Critical Companion To Contemporary Marxism

Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Paul Blackledge, Leeds – Sébastien Budgen, Paris
Michael Krätke, Amsterdam – Stathis Kouvelakis,
London – Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam
China Miéville, London – Paul Reynolds, Lancashire
Peter Thomas, Amsterdam
VOLUME 16
Critical Companion to
Contemporary Marxism
Edited by
Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008
This book is an English translation of Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvelakis, Dic-
tionnaire Marx contemporain. C. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2001.
Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre

national du Livre.
This book has been published with financial aid of CNL (Centre National du Livre),
France.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Translations by Gregory Elliott.
ISSN 1570-1522
ISBN 978 90 04 14598 6
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Contents
Introduction: Marxism, Post-Marxism, Neo-Marxisms .......................... xi

Pregurations
Chapter One A Key to the Critical Companion to Contemporary

Marxism ....................................................................................................... 3
Jacques Bidet
Chapter Two The Crises of Marxism and the Transformation

of Capitalism .............................................................................................. 23
Stathis Kouvelakis
Chapter Three The Development of Marxism: From the End

of Marxism-Leninism to a Thousand Marxisms – France-Italy,
1975–2005 .................................................................................................... 39
André Tosel
Chapter Four Whither Anglo-Saxon Marxism? ..................................... 79

Alex Callinicos
Chapter Five Old Theories and New Capitalism: The Actuality of

a Marxist Economics ................................................................................. 95
Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
Congurations
Chapter Six Analytical Marxism .............................................................. 123

Christopher Bertram
vi • Contents
Chapter Seven The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory:

From Neo-Marxism to ‘Post-Marxism’ .................................................. 143
Gérard Raulet
Chapter Eight The Late Lukács and the Budapest School ................... 163
André Tosel
Chapter Nine The Regulation School: A One-Way Ticket from

Marx to Social Liberalism? ....................................................................... 175
Michel Husson
Chapter Ten Ecological Marxism or Marxian Political Ecology? ........ 189

Jean-Marie Harribey
Chapter Eleven Theories of the Capitalist World-System ................... 209

Rémy Herrera
Chapter Twelve Liberation-Theology Marxism .................................... 225

Michael Löwy
Chapter Thirteen Market Socialism: Problems and Models ................ 233

Tony Andréani
Chapter Fourteen The American Radicals: A Subversive Current

at the Heart of the Empire ....................................................................... 255
Thomas Coutrot
Chapter Fifteen Political Marxism ........................................................... 267

Paul Blackledge
Chapter Sixteen From ‘Mass Worker’ to ‘Empire’:

The Disconcerting Trajectory of Italian Operaismo ............................... 285
Maria Turchetto
Chapter Seventeen Marxism and Postcolonial Studies ........................ 309

Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma
Contents • vii
Chapter Eighteen British Marxist History .............................................. 333

Paul Blackledge
Chapter Nineteen Developments in Marxist Class Analysis .............. 353

Vivek Chibber
Chapter Twenty New Interpretations of Capital ................................... 369

Jacques Bidet
Chapter Twenty-One The New Dialectic ............................................... 385

Jim Kincaid
Chapter Twenty-Two States, State Power, and State Theory .............. 413
Bob Jessop
Chapter Twenty-Three Marxism and Theories of Racism ................... 431

Robert Carter
Chapter Twenty-Four Historical Materialism and International

Relations ..................................................................................................... 453
Frédérick Guillaume Dufour
Chapter Twenty-Five Marxism and Language ...................................... 471

Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Figures
Chapter Twenty-Six Adorno and Marx .................................................. 489

Jean-Marie Vincent
Chapter Twenty-Seven Louis Althusser, or the Impure Purity

of the Concept ............................................................................................ 503
François Matheron
Chapter Twenty-Eight Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn .... 529

Alberto Toscano
viii • Contents
Chapter Twenty-Nine Revolutionary Potential and

Walter Benjamin: A Postwar Reception History .................................. 549
Esther Leslie
Chapter Thirty Critical Realism and Beyond: Roy Bhaskar’s

Dialectic ....................................................................................................... 567
Alex Callinicos
Chapter Thirty-One Bourdieu and Historical Materialism ................. 587

Jacques Bidet
Chapter Thirty-Two Deleuze, Marx and Revolution: What It

Means to ‘Remain Marxist’ ...................................................................... 605
Isabelle Garo
Chapter Thirty-Three Jacques Derrida: ‘Crypto-Communist’? ........... 625

Jason Smith
Chapter Thirty-Four Foucault, Reader and Critic of Marx .................. 647

Roberto Nigro
Chapter Thirty-Five Beyond the Crisis of Marxism: Gramsci’s

Contested Legacy ...................................................................................... 663
Fabio Frosini
Chapter Thirty-Six Falling Short of Marx: Habermas .......................... 679

Jacques Bidet
Chapter Thirty-Seven Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst

for Totalisation ........................................................................................... 697
Stathis Kouvelakis
Chapter Thirty-Eight Henri Lefebvre, Thinker of Urban

Modernity ................................................................................................... 711
Stathis Kouvelakis
Contents • ix
Chapter Thirty-Nine Kôzô Uno and His School: A Pure Theory

of Capitalism .............................................................................................. 729
Jacques Bidet
Chapter Forty Raymond Williams .......................................................... 741

Notes on Contributors .................................................................................. 751
Bibliography .................................................................................................. 755
Index ............................................................................................................... 801

Introduction: Marxism, Post-Marxism,
Neo-Marxisms
Periodically proclaimed to be dead, or on its way back, Marxism and, more

generally, references to Marx are an integral part of contemporary culture. A
broad view capable of taking the slightest distance indicates that even today,
more than two decades after the eruption of the last ‘crisis’ of Marxism and at
a time when the régimes ofcially identied with it belong to history, refer-
ence to Marx is in no sense ephemeral – mere residue of a period that is now
past – or a local phenomenon, conned to a few geographical and cultural
zones or countries. Marxism is demonstrating its persistence, its productivity
and its capacity to adapt to contexts and conjunctures. Such is the statement
of fact that guided us in the choices governing the production of this book: to
indicate the diverse forms – emulating the famous mole of history, they are
often subterranean – through which that reference has shaped, and continues
to shape, the theoretical debates of the last three decades.
Thus, in this Companion, readers will not nd a series of entries correspond-
ing to notions or authors, but a set of chapters offering a broad sense of the
main axes (themes, theoretical schools and currents, major authors) around
which debates from the 1970s and 1980s onwards have been structured. This
perspective is not exhaustive; and different choices could have been made.1
1
Note to the English language edition: six of the chapters in the Dictionnaire Marx
contemporain (Presses Universitaires de France, 2001) were not included in this edi-
tion, either because they were unsuitable for an anglophone publication, or because
they had already appeared in English elsewhere. Chapters 17–25, 28, 29, 32, 33 and
35 were newly commissioned for this edition, whilst Chapters 3 and 16 were sub-
stantially revised and updated. The Editors regret that their very ambitious hopes of
covering a range of other themes, such as Marxist feminism, geographical-historical
materialism (particularly the work of David Harvey), literary and cultural criticism
(especially the contributions of Terry Eagleton), new debates in crisis theory (such as
xii • Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis
It certainly leaves aside various important geo-cultural zones and some read-
ers are bound to nd it Eurocentric. However, our aim was not to provide a
guide to the main concepts of Marxism or an encyclopaedic survey of Marx-
ism. Others, before us, have done that to great effect: we shall simply mention
Tom Bottomore’s Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1983),
Georges Labica’s and Gérard Bensussan’s Dictionnaire critique du marxisme
(Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1985), and the Historisch-Kritisches
Wörterbuch des Marxismus directed by Wolfgang Fritz Haug (ten volumes,
Argument Verlag, Berlin 1994–). And the present volume in no way claims
to replace these works, which are indispensable for any reader or researcher
interested in Marxism and its history. For our part, what we have sought to
do is to pinpoint, and sometimes to disclose, the main tendencies, the lines of
demarcation or ight, which today mark the eld of reference to Marx; and
the type of effect produced by this reference in the intellectual culture of our
time, over and above the question (no doubt crucial) of the future of ‘Marx-
ism’ as such.
From this initial decision several imperatives follow, which imposed them-
selves in the selection and organisation of the material that makes up this
Critical Companion of Contemporary Marxism.
First and foremost, we wanted to demonstrate the displacement of the ‘cen-
tre of gravity’ of Marxist work, which has migrated from the lands where it
was traditionally afrmed in the initial postwar decades – namely, southern
Europe and Latin America – towards the anglophone world (and especially its
universities), which in our time has become the centre of theoretical produc-
tion referring to Marx. This involves a major transformation in the ‘becoming-
a-world’ of Marx’s thought, to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase. It requires an
in-depth analysis, some elements of which we shall suggest, both in terms
of theoretical and historical balance-sheets (‘Pregurations’) and, throughout
the book, of sketches that seek to construct a cartography of Marxism today,
which is surprising in many respects. The constellations outlined thus simul-
that regarding Robert Brenner’s theses), and so forth could not be realised in the time
available. However, they hope that these chapters might be added in future editions of
this Companion. The panoramic survey of journals included in the French edition also
could not be updated and included here but, again, may appear in future editions.
Marxism, Post-Marxism, Neo-Marxisms • xiii
taneously convey a diversication of the philosophical identity of Marxism,

its integration into new social and political contexts, and its confrontation
with what are in part historically unprecedented subjects – for example, the
issue of the so-called ‘globalisation’ of the economy, changes in the labour
process and production, generalised urbanisation, the effects of the revolu-
tion brought about by information and communication technologies, the new
forms of racist violence, of cultural and military imperialism, of male domina-
tion, and of the ecological threat.
We have also sought to illuminate the interface between ‘Marxism’ and its
other – that is to say, to indicate the ways in which Marx is present in what
constitutes a kind of environment of Marxism and which, far from being
external to it, is its very condition of existence, regardless of whether this is
recognised. From Foucault to Bourdieu, and from Habermas to Deleuze, from
theoreticians of postcolonialism to a international relations, a set of gures
have established themselves, a multiplicity of congurations has developed
and become rmly rooted in various political and intellectual contexts, attest-
ing to the vitality of the Marxian reference.
It will perhaps be asked if we are still dealing with ‘Marxism’ here. Much
has been said recently about ‘post-Marxisms’ and ‘neo-Marxisms’. Although
it is not always easy to distinguish between the two, they are differentiated
in principle in as much as the one seems to proclaim the exhaustion of the
Marxist paradigm, whereas the other introduces problematics which, while
maintaining a special relationship with certain ideas derived from Marx,
reinterpret them in new contexts or combine them with different traditions.
The notion of neo-Marxism is opposed to that of some quintessential Marx-
ism, inscribed in the empyrean of ideas. And, in reality, historically accred-
ited Marxism indeed appears always to have lived off incessant restructuring
and innovation, constantly nding in the surrounding culture, in perspec-
tives generated outside its conceptual space and through the breaks that their
integration involved, the conditions for its renewal. With the upheavals that
marked the end of the twentieth century, any idea of orthodoxy has been shat-
tered. The ‘crisis of Marxism’ has released a variety of more or less eeting
currents, schools, groups and unique individual trajectories, translated into
shifting reclassications in the theoretical eld. The old lines of demarcation
have in the main ceased to operate. It seemed to us that the moment had
xiv • Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis
come to attempt to take stock, and to try to pinpoint some of the main themes
and tracks in a vast landscape. We felt encouraged to do so by the complete
absence of such a cartography in the French literature – an absence that is not
without consequences in a debate which is too often enclosed in the national
cultural space.
Exploring the new tendencies, we have certainly neglected some worthy
and signicant work, developed on more traditional foundations. Other g-
ures might have featured, such as Lacan, alongside Foucault and Althusser.
Moreover, different organisational options would doubtless have brought
out different sorts of intellectual phenomena. For example, had we opted for
a presentation by disciplines, readers would have got a better sense both of
some massive regressions, like that of Marxist historiography in France (with
notable exceptions, such as, inter alia, Guy Bois’s works on the Middle Ages,
research in the ‘history of concepts’ or on the French Revolution); and of the
complexity and singularity of the relationship to Marx that can be assumed
by the various forms of knowledge – sociological, economic, juridical, and so
on – whose rigour implies specialisation in their scientic criteria, and which
experience some difculty relating to a theorisation of general ambition like
that of Marxism. Entering into the subject via major ‘problematics’ seemed to
us to be the way to show precisely how, in different fashions, this kind of junc-
tion was sought. We have aimed at a meaningful outline, stimulating debate
and confrontation, rather than encyclopaedic exhaustiveness.
The index of ideas which, as it was being constructed, greatly surprised the
editors of this book, makes it clear that contemporary Marxisms speak new
languages, that they nd expression only through a broad spectrum of con-
cepts deriving from philosophies and forms of knowledge foreign to the clas-
sics, and which today mark its communication with shared critical thinking.
However, this does not entail the erasure of the distinguishing characteristics
involved in the analysis of societies in terms of class, exploitation, political
and cultural domination, and imperialism.
* * *
Obviously, this work owes much to the work over fteen years of the editorial
team of the journal Actuel Marx, one of whose constant concerns has been to
Marxism, Post-Marxism, Neo-Marxisms • xv
take the measure of reworkings of Marxism throughout the world, in differ-

ent national cultures, in a new era, and in the context of a new civilisation.
We hope that this map will make it possible to get a better sense of what
is at stake – which is not only theoretical – in the debates that animate a
signicant part of the contemporary intellectual eld and thereby contribute
to that knowledge of the world which is so essential to those who wish to
change it.2
2
We must thank all those who have helped us during this long task: Annie Bidet-
Mordrel and Pascale Arnaud, who have participated in a whole host of ways in
this undertaking; Sebastian Budgen, who has generously put his vast knowledge of
anglophone Marxism at our disposal; our remarkable translators; Dorothée Rousset,
who followed the work from beginning to end; Annie Dauphin, for her participa-
tion in giving effect to the questionnaire; Gérard Raulet, director of the UPRESA
8004, Contemporary Political Philosophy, for his concern for our project; Jean-Marc
Lachaud; Christine Vivier; Emmanuel Renault; Roberto Nigro; and nally Sébastien
Mordrel, who took responsibility for producing the text of the French edition. Note
on the English language edition: the Introduction and Chapters 1–16, 20, 26, 27, 31, 34,
36–40 were translated by Gregory Elliott, who the Editors would like to take this
opportunity to thank. Others who contributed to this edition should also be men-
tioned: Cinzia Arruzza, Ande de Cannes, David Fernbach, G.M. Goshgarian, Marie-
José Gransard, Gonso Pozo-Martin, Guido Starosta, Peter Thomas, Alberto Toscano
and Nicolas Vieitlescazes.
Pregurations
Chapter One
A Key to the Critical Companion to Contemporary
Marxism
Jacques Bidet
A Companion for a different world

This Companion, which bears the stamp of the major
crisis experienced by Marxism over the last three
decades, also aims to attest to the renewal it has
undergone in the last ten years.
Crisis of socialism, crisis of Marxism
The crisis of Marxism that marked the end of the

twentieth century is scarcely comparable with those
that preceded it at the turn of the previous century.
The latter affected the doctrine of what was still only
a movement (working-class, socialist), one mainly
conned to Europe, and which as yet only expressed
hopes for an alternative. The current crisis affects a
world which this movement, having become state
power, helped fashion in signicant measure. In what
was called the Communist sphere, where ofcial
doctrine claimed to be rooted in Marxism, it suppos-
edly dened the socio-economic order. In the capi-
talist sphere, much of the institutional architecture
of society, inspired by socialism, had become popu-
lar to such an extent that it seemed to be inscribed in
the naturally progressive course of history and to be
4 • Jacques Bidet
set gradually to win over the whole world, thanks to the emergence of the
new nation-states issued from liberation struggles. And, throughout most
of the world, authoritarian régimes faced movements inspired by Marxism
ranged against them. Up until the 1970s, capitalism could appear to be his-
torically doomed by the gradual increase in the constraints weighing on it,
by the nationalisation of economies, and by the assertion of social logics that
challenged purely private capitalist interests.
The ‘crisis of Marxism’ is the calling into question of this optimistic view
of the world and future history. It is not reducible to the collapse of the USSR
and the evolution of China, where models prevailed which, in the eyes of
most of those identifying with Marxism, had long since been exhausted. It
is more general and more profound. Along with the former Third World, it
affects all developed capitalist countries, particularly those of Europe, whose
institutions of a socialist orientation, constructed in the course of a century
and once so powerful and resonant – and sometimes going well beyond the
‘social state’, especially in their economic dimension – are gradually being
dismantled, in a process that nothing seems capable of checking.
The obvious question facing Marxists is why things are thus. According to
the type of hypothesis offered by ‘historical materialism’, such a reverse can-
not be explained exclusively by political developments – by the implementa-
tion of the neoliberal project, conceived as a machination or conspiracy on the
part of capitalist élites. The old adage according to which, at a certain point, the
development of the ‘productive forces’ calls into question the existing ‘social
relations’, is especially pertinent here. This does not mean that starting from a
new technological age we can deduce a new social and political régime, which
is its expression. The intertwining of the two orders is more complex: the ‘pro-
ductive forces’, as they have developed in the context of capitalism and in the uneven
world system, have ended up undermining, albeit in highly uneven fashion,
the national form that prevailed in the modern world and perverting its con-
tent. New potentialities (deriving, in particular, from easier communications
and transport, the immediacy and ubiquity of information, and the growing
importance of immaterial production) have emerged, which form the basis
for various political, economic, and military projects. In concrete terms, the
new technological era has favoured those capitalist rms of the imperialist
centre able to operate as transnationals within the world system in their pur-
suit of prot, distributing production here, research there, and nancial man-
Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism • 5
agement somewhere else again. The transnationals have acquired the power
to dominate the states of the centre and their directive bodies, and to corrupt
and dissolve those of the periphery. Consequently, national authorities – the
institutional site of projects of a socialist orientation – nd themselves neu-
tralised as they come under the control of new bodies, whose political func-
tion is to dismantle the old institutions and open up national territories to a
globalised neoliberal economy.
In these circumstances, it is the predictive power of Marxism that seems to be
affected – its ability to dene a different type of society, to which capitalism
itself supposedly leads via the development of its contradictions. We are no
longer dealing with a crisis within Marxism, between various interpretations,
provoking expulsions and splits (which Marxism, as used to be said in opti-
mistic former days, lived off). We face a crisis that involves Marxism’s very
existence, capped as it is by the disappearance of the institutions, party or
other, that ofcially referred to it, and by its erasure from the cultural sphere,
the collective memory, and individual imaginations.
Naturally, in the public mind the most spectacular aspect of the crisis was
the disappearance of the USSR and the socialist bloc. Among professed Marx-
ists, this massive upheaval was not exactly experienced as a crisis, since that
major historical experiment had issued in a new form of class society, which
had long been the object of their criticism. Instead, it took the form of disap-
pointment in the inability of these régimes to reform themselves in any way,
if only in a social-democratic direction. Only a few optimists regarded this
as a ‘liberation of Marxism’ and the chance of a new beginning – a sublima-
tion, no doubt, of their relief. The Chinese mutation was less of a cause for
surprise, since it inscribed this continent in a common logic, where modern
class confrontation, with its antagonistic projects, persists, even if it assumes
specic forms.
In reality, Marxist morale is affected by something more profound and
more general. It is the gradual destruction, within nation-states, of every-
thing that was constructed in the name of socialism, with Marxism as a major
theoretical reference-point: an economy in part under collective control, with
multiple public services in education, health, information and communica-
tion, transport, research and culture. It is the privatisation of all aspects of
social existence, the private appropriation of all sources of wealth, and the
establishment of a world order in which the logic of prot, backed by military
6 • Jacques Bidet
domination, holds exclusive sway. It is the consignment of the greatest num-

ber once again to the domination of capitalist power and thus to the cycle of
poverty or insecurity. It is the crisis of any prospect for the social and politi-
cal emancipation of humanity as a whole. Put in command by the insatiable
pursuit of prot, it is the collective irresponsibility whose most visible sign is
its powerlessness to curb the destruction of nature.
The resistance and resurgence of Marxism
The paradox is this: at the same time as Marxism’s predictive power seems to
be inrmed, its analytical power appears intact. And, in so far as it retains a
capacity to interpret the new course of the world, it is also capable of interven-
ing in it. To understand its reverses and defeats in its own language is already
to possess resources with which to resist and to conceive new offensives – if
this language is legitimate, at any rate. As we intend to demonstrate, Marxism
does indeed supply interpretative perspectives for the great changes – social,
political, cultural, anthropological – that are underway. And this is why it is –
or can be – mobilised wherever social and popular struggles unfold against
economic or bureaucratic domination, male domination, imperial power, and
the commodication of nature and cultures. And it is what imparts acuteness,
power, and potential universality to the prospect of an alternative globalisa-
tion, which is beginning to emerge as a common horizon.
As yet, this analytical power has not found expression in a general prospec-
tive vision, making it possible to give new life to the modern movement for
emancipation, to bring about a convergence between the movements that are
emerging. The precondition for this is unquestionably that Marxism should
prove able to interpret its own shortcomings and to reconstruct itself by draw-
ing on what is around it. To this end, while referring to the various chapters
of this Companion, I offer some reections below that refer to the perspective I
have sought to develop in my recent trilogy, whose aim is precisely to recon-
struct Marxism.1
The crisis and the alternative – this is what is at stake in this Companion,
which is certainly to be taken as an academic reference work, permitting ready
1
See Bidet 1999, 2000, and 2004. Various translations of these works are underway,
particularly in English and Chinese.
access to the new forms, structures, and hypotheses that have been developed
in Marxism. However, these gures and congurations are not restricted to a
collection of what professes to be ‘Marxist’ today. The most important authors
we present, from Bourdieu, via Habermas and Foucault, to Derrida, can in no
way be identied as Marxists. Such gures, along with others, simply seem
to us to be indispensable to any reconstruction. They represent other ele-
ments in our culture, which cannot be assimilated to Marxism, but which are
nevertheless precious to us. Accordingly, this Companion aims to participate
in a reconsideration and reconstruction of Marx’s legacy, in reformulating a
theory for the present.
For a re-generative grammar of Marxism
The ofcial presuppositions of modernity
A rst aspect of the crisis, directly related to the collapse of the communism
derived from the Third International, concerns the issue of democracy. It was
all too clear that if democratic forms had been neglected in the construction of
‘socialism’ in the USSR, China, and elsewhere, this was not some careless mis-
take on the part of history, or simply because the revolutionaries had betrayed
revolutionary ideals. It was related to the very economic-political form of the
societies constructed in the name of socialism. With the collapse of ofcial
communisms, an ever more radical issue than that of democracy has thus
come back onto the Marxist agenda: the issue of right in general. Not, in the
rst instance, the issue of morality, but that of right, the just and the unjust,
the foundation of a legitimate political and social order. Here, an engagement
with liberalism was inevitable, particularly with those forms of it renewed
by authors like Rawls and Habermas, which have proved capable of at least
articulating the claims of modernity: that of basing all our relations on liberty
and equality and of consigning them, in the last instance, to the requirements
of a relationship of discursive communication. Particularly in the Anglo-
American world, Marxism itself has sometimes been treated as one ‘theory
of justice’ among others, striving for supremacy, capable of adding economic
and social liberties to those that already exist; or it has been invoked as a uto-
pia, as the declaration of a future society.
8 • Jacques Bidet
All this can be related to those elements in Marx’s Marxism that are bound
up with Enlightenment traditions of the social contract and political economy,
Rousseau and Adam Smith. Moreover, in a sense, it is indeed to these tradi-
tions that Marx pays homage at the start of Capital, when he begins his exposi-
tion by referring to what constitutes the presupposition of the modern form
of society. Marx begins by considering that which, ofcially at least, presents
itself as the most general feature of capitalist society: market relations of pro-
duction, based on exchange, in which everyone eo ipso considers the other as
a free, equal, and rational individual, and thereby enjoys the status of citizen
in a polity based on the social contract. Marx then shows how, in reality, this
framework of production for exchange, in so far as it is generalised, turns
labour-power itself into a commodity, bought by capitalists with a view to
prot – that is to say, at a lower price than the value it will produce. There-
after, social relations can no longer be analysed as simple relations of exchange
between individuals, because they are at the same time relations of exploita-
tion between classes with conicting interests. And the class that is economi-
cally dominant is also the class which is politically dominant, in a state whose
institutions, in this respect, are non-contractual, are such as to reproduce and
maintain the class structure. The aim of the remainder of Capital is to demon-
strate that this form of society is historically transient, leading to its own
supersession. In fact, it has an irresistible tendency to the concentration of
capital, such that large rms gradually replace small ones, to the point where
the working class, increasingly numerous, educated, and organised by the
production process itself, becomes capable of taking over management of it
and replacing the logic of the market by democratically organised planning,
so that a logic of concerted discourse can henceforth replace the blind mecha-
nisms of the market.
It might be thought that there is much truth in Marx’s analysis. And we
have seen that during the twentieth century the working class, allied with
other categories of wage-earner and elsewhere with peasant masses, demon-
strated its ability to promote alternatives to capitalism, to impose limits on the
omnipotence of the logic of the capitalist market, to establish non-market con-
ditions for the employment of labour-power, and to appropriate in a national
form a proportion of the production of goods and especially services. Even
so, when attempts were made to substitute the ‘organised’ (or planned) form
of society for the ‘market’ form in the USSR and China, it displayed a similar
tendency to generate class relations, which in some respects were even more
regressive. On the other hand, far from it being possible to envisage a utopia
in which the market can simply be replaced by organised direction, market and
organisation, these two poles of rational co-ordination on a social scale, function
(as Marx saw, in least in the case of the market) as the two class factors consti-
tutive of class relations in the modern era. These two factors are certainly not
of the same nature. And the struggle for emancipation, which aims at forms of
discursive, self-managerial, and associative co-operation, naturally looks for
support to democratic (particularly national) to direction, organisation, against
the capitalist market. Nevertheless, market and organisation are to be taken as
two poles, correlative and co-imbricated, in all social structuration, from the
rm to the state, giving rise in their interaction to a specic ‘class-form’.
The specicity of these two poles in the modern era, however, is that each
of them is identied, ofcially at least, with the same principles of liberty and
equality, which supposedly govern the relation of ‘each to each’ and the rela-
tionship ‘between all’ (or ‘from each to all and from all to each’). The market,
where everyone decides freely with respect to others, theoretically excludes
any duress by one person against another. The constraints of the organisa-
tion, including those of the rm, are supposedly neutralised by the fact that in
principle people only pertain to it voluntarily, can withdraw from it, and that
it is subject to rules which citizens supposedly develop together. These two
modes of co-ordination are in conict with one another, in the sense that what
is constructed in the organisational mode is withdrawn in the market order,
and vice versa. But they are, at the same time, mutually imbricated in the social
whole: while constantly on the labour market, modern workers are organised
by the rm, which is an organisation on a market that is itself organised to a
considerable extent. In this sense, the Rechtsstaat is the instance that suppos-
edly presides over the democratic arbitration between these two modes of co-
ordination. It is itself an organisation, but one which presents itself as ensuring
the power of collective deliberation, of an equal say between the ‘voices’ of
citizens.
The bipolar matrix (market-organisation) of rational economic co-ordination
thus presents another, juridico-political aspect, which is itself bi-polar. In this
respect, the two poles are not only mutually imbricated, but mutually imply
one another. In fact, a free and equal relationship between each person can
only exist if it is based on a free and equal relationship between all, and vice
10 • Jacques Bidet
versa. Such, in its complexity, is what it seems to me appropriate to call the

‘metastructure of modernity’, to which any modern structural form necessar-
ily refers. And as we can see, it possesses an inherently critical character. In
fact, in such a matrix no social law (no distribution of tasks, powers or prop-
erty within the social space, from the family to the state), imposed on society
in the name of nature or some transcendent principle, can exist, but only rules,
which members reach agreement over. No alleged natural law, such as a ‘law
of the market’, can be imposed on the deliberation of citizens, who are the
sole judges of the collective order. Nor can there be any putatively rational
organisation that does not respect the free relationship between persons. As
we shall see, it remains the case that this modern claim is only ever present in
amphibological fashion, articulated by the dominated as a requirement to be
realised, and by the dominant as already existing, as a good to be defended –
a sublimated expression of their privileges.
Marx reveals this amphibology in remarkable fashion. He begins his expo-
sition in Capital with a theoretical description of what he regarded as the most
general gure of the modern form of society: the logic of market relations
between putatively free and equal partners, to which he devotes part one of
Volume One. This is the basis, he explains, on which we can dene what capi-
talism proper is: a society where labour-power is itself a commodity – which
transforms so-called market society into a (commodity) capitalist society. And
his objective was to show how the historical tendencies of this structure made
it possible to conceive revolutionary strategies. For him, it was a question of
going beyond the reign of the capitalist market, based on private property,
through a collective appropriation of the means of production, leading to an
organisation of production negotiated between all. It was a question of abolish-
ing the market along with capital. And, although he refrained from futuristic
constructions, he traced a path from market to organisation, which, with the
abolition of capitalist property, would lose the despotic character it has in
private rms. Yet it is clear that this historical schema must be revised. For the
general matrix of modernity, which must form the starting-point, is in fact (as
we have seen) more complex, containing two poles – that of market inter-indi-
viduality and that of organisational centricity – according to these two aspects –
that of economic-rational co-ordination and that of politico-juridical order. If
we wish to resume Marx’s endeavour, these are the terms, so it seems to me,
in which we must correct and expand the abstract general gure with which
the analysis starts (and to which it regularly reverts). It will be understood

that such a metastructural gure is strictly ‘aporetic’: on its own, it does not
open up any ‘royal road’. In itself, it is simply the form in which the problems
of modernity are posed and to which anything that claims to be modern – that
is to say, acceptable to us today – necessarily refers.
Thus, readers will nd in this Companion a fair number of highly distinct prob-
lematics referring to this moment of the ‘claim’ of modernity. It is to be found in the
form of ideology, in the Althusserian terms of ‘interpellation’, or in the hauntology
whereby Derrida presents the spectre who announces and denounces, threatens and
promises, disappears and always ‘returns’. It is equally present, albeit in contrasting
terms, in the positive programme of rationalisation proposed by the regulation school,
in American radicalism, or in the elaboration of ‘models of socialism’. It is wholly
explicit in Habermas’s project, to be realised in a ‘communicative’ society. It is tran-
scended in hope in liberation philosophies and theologies.
The social and economic structure of capitalism
Better than anyone else, Marx showed how this universe of the claims of
modernity does not coincide with the actual reality of the modern world. The
egalitarian metastructure of commodity exchange, with which he begins his
systematic exposition at the start of Capital, certainly possesses some reality
in his eyes. But it actually only exists in the form of its converse in the actual
structure. He reveals this inversion by means of two conjoint initiatives. On
the one hand, he elaborates a ‘critique of political economy’ – of the market
as the universal principle of the economic order; on the other, he develops
a ‘critique of politics’ – of the social contract allegedly realised by the institu-
tions of constitutional democracy – in a context where, more generally, any
modern ‘organisation’ supposedly rests on a delegation of the authority that
everyone has over themselves. His analysis always comes back to register-
ing that the ofcial reference-points of the capitalist modern world in no sense
represent its essence, but its phenomenon – understood as that aspect of itself
which this essence allows to appear, as that which it claims to be. The pecu-
liarity of modernity is certainly the claim that the totality of relations between
free and equal individuals is only conceived in a contractual form, which is
indissociably private equal exchange and equal citizenship. But such a claim
is only ever formulated in forms of society where market and organisation
are already transformed into class factors, into vectors of class relations. And,
in this sense, liberty and equality are always already ‘transformed into their
opposites’. They are denitely not mere appearances, sheer ideological smoke
screens. For the fact that in any dealing one must invoke the liberty and equal-
ity of all is a constitutive critical feature of modern society, which confers on
it its revolutionary character. But this society, like those that preceded it, is to
be understood as a class society, which is neither free nor equal, but which
nevertheless exhibits the peculiarity that class relations are constituted on the
basis of the two major forms of rational social co-ordination – market and
organisation – with their correlative claim of liberty-equality.
Marx focused analysis on demonstrating that underlying the appearances
of wage-labour exchange is concealed exploitation. But he also disclosed that
this is not realised by the simple relationship between wage-earners and own-
ers of the means of production. For it always assumes the intervention of the
other pole of the dominant class – that of the manager, the organiser, who
directs, having supposedly been chosen for his competence. The power of
‘competence’ (supposed, professed, qualied) is of a different kind from that
of ownership and extends far beyond private production, since it is equally
deployed in the public sphere of administration and culture and, in truth,
throughout society.
Marx was unable to complete a study of modern class structure, of which
he nevertheless set out the main elements. If we wish to take up his outline
today, we must in particular appreciate that the dominant class comprises
two poles, one based on the market and on ownership, the other on organisa-
tion and ‘competence’ – two poles that are at once complementary and com-
paratively antagonistic. Like ownership, competence too is socially dened
and recognised by means of specic titles (degrees, etc.). This bipolarity gov-
erns the existence of two distinct poles of hegemony, to which we can relate
the pair of ‘Right’ (more on the side of ownership and the market) and ‘Left’
(more on the side of organisations and their competences) – a pair whose
content varies enormously from one capitalist society to another (republi-
cans and democrats here, conservatives and social democrats elsewhere), is
always uid and problematic, and preserves itself only by misrepresenting
itself, with each pole being hegemonic only to the extent that it can in some
way represent the other within itself and thus pass itself off as guarantor of
the general interest.
For its part, the exploited class is correlatively distributed into various frac-
tions, according to whether the exploitation and domination they endure
proceed more or less directly from the market factor, the organisational-hier-
archical factor, or both at once. Thus, we have self-employed workers (farmers,
artisans, shopkeepers), public-sector wage-earners (workers in central or local
administration, with or without the status of ‘civil servant’), and private-
sector wage-earners (workers and employees). Finally, the modern class fac-
tors (market/organisation), unlike earlier communitarian forms, structurally
dene an exterior comprising all those who are rejected by the capitalist market
as lacking any regularly employable skill for the purposes of prot. These two
structural factors are thus such as to generate a growing mass of the excluded,
‘without’ work, income, qualication, roof, abode, or recognised identity
and yet, in this very margin, invariably prey to super-exploitation – not to
mention the immigrants ‘without papers’, who are simultaneously subject to
what will be called ‘systemic’ domination. Social relations between the sexes,
bound up with the other major social function – the family – directed (at least
in developed capitalism) not towards production, but towards the biologi-
cal reproduction of the species, are closely interwoven with class relations,
evolving with the variation in modes of production. The interplay of class
factors, which in particular generates partial and illusory afnities between
the ‘self-employment’ and ownership, as between ‘civil servants’ and com-
petence, determines the obstacles that have to be surmounted for the class of
the exploited to discover its unity and prove capable of an alliance politics (we
shall see which later).
While outlining the sociological and juridical aspects of the capitalist form
of society, Marx himself mainly set out its economic dimension. He showed
how this society is reproduced and revealed the logic whereby it gives rise to
accumulation. His analysis is mainly directed to a study of the market mecha-
nisms peculiar to capitalism. It culminates in capitalism’s structural tendency
to cyclical crisis, attesting to its instability, to the menaces that constantly
hang over it, which it eludes only by accentuating its contradictions; and, cor-
relatively, in the prospects for its universal diffusion (particularly through
colonial conquest). Yet it can be deemed inadequate. Certainly, Marx strongly
emphasised the tendency to oligopolistic concentration, which for him was a
prelude to the decline of the market. However, he failed – and this cannot be
attributed solely to the era in which he wrote – to consider the potentialities
of the capitalist structure starting from the other pole: organisation. On the
one hand, he proved unable to take full account of the fact that this structure,
given its ‘metastructural matrix’, materialises as such rst of all in the form of
the nation-state, which possesses a genuine potential to determine, organise,
and regulate the capitalist market. On the other hand, he was unable clearly
to envisage or examine the fact that in this framework a growing percentage
of production – particularly services – could, as a result of the growing power
of the wage-earning classes and their impact on the social order, be carried
out in non-market form, in a publicly organised form, without this entailing
an exit from capitalism – in a context where, correlatively, within the dominant
class the pole of managers and, more broadly, of qualied competence, would
come to occupy an important position (and even, under ‘real socialism’, come
to represent the totality of this class).
Nevertheless, Marx identied the essential character of capitalism remark-
ably well. At the centre of his approach, an in some sense quantitative analysis
of exploitation, which explains how class division occurs and is reproduced,
how capital is accumulated, leads into a qualitative analysis of the logic of capi-
talism. His thesis is that capitalist production is not identical with production
in general, or only with market production or the ‘market economy’. Not only
is it, like every form of exploitation, geared towards the extraction of a sur-
plus-product from the producer. But it is very specically geared towards the
accumulation of prot, a purely abstract wealth (in reality, accumulation of a
private social power over production), whatever the consequences for human
beings, cultures, and nature. This is the root of the ecological and cultural
critique, the most radical there is, articulated by Marxism.
To this it must be added that Marx’s analysis, which mainly consists in the
theoretical construction of the structure of capitalism (the main ideal type for
an understanding of the modern world, according to Weber), offers, if not a
sure way of comprehending capitalism’s overall evolution and its historical
tendency towards an end-point, then at least the most signicant outline of
the kind of investigation required for that purpose. It is also the analysis that
makes it possible to pose the question of the beginning of capitalism in the
West, starting out from the aleatory conditions in which it emerged. Marx,
whose works pertain more directly to economics or sociology than historiog-
raphy, nevertheless bequeathed historians an enormous work programme,
since it is only on the basis of a denition of the structure of a form of society
that one can examine its origins, its development, and its end.
Various chapters in this Companion refer to the structural form, economic and
sociological, of capitalism, drawing on Marx’s analysis while contributing new
dimensions to it – particularly by way of a more concrete examination of the features
that characterise its current form. As regards more general issues, the stimulus in
part derives from non-Marxist sociology. Thus, Bourdieu endeavoured to expand the
concept of social ‘reproduction’, analysed by Marx in terms of production and capital-
ist market ownership, and which he redeploys to the other pole – that of ‘competence’,
recognised in its arbitrariness through the very process of its production. Reproduc-
tion is not understood here, any more than it is in Marx, as a transmission to inheri-
tors, but as the reproduction of a structure of domination. An analogous theme is
developed by Erik Olin Wright in the idiom of analytical Marxism. A similar expan-
sion underlies the problematic proposed by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, in
the broad panorama they offer us which reveals the rise of a ‘capitalo-cadrism’. On this
basis they interpret the history of capitalism, with its successive switches marking
an alternation between market dominance (‘nance’) and organisational dominance
(‘cadres’). Among other things, Foucault’s work claries the fact that modernity is
characterised not only by the generalisation of private relations, but equally by an
organisational mesh which similarly counts in the emergence of the forms of afrma-
tion and subjection of modern subjectivity. The historians of modernity are natu-
rally widely called upon here. And sociologists also obviously have a large part to
play when it comes to dening the characteristics of the current phase of capitalism,
whether in the schema of neoliberalism and universal deregulation, or ‘post-Fordism’
and the ‘postmodern exibilisation’ of labour-power. Nor will readers be surprised to
nd a chapter which roots the ecological critique of contemporary society in Marx’s
analysis; or another devoted to the sociological studies produced by feminism.2
The world-system, the planet, and humanity
The concepts of social structure, class relations, and corresponding state

authority are insufcient to dene capitalism. They are simply those that
determine it in the framework of the nation-state, characteristic of the modern
form of society. But this nation-state precisely emerges as one state among
others of the same kind, in a totality that progressively takes the form of a
2
[Editorial note: the chapter on feminism included in the Dictionnaire Marx contem-
porain was a translation of a chapter by Stevi Jackson in Gamble (ed.) 1999. Despite
many efforts, the editors were not able to secure a replacement chapter written spe-
cically for the Companion.]
‘state system’. Capitalism is thus at once (class) structure and (world) system –
a particular historical structure of the nation-state and a particular historical
system formed by the set of nation-states. The systemic totality is distinct from
the structural totality in that it is not organised by a state. It does not embody a
reference to a putatively collective power, exercised by supposedly equal part-
ners. Nor is not realised by the domination of one class over another. The rela-
tion between nations, as modern theoreticians of the contract (from Hobbes to
Kant) bluntly put it, is a ‘state of war’. The capitalist market relation operates
in it without encountering the claim of a supposedly collective, supra-national
democratic government that regulates and possibly plans. Between nations,
it is combined with a pure relationship of force, with the asymmetrical power
of the nations of the centre over the periphery, limited by the mechanism of
alliances and the strength of any resistance.
Obviously, none of this was wholly foreign to Marx. However, for want of
a sufciently complete theorisation of the structure – particularly of the rela-
tion between the economy and the capitalist state, between the two poles of
structural domination (market and organisation), and hence also between its
two aspects (economic and juridico-political) – Marx was unable to articu-
late structure and system adequately. Lenin’s genius consisted, among other
things, in taking up the issue of capitalism in its global dimension, starting
from the world system. Yet imperialism still gures in his work as a (nal)
‘phase’ of capitalism. The Third-Worldists of the 1960s developed a more
adequate picture, which elevated the concepts of the system to the same epis-
temological level as the structure. As asymmetry within the world system,
imperialism is as old as capitalism itself, in the sense that the capitalist system
emerges as a multiplicity of nation-states, as a totality within which the states
forming the centre dominate the periphery and the surrounding space. Thus,
in different balances of forces, the same capitalism develops as wage-labour
in the centre and slavery in the periphery, as (relative) civil peace within
the Western nations, as war between them, and as colonial subjugation and
extermination.
It is at this global level of the system and its development that the condi-
tions for globalisation, neoliberal policy, the resistance to them, and the move-
ment for an alternative globalisation are to be analysed. It is also at this total
systemic level that the ecological crisis provoked by capitalism is most obvi-
ous, particularly as a result of the refusal of the leading powers to abandon
the logic of prot, which is also a logic of the ineluctable destruction of the
nature around us.
At this level too we begin to perceive the emergence, in the very long term,
of a form of capitalist world state, encompassing and determining existing
state entities, without bringing about their disappearance – and this in a per-
verse relationship with the world system, whose centre, unable to avoid the
reproduction on an ultimate scale of a social form similar to the nation-state,
seeks to colonise it for its benet. The very relative legitimacy of the UN, for
example, when it cannot be ignored, is instrumentally invoked, albeit with
uneven success, to legitimate the most arbitrary enterprises of the imperialist
centre. However, nothing will prevent the relation between the world-sys-
temic centre and the world-state centre – two variable-geometry institutional
conglomerations – emerging, in an oscillation between complicity and con-
ict, as the ‘principal contradiction’ of capitalism.
An important section of this Companion is thus given over to the problematic of
the capitalist totality. Hence the articles devoted to theories of the world-system, post-
colonialism, the analysis of economic neoliberalism presented by Duménil and Lévy,
the advances in Anglo-American Marxism highlighted by Alex Callinicos, and, once
again, Jean-Marie Harribey’s article on ecology.
Tendencies and practices, Marxism and history
Marx’s specicity consists in the fact that he not only described the structure
of modern capitalist society, but also situated it in a general schema of history
in line with the analytical grid of historical materialism, that he analysed its
specic tendencies. It consists in the fact that he sought to elucidate the pre-
conditions for its end and for the establishment of a superior form of society.
This stance on the future, sketched on the basis of the present, is not reduc-
ible either to an optimistic evolutionism diagnosing the ‘revolution’ as a natu-
ral phenomenon, in itself inevitable but whose advent can be hastened; or to
a normative posture basing political action on a rm belief in a just order to be
established. It can only be understood in terms of a dialectic, in which what is
and what should be are not external to one another. Marx describes the actual
tendency of capitalism to produce its own ‘gravediggers’. But the task of this
new class, the universal class of workers, seems to him to involve actually
implementing, by means of production collectively determined by equals,
what modern society proclaims – equality and liberty – without being able
to realise it under capitalism. In fact, it can only assert itself as the universal
class, sounding the death knell of class society, by meeting this expectation.
This does not entail it conforming to values inscribed in the empyrean of the
modern world, but means it responding to the imperatives that are actually
operative as imperatives.
In reality – and we have seen why – these claims on the part of modernity
could not be adequately realised in the form of the ‘concerted-plan’ régime,
and still less when it was taken literally, as under collectivism. Yet they remain
the reference-point. Modernity cannot but promise more every day. But it does
so via the modern class factors of market and organisation, in the conditions
of a class relation that inverts the outcome. The march towards emancipation
is therefore to be conceived as a class struggle for a classless society on these
two fronts.
However, those below know from experience that the two poles, and the
two components of the dominant class corresponding to them, are not of the
same kind. They know that ‘organised’ co-ordination, in so far the form of
public deliberation can be imparted to it, can be imbued with self-managerial
or associative co-responsibility and with discursive communication to a far
greater extent than can ‘market’ co-ordination. And that is why the workers’
movement has regularly privileged an alliance with this pole (competence) of
the dominant class against the other, endeavouring to uncouple and hegemo-
nise it.
The class struggle for a classless society is, in a sense, a struggle in the name
of the claims made by modernity. But this does not boil down to achieving
what capitalism only promises. In fact, such claims do not exist, have no
determinate substantive content, outside of the struggles that generate them
historically as principles without which societies cannot legitimately be gov-
erned. They would merely be insubstantial abstractions in the absence of
social struggles, which alone impart concrete content to them. Thus, liberty-
equality acquires a new content when women’s struggle wrests universal
suffrage or some right from the patriarchy, when trade unions force rms
to recognise them, when homosexuality gets itself acknowledged as of equal
value, when oppressed peoples drive out the colonisers or free themselves
from their economic and cultural dominion. To decline the major gures of
logic, the promise of the universal is meaningful only in and through its par-
ticular contents, the outcome of singular acts and events. The metastructural
claims with which, emulating Marx in Capital, the exposition must begin, are
only ever posited in their concrete content through such practices, which are
always to be construed as ‘struggles for recognition’. These practices emerge
in the framework of determinate social structures, constitutive of a particular
form of society (they are quite simply inconceivable elsewhere). But they are
not to be understood as mere reections of these structural forms. They only
open up denite spaces of possibility, which alter as their tendencies unfold
historically.
What is specic about the struggle of the exploited in the modern form
of society is that, in as much as it exists, it is contrary to the logic of capital,
which is that of modern class power: the abstraction of prot, abstract wealth,
and the destruction of ‘concrete’ wealth. It is directed towards the use-values
whose use is truly ‘valuable’ for all. That is why such struggle, as it develops,
increasingly emerges in its cultural and ecological dimensions. It is organised
by critical forces that are always resurgent within culture, by ‘avant-gardes’
which are regularly there at the appointed hour, even though, of necessity,
they cannot be foreseen.
Thus, in the dialectical form represented by the circle ‘metastructure/struc-
tures/practices’ – a circle because metastructural claims are only ever given
in practices – is formulated the Marxian concept of the modern class struggle.
However, we cannot, in the name of this dialectical form, invoke a ‘dialectic of
history’, a historical teleology. The dialectic is what makes it possible to tran-
scend the ontological naivety which counter-poses structure to metastructure
as what is to what should be, the real to the ideal, the balance of forces to legit-
imate values. It thus makes it possible to tackle the actual social process real-
istically. But its discourse is only acceptable within the limits of this denite
object. It does not authorise the counter-position of ‘man’ to ‘nature’ (of which
he only forms a part) as ‘subject’ to ‘object’; or the conception of a dialectical
development which is the dynamic of history itself, as the realisation of man
and humanity. For history does not possess this teleological character, this
subjective intention towards an end. That pertains exclusively to the designs
that human beings, individually or collectively, can formulate, and which his-
tory carries off in a ux, of which we can only seek to analyse the tendencies.
More precisely, practices can only be conceived in determinate social structures,

