o­rate often falls apart not over polit­i­cal plat­forms, but over per­sonal and social engage­ments around race, cul­ture, eth­nic­ity, and gen­der – often in seem­ingly non-political set­tings, like night­clubs and par­ties. In rela­tion to music, these prob­lems result from the “protest” mind­set. Many par­tic­i­pants in the Occupy move­ment have approached music as a didac­tic event, instru­men­tal­ized around “get­ting a mes­sage to peo­ple,” to inspire them or oth­er­wise make them behave in a cer­tain way. Alter­nately, music is expected to be a gen­eral com­mu­nal “emo­tional release” where the specifics of par­tic­u­lar cul­tural and musi­cal prac­tices and his­to­ries are expected to be sub­sumed or erased – and that era­sure is appar­ently assumed to be liberating.

Nei­ther under­stand­ing of music is polit­i­cally fer­tile, or likely to take the musi­cal expe­ri­ence very far out­side of white middle-class activists, because it fun­da­men­tally mis­takes or ignores the social func­tion of music within mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties. This reflects a broader prob­lem fac­ing the self-identified “Amer­i­can left,” which has long made it irrel­e­vant, or even harm­ful, to com­mu­ni­ties of color, queer com­mu­ni­ties, and indeed the work­ing class – an inabil­ity to deal with cul­ture as an aspect of polit­i­cal iden­tity and practice.

Much like Jamaican street dances, the his­tory of vogue balls, hip-hop (which includes DJing, danc­ing, rap­ping, and graf­fiti), and house or block par­ties where immi­grants play the music of their home coun­tries or dias­poric com­mu­ni­ties, all demon­strate that music affirms spe­cific his­to­ries and iden­ti­ties in the face of mar­gin­al­iza­tion. Queer com­mu­ni­ties, espe­cially queer com­mu­ni­ties of color, have been espe­cially rooted in these spaces, since a queer per­son of color may not be safe diverg­ing from expected iden­tity per­for­mances any­where else they go. While cer­tain norms of gen­der are enforced at home, at school, and at work, the dance floor is a space to work out plea­sure, sex, and style, in the face of often mur­der­ous hos­til­ity from dom­i­nant cul­ture. Plea­sure, sex, and style can be dis­rup­tive of dom­i­nant social orders – not always, but depend­ing on the spe­cific bod­ies and com­mu­ni­ties who per­form them, and the modes of their per­for­mance. It is pos­si­ble, to be sure, for peo­ple to take plea­sure in racism or sex­ism, or for hedo­nism to col­lapse, espe­cially along lines of class, into con­sumerism and addic­tion. But when people’s actual bod­ies face hos­til­ity – from arrest to state-sanctioned vig­i­lante vio­lence, or direct police vio­lence – for devi­at­ing from dom­i­nant norms of sex­u­al­ity, gen­der, and race, then their prac­tices are more sig­nif­i­cant than sim­ple “sex-positivity” or the fetishiza­tion of transgression.

After all, we shouldn’t for­get that despite the white faces of main­stream “gay rights,” it has always been queer and trans­gen­der peo­ple of color at the fore­front of the strug­gles against the polic­ing of sex­u­al­ity. Such strug­gles often began with attempts to defend seem­ingly dis­rep­utable spaces of refuges and resis­tance. Such spaces are spe­cially impor­tant for peo­ple – dis­pro­por­tion­ately queer peo­ple of color – who have been expelled from or are unable to find homes. If a home isn’t safe, or you don’t have one to live in, spaces where you can just be your­self, with­out scrutiny and threat from oppres­sive forces, are even more nec­es­sary. Many of these spaces exist on the mar­gins of respectable and legal soci­ety. From ware­house par­ties to the Christo­pher Street Pier, such strug­gles are rooted in the his­tory of queer lib­er­a­tion: it should be no sur­prise that Stonewall is so sig­nif­i­cant to the movement’s his­tory – a bar fre­quented by trans peo­ple of color like Sil­via Rivera, who led the resis­tance. Nightlife can be a refuge, but also a source of resis­tant iden­tity and mobilization.

When we talk about cul­ture, we’re also talk­ing about his­tory, and often music defines people’s iden­ti­ties from the begin­ning. Songs with lyrics that might make white middle-class activists squirm can take on dif­fer­ent mean­ings in the con­text of the dance floor. Such an engage­ment with music is not defined by the record­ings or lyrics them­selves – music is a socialexpe­ri­ence, and its polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance can’t be under­stood until you know who is phys­i­cally in the room, and how they are inter­act­ing with each other in the moment of musi­cal engage­ment. A room­ful of white frat boys singing along to DJ Assault’s “suck my moth­er­fuck­ing dick” has a very dif­fer­ent sig­nif­i­cance, and a very dif­fer­ent effect, from the same cho­rus sung by black drag queens.

What I’ve learned as a DJ is that the sig­nif­i­cance of a musi­cal expe­ri­ence is enacted by the actual bod­ies of the peo­ple in the room, and thus mak­ing mean­ing­ful musi­cal expe­ri­ences requires know­ing specif­i­cally who you’re try­ing to reach and what their (musi­cal) his­to­ries are. Reusing those musi­cal ref­er­ences can affirm and rep­re­sent the lis­tener in a way that builds col­lec­tive emo­tional con­nec­tions. In the con­text of mass polit­i­cal mobi­liza­tions, these tools are espe­cially impor­tant, to gen­er­ate the inclu­siv­ity that is the con­di­tion for any mean­ing­ful dia­logue or connection.

The fail­ure to build these con­nec­tions has been one of the major weak­nesses of the Occupy move­ment, which set its camps up against insti­tu­tions – like the police – that many com­mu­ni­ties were already in strug­gle against. It’s not sur­pris­ing that Occupy had repeat­edly repli­cated the racist, sex­ist, nativist, and eth­no­cen­tric atti­tudes of main­stream soci­ety; it just requires a con­scious effort to resist. Part of the solu­tion is to more care­fully define the prob­lems fac­ing Occu­piers, to con­nect them to exist­ing strug­gles over, for exam­ple, police vio­lence or indige­nous rights. And another part of the solu­tion is that these same strug­gles take place over the role of music.

The great protest songs were pow­er­ful not only because the lyrics were true, and forced peo­ple to respond, but because the music called out to con­nec­tions that already existed, named real­i­ties and iden­ti­ties that were already lodged in people’s mem­o­ries, in their own expe­ri­ences and tra­di­tions. That force is lost if music is sub­or­di­nated to a pas­sive vision of “mes­sage” and “protest,” or a homo­ge­neously com­mon strug­gle. Attend­ing to music’s cul­tural res­o­nance, and the social dynam­ics around its prac­tice, can make it a pow­er­ful force for shar­ing plea­sure, trust, release, and pur­pose across mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, and forg­ing a rad­i­cal, broadly par­tic­i­pa­tory movement.

Larisa K. Mann is a legal ethnographer, educator, journalist, public speaker, and DJ, who teaches Media Studies at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Sociology of Law at Brooklyn College. She has written for WireTap, the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, and other publications, and has contributed chapters to Bits without Borders: Law, Communications & Transnational Culture Flow in the Digital Age (forthcoming, Elgar, 2012), and Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement (New Internationalist Publications, 2012). As DJ Ripley, she has played in 19 countries across 3 continents over the past 16 years.

The man who only observes him­self how­ever never gains
Knowl­edge of men. He is too anx­ious
To hide him­self from him­self. And nobody is
Clev­erer than he him­self is.
So your school­ing must begin among
Liv­ing peo­ple. Let your first school
Be your place of work, your dwelling, your part of the town.
Be the street, the under­ground, the shops. You should observe
All the peo­ple there, strangers as if they were acquain­tances, but
Acquain­tances as if they were strangers to you.

—Bertolt Brecht, Speech to the Dan­ish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Obser­va­tion (1934-6)

“Anthro­pol­ogy is the daugh­ter to this era of vio­lence,” Claude Levi-Strauss once said. Poetic as that state­ment is, I pre­fer the more pre­cise and less gen­dered words of esteemed anthro­pol­o­gist and Johnson-Forest Ten­dency mem­ber Kath­leen Gough: “Anthro­pol­ogy is a child of West­ern impe­ri­al­ism.” Much like Catholic mis­sion­ar­ies in the Span­ish Empire, anthro­pol­o­gists exam­ined indige­nous groups in order to improve colo­nial admin­is­tra­tion, a tra­di­tion that con­tin­ues into the present day with the US military’s Human Ter­rain Project in Iraq and Afghanistan. Often, this colo­nial imper­a­tive has fed a racist dis­re­spect of the sub­jects under study. It was not uncom­mon, for exam­ple, for researchers to draw upon colo­nial police forces to col­lect sub­jects for humil­i­at­ing anthro­po­met­ric measurements.

Accord­ing to Gough, at their best, anthro­pol­o­gists had been the “white lib­er­als between con­querors and col­o­nized.” Ethnog­ra­phy, the method in which researchers embed them­selves within social groups to best under­stand their prac­tices and the mean­ings behind them, had only medi­ated this rela­tion­ship, while Gough, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary social­ist, wanted to upend it. Writ­ing in 1968, she urged her dis­ci­pline to study impe­ri­al­ism and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments against it as a way to expi­ate anthro­pol­ogy of its sins. Gough later attempted this her­self, trav­el­ling through­out Asia in the 1970s. Although she lacked a solid uni­ver­sity con­nec­tion due to her polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies, she man­aged to con­duct field­work abroad, ana­lyz­ing class recom­po­si­tion in rural South­east India dur­ing the Green Rev­o­lu­tion, and detail­ing the improve­ment in the liv­ing stan­dards of Viet­namese peas­ants after the expul­sion of the United States.

Years later, anthro­pol­o­gist Ana Lopes sees fit to ask, “Why hasn’t anthro­pol­ogy made more dif­fer­ence?” The prob­lem is not that anthro­pol­o­gists are ret­i­cent to con­tribute to end­ing impe­ri­al­ism. Indeed, there are prob­a­bly more rad­i­cal and crit­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gists now than dur­ing Gough’s time, and cer­tainly the dis­ci­pline takes anti-racism and anti-imperialism incred­i­bly seri­ously. Gough her­self artic­u­lated some dif­fi­cul­ties:

(1) the very process of spe­cial­iza­tion within anthro­pol­ogy and between anthro­pol­ogy and the related dis­ci­plines, espe­cially polit­i­cal sci­ence, soci­ol­ogy, and eco­nom­ics; (2) the tra­di­tion of indi­vid­ual field work in small-scale soci­eties, which at first pro­duced a rich har­vest of ethnog­ra­phy but later placed con­straints on our meth­ods and the­o­ries; (3) unwill­ing­ness to offend the gov­ern­ments that funded us, by choos­ing con­tro­ver­sial sub­jects; and (4) the bureau­cratic, coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ary set­ting in which anthro­pol­o­gists have increas­ingly worked in their uni­ver­si­ties, which may have con­tributed to a sense of impo­tence and to the devel­op­ment of machine-like models.

None of these plague anthro­pol­ogy today. Anthro­pol­o­gists are often incred­i­bly deep knowl­ege about mul­ti­ple dis­ci­plines (I have an anthro­pol­o­gist friend I con­sult on any ques­tions of struc­tural semi­otics, Marx­ism, 19th cen­tury lit­er­a­ture, or gam­bling); they have exam­ined cul­ture within large indus­trial and post-industrial soci­eties; they have been involved in all sorts of rad­i­cal issues, from union­iz­ing sex work­ers to ana­lyz­ing the secu­ri­tized state; and while the uni­ver­sity may remain a bureau­cratic, coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion­ary set­ting, anthro­pol­o­gists have largely aban­doned machine-like mod­els. So what gives?

One issue is how anthro­pol­ogy chose to atone for its com­plic­ity in racism and impe­ri­al­ism. Instead of mak­ing a direct polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion into impe­ri­al­ist prac­tice, ethnog­ra­phy attacked impe­ri­al­ist hermeneu­tics. A deep cri­tique of the Enlight­en­ment sub­ject, the source of anthropology’s claims to sci­ence and objec­tiv­ity as well as meta­phys­i­cal ground for West­ern notions of supe­ri­or­ity, became a major tar­get of the dis­ci­pline. Thus rose crit­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy, decon­struc­tive in spirit. Accord­ing to Soyini Madi­son, crit­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy “takes us beneath sur­face appear­ances, dis­rupts the sta­tus quo, and unset­tles both neu­tral­ity and taken-for-granted assump­tions by bring­ing to light under­ly­ing and obscure oper­a­tions of power and control.”

This func­tions at the level of the method itself: crit­i­cal ethno­g­ra­phers should be self-reflexive. Rather than assum­ing an omni­scient author­i­ta­tive view­point, they should high­light their own posi­tion­al­ity in the field by empha­siz­ing it in the writ­ten account, thereby decon­struct­ing the Self and its rela­tion to the Other when­ever pos­si­ble. In an attack on Enlight­en­ment pre­ten­sions to uni­ver­sal­ity, accounts became par­tial and frag­men­tary, a way to head off poten­tially demean­ing total­ized por­tray­als at the pass.

How­ever, iron­i­cally enough, by per­for­ma­tively ques­tion­ing one’s own research, the fig­ure of the ethno­g­ra­pher risks becom­ing the cen­tral fig­ure in the study, rather than the social group. Even as it pro­duces an often-engrossing lit­er­a­ture, crit­i­cal ethnog­ra­phy can under­mine its own polit­i­cal thrust by dras­ti­cally lim­it­ing what it per­mits itself to say. While Marx­ist soci­ol­o­gist Michael Bura­woy, who shov­eled pig iron for years in the name of social sci­ence, claims that with exces­sive reflex­iv­ity ethno­g­ra­phers “begin to believe they are the world they study or that the world revolves around them,” I’d counter that this isn’t so much pro­fes­sional nar­cis­sism as a prod­uct of the very real anx­i­ety sur­round­ing the ethics of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. How best to fairly, but accu­rately, por­tray one’s sub­jects? How can one really know the Other? I’ve strug­gled with this in my own work, and I know col­leagues who have been all but con­sumed by it. Writ­ing about one­self seems, at the very least, safer. But this aban­dons sci­en­tific rigor in its reluc­tance to make any gen­er­al­iz­able claims.

My own expe­ri­ence in ethnog­ra­phy came from a study of pop­u­lar cul­ture. I had grown tired of schol­arly tex­tual analy­sis: it seemed like more of a game for the com­men­ta­tors, where we crit­ics bandied about spec­u­la­tive assess­ments of books and films and TV shows, try­ing to one-up each other in nov­elty and jar­gon. These inter­pre­ta­tions said more about our posi­tions as theory-stuffed grad­u­ate stu­dents eager to impress than they did about the puta­tive “audi­ences” for the texts. Our con­scious­ness of the objects in ques­tion had been deter­mined by our mate­r­ial lives as critics-in-training. I felt pulled fur­ther away from cul­tural phe­nom­ena, when I wanted to get closer in order to bet­ter under­stand its sig­nif­i­cance. So I revolted against the rule of thoughts, start­ing to learn the meth­ods that got closer to the mat­ter at hand: ethnography,

In cul­tural stud­ies, ethnog­ra­phy (or as a fully-trained anthro­pol­o­gist would prob­a­bly write, “ethnog­ra­phy”) is most closely asso­ci­ated with audi­ence recep­tion and fan­dom stud­ies. Tex­tual analy­sis tells you only what a critic thinks of the work; in order to dis­cover how “aver­age” con­sumers expe­ri­ence it, you have to ask them. This way you avoid the total­iz­ing, top-down gen­er­al­iza­tions of some­one like Adorno, where a rei­fied con­scious­ness is deter­mined by the repet­i­tive, sim­pli­fied forms of the cul­ture industry.

This was Janet Radway’s goal when she stud­ied female read­ers of misog­y­nist romance nov­els. She found out that read­ers cared more about hav­ing pri­vate time away from domes­tic duties than the borderline-rape occur­ring in the books. How­ever, she was forced to con­clude that romance nov­els worked as com­pen­satory mech­a­nisms, secur­ing women in cap­i­tal­ist patri­ar­chal dom­i­na­tion – in other words, she took the long way around and ended up in the same Adornoian con­clu­sion: we’re fucked and it’s our mass cul­ture that makes it so.

My cho­sen topic helped me get on a dif­fer­ent path, one that I believe has more rel­e­vance to rad­i­cal pol­i­tics than harangu­ing the choices of hap­less con­sumers. I wanted to study inde­pen­dent pop­u­lar music instead of romance nov­els. This meant I was well posi­tioned to exam­ine music from the stand­point of pro­duc­tion, rather than just sur­vey­ing audi­ence mem­bers, a tech­nique that always felt too spec­u­la­tive and a bit too closely aligned with mar­ket research.

Not that mar­ket research was totally off base. Pop­u­lar music exists in the form of com­modi­ties. Its form, as Adorno rightly points out, is dic­tated by the needs of the cul­ture indus­try. If the music indus­try was a fac­tory, then musi­cians were the work­ers, bang­ing out prod­ucts. A pecu­liar fac­tory, to be sure, where oper­a­tions spread to the homes of the work­ers, the machines were pirated soft­ware, and the prod­ucts were derived from unique cre­ative labors, becom­ing objects of intense devo­tion among consumers.

You can run into resis­tance when you define art in this way – it seems to cheapen it, as if you can’t call a song a “com­mod­ity” with­out implic­itly stick­ing a “mere” in there, just as refer­ring to artists as work­ers seems to demean their abil­i­ties. But this resis­tance comes almost entirely from music fans, who com­mit their own Adornoian blun­der by plac­ing music on that archaic crum­bling pedestal of Art. The pro­duc­ers and DJs I spoke to in Detroit didn’t see it that way. They saw them­selves as cre­ative work­ers; at best, as entre­pre­neurs. One DJ talked about remix­ing songs in the morn­ing over cof­fee. “You know how some peo­ple check their email or read the news­pa­per? Well, I’m mak­ing a remix of the new Ciara song dur­ing that time.” He took pride in his work ethic, but never roman­ti­cized his occupation.

There wasn’t much to wax roman­tic about in the Detroit music scene at that time. The cul­ture indus­tries were under­go­ing a restruc­tur­ing for the imma­te­r­ial age. Vinyl was no longer mov­ing. Local radio and local music venues had gone cor­po­rate, squeez­ing out local music. DJs who wanted local gigs had to play Top 40 playlists in the sub­ur­ban mega­clubs instead of the native styles of elec­tronic music that had given Detroit mythic sta­tus around the world. Many had given up on record labels entirely. Every­one looked to the inter­net as the sav­ing grace for record sales, pro­mo­tion, net­work­ing – for every­thing, prac­ti­cally. Some of the more suc­cess­ful artists were attempt­ing to license their tracks for video games. Almost every­one had other jobs, often off the books. For crit­i­cally acclaimed Detroit pro­ducer Omar-S, music is his side job, in case his posi­tion on the fac­tory line is eliminated.

I wasn’t embed­ded within this com­mu­nity, as an anthro­pol­o­gist would be. Instead, I made the 90 minute drive to Detroit when I could, and spent the time inter­view­ing artists in their homes or over the phone. I attended some events, par­tic­i­pated and observed. And still, I could have writ­ten vol­umes on my subject-position and how it dif­fered from many of the musi­cians: I was white, college-educated, not from Detroit (the last one being the most salient dif­fer­ence). But my goal was to go beyond self-reflexive inter­ro­ga­tions, in spite of their impor­tance as a start­ing point. I aspired to write some­thing that would in some way, how­ever minor, par­tic­i­pate in the implicit polit­i­cal projects of musi­cal workers.

I can’t say I suc­ceeded in this goal. But while I may have done lit­tle for the polit­i­cal for­tunes of Detroit musi­cians, I had started to think about how to rev­o­lu­tion­ize my the­o­ret­i­cal tools. The point was not to efface or under­mine my role in my research, but to iden­tify the struc­tural antag­o­nism the artists were deal­ing with and describe it from a par­ti­san per­spec­tive. Beyond the self-reflexive analy­sis of the ethnographer’s subject-position was the pos­si­bil­ity of pick­ing sides.

Decid­ing to pick sides is the dif­fer­ence between mil­i­tant research, of the kind Kath­leen Gough prac­ticed, and purely scholas­tic exer­cises. Bura­woy argues that this is a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of Karl Marx’s “ethno­graphic imag­i­na­tion”: Marx rooted his the­o­ries – not just of how cap­i­tal­ism func­tioned, but how best to destroy it – in the con­crete expe­ri­ences of work­ers, as relayed to him by Engels and oth­ers. Kath­leen Gough is an exem­plary fig­ure in this respect, remain­ing a firm mate­ri­al­ist in her stud­ies. As Gough’s friend and col­league Eleanor Smol­lett puts it in a spe­cial jour­nal ded­i­cated to Gough’s legacy,

she did not arrive in Viet­nam with a check­list of what a soci­ety must accom­plish to be ‘really social­ist’ as so many Marx­ists in acad­e­mia were wont to do. She looked at the direc­tion of the move­ment, of the con­crete gains from where the Viet­namese had begun… Observ­ing social­ist devel­op­ment from the point of view of the Viet­namese them­selves, rather than as judged against a hypo­thet­i­cal sys­tem, she found the people’s stated enthu­si­asm credible.

After study­ing mate­r­ial con­di­tions and for­eign pol­icy in the social­ist bloc, Gough decided that the Soviet Union, while cer­tainly no work­ers’ par­adise, was a net good for the work­ers of the world – heresy for any­one try­ing to pub­lish in the West, let alone a Trotskyist.

Analy­sis is impor­tant, but the really explo­sive stuff of ethnog­ra­phy hap­pens in the encounter. Accord­ingly, ethno­g­ra­phers and oth­ers have increas­ingly turned towards the meth­ods of par­tic­i­pa­tory action research (PAR). In these stud­ies, a blend of ethnog­ra­phy and ped­a­gogy, the anthro­pol­o­gist takes a par­ti­san inter­est in the aspi­ra­tions of the group, and aids the group in actively par­tic­i­pat­ing actively in the research. Mem­bers of the group under study become co-researchers, ask­ing ques­tions and artic­u­lat­ing prob­lems. The goal is to tease out native knowl­edges that best aid peo­ple in nav­i­gat­ing dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances while mobi­liz­ing them to cre­ate polit­i­cal change.

But par­tic­i­pa­tory action research has returned to the same old prob­lems of impe­ri­al­ist anthro­pol­ogy. In the hands of rad­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gist Ana Lopes, PAR led to the for­ma­tion of a sex work­ers’ union in Great Britain. But in the hands of devel­op­ment scholar Robert Cham­bers, PAR is a tool to bet­ter imple­ment World Bank ini­tia­tives and gov­ern pop­u­la­tions by allow­ing them to “par­tic­i­pate” in their subjection.

The point, then, is to real­ize that ethnog­ra­phy has no polit­i­cal con­tent of its own. Pol­i­tics derives not from the com­mit­ment or beliefs of the researcher, but from engage­ment with wider social antag­o­nisms. Ethnog­ra­phy enables Marx­ism to trace the con­tours of these antag­o­nisms at the level of every­day life: a mil­i­tant ethnog­ra­phy means Marx­ism at work, and func­tions not by impos­ing mod­els of class con­scious­ness and rad­i­cal action from above, but by reveal­ing the ter­rain of the strug­gle – to intel­lec­tu­als and to work­ers – as it is con­tin­u­ally pro­duced. Ethnog­ra­phy can con­tribute in just this way, as a method where researchers lis­ten, observe, and reveal the now hid­den, now open fight for the future.

Gavin Mueller is a graduate student in Washington, DC.

The crises con­tinue to accu­mu­late: the eco­nomic cri­sis, the eco­log­i­cal cri­sis, the social cri­sis, crises upon crises. But as we try to cre­ate “solu­tions,” we dis­tress­ingly find our­selves up against a limit, dis­cov­er­ing that the only alter­na­tives we can imag­ine are merely mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the same. Pro­posed solu­tions to the eco­nomic cri­sis toss us back and forth between two immo­bile poles: free mar­ket or reg­u­lated mar­ket. When we face the eco­log­i­cal cri­sis, we decide between sus­tain­able tech­nol­ogy or unsus­tain­able tech­nol­ogy. What­ever our per­sonal pref­er­ence, a lit­tle to this side or a lit­tle to that side, we all unwit­tingly play accord­ing to the same rules, think with the same con­cepts, speak the same lan­guage. We have for­got­ten how to think the new – or the old.

Ivan Illich, priest, philoso­pher, and social critic, is not a fig­ure that most would expect to read about in a Marx­ist mag­a­zine. But he iden­ti­fied this prob­lem long ago, and argued that the only “way out” was a com­plete change in think­ing. His sug­ges­tion, both as con­cept and his­tor­i­cal fact, was the “ver­nac­u­lar.” We will not escape from cap­i­tal­ism through the ratio­nal­ity of the sci­en­tist of his­tory; nor will we get any help from the stand­point of the pro­le­tariat. The firm ground of Illich’s cri­tique was pre­cap­i­tal­ist and prein­dus­trial life in common.

Even those who reject this posi­tion must meet its chal­lenge. Those for whom pol­i­tics is embed­ded in the pro­lif­er­a­tion of post­mod­ern “lifestyles,” inflected with pseudo-Marxist jar­gon, will have to rec­og­nize that the only model we have of forms of life based on direct access to the means of sub­sis­tence is pre­cisely the “ver­nac­u­lar” that Illich pro­poses. Alter­na­tively, those who locate eman­ci­pa­tion in a Marx-inflected nar­ra­tive of tech­no­log­i­cal progress must to face Illich’s deep crit­i­cisms of devel­op­men­tal­ism, sci­en­tism, and pro­gres­sivism. The fol­low­ing is a chal­lenge not only to cap­i­tal­ism and the experts who defend it, but also to its critics.

Mind Trap 1: the eco­nomic crisis

Ignor­ing his own con­tri­bu­tions to the fes­tiv­i­ties, George W. Bush recently scolded those on Wall Street for get­ting drunk on the prof­its from sell­ing unpayable debts.1 The result­ing col­lapse of finan­cial mar­kets her­alded the end of the party. The drunks seem to have sobered up with­out them­selves suf­fer­ing the con­se­quent hang­over. Instead, in the U.S. and else­where, a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple are left stranded with­out homes, jobs, food, or med­i­cines in the wake of that twenty-year long binge. In the opin­ion of some, the prospects of full employ­ment or secure retire­ments for US cit­i­zens are a dis­tant and unlikely dream. As recently as April 19th 2011, The McDon­ald Cor­po­ra­tion con­ducted a national hir­ing day. Almost one mil­lion peo­ple applied for those jobs, known nei­ther for their lav­ish pay nor for their agree­able work­ing con­di­tions. McDonald’s hired a mere six per­cent of these appli­cants, as many work­ers in one day as the num­ber of net new jobs in the US for all of 2009.2

Unsur­pris­ingly, diag­noses of what went wrong have pro­lif­er­ated fast and furi­ously. Of the many expla­na­tions offered, three stand out.3 First, in a spirit of self-examination, econ­o­mists have con­cluded that their sci­en­tific mod­els of how peo­ple behave and asset prices are deter­mined were wrong and con­tributed to their inabil­ity to antic­i­pate the cri­sis. That is, econ­o­mists con­fessed to their igno­rance of how economies work. Since their earnest attempts to improve these mod­els are unlikely to ques­tion the credulity that forms the shaky foun­da­tions of finan­cial mar­kets, it is likely that the future of finan­cial and macro­eco­nom­ics will resem­ble the epicy­cles and eccen­tric­i­ties of Ptole­maic astron­omy in the time of its decline.4

Sec­ond, jour­nal­ists, pol­icy mak­ers, and econ­o­mists who began to sing a dif­fer­ent tune after the cri­sis erupted, find fault with the ide­ol­ogy of neo-liberalism. There is wide­spread recog­ni­tion now that dereg­u­lated and unreg­u­lated mar­kets allowed com­mer­cial and invest­ment banks to invent and trade in finan­cial instru­ments that car­ried sys­temic risks and con­tributed to the fail­ure of credit and cap­i­tal mar­kets. This doc­trine that unfet­tered mar­kets pro­duce the great­est eco­nomic ben­e­fit for the great­est num­ber, while embar­rassed, is not in full retreat, at least in the U.S.5 That neo-liberal ide­ol­ogy is not van­quished by its evi­dent fail­ures is related to the third cause iden­ti­fied in these diag­nos­tic exercises.

If igno­rance excused econ­o­mists and pol­icy mak­ers from antic­i­pat­ing the cri­sis and widely worn ide­o­log­i­cal blink­ers exac­er­bated it, then it is badly designed incen­tives that are gen­er­ally fin­gered as the most promi­nent and prox­i­mate cause of the cri­sis. Accord­ingly, much ink has been spilled on redesign­ing incen­tives to more effec­tively rein in the “ani­mal spir­its” that derail economies from their pre­sumed path of orderly growth. As such, incen­tives are a flaw that rec­om­mends itself as remedy.

This con­ceit is per­haps best exposed in the report authored by the Finan­cial Cri­sis Inquiry Com­mis­sion of the US gov­ern­ment.6 For instance, in indict­ing the process and meth­ods for gen­er­at­ing and mar­ket­ing mortgage-backed secu­ri­ties, the com­mis­sion empha­sizes that incen­tives unwit­tingly encour­aged fail­ures at every link of the chain. Low-interest rates allowed bor­row­ers to refi­nance their debts and use their homes as ATM cards; lucra­tive fees drove mort­gage bro­kers to herd up sub­prime bor­row­ers; the demand for mort­gages from Wall Street induced bankers to lower lend­ing stan­dards; rat­ing agen­cies stamped lead as gold because paid to do so by invest­ment bankers; the lat­ter dis­trib­uted these toxic assets world­wide rely­ing on math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els of risk; and the C-suite of the finance, insur­ance, and real estate sec­tors presided over the house of card because hand­somely rewarded for short term prof­its. Unsur­pris­ingly, chang­ing these incen­tives through more strin­gent reg­u­la­tions and better-specified rewards and pun­ish­ments to guide the behav­iors of dif­fer­ent mar­ket par­tic­i­pants occupy most of its rec­om­men­da­tions for the path for­ward7

This pecu­liar com­bi­na­tion of igno­rance, ide­ol­ogy, and incen­tives used to explain the eco­nomic cri­sis, also illu­mi­nates the space of con­tem­po­rary politico-economic thought. Most of the heated debates on how to ensure orderly growth, cen­ter on the quan­tum of reg­u­la­tion nec­es­sary to con­trol eco­nomic motives with­out sti­fling them. Accord­ingly, think­ing about eco­nomic mat­ters vac­il­lates on a fixed line anchored by two poles-free mar­kets on the one end and mar­kets fet­tered by legally enforced reg­u­la­tions at the other. Only a brief exposé can be afforded here of the lin­ea­ments of this thought-space cir­cum­scribed almost two cen­turies ago.8

Around 1700, Bernard Man­dev­ille acer­bically exposed the mech­a­nism dri­ving eco­nomic growth. Poet­i­cally, he pointed out that it was the vices—vanity, greed, and envy—that spurred the expan­sion of trade and com­merce. In bar­ing the vicious­ness that nour­ished the desire to accu­mu­late riches, he also left to pos­ter­ity the prob­lem of pro­vid­ing a moral jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for mar­ket activ­ity.9 Adam Smith pro­vided a seem­ingly last­ing rhetor­i­cal solu­tion to this moral para­dox. First, he col­lapsed the vices into “self-interest” and so removed the sting of vicious­ness from the vices by renam­ing them. Sec­ond, he grounded “self-interest” in a nat­ural desire to “bet­ter our con­di­tion” that began in the womb and ended in the tomb and so mor­al­ized it.10 Third, he invoked an invis­i­ble hand to trans­mute the self-interest of indi­vid­u­als into socially desir­able ben­e­fits. Not only was the pas­sage from the indi­vid­ual to the social thereby obscured by prov­i­den­tial means but the pri­vate pur­suit of riches was also jus­ti­fied by its sup­posed pub­lic benefits.

Thus, Smith hid the para­dox unveiled by Man­dev­ille behind a rhetor­i­cally pleas­ing façade. The uncom­fort­able insight that pri­vate vice leads to pub­lic ben­e­fit was defanged by the notion that pub­lic ben­e­fits accrue from the unflinch­ing pur­suit of self-interest. Whereas the for­mer revealed the vicious mech­a­nism fuel­ing com­mer­cially ori­ented soci­eties, the lat­ter made it palat­able. Faith in the effi­cacy of the inscrutable invis­i­ble hand thereby under­wrote the pur­ported “nat­ural har­mony of inter­ests,” accord­ing to which the butcher and the baker in each pur­su­ing his own ends unwit­tingly fur­thers the wealth of the nation at large.

Smith’s rhetor­i­cal con­vo­lu­tions were nec­es­sary because he excised use-value from polit­i­cal econ­omy and founded the lat­ter entirely on exchange-value. In con­trast to his pre­de­ces­sors for whom the eco­nomic could not be sep­a­rated from ethics and pol­i­tics, Smith carves out a space for the eco­nomic by defin­ing its domain by the deter­mi­nants of mar­ket prices.11 He accepted Locke’s argu­ments: that labor is the foun­da­tion of prop­erty rights; that apply­ing labor trans­forms the com­mons into pri­vate prop­erty; that money ignites acquis­i­tive­ness; and that accu­mu­la­tion beyond use is just.12 Smith delib­er­ately ignores the com­mons and embold­ens the mar­ket because it is the sphere in which acquis­i­tive­ness flour­ishes. He cur­tails his inquiry to exchange-value in full aware­ness of the con­trast­ing “value-in-use.” Even if not in these pre­cise terms, the dis­tinc­tion between “exchange-value” and “use-value” was known to both Aris­to­tle and Smith. Yet, Smith is per­haps the first who rec­og­nizes that tra­di­tional dis­tinc­tion and nev­er­the­less rules out use-value as a legit­i­mate sub­ject of an inquiry on wealth.13 For Aris­to­tle, it was pre­cisely the dis­tinc­tion between use and exchange that grounded the dis­tinc­tion between appro­pri­ate acqui­si­tion and inap­pro­pri­ate accu­mu­la­tion. More gen­er­ally, it is when con­sid­er­a­tions of jus­tice and the good con­sti­tute the start­ing point of think­ing about man that profit-seeking becomes vis­i­ble as a force that rends the polit­i­cal com­mu­nity into a com­mer­cial soci­ety. By encour­ag­ing self-interestedness, Smith allows the vain­glo­ri­ous pur­suit of wealth to over­shadow virtue as the nat­ural end for man.14 By focus­ing eco­nomic sci­ence on exchange val­ues, Smith priv­i­leges the world of goods over that of the good. The price Smith pays for ignor­ing use-value is the need to invoke prov­i­den­tial the mys­tery by which self-interest becomes socially ben­e­fi­cial. Since Smith, neo-classical eco­nom­ics has either dis­avowed the dis­tinc­tion between use and exchange value or con­fessed to being inca­pable of under­stand­ing use-value.15 By insist­ing that the valu­able must nec­es­sar­ily be use­ful, Marx, unlike Aris­to­tle, could not rely on the lat­ter to crit­i­cize the for­mer.16

Nev­er­the­less, it was soon dis­cov­ered that indi­vid­ual self-interest did not “nat­u­rally” pro­duce social ben­e­fits. Vast dis­par­i­ties in wealth, endemic poverty, mis­er­able liv­ing con­di­tions, and per­sis­tent unem­ploy­ment con­sti­tuted some of the many socially maligned con­se­quences of unfet­tered mar­ket activ­ity. To account for these vis­i­ble fail­ures in the nat­ural har­mony of inter­ests, a sec­ond for­mula, due to Jeremy Ben­tham, was there­fore paired to it. An “arti­fi­cial har­mony of inter­ests” forged through laws and reg­u­la­tions were deemed nec­es­sary to lessen the dis­junc­tion between pri­vate inter­ests and pub­lic ben­e­fits. That is, state inter­ven­tions in the form of incen­tives – whether coded in money or by law- were thought nec­es­sary to prod way­ward mar­ket par­tic­i­pants to bet­ter serve the pub­lic inter­est.17

Accord­ingly, it is this dialec­tic between the nat­ural and arti­fi­cial har­mony of inter­ests that encodes the poles of the Mar­ket and the State and con­sti­tutes the thought-space for con­tem­po­rary dis­cus­sions on eco­nomic affairs.18 Too lit­tle reg­u­la­tion and mar­kets become socially destruc­tive; too much reg­u­la­tion and the wealth-creating engines fueled by self-interest begin to sput­ter. And yet, the con­tin­uum con­sti­tuted by these two poles is uni­fied by a com­mon pre­sup­po­si­tion: that use-value is of no use to com­merce and that the ego­ism implied by self-interest is both nec­es­sary and nat­ural to com­mer­cial expansion.

Though the eco­nomic cri­sis has, once again, exposed the Man­dev­il­lian foun­da­tions of com­mer­cial soci­ety, think­ing about it con­tin­ues to func­tion in the space marked out by Smith, Ben­tham and the founders of that philo­soph­i­cal rad­i­cal­ism, which erected the moral­ity of a soci­ety ori­ented by exchange value on the foun­da­tion of ego­ism. When con­fined to this thought-space, one is con­demned to rely­ing, in alter­nat­ing steps, on the inter­re­lated log­ics of free and reg­u­lated mar­kets. The ques­tion remains whether there is an alter­na­tive to the thought-space con­sti­tuted by the State and the Mar­ket. Per­haps the answer to this ques­tion lies in tak­ing a dis­tance to what these log­ics pre­sume: that exchange-value is of pre­em­i­nent worth and that pos­ses­sive indi­vid­u­als are to be har­nessed to that cause.

Mind Trap 2: the envi­ron­men­tal crisis

Boarded up homes and idle hands are to the ongo­ing cri­sis in eco­nomic affairs, what dis­ap­pear­ing fish and poi­soned airs are to the oncom­ing envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis. A gen­er­a­tion after Rachel Car­son and Barry Com­moner, sci­en­tists are now of almost one mind: humankind’s activ­i­ties on the earth have so changed it, that the species is now threat­ened by dis­as­ter on a plan­e­tary scale.19 What poets and prophets once warned in verse, sci­en­tists now tell us through sta­tis­tics and mod­els. Lurk­ing beneath those dry num­bers is a grow­ing cat­a­log of hor­rors – ris­ing seas, rag­ing rivers, melt­ing glac­i­ers, dead zones in the oceans, unbear­able hot spots on land – that fore­tell an unliv­able future.

Were the pic­ture they paint not so dire, it would be laugh­ably ironic that sci­en­tists and tech­nocrats now dis­avow the fruits of the very techno-scientific machine they once served to mid­wife. But it is cer­tainly tragic that in think­ing about what can be done to avert the impend­ing cri­sis, sci­en­tists and engi­neers no less than politi­cians and cor­po­rate bosses insist on more of the same. Atten­tion is now directed at invent­ing meth­ods to not only mit­i­gate the phys­i­cal effects of run­away indus­tri­al­iza­tion, but also to re-engineer the human psy­che to bet­ter adapt to such effects. Thus, from recy­cling plas­tic and increas­ing fuel mileage in cars to devis­ing tow­ers to sequester car­bon under­sea and engi­neer­ing car­bon eat­ing plants, the pro­posed solu­tions range from the mun­dane to the bizarre. More gen­er­ally, the debate on what to do about the con­flict between eco­nomic growth and eco­log­i­cal integrity is anchored by two poles: at the one end, “eco-friendly” or “sus­tain­able” tech­nolo­gies, and at the other, pre­sum­ably “unsus­tain­able” or envi­ron­men­tally destruc­tive ones.

Thus man’s sur­vival appears as a choice between the Prius, solar pan­els, biodegrad­able paper bags, local foods, and high den­sity urban lofts on the one hand, and the Hum­mer, oil tanks, plas­tic bags, indus­tri­al­ized foods, and sub­ur­bia on the other. Eco-friendly tech­nolo­gies may change the fuel that pow­ers our energy slaves but does noth­ing to change our depen­dence on them. That the fruits of techno-science have turned poi­so­nous is seen as a prob­lem call­ing for more and improved tech­ni­cal solu­tions imply­ing that the domain of tech­nol­ogy forms the hori­zon of eco­log­i­cal thought.20 That more and dif­fer­ent tech­nol­ogy is the dom­i­nant response to its fail­ure sug­gests that the made (techne) has replaced the given (physis). Eco­log­i­cal thought is con­fined to the space framed by tech­nol­ogy partly because of the unstated assump­tion that knowl­edge is cer­tain only when it is made.

It was Vico who announced the specif­i­cally mod­ern claim that knowl­edge is made, that verum et fac­tum con­ver­tun­tur (the true and the made are con­vert­ible; have iden­ti­cal deno­ta­tion). It is true that the school­men, in think­ing through the ques­tion of the Chris­t­ian God’s omnipo­tence and omni­science, argued his knowl­edge was iden­ti­cal to his cre­ations. They argued this by insist­ing that through his cre­ative act (mak­ing some­thing from noth­ing) he expressed ele­ments already con­tained within Him­self. God knows every­thing because he made it all from his own being. How­ever, the school­men humbly held that the iden­tity of mak­ing and know­ing applied only to God. Man, being cre­ated, could not know him­self or other nat­ural kinds in the man­ner akin to God. Since sci­en­tia or indu­bitable knowl­edge was the most per­fect kind of knowl­edge, and nature or physis was already given to man, it implied that man could not sci­en­tif­i­cally know the sub­lu­nary world. It took a Galileo and a Descartes to turn this under­stand­ing on its head.21

These early mod­erns were “sec­u­lar the­olo­gians” who tried to marry heaven and earth. They argued that geo­met­ri­cal objects or forms – such as tri­an­gles and squares – were unearthly. At best, such math­e­mat­i­cal objects were “ideas” formed by the cre­ative act of the imag­i­na­tion. The imag­i­na­tion as a site of cre­ative activ­ity entailed that it be unhinged from what is given. Exem­pli­fied by math­e­mat­i­cal objects, whose per­fec­tion owes lit­tle, if any­thing, to the imper­fect beings of the world, the sec­u­lar the­olo­gians thus argued that the truth of ideas is guar­an­teed by the very fact that they are made.22

The per­fect and time­less shapes of geom­e­try were once thought to be applic­a­ble only to the unmov­ing heav­ens. The sub­lu­nary sphere of gen­er­a­tion, change, and decay was not sus­cep­ti­ble to immo­bile math­e­mat­i­cal forms. But accord­ing to the sec­u­lar the­olo­gians, what was good for the heav­ens was good enough for the earth. By insist­ing that the book of nature was writ­ten in “mea­sure, weight and num­ber,” these early mod­erns raised the earth to the stars.

For them, beneath the bloom­ing, buzzing, phe­nom­e­nal world lurked the laws of nature inscribed in math­e­mat­i­cally for­mu­lated reg­u­lar­i­ties. Thus the made lay beneath the given, it required ardu­ous exper­i­men­ta­tion – the vex­ing of nature – to unveil these insen­si­ble but imag­ined laws. Accord­ingly, math­e­mat­i­cal forms and lab­o­ra­tory exper­i­ments con­sti­tuted the pre­em­i­nent meth­ods for con­struct­ing knowl­edge of the world. Unhinged from the given because com­mit­ted to the cause of the made, techno-science shook off its Aris­totelian roots, where expe­ri­ence was the mem­o­rable formed from long immer­sion in the reg­u­lar­i­ties of the world, gen­e­sis and move­ment were impos­si­ble to know with cer­tainty but only for the most part, and beings in the world were pos­sessed of sub­stan­tive natures.23

Pride­ful immod­esty was not the only rea­son that early mod­ern philoso­phers brought the heav­ens to the earth. They also did so for char­i­ta­ble rea­sons. Moved by con­cern for the poor this-worldly con­di­tion of man, they sought to improve man’s estate by escap­ing what is given – food tech­nolo­gies to erase hunger, cars and planes to over­come the lim­its of time and space, med­i­cines to elim­i­nate dis­ease, and now genetic manip­u­la­tions to per­haps even cheat death. Thus, pride and char­ity infuse that potent and world-making brew we call techno-science.24

Mod­ern techno-science grew, a bit topsy-turvy, but always cleav­ing close to these found­ing impulses. The pride that com­pels to know-by-construction con­tin­ues to be wed­ded to the char­ity fuel­ing the pro­duc­tion of arti­facts that bet­ter our con­di­tion by trans­mo­gri­fy­ing it. Whether TV’s or the­o­rems, the mod­ern techno-scientific endeavor is one by which, Entis ratio­nis, cre­ations or con­struc­tions of the mind, are pro­jected and given form as entis realis, things real­ized. Caught in this closed loop between mind and its pro­jec­tions, every­where he looks, man now sees only what he has made. Instead of recov­er­ing the gar­den of his orig­i­nal inno­cence, mod­ern man is now faced with the grow­ing desert of his own mak­ing. Yet, trapped by the premise of the iden­tity between know­ing and mak­ing, con­tem­po­rary thought remains unable to think of any­thing other than remak­ing what has been badly made.25

Per­haps it is this com­mit­ment to the propo­si­tion that we can know only what we make, to knowl­edge by con­struc­tion, that forces us to be trapped within the techno-scientific frame. The envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis has exposed the Achilles heel of unre­strained techno-scientific progress. Yet, faith in Progress and in Knowl­edge as the cur­rency of Free­dom remains unshaken. Shut­tling between the poles of “sus­tain­able” and “unsus­tain­able” tech­nolo­gies, the for­mer is prof­fered as the new and improved cure for the dis­eases caused by the lat­ter. And once more, dis­in­ter­ested curios­ity and solic­i­tous con­cern for the wel­fare of oth­ers jus­tify and reaf­firm faith in sal­va­tion through tech­nol­ogy. To escape this debil­i­tat­ing con­fine per­haps requires being dis­abused of the prej­u­di­cial iden­tity between know­ing and mak­ing, which ani­mates techno-science.

Planely speak­ing, but not entirely

The space con­sti­tuted by the dialec­tic between a nat­ural and arti­fi­cial “har­mony of inter­ests” enfolds the rela­tion between free and reg­u­lated mar­kets. The pol­i­tics of a com­mer­cial repub­lic is ori­ented to the sat­is­fac­tion of human needs through com­modi­ties. To con­tin­u­ally increase the sat­is­fac­tion of needs, mar­ket soci­eties must expand the sphere of com­mod­ity depen­dence, that is, the relent­less pur­suit eco­nomic growth. The pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion of com­modi­ties pre­sup­poses the worker and the con­sumer, and regard­less of who owns the means of pro­duc­tion or how prof­its are dis­trib­uted, eco­nomic growth requires workers/consumers. Even if work­ers are no more likely to find well-paying jobs than are debt sat­u­rated con­sumers likely to buy more stuff, the social imag­i­nary formed of work­ers and con­sumers per­sists. Accord­ingly, any effort to see beneath or beyond this con­fin­ing thought-space must take its dis­tance to this indus­trial mind-set formed by the thor­ough­go­ing depen­dence on commodities.

Sim­i­larly, the debate on the neces­sity of “eco-friendly” tech­nolo­gies that carry a lower “eco­log­i­cal foot­print” pre­sup­poses man as oper­a­tor instead of as user.26 The user is trans­formed into an oper­a­tor when the power of a tool over­whelms that of its user. Thus, whether it is a Prius or a Hum­mer, both aim to improve man’s con­di­tion by frus­trat­ing his nat­ural abil­ity and capac­ity to walk. Both demand skilled oper­a­tors to steer, and nei­ther per­mits the degrees of free­dom nec­es­sary for autonomous use. Whether pro­moted by the tech­no­crat or eco­crat, men are dis­abled by and become depen­dent on their arti­facts when the lat­ter are designed for oper­a­tors instead of enabling users.

The ordi­nary and every­day mean­ing of use­ful­ness embeds it within both human pur­poses and human actions. A thing is use­ful inso­far as it unleashes and extends the capac­i­ties of the user; as long as it can be shaped, adapted, and mod­i­fied to fit the pur­poses of its users. There­fore, the capac­ity of a thing to be use­ful is lim­ited by the innate pow­ers or nat­ural thresh­olds of the user. For exam­ple, a bicy­cle calls for users because it only extends the innate capac­ity for self-mobility. In con­trast, the auto­mo­bile requires immo­bile if adept machine oper­a­tors. In this sense, the for­mer is a con­vivial tech­nol­ogy where the lat­ter is manip­u­la­tive. A hand-pump or a well can be used to raise water for drink­ing or bathing. In con­trast, a flush-toilet or a dam must be oper­ated to pipe or store a liq­uid resource. Thus, to bring to light was has been cast into the shad­ows requires expos­ing the dis­abling fea­tures of some technologies.

Accord­ingly, what­ever lies beyond the thought-space marked by the dialec­tic of the State-Market on the one hand and that of the sustainable-unsustainable tech­nol­ogy on the other, it must be het­ero­ge­neous to both the worker/consumer and the oper­a­tor. In this search, two caveats are to be kept in mind. First, even if the ques­tion is addressed to the present, the answer must be sought for in the past. One is obliged to rum­mage in the dust­bin of his­tory to recover what was once mus­cled into it. Oth­er­wise, imag­ined futures would give wing to utopian dreams just like those that have now turned night­mar­ish. Sec­ond, there is no going back to the past and there is no choice between the (post)industrial and the tra­di­tional immured in habit and trans­mit­ted by mem­ory. The depen­dence on com­modi­ties and manip­u­la­tive tech­nolo­gies has been and con­tin­ues to be estab­lished on the destruc­tion of alter­na­tive modes of being and think­ing. There is lit­tle of the lat­ter around, even as mil­lions of peas­ants and abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples are daily uprooted and dis­placed in China, India, and Latin Amer­ica. But it would be sen­ti­men­tal and dan­ger­ous to think that one can or should bring back the past. Instead, the task for thought is to find con­cep­tual cri­te­ria to help think through the present.27

The Ver­nac­u­lar Domain

Ivan Illich pro­posed to reviv­ify the word “ver­nac­u­lar” to name a domain that excludes both the con­sumer and the oper­a­tor. The appro­pri­ate word to speak of the domain beyond depen­dence on com­modi­ties and dis­abling tech­nolo­gies is fun­da­men­tal to avoid­ing one or both of two con­fu­sions. First, the pre­sup­po­si­tions of eco­nom­ics and techno-science are likely to be anachro­nis­ti­cally pro­jected into forms-of-life that lie out­side or beyond the thought space con­sti­tuted by them. This is obvi­ous when econ­o­mists retro-project fables of the dia­mond and water “para­dox,” “utility-maximization” and “scarcity” into pre-modern texts. So does the his­to­rian of tech­nol­ogy who indif­fer­ently sees the mon­key, Nean­derthal man, and the uni­ver­sity stu­dent as tool users. In a related vein, forms-of-life orthog­o­nal to techno-scientifically fueled economies are likely to be mis­un­der­stood. Thus, those who today refuse mod­ern con­ve­niences are labeled Lud­dites or just cussed, while those who get by out­side the techno-scientific and com­mod­ity bub­bles are clas­si­fied as back­ward or poor.

A sec­ond, more potent, con­fu­sion flour­ishes in the absence of a word ade­quate to the domain out­side tech­no­log­i­cally inten­sive mar­ket soci­eties. Dis­abling tech­nolo­gies no less than wage work can pro­duce or gen­er­ate unpaid toil. That the spin­ning jenny and the com­puter have put peo­ple out of work is well-known. But it is less famil­iar that waged work neces­si­tates a shad­owy unpaid com­ple­ment. Indeed, wage work is a per­haps dimin­ish­ing tip of the total toil exacted in market-intensive soci­eties. House­work, school­work, com­mut­ing, mon­i­tor­ing the intake of med­i­cines or the out­flows from a bank account are only a few exam­ples of the time and toil devoted to the nec­es­sary shadow work com­pelled by commodity-intensive social arrange­ments. To con­fuse the shadow work neces­si­tated by the sep­a­ra­tion of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion with the unpaid labor in set­tings where pro­duc­tion is not sep­a­rated from con­sump­tion is to mis­un­der­stand shadow work as either autonomous action or the threat­ened and shrink­ing spaces out­side the mar­ket.28

Indica­tive of this con­fu­sion is the use of such terms as “sub­sis­tence econ­omy,” “infor­mal economies,” or “peas­ant econ­omy” to refer to what has been cast into the shad­ows. By adding an adjec­tive to the “econ­omy,” his­to­ri­ans and anthro­pol­o­gists unwit­tingly rein­force the grip of what they intend to weaken. By merely mod­i­fy­ing the “econ­omy” they are nev­er­the­less beholden to its pre­sup­po­si­tions. A sim­i­lar weak­ness attends the term “sub­sis­tence.” While its ety­mol­ogy is noble and invokes that which is self-sufficient and stands in place, its mod­ern con­no­ta­tions are irre­deemably nar­row and uncouth. In pri­mar­ily invok­ing the modes by which peo­ple pro­vided for their mate­r­ial needs – food and shel­ter – “sub­sis­tence” rein­forces the eco­nomic by nega­tion. With its con­no­ta­tions of “basic neces­si­ties” or “bare sur­vival,” sub­sis­tence des­ic­cates the var­ied and mul­ti­far­i­ous forms-of-life once and still con­ducted beyond the space cir­cum­scribed by the machine and the mar­ket. One can­not speak of “sub­sis­tence archi­tec­ture” as one can of ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­tures. “Peas­ant” or “infor­mal” does not mod­ify dance and song, prayer and lan­guage, food and play. And yet, these are inte­gral to a life well-lived, and at least his­tor­i­cally, were nei­ther com­mod­i­fied nor the prod­ucts of techno-science. It is to avoid such blind­ing con­fu­sions that Illich argued for reha­bil­i­tat­ing the word “ver­nac­u­lar.“29

Though from the Latin ver­nac­u­lum, which named all that was home­bred, home­made, and home­spun, it was through Varro’s restricted sense of ver­nac­u­lar speech that the word “ver­nac­u­lar” enters Eng­lish. The his­tory of how ver­nac­u­lar speech was trans­muted into a “taught mother tongue,” is an exem­plar of not only what lies beyond the con­tem­po­rary thought-space but also for what may be wor­thy of recu­per­a­tion in mod­ern forms.30

Elio Anto­nio de Nebrija was a con­tem­po­rary of Christo­pher Colum­bus. In 1492, he peti­tioned Queen Isabella to spon­sor a tool to quell the unruly every­day speech of her sub­jects. In the Spain of Isabella, her sub­jects spoke in a mul­ti­tude of tongues. To dis­ci­pline the anar­chic speech of peo­ple in the inter­est of her power Nebrija noted, “Lan­guage has always been the con­sort of empire, and for­ever shall remain its mate.” To unify the sword and the book through lan­guage, Nebrija offered both a rule­book for Span­ish gram­mar and a dic­tio­nary. In a kind of alchem­i­cal exer­cise, Nebrija reduced lived speech to a con­structed gram­mar. Accord­ingly, this con­ver­sion of the speech of peo­ple into a national lan­guage stands as a pro­to­type of the for­ays in that long war to cre­ate a world fit for workers/ con­sumers and operators.

Nebrija fab­ri­cated a Span­ish gram­mar as a tool to rule enlivened speech. Because stan­dard­ized and pro­duced by an expert, his gram­mar had to be taught to be effec­tive. More­over, fol­low­ing gram­mat­i­cal rules for speech con­veys the belief that peo­ple can­not speak with­out learn­ing the rules of gram­mar. By this dis­pen­sa­tion, the tongue is trained to repeat the gram­mat­i­cal forms it is taught; the tongue is made to oper­ate on lan­guage. Hence, the nat­ural abil­ity to speak that can be exer­cised by each and all is trans­formed into an alien­able prod­uct requir­ing pro­duc­ers and con­sumers. The con­ver­sion of every­day speech into a teach­able mother tongue thus ren­ders what is abun­dant into the regime of scarcity – to the realm of exchange-value. Instruc­tion in lan­guage not only dis­ables the nat­ural pow­ers of the speaker but also makes her depen­dent on cer­ti­fied ser­vice providers. Thus, Nebrija’s pro­posal at once dis­closes and fore­shad­ows the world pop­u­lated by work­ers and oper­a­tors, by the mar­ket and the machine.

The war against the ver­nac­u­lar has been pros­e­cuted for some 500 years.31 Once the com­mod­ity and mar­ket occu­pied the inter­stices of every­day life. Today, it is every­where. For most of human his­tory, tools were shaped by the pur­poses and lim­ited by the nat­ural abil­i­ties of its users. Today, their machines enslave the major­ity of peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly in advanced indus­trial soci­eties. Though this trans­for­ma­tion has and is occur­ring in dif­fer­ent places at dif­fer­ent times and rates, it nev­er­the­less dupli­cates the dia­gram of how stan­dard­ized Span­ish gram­mar dis­em­bed­ded the speech of peo­ple. For instance, the rapa­cious “prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tion” that enclosed the com­mons in the 17th cen­tury, uprooted Eng­lish peas­ants from the land to make them fully depen­dent on wages. A sim­i­lar dis­pos­ses­sion now occurs in China and India, where hun­dreds of mil­lions move from farms to fac­to­ries and slums. Abo­rig­i­nal tribes of the Ama­zon are being dis­pos­sessed and killed now with the same impunity as those in Aus­tralia and the Amer­i­cas once were. For enter­tain­ment, chil­dren now oper­ate PlaySta­tions where they once kicked around a ball on the street. Mega-churches in the US indoc­tri­nate the flock with power point slides and music, much as teach­ers, train­ers, and coaches do in class­rooms around the coun­try. Food sci­en­tists, nutri­tion­ists, and plant pathol­o­gists pro­vide just some of the inputs that con­sumers depend on for their daily calo­rie intake. Whether in single-family homes or boxes piled on top of each other, peo­ple live in houses seem­ingly cut from an architect’s tem­plate. Women in India now demand valen­tine cards with as much enthu­si­asm as Turk­ish men pur­chase hair, calf, and chest implants. The his­tor­i­cal record is rife with exam­ples that stand as wit­nesses to the con­tin­u­ing destruc­tion of the ver­nac­u­lar –whether of food, shel­ter, song, love, or pleasures.

It is by attend­ing to the his­tor­i­cal speci­ficity of our present predica­ment in the mir­ror of the past that Illich thus reveals a third axis that lies orthog­o­nal to the plane cir­cum­scribed by the axes of com­mod­ity inten­sity and dis­abling tech­nolo­gies. On this z-axis are located forms of social orga­ni­za­tion anchored by two het­ero­ge­neous forms. At the point of ori­gin of this three-dimensional space, are social arrange­ments that plug peo­ple into mar­kets and machines and thereby pre­vent them from exer­cis­ing their freely given pow­ers. At the other end of this z-axis is found a pro­fu­sion of social forms, each dif­fer­ent from the other, but all marked by sus­pi­cion towards the claims for techno-science and the commodity.

For these modes of social orga­ni­za­tion, the dif­fer­ence between “sus­tain­able” and “unsus­tain­able” tech­nolo­gies is a chimera. Instead, what mat­ters is the real dis­tinc­tion between con­vivial and dis­abling tech­nolo­gies. Sim­i­larly, the pur­ported dif­fer­ence between reg­u­lated and free mar­kets, between pub­lic and pri­vate prop­erty does lit­tle to shape these social forms. Instead, they are ani­mated by the dis­tinc­tion between the house­hold and the com­mons. Thus, the Amish of Penn­syl­va­nia cur­tail their use of such power tools as trac­tors. The Bhutanese limit the num­ber of tourists to whom they play host. Some cities in Ger­many and Den­mark have banned the car to make way for the bicy­cle and walk­ing. Whether on a rooftop in Chicago or by the rail track in Mum­bai, diverse groups rely on their veg­etable patches for some their daily sus­te­nance. While com­mu­nity sup­ported agri­cul­ture build bonds of per­sonal depen­dence, ceramic dry toi­lets and related forms of ver­nac­u­lar archi­tec­tures allow peo­ple to dwell. In a fine essay by Peter Linebaugh on the Lud­dites and the Roman­tics, one is per­suaded by the implicit claim that com­mu­nism for the 21st cen­tury may need to mimic in a new key, the coura­geous Lud­dite defense of the ver­nac­u­lar.32 Even Marx, in his last years, was less of a Marx­ist than many of those who spoke in his name. He was far more open to the peas­ant com­munes of Rus­sia and West­ern Europe than usu­ally assumed.33

These modes and man­ners of liv­ing in the present are informed by the past. Those engaged in the attempt to unplug from the mar­ket and the machine know that the reign of prop­erty – whether pri­vate or public-was erected on the ruins of the com­mons and that the ubiq­uity of dis­abling technologies-whether sus­tain­able or not-was achieved by den­i­grat­ing con­vivial tools. Yet, cru­cially, know­ing what is past has gone, they are not dog­matic in their fight. They prac­tice a form of brico­lage, oppor­tunis­ti­cally tak­ing back what­ever they can get. A shared lawn­mower here, an over­grown and weed infested gar­den there, a polit­i­cal strug­gle to retain arti­sanal fish­ing in Ker­ala, a move to the bar­ri­cades in the Chi­a­pas, the will­ing­ness to ped­dle cocaine derived home reme­dies in Peru and build­ing ille­gal ten­e­ments on pub­lic lands in Sao Paulo, each effort is aimed at reduc­ing the rad­i­cal monop­oly of com­modi­ties and dis­abling tech­nolo­gies. Such ways – of fish­ing, farm­ing, cook­ing, eat­ing, dwelling, play­ing, pray­ing or study – are as diverse and var­ied today as the peo­ple who engage in them. How­ever, what they have in com­mon is being ori­ented by the same genus, the vernacular.

Epis­temic Prudence

The effort to fight against the con­tin­u­ing war on the ver­nac­u­lar also extends to the activ­ity of think­ing.34 What is con­fused for knowl­edge today is largely R&D funded and deployed by gov­ern­ment and indus­try. Sci­en­tists, whether in the employ of uni­ver­si­ties, gov­ern­ments, or cor­po­ra­tions, pro­duce objec­tive knowl­edge for use by oth­ers. The per­ti­nent ques­tion for those affected by these cir­cuits of knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and sale is to ask if there are ver­nac­u­lar styles of think­ing. Is there a kind of thought jus­ti­fied by nei­ther pride nor char­ity? What is the nature of rig­or­ous thought that is nev­er­the­less con­ducted among friends and aimed at shap­ing one’s own modes of life in more beau­ti­ful ways? Are some styles of think­ing bet­ter suited to com­pre­hend­ing the vernacular?

It is likely that the intel­lec­tual effort appro­pri­ate to bring­ing ver­nac­u­lar ways out of the shad­ows might itself be self-limiting. I sug­gest the now dis­carded notion of com­mon sense as a cri­te­rion to both com­pre­hend the ver­nac­u­lar domain and to rec­og­nize the styles of thought appro­pri­ate to it. Though the his­tory of com­mon sense is too tan­gled a story to be told here, it is suf­fi­cient to note its pri­mary mean­ing, at least in Eng­lish. The first mean­ing of com­mon sense is the Aris­totelian “sen­sus com­mu­nis”: “The com­mon bond or cen­ter of the five senses; the endow­ment of nat­ural intel­li­gence pos­sessed by ratio­nal beings.”35 This under­stand­ing of the com­mon sense stretches from at least Plato to Descartes and, in this pri­mor­dial sense, refers to the fac­ulty nec­es­sary for the exer­cise of rea­son­able judg­ments. Con­trary to pop­u­lar prej­u­dice today, com­mon sense does not refer to the con­tent of what is known but rather how knowl­edge is achieved. Com­mon sense is not reducible to a body of propo­si­tions or of knowledge-claims: instead, it is the ground from which judg­ments are reached, par­tic­u­larly, the judg­ment of what is appro­pri­ate, fit­ting, or ade­quate.36

Briefly, com­mon sense is that fac­ulty which syn­the­sizes sense impres­sions into per­cep­tions of the world. In turn, the active intel­li­gence abstracts con­cepts from these sen­si­ble per­cep­tions. An echo of this activ­ity of the intel­lect still res­onates in the word “con­cept,” ety­mo­log­i­cally related to grasp­ing or touch­ing. That con­cepts are teth­ered to per­cepts, which are rooted in the sen­sual, under­writes that Aris­totelian com­mon­place, “noth­ing in the intel­lect that is not first in the senses.” Con­cepts are abstrac­tions. But pre­cisely because they are abstrac­tions from the real, they main­tain an accord between the world and the mind. Stated sim­ply, both per­cep­tion and the con­cepts that flow from them are depen­dent on what is given to the senses; con­cep­tions of the world depend on grasp­ing the world as it is.

Yet, techno-science is based on pre­cisely turn­ing this under­stand­ing on its head. Indeed, the announce­ment of Vico may be taken as the slo­gan behind which a com­mon sense under­stand­ing of the world was slowly suf­fo­cated. From the very begin­ning of mod­ern sci­ence, know­ing is under­stood to be the same as mak­ing: the Carte­sian plane is as con­structed as an air­plane; the Pois­son dis­tri­b­u­tion is as fab­ri­cated as a pipette in the lab­o­ra­tory. Mod­ern sci­en­tific ideas are not con­cepts teth­ered to the senses; instead they are con­structs. Con­structs, as the word sug­gests, are made and not given. As Ein­stein famously said, “Phys­i­cal con­cepts are free cre­ations of the human mind, and not…uniquely deter­mined by the exter­nal world.” Though wrong to use the word “con­cepts,” his acknowl­edge­ment that sci­en­tific the­o­ries are cre­ated under­scores how sci­en­tific con­structs frac­tures the com­mon sense tie between per­cep­tion and reality.

The sharp dis­tinc­tion between con­cepts and con­structs recalls that the mod­ern world is con­structed and that peo­ple and things are often resized to fit in. Con­cepts are forms of thought engen­dered by the com­mon sense, which itself expresses the union between the world and the senses. Con­cepts reflect a way of know­ing things from the out­side in – from the world to the mind. In con­trast, con­structs are forms of reflex­ive thought express­ing a way of know­ing from the inside out – from the mind to the world.In mod­ern times, what is made up does not ide­ally con­form to what is given. Instead, what is given is slowly buried under the made-up world.

Sci­en­tific con­structs are there­fore not rooted by a sense for the world. Indeed, given the con­trast between con­cepts and con­structs, it fol­lows that sci­en­tific ideas are non-sense. They are not abstracted from expe­ri­ence but can often be used to reshape it. They can be exper­i­men­tally ver­i­fied or fal­si­fied. But exper­i­ments are not the stuff of ordi­nary expe­ri­ence. No exper­i­ment is nec­es­sary to ver­ify if peo­ple breathe, but one is required to prove the prop­er­ties of a vac­uum. Exper­i­ments are nec­es­sary pre­cisely to test what is not ordi­nar­ily evi­dent, which is why they are con­ducted in con­trolled set­tings and also used to pro­pa­gan­dize the unusual as ordi­nar­ily com­pre­hen­si­ble. Exper­i­men­tal results are nei­ther nec­es­sar­ily con­tin­u­ous with nor com­pre­hen­si­ble to every­day expe­ri­ence; they do not clar­ify expe­ri­ence but usu­ally obfus­cate it.

Unlike R&D, ver­nac­u­lar styles of thought are nei­ther insti­tu­tion­ally funded nor directed at the pur­ported hap­pi­ness and ease of oth­ers. More­over, ver­nac­u­lar think­ing also cleaves closely to the com­mon sense under­stood as the seat of rea­son­able judg­ments. Thus, it avoids the mon­strous heights to which thought can rise on the wings of the unfet­tered imag­i­na­tion. Accord­ingly, the abil­ity to grasp the ver­nac­u­lar demands not only the courage needed to buck aca­d­e­mic pres­sures but also to avoid those flights of the­o­ret­i­cal mad­ness pow­ered through the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of con­structs.37

To draw out some fea­tures of the form of thought ade­quate to the ver­nac­u­lar domain, con­sider Illich’s essay titled Energy and Equity, where he dis­tin­guishes between trans­port, tran­sit, and traf­fic. Whereas tran­sit bespeaks the motion afforded to man the self-moving ani­mal, trans­port refers to his being moved by het­eronomous means, whether car, train, or plane. There, a bul­lock cart trans­ports vil­lagers headed to the mar­ket. Here cars trans­port com­muters to the work­place. By com­mon sense per­cep­tion, trans­port – whether by cart or car – per­verts tran­sit, which is embod­ied in the freely given capac­ity to walk. To those who can­not per­ceive the sen­sual and car­nal dif­fer­ence between walk­ing and being moved as a Fedex pack­age, the dis­tinc­tion between trans­port and tran­sit is unper­sua­sive. It is equally unper­sua­sive to those mired in that con­structed uni­verse where all motion is iden­ti­fied with the dis­place­ment of any body in space. The rit­u­al­ized expo­sure to passenger-miles – whether in cars or class­rooms – is the likely rea­son for the inabil­ity to per­ceive the felt dis­tinc­tion between trans­port and tran­sit. Thus, the elab­o­ra­tion of con­cepts to prop­erly grasp the ver­nac­u­lar domain can­not but begin by plac­ing the con­struc­tions of the econ­omy and techno-science within epis­temic brackets.

Yet, if it is to be rea­son­able, such an exer­cise in epis­temic hygiene can­not be immod­er­ate.38 The con­trast between trans­port and tran­sit is clear and dis­tinct, rooted as it is in phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cally dis­tinct per­cep­tions. Yet, traf­fic is a the­o­ret­i­cal con­struct, pro­posed to com­pre­hend any com­bi­na­tion of trans­port and tran­sit. This neces­sity for con­structs is nev­er­the­less under­mined by their being teth­ered to and by con­cepts. Accord­ingly, the con­cep­tual grasp of the world hob­bles the free con­struc­tion of it. The dis­tinc­tion between con­cepts and con­structs does not imply refus­ing the lat­ter at all costs but rather entails see­ing the hier­ar­chi­cal rela­tion between them. That is, ver­nac­u­lar styles of think­ing do not exclude the­o­ret­i­cal con­structs but only seek to keep them in their place.

A sec­ond and related fea­ture of ver­nac­u­lar thought-styles con­firms its mod­er­ate and indeed, mod­est nature. In accord with ver­nac­u­lar ways, ver­nac­u­lar thought does not demand the exclu­sion or exci­sion of that which is anti­thet­i­cal and for­eign to its domain – the mar­ket or the machine. For instance, ver­nac­u­lar thought does not demand the era­sure of trans­port so that tran­sit can flour­ish. Instead, because rooted in the per­ceived accord or just pro­por­tion between the tran­sit and trans­port, ver­nac­u­lar thought insists only that the capac­ity for auto-mobility impose a bind­ing con­straint on trans­port. The sug­ges­tion that the speed limit for cars be roughly the same as that reached by a bicy­cle is rooted in the argu­ment that traf­fic be cal­i­brated by the lex­i­co­graphic pref­er­ence for tran­sit over transport.

Thus, ver­nac­u­lar ways of think­ing in con­so­nance with doing and being do not deny con­structs – whether imag­ined or real­ized. It merely refuses the char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally mod­ern iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of know­ing and mak­ing, of reduc­ing think­ing to cal­cu­lat­ing, of dis­plac­ing the rela­tion between sub­jects and their pred­i­cates by quan­ti­ta­tive com­par­isons. In see­ing beyond the prej­u­dice that com­pares beings in terms of “mea­sure, num­ber, and weight,” ver­nac­u­lar thought rean­i­mates a sec­ond form of quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sure­ment that, with it, was also cast into the shad­ows. Recall, as Ein­stein admit­ted, sci­en­tific con­structs are free cre­ations of the mind, exem­pli­fied by math­e­mat­i­cal con­structs – equa­tions, cal­cu­la­tions, and the like. But such math­e­mat­i­cal mea­sure­ment is only the infe­rior of two kinds of quan­ti­ta­tive measurement.

In The States­man, Plato argues for the dis­tinc­tion between arith­meti­cal and “geo­met­ric” mea­sures.39 While both are forms of quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sure­ments, arith­meti­cal or numer­i­cal mea­sure is inde­pen­dent of the pur­poses of the cal­cu­la­tor and either cor­rect or incor­rect. In con­trast, “geo­met­ric” mea­sure­ments of too much or too lit­tle are inex­tri­ca­bly bound to inten­tion­al­ity and there­fore never sim­ply cor­rect or incor­rect but always mea­sured with respect to what is just right or fit­ting. To clar­ify the dis­tinc­tion, con­sider the fol­low­ing two points. Given a con­ven­tional mea­sure – gal­lons or liters – a quan­tity of water can be pre­cisely and uni­ver­sally mea­sured as 4. How­ever, whether 4 is too much or too lit­tle depends on whether one intends to fill a 3 or 5 gal­lon pail; or to put out a blaz­ing fire or to water a horse. The frame of inten­tion­al­ity or pur­pose thus defines the quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sure­ment of greater or lesser, of more or less. Accord­ingly, the numer­i­cal mea­sure of plus or minus 1 gains its mean­ing from and is there­fore sub­or­di­nate to the non-numerically mea­sure of too much or too lit­tle. More­over, it is also rel­a­tive to pur­pose that 3 or 5 is con­sid­ered fit­ting, appro­pri­ate or just right.

But there is a sec­ond point to be empha­sized about the rela­tion between so-called arith­meti­cal and “geo­met­ri­cal” mea­sure­ments. Arith­meti­cal mea­sures are utterly ster­ile when it comes to answer­ing the ques­tion of pur­pose, of what is to be done. That is, the ques­tion of whether a given end is appro­pri­ate or fit­ting can­not be debated in math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols. In fact, the oppo­site is true. It is always pos­si­ble to ask if apply­ing arith­meti­cal mea­sures to a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion is appro­pri­ate. Thus, whether one should fill a 5-gallon pail, or con­struct a math­e­mat­i­cal model of human behav­ior or fab­ri­cate a mea­sure called eco­log­i­cal foot­print are unan­swer­able in numer­i­cal terms.40

That arith­meti­cal mea­sure­ments can­not adju­di­cate its own appro­pri­ate­ness shows they are infe­rior in rank or hier­ar­chi­cally sub­or­di­nate to “geo­met­ric” mea­sure­ment. The ques­tion con­cern­ing pur­pose is pre­em­i­nently a ques­tion of ethics, of jus­tice among per­sons. More­over, since per­sonal rela­tion­ship can­not but be grounded in the embod­ied sense of and for another, it fol­lows that eth­i­cal judg­ments must be rooted in com­mon sense. Thus, geo­met­ric mea­sures of what is just and right, of what is appro­pri­ate and fit­ting, are judg­ments formed of the com­mon sense. Accord­ingly it fol­lows that con­cepts should reg­u­late and serve as norms for con­structs and, anal­o­gously, that ver­nac­u­lar ways should reg­u­late techno-scientific constructions.

Past or Future?

Illich’s plea to resus­ci­tate the ver­nac­u­lar must be taken seri­ously – espe­cially now, when the ongo­ing eco­nomic and eco­log­i­cal crises reveal the restricted thought-space within which con­tem­po­rary debates con­tinue to be con­ducted. Just as the demand for more reg­u­lated mar­kets expose exchange-value as the pre­sup­po­si­tion of eco­nomic thought, so also the call for sus­tain­able or eco-friendly tech­nolo­gies expose the grip of techno-science on the mod­ern imag­i­nary. The ver­nac­u­lar, we could say, lies orthog­o­nal to these axes of mar­kets and machines, offer­ing us a unique stand­point from which to inter­ro­gate the present. While the object of an almost 500 year long war, it nev­er­the­less per­sists within the inter­stices and byways of mod­ern life, ready for reactivation.

Sajay Samuel is a Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. He has spoken on science, economic thought, and the vernacular for Canadian radio. His academic publications aim to undermine the current fascination with accounting and related numbers as a modality of management.

• 1BBC, “‘Wall Street got drunk’ says Bush.”
• 2Andy Kroll, “How the McE­con­omy Bombed the Amer­i­can Worker,” TomDis­patch. While advanced indus­tri­al­ized economies can­not find enough jobs for its unem­ployed pop­u­la­tions, so called emerg­ing economies are actively cre­at­ing employ­ment. By inverse sym­me­try, to sat­isfy the demand of eco­nomic growth through indus­tri­al­iza­tion, notably in China and India, peas­ants are con­verted into fac­tory work­ers in the hun­dreds of millions.
• 3Of the raft of books on the causes and con­se­quences of the cur­rent eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion, there are those who argue, rightly in many par­tic­u­lars, that this was only the most severe of the cri­sis prone dynam­ics of cap­i­tal­ism. In this vein, see for exam­ple most recently, Paul Mattick, Busi­ness As Usual (Lon­don: Reak­tion Books, 2011); David Har­vey, The Enigma of Cap­i­tal (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2010); and John Bel­lamy Fos­ter and Fred Magd­off, The Great Finan­cial Cri­sis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). I ignore these accounts since they are and were largely ignored in pol­icy cir­cles and main­stream eco­nomic thinking.
• 4Notably, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Ani­mal Spir­its (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009). But see also Justin Fox, The Myth of the Ratio­nal Mar­ket (New York: Harper Busi­ness Books, 2009); and Paul Krug­man, “How did econ­o­mists get it so wrong?” New York Times, Sep­tem­ber 9, 2009.
• 5Joseph Stiglitz in Freefall (New York: Nor­ton Books, 2010) is per­haps the most tren­chant of the well-known econ­o­mists to fin­ger free mar­ket ide­ol­ogy as an impor­tant cause of the cri­sis. Also see, N. Roubini & S. Mihm, Cri­sis Eco­nom­ics (New York, Pen­guin Press, 2010); and S. John­son & J. Kwak, 13 Bankers (New York: Pan­theon Books, 2010). Wor­thy of spe­cial men­tion in this regard, is Richard Posner’s, A Fail­ure of Cap­i­tal­ism (Cam­bridge: Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2009), which stands as a model for ret­ro­spec­tive hand-wringing by a booster of neo-liberalism.
• 6The Finan­cial Cri­sis Inquiry Report (New York: Pub­lic Affairs, 2011). Most if not all of the writ­ings on the finan­cial cri­sis cite incen­tives as both cause and rem­edy. The U.S. Con­gres­sional report pub­lished after two years of study and inves­ti­ga­tion is exem­plary since failed or inad­e­quate incentives—whether in the form of reg­u­la­tion or compensation- com­prise the sum of causal fac­tors dri­ving the cri­sis. But also con­sult among any of the above-mentioned books, Lau­rence Koltikoff’s, Jimmy Stew­art is Dead (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2010) for a sen­si­ble pro­posal to limit finan­cially induced boom-bust cycles through lim­ited pur­pose bank­ing. The lat­ter is designed to dampen the ill-effects of debt financing.
• 7The para­dox of design­ing incen­tives to deter­mine future behav­ior seems not to have been fully com­pre­hended. Indeed, in a forth­com­ing work, I intend to argue that incen­tive mech­a­nisms assure only one con­se­quence: they will cer­tainly fail.
• 8For a fuller account, see Sajay Samuel & Jean Roberts, “Water can and ought to run freely: reflec­tions on the notion of “scarcity” in eco­nom­ics” in The Lim­its to Scarcity, ed. Lyla Mehta(London: Earth­scan, 2010), 109-126.
• 9Bernard Man­dev­ille, The Fable of the Bees or Pri­vate Vices, Pub­lick Ben­e­fits (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1924).
• 10“It is because mankind are dis­posed to sym­pa­thize more entirely with our joy than with our sor­row, that we make parade of our riches, and con­ceal our poverty…Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sen­ti­ments of mankind, that we pur­sue riches and avoid poverty. For to what pur­pose is all the toil and bus­tle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambi­tion, of the pur­suit of wealth, of power, and pre­hem­i­nence? Is it to sup­ply the neces­si­ties of nature? The wages of the mean­est labourer can sup­ply them… If we exam­ined his oecon­omy with rigour, we should find that he spends a great part of them upon con­ve­nien­cies, which may be regarded as super­fluities, and that, upon extra­or­di­nary occa­sions, he can give some­thing even to van­ity and distinction…From whence, then, arises that emu­la­tion which runs through all the dif­fer­ent ranks of men, and what are the advan­tages which we pro­pose by that great pur­pose of human life which we call bet­ter­ing our con­di­tion? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sym­pa­thy, com­pla­cency, and appro­ba­tion, are all the advan­tages, which we can pro­pose to derive from it. It is the van­ity, not the ease, or the plea­sure, which inter­ests us. But van­ity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of atten­tion and appro­ba­tion.” Adam Smith, The­ory of Moral Sen­ti­ments (Lon­don: A Mil­lar, 1759/1858), pt. 1, sec. 1, ch. 3, empha­sis added. Con­sult Louis Dumont, From Man­dev­ille to Marx (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press 1977) whose close tex­tual analy­sis of clas­si­cal authors shows that it is the idea of a nat­ural har­mony between indi­vid­ual self-interest and the gen­eral inter­est, that allows, in prin­ci­ple, acquis­i­tive­ness to be free of ethico-political restraints. Though he includes William Petty and John Locke among “econ­o­mists,” William Letwin’s judg­ment is instruc­tive: “…there can be no doubt that eco­nomic the­ory owes its present devel­op­ment to the fact that some men…were will­ing to con­sider the econ­omy as noth­ing more than an intri­cate mech­a­nism, refrain­ing for the while from ask­ing whether the mech­a­nism worked for good or evil”; Ori­gins of Sci­en­tific Eco­nom­ics (Lon­don, 1963), 147-48. See CB Macpher­son, The Polit­i­cal The­ory of Pos­ses­sive Indi­vid­u­al­ism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1962) for sup­port­ing argu­ments that root eco­nomic lib­er­al­ism in 17th cen­tury polit­i­cal thought.
• 11“…money has become in all civ­i­lized nations the uni­ver­sal instru­ment of com­merce, by the inter­ven­tion of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another. What are the rules which men nat­u­rally observe in exchang­ing them either for money or one another, I shall now pro­ceed to exam­ine”; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 4.
• 12The impor­tance of Locke to Smith is evi­dent in his paean to prop­erty. “The prop­erty which every man has in his own labour, as it is the orig­i­nal foun­da­tion of all other prop­erty, so it is the most sacred and invi­o­lable” (Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 10, part 2). For rea­sons of space, I can­not do full jus­tice to Locke’s argu­ments. How­ever, the fol­low­ing state­ments suf­fi­ciently sup­port the four points I empha­size. “What­so­ever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath pro­vided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to some­thing that is his own, and thereby makes it his prop­erty. It being by him removed from the com­mon state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour some­thing annexed to it that excludes the com­mon right of other men”; “And as dif­fer­ent degrees of indus­try were apt to give men pos­ses­sions in dif­fer­ent pro­por­tions, so this inven­tion of money gave them the oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue and enlarge them”; “…the exceed­ing of the bounds of his just prop­erty not lying in the large­ness of his pos­ses­sion, but the per­ish­ing of any­thing use­lessly in it”; John Locke, Con­cern­ing Civil Gov­ern­ment, Sec­ond Essay, ch. 5.
• 13“…These rules deter­mine what may be called the rel­a­tive or exchange­able value of goods. The word value, it is to be observed, has two dif­fer­ent mean­ings, and some­times expresses the util­ity of some par­tic­u­lar object, and some­times the power of pur­chas­ing other goods which the pos­ses­sion of that object con­veys. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange.’” (Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 4).
• 14Smith argues that “virtue con­sists not in any one affec­tion but in the proper degree of all the affec­tions.” For him, Agree­able­ness or util­ity is not a mea­sure of virtue. Instead, it is ‘sym­pa­thy’ or the “cor­re­spon­dent affec­tion of the spec­ta­tor” that “is the nat­ural and orig­i­nal mea­sure of the proper degree (of virtue).” ***TMS, Part 8, Sec. 2, Ch.3. But such sym­pa­thy is not a virtue. At best it is a mir­ror of social prejudices.
• 15The blind­ness to sub­sis­tence in con­tem­po­rary eco­nom­ics is evi­dent in the judg­ment of George Stigler in his review of late 19th cen­tury efforts to grasp use-value: “…and there were some mys­ti­cal ref­er­ences to the infi­nite util­ity of sub­sis­tence.” See his “Devel­op­ment of Util­ity The­ory II,” Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Econ­omy, 58 (1950), 373. Stigler is only capa­ble of equat­ing the use­ful, which is price-less, with the mystical.
• 16“A thing can be a use-value with­out being a value. A thing can be use­ful and a prod­uct of human labor, with­out being a com­mod­ity. …Noth­ing can be a value with­out being an object of util­ity..” Marx, K.(1976) Cap­i­tal, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Pen­guin Books), 131.
• 17The fun­da­men­tal, though largely over­looked, essay on the elab­o­ra­tion of the twinned yet polem­i­cally related “nat­ural” and “arti­fi­cial” har­mony of inter­ests remains, Elie Halevy The Growth of Philo­soph­i­cal Rad­i­cal­ism (Boston: Bea­con Press, 1955).
• 18It would take a longer essay to show the func­tion of law in com­mer­cial soci­ety. Sum­mar­ily, Com­mer­cial soci­ety trans­forms Law into an instru­ment of social engi­neer­ing; and thus of reg­u­la­tion. It began to be used to engi­neer soci­ety towards more or less market-intensive rela­tions. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism pred­i­cated on the “nat­ural har­mony of inter­ests” requires econ­o­miz­ing on law. In con­trast, to mit­i­gate the destruc­tive­ness of ram­pant mar­ket soci­ety requires shack­ling com­mer­cial­ism with­out destroy­ing it, forg­ing an “arti­fi­cial har­mony of inter­ests” through puni­tive reg­u­la­tions. Hence both the min­i­mal state of lib­er­al­ism (whether clas­si­cal or neo-liberalism) and the expanded state of wel­fare lib­er­al­ism implies the instru­men­tal­iza­tion of Law. See Michel Fou­cault, “On Gov­ern­men­tal­ity,” in The Fou­cault Effect, eds. Colin Gor­don, G. Burchell and P. Miller (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1998). The newest crin­kle to this old tale is that mar­kets are no longer thought nat­ural. Instead, mar­kets can be designed, often by mar­ket par­tic­i­pants them­selves. Thus mod­er­at­ing mar­kets through incen­tives becomes a mat­ter of auto-engineering of and by mar­kets around the late 20th century.
• 19 Rachel Car­son, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mif­flin Co, 1962) and Barry Com­moner Sci­ence and Sur­vival (New York: Viking Books, 1967) are per­haps the two most promi­nent sci­en­tists to have jump-started the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment with the bless­ings of sci­ence. By now, despite a few if noisy detrac­tors, wide­spread anthro­pogenic envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion is, as it is said, “sci­en­tific fact.” Over 2000 sci­en­tists world­wide con­tribute to the reports and rec­om­men­da­tions pro­duced by The Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC) on the envi­ron­men­tal effects of indus­tri­al­iza­tion at per­haps the most gen­eral envi­ron­men­tal reg­is­ter. See Cli­mate Change 2007 for its most recent report.
• 20 A pair of recent books authored by French philoso­phers sug­gests the philo­soph­i­cal ambit within with the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis is com­pre­hended. On the one hand, Michel Serres’s The Nat­ural Con­tract (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan Press, 1995) insists on the neces­sity of a con­tract with the Earth now that Human­ity presses against it as does any mam­moth nat­ural force. Such a nat­ural con­tract, pre­sup­poses a new meta­physics, accord­ing to which human­ity can­not be reduced to indi­vid­u­als and Earth is not under­foot but whirling in empty space; both so com­pre­hended by Sci­ence and Law. In some con­trast, Luc Ferry’s The New Eco­log­i­cal Order (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1995) fears the new meta­physics. Cleav­ing to mod­ern ways, he believes “it will ulti­mately be by means of advance­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy that we man­age one day to resolve the ques­tions raised by envi­ron­men­tal ethics” (127). Nev­er­the­less, nei­ther doubt the path for­ward to be illu­mi­nated by a suit­ably refor­mu­lated techno-science.
• 21Lynn White, Jr., “The His­tor­i­cal Roots of Our Eco­log­i­cal Cri­sis,” Sci­ence Mag­a­zine, 155:3767, argued for anthro­pocen­tric sin­gu­lar­ity of Chris­tian­ity and its atten­dant bequest of nature to man for fuel­ing techno-science that has caused the eco­log­i­cal cri­sis. In this sec­tion I focus on the meta­physics of mod­ern sci­ence. For a recent state­ment on how his­to­ri­ans of sci­ence who raise their heads from the dusty archives deal with the meta­physics of mod­ern sci­ence, see Lind­berg, The Begin­ning of West­ern Sci­ence (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1992), ch.14. He agrees with E.A. Burtt, The Meta­phys­i­cal Foun­da­tions of Mod­ern Sci­ence (New York: Dou­ble­day, 1932), whose judg­ment of the pre­sup­po­si­tions and impli­ca­tions of New­ton­ian mechan­ics has not been fun­da­men­tally chal­lenged. Han­nah Arendt, “The Con­quest of Space and the Stature of Man” in Between Past and Future (New York: Ran­dom Books, 1993) offers a suc­cinct sketch of the ground­less­ness pre­sumed by techno-science.
• 22For a fuller account of the the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal debates that pre­pared this view from nowhere, see Amos Funken­stein, The­ol­ogy and the Sci­en­tific Imag­i­na­tion, (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1986). It is he who names as sec­u­lar the­olo­gians, “Galileo and Descartes, Lieb­niz and New­ton, Hobbes and Vico” among oth­ers. I rely heav­ily on him (par­tic­u­larly part 5) and on Peter Dear, Dis­ci­pline and Expe­ri­ence: The Math­e­mat­i­cal Way in the Sci­en­tific Rev­o­lu­tion (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1995) to grasp the cen­tral lines in the math­ema­ti­za­tion of physis. Also con­sult Peter Dear’s text­book, Rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the Sci­ences (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press, 2001) cast as a pithy sum­mary of the seis­mic changes between 1500 and 1800 in what was worth know­ing and how it was known.
• 23See A. Mark Smith’s “Know­ing things inside out: the sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion from a Medieval Per­spec­tive,” The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Review, 95:3 (1990) for an excel­lent sum­mary on the rever­sal of the hier­ar­chy between sense and rea­son in mod­ern sci­en­tific thought. Also, con­sult Eamon Duffy, Sci­ence and the Secrets of Nature (Prince­ton: Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press, 1994) for a per­sua­sive account of sci­en­tific exper­i­ments as vex­ing nature in order to extract her secrets.
• 24To appre­ci­ate the brew of pride and char­ity that con­sti­tutes mod­ern techno-science we need only to attend to Descartes. “…It is pos­si­ble to reach knowl­edge that will be of much util­ity in this life… instead of the spec­u­la­tive phi­los­o­phy now taught in the schools we can find a prac­ti­cal one, by which, know­ing the nature and behav­ior of fire, water, air, stars, the heav­ens, and all the other bod­ies which sur­round us, as well as we now under­stand the dif­fer­ent skills of our arti­sans, we can employ these enti­ties for all the pur­poses for which they are suited, and so make our­selves mas­ters and pos­ses­sors of nature. This would not only be desir­able in bring­ing about the inven­tion of an infin­ity of devices to enable us to enjoy the fruits of agri­cul­ture and all the wealth of the earth with­out labor, but even more so in con­serv­ing health, the prin­ci­pal good and the basis of all other goods in life.” Rene Descartes, Dis­course on Method (Indi­anapo­lis: Library of Lib­eral Arts Press, 1960), part six.
• 25The term con­struc­tion refers to things – whether phys­i­cal or sym­bolic – made. The math­e­mat­i­cal roots of con­struc­tion and con­struc­tivism are thor­oughly explored with spe­cial note of Descartes in David Lachter­man, The Ethics of Geom­e­tr (Lon­don: Rout­ledge 1989). Funken­stein, The­ol­ogy, espe­cially chap­ter 5, describes well the philo­soph­i­cal shift from the con­tem­pla­tive ideal of know­ing to the ideal of knowing-by-doing or made knowl­edge. A cur­sory glance at any sci­en­tific book should con­vince that “the­o­ret­i­cal con­structs” are a sta­ple of the mod­ern sci­en­tific enter­prise. Those (so-called post­mod­ern philoso­phers, his­to­ri­ans and soci­ol­o­gists of sci­ence) who think they chal­lenge techno-science by empha­siz­ing that sci­en­tific knowl­edge is con­structed only repeat in prose what Bacon, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, and New­ton said in verse. Those who think they defend sci­en­tific knowl­edge by invok­ing, as the last trump card, its tech­ni­cal pro­duc­tions merely recon­firm the found­ing con­ceit of mod­ern techno-science: that know­ing and mak­ing are interchangeable.
• 26In this sec­tion I rely on the most exten­sive state­ment of Illich on crit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy, Tools for Con­vivi­al­ity (Lon­don: Mar­ion Boyars, 1973). Note espe­cially the Chap­ter 4, “Recov­ery” (84-99) call­ing for the demythol­o­giza­tion of sci­ence, the redis­cov­ery of lan­guage and the recov­ery of legal pro­ce­dure. He super­sedes this state­ment only in some respects with his later think­ing: on sys­tems; on the his­toric­ity of the instru­ment as a cat­e­gory; and the empha­sis on the sym­bolic power of technology.
• 27Louis Dumont, Essays on Indi­vid­u­al­ism (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1983), shows pre­cisely the con­se­quences of attempts to recover the past, whose sig­nal dimen­sion has been the rel­a­tive embed­ded­ness of the indi­vid­ual within the social whole. To insist on recov­er­ing that past today is thus to court a species of inhu­man­ity the West­ern world has once already encoun­tered in the mid 20th century.
• 28The chill­ing con­clu­sion of this con­fu­sion is the dis­hon­est sen­ti­men­tal­ism fos­tered in indus­trial soci­eties, to wit “that the val­ues which indus­trial soci­ety destroys are pre­cisely those which it cher­ishes” Ivan Illich, “Shadow Work” in Shadow Work (Lon­don: Mar­ion Boyars, 1981), 99. Thus, the rad­i­cal depen­dence on work pro­motes the cher­ished value of Freedom.
• 29“Ver­nac­u­lar comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies ‘root­ed­ness’ and ‘abode.’ Ver­nac­u­lum as a Latin word was used for what­ever was home­bred, home­spun, home­grown, home­made, as opposed to what was obtained in for­mal exchange. The child of one’s slave and of one’s wife, the don­key born of one’s own beast, were ver­nac­u­lar beings, as was the sta­ple that came from the gar­den or the com­mons. If Karl Polanyi had adverted to this fact, he might have used the term in the mean­ing accepted by the ancient Romans: sus­te­nance derived from reci­procity pat­terns imbed­ded in every aspect of life, as dis­tin­guished from sus­te­nance that comes from exchange or from ver­ti­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion… We need a sim­ple adjec­tive to name those acts of com­pe­tence, lust, or con­cern that we want to defend from mea­sure­ment or manip­u­la­tion by Chicago Boys and Social­ist Com­mis­sars. The term must be broad enough to fit the prepa­ra­tion of food and the shap­ing of lan­guage, child­birth and recre­ation, with­out imply­ing either a pri­va­tized activ­ity akin to the house­work of mod­ern women, a hobby or an irra­tional and prim­i­tive pro­ce­dure. Such an adjec­tive is not at hand. But ‘ver­nac­u­lar’ might serve. By speak­ing about ver­nac­u­lar lan­guage and the pos­si­bil­ity of its recu­per­a­tion, I am try­ing to bring into aware­ness and dis­cus­sion the exis­tence of a ver­nac­u­lar mode of being, doing, and mak­ing that in a desir­able future soci­ety might again expand in all aspects of life.” Ivan Illich, “The War against Sub­sis­tence” in Shadow Work, 57-58. The argu­ment of this essay belies its title.
• 30For the fol­low­ing sec­tion, I gloss “Ver­nac­u­lar Val­ues” and The War on Sub­sis­tence,” both in Illich, Shadow Work.
• 31A more com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of the themes in this sec­tion would include a selec­tive sur­vey on the his­tor­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture on ver­nac­u­lar ways and its destruc­tion. As a first ori­en­ta­tion to the exten­sive lit­er­a­ture on the war on the ver­nac­u­lar, con­sult Ivan Illich, Gen­der, (Berke­ley: Hey­day Press, 1982). The works of Karl Polanyi, pre­em­i­nently, The Great Trans­for­ma­tion, (NY: Rein­hart, 1944); but also the essays col­lected in Prim­i­tive, Archaic and Mod­ern Economies, ed. George Dal­ton, (NY: Anchor Books, 1968) and those in Trade and Mar­kets in Early Empires,eds. K. Polanyi, C. Arens­berg, and H. Pear­son (NY: The Free Press, 1957) clar­ify the his­toric­ity of commodity-intensive soci­eties, made vis­i­ble when nature and human action become widely priced as land and labor respec­tively. Mar­shall Sahlins in Stone Age Eco­nom­ics, (NY: Adline, 1972) and M.I. Fin­ley in The Ancient Econ­omy, (Berke­ley, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 1985) con­firm that pre- mod­ern soci­eties, whether Abo­rig­i­nal Aus­tralia or West­ern Antiq­uity, got on quite well with­out it. Jacques Le Goff, in Medieval Civ­i­liza­tion, 400-1500 empha­sizes the aim of the medieval “econ­omy” as that of sub­sis­tence, of pro­vid­ing for neces­si­ties (Lon­don: Black­well, 1988). The con­tin­u­ing mod­ern war on sub­sis­tence and the resis­tance to it is well doc­u­mented. Con­sult for exam­ple, E.P. Thomp­son, “The Moral Econ­omy of the Crowd,” reprinted in The Essen­tial E.P. Thomp­son, ed. Dorothy Thomp­son (NY: The New Press, 2000), and the essays col­lected in Cus­toms in Com­mon (New York: New York Press, 1993); Eric Wolf, Peas­ant Wars of the 20th Cen­tury (NY: Harper & Row 1969), Teodor Shanin, The Awk­ward Class (Lon­don: Cam­bridge, 1977) and Sub­co­man­dante Insur­gente Mar­cos, Our Word is our Weapon (NY: Seven Sto­ries Press, 2001). James Scott, in See­ing Like a State (Prince­ton: Yale Uni­ver­sity, 1999) argues that vision­ary plans to mod­ern­ize soci­ety invari­ably fail and usu­ally leave their ben­e­fi­cia­ries worse off for the atten­tion. Study the key terms col­lected in The Devel­op­ment Dic­tio­nary, ed. Wolf­gang Sachs (NY: Zed Books, 1992) as com­mands that rally the troops to the war against subsistence.
• 32Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd, Queen Mab: Machine Break­ing, Roman­ti­cism, and Sev­eral Com­mons 1811-12 (Oak­land: PM Press/Retort, 2012).
• 33Con­sult the well-documented essay by Teodor Shanin, “Late Marx: Gods and Crafts­men” in Late Marx and the Russ­ian Road, ed. T. Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), for a per­sua­sive case that “…to Marx, a timely rev­o­lu­tion­ary vic­tory could turn the Russ­ian com­mune into a major ‘vehi­cle of social regeneration.’”
• 34This sec­tion is derived from Ivan Illich, “Research by Peo­ple” in Shadow Work (Lon­don: Mar­ion Boyars, 1981), and his unpub­lished man­u­script titled The Wis­dom of Leopold Kohr which makes ref­er­ence to the com­mon sense.
• 35This sen­tence from the OED weakly sum­ma­rizes the fol­low­ing: “The senses per­ceive each other’s spe­cial objects inci­den­tally; not because per­cip­i­ent sense is this or that spe­cial sense, but because all form a unity: this inci­den­tal per­cep­tion takes place when­ever sense is directed at one and the same moment to two dis­parate qual­i­ties in one and the same object, e.g., to the bit­ter­ness and the yel­low­ness of bile…” De Anima, III, 425a 30-425b 1. And: “Fur­ther, there can­not be a spe­cial sense-organ for the com­mon sen­si­bles either, i.e, the objects which we per­ceive inci­den­tally through this or that spe­cial sense, e.g, move­ment, rest, fig­ure, mag­ni­tude, num­ber & unity…. In the case of the com­mon sen­si­bles, there is already in us a com­mon sen­si­bil­ity (or com­mon sense) which enables us to per­ceive them non-incidentally; there is there­fore no spe­cial sense required for their per­cep­tion,” De Anima, III 425a 15-26.
• 36I do not fully explore here the trans­for­ma­tion from a fac­ulty into the “innate capac­ity” of any per­son to rea­son and judge cor­rectly after Descartes. The judg­ment of Funken­stein in The­ol­ogy, espe­cially page 359, is instruc­tive. He sug­gests that the “mil­i­tant, mis­sion­ary ideal” of edu­ca­tion over the 17th and 18th cen­turies is related to “the shift in the con­no­ta­tion of the term ‘com­mon sense.’” The con­no­ta­tions of the terms “le bon sens,” “gemeiner Men­schen­ver­stand,” and “com­mon sense” after the 17th cen­tury imply the capac­ity to be edu­cated; for all men to become philoso­phers. Indeed, the prop­a­ga­tion of a method for think­ing pre­sup­poses the com­mon­sense as that which is in need of edu­ca­tion. More recently, Sophia Rosen­feld, Com­mon Sense: A Polit­i­cal His­tory (Cam­bridge: Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011) traces the twinned log­ics gen­er­ated by the degra­da­tion of com­mon sense from a fac­ulty. On the one hand, it serves as a touch­stone for the wis­dom of peo­ple against elites; on the other, the mul­ish­ness of the masses needed re-education. For a con­spec­tus of writ­ers on the com­mon sense con­sult, AN Foxe, The Com­mon Sense from Her­a­cli­tus to Pierce (Turn­bridge Press, 1962). It is how­ever frus­trat­ing for the lack of a bib­li­og­ra­phy and a his­tor­i­cally insen­si­tive read­ing of the authors sur­veyed. In con­trast, JL Beare, Greek The­o­ries of Ele­men­tary Cog­ni­tion from Alcemaeon to Aris­to­tle (Claren­don Press, 1926); WR Bundy, The The­ory of the Imag­i­na­tion in Clas­si­cal and Medieval Thought (Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois Press, 1927); David Sum­mers, The Judg­ment of Sense (Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Press, 1987) are excel­lent treat­ments of the his­tory of the com­mon sense as fac­ulty from Aris­to­tle to the late Renais­sance when read seri­ally. See also E. Ruth Har­vey, The Inward Wits: Psy­cho­log­i­cal The­ory in the Mid­dle Ages and the Renais­sance (Lon­don, 1975); and HA Wolf­son, “The Inter­nal Senses in Latin, Ara­bic and Hebrew Philo­soph­i­cal Texts,” Har­vard The­o­log­i­cal Review, 25 (1935).
• 37 Stan­ley Rosen, The Elu­sive­ness of the Ordi­nary (New Haven: Yale Uni­ver­sity Press, 2002) argues spirit­edly for the com­mon­sense foun­da­tions of thought. Such foun­da­tions sup­port but can­not rise to heights reached by extra­or­di­nary thought, which by neces­sity, exceed its grasp. In the so-called “sci­ence wars” of recent decades, the issue was framed as that between the social con­struc­tivists and the real­ists. In the light of the fore­go­ing dis­tinc­tion between con­cepts and con­structs, it is clear that both par­ties to the debate agree that sci­en­tific knowl­edge is made, that is to say, constructed.
• 38 In much of his writ­ings, Illich insists on elab­o­rat­ing con­cep­tual dis­tinc­tions built on the per­cep­tion of autonomous human actions. Between Deschool­ing Soci­ety and The His­tory of Homo Edu­can­dus he con­trasts learn­ing to edu­ca­tion and school­ing; in Med­ical Neme­sis, between autonomous cop­ing and health­care; between Research by Peo­ple and R&D. In some cases, he invents or gives new shades of mean­ing to terms to recover per­cep­tions buried by con­structs – for exam­ple, dis­value, shadow work, gen­der and ver­nac­u­lar. Let the triple, hous­ing, dwelling, and habi­ta­tion stand as a par­al­lel exam­ple to trans­port, tran­sit, and traf­fic used in the text above. A gen­eral case for the com­mon­sen­si­cal Illich still awaits a care­ful exe­ge­sis of his texts.
• 39 I take some lib­er­ties with inter­pret­ing The States­man, 283d-284e in Plato, Com­plete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Hack­ett Pub­lish­ing, 1997).The rel­e­vant dis­tinc­tion as described by the vis­i­tor reads as fol­lows: “It is clear that we would divide the art of mea­sure­ment, cut­ting it in two in just the way we said, post­ing as one part of it all sorts of exper­tise that mea­sure the num­ber, lengths, depths, breaths, and speeds of things in rela­tion to what is opposed to them, and as the other, all those that mea­sure in rela­tion to what is in due mea­sure, what is fit­ting, the right moment, what is as it ought to be-everything that removes itself from the extremes to the mid­dle” (384e).
• 40 It is a weak recog­ni­tion of this hier­ar­chy that is reit­er­ated in the widely accepted dis­junc­tion or dis­con­ti­nu­ity between “sci­ence” and “values.”

In an era when the exploits of Sil­vio Berlusconi’s “pri­vate” life seem to have cat­e­gor­i­cally oblit­er­ated any progress towards sex­ual equal­ity achieved dur­ing the Ital­ian fem­i­nist move­ment of the 70s, it is essen­tial to remem­ber what was once accom­plished. Although second-wave fem­i­nism was already a well-established net­work of debates in the U.S. by 1970, Ital­ian women influ­enced by work­erist writ­ings of the fem­i­nist ilk, most notably Mari­arosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Sub­ver­sion of the Com­mu­nity (1972), set out to ini­ti­ate bat­tles over issues such as abor­tion and divorce.1 Fem­i­nist cur­rents both from within and inde­pen­dent of work­erist move­ments then spread with a fierce momen­tum that would endure through the decade.

From the inad­e­quate patri­ar­chal rubric of the New Left, from the ashes of male-dominated work­erist orga­ni­za­tions such as Potere Operaio, and later Lotta Con­tinua, women through­out Italy orga­nized autonomously, on the basis of the inher­ent con­nec­tion of repro­duc­tion and gen­der roles to class strug­gle.2 It was the prob­lem of mar­gin­al­iza­tion of women within these move­ments, along with the larger ques­tion of unpaid domes­tic labor, that directed many fem­i­nist inquiries. Sil­via Fed­erici has said, reflect­ing on her dif­fi­culty rec­on­cil­ing her expe­ri­ence as a woman with the rhetoric of these orga­ni­za­tions, “I was unwill­ing to accept my iden­tity as a woman after hav­ing for years pinned all my hopes on my abil­ity to pass for a man.“3 An orga­nized col­lec­tiv­ity of women inde­pen­dent of the uni­form assim­i­la­tion to a male-driven class per­spec­tive became nec­es­sary, since women’s work was to this point largely con­fined to the domain of repro­duc­tion, but remained an equally essen­tial yet cat­e­gor­i­cally unique form of pro­duc­tion in the greater sense.

Mari­arosa Dalla Costa has described how, in the 1970s, Ital­ian fem­i­nism largely took one of two posi­tions: a kind of gen­er­al­ized, over­all “self-awareness” or a workerist-driven fem­i­nism. The lat­ter took shape as Lotta Fem­min­ista, which orga­nized into a more sub­stan­tial inter­na­tional move­ment. The focus of their attack, house­work, was described in Federici’s Wages Against House­work as “the most sub­tle and mys­ti­fied vio­lence that cap­i­tal­ism has ever per­pe­trated against any sec­tion of the work­ing class.”4 In 1972, Dalla Costa, Selma James, and oth­ers formed the Inter­na­tional Wages for House­work Cam­paign around the notion that women held a sig­nif­i­cant power as pro­duc­ers of the labor force itself – and that through the refusal of this pro­duc­tion, they engaged in a form of social sub­ver­sion that could lead to “a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety.”5

How­ever, Fed­erici has since acknowl­edged this kind of utopian think­ing as dam­ag­ing to the fem­i­nist movement:

One of the major short­com­ings of the women’s move­ment has been its ten­dency to overem­pha­size the role of con­scious­ness in the con­text of social change, as if enslave­ment were a men­tal con­di­tion and lib­er­a­tion could be achieved by an act of will. Pre­sum­ably, if we wanted, we could stop being exploited by men and employ­ers… rev­o­lu­tion­ize our day to day life. Undoubt­edly some women already have the power to take these steps… But for mil­lions these rec­om­men­da­tions could only turn into an impu­ta­tion of guilt, short of build­ing the mate­r­ial con­di­tions that would make them pos­si­ble.6

In an inter­view accom­pa­ny­ing the vol­ume Futuro Ante­ri­ore, Alisa Del Re describes how she began her own path towards the analy­sis of women and work, ini­tially as a polit­i­cal sci­ence stu­dent and research assis­tant to Anto­nio Negri in the late 1960s.7 Encoun­ters with the meth­ods of work­ers’ inquiry, and later the writ­ings of Tronti and Marx, became points of ref­er­ence that would inform Del Re’s involve­ment with Potere Operaio until its dis­so­lu­tion in 1973. With­out offi­cially cross­ing over to Autono­mia Operaia like many of her com­rades, Del Re remained in some­what close prox­im­ity to the group, while begin­ning to address issues from a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive that was unique for this period, par­tic­u­larly regard­ing social ser­vices and the rela­tion­ship between work and per­sonal time.