and always with reference to metastructural claims. But they only emerge in
conformity with the objective tendencies of these structures, which constantly
alter the relations between the productive forces and relations of production
and, therewith, the projects that can be envisaged. And this in the swarm of
overdeterminations and discrepancies whereby past forms never stop interfer-
ing, and being reinterpreted, in the present; in the uncertainty of conjunctures,
by way of unforeseeable events, whose consequences are invariably incalcu-
lable. Hegel’s dialectical lesson is thus inscribed in Spinoza’s materialist les-
son, as human action in a history that is ultimately natural. This is a Marxism
of nitude: men do not make history.
And yet they act in it. No one has a monopoly on action in history. But the
great mass of the exploited and the oppressed have every reason to demand
their share of it, and constantly to refashion the project of ‘changing the
world’. No historical failure will be able to dispossess them of their capacity
to project a future in accordance with their self-proclaimed dignity. Techno-
logical changes have been used by neoliberalism to destroy the mechanisms
of solidarity constructed over generations of political confrontation and social
invention. They can be summoned as witnesses against the great projects
referred to as ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. In reality, however, embodied
in increasingly intellectual forms of work, demanding ever more intellectual
exchange, communication, and mutual responsibility (particularly in the face
of the dangers that production now poses for the future of the human species
and its environment), they are such as to reawaken, on an ever broader can-
vas, modern struggles for emancipation, eliciting unprecedented capacities
to ‘see them through to a conclusion’. And that is why the revolution never
dies or why, at any rate, its death cannot be anticipated in the horizon of
modernity.
There is thus a whole series of articles in this Companion that aims to extend the
principles required to analyse practices in the age of capitalism. There are also texts
that provide bearings in the debate which seeks to make it possible to think together
the dialectical heritage represented by the Frankfurt school and Gramscian traditions,
and which underlies controversies over the theoretical status of Capital (through
authors as varied as Kôzô Uno, Helmut Reichelt, or Hans-Georg Backhaus), and the
materialist exigencies reformulated by Althusser, in a Spinozist tradition exempli-
ed by Gilles Deleuze and also taken up by Toni Negri, but to which the intersecting
reections of G.A. Cohen and Jon Elster on historical materialism also attest in their
different way. And a large portion of it, naturally, is devoted to cultural criticism,
from Adorno and Lefebvre to Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson.
Chapter Two
The Crises of Marxism and the Transformation of
Capitalism
Stathis Kouvelakis
In order to arrive at a sound assessment of the

change that has occurred in ideas, we must take
account of the transformation that capitalism
itself has undergone.1
Among the reasons why Marxism is a strange, even

disconcerting, intellectual object is, not least, the
occurrence and recurrence of its ‘crises’. The term
‘crisis’, much overused, requires some introductory
discussion, however. In what follows, the formula
‘crisis of Marxism’ is to be construed in a resolutely
‘subjective’ sense – at the antipodes, for example,
of the usage when economic crises are involved.
Thus, we can only speak of a ‘crisis of Marxism’ as a
unique moment in which something rather unusual
in the history of ideas occurs (have Platonists ever
been heard to speak of a ‘crisis of Platonism’ or Kan-
tians of a ‘crisis of Kantianism’?). What this suggests
is that a category of agents who identify themselves
as ‘Marxists’ declare that they live their relationship
to this theoretical object in the form of a ‘crisis’. In
other words, ‘crises of Marxism’ are conjunctures
when the statement that ‘there is a crisis of Marxism’
1
Sorel 1982, pp. 237–8.
24 • Stathis Kouvelakis
is predominantly internal – when this statement serves, in other words, to

designate the experience of ‘Marxists’ when they dene their own relation-
ship to this referent.
From this self-referential denition follow several consequences, which
are less seemingly tautological. First of all, the ‘crises of Marxism’ are de-
nitely not the same as the ‘deaths of Marxism’, periodically proclaimed from
an external and, in general, openly polemical standpoint. The latter pertain
to a quite different logic, in other words, to the ‘spectral’ dimension of the
presence of Marxism in history. What these exorcism sessions tell us is essen-
tially that, like the dead who are feared not to be at rest, Marxism never stops
haunting our present (how else are we to explain the repetition-compulsion
that drives such ritual putting to death?). They also tell us that every ‘death’
of Marxism will invariably be followed by its ‘return’2 on the occasion of a
changed conjuncture, like the one we are doubtless currently witnessing.
In a way, Marxism escapes the spectral repetition of death and resurrection
only to enter into crisis, and this is something that gives it a rather disturbing
resemblance to psychoanalysis and the ‘natural’ sciences (compare with the
‘crisis of physics’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century, concomitant,
moreover, with the rst crisis of Marxism).3 Is this a merely formal analogy?
It would appear not, in so far as, like the natural sciences and psychoanalysis,
Marxism can only be dened as a combination of theory/practice stamped
by a radical historicity, and not as a doctrinal corpus formed sub specie aeter-
nitatis, or rather, let us say that it only presents itself thus as a result of cer-
tain conjunctures. In this connection, ‘crises’ are moments when, generating
‘controversies’ that witness a confrontation between contradictory theses, the
discrepancies internal to the theory/practice mix are paraded in the full light
of day and pose the question of a wholesale reorganisation of the theoretico-
practical conguration.
Now – and this is where the convergence with the natural sciences ends – it
is completely illusory to think that the ‘crises of Marxism’ are simple transi-
tional moments, separating two more or less stable states of theory/practice –
2
For a development of this theme, see Kouvélakis 2000.
3
Lenin begins the section of Chapter 5 of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism entitled
‘The Crisis in Modern Physics’, with this quotation from ‘the famous French physicist
Henri Poincaré’: ‘there are “signs of a serious crisis” in physics’: Lenin 1968, p. 252.
On this episode, see Lecourt 1973.
The Crises of Marxism • 25
whether this transition is conceived in the manner of a succession of para-

digms enjoying consensus in the scientic community (T.S. Kuhn’s ‘scientic
revolutions’); or as the crossing of internal thresholds of scienticity thanks
to repeated ‘epistemological breaks’ (the French tradition of Bachelard and
Canguilhem). This is because Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contri-
bution itself, including the internal discrepancies, limits and incompletion of
his œuvre, crisis theory. This is an effect of, and reaction to, the shock wave
that the founding event of modernity (the French Revolution and its repercus-
sions) set off in the sphere of theory and culture. A reection of the original
crisis of bourgeois society and emergent capitalism, whose absolute equiva-
lence with the actuality of uninterrupted revolution it posited, Marxism is
such, above all, in that it duplicates the crisis within the impurity of its theo-
retico-practical conguration. Inseparable from an imperative of ‘scientic-
ity’ (which no real Marxism, not even the most ferociously ‘anti-positivist’,
has been able to do without), Marxism conceived this in a wholly original
manner (on this point, only psychoanalysis sustains comparison, as Althusser
judiciously noted),4 since in the nal analysis it refers to nothing other than
an intrinsically agonistic eld, a tendency struggle – a struggle that focuses
in itself, via the mechanism of displacement of lines of demarcation and its
capacity to reformulate problems, the historicity and productivity of the the-
ory. The Marxist theoretico-practical mix can only assert itself as the bearer
of the ‘spirit of scission’ (Sorel) immanent in the capitalist order in so far as
it (re)constitutes itself as a ‘scissile science’,5 irreducibly divided into a multi-
plicity of tendencies, governed by a relationship of mutual interdependence
that takes the form of confrontation.
‘Fin-de-siècle’ crises?
Despite its abstract character, this brief reminder of the constitutive dimen-
sion of the crisis of Marxism is necessary in order to place the conjunctures
of particular crises in historical perspective. This is especially so for the two
crises which, separated by about a century (end of the nineteenth century
and of twentieth century), dene a historical cycle of Marxism, whose effects
4
See Althusser 1991.
5
See Althusser 1991 and the discussion of this notion in Balibar 1991, pp. 80–9.
have not been exhausted. In these two cases, what is immediately striking
on comparison of the inaugural texts (Masaryk and Bernstein for the crisis of
the nineteenth century, Althusser for that of the twentieth) is the repetition
of what seems like the symptomatology peculiar to the processes called crises
of Marxism. We nd the same inaugural observation of a crisis in the concrete
forms of proletarian politics (the schizophrenia of German Social Democracy,
torn between an unconsciously reformist practice and an impotent revolu-
tionary discourse; the crisis of the workers’ movement suffering in the long
term the effects of the embodiment of twentieth-century revolutions as states).
There is the same disquiet faced with the realisation of the unnished and
internally contradictory character of Marx’s œuvre, even in the cornerstone
of the theory – the magnum opus, Capital.6 There is the same doubt about the
actuality of the revolution, especially as regards its subjective conditions (the
historical mission vested in the proletariat).7 The same protest too against
the primacy attributed to the ‘economy’ by historical materialism and against
a ‘determinist’ and ‘necessitarian’ vision of social dynamics.8 The same proc-
lamation as well of the regenerative character and creative potential of the
crisis for Marxism itself.
This last point is worth emphasising, given how forcefully it is asserted
among authors who can scarcely be suspected of displaying any desire for
6
Even before Volume Three of Capital appeared, Conrad Schmidt had launched
the debate on the validity of the law of value – a debate that took off again after its
publication, in particular with the interventions of Engels, Sombart and Böhm-Bawerk
on the compatibility between Volumes One and Three. Generally speaking, the camp
hostile to orthodoxy – with the (doubtful) exception of Labriola (see Bidet 1988) – was
favourable to challenging the labour theory of value (compare Bernstein 1961, pp.
24ff, Sorel 1982, pp. 145–9, and Labriola 1934, pp. 25–9). For a general overview, see
Besnier 1976. A century later, at the moment when he began to speak of a crisis of
Marxism, Althusser cited the ‘ctitious’ character of the unity of the order of expo-
sition in Capital as a rst example of the ‘contradictions’ internal to Marx’s œuvre
(Althusser 1979, pp. 232–4).
7
Bluntly summarising the dominant interpretation of Engels’s ‘political testament’
within the Second International, Masaryk asserted that in it Engels pronounced ‘the
futility of revolution’ and a rallying to ‘political and parliamentary tactics’ (Masaryk
1898, p. 515). Bernstein, who remained ambiguous as to the utopian or straightfor-
wardly undesirable character of revolution, in any event sharply challenged the thesis
of a proletariat that was homogeneous and revolutionary by nature (Bernstein 1961, pp.
6–12). To say the least, the ‘anti-classist’ and ‘anti-essentialist’ vigour of present-day
post-Marxism (see, for instance, Laclau and Mouffe 1985) is not without precedent.
8
This is another signicant point of convergence between Bernstein and Sorel (com-
pare Bernstein 1961, pp. 103–6 and Sorel 1982, pp. 106–9, 150–63). The importance of
these themes in the post-Marxist vision of the ‘plurality’ and ‘dispersion’ constitutive
of the social needs no emphasis (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, passim).
orthodoxy. Thus, at the very moment when he declares himself ‘fully con-
scious that [he] differs in several important points from the ideas to be found
in the theory of . . . Marx and Engels’,9 Bernstein denes his approach as a
‘revision in Marxism’,10 and even as a contribution to it as a ‘theory of modern
society’.11 Refusing to amalgamate ‘revisionism’ – a term with which he iden-
ties – with the project of ‘superseding Marx’,12 his aim is to revive the ‘critical
spirit’ inspired by Kant,13 and break with the ‘scholasticism’ of ‘orthodoxy’,14
by rectifying, via the requisite updating, the ‘gaps’ and ‘residues of utopia-
nism’15 that burden the theory founded by Marx.
Close on his heels, Sorel, who warmly applauded Bernstein’s critique of
the orthodoxy of Engels and Kautsky and even regarded it as a ‘work of
rejuvenation of Marxism’ and a ‘return to the Marxist spirit’,16 discerned in
the ‘crisis’ and ‘decomposition of Marxism’, ‘a great advance’,17 the begin-
ning of a period of secularisation of the doctrine.18 To the great displeasure
of his trans-Alpine friend and interlocutor, Labriola, he carried on brandish-
ing these terms.19 ‘Purged’ of ‘everything that is not specically Marxist’,20
9
Bernstein 1961, p. 3.
10
‘As regards theory, it would be more accurate to speak of a revision in Marxism
than of an anti-Marxist revision’ (quoted in Lidtke 1976, p. 349).
11
12
Bernstein 1961, p. 213 (translation modied).
13
‘It is not a matter of going back to the letter of what the Königsberg philosopher
wrote, but to the fundamental principle of his work: the critical spirit’ (Bernstein 1961,
pp. 223–4; translation modied). The famous last chapter of his book (‘Ultimate Aim
and Tendency’) has as its sub-title ‘Kant against Cant’. However, Lidtke stresses that
while being steeped in the neo-Kantian climate of the epoch, Bernstein never took
this to its ultimate consequences (Lidtke 1976, p. 375).
14
Bernstein 1961, p. 4 (translation modied).
15
Bernstein 1961, pp. 25, 210.
16
Sorel 1982, p. 182.
17
‘The current crisis of scientic socialism marks a great advance: it facilitates
the progressive movement by emancipating thinking from its shackles’: Sorel 1982,
p. 91.
18
Sorel 1982, p. 215.
19
‘Sorel has delivered himself body and soul to the crisis of Marxism, treats of it,
expounds it, comments on it with gusto whenever he gets an opportunity’: Labriola
1934, p. 179. Labriola, a careful and profound critic of Sorel, Masaryk, and Bernstei-
nian revisionism, while never conceding the legitimacy of the ‘crisis of Marxism’,
nevertheless accepted the need for a ‘direct and genuine revision of the problems of
historical science’ (Labriola 1970, p. 293). He rejected orthodoxy and revisionism alike
and argued that ‘[s]ince this theory is, in its very essence, critical, it cannot be contin-
ued, applied, and improved, unless it criticises itself’ (Labriola 1934, p. 29). Labriola’s
term for this theory was ‘critical communism’ (Labriola 1966, p. 244).
20
Sorel 1982, p. 252.
this ‘other’ secularising decomposition would render Marxism once again

adequate to the practice of proletarian self-organisation, concretely embodied
in revolutionary syndicalism.21 Even Masaryk, the typical positivist scholar
with vaguely ‘progressive’ and socialist tendencies, concluded the article that
publicly launched the debate on the ‘crisis of Marxism’ by interpreting it as
the beginning of a possible renewal, if not of Marxism, then at least of social-
ism, which was bound to be reborn on the very basis of capitalist relations and
their continued effects.22
In proclaiming Marxism’s entry into crisis towards the end of the 1970s, and
in banking on the liberating aspects of this performative statement, Althusser
(as we can see) was hardly breaking new ground, contrary to what he himself
seemed to think.23 This amnesia, however, which is no real cause for surprise
in an author who never attached much importance to anything outside his
own extraordinarily selective and Gallocentric reading of Marx, is accompa-
nied by an omission of a different order. Althusser, in fact, comes to ‘ofcially
launch’ the crisis of Marxism without a single mention of what Marxism is the
intellectual Other of: capitalism. There is merely a passing reference to the ‘par-
adox’ of the different paths being followed by the Communist parties in the
context of ‘unprecedented levels . . . [in] . . . the struggles of the working class
and of the people’, combined with ‘the most serious crisis which imperialism
has ever known’.24 And then we pass onto serious matters: the ‘theoretical
21
‘In acting, the workers fashion real social science; they follow the paths that cor-
respond to Marx’s basic, essential theses’: Sorel 1982, p. 90. Some three decades later,
in a much darker context, Karl Korsch drew conclusions that were rather similar to
Sorel’s as regards the outcome of the ‘crisis of Marxism’ (Korsch 1973, pp. 166–7).
22
Given the decline in the terms of intellectual debate that has occurred, especially
in France, after two decades of violent anti-Marxist campaigns, it is worth quoting
the conclusion of this article, written a little over a century ago: ‘Even if Marxism
was completely awed, socialism would not collapse. It has real foundations in the
clear defects of today’s social organization, in its injustice and immorality, in the
great material, intellectual and moral poverty of the masses. Hence the opponents of
socialism would be mistaken if they thought that this crisis could be of much use to
them. On the contrary, it can provide new forces for socialism, if its leaders march
boldly towards the truth. This is what I feel obliged to say after having signalled the
facts’ (Masaryk 1898, p. 528).
23
Whether in the text of his public intervention at the Venice conference, or in an
unpublished text where he takes up the question of the crisis of Marxism (Althusser
1994a, pp. 359–66), Althusser suggests that the term has been brandished solely ‘by
the enemies of the labour movement’, with the aim of ‘intimidat[ing]’ Marxists, by
announcing the ‘collapse’ and ‘death’ of their theory (Althusser 1979, p. 225).
24
Althusser 1979, p. 226.
crisis within Marxism’.25 To say the least, the proposed reconstruction of that
crisis is strange, since, having ‘started in the 1930s’, it went completely unno-
ticed by the author of For Marx. Althusser, loyal to his habits, was silent about
the other diagnoses of a ‘crisis of Marxism’ issued during this period (Korsch
as early as 1931 and Henri Lefebvre in 1958).26 Moreover, after some reec-
tions on the effects of Stalinism that are as schematic as they are unoriginal,
the text lingers over the ‘discovery’ that Althusser seems to have made at this
moment: the existence of ‘lacunae’, and even ‘enigmas’, in Marx’s œuvre (the
order of exposition of Capital, the state, or the problem of the working-class
organisation). Althusser, however, would only dedicate a single unnished,
posthumous text to these issues.27 In all this, at any rate, capitalism remains
obstinately and utterly off-stage. As for the references to the ‘struggles of the
masses’ scattered throughout, these are more like a ritual incantation than an
analysis – if only in outline – of some concrete situation or practice.
The contrast with the crisis of the nineteenth century is, in this respect, truly
arresting. A mere glance at the introductory texts sufces to indicate the acute
understanding which, notwithstanding their divergent conclusions, Bern-
stein, Sorel or Luxemburg demonstrated as regards the overdetermination of
the crisis of Marxism by extra-theoretical factors. To put it differently, if the
crisis of politics that refers to Marx, above all, that of the organisations of the
workers’ movement, is at the centre of the controversy, it is constantly and
highly systematically related to these conditions. In other words, it is linked
to the great transformation which capitalism underwent at the end of the cen-
tury under the dual impact of working-class struggles and the revival of the
25
26
Korsch’s text is comparatively well-known (cf. Korsch 1931). However, justice
should be done to the lucidity of Lefebvre, who in that monument of twentieth-century
Marxist literature La Somme et le reste delivered a pioneering analysis of the ‘crisis of
philosophy’ (Lefebvre 1989, pp. 9–151), and in particular, of the ‘crisis of Marxism’,
of which the ‘crisis of philosophy’ was only one aspect (p. 220). This analysis was
accompanied by a long study of the concrete conjuncture of the rise of Gaullism, the
paralysis of the Left and of the PCF, as well as by all sorts of theoretical material
which led to the extraordinary productivity of Lefebvre’s interventions throughout
the subsequent decades – a work at the antipodes of Althusser’s self-destructive and
sterile ‘silence’.
27
And which ends on an interrogative note that is eloquent as to Althusser’s
confusion at the time: ‘for to speak of what politics might be involves giving one’s
opinion on the party. But what does one do in the party if not politics?’ (Althusser
1994a, p. 512).
cycles of accumulation, involving the extension of suffrage, the transition to

a ‘monopoly’ phase after the crisis of 1890–5, imperial expansion, changes in
the role of the state, and so on).
This perception of the ‘absolute’ character of the crisis, as a moment when
the discrepancies in the theory and in its forms of subjective existence impacted
with the changing reality of their object, is not unrelated to the extraordinary
productivity displayed by this ‘original crisis’ of Marxism. It showed a real
capacity to reformulate and reorder the questions around which the Marxist
theoretico-practical complex had been constructed, including interpretations
of the ‘economic’ transformation of the system (the debate on ‘capitalist col-
lapse’ and the new modes of accumulation); questions of strategy (the role of
parliament and the mass strike, trade unions and co-operatives); conceptions
of working-class organisation (party/class relations, the place of unions); and
nally, assessments of the ‘imperial’ realities of the new stage of capitalism
(militarism, colonial expansion, the national question).
If, as Gérard Bensussan notes, it is true that the outbreak of the First World
War and the ensuing disaster in the working-class movement reveal the
‘objective limits’ of any ‘optimistic and productive’ interpretation of the cri-
sis,28 the idea that it was precisely during this crisis that the materials which
made possible the ‘reversal’ of the disaster into a revolutionary offensive were
being prepared,29 appears no less justied.
The end of an era of crises?

In the light of the comparison, it does not seem exaggerated to reverse the
usual perceptual schemata of contemporary history. It was not the crisis of the
end of the nineteenth century that had ‘n-de-siècle Wagnerian overtones’,30
but that of the end of twentieth century, harbinger of a crushing defeat of the
subaltern classes, which set off a ‘process of dis-emancipation’31 of literally
epochal signicance. If the performativity of Althusser’s text proved effective,
it was precisely due to this fact. Far from being conned, as the rst optimistic
28
Bensussan 1985, p. 263.
29
If only in gradually clearing the way for a ‘left critique’ of orthodoxy, on bases
that were much clearer than those of Sorel or even Labriola.
30
Anderson 1983, p. 66.
31
Tosel 1996, pp. 9–10.
commentators had it, to a ‘regional crisis of Latin Marxism’, bound up with

the ebbing of the mass Communist parties and the failure of Eurocommu-
nism,32 the ‘break’ in the history of the working-class movement diagnosed in
the European context of 1977 marked the beginning of a general mutation of
conjuncture. This is so, even if, as regards the current topography of Marxism,
the process proved uneven, releasing new zones of inuence centred on the
anglophone world.33
It remains the case that if Althusser opened the crisis, he also frustrated
its unfolding and productivity, as a result of a narrow, theoreticist vision of
its deep springs, of an absence of historical sense both at the level of Marx-
ist theory and of the working-class movement. This is not unconnected to
the ‘depthlessness’ characteristic of postmodern consciousness according to
Fredric Jameson,34 and even of a tone of ‘pathos’ – the very thing for which, in
a familiar mechanism of ‘projective displacement’, he criticises the Gramsci of
the Prison Notebooks and even Lenin in this same text.35 All this, conveying a
disarray in the immediacy of a situation of defeat, had its specic weight in the
form of the ‘veritable débandade’,36 with its train of repentance, acts of despair,
and the unleashing of nihilistic drives, taken by the retreat of Marxism in the
Latin world, especially in France. But it is also true, as his correspondence of
the time indicates, that Althusser was conscious of his own limits and, con-
versely, of the imperatives that the crisis was already placing on the agenda.
Evoking a time when it would be necessary to be equipped with ‘concrete
knowledge in order to speak of such things as the state, the economic crisis,
organizations, the “socialist” countries’, he confessed:
I don’t possess this knowledge and it would be necessary, like Marx in

1852, to ‘begin again at the beginning’. But it is far too late, given my age,
fatigue, weariness, and also solitude.37
To grasp the distance that separates us from this conjuncture today, it is per-
haps necessary to pose the question: where do we stand with respect to this
32
This is the hypothesis advance by Perry Anderson in Anderson 1983, pp. 28–30,
68–81. See the balance-sheet drawn up by Alex Callinicos below, Chapter 4.
33
This is certainly the least questionable part of Anderson’s diagnosis.
34
Jameson 1991.
35
36
37
Althusser 1994b, p. 528.
solitude? Does its echo resonate in silence and nothingness? Or does it open
onto another solitude, which Althusser also had in mind38 – the creative,
liberating solitude of a Machiavelli? Without claiming to offer a denitive
answer to that question, the hypothesis that I am advancing at least seeks to
impart some consistency to the alternative terms of the question. In essence,
the ‘crisis of Marxism’ is already behind us, which is by no means necessarily
reassuring for Marxism. The more ‘open’ the period we are living through,
without excluding new defeats that could lead to a denitive disintegration,
is preparing at least some of the conditions required for a new ‘encounter’
between Marxism and mass practice and, therewith, a comprehensive radical
theoretical reconstruction.
Like its inaugural act (Venice, November 1977), the end of the last crisis of
Marxism can be dated with precision. It began twelve years later, nearly to the
day, in Berlin, and ended in 1991 in Moscow, with the collapse of the USSR. A
grand nale of the capitalist restructuring was underway since the mid-1970s
under the sign of neoliberalism. The end of the states identifying with Marx
and socialism put an end also to the conditions of the crisis of Marxism in two
respects, which can be conveniently designated ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’.
Subjectively, the end of the embodiment of twentieth-century revolutions
in states delivered the coup de grâce to the organisations of the working-class
movement, and the mass practices, that referred to it, even if in critical or
openly oppositional fashion. With Stalinism and its descendents there also
disappeared the various ‘anti-Stalinisms’. In reality, the shock wave of 1989–
91 affected the whole of the working-class movement, with social democracy,
rapidly joined by substantial sections of the Communist parties, reacting to
the removal of the ‘Communist’ obstacle by abandoning what had formed the
basis of its identity and by rallying to the management of the new order, par-
ticularly in its imperialist dimension. The persistence of Communist parties,
or parties directly derived from them, signicant above all in the countries of
the ‘periphery’, should not induce illusions. The ‘international Communist
movement’ now belongs irrevocably to the past and this very persistence,
even in the forms of the most open nostalgia, is not to be explained so much
as of residues of the past, but much more as the result of, or as a reaction to,
38
See Althusser 1999.
the new sociopolitical realities created by capitalist restructuring on a world

scale.
In these conditions, it is hardly surprising to register the disappearance of
any possible ‘orthodoxy’, but also the concomitant disappearance of any ‘her-
esy’ or ‘heterodoxy’, given that these notions clearly presuppose one another.
This unquestionably involves a major break with any previous state of crisis of
Marxism, where what was at issue in large part consisted precisely in simul-
taneously redening the terms of an ‘orthodoxy’ and a ‘revisionism’. Both of
them refer to the shared reality of a Marxism that had become the ideological
and doctrinal reference for mass organisations and state structures. Such an
observation certainly licenses no triumphalism, since it appears to signal the
end of any relationship between Marxism and organised forms of collective
practice, without its future seeming to be any more assured in existing public
institutions, especially higher education.39 But, and this is the reverse side of
any ‘vacuum’, it leaves the question of an encounter between a ‘reconstructed’
Marxism and the new forms of emancipatory struggle that neoliberal capital-
ism carries within it entirely open.
From this simultaneous collapse of orthodoxies and heresies likewise
derives the other striking feature of the current ‘exit from crisis’: the absence
of meaningful ‘controversy’ within the space that continues to recognise itself
in the Marxist constellation (with one exception that will be dealt with below).
It is as if the ‘thousand Marxisms’ to which André Tosel politely refers,40 co-
existed in a pacic landscape from which the need to generate controversy
seems strangely absent. Given Marxism’s status as a ‘scissile science’, a status
that crisis conjunctures have amply conrmed, this surely involves an altera-
tion of great signicance, with ambiguous and unstable effects. An effect of
attenuation unquestionably predominates insofar as it is in a struggle between
tendencies that the productivity of Marxism nds its very principle, the cohe-
sion of the theory, its only legitimate source. This explains, moreover, why the
pacication of the theoretical eld in question is strictly complementary to its
39
In particular, this is the viewpoint of Étienne Balibar, who, abandoning his habitual
aporetic and ambivalent formulations, categorically asserts: ‘The century-long cycle to
which I have referred (1890–1990) certainly marks the end of any mutual attachment
between Marx’s philosophy and an organization of whatever kind, and hence, a fortiori,
between that philosophy and a State’ (Balibar 1995, p. 118, my emphasis).
40
See his contribution below, Chapter 3.
extreme fragmentation. On the other hand, if the validity of the hypothesis of

the end of a historical cycle is accepted, then it is the mode of conictuality of
the previous period that has expired, precisely on account of its constitutive
function. We would then be witnessing something like the end of the ‘crisis-
form’ of Marxism, inseparable from the end of a certain ‘party-form’.
In this case, the trend that is currently emerging could be interpreted as a
slow reconstruction ‘from cold’ of the theoretical problematic, in conditions
not simply of defeat – the whole history of Marxism, beginning with that of
Marx, unfolds under the sign of defeat41 – but through a mutation in the very
status of Marxism as a theoretico-practical complex. The condition is one of
maximum dissociation between activist groups adapting ‘pragmatically’ to
a fragmentary practice, and a theory entrenched in some academic islands,
where it struggles to persuade people that social transformation refers to any-
thing other than, for example, an expansion of Habermasian communicative
action or Rawlsian principles of justice.
The crisis of the new century

More profoundly, however, the hypothesis of a change of historical cycle is
corroborated ‘objectively’ by the transformation of capitalism that certainly
predated the dramatic reverse of 1989–91, but to which the latter imparted an
irresistible force. The real strength of Bernstein’s revisionism, archetype of all
the ‘post-Marxisms’ of the subsequent century, consisted not so much in the
‘purely’ theoretical force of his arguments but in his perception of the inevi-
tability of changes in the politics of the working-class organisations induced
by the ‘passive revolution’ of capitalism underway in the imperialist period,
particularly in its dual aspect of an enhanced capacity for sociopolitical com-
promises within the countries of the ‘centre’ and the extension of colonial
violence, sustained by militarist escalation, to the outside and the periphery.
Bernstein could thus allow himself to shelve the two pillars of working-class
theory and practice in the nineteenth century. One is economic catastrophism,
which justied the quietism of orthodoxy and which the economic growth fol-
41
And not simply that – for this reason suspect – of a ‘Western Marxism’, guilty of
damaging contact with bourgeois culture, as dened by Perry Anderson (1976).
lowing the crisis of 1890–5 seemed to have denitively liquidated.42 The other
is ‘Blanquism’, codename for the insurrectionary traditions of a working-class
movement that was still widely infused with the memory of the Commune,
the revolutions of 1848 and, perhaps above all,43 of the Great Revolution and
1793. Bernstein wagered entirely on factors issued from the new equilibria of
the system, which crystallysed the effects of its expanded reproduction and
the conquests of popular struggle. Among these, was the dynamic of democ-
ratisation (which he deemed irrepressible) triggered by the extension of the
suffrage in several European countries and by the abolition of the anti-social-
ist law in German; the strength of rapidly expanding co-operatives and trade
unions; the expansion of the ‘middle classes’; the increasing complexity of the
social structure (especially the growing heterogeneity of the proletariat); and
nally, the more prosaic but quite crucial element of the pacifying effect antic-
ipated by the dominant classes because of the working-class movement’s sup-
port for a policy of colonial expansion and defence of ‘national interests’.44
There is no need to point out the extent to which, confronted with this
resolutely offensive and prospective posture, conducted – under the sign
of ‘Marx . . . against Marx’45 – by an executor of Engels’s will possessed of
great independent-mindedness and unquestionable intellectual honesty, the
response of orthodoxy – Kautsky but also, initially, Luxemburg46 (with the
42
In this sense, Gustafsson’s formulation, which is certainly one-sided, contains
an important truth: ‘the revisionist tendency of the 1890s was, in the last analysis,
the consequence of the cyclical economic boom that started at the beginning of the
decade’ (Gustafsson 1976, pp. 275–6).
43
As Eric Hobsbawm has stressed, throughout the nineteenth century, in the eyes
of the revolutionary working-class movement it was ‘Jacobinism’ that appeared to
furnish the key to the problem bequeathed by the defeats of 1848–50 (Hobsbawm
1990, pp. 40–1). In contrast, notwithstanding diametrically opposed motives, it was a
shared desire to have done with the resonance of the Jacobin tradition that explains
the considerable support Sorel gave to Bernstein, despite the latter’s moderation
and, more serious still, his praise for liberalism – supreme sin for the theoretician
of revolutionary syndicalism. It is scarcely surprising to nd the old refrain of the
rejection of the ‘Jacobin’ conception of revolution resurfacing in 1980s post-Marxism
(see Laclau and Mouffe 1985, pp. 177–8).
44
Signicantly, Bernstein concluded his eulogy of colonisation and German expan-
sionism with the statement that ‘[t]he higher civilization ultimately can claim a higher
right’: Bernstein 1961, pp. 178–9.
45
46
It should not escape us that Reform or Revolution (Luxemburg 1970, pp. 33–90)
largely adopts the arguments of Kautsky, to whom Luxemburg was very close at this
time, also personally. It was only from the debate on the mass strike, fuelled by the
Belgian experience of 1902–3, and, later still, from the 1905 Russian revolution, that
exception – decisive, it is true – of the issue of militarism and colonialism) –

could seem weak. Moreover, the perception of this rst crisis of Marxism in
the Latin world (Sorel, Labriola) offers ample evidence of this.
In this connection, the ‘post-Marxism’ constructed during the last crisis of
Marxism, and which has found its bible in the work by Chantal Mouffe and
Ernesto Laclau,47 is a ‘poor man’s Bernsteinism’, or, in other words, a revision-
ism that is unaware of itself in as much as it is mistaken as to both its novelty
and its object. The results of the ‘controversy’ that it launched (the sole excep-
tion to the tendency to a pacication of the Marxist eld)48 soon appeared
meagre enough, from the standpoint both of theoretical productivity and of
the theory/practice relationship. On the one hand, the sophistication of the
discourse around ‘hegemony’, ‘multiple subject positions’, and ‘radical, plu-
ral democracy’ cannot disguise an increasingly patent rallying-call to liberal
common sense and to a state of fragmentation of social practices severely
tested by a capitalist offensive. On the other hand, the stance of reafrma-
tion in the theory’s core, albeit often judicious, and sometimes accompanied
by nostalgia for a return to a mythical ‘classical Marxism’, has proved inad-
equate when confronted with the realities of the capitalism’s new ‘passive
revolution’,49 and is just as cut off from collective practice as that advocated
by ‘neo-revisionism’. The latest episode in the cycle of the crises of Marxism
ended with a rather disappointing balance-sheet.
During this time, capitalist restructuring has been following its course. The
collapse of the ‘socialist’ states opens up vast zones of ‘external’ expansion
for it. The dismantling of the social compromises of the Keynesian period
opens up no less sizeable ‘internal’ zones of penetration. The working classes
are undergoing the experience of a traumatic reproletarianisation on a world
scale. Nation-states are enjoined to redeploy their forms of intervention in a
way that is exclusively functional for the new requirements of accumulation,
the Left of the party (Luxemburg, Mehring, Liebknecht) gradually detached itself
from the Kautskyite centre.
47
Cf. Laclau and Mouffe 1985.
48
See, in particular, Callinicos 1989, Geras 1990, and Wood 1998 [1986]. Signicantly,
both the ‘neo-revisionist’ literature and that of its opponents is exclusively anglophone –
an additional indication of the displacement of the main zones of Marxism outside
of Southern Europe.
49
For a reading of capitalist transformation in the light of this Gramscian concept,
see Kouvélakis 1996.
while a new imperialist order is being established that is now without any
counterweight of the state variety. Faced with this reality, which resoundingly
conrms the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity peculiar to capitalism,
the question arises whether Fredric Jameson’s thesis, according to which ‘a
postmodern capitalism will always call a postmodern Marxism into existence
over and against itself’,50 has found initial conrmation?
Various facts prompt a response in the afrmative. Unnameable at the
moment of its triumph, constantly veiled under the term of ‘market econ-
omy’, the system is increasingly referred to by its proper name. Few now
doubt the relevance of the term ‘capitalism’ to refer to the reality that is now
expanding on a planetary scale and the explosive contradictions that it har-
bours. It is not fortuitous if it is precisely in this conjuncture that Marxism
has progressed in the direction of the ‘cognitive mapping’ for which Jameson
called when he formulated his hypothesis on postmodernism as the cultural
logic of late capitalism.51 Whether in the recent works on the current crisis of
capitalism always grasped in the historical medium-long durée, as those of
Robert Brenner, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy; or of the ‘historico-
geographical materialism’ launched by David Harvey; or the approaches to
the national phenomenon proposed by Benedict Anderson; or the study of
postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ initiated by Jameson,52
Marxism has unquestionably demonstrated a capacity to think the present
which, while not supplying any guarantees for the future, offers the best refu-
tation of prognoses of collapse or death.
There is something more, however: naming the system is in fact both a
condition, and also a sign, which indicates that, subjectively speaking, some-
thing different has become possible. Not without being obliged to undertake
the requisite labour of self-criticism, the experience of defeat is beginning to
be superseded. The resumption of social struggles on a world scale, which
was clear from the mid-1990s onwards (from Korea to Chiapas), including
the December 1995 movement in France, the leftward turn in Latin America,
or the extension of ‘anti-globalisation’ mobilisations in the wake of Seattle,
50
Jameson 1993, p. 195.
51
Jameson 1991, pp. 399–418.
52
For references to these works, readers are referred to the Bibliography at the
end of this volume.
doubtless marks the entry of the new capitalist order constructed under neo-
liberal hegemony into irreversible crisis. There is no doubt that the future of
Marxism, which always pays a heavy price for its status of crisis theory par
excellence, will be played out here, in the patient reconstruction of the condi-
tions for the collective struggle for liberation.
Chapter Three
The Development of Marxism: From the End of
Marxism-Leninism to a Thousand Marxisms –
France-Italy, 1975–2005
André Tosel
Preliminary reections
The inglorious end of Soviet Communism, the disso-
lution of the USSR, the victory of liberal democracy,
and especially that of the capitalist world economy,
seemed to mark the end of Marxism and close down
any possibility of renewal. The hegemonic intellec-
tual system in political, economic and social terms is
liberalism (more or less social, or more or less neolib-
eral). Behind the anti-totalitarian defence of human
rights, the market has imposed itself as the deni-
tive institution of postmodernity. Marxism suppos-
edly belongs to a past of errors and horrors. Such is
the credo of the la pensée unique, of the world-view
which, reversing the hopes of Gramsci, has become
the common sense of the intelligentsia, and of busi-
ness and political circles, and which is laid down as
the religion of the individual with the full force of
the means of communication. Hence, it supposedly
remains to write an obituary column on the now
denitive death of Marx and Marxisms and release
thought to confront the ‘the time of the end of the
grand narrative of emancipation’.
40 • André Tosel
But things are not so simple. The history of the years 1968–2005 is extremely
uneven. While Marxism-Leninism sank ever deeper into irreversible crisis and
moved towards its end, several major operations of theoretical reconstruction
testied to the contradictory vitality of the hard core of Marx’s œuvre. Between
1968 and 1977, the last attempts at a revival of Marxist theory in the tracks of
the Third International, or on its margins, emerged. They involved propos-
als for intellectual, moral and political reform addressed to the Communist
parties, whether in power or opposition, by theoreticians who were members
of them. The œuvre of the great heretics and communist philosophers expe-
rienced a nal, transient blaze. György Lukács (1885–1971) contributed his
last great work, Zür Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Sein (1971–3), while Ernst
Bloch (1885–1977) published Atheismus im Christentum (1968), Das Materialis-
mus Problem. Seine Geschichte und Substanz (1968), and Experimentum Mundi
(1975). In Italy, publication of the original edition of the Quaderni del carcere
(1975) of Antonio Gramsci facilitated a better appreciation of the philosophy
of praxis, by differentiating it from the interpretation offered by Palmiro Tog-
liatti (leader of the Italian Communist Party), and made it possible to assess its
potential one last time. In France, Louis Althusser (1918–90) made the debate
on a new extension of the materialist science of history and its forms a major
element in the last international philosophico-political discussion of Marxism,
with Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants and Éléments d’autocritique,
both published in 1974. In fact, the shadow of 1968 held out the prospect of
going beyond the old orthodoxy and even allowed for hopes that the project
of an escape from Stalinism from the Left might be resumed, at a time when
the issue of a revolutionary reformism centred on the rise of instances of radi-
cal democratisation was being posed. The de facto competition between these
different models for reconstructing Marxist theory, nurtured by a re-reading
of Marx, contradictory in their relationship to Hegel and the dialectic (which
Hegel? Which dialectic?), marked by great heterogeneity in their references
to elements of the philosophical or scientic tradition, divided in their assess-
ment of liberalism. This competition between an ontology of social being, a
critical utopia of the not-yet, a philosophy of praxis, and a philosophy of mate-
rialist intervention in the sciences and philosophy, represented a moment of
great intensity which the over-hasty gravediggers of Marx affect to ignore.
It was accompanied by a great deal of research and the importance of Marx’s
contribution and the great Marxist heresies continued to make itself felt in
The Development of Marxism in France and Italy • 41
historical and social science. But it was very brief. In fact, it still remained to
explain what had occurred in the USSR and what had really become of the
October 1917 revolution; to explain how – for reasons some of which were
certainly external, but others internal – an œuvre of unprecedented, heterodox,
revolutionary critical radicalism had been able to give rise to a dogmatism as
sclerotic as Marxism-Leninism, with its laws of history and handful of ‘dialec-
tical’ categories, open to all sorts of manipulation, a pathetic ideology legiti-
mating a politics that was unaware of its true character, sealing the union
between a philosophy that had once again become science of the sciences and
a total Party-State. The inability of Soviet Communism to reform itself in a
democratic direction, its deciency as regards human and civil rights, its eco-
nomic inefciency in satisfying needs whose legitimacy it acknowledged –
all this rendered it incapable of confronting the pitiless war of position that
had been imposed on it since its foundation. The argument from the gulag
became universal and wholly delegitimised Marx and the reconstructions of
the Marxist heretics, subjecting them to the same verdict of infamy. Much of
the Marxist intelligentsia, which had revelled in ruminating on Jean-Paul Sar-
tre’s thesis – that Marxism is unsurpassable as long as the moment of which
it is the expression has not been surpassed (the thesis of Search for a Method of
1957, which became the introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960)1 –
reckoned that the hour of liberation from the imposture of the century had
struck. Most joined the ranks of liberalism and Karl Popper’s falsicationist
epistemology. The self-dissolution of the largest Communist party in Europe
(the Italian), which abandoned the ambiguous principles of Eurocommunism
to join the Euro-Left and take the name of Party of the Democratic Left, and
the general crisis of strategy experienced by the Western Communist parties,
which covered with a Marxist fundamentalism their rapprochement with clas-
sically social-democratic positions, all equated to the West-European equiva-
lent of the implosion of the USSR after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
And yet, beneath this spectacular obliteration of a culture, free, pluralistic
research continued. However, it had now lost one of its erstwhile major char-
acteristics – its link with identiable political forces and social actors (as com-
pact as the working-class movement), which capitalist modernisation was in
the process of violently dispersing. The disappearance of the party intellectual,
1
See Sartre 1968, p. 7.
42 • André Tosel
the fading of the gure of the intellectual as critical consciousness and the
emergence of the gure of the intellectual as expert, did not represent an epi-
sode in the end of history, summoned to contemplate itself in the marriage
between liberal-representative democracy and the sovereign market that had
nally been effected. Marx continued to be the subject of topical re-readings
and represented a moment in attempts to revive a critical theory commensu-
rate with the new era, different from the reconstructive endeavours ventured
by the great communist heretics of the previous period. Rather than an end of
Marxism, what occurred was the diffuse and, above all, well-nigh impotent
owering of a thousand Marxisms, as the historian of the world economy
Immanuel Wallerstein has nicely put it.2 The problem is an adequate assess-
ment of this situation, which frustrates the hopes of Marxism’s undertakers.
The immediate cause of the paradoxical emergence of a thousand Marxisms
is no mystery. It stems from the dynamic of global capitalism and the emer-
gence of new contradictions, on the one hand, and from the unique status of
Marx’s thought, on the other. Let us begin with the second point. The fate of
this thought, which (to adopt Henri Lefebvre’s expression) became a world, is
not comparable to that of any other philosophy. In the course of a century, it
underwent developments that extended it to the human race and prior to its
last crisis it had ended up, in its Leninist form, inspiring a third of humanity.
If the hopes of emancipation it aroused were as boundless and overween-
ing as the disillusionment caused by the terrible and terrifying defeat of the
Bolshevik Revolution, and if we must not confuse Marx with Lenin, Lenin
with Stalin, and Stalin with Mao Zedong, there remains an enormous bloc
of ideas common to these Marxisms and their aberrations. Among them are
the idea that it is possible to put an end to the domination and exploitation
which stick to the capitalist mode of production like Nessus’s shirt, or the idea
that capitalist social being can be subject in its very immanence, in its eco-
nomic, political, social and cultural forms, to a critique that will only end only
when it does. This thinking, which is also a bloc of practices derived from
Marx, developed in the context of extraordinary internal oppositions within
these Marxisms, generating contradictory orthodoxies (Kautsky/Lenin, Sta-
lin/reconstructive Marxist heresies, Tito/Mao, etc.). This development was
2
See Wallerstein 1991.
always discontinuous, just as the relationship to Marx, whose unnished

work was only partially known, was always fragmentary. Each generation
has had to discover its own Marx (to paraphrase the title of a famous article by
the young Gramsci) and has also had to draw on a changing corpus. We need
only think of the fact that Volumes Two and Three of Capital only became
available at the end of the nineteenth century, that the 1844 Economic and Phil-
osophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology were only accessible at the end
of the 1930s, and that the major texts of 1858–63, including the Grundrisse,
were only really usable and used after 1945. This régime of discontinuous
development and recurrent crisis is thus the de facto norm for the existence of
a body of thinking that has simultaneously altered the historico-social world.
There would then be nothing to prevent us formulating the hypothesis that
the deep crisis affecting Marxism from within is the very mode of existence
and resurrection of the Marxist phoenix.
If it is wholly illegitimate to conclude that Marxism, which is fated to be
transformed, and which only exists in the open-ended series of its forms, has
arrived at its nal end. We must go much further. The discontinuous exis-
tence of Marxism also stems from its specicity, which is that, before 1914,
and again after 1917, it sought to tie itself to a real political movement. This
movement, created by the contradictions of the capitalist socio-historical
world, can only maintain itself in being when engaged in a ‘revolutionary’
transformation of the established order, embodied in the unwavering forms
of practical resistance mounted by social forces subject to capitalist domina-
tion. If its global expansion up to 1991 – date of the end of the USSR – seems
to give it some resemblance to a secular religion, with its orthodoxies and
heresies, with its ineradicable divorce between utopian promise and practical
fullment, it remains the case that Marxism has been more international than
the most universal of religions, and in a different way. It was born out of the
limits, contradictions and insufciencies of the liberal order – that other secu-
lar religion. It may be that this liberal order in its neoliberal form only won a
Pyrrhic victory in 1991. Certainly, this date clearly marks the end of a histori-
cal cycle that began in 1848 with the emergence of the social question and the
national question. Third-International Marxism was not wrecked solely by its
democratic decit, which cancelled the prospect of a revolutionary outcome
to the social question and a supersession of the crisis of liberalism. It was also
broken by its internationalist decit, by its inability to deal with the national
44 • André Tosel
question in the twentieth century in the context of the world economy. But it
appears increasingly clear that the victory of globalised, rationalised capital-
ism, theoretically sanctioned and prepared by the hegemony of liberalism,
issued in a new, unprecedented crisis of this new liberal order. The world
economy is faced with the globalisation of a new social question, which beto-
kens mass dis-emancipation and proletarianisation in the capitalist centres,
and a decline (differentiated, obviously) in the living conditions of vast num-
bers of human beings, all of this accompanied by a staggering transfer of social
wealth to what must be called a ruling class that is ever more concentrated and
yet divided by the ruthless economic war its fractions are waging. This same
world economy simultaneously confronts various national questions, often
racialised into ethnic questions, and rooted in the transnational management
of the international labour force and in the market’s contradictory differentia-
tion. The ambiguous current afrmation of a thousand Marxisms is thus the
harbinger of the incipient, unprecedented crisis of the new liberal order and
its forms of thought. Nothing is guaranteed – neither the historical capacity of
these neo-Marxisms to think and transform this new period, nor the ability of
liberalism to identify its crisis and control its results in a way that is compat-
ible with the systemic imperatives of the capitalist mode of production. The
thousand Marxisms likewise take an unprecedented form that will have to be
examined, if only because the end of the coercive (and always provisional)
unity of a Marxist orthodoxy renders their pluralism indeterminate. What,
in fact, is the minimal consensus as to what may appropriately be called a
legitimate Marxist interpretation, it being understood that this legitimacy is
‘weak’ in so far it has bid farewell to the prospect of becoming orthodoxy or
even heresy? This is the very question posed by Eric Hobsbawm, one of the
general editors of the most recent history of Marxism.3
In any event, one thing is certain: the period which began in 1991 is that
not of the end of Marxism, but of the end of Marxism-Leninism as a single,
dominant orthodoxy and, by a different token, of the great Marxist heresies,
insofar as they were secretly haunted by hopes for the one true Marxism.
Faced with the crisis that threatens the new liberal order at the point of its
seeming triumph both over Soviet Communism and over all anti-systemic
3
Hobsbawm 1982, pp. 36ff.
movements (the working-class movement and the national liberation and

anticolonial movement, both of them stably integrated), Marx’s thought
retains an enormous critical potential on which the thousand Marxisms will
be able to draw. For, as long as capitalism dominates, it demands a critique,
dictated by capitalism’s own self-criticism in its forms of existence. And Marx-
ism will be able to be appealed to, transformed, reconstructed, reworked, in
and through the renunciation, without any nostalgia, of the old certainties (on
the ultimate fate of capitalism, the univocal forms of the old class struggle,
the comparative merits of plan and market, the kinds of democracy required
for a transition, the very meaning of this transition, the place and content of
a labour freed from exploitation). Separated from the political practice of the
old Communist parties, in search of a new, problematic link between theory
and practice, the thousand Marxisms represent the fragile form of the broken,
discontinuous continuity of the Marxist tradition. Once again, as Hobsbawm
has pointed out, at some stage or other of their development they are vulner-
able to the resurgence within them of a Marxist fundamentalism. A funda-
mentalism neurotically xated on rehashing certain points identied with the
hard core of the theory (the generic importance of the class struggle, not anal-
ysed in its current, displaced forms; denunciation of the exploitation of work-
ers in ignorance of debates on the centrality of a labour that is in the process
of becoming non-central; unqualied condemnation of what is alleged to be
reformism or revisionism; scorn for the requisite rectication and reworking;
abstract maximalism; and so on).
It will be difcult to conceive the unity of a capitalism reproduced in its
mechanism of exploitation and transformed in its component parts and prac-
tices. It will also be difcult to reconstruct a link between the analysis of this
capitalism and a politics of profound yet always specic changes; to reformu-
late hopes for a better society without once again wrapping it in the illusion
of nally realising a perfect society; to impart to the inevitable eschatology the
unquestionably reduced, but all the more militant form of a stubborn, always
determinate struggle. It will be still more difcult to produce models that inte-
grate a self-criticism of the historical experience supported by previous Marx-
isms and a critique of the forms of globalised capitalism. But the open crisis
of liberalism is the objective foundation for the thousand Marxisms. Of itself,
this crisis supplies no guarantee of success for the simultaneous supersession
of the old Marxisms (plus the obsolete elements in Marx) and of liberalism.
46 • André Tosel
But the task is on the agenda and it will be a history which the neo-Marxisms
will make in the same way that human beings make their own history: it will
be accomplished in determinate conditions and in unexpected forms.
The crisis of (and in) Marxism: problematic reconstructions and

renunciations, 1975–89
This crisis exploded in the clear light of day at the end of the 1970s and was
justied by the inability of Marxist theoreticians to illuminate the course of
the twentieth century – to explain the evolution of the ‘socialist’ societies,
their character and their structures, on the basis of historical materialism. Ref-
erence to the democratic decit, denunciation of totalitarianism, insistence
on the ambiguities of the Marxist theory of the state and law, renunciation
of any necessitarian and nalistic philosophy of history, these reinforced the
claims of social and political liberalism, rather than giving rise to positive,
genuine theoretical reconstructions. If the former great heresies continued to
fuel inter-Marxist debates, the latter lost their philosophical purchase outside
of Marxist circles and were reduced to a secondary role. The hour of neo-
positivism struck, as did that of several variations on hermeneutics (whether
Heideggerian, postmodernist or otherwise) and of a return to various neo-
Kantian or phenomenological philosophies of the subject (theological or
otherwise). Marxist circles underwent a process of open or creeping disinte-
gration, bound up with the marginalisation (France and Spain), social-liberal
transformation (Italy), or implosion (Eastern Europe) of the Communist par-
ties. This particular crisis formed part of the more general crisis of capitalism
which, once the trente glorieuses of postwar reconstruction were over, had to
counter the tendency for prot rates to fall through global competition, the
management of a labour-force racialised and ethnicised by the reorganisation
of nation-states, the restructuring of the dominant poles in the North, and the
prosecution of a war of position against the ‘socialist camp’. The true objective
of what revealed itself ever more clearly to be a major offensive against the
welfare state and the working-class movement, and an enterprise of nancial
recolonisation of the Third World, was ideologically draped in the ag of the
human rights so cruelly outed in the ‘socialist’ countries. The crisis of Marx-
ism seemed to nd a solution in social liberalism on the theoretical level and
in a social-democratic strategy of social compromise at a political level. If the
election of François Mitterrand to the presidency of the French Republic, or

the electoral success of the PCI, or the good performance of the German SPD
could temporarily convey this impression, the moment of a major neoliberal
offensive had arrived, as indicated by the success of Mrs. Thatcher’s Con-
servatives in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan’s Republicans in the United
States. The crisis of Marxism still concealed that of social liberalism, just as the
crisis of Communism masked that of the social-democratic experience. More
than the French ‘New Philosophers’ – André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri
Lévy – and even the much more substantial gure of Karl Popper, it was the
great shadow of Friedrich von Hayek that dominated debates. In this context,
Marxism rapidly lost its relative hegemony. Depending on their personal eth-
ics, many philosophers and intellectuals renounced it with much ado or dis-
cretely distanced themselves from it. But the bill for the failure of the century
had to be paid.
The positions subsequently adopted can be reduced to three: abandonment
of Marxism; an attempt to return to Marx and a minimal Marx, in the hope
of a reconstruction conducted with transplants from other intellectual cur-
rents; and the preservation of Marxism as a reserve for a critical utopia, while
awaiting better days for a resumption of theory. Without being able to track
this evolution in its entirety, I shall restrict myself to providing some samples
of the crisis and its forms by studying a zone where Marxism had known an
especially striking afrmation: France and Italy.
Post-Althusserianism, deconstruction and Marxist reformation

in France
France is one of the countries where the crisis of Marxism was virulent. For
legitimate reasons, the argument from the gulag defended by the ‘New Phi-
losophers’ hit home. Certainly, what was merely a moralistic condemnation
and a complete lack of any organic philosophical conception stood in for
thought. But it presented the bill for the failure of Soviet Communism, its
errors and its horrors. Althusserianism had had the merit of posing the issue
of what the Third International represented. If recourse to Mao soon came to
seem impossible, once the violence bound up with the Cultural Revolution
became known, the pursuit of a mass politics in a developed country posed
the question of a knowledge of the new forms of hegemony. The debate on
48 • André Tosel
humanism persisted for a while and gave rise to interesting research by a g-
ure who (before distancing himself) was an ofcial Communist philosopher,
Lucien Sève. In Man in Marxist Theory and the Psychology of Personality (1968;
third, expanded edition, 1974), he formulated the question of an anthropol-
ogy centred on the use of time as an alternative to the employment of con-
strained time, and demonstrated the unavoidable character of reference to
the formation of an expanded moral personality. Despite interesting remarks
on the problem of contradiction, Sève’s limit was that he continued to refer
to a relatively conventional dialectical materialism, wavering between neo-
Hegelianism and neo-Kantianism (Une introduction à la philosophie marxiste,
published in 1980). Similarly, his critique of structuralism as an ideology of
the eternity of a history that had become immobile posed the question of his-
toricity in its singularity, without resorting to improbable laws of history, and
emphasised the importance of forms as material logics (the Structuralisme et
dialectique of 1984). But the nalistic structure and guarantees of the commu-
nist goal were retained in dogmatic fashion and compromised fertile intu-
itions as to the plurality of dialectics.
Other projects, more sensitive to the impasse of Marxism, were attempted in
a French resumption of the philosophy of praxis. This was the moment when,
in the paradoxical wake of the Althusserian critique, Gramsci enjoyed a cer-
tain signicance in France and seemed capable of supporting the political sci-
ence of a hegemony in the conditions of modern capitalism at the height of its
Fordist phase (see the works of Jacques Texier, Christine Buci-Glucksmann,
or André Tosel’s Praxis. Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste, which
appeared in 1984). Other instances of reconstruction, which were more highly
theoretical, also attempted balance-sheets, based on real attempts to expand
knowledge of society, without managing to escape from a certain isolation
despite their vitality. Such was the case of Henri Lefebvre (1901–91). While
pursuing his analysis of the concrete forms of capitalist modernity (Le droit à
la ville, of 1968 and The Production of Space, released in 1974), he identied the
statist mode of production as the greatest obstacle to emancipation and sought
to demonstrate Marxism’s inability to confront this crux (De l’État, four vol-
umes, published between 1975 and 1978). He also pondered the balance-sheet
of Marxism as a world ideology and the elements of content and method that
should be inherited from it. In 1980, Une Pensée devenue monde made it clear
that capitalist globalisation had demonstrated both Marx’s perspicacity and
his failure, without having exhausted his reection on historical possibility or

the indispensable utopia of the project.
Amid the retreat of French Marxism, we should highlight the importance of
the enterprise of Georges Labica (b. 1931), who, strongly marked by Althuss-
er’s politicism (Marxism and the Status of Philosophy [1976]), accomplished the
difcult undertaking of the Dictionnaire critique du marxisme (1982 and 1985),
in collaboration with Gérard Bensussan. This allowed the already attested
multiplicity of Marxisms to reveal themselves and demonstrated the essential
character of a theory that it was fashionable in Paris at the time to throw out
of the window. This audit made it possible to x the limits of the retreat of
Marxist theory by transforming it into an intelligent retreat, as a basis for new
treatment (of which Labica himself has provided some samples).
In this period of virulent delegitimisation of Marxism, a subterranean
post-Althusserian (not anti-Althusserian) Marxism maintained itself which,
although increasingly bereft of any organic relationship with organisational
practice and politics, was able to develop in two directions. The rst would
lead to the ongoing discovery of the complexity of an unnished œuvre, and
the other, to the continuation of a certain theoretical productivity – and all
this, in the face of various denials that the Althusserian seam was completely
exhausted.
As regards the rst, we may note the important contribution of Jacques
Bidet (b. 1945), Que faire du ‘Capital’? Matériaux pour une refondation (published
in 1985 with a second edition printed in 2000),4 which is a critical balance-
sheet and general reinterpretation of Marx’s masterpiece. Conrming certain
Althusserian interpretations, Bidet shows how the Hegelian dialectic is both
a support and an obstacle in the method of exposition of the Marxian critique
and suggests a re-examination of all the system’s categories – value, labour-
power, classes, wage-labour, production, ideology, economy – while stressing
that the aporiae of the quantitative conception of the labour theory of value can
only be resolved through an indivisibly socio-political reading which makes
it necessary to think through an effectively political economy of living labour.
For his part, Jean Robelin (b. 1949) extends Althusser to track the theoretical
vicissitudes of the socialisation of Marx and Engels’s economics and politics
4
For the English edition, see Bidet 2007.
50 • André Tosel
in the practice of the Second and Third Internationals. Marxisme et socialisation

(published in 1989) is, in fact, a historical critique of the communist idea and
of the aporiae of its realisation from the standpoint of direct democracy and
councils, regarded as the only pertinent level for the revolutionary articula-
tion of practices. Alongside these fundamentals works, underground research
on heretical Marxisms and their unexplored possibilities has developed, in a
trend which includes works by Gérard Raulet, Michael Löwy, and Arno Mün-
ster on Bloch; work by Nicolas Tertulian on the late Lukács.
As regards the second post-Althusserian direction, there is the original con-
tribution of Étienne Balibar (b. 1942) who, having claried the basic concepts
of historical materialism in his contribution to Reading ‘Capital’, restarted
work on decisive categories centred on the theme of real subsumption and
sought to demonstrate the permanency of the class struggle (‘Plus-value et
classes sociales’, in Cinq études du matéralisme historique, published in 1974). In
these years, Balibar abandoned a dogmatic constructivism to practice a sort of
theoretical experimentalism, aporetic in style, and to problematise the uncer-
tainties of the Marxist theory of the state, the party, and ideology (‘État, parti,
idéologie’, in Marx et sa critique de la politique, of 1979). On the basis of this
re-reading of Marx, and after assimilating Immanuel Wallerstein’s theses on
the world economy, Balibar showed how the class struggle is bound up with
the international management of labour-power; how it is doubly overdeter-
mined by the production of national and ethnic imaginary identities; how the
potential for resistance by working classes always risks being transformed
and altered by nationalist and racist forms; and, nally, how nationalism
and racism imply one another (Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, with
Immanuel Wallerstein, appeared in 1988). Balibar thereby creatively refutes
all those who had rushed to conclude the exhaustion of the Althusserian stim-
ulus, which he continues while maintaining a relationship with it that is at
once critical and constructive (see the collection Écrits pour Althusser, of 1991).
Thus continues the enterprise tragically interrupted by the suicide of Nicos
Poulantzas (1936–80), who had sought in more abstract fashion to establish
the general lines of a structural theory of political practice (Political Power and
Social Classes, rst published in 1968) and to rethink the state’s functions in a
relational conception of power (State, Power, Socialism, 1978).
Moving in the same direction, but in a sharply polemical relationship with
Althusserianism, accused of ignoring the reality of the dynamic of the pro-
ductive forces grasped in their singularity, is the research of Yves Schwartz. In

Expérience et connaissance du travail (1988), he shows that through the repetition
of the distance between prescribed work (the norms of capitalist productivity
in their constant adjustment to the technological and social revolution in the
labour process) and real work, human labour-power (or rather the produc-
tive act), conceived by its agents in the rst person, focuses and reshapes the
unexplored congurations of existence, history, thought and language. This
approach makes it possible to open a discussion with other theoreticians like
Jean-Marie Vincent, already author of Fétichisme et société (1973) and La Théorie
critique de l’École de Francfort (1976). In Abstract Labour: A Critique (1987), he
proposes a comparison between the Marxian critique of political economy
and the Heideggerian deconstruction of technicist ontology, envisaging a
prospect of action beyond productivism, centred on democracy understood
as a transformation of action and an art of living. Finally, an attempt at a
balance-sheet of the achievements and problems of historical materialism
was attempted by Tony Andréani (1935), who in De la société à l’histoire (1989)
simultaneously posed the issue of modes of production and of anthropology.
The latter received an important contribution from Maurice Godelier (b. 1934),
who gave his career as a Marxist ethnologist (Horizon, trajets marxistes en
anthropologie, of 1973) a kind of systematisation in The Mental and the Mate-
rial in 1984. The symbolic is co-constitutive of the social relationship in a way
that differs according to social forms (we should not conate the symbolic
order bound up with societies in which kinship relations are the relations of
production and societies where economic relations of production are directly
determinant).
All these bodies of research propose a kind of critical re-reading of Marx
and it would be appropriate to clarify the doctrinal minimum on which they
concur in characterising themselves as ‘Marxist’. In any event, even if the Pyr-
rhic victory of the ‘socialist’ new Left at the time consigned them to a limited
readership, by establishing social-liberal theoreticians resigned to the eternity
of capitalism; and if it briey made people believe in the virtues of a politics
of opinion, disconnected from any substantive critique of neocapitalist social
relations, piloting so-called ‘modernisation’, they did more than simply resist.
They explored the limits and impasses of this modernisation; in their fash-
ion, they updated the anticapitalist passion of which the old Lukács spoke
– and this in full awareness of the irrevocably dated, nished and unviable
52 • André Tosel
character of the organisational forms and strategies of historical Communism.

Their own weakness precisely consisted in their separation from any political
process capable of positively translating their critical substance.
The decomposition of the philosophy of praxis and returns to

Marx in Italy
Italy is a unique case. The country of the largest and most liberal European
Communist party, rich in a strong and distinctive Marxist tradition (that of
Togliattian Gramscianism or the philosophy of praxis) experienced a rapid
dissolution of this tradition. The declared strategy of conquering hegemony
was ever more patently transformed into a simple democratic politics of elec-
toral alliances. Historicism, which was more Togliattian than Gramscian,
entered into an irreversible crisis. It had hitherto succeeded in combining, in
a certain tension, the abstract, general perspective of a transformation of the
capitalist mode of production and the denition of a policy of reforms that
was supposed to realise the end of the process, and which found its conr-
mation in the real movement – that is to say, in the strength of the party and
its mass reality. If this historicism spared Italian Marxism the experience of
Stalinist diamat, and if it also long permitted it to avoid reverence for general
historical laws, forecasting the conditions of possibility for a hegemonic revo-
lutionary shift, it nevertheless ended up being diluted into a tactics bereft of
any perspective, while the preservation of a link with the ‘socialist camp’ gave
credence to the idea of a duplicity in the strategy itself.
At any rate, what was forgotten was that Gramsci had attempted to concep-
tualise a revival of the revolution in the West in a situation of passive revolu-
tion that assumed the reactivation of the popular masses and the construction
of democratic situations going beyond the parliamentary framework.
This is why the Gramscian research still being conducted is obsessed by an
increasingly liberal-democratic updating of the theory and reaches its limits
when it steps beyond the analysis of the classic theme of modernity. Such
was the case with the conference organised by the Istituto Gramsci, and pub-
lished in 1977–8, Politica e storia in Gramsci. We must certainly take account of
the work of the specialists who did so much to edit the Quaderni and clarify
their internal structure and the dynamic of Gramsci’s thought (among other,
V. Gerratana, N. Badaloni, G. Francioni, F. Lo Piparo, L. Paggi, G. Vacca), or

to take the measure of historical materialism (G.M. Cazzaniga, M. Di Lisa,
A. Gianquinto). Similarly, we must acknowledge the scholars who have con-
tinued to study Marx seriously in order to clarify the role of the real abstrac-
tion of labour (for example, R. Finelli and M. Mugnai), or who have resumed
examination of the early works (F.S. Trincia) or of the 1861–3 Manuscripts
(again, Badaloni). But, in fact, the philosophy of praxis lost the link with its
analytical programme that had constituted its specicity. In some instances,
(Biaggio De Giovanni to name but one) the tendency was for it to be drawn
back to its actualist origins in Gentile’s philosophy.
Corresponding to this dilution was the disappearance of the alternative
line that had constituted a counter-weight to Gramscianism in the 1960s: the
work of Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968). The methodological call to con-
ceive Marx’s moral Galileanism in accordance with a Humean-Kantian scien-
tic theory of determinate abstraction, and to abandon any Marxist-Hegelian
dialectic as metaphysical speculation that made it impossible to envisage the
determinate logic of a determinate object, was heeded only in its deconstruc-
tive aspect. Certainly, Della Volpeans like Mario Rossi (with his monumental
study Da Hegel a Marx, appeared between 1960–70), or Umberto Cerroni (with
such research in political theory as La Libertà dei moderni, in 1969, or Teoria
politica e socialismo, in 1973), continued to produce work. But Della Volpe’s
scientic concerns were eventually translated into the language of Popper’s
fallibilist empiricism and turned into a polemic against Marx. Exemplary in
this regard was the parabola of Lucio Colletti (1924–2000). His Marxist work
is concentrated in Hegel e il marxismo (1969). Rejecting the Hegelian distinction
between analytical understanding and dialectical reason, it defended the uni-
versality of the scientic method via hypothesis and experimentation. Marx,
the scientist, had founded a sociology that explains the laws of the capitalist
system by linking them to the generalisation of abstract labour and the reica-
tion this involves. The horizon of the theory was a struggle against this abstrac-
tion become reality, against this alienation-reication (which Della Volpe had
missed). Liberation must result in a different set of laws. But very rapidly,
Colletti rejected the scienticity of this sociology, which fashioned its unity on
the labour theory of value, and separated the romantic critique of alienation
from an objective approach. In particular, he questioned the theory of dialec-
tical contradiction, which he replaced by real opposition. Things accelerated
54 • André Tosel
and the labour theory of value was rejected on the basis of the classic problem
of the transformation of values into prices, which was highlighted by a gen-
eration of economists who had also reformulated Marx’s critique downwards
(C. Napoleoni, P. Garegnani, or M. Lippi). Having started out from an anti-
revisionist and scientic (or scientistic) Marxism, Colletti left Marxism behind
in stages, aligning himself with Popper, whose falsicationist epistemology
and political options in favour of social engineering focused on social amelio-
ration he defended. A Philosophico-Political Interview (1974), Tra marxismo e no
(1979), and nally Tramonto dell’ideologia (1980) are the milestones on this road
out of Marxism.
There was resistance, above all on the part of philosophers who had partici-
pated in the debate on the Galilean scienticity of the Marxist critique, imme-
diately followed by the debate on historicism provoked by the reception of the
Althusserian problematic. The road of the return to Marx crossed that of the
reference to concrete utopia. The rst road was followed by Cesare Luporini
(1909–92); the second by Nicola Badaloni (1924–2005). In his 1974 collection
Dialettica e materialismo, Luporini proposed to read Marx according to Marx.
Criticising historicism with Althusser for its inability to think socio-historical
forms and its tendency to atten them out on the apparently continuous ow
of tactical choices, he proposed to study the different modalities of transi-
tion to a different society within a model of the uneven development of the
relations of production and the superstructures. He urged further research
on the levels neglected by Marx, such as the critique of politics. His interven-
tions in the 1980s led him to radicalise his position: the return to Marx beyond
Marxisms amounted to registering the failure of the latter in the dual task of
reecting on the aporiae of socialism and the displacement in the relations of
production of a now victorious neocapitalism. The stress on politics consisted
in linking the theme of the dictatorship of the proletariat to an archaic phase
of historical materialism dominated by the liberal opposition between civil
society and the state. The mature phase of the doctrine thus lacked a political
theory and this, so it was implied, could not be dened in such a dictatorship.
Luporini went no further and ended his career without accepting the social-
democratic normalisation of the PCI turned PDS.
For his part, Badaloni did not abandon the perspective opened up by his
work of 1972, Per il comunismo. Questioni di teoria. In numerous important
studies devoted to Marx and Gramsci among others (in particular, Dialettica
del capitale, published in 1980), he proposed a radically democratic ‘recon-

struction’ of the theory. The latter could not count on the exacerbation of the
simple antagonism between capital and labour. It was a question of concep-
tualising the process by which social forces separated from hegemony can
control the process of self-government that gives them mastery in the recon-
stitution of the elements hitherto subject to capital – or, constant capital, vari-
able capital, and surplus-value. The communist perspective is anticipated in
the possibility, which has become a reality, of free time. This does indeed
involve a utopia, in that immediate political consequences are drawn from
a long-term morphological forecast. But this utopia has its coherence and it
has maintained an island of resistance in the rapid decomposition of Italian
Marxism.
The same applies to the remarkable research of Ludovico Geymonat (1908–
91), whose Marxist school in the theory of knowledge declined yet more
rapidly, with a few exceptions (historians of science like A. Guerragio and
F. Vidoni, or neo-empiricist philosophers like S. Tagliambe). Geymonat’s main
aim was to re-tie the threads of dialectical materialism, scarcely implanted
in Italy, by showing that neo-positivist conventionalism and Leninist mate-
rialism could correct one another. While the former was able to dene any
theory as an operative construction, the second introduced the dimension of
the process into theory and reminded it of its realism. Far from being naïve
or pre-critical, the notion of reection, once dialecticised, aimed to re-produce
the various levels of reality in accordance with an indenite process of suc-
cessive deepening. Thus, theories could be regarded as the advanced point
of an innitely rectiable knowledge, which had its basis in a vast scientic
and technical inheritance (Scienza e realismo, appeared in 1977). Despite Gey-
monat’s considerable efforts as organiser of a culture open to the sciences and
permeated by the political imperatives of a revolutionary transformation (as
attested by the monumental Storia del pensiero losoco e scientico, published
between 1970 and 1978, and which proved very original in an Italian context
largely uninterested in the rationality of the sciences), his school did not sur-
vive. Many of its members ended up rallying to Popperian theory and prac-
tice, thus following Colletti.
The exhaustion of Marxism-Gramscianism-Togliattism involves more than
the return of many ‘Marxists’ to the bosom of social liberalism. We should
also take into account an opposing current which left its imprint on the 1970s
56 • André Tosel
and conceived of itself as a return to revolutionary Marxism. We have in mind

Italian operaismo, which framed the workers’ and students’ rebellion during
the turbulent year 1969, extolling ‘the great subjective revolution’ against the
objectivist determinism which characterised the Marxism of the Communist
parties of the Third International, including the Italian Communist Party itself.
This movement crystallised in 1961 around Raniero Panzieri, the founder of
the journal Quaderni rossi. This trade-unionist theoretician contested the thesis
of the development of the productive forces which underpinned the trade
unions and promoted the role and interests of skilled ‘professional’ work-
ers. He disputed the thesis of the neutrality of science, technology, and work
organisation, elements which, it was claimed, had to be taken over from capi-
talism. These elements were said to be marked by capitalist social relations of
production, and inscribed in the process of real subsumption which reduces
the function of skilled work in favour of the unskilled work of the mass
worker. Using some of Marx’s important writings – the chapters from the rst
volume of Capital devoted to large-scale industry and ‘Maschinerie’, thus put-
ting into circulation some little-known Marxian analyses – in particular the
Grundrisse and the unpublished sixth chapter of Capital, Panzieri attempted to
analyse the transformations of the capitalism of the period marked by Ford-
ism. He singled out the mass worker, alienated by the subjective expropriation
which separates him from the intellectual forces of production, a dominated
worker who was also often an internal immigrant, as the paradoxical gure of
a potentially revolutionary subject. Indeed, this unskilled worker could turn
expropriation into a class struggle for autonomy, forcing reformist parties and
corporatist trade unions to reconstruct themselves as political forces. Priority
was given to the struggles of these new workers, who disrupted routine and
relaunched the perspective of a political subjectivisation (see ‘Surplus-Value
and Planning’ in the anthology of Quaderni rossi published in 1964).
According to Panzieri, Fordist capitalism plans the labour process of the
factory and must extend this capitalist planning to a society dominated by
competitive anarchy. The workers’ struggle for autonomy could utilise such
planning to appropriate and transvalue scientic knowledge and technology
for its own purposes. Panzieri thus furnished the rudiments of a theory which
had the incontestable merit of re-activating a certain Marxian conceptuality –
particularly that developed in the chapter of the Grundrisse on machine indus-
try and the formation of the workers’ general intellect. Transformations in
contemporary capitalism without fetishising a then ourishing welfare state.

But the transition from the autonomous struggles of the mass worker to politi-
cal struggle remained problematic, due to the PCI strategy aimed at uniting
workers and the supposedly healthy parts of industrial capitalism and orga-
nising them against parasitical capitalism.
As Maria Turchetto shows in her study of Italian operaismo and its decline
in this volume, operaismo came to an end over this issue. Thus Panzieri’s two
young collaborators, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, broke from him in 1963
in order to found a new, more political journal, Classe operaia. But they, in their
turn, also parted company and set off down opposite paths.
Tronti maintained the view that the struggle for workers’ autonomy could
not succeed unless it was transformed into a political struggle waged by a
political party able to defend the autonomy of politics – that is, to invest the
state and transform it into an organisation capable of shape the class conict.
Thus he reunited Lenin and Schmitt. Such is the trajectory leading from Operai
e capitale (1966) to Sull’autonomia del politico (1976).
Negri doubted the capacity of the state-form to transform production and
found Tronti’s rallying to the PCI unproductive; he regarded Tronti’s hope
of transforming it into a party which would shape the outcome of conict
as utopian. He remained faithful to the idea of class subjectivity, which he
opposed to the subjectivity of Jacobin organisation, and he maintained the
theme of a class composition denatured by the Communist search for a his-
torical compromise. If capitalism was increasing its domination with a para-
doxical planning which went beyond the working class to affect all aspects of
society, thus radicalising ‘social workers’, it was crucial to deepen struggles
by focusing them on the prospect of the end of work. It was necessary, Negri
thought, to wager on a movement contrary to the one analysed by Panzieri,
namely, a revolutionary version of the development of new productive forces
that would economise labour-power. Such was Negri’s thesis, which he has
persistently maintained ever since. From initial texts such as Proletari e stato.
Per una discussione su autonomia operaia e compremesso storico (1976) or La forma
Stato (1977), through the study of the Grundrisse, Marx oltre Marx (1979) and
his work on Spinoza L’anomalia selvaggia (1981), to the historical and specula-
tive research on Il potere constituente (1993), Negri sees the failure of operaismo
and his own life story (his prison sentence for terrorist activity) as so many
proofs of the irreformability of the state machine and so many stages on the
58 • André Tosel
way to the constitution of the general intellect of the social multitudes who can
be freed from work. A philosophy of plenary power is reinforced by an anti-
modern theory of history. Negri wishes to inscribe himself in the subversive
anti-modern movement of modernity – Machiavelli, the English Levellers,
Spinoza, Marx and Lenin – against the dominant natural-law and contractu-
alist current – Locke, Rousseau, Kant and even Hegel.
Marxo-Gramsciano-Togliattism had had its day. We must now introduce
the theoretical victor who had proved capable of posing the questions of
political theory that indicated the attrition of historicism and the hybrid char-
acter of a political theory suspended between an afrmation of parliamentary
democracy and a critique of its impasses. I am referring to Norberto Bobbio,
who in 1976 collected the various interventions made during a key debate that
had opposed him to Marxist intellectuals in Which Socialism? – a debate that
was extended in a discussion of the real meaning of Gramscian hegemony
(Egemonia, stato, partito e pluralismo in Gramsci, published in 1977). Bobbio’s
theses were as follows. First, there was no Marxist political theory, only a
critique of politics that had never answered the question it poses by specify-
ing which social functions the socialist state should be responsible for. The
historical response provided by the Soviet experience consisted in a central-
ising despotism involving a regression in terms of civil liberties. Obsessed
by the issue of ‘who governs?’, Marxist theory had fetishised the party and
had not broken new ground in inventing democratic power mechanisms
and procedures. Secondly, the PCI’s national road to socialism and theme
of progressive democracy had indeed combined respect for political plural-
ism and the constitutional framework. But by retaining the reference to a
soviet democracy, it had created uncertainty about the preservation of the
institutions of liberty once power had been conquered. The real and imper-
fect democracy of the Western countries had certainly not checked the real
centres of economic power, or developed forms of workers’ participation in
the management of capitalist rms. Conversely, however, the Party-State in
the East had liquidated ethical, political and cultural pluralism, as well as
its rules and procedures – that is to say, liberalism’s most precious legacy.
Thirdly, with the ambiguous exception of Gramsci, Marxist theoreticians had
made no contribution to the problems of modern democracy, or posed the rel-
evant questions: how could the private and public administrative institutions
whose structural principle was hierarchical be transformed in a democratic

direction? How could popular control be exercised when the autonomisation
of technical skills was on the increase?
Italian Communism was unable to respond creatively to these questions
and ended up drawing with the party leadership the conclusion that seemed
self-evident to many at the time. Only a liberal-social natural-rights politi-
cal theory can inform the action of mass parties, which are also reduced by
certain sociological developments to operating as parties of opinion, focused
on democratically agreed reforms that ameliorate the lot of the worst-off. In
short, Italian Marxism by and large committed suicide, through a precipita-
tion into social-liberal metamorphoses, and ended up accepting the liberal-
ism of theories of justice derived from John Rawls, without even retaining
the sense of tragic defects characteristic of Bobbio. An example of this devel-
opment is the career of Salvatore Veca, long-time director of the Feltrinelli
Foundation. Having started out from a resolute defence à la Della Volpe of
the scienticity of Marx (Saggio sul programma scientico di Marx, published in
1977), he became the effective introducer of Rawls and the liberalism of the
Anglo-American Centre-Left (with La Società giusta, in 1982, and with Una
Filosoa pubblica, four years later, where he develops a critique of Marx based
on a condemnation of the guilty absence of a genuine theory of justice).
One might conclude that what died was only that which did not possess
sufcient internal strength to resist and to reconstruct theoretical resources.
This is the question posed by an atypical philosopher who, in these years of
liquidation, was able to proceed to a balance-sheet of Marxism focused on
Italy, which opened out into an examination of the major communist heretics –
Bloch, the late Lukács, Althusser – and took account of the development of
critical thinking in the West, with Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger. The phi-
losopher in question is Costanzo Preve (b. 1943). In La losoa imperfetta. Una
proposta di ricostruzione del marxismo contemporaneo (1984), he pinpointed the
nihilism peculiar to capitalist productivism as the instance that had contami-
nated Marxism and prevented it from reforming itself by settling accounts
with a whole swathe of Western rationalism. The will to mastery was identi-
ed as the shadow of a voluntarist philosophy of history that risked dashing
emancipatory intentions. Preve announced a reconstruction whose elements
were to be borrowed from Bloch’s hermeneutic ontology, Lukács’s ontology
60 • André Tosel
of social being, and Althusser’s anti-nalistic epistemology, with each ele-

ment in some sense correcting the others. This programme awaits execution
and, as we shall see, is problematic. But it remains highly distinct from the
liquidations that were fashionable at the time and inspired by a desire to get
to the heart of things.
But it is perhaps from what is best in the Italian historicist tradition that
the most resolute resistance to the liberal and neoliberal wave has been forth-
coming. The historian of philosophy Domenico Losurdo (b. 1941) undertook
a counter-history of the liberal tradition, in numerous substantial works
devoted to Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the history of freedom in the classical
German philosophy of the nineteenth century (inter alia, Tra Hegel e Bismarck.
La rivoluzione del 1848 and la crisi della cultura tedesca, published in 1983, and
Hegel, Marx e la tradizione liberale, in 1988). He demonstrated that, far from
coinciding with the hagiographical history of liberty, liberalism has always
dened human rights as those of the private property owner, has denied the
universality of the concept of man that it seemed to afrm, and was extended
only under the pressure of class and mass struggles, which for their part were
inspired by a subordinate tendency of modernity – the civic humanism or
plebeian republicanism to which Rousseau, Hegel and Marx belonged. His-
toriographical resistance thus operates as a theoretical basis for reviving that
tendency and Marxism, which is invited to proceed to its self-criticism.
The thousand Marxisms in search of their unity, 1989–2005

The fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the end of the USSR, ushered in the
phase of a thousand Marxisms, all of them faced with capitalist globalisation
and the massive enterprise of dis-emancipation that accompanied it (disman-
tling of the welfare state, neocolonialism, rise of nationalism and ethnicism,
aggravation of North-South contradictions) – and this at a time when global
wealth continued to increase and labour productivity, rather than tabling
the issue of the relationship between necessary labour-time and free time,
translated into persistent unemployment and a new poverty. The end of the
orthodoxies/heresies dialectic, once the inability of the Communist parties
to reform themselves other than by imploding or becoming mere (social-)
democratic parties had become obvious, posed the question of what united
the plurality of research. Long desired, in the face of the violence of the Party-
State monolith, this pluralism made Marx and Marxisms available. If theo-
retical readings and essays could now develop, confronting one another on
such crucial points as those of the labour theory of value and the market, the
relative importance of the forces of production and the relations of produc-
tion, the conguration of classes and the effectiveness of class struggle; if the
crisis exceeded the single issue of the tendency for the prot rate to fall; if the
critique of politics cannot conclude simply by forecasting the extinction of
the state, but re-poses the question of democracy, its forms and procedures,
and the same is true of law; if communism cannot be projected as a utopia
involving the end of every known social form, or if it must be redened as
a constructible form assumed by ‘the movement that abolishes the present
state of things’; if all the above hold, then what does it mean to call oneself
‘Marxist’? Where does the difference between Marxism and non-Marxism lie
for each Marxism? The phase of a thousand Marxisms ushered in by the end
of a whole cycle of struggles conducted by the working-class movement as an
anti-systemic movement, and relayed at one time by anti-imperialist national-
popular movement, represents the greatest fracture in the history of Marxism
and dictates both a labour of mourning for a certain continuity and the task of
thinking through a new unity.
The irreversible multiplicity of the present and future thousand Marxisms
poses the issue of minimal theoretical agreement on the range of legitimate
disagreements. Without anticipating, we may say that this consensus allow-
ing for dissensus consists in two elements. The rst element is an agreement
on the theoretical possibility (rendered practically urgent by the persistence
of an unnecessary, unjustiable inhumanity) of an analysis of globalised capi-
talism and its forms, inscribed in, but not directly derivable from, the real
submission of labour to capital. The second element is an agreement on his-
torical hope in the real possibility of eliminating this inhumanity (whether
it is called alienation, exploitation, domination, subjection, or manipulation
of the powers of the multitude), and constructing determinate social forms
that express the power or freedom of the multitude. If the second element is
determinant, in the sense of the driving force, the rst has a dominant func-
tion in that it ballasts utopia with its dimension of ‘knowledge’ and provides
it with its condition of feasibility. The thousand Marxisms possess – and will
possess – an epochal grasp of the time of capitalist globalisation only if they
avoid the trap of Marxist fundamentalism (sheer repetition of the inhumanity
62 • André Tosel
of capitalism and generic appeals to the class struggle); and if they simultane-
ously carry out the work of critical memory as regards what became of Marx
and Marxisms in the twentieth century and yield knowledge of the terrain
of capitalist globalisation. The thousand Marxisms have – and will have –
a capacity for understanding and altering the direction of the time only if
they succeed in combining rigorous work in critically rediscovering the work
of Marx and Marxisms and confronting the highpoints of philosophical and
theoretical thought. Finally, they have a future in as much as the crisis that is
rife in Marxism reveals itself ever more clearly to be simultaneously a crisis
of the neoliberal order faced with the reality of vast processes of social dis-
assimilation engendered by its seeming victory, and increasingly tempted to
resort to forms of reactionary management of the dis-emancipation projected
by its globalisation.
This work is already underway, for example, where the disintegration of
Marxism has been most spectacular – in Italy. The marginality of Marxism
cannot conceal the importance of the enterprise of Losurdo, who has now
enriched his counter-history of liberalism in Western thought with an analy-
sis of present-day liberal political forms (Democrazia o bonapartismo. Trionfo
e decadenza del suffragio universale, of 1993), and offered an analysis of the
political conjuncture in Italy that brings out the bond between neoliberalism,
federalism and post-fascism (La seconda repubblica. Liberismo, federalismo, post-
fascismo, in 1994), while also presenting a historical-theoretical balance-sheet
of twentieth-century communism and Marxism, afrming the charge of lib-
eration initially contained in the October Revolution while at the same time
proceeding to a critique of the elements of abstract utopia in Marx as regards
the state (Marx e il balancio storico del Novecento, published in 1993).
Losurdo has given his research a more systematic dimension by confronting
head-on the revisionism which had obscured and distorted the comprehen-
sion of modern revolutions, in particular the Russian Revolution, preventing
an equitable comparative analysis of historical processes. This revisionism
united liberal currents – from Burke and Constant to Tocqueville, Mill, Croce,
Hayek and Popper – with the line running from de Maistre to Chamberlain,
Calhoun, and the Nazi and fascist theoreticians. This study, initiated in Il revi-
sionismo storico. Problemi e miti (1996), was completed by a synthetic work,
Contrastoria del liberalismo (2005), which denes liberalism as the philosophy
of chosen people(s), masters of the modern world. It confronts the paradox
of a doctrine which praises individual liberties, yet always contradicts this

afrmation of universality with exception clauses. Thus excluded initially
were wage-workers, assimilated to instruments of labour, and colonised peo-
ples, identied as modern slaves, enemy nations excluded from the human
race and categorised as inhuman. Liberalisms have always directly or indi-
rectly justied social relationships of domination which actualised freedom.
Losurdo does not restrict himself to deconstructing the liberal hagiography
which has criminalised revolutionary attempts at emancipation. His black
book of liberalism points to a tradition of radical liberalism which he argues
we should take up (Diderot, Condorcet, Marx and Engels), yet which remains
undened. The lesson communists should learn from this history is not to ee
history but to persevere in the analysis of social relations and their open con-
tradictions. It would be wrong not to mention, as well, the work done by the
historian of philosophy Losurdo in his study Antonio Gramsci, dal liberalismo al
‘communismo critico’ (1997) and his monumental Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico.
Biograa intelletuale e bilancio critico (2002), which succeeds exactly where the
Lukács of The Destruction of Reason fails – namely, in giving an account of the
overwhelming power and ambiguities of the greatest of genealogists.
This work of theoretico-political historiography is directed to the two poles
that form the spectrum of the thousand Marxisms: the pole of a good utopia-
nism and the pole of an analysis based on a re-reading of Marx’s key con-
cepts. These two poles can be illustrated by recourse to examples that seem to
belong to the previous phase, but which in reality are endowed with actuality
in the new historical period – the pole represented by Walter Benjamin’s nal
theses on the philosophy of history and that constituted by Anglo-Saxon ana-
lytical Marxism.
The thousand Marxisms in motion between conceptual

deconstruction-reconstruction and utopia
It is impossible to take account of the thousand Marxisms that have devel-
oped between these two poles. We shall limit ourselves to a thematic selection
of samples according to cultural-national context.
In Italy, where the collapse of Marxism was so profound, a revival seems to
be in the ofng. Sustained by the critical historiographical œuvre of Losurdo
and a Marxist school of intellectual history (Guido Oldrini and Alberto
64 • André Tosel
Burgio), various attempts at systematic reconstruction are in course. Two, in

particular, stand out. The rst is that of Giuseppe Prestipino (b. 1928) who,
having started out from a historicism mixed with Della Volpeanism, has for
many years been reformulating the theory of modes of production, conceived
in terms of a logico-historical bloc. In any human society, the existence of
an anthropologico-historical inheritance comprising distinct systems – pro-
ductive, social, cultural, institutional – is presupposed. These systems can be
combined in the course of history in different structures, or according to the
dominant system in the theoretical model of a given formation. The thesis of
an invariant dominance of the productive and/or social base over the cultural
and institutional superstructure is peculiar to the bloc of initial modernity.
Today, the developed modern bloc and an inceptive postmodern bloc are in
competition. The rst is dominated by the cultural element in the form of
a comprehensive rationalisation, permeating all other domains, through the
productivist discipline of labour, by following the (social) rules of the market
and organising itself according to the (political) order of bureaucratic democ-
racy. The second, which is still hypothetical, is dominated by the public insti-
tution, at its highest stage as an ethico-juridical, supra-state and supra-national
system. Its task is to guide in hegemonic fashion (in the Gramscian sense) the
other elements – that is to say, free cultural and scientic research, planetary
social mobility established in a regime of real equality of opportunity and
wealth, and technological production treated at last as a common property
of human intelligence and ‘descent’ (Da Gramsci a Marx. Il blocco logico-storico,
published in 1979, Per un anthropologia losoca, in 1983, and Modelli di strut-
ture storiche. Il primato etico nel postmoderno, in 1993). Prestipino has furnished
a kind of conclusion to his research in a study (Realismo e utopia [2002]) which
discusses both the Lukács of the Ontology of Social Being and Bloch in order to
revisit the categories of the dialectic, such as the dialectic of logico-historical
blocs. The de-anthropomorphising perspective of knowledge roots human
activity in nature and life to allow us a better grasp of anthropogenesis and its
particular categories, with their relations of conditioning, determination and
succession. These themes deserve the kind of sustained attention that they
have been denied for too long.
The second endeavour is that of Costanzo Preve. Having started out from
a programme for a systematic reformulation of Marxist philosophy, on the
Lukácsian basis of the ontology of social being, integrating the Blochian
theme of ethical utopia, and centred on the theme of an Althusserian sci-

ence of modes of production (Il lo di Arianna, in 1990), it faces the difcul-
ties of a certain eclecticism. Taking account of the effective dominance of the
nihilism inscribed in neocapitalism and reected by the century’s organic
thinkers, Heidegger and Weber, Preve examines the major problems of uni-
versalism and individualism, seeking to eliminate from Marx certain aspects
of Enlightenment thinking compromised by nihilism (Il convitato di pietra.
Saggio su marxismo e nihilismo, which appeared in 1991; Il planeta rosso. Saggio
su marxismo e universalismo, in 1992; and L’assalto al cielo. Saggio su marxismo
e individualismo, in 1992). Preve’s latest research nds him abandoning the
programme of the ontology of social being and redening a communist phi-
losophy, criticising the notions of class-subject and the paradigm of labour
and needs in a confrontation with theoreticians of postmodernity (Il tempo
della ricerca. Saggio sul moderno, il post-moderno e la ne della storia, 1993). Finally
compressing Marx’s legacy into the critique of capitalism as destructive of the
potentialities of human individuation initially liberated by it, Preve under-
takes an anthropological reection in order to identify the bourgeois-capi-
talist and archaeo-communist (the ‘comrade’) conceptions of human nature,
in order to sketch a neo-communism as a community of individualities pos-
sessed of equal liberty (L’eguale libertà. Saggio sulla natura umana, published
in 1994).
Finally, Preve attempts to reconstruct Marx’s thought by radically separat-
ing it from historical Marxisms. With only a few exceptions (Korsch, Althusser,
the later Lukács), these Marxisms sought to systematise, in a sterile manner,
the necessarily incomplete thought of Marx. Marxism thought of itself as a
triple synthesis of historicism, economism and utopianism. But this was in
fact a triple denaturing of which we must rid ourselves. Historicism wraps
theory in an illusory teleological grand narrative. Economism is a form of
reductionism which takes the development of the forces of production as the
sole evaluative criterion and ignores the articulated complexity of social total-
ities. Utopianism is the dream of a normative community where the plurality
of human individualities must necessarily be subjected to an a priori model of
socialisation. Such is the thesis of Marx inattuale. Eredità e prospettiva (2004).
This critique implies the necessity of rehabilitating philosophical thought as
such by posing the question of the possibility of communism in the light of an
understanding of the nihilism which has run through Western thought since
66 • André Tosel
Nietzsche, Weber, Schmitt and Heidegger. Preve accordingly offers a general

philosophical reconstruction of twentieth-century thought as a transcenden-
tal condition in another little discussed book, I tempi difcile (1999). Here he
re-opens the perspective of truth and discusses the key question of Marxian
communism, that of the relations between individualism and universalism,
in the context of a multilinear vision of history. A certain obscurity, or, rather,
a dubious ambiguity, nevertheless persists: in these later texts, Preve seeks a
mediation by way of a political proposal appealing to a national or ‘nationali-
tarian’ type, which is highly questionable to the extent that nationalitarianism
turns into an apologia for a multiplicity of regionalisms that can hardly be
characterised as universalistic.
In Italy, where the Party of Communist Refoundation is actively present,
grouping together many militants who refused to accept the self-liquidation
of the PCI into the PDS, we can still nd scholars who engage with Marx.
Thus, Alberto Burgio, whilst also intervening in questions of political theory
(Modernità del conitto, 1999), maintains, in Strutture e catastro. Kant, Hegel,
Marx (2002), a classical dialectical tradition of interpretation quite close to
Lucien Sève’s. Roberto Finelli, for his part, identies Marx’s contribution
with the theory of real abstractions (Astrazione e dialettica dal romanticismo
al capitalismo, 1987) and shows that the materialism defended by Marx rests
on a faulty understanding of the Hegelian theory of the subject, which only
becomes itself in relation to alterity (Un parricido mancato. Hegel e il giovane
Marx, 2004). Roberto Fineschi has undertaken a systematic study of Capital
with Ripartire da Marx. Processo storico ed economia politica nella teoria del ‘Capi-
tale’ (2001). Similarly, Gramscian research, brought to a halt with the ‘liberal’
mutation of the PCI, has been revived thanks to the International Gramsci
Society, which has effectively replaced the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci with
noteworthy contributions, such as those by Fabio Frosini and Franco Consi-
glio (A. Gramsci. Filosoa e politica, 1997), by Frosini again (Gramsci e la losoa.
Saggio sui ‘Quaderni de carcere’, 2003), or by Giorgio Baratta (La rose e i quaderni.
Saggio sul pensiero di Antonio Gramsci, 2000) and Domenico Losurdo.
Operaismo has made a stunning comeback thanks to its identication of glo-
balisation as the indicated level for new analyses. Thus Antonio Negri, with
Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), both co-written with Michael Hardt, pres-
ents himself as a Marx redivivus who takes as his object of study the revolu-
tionary transformation of capitalist globalisation. Although these works were
celebrated by the international media as the Bible of the alterglobalisation