Del Re reveals a sub­jec­tiv­ity that informed her posi­tion on wel­fare pro­grams – a posi­tion that, stem­ming in large part from her own need for sub­si­dized child­care while nav­i­gat­ing the work­force, would unin­ten­tion­ally oppose the views of Dalla Costa and oth­ers dri­ving the Wages for House­work move­ment. While Wages for House­work sought com­pen­sa­tion for domes­tic labor, Del Re argued for sub­si­dized child­care and other such social pro­grams so that a woman could have a life out­side of work­ing, both in and out­side of the home – not because she dis­agreed with Wages for House­work, but because their demands did not apply to her own sit­u­a­tion as a woman choos­ing to sub­sist within the work­force rather than in the home. She describes how her very posi­tion as a work­ing woman assigned her to the mar­gins of the work­erist move­ment, while the women of Wages for House­work were demand­ing rights from within their imposed “ter­rain” – that of reproduction:

…the issue of wages was per­haps more “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” but from the polit­i­cal prac­tice that Rosa [Dalla Costa] endorsed it was dif­fi­cult to under­stand who was demand­ing these wages and when… maybe my issue was much more reformist even though it is true that we annoyed a few peo­ple when we occu­pied local gov­ern­ment meet­ings, demand­ing the con­struc­tion of nurs­ery schools and propos­ing con­crete forms of ‘lib­er­a­tion from house­work.8

It is worth not­ing, how­ever, that while the posi­tions of Wages for House­work and Del Re were seem­ingly in oppo­si­tion, they are per­haps bet­ter described as par­al­lel streams of strug­gle, progress in both are­nas con­sti­tut­ing a nec­es­sary con­di­tion for women’s auton­omy. In the first place, Wages for House­work rec­og­nized house­work as work, and thus, the strat­egy of “get­ting a job” as a means of lib­er­at­ing women from depen­dence on men’s wages, as Fed­erici would later reflect, alien­ated women who worked because their fam­i­lies need the added finan­cial sup­port “and not because they con­sider it a lib­er­at­ing expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­larly since ‘hav­ing a job’ never frees you from house­work.“9 Fur­ther­more, Del Re’s view on the recla­ma­tion of per­sonal time sup­ported by state-funded child care pro­vi­sions offers the only pos­si­bil­ity of relief from what would oth­er­wise be a near-24/7 work week, waged or not, for working-class women. Years after Wages for House­work, Fed­erici rec­og­nizes the mutual depen­dence of these two conditions:

…as long as house­work goes unpaid, there will be no incen­tives to pro­vide the social ser­vices nec­es­sary to reduce our work, as proved by the fact that, despite a strong women’s move­ment, sub­si­dized day care has been steadily reduced through the 70s. I should add that wages for house­work never meant sim­ply a pay­check. It also meant more social ser­vices and free social ser­vices.10

In a later piece enti­tled “Women and Wel­fare: Where is Jocasta?”, Del Re describes the labor of repro­duc­tion as “a spe­cific rela­tion between women and the State” that is sep­a­rate from the labor mar­ket and that has been inad­e­quately sup­ported and stud­ied.11 The wel­fare sys­tem, despite “its lim­i­ta­tions on the qual­ity of life,” she pro­poses, “liberat[es] the labor of repro­duc­tion from its depen­dence on another person’s salary,” in other words, the labor of pro­duc­tion.12 Thus, Del Re pro­poses that since women con­trol the means of repro­duc­tion, we “must find a way to present [our] bill” – by mak­ing “vis­i­ble the labor of repro­duc­tion in its total­ity” and by under­lin­ing “its cen­tral­ity with respect to pro­duc­tion and the mar­ket.” As she has con­tin­ued to assert, this begins with a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of one’s time.13

Inter­est­ingly, sit­u­ated upon this same imposed ter­rain were both the sub­jects and objects of a year-long research study regard­ing work and fam­ily, cul­mi­nat­ing in the pub­li­ca­tion of Le sexe du tra­vail: struc­tures famil­iales et sys­tème pro­duc­tif (Greno­ble: Presses Uni­ver­si­taires de Greno­ble, 1984). In an arti­cle for the jour­nal Primo Mag­gio, Del Re exam­ines this work with a favor­able view on their inves­ti­ga­tions, as women researchers, into the sex­ual and social divi­sions of labor. Trans­lated here, Del Re’s piece rep­re­sents in itself an evolv­ing vision of these divi­sions that does not, as she writes, “sig­nal a marginality.”

In “Women and Wel­fare,” Del Re ele­gantly states the impor­tance of the woman’s role as both sub­ject and object:

It is cru­cial, there­fore, that women’s lives – their exis­tence, their nature, as well as their activ­i­ties - become an inte­gral part of philo­soph­i­cal and intel­lec­tual dis­course, so that the acknowl­edg­ment of female sub­jec­tiv­ity, con­structed as it is in mul­ti­ple sym­bolic and mate­r­ial loci, can reveal the par­tial­ity of a vision of the world that even today is con­sid­ered uni­ver­sal.14

Like other projects of the work­erist move­ment, Primo Mag­gio as a pub­li­ca­tion reveals con­cep­tual lay­ers rang­ing from his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal record to schol­arly peri­od­i­cal to polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion. As Primo Mag­gio’s Ser­gio Bologna writes in his review of Steve Wright’s Storm­ing Heaven, the jour­nal focused on main­tain­ing a sub­ject posi­tion “within a net­work of ini­tia­tives of self organ­i­sa­tion at the level of polit­i­cal cul­ture and for­ma­tion ‘at the ser­vice of the move­ment.’”15 In an inter­view with Patrick Cun­ing­hame, Bologna describes Primo Mag­gio’s search for new method­olo­gies, in con­trast to the efforts at party orga­ni­za­tion by Negri and Autono­mia Orga­niz­zata:

Primo Mag­gio was not even a polit­i­cal elite. Rather, we had refused our role as a polit­i­cal elite to put our­selves instead in the role of that techno-scientific intel­li­gentsia which exca­vated within the dis­ci­plines. So, we wanted to exca­vate within the his­tor­i­cal dis­ci­plines to make his­tory in another way. You read Primo Mag­gio and it is not a polit­i­cal jour­nal, in the sense that it is a jour­nal … for the trans­for­ma­tion of his­tor­i­cal method­ol­ogy. In the sense of trans­for­ma­tion also of his­to­ri­o­graph­i­cal lan­guage which has an enor­mous impor­tance in polit­i­cal lan­guage.16

The idea of a “woman-science,” women (and sex­ual divi­sions of labor) as a topic of research by women researchers, is the prod­uct of this strat­egy, recon­struct­ing a sub­ject through its methodologies.

Anna Culbertson is a special collections librarian at San Diego State University, where she has taught courses on using primary sources to research feminism and gender roles.

• 1See Jacque­line Andall, “Abor­tion, pol­i­tics and gen­der in Italy,” Par­lia­men­tary Affairs 47:2 (1994).
• 2Lotta Con­tinua, in fact, aided in its own demise through its betrayal of female LC mil­i­tants by sab­o­tag­ing an abor­tion march in Rome in 1975. See espe­cially Red Notes’ Italy 1977-8: Liv­ing with an Earth­quake, chap­ter 19, and the Big Flame Women’s Group pam­phlet Fight­ing for Fem­i­nism: the ‘Women Ques­tion’ in an Ital­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Group.
• 3Sil­via Fed­erici, “Putting Fem­i­nism Back on its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338.
• 4Sil­via Fed­erici, Wages Against House­work (Bris­tol: Power of Women Col­lec­tive and Falling Wall Press, 1975), 2.
• 5Mari­arosa Dalla Costa, “The Door to the Gar­den: Fem­i­nism and Operaismo,” reprinted on libcom.org.
• 6Fed­erici, “Fem­nism,” 339.
• 7 “Inter­view with Alisa Del Re - 26th July 2000,” trans. Ari­anna Bove, Futuro ante­ri­ore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movi­menti glob­ali: ric­chezze e lim­iti dell’operaismo ital­iano (Rome: DeriveAp­prodi, 2002).
• 8“Inter­view with Alisa Del Re.”
• 9Fed­erici, “Fem­i­nism,” 340.
• 10Fed­erici, “Fem­i­nism,” 341
• 11 Alisa Del Re, “Women and Wel­fare: Where is Jocasta?” trans. Mau­r­izia Boscagli in Rad­i­cal Thought in Italy: A Poten­tial Pol­i­tics, eds. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, (Min­neapo­lis: U Minn. Press, 1996), 101-2.
• 12Del Re, “Women,” 108
• 13Del Re, “Women,” 110
• 14Del Re, “Women,” 101
• 15Ser­gio Bologna,“A Review of StormingHeaven: Class Com­po­si­tion and Strug­gle in Ital­ian Auton­o­mist Marx­ism,” Strate­gies: Jour­nal of The­ory, Cul­ture and Pol­i­tics, 16:2 (2003).
• 16Patrick Cun­ing­hame, “For an Analy­sis of Autono­mia: An Inter­view with Ser­gio Bologna.” Mex­ico City, June 1995.

From Primo Mag­gio, no. 23/24 (sum­mer 1985)1

“Should work, then, have a sex? Absurd ques­tion. Every­one knows it has existed only in the mas­cu­line [form], in sec­tors where activ­ity is car­ried out by men. No work else­where, and no women in work. What remains, of course, is to set­tle the ques­tion of a few mil­lion ‘actives’…”2 And so is intro­duced The Sex of Work (Famil­ial Struc­tures and the Sys­tem of Pro­duc­tion), pub. by PUG, 1984, by the authors them­selves: a large group of researchers who found them­selves over the course of the pre­vi­ous year in the most diverse spaces of debate: from the con­fer­ence Women and the Work­ing Class (Vin­cennes, Decem­ber 1978); to their days at the Société Française de Soci­olo­gie on The Famil­ial Insti­tu­tion and Women’s Work (Nantes, June 1980); to the con­fer­ence of the Cen­tre Lyon­nais d’Etudes Fémin­istes on Women and the Ques­tion of Work (Lyon, Decem­ber 1980); and finally to the research sem­i­nar of the Unité de Recherche et d’Etudes Soci­ologiques, Divi­sion sociale et sex­uelle du tra­vail, on Women’s Work, Paid Work, Domes­tic Work (1980-81-82), result­ing directly in the for­ma­tion of this group.

Draw­ing upon their own intel­lec­tual and exis­ten­tial resources, their own claims to both fem­i­nism and a suc­ces­sion of the most insti­tu­tional of ini­tia­tives, the group finally formed at the Tenth World Con­gress of Soci­ol­ogy (Mex­ico City, August 1982), express­ing the desire to pro­mote research cen­tered on the simul­ta­ne­ous analy­sis, for both men and women, of the sit­u­a­tion of work and fam­ily. This book rep­re­sents the bulk of the com­mu­ni­ca­tions pre­sented in Mex­ico City and con­sti­tutes a first tan­gi­ble, vis­i­ble step of the expe­ri­ence of the group, a moment in its life.

Women, researchers, fem­i­nists, in an insti­tu­tion­al­ized group with a research topic both pre­cise and iso­lated from the tra­di­tional sci­en­tific con­text, with the pal­pa­ble need to find new method­olo­gies, new avenues, of recon­struct­ing the sub­jects in their entire form, the same sub­jects that in tra­di­tional sci­ence become chopped, muti­lated, seen in quan­tity and with­out qual­ity. And this in “sci­ence,” to impose a new “sci­en­tific” point of view that con­cerns women and their work, the sex­u­al­ity of social rela­tions as an “exis­tent.” As a method, bring­ing sci­en­tists together from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines and dif­fer­ent “schools” (although here we limit our­selves to the social sci­ences) is noth­ing new: inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research in the human­i­ties has been fruit­ful in var­i­ous fields. But the nov­elty lies in the fact that it is the woman-subject that is study­ing the woman-object. And the effect this pro­duces is that it seems the very object of the research floods the lim­its tra­di­tion­ally imposed, reach­ing into cur­rent method­ol­ogy, find­ing itself within strict def­i­n­i­tions of use. The very def­i­n­i­tion of the field research requires dif­fer­ent means of approx­i­ma­tion, as if one were to turn on dif­fer­ent lights rather than just one to iden­tify the road ahead, the con­tours of the object to be stud­ied. And some­times it is right at the inter­sec­tion of two dis­tinct fields, in the area of exist­ing soci­o­log­i­cal frame­works, that the object of exam­i­na­tion is found. As Mar­tine Chau­dron says about her research, “The object – the social tra­jec­to­ries and the famil­iar strate­gies of repro­duc­tion, the one and the other sexed – has been con­structed on the inter­sec­tion of two fields, that of social mobil­ity and that of the fam­ily; it [the object] can’t exist soci­o­log­i­cally out­side of the prob­lem attempt­ing to artic­u­late and hold together the sex­ual and social divi­sions of work with social rela­tions of sex and class.”

And this per­ma­nent pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with iden­ti­fy­ing the rela­tions between the sexes as social rela­tions is impor­tant, in order to exit the fix­ity of roles, totally deter­mined and hier­ar­chi­cal: “That which is impor­tant in the notion of social rela­tions – defined by the antag­o­nism of social groups – is the dynamic that it introduces.”

The form that attempts this mode of stat­ing, of seek­ing, of point­ing towards a sex­u­al­iza­tion of social rela­tions that does not sig­nal a mar­gin­al­ity, but is in recog­ni­tion of an exist­ing injus­tice, to be changed, requires an adjust­ment to a new vision of real­ity, and to do this demands a dif­fi­cult but nec­es­sary inno­va­tion of tools. And then the inter­est to depart from tra­di­tional method­olo­gies that have always made the study of women subordinate.

For exam­ple, as well stated in the gen­eral intro­duc­tion: “The dom­i­nant dis­course on work con­tin­ues to func­tion as an implicit model: the male worker, nei­ther too young nor too old, light-skinned, clearly. In short, the ideal type! All the rest are not spec­i­fied. And so that the fam­ily remains the essen­tial start­ing point of analy­sis for the pro­fes­sional activ­ity of women; as if their work sit­u­a­tion results solely of the oblig­a­tion (real or sym­bolic, mate­r­ial or ide­o­log­i­cal) imposed upon them to take on the bulk of fam­ily respon­si­bil­i­ties.” “Mater­nity ren­ders sus­pect the pro­fes­sional qual­i­ties of women”: and then, to remove this sus­pi­cion, they must “act like a man,” or not have chil­dren socially. And this, only for women. Because how­ever the worker con­forms to the norms of work is as a non-parent. But the non-parent as an absolute, the priv­i­leged worker, is the father with a fam­ily to pro­vide for, but with­out the respon­si­bil­i­ties of a fam­ily. This bur­den is placed on the mother, so that it becomes non-compliant to the norm and – per­fectly squar­ing the cir­cle – jus­ti­fies her pro­fes­sional stag­na­tion, her non-career with the same motives by which it pro­motes “the man of the house.”

In eco­nom­ics, soci­ol­ogy and the other human­i­ties, the social infe­ri­or­ity of women is due to the mech­a­nisms of mar­gin­al­iza­tion suf­fered by this sec­tor of the pop­u­la­tion, most unarmed for the labor mar­ket. So women would con­sti­tute, as the young or the old, as immi­grants or the hand­i­capped, a mar­ginal group, non-competitive. In other words: because of their fam­ily respon­si­bil­i­ties, women face obsta­cles, and there­fore require assis­tance in order to be able to work, given the para­me­ters of work hours, vaca­tion time, and pensions.

Con­versely, when it comes to study­ing the work of men, there is no ref­er­ence to their mar­i­tal sta­tus, nor to the size of their fam­ily (num­ber of chil­dren, etc.), nor even to the pro­fes­sional activ­i­ties of their wives. Only women are enlisted to a fam­ily, only men to their posts in the work world; women are inac­tive and men are with­out fam­ily. So, a joint approach to the famil­ial struc­ture and the pro­duc­tive sys­tem that is not the super­im­po­si­tion of one sec­tor on the other is sought.

It is by the denun­ci­a­tion of the invis­i­bil­ity of domes­tic work in soci­o­log­i­cal and eco­nomic analy­ses that fem­i­nists have intro­duced a deci­sive break. The analy­sis of domes­tic work and rela­tions between the sexes has sig­ni­fied new approaches in respect to social rela­tions and women’s work. We no longer con­sider the study of rela­tions between the sexes as con­fined to the fam­ily, but rather, merge all the inter-dependencies between house­work and pro­fes­sional work.

And all of this within a con­stant: the crit­i­cal analy­sis of sci­ence con­sti­tutes the insuf­fi­ciency of the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines, their blind spots.

So these researchers con­test research (and meth­ods) based on the dis­tinc­tion between pro­duc­tive work and repro­duc­tive work, where the par­tic­i­pa­tion of women in “pro­duc­tive” work is not ana­lyzed as such, but as a par­tic­u­lar of a gen­eral, mas­cu­line model. And the over­tak­ing occurs in the simul­ta­ne­ous analy­sis of pro­duc­tion sys­tems and fam­ily struc­tures. The rejec­tion of the production/reproduction dichotomy, and, to its con­trary, the study of their inter­re­la­tions, nec­es­sar­ily impli­cates the accep­tance of key con­cepts, which I briefly define here from the text:

The con­cept of repro­duc­tion, used in the text in oppo­si­tion to pro­duc­tion. It’s not, then, treated in the clas­si­cal sense of social repro­duc­tion. Repro­duc­tion includes, apart from the pro­duc­tion of chil­dren and more broadly of indi­vid­u­als, a set of activ­i­ties, exclud­ing the activ­ity of the pro­duc­tion of com­modi­ties. From this per­spec­tive the analy­sis of the fam­ily is insep­a­ra­ble from the study of other insti­tu­tions that con­tribute to reproduction.

The con­cept of work: a term that, in the broader sense, takes into account as much pro­fes­sional activ­ity as that which is devel­oped in the domes­tic sphere. From this per­spec­tive it becomes nec­es­sary to renew the analy­sis of production.

The con­cept of fam­ily, as some­thing that is not a closed space con­cern­ing the pri­vate sphere. It is nec­es­sary, there­fore, to study it in terms of social rela­tions and not of the rules between the sexes, in terms of the divi­sions of work rather than the divi­sions of labor.

It is from these base con­cepts, these gen­eral agree­ments, that the itin­er­aries of each researcher become the heads of rams with which this group attempts to break down the social sci­ences build­ing, lit­tle by lit­tle, at dif­fer­ent lev­els. Already the crit­i­cal read­ing of the sta­tis­tics of social mobil­ity (gen­er­ally sexed in terms of the mas­cu­line model) is fur­ther enriched by qual­i­ta­tive meth­ods (sur­veys, inter­views, biogra­phies, genealo­gies) of iden­ti­fy­ing the social tra­jec­to­ries of men and women.

The simul­ta­ne­ous study of pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion nec­es­sar­ily involves the con­struc­tion of new ter­rains, cut­ting across tra­di­tional dis­ci­plines. And again, all of the more secure con­cepts should be recon­sid­ered: from, for exam­ple, the sex­ual divi­sion of work as a given, it is obvi­ous that the con­cept of the social divi­sion of work itself should be called into ques­tion. “To state, as we do, that work has a sex and that there­fore the divi­sion of work is also sexed, has effec­tively sub­ver­sive virtues”.

And it does not end with the book, because this group con­tin­ues to work together at an annual sem­i­nar (1984-85) called Production/Reproduction Work­shop (pre­sented at PIRTTEM). They con­tinue the hard work of research­ing, defin­ing a sub­ject, woman, at full length; of remov­ing the veil of invis­i­bil­ity, of renew­ing the ties between the vis­i­ble and the hid­den, between the impor­tant and the disregarded.

A short digres­sion: already many passes have been made in an attempt to untie the Gor­dian knot of the rela­tion­ship between pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion, for exam­ple by study­ing “in con­tin­uum” the two phe­nom­ena, thus defeat­ing the acqui­es­cent accep­tance of inequal­ity, attrib­uted to the nat­ural order of things.

Is it not pos­si­ble to ven­ture fur­ther? Why not attempt to estab­lish a com­pletely new method of inves­ti­ga­tion, that has repro­duc­tion as its epi­cen­ter, its qual­ity, in which com­modi­ties and their pro­duc­tion result in some sub­or­di­nate way, objects of an exter­nal strat­egy; and inside this grid inter­pret the strug­gles, find again the real sub­jects, inter­ests, the same recent his­tory of the devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal and of its insti­tu­tions? Is it too much to pro­pose a scale of val­ues, even in research, less sub­or­di­nated to the val­ues of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion (and I insist that it is already a lot to have even changed the com­po­si­tion of the field of inves­ti­ga­tion by inter­weav­ing the prob­lem of reproduction)?

A woman-science that artic­u­lates itself on (being directly from) an imposed and not cho­sen ter­rain, that is the ter­rain of repro­duc­tion – might that there­fore be a sub­or­di­nate science?

Two con­sid­er­a­tions:

Even though it has been imposed as a mode of dom­i­na­tion, even though it sub­sists as a form of exploita­tion, even though it has been deval­ued, unpaid, “nat­u­rally” attrib­uted to our sex, repro­duc­tion, in the broader sense of the word, is in real­ity the cen­tral axis of a world of val­ues to recon­sider, plac­ing them in the sub­or­di­nate, direct­ing all work for the pro­duc­tion of com­modi­ties. It may be a con­sid­er­a­tion of plain com­mon sense, but then plainly we speak of work time and free time, we speak of peace and ecol­ogy, from the old poor, we speak of the new poor, of unem­ploy­ment, of famine.

In the sec­ond place, if it is true of the world in which we live that this is not the case, that work for the sake of work­ing seems to be the only form of social and per­sonal real­iza­tion, and the mea­sure­ment of exist­ing passes through the mea­sure­ment of exis­tence or at least of earn­ing a wage, and, sub­se­quently, the amount of that wage (“Marx was right, but that doesn’t suit me – and then, until when?”), it is not clear why, exactly, in a time in which salaries have the ten­dency to shrink and work to dis­ap­pear, for both women and men, we can’t see a glimpse of a chance to change our point of view.

But I don’t want to cast aside other bud­ding ideas that need the soil of col­lec­tive debate to grow. In every case, the very exis­tence of this group of women-feminists-researchers, of a new rig­or­ous and effec­tive style, requires the assump­tion of a new point of view, mark­ing a point of no return.

All women, researchers, teach­ers, who work on a topic con­cern­ing women, and thus on an issue that directly con­cerns them, have often seen, at some time or another, their results affected by deri­sion, or else by invis­i­bil­ity. Already the fact of “try­ing to remain in touch with our sim­i­lar­i­ties in the world” (see Sot­toso­pra [Upside Down], More Women Than Men) “by weav­ing a web of pref­er­en­tial rela­tion­ships between women, where the expe­ri­ence asso­ci­ated with being a woman becomes stronger in mutual recog­ni­tion by invent­ing ways to trans­late it into social real­ity,” is a mode of exist­ing and cre­at­ing the strength to impose their own ideas. When, then, this also serves to invent new tools with which to under­stand and ana­lyze the real­ity that sur­rounds us, and from this per­haps the strength and courage to change it, we get the impres­sion that some­thing is mov­ing in the right direc­tion, that con­crete pos­si­bil­i­ties reopen.

—Trans­lated by Anna Culbertson

Alisa Del Re is associate professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Padova.

• 1I would like to thank Andrea Righi for his invalu­able advice; any errors in trans­la­tion are my sole respon­si­bil­ity. All notes are the translator’s.
• 2The authors of The Sex of Work use “actives” in this case to refer to the four out of ten work­ers that are women, and as such, are “lost” or not accounted for out­side of the domes­tic sphere. The eco­nomic term “active pop­u­la­tion” refers to all per­sons legally able to per­form work, and cor­re­sponds to a country’s labor supply.

How sur­pris­ing the events of May 1968 must have seemed to Michel Fou­cault is sug­gested by a remark made to his life-long part­ner Daniel Defert in Jan­u­ary of that year, fol­low­ing his nom­i­na­tion for a fac­ulty posi­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Paris Nan­terre. “Strange how these stu­dents speak of their rela­tions with profs in terms of class war.”1 Inter­pre­ta­tions of this remark will reveal a lot about one’s received image of the late philoso­pher. Among fig­ures of the New Left he had earned a rep­u­ta­tion as an anti-Marxist for dis­parag­ing pub­lic com­ments about Jean-Paul Sartre, and the appar­ent here­sies of Les mots et les choses (1966).2 A younger gen­er­a­tion of left-leaning intel­lec­tu­als, activists, and agi­ta­tors, exposed only to later por­traits of the rad­i­cal philoso­pher – the author of Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish (1974), mega­phone in hand, rub­bing shoul­ders with Sartre and other ultra-gauchistes at protests in the streets of Paris – will prob­a­bly find the con­fes­sion dis­con­cert­ing. Is it pos­si­ble that he was taken off guard by the polit­i­cal sparks that would set alight le mou­ve­ment du 22 mars? He did, after all, arrive in Paris post fes­tum, par­tic­i­pat­ing in some of the final ral­lies at the Sor­bonne in late June.

I pre­fer to read the remark as a know­ing reflec­tion on the pecu­liar­ity of priv­i­leged Nan­terre stu­dents, rep­re­sent­ing them­selves as some rev­o­lu­tion­ary pro­le­tar­ian sub­ject, locked in a bat­tle with their pro­fes­sors as though the lat­ter owned the means of pro­duc­tion. As if to draw out the con­se­quences of this con­tra­dic­tion, by 1969 Fou­cault began using the lan­guage of class strug­gle in polit­i­cal dis­cus­sions, and pub­licly declar­ing the “retour à Marx” as the spirit of his age.3 Foucault’s polit­i­cal makeover occurred among a group of Trot­sky­ist stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Tunis where he was teach­ing phi­los­o­phy in 1968. The young Tunisians inspired him to brush up on the clas­sics of his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ism from Marx’s own work to Rosa Lux­em­burg, in addi­tion to pop­u­lar fig­ures of the New Left, includ­ing Che Gue­vara and the Black Pan­thers.4 Reflect­ing back on this year of strikes, course sus­pen­sions, occu­pa­tions, arrests, impris­on­ments and tor­ture in Tunisia, Fou­cault admired the moral energy and exis­ten­tial charge of his stu­dents’ Marx­ist iden­ti­fi­ca­tion more than its rigor or pre­ci­sion. Revers­ing his ear­lier posi­tion on the his­tor­i­cal obso­les­cence of Marx, he had been con­vinced “that myth was nec­es­sary. A polit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy or a polit­i­cal per­cep­tion of the world, of human rela­tions and sit­u­a­tions was absolutely nec­es­sary to begin the strug­gle.”5

These remarks imme­di­ately recall Sorel, rather than Marx; how­ever, is it going too far to sug­gest that Fou­cault sought to cap­ture the polit­i­cal imag­i­nary of his day by spin­ning a new myth, an alter­nate “polit­i­cal per­cep­tion of the world” with his con­cep­tual unfold­ing of the term “power?”6 After all, Foucault’s key insight in this regard – power is pro­duc­tive rather than repres­sive; indi­vid­u­al­ity is itself the prod­uct of a his­tor­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion of power – is not some world-weary warn­ing about the ruse of his­tory. It is not to say that “power always wins.” In fact, it is a research agenda: try to his­tor­i­cally val­i­date the hypoth­e­sis accord­ing to which every­where power has crushed some­one in its gears, or men­aced peo­ple with guns and over­seers, it has done so pre­cisely because that indi­vid­ual or group pre­sented some essen­tial threat to the exer­cise of that power. The oppressed, Fou­cault argues, also make use of an immense “net­work of power.” They are not pas­sive vic­tims of a his­tor­i­cal process; in fact, power is his­tor­i­cally con­tin­gent. The resis­tance of the oppressed has shaped the present orga­ni­za­tion of power. Rev­o­lu­tion, accord­ing to this view, is a rare bird indeed.7

Such polit­i­cal reflec­tions may be cyn­i­cal, but they are not alto­gether for­eign from the Marx­ist polit­i­cal tra­di­tion of thought. For instance, some of the above for­mu­la­tions are remark­ably sim­i­lar to the lessons Ben­jamin gleans from the his­tory of the oppressed, includ­ing his idea of the “weak mes­sianic power” of rev­o­lu­tion­ary pos­si­bil­ity.2 Through­out Foucault’s career, he was atten­tive to the voices of the oppressed. His writ­ten work and its bib­li­o­graphic sources are scan­dalous pre­cisely to the extent that he gives less space to mas­ter thinkers – Ben­tham, Marx, Freud, Decartes, Smith, Machi­avelli, Rousseau – than to long-forgotten voices unearthed from volu­mi­nous time spent in libraries. These were also Marx and Benjamin’s pre­ferred meth­ods. Fou­cault fondly referred to it as the “warm freema­sonry of use­less eru­di­tion.” Although he immersed him­self in the heights of West­ern thought, he was far more likely to write a book about a late-19th cen­tury her­maph­ro­dite like Her­cu­line Barbin, than some more explicit expo­si­tion or com­men­tary on the thought which con­sti­tuted his ground. Detect­ing his intel­lec­tual influ­ences demands care­ful reading.

Given that Foucault’s par­tic­u­larstar rose at the start of the mass media age, dur­ing France’s trente glo­rieuses, it is pos­si­ble that he crafted ambiva­lent con­cepts and catch­phrases with pre­cisely this vastly expanded power of media out­lets in mind. It would be a mis­take to assume that he did not fore­see the dif­fi­cul­ties of phi­los­o­phiz­ing with a word that invokes the stuff of super­sti­tion. In stark con­trast to the Frank­furt School and Sit­u­a­tion­ist Inter­na­tional, Fou­cault refrained from crit­i­ciz­ing mass media tech­nolo­gies and con­sid­ered them as mostly neu­tral instru­ments, which broad­ened the field of dis­cur­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties. This was prob­a­bly due to the fact that he was able to nav­i­gate and manip­u­late this media appa­ra­tus so deftly as a pub­lic intel­lec­tual, fore­shad­ow­ing the rise of the much-loathed, television-ready nou­veau philosophe. How­ever, this too is a prin­ci­pled stance. Foucault’s method­ol­ogy resists divi­sions between “high” and “low” cul­tural forms: Ben­tham is just as likely to betray his era’s par­a­digm of pun­ish­ment as the plan for a Quaker prison in Penn­syl­va­nia or the mun­dane daily rou­tine from a prison in the French provinces. With Machi­avelli in mind, Fou­cault calls this “the local cyn­i­cism of power.”9

Foucault’s thought about power must first be sit­u­ated within his con­junc­ture and our own if we want to artic­u­late his con­cep­tual prob­lems and grasp their stakes. These con­tex­tual moves will help us unlearn the way his thought was received and recon­structed. To uncover the ratio­nal ker­nel of his sweep­ing his­tor­i­cal argu­ment will require de-emphasizing his descrip­tive lan­guage, which was often quite beau­ti­ful but has a ten­dency to dis­tract. He often rhetor­i­cally dis­tanced him­self from his own neol­o­gisms, treat­ing them as index­i­cal place­hold­ers for a thought rather than as rig­or­ous the­o­riza­tions. As a cipher for unlock­ing this admit­tedly par­tic­u­lar read­ing of Fou­cault, I offer a trans­la­tion of “Les mailles de pou­voir” – “The Mesh of Power” – which for rea­sons that still remain obscure is absent from all English-language edi­tions of Foucault’s “col­lected works.”

Orig­i­nally deliv­ered in two install­ments at the Fed­eral Uni­ver­sity of Bahia in 1976, Foucault’s words were recorded on cas­sette tapes, tran­scribed and pub­lished as a text, first appear­ing in Por­tugese, and trans­lated back into French for pub­li­ca­tion in Dits et écrits– now deliv­ered to you in Eng­lish, via the Inter­net. The “mesh” of a net of power, the size or gauge of its holes, is a par­tic­u­larly apt metaphor in the Inter­net age, res­onat­ing with these new kinds of cap­ture and slip­page.10 The trans­mis­sion of this pur­loined let­ter to you is itself the result of the devel­op­ment of tech­nolo­gies that have made it eas­ier to cir­cu­late what Fou­cault once termed dis­cours veridique, par­rhe­sia, or truth­ful speech. Indeed, Foucault’s work from the late 1970s reaches us like a tick­ing time bomb from some for­got­ten past, threat­en­ing to explode a whole set of assump­tions about the unity and dis­unity of his thought, reveal­ing new insights and limitations.

Sit­u­at­ing Foucault’s Intel­lec­tual Cri­sis and “The Mesh of Power”

The “polit­i­cal turn” of 1969 and the late “eth­i­cal turn” towards the “care of the self” are widely cited episodes in the intel­lec­tual his­tory of Fou­cault. This peri­odiza­tion pro­vides a neat tri­par­tite divi­sion of his work into early, mid­dle and late. In the sec­ondary lit­er­a­ture, these turns are noted, but their causes remain obscure. Few have attempted a rea­soned and well-argued recon­struc­tion of their sig­nif­i­cance, and most stud­ies of the sub­ject com­pen­sate for such lacu­nae with gos­sip and speculation.

These dif­fi­cul­ties have only been com­pounded by prob­lems of recep­tion. French his­to­rian François Cus­set con­sid­ers the “Amer­i­can adven­ture with French The­ory” to be a para­dox of com­par­a­tive intel­lec­tual his­tory; although “Der­rida, Fou­cault and Deleuze & co.” were embraced on this side of the Atlantic and pack­aged together “for what was seen as their anti-Marxism… they were banned from their home coun­try under the charges of a per­verse col­lu­sion with the worst of left­ist Marx­ism.”11

For var­i­ous rea­sons, the Amer­i­can recep­tion of Fou­cault emerged as the hege­monic one, and his con­cepts have crys­tal­lized into so many polit­i­cal ontolo­gies – “nor­ma­tiv­ity” in queer the­ory, “biopol­i­tics” and war in the works of Gior­gio Agam­ben, Michael Hardt and Anto­nio Negri – but none of these ontolo­gies responds to our political-economic hori­zon of low or no-growth cap­i­tal­ism and its impli­ca­tions for state power, social insti­tu­tions, and resis­tance strug­gles. Indeed, the period char­ac­ter­ized by bub­ble­nomics, osten­si­ble ero­sions of state sov­er­eignty and the dif­fuse resis­tance offered by alter-globo and anti-war mul­ti­tudes, which once gave these Fou­cauldian assess­ments of the con­junc­ture a cer­tain bite in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has now cap­sized into a sit­u­a­tion of eco­nomic melt­down, con­sol­i­da­tions of old-fashioned class power, sov­er­eign debt crises, uneven reasser­tions of Euro-American mil­i­tary might and emer­gent strug­gles over aus­ter­ity mea­sures in the US and Europe along­side pop­u­lar rebel­lions against author­i­tar­ian regimes in the Mid­dle East.

The Amer­i­can hey­day of French The­ory now appears like a blip on the radar between the eco­nomic down­turn, debt cri­sis, youth unem­ploy­ment and Mideast upris­ings of the 1970s, which was Foucault’s con­junc­ture, and the eco­nomic chain reac­tion set off by the Amer­i­can banks in 2008, polit­i­cal upheavals,youth unem­ploy­ment and Arab Spring which con­sti­tutes our own. His polit­i­cal thought from this ear­lier period of eco­nomic cri­sis – espe­cially his thought con­cern­ing neolib­er­al­ism as an emer­gent art of gov­ern­ment for man­ag­ing the cri­sis ten­den­cies of cap­i­tal – merit a care­ful reap­praisal in light of the present conjuncture.

Most cru­cially for a reassess­ment of Foucault’s thought, all of his pub­lic lec­tures at the Col­lège de France have now been published.These lessons, which had pre­vi­ously cir­cu­lated on boot­leg cas­settes within a lim­ited milieu of con­nois­seurs, have now become a pub­lic record of Foucault’s intel­lec­tual tra­jec­tory from 1971 to his death in 1984. Although his will stip­u­lated that there were to be “no posthu­mous pub­li­ca­tions” and Fou­cault admit­ted to being “aller­gic” to the record­ing devices clut­ter­ing his lectern, he under­stood their impor­tance: “word always gets out,” he affirms in a lec­ture from 1976.12 Indeed, with these pub­li­ca­tions, his lessons are no longer sub­ject to the dem­a­goguery and occul­ta­tion that so fre­quently accom­pa­nies arcana. The can­did form of the lec­tures reveals a remark­able tran­si­tional period from 1976 to 1979 in which Fou­cault expe­ri­enced a pro­found intel­lec­tual cri­sis and began a project of self-criticism, before turn­ing to the more eth­i­cal con­cerns that would char­ac­ter­ize his late period.

We may now be in the posi­tion to eval­u­ate the intel­lec­tual sig­nif­i­cance of this moment, and ven­ture a guess as to why the ever-prolific Fou­cault stopped pub­lish­ing from 1976 to 1983.13 Does the thought that emerges from this period of intel­lec­tual cri­sis and self-criticism bring into focus the insights and lim­i­ta­tions of Foucault’s ear­lier attempts to the­o­rize power?Does his empha­sis upon prob­lems of state­craft, his­tor­i­cal con­scious­ness, and polit­i­cal econ­omy dur­ing this period rep­re­sent a depar­ture from or a cul­mi­na­tion of his ear­lier stud­ies of the inter­nal phys­iog­nomy of insti­tu­tions such as the mil­i­tary, pris­ons, med­i­cine and psychiatry?

No mat­ter how many col­lege fresh­men have their minds blown by a vir­ginal voy­age through Foucault’s work, his prob­lem­atic and its famil­iar con­stel­la­tion of sexy neol­o­gisms, “biopol­i­tics,” “panop­ti­cism,” and “gov­ern­men­tal­ity,” not to men­tion the dark atmos­pher­ics of a finely-meshed “net­work of power” in which “there is no out­side,” have been in cir­cu­la­tion for nearly thirty-five years.These terms have accreted a mean­ing that can­not be found in the orig­i­nal copy. This lan­guage and its many polit­i­cal valances – lib­eral, anar­chist, rad­i­cal – has gone in and out of fash­ion. The vin­tage of most “The­ory peo­ple” can be ascer­tained from their pre­ferred (or loathed) Fou­cauldian jar­gon. Per­haps with some dis­tance from this period, we are now in a posi­tion to eval­u­ate his remark­able and oscil­lat­ing attempts to think pol­i­tics with­out recourse to bour­geois con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions of the state, law or rights.His old ene­mies – psy­chi­a­try, uni­ver­si­ties, pris­ons, human­ism, rights dis­course, and the remorse­less com­pul­sion to give an account of one’s sex­u­al­ity – have con­tin­ued to pro­lif­er­ate and expand along­side the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of his analy­ses of them.This para­dox­i­cal sit­u­a­tion arouses the sus­pi­cion that these insti­tu­tions of power are not threat­ened by the attempt to reawaken the his­tor­i­cal mem­ory of their entry into the world, drip­ping with blood and dirt.In the absence of the social move­ments that once con­tested these insti­tu­tions, Foucault’s his­tor­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion up through the mid 1970s risks becom­ing a con­fessed cri­tique, an advanced kind of agi­ta­tion and pro­pa­ganda for a strug­gle that expe­ri­enced defeat and pyrrhic victories.

This con­clu­sion may be pre­ma­ture, but Fou­cault admit­ted as much around the time that he deliv­ered “Mesh of Power” to rad­i­cal stu­dents in Brazil. While edit­ing the final proofs of His­tory of Sex­u­al­ity, vol­ume 1, Fou­cault pub­licly pro­fessed to his audi­tors, as stu­dents are called at the Col­lège de France, that he was suf­fer­ing some­thing of an intel­lec­tual cri­sis. In his first lec­ture of 1976, Fou­cault begins the course by ques­tion­ing both the rel­e­vance and coher­ence of his intel­lec­tual project. He wor­ries that his research agenda “had no con­ti­nu­ity” and was “always falling into the same rut, the same themes, the same con­cepts,” ulti­mately fear­ing that “it’s all lead­ing us nowhere.” Char­ac­ter­iz­ing his genealog­i­cal method as an “insur­rec­tion of knowl­edges” against “sci­en­tific dis­course embod­ied in the Uni­ver­sity” – and here the attack on his old men­tor, Louis Althusser, is barely con­cealed – Fou­cault con­fronts the his­toric­ity of his own thought and the shift­ing cul­tural sta­tus of both the Uni­ver­sity and Marx­ism in France. He states that his work “was quite in keep­ing with a cer­tain period; with the very lim­ited period we have been liv­ing through for the last ten or fif­teen years.” A cer­tain num­ber of “changes in the con­junc­ture” sug­gest to him that “per­haps the bat­tle no longer looks quite the same.”14

Such sober assess­ments give one pause. Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish had just been pub­lished the pre­vi­ous year to great acclaim fol­low­ing an intense period of activism around pris­ons in France. The activ­i­ties of the Prison Infor­ma­tion Group (Groupe d’information sur les pris­ons, GIP) brought about suc­cess­ful reforms of France’s sen­tenc­ing prac­tices and penal sys­tem by foment­ing an unprece­dented wave of prison strikes, forc­ing the appa­ra­tus to become more open and trans­par­ent. In autumn of 1971, twenty pris­ons across France simul­ta­ne­ously exploded into open revolt against their cages and masters.

The suc­cess of the GIP was due in large part to the fact that many of its agi­ta­tors had them­selves been impris­oned for polit­i­cal activ­i­ties – thus the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary activ­ity by the French state wound up politi­ciz­ing crime.15 In a curi­ously Maoist adap­ta­tion of the tra­di­tion of worker’s inquiries, the GIP smug­gled sur­veys to pris­on­ers to dis­cover weak points in the sys­tem and find out what demands they would make for their reform or abo­li­tion. Pris­on­ers forced anal­o­gous reforms in the US, due to the resis­tance and lit­i­ga­tion of mem­bers of the Nation of Islam who estab­lished an unprece­dented jurispru­dence per­tain­ing to prisoner’s rights in the 1970s.16 Dur­ing this era, French pris­ons per­mit­ted no vis­i­tors, unlike Amer­i­can pris­ons, and remained some­thing of an infor­ma­tion black hole. Fou­cault first vis­ited a prison while in the US; he toured the Attica Cor­rec­tional Facil­ity fol­low­ing its upris­ing and repression.

Due to his grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity, Foucault’s pub­lic lec­tures had become so uncom­fort­able and over-crowded as to per­mit lit­tle exchange or con­tact with students.Politically, the heady days of post-68 French ultra-gauchisme and “new social move­ments” had begun to wane. The milieu with whom Fou­cault had orga­nized and demon­strated in the early sev­en­ties began to dis­solve. Some of these Maoist com­rades became the nou­veaux philosophes, celebrity aca­d­e­mics pre­oc­cu­pied with total­i­tar­i­an­ism or the­o­log­i­cal con­cerns, cit­ing Fou­cault him­self as their inspi­ra­tion. The Stal­in­ized Marx­ism of the French Com­mu­nist Party (Par­tie com­mu­niste française, PCF) had also begun to decom­pose. The PCF had entered an alliance with François Mitterand’s new Social­ist Party, (Par­tie social­iste, PS), sign­ing a com­mon pro­gramme in 1973. The PCF aban­doned all ref­er­ences to the “dic­ta­tor­ship of the pro­le­tariat” and was forced to reeval­u­ate the legacy of Lenin dur­ing the 1976 firestorm sur­round­ing the French pub­li­ca­tion of Alek­sandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Arch­i­pel­ago, which detailed the abuses of the Soviet Union’s forced labor system.The alliance between the PCF and PS would pro­pel Mit­ter­rand into the pres­i­dency in 1981.All of this amounted to a tec­tonic shift in the intel­lec­tual and polit­i­cal ter­rain of the post-68 Left in France.

The con­junc­ture com­ing to a close in the mid-1970s had opened with the Alger­ian War of Inde­pen­dence in 1954, which did more to negate than con­struct a field of pol­i­tics and intel­lec­tual activ­ity in France – Sartre, de Beau­voir and Les temps mod­ernes were excep­tions in this regard. Reports of the bru­tal­ity and tor­ture of the gen­darmes were a major blow to the tra­di­tion of la République and its sup­pos­edly uni­ver­sal val­ues.17 Fol­low­ing the 1957 Bat­tle of Algiers, 1958 coup d’etat and mil­i­tary junta in Alge­ria, the col­lapse of the Fourth Repub­lic, and Charles de Gaulle’s return to the head of a much strength­ened exec­u­tive power, the non-Communist left was argu­ing that the Com­mu­nist and Social­ist par­ties had failed to use their moral and polit­i­cal high ground fol­low­ing the resis­tance to Nazi occu­pa­tion to estab­lish a clear direc­tion and pro­gram. Accord­ing to this view, they no longer rep­re­sented the his­tor­i­cal inter­ests or con­scious­ness of the French work­ing class. Cit­ing the aston­ish­ingly low union mem­ber­ship in France and the wild­cat strikes of ‘53 and ‘55, André Gia­cometti writes that “[t]he bulk of the work­ers is unor­ga­nized, and the real life of the working-class takes place out­side of their scope.”18 Spon­tane­ity was, in keep­ing with long-standing polit­i­cal legacy of French rad­i­cal­ism, still the nation’s only rev­o­lu­tion­ary hope. Sartre and other mem­bers of the non-Communist left saw the party’s sup­port of the Soviet Union’s inter­ven­tion in Hun­gary and the party’s tacit endorse­ment of the Alger­ian War as evi­dence of either a con­ser­v­a­tive turn in the tra­di­tional French work­ing class or a reformist and inte­gra­tionist turn of its offi­cial polit­i­cal organs, or both. Many intel­lec­tu­als of the non-Communist left no longer con­sid­ered “the Party” to be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary sub­ject. In this regard, Althusser was the exception.

The rapid expan­sion of the uni­ver­sity sys­tem dur­ing the post­war eco­nomic and demo­graphic boom, along with oppo­si­tion to the Viet­nam War, had estab­lished a new polit­i­cal actor that would become essen­tial to the strug­gle in 1968: youth in gen­eral, and stu­dents in par­tic­u­lar. An increas­ingly edu­cated pop­u­la­tion cre­ated an his­tor­i­cally unprece­dented mar­ket for cul­tural jour­nal­ism, which lent non-party intel­lec­tu­als greater power and influence.The non-party Marx­ist tra­di­tion in France, as rep­re­sented by the work of Social­isme ou Bar­barie and the Sit­u­a­tion­ist Inter­na­tional, had reached the con­clu­sion that rev­o­lu­tion­ary agi­ta­tion would have to out­flank estab­lished unions and par­ties if it was to gal­va­nize the population.

Decol­o­niza­tion strug­gles and polit­i­cal break­throughs in the Third World, above all China and Cuba, led to sig­nif­i­cant revi­sions of the the­ory of revolution.Regis Debray pub­lished Rev­o­lu­tion in the Rev­o­lu­tion in 1967, propos­ing foquismo– a viral the­ory of how an armed rev­o­lu­tion­ary van­guard could dis­trib­ute hotbeds of dis­con­tent through­out a pop­u­la­tion, foment­ing a gen­eral fever of insur­rec­tion – based on the Che Guevara’s expe­ri­ence of guer­rilla war­fare dur­ing the 1959 Cuban Rev­o­lu­tion. Beneath the ban­ner of a “rev­o­lu­tion in every­day life” and a renewed empha­sis upon the con­cept of alien­ation, Marx­ism became a the­o­ret­i­cal home for new social move­ments. The events of May 1968 dove­tailed these already exist­ing polit­i­cal currents.

After May-June 1968, the rev­o­lu­tion was no longer con­sid­ered a mat­ter of con­test­ing the own­er­ship of the means of pro­duc­tion alone. State-managed cap­i­tal­ism was not a solu­tion to the social prob­lems iden­ti­fied by the new rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. The divi­sion of labor, and espe­cially the author­ity struc­ture of man­agers, union bosses, inspec­tors, and func­tionar­ies in place to keep work­ers in line had to be contested.

In the pages of Les temps mod­ernes, Andre Gorz inter­preted May ‘68 as demon­strat­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary hori­zon in West­ern Europe, and blamed its fail­ure on the PCF and CGT. Les temps mod­ernes under­took an explicit cri­tique of Lenin­ism from 1969 to 1971 and attacked insti­tu­tions from a rad­i­cal demo­c­ra­tic per­spec­tive, exhort­ing its read­ers to “destroy the Uni­ver­sity” as part of the strug­gle against the divi­sion of labor. Not only the abode of pro­duc­tion, but also those super­struc­tural appa­ra­tuses that repro­duce racial and class divi­sions, cre­ate divi­sions of labor, sup­port tra­di­tional roles for women, and prop up citizen/non-citizen dis­tinc­tions had to be assaulted.19

The extra-parliamentary pol­i­tics of the extreme Left of this period were announced by the 1969 text Vers la guerre civile (Towards Civil War), by indi­vid­u­als who would later found the Gauche pro­lé­tari­enne. May ‘68 had, accord­ing to this view, “placed rev­o­lu­tion and class strug­gle at the cen­ter of every strat­egy. With­out play­ing the role of prophet: Rev­o­lu­tion is France’s hori­zon from ‘70 to ’72”; the con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­ity for such a strug­gle were iden­ti­fied as the “the pro­le­tar­i­an­iza­tion of the mass move­ment.”20 Vers la guerre civile empha­sizes the exem­plary use of ille­gal direct action, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial of the lumpen­pro­le­tariat, and the strate­gic impor­tance of the divi­sion of labor for the main­te­nance of dis­ci­pline and hier­ar­chy. Armed strug­gle is invoked as the rad­i­cal legacy of the French work­ing class’s resis­tance to Nazi occu­pa­tion.21

The text pro­vided a pro­gramme for the Gauche pro­lé­tari­enne (Pro­le­tar­ian Left, 1968-1973) which was con­sid­ered “a greater threat to state secu­rity than any other left-wing group” by the head of the renseigne­ments généraux (Gen­eral Intel­li­gence).22 With grou­pus­cules scat­tered through­out France, theirs was a pol­i­tics that com­bined vol­un­tarism, rad­i­cal democ­racy and spon­tane­ity. The new fig­ures of this rev­o­lu­tion were the immi­grant worker, ouvrier spé­cial­isé, and prison inmate. Impris­on­ment, state repres­sion, and union bureau­cra­cies were the forces that had, in the ter­mi­nol­ogy of this group­ing, “pro­le­tar­i­an­ized” the mass move­ment. The French state banned the sale of Gauche pro­lé­tari­enne’s broad­sheets in pub­lic spaces, which led to an engage­ment with intel­lec­tu­als of the non-communist left. Daniel Defert joined and invited Fou­cault to par­tic­i­pate in this group’s activ­i­ties. Sartre, Simone de Beau­voir, Fou­cault and other pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als were asked to con­tinue dis­tri­b­u­tion of the broad­sheets on the assump­tion that the Repub­lic would not arrest its lumières. Indeed, dis­tri­b­u­tion con­tin­ued unmo­lested. Foucault’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gauche pro­lé­tari­enne even­tu­ally resulted in the found­ing of the Prison Infor­ma­tion Group.

As his­tory would have it, the warm after­glow of May ’68 in France turned out to be “a still­born rev­o­lu­tion – what should have been the turn­ing point of its mod­ern his­tory that, as in 1848, failed to turn.”23 Reflect­ing on this period with his char­ac­ter­is­tic wit, Foucault’s 1976 course hinges on an inver­sion of Clauswitz’s famous apho­rism that war is pol­i­tics con­tin­ued through other means, by trac­ing the geneal­ogy of the view that “pol­i­tics is a con­tin­u­a­tion of war by other means.”Although the theme imme­di­ately recalls the pre­vail­ing polit­i­cal lan­guage of a period of extreme left mil­i­tancy, Fou­cault has deeper philo­soph­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal prob­lems in mind. In the dis­courses of the 17th and 18th cen­tury aris­toc­racy and rev­o­lu­tion­ary bour­geoisie, he attempts to track the entry of race and class war into his­tor­i­cal reflec­tion, artic­u­lat­ing the cen­tral para­dox of the “the­ory of right” within which mod­ern polit­i­cal strug­gles from the French Rev­o­lu­tion to con­tem­po­rary human rights dis­course become intel­li­gi­ble. Rights talk always appeals to an imag­i­nary his­tory of ancient priv­i­leges which, Fou­cault sug­gests, erect a whole series of dis­tinc­tively mod­ern polit­i­cal oppo­si­tions between the indi­vid­ual and society.

His­tor­i­cal thought is thus polit­i­cally use­ful to strug­gles over gov­ern­men­tal pri­or­i­ties and rec­i­p­ro­cal oblig­a­tions only to the extent that it empha­sizes one of two dis­cur­sive par­a­digms. On the one hand, the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of pol­i­tics as war priv­i­leges the moment of strug­gle, the moment of dom­i­na­tion: “what is being put for­ward as a prin­ci­ple for the inter­pre­ta­tion of soci­ety and its vis­i­ble order is the con­fu­sion of vio­lence, pas­sions, hatreds, rages, resent­ments, and bit­ter­ness.”24 On the other hand, one may priv­i­lege the moment of uni­ver­sal­ity and peace, the found­ing of cities and laws, accord­ing to which all his­tory would be noth­ing other than praise of Rome. Fou­cault con­sid­ers these to be the reac­tionary and lib­eral dis­courses of his­tory – here “reac­tionary” in the strict sense of reac­tion to an ascen­dant bour­geois lib­er­al­ism – reach­ing their high­est philo­soph­i­cal artic­u­la­tions in Hegel and Kant respec­tively, a strug­gle for recog­ni­tion or per­pet­ual peace.25 This dilemma and its bloody 20th cen­tury his­tory of national con­flict and state racism is, accord­ing to Fou­cault, the reef upon which the con­cept of power as dom­i­na­tion, repres­sion, and war comes to grief.

Thus, Fou­cault returns to pre-Marxist the­o­rists of class strug­gle – the Dig­gers, Henri de Boul­lainvil­liers and Abbé Siyès – to show that the rhetoric of class war has cer­tain genealog­i­cal affini­ties with pre-scientific and aris­to­cratic the­o­ries of race. The later crys­tal­liza­tion of sci­en­tific the­o­ries of race also have, as their imme­di­ate antecedent, cer­tain 19th cen­tury pseudo-scientific racial­iza­tions of lower classes.26 Instead of a “war-repression schema” Fou­cault calls for a the­ory of polit­i­cal power as essen­tially “pro­duc­tive,” that is as a set of tech­niques for reg­u­lat­ing human pop­u­la­tions and mak­ing bod­ily com­port­ment more effi­cient. The lec­tures from 1976 cul­mi­nate in an analy­sis of the con­cen­tra­tion camps of Nazi Ger­many and the forced labor sys­tem of the USSR as pro­duc­tive deploy­ments of the power to man­age pop­u­la­tions. It is an attempt to demon­strate the con­ti­nu­ity of these pol­i­tics with those of the Enlight­en­ment project: what estab­lishes their com­mon ground and pro­vides a grid of intel­li­gi­bil­ity for this his­tory is not, as in the Frank­furt School, the “ratio­nal irra­tional­ity” of cap­i­tal­ism; it is rather the phe­nom­e­non of pop­u­la­tion, as the liv­ing sub­stra­tum of cap­i­tal accu­mu­la­tion and mod­ern polit­i­cal power.

After a year-long sab­bat­i­cal in 1977, dur­ing which time Bernard-HenriLévy and Andre Glucks­mann take to the air­waves and tele­vi­sion screens pro­mot­ing their books La bar­barie à vis­age humain (Bar­barism with a Human Face, 1977) and Les maîtres penseurs (The Mas­ter Thinkers, 1977) with totalitarianism-mongering, Foucault’s lec­tures change course. This is also the year of Foucault’s reportage on the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. He becomes increas­ingly cir­cum­spect regard­ing his ear­lier descrip­tive lan­guage. He explic­itly aban­dons his claim that ours is a “dis­ci­pli­nary soci­ety” in 1978, argu­ing that power now oper­ates through more sub­tle lib­eral tech­niques pro­mot­ing free­dom of var­i­ous kinds.27 He aban­dons the words “biopol­i­tics” and “biopower” after the 1979 course, and con­cludes that they were noth­ing other than an attempt to grasp “‘lib­er­al­ism’… as a prin­ci­ple and method of the ratio­nal­iza­tion of the exer­cise of gov­ern­ment, a ratio­nal­iza­tion which obeys – and this is what is spe­cific about it – the inter­nal rule of max­i­mum econ­omy.”28 Per­haps after cul­tural rev­o­lu­tion and de-industrialization, the fac­tory dis­ci­pline no longer pro­vided the blue­print for power in advanced cap­i­tal­ist societies.

Future French edi­tions of Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish will qui­etly remove the phrase “carceral arch­i­pel­ago,” no doubt because Fou­cault wished to dis­tance him­self from the gulag­ism of Glucks­mann and Lévy. His lec­tures turn to an account of the his­tor­i­cal emer­gence of the con­cept of rai­son d’état and polit­i­cal eco­nomic thought as prac­ti­cal and reflec­tive schemas for the “art of gov­ern­ment” in the 17th and 18th cen­turies. He returns to the clas­sics of polit­i­cal econ­omy in order to make a remark­able analy­sis of Quesnay’s Tableau économique, the tran­si­tion from feu­dal­ism to cap­i­tal­ism, and the birth of neolib­er­al­ism. At times he seems to address him­self directly to the nou­veaux philosophes, con­fronting a car­i­ca­ture of his own thought on “secu­rity”: he crit­i­cizes right- and left-wing “state pho­bia” as elid­ing, “thanks to some play on words,” the dif­fer­ence between social secu­rity and con­cen­tra­tion camps; “the req­ui­site speci­ficity of analy­sis is diluted.”29 The lec­tures then veer into an analy­sis of the var­i­ous regimes of truth-telling among the early Chris­t­ian desert fathers and con­clude with an analy­sis of the prac­tice of Par­rhe­sia among the ancient Greeks, before Foucault’s project and life are sud­denly cut short by AIDS in 1984. The above intel­lec­tual his­tory sug­gests that, fol­low­ing his intel­lec­tual cri­sis and the clo­sure of cer­tain polit­i­cal hori­zons in France, Fou­cault refused to pro­vide a uni­fied polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and turned to more explic­itly “Marx­ist” themes when Marx­ism was being equated with bar­barism and had became unfash­ion­able for pub­lic intellectuals.

Foucault’s Con­cept of Power and its Rela­tion to Marx

In the wake of the May ’68 upris­ing, the French ultra-left attempted to cir­cum­vent the Com­mu­nist Party as the vehi­cle for the trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety, and sought to dis­place the state-capital nexus of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal the­ory by propos­ing a rad­i­cally expan­sive rev­o­lu­tion­ary sub­ject. Foucault’s thought from the early 1970s attempts to cap­ture these dis­parate and con­tra­dic­tory polit­i­cal cur­rents with a con­cept of pou­voir, or “power,” which he claims to have devel­oped out of the work of Ben­tham and Marx. This “power” posits the bio­log­i­cal and social phe­nom­e­non of pop­u­la­tion and the phys­i­cal move­ments of the human body not only as the eco­nomic sub­strate of pro­duc­tion, but also the polit­i­cal ground of con­tention and neu­tral­iza­tion. These kinds of knowl­edge, or gen­eral intel­lect – inter­ven­tions in the col­lec­tive social and bio­log­i­cal metab­o­lism, a New­ton­ian ana­lyt­ics of bod­ily com­port­ment, move­ment and habi­tus – make pos­si­ble wholly unprece­dented kinds of polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion, new forms of social engi­neer­ing and con­trol, that cre­ate a pro­duc­tive machine out of human mul­ti­plic­ity, a mul­ti­plic­ity pre­vi­ously wasted by polit­i­cal power.30 Fou­cault is try­ing to think about how a mod­ern polit­i­cal field, dif­fer­ent from abso­lutism, forms, takes shape, and allows for cap­i­tal accu­mu­la­tion to take place, while under­cut­ting worker mil­i­tancy by pro­vid­ing the pro­le­tariat with “secu­rity” (Polizewis­senschaft) – i.e., mod­est reforms that increase life expectancy, encour­age fam­ily life, and so on. This thought implies that Marx aban­doned the clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­o­mists’ for­mu­la­tions of the prob­lem of pop­u­la­tion, only to redis­cover the phe­nom­e­non of pop­u­la­tion as class strug­gle and labor-power.Although this political-economic con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of “power” responds to Foucault’s par­tic­u­lar con­junc­ture of renewed inter­est in Marx, and the demand made by new social move­ments for a more expan­sive model of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sub­ject, it is not reducible to such.

By con­ceiv­ing of a prop­erly cap­i­tal­ist polit­i­cal moder­nity in terms of the pro­duc­tive man­age­ment of human pop­u­la­tions and bod­ies, Fou­cault strate­gi­cally returns to Marx in order to short cir­cuit the ten­dency of bour­geois thought – and of many Marx­ists, for that mat­ter! – to reify the “state appa­ra­tus” by con­ceiv­ing of power in vul­gar terms of prop­erty own­er­ship, seizure of prop­erty and alienation.This is, accord­ing to Fou­cault, a pro­foundly anthro­po­mor­phic con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the polit­i­cal field. Polit­i­cal power ulti­mately appears as a con­spir­acy of inter­ests which receive rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the state appa­ra­tus; whereas power actu­ally resides in the coor­di­na­tion, cir­cu­la­tion, and pro­duc­tive employ­ment of a mul­ti­plic­ity of forces with­out any “mas­ter plan” or inventor.The gov­ern­ment of these forces is not pro­vided by some cen­tral com­mit­tee of the rul­ing class; it is pro­vided by a non-subjective inten­tion­al­ity or abstract com­pul­sion – the prin­ci­ple of “max­i­mum econ­omy,” the com­pul­sion to work for some­one else to repro­duce your life – which pro­vides the polit­i­cal field with a for­mal unity and prin­ci­pal of intelligibility.

Fou­cault also returns to Marx in order to neu­tral­ize the ten­dency of many fel­low trav­el­ers on the Left to con­ceive of power in terms of sup­pres­sion, which Fou­cault con­sid­ered the polit­i­cal par­a­digm of an early mod­ern tran­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism. He held that both ten­den­cies of thought – power as own­er­ship, power as sup­pres­sion – ulti­mately affirmed the lib­eral model of soci­ety accord­ing to which “soci­ety is rep­re­sented as a con­trac­tual asso­ci­a­tion of iso­lated juridi­cal sub­jects.” To claim such posi­tions for Marx is to aban­don his cri­tique of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy and merely “re-subscribes us to the bour­geois the­ory of power.” In the polem­i­cal judge­ment pro­nounced in “Mesh of Power,” these alter­nate con­cep­tions of power “Rousseauify Marx,” as if the social form of cap­i­tal­ism were some contract-based free-association of indi­vid­u­als air-dropped from the heav­ens, for­ever abol­ish­ing man’s more per­fect nat­ural state.According to Fou­cault: “The indi­vid­ual is no doubt the fic­ti­tious atom of an ‘ide­o­log­i­cal’ rep­re­sen­ta­tion of soci­ety; but he is also a real­ity fab­ri­cated by this spe­cific tech­nol­ogy of power that I have called ‘dis­ci­pline.’”31

The above pas­sage imme­di­ately recalls Marx’s lan­guage from the intro­duc­tion to Grun­drisse.32 Fou­cault is attempt­ing to trace the geneal­ogy of a social form in which com­mod­ity rela­tions pre­dom­i­nate by grasp­ing the his­tor­i­cal speci­ficity of the iso­lated indi­vid­u­als of exchange. This trans­for­ma­tion is not the inevitable out­come of the tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment of the forces of pro­duc­tion. Instead, the moment of tran­si­tion has to be under­stood as a con­tin­gent out­come of a new form of pol­i­tics, which Fou­cault calls, again fol­low­ing Marx, “dis­ci­pline.” The rel­e­vant pas­sages in Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish explic­itly cite Marx’s dis­cus­sion of “coop­er­a­tion” in Cap­i­tal, vol­ume 1, and his exchanges with Engels about the ori­gins of fac­tory dis­ci­pline in mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline. Fou­cault asks how a trib­u­tary sov­er­eign power to levy a tax – on pro­duce, blood, trade, etc. – tran­si­tions to a pro­duc­tive eco­nomic power gen­er­a­tive of sur­plus. The thread of this thought about the ori­gins of cap­i­tal­ism proper – rather than the ori­gins of mere mar­ket exchange – and its care­ful play on Marx­ist lan­guage can be fol­lowed through all of Foucault’s pub­lished works, though his cita­tions and insin­u­a­tions are rarely as obvi­ous as they appear in “Mesh of Power” or Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish.

Pre­sented very schemat­i­cally, consider:

1. His analy­ses of the con­fine­ment of pau­pers and the mad in the same work­houses inMad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion (1961).

2.His con­cern for the pas­sage from an analy­sis of wealth to polit­i­cal econ­omy in The Order of Things.

3. His analy­sis of the impor­tance of dis­ci­pline in the devel­op­ment of the forces of pro­duc­tion in Dis­ci­pline and Pun­ish.33

4. His asser­tion that human life is the real mate­r­ial sub­strate of an expand­ing and pro­duc­tive deploy­ment of polit­i­cal power in The His­tory of Sex­u­al­ity(1976).

5. His very explicit analy­ses of Phys­io­cratic thought and the tran­si­tion from feu­dal­ism to cap­i­tal­ism in Secu­rity, Ter­ri­tory, Pop­u­la­tion (1978).

6. Finally, his pre­sen­ta­tion of the prob­lem of the polit­i­cal sub­ject of neolib­er­al­ism, ver­sus that of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy in The Birth of Biopol­i­tics (1979).

These are not merely inci­den­tal pas­sages or asides. They are in fact quite cru­cial to under­stand­ing Foucault’s cen­tral his­tor­i­cal claims; each of them returns us to Marx.

Per­haps gen­er­ous minds will grant that Fou­cault was a care­ful reader of Marx, a scholar who appre­ci­ated the latter’s enor­mously sig­nif­i­cant his­tor­i­cal account of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion. But what would it mean to argue that Foucault’s thought expresses some essen­tial under­ly­ing polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tual affin­ity for Marx’s project – one pos­si­bly even deserv­ing of the moniker “Marx­ist”? There are many dan­gers to this kind of inter­pre­ta­tion. It must be atten­tive to Foucault’s strong polit­i­cal cyn­i­cism. It requires a full recon­struc­tion of Marx’s thought as well as Foucault’s, and there is no space for that dis­cus­sion here. But this read­ing strat­egy faces other objec­tions as well, con­sid­er­ing his well known cri­tique of the author-function. Wouldn’t call­ing his thought “Marx­ist,” even grant­ing a bit of iron­i­cal dis­tance from such a claim, be to engage in what Jacques Lacan termed “Uni­ver­sity Dis­course,” the use of proper nouns, a chain of sig­ni­fiers in place of actual thought or truth?34

Such an oper­a­tion may be jus­ti­fi­able in Foucault’s own terms. Fou­cault makes the case in “What is an Author?” that cer­tain founders of dis­course, such as Marx and Freud, open up entirely new fields of inquiry, explod­ing the lim­its of what is sayable. Fou­cault con­sid­ers their thought to be infi­nitely pro­duc­tive. New appli­ca­tions and trans­for­ma­tions of such thought have the qual­ity of “reac­ti­va­tions,” for the philoso­pher avails him­self of a new zeit­geist only in order to clear the cob­webs away from old prob­lems.35 Such claims are close to Sartre’s argu­ment in the intro­duc­tion to Cri­tique of Dialec­ti­cal Rea­son that Marx is the untran­scend­able hori­zon of our thought.

The wager of the fol­low­ing is that it is pre­cisely in the spirit of a reac­ti­va­tion of Marx – rather than a faith­ful recita­tion of a dead let­ter, or some more thor­ough crit­i­cal recon­struc­tion – that Fou­cault pur­sued his his­tor­i­cal analy­ses of power. Foucault’s result­ing body of work is a tes­ta­ment to just how fruit­ful or fruit­less such an approach may be. Ulti­mately, we must admit the pos­si­bil­ity that his glib dis­missals of Marx were face­tious. To admit this pos­si­bil­ity is to sug­gest that, by mis­un­der­stand­ing or reject­ing Fou­cault, self-professed Marx­ists are tak­ing the bait. They risk demon­strat­ing that they haven’t under­stood some­thing essen­tial in their master’s discourse.

Although Fou­cault was under no illu­sion that he had sup­planted Marx, he may have con­sid­ered him­self an inher­i­tor of Marx’s project. I quote his words on the sub­ject from a 1978 inter­view with a Japan­ese Marx­ist at length and with­out comment:

So long as we con­sider Marx­ism to be a unity [ensem­ble] of the forms of appear­ance of power con­nected, in one way or another, to the words of Marx [la parole de Marx], then to sys­tem­at­i­cally exam­ine each and every one of these forms of appear­ance is the least that a man liv­ing in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury could do. Even today we are pas­sively, scorn­fully, fear­fully and inter­est­edly sub­mit­ting to this power, whereas it’s nec­es­sary to com­pletely lib­er­ate our­selves from it. This must be sys­tem­at­i­cally exam­ined with the gen­uine sen­ti­ment that we are com­pletely free in rela­tion to Marx. Of course, to be free with regards to Marx­ism does not imply return­ing again to the source to show what Marx actu­ally said, grasp­ing his words [sa parole] in their purest state, and treat­ing them like the one and only law. It cer­tainly doesn’t mean demon­strat­ing, for exam­ple, with the Althusser­ian method, how the gospel [la véri­ta­ble parole] of the prophet Marx has been mis­in­ter­preted. These for­mal ques­tions are unim­por­tant. How­ever, recon­firm­ing the func­tional unity of the forms of appear­ance of power, which are con­nected to Marx’s own state­ments [la parole de Marx lui-même], strikes me as a wor­thy endeavor.36

Polit­i­cal Questions

Three cru­cial ques­tions are raised by “Mesh of Power.” The first con­cerns Foucault’s curi­ous claim that he derives his the­ory of power, at least in part, from the sec­ond vol­ume of Cap­i­tal. The sec­ond con­cerns “the prob­lem of pop­u­la­tion” as the con­cept which gives Foucault’s dis­parate his­tor­i­cal stud­ies a the­matic unity, despite his protests to the contrary;the prob­lem of pop­u­la­tion returns us to the ques­tion of the tran­si­tion from feu­dal­ism to cap­i­tal­ism and that of any uncer­tain con­tem­po­rary tran­si­tion out of capitalism.The third con­cerns his response to the ques­tion raised at the very end of the lec­ture by a female audi­tor, which will return us to the themes of Foucault’s his­tor­i­cal con­junc­ture and the prob­lem of his reception.

1. The ques­tion of Cap­i­tal. Marx’s the­ory of the expanded repro­duc­tion of cap­i­tal is impor­tant because he is attempt­ing to describe the unity of dis­parate social processes. Although mar­ket soci­ety has anar­chic qual­i­ties, there is a unity to the social form of pro­duc­tion. Marx avoided the dead­locks of clas­si­cal polit­i­cal econ­omy with the con­cept of labor-power. Labour, as such, does not cir­cu­late on the mar­ket. The poten­tial for labor –la force de tra­vail, Arbeit­skraft – is what cir­cu­lates. Labor as force, as poten­tial, as power is exchange­able accord­ing to abstract equiv­a­lence regard­less of its par­tic­u­lar uses because the mar­ket estab­lishes a con­crete min­i­mum stan­dard for its value: the labor nec­es­sary to repro­duce labor as human life. Hence, “liv­ing labour.”

Although it is impor­tant to main­tain a dis­tinc­tion between the two, Fou­cault unfolds “power,” as a cat­e­gory of thought, in a way anal­o­gous to Marx’s unfold­ing of the cat­e­gory of “cap­i­tal” in his the­ory of expanded reproduction.“Capital” is invested in means of pro­duc­tion, infra­struc­ture, and the built envi­ron­ment just as “cap­i­tal” is invested in liv­ing labour. With­out either cir­cuit, or depart­ment, “cap­i­tal” can­not real­ize the value crys­tal­ized in com­modi­ties. This dou­ble move­ment is what dif­fer­en­ti­ates cap­i­tal­ism from mere rent extrac­tion; it is what his­tor­i­cally and cat­e­gor­i­cally dis­tin­guishes “rel­a­tive” from “absolute” sur­plus value extrac­tion. It is the source of capital’s peri­odic, and per­haps ter­mi­nal, cri­sis tendencies.

For Fou­cault, “power” is a unity of both power and resis­tance. “Power” sus­tains and guar­an­tees the life of human pop­u­la­tions just as “power” is invested in the orga­ni­za­tion of a fac­tory, the plan for a prison, or the orga­ni­za­tion of city streets accord­ing to a grid.The pro­duc­tive orga­ni­za­tion of human bod­ies and pop­u­la­tions is a tech­nol­ogy, he argues, just as impor­tant to the mode of pro­duc­tion as the machines whose smooth oper­a­tion it allows. He gave this term “power” a polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance out­side the abode of pro­duc­tion, as an alter­na­tive to rep­re­sen­ta­tional the­o­ries of polit­i­cal power, but locates the ori­gins of this “power” in the abode of pro­duc­tion and in cer­tain early mod­ern mil­i­tary inno­va­tions. Accord­ingly, the divi­sions set up by the “power” Fou­cault describes are not reducible to those of class. In the lec­tures from ‘78 he argues that polit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy of secu­rity dis­tin­guishes between “essen­tial” and “non-essential” lev­els of the pop­u­la­tion in order to deter­mine accept­able lev­els of risk. That is, Phys­io­cratic reforms per­tain­ing to grain short­ages were not attempts to elim­i­nate star­va­tion. They were attempts to use mar­ket mech­a­nisms to dis­trib­ute scarcity within iso­lated pock­ets of the pop­u­la­tion, attempts to pro­tect against mass hunger and scarcity which threat­ened polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity. The polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions he iso­lates – per­tain­ing to san­i­ta­tion, hous­ing, epi­demic dis­ease, insur­ance, mass immi­gra­tion, wel­fare, and so on – emerge quite late in the 19th cen­tury, as a result of polit­i­cal reforms and exi­gen­cies that had only just begun in Marx’s time.

2. The ques­tion of pop­u­la­tion. Genealogy’s abil­ity to jux­ta­pose rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent con­junc­tures enables a thought about the tran­si­tion from feu­dal­ism to cap­i­tal­ism which sheds light on the present moment in a way that other his­to­ries can­not. The­o­riz­ing the prob­lem of pop­u­la­tion caused Fou­cault to revise his ear­lier claims about power; the con­cept of “secu­rity” rep­re­sents a return to polit­i­cal econ­omy and a more care­ful peri­odiza­tion of “dis­ci­pline” as inter­nal to a tran­si­tion to a cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, after which dis­ci­pline is in the ser­vice of more lib­eral arts of gov­ern­ment. Fou­cault locates the epis­temic and polit­i­cal break of moder­nity in the thought of the Phys­iocrats and their his­tor­i­cal role within the French abso­lutist state. In an attempt to think the rad­i­cally incom­men­su­rable, Fou­cault poses the fol­low­ing prob­lem: within a largely back­wards and pop­u­lous region of Europe, in which a set of class rela­tions par­tic­u­lar to the French abso­lutist state fore­stalled the full tran­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ism until the 19th cen­tury, a prop­erly mod­ern polit­i­cal eco­nomic the­ory of agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tiv­ity emerges in the 18th cen­tury due to a suc­ces­sion of demo­graphic crises which directly threat­ened monar­chi­cal power and cre­ated a remark­ably polar­ized polit­i­cal field. How­ever, this new art of eco­nomic gov­ern­ment ‘remained imprisoned…within the forms of the admin­is­tra­tive monar­chy.’37 The pop­u­la­tion, accord­ing to Fou­cault, pro­vides a uni­fy­ing – if not entirely uni­fied – field of prac­tice for the tran­si­tion from an analy­sis of wealth to polit­i­cal econ­omy, from nat­ural his­tory to biol­ogy, from gen­eral gram­mar to philol­ogy.38

I would like to sug­gest that Fou­cault calls this new orga­ni­za­tion of power “secu­rity” because he is his­tor­i­cally sit­u­ated at the moment in which the ris­ing post-war demand for hous­ing credit in the United States required the struc­tured financ­ing of mort­gage pools in the 1970s: the secu­ri­ti­za­tion of debt. Such devel­op­ments enabled Fou­cault to ven­ture the hypoth­e­sis that the utopian pro­gramme of neo-liberalism is not “a super mar­ket soci­ety, but an enter­prise soci­ety. “Thus, he con­ceived of this new phase of cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment, inau­gu­rat­ing our own late cap­i­tal­ist era, in terms of a trans­for­ma­tion in the man­age­ment of polit­i­cal dan­ger and mar­ket risk.39 In Foucault’s final analy­sis, neo-liberalism is not a reac­ti­va­tion of the prac­tice of lais­sez faire, for the state must “inter­vene on soci­ety so that com­pet­i­tive mech­a­nisms can play a reg­u­la­tive role at every moment and every point in soci­ety and by inter­ven­ing in this way its objec­tive will become pos­si­ble… a gen­eral reg­u­la­tion of soci­ety by the mar­ket.”40

How­ever, what does Fou­cault allow us to see about the birth of neolib­er­al­ism that pre­vail­ing accounts of the cri­sis of the 1970s in terms of finan­cial­iza­tion, dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, and the con­sol­i­da­tion of class power fail to bring into view?In unequiv­o­cal terms, Fou­cault asserts: “Neo-liberalism is not Adam Smith; neo-liberalism is not mar­ket soci­ety; neo-liberalism is not the Gulag on the insid­i­ous scale of cap­i­tal­ism.”41 For the Marx­ist tra­di­tion, it was the dis­cus­sion of “com­mod­ity fetishism” in Book I of Cap­i­tal, vol­ume 1,and the infa­mous “ten­dency of the rate of profit to fall” from vol­ume 3, which pre­vented them from grasp­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of this new form of gov­ern­men­tal power. In an analy­sis of the Frank­furt School, which could be mobi­lized to crit­i­cize con­tem­po­rary the­o­rists of the grim arcana of “biopower” today, Fou­cault argues that it was Max Weber’s influ­ence that dis­placed Marx’s prob­lem­atic of the con­tra­dic­tory logic of cap­i­tal in 20th cen­tury Ger­many. The prob­lem of “the irra­tional ratio­nal­ity of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety” would – in the wake of Nazism, polit­i­cal exile and the destruc­tion unleashed by the sec­ond world war – moti­vate the Marx­ists of the Frank­furt School and the ordolib­er­als of the Freiburg School to crit­i­cize the irra­tional excesses of cap­i­tal­ism, rather than ana­lyz­ing its for­ward march through inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions and crises. Fou­cault con­cludes that, for both schools, Nazism rep­re­sented “the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal ‘Road to Dam­as­cus’… the field of adver­sity that they would have to define and cross in order to reach their objec­tive.” As for the polit­i­cal out­come: “his­tory had it that in 1968 the last dis­ci­ples of the Frank­furt School clashed with the police of a gov­ern­ment inspired by the Freiburg School, thus find­ing them­selves on oppo­site sides of the bar­ri­cades.”42 Neo-liberalism and its pro­po­nents seem to have emerged – from the bar­ri­cades and occu­pa­tions in Berke­ley, Paris or Frank­furt – the vic­tor of this his­toric clash of forces.

In Foucault’s view, actu­ally exist­ing social­ism rep­re­sented a hyper­tro­phied ratio­nal­iza­tion of exist­ing arts of government.It had pro­posed strong eco­nomic and his­tor­i­cal par­a­digms but failed to pro­vide a “rea­son­able and cal­cu­la­ble mea­sure of the extent, modes and objec­tives of gov­ern­men­tal action.”In the absence of a gov­ern­men­tal art of its own, Fou­cault argues, social­ism was forced by its his­tor­i­cal strug­gles to con­nect up with lib­er­al­ism, on the one hand – as a “cor­rec­tive and a pal­lia­tive to inter­nal dan­gers” – or to a large admin­is­tra­tive appa­ra­tus and police state, as in the Soviet Union, on the other.43

3. The ques­tion of hys­ter­i­cal dis­course. Fou­cault refused hys­ter­i­cal discourse.He said it was sim­plis­tic, used by reac­tionar­ies, dem­a­gogues, and racists, and obscured the impor­tant his­tor­i­cal ques­tions. In con­fronting a car­i­ca­ture of his own thought, Fou­cault had to appeal to Marx. This moment in “Mesh of Power” epit­o­mizes Foucault’s intel­lec­tual tra­jec­tory after the cri­sis of 1976. Return­ing to Marx was far more cru­cial dur­ing a reac­tionary period than dur­ing one of rev­o­lu­tion­ary upheaval.

Like Engels at the close of the 19th cen­tury, Fou­cault spent his final years con­tem­plat­ing early Chris­t­ian move­ments and their prac­tices of free love.44 Foucault’s response to talk of bath­house clo­sures in New York, San Fran­cisco, and Mon­tréal was a prin­ci­pled stance rather than the hys­ter­ics that char­ac­ter­ized the main­stream gay movement’s responses. In an inter­view with Gai pied (Gay Foot) from 1982, Fou­cault did not require a the­ory of “het­ero­nor­ma­tiv­ity” to oppose gay bath­house clo­sures. It was sim­ply a mat­ter of oppos­ing this exten­sion of police power on principle:

it is nec­es­sary to be intran­si­gent, we can­not make a com­pro­mise between tol­er­ance and intol­er­ance, we can­not but be on the side of tol­er­ance. It isn’t a mat­ter of search­ing for an equi­lib­rium between the per­se­cu­tor and per­se­cuted. We can­not give our­selves the objec­tive of win­ning mil­lime­ter by mil­lime­ter. On this issue of the rela­tion between police and sex­ual plea­sure, it’s nec­es­sary to go the dis­tance and take prin­ci­pled posi­tions.45

A Social­ist Art of Government

Fou­cault appro­pri­ately con­sid­ered the “utopian dream” of neolib­er­al­ism to be an “enter­prise soci­ety,” a soci­ety which treats human life and its risks as income streams. It encour­ages own­er­ship and guar­an­tees a min­i­mum social safety net in order to pre­vent the for­ma­tion of a class in open rebel­lion against their tech­no­cratic mas­ters. Where these soft touches do not work, police power is deployed. Fou­cault iden­ti­fies the ide­o­log­i­cal basis of this polit­i­cal eco­nomic sys­tem as a “cul­ture of dan­ger,” a dark glamor in which the risks of this sys­tem pro­vide occa­sion for a mor­al­iz­ing dis­course. This is the stuff of the 24-hour news cycle and Andy Warhol’s “super­stars.” We are now observ­ing this utopian dream come to grief on its own con­di­tions of pos­si­bil­ity: the defeat of class strug­gles of the 1970s and dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion of the West have cre­ated a pop­u­la­tion prob­lem inter­nal to advanced cap­i­tal­ist states anal­o­gous to that of the sur­plus human­ity in devel­op­ing coun­tries.46 This is the polit­i­cal hori­zon of the Occupy move­ment, and its pro­fessed sol­i­dar­ity with events in Tunis and Egypt is not merely hubris. The Left is once again caught in a tac­ti­cal stran­gle­hold, forced to defend the most mod­est of social safety nets – pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, wel­fare, pen­sions etc. – against neolib­eral shock therapy.

By return­ing to Marx’s prob­lem­atic of the pop­u­la­tion as a cen­tral con­tra­dic­tion of cap­i­tal, Fou­cault pro­vides insights into our polit­i­cal moment. What hap­pens to power when human life becomes super­flu­ous to the mode of pro­duc­tion? The lessons Fou­cault derives from the expe­ri­ence of the 1970s sug­gest that such ques­tions will be decided by a strug­gle, but we need more than just strug­gle to chal­lenge neolib­er­al­ism. We need a new art of gov­ern­ment. The con­clu­sion to the above men­tioned lec­ture from 1979 is a chal­lenge to the his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ist tra­di­tion: “the impor­tance of the text in social­ism is com­men­su­rate with the lacuna con­sti­tuted by the absence of a social­ist art of government.”Foucault then asks, “What gov­ern­men­tal­ity is pos­si­ble as a strictly, intrin­si­cally, and autonomously social­ist gov­ern­men­tal­ity?” Doubt­ing that a social­ist art of gov­ern­ment can be found in the his­tory of social­ism or its texts, Fou­cault con­cludes: “It must be invented.”47

• 1Michel Fou­cault, “Chronol­ogy,” Dits et écrits I, 1954-1975, eds. Daniel Defert, François Ewald (Paris: Jacques Lagrange, 2001), 42. Trans­la­tions from French are mine unless oth­er­wise noted.
• 2Wal­ter Ben­jamin, “On the Con­cept of His­tory,” (1940).

Exact and Pos­i­tive Knowl­edge: Marx’s Questionnaire

In 1880, La Revue social­iste asked an aging Karl Marx to draft a ques­tion­naire to be cir­cu­lated among the French work­ing class. Called “A Work­ers’ Inquiry,” it was a list of exactly 101 detailed ques­tions, inquir­ing about every­thing from meal times to wages to lodg­ing.1 On a closer look, there seems to be a pro­gres­sion in the line of ques­tion­ing. The first quar­ter or so ask seem­ingly dis­in­ter­ested ques­tions about the trade, the com­po­si­tion of the work­force employed at the firm, and the gen­eral con­di­tions of the shop, while the final quar­ter gen­er­ally shifts to more explic­itly polit­i­cal ques­tions about oppres­sion, “resis­tance asso­ci­a­tions,” and strikes.

The ques­tion­naire began with a few prefa­tory reflec­tions on the project as a whole. These fif­teen or so lines basi­cally amounted to a sin­gle prin­ci­ple: learn­ing from the work­ing class itself. Only the work­ing class could pro­vide mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion on its own exis­tence, just as only the work­ing class itself could build the new world. But behind this sim­ple call lay a num­ber of com­plex moti­va­tions, objec­tives, and inten­tions, mak­ing work­ers’ inquiry – this seem­ingly mod­est desire to learn from the work­ers – a highly ambigu­ous, mul­ti­fac­eted, and inde­ter­mi­nate project from the very start.

At its most rudi­men­tary level, work­ers’ inquiry was to be the empir­i­cal study of work­ers, a com­monly neglected object of inves­ti­ga­tion at the time. “Not a sin­gle gov­ern­ment, whether monar­chy or bour­geois repub­lic, has yet ven­tured to under­take a seri­ous inquiry into the posi­tion of the French work­ing class,” Marx lamented. “But what a num­ber of inves­ti­ga­tions have been under­taken into crises – agri­cul­tural, finan­cial, indus­trial, com­mer­cial, political!”

Since these other forms of inves­ti­ga­tion – like those end­less gov­ern­ment inquiries into this or that cri­sis – sim­ply could not pro­duce any real knowl­edge of the work­ing class, some new form of inves­ti­ga­tion had to be devel­oped. Its objec­tive, as those hun­dred ques­tions reveal, would be to amass as much fac­tual mate­r­ial about work­ers as pos­si­ble. The goal, Marx wrote, should be to acquire “an exact and pos­i­tive knowl­edge of the con­di­tions in which the work­ing class – the class to whom the future belongs – works and moves.”

Of course, even in Marx’s time, health inspec­tors and oth­ers had already begun to under­take this kind of inves­ti­ga­tion into the world of the work­ing class. But not only were these offi­cial inves­ti­ga­tions unsys­tem­atic and par­tial, they treated work­ers as mere objects of study, in the man­ner of the soil and seeds of those well-investigated agri­cul­tural crises. What set worker’s inquiry apart from these other empir­i­cal stud­ies was the belief that the work­ing class itself knew more about cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion than any­one else. It is the “work­ers in town and coun­try,” Marx thought, who “alone can describe with full knowl­edge the mis­for­tunes from which they suffer.”

With this brief inter­ven­tion, Marx estab­lished a fun­da­men­tal epis­te­mo­log­i­cal chal­lenge. What was the rela­tion­ship between the work­ers’ knowl­edge of their exploita­tion, and the sci­en­tific analy­sis of the “laws of motion” of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety? In Cap­i­tal, he devoted many pages to doc­u­ment­ing the labor process, yet this seemed to be part of a log­i­cal expo­si­tion which began with the crit­i­cal expo­si­tion of value, an abstract cat­e­gory of bour­geois polit­i­cal econ­omy. He nev­er­the­less main­tained in his 1873 after­word that “In so far as such a cri­tique rep­re­sents a class, it can only rep­re­sent the class whose his­tor­i­cal task is the over­throw of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion and the final abo­li­tion of all classes – the pro­le­tariat.”2 Louis Althusser, in his famous Pref­ace to the French trans­la­tion, sug­gested that this meant that Cap­i­tal could only be under­stood from a specif­i­cally pro­le­tar­ian view­point, since that is “the only view­point which makes vis­i­ble the real­ity of the exploita­tion of wage labour power, which con­sti­tutes the whole of cap­i­tal­ism.”3 Yet Marx’s own view remains unclear. Was work­ers’ inquiry a means of access­ing the pro­le­tar­ian view­point? Was it sim­ply the work­ers’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in gen­er­at­ing a uni­ver­sal knowledge?

What is abun­dantly clear is that Marx had a high esti­ma­tion of the autonomous activ­ity of the work­ing class. Not only would work­ers pro­vide knowl­edge about the nature of cap­i­tal­ism, they would be the only ones who could over­throw it: only the work­ers in town and coun­try, “and not sav­iors sent by prov­i­dence, can ener­get­i­cally apply the heal­ing reme­dies for the social ills which they are prey.” This prac­tice of work­ers’ inquiry, then, implied a cer­tain con­nec­tion between pro­le­tar­ian knowl­edge and pro­le­tar­ian pol­i­tics. Social­ists would begin by learn­ing from the work­ing class about its own mate­r­ial con­di­tions. Only then would they be able to artic­u­late strate­gies, com­pose the­o­ries, and draft pro­grams. Inquiry would there­fore be the nec­es­sary first step in artic­u­lat­ing a his­tor­i­cally appro­pri­ate social­ist project.

The prac­tice of dis­sem­i­nat­ing the inquiry also rep­re­sented a step towards orga­niz­ing this project, by estab­lish­ing direct links with work­ers. “It is not essen­tial to reply to every ques­tion,” Marx wrote. “The name of the work­ing man or woman who is reply­ing will not be pub­lished with­out spe­cial per­mis­sion but the name and address should be given so that if nec­es­sary we can send com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” For some, this attempt to forge real con­tacts with the work­ers was in fact a gen­uine inten­tion of the project.

Of course, Marx men­tions noth­ing about build­ing orga­ni­za­tions in this short arti­cle. How­ever, he would later indi­cate that research and orga­ni­za­tion had a close rela­tion­ship. In 1881, just a year after pen­ning this ques­tion­naire, Marx received a let­ter from a young social­ist who wanted to know what he thought about the recent calls to refound the Inter­na­tional Workingmen’s Asso­ci­a­tion. Marx revealed that he was opposed to this project. The “crit­i­cal junc­ture” for such an asso­ci­a­tion had not arrived, and attempt­ing to form one would be “not merely use­less but harm­ful,” since it would not be “related to the imme­di­ate given con­di­tions in this or that par­tic­u­lar nation.”4

So any orga­ni­za­tion had to be tied to con­crete his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions. We can con­clude from Marx’s enthu­si­as­tic response to La Revue social­iste that he granted a strate­gic role to research; in this spe­cific con­junc­ture, inquiry was a more appro­pri­ate mea­sure than launch­ing an orga­ni­za­tion, and was per­haps even its precondition.

Marx died a few years after this first stab at inquiry, never receiv­ing a sin­gle response. But the project would have a remark­able after­life in the fol­low­ing cen­tury. As we pull away from Marx’s orig­i­nal blue­print to sur­vey the much longer his­tory of work­ers’ inquiry, it is hard not to notice the remark­able insta­bil­ity of this prac­tice. Though nearly every exam­ple touches the coor­di­nates first devel­oped by Marx, inquiry has been pol­y­semic and con­tra­dic­tory. This intro­duc­tion will sur­vey its devel­op­ment as a way of inves­ti­gat­ing its under­ly­ing questions.

Rais­ing Con­scious­ness: The Johnson-Forest Tendency

While fig­ures like Pierre Nav­ille and Simone Weil had ear­lier pub­lished first­hand accounts of fac­tory life, Marx’s project was only truly rein­car­nated in 1947, when the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency released a short pam­phlet called The Amer­i­can Worker. Named after the pseu­do­nyms of its two prin­ci­pal the­o­rists, CLR James (J.R. John­son), the Trinida­dian author of The Black Jacobins, and Raya Dunayevskaya (Fred­die For­est), Leon Trotsky’s one­time assis­tant, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency first emerged in 1941 as an oppo­si­tional cur­rent within the Trot­sky­ist Work­ers’ Party. In 1947, the year they spon­sored their first inquiry, this mar­ginal though respected cur­rent left the WP over what was then known as the “Negro Ques­tion.” While the Work­ers’ Party argued for a sin­gle, broad, mul­tira­cial move­ment orga­nized under the slo­gan “Black and White, Unite and Fight,” the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency coun­tered that the black com­mu­nity had its own spe­cific needs, which could not be peremp­to­rily sub­sumed under such a homog­e­niz­ing move­ment, and along with other oppressed minori­ties should strug­gle for its own auton­omy.5

In 1951, after break­ing from Trot­sky­ism alto­gether, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency formed Cor­re­spon­dence, with a news­pa­per of the same name.6 Cor­re­spon­dence, whose first issue was released that Novem­ber, was to be a new kind of paper. Prin­ci­pally writ­ten, edited, and dis­trib­uted by work­ers them­selves, it was intended to serve as a forum in which work­ers could share their own expe­ri­ences. Reflect­ing the Tendency’s con­tin­ued empha­sis on the pri­macy of autonomous needs, each issue was delib­er­ately divided into four sec­tions – for fac­tory work­ers, blacks, youth, and women – so that each sec­tor of the broader work­ing class would have its own inde­pen­dent space to dis­cuss what con­cerned them most. The hope was that in writ­ing about their lives, work­ers would come to see that their prob­lems were not per­sonal, but social. A 1955 edi­to­r­ial titled “Gripes and Griev­ances” stated the pur­pose of the paper: “When mil­lions of work­ers are express­ing the same gripe about their job, the fore­man, the union, and the com­pany, it is no longer a gripe, it becomes a social prob­lem. That gripe or griev­ance no longer affects just this or that indi­vid­ual, it affects all of soci­ety.”7 The objec­tive of the paper, then, was to make peo­ple real­ize the uni­ver­sal­ity of their seem­ingly par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ences, by pro­vid­ing a space where they could be dis­sem­i­nated. Draw­ing an anal­ogy to polio, which, they claimed, was once con­sid­ered a per­sonal prob­lem before being accepted as a social con­cern, the edi­tors argued that the whole point of Cor­re­spon­dence was to change pub­lic atti­tudes on deci­sive ques­tions. The goal of the work­ers’ paper, to put it another way, was to raise consciousness.

This news­pa­per was in many ways a log­i­cal con­tin­u­a­tion of the Tendency’s ear­lier efforts at inquiry. The first and per­haps most famous of these was The Amer­i­can Worker. Grace Lee Boggs, a co-author of the pam­phlet, recalls that it first began as a diary. When Phil Singer, an auto worker employed in a New Jer­sey GM plant, began to dis­cuss the frus­tra­tions of the rank and file at the fac­tory, CLR James sug­gested that he write his thoughts down in a diary.8 Sec­tions of it were later assem­bled into a coher­ent piece, and paired with a the­o­ret­i­cal essay by Grace Lee Boggs. The first part of the pam­phlet, now attrib­uted to Paul Romano, Singer’s pseu­do­nym, became a kind of self-reflexive ethno­graphic inves­ti­ga­tion into the con­di­tions of pro­le­tar­ian life in post­war Amer­ica. The sec­ond part, attrib­uted to Ria Stone, Boggs’s party name, con­sciously drew on the con­crete expe­ri­ences doc­u­mented in the first part in order to the­o­rize the con­tent of social­ism in a world changed by automa­tion, the assem­bly line, and semi-skilled labor.

When Social­isme ou Bar­barie later trans­lated the pam­phlet into French, they called it the “first of its genre.”9 A worker was describ­ing, in his own voice and explic­itly for other work­ers, his con­di­tions of exploita­tion in a way that the­o­rized the pos­si­bil­ity of its strate­gic over­throw.10 Singer’s account rep­re­sented both research into the changes in the labor process, as well as a polit­i­cal prac­tice aimed at rais­ing the con­scious­ness of his co-workers. He steadily moved from sta­tic descrip­tions of exploita­tion in the fac­tory to a dynamic con­sid­er­a­tion of the new forms of strug­gle that had emerged out of those forms of exploita­tion. Sur­vey­ing the con­tra­dic­tions in the work­place, the var­i­ous points of con­tes­ta­tion, and signs of pro­le­tar­ian dis­gust with man­age­ment, bureau­cracy, and even unions, Singer pointed to the wild­cat strike, with work­ers’ self-management as its con­tent, as the new form of strug­gle in the post­war period.

While Phil Singer pro­vided the first exam­ple of this new kind of work­ers’ inquiry, Grace Lee Boggs laid out the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s the­o­ret­i­cal prob­lem­atic. She drew heav­ily on a pas­sage from Cap­i­tal that described how the “par­tially devel­oped indi­vid­ual,” who was restricted to “one spe­cial­ized social func­tion,” had to be replaced in large-scale indus­try by the “totally devel­oped indi­vid­ual” who could adapt to vary­ing forms of labor.11 Read­ing this in light of Marx’s ear­lier works, prin­ci­pally the Eco­nomic and Philo­soph­i­cal Man­u­scripts of 1844, which Boggs her­self was the first to trans­late into Eng­lish, she took this to mean that mod­ern indus­try in post­war Amer­ica had now real­ized the com­plete alien­ation of human nature.

Accord­ing to Boggs, cap­i­tal­ism was to be under­stood as the pro­gres­sive alien­ation of humanity’s nat­ural pow­ers into the things it pro­duces. Even­tu­ally, how­ever, this process will reach a point where all of human­ity, all of its social essence, has been fully alien­ated into the means of pro­duc­tion. But this thor­ough­go­ing dehu­man­iza­tion of the indi­vi­ual, she argues, is at the same time the poten­tial human­iza­tion of the world in its entirety. It is at that point that the objec­tive con­di­tions will finally be ripe to reclaim those pow­ers, recover human essence, and defin­i­tively recon­sti­tute the indi­vid­ual as a uni­ver­sal being. In her words, “Abstract labor reaches its most inhu­man depths in machine pro­duc­tion. But at the same time, it is only machine pro­duc­tion which lays the basis for the fullest human devel­op­ment of con­crete labor.”12

“The essen­tial con­tent of pro­duc­tive activ­ity today is the coop­er­a­tive form of the labor process,” Boggs con­cluded. In “the trans­for­ma­tion of the instru­ments of labor into instru­ments of labor only usable in com­mon” and “the economis­ing of all means of pro­duc­tion by their use as the means of pro­duc­tion of com­bined, social­ized labor,” cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion had reached the point where it was now implic­itly already social­ist. How­ever, the real­iza­tion of this implicit social­ism was blocked:

The bour­geoisie main­tains a fet­ter on this essen­tially social activ­ity by iso­lat­ing indi­vid­u­als from one another through com­pe­ti­tion, by sep­a­rat­ing the intel­lec­tual pow­ers of pro­duc­tion from the man­ual labor, by sup­press­ing the cre­ative orga­ni­za­tional tal­ents of the broad masses, by divid­ing the world up into spheres of influence.

This con­flict between the invad­ing social­ist soci­ety and the bour­geois fet­ters pre­vent­ing its emer­gence is part of the daily expe­ri­ence of every worker.”13

Inter­est­ingly, this con­cept had emerged in a pam­phlet that James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs wrote the same year, with the title The Invad­ing Social­ist Soci­ety – a polemic against Trot­sky­ists who did not share their view that the USSR rep­re­sented a new form of cap­i­tal­ism. The pam­phlet elab­o­rates on some of the the­o­ret­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions of The Amer­i­can Worker, in which Boggs had defended “the dis­tinc­tion between abstract labor for value and con­crete labor for human needs.” For Boggs, Marx’s def­i­n­i­tion of “value pro­duc­tion” was “pro­duc­tion which expanded itself through degra­da­tion and dehu­man­iza­tion of the worker to a frag­ment of a man,” which in its use of machin­ery “degrades to abstract labor the liv­ing worker which it employs.” Con­crete labor was instead directed towards needs, “the labor in which man real­izes his basic human need for exer­cis­ing his nat­ural and acquired pow­ers.”14

In The Invad­ing Social­ist Soci­ety, the authors argued that value pro­duc­tion was clearly at work in Russ­ian “state cap­i­tal­ism,” just as it was in the United States, and they elab­o­rated on the “dual char­ac­ter” of labor Boggs had described in the other pamphlet:

Labor’s fun­da­men­tal, its eter­nally nec­es­sary func­tion in all soci­eties, past, present and future, was to cre­ate use-values. Into this organic func­tion of all labor, cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion imposed the con­tra­dic­tion of pro­duc­ing value, and more par­tic­u­larly surplus-value. Within this con­tra­dic­tion is con­tained the neces­sity for the divi­sion of soci­ety into direct pro­duc­ers (work­ers) and rulers of soci­ety, into man­ual and intel­lec­tual laborers.

The man­age­r­ial rev­o­lu­tion, in this con­cep­tion, was sim­ply an expres­sion of value pro­duc­tion and the class divi­sion between man­ual and intel­lec­tual labor. If this class divi­sion and this kind of alien­at­ing labor process could be observed in Rus­sia, there was only one con­clu­sion: the state bureau­cracy extracted sur­plus value from Russ­ian work­ers, and was in fact a cap­i­tal­ist class.

The pro­le­tariat, they went on to argue, had been dis­abused of all the illu­sions of bureau­cratic van­guards, which had sim­ply insti­tuted a new form of cap­i­tal­ism, and reformism, which lim­ited itself to con­test­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of surplus-value. Now the pro­le­tariat had “drawn the ulti­mate con­clu­sion”: “The revolt is against value pro­duc­tion itself.” The invad­ing social­ist soci­ety, for James, Dunayevskaya, and Boggs, could be observed in this real­iza­tion.15

The polit­i­cal moti­va­tion of this the­ory may have been under­stand­able, but it led the group to use Marx’s cat­e­gories in a way that dis­solved their his­tor­i­cal speci­ficity. Two decades ear­lier I.I. Rubin, at the close of a period of rel­a­tively free debate in the Soviet Union, had explained in a lec­ture at the Insti­tute for Eco­nom­ics in Moscow that a “con­cept of labour which lacks all the fea­tures which are char­ac­ter­is­tic of its social organ­i­sa­tion in com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, can­not lead to the con­clu­sion which we seek from the Marx­ian stand­point.” In his elab­o­ra­tion of Marx’s con­cepts Rubin asked directly whether the value-form could be observed in a planned econ­omy, in which some social organ had to equate labor which pro­duced dif­fer­ent things and was under­taken by dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als. While this social equa­tion was often described as “abstrac­tion” in some gen­eral sense, Rubin dis­tin­guished it from Marx’s con­cept of abstract labor. In all his­tor­i­cal epochs, Rubin con­ceded, human beings have engaged in a phys­i­o­log­i­cal expen­di­ture of effort to repro­duce their con­di­tions of exis­tence. But Marx’s value the­ory set out to explain cer­tain his­tor­i­cally spe­cific char­ac­ter­is­tics of cap­i­tal­ist commodity-producing soci­eties. In such soci­eties the labor of indi­vid­u­als, as con­crete labor which pro­duces use-values, is not “directly reg­u­lated by the soci­ety” – in con­trast to a soci­ety in which social equa­tion is done on the basis of the planned allo­ca­tion of those use-values.16

In commodity-producing soci­eties, labor is only socially equated when the prod­ucts of indi­vid­ual labor­ers are “assim­i­lated with the prod­ucts of all the other com­mod­ity pro­duc­ers, and the labour of a spe­cific indi­vid­ual is thus assim­i­lated with the labour of all the other mem­bers of the soci­ety and all the oth­ers kinds of labour.” And cru­cially, this social equa­tion only hap­pens “through the equa­tion of the prod­ucts of labour”; labor “only takes the form of abstract labour, and the prod­ucts of labour the form of val­ues, to the extent that the pro­duc­tion process assumes the social form of com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, i.e. pro­duc­tion based on exchange.” When com­mod­ity own­ers in cap­i­tal­ist soci­eties engage in pro­duc­tion, they do so seek­ing to “trans­form their prod­uct into money and thus also trans­form their pri­vate and con­crete labour into social and abstract labour,” since they depend on the mar­ket for their con­di­tions of exis­tence. It is through the medi­a­tion of the mar­ket that these pri­vate labor expen­di­tures take on a social form.17

From the van­tage point of Rubin’s inter­ven­tion, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency had ended up align­ing itself with those Soviet econ­o­mists who believed that value was a tran­shis­tor­i­cal cat­e­gory, reducible to the social equa­tion of labor that would exist in any soci­ety and nec­es­sar­ily take the same form in social­ist plan­ning as it did in a cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket. Their attempt to show that the USSR, despite its plan­ning of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion, com­peted on the world mar­ket and there­fore had the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a huge cap­i­tal­ist enter­prise, sim­ply dodged the ques­tion of the exchange of the prod­ucts of labor as an expres­sion of the mar­ket depen­dence of individuals.

Of course, Rubin did not address the ques­tion of whether the plan­ning organ of a social­ist soci­ety was a party bureau­cracy, a work­ers’ coun­cil, or any­thing else. While this dis­tinc­tion would cer­tainly be of polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, it has no bear­ing on the ques­tions of abstract labor and value. In its under­stand­able drive to crit­i­cize the oppres­sive char­ac­ter of work in the USSR, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency had lost grip on its own crit­i­cal con­cepts, and above all, by reduc­ing the value-form to alien­ation in the labor-process, com­pletely mud­dled the dis­tinc­tion between abstract and con­crete labor. In this regard inquiry had a tense rela­tion­ship to Marx­ist the­ory; shift­ing towards the doc­u­men­ta­tion of work­ers’ expe­ri­ence, the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of the shop floor, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency accepted and inverted the ortho­dox eco­nomic world­view of their adver­saries, leav­ing it more or less intact.

And by accept­ing the tran­shis­tor­i­cal con­cep­tion of the cat­e­gories of labor and value, social­ism itself took on tran­shis­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics. It was a telos already con­tained in the ori­gin, in human nature which alien­ated itself in machin­ery. The task of social­ists was to uncover it by cast­ing aside the cap­i­tal­ist fet­ters. Accord­ing to this view, social­ism would not have to be con­structed; it would have to be real­ized. We can iden­tify a kind of dou­ble mean­ing to this term: on the one hand, social­ism as an inher­ent ten­dency would have to be made “real,” or actual, and on the other hand, social­ism could be actu­al­ized only when those work­ers cur­rently engaged in these embry­onic social­ist rela­tions grad­u­ally came to rec­og­nize, or “real­ize,” that social­ism already con­sti­tuted the very essence of post­war capitalism.

This con­cep­tion of social­ism was a com­men­tary on Singer’s expe­ri­ences inso­far as work­ers’ inquiry was the means of this real­iza­tion. It was through inquiry that work­ers would come to “real­ize” that social­ism was already there, hid­den in their every­day lives, wait­ing to burst forth. In cir­cu­lat­ing these inquiries, other work­ers with sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences would come to the same real­iza­tion, spark­ing a dia­logue over their uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ences. In this way the work­ers would become con­scious of them­selves as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary class. The prin­ci­pal task of the orga­ni­za­tion, first as the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency, and then as Cor­re­spon­dence, would be to facil­i­tate this coming-to-consciousness by cre­at­ing a space where con­nec­tions or “cor­re­spon­dences” between dif­fer­ent work­ers could be made.

Inquiry, then, was the cor­ner­stone of this project. Grace Lee Boggs had the­o­rized it, and Phil Singer had pro­vided the first con­crete exam­ple. The Amer­i­can Worker would there­fore emerge as a kind of par­a­digm. In 1952 Si Owens pub­lished Indig­nant Heart: A Black Worker’s Jour­nal, under the pseu­do­nym of Matthew Ward. It was much longer, in fact prac­ti­cally a book, and was explic­itly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. It told the story of how a young black worker moved from the cot­ton fields of Ten­nessee to the auto­mo­bile plants of Detroit and became a mil­i­tant, a rad­i­cal force within the United Auto­mo­bile Work­ers of Amer­ica. In 1953 “Arthur Bau­man,” the pseu­do­nym of an anony­mous stu­dent, recounted his story to Paul Wal­lis in what would become Artie Cuts Out, a nar­ra­tive, again in the style of Singer’s The Amer­i­can Worker, about high school stu­dents in New York. Also that year, Correspondence’s best­selling pam­phlet, A Woman’s Place by Marie Brant (Selma James) and Ellen San­tori (Filom­ena D’Addario), made its first appear­ance. What Singer did for fac­tory work­ers, Owens for black work­ers, and Bau­man for the youth, James and D’Addario sought to do for house­wives. A Woman’s Place dis­cussed the role of house­work, the value of repro­duc­tive labor, and the orga­ni­za­tions autonomously invented by women in the course of their struggle.

Fol­low­ing Singer’s model and Boggs’s the­o­ret­i­cal frame, all of them drew on the every­day expe­ri­ences of the author in order to rig­or­ously inves­ti­gate the social con­di­tions of a par­tic­u­lar class fig­ure; they then used that inquiry to the­o­rize how that frag­mented social group might come together as a col­lec­tive polit­i­cal sub­ject. The objec­tive in all of these – as it would later be for the Cor­re­spon­dence news­pa­per – was to show how seem­ingly per­sonal expe­ri­ences were actu­ally social. The under­ly­ing assump­tion of these inquiries was that what one par­tic­u­lar worker felt some­where is very sim­i­lar to what another might feel else­where, and that these shared expe­ri­ences, these com­mon ways of liv­ing, can pro­vide the ground­work for col­lec­tive action.18

Of course, it should be noted that nei­ther The Amer­i­can Worker nor any of these other texts ever called itself a work­ers’ inquiry. Indeed, they could just be called worker nar­ra­tives, or per­haps even tes­ti­monies.19 But they should all still be seen as rep­re­sent­ing an iter­a­tion, or at least a vari­a­tion, of the project Marx laid out in 1880. The Ten­dency was quite famil­iar with Marx’s 1880 arti­cle.20 Boggs had read it, and made an explicit ref­er­ence to it in a foot­note in her sec­tion of The Amer­i­can Worker.21 And despite sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences, these inquiries, espe­cially The Amer­i­can Worker, repro­duced many of the inten­tions, moti­va­tions, and objec­tives of Marx’s orig­i­nal project. In fact, read­ing Marx’s ques­tions along­side The Amer­i­can Worker, it seems as though Singer had pro­vided Marx with the first, com­pre­hen­sive response to his ques­tion­naire – it was just sev­eral decades late.

But Singer’s response took a form that Marx did not antic­i­pate. Marx imag­ined that work­ers would offer line-by-line answers to his ques­tion­naire. “In replies,” he made sure to spec­ify, “the num­ber of the cor­re­spond­ing ques­tion should be given.” Singer, how­ever, did not pro­duce a neat list of bul­leted responses; he crafted these raw answers into a lit­er­ary nar­ra­tive. This was per­haps the most dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of all the inquiries spon­sored by the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency – and per­haps one of the main rea­sons why they were never for­mally called “work­ers’ inquiries.” Work­ers’ inquiry, in this vari­a­tion, was specif­i­cally a sub­jec­tive nar­ra­tive account, not a response to a questionnaire.