movement, although their great merit is to integrate many of the ndings of
Anglo-Saxon research in a kind of portable encyclopedia; they proved capable
of mobilising the enthusiastic, they were nonetheless shaped by the presup-
positions of Negrian thought. Eulogies of communication technology and its
determinism, a thoroughly positive metaphysics of power delegated to the
multitude, the dilution of the notion of imperialism in an all-encompassing
and indeterminable Empire – these features are more indicative of suggestive
power rather than bearers of operational knowledge.
The insufciently discussed work of the economist and theorist Gianfranco
La Grassa, a collaborator of Costanzo Preve, with whom he published La ne di
una theoria in 1996, proceeds in the opposite direction. Starting from a problem-
atic inspired by Althusser and Bettelheim, author of thirty works on the Marx-
ian critique of political economy and on economic theory, La Grassa became
convinced of the analytical insufciency of Capital (notably with regard to the
theory of value). He seeks to develop a theory of the mode of production in
the Althusserian sense of a science of society. The question of private prop-
erty in the means of production is no longer central, for it has been displaced
under contemporary capitalism, dened by a conict of strategies between
dominant social agents. These internal struggles are at once economic, politi-
cal, ideological and cultural and lead to many more transformations than the
struggles between the dominant and the dominated. As Althusser put it, to be
a good materialist one must not tell oneself stories, including those about the
existence and real power of a transmodal class supposedly capable of effect-
ing a transition from the capitalist to a superior mode of production. These
analyses inform, notably, Lezioni sul capitalismo (1996), Il capitalismo oggi. Dalla
proprietà al conitto stratégico (2004), Gli strateghi del capitale. Una teoria del con-
itto oltre Marx e Lenin (2005). The struggles of the dominated persist and,
with them, unexpected openings and possibilities. They provide the basis for
a different anticapitalism which cannot be reduced to an ethical demand, but
which has as its condition political vigilance armed with objective knowledge
of the transformations underway.
In France, a change in the conjuncture seems to be emerging. Once the pros-
pect of Communism had seemingly disappeared with the end of the USSR
and its bloc, the reference to Marx ceased to be criminalised. Marx and Marx-
isms remain marginal, and lack academic recognition, but it is possible now
68 • André Tosel
to study them as intellectual classics. Journals, some already relatively old,

such as Actuel Marx, founded by Jacques Bidet and Jacques Texier and now
directed by Emmanuel Renault, or more recent, such as Contretemps, directed
by Daniel Bensaïd, or Multitudes, close to Negri, and the successor to Futur
Antérieur (long edited by the late Jean-Marie Vincent; Yann Moulier-Boutang
is the editor of Multitudes), continue their critical activities, feature signi-
cant themes and even, as in the case of Actuel Marx, organise major confer-
ences. Other older periodicals such as La Pensée (editor: Antoine Casanova) or
L’homme et la Société (editor: Pierre Lantz) continue to occupy their niches.
These activities are not guided by research into the critical history of liberal
thought like that of Domenico Losurdo in Italy. On the other hand, they are
sustained by the renewal of an analysis of globalised capitalism of a Marxist
orientation which has no counterpart in Italy (with the exception of La Grassa
or Riccardo Belloore). Gérard Duménil and Dominque Lévy, in particular,
have developed an original school of thought which studies the new forms of
capitalism (La dynamique du capital. Un siècle d’économie américaine. 1996, Crise et
sortie de crise. Ordre et désordre néo-libéraux. 2000). As in Italy, however, this work
has not given rise to debates comparable to those which accompanied the
publication of the texts of Althusser or Gramsci. The only debate of any note
concerns Negri’s theses in Empire, but these owe as much to passing fads or
their rhetorical force as to their real novelty. There is no scientic community
which is up to the task of discussing works and comparing and contrasting
analyses. Scholars remain isolated and simply juxtapose their work to that of
others. The previously cited journals are not sites of intellectual confrontation
and their choices of book reviews are rather meagre. It is no longer a question
of orthoxies nor of heresies; rather, separate and unquestioned doxai are ranged
alongside one another. Certainly, it is better to have a thousand Marxisms
than none at all, but this pluralism remains inert and has not (yet?) produced
propositions that could make for a politically operative common sense.
We are dealing, then, with a centrifugal recovery which has neither had a
snowball effect nor established a new school of thought and which is often
marked by nostalgia and an inability to let go of the past. We can outline the
conjuncture by situating current research in its degree of effective proxim-
ity and/or distance from the Marxian opus grasped in its complexity, and
also from the heretical Marxisms of the communist movement (Lukács, Bloch,
Gramsci, Althusser, or Adorno, Della Volpe, Lefebvre, etc.).
We should rst note a certain resumption of philosophical-historical stud-
ies of Marx (and, to a lesser degree, Engels). They bear, rst of all, on poli-
tics. Here, one might cite Miguel Abensour, La Démocratie contre l’État (1997),
Antoine Artous, Marx, l’État et la politique (1999), Stathis Kouvelakis, Philoso-
phy and Revolution from Kant to Marx (2001) – which happily renews the tra-
dition of Auguste Cornu – Solange Mercier-Josa, Entre Hegel et Marx (1999),
and, nally, Jacques Texier, Révolution et démocratie chez Marx et Engels (1998),
which recasts the question referred to in its title. Engels was the subject of
a very useful collective volume edited by Georges Labica and Mireille Del-
braccio, Friedrich Engels, savant et révolutionnaire (1997). We should note that
the classic question of democracy and/or revolution, which used to oppose
communists to social democrats, has been displaced in favour of the issue as
to what kind of democracy is possible or desirable after the self-dissolution
of capitalist representative democracy? What kind of revolution can there be
after the failure of Soviet Communism and the dead end of a certain type of
violence? What should we adopt from the great ethico-political tradition of
liberalism (cf. André Tosel. Démocratie et libéralismes, 1995)? All these studies
are haunted by the possible renewal of a form of direct democracy capable of
confronting structural conict in the political eld. This is the subject of a book
by Jacques Rancière now considered a reference-point (Disagreement, 1995),
which takes up a debate with the directive radicalism of Alain Badiou, who
effectively responded in Metapolitics (1998) and reafrmed the inevitability of
violent rupture in The Century (2005), a reection on the twentieth century.
Rare indeed are those who insist on the need to cling to the perspective of
revolution in the class struggle and who remind us that the democratic path,
when the violence by the dominant reaches extreme forms, dictates the use of
the revolutionary violence by the dominated as the only adequate response.
This is Georges Labica’s argument in Démocratie et révolution (2002).
The Marxian critique of political economy has been less thoroughly stud-
ied. Challenging theses which underline the importance of the critique of real
abstractions in Marx (Jean-Marie Vincent, Un autre Marx, 2001), the analytical
work of Jacques Bidet eliminates all dialectical residues in order to highlight
70 • André Tosel
the copresence within capital of a logic of ineliminable inter-individual con-

tractuality (the market) and of central contractuality (the plan). These ideas
are developed in Bidet’s Exploring Marx’s ‘Capital’ (new edition, 2000).
A philosophical approach has been sustained by specic studies bearing
on one or another point of Marx’s philosophical practice: Michel Vadée has
systematically reconstructed the problematic of possibility in Marx, penseur
du possible (1992); Isabelle Garo has done the same for representation in
Marx, critique de la philosophie (2000); Henri Maler has interrogated the uto-
pian dimension in two closely related works, Congédier l’utopie? L’utopie selon
Karl Marx (1994) and Convoiter l’impossible. L’utopie selon Marx malgré Marx
(1995). Emmanuel Renault has considered Marx et l’idée de critique (1995).
Hervé Touboul, in a detailed study of The German Ideology, has dealt with
Marx et Engels et la question de l’individu (2004). André Tosel, in his Etudes sur
Marx (et Engels). Vers un communisme de la nitude (1996), has posed questions
regarding the relationship between action and production in Marx and on the
dialectical integration of the sciences. Franck Fischbach has re-examined, in
a broader philosophical perspective, German idealism as an ontology of the
act of production; he interprets Marx as a critic of the productivist apologia
of production, and as a thinker of human beings’ production of their selves
by themselves. Marx is thus said to pursue Spinoza’s enterprise by reinsert-
ing human and social productivity, which is productivity of a world, into the
heart of natural and vital productivity (these theses are developed in L’Être et
l’acte. Enquête sur les fondements de l’ontologie moderne de la relation (2002) and La
Production des hommes. Marx avec Spinoza (2005)).
This interest in Marx beyond the Marxisms has not produced results which
capable of making Marx an interlocutor of the thought of the twentieth cen-
tury, and worthy of comparison with Heidegger or Wittgenstein, as both the
later Althusser and Gérard Granel have proposed in a number of suggestive
texts. The classic comparison with Hegel has not been renewed, except by
Fischbach, and the connection with Spinoza has been rendered more com-
plex, even confused. Bidet, Balibar, Negri and others invoke the latter, but is it
in fact the same Spinoza? He remains rather a programme and an ambiguous
token of recognition.
The great gures of twentieth-century Marxism have not received sus-
tained attention, if we set aside the enigmatic references to the equally enig-
matic notion of aleatory materialism in the later Althusser. Gramsci is unread
other than by some incorrigible individuals. Lefebvre is still in purgatory, as

is Sartre. Lukács has become an illustrious stranger despite the efforts of Nico-
las Tertullian. Bloch has been the subject of a few studies (notably by Arno
Münster, such as L’utopie concrète d’Ernst Bloch. Une biographie. 2001). Benjamin
has been more extensively studied, by Münster (Progrès et catastrophe. Walter
Benjamin et l’histoire. 1996), and also by Michael Löwy (Fire Alarm: Reading
Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ 2001) and Daniel Bensaïd (Wal-
ter Benjamin, sentinelle messianique, 1990). The Frankfurt school has beneted
from the interest of Germanophone philosophers such as Gérard Raulet. The
watchword of a ‘return to Marx beyond the Marxisms’ has gone hand in hand
with ignorance of the theoretical history of those Marxisms. It is symptomatic
that Lenin, who used to count for so much, has not been the subject of any
serious study, if we except Jean Robelin’s Marxisme et socialisation, which has
also been studiously ignored. We should not, therefore, tell ourselves stories
about the radiant future of the thousand Marxisms. None of us is in a position
to reforge Siegfried’s sword, as Jean Robelin has sarcastically put it.
While it is true that the concern for philological and historical precision
which characterises these lines of research should stimulate the translation
into French of Marx’s texts, in tandem with the publication of the new edi-
tion of the complete works of Marx and Engels (MEGA 2), it must also be
said that the danger of Marxological ‘exegeticism’ looms large. Lucien Sève is
right to ask ‘Do we still need Marx?’. That is why it is important to consider
work which has attempted to reply to the question by opening up avenues
which go beyond historiography or merely indicative suggestions. Here we
can take stock of those authors emblematic of the internal division wihich
runs through the thousand Marxisms – namely Lucien Sève, Daniel Bensaïd,
Jean Robelin, Jacques Bidet and Étienne Balibar. We have here a spectrum of
theoretical positions which stretches from the assumption of Marx’s useful-
ness to the rejection of numerous obsolete parts of the corpus and an exit from
it in other directions. This reconstruction is a roll-call neither of honour nor
horror, but, rather, an examination as to the real state of affairs. It hopes to
help bring about a confrontation between authors who (with, of course, a few
exceptions) scarcely engage in discussion with one another.
Lucien Sève is one of these exceptions. He discussed Althusser’s theses in
their time, criticising them for attributing an anti-dialectical conception of the
epistemological break to Marx and denying the persistence of the problematic
72 • André Tosel
of alienation. Today, Sève discusses Bidet’s positions, criticising him, too, for
ignoring the dialectic. Sève thinks that most ‘Marxist’ interpretations of Marx
rest, in reality, on partial or erroneous readings. He refuses to pass on too
rapidly to distinguishing between the good Marx and the bad. In a certain
sense, Sève retains all of Marx, after dusting him off a bit. He accepts the old
framework of the articulation between historical materialism and dialectical
materialism. The rst lies, he says, on an ethico-political axis that opens out
onto a re-afrmation of the legitimacy of the communist perspective. Class
struggle is simultaneously ethical inasmuch as it is the abolition of alienations.
Two works outline this theme: Communisme, quel second soufe? (1990) et Com-
mencer par les ns. La nouvelle question communiste (1999).
Sève questions the autonomy of a socialist phase supposedly preparing the
way for communism. The full development of capital in globalisation autho-
rises a direct transition based on not only the central class struggle but also
the mobilisation of all those who are ground down by capitalist exploitation.
The democratic republic is the accomplished political form for this transition,
a possibility that Lenin, according to Sève, did not exclude.
Today, dialectical materialism, likewise has an opportunity to rethink its
categories, setting out from an enrichment of the category of contradiction. De
facto, the natural sciences are the practical laboratory for this categorial pro-
ductivity, which should no longer be conceived as a dialectic of nature raised
to the level of a superscience. Sève gives concrete example of this immanent
dialectic in Dialectique et sciences de la nature, written in collaboration with nat-
ural scientists (1998). Another work, Emergence, complexité et dialectique (2005),
goes further down the same road and, engaging with the physics of non-linear
phenomena and the biology of emergence, sketches the elaboration of these
new categories, which can also be imported into the human sciences. Mediat-
ing these two lines of research is a reection on the formation of the person
and on bioethics (Pour une critique de la raison bioéthique, 1994).
The political polemics which challenged Sève’s position, when he was the
‘ofcial philosopher’ of the French Communist Party, contained a grain of
truth, but they have so far prevented us from taking the measure of a coherent
body of philosohical work. Sève announces in his programmatic book of 2004,
Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui. I. Marx et nous, that he is in the process of under-
taking a vast reading of Marx according to Marx. We shall wait and see.
With Daniel Bensaïd (b. 1946), we have a less conservative relationship to

Marx, but one that is equally concerned to maintain the unity of a thought
while also duly criticising it. Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures
of a Critique, rst published in 1995, re-elaborates Marx’s thought on the basis
of a triple critique. This thought is not a philosophy of the end of history, nor an
empirical sociology of class that announces the inevitable victory of the prole-
tariat, nor a universal science which carves out the path of inevitable progress
that all peoples must follow in nature. The three critiques of historical reason,
economic reason and speculative reason echo one another. Knowledge of the
movements of capital frees the space for the idea of plurilinear temporali-
ties, open to aleatory bifurcations and the category of possibility. The critique
of political economy opens onto a specic ontology of social relations and
their contradictions, but also onto all the other forms of oft-neglected conic-
tuality (gender, nationality, religion). Reason, nally, needs to recognise the
supersession of a dominant model of scienticity and to be illuminated by the
innovatory and dialectical thrust of scientic practices. Bensaïd is more open
than Sève to the imperative of making the effort to understand the novelty
of globalised capitalism and the concrete, especially political, conditions of
the transformation of the world. In a work which is a pendant to the one just
mentioned, Le pari mélancolique (1997), he takes into account the new spatio-
temporal co-ordinates and the modications in production and consumption
in the context of a radical crisis of of the idea of progress. Communism is no
longer thought of in positive Marxian fashion as the accomplishment of all
the possibilities blocked by capitalist domination, but, rather, as an ethical
and political effort to stave off impediments, to resist the threatening catas-
trophe. Bensaïd is closer to Benjamin or Péguy than Sève, and he defends a
melancholic romanticism. It is the end of the certainties of all faiths; it is a Pas-
calean Marxism which wagers on resistance – as demonstrated by numerous
texts, such as Résistance. Essai de topologie générale (2001), or Les Irréductibles.
Théorèmes de résistance à l’air du temps (2001). The revolutionary perspective is
rendered more complex, but remains an axis. It requires attention to the total-
ity of popular and alterglobalist struggles, and a renement of politics as a
strategic art (this is the theme of Un monde à changer. Mouvements et stratégies,
2003). It necessitates vigilance against the return of wars which, with their
claims to being ethically justied, are forging a new imperialism. A sense of
74 • André Tosel
urgency dominates all of Bensaïd’s thinking, which conceives mass demo-

cratic struggles in the context of a new internationalism (Un nouvel internationa-
lisme, 2003) and which is more sensitive than any competing body of thought
to contingency and time (as La Discordance des temps, 1995, attests).
In Jacques Bidet, we nd at one and the same time profound attention to the
Marx of Capital, a considerable distance from Marx, and an enormous theoreti-
cal ambition which seeks to produce acontemporary but more comprehensive
equivalent of the Marxian critique. In short, the desire for a Marx redivivus.
A stringent reader of Capital, to which he devoted another volume in 2004
(Explication et reconstruction du ‘Capital’), Bidet tracks down the weaknesses of
Marx’s masterpiece: the inadequacy of the theory of value, the impossibility
of separating the market from its political forms and conditions, the ambi-
guities in the conception of law and freedom, and the need to preserve both
inter-individual and central contractuality. This deconstructive enquiry opens
out positively onto a reconstruction, or rather refoundation, of Marxism that
sets itself up as an alternative to the euthanasia-reconstruction proposed by
Habermas, yet complements Marx with a renewed form of contractualism
(Bidet has devoted a perceptive study to Rawls: John Rawls et la théorie de la
justice, 1995).
We must therefore take the measure of Bidet’s magnum opus, Théorie générale
(1999), which sets itself the task of formulating, in the unity of a single con-
cept, a theory of modern society and a political philosophy which is both
realistic and prescriptive. This conjunction of science and political doctrine
is what Marx was aiming at in trying to think the world of real capitalism
whilst at the same time trying to determine what is to be done. It is impos-
sible to summarise a theory which rests on a complex intellectual organisation
implying the separation of structures (the market, classes, the state) from the
metastructure, which is the enunciation of modern social being by individuals
who recognise each other as free and equal, yet a contradictory one divided
between the discourses of domination and co-operation. This work deserves
discussion that it has not received. Although one might baulk at the claim
to generality, given the risk of a discourse from on high, such reservations
can only be justied by a respectful analysis of the audacity of this attempt.
Similarly, if one might be sceptical about the proposal of a communism iden-
tied with a world-state, a correlate of the world-system, which paradoxically
realises an ‘anarcho-Spinozist imperative’, one must recognise the richness
of a multidisciplinary enterprise which is capable of engaging the summits

of contemporary thought (notably in a detailed critique of Habermasian dis-
course ethics or of the economics of conventions or regulation theory).
The long reection of Étienne Balibar, begun when he was a very young
man under the mentorship of Louis Althusser in the 1960s, took a noteworthy
turn after Race, Class, Nation (1988). The death of the master and friend, fol-
lowing the personal catastrophe, the irreversible crisis of Soviet Communism,
and the end of Maoism, obliged Balibar to engage in a labour of mourning
which none of the other authors mentioned here has had to face. Without
abjuring Marx, on whom he is a an expert and to whom he has devoted a sub-
stantial study – The Philosophy of Marx (1993) – Balibar renounced ‘Marxism’,
which he regarded as an unproductive form of scholasticism. Moreover, he
no longer considered as relevant the perspective of a communist revolution
which would both surpass social democracy and outank Stalinism on its left.
There was no longer any reason to focus on the dictatorship of the proletariat
that he had defended in 1976. Balibar believes that the Communist parties
can no longer play a dynamic role because they conducted their struggles in a
narrow nationalist and statist framework and because they cut themselves off
from the modern masses due to their refusal to engage in grassroots politics.
He maintains that they have completely failed to understand the social trans-
formation wrought by globalisation, namely, the racist and ‘nationalitarian’
overdetermination of social conict and the obsolescence of delegatory poli-
tics. If Althusser denounced what ‘could no longer last’ within the party – its
clerico-military organisation and lack of a real strategy – Balibar arrived at the
position, without declaring it publicly, that it was the historical communist
party that could no longer last; that Marxism as a world-view was nished
because it was incapable of accounting for its own history; and that all the
attempts at reconstruction and refoundation (a return to Marx, or to Gramsci,
or to Lenin) were without a future because they had not grasped the changes
in the times and society.
A major work attests to this tacitly self-critical mutation, La Crainte des
masses. Politique et philosophie avant et après Marx (1997), which many readers
imagine to be a continuation of the essays in the reconstruction of historical
materialism of the Althusserian period (1974). Heralded by Les Frontières de la
démocratie (1992) et followed by Droit de cité. Culture et politique en démocratie
(1998) and Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’Etat, le peuple (2001), this
76 • André Tosel
investigation is based on a consideration of the unprecedented rise in violence

inscribed in globalisation (policies of generalised apartheid implemented by
capitalism that nd their translation in an explosion of racisms, identitarian
communitarianisms, cruel and endemic wars). The modern enunciation of
égaliberté has to be considered as the ethico-political foundation for any analy-
sis. First declared by the French Revolution, it was ignored by Marx, who per-
tinently analysed the conditions of politics while dissolving the historically
produced norm in a purely ideological critique. Thus Marx’s analysis cannot
come to terms with the fact that subjective human action and social move-
ments advance by mobilising the powers of the imagination and of life and
by repressing norms. The conicts of our modernity actualise the fear of the
masses – the fear that the masses provoke in the state or in themselves; and the
fear that the state arouses in them. Spinoza, Freud, and Foucault knew how to
explore this conictuality, which does not necessarily culminate in emancipa-
tion. More profoundly still, the political culture shared by Marx remains that
of emancipation and social transformation, but ignores the background of
minimal civility which is fundamentally that of non-violence. Only a politics
that is democratic from top to bottom is capable of rethinking the possibilities
of a universal, plural, cross-frontier community of right. It must stop referring
exclusively to the resolvent power of the counter-violence that the oppressed
counterpose to the different forms of violence of the dominant. This politics
of civility bears within it the possibility of a universal which conjoins the
spirit of revolt and the need for realistic intelligibility in the excessive condi-
tions of our age. As we can see, Marx and Spinoza must learn to live with
Hannah Arendt, the theorist of the superuous human, and with Locke, the
inventor of consciousness. From this point of view, ethico-political liberalism
is untranscendable.
The same absence of religious respect and blind loyalty vis-à-vis the Marx-
isms and the aporiae of Marx may be observed in the case of Jean Robelin.
The last student of Althusser, who recognised the importance of Marxisme et
socialisation (1989), Robelin has been scandalously ignored by both the aca-
demic authorities as well as his comrades in ‘Marxism’, although he is the
author of an important œuvre which has a real purchase on contemporary
phenomena. He, too, has left behind the notion of Marxism as a world-view.
His work is grounded in an analysis of the failure of Marxist socialisms as well
as of Soviet Communism. He has highlighted its difculties: the inadequacy
of economism, organisational fetishism, the impasses of any general theory

of the state, and the degeneration of critical communism into a teleological
metaphysics of nature and of history. However, unlike Balibar, he has turned
neither towards a normative theory of égaliberté nor a thematics of incontro-
vertible civility. He defends the relevance of the Marxian distinction between
formal and real subsumption of labour, which the young Balibar magiste-
rially underlined in his contribution to Reading ‘Capital’ in his Althusserian
days. Robelin uses this as his guiding thread in analysing the transformations
of politics, public and private law, international law, and social, productive,
private, and communicational technology in works that are enriched with
specic kinds of knowledge: La petite fabrique du droit (1994) and Les Sagesses
de l’art. Études de technologie sociale (1998). Thus, law is a necessary expression
of social relations; it functions politically and is always impure. The justice
to which it refers can only result in divisive confrontations, without being
able to constitute a foundational and transcendental order. Only a democracy
that is really social and re-activates the experience of direct democracy, of the
producers’ and citizens’ councils, can guarantee the functionning of juridicity
via a confrontation between different conceptions of justice. Thus, far from
being a form of aggression against Dasein, technique is the ‘possibilisation’ of
things. It is not dened not as a subordination of ends to the simple rationality
of means, but as a social technology which is realised through uses invested
by social relations and the division of labour. Through it, human beings
become the measure of all things, but, under capitalism, the possibilities of
concrete freedom are inverted into vital impossibilities (the impossibility of
working, living, escaping from interimperial wars or from the devastation
of nature or the manipulation of human substance). The function of politics
is to develop a democracy-process which makes these impossibilities impos-
sible, not to realise the magnicent destiny of Humanity as a subject. More
recently, Robelin has expanded his investigations to embrace thought and the
form of reason, plunging as a materialist and pragmatist into the eld of the
metaphysics of the mind (Esquisse d’une politique de l’esprit, 2000). This is an
œuvre whose time is still to come.
This review is incomplete. Other projects which seek to translate the Marx-
ian critique into other elds deserve to be mentioned. Thus Yvon Quiniou has
focused on morality (Figures de la déraison politique, 1995) and Jean Lojkine on
the labour process (Entreprise et société, 1998). Yves Schwartz has produced a
78 • André Tosel
major work on work and industrious activities (Travail et philosophie. Convoca-

tions mutuelles, 1992). In philosophy in the strict sense, the defence of Marx
and alterglobalisation proposed by Jacques Derrida (Specters of Marx, 1993)
has played a noteworthy role.
Marx will not cease to haunt thought as long as capitalist globalisation ren-
ders both our being-in-the-world, and the very idea of a world shared in com-
mon, problematic. Do we still inhabit a world worthy of the name?
Today, from the point of view of the future of Marxism(s), it is the level
of the world economy that is pertinent. The capacity to analyse it in its rela-
tionship to the real submission of labour, taken as the guiding thread, and
to develop the skein of that thread, will constitute the immanent criterion of
the importance of the thousand Marxisms. Acquiring this ability will oblige
us to read both the known and the unknown Marx better; it will govern the
development of Marxist ‘science’ in its confrontation with other forms of
knowledge that will have to submit to the test of their critical transformation;
it will revive examination of ‘its’ philosophy and the link between that sci-
ence and that philosophy. The crisis of the neoliberal order has always been
the negative precondition for a revival of Marxism. If the twentieth century
was the short century that ran from capitalism to capitalism; if it opened with
a catastrophic crisis which revealed the liberal-national order’s fragility and
potential for inhumanity, if it had at its centre the failure of the rst attempt at
communism, it did not close only with the crisis of Marxisms. It ended with
the onset of a new crisis secreted in the barbarism of the new liberal order.
This is where the thousand Marxisms discover the material for a new histori-
cal justication, the object of their analyses, and the occasion for their radical
self-criticism, which is also the critique of the liberal order by itself. This is the
terrain for the reconstitution of their positive precondition: the emergence of
new social movements and new practices beyond the monstrous dead ends
of the organisation of the State-Party, the possibility of forging a new link
between theory and practice, whose forms cannot and must not be prejudged.
Let us leave the last – and subsequent – word to the old Antonio Labriola: ‘But
what does the real novelty of the world which has made the imperfections of
Marxism so very obvious consist in? There’s the rub.’5
5
Labriola 1975, p. 337.
Chapter Four
Whither Anglo-Saxon Marxism?
Alex Callinicos
François Truffaut famously suggested that once there

was ‘a certain incompatibility between the terms
“cinema” and “Britain”’.1 Till a generation ago one
might have said the same about the words ‘Marx-
ism’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Before the 1960s, the terrain
was not completely barren, but the limited political
inuence of Marxism on the workers’ movement the
United States and Britain corresponded to the rela-
tive weakness of Marxism as a theoretical discourse
in these countries.
The impact of the 1930s

The left radicalisation of the 1930s did produce
some important contributions. In the US the early
writings of Sidney Hook, notably Towards an Under-
standing of Karl Marx,2 represented an intriguing
encounter between the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács
and Korsch and the left-liberal pragmatism of John
Dewey. In Britain, the writings of John Strachey bril-
liantly publicised a version of Marxism close to that
of the Communist Party and, in the domain of eco-
nomic theory, a more original analysis willing to
1
Truffaut 1978, p. 140.
2
Hook 1933.
80 • Alex Callinicos
engage with the work of Hayek and Keynes. And Trotskyist writers produced
some outstanding texts of historico-political analysis such as C.L.R. James’s
The Black Jacobins and Harold Isaacs’s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.
The 1930s had, moreover, some signicant longer-term consequences. The
Popular Front and the struggle against fascism was the formative political
experience of a generation of young intellectuals some of whom, during the
harsher climate of the Cold War, refused to abandon Marxism, and instead
creatively developed it. The most important example is provided by the bril-
liant gallery of historians – among them Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill,
Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and George Rudé – who emerged from the
Communist Party of Great Britain after the Second World War. The CP Histo-
rians’ Group provided in the late 1940s and early 1950s the milieu for a series
of important debates that took as their starting point the Cambridge Marx-
ist economist Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946).
With the exception of Hobsbawm, all the leading gures left the CPGB after
the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. But, as indepen-
dent socialist historians, they continued to develop a version of Marxism that
sought to study history ‘from below’ – from the perspective of the oppressed
and exploited – and to give the study of culture and representations a greater
importance than had been accorded it in more orthodox approaches.
The American Marxist journal Monthly Review represented a somewhat
analogous tendency the other side of the Atlantic. Under the guidance of g-
ures such as Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, and Harry Magdoff, Monthly Review
practised a version of Marxism that was broadly sympathetic to the Com-
munist régimes (notably those in the Third World, such as China and Cuba)
but intellectually independent, for example in its development of an account
of contemporary capitalism that distanced itself from the labour theory of
value. The two groups clashed in the celebrated debate on the transition from
feudalism to capitalism in the late 1940s precipitated by Sweezy’s attack on
Dobb’s Studies.3
3
See Hilton 1976.
Whither Anglo-Saxon Marxism? • 81
Western Marxism and the 1960s generation

It is nevertheless fair to say that, before the 1960s, Marxism was marginal
to the broader intellectual culture of the English-speaking world. One of the
main preoccupations of New Left Review (NLR) under the editorship of Perry
Anderson (1962–83) was the humiliating gap between the Western Marxism
of Lukács and Gramsci, Adorno and Horkheimer, Sartre and Althusser, Della
Volpe and Colletti, and the stunted growth in Britain. In a celebrated pair of
interpretive essays, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1964) and ‘Components of
the National Culture (1968),4 Anderson used a particular reading of Gramsci
and Sartre, to present England as a case of abnormal capitalist development,
in which a partially modernised aristocracy had succeeded in maintaining
hegemony over both the main classes of industrial society: bourgeoisie and
proletariat alike remained subaltern classes that had failed to develop their
own hegemonic ideology. This specic pattern of class relations explained
what Anderson claimed to be the peculiar backwardness of English intellec-
tual culture by comparison with its continental counterparts: nowhere was
there to be found a totalising analysis of society – neither a bourgeois sociol-
ogy comparable to that of Weber or Durkheim nor a revolutionary Marxist
critique.
Anderson’s interpretation of English history was itself the subject of a dev-
astating riposte by Thompson, ‘The Pecularities of the English’.5 But the qual-
ity of the arguments produced on both sides of this debate itself indicated that
the poverty of British Marxism was a thing of the past. The fundamental force
at work was political. The 1956 crisis in the Communist movement produced
by Krushchev’s secret speech and the Hungarian Revolution created a politi-
cal space for a left independent of both Labourism – of course, dominant in
the British workers’ movement – and ofcial Communism. NLR was one of
the intellectual products of this New Left. The base of this Left was greatly
expanded by a series of movements – for nuclear disarmament, against apart-
heid in South Africa, in solidarity with the struggle of the Vietnamese peo-
ple – that folded into the more general contestation that Britain experienced,
though on a more modest scale than the United States or continental Europe,
at the end of the 1960s.
4
Reprinted in Anderson 1992a.
5
Reprinted in Thompson 1978.
The result was greatly to expand both the consumers and the producers of
Marxist ideas. The generation of the 1960s provided much of the readership
of the great mature works of the Marxist historians – Thompson’s The Making
of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters, Hill’s The World Turned
Upside Down, Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the long nineteenth century.6 Not least
among the signicance of these works was the model they offered for the
radical young scholars who now began to enter an academy that, thanks to
the expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, offered many more
teaching posts.
One main thread in the ferment of debate that ensued concerned the kind
of Marxism relevant to the needs of both political militants and socialist schol-
ars (it was a characteristic of the radicalisation that most refused to distin-
guish between these two groups). In both Britain and the US this was issue
was inseparable from that of the reception of forms of continental thought to
which the intellectual cultures of these countries had hitherto been hostile.
Perhaps because of the historical connection between the Frankfurt school
and the American academy – reected in the personal inuence of Herbert
Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal, who did not return from exile to Germany after
the Second World War – it was this version of Western Marxism that proved
most inuential on American radicals.
In Britain, by contrast, it was Althusser’s reconstruction of Marxism that
formed the focus of debate. NLR and its publishing house New Left Books
(later Verso) were particularly assiduous in publishing translations of Althus-
ser’s and his associates’ writings, though for the Review he was merely one of
a number of French and Italian Marxists whose works it sought to introduce
to an English-speaking readership. The enthusiasm for Althusser was part of
a broader reception of French structuralism and poststructuralism. In Britain,
cultural studies had been launched in the late 1950s by New-Left intellectuals
such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. Compared therefore to the largely
depoliticised reception of Lacan and Derrida in the US, where they were rst
taken up by literary critics at Yale, the various intellectual strands generated
by Saussure’s theory of language were received in Britain as contributions to
a materialist analysis of culture and representations.
6
Hobsbawm 1962, 1975 and 1987.
This reception of Western Marxism did not go uncontested. Once again

Thompson and Anderson are emblematic gures. Thompson denounced the
uncritical adoption of continental models in the name of a native English radi-
cal tradition dating back to the democratic revolutions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In an essay that showed his mastery of polemic to the
full, ‘The Poverty of Theory’ (1978), he launched an all-out attack on Althus-
serian Marxism, which he excoriated for seeking to dene experience out of
theory and agency out of history.
Anderson was, by contrast, the chief gure responsible for importing the
Continental Marxism Thompson reviled in order to remedy the defects of the
native stock. Yet by the time ‘The Poverty of Theory’ appeared, Anderson had
developed a more ambivalent position. In Considerations of Western Marxism
(1976) he contrasted the Marxism of Adorno, Althusser, and Della Volpe –
philosophical, preoccupied with ideology and aesthetics, alienated from prac-
tice – unfavourably with what he called (following Isaac Deutscher) classical
Marxism, the tradition of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, whose historical,
political, and economic analyses were organically connected to their practical
involvement in the workers’ movement. Anderson’s response to ‘The Poverty
of Theory’ combined a reasoned defence of Althusser’s contribution to Marx-
ism with the espousal of a more materialist approach represented philosophi-
cally by G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978), and politically by
the Trotskyist movement.7
Anderson’s evolution reected the relative weight of Trotskyism in Anglo-
phone left culture. While the Maoist groupuscules which dominated the
American student movement at its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s
had, if anything, a negative intellectual impact, the various strands of Trotsky-
ism were a signicant reference point. The writings of Isaac Deutscher dur-
ing his later years in English exile were an important formative inuence on
the British New Left, and his great biography of Trotsky helped to increase
the general intellectual prestige of Trotskyism. Ernest Mandel was an active
contributor to left debates in the English-speaking world, and his economic
writings – most notably Late Capitalism – were rapidly translated into English.
Deutscher and Mandel were the chief inuences on Anderson and the rest of
the NLR team, but there were other signs of the vitality of English-speaking
7
Anderson 1980.
Trotskyism, notably Tony Cliff’s path-breaking analysis of Stalinist Russia as

an instance of bureaucratic state capitalism, and the studies of postwar capi-
talism by his associates Michael Kidron and Chris Harman.
Crisis
By the early 1980s, Anderson could contrast the intellectual eforescence of
Marxism in the English-speaking world with the political and intellectual
reaction that was gripping France after the nouveaux philosophes had led the
generation of 1968 from Maoism to Cold-War liberalism.8 The work of radical
scholars such as the historian Robert Brenner and the sociologist Erik Olin
Wright represented serious attempts systematically to connect theoretical
reection and empirical analysis. No doubt, serious weaknesses remained –
certainly at the level of political strategy, but also theoretically with respect
to such key issues as the analysis of gender and the problem of articulating
market and plan in a socialist economy – but the future of ‘Anglo-Marxism’
seemed safe.
Alas, Anderson’s analysis stands up better as a retrospective survey of the
development of Marxist thought between the 1960s and the early 1980s than
as a prediction of its future. Just as he was writing, the tide turned against
Marxism in the English-speaking world. Once again, the decisive factor was a
change in the political conjuncture. The advent of Margaret Thatcher and Ron-
ald Reagan represented the beginning of major offensives against the workers’
movements in Britain and the US that not only inicted major defeats – above
all, that of the British miners’ strike of 1984–5 – but inaugurated the complex
of neoliberal policies that by the 1990s had become a normative model for
capitalism as a whole.
These reverses would have in any case produced a climate of pessimism
and doubt on the intellectual Left. But more strictly theoretical problems
also played their role in the unravelling of ‘Anglo-Marxism’. Thus, in Brit-
ain, Althusserian Marxism self-destructed in the second half of the 1970s.
An intensive exploration of the internal problems of the Althusserian system
led some adepts rst to renounce the notion of a general theory of history,
8
Anderson 1983.
then the concept of mode of production, and nally Marxism tout court.9 This
rather arcane process was in fact symptomatic of a more general develop-
ment. Whereas, at the height of the radicalisation in the late 1960s and early
1970s, French structuralism and what would later be called poststructuralism
were embraced as forms of thought contributing to the renaissance of Marx-
ism, by the end of the 1970s they were seem as constituting a major challenge
to Marxism.
The writings of what might call ‘Middle Foucault’ – Surveillir et punir, La
Volonté de savoir, and associated interviews and other texts on power-knowl-
edge – were particularly important here. Detached from their immediate
French context – the intense debates of the mid-1970s over the meaning of
the Gulag – they played a broader theoretical role in the English-speaking
world in helping philosophically to articulate a growing sense of the limita-
tions of all forms of Marxism. The question of how to interpret gender oppres-
sion and other forms on non-class domination was particularly pressing. The
belief that these forms could not be explained on the basis of the classical con-
cepts of historical materialism – forces and relations of production, base and
superstructure, exploitation and class, etc. – encouraged a quasi-Foucauldian
view of society as a irreducible multiplicity of power-relations. Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe offered a particularly inuential version of this view in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which drew on the post-Althusserian
debates as well as a peculiar reading of Gramsci to argue for a ‘radical demo-
cratic’ politics bringing together a plurality of different social movements.
The rise and fall of analytical Marxism

Yet it was in this very unpromising conjuncture of the 1980s that there emerged
what might be considered the rst Marxist theoretical current completely
indigenous to the English-speaking world. The founding work of analytical
Marxism is Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History, which represents one of the
three main currents that went to make it up. Cohen, the product of a Commu-
nist-Party milieu in Quebec, but trained at Oxford in the techniques of post-
war ordinary language philosophy, sought to use these techniques rigorously
to articulate the conceptual structure of an orthodox historical materialism in
9
See Hindess and Hirst 1974, Hindess and Hirst 1977, and Cutler et al. 1977–8.
which the development of the productive forces is the motor of social trans-
formation. His main substantive thesis involved the elaboration of a concep-
tion of functional explanation that allowed him to argue that the production
relations exist because of their tendency to develop the productive forces and
the superstructure because of its tendency to stabilise these relations.
The elegance and originality of Cohen’s treatment of historical materialism
have permanently altered the terms on which discussion of Marx’s work is
conducted. More important perhaps than the content of Cohen’s interpreta-
tion was the intellectual style it embodied – a combination of close acquain-
tance with Marx’s writing with a careful attention to precision of statement
and consequence of argument. Yet, surprisingly enough, the development of
historical materialism did not for long provide the main focus of the group of
philosophers and social scientists whose annual meetings represent the intel-
lectual core of analytical Marxism. Cohen’s critics were quick to seize on his
reliance on the assumption that humans are ‘somewhat rational’ in order to
justify the claim that the productive forces tend to develop through history.
It was the attempt systematically to reconstruct Marxism on the basis of such
an assumption that was pursued by the second, and arguably the dominant
tendency within analytical Marxism.
‘Rational-choice Marxism’ was most systematically expounded by Jon Elster
in Making Sense of Marx (1985). It rested on two theses: rst, methodological
individualism – social structures must be interpreted as the unintended con-
sequence of individual actions; second, human actors must be regarded as
instrumentally rational, in the sense of selecting the most efcient means for
securing their ends. The rst thesis was associated with the ideological offen-
sive waged against Marxism by Popper and Hayek at the height of the Cold
War; the second was a generalisation of an animating assumption of neoclas-
sical economics. How could an approach with such anti-Marxist credentials
come to be associated with an attempted reconstruction of Marxism?
In part this outcome was a consequence of the evolution of Marxist eco-
nomic theory in the English-speaking world. The explosion of radical ideas
at the end of the 1960s encouraged both the serious critical scrutiny of Marx’s
Capital, particularly by those inuenced either by Althusser or by the Ger-
man capital-logic school, and the attempt to develop the Marxist tradition of
political economy by explaining why the Golden Age of postwar capitalism
had come to an end. In the 1970s, however, these efforts became embroiled
in prolonged debates about the internal coherence and explanatory power

of Marx’s value theory. Left-wing economists inuenced by Piero Sraffa gen-
eralised from certain long-standing arguments about the transformation of
values into prices of production and the theory of the tendency of the rate of
prot to fall to argue that the labour theory of value was irrelevant to deter-
mining relative prices and an obstacle to understanding the actual behaviour
of capitalist economies. The Srafans’ own crisis theory resembled Ricardo’s
theory that wages and prots are inversely related – hence they were com-
monly known as neo-Ricardians.
Some analytical Marxists – notably John Roemer and Philippe Van Parijs –
took part in these debates on the neo-Ricardian side. But Roemer in particu-
lar went much further, embracing the neoclassical orthodoxy of which Sraffa
had been such a subversive critic. In A General Theory of Exploitation and Class
(1982), he sought to detach Marx’s theory of exploitation from the labour the-
ory of value and restate in terms of general equilibrium analysis and game
theory. Since the latter both reduce social relations to the activities of optimis-
ing individuals, the rigour and imagination that Roemer displayed in using
them to construct various formal models of exploitation seemed to demon-
strate the fertility of a rational-choice approach.
The third current in analytical Marxism – represented chiey by Wright and
Brenner – enjoyed a somewhat oblique relationship to rational-choice Marx-
ism. Wright drew on Roemer’s theory of exploitation in his Classes (1985).
But his own research was driven by a much more long standing preoccupa-
tion was systematically and empirically to test a carefully articulated Marxist
theory of class whose original Althusserian inuences remained visible even
in the later versions. Both Wright and Brenner rejected methodological indi-
vidualism. While the latter’s interpretation of the origins of European capital-
ism laid great weight on the role of agency, in the shape of the class struggles
between lord and peasant in the late mediaeval countryside, individual action
was constrained by the ‘rules of reproduction’ imposed on social actors by
their place in the structure of ‘property relations’ (as Brenner preferred to
name the relations of production).
It is perhaps not surprising that, given the heterogeneity of analytical
Marxism, its claim to be developing a distinctively Marxist understanding
of the world proved to be quite short-lived. To some extent, this was a prod-
uct of the contradictory internal logic of rational-choice Marxism itself. The
labour theory of value and the theory of the falling rate of prot proved not
to be the only item of Marxist thought that were deemed to be incompatible
with the canons of rational-choice theory. The resulting intellectual vacuum
encouraged some leading gures – notably Cohen and Roemer – to shift their
intellectual focus towards normative political philosophy, and to become con-
tributors to the debates provoked by the efforts of egalitarian liberals such as
John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen to develop a theory of justice
that would give a prominent place to equality.10
There were internal reasons why this shift in focus should occur. A wide-
ranging debate among English-speaking Marxist philosophers had drawn
attention to Marx’s tacit reliance in condemning capitalist exploitation on
normative principles of justice that he denied possessing.11 Roemer’s attempts
to reconstruct Marx’s theory of exploitation led him to conclude that the injus-
tice of exploitation did not derive from the appropriation of surplus labour
but in the unjust initial distribution of productive assets responsible for this
surplus extraction.12 But such a view required some statement of egalitarian
principles of justice in terms of which particular distributions could be evalu-
ated. In Cohen’s case, his attempt to articulate such principles seemed to be
driven less by any such strict logic than by a more general sense that the most
urgent task of socialist theory was to identify the normative preconditions of
an egalitarian society. Thus, explaining his shift, he cites as a reason,
which doesn’t require that there is something wrong with historical

materialism, is that I just don’t think that it’s terribly important, whereas I
think that the normative questions are desperately important. The struggle
at the intellectual level between capitalism and socialism as realizations of
different normative orientations is immensely important for the future of
socialist politics.13
10
See Cohen 1989 and Cohen 1995 and Roemer 1995.
11
See Geras 1985.
12
Roemer 1986.
13
Cohen 1996, pp. 12–13.
Is Marxism ‘over’?
Cohen’s move away from classical Marxism towards something more closely
resembling utopian socialism was symptomatic of a more general sense of
malaise. The impact of 1989 and 1991 – the East-European revolutions and
the collapse of the Soviet Union – were undoubtedly of great importance,
reinforcing the doubts and difculties that had developed since the late 1970s.
Even those Marxists critical of Stalinism often had hidden political capital
invested in ‘existing socialism’: the existence of a viable state-run economic
system, however authoritarian its political régime, offered a visible limit to
the power and rationality of Western capitalism. Hence the fall of the Stalin-
ist régimes demoralised the international Left well beyond the ranks of these
régimes’ organised political supporters in the Communist Parties. It was on
this basis that Ronald Aronson argued that ‘Marxism is over’: ‘By erasing its
last, lingering hopes, the dissolution of the Soviet Union closes the eyes of the
Marxian project.’14
In considering Aronson’s claim in the Anglo-Saxon context it is necessary
to draw a critical distinction.15 Marxism has always operated in two registers.
It is both an intellectual tradition and a political movement. The tension this
implies is evident even in the name Engels sought to give it – scientic social-
ism. For sciences proceed according to protocols that respect the autonomy of
theoretical research: propositions are scrutinised according to their heuristic
power, empirical corroboration, logical consistency, and (occasionally) philo-
sophical foundation. Socialism, by contrast, as a political movement must be
judged by criteria of worldly success – mass support, political power, global
extension. By proudly embracing the unity of theory and practice, Marxism
submits itself to two standards of judgement.
Having drawn these unavoidable distinctions, I now wish to offer a hypoth-
esis. Marxism has not been theoretically refuted, but has suffered several seri-
ous though not fatal political defeats. To assert that Marxism continues to
be a viable and indeed a robust scientic research programme is not to deny
that it suffers from a variety of anomalies, silences, and other limitations. It is
simply to argue that none of its basic propositions have been refuted, let alone
14
Aronson 1995, pp. 1, 69.
15
This and the subsequent three paragraphs draw on Callinicos 1996, pp. 9–10.
replaced by those offered by a more powerful successor. This is, of course, a

very strong claim, and one that I cannot make out in any detail here.16 Indirect
support for it is, however, provided by the current state of debate in the West-
ern academy. It is not that there has been any decisive encounter between
Marxism and its rivals in which the former was intellectually crushed. On the
contrary, it is the most fashionable of these rivals, postmodernism, that has
been subjected to such devastating theoretical criticism that the most interest-
ing question about it is why ideas as bankrupt as these continue to exercise so
widespread an inuence.17
The intellectual retreat of Marxism is less a matter of outright defeat than of
positions being abandoned, debates cut short, arguments left half way. Thus
the early controversies among analytical Marxists over Cohen’s interpretation
of Marx represented competing attempts to articulate the conceptual struc-
ture of historical materialism. No ineluctable logic led from these arguments
to the abandonment of classical Marxism. Rather, the antagonists lost interest
and moved into the academic mainstream.
It is as if the defenders of a well-fortied stronghold were voluntarily to
abandon it. There was, it is true, one area where Marxism has come under chal-
lenge, with the appearance of several powerful historical sociologies whose
theoretical sources can be traced back ultimately to Max Weber.18 These works
offered wide-ranging theories of history that sought to establish that class
exploitation is merely one among an irreducible plurality of forms of forms of
domination, each of co-equal importance to the others. The appearance of the
rst volume of Mann’s The Sources of Social Power apparently decided Ander-
son to abandon ‘the intellectual world of the revolutionary left’, since ‘there
now existed a developed analytical theory of the pattern of human develop-
ment, exceeding in explanatory ambition and empirical detail any Marxist
account’.19
But this seems like much too despairing a response. Once proper tribute
has been paid to Mann’s conceptual sophistication and historical range, the
fact remains that a theory’s strength is not primarily a matter of the amount of
evidence it covers, but of how well it does so. Anderson’s failure to draw this
16
But see Callinicos 1983 and 1991.
17
See Habermas 1987, Dews 1987, Callinicos 1989.
18
Gellner 1989, Giddens 1981, Mann 1986 and 1993, and Runciman 1989.
19
Anderson 1992b, p. xii.
distinction is particularly surprising since he was one of a number of writers

who identied, from a Marxist perspective, major aws in Mann’s claim to
have come up with a theory of history superior to Marx’s.20 It seems likely
that Anderson’s willingness to concede intellectual ground to neo-Weberian
historical sociology was a symptom of a more general pessimism about the
political prospects for the Left rather than a reection of the demonstrable the-
oretical superiority of, say, Mann’s work to classical historical materialism.
The transatlantic shift