This inno­va­tion in the genre of inquiry, how­ever, ampli­fied ten­sions already embed­ded in the orig­i­nal project. On the one hand, the nar­ra­tive form worked to advance inquiry as a form of pro­le­tar­ian self-activity. Although Marx made it clear that knowl­edge of the work­ing class could only be pro­duced by work­ers them­selves, his orig­i­nal project seemed to fore­close the space for any kind of cre­ative expres­sion, demand­ing mechan­i­cal answers to pre­fab­ri­cated ques­tions. Singer’s nar­ra­tive model allowed work­ers to raise their own unique voice, express them­selves in their own lan­guage, with their own idioms, ideas, and feel­ings, and even pose their own questions.

On the other hand, although priv­i­leg­ing the nar­ra­tive form might have ampli­fied the power of work­ers’ inquiry as a means of self-activity, it had the poten­tial to under­mine another of aspect of that project, what Marx called the acqui­si­tion of “an exact and pos­i­tive knowl­edge of the con­di­tions” of the work­ing class. The open­ness of the nar­ra­tive form exag­ger­ates a ten­dency to slip from mea­sured gen­er­al­iza­tion to unten­able over­gen­er­al­iza­tion. By try­ing to fuse his sub­jec­tiv­ity with that of the rank and file as a whole, Singer ends up attempt­ing to legit­imize him­self as a reli­able mouth­piece for all the work­ers in his fac­tory: “Their feel­ings, anx­i­eties, exhil­a­ra­tion, bore­dom, exhaus­tion, anger, have all been mine to one extent or another.”22 But as the text pro­ceeds, Singer qui­etly goes from “their feel­ings are mine” to “my feel­ings are theirs,” lead­ing the reader to believe that Singer’s per­sonal expe­ri­ences, desires, and opin­ions are actu­ally those of the GM rank and file itself – if not those of the entire Amer­i­can work­ing class. His expe­ri­ences, or those of some work­ers at his par­tic­u­lar plant, are pre­sented as the expe­ri­ences of all work­ers everywhere.

Allegedly com­mon daily expe­ri­ences are then gen­er­al­ized to uni­ver­sal polit­i­cal atti­tudes: “The work­ers feel that strikes merely for wages do not get them any­where.”23 This is a prob­lem shared by all the nar­ra­tive accounts, since they all repli­cate Singer’s model. In A Woman’s Place, for exam­ple, Selma James wrote, “The co-authors of this book­let have seen this in their own lives and in the lives of the women they know. They have writ­ten this down as a begin­ning of the expres­sion of what the aver­age woman feels, thinks, and lives.” One first won­ders whether there is such a thing as an “aver­age woman,” free from the com­pli­cat­ing dimen­sions of region, class, race, sex­u­al­ity, and so forth; but even if this uneasi­ness is set aside, one is still left to ask whether James’s own unique expe­ri­ences are enough to access “the aver­age.” In fact, James intro­duces another inno­va­tion that extends the reach of her gen­er­al­iza­tions. Her inquiry begins in the third per­son, but after only a few pages abruptly shifts to the sec­ond per­son. The pat­tern quickly repeats itself: “Every­thing a house­wife does, she does alone. All the work in the house is for you to do by your­self.”24

This kind of homog­e­niza­tion sup­ports, and is in fact sup­ported by, a decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of expe­ri­ence. Nearly all of these inquiries, with the slight excep­tion of Indig­nant Heart, go to great lengths to detach their nar­ra­tive from a spe­cific local­ity. There is noth­ing in The Amer­i­can Worker reveal­ing where Singer actu­ally works; the same goes for A Woman’s Place.25 If one of the pri­mary objec­tives of work­ers’ inquiry is to rig­or­ously study the con­di­tions of exploita­tion at spe­cific points of pro­duc­tion, to pro­duce a pos­i­tive and exact knowl­edge of the work­ing class, it must spec­ify the bound­aries of its inves­ti­ga­tion. Though fac­to­ries in post­war Amer­ica might have had some com­mon­al­i­ties, they were wildly dif­fer­ent, each with its dis­tinct con­di­tions of pro­duc­tion, power rela­tions, and demographics.

A closely related prob­lem is the delib­er­ate mod­i­fi­ca­tion of infor­ma­tion, in a way that often alters the mean­ing of the accounts. One imme­di­ate exam­ple results from the use of pseu­do­nyms. Nearly every­one in the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency had one, and most had sev­eral; in fact, there were so many fake names in cir­cu­la­tion, Boggs recalled that there were times when they them­selves didn’t even know who was who.26 This was partly a holdover from Trot­sky­ist prac­tices, but more seri­ously a secu­rity mea­sure against McCarthy­ism; at one point Cor­re­spon­dence had as many as 75 infil­tra­tors, and CLR James would later be deported because of his activ­i­ties with the group.27

But despite the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the prac­tice of assum­ing pseu­do­nyms, they pro­vided a cover for ambigu­ous author­ship. A Woman’s Place was signed by two women, both under pseu­do­nyms, but was actu­ally writ­ten only by Selma James. As James later recalled, she wrote the book by jot­ting down ideas on scraps of paper, then drop­ping them into a slit made in the top of a shoe box. She later sat down and pieced together the ideas into a draft. After she shared the draft with the group and her neigh­bors, and made some revi­sions, CLR James told her to include Filom­ena D’Addario’s sig­na­ture so that the lat­ter could speak about it to the pub­lic with some legit­i­macy.28 It turns out that a piece which claims to have been writ­ten by two women, and in fact tries to con­vince its read­ers that it was con­structed from the expe­ri­ences of two dif­fer­ent women, was actu­ally writ­ten by one.

But the most seri­ous trou­ble is in Indig­nant Heart. Of all the accounts, this is the only one to give pre­cise details about places, and so, at first glance, seems to break with the model devel­oped by Singer. In actual fact, how­ever, though the book is largely accu­rate regard­ing Owens’ later life in the North, it delib­er­ately dis­torts his place of birth, set­ting his child­hood in south­east Ten­nessee rather than in Lown­des County, Alabama. In the 1978 reprint, which included a sec­ond part pick­ing up where the orig­i­nal 1952 text left off, Owens jus­ti­fied this by remind­ing his read­ers of the “vicious McCarthyite witch hunt,” adding that “few who did not go through that expe­ri­ence of national repres­sion of ideas can fully under­stand the truly total­i­tar­ian nature of McCarthy­ism and the ter­ror it pro­duced.”29 Less con­vinc­ing, how­ever, is his claim that these changes “do not take any­thing away from the truth of the expe­ri­ences described,” and that what he wrote about his early years “could be true of almost all Blacks” liv­ing in the South­ern United States.30

In other words, the rewrit­ing of the facts is ratio­nal­ized by the assump­tion of a homo­ge­neous and uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ence. But Alabama is not Ten­nessee, and such a dras­tic move com­pro­mises the sci­en­tific char­ac­ter of the piece; it becomes more like his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, and less a con­crete inquiry into spe­cific con­di­tions of exploita­tion. An inquiry into the world of the work­ing class threat­ens to degen­er­ate into a kind of travel diary; close, metic­u­lous, mil­i­tant inves­ti­ga­tion tends to be replaced with enter­tain­ing sto­ries about the mys­tery, exoti­cism, and strange­ness of an unknown world.

Per­haps even more trou­bling, Si Owens did not actu­ally write Indig­nant Heart. Con­stance Webb, another mem­ber of the group, and James’s one­time lover, did. Cor­re­spon­dence cham­pi­oned a prac­tice which Dunayevskaya later called “the full foun­tain pen” method – though it is per­haps bet­ter known as amanu­en­sis. Intel­lec­tu­als would be paired with work­ers who might be uncom­fort­able writ­ing their expe­ri­ences; they would lis­ten as the work­ers recounted their story, write them down on their behalf, and then have these work­ers revise the writ­ten doc­u­ments as they saw fit. It was Webb, then, who recorded the story, made revi­sions, edited the drafts, and pieced it all together into a coher­ent whole.31 It was in many ways just as much her book.

But the lead­er­ship, in this case largely Dunayevskaya, and not the authors, decided how the book should appear. Dunayevskaya insisted that it be called Indig­nant Heart, after a quo­ta­tion by Wen­dell Phillips, over the protest of both Owens and Webb; and, even more seri­ously, she decided to pub­lish it all under the sin­gle name of Matthew Ward.32 In an odd way, Cor­re­spon­dence had delib­er­ately effaced its con­di­tions of pro­duc­tion, mak­ing it appear as though a sin­gle author had writ­ten the book by him­self, which was far from true. Yet one of orig­i­nal aims of Correspondence’s inquiries had been to hon­estly rec­on­cile the ten­sions between intel­lec­tu­als and work­ers. Why hes­i­tate in admit­ting that Indig­nant Heart had been, at its very core, a work of col­lab­o­ra­tion? Why go to such lengths to make the text look like an exam­ple of raw pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence, rather than a medi­ated production?

Finally, all these inquiries imbri­cate the descrip­tive with the pre­scrip­tive. They draw lim­ited con­clu­sions based on the analy­sis of observ­able phe­nom­ena while simul­ta­ne­ously mak­ing declar­a­tive state­ments about what real­ity should actu­ally look like. The trend was first set by Singer, who con­cluded the first part of The Amer­i­can Worker by announc­ing that the work­ers’ frus­tra­tion with the incen­tive sys­tem amounted to “no less than say­ing that the exist­ing pro­duc­tion rela­tions must be over­thrown.”33 In the same way, James ends her own inquiry, “Women are find­ing more and more that there is no way out but a com­plete change. But one thing is already clear. Things can’t go on the way they are. Every woman knows that.”34 Surely not all women actu­ally thought this in 1953. And surely James knew this, just as Singer was well aware that most work­ers did not want to over­throw exist­ing pro­duc­tion rela­tions. These state­ments can only really be under­stood as per­for­ma­tive – not descrip­tions of exist­ing sit­u­a­tion, but declar­a­tive moves seek­ing to trans­form what the text has already described. For a tra­di­tion which grounded itself in the rais­ing of con­scious­ness, these state­ments about the con­scious­ness of work­ers, dis­sem­i­nated to those work­ers them­selves, sought to become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Though all four of these inquires cer­tainly engage in sci­en­tific analy­sis, tak­ing note of new forms of pro­duc­tion, exploita­tion, and resis­tance, these obser­va­tions only seem to serve as the lit­er­ary back­ground for an unfold­ing nar­ra­tive, rather than serv­ing as inci­sive obser­va­tions into a par­tic­u­lar point of pro­duc­tion. All the ten­sions explored above work to seri­ously dimin­ish the spe­cific research value of these texts. But it is impor­tant to rec­og­nize that they only become prob­lems if one con­tin­ues to pri­or­i­tize the research func­tion of work­ers’ inquiry. If, how­ever, the objec­tive is to build class con­scious­ness, then the dis­tor­tions of the nar­ra­tive form are not prob­lems at all. They might actu­ally be quite nec­es­sary. With these nar­ra­tives, the ten­sion in Marx’s work­ers’ inquiry – between a research tool on the one hand, and a form of agi­ta­tion on the other – is largely resolved by sub­or­di­nat­ing the for­mer to the lat­ter, trans­form­ing inquiry into a means to the end of consciousness-building.

Build­ing the Cir­cuit: Social­isme ou Barbarie

These Amer­i­can exper­i­ments in work­ers’ inquiry res­onated quite broadly, becom­ing an explicit ref­er­ence point for one French group in par­tic­u­lar. Social­isme ou Bar­barie fol­lowed a remark­ably sim­i­lar tra­jec­tory to that of its Amer­i­can equiv­a­lents – the two groups were in con­tact, shar­ing their dis­cov­er­ies, trans­lat­ing each other’s work, and even co-authoring a book at one point. It began as the “Chaulieu-Montal Ten­dency,” an inter­nal cur­rent within the French sec­tion of the Trot­sky­ist Fourth Inter­na­tional, named after the pseu­do­nyms of its prin­ci­pal ani­ma­tors, Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis (Pierre Chaulieu) and Claude Lefort (Claude Mon­tal). Like the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency in the United States, the Chaulieu-Montal Ten­dency soon found itself opposed to the offi­cial Trot­sky­ist move­ment, prompt­ing a split in late 1948. About twenty mil­i­tants left to form a new orga­ni­za­tion, Social­isme ou Bar­barie, with a new jour­nal of the same name. The first issue was released in March of the fol­low­ing year.35

Like Cor­re­spon­dence, Social­isme ou Bar­barie placed a great deal of empha­sis on the notion of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence. For both these groups, social­ist the­ory and strat­egy, even the very con­tent of social­ist project itself, could only be derived from the every­day expe­ri­ences of the work­ing class. Daniel Blan­chard, a for­mer mem­ber of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, has reflected on the organization’s con­cep­tion of a social­ist soci­ety: it would be “not the result of either utopian dream­ing, or of an alleged sci­ence of his­tory, but of the cre­ations of the work­ers move­ment. The pro­le­tariat is, by its prac­tice, the per­pet­ual inven­tor of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory and the task of the intel­lec­tu­als is lim­ited to syn­the­siz­ing and sys­tem­atiz­ing it.“36

In this regard Social­isme ou Bar­barie con­tested the French Com­mu­nist Party (PCF) which held that social­ism had to be brought to the work­ing class from the out­side. For both Cor­re­spon­dence and Social­isme ou Bar­barie, on the other hand social­ism actu­ally came from within every­day pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences. But these groups agreed that work­ers are largely social­ized by cap­i­tal­ism, and there­fore still marked by cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­ogy, at least to some degree. Since almost no one was free of cap­i­tal­ist think­ing, social­ist con­scious­ness would not spon­ta­neously burst forth, even though it was always lurk­ing below. Cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­ogy still had to be com­bated; and some other mech­a­nism was required to allow this latent con­scious­ness to appear.

That mech­a­nism was work­ers’ inquiry. So while the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency was the first to recode work­ers’ inquiry in the form of the worker nar­ra­tive, Social­isme ou Bar­barie explained why: the worker nar­ra­tive could express the pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence in such a way as to make its embed­ded social­ist con­tent appear.

Social­isme ou Bar­barie adopted this spe­cific form of work­ers’ inquiry – inquiry as nar­ra­tive account – from Cor­re­spon­dence almost ready­made. The group set about trans­lat­ing The Amer­i­can Worker, which appeared seri­ally in the first eight issues of its homony­mously titled jour­nal. These mil­i­tants hailed the pam­phlet as a new, rev­o­lu­tion­ary kind of writ­ing; Philippe Guil­laume intro­duced it with the dec­la­ra­tion that “the name Romano will stay in the his­tory of pro­le­tar­ian lit­er­a­ture, and that it will even sig­nify a turn­ing point in this his­tory.”37

Work­ers’ inquiry, in this early French con­text, there­fore took on roughly the same form that it did with the Amer­i­cans, with The Amer­i­can Worker again set­ting the par­a­digm. It not only formed the empir­i­cal ground for Claude Lefort’s “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence,” Social­isme ou Barbarie’s most seri­ous the­o­riza­tion of inquiry, but would also spawn a num­ber French inquiries mod­eled on Singer’s account. The first came in 1952, when Georges Vivier, a young worker at Chaus­son, began a series on pro­le­tar­ian life titled “La vie en usine” (Life in the Fac­tory). The most famous of these nar­ra­tives, how­ever, were the diaries of Daniel Mothé, the nom de guerre of Jacques Gau­trat, a machin­ist at Renault-Billancourt.38 His writ­ings, which first appeared in the pages of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, attracted so much atten­tion that an edited ver­sion was soon pub­lished by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1959 under the title Jour­nal d’un ouvrier 1956-1958 (Jour­nal of a Worker). It was received well enough to prompt the pub­li­ca­tion of a sec­ond diary, called Mil­i­tant chez Renault (Mil­i­tant at Renault), by Les Éditions du Seuil in 1965.

There would be a sec­ond moment in this transna­tional cir­cu­la­tion. By the time Cor­re­spon­dence split from the offi­cial Trot­sky­ist move­ment to become its own dis­tinct entity, the group decided to fur­ther rev­o­lu­tion­ize the form of work­ers’ inquiry: worker nar­ra­tives became a work­ers’ paper. The work­ers’ paper was to be a more dynamic form of inquiry, where dif­fer­ent sec­tors of the work­ing class could not only share their expe­ri­ences with sim­i­lar kinds of work­ers, but could in fact exchange those expe­ri­ences with each other through let­ters to the editors.

Social­isme ou Bar­barie cer­tainly had some reser­va­tions about the the­o­ret­i­cal assump­tions under­pin­ning the Cor­re­spon­dence project, but the group was suf­fi­ciently inspired by the model of the work­ers’ paper to spon­sor one of its own in France. Just as The Amer­i­can Worker had cre­ated a new genre of writ­ing, so too, they believed, did Cor­re­spon­dence stand for an entirely new kind of pub­li­ca­tion. “It rep­re­sents a pro­foundly orig­i­nal effort to cre­ate a jour­nal for the most part writ­ten by work­ers to speak with work­ers from the work­ers’ view­point,” they wrote in 1954. “It must sim­ply be acknowl­edged that Cor­re­spon­dence rep­re­sents a new type of jour­nal and that it opens a new period in rev­o­lu­tion­ary worker jour­nal­ism.”39 So just as Social­isme ou Bar­barie was inspired by The Amer­i­can Worker to spon­sor its own worker nar­ra­tives, so too was it prompted to sup­port the for­ma­tion of a work­ers paper along the same lines as Cor­re­spon­dence.

But although both groups used the work­ers’ nar­ra­tive and the work­ers’ paper as a means of access­ing the pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence, there was still at least one sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. For Cor­re­spon­dence, social­ism already existed embry­on­i­cally in pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences, which sim­ply had to be expressed and shared with other work­ers. It was enough to pro­vide a forum in which to cir­cu­late these expe­ri­ences; the “invad­ing social­ist soci­ety” would emerge on its own.

Social­isme ou Bar­barie remained skep­ti­cal. Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis would com­ment many years later, if “you talk about the invad­ing social­ist soci­ety,” then you “keep the apoc­a­lyp­tic, mes­sianic streak; the idea that there is a def­i­nite end to the road, and unless every­thing blows up we are going there and we are bound to end there, which is not true.”40 For Social­isme ou Bar­barie, the devel­op­ment of social­ism was not an irre­sistible force, but the very ques­tion to be answered. While there were cer­tain ele­ments, rudi­men­tary, inchoate, frag­mented, that could be found in pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences, they could not be acti­vated sim­ply through writ­ing, or even the shar­ing of that writ­ing with other work­ers. Some in Social­isme ou Bar­barie even believed that these ele­ments could not be prop­erly artic­u­lated into a coher­ent social­ist project until they had been reworked through theory.

So the buried ele­ments recov­ered by inquiry had to be politi­cized before social­ism could see the light of day. These dif­fer­ences imme­di­ately put into ques­tion the poten­tial func­tion of mil­i­tant intel­lec­tu­als. For Cor­re­spon­dence, the role of intel­lec­tu­als was ambigu­ous. Their goal was to pro­vide the space for worker expe­ri­ences to be shared, even if this resulted in a poten­tial ven­tril­o­quism, as in the case of Con­stance Webb and Si Owens. As a 1955 edi­to­r­ial called “Must Serve Work­ers” put it, “The pri­mary task of any indi­vid­ual who comes to a work­ing class move­ment from another class is to put behind him his past and com­pletely iden­tify and adapt him­self to the work­ing class… The func­tion of the intel­lec­tual is to aid the move­ment, to place his intel­lec­tual accom­plish­ment at the dis­posal of the work­ers.”41

Indeed, the very struc­ture of the orga­ni­za­tion was deter­mined by this belief. Grace Lee Boggs later recalled in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy that the group tried to ground itself on Lenin’s notion that the best way to com­bat the bureau­cracy of the “first layer” of intel­lec­tu­als was to develop the “third layer” of the work­ers.42 Cor­re­spon­dence divided itself into three lay­ers: “real work­ers” in the first, “intel­lec­tu­als” who were now employed in jobs tra­di­tion­ally done by “work­ers” in the sec­ond, and the “real intel­lec­tu­als” in the third. As an evi­dently dis­grun­tled for­mer mem­ber recalled:

The real pro­le­tar­i­ans were put in the first layer, peo­ple of mixed sta­tus, like house­wives, in the sec­ond, and the intel­lec­tu­als were put in the third. Our meet­ings con­sisted of the now highly pres­tige­ful first layer spout­ing off, usu­ally in a ran­dom, inar­tic­u­late way, about what they thought about every­thing under the sun. The rest of us, espe­cially we intel­lec­tu­als in the third layer, were told to lis­ten.43

In con­trast to this, Social­isme ou Bar­barie claimed that worker expe­ri­ences had to be inter­preted and devel­oped, and this opened up space for a dif­fer­ent role for intel­lec­tu­als. The larger space that Social­isme ou Bar­barie accorded to the­o­ret­i­cal pro­duc­tion forced it to more directly, and per­haps more con­tentiously, inter­ro­gate the rela­tion­ship between work­ers and intel­lec­tu­als, espe­cially as it related to the prac­tice of work­ers’ inquiry.

But to under­stand the prob­lems raised by the work­ers’ paper, we have to go back to 1952 and an unsigned arti­cle by Claude Lefort titled “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.”44 Hid­den within their daily expe­ri­ences, Lefort claimed, lay basic, per­haps even uni­ver­sal, pro­le­tar­ian atti­tudes: “Prior to any explicit reflec­tion, to any inter­pre­ta­tion of their lot or their role, work­ers have spon­ta­neous com­port­ments with respect to indus­trial work, exploita­tion, the orga­ni­za­tion of pro­duc­tion and social life both inside and out­side the fac­tory.”45 To access these atti­tudes, which for Lefort formed the very ground of the social­ist project, mil­i­tants had to col­lect accounts of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences. Indeed, learn­ing about the expe­ri­ences of the work­ing class, and inquir­ing into its daily life, had to be a fun­da­men­tal aspect of any rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tions. “Social­isme ou Bar­barie would like to solicit tes­ti­monies from work­ers,” he announced, “and pub­lish them at the same time as it accords an impor­tant place to all forms of analy­sis con­cern­ing pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence.”46

Since those atti­tudes, how­ever, remain latent, and because they are nec­es­sar­ily par­tial, tes­ti­monies must not only be col­lected, but actu­ally inter­preted. And therein lay the real prob­lem: who had the right to inter­pret these accounts? Lefort con­cluded his pro­gram­matic essay with exactly this ques­tion, which he answered with another:

Who will reveal from beneath the explicit con­tent of a doc­u­ment the inten­tions and atti­tudes that inspired it, and jux­ta­pose the tes­ti­monies? The com­rades of Social­isme ou Bar­barie? But would this not run counter to their inten­tions, given that they pro­pose a kind of research that would enable work­ers to reflect upon their expe­ri­ence?47

For the moment, these ques­tions were not so press­ing, since Social­isme ou Bar­barie remained on the mar­gins, and inquiry on the scale imag­ined by Lefort a mere pro­posal. But they became a prac­ti­cal con­cern in May 1954, when a work­ers’ paper actu­ally emerged in France. It all began at Renault-Billancourt, an auto­mo­bile plant in the sub­urbs of Paris. A mon­ster of a fac­tory, employ­ing some 30,000 work­ers, it was also a leg­endary site of pro­le­tar­ian mil­i­tancy, and widely con­sid­ered a Com­mu­nist strong­hold. But by the 1950s, the Party slowly began to lose its grip, increas­ingly com­ing under fire from more rad­i­cal ele­ments, like the Trot­sky­ists. It was in this con­text that, in April 1954, a break­through arrived when a few work­ers from one of the fac­tory shops cir­cu­lated a leaflet on wage lev­els. It was warmly received by other work­ers, and, encour­aged by this enthu­si­as­tic recep­tion, a few work­ers decided to launch an inde­pen­dent, clan­des­tine, monthly paper called Tri­bune Ouvrière.48

“What we want,” announced the first issue of the work­ers paper, posi­tion­ing itself against both the Renault man­age­ment and the PCF lead­er­ship, “is to end the tute­lage that the so-called work­ers’ orga­ni­za­tions have exer­cised over us for many years. We want all prob­lems con­cern­ing the work­ing class to be debated by the work­ers them­selves… What we sug­gest is to make of this paper a tri­bune in which we ask you to par­tic­i­pate. We would like this paper to reflect the lives and opin­ions of work­ers. It’s up to you to make this hap­pen.”49

Social­isme ou Bar­barie quickly sup­ported the paper, offer­ing it finan­cial back­ing, help­ing to dis­trib­ute it, and even pub­lish­ing extracts of the paper in its own review. But the exact rela­tion­ship between the two pub­li­ca­tions – the one a clan­des­tine paper writ­ten, edited, and man­aged by fac­tory work­ers, the other a the­o­ret­i­cal jour­nal almost entirely pro­duced by intel­lec­tu­als – was ambigu­ous, and, at times highly divi­sive. Some saw the work­ers’ paper as an inde­pen­dent venue for the raw voice of the work­ing class, what­ever it might have to say, and there­fore only loosely allied with the the­o­ret­i­cal project car­ried out by Social­isme ou Bar­barie; oth­ers wanted to for­mally inte­grate it with Social­isme ou Bar­barie, hop­ing the work­ers’ paper could intro­duce the rig­or­ous ideas of the group to a broader pro­le­tar­ian audience.

In 1955, Tri­bune Ouvrière began run­ning into dif­fi­cul­ties. The col­lec­tive had not really grown, work­ers by and large seemed indif­fer­ent to the paper, and the edi­to­r­ial board remained tiny, with no more than per­haps 15 work­ers. Part of this gen­eral lack of inter­est stemmed from logis­ti­cal chal­lenges. The edi­to­r­ial team had min­i­mal fund­ing, and couldn’t afford to charge high prices, since none of the work­ers would buy an expen­sive paper. It was also very dif­fi­cult to dis­trib­ute. As a clan­des­tine paper, it could only be cir­cu­lated from hand to hand. And its meet­ings could not be orga­nized out in the open, mak­ing it very dif­fi­cult to estab­lish long-term rela­tions with inter­ested readers.

But there were also other, per­haps more fun­da­men­tal prob­lems at play. Daniel Mothé used the oppor­tu­nity to write a pro­gram­matic piece on the mean­ing of the work­ers’ paper, spend­ing a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the arti­cle dis­cussing the rela­tion­ship between work­ers and intel­lec­tu­als. It should be noted at the out­set that Mothé was not really a “neu­tral” observer. The only one to have a foot in both orga­ni­za­tions, Mothé was one of the prin­ci­pal ani­ma­tors behind the paper as well as mem­ber of Social­isme ou Bar­barie since 1952 – he there­fore had a vested inter­est in “solv­ing” the vexed rela­tion­ship between the two pub­li­ca­tions.50 It’s highly sig­nif­i­cant, more­over, that Mothé pub­lished his long piece about Tri­bune Ouvrière in Social­isme ou Bar­barie.

In con­trast to Cor­re­spon­dence, which he directly men­tioned in his piece, Mothé argued that a work­ers’ paper, though entirely writ­ten by work­ers them­selves, still had to par­tic­i­pate in some kind of dia­logue with mil­i­tant intel­lec­tu­als – in fact, this had to be its pri­mary func­tion. For Mothé there is a clear divi­sion of labor, deter­mined by the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion itself, which can­not be will­fully ignored. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics has to take account of this divi­sion, rather than wish it away. Mothé builds on this obser­va­tion to con­struct a dichotomy between two ideal types: the worker on the one hand, and the mil­i­tant intel­lec­tual on the other. They are pri­mar­ily dis­tin­guished, he says, by their train­ing, sug­gest­ing that “if the for­ma­tion of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant is a for­ma­tion that is almost exclu­sively intel­lec­tual,” espe­cially dur­ing a period in which “rev­o­lu­tion­ary minori­ties” have been uprooted from the work­ing class, the “polit­i­cal for­ma­tion of work­ers is, on the con­trary, almost exclu­sively prac­ti­cal.” This prac­ti­cal for­ma­tion was both acquired in the expe­ri­ence of strug­gle and became the basis of new meth­ods of strug­gle. The key prob­lem is to find a way to link these two dis­tinct poles, to cre­ate a form that can fuse the “imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence of the work­ers and the the­o­ret­i­cal expe­ri­ence of rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants.”51

Mothé argued that each pole had to play a unique func­tion that was nev­er­the­less depen­dent on the other. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant artic­u­lates rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory, imparts that the­ory to the work­ing class, and com­bats false ideas.52 The “essen­tial ele­ments” of that the­ory, how­ever, are them­selves drawn from the lived expe­ri­ences of the work­ing class. They form a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship: “In this sense, if the work­ing class needs the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion to the­o­rize its expe­ri­ence, the orga­ni­za­tion needs the work­ing class in order to draw on this expe­ri­ence. This process of osmo­sis has a deci­sive impor­tance.”53

The key­stone of this rela­tion, Mothé argued, is pre­cisely the work­ers’ news­pa­per. The real func­tion of the work­ers’ paper is to medi­ate between these two poles. It is the means through which work­ers can express their every­day expe­ri­ences, which can then be the­o­rized by rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants. Mil­i­tants can then read these accounts, sift through them for latent polit­i­cal ten­den­cies, and work their rudi­men­tary insights into rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory. At the same time, one assumes, the paper can serve as the vehi­cle through which these newly devel­oped the­o­ries will then be trans­mit­ted back to the work­ing class.

Mothé’s model, how­ever, posed as many ques­tions as it answered. To begin with, there was the impre­cise notion of expe­ri­ence, and the ques­tion­able assump­tion that, at base, all pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences artic­u­lated a set of uni­ver­sal atti­tudes. The Johnson-Forest Ten­dency and Claude Lefort both shared this sup­po­si­tion. Indeed, in “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence,” Lefort went so far as to write:

Two work­ers in very dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions have in com­mon that both have endured one or another form of work and exploita­tion that is essen­tially the same and absorbs three-quarters of their per­sonal exis­tence. Their wages might be very dif­fer­ent, their liv­ing sit­u­a­tions and fam­ily lives may not be com­pa­ra­ble, but it remains the case that they are pro­foundly iden­ti­cal both in their roles as pro­duc­ers or machine oper­a­tors, and in their alienation.

Even if one lim­its the work­ing class to fac­tory work­ers, which Lefort seemed to do, such a claim reduces the het­ero­gene­ity of the work­ing class to a shared human essence: work­ers are every­where the same because they have all alien­ated their uni­ver­sal cre­ative pow­ers into the things they pro­duce. But such a con­cep­tion pre­vents us from grasp­ing the many forms that labor-power assumes, the plu­ral­ity of ways it is put to work, and the diverse processes through which it is exploited.

All this leads one to won­der who these “work­ers” Mothé keeps talk­ing about really are. If rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants must draw on pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences, do these include those of house­wives and farm­work­ers? Must rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants draw on all these expe­ri­ences, or is the expe­ri­ence of only one sec­tor suf­fi­cient, and if so, which will speak for all the rest? Mothé’s unsta­ble ter­mi­nol­ogy exposes his pref­er­ence. The piece begins by draw­ing a dis­tinc­tion between “rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants” and “work­ers,” but Mothé soon speaks of “rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants” and “van­guard work­ers.” The slip sig­nals his pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of one kind of worker over the oth­ers. Indeed, for Mothé, as with most Social­isme ou Bar­barie, when they spoke of the work­ing class, they really meant the indus­trial work­ing class, par­tic­u­larly at the auto­mo­bile fac­to­ries; but even more specif­i­cally, their ideal fig­ure, their con­structed van­guard, was semi-skilled labor­ers. It is impor­tant to observe that while Social­isme ou Bar­barie sought to bypass the whole notion of the van­guard party by going directly to the work­ing class, even its most “anar­chis­tic” ele­ments, like Lefort, remained encased in the gen­eral prob­lem­atic of van­guardism: the van­guard ele­ment was no longer out­side the class, but within it.

Mothé added a fur­ther qual­i­fi­ca­tion to this reduc­tion. The worker must not only be the most polit­i­cally con­scious of his class, but must also be capa­ble of express­ing his expe­ri­ences in such a way that they could be the­o­rized. This required not only a high degree of gen­eral lit­er­acy, as well as a fair share of con­fi­dence, but also some flu­ency in a more chal­leng­ing polit­i­cal lex­i­con. “In this sense,” Mothé clar­i­fied, “those work­ers most suit­able for writ­ing will be those who are at the same time the most con­scious, the most edu­cated but also those who will be the most rid of bour­geois or Stal­in­ist ide­o­log­i­cal influ­ence.”54 So Mothé wanted a worker who could not only reflect on his sit­u­a­tion and tran­scribe it into a nar­ra­tive that mim­ic­ked the nat­ural oral cul­ture of the aver­age worker, but who would also be free of all non-revolutionary ide­ol­ogy. It’s no sur­prise then, that Mothé, and much of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, only found one worker who fit the bill: Daniel Mothé him­self.55

The synec­dochic sub­sti­tu­tion of a sin­gle polit­i­cally con­scious male fac­tory worker for the work­ing class as a whole marks a sig­nif­i­cant step back from the posi­tions devel­oped by the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency, and later Cor­re­spon­dence, which had iden­ti­fied at least four dis­tinct seg­ments of the work­ing class: indus­trial work­ers, blacks, women, and youth.

Per­haps the shaki­est part of Mothé’s model, how­ever, had to do not so much with the first step in this process – from work­ers to intel­lec­tu­als – but the sec­ond, from intel­lec­tu­als to work­ers. Mothé spent a great deal of time dis­cussing the first process, but very lit­tle on the sec­ond. This was largely because this sec­ond process proved to be con­tentious among both the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants of Social­isme ou Bar­barie as well as the fac­tory work­ers who formed the edi­to­r­ial core of Tri­bune Ouvrière.56

Some were strongly sup­port­ive of “return­ing” social­ist ideas to the work­ing class. Cas­to­ri­adis was the first to argue, as early as June 1956, that the group had to cre­ate a sep­a­rate “work­ers’ paper” aimed explic­itly at the work­ing class, not just in Paris, but all of France. It was imper­a­tive, he thought, to intro­duce more work­ers to Social­isme ou Barbarie’s the­o­ret­i­cal work, and to sharpen the the­ory itself, since the need to engage with a broader audi­ence, and there­fore write more acces­si­bly, would push the mil­i­tants to work in a more “con­crete” way, avoid­ing abstrac­tions and pay­ing greater atten­tion to devel­op­ments in the class struggle.

This pro­posal was rejected. Some, like Mothé, accepted Cas­to­ri­adis’ the­o­ret­i­cal posi­tion whole­heart­edly, and agreed with the neces­sity of such paper, but felt it was imprac­ti­cal due to the lack of resources, and the fact that the paper prob­a­bly would not find a ready audi­ence, given that it did not already enjoy strong links with the wider work­ing class in France. More­over, Mothé had seen first­hand, through his work with Tri­bune Ouvrière, just how dif­fi­cult it was to oper­ate a “work­ers’ jour­nal” in even one fac­tory, let alone all of France, as Cas­to­ri­adis hoped.

Oth­ers, like Henri Simon and Claude Lefort, opposed the paper on the­o­ret­i­cal grounds, high­light­ing once again a major divi­sion over the vexed “orga­ni­za­tion ques­tion.” Simon asked to what extent the paper would actu­ally be a work­ers’ paper if it were forcibly repur­posed to trans­mit rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory to work­ers.57 How would this be any dif­fer­ent from the other “worker” news­pa­pers, such as those spon­sored by the PCF, which they so harshly criticized?

In a sim­i­lar vein Lefort, who had always opposed the impo­si­tion of any kind of “direc­tion” onto the autonomous move­ments of the work­ing class, decried Castoriadis’s pro­posed paper as “an oper­a­tion from above.” As he put it, “Chaulieu has decided to have this paper at any cost, even though there is no working-class pub­lic in which to dif­fuse it, and even fewer work­ers to actively take part in it.”58 To be sure, Lefort was never opposed to the notion of a work­ers’ paper, not even to orga­ni­za­tion or the­ory as such. But his con­vic­tion that every­thing had to flow organ­i­cally from the work­ing class itself trans­lated into a deep sus­pi­cion of pro­grams: what­ever the inten­tions behind the draft­ing of such a doc­u­ment, and even if it were elab­o­rated in ref­er­ence to the class, a pro­gram would always end up ossi­fy­ing into an exte­rior form, ulti­mately strait­jack­et­ing working-class spon­tane­ity. Such a stance, which implied an extremely cir­cum­scribed role for mil­i­tants, was anti­thet­i­cal to Cas­to­ri­adis’ posi­tion, already reveal­ing an irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ence between the two prin­ci­pal the­o­rists behind the jour­nal. And it was pre­cisely work­ers’ inquiry, in the form of the paper, that revealed it most strik­ingly. Though both ral­lied around work­ers’ inquiry, each had a very dif­fer­ent objec­tive in mind. For Lefort, the object of inquiry was uni­ver­sal pro­le­tar­ian atti­tudes; for Cas­to­ri­adis, it was the rudi­men­tary con­tent of the social­ist program.

Although the pro­posal was defeated, the mat­ter exploded into full view again in 1958. De Gaulle’s coup cre­ated an entirely new sit­u­a­tion. The estab­lished Left seemed par­a­lyzed, a wave of new recruits flooded into Social­isme ou Bar­barie, and many, led by Cas­to­ri­adis, believed the time had finally come to trans­form the group into a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion, com­plete with a line, and a pop­u­lar paper like the one he had pro­posed back in 1956.59 A split took shape along the old fault lines, and in Sep­tem­ber, the minor­ity, led by Lefort and Simon, left to form Infor­ma­tion et Liaisons Ouvrières (Worker Infor­ma­tion and Con­nec­tions, ILO).60

One of the very first actions of this rein­vented Social­isme ou Bar­barie was to cre­ate a new paper, Pou­voir Ouvrier, in Decem­ber of that year. The form of the paper reflected Mothé and Castoriadis’s goals, ini­tially divided into two sec­tions: a polit­i­cal one, which pub­lished sim­pli­fied ver­sions of the the­o­ries devel­oped in its par­ent orga­ni­za­tion, and another, titled “La parole aux tra­vailleurs” (loosely, The Work­ers’ Turn to Speak), which pub­lished worker tes­ti­monies in the tra­di­tion of Paul Romano.

Argu­ing for the strate­gic neces­sity of the paper, Cas­to­ri­adis elab­o­rated his con­cep­tion of the rela­tion­ship of the intel­lec­tual and the worker in “Pro­le­tariat and Orga­ni­za­tion, Part 1,” writ­ten in the sum­mer of 1958 as the split with Lefort’s fac­tion was tak­ing place. While Mothé’s model of the paper had been some­thing like a trans­mis­sion belt, mov­ing for­ward then back­wards between work­ers and intel­lec­tu­als, as if at the flip of a switch, in this text Cas­to­ri­adis pro­vides a more dynamic image, more like a cir­cuit. Mil­i­tants do not sim­ply dis­sem­i­nate their the­o­ries among work­ers in order to con­vert them to social­ism, they sub­mit their the­o­ries for ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory will “have no value, no con­sis­tency with what it else­where pro­claims to be its essen­tial prin­ci­ples,” Cas­to­ri­adis argued, “unless it is con­stantly being replen­ished, in prac­tice, by the expe­ri­ence of the work­ers as it takes shape in their day-to-day lives;” it was this process which would allow the work­ers to “edu­cate the edu­ca­tor.”61 This meant that Social­isme ou Bar­barie, which had hith­erto been an exceed­ingly “intel­lec­tual” review, had to rethink its prac­tice. “The task the orga­ni­za­tion is up against in this sphere,” he con­tin­ued, “is to merge intel­lec­tu­als with work­ers as work­ers as it is elab­o­rat­ing its views. This means that the ques­tions asked, and the meth­ods for dis­cussing and work­ing out these prob­lems, must be changed so that it will be pos­si­ble for the worker to take part.” Rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory had to be more acces­si­ble, the orga­ni­za­tion had to become more dis­ci­plined, and its com­po­si­tion had to change:

Only an orga­ni­za­tion formed as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary work­ers’ orga­ni­za­tion, in which work­ers numer­i­cally pre­dom­i­nate and dom­i­nate it on fun­da­men­tal ques­tions, and which cre­ates broad avenues of exchange with the pro­le­tariat, thus allow­ing it to draw upon the widest pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence of con­tem­po­rary soci­ety – only an orga­ni­za­tion of this kind can pro­duce a the­ory that will be any­thing other than the iso­lated work of specialists.

Like Mothé, he argued that mil­i­tants had to “extract the social­ist con­tent in what is con­stantly being cre­ated by the pro­le­tariat (whether it is a mat­ter of a strike or of a rev­o­lu­tion), for­mu­late it coher­ently, prop­a­gate it, and show its uni­ver­sal import.”62 The­ory must flow from the “his­toric as well as day-to-day expe­ri­ence and action of the pro­le­tariat,” and even “eco­nomic the­ory has to be recon­structed around what is con­tained in embryo in the ten­dency of work­ers toward equal­ity in pay; the entire the­ory of pro­duc­tion around the infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion of work­ers in the fac­tory; all of polit­i­cal the­ory around the prin­ci­ples embod­ied in the sovi­ets and the coun­cils.” But then it would be up to mil­i­tants to extract “what is uni­ver­sally valid in the expe­ri­ence of the pro­le­tariat,” work this up into a gen­eral “social­ist out­look,” then prop­a­gate this out­look among the work­ers whose expe­ri­ences served as its very con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity (214).

Cas­to­ri­adis had attempted pre­cisely this in the third part of his “On the Con­tent of Social­ism,” also in 1958. After crit­i­ciz­ing the bureau­cratic Bol­she­vik expe­ri­ence and then imag­in­ing a coun­cilist man­age­ment of soci­ety in parts one and two, he turned in the last part to the analy­sis of the labor process at the level of the enter­prise. The con­tent of social­ism is the “priv­i­leged cen­ter, the focal point” with­out which there is only “mere empir­i­cal soci­ol­ogy.” The con­tent of social­ism could only be demon­strated in the “proletariat’s strug­gle against alien­ation” (156).

The main con­tra­dic­tion of cap­i­tal­ism, Cas­to­ri­adis argued, lay in the def­i­n­i­tion of the exchange of labor-power, under­stood as the ten­sion between the “human time” of the laborer and the ratio­nal­iza­tion imposed by man­age­ment. There can only be a tem­po­rary bal­ance of forces between the two, the worker resign­ing to a com­pro­mise estab­lish­ing a cer­tain pace of work, which must be dis­solved and rein­vented when the man­u­fac­tur­ing process is trans­formed by new machin­ery. Taylorism’s func­tion was to reduce the het­ero­gene­ity of human time to the “‘one best way’ to accom­plish each oper­a­tion,” stan­dard­iz­ing the pro­ce­dures of work and deter­min­ing an aver­age out­put against which wages could be deter­mined – management’s attempt to the elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­ity of wage con­flicts (159-60).

But Taylorism’s “one best way” could not pos­si­bly account for the real­ity of the work process, under­taken by indi­vid­u­als with mul­ti­plic­i­ties of “best ways” – with their own ges­tures and move­ments, their their own forms of adap­ta­tion to their tools, their own rhythms of exe­cu­tion. The col­lec­tiv­ity of indi­vid­u­als on the shop floor would have to under­take its own form of “spon­ta­neous asso­ci­a­tion” against the ratio­nal­iza­tion of man­age­ment, even to ful­fill management’s goals (163).

Here the con­cept of the “ele­men­tary group,” the “liv­ing nuclei of pro­duc­tive activ­ity,” drawn from The Amer­i­can Worker and the jour­nals of Mothé as much as from indus­trial soci­ol­ogy, became deci­sive (170).63 Each enter­prise, Cas­to­ri­adis wrote, had a ” dou­ble struc­ture,” its “for­mal orga­ni­za­tion” rep­re­sented in charts and dia­grams, and the infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion, “whose activ­i­ties are car­ried out and sup­ported by indi­vid­u­als and groups at all lev­els of the hier­ar­chi­cal pyra­mid accord­ing to the require­ments of their work, the imper­a­tives of pro­duc­tive effi­ciency, and the neces­si­ties of their strug­gle against exploita­tion” (170). The dis­tinc­tion between the two was not merely a ques­tion of “the­ory ver­sus prac­tice,” of an illu­sory boss’s ide­ol­ogy against the messy real­ity of the shop floor, as some lib­eral soci­ol­o­gists would have it. It rep­re­sented the real strug­gle by which man­age­ment attempted to encom­pass the entire pro­duc­tion process.

Against the “sep­a­rate man­age­ment [direc­tion]” of the bureau­cracy, the ele­men­tary group con­sti­tuted “the man­age­ment [ges­tion] of their own activ­ity” (169-70, 171). The oppo­si­tion between the two, Cas­to­ri­adis argued, was the real char­ac­ter of class strug­gle, the for­mal orga­ni­za­tion coin­cid­ing with the “man­age­r­ial stra­tum” and the infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing “a dif­fer­ent mode of oper­a­tion of the enter­prise, cen­tered around the real sit­u­a­tion of the exe­cu­tants.” This strug­gle between “direc­tors and exe­cu­tants” char­ac­ter­ized the cap­i­tal­ist work­place, begin­ning at the level of the ele­men­tary group and extend­ing across the whole enter­prise. Since the “posi­tion of each ele­men­tary group is essen­tially iden­ti­cal to that of the oth­ers,” the coop­er­a­tion between the groups leads them “to merge in a class, the class of exe­cu­tants, defined by a com­mu­nity of sit­u­a­tion, func­tion, inter­ests, atti­tude, men­tal­ity” (171).

If indus­trial soci­ol­ogy from management’s per­spec­tive was unable to rec­og­nize this class divi­sion in the work­place, and there­fore got lost in the­o­ret­i­cal abstrac­tion, the same went for Marx­ists whose con­cept of class did not begin with “the basic artic­u­la­tions within the enter­prise and among the human groups within the enter­prise.” Their ide­ol­ogy blocked them from “see­ing the proletariat’s vital process of class for­ma­tion, of self-creation as the out­come of a per­ma­nent strug­gle that begins within pro­duc­tion” (172).

This ide­ol­ogy had direct polit­i­cal con­se­quences. For Cas­to­ri­adis, even wage demands were nascent expres­sions of the strug­gle by which the infor­mal orga­ni­za­tion of the exe­cu­tants tended towards an attack on the cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment of pro­duc­tion. If Marx­ist par­ties and unions attempted to restrict the con­tent of these strug­gles to the bureau­cratic man­age­ment of income redis­tri­b­u­tion, this could only rein­force the directors/executants divi­sion. “To the abstract con­cept of the pro­le­tariat cor­re­sponds the abstract con­cept of social­ism as nation­al­iza­tion and plan­ning,” Cas­to­ri­adis wrote, “whose sole con­crete con­tent ulti­mately is revealed to be the total­i­tar­ian dic­ta­tor­ship of the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of this abstrac­tion – of the bureau­cratic party.” For the work­ers’ strug­gle to truly real­ize itself, it would have to go fur­ther towards the work­ers’ self-management of pro­duc­tion (172).

With­out this thor­ough­go­ing trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety, cap­i­tal­ism would con­tinue on its cur­rent course, with the “tremen­dous waste” gen­er­ated by its irra­tional pro­duc­tion process. Each enter­prise unsteadily tried to bal­ance between the decom­po­si­tion of exe­cu­tants into atom­ized indi­vid­u­als, and their rein­te­gra­tion into new uni­fied wholes cor­re­spond­ing to a newly ratio­nal­ized pro­duc­tion process (172-3). But the man­age­r­ial plan is inevitably unable to estab­lish a hier­ar­chy of tasks that reflects the real require­ments of pro­duc­tion – while man­age­ment is unaware of the real­ity of the process on the shop floor, the exe­cu­tant is sep­a­rated from the plan and unin­ter­ested in the results, prone to tak­ing short­cuts (175). Only “the prac­tice, the inven­tion, the cre­ativ­ity of the mass of exe­cu­tants,” the col­lec­tiv­ity of the ele­men­tary group, can fill the gaps in management’s pro­duc­tion direc­tives (176).

But despite Castoriadis’s affir­ma­tion of the cre­ativ­ity of the exe­cu­tants in the pro­duc­tion of com­modi­ties, their role in the pro­duc­tion of the­ory was pre­cip­i­tously declin­ing. As Simon, Lefort, and oth­ers had feared, the work­ers’ nar­ra­tives increas­ingly became a mere orna­ment in Pou­voir Ouvrier. Con­firm­ing this wor­ri­some trend, in Novem­ber of 1959 the group voted to shift the empha­sis of the jour­nal even more towards the “polit­i­cal” sec­tion. By the spring of 1961 the sep­a­rate sec­tion titled “La parole aux tra­vailleurs” had van­ished com­pletely.64 The paper there­fore ended up only ful­fill­ing the sec­ond func­tion out­lined by Mothé – trans­mit­ting rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory to the work­ing class. But with­out the first func­tion – express­ing pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ences – Pou­voir Ouvrier sim­ply became another van­guardist pub­li­ca­tion, indis­tin­guish­able from the var­i­ous papers Mothé had orig­i­nally criticized.

To be fair, it seems that the dis­ap­pear­ance of “La parole aux tra­vailleurs” was in large part the result of a lack of worker nar­ra­tives. Indeed, this prob­lem cut across the splits in Social­isme ou Bar­barie. What­ever the dif­fer­ences between Lefort’s, Mothé’s, and Pou­voir Ouvrier’s con­cep­tions of inquiry and the rela­tion between work­ers and intel­lec­tu­als, all were depen­dent on a steady stream of worker accounts. But to their cha­grin, they found that work­ers’ sim­ply did not want to write.65

It’s sig­nif­i­cant here that all of these mod­els imag­ined work­ers’ inquiry in the same way: not the ques­tion­naire, as Marx sug­gested, but the writ­ten tes­ti­mony ini­ti­ated by Romano. Lefort had gone as far as to explic­itly crit­i­cize the “statistically-based” strat­egy of work­ers pos­ing “thou­sands of ques­tions” to each other, since these would result in mere numer­i­cal cor­re­la­tions and would be unable to bring out the “sys­tems of liv­ing and think­ing” of “con­crete indi­vid­u­als.” Even worse, a “ques­tion imposed from the out­side might be an irri­tant for the sub­ject being ques­tioned, shap­ing an arti­fi­cial response or, in any case, imprint­ing upon it a char­ac­ter that it would not oth­er­wise have had.”66 But it is hard not to won­der if the dearth of worker responses has to do with this spe­cific form of inquiry. Though worker nar­ra­tives might allow work­ers to express them­selves more organ­i­cally, they are nonethe­less much more dif­fi­cult to com­pose than respond­ing to a questionnaire.

Just as Pou­voir Ouvrier saw itself mov­ing away from its orig­i­nal goals, Infor­ma­tion et Liaisons Ouvrières also ran into some dif­fi­cul­ties. Unlike the major­ity of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, which asserted the neces­sity of a for­mal party, com­plete with a kind of cen­tral com­mit­tee, the ILO minor­ity had advo­cated a more decen­tral­ized struc­ture, based on autonomous worker cells, where every­thing could be openly dis­cussed. The core of the group would be these cells, based in var­i­ous firms, and the role of ILO would not be to dis­sem­i­nate ideas from above, as Pou­voir Ouvrier would soon do, but to cir­cu­late expe­ri­ences, infor­ma­tion, and ideas between these var­i­ous cells. It was to be some­thing of a net­work, pro­vid­ing links between dif­fer­ent work­ers, very much along the lines of Cor­re­spon­dence. Whereas Pou­voir Ouvrier wanted to prop­a­gate the social­ist project among work­ers, ILO, Lefort later recalled, aimed to “dis­trib­ute a bul­letin as unpro­gram­matic as pos­si­ble attempt­ing pri­mar­ily to give work­ers a voice and to aid in coor­di­nat­ing expe­ri­ences in indus­try – that is, those expe­ri­ences result­ing from attempts at autonomous strug­gle.”67

It should be noted that the minor­ity which split off to form ILO was less united by a com­mon per­spec­tive than by its gen­eral oppo­si­tion to the major­ity that pushed for a party. It’s there­fore unsur­pris­ing that this new group of about twenty would soon run into its own inter­nal dif­fer­ences. A fis­sure began to appear between the prin­ci­pal ani­ma­tors of the group: Lefort, who wished to com­bine the authen­tic­ity of the work­ers’ voice with some kind of the­ory, felt that Simon not only wanted to aban­don all signs of direc­tion, ori­en­ta­tion, and party line, but even inter­pre­ta­tion and the­ory as such. He would later reflect:

The essen­tial thing was that these peo­ple speak of their expe­ri­ence in every­day life. In a sense [Simon] was absolutely cor­rect. We all thought that there was an evil spell of The­ory detached from, and designed to mask, expe­ri­ence and every­day­ness. But it was still a mat­ter of expe­ri­ence as actual expe­ri­ence and every­day­ness, not banal­ity. Expe­ri­ence is not raw; it always implies an ele­ment of inter­pre­ta­tion and opens itself to dis­cus­sion. Speech in every­day life tac­itly or explic­itly refuses another speech and solic­its a response. For Simon, the speech of the exploited, who­ever he might be, what­ever he might say, was in essence good. He knew like all of us that the dom­i­nant bour­geois or demo­c­ra­tic dis­course weighs heav­ily on the speech of the exploited. This knowl­edge did not weaken his con­vic­tion. The speech of the exploited was suf­fi­cient unto itself. Essen­tially, he said that a per­son speaks about what he sees and feels; we have only to lis­ten to him, or bet­ter yet record his remarks in our bul­letin, which is our rai­son d’être.68

Lefort, who left the group in 1960 (prompt­ing them to rename them­selves Infor­ma­tions et Cor­re­spon­dance Ouvrières, ICO), argued that no mat­ter what, some kind of inter­pre­ta­tion will always slip into inquiry, even if only in the selec­tion of texts, the order in which they would be pub­lished, and so forth. To deny this was to deceive oneself.

In other words, the orig­i­nal project of work­ers’ inquiry broke down on both sides. Pou­voir Ouvrier became another van­guardist jour­nal, indis­tin­guish­able from a Trot­sky­ist paper, try­ing to edu­cate the work­ing class through sim­pli­fied ren­di­tions of eso­teric the­o­ries devel­oped with­out ref­er­ence to the con­crete expe­ri­ences of the work­ing class. On the other, ICO tricked itself into ignor­ing the role of intel­lec­tu­als, only to find itself immo­bi­lized, chas­ing after some pure pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence untar­nished by the­o­ret­i­cal interpretation.

As for Cas­to­ri­adis, he broke with his own group in 1962. His reflec­tions on these debates had pro­duced an even more dras­tic effect: Cas­to­ri­adis had come to the con­clu­sion that Marx­ism as a the­ory had been defin­i­tively dis­proved. “Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism and Rev­o­lu­tion,” first writ­ten between 1959 and 1961, had been pub­lished before he left with the dis­claimer that its “ideas are not nec­es­sar­ily shared by the entire Social­isme ou Bar­barie group” (226). Draw­ing on his day job as pro­fes­sional econ­o­mist for the OECD, Cas­to­ri­adis drew up a dev­as­tat­ing bal­ance sheet for Marx­ist the­ory. In the con­text of the post­war boom, Marx­ists were con­tin­u­ing to claim that cap­i­tal­ism, through struc­tural unem­ploy­ment and the increase in the rate of exploita­tion, was impov­er­ish­ing and pau­per­iz­ing the worker. But in real­ity, the sys­tem had yielded full employ­ment and wages were grow­ing more rapidly than ever, lead­ing to a mas­sive expan­sion of con­sump­tion which both pro­vided a steady source of effec­tive demand and rep­re­sented a major rise in the stan­dard of liv­ing of the work­ing class. Marx­ist mil­i­tants had exposed them­selves as worse than use­less; unions had become “cogs in the sys­tem” which “nego­ti­ate the work­ers’ docil­ity in return for higher wages,” while pol­i­tics “takes place exclu­sively among spe­cial­ists,” the sup­posed work­ers’ par­ties dom­i­nated by bureau­crats (227).

As Lefort him­self had sug­gested, the pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence that Social­isme ou Barbarie’s inquires had attempted to reach would have to be coun­ter­posed to the rigid deter­mi­na­tion of eco­nomic laws. “For tra­di­tional Marx­ism,” Cas­to­ri­adis wrote, “the ‘objec­tive’ con­tra­dic­tions of cap­i­tal­ism were essen­tially eco­nomic ones, and the system’s rad­i­cal inabil­ity to sat­isfy the work­ing class’s eco­nomic demands made these the motive force of class strug­gle.” But under­ly­ing this premise was an “objec­tivist and mech­a­nis­tic” fal­lacy which rein­forc­ing the notion that spe­cial­ists and bureau­crats who could under­stand history’s “objec­tive laws” would be respon­si­ble for the analy­sis of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and the “elim­i­na­tion of pri­vate prop­erty and the mar­ket.” Stuck within this fal­lacy, tra­di­tional Marx­ists could not even explain their own fix­a­tions; they failed to grasp that wages had increased because they were actu­ally deter­mined by class strug­gle, and the demands put forth by wage strug­gles could be met as long as they did not exceed pro­duc­tiv­ity increases (227).

Like the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency, Cas­to­ri­adis argued that the con­tra­dic­tion of cap­i­tal­ism had to be located in “pro­duc­tion and work,” and specif­i­cally in terms of the “alien­ation expe­ri­enced by every worker.” But unlike his stal­wart Marx­ist pre­de­ces­sors, Cas­to­ri­adis rec­og­nized that this the­ory was incom­pat­i­ble with the lan­guage of value, and rejected “eco­nomic” def­i­n­i­tions of class. The oppo­si­tion between direc­tors and exe­cu­tants thor­oughly replaced the one between own­ers of the means of pro­duc­tion to non-owners. This had major impli­ca­tions for the view of cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment itself: the “ideal ten­dency” of “bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism” would be “the con­sti­tu­tion of a totally hier­ar­chized soci­ety in con­tin­u­ous expan­sion where people’s increas­ing alien­ation in their work would be com­pen­sated by a ‘ris­ing stan­dard of liv­ing’ and where all ini­tia­tive would be given over to orga­niz­ers” (229). This project, how­ever, was prone to the con­tra­dic­tion of bureau­cratic ratio­nal­ity, “capitalism’s need to reduce work­ers to the role of mere exe­cu­tants and the inabil­ity of this sys­tem to func­tion if it suc­ceeded in achiev­ing this required objec­tive.” The con­tra­dic­tion, then, was that “cap­i­tal­ism needs to real­ize simul­ta­ne­ously the par­tic­i­pa­tion and exclu­sion of the work­ers in the pro­duc­tion process” (228). This inher­ent ten­dency of cap­i­tal­ism could “never com­pletely pre­vail,” since “cap­i­tal­ism can­not exist with­out the pro­le­tariat,” and the proletariat’s con­tin­u­ous strug­gle to change the labor process and the stan­dard of liv­ing played a fun­da­men­tal role in cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment: “The extrac­tion of ‘use value from labor power’ is not a tech­ni­cal oper­a­tion; it is a process of bit­ter strug­gle in which half the time, so to speak, the cap­i­tal­ists turn out to be losers” (248).

The expe­ri­ence of this strug­gle, and the inad­e­quacy of reformism within it, had shorn the exe­cu­tants of any delu­sional faith in “objec­tive” con­tra­dic­tions as the guar­an­tee of bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions. Now the pro­le­tariat could finally rec­og­nize that the true rev­o­lu­tion­ary hori­zon was “work­ers’ man­age­ment and the over­com­ing of the cap­i­tal­ist val­ues of pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion” (230).

In other words, the demands of this move­ment would not be at the level of wages, which rep­re­sented the alien­ated sub­sti­tute for a moti­va­tion dri­ven by cre­ative work. The source of moti­va­tion required for social cohe­sion no longer lay in “sig­ni­fy­ing” activ­i­ties, but solely in the pur­suit of income. Even the clas­si­cal careerist goal of pro­mo­tion in the hier­ar­chy of the bureau­cracy ulti­mately led to higher income (276). But since per­sonal income can­not lead to accu­mu­la­tion – it can­not make a worker a cap­i­tal­ist – “income there­fore only has mean­ing through the con­sump­tion it allows.” Since con­sump­tion could not rest solely on exist­ing needs, which were “at the point of sat­u­ra­tion, due to con­stant rises in income,” cap­i­tal­ists had to gen­er­ate new needs through the intro­duc­tion of new com­modi­ties, and the alien­ated cul­ture of adver­tis­ing which embed­ded them in every­day life (277).

Yet the increase in out­put which was required for a con­stantly ris­ing level of con­sump­tion could only be ensured through the automa­tion of pro­duc­tion, capitalism’s attempt at “the rad­i­cal abo­li­tion of its labor rela­tion prob­lems by abol­ish­ing the worker” (283). And this is the con­text in which the “wage rela­tion becomes an intrin­si­cally con­tra­dic­tory rela­tion,” since a rapidly devel­op­ing tech­nol­ogy, as opposed to the sta­tic tech­nol­ogy of pre­vi­ous soci­eties, pre­vented man­age­ment from set­tling on any per­ma­nent means for the “sta­bi­liza­tion of class rela­tions in the work­place,” and pre­vented “tech­ni­cal knowl­edge from becom­ing crys­tal­lized for­ever in a spe­cific cat­e­gory of the labor­ing pop­u­la­tion” (260). The whole his­tory of class strug­gle within cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion could be under­stood in these terms. The intro­duc­tion of machin­ery in the early 19th cen­tury was met with the pri­mor­dial acts of indus­trial sab­o­tage. Despite the defeat of its Lud­dite begin­nings, the work­ers’ strug­gle con­tin­ued within the fac­tory, lead­ing to the intro­duc­tion of piece­work, wages based on out­put. Now that “norms” of pro­duc­tion were the pri­mary line of strug­gle, cap­i­tal­ism fought back with the Tay­lorist sci­en­tific man­age­ment of norms. The work­ers’ resis­tance to man­age­ment yielded the ide­o­log­i­cal responses of indus­trial psy­chol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy, with their goals of “inte­grat­ing” work­ers into alien­ated work­places. But it was impos­si­ble, even by these mea­sures, to sup­press the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism of work­ers towards the pro­duc­tion process – in fact, in the most advanced cap­i­tal­ist coun­tries, with the high­est wages and the most “mod­ern” method of pro­duc­tion and man­age­ment, the “daily con­flict at the point of pro­duc­tion reaches incred­i­ble pro­por­tions” (264).

Accord­ing to Cas­to­ri­adis, the tra­di­tional Marx­ist con­cep­tion was unable to com­pre­hend this his­tor­i­cal process. For Marx­ism, “cap­i­tal­ists them­selves do not act – they are ‘acted upon’ by eco­nomic motives that deter­mine them just as grav­i­ta­tion gov­erns the move­ment of bod­ies” (262). But his­tory proved that the rul­ing class adapted its strate­gies accord­ing to its sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of class strug­gle, learn­ing that wages can buy the work­ers’ docil­ity, that state inter­ven­tion can sta­bi­lize the econ­omy, and that full employ­ment can pre­vent the rev­o­lu­tion­ary upheaval which would result from a rep­e­ti­tion of 1929 (269-70).

So the new rev­o­lu­tion­ary cri­tique of soci­ety had to shed the dis­trac­tion of the objec­tivist the­ory and directly denounce the irra­tional and inhu­man results of bureau­cratic man­age­ment and alien­ated work. And cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment had ren­dered the over­com­ing of alien­ation defin­i­tively pos­si­ble, since at the tech­ni­cal level “the entire plan­ning bureau­cracy already can be replaced by elec­tronic cal­cu­la­tors,” and on the social level the irra­tional­ity of the bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tion of soci­ety had been com­pletely unveiled (299).

Just as Cas­to­ri­adis drew up a bal­ance sheet of “tra­di­tional Marx­ism,” we can now eval­u­ate this par­tic­u­lar moment of rup­ture. The new the­ory of class was expe­di­ent for an analy­sis of the planned econ­omy of the Soviet Union as “bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism,” for­mu­lated in dia­logue with the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency. Cas­to­ri­adis rad­i­cal­ized their claim that cap­i­tal­ism emerged from rela­tions on the shop floor, rather than own­er­ship of the means of pro­duc­tion.69 The ratio­nal ker­nel of this the­ory was clear: the process which began with the Bol­she­vik enthu­si­asm for Taylorism, the adop­tion by the Russ­ian bureau­cracy of forms of orga­ni­za­tion of the labor process pio­neered by cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment and soci­ol­ogy, shat­tered the Sec­ond Inter­na­tional phi­los­o­phy of his­tory. The advance­ment of the pro­duc­tive forces, whether they were pri­vately or pub­licly owned, had become an ele­ment of the ratio­nal­ity which gov­erned ever more com­plex forms of social stratification.

How­ever, Castoriadis’s new the­ory was sub­ject to the same blindspots as his pre­de­ces­sors, unable to explain class rela­tions in their unity with exchange rela­tions. The ques­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment itself poses fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about his analy­sis. While Cas­to­ri­adis cor­rectly crit­i­cized the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the devel­op­ment of the pro­duc­tive forces with the polit­i­cal project of social­ism, he did not explain how this process was sit­u­ated within the social rela­tions of cap­i­tal­ism. Tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment was an expres­sion of the ratio­nal­ity of man­age­ment; while Cas­to­ri­adis bril­liantly out­lined the con­tra­dic­tions of this ratio­nal­ity at the level of the enter­prise, the under­ly­ing system-wide ques­tions of Marx’s analy­sis, to which each vol­ume of Cap­i­tal had been devoted, were now left unan­swered. If tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is a waste­ful process, why does a profit-seeking enter­prise under­take it? How is it able to make large expen­di­tures in fixed cap­i­tal, in expen­sive machin­ery, and con­tinue to repro­duce its ongo­ing con­di­tions of pro­duc­tion? In Castoriadis’s analy­sis, tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is prac­ti­cally the result of a lack of moti­va­tion, which can only be over­come through the expan­sion in con­sump­tion that is enabled by tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment and its aug­men­ta­tion of out­put. We now lack the the­o­ret­i­cal resources to under­stand why pro­duc­tion has become the end of human exis­tence, or what “max­i­mum pro­duc­tion” would mean – as though the capitalist’s goal were to own more things rather than to make more profits.

Just as fun­da­men­tal was the ques­tion of this system’s basic pre­con­di­tions. While Cas­to­ri­adis explained cap­i­tal­ism as the fullest expres­sion of alien­ation and reifi­ca­tion, it was by no means clear how these phe­nom­ena were spe­cific to cap­i­tal­ism, and what they had to do with the eco­nomic dynam­ics he was so quick to dis­miss. Under­ly­ing management’s attempt to direct labor-power towards the max­i­mum pos­si­ble out­put was the fact that cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment was com­pelled to exploit labor-power to the most prof­itable extent – and that work­ers were equally com­pelled to sell their labor-power in exchange for a wage. What accounted for this compulsion?

If these ques­tions were some­how incom­pat­i­ble with the analy­sis of the cap­i­tal­ist enter­prise, this would not only inval­i­date Marx­ism – it would make the cap­i­tal­ist nature of the enter­prise inex­plic­a­ble. But by start­ing from inquiries into the trans­for­ma­tion of the labor process, and shift­ing to a his­tor­i­cal account of the logic of cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment, Social­isme ou Bar­barie had served as an indis­pens­able foundation.

Sci­ence and Strat­egy: Operaismo

The influ­ence of Cas­to­ri­adis, Lefort, Mothé and oth­ers from Social­isme ou Bar­barie was quite appar­ent in the Italy of the early 1960s. Toni Negri, for instance, recalls how Social­isme ou Bar­barie, “the jour­nal that Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis and Claude Lefort pub­lished in Paris,” became “my daily bread in that period.”70

Direct links, in fact, had already been estab­lished. In 1954 Danilo Mon­taldi, who had ear­lier been expelled from the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Party (PCI), trans­lated “The Amer­i­can Worker,” not from the orig­i­nal Eng­lish, but from the French trans­la­tions that appeared in Social­isme ou Bar­barie. He trav­eled to Paris that year, meet­ing the mil­i­tants of Social­isme ou Bar­barie and ini­ti­at­ing an exchange with none other than Daniel Mothé, whose diary he would later trans­late into Ital­ian. Mon­taldi would main­tain these con­nec­tions, return­ing to Paris in 1957, and again in 1960, to strengthen ties with Cas­to­ri­adis, Lefort, and Edgar Morin, among oth­ers.71

Mon­taldi not only played an indis­pens­able role in the trans­mis­sion of the ideas of Social­isme ou Bar­barie into the Ital­ian con­text, he put them into prac­tice, con­duct­ing his own brand of work­ers’ inquiry. These prac­ti­cally unprece­dented inves­ti­ga­tions, which relied on a plu­ral­ity of meth­ods, from nar­ra­tive to soci­o­log­i­cal inquiry to oral his­tory, resulted in a series of highly influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions: “Milan, Korea,” an inquiry into south­ern immi­grants liv­ing in Milan, Auto­bi­ografie della leg­gera, and finally Mil­i­tanti politici di base.

Mon­taldi pro­posed an entirely dif­fer­ent way of see­ing things. The objec­tive of inquiry was to uncover the every­day strug­gles of the work­ing class, inde­pen­dently of all the offi­cial insti­tu­tions that claimed to rep­re­sent it. Yet as Ser­gio Bologna recalls, Montaldi’s care­ful his­to­ries rejected myth­i­cal trib­utes to spon­tane­ity, opt­ing instead for rich descrip­tions of “microsys­tems of strug­gle,” the polit­i­cal cul­tures of resis­tance that made seem­ingly spon­ta­neous move­ments pos­si­ble.72 This new focus on buried net­works and obscured his­to­ries would have tremen­dous ramifications.

In addi­tion to his own inves­ti­ga­tions, Mon­taldi orga­nized a group in Cre­mona called Gruppo di Unità Pro­le­taria. Last­ing from 1957-1962, it brought together a num­ber of young mil­i­tants, all united by their desire to dis­cover the work­ing class as it really was, beyond the frigid world of party cards. One of these young mil­i­tants was Romano Alquati.

Alquati, trained as a soci­ol­o­gist, would be a piv­otal fig­ure in the for­ma­tion of the jour­nal Quaderni Rossi, the ini­tial encounter of het­ero­dox mil­i­tants from the Ital­ian Social­ist Party and the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Party which would found operaismo, or “work­erism.” Quaderni Rossi began with a debate over soci­ol­ogy, whose use by the bosses had yielded new forms of labor man­age­ment and dis­ci­pline, but had also gen­er­ated invalu­able infor­ma­tion about the labor process. While a crit­i­cal Marx­ist appro­pri­a­tion of soci­ol­ogy was on the agenda, its rela­tion to Montaldi’s work­ers’ inquiry was not entirely clear. Some in Quaderni Rossi – the “soci­ol­o­gist” fac­tion sur­round­ing Vit­to­rio Rieser – believed that this new sci­ence, though asso­ci­ated with bour­geois aca­d­e­mics, could be used as a basis for the renewal of the insti­tu­tions of the work­ers’ move­ment. Oth­ers, includ­ing Alquati, felt soci­ol­ogy could only be, at best, an ini­tial step towards a specif­i­cally mil­i­tant col­lab­o­ra­tion between researchers and work­ers, a new form of knowl­edge which would be char­ac­ter­ized as “core­search.”73

Alquati’s inquiries would prove to be fun­da­men­tal in the devel­op­ment of workerism’s eco­nomic analy­sis. Steve Wright has bril­liantly traced the break which can be observed between Alquati’s “Report on the ‘New Forces,’” a study of FIAT pub­lished in the first issue of Quaderni Rossi in 1961, and the 1962 study of Olivetti. In the first text, along with the two oth­ers pub­lished that year on FIAT, Alquati oper­ates, inter­est­ingly enough, within the prob­lem­atic estab­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie.74 The “new forces” at FIAT were the younger gen­er­a­tion, brought in to work the recently installed machin­ery that had deskilled more expe­ri­enced pro­fes­sional work­ers. Man­age­ment imposed hier­ar­chies within the work­force – a divi­sion of labor sep­a­rat­ing tech­ni­cians and skilled work­ers from the major­ity, along with divi­sive pay scales. But this process of ratio­nal­iza­tion was sub­ject to the con­tra­dic­tory irra­tional­ity Cas­to­ri­adis had described; and it gave rise to forms of “invis­i­ble orga­ni­za­tion” result­ing from the fact that man­age­ment was con­strained to give exe­cu­tants respon­si­bil­ity while at the same time try­ing to repress their con­trol. Alquati also drew polit­i­cal con­clu­sions rem­i­nis­cent of his French pre­cur­sors: the work­ers were uncon­vinced by the reformism of the offi­cial work­ers’ move­ment, and instead expressed inter­est in work­ers’ man­age­ment, in an end to the alien­at­ing process of work.

Along­side Alquati’s text in the inau­gural issue of Quaderni Rossi, Ranziero Panzieri, the founder of the review, pub­lished a highly influ­en­tial arti­cle called “The Cap­i­tal­ist Use of Machin­ery: Marx Against the Objec­tivists.” Writ­ten after Alquati’s “Report,” it reflected on the themes raised by Alquati, refer­ring through­out to the work­ers “stud­ied in the present issue of Quaderni Rossi,” while push­ing towards a new frame­work. Panzieri, who had not only writ­ten the intro­duc­tion to the Ital­ian edi­tion of Mothé’s diary, but was also the Ital­ian trans­la­tor of the sec­ond vol­ume of Cap­i­tal, was not pre­pared to drop Marx’s lan­guage in favor of that of direc­tors and executants:

the worker, as owner and seller of his labour-power, enters into rela­tion with cap­i­tal only as an indi­vid­ual; coop­er­a­tion, the mutual rela­tion­ship between work­ers, only begins with the labour process, but by then they have ceased to belong to them­selves. On enter­ing the labour process they are incor­po­rated into cap­i­tal.75

For Panzieri, the means by which this incor­po­ra­tion took place was machin­ery, in the pas­sage from man­u­fac­ture to the devel­oped level of large-scale indus­try. Cit­ing Marx’s remark that in the cap­i­tal­ist fac­tory, “the automa­ton itself is the sub­ject, and the work­ers are merely con­scious organs,” Panzieri’s tar­get was the labor bureaucracy’s enthu­si­asm for tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment.76 Accord­ing to this ortho­dox posi­tion, tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment rep­re­sented a tran­shis­tor­i­cal force, deter­min­ing the pro­gres­sive move­ment through modes of pro­duc­tion. To drive down the Ital­ian road to social­ism, the Ital­ian worker would have to sub­mit to the automa­tons in the auto­mo­bile fac­to­ries.77

It is sig­nif­i­cant that while Panzieri made many of the same his­tor­i­cal obser­va­tions as Cas­to­ri­adis, he defended them as dis­cov­er­ies inter­nal to Marx’s the­ory. The same went for the ris­ing stan­dard of liv­ing. Accord­ing to Panzieri, “Marx fore­saw an increase not just of the nom­i­nal but also of the real wage”: “the more the growth of cap­i­tal is rapid, the more the mate­r­ial sit­u­a­tion of the working-class improves. And the more the wage is linked to the growth of cap­i­tal, the more direct becomes labour’s depen­dence upon cap­i­tal.“78 For this rea­son, though now in agree­ment with Cas­to­ri­adis, Panzieri con­sid­ered wage strug­gles a func­tion of the unions’ bureau­cratic incor­po­ra­tion of labor into cap­i­tal; only by directly attack­ing capital’s con­trol and replac­ing it with work­ers’ con­trol could tech­no­log­i­cal ratio­nal­ity be sub­jected to “the social­ist use of machines.” Indeed, for Panzieri, Quaderni Rossi’s inquiries showed that the work­ers were already com­ing to this view. How­ever, he still warned against draw­ing any directly polit­i­cal con­clu­sions: “The ‘new’ working-class demands which char­ac­ter­ize trade-union strug­gles (stud­ied in the present issue of Quaderni Rossi) do not directly fur­nish a rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal con­tent, nor do they imply an auto­matic devel­op­ment in that direction.”

When Alquati’s own inves­ti­ga­tions turned from FIAT to Olivetti – from a fac­tory that made cars to one that made cal­cu­la­tors and type­writ­ers – he was able to draw on and build upon Panzieri’s analy­sis of tech­nol­ogy. In the title “Organic Com­po­si­tion of Cap­i­tal and Labor-Power at Olivetti,” Alquati defin­i­tively brought the dis­course of work­ers’ inquiry back into the lan­guage of Marx­ist eco­nomic analy­sis, and implic­itly sug­gested a new con­cept: class composition.

While the seeds of class com­po­si­tion can be already observed in the “Report on the ‘New Forces,’” inso­far as Alquati attempted to describe the mate­r­ial exis­tence of the work­ing class, its behav­iors and forms of inter­ac­tions and orga­ni­za­tion, the ear­lier inquiry had treated machin­ery purely as a means by which direc­tors reduced work­ers to exe­cu­tants. Deskilling was sim­ply a way to break the will of the exe­cu­tants, and new machin­ery an instru­ment in this process. Now, in the inquiry at Olivetti, the increas­ing organic com­po­si­tion of cap­i­tal was seen from the working-class view­point as the recom­po­si­tion of labor-power, the trans­for­ma­tion of the very forms of worker coop­er­a­tion. Tech­nol­ogy, in this sense, rep­re­sented the field in which the social rela­tions of class were embed­ded, but as part of a dynamic process in which the con­flict between the extrac­tion of sur­plus value and work­ers’ insub­or­di­na­tion shaped the process of pro­duc­tion. Direc­tors were not mere par­a­sites; while it was true that exe­cu­tants infor­mally orga­nized their con­crete labor, the func­tion of man­age­ment was to plan and coor­di­nate this labor within the val­oriza­tion process. Work­ers’ strug­gles would have to artic­u­late forms of polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion that responded to this tech­no­log­i­cal recom­po­si­tion, and in this con­text self-management would no longer be ade­quate – except as the work­ers’ self-management of the strug­gle against the cap­i­tal relation.

If these inquiries resulted in the begin­nings of a new sci­en­tific prob­lem­atic, and an enthu­si­as­tic embrace of new forces, then inquiry turned out to be more polit­i­cally divi­sive than the par­tic­i­pants had real­ized. After the riots of Piazza Statuto in 1962, when work­ers attacked the offices of the Unione Ital­iana del Lavoro (UIL) in Turin, Quaderni Rossi would be torn apart by inter­nal dis­agree­ments.79 While Tronti, Alquati, Negri, and oth­ers believed that this rep­re­sented a new phase of the class strug­gle, an oppor­tu­nity to break with the increas­ingly unten­able strat­egy of col­lab­o­ra­tion with the unions, Panzieri saw it as a polit­i­cal impasse. Uncon­vinced that autonomous work­ers’ strug­gles could advance a last­ing orga­ni­za­tional form – even if the form of the unions had been exhausted – Panzieri thought that a renewed empha­sis on inquiry and soci­o­log­i­cal research would be required before any move­ment could emerge.

This polit­i­cal dif­fer­ence was, sig­nif­i­cantly, also a the­o­ret­i­cal one. At an edi­to­r­ial meet­ing at the end of 1963, Panzieri remarked that an essay of Tronti’s was

for me a fas­ci­nat­ing resume of a whole series of errors that the work­ers’ Left can com­mit in this moment. It is fas­ci­nat­ing because it is very Hegelian, in the orig­i­nal sense, as a new way of re-living a phi­los­o­phy of his­tory. It is pre­cisely a phi­los­o­phy of his­tory of the work­ing class. One speaks, for exam­ple, of the party, but in that con­text the con­cept of the party can­not be deduced or forced in; one can only deduce the self-organisation of the class at the level of neo-capitalism.80

In Jan­u­ary of the fol­low­ing year, this essay would launch the new jour­nal Classe Operaia, formed by Tronti’s fac­tion. His con­tro­ver­sial essay would famously announce, in the lines which have now become the inescapable catch­phrase of work­erism: “We too have worked with a con­cept that puts cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment first, and work­ers sec­ond. This is a mis­take. And now we have to turn the prob­lem on its head, reverse the polar­ity, and start again from the begin­ning: and the begin­ning is the class strug­gle of the work­ing class.”81

In the fall of that year, the last of his life, Panzieri spoke at a Turin sem­i­nar called “Social­ist Uses of Work­ers’ Inquiry,” along­side the “soci­ol­o­gist” fac­tion that had remained with Quaderni Rossi. Here he argued for “the use of soci­o­log­i­cal tools for the polit­i­cal aims of the work­ing class,” and in doing so pre­sented a kind of coun­ter­point to “Lenin in Eng­land.” In his inter­ven­tion, pub­lished the fol­low­ing year in Quaderni Rossi, Panzieri defended the anti-historicist char­ac­ter of inquiry, claim­ing that Marx’s Cap­i­tal itself had the fea­tures of a soci­o­log­i­cal analysis:

In Marx’s Eco­nomic and Philo­soph­i­cal Man­u­scripts and other early writ­ings the point of com­par­i­son is alien­ated being (“the worker suf­fers in his very exis­tence, the cap­i­tal­ist in the profit on his dead mam­mon”) and the cri­tique of polit­i­cal econ­omy is linked to a his­tor­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal con­cep­tion of human­ity and his­tory. How­ever, Marx’s Cap­i­tal aban­dons this meta­phys­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal out­look and the later cri­tique is lev­elled exclu­sively at a spe­cific sit­u­a­tion that is cap­i­tal­ism, with­out claim­ing to be a uni­ver­sal anti-critique of the one-sidedness of bour­geois polit­i­cal economy.

Work­ers’ inquiry as a sci­en­tific prac­tice had to be elab­o­rated on this basis – by advanc­ing its own one-sidedness in response. For Panzieri, Marx­ist soci­ol­ogy “refuses to iden­tify the work­ing class with the move­ment of cap­i­tal and claims that it is impos­si­ble to auto­mat­i­cally trace a study of the work­ing class back to the move­ment of cap­i­tal.”82

But what was the mean­ing of this one-sidedness? Panzieri had indi­cated his dis­taste for Tronti’s grandiose inver­sion, and this was indeed a per­ti­nent crit­i­cism, pre­sag­ing the increas­ing dis­tance of work­erist the­ory from the con­crete prac­tice of inquiry over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. How­ever, Panzieri was unable to pro­pose a new polit­i­cal approach; while he had tied the prac­tice of inquiry to a Marx­ist eco­nomic analy­sis, he was unable to bring this the­ory to bear on the real polit­i­cal activ­ity that was begin­ning to emerge, and which would char­ac­ter­ize over a decade of class strug­gle to fol­low. Recently Tronti has reflected on this split:

Panzieri accused me of “Hegelian­ism,” of “phi­los­o­phy of his­tory.” This read­ing, and the accu­sa­tion that under­lies it, will often return; after all, Hegelian­ism was a real fac­tor, it was effec­tively there, always had been; while this idea of a “phi­los­o­phy of his­tory” absolutely did not… Ours was not a the­ory that imposed itself from out­side on real data, but the oppo­site: that is, the attempt to recover those real data, giv­ing them mean­ing within a the­o­ret­i­cal hori­zon.83

Indeed, work­erism would, for its entire his­tory, be tor­tured by the ten­sion between “phi­los­o­phy of his­tory” and “real data”; this lives on in today’s “post-workerism.” But these are the risks taken by those whose eyes are on the “the­o­ret­i­cal hori­zon.” It is impor­tant to note that Alquati, who did not share Panzieri’s views on the incom­pat­i­bil­ity of research and insur­rec­tion, split from Quaderni Rossi and joined Classe Operaia. His con­cep­tion of inquiry was a mil­i­tant and polit­i­cal one.

For this rea­son Tronti’s the­o­ret­i­cal syn­the­sis, in his 1965 essay “Marx, Labor-Power, Work­ing Class,” has to be reex­plored. This essay makes up the bulk of Work­ers and Cap­i­tal (1966), with only a cou­ple con­clud­ing sec­tions trans­lated into Eng­lish. Unlike the rest of the book, which con­sists of arti­cles writ­ten for Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, this hith­erto unpub­lished essay is a long and con­tin­u­ous argu­ment, devel­oped on the basis of Tronti’s Marx­ol­ogy and his­tor­i­cal analy­sis. While this leads us to a cer­tain digres­sion, we believe it is the indis­pens­able basis for redis­cov­er­ing the the­ory of class com­po­si­tion that Alquati’s prac­tice of inquiry sug­gested, while also devel­op­ing this the­ory in a way that takes Panzieri’s warn­ing seriously.

Though Tronti’s clas­si­cal work­erist inver­sion is widely known and cited, less is known about the process of the­o­ret­i­cal elab­o­ra­tion that led to it. Through­out Work­ers and Cap­i­tal the pri­macy of work­ers’ strug­gle is described as a strate­gic rever­sal which attempts to iden­tify and advance the polit­i­cal char­ac­ter of Marx’s the­o­ret­i­cal devel­op­ment, with the expe­ri­ence of 1848 and the polit­i­cal writ­ings pre­ced­ing the sci­en­tific eco­nomic analy­sis.84 In a sense, this rep­re­sented a new object of inquiry. No longer was the goal, as it was for the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency or Social­isme ou Bar­barie, to dis­cover uni­ver­sal pro­le­tar­ian atti­tudes, or even the con­tent of social­ism, but to access a specif­i­cally polit­i­cal logic which emerged from the working-class view­point – a con­se­quence of the dif­fi­cult rela­tion between strat­egy and sci­ence rep­re­sented by Marx’s the­o­ret­i­cal practice.

Despite what seems to be an affir­ma­tion of some pur­ported working-class iden­tity, Tronti did not seek to defend, in the man­ner of the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency and Social­isme ou Bar­barie, the dig­nity of labor. On the con­trary, the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of the “refusal of work” meant return­ing to Marx’s own cri­tique of the ide­ol­ogy of the work­ers’ move­ment: “When Marx refused the idea of labor as the source of wealth and took up a con­cept of labor as the mea­sure of value, social­ist ide­ol­ogy was beaten for good, and working-class sci­ence was born. It’s no acci­dent that this is still the choice” (222).85

Marx had tire­lessly repeated that “labor is pre­sup­posed by cap­i­tal and at the same time pre­sup­poses it in its turn” – in other words, the owner of cap­i­tal pre­sup­poses labor-power, while labor-power pre­sup­poses the con­di­tions of labor. On its own, Tronti wrote, “labor cre­ates noth­ing, nei­ther value nor cap­i­tal, and con­se­quently it can­not demand from any­one the resti­tu­tion of the full fruit of what ‘it has cre­ated’” (222). But since social­ist ide­ol­ogy had extended to new the­o­ries of labor and class, it would be nec­es­sary to “clear the field of every tech­no­log­i­cal illu­sion” which tried to “reduce the pro­duc­tive process to the labor process, to a rela­tion of the laborer to the instru­ment as such of his labor, as though it were an eter­nal rela­tion of man with an evil gift of nature.” Just as treach­er­ous was “the trap of the processes of reifi­ca­tion,” which started with the “ide­o­log­i­cal lament” of machinery’s mor­ti­fi­ca­tion of the worker and quickly moved to pro­pose “the mys­ti­cal cure for the class con­scious­ness of this worker, as if it were the search for the lost soul of mod­ern man” (203).

Instead, rec­og­niz­ing that the “work­ing class is the point of his­tor­i­cal depar­ture for the birth and growth of cap­i­tal­ism,” Marx’s path was to “start from cap­i­tal to arrive at log­i­cally under­stand­ing the work­ing class” (230). Con­se­quently, it was nec­es­sary to affirm that the cap­i­tal­ist view­point could attain the sta­tus of sci­ence. In fact, cap­i­tal­ist sci­ence would be supe­rior to social­ist ide­olo­gies, which were still trapped in the view that “only the work­ing class, in par­tic­u­lar in the per­sona of its rep­re­sen­ta­tive offi­cials, is the repos­i­tory of real sci­ence (of real his­tory etc.), and that this is the sci­ence of every­thing, the gen­eral social sci­ence also valid for cap­i­tal.” It would be bet­ter to rec­og­nize that “in the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the pro­duc­tive process of a large fac­tory, there is at least as much sci­en­tific knowl­edge as in the Smithian dis­cov­ery of pro­duc­tive labor that is exchanged for cap­i­tal” (172). To want to know more about cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety from the working-class view­point “than the cap­i­tal­ists them­selves” was a “pious illu­sion,” and “every form of work­ers’ man­age­ment of cap­i­tal proves to be nec­es­sar­ily imper­fect with rela­tion to a directly cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment.” The work­ers’ path was not a per­fected man­age­ment, but destruc­tion of cap­i­tal­ism by rev­o­lu­tion. “So from the view­point of the cap­i­tal­ists,” Tronti argued, “it is com­pletely cor­rect to study the work­ing class; only they are capa­ble of study­ing it cor­rectly. But the ide­o­log­i­cal smog of indus­trial soci­ol­ogy will not suc­ceed in can­celling the death sen­tence that it rep­re­sents for them” (230).

In this regard research from the working-class view­point would be dis­tinct from cap­i­tal­ist soci­ol­ogy, since its find­ings would be ori­ented towards the orga­ni­za­tion of this destruc­tion. This indi­cates the ques­tion of “polit­i­cal com­po­si­tion”; as Tronti wrote, “the the­o­ret­i­cal research we have con­ducted on the con­cepts of labor, labor-power, work­ing class, becomes noth­ing more than an exer­cise on the path to the prac­ti­cal dis­cov­ery of a con­quest of orga­ni­za­tion” (259). This spe­cific line of research, which emerges from work­ers’ inquiry and, in the his­tory of work­erism, some­times strays quite far from it, requires a sep­a­rate inves­ti­ga­tion. For the time being, we will dwell on the con­cepts of labor, labor-power, and work­ing class, inso­far as they com­ple­ment and sys­tem­atize the find­ings of work­ers’ inquiry and the cat­e­gory of class composition.

Before even ask­ing what it means to say that the work­ing class dri­ves cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment, we have to ask what it means to say class, and indeed this is the absolutely cen­tral ques­tion of Tronti’s the­o­ret­i­cal elab­o­ra­tion. For Tronti the the­ory of class can­not be restricted to the point of pro­duc­tion, and does not even nec­es­sar­ily begin there. Its expo­si­tion begins with Marx’s point in vol­ume 2 of Cap­i­tal: “The class rela­tion between cap­i­tal­ist and wage-labourer is thus already present, already pre­sup­posed, the moment that the two con­front each other in the act M-L (L-M from the side of the worker).”86 Indeed, Tronti will affirm that “for Marx it is beyond doubt that the class-relation already exists in-itself [an sich] in the act of cir­cu­la­tion. It is pre­cisely this which reveals, which brings out, the cap­i­tal­ist rela­tion dur­ing the production-process” (149).87

His analy­sis pur­sues the lines of Marx which follow:

Money can be spent in this form only because labour-power is found in a state of sep­a­ra­tion from its means of pro­duc­tion (includ­ing the means of sub­sis­tence as means of pro­duc­tion of labour-power itself); and because this sep­a­ra­tion is abol­ished only through the sale of labour-power to the owner of the means of pro­duc­tion, a sale which sig­ni­fies that the buyer is now in con­trol of the con­tin­u­ous flow of labour-power, a flow which by no means has to stop when the amount of labor nec­es­sary to repro­duce the price of labour-power has been per­formed. The cap­i­tal rela­tion arises only in the pro­duc­tion process because it exists implic­itly in the act of cir­cu­la­tion, in the basi­cally dif­fer­ent eco­nomic con­di­tions in which buyer and seller con­front one another, in their class rela­tion.88

What can it mean that a the­o­ret­i­cal tra­di­tion so known for its focus on the point of pro­duc­tion starts with a the­ory not only of value, but of class, that is cen­tered on exchange? Hel­mut Reichelt has com­mented on the choice faced for eco­nomic form-analysis between, on the one hand, labor as a “quasi-ontological cat­e­gory” which presents “sub­stan­tialised abstract human labour as the sub­stance of value”; and on the other hand, an account of the specif­i­cally cap­i­tal­ist social processes which con­sti­tute the “valid­ity [Gel­tung]” of human activ­ity as abstract labor, and the nat­ural form of prod­ucts as val­ues – in other words, the deter­mi­na­tion of what is counted as labor in exchange.89 For Reichelt this is the basis of Marx’s advanced the­ory of value, and we can also observe Tronti fol­low­ing this thread: “Con­crete labor real­izes itself in the infi­nite vari­ety of its use val­ues; abstract labor real­izes itself in the equal­ity of com­modi­ties as gen­eral equiv­a­lents” (124).

In an adven­tur­ous recon­quer­ing of Marx’s 1844 Man­u­scripts, against their human­ist appro­pri­a­tion, Tronti argued that Marx’s early writ­ings on alien­ation rep­re­sented an ini­tial and incom­plete the­ory of abstract labor, aris­ing from the sep­a­ra­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic of pri­vate prop­erty.90 But this account would only be truly devel­oped in Cap­i­tal. While for Cas­to­ri­adis Cap­i­tal amounted to lit­tle more than eco­nomic objec­tivism, it raised the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of the com­men­su­ra­bil­ity assumed in exchange – which, as Reichelt points out, is cen­tral to the “dou­ble char­ac­ter” of “the wealth of bour­geois soci­ety”: “a mass of a mul­ti­tude of use-values that as homoge­nous abstract quan­ti­ties can at the same time be aggre­gated into a social prod­uct.“91 The value rela­tion is meant to explain the form of “equal valid­ity” which allows dif­fer­ent prod­ucts to be ren­dered equiv­a­lent in exchange.92

A the­ory of class rela­tions spe­cific to cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety, then, can­not neglect to explain how the abil­ity to work can pos­si­bly be part of a sys­tem of exchange: how labor-power can be exchanged for a wage, inserted into a sys­tem of cir­cu­la­tion in which com­modi­ties are ren­dered equiv­a­lent accord­ing to their val­ues. But this ques­tion can only be answered within the con­text of a his­tor­i­cal analy­sis which opens onto the def­i­n­i­tion of class. Abstract labor is con­sti­tuted in exchange, but the typ­i­cal exchange of cap­i­tal­ism is money/labor-power; so how does this con­sti­tu­tive class rela­tion arise, in which own­ers of money and own­ers of labor-power con­front each other on the mar­ket, and what is its rela­tion to the process of cap­i­tal­ist development?

For both Lefort and Cas­to­ri­adis, rely­ing on the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, capitalism’s pre­con­di­tion was the bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion. For Lefort, the bour­geoisie had to be under­stood as con­sti­tut­ing “a homo­ge­neous group with a fixed struc­ture” which had “com­mon inter­ests and hori­zons”; the pro­le­tariat, on the other hand, reduced to its atom­ized eco­nomic func­tions, would have to unify itself through its strug­gle against the bour­geoisie.93 Cap­i­tal­ism rep­re­sented the reshap­ing of soci­ety accord­ing to the bourgeoisie’s col­lec­tive interest.

For Tronti, start­ing from the forms of gen­er­al­ized exchange­abil­ity char­ac­ter­is­tic of cap­i­tal­ism, such an account of the bour­geoisie was sim­ply impos­si­ble. For a sys­tem in which the typ­i­cal, defin­ing exchange was money/labor-power, the start­ing premise had to be the con­sti­tu­tion of a class with noth­ing to sell but labor-power, the free laborer con­strained eco­nom­i­cally but not legally to sell labor-power in exchange for a wage. This, for Tronti, was the con­sti­tu­tion of the pro­le­tariat: “the prop­erly his­tor­i­cal pas­sage from labor to labor-power, that is from labor as slav­ery and ser­vice to labor-power as the sole com­mod­ity able to sub­mit wealth to value, able to val­orize wealth and thereby pro­duce cap­i­tal” (139). But the pro­le­tariat had to enter into exchange not with a class, but with indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal­ists, whose only “col­lec­tive” inter­est was their shared drive to com­pete with each other:

The his­tor­i­cal point of depar­ture sees in cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety the work­ers on one side and the cap­i­tal­ist on the other. Here again is one of the facts which imposes itself with the vio­lence of its sim­plic­ity. His­tor­i­cally we can speak of an indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal­ist: this is the socially deter­mined fig­ure which pre­sides over the con­sti­tu­tion of cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions of pro­duc­tion. As such, at least in the clas­si­cal devel­op­ment of the sys­tem, this his­tor­i­cal fig­ure does not dis­ap­pear, it is not sup­pressed or extin­guished, but only orga­nizes itself col­lec­tively, social­iz­ing itself so to speak in cap­i­tal, pre­cisely as the class rela­tion. On the other hand we can­not speak of the iso­lated worker at any his­tor­i­cal moment. In its mate­r­ial, socially deter­mined fig­ure, the worker is from his birth col­lec­tively orga­nized. From the begin­ning the work­ers, as exchange val­ues of the cap­i­tal­ist, come forth in the plural: the worker in the sin­gu­lar does not exist (232-3).

In this regard the indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal­ist per­sists, and con­tin­ues to engage in the mar­ket exchange which char­ac­ter­izes cap­i­tal­ism. But the cap­i­tal­ist class is “always some­thing else more or less than a social class. Some­thing less, since direct eco­nomic inter­est has not ceased and per­haps will not cease to present itself as divided on the cap­i­tal­ist side. Some­thing more, because the polit­i­cal power of cap­i­tal now extends its appa­ra­tus of con­trol, dom­i­na­tion, and repres­sion beyond the tra­di­tional forms taken by the State, to invest the whole struc­ture of the new soci­ety” (233).

Once labor-power is exchanged for the wage, Tronti argues, intro­duc­ing a ter­mi­no­log­i­cal dis­tinc­tion into Marx’s cat­e­gories, the pro­le­tariat is recom­posed as work­ing class: as labor-power which is coop­er­a­tive, col­lec­tive within the labor-process. This ongo­ing process of social­iza­tion of labor is the first source of rel­a­tive sur­plus value; it will later require tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment for its fur­ther growth. Here Tronti devel­ops the point implic­itly sug­gested by Panzieri; but while the lat­ter started with the indi­vid­ual worker whose labor-power was inte­grated into the fac­tory plan, Tronti iden­ti­fies a process of class recom­po­si­tion.94 Between the pro­le­tariat and the work­ing class Tronti sees “the same his­tor­i­cal suc­ces­sion and the same log­i­cal dif­fer­ence as that which we have already found between the seller of labor-power and the pro­ducer of sur­plus value” (161).

The strug­gle for a nor­mal work­ing day, for Marx so fun­da­men­tal in the log­i­cal expo­si­tion of rel­a­tive sur­plus value, man­i­fests the class strug­gle in terms which also framed the pro­le­tariat: the strug­gle to reduce a het­ero­ge­neous mass to the com­mod­ity labor-power, and the refusal to be reduced to it. This refusal is what dri­ves cap­i­tal to act in its col­lec­tive inter­est; in this strug­gle cap­i­tal con­sti­tutes itself polit­i­cally as a class, which became an absolute imper­a­tive in the moment of 1848. Marx’s writ­ings on 1848 show “the encounter and the super­im­po­si­tion of the abstract con­cept of labor with the con­crete real­ity of the worker.” At this point, Marx could sup­ple­ment his ear­lier, intu­itive reflec­tions on abstract labor with dis­cov­ery of the pecu­liar char­ac­ter­is­tics of the labor-power com­mod­ity: “the labor-power com­mod­ity as work­ing class” (161).

It was not enough, how­ever, to con­clude that waged work­ers first con­sti­tuted them­selves as a class when they became sell­ers of labor-power and were thus incor­po­rated into cap­i­tal. It was imper­a­tive not to “fix the con­cept of the work­ing class in one unique and defin­i­tive form, with­out devel­op­ment, with­out his­tory.” Just as the “inter­nal his­tory of cap­i­tal” had to include “the spe­cific analy­sis of the var­ied deter­mi­na­tions assumed by cap­i­tal in the course of its devel­op­ment,” against the easy tran­shis­tor­i­cal assump­tions of a “his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­al­ist” tele­ol­ogy, an “inter­nal his­tory of the work­ing class” would have to be “recon­struct the moments of its for­ma­tion, the changes in its com­po­si­tion, the devel­op­ment of its orga­ni­za­tion accord­ing to the var­ied deter­mi­na­tions suc­ces­sively assumed by labor-power as pro­duc­tive force of cap­i­tal, and accord­ing to the expe­ri­ences of dif­fer­ent strug­gles, recur­ring and always renewed, with which the mass of work­ers equip them­selves as the sole adver­sary of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety” (149).

And indeed this account of the dynamic his­tor­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion and recon­sti­tu­tion of labor-power was required by the social rela­tion of sur­plus value, and the unity of cir­cu­la­tion with the process of pro­duc­tion: “The his­tory of diverse modes in which pro­duc­tive labor is extracted from the worker, that is, the his­tory of dif­fer­ent forms of pro­duc­tion of surplus-value, is the story of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety from the working-class view­point” (170). This is pre­cisely because of the twofold char­ac­ter of labor, Marx’s most trea­sured dis­cov­ery, in which both aspects were deci­sive. While one could not derive the abstract char­ac­ter of labor from the level of use-value and con­crete labor – that is, this was not a mat­ter of abstrac­tion as a psy­cho­log­i­cal effect of fac­tory time-management – the val­oriza­tion of value could not take place with­out the use-value of labor-power:

labor, the uti­liza­tion of labor-power, is work­ers’ labor, a con­crete deploy­ment, a con­cretiza­tion of abstract labor – abstract labor which finds itself already in its turn reduced to the rank of com­mod­ity, and which real­izes its value in the wage. There­fore the step where abstract labor over­turns itself and takes the con­crete form of the worker, is the process of con­sump­tion of labor-power, the moment where it becomes in action what it was only in poten­tial, the step of the real­iza­tion of the use-value of labor-power, if we may. What was already present in the oper­a­tion sale/purchase as a class rela­tion pure and sim­ple, ele­men­tary and gen­eral, has defin­i­tively acquired from this point on its spe­cific, com­plex, and total char­ac­ter (166).

This com­plex and total char­ac­ter is implied by the coop­er­a­tive and col­lec­tive form of the work­ing class. Unless indi­vid­ual labor-powers are brought into asso­ci­a­tion, they can­not “make valid [far valere], on a social scale, the spe­cial char­ac­ter of the labor-power com­mod­ity in gen­eral, that is to say can­not make abstract labor con­crete, can­not real­ize the use-value of labor-power, whose actual con­sump­tion is the secret of the process of val­oriza­tion of value, as a process of pro­duc­tion of surplus-value and there­fore of cap­i­tal” (205).

Within this process we can glimpse the the­o­ret­i­cal loca­tion of the con­cept of class com­po­si­tion: “The sale of labor-power thus pro­vides the first ele­men­tary stage, the sim­plest, of a com­po­si­tion into a class of waged work­ers: it is for this rea­son that a social mass con­strained to sell its labor-power remains the gen­eral form of the work­ing class” (149). But this remains an ele­men­tary stage, since as Marx con­cluded in his chap­ter on the work­ing day, “our worker emerges from the process of pro­duc­tion look­ing dif­fer­ent from when he entered it”; enter­ing as seller of labor power (“one owner against another owner”), the worker leaves know­ing that the pro­duc­tion process is a rela­tion of force, and that for pro­tec­tion “the work­ers have to put their heads together and, as a class, com­pel the pass­ing of a law, an all-powerful social bar­rier by which they can be pre­vented from sell­ing them­selves and their fam­i­lies into slav­ery and death by vol­un­tary con­tract with cap­i­tal.”95 For Tronti this dif­fer­ence is “a polit­i­cal leap”: “It is the leap that the pas­sage through pro­duc­tion pro­vokes in what we can call the com­po­si­tion of the work­ing class or even the com­po­si­tion of the class of work­ers” (202).

We are now in a posi­tion to under­stand why the working-class strug­gle, for Tronti, comes first in the his­tory of cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment. Cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment has to be under­stood as a process of exchange in which the val­oriza­tion of value is dri­ven by the sale and pur­chase of labor-power. It is only in the social­iza­tion of labor-power within the labor process that pro­le­tar­i­ans take the asso­ci­ated form of work­ing class, in the real­iza­tion of the use-value of their labor-power by the indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal­ist. And only the resis­tance of their reduc­tion to the labor-power com­mod­ity can com­pel indi­vid­ual cap­i­tal­ists, who com­pete on the mar­ket, to form a cohe­sive class:

The par­tic­u­lar­ity of labor-power as a com­mod­ity faced with other com­modi­ties coin­cides there­fore with the specif­i­cally working-class char­ac­ter that the pro­duc­tion process of cap­i­tal takes on; and, inside of this, with the con­cen­tra­tion of a working-class ini­tia­tive in the class rela­tion, that leads to a leap in the devel­op­ment of the work­ing class and to the sub­se­quent birth of a class of cap­i­tal­ists (166).

Within the con­text of this broad eco­nomic and his­tor­i­cal the­ory, we are in a posi­tion to close the lengthy digres­sion and return to work­ers’ inquiry. Workerism’s sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery was to push the prac­tice of inquiry away from the human­ist prob­lem­atic of expe­ri­ence towards a value the­ory which was able to rein­ter­pret Marx’s cri­tique of polit­i­cal econ­omy and put it to use. It implied a polit­i­cal prac­tice which affirmed shop floor pas­siv­ity and wage strug­gles as expres­sions of a nascent power of refusal of work.

We can now under­stand that work­ers’ inquiry was an inves­ti­ga­tion into the com­po­si­tion of the work­ing class, as the his­tor­i­cal body which, sep­a­rated from the means of sub­sis­tence and reduced to the sale of its labor-power, had to be formed into a social­ized pro­duc­tive force within a process of con­stant expan­sion – the expanded repro­duc­tion of the class itself, and its recom­po­si­tion in ever more tech­no­log­i­cally advanced labor processes.

To close this geneal­ogy we described a sig­nif­i­cant moment of rup­ture, the dis­cov­ery of a con­cept which opens new paths of sci­en­tific and polit­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion. But it was a the­ory which emerged from a spe­cific his­tor­i­cal moment. “We all have to be born some day, some­where,” Althusser remarked, “and begin think­ing and writ­ing in a given world.”96 Tronti began with the hege­mony of the fac­tory to show how the class antag­o­nism could be thought together with capitalism’s laws of motion, in a way that his pre­de­ces­sors had failed to do.97 Yet despite their the­o­ret­i­cal under­de­vel­op­ment, the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency had under­stood that pro­le­tar­ian life exists beyond the fac­tory, that it encom­passes a child­hood in the cot­ton fields, after­noons in the kitchen. And just as fem­i­nists in Italy would chal­lenge the hege­mony of the fac­tory as a mas­cu­line blindspot, Ital­ian work­erism would also have to respond to changes in cap­i­tal­ist devel­op­ment which they had not pre­dicted: global eco­nomic cri­sis, the restruc­tur­ing of pro­duc­tion, and the decline of fac­tory hege­mony. Attempts to develop this the­o­ret­i­cal prob­lem­atic still have to respond to this his­tor­i­cal chal­lenge, and nav­i­gate around Panzieri’s warn­ing – the risk of laps­ing into a phi­los­o­phy of his­tory sup­ported by the ontol­o­giza­tion of labor.

Although the intro­duc­tion of class com­po­si­tion iden­ti­fied cap­i­tal­ism with indus­trial labor, and the social world cre­ated by the post­war boom, at the same time it pro­vided a method which could today be used to trace the con­sti­tu­tion and trans­for­ma­tion of labor-power in the con­text of uneven devel­op­ment and global cri­sis.98 Tronti con­fesses that his and his com­rades’ fix­a­tion on the indus­trial work­ing class now presents itself as an unre­solved prob­lem: “I have come to the con­vic­tion that the work­ing class was the last great his­tor­i­cal form of social aris­toc­racy. It was a minor­ity in the midst of the peo­ple; its strug­gles changed cap­i­tal­ism but did not change the world, and the rea­son for this is pre­cisely what still needs to be under­stood.”99 We sug­gest that inquiry will be the first step in understanding.

Asad Haider is an editor of Viewpoint and a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz.

Salar Mohandesi is an editor of Viewpoint and a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

• 1Karl Marx, “Enquête ouvrière” and “Work­ers’ Ques­tion­naire” in Marx-Engels Col­lected Works vol. 24. (New York: Inter­na­tional Pub­lish­ers, 1880). The Eng­lish ver­sion at marxists.org has only 100 ques­tions; this is because Marx asks two sep­a­rate ques­tions about the decrease in wages dur­ing peri­ods of stag­na­tion, and their increase in peri­ods of pros­per­ity (ques­tions 73 and 74), and in this Eng­lish ver­sion the for­mer is omit­ted.
• 2Karl Marx, Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Pen­guin, 1976), 98.
• 3Louis Althusser, Lenin and Phi­los­o­phy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 65.
• 4“Marx to Domela Nieuwen­huis In The Hague,” avail­able online at marxists.org.
• 5Kent Worces­ter, CLR James: A Polit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy (New York: State Uni­ver­sity of New York Press, 1996), 55-81; Paul Buhle, CLR James: The Artist as Rev­o­lu­tion­ary (New York: Verso, 1988), 66-99.
• 6For a brief, but excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the his­tory of the news­pa­per, see “Intro­duc­tion to Part 1” in Pages from a Black Radical’s Note­book: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen M. Ward (Detroit: Wayne State Uni­ver­sity Press, 2011), 37-41.
• 7“Gripes and Griev­ances,” Cor­re­spon­dence, vol. 2, no. 2 (Jan­u­ary 22, 1955), 4.
• 8Grace Lee Boggs, “CLR. James: Orga­niz­ing in the USA, 1938-1953,” in CLR James: His Intel­lec­tual Lega­cies, ed. Sel­wyn Cud­joe and William Cain (Amherst: Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts Press, 1995), 164. Paul Buhle, on the other hand, explictly claims that Grace Lee actu­ally wrote the text, in, Buhle, CLR James, 90.
• 9Ph. Guil­laume, “L’Ouvrier amer­i­can par Paul Romano,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 1 (Mars/Avril 1949), 78.
• 10It is sig­nif­i­cant that Singer was not address­ing this to phil­an­thropists, bour­geois spe­cial­ists, or even sym­pa­thetic intel­lec­tu­als. This was for work­ers. “I am not writ­ing in order to gain the approval or sym­pa­thy of these intel­lec­tu­als for the work­ers’ actions. I want instead to illus­trate to the work­ers them­selves that some­times when their con­di­tions seem ever­last­ing and hope­less, they are in actu­al­ity reveal­ing by their every-day reac­tions and expres­sions that they are the road to a far-reaching change.” Paul Romano and Ria Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker (New York, 1947), 1.
• 11Marx, Cap­i­tal vol. 1, 618; Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 52.
• 12Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 47-48.
• 13Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 57.
• 14Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker.
• 15CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs, “World War II and Social Rev­o­lu­tion” in The Invad­ing Social­ist Soci­ety, avail­able online at marxists.org.
• 16I.I. Rubin, “Abstract Labour and Value in Marx’s Sys­tem,” Cap­i­tal & Class 2 (1978). See Rubin’s admirably con­cise def­i­n­i­tion: “Abstract labour is the des­ig­na­tion for that part of the total social labour which was equalised in the process of social divi­sion of labour through the equa­tion of the prod­ucts of labour on the mar­ket.”
• 17Rubin, “Abstract Labour and Value.”
• 18“The rough draft of this pam­phlet was given to work­ers across the coun­try. Their reac­tion was as one. They were sur­prised and grat­i­fied to see in print the expe­ri­ences and thoughts which they have rarely put into words. Work­ers arrive home from the fac­tory too exhausted to read more than the daily comics. Yet most of the work­ers who read the pam­phlet stayed up well into the night to fin­ish the read­ing once they had started.” Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 1.
• 19In his intro­duc­tion to the French trans­la­tion of “The Amer­i­can Worker,” Philippe Guil­laume called it “pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture.” For more on this, see Stephen Hastings-King, “On Claude Lefort’s ‘Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence,’” in this issue.
• 20“A Worker’s Inquiry” was first pub­lished in the United States by The New Inter­na­tional in Decem­ber 1938.
• 21She wrote: “See, ‘A Work­ers’ Inquiry’ by Karl Marx in which one hun­dred and one ques­tions are asked of the work­ers’ them­selves, deal­ing with every­thing from lava­to­ries, soap, wine, strikes and unions to ‘the gen­eral phys­i­cal, intel­lec­tual, and moral con­di­tions of life of the work­ing men and women in your trade.’” Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 59.
• 22Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 1.
• 23Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker, 12.
• 24Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The Power of Women and the Sub­ver­sion of the Com­mu­nity (Lon­don: Falling Wall Press, 1972), 58, 64.
• 25It is only Mar­tin Glaberman’s 1972 pref­ace to the pam­phlet which finally reveals that Phil Singer worked at Gen­eral Motors fac­tory in New Jer­sey.
• 26Quoted in Rachel Peter­son, “Cor­re­spon­dence: Jour­nal­ism, Anti­com­mu­nism, and Marx­ism in 1950s Detroit,” in Anti­com­mu­nism and the African Amer­i­can Free­dom Move­ment: “Another side of the Story,” ed. Rob­bie Lieber­man and Clarence Lang (New York: Pal­grave Macmil­lan, 2009), 146. As if to dra­mat­i­cally con­firm this, Boggs’s own pseu­do­nym, Ria Stone, is often misiden­ti­fied as Raya Dunayevskaya.
• 27Peter­son, “Cor­re­spon­dence,” 146.
• 28Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class – The Per­spec­tive of Win­ning: A Selec­tion of Writ­ings, 1952-2011 (Oak­land: PM Press, 2012), 13-14; Frank Rosen­garten, Urbane Rev­o­lu­tion­ary: CLR. James and the Strug­gle for a New Soci­ety (Mis­sis­sippi: Uni­ver­sity of Mis­sis­sippi Press, 2008), 89.
• 29Charles Denby [Si Owens], Indig­nant Heart: A Black Work­ers’ Jour­nal (Detroit: Wayne State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1978), xi. This edi­tion was attrib­uted to Charles Denby, Owens’s more com­mon pseu­do­nym, and the one he used for most of his arti­cle in Cor­re­spon­dence. It is also sig­nif­i­cant that Owens still wrote under a pseu­do­nym in 1978, even though McCarthy­ism had clearly passed.
• 30Denby, Indig­nant Heart, xi.
• 31Peter­son, “Cor­re­spon­dence,” 123.
• 32Con­stance Webb, Not With­out Love: Mem­oirs (Lebanon, NH: Uni­ver­sity Press of New Eng­land, 2003), 266.
• 33Romano and Stone, The Amer­i­can Worker.
• 34James, “A Woman’s Place,” 79.
• 35For an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to the group in Eng­lish, see Mar­cel van der Lin­den, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie: A French Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Group (1949-1965),” Left His­tory vol. 5, no. 1, 1997. Repub­lished at http://www.left-dis.nl/uk/lindsob.htm.” For a gen­eral his­tory, see Philippe Got­traux, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie”: Un engage­ment poli­tique et intel­lectuel dans la France de l’après-guerre (Paris: Edi­tions Payot Lau­sanne, 1997).
• 36“From Work­ers’ Auton­omy to Social Auton­omy: An inter­view with Daniel Blan­chard by Amador Fernández-Savater,” avail­able online at libcom.org
• 37Philippe Guil­laume, “L’Ouvrier Amer­i­cain par Paul Romano,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 1 (Mars/Avril 1949), 78; trans­lated in this issue of View­point.
• 38For more on this fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure, see Stephen Hastings-King’s forth­com­ing book on Social­isme ou Bar­barie.
• 39“Un jour­nal ouvrier aux Etats-unis,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie, no. 13 (jan-mars 1954): 82.
• 40Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “CLR James and the Fate of Marx­ism,” in CLR James: His Intel­lec­tual Lega­cies, ed. Sel­wyn Cud­joe and William Cain (Amherst: Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts Press, 1995), 287.
• 41“Work­ers and Intel­lec­tu­als,” Cor­re­spon­dence, vol. 2, no. 3 (Feb­ru­ary 5, 1955): 4.
• 42Grace Lee Boggs, Liv­ing For Change: An Auto­bi­og­ra­phy (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1998), 67.
• 43An anony­mous ex-member of Cor­re­spon­dence quoted in Ivar Oxaal, Black Intel­lec­tu­als Come to Power (Cam­bridge: Schenkman Books, 1968), 78.
• 44For a detailed dis­cus­sion of Lefort’s take on this prob­lem, see Stephen Hastings-King, in this issue.
• 45Claude Lefort, “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence,” trans­lated in this issue.
• 46Lefort, “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.”
• 47Lefort, “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.”
• 48For a fas­ci­nat­ing account of this paper by a mil­i­tant closely involved in its devel­op­ment, see Henri Simon’s con­tri­bu­tion to this issue.
• 49“Que voulons-nous?” in Tri­bune Ouvrière no. 1 (mai 1954), reprinted in Social­isme ou Bar­barie nos. 15/16: 74.
• 50Mothé was one of the few work­ers in the group, which led many to put him on a kind of pedestal. As Lefort has recalled “Mothé’s pro­pos­als, often very rich but some­times also con­fused, car­ried weight for many because he was sup­posed to ‘rep­re­sent’ Renault. Mothé was con­scious of the role he was led to play and while he took advan­tage of it, he was also exas­per­ated by it. The cli­mate would have been very dif­fer­ent if we had had more work­ers among us.” “An inter­view with Claude Lefort,” Telos 30 (Win­ter 1976-77): 178. This lack of work­ers in the group might have been a rea­son for the short­age of worker nar­ra­tives that con­stantly plagued Social­isme ou Bar­barie. This also marks a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between Cor­re­spon­dence and Social­isme ou Bar­barie. The first was over­whelm­ingly working-class. In 1954 it boasted a mem­ber­ship of 75 work­ers and only 5 self-described intel­lec­tu­als; see The Cor­re­spon­dence Book­let (Detroit: Cor­re­spon­dence, 1954), 1. In con­trast, Social­isme ou Barbarie’s mem­ber­ship largely con­sisted of intel­lec­tu­als or stu­dents
• 51Daniel Mothé, “Le prob­lème d’un jour­nal ouvrier,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 17 (juillet-septembre 1955), 30; trans­lated in this issue of View­point.
• 52Mothé often uses the term “rev­o­lu­tion­ary ide­ol­ogy” instead of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory.
• 53Note how Mothé sub­sti­tutes “rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion” for “rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants.” This seems to sug­gest that, accord­ing to this model, the orga­ni­za­tion can be com­posed only by mil­i­tants. This might be a reflec­tion of the sit­u­a­tion Social­isme ou Bar­barie found itself in: a group that hap­pened to be com­posed almost entirely of intel­lec­tu­als is turned into the­o­ret­i­cal type.
• 54Mothé, “Le prob­lème d’un jour­nal ouvrier,” 47.
• 55These strin­gent qual­i­fi­ca­tions exac­er­bated the major prob­lem fac­ing this project: the unwill­ing­ness of most work­ers to write. More on this below.
• 56The edi­to­r­ial core of Tri­bune Ouvrière was already wracked by inter­nal ide­o­log­i­cal dis­putes. Although he sup­ported a closer rela­tion­ship between the two jour­nals, Mothé did not want to turn Tri­bune Ouvrière into a polit­i­cal jour­nal, in other words, he opposed the idea that the jour­nal should com­mu­ni­cate overtly polit­i­cal ideas to the work­ers, and held that it should pri­mar­ily be a space where work­ers could dis­cuss their expe­ri­ences. Got­traux, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie”, 67
• 57For more on Henri Simon’s stance on inquiry, the work­ers’ paper, and this broader expe­ri­ence, see his con­tri­bu­tion to this issue.
• 58Got­traux, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie”, 86.
• 59For more on this con­junc­ture, see “Inter­view with Cas­to­ri­adis,” Telos 23 (Spring 1975), 135.
• 60For more on this split, Mar­cel van der Lin­den, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie: A French Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Group (1949-1965).” For a brief analy­sis from the per­spec­tive of a mil­i­tant who was involved, see Henri Simon, “1958-1998: Com­mu­nism in France: Social­isme ou Bar­barie, ICO and Echanges,” avail­able online at libcom.org
• 61Daniel Blan­chard saw a per­fect illus­tra­tion of this in the rela­tion­ship between Mothé and Cas­to­ri­adis: “Whereas the Lenin­ist orga­ni­za­tions kept the man­ual and intel­lec­tual work­ers strictly sep­a­rated in spe­cific roles (the lat­ter edu­cat­ing the for­mer in any case), in SouB we devoted spe­cial efforts—which were often unsuccessful—to abol­ish this sep­a­ra­tion. For exam­ple, the rela­tion­ship between Daniel Mothé and Cas­to­ri­adis was an inter­est­ing exam­ple of the col­lab­o­ra­tion of a very intel­li­gent worker, as Mothé was, and a the­o­reti­cian like Cas­to­ri­adis. The ideas that Cas­to­ri­adis elab­o­rated helped Mothé to under­stand his own real­ity in the fac­tory. And Mothé was then able to ana­lyze his expe­ri­ence in a very con­crete way that in turn nour­ished the the­o­ret­i­cal labors of Cas­to­ri­adis; Blan­chard, “Auton­omy.” Henri Simon has also com­mented on this pair­ing, but from a more crit­i­cal per­spec­tive: “In Social­isme ou Bar­barie, there was a kind of har­mony [osmose], sym­bio­sis Mothé/Castoriadis. There was almost always placed side by side in Social­isme ou Bar­barie a the­o­ret­i­cal arti­cle by Cas­to­ri­adis and a con­crete arti­cle by Mothé. Mothé saw the fac­tory through the the­o­ret­i­cal lenses of Cas­to­ri­adis”; “Entre­tien d’Henri Simon avec l’Anti-mythes (1974),” avail­able online at raumgegenzement.blogsport.de.
• 62Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings, Vol­ume 2, 1955-1960: From the Work­ers’ Strug­gle Against Bureau­cracy to Rev­o­lu­tion in the Age of Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1988), 213. Fur­ther ref­er­ences to this col­lec­tion are given in the text.
• 63For a fas­ci­nat­ing auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal account of the phe­nom­e­non, see Stan Weir, “The Infor­mal Work Group” in Rank and File: Per­sonal His­to­ries by Working-Class Orga­niz­ers, ed. Alice and Staughton Lynd, expanded edi­tion (Chicago: Hay­mar­ket Books, 2011).
• 64Got­traux, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie”, 120-121.
• 65Indeed, it appears that Pou­voir Ouvrier never really learned the lessons of Tri­bune Ouvrière; Cas­to­ri­adis found him­self writ­ing another arti­cle, this time in Pou­voir Ouvrier, in which he tried, yet again, to the­o­rize why work­ers sim­ply were not writ­ing. See Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “What Really Mat­ters” in PSW 2, 223-5.
• 66Claude Lefort, “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.”
• 67“Inter­view with Lefort,” 179.
• 68“Inter­view with Lefort,” 183.
• 69See “The Rela­tions of Pro­duc­tion in Rus­sia” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings, Vol­ume 1, 1946-1955: From the Cri­tique of Bureau­cracy to the Pos­i­tive Con­tent of Social­ism, trans. and ed. David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1988), and our com­men­tary in “Devi­a­tions, Part 1: The Castoriadis-Pannekoek Exchange.”
• 70Cesare Casarino and Anto­nio Negri, In Praise of the Com­mon (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota, 2008), 54.
• 71Danilo Mon­taldi, Bisogna sognare. Scritti 1952-1975 (Milano: Col­i­brì, 1994).
• 72Ser­gio Bologna and Patrick Cun­ing­hame, “For an Analy­sis of Autono­mia – An Inter­view with Ser­gio Bologna,” avail­able online at libcom.org
• 73Mon­taldi him­self had believed that soci­ol­ogy, as Steve Wright recounts, “could help in the devel­op­ment of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory”; see Storm­ing Heaven: Class Com­po­si­tion and Strug­gle in Ital­ian Auton­o­mist Marx­ism (Lon­don: Pluto Press, 2002), 21-25. On the divi­sion within Quaderni Rossi, see Marta Malo de Molina, “Com­mon Notions, part 1: workers-inquiry, co-research, consciousness-raising,” trans. Mari­bel Casas-Cortés and Sebas­t­ian Cobar­ru­bias of the Notas Rojas Col­lec­tive Chapel Hill, eicp (2006). Finally, for more on core­search or con­ricerca, and the influ­ence of both Mon­taldi and another of Alquati’s pre­cur­sors, Alessan­dro Piz­zorno, see Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, and Gigi Rog­gero, “Con­ricerca as Polit­i­cal Action” in Utopian Ped­a­gogy: Rad­i­cal Exper­i­ments Against Neolib­eral Glob­al­iza­tion, ed. Mark Coté, Richard J.F. Day, and Greig de Peuter (Toronto: Uni­ver­sity of Toronto Press, 2007).
• 74See Wright, Storm­ing Heaven, 46-58; the texts them­selves are col­lected in Romano Alquati, Sulla Fiat (Milano: Fel­trinelli, 1975): “Relazione sulle ‘forze nuove.’ Con­vegno del PSI sulla FIAT, gen­naio 1961”; “Doc­u­menti sulla lotta di classe alla FIAT”; “Tradizione e rin­no­va­mento alla FIAT-Ferriere.” A par­tial trans­la­tion of the 1962 text, “Organic Com­po­si­tion of Cap­i­tal and Labor-Power at Olivetti,” is pre­sented in this issue. For a very per­cep­tive analy­sis of Alquati’s Olivetti text, and the tra­jec­tory of inquiry in gen­eral, see Wild­cat, “The Renascence of Operaismo,” avail­able online at libcom.org
• 75Raniero Panzieri, “The Cap­i­tal­ist Use of Machin­ery,” trans. Quintin Hoare, avail­able online at libcom.org.
• 76Marx, Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 1, 544.
• 77Since the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the ortho­dox posi­tion was that col­lab­o­ra­tion between the unions, the state, and the employ­ers, rep­re­sented the dis­place­ment of com­pe­ti­tion towards plan­ning, and there­fore a step towards social­ism, Panzieri also made the argu­ment that plan­ning rep­re­sented the nec­es­sary social exten­sion of capital’s despo­tism in the fac­tory. “The basic fac­tor in this process is the con­tin­ual growth of con­stant cap­i­tal with respect to vari­able cap­i­tal”; as machines grew more numer­ous than work­ers, cap­i­tal had to exer­cise an “absolute con­trol,” impos­ing its ratio­nal­ity of pro­duc­tion upons work­ers, and through the growth of monop­o­lies extend­ing its plan “from the fac­tory to the mar­ket, to the exter­nal social sphere” (“Cap­i­tal­ist Use of Machin­ery.”) This the­sis would be the sub­ject of Panzieri’s last major essay, “Sur­plus Value and Plan­ning,” in issue 4 of Quaderni Rossi (trans­lated by Julian Bees and avail­able online at zerowork.org). In this sense, while Panzieri’s argu­ment rep­re­sented a sophis­ti­cated the­o­ret­i­cal advance and had a worth­while polit­i­cal func­tion, it also con­tained a cer­tain reifi­ca­tion of the fea­tures of post­war cap­i­tal­ism, and lost some of its clar­ity on the nature of cap­i­tal­ist exchange rela­tions. Inter­est­ingly, this essay was fol­lowed in Quaderni Rossi with Marx’s so-called “Frag­ment on Machines” from the Grun­drisse.
• 78Panzieri, “Cap­i­tal­ist Use of Machin­ery.”
• 79See Wild­cat, “Renascence of Operaismo,” for some inter­est­ing com­ments on Piazza Statuto in the con­text of work­ers’ inquiry.
• 80Quoted in Robert Lum­ley, “Review Arti­cle: Work­ing Class Auton­omy and the Cri­sis,” Cap­i­tal and Class 12 (Win­ter 1980): 129; also dis­cussed in Wright, Storm­ing Heaven, 58-62. Lum­ley con­sid­ers Tronti’s inter­ven­tion to be “a the­o­ret­i­cal and polit­i­cal regres­sion”; as we will try to demon­strate below, we dis­agree with this assess­ment
• 81Mario Tronti, “Lenin in Eng­land,” avail­able online at libcom.org.
• 82Raniero Panzieri, “Social­ist Uses of Work­ers’ Inquiry,” trans. Ari­anna Bove, eicp (2006).
• 83Tronti, Noi operaisti, quoted in Adelino Zanini, “On the Philo­soph­i­cal Foun­da­tions of Ital­ian Work­erism,” His­tor­i­cal Mate­ri­al­ism 18 (2010): 60.
• 84Mario Tronti, Operai e cap­i­tale (Turin: Ein­audi, 1966), 128, 179, 209-10, 220, 256. Trans­la­tions from this text are ours, with the invalu­able help of Evan Calder Williams, unless oth­er­wise noted. We also prof­itably con­sulted the French trans­la­tion by Yann Moulier-Boutang and Giuseppe Bezza, avail­able online at multitudes.samizdat.net. Fur­ther ref­er­ences to the orig­i­nal Ital­ian are given in the text
• 85Here of course Tronti recalls Marx’s Cri­tique of the Gotha Pro­gramme.
• 86Karl Marx, Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 2, trans. David Fern­bach (Lon­don: Pen­guin, 1978), 115; Tronti quotes this pas­sage in Operai e cap­i­tale, 144-5.
• 87This is also quoted in Zanini, “Philo­soph­i­cal Foun­da­tions,” 50. Zanini’s is one of the few texts in Eng­lish which addresses Tronti’s eco­nomic analy­sis.
• 88Marx, Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 2, 115; sec­ond sen­tence quoted by Tronti, Operai e cap­i­tale, 148-9.
• 89Hel­mut Reichelt, “Marx’s Cri­tique of Eco­nomic Cat­e­gories,” trans. Werner Strauss and ed. Jim Kin­caid, His­tor­i­cal Mate­ri­al­ism 15 (2007): 11. It is worth not­ing that work­erism was not always able to suc­cess­fully nav­i­gate between the two; while Reichelt’s “quasi-ontological cat­e­gory” refers to the con­cep­tion which under­stands abstract labor as expen­di­ture of phys­i­o­log­i­cal energy, mea­sur­able in calo­ries, work­erism would at times be cap­ti­vated by labor as the “liv­ing, form-giving fire,” which is at times sug­gested in Tronti’s assess­ment of the Grun­drisse as “a more advanced book” than Cap­i­tal. (Tronti, Operai e cap­i­tale, 210; trans­lated in Mur­phy 339). The Grun­drisse played an ambigu­ous role in the his­tory of work­erism, pro­vid­ing new the­o­ret­i­cal ener­gies while also obscur­ing the rup­tures in Marx’s eco­nomic thought. Future research will have to draw these dis­tinc­tions clearly, espe­cially to move beyond the Grun­drisse’s prob­lem­atic of “cap­i­tal in gen­eral”; see Michael Hein­rich, “Cap­i­tal in Gen­eral and the Struc­ture of Marx’s Cap­i­tal,” Cap­i­tal and Class 13:63 (1989).
• 90This argu­ment is pre­sented through­out the intro­duc­tion to the essay, pages 123-43, with atten­tion to a range of Marx’s other early man­u­scripts.
• 91Hel­mut Reichelt, “Social Real­ity as Appear­ance: Some Notes on Marx’s Con­cep­tion of Real­ity,” trans. Werner Bone­feld, Human Dig­nity, eds. Werner Bone­feld and Kos­mas Psy­cho­pe­dis (Alder­shot: Ash­gate, 2005), 40. Reichelt ends this arti­cle (65) with com­ments on the cat­e­gory of class which, in con­trast to Tronti’s, do not man­age to incor­po­rate Marx’s close atten­tion to the his­tor­i­cal con­sti­tu­tion of the pro­le­tariat, and its recom­po­si­tion in the labor process.
• 92Reichelt, “Marx’s Cri­tique,” 22.
• 93Lefort, “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence”; see also the some­what dif­fer­ent argu­ment, which refers to waged labor and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment along­side the bour­geois rev­o­lu­tion, in Cas­to­ri­adis, “Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism and Rev­o­lu­tion,” 259-60.
• 94Com­pare to Raniero Panzieri, “Sur­plus Value and Plan­ning”: “The rela­tion­ship between the work­ers, their coop­er­a­tion, appears only after the sale of their labour-power, which involves the sim­ple rela­tion­ship of indi­vid­ual work­ers to cap­i­tal.” It is worth not­ing that while Panzieri’s 1964 account was based on the dis­place­ment of com­pe­ti­tion by plan­ning, Tronti’s descrip­tion of “the plan of cap­i­tal” a year ear­lier in Quaderni Rossi had rep­re­sented it as the high­est level of devel­op­ment of the social­iza­tion of cap­i­tal still medi­ated by com­pe­ti­tion, in the indi­vid­ual capitalist’s pur­suit of prof­its higher than the aver­age: “Indi­vid­ual enter­prises, or entire ‘priv­i­leged’ pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties, along with the propul­sive func­tion of the whole sys­tem, con­stantly tend to break from within the total social cap­i­tal in order to sub­se­quently re-compose it at a higher level. The strug­gle among cap­i­tal­ists con­tin­ues, but now it func­tions directly within the devel­op­ment of cap­i­tal.” Plan­ning rep­re­sented the exten­sion of capital’s despo­tism to the state, not a new phase dis­plac­ing com­pet­i­tive cap­i­tal­ism: “The anar­chy of cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion is not can­celled: it is sim­ply socially orga­nized.” See “Social Cap­i­tal,” avail­able online at libcom.org, and the orig­i­nal col­lected in Operai e cap­i­tale, 60-85.
• 95Marx, Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 1, 415-6.
• 96Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brew­ster (Lon­don: Verso, 1969), 74.
• 97Intro­duced in “Fac­tory and Soci­ety” in the sec­ond issue of Quaderni Rossi (1962), col­lected in Tronti, Operai e cap­i­tale, 39-59; see also Ser­gio Bologna, “The Factory-Society Rela­tion­ship as an His­tor­i­cal Cat­e­gory,” avail­able online at libcom.org (trans­la­tion of “Rap­porto società-fabbrica come cat­e­go­ria stor­ica,” Primo Mag­gio 2, 1974).
• 98For an account of the work­erist attempt to develop the the­ory of money and class com­po­si­tion in the con­text of the eco­nomic insta­bil­ity of the early 1970s, see Steve Wright, “Rev­o­lu­tion from Above? Money and Class-Composition in Ital­ian Operaismo” in Karl Heinz-Roth and Mar­cel van der Lin­den, ed., Beyond Marx (Lei­den: Brill, forth­com­ing).
• 99Mario Tronti, “Towards a Cri­tique of Polit­i­cal Democ­racy,” trans. Alberto Toscano, Cos­mos and His­tory, 5:1 (2009): 74.

In a 1982 paper pre­sented at MIT, Ital­ian urban­ist Paolo Cec­ca­relli char­ac­ter­ized Detroit and Turin as “città frag­ili” – frag­ile cities. His assess­ment con­trasted starkly with the way the two “motor cities” had been rep­re­sented for most of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, but it res­onated with his con­tem­po­rary audi­ence. While they were once seen, at the pin­na­cle of their indus­trial devel­op­ment, as the bench­mark for the mod­ern city, Cec­ca­relli argued that Detroit and Turin, were actu­ally exam­ples of how such cities should not be built. In both places, Fordism had sparked rapid and tumul­tous demo­graphic change, first through mass immi­gra­tion, then through emi­gra­tion. This upheaval had not been matched by ade­quate urban plan­ning and gov­er­nance. The ini­tial inor­di­nate growth had gen­er­ated soci­eties divided along fault lines of race, eth­nic­ity, and class. Indus­trial expan­sion had brought a num­ber of social ills, but decen­tral­iza­tion, a har­bin­ger of dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, made things worse, leav­ing in its wake a des­o­lated urban land­scape of aban­doned plant com­plexes and dilap­i­dated neigh­bor­hoods (in Detroit), or pau­per­ized and mar­ginal periph­eries and slums (in Turin).1

In depict­ing the his­tory of Detroit and Turin as a cau­tion­ary tale of mod­ern­iza­tion gone awry, Cec­ca­relli neglected to note that Fordism had brought not only an urban cat­a­clysm, but also the oppor­tu­nity for a far-reaching working-class recom­po­si­tion within the indus­trial plants, the rise and fall of social move­ments, and the cre­ation of a cor­pus of social the­ory and mil­i­tant prac­tice related to both. All these top­ics would ben­e­fit from the kind of com­par­a­tive per­spec­tive that Cec­ca­relli applied to urban plan­ning. After all, it had been Merid­ion­ali, south­ern Ital­ians, in Turin, and African-Americans in Detroit (two groups heav­ily rep­re­sented in the auto­mo­bile fac­to­ries of these cities in the 1960s), who had exposed how ‘frag­ile’ the motor cities were.

A num­ber of transna­tional threads con­nected the two cities dur­ing the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, in par­tic­u­lar in the 1950s and 1960s, two decades cru­cial for the des­tiny of these cities and for the par­a­digm of pro­duc­tion and social orga­ni­za­tion on which they thrived, Fordism. Dur­ing the 1950s and early 1960s, polit­i­cal mil­i­tants out­side the tra­di­tional left devel­oped a cri­tique of the prac­tice and ide­ol­ogy of trade unions and Soviet-inspired com­mu­nist par­ties, and gen­er­ated a new, empir­i­cal way of doc­u­ment­ing and research­ing the working-class that pop­u­lated Turin and Detroit. Ini­tially inde­pen­dent from each other, these mil­i­tants would even­tu­ally sit­u­ate their work within transna­tional con­nec­tions. In the Amer­i­can Motor City, dis­si­dent Marx­ists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya exposed Soviet com­mu­nism as “state cap­i­tal­ism” – a sys­tem which, like its market-driven coun­ter­part, rested on the exploita­tion of work­ers – and at the same time issued a scathing attack on Amer­i­can labor unions. By the early 1950s they had gath­ered in Detroit a small but vocal group of activists and intel­lec­tu­als, under the name of Cor­re­spon­dence; this described both a pub­li­ca­tion and its sup­port­ing activist group, focused on polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion in the fac­to­ries. Correspondence’s vision of class strug­gle with the auto­mo­bile fac­to­ries of Detroit was grounded in the idea of work­ers’ self-organization out­side the exist­ing labor move­ment. The 1947 pam­phlet The Amer­i­can Worker by Paul Romano (a pseu­do­nym for Phil Singer, a Gen­eral Motors autoworker) and Ria Stone (an alias for Grace Lee, one of the lead­ing mem­bers of Cor­re­spon­dence) was one of the group’s most influ­en­tial early pub­li­ca­tions. Even though the pam­phlet was penned by these two authors, it was born out of the col­lec­tive dis­cus­sion of the group. Writ­ten just after Amer­i­can trade unions had cur­tailed a period of intense strike activ­ity, The Amer­i­can Worker denounced the adverse effect of union bureau­cracy on the every­day life of work­ers, and on the prospect of working-class strug­gle. It decried the union’s fail­ure to address the issues that mat­tered most to work­ers, such as the speed-up. Romano also touched upon two prin­ci­ples that would become fun­da­men­tal to the new transna­tional approach: the exis­tence of a latent and spon­ta­neous work­ers’ resis­tance to the reg­i­mented life of the fac­tory, irre­spec­tive of any actual union orga­ni­za­tion; and their instinc­tive abil­ity to orga­nize their work in a more humane, but equally effec­tive way: “Many work­ers become angry because of the fact that sug­ges­tions which they put in are ignored. These sug­ges­tions would add to effi­ciency and also increase pro­duc­tion as well as save money. There is a gen­eral ten­dency in all strata of the work­ing class to work in as effi­cient a man­ner as pos­si­ble.” How­ever, the pam­phlet argued, the exploita­tion work­ers were sub­jected to forced them to oppose the man­agers’ efforts, resort­ing in their pent-up frus­tra­tion to jus­ti­fied acts of sab­o­tage and van­dal­ism.2 The Amer­i­can Worker’s nov­elty con­sisted in pre­sent­ing, in a worker’s own words, a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of fac­tory work and its reper­cus­sions on the psy­che and polit­i­cal out­look of the worker. The indus­trial worker’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal account became a minor genre dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s, as Cor­re­spon­dence and other groups tried to inquire into the con­di­tion of work­ers on the basis of their actual expe­ri­ence in the fac­tory – rather than on the basis of a dog­matic truth bequeathed by Marx­ist the­ory. The Amer­i­can Worker was seri­al­ized by the homony­mous pub­li­ca­tion of the French group Social­isme ou Bar­barie and found an echo in another influ­en­tial biog­ra­phy, Jour­nal d’un ouvrier by Daniel Mothé, a worker at Renault’s auto­mo­bile plants. Coop­er­a­tion between mem­bers of Cor­re­spon­dence and Social­isme ou Bar­barie in Paris spanned through­out the 1950s, result­ing in the book Fac­ing Real­ity (1958), co-authored by C.L.R. James, Grace Lee Boggs, and Pierre Chaulieu (the cover name for Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, one of the lead­ing mem­bers of Social­isme ou Bar­barie).3 This book built on the com­mon per­spec­tive shared by the groups in Detroit and Paris and char­ac­ter­ized trade unions as the “body­guards of cap­i­tal,’.” Their repres­sive action man­i­fested itself into two ele­ments: the stew­ard sys­tem and the griev­ance pro­ce­dure. Both had orig­i­nally been devised to pro­tect the union and the worker from the whims of man­age­ment, but now they acted as a strait­jacket, restrict­ing work­ers’ capac­ity to orga­nize pro­duc­tion on the shop floor. The stew­ard secured work­ers’ com­pli­ance with the union con­tract, rather than rep­re­sent­ing work­ers in man­age­ment. The griev­ance pro­ce­dure defused con­flict with man­age­ment through an “‘elab­o­rate”’ process that removed con­flict from work­ers’ hands and trans­ferred it to the labor bureau­cracy. Later, observers on the lib­eral Left would uphold the idea that the griev­ance pro­ce­dure was an inef­fec­tive way to solve work­ers’ com­plaints, but the main cri­tique made by James and the other went fur­ther: griev­ance pro­ce­dures gave man­age­ment the power to sched­ule and con­trol the pro­duc­tion flow and the orga­ni­za­tion of work. This crit­i­cism was not totally wholly fair, since the union’s encroach­ment on the shop floor did after all check to some degree the arbi­trary power of man­age­ment, but it also touched a nerve: the UAW had in fact suc­cumbed to the auto man­u­fac­tur­ers’ wish to con­trol and orga­nize the point of pro­duc­tion as they saw fit, even though indi­vid­ual work­ers were now less vul­ner­a­ble to retal­ia­tory lay offs and wage cuts. Fac­ing Real­ity argued that this sys­tem sup­pressed work­ers’ desire for self-organization, which, while not a con­scious pro­gram, but sim­ply some­thing “inher­ent in all their actions and in the dis­cus­sions they hold among them­selves.”’4

In early 1950s Italy, this analy­sis appealed to those left­wing activists who ques­tioned whether the dog­matic Marx­ist nar­ra­tive pro­pounded by the Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Party really applied to the actual con­di­tions of the Ital­ian work­ing class. By the mid­dle of the decade, the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency began to fil­ter through to dis­si­dent Marx­ist cir­cles through the trans­la­tion of Romano’s and Mothé’s work by Danilo Mon­taldi. Mon­taldi was an essay­ist and soci­ol­o­gist who had left the PCI after the war, remain­ing crit­i­cal of the Old Left through­out his life. In his pref­ace to the trans­la­tion of The Amer­i­can Worker, Mon­taldi cel­e­brated the text as a sign that, con­trary to pre­vail­ing assump­tions, the Amer­i­can working-class remained class con­scious and had not fallen for the ide­o­log­i­cal blan­d­ish­ments of cap­i­tal­ism. Mon­taldi described Cor­re­spon­dence as the Amer­i­can “rev­o­lu­tion­ary van­guard”, a group that under­stood that “the worker is first of all some­one who lives at the point of pro­duc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist fac­tory before being the mem­ber of a party, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant, or the sub­ject of com­ing social­ist power. It is the pro­duc­tive process that shapes his rejec­tion of exploita­tion and his capac­ity to build a supe­rior type of soci­ety, […] and his class sol­i­dar­ity.” The devel­op­ment of this fun­da­men­tal idea, wrote Mon­taldi, was Correspondence’s cru­cial con­tri­bu­tion to the con­tem­po­rary rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment.5

One of Montaldi’s col­lab­o­ra­tors, Romano Alquati, was greatly inspired by both The Amer­i­can Worker and Mothè’s Jour­nal. They both trav­elled to Paris to meet the mem­bers of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, and Alquati orga­nized round­table pre­sen­ta­tions of the Jour­nal in Turin.6 Alquati was in the process of devel­op­ing his own brand of work­ers’ inquiry, close in many ways to that of Cor­re­spon­dence, in which the expe­ri­ence of work­ers con­sti­tuted the basis for the­ory, rather than vice versa.

In 1961, Alquati pio­neered this new kind of work­ers’ research at FIAT.7 Two themes ran through Alquati’s report, later pub­lished in Quaderni Rossi: first, the pre-eminence of a new work­ing class at FIAT, dis­il­lu­sioned with the com­pany, but also indif­fer­ent to left-wing unions and par­ties. Alquati con­tro­ver­sially argued that even a large com­pany such as FIAT failed to “inte­grate” work­ers into cap­i­tal­ism and to neu­tralise their rebel­lious­ness: what­ever faith these youth had before enter­ing the fac­tory in the desir­abil­ity of indus­trial work, this was quickly shed after only a few months’ work at the point of pro­duc­tion. Rel­a­tively high wages (for some) and the con­sumerism they enabled did not lessen the effects of alien­ation. Any resur­gence of class strug­gle within the firm would be based upon these forze nuove, as Alquati called them, which included south­ern Ital­ian migrants. Even though the “new forces” lacked class con­scious­ness in a tra­di­tional sense, they spon­ta­neously under­stood the need for “self-determination,” that is, self-organization within the fac­tory.8

Sec­ond, Alquati empha­sized the inabil­ity of the tra­di­tional left to iden­tify and make use of these new trends. The report accused the union and PCI lead­er­ship of focus­ing on loftier polit­i­cal goals, such as legal reform, which did not directly affect fac­tory con­di­tions. The pol­i­tics of the tra­di­tional Left did not mea­sure up to the pol­i­tics of the new work­ing class. Or, con­versely, the new work­ers did not per­ceive their action to be “polit­i­cal” because they asso­ci­ated pol­i­tics with par­ti­san pol­i­tics in Rome. The solu­tion lay in a new “orga­ni­za­tional praxis” through which the new work­ers would be led to ana­lyze their sit­u­a­tion.9 The wave of work­ers’ strug­gles in the Turi­nese fac­to­ries in 1962, lead­ing to the so called “riot of Piazza Statuto” and the events from 1969 onwards, vin­di­cated Alquati’s insight that the work­ing class orga­nized itself in ways that tran­scended the trade union lead­er­ship.10

By the early 1960s, in both Turin and Detroit, polit­i­cal mil­i­tants and rad­i­cal social the­o­rists ana­lyzed a dras­ti­cally recom­posed working-class, whose sig­nif­i­cance escaped the dom­i­nant orga­ni­za­tions of the labor move­ment. This recom­po­si­tion accounts for the strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties, as well as impor­tant dif­fer­ences, in the way indus­trial rela­tions broke down in the auto­mo­bile fac­to­ries, and social protest flared up in Detroit and Turin after 1968. In both cases, a mas­sive wave of migra­tion had fun­da­men­tally changed the demo­graph­ics of the two cities. Ten­sions over com­pe­ti­tion for hous­ing and resources between new­com­ers and natives were com­pounded by eth­nic (and in Detroit, racial) prej­u­dices. Racial dis­crim­i­na­tion took a heav­ier toll on African-Americans, since they were vic­tims of a racially seg­mented labor and hous­ing mar­ket, police bru­tal­ity, and none-too-subtle forms of social seg­re­ga­tion. In Turin, Ital­ian south­ern migrants like­wise encoun­tered hous­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion and were con­cen­trated in run-down sec­tions of the city cen­ter, or in build­ing projects in degraded sub­urbs poorly con­nected to the rest of the met­ro­pol­i­tan area. Even though their prob­lems were not exac­er­bated by “race,” south­ern migrants were at the mercy of a dual labor mar­ket, typ­i­cal of Fordism, that allot­ted high-paid steady jobs to natives, and pre­car­i­ous low-wage occu­pa­tions to new­com­ers. Because Turin and Detroit were indus­trial cities, the expe­ri­ence and the stand­ing of south­ern migrants and blacks within the fac­to­ries played a con­sid­er­able role in their over­all posi­tions in the com­mu­nity, in terms of income, polit­i­cal influ­ence, and sym­bolic sta­tus. The par­al­lel tra­jec­to­ries of the two cities were deter­mined by the struc­tural con­fig­u­ra­tion and urban con­cen­tra­tion of the Fordist indus­try par excel­lence: the auto­mo­bile indus­try.

League of Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Black Workers.

Working-class unrest in Turin and Detroit shared an impor­tant fea­ture: the activism of social groups occu­py­ing a mar­ginal posi­tion in the polit­i­cal econ­omy of the city. In both cases, the dis­tinct cul­tural back­ground of the “new work­ers” shaped the tac­tics, polit­i­cal lan­guage, and goals of the move­ment. They sub­verted the tra­di­tional class nar­ra­tive of insub­or­di­na­tion against cap­i­tal by ele­vat­ing cul­tural, regional, or racial “dif­fer­ence” to polit­i­cal impor­tance. Amer­i­cans had long asso­ci­ated Euro­pean immi­gra­tion with rad­i­cal­ism, but this argu­ment was not usu­ally applied to inter­nal migra­tion, the kind that brought tens of thou­sands of south­ern blacks to Detroit in the 1940s, 1950s, and also, to a lesser extent, in the 1960s.11 Sim­i­larly, in Italy, after the war few would have imag­ined that south­ern­ers were des­tined to become a major force of polit­i­cal change. On the con­trary, indus­tri­al­ists and union­ists, con­ser­v­a­tives and Com­mu­nists, all expected south­ern migrants to sap working-class consciousness.

My book Chal­leng­ing Global Cap­i­tal­ism puts for­ward the argu­ment that in the case of both Detroit and Turin, the expe­ri­ence of mar­gin­al­iza­tion was a key stim­u­lus to action, even when pro­test­ers inter­preted their resis­tance in terms of inter­est cat­e­gories such as race, class, or eth­nic­ity.12 This char­ac­ter­is­tic had been cap­tured by the dis­sent activists that oper­ated in both cities dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s, but caught the tra­di­tional labor move­ment by surprise.

The analy­sis of this period of intense social mobi­liza­tion, which takes into account par­al­lel devel­op­ments in dif­fer­ent local set­tings – an analy­sis, that is, which pur­sues sim­i­lar­i­ties and con­nec­tions beyond national bor­ders – high­lights three sig­nif­i­cant themes that enhance our under­stand­ing of this phe­nom­e­non. The first is the direct con­se­quence of the mar­gin­al­iza­tion processes described above. In Detroit and Turin, “mar­ginal” work­ers; that is African-Americans and Merid­ion­ali, who, for a num­ber of rea­sons, had ben­e­fited least from the exist­ing sys­tem of indus­trial rela­tions, and whose path to social inte­gra­tion had been steep and strewn with obsta­cles, were promi­nent in the work­ers’ unrest. In a sense, this is hardly unex­pected for the his­to­rian, yet it did take many rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Left by sur­prise. These work­ers were bring­ing into the strug­gle motives, tac­tics, and polit­i­cal iden­ti­ties that clashed with the tra­di­tional approach of orga­nized labor – their emer­gence as a class sub­ject changed the work­ing class forever.

The sec­ond theme that res­onates on both sides of the Atlantic was the chal­lenge that work­ers’ mil­i­tancy posed to exist­ing indus­trial rela­tions, in par­tic­u­lar to the link between wages and pro­duc­tiv­ity – a cen­tral pil­lar of Fordism. This had been the result of hard bar­gain­ing and col­lec­tive action, in the Amer­i­can case, and the out­come of FIAT’s attempt to defuse mass union­iza­tion by means of heavy-handed pater­nal­ism, in the Ital­ian case. Work­ers dis­rupted this nexus by turn­ing the shop floor into the key site of indus­trial con­flict. In the auto­mo­bile plants of the late 1960s, work­ers not only took time off work by strik­ing, but blocked pro­duc­tion in a vari­ety of ways with­out renounc­ing their wages. Because Fordist indus­try relied on a highly inte­grated process, these actions dis­rupted not only the depart­ment directly impli­cated, but also all the other depart­ments and plants con­nected to it. The demands that accom­pa­nied these tac­tics were equally dis­rup­tive of the old order, as they rarely focused solely on wage increases, but also tended to involve changes in the orga­ni­za­tion of work, or the bal­ance of author­ity at the point of pro­duc­tion, and safety issues raised by the pro­duc­tion process. In both Detroit and Turin, when the work­force mobi­lized, decision-making shifted away from union and cor­po­rate board­rooms onto the shop floor.

Finally, the third theme implicit in both cases stud­ied here, and no doubt in many oth­ers, is the link between work­ers’ strug­gles and a wider process of social mobi­liza­tion which had “anti­sys­temic” objec­tives (a term used by Arrighi, Waller­stein, and Hop­kins in the con­text of 1968).13 Work­ers hardly needed to be con­vinced by stu­dents of the desir­abil­ity of resist­ing the exhaust­ing demands of the assem­bly line, but the coali­tion with New Left activists mag­ni­fied the effect of the revolt on the shop floor. This period saw the estab­lish­ment of var­i­ous forms of col­lab­o­ra­tion between stu­dents and indus­trial work­ers. Some­times it was spon­ta­neous or unstruc­tured, but more often it occurred within the rad­i­cal groups that agi­tated against cap­i­tal­ism, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and oppres­sion, both inside and out­side the fac­tory. Men­tion might here be made of groups such as the League of Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Black Work­ers, Lotta Con­tinua, and Potere Operaio. Work­ers and stu­dents (at any rate those on the Left), shared a youth cul­ture that extolled anti-authoritarianism, forms of par­tic­i­pa­tory democ­racy – such as gen­eral assem­blies where any­one could take the stage and speak – and dis­rup­tive tac­tics such as unan­nounced sit-ins or occu­pa­tions. These actions often riled labor activists from the Old Left.

Rad­i­cals on both sides of the Atlantic found solace in the idea that a trans­for­ma­tion of the rela­tions of pro­duc­tion else­where could abet change in their own region. They engaged in dia­logue – some­times in writ­ing, at other times in per­son – in order to share tac­tics of rebel­lion, to elicit sup­port for their par­tic­u­lar groups, or to refine their analy­sis of the work­ings of cap­i­tal­ism. They saw in the autonomously orga­nized work­ing class the engine of rad­i­cal social trans­for­ma­tion. Simul­ta­ne­ous upheaval in Detroit and Turin, and else­where, seemed to sug­gest that at the turn of the 1970s the world was on the point of being fun­da­men­tally trans­formed by social move­ments. Fordism was at the twi­light of its exis­tence, crum­bling under the pres­sure of self-organized protest and with­drawal from work. It was a fun­da­men­tal insight of the social the­ory devel­oped in this period that the protest devel­oped in the fac­to­ries by this new work­ing class ush­ered in an utterly new era of cap­i­tal­ism in the West which could no longer be called Fordist.

Nicola Pizzolato is the author of Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin.

• 1Paolo Cec­ca­relli, “Due città frag­ili: Detroit e Torino. Ovvero, come non si dovrebbe costru­ire la città mod­erna” in Il Mulino, 1 (1983).
• 2Ibid, 15.
• 3Mar­cel van der Lin­den, “Social­ism ou Bar­barie: A French Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Group (1949-1965),” Left His­tory, 5:1 (1997).
• 4CLR James, Grace Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Fac­ing Real­ity (1958; Detroit: Bewick Edi­tions, 1974), 21, 27.
• 5Pref­ace to L’operaio amer­i­cano in Danilo Mon­taldi, Bisogna sognare. Scritti 1952-1975 (Milano: Col­i­brì, 1994), 501.
• 6Romano Alquati, inter­view in Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi, Gigi Rog­gero, Futuro Ante­ri­ore. Dai ‘Quaderni Rossi’ ai movi­mento glob­ali: ric­chezze e lim­iti dell’operaiosmo ital­iano (Roma: DeriveAp­prodi, 2002), attached CD-ROM.
• 7“Relazione sulle ‘forze nuove. Con­vegno del PSI sulla FIAT, gen­naio 1961” and “Doc­u­menti sulla lotta di classe alla FIAT” in Romano Alquati, Sulla Fiat e altri scritti, (Milano, 1975), 314-341.
• 8Alquati, “Relazione sulle “Forze nuove,” 35.
• 9“Doc­u­menti sulla lotta di classe alla FIAT,” 63.
• 10See Dario Lan­zardo, La riv­olta di Piazza Statuto (Milano: Fel­trinelli, 1980); Sante Notar­ni­cola, L’evasione impos­si­bile (Milano: Fel­trinelli, 1978), 79-82.
• 11For the immigrants-radicals asso­ci­a­tion see John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New Brunswick, N. J., Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity Press, 1955); see also C. Guerin-Gonzales and C. Strik­w­erda eds., The Pol­i­tics of Immi­grant Work­ers. Labor Activism and Migra­tion in the World Econ­omy Since 1830 (New York, Lon­don: Holmes & Meier, 1993).
• 12Nicola Piz­zo­lato, Chal­leng­ing Global Cap­i­tal­ism: Labor Migra­tion, Rad­i­cal Strug­gle and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (New York: Pal­grave, 2013).
• 13Gio­vanni Arrighi, Ter­ence Hop­kins, Immanuel Waller­stein, Anti­sys­temic Move­ments, (Lon­don: Verso, 1989).

The Amer­i­can Worker by Paul Romano
Trans­lated from the American

We present here an unprece­dented doc­u­ment of great value about the lives of Amer­i­can work­ers. This appraisal stems not only from the fact that it defin­i­tively puts paid to both the absurd claim that Amer­i­can work­ers don’t have class con­scious­ness, and the myth of the com­fort and lux­ury of the Amer­i­can pro­le­tariat. This would already be amply suf­fi­cient rea­son to make a point of pub­lish­ing the doc­u­ment by the worker and mil­i­tant rev­o­lu­tion­ary Romano. It is indis­pens­able that a cred­i­ble voice is raised to destroy the barefaced pro­pa­ganda of Hol­ly­wood firms which show us work­ers in bath­rooms, or those of Reader’s Digest which depict at every oppor­tu­nity the ben­e­fits of class collaboration.

The mer­its of this small pam­phlet are much more pro­found. Every worker, regard­less of “his nation­al­ity” of exploita­tion, will find in it the image of his own exis­tence as a pro­le­tar­ian. There are, in fact, deep and con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­is­tics of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence that know nei­ther fron­tiers nor regimes. Fur­ther­more every worker, and this is pre­cisely because it’s the reflec­tion of the exploita­tion “with­out for­mal­i­ties” [sans phrase] that is given to us, will be filled with a bound­less con­fi­dence in the his­toric des­tiny [des­tinées his­toriques] of his class, because he will see there, like the author, that even at the moment when the worker is in the deep­est despair, when his sit­u­a­tion appears to him to be insol­u­ble, his own “every­day reac­tions and expres­sions” reveal that he is on “the road to a far-reaching change…”

The trans­la­tor of this small pam­phlet him­self has worked sev­eral years in the fac­tory. We was struck by the accu­racy and the impor­tant impli­ca­tions of every line. It is impos­si­ble for a worker to remain indif­fer­ent to this read­ing. It is even more impos­si­ble to trans­late such a text in an indif­fer­ent, or even rou­tine, man­ner. At sev­eral junc­tures, it was nec­es­sary to take a con­sid­er­able dis­tance from the let­ter of the Eng­lish text to pro­vide a really faith­ful trans­la­tion. Some Amer­i­can pop­u­lar expres­sions have an exact cor­re­spon­dence in French, but embed­ded in dif­fer­ent imagery. Even in his descrip­tive style, Romano uses a pro­le­tar­ian optic. It was nec­es­sary to find a cor­re­spond­ing style in French, even if it meant stray­ing from the text. Admit­tedly, this trans­la­tion is not ele­gant, but it is the most faith­ful we could have given.

Even more in trans­lat­ing than read­ing one is struck by the con­crete uni­ver­sal­ity of the pro­le­tar­ian con­di­tion, and we hope to have respected this expression.

In our eyes, it is not by acci­dent that such a sam­ple of pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture comes to us from Amer­ica, and it is also not by acci­dent that it is, in some of its deep­est aspects, the first of the genre. One can be cer­tain that the name Romano will stay in the his­tory of pro­le­tar­ian lit­er­a­ture, and that it will even sig­nify a turn­ing point in that his­tory. The most indus­tri­al­ized coun­try in the world, with the most con­cen­trated pro­le­tariat, should give rise to new and orig­i­nal tal­ent. That is a sign of the vigor and the depth of Amer­i­can work­ers’ movement.

—Trans­lated by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

Philippe Guillaume was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

The doc­u­ment with which we start off this issue was writ­ten by Paul Romano, an Amer­i­can worker. There exists an Amer­ica that no one talks about, which is to be found beyond the myth of the refrig­er­a­tor, the auto­mo­bile, and the tele­vi­sion, and beyond the myth of afflu­ence for all. It is the Amer­ica of the fac­tory: an unknown Amer­ica whose his­tory is made of strikes, exploita­tion, and pro­le­tar­ian mis­ery. The pro­tag­o­nists of this story are the work­ers, and Paul Romano is a worker who writes about the life of the workers.

It is no coin­ci­dence that such a deeply inter­est­ing doc­u­ment comes from the most highly indus­tri­al­ized coun­try in the world, to counter the lie that the Amer­i­can pro­le­tariat has no class consciousness.

We know the dif­fi­cul­ties through which the rev­o­lu­tion­ary van­guard must move in the United States. The group that Paul Romano belongs to was formed within the Amer­i­can Trot­sky­ist orga­ni­za­tion, but split off fol­low­ing a pro­found dis­agree­ment. At the heart of this dis­agree­ment lay the refusal to adhere to the watch­word of “uncon­di­tional defense of the USSR,” which con­sti­tuted the clas­si­cal plat­form of Trot­sky­ism, rep­re­sented in the United States by the Social­ist Work­ers’ Party; the eval­u­a­tion of the USSR as state cap­i­tal­ist; the same analy­sis of the cap­i­tal­ist sit­u­a­tion as that of the Work­ers’ Party, another wing of Amer­i­can Trot­sky­ism, which did not present any­thing fun­da­men­tally new, while this group stressed the con­cen­tra­tion and sta­ti­za­tion of the econ­omy; and, finally, dif­fer­ences over their polit­i­cal tasks, since the seizure of power by the pro­le­tariat remained fun­da­men­tal to the group that pub­lished “The Amer­i­can Worker” in 1947. Formed in 1950 as an inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tion, since Octo­ber 1953 the group has pub­lished a bimonthly news­pa­per, Cor­re­spon­dence, of which ten issues are already out. “The Amer­i­can Worker,” as much as the news­pa­per Cor­re­spon­dence, expresses with great force and pro­fun­dity this idea, prac­ti­cally for­got­ten by the Marx­ist move­ment after the pub­li­ca­tion of the first vol­ume of Cap­i­tal, that the worker is first of all some­one who lives at the point of pro­duc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist fac­tory before being the mem­ber of a party, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant, or the sub­ject of com­ing social­ist power; and that it is the pro­duc­tive process that shapes his rejec­tion of exploita­tion and his capac­ity to build a supe­rior type of soci­ety, his class sol­i­dar­ity with other work­ers, and his hatred for exploita­tion and the exploiters, the tra­di­tional bosses of yes­ter­day and the imper­sonal bureau­crats of today and tomor­row. The devel­op­ment of this fun­da­men­tal idea is the prin­ci­pal con­tri­bu­tion of this group to the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment of today. But the doc­u­men­tary value of Paul Romano’s book resides also in this: that it reveals the con­di­tions of the work­ers to be uni­ver­sal. For this rea­son, we invite the com­rades, the work­ers, the read­ers to write to Battaglia, to com­pare their own sit­u­a­tions to that of the “Amer­i­can worker,” which is to say, with the worker of all coun­tries – the worker with whom they feel some­thing sim­i­lar and yet see some­thing different.

—Trans­lated by Salar Mohandesi

Danilo Montaldi was an Italian historian and militant.

Before tak­ing up the sub­ject, it is nec­es­sary to point out that Social­isme ou Bar­barie, pri­mar­ily at the impe­tus of Cas­to­ri­adis (alias Chaulieu), went through dif­fer­ent peri­ods, largely cor­re­spond­ing to polit­i­cal analy­ses of the prospects of strug­gle which con­di­tioned the devel­op­ment of the group.

If one can schemat­i­cally dis­tin­guish a Marx­ist period from a non-Marxist period, with the new posi­tions of Cas­to­ri­adis and the split of Pou­voir Ouvrier (Marx­ist ten­dency) in 1963, the pre­ced­ing period, begin­ning in 1949, went through dif­fer­ent approaches in the analy­sis of the eco­nomic, social, and polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion not only in France, but also in the entire world. In these dif­fer­ent ori­en­ta­tions, which are easy to detect in the 40 issues of the review, the ques­tion of work­ers’ inquiry was only posed in peri­ods dur­ing which the group affirmed the pri­macy of the class strug­gle. It might be worth recall­ing that the Chaulieu-Montal tendency’s break with the Parti Com­mu­niste Inter­na­tion­al­iste and the Fourth Inter­na­tional hap­pened over the ques­tion of the nature of the USSR; and at the same time, and for sev­eral years, the group essen­tially fixed its atten­tion on the com­ing of the Third World War. But it could show an inter­est in the work­ing class in the form of tes­ti­monies, as is demon­strated by the pub­li­ca­tion, from the first issue of the review, of a trans­la­tion of Paul Romano’s text – The Amer­i­can Worker – and some reports on strikes in both France and abroad. But, then, it was never a ques­tion of work­ers’ inquiry and one can­not say that the class strug­gle and an attempt to under­stand the world of the worker were at that time pri­mary con­cerns of the group.

Per­son­ally, I par­tic­i­pated in Social­isme ou Bar­barie from 1952 to 1958. I left Social­isme ou Bar­barie with Claude Lefort (Mon­tal) after an attempt by the major­ity of the group to cre­ate a polit­i­cal party dur­ing the events bound up with the war in Alge­ria and the Gaullist semi-coup. This rup­ture hap­pened over purely orga­ni­za­tion con­sid­er­a­tions that did not directly put into ques­tion the inter­est in the action of the work­ing class. On the con­trary, the major­ity saw in Gaullism a kind of fas­cism (which was an incor­rect analy­sis), and drew the con­clu­sion that we were going to par­tic­i­pate in a work­ers’ revolt, hence the neces­sity of a struc­tured orga­ni­za­tion. This ori­en­ta­tion was, how­ever, in oppo­si­tion to the con­cept of work­ers’ inquiry because the group saw itself, at that time, as a guide, a coor­di­na­tor, a recruiter aim­ing to impose a line rather than draw­ing this line from an analy­sis of work­ers’ behav­ior. I would not know what to say about what really hap­pened after 1958 – because I was no longer a part of it – except to com­ment on the texts pub­lished by the review, or to trust what my con­tacts in the group could tell me.

If the first issues of the review did not have an essen­tial inter­est in hav­ing a deep under­stand­ing of the work­ing class, of the pro­le­tariat in gen­eral and in par­tic­u­lar, the 11th issue of the review, from November-December 1952, did address the ques­tion of work­ers’ inquiry in a lead­ing arti­cle (not signed, which leads one to sup­pose that there was a con­sen­sus on this point, or a com­pro­mise) enti­tled “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.” But, if this arti­cle spoke about inquiry, it was not to priv­i­lege this method of under­stand­ing what the pro­le­tariat really is, but, on the con­trary, to rule in favor of these “nar­ra­tive accounts.” It is inter­est­ing to copy this pas­sage, which is the con­clu­sion of a long text on the­o­ret­i­cal developments:

Social­isme ou Bar­barie would like to solicit tes­ti­monies from work­ers and pub­lish them at the same time as it accords an impor­tant place to all forms of analy­sis con­cern­ing pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence. In this issue the reader will find the begin­ning of such a tes­ti­mony, one that leaves aside sev­eral of the points we have out­lined.1 Other such texts could broach these points in ways that go beyond those envi­sioned in this issue. In fact, it is impos­si­ble to impose an exact frame­work. If we have seemed to do so in the course of our expla­na­tions, and if we have pro­duced noth­ing but a ques­tion­naire, then this work would not be valu­able: a ques­tion imposed from the out­side might be an irri­tant for the sub­ject being ques­tioned, shap­ing an arti­fi­cial response or, in any case, imprint­ing upon it a char­ac­ter that it would not oth­er­wise have had. Our research direc­tions would be brought to bear even on nar­ra­tives that we pro­voke: we must be atten­tive to all forms of expres­sion that might advance con­crete analy­sis. As for the rest, the prob­lem is not the form taken by a doc­u­ment, but its inter­pre­ta­tion. Who will work out the rela­tion­ships under­stood as sig­nif­i­cant between such and such responses? Who will reveal from beneath the explicit con­tent of a doc­u­ment the inten­tions and atti­tudes that inspired it, and jux­ta­pose the tes­ti­monies? The com­rades of Social­isme ou Bar­barie? But would this not run counter to their inten­tions, given that they pro­pose a kind of research that would enable work­ers to reflect upon their expe­ri­ence? This prob­lem can­not be resolved arti­fi­cially, par­tic­u­larly not at this first step in the work. In any case, the inter­pre­ta­tion, from wher­ever it comes, will remain con­tem­po­rary with the text being inter­preted. It can only impress if it is judged to be accu­rate by the reader, some­one who is able to find another mean­ing in the mate­ri­als we sub­mit to him. We hope it will be pos­si­ble to con­nect the authors with texts in a col­lec­tive cri­tique of the doc­u­ments. For the moment, our goal is to gather these mate­ri­als: in this, we count on the active sup­port of those sym­pa­thetic with this journal.

All of this talk ends in this deci­sion to put aside work­ers’ inquiry in favor of the first-hand nar­ra­tive of a sin­gle per­son, when one knows what Social­isme ou Bar­barie really was at that time: a core of some dozen mil­i­tants with a few con­tacts in the provinces and review that cir­cu­lated barely more than 200 copies. It was out of the ques­tion, for purely prac­ti­cal rea­sons to start any kind of “work­ers’ inquiry,” even less because only three or four of these par­tic­i­pants were pro­le­tar­i­ans. Did this crit­i­cal rejec­tion not express the con­crete impos­si­bil­ity of real­iz­ing this work, given the size of the group? Or rather, was it not the con­se­quence of a polit­i­cal approach to the ques­tion – that the group had noth­ing to learn from the work­ing class but, on the con­trary, had sev­eral things to teach it? (This con­nects to the posi­tions on the role of the orga­ni­za­tion that exploded in 1958 in the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the war in Alge­ria.) In fact, the review would only include, fol­low­ing The Amer­i­can Worker by Paul Romano men­tioned above, nar­ra­tives from the pro­le­tar­ian mem­bers of the group. There is clear evi­dence that these nar­ra­tives were influ­enced by the polit­i­cal vision of the group; this was par­tic­u­larly true, for exam­ple, with the Mothé’s nar­ra­tives on the Renault Bil­lan­court fac­tory, which were strongly influ­enced by the Cas­to­ri­adis’ positions.

The pub­li­ca­tion of this text on “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence” coin­cided with the devel­op­ment of strug­gle in France, notably the large strikes in 1953 and 1955, up until 1958, when the polit­i­cal prob­lems tied to the war in Alge­ria gained the upper hand over the life of the group, the dis­cus­sions in the group, and the arti­cles in the review, priv­i­leged the work­ers’ strug­gles and the nar­ra­tives in ques­tion, but at no moment did the ques­tion of “work­ers’ inquiry” posed in 1952 reap­pear. On the con­trary, innu­mer­able debates unfolded in the weekly meet­ings on the ques­tion of a work­ers paper. Such a paper existed, clan­des­tinely, Tri­bune Ouvrière, oper­ated by group of work­ers at the Renault fac­tory in Bil­lan­court (a sub­urb of Paris), a few of whom were close to Social­isme ou Bar­barie (one was a member).

To recount the his­tory of Tri­bune Ouvrière, work­ers bul­letin of the Renault fac­tory at Bil­lan­court neces­si­tates retrac­ing the sit­u­a­tion in the fac­tory and the rela­tions of labor in the fif­teen years that fol­lowed the Sec­ond World War. To broadly sum­ma­rize, this fac­tory of about 30,000 work­ers, the “work­ers’ fortress,” as we used it call it at the time, was then dom­i­nated by the CGT, tied closely to the Com­mu­nist Party, and which until 1947, imposed the management’s pro­duc­tion imper­a­tives. It was in line with the national polit­i­cal union for the eco­nomic recon­struc­tion of cap­i­tal­ism in France.

The class strug­gle con­tin­ued nonethe­less, and Trot­sky­ist mil­i­tants suc­ceeded in polar­iz­ing oppo­si­tion against this pol­i­tics of class col­lab­o­ra­tion in cer­tain work­shops in the fac­tory, and in unleash­ing in April-May 1947 a wild­cat strike and the cre­ation of a strike com­mit­tee out­side the union. The vio­lent repres­sion of the strike ended with a com­pro­mise (signed by the CGT with­out the pres­ence of the strike com­mit­tee), but had polit­i­cal con­se­quences: the ejec­tion of the Com­mu­nist min­is­ters from the gov­ern­ment (other fac­tors also con­tributed to this ejec­tion: on the one hand, the begin­ning of the cold war and align­ment on the pol­i­tics of the USSR, and on the other hand, the first war in Viet­nam). The end of the strike saw the exclu­sion of the CGT from those sec­tions that had launched the strike, which had to cre­ate a new union, the Renault Demo­c­ra­tic Union (SDR), led by a Trot­sky­ist mil­i­tant, Bois. The exis­tence of this union was very ephemeral because it clashed with both the CGT and the man­age­ment (the legal arrange­ment prac­ti­cally pro­hib­ited it from par­tic­i­pat­ing in any dis­cus­sion in the factory).

A few years later, in 1954, some par­tic­i­pated in the cre­ation of a new oppo­si­tion in the fac­tory, which regrouped, under the impe­tus of a mil­i­tant close to Social­isme ou Bar­barie, Ray­mond (who still refused to par­tic­i­pate in the group), and other mil­i­tants in the fac­tory, an anar­chist, Pier­rot, the Trot­sky­ist Bois, and a mem­ber of Social­isme ou Bar­barie, Mothé. It was in this way that the work­ers bul­letin, Tri­bune Ouvrière, was launched. It was totally clan­des­tine and dis­sem­i­nated secretly in the fac­tory - the CGT’s pres­ence was still so strong that it could oppose any attempt to orga­nize out­side its union con­trol. The true facil­i­ta­tor of this nucleus was Gas­pard, who did not con­tent him­self with ensur­ing the appear­ance and dis­tri­b­u­tion of the bul­letin, but was a true orga­nizer of a real nucleus of nearly 50 work­ers in a col­lec­tive approach that expanded beyond the union into a kind of col­lec­tive life out­side the fac­tory (vaca­tions, cul­tural trips, etc.). I can tes­tify to this since, orga­nizer of an oppo­si­tion core at my com­pany. I occa­sion­ally took part in these “activities.”

There were attempts to turn Tri­bune Ouvrière into the worker bul­letin of Social­isme ou Bar­barie; these dis­cus­sions aimed to define the method of such a bul­letin, which was intended to prop­a­gate the ideas of the group, rather than to pro­mote a deeper under­stand­ing of the pro­le­tariat. After 1958, and the group’s split, such a paper appeared under the title Pou­voir Ouvrier. No longer a mem­ber of Social­isme ou Bar­barie after this date, I can only refer to pub­li­ca­tions in order to main­tain that the ques­tion of Work­ers’ Inquiry was never addressed in the group, and even more so that even the worker nar­ra­tives dis­ap­peared [from the review] com­pletely, the group being in large part com­posed of intel­lec­tu­als and stu­dents, and no proletarians.

The debates that, in 1958, led to Social­isme ou Barbarie’s split, were polar­ized around two texts on the role of the orga­ni­za­tion, one com­ing from Cas­to­ri­adis, the other from Lefort. In this lat­ter text one finds a brief ref­er­ence to work­ers inquiry in the con­clu­sion on “mil­i­tant activ­ity” in these terms: “On the other hand, one can begin sev­eral seri­ous analy­ses con­cern­ing the func­tion­ing of our own soci­ety (on the rela­tions of pro­duc­tion, the French bureau­cracy, or the union bureau­cracy). One would in this way estab­lish a col­lab­o­ra­tion with fac­tory mil­i­tants in a way that poses in con­crete terms (through inquiries into their life and work expe­ri­ences) the prob­lem of work­ers’ man­age­ment.”2 But even there this remained a purely the­o­ret­i­cal posi­tion with­out the pos­si­bil­ity of prac­ti­cal real­iza­tion given the reduced size of the group and, in fact, every­thing would unfold differently.

In a cer­tain way, one can say that this approach to under­stand­ing the pro­le­tar­ian milieu was adopted by those who emerged, after the var­i­ous tur­moils that lasted up until 1962, as the minor­ity that was more or less excluded from Social­isme ou Bar­barie in 1958. It would take too long to explain how, from the autumn of 1958, we con­sti­tuted an “inter-firm group” com­posed solely of pro­le­tar­i­ans, and which began to pub­lish a monthly bul­letin essen­tially repro­duc­ing what the par­tic­i­pants could say about what­ever hap­pened in their fac­tory. This bul­letin ended up call­ing itself Infor­ma­tions Cor­re­spon­dance Ouvrières (ICO)3 and con­tin­ued under this form until 1968 where, once again, an influx of stu­dents fun­da­men­tally mod­i­fied the orig­i­nal char­ac­ter of the group and the con­tent of the bul­letin. In a cer­tain way this resem­bles work­ers’ inquiry, but it was in no way a response to pre­cise ques­tion­naire, but a nar­ra­tive, even­tu­ally clar­i­fied by ques­tions to other pro­le­tar­i­ans par­tic­i­pat­ing in the meet­ing. I must add that until 1967-1968, when eco­nomic and social devel­op­ment sparked a revival of inter­est in this expe­ri­ence, the mem­ber­ship of ICO never sur­passed more than 30, the bulletin’s cir­cu­la­tion hav­ing finally attained 1000 copies, and that the influ­ence of the group remained neg­li­gi­ble all the same.

Tri­bune Ouvrière dis­ap­peared around 1962-63 because Ray­mond left – and he took with him a cer­tain num­ber of Renault work­ers – to cre­ate a col­lec­tive vaca­tion cen­ter. In the years before 1958 dis­cus­sions went on in Social­isme ou Bar­barie about a “work­ers’ paper” that would express the group’s posi­tion on work­ers’ strug­gles to the work­ers. For some time some in Social­isme ou Bar­barie had thought that Tri­bune Ouvrière would be this work­ers’ paper express­ing the group. But the oppo­si­tion of Ray­mond and the other mem­bers (except Mothé, who pushed for such an inte­gra­tion), nul­li­fied all these efforts. It was then that the major­ity, tak­ing advan­tage of the 1958 split, launched the work­ers’ paper of the group: Pou­voir Ouvrier. It was nei­ther the con­tin­u­a­tion of Tri­bune Ouvrière, which con­tin­ued for some time in its orig­i­nal form, nor some for­mula that cor­re­sponded to it, but the paper of a polit­i­cal group car­ry­ing, in more acces­si­ble lan­guage, the good word to the work­ers: it did not base itself on any con­crete work­ers expe­ri­ence. This was so true that at the time of Social­isme ou Barbarie’s new split in 1963, “Pou­voir Ouvrier” became the name and the polit­i­cal organ of the new group. After 1958 Mothé founded the paper accord­ing to the for­mula he defended in the review, but he quickly aban­doned it to pur­sue a union career in the CFDT.

With Mothé hav­ing become a syn­di­cal­ist, Ray­mond leav­ing for a com­mer­cial career, and Bois, who was the ani­mat­ing spirit behind Voix Ouvrières, launch­ing fac­tory bul­letins that were closely con­trolled by the Trot­sky­ist appa­ra­tus, Tri­bune Ouvrière could dis­ap­pear because the major­ity of those who had directed it were work­ing else­where. Only one of them was left, Pier­rot, still a worker at Renault Bil­lan­court, who joined ICO and became one of its ani­ma­teurs. But one can­not say there was any fil­i­a­tion with Tri­bune Ouvrière, which dis­ap­peared prac­ti­cally the moment when ICO emerged on com­pletely dif­fer­ent bases than any of the groups of bul­letins cited. Prac­ti­cally, all the par­tic­i­pants in ICO were work­ers who, opposed to unions, shared their expe­ri­ence as work­ers, and their expe­ri­ence of the dif­fi­cult strug­gle between the boss’s exploita­tion and the union bureau­cracy; this made for an orig­i­nal con­cep­tion, very dif­fer­ent from both Tri­bune Ouvrière, lim­ited to a sin­gle fac­tory, and Pou­voir Ouvrier, the expres­sion of a polit­i­cal group. ICO con­tin­ued in this form prac­ti­cally until 1968, then every­thing was over­turned in May 68 with an influx of non-workers, and with this influx a muta­tion towards a polit­i­cal group, which, for its part, led to shat­ter­ing of the group around ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions. Nei­ther one nor the other of these so-called “work­ers’” bul­letins can serve as mod­els for today because they cor­re­sponded to cer­tain struc­tures of cap­i­tal, to ensu­ing rela­tions of pro­duc­tion, and a cer­tain union pres­ence. A half cen­tury later, many things have changed in this area and few today dis­cuss the “work­ers’ paper.”

ICO dis­ap­peared after 1968 in large part because of pro­found diver­gences over the role of the pro­le­tariat, some fore­see­ing a rise in strug­gles, which would jus­tify a rev­o­lu­tion­ary per­spec­tive (which led to the reemer­gence of the old debates on the role of orga­ni­za­tions and an irre­ducible cleav­age between the Marx­ist and anar­chist cur­rents); oth­ers think­ing the role of the pro­le­tariat was no longer cen­tral to the prospects of a com­mu­nist trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety. These are the cur­rents that still con­front each other 40 years later, but the least that can be said is that nei­ther one con­cerned itself with really know­ing how pro­le­tar­i­ans live and strug­gle, and their vision of a non-capitalist world. For these cur­rents – even though a whole arse­nal of soci­ol­o­gists and eth­nol­o­gists around the world try to tap into this in order to fur­ther the dom­i­na­tion of the worker how­ever they can, with the sole inter­est of ensur­ing the per­ma­nence of the sys­tem that exploits labor-power – the theme of work­ers’ inquiry is no longer rel­e­vant: for some it is totally use­less, because the work­ers are no longer a deter­min­ing fac­tor; for oth­ers, as in the past, it is a sec­ondary thing, because they still think they have to teach some­thing to work­ers, and not the other way around.

—Trans­lated by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

Henri Simon was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

• 1G. Vivier, “La vie en usine,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 11.
• 2Claude Lefort, Élé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1979), 112.
• 3This is some­times writ­ten as Infor­ma­tions et Cor­re­spon­dance Ouvrières, but we have left Simon’s phras­ing.

There is no phrase from Marx more often repeated: “The his­tory of all soci­eties to date has been the his­tory of class strug­gle.”1 These words have lost none of their explo­sive poten­tial. Peo­ple are con­tin­u­ously pro­vid­ing prac­ti­cal com­men­taries, char­la­tans have obscured their mean­ing, replac­ing them with more reas­sur­ing truths. Yet must we still say that his­tory is defined entirely around class strug­gle, that his­tory today is defined entirely by the strug­gles of the pro­le­tariat against the class that exploits it, and that his­tor­i­cal cre­ativ­ity and the cre­ativ­ity of the pro­le­tariat are today one and the same? On these points, there is no ambi­gu­ity in Marx. He wrote: “Of all the instru­ments of pro­duc­tion the great­est pro­duc­tive power is the pro­le­tariat itself.”2 But rather than sub­or­di­nate every­thing to this pro­duc­tive power and inter­pret the devel­op­ment of soci­ety as a whole in terms shaped by that of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary class, pseudo-Marxists of all kinds have tried to base the con­cep­tion of his­tory on less move­able grounds. They have con­verted the the­ory of class strug­gle into a purely eco­nomic sci­ence and claim to have derived its laws in the image of those of clas­si­cal physics, deduc­ing a super­struc­ture and thereby con­flat­ing class com­port­ment3 with ide­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­ena. Tak­ing an expres­sion from Cap­i­tal, they say that the pro­le­tariat and bour­geoisie are “per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of eco­nomic cat­e­gories,” the for­mer of wage labor and the lat­ter of cap­i­tal. The strug­gle between them is the mere reflec­tion of an objec­tive con­flict, the nature of which is tied to a given period as a func­tion of the devel­op­ment of pro­duc­tive forces and exist­ing rela­tions of pro­duc­tion. Because this con­flict results from the devel­op­ment of pro­duc­tive forces, his­tory is essen­tially reduced to it, and is in the process unwit­tingly trans­formed into a par­tic­u­lar episode in the evo­lu­tion of nature. Simul­ta­ne­ously, the role of class and of human beings is vacated. To be sure, this the­ory does not dis­pense entirely with inter­est in the devel­op­ment of the pro­le­tariat, but restricts it to objec­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics – to exten­sion, den­sity, and con­cen­tra­tion. In the best sce­nario, these char­ac­ter­is­tics are then brought into rela­tion with large-scale pro­le­tar­ian actions. This the­o­ret­i­cal view­point mon­i­tors the nat­ural evo­lu­tion of a pro­le­tariat that it casts as an uncon­scious and undif­fer­en­ti­ated mass. The per­ma­nent strug­gle against exploita­tion, rev­o­lu­tion­ary actions and ide­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­ena that accom­pany them, are not the real his­tory of the class. They are mere expres­sions of an eco­nomic function.

Not only did Marx dis­tance him­self from this the­ory, there is an explicit cri­tique of it in the philo­soph­i­cal work of his youth. Accord­ing to Marx, attempts to grasp social devel­op­ment in itself, inde­pen­dently of con­crete human beings and the rela­tions they estab­lish amongst them­selves – be they of coop­er­a­tion or of con­flict – are expres­sions of the alien­ation inher­ent in cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. Because they are made strangers to their work, because their social sit­u­a­tion is imposed on them inde­pen­dently of their will, peo­ple are inclined to grasp human activ­ity in gen­eral on the model of physics and to grasp soci­ety as a being in-itself.

Marx’s cri­tique did not destroy this ten­dency any more than he elim­i­nated alien­ation by reveal­ing it. On the con­trary, this ten­dency devel­oped out of other aspects of Marx in the form of a so-called eco­nomic mate­ri­al­ism that, with time, came to play a spe­cific role in the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of the work­ers’ move­ment. Its dupli­ca­tion of the social divi­sion within the pro­le­tariat between the worker elite asso­ci­ated with the intel­li­gentsia and the masses fed into a com­mand ide­ol­ogy the bureau­cratic char­ac­ter of which is fully revealed in Stal­in­ism. By con­vert­ing the pro­le­tariat into a mass gov­erned by laws and its agency into an eco­nomic func­tion, this ten­dency jus­ti­fies the reduc­tion of work­ers to the sta­tus of exe­cu­tants within their own orga­ni­za­tions, which have become instru­ments of worker exploitation.

The pro­le­tariat is the real response to this eco­nomic pseudo-materialism. Its response is elab­o­rated through its prac­ti­cal exis­tence. Any­one who looks at its his­tory can see that the pro­le­tariat has not merely reacted to def­i­nite, exter­nal eco­nomic fac­tors (degree of exploita­tion, stan­dard of liv­ing, mode of con­cen­tra­tion), but that it has really acted. The pro­le­tariat has inter­vened in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary man­ner based not on some schema pro­vided by the objec­tive sit­u­a­tion, but on its total, cumu­la­tive expe­ri­ence. While it would be absurd to inter­pret the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment with­out con­tin­u­ous ref­er­ence to the eco­nomic struc­ture of soci­ety as a whole at the time, to reduce work­ers to that struc­ture is to con­demn one­self to ignore three-quarters of its con­crete class com­port­ment. Who would try to deduce a century’s worth of trans­for­ma­tions in worker men­tal­ités4 , meth­ods of strug­gle and forms of orga­ni­za­tion on the basis of purely eco­nomic processes?

Fol­low­ing Marx, it is essen­tial to affirm that the work­ing class is not merely an eco­nomic cat­e­gory, but the “great­est of pro­duc­tive forces.” We must show how this is the case both against crit­ics and mys­ti­fiers and for the devel­op­ment of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory. But we must also rec­og­nize that this topic was only broached in Marx and that its expres­sion through his con­cep­tion of the pro­le­tariat remained con­cep­tu­ally unclear. He was often con­tent with abstract claims about the role of changes of con­scious­ness in class for­ma­tion with­out explain­ing what they meant. At the same time, in the inter­est of show­ing the neces­sity of fun­da­men­tal rev­o­lu­tion, he often depicted the work­ing class in terms so dark that they lead one to won­der how work­ers could pos­si­bly acquire con­scious­ness of their sit­u­a­tion and their role in the man­age­ment of Human­ity. Marx argues that cap­i­tal­ism has trans­formed the worker into a machine and robbed it of “every human phys­i­cal and moral char­ac­ter­is­tic” and that cap­i­tal­ism has removed from work all sem­blance of “indi­vid­ual inter­ac­tion.” The result has been a “loss of human­ity.” How­ever, accord­ing to Marx, because it is sub­hu­man, because it is totally alien­ated and an accu­mu­la­tion of all social dis­tress, the proletariat’s revolt against its fate can eman­ci­pate all of human­ity. (It requires “a class…for which human­ity is entirely lost and which can only recon­quer itself by con­quer­ing all of human­ity” or “the pro­le­tariat of the present day alone, totally excluded from all per­sonal activ­ity, is able to real­ize its total per­sonal activ­ity and no longer rec­og­nize lim­its on the appro­pri­a­tion of the total­ity of col­lec­tive forces.”5 ). At the same time, it is clear that pro­le­tar­ian rev­o­lu­tion is not a lib­er­a­tory explo­sion fol­lowed by the instant trans­for­ma­tion of all soci­ety (Marx directed much sar­casm at this anar­chist naïveté). Rather, pro­le­tar­ian rev­o­lu­tion is when the exploited class assumes the man­age­ment of all of soci­ety. But how could the pro­le­tariat suc­cess­fully take on the innu­mer­able social, polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and cul­tural tasks that a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion would bring if the night before it had been rad­i­cally excluded from social life? One response could be: the class under­goes a meta­mor­pho­sis through rev­o­lu­tion. But even as there is an accel­er­a­tion of his­tor­i­cal processes in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary period, one that upsets exist­ing rela­tions amongst men and estab­lishes com­mu­ni­ca­tion that links each to soci­ety as a whole, phe­nom­ena which are required for the extra­or­di­nary mat­u­ra­tion of the class that rev­o­lu­tion brings, nonethe­less it would be absurd, soci­o­log­i­cally speak­ing, to see the class as born of rev­o­lu­tion. Its mat­u­ra­tion is only pos­si­ble due to prior expe­ri­ence that it inter­prets and puts into a pos­i­tive practice.

Marx’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the total alien­ation of the pro­le­tariat are linked to the idea that the over­throw of the bour­geoisie is the nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient con­di­tion for the vic­tory of social­ism. In these cases, he is pre­oc­cu­pied with the destruc­tion of the old order and opposes to it com­mu­nist soci­ety, like a pos­i­tive is opposed to a neg­a­tive. These points show that Marx was nec­es­sar­ily depen­dent on a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. The unfold­ing of sub­se­quent decades requires us to think oth­er­wise about the pas­sage from the old order into a post-revolutionary soci­ety. The prob­lem of rev­o­lu­tion has become that of the proletariat’s capac­ity to man­age all of soci­ety. This requires us to think about the devel­op­ment of this capac­ity within cap­i­tal­ist society.

There is no lack of indi­ca­tions in Marx of the mate­r­ial that would be required to out­line another con­cep­tion of the pro­le­tariat. For exam­ple, Marx writes that com­mu­nism is the actual move­ment of over­throw­ing the exist­ing soci­ety that is pre­sup­posed by it. From a cer­tain view­point, this indi­cates con­ti­nu­ities that would link social forces in the exist­ing cap­i­tal­ist stage to the future of human­ity. More explic­itly, Marx high­lights the orig­i­nal­ity of the pro­le­tariat, which already rep­re­sents the “dis­so­lu­tion of all classes,”6 he says, because, it is not linked to any par­tic­u­lar inter­est, because it absorbs aspects of pre­vi­ous social classes and recom­bines them in a unique man­ner, and because it has no nec­es­sary link with the soil or, by exten­sion, with any nation. What is more, while Marx insists – cor­rectly – on the neg­a­tive, alien­ated char­ac­ter of pro­le­tar­ian work, he also shows that this same sit­u­a­tion puts the pro­le­tariat in a uni­ver­sal sit­u­a­tion because of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment which has enabled an inter­change­abil­ity of tasks and a ratio­nal­iza­tion of pro­duc­tion vir­tu­ally with­out lim­its. This enables us to see the cre­ative func­tion of the pro­le­tariat within Indus­try, which he calls the “open book of human forces.”7 In this, the pro­le­tariat appears, not as sub­hu­man, but as the pro­ducer of social life in its entirety. The pro­le­tariat fab­ri­cates the objects thanks to which human life con­tin­ues in all domains because there is no one who does not owe his con­di­tions of exis­tence to indus­trial pro­duc­tion. If the pro­le­tariat is the uni­ver­sal pro­ducer, it must some­how also be a depos­i­tory of social and cul­tural progress.

In other places, Marx describes the devel­op­ment of the bour­geoisie and pro­le­tariat in much the same terms, as if the classes belong together not only because of their places in pro­duc­tion, but also because of their mode of evo­lu­tion and the rela­tions they estab­lish between peo­ple. For exam­ple, he writes: “The diverse indi­vid­u­als only con­sti­tute a class when they sup­port a strug­gle against another class. The rest of the time, they con­front each other in com­pe­ti­tion. At the same time, the class becomes autonomous rel­a­tive to indi­vid­u­als, so that they find their pre­des­tined con­di­tions of exis­tence.”8 How­ever, when he con­cretely describes the evo­lu­tion of the pro­le­tariat and bour­geoisie he dif­fer­en­ti­ates them rad­i­cally. Essen­tially, the bour­geoisie com­pose a class because those who con­sti­tute it have a com­mon eco­nomic func­tion. Com­mon inter­ests and hori­zons describe their com­mon con­di­tions of exis­tence for them. Inde­pen­dently of the pol­i­tics each adopts, the bour­geoisie con­sti­tutes a homo­ge­neous group with a fixed struc­ture. Their com­mon­al­i­ties of inter­est explain the ease with which the class can develop a spe­cial­ized frac­tion to under­take its pol­i­tics. Bour­geois pol­i­tics are expres­sions and inter­pre­ta­tions of these shared dis­po­si­tions. This char­ac­ter­is­tic of the bour­geoisie is equally evi­dent in the process of its his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment: “Because they were in oppo­si­tion to exist­ing con­di­tions and the divi­sion of labor that resulted from them, the con­di­tions of exis­tence for iso­lated bour­geois became the con­di­tions com­mon to all of them.”9 In other words, the iden­tity of their eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion within feu­dal­ism uni­fied them and gave them a class aspect, impos­ing on them from the begin­ning a sim­ple asso­ci­a­tion by resem­blance. This is what Marx means by the expres­sion the run­away serfs were already half-bourgeois. There was no con­ti­nu­ity that linked serf and bour­geois. Rather, the lat­ter sim­ply legal­ized the former’s already-extant mode of life. As a group, the bour­geoisie insin­u­ated itself into feu­dal soci­ety, and its focus was broad­en­ing its own mode of pro­duc­tion. When this mode of pro­duc­tion encoun­tered the lim­its of the exist­ing con­di­tions, there was no con­tra­dic­tion; exist­ing con­di­tions merely impeded its devel­op­ment. Marx does not say, but enables one to say: From the begin­ning the bour­geoisie is what it will become, an exploit­ing class. Of course, it was ini­tially under­priv­i­leged, but it already con­tained within itself all the char­ac­ter­is­tics that its his­tory would sim­ply develop.

The devel­op­ment of the pro­le­tariat is com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Reduced solely to its eco­nomic func­tion, it rep­re­sents a deter­mi­nate social cat­e­gory. But this cat­e­gory does not yet posses a class direc­tion. Its direc­tion [sens de classe] is con­sti­tuted by its orig­i­nal com­port­ment: the strug­gle against all forms of class in the soci­ety which it con­fronts as adver­sar­ial strata. This does not mean that the role of class in pro­duc­tion should be neglected; on the con­trary, we will see that the role work­ers play in soci­ety, and those they will be called upon to play in becom­ing its mas­ters, are directly rooted in their roles as pro­duc­ers. But the essen­tial point is that their role does not give them the abil­ity to act, but only an increas­ingly strong capac­ity to man­age. The bour­geoisie is con­tin­u­ally con­fronted with the results of its work: that is what gives it objec­tiv­ity. The pro­le­tariat is raised up through its work with­out ever being con­cerned with its results. Both the objects it pro­duces and the sequence of oper­a­tions required to pro­duce them are taken from it. While there is a progress in tech­ni­cal skill, this progress will only acquire a value in the future. In the present, it is inscribed in the neg­a­tive image of an exploita­tive soci­ety. (The tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of the con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can pro­le­tariat have no com­mon mea­sure with that of the French pro­le­tariat of 1848, but both the for­mer and the lat­ter are equally with­out eco­nomic power.) It is true that work­ers, like the bour­geoisie, have sim­i­lar inter­ests imposed on them by their com­mon work­ing con­di­tions – for exam­ple, they have an inter­est in full employ­ment and higher wages. But these inter­ests are of a dif­fer­ent order than their most fun­da­men­tal inter­est, which is to not be work­ers. It appears that work­ers seek higher wages in the same way as bour­geois seek prof­its, just as it appears both offer com­modi­ties on the mar­ket – the lat­ter cap­i­tal, the for­mer labor-power. In fact, the bour­geoisie con­sti­tutes itself through this com­port­ment as author of its class: it builds the sys­tem of pro­duc­tion that is the source of its own social struc­ture. For its part, while the pro­le­tariat seems only to react to con­di­tions that are imposed on it, it is being matured by its exploiters. Even if the work­ers are points of depar­ture for rad­i­cal oppo­si­tion to the sys­tem of exploita­tion itself, they nonethe­less play an inte­gral part in the dialec­tic of cap­i­tal. In con­fronta­tion with the bour­geoisie, the pro­le­tariat only affirms itself as an autonomous class when it con­tests bour­geois power, which is to say its mode of pro­duc­tion, or, more con­cretely, exploita­tion itself. Its rev­o­lu­tion­ary atti­tude con­sti­tutes its class atti­tude. Pro­le­tar­ian class direc­tion is not devel­oped through an accu­mu­la­tion of eco­nomic attrib­utes, but rather through their rad­i­cal denial in order to insti­tute a new social order. From this fol­lows that the pro­le­tariat, unlike the bour­geoisie, can­not cast off their chains as indi­vid­u­als because the ful­fill­ment of their des­tiny can­not be located in what they already vir­tu­ally are, but only through the abo­li­tion of the pro­le­tar­ian con­di­tion itself.10 Marx notes that the bour­geoisie are only of their class as “mem­bers” or as “aver­age” indi­vid­u­als (that is, as pas­sively deter­mined by their eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion) while the work­ers, form­ing a “rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­mu­nity,”11 are prop­erly indi­vid­u­als to the extent they dom­i­nate their sit­u­a­tion and imme­di­ate rela­tions to production.

If it is true that no class can ever be reduced solely to an eco­nomic func­tion and that a descrip­tion of con­crete social rela­tions within the bour­geoisie are a nec­es­sary com­po­nent of a com­pre­hen­sion of that class, then it is even more true that the pro­le­tariat requires a spe­cific approach that would enable access to its sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment. Despite some reser­va­tions con­cern­ing what is entailed by this term, it sum­ma­rizes bet­ter than any other the dom­i­nant trait of the pro­le­tariat. The pro­le­tariat is sub­jec­tive to the extent that its com­port­ments are not the sim­ple result of the con­di­tions of its exis­tence: its con­di­tions of exis­tence require of it a con­tin­u­ous strug­gle for trans­for­ma­tion, thus a con­tin­u­ous dis­tance from its imme­di­ate fate. The progress of this strug­gle, sense of dis­tance and the devel­op­ment of the ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent that enables them com­prise an expe­ri­ence across which the class con­sti­tutes itself.

To para­phrase Marx again, one must avoid above all fix­ing the rela­tion of the pro­le­tariat to the indi­vid­ual as an abstrac­tion. One must search for how its social struc­ture emerges from the sit­u­a­tions of deter­mi­nate indi­vid­u­als because it is true, accord­ing to Marx, that in soci­ety it is the pro­le­tariat which rep­re­sents a for­tiori an emi­nently social force within the present his­tor­i­cal stage as the group which pro­duces col­lec­tive life.

The indi­ca­tions that we find in Marx of an ori­en­ta­tion toward the con­crete analy­sis of the social rela­tions con­sti­tu­tive of the work­ing class have not been devel­oped by the Marx­ist move­ment. The fun­da­men­tal ques­tions for us have not been directly broached – how do men, placed in the con­di­tions of indus­trial work, come to appro­pri­ate that work? how do they build links between spe­cific rela­tions amongst them­selves, and how do they per­ceive and fash­ion rela­tions with the rest of soci­ety? and, in a sin­gu­lar man­ner, how do they com­pose the shared expe­ri­ence which makes of them a his­tor­i­cal force? For the most part they have been left aside in favor of a more abstract con­cep­tion, the object of which is, for exam­ple, cap­i­tal­ist Soci­ety (con­sid­ered in its gen­er­al­ity). The forces which com­prise it are placed on the same level. So it was for Lenin, for whom the pro­le­tariat was an entity whose his­tor­i­cal mean­ing had been estab­lished once and for all and which was, with some excep­tions, treated as an adver­sary by virtue of its exter­nal char­ac­ter­is­tics. An exces­sive inter­est was accorded to the study of “forces of pro­duc­tion,” which were con­flated with class strug­gle itself, as if the essen­tial prob­lem were to mea­sure the pres­sure that one mass exerted on an oppos­ing mass. For us, this does not at all mean that we reject the objec­tive analy­sis of the struc­ture and insti­tu­tions of the social total­ity, nor do we imag­ine, for exam­ple, that the only true knowl­edge that can be given has to be elab­o­rated by the pro­le­tar­i­ans them­selves as a func­tion of their root­ed­ness in the class. This “work­erist” the­ory of knowl­edge which, it must be said in pass­ing, reduces the work of Marx to noth­ing, must be rejected for two rea­sons: first, because all knowl­edge claims objec­tiv­ity (even as it may be con­scious of being socially and psy­cho­log­i­cally con­di­tioned); sec­ond, because the aspi­ra­tion to prac­ti­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal uni­ver­sal­ity belongs to the very nature of the pro­le­tariat, which would iden­tify itself with soci­ety as a whole. But the fact remains that objec­tive analy­sis, even car­ried out with the great­est rigor, as it was done in Marx’s Cap­i­tal, remains incom­plete because it is con­strained to be only inter­ested in the results of social life or in the fixed forms into which it is inte­grated (for exam­ple tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment or the con­cen­tra­tion of cap­i­tal) and to ignore the human expe­ri­ence that cor­re­sponds to more or less exter­nal mate­r­ial processes (for exam­ple, the rela­tions of men to their work in the steam age or the age of elec­tric­ity, in the age of com­pet­i­tive cap­i­tal­ism and in that of state monop­oly cap­i­tal­ism). In a sense there is no way to sep­a­rate mate­r­ial forms and human expe­ri­ence because the for­mer is deter­mined by the con­di­tions in which they are made, and these con­di­tions, which are the result of social evo­lu­tion, are the work of human beings. But from a prac­ti­cal view­point, objec­tive analy­sis is sub­or­di­nated to con­crete analy­sis because it is not con­di­tions that are rev­o­lu­tion­ary, but human beings, and the ulti­mate ques­tion is how to know about the ways that human beings appro­pri­ate and trans­form their situation.

The urgency of and inter­est in con­crete analy­sis comes from another direc­tion as well. Hold­ing close to Marx, we have under­lined the role of pro­duc­ers in the social lives of work­ers. It must be said, how­ever, that the same could be said in a gen­eral way of any class that has played any role in the his­tory of work. But the role of the pro­le­tariat in pro­duc­tion is unlike that of any other class from the past. Its role is spe­cific to mod­ern indus­trial soci­ety and can only be indi­rectly com­pared with other social forms which have pre­ceded it. The idea fash­ion­able today amongst many soci­ol­o­gists, for exam­ple, that the most archaic forms of prim­i­tive soci­eties are closer to feu­dal Europe of the Mid­dle Ages than the lat­ter is to the cap­i­tal­ism to which it gave way, does not pay ade­quate atten­tion to the role of classes and their rela­tions. There is a dou­ble rela­tion in any soci­ety, one amongst men and another between men and the objects they trans­form, but with indus­trial soci­ety the sec­ond rela­tion took on a new sig­nif­i­cance. Now there is a sphere of indus­trial pro­duc­tion gov­erned by laws that are to a cer­tain extent autonomous. Of course they are sit­u­ated in a total social sphere because the rela­tions between classes are con­sti­tuted through the rela­tions of pro­duc­tion, but not strictly so because the tech­ni­cal devel­op­ments and processes of ratio­nal­iza­tion which have been char­ac­ter­is­tic of cap­i­tal­ism since its ori­gins have had impacts that go beyond class strug­gle. To take a banal exam­ple, the indus­trial usage of steam or elec­tric­ity entail a series of con­se­quences – on the divi­sion of labor, on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of firms – that are rel­a­tively inde­pen­dent of the gen­eral form of social rela­tions. Of course, ratio­nal­iza­tion and tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment are not real­i­ties in them­selves: there is so lit­tle to them that they can be inter­preted as defenses erected by cap­i­tal­ists whose prof­its are con­tin­u­ously threat­ened by pro­le­tar­ian resis­tance of exploita­tion. Nonethe­less, even if the moti­va­tions of Cap­i­tal are suf­fi­cient to explain these ori­gins, they still can­not account for the con­tent of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment. The deeper expla­na­tion for the appar­ent auton­omy in the logic of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment is that it is not the work of cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment alone: it is also an expres­sion of pro­le­tar­ian work. The action of the pro­le­tariat, in fact, does not only take the form of a resis­tance (forc­ing employ­ers to con­stantly improve their meth­ods of oper­a­tion), but also of con­tin­u­ous assim­i­la­tion of progress, and even more, active col­lab­o­ra­tion in it. It is because work­ers are able to adapt to the rhythm and form of con­tin­u­ous evo­lu­tion that this evo­lu­tion has been able to occur. More basi­cally, because work­ers carry within them­selves responses to the myr­iad prob­lems posed within pro­duc­tion in its detail they make pos­si­ble the appear­ance of the sys­tem­atic response that one calls tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. Explicit ratio­nal­iza­tion is the gath­er­ing, inter­pre­ta­tion, and inte­gra­tion from a class per­spec­tive of the mul­ti­ple, dis­persed, frag­mented, and anony­mous inno­va­tions of men engaged in the con­crete processes of production.

From our view­point, this last remark is fun­da­men­tal because it places the empha­sis on expe­ri­ence that unfolds at the point of pro­duc­tion and on the per­cep­tions of work­ers. This does not entail a sep­a­ra­tion of this par­tic­u­lar social rela­tion from those of the global soci­ety that shape it, but rather recog­ni­tion of its speci­ficity. In other words, if we say that indus­trial struc­ture deter­mines social struc­ture, which is the means by which it acquires per­ma­nence, so that any soci­ety – regard­less of the class char­ac­ter­is­tics – mod­els itself on cer­tain of its char­ac­ter­is­tics, then we must under­stand the sit­u­a­tion into which it places those who are inte­grated out of neces­sity – that is, the sit­u­a­tion of the proletariat.

So what is a con­crete analy­sis of the pro­le­tariat? We will try to define it by enu­mer­at­ing some pos­si­bil­i­ties and deter­min­ing their respec­tive interests.

The first approach would be to describe the eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion in which the class finds itself and the influ­ences that sit­u­a­tion has on its struc­ture. At the limit, it would require a total social and eco­nomic analy­sis. In a more restricted sense, we would want to talk about work­ing con­di­tions and those of the lives of work­ers, the mod­i­fi­ca­tions that have accom­pa­nied its con­cen­tra­tion and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, changes in meth­ods of exploita­tion (inten­sity of work, length of the work day, wages and labor mar­kets and so forth). This is the most objec­tive approach in that it is focused on the appar­ent (but nonethe­less essen­tial) class char­ac­ter­is­tics. Any social group can be stud­ied in this way, and any­one can devote a study to it inde­pen­dently of any rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­mit­ments what­so­ever.12 There is noth­ing specif­i­cally pro­le­tar­ian about such work, even as one can say that it is or would be inspired by polit­i­cal forms opposed to the inter­ests of the exploit­ing class.

A sec­ond approach, the inverse of the first, would typ­i­cally be labeled more sub­jec­tive. It would focus on all expres­sions of pro­le­tar­ian con­scious­ness, or on what one ordi­nar­ily refers to as ide­ol­ogy. For exam­ple, prim­i­tive Marx­ism, anar­chism, reformism, Bol­she­vism, and Stal­in­ism rep­re­sent stages in the devel­op­ment of pro­le­tar­ian con­scious­ness. It is impor­tant to under­stand the mean­ing of their suc­ces­sion, to under­stand why large num­bers of work­ers have ral­lied around them at dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal stages and why these forms con­tinue to sig­nify in the present con­text. In other words, it is impor­tant to under­stand what the pro­le­tariat is try­ing to say by way of these inter­me­di­aries. While we make no claim for its orig­i­nal­ity – many exam­ples can be found in Marx­ist lit­er­a­ture (in Lenin’s cri­tiques of anar­chism or reformism, for exam­ple) – this type of analy­sis could be taken quite far: the con­tem­po­rary decline enables an appre­ci­a­tion of the trans­for­ma­tions of doc­trines despite the super­fi­cial appear­ances of con­ti­nu­ities (that of Stal­in­ism from 1928-1952 or that of reformism over the past cen­tury). How­ever, what­ever its inter­est, this approach remains abstract and incom­plete. It remains exter­nal, using infor­ma­tion that can be gath­ered through pub­li­ca­tions (the pro­grams and larger state­ments of the move­ment in which one might be inter­ested) that do not nec­es­sar­ily impose a pro­le­tar­ian view­point. And it allows what is arguably most fun­da­men­tal about worker expe­ri­ence to escape. It is only con­cerned with explicit expe­ri­ence, in what is expressed and put into the form of pro­grams or arti­cles with­out being pre­oc­cu­pied with whether or how these ideas reflect the thoughts and inten­tions of the work­ers in whose name they speak. While there is always a gap that sep­a­rates what is expe­ri­enced from what is elab­o­rated, it acquires a par­tic­u­lar ampli­fi­ca­tion in the case of the pro­le­tariat. This ampli­fi­ca­tion fol­lows from the fact that the work­ing class is not only dom­i­nated, but is also alien­ated, totally excluded from eco­nomic power and by virtue of that excluded from being able to rep­re­sent any sta­tus at all. This does not mean that ide­olo­gies have no rela­tion to the class expe­ri­ence of work­ing peo­ple, but the trans­for­ma­tion into a sys­tem of thought pre­sup­poses a break with and antic­i­pa­tion of that expe­ri­ence which allows non-proletarian fac­tors to exer­cise their influ­ence and make the rela­tion indi­rect. Here we encounter once again the basic dif­fer­ence between the pro­le­tariat and bour­geoisie noted ear­lier. For the lat­ter, the the­ory of lib­er­al­ism of a given period is a sim­ple ide­al­iza­tion and/or ratio­nal­iza­tion of its inter­ests: the pro­grams of its polit­i­cal par­ties express the sta­tus of cer­tain strata of their orga­ni­za­tions. For the pro­le­tariat, Bol­she­vism, although to some extent a ratio­nal­iza­tion of the worker’s con­di­tion, was also an inter­pre­ta­tion of it elab­o­rated by a frac­tion of the worker avant-garde13 asso­ci­ated with an intel­li­gentsia that was rel­a­tively sep­a­rated from the class. In other words, there are two rea­sons for the defor­ma­tion of worker expres­sion: that it is the work of a minor­ity exter­nal to the real life of the work­ing class or which is con­strained to adopt a rela­tion of exte­ri­or­ity to it; and that it is utopian, not in a pejo­ra­tive sense, but in the sense that it is a project that would estab­lish a sit­u­a­tion all the premises of which are not given in the present. Of course, the var­i­ous ide­olo­gies of the work­ers’ move­ment rep­re­sent cer­tain kinds of rela­tions to work­ers, which the work­ers rec­og­nize as their own, but only rep­re­sent them in a deriv­a­tive form.

A third approach would be more specif­i­cally his­tor­i­cal. It would con­sist in research into a con­ti­nu­ity link­ing the great man­i­fes­ta­tions of the work­ers’ move­ment since it came into being, to demon­strate that rev­o­lu­tions and, more gen­er­ally, diverse forms of worker resis­tance and orga­ni­za­tion (asso­ci­a­tions, unions, polit­i­cal par­ties, com­mit­tees formed dur­ing strikes or in the con­text of par­tic­u­lar con­flicts) are part of a pro­gres­sive expe­ri­ence and to show how this expe­ri­ence is linked to the evo­lu­tion of eco­nomic and polit­i­cal forms within cap­i­tal­ist society.

Finally there is a fourth approach, one that we see as the most con­crete. Rather than exam­in­ing the sit­u­a­tion of the pro­le­tariat from the out­side, this approach seeks to recon­struct the proletariat’s rela­tions to its work and to soci­ety from the inside and show how its capac­i­ties for inven­tion and power of orga­ni­za­tion man­i­fest in every­day life.

Prior to any explicit reflec­tion, to any inter­pre­ta­tion of their lot or their role, work­ers have spon­ta­neous com­port­ments with respect to indus­trial work, exploita­tion, the orga­ni­za­tion of pro­duc­tion, and social life both inside and out­side the fac­tory. By any account, this is the com­port­ment that most com­pletely man­i­fests in their per­son­al­i­ties. At this level, the dis­tinc­tion between sub­jec­tive and objec­tive loses its mean­ing: this com­port­ment includes ide­olo­gies which it con­sti­tutes with a cer­tain degree of ratio­nal­iza­tion, just as it pre­sup­poses eco­nomic con­di­tions. This com­port­ment per­forms their ongo­ing inte­gra­tion and elaboration.

As we have said, such an approach has yet to be really explored. No doubt there are valu­able lessons in the analy­sis of the 19th cen­tury Eng­lish work­ing class from Cap­i­tal; how­ever, to the extent that Marx’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion was to describe the work­ing con­di­tions and lives of work­ers, he oper­ated within the first approach out­lined ear­lier. Since Marx, there are only “lit­er­ary” doc­u­ments attempt­ing to describe the worker per­son­al­ity. Over the past few years and pri­mar­ily from the United States, a “worker” soci­ol­ogy has appeared that claims to do con­crete analy­ses of social rela­tions within pro­duc­tion and to iso­late their prac­ti­cal inten­tions. This soci­ol­ogy is the work of man­age­ment. “Enlight­ened” cap­i­tal­ists dis­cov­ered that mate­r­ial ratio­nal­iza­tion had its lim­its, that human-objects had spe­cific reac­tions one had to account for if one wanted to get the most out of them – that is, to get them to sub­mit to the most effi­cient forms of exploita­tion. This admirable dis­cov­ery pressed into ser­vice a Tay­lorized form of human­ism and made lots of money both for pseudo-psychoanalysts, who were called upon to lib­er­ate work­ers from their resent­ment as a harm­ful obsta­cle to pro­duc­tiv­ity, and for pseudo-sociologists, who car­ried out stud­ies of worker atti­tudes toward their work and their com­rades in order to help imple­ment the newest notions of social adap­ta­tion. The mis­for­tune of this soci­ol­ogy is that it can­not get to the pro­le­tar­ian per­son­al­ity by def­i­n­i­tion and is con­demned to remain out­side by virtue of its class per­spec­tive, see­ing noth­ing but the per­son­al­ity of the pro­duc­ing worker, a sim­ple exe­cu­tant irre­ducibly linked to the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem of exploita­tion. The con­cepts used in these analy­ses, like social adap­ta­tion, have for work­ers a mean­ing oppo­site to that of the researchers (for the lat­ter, there can only be adap­ta­tion to exist­ing con­di­tions: for work­ers, adap­ta­tion implies a lack of adap­ta­tion for exploita­tion). The results gen­er­ated are worth­less. This fail­ure shows the pre­sup­po­si­tions that would shape a real con­crete analy­sis of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence. It is fun­da­men­tal that the work be rec­og­nized by work­ers as a moment of their own expe­ri­ence, an oppor­tu­nity to for­mal­ize, con­dense and con­front types of knowl­edge usu­ally implicit, more “felt” than thought, and frag­men­tary. The dis­tance that sep­a­rates a soci­ol­ogy shaped by rev­o­lu­tion­ary aspi­ra­tions from the indus­trial soci­ol­ogy we have referred to is that which sep­a­rates the work of time-motion men from the col­lec­tive deter­mi­na­tion of pro­duc­tion norms in the con­text of worker man­age­ment. To the work­ers, an indus­trial soci­ol­o­gist looks like a time-motion man try­ing to mea­sure his “psy­cho­log­i­cal dura­tions” and the coop­er­a­tive dimen­sions of his social adap­ta­tion. In con­trast, what we are propos­ing pre­sup­poses that the work­ers are engaged in a pro­gres­sive expe­ri­ence that would tend to explode the frame­work of exploita­tion itself. The work would only be mean­ing­ful for those who par­tic­i­pate in that expe­ri­ence them­selves. Chief amongst those peo­ple are the workers.

In this respect, the rad­i­cal orig­i­nal­ity of the pro­le­tariat emerges once again. This class can only be known by itself, on the con­di­tion that whomever inquires about it acknowl­edges the value of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence, ori­ents him­self through their sit­u­a­tion and makes his own their social and his­tor­i­cal class hori­zons, and on the con­di­tion that he breaks with the imme­di­ately given, that is, with the frame­work of exploita­tion. This sort of work could go quite oth­er­wise with any other social group. Amer­i­can researchers have stud­ied with con­sid­er­able suc­cess the Mid­west petite bour­geoisie as if they were study­ing the Papou on the island of Alor. What­ever com­plex­i­ties were encoun­tered (we are still dis­cussing the rela­tion of an observer to what is being stud­ied) along with the neces­sity for the ana­lyst to go beyond the sim­ple analy­sis of insti­tu­tions in order to con­sti­tute some­thing of the mean­ings they have for con­crete human beings, it is nonethe­less pos­si­ble to acquire a cer­tain under­stand­ing of the group being stud­ied with­out shar­ing their norms and accept­ing their val­ues. This is because the petit bour­geois, like the Papous, have an objec­tive social exis­tence which, for bet­ter or worse, tends to per­pet­u­ate itself in the same form, one which is solidly linked to con­di­tions in the present. As we have empha­sized through­out, the pro­le­tariat is only defined in appear­ance by its con­di­tion as the col­lec­tiv­ity of exe­cu­tants within cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion. Its actual social life is hid­den: it is at once sym­met­ri­cal with exist­ing con­di­tions and in stark con­tra­dic­tion to the sys­tem that deter­mines those con­di­tions (the sys­tem of cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion itself). This opens onto a role that is dif­fer­ent from that which con­tem­po­rary soci­ety imposes on it at every point.