Certainly the past two decades of crisis have seen some major contributions
by English-speaking Marxists. They include one undeniable classic – G.E.M.
de Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981), the work of
a historian of the same generation as Hill and Hobsbawm, albeit formed in
a different intellectual and political milieu, that of Oxford classical scholar-
ship, on the one hand, and the Labour Party, on the other. Younger historians
have also produced some important works – for example, Peter Linebaugh’s
The London Hanged (1991), Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution (1993), and John
Haldon’s Byzantium in the Seventh Century (1997). Brenner has also contributed
to the analysis of contemporary capitalism in his controversial study of the
advanced economies since 1945.21 In a similar mode is Wright’s latest report
from his ongoing comparative study of Western class structure.22 These well-
known texts are merely the tip of ice-berg: particularly in the United States,
many Marxist scholars have simply ignored the grand apostasies of the past
twenty years and carried on working in various areas of philosophy, political
economy, sociology, and history.
This is a reection of the fact that, as the huge wave of youth radicalistion that
swept the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s receded, it deposited in its wake
many of the participants lodged in niches within the vast university system.
This has been one source of the ‘culture wars’ waged in the American acad-
emy over issues such as a race, gender, and sexual orientation. At its worst, the
result has been a narcissistic, self-enclosed academic culture striking radical
20
Anderson 1992b, Chapter 4; also Wickham 1988, Haldon 1993, and Callinicos
1995, pp. 110–28.
21
Brenner 1998.
22
Wright 1997.
postures and conducting arcane debates while, outside the campuses, the
larger society moves in the opposite direction, as neoliberalism steers the state
and economy, and the ‘prison-industrial complex’ expands remorselessly to
process the casualties of an increasingly social-Darwinist capitalism. But the
size and diversity of the university system has nevertheless provided spaces
within which more serious Marxist and marxisant intellectuals can pursue
their work according to a bewilderingly diversity of theoretical paradigms.
To some extent this is a repetition on a larger scale on what happened to
the 1930s’s generation from which gures such as Edward Thompson, Chris-
topher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and Paul Sweezy sprang. There is, however,
an important difference: the centre of gravity has shifted across the Atlantic.
Thus, of the ve leading gures associated with analytical Marxism, three –
Roemer, Brenner, and Wright – are American, Cohen is a Canadian based at
Oxford, and Elster is a Norwegian working in the US. It is not that there are no
important British gures: the literary theorist Terry Eagleton has, for example,
kept up for the past generation a dazzling performance in which he somehow
manages to draw on such diverse sources as Althusser, Derrida, Trotsky, and
Benjamin to produce a series of scintillating texts. But those British Marxists
with an international reputation tend to write increasingly for an audience
centred on the American academy and often to work there.23
The presence at UCLA of Anderson, an Anglo-Irish intellectual who has
done more than anyone else to thematise the problem of a British Marxism, is
symbolic of the process.
This phenomenon is part of a broader redistribution of intellectual power
in the Western academy. For example, the dominance that the US has come
to acquire in the domain of analytical philosophy in the era of Quine, David-
son, Rawls, Dworkin, Kripke, and Dennett is striking. The fact that Marxist
theory has participating in the same process is a symptom of its integration
in academic life. Today probably the two best-known Marxists in the English-
speaking world are Eric Hobsbawm and Fredric Jameson. The rst recalls an
era that is now rmly in the past – Hobsbawm was formed by the experi-
ence of fascism and Popular Fronts in the 1930s, a loyal member of the British
23
The US also acts as a conduit for communication with left intellectuals outside
Europe. In East Asia, for example, radical milieux in countries such as South Korea
and Taiwan have shown a healthy appetite for English-language Marxist texts that
reach them largely via the US.
Communist Party till its collapse after 1989, apart from Thompson the most
publicly active of the postwar historians, the practitioner of a subtle, even
Jesuitical politics that may explain that he is the only Marxist to have been
awarded the accolade of being made a Companion of Honour by the Queen.
Jameson, by contrast, is chiey known for his celebrated essays on post-
modernism.24 These texts display an idiosyncratic Marxism at work, one that
remarkably seeks to reconcile Althusser and Lukács by treating all the slips,
elisions, and absences characteristic of ideological discourses as symptoms of
the unrepresentable totality that constitutes the horizon of all human activity.
It is the task of historical materialism to conceptualise this totality: thus James-
on’s famous injunction: ‘Always historicize!’ might be transcribed: ‘Always
totalize!’.25 This is an intellectual project working against the grain of the dom-
inant tendency in discussions of postmodernism, which privileges fragmenta-
tion and uncertainty. Jameson’s unapologetically totalising interpretation of
postmodern art as the culture appropriate to a new epoch of global capital-
ism has recently won over at least one sceptic.26 But, whatever one thinks
of this interpretation as an historico-economic analysis, in its preoccupation
with tracing the particularities of contemporary culture it is relatively easily
recuperable within academic discourses that share none of Jameson’s resolute
materialism or his undiminished hostility to capitalism.
There is, then, a sense in which Anderson’s earlier diagnosis of Western
Marxism as an idealism that ed from a hostile world into the academy can
be applied to contemporary English-speaking Marxism. It has been left to
the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty to criticise ‘the cultural Left’ for
effectively ignoring the sharp increase in socio-economic inequality over the
past generation and to call a return to class politics.27 This criticism does not
apply to all left intellectuals: the work of Brenner and Wright, for example,
has sought seriously to engage with the realities of contemporary capitalism.
Beyond the academy, the heterodox Trotskyism inaugurated by Tony Cliff
has represented a version of Marxism that seeks both to be analytically rigor-
ous and to maintain the kind of systematic connection with political prac-
tice constitutive of the classical tradition. Chris Harman is perhaps the most
24
See Jameson 1991.
25
Jameson 1981, p. 9.
26
See Anderson 1998.
27
Rorty 1998 and Rorty 1999.
impressive exponent of this approach, producing a stream of books that span

analysis of Stalinism (1974), historiography of the Left (1982 and 1988), politi-
cal economy (1984), and, most recently, non-Eurocentric universal history
(1999).
This still leaves a painful gap between theory and practice – between con-
temporary Marxists’ capacity to offer critical analyses of the world in which
they live and their ability to inuence the development of that world. Under-
standing the source of this gap is a matter of critical political importance.
Does it signify the demise of Marxism as a coherent intellectual and political
project as Aronson, among many other left intellectuals, argues? Must we,
rather, accept Jacques Bidet’s and Jürgen Habermas’s contrasting proposals to
incorporate what was valid in Marx’s critique of capitalism in a larger general
theory of modernity? Does the current ineffectiveness of Marxist critique, as
Jameson and Anderson suggest, reect the inauguration of a new epoch of
capitalist development that will eventually stimulate its socialist negation in
some unimagined, unforeseeable form? Or, nally, are we already beginning
to emerge from a period of severe but temporary defeats from the workers’
movement, and entering an era when the new social struggles stimulated by
neoliberalism will allow classical Marxism once again to become a material
force?
I incline personally towards the last of these alternatives. The debate among
the four options will not be quickly or decisively concluded. It is important
that it is conducted in a way that avoids reliance on a misleading stereotype
of a caricatured unitary ‘Marxism’ that typically combines the least attractive
traits of the Second and Third Internationals. One positive consequence of the
past twenty years of disorientation has been the recognition of what has been
a fact at least since the Bernstein debate – that there is a plurality of Marxisms
offering rival ways of carrying the tradition on. 1989 may have denitively
killed off one such version – the Marxist-Leninist ideology that provided
‘existing socialism’ with its state religion. It does not follow that rival vari-
ants have also been disposed of – particularly those, stemming from Trotsky,
that dened themselves in opposition to Stalinism. This does not mean one
may take refuge in a dogmatised ‘orthodoxy’. But not the least interesting
feature of English-speaking Marxism over the past generation is the resources
it offers for renewing the classical tradition.
Chapter Five
Old Theories and New Capitalism:
The Actuality of a Marxist Economics
Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
Introduction
Yes, capitalism undergoes a process of permanent
change. Its capacity to plunge into enduring, pro-
found crisis and then bounce back appears limit-
less. Each of these pulsations occurs at the cost of
a renewal of certain aspects of its structure and
dynamic. Which should surprise us more – the conti-
nuities or the ruptures? More clearly than in some of
its previous phases, contemporary capitalism exhib-
its the basic characteristics that have dened it as
such since it came into existence: private ownership
of the means of production; concentration of income
and wealth; exploitation at national and interna-
tional levels; and a dynamic of change directed
towards perpetuating the privileges of a minority.
But other observations underline the extent of its
transformation: new techniques of production and
nancial institutions; changes in property forms and
managerial modes; the retreat of the working class in
the advanced capitalist countries and the dissolution
of old class boundaries into new intermediate strata;
and so on. Are we already beyond capitalism?
What tools do we possess to master the paradoxi-
cal coexistence of continuity and change, to guide us
96 • Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
in these developments? The thesis we wish to defend here is that, far from
being obsolete, the tools identied by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century –
by the Marx who was a theorist of capitalism – have still not been superseded
and have not realised their full potential. The object of the present exercise,
however, is not to elicit retrospective admiration, but to contribute to the
renewal of an analytical framework.
In order to think the new starting from the old, two rules dictate themselves:
rst, grasping recent events in a historical perspective; and second, killing
two birds with one stone – combining use of these tools and their renement
in a single intervention. If the concepts and analytical mechanisms that Marx
bequeathed us are those most apt to supply us with the keys to the contempo-
rary world, we must also know how to acknowledge their lacunae and defects –
and the need for supplementation and reformulation.
This programme has only been very partially executed since the publica-
tion of the last volumes of Capital.1 There are several reasons for this. In the
developed capitalist countries, Marxist analysis has always been in a subor-
dinate position, bereft of the resources required for its advance; and this is
perhaps more than ever the case today. Where it was dominant, it was instru-
mentalised, put in the service of a party, whether conducting the revolution-
ary process or holding the reins of power. Next, we should remember, this is
an arduous task! One of the characteristics of Marxist theory, which adds to
its complexity, is the very general apprehension of social processes peculiar
to it. If the economic theory is clearly dened by its concepts (commodity,
value, capital, surplus-value, price, and so on), their deployment in empirical
analysis necessarily draws us into the elds traditionally dened as sociologi-
cal or political.
The two sections below elaborate on these themes: rstly, the tendencies
and mechanisms that have emerged in world capitalism in the last decade
or so pose a major analytical challenge; secondly, the concepts fashioned by
Marx in the nineteenth century provide us with the keys – their utilisation
requires and governs a deepening of them.
1
See the major synthesis made in Howard and King 1989 and 1992.
Old Theories and New Capitalism • 97
A new phase of capitalism

If we must go straight to the heart of the matter and characterise the current
operation of capitalism by way of its major features, two stand out. The rst
concerns the new tendencies of technical change and distribution. The second
involves the neoliberal course of capitalism, in both its national characteristics
(the rigour of its rules as regards the dominated classes and its service of the
dominant classes) and its international features (the neoliberal phase of glo-
balisation and its nancial disorder). We shall consider them in turn. In this
analysis, we shall tend to privilege, often implicitly, the examples of France
and the United States.
Technical change and capital protability
The structural crisis of the 1970s and 1980s followed a fall in the protability
of capital, which was itself an expression of the gradual deterioration in the
conditions of technical change. The most obvious expression of this was the
gradual slow-down in the growth in labour productivity. However, the quan-
titative output that can be achieved with the same mass of capital – what is
called capital productivity (without any implication as to the ability of capital
to produce) – is even more revealing: it began to diminish in absolute value.
More and more capital was required to achieve the same output. From the rst
signs of these unfavourable trends, and with the help of the expanding wave
of unemployment, wage growth was rapidly called into question (with more
difculty when it came to the social contributions entailed by state benets,
for obvious institutional reasons). Despite the low increase in labour costs, the
protability of capital continued on its downward slide until the mid-1980s.
The important point is that this trend has now been reversed on a long-term
basis. Prots are increasing not only in absolute value, but relative to the stock
of capital (this is what is measured by the prot rate).2 In this respect, condi-
tions are favourable for capital. On the one hand, although labour productiv-
ity is continuing to grow only slowly, capital productivity is now increasing.
On the other hand, labour costs are still being contained. As this dynamic has
2
The tendency for the rate of prot to rise has been evident for about twenty years,
at least in the United States and the principal European countries. It is no more marked
in the United States than Europe (Duménil and Lévy 2004, Chapter 3).
continued over the last fteen years, it indicates the contours of a new phase of
capitalism.
This is not the rst time such a process has occurred. Going as far back as
the statistical series allow, we can identify two phases of declining prot rates
(from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and
from the initial postwar decades up to the 1980s); and two phases of rising
prot rates (during the rst half of the twentieth century and since the mid-
1980s). Each lasted for some decades. The rst and third, which are similar
in many respects, resulted in equally similar structural crises: the crisis at the
end of the nineteenth century and the crisis that began in the 1970s. The main
symptoms of these crises were a slow-down in the accumulation of capital,
and hence in growth; a correlative rise in unemployment; and greater instabil-
ity (proliferating recessions). The crisis of 1929 interrupted the intermediary
period, which was more auspicious, and of a different character.
The crisis at the end of the nineteenth century prompted a major transfor-
mation of capitalism. In the context of a crisis of competition (this was the era
of trusts and cartels), the institutions of modern capitalism emerged: the large
public limited company backed by modern nance – the institutional form of
the separation between ownership and management. Large rms were man-
aged by an enormous staff, extremely hierarchical in character, of managers
and employees. This managerial revolution (a revolution in management in the
broad sense)3 underlay major efciency gains in capital utilisation. Coupled
with the growth in the number of public-sector managers and employees, this
development created new social congurations, characteristic of twentieth-
century capitalism. In a context of intense class struggle, it resulted in signi-
cant increases in workers’ purchasing power.
In analysing the origin of the new course of technical change over the last
twenty years, comparisons with the resolution of the structural crisis of the
late nineteenth century are very useful. The new trends in technology and
organisation, particularly what is often referred to as the information revolu-
tion or the new economy, bear a strong resemblance to the transformations at
the beginning of the twentieth century. The changes of the last two decades
3
These changes combined technology in the strict sense and organisation. The
assembly line is the archetype, but management as a whole (commercial, nancial)
was transformed.
can be interpreted as a revolution in management, still in the very broad

sense of the term,4 in which computing and communications are the distinc-
tive techniques. Somewhat schematically, we can say that, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, management transformed production and marketing,
whereas today it is transforming itself, enhancing its efciency and reducing
its own costs.
In tandem with this restoration of capital protability, growth is reviving.
Europe, which has been more heavily penalised by neoliberal policies (even
more of a break with its previous practices than in the United States), is some-
what lagging behind on this path – hence the slow reduction in unemploy-
ment. That vast regions of the globe remain excluded is a major element in
this picture requiring more detailed treatment. The global distribution of
prots during this new phase appear far from equitable.
Neoliberalism – neoliberal globalisation – American hegemony
Neoliberalism corresponds to the reassertion of the power of nance – that

is to say, of capitalist property owners (in a capitalism where ownership and
management are separate). The contrast with the Keynesian (or social-demo-
cratic) years is marked. Then, the shareholder had become a partner of the
managers, almost on a par with the others (workers and the state). Managers,
whose autonomy had been greatly enhanced by the 1929 crisis, both in rms
and in the state apparatuses, were reduced by property-owners to the role of
agent of the maximisation of the rm’s prot rate or stock-market value – an
important inexion in what has long been called corporate governance.
This resurgence of nance was secured following persistent action and
determined struggle under the leadership of American nance, which con-
solidated its pre-eminence on this occasion. Popular struggles were defeated
amid the ebbing of the international Soviet and Communist threat.5
4
Thus comprising the management of production, as well as electronic trade and
the new techniques that govern nancial operations. These new techniques are espe-
cially characteristic of multinationals, major funds, and markets – institutions that all
now possess a planetary, global dimension.
5
Just as, for example, the 1970s policy of credits for the Third World at negative real
interest rates had been dictated by the anti-communist struggle, so the 1979 decision
to increase them to levels that were intolerable for these countries was made possible
by the ebbing of this threat (see Toussaint 1998).
To measure the consequences of these drastic changes in terms of income

and property, it is necessary to enter into the labyrinth of the statistical series.6
The nancial income of the dominant classes had been very signicantly
reduced during the 1970s (negative real interest rates, weak distribution of
dividends, agging stock markets). The situation was abruptly reversed. At
a time when the crisis had still not come to an end, and workers’ purchasing
power was stagnating (or, in the case of some categories, falling), neoliberal-
ism engineered a prodigious enrichment of the dominant classes. Previous
inequalities were restored and even accentuated.
A feature of the neoliberal period is the major development of nancial
activities, or nancialisation: an explosion in nancial operations, in the nan-
cial sector, and in rms’ nancial activities. We are familiar with the impact on
prices in different stock markets, which took off in concert in the developed
countries at the beginning of the 1980s. Obviously, this edice posed risks for
the capitalist economies that are reminiscent of the 1929 crash.
In the course of these events, the internationalisation of capital continued.
Neoliberalism, shattering the arrangements set up at Bretton Woods at the
end of the Second World War or hijacking the international institutions estab-
lished at the time (IMF, World Bank) to its advantage, gave this internation-
alisation a nancial dimension, whose main feature is the free circulation of
capital (the globalisation of markets). This freedom of manoeuvre for capi-
tal sowed the seeds of the nancial instability with which we are familiar.
A more in-depth study of these developments reveals the driving role and
hegemonic position of American nance. Whether as regards nancial, trade,
currency, or industrial mechanisms, we can speak of new forms of imperial-
ism, of a new hegemony.7
This is not the rst time that nance has been hegemonic. The emergence of
modern nance at the beginning of the twentieth century was accompanied
by a similar process, which was interrupted by the 1929 crisis. Thus, history
is in very large measure repeating itself: a new favourable course of technical
6
See Duménil and Lévy 1999b.
7
See the contributions by François Chesnais, Odile Castel and Bernard Gerbier to
Duménil and Lévy (eds.) 1999a, as well as those of Gilbert Achcar, Noam Chomsky,
Larry Portis, Giovanni Arrighi, Peter Gowan, Fredric Jameson, James Cohen, and
Jacques Bidet to Actuel Marx, no. 27, 2000. See also Amin 1996 and Chesnais 1997.
change (governed by a revolution in management in the broad sense); an

explosion in nancial activity; and nancial instability. Thus, the present
period combines two features, which should not be deemed contradictory but
complementary: a revival of growth and dangerous nancial instability.
If neoliberalism is indeed the expression of nance’s restored hegemony,
and hence the reassertion of major features of capitalism (the prerogatives
and prots of property owners), these transformations are nonetheless
fraught with ambiguity. The current revolution in management, in stimu-
lating an expansion in managers and employees, is once again blurring the
boundaries of the division between capitalists and proletarians. New prop-
erty forms at the beginning of the twentieth century had created a distance
between share-holders and rms, distorting the notion of ownership of the
means of production. Contemporary capitalism, which some characterise as
institutional, witnesses the concentration of capital in gigantic funds (pension
and investment funds) managed by specialists. The position of the capitalist
property-owner has survived and is reasserting its pre-eminence, but through
institutional transformations that increase the many delegations from it, and
hence dissolve it in a certain way.
The tools
The relevance of a Marxist toolkit in explaining these phenomena can be dem-
onstrated in many respects. It goes without saying that we cannot pretend to
any exhaustiveness here and the exercise encounters many other difculties.
The main one is linked to the fact that the different analyses are mutually
related. The meaning of a theory like that of value, for example, can only
be grasped at the end of long detours through other theoretical elds. We
have selected ten themes: (1) the theory of value; (2) competition and con-
centration; (3) historical tendencies – in particular, the tendency for the rate
of prot to fall; (4) the structural crises and phases of capitalism; (5) the con-
junctural cycle (the sequence of overheating and recessions); (6) the law of
capitalist accumulation and unemployment; (7) capitalist anarchy; (8) nance
and its relations with the real economy; (9) classes and class struggle; (10)
the mutation in the relations of production and the possible supersession of
the explanatory power of traditional concepts. All these themes are related to
the analysis of the tendencies and transformations of contemporary capitalism
referred to above – relations that are more or less strong, direct or indirect, jus-
tifying the unequal treatment of them that we propose to suggest.
Here we shall conne ourselves to bringing out the explanatory power of
Marxist concepts with respect to the contemporary world, while restricting
critical remarks about other theories, especially the dominant neoclassical
economics, to a minimum. Moreover, we shall set aside any analysis of social-
ism.
The theory of value
If Marx’s labour theory of value derived directly from the dominant thought
of his time – that of his classical predecessors (Smith and Ricardo) – in our
day it seems highly singular. Following an interminable historical contro-
versy over the transformation of values into prices of production,8 many Marxists
have rejected it, troubled as they often are by the narrow notion of productive
labour associated with it (and which is opposed to a broader view of exploita-
tion in contemporary capitalism). The stumbling block is thus twofold: intel-
lectual and political.
This is, in fact, a very particular point of Marxist theory: a theory of value,
distinct from that of prices, which leads to a theory of exploitation of the
productive worker (the extortion of surplus-value). Marx draws a very strict
distinction between two types of labour: productive labour, which creates
the value from which surplus-value is extracted; and work of a different
kind – likewise justied by the employment of capital (value captured in a
movement of self-expansion) – which is dubbed unproductive. He devotes con-
siderable attention to unproductive labour, such as the circulating costs of
capital (for instance, the wage of an employee in sales), but it cannot be denied
that he allots such labour a peripheral position – one further from the core
of his system than productive labour. The function of unproductive labour
is the maximisation of the prot rate. Schematically, this involves conceiving,
organising, and supervising the labour process (productive) and making cap-
ital circulate (buying, selling, minimising stocks, managing accounts).9 These
8
See Duménil 1980; Foley 1982; Lipietz 1982; Dostaler 1985; Ehrbar and Glick 1986;
and Freeman 1996. See also the picture of the controversy sketched in Jorland 1995.
9
We can distinguish between tasks concerned with the maximisation of the prot
rate in a given state of technique and organisation, and innovatory tasks aimed at
unproductive jobs, which can be those of the active capitalist or delegated to

wage-earners, correspond to what is now called management: management in
the broad sense, à la Marx.
Is this distinction between productive and managerial forms of relevance
to the analysis of present-day capitalism? Enormously relevant, on condition
that we recognise the quantitative expansion and qualitative transformation
of managerial tasks (their constantly renewed forms, their effects, and so on).
If, in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx could assign them a subaltern posi-
tion, this is no longer possible at the end of the twentieth century. But it is not
a question of everything merging and becoming confused, or of abandoning a
theoretical corpus with undue haste. Without a shadow of a doubt, the theory
of capitalist exploitation refers to the appropriation of the surplus-labour of
the productive worker (an exploitation that is now planetary). But new social
categories have emerged and it is up to us to develop the already very sub-
stantial elements with which Marx supplied us for analysing them.
Is it important? What is at stake is nothing less than our understanding of
the new forms of exploitation, the mutation in the relations of production, ten-
dencies and counter-tendencies, income creation in present-day capitalism –
particularly nance income – and so on. We shall return to this.
Competition and concentration
Marx also took from the classics an analysis of competitive processes – the
so-called theory of the formation of production prices in competition. This analy-
sis must be related to Marx’s theses on the concentration and centralisation
of capital. Unquestionably better than anyone else, Marx had perceived
the tendency of capitalism to concentration; and the relationship of this to
contemporary capitalism and the globalisation of capital is obvious. While
encompassing these tendencies, Marx never called into question his highly
classical analysis of competitive processes.10 Firms that are heterogeneous
in terms of size and performance confront one another in markets, entering
into competition as soon as their products, goods or services can lay claim to
obtaining new products and enhanced efciency (whose criterion is always prot-
ability), for which the acquisition of knowledge is vital.
10
Cf. Marx 1981, Chapter 10. For the contemporary reformulation of these mecha-
nisms, see the special issue of Political Economy 1990, as well as Bidard 1984.
similar uses (dening branches). Capitalists invest their capitals in these rms
to various degrees, and hence in these branches, comparing the prot rates
obtained (what is referred to as the inter-branch mobility of capital). This search
for maximum protability creates a tendency to the equalisation of prot
rates between branches, while maintaining the differences between rms, and
adjusts the proportions of supply to those of demand. Competitive struggle
stimulates the process of concentration and elimination of the less successful.
This theory’s alleged loss of the explanatory value fascinated Marxists
from the time of the crisis of competition at the end of the nineteenth century,
resulting in the theory of monopoly capitalism. Numerous versions of this
exist, from Hilferding and Lenin onwards. How does this relate to contem-
porary capitalism? In our view, it is vital to understand that this tendency to
the equalisation of prot rates is still operative, despite the increased size of
rms.11 Financial institutions and mechanisms likewise grow in size and ef-
ciency, facilitating the inter-branch mobility of capital; opportunities for prot
are exploited at great speed. We must therefore look elsewhere for an expla-
nation of the dynamics of late twentieth-century capitalism and treat theses
that focus either the attenuation of competition, or on its exacerbation, with
caution. Monopolistic trends have not transformed the tendency for the rate
of prot to fall into a tendency for the rate of surplus-value to rise;12 excess
competition does not explain falling prot rates.13
The decline in the rate of prot, the other tendencies, and counter-tendencies
No economic theorist has placed the protability of capital (the prot rate)
at the centre of his interpretation of the dynamic of capitalism in the same
way that Marx did, in neither the neoclassical nor the Keynesian traditions.
When this variable is taken into account, particularly in empirical work, it is
assigned a secondary role. However, we are dealing with a key point when it
comes to understanding the long-term dynamics of capitalism and its struc-
tural crises – particularly the reversal in trends between the 1970s and the
1980s. Two types of question are involved: tendencies and counter-tendencies,
11
Cf. Duménil and Lévy 2002a.
12
Cf. Baran and Sweezy 1966.
13
Contrary to the thesis defended in Brenner 1998.
which are dealt with in this section, and the consequences of the shift in the
prot rate, which will be discussed in the following section.
In Volume Three of Capital, Marx left us with an especially sophisticated
analysis of what he called the historical tendencies of capitalism (tendencies
as regards technology, distribution, accumulation, production, and employ-
ment). As far as we know, he was the only one to conceive trajectories of
growth in production and employment, associated with the strengthening
of the capital-labour or capital-output relationship (the expression of a high
degree of mechanisation), where the reduction in the results of technical prog-
ress translates into a fall in the rate of prot. For this reason, we refer to such
trajectories as Marxian trajectories. Capitalism’s propensity to follow such tra-
jectories is a largely established fact. In particular, the phase of falling prot
rates in the period following the Second World War has been the object of
numerous investigations.14 Marx did not bring this highly complex analysis to
a conclusion and, in addition, lacked some of the empirical material required
to do so.15
We link capitalism’s tendency to follow such trajectories to certain weak-
nesses in the process of innovation. This difculty without doubt testies to
the private character of research and development (costly activities) and the
limits of the private appropriation of the results. Inter-rm co-operation, and
especially state involvement, in research programmes and scientic training
partially remedy these limitations, but only partially. However, much remains
to be done to arrive at a better understanding of these mechanisms.
Marx offered important accounts of the counter-tendencies to the rate of
prot to fall. They are of several kinds. Some, like the development of joint-
stock companies, account for the capacity of the capitalist system to perpetu-
ate itself despite a lower prot rate; this is more a question of a process of
adaptation than of counter-tendencies in the strict sense. Others, like the rise in
the rate of surplus-value or the fall in prices relative to capital, correspond to
straightforward attenuation of the tendencies, or to their reversal. Capitalism’s
14
See, in particular, Moseley 1992 and 1997; Shaikh 1992; Wolff 1992; Brenner 1998;
and Husson 1999. We have recently devoted Duménil and Lévy 1996 and 2002b to
the subject.
15
An important controversy was sparked off by Marx’s description of the intro-
duction of new techniques making it possible to obtain a surplus prot, and of the
consequences for the average rate of prot of the generalisation of these techniques
to the whole set of producers (see Okishio 1961).
entry into new types of trajectory during the rst half of the twentieth century
stems from these two sets of developments. The development of joint-stock
companies (the corporate revolution) pertains to the former; the revolution in
management (the managerial revolution) to the latter.
The analysis of tendencies and the analysis of counter-tendencies belong
to the same theoretical corpus: the afrmation and negation of the Marxian
character of technical change. Our interpretation of the alternation of these
two types of phases refers, in what at rst sight is perhaps a rather surpris-
ing manner, to the theory of value and the distinction between the two types
of labour (see above). We think that the expansion of posts maximising the
prot rate16 (unproductive labour) stands out historically as the principal coun-
ter-tendency to the falling rate of prot, with the characteristics that have been
indicated for each of the two phases of restoration: revolution through man-
agement and revolution in management.
The importance here of the articulation of two basic theories – of value and
of tendencies – is therefore obvious. And this is one of the points where the
need for development makes itself felt. Two types of labour co-exist: labour
that produces surplus-value and labour that maximises the prot rate. The
managerial revolution was the expression of the tremendous comparative
development of the second type of labour during the rst half of the twenti-
eth century. But it reached its limits, in terms of quantity and efciency alike.
The new phase of declining prot rates that ensued belatedly led to a further
extension of this revolution to other domains which had hitherto been less
involved (like nancial management – for example, in funds); and to new
efciency gains (thanks to information and communication technologies, and
to the renewal of organisational practices running counter to the bureaucratic
propensity of management).
Structural crises, the genesis of counter-tendencies, and phases of capitalism
The other aspect of the Marxist theory of tendencies concerns the effects of
actual reductions in the prot rates. Marx is unduly brief, but categorical on
16
This is equivalent to the minimisation of the production and circulation costs
of capital, as well as to that of the sums incorporated in the various components of
capital. Contrariwise, Fred Moseley regards the rise in these costs as the main factor
in the falling prot rate (cf. Moseley 1992).
this point. Such falls slow down capital accumulation and provoke a prolif-
eration of crises, as well as nancial problems (hypertrophy of nancial activ-
ity, speculation, etc.):
On the other hand, however, in view of the fact that the rate at which the total
capital is valorised, i.e. the rate of prot, is the spur to capitalist production
(in the same way as the valorisation of capital is its sole purpose), a fall in
this rate slows down the formation of new, independent capitals and thus
appears as a threat to the development of the capitalist production process; it
promotes overproduction, speculation and crises, and leads to the existence
of excess capital alongside a surplus production.17
We shall call such a set of problems a structural crisis. The two phases of the
real fall in the prot rate described above result in such periods of crisis.
In fact, in Volume Three of Capital, two ideas co-exist whose relationship
is not wholly explicit. The rst is that periods of actual decline in the rate of
prot lead into structural crises; while the second is that the fall in the prot
rate is counter-acted by counter-tendential developments. To maintain that
structural crises play a crucial role in the emergence of counter-tendencies – at
least of some of them or at the peak of their assertion – hardly goes beyond
Marx’s analysis. Here we return to the major Marxist theme of the obstetric
violence of history. Marx sometimes refers to the powerful development of
the productive forces in capitalism as its ‘historical vocation’, emphasising the
convulsive character of the ensuing changes (obtained at the cost of repeated,
profound crises).
Observation of more than a century of capitalism, for which certain systems
of measurement are possible, and the numerous works of economic history
suggest giving substance to these intuitions. This analytical framework is at
the centre of our interpretation of the history of capitalism. Thus, we converge
with perspectives that foreground the notion of long waves.18 Such interpre-
tations too often take a mechanistic turn. Certainly, instability is inscribed in
recurrent fashion in the history of capitalism. But these phases of profound
disruption and the changes that they tend to provoke can be very diverse
in kind – which rules out regarding them as the expression of a cyclicality
17
Marx 1981, pp. 349–50.
18
In a Marxist framework and with respect to falling prot rates, as in Mandel
1995. See also Kleinknecht, Mandel and Wallerstein 1992.
inherent in capitalist relations. In its causes and consequences, the crisis of

1929, in particular, was profoundly different from those of the end of the nine-
teenth or twentieth centuries.
Having taken these methodological precautions, the analytical framework
of tendencies, structural crises, counter-tendencies, and phases seems to us
wholly adequate to account for the historical dynamic of capitalism and its
periodisation.19 The phase we have been in for the last fteen years is a new
expression of them.
Crises and conjunctural cycle
The relationship between a fall in the prot rate and crisis thus leads into the
notion of relatively long periods of disturbance, which we have termed struc-
tural crises. It is necessary to distinguish these crises from the recessions of the
business cycle that Marx also deals with, independently of the falling prot
rate, which is only the factor of their proliferation during structural crises.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, economic activity in the capi-
talist countries has been subject to recurrent disruption, racing out of control –
overheating – and contracting – recession. This used to be referred to as the
industrial cycle; people now refer to the business cycle. Strictly speaking, these
movements are more recurrent than cyclical in character. No doubt they have
declined in magnitude since the nineteenth century, but the instability of the
general level of activity is still a major phenomenon in the capitalism of recent
decades. Their explanation is still much debated.
Marx has legitimately been criticised for never having provided a clearly
articulated, coherent interpretation of them. The rich accounts of the topic
that he left suggest the following observations:
(1) Partial crises can exist.20 But what matters to Marx is general crises – the kind
of crisis that affects all branches (a simultaneous decline in production in
these branches). As with Keynes’s, his viewpoint is macroeconomic.
19
In periodising capitalism, various criteria can be privileged: tendencies, structural
crises, institutional changes, relations of production, and so on. In fact, they need to
be combined in a particular way (Duménil and Lévy 2001). Regulation theory offers
a different combination (Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1979; and Boyer 1986).
20
According to the terminology of Marx 1981.
(2) Marx has no single theory of the destabilisation of the general level of
activity. Various real mechanisms (a rise in wages during peaks of activ-
ity) and monetary mechanisms (a rise in interest rates or any nancial fra-
gility) are involved. Whereas Keynes endeavoured to describe equilibria of
underemployment, Marx is much closer to a modern analysis in terms of
the stability and instability of an equilibrium.
(3) As has been said when dealing with structural crises, the frequency and
severity of these crises are reinforced by more profound developments,
bound up with the major tendencies of capitalism (the falling rate of
prot).
Despite the imprecision of these observations, it must be stressed that no mod-

ern theory offers a better account of the uctuations in economic activity.
It is interesting to note that Marx combines: (1) a theory of the efciency of
the mechanisms of capital mobility and of the tendency to the equalisation of
prot rates between different branches, and supplying the market with what
is demanded; and (2) a theory – or elements of such a theory – of instability in
the general level of economic activity. This is a strong point of Marx’s analy-
sis, on which his empirical relevance and modernity are based. It remains
for economists who work in Marxian perspective to pursue the task. In the
models we have constructed,21 which correspond fairly closely to the indi-
cations left by Marx, we show that the stability of capitalism proportionately
(concerning the allocation of capital, the formation of relative prices, and the
determination of the relative quantities produced) contrasts strongly with its
instability dimensionally – its propensity for recurrent uctuations at the gen-
eral level of activity; and that this dual property results from the same char-
acteristics of the behaviour of rms and the mechanisms of monetary creation
(whether involving control by large private banks, as in the United States in
the nineteenth century, or public, centralised control, as in modern monetary
policy).
The theory of disproportionalities is that of Ricardo and numerous Marxists
who, on the pretext of certain of Marx’s statements concerning partial crises
(see above), have chosen to see in the reproduction schemes the theory of
21
See Duménil and Lévy 1996.
capitalist crises.22 We can be very decisive on these issues: the major reces-
sions of the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s did not originate in disproportionality in
economic activity – an inability to inect production in the requisite direc-
tions. Likewise, Marx’s famous formula making ‘poverty and restricted con-
sumption by the masses’ the ‘ultimate cause [der letzte Grund] of crises’ has
led numerous Marxists to a very widely diffused interpretation of the crises
of capitalism – whether structural or conjunctural-cyclical – in terms of under-
consumption or, more generally, a shortage of outlets.23 Neither the crisis of
1929, nor that of the 1970s, was caused by inadequate wages or, in more or
less equivalent fashion, by excessive prots. Prots were weak in the 1920s;
the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s derived from a fall in the prot rate, har-
boured by a long phase of decline in the performances of technical progress.
The law of capitalist accumulation, the overaccumulation of capital, and

unemployment
Well before Keynes, Marx had developed an analysis of unemployment that

attributed it to variations in the general level of economic activity – and not to
the blockage in some adjustment of prices (of wages). Keynes articulated his
analysis in term of the level of effective demand, whereas Marx stressed the
vicissitudes of capital accumulation. But the idea is the same.
At the heart of Marx’s analytical apparatus is what is called the general law
of capitalist accumulation.24 The study of the overaccumulation of capital, intro-
duced during the treatment of historical tendencies, rounds it off.25 It can be
summarised as follows. The accumulation of capital drives up employment,
to the point where it comes up against certain limits as regards the popula-
tion available in the short term for work and, in this way, recurrently boosts
wages. Various kinds of mechanism make it possible to overcome these ten-
sions – recourse to more capitalistic techniques (a rise in the composition of
22
The reproduction schemes highlight a certain number of relationships between
large aggregates, such as production, consumption and investment, which are at the
heart of national accounting. They do not account for the mechanisms adjusting the
inter-branch proportions of supply and demand (this is the subject of Capital, Volume
Three, Chapter 10).
23
Marx himself refutes this thesis: ‘It is a pure tautology to say that crises are pro-
voked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption’ (Marx 1978, p. 486).
24
Marx 1976, Chapter 25.
25
Marx 1981, Chapter 15.
capital) and the impact of recessions, which devalue a fraction of capital and
recreate a body of unemployed. This is the theory of the industrial reserve
army, with its different fractions depending on the degree of their exclu-
sion from employment (temporary or quasi-permanent), its expansion, and
its phases of reduction. It shows that unemployment is not some accident of
capitalism, or the result of inappropriate behaviour, but a cornerstone of the
apparatus of its perpetuation, since it helps to control wages.
This framework is still perfectly adequate for analysing the conjunctural
component of unemployment (responding to the uctuations of the con-
junctural cycle) in contemporary capitalism; and it has not been superseded.
What is missing, however, is an explicit treatment of the other component of
unemployment: so-called structural unemployment. The wave of unemploy-
ment that has arisen in the countries of the centre followed a slow-down in
accumulation, which was itself caused by a fall in the prot rate. The growth
in structural unemployment was a key factor in restoring control over wage
costs, according to the same mechanism as conjunctural unemployment, but
on a much larger scale.
Capitalist anarchy – ex-postism
In the history of Marxism and the socialist movement, the idea of the neces-
sary supersession of capitalism has always been based on the critique of the
anarchy peculiar to the system. This move already lay at the heart of the Com-
munist Manifesto: capitalism brings about an unprecedented development of
the productive forces, but it proves incapable of controlling the forces that it
has unleashed – hence the proliferation and intensication of crises. Respon-
sibility for this is frequently attributed to the market, which only planning
(deliberate organisation on a societal scale) would make it possible to over-
come.26
This type of analysis has obviously receded very considerably following
the failure of the countries that claimed to be socialist. However, the persis-
tence of unemployment and international nancial crises in the recent years
26
A market analysis of capitalist anarchy of this kind is foregrounded by Engels,
contrasting organisation within each factory and market anarchy (see Engels 1977,
Chapter 3).
has periodically led to a revival of this discourse, as a topical proposition.

Here we touch on a key element in the analysis of neoliberalism.
If the characterisation of capitalism as a market economy is often symptom-
atic of narrow or simply erroneous conceptions, the debate nevertheless refers
to fundamental features of capitalism. The decentralisation peculiar to it, the
private character of decisions, denes one of its main properties: to a large
extent, problems are resolved a posteriori – and these corrections can be violent.
We refer in this connection to ex-postism. However, we must at once correct
this observation, whatever its relevance, by adding that capitalism develops
historically, giving rise to new ex ante processes of collective co-ordination
(taking into account possible failures and regressions).27
The relations between ex ante and ex post decisions are complex. Ex ante
organisation requires a high level of socialisation of the productive forces that
capitalism rst of all acquires in the rm and then at the level of society as a
whole. To destroy ex-post adjustments in a more or less centralised or decen-
tralised postcapitalist economy would, in every instance, be an error. The
problem is to limit the scope of the dysfunctions and their consequences. But
any disadjustment must give rise to correction, even in the most sophisticated
society. In capitalism, too much relies on prolonged structural crises; and the
costs are largely borne by the dominated classes and countries. It is the vio-
lence and unequal treatment of classes peculiar to capitalism that are at issue –
not the necessity of a posteriori corrections.
As has been said, to refer only to the market in this connection is a very nar-
row conception – that of a Marxism conned to the rst part of Volume One
of Capital. Other processes must be taken into consideration:
(1) The decentralised mechanisms through which capitalism governs the

allocation of capital (the inter-branch proportions of investment), and the
supply of goods on the market (production), largely proceed in response
to disequilibrium, that is, ex post. If too many goods are produced, output
is reduced. From this point of view, capitalism is efcient and ex-postism
is not synonymous with anarchy.
27
This relationship between inter-individual and central contractuality and between
organisation and market – mutual implications with many facets – is at the heart of
Jacques Bidet’s work (see Bidet 1999).
(2) Control of the general level of economic activity also operates ex post. It is
the role of macro-economic policies to ensure a sufcient, but not exces-
sive, level of demand.28 The risks of destabilisation are large and manifest
in the sequence of overheatings and recessions. What Marx called crises
were nothing other than uncontrolled recessions. The history of the end
of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth century attests to the
progress made in this area, particularly following the Keynesian revolu-
tion. Despite this progress, we can still speak of disorder, since the stability
of the general level of economic activity is not fully ensured.29 Neoliberal-
ism has simultaneously reinforced the social procedures of stabilisation,
while placing them in the service of the dominant classes (price stability
rather than full employment), and revived planetary anarchy, which has
now attained new degrees.
(3) The major historical tendencies and rhythms of accumulation are the main
elements in this capitalist anarchy in the contemporary world. Capital-
ism exhibits an intrinsic difculty in maintaining the results of technical
change. Compounding this are the inhibitions bound up with preserv-
ing privileges – particularly those of property-owners (resistance to the
transformation of property relations and, more generally, of production).
Thus, major changes occur ex post, in the wake of structural crises. It is this
very turbulent dynamic that becomes apparent in the successive phases
of decline and recovery in the prot rate, of which the recent course of
capitalism is a new expression. Accumulation is at the mercy of these
movements. Moreover, it is governed by complex nancial circuits and
behaviour (that of the owners of capital and that of rms seeking to maxi-
mise their stock-market value).
28
By means of monetary policy, the central bank more or less efciently controls
the mass of money and credit, and hence demand, in the economy (demand on the
part of households, rms, and the state). When the supply of credit no longer nds
borrowers despite a fall in interest rates, the state must borrow and spend. This is the
function of budgetary policy during phases of a sharp fall in economic activity.
29
In fact, progress in private management and nancial mechanisms are vectors
of new agents of instability and policies have to become historically more effective –
which implies important institutional changes. We call the constant pressure of non-
nancial and nancial private agents on macro-economic stability tendential instability
(Duménil and Lévy 1996, Chapter 12).
Ecology is a major area where this specic dynamic of capitalism has – and
could have even more – dramatic consequences and where anticipation is
imperative. Analysis of it exceeds the bounds of this study.30
The relations between nance and the real sector
Marx’s analysis of money – from the money commodity to the sign of value,
from the measurement of values to money proper, as the stock of purchasing
power – is remarkable.31 It certainly helps to conceive the mechanisms pecu-
liar to contemporary capitalism, but it fails to provide much-needed indica-
tions. In particular, the absence of any analysis of monetary creation in the
modern sense of the term is sorely felt.
The relationship between nancial and non-nancial sectors is obviously at
the heart of any analysis of neoliberalism. The Marxist theories of value and
of capital have strict implications in this respect. The theory of productive
labour and surplus-value leads to the characterisation of nancial activities
as non-productive. As with trade, the prot realised in a nance company,
such as a bank, is interpreted as the realisation of a fraction of the total sur-
plus-value appropriated elsewhere. Marx ironises about the ability of money
to bear fruit, just as ‘the pear tree bears pears’. Marxists are therefore par-
ticularly well shielded against the tendency to associate nancial activities and
wealth creation too closely. This does not mean that nancial activities are use-
less (they possess a utility relative, obviously, to capitalist relations of produc-
tion and not in general). Here we cannot go into the details of the extended
accounts of nance Marx gives in Volume Three of Capital:
(1) Part of this analysis refers to the circuit of capital through its three forms:
money-capital, commodity-capital, and productive capital. Like commer-
cial capital, banking capital appears to have a special role in certain of the
operations required by the circuit of capital. This involves the capital of
trade in money. Its function consists in contributing to the general circuit of
capital and hence, ultimately, to social (capitalist) production.
30
This section does not claim to draw up a general picture of the defects of capital-
ism, which are much greater.
31
See de Brunhoff 1973.
(2) Finance also contributes to making capital available to the non-nancial

sector, advances proper, separate from activity – another contribution to
the general functioning of the system, which is likewise relative to the rela-
tions of production. This capital is loan-capital, which, in addition to cred-
its proper, also comprises shares. The capital thus invested in credits and
shares is the counterpart – a second expression – of the capital placed in
rms in its three forms. The idea of ctitious capital results from this dupli-
cation (capital must not be counted in the real and monetary property of
rms and in the title deed by securities materialising its ownership by
another agent, in particular another rm);32 or, a fortiori, from the existence of
a title that does not represent any property of a rm, like a treasury bond.
Marx also describes the proliferation of monetary and nancial mechanisms

and institutions, denouncing their parasitic, speculative character, which he
regards as a threat to the stability of the system.
No ‘revelations’ capable of making neoliberal congurations miraculously
intelligible to us emerge from these hypotheses about money and nance. But
this framework remains highly appropriate – overall, the most appropriate –
and represents an effective barrier against various erroneous and excessive
assessments. Nevertheless, it clearly needs to be supplemented.
The theory of interest rates affords an excellent example of the relevance
and modernity of Marx’s analysis, which are especially welcome in the analy-
sis of neoliberalism. The following aspects might be highlighted:
(1) Marx rigorously distinguishes between rate of interest and rate of prot.
No mechanism equalises them. The difference between prot rate and
interest rate is symptomatic of a relation of production: the rm and the
capitalist lender are two quite distinct agents (connected within certain
congurations).
(2) Correlatively, Marx asserts that there is no ‘law’ which determines inter-
est rates. Whereas neoclassical theory makes interest rates a price like any
other, and Keynesian theory links them to the demand for liquidity, Marx
regards them as the expression of a social relation – a power relation, one
might say – although the conditions of general liquidity (with the course
of the business cycle) affect their uctuations. These analyses, which might
32
In accounting terms, rms’ balance-sheets must be consolidated.
be deemed vague, perfectly reect the movement of interest rates in pres-

ent-day capitalism. The rise in real interest rates experienced in 1979 – a
deliberate option on the part of the political and monetary authorities – intro-
ducing neoliberalism, is a highly convincing expression of these relations.33
Class struggle
Marx’s whole analysis reverberates with class struggle. Capital is shot through
with the confrontation between capitalists and proletarians, to which the work
supplies the keys. Taking Marx’s economic and political writings together, we
see the analytical framework expanding: capitalists and landowners, indus-
trialists and nanciers, small producers, as well as salaried managers. Far
from being the autonomous agent it is often described as, the state is directly
bound up with the exercise of the power of the dominant classes and its
compromises.
No authentic reading of history can ignore these powers and struggles.
Each of the system’s transformations, be it the emergence of the institutions
of modern capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, of private
and public managerialism in the rst half of the twentieth century and the
concomitant development of social protection, or of the new congurations
peculiar to neoliberalism, has been produced in and through struggles, taking
account of the strength or weakness of the working-class movement, the com-
bativeness of property owners (of nance), and so on. Policies are their direct
expression, from Keynesianism to neoliberalism in particular.
The role allotted to technical and distributive tendencies and to structural
crises in the periodisation of capitalism that we have proposed must not give
the impression of economism. We are not caught in a hellish dilemma between
two perspectives, one of which privileges tendencies while the other privi-
leges struggles. The changes in capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth
century were commanded by struggles, in which the strength of the working-
class movement played a central role, combining with the internal contradic-
tions of the ruling classes (for example, the relationship between nanciers
33
It refutes apologetic discourses – for example, those that make the rise in interest
rates a consequence of public decits, whereas the reverse can be demonstrated to be
the case (see Duménil and Lévy 2004, Chapter 10).
and those in charge of the new managerial companies, on the one hand, and
the old-style capitalists, on the other hand). Similarly, the reassertion of the
power of property-owners in neoliberalism was the result of a prolonged con-
frontation, a stage in a constant battle to maintain the prerogatives of a minor-
ity. Such major historical developments can only be rendered intelligible by
the combination of these various elements. Marxism is the most apt frame-
work for such an approach – or should be.
Thinking the mutation – beyond capitalism

In the preceding sections, we have stressed the explanatory power of a set of
concepts, laws or mechanisms. But there is also a lot to learn from the possible
respects in which this explanatory power has been superseded. In some cases –
we have given various examples – the problem is to extend the analysis and
overcome some of its limitations. In others, the difculty derives not from the
imperfection of the analytical instrumentarium, but from a qualitative muta-
tion in the phenomenon itself. This point warrants some clarication.
For example, we noted above that Marx’s analysis of value and exploitation
privileges a type of labour – so-called productive labour – relegating to a sec-
ondary status other kinds of labour, bound up with the maximisation of the
prot rate, which we have encompassed under the term management. It is one
thing to give these types of labour, which have become very important today,
their due. It is another to ponder the possible dissolution of such distinctions –
which would mean greatly distancing ourselves from the major concepts
of Marxism. Must we merge working-class production tasks and the tasks
of employees in commerce (salespersons, cashiers, and so on)? If we opt to
do this, what position should we adopt vis-à-vis higher managerial person-
nel? The most economical way out in terms of theorisation is to squeeze such
new complexities of our economies and societies back into old boxes – that
is to say, into the traditional categories of capitalism. But is it the most appro-
priate? Marx had decided to base his whole system around the principal
social relation: the confrontation between capitalists and proletarians, as
specically dened. We can pursue his approach, dissolving the rigour of
the system, at the same time as preserving the terminology. We would thus
speak of a new working or proletarian class, new capitalists, or a new petty
bourgeoisie.34 Marx’s denition of productive labour and surplus-value is

quietly set aside or abandoned. A more exacting approach consists in renew-
ing the analytical framework. It is not that the concept of productive labour
is to be dismissed. But we must acknowledge the gradual supersession of its
explanatory power, as is normal in a changing world. It remains to reect
on what is new and to recognise the coexistence of the new and the old. The
analysis of contemporary capitalism confronts us with such challenges.
Where have we got to? In our view, the process of these transformations
is broader than the still partial fusion of subaltern forms of labour (those of
workers and employees). The managerial tasks allocated to salaried person-
nel are subject to a polarisation, whose precise contours are still being dened,
between tasks of execution (the employee component) and conception, organi-
sation and direction (the manager component). This new class contradiction –
class, because it is rooted in new relations of production – has been dialecti-
cally superimposed on the traditional contradiction between capitalists and
proletarians.35 The continuation of this development might lead to a certain
fusion between employees’ and workers’ jobs. Until the advent of neoliberal-
ism, the political unity of these wage groups, including managers, had been
largely preserved, although this did not involve class unity. By contrast, neo-
liberalism, intent on maintaining the privileges of property-owners, tends to
certain forms of combination of the higher fractions of these salaried person-
nel with capital.
Capitalist property has been subject to transformations comparable to those
affecting labour; neoliberalism enormously complicates analysis of them, for
it is the expression of a reassertion of certain basic capitalist characteristics
of contemporary economies and societies – at least of the power of the own-
ers of capital. The rst great mutation in capitalist property (ownership of
the means of production), which has already been referred to, occurred at
the turning-point of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the separa-
tion of ownership and management, and the concentration of ownership in
nance and of management in the rm. The property relation became looser.
Neoliberalism underlies a development that extends the preceding one: the
concentration of capital in funds, taking account of the association of certain
34
See Poulantzas 1975.
35
See Duménil 1975 and Duménil and Lévy 1994.
salaried fractions with this capitalist power. Behind these changes some have
glimpsed a supersession of the capitalist social relationship, whether invok-
ing institutional capitalism or post-capitalism,36 or even socialism.37
Our interpretation prompts us to underscore in the delegation of mana-
gerial tasks a polarisation between managers and other groups, employees
and workers. We regard it as a new relation of production and a new class
relation – which leads us refer to a hybrid society that we call capitalo-cadrist.
Neoliberalism strives to preserve the pre-eminence of the traditional capitalist
component, in terms of power and income, but it cannot halt the change in the
relations of production, although it can possibly slow it down and certainly
inect it. To reect on the mutation, to reect on the balance of power – such
is the analytical challenge facing us.
36
See Drucker 1993.
37
See Blackburn 1999.
Congurations
Chapter Six
Analytical Marxism
Christopher Bertram
Analytical Marxism came into the world with the

publication in 1978 of G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s
Theory: A Defence.1 In that work Cohen, a Canadian
from a Jewish Communist background, sought to
clarify the claims of historical materialism by an
application of the techniques of analytical philoso-
phy. That endeavour must have seemed perverse to
at least two sets of people. Marxists and radicals in
the anglophone world may have been divided into
Hegelian and Althusserian camps, but they were
united in the view that analytical philosophy of the
type studied at Oxford and Cambridge was both
politically conservative and stultifyingly parochial
in outlook. Analytical philosophers, on the other
hand, had tended either to dismiss Marx as being of
no properly philosophical signicance or considered
the central doctrines of historical materialism to be a
mixture of Hegelian obscurantism and naïve philo-
sophical mistakes. Cohen believed, however, that
it was possible to use the techniques of ordinary-
language philosophy to clarify and to state clearly the
1
Cohen 1978. Henceforth, KMTH. It has been claimed, though, that some earlier
writings should be included in the analytical-Marxist canon: notable candidates include
the Polish economists Oskar Lange and Michal Kalecki and the Italian Piero Sraffa.
124 • Christopher Bertram
key claims of historical materialism as the necessary preliminary to assessing

the truth or falsity of those very claims.
In carrying through his programme, Cohen was setting his face rmly
against a view that most Marxists had agreed upon since Plekhanov (if not
before). Namely, the view that there is a fundamental distinction in method
between Marxism and ‘bourgeois’ social science. For Cohen, Marx was to be
understood as making various claims about the world – about history, about
social classes, about revolution – that were legitimately the object of investiga-
tion by the same methods as one might assess any other body of social theory.
If Lukács had famously asserted that Marxism was to be distinguished not by
its empirical claims but by its method,2 Cohen forthrightly took the directly
opposite view.
Cohen’s example encouraged and brought to light an afnity with the
work of other researchers, mainly (but not exclusively) in the Anglo-Saxon
world: John Roemer (an American economist); Jon Elster (a Norwegian phi-
losopher), Erik Olin Wright (an American sociologist), Philippe Van Parijs (a
Belgian political philosopher), Adam Przeworski (a Polish political scientist),
Robert Brenner (an American historian) and a number of others.3 These think-
ers formed a very odd school: they agreed about very little of substance and
often disagreed profoundly with one another. But they at least prided them-
selves on the need to state arguments and positions clearly and in ways that
were open to critique and debate. They self-consciously avoided indulgence
in anti-falsication strategies of the sort often practised by other Marxists. For
this reason, they called the group they formed (which had, by reason of the
date of its annual meetings, the formal title of the ‘September’ group) the ‘No-
Bullshit Marxism’ group. This group has one characteristic that is surprising
in a ‘Marxist’ group: some of the members – most notably in this context Van
Parijs – have never claimed to be Marxists at all!
2
Lukács 1971.
3
The September Group currently (2007) consists of Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley),
Samuel Bowles (Amherst), Robert Brenner (Los Angeles), G.A. Cohen (Oxford), Joshua
Cohen (Stanford), Stathis Kolyvas (Yale), Philippe Van Parijs (Louvain-la-Neuve), John
Roemer (Davis), Seana Shiffrin (UCLA), Hillel Steiner (Manchester), Robert van der
Veen (Amsterdam) and Erik Olin Wright (Madison). Jon Elster and Adam Przeworski
left the group in 1993. It is important to note though that there are analytical Marxists
such as Alan Carling who are not and have never been members of the group.
Analytical Marxism • 125
In what follows I shall rst outline what I take to be the enduringly valuable
contributions of the rst phase of analytical Marxism: Cohen’s work on his-
torical materialism and John Roemer’s work on class and exploitation. I shall
then have something to say about the philosophy of social science associated
with analytical Marxism and about whether the appellation ‘rational-choice
Marxism’ is correct. Finally, I discuss the most recent phase of analytical
Marxism, which concerns the defence of socialist values and the elaboration
of institutional alternatives to capitalism in a world which is far less congenial
to the Left than it was at the beginning of their project.4
Cohen and history

In Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Cohen defended a traditional and,
it has to be said, unfashionable interpretation of historical materialism based
on Marx’s ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, against
philosophical criticism. Central to that defence were his attribution to Marx of
a sharp distinction between the material and the social, and his insistence that
historical materialism depends upon functional explanation.
At the centre of Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism are two the-
ses: the development thesis and the primacy thesis. The development thesis
tells us that there is a tendency for the material productive forces to develop
over time, where those material productive forces include not only physical
means of production but also (and most importantly) technical and scientic
knowledge. The primacy thesis asserts that the character of the social form of
society (the social relations of production) is explained by the level of devel-
opment of the material productive forces (and not vice versa). Cohen also
asserts the character of political and legal institutions is to be explained by the
nature of the social relations of production.
If we put the development and primacy theses together, and add the plausi-
ble thought that at different levels of development of the forces of production,
different social forms are suitable for their further development, then we have
4
There are now two book-length studies of analytical Marxism: Mayer 1994 is a sober
and academic study that gives particular weight to the contributions of Roemer and
Przeworski; Roberts 1996 is a somewhat intemperate polemic which concentrates on G.A.
Cohen. A good selection of papers by the main protagonists is Roemer (ed.) 1986 and
Carver and Thomas (eds.) 1995 contains a selection of friendly and hostile articles.
a very traditional Marxist picture of history. Forms of society act as shells for
the development of the productive forces, which, at a certain point slough off
those shells and replace them with new ones.
But, as Cohen was well aware, this traditional picture of history had fallen
into disfavour for apparently compelling reasons, the principal one of which
was the seeming inconsistency between the explanation of relations by forces
(and superstructure by base) and the simultaneous insistence that the adop-
tion of a certain set of social relations was propitious for the development
of the forces (and superstructures have powerful effects on bases). Since we
normally explain effects by reference to their causes (and not the other way
round), it had seemed to many theorists that historical materialism was com-
mitted to incoherence or inconsistency.
Cohen’ s solution to this problem was to argue that the Marxist theory of his-
tory is committed to functional explanations. Just as a biologist might explain
the fact of a bird having hollow bones by the propensity of those bones to
enable the bird to y, Marxists can explain the character of social relations
of production by reference to the propensity of those very social relations to
promote the development of the material productive forces.5
Cohen’s invocation of functional explanation in historical materialism was
the occasion for one of the rst major debates within analytical Marxism. Jon
Elster claimed, in a series of articles, that if Marxism relied upon functional
explanation, then so much the worse for Marxism. Elster accepted, in prin-
ciple, three modes of explanation: causal explanation was the standard form
of explanation for the physical sciences; intentional explanation, by reference
to the beliefs and desires of individual persons, was the usual form of social-
scientic explanation; and functional explanation was often acceptable in the
biological sciences. But, in order to be acceptable, Elster claimed, a proposed
functional explanation must be underpinned by a feedback loop consisting
of more regular causal or intentional components. Such an elaboration is
provided by Darwin’s theory of natural selection (together with Mendelian
genetics) for the biological sciences. But no such plausible elaboration is to
5
See, especially, Chapters 9 and 10 of Cohen 1978.
be found for historical materialism, which – according to Elster – must be

rejected (at least in the form defended by Cohen).6
Cohen, in turn, sought to defend his position by arguing that it can be ratio-
nal to rely upon functional explanations of phenomena, even where one has
no understanding of the underlying causal (or intentional) mechanisms. So,
for example, it was rational to believe in the functional explanation of well-
adapted features of organisms even before Darwin and Mendel had lled in
the explanatory structure.7 Other analytical Marxists have sought to defend
Cohen by sketching processes which might play a role for social phenomena
akin to that played by natural selection for biological phenomena. In particu-
lar Christopher Bertram and Alan Carling have both suggested that the well-
adaptedness of social relations of production to the level of development of
the material productive force may historically be achieved by the pressures of
economic and military competition among societies.8
Numerous other aspects of Cohen’s reconstruction have also come under
attack. In particular, the development thesis has been seen by many as
implausible. In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen appeared to ground the
development thesis in the rationality of individual producers faced with
material scarcity. According to many, this appeared to imply a commitment
to a transhistorical account of rationality, a commitment that seemed to them
un-Marxist. Cohen has since claried and developed his position: he now
stresses not the technical ingenuity of individual producers faced with mate-
rial scarcity, but rather the rational choice of developmentally optimal produc-
tion relations. While this clarication has the merit of invoking the benecial
effects of social forms on productive development in a way consistent with
Cohen’s views on functional explanation, it looks deeply implausible in fact.
It is highly unlikely that the more efcient character of new social relations
reliably gures among the reasons for action of those making social revolu-
tions in the way that would be necessary according to Cohen’s theory.9
6
For Elster’s critique of Cohen see especially Elster 1980, Elster 1982, Elster 1986
and Elster 1985.
7
See Cohen 1982a and Cohen 1982b. See also Cohen 1988.
8
See Bertram 1990 and Carling 1991, Part One.
9
See especially the critique by Levine and Wright 1980, a version of which is
reprinted as Chapter 2 of Wright, Levine, Sober 1992. Cohen’s reply (written with
Will Kymlicka) is in Cohen and Kymlicka 1988 and Chapter 5 of Cohen 1988.
Roemer and exploitation

Central to Jon Elster’s critique of Cohen’s use of functional explanation was
an aggressive programme in the philosophy of social science. Elster particu-
larly commended the use of rational-choice methods and the application of
the insights of game theory. Elster’s own work remained at a methodological
level: the principal analytical Marxist who has applied these methods to stan-
dard Marxist problems has been John Roemer. In his early Analytical Founda-
tions of Marxian Economic Theory, Roemer proposed a highly mathematised
neo-Ricardian reconstruction of Marx’s economic theory. This was further
developed in his magnum opus: A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. A
General Theory really exemplies the whole analytical-Marxist project in the
way that it seeks to ground the Marxist pictures of social macrophenonena
(such as class) in the micromotives of individuals. In relation to orthodox
Marxism, we might say that it is simultaneously iconoclastic (in its methodol-
ogy) and conservative (in its emphasis on the centrality of class as opposed to
other dimensions of social division).10
Much of A General Theory is devoted to showing how Marxian concepts of
exploitation and class can be derived from fairly standard neoclassical eco-
nomic models. Roemer at rst accepts a standard Marxian view of exploi-
tation where the performance of surplus-labour indicates whether or not
exploitation is going on. He demonstrates, among other things, the heretical
proposition (from a Marxist standpoint) that, in an economy where all agents
work for themselves and require only their subsistence requirements and
where they interact only to trade their products on the market, there will be
exploitation if the producers start off with differential endowments of labour-
power. This is because the richer producers will have access to a wider choice
of production techniques and will therefore have to work for a shorter period
than is socially necessary to produce a quantity of goods that can be traded
for a subsistence bundle on the market: to produce the total social product, to
be divided equally, the poor work for longer than the rich.11 In a whole series
of further examples, Roemer shows that classes will emerge in an economy
where there is a labour market and differential initial endowment of assets;
that a credit market and a labour market achieve exactly parallel results in this
10
Roemer 1981 and Roemer 1982a.
11
Roemer 1982a Chapter 1. See also Roemer 1982c.
respect; and that something like a labour theory of value can be constructed
but that it is logically subsequent to prices rather than being explanatory
of them. The central theoretical term of this section of Roemer’s book is his
‘Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle’, which states that agents who
optimise by selling their labour-power are exploited and that those who opti-
mise by buying labour-power are exploiters. Whether or not agents are labour
hirers or labour sellers is determined by their initial endowment of assets. Dif-
ferential ownership of the means of production determines whether someone
is in a labour-hiring or labour-selling class. Thus exploitation status and class
position are systematically related. This relationship fails to hold, however,
when agents are endowed with different quantities and qualities of labour.
This is one of the reasons why Roemer seeks a theory of exploitation that is
more ‘general’ than the labour theory.
But the difculty of constructing a surplus-labour theory of exploitation
that is well dened under all assumptions is not the only barrier to dening
exploitation in terms of the transfer of surplus labour, since a neoclassical
economist might agree that there is such transfer but deny that it merited the
morally-charged appellation, ‘exploitation’. This is because neoclassicals hold
that, under competitive conditions, there is no exploitation in capitalism since
everyone gains from trade. If people refused to trade and simply set up with
their own assets, they would do considerably worse than they actually do.
On the other hand, a neoclassical would concede that, where extra-economic
coercion allows some people to live off the labour of others (as in feudal or
slave society), exploitation does take place.
A further achievement of A General Theory of Exploitation and Class was then,
to provide a general construct, of which Marxian exploitation and the sort of
exploitation that the neoclassical is concerned with are special cases. If we
take a society N, then a coalition S within that larger society is exploited if
and only if:
(1) There is an alternative, which we may conceive of as hypothetically fea-

sible, in which S would be better off than in its present situation.
(2) Under this alternative, the complement to S, the coalition N- S = S’ would
be worse off than at present.
(3) S’ is in a relation of dominance to S.12
12
Roemer 1982a, pp. 194–5.
Condition (3) is a sociological one, entailing that the coalition S’ prevents the
hypothetical alternative from being realised, thus giving rise to its exploita-
tion of S.13 Roemer claims that he needs this condition, different in type from
(1) and (2) to rule out certain bizarre examples. Roemer models (1) and (2) by
specifying a game that is played by coalitions of agents in the economy. A
coalition has the alternatives of participating in the economy or of withdraw-
ing and taking its payoff under the denition of the game. If the coalition S
does better for its members under the alternative of withdrawing and if its
complement S’ does worse after S has withdrawn, then S is an exploited coali-
tion under that particular version of the game.14 It must be required that not
only the allocation to a coalition be better under the hypothetical alternative,
but also that the complement does worse, if the coalition is to be character-
ised as exploited under the rules of the game. This is because, in an economy
with decreasing returns to scale, both coalitions might do better under the
alternative. Conversely, if we have an economy characterised by increasing
returns to scale, both coalitions might do better under present arrangements.
A coalition must be exploited by someone if it is to be considered exploited
at all. How is the alternative to be dened? The answer seems to depend on
the level of abstraction at which Roemer is operating. In practice, the alterna-
tive is dened in terms of property relations; that is, rights to control means
of production. The alternative to existing arrangements that makes clear why
Marxists consider them to be exploitative is the equalisation of access to non-
human means of production. At a more abstract level, this is less clear. We
specify a game by stipulating a characteristic function v which assigns to every
coalition S a payoff on withdrawal v(S). Roemer writes, ‘the function v may
dene what some observer considers a just settlement to coalitions should
be, were they to opt out of society’.15 But he states later: ‘There are, of course,
both interesting and silly ways of specifying v: our task will be to specify par-
ticular functions v which capture intelligible and historically cogent types of
exploitation.’16
Marxists have never held that a social order can be overthrown at will. On
the contrary, as Marx puts it, ‘No social order ever disappears before all the
13
Roemer 1982a, p. 195.
14
Ibid. See also Roemer 1982b.
15
Roemer 1982a, p. 196.
16
Roemer 1982a, p. 197.
productive force for which there is room in it have been developed’.17 This is
bound to pose some problems for a theory which proposes to test for exploi-
tation in terms of feasible hypothetical alternatives. Roemer’s proposal for
dealing with this problem is to make the assumption that, after a coalition has
withdrawn from the economy, its incentive structure remains unchanged. If
the coalition then improves its position and its complement does worse, it is
said to suffer ‘socially-necessary’ exploitation before withdrawal.
There are, according to Roemer, two distinct types of socially-neces-
sary exploitation: dynamically socially-necessary exploitation and statically
socially-necessary exploitation. If a coalition could not maintain the incen-
tive structure of its members on withdrawal and as a consequence of that
failure would immediately be worse off, then the exploitation which it suffers
is socially necessary in the static sense. If such a coalition would be better off
on withdrawal, but would soon fall behind the alternative because, although
the coalition would work just as hard as before, it perhaps lacks incentives to
technological innovation, then the exploitation it suffers is socially necessary
in the dynamic sense.18
One of the most startling and impressive results of the rst half of Roemer’s
investigations in A General Theory of Exploitation and Class is his ‘Class-
Exploitation Correspondence Principle’. This shows that exploitation status
and class position are systematically related. This systematic relationship dis-
appears when we talk about coalitions rather than classes. For the coalitions
that have the option of withdrawing from the economy in Roemer’s ‘gen-
eral theory’ seem to have arbitrary boundaries. If we liked, we could include
any selection of individuals in a coalition and test whether the coalition was
exploited under the rules of a particular game. This exibility might seem to
be an advantage at rst but a little reection reveals that all sorts of problems
can arise. For example, a coalition of all workers plus the richest capitalist
will probably turn out to be exploited if it withdraws from the economy with
its per capita share of alienable assets. By drawing boundaries in particular
ways we might get the result that all agents were members of some exploit-
ing and some exploited coalitions. Now, in fact, there are good reasons not
to draw boundaries in this sort of way. The coalitions that form in games do
17
Marx 1970 [1859], p. 21.
18
Roemer 1982a, pp. 265–70.
so because it is in the interests of their members to ally in pursuit of common

objectives and so it would be wise to look for some prima facie community of
interest before including people in a coalition. The community of interest that
is tacitly presupposed in Roemer’s work is that possessed by classical-Marx-
ian classes, which is in turn based on whether agents are labour hirers or
sellers (a fact determined by what they own in the way of means of produc-
tion). But, although the Roemerian coalitions do seem to be based on Marxian
principles in practice, there does not seem to be any reason why we should
seize on this type of grouping outside of the framework of a surplus-labour
theory of exploitation, a framework that Roemer’s analysis has supposedly
transcended.
Whatever quibbles one might have with Roemer’s reconceptualisation of
Marxian class and exploitation theory, there is little doubt that this has been
one of the most pathbreaking and fertile of the analytical-Marxist achieve-
ments.19 The sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his work Classes,20 drew upon
the Roemerian ‘general theory’ to propose a cross-cutting analysis of the class
structure of modern societies based upon the different types of assets (labour-
power, capital ownership, skills, credentials) possessed by different potential
coalitions of agents. Wright’s analysis had the advantage of addressing, in a
new and more rigorous framework, the problem of ‘contradictory class loca-
tions’ that he had rst explored from within an Althusserian methodology.
But, like much analytical-Marxist work, the problem of its Marxist identity
was once again posed. Both Roemer and Wright were focusing on a series
of characteristically Marxist problems, but their methodology and solutions
appeared profoundly non-Marxist. Indeed, once the analysis was translated
from Roemer’s formal constructs to the domain of sociology proper, it looked
for all the world like a Weberian analysis based on different groups exploiting
particular assets in the marketplace, rather than a Marxian one based upon
conict over surplus extraction.
If Cohen and Roemer made the most important original contributions to
analytical Marxism, we should not pass over the contribution of Adam Prze-
worski.21 His is the only real attempt at an analytical-Marxist political sociol-
19
For some further problems with Roemer’s approach, see Bertram 1988.
20
Wright 1985.
21
See, especially, his Przeworski 1985 but also Przeworski 1991.
ogy. His work centres on the dilemma facing socialist parties seeking political
power in a parliamentary democracy. He argues that the rational pursuit of
electoral majority by those parties leads them to downplay the importance of
class as an axis of political organisation, this, in turn, tends to alienate their
core electorate. Whatever one thinks of Przeworski’s arguments, they repre-
sent an important step in Marxist political sociology. Marxist political analysis
has often sought to explain the absence of political transformation in the West
by reference to ideology: on the standard Western-Marxist view, workers are in
the grip of false consciousness or dominated by ideological state apparatuses.
Przeworski was able to sketch his explanations by reference to the working
class’s pursuit of its interests.22
Rational choice and methodological individualism

If there is one aspect of analytical Marxism that has provoked hostility and
even incredulity among rival Marxists, it is the commitment of many ana-
lytical Marxists to methodological individualism and rational actor models
of social interaction. Methodological individualism is the view that all social
practices and institutions are in principle explicable in terms of the behaviour
of individuals; rational-actor models use economic theory to model individ-
ual behaviour given presumed desires and beliefs. Methodological individu-
alism is opposed to structuralism or holism which hold that the fundamental
units of social explanation – pre-empting or determining individual choice –
are supraindividual entities such as nations, classes or modes of production.
Enthusiasm of analytical Marxists for individualistic positions and techniques
has sometimes been reminiscent of the ‘Robinsonades’ against which Marx
inveighs in the ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse. There are clearly a number of
issues here. The rst type of issue concerns the substance of whether meth-
odological individualism is the correct position in the philosophy of social
science and whether rational-actor models are an appropriate tool of analysis.
The second concerns the question of whether such commitments and meth-
ods are compatible with a body of theory bearing the name ‘Marxist’. Let us
deal with those questions in reverse order.
22
For a penetrating critique of Przeworski’s approach, see King and Wickham-
Jones 1995.
Analytical Marxists have been able to point to a number of examples where

Karl Marx himself employs what look very much like rational-actor mod-
els. For instance, the explanation given in Capital of the tendency of the rate
of prot to fall is a classic case where the pursuit of rational self-interest by
individuals brings about an outcome which is worse for all.23 One of Marx’s
ways of talking about the state suggests that it plays the role of overcom-
ing collective action problems facing the bourgeoisie: factory legislation is in
the general interest of the capitalist class but the pursuit of self-interest by
capitalists tends to undermine the physical health of the workers.24 As well
as examples of such analyses, analytical Marxists can point to some explicitly
methodological statements by Marx which appear to support – in principle –
the application of an individualistic rational-actor approach. For example,
Marx says in The Poverty of Philosophy ‘What is society, whatever its form may
be? The product of men’s reciprocal action’.25 But those hostile to analytical
Marxism have been quick to point out that rational-choice analyses take as
given the circumstances against which choice and deliberation take place and
that it is those very structural features of society that are at the centre of what
Marxism takes itself to be explaining. In other words, analytical Marxism
often takes as given what is most in need of explanation. Ellen Meiksins Wood
has been particularly keen to press this point.26 What analytical Marxists then
take as a paradigmatic use of rational-choice explanation by Marx himself,
the behaviour of capitalists, takes place in a context that is really doing all the
explanatory work: it is that context – the social relations obtaining in a capital-
ist society – that requires explanation.
Analytical Marxists can reply to this that both the behaviour of individuals
and the context in which they behave require explanation. Historical materi-
alism is the theory which explains the genesis of social forms and even here
some progress can be made in advancing individualistic explanations. While
Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism might be thought to be rather
neutral on the questions of rational choice and methodological individual-
23
See the comments by Jon Elster in Elster 1985, pp. 45–6.
24
Ibid. Chapter 4.1.4.
25
Cited by Przeworski 1985, p. 92. Przeworski also mentions that Engels in his
letter to Bloch of September 1890 treats society as the product of strategically behav-
ing individuals.
26
See Wood 1995.
ism, analytical Marxists can point to Robert Brenner’s work as an example of

Marxist rational-choice explanation of the transition to capitalism (and Alan
Carling has done some interesting work rendering the perspective of Cohen
compatible with that of Brenner).27
But the question remains: should Marxists (or anyone) support method-
ological individualism and rational choice? If methodological individualism
is taken to be the Hobbesian view that holds that social phenomena are expli-
cable in terms of individual beliefs and desires that can be stated without
ineliminable reference to the social, then the position is clearly absurd. But
methodological individualism as defended by analytical Marxists is the much
more moderate position that good social scientic explanations should show
how macrophenomena issue from the action of individuals (without denying
that those individuals have socially formed desires and beliefs). This position
would be better characterised as an anti-holism – a denial of the autonomy
of macrophenomena – rather than a genuine individualism. Many analytical
Marxists have now come to see that, in any case, methodological individu-
alism mis-states the correct view. Although it was right to insist that token
social events need individualistic underpinnings, social science also investi-
gates social types. Those social types can be independently realised by differ-
ent combinations of individuals with very different beliefs and motives and
so no individualistic-reductionist explanation may be available to account for
them.28
The question of rational-choice theory should, in any case, be dealt with
independently from that of methodological individualism. It would be pos-
sible to be a methodological individualist without being a proponent of
rational-choice theory. Analytical Marxists have pursued a twin-track strat-
egy here. Pragmatically, they have demonstrated through the successful use
of rational-choice tools by Roemer and Przeworski that the key features of the
Marxian programme can be illuminated by the intelligent application of neo-
classical economic techniques. Philosophically, they have been ‘internal’ crit-
ics of rational-choice methodology: that is to say that they have not rejected it
out of hand but have been concerned to point out its defects and shortcomings
whilst remaining sympathetic too it. At the forefront here was Jon Elster who
27
See Carling 1991, Chapters 1–3. Brenner 1977; Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1986.
28
See especially Wright, Levine, Sober 1992, Chapter 6.
has combined an aggressive anti-holism with a keen awareness of the difcul-

ties faced by rational-choice theory in the light of the psychological ndings of
Kahneman and Tversky and the alternative behavioural model of rationality
advanced by Herbert Simon.29
The turn to normativity

Since the original pathbreaking contributions of Cohen, Roemer and Prze-
worski, analytical Marxism as a school has undergone a further loss of unity
and coherence. This is despite the very interesting work that the principal
members have continued to do. To take the case of Cohen rst: since Karl
Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen has published two works based on numerous
papers and has also begun a critical engagement with the work of John Rawls.
The rst of these works, History, Labour and Freedom, represents primarily a
continuation of Karl Marx’s Theory of History and a reply to critics of that work.
Its successor,30 Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality is a work of normative
political philosophy which engages rst and foremost with the work of the
American libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick. In his book Anarchy, State
and Utopia,31 Nozick had put a moral case for a minimal state and a free-market
economy on the basis of premises that, in Cohen’s view, were widely shared
by Marxists and socialists more generally. In particular, Cohen thought that
the idea of self-ownership lay behind many Marxist intuitions about exploita-
tion (workers are exploited because what they have produced with the labour
of their bodies is appropriated by the capitalist). It would therefore be a deep
problem for Marxists if their most fundamental presuppositions could form
the basis of an argument justifying inexorably not a communist future but a
régime of market and private property.32 Cohen was thus led to inquire more
deeply into the normative foundations of property-ownership and exploita-
tion. Cohen’s investigations ultimately led to his rejection of the thesis of self-
ownership and to an increased admiration for the egalitarian liberalism of
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. But this admiration has been heavily qualied
29
The key texts here are his three volumes: Simon 1979; Simon 1983; and Simon 1989.
Simon 1983 in particular, contains the best analytical-Marxist writing on ideology.
30
Cohen 1995.
31
Nozick 1974.
32
See, especially, Chapter 6, Cohen 1995.
in recent work by an increasing dissatisfaction on Cohen’s part with the way

in which Rawls’s theory permits incentives the play a part in determining
the structure of the just society. Perhaps paradoxically, this expresses itself
in a rejection of what many have seen as the most ‘Marxist’ aspect of Rawls’s
whole construction: its emphasis on the way in which the basic structure of
society can be fateful for individuals’ life prospects.33
This is not the place to examine all the details of Cohen’s evolution. And it
is important to stress that it is constituted mainly by a shift in philosophical
attention from one set of problems to another rather than a basic change of
mind concerning Marxism. What it is important to note here is that Cohen is
now concerned not with specically Marxist problems of sociology or poli-
tics, but rather with the clarication of the core values underlying socialist
and communist commitment. In my view, that is not a cause for regret. It is,
however, supercially problematic in Marxist terms for two reasons. First, the
problems of ethics are historically a repressed aspect of Marxist thought – ‘the
love that dare not speak its name’ – many Marxists (including Marx himself)
have often denied that their commitment to the cause of revolution is based
on any moral values whatsoever.34 Second, Cohen’s focus on the normative
problems of political philosophy (and particularly on the problem of justice),
when coupled with his rejection of any methodological barrier between Marx-
ism and ‘bourgeois’ theory, means that he is now a participant in a broad eld
of debate that includes analytical political philosophers of all political stripes.
Within that eld, it is now impossible to say clearly who counts as a social-
ist, who is an egalitarian liberal etc. These ideological camps have fused and
interpenetrated.
Further evidence for that interpenetration is found in the work of Philippe
Van Parijs. Van Parijs is one of a number of September Group members who
have never claimed to be Marxist. Instead, Karl Marx gures as just one of a
range of inuences on his work. After and early interest in the philosophy of
the social sciences, a period which resulted in his Evolutionary Explanation in
the Social Sciences,35 Van Parijs has become renowned mainly for his pursuit
33
See, for example, Cohen 1997.
34
The question of whether Marx believed that capitalism is unjust is the subject of
a voluminous literature within analytical Marxism. Norman Geras provides a helpful
survey of the literature in Geras 1985.
35
Van Parijs 1981.
of one issue: basic income. In a pathbreaking paper with the Dutch political
scientist, Robert van der Veen, entitled ‘A Capitalist Road to Communism’,36
he rejected the idea that the Left should pursue the goal of ‘socialism’, that is
to say Marx’s ‘lower stage’ of communism. Rather, the achievement of abun-
dance, the precondition for true communism, could be best met by capitalism:
a régime of market and private property. Capitalism should be conjoined,
though, with a system of universal grants or ‘basic income’. Everyone (or per-
haps all adults) should be entitled to receive an unconditional grant inde-
pendently of whether or not they participate in the labour market. This basic
income would have the effect of freeing people from the obligation to have
paid employment in order to satisfy their basic material needs. As well as
freeing people from the obligation to work, it also responds to the demands
of social justice in an age when the holding of a job has become the holding of
a scarce resource by a few privileged workers to the disbenet of the socially
excluded. In a further series of papers and an important book, Real Freedom for
All, Van Parijs has developed a number of challenging arguments in favour of
universal basic income.37
Once again, whatever the particular merits of Van Parijs’s proposals, we
see that September Group members are now at a very great distance from
the Marxian projects. Enthusiasm for ‘basic income’ is not even limited to
the political Left: in one form or another, even some of the originators of the
neoliberal consensus have backed related ideas. If we look, for example, at
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom we see him advocating a ‘negative
income tax’. Van Parijs’s proposals are, not surprisingly, more radical and
redistributive than Friedman’s.38 But, in an important sense, they occupy the
same ground: that of the correct social policy to be adopted by governments
of liberal-democratic states. If there is to be an emancipation of the working
class, it is not to be the work of the working class itself but rather of parlia-
mentary élites and the civil service.
Rather like Van Parijs, John Roemer has now strayed a very long way
from anything that looks like Marxian orthodoxy. In the 1990s, he had been
strongly concerned with developing a model of a market-socialist economy.
36
Van Parijs 1993.
37
Van Parijs 1995.
38
Friedman 1962. Van Parijs discusses the relationship between his proposal and
Friedman’s at p. 57 of Van Parijs 1995.
This ‘socialist’ economy is very different from anything that has hitherto
borne the label.39 Roemer accepts the view that an efcient and dynamic econ-
omy requires a combination of free markets and political democracy. Despite
a commitment to egalitarianism, he also sees little hope in the foreseeable
future for the redistribution of incomes derived from the labour market. He
also rejects the idea of public ownership of industry, and is rather agnostic on
the question of worker-ownership of rms. What, then, is ‘socialist’ about his
scheme? He would focus on two things: ownership of capital and government
direction of investment.
Roemer argues that there is great scope for the institutional separation of
markets for stock from markets for labour and consumer goods. He envisages
a scheme where capital ownership is held by all the population via coupons
which they can use to buy and sell shares on the stock market. An equal num-
ber of coupons would be issued to each adult and would revert to the public
treasury on the death of the holder. These coupons would be non-convertible
into cash and people would be unable to give them away or trade them for
any other consideration. So there would be no possibility of workers and the
poor trading-in their capital assets in a way leading to a concentration of own-
ership in the hands of a few capitalists. All would have an equal expectation
of beneting from the prots accruing to capital. In addition to this parallel
currency for stock, Roemer proposes the use by the state of differential inter-
est rates to encourage investment in sectors where it is socially desirable that
investment be increased but where normal incentives to do so are poor.
Roemer’s proposals are certainly not to be dismissed out of hand. Roemer
is engaging in the kind of creative thinking about the institutions of a social-
ist society that must be done if the project of an egalitarian and democratic
society is to regain momentum. From the point of view of egalitarian justice,
a proposal that permits substantial inequalities arising from the people’s pos-
session of scarce skills and abilities in the labour market, is clearly imper-
fect. But Roemer does, at least suggest a way beyond a society in which the
means of production are in the hands of a tiny capitalist class. Nevertheless,
his scheme does have many defects. First, it is far from clear how the cou-
pon-holders are to be motivated to gather the necessary information and then
39
The proposal is advanced in Roemer 1994 and debated in the collection Roemer
1996. See also Bardhan and Roemer (eds.) 1993.
to act on it. Granted, many ordinary workers already spend a great deal of
time and intellectual effort gathering and acting on information to do with
horse-racing or the performance of football teams. But it seems unlikely that
the performance of key stocks is going to capture the imagination of millions
in quite the same way. Second, given the persistent inequalities arising from
the labour market and the requirement to act as a utility-maximising agent
in that market, it is probable that this market-socialist scheme would tend to
promote an egoistic psychology in much the same way as capitalism. Third, it
is entirely unclear how we might get from the welfare-state capitalisms of the
present to such a society. It certainly seems most unlikely that the movement
to create a coupon market socialism will inspire the levels of commitment and
self-sacrice that have characterised workers’ movements in the past.
Conclusion
Analytical Marxism started with a group of thinkers who combined a leftist
commitment to socialist goals with a willingness to expose Marxist orthodoxy
to critical scrutiny using the tools of analytical philosophy and ‘bourgeois
social science’. In the time since the movement began, the environment in
which they have conducted their enquiries has changed in far-reaching ways.
First, and most dramatically, the political environment has shifted enor-
mously: the Soviet Union and its allies have disappeared and an increasingly
globalised capitalism has demonstrated both dynamism and self-condence.
The egalitarian political project has been everywhere in retreat for nearly
twenty years. Second, many thinkers on the Left have over the same period
been diverted away from serious reection concerning class, inequality and
political order and have, by contrast devoted their attention into the marginal
and politically inconsequential agendas of literary theory, poststructuralism
and deconstruction.
Whatever one thinks of the positive proposals now advanced by leading
analytical Marxists, it is to their credit that they have neither lapsed into
dogmatism, nor have they transmuted into apologists for the existing order.
Instead, they have attempted to ally the new egalitarian political philosophy
associated with John Rawls, Amartya Sen and others with the tools of ‘bour-
geois’ social science in an attempt to devise feasible institutions to move the
socialist project forward. What is clearly lacking, though, is any kind of con-
nection between these academic theoreticians and the wide social movement
of the oppressed that could force their proposal onto the political agenda.40
But they retain a sense that the triumph of the capitalist order may be a tem-
porary phenomenon: twenty years ago, things looked very different, and they
may do so again twenty years hence.41 For now, it is essential that those com-
mitted to an egalitarian and democratic future for humankind continue to
think rigorously and creatively about the path to the future society – current
setbacks notwithstanding.
In a volume devoted to post-Marxisms and neo-Marxisms, it seems appro-
priate to ask whether analytical Marxists are Marxists at all? Since some of
them never were in the rst place, it is nevertheless a slightly odd question
to pose. G.A. Cohen has said that he regarded Karl Marx’s Theory of History
as a settling accounts with his Marxist upbringing and background. Once it
was completed and he had done his duty by that past, he felt free to think
creatively and more critically about that heritage.42 We should see analytical
Marxism as preserving the egalitarian and democratic values of Marx, but as
being willing to jettison where necessary the details of Marx’s analysis of capi-
talism, his method and his prescriptions for the future. Whether what remains
should be called Marxist is a question for the historian of ideas rather than a
philosophical or political one.
40
This may be too strong a statement, since Philippe Van Parijs has done much to
force the basic-income proposal onto the agenda of non-governmental organisations
worldwide.
41
A point powerfully made by Wright 1997, pp. 116–17.
42
See his remarks at pp. x to xi of Cohen 1988.
Chapter Seven
The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory:
From Neo-Marxism to ‘Post-Marxism’
Gérard Raulet
The Institute of Social Research was founded in

Frankfurt in 1924 and celebrated its 75th anniversary
between the 23–5th of September 1999. Refounded
by Horkheimer in 1949 on his return from exile, it
was subsequently directed by Adorno until his
death in 1969 and then by one of his pupils, Ludwig
von Friedeburg.1 It still expressly claims to adhere to
its original conception and is committed to interdis-
ciplinary studies of the social state, law and politics,
culture and social psychology, while conceding that
the general theory advocated by Horkheimer is no
longer acceptable.2
In his inaugural lecture of 1931, Horkheimer had
set out a way of organising scientic work that
replaced the Marxist primacy of political economy
by a ‘social philosophy [Sozialphilosophie]’. This phi-
losophy aimed to develop a comprehensive theory
of society by integrating multidisciplinary research
1
By director should be understood ‘executive director [geschäftsführender Direktor]’.
In fact, the Institute had at its head a three-man directorate. In 1997, this directorate
was replaced by a college which elected an executive director for ve years (Ludwig
von Friedeburg since 1997).
2
See Dubiel 1994, p. 12. But the ‘crisis of capitalist integration’ has nevertheless
prompted the Institute to ‘revive Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture and to reorient its
future research in a more general, interdisciplinary direction’ (Dubiel 1994, p. 107).
144 • Gérard Raulet
(economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy), taking account of the new

conditions of reproduction of advanced capitalism, namely, its ability to
short-circuit the crisis mechanism by means of state intervention and the new-
found weight of ideology and the cultural sphere. The principal idea was that
the Marxist critique of ideology did not permit explanation of
the relationship between the economic life of society, the psychic devel-
opment of the individual and the changes within the cultural sphere in the
narrower sense.3
Objections to the critique of ideology reached a peak in 1944 with Dialectic of

Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer called into question mod-
ern rationality as such. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action partook
of this logic, demanding a communicative regrounding of rationality. In this
work from 1981, Habermas engaged in a ruthless revision of critical theory,
proposing to release it from the ‘ballast of historical materialism’. Once ‘neo-
Marxist’, the Frankfurt school’s critical theory was in the process of becoming
‘post-Marxist’.4
The conjuncture of the 1980s

Following the existentialist wave, which created moderate currents of exchange
between France and Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s were marked
by two distinct intellectual logics, despite the shared upheaval of 1968: the
structuralist vogue in France and the revival of critical theory in Germany.
These two currents – embodied in France by Althusser and in Germany by
strategies for updating critical theory, on the one hand, and the rising star
of Habermas, on the other – seemed impervious to one another, including
(and especially) in the Marxist domain. In France, the Frankfurt school was
virtually unknown; in Germany, the Althusserian approach circulated only
among a limited audience in the form of pamphlets, produced outside tradi-
tional publishing, diffused by the student movement. A study of the currents
responsible for this marginal diffusion and its impact on left-wing thought in
3
Horkheimer 1972, p. 43.
4
This chapter, which is restricted to the 1980s and 1990s, is extracted from an essay
on the evolution and identity of critical theory.
The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory • 145
Germany remains to be carried out. According to Wolfgang Bonss and Axel