The con­crete approach that we see as required by the very nature of the pro­le­tariat entails that we col­lect and inter­pret tes­ti­monies writ­ten by work­ers. By tes­ti­monies we mean espe­cially nar­ra­tives that recount indi­vid­ual lives, or, bet­ter, expe­ri­ences in con­tem­po­rary indus­try, made by the inter­ested par­ties that can pro­vide insights into their social lives. Let us indi­cate some of the ques­tions that we think are the most inter­est­ing that can be posed by read­ing these tes­ti­monies, ques­tions which have been shaped in sig­nif­i­cant mea­sure by doc­u­ments that already exist14 :

We would like to know about a) the rela­tions of a worker to his work – his func­tion within the fac­tory, level of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, and under­stand­ing of the pro­duc­tion process. For exam­ple, does he know where the piece comes from that he works on? His pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence – has he worked in other fac­to­ries, in other branches of indus­trial pro­duc­tion, etc.? His inter­est in pro­duc­tion – what types of ini­tia­tive can he bring to his work, is he curi­ous about tech­ni­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments? Does he have a spon­ta­neous sense of the trans­for­ma­tions that could be brought to the struc­ture of pro­duc­tion and rhythms of work, to the con­text and con­di­tions that shape life in the fac­tory? Does he have in gen­eral a crit­i­cal atti­tude toward man­age­r­ial efforts at ratio­nal­iza­tion? How does he wel­come attempts at modernization?

b) Rela­tions with other work­ers and ele­ments from dif­fer­ent social strata within the enter­prise (dif­fer­ences in atti­tudes toward other work­ers, toward fore­men, man­agers, engi­neers and exec­u­tives), and under­stand­ing of the divi­sion of labor. What do hier­ar­chies of func­tion and wage rep­re­sent? Would he pre­fer to do some of his work at a machine and some in an office? How does he accom­mo­date his role as sim­ple exe­cu­tant? Does he under­stand the social struc­ture in the fac­tory as nec­es­sary or at least as some­thing that “goes with­out say­ing”? Are there ten­den­cies toward co-operation, com­pe­ti­tion or iso­la­tion? Pref­er­ence for work­ing as an indi­vid­ual or in a team? How are rela­tions amongst indi­vid­u­als divided up? Per­sonal rela­tions, the for­ma­tion of small groups and the basis on which they are estab­lished? How impor­tant are these small groups for indi­vid­u­als? If these are dif­fer­ent from social rela­tions that take shape in offices, how are these per­ceived and eval­u­ated? What impor­tance does he attribute to the social phys­iog­nomy of the fac­tory? Does he know about other fac­to­ries and how does he com­pare them? Does he have exact knowl­edge of the wage lev­els attached to other func­tions through­out the enter­prise? Does he com­pare pay stubs with other work­ers? Etc.

c) Life out­side the fac­tory and knowl­edge about what is hap­pen­ing in the wider social world. Impact of life inside the fac­tory on life out­side of it – how his work mate­ri­ally and psy­cho­log­i­cally influ­ences his per­sonal and fam­ily life, for exam­ple? Which milieu does he fre­quent out­side the fac­tory? To what extent are these pat­terns imposed on him by his work, or by the neigh­bor­hood in which he lives? What are the char­ac­ter­is­tics of his fam­ily life, rela­tions with his chil­dren and how he edu­cates them, his extra-professional activ­i­ties? How does he occupy his leisure time? Does he have predilec­tions for par­tic­u­lar types of dis­trac­tion? To what extent does he use mass media: books, news­pa­pers, radio, cin­ema? What are his atti­tudes about them? What are his tastes… not merely what news­pa­per does he read, but what does he read first? What inter­ests him (accounts of polit­i­cal or social events, tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments, bour­geois scan­dals)? Etc.

d) Links to prop­erly pro­le­tar­ian his­tory and tra­di­tions: knowl­edge of the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment and famil­iar­ity with it; par­tic­i­pa­tion in par­tic­u­lar social or polit­i­cal strug­gles and the mem­o­ries they have left with him; knowl­edge of work­ers in other coun­tries; atti­tudes toward the future inde­pen­dently of any par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal esti­ma­tion, etc.

What­ever the inter­est of these ques­tions, it is nonethe­less impor­tant to ask about the weight attrib­uted to indi­vid­ual tes­ti­monies. We know that we will be able to gather a rel­a­tively lim­ited num­ber of texts: on what basis can one gen­er­al­ize from them? A tes­ti­mony is by def­i­n­i­tion par­tic­u­lar: that of a 20- or 50-year-old worker who works in a small plant or large facil­ity, a devel­oped mil­i­tant, some­one with exten­sive trade-union and polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence, one with rigid opin­ions with­out ben­e­fit of any par­tic­u­lar train­ing or expe­ri­ence in par­tic­u­lar… with­out resort­ing to arti­fice, how can one dis­count these dif­fer­ences of sit­u­a­tion and derive from such dif­fer­ently moti­vated nar­ra­tives lessons of uni­ver­sal import? On this point, cri­tique is largely jus­ti­fied, and it seems clear that the results it would be pos­si­ble to obtain would nec­es­sar­ily be lim­ited. At the same time, it would be equally arti­fi­cial to deny all value to these texts. First, no mat­ter how sig­nif­i­cant the dif­fer­ences amongst them, all these texts are sit­u­ated within a sin­gle frame: the sit­u­a­tion of the pro­le­tariat. This allows us to see much more than the speci­ficity of a par­tic­u­lar life in the read­ing of these texts. Two work­ers in very dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions have in com­mon that both have endured one or another form of work and exploita­tion that is essen­tially the same and absorbs three-quarters of their per­sonal exis­tence. Their wages might be very dif­fer­ent, their liv­ing sit­u­a­tions and fam­ily lives may not be com­pa­ra­ble, but it remains the case that they are pro­foundly iden­ti­cal both in their roles as pro­duc­ers or machine oper­a­tors, and in their alien­ation. Every worker knows this: it is what enables that sense of famil­iar­ity and com­plic­ity (even when the indi­vid­u­als do not know each other) which is evi­dent at a glance for a bour­geois who finds him­self in a working-class neigh­bor­hood. It is not absurd to look amongst these par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter­is­tics for those with a more gen­eral sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, given that they all have resem­blances which are suf­fi­cient to dis­tin­guish them from those of any other social group. To this it must be added that this approach to tes­ti­monies would be sus­cep­ti­ble to cri­tique if we were inter­ested in gath­er­ing and cor­re­lat­ing opin­ions because these would nec­es­sar­ily be of a great diver­sity – but as we have said, we are inter­ested in worker atti­tudes. These atti­tudes are some­times expressed in the form of opin­ions, and are often dis­fig­ured by them, but they are in every case deeper and more sim­ple. This would present a con­sid­er­able obsta­cle were we to try to use a lim­ited num­ber of texts to infer the pro­le­tar­ian view of the USSR or of wage hier­ar­chies in gen­eral. But it is a much sim­pler mat­ter to iso­late worker atti­tudes toward bureau­cracy spon­ta­neously devel­oped from inside the pro­duc­tion process. Finally, we should note that no other mode of knowl­edge would allow us to respond to the prob­lems we have posed. Even if we had avail­able the mate­ri­als required for a vast statistically-based inves­ti­ga­tion (the data for which would be gath­ered by numer­ous com­rades who would pose thou­sands of ques­tions to other work­ers in var­i­ous fac­to­ries, given that we have already excluded any inves­ti­ga­tion car­ried out by researchers from out­side the work­ing class), the results would be use­less, because results based on responses gath­ered from anony­mous respon­dents that could only be cor­re­lated numer­i­cally would be with­out inter­est. Only responses attrib­uted to con­crete indi­vid­u­als can be brought into rela­tion with each other; their con­ver­gences and diver­gences enable the iso­la­tion of mean­ing and invoke sys­tems of liv­ing and think­ing that can be inter­preted. For all these rea­sons, indi­vid­ual nar­ra­tives are invaluable.

This does not mean that we would use this approach to define what the pro­le­tariat is in its real­ity after hav­ing rejected all rep­re­sen­ta­tions that have been made of its sit­u­a­tion as per­ceived through the dis­tort­ing prism of bour­geois soci­ety or the polit­i­cal par­ties that pur­port to speak in its name. A worker tes­ti­mony, no mat­ter how evoca­tive, sym­bolic or spon­ta­neous it may be, remains con­di­tioned by the sit­u­a­tion of its author. We are not refer­ring here to the defor­ma­tions that can arise in the par­tic­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions given by an author, but rather to those which tes­ti­mony nec­es­sar­ily imposes on the author. To tell a story is not to act within it. Telling a story even entails a break with action in ways that trans­form its mean­ing. For exam­ple, writ­ing an account of a strike is not the same as par­tic­i­pat­ing in that strike sim­ply because as a par­tic­i­pant, one does not yet know the out­come of one’s actions, and the dis­tance entailed by reflec­tion allows for judg­ments about that which, in real time, is not fixed as to mean­ing. In fact, there is in this case some­thing much more than a sep­a­ra­tion of opin­ion: there is a change of atti­tude, that is, a trans­for­ma­tion in the mode of react­ing to sit­u­a­tions in which one finds one­self. In addi­tion, a nar­ra­tive puts the indi­vid­ual in an unnat­u­rally iso­lated posi­tion. Work­ers typ­i­cally act out of sol­i­dar­ity with the other peo­ple who are caught up in the same sit­u­a­tion; with­out even talk­ing about open social strug­gles, there is the ongo­ing every­day strug­gle within the pro­duc­tion process to resist exploita­tion, a strug­gle hid­den but con­tin­u­ous and shared amongst com­rades. The atti­tudes most char­ac­ter­is­tic of a worker toward his work or toward other social strata are not found in him, as would be the case with the bour­geois or the bureau­crat who see their own actions deter­mined by their indi­vid­ual inter­ests. Rather, the worker shares in col­lec­tive responses. The cri­tique of a worker nar­ra­tive must make vis­i­ble within indi­vid­ual responses that aspect which leans on col­lec­tive com­port­ments; how­ever, in the final analy­sis, these reg­is­ters do not entirely over­lap in a nar­ra­tive, with the result that we can only derive an incom­plete knowl­edge from them. To fin­ish – and this cri­tique con­nects back to the first at a deeper level – the his­tor­i­cal con­text in which these nar­ra­tives are pub­lished must be clar­i­fied. There is no eter­nal pro­le­tariat that speaks, but a cer­tain type of worker who occu­pies a def­i­nite his­tor­i­cal posi­tion, sit­u­ated in a time char­ac­ter­ized by a sig­nif­i­cant retreat of worker forces all over the world as the strug­gle between two types of exploita­tive soci­ety lit­tle by lit­tle reduces to silence all other social man­i­fes­ta­tions, as a func­tion of its ten­dency to develop into both an overt con­flict and a bureau­cratic uni­fi­ca­tion of the world. The atti­tude of the pro­le­tariat (even the atti­tude that we are search­ing for which tran­scends to some extent this par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal con­junc­ture) is not the same in a period in which the class works with an antic­i­pa­tion of eman­ci­pa­tion in the short term, on the one hand, and one in which it is con­demned to momen­tary con­tem­pla­tion of blocked hori­zons and to main­tain a his­tor­i­cal silence, on the other.

It is enough to say that the approach that we char­ac­ter­ize as con­crete remains abstract in many respects given that the three aspects of the pro­le­tariat (prac­ti­cal, col­lec­tive, his­tor­i­cal) only emerge indi­rectly and are thereby deformed. In fact, the con­crete pro­le­tariat is not an object of knowl­edge: it works, it strug­gles and it trans­forms itself. One can­not catch up with it at the level of the­ory, but only at the level of prac­tice by par­tic­i­pat­ing in its his­tory. But this last remark is abstract because it does not take into account the role of knowl­edge in his­tory itself, as a mode of inte­gra­tion along with work and strug­gle. It is a fact as man­i­fest as oth­ers that work­ers pose ques­tions about their con­di­tion and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for trans­form­ing it. One can only mul­ti­ply the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives, which are nec­es­sar­ily abstract, even at moments of their con­ver­gence, and pos­tu­late that progress in the clar­i­fi­ca­tion of worker expe­ri­ence will advance that expe­ri­ence. So it is not by way of a stan­dard for­mula that we say that the four approaches we crit­i­cized in suc­ces­sion are in fact com­ple­men­tary. This is not to say that their results can be use­fully added together, but rather that their con­ver­gence across dif­fer­ent paths com­mu­ni­cates, in a more or less com­pre­hen­sive man­ner, the same real­ity that we have called pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence, for lack of a bet­ter term. For exam­ple, we think that the cri­tique of the evo­lu­tion of the work­ers’ move­ment, of its forms of orga­ni­za­tion and strug­gle, the cri­tique of ide­olo­gies, and the descrip­tion of worker atti­tudes nec­es­sar­ily all con­firm one another. Because the posi­tions that expressed them­selves in sys­tem­atic and ratio­nal ways in the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment and the orga­ni­za­tions and move­ments that have fol­lowed one another all coex­ist, in a sense, as the inter­pre­ta­tions and pos­si­ble accom­plish­ments of the pro­le­tariat today. Beneath (so to speak) the reformist, anar­chist, or Stal­in­ist move­ments, there is a pro­jec­tion amongst the work­ers, pro­ceed­ing directly from the rela­tion to pro­duc­tion, a pro­jec­tion con­cern­ing their fate which makes these elab­o­ra­tions pos­si­ble and con­tains them at the same time. There is a sim­i­lar rela­tion to forms of strug­gle that seem to be asso­ci­ated with phases of worker his­tory (1848, 1870 or 1917) but which express types of rela­tions between work­ers that con­tinue to exist and even to man­i­fest them­selves (in the form of a wild­cat strike with­out any orga­ni­za­tion, for exam­ple). This is not to say that the pro­le­tariat con­tains by its nature all the moments of its his­tory and all pos­si­ble ide­o­log­i­cal expres­sions of its con­di­tion. Fol­low­ing on what we have been say­ing, the mate­r­ial and the­o­ret­i­cal evo­lu­tion of the pro­le­tariat has led it to be as it is and the ways in which the past has come to be con­densed in its com­port­ment today have opened whole new fields of pos­si­bil­i­ties and reflec­tions. In ana­lyz­ing worker atti­tudes, what is essen­tial is not to lose sight of the fact that the knowl­edge obtained through it is lim­ited and that, more pro­foundly and com­pre­hen­sively than is the case with other forms of knowl­edge, while this does not under­mine its valid­ity, it must be con­nected back with the work­ers or risk becom­ing unintelligible.

Now that we have enu­mer­ated a series of ques­tions that con­crete analy­sis should enable us to answer or to pose bet­ter, we will turn to how con­crete analy­sis might reor­ga­nize and con­tribute to a deep­en­ing of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory, after first for­mu­lat­ing some reser­va­tions. The fol­low­ing seem to us the main prob­lems: (1) Under what form does the worker appro­pri­ate social life? (2) How does the worker inte­grate him­self into his class? That is, what are the rela­tions that unify peo­ple who share this con­di­tion and to what extent do these rela­tions con­sti­tute a delim­ited and sta­ble com­mu­nity in soci­ety? (3) What are his per­cep­tions of other social strata, his com­mu­ni­ca­tion with soci­ety glob­ally, his sen­si­tiv­ity to insti­tu­tions and to events that do not directly con­cern him or his every­day life? (4) In what ways does he sub­mit mate­ri­ally and ide­o­log­i­cally to the pres­sures brought by the dom­i­nant class and what are his ten­den­cies to escape from his own class? (5) Finally, what is his aware­ness of the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment? To what extent does he feel inte­grated with the past of the class and what are his capac­i­ties to act with a sense of class tradition?

How could these prob­lems be broached and what would be the inter­est in doing so? Take for exam­ple the appro­pri­a­tion of social life. The ini­tial approach would be to detail the skills and tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of the worker: there is no doubt about the need for infor­ma­tion that directly con­cerns his pro­fes­sional apti­tudes. But research should also be done into how tech­ni­cal curios­ity appears out­side of the work­place, in leisure activ­i­ties ( in all the forms of brico­lage, or in the inter­est accorded to sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal pub­li­ca­tions, for exam­ple) and should clar­ify the under­stand­ings of tech­nol­ogy and the indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion of work that the worker has, as well as his aware­ness of every­thing that touches the admin­is­tra­tion of things more gen­er­ally. With­out los­ing inter­est in an eval­u­a­tion of the cul­tural level of the worker (in the nar­row sense that the bour­geoisie typ­i­cally gives the term – extent of lit­er­ary, sci­en­tific and artis­tic knowl­edge), one would describe the field of infor­ma­tion to which he is open: news­pa­pers, radio, cin­ema. At the same time, we would want to know whether the pro­le­tar­ian has a spe­cific way of envi­sion­ing events and out­comes and which inter­est him (whether he hears about them in the course of every­day life or reads about them in a news­pa­per, whether these are of a polit­i­cal order or, as the expres­sion goes, enter­tain­ments). The essen­tial would be to deter­mine whether there is a class men­tal­ité and how it dif­fers from a bour­geois mentalité.

We merely pro­vide some indi­ca­tions on this point: devel­op­ing them here would run us ahead of the tes­ti­monies them­selves, and these texts allow not only for an inter­pre­ta­tion but also the recon­sid­er­a­tion of the extent and order of the ques­tions involved in our approach to research. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary inter­est of such research is evi­dent. In short, this would be a way to know whether the pro­le­tariat has or has not sub­mit­ted to the cul­tural dom­i­na­tion of the bour­geoisie and whether its alien­ation has robbed it of an orig­i­nal per­spec­tive on soci­ety. The answer to this ques­tion could either enable one to con­clude that any rev­o­lu­tion is doomed to fail­ure because the over­throw of the State would only bring back a cul­tural hodge­podge of the pre­vi­ous soci­ety, or it could allow one to per­ceive the direc­tion in which a new cul­ture may develop in the scat­tered and often uncon­scious ele­ments that already exist.

Again, we must empha­size, against the all too pre­dictable accu­sa­tions of bad faith, that this inquiry into the social life of the pro­le­tariat will not study the class from the out­side and will not reveal its nature to those who do not know it. It is a response to a series of ques­tions posed explic­itly by the worker avant-garde and implic­itly by the work­ing class more gen­er­ally in a sit­u­a­tion where a series of rev­o­lu­tion­ary defeats and the dom­i­na­tion of a worker bureau­cracy have under­mined the con­fi­dence of the pro­le­tariat in its capac­i­ties for cre­ativ­ity and in its own eman­ci­pa­tion. Still dom­i­nated by the bour­geoisie on this point, work­ers do not believe that they have any knowl­edge of their own. They see them­selves as the pari­ahs of bour­geois culture.

In fact, their cre­ativ­ity is such that there is no need for it to show itself accord­ing to bour­geois norms; their cul­ture does not exist as an order sep­a­rated from their social lives, it does not take the form of the pro­duc­tion of ideas. Pro­le­tar­ian cul­ture exists as a cer­tain power in the orga­ni­za­tion of things and an adap­ta­tion to progress, as a cer­tain under­stand­ing of human rela­tions, a dis­po­si­tion toward social com­mu­nity. As indi­vid­u­als, work­ers have only a con­fused sense of this: because it is impos­si­ble for them to give their cul­ture objec­tive con­tent in a soci­ety based on exploita­tion, they have come to doubt it and to believe in the real­ity of bour­geois cul­ture alone.

Let’s take a sec­ond exam­ple: how to describe the inte­gra­tion of the pro­le­tar­ian into the class? In this case, the ques­tion is know­ing how, within the fac­tory, the worker per­ceives those who share his work, as well as the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of all other social strata; of know­ing the nature and mean­ing of the rela­tions he has with his cowork­ers; whether he has dif­fer­ent atti­tudes toward work­ers of dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sional grades (Pro­fes­sional, O.S., or semi-skilled, and manoeu­vre, or unskilled); whether these rela­tions of cama­raderie extend beyond the fac­tory; whether he tends to seek out work that require coop­er­a­tion. If he has always worked in a fac­tory, in what sit­u­a­tion he began to do so; whether he has con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­ity of doing some­thing dif­fer­ent or whether the chance has ever pre­sented itself to change trades? It would be good to know whether he fre­quents milieus that are not working-class and what he thinks of them, in par­tic­u­lar whether he has inter­ac­tions with the peas­ant milieu and how he eval­u­ates it. It would be nec­es­sary to jux­ta­pose this infor­ma­tion with responses con­cern­ing quite dif­fer­ent top­ics. For exam­ple, one might use the famil­iar­ity of the indi­vid­ual with the tra­di­tions of the work­ers’ move­ment, the acu­ity of mem­o­ries asso­ci­ated with episodes of social strug­gle, the inter­est that he takes in this strug­gle inde­pen­dently of the judg­ment he might make of it (a con­dem­na­tion of a strug­gle inspired by rev­o­lu­tion­ary pes­simism and an enthu­si­as­tic nar­ra­tive of the events of 1936 of 1944 can often be found together). Or one might locate a ten­dency to the his­tory and, more par­tic­u­larly, the future of the pro­le­tariat, not­ing his reac­tions to for­eign pro­le­tar­i­ans, par­tic­u­larly to a rel­a­tively well-off pro­le­tariat like that in the United States. In other words, look for every­thing in the worker’s per­sonal life that might show the effects and sense of belong­ing to the work­ing class and also attempts at escape from from the con­di­tion of being a worker (atti­tudes about chil­dren, the edu­ca­tion they receive and projects ori­ented toward the future are par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant in this respect.)

From a rev­o­lu­tion­ary view­point, this kind of infor­ma­tion would have the inter­est of show­ing the man­ner in which a worker is joined with the class and whether his belong­ing to his group is or is not dif­fer­ent from that of a petit-bourgeois or a bour­geois to his group. Does the worker link his fate to all lev­els of his social exis­tence and, con­sciously or not, to that of his class? Can one con­firm con­cretely clas­sic, but too-often abstract, phrases class con­scious­ness or class atti­tude, and the idea from Marx that, unlike the bour­geois, the pro­le­tar­ian is not only a mem­ber of his class, but an indi­vid­ual within a com­mu­nity and con­scious of only being able to go beyond that by act­ing collectively?

Social­isme ou Bar­barie would like to solicit tes­ti­monies from work­ers and pub­lish them at the same time as it accords an impor­tant place to all forms of analy­sis con­cern­ing pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence. In this issue the reader will find the begin­ning of such a tes­ti­mony, one that leaves aside sev­eral of the points we have out­lined.15 Other such texts could broach these points in ways that go beyond those envi­sioned in this issue. In fact, it is impos­si­ble to impose an exact frame­work. If we have seemed to do so in the course of our expla­na­tions, and if we have pro­duced noth­ing but a ques­tion­naire, then this work would not be valu­able: a ques­tion imposed from the out­side might be an irri­tant for the sub­ject being ques­tioned, shap­ing an arti­fi­cial response or, in any case, imprint­ing upon it a char­ac­ter that it would not oth­er­wise have had. Our research direc­tions would be brought to bear even on nar­ra­tives that we pro­voke: we must be atten­tive to all forms of expres­sion that might advance con­crete analy­sis. As for the rest, the prob­lem is not the form taken by a doc­u­ment, but its inter­pre­ta­tion. Who will work out the rela­tion­ships under­stood as sig­nif­i­cant between such and such responses? Who will reveal from beneath the explicit con­tent of a doc­u­ment the inten­tions and atti­tudes that inspired it, and jux­ta­pose the tes­ti­monies? The com­rades of Social­isme ou Bar­barie? But would this not run counter to their inten­tions, given that they pro­pose a kind of research that would enable work­ers to reflect upon their expe­ri­ence? This prob­lem can­not be resolved arti­fi­cially, par­tic­u­larly not at this first step in the work. In any case, the inter­pre­ta­tion, from wher­ever it comes, will remain con­tem­po­rary with the text being inter­preted. It can only impress if it is judged to be accu­rate by the reader, some­one who is able to find another mean­ing in the mate­ri­als we sub­mit to him. We hope it will be pos­si­ble to con­nect the authors with texts in a col­lec­tive cri­tique of the doc­u­ments. For the moment, our goal is to gather these mate­ri­als: in this, we count on the active sup­port of those sym­pa­thetic with this journal.

—Trans­lated by Stephen Hastings-King

• 1Translator’s Note: This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared in Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 11, dated July, 1952. It was reprinted in the col­lec­tion Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie (Paris: Droz, 1971). A scan of the orig­i­nal can be con­sulted at the Pro­jet de scan­ner­i­sa­tion de la revue Social­isme ou Bar­barie. In com­pos­ing this text, Lefort used L’oeuvre com­pletes de Karl Marx pub­lished in Paris by Alfred Costes between 1948 and 1953. For rea­sons of con­sis­tency in ter­mi­nol­ogy and tone, I have trans­lated quo­ta­tions directly from the French and left the orig­i­nal pag­i­na­tion. Social­isme ou Bar­barie oper­ated in Paris from 1948-1966. This essay is part of the turn to the soci­o­log­i­cally ori­ented approach to the work­ing class fun­da­men­tal for the group’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary project, in par­tic­u­lar from 1953 through 1957. My thanks to Kelly Grotke.
• 2Marx, La mis­ère de la philoso­phie, Costes ed, 135.
• 3Translator’s Note: I retain the phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal term “com­port­ment” through­out this piece. The term refers to the struc­ture of behav­iors or atti­tudes toward an envi­ron­ment or sit­u­a­tion. It is sym­met­ri­cal with the empha­sis on over­all his­tor­i­cal direc­tion that one encoun­ters in this essay as well.
• 4Translator’s Note: I left this in French. It is asso­ci­ated with the Annales School of French his­tory. There is no good Eng­lish equiv­a­lent: I have seen “cog­ni­tive tool­box” used. The term “world­view” used in trans­la­tions of Wil­helm Dilthey’s hermeneu­tics is log­i­cally closer, even as the social-history ori­ented method­olo­gies pio­neered by the Annales School made of men­tal­ité a quite dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory that refers to a more mate­r­ial ori­en­ta­tion toward a historically-specific world.
• 5Idéolo­gie alle­mande, 242.
• 6Cf. The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo.
• 7Economie poli­tique et Philoso­phie, 34.
• 8Idéolo­gie alle­mande, 223.
• 9Ibid., 229
• 10Ibid„ p. 229.
• 11Ibid., p. 230.
• 12I am think­ing of the work by Georges Duveau, La vie ouvrière sous le Sec­ond Empire (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1946).
• 13Trans­la­tor Note: The worker avant-garde is the cen­ter of Social­isme ou Barbarie’s con­struc­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory. I kept the term “avant-garde” in favor of “van­guard” – an alter­nate pos­si­bil­ity for ren­der­ing the term in Eng­lish – in order to avoid con­fu­sion with Lenin’s Van­guard Party.
• 14Paul Romano, “The Amer­i­can Worker,” trans­lated in Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 1, and Eric Albert, “Témoignage” in Les Temps Mod­ernes, juil­let 1952.
• 15G. Vivier, “La vie en usine” in Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 11.

The schema that ordered Social­isme ou Barbarie’s con­cep­tion of rev­o­lu­tion relied upon the close exam­i­na­tion of working-class expe­ri­ence.1 This put the group in little-explored ter­ri­tory. Even though tra­di­tional Marx­ism placed the pro­le­tariat at the con­cep­tual and polit­i­cal cen­ter of its con­cerns, its treat­ment of the work­ing class as the embod­ied expres­sion of abstract eco­nomic forces fore­closed close analy­sis of con­crete rela­tions of pro­duc­tion. It also evac­u­ated ques­tions of how the pro­le­tariat could act as a rev­o­lu­tion­ary agent by con­ceiv­ing of rev­o­lu­tion as a quasi-automatic result of con­tra­dic­tions that played out at the level of “objec­tive forces.”2 French “human sci­ences” had not yet begun pro­duc­ing researchers who took the French work­ing class as a legit­i­mate object of study. Through the 1950s, anthro­pol­ogy was dom­i­nated on the one hand by research on the “exotic,” and on the other by the con­flict between struc­tural anthro­pol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy over which dis­ci­pline “owned” epis­te­mol­ogy.3 Soci­ol­ogy, for the most part, oper­ated in a zone of inquiry that hov­ered between pol­i­tics and the uni­ver­sity. While stu­dents of Georges Fried­man, like Alain Touraine, pro­duced stud­ies of the French work­ing class in modes quite dis­tinct from American-style indus­trial soci­ol­ogy, it was only with the fail­ure of the work­ers to oppose the Gaullist Fifth Repub­lic in 1958 that the aca­d­e­mic discipline—represented notably by Touraine, Serge Mal­let and Michel Crozier—concerned itself with the “fate” of the French work­ing class.4 Only indus­trial rela­tions and indus­trial soci­ol­ogy took the prob­lem of shop-floor expe­ri­ence seri­ously. How­ever, the field was dom­i­nated by Amer­i­can researchers who, in the main, viewed indus­trial con­flict as the social expres­sion of psy­cho­log­i­cal deviance. This epis­te­mo­log­i­cal posi­tion was the direct recod­ing of the polit­i­cal world­view par­tic­u­lar to the Cap­i­tal­ists who employed them.5

Even Marx’s early writ­ings offered lit­tle in the way of a his­tor­i­cally spe­cific approach to working-class expe­ri­ence. Lefort argues that this fol­lows from the dou­ble image of the pro­le­tariat in Marx. The pro­le­tariat is a cre­ation of cap­i­tal­ism, posi­tioned at the lead­ing edge of tech­no­log­i­cal and orga­ni­za­tional devel­op­ment. It oper­ates simul­ta­ne­ously inside the dom­i­nant bour­geois ratio­nal­ity by virtue of its social­iza­tion and out­side by virtue of the expe­ri­ence of the real­ity of exploita­tion that the dom­i­nant ratio­nal­ity legit­i­mates and con­ceals at once. This unique sit­u­a­tion is what enables the pro­le­tariat to develop a ratio­nal­ity that goes beyond that of the bour­geoisie, and to become the his­tor­i­cal agent that brings about social­ism. This posi­tion is jux­ta­posed with another in which ruth­less exploita­tion and whole­sale alien­ation have reduced work­ers to a less-than-human sta­tus. Lefort argues that this sec­ond image is sym­met­ri­cal with a notion of rev­o­lu­tion as explo­sion, and of a social­ism that requires no inter­nal artic­u­la­tions at the level of the­ory because it would sim­ply replace cap­i­tal­ism “as a neg­a­tive to a pos­i­tive.”6 This is the image of the pro­le­tariat that came to be dom­i­nant in Marx.7

Work­ing against this pre­dom­i­nance, Lefort takes up a ver­sion of the first but posi­tions it in the spe­cific con­text of post-1945 cap­i­tal­ism. His approach is con­di­tioned by the assump­tion that alien­ation is a ten­dency rather than an accom­plish­ment. This assump­tion is rooted in Social­isme ou Barbarie’s view of the basic con­tra­dic­tion of bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism, accord­ing to which cap­i­tal­ist man­age­r­ial ide­ol­ogy and prac­tice tends to exclude work­ers from cre­ative inter­ac­tion with their work while, at the same time, that cre­ative inter­ac­tion is con­tin­u­ally required in order to solve the myr­iad prob­lems that arise in the course of pro­duc­tion. If work­ers were com­pletely alien­ated, not only would rev­o­lu­tion­ary action be impos­si­ble, but cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion itself would grind to a halt.8 Implicit in the use of the con­cept of bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism is the more basic claim that modal­i­ties of exploita­tion, con­flict, and cre­ativ­ity are vari­able and his­tor­i­cally spe­cific. The sit­u­a­tion in bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ist enter­prises is dif­fer­ent from that of enter­prises in ear­lier peri­ods and expe­ri­ence at the point of pro­duc­tion is par­tic­u­lar not only to this type of orga­ni­za­tion, but also to the spe­cific sit­u­a­tion of the work­ers’ move­ment.9 Even if there were a fully artic­u­lated approach to this reg­is­ter of working-class expe­ri­ence in the early Marx, it could serve only as a tem­plate. The prob­lems of analy­sis would still have to be posed again.

“Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence” empha­sizes the rad­i­cal cre­ativ­ity of the work­ing class and the his­tor­i­cally con­tin­gent char­ac­ter of that cre­ativ­ity. Fol­low­ing in part from his posi­tion on rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion, Lefort argues that only work­ers can know and write about their expe­ri­ence: rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory must be con­fined to ana­lyz­ing and inter­pret­ing what they write.10 Using Paul Romano’s “The Amer­i­can Worker” and Eric Albert’s “Témoinage: La vie en usine” as points of depar­ture, Lefort out­lines a pro­gram for the inves­ti­ga­tion of “the pro­le­tar­ian stand­point” that would iso­late and describe the sig­ni­fi­ca­tions that struc­ture pro­le­tar­ian com­port­ment. These analy­ses would be sup­ple­mented with crit­i­cal accounts of autonomous worker actions which would func­tion as state­ments of polit­i­cal hori­zon, and as broadly syn­thetic analy­ses of con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism. Lefort also imag­ines the col­lec­tion of these nar­ra­tives as the basis for a wide-ranging working-class soci­ol­ogy “from the inside” that would include all aspects of worker inter­ac­tion with the dom­i­nant cul­ture and be cen­tered on the ques­tion of whether there was a spe­cific “men­tal­ité ouvrier” and what it might look like. Worker nar­ra­tives would be part of an ongo­ing dia­logue between the group and the worker avant-garde that was to be the cen­ter of Social­isme ou Barbarie’s activ­ity as Lefort envi­sioned it. But it never became the model for the group or as the jour­nal because, despite the solic­i­ta­tion for writ­ings which fre­quently appeared in Social­isme ou Bar­barie (as well as in related projects like Tri­bune Ouvrière), work­ers sim­ply did not write.

Lefort’s empha­sis on second-order descrip­tions and inter­pre­ta­tion fol­lows from his posi­tion elab­o­rated in recur­rent debates within Social­isme ou Bar­barie on “the orga­ni­za­tion ques­tion.” A point of con­sen­sus within the group was the vision of rev­o­lu­tion as the cul­mi­na­tion of a process whereby the work­ing class, act­ing autonomously, would con­sciously assume the direc­tion of pro­duc­tion and, by exten­sion, of soci­ety. Posi­tion­ing them­selves broadly within in the tra­di­tion of the gen­eral strike, mem­bers of SB empha­sized the con­tent of social­ism rather than the modal­i­ties of tran­si­tion. With this, the group put aside the more mil­i­ta­rized con­cep­tions of rev­o­lu­tion that emerged within the Marx­ian tra­di­tion in response to the vio­lent sup­pres­sion of the Paris Com­mune, which served as the log­i­cal basis for Lenin­ism. The move was in sig­nif­i­cant mea­sure a result of the group’s shared pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the his­tor­i­cal fate of Lenin­ism. There was lit­tle dis­agree­ment over the basic analy­sis. The Van­guard Party was a mil­i­tary orga­ni­za­tion that, in its divi­sion between Party and Masses, reca­pit­u­lated the divi­sion of intel­lec­tual labor char­ac­ter­is­tic of bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism in gen­eral which sep­a­rated dirigeant from exé­cu­tant, think­ing from doing, those who con­cep­tu­al­ize from those who carry out orders. It was this, and not ques­tions of own­er­ship, that shaped the out­comes of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment. The con­se­quences were appar­ent in the tra­jec­tory taken by the USSR.11

While there was agree­ment about the cri­tique of Lenin­ism, Social­isme ou Bar­barie was not of one mind about how best to avoid rep­e­ti­tion of the prob­lem of the Van­guard Party in their own activ­i­ties. Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis argued that the group should be an orga­ni­za­tion that gen­er­ates rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory aimed at empow­er­ing the worker avant-garde and not be wor­ried about appear­ing to reca­pit­u­late the Lenin­ist split between the­o­rists (those who think) and masses (those who fol­low instruc­tions). The­ory devel­oped in a dia­logue with the worker avant-garde: it rep­re­sented a com­ple­men­tary, but not sep­a­rate, form of activ­ity. Social rela­tions within the orga­ni­za­tion could be seen as a kind of lab­o­ra­tory for rev­o­lu­tion­ary socia­bil­ity unfold­ing in its own, par­tic­u­lar reg­is­ter. For Lefort, the prob­lem of bureau­cra­ti­za­tion was para­mount. Not only was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion in itself a prob­lem, but the­o­ret­i­cal pro­duc­tion had to avoid falling into the trap of telling the work­ers what they were “really doing.” For Cas­to­ri­adis, this would make polit­i­cal work impos­si­ble because one or another ver­sion of this rela­tion was built into the nature of the­ory itself. “Pro­le­tar­ian Experience“can be read as Lefort’s attempt to address this prac­ti­cal impasse. The project out­lined was rev­o­lu­tion­ary action.12 We will see in the sec­ond part of this arti­cle that this desire to not tell the work­ers what they are really doing had con­se­quences for the selec­tion of texts that would con­sti­tute “pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary literature.”

As we have seen, fol­low­ing Marx, Lefort (and the group more gen­er­ally) saw the pro­le­tariat as a cre­ation of cap­i­tal­ism posi­tioned at the lead­ing edge of tech­no­log­i­cal and orga­ni­za­tional devel­op­ment. The pro­le­tariat is simul­ta­ne­ously inside the dom­i­nant ratio­nal­ity by virtue of social­iza­tion and out­side it by virtue of the expe­ri­ence at the point of pro­duc­tion of the real­i­ties of exploita­tion and irra­tional­ity that the dom­i­nant ratio­nal­ity legit­i­mates and con­ceals. Con­flicts at the point of pro­duc­tion would, in the­ory, make of work­ers the source of an alter­nate ratio­nal­ity that might inform socialism—but because they are also par­tic­i­pants in the dom­i­nant ratio­nal­ity, the ele­ments of this ratio­nal­ity would be frag­men­tary and work­ers erratic in their abil­i­ties to rec­og­nize them. The same prob­lem repeats in an exac­er­bated form in the the­o­rist, whose capac­ity to gen­er­ate the­ory pre­sup­poses cer­tain train­ing and skills that come tied to pre­cisely the ratio­nal­ity that the­ory works to over­throw. Indi­vid­ual nar­ra­tives writ­ten by work­ers that detail expe­ri­ence at the point of pro­duc­tion pro­vide mil­i­tants access to these con­flicts and the indus­trial real­i­ties that con­di­tion them. A phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of these nar­ra­tives would use a com­par­a­tive approach, based on the idea of the eidetic reduc­tion, to pro­duce second-order descrip­tions of struc­tur­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of worker expe­ri­ence in gen­eral. These second-order descrip­tions would point to the latent con­tent of that expe­ri­ence, dis­en­gag­ing uni­ver­sal sub­struc­tures with rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal poten­tials from the con­tin­gency of the par­tic­u­lar and feed­ing them back to the worker avant-garde through the medium of the journal.

This rela­tion to worker-writers, and, by exten­sion, to the worker avant-garde con­sti­tuted rev­o­lu­tion­ary action in part because, fol­low­ing on the ways in which he was sen­si­tive to the prob­lems of objec­ti­fy­ing the work­ing class, Lefort tended not to dif­fer­en­ti­ate within it. This effec­tively elim­i­nated any space for mil­i­tant action: there were no tasks to be per­formed by mil­i­tants within the work­ing class.13 One had to be either with the work­ers, which was good, or to be out­side, which was bad. One could either be a worker or a mil­i­tant, but not both. The gen­er­ally phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal approach to worker nar­ra­tives was sym­met­ri­cal with this view: rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants could gather worker nar­ra­tives and cre­ate inter­pre­ta­tions of those nar­ra­tives as their part of an ongo­ing dia­logue with the worker avant-garde. But that role, and the dia­logue along with it, would be pro­gres­sively effaced by the unfold­ing of the proletariat’s capac­i­ties to direct, man­i­fested in rev­o­lu­tion­ary action.

Through­out “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence,” Lefort argues that the analy­sis of the pro­le­tar­ian stand­point has to be thor­oughly his­tor­i­cal. It can­not gen­er­ate tran­scen­den­tal claims or reify worker expe­ri­ence. The results of analy­sis must account for every­day expe­ri­ence at the point of pro­duc­tion in terms of its spe­cific his­tor­i­cal deter­mi­nants. He out­lines what is at stake by refer­ring to Marx’s the­ory of social change using the well-known schema of the tran­si­tion from feu­dal to bour­geois dom­i­na­tion out­lined in The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo, and the more elab­o­rated ver­sion in The Ger­man Ide­ol­ogy, as points of depar­ture. Per­haps one rea­son the rev­o­lu­tion will not be tele­vised is that rev­o­lu­tion can­not be under­stood through the analy­sis of dis­crete events. Rather, rev­o­lu­tion of the sort that replaces one his­tor­i­cal form with another is a result of the pro­gres­sive unfold­ing of poten­tials that are being worked out in the pre­vi­ous social-historical for­ma­tion14 :

Marx does not say, but allows to be said, that, from its ori­gin, the bour­geoisie is what it will be, an exploit­ing class, under­priv­i­leged at first to be sure, but pos­sess­ing from the out­set all the traits that its his­tory only devel­oped. The devel­op­ment of the pro­le­tariat is entirely dif­fer­ent; reduced to its eco­nomic func­tion alone, it rep­re­sents a cat­e­gory that does not yet pos­sess its class-meaning/direction [sens], the meaning/direction that con­sti­tutes its orig­i­nal com­port­ment, which is, in its defin­i­tive form, strug­gle in all class-specific forms within soci­ety against adver­sar­ial strata. This is not to say that the role of the class in pro­duc­tion should be neglected—on the con­trary, we will see that the role work­ers play in soci­ety, and that they are called on to play in mak­ing them­selves its mas­ters, is directly based on their role as producers—but the essen­tial thing is that this role does not give them any actual power, but only an increas­ingly strong capac­ity to direct [pro­duc­tion and soci­ety].15

Lefort’s open­ing line repro­duces a prob­lem in Marx­ism that Social­isme ou Bar­barie else­where crit­i­cized at length: the treat­ment of the bour­geoisie as if it were inca­pable of cre­ativ­ity or trans­for­ma­tion.16 Such a view con­structs the bour­geoisie in the image of its ratio­nal­ity and then shifts to the claim that the bour­geoisie was always, in its essence, what it would become once it was dom­i­nant. His­tory changed noth­ing except its posi­tion.17 But Lefort’s point does not cen­ter on this schematic analy­sis of the bour­geoisie and its rise to power; rather, it pro­vides both a back­drop against which he begins to set up the prob­lem of under­stand­ing the nature of the work­ing class, and a short­hand way of stag­ing the present as con­di­tioned by bour­geois domination.

Lefort’s lines make explicit the assump­tions about class for­ma­tion that run through much of Social­isme ou Barbarie’s col­lec­tive eval­u­a­tions of autonomous worker actions. As a class in itself, the pro­le­tariat occu­pies a com­mon posi­tion in the pro­duc­tion process, which sells its labor-power for a wage, engages in cer­tain types of con­flict at the point of pro­duc­tion, and so on. The shift into reflex­iv­ity, into a class for-itself, is pred­i­cated on recog­ni­tion of what links the peo­ple who occupy a com­mon posi­tion in the pro­duc­tion process and the con­flicts that arise there, as well as the inter­ests and polit­i­cal projects that arise from that recog­ni­tion. In a strict sense, both reg­is­ters are his­tor­i­cal so both forms can be under­stood as endowed with cer­tain mean­ings and/or a sense of direc­tion (sens).18 But, fol­low­ing on the logic above, that of the class in-itself is cir­cum­scribed by its imme­di­ate sit­u­a­tion. The pos­si­bil­i­ties for a shift into a class for-itself and would be frag­men­tary and scat­tered. For Lefort, the tran­si­tion of the work­ing class into a class for itself hinges on its assim­i­la­tion of an over­ar­ch­ing telos—its “increas­ing capac­ity to direct pro­duc­tion.” Both the telos and process of assim­i­la­tion are con­di­tioned by the types of con­flict char­ac­ter­is­tic of bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism. So there is a level of direct­ed­ness that may unfold through every­day expe­ri­ence and con­flict and another, linked but not iden­ti­cal, that fol­lows from the same expe­ri­ences reprocessed through dif­fer­ent sig­ni­fi­ca­tions.19 The rela­tion between these reg­is­ters echoes Vico’s con­cep­tion of social devel­op­ment, with his­tory under­stood as a spi­ral, a cir­cu­lar motion spread out tem­po­rally, and in prin­ci­ple pro­gres­sively, that allows for both rep­e­ti­tion and change. Strug­gle acquires its mean­ing rel­a­tive to an over­all (rev­o­lu­tion­ary) project (here, a syn­onym for direc­tion), and the over­all project is, in turn, con­tin­u­ally inflected by par­tic­u­lar strug­gles. The role for rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants in feed­ing back descrip­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions of the com­mon­al­i­ties that link worker expe­ri­ence, based on the close read­ing of worker writ­ings, is to facil­i­tate the shift into this kind of col­lec­tive self-awareness. And in line with his cri­tique of deduc­tivism20 , Lefort argues that this pro­pels analy­sis toward close scrutiny of what social-historical con­di­tions shape and inform worker expe­ri­ence, and away from the heady aether of the dialectic.

For rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants to access this expe­ri­ence, they would need to posi­tion them­selves “inside” it, but are pre­vented from doing so by their social posi­tions. From this fol­lows the cen­tral­ity of nar­ra­tives writ­ten by work­ing peo­ple about their expe­ri­ences at the point of pro­duc­tion. As noted before, what mil­i­tants can bring to the dia­logue that links them to the worker avant-garde (for which worker-writers stand in) is the com­par­a­tive analy­ses of the nar­ra­tives that would pro­vide a coher­ent descrip­tion of work­ers’ “spon­ta­neous com­port­ments” in the con­text of indus­trial work, the pre­con­di­tion for appre­hen­sion of the “pro­le­tar­ian stand­point” spe­cific to a par­tic­u­lar period. What this phe­nom­e­nol­ogy con­sists in should by now be clear. It would use com­par­a­tive read­ings, informed by rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory, to iso­late and inter­pret types of con­flicts, prac­tices, or other pat­terns that emerge as uni­ver­sal (and polit­i­cally coher­ent) from within accounts of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence. The usage of meth­ods drawn from tran­scen­den­tal phe­nom­e­nol­ogy would be loose, but the assump­tions are sim­i­lar. The reduc­tions as Husserl devel­oped them were a method for iso­lat­ing uni­ver­sal aspects of mean­ing attached to a con­cept from within the shift­ing ter­rain of usage. The reduc­tions move through a series of steps of com­par­ing exem­plars in order to pro­duce inter­sub­jec­tively ver­i­fi­able sets of nec­es­sary pred­i­cates clus­tered around a “deter­minable x.”21 But there is a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between objects and social groups or processes as objects of knowl­edge. Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy trans­posed empir­i­cal objects to tran­scen­den­tal objects in a quest for cer­tainty. For Lefort, the goal of com­par­a­tive read­ing is the delin­eation, trans­for­ma­tion, and (rev­o­lu­tion­ary) politi­ciza­tion of what Cas­to­ri­adis would later term the social-imaginary sig­ni­fi­ca­tions that shape worker experience.

These premises come together in the analy­sis of what Lefort called a “recon­sid­er­a­tion of the sub­jec­tive ele­ment of class for­ma­tion.” This issue was cru­cial in the early Marx but remained under­de­vel­oped, because the reduc­tion of his­tory to the play of objec­tive forces ren­dered it epiphe­nom­e­nal.22 For Social­isme ou Bar­barie, it was a basic ana­lytic and polit­i­cal mat­ter. Rev­o­lu­tion does not sim­ply hap­pen. Rev­o­lu­tion is made by peo­ple who con­sciously and col­lec­tively assume con­trol over their lives, their sur­round­ings, and the soci­ety in which they live. They can only do so on the basis of their expe­ri­ence. Here, expe­ri­ence refers to the explicit con­tent of expe­ri­ence processed through a re-imagining of what is, at the level of the worker nar­ra­tives at least, their latent polit­i­cal con­tent. A sub­jec­tively ori­ented restate­ment of the trans­for­ma­tion from a class in itself to a class for itself, the re-imagining of this latent dimen­sion pro­vides work­ers with the forestructure(s) of rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­scious­ness, the condition(s) of pos­si­bil­ity for rev­o­lu­tion­ary agency. The “sub­jec­tive” there­fore had a cen­tral place in rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory.23 The term “sub­jec­tive” is used in a spe­cific sense:

If it is true that no class can ever be reduced to its eco­nomic func­tion alone [… ] it is even more so that the pro­le­tariat requires an approach that enables one to attend to its sub­jec­tive devel­op­ment. With some reser­va­tions as to the impli­ca­tions of the term, it nonethe­less sum­ma­rizes bet­ter than any other the dom­i­nant trait of the pro­le­tariat. It is sub­jec­tive in the sense that its com­port­ment is not the sim­ple con­se­quence of the con­di­tions [that objec­tively shape its] exis­tence, or, more pro­foundly, the con­di­tions that require of it a con­stant strug­gle for trans­for­ma­tion. [One can­not define the work­ing class by] con­stantly dis­tin­guish­ing its short-term fate. [Rather, the] strug­gle to elu­ci­date the ide­o­log­i­cal [pre­con­di­tions] that enable this dis­tin­guish­ing con­sti­tutes an expe­ri­ence through which the class con­sti­tutes itself.24

The sub­jec­tive des­ig­nates that which is elim­i­nated by the reduc­tion of the work­ing class to a sim­ple eco­nomic cat­e­gory entirely shaped by the posi­tion it occu­pies within indus­try, the ways in which the work­ers accom­mo­dates their sit­u­a­tion and strug­gle to trans­form it. For Lefort, the sub­jec­tive is the domain within which the bases for a working-class “for itself” are prac­ti­cally elab­o­rated. Again, this class for-itself is the fore­struc­ture of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary “for itself” that would insti­tute social­ism. The analy­sis of this sub­jec­tive domain posed a method­olog­i­cal prob­lem of iso­lat­ing the par­tic­u­lar dimen­sions of every­day expe­ri­ence on the shop floor to be ana­lyzed. It also posed a prob­lem of data.

The every­day expe­ri­ence that con­cerned Social­isme ou Bar­barie took place within infor­mal col­lec­tives that formed by shop and by shift in mod­ern indus­try. The col­lec­tives are the scenes out of which a given “spon­ta­neous com­port­ment in the face of indus­trial work” or hori­zon struc­ture emerges. The analy­sis of these col­lec­tive com­por­ments extends the rethink­ing of inten­tion­al­ity begun by Merleau-Ponty in Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Per­cep­tion, par­tic­u­larly in the sec­tion “The Body as Expres­sion and Speech.”25 Merleau-Ponty trans­posed the Husser­lian frame­work directly onto the prob­lem of sub­jec­tive ori­en­ta­tion in the social-historical.26 For Merleau-Ponty, Husserl’s tran­scen­den­tal sub­ject becomes a his­tor­i­cally sit­u­ated, embod­ied sub­ject that moves through and con­sti­tutes a mean­ing­ful world. Inten­tion­al­ity, direct­ed­ness toward/constitution of the world, is mapped onto the body as the source of spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion, and the site upon which cul­tural mean­ings are writ­ten. This places inten­tion­al­ity between the per­sonal and the social. By the sem­i­nars of the mid-1950s, in the con­text of a more gen­eral shift away from subject-centered think­ing, Merleau-Ponty made inten­tion­al­ity explic­itly social by rework­ing it through the notion of insti­tu­tion.27 A sub­ject is insti­tuted in that it artic­u­lates itself and its world by way of spe­cific pre-existing forms of rule-governed activ­ity; a sub­ject is insti­tut­ing in that such an engage­ment is never sim­ply a pas­sive accep­tance but is at once an oper­a­tional­iz­ing of the rules and a cre­ative bringing-into-being of the envi­ron­ment cir­cum­scribed by them.28 The char­ac­ter­is­tics of what came to count as pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture mir­ror this in the pref­er­ence for a sense of an embod­ied nar­ra­tor who uses a suit­ably working-class lan­guage in the present tense, cap­tur­ing sight­lines and a sense of move­ment through the spaces that are staged.

Lefort regarded the work­ing class “for itself” as a prac­ti­cal cre­ation elab­o­rated on a con­tin­ual basis through the play of gen­eral pat­terns of assim­i­la­tion and con­flict char­ac­ter­is­tic of expe­ri­ence at the point of pro­duc­tion under bureau­cratic cap­i­tal­ism. The notion that the “sens” of working-class expe­ri­ence was its “ever increas­ing capac­ity to direct” served as a premise and a sort of fil­ter that enabled Lefort to order expe­ri­ence as an ana­lytic prob­lem. Lefort argues that the par­tic­u­lar working-class “for itself” man­i­fests itself as a view­point linked directly to par­tic­u­lar prac­tices. The notion of prac­tice can be bro­ken into two com­po­nents: a nar­row or imma­nent level and another, implicit level that uni­fies prac­tices and gives them a direc­tion. At the more imma­nent level, it refers to the actual work­ing at a machine, the reper­toire of motions and deci­sions required to per­form a given task. This imma­nent level is sit­u­ated in a larger ensem­ble of social rela­tions and prac­tices that socially and infor­mally reg­u­late, inform, and orga­nize both rela­tions among work­ers and the per­for­mance of work. These prac­tices shape the deploy­ment of skill as a col­lec­tive attribute, the pace of work and so forth. This same reg­is­ter of prac­tice shapes rela­tions between work­ers and the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of fac­tory man­age­ment: fore­men, time-motion men (chronos), and indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion gen­er­ally.29 Cen­tral to the acqui­si­tion of these prac­tices was the process of social­iza­tion that shaped the rela­tion­ships of work­ers to each other, to pro­duc­tion and to pol­i­tics. Work­ers who oper­ate in envi­ron­ments shaped by these pat­terns of social­iza­tion and cir­cum­scribed by these prac­tices occupy an insti­tuted and insti­tut­ing “pro­le­tar­ian standpoint.”

The other, latent reg­is­ter of worker expe­ri­ence is given its coher­ence in part by the degree of famil­iar­ity on the part of work­ers (or, more pre­cisely, of worker-writers) with the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment, which stands in for famil­iar­ity with the Marx­ist dis­course that ori­ented this his­tory as a polit­i­cal project.30 This broader his­tory stands in con­trast to the insti­tuted man­i­fes­ta­tions of a ver­sion of that his­tory in the (bureau­cratic) trade unions and main polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions that use ver­sions of that same discourse—the PCF and CGT in par­tic­u­lar in the French con­text. Famil­iar­ity with this broader tra­di­tion pro­vides space for alter­nate “acti­va­tions” of a heav­ily sed­i­mented lan­guage that, by its sed­i­men­ta­tion, pro­vides a sense of legit­i­ma­tion. An exam­ple of this is the role played in the 1953 East Berlin June Days by the study cir­cles devoted to read­ing Marx and Lenin directly rather than as medi­ated through offi­cial cat­e­chisms. In the analy­ses pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie, these col­lec­tive read­ings formed a hori­zon of insti­tuted sig­ni­fiers that enabled the artic­u­la­tion of polit­i­cal posi­tions in rev­o­lu­tion­ary lan­guage out­side the purview of the main bureau­cratic orga­ni­za­tions. Inso­far as Social­isme ou Bar­barie was con­cerned the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of this lan­guage was a con­di­tion of pos­si­bil­ity for autonomous worker action, and an indi­ca­tion of the extent to which at this time the group under­stood it as a nat­ural hori­zon against which these actions could take shape. Autonomous worker actions, then, insti­tuted alter­nate inter­pre­ta­tions of the lan­guage that struc­tured the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment. In this, they were Social­isme ou Barbarie’s pro­le­tar­ian doubles.

Social­isme ou Bar­barie never explic­itly said who these work­ers were: we will return to this point in the sec­ond part of this arti­cle. How­ever, it is clear that when Social­isme ou Bar­barie referred to the work­ing class, they had in mind pri­mar­ily semi-skilled work­ers like machin­ists and lathe oper­a­tors.31 In a con­text dom­i­nated by assembly-line pro­duc­tion, these work­ers were under sus­tained attack. Semi-skilled work­ers worked in col­lec­tives, and not in the indi­vid­u­ated image of Fordism. They retained some auton­omy in the con­cep­tion and exe­cu­tion of their work, though the extent of this auton­omy var­ied con­sid­er­ably from fac­tory to fac­tory, and within the same fac­tory as a func­tion of the shop’s place in the fac­tory hier­ar­chy. This auton­omy enabled these shops to develop types of socia­bil­ity that were for the most part tied to the trans­mis­sion of skill. How­ever, as French heavy indus­try, led by Renault, increas­ingly adopted Amer­i­can indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion dur­ing the 1950s, the strug­gles of these work­ers to retain their auton­omy and skill became more acute. The explo­sions engen­dered by this strug­gle were among the most intense and vio­lent of the decade.32

These con­flicts over the auton­omy of semi-skilled work­ers within mass pro­duc­tion were a con­tin­u­a­tion of what Ben­jamin Coriat called Fordism’s war on skill, which he argues was the defin­ing fea­ture of its mode of indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion. The genius of Henry Ford, from a cap­i­tal­ist view­point, was his recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of skill as a block on accu­mu­la­tion. Ford’s meth­ods did not develop in iso­la­tion, but rather appear as a con­densed expres­sion of exper­i­ments in orga­ni­za­tion that arose with monop­oly cap­i­tal­ism. Pre­vi­ously, skill had been monop­o­lized by work­ers. This monop­oly lay at the heart of a con­trac­tual rela­tion between them and employ­ers: employ­ers were beholden to work­ers as the actual source of wealth, and work­ers were beholden to employ­ers as providers of the means to exer­cise their skills.33 The auto­mo­bile indus­try, a prod­uct of monop­oly cap­i­tal­ism, played a cru­cial role in devel­op­ing the mech­a­nisms by means of which the assault on skill was car­ried out. Henry Ford led the way in this domain with his aim of pro­duc­ing a low-cost auto­mo­bile. Stan­dard­iza­tion of prod­uct enabled stan­dard­iza­tion of pro­duc­tion process, which in turn made pos­si­ble the assem­bly line. The assem­bly line ini­ti­ated a mas­sive trans­fer of ini­tia­tive away from work­ers into man­age­ment and wiped out pre­vi­ously sacro­sanct lim­its to the ratio­nal­iza­tion of pro­duc­tion.34 Most indica­tive of this pat­tern was the fact that Fordist indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion encour­aged the spa­tial sep­a­ra­tion of research and devel­op­ment from pro­duc­tion, putting them into dif­fer­ent build­ings, and often in dif­fer­ent towns, as a func­tion of the more gen­eral trend of ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion.35

Tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments closely tracked these orga­ni­za­tional inno­va­tions in delim­it­ing the sit­u­a­tion of semi-skilled work­ers under Fordism. Machine tools were increas­ingly designed as vari­a­tions on the lathe. Hav­ing learned to turn, a worker could with rel­a­tive ease shift to another machine and pick up the nec­es­sary move­ments.36 In hind­sight, it is clear that the stan­dard­iza­tion of tool design was a first step in the both the stan­dard­iza­tion and rou­tiniza­tion of tasks.37 In French heavy indus­try of the mid-1950s, imple­men­ta­tion of indus­trial Fordism rapidly changed over­all pro­duc­tion design; in the intro­duc­tion of man­age­ment; and in the impo­si­tion of a new divi­sion of labor that sep­a­rated intel­lec­tual and man­ual work.Changes in tool design facil­i­tated the atom­iza­tion of the fac­tory itself into iso­lated units con­cerned with max­i­mum ratio­nal­iza­tion of what were ini­tially com­po­nent parts of the larger pro­duc­tion process. The stan­dard­iza­tion of tasks and increased spe­cial­iza­tion of tech­nol­ogy reopened the pol­i­tics of wage rates and pro­duc­tion speed. It also sparked, with more polit­i­cal vari­abil­ity, a move to inte­grate and depoliti­cize trade unions through the mech­a­nism of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing. In these larger con­texts, the fate of the machin­ists played a small, but sym­bol­i­cally impor­tant part.

Social­isme ou Bar­barie col­lec­tively believed the rel­a­tive pro­fes­sional auton­omy of semi-skilled work­ers enabled them to develop the type of infor­mal shop-floor cul­ture pre­sup­posed by any rev­o­lu­tion­ary project that did not assume the inter­ven­tion of a Van­guard Party. There­fore, when the group inquired into worker expe­ri­ence, they referred to semi-skilled work­ers in the con­text of Fordist mass pro­duc­tion, the most advanced form of indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion of the period. In this, they con­formed to a gen­eral ten­dency of the French Left. Les métal­los were, for the most part, French, and were highly politi­cized and volatile.38 French heavy indus­try recruited and increas­ingly relied upon an immi­grant work­force on the assembly-line. This pol­icy set up polit­i­cal, cul­tural and pro­fes­sional frac­tures within the fac­tory that Social­isme ou Bar­barie mem­ber Daniel Mothé (Jacques Gau­trat) wrote about can­didly in 1956.39 For Social­isme ou Bar­barie, it was in gen­eral more sig­nif­i­cant that assembly-line work was unskilled. The lack of skill and col­lec­tive life in the con­text of pro­duc­tion as well as the nature of line work itself were more impor­tant than the plu­ral­ity of eth­nic­i­ties, nation­al­i­ties and lan­guages in pre­vent­ing these work­ers from act­ing col­lec­tively. Like most French Left orga­ni­za­tions, Social­isme ou Bar­barie did not focus on the unskilled OS work­ers on the line.40

On Worker Nar­ra­tives and Pro­le­tar­ian Experience

Text means Tis­sue; but whereas hith­erto we have always taken this tis­sue as a prod­uct, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hid­den, mean­ing (truth), we are now empha­siz­ing, in the tis­sue, the gen­er­a­tive idea that the text is made, is worked out in a per­pet­ual inter­weav­ing; lost in this tissue--this texture--the sub­ject unmakes him­self, like a spi­der dis­solv­ing in the con­struc­tive secre­tions of its web. Were we fond of neol­o­gisms, we might define the the­ory of the text as a hypol­ogy (hyphos is the tis­sue and the spider’s web).41

The worker nar­ra­tives that Social­isme ou Bar­barie envi­sioned col­lect­ing would com­bine first per­son obser­va­tion of shop-floor expe­ri­ence with an anthro­po­log­i­cal per­spec­tive on the processes that shaped that expe­ri­ence and a soci­o­log­i­cal view of indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion. The worker/writer of such nar­ra­tives had to be both involved with, and detached from, the expe­ri­ence described. The nar­ra­tives were to be auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal and descrip­tive of worker expe­ri­ence gen­er­ally. The descrip­tions pro­vided by any one nar­ra­tive would have obvi­ous lim­i­ta­tions with respect to com­plete­ness and uni­ver­sal­ity.42 Many nar­ra­tives gath­ered together might over­come these lim­i­ta­tions. A phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of these texts would pro­vide the gen­eral struc­ture of worker com­port­ments at the point of pro­duc­tion as repro­duced in these nar­ra­tives and shaped by their genre. What Social­isme ou Bar­barie wanted was a win­dow onto fac­tory expe­ri­ence that would enable them to see how work­ers processed struc­tural con­di­tions as hori­zons. Fur­ther, Social­isme ou Bar­barie wanted access to the inter­ac­tion of appro­pri­a­tion and resis­tance con­sti­tu­tive of the pro­le­tar­ian stand­point. The analy­sis would acquire its sig­nif­i­cance from the larger rev­o­lu­tion­ary project.

In “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence”, Lefort argues that a fea­ture of the “rad­i­cal orig­i­nal­ity of the pro­le­tariat” is that it can only be known by itself. Con­se­quently, oth­ers may under­stand the work­ing class only on its terms and in its lan­guage. From this premise fol­lows the neces­sity of inter­pret­ing worker writ­ing. How­ever, these texts were not with­out problems:

This does not mean that we will claim to define what the pro­le­tariat is in its real­ity from this angle, after hav­ing rejected all other rep­re­sen­ta­tions that have been made of its con­di­tion, which view it either through the deform­ing prism of bour­geois soci­ety or that of the Par­ties that claim to rep­re­sent it. A worker tes­ti­mony, no mat­ter how evoca­tive, sym­bolic and spon­ta­neous it might be, remains con­di­tioned by the sit­u­a­tion of its source. We are not allud­ing to the defor­ma­tion that can come from an indi­vid­ual inter­pre­ta­tion, but to that which nar­ra­tion nec­es­sar­ily imposes on its author. Telling is nec­es­sar­ily not act­ing, and even sup­poses a break with action that trans­forms its mean­ing. Mak­ing a nar­ra­tive about a strike is entirely dif­fer­ent from par­tic­i­pat­ing in a strike, if only because one then knows the out­come, and the sim­ple dis­tance of reflec­tion enables one to eval­u­ate what had not, in the moment, yet become fixed in its mean­ing. In fact, this is much more than a sim­ple change of opin­ion: it is a change of atti­tude, that is to say a trans­for­ma­tion in the man­ner of react­ing to sit­u­a­tions in which one finds one­self. To this must be added that nar­ra­tive places the indi­vid­ual in an iso­lated posi­tion which is not nat­ural to him either […] Cri­tique of a tes­ti­mony must pre­cisely enable one to see in the individual’s atti­tudes that which implies the com­port­ment of the group. How­ever, in the last analy­sis, the for­mer does not coin­cide exactly with the lat­ter, and we have access only to incom­plete knowl­edge.43

For Lefort, the basic issue is not defin­ing what the pro­le­tariat is or sub­sti­tut­ing a new, bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion for exist­ing ones, because the class can­not be an object of this type of knowl­edge. He argues that “know­ing” the work­ing class is more “being-with.” It is an imag­i­na­tive trans­for­ma­tion, car­ried out through read­ing and cri­tique. Know­ing the work­ing class trans­forms the reader into a spec­u­lar “par­tic­i­pant observer.”44

A vic­ar­i­ous “acqui­si­tion” of the pro­le­tar­ian stand­point and its con­stituent prac­tices is hin­dered by the nec­es­sary incom­plete­ness of any given nar­ra­tive. Such incom­plete­ness is a result of per­spec­ti­val­ism and of the sus­pen­sion of the “nat­ural atti­tude” implicit in the act of writ­ing. To para­phrase from the quoted pas­sage above: “Writ­ing about an action is not to act within it and pre­sup­poses a break with act­ing that trans­forms its mean­ing.” For a worker to adopt an anthro­po­log­i­cal rela­tion to his own expe­ri­ence as worker places him inside and out­side that expe­ri­ence at the same time. The writer ret­ro­spec­tively orders expe­ri­ence by writ­ing it: expe­ri­ence is no longer an open-ended rela­tion to a con­text on the part of an embed­ded sub­ject who inter­prets and makes judg­ments about it based on incom­plete infor­ma­tion.45 The con­se­quence of this ret­ro­spec­tive char­ac­ter is to ren­der con­tin­gent aspects of human expe­ri­ence as nec­es­sary ele­ments by giv­ing expe­ri­ence a dra­matic or nar­ra­tive form. Doing so elim­i­nates the space for cre­ativ­ity.46 Not only is writ­ing nec­es­sar­ily ret­ro­spec­tive, but it re-orders and spa­tial­izes the envi­ron­ment in par­tic­u­lar ways and re-temporalizes expe­ri­ence accord­ing to cri­te­ria inter­nal to the process of nar­ra­tion and the type of nar­ra­tive being pro­duced. While Lefort acknowl­edges these medi­a­tions, the real ques­tion for him does not con­cern the gap that might be thereby insti­tuted between text and expe­ri­ence. Rather, the main prob­lem fac­ing the critic/reader is in rec­og­niz­ing and bridg­ing the divide that sep­a­rates the “unnat­u­rally iso­lated” writ­ing worker from the nec­es­sar­ily social char­ac­ter of that which is described. The role of phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal analy­sis is to search for traces of the col­lec­tive com­port­ments within indi­vid­ual, frag­men­tary accounts.

For Lefort, the worker-writer is the phenomenologist’s accom­plice who sorts out, com­pares and reduces. He (almost always he) trans­forms expe­ri­ence into data from which a sec­ond order cri­tique can derive frag­ments of “authen­tic” expe­ri­ence. At the same time the worker-writer remains a worker, writ­ing like a worker, describ­ing fac­tory con­di­tions in a rec­og­niz­ably “prolo” man­ner. The worker-writer is the critic’s dou­ble: the critic watches the worker watch­ing; the critic appro­pri­ates what the worker describes.47 The writ­ing worker is a vehi­cle for the militant/critic’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the work­ers, an iden­ti­fi­ca­tion given con­tent through the dis­cov­ery of their prac­tices, the adop­tion of their stand­point and the the­o­riza­tion of their self-production. Haunted by the fear of revert­ing to a form of Lenin­ism, Lefort con­fines the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant to the role of phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal observer. How­ever, this same iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is encour­aged and exac­er­bated by the for­mal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the nar­ra­tives that Lefort treats as pri­mary evi­dence. To show how this part of the cir­cuit oper­ates, we take up the two texts that Lefort con­sid­ered exem­plary: Paul Romano’s 1947 “The Amer­i­can Worker” and Eric Albert’s 1952 “Témoignage: la vie en usine.”

Social­isme ou Bar­barie mem­ber Philippe Guil­laume intro­duced his trans­la­tion of Paul Romano’s “The Amer­i­can Worker” with: “We present here an unprece­dented doc­u­ment of great value about the lives of Amer­i­can work­ers.” The pamphlet’s value, Guil­laume argues, lay first of all in its demo­li­tion of the “Hol­ly­wood and Read­ers’ Digest” illu­sion that the Amer­i­can worker, rich and with­out class con­scious­ness, is a liv­ing exam­ple of the ben­e­fits of class col­lab­o­ra­tion. More than this, Guil­laume argues that Romano has pro­duced the first exam­ple of a new “pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture.” This doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture holds a mir­ror up to work­ers that reflects (polit­i­cally) sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments within their expe­ri­ence back to them in their own lan­guage. The pam­phlet addresses the reader by solic­it­ing recog­ni­tion. Guil­laume repeats this ges­ture, and it is repeated a num­ber of times there­after, before Romano’s nar­ra­tive actu­ally begins. Guil­laume writes:

Every worker, regard­less of “his nation­al­ity” of exploita­tion, will find in it the image of his own exis­tence as pro­le­tar­ian. There are, in fact, deep and con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­is­tics of pro­le­tar­ian alien­ation that know nei­ther fron­tiers nor regimes… The trans­la­tor of this small pam­phlet him­self has worked sev­eral years in the fac­tory. He was struck by the accu­racy and the impor­tant impli­ca­tions of every line. It is impos­si­ble for a worker to remain indif­fer­ent to this read­ing. In our eyes, it is not by acci­dent that such a sam­ple of pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture comes to us from Amer­ica, and it is also not by acci­dent that it is, in some of its deep­est aspects, the first of the genre.48

Near the end of this quote, Guil­laume repeats the Marx­ist axiom that the most advanced indus­trial set­ting will pro­duce the most advanced forms of worker resis­tance. These advanced forms of oppo­si­tion, and their poten­tials for new modes of class con­scious­ness, are reflected in the cre­ation of a new form of writ­ten expres­sion.49 This new form of expres­sion is itself reflec­tive of the tran­si­tion within the indus­trial work­ing class away from more tra­di­tional types of polit­i­cal (rev­o­lu­tion­ary) action which amounts to pos­tu­lat­ing that a new rev­o­lu­tion­ary avant-garde is devel­op­ing out of worker expe­ri­ence of tech­nol­ogy, con­ven­tional polit­i­cal par­ties, trade unions, and so on, at the point of pro­duc­tion. All this is implicit in Guillaume’s state­ment but it is made explicit in Ria Stone’s “The Recon­struc­tion of Soci­ety,” the extended the­o­ret­i­cal essay that accom­pa­nied Romano’s nar­ra­tive in its orig­i­nal Amer­i­can edi­tion.50

From the out­set, Romano is pre­sented as a part of a new “rev­o­lu­tion­ary tide” ris­ing within the Amer­i­can work­ing class. The eli­sion of the par­tic­u­lar into the gen­eral is made all the more attrac­tive by his use of a pseu­do­nym or “war name.” These names were nor­mal amongst the anti-Stalinist Left in both the U.S. and France. Within Social­isme ou Bar­barie, adop­tion of an alias was sim­ply a mat­ter of tac­ti­cal neces­sity. It should be kept in mind that rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal activ­ity amongst intel­lec­tu­als occurred in a semi-clandestine zone. Groups were sub­ject to sur­veil­lance by the polit­i­cal arm of the Parisian Police, the “Ren­seigne­ments Généraux.” Social­isme ou Bar­barie included a num­ber of for­eign­ers who were actively engaged in a type of polit­i­cal activ­ity that could get them deported, like Cas­to­ri­adis and Alberto Maso (Véga).51 These groups were also sub­ject to sur­veil­lance and repres­sion from the PCF. Anti-Stalinist pol­i­tics in a PCF-dominated envi­ron­ment, like Renault’s Bil­lan­court fac­tory, could pose real phys­i­cal and career dan­gers to those who engaged in it.52 These pres­sures affected dif­fer­ent peo­ple in dif­fer­ent ways, and Lefort is inter­est­ing in this regard. A phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor dur­ing the day, he ini­tially pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie under the name C. Mon­tal. He began to use his real name more fre­quently after leav­ing Les Temps Mod­ernes in 1952, and exclu­sively after 1956.

The names take on another, quite inde­pen­dent func­tion in the read­ing of these nar­ra­tives. Scant infor­ma­tion was pro­vided about Paul Romano, the pamphlet’s author. Even in 1972, in a pref­ace to a new edi­tion of the pam­phlet, Mar­tin Glaber­man would only say that Romano was active in the Johnson-Forest Ten­dency, and worked at a Gen­eral Motors fac­tory in New Jer­sey that employed about 800 pro­duc­tion work­ers.53 The Intro­duc­tion to the first edi­tion, signed J.H., describes Romano as:

him­self a fac­tory worker, [who] has con­tributed greatly to such under­stand­ing [of “what the work­ers are think­ing and doing while actu­ally at work on the bench or on the line”] by his descrip­tion, based on years of study and obser­va­tion of the lives of work­ers in modem mass pro­duc­tion. The pro­fun­dity of Romano’s con­tri­bu­tion lies not in mak­ing any new dis­cov­ery but rather in see­ing the obvious-the con­stant and daily rag­ing of the work­ers against the degrad­ing and oppres­sive con­di­tions of their life in the fac­tory; and at the same time, their cre­ative and ele­men­tal drive to recon­struct soci­ety on a new and higher level.54

Romano’s own open­ing para­graphs repeat this oper­a­tion in a some­what more com­plex manner:

I am a young worker in my late 20s. The past sev­eral years have found me in the pro­duc­tive appa­ra­tus of the most highly indus­tri­al­ized coun­try in the world. Most of my work­ing years have been spent in mass pro­duc­tion indus­tries among hun­dreds and thou­sands of other work­ers. Their feel­ings, anx­i­eties, exhil­a­ra­tion, bore­dom, exhaus­tion, anger, have all been mine to one extent or another. By “their feel­ings” I mean those which are the direct reac­tions to mod­ern high-speed pro­duc­tion. The present finds me still in a fac­tory – one of the giant cor­po­ra­tions in the country.

This pam­phlet is addressed to the rank and file worker and its inten­tion is to express those inner­most thoughts which the worker rarely talks about even to his fellow-workers. In keep­ing a diary, so to speak, of the day-to-day fac­tory life I hoped to uncover the rea­sons for the worker’s deep dis­sat­is­fac­tion which has reached its peak in recent years and has expressed itself in the lat­est strikes and spon­ta­neous walkouts.

The rough draft of this pam­phlet was given to work­ers across the coun­try. Their reac­tions were as one. They were sur­prised and grat­i­fied to see in print the expe­ri­ences and thoughts which they have rarely put into words. Work­ers arrive home from the fac­tory too exhausted to read more than the daily comics. Yet most of the work­ers who read the pam­phlet stayed up well into the night to fin­ish the read­ing once they had started.55

The first three sen­tences con­tain all the par­tic­u­lar infor­ma­tion we are given. From this point on, the indi­vid­ual is blurred into the col­lec­tive, and vice-versa. For exam­ple, Romano claims to describe “the inner­most thoughts which the worker rarely talks about even to his fel­low work­ers.” The accu­racy of such descrip­tion is, in Husser­lian lan­guage, inter­sub­jec­tively ver­i­fied, estab­lished quasi-scientifically, by means of a straw-poll of “work­ers around the coun­try” who stayed up late to read it because they (who? where?) rec­og­nized them­selves in the writ­ing. “Paul Romano” itself is a nearly arbi­trary name, a proper name that does not sig­nify, that does not limit, that does not help estab­lish some ref­er­ence point around which to sta­bi­lize the shift­ing bor­der between expe­ri­ence and writ­ing about expe­ri­ence. The author, Paul Romano, is an empty func­tion that gen­er­ates propo­si­tions in the form “the worker feels x…”; “the work­ers see y…every day.” We are pre­sented with a claim to a sort of “lat­eral ver­i­fi­ca­tion.” The work­ers stayed up late to read these propositions.

Romano delim­its his intended audi­ence in another way through the para­graphs on intel­lec­tu­als.56 The pam­phlet is a con­ver­sa­tion between work­ers: intel­lec­tu­als “so removed from the daily expe­ri­ence of the labor­ing masses” could not be sym­pa­thetic to its con­tent. Romano argues that: “They felt cheated” because there was “too much dirt and noise.” This char­ac­ter­i­za­tion places the phenomenologist-cum-revolutionary mil­i­tant, who in all prob­a­bil­ity has a roman­tic attach­ment to the idea of dirt and noise, in an ambigu­ous posi­tion. He seems to approx­i­mate an eaves­drop­per lis­ten­ing in on a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion between two oth­ers dur­ing which they begin to make dis­parag­ing remarks that could be about the silent third party. There is a cer­tain voyeurism that attends look­ing at the “ele­men­tal drive” of the work­ing class in process through the act of read­ing. At the same time, the reader is encour­aged to side with the work­ers, to embark on a voy­age accom­pa­nied by a trusted native informant.

The war name func­tions to turn the author into a con­tent­less vari­able, an observ­ing machine that gen­er­ates a trail of propo­si­tions about fac­tory life. I have argued above that there is a struc­tural dou­bling of the militant/critic in the writ­ing worker, and pow­er­ful polit­i­cal rea­sons for the for­mer to project him­self into the posi­tion made avail­able within the nar­ra­tives by the lat­ter. The arbi­trari­ness of the proper name in this con­text removes any brake that might oth­er­wise have been set up on this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion by infor­ma­tion on the empir­i­cal life of the author.57 This iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, staged at the level of rela­tion between militant/critic as phe­nom­e­nol­o­gist and the worker-writer, is fur­thered by the narrative’s use of “prolo” lan­guage. Philippe Guil­laume touched on this issue again in his brief translator’s pref­ace, and on some of the prob­lems he encoun­tered while trans­lat­ing Romano’s English:

It is impos­si­ble for a worker to remain indif­fer­ent to this read­ing. It is even more impos­si­ble to trans­late such a text in an indif­fer­ent, or even rou­tine, man­ner. At sev­eral junc­tures, it was nec­es­sary to take a con­sid­er­able dis­tance from the let­ter of the Eng­lish text to pro­vide a really faith­ful trans­la­tion. Some Amer­i­can pop­u­lar expres­sions have an exact cor­re­spon­dent in French, but embed­ded in dif­fer­ent imagery. Even in his descrip­tive style, Romano uses a pro­le­tar­ian optic.58

The trans­la­tion prob­lem in mov­ing from pop­u­lar Amer­i­can to a par­al­lel French while not dis­solv­ing Romano’s “pro­le­tar­ian optic” was resolved in such a way as to make the ver­sion pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie an inter­est­ing primer in “prolo” French for an Amer­i­can reader. It also func­tions as a sec­ond order legit­i­ma­tion of Romano’s sta­tus as worker, some­thing which go with­out say­ing were the pam­phlet were actu­ally being trans­mit­ted worker to worker. For whom need a “pro­le­tar­ian optic” be defined?

The var­i­ous pref­aces and intro­duc­tions to Romano’s pam­phlet are impor­tant because they make explicit what usu­ally left unsaid in these nar­ra­tives and is worked out at the level of style and through the manip­u­la­tion of cer­tain con­ven­tions. Once past these intro­duc­tions, we encounter Romano’s nar­ra­tive proper. Here we shift to a more struc­tural analy­sis, read­ing Romano along with Eric Albert’s “Témoignage: la vie en usine,” pub­lished in the July 1952 issue of Les Temps Mod­ernes, to iso­late sev­eral com­mon fea­tures that oper­ate as genre mark­ers informing/shaping “pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture” as col­lected or gen­er­ated by Social­isme ou Bar­barie.59

In sev­eral ways, Albert’s nar­ra­tive is quite dif­fer­ent from that of Romano. It was writ­ten for a dif­fer­ent audience—the edu­cated, pro­gres­sive bour­geois read­er­ship of Les Temps Mod­ernes. A jour­nal­is­tic expose of con­di­tions inside the newer types of fac­to­ries, com­bined with ele­ments of a travel nar­ra­tive it doc­u­ments Albert’s expe­ri­ence as an O.S. (an unskilled worker). Albert worked in two dif­fer­ent fac­to­ries owned by the same cable man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany near Paris. The first, in which Albert learns his job, is older, roughly on the order of Bil­lan­court; the sec­ond is a more recent build­ing and an exam­ple of Fordist orga­ni­za­tion on the order of Flins.

The point of Albert’s nar­ra­tive emerges through the con­trast between his expe­ri­ences in the two fac­to­ries, which are staged as emblem­atic of the past and future of fac­tory design. The for­mer allowed a mar­gin for worker auton­omy, and thereby the cre­ation of the types of infor­mal shop and shift-specific col­lec­tiv­i­ties that are the focus of Romano’s writ­ing. The lat­ter offers no such mar­gin. Its lay­out is entirely sub­or­di­nated to what Albert calls the “geo­met­ri­cal require­ments of the machin­ery.”60 Albert uses his expe­ri­ence to reveal the inhu­man­ity, and the polit­i­cal dan­ger for the Left, of Fordist fac­tory design from the van­tage point of an unskilled worker. Romano’s nar­ra­tive, on the other hand, con­sists mostly of detailed descrip­tions of infor­mal shop-floor com­mu­ni­ties from the view­point of a semi-skilled worker (who would be in the range of a P1-P3 accord­ing to the French pro­fes­sional hier­ar­chy). Romano uses these descrip­tions to win­now out the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of their col­lec­tive life.

There are thus sig­nif­i­cant diver­gences between the two nar­ra­tives that Lefort takes as exem­plary in “Pro­le­tar­ian Expe­ri­ence.” There was an enor­mous gulf that sep­a­rated the expe­ri­ence of an O.S. from that of a P1-P3 worker. The accounts were writ­ten for dif­fer­ent assumed audi­ences. There is also a polit­i­cal dif­fer­ence between the two. It is dif­fi­cult to pin­point Albert’s polit­i­cal view­point. He appears at times to be an old-style anarcho-syndicalist whose pol­i­tics come from the pre-World War II period, and who is still attached to the tra­di­tions of the “worker aris­toc­racy.” At other times, he appears to have sim­ply read a lot of mate­r­ial like Michel Collinet’s 1950 Esprit du syn­di­cal­isme.61 Romano’s affil­i­a­tion with “Cor­re­spon­dence” would posi­tion him closer to Social­isme ou Bar­barie.62

That said, the nar­ra­tives nonethe­less share a num­ber of for­mal char­ac­ter­is­tics, though each deploys these fea­tures in a dif­fer­ent order. This vari­a­tion can serve as an index of the writer’s polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion or aspi­ra­tions. For exam­ple, con­sider the loca­tion of the ini­ti­a­tion scene. Romano’s nar­ra­tive begins:

The fac­tory worker lives and breathes dirt and oil. As machines are speeded up, the noise becomes greater, the strain greater, the labor greater, even though the process is sim­pli­fied. Most steel cut­ting and grind­ing machines of today require a lubri­cant to facil­i­tate machin­ing the mate­r­ial. It is com­mon­place to put on a clean set of clothes in the morn­ing and by noon to be soaked, lit­er­ally, with oil. Most work­ers in my depart­ment have oil pim­ples, rashes and sores on their arms and legs. The shoes become soaked and the result is a steady case of athlete’s foot. Black­heads fill the pores. it is an extremely aggra­vat­ing set of effects. We speak often of sit­ting and soak­ing in a hot tub of water to loosen the dirt and ease the infec­tious blackheads.

In most fac­to­ries the worker freezes in the win­ter, sweats in the sum­mer and often does not have hot water to wash the day’s grime from his body…63

This para­graph intro­duces two fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of Romano’s nar­ra­tive, and of these nar­ra­tives in gen­eral. The uni­ver­sal and the par­tic­u­lar are inter­twined in a com­plex man­ner. The uni­ver­sal appears through the propo­si­tional form “the worker lives…”; “most work­ers in my depart­ment have oil pim­ples…”; “we speak often…” The par­tic­u­lar appears through Romano’s evo­ca­tion of pain. This usage of pain is a bit sur­pris­ing, given its extreme par­tic­u­lar­ity, its incom­mu­ni­ca­bil­ity, its ten­dency to “unmake the world” avail­able to the sub­ject by forc­ing the body (roughly fol­low­ing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as social and spa­tial ori­en­ta­tion for a sub­ject) back onto itself. Another’s pain is most dis­tant from one­self.64

The col­lec­tive first-person pro­nouns func­tion in Romano’s text to shift iden­ti­fi­ca­tion onto a very imme­di­ate level. The reader/militant/critic is encour­aged to project him­self into the empty space out­lined by the author as gen­er­a­tor of propo­si­tions, but left empty because of the arbi­trari­ness of the proper name. The tone of the descrip­tions is on the order of: you and I know the extreme noise, the stress induced by machine speed-ups; the rashes and pim­ples caused by inad­e­quate facil­i­ties and poor ven­ti­la­tion. The reader is squarely on the shop floor. Albert’s nar­ra­tive opens with a struc­turally sim­i­lar “reduc­tion of the sub­ject.” Because the piece is not designed as explic­itly to draw the reader into the expe­ri­ence being described, though it is not with­out its vivid moments, the reader’s ini­ti­a­tion into the Tex­tual Fac­tory can be more abstract. Albert’s expe­ri­ence is pre­sented as uni­ver­sal in a rather dif­fer­ent way: I ran out of money. I had to get a job. I got hired at this place. Here is what hap­pened: “When one no longer knows what, to do to make a liv­ing, all that remains is find­ing a job as an O.S.. That is why I found myself one day on a street out­side the large door of a cable-making plant, along with about twenty other men…”65

The inter­twin­ing of the uni­ver­sal and par­tic­u­lar is repeated at the level of fram­ing infor­ma­tion. Romano’s text fea­tures extremely detailed accounts of worker responses to con­crete prob­lems (using steel pipe to smash closed win­dows that should be open to pro­vide ven­ti­la­tion) and resis­tance (the infor­mally orga­nized slow-downs accom­pa­ny­ing the arrival of the time-study men, chronos in French, because every­one knows that work­ing up to or over speed is self- defeat­ing and results only in increased pro­duc­tion quo­tas and cadences). In the sec­tion “Why Such Inef­fi­ciency?” Romano pro­vides descrip­tions of the shop-floor view of over­all indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion. These accounts are sit­u­ated within a “shop floor” that is itself decon­tex­tu­al­ized. The reader is pro­vided with no infor­ma­tion about where these acts occur, either within the geog­ra­phy of the fac­tory (work­ers sim­ply do this) or in the world (not a word).66

How­ever, the shop floor is sit­u­ated rather care­fully with respect to the Abstract Fac­tory that is pro­duced within or by the text. The Abstract Fac­tory is elab­o­rated along one of two gen­eral lines. In the writ­ings of Albert and Vivier, a soci­ol­o­giz­ing gaze sur­veys the entirety of the Fac­tory from top to bot­tom and gen­er­ates a typol­ogy of worker strata and var­i­ous per­son­al­ity types.67 In the other pat­tern, the Abstract Fac­tory is described from the stand­point of a par­tic­u­lar shop. For Romano and Mothé, the Abstract Fac­tory func­tions to legit­i­mate and give con­tent to the “pro­le­tar­ian stand­point,” which is a nar­ra­tive posi­tion. The Fac­tory envi­ron­ment locates the reader on the shop floor. The pre­sen­ta­tion of other work­ers from this nar­ra­tive view­point is also pre­sen­ta­tion of types, but one that serves to fill out the reader’s expe­ri­ence of the tex­tual shop-floor. In his texts pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie sev­eral years later, Mothé was able to take this much fur­ther than Romano, as will be seen in the next parts of this dis­ser­ta­tion, because the promi­nence of Bil­lan­court for Parisian Left pol­i­tics enabled him to avoid hav­ing to stage the entirety of the Abstract Fac­tory and because his writ­ings appeared as a series of arti­cles that fre­quently involved the same shop and char­ac­ters. Mothe’s read­ers become almost com­fort­able with them: they con­sti­tute some­thing of a reper­toire company.

The point where the worker enters the effec­tive life of the shop floor is also the moment the reader enters the “inte­rior.” The ini­ti­a­tion scene in “The Amer­i­can Worker” is ret­ro­spec­tive, and is staged as an account of rela­tions between a neo­phyte and the polit­i­cal cul­ture of the shop:

The Work­ers’ Organization

I arrived in the plant sev­eral weeks after the “Big Strike” had ended. Things were tense for sev­eral weeks. New­com­ers were eyed with sus­pi­cion by both work­ers and com­pany so soon after the strike. My first day in the plant found me wait­ing in one of the depart­ments for the fore­man. A worker saun­tered over to me. In a very brief dis­cus­sion, he tried to deter­mine my atti­tude toward unions. I shook him off and he walked away. His speech made it clear that he was anti-union. Union men made them­selves con­spic­u­ous by their avoid­ance of new­com­ers.68

Romano only stays on this thresh­old for a para­graph: hav­ing passed an ini­tial test, he is soon inte­grated into the polit­i­cal struc­ture of the shop. This is a cru­cial pas­sage in the pam­phlet, as it marks more than Romano’s pas­sage into the inte­rior of shop-floor life. The sec­tion of which this is the open­ing quickly turns to a detailed dis­cus­sion of the gap that sep­a­rates the union hier­ar­chy from the shop-floor, it is also a demon­stra­tion of, and argu­ment for, the exis­tence of a class per­spec­tive tied to this shop life and inde­pen­dent of union orga­ni­za­tion and ide­ol­ogy. Only after estab­lish­ing this per­spec­tive does Romano under­take his sur­vey of the Abstract Fac­tory: the func­tion of this sur­vey is the legit­i­ma­tion of the view­point from which it is car­ried out. The polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions of the posi­tion of the ini­ti­a­tion scene can be seen by coun­ter­pois­ing Romano to Albert. Albert’s nar­ra­tive con­forms much more explic­itly to the con­ven­tions of a travel nar­ra­tive: the encounter, the thresh­old moment, the unan­tic­i­pated test and pas­sage into the inte­rior all hap­pen at the begin­ning. This pas­sage into the inte­rior is explic­itly linked with the acqui­si­tion of skill, where this link remains a per­va­sive assump­tion only made explicit in Romano’s final pages.69

At this point, by way of a con­clu­sion, a reca­pit­u­la­tion. Lefort’s essay is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing Social­isme ou Barbarie’s efforts to gain access to and think about worker expe­ri­ence as the basis for a type of polit­i­cal work that did not sub­or­di­nate this expe­ri­ence to the Higher His­tor­i­cal wis­dom of the Party. Lefort’s approach to worker nar­ra­tives, and his phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of worker expe­ri­ence that frames it, would have com­bined the care­ful gath­er­ing and col­lat­ing of texts with a sophis­ti­cated the­ory of read­ing. His the­o­ret­i­cal frame­work was also shot through with prob­lems of uncon­trolled identification/projection. Efforts to con­trol for this pro­jec­tion were impeded by the nar­row­ness of the sam­ple the group was able to col­lect. This small data set meant that, while the phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal appa­ra­tus was in place, the reduc­tions them­selves really could not be under­taken. The pos­si­bil­ity remains that a more detailed phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal descrip­tion of the “pro­le­tar­ian stand­point,” based on reduc­tions per­formed with a larger data set, could have sig­nif­i­cantly reduced, or elim­i­nated, the space for pro­jec­tion. Because Social­isme ou Barbarie’s project belongs to the past, we can­not know.

Lefort’s approach to the ques­tion of inter­pret­ing worker nar­ra­tives as win­dows onto shop floor expe­ri­ence took as cen­tral the prob­lem of knowl­edge about social-historical phe­nom­ena, under­stood as spa­tially and tem­po­rally imbri­cated processes that entail or pro­duce meaning-structures or what Cas­to­ri­adis would later call social-imaginary sig­ni­fi­ca­tions. Lefort’s use of phe­nom­e­nol­ogy to ana­lyze these texts cut two ways. By focus­ing on them in terms shaped by the sit­u­a­tion of their pro­duc­tion, it allowed for the devel­op­ment of some inter­est­ing and fruit­ful con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions, par­tic­u­larly in think­ing about prac­tice, which was the domain Social­isme ou Bar­barie wanted to ana­lyze as the every­day “ground” of its rev­o­lu­tion­ary project. The sit­u­at­ing of prac­tice and how it unfolds within both the imma­nent and (poten­tially) rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­texts at once clar­i­fies the ori­en­ta­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­ory with respect to the present. At the same time, Lefort’s focus on the con­di­tions of their pro­duc­tion and indi­ca­tions of worker cre­ativ­ity, pat­terns of self-organization and ori­en­ta­tions toward the future entailed a curi­ous neglect of these texts as texts, and of the expe­ri­ence of being a reader of them. At the same time as it enabled an iso­la­tion of poten­tials for rev­o­lu­tion­ary cre­ativ­ity, the phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of worker nar­ra­tives for­mal­ized a pro­jec­tive rela­tion between analyst/critic/militant and worker. This pro­jec­tive rela­tion­ship repeated within the texts, in the gaps that sep­a­rated their extreme pre­ci­sion about con­crete shop-floor expe­ri­ence and its pre­sen­ta­tion in a decon­tex­tu­al­ized, abstract man­ner, that is in pre­cisely the way these nar­ra­tives gave Social­isme ou Bar­barie, as a com­mu­nity of read­ers (like our­selves), access to the shop floor, the pro­le­tar­ian stand­point, and the “games” in the con­text of which that stand­point was instituted.

Lefort’s phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of worker nar­ra­tives approach brack­eted from the out­set the pos­si­bil­ity that this type of self-reflexive writ­ing was as much a lit­er­ary con­struc­tion (a set of genre rules and expec­ta­tions) as an account of actual expe­ri­ence. By treat­ing these nar­ra­tives as phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal data for a series of reduc­tions that never get under­way, Lefort’s approach sets Social­isme ou Bar­barie up for a whole­sale con­fu­sion of the sig­ni­fied of the nar­ra­tives’ dis­course with the ref­er­ent, tak­ing for “objec­tive” his­tory that which is highly medi­ated and processed through cer­tain lin­guis­tic and generic con­ven­tions. The sig­ni­fied would be the inter­nal world of the nar­ra­tive, the Abstract Fac­tory, the decon­tex­tu­al­ized shop floor, the Work­ers as types or as indi­vid­ual atoms, the upsurg­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary wave sweep­ing across the Amer­i­can work­ing class, the for­ma­tion of a class con­scious­ness closely linked to the pro­duc­tion of sig­ni­fi­ca­tions on the shop floor out­side of and in direct oppo­si­tion to the exist­ing work­ers’ move­ment. The ref­er­ent would be the actual fac­tory expe­ri­ence of Paul Romano or Eric Albert. The rela­tion between the two would be dif­fi­cult enough to estab­lish even were Romano and Albert present in Social­isme ou Bar­barie, as will be seen by way of Gautrat/Mothé. Here, the rela­tion is unde­cid­able. That Social­isme ou Bar­barie took these nar­ra­tives as direct accounts of expe­ri­ence, whose con­structed char­ac­ter is sim­ply a func­tion of the tem­po­ral gap that sep­a­rated the worker within a spe­cific sit­u­a­tion from that same worker writ­ing about that sit­u­a­tion tes­ti­fies to the power of what Roland Barthes called the “real­ism effect” of these nar­ra­tives.70

Stephen Hastings-King lives by a salt marsh in Essex, Massachusetts where he makes constraints, works with prepared piano and writes entertainments of various kinds. His short fictions have appeared in Sleepingfish, Black Warrior Review and elsewhere. He has a Ph.D in Modern European History from Cornell University. His book, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Question of Worker Writing, will be published in the Spring of 2014 from Brill as part of the Historical Materialism series.

Originally posted: September 27, 2014 at Viewpoint

• 1This is a ver­sion of a chap­ter that will appear in my Look­ing for the Work­ing Class: Social­isme ou Bar­barie, Cor­re­spon­dence and the Prob­lem of Worker Writ­ing through the His­tor­i­cal Mate­ri­al­ism Series at Brill in early 2014. Many thanks are owed to Kelly Grotke and David Ames Cur­tis for their help with prepar­ing this piece.
• 2Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie 11 (1952), 1-19. Reprinted as Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1979). Ref­er­ence here is to Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1979), 74.
• 3See François Dosse, L’Histoire du struc­tural­isme t. 1: le champs du signe (Paris: Le Décou­verte, 1991).
• 4See Alain Touraine, L’Evolution du tra­vail ouvrier aux usines Renault (Paris: CNRS, 1955). Argu­ments no. 12/13 is an impor­tant com­pi­la­tion of texts on 1958 and the French work­ing class. I will return to the inter­ac­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics and the nascent “soci­olo­gie du tra­vail” in my Look­ing for the Work­ing Class: Social­isme ou Bar­barie, Cor­re­spon­dence and the Prob­lem of Worker Writ­ing.
• 5This is not to say that the work of peo­ple like Elton Mayo was with­out util­ity: see the exten­sive, crit­i­cal use made of Mayo in Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “On the Con­tent of Social­ism III: Worker’s Strug­gles against the Orga­ni­za­tion of Cap­i­tal­ist Enter­prise” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings v.2, edited and trans­lated by David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Min­nesota, 1988). Don­ald Roy’s work, which rep­re­sented a mar­ginal, more explic­itly Left/critical vari­ant of indus­trial soci­ol­ogy, is fun­da­men­tal to Cas­to­ri­adis’ 1958 text. See pp. 184-188, Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings v.2, edited and trans­lated by David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Min­nesota, 1988).
• 6Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, 74.
• 7This mis­er­a­bal­ist con­cep­tion of the work­ing class, which empha­sizes its exploita­tion to the near exclu­sion of other aspect of working-class life, is evi­dent in Engels On the Con­di­tion of the Work­ing Class in Eng­land, 1844 and in the (quite remark­able) analy­sis of the Eng­lish work­ing class of 1860 in vol­ume one of Cap­i­tal. By con­trast, see, for exam­ple, E. P. Thomp­son, The Mak­ing of the Eng­lish Work­ing Class (New York: Van­tage, 1966).
• 8Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “Social­isme ou Bar­barie,” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings v.1, edited and trans­lated by David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Min­nesota, 1988).
• 9This refers pri­mar­ily to the con­fig­u­ra­tion of trade unions and polit­i­cal par­ties dom­i­nant at a given time and the pos­si­bil­i­ties that may or may not exist for autonomous action. On this, see fur­ther on in this sec­tion.
• 10Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, pas­sim.
• 11See Chap­ter 2 in my forth­com­ing Look­ing for the Pro­le­tariat.
• 12See the debate on rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie 10 (July-August, 1952): Chaulieu, Pierre, “La direc­tion pro­lé­tari­enne,” 10-18 and Mon­tal, Claude, “Le pro­lé­tariat et le prob­lème de la direc­tion révo­lu­tion­naire,” 18-27. The ref­er­ence here is to Montal’s (Lefort), 27: There is no need for a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion at all.
• 13This point emerges from a read­ing of the exchange between Lefort and Jean Paul Sartre that resulted in Lefort’s depar­ture from Les Temps Modemes in 1954. Par­tic­u­larly impor­tant is Cas­to­ri­adis’ “con­tri­bu­tion” to the debate which, in the con­text of a gen­eral defense, crit­i­cizes Lefort on pre­cisely this point. See the first two parts of Sartre’s “Com­mu­nists and Peace” orig­i­nally pub­lished in TM no. 81, July 1952 and 84-85, Novem­ber 1952; reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Sit­u­a­tions VI (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1964). Lefort’s “Le marx­isme et Sartre” orig­i­nally in TM no. 89, April 1953 along with Sartre’s response, “Réponse a Claude Lefort”. Lefort’s arti­cle is reprinted in Claude Lefort, Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie. Sartre’s two essays are trans­lated as Jean-Paul Sartre, The Com­mu­nists and Peace (New York: George Braziller, 1968). Cas­to­ri­adis, “Sartre, le stal­in­isme et les ouvri­ers,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie, 12: 63–88 is a response to Sartre’s attack on Lefort. It was reprinted in Cas­to­ri­adis, L’experience du mou­ve­ment ouvrier 1: Com­ment lut­ter (Paris: 10/18, 1974) and is trans­lated in Cas­to­ri­adis, Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings v.1, edited and trans­lated by David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Min­nesota, 1988), pp. 207-241. See also Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, “Sartre and Ultra­bol­she­vism,” in Adven­tures of the Dialec­tic (Evanston: North­west­ern, 1973).
• 14This point could be much more fully devel­oped, par­tic­u­larly since it addresses one of the more com­mon charges lev­eled at Marx(ists) con­cern­ing the prob­lem of peri­od­ic­ity and, by exten­sion, of account­ing for changes lead­ing up to cap­i­tal­ism. Lefort’s argu­ments can be found in Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie (Paris: Gal­li­mard, 1979), 4-5. See also Lefort 1978, orig­i­nally pub­lished in Les Temps Mod­ernes no. 78.
• 15Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie 11: 4- 5.
• 16For the most fully worked out state­ment of this cri­tique of Marx, see “L’expérience de l’histoire du mou­ve­ment ouvrier” in Cas­to­ri­adis, L’experience du mou­ve­ment ouvrier 1: Com­ment lut­ter (Paris: 10/18, 1974), trans­lated as “On the Expe­ri­ence of the His­tory of the Work­ers’ Move­ment” in Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “The Ques­tion of the His­tory of the Work­ers’ Move­ment,” in Polit­i­cal and Social Writ­ings v.2, edited and trans­lated by David Ames Cur­tis (Min­neapo­lis: Min­nesota, 1993).
• 17See Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, L’experience du mou­ve­ment ouvrier 1: Com­ment lut­ter (Paris: 10/18, 1974).
• 18A term taken, along with the prob­lems in trans­lat­ing it, from Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty.
• 19The lan­guage of social-imaginary sig­ni­fi­ca­tions is taken from the later philo­soph­i­cal work of Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis. While it appears through­out this arti­cle, it oper­ates pri­mar­ily as a heuris­tic rather than as an explicit ana­lytic cat­e­gory. Here refers to the rev­o­lu­tion­ary project and its recon­fig­u­ra­tion of ele­ments of every­day expe­ri­ence in terms shape by an under­stand­ing of social­ism as direct demo­c­ra­tic.
• 20The posi­tion that bour­geois thought in gen­eral is char­ac­ter­ized by an effort to derive real­ity from the con­cepts used to think about/order that real­ity, a posi­tion com­mon to Marx, Niet­zsche, and oth­ers.
• 21See para­graph 87 of Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: Col­lier, 1962), for the dis­tinc­tion between the object in itself and the noe­matic, and on the func­tion of inverted com­mas in restrict­ing mean­ing to the noe­matic.
• 22The open­ing pages of Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, expend con­sid­er­able energy to define and defend this domain from within the Marx­ist tra­di­tion.
• 23S ou B used phrases like this in a quite dif­fer­ent sense than is cur­rent largely in inter­est group-based pol­i­tics fash­ion­able on Amer­i­can cam­puses. its usage has noth­ing to do with the “post-modern” notion that sub­ject posi­tions are con­sti­tuted dis­cur­sively to such an extent that one can sim­ply pick one out that best cor­re­sponds to the struc­ture of affect—a vari­ant of shop­ping in a “free mar­ket” where “ratio­nal actors” cal­cu­late their inter­ests and buy (into) a pol­i­tics off the rack. Such shop­ping need never call into ques­tion the sys­tem of dis­tri­b­u­tion that sup­plies par­tic­u­lar options to the exclu­sion of oth­ers, any more than one would be led to think about transna­tional cap­i­tal­ism by roam­ing the Gap. For S ou B, the goal was rather auton­omy: the rev­o­lu­tion­ary project aspired to insti­tute direct democ­racy, the polit­i­cal form within which auton­omy might be oper­a­tionally pos­si­ble.
• 24The last sen­tence is quite dif­fi­cult to trans­late. It appears to try replac­ing a more Trot­sky­ist mode of ana­lyz­ing worker strug­gles in terms of short-term prospects with a more abstract form of inter­ro­ga­tion into the polit­i­cal or ide­o­log­i­cal pre­con­di­tions that enabled Trotskyism—and others—to assess the “mean­ing” of worker strug­gle. This reflex­ive, prop­erly philo­soph­i­cal and open-ended mode of inter­ro­ga­tion is posited here as the expe­ri­ence through which the class might develop, Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie 11: 6.
• 25Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, The Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Per­cep­tion, trans­lated by Colin Smith (Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 1965), Chap­ter 6.
• 26From Merleau-Ponty’s view­point, Heidegger’s effort to push the inquiry about the nature of the cop­ula into a sin­gle gen­eral ques­tion of Being could be viewed as itself an effort to insti­tute a tran­scen­den­tal phi­los­o­phy of fini­tude. On how dif­fi­cult it is to sep­a­rate what phi­los­o­phy says from what it does insti­tu­tion­ally, see François Dosse, L’Histoire du struc­tural­isme t. 1: le champs du signe (Paris: Le Décou­verte, 1991) and Vin­cent Descombes, Le même et l’autre (Paris: Minuit, 1979). Both detail the con­se­quences of Merleau-Ponty’s think­ing as open­ing the field for struc­tural­ist anthro­pol­ogy to take over the posi­tion for­merly occu­pied by phi­los­o­phy.
• 27The notion of insti­tu­tion as used by Merleau-Ponty derives from a read­ing of Edmund Husserl, “The Ori­gin of Geom­e­try,” in The Cri­sis of Euro­pean Sci­ences and Tran­scen­den­tal Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy trans­lated by David Carr (Evanston: North­west­ern, 1970). See Merleau-Ponty, “Insti­tu­tion in Per­sonal and Pub­lic His­tory,” in Themes from the Lec­tures at the Col­lège de France (Evanston: North­west­ern, 1970). The sem­i­nars on the notion of insti­tu­tion have since been pub­lished as Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses uni­ver­si­taires de France, 1998). See also Dick Howard, The Marx­ian Legacy (Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Press, 1988), 167.
• 28The notion of rules in rela­tion to par­tic­u­lar lan­guage games is an impor­tant theme explored in Wittgenstein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which could be prof­itably cross-voiced with Merleau-Ponty’s think­ing in this regard.
• 29This dis­tinc­tion between prac­tices nar­rowly con­strued and that which uni­fies them, gives them a direc­tion (a sens), the domain out of which they emerge and rel­a­tive to which they acquire mean­ing has been elab­o­rated in var­i­ous ways. Merleau-Ponty does so in “Cezanne’s Doubt” in Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, trans­lated by Hubert Drey­fus and Patri­cia Allen Drey­fus, (Evanston: North­west­ern, 1964), or on Matisse in Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity Press, 1964) through his notion of “l’oeuvre.” Lefort later took up the same issue in his work on Machi­avelli (l’oeuvre of Machi­avelli is the cre­ation of the polit­i­cal). Devel­op­ing in a sep­a­rate direc­tion, Cas­to­ri­adis, fol­low­ing Freud, refers to this dimen­sion of social prac­tice as sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, that which brings into rela­tion. The pro­duc­tion and deploy­ment of such sig­ni­fi­ca­tions is what the social-historical does.
• 30Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, 91-92.
• 31On the French salary scale, occu­py­ing the rank­ings of P1-P3.
• 32The ship­yard strikes in St. Nazaire and Nantes dur­ing the sum­mer of 1955, for exam­ple, were trig­gered by Pen­hoët (and the state’s) efforts to increase cadences by redesign­ing pro­duc­tion in such a way as to tie together the wages and func­tions of work­ers involved with var­i­ous stages of weld­ing despite some oper­a­tions being sim­pler and faster than oth­ers. See Louis Oury, Les Pro­los (Paris: DeNoël, 1973) and the accounts of the strikes pub­lished in Social­isme ou Bar­barie no. 18 (Jan-Mar 1956).
• 33Ben­jamin Coriat, L’atelier et le chronomètre (Paris: Chris­t­ian Bour­gois, 1979), 16ff.
• 34On the role of the auto­mo­bile indus­try as lead­ing edge of tech­no­log­i­cal, orga­ni­za­tional and demand changes in the 20th cen­tury, see Jean-Pierre Bar­dou, The Auto­mo­bile Rev­o­lu­tion (Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina Press, 1982). For a litany of pre­con­di­tions that allowed the Amer­i­can auto­mo­bile indus­try to shape this rev­o­lu­tion in indus­trial orga­ni­za­tion, see Chap­ter 6.
• 35On this process at Renault, see Michel Freyssenet, La siderurgie fran­caise, 1945-1979: L’histoire d’une fail­lite: les solu­tions qui s’affrontent (Savelli, 1979).
• 36See Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker (Detroit: Bewick, 1972), 40. See also Alain Touraine, L’Evolution du tra­vail ouvrier aux usines Renault for a more detailed ver­sion of the same argu­ment in the con­text of Renault’s Bil­lan­court fac­tory.
• 37This was often more true on paper than in actual fac­to­ries. By the time cov­ered in Touraine’s book on work at Bil­lan­court, it had become an awk­ward com­bi­na­tion of advanced design and heav­ily mod­i­fied older machin­ery that required an unusu­ally large sec­tion of machin­ists sim­ply to maintain—rather like the Boston MTA does today. A more thor­ough­go­ing Fordi­s­a­tion of pro­duc­tion could not be adapted to such con­di­tions: it was there­fore cheaper and eas­ier sim­ply to build a new fac­tory at Flins based on newer con­cep­tions and employ­ing more up-to- date equip­ment. When Flins opened in 1952, the writ­ing was in a sense already on the wall for Bil­lan­court. Demon­stra­tion that tran­si­tions take time: Bil­lan­court, the clos­ing of which was announced in 1980, closed in 1992, the same week EuroDis­ney opened.
• 38For the French Left, the métallo was the quin­tes­sen­tial rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant.
• 39Daniel Mothé, “Les ouvri­ers français et les nord africains,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie 21 (1958): 146ff.
• 40These would only later be tar­geted by Maoist “étab­lis” after 1968. Les etab­lis were Maoist stu­dents who got jobs on fac­tory assem­bly lines in order to be with the work­ers in the period fol­low­ing May 1968. See Robert Lin­hardt, L’établi (Paris: Minuit, 1978). Nico­las Dubost, Flins sans fin (Paris: Maspero, 1979) pro­vides an inter­est­ing and oddly mov­ing account of the con­di­tions among immi­grant work­ers on the line at Flins and of the dis­as­trous mis­takes the Maoists made while try­ing to orga­nize them.
• 41Roland Barthes, Plea­sure of the Text, edited and trans­lated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
• 42Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, 87-88.
• 43Claude Lefort, “L’experience pro­lé­tari­enne,” in Elé­ments d’une cri­tique de la bureau­cratie, 90.
• 44The clas­sic state­ment on par­tic­i­pant observer soci­ol­ogy is William Foote Whyte, Street Cor­ner Soci­ety (Chicago: Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press, 1993). More recent exam­ples include David Simons and Edward Burns: The Cor­ner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neigh­bor­hood (New York: Ran­dom House (Broad­way), 1998). Loïc Wac­quant, Body & Soul: Note­books of an Appren­tice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 2006) is a lovely demon­stra­tion of what can be done with this form.
• 45This is the peril of the insti­tut­ing. On this theme, see Cor­nelius Cas­to­ri­adis, “Marx­ism and Rev­o­lu­tion­ary The­ory,” reprinted in The Imag­i­nary Insti­tu­tion of Soci­ety trans­lated by Kath­leen Blamey, Cam­bridge: MIT, 1998), pas­sim.
• 46Con­sider the dif­fer­ence between a musi­cal impro­vi­sa­tion and a record­ing of an impro­vi­sa­tion. See also Merleau-Ponty “Indi­rect Lan­guage and the Voices of Silence” in Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity Press, 1964) on the gap which sep­a­rates Matisse paint­ing from a film of Matisse paint­ing and the whole­sale trans­for­ma­tions of mean­ings that accom­pany the pas­sage from open-ended cre­ative work to the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of open-ended cre­ative work.
• 47I think the motif of dou­bling was inspired by Jacques Ran­cière, La nuit des pro­lé­taires: Archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
• 48Philippe Guil­laume, “L’ouvrier améri­cain,” Social­isme ou Bar­barie 1 (1949): 78.
• 49Ibid.
• 50Orig­i­nally pub­lished along with Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker (Detroit: Bewick, 1972). It was trans­lated by Guil­laume and pub­lished in Socialise ou Bar­barie nos. 7 and 8 (1950-1951). See the pamphlet’s final flour­ishes.
• 51Inter­views with most mem­bers of S ou B, Véga in par­tic­u­lar. This theme of the war name recurs in Chap­ter 5 of my forth­com­ing Look­ing for the Pro­le­tariat more exten­sively.
• 52Inter­view with Pierre Blachier.
• 53Mar­tin Glaber­man, Intro­duc­tion to Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker, v.
• 54J.H. Pref­ace to The Amer­i­can Worker, viii.
• 55The Amer­i­can Worker, 1. We return to this shortly.
• 56Ibid.
• 57Roland Barthes, “L’effet du réel,” Com­mu­ni­ca­tions 11 (1968): 11.
• 58Philippe Guil­laume, “L’ouvrier améri­cain.”
• 59Eric Albert “La vie dans une usine,” Les Temps Mod­ernes 81 (1952): 95–130.
• 60Ibid., 98-101. This sec­tion in Albert is an exact mir­ror­ing of a sim­i­lar sec­tion in Georges Navels 1945 auto­bi­og­ra­phy Travaux, which recounts his expe­ri­ences in fac­to­ries on either side of World War I. On Navel, see the sec­tion on pro­le­tar­ian lit­er­a­ture in Chap­ter 5 of my forth­com­ing Look­ing for the Pro­le­tariat.
• 61I know noth­ing about Eric Albert. The pos­si­bil­ity of being an anarcho-syndicalist comes from page l25ff: Albert dis­cusses what he con­sid­ers to be the sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal tra­di­tion lost to younger work­ers in anar­chist writ­ers like Proud­hon, Bakunin, Jules Val­lès, Collinet and Fried­mann. He also out­lines an anar­chist take on the Pop­u­lar Front on page 117.
• 62See Chap­ter 5 of my forth­com­ing Look­ing for the Pro­le­tariat for an extended dis­cus­sion of Cor­re­spon­dence.
• 63Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker, 3.
• 64This dis­cus­sion leans heav­ily on Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: Mak­ing and Unmak­ing the World (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press 1985).
• 65Eric Albert, “La vie dans une usine,” 98-100.
• 66Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker,14-15.
• 67Albert’s typo­log­i­cal chap­ters are enti­tled “Les anciens,” “Les jeunes” etc. Vivier fol­lows much the same model. That Viver’s nar­ra­tive is rel­a­tively ignored in sub­se­quent devel­op­ment is indica­tive, I think, of S ou B’s col­lec­tive rela­tion to this type of writ­ing. See Eric Albert, “La vie dans une usine,” 118-126.
• 68Paul Romano, The Amer­i­can Worker, 21.
• 69Ibid., 34-41.
• 70See Roland Barthes, “The Dis­course of His­tory,” trans­lated by Stephen Bann, Com­par­a­tive Crit­i­cism 3: 7–20.

This text opens a dis­cus­sion on the prob­lem of the work­ers’ paper, which will be car­ried on in the fol­low­ing issues of Social­isme ou Bar­barie. It draws on the expe­ri­ence of Tri­bune Ouvrière, pub­lished for over a year by a group of work­ers from Regie Renault, from which we have pub­lished extracts in the pre­ced­ing issue of this review, and from which one will find new extracts in the cur­rent one.

The devel­op­ment of cul­ture and the role of polit­i­cal par­ties are at the ori­gin of the enor­mous expan­sion of the press that char­ac­ter­izes our cen­tury. The divi­sion of labor, on the other hand, had turned jour­nal­ism into a dis­tinct indus­trial branch with its own laws. This is par­tic­u­larly the case in “lib­eral” cap­i­tal­ism, where the press must gen­er­ally be a prof­itable industry.

Although total­i­tar­ian regimes sup­press this appar­ent auton­omy, and closely bind the paper to the regime, it is no less true that the paper of a com­mu­nist party in a pop­u­lar democ­racy must obey the same fun­da­men­tal rules of a lib­eral paper in a West­ern democ­racy: to inform, influ­ence the ide­ol­ogy of its read­ers – and above all: to be read. It’s for this rea­son that even in total­i­tar­ian coun­tries, the paper must make con­ces­sions to read­ers; since these can­not be made on the polit­i­cal or ide­o­log­i­cal level, the role of the jour­nal­ist is pre­cisely to find the means of inter­est­ing the reader through the back door. We will not put jour­nal­ism on trial here, or ana­lyze the con­tra­dic­tions in which it develops.

Against the offi­cial press arises the press of rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tions: the lat­ter, and in par­tic­u­lar dur­ing peri­ods of rev­o­lu­tion­ary cri­sis in soci­ety, are blessed by the fact their polit­i­cal con­tent cor­re­sponds to the inter­ests of their working-class read­ers. But, although their polit­i­cal con­tent may be com­pletely dif­fer­ent, rev­o­lu­tion­ary papers always have this in com­mon with bour­geois papers, their sep­a­ra­tion from the work­ing class; the paper is in both cases a sep­a­rate body, with its offi­cial staff, its hier­ar­chy of edi­tors, of which some have pro­pa­ganda as their task, all kinds of papers; con­clude, under the pre­text that both of them pro­duce other infor­ma­tion, etc.

On the one side, there­fore, we have the bour­geois or Stal­in­ist paper, on the other the rev­o­lu­tion­ary paper, each of which spreads its own ide­ol­ogy. Our goal here is not to mix these two kinds of papers; to assume that both make pro­pa­ganda and pol­i­tics, that they have the same ide­ol­ogy, would be a stu­pid­ity that one would only find in syn­di­cal­ist and anar­chist currents.

But if we have spo­ken of these papers and dis­cov­ered a char­ac­ter­is­tic com­mon to them, it’s in fact to set them against another kind of paper, which we call the work­ers’ paper.

This is not about a new idea, pro­duced through intel­lec­tual cre­ation; such papers have already existed in the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment (work­ers’ papers of the 19th cen­tury). And, as we will try to show in the fol­low­ing pages, this idea belongs to the fun­da­men­tal con­cep­tion of social­ism, the capac­ity of the work­ing class to destroy cap­i­tal­ism and man­age a social­ist soci­ety itself.

This work­ers’ paper will be a paper that will not have a sep­a­rate appa­ra­tus; in other words, its edi­tors, its dis­trib­u­tors, its read­ers will be a rea­son­ably large ensem­ble of work­ers. Not only will the paper’s appa­ra­tus not be sep­a­rated from from its read­ers, but its con­tent, too, will be deter­mined by this col­lec­tive of working-class edi­tors, dis­trib­u­tors, and read­ers. The paper will not have as its objec­tive the dif­fu­sion of an estab­lished polit­i­cal con­cep­tion to the work­ing class, but will share the con­crete expe­ri­ences of indi­vid­ual work­ers and groups of work­ers, in order to respond to the prob­lems that con­cern them.

What are these problems?

There are first of all prob­lems of exploita­tion, which impose them­selves every day, at the heart of pro­duc­tion – and we don’t just mean by that the prob­lems of every­day demands [reven­di­ca­tion], but all aspects of the work­ers’ alien­ation within the frame­work [cadre] of cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion. There are then all the prob­lems that the social frame­work of cap­i­tal­ism imposes on work­ers. But the class is not only held in its exploited role by the eco­nomic laws of cap­i­tal­ism, but also by the ide­ol­ogy of this soci­ety. The con­cerns of the work­ers are devi­ated from their real goals by the dom­i­nant ide­olo­gies: either bour­geois or Stal­in­ist cur­rents deform the prob­lems that con­cern work­ers (for exam­ple the prob­lem of wages tied to pro­duc­tiv­ity by the bosses, or Ger­man rear­ma­ment by the Stal­in­ists), or they insert into the class con­cerns that are fun­da­men­tally alien (elec­toral law). Finally, the very exis­tence of these ide­olo­gies and their dif­fu­sion in the heart of the work­ing class poses a prob­lem in itself. What are these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents, in what way do they influ­ence the work­ers, in what ways do the work­ers react? Respond­ing to these ques­tions is the goal the paper has to set for itself. It is there­fore just as absurd to say from the start that the work­ers’ paper will only talk about the inter­na­tional polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, as to say that the jour­nal will only talk about the rela­tion­ship between work­ers and the man­age­ment. Thus, the paper must be “empir­i­cal” to a cer­tain degree; it must fol­low the every­day con­cerns of the work­ers. Only the bureau­cratic or bour­geois orga­ni­za­tions could fear this; rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies have noth­ing to lose in this dia­logue, they have every­thing to gain because only the work­ing class can pro­vide the means and the forms of strug­gle against cap­i­tal­ist society.

If we are led to talk to talk about this prob­lem today, it’s because there exist two exper­i­ments with a paper of this type, one in the United States with the paper Cor­re­spon­dence, the other in France, with Tri­bune Ouvrière. We will exam­ine the prob­lem in light of the expe­ri­ence of Tri­bune Ouvrière, both at the the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal level, and we will try to draw lessons from this exper­i­ment, how­ever slim they may be.

We will there­fore remain loyal to this fun­da­men­tal con­cern: the rela­tion between the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion and the work­ing class, between the­ory and the prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence of work­ers. These two ele­ments will have to meet up, and their junc­tion will not only be an absorp­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary ide­ol­ogy by the work­ing class, but also an assim­i­la­tion of working-class expe­ri­ence by rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants. In this arti­cle, we will try to put into dia­logue [met­tre face à face] our fun­da­men­tal the­o­ret­i­cal con­cep­tion and the dynamic of the work­ers’ efforts who par­tic­i­pate in this paper. We will always be led by these two ele­ments, and in the end we will try to bring them together, the most abstract and the most con­crete, to for­mu­late pre­cise con­clu­sions on the devel­op­ment of the work­ers’ paper.

The Two Processes of Politicization

Pol­i­tics, in cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety, has become a spe­cial­ized pro­fes­sion, a kind of sci­ence requir­ing study; becom­ing ini­ti­ated is ardu­ous and dis­cour­ages many work­ers who often end up clas­si­fy­ing every­thing they don’t under­stand as “pol­i­tics.” There is there­fore a divi­sion within the work­ing class between those who do pol­i­tics and those who don’t.

For social­ist, Stal­in­ist, or Trot­sky­ist mil­i­tants, the objec­tive is to “politi­cize the worker,” which is to say, to ini­ti­ate him, in a vul­gar­ized and sim­pli­fied form, into the mys­ter­ies of this sci­ence. This ini­ti­a­tion aims to con­vince him that the party in ques­tion defends the worker and that, for his part, the worker must defend the party.

For Stal­in­ists, this politi­ciza­tion con­sists in intro­duc­ing the work­ers to the polit­i­cal mech­a­nisms of the bour­geoisie, both on the domes­tic ter­rain (the mean­ing of the bour­geois par­ties), as well as the for­eign (the mean­ing of inter­na­tional rela­tions). For Trot­sky­ists, intro­duc­ing work­ers to pol­i­tics is much more com­plex and dif­fi­cult: it requires an inter­pre­ta­tion of the his­tory of the work­ers’ move­ment (the degen­er­a­tion of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion and of the Third Inter­na­tional), and an equally abridged expla­na­tion of Marx­ist the­o­ries on the econ­omy, pol­i­tics, etc.

Both the attempts to ini­ti­ate work­ers to bour­geois pol­i­tics as well as the attempt to intro­duce them to abstract ques­tions rests on a par­tic­u­lar con­cep­tion of the role of mass orga­ni­za­tions and move­ments. For Stal­in­ism and Trot­sky­ism, the mass orga­ni­za­tions and move­ments are only the reser­voirs from which the party draws its worker mil­i­tants, and onto which the party tries to imprint its unique ori­en­ta­tion, by means of infil­tra­tion and other maneu­vers. They tend to sub­sti­tute the pol­i­tics of mass orga­ni­za­tions with the pol­i­tics of the party, the ini­tia­tive of the work­ers with the ini­tia­tive of the party; it’s all about sub­sti­tut­ing the prob­lems that are born in pro­duc­tion or in the pub­lic lives of work­ers, with the gen­eral polit­i­cal prob­lems that con­cern the party. This is how they end up explain­ing to work­ers that low wages are result of the accords made in Paris, or that they are the prod­uct of the degen­er­a­tion of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion – some­thing that is, in vary­ing degrees, an absur­dity and a mystification.

In the two con­cep­tions, we find the same idea: gen­eral polit­i­cal prob­lems that con­cern the party, no inter­est, the only inter­est resides in the pol­i­tics of the French gov­ern­ment or in the pol­i­tics of the Russ­ian bureaucracy.

Aside from its mys­ti­fy­ing con­tent, this con­cep­tion rests on fun­da­men­tal the­o­ret­i­cal error: it mis­rec­og­nizes the exis­tence of two processes of politi­ciza­tion, one which is par­tic­u­lar to mil­i­tants, another which is par­tic­u­lar to the work­ing class.

If the train­ing [for­ma­tion] of rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant is a for­ma­tion that is almost exclu­sively intel­lec­tual, espe­cially in those peri­ods, like the ones we have lived through, where the absence of work­ers’ move­ments has uprooted the rev­o­lu­tion­ary minori­ties from the class, the polit­i­cal for­ma­tion of work­ers is, on the con­trary, almost exclu­sively prac­ti­cal. It’s in the course of its dif­fer­ent strug­gles that the work­ing class assim­i­lates, in a more or less last­ing way, a cer­tain polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence, and cre­ates its own meth­ods of strug­gle.1

If it’s obvi­ous that these two poles, the imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence of the work­ers and the the­o­ret­i­cal expe­ri­ence of rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants, must come together, the con­tro­ver­sial ques­tion is to deter­mine their meet­ing point. The Stal­in­ist con­cep­tion only con­sid­ers one aspect of the rela­tion­ship between the orga­ni­za­tion and the class, the one in which the party gives its rev­o­lu­tion­ary ide­ol­ogy to the work­ing class. The other aspect, passed over in silence, is that the ide­ol­ogy which the van­guard orga­ni­za­tion gives to the work­ing class is itself drawn from this class. Thus, there is not only one cur­rent, going from the orga­ni­za­tion to the class and from the class to the orga­ni­za­tion. In this sense, if the work­ing class needs the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion to the­o­rize its expe­ri­ence, the orga­ni­za­tion needs the work­ing class in order to draw on this expe­ri­ence. This process of osmo­sis has a deci­sive importance.

When we say that the orga­ni­za­tion draws from the work­ing class, we don’t mean that it only draws from it the method to make itself under­stood, the way of teach­ing its the­o­ries to the pro­le­tariat, but also the essen­tial ele­ments for the very devel­op­ment of this the­ory. To schema­tize, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion has noth­ing to do with the Church, which instills a dogma by using every mode of expres­sion, slang for the work­ers, music for the artists. It’s not a ques­tion of find­ing a lan­guage acces­si­ble to the class, but of extract­ing the ideas that it gen­er­ates within itself.

One is thus led to acknowl­edge the deep link between the basic and spon­ta­neous reac­tions of the masses and the estab­lish­ment of a social­ist soci­ety; but then, the role of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion is noth­ing more than to sup­port these reac­tions through tac­tics and solely to attach itself to the masses, or else, to trans­pose these onto the ter­rain of bour­geois pol­i­tics. These are the fun­da­men­tal aspi­ra­tions that must guide us.

There are not, of course, two sep­a­rate prob­lems, one of which would be the strug­gle against the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem cul­mi­nat­ing in the seizure of power, and the other being the real­iza­tion of social­ism and the man­age­ment of soci­ety by work­ers; and the role of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion is not to “con­quer” mass organ­isms, but to help them to become the struc­ture of society.

Indeed, social­ism is only pos­si­ble if the work­ers are able to man­age this soci­ety. The abil­ity to man­age must be devel­oped to a max­i­mum at the very heart of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety. How­ever, this man­age­ment can­not be done within cap­i­tal­ist pro­duc­tion, but only in the strug­gle against cap­i­tal­ist man­age­ment; put dif­fer­ently, there’s no way that work­ers can man­age any­thing so long as cap­i­tal­ism per­sists, with the only excep­tion of their own polit­i­cal bod­ies designed to strug­gle against cap­i­tal. And the meth­ods of this appren­tice­ship in man­age­ment must be directed from the start towards the goal they set out to real­ize. How can the work­ing class’s abil­ity to man­age be devel­oped? It’s this ques­tion that the work­ers’ paper must answer, not only in its con­tent, but also in its very con­cep­tion, and in its way of oper­at­ing; which is to say it must itself be man­aged by workers.

The Nature of the Work­ers’ Paper

The work­ers’ paper must there­fore be at the same time the expres­sion of work­ers’ expe­ri­ences (and in this sense, we will see, it can only be writ­ten by work­ers them­selves) and the means of aid­ing in the the­o­riza­tion of this expe­ri­ence (and, in this way, con­tribut­ing to the process of politi­ciz­ing the work­ing class). But the paper must not sep­a­rate itself from this expe­ri­ence, for oth­er­wise it will nec­es­sar­ily escape the con­trol of the work­ing class.

In this def­i­n­i­tion, the work­ers’ paper is nei­ther a polit­i­cal paper, nor a trade-union paper, nor doc­u­men­tary literature.

a) This is not a polit­i­cal paper; that means it is not the expres­sion of a polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, that it does not cir­cu­late the ide­ol­ogy of this orga­ni­za­tion within the masses. It does not assume a pre­req­ui­site agree­ment between dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal ten­den­cies under a pro­gram. The prin­ci­ple that it bases itself on, and that suf­fices to dis­tin­guish it from every other under­tak­ing, is that “the work­ing class is itself able to resolve the prob­lems of its emancipation.”

This does not at all mean that the paper will not dis­cuss pol­i­tics. It can deal with polit­i­cal ques­tions. But the polit­i­cal ideas that will come out of this paper will only be the find­ings of actual expe­ri­ences; they will never be posed as thoughts or pos­tu­lates imply­ing the prior accep­tance of what­ever ideology.

b) But nei­ther will it be a trade-union paper con­cern­ing itself with eco­nomic questions.

We have already had the oppor­tu­nity to show how this sep­a­ra­tion between eco­nomic and polit­i­cal ques­tions does not cor­re­spond today to any­thing in real­ity, that every syn­di­cal­ism, how­ever pure it may be, is polit­i­cal. The paper will not be trade-union paper in the sense that the ques­tions treated will go beyond the frame­work of unionism.

c) This will not be doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture. The work­ers’ paper can­not be a mag­a­zine that con­tents itself with recount­ing the life of fac­tory work­ers in an anec­do­tal fash­ion. The worker knows what hap­pens in the fac­tory; the descrip­tion of his place of work and of his rela­tions with man­age­ment only inter­est those who are out­side the fac­tory. And this is not the case of the paper. The descrip­tion of an event in the fac­tory or some­where else is only of inter­est if one can extract from this event some reflec­tions that con­cern working-class expe­ri­ence in general.

The paper will be nei­ther a polit­i­cal paper, nor a trade-union paper, nor a doc­u­men­tary on the life of work­ers, but it will be all of that at once. We are not say­ing that the work­ers’ paper must be a paper of which one part must be reserved for pol­i­tics, another for eco­nom­ics, and another for description.

The paper will have a more uni­ver­sal mean­ing to the extent that it will con­dense the polit­i­cal, the eco­nomic, and the social. It’s in this way that it will attain a deeper mean­ing of politics.

In tra­di­tional papers one part is reserved for polit­i­cal ques­tions that are the polit­i­cal ques­tions of the bour­geoisie of dif­fer­ent coun­tries: the evo­lu­tion of the rela­tions between the dom­i­nant classes of dif­fer­ent coun­tries, the rela­tions between dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ties, etc.

Another part is reserved for eco­nomic ques­tions and con­sists in lay­ing out the demands of this or that pro­fes­sional cat­e­gory or of this or that union.

Fur­ther­more a con­stant effort is made to recon­nect these sec­tors among them­selves. For exam­ple, the cam­paign led by the CGT against Ger­man rear­ma­ment is tied directly to all kinds of min­i­mum demands of work­ers. This prac­ti­cally amounts to: in order to increase your wages, strug­gle against Ger­man rearmament.

There are there­fore two poles, one polit­i­cal, the other eco­nomic, and for the party papers, it’s a ques­tion of draw­ing a path from one pole to the other. It is in this sense that today the union is a polit­i­cal form and that the polit­i­cal party is an eco­nomic union. It’s a ques­tion of going from the uni­fied agree­ment of the work­ers around a demand, under­stood by every­one, towards a gen­eral pol­i­tics which can­not be eas­ily under­stood by any­one.” For exam­ple, the fact that the unions defend a pro­gram of demands such that “40 hours paid 48, 3 weeks of paid vaca­tions” might make it so that the work­ers will accept the pol­i­tics of the unions, not for them­selves but for the demand. The com­mu­nist munic­i­pal­i­ties take care of old work­ers, vic­tims, pub­lic works, etc. in order to legit­i­mate their gen­eral pol­i­tics. The fact that at this level the com­mu­nists are unbeat­able is the result of their posi­tion of oppo­si­tion to the government.

A minor­ity that is even more detached from the appa­ra­tuses of the bour­geois state than the Stal­in­ists are, which there­fore has noth­ing to lose, could at this level rival and sur­pass the com­mu­nist organizations.

This is what Trot­sky­ist and anar­chist orga­ni­za­tions, which out­bid the demands posed by unions as well as their forms of strug­gle, often do.

Thus appears an entire hier­ar­chi­cal lad­der of polit­i­cal and demand-centered strug­gles. The Syn­di­cat Chré­tien or FP ask for a 10 franc raise, in propos­ing one day of strike. The CGT will demand 20 francs and two days of strikes; the Trot­sky­ists and anar­chists demand a 1,000 franc raise and an unlim­ited strike.

The path that leads from a sim­ple eco­nomic demand to a polit­i­cal demand or action is tor­tu­ous. Some will tie the demands to the ques­tion of Ger­man rear­ma­ment; for oth­ers, the demands will be tied to the destruc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem and the seizure of polit­i­cal power by the work­ing class.

For both, there exist two issues. The first is the imme­di­ate demands of the work­ers, that of the spon­ta­neous action of the work­ers, of the class strug­gle at its most basic state; the other is the seizure of polit­i­cal power. The con­nec­tion between these two con­cerns can be boiled down like this: “if you help us take polit­i­cal power, you will no longer have to strug­gle for your imme­di­ate demands: we will give them to you.”

This pro­pa­ganda tends to pro­pose a sort of deal to the work­ing class to show it that in every sit­u­a­tion it has the most to gain by vot­ing for this party, and to put this party in power or to make a Rev­o­lu­tion that demands a 10-franc hourly raise every six months.

In fact, this pol­icy con­sists either in show­ing that the work­ing class takes the wrong road when it demands or defends itself in this way, or that it does not demand enough and that in ask­ing for more it will be able to suc­ceed lit­tle by lit­tle in pro­vok­ing crises and pre­cip­i­tat­ing the con­tra­dic­tions of the regime and will, in this way, oppose itself more and more to the sys­tem itself.

But for all these orga­ni­za­tions the work­ers’ strug­gle is con­sid­ered an acces­sory, some­thing sec­ondary, a means to real­iz­ing a final end.

The work­ers’ paper belongs to a dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion. This con­cep­tion is that the most ele­men­tary class strug­gle con­tains within itself the fun­da­men­tal ele­ments for the destruc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem and for the estab­lish­ment of social­ism. And these are the ele­ments that the paper must find and develop. For it, there is a deep con­nec­tion between the rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­cep­tions of social­ism and the every­day class struggle.

We don’t at all want to say that every class strug­gle poses in its entirety the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of the destruc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem and the estab­lish­ment of social­ism. Every class strug­gle car­ries the trace of bour­geois or Stal­in­ist ide­o­log­i­cal influ­ences. And it’s first of all these influ­ences that the paper must expel from the class strug­gle. But this can­not be done by enlarg­ing the scope of the strug­gle like the Trot­sky­ists or the anar­chists do, but in dis­cov­er­ing the real objec­tives of this strug­gle. Thus, for exam­ple, for the strike of 28 April 1954, the Trot­sky­ists and the anar­chists launched the idea of an unlim­ited strike – with­out con­cern­ing them­selves with the demand itself. In con­trast, we iden­ti­fied the false mean­ing of the demand, which had been hier­ar­chized. This had a deeper polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance than out­do­ing a move­ment that only rested on a tac­ti­cal objec­tive and which had a false base from the start.

How­ever, the paper could nei­ther address all the fun­da­men­tal issues nor pro­vide an auto­matic con­clu­sion to every issue. The expe­ri­ence of the work­ing class is often a par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence; the role of the paper will be to start with these par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ences in order to pull gen­eral con­clu­sions from them - this is not to say that these gen­eral con­clu­sions are always possible.

The paper will also have to com­bat bour­geois or Stal­in­ist con­cep­tions. In order to do this, it will some­times have to dis­cuss in gen­eral and abstract terms, but will try to recon­nect, as much as pos­si­ble, these issues to the liv­ing expe­ri­ence of the workers.

Every­thing we have just said about the con­tent of the paper cor­re­sponds to a cer­tain ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion. This is unde­ni­able and it would be hyp­o­crit­i­cal to want to present the work­ers’ paper as a paper that does not fol­low any course of action, guided sim­ply by “what the work­ers want and think.”

A paper with­out a direct­ing line would auto­mat­i­cally be con­tra­dic­tory paper which, sooner or later, will fall under the influ­ence of the most wiley polit­i­cal ele­ments. The paper has a line. It’s the dis­cus­sion and inter­ac­tion of the work­ers, but it is only the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants who have under­stood the great mean­ing of this dis­cus­sion, and of the par­tic­i­pa­tion of work­ers in polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and social issues, who can pre­vent the stran­gu­la­tion of this dis­cus­sion by crafty politicians.

The role of rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant in the paper is not lim­ited to that. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant is not a spec­ta­tor who watches the clash­ing of work­ers in a dis­cus­sion, or who gath­ers, like a col­lec­tor, the reflec­tions of the work­ing class. He is a defender of this dis­cus­sion, but also a par­tic­i­pant. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant will aim to deepen and develop the dis­cus­sion, which will become a dia­logue between work­ers and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant will try to make his ide­ol­ogy tri­umph but, in con­trast to bour­geois and Stal­in­ist politi­cians, he will only use the expe­ri­ence of the work­ers, on the ter­rain of con­crete ques­tions. In this sense, his dia­logue with the work­ers will be a gen­uine dia­logue, and not a monologue.

In this way the paper will avoid the dan­ger of being noth­ing but a con­fronta­tion between polit­i­cal par­ties, and can escape the rut of these par­ties. The role of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant is to help the work­ing class get out of this rut at that will be the direct­ing line of the paper.

In this sense, the sep­a­ra­tion between polit­i­cal arti­cles and “arti­cles that inter­est work­ers” must dis­ap­pear. In bour­geois or Stal­in­ist papers, it is cus­tom­ary to make the polit­i­cal arti­cle eas­ier to swal­low by dilut­ing it with faits divers, with things that hap­pen in every­day society.

In this way the two things are sep­a­rated: the con­crete aspects of life and the abstract aspects, the things “of the peo­ple” and the things “of the politi­cians” or the “ini­ti­ated.” The things that hap­pen every day and which the work­ers can appre­ci­ate are con­sid­ered gos­sip, the gos­sip with which the main­stream media guar­an­tees its success.

The crit­i­cism of the main­stream paper is not that it deals with this every­day life but that it deforms it and that it han­dles it ran­domly, in accor­dance with their moral­ity and ide­ol­ogy. But inas­much as these are the ide­o­log­i­cal con­cerns of the exploit­ing lay­ers who give an inter­pre­ta­tion to real facts, it fol­lows that the facts them­selves undergo a distortion.

Real­ity is also, as a result, unreal, above all dur­ing the peri­ods in which the pro­le­tariat tends to free itself from the dom­i­nant ideologies.

In this way one rep­re­sents abstract men with imag­i­nary feel­ings. The ideal pro­le­tariat – such as it would have to be for a com­mu­nist bureau­crat or for a bour­geois. Thus the com­mu­nist Super­man has more in com­mon with Great Man of His­tory than with the worker-reader that it is sup­posed to represent.

The worker paper will not con­tain these two sep­a­rate ele­ments – the­ory on the one hand and real­ity on the other – not to pan­der to or to have a larger fol­low­ing, but because the prob­lems of every­day life are the essen­tial prob­lems that the work­ing class and its van­guard have to resolve, and because want­ing to limit these con­cerns of the work­ers to “polit­i­cal” aspects of the strug­gle is the inher­i­tance of a false con­cep­tion that only sees in the pro­le­tariat a force likely to back the polit­i­cal party.

The final goal, the solu­tion of all these prob­lems is incon­testably the sup­pres­sion of cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety and its replace­ment by a social­ist society.

The final goal is an abstract solu­tion in the sense that it cor­re­sponds to a purely intel­lec­tual notion. The final goal is the schema, the frame­work that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant has absorbed. But this notion remains abstract up until the moment when the expe­ri­ence of the work­ing class leads it to con­cretize this schema, to blan­ket this frame­work with an entire net­work of prac­ti­cal actions. But before this period, the gap sep­a­rat­ing the real actions of the work­ers and the final goal can­not be resolved through a leap from the actual sit­u­a­tion to an abstract solu­tion. Thus, we have crit­i­cized this way of arti­fi­cially treat­ing every prob­lem, which ends every arti­cle with the neces­sity of mak­ing the social­ist rev­o­lu­tion. In order to remain on a con­crete plane, the paper can­not there­fore jump over this gap arti­fi­cially. If, how­ever, we want to offer a con­clu­sion, a per­spec­tive that could be absorbed, which appears con­crete, we risk falling into cer­tain traps. Sim­ply observ­ing the pos­i­tive role of the bureau­cracy of the fac­tory or of the State, for exam­ple, might lead to the con­clu­sion that sup­press­ing the par­a­sites in the very frame­work of soci­ety would be enough to resolve these problems.

That is where the essen­tial role of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant emerges; if he can­not pro­vide a con­crete con­clu­sion to a prob­lem, he can show that every solu­tion call­ing for the reform of this soci­ety is impos­si­ble. In this sense, the paper becomes the set­ting of a real dia­logue that can con­tinue through sev­eral issues.

Even if the solu­tion to every prob­lem finds itself joined in the destruc­tion of the cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, there are actions, pos­si­bil­i­ties for defense, or of strug­gle against cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety; these strug­gles suc­ceed in devel­op­ing the con­scious­ness of the work­ers, advanc­ing their expe­ri­ence. The mil­i­tants will have to enrich all of these strug­gles with their own expe­ri­ence as the­o­rists, with­out, for all that, say­ing that they can nec­es­sar­ily pro­vide a solu­tion to every problem.

The Work­ers’ Paper in the Present Period

If we pose the prob­lem of the work­ers’ paper today, it’s not solely because this work­ers’ paper fol­lows from our fun­da­men­tal the­o­ret­i­cal con­cep­tions, but also, and above all, because this paper seems real­iz­able in a very con­crete way. It cor­re­sponds to the most appro­pri­ate form of activ­ity in our present period, the form of activ­ity that may be the link [trait d’union] between rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants and the worker van­guard. It is nec­es­sary here to pre­cisely define this period.

In the period that fol­lowed the Lib­er­a­tion, the pro­le­tariat adopted the pol­i­tics of the Stal­in­ist par­ties. The prob­lems that the work­ers posed for them­selves were resolved by the par­ties. Inso­far as the solu­tions pro­posed by the par­ties were only false solu­tions, the adhe­sion of the work­ers to these polit­i­cal forces could not last for long. This is prov­ing to be true more and more clearly today. In this way, we can say that a work­ers’ paper in this period was impos­si­ble in the sense that the pro­le­tariat still put its hopes in the polit­i­cal forces that it fol­lowed. If today, the rela­tion between the work­ers and “their” par­ties has changed, it has not changed in the sense that the Trot­sky­ist orga­ni­za­tions had hoped. The work­ers have not changed their pol­i­tics. They have not changed their ideas on Rus­sia in order to pro­gres­sively con­sti­tute them­selves as a frac­tion, or a party, fur­ther left than the Stal­in­ists, in order finally to bring them­selves closer to the Trot­sky­ist posi­tions, and then the Trot­sky­ists of the Left. This is roughly what the left­ist orga­ni­za­tions had expected would hap­pen over the years, and the major­ity of the strug­gles between these group­ings were based on the tac­tics to adopt in order to form a mass party fur­ther to the Left than the Stal­in­ists. If many work­ers have held onto their hopes about Rus­sia, they have detached them­selves lit­tle by lit­tle from Stal­in­ist pol­i­tics. They have refused to fol­low their watch­words, to union­ize, to read their press, etc.

In this devel­op­ment of the work­ing class one can say that the influ­ence of the social­ist par­ties or the FO unions had no heft since all the pro­pa­ganda and every ide­ol­ogy of these orga­ni­za­tions lim­ited them­selves to an anti-Stalinism that sub­se­quently became their very rai­son d’être.

If the work­ers have bro­ken away from Stal­in­ism after break­ing away from the Social­ist Party, it’s not to go to the Trot­sky­ists, it’s to not do “pol­i­tics”; the work­ers are less and less inter­ested in “politics.”

There, we saw a unan­i­mous reac­tion from all the Left­ist par­ties, from the social­ists to the Trot­sky­ists, who were out­raged by such an atti­tude from the pro­le­tariat. Every­one saw in it a reac­tionary devel­op­ment that could have led to fascism.

For all of these par­ties, the pro­le­tariat is a force that has to be dom­i­nated, canal­ized in its own direc­tion. That the work­ers were mys­ti­fied by Stal­in­ism is only a lesser evil. For oth­ers, it is a ques­tion of find­ing the tac­tic or the method for secur­ing the work­ers through com­pro­mises, alliances, etc.

But the work­ers do not want to let them­selves be canal­ized by any exist­ing orga­ni­za­tion – pre­cisely what makes all these politi­cians shud­der with bitterness.

In con­trast to all these par­ties, we thought that the proletariat’s detach­ment from “pol­i­tics” had a pos­i­tive meaning.

Not only has the pro­le­tariat bro­ken away from the pas­times to which the bour­geois or the Stal­in­ist par­ties tried for year to fas­ten it and which is their own pol­i­tics. But this very deep dis­af­fec­tion does not end in blind con­for­mity to other polit­i­cal par­ties, but in a gen­eral distrust.

In this sense, one can say that the indif­fer­ence of the pro­le­tariat to pol­i­tics is a real­iza­tion that has a polit­i­cal value infi­nitely more pro­found than the dis­cov­ery of the degen­er­a­tion of Russia.

These two char­ac­ter­is­tic traits of the work­ing class today (dis­en­gage­ment from the par­ties and pas­siv­ity) are, it is true, applauded by the bour­geoisie which sees on the one hand a weak­en­ing of a rival power – Russ­ian Stal­in­ism – and on the other hand an ide­o­log­i­cal dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion of the work­ing class. In the past, the work­ers who broke with the par­ties, bypassed these par­ties through their direct action. This was the case with com­mu­nist minori­ties within social democ­racy. If the bour­geoisie delights in the pas­siv­ity of the work­ing class, we can see the dif­fi­cul­ties that this very pas­siv­ity brings about for the devel­op­ment of its own pol­i­tics. Because the dis­af­fec­tion of the work­ers from the Stal­in­ist party is at the same time a very pro­found detach­ment of the work­ing class from the dom­i­nant classes. Thus, for exam­ple, the mobi­liza­tion of the work­ers by the Stal­in­ists for a nation­al­ist demon­stra­tion against Ger­man rear­ma­ment does noth­ing, in real­ity, except rein­force nation­al­ist ide­ol­ogy, even if it finds itself led against the bour­geoisie in a cer­tain period. On the other hand, the refusal of the work­ers to mobi­lize them­selves under the watch­word “against the CED” sig­ni­fies a cer­tain rup­ture with the nation­al­ist ide­ol­ogy, which is to say, bour­geois ide­ol­ogy. This rup­ture has con­se­quences on another plane. When the bour­geoisie will try to recruit the work­ing class to its national ide­ol­ogy, for this Euro­pean army or for the main­tain­ing its dom­i­na­tion in the colonies, it will find itself faced with the very refusal of the work­ers who favored it in the pre­ced­ing case. See­ing the proletariat’s action as pos­i­tive ele­ment in itself, even if this action is com­pletely or in part led towards bour­geois objec­tives amounts to con­sid­er­ing the proletariat’s action, and the pro­le­tariat itself, as an instru­ment merely capa­ble of act­ing, with­out itself deter­min­ing its direc­tion. From such a con­cep­tion flows, for exam­ple, all the Trot­sky­ist pro­pa­ganda, which con­sists of lead­ing every work­ers’ action by sup­port­ing these actions and in try­ing to make them go beyond their frame­work, “in push­ing the movement.”

We think that the pas­siv­ity of the pro­le­tariat is pos­i­tive inso­far as it is a form of dis­en­gage­ment from bour­geois ide­ol­ogy. This is not to say that we wel­come such pas­siv­ity; the pro­le­tariat finds itself in a period where it finds its own route by shrug­ging off bour­geois and Stal­in­ist ide­ol­ogy lit­tle by lit­tle. The work­ers’ paper is pos­si­ble only inso­far as this auton­omy emerges.

The out­line of the present sit­u­a­tion in which work­ers expe­ri­ence devel­ops must how­ever be clarified.

If the work­ing class today has accu­mu­lated a cer­tain “polit­i­cal” expe­ri­ence, it is nec­es­sary to imme­di­ately trace the lim­its of this experience.

The role of the Stal­in­ist party in France was not as deeply advanced as in the coun­tries of “pop­u­lar democ­racy,” the role of the reformist union bureau­cracy is not more devel­oped than in coun­tries like Eng­land or Amer­ica. France remained mid­way between the erst­while forms of cap­i­tal­ist dom­i­na­tion and the new bureau­cratic forms. In this sense, work­ers expe­ri­ence finds itself in a very ambigu­ous sit­u­a­tion and it’s from this sit­u­a­tion that comes the dif­fi­culty of cre­at­ing a work­ers’ paper that can dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself from other polit­i­cal ten­den­cies on every plane. The work­ers’ paper will not only have to strug­gle against the new ten­den­cies of exploita­tion, the bureau­cratic ten­den­cies, it will also have to fight the pre­vi­ous forms and there it will find itself next to the Stal­in­ist or reformist forces from which it will be dif­fi­cult to delimit itself.

The work­ers’ paper will have to fight two forces:

-The power of the tra­di­tional bosses;
-The bureau­cratic forces (reformist or Stalinist);

The great major­ity of French cap­i­tal­ists are com­posed of small, pri­vate own­ers who man­age their firms them­selves. In many fac­to­ries, the unions are prac­ti­cally nonex­is­tent. The trade union mil­i­tant risks get­ting fired, there is no union bureau­cracy. The strug­gle against the employ­ers has held onto these older forms and there the work­ers will even have to aid the unions in mak­ing the bosses respect the law. Next to this, there are large fac­to­ries, pri­vate or nation­al­ized, where the union bureau­cracy played a cer­tain role in the pro­duc­tion appa­ra­tus and where the “mod­ern­ized” forms of dom­i­na­tion have sur­passed the tra­di­tional, vio­lent forms.

In par­al­lel with the diver­sity of the forms of dom­i­na­tion in French cap­i­tal­ism, one finds the diver­sity of forms of resis­tance. The fact the union bureau­cracy has not been able to play its role in France, the fact that Stal­in­ism finds itself in the posi­tion of an oppo­si­tion party, has given to these forces a char­ac­ter which is dif­fer­ent from their true role. Thus, the Stal­in­ist or union forces, instead of demand­ing to man­age soci­ety, con­tent them­selves with tak­ing over, more often than not, a pol­i­tics drawn from the tra­di­tional reformist arse­nal: par­lia­men­tarism, munic­i­pal dis­putes, etc.

In this com­plex sit­u­a­tion, the work­ers’ strug­gle against the small cap­i­tal­ist [petit patron] or the work­ers’ strug­gle against the bait­ing of the fac­tory man­age­ment, could be sup­ported by the Stal­in­ist or reformist unions. The work­ers’ strug­gle against the union bureau­cracy could be sup­ported by the fac­tory man­age­ment. The strug­gle against the reformists could be sup­ported by the Stalinists.

Only in par­tic­u­lar and really char­ac­ter­is­tic cases will the work­ers’ strug­gle against their exploita­tion simul­ta­ne­ously be a strug­gle against the employ­ers and the union bureau­cra­cies; it is over the most fun­da­men­tal issues that this strug­gle will there­fore become a real­ity on the three planes.

From this, it appears with evi­dence that the expe­ri­ence of the French work­ing class with Stal­in­ism and union bureau­cracy is a latent and incom­plete expe­ri­ence, and it’s from this that the prin­ci­pal obsta­cles to the real­iza­tion of a work­ers’ paper will arise.

The Obsta­cles

We will now try to describe the prob­lems we have encoun­tered in our prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence with the work­ers’ paper:

La Tri­bune Ouvrière.

I. The dif­fi­culty in demar­cat­ing our­selves from other forces

a) Strug­gle against the bosses

At an ele­men­tary stage, it we found that our strug­gle against cap­i­tal­ist forms of dom­i­na­tion was iden­ti­cal with that waged by Stalinism.

We can cite a few examples:

-Man­age­ment fires a worker.
-A worker is injured by the lack of proper safety measures.
-Man­age­ment sets up a fundraiser for the direc­tor general’s funeral services.

Faced with these events, what is done?

The work­ers dis­cuss; some are enraged; oth­ers are pas­sive; oth­ers finally accept and, even jus­tify, the con­duct of the management.

The reac­tion of the most con­scious work­ers is to protest these kinds of things. They want to talk, to make oth­ers under­stand, and that is jus­ti­fied. But it is impos­si­ble to talk about these things in a way that is dif­fer­ent from the Stal­in­ists, unless they tie these three events to some polit­i­cal ques­tion. The only way to demar­cate our­selves would be to deepen these facts by return­ing them to the course of his­tory. Tak­ing the third case for exam­ple: “you are out­raged by the fundraiser for the direc­tor, yet in a given year you glo­rify him.” But already the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion seems arti­fi­cial and in bad faith. One can respond that for­merly the com­mu­nist party made mis­takes, etc.

b) The strug­gle against Stalinism

The cap­i­tal­ist in France is anti-Stalinist these days. We have already spo­ken about the anti-Stalinist ten­den­cies rep­re­sented by the FO unions, Chris­t­ian or Gaullist. The neces­sity of dis­tin­guish­ing our­selves is incon­testable, but some­times dif­fi­cult. Examples:

-The CGT demands a moment of silence to com­mem­o­rate the death of Stalin.
-The CGT demands to hold an action to defend a cam­paign against rear­ma­ment or the release of Duclos.
-The CGT calls a warn­ing strike [grève d’avertissement] doomed to fail­ure from the start. The work­ers find them­selves split into two blocs, this split does not often rep­re­sent a delim­i­ta­tion based on posi­tions in the class struggle.

Some work­ers go on strike because, for them, the strike is a way of oppos­ing their exploita­tion: “Every­thing that is against the boss is for the worker.” Oth­ers, on the other hand, don’t go on strike, even if they still share Stal­in­ist ideas about Rus­sia, because the strike requires effort, sac­ri­fice, a risk they are not will­ing take, because they are afraid of the super­vi­sors, because they want to ingra­ti­ate them­selves with the man­age­ment. When a split hap­pens in this way, one is right to affirm that such a split, despite its false polit­i­cal char­ac­ter, cor­re­sponds in real­ity to a split on the level of the class, a split between the brawlers and the cowards.

But in most cases the divi­sion is far more com­pli­cated. Take for exam­ple the strike of April 28, 1954. Many work­ers really saw the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of the move­ment and the impos­si­bil­ity of its suc­cess. Oth­ers refused to go on strike to show that they no longer wanted to fol­low a union that had betrayed them. The refusal to strike was the refusal to fol­low the union lead­er­ship. Still oth­ers did not want to go on strike in order to get back at the unions that had led them, in cer­tain peri­ods, almost by force, into move­ments which they dis­ap­proved of. What posi­tion to adopt under these cir­cum­stances? Any posi­tion could be ambigu­ous. To go on strike is to leave your­self open to reproach for being a tool of the union; not going on strike is open your­self up to reproach that you defend the boss. How to avoid this ambiva­lence? We solved the ques­tion in the fol­low­ing way. We denounced the strike to all those who asked for our opin­ion, adding, how­ever, that we didn’t want to be scabs, and that we would fol­low the major­ity, while affirm­ing that those who refused to par­tic­i­pate in this strike were not nec­es­sar­ily cow­ards. We adopted a very ambigu­ous posi­tion by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the movement.

c) The strug­gle against the reformist unions

-The reformist unions agree to par­tic­i­pate in the funeral ser­vices of the fac­tory director.
-The reformist unions put together a fundraiser with the man­age­ment to help out victims.

In our crit­i­cism we find our­selves side by side with the Stalinists.

Faced with such prob­lems, the work­ers’ paper find itself before an alternative:

-either to deal with these events and to risk per­haps adding to the confusion.
-or to keep quiet about these events because they do not suf­fi­ciently per­mit us to dis­tin­guish the paper.

To not stand up to a provo­ca­tion by the man­age­ment under the pre­text that it would be impos­si­ble for us to do so with­out being able to dis­tin­guish our­selves from anti-worker forces would be the very nega­tion of a paper that must han­dle the prob­lems that con­cern the work­ers, and which must, on the other hand, cover the prob­lems that appear at the level of work­ers’ experience.

Want­ing to arti­fi­cially down­play cer­tain prob­lems under the pre­text that they are tend­ing to dis­ap­pear – the strug­gle against the pri­vate employer, for exam­ple – would be the proof of an absurd sectarianism.

We must respond to the real prob­lems that the work­ing class con­fronts every day. If his­tory were cut up into dis­tinct slices, if the world evolved accord­ing to the sin­gle rhythm, if the devel­op­ment of soci­ety were every­where uni­form, such prob­lems would not pose them­selves: but the fact that some prob­lems are fated to dis­ap­pear does not at all mean that they have dis­ap­peared, and that is why we must still respond to them.

In cer­tain peri­ods one risks, there­fore, in cre­at­ing a work­ers’ paper that will be orig­i­nal solely because its arti­cles will be finely tuned, and because it will simul­ta­ne­ously crit­i­cize the three ten­den­cies: cap­i­tal­ist, reformist, and Stalinist.

Pre­tend­ing that a work­ers’ paper can only exist when it will be able dis­tin­guish itself on every ques­tion, that one will only be able to pose the prob­lem of the work­ers’ paper in period that will have per­mit­ted the work­ing class to have acquired a far more advanced expe­ri­ence is an absur­dity; because, this period will be the period of the total­i­tar­ian dom­i­na­tion of the bureau­cracy. Then the prob­lem of the work­ers’ paper will have been bypassed, it will be unre­al­iz­able and the work­ing class will have to find other forms expression.

II. Dif­fi­cul­ties due to the pas­siv­ity of the work­ing class

The work­ing class’s rup­ture with the tra­di­tional polit­i­cal forces is not accom­pa­nied by an autonomous activ­ity; it appears that the expe­ri­ence of the work­ers in polit­i­cal par­ties or unions has worn out their desire to revolt, their need for activ­ity. And that is pre­cisely one of the obsta­cles to the appear­ance of an activ­ity as sim­ple as the edit­ing, dif­fu­sion, and financ­ing of a work­ers’ paper.

In a sit­u­a­tion of acute cri­sis between the man­age­ment and the work­ers, or between the union bureau­cracy and the work­ers, the prob­lem of the work­ers’ paper is easy to solve; when some­thing has aroused the anger or indig­na­tion of the work­ers, when the divi­sion of the work­ers expresses itself through dis­cus­sions and show­ing matches, when they form two camps – those who approve, those who crit­i­cize – the rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tant only has to gather these polemics, to arrange the argu­ments, and the arti­cle is writ­ten. It will inter­est, it will cor­re­spond to an effort by the van­guard work­ers to resolve the problem.

But it’s not always like this. The antag­o­nism between the work­ers and the machine, between the work­ers and sys­tem of man­age­ment, does not always arouse a vio­lent oppo­si­tion: this antag­o­nism is like a wound that heals itself dur­ing cer­tain peri­ods. The role of the paper is not to arti­fi­cially open these wounds – it more­over does not have the power to do that; the antag­o­nism can only be born from the events them­selves. The paper can, at most, only give an expla­na­tion, try to express, and ori­ent this class antagonism.

In these peri­ods the work­ers will not expe­ri­ence the need to express them­selves and the work­ers’ paper will fall again unto a nucleus of the most con­scious, most politi­cized work­ers, but who will have the ten­dency to express their own polit­i­cal or the­o­ret­i­cal prob­lems. The work­ers’ paper will there­fore have a ten­dency to fall back into the same rut as the other papers. It will lose its inter­est, the prob­lems treated will not cor­re­spond to the con­cerns of the work­ers. The work­ers will place their trust in their com­rades, des­ig­nat­ing them to speak, to write, to think, in their place. One there­fore sees the dan­ger in such an atti­tude, which could lead the work­ers who have the trust of oth­ers to express, in turn, their per­sonal ideas, with­out relat­ing to the prob­lems of workers.

The other dan­ger is of cre­at­ing a lead­er­ship of the paper that is more and more sep­a­rated from the other work­ers; that the pas­siv­ity of some leads to a cer­tain habit by the lead­ers to decide in their place.

III. Dif­fi­cul­ties due to the oppo­si­tion of workers

We started by affirm­ing that the paper will have to reflect the level of expe­ri­ence of the work­ers. But two dif­fi­cul­ties result:

-First is to deter­mine this level;
-The sec­ond is to respond to the prob­lems that the work­ers pose at this level.

We have said that the prob­lems which inter­est the work­ers are essen­tial prob­lems that must be resolved. This is true, but it is nec­es­sary, how­ever, to add a few restric­tions to this idea – two orders of restric­tion. The influ­ence of bour­geois of Stal­in­ist ide­ol­ogy on the work­ing class: the dis­cus­sion around the elec­tion of Mendès-France for exam­ple. When the major­ity of work­ers, at the moment, still end up influ­enced by a wave of chau­vin­ism, it is obvi­ous that if we address these prob­lems, we will be in oppo­si­tion to the major­ity of workers.

At another order of ideas, one finds the prob­lems that divide the work­ers in two; for exam­ple, one worker wants to write an arti­cle that crit­i­cizes the divi­sion of labor and hier­ar­chy, but this cri­tique is solely made against his own com­rades; he shifts the blame for his con­di­tion onto his com­rades. Such a prob­lem is dealt with in a way that agrees with the man­age­ment, and it is impos­si­ble to accept it.

Thus, in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, one finds one­self before the fol­low­ing dilemma: either accept reac­tionary cur­rents in the pages of the paper, or oppose one­self to the major­ity of work­ers. It goes with­out say­ing that on this plane we have always cho­sen the sec­ond solution.

We some­times also find our­selves before the impos­si­bil­ity of respond­ing to cer­tain prob­lems. Faced with this impos­si­bil­ity, the edi­tors will have the ten­dency to replace solu­tions with dem­a­gogic arti­cles that suc­cumb to the crit­i­cism we made above about union or polit­i­cal papers. We will pro­pose a demand that will receive the approval of the work­ers, but will remain a pious vow; or else we will hurl insults towards super­vi­sors, man­age­ment, or the government.

IV. Dif­fi­cul­ties due to the enlarge­ment of the paper

The level of work­ers’ expe­ri­ence is not the same every­where; it dif­fers with pro­fes­sion, indus­trial sec­tor, cor­po­rate tra­di­tion, geo­graphic milieu. It also dif­fers for rea­sons accord­ing to the very nature of the problems.

It suf­fices for all that to refer to the polemics on the union ques­tion in order to to observe the diver­sity of prob­lems. Thus, an arti­cle con­cern­ing the O.S. on the assem­bly line at Renault will not nec­es­sar­ily inter­est, or respond to, the prob­lems of the worker of Toulouse fac­tory. The devel­op­ment of such a paper can there­fore only hap­pen in the oppo­site way of other papers; this devel­op­ment will be con­di­tioned by the growth in the num­ber of its par­tic­i­pants and edi­tors. A dilemma poses itself here, which can be dis­tilled as fol­lows: the paper must inter­est the work­ers so that they will par­tic­i­pate in it and express their own expe­ri­ence, but these work­ers will only be inter­ested in the paper if they find in it the prob­lems that them­selves deal with the expe­ri­ence that they have lived.

V. Dif­fi­cul­ties of form

Pol­i­tics, like jour­nal­ism, tends to breaks itself away from social real­ity, to become a par­tic­u­lar sci­ence. In this way, polit­i­cal and jour­nal­is­tic lan­guage tends to sep­a­rate itself from real language.

One must not think that the work­ers, when they want to express them­selves, draft an arti­cle that is free from these lit­er­ary prej­u­dices. It enters into spo­ken habits in one way and writ­ten ones in another. There­fore the arti­cles writ­ten by the work­ers are quite often stamped by this jour­nal­is­tic form, full of clichés, ready­made and inex­act for­mu­las. The work­ers most fit to write are pre­cisely those who have been most sub­jected to this jour­nal­ist influ­ence and who, ini­ti­ated into these mys­ter­ies, think they must only express them­selves in an equally tor­tu­ous way or with the help of expres­sions that are quite often incom­pre­hen­si­ble to the major­ity of work­ers. The paper’s task is there­fore also to free the work­ers from lit­er­ary prej­u­dices, to encour­age them to express them­selves in a fash­ion as sim­ple as their nat­ural form of spo­ken expres­sion. The allu­sions, images, ref­er­ences, com­par­isons can only be bor­rowed from of daily pro­le­tar­ian life. In this sense the most capa­ble of writ­ing will be both the most con­scious work­ers, the most cul­ti­vated, but also those who will be the most dis­en­cum­bered by bour­geois or Stal­in­ist ide­o­log­i­cal influence.

Con­clu­sion

We have devel­oped sev­eral fun­da­men­tal ideas on the work­ers’ paper, on what it must be. We have exam­ined the prin­ci­ple obsta­cles that a paper of this type encoun­ters. In accor­dance with all of this one ques­tion poses itself:

Is a work­ers’ paper pos­si­ble today?

Pro­duc­ing a work­ers’ paper today entails a series of disadvantages.

In those peri­ods when the paper will not respond to the needs of the work­ers it risks becom­ing a paper with­out inter­est. A paper that will have no echoes among the work­ing class could dis­cour­age the few worker mil­i­tants who devote them­selves to it, los­ing them for good. But can we give up on the paper after hav­ing made it, after hav­ing earned the sup­port of the work­ers, let­ting go of it solely because dur­ing six months or more the work­ers seemed dis­in­ter­ested in it?

Can one think that the com­bat­iv­ity of the work­ers grows in a con­tin­ual way, that there aren’t peri­ods of calm and dis­cour­age­ment, even when the work­ing class pro­gresses in its experience?

In any event, in the peri­ods of work­ing class com­bat­iv­ity, can one think of mak­ing a paper from scratch, with such a for­mula, the day after tomor­row. Can one believe that, because the work­ers will have under­stood the role of Stal­in­ism and unions, they will spon­ta­neously be led to write for a paper that we put at their ser­vice? Will they not be sus­pi­cious of us as well? Would it not be bet­ter that the paper exist dur­ing the peri­ods that fol­low and pre­cede these moments?

Must we not pre­pare the most expe­ri­enced and most con­scious work­ers to become the cadres of this paper?

An inter­mit­tent paper is unthink­able and unrealizable.

What bal­ance sheet can we draw up of this expe­ri­ence that has lasted less than one year?

Despite the errors we have made with the paper, it appears that we have accom­plished our objec­tive on the four most impor­tant points.

1. The work­ers – more than fif­teen – have par­tic­i­pated in and writ­ten for this paper – the major­ity among them hav­ing never writ­ten before.

2. The sub­jects of the paper are the prob­lems of the fac­tory and the prob­lems picked up by the work­ers, and no longer the prob­lems of the bour­geoisie treated by the usual papers.

3. The paper in large part no longer com­prises only insid­ers, but even the least cul­ti­vated and least politi­cized workers.

4. The paper has sparked lively dis­cus­sions in the workshops.

We believe that this bal­ance sheet is pos­i­tive and that it allows us to con­clude that this paper must be con­tin­ued, enriched, devel­oped. But this does not only depend on us; it depends on the work­ers who are inter­ested in it.

Image thanks to Pierre J.

Daniel Mothé was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Originally posted: September 26, 2014 at Viewpoint

• 1It is quite obvi­ous that these two processes have been reduced here to a schema; in real­ity there exists nei­ther one nor the other as pure state. In the for­ma­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary mil­i­tants there is always a dimen­sion of prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence, and in the for­ma­tion of van­guard work­ers there exists a dimen­sion of intel­lec­tual for­ma­tion.

As it forces the matter of the political form of the people, the Paris Commune serves as a key reference point in Marxist discussions of the state. What form does the people’s self-government take? Insofar as the people precede the state, analysis of the Commune event necessarily opens up to the people’s subjectification and to the political process of which the people are the subject. And insofar as the people politicized are people divided, a part of a constitutively open and incomplete set, the place from which the people are understood is necessarily partisan. The question of the party precedes the question of the state. Until we pose the party as a possibility, discussions of the state—of whether or not we should target or seize the state—are nothing more than fantasies that cloak failure as a choice: it’s not that we couldn’t take power; we just didn’t want to.

Crowd and People

A feature of every discussion of the Paris Commune is the crowd, the people, the working class, the shocking presence of those who have been excluded from politics now in its place and the confounding of politics that results. In the Commune event, crowd and Commune overlap in an expression of the desire of the people. Interpretations of the Commune read this desire, making claims about who the people are and what it is that they want.

It’s not quite right to say that what the people wanted was the Commune: prior to March 18, 1871 clubs and associations throughout Paris had repeatedly called for elections to a new Commune. People had rioted. But the protests and dissent hadn’t yet broken the connection with the National Government. That didn’t happen until the National Government attempted to disarm the Paris National Guard and the crowd emerged to stop it. In the wake of this rupture, advocates for a new municipal government, a Commune, present the Commune as answer and object, answer to the question of the political form for Paris (and perhaps all of France) and object of the desire of the people. The people are an effect of the positing of the object of their desire. They don’t precede it. What precedes it is the crowd.

After March 18th, there would be argument over who the Commune is—the working class in power?—and what it wants, but no one will dispute the fact that the situation had turned on the actuality of an insistence and a desire. The crowd forced an opening, an interruption that changed the political setting. It ruptured suppositions of order, inciting thereby attempts to expand, enclose, and target the unleashed intensities in one direction rather than another.

That the March 18th crowd event was followed by the Commune does not mean that the crowd created the Commune or that the Commune was an expression of the constituent power of the people expressed by the crowd. The Commune form preceded the event. It was an already existent political possibility, attempted yet thwarted in revolts in October and January.1 Throughout the fall and winter of 1870-1871, militants organized as vigilance committees in the districts of Paris collected and distributed information, debated proposals, and planned demonstrations. Yet when in their attempts to establish the Commune they pushed for revolt, the people weren’t with them. In the elections following the October 31st march on the Hotel de Ville, over 322,000 Parisians voted in support of the National Government. 54,000 voted against.2 In January, only a few hundred people responded to the “red poster” calling for insurrection that was distributed by the delegation of the Twenty Districts, which “saw itself as the Commune to be constituted.”3 Later that month, even as thousands were dying from the Prussian siege, only a few insurgents showed up for a new insurrection planned for January 22. The insurrection was brutally suppressed, and the National Government cracked down on clubs, public meetings, and newspapers. The national elections held in February, however, made it clear that while the majority of the French countryside supported monarchy, the cities favored a republic. Resulting anxiety over the restoration of a monarchy, the convening of the National Assembly in Bordeaux, the Assembly’s failure to pay the National Guard in Paris, and the exodus of the bourgeoisie, not to mention the ongoing destitution of the people because of the siege, produced conditions more auspicious for an uprising. The previous efforts on behalf of the Commune established in advance the idea of what an uprising would produce even as they couldn’t in themselves produce it. Commune could name a division, “the direct antithesis to the empire,” in Marx’s words.4 Yet until the crowd created the opening for it, it was just this “vague aspiration” denoting a fundamental opposition. As antithesis and aspiration, the Commune form preceded its arrival.

The struggle for the Commune was also a struggle over its meaning. It has been offered as a figure for republicanism, patriotic nationalism, federalism, centralism, communism, socialism, anarchism, even secessionism. Marx views the multiplicity of its interpretations, “and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor,” as indicative of the thorough expansiveness of the Commune form.5 This same excess can also be read as a lack, as the gap of the political. For example, although Charles Beslay’s opening speech depicted the Commune as a municipal government concentrating on local matters, its decrees quickly encompassed national affairs. As Prosper Olivier Lissagaray observes in his definitive account, it was, “Commune in the morning, Constituent Assembly in the evening.”6 Contention over the political form of the Commune is inseparable from, indicative of, the Commune event.7

Consider reception of the Commune in the United States. It was configured through the politics of Reconstruction.8 Some in the North saw Paris as wrongfully seceding from France, just as the Southern states wrongly left the Union. Commune and Confederacy both rejected legitimate centralized government. Others in the North, increasingly mistrustful of popular sovereignty, used the Commune as an emblem of the failure of Reconstruction. An editor of the Nation railed against the “Socialism in South Carolina” that came from “allowing incompetent black men to govern and vote.”9 As he saw it, neither Paris nor the South had the political capacity to govern itself. Some Southerners embraced the parallel between Paris and the Confederacy, particularly the revolt against a repressive governmental authority. Weirdly, a former vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who became a member of Congress from Georgia after the war, identified himself as a communist in 1880. For Stephens, to be a communist means to favor home rule, the sovereignty of the local government.10. He explicitly rejects the abolition of private property, capturing communist desire in a racist ressentiment that substitutes for and attempts to displace class struggle.

Marx suggests that the Paris Commune provided a glimpse of a solution to the problem of the political form of the people. While all previous forms of government had been repressive, the Commune was a “thoroughly expansive political form.”11. Marx’s rhetoric is stirring, polemically suited to struggle over the meaning of the Commune. “Commune” named an aspiration and antagonism; it designated the alternative to the empire. Within the ongoing struggle over the positive realization of that alternative, Marx prioritizes one among the multiple interests that could see itself in the Commune form, presenting the Commune “essentially” as the political form “under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” Analytically, Marx’s account is less satisfying insofar as it is equates proletarian self-government with a federal system composed of local communes, district assemblies (composed of delegates elected from the communes), and a National Delegation of deputies sent from these assemblies to Paris. That this arrangement presented itself does not make it uniquely suited for the emancipation of labor (distributed and federal political arrangements have served bourgeois and imperial power quite well). It was the break, the disruption, and the positing of a new arrangement for governance that matters. Moreover, Marx himself acknowledges that in Commune’s governing schema rural producers were brought under the lead of the towns; it didn’t eliminate repression. To the extent that Commune names a governing body, apparatus, or schema, one containing an arrangement of offices, the rules for their maintenance and distribution, as well as of a set of dictates connecting this arrangement to the people it would govern, Commune institutionalizes some possibilities and excludes others. Marx treats the coherence it inscribed as a partisan subjectification, an event in the political expression of the working class.

In the different accounts of the Paris Commune, the referent of “Commune” is unstable. It shifts from all of Paris, to the people of Paris who voted representatives to the Commune, to the working class, to those elected to the Commune, to those who served in it, even to particular sets of voices in the Council. While a politics can and should be traced in these shifts, for this movement is nothing but the expression and enclosure of a political subject, we might also note that the fact of shifting indexes an irreducible feature of the people as non-all, non-totalizable, and never fully present to itself. It is only present as few, some, or many. The substitutionism about which Trotsky warned is not a danger particular to communist or working class parties. It’s an unavoidable condition of any popular politics with emancipatory egalitarian ends. Neither people nor class (nor movement or mass) exists as a unity; every attempt to invoke, create, or speak in behalf of such a unity comes up against an ineliminable, constitutive, division.

Instead of solving a political problem, the Commune poses one: the sovereignty of the people. Is it possible and what forms can it take? The non-all character of the people has been a consistent sticking point in democratic theory. If the people are not a unity, how can they rule themselves? How can they speak or legislate? And how do we know? The theoretical discussions take place under various headings—foundings, constituent power, and the possibility of bringing something new into being. Taking the place of the mythic social contract, the power of the people to make their own history comes up against its grounding in what cannot be other than a crime against the prior order. Marxist theory makes the prior order itself the crime. The revolutionary class gives its ideas “the form of universality” and represents these ideas “as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Marx explains, “The class making revolution emerges at the outset simply because it is opposed to a class not as a class but as a representative of the whole of society.”12 This is the sense in which class struggle is a political struggle. Rather than determined within the economic conditions in which class confronts class as two distinct forces with particular interests, the class making revolution represents its interests as general over and against the particular will of the oppressing class. More precisely, class partisans and allies struggle to present the real of the crowd’s destructive interruption as expressions of the desire of the people.

Marx premises the revolutionary break within existing conditions of production; nevertheless, Marxist theory doesn’t escape the problem of the people. Whether as the limits of working class struggle in trade union consciousness, the failure of the masses to revolt, or the betrayal of elitist, authoritarian vanguard parties, Marxist theory and communist movement run up against the disorganized, disagreeable, divided people. The people resist and evade the very forms on which their political subjectivity depends. When it appears, which isn’t often, the movement for the majority isn’t necessarily in the immediate interest of the majority. Since they can never be fully present, no revolution or revolutionary movement can actually be that of the people. It will always entail the imposition of the ideas of some upon the many.

The Commune gives form to the break with the National Government effected by the crowd even as the people’s elusive desire propels a new subjective process, that is to say, a process of inserting the people into history as an active subject and re-reading history in terms of the actions of this subject.13 Interpretations of the Commune thus grapple with how to understand the power of the people. Marx suggests as much in the letter to Kugelmann that Lenin cites in The State and Revolution: heroic party comrades in Paris are attempting “real people’s revolution.”14The multiple, opposing treatments of the Commune are not just indications of an expansive political form. That is to say, they are not simply reflections of specific features of institutional design. Rather, they underscore the irreducibility of the gap between the people and their political forms, the gap constitutive of the people’s subjectivity. Badiou writes, “The subject glides between the successive partial representations of that whose radical lack institutes it as articulated desire.”15 Badiou is glossing Lacan. What I find suggestive is the possibility of seeing in the partial representations of the Commune traces of the people as a political subject. The point here is not to celebrate multiplicity or indeterminacy. It is to see in the overlap of the Commune form and the crowd event the specificity of an emancipatory egalitarian politics. Because it is a form for the expression of the people’s desire the Commune is necessarily lacking.

Subjectivization and Subjective Process

In Theory of the Subject, a book that grew out of a seminar given from 1975 to 1979, Alain Badiou says that the Marxist tradition has given us two assessments of the Paris Commune. The first, from Marx, objectively considers the Commune in terms of the political goals of the working class with regard to the state. The proletariat has to smash the old state machinery and build new organs of political power. It has to take a place and exert force. How exactly force is concentrated, Marx neglects to explain. The second assessment of the Commune, from Lenin, takes up this concentration. Lenin brings out the subjective aspect of force. Reading What is to Be Done? for its “silent assessment” of the Commune, Badiou tells us that Lenin draws four consequences from the Commune’s defeat: “it is necessary to practice Marxist politics, and not some local romantic revolt”; “it is necessary to have some overall view of things … and not be fragmented into the federalism of struggles”; “it is necessary to forge an alliance with the rural masses”; and, “it is necessary to break the counter-revolution through an uninterrupted, militarily offensive, centralized process.”16 Lenin conceives the party by inferring a certain kind of subjective force from the Commune. In other words, he reads the Commune as an effect or consequence of a political subject and builds his idea of the party from this reading. The party is an “operator of concentration” of the four consequences, “the system of practical possibility for the assessment of the Commune.” The party provides the vehicle enabling assessment of the Commune even as it is an effect of this very assessment. Or, the place from which the Commune is assessed itself results from the Commune.

Badiou uses Lacan’s notion of the real to express the function of the Commune for Marxists. More than an historical event or political institution, the Commune serves as a concept that enables us “to think the relation of the political subject to the real.” Badiou writes, “The Marxist status of the revolutions is their having-taken-place, which is the real on the basis of which a political subject pronounces itself in the present.” The crowd rupture can be the exciting cause of a political subject, but its pronouncement or appearance as such a cause is a separate, analytically distinct, move. The crowd rupture has to be politicized, tied to a subject. The crowd provides a material opportunity for the expression of a political subject, a moment that has happened and the happening of which can be attributed to the workings of this political subject.

That’s not all. The political subject is more than the combination of event and interpretation. Badiou demonstrates that the Marxist approach remains incomplete. How event and interpretation are combined matters if an event is to be the cause of a subject. The real of the Commune event consisted in its rupture with the state, both the official state and the Marxist conception of the state. Confronted with the event, Marx was surprised. He had to change his thinking. Badiou writes, “It is by putting into effect a point of the impossible in this theory that it reveals its status as real, so that Marx, who logically disapproves of the triggering of the insurrection can only encounter in it the vanishing Parisian masses. Whence the obligation, to which he remains faithful, of being wholly on the side of that of which he disapproves in theory, so as to find the new and retroactive concept of his practical approval.”17 The people as a collective subject appeared through the disruption of the crowd insofar as there was something about the insurrection that was unimaginable prior to its enactment. The impossible happened, compelling Marx to take a stand: whose side was he on? Here was the unpredictability of an exciting cause, the people forcing a change of theory and practice. Riotous crowd, available political form, force of the impossible: the political subject impresses itself at the effervescent site of their convergence. Marx responds to this appearance of the people with fidelity. As he says in his letter to Kugelmann, no matter the Commune’s multiple tactical and policy errors, “the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris.”18.

Marx nevertheless criticizes the Commune in this same letter. After praising the elasticity, historical initiative, and sacrifice of the Parisians, he chides them, first, for missing the right moment when they failed to march on Versailles. He faults them, second, for eliminating the Central Committee of the National Guard and holding elections to institute the Commune.

The order Marx lists his criticisms is odd, seemingly backwards in that the first is a consequence of the second; the second happened first. Badiou, drawing from Lacan’s discussion of anticipation and certainty in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” explains why it is not. Marx is using Versailles’s reaction (or what he imagines Versailles’s reaction would have been) to register the Commune event. Versailles’s reaction validates the hasty or anticipatory move that created the Commune. A subject had acted and Versailles had no choice but to respond. Badiou writes:

Marx judges the Commune to be precipitated—subjectivizing in its political haste—and blames it for not marching onto Versailles. But this is in order to indicate retroactively the nature of the certainty (of victory) of which this haste itself could be the bearer, insofar as it could be deciphered in the other: in the initial disorder and surprise of the inhabitants of Versailles, and in the possibility of changing the lack into reason by a second haste, that of the military offensive against Versailles. The latter would then be finally caught up in the subjective process, that is to say, in a consequent political direction, which is the only validation of the vanishing algebra of the Parisian masses into a consistent subject.

In subjectivization, certainty is anticipated.

In the subjective process, consistency is retroactive.

To put into consistency the haste of the cause: therein lies the whole enigma of the subject.19

Understanding an event as the effect of a political subject the political subject requires conjoining two operations: subjectivization and the subjective process. We will win. We will be shown to have been right. The certainty of the political subject is too soon, an anticipation of results it cannot guarantee but pursues nonetheless. Precipitous certainty, we might say, is another term for political will. Rather than an amorphous combination of multiple possibilities, which is just a description of a manifold, the subject is a direction that cuts through this manifold. The other provides evidence of this direction. The response of the other, its disorder and surprise, indicates the presence of a subject. The other’s response reads the disorder as an effect of a subject, attributing to this subject a consistency of action, purpose, and will. That the other can do nothing but respond, that it cannot proceed as it had, that it pushed, affected, is the work of the subject.

Each operation, subjectivization and subjective process, involves political struggle. Militants, organizers, agitators, and vanguards try to set things in motion. They produce actions. They try to bring people out, get them to feel their collective power, and incite them to use it. They are alert to possibilities, to protests that may become ruptures. And, consequent to the gap of a disruption, militants, organizers, agitators, and vanguards work to render the disruption as an effect of a subject. They fight on the terrain of the other, endeavoring to insure that the gap remains and to give this gap meaning and direction, to make it consistent. Enemies fight back. They may deny that a disruption occurred: nothing significant happened; the demonstration or event was within the field demarcated by capital and state, part of business as usual, an expected and permitted protest, child-friendly and within the demarcated free-speech zone. They may deny that the disruption was the effect of a subject: it was hooligans; it was a motley and contingent array of disparate voices (here empirical sociological data that identifies and fragments crowd elements comes in handy). They may attribute the disruption to the wrong subject, another state, class, or agency. For the militants, organizers, agitators, and vanguards, establishing the collectivity as the subject of a politics, inscribing it in a process and rendering it consistent, politicizes the rupture.

Subjectification and the subjective process are connected by an anticipation and a lag. To disrupt and surprise, subjectification has to come too soon. It can’t be predicted, expected, or natural, for that would mean that it remained within the order of things. Rather than the advent of a new subject, “it” wouldn’t have appeared at all. Correlative to anticipation is a lag, a gap between a move that may or may not disrupt and the disruption as it registers in the other. The lag means that effects seem to precede their causes; only after an effect registers is its cause brought into consistency with it.

Badiou associates four “categories of the subject-effect” with subjectification and the subjective process. Anxiety and courage respond to the gap of anticipation. The former wants to fill in the void in the old order, to restore things to their proper place, to put the law back where it belongs. The latter wants to extend the hole, to force it forward in the direction of justice. Courage leaves behind (and no longer feels) the former sense of proper place. It looks ahead to the building of something new. Correlative to anxiety and courage, then, are super-ego and justice, which are themselves effects of the subjective process, reactions to the rupture of anticipation.

That perspective which gives body to the political subject is the party. Marx describes the Commune as a glorious achievement of “our party.” This is not a descriptive empirical claim regarding membership in a political organization. It is the point from which he responds to the subjectification effected by the Commune event, positioning it within a process oriented to justice.

Politicizing the people

Thirty years subsequent to his analysis of Commune, subject, and party, Badiou revises his analysis. In an essay included in The Communist Hypothesis (a slightly revised version of material presented in The Logics of Worlds), Badiou presents the Marxist discussion of the Commune in terms of the state. Rather than reading the party as the subject support of a politics, he figures it as the realization of the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the Commune.20 On the one hand, the Commune is a clear advance in proletarian struggle insofar as it smashes the machinery of the state. On the other, it ultimately fails because it smashed the machinery of the state—it’s unorganized, incapable of decision, unable to defend itself. To resolve these problems, the party takes a statist form. It is a vehicle of destruction and reconstitution, but reconstitution within the constraints given by the state.

Badiou’s rejection of party and state is familiar. Bruno Bosteels and Slavoj Zizek compellingly demonstrate the political inadequacy of this rejection. Arguing for the actualization and organization of communism in real movement, Bosteels criticizes the leftist idealism of the later Badiou’s emphasis on the pure Idea.21 Zizek likewise rejects the alternative of seizing or abandoning the state as a false one: the real challenge is transforming the state itself.22 I agree with Bosteels and Zizek. I want to add, moreover, that for us to focus on the state now is to short-circuit the discussion that matters. The left in the US, UK, and EU—not to mention communists—barely registers as a political force of any kind whatsoever. To worry about our seizing the state, then, is a joke, fantasy, and distraction from the task at hand. Rather than a concentration of political will, communist possibility remains diffuse, dispersed in the multitudinous politics of issues, identities, and moments of action that have yet to consolidate in the collective power of the divided people. What matters for us here and now is the galvanization of such a communist will.

In his effort to reduce the Marxist discussion of the Commune to the problem of the party-state, Badiou neglects the more fundamental question posed by the Commune, namely, that of the relation of the party to the people, the collective political subject. The Commune is less the form of a state than it is the form of a break with a previous state, both the state as in the National Government and the state of political incapacity associated with the workers, as Badiou himself emphasizes in the later work. As such a break, it opens up and disorders. The people are disassembled, suggestible, strong, and mobile as crowds. It is a mistake, then, to reduce the Commune to a state form and the Marxist tradition to commentary on and reaction to this state form. Badiou seems to have fallen prey to the fatalism his younger self criticizes—parties will be parties; “we will always be fucked over.”23 Particularly now, in the wake of the collapse of the socialist party-states and the generalized disarray of the left of the global north, the consolidated state power of a communist party state, should not be our concern. More pressing is the necessity of building collective power – the very problem facing the Commune that the party attempts to solve.

Marx himself analyzes the Commune in terms of the subjectification of the people. In the letter to Kugelmann, Marx treats the Parisians, the people of Paris, as “our heroic Party comrades.” Their advances are teaching new lessons in political struggle, namely, that smashing the bureaucratic-military machine is essential “for every people’s revolution on the Continent.”24 In The Civil War in France, as he presents the Commune as the “direct anti-thesis to the empire,” Marx describes it as the positive form of a republic in which class rule itself is superseded. He draws out the politics of constituting the people under the leadership of the working class, noting the replacing of the standing army by the armed people, the establishing of universal suffrage, the opening of education open to all, and, of course, the replacing of the parasitic excrescence of the old state organization with the self-government of the producers. Marx writes, “The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people.”

The people “storming heaven” don’t preexist the revolutionary event of the Commune. The Commune produces them as its cause. The middle class, which had helped put down the workers’ insurrection of June 1848, finds itself enrolling “under the colors of the Commune and defending it against the willful misconstructions of Thiers.” Marx explains this support as resulting from the Commune’s abolition of interest on debts and extension of time for repayment. The peasantry had Louis Bonaparte, but this support started to break down under the Second Empire. Were it not for the blockade around Paris, Marx argues, the French peasantry would have had to recognize that the Commune was its only hope, its only source of release from blood tax, gendarme, and priest. Again, the temporality is important: the peasantry “would have had,” had the Commune process been able to continue, a process that Marx presents as the subjectification of the people as party.

In his discussion of the Commune, Lenin takes up a similar problematic of people and party. State and Revolution observes that the idea of “a people’s revolution seems strange coming from Marx.”25 Lenin, however, thinks this idea is crucial—and crucial to understanding the role of the party—insofar as it points to the active and independent activity of the majority, “the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation,” imprinting the revolution with their own demands. Because in 1871 the proletariat was not a majority anywhere in Europe, a “people’s revolution” had also to embrace the peasants. Lenin writes, “These two classes then constituted the ‘people’. These two classes are united by the fact that the “bureaucratic-military state machine” oppresses, crushes, exploits them.” For Lenin, where the Commune fails and where its failure impresses itself on (en-forms) the party is in the constitution of the people, that is, in actually producing the alliance between peasants and proletariat necessary for revolution. Lenin commends Marx for seeing that, insofar as the “smashing of the state machine was required by the interests of both the peasants and the workers,” it united them and placed before them a common task. Smashing the state, or eliminating a “special force” of oppression, requires that the majority (workers and peasants) suppress the minority (the bourgeoisie), which means that the majority have to be organized to carry this out. This is the role of the party: concentrating and directing the energies of the people. The party shapes and intensifies the people’s practical struggles.

Given Lenin’s interests in establishing the revolutionary action of the Russian working class within the historical trajectory of proletarian struggle, that he highlights the idea of a people’s revolution isn’t surprising. The parallel with the Commune helps him here, providing a form by which to understand the Russian 1905 revolution. In an earlier text, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” published in 1906, he looks more closely at the revolutionary events in Moscow in December 1905.26 And while he does not look specifically at the Commune, he does highlight the action of the crowd, seeing in the crowd the march of practice ahead of theory, or, the anticipation effect of the subject.

For Lenin, the December movement in Moscow demonstrates that the general strike, as a predominant mode of struggle, is outmoded: “the movement is breaking out of these narrow bounds with elemental and irresistible force and giving rise to the highest form of struggle—an uprising.” He argues that even as the unions and revolutionary parties “intuitively felt” that the strike they called for December 7 should grow into an uprising, they weren’t prepared for this; they spoke of it as something remote. At the same time, a general strike was already contained within the parameters of the expected. The government was ready for the strike, organizing its counter-measures accordingly. These counter-revolutionary measures on the part of the government pushed the masses of people to insurrection. As the government escalated its repression, “the unorganized street crowds, quite spontaneously and hesitatingly, set up the first barricade.” Lenin traces the move from strike, to isolated barricades, to the “mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops.” At each point, the revolutionary movement compels the reaction to further violence, further attack, further extension and exhaustion of its troops. The workers demand more resolute action: “what is to be done next?” The Social Democratic leaders are left behind, perhaps because they are still arguing over what is to be done even as the revolutionary masses have already destroyed the previous setting of action and are rapidly creating a new one.

Lenin’s excoriating critique of Plekhanov puts “into consistency the haste of the cause,” that is, it retroactively assigns consistency to the revolutionary workers in anticipation of the certainty of their ultimate victory. Lenin writes:

Thus, nothing could be more short-sighted than Plekhanov’s view, seized upon by all the opportunists, that the strike was untimely and should not have been started, and that “they should not have taken to arms.” On the contrary, we should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively; we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine things to a peaceful strike and that a fearless and relentless armed fight was necessary. And now we must at last openly and publicly admit that political strikes are inadequate; we must carry on the widest agitation among the masses in favour of an armed uprising and make no attempt to obscure this question by talk about “preliminary stages,” or to befog it in any way.

Plekhanov failed to respond to the masses as subject; he failed to note how their haste brought into being another phase of political conflict. What if the party had not lagged behind the workers? As he makes the party the subject support of the revolutionary people, Lenin makes it responsive to the lessons they teach.

In a passage evocative of descriptions of the March 18, 1871 crowd event that made way for the Commune, Lenin praises the crowd:

In the December days, the Moscow proletariat taught us magnificent lessons in ideologically “winning over” the troops, as, for example, on December 8 in Strastnaya Square, when the crowd surrounded the Cossacks, mingled and fraternised with them, and persuaded them to turn back. Or on December 10, in Presnya District, when two working girls, carrying a red flag in a crowd of 10,000 people, rushed out to meet the Cossacks crying: “Kill us! We will not surrender the flag alive!” And the Cossacks were disconcerted and galloped away, amidst the shouts from the crowd: “Hurrah for the Cossacks!”

The party is the bearer of the lessons of the uprising. It is both the perspective from which the uprising is assessed and itself as an organization capable of learning and responding an effect of the uprising. The party learns from the subject it supports – and that it is the support of this subject is clear insofar as the subject necessarily exceeds it. Whether posed as crowd or Commune, the political form of the party cannot be reduced to a problem of the state. It must also be thought in terms of the collective subject of politics, to the subjectification of the people and their process as the subject of a politics.

In his classic account of the Commune, the French journalist and revolutionary socialist Lissagaray likewise links crowd and party such that movements in the street are legible as the actions of a subject. He describes the weeks and months prior to the Paris Commune—the defeats in the war with Prussia, negotiations toward surrender, substitution of plebiscite (an up or down vote of confidence in the provisional government) for elections, and increase of political clubs in working class areas of the city. As he does so, Lissagaray attends to poor, the working men, and the faithful children of 1789, young men from the bourgeoisie who “have gone over to the people.” In 1863, he tells us, these people scandalously affirm themselves as a class. In 1867, their demonstrations in the streets are the “appearance of a revolutionary socialist party” (which will be asserted more directly in a resolution adopted by a meeting of the vigilance committees in February 1871).27 In 1870, they alone in a paralyzed summer exhibit political courage. Yet this class, this party (Lissagaray doesn’t think it necessary to make distinctions here, implying, perhaps, the open, changing, and interconnected dimensions of each), remains unable to direct the energies of the crowd. They may be a “party of action,” but they are in a “chaotic state,” criss-crossed by different currents (and, again, “party” here suggests a collective that is part of a changing situation).28 So even as the crowd riots against the armistice, the people nonetheless endorse the government in the plebiscite that follows: 558,000 yes and 62,000 no.29 Lissagaray explains that this happened because those who were “clear-sighted, prompt, and energetic” were wanting in “cadres, in method, in organizers.”30 Jacobins like Blanqui “lived in an exclusive circle of friends.” Still other potential leaders “carefully kept aloof from working men.” Even the Central Committee of the twenty arrondissements, while “daring, eloquent” treated “everything by manifestos” and so remained “only a center of emotions, not of direction.”31

Lissagaray establishes the setting of the Commune in the challenge of responding to the opening the active crowd produces, in the consequences of the gap effected by the crowd for organizing the people. At stake is not the specificity of a form of government, municipal or national. Nor is it a matter of the legitimacy of elections, representatives, or decisions. Instead it concerns the movement from class, to people, to party, the movement at stake in politicization. The stakes of this movement, moreover, are not those of substitution, vanguardism, or domination—they are arrangements of intensity, courage, and will. The relation of the people to the party is a question of organization in the context of those who might steer the people against themselves, making them a means of a revolution not their own. Lissagaray suggests that a class enters politics as a scandal, a scandalous insistence on equality. When this insistence makes itself felt on the streets, a revolutionary socialist party appears, a party characterized by action, even by a concentration of emotions. But action and emotion, subjective capacity, aren’t enough. The capacity, to persist as the capacity of a subject, has to be organized, incorporated, into a form. Thus, the problem of the party is organizing the people in one direction rather than another, but always retroactively.

The English translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s autobiography, Une lente impatience, is a welcome event in the Anglophone Marxist world.1 Not only does it contain a rich history of some of the most decisive moments for the French Left from the ’60s to the present, it also deepens our understanding of the heterodox sources that coexisted within Bensaïd’s unique form of Marxism. Two key chapters contribute to this theoretical approfondissement: “A Thousand (and One) Marxisms” and “Thinking the Crisis.” The former is a winding, wide-ranging intellectual mini-history of the various currents of Marxism that have been an influence on his own work, from the critical, historicist Marxisms of Lukács and Gramsci in the face of Second International orthodoxy, to the the analytical Marxist and post-workerist schools.2 Bensaïd stresses that each generation must face its own “crisis” of Marxism, thus sweeping away any “myth of a homogeneous doctrine”; it is a critical theory inseparable from social struggles and practices, and “inseparable from the history of its receptions.” From this perspective there is always a capacity for Marxism to begin anew, something that needed to be urgently reiterated and emphasized in the post-’89 conjuncture. This way of approaching the history of Marxism as an “open dogmatism” is familiar to anyone who has read Marx for Our Times, his most substantial and extensive theoretical statement.3

The latter chapter, however, reveals a side of Bensaïd that is less well-known to readers outside of France. This is a retrospective look at his memoire de maîtrise (master’s thesis) written under the supervision of Henri Lefebvre, entitled “The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin.” Parts of the thesis were recycled for a famous article in Partisans from 1968, co-written with Samy Naïr.4 With the recent launch of Le site de Daniel Bensaïd, the majority of Bensaïd’s writings are now available, including the complete version of this fascinating thesis. With an impressive range of sources and an auspicious analytic and intellectual prowess on display (coupled with a deep knowledge of Lenin’s Collected Works), Bensaïd seeks in this text to theoretically clarify the concept of crisis in Lenin and the broader Marxist tradition. While the marks of the then-current Parisian scholarly field are evident in the more Althusserian aspects of the text, it is also true that the themes he encounters here would, as Sebastian Budgen notes, “continue to goad him for the next 40 years.”5 These included the recurrent dialectical oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity, structure and event, and crisis and strategy; Bensaïd constantly, and from many different angles, tried to set these philosophical dualisms in motion through a politically charged optic. It becomes readily apparent, from even a cursory perusal of his later texts (not only on Lenin, but also his writings in La discordance des temps and Marx for Our Times) that these are concerns that stayed with him, as direct sections of the thesis will appear in his rightly praised article from the Lenin Reloaded collection.6 This an opportune moment, then – un moment propice, in Bensaïd’s evocative vocabulary – to reconsider the impact of this thesis on his career, with his critical recollections serving as our guide. This is not meant to serve as an exhaustive overview, as his corpus demands a more patient and thorough reading, but is instead intended as a brief inquiry into the reading of Lenin that this particular work opens up for us, and the ways in which the problems evident in this very early text have a continuing actuality for contemporary Marxism.7

The first question we may pose is a common problematic that can be found in previous pages of Viewpoint: what kind of Lenin does Bensaïd give us?8 How does Lenin’s understanding of the relation between theory and practice, organizational form and class struggle, state power and ultimately, the revolutionary crisis, bear on present struggles? As we will see, Henri Lefebvre’s “unfortunately neglected” book on Lenin was a major influence on Bensaïd’s own reading, primarily in its comprehensive and careful reconstruction of the connection between Lenin’s contributions to historical materialism and his advancement of a distinctly Marxist political theory, comprising both a theory of the state and revolutionary political action. Bensaïd’s text here and his later work will bear the traces of Lefebvre’s interpretation, but we will also encounter an even more intriguing and innovative fusion of these two facets of Leninism which, in an untimely fashion, endeavors to think politics both as an art of scanning historical possibilities and as a surveying of situated conflicts for moments of strategic intervention.

The second issue concerns the qualification of a revolutionary crisis being restricted to the status of a notion, not a concept. This separation is connected to the distinct difference drawn between a revolutionary situation and a revolutionary crisis. With the latter problem, there is a clear reference to the French historical epistemological tradition in Bensaïd’s analysis of how Lenin tried, and ultimately failed, to truly “establish [fonder] a concept,” understood as a definition that can hold up to the modalities of history, theory, and politics.9 There could not be, in other words, a truly scientific concept of the “revolutionary crisis” in the Althusserian sense, since its predicative characteristics necessarily had to pass through the test of practice: therefore, it could not escape the trappings of ideology and remained at the level of the notion. This line of questioning, then, involves a strict delineation between the subjective and objective aspects of a crisis (between what can be described and what has to to be accomplished through practice) through a methodological lens that is tainted by an “ultra-Bolshevism” inspired by Lukàcs circa History and Class Consciousness, with the subjective factor – or revolutionary party – as the nodal point of differentiation and decisive element. Ultimately, I will look to Bensaïd’s later writings to answer this question of the demarcation between a revolutionary situation and crisis, or notion and concept: there, he notes that possible resolution of this problem can come from seeing “crisis” as a “strategic concept,” a concept that has political implications relative to its historical and theoretical efficacy.

Lenin and Political Strategy

If we we want to gain an understanding of the basic ideas underlying Bensaïd’s dense text, it is useful to start with the “unjustly forgotten” book his thesis supervisor devoted to Lenin’s thought, La pensée de Lenine, from 1957.10 There Lefebvre embarks on an ambitious attempt to synthesize all the periods of Lenin’s thought, an approach that finds definite echoes in Bensaïd’s own panoramic view that connects “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” to the “April Theses,” within a coherent theoretical and practical narrative. There are three features of Lefebvre’s account in particular that I want to highlight for their importance to Bensaïd: first, the consideration of Lenin’s rigorous investigation into the expansion of capitalism in the Russian countryside and the drawing out of its strategic and political implications; second, the role of the party as the principal “subjective factor” in the class struggle; third, and most significantly, the attention given to the notion of revolutionary crisis as the moment where the political, economic, and social contradictions engendered by capitalism fuse and condense to produce a conjuncture where true change is possible, when it becomes possible “to sketch the outline of another mode of production.”11 We can take these features in turn.

Lefebvre links Lenin’s body of thought as a whole to his initial investigation into the conditions of the development of the Russian proletariat: “What has Lenin contributed? A theoretical analysis of the totality [ensemble] of Russian society and its historical development – a new analysis that led him to a new analysis of the global situation itself.”12 Lenin’s Marxist stance in theory and politics – what Gramsci would call his methodological criterion – allowed him to grasp historical and societal development in all its contradictory reality. Lefebvre continues: “it was necessary to find a revolutionary formula specifically adapted … to Russian conditions, adapted to the backward countries that are predominantly agricultural.” But this agricultural basis does not diminish the role of the proletariat: “the revolution forming in Russia – and in Asia and other continents – will have Marxism as a guide, the proletariat as the leading force.”13 From his detailed study of the ongoing introduction of capitalist social relations into Russian agriculture, Lenin ensures that this thesis – “the capitalist mode of production becoming increasingly dominant in Russia” – is the focal point for his political strategy, stressing the leading hegemonic role of the proletariat in the coming revolution.14 While there is clearly (as will be shown below) a complex interplay between rupture and continuity in Lenin’s thought—chiefly based around the outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the Second International, as well as his close reading of Hegel’s Logic15—Bensaïd will maintain even in his later work that this “foundational work of his youth… will put in place the problematic that subsequently allows him to make theoretical corrections and strategic adjustments.”16 This provides an initial yet cohesive framework that can be bent and shaped in light of the shifting terrain of conflict, as will become evident in the particular shifts that took place in Lenin’s political vocabulary and focus from 1905 to 1917.

There is a persistent emphasis, then, on the fact that political theory and practice follows from and is bound up with inquiry into actual historical developments: Lenin’s early work could be seen as a “theoretical summing up,” to use Lenin’s terms in State and Revolution, that can be referred back to for direction in future struggles.17 For Bensaïd, these early theoretical and scientific works provide a “confrontational clarity” and coherence to all of Lenin’s political interventions, from his polemical texts against the Populists, his debates within the RSDLP, and (most importantly) his conjunctural analyses of 1917. Lenin transposed, in other words, Marxist theory to a certain set of unique conditions, conditions which in turn delimited or made clear certain tactical and strategic choices. Lefebvre sees this as Lenin’s fundamental deepening or elaboration upon Marx and Engels’s own revolutionary thought; the most effective consequences of this transposition are reflected in the novelty of Lenin’s political theory, and the conceptual apparatus that is thereby established. The crucial fifth chapter of Lefebvre’s book – “Lenin’s Political Thought” – has two passages from Lenin that will serve a critical function both in Bensaïd’s mémoire de maîtrise and his later work: first, from 1917, that “the key question of every revolution is undoubtedly the question of state power;” and second, from 1920: “politics is more like algebra than like elementary arithmetic, and still more like higher rather than elementary mathematics.”18 The question of state power will always be in play when politics is involved, this is a matter of course; yet the second quotation is connected to the first, and helps to explain its deeper meaning. Politics has its own logic that is irreducible to the social order, i.e. the social relations of capitalism; Marxist politics cannot be imagined as a form of sociologism.19

For Lenin, the confusion between the political subject and the social subject – party and class – can only lead to a “disorganizing” confusion that can considerably hamper the impact of short- or long-term political strategies. There is an undoubtedly a connection between the two orders; but, as Lefebvre notes, “the perpetual relations between these two elements is also perpetually changing.” Politics reveals certain “becomings, possibilities.”20 Bensaïd will describe it in terms of “a permanent game of displacements and condensations,” whereby “social reality is manifested in political language.”21 This refraction causes the central antagonism of capitalist social reality, between capital and labor, to appear in more complex, convoluted form, thus requiring an expanded conception of political practice to navigate through these historically specific articulations. This point was also made quite forcefully by Trotsky in “Class, Party, and the Leadership,” where he polemicizes against determinist explanations of revolutionary politics. He notes that “History is a process of the class struggle,” but it also remains the case that “classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and simultaneously,” as “in the process of struggle the classes create various organs which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations.”22 Politics, and a form of politics based on revolutionary Marxist principles in particular, is to be conceived as a “strategic art,” traversing the interacting and shifting variables of a volatile situation. In turn, it also requires a theoretical understanding of the revolutionary political subject and the objective conditions in which it finds itself that goes beyond any and all simplifying or reductive (sociological) gestures:

The force of Lenin’s thought lies in the fact that he knew to establish, through the theory of the party, the specificity of politics as seen from the viewpoint of the working-class. His theory of organization (the party) is at the center of a conceptual network which structures this new understanding of the political field: class consciousness, relation of forces, alliances, moment (revolutionary crisis). It is with Lenin that time, duration, irrupts into politics, giving it a strategic formulation. The proletarian struggle is no longer a pilgrimage [pèlerinage] to the horizon of history, or an abstract dialectic of means and ends; rather, it is a rhythmic battle where, for the first time, there is a tactic (initiative, decision) that is not a empirical fragment the battle, but the permanent actualization of a plan, the translation of a project and a will. It is thus with Lenin that Marxism makes a real step forward in terms of political theory.23

Two concepts are crucial to this reading: on the one hand, the formation of the revolutionary party and its implementation of tactics and strategy based on the historical development and activity of the proletariat and its class allies; on the other, the objective conditions, or situational elements, of a revolutionary crisis. Once again, these concepts are of great significance for Lefebvre’s earlier study. The revolutionary party, as described in What is to be Done?, “realizes concretely, practically, the fusion of thought and action, socialism and the workers’ movement, knowledge and the mass movement.”24 The revolutionary crisis is the necessary condition for this practical realization. The crisis is the moment where the subjective and objective conditions fuse together and reciprocally condition each other, where a potentially revolutionary situation is altered and transformed by the subject which traverses it. In Lefebvre’s words, it is a “total crisis, shaking the existing society from the base to the superstructures, from the social relations of production to ideologies and juridical institutions … it is as much a crisis of daily life as it is of politics.” In brief: “no revolution without a revolutionary crisis.”25

As parenthetically noted above, the traumatic shock of the almost unanimous support given by the European Social-Democratic parties for war credits in 1914 allowed Lenin to modify as well as systematize his conceptual and practical understandings of revolutionary situations and revolutionary crises in “The Collapse of the Second International.” The revolutionary crisis became essential to his overall strategic approach, highlighting the break between Lenin’s outlook and the majority opportunist orientation of the Second International. Above all, the consideration of the “factors” that are at work within a revolutionary situation implies a reworking of the role of the party, from a pedagogical role to “a conscious project, a force capable of initiative – of decision.”26 Instead of an educative party that mainly has a clarifying task, the party becomes a “strategic operator” that is ready not only to reflect upon but also make tactical choices depending on the current relation of forces within the political struggle. And without a notion of crisis, the “taking of power by the proletariat… becomes strictly unthinkable… all avoidance of the revolutionary crisis leads sooner or later to the replacement of the perspective of revolution by a gradual and electoral process of partial conquests, substituting the movement for the goal.”27 The crisis, understood as the theoretical and practical lens through which to view political struggle, breaks up the continuity of revolutionary strategies based on economistic themes of development and growth, and keeps the question of working-class emancipation as the end goal. Revolutionary strategy now articulated a plurality of times and spaces through the analysis of concrete, conflictual situations and precise evaluations of the national and international class struggles that did not accord to any form of historical rationality, thus “combining history and event, act and process, the taking of power and the ‘revolution in permanence.’” Bensaïd will come back to this question of the crisis as a “discontinuity within continuity” in his thesis.

This emphasis on the theoretical centrality of revolutionary crisis is perhaps the most noteworthy upshot of Bensaïd’s continual engagements with Lenin’s thought, as he takes Lefebvre’s short mention of the notion’s importance to a much more rigorous level. This is clear in his balance-sheet of the events of May, Mai 1968: Une répétition générale [May 1968: A Dress Rehearsal], co-written with Alain Krivine right before the completion of the master’s thesis.28 This work contains the essentials of Bensaïd’s outline of the elements of a revolutionary crisis, as the authors analyze Mai ‘68 as an “objectively” revolutionary situation that fatally lacked a political subject to work towards its resolution–thus remaining at a “pre-revolutionary” level. The inexistence of “the subjective conditions of revolution in May,” the lack of a “sufficiently organized and politically educated political force” that could take up the project of overthrowing bourgeois power and radical social transformation, meant that there could not even be discussion of a “situation that was ¾ths revolutionary.”29 Revolution, on this view, is not a matter of percentages. Bensaïd’s reading of Lenin will stress the “interdependence” of the elements of revolutionary crises: but it is precisely this interdependence or reciprocity of conditions (i.e., subjective and objective) that make the formation of a concept of revolutionary crisis so difficult.

Lenin in the Crisis

In his thesis, Bensaïd takes the schema from “The Collapse of the Second International” as his starting point. First, he delineates the criteria that Lenin describes as essential for a revolutionary situation to take place: when there is a crisis in the policies of the ruling class; when class exploitation has grown more and more; when class struggle has become more antagonistic. But there is always a deciding factor, the subjective factor of the party and the actions of the masses in their ability to take power. As he argues, “the nodal point of the crisis is no longer located in one particular objective element, but is transferred within the organization-subject which combines and incorporates them.”30 From this basic point, common to both Lenin and Trotsky, he then complicates his analysis. There is an acknowledgement very early on in the text that there is no satisfactory construction of the “concept” of revolutionary crisis in Lenin’s work; and yet, it still serves as a singular term, one in which all of the key terms of Lenin’s political theory – many of which probably reach a higher degree of scientificity and thus conceptuality – seem to merge and interact. He sets up these basic groupings, or parallel syllogisms, modeled after the Hegelian syllogisms of existence, whereby the “singular serves as the mediation between the particular and the universal”:31

Social Formation Revolutionary Crisis Mode of Production
Subservient Spontaneity Organization – Party Class
Ideology Theory Truth

The first vertical column (social formation, spontaneity, ideology) corresponds to the particular, the middle column (revolutionary crisis, party, theory) corresponds to the singular, and the last column (truth, class, mode of production) represents the universal, or the basic concepts of historical materialism. It is the dialectical interaction of the first and third columns with the middle (singular) terms that specifically provides the historical conjuncture of a revolutionary event, with the last column reduced to, or condensed into, their most acute and antagonistic forms. So, while the revolutionary crisis can only be the crisis of a determinant social formation with all its contradictory and overlapping realities, it still lays bare the antagonistic relation between the working-class and the bourgeoisie, marking the “determinate unity of the extremes.”32 The party is what allows, in the best Lukácsian fashion, for the passage from the proletariat as the theoretical subject of the revolution to its role as the political revolutionary subject. More ambiguously, the crisis is what allows for the intersection of truth and ideology to be measured through revolutionary theory, that is, Marxism. It is through the crisis that theory can take on a practical role. As he writes later, the crisis is the moment where theory can be transformed into strategy, touching upon practice. It is, in an interesting turn of phrase, the “truth-operator of an event,” mediating and suturing the hole between continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. A revolutionary crisis, then, constitutes a “test of truth” for these different groupings: for the social formation, by heightening the contradictions between the antagonistic classes of the capitalist mode of production; for the party-organization in that it must “take on the state” through its leadership of the proletariat, while also fighting opportunistic and reformist deviations with its own ranks; and finally for theory in that it allows for, in a historically determinant and differential manner, a “reconnection” of truth (historical materialism) and ideology (class struggle or political practice).

However, Bensaïd performs some audacious theoretical leaps to keep this intricate structure intact, not all of them effective: drawing on Freud and Lacan, linguistics (Greimas and Guillaume), as well as Lukács, Poulantzas, Bachelard, and Sartre, he tries to hold the dialectical articulation of the three groupings together. It is clear that they do not always work, and he would later disavow this theoretical structure as inevitably leading to a form of “ultra-Bolshevism” and blind voluntarism. No matter how differential or non-linear he tries to make the gap between the theoretical subject of revolution (the proletariat) as compared to its historically concrete political subject in the party, there is always an inevitable conflation of party and class within this framework. This tendency to absorb the class into the party was driven in a certain sense by the very concept of revolutionary crisis, through which one could “reconcile, in a kind of historical epiphany, the practical subject and its theoretical phantom.”33 Bensaïd was deeply critical of this “Hegelian metaphysics,” but also saw it as a product of a particular practical-theoretical milieu:

the very choice of such a theme was clearly a critique of the structuralist ideology that was tendentially dominant (at the university at least), whose ultimate consequence could be to render the very idea of revolution unthinkable. In other words: against the ventriloquist structures, everything for the subject!34

In later works, most evidently Marx for Our Times, Bensaïd would try and rethink this linked problematic of party and class, subject and object, and ultimately, the in-itself/for-itself division in more materialist and anti-historicist terms. Put otherwise, it will be his reconception of time, and its relation to politics, that will allow Bensaïd to overcome the Lukácsian problematic. The concept of the discordance of different times within the present opens up a radical critique of historical progress and the “homogeneous, empty time” that is seen as inhabiting much of the previous Marxist political tradition.35 The consequences of such a critique of historical reason for political action are evident in Marx for Our Times:

Object and subject, being and essence are bound up with one another in the development of classes. In the dynamic of class relations, the subjectivity of consciousness cannot arbitrarily emancipate itself from the structure, any more than the objectivity of being can be passively detached from consciousness. This problematic is opposed to any mechanical conception of a necessary transition from the in-itself to the for-itself, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the pre-conscious social to the conscious political, with time acting as a neutral go-between. Class consciousness and unconsciousness are intertwined in a perverse embrace, and both are consistently mistaken.36

This leads Bensaïd to posit a conception of politics based upon the uncertainties and uneven development of struggle, and most importantly, the unpredictable bifurcations of historical possibility. This is a domain that can only be charted through a form of strategic reason, “based on the interaction between theory and practical experimentation”; this idea of strategy, and the revolutionary crisis as fundamentally a strategic concept—the qualifier is absolutely essential, as it signals a political importance—is the key breakthrough Bensaïd retains from this early text.37

This returns us to to one of our guiding questions – why the insistence in this text that the revolutionary crisis was not a concept, but a notion? It is because it necessarily breaks down at the threshold of practice.38 This is a point that is reminiscent of Lenin’s explanation in the Postface of State and Revolution for the incompleteness of the text: “I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis – the eve of the October Revolution of 1917.”39 Revolutionary crises find their resolution and completion through a subjective intervention: it is a concept with a necessarily practical referent, a concept that is necessarily encountered on the concrete terrain of history and politics. For the Althusserianism dominant during the immediate period, Marxism was based on an epistemology of the concept, and reliant on the autonomous production of theoretical practice. There could be no subject of a science. As is well known, high-Althusserianism encountered real and unresolvable difficulties after May ‘68; it is clear that Bensaïd had already observed these and taken them into account (he maintained a critical, if appreciative, distance from Althusser throughout his career).40 The fact that a revolutionary crisis can only rise to the level of a notion – and not the “purity of the concept” – is surely attributable to the impure imprint left by one of its conditions, the revolutionary organization or subject.41 This means that instead of a concept fashioned from the concrete-in-thought, the development and efficacy of the notion of revolutionary crisis indicated a shift from theory to strategy: “the crisis then appears as the moment of rupture at which theory be transformed into the art of conflict.”42

Strategic Questions

In some of his later articles, and in the context of his own work as a militant within the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, Bensaïd deepens this shift from theory to politics—the latter informed by strategy, with an emphasis on the importance of strategic hypotheses. These mediate the exigencies of struggle and a critical understanding of previous revolutionary experiences:

We have insisted on the role of the “subjective factor” as against both the spontaneist view of the revolutionary process and the structuralist immobilism of the 1960s. Our insistence is not on a “model” but on what we have called “strategic hypotheses.” Models are something to be copied; they are instructions for use. A hypothesis is a guide to action that starts from past experience but is open and can be modified in the light of new experience or unexpected circumstances. Our concern therefore is not to speculate but to see what we can take from past experience, the only material at our disposal. But we always have to recognise that it is necessarily poorer than the present and the future if revolutionaries are to avoid the risk of doing what the generals are said to do – always fight the last war.43

From this passage we can see how the question of strategy is implicated both in the Leninist notion of revolutionary crisis and its theoretical-practical implications (the crisis transforms the place or role of theory and the party), as well as Bensaïd’s own understanding of historical time that stresses the “primacy of politics over history.”44 In a way, this is an example of Bensaïd’s heterodox historical materialism, what could be described as “the concrete analysis of historical possibility” that combines historical reflection with strategic foresight and tactical creativity.45 Revolutionary politics must have a conception of how ruptural events are historically determined. Today, when it seems that we can’t get away from the word “crisis,” this combination or merger of perspectives is more relevant than ever. Bensaïd’s Lenin invites us to ask ourselves: what is a crisis, how do we think its emergence, and what do we do about it? For what are we to do when the real crisis happens?