Honneth, the ‘return to Marxism’ in German university culture in any event
undermined the impact of critical theory at the very moment when it returned
to centre-stage, in the agitated context of the late 1960s.5 According to them,
in consequence it no longer appeared to be ‘a continuation of Marxism but a
bourgeois revision’6 – to the extent that it may be asked whether it was criti-
cal theory which was in tune with the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, or rather a
mixture in which the hopes that had been invested in it weighed more than it
delivered or was in a position to offer.
In the context of a renewed interest in Marxism and rediscovery of the orig-
inal critical theory, Alfred Schmidt played a signicant role. He was one of the
critical mediators of the reception of French structuralism.7 He also re-edited
the complete collection of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the essays by
Horkheimer published in that journal (Kritische Theorie), and older texts that
Horkheimer had published under the pseudonym Heinrich Regiue: Dämmer-
ung. He was also responsible for the German translation of Eclipse of Reason.
Philosopher and anglicist, Schmidt also translated a fair number of Marcuse’s
American works into German: Reason and Revolution, One-Dimensional Man,
Critique of Pure Tolerance, and (jointly) Counterrevolution and Revolt, as well
as the Essay on Liberation. Moreover, Schmidt did not conne himself to this
decisive contribution to the turning-point of the years 1967–70. Starting with
his doctoral thesis on The Concept of Nature in Marx (1962),8 he also elaborated
his own thoughts on historical materialism and the tradition of philosophical
materialism,9 reviving an old, aborted project of critical theory: a critical study
of the materialist tradition on which Ernst Bloch had been due to collaborate
(this was at the point when he was negotiating his emigration to the USA with
Horkheimer).10
5
On the development of critical theory from the return to Germany up to the 1970s,
see Demirovic 1999 and Albrecht et al. 1999. It is also appropriate to pay tribute to
the pioneering work done by Rolf Wiggershaus, who was the rst person to make
use of the all the available correspondence: see Wiggershaus 1994.
6
Bonss and Honneth 1982, p. 8.
7
See especially Schmidt 1969 and 1981.
8
Schmidt 1971.
9
Let us cite, inter alia, Schmidt 1965; Schmidt 1977a; Schmidt and Post 1975; and
Schmidt 1977b. On Schmidt’s œuvre, see Lutz-Bachmann and Schmid-Noerr 1991.
10
In a way, Bloch carried out this project in his own right: see Bloch 1972 and
Raulet 1998.
It was doubtless not fortuitous if the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s
were marked by a rst wave of historical studies of critical theory/the Insti-
tute of Social Research/the Frankfurt school.11 The three were still far from
disentangled, but the Institute/school/theory had already turned a page.
They could now form the subject of historical and philological studies, even
as the contemporary relevance of ‘critical theory’ was being questioned – and
often by the same gures.
In the 1980s the situation was abruptly transformed. Virtually from one
day to the next, French philosophers and sociologists became an unavoid-
able point of reference – but it was now a question of Foucault, Baudrillard,
Lyotard, Derrida and, incidentally, a few others. These are the gures charac-
terised in the German reception as ‘poststructuralists’. In its abruptness, this
switch represented an ideological and political phenomenon that remains gen-
erally unexplained. We can only offer a few hypotheses. Above all, there was
the exhaustion of the Marxist paradigm. Habermas’s Theory of Communicative
Action (1981) registered it and aimed to jettison the ballast represented by the
Hegelian-Marxist theoretical co-ordinates of the critical theory inherited from
Adorno and Horkheimer.12 Via a different logic, French political philosophy
had reached the same conclusion. One way or another, the two particularisms –
French and German – were to coincide. This encounter was massively to the
advantage of the French contribution (already assimilated in the USA, which
doubtless rendered it all the more unavoidable for Germans). The lectures
delivered at Düsseldorf and Geneva by Manfred Frank, and published under
the title What Is Neostructuralism? in 1983, played a major role.13 They initiated
a whole generation of young, German-speaking philosophers into the new
French approaches. The innovative power of French authors swept over a
critical theory which, in the person of Habermas, was certainly in the process
of renewing itself, but slowly. Invited to the Collège de France in 1983, he
adopted the strategy of a frontal offensive against the French trends. In 1980,
when he received the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt, Habermas had
revealed his persuasion in ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, by character-
11
See Jay 1973; Dubiel 1978; and Held 1980.
12
See Habermas 1987.
13
See Frank 1989.
ising the ‘line lead[ing] from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques
Derrida’ as neo-conservatism:
On the basis of modernistic attitudes they justify an irreconcilable anti-

modernism. They remove into the sphere of the far-way and the archaic
the spontaneous powers of imagination, self-experience, and emotion. To
instrumental reason they juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only
accessible through evocation, be it the will to power or sovereignty, Being
or the Dionysiac force of the poetical.14
This (counter-)offensive appeared in German in 1985 under the title Der phi-
losophische Diskurs der Moderne. Offered to Éditions du Seuil as early as 1983,
for some inexplicable reason it was not accepted.15 The French translation
was only published in 1988 by Gallimard. In any event, its only effect was to
open the oodgates to the reception of ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmodern’
thought in Germany. Frank had the enormous merit not only of presenting
the currents under attack in the deliberately neutral form of university lec-
tures, but also of engaging in order to create a dialogue on fundamentals with
the French thinkers.16 Although not sharing the enthusiasm of small publish-
ers who began to publish anything hailing from France, he thereby helped
to anchor reference to French ‘poststructuralism’ in German philosophical
debates. Thereafter, alongside small publishers like Merve, major ones –
Suhrkamp at their head – included French philosophers among the sure-re
assets of their publishing programmes. At the outset, there were more trans-
lations into German of texts by Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and
company, than of material by Habermas and by critical theory as a whole
into French.17 One result of this Franco-German conjuncture was that, on the
French side, Foucault admitted in an interview which circulated throughout
the world that his positions were in no sense incompatible with those of the
Frankfurt school – at least with the diagnosis of the self-destruction of Reason
formulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).18
14
Habermas 1985, p. 14.
15
Here I am speaking as a witness of the affair.
16
See Frank, Raulet and van Reijen 1988 (the fruit of two seminars, at Vienna and
Amsterdam).
17
Things were reversed only at the end of the 1980s.
18
See Foucault 1983.
During the important Adorno conference organised for the eightieth anni-
versary of Adorno’s birth in 1983, reference to Dialectic of Enlightenment
formed the spinal column of the German counter-attack. In his introductory
talk, Ludwig von Friedeburg gave prominence to the text jointly written by
Adorno and Horkheimer, which inspired him to comment: ‘Adorno’s inu-
ence on critical theory is becoming perceptible today.’19 The third generation
took up battle stations. Relaying Habermas’s line of argument, Helmut Dubiel
declared:
The interest of the social sciences in a continuation of the critical theory

of society currently takes the form of a powerful renaissance of themes
developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. This renaissance feeds on a wide-
spread cultural pessimism whose line of argument simultaneously aims at
a theory of civilisation and a critique of rationality. . . . As for its political
impact, this way of reading Adorno dramatises the crisis of Marxism to the
extent that not only the current prospects for an emancipatory theory of
society, but also the very meaning and possibility of a critical theoretical
attitude towards the present, are put in doubt. Among experts on critical
theory, this interpretation is all the more irritating in that it attempts, by
means of a left-wing line of argument, to assimilate Adorno to a terrain
that has always been occupied by right-wing intellectuals in the German
ideological tradition.20
The previous year, in their preface to the proceedings of a conference that

dated back to 1977, Wolfgang Bonss and Axel Honneth, colleagues of Haber-
mas at the Max Planck Institute at Starnberg, had already adopted a defen-
sive line of argument with respect to ‘poststructuralism’, while bringing out
‘the unanticipated afnity between Dialectic of Enlightenment and French post-
structuralism, from Foucault to Baudrillard’. According to them, the con-
temporaneity of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason
(translated into German in 1967) derived from a generalised scepticism about
science, ‘which the crisis of Marxism conceals by radicalising it’.21 In 1983 the
fallback position was Negative Dialectics, in line with a strategy that posited a
19
Friedeburg and Habermas 1983, p. 9.
20
Friedeburg and Habermas 1983, pp. 239–40.
21
Bons and Honneth 1982, p. 13.
continuity between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics.22 Anxious

to stem the haemorrhage, as early as 1982 Bonss and Honneth were also fore-
grounding the importance ‘of Adorno’s aesthetics and Benjamin or Marcuse’s
theory of culture’ for this updating of critical theory.23 This laudable ecumeni-
cism was at least a sign: the institutional practices of Horkheimer, who until
the end of the 1960s had controlled and ltered republication of the founding
texts, had been abandoned.24 Anything in critical theory that could be put to
contemporary use was rediscovered without any restrictions, even if this ini-
tiative was still inspired by a defensive logic: showing that there was no need
for French ‘poststructuralism’; demonstrating that it was the self-inated ver-
sion of a problematisation of rationality which critical theory had already con-
ducted – even that it was ruining such work by risking fuelling metaphysical
and/or right-wing excesses. However convincing, at least as a contribution to
the debate, the argument suffered from a weakness: critical theory had arrived
at this point under duress. Otherwise, to adopt Dubiel’s words, it would not
have let itself be drawn onto ‘a terrain that has always been occupied by right-
wing intellectuals in the German ideological tradition’. Nevertheless, without
the rediscovery of Dialectic of Enlightenment,25 the Franco-German dialogue
over critical theory would have been largely impossible.
Habermas was not to be outdone. He too ‘rediscovered’ Dialectic of Enlight-
enment. In his brief introduction to Martin Jay’s intervention during the 1983
Adorno conference, he suggested: ‘Perhaps the discussions would have
been even more gripping if the neo-structuralist interpretation of Dialectic of
Enlightenment had been stated more clearly’.26 He rammed home the point
without further delay in Karlheinz Bohrer’s collective volume, Mythos und
Moderne.27 Certainly, in it he does not refer to the afnities between Dialectic
of Enlightenment and ‘poststructuralism’. But following a brilliant rereading
of the major themes and an interpretation of the meaning of the work in the
development of critical theory, he comes to the question of total critique and
afnities with Nietzsche:
22
See Bonss 1983, p. 203.
23
Bonns and Honneth (eds.) 1982, p. 15.
24
See the edifying collective work of Albrecht et al. 1999.
25
See especially Wellmer 1985 (an indispensable essay); 1988; and Honneth 1991,
to which we shall return.
26
Habermas 1983a, p. 351.
27
Habermas 1983b.
Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge and morality anticipates an idea that

Horkheimer and Adorno develop in the form of the critique of instrumental
reason: behind positivism’s ideals of objectivity and claims to truth, behind
universalistic morality’s ideals of asceticism and claims to rightness, lurk
imperatives of self-preservation and domination.28
To understand the strategy, it is enough to consult the table of contents of

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), where the essay is recycled.
In Chapter 4, Nietzsche is characterised as a ‘turning point’. We might also
speak of a bifurcation: either one pursues the line inaugurated by Horkheimer
and Adorno or one engages in the ‘adventures of Reason’ represented by
Heideggerianism and French ideologies – Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, or the
neo-Nietzscheanism denounced in the Frankfurt speech in 1980. Neverthe-
less, a signicant concession will be noted: the problematic of ‘reason and
self-preservation’ qualies critical theory as belonging among the ‘critiques
of domination’. Later on, we shall see how Habermas’s pupils were subse-
quently to develop this opening.
But, by the same token, while mobilising its own resources, critical theory
was indeed drawn onto enemy terrain – which it ultimately had to recognise
as being neither Klages, nor Spengler, nor even Nietzsche. It ended up coming
round to the view of Hans Robert Jauss, who, having assimilated postmo-
dernity to the ‘spectre haunting Europe’ during the 1983 Adorno conference,
recalled in time his own work on modernity and concluded in 1985 that one
should not ‘regard postmodernity as the mythologeme of a neoconservative
counter-Enlightenment, but as the advent of a new epochal consciousness’.29
As a result, the positions of the mediators prevailed – and we may count the
works of Wellmer, offspring of critical theory who had ended up at Constance,
among the most effective mediations.
In his small but important essay collection On the Dialectic of Modernity and
Postmodernity, Wellmer reinterprets Adorno by looking to his deconstruction
of the ‘constraint of identity [Identitätszwang]’ for the preconditions of a dif-
ferent form of rationality, a form of subjectivity that no longer corresponds
to the
28
Habermas 1983b, p. 421.
29
Jauss 1988, p. 228.
rigid unity of the bourgeois subject, but attests to a more exible form
of organisation of an ego identity ‘rendered fluid by communication’
(Habermas). These two aspects – the shaking of the subject and its prison of
meaning in the modern world and the possibility of a different relationship to
a world decentred by the expansion of the boundaries of the subject – were
prepared well in advance in modern art. Against the excesses of a technical
and bureaucratic rationality, that is to say, against the form of rationality
dominant in modern society, modern art highlighted an emancipatory
potential of modernity; it in fact made it possible to envisage a new type
of ‘synthesis’ and ‘unity’ thanks to which what is diffuse, unintegrated,
extravagant, and dissociated could nd its place in a space of communication
free of violence.30
Seemingly aligned with Habermas, this was to go beyond Habermas. Cer-

tainly, Habermas had himself claimed a role for art and mimesis as ‘allusions’
to a necessary paradigm change. But this mutation in rationality was ultimately
to be effected by the Theory of Communicative Action. Wellmer too adhered to
the Weberian-Habermasian conception of the inevitable separation of reason
into distinct spheres – science, law and morality, art.31 However, following
Peter Bürger,32 he was interested in the transformation of the ‘art institu-
tion’, in the new constellations being created between art and life-forms –
that is to say, in the forms of communication that occurred in the medium of
art, such as they could be observed in postmodern architecture in particu-
lar.33 Like Bürger, Wellmer did not believe in an abolition of the distinction
between expert culture and common culture, but he broke down the barrier of
‘single coding’ by admitting the emergence of a ‘denser network of relations’
between the two.34 If he remained faithful to the idea of an ‘unnished moder-
nity’, his argument was that modernity can and must precisely discover the
30
Wellmer 1985, pp. 163ff. See also p. 29: ‘What Adorno called “aesthetic synthesis”
can be nally be related to the utopia, construed in a perfectly realistic sense, of a
communication free of violence’.
31
Wellmer 1985, p. 38.
32
See Bürger 1984 and 1983.
33
Cf. Raulet 1989a; 1989b; and 1999. In the essay ‘Kunst und industrielle Produktion’,
written for the seventy-fth anniversary of Werkbund, Wellmer sought to interpret
Charles Jencks’s multiple coding in Habermasian fashion.
34
Wellmer 1985, p. 40.
potential for its revival in postmodernity. He did not even hesitate to query
‘the desirability of a universal consensus’.35
Wellmer opened the Pandora’s Box of new forms of social interaction, which
Habermas always kept under the lid of his ‘communicative reason’. If the
modernity/postmodernity debate as such is exhausted, this problem is bound
to resurface. Scarcely was the ‘postmodern’ chapter closed than the Frankfurt
school opened another front: that of law and sociality. It certainly could and
should have done so much earlier, given the extent to which the ‘postmod-
ern’ context prompted such a move. But it displayed a blind spot, or rather a
deliberate blindness, towards all the works that in fact fell within its eld and
pertained to its original vocation: ‘social philosophy’. If Habermas registered
in passing the mutations in social space produced by new technologies of
information and communication, in Theory of Communicative Action they do
not seem to constitute a revolution such as to demand real theoretical revi-
sion. Important in France, this line of thought was deliberately minimised.
It took the debate between neo-communitarians and liberals in the United
States for critical theory – Habermas and the third generation of the Frankfurt
school – to emerge from the dogmatic slumber it had been lulled into by its
certainty that it had hit upon an unanswerable theoretical rejoinder by ritually
invoking the legacy of Dialectic of Enlightenment, while leaving things to ‘com-
municative action’. Here we see that, for critical theory, what occurs in the
United States is, as when Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt, more important
than what happens in Europe as regards any ‘social philosophy’.
The Habermas effect

Viewed from without, Habermas did not carry the day. In June 1965, the year
in which Marcuse took his hat off to Horkheimer (the Horkheimer of the
old Institute) in Kultur und Gesellschaft, Habermas too, when delivering his
inaugural lecture upon taking up Horkheimer’s chair in social philosophy at
Frankfurt – ‘Knowledge and Human Interests’ – could allow himself to stress
that he was adopting one of Horkheimer’s ‘most important lines of enquiry’
in his own right.
35
Wellmer 1985, p. 105.
Habermas is the only person to have completed a quasi-systematic œuvre,

which, measured in the light of the Hegelian system, after the theory of law
(Between Facts and Norms)36 lacks only an ‘Aesthetics’ that others have pro-
duced for him or in his place, as we have just seen. In fact (and perhaps this
is the reason for the absence of aesthetics), the Theory of Communicative Action
claims to reconstruct the unity of reason separated by modernity. Therewith,
it shares the diagnosis according to which instrument rationality is a ‘trun-
cated [halbiert]’ reason. Modernisation has led to the triumph of the rationality
of understanding of science and technology, or only one aspect of eighteenth-
century Reason. According to Horkheimer, industrial rationality embodied
this truncated reason: the aim of Eclipse of Reason was ‘to inquire into the
concept of rationality that underlies our contemporary industrial culture, in
order to discover whether this concept does not contain defects that vitiate it
essentially’.37
But Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action does not share the conclu-
sions drawn in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Certainly, Habermas has inciden-
tally claimed a role for art and mimesis as ‘allusions’ to a necessary paradigm
change supposedly nally accomplished by Theory of Communicative Action.
But, for him, it is as if the only thing at stake in ‘communicative action’ is to
reconstruct a faltering legitimacy. Can it at the same time transform the ratio-
nality underlying this crisis of legitimacy? To what extent does Theory of Com-
municative Action overcome an ultimately rather simplistic dualism between
rationality and legitimacy?
Twenty years after it was ‘launched’, Habermas’s programme remains
problematic and fragile, given the concrete forms of communication that
ourished in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the diffusion of the new tech-
nologies.38 Notwithstanding the corrections or clarications he has made,
Habermas’s position, even in Between Facts and Norms, remains defensive:
while embellishing it with successive qualications, he continues to invoke an
ideal community of understanding. At the same time, he is certainly increas-
ingly interested in the reality of social interactions, but without succeeding in
really taking their measure.
36
See Habermas 1996.
37
Horkheimer 1947, p. v.
38
See Raulet and Hörisch 1992 and Raulet 1988.
The principle of a discursive formation of the general will remains ‘coun-

terfactual [kontrafaktisch]’; and the fact that Habermas has for years expressly
assigned it this status in no way changes the problem. In Legitimation Crisis in
1973, readers were already struck by the conditionals:
Such a counterfactually projection reconstruction . . . can be guided by

the question (justied, in my opinion, by considerations from universal
pragmatics): how would the members of a social system, at a given stage
of development of productive forces, have collectively and bindingly
interpreted their needs (and which norms would they have accepted as
justied) if they could and would have decided on organization of social
intercourse through discursive will-formation, with adequate knowledge of
the limiting conditions and functional imperatives of their society?39
In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard had issued this warning: ‘Where, after the
metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? . . . Is legitimacy to be found in con-
sensus obtained through discussion, as Jürgen Habermas thinks? Such con-
sensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games.’40 For his part,
Habermas stuck to his abstract construction of a communicative action that
overcomes the fragmentation of linguistic acts and, consequently, of the gen-
eral will and Reason itself. The issue of the instance that unied the different
types of validity41 was ‘resolved’ by invoking a rational argument, but with-
out Habermas really asking whether the dominant language games allowed it
to operate. As long as this issue is not claried, the argument that the sociali-
sation of individuals occurs through the internalisation of truth-dependent
norms is likewise problematic. Which truth (even if purely communicative)?
And what are the forms of this miraculous ‘internalisation’?
This is precisely the question to which the Habermasian conception of law
has attempted a response. To Luhman Habermas objects only that law rep-
resents a domain which refutes the functional differentiation between sub-
systems, because it is the site of awareness and rationally motivated demands
39
40
Lyotard 1984, pp. xxiv–v.
41
The propositional truth of statements [Wahrheit]; their normative correctness
[Richtigkeit]; their expressive veracity – in other words, the requirement of authenticity
and sincerity on the part of the speaking subject [Wahrhaftigkeit]; the correct confor-
mation of symbolic structures [Regelrichtigkeit]; the formal correctness of statements
[Wohlgeformtheit]; and their intelligibility [Verständlichkeit].
and, in addition, opens up a space of deliberation and understanding for the

purposes of social integration:
[u]nder these premises, law then functions as a hinge between system and
lifeworld, a function that is incompatible with the idea that the legal system,
withdrawing into its own shell, autopoietically encapsulates itself.42
Law represents the mediating instance par excellence between the ‘life-world’
and the social systems that are independent of one another and obey particu-
lar codes. It is the transmission belt capable of checking social and political
fragmentation:
Normatively substantive messages can circulate throughout society only in

the language of law. Without their translation into the complex legal code
that is equally open to lifeworld and system, these messages would fall
on deaf ears in media-steered spheres of action. Law thus functions as the
‘transformer’ that rst guarantees that the socially integrating network of
communications stretched across society as a whole holds together.43
Yet it is precisely at this point that the crucial problem of proceduralisation,

which can be dened in Habermas’s terms as ‘levelling between factuality
and validity’, also arises. For the problem is indeed then posed on the terrain
of positive law. For it to be resolved, the recipients of juridical norms must at
the same time be able to construe themselves as the rational authors of these
norms. This poses the issue of citizenship. The corollary of this problem is the
moralisation of law: when citizens no longer regard themselves as the authors
of law, not only do procedures proliferate, but they draw their inspiration
from the law/morality divide. Confronted with this proceduralisation, it has
to be noted that Habermas’s ‘D principle’ (the principle of rational discussion)
plays the role of a magic wand, once again elevating rational communica-
tion into mediation, but chasing its tail, because the problem posed is that
of its malfunctioning! In Habermas, Law has become the stake of his whole
approach, but Law resolves nothing.
It would appear that its rear normative base is now an informal ‘Öffentlich-
keit’ – a mediocre deus ex machina derived from the absence of a sociological
study of social interaction, but nevertheless claiming to be inspired by its
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.
empirical reality. The schematisation of basic rights proposed by Habermas

reects this contradiction by adding a fth (‘contextual’ and culturalist) right
to the basic right to participate on equal terms in the processes of opinion and
will formation, representing the framework in which citizens exercise their
political autonomy and through which they establish legitimate law.
The Habermasian formulation of the four rst types of basic rights itself
warrants extended commentary. We shall limit ourselves to the fth:
basic rights to the provision of living conditions that are socially, techno-
logically, and ecologically safeguarded, insofar as the current circumstances
make this necessary if citizens are to have equal opportunities to utilise the
civil rights list in (1) through (4).44
This ‘dialectic’ between the universal rights of citizens and rights to difference
concretely seems to boil down to a weak version of afrmative action. Haber-
mas concedes, moreover, that:
Although basic rights originally consisted of negative or ‘defensive’ rights

[Abwehrrechten] that grant liberties and keep an intervening administration
within the bounds of law, they have now become the architectonic principles
of the legal order, thus transforming the content of individual, or ‘subjective’
liberties [Freiheitsrechte] into the content of fundamental norms that penetrate
and shape ‘objective’ law, albeit in a conceptually unclaried manner.45
A politics of recognition must take the form of a communicative struggle

in order for identities and criteria to be dened in an authentically dialogi-
cal fashion and in the most egalitarian manner possible. The ‘D principle’ as
magic wand! Quite clearly, it is time to assess what communicative struggle
might consist in.
To describe the deterioration in the relationship between public opinion and
politics, in Between Facts and Norms Habermas replaces the metaphor of siege
by that of a lock: to inuence political power, judicial power, and the bureau-
cracy that form the core of the system, ‘citizens’ relegated to the periphery
must open the ‘locks’ of the democratic and juridical procedures peculiar to
the Rechtsstaat. Law is the lock par excellence.46 By reducing values to the act
44
45
Habermas 1996, pp. 247–8.
46
See Habermas 1995, pp. 138ff.
of asserting them, the mediation between facts and values promised by the
title Between Facts and Norms remains dependent on the quasi-transcendental
medium of the community of understanding and, in consequence, is as uncon-
vincing as the latter.47
The third generation confronted with current problematics

Today, the contours of the Frankfurt school are more uid than ever. After
the death of the two tutelary gures,48 the legacy of critical theory was repre-
sented by Habermas and Alfred Schmidt, who both formed pupils and gen-
erated two currents, despite shared interests and some two-way trafc. The
pupils of Adorno, of Horkheimer, and then of Habermas and Schmidt have
scattered and in their turn created new poles of critical theory: Oskar Negt
(whom the student movement wished to nominate as Adorno’s successor) in
Hanover in the 1970s;49 Clause Offe at Bielefeld;50 Albrecht Wellmer in Con-
stance in the 1980s and then in Berlin after German reunication.
47
See Raulet 1999.
48
Adorno in August 1969 and Horkheimer – who ofcially retired in 1964 but
remained active in the Institute – in 1973. The third historical witness – Pollock –
died in 1970.
49
Negt was one of the brains of the SDS [Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund]
excluded from the SPD during the Godesberg congress in 1960 and whose organ was
the journal Neue Kritik. It is striking that in this journal we nd practically no mention
of Horkheimer and Adorno, but instead Marx himself, Lukács, Baran and Sweezy, Joan
Robinson, and Wolfgang Abendroth, with whom Habermas had taken refuge after his
departure from Frankfurt (when Horkheimer had opposed his Habilitation). In his 1962
doctoral thesis (on Comte and Hegel), experts calculate Negt’s references to critical
theory at 0.5 per cent (Behrmann 1999, p. 385). Negt has pursued a career in constant
tension between the academy and trade unionism and was particularly active in the
permanent formation of the DGB [Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund]. In 1969, he created the
‘Socialist Bureau [Sozialistisches Büro]’, an unorthodox political organisation. If there is
a base line in his theoretical output and political engagement, it consists in the notion
of political culture and, in particular, the formation of the political consciousness of
workers. With respect to the Habermasian ‘public sphere [Öffenlichkeit]’ – he was
Habermas’s assistant at Heidelburg from 1962–4 and followed the latter to Frankfurt
in 1964 when he succeeded Horkheimer – he adopted a radical position: the public
sphere only serves the self-representation of the dominant class (see Negt and Kluge
1993). This approach contains aspects worth taking into consideration again today: in
particular, the dialectic of organisation and spontaneity that Negt articulated at the
time with reference to Rosa Luxemburg. This continues to be a stumbling block for
‘communicative action’, since it must (or should) start out from real forms of inter-
action. In Negt and Kluge 1981, Negt attempts to implement, in what is in a sense
a ‘Benjaminian’ fashion, an apprehension of ‘expressive’ forms of experience that is
precisely supposed to correct the rigidity of the Habermasian model.
50
See Offe 1984.
Succeeding the second generation today is the third, composed of pupils of

Habermas (Axel Honneth), of Schmidt (Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Gunze-
lin Schmid-Noerr),51 and of Wellmer (Martin Seel).52 It began its career with
the debates of the 1980s. For example, Honneth stepped into the ‘opening’ in
the form of the concession nally made by Habermas in his polemic against
poststructuralism in the early 1980s. His rst major work – The Critique of
Power (1985) – is the very image, the archetype, of the strategy for render-
ing critical theory contemporary that we have described. In its rst part, it
acknowledges the lacunae, even aporiae, of critical theory as regards social
analysis. It goes back to ‘Horkheimer’s original idea’ (this is the rst, philo-
logical move); notes its ‘defects’ and seeks its salvation in ‘the turning-point
in philosophy of history’ represented by Dialectic of Enlightenment; and then
turns, in a third, equally expected move, towards Adorno. Nevertheless, the
thesis is not wanting in vigour: critical theory failed to apprehend an inte-
gral part of its denition – the social. Whence a dramatic turn (part two): this
‘rediscovery of the social’ is to be sought in . . . Foucault and Habermas. The
argument is not particular about details: it aims at nothing less than reinte-
grating into the intellectual horizon of critical theory (such as it has been codi-
ed since the beginning of the 1960s) anything that might contradict it:
Both the theory of power, which Foucault has grounded in historical

investigation, and the theory of society, which Habermas has developed on
the basis of a theory of communicative action, can be viewed as attempts
to interpret in a new way the process of a dialectic of enlightenment
analyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno. If the history of critical social
theory is reconstruction from this point of view, then Foucault’s theory
of power proves to be a systems-theoretic and Habermas’ social theory a
communication-theoretical solution to the aporias encountered by Adorno
and Horkheimer in their philosophical-historical analysis of the process of
civilization.53
While the trick is unsubtle, the tactics are clever. In sum, they consist in saying:
we are not going to revert to the Habermas-Luhmann controversy. This major
51
See Lutz-Bachmann 1991 and 1997; and Schmid-Noerr 1988.
52
See Seel 1996a; 1996b; and 1997.
53
Honneth 1991, p. xi.
debate of the 1970s54 is kept on the sidelines because, as everyone observed, it

ended in a peace of the brave. Critical theory cut its losses and since then it has
not been rare to nd references to both – the theory of communicative action
and systems theory – combined in research. But systems theory is indirectly
condemned, since the French – Foucault – can be regarded as one of its mani-
festations (they were previously characterised as Nietzscheans, but no matter:
the main thing is to label them and thereby keep them at a distance). After the
Pyrrhic victory over systems theory, it is necessary to win a victory of at least
equal (if not greater) magnitude over the Gallic theory of power. Eureka: to
demonstrate that it is a theory of the social (which it unquestionably is and the
argument is in fact unimpeachable) and thus render it ‘acceptable [salonfähig]’
to critical theory. Consequently, the problems are dismissed, if not resolved:
let us embrace, Luhmann, Foucault, Habermas – unite and ght! Except, obvi-
ously, that it still has to be demonstrated that critical theory, accused in part
one of having neglected the social, has nally discovered it in Habermas. In
this strategico-tactical night in which all cats are grey, a few glimmers of cri-
tique emerge – reections that take their distance from Habermas and venture
towards Wellmer, even towards Lyotard (who, naturally, is not cited):
If . . . linguistic understanding represents the particular form of a coordina-

tion of goal-directed actions that comes about by virtue of the mutual
accomplishments of interpretation, it may be asked how all the processes
of coordinating action that exist in the physical or psychological, moral or
cognitive relations between a subject and its object are to be characterized.
To be sure, in the section of his work on speech-act theory Habermas
attempts to demarcate forms of strategic action oriented to understanding,
but the former do not systematically appear in his argument as ways for
coordinating actions. . . . Habermas loses . . . the communication-theoretic
approach he had initially opened up: the potential for an understanding
of the social order as an institutionally mediated communicative relation
between culturally integrated groups that, so long as the exercise of power
is asymmetrically distributed, takes place through the medium of social
struggle. Only a consistent elaboration of this alternative vision would
make it possible to understand the social organizations that Adorno and
54
Habermas and Luhmann 1971; 1973; and 1974.
Foucault mistook as power complexes functioning in a totalitarian manner

as fragile constructions that remain dependent for their existence on the
moral consensus of all participants.55
Obviously, one cannot but subscribe to this diagnosis. Today, as a result of

the attenuation or disconnection of a shared normative instance, everything
hinges on the level of the capacity of social agents to asset their ‘difference of
opinion’ and thereby inuence the ‘consensus’. In other words, the articula-
tion of the expressive and the normative must be rethought. In this respect,
according to Honneth, it appears that
The communicative model of action that lies at the basis of Habermas’s

social theory has changed considerably in comparison with his previous
approaches . . . the dimensions of communicative and instrumental rationality,
which Habermas had previously distinguished, are extended by the third
dimension of aesthetic-expressive rationality, which is supposed to be set
forth in the authentic relationship of the subject to the world of his internal
perceptions and experiences. From this Habermas derives a view of aesthetics
that, in problematic ways, attempts to connect the rationality of a work of
art to the truthfulness of expressions formed within it.56
We indicated our opinion of this above. At least in 1985 this was a lucid diag-
nosis. And we can only rejoice to note that it has entered into the programme
of the Institute of Social Research, albeit in Habermasian fashion – that is to
say, using the metaphor of the siege of institutions by civil society. The Insti-
tute’s current thinking on civil society is in fact described thus:
Civil society refers to the sphere of the public arena in which individuals
who are victims of discrimination begin to act in communicative fashion
and to demand rights. They aim to besiege, check and civilise the power
of the state and market, not to abolish it.57
55
Honneth 1991, pp. 287 and 303.
56
Honneth 1991, pp. 286–7.
57
Institut für Sozialforschung an der J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main,
Mitteilungen, no. 10, 1999, p. 117. The following works by Honneth are also to be
referred to: Honneth 1995 and 1999.
Hauke Brunkhorst, whilst enormously involved in reecting on the new

political and social challenges,58 has opted for a route that is just as difcult,
and whose co-ordinates are not unprecedented either: on the one hand, like-
wise preserving the strained arc between the programme of the 1930s and
its Habermasian revision; and on the other, calling a halt to the 1970s debate
between Habermas and Luhmann and, in his own right and without pre-
conceptions, accepting theoretical stimulus from both camps. The issue that
he pursues is likewise not unprecedented, quite simply because it involves
the issue of contemporary political philosophy. He merely formulates it in
more radical fashion. It is in fact clear that the desire to render critical theory
contemporary can only take the form of a theory of democracy. But, whereas
Honneth has recently drawn his main theoretical inspiration from American
communitarianism, including the ‘civil-society approach’, Brunkhorst proves
more inexible when it comes to the question of sovereignty as the core of the
problem of the transformation of (post)modern democracy. At the same time –
and this is what distinguishes him from Habermas and prompts his publicity
and activity – he attaches less value to the constitution of norms than to their
effective operation. Here, evidently, lies the ‘defect’ (to use Honneth’s term)
of critical theory as a ‘social philosophy’. It keeps turning it over, as indicated
by the September 1999 edition of its bulletin. It is perfectly obvious that it has
not overcome it.
58
See Brumlik and Brunkhorst 1993, 1994 and 1998.
Chapter Eight
The Late Lukács and the Budapest School
André Tosel
Up until approximately the late 1970s, Marxism

remained an explicit reference point in major social
and intellectual debates. This was the period when
from within international Communism the great
heretics of Marxism, whose thinking had been
formed from the 1920s onwards and who had expe-
rienced the vicissitudes of Stalinism and post-Stalin-
ism, made their nal contributions and won a certain
audience. This was the case with Gyorgy Lukács and
Ernst Bloch, who died in 1971 and 1977 respectively,
after having published their last great books: On
the Ontology of Social Being (1971) and Experimentum
Mundi (1977). In a way, this was also true of Anto-
nio Gramsci’s major work: the Prison Notebooks were
published in 1975 in their original version by Val-
entino Gerratana (replacing the old thematic edition
organised by Palmiro Togliatti, which had formed a
whole generation of Italian Marxists from the 1950s)
and imparted a nal radiance to the philosophy of
praxis. All these works sought to subject the worn-
out orthodoxy of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to a
critique of its presuppositions and to challenge its
claim to represent the one and only truth. A survi-
vor of the Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian
uprising, Lukács explicitly made his ontology of
social being a new theoretical basis for a democratic
revival of real socialism.
164 • André Tosel
These years also witnessed a multiplicity of programmes for an intellectual

and moral reform of Marxism, united in their rejection of Soviet diamat and
histomat and their concern to give a second lease of life to a revolutionary
movement confronted with its own involution and impasses. These full-scale
endeavours accept theoretical pluralism as a fact, but do not renounce a new
unity of theory and practice whose vehicle is to be a communist party that has
certainly been democratised, but nevertheless maintained in its revolutionary
unicity. Over and above their shared anticapitalist passion, it is doubtless this
political and organisational assumption that profoundly unites them. Each
seeks to rediscover a unity of theory and practice; and the theory is always
identied with historical materialism as a system of knowledge of capitalist
development, its contradictions and its possible transformation, just as the
practice is identied with the historical action of the masses guided by Com-
munist parties. Finally, all of them are convinced of the necessity of a dis-
tinctively philosophical or meta-theoretical clarication of Marx’s theory as a
condition of its revival and of its heuristic capacity for analysing changes in
capitalism and socialist society.
These points of agreement soon give way to substantial disagreements,
which demonstrate both the fertility and the ambiguity of Marx’s legacy;
to notable differences in theoretical references, with the crucial problem of
assessing Hegel and interpreting the dialectic; and to signicant divergences
on the politics to be pursued (in particular, as regards the role of the state,
law, ethics, ideologies, and culture). In the guise of a return to Marx, each
constructs its own Marx – a Marx who is, above all, meta-theoretical.
The late Lukács and the ontology of social being

Reverting at the end of his enterprise to the themes of History and Class
Consciousness (1923), the late Lukács criticises the Weberianism of his leftist
youth – a romantic Weberianism, focused on the denunciation of capitalist
rationalisation-alienation. He abandons the subject-object dialectic embod-
ied in the class consciousness of the proletariat, charged with overcoming
the bourgeois separation between subject and object via the teleology of his-
tory. He stops exalting the revolutionary subjectivity of a class that is the
only one capable of putting an end to the abstractional effects of commodi-
ties and exchange-value, of surmounting the catastrophic crisis of capitalist
The Late Lukács and the Budapest School • 165
rationalisation identied with a socio-economic mechanism of reication. He

once and for all criticises what he had himself imposed on Western Marxism,
with a work that was as dazzling as it was over-simplistic: the theme of the
consciousness of an exceptional class that had become totalising knowledge
of social existence beyond the limited perspectives of the bourgeois sciences,
and which was adequately represented by its party. Haunted by the failure
of the socialist bureaucracy to realise the radical-democratic content of this
imputed class consciousness, and conscious of the fact that this speculative
rehabilitation of party organisation had proved capable of unwisely sanction-
ing the twists and turns of Stalinist policy, Lukács proposed an ontological
reconstruction of theory with the ultimate aim of constituting a materialist
and dialectical ethics furnishing norms for the democratic action of the com-
munist state.
Lukács starts out from the priority of being and its independence from
thought. Philosophically, Marx’s œuvre pertains to an ontological approach
that enables it to form an alternative to the specular couple of the Heideggerian
ontology of Dasein, which negates any scientic objectivity (accused of inau-
thenticity), and of neo-positivism, which only acknowledges the scienticity
of those sciences that analyse the physical or biological levels of being. Social
being constitutes a level of objectivity – the level conceptualised by Marx. The
essential fact in social being is labour, which both presupposes and, in recur-
rent fashion, claries the other levels of objectivity, which are subject either to
causality or to a causality woven out of an immanent quasi-teleology. Labour
is a causal activity establishing teleological sequences producing intentional
objects – that is to say, objectications which in the capitalist mode of produc-
tion can generate specic forms of estrangement under the pressure of the
search for relative surplus-value, of the real submission of labour to capital.
Neo-capitalist manipulation succeeds the open violence of the formal submis-
sion of labour to capital. But, for its part, socialist society is based on specic
objectications that do not realise the freedom of a praxis combining objecti-
cation of the capacities of labour and a connection with the forms of social
being in its various levels. Ontology dissolves the deleterious economism of
Stalinist historical materialism by returning to Marx and making critical use
of Hegelian categories or ‘reexive determinations’, which constitute human
praxis as a self-realisation of human capacities in the unity of the industrious
appropriation of nature and of objectication in social relations.
Lukács in fact distinguishes between objectication, alienation, and

estrangement. Objectication is the teleologically adequate transformation
through which a natural object is worked on so as to endow it with social
utility; it is posited by the ‘ideal’ moment that determines the goals of labour.
As such, it is the framework for any scientic knowledge, which presupposes
a minimum of exploration of means, an identication of independent causal
chains, and a knowledge of certain natural relations and laws. If science as ade-
quate reection becomes autonomous of this objectication, in that it acquires
a capacity for de-anthropomorphisation, it cannot be severed from industri-
ous objectication. But there is no objectication without alienation, without
this objectication rebounding on individuals, without a necessary separation
between things and the personality of individuals. Alienation combines with
objectication in that it designates the appearance of new needs and new goals
by virtue of the retroactive effect of objectifying praxis itself on individuals.
Alienation is therefore positive, but it can be transformed into estrangement
with relations of exploitation and domination. Individuals are in fact posited
as instruments of execution of a teleological social situation, such as capital-
ist valorisation. In this way, systems of nalisation become autonomous; and
their effect is to inuence individuals to perform the directly teleological roles
required for the realisation of a dominant, indirect teleological phenomenon –
valorisation – which contradicts the possibilities for creating the rich social
individuality that such valorisation simultaneously facilitates and frustrates.
The human race arrives at the threshold of an ontological alternative,
beyond classes and nations: either it remains a species in itself – mute, sub-
ject to manipulation by the estrangement that separates individuals from any
subjective appropriation of accumulated capacities, or it becomes species
for itself – allowing human beings to realise themselves as beings capable of
responding to the challenge of their modern ontological situation and to pro-
duce the teleological projects that derive from their personality. Accordingly,
ontology is not an abstract metaphysical translation of Marx, but the most
powerful expression of his potential – one equal to our age, which obliges us
to ask ourselves the ontological question: to be or not to be. To be for the gen-
eral manipulation that negates the possibilities of the species for itself, or to be
for a ‘capacity to be’ by realising the determinate alternative, which is to treat
the humanity in each and every one of us as an end. The horizon of ontology
is an ethics in which what should be introduces no rupture in that which is,
but is determined as a what-could-be liberated in being itself: ‘You can, there-

fore you must.’ The struggle against radical ontological manipulation thus
combines a critique of neo-capitalism extended to the sphere of the reproduc-
tion of subjectivity and a ght against the degenerated forms of socialism.
And it still has condence in the capacity of the party-state to reform itself.
The Budapest school: between an ethical-anthropological exit

from Marxism and the pursuit of a critique of globalised capital
With this we must compare the trajectory of the members of what was once
called the Budapest school, and which belongs by its culture to the German
zone. Pupils, disciples, and colleagues of the old Lukács in Hungary, they fol-
lowed the project of the ontology of social being with interest. Critics of the
Communist régime, Ferenc Fehér (b. 1933), Agnes Heller (b. 1929), György
Màrkus (b. 1934), and István Mészáros (b. 1930) became dissidents to one
degree or another and were excluded from the University of Budapest. The rst
to follow this path was Mészáros, who participated in the activities of the Petö
Circle in 1956 and who became a professor in England (at Sussex University).
Heller and Markus followed suit after the repression of the Prague Spring in
1968 and in the 1970s moved to Australia, where they taught and worked.
These philosophers have taken different theoretical paths. They have
been united above all by a common desire to participate in what was to be a
self-criticism of Marxist orthodoxy, and which proved a fruitless attempt at
reform. Their activity unfolded in two phases: a reform of Marxism by way
of a social anthropology integrating numerous aspects of political liberal-
ism; and a deeper disaffection which led them, with the notable exception of
Mészáros, to situate themselves outside Marxism.
The rst phase involved exploiting the standpoint of the ontology of social
being against Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism and rethinking Marx’s
contribution, without inscribing it in a socio-cosmic conception of the uni-
verse charged with defending and illustrating a sociopolitical order domi-
nated by a party-state that was unshakeable in its claim to perform a leading
role, and yet increasingly incapable of analysing the social and economic
reality which it determined. The road initially taken consisted in an anthro-
pological inection of the Lukácsian perspective, centred on the notion of
radical needs of individuals as expressed in everyday life. With The Theory
of Need in Marx (1973), translated into numerous languages, Heller began a

series of works receptive to contemporary research, which took their distance
from Lukácsian ontology, deemed to be still too dominated by a paradigm
of production incapable of integrating the diversity of human poeisis-praxis.
The importance of everyday life as the life-world where human enterprises
are tested was maintained. These works, following one another with great
rapidity, were Soziologie des Alltagsleben (1974), then Instinkt, Agression, Cha-
rakter. Einleitung zu einer marxistischen Sozialanthropologie (1977) and Theorie
der Gefühle (1978), and A Theory of History (1981). For his part, Markus carried
out the most scathing critique of the production paradigm with Language and
Production (1981). He examined the emergence of the linguistic turn in phi-
losophy already signalled by Jürgen Habermas’s research, in its confrontation
with Hannah Arendt, and hermeneutics. He showed how the linguistic para-
digm paid for its undoubted relevance by idealising the virtues of discussion
and consensus and neglecting the antagonistic objectivity of social relations.
Meanwhile, the production paradigm peculiar to Marx left the construction of
communist forms exposed, because it radicalised production for production’s
sake by separating it from all forms of domination (relations of class exploita-
tion, state domination, subjection to ideological fetishisms). In any event, for
Heller and Markus alike, Marx remained relevant in so far as he undertook to
combine a theory of alienation radicalising the theme of the human right to
dignity with a social phenomenology.
At the same time, the Budapest theoreticians sought to analyse the ‘social-
ist’ societies and criticised orthodox historical materialism for its inability
to account for the reality that it intended to govern in the name of science.
With Ferenc Fehér, Heller and Markus published Dictatorship over Needs in
1982. This work may be regarded as the culmination of the critique of the
irremediably blocked ‘socialist’ societies. It radicalised earlier works by the
economist Andras Hegedus. Contrary to what Lukács had thought, ‘real
socialism’ could not be reformed. The suppression of the market coincided
with the suppression of civil society in favour of the state, and a single plan
for production and distribution, regarded by Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy as
the economic basis of ‘socialism’, was intrinsically incompatible with plural-
ism, democracy, and liberties. The replacement of private property by state
property could only result in the dictatorship over needs that represented the
anthropological originality of the ‘socialist’ societies. Producers are subjected
by the mechanisms of this dictatorship to a new class: the bureaucracy of the

party-state. This critique thus adopted elements of the liberal critique in its
own right, and it is only natural that it should conclude with a defence of the
market and the spontaneity of civil society. But it would be unfair to forget
that, for Heller, the imperative of a radical democratisation of civil society
represents the other logic operative in modernity, and that the categorical-
utopian imperative of satisfying the needs of the destitute of all countries, as
a matter of priority, was on the agenda.
This synthesis combines Marx’s conception of the human essence, a Marx-
ist version of the thesis of totalitarianism, and a Weberian theory of rational-
ity. The self-realisation of human essence remains the basis, but it requires
a resolutely pluralistic interpretation of life forms against any reduction to
the all-encompassing unity of the party-state. Dictatorship over needs is an
unprecedented, total system of social domination, wherein a new corporative
apparatus appropriates the social surplus-product. This apparatus is the sole
material foundation and decisive economic-political component of a mech-
anism that carries out the expropriation of social agents, whose individual
right to chose their work and to consume it recognises, while crushing them
by means of a centralised administrative system. The subject of this mecha-
nism is the apparatus, which goes beyond the mere logic of a new dominant
class. The goal is neither production for production’s sake, nor consumption,
but a functional equivalent of ownership: the corporative ownership exer-
cised by the apparatus in a command economy. The pretension to transcend
the market results in liquidating civil society, substituting non-quantiable
markets. The result is the coexistence of two complementary economies: the
planned set of public enterprises and activities and a set of private activities
where services are exchanged according to informal relations of assistance
within the apparatus itself. Ideological totalitarianism is the condition for the
operation of this system, generating a permanent elimination of civil soci-
ety, incorporated into the party-state, and a constant restriction of needs. It
excludes visible struggle between opposed interests and, while seeking the
re-politicisation of society, excludes it.
The second phase of the activity of the Budapest school thinkers initiates a
chapter of post-Marxism. Heller has produced a multi-faceted, original œuvre,
close to Habermas, focused on the urgency of developing a theory of moder-
nity. Gone are the days when it was necessary to test the value of the Marxist
tradition via a comparison with the experience of historical Communism, to

stress the centrality of the individual, and to reformulate the concept of praxis
dened either as social activity, directed towards a goal where human beings
realise the potentialities of their being, which is to be an end in itself, or as a
complex unity of the three dimensions represented by the creation of a spe-
cically human world, the constitution of freedom through struggle, and a
connection with humanised nature. Henceforth the Lukácsian theory of objec-
tication must be transformed into a systematic theory of modes of objecti-
cation. From The Power of Shame: Essays on Rationality (1983) up to A Theory of
Modernity (1999), Heller has developed a theory of rationality based on a dis-
tinction between three spheres of objectication: objectication in itself as an
a priori of human experience (shared language, objects produced for human
use, customs); objectication for itself – an anthropological translation of the
Hegelian absolute spirit (religion, art, science, philosophy); and objectication
in and for itself (the system of political and economic institutions). This theory
becomes a kind of grammar of modernity in that a logic of social organisa-
tion based on the market and the social division of labour constantly limits a
logic of justice and freedom inherited from socialism, and the three spheres
of objectication are shot through with this conict. The untenable promises
of a socialism built on the idea of an unlimited self-realisation, which under-
estimates the constraints of the logic of organisation, must be abandoned. But
the ght for a modernity that maintains the perspective of a just polity in
globalisation cannot be eliminated. In particular, it is important to develop a
form of ethical thinking beyond political cynicism, in order to nourish an eth-
ico-politics in tune with the materialisation of social rules and human capaci-
ties in their economic context. Twentieth-century ‘socialism’ was a form of
modernity that sought to take account of one logic while underestimating the
other (A Philosophy of Morals, published in 1990, and An Ethics of Personality, in
1996). This ethics discloses that there is a world beyond justice in the freedom
of each and every one person to full themselves.
It is precisely this disengagement from the specically Marxian instance of
the critique of political economy, in favour of a normative theory of the axi-
ological logics of modernity, that is rejected by the other major thinker of the
Budapest school, whom we have hitherto left to one side. The gure in ques-
tion is István Mészáros, who, having been the rst to embark on dissidence,
is also the only one to have maintained a direct link with Lukács and Marx,
avoiding the temptation of social-liberal reformism and a radically reformist