The State of Supply Chains

We have entered a time of logistics space. Contemporary capitalism is organized as a dispersed but coordinated system, where commodities are manufactured across vast distances, multiple national borders, and complex social and technological infrastructures. Geopolitical economies that were previously governed largely at the national scale – even though as part of a global system of trading nation states – have been reordered into transnational circulatory systems. The global circulation of stuff is organized around the standard shipping container and the intermodal infrastructures that support its mobility across rail, road, and especially sea. Ninety percent of the world’s commodities move through maritime space, much of it in the form of containers. Like giant Lego blocks, these boxes move in vast and growing quantities, eliminating much of the human labor of distribution. Thomas Reifer goes as far as to suggest that if Marx were with us today, he would begin his analysis with the container in place of the commodity.1

Yet it is not simply the shipping container, but the modern supply chain that is carving contours of contemporary capitalism. Anna Tsing posits the rise of what she calls, “supply chain capitalism,” helpful for its emphasis on difference within structure2. She is unequivocal about the large scale of supply chains, but without sidelining the diversity of forms and experiences across space. For Tsing, “diversity forms a part of the structure of capitalism rather than an inessential appendage.”3 Difference is not only a central element of supply chains; it is through the exploitation of difference as well as its production that supply chains are consolidated. Supply chain capitalism is in effect the socio-spatial ordering of difference and unevenness at a global scale, governed through geoeconomic as much as geopolitical logics. This ordering is the domain of an understudied field that presents itself as technical and apolitical, despite its vital role in global geopolitical economy. Even the World Bank now asserts, “a competitive network of global logistics is the backbone of international trade.”4

If contemporary capitalism assumes the form of the supply chain, it is ordered by the logics of the “revolution in logistics.” This revolution transformed geographies of trade, not simply by coordinating the movement of production to new and distant places. Rather, production itself was systematized, disaggregated into component parts and distributed into complex spatial arrangements. The supply chain now supersedes the factory, which is “stretched” across a highly uneven economic and political geography. In a sense, the vast logistical network is today’s factory, and it is often repeated in the world of business management that competition today takes place on the basis of supply chains not individual firms.

Explicit “securitization” of supply chains is recent, but the entanglement of military and civilian forms is far from new. While Tsing’s is a useful way of conceptualizing contemporary capitalism – a much more material way of saying “globalization” – it tends to civilianize the field and underplay the central role of martial violence. The civilianized story of supply chain capitalism is called into question historically by scholars like Erica Schoenberger, who has argued that the rise of capitalism relied on the logistics of early modern warfare.5 Logistics had a long life as a military art before being imported into the business world in the twentieth century. As I explore in The Deadly Life of Logistics, the revolution in logistics that gave rise to a corporate management science in the post-WWII period was centrally about the mobility of calculation across military and corporate worlds – a public-private partnership that has only intensified recently.

Over the last decade, supply chains have been securitized such that disruption is managed as a security threat and policed by public and private military and civilian forces. Only a few years ago, the imperatives of national security were understood as an obstacle to trade. Security experts bemoaned what was understood as an inherent contradiction between the transnational flows of trade and the national imperatives of border security. In 2002, The Economist could exclaim that there is “a tension between the needs of international security and those of global trade.”6 Only a decade later, with the launch of the US Global Supply Chain Security Strategy, US President Obama could assert the profound compatibility of trade and security. This was a result of a rapid and extensive recasting of logics of national security in terms of how security is conceptualized, designed, and operationalized on the ground. In 2013, the World Economic Forum’s survey on “supply chain resilience” reported, “security measures and supply chain systems are increasingly co-designed to facilitate rather than disrupt trade.”7 They specifically identify the impact of the US Global Supply Chain Security Strategy in catalyzing this gestalt shift, amidst a plethora of policies and regulations implemented at multiple scales over the last decade that could now be said to constitute a global architecture of security.

Countless critical security scholars have highlighted the rise of a shifting cartography of security that is no longer anchored in national territoriality. Marc Duffield maps a geography of imperialism defined by “nodal bunkers, linked by secure corridors and formed into defended archipelagos of privileged circulation.” Duffield emphasizes the ways in which “secure corridors” delineate “global camps” offering a networked map of the world that is also a map of logistics space, without calling it such.8 Martin Coward insists that critical infrastructure – long the target of warring states – has become profoundly constitutive of the contemporary global city.9 Warfare today, following the geography of circulatory systems, is defined by its urban and transnational cartography. But it is logistics that perhaps most clearly maps the geography of imperialism today. It is no accident that the supply chain of contemporary capitalism resonates so clearly with the supply line of the colonial frontier. It is not only striking but diagnostic that old enemies of empire – “Indians” and “pirates” – are among the groups that pose the biggest threats to the “security of supply chains” today.

Disruption as Threat and Tactic

If the supply chain stretches the factory across the corridors, nodes, and seams of logistics space, it is a system that is extremely vulnerable to disruption. Far from a mark of its strength, the securitization of logistics marks its vulnerability. It is precisely because of the potency of disruption that we have seen the assembly of this new architecture of security. The World Economic Forum highlights how the very material form of supply chains – the distributed nature of distribution networks – means that disruption can easily become systemic. They explain, “systemic risks are created or magnified by the way supply chain systems are configured… In today’s globalized and interconnected world, any major disruption… has the potential to cascade through supply chains and permeate other systems.” Using a database created by the US National Counterterrorism Center, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) tracks more then 68,000 incidents worldwide from its founding in January 2004 through April 2010.10 They report on the steady increase in supply chain attacks, which reached 3,299 in 2010, despite post-2001 securitization. The Panalpina study has been tracking global logistics outsourcing for the past 17 years.11 In their 2013 3PL Logistics Study they assert, “Economic losses from supply chain disruptions increased 465% from 2009 to 2011, reaching a staggering $350 billion.” The salience of disruption in key nodes and chokepoints of circulatory systems in an era of just-in-time logistics is heightened, and yet disruption has long been a powerful tactic of social movements of different stripes.

There is precedent for the contemporary power of disruption across vastly uneven imperial networks. Strikes, blockades, and occupations clearly all have long histories. In their prescient engagement with the “many-headed hydra” of the early Atlantic, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker investigate the geographies of exploitation, dispossession, and circulation that not only made imperial rule possible but which also brought disparate groups into relation – sometimes intimately and sometimes instrumentally.12 They describe the unlikely ways in which these imperial cartographies also provided a skeleton for the emergence of a surprising flesh of connections across vast spatial networks. Precisely because the organized violence of empire threw spatially dispersed social orders into heterogeneous relations of rule – through exploitation, slavery, incarceration, and colonization, for instance – it also brought oppressed peoples into relation differently. Without guarantee or even intentionality, these relations could at times produce creative solidarities. “Sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians, mobile workers of all kinds made new and unexpected connections,” they write, “which variously appeared to be accidental, contingent, transient, even miraculous.” Connections forged through the violent infrastructures of relations of rule may become the connective tissues of alternative futurities, when occupied differently.

These lessons are instructive and help focus our attention on the widespread resistance that characterizes our era of supply chain capitalism. Reading Linebaugh and Rediker raises the question of the constitution of today’s hydra. Social and labor movements are acting in ways that exploit the specific vulnerabilities of logistics systems – occupying strategic sites in the infrastructures of circulation, as well as organizing creative coalitions across diverse social and spatial locations. One of the most potent forms of disruption to supply chains comes from logistics workers. As Jo Anne Wypijewski asserted at a longshore workers convention in 2010, “The people who move the world can also stop it.”13 And indeed they do. Supply chain security managers repeatedly highlight labor and industrial disputes as the top sources of disruption. These are often assessed interchangeably with disruptions caused by acts of terrorism. For instance, PwC outlines how labor actions in supply chain chokepoints provide a useful proxy for the effects of terror. They use a 2002 lockout in West Coast US ports with its estimated costs of $1 billion per day as a proxy for the impacts of terror attacks in key logistics hubs. As I have detailed elsewhere, logistics workers are also subject to exceptional security measures aimed to pre-empt disruption in ports and transport corridors.14

Over the last decade, there has been a surge of labor actions targeting transportation networks around the world. From Busan15 to Shezhen,16 Chittagong,17 Sokhna,18 Johannesburg,19 Piraeus, Tangiers,20 the Panama Canal,21 and across the West Coast of North and South America,22 workers are taking action at inland and maritime ports, and within massive logistics companies like DHL, DP World, Fed-Ex, Amazon, and Walmart. It is the supply chain itself – its spaces, infrastructures, and flows – that unites these actions. State and corporate efforts to make supply chains more “efficient” through privatization of infrastructure and employment, the gutting of conditions of work, and the increasing securitization of management are also common provocations. It is precisely to fight these sorts of developments that organizations like the International Transport Federation (ITF) and Union Network International (UNI) have been supporting transnational organizing and bargaining efforts like their “Global Delivery” campaign. The campaign works for rights and standards for all workers, “regardless of country or employment status,” by connecting activists within multinational logistics companies.23

While the logistics system is distributed, it is also highly uneven; some nodes and networks are more critical in terms of global circulation then others, meaning some nodes are also more vulnerable than others. As one conservative media outlet analyzing the power of West Coast dockworkers in the United Stated suggests, “The modern, just-in-time global economy is often analyzed as a threat to workers because fluid international markets mean that jobs can be outsourced anywhere. Overlooked is the fact that when companies depend upon international logistics, they are at the mercy of workers who run the cargo network.” Stephen Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, outlines the role of logistics as the critical infrastructure for contemporary capitalism. “This is not just another industry like aluminum or tires, or even automobiles,” he suggests, “It’s more like utilities. This affects the whole economy very broadly and very quickly.”24 Describing the complex organization of supply chain capitalism, Cohen explains, “At some point you start running out of parts, and the factory stops, and the factory that relies on that factory for components stops, and you have a chain reaction that’s really rather a nightmare.” It is not just cargo workers in general that are identified in the article, but the ILWU specifically, “which represents 25,000 dockworkers at 29 Pacific coast ports, [and] is simultaneously the most politically radical, materially comfortable and economically significant group of US workers.” Indeed, the ILWU is exceptional within the US labor movement more broadly, with a strong tradition of internationalism, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-apartheid organizing, initiatives on gender equity, and for the rights of undocumented workers. They have not only taken powerful stands against the national security state and the speeding up of global trade, which have seen them branded a threat to US national security and subject to the use of the Taft-Hartley Act; they have also taken a lead in organizing across supply chains.

Labor actions are of undoubted significance to the flows of global trade, but so are the protests of many other groups whose lands and livelihoods stand in the path of logistics space. In fact, one of the best maps of the resistance of diverse groups that disrupt logistics space are supply chain security reports and policies themselves, which in addition to “industrial disruption,” alternately cite “pirates,” “terrorists,” “indigenous blockades” and the generic “political disruption” as key risks. Supply chain security documents offer valuable inventories of old and new enemies of empire. In the first ever textbooks on the topic of supply chain security, two entire chapters are devoted to the “threat of piracy” focusing on the Gulf of Aden and the so-called “crisis of the Somali Pirate.” As one author explains, “waters off the Indian Ocean coast of Somalia have proved to be a dangerous area that threatens the shipping industry with the offense of piracy.”25 This is despite the fact that so-called Somali pirates have organized in response to the patent disregard for anything approaching international law by individual nations, the EU and the UN in toxic waste dumping and direct military aggression in Somalia. In fact, I suggest that it is in the violent experiments being conducted in the Gulf of Aden under the banner of the crisis of Somali piracy that important new spatial logics of imperialism are being coded in international law.26

According to the Panalpina report, topping the list of “global risks with the potential to cause system-wide disruptions” are “natural disasters and extreme weather” and “conflict and political unrest.” The report cites the Icelandic Volcano eruption, the “Arab Spring” and “the on-going social turmoil in Europe and South Africa, which led respectively to oil price increases and labour strikes” as the most disruptive events of 2011. The “Arab Spring” is not typically thought about in the context of supply chains, but it is especially difficult to overlook the ever-present politics of the Suez Canal – one of the most important spaces in the global architecture of trade flow. Canal and dockworkers were critical in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak; on February 8, 2011, more then six thousand Suez Canal workers at five service companies initiated a wildcat strike in the cities of Suez, Port Said, and Ismailia. Dock workers followed suit, stopping work at the key port of Ain Al Sokhna, disrupting Egypt’s vital sea links.

Jumping far across space but not time, we could also look to Occupy Oakland in California, where the movement demonstrated some of its most aggressive and sustained analysis and action, and here the port was central. Oakland’s Occupy movement builds on long traditions of radical organizing around a variety of issues, most notably antiracist and labor organizing. Referring to the Oakland port as “Wall Street on Water” in 2011, organizers drew connections between the dramatic decline of the city and the booming prosperity of the port. With the city facing economic crisis, the port was bankrolling revenues of $27 billion per year while operating rent-free on public lands. The city’s financial crisis (acute enough to provoke the closure of public schools) was in part a result of Goldman Sachs’s predatory lending in financing Oakland’s debts. Occupiers drew many lines of connection between finance capital and commodity circulation, one of the most direct connections being Goldman Sachs’s majority ownership of global shipping company SSA Marine, one of the main port operators in Oakland. It was, furthermore, right around this time that the Oakland Army Base (OAB) – once the world’s largest military port complex – was preparing to transform into “a world-class trade and logistics center.”27 The project is led by ProLogis – the world’s largest owner, manager, and developer of distribution facilities. Plans for “Oakland Global” – the military base-cum-logistics facility’s new identity – were solidified when ProLogis and partners were promised hundreds of millions in grants from city, state, and federal government.

The “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy” movements ignited in 2011, with “Idle No More” following closely in 2012. This grassroots movement galvanized a renewed energy of organizing and claims-making in indigenous communities, first in Canada, and then across the settler colonial world. And indeed, this activism has often assumed the form of blockades of rail and highway corridors, making indigenous resistance a key concern for corporate and state security managers north of the 49th parallel. Groves and Lukacs,28 Pasternak,29 and Dafnos’s30 work on the securitization of indigenous resistance exposes the surveillance of indigenous movements by the Canadian state, working in concert with extractive and logistics industries. Of particular concern to this public-private security partnership are the “coordinated efforts of First Nations across the country” and the “economic cost of even a few hours of such coordinated efforts.” Pasternak also highlights a third concern that haunts state and corporate joint efforts at securitization, “that solidarity and coordination between non-natives and Indigenous peoples will encourage the movement to build.”31

Disrupting Futurity

Dismissive accounts of any of these efforts abound that diagnose them as momentary, isolated, or failed. Yet, the supply chain security world refrains from such confident assertions and instead works to secure their failed futurity. No doubt, these movements have encountered limits and obstacles of all kinds, but we might consider them differently to appreciate their enormous potential. In place of a simple assessment of their individual impact in a moment, we might consider their cultivation of networks of resistance that take shape through the geographies of supply chains they seek to contest. Both the networked space and networked relations of supply chain capitalism can be occupied and activated differently. As Linebaugh and Rediker highlight historically, and as Pasternak shows in the present, one of the greatest fears of state and corporate security experts is the aligning of forces across movements. Indeed, a fascinating world of collaboration is underway which can constitute these socio-spatial alternatives. Elaborating on these forms requires engagement with the questions of both disruption and futurity, an engagement that I can only briefly hint at here.

In the world of organized labor, inspiring coalitions are emerging specifically to tackle the challenges of supply chain capitalism, coalitions which themselves are organized along supply chains. A key organizing challenge, and also a mark of their creativity and strength, is the dramatically uneven relations of power along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and status that make workers of the world as different as they are alike. One impressive example of these efforts is the work of the American labor movement forging coalition with Iraqi Dock and Oil workers. This 2008 action marked the first time ever that an American union has struck against a US war. The union rank and file defied the rulings of an arbitrator, who twice ordered them to go to work. The employers’ Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) declared the May 1 port shutdown an “illegal strike.” The action was felt all the way to Iraq, where workers from the General Union of Port Workers in two ports stopped work in solidarity with the ILWU for an hour. A May Day message from the General Union of Port Workers in Iraq to the “brothers and sisters of the ILWU” acknowledged the organizing and solidarity.

Logistics labor has also been active in organizing efforts with other social movements. Some of the best known and most interesting initiatives have seen ILWU collaborate with various Occupy sites around ports. It would be easy to oversimplify complex conversations, but at stake are the distinct interests, experiences, and desires emanating from very different movements – neither of which are anything like internally homogenous. On the one hand, organized labor has decades of experience in movement building, but also relative material comfort, and a stake in the very logistics system to be disrupted. On the other hand, the often younger and less resourced activists are typically also less experienced working in the very kinds of complex coalitions they aimed to build. In telling me about the “failed effort” at a coordinated action in 2011, one ILWU member from Vancouver who acted informally as an intermediary between these movements because of their extensive activist work in the ILWU, the broader labor movement, and feminist, queer, and anti-racist organizing, outlined for me how these different class positionalities and organizing styles, combined with a limited political education around racism, colonialism, and sexism among the largely younger “occupiers,” helped to dissolve that coalition. However, when questioned further about the outcomes of those efforts, they also discussed the lasting effects of these events in terms of coalition building. In fact, they described lasting initiatives around anti-oppression training and education across generations of activists. This lively and intensive organizing work is an achievement in itself while also heralding alternative possibilities for more meaningful action and collaboration in the future. And indeed, we are seeing important organizing work in many of these same ports in response to the summer 2014 assault on Gaza in the “Block the Boat” movement that has been especially active in the port of Oakland, disrupting the Israeli shipping line Zim and preventing it from unloading in August 2014.32 Describing the initiative as “raising the bar” on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement by engaging in direct economic disruption, the “Block the Boat” movement understands its work as profoundly coalitional:

We have learned from the freedom fighters that ended apartheid in South Africa. We are committed to the values of worker solidarity and the legacy of ILWU who have always waged struggles for justice from the memories of Bloody Thursday to their solidarity with the anti apartheid movement in South Africa in 1984. We are inspired by the resistance to state violence by our brothers and sisters from Ferguson to Oakland. And from the ports of Long Beach, Tampa, New York, New Orleans, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma and Oakland, we are holding the US government accountable for its role in making Israel possible.33

Occupy has been in a host of creative conversations that rarely make it to mainstream media. Indeed, across its diverse local iterations, the movement encountered extensive critique about racism, sexism, and especially colonialism in its conceptual and practical efforts, signaled immediately by the frame of “occupying” occupied lands. The New York movement engaged in dialogue with groups like “Take Back the Land” – a group of organizers of color involved in reclaiming foreclosed homes in US cities, who work in solidarity with US indigenous groups.34 And on the anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park, it was the Sylvia Rivera Project that led a teach-in on the site; transgender activists made powerful statements that connected contemporary economic, racial and gender oppression to the histories of settler colonialism and the slave trade in that same area of lower Manhattan. And indeed, the work of Occupy NY increasingly became tied to the longer-term labors of environmental justice initiatives in post-Sandy relief efforts. “Occupy Sandy” turned its attention to the work of community organizing in low income racialized neighborhoods like Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Far Rockaways, Queens. In highlighting alternative trajectories and the people who have labored towards their potential I do not intend to minimize the problems of the politics of “occupation” or the specific struggles between different movements. Rather, recalling these efforts and labors of transformation marks the work of indigenous and antiracist activists who devoted their time, skill, and spirit to these conversations.35

Perhaps more than any other, it is Idle No More that has demonstrated an incredible flair for creative translocal coalition. Idle No More has inspired and connected to anti-pipeline activists in Houston, Palestinian activists in the occupied territories, LGBTQI organizing, and migrant solidarity activists in many places, and has provoked increasing settler solidarity in many forms. Indeed, the Idle No More movement website makes these coalitional politics a cornerstone of the movement by highlighting efforts to engage the “contemporary context of colonialism, and provide an analysis of the interconnections of race, gender, sexuality, class and other identity constructions in ongoing oppression,” and explicitly invites “everyone to join in this movement.”36

I call these coalitions “queer,” intending a playful reference to the seemingly strange nature of the alliances borne out of supply chain capitalism, but also to gesture at the actual LGBTQ organizing and theorizing that has been so lively within many of these movements, and which has engaged the politics of alliance so centrally. Cathy Cohen has made powerful claims about the necessity of coalition in queer politics, arguing that the promise of queerness is a politics in which, “one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades.” For Cohen, nonnormative and marginalized political position is the basis for “progressive transformative coalition work.”37 In a conversation about queer-Palestinian solidarity work, Judith Butler suggests: “I think acting in coalitions means finding a way to struggle with other groups where some disagreements and antagonisms remain in play. I am not sure all disagreements need to be solved before we agree to enter a coalition.”38 Butler frames this approach to coalition not as a liberal choice, but as a political necessity. “Some of us are ‘coalitional subjects’ without any choice, and other times we work with people with whom we disagree because certain notions of political equality and justice bring us together.” Conversations within and between movements are often aimed specifically at developing more sophisticated analysis of how differently located peoples experience and engage violence and envision possibilities for alternative futures, and this is key to the work of transforming systems of oppression. It is telling that for Butler, “it is only after people have worked with one another that those antagonisms become less defining or important.” There is further an intimacy between questions of queerness and those of futurity, taken up most artfully by the late Jose Muñoz. Queerness, he asserts, “is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality of concrete possibility for another world.” Queerness brings the future into the present as a deliberate object of scrutiny and action for transformative politics, and a conceptual focus on futurity works in coalition with the kind of movement building work highlighted above. Muñoz writes, “we must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”39 Queer coalition insists that alternative futurity is ripe for cultivation in our violent present.

It is perhaps in transformative alliance that works from and through difference, and which insists that subjects and groups might change, that meaningful “disruption” occurs. The common sense notion of disruption equates it with the act or effect of disabling something, in this case material circulation. In this conception, to disrupt is to stop the normal workings of things for some period of time or in some space. No doubt this is an important way of conceiving disruption, and acts of this kind can produce the kinds of effects detailed above. Yet there are other ways of conceptualizing disruption that have more productive connotations. Disruption can also signal a creative destruction that brings new possibilities into the world, as old or normative ways are brought to a halt. This is, in fact, a dictionary definition of the term. Indeed, as Toscano insists, “it is also possible, and indeed necessary, to think of logistics not just as the site of interruption, but as the stake of enduring and articulated struggles.”40 A vision of today’s many headed hydra as coalition on these terms responds directly to Tsing’s arguments about supply chain capitalism as a structure assembled through difference.

If logistics is essentially about networks that provision and sustain both human life and the non-human animals, machines, and infrastructures that constitute our ecologies, then it is in fact not a practice, industry, or assemblage that could ever be ceded to the corporate and military worlds that today work and fight under its banner. Provisioning and sustaining are also the labors of social reproduction that gendered and racialized peoples and social movements have always done. Alongside its military and corporate forms – in fact, provoked directly by these – we can see explicit take-up of logistics by disruptive movements in an alternative register. Now a critical element of social movements from social forums to the Occupy movement, logistics is also a field that activists are actively exploring investing in further for the future.41 Logistics is not only the calculative technologies and material infrastructures that order the global social factory. Today, logistics also renders a complex network of coalitions through which disrupted futures of distribution are assembled.

“Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” – Jean Monnet

These are turbulent but confusing times in Europe. The Great Recession has taken a serious toll. In Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain (the PIIGS), intervention by the EU in domestic policy seems unprecedented. Portugal, Ireland, and Greece were forced by financial markets into bailout agreements with the “Troika.”1 In Italy, under the watchful eyes of Europe, the unelected technocratic government of Mario Monti replaced the elected government of Silvio Berlusconi – and not a single member of this new technocratic government was elected. Spain negotiated with the Troika, but was saved by changes in the financial markets.

The EU’s intervention has not been restricted to the so-called European periphery. In the Netherlands, the government fell in 2012 under pressure from the European Commission to implement major spending cuts. The subsequent government did as it was told. In France, in the summer of 2014, the Prime Minister presented the resignation of the entire government to the president, in protest over the implementation of the austerity programme demanded by the EU.

The political reaction has been fierce, with demonstrations, riots, and occupations a frequent occurrence across Europe. There has also been an electoral backlash. In the UK, France, and Denmark, the far right topped the polls in the 2014 European Parliament elections, while in Italy, the Five Star Movement led by the clownish Beppe Grillo came second. Across Europe few governments now last more than one term. Jean Claude Junker, then Luxembourg’s Prime Minister and now the incoming President of the European Commission, lamented: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” But the story can be told equally well in reverse: we all oppose what you’re doing, but even when we elect someone different it keeps being done.

This phenomenon whereby policies are decided by Europe, implemented nationally, and contested helplessly is not as new as it may seem. We need only think of the Juppe plan in France in 1994, which led to France’s largest strike wave since 1968. This was just an early example of a government implementing hated policies in order to meet an EU target. What is new is that with the current crisis, this is not happening in one or two countries but across the EU simultaneously.

Although the EU is not new, and its role in determining the economic and political development of Europe is both substantial and well established, critical analysis of the EU is sorely lacking. Most of what is written on the EU is uncritically liberal and focuses on diplomatic and legislative detail.2 What little critical literature exists often simply interprets the EU in terms of the function it plays for neoliberal globalization. At one extreme, it is portrayed as a transnational capitalist conspiracy, while at the other extreme the critique is limited to identifying the wrong policies: too much liberalization, privatization, etc.3 When analyses of the EU go from what it does to the larger questions of what it is and why it exists, analysis often becomes completely un-rooted. We see nonsense claims about the idea of a united Europe across time, sometimes extending to hagiographic accounts about the founding fathers of Europe.4 At times it is truly absurd: Europe is a bastion of social democratic anti-imperialist capitalism in distinction to the USA.5 Other times more intriguing claims are made, such as the argument that the EU is a neo-medieval state like the Holy Roman Empire!6

Curiously the question of whether the EU is a state or not and, if so, what kind of state is it, rarely connects the development of the EU polity with what has been at its core: economic integration. The state is treated as though its existence and form can and should be understood separately to the question of the economic reproduction of society.

Instead, I will try to address the emergence and development of the EU as a new political form by focusing on the underlying process of economic integration: why was economic integration needed and why did its establishment involve the creation of the EU? Pursuing this question will allow us better understand what the EU is in relation to the state, how it developed, and what it does.

European integration should not be understood as a steady and continuous progress towards “ever closer union.” Rather, we need to understand the development of the EU as an iterated process of dealing with crises of capitalist reproduction that arise from working class power and the threat of working class autonomy. This iterated process can be seen then as having two waves, the first one emerging in the late ’40s and ’50s, the second emerging in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and continuing to develop ever since.7

I: Economic Regulation and State Form

In order to root my analysis of the relation between the form of political institutions (the EU and the national state) and the economy, I want to begin this article with a brief theoretical consideration of this issue. I would like to step back from Europe and discuss the nature of the state and its relation to economic regulation over a much longer time frame. I draw substantially here on both, what Benno Teschke has called the “theory of social property relations”8 and on the state derivation debate in the 1960s and 70s.9

The question always facing materialist social analysis is: “how does a society reproduce itself?” The answer to this question differs across history, but in every society central to the question of how a society reproduces itself is the question of the extraction of surplus labor.10

In pre-capitalist forms of society the extraction of social surplus occurs primarily under threat of direct violence.11 For example, a peasant worked a corvée for their lord because that lord could directly threaten violence on the peasant. Importantly, here both economic power (the power to buy, sell and exploit) and political power (the control of violence) are united in the one person, the lord, whereas under contemporary liberal capitalist society these powers are separated. With the separation of economic and political power, the exploiting subject that extracts surplus labor no longer directly or personally holds the threat of violence. Under capitalism, this exploiting subject, i.e. the capitalist, is the subject of a logic of accumulation through exploitation independent of the use of violence, but which requires a form of violence equally independent from the process of exploitation. This mutual requirement of independence is symbiotic. Neither the economic nor the political can exist or be understood independently of the other, despite their necessary mutual independence.

This independent process of exploitation occurs through a seemingly non-violent form of legal contracting. This free contracting involves the capitalist paying the worker the value of their labor-power, which is less than the value of the goods they produce. However, despite the apparent political neutrality of this contract, workers engage in it is because they lack independent access to the means of production. Therefore, they are incapable of satisfying their own needs and desires except by selling their labor-power to an employer. This of course raises the question: “why do workers not have access to the means of production?” The well-rehearsed answer is that the means of production are the private property of the capitalist, and this private property is publicly enforced through the public power of state violence. This returns us to the bifurcation of social power into private, economic power to contract and public, political power to enforce contracts. The economic power to buy, sell and, most importantly, to exploit, and the political power to enforce, are separated under capitalism. Through the separation of the political power of enforcement, economic power takes on a natural semblance devoid of force. The violence that is involved in ensuring the operation of capitalist processes of exploitation is separated into the sphere of the state.

The fundamental characteristic of this separate political sphere of the state is its control of violence. But what this violence is there for is to ensure the operation of capitalism. It is to ensure that seemingly neutral property rights exist. These property rights are ensured through the creation of laws and regulations regarding the operation of these property rights and through the use of violence to maintain the operation of these laws and regulations. However, as this political sphere is where laws and regulations are decided, they are also where these property relations can be contested and feasibly changed.12 The state is therefore simultaneously the institution through which the legal framework of capitalist reproduction is put in place, the violent organization that enforces that framework, and the institution through which antagonism to capitalist reproduction can be mediated. The state mediates class antagonism by being the institution that implements the legal framework through which class relations are maintained. To reiterate, we can point to three aspects of the state, firstly, a legal framework for exploitation to occur, secondly, a medium for the mediation of class antagonism, and finally, a means through which these property relations are violently imposed and maintained.

This framework will help us understand the changing nature of the state in the twentieth century, with the increasing incorporation and mediation of class conflict within the state. And it will help frame the fundamental argument of this article: that the development of the EU needs to be understood as a bifurcation of the state, where the regulation of capitalist reproduction takes place at a European level, while the mediation of class antagonism and the enforcement of these regulations remains at a national level.

II: The creation of the EEC (1914-1957)

The Crisis of the Interwar Period

By 1945 Europe had experienced over 30 years of chaos. Beginning in 1914, the continent had seen over 10 years of war, and 70 million deaths. The 21 interwar years were marked by permanent volatility, with extreme economic and political crises. It was from this chaos, and more specifically the crisis of the postwar years, that European integration was born.

World War I marked the end of the long period of peace, liberalism, free trade, and unprecedented economic growth that defined 19th century Europe. There were therefore repeated attempts after the war to return to the 19th century order. But they all failed, and the economy slumped. Growth of GDP per capita in Western Europe between 1913-1950 was 0.8% per annum, lower than any period between 1820 and 2000.

Table 1: Growth of real GDP per capita, 1820-2000 (Average annual compound growth rate)

1820-1870 1870-1913 1913-1950 1950-1973 1973-2000
Austria 0,7 1,5 0,2 4,9 2,2
Belgium 1,4 1,0 0,7 3,5 2,0
Denmark 0,9 1,6 1,6 3,1 1,9
Finland 0,8 1,4 1,9 4,3 2,2
France 0,8 1,5 1,1 4,0 1,7
Germany 1,1 1,6 0,3 5,0 1,6
Italy 0,6 1,3 0,8 5,0 2,1
Netherlands 1,1 0,9 1,1 3,4 1,9
Norway 0,5 1,3 2,1 3,2 2,9
Sweden 0,7 1,5 2,1 3,1 1,5
Switzerland NA 1,5 2,1 3,1 0,7
UK 1,2 1,0 0,8 2,5 1,9
Regional Average 1,0 1,3 0,8 4,0 1,8
Source: Barry Eichengreen, The European economy since 1945, 17.

In addition to economic failure, the period was one of extreme political volatility. Immediately after the war there was the revolutionary wave, which in many ways continues to define the ideational identity of the radical left. This wave coincided with the expansion of suffrage, the rise of mass parties and mass unions, increased democratization of the state, and the politicization of the economy. In Russia this revolutionary movement took state power, while in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Greece, and Portugal the fascist counterrevolution took state power. In other countries the high levels of class conflict lead to the creation of some form of democratic corporatism: the Basic Agreement in Norway (1935), the Peace Agreement in Switzerland (1937), and the Basic Agreement in Sweden (1938).

As World War II approached it was widely expected that the crisis of the interwar years would continue unless there was some final resolution. For the Axis powers this solution was the victory of the Third Reich. But others had different hopes. On the Left, many believed that World War II would end with a revolutionary wave greater than that at the end of World War I. Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International with the explicit aim of acting act as the “head of the revolutionary tide” which would inevitably follow the war.13 For leaders of the allied nations, it was equally clear that postwar reconstruction could not follow the same path as after World War I.

In August 1941, Winston Churchill sailed to Newfoundland to meet with President Roosevelt to agree on the “Atlantic Charter,” an eight-point plan for postwar reconstruction. At the center of this plan was a clear commitment to lower trade barriers and to the rather social democratic goal of bringing “about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security… and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”14 While the sincerity of this commitment can easily be questioned, it is clear that a lesson had been learnt from the interwar crisis and the postwar period would be different.

Postwar Settlement

After World War II, Trotsky’s anticipated revolution never happened. As can be seen from Table 2, the years from 1946 to 50 experienced far less labor unrest than those immediately following WWI. This does not mean there were no revolutionary pressures. Across Europe communist parties were growing rapidly, and in some countries were winning elections. But instead of leading to socialism, Europe saw the creation of what has been called the postwar settlement.

Table 2. Strike Activity (Annual days lost per 100 workers)

France Germany Italy UK
1919-24 120 191 149 233
1946-50 87 4 145 10
1953-61 41 7 64 28
1962-66 32 3 134 23
1967-71 350 8 161 60
1972-76 34 3 200 97
1977-81 23 8 151 112
1982-87 13 9 93 88
Source: 1919-1924 & 1946-1950: Andrea Boltho “Reconstruction after Two World Wars: Why the Differences?” Journal of European Economic History 30 no. 2 (2001), 429–456. 1953-1987: Philip Armstrong, Andrew Glyn, John Harrison, Capitalism since 1945, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Note that the figures do not measure exactly the same thing. Boltho’s figure measure “man-days lost” per 100 non-agricultural wage earners. Armstrong et al measure workers in industry and transport.

This postwar settlement resulted in the rise of the welfare state, full employment, and the incorporation of workers’ organizations into the management of capitalist development. It also saw an unprecedented economic boom and a massive increase in international trade.

The growth boom is remembered well across the Western world. In almost every country the thirty year period after 1945 has a unique name emphasising its novelty: Les Trente Glorieuses (France), Wirtschaftswunder (Germany), Rekordåren (Sweden), the “Economic Miracle” (Italy, Japan and Greece) or simply the “Golden Age” (United States and UK). As Table 1 shows, growth in Western Europe in this period was around 4% per annum, the highest growth ever recorded for Western Europe and startlingly higher than the 0.8% growth in the interwar period.

The boom in international trade, while not as well remembered, is even more dramatic. As can be seen in Table 3, while during the interwar years exports declined, the postwar years saw a massive increase in international trade.

Table 3. Growth in Volume of Merchandise Exports (Annual average compound growth rates)

1870–1913 1913–1950 1950–1973 1973–1998
Western Europe 3,24 –0.14 8,38 4,79
Source: Angus Maddison, The world economy, (Paris, France: OECD, 2006), 127.

The postwar growth boom was driven both by this increase in international trade and by a significant increase in investment.

Central to this growth in investment were the institutions created as part of the postwar settlement. These “institutions solved commitment and coordination problems in whose presence neither wage moderation nor the expansion of international trade could have taken place.”15 Under these institutions workers moderated their wage claims, making profits available to capitalists to reinvest. Capitalists restrained dividend payouts in order to reinvest. Investing in modernization and expansion of productive capacity stimulated growth and increased the future income of both workers and capital owners.

The benefit for employers was that the threat of an insurgent working class was avoided; for the organized working class, it was a seat at the table, which facilitated the other aspects of the postwar settlement – it enabled the creation of the welfare state and the oversight of rising living standards and full employment.

However, the postwar settlement went further than the conflict between labor and capital. The instability of the interwar years was not only created by working class militancy. In Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and elsewhere the far right had come to power on the basis of a popular movement dependent on the support of disgruntled nationalist farmers.16 During the great depression, agriculture was hit badly, resulting in growing demands for autarky and the protection of agricultural producers from the world market. The solution to these issues in the postwar period was the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Before getting to CAP, we need to look at the emergence of the European Economic Community (EEC).

The Birth of Europe?

The standard political narrative regarding the EU is to pose the alternative as being either for Europe or for national sovereignty. The appeal of national sovereignty here is obvious both to the Left and Right. For the Right national sovereignty means the collective nation walking its own path, and for the Left it means people democratically determining their own social development. The postwar period was an era whereby national peoples were able to determine their own domestic policies in a highly democratic and free manner that was unprecedented. Today both the Left and Right recall this period wistfully.

A seeming paradox here is that this emergence of popular sovereignty went hand in hand with the development of a level of supranational governance that had never been seen before. Internationally, this was represented by the creation of the IMF, GATT, and World Bank. But this development was even more extreme in Europe, where a vast array of new institutions emerged: the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which exists today as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the Western European Union (WEU), the European Payments Union (EPU), and of course the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC). Between them, these organizations marked a new phase in the political organization of the European economy.

In order to disentangle the paradox of a simultaneous increase in national democratic sovereignty with the increase in European supranational governance, it is necessary to depart with some of the mythology surrounding the birth of the European Union.

A frequent story often told is that the early development of the EU was driven by a noble few or a sinister cabal, depending on the political perspective. But regardless of the perspective, the names are generally the same. At the front is the French civil servant Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, the Luxembourg-born French Prime Minister (1947-1948). The supporting cast is provided by Altiero Spinelli, the Italian author of the Ventotene Manifesto; Paul-Henri Spaak, Prime Minister of Belgium (1947-49); Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of Germany (1949-1963); and Walter Hallstein, a German civil servant who became the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community (1958-1967).17

The legend is that a few people determined to establish peace across the continent, and convinced of the need for a European Federation, set about establishing a European state bit by bit. The first step in reaching this high and noble ideal was an agreement on coal and steel, and the rest naturally followed.

Indeed the Treaty of Paris and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) is a rather odd moment of international diplomacy. It emerged as a proposal from the rather grandiose “Schuman Declaration,” made by the then French Foreign Minister on May 9, 1950, which gave “world peace” as its aim, and “a united Europe” as its interim objective, but settled for “the pooling of coal and steel production… as a first step.”18

In addition to these overflowing statements, the treaty overflowed with institutions. To administer a common market in coal and steel, it created in embryo the institutions of the modern EU: a High Authority (the precursor of the European Commission), a Common Assembly (the precursor of the European Parliament), a Council of Ministers (the precursor of the Council of Ministers), and a Court of Justice (the precursor of the Court of Justice of the EU).

In order to understand why the European federalists came to found the ECSC, the important issue is less their federalist ambitions, but rather the actual issue of European coal and steel production.

The coal and steel heartlands of continental Europe encompassed the borderlands of Germany, Luxembourg, France, and southeast Belgium. It had been at the centre of all recent western European military conflicts, as well as being both economically important and potentially highly economically integrated. It was a region both where the breakdown of international trade mattered greatly and where the industrial working class was at its strongest.

The question, therefore, was how to manage the transition to a liberal market economy while avoiding social conflicts that might arise from that transition. The content of the Treaty of Paris is therefore focused heavily on the social difficulties in managing the transition to an integrated coal and steel market. It is striking from any brief perusal of Title III of the Treaty, the section which deals with the coal and steel industries, how much of it is focussed on matters such as “the possibilities of reemployment… of workers set at liberty by the evolution of the market or by technical transformations” or “the appraisal of the possibilities of improving the living and working conditions of the labor force… and of the risks which menace such living conditions.”19

Alan Milward supports this understanding when, in his detailed discussion of the social dynamics behind Belgian participation in the ECSC, he writes “The Treaty of Paris can be understood not just as the diplomatic substitute for a peace treaty, but also as the moment when Belgium formally entered the mixed economy… It ratified the shift to public responsibility in management, to the incorporation of the labor force into that responsibility, and to the commitment of the state to welfare and employment.”20

However, the importance of the ECSC should not be overstated – although it often is. The ECSC was important in primarily two ways, firstly, it was an early step in the direction of the creation of the common market; secondly, it created the institutions of the EEC. However, the ambition of an integrated European economy was not realized with the ECSC. In fact, the ECSC was really only a very small step in that direction.21

The first major step in the creation of the EU was not the Treaty of Paris or the ECSC; it was the creation of the EEC with the Treaty of Rome. Today the Treaty that started as the Treaty of Rome constitutes roughly three quarters of the “constitution” of the EU.22

International Trade and Social Protection: The Creation of the EEC

As we have already emphasized, central to the postwar boom was the growth in postwar trade (see Table 3). In Europe this was enabled by the creation of the Common Market with the Treaty of Rome.23 The Common Market entailed a customs union — no internal tariffs or trade barriers. It was to be administered through the European Economic Community (EEC), which inherited the ECSC institutions.

From the Treaty of Rome onwards the EEC was to present a single economic tariff and customs bloc to the rest of the world, while internally trade would be free.

But why was the creation of the EEC necessary? In the late 19th century, tariff barriers were radically reduced across the Western world and a Commission, an Assembly, a Council of Ministers, and a Court of Justice weren’t necessary. Through the wonders of the “most favoured nation” clause, economic integration appeared to develop naturally.

However, after World War I, things were different. With the rise of democracy and the organized working class in the first half of the twentieth century, the separation between liberal politics and the liberal economy were threatened. The economy was politicized. In the interwar period there was no successful resolution of this problem.

After World War II, the problem was resolved through the incorporation of the organized working class into capitalist governance. This entailed both an expansion of the state into new spheres of socioeconomic life as well as its increased democratic administration.

Therefore the integration of European trade after the war required not only the reduction of barriers, but also the means through which the reduction of these barriers could take place without threatening the living standards of European citizens.24

We can see this clearly in the negotiations leading up to the creation of the EEC. Central to these negotiations were concerns regarding issues such as wage rates, differences in holidays, and the fact that working hours in the French automobile industry were 40 hours per week, while they were 48 in Germany. Even the question of equal pay for women was on the agenda.

Here, we can finally return to the issue raised earlier regarding farmers. The Treaty of Rome included a commitment to the creation of a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Whilst the signatories of the Treaty did surely not anticipate the current size of the CAP in 1957, it serves as another example of creating a means through which citizens could be protected by the state from the disruption and threat of free and open markets. This kind of defensive mechanism defines what is novel about the approach to the reduction of trade barriers brought about by the Treaty of Rome.25

The creation of the EEC brought about the reduction of trade barriers, the expansion of trade within Europe and thereby contributed to growth and capitalist development. The creation of this supranational organization created a new means through which the rules of economic life could be set. It thereby increased the power of national states to set these rules and facilitated the increased democratic administration of economic life.

It can now be seen how opposing national sovereignty to European governance makes little sense. Rather than threatening the power of the state, the EEC was created as a means through which the power of the state could be preserved and enhanced.

III: From Consensus to Crisis (1957-1984)

The establishment of the EEC ushered in the first wave of European Integration, after which little changed for nearly 30 years. Indeed, it was not until the mid-1980s that the process of European Integration was renewed.

But this is not at all to say that nothing was happening. Indeed, one can retrospectively discern three very important developments. First, expansion; second, the flurry of failed proposals; and finally, the early moves towards monetary union.

Perhaps the most major change in the EEC between 1957 and 1986 was its expansion. First the UK, Ireland, and Denmark joined (1973). They were followed later by the recently democratized Greece (1981), Spain and Portugal (1986).26

The second development was the flurry of failed reforms. Amongst these, there were proposals for a common currency (see the Werner report27), proposals for a massive expansion in Europe’s fiscal capabilities (see the MacDougall report28), and proposals for developing a European social democracy (see the Social Action Programme arising from the Paris summit29). However despite these debates, processes, reports and agreements, very little of these proposals actually materialized, and they are therefore of limited interest and importance.

The one major development that did take place was the response of EEC states to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. First, there was the “snake in the tunnel,” then simply “the snake”. This was followed by the European Monetary System, which lasted the early 1990s. I will cover these in some more depth below. But first, it is worth considering why these developments happened at all.

The Postwar Settlement becomes Unsettled

As described above the postwar settlement was a fundamentally unstable arrangement, under which the working class agreed to moderate wage demands and the capitalist class agreed to invest the surplus profits generated by this wage restraint. The result was an unusually high level of investment in the postwar period (See Chart 2). This arrangement was managed through the expansion and integration of working class organizations into capitalist governance. The instability arose from the fact that at any point there were gains to be made from abandoning this agreement. There was an additional problem; the integration of the working class into capitalist governance was brought about partially as a means of avoiding revolutionary conflict. In other words, in order to avoid the threat of working-class organizations seizing power and expropriating the capitalist class, these organizations were integrated into the management of capitalist development. However, this integration brought about a dramatic increase in the size and power of workers organizations, both as integrated bodies and, potentially, as independent actors. For those who believed in the potential of revolutionary action, the opportunities for the revolutionary activity of the working class were not dwindling, but rather growing.

Increasingly, the problem for the revolutionary elements in the workers’ movement was not organization; it was the bureaucratic leadership of the workers’ movement, which had become integrated into capitalist management. This problem was expressed differently by different sectors of the newly emerging New Left, perhaps most clearly in Trotskyism: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”30 But similar sentiments can be seen in Maoism, anarchism, and the general rise of anti-authoritarian movements, in which notions of self-management and self-managed autonomous struggles became paramount.

Extricating the exact causal relationship is difficult, but by the late 1960s, strikes were increasing, profit rates were decreasing, and the investment rate began its decline.

In France, days lost to strikes more than doubled. In 1962-1966, annual days lost were 32 per 100 workers; between 1967-1971 it was 350 days lost to strikes per annum. This figure was of course largely driven by the revolutionary crisis of May 1968. In the UK, the figure also more than doubled. It climbed from 23 in 1962-1966, to 60 in 1967-71. However, in the UK the number of strikes continued to rise throughout the 1970s, and only began to fall after the election of Thatcher. In Italy, the workers’ movement was in the 1970s perhaps the most militant of anywhere in Europe, and the days lost to strikes nearly quadrupled, from 64 annual days per 100 workers in 1953-61 up to 200 days in 1972-1976 (see Table 2).

oisin chart 1
Source: Phillip Armstrong, Andrew Glyn, John Harrison, Capitalism since 1945, 352.
Profit rates went in the opposite direction, as can be seen in Chart 1. Here we see the weighted average net manufacturing and business profit rates for France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. As can be seen the net manufacturing profit rate decreased from 24.3% in 1955 to a low of 8.8% in 1975.31

By the late 1960s, the investment rate had also started to decline. As can be seen in Chart 2, in Germany it fell from 37% of GDP in 1965 to less than 27% in 1975. In the UK and France, the postwar rise in the investment rate came to an end.32

oisin chart 2
Source: Penn World Tables 8.0
Not only was there a crisis in the private sector, but the postwar state continued to expand in order to meet rising demands for the universal provision of social services. As can be seen from Table 4, the size of the government sector in Western European economies had been increasing throughout the twentieth century, and by the mid-1970s there was little sign this trend would be coming to an end.

Table 4. Total Government Expenditure as Per Cent of GDP at Current Prices, 1913–1999

1913 1938 1950 1973 1999
France 8,9 23,2 27,6 38,8 52,4
Germany 17,7 42,4 30,4 42 47,6
Netherlands 8.2a 21,7 26,8 45,5 43,8
United Kingdom 13,3 28,8 34,2 41,5 39,7
Arithmetic Average 12 29 29,8 42 45,9
Source: Angus Maddison, The world economy, 135.

a. 1910

However, despite the significant rise in social spending during this period, social conflict did not abate, and the legitimacy of the existing political order was being increasingly undermined.

A telling example was in Britain, where, in 1973, industrial action by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had reduced the supply of electricity to the point where the Conservative government was forced to declare a three-day-week. But public support was largely behind the miners. The Prime Minister sought a mandate to take on miners and called a snap election under the slogan “Who governs Britain?” – the government or the labor movement. The Conservatives got their answer when they were kicked out of office, and the Labor Party was voted in.

The reaction to the crisis of the late ’60s and ’70s was largely to concede to the demands of the movement. Wages went up, profit shares went down, government expenditure increased, and the doors were open to the social movement to come inside and share power. In brief, the postwar solution was extended. Rather than aiming to suppress the movement, it was thought that a demobilizing democratic resolution was possible.

This enables us to understand the flurry of well-meaning and often ambitious proposals that developed at a European level in this period, such as the aforementioned MacDougall report, which proposed to massively increase Europe’s spending power and move some fiscal decision-making to a European level. It also helps us understand the Social Action Programme, which emerged from the 1972 Paris summit, and began that ephemeral dream of the European liberal Left: “Social Europe.” The political space from which these proposals arose was a crisis whereby the trajectory of postwar development was breaking down and generating a desire for new solutions. But none of these projects ever had any real legs. The reason for this is equally obvious – they could not solve the problems that existed within the nation states of Europe.

The only proposal that did get some real traction was the one that was at first merely intended to solve a problem arising from America.

The Breakdown of Bretton Woods

It is widely believed that a major contributing factor to the economic chaos of the interwar period was the gold standard. This operated through the declared commitment to maintain convertibility of currency into a specified amount of gold. Thereby all currencies were fixed in value against a homogenous internationally tradable commodity. In order to maintain gold convertibility, countries needed to pursue a set of economic policies to avoid balance of payments problems and maintain their gold reserves. This could involve cutting wages and government spending, regardless of the effect this might have on the country’s wider economic health, the living standards of its citizens, or its political stability. Accordingly, this led to many problems in the interwar period.

Therefore, in 1944 an agreement was reached that the postwar monetary system would be much more flexible. It was agreed that the US dollar would be convertible into gold, and every other currency would be convertible into dollars. This allowed for adjustments to a country’s exchange rate. For example, if workers in a country brought about wage increases and thereby made that country’s exports uncompetitive, it would be possible to adjust the exchange rate so that the value of the national currency would be worth less in dollar terms, reversing some of the negative effect that this wage increase might have.

By 1971, almost all of America’s main competitors had devalued against the dollar on a number of occasions, and as wage demands, the cost of social services, and the cost of the war in Vietnam rose, America found itself in a situation where it had a growing balance of payments problem and an overvalued currency. The solution was obvious, and the US ended dollar-gold convertibility. The stated intention was to devalue the dollar but maintain the system more or less unchanged. And indeed, a few short months later, the “Smithsonian Agreement” was signed, which largely returned the system to how it operated before. One significant change, however, was that currencies were now allowed to fluctuate against the dollar more than previously. Under the new Smithsonian Agreement, countries could fluctuate ±2.25% against the dollar. However, this meant that in the EEC, currencies would now be able to fluctuate much more against one another.33

The response to this drew on the Werner Report (1970), which laid out a plan for creating a single European currency. The EEC countries agreed to allow their currencies fluctuate by only ±2.25% against one another. This framework, whereby European currencies fluctuated within a smaller band than the band for fluctuation faced by other countries, was called “the snake in the tunnel.” However, very shortly after the signing of the Smithsonian Agreement, its “tunnel” fell apart and the international monetary system moved to free floating exchange rates. In Europe, however, the snake persisted without the tunnel. But even this was only of limited success, and through the 1970s countries entered and exited the snake depending on their domestic economic situation. In 1979, therefore, the European Monetary System was created, which operated on more or less the same principle, only in a more structured manner.

Despite this important change, looking at the long period between the Treaty of Rome (1957) and the Maastricht Treaty (1992), we can see relatively few developments. It is therefore useful to consider European Integration as occurring in two waves. The first was established by the Treaty of Rome, was centered on the common market, and lasted until the mid-80s. The second was established by the Maastricht Treaty and lasts to this day. This second wave was centered on the single market and the common currency, whose early moments I have just described. However, before we consider the development of this second wave from 1992 onwards, it is worth considering the situation in Europe in the 1980s that it developed in response to.

The Delayed Resolution of the Crisis

By the late 1970s the crisis that had emerged in the mid-60s was still not resolved. Profit rates were continuing their decline and had not recovered (See Chart 2). Investment rates had fallen substantially (See Chart 1). Growth rates were substantially lower than what they had been during the 1945-1975 period. In addition, the re-emergence of unemployment became a major social problem. This was in fact a very significant change, since full employment had been the norm across Western Europe for the entire 1945-1973 period (see Table 5).

Table 5: Level of Unemployment (% of labour force)

1950–73 1974–83 1984–93 1994–98 2000 2004 2008 2012 2014
Belgium 3 8,2 8,8 9,7 7,5 8,7 7,2 7,2 8,5
Finland 1,7 4,7 6,9 14,2 10,0 9,0 6,4 7,5 8,4
France 2 5,7 10 12,1 10,4 9,0 7,3 9,4 10,2
Germany 2,5 4,1 6,2 9 8,2 9,9 8,1 5,6 5,2
Italy 5,5 7,2 9,3 11,9 10,6 8,2 6,4 9,5 12,6
Netherlands 2,2 7,3 7,3 5,9 3,3 4,8 3,2 5,0 7,1
Norway 1,9 2,1 4,1 4,6 3,4 4,2 2,4 3,2 3,5
Sweden 1,8 2,3 3,4 9,2 6,2 7,0 6,0 7,9 8,2
United Kingdom 2,8 7 9,7 8 5,7 4,7 5,1 8,2 6,8
Ireland n.a. 8,8 15,6 11,2 4,8 4,9 5,0 15,0 12,1
Spain 2,9 9,1 19,4 21,8 12,7 11,3 9,0 23,2 25,5
Average 2,4 6,0 9,2 10,7 7,5 7,4 6,0 9,2 9,8
Source: 1950-1998: Angus Maddison, The world economy, 134. 2000-2014: January data from Eurostat.

And society was still politically highly unstable. In Italy, the very high level of industrial activity continued, albeit with greater desperation. This hopelessness saw the beginning of the “Years of Lead,” which perhaps reached its peak with the kidnapping and execution of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Brigate Rosse in 1978. Such violence was not limited to Italy. Germany witnessed left-wing guerrilla activity during this period as well, with such groups as the Rote Armee Fraktion, Rote Zellen, Rote Zora and the June 2 Movement. The UK experienced left-wing armed activity in the north of Ireland and, in Britain, there was a persistent increase in strike activity.

Indeed, the British winter of 1978-1979 was rocked by a strike wave that is remembered as the “Winter of Discontent.” This strike wave was both felt and visible across the UK. The fact that the winter was one of the coldest on record did not improve things. City centers filled with uncollected trash. Infamously, in Liverpool, the city was forced to hire an empty factory to store corpses as the gravediggers struck. The UK had to go to the IMF for a £2.3bn loan. By the time an election was called in 1979, the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher won.

Thatcher famously used her mandate to take on the British labor movement piece by piece, until what was once one of the strongest and most militant labor movements in Europe was destroyed. Today in Britain unions scarcely exist outside the public sector, and strikes are a minor issue economically and politically.

Although the social movement of the 1960s and 1970s were filled with hope, by the late 1970s the movement had reached an impasse. It could continue to force the state to increase its social spending, but it was unclear how to fund it. Equally, it could continue to increase wage demands, but it was clear that this was reducing profit opportunities and damaging the economy. The next step seemed unclear, and many believed the moment for a break with capitalism had passed.34 As these hopes faded, the emerging voices from the Right for a return to pre-war liberalism began to gain favor.

Of course, the Left did not simply abandon its project, and the debates of this period remain of real interest.35 And although across Europe the labor movement was suffering defeats: the mass arrests in Italy 1979-1981,36 the defeat at FIAT Mirafiori (1980),37 the UK Miners’ Strike (1984), Wapping (1986), etc. There were other attempts to find another route for the Left. Perhaps the most successful was François Mitterrand’s electoral victory in France in May 1981. This brought together much of the Left, many of the militants of 1968, along with many of the political refugees fleeing persecution in Italy. Mitterrand was elected on a radical platform named the “110 Propositions for France.” This involved a major push further towards more social control of the economy. There were several nationalizations and the minimum wage, statutory holidays, pensions, health insurance for the unemployed, social housing, family allowances, taxes on wealth, were all increased, while simultaneously the workweek was reduced. However, as this happened, capital began to leave the country. With inflation continuing to rise, France faced a persistent and serious balance of payments problem. The franc was devalued in October 1981, again in June 1982, and yet again in March 1983! Ultimately, Mitterrand was forced to abandon his left-wing economic policy and launched the “Franc Fort” (Strong Franc) policy. This involved a major shift to austerity, and in many ways the end of postwar social democracy. From this point on across Europe, the parties of the Left reoriented themselves towards a pro-market, neoliberal approach to the economy.

Neoliberalism?

Despite the appearance of neoliberalism as an intellectual movement, it is important to treat it as neither a purely intellectual phenomenon nor as a return to normal. Neoliberalism emerged as a response to the prolonged political instability and economic downturn of the 1965-1985 period. While the prolonged political instability is often underplayed and reduced to the momentary madness of May 1968, the economic downturn is often overplayed. By almost any measure, European economies were doing better in the 1970s than at any point since. The growth rate was higher, the investment rate was higher, the unemployment rate was lower and inequality was lower. Compared to the economic situation in the 70s, the only clear improvement for workers today is that inflation has stabilized at a low level. However, low inflation primarily benefits creditors and capital owners. Other changes also benefit capitalists. Strikes have gone down dramatically. Tax rates have stabilized and the growth of the public sector has been more or less halted (although contrary what much of the left might say, it has not reversed) (see Table 4). And, by most measures, the profit rate has risen again.

Presumably in 1975 it was possible for Europe to continue to develop away from capitalism and place the economy under increasing democratic control. Whether this might have been achieved through socialist revolution, autonomous action, or legislation, is unknown to us because, of course, it never happened.

In the Western European countries where revolutions did happen,38 despite their revolutionary commitments, these societies quickly entered the Western liberal order. The high points of workers’ autonomy in Italy and the UK were crushed, and the more nebulous forms of autonomy among squatters and environmentalists in Northern Europe were gradually hacked away at, so that little remains but some interesting concert venues and the embarrassment of the Green parties. Where legislative reform was attempted, most significantly in France under Mitterrand, the renewed freedom of capital to flow across borders brought about rapid balance of payments problems, forcing the reforms to be abandoned.

In short, by the early ’80s the Left was at an impasse while the Right had a clear agenda: liberalize!

Seen from the Right, the problem of the European economy and the reason for the downturn was an over-empowered labor movement and excessive government intervention in the economy. What was necessary therefore was to facilitate the process of private firms competing for profits via the market. By stimulating trade and profit-making, this would lead to increased investment, growth and employment. Central to this process was increasing cross-border European trade.

IV: The Second Wave of European Integration (1984-Today)

The second wave of European integration began with the Single European Act (1986) and was properly established with the Maastricht Treaty (1992). The Maastricht Treaty is perhaps the most significant of all treaties relating to European integration. It created the European Union and along with the Treaty of Rome (1957), the Maastricht Treaty is the basis of one of the two “Treaties” that form the core of the European constitution.39

The core of the establishment of this second wave of European Integration was the creation of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) under Maastricht, which in turn involves two key elements: the creation of the Single Market and the creation of the Euro.

It is worth distinguishing the Single Market from the Common Market. The first was established under the Single European Act (1986), the latter under the Treaty of Rome (1957).

The core of the common market (i.e. the EEC) was, as discussed earlier, the creation of a tariff free area within Europe for the international trade of nationally produced goods. These goods were, even when produced by multinationals, produced within nation states in a manner laid out by national legislation. The logic behind this process was to democratically manage the transition to free trade. This involved the incorporation at the national level of working-class and farmers’ organizations into capitalist management. The aim was to maintain living standards and avoid the chaos of the interwar years, while still getting the benefits of higher levels of trade and market expansion and integration. In other words, the logic was one that saw the postwar maintenance of a market society through the exercise of social control over the market.

The Single European Act is often presented as simply being a part of the further extension of an undetermined process of “ever closer union.” It is often suggested that it was simply a matter of “completing” the common market.40 However, the logic of the creation of the single market was qualitatively different from the creation of the EEC. Whereas the creation of the EEC was embedding the market within wider social controls, the move towards the single market was aimed at making greater aspects of society subject to market control.

The first wave of European integration aimed at empowering both the market and the nation state, by reducing political and social turbulence through the creation of democratic controls over the market economy. The second wave of European Integration, on the other hand, involved reducing political and social turbulence by removing the market from democratic contestation.

The Single European Act, and the Maastricht Treaty which followed, committed Europe not simply to creating a common market free of tariffs for international trade within Europe, it aimed at creating single markets ruled and regulated by a common set of rules and regulations determined at a European level.

The pre-history of the SEA is rather telling about its development. The wordy declarations by heads of states on the need for European unity continued throughout the ’70s and early ’80s. But over time the focus of these announcements, reports, draft treaties and white papers shifted from the ephemeral federalist goal of “political union” to what has always been the core of the European project: economic integration.41

Interestingly, this period of the mid-80s, in particular around the SEA, is perhaps the only point in the history of European integration when the UK plays an agenda-setting role in Europe. Desmond Dinan writes “Mitterrand and Kohl42 had succumbed to Thatcher’s minimalist programme.”43

The core of the SEA was a commitment to implement the 279 proposals in the 1985 Commission White Paper on the Internal Market and create a single market by December 31, 1992. This involved harmonizing economic regulation of a huge number of industries across Europe – thereby the regulation of the internal European market would be fundamentally European, replacing the system of national regulation.

France’s enthusiasm for this process is of interest. As noted above, Mitterrand’s agenda for pushing social democracy forward collapsed in ’83/’84 with the Franc Fort policy. In response to this shift Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the Minister of Industry, resigned and was replaced by Laurent Fabius.44 In his first speech as minister, Fabius announced that “the state does not intend to become a substitute for the role of enterprises and entrepreneurs,” and launched a series of reforms under the motto “Modernize or decline.” It is against this background of the turn to market liberalization, and the notion that France must “adapt itself to the conditions of the new world economy,” that the French government’s attitude to the SEA and Maastricht should be understood. The aim was for France to bind herself to Germany’s strong Deutschemark and to adjust her internal markets by liberalising and internationalising.45

Maastricht

While the Single European Act marked the launch of the second wave of European integration, the Maastricht treaty marked its establishment. At the core of the Maastricht treaty were two core elements: institutional change and economic integration.

The institutional changes brought in by Maastricht were substantial. For one, Maastricht established the European Union. Secondly, it established a new structure of the European Union, which was to last until the passing of the Lisbon Treaty.

The new structure brought together an array of forms of European cooperation that had previously been separate under the common framework of the EU. Part of the logic here was to increase European integration in areas beyond economic integration by tying them institutionally to economic integration. Under Maastricht, the EU was structured around “the three pillars of the EU.” These were the European Community (EC), Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Intuitively, this maps onto the economy (EC), law (JHA), and foreign affairs (CFSP). The European Community was basically the EEC renamed and was by far the most important pillar of the EU. The other two pillars that were created under Maastricht took over from relatively minor institutions, but it was hoped they would grow in importance. Justice and Home Affairs took over from TREVI, which was little more than a means to facilitate cross-border cooperation in responding to terrorism, in particular the growing number of left-wing armed actions and by Palestinian groups within Europe.46 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) took over from “European Political Cooperation” – the name given to the then existing institution which aimed to give form to the perennially unrealized dream that one day Europe would have an independent and united foreign policy.47 The competencies of neither the JHA nor the CFSP pillar grew much over time, as decision-making under these pillars was based on consensus. Therefore, many of the responsibilities under the JHA and CFSP pillars were transferred to the EC pillar, to allow for easier decision-making. With the Lisbon Treaty the pillar system was abolished, and the EU was given a single legal personality. Nevertheless, the institutional changes under Maastricht were significant, marking the creation of a single structure in relation to which essentially all future moves to greater European integration would be oriented.

The second major change with the creation of the European Union under Maastricht was the commitment to the creating the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The euro is the central plank of the EMU. Every member of the EU is a signatory to the Maastricht treaty and as such every country, barring two,48 is committed to joining the common currency. However, joining the euro is a three-stage process. First, the country must reach a set of “convergence criteria.” Second, it must join the Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II).49 The third and final stage is adopting the euro.50

Perhaps as significant as the euro itself was the creation of the system through which countries adopt the currency. There are four convergence criteria. First, there is a tight limit on inflation.51) Second, there is an extremely tight limit on governments fiscally: debt to GDP must not exceed 60% and government deficits must not exceed 3%. Third, exchange rates must be stable with the euro. Finally, the interest rate of 10-year government bonds must be below a certain level.52

With the creation of the “Stability and Growth Pact” in 1996 the two elements of the fiscal convergence criterion – the 60% debt rule and the 3% deficit rule – were made permanent. All countries must, after accession to the euro, remain with their debt at or below 60% and with their deficit at or below 3%. If they do not meet these criteria, they must be on a path towards realizing them.

Thereby all EU countries, with the partial exception of the UK, have committed themselves to having the same regulations for the industries in their economies and having the same macroeconomic situation. Industrial regulation and monetary policy are now decided at a European level, not a national level, while national fiscal policy in the form of expansionary or contractionary policy is simply precluded by European law.

After Maastricht

Since Maastricht the second wave of European integration has not abated. There have been three major changes to the Treaties since Maastricht. First there was the Amsterdam Treaty, which was mainly about two things: the CFSP pillar, and the fact that many center-left governments had been elected and wanted to reform the Maastricht treaty by increasing the power of the European Parliament, and by including some “social” issues in the Treaty.53 Then there was the Nice Treaty, which was primarily about amending the voting arrangements in the EU to allow for the accession of Eastern European countries. Finally, there was the Lisbon Treaty. This was basically the EU Constitution under a different name. It involved a large number of changes including, as mentioned above, the abolition of the pillar system. The main thing the Lisbon Treaty did was push Maastricht further, in terms of turning the European institutions into a single integrated whole. But beyond that the Treaty did not change the direction or speed of European integration dramatically.

In terms of European economic integration things also proceed apace. Building on the success of the regulatory homogenization brought about by the Single European Act, more and more aspects of economic life within the EU are being homogenized. In some areas this is generally welcomed; for example, the creation of a single European telecoms market has resulted in technological improvements and lower roaming charges, although it has also overseen the privatization of telecoms companies. Today it is harder to think of aspects of economic life that are regulated by the national state rather than the EU,54 and the extent of European regulation of markets within Europe is only increasing. For example, today, there is a major drive to move the regulation of all aspects of the finance industry, e-commerce, and patents to a European level. In addition to the ever-increasing competencies of the EU with regards to the regulation of markets, the competence of the EU over national economic policy has also increased.

As mentioned above, the 60% debt rule and the 3% deficit rule were expanded under the Stability and Growth Pact to cover all countries all the time, not just in the period leading up to adopting the euro. However, in 1998 German debt went above the 60% mark, where it has remained since (with the exception of 2001 when it dropped to 59%). Likewise, France went over the 60% limit in 2002 and has remained above it ever since. Therefore, in 2005 the rules were changed to allow for breaches but requiring that countries have a Medium Term Objective (MTO) whereby they would return to the 60% debt, the 3% deficit and a 1% “underlying deficit.” Since the crisis this has been extended further, and now every country must have binding national legislation regarding the 60% debt and the 3% deficit rules.

In addition, the EU has significantly increased it oversight of national economic policy. This began with the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs), which countries had to send to the EU Commission explaining how their economic policy was in line with European objectives. Then in 1998, the European Commission began to issue Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) explaining how countries should improve their policies. In 2000 the ten-year Lisbon Strategy was launched, which aimed to bring European economic and social policy more in line and tried to use the BEPG/CSR framework to achieve that. However, the Lisbon Strategy was not a major success, and was replaced in 2010 by the Europe 2020 strategy.

More significantly, in 2011 a new process known as the European Semester was launched.55 It is a rather complicated process of economic surveillance through which the EU monitors national economic development. It combines and integrates

A reinforced Stability and Growth Pact, with significant sanctions if countries breach the set objectives
A Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure which sets out 10 objectives which a country must achieve
The overview of national budgetary plans by the European Commission
A reinforced process around Country Specific Recommendations
A set of sanctions for countries that are failing to achieve their targets
An annual framework through which this entire process is organised
A framework through which countries that are failing to address their problems are dealt with
In addition to these recent reforms, during the ongoing economic crisis Ireland, Portugal and Greece have been placed in EU/ECB/IMF recovery programmes, which determine economic policy for a few years.56

Having now followed the process of European integration up to the current day, it is now possible to make some general remarks. I have already made a distinction between the first wave and second wave of European integration. The first was an attempt to gain control over the market, in order to both avoid socialist change and facilitate the integration of labor and agricultural interests into capitalist governance. The second wave was qualitatively different. Over the last thirty years, with the second wave of European integration, greater and greater responsibility for economic regulation is being shifted to the European level. This happened in response to the political impasse faced by the Left, and the new political economic situation that had developed by the 1980s. Control over economic regulation was taken out of the hand of democratic national states and transferred to the European Union.

V: The European Union as State Form

This brings us back to the Middle Ages – to what might have seemed the slightly esoteric start to this article. As described above, the emergence of capitalism was characterized by a division of social power into economic power and political power. Economic power is the power to buy and sell, in particular to buy labor-power and sell the commodities produced. Political power, on the other hand, is power over violence. The control over violence implied in political power involves not only the exercise of violence, but also the determination of when and how to exercise that violence. This determination process involves setting down rules, and the contestation of those rules. Less abstractly, it is through the state that laws are made, contested and enacted. These laws create the framework through which social reproduction occurs under capitalism. The state thereby uses its control of violence to determine the framework through which economic life occurs, and acts as a means and forum for the contestation and change of this framework.

We can therefore see how with the postwar settlement, the framework through which economic life occurred was changed by the expansion of state action into aspects of economic life that were previously considered outside the scope of politics.

We can also understand what has happened with European integration. The first wave of European integration was an aspect of the general expansion of state action into previously non-political spheres. The development of the welfare state and the incorporation of the organized working class into capitalist governance at a national level went hand in hand with European integration. The EEC and the organizations that preceded it developed to facilitate the democratic governance and organization of international economic activity. This was the international dimension of the primarily national process of the postwar settlement.

The second wave of European integration is rather different. This too can be understood as the international dimension of a primarily national process. But this national process was a process whereby democratic intervention in the economy was being reduced. However, this did not mean simply deregulation or privatization. In Europe it involved the transfer of power over economic regulation out of the hand of the national state and onto a supranational level. Increasingly, the laws that govern economic activity in the EU are determined at a European level.

While the power of the feudal lord was bifurcated into the economic power of the modern employer and the political power of the modern state, the development of the EU over the last 30 years involves a further bifurcation. The political power of the state involves the creation, contestation, and implementation of the legal framework for economic life and the rise of the EU involves the bifurcation of this political power. The EU now creates the regulations that govern almost all aspects of economic life in Europe. However, both the contestation and implementation of these regulations remains at a national level. This is not sustainable.

Today, the political contestation of economic life, which has been the core of liberal democracies based on universal suffrage, is increasingly impossible. In each national state, governments change, but the policies do not. Policies are not set by national government, but by the EU. But it is not possible to democratically change the government of the EU, or to democratically change the policies it pursues.

This has not only drawn outrage from the European electorate, but also from national governments. In 2012, when Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs directed the Belgian government to cut between €1.2 billion and €2 billion from its budget, a government Minister responded: “Who knows who Olli Rehn is? Who has seen Olli Rehn’s face? Who knows where he comes from and what he’s done? Nobody. Yet he tells us how we should conduct our economic policy.”57

The superficial solution to this “democratic deficit” would be to return to national democracies. This is not an unpopular idea. We see this demand being raised by both the far right and the far left. In France, the quasi-fascist Front National was the largest party in the 2014 European Parliament election winning one in every four votes cast. In the UK the right-populist UK Independence Party also topped the poll. In Italy, the “Five Star Movement” went from nothing to winning 20% of the vote. In social democratic Denmark, the extreme right Danish People’s Party also topped the poll.

However, the superficial, and obviously popular, appeal for a return to national democracy does not correspond with the social possibilities that exist today. I have tried to describe at some length the crisis in response to which the EU and the second wave of European Integration developed. And I have tried to show that the alternative route pursued by the Mitterrand government in France in the early 1980s did not and could not work. In the presence of free capital movement, the kind of policies that Mitterrand pursued will always end with balance of payments crises.

This is not to pose some grim inevitability to the European development, but rather to point to the fact that the scope of change that has occurred over the last 150 years is massive, and that to change the direction of its further development involves more than political ambition or a change in political focus. The postwar settlement happened where there was an imminent threat of socialist revolution and where, due to wartime capital controls, it was very hard for capital flight to occur. We are living in a very different world.

Europe is at an impasse. Economic regulation now takes place at a European level, but the social contestation of economic issues is contained at an impotent national level. It seems most likely that European integration will continue to follow the path mapped out in this article for the foreseeable future. Despite this, one fact remains: all structures of governance rely on the passive consent of the governed. It is hard to see much hope for socialist change in Europe. But it is equally hard to see European’s passive consent lasting indefinitely.

In February, scenes of protest began filtering out from cities all over Venezuela. Students threw molotov cocktails. Red banners waved in the streets. Barricades, made of old tires, burned high. After two years of intensified global protest from Cairo to Athens to Oakland, these images were somewhat familiar. President Nicolás Maduro had been in office for less than a year following the death of Hugo Chávez, and now the people seemed ready to give their judgment on his tenure. The Venezuelan government’s response appeared to mimic the actions of so many other states under threat; the National Guard faced off with demonstrators in the streets, and police arrested the movement’s most visible promoter for inciting violence.

For some outside observers, this series of events made for easy political positioning in support of the protestors. And it is difficult to blame anyone whose first impulse is sympathy with the streets. Yet most of the protesters, despite the evocative face masks and stone-hurling, are demanding little more than a return of the privileges they held in the pre-Chávez era.1 If the situation in Venezuela is, in fact, different from elsewhere, it is because political content matters: those on the revolutionary Left must reconcile their reflexive sympathies for protest with the fact that, at the moment, Venezuela represents just about the closest thing in the world to really existing socialism.

Of course, the purported political goals of the Venezuelan state do not automatically guarantee it a free pass. But it is difficult to ignore that the current government is the product of a massive and popular two-decade political transformation. Indeed, as people throughout Latin America react to the unsparing neoliberal policies that swept the region in the 1980s and 90s, Venezuela has become the hinge of a much broader leftward turn. This shift has impelled massive political transformations in Venezuela and Bolivia, stirred more moderate resonances in the Southern Cone, and in the cases of Paraguay and Honduras, aroused reactionary coups. As one of the few left political projects of its scale in the post-Soviet era, this Latin American marea rosada, or pink tide, is a material testing ground for the transition from capitalism to something else – leaving open for now the question of whether this something else is communism – and it demands substantive discussion on the Left.

To really grasp what is happening in Venezuela and elsewhere, however, it is important to rethink the concepts through which we approach new political scenarios. In the 20th century, the theme of guerilla warfare dominated the theoretical currents in and about Latin America; Che Guevara’s own work on the subject and Regis Debray’s foco theory of revolution are notable examples. But as cultural studies and international affairs scholar Sophia McClennen has suggested, “the currently existing forms of political activism [in Latin America] have taken on new modes of organization that no longer track to the idealized ideas of indigenous resistance movements and guerilla groups, and they no longer take place wholly within the nation state.”2 In other words, the old theoretical tools and political impulses are inadequate for the new terrain of the Latin American Left—particularly when one considers its entry into the state.

The challenge in assessing Latin America’s 21st century socialism, then, is twofold: first, it is necessary to formulate a conceptual framework that can explain the pink tide’s various processes of state-centered political change. And second, such a framework must serve as a political compass for those of us on the Left who favor the broader goals of the popular marea rosada states, and thus give us criteria by which to make serious political assessments as these projects unfold.

Sixteen years after Hugo Chávez’s election to the Venezuelan presidency, people have already begun to theorize these developments and supercede the guerilla-centered framework of Guevara and Debray. The main currents in this newer vein revolve around the theory of hegemony and the related concept of subalternity. But these ideas, focusing as they do on exclusion from state power, must now too be rethought, or at least relativized. The state itself must now fall at the center of the Left’s political analysis. As John Beverley puts it, “In a situation where, as is the case of several governments of the marea rosada, social movements from the popular-subaltern sectors of society have ‘become the state’… or are bidding to do so, a new way of thinking the relationship between the state and society has become necessary.”3 This new way of thinking the about the state is necessary in order to assess the achievements, weaknesses, and post-capitalist possibilities presented by the pink tide. One potential foundational source of a renewed state theory is a figure who was once central to any Marxist discussion of the political, but who is now rarely mentioned: Nicos Poulantzas. But before turning to Poulantzas, it is useful to examine the contributions and limitations of the theory of hegemony as it has been used to understand Latin American politics.

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The theory of hegemony, of course, has a long, multi-threaded history. Though the term itself was important to some early Russian socialist political debates prior to 1917, its more famous conceptualization emerged within Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s attempt to understand the position of Western European workers’ parties in the 1920s and 30s. The increasing popularity of Gramsci’s work over the course of the 20th century meant that hegemony theory soon found resonance outside of “Western Marxism”—the importance of the concepts of hegemony and subalternity for the South Asian subaltern studies school, for instance, is well known. Scholars of Latin American politics and culture within the North American academy, including many who originally hail from Latin America, have also made extensive use of this theoretical complex, and in 1993 the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (which officially lasted until 2000) was founded on the model of Ranajit Guha and his South Asian colleagues.4

Literary scholar Gareth Williams was one of the latter-day members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. In his 2002 book The Other Side of the Popular, Williams attempts to push onward with the group’s mission “to recuperate the figure of the subaltern” in order to challenge “elitist forms of conceptualization that have silenced Latin American subalternity within Latin America’s histories of nation formation.”5 He seeks to refine the notion of subalternity so as to unite the “philosophical-deconstructive” meaning of the term, which he associates with Gayatri Spivak, with a more sociological understanding ascribed to Guha.6 In its more “philosophical” role, subalternity “promises to interrupt” dominant political narratives—it is an ontological fragment whose very presence signals the limit of state politics. In its more concrete sociological meaning, on the other hand, it denotes the persistence of a sort of working-class or peasant political sensibility that stands outside, and in antagonism to, elite politics. With these two meanings taken together, Williams explains that “subalternity continues the possibility of, and yet promises to destabilize, hegemony’s often neo-colonial expansion of its universalizing logics… [it] is a limit to constituted power that is potentially constitutive of alternative forms of thinking, reading, and acting.”7 In other words, the oppressed and excluded quarters of society constitute a subaltern difference, which in turn stands in for the political possibility of a different future to come. Thus, politically, Williams’ synthesis means that one should take one’s cues from those outside what Gramsci called the historic bloc in power; philosophically, these outsiders are the bulwark of potential deconstructive difference holding back the totalizing threat of state and capital.

Williams’ argument is a representative example of Latin American Subaltern Studies: he offers some important insights, but he also comes up against characteristic limitations. His definition of subalternity clarifies some of the group’s more ambiguous work by arguing that subalternity cannot be reduced to simple identity politics. And he provides a compelling analysis of the dangers of such an approach by explaining how Latin American states in the mid-20th century used variants of subaltern identity politics in order to solidify the position of national capitalists and forge mass bases for elite political parties.8 Nevertheless, the incorporation of the “philosophical-deconstructive” reading of hegemony and subalternity means that Williams mistakes theoretical concepts for ontological categories—that is, he takes a set of ideas that correspond to a specific political issues and radically over-generalizes them.9 By using hegemon and subaltern as synonyms for “oppressed” and “oppressor,” Williams and other subalternists lose the ability to explain the particular relation that the former set of concepts is meant to illustrate. This mistake obscures the more specific sociological meaning in the work of Gramsci and Guha (relating to class alliances and ideological leadership), and the terms hegemony and subalternity become transhistorical stand-ins for an eternally recurring dynamic of unequal power relations.10

The consequence of philosophizing and generalizing hegemony theory is that as soon as the subaltern strata become hegemonic—which was, of course, the strategic goal underlying Gramsci’s own theory—subalternists run into a political dead end. Their conflation of subalternity and oppression does not permit the possibility that the newly hegemonic classes and groups are still oppressed and exploited. Such a political scenario destabilizes the entire relationship of subalternity and hegemony and should lead to a search for appropriate concepts.

To return to this year’s protests in Venezuela—it would be possible, on a certain view of the scenes there, to project onto protesters the status of a subaltern group, an oppressed minority who is excluded from the hegemonic bloc in power represented by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (a catch-all collection of pro-Chávez parties and movements). Such an assumption (protesters=oppressed=subaltern) might have been a safe bet for the Left in the last quarter century, but this political reduction is untenable in the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. One has to look instead beyond immediate power relations to the underlying social framework. It would be important to note in this case: the history of gentrification in the Venezuelan universities where many protesters came from; the relationship of these anti-Chavista students to the traditional power elite; the nature of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela itself as a state comprising a great number of social organizations that, in another moment, were clearly subaltern.11 In short, to define the relations of power, Left observers need to theorize the political situation in question rather than rely on the categorical oppositions of a social ontology of oppressed and oppressor.

In light of the new success of popular mass movements, some thinkers have begun the necessary reconceptualization. John Beverley sums up the question that I am trying to advance here:

What happens when, as has been the case with some of the governments of the marea rosada in Latin America, subaltern or, to use the expression more in favor today, subaltern-popular social movements originating well outside the parameters of the state and formal politics (including the traditional parties of the Left), have “become the state,” to borrow Ernesto Laclau’s characterization, or have lent themselves to political projects seeking to occupy the state?12

In other words, what happens when the state and subaltern cease to be in opposition? In answering this, Beverley, a founding member of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, abandons his previously strict anti-state orientation. He rightly notes that we cannot approach Latin American politics today within a merely philosophical or deconstructive framework— the pressing weight of political possibility, that is, “the resurgence of an actual political Left in Latin America,” compels us to take a stand beyond solidarity with those who happen to be out of power, and to pay attention instead to the political and social composition of the new left states.13 In doing so, one finds that far from reproducing an infinite alternation of hegemony and subalternity, the marea rosada represents a rarity: the agency of the subaltern passing through the framework of the state. Beverley is an thus an unabashed supporter of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and, despite many acute differences, all other left-leaning political undertakings in the region. Whatever their present weaknesses, he argues,the current state-centered Latin American Left can “keep alive the idea of socialism as the postcapitalist order of things,” and at the same time present the actual “‘transformative’ possibility” that “society itself can be remade in a more redistributive, egalitarian, culturally diverse way.”14

Beverley notes that it is not enough for the Left to simply take over the state; it must transform the state machinery as well. Yet his readiness to indiscriminately endorse any left-leaning state project, as well as his quick condemnation of left endeavors that aim away from state power (namely, the anti-electoral stance of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army), mean that he does not ask important questions that might help to drive such transformations. The imprudence of this nearly dogmatic support is clear when one considers the history of the Left-in-power, so full of mistakes, betrayals, and tragedies. The troublesome legacies of the German SPD and the USSR parallel the difficulties of Salvador Allende’s aborted term as president of Chile and the missteps of the ongoing Cuban Revolution. Each of these cases is unique, but then, as now, the institutionalized Left had more to gain from questions and challenges than from acritical admiration. It is essential to keep these questions alive: how can the Left consolidate power without falling into authoritarianism? What are the possible pitfalls that might derail a revolutionary project? And beyond abstract ideals, what do we hope that Left-leaning states actually do—and don’t do—in order to open up a set of post-capitalist possibilities?

Jon Beasley-Murray, like Beverley, argues for a renewed attention to the state, but his skepticism about state-centered projects gives his 2010 book Posthegemony a critical edge that Beverley lacks. He advances his argument through a critique of Argentine political philosopher Ernesto Laclau—one the most complex theorists of hegemony, and a waypoint of the theory’s proliferation within both British cultural studies and South Asian subalternist scholarship. A brief reconstruction of Beasley-Murray’s argument will thus illustrate another threshold of the present theoretical conjuncture.

Laclau, for his part, attempts to theorize the articulation of social antagonism through chains of equivalence between social sectors. His version of hegemony theory is meant to explain how a figure like Argentina’s Juan Perón, for instance, came to signify different things for his polarized base of both left and right political groups—an unexpected joining of students and militarists, trade unionists and capitalists.15 Laclau conceives of Perón himself as an empty signifier that took on different valences for each of these different factions. He discursively managed to bring them all together against the common enemy at the core of Peronist discourse, an always-shifting “anti-people” consisting sometimes of communists, at other times imperialists, and yet at other times, the old oligarchy. Conversely, Laclau uses this same logic to explain how excluded subaltern movements begin to make demands on a state, establishing an equivalence between them that can ultimately lead to the creation of a mass counter-hegemonic project.16 Though Laclau’s work is considerably more elaborate than this brief account might suggest, the point is that the concept of hegemony and the logics of equivalence and difference sit at the center of his theoretical world.

But for Beasley-Murray, this emphasis leads Laclau into the same error that I’ve identified in Williams: by ascribing an ontological status to particular concepts, Laclau reduces all of politics to a relation between hegemony and subalternity. Other manifestations of the political are categorically discounted; nothing can be explained except through the play of signifiers and discursive representations. As Beasley-Murray argues, “The basic flaw in hegemony theory is not [as some have suggested] its underestimation of the economy; it is that it substitutes culture for state, ideological representations for institutions, discourse for habit.”17 In other words, questions of representation displace all other mechanisms of power. All of politics becomes a game of who or what can best represent their hegemonic bloc, and the state itself—not to mention the constituents of hegemonic power—receives no theoretical elaboration.

Beasley-Murray, however, does not focus on to the state so as to better support it. Rather, his goal is to understand the way that the state restrains revolutionary potential by harnessing the constituent power of the multitude and stabilizing it in the constituted power of the state and its subject, the people. He thus aligns himself with movements that eschew such capture—again, Mexico’s contemporary Zapatistas come to mind—through the pursuit of autonomy and sporadic insurrection, occupying the boundaries of constituent and constituted power rather than attempting to simply replace one state with another. The real political test of a movement, for Beasley-Murray, is whether transformations manifest themselves in creative forms of collectivity and novel social practices outside the arena of the state.18

As Becquer Seguín points out, if Beverley is not critical enough of the pink tide states, Beasley-Murray’s theoretical positions lead him into an unsatisfying political ambivalence regarding state power itself. At best, his emphasis on insurgency and insurrection leads to the conclusion that the positive power of the state is largely irrelevant. And at worst, this route leads back into the same cul-de-sac as subalternism: an oversimplification of politics in which whatever is against the state is always deserving of political backing.19

While Beverley and Beasley-Murray therefore represent two opposite poles of a theoretical advance beyond hegemony theory and subalternism, neither gives us any political criteria by which assess the various actions and decisions of pink-tide governments. Seguín rightly notes that their accounts “all too quickly support or reject pink tide governments without being able to differentiate among them.”20 He asks instead what it would mean to present a true “left-wing critique” of the pink tide: “Can we critique these governments from within the realm of their theoretical enterprise precisely in order to make them more egalitarian, democratic, multicultural, multiethnic, and the like?”21 In other words, how can we contribute to and learn from the political projects underway while holding onto a Marxist theoretical framework and sharing the stated emancipatory goals of those governments? And how can we gauge the achievements, flaws, and trajectories of these governments without rejecting them or unequivocally backing their every move?

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An oft neglected theoretical perspective presents itself as a stepping stone out of the mire: Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the capitalist state.22 The most intriguing elements of this theory for a left-wing critique of the pink tide are found in State, Power, Socialism, published a year prior to the author’s death in 1979. Part of the difficulty with this text is that, as Stuart Hall noted in a commemorative 1980 article, many of its more exciting insights require further explication.23 Poulantzas opened a path that he himself did not live long enough to walk. Even his most basic insights, however, can shed some light on our central question of how best to evaluate 21st century socialism today. First, with Poulantzas’ concept of state power, it is possible to rethink what it means for a president like Chávez or a movement like Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) to “take power.” And with the complementary idea of the institutional materiality of the state , we can reexamine key transitional questions—like the status of the nation, or the social division of labor—in order to grasp how different political changes may deepen the process of socialist construction. Together, these two concepts, state power and institutional materiality, form the nucleus of a general political orientation toward the pink tide.

For Poulantzas, Marx and Engels’ comment in the Manifesto of the Communist Party that the state is the committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie is a starting point, but it is incomplete. It aims at the first concept, state power, without recognizing that the state is “a special apparatus, exhibiting a peculiar material framework that cannot be reduced to given relations of political domination.”24 In other words, the flaw in Marx and Engels’ most commonly cited (but by no means only) formulation on the state is that it fails to specify the shape and role of the state machinery within the broader landscape of bourgeois class rule. Rather than speaking to its institutional materiality, it suggests that it is enough to qualify a state as a bourgeois state in order to understand it.

But even state power is more complex than it appears in the “ruling committee” formulation: important divisions traverse its configuration, meaning that the state cannot be reduced to the expression of a unified class. Class conflict, says Poulantzas, is “inscribed into the institutional structure of the state.”25 This means that, against the notion of class dictatorship emphasized by Lenin, the state is not the product of a victory by one class over another, but is rather itself “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions.”26 That is to say, the antagonism with which classes encounter each other in the economic realm reproduces itself politically on the terrain—though not only on this this terrain—of the state. Thus, even while a state may be bourgeois in the sense that it ultimately reproduces capitalist relations of production, Poulantzas’ argument suggests that no single class or class fraction can dictate the terms of this reproduction.27 The presence of social and political resistance by exploited classes is registered in the political architecture of bourgeois class domination.

Most basically, one can conceptualize by this the concrete presence of the working classes and other oppressed groups within state institutions. The capitalist state comprises massive numbers of workers whose obedience allow it to operate effectively, or not. In the case of Venezuela, for instance, left organizations have found some success organizing the many working class (and often racialized) members of the military. This class division within the armed forces led to a number of soldier-led rebellions and defections during the armed movements of the Left in the 1960s, and also spawned the clandestine Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement from which Chávez himself emerged.28 The internal divisions in the military also proved important during the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez, when number of junior officers decided to turn against the coup-plotters and join the masses of more or less organized workers and Caracas slum-dwellers who crowded the streets to demand his return.29 In short, state power in this context is conditioned by the status of class conflict: the ruling classes cannot simply possess or occupy it as if in separation from the the classes they exploit, since these classes are vital to the operation of the state itself.

Cutting across these class divisions, another set of fissures separates the many institutional components that frame the broader structure of state power. Side-by-side apparatuses with potentially clashing goals—the military, the bureaucracy of this or that department, even individual judges or legislators—engage in a complex, situationally dependent, and ultimately contingent interplay of decisions and priorities.30 These differing priorities may in turn be the manifestation of variable configurations of class contradiction within a given branch or department. Ultimately, says Poulantzas, developing Althusser’s account of the relative autonomy of the state, “the establishment of the State’s policy must be seen as the result of class contradictions inscribed in the very structure of the State.”31 That is, through the interaction of the various departments and branches affected in different ways by class relationships, the state takes on a number of potentially conflictive projects, and cannot therefore be thought as an instrument to be unilaterally directed by a particular class.

Here, Poulantzas’ non-unitary concept of state power provides some insight into the role and limits of charismatic leaders like Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and it can correct some misconceptions arising from an overemphasis on hegemony. If the theory of hegemony can explain how these figures became emblematic of their respective movements through the play of empty signifiers and subaltern demands, the concept of the relatively autonomous and internally divided state shows that the ideological prominence that led to their election does not translate into unfettered political power. The positions of such leaders are always both bolstered by and beholden to the contours of class struggle and the multifarious structures of the capitalist states they inherit. As Beasley-Murray correctly argues, hegemony theory tends toward a fetishization of both state and individual leader that finds its apogee in the ideology of populism. The result is either a hope- or fear-driven assumption (depending on your political position) of instrumentalism: the populist President appears to have complete control of the State. Poulantzas’ conceptualization of relative autonomy precludes such conclusions; “A change in state power,” he writes, “is never enough to transform the materiality of the state apparatus,” rather, “such a transformation depends on a specific kind of operation and action.”32 But what is this “specific kind of operation and action”? And what sort of transformations are we to expect or hope for in any case? To ask this is to bring into view the question of institutional materiality.

***

While the concept of state power designates how different positions of power are structurally related, institutional materiality designates the specific means and circuits through which these relationships crystallize in capitalism.33 To ask about the specifics of the institutional materiality of the state in a given scenario is to ask: what is the sedimented shape of political bodies and institutions in a given social formation, and by what mechanisms are they linked to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production and the classes that inhere in it? From this perspective, Poulantzas offers further inquiries—what is it about capitalism that has made so prominent the institutions of representative democracy, such as parliaments and legislatures? How might the separation between the governing and the governed be related to the larger division of manual and intellectual labor within capitalism? Why is the individual, and not some other unit, the object of power in such political circumstances? And why, more often than not, has nationality become the de facto binding agent of capitalist states?

Of course, not all of these can be directly addressed here, and the answers may vary in different concrete scenarios. But taken alongside the concept of state power, the concept of institutional materiality can set these questions into motion, so to speak, as questions of transformation—and perhaps even point toward the transition to a new mode of production. In other words, in understanding how the specific shape of the state relates to the distribution of power both within and outside of it, the measures by which that shape can change become clearer.

The transformation of the institutional materiality of the state, however, should be differentiated from minor policy shifts in response to popular demands. This distinction is what separates social democratic welfare states from potentially revolutionary ones. It is the difference between a supposedly socialist state that tries to create objective economic conditions for a perpetually deferred future socialist society, and one that sets itself to, as Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera says, “support as much as possible the deployment of society’s autonomous organizational capacities,” and to invite the masses into the political circuitry of the state.34

Poulantzas approaches this issue in terms of the social division of labor. He argues that the existence of a specific institution charged with social organization ( the state) is an instance of the division between intellectual labor and manual labor at the heart of the broader social division of labor within capitalism.35 This insight opens various options for left political projects. It would be characteristic of social democracy, for instance, to act strictly within the confines of the existing social division of labor, governing with an eye toward the masses, and toward a redistribution of wealth, toward regulating capital, and even taking on a more direct organizational role in some industries by nationalizing them. In contrast, a revolutionary perspective on this point would have to refigure this divide: if the science of government is an intellectual project of capital, then one thing that the institutionalized Left must do, instead of simply governing differently, is open up governing apparatuses to those who were previously excluded from this intellectual work with the hope that the types of knowledge they bring to social organization will displace that of a class trained in reproducing relations of exploitation.

To what extent are pink tide governments and the movements that propel them expanding the possibilities for regular mass engagement with the day-to-day work of governing, usually ceded to technocrats and representatives? How might workers, campesinos, neighborhood organizations, and others execute their own projects with resources that would otherwise travel through the upper echelons of the state? In short, to what extent is the state being restructured so as to encourage and make possible popular participation?

In the case of Bolivarian Venezuela, Article 62 of the 1999 Constitution articulates this goal: “The participation of the people in the formation, execution, and control of public administration is the necessary means to achieve its protagonism and guarantee its complete development, both individual and collective.”36 The state, according to Article 62, is to create conditions favorable to this possibility. A great number of programs have come into existence to this end, including Communal Councils that, as stated in the 2006 law implementing them, “allow the organized people to directly manage public policy and projects oriented toward responding to the needs and aspirations of communities in the construction of a society of equity and social justice.37

Also in the spirit of Article 62 is the a policy of worker-state co-management that actually blurs the lines between the political and the economic by redistributing the intellectual work of social organization across the boundaries of the productive sphere. Inveval, a worker-occupied valve producer in the coastal state of Miranda, is one of the more successful projects of co-management, operating not only under worker control, but in tandem with local community-based participatory structures in order to avoid the capitalist pitfalls that undo the best efforts of many workers’ cooperatives. The balance of worker power, community power and the state at Inveval creates a nexus of transformation in which the top-down social division of labor has no place.38 The realms of production, consumption, and distribution are bound together in a novel reconfiguration of the social division of labor.

Thus, against social democracy, the thing to pay attention to in the marea rosada is not so much a state’s intervention in the economy, as if from the outside, but rather the state’s efforts to transform its own role in the social division division of labor and refigure class relationships that otherwise exclude direct producers from decision-making. The above are just brief examples—deserving of more scrutiny—whose significance becomes intelligible within this Poulantzian theoretical framework. Without then succumbing to an abstract faith in participation, and without confusing these examples for the death throes of capitalism, this perspective illuminates the emphasis on participatory democracy that pervades the discourse of the institutionalized Latin American Left. The standard of this greater participation, from a critical left perspective, must be to leave open the political door to greater transformations down the line. Against economism or revisionism, the pink tide states can only create post-capitalist possibilities by building, as Marta Harnecker says, “spaces of popular protagonism that continue to prepare the popular sectors to exercise power from the simplest level to the most complex.”39

The importance of reflexive political transformation also becomes clear through the example of the nation. Nationalism is, of course, a recurring historical question for the Left, and one with important consequences for any revolutionary approach to politics. With respect to Latin America, John Beverley argues (contra Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) that the nation is still an indispensable political locus: “To construct the politics of the multitude today, under conditions of globalization and in the face of the neoliberal critique and privatization of state functions requires a relegitimization and reterritorialization of the nation-state.”40 In other words, with the apparent fragmentation and weakening of the nation-state vis-á-vis international capital, the Left needs to push back, emphasizing its importance and making it a site of struggle.

Beverley makes a fair point here, but wades into dangerous territory in the process: In the mid-20th century, the consolidation of mestizo national-popular identities throughout Latin America, alongside import-substitution economic models, offered an important way for various national capitals to strengthen themselves and to build corporatist arrangements through unions and political parties. The result of this political project in ostensible defense of the nation was largely a co-optation of fledgling worker’s movements and a refusal to acknowledge the persistence of racism and indigenous oppression.41 And as the wave of right wing dictatorships that followed in the wake of these projects shows, the contradictions within these national coalitions were always resolved in favor of capital.42

Acknowledging this history under the heading of “populist” nationalism however, Beverley hopes for something else:

What might be envisioned in the place of both classical nineteenth-century style nationalism and more recent populist forms of nationalism is a new kind of politics that interpellates “the people” not as a unitary, homogeneously modern subject, but rather in the fashion of [Otto] Bauer’s “communities of will,” as internally fissured, heterogeneous, multiple.43

This general call for pluralism allows Beverley to differentiate his hopes from those of last century’s nation building projects, yet he does not remark on the role of the state in actualizing his ideals, nor on the relationship of different internal fissures—namely class struggle—to nationalism.

Poulantzas can fill in these gaps on the heterogeneity of the nation. Like the state itself, “the modern nation is… the outcome of a relationship of forces between ‘modern’ social classes—one in which the nation is the stake for the various classes.”44 In other words, the fractures and divisions that traverse the state also cut through the nation. This is because, according to Poulantzas, the nation itself is a state project, built and defined through the construction of borders and the shaping of national histories.45 To construct the nation as an “internally fissured, heterogeneous, multiple,” then, is to play upon borders and histories as they relate to existing social divisions. Just as with the division of labor, the point is not to use the existing apparatuses to alleviate the ills of capitalism—for instance by smoothing over class or racial heterogeneity with a new discursive construction. Instead, a refiguration of the nation-state must bring those antagonisms into its very structure in order to open new political possibilities.

If, as Poulantzas says,“the state establishes the modern nation by eliminating other national pasts and turning them into variations on its own history,” then to what extent have the marea rosada states staked a claim for legitimacy by digging up these other pasts? What does it mean for a state to build upon an alternative and potentially divisive conception of subaltern history that explicitly challenges, and does not merely subsume, the historical narration of the dominant national framework? In other words, how do these states set the stage for transformation by bringing different claims to national legitimacy into conflict—in particular, by drawing on hidden discourses that locate the nation not in the past of the colonizers, or even of mestizo unity, but rather, of the oppressed, excluded, and exploited?

In Venezuela, the state’s acknowledgement of social conflict is itself a rebuke to a certain national history which has emphasized the “Venezuelan exception” in the second half of the 20th century. This supposedly exceptional history of Venezuelan unity and stability at a time when other South and Central American countries were divided by political strife was only achieved, in fact, through the strategy of puntofijismo, wherein Venezuela’s three major political parties agreed, following the 1959 introduction of formal democracy, to share power at the expense of both the radical Left and the remnants of the old rightist regime, and to enforce this pact through violent repression and exclusion of anyone who would question it.46 Chávez’s election marked the end of puntofijismo; with the support of the masses, political antagonism, which had erupted more than a few times even under that system, burst out into the open and achieved a presence in the state. The accusations that he was a divisive figure are correct in this respect: Chávez and the movements that brought him to power sought precisely to highlight the already divided status of the Venezuelan nation that had been obscured through 40 years of elite party rule. Thus, by acknowledging the existence of at least two Venezuelan nations, divided by class, the Bolivarian state took a giant forward leap in the founding of a new history and a new Venezuelan nation.

The theory of hegemony can, in part, explain this logic of equivalence wherein the social is split along increasingly clear lines, and one of Laclau’s great contributions is to reveal how these discursive demarcations (e.g., two Venezuelas) emerge. But Poulantzas introduces the question of how the state participates in and solidifies these reconceptualizations of the divided nation—i.e, to what extent these discursive constructions at the level of hegemony translate into changes in the state’s own nation-building role.

The case of Bolivia provides concrete examples of such changes. There, the rise of the Movimiento al Socialismo and the eventual propulsion of Evo Morales to the country’s presidency corresponded to a series of racial and class-based re-identifications of indigenous and national identity.47 MAS began as the “political instrument” of a grassroots coca growers syndicate, but with its 2006 entry into various key positions of state power, the battle it had been waging for social hegemony on the question of the nation—what is the Bolivian nation? what of the other indigenous nations that exist within the Bolivian borders?—entered the terrain of the state under the banner of plurinationalism. The 2009 constitution ended the Republic of Bolivia, a title and form of government predicated on national unity, and created the Plurinational State of Bolivia in its place; representatives from indigenous communities took seats alongside other deputies in the new Plurinational Legislative Assembly. That is to say, Bolivia gave up the very concept of the nation-state, and members of MAS, with massive participatory support, began to restructure both state power and institutional apparatuses on the basis of the Bolivian multitude’s internal divisions of class, race, and nationality.

The point here is not whether one is “for or against” the nation-state as a site of political mobilization—this matter is already settled in the case of the pink tide. One must ask instead how left-leaning governments can use the positive power of the state to transform the shape and content of the nation, even as they rely on it, and consider whether they are creating political space through which constituent power can push social transformation toward a decisive break with the capitalism. What should be clear, more broadly, is that beyond the questions of who is in charge and who they claim to represent stands the pressing matter of how those in power can reconfigure the various parts of the state, its institutional materiality, and change the terms of popular political engagement with an eye toward continuing struggle and future ruptures.

***

Changes in theoretical practice must match the changes in the political practice of those we support. Though the course of political developments must guide any ongoing analysis of the pink tide, and though hegemony theory has its uses, Poulantzas’ state theory offers a necessary orientation for the current conjuncture.

Once we recognize that state power is a variegated and contradictory phenomenon, and that the task of state power is not simply to “take over” the state machinery, as one takes over the driver’s seat of a vehicle, then the need to deeply reconfigure the already-divided structure of the state becomes obvious. But how can one know when the reconfigurations are moving in the right direction? The guiding question is this: to what extent are purportedly left-leaning states sharpening the divisions that inhere in the state’s institutional materiality? In other words, to what extent are they carrying class struggle into the structure of the state apparatus, not to tame or reconcile it, but to advance, on the political level, the possibility of a rupture with capitalism? Where the mandate of capitalist states is always to accommodate or repress antagonism, the mandate of 21st century socialism must be heighten it and bring it to its political, and not solely economic, conclusions.

The political processes underway across Latin America are something less than communism, but they are something more than reformism. As they move on, however, they have the potential to become either. Their momentum is difficult to gauge; at times it is hard to tell the difference between a genuine opening of a state’s political structure and a cynical attempt to garner popular favor. The proof can only be in concrete transformations. Further elaboration of Poulantzas’ theoretical intervention can, hopefully, serve as a guide for understanding these changes. If we are to be fellow travellers of any political project today, and if critical voices can lend any sort of support to these political projects, then we need to track new developments, to push onward to further political rupture, and to encourage the deepening of the class struggle both outside of state apparatuses and within them.

International solidarity, of course, will not make or break a revolution. But cross-border engagements have been the glue of the worker’s movement since the days of the First International, and the stakes now are as high as ever: for if the pink tide turns red, it may sweep the whole world into uncharted seas.

Hans-Jürgen Krahl died in a car crash in 1970, at the age of twenty-seven. By that time he had weathered the rise and decline of the Socialist German Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS), among whose ranks he was, arguably, both the most sophisticated theorist and, after Rudi Dutschke, the most incendiary orator. The SDS had been founded shortly after World War II as the youth wing of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Germany. As the latter moved towards the center, however, the SDS radicalized, eventually leading to expulsion from its parent organization in 1961. It would soon become the most important student group in Germany, even as its official policy shifted further towards revolutionary Marxism.1 Krahl’s historical significance lies in the role he played as a leader of the SDS in the few years immediately before and after 1967-68, when the West German student movement reached its highest pitch. Yet his theoretical contributions are by no means inconsiderable – nor, in any case, can they be divorced from the practical political activities with which Krahl was occupied at the same time.

In this sense it may be argued that Krahl brought to a head the distinctive relation between theory and practice that had long been gestating within his milieu. Crucial to the development of the SDS was the attendance of various members, including Krahl, at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. It was here that West German students with little or no personal memory of the Nazi period encountered the early works of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and others, as well as the still-evolving thought of the Institute’s own faculty. As such the Frankfurt School was a living connection to a Weimar-era left that had been utterly destroyed under Hitler. By the same measure it also demonstrated the existence of a Marxist tradition distinct from that of the neighboring German Democratic Republic. New recruits belonging to the Frankfurt School’s so-called second generation, such as Jürgen Habermas and Oskar Negt, further enhanced the Institute’s prestige among would-be anti-authoritarians.

Yet for young radicals the Frankfurt School’s legacy was far from unambiguous. Its protagonists had made various compromises merely to survive the preceding decades of Nazism and Cold War reconsolidation. Notably, both Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Institute’s leaders, had over the years retreated to positions that came to seem quietist if not openly conservative, at least to students beginning to take cues from the era’s decolonization movements, anti-rearmament campaigns, and protests against the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1960s this led to direct confrontations between Adorno and his own students, most dramatically in January 1969 when Adorno called in the police to break up an occupation of the Institute that had been initiated by Krahl himself. Of the Institute’s prewar cohort only Herbert Marcuse – based at the time in San Diego, rather than West Germany – maintained a consistently revolutionary stance. If, then, the paradigmatic relationship between postwar Germans and their parents was inevitably fractured by the question of complicity with Nazism, by the mid- to late-1960s it appeared that a secondary divide was starting to open between the first and second, or more properly the third, generations of critical theorists.

It was in this context that Krahl made his decisive interventions, both theoretically and practically. He began writing a dissertation under Adorno’s supervision in 1965, at the same time as he was becoming involved in the day-to-day operations of the SDS (he had in fact previously belonged to the political Right). Yet by the time of his former teacher’s death in 1969 he was capable of delivering a biting critique of the “political contradiction of Adorno’s critical theory” – in the guise of an obituary, no less.2 Krahl published little during his lifetime. Other than reading notes for personal use, most of his surviving texts are seminar papers or speeches, or were prepared as discussion material for teach-ins.3 Krahl was nonetheless a distinctive voice in the German New Left’s fractious intellectual culture, the flavor of which one can now gather from the pages of journals such as Das Argument and neue kritik, where immediate strategic and tactical concerns of the day tend to lie in close proximity to theoretical discourse at the highest level of abstraction.

Krahl epitomized this mobility. In his writing, points that at first seem straightforward often lead to intricate theoretical justification, while dryly philological matters take on the texture of everyday struggle. Nowhere is this two-step more striking than in the notorious speech he delivered jointly with Dutschke at an SDS conference in September 1967, in which analysis of recent economic trends quickly leads to a call for the “propaganda of gunfire in the Third World” to be complemented by “the propaganda of the deed in the metropole.”4 The effect can be vertiginous – “like Hegel on acid,” Anders Ramsay has said.5 Whatever the defects of his prose, though, Krahl’s basic impulse is always clear. The Frankfurt School as he knew it had passed down a trove of theoretical tools, but these had become transfixed in a conservative attitude that denied the dialectical mediation of theory and practice. It was Krahl who most insisted on taking up the legacy of critical theory from the perspective of revolutionary theory (against the likes of Habermas, it bears mentioning), that is to say – to quote the essay translated in this issue of Viewpoint – from the perspective of a “doctrine the propositions of which describe society in terms of its revolutionary transformability.” His work is thus an immanent critique and eclipse of the very intellectual tradition in which he was profoundly immersed. This perhaps accounts for the somewhat estranging effect of many of Krahl’s essays. In his collected writings published posthumously as Konstitution und Klassenkampf (Constitution and Class Struggle), it may seem that he is only juggling quotations, or drawing links from one Marxist authority to another, yet his conclusions are always, inevitably, nothing if not radical with respect to any given political conjuncture. Precision and philosophical rigor sometimes give way to polemical effect; on the other hand, concrete analysis often bogs down in obscure jargon. Yet, if this is regrettable, it is also the surest index of the intensity with which Krahl set himself to the work of building a theoretically ambitious post-Frankfurt School Marxism adequate to the upheavals of the few years in which he was writing.

So it is with the text at hand, “The Philosophy of History and the Authoritarian State.” (The German title, slightly different, is “Zur Geschichtsphilosophie des autoritären Staates.”) Krahl’s aim here is to review Marxist theories of the state – specifically, of the authoritarian state during periods of economic crisis – in order to better describe the possibility of revolution in his own moment of the late 1960s. This effort takes the form, notably, of a recovery of Max Horkheimer’s essay on the topic from 1940 – one of the author’s most insistently radical statements, which was read feverishly by anti-authoritarians in the 1960s (much to the older and more conservative Horkheimer’s displeasure). We hope Krahl’s piece will speak for itself, in spite of its difficulties, and hence we will merely gesture at the problems it seeks to address. The following strike us as among the more significant: the changed relation of base and superstructure in late capitalism; the necessity that historical materialism apply its method to itself; the obsolescence of the traditional Marxist critique of voluntarism; the degeneration of Marxist theory following the revolutionary wave of the early twentieth century; and the status of both fascism and the welfare state as intermediaries between capitalism and socialism. The piece covers tremendous ground, then. Not everything is equally well developed. Hence the reader is encouraged to approach this essay in part as a snapshot of Krahl’s thinking caught in midair.

So what exactly is the authoritarian state according to Krahl? We might take a cue here from the author himself and approach the authoritarian state as he did, both theoretically as well as practically, with the aim of grasping how its manifestation shapes the form and horizon of political struggle. While Krahl’s essay makes reference to myriad theorists, two tributaries are essential: Horkheimer’s own thoughts on the authoritarian state, and the theory of monopoly capitalism. For Horkheimer, writing in 1940 in a volume dedicated to the memory of Walter Benjamin, the authoritarian state could appear in fascism as well as in its supposed alternatives, the capitalist welfare state and, especially, state socialism. What defined it was not its form of appearance, but the drive to subsume the contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism to deliberate political control. The authoritarian state’s existence not only intensified and expanded modes of extra-economic coercion, but, by suspending capital’s tendency toward crisis, it also abolished the very conditions on which certain Marxist traditions had thought the possibility for revolt depended. Yet rather than lead to resignation, Horkheimer’s analysis moved him to embrace – however briefly – a revolutionary praxis for which the argument of properly mature conditions hardly applied. In his remarkable essay, we see Horkheimer promote the need for the masses to spontaneously capture the forces of production, bypassing and abandoning the state entirely. “For the revolutionary,” Horkheimer declared boldly, “conditions have always been ripe.”6

Krahl’s description of the authoritarian state is in most ways the application of Horkheimer’s theory to a specific historical situation, defined by what Krahl would describe – informed in the first instance by Lenin’s analysis of imperialism – as the shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism. In contrast to the clear influence of Horkheimer on Krahl’s concept of the authoritarian state – he even bookends the essay with quotations from Horkheimer – the main source for his understanding of monopoly capitalism is not specifically stated; it seems instead an amalgamation of classic works by the likes of Engels, Lenin, and Hilferding molded by the many postwar proponents of the monopoly capitalism thesis. While frequently named in the essay, the term “monopoly capital” is, notably, undefined by Krahl. This is no doubt a reflection of the particular West German radical milieu in and to which Krahl was writing, one that took it for granted that capitalism had entered a new historical stage defined by monopolistic business interests. There were (and continue to be) varied takes on what monopoly capitalism is, but to give a sense of Krahl’s intellectual context we might do well to gloss the influential work of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, whose 1966 book Monopoly Capital left a profound mark on the German New Left’s Marxism.7 According to Baran and Sweezy, the world following the Second World War was dominated by large corporations protected against competition from smaller upstarts by government intervention. In such a landscape, states worked together with enterprises to create sites for absorbing economic surpluses generated during the so-called golden age of capitalism, although these outlets were most often military endeavors and the financial sector. Krahl’s understanding of monopoly capitalism certainly encompassed more than Baran and Sweezy’s book; and given his study of value theory, Krahl likely even took issue with their controversial notion of “economic surplus.” Yet the point to be made here is this: the authoritarian state of interest to Krahl is the state formation proper to monopoly capital. As he explains, the authoritarian state consists of the entire “repressive instrumentarium” necessary “to delay definitive economic collapse and to sabotage the real possibility” that unified struggle by the proletariat could bring an end to capitalism. Ultimately Krahl’s theory of the authoritarian state amounts to less a revision of Horkheimer – or, for that matter, Marxian understandings of the state – than a refusal of past theories of the crisis and collapse of capitalism, as well as what he names in a related essay the “fatal social democratic ideology of the Second International that predicted capitalism would bring socialism into being by natural necessity.”8 Such traditions had lost their luster in the years since the First World War, though certain of their precepts continued to hold sway among the intellectual mentors of the German New Left, many of whom looked askance at the younger generation’s political will and worked intensely to convince them to change course. It is into this discourse that Krahl looked to intervene.

Left unstated in the translated portion of this text are the circumstances of its composition, which clarify Krahl’s practical intents for it. The essay was meant to be included in documentation of the “political university” that Frankfurt SDS members had attempted to establish in May of 1968, in the midst of student strikes against passage of the notorious Notstandsgesetze, or emergency laws. These were a major priority of the ruling Grand Coalition between the SPD and the conservative Christian Democrats. They provided for abrogation of basic civil rights in the event of ill-defined states of emergency, and were seen by the German Left as revivals of Nazi-era policies. Despite enormous nationwide street protests and strikes, the laws were passed on May 30 of that year. Failure to sway the course of the legislative process was then an impetus for further radicalization in the New Left milieu and was taken to prove, as Krahl notes in the essay’s preface, here untranslated, that the “dialectic of reform and revolution” had been “historically exhausted.”9 It was the evident paradox of a Social Democratic government pushing through repressive legislation that was presumably the immediate prompt for Krahl’s analysis. But the intervention he sought to make with it targeted an ingrained belief that successful revolutionary action depended on the maturation of proper objective conditions. As the 1960s wore on and the SDS grew increasingly militant, its members were bombarded from all sides by innumerable critiques, the fiercest of which emanated from the halls of the Institute for Social Research itself. It was neither Horkheimer nor Adorno, but a young Jürgen Habermas who distinguished himself as the SDS’s most virulent critic. In a heated debate with Rudi Dutschke in June 1967, Habermas infamously accused the SDS not just of “subjective insolence” in their apparent disregard for the absence of proper conditions for revolutionary struggle, but of “left fascism” as well. It is as a justification for continued and escalated struggle in the face of charges of voluntarism that we might read Krahl’s essay.10 If nothing else, it is a passionate defense of the thesis that the conditions for struggle will always be ripe so long as the “exploitative essence” of the capital relation persists.11

This is the crux of what Krahl’s essay contributes to the theory and praxis of his time. It is a critique of the critiques of voluntarism that faced West Germany’s anti-authoritarian Left. But here we run up against the trickiest aspect of Krahl’s argument. At the time he was writing, critics of the monopoly capitalism thesis, like Paul Mattick, charged its proponents with suggesting that the government intervention made necessary by monopoly capitalism could also make the possibility of abolishing economic crisis and collapse a reality. In his 1966 review of Monopoly Capital, Mattick insisted that even if one were to accept the fleeting actuality of monopoly capitalism, the state that supports it could only be “capable of postponing, but not of abolishing, crisis conditions.”12 Whether Mattick is correct in his accusation that Baran and Sweezy argued state intervention could eliminate the possibility of crisis is certainly beyond the scope of Krahl’s essay. Yet it does force us to ask a question that may nag contemporary readers of “The Philosophy of History and the Authoritarian State”: does Krahl’s description of the authoritarian state take as a premise the possible end of capitalist crisis? Unfortunately, on this topic, the present essay is ambiguous. But keep in mind, the West German recession of 1966, which marked the end of the so-called postwar “Economic Miracle” and reintroduced the country to the vicissitudes of capital accumulation, was still fresh in the memory of the New Left. It was clear to most, Krahl included, that the possibility for economic crisis surely had not passed. And yet Krahl joined the ranks of those who viewed the formation of the Grand Coalition between the SPD and CDU as partly a political response to the return of such economic turbulence. Thus, instead of accepting the authoritarian state as what Krahl describes here as “capital’s political exit from the economic crisis,” we might better grasp it as the “repressive instrumentarium” that allows capital to mediate economic crisis politically.

Over half a decade into the current global crisis – itself the postponed fulfillment of the crisis of the 1970s – evidence of its mediation by the state is everywhere and takes varying forms, from so-called austerity measures to the militarization of police. There is no way to “fix” capital, and there is certainly no fixing it via state intervention. Every measure the state takes to solve the current crisis and prevent its recurrence will only favor capital. As Krahl might have insisted, the only hope we can place in the state is the chance to destroy it. But alas, destroying the state – even the authoritarian state – will never, on its own, bring about the destruction of capital. By the same measure, though, neither will economic crisis automatically lead to the overthrow of capital’s state.

“The Philosophy of History and the Authoritarian State” ought then to be considered in tandem with Johannes Agnoli’s contemporaneous work on the same topic, some of which is also translated in this issue of Viewpoint: they are joint attempts to advance a theory of the state that does not succumb to one variety or another of Marxist reductionism (the state as either fully autonomous from, or fully subservient to, the interests of capital). As such, the essay can also legitimately be considered part of the prehistory of the 1970s “state derivation debate,” in which context these matters were to be theorized at much greater length. It was precisely to, or against, interventions by Krahl, Agnoli, and their contemporaries around 1968 – in addition to the orthodox theories of the state emanating from both eastern and western Communist Parties – that thinkers such as Claus Offe and Elmar Altvater were to respond a few years later. It is also these slightly later developments that help to fill out what is a missing link in Krahl’s writings on the state. His greatest theoretical legacy, in fact, does not lie in this field at all: it was rather the themes broached in Krahl’s attempts to reconstruct the logic of the commodity and its value-form that were to be taken up in the body of discourses known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre (New Reading of Marx, or NML), value-form theory, and the so-called “capital-logic” school.13 This is in part a matter of convergent evolution rather than direct filiation. Like Krahl, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt (key names in the early history of the NML) had studied with Adorno in Frankfurt; in all three cases, the events of the 1960s stimulated a return to the basics of the Marxist critique of political economy, at the expense of the cultural preoccupations that had dominated much of Adorno’s later work. Their point of departure was therefore similar.

Backhaus and Reichelt, though, have had the luxury of another forty-odd years to further develop the implications of their early insights. Krahl was not so lucky. His untimely death in February of 1970 deprived the SDS of one of its brightest stars. By then, though, the organization was already on its last legs. The era of the K-Groups followed soon thereafter – miniature Marxist-Leninist parties, generally also Maoist in orientation. The “anti-authoritarian” student revolt was then mostly liquidated in favor of supposedly necessary revolutionary discipline. Or else it flipped over into armed struggle, or diffused into the anarchistic Sponti (“Spontaneist”) scene, or into the apolitical counterculture. There was also, of course, what remains today the most lasting political legacy of the German New Left: the “long march through the institutions,” the path of which led directly to founding the Green Party, who, like the SPD before them, would prove their willingness to govern alongside the Christian Democrats. The personnel responsible for these developments had in many cases passed through the SDS orbit. Subsequent contributions to German critical theory also often read like a who’s who of its former activists. But the unity that the group had once provided was irrevocably lost. The SDS itself dissolved barely a month after Krahl’s decease. Though collected and published the next year, his writings of necessity quickly passed into the realm of the merely historical.

He had not been, at any rate, a universally adored figure. The most trenchant critique arrived via tomato: in September of 1968, the feminist Sigrid Rüger landed one on Krahl’s neck at an SDS conference in Frankfurt. Rüger was acting against male dominance within the organization. Ulrike Meinhof soon wrote a column approving the “attack”; it has since been recognized as a foundational moment in German feminism.14 Though it would exceed the scope of this introduction to consider the episode at greater length, perhaps we can at least recommend an aphorism from Marx that Krahl himself was fond enough of quoting – to wit: “The weapon of critique cannot indeed replace the critique of weapons.”

This interview was originally published by Commonware on September 10, 2013.

Commonware: Let us begin with the situation in the logistics industry in Italy. You have highlighted a few times how Italian businesses invest little in innovation, information systems, automatic storage systems and networks, and rely instead on the hyper-exploitation of low-skill labor, or those paid as though they were low-skill even if they have medium or higher levels of education (think of many migrants) – to give a snapshot of the paradigmatic traits of Italian business. How do things stand now in the logistics sector in Italy? What is changing in terms of innovation in this sector?

Sergio Bologna: I do not think that anything has changed, notwithstanding some expansion, in some parts of the country, of warehouses and logistics platforms.1 The expansion is often illusory because it is often a matter of moving from pre-existing locations. In the last three years, logistics companies that had their warehouses outside an interport, or were previously in an interport but left because it was cheaper elsewhere, have transferred to the Bologna and Padua interports, for example.2

Today the prices of warehouses of excellent quality, for sale or rent, are sometimes equal to or even lower than the prices in the less modern warehouses of a few years ago. The crisis is really about the unwillingness of managers or buyers to accept certain prices, and in particular the unwillingness to enter into long-term contracts, so that the owners of the property live with the anxiety of seeing the warehouse empty after a year, forced to go in search of a new tenant. Therefore, the opening of new platforms or new warehouses often coincides with the closing of others, abandoned because they are obsolete. The warehouses of class A, class B, or C correspond to different markets. In addition, you need to keep in mind the different roles of the key figures of this market, in particular the so-called “developers,” who represent a crucial link between landed property or real estate and the actual user, the one who manages the inventory on behalf of the company or on behalf of third parties. In this situation, although the market is not as stable as in certain industrial sectors, it is difficult to imagine that the lessee or purchaser of a warehouse would make the costly investments in advanced technologies – except for some market segments, such as pharmaceuticals and automobile manufacturing, where it is inevitable. So continues the intensive exploitation of the workforce.

Logistics is an industry with a highly complex organization of production and labor. Bearing in mind the extreme differentiation of what we call the logistics system, what are the main forms of labor that keep it running? In which nodes and particular links in the chain is valorization concentrated?

Before we talk about work, you must have a basic idea of ​​which sectors we call logistics. First of all, we should distinguish industrial logistics from distribution logistics. Germany is the world leader, because it has developed industrial logistics to the utmost, with industrial quality standards, thus requiring adequate investment and sophisticated technology. It provides support in the choice of production planning, marketing, and location of production facilities; it provides support in the selection of suppliers, and sometimes get to have its say in the design of the product.

The other thing is distribution logistics, in turn divided into high-end distribution and low-level distribution, which consists essentially in bringing goods to stores according to a logic and parameters set by the owner of the goods or the manufacturer. There may be multi-client distribution companies that have a financial power much higher than that of their clients, and thus are able to organize distribution, with other value-added services attached, in conjunction with the client, and sometimes according to their own criteria. But there are also distribution companies that simply collect the cartons or pallets and deliver them to the point of sale. Logistics can never be understood from outside the warehouse, only by coming inside and looking at the techniques employed, the equipment and the organization of work does one understand if we find ourselves faced with something that belongs to the new economy, in the real sense of the term, or that resembles the sweatshops of Bangladesh.3 There is therefore no organization of standardized labor with specific figures, because every commodity sector has its specificity in industrial logistics, and because in distribution logistics, not all goods are subject to the same treatment (think only of perishable products, the cold chain4 or dangerous and toxic products). Speaking in the generic sense of “logistics” does not lead us anywhere. We have to start with the fundamental distinction between distribution logistics and industrial logistics, we have to identify the different industrial sectors that require a specific logistics, being careful to distinguish the internally organized phases of the cycle and those that are outsourced, assigned through outsourcing to a specialist. Then you have to deal with distribution logistics with its characteristics for specific products, always remembering that the three basic components of a logistics cycle are: the management of orders, warehousing, transportation, with the last two covering at least 50% of the total cost. It should be a labor of in-depth investigation. Out of 40 or 50 logistics companies established in an interport as big as Bologna you can also find 40 or 50 different models.

The last few years, especially the last one, have witnessed in Italy what can be defined as a cycle of struggles of logistics workers, in particular migrants. They fight against the cooperative system,5 which – as you’ve pointed out – constitute a system of blackmail and hyper-exploitation, and are born and die quickly and in a fraudulent way. These cooperatives are often permeated by or use parts of organized crime and the Mafia. What weight do you think these struggles have?

I do not know if you can speak of a cycle of struggles yet. However, they were very important because for the first time they unveiled this sector which is little-known and much discussed (almost always inappropriately). What they have achieved, I don’t know. In some places they haven’t moved anything – with this absurd idolatry of the market elements of incivility have rooted themselves so deeply, even in some unionized quarters, that one part, small I hope, of the diverse world of the counterparty sees the solution only in violent repression. One part, which is the majority, thinks it can get away with declarations of intent, memoranda of understanding and conferences; another side – aware even before the strikes of having taken things too far – sees that it has to change its tune. Unfortunately, the general background conditions are not favorable. The Letta government is a real disaster from this point of view, worse than the Monti-Fornero government, not only because he lives under the blackmail of Berlusconi and is apparently even happy to endure this blackmail, but because in this way he can make reactionary policy, which is now in the Democratic Party’s blood. But why does he continue to think that only flexibility at entry raises employment, repeating the mistake made by all governments from the Treu Law onwards.6 He therefore legitimates the exploitation of the labor force and does not open his mouth on the issue of legality. As for the logistics interests in the governing party, about which he talks plenty, it is clear from the unfortunate choice of the Municipality and the Province of Bologna to sell their controlling interest in the Bologna interport company, a public company that was useful and which will be sold for a pittance to an on-call real estate adventurer. The profits were not reinvested; they preferred to fall back on being indebted to the bank (to make some banker friend happy?). Thus, the interport finds itself with an exposure that eats all the profits, with interest. A clearer display of the ignorance of a local ruling class is hard to find. Therefore, the struggles in this key area will raise the bar, will have to involve the world of transport, will have to create a wide front, otherwise they will end up being crushed.

– Translated by Salar Mohandesi. The trans­la­tor would like to thank Asad Haider, Evan Calder Williams, and Anna Curcio for check­ing the draft.

The Crisis of Social Democracy

The failure of socialism in the early 20th century is a product of the internal contradictions of bourgeois democracy, which permitted independent working-class organizations on condition that they did not pose a challenge to the capitalist state.1 In this way, the most significant historic fracture on the Left, one which remains with us today, followed the eager embrace of liberal democracy by Second International reformist socialists. The rise of social democracy in Germany dashed any prospect of a transition to working class power in Europe by instead appealing to the base sentiment of nationalism. But even more importantly, the rise of social democracy under capitalism was a declaration of war against the revolutionary Left that advocated a socialist break with capitalism. Social democracy is still more a declaration of war by the leading workers’ organizations of the imperialist countries, as well as their followers, on the oppressed nations of the Third World. From the late nineteenth century and increasingly until today, it is only the unrequited transfer of wealth from the latter to the former that has provided the rising incomes necessary to sustain a mass working class base for social democracy.2

Lenin as intellectual and revolutionary always recognized the state as a coercive apparatus in Tsarist Russia and the capitalist west. Following Marx, Lenin also recognized that socialist revolution would bring about a workers’ state that would maintain power through coercion. Decisively, the socialist state, under attack from national and international capitalists, would operate at the directive of the working class and peasants. Lenin sees the state as permanently repressive. The formation of the workers’ state following the Bolshevik Revolution did not transform the fact that state power remains rooted in class power. By raising an idealistic unobtainable bar for a workers’ state as an idyllic paradise of democracy and equality far above the present bourgeois liberal democracy is sheer fantasy rooted in pretense and chicanery. Georg Lukács underscores the revolutionary nature of the historically grounded state:

Workers’ Soviets as a state apparatus: that is the state as a weapon in the class struggle of a proletariat. Because the proletariat fights against bourgeois class rule and strives to create a classless society, the undialetical and therefore unhistorical and unrevolutionary analysis of opportunism concludes that the proletariat must fight against all class rule; in other words, its own form of domination should under no circumstances be an organ of class rule, of class oppression. Taken abstractly this basic viewpoint is Utopian, for proletarian rule cold never become a reality in this way; taken concretely, however, and applied to the present, it exposes itself as an ideological capitulation to the bourgeoisie.3

Of course, in 1918 the distinction was that the state would operate in the interests of the working class. This did not denote that the state would cease to be a coercive and violent force, even if it would be far less destructive than the bourgeois-liberal state that has operated and continues to operate in the form of a violent dictatorship. The liberal-democratic state is a violent class dictatorship. The targets of this violence and the forms it takes change over time. The maintenance of social peace and inter-class national solidarity in the developed countries has typically come about by displacing violent class antagonisms onto oppressed nations and peoples. Thus, for example, whilst placating the militant (and largely Jim Crow) white working class at home, the Roosevelt presidency of the 1930s stepped up repression of the Puerto Rican independence struggle. As such, the violent class dictatorship of bourgeois society can be seen most clearly in the colonial world. There, as Marx said, is displayed the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization [that] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.” In the same article, he wrote that capitalist progress resembled a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”4

Lenin certainly recognized that the state was an instrument of class power and would be wielded in the interests of the class that seized power. As Lenin states: “The main thing that socialists fail to understand and that constitutes their short-sightedness in matters of theory, their subservience to bourgeois prejudices and their political betrayal of the proletariat is that in capitalist society, whenever there is any serious aggravation of the class struggle intrinsic to that society, there can be no alternative but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of some third way are reactionary, petty-bourgeois lamentations.”5 Imperialist capitalism, of course, by displacing class contradictions onto a world scale, allows these dreams to become a reality for a minority of the world’s workers (and, initially, only a minority of the metropolitan workers, too). Further revolutionary workers’ states have not cynically asserted that they were an abstract force for freedom, equality, and a means of guaranteeing social rights, as was the case in every liberal-democratic regime.

Given the failure of European socialist revolutions in the early 20th century, Lenin was most eager to develop the forces of production for the Soviet workers state. To do so also required the domination of the working class. The notion of the state as a transmission belt is a recognition that the seizure of power by workers and peasants would not transform the state straightaway into a socialist paradise.

The act of seizing state power does not alter the landscape and apparatus of the repressive state, which, under workers’ control, represents and defends the class interests of the proletariat; the organized trade unions which formed under liberal democracy must alter their stance to defend the project of socialist transformation in opposition to capital and support of the proletarian state, which at times inevitably will lead to conflict within the labor organization. Lenin makes this patently obvious in in “Role and Functions of the Trade Unions,” upon launching the New Economic Policy in 1922.

The only correct, sound and expedient method of removing friction and of settling disputes between individual contingents of the working class and the organs of the workers’ state is for the trade unions to act as mediators, and through their competent bodies either to enter into negotiations with the competent business organisations on the basis of precise demands and proposals formulated by both sides, or appeal to higher state bodies.6

Marxist currents over the past century have selectively emphasized the Marxist-Leninist vision that they share and discard those doctrinal arguments that may be uncomfortable and do not conveniently fit in to their perspective, rooted in a puerile utopianism. However, a humanitarian and moral Leninist perspective can be drawn from the above passage. To wit: Lenin understands the profound internal divisions within the working class, and the actuality that a parasitic fraction benefits materially from its position in established trade unions under competitive capitalism. Trade unions forged under capitalism are often not engaged in class struggle for systemic change but preoccupied with economism that benefits individual privileged workers over the masses—first against unorganized elements of the class, and then through imperialism and monopoly capitalism.

State Power Today

To understand the relevance of the state power in the contemporary era we are duty-bound to begin by detecting the profound transformations within capitalism over the past 100 years, under which the working classes in the imperial world have gained material advantages through the marginalization and collective exploitation of workers more generally in the Global South. As Ellen Meiksins Wood maintains, state power was and remains crucial to maintaining class power and privilege throughout the history of capitalism,7 a position that is shared by French political economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, who document a class and imperial project under historical capitalism.8 Today more than ever the state exerts power through direct exploitation of workers in the semi-colonial world.

The transformation of the Chinese workers’ state to market socialism is crucial to investigate in this context, as it represents a variation of Lenin’s understanding of developing the forces of production carried to the extreme. The PRC and the Communist Party of China maintain firm control of the organs of all organizational and state power. Workers are subordinated to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a remote trade union organization that claims to represent the interest of organized labor. But we do have a difference: the industrial working class in China is emerging as the majority and is hardly a freeloading class profiteering off the exploitation of lower-wage workers in a dependent state. Concomitantly, Chinese industrial workers maintain state power in the abstract sense and would benefit from organizing a broader class alliance within a mutable and ideologically warped state that is cohering in support of the upper class and foreign capital. Workers are engaged in direct struggle against private, mostly foreign capital devoid of organizational power for their class.

It is fundamental to establish what we mean by the representation of state power. I would argue that the nature and location of state power has not appreciably changed over the last 100 years if understood through the prism of a hierarchical system of states dominated by an imperial core. The former colonial powers continue to dominate the world through international relations established upon superior force and economic dependency. However, state power does vary over time and place, principally according to the dynamic between the political exigencies of class struggle and the economic priorities of its protagonists. Thus, for example, what Bagchi refers to as the developmental state is one in which government policy is designed to promote national economic development.9 The developmental state can, of course, be one in which the national bourgeoisie rules primarily in its own interests, whether by means of parliamentary democracy or right-wing dictatorship (as, for example, in post-war Japan and Rhee’s southern Korea, respectively); one in which the working masses, the peasantry and proletariat, rule (as in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin and China under Mao); or an admixture of the two types (as in the USSR after Stalin and China today). Such states are relatively distinct both from imperialist sates and colonial dependencies. In the early 20th century the United States and a handful of declining European powers dominated the world through the exertion of economic and military force. Today the domination of the US ruling capitalist class is more far-reaching than a century ago, through its increased capacity to demarcate the boundaries of independent state activity and to subordinate the interests of smaller states to its class and geopolitical interests. As imperialism has integrated the world economy even further, any state that threatens to depart from the dominant international neoliberal paradigm is scorned, punished, and excluded from the international system.

The state remains an oppressive instrument today and is controlled by the capitalist class.

Revolutionaries must challenge capital’s control over the state through exposing its sham democratic pretenses that maintain and expand the power of the upper class and under which political competition offers no hope and only misery for the working class. The violent suppression and eradication of political opponents of white supremacy and capitalism in the United States are a testament to the fraudulent nature of alleged “representative” liberal democracy there. We must pursue a revolutionary strategy not just to challenge a rapacious state, but also to forestall the growth of national chauvinism which is emerging due to popular recognition of the failure of electoral systems and the alarming growth of paramilitary police and incarceration systems. The façade of democracy is now exposed to the popular masses at a time when fascist parties are emerging as the only organized political alternative. More likely is a rise of the fascist right, which can manipulate worker interests in Europe and elsewhere far better than liberals and social democrats. Fascism’s appeal to the metropolitan working class in the current crisis stems from its unmitigated promise to maintain and extend existing patterns of labor stratification based on established national and gender hierarchies. Social democratic trade unions and their leaders in settler-colonial states have a history of embracing outright white nationalism and chauvinism when the victims of colonial-capitalist exploitation appear as any form of labor competition amongst them. I would not say that workers whose living standards have always come at the expense of the superexploited and oppressed are being “manipulated” when they are encouraged to join in a renewed drive to plunder them further. Proletarian feminist revolutionary nationalism, by contrast, aims at the expulsion of imperialism from oppressed nation territories by means of creating a worker-led united front of all sections of the oppressed with all patriotic classes. Support for the anti-imperialist struggles of the oppressed nations is a solid foundation for socialist ideology in the current age just as much as it was a century ago. Unfortunately, it faces the same and even greater obstacles now as then. Poulantzas was correct about the necessity of democracy under socialism, but he also did not have a solution to the greater danger of capital and its ability to create the appearance of real power struggles among competitive parties, hypnotize people through the media and disillusion most people who seek to create an equitable democracy.10

A revolutionary stance must first and foremost appear as a political movement that repudiates the existing bourgeois political system and categorically distinguishes the far more exploited workers in the South from those struggling in the North. Occupy gained traction in 2011 amid working class frustration with capitalist domination over state, politics, and society, not just in the West but throughout the world. But the diffuse movements lacked a dialectical historical analysis of class interest in global capitalism and were an expression of disapproval rather than a revolutionary challenge to capitalist hegemony.

Imperialism and the Global South

One hundred and ten years ago, the Industrial Workers of the World formed in strict opposition to the capitalist state. They did not believe in compromising the principles of socialism and believed strongly in a disciplined opposition to capital. The provisional interests of the working class were upheld through tactics. The IWW was a genuinely proletarian party for a time, but the economism of the IWW was responsible for its fatal inability to connect US labor struggles to those of the oppressed internal colonies.

A working class and anti-imperialist party form dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and in opposition to US and western hegemonic power is indispensable. Occupy was right to direct indignation at finance capital, but failed to express its opposition to the capitalist and imperial state as such. A socialist strategy must have at its core taking state power: but to succeed we must challenge the power of imperial states to dictate extractive and unequal policies around the world. We must seek a power bloc that is not the conventional set of left parties, but a bloc of working-class/anti-imperialist forces in the Global South, recognizing class inequality within a divided world system. We also must recognize the sustained importance of imperialism. In the 1970s to 1980s, smug Western Marxists and Eurocommunists all but jettisoned the concept as an applicable means for understanding the reality of class struggles on a global basis. Opposition to capitalism without a grasp of the class divisions that correspond with national boundaries is essential.

Ever since the French Socialists came to power in 1981 it is obvious to us all that the Second International socialism idea of the Left taking power is delusional, even if it provided a momentary period of hope when capital in the modern state was ascendant and the post-war Soviet Union was failing to meet its ideals rooted in building a workers’ state. Socialist praise for the development of civil liberties and human rights in the West is highly insensitive to cultural difference and relevant only to the privileged and a thin layer of the oppressed. We have no examples of successes on the Left in the West that could be sustained for more than a short period of time without a counterattack from capital. The growth of financialization has made it even more difficult to rein in the power of capital in most states. The idea of a power bloc, as in Greece and other regions, is a stimulating undertaking for the Left, but it is also largely bereft of any concrete evidence that it will achieve any gain.

Taking state power is only relevant if seized by socialists in the Third World countries on a regional geographic level. Yes, something like a Soviet Union. In the early 21st century most states can be turned into “failed states” if opposed by capital. Thus. we need to re-imagine taking state power on a much wider level. The axiom of the Cold War era that imperial wars were to be fought over the spoils in the Third World is more prescient today than ever, as class struggles expand in the Global South and the West is extending its exploitation from extractive industries to the production of commodities. The United States is reviving its Cold War stance not in opposition to Russia or other regional states, but out of fear that a working class bloc could form at a time when the West is ever more dependent on both natural resources and commodities produced by workers in the Global South.

This model is analogous to extant socialist states that have asserted the importance of developing the means of production before advancing the class interests. The state becomes essentially the representative of the workers. The question is whether in fact the “communist” State does represent the interests of workers and peasants. This is certainly not the case in China and Vietnam, and other states that are advancing with the patina of “communism.” The Chinese state could crush the “democracy” protests of the educated middle class at Tiananmen Square, and perhaps Hong Kong, but given the nature of state power, this new movement could gain control over the state: a fate much more threatening to The City of London and Wall Street than to Beijing. Thus we could consider the potential of workers’ states to evolve into representatives of the working class, as direct struggles grow at an ever more rapid pace.

Lineament. noun. GEOLOGY. A linear feature on the earth’s surface, such as a fault.

“State space subordinates both chaos and difference to its implacable logistics.” – Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State” (1978)

Logistical revolts

Sometimes, we have to look in unlikely places for news that can nourish a radical political imagination.1 World Cargo News, for instance:

According to The Strike Club, the market leader for delay insurance for the maritime trades, the early months of 2013 have been marked by extremely damaging strike action in several countries, which has punished shipowners and charterers even though they are innocent parties. Some of the worst trouble spots in recent weeks have been in South America, particularly Chile, where a three-week strike crippled the country’s key ports, blocking exports of copper, fruit and wood products. Chile’s business leaders estimate the country lost more than US$200M a day due to the conflict. There has also been a miners’ strike in Colombia and it was only this month that US stevedores signed a six-year master contract with employers that removed the strike threat at east and Gulf coast ports. In South East Asia, a port workers’ strike has now dragged on for more than three weeks in Hong Kong, while Greece is currently in the spotlight as the seafarers’ union is threatening strike action in protest at new maritime legislation that, it is claimed, will swell their current high unemployment number. It was against this background that the Strike Club’s directors met in Singapore at the end of last week, where the managers reported higher levels of shore-related claims from a wide range of incidents. These included general strikes, port strikes, strikes by land transport operators, customs and pilots, as well as port closures, blockades by fishermen, physical obstructions and mechanical equipment breakdowns.2

It has long been noted that the apparatuses of control and accumulation that structure the social and material reality of circulation – transport, the energy industry and, after World War Two, “business logistics” as a veritable science of real subsumption – though born to break the bargaining power of transport workers and accumulate profits by annihilating space and depressing wages, have also, especially through their energetic dimensions, created dynamic arenas for class struggle. Tim Mitchell has advanced this argument with great acumen – writing that in the age of coal, workers’ power “derived not just from the organizations they formed, the ideas they began to share on the political alliances that they built, but from the extraordinary quantities of carbon energy that could be used to assemble political agency, by employing the ability to slow, disrupt, or cut off its supply.”3 Interruption here represented a form of power correlated to the energetic vulnerabilities of capital accumulation and political power. The strike and the blockade, control and interruption, were entwined in the history of what, repurposing Mitchell, we could call carbon syndicalism or carbon communism. More recently, struggles at the choke points of a planetary logistical system have led Sergio Bologna to speak of “the multitude of globalization,” designating all of those who work across the supply chain, in the manual and intellectual labour that makes highly complex integrated transnational systems of warehousing, transport, and control possible. It is members of this multitude, clerical workers and truckers in Los Angeles and Long Beach,4 crane operators in Hong Kong,5 distribution centre workers for Wal-Mart,6 logistical workers in Northern Italy7, or even air-traffic controllers in Spain8 that have led some to see not a secular vanishing but a shift in the loci of class struggle. This has prodded some to look again at the critical role of antagonism along the conduits of circulation – an abiding feature of the workers’ movement throughout its history – taking into consideration the intensifying significance of logistics to the reproduction of capital, but also its contradictory, uneven relationship to the reproduction of the capital-labor relation.

Can we define or declare a relocation of political and class conflict, in the overdeveloped de-industrializing countries of the “Global North,” from the point of production to the chokepoints of circulation? Is it possible to raise the status of logistical counter-power, in the guise of the blockade, for instance, from that of a tactic to that of a strategy, one that would redefine anti-capitalist and revolutionary action in a context where the appropriation of the means of production is either a distant or an unappealing prospect? In order to begin to approach such challenging issues of theory and practice, I believe it is necessary to consider the centrality of a theory and practice of interruption, targeted at logistical apparatuses, which has become increasingly attractive to anti-systemic militancy – and in a second moment to explore the forms of capitalist and political power that have accompanied the “logistics revolution.”

In this light, I would like to revisit – meaning both to expand and revise – some arguments about the current political significance of logistics that I rehearsed 3 years ago in a brief article for Mute magazine, entitled “Logistics and Opposition.”9 That article tried to identify, picking up on one of the leitmotifs of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, how an ambient radical preoccupation with events, ruptures, dissensus, was being both concretized and in some ways surpassed by a “spontaneous philosophy of interruption,” or even of sabotage, which saw disruptive actions at the nodes and terminals of circulation (here used loosely to include distribution, transportation, and consumption, but with an emphasis on the logistical) as overtaking workers’ actions at the point of production, the paradigm for nineteenth and twentieth century socialist politics. The Invisible Committee’s stance – which I think faithfully renders a structure of feeling of contemporary radicalism – is nicely encapsulated in the following declaration:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable: its flows are not merely for the transportation of people and commodities; information and energy circulate by way of wire networks, fibres and channels, which it is possible to attack. To sabotage the social machine with some consequence today means re-conquering and reinventing the means of interrupting its networks. How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?10

As suggested by some statements and reflections that accompanied the 2 November 2011 shutdown of the Port of Oakland,11 this could be framed – in that periodizing register so prevalent in contemporary debates – as an epochal transformation in anti-capitalist action, figuratively captured as a move from the strike to the blockade, as well as from workers’ demands centered on their own workplaces to a less regimented convergence of an “extrinsic proletariat” around the interruption of capital flows. If capital not in motion, is (as Marxists and managers concur) no longer capital, then its political immobilization, however fleeting, lends an impact otherwise absent from defensive anti-austerity politics. Motion and mobility, or rather “mobilization,” were the targets of The Invisible Committee’s jeremiads against the depoliticizing despotism of the metropolis, and their wager – common to other strands in contemporary insurrectionary thought – was that the interruption of this spectacular regime of commodity flows may serve as the catalyst for the forging of antagonistic collectivities and forms-of-life: a recasting of the political form of the commune, which traced its arc from the beginning of the age of Empire to the present through the transfiguration of the social spaces and political temporalities of cities such as Paris, Barcelona, Shanghai, Kwangju, mutating in step with economic conjunctures and ideas of politics.

In my Mute article, leaning on Furio Jesi’s remarkable book on the Berlin insurrection of 1919, Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt,12 I suggested that the spatio-temporal imaginary at work here is not one of revolution but of revolt, yet that the revolt imagined in The Coming Insurrection and kindred texts is a different kind of revolt, one aimed not so much at the urbanization of capital, à la David Harvey, but at the all-encompassing integration of production, circulation and distribution in logistical systems through which the supremacy of constant capital prophesied by Marx writes itself on the surface of the earth in forms both titanic and capillary. This is the baleful spatio-energetic complex that Mumford identified when he argued that “processing” had become “the chief form of metropolitan control.”13

Beyond the notion, shared by both the pro- and anti-union left, that attention to logistics lays bare some of capital’s nerve-centers, be they levers for political pressure or sites of negation, I also wanted to speculate about, and partially endorse, a trend in some recent radical thought, to consider the “logistical revolution” as an important site for thinking the “reconfiguration” or “refunctioning” of capitalist social relations of production – efforts towards imagining and practicing non-capitalist uses of quintessential instruments of contemporary capital accumulation. Could the speed, standardization and automation of the container port, or the capacities of Walmart distribution chains, be regarded as possible material bases for alternative, antagonistic organizations of production, circulation and distribution?

My Mute article has been the object of trenchant if comradely critique in a contribution to the journal Endnotes by Jasper Bernes. That piece, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Prospect”14 raises some urgent critical and strategic questions, and I want to take the opportunity to respond to some of its arguments here, since I think they clarify the stakes (as well as the different conceptions) of a politics of circulation. I then want to consider how our conceptions of capital accumulation, the capital-relation, and material flows might determine a certain understanding of tactics of resistance and strategies of antagonism by considering two geographically-inflected ways of approaching these problems – drawn from Marx and Henri Lefebvre – that can help us better to specify what kind of “circulation” is at stake. What emerges from this brief foray into historical materialist geographies of circulation are two corrections to a direct political identification of crisis capitalism with its logistical infrastructure: first, the need to offset a tendency to class logistics and transport on the side of circulation, neglecting Marx’s prescient assertion that locational change could be a commodity on its own right, and that the capitalist transport industry was itself a form of, as it were, directly productive circulation, blurring the boundaries between making and moving15 ; second, now following Lefebvre, a recognition that even or especially in a neoliberal moment, the state has played an absolutely crucial role in the deployment and securitization of logistics, meaning that conflicts at the choke points of circulation are not immediate challenges to value-in-motion, but mediated assaults on capitalist power, in the guise of what Lefebvre depicted in the 1970s as the emergent logistical state.

The reconfiguration thesis: a reply

Bernes’s article takes me to task as a representative of what he calls the “reconfiguration thesis,” a strategic hypothesis which argues that anti-capitalist politics should move beyond a mere negation of capitalist relations, orienting itself instead towards a reckoning with what can be redeployed or refunctioned in the vast, and vastly complex, systems of “dead labor” that capital accumulation has thrown up – systems of which logistics is both an emblem and a vital component. Bernes’s text is an important theoretical balance sheet of the struggles that culminated, for the time being, in the Oakland port blockade, and provides a rich, polemical synthesis of many of their key stakes. For that reason, I hope that engaging with his criticisms can serve to clarify the problems of circulation and logistics that confront present efforts to revive communist theory and practice.

Bernes suggests that I – along with other advocates of the aforementioned thesis, namely Mike Davis16 and Fredric Jameson17 – hold to the argument that “all existing means of production must have some use beyond capital, and that all technological innovation must have, almost categorically, a progressive dimension which is recuperable through a process of ‘determinate negation.’” Though I was purposely bending the stick against a romantic vision of communitarian sabotage,18 I stressed that any “reconfiguration” concerns an evaluation, both practical test and theoretical anticipation, of, as I had said, “what aspects of contemporary capitalism could be refunctioned in the passage to a communist society.” This implies that some (many, even most – the ratio is not decidable a priori) of these aspects could not be refunctioned at all (though they would still need to be somehow dealt with or disposed of). Notwithstanding our strategic differend, or our different intuitions about the leeway for repurposing, I think we broadly agree that the there is no a priori way to simply declare certain features of capitalist production and circulation as allowing for communist uses. The test is a practical and political one. Where we part ways, perhaps, is in the confidence with which Bernes dismisses the potentialities of the assemblages of capitalist accumulation – logistics in primis – which he presents as (to employ Jameson’s terminology) essentially mono-valent, dialectically irrecuperable.

Approaching logistics in a transitional horizon necessarily involves reflecting on how much of the gigantism of the contemporary logistical complex is unthinkable outside of capital’s irrational rationalities – as Sergio Bologna has pointed out in some very interesting “insider” interventions (his “day job” for many years has been as a logistics consultant) on Italian ports: the vast majority of containers travelling east from Europe are full of “shit and air” (waste products and emptiness) and the craze for supercontainers as well as for the building of countless deep ports is comprehensible only in the context of the financialization of maritime assets and the correlated competition between different local authorities for subsidies and capital.19 So speaking of “potentially reconfigurable” devices is, I hope, compatible, with the practical evaluation of what, where and how can any reconfiguration could occur (we could think here of the experience of the Lucas Plan in the UK as a rough precursor for this kind of social practice20 ). As both Bernes’s “communist prospect” and Bologna’s advice to the Italian logistics industry suggest, this would most likely involve smaller ships and fewer ports…

Bernes also suggests that, together with its contribution to the tendential evanescence of an organized working class at the hinges of circulation, the specifically capitalist use-value of logistics – principally its depression of labour costs through a smooth despotism over the international division of labor – means that it cannot be approached by analogy with the factory, traditionally envisaged by the left as the site of workers’ reappropriation and control.

That logistics has been driven by labour arbitrage and class struggle (the latter more in its inaugural moments, I think) is certainly true, but I remain sceptical about some of the conclusions Bernes draws from it, as well as about the assumption that logistics has made possible a linear race to the bottom. Though conditions there are hardly rosy, if we view the logistical revolution say from Shenzen and not Long Beach, the bargaining power as well as wages of some sectors of the Chinese workers have risen.21 Moreover, the complexities of the international division of labour and possibilities of class struggle involved therein are not comprehensible, in my view, through the axis of absolute/relative surplus value alone – as suggested in Bernes’s claim that, inasmuch as the “technological ensemble which logistics superintends is therefore fundamentally different than other ensembles such as the Fordist factory,” focusing on labour arbitrage rather than increased labour productivity, logistics “is absolute surplus value masquerading as relative surplus value.” The passage from craft to industrial (assembly line) production in the earlier twentieth century was also viewed as a devastation of the workplace and associational bargaining power of workers, but it turned out not to be such a univocal process. Here I think Bernes falls into what for me remains a serious shortcoming of so-called communization theory, the positing of a linear periodization of figures of struggle and exploitation (not dissimilar from the periodizing problems of operaismo, with a similar tendency to generalise from “Northern” conditions), and a disregard for the political and economic unevenness of capitalism, which at times ends up generating a baleful materialist teleology. In short, the notion that Chinese industrial strikes are somehow historically residual is as untenable today as the Stalinist notion that agrarian struggles were regressive was in the 1940s.

In the final analysis, I think the economic and political arguments enlisted by Bernes to establish that logistical systems are lacking the “refunctionable” potentialities that were once projected onto the factory are not definitive. In effect, we could see logistics as a crucial component of the materialization of that old Italian workerist thesis, the “social factory.” Leaning on the embryonic theorization of value-production in the transport industry in volume 2 of Capital (on which more below), on the material reality that commodities today are “manufactured across logistics space,”22 as well as on the explicit capitalist strategy behind the rise of logistics in the postwar period – grounded as it is on the idea of a “shift from cost minimization after production to value added across circulatory systems”23 – it seems difficult not to conclude that logistics is only analytically and not actually separable from the production-process nowadays, such that we could really hive-off valorization in the factory (which is a spatially-segregated production unit only in economic abstraction) from valorization at the container terminal. Moreover, as a complex material and social relation of circulation and exploitation, it does not seem to me that logistics is “more” constitutively hostile to workers’ needs than the factory. That said, I think Bernes’s essay is to be commended for delineating some of the formidable problems for political strategy and especially for envisaging transitions out of capitalism that the “logistics revolution” entails.

Bernes, who nicely presents logistics not only as “capital’s art of war” but as its own solution to what Jameson had called the problem of cognitive mapping rejects the idea that some kind of counter-logistics, or more bluntly the collective planning of circulation, could throw up such a map.24 For him:

Because of the uneven distribution of productive means and capitals – not to mention the tendency for geographical specialisation, the concentration of certain lines in certain areas (textiles in Bangladesh, for instance) – the system is not scalable in any way but up. It does not permit partitioning by continent, hemisphere, zone or nation. It must be managed as a totality or not at all. Therefore, nearly all proponents of the reconfiguration thesis assume high-volume and hyper-global distribution in their socialist or communist system, even if the usefulness of such distributions beyond production for profit remain unclear.

The fundamental opacity of logistical systems to workers has been much remarked upon, and it can indeed be seen as one of its broadly political functions. As Allan Sekula noted, those boxes, uncannily proportioned like dollar bills, are also coffins of labor-power.25 Yet, for all of the skepticism towards refunctioning this state of affairs should inspire, we can’t simply infer from these blockages to proletarian knowledge that an emancipatory refunctioning (and therefore profound transformation) of these systems is impossible. One should be wary in any case of treating this primarily as an issue about the mappability of the system for the individual, when it is really a question of devising forms of collective control, which might include – especially at larger scales of social mediation – considerable quotas of opacity. In this regard, short of the unviable idea that a post-capitalist society must be local, and that its politics needs involve the transparency of the small community or commune, I think the world market remains, in however arduous a way, a presupposition (not a framework!) for any transition out of capitalism. Most things of worth and interest are beyond the cognizability of single individuals (scientific developments, cultural traditions, how technology works, what have you) but this only poses a problem as such if we think dis-alienation is a matter of personalization, of making us “at home in the world” (a cast of mind that some recent radical theory shares with the palliative spectacles of ethical consumption it would undoubtedly castigate). I struggle to see why this would either be emancipatory or attractive. I also don’t think that, as Bernes suggests, logistics is a view from nowhere of Capital-as-subject: it is a deeply incoherent, contradictory, conflicted, and competitive domain; a strategic field of fierce competition sitting uneasily with state and security coordination, as well as inevitable processes of standardization. Process mappings, while striving towards homogeneity of spaces and codes, remain strategic weapons in the hands of capitalist agents, not overviews by “capital.” Ideas of full visibility as integral flexibility are part of the ideology (and fantasy) of logistics, which in many ways is just a later iteration of other ideologies of capitalist efficacy: Taylorism, Toyotism, etc. The value-dynamics and spaces of logistics are deeply contradictory, in ways I will explore further below with reference to Lefebvre; they are more likely to be gummed up – for the time being – by internal impasses than by resolute political intervention.

Bernes is rightly wary of those “reconfigurationists” who see the problems of building a post-capitalist society resolved by a digital magic bullet – communist algorithms of distribution and other such hopeful schemes. But faced with such technological fixes, it is worth recalling that26 paucity of solutions has never been an argument for the non-existence of problems. Bernes also takes me to task for asserting, in keeping with some of David Harvey’s observations in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, that social processes and spaces have built-in hierarchies and opacities, and that a sober if intransigent anti-capitalist politics would require, by analogy with Marcuse’s distinction between surplus and necessary repression, to think, practically, through something like “necessary alienation.” What I meant by this was the (perhaps banal) point that the reproduction of social life in general, even outside of the mediation of value, will involve certain asymmetries of authority, partial delegations of control, opacity, and so forth. Post-capitalism, or communism, is not the absence of social form or social synthesis but another form or synthesis, another mode of regulation – as Raymond Williams noted, a more complex one.

Here I think Bernes takes back with one hand what he’s abandoned with the other. On one side, he writes about those who through blockades and communes, “occupations,” may try to undo the rule of capital: “To meet their own needs and the needs of others, these proletarians would have to engage in the production of food and other necessaries, the capacity for which does not exist in most countries.” I agree, and would add, that, as such, there is nothing particularly attractive about the devastation of capitalist everyday life, in all its alienations, in favour of some kind of re-ruralization, where the social form is based on comradeship, friendship, or some kind of band of brothers bond (communism too needs to think through “unsociable sociability”). But then he says that: “The absence of opportunities for ‘reconfiguration’ will mean that in their attempts to break from capitalism proletarians will need to find other ways of meeting their needs.” To which I think a sober material analysis will simply answer: they won’t (even if, which I think would be a big problem, we maintain “needs” as defined in a rather biological way). This entails that in many cases (perhaps most – but again this is not an a priori matter) “delinking” is simply not an option.

The rhetoric of communist abundance has most likely seen its day, but not for that should it be replaced by some kind of communism of penury or emergency – and in this sense I think the “delinking” point is somewhat “terroristic” in form (in the noble sense of a Sartrean terror-fraternity, not of the PATRIOT Act): a communism of survival in a besieged enclave forced by the fact that existing in a global capitalist system involves irrevocable compromises. This other formulation, on the other hand, I find much more plausible, and, strategic differences aside, would endorse: “one might also develop a functional understanding of the infrastructure of capital, such that one then knew which technologies and productive means would be orphaned by a partial or total delinking from planetary flows, which ones might alternately be conserved or converted, and what the major practical and technical questions facing a revolutionary situation might look like.” The “inventory” would certainly be a part of anything I would consider as refunctioning. As would of course the problem of what to do with the unrefunctionable dead labors (both in terms of the social relations they bear, and the material problems they pose, the waste they perpetuate). Planned communist obsolescence perhaps? This too would be the object of some pretty trenchant struggles, for which we have some interesting preludes in the big disputes in the 1920s over whether the urban form as it existed was compatible with communism (here I’m more with Mike Davis than with Amadeo Bordiga’s urban abolitionism in his bracing screed “Space Versus Cement,”27 much as I’m exceedingly fond of the latter).

Bernes, reflecting on the experience of Oakland – which he’s largely right in seeing as a high point of the Occupy moment, transcending a certain fetishism for democratic participation, while rediscovering forms of struggle adequate to our present – puts much emphasis on the blockade, but I have questions as to whether its status as tactic and strategy has been duly clarified here. In particular, I remain unclear about what the criteria of political “efficacy” are in this instance. Presumably, they are not a matter of workplace bargaining power – of the kind recently seen in Long Beach or the Hong Kong container port, or in that sadly missed opportunity that was the Spanish air traffic controllers strike. Is “power” here measured principally by providing an emblem (logistics as a kind of symbolic insurrectional adversary, rather than a lever for traditional workers’ politics), as a point of political condensation? Is it marked by the losses incurred by capital (usually nugatory in the broader scheme, even in strong struggles)? What kind of political spaces and durable organization (in the widest sense of the term) can we see coalescing around the blockade as a form of contemporary struggle?

Social forms of dead labor

As I’ve noted, Bernes’s argument against the presupposition that devices and systems crucial to capital accumulation could be refunctioned in a non-capitalist guise is a healthy reminder of the fact that we’re never dealing with mere materiality or technology, but with certain often invisible social forms that animate given configurations of matter. Yet if we concur that technological contents or forces can’t simply slough off their forms and find themselves happily relocated within other relations of production and reproduction, we should likewise, while remaining cognizant of the material and energetic preconditions for certain forms, not fetishize them. This, it seems to me, is one of the pitfalls of the “interruptive strain” in the politics of circulation – which sees the blockage as a kind of material revelation (this is a problem which haunts The Coming Insurrection much more than Bernes’s essay). In this respect, there is a left version here of the notion of frontstaging the urban backstage which has recently been ably criticized by Stephen Graham28 – where state phobias and practices of disruption (like military strategy of “shutting cities down”) are simply mirrored in activist discourses, where disruption is not sufficiently linked to control.

One of the theoretical limits of the philosophy of interruption, whether spontaneous or reflexive, that marks much contemporary radicalism lies then in its insufficient consideration of the polysemy of “circulation.”29 The hypostasis of the blockade tactic can suggest that all varieties of circulation may be targeted at the “choke points” of logistics. But even if we remain only within the bounds of the Marxian canon, circulation can take an at times bewildering and slippery variety of guises. It can denote flows of material and resources (such as would exist in any mode of production); the sphere of exchange (that domain ruled over by freedom, equality and Bentham, and from which most of our misprisions about liberalism are deemed to derive); it can denote circulating as opposed to fixed capital (meaning the capital consumed in process of production, be it raw materials or the exertion of living labour-power); but it can also mean “capital of circulation,” which takes different guises in its travels through the market – leading to Marx’s crucial reflections on “circulation time,” which the annihilation of space through time is constantly driving to diminish. We can even think of circulation in keeping with the circuits in which Marx maps the formal metamorphosis of value, which are also the sites, at the level of theory, of capital’s contradictions.

In 1928, Isaak Illich Rubin pioneered the discussion of Marx as a thinker of “social form.” Rubin stressed how Marx’s critique of classical political economy hinges on distinguishing between “material categories” concerned with “technical methods and instruments of labour,” on the one hand, and “social forms” concerned with specifically capitalist relations, on the other. The blind spot of political economy is precisely its inability, evidenced by the theory of commodity fetishism, to think about why these particular value-forms are generated in bourgeois society, wrongly supposing that it is in transhistorical “material categories” – a physiological understanding of labor rather than labor-power, exchange separate from capital, and so on – that one can look for the clues to the structure and development of a mode of production.

Contrariwise, it is “the social function which is realized through a thing [that] gives this thing a particular social character, a determined social form, a ‘determination of form’ (Formbestimmtheit), as Marx frequently wrote.”30 Marx’s remonstrations against those political economists who, in Rubin’s terms, cannot see the “social forms” lying “beneath” the “technical functions in the process of material production” are legion. Historical materialism is predicated on the rejection of the spontaneous materialism of the political economists. This is the impetus behind such seemingly anti-materialist declarations as this famous passage from Volume 1 of Capital: “The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition.”31 The critique of “materialism” is also a key methodological postulate in Volume 2, for instance in Marx’s sardonic attempts on those who think that fixed capital, for instance, should be “fixed” in a common-sensically material sense of the term. This is how political economists go astray:

Firstly, certain properties that characterize the means of labour materially are made into direct properties of fixed capital, e.g. physical immobility, such as that of a house. But it is always easy to show that other means of labour, which are also as such fixed capital, ships for example, have the opposite property, i.e. physical mobility. Alternatively, the formal economic characteristic that arises from the circulation of value is confused with a concrete [dinglich] property; as if things, which are never capital at all in themselves, could already in themselves and by nature be capital in a definite form, fixed or circulating.32

What’s more, those ships (say the new mega-containers lumbering their way onto the market and demanding huge outlays of public finances on the construction of the corresponding ports) may themselves be best understood as financial assets and not just physical capitals or commodities. What happens then if we consider the question of circulation less literally? And what would it mean to struggle not simply against material flows but against the social forms that channel them? Can we think of different types of struggle in terms of how they map onto the various meanings of circulation mentioned above?

On the one level, the notion that capital not in motion is no longer capital, or, as Marx rather stunningly puts it, that “continuity is a productive force of labour,” has important political resonances – though these are far more palpable in in the creeping devastation of deindustrialization than in the successful blockade. On the other, the nature of capital is such that the arms race to lessen circulation times by deploying (and securitizing) vast circulatory apparatuses necessarily involves the hypertrophy of constant capital, dwarfing variable capital (proletarians) and revealing potentially paralyzing quanta of fixity as the price for accelerated circulation. I have recently tried to argue, in another piece for Mute, how in the real-estate politics and energetic difficulties plaguing the seemingly ethereal rise of high-frequency trading we could witness such a revenge of matter and space upon financial ideality – a revenge we can only understand in terms of certain social forms that are specifically capitalist.33 In an economic field whose drive to instantaneousness seems to obliterate spatial difference, this corroborates, in the financial arena, a well-known observation from Marx’s Grundrisse:

The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.34

For the costs of financial circulation “physical conditions” are paramount – as manifested in the fierce competition over “co-located” server space, proximity to trading venues and access to data, and in related phenomena like the rush to acquire and develop real-estate for data centres. As mentioned above, Marx had already argued in volume 2 of Capital that transport is itself a domain of production, in which the commodity, as he puts it, “is the change of place itself” – revisiting this thesis in the light of financializtion and the logistics revolution makes a politically overdetermined schematism separating production and circulation, the factory and the port, all the more difficult to sustain.

But I have as yet only glancingly dealt with a or perhaps the key player in the politics of circulation: the state. One of the strategic dangers of a politics of interruption is to think of the blockade as a kind of unmediated confrontation with or negation of the social form of value, of capital as a social relation, in which the state is either ignored or reduced to the mesmerizing metonym of the cop. I’d like instead, simply by way of opening up another geographical and materialist avenue of inquiry, to sketch out how the very thinker who pioneered the analysis of the production of space also gave us some tools to think through the imbrication of logistics and the state – something easily verified, for instance, by the strategic panics and confusions regarding how to secure the flows of capital witnessed after 9/11. This is what Deborah Cowen has presented, in her illuminating work on logistics, as the problem of September 12 – the collapse of cargo flow in the wake of that of the World Trade Center, showing the profound tear in the tactics and strategy of the capitalist state, spanning as they do still contradictory spaces.

Contradictions in the logistical state35

On the face of it, Henri Lefebvre’s thesis about the emergence of a “state mode of production” (SMP) – as elaborated on the eve of the neoliberal surge in the four volumes of his De l’État (1976-78) – would appear to be a threadbare Marxist anachronism, a belated successor to twentieth-century efforts to think the convergence between liberal-capitalist and state-socialist or fascist political systems – Horkheimer’s authoritarian state, Burnham’s managerial revolution, Rizzi’s bureacuratization of the world, or Debord’s integrated spectacle. Yet I would like to suggest that attending to the French philosopher’s arguments about the spatial contradictions of the modern state can allow us to refine our understanding of the forms of power borne by logistics, the tensions they carry, and how they cannot simply be reduced to a direct expression of Capital.

For Lefebvre, the state is initially identified with a specific production of space, that of the national territory. This state does not have the “chaotic” characteristics of “private space.” Moreover, unlike the nightwatchman state, it is a persistent agent of social reproduction; it “does not intervene in an episodic and circumscribed fashion but ceaselessly, through different organisms and institutions devoted to the management as well as the production of space.”36 This space is both homogeneous – everywhere subject to the same logic – and broken, shattered – by the logics of property, rent, social conflict, and the ensuing fragmentation. The logistical space of the SMP, like capitalist space broadly construed, is homogeneous-broken [homogène-brisé]. Isn’t this a paradox? No, says Lefebvre: “This space is homogeneous because everything in it is equivalent, exchangeable, interchangeable, because it is a space bought and sold and exchange only exists between equivalences and interchangeabilities. This space is broken because it is treated by lots and sections; sold by lots and sections, it is therefore fragmentary.”37

Logistical space, as conceived in Lefebvre’s work of the 1970s, is prolonged by energetic space – beyond its specific economic and political investments in railways, roads and aerial space,38 the state’s relation to the production of energy is intimately linked to the production of a political space, state-space. This space is both a precondition of, and in contradiction with, the fragmented space of capitalist urbanization, and its attendant chaos. In the end, state action does not resolve spatial contradictions, it aggravates them, in the guise of synthesis and regulation. Its need to keep the flows smooth does not undo spatial chaos, or at best replaces it with social void. For Lefebvre, the logistical non-places of late capitalist modernity are thus byproducts of the spatial strategies of the capitalist state:

Wherever the state abolishes chaos, it establishes itself within spaces made fascinating by their social emptiness: a highway interchange or an airport runway, for example, both of which are places of transit and only of transit … Armed with the instrument of logistical space, the State inserts itself between pulverized spaces and spaces that have been reconstructed differentially.39

Space is thus the secret of the state in general and the SMP in particular. Lefebvre presented the space of the SMP as an anti-political space, organized to neutralize “users” (usagers), their movements, and the creation of differential spaces (these are all key themes in Lefebvre’s writings of the 1970s, crystallized especially in the 1971 Le manifeste différentialiste). Two of the key vectors of this antipolitical space, which is the product and precondition of the state mode of production, are its logistical orientation, which reveals it as a space of catastrophe or potential breakdown, and its “visuality,” which transforms space into a spectacle or series of images, in which the body disappears. Nonetheless, Lefebvre still wishes to maintain a dialectical foothold, allowing one to imagine the appropriation of state space for the sake of differential social practices. As he writes, the space of the SMP is “opposed to possible (differential) space and nevertheless leading towards it.”

At different points in his argument, Lefebvre qualifies this new space as phallic, optical, visual, homogeneous and broken, global and fragmentary, “logical-logistical.”40 This is also the space in which capitalism organises its survie, its living-on, its afterlife – through the reproduction of the relations of production. As Lefebvre would write in The Survival of Capitalism: “It is in this dialecticized (conflictual) space that the reproduction of the relations of production takes place. It is this space that reproduction produces, by introducing into it multiple contradictions.”41 The formula “logical-logistical” crops up at different points in Lefebvre’s notoriously sprawling and often slippery texts. In The Production of Space, for instance, he writes that logic and logistics both conceal latent violence.42 De l’État insistently links the two terms together. Without exploring Lefebvre’s complex engagement with logic and language,43 we can note here that logistics designates in these texts not the military or capitalist practice of managing resources and circulation, but a particular, abstract representation of space – one which, however, is dialectically bound-up with spatial and political practices – namely the state’s oversight of stocks and flows – which are, so to speak, concretely logistical.

One possible name for this link between logistical representations and logistical practices is what in The Survival of Capitalism Lefebvre calls aménagement (a term used in urbanism to denote planning or layout). “To the extent that it is represented by naming it aménagement,” he writes, “the production of space is considered logically or logistically.”44 This aménagement is responsible for the reproduction of means of production and of production relations, for organizing the “environment” of firms, for setting out a “puzzle” of cities and regions, for spatially organizing life itself. Elsewhere, Lefebvre refers to this same set of issues under the heading of a “spatiotemporal programming” which requires the knowledge of flows, circulation and terrain.45 Logistics, broadly construed, is a critical field for the reproduction of the relations of production, in which the state intervenes as producer of capitalist space. This logistical imperative – to lay out the space of stocks and flows for the optimal reproduction of capitalist relations – involves the state precisely to the extent that reproduction is not a matter of logic, but of strategy.46

In this regard the “logical-logistical” – as we’ve already noted in our discussion of Bernes – is also a fantasy, albeit a partially realized one, about the possibility to master spatial reproduction for the sake of state and capital.47 Such is the lure of abstraction: if the science of space “is a science of formal space, of a spatial form,” Lefebvre writes, “it implies a rigid logistics, and this science would consist of nothing but the constraints placed on the contents (the people!).” Behind this theoretical and mental abstraction, however, lies the sedimentation of really abstract social practices: “If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be ‘purely’ formal, the essence of rational abstraction, it is precisely because this space has already been occupied and planned, already the focus of past strategies, of which we cannot always find the traces.”48 “Systems of equivalence take on a sensible existence and are inscribed in space.”49 The persistence of contradictions, which themselves are the product of a logical-logistical imperative, means that the science of space “does not have a logistics of space as its culmination”50 – where logistics entails an all-encompassing intelligibility and control of a homogeneously coded space, from whence the negativity of practices and struggles has been stripped out.

State space is understood as a space of flows and stocks, logistically organized and controlled for political ends; it reorganises social relations of production in function of their spatial support. The state tends to oppose a chaos of fragmentary relations – which it has itself created – with a rationality in which space is the privileged instrument, and in which economics is reconceived spatially (in terms of stocks and flows, but also rents and real estate). As Lefebvre writes: “The state tends to control flows and stocks, assuring their coordination. In the course of this process, which has a threefold aspect – growth, namely increase in the productive forces; urbanization, that is formation of giant units of production and consumption; spatialization – a qualitative leap takes place: the emergence of the SMP (state mode of production).”51 Or, in another illuminating formulation:

In the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, class factions, and classes, the State tends to impose a rationality, its own, that has space as its privileged instrument. The economy is thus recast in spatial terms – flows (of energy, raw materials, labor power, finished goods, trade patterns, etc.) and stocks (of gold and capital, investments, machines, technologies, stable clusters of various jobs, etc.). The State tends to control flows and stocks by ensuring their coordination. … Only the State can control the flows and harmonize them with the fixed demands of the economy (stocks), because the State integrates them into the dominant state it produces.52

Especially as Lefebvre turns to the present, he is sensitive to the state’s contradictory trespassing of confines of the national territory in the process of its mondialisation – a “globalization” which is not, as commonly understood, beyond the state, but rather of the state, in ways that can allow us also to rethink the tendency to take logistics as an instance of the state’s loss of predominance.53 Consider the following:

Through organization and information, there is produced a kind of unification of world space, with strong points (the centres) and weaker and dominated bases (the peripheries). In these latter zones are perpetuated differences that, for better and for worse, resist but do not paralyse the process as a whole. The latter is translated through efficient apparatuses [dispositifs] of control and surveillance, linked to informational machines: satellites, radars, beacons, and grids. In this respect, space has a much stronger connection with the State than territory once had with the nation.54

This spatialization of the state is not just projective, but endogenous. In other words, as the state becomes increasingly occupied by the logistical problems of stocks and flows, we cannot think of it as concentric, centripetal or centrifugal. Though it is inseparable from effects of centring and centrality, it is capable of considerable dissemination and multiplicity, as well as internal contradiction, if not proper difference. In the first volume of De l’État, interestingly in the context of an exploration of the place of “intelligence” in the state mode of production (one resonating in the moment of Assange and Snowden), Lefebvre will posit that the state is not a system with a central nucleus but a hierarchically-ordered network of institutions and organizations intervening at different levels of society, and thus of space.

Conclusion

The foregoing discussion of Lefebvre is but a sketch of a reconstruction, whose aim was merely to complicate the political meanings accorded to logistics in contemporary radical thought and practice. To rethink logistics not just as a spatio-political fix for a potentially stagnating capitalism, but as a contradictory strategy of state power – a task that would obviously require a radical updating and revision of Lefebvre’s unruly intuitions – could help us to move beyond both the naïve perspective of its integral refunctioning as well as the untenable prospect that it will be the privileged site of a revolutionary interruption of value-in-motion. Technology, as a social relation of production, distribution, and circulation, is by no means innocent of capitalist value-imperatives and of the strategic expediencies of exploitation. But neither is the reproduction of the social forms of value endangered by the notion that the interruption of capital’s motion is directly political. Lefebvre’s scattered insights on the logistical and strategic space of the state can help situate the contemporary surge of struggles at the point of circulation within a broader historical and geographic horizon, spurring us to investigate what the state itself has become in the age of the “logistics revolution,” and thus what strategies may be adequate to struggles in and against it.

“I believe that the status of the state in current thinking on the Left is very problematic,” Stuart Hall wrote in 1984, in the midst of Margaret Thatcher’s war on the “enemy within.” He reflected on the legacy of the postwar period, which saw the extension of public services within the context of a vast expansion of the state’s intervention in social life. The ensuing crisis and restructuring of global capitalism was characterized by the strategic use of policing and repression, not to mention global military power – warfare alongside welfare. Hall’s description of the ideological dilemma faced by the Left could, with minor updates in terminology, have been written in today’s United States:

On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive managerial, bureaucratic force in their lives. However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company along the road but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new Right, the free market “hot gospellers,” who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-Left, “roll back the state” crusade. And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for “rolling back the state” – including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the Left on the hop – hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground. 1

We now confront an even more drastic expansion of state power. Even the mainstream media documents with trepidation the new technologies of surveillance and the increasing fusion of military and police control, alongside the continuing domestic growth of prisons and the fortification of imperial domination.

The hypertrophy of the state’s repressive dimensions has been matched, however, by an amputation of its welfare functions. The neoliberal restructuring that began in the 1970s is therefore experienced by many on the Left as a loss of the state’s angelic effects, of everything that once emanated from the regulation of finance and the embeddedness of markets. The state, we note forlornly in the age of austerity, is just as much teachers and the post office as it is cops and prisons. “On the hop,” as Hall described, we wonder whether it would not be better to take our distance from the Tea Party, and even the austerians of the Democratic Party and European social democracy, by defending big government from big business. We are unable to find our way out of this bind: fighting some aspects of the state – police violence, a racist judicial system, a surveillance apparatus beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s wildest dreams – while putting everything on the line to preserve others – a failing public education system, besieged social welfare programs, crumbling infrastructure. Meanwhile, one of the most precious tenets of our legacy – not the reform, not the infiltration, but the abolition of the state – risks being abandoned to the slogans of an agitated fringe of the Republican Party.

Regrettably, these formulations have also become an obstacle to clarity about contemporary capitalism. Covered up completely is the role of the state in the crisis management that followed the postwar boom, and the character of neoliberalism as a wholly state-driven project – in which the institutional coordination of markets and the penetration of finance into everyday life, both part of the heritage of the New Deal, were profoundly extended and articulated with an open assault on labor. 2

The brutal reality of the neoliberal state, on ample display in economic history, can be documented just as much in the doctrines of its theorists – a kind of unity of neoliberal theory and practice elegantly illustrated by Friedrich Hayek’s admiring visits to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. As both Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas would recognize, in an instance of the underappreciated convergence which began to develop just as their famous debate was peaking in vitriol, Salvador Allende’s defeat had already raised the strategic question of the state – the questions of parliamentary action, the political allegiances of the state personnel, the socialist use of the state apparatus, the relation of state reform to popular movements, and the danger posed by the violence of the Right. 3 The problem of the state was at the very center of both the defeat of the Left and the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

Fortunately, the past few years have seen major shifts in the field of political possibilities. After a long period of decline, a new cycle of struggle seems to have emerged, marked by an upsurge in radical movements facing off against the state. Global mobilizations against repressive immigration laws, police violence, and austerity directly put the question of the state on the table. After all, the struggles for clean water, against racist police, and over the future of public schools are all state issues. But alongside these movements there is also a striking resurgence of socialist electoral parties and programs – from Syriza in Greece, to Podemos in Spain, to Kshama Sawant in Seattle – and much excitement about municipal socialism, popular referendums, and even the prospects of a future third party.

But the relation between these two different political approaches is uncertain. One side of the Left hopes to participate in the state – to push for ameliorative reforms, to restore the forms of public spending that characterized the now-mutilated welfare state, to pressure elected officials and push them to the left, or to themselves be elected into parliament or local government. At the opposite extreme are those who categorically reject the electoral terrain, identifying the primary line of struggle as the confrontation with the police. While the militants denounce those who seek to work within the state as collaborators, decrying any such participation as an irredeemable capitulation to its logic, the pragmatists insist that confrontational politics can only harm the movement, and demonize their ostensible comrades in terms sometimes worse than what you’ll hear from the Right. In the past, socialist movements struggled to articulate these approaches to the state into a coherent front; today, the distance between them has never been greater.

What our situation requires is a serious strategic rethinking of the state. The renewed vigor of electoral struggles on the one hand and militant mobilizations on the other form a vivid landscape of action, a dizzying “diversity of tactics.” But too often the language intellectuals use to theorize these struggles remains locked in obsolete organizational traditions, still fighting the vendettas of previous generations – against anarchism, against Leninism, against Eurocommunism. It is time to give up chasing after ghosts. A renewed theory of the state, the kind of theory that can help us overcome the political ambiguities of the present, will emerge from a space of encounter, from the convergence of perspectives conditioned by distinct sets of struggles from different times and places. This issue of Viewpoint is intended as a contribution to rebuilding such a theory. We have no “line” to propose; instead, we wager that it is precisely through such unexpected combinations and confrontations that a set of historically apposite strategies may begin to emerge.

• 1Stuart Hall, “The State – Socialism’s Old Caretaker,” Marxism Today(November 1984); also collected in The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988). See his self-critical reflections on the remainder of this article and the Marxism Today legacy in his interview with Helen Davis, in her Understanding Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2004), 157-8; and Robin Blackburn’s astute commentary on Hall’s political conjuncture, “Stuart Hall: 1932-2014,” New Left Review 86 (March-April 2014).
• 2For noteworthy examples of the extensive literature on the neoliberal state, see Werner Bonefeld, “Free economy and the strong state: Some notes on the state,” Capital & Class 34 (2010); and Martijn Konings, “Neoliberalism and the American State,” Critical Sociology 36:5 (2010).
• 3See Ralph Miliband, “The Coup in Chile,” Socialist Register 10 (1973), also collected in Class Power and State Power (London: Verso, 1983); and Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978), 263. In a manuscript currently under preparation, we trace this convergence and try to explain its significance, but the point has already been argued by attentive readers of Miliband and Poulantzas. See Leo Panitch, “The State and the Future of Socialism,” Capital & Class 4:2 (1980); “Ralph Miliband, Socialist Intellectual,” Socialist Register 31 (1995); and “The Impoverishment of State Theory” in Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). With specific reference to their debate, see Bob Jessop, “Dialogue of the Deaf: Some Reflections on the Poulantzas-Miliband Debate” inClass, Power and the State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph Miliband, ed. Paul Wetherly, Clyde W. Barrow, and Peter Burnham (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

“Politics” distinguishes itself from the “political,” which has as a characteristic that of contemplating, alongside the state, other holders [titolari], other subjects of political reality. Here then is a history of these subjects that is anything but over.
— Mario Tronti1

Written towards the end of what we might call the “second period” of Tronti’s reflections, that of the so-called “autonomy of the Political,” sandwiched between the more famous phase of Operaismo and the – almost completely unknown to the Anglophone world – “third period” political theological phase, that of the twilight [tramonto] of the political, the short text translated here will come to many Anglophone readers of Tronti as a surprise. The heretical Marxist, the author of Workers and Capital who analyzed the development and dynamics of the “mass worker” and argued that the working class was the dynamic element of capitalism – within and against – but always shifting capital on (every innovation a failed revolution), and that the political form of capital was determined by the intensity and form of the struggle, now shifts the theoretical framework onto another, much more historical level: the longue durée of the capitalist state from the 16th century.

In the first phase of his work, Tronti confronted the theoretical and political problems that stemmed from the dynamics of industrial capital spreading at breakneck speed throughout the Italian peninsula in the 1950s and ‘60s, neo-capitalism (as it was known at the time), alongside the massive extension and concentration of the working class in terms of condition and unification of desire – and of the need to organize this spontaneity. In the second phase, the international crisis of capital in the late-‘60s and ‘70s revived, for Tronti and others, questions of past capitalist responses to economic and political crisis, bringing the state into relief. As Tronti argues in a number of texts throughout the 1970s, with the crisis of capital of 1929, with the “Great Transformation” discussed so insightfully by Karl Polanyi, capitalism would never be the same again. The role of the state, of politics – of bourgeois politics – would be that of stabilization. So, whereas capitalism is crisis, as so many have argued since Marx’s day, the state is order.2 It is this conjuncture – capitalism and state, crisis and order – that becomes the focus of Tronti’s thought from this period, driven by the concrete shifts on the ground that confronted the working class and its organizations. In the rest of this brief introduction, I shall try to outline the reasons for this shift.

***

The “very gist, the living soul, of Marxism – a concrete analysis of a concrete situation”3; so why, precisely at this time – that of the crisis of the international capital of the 1970s – does Tronti decide that this “concrete situation” can best be analyzed through a study of the development of the “political” and of the bourgeois state (which are by no means synonymous, as we shall see) since the 16th century? Why is this the period in which Tronti decided to compose his first and only monograph, on Hegel of all people (Hegel Politico, 1975), an edited volume on the English Civil War (Stato e Rivoluzione in Inghilterra, 1977),4 and a subsequent four-volume edited anthology, of excerpts and critical essays on the leading bourgeois theorists from 1500-1800 (Il Politico, 1979-1982 – from which the translation below is drawn)? It should be noted, first of all, that this is by no means all that he worked on during this period – he continued to write on current affairs, such as the relationship that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) should maintain with extra-parliamentary movements and parties, the role of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) in the state-system, as well as more general articles on the nature of the political,5 and studies of more recent phases of capitalist restructuring such as the New Deal and Weimar.6 Alongside the important studies of the contemporary situation, he also sat on the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party during the period of the “Historic Compromise.” Hence, although his work was not restricted to the study of the early history of the bourgeois state, it is clear that during this period, from the mid-1970s till the early ‘80s, much of Tronti’s theoretical work was focused upon the bourgeois state since the 16th century, and that this decision he saw as essential to renewing the theoretical and practical tools of the workers’ movement and its party. Why? What was the question to which this course of study was to provide an answer, the problem to which this would be a solution? And what of these problems, these questions, is alive today after – or within – the Great Recession?

One path towards an answer would lead us through the fraught territory of the “autonomy of the political,” the infamous term first discussed in a lecture in 1972 (published only five years later), and that sparked Tronti’s investigations into the longue durée of the state. Whereas the “autonomy” traced here was developed through an analysis of the structure and function of the state following the Great Crash (but also the transformation of the Soviet State under Lenin was a persistent reference point), we will see that this proved to be just the first step towards a longer analysis of the political in which the bourgeois state – as theorized by Hegel and returning to the fore in the 1930s – was simply the highest or latest incarnation of the political.7

Let us begin, then, by briefly outlining the – frequently misunderstood – problem that Tronti encountered in this period. Doing so will help us understand why the history of the bourgeois state, from its origins in the 16th century, becomes so important for Tronti at this specific historical moment; it will also serve to correct some of the misunderstandings that have bedevilled many subsequent interpretations, standing in the way of an adequate theoretical and practical interpretation of the question of the autonomy of the political.

***

The first thing to note is that the series of reflections that would converge on the idea of the autonomy of the political, did not come fully formed and, arguably, never did find a definitive formulation.8 The autonomy of the political can be best described as a field of forces, of unresolved tensions that circumscribe a problematic theoretical and practical space that stems from a concrete conjunctural intuition: that once capitalism ceases to be a progressive force, i.e. when it ceases to be able to integrate the working class through a reformist moment of wage increases and heightened consumption (as during the so-called Fordist-compromise), the command of the state by bourgeois parties permits the strategic use of crisis – most notably under Thatcher and Reagan – to restructure the working class, fragmenting and isolating it geographically, sectorially or within the space of production, thereby permitting the process of the reproduction of capital to be re-established on a new and more advanced terrain of integration.9 This intuition of the active role of the state in the reproduction of capitalwould be developed further, in a series of analyses of the relation between economic crisis and the political to an investigation into the history of the bourgeois state since the Great Depression.

The autonomy of the political identifies a phenomenon of the Great Transformation. It accounts for how the bourgeoisie, confronted with economic crisis, used the state to restructure society from above, in tandem with capital. This is a necessity driven by crisis and by the combined and uneven development of capital and of its state, of the mechanisms of the state, sometimes in advance (as during the New Deal), more often retarded with respect to capitalist development (as in the Italy of the 1960s-‘70s); of the different articulations of fractions of capital with one another; and of capital and its state in relation to the level of development of its great antagonist, the working class. The question of the autonomy of the political is the question of the mechanisms at the disposal of capital10 to mediate between, to manage and to coordinate its fragments, its advances and delays, and its antagonist – a function that is initially called upon when the mechanism of development breaks down. The question to which the autonomy of the political is an answer, is not only – as so many left critics have described it, and despite evident ambiguities and rhetorical excesses11 – that of the proper relation of the Party to the class or to the state, or – for that matter – of the class to the state (although it is also this). The problem is not merely that of the correct form of political participation; the problem is also how to count politically within the bourgeois state.12 More specifically, the reality of the 1970s posed a problem with two component parts: given the autonomy of the political – “a fact of capital … I repeat, so that people stop pretending not to understand”13 – how can the workers’ movement make use of this autonomy in order to intervene at the level of the state?

In order to clarify what we mean by this problem with two elements, we can perhaps think of it in analogy with the New Economic Policy. With the Soviet Union coming out of revolution and civil war, the question for Lenin was one of rebuilding the economy and even rebuilding the class subject of the revolution, the working class, decimated by violent conflict and industrial collapse. The NEP was, as Lenin himself conceded, a step back, a “strategical retreat”;14 it was the conscious use of capitalist tools – private ownership of the means of production – for socialist purposes. Capitalism was to be let back in, was to be allowed to grow and, in growing, strengthen, but in so doing it would also rebuild the proletariat that had been “declassed” by the previous period of economic defeat and political and military conflict, and rebuild the productive forces – but this time, it would do so to defend the revolution. The question was: “who will take the lead?” Rereading the Lenin of these years alongside Tronti, the similarities in tone and form are extraordinary:

The whole question is who will take the lead. We must face this issue squarely – who will come out on top? Either the capitalists succeed in organizing first – in which case they will drive out the Communists and that will be the end of it. Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper rein on those gentlemen, the capitalists, so as to direct capitalism along state channels and to create a capitalism that will be subordinate to the state and serve the state. (Lenin15)

[We must] elaborate a medium term strategy, that is, to get to the point of being able to lead the process of adjustment of the state machine to the productive machine of capital… it is a case of going so far as to consciously take hold of the process of modernization of the state machinery, to even manage not the reforms in general, as one says in the usual jargon, but in particular that specific reform that is the capitalist reform of the state. (Tronti16)

We can speak, only half in jest, of a New Political Policy, the use of the autonomy of the political, that eminently bourgeois invention brought in most recently to save capital from its crisis (in the ‘20s and ‘30s), in order to advance the workers’ movement. This is the problem and the challenge that Tronti tries to develop in this period.

I do not want to make too much of this analogy,17 but I think it is useful when trying to make sense of the problem and the task Tronti set himself at this time. It was not, therefore, to provide a new, even if heretical Marxist theory of the state – the lack of which was a widespread topic of discussion at this time – that Tronti developed the notion of the autonomy of the political. Instead, this notion served both to make sense of the specific practice of the capitalist state after the Great Transformation and was a call to a pragmatic engagement with those tools in order to bend them to different ends. The autonomy of the political is the subjective stance of the bourgeois state, used to further its interests; Tronti demanded that it should be appropriated by the working class and bent to its interests. So it is not a question of a new Marxist Theory of the State, which had been lacking (although that too); but, crucially, a Marxist Practice of the State is what was called for. Only a thorough understanding of the machinery of state and of the political could enable one to effectively operate it – but a call for an “art of politics, that is, of particular techniques for the conquest and conservation of power,”18 was by no means a ‘“politicist-abstract” departure from the more “political-conjunctural” focus of the militant interventions of the 1960s’ – as the parallel with the NEP makes plain.19 In the final text in the book L’Autonomia del Politico, Tronti writes:

I am struck (given that we are speaking of the subjectivity of the State, [i.e.] of capitalist interests) that to some it has appeared that the properly subjective moment, in particular, that of the working class had disappeared from my discussion. We must certainly correct this impression: in the background of this argument, there is a carefully hidden interlocutor who pulls all the strings of the matter… It is true: every movement in the relationship between capital and power has a class relationship between capital and its antagonist at its origin …20

He goes on to argue with respect to the change in the state-form in the 1930s, much in the same way as does Antonio Negri21 – one of the most fierce adversaries of the notion of the autonomy of the political – that one cannot understand the particular solution given to the Great Crash without the rupture of 1917. That solution – as Tronti argues – is that which leads to the autonomy of the political, of the state as agent called to compensate for the failures of capital, to try to stabilize, re-start, re-model development, and redirecting investment between more or less advanced industrial sectors – in short, to mediate, recompose, decide and to organise the institutionalization of the class compromise that alone could save capitalism from itself and from its great antagonist. For analogous reasons, we can say that Lenin – as well as Roosevelt (in the New Deal) and Keynes – could be said to have understood the historical necessity for the autonomy of the political for the re-establishment of order on a new footing. It is here that we encounter the specificity of the political: the political in its autonomy is a theory of the reproduction of order after crisis and a theory of the means to intervene in the process of the reproduction of order. Both of these operations come under the heading of the “political,” without being reducible to it.22For this reason, Tronti privileges bourgeois theorists (including social democratic ones) who developed a theory and practice of the state to guide the autonomy of the political for the reproduction of capital, in the same way that Lenin turned to “bourgeois specialists” to run the machinery of state and large-scale industry; and it is for this same reason that Marx, who was faced with a liberal state, ceases to be a theoretical and practical reference point for thinking the new political mechanisms for the reproduction of capital.23 The autonomy of the political in the bourgeois state is precisely “in order to be able to intervene” in the reproduction of capitalism after its crisis, to re-establish conditions of development and exploitation. Tronti argued that the mechanisms of its autonomy should instead be grasped by the organization of the working class, “in order to be able to intervene” in the reproduction of capital, after its crisis, to establish conditions for a “new idea of the state,” because “one cannot introduce new masses into an old state.”24 There is no easy way to do this, no easy delegation – whether to party or to class for that matter; each concrete situation calls for a concrete analysis and the flexibility to act on the basis of the results of that analysis. The analysis always starts from the relations of class forces that determines the relative strength of the contenders and, hence, circumscribes the level of autonomy of action. An additional level of autonomy may be given by the relation to the state, to the political form of reproduction. The question is not whether or not the political operates independently of, autonomously from material conditions – it does not; the character and quality of that autonomy is governed, circumscribed by very concrete material conditions. For example, we have already indicated how, though a “great transformation,” the state became a renewed principle of order emerging from a very concrete crisis of reproduction. It did so by reproducing the class relation through, firstly, a class compromise between the two great contending classes the relative strength of which would circumscribe the relative levels of autonomy (in the New Deal / Fordist compromise) and, later, through a careful deployment of crisis, one that re-established the conditions of growth through the intensification of relative and absolute surplus value (shift to floating exchange rates / end of dollar convertibility, oil shocks, Volker shock, war on organized labour, etc.). The question for Tronti was: what are the conditions for achieving a level of autonomy, in practice, that can be exercised in order to intervene within the reproduction of class relations in a form more favorable to the working class. His answer was that it was necessary to understand and to appropriate the bourgeois mechanisms of autonomy experimented in the course of the twentieth century.25

***

To return, then, to our starting point. Why did Tronti feel the need to spend much of the 1970s, at the same time as that he was arguing for the appropriation – in theory and practice – of the bourgeois autonomy of the Political, i.e. of the mechanisms for the reproduction of capitalism, by the workers’ movement, carrying out an analysis of the political over the longue durée?

The hypothesis is that precisely with the 1930s the return of the political, call it what you will, of the autonomy, of the primacy, of the anticipation of the political, the opening – that is – of a new classical phase of politics is accompanied by a history of the State on the grand scale [in grande], where the origins of modern bourgeois power – unity and concentration, sovereignty and violence, the machine and the prince – are once again decisive. Naturally there are great changes: new paths, ideological apparatuses, grand solutions to mass organization, and the planned control of economic contradictions. But in this phase I would like to underline and hold to the common ground of correspondences and echoes [richiami] between the two periods, that of the origins and that of the great crisis, between the long process of the transition to capitalism and the epoch of the “great transformation.” From here stems the almost obligatory choice of classical political thought, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the terrain of study of living problems and the encounter with the model of political revolution, as the intersection of conditions for the passage to capitalism. At the same time, the setting to work, in practice, of the relationship between the economic crisis and the political exit from the crisis. I do not want to claim that everything holds together. But at a time when the “organic” has become a bad word, to lay claim to the organic nature of a course of study might be useful. Not in order to go against the current but to demonstrate that, in addition to studying, one can also understand.26

What I particularly want to highlight in this rich passage is the clear statement that the political is not the state – it is not only the state, but even precedes it and may – and sometimes does – become concentrated in it.27 This process of the original coming together of the political in the state is what Tronti calls, in an almost identical formulation to that used by Louis Althusser at this time, an “originary accumulation of the political.”28 This is the period of the formation of national states that accompanied but is irreducible to the transition to capitalism. So, while it is clear from the origins of modern politics that politics and the state were thrown together violently in an originary accumulation of the political, in the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we encounter the bourgeois fear of the breaking apart of this unity, when the state loses the monopoly on the political – either to the working class and its organizations (even the reformist ones such as trade unions), to large corporations, to international bodies, or even to markets.29 Carl Schmitt’s sensitivity to the gradual erosion of sovereign authority and the ever-increasing threat of potestas indirecta makes him a privileged interlocutor for Tronti, for while the discussion of the political is one concerning the “complex path of the sometimes contradictory relationship between the political and the state,” Tronti is looking to this relationship of the political to the state so as to take stock, “in Marxist and Leninist terms, of the possibility, the probability of an original way to power.”30

***

So, have we answered our question? Why did Tronti dedicate so much time in the 1970s to the study of the bourgeois state over the longue durée and concern himself with the transformations of the political over the same period? It is because he contended that it was only a detailed study of the bourgeois state since its origins in the 16th century, which marks the start of an epoch within which we continue to operate, and of the – frequently contradictory – relations between the political and the state over this period, that could provide the workers’ movement with sufficiently sophisticated analytical and practical tools to begin to grasp the mechanisms for the appropriation and the transformation of the state. The 1930s signalled a reprise of the political after a century in which it had, for much of the time, been subordinated to the economic; this came together with a return of the “grande storia” of the state – the conjuncture again of “political maneuvering of the class struggles” through the “political control” over the social, and the “new political management of a new economic cycle;”31 to study this reprise of the origins of bourgeois power, with all the novelties that intervened in the meantime, could provide the working class with analytical and practical tools for the transformation of the state, so that it could truly “count politically.”

I do not believe that we are at the end of the history of the state. The political, the new political subjectivity strikes at it, transforms it, it does not smash it, it does not break it. As we run we will once again feel the bite of the state. We may as well grasp the reins and attempt to tame it.32

What then of today? Today, after the end of the long twentieth century of the European workers’ movement, when once again the state is assailed by numerous, even more powerful potestas indirectae; when the subjectivity of the state seems ever more closely aligned with that of international capital, what can Tronti’s work on the autonomy of the political still teach us? It continues to confirm that this autonomy is indeed “a fact of capital” and that without a workers’ movement capable of appropriating those instruments of the state for itself, the political is forced to migrate to another terrain, one where it may be better served; recognizing, at the same time, that by so doing, it will have left an instrument of inestimable power for the sole use of those whose interests are the reproduction of capital and exploitation. What Tronti allows us to think is the different and changing articulations of the political, of how it can intersect with and be pulled from the state; how it can serve to re-establish order – its function of stabilization within capitalist crisis – as well as the potential for it to be appropriated to reconfigure the reproductive mechanisms for the purposes of other subjectivities and interests, antagonistic to those of capital; but always, within capital, it is the quality of its autonomy that will determine its function and effectiveness in intervening in the process of reproduction. When that autonomy diminishes, or is too clearly subordinated to specific interests, its effectiveness is eroded – think of the Great Recession, of the way that the state has been subordinated not to international capital in general, but to finance capital, eroding both consumption as well as productive investment, rerouting cheap monetary flows into share buy-backs stoking the stock market and real estate bubbles while exacerbating geopolitical and economic instabilities, while evacuating the state of the means to serve further rounds of reproduction and stabilization, leaving capital open to its always threatening crisis and without its principle of order.

The position Tronti leaves us in is perhaps an unsettling one; but he leaves us with a great lucidity about our condition and the analytical tools to begin to think possible new articulations of the political and – perhaps – eventually to avail ourselves of them.

I would like to thank Giorgio Cesarale and Alberto Toscano for their careful reading and perceptive comments to the introduction and translation. Unfortunately, I have not been able to resolve all the issues that they have raised.

The recent European elections in May 2014 were a startling display of the rise of radical racism in Europe. But the triumph of Ukip in the United Kingdom, the Front National and Marine Le Pen in France, and the Golden Dawn in Greece, whose members have been involved in several racist attacks and murders of immigrants and leftists, are merely the more institutional evidence of a deeper trend. In Italy, where I write this text, the European elections led to the victory of the leftist, but strongly neoliberal, Democratic Party (PD), the former PCI. Nevertheless, racism increasingly circulates within the country, perpetrated by the leaders and members of both left- and right-wing parties as well as private citizens.1

During the spring of 2013, Cécile Kyenge, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, became Minister of Integration in the center-left government of Enrico Letta. The first black minister in Italy, Kyenge was targeted by racist attacks from members of the right-wing party Lega Nord, and described by Roberto Calderoli as “an orangutan.” Of course, racist attacks are not limited to verbal harassment. In December 2011, in Florence, a member of an extreme-right racist organization killed two Senegalese vendors, and injured a third, in a local market.2 In metropolitan contexts, such as Milan or Rome, racist assaults against black people are daily occurrences. In 2009, a nineteen-year-old second-generation migrant from Burkina Faso in Milan was killed by two kiosk owners for stealing a packet of biscuits – they ran after him and beat him with an iron bar, yelling, “fuck you, nigger.” We could go on to make a very lengthy list of such incidents, especially if we were to include the daily racism migrant workers face on the job.

As the examples from Italy show, the targets of such racist attacks are mostly immigrants. They are accused of “stealing jobs,” especially – but not only – since the outbreak of the economic crisis. On the institutional level, these “popular” or “daily” racist behaviors have been translated into a very strict control over labor mobility. In 2002, after two decades of mass immigration,3 the latest in a long series of racist laws – known as the Bossi-Fini law, after the two members of parliament who signed it (one from Lega Nord, and the other from Alleanza Nazionale, the successor of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano) – entered into force, fully differentiating between migrants and natives. According to the law, immigrants can reside on national territory only if they hold a formal contract of employment, and they may be jailed on administrative charges, such as not holding a residential permit.4 The common assumption in Italian politics is that these outbreaks of racism are the combined effect of mass migrations and financial crisis: since the crisis has narrowed the labor market, competition between native and immigrant workers has intensified.

But what this interpretation misses is that Italian racism, and European racism in general, is not a transitory or contingent effect of social phenomena such as economic crisis, mass migrations, or right-wing politics; rather, it is linked to the very core of European modernity, at the nexus of the rise of capitalism, the formation of the nation-state, and the colonial project.

In what follows I will discuss Italian and European racial thinking, the roots of which can be traced to the origins of the narrative of modern Europe. Since the mid-19th century, Europe has been characterized by a “double path” of racism, directed against Southerners on the one hand, and the African colonized population on the other. To understand the present, not just the question of racism, but of Europe’s “Southern” problem, and of underdevelopment itself, it will be necessary to consider the metamorphosis of Italian racism through the 20th century, and the shape taken by European racism within the crisis.5 It will be just as important to identify new possible antiracist practices, which can both identify and struggle against the material basis of racism.

The Material Basis of Racism

To reject the assumption that racism is the effect of other social phenomena, an incidental issue in the analysis of society and politics, means identifying it as an enduring factor in the history of modern capitalist societies. I reflect here on racism as a historical fracture in the narrative of European modernity, which has shaped social relations at the local, continental, and transnational level, especially in the organization of the labor market. In this sense, in contrast with the mainstream debate about racism in Europe, I stress the material basis of racism, including race and racialization. I mean by racialization a means for disciplining intersubjective social relationships, or better, for the construction of institutional and non-institutional practices and discourses oriented towards the hierarchical representation of differences, both real and imagined. In this sense, my aim is to start with the histories of economic and cultural processes of essentialization and discrimination against certain social groups, which results in manifestations of material and symbolic violence.

As Frantz Fanon has powerfully pointed out, racism is “the shameless exploitation of one group of men by another” which entails processes of “inferiorization” and the “gigantic work of economic, and even biological, enslavement”;6 that is to say, it is not a constant of the human mind, but a tendency arising within the history of of the system which has imposed white supremacy on the social fabric and in the labor market. Thus, once again in contradistinction to a mainstream European reading of racism as ideological-cultural-ontological-psychological need, as an “ancestral sin” that describes a “deferential racism” or a “racism without race,”7 I focus on the material and structuring nature of racism, placing it at the very center of the constitution of colonial modernity and at the core of the construction and narration of modern nation-states.

In the history of capitalism, from its outset and at all latitudes, class domination has largely been intertwined with and supported by race discourses, assuming different historical inflections, always according to new or contingent political and economical circumstances – or, in Marxian terms, according to the character of the capitalist transition and forms of accumulation. From this perspective – and again against the idea of racism as psychological or ancestral sin – it is possible to analyze the metamorphosis of racism in Italy, considering the different social groups it targets, in order to bring to the fore the system of hierarchies built around and supported by “race management”8 in Europe and Italy. In this sense, as critical race theory has demonstrated, race is not an objective or fixed category, but rather something that “society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient.”9 It is a powerful dispositif of social control and the organization and disciplining of living labor, describing an actual “wage of whiteness” – to refer to the classic definition of W.E.B Du Bois – that is constitutive of modern capitalist formations.10

Despite the resistance in the Italian and European debate to discussing “race,”11 to talk distinctly about race means both calling up a whole system of historically constructed inequalities and highlighting the material and structural nature of racism – that is to say, its strong connection to the relations of production and their transformation. However, focusing on the necessary connection between the capitalist use of race and the relations of production does not require a deterministic or economistic point of view. Rather, this focus allows us to rethink the concept of relations of production, starting from the racialization process in order to stress the unavoidable “articulation”12 or “translation”13 of race in capitalist social formations. Following Marx, this means analyzing capital as a social relation, and so insisting on the structures of domination and exploitation which lie within racism, as well as on the experiences that exceed and challenge it. Finally, it should be noted that by emphasizing the necessary connection between racialization and the relations of production, I do not mean to deny that racism and racialization predate capitalism; I only mean to trace the history of capitalism as it has been marked and saturated by race.

The Double Path in Italian Racism

Italian racism, and indeed European racism in general, has followed a “double path”: first, the invention of the “geographically close” Other in the South of the country (strictly intertwined with the racialization of Southern or Mediterranean Europe, a sort of joint-space between Europe and Africa); second, the construction of the colonial Other in Africa. These two process, which led to Italian nation-building and the formation of modern Europe itself, have been bound up with one other, each describing a specific facet of Italian racism.

After its birth as a nation-state in 1861, Italy immediately had to negotiate the narration of its identity at the European level. In fact, in order to enter the ranks of the modern European state, Italy had to shake off the image of a backward, poor, oppressed, and irrational country, deeply ingrained in the cultural taxonomy of modern Europe. Travel literature at the turn of the 19th century largely describes Italy as a country of incredible natural beauty, but one that is economically backward, lagging behind the social and political development of other European countries. The South of the country especially is described as “picturesque” and yet “primitive,” with little sense of morality, dedicated instead to civil inertia.14 It is “a paradise inhabited by devils,” according to the famous definition of Naples attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This image was clearly antithetical to the reputation of Europe for dynamism and technological advancement, represented above all by Great Britain in its transition to capitalism and the first Industrial Revolution.15

In this scenario, the narration of the newborn nation-state found its basis in the idea of the existence of “Two Italies,” coined by the Italian positivist anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo of the Lombrosian School. In the 1890s, Niceforo – providing “scientific” support for the racialization of southern Italians – described the existence of two races in Italy:16 the “Aryan and Caucasian” in the North and a “Negroid” in the South. According to Niceforo, the Italian populations of Germanic descent in the North were “easier to discipline and educate” and “much inclined to the common interest,” while the Latin populations originating in the South were “rebels, undisciplined, and too often averse to education.” Furthermore, just as the “Germans” were “civilians” capable of self-government, the “Latins” were considered less civilized, and, especially, politically immature.17 As a result, the existence of “Two Italies,” each one inhabited by a different racial group, signifies the existence of two different moral and sociopolitical inclinations, where the “Negroid” ancestry of southern Italians becomes the evidence of their inferiority and criminal behaviors, as well as the justification for brutal repression of social uprisings in the South.

Thus, the racialization of southern Italians and the invention of an “accursed race” [razza maledetta] – according to the forceful expression of the Meridionalist Napoleone Colajanni in a 1898 pamphlet strongly critical of the racial theory of the Lombrosian criminal anthropology school – constituted the basis from which the narration of modern Italy was built. On the one hand, the existence of “Two Italies” gave Italian political elites the opportunity to mark a positivist difference between the North and the South of the country, offering a tidy explanation for the internal social and economic gap to other European countries. The South was given the main responsibility for the severe economic crisis affecting Italy in the last decade of the 19th century, covering over the incompetence and irresponsibility of national policy in addressing this issue. On the other hand, “Two Italies” also allowed the construction of a vast supply of cheap (because it was racialized) labor that enabled the economic development of the country. The development of Italian capitalism was the first concrete translation in the local context of the “modern racial capitalism”18 that was developing in the United States and Australia.

Following the coordinates mapped by white supremacy, Southerners, who had been considered lazy and unintelligent because of the presence of “Negro” blood in theirs veins,19 were subjected to harsh forms of exploitation and wage discrimination, becoming cheap labor-power in service of the development of Italian capitalism. This was not much different from what was happening in the United States, where race management, drawing important lessons from the work of Alfredo Niceforo, was producing a real taxonomy of race. According to David Roediger’s analysis of American race management in the early 20th century, German workers (who “embodied strength, doggedness, and thrift”) occupied the highest levels of wage and labor hierarchies, while all other workers gradually found placement in the lower ranks: Italians, especially those from the South (“Italians allegedly excelled with pick and shovel but were unable to assist engineers,” as Roediger records), then Slavs (funneled “into filthy and unhealthy jobs because they were ‘immune’ to dirt”), then Armenians (who “ranked ‘good’ in none of the twenty-two job categories listed and rose to fair only once: wheelbarrow”). At the very bottom were Chinese workers, who were considered biologically ill-equipped with low intelligence.20

The other path of Italian racism, namely the construction of the colonial Other in Africa, took place almost simultaneously with the invention of the “accursed race.” Italy had just been unified for twenty years when, between 1882 and 1885, it gave way to its first colonial experience, once again aiming – among other reasons – to become a member of modern Europe in all respects. In conquering Africa, all the rhetoric used for the racialization of Southern Italians was put to work. Much of positivist anthropology, starting from the assumed inclination to indolence and laziness because of “Negroid” descent, was drawn upon in order to racialize the colonized population in Africa. This was the basis for a correspondence between Southern Italians and Africans. At that time, this correspondence was so strong, as historians of colonial Italy point out, that “when the government began to talk about Africa, the left opposition [which was against the colonial expansion] warned that ‘Italy had Africa at home.’”21

The idea of “Africa at home” played a specific role in the construction of national identity, clearly revealing the Italian aspirations for redemption, which is the possibility of holding a different position in the European context. To become “empire builders” meant that Italy could represent itself as more European, politically stronger and more modern. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to mark a distance between Italians – as white colonizers – and racialized non-Europeans, seizing on the possibility to start a process of “whitening” in order to enter modernity in all respects. What is crucial, however, is that the colonial project expressed the material aspirations for managing the transition to capitalism.

On the one hand, it aimed to manage poverty in the South, and the rising migration away from the South. In a first stage of colonial expansion, many southern Italians moved to Africa, where they became a bit less “black” (or a bit more white) than they were at home. On the other hand, colonial expansion served to organize a colonial labor market in Africa, especially beginning with the process of industrialization in the last decade of the 19th century. From this point on, the Italian colonial expansion in Africa took on a more markedly capitalist nature. And as investments became more massive, colonialist rhetoric took a more aggressive and violent drift, extolling “the superiority of race” over native populations. The production of labor segmentation and hierarchies intensified while journalism put the construction of racial taxonomies to work, such as the following description of the existence of four races in Tripolitania (now western Libya), each one with its own productive location: “Arabs… seem to be created to withstand long labors”; “Blacks… are the best servants”; “Jews [have] a strong disposition to business and commercial banking”; “the Turks… are soldiers, officers and officials.”22

The Metamorphosis of Racism

During the 20th century, Italian racism took on new characteristics, showing the ability to remodel and complexify itself according to the transformation of the mode of production and the new geopolitical context. In the aftermath of the earthquake that was the crisis of 1929, racism, on the entire European level, took on the task of managing new economic and social international arrangements, especially in the relationship between the mother country and the colonies. Such new articulations mainly meant a growing protectionism and a more strict use of colonial resources (raw materials and labor-power), as well as, simultaneously, the reorganization of the international division of labor which had broken down following the collapse of the American stock market. In both cases, the alleged superiority of whiteness was the ground from which the two processes were redesigned. Italy, for its part, took a more precise and aggressive approach, producing a real breakthrough in the race management of the colonial context.

Between 1930 and 1933, 15 concentration camps were set up in the desert region of Sirtica in the middle of the Italian colony in Libya. More than 100,000 Libyan civilians were deported to Sirtica in order to break up the partnership between the civilian population and the insurgents engaged in anti-colonial resistance. More specifically, and what is more relevant for our purposes, this mass deportation can be described as an incredible laboratory of race management. The semi-nomadic farmers, forced to become sedentary, were transformed into a large pool of free labor that provided for both the construction of roads (mainly men) and the preparation of fields (mainly women), both of which largely contributed to the economic output of the colonies.23

However, a stronger process of racialization in the colonies took shape in the aftermath of the proclamation of the empire during the fascist regime in May 1936. The new imperial identity aimed at erasing all traces of the past backwardness and civil inertia in which the country had long been placed, which required marking the differences between Italians and Africans. In support of this project, starting in 1937, two different legal circuits were activated: the metropolitan right and the colonial, both intending to segment and hierarchize labor-power along the color line. In the colonies, the segregation of the African black population was organized around all spheres of life: African black neighborhoods were separated from the Italian white neighborhoods.24 At work, any native employee could be employed in tasks equal to or greater than Italians,25 but native workers earned only one-fifth of the daily wage of an Italian (7 lire vs. 33 lire);26 in the schools for natives (strictly separate from those for Italian whites), the only forms of teaching were oriented around the training of unskilled workers.27

In the homeland, the new imperial identity was structured as a “defense of race,” taking the form of Aryanism, which in 1938 promoted the so-called “racial laws” and the persecution of Jews. On the one hand, these laws – fully in accordance with the functioning of race management and at the very core of the “invention of the white race”28 – were responding to the need to break the bonds of solidarity among workers, facing the real possibility of an explosion of dissent amidst growing uncertainties in the geopolitical context on the eve of the outbreak of the World War II. On the other hand the systematic exclusion of “citizens from the Jewish race” by many working environments, which was a prelude to further persecution such as searches and concentration camps, managed the reorganization of the internal labor market after the 1929 crisis. Starting in the late 1930s, violent propaganda marginalized shops run by Jews; Jews were expelled from the Fascist party, causing a large rise in unemployment.29 As a result of the process of “Aryanization” of the Italian culture, all Jewish scholars and teachers were expelled from schools and universities. Nevertheless, as evidence of the material (rather then psychological) basis of racism, and of race as an actual changeable dispositif for labor hierarchization and social control, in November 1938 an exception was made to the provision preventing Jews from having Italian citizens of the “Aryan race” as servants, allowing for “special reasons of expediency.”30 More than 2,500 “Aryan” workers, mainly women working as servants, were able to return to work.

In the aftermath of World War II and as result of the horrors produced by Nazi and Fascist eugenics, the word “race” become a taboo, disappearing from both the scientific vocabulary and everyday discourse in Europe. Nevertheless, it remained an actual dispositif of segmentation and hierarchization of social relations. Although racism was radically reinterpreted through what has been called the “epistemological turn,” put into motion through UNESCO’s statements ​​on the racial issue in 1950 and 1951, which erased the material and structuring nature of racism, no longer regarding it as system of inequalities (an objective phenomenon), but rather as original “vice” or “injury” (subjective phenomenon),31 race would continue to organize the labor market at the national and continental levels.

The racialization of Italian workers who immigrated to Germany, France, Switzerland, or Belgium ran along very similar lines as the life and work experience of other Italians at the beginning of the century in United States, where they came to be “classified” as “Color: White/Complexion: Dark,”32 and downgraded in labor and wage hierarchies. Similarly, during the aftermath of World War II in Europe, Italian racialized workers were pushed to the low ranks of labor hierarchies, finding very insecure jobs, which resulted in tragic events such as the explosion at the coal mine in Marcinelle, Belgium, in 1956, when over a hundred Italian workers died.

Within the Italian borders the process of reinterpreting racism was translated as the removal of one of the most revolting pages in the history of the country from collective discourses and imaginaries. The new national identity put forth by the partisans of resistance against fascism left no room for such a detestable story, and quickly tried to rid itself of the uncomfortable legacy of racism at home and in the colonies, together with mass murders and atrocities. Nevertheless, race survived, and the Italian post-war reconstruction, and especially the economic boom that followed, could once again benefit from the processes of racialization and race management.

In Italy, the post-war transition highlighted the shift from a still predominantly agricultural economy to a more distinctly industrial one, and showed the revival of myths and representations from the post-unification period, which re-proposed the distinction between ​​a “backward” South assimilated to Africa and a “modern” and “civilized” North holding its place within the European matrix. Through government decisions, all productive activities of the emerging industrial capitalism were placed in the Northwest of the country; in the South, the few industrial complexes were dismantled, while the drastic reduction of arable land produced a surge in unemployment. In the following two decades, the South “offered” more than two million people to the North, who were employed in various capacities of industrial production.

In Northern cities, migrant workers from the South found an uncomfortable social climate marked by misinterpretation and mistrust, with blatant discrimination that made ​​it difficult to even to find a home or access adequate education. Meanwhile, the representation of a southern Otherness, largely circulated through the media, had been mainly articulated around the concepts of poverty, backwardness, and violence.33 Marginalized and subjected to processes of subordination, workers from the South were driven to unskilled jobs, often with irregular administrative positions, and forced to accept shorter labor contracts and very low wages.34 Many of them worked by either piecework or subcontracting in the building industry. Others, especially women, were “illegally” employed in sort of renewed “craft” jobs within the satellite industries.35 And, until 1961, when the law that controlled the internal mobility of labor was repealed, only workers holding the status of “resident” could find work in the industrial plants.

In sum, the racialization of workers from the South had the task of managing the particular phase of capitalist transition, introducing the mechanization of production into Italy. These transformations were increasingly rendering obsolete the figure of the “craft workers,” predominantly from the North, in favor of the introduction of the system of new, generic, and low-skilled labor-power that was the young workers from the South (which we will eventually call “mass worker”).36 Therefore, the construction of race hierarchies aimed both at devaluing the new labor-power that was entering the labor market, and undermining the forms of solidarity among workers that could challenge the recovery of Italian industry. The racialization of southern workers in the aftermath of World War II allowed the creation of a large pool of cheap and docile labor-power that enabled the so-called “Italian miracle.” However, here it should be also noted that at the end of the 1960s, young and low-skilled racialized workers from the South were the main actors of an extraordinary season of labor struggles in Italy, which started a profound process of social transformation, calling into question both labor hierarchies and hierarchies constructed around the Otherness of the South. These struggles demonstrate how the processes of racialization – and therefore racism understood as material and structuring phenomenon – constitute a battleground in which racial hierarchies can be reversed.

Nevertheless, the ability of workers’ struggles in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge racial hierarchies did not mean, of course, the end of racism in Italy. Within the processes of globalization, as the country dealt for the first time with international immigration, racism developed new roots, contributing to the construction of what, following Etienne Balibar, one could define as a “migrant race.”37 In a manner different from other European countries such as England and France, which had experienced a steady stream of migrants from former colonies since the time of decolonization, Italy met its colonial Other at home for the first time only in the late 1980s. Then, the aggressive racism already seen in the African colonies was quickly set ablaze, affecting newcomers especially from North Africa and Eastern Europe (mainly from the former Soviet States after 1989).38

Starting from the end of the 1990s, legislative measures to control and govern global labor mobility were largely responsible for the management of globalization and the increasing mass phenomenon of immigration. Similar to other European countries, the management of labor mobility in Italy has privileged processes of differentiation and selection of migrant workers, “including” rather than “excluding” them, although in a subordinate position. Status with respect to citizenship, the non-recognition of education and degrees, and the often stereotypical interpretation of signs of recognition, such as clothing or language, work as dispositifs of “differential inclusion,”39 continuing to ensure a large supply of low-cost labor. All Italian immigration laws have been shaped and continue to be shaped in this direction, such as the aforementioned Bossi-Fini law that is now fundamental in regulating labor mobility.

Racism and the Crisis