ethics. Mészáros won renown in 1970 with Marx’s Theory of Alienation, a study
that was humanist in inspiration. Following various essays, in 1990 he pub-
lished a comprehensive survey, Beyond Capital, which fused several lines of
research. It was not so much a question of exploring a post-Marxist path as of
dening a Marxism for the third era in the West. The rst Marxism was that
of the original Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, which explored the
tragic tension between the universal perspectives of socialism and the immedi-
ate limit of historical actuality (the failure of the revolution in the West and of
socialism in one country). The second Marxism was Marxism-Leninism, with
its dissident currents (Bloch, Gramsci, the second Lukács). It was based on the
form of the separate party-state that blocked the materially based self-activity
of the workers. It criticised capitalism without going beyond the empire of
capital. It could only effect a critique of its aporias by appealing to reserves
of practical energy and to the Prinzip Hoffnung. If, with Gramsci, it reected
on the transition from capital to a form of intensive totality, it was incapable
of constructing any alternative. The Marxism of the third epoch involves tak-
ing the measure of the process through which capitalism, as the most recent
form of the production of capital (production based on exchange-value and
separation from the means of production), becomes global integration and
takes capital as a mode of control regulating the totality of social relations to
its limit.
Mészáros pursues his line of reasoning within Marxist theory and his-
toricises it by showing that Soviet socialism was based on a novel form of
personication of capital. By personication is to be understood a form of
imposition of objective imperatives on the real subject of production as com-
mands. Capital is a system without a subject that includes a personication
of subjects, who are called upon to translate the imperatives in a practical
direction on pain of exclusion. It is personied in labour-power destined to
enter into a contractual relationship of politically regulated economic depen-
dence. The USSR had realised a new form of personication of capital, while
asserting as its political objective the negation of capitalism. It had invented
a new type of control whose aim was an accelerated rate of extraction of sur-
plus-labour by the party, which justied itself on the grounds of catching
up with the capitalist countries. The limited objective of negating capitalism
involved a refusal to go beyond capital. The social-democratic experience was
based on state control of the economy, forgetting that the social state itself
functions as a political structure ensuring the transformation of capital into
a coherent system. It too did not succeed in breaking capital, a self-referen-
tial system in which the presupposition is also the goal. Ongoing globalisa-
tion poses the question of the saturation of mechanism of self-reproduction,
which has hitherto been capable of transcending the internal obstacles to its
own expansion. Against Heller and Markus, who consider the critical capac-
ity of Marxism exhausted, Mészáros reopens the question of the transition
to a different mode of control of the metabolism, based on the invention of
a process of decision-making derived from the base, leading capital to come
up against its absolute limits. Globalisation poses the issue using processes
of malfunctioning at the level of basic functions (production/consumption,
circulation/distribution), right up to the jamming of the mechanisms of the
displacement of contradictions. Mészáros analyses the structural crisis signi-
ed by the saturation of capital in connection with the emergence of three
problems: (a) a decreasing rate of utilisation in the lifetime of goods and ser-
vices; (b) accelerating speeds of circulation of capital and under-utilisation
of structures and equipment-machinery, with an articial reduction in their
cycle of depreciation; and (c) a growing gap between the mass consumption
required by capital and the decreasing need for living labour. The quest for
global regulation, even global governance, indicates the novelty of the crisis.
Theories of modernity are invited to make way for a critique of globalisation
as a contradictory scenario, which is not predetermined. In surprising fash-
ion, Lukácsian ontology has thus supplied itself with a critical organon in the
powerful work of this stubborn pupil.
In any event, the level of the world economy is indeed the pertinent one
today. Any theory is faced with the challenge of analysing it in its relationship
with the real submission of labour taken as a guiding thread, and to develop
the skein of this thread. The crisis of the neoliberal order has always been the
negative precondition for a revival of Marxism. If the twentieth century was
the short century that ran from capitalism to capitalism; if it opened with a
catastrophic crisis that revealed the fragility and potential inhumanity of the
liberal-national order; if it had at its centre the failure of the rst attempt at
communism, it did not only close with the crisis of Marxisms. It also ended
with the onset of a new crisis bound up with the barbarism of the liberal new
order. This is where the neo- or post-Marxisms can nd a new historical jus-
tication, the object of their analyses, and the occasion for their radical self-
criticism, which is also the critique of the neoliberal order by itself. This is
the terrain for a reconstruction of their positive condition: the emergence of
new social movements and new practices, beyond the monstrous impasses of
organisation as a state-party. This is where the possibility of weaving a new
link between theory and practice, whose forms neither can nor should be pre-
judged, will be played out.
Chapter Nine
The Regulation School: A One-Way Ticket from
Marx to Social Liberalism?
Michel Husson
Michel Aglietta’s book, A Theory of Capitalist Regu-

lation, dates from 1976 and may be regarded as the
founding act of regulation theory. Its republication
in 1997 and the accompanying afterword doubtless
mark the end point of a trajectory that has led this
school some considerable way from the Marxism
from which it partially derived.
Genesis of a school
On publication, Aglietta’s work provoked a debate
to which it is appropriate to return today. Did it
represent a reformulation/revision of Marxism or a
completely new theoretical approach? At the time,
the regulationists (with the notable exception of
Boyer) situated themselves within the eld of Marx-
ism. Aglietta came from the PCF, Lipietz from Mao-
ism, Billaudot directed the economic committee of
the PSU, in which Bertrand was likewise active. For
the most part, the founding members were former
students of the École polytechnique and worked as
economists in the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (to
adopt Althusser’s category), rather than in the acad-
emy. They were therefore marked, on the one hand,
by a Colbertian or Saint-Simonian tradition and, on
176 • Michel Husson
the other, by a certain – likewise very French – version of Marxism. Lipietz was
not wrong when he cast them as the ‘rebel sons of Massé and Althusser’,1 for
their project can be analysed as a dialectical rupture with this dual liation.
The crisis afforded them their opportunity. The project in fact emerged in
a very precise conjuncture. On the political level, this was the period of the
debate on the Common Programme, which was to conclude with the rup-
ture of the Union of the Left in 1977. On the economic level, the generalised
recession of 1974–5 signalled the onset of ‘crisis’. In some respects, this vin-
dicated the PCF’s theoreticians, who for two decades had forecast that ‘State
Monopoly Capitalism’ would ultimately become bogged down. But above all
it revealed the dogmatism of a pessimistic theorisation of postwar capitalism.
The regulationists’ intuition was that the key to the crisis lay in understanding
the trente glorieuses which had just ended, without the fact having been fully
registered. Two founding texts resulted: Aglietta’s book in 1976 and then the
1977 report by Boyer, Lipietz et al. on ination (Approches de l’ination).
Rereading them today conrms the impression at the time that they offered
a reformulation of Marxism whose principal novelty resided in casting off its
Stalinist rags. In the main, Aglietta’s book is a rather classical account of the
laws of capitalist accumulation as applied to the United States. The novelty,
which, to my mind, was relative, consisted in referring to intensive accumula-
tion, dened as based on the production of relative surplus-value. Various of
Marx’s concepts were confronted with national accounting macro-economic
data and Aglietta proposed some pseudo-concepts, forgotten today, such as
‘real social wage cost’, which is nothing other than the share of wages in value
added. Empirical analysis led him to venture that the best statistical indicator
‘for representing the evolution of the rate of surplus-value is the evolution of
real wage costs’. This was scarcely an amazing discovery.
However, the regulationists had a sense that they were making radical inno-
vations at a methodological level, simply by virtue of the fact that they tested
their concepts against empirical reality. Here again, the break with ‘Marxist’
structuralism, combined with their integration into the economic bureaucracy,
inclined them to pursue an empirical quantication of their analyses. But they
marvelled at this epistemological break with the ardour of neophytes:
1
Lipietz 1994.
The Regulation School • 177
this return to empirical assessment, even when difcult and invariably

unsatisfying given the precise origin of the statistics used, introduces the
possibility of refuting the initial theoretical framework, however satisfying
it might be from a strictly logical standpoint.2
This was the least they could do! The naïve discovery of the autonomy of
concrete reality with respect to theoretical logic cannot seriously claim to
supersede the Marxist method and remains far inferior, for example, to Karel
Kosik’s extremely rich and subtle contribution, Dialectics of the Concrete (1970).
It can certainly be regarded as progress by comparison with dogmatism, but
it is also a banality for any living Marxism. In this respect, it was Phéline who
was to claim the title of precursor for the 1975 article in which he analysed the
evolution of surplus-value (without naming it!) in a Finance Ministry journal.
But the continuing hesitation about using statistics of dubious ‘origin’ (bour-
geois?) will provoke a smile in readers of Marx and Lenin – or, nearer in time
to us, Baran, Sweezy, or Mandel – who know very well that these Marxist crit-
ics of Capital spent their lives amassing statistics. That the need to rub shoul-
ders with the statistics could seem such a daring idea speaks volumes on the
regression represented by the particular resonance of Stalinism in France.
The rupture with Althusser was described at length in 1979 by Lipietz, who
principally criticised him for
denying that on the material basis of social relations something could

constitute itself which can say ‘it’s us’ and change the system of relations.
For us, this something was the revolutionary movement of the masses.3
This quotation is entertaining, rst of all because of the development of the

‘prospective concepts’ used by a Lipietz who is today promoter of mutual
insurance companies as the depository of wage-earners’ savings. But, above
all, it is extraordinary to present the intervention of the revolutionary move-
ment of the masses as ‘something’ that has to be rediscovered in order to
revive Marxism, when it is obviously one of its constitutive elements! This
ability to break down open doors attests to the Stalino-Maoist lead weight
that the inventors of regulation theory had to lift in order to nd themselves
in the open air once again. This trajectory is not irrelevant, for it kept them
2
See Bertrand et al. 1980.
3
See Lipietz 1979.
estranged from the living tradition of Marxism, which they practised only
by way of Althusser, Mao, or Boccara. There is therefore nothing surprising
about the fact that they were wonderfully ignorant of fertile currents in Marx-
ism (particularly Anglophone ones), like the one embodied by Ernest Mandel,
whose fundamental work Late Capitalism appeared in France in 1976. But all
this does not mean that at the time the regulationists were not fairly consistent
critics of capitalism.
When regulationism was not (yet) a harmonicism

We owe Lipietz the following eloquent denition of the regulationist
approach:
one is a regulationist as soon as one asks why there are relatively stable
structures when, given that they are contradictory, logically they should
disintegrate from the outset . . . whereas a structuralist nds it abnormal that
they should enter into crisis.4
But if Marxism is not reduced to structuralism, study of the modalities of the

reproduction of capital naturally forms an integral part of its critique, which
has no need for a kind of theorem of constant collapse.
However that might be, Aglietta’s initial reections on neo-Fordism indi-
cate that at the time he situated himself squarely within the eld of Marxism
and that, on one key point, he was possibly not wholly regulationist in the
sense that we understand it today. In fact, Aglietta envisaged the possibility
of a resolution of the crisis based on a ‘neo-Fordism’ that he dened thus:
A new regime of accumulation, Neo-Fordism, would arise from the crisis,

articulating the progress of capitalist accumulation to the transformation of
the totality of conditions of existence of the wage-earning class – whereas
Fordism was geared simply to the private consumption norm, the social
costs of mass consumption continuing to be met on the margins of the
capitalist mode of production.5
4
Lipietz 1994.
5
Aglietta 1979, p. 168.
In other words, the crisis might be resolved by extending to collective con-

sumption (health, education, transport, etc.) what Fordism had realised in
the case of private consumption (housing and household appliances, private
cars). This theme is also to found in Attali, who wrote for example:
Post-industrial society will probably be hyper-industrial. But production in it

is geared to new sectors, substitutes for the collective services that generate
demand, for schools, for hospitals. It is based on a new technological and
social network, generating demand for these market items.6
However, Aglietta introduced a decisive qualication by immediately stress-

ing that ‘[t]he fact that this transformation of the foundations of the regime
of intensive accumulation is the sole durable solution to the crisis does not in
itself mean that it is possible under capitalism’.7 This qualication indicates
that the regulationist approach was at the time free of harmonicist tempta-
tions and could thus be absorbed into the Marxist corpus without difculty.
The wage relation: a key concept

In another founding text, Boyer introduced a distinction between ‘major cri-
ses’ and ‘minor crises’,8 without adding much by comparison with the formu-
lation of the theory of long waves,9 which he has always managed to confuse
with a resurgence of Kondratiev. Instead, it was around the notion of wage
relation that the originality of the postwar period was established. Boyer notes
in the rst instance a ‘rise of monopolistic structures’ – a common place of the
heterodox thinkers of the period. But in order to establish a ‘monopolistic’
regulation, which replaces ‘competitive’ regulation, an additional ingredient
is required, namely, the establishment of an adequate ‘wage relation’.
This new wage relation was institutionalised after 1945 with the establish-
ment of a minimum wage, collective agreements, and the extension of the
indirect wage. As a result, wages growth was no longer governed by the pres-
sure of unemployment. It depended
6
Attali 1978.
7
Aglietta 1979, p. 168.
8
See Boyer 1979.
9
See Mandel.
on the one hand, upon a quasi-automatic adjustment to the development

of the cost of living and, on the other, upon implicitly or explicitly taking
account of the productivity increases expected or registered at the level of
rms, sectors, or even the economy as a whole.10
Capitalist contradictions had not disappeared, but they had been displaced:
‘the reduction in the tensions bound up with non-realisation eventually comes
up against the stumbling block of the problems of capital valorisation’.11 To all
this must be added the extension and transformation of the role of the state.
The real novelty is basically to be found in this analysis of the Fordist wage
relation. Boyer makes it a key indicator of the specicities of monopolistic reg-
ulation: cyclical adjustment no longer operates through prices;12 institutions
help to align the average increase in wages with industrial productivity.13
For his part, Aglietta introduced the key notion of ‘consumption norm’ and
clearly showed how Fordism precisely marked the entry of goods produced
with signicant productivity gains into wage-earners’ consumption.14 Finally,
Bertrand conrmed this hypothesis by means of a ‘sectional’ analysis of the
French economy that adopted Capital’s reproduction schemas.15
Once again, from a theoretical standpoint, what was involved was a rede-
ployment of debates and schemata already available elsewhere, although we
do not know whether the regulationists, who appeared to be ignorant of Marx-
ism after Marx, were conscious of these liations. To take one example, to my
knowledge a link was never established with the prolonged debate involv-
ing Marxist economists in the years before and after the First World War: its
protagonists were called Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg,
Bauer, and Tugan-Baranovsky. The latter, for example, proposed reproduc-
tion schemata in which a decline in production is compensated for by accu-
mulation, and for this reason rejected the thesis of ultimate capitalist collapse.
Bauer arrived at a similar result and concluded that capital accumulation was
valid within certain limits governed by productivity and population. His
polemic with Luxemburg revolved around an issue which is precisely the
10
Boyer 1979.
11
Boyer 1979.
12
See Boyer 1978.
13
See Boyer and Mistral 1978.
14
See Aglietta 1979.
15
See Bertrand 1979.
question of regulation: why does capitalism not collapse? These references are
never cited and this often imparts a certain naïveté to the regulationists, as if
tackling such themes betokened a major impertinence to Marxism, which is
assimilated to the ofcial manuals published in Moscow, Peking or Paris.
A different source of inspiration, by contrast, is very clearly afrmed in
the case of Boyer: the Cambridge school. The basic intuitions of the model
developed in the forecasting department of the Finance Ministry16 – in par-
ticular, the prot-growth relationship – are directly drawn from Kalecki’s or
Joan Robinson’s conceptualisations. In The Accumulation of Capital, Robinson
proposed, for example, a denition of the ‘golden age’ which very closely
resembles Fordist regulation.17 This acknowledged liation is perfectly legiti-
mate and is only mentioned here to highlight the extent to which regulation
theory is a fruitful synthesis of Marxism and Cambridge post-Keynesianism.
Rather than representing some supersession of Marxism, regulation theory
thus seems to be the updating or reappropriation of it required to take account
of the historical specicities of postwar capitalism and to escape dogmatism.
In my view, the work that in this respect represents the veritable synthesis of
the regulationist contribution is Dockès and Rosier’s book, published in 1983,
which also deserves to be reprinted. The analysis of the wage relation and the
consumption norm can readily be assimilated by a living Marxism, on condi-
tion that we abandon the implicit hypothesis of a constant real wage – some-
thing that does not problematise the general analytical framework.18 Finally,
there is no reason why a study of ‘institutional forms’ should be incompatible
with highlighting the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. But
there is something more in the regulationist approach that constitutes its real
specicity, but also its principal limit: harmonicism.
The harmonicist turn

From the correct thesis that capitalism can function, the regulationists imper-
ceptibly proceed to a different position, which is not a necessary deduction
from it, but a possible extension of their analysis: that, in the end, capitalism
16
See Boullé et al. 1974.
17
Robinson 1956.
18
See Dockès and Bernard 1983; and see Husson 1999.
can always function in a relatively harmonious fashion. As Lipietz clearly

puts the point: ‘if we understand how it has worked, we will also understand
how to make a different model work’.19
This slide was all the more tempting in that the arrival of the Left in power in
1981 afforded the regulationists an opportunity to quit the position of enlight-
ened critics and become advisers to the prince. Their position in the appa-
ratus of the economic bureaucracy and their formation as economic experts
naturally prompted them to wish to ‘act’ – in other words, to inuence the
establishment of a new mode of regulation making it possible to resolve the
crisis from above.
At a theoretical level, the turn was effected around the notion of consump-
tion norm. It can be precisely dated from the contribution by Aglietta and
Boyer to a conference organised in 1982. On the basis of a typically regulationist
analysis, their text issued in an initial recommendation: it was necessary to
maintain a certain increase in consumption, so far as is compatible with the

recovery of industrial investment and the balance of external payments
and to seek to identify the new demand ‘whose emergence and development
are being curbed today by the instability and uncertainty brought about by
the crisis’.20 This analysis approximated to a more ‘technologistic’ version
of the regulation school, which cast the electronics sector as the natural site
for the emergence of solution to the crisis, as a result of a line of reasoning that
logically followed from the analysis of Fordism:
Our perception of a resolution of the crisis corresponds to our explanation

of it. The new sites of accumulation must therefore generally respect the set
of constraints set out in our representation – i.e. simultaneously allow for
productivity increases and for a new consumption norm – and transform
a proportion of unproductive labour into productive labour.21
The regulationist work programme was then refocused on the invention of

a post-Fordism. This involved imagining a new, positive social compromise,
based on ‘new productivity’ and a new ‘social model’. Ten years after the rst
report for CEPREMAP, in 1987 Boyer co-ordinated a massive study entitled
19
Lipietz 1994.
20
Aglietta and Boyer 1982.
21
Lorenzi, Pastré and Toledano 1980.
Aspects de la crise, whose concluding volume was entitled Economies in the

Process of Fording the River. In it, we discover a logic, typical of French-style
planning (Massé!), that consists in presenting three scenarii, which might be
dubbed the good, the bad, and the lazy. The last is a rather lacklustre continu-
ation of current trends; the second corresponds to a switch to a socially regres-
sive model; and the rst represents the positive option. These scenarios outline
‘three main perspectives, dened by developments that are fairly coherent
and plausible from a socio-political standpoint’.22 This coherence is dened
around the differential combination of ve basic elements: technical system,
forms of competition, wage relation, public intervention, international régime.
The type of picture formed by this combinatory, constantly used thereafter
by Boyer, irresistibly evokes the famous matrices of the Boston Consulting
Group, and, basically, it is indeed a question of social management tools. The
regulationists address themselves to decision-makers, indicating the options
available and assessing their respective advantages: regulation theory has
become a regulatory technique.
The option of doing nothing is always available; and this is the scenario
dubbed ‘going with the stream’ to serve as a foil. Obviously, it is also pos-
sible to opt to implement a ‘voluntarist programme of returning to the mar-
ket’, neoliberal in inspiration. But naturally the positive scenario is the third
option. It is equally voluntarist, but it aims to establish ‘collective forms of
adaptation’ to the changes and assumes ‘negotiation of a new conguration
of the wage relation’, based on an ‘original principle for distributing produc-
tivity gains between wage increases, a reduction in working hours, and job
creation at the level of society as a whole’.23 The regulationist touch is evident
here: there was once a good Fordist wage relation, but it has served its time
and we must all of us therefore hit upon an alternative.
This project has the effect of pointing up several gaps in the theory, once
faced with what is for it the unprecedented question of the conditions of emer-
gence of a new mode of regulation. Will the best one necessarily win out? And
what happens in the interim? The latter question is especially tricky for the
regulationists. On the one hand, their main problematic consists in studying
how capitalism works, given that it does not collapse. On the other hand,
22
Boyer et al. 1987.
23
Boyer et al. 1987.
however, they show that there is a choice between several ways in which
capitalism might function. In these circumstances, one of the major problems
with the regulationists is that, twenty years after the crisis, they are forever
elaborating different possible scenarii, as opposed to studying the really exist-
ing neoliberal model.
This shift was accompanied by a theoretical reorganisation. Where the
founding texts integrated institutional forms into the framework dened by
capitalist invariants, the plasticity of modes of regulation now comes to be
regarded as virtually boundless. It was Coriat who formulated this analytical
slide with the greatest lucidity:
In regulation theory, these structural forms have gradually acquired the

status of genuinely intermediate categories in the following sense: as between
pure theory and invariants on the one hand, and observed and modelled
facts on the other, they provide the indispensable tools we were searching
for in order to be able to conceive changes and their specicities, over and
above constants.24
The door was now open to an innite combinatory.

Consequently, the central theoretical question shifts and becomes that of
the genesis of modes of regulation. This led to a temporary alliance with con-
ventions theory, which was no doubt a serious tactical error. The rather dis-
tressing article by Boyer and Orléan illustrates the dead end involved in this
manner of subscribing to a fundamentally individualist methodology and
neglecting any social dynamic.25 As a result, regulation theory is torn between
two symmetrical positions: sometimes saying that ‘the bad capitalism is
prevailing over the good one’; and sometimes showing that there only exist
concrete capitalisms, which are constructed from a combinatory that can be
drawn on at will. As between analysis and norms, the message is denitively
scrambled, or reduced to a few worthy commonplaces: competitiveness does
not depend exclusively on labour costs; the market cannot be wholly efcient
in the absence of institutions; unbridled capitalism is not necessarily the most
legitimate form of capitalism; and the Japanese model has been affected, but
is nevertheless resistant.
24
Coriat 1994.
25
See Boyer and Orléan 1991.
This trajectory has just led the regulationists to a new change of direction.
The post-Fordist horizon (reduction in working hours in return for wage-
earner involvement) is denitively abandoned for that of patrimonial capital-
ism (increased work and a wage freeze in return for stock options). This is
a point that must be rmly underscored and which the regulationists care-
fully avoid assessing in their collection:26 capitalist reality has inicted a sting-
ing refutation of this prospectus, since what has actually been installed is a
neoliberal model. And what they are suggesting today is utterly different
what they were proposing ten years ago, without the implications of this turn
having been truly drawn.
The new mode of regulation of capitalism

If Fordism is at an end and capitalism has not collapsed, it is because it has
been able to invent something new and a new mode of regulation has been
instituted. Basically, the regulationists have forgotten to be regulationist,
because they have spent twenty years explaining that we are ‘at a crossroads’,
rather than studying the mode of regulation being established before our very
eyes. Or, taking the drift towards harmonicism to its ultimate conclusion, we
should reserve the label for good, stable, coherent and legitimate forms of
regulation. But what is going on during periods of unstable coherence and, in
particular, during this recessive phase of the postwar long wave?
In contrast, it seems to me that it is perfectly possible to set out, from a
Marxist-regulationist standpoint if one wishes, the co-ordinates of a model
for the functioning of capitalism based on a conjoint increase in the rate of
exploitation, the rate of unemployment, and the share of national income
going to rentiers. Rather than invoking neo-Fordism, we should be speaking
of neo-Malthusianism. Alongside his famous demographic law, Malthus was
also the inventor of an interesting theory demonstrating the need for a class
of unproductive consumers ‘as a means of increasing the exchangeable value
of the total sum of products’. Certainly, Malthus would have liked to think
that ‘the happiness of the great mass of society’ was possible. But an excessive
increase in wages ‘is bound to increase production costs; it is also bound to
reduce prots and diminish or destroy the motives underlying accumulation’.
26
See Boyer and Saillard 1995.
On the other hand, Malthus was aware that consumption by the productive
classes would tend to be inferior to the supply of material products; it was
therefore fairly logical for him to conclude that a ‘body of consumers who are
not directly involved in production’ was required. These are old regulationist
issues and it seems to me that this is precisely how contemporary capitalism
operates.27
In these circumstances, where a high unemployment rate entails constant
pressure on wages and where alternative outlets to wage-earner demand
exist, it is rational to freeze wages. All the arguments about a new productiv-
ity underpinning a new social consensus fade before an observation28 that can
be summarised thus: the employers can have their cake (wage-earner involve-
ment) and eat it (wage freeze). This constitutes the revenge of capitalist invari-
ants and, in pride of place, of competition between private capitalists.
The theory of patrimonial capitalism, or the involution

But this involves a highly regressive regulation; and the regulationists believe
that capitalism can do better. Via circuitous routes, they are in the process
of reconstructing a unied position around a proposal for wage-earners’
shareholding appropriate to ‘patrimonial capitalism’. To reach this point, it
has been necessary to effect a new switch and to make the relations between
nance and industry a basic relationship overdetermining the wage relation.
The operation has been conducted by Aglietta, who suggests a new principle
of periodisation of capitalism based exclusively on the way in which accumu-
lation is nanced:
over a very long period, nance guides the development of capitalism. It

determines the conditions of nancing which, in turn, bring about long
phases in which growth is rst encouraged and then discouraged.29
The history of capitalism is thus supposedly punctuated by the succession of

two major modes of nancing. Financial systems ‘with administered struc-
tures’ have the advantage of ‘safeguarding investment projects’, such that
27
See Husson 1996.
28
See Coutrot 1998.
29
Aglietta 1995.
‘capital accumulation is maintained but ination can uctuate’. Liberalised

nance possesses the converse properties: it ‘encourages stable, low ination,
but fetters accumulation’. Aglietta thus summons us to an original reading
of the long history of capitalism and its crises. Twenty years after proposing
an analysis of capitalism based on notions such as the consumption norm of
wage-earners, Aglietta reconsiders this understanding of the necessary artic-
ulation between the different domains of the reproduction of capital, reduc-
ing the whole dynamic of capitalism to a single dimension: nance. A cycle
is thereby denitely closed, bringing the regulationists back to one of their
starting points: in other words, Keynesianism.
In a text written for the Saint-Simon Foundation, Boyer and Jean-Louis
Beffa conclude that ‘the creation of wages funds at the instigation of rms and
unions, and their management in accordance with jointly decided objectives,
even if entrusted to professionals, could mark an advance in terms of new
social rights’.30 Aglietta justies new forms of remuneration through changes
in work:
With current technologies, what is prized is initiative and adaptation . . . you

no longer have a guaranteed job, but you do receive a share of the prots in
the form of an interest, prot-sharing, or stock options for senior managers:
the distribution of responsibilities is accompanied by a distribution of
prots.31
As for Lipietz, he has discovered the new institutional form for the twenty-
rst century in mutual insurance companies:
Even if one remains convinced of the robustness of contributory pension

schemes amid nancial and demographic instability, one can no longer
exclude the contribution of a complementary component by capitalization. . . .
This development corresponds to two social demands: the desire for a certain
exibility and a certain diversication . . . a desire to put the capitalization
of French rms on a nancial basis that is concerned with employment in
France.32
30
Beffa Boyer and Touffut 1999.
31
Aglietta 1998.
32
Lipietz 1999.
Thus, the cycle is complete. The regulationists have opted to become apolo-
gists for wage-earners’ shareholding and, in passing, have abandoned all sci-
entic rigour. The way in which Aglietta praises democracy in America is in
fact a veritable travesty of something based on an unprecedented concentra-
tion of income (and possession of shares). Moreover, in suggesting that this
model can be transferred, the regulationists quite simply forget the advan-
tages derived from the USA’s position as dominant power, thereby conrm-
ing their inability to integrate the concept of the global economy. Elements of
analysis and useful literature surveys can still be found in regulationist texts,
but they contain few developed suggestions for those who want to understand
the world and change it. This is a pity, because this trajectory was doubtless
not the only possible one: regulation theory could have done more enduring
work, rather than breaking with the critical tradition of Marxism in order to
become a sort of think tank for human resources directors.
Chapter Ten
Ecological Marxism or Marxian Political Ecology?
Jean-Marie Harribey
The twentieth century ended against a backdrop

of global general crisis. The capitalist mode of pro-
duction was extended to the ends of the Earth and
gradually subjected all human activities to the reign
of the commodity. However, for the rst time in its
history no doubt, it produced two simultaneous,
major regressions. The rst was social, for, despite
a signicant increase in the amount of wealth being
created, poverty and misery are not on the decrease:
1.3 billion human beings dispose of the equivalent
of less than a dollar a day; as many have no access
to drinking water or the most elementary health
care; 850 million are illiterate; 800 million are under-
nourished; at least 100 million children are exploited
at work; and, during the last four decades, the
inequalities between the richest twenty per cent and
the poorest twenty per cent have progressed from
30 to 1 to 80 to 1. This social disaster affects even
the richest countries, since the United States contains
34.5 million people living beneath the poverty line
and the OECD countries include 34 million people
suffering from hunger, 36 million reduced to unem-
ployment, and many more whose situation is becom-
ing insecure.
190 • Jean-Marie Harribey
The second major regression involved nature and eco-systems, which were
seriously affected or threatened by the exhaustion of certain non-renewable
resources and pollution of every sort. Moreover, the bulk of scientic opinion
concurred in taking fright at the risk of global warming bound up with the
emission of greenhouse gases. The origin of this ecological crisis is unques-
tionably the industrial mode of development pursued without any other
evaluative criterion than the maximum protability of the capital employed,
but whose legitimacy is ensured by the ideology according to which increased
production and consumption are synonymous with an improvement in well-
being from which all the planet’s inhabitants will sooner or later benet.
If it can be established that the simultaneous advent of these two types of
disaster, social and ecological, is not fortuitous – or that they are the result of
the economic development stimulated by capital accumulation on a planetary
scale and, worse still, if they are its inevitable outcome – then the question
of an encounter between the Marxist critique of capitalism and the critique
of productivism dear to ecologists is posed. Now, not only were these two
critiques born separately, but they have largely developed in opposition one
another in so far as the rst was identied throughout their existence with
the experience of the so-called ‘socialist’ countries, whose ecological depreda-
tions – like their social depredations – were equivalent to that of the capital-
ist countries, while the second critique long hesitated to resituate humanity’s
relationship with nature in the framework of social relations.
However, the conjunction of three events has created the conditions for a
rapprochement between the two approaches. First of all, there is the disap-
pearance of the ‘socialist’ (anti-)models that handicapped the use of Marx’s
theory for the purposes of a radical critique of capitalism. The second is the
complete liberalisation of capitalism, under the supervision of globalised
nancial markets, which ended in a reversal in the balance of forces to the
advantage of capital and the detriment of labour. The third event is the con-
vergence of popular mobilisations and social struggles against the ravages of
capitalist globalisation, particularly by clearly identifying what is at stake in
negotiations within the World Trade Organisation. Rejection of the commodi-
cation of the world and of the privatisation of living beings in itself contains
a challenge to the two terms of the crisis – social and ecological – striking the
worst-off populations with especial severity.
Ecological Marxism or Marxian Political Ecology? • 191
The last element – social struggle – is not the least. Of itself, it grounds
the possibility of developing a general theoretical critique of a crisis that is
global. Of itself, it justies theoretical research to overcome a sterile, paralys-
ing opposition between a traditional Marxist critique of social relations sev-
ered from human relations with nature and a simplistic ecological critique of
human relations with nature that makes no reference to the social relations
within which humanity pursues its project of domesticating nature.
Consequently, the material conditions seem to have been created for a
materialist theorisation of the knowledge and transformation of human rela-
tions with nature – and this in two directions: the formulation of a naturalistic
materialism and the reintegration of political ecology into a comprehensive
analysis of capitalism, in a sort of cross-fertilisation of two paradigms. How-
ever, a sizeable obstacle confronts this alliance: a new paradigm only prevails
by replacing another one. The most plausible wager is therefore that the nec-
essary condition for the birth of a Marxian political ecology or an ecological
Marxism is a complete, denitive supersession of the form taken by tradi-
tional Marxism as an intellectual and practical movement bound up with a
given historical period – a movement, roughly speaking, encapsulated in, and
reduced to, the collectivisation of the means of production without any altera-
tion in social relations. Conversely, the thinking of political ecology will not
be able to lay claim to the title of new paradigm if it does not manage to inte-
grate itself into a much larger corpus aiming at social transformation. Today,
although this dual enterprise is far from being completed, we can report an
important number of contributions in an innovative direction. Some of them
indicate that materialism can, under certain conditions, constitute the concep-
tual matrix for due consideration of ecology by society; while others dene
the bases for an ecology rid of the illusion of a clean capitalism.
Materialism as the conceptual matrix of ecology

Marx’s œuvre proposes a conceptual framework which, rstly, locates human
beings’ social activity within a natural material environment and, secondly,
makes a radical distinction between the labour process in general and the
process of capitalist production. However, several problems remain, whose
resolution is indispensable if we are to be able to integrate the ecological prob-
lematic into it.
Society in nature
An initial consensus exists among authors who identify with Marx today and
who are concerned with ecology: natural material conditions exist that are
indispensable to human activity, whatever the mode of production. ‘Nature
is man’s inorganic body’ or ‘[m]an lives from nature’, Marx wrote in his 1844
Manuscripts.1 Consequently, according to Ted Benton,2 Marx and Engels’s
philosophical positions pertain at once to naturalism and materialism. At rst
sight, this vision of nature as ‘man’s inorganic body’ could be interpreted as
purely utilitarian. Alfred Schmidt challenges this interpretation of Marx, for
Marx distances himself from such a conception inherited from the Enlight-
enment and adopts a dialectical position: ‘Nature attains self-consciousness
in men, and amalgamates with itself by virtue of their theoretical-practical
activity’.3 For John Bellamy Foster, ‘this ecological perspective derived from
his materialism’4 and Paul Burkett has demonstrated Marx’s ecological con-
sciousness.5
James O’Connor, founder of the American socialist ecological journal Capi-
talism, Nature, Socialism, pursues the point, indicating that the fundamental
difference between the natural conditions of production and the productive
forces usually considered by Marxism, as well as the superstructural condi-
tions for employing them, is based on the fact that the former are not pro-
duced.6 The fact that these objective natural conditions are not produced, and
that their existence is posited ex ante, grounds a materialist approach to ecol-
ogy and establishes a rst point of convergence with the principles of thermo-
dynamics, whose implications for the economy Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
was one of the rst to draw: ‘the entropy of a closed system increases continu-
ally (and irrevocably) towards a maximum. In other words, usable energy
is continually transformed into unusable energy, up to the point where it
dissipates completely’.7 For economic development is based on the reckless
utilisation of the terrestrial stock of energy accumulated over time. This is
1
Marx 1975, p. 328.
2
See Benton 1989.
3
Schmidt 1971, p. 79.
4
Foster 2000, p. viii.
5
Burkett 1999.
6
See O’Connor 1992.
7
Georgescu-Roegen 1995, pp. 81–2. See also Georgescu-Roegen 1971.
a point of convergence but not identity, because, as René Passet suggests,8

Marx and Engels are doubtless closer to the idea of a ‘creative destruction’ à
la Ilya Prigogine than an inexorable decline of the universe.9 However, Juan
Martinez-Alier recalls that, for Georgescu-Roegen as for Vladimir Vernadsky,
the Earth is an open system, because it receives external energy from the Sun.
Thus, processes of growth and complexication can unfold on it over time.10
But the process of the structuring of life takes place over a timescale that has
nothing in common with the human timescale which thus has to deal with the
problem of resource scarcity.
The fact that human activity unfolds within a natural envelope legitimates
the ‘normative management with constraints’ advocated by Passet. Authors
like Georgescu-Roegen and Passet, although not identifying with Marxism,
approximate to it when they challenge the reduction of the social to the eco-
nomic and a conception of the economy solely in terms of equilibria.
The distinction between the labour process in general and the process of
capitalist production
From the outset in Capital, Marx distinguishes between the labour process in
general, which is an anthropological characteristic whose goal is the produc-
tion of use-values that can satisfy human needs, and the labour process pecu-
liar to the capitalist mode of production, which only represents a phase in
human history and whose goal is the production of surplus-value making the
valorisation of capital possible. In the latter case, the production of use-values
ceases to be an end and is merely a means for value, of which the commodity
is the support. Henceforth, as Jacques Bidet explains,11 the possibility exists
that real social needs will not be satised and, on the contrary, that externali-
ties and social ‘counter-utilities’ will be generated by a mode of production
‘focused on prot’.12 Thus, according to Benton and Bidet, the principle of the
8
Passet 1996, p. xvii.
9
See Prigogine 1979.
10
See Martinez-Alier 1992a, p. 21 and 1992b, pp. 183–4. On Vernadsky 1924, see
Deléage 1992.
11
See Bidet 1992 and 1999.
12
Bidet 1992, p. 103.
ecological critique is already – at least implicitly – contained in the distinction

made by Marx.
However, Marx devoted the bulk of his work to analysing the contradic-
tion resulting from the exploitation of labour-power, which in his view was
fundamental: capital’s difculty in securing the production and then the
realisation of surplus-value. And, although conscious of them, he arguably in
part neglected the ecological consequences of the development of capitalism.
To explain this, Benton advances the hypothesis that he underestimated the
‘non-manipulable natural conditions’ of the labour process and overestimated
the role and technical capacities of human beings.13 Marx was thus unable to
detach himself from the Promethean standpoint that marked the nineteenth
century and was guilty of complacency or, at any rate, of a lack of vigilance as
regards what ecologists today call productivism. This criticism is challenged
by Reiner Grundman,14 who believes that the desire to utilise nature with a
view to satisfying human needs cannot be assimilated to a project of the auto-
matic, deliberate destruction of nature. The reason for this is that to destroy
nature would backre on the satisfaction of these needs. It seems to me that
this argument can only be advanced if the practices destructive of nature are
intentional, determined in accordance with a destructive goal. If capital accu-
mulation derived from a conscious collective project, there would be no logi-
cal reason why the imperative of saving nature should not be substituted for
that of maltreating it. And this would mean that the precautionary principle
could potentially be enshrined in capitalist activity. The least one can say is
that this appears unlikely and we cannot therefore totally exonerate Marx
from the charge of having been a – willing? – victim of the myth of progress.
The preceding discussion has introduced the idea that the development of
capitalism generates two contradictions. The rst is the one Marx devoted his
whole life to. By fashioning the concepts of labour-power and surplus-value,
and making the theory of value a critical theory of capitalist social relations,
Marx laid bare the basic antagonism between capital and labour, which could
only be superseded in communism. And he allegedly neglected on the theo-
retical level a ‘second contradiction’ of capitalism.
13
Benton 1989, p. 64.
14
See Grundman 1991.
This idea has been advanced by O’Connor and several other authors in Cap-
italism, Nature, Socialism, like Enrique Leff, Paul Burkett, Stuart Rosewarne,
and Tim Stroshane, and is adopted by Bidet.15 The denition of the second
contradiction is wanting in precision and varies somewhat from author to
author. For O’Connor, it involves the costs pertaining to ‘sociological or polit-
ical categories’.16 Whereas the rst contradiction manifests itself more in the
difculty in realising surplus-value than in producing it, the reverse is true
of the second. This comprises two aspects. According to Bidet, the rst is the
fact that members of society are dispossessed ‘of the ability to confer meaning
on their existence’; the second is connected, in both O’Connor and Bidet, with
‘the externalisation of a certain number of costs of social production’.17
Several remarks are in order here. First, the contradiction between capital
and labour – what is here called the rst contradiction – combines the two
problems of producing and realising surplus-value. It is false to counter-pose
overaccumulation of capital and underconsumption, for they are indissocia-
ble, corollaries of one another. Secondly, authors who analyse what is called
the second contradiction slide from the notion of externalisation to that of
exteriorisation. What justies characterising the ecological contradiction of
capitalism as an ‘external’ contradiction, while reserving characterisation as
a contradiction ‘internal’ to the capitalist production process for the exploi-
tation of labour-power?18 This seems to me to constitute a retreat from the
materialist postulate of the necessary integration of capitalist production into
the natural environment. Consequently, both the rst and the second contra-
dictions are internal to the capitalist mode of production and hence cannot be
separated. Without the exploitation of nature, exploitation of labour would
have no material support; and without the exploitation of labour, exploita-
tion of nature could not have been extended and generalised. It follows that
the social crisis and the ecological crisis are two aspects of one and the same
reality.19 Moreover, Bidet, joined by Daniel Bensaïd, agrees with André Gorz
when he establishes a link between the intensication of the ecological crisis
15
See Leff 1986; Burkett 1996; Rosewarne 1997 and Stoshane 1997; and Bidet 1992
and 1999.
16
O’Connor 1992.
17
Bidet 1992, pp. 104–5.
18
See Bidet 1999, p. 296.
19
See Rousset 1994 and Harribey 1997. I stress a logical point: capitalism develops
the two contradictions conjointly; they are therefore internal to it – which does not
and a fall in the prot rate.20 And O’Connor conrms this link when he says
that capital reduces its possibilities for protability as it subjects the natu-
ral conditions of production to its law. Thirdly, and nally, the loss of the
capacity to endow existence with meaning is nothing other than the alienation
already analysed by Marx and is wholly bound up with exploitation. It is true
that the destruction of nature produced by capitalist activity involves a loss of
meaning, but if ecological disasters were conveyed by the single philosophi-
cal concept of alienation, what need would there be for a science called ecology
to arrive at a knowledge of them?
The remaining theoretical difculties

The issues raised above indicate the persistence of theoretical difculties,
which remain an obstacle to a genuine symbiosis within current Marxist
research on ecology. They essentially bear on the hypotheses and purposes
of Marx’s model.
In the rst place, is the distinction between the various forms of labour
process adequate for analysing the relations between human beings and
nature? In other words, is the process of capitalist production the sole culprit
in the destruction or undermining of ecosystems? Were human activity to
be restricted to producing use-values, would any contradiction between this
activity and the set of biological equilibria disappear? This is not certain, and
we know that some societies which are scarcely technologically developed,
and not subject to the law of prot, can nd themselves compelled to engage
in agricultural practices that result in rapid soil exhaustion. Conversely,
within technologically advanced societies the disappearance of capitalism is
a necessary but insufcient condition for a balanced co-development of living
systems. This is what emerges from an observation registered by Martinez-
Alier: planning is no better than the market at resolving the problem of the
lack of a common yardstick between present and future.21 Can the fundamen-
mean that it is the only mode of production that has to confront the contradiction
vis-à-vis nature, as we shall see later.
20
See Gorz 1978 and 1992; and See Bidet 1992 and Bensaïd 1993.
21
See Martinez-Alier 1987. Elsewhere, in 1992a, Martinez-Alier also stresses the fact
that the debate between Hayek and Lange in the 1930s did not pose the problem of
the inter-generational allocation of non-renewable resources.
tal origin of Marxism’s belated acknowledgement of the ecological question

be located in the ‘meta-structural insufciency’ of Marx’s approach – that is
to say, in the fact that he established an identity between capitalism and the
market, making it impossible really to think the liberty-equality pair through,
with the result as regards ecology of making it impossible to reect on the use
of the world? Such is Bidet’s thesis,22 which has the advantage of connecting
property, power and ethics.
In order to appreciate the signicance of this problematic, it is appropriate
rst to reopen the discussion about the existence of natural limits. The vio-
lence with which Marx and Engels opposed Malthus’s theses on population
has profoundly marked the history of Marxism. Although starting out from a
basically correct criticism, their desire to construct a socio-historical theory of
capitalism doubtless had unintended consequences. Engels rejected the prin-
ciple of entropy and unequivocally condemned the attempt by Sergei Podo-
linsky to combine a labour theory of value with an energy theory of value.23
While it is true that it is impossible to reduce all the aspects of human activ-
ity to an expenditure of energy measured in calories, and that it is pointless
searching for a universal equivalent, Podolinksy’s thesis cannot be reduced
to this. It maintains that, if techniques allow them to, human beings can pro-
duce more calories than they expend, thus removing the prospect of thermic
death.24 Podolinsky paved the way for the subsequent analyses by Howard
Odum,25 measuring the efciency of a living system by its capacity to maxi-
mise its incorporated energy, which he calls emergy. The development and
outcome of human activities does not mechanically depend on natural condi-
tions, but on the social and technical conditions of the utilisation of natural
conditions. Contrary to Engels’s unduly hasty conclusion, Podolinsky was
therefore perfectly aligned with a materialist viewpoint – one, moreover, that
was Marxism – and does not merit the treatment still meted out to him today
by some Marxist authors.26
In reality, the reticence of Marx and Engels, and then of Marxists in gen-
eral until recently, is largely explained by the fear that, hidden behind the
22
Bidet 1999, p. 297.
23
See Engels 1976 and See Podolinsky 1880a, 1880b and 1880c.
24
See Vivien 1994 and 1996.
25
See Odum 1971.
26
For example, in Husson 2000, p. 141.
argument of natural limits to human activity, was a conservatism unwilling

to speak its name. However, according to Benton, the issue of natural limits
does not come into conict with emancipatory projects as long as the elements
of the labour process that are ‘impervious to intentional manipulation’27 are
identied – for example, photosynthesis, repeated or accumulated human
interventions that create unwanted and undesirable effects, like the green-
house effect, and interventions that have obscured or altered certain limits,
such as genetic manipulations.
Ultimately, the problem can be summarised thus: natural ‘limits’ are not
xed, but shift in time and place according to the socio-technical organisation
of society; and yet that displacement itself is certainly not innite. Must we
not therefore bid farewell to boundless economic growth which, according
to Herman Daly,28 cannot be durable? And begin to think ‘beyond develop-
ment’, which is an ‘ideology in ruins’, as invited to by Wolfgang Sachs and
Gustavo Esteva, as well as Serge Latouche?29
[A]n ecosystem is invariably a totality which is only reproduced within

certain limits and which imposes on humanity several series of specic
material constraints
writes Maurice Godelier.30 As a result, another problem emerges, raised by

Hans Jonas, who is regarded as the founder of a philosophy of respect for life
and the conditions of life that he calls the responsibility principle.31 Jonas is not a
Marxist philosopher, but his interrogation of Marxism bears precisely on one
of the latter’s most important philosophical foundations. For him, the ethic of
responsibility cannot be reconciled with the notion of utopia and, in particu-
lar, the utopia of abundance. Given the limits of nature’s tolerance, the prom-
ise of abundance must be abandoned, especially because it will be impossible
to bring the underdeveloped countries up to the level of the developed coun-
tries without yet more recourse to technological progress – which serves to
exacerbate the contradiction with respect to the principle of responsibility.
Like those of liberal ideology, the material bases of the Marxist utopia, which
27
Benton 1989, p. 68.
28
See Daly 1992.
29
See Sachs and Esteva 1996; Latouche 1986.
30
Godelier 1986, p. 28.
31
See Jonas 1984.
would have made it possible to make the transition from the ‘realm of neces-
sity’ to the ‘realm of freedom’,32 will never be created. Even an author who
has endeavoured to rehabilitate the Marxian utopia, Henri Maler, is categori-
cal about the productive forces inherited from capitalism that are supposedly
vehicles of emancipation: this involves ‘lethal illusions’.33 For all that, must we
take no interest in improving the material conditions of existence? No, replies
Jonas, ‘[b]ut as regards the much-needed improvement of conditions for much
or all of mankind, it is vitally necessary to unhook the demands of justice, charity,
and reason from the bait of utopia.’34 For Jonas, the principle of responsibility is
not compatible with Ernst Bloch’s hope principle.35 The renunciation of abun-
dance in Jonas can be compared with the notion of ‘sufciency’ in Gorz:
The establishment of a norm of sufciency is incompatible – by virtue of

the self-limitation of needs and the agreed effort that it involves – with the
pursuit of maximum output, which constitutes the essence of economic
rationality and rationalisation.36
However, the abandonment of the illusion of abundance does not imply that
Marxism should give up the development of humanity, especially for its
poorest fraction. As John Bellamy Foster says: ‘[e]conomic development is
still needed in the poorest regions of the world’.37
In a way, Jonas anticipates the rejection of the primacy of the productive
forces formulated by Alain Lipietz, an ecological economists and theorist
issued from Marxism. According to him, by reducing the history of the human
race to its transformative activity, Marxism is ‘at odds with human ecology’
and ‘nature is not man’s inorganic body, but equally the inorganic body of the
bee or royal eagle’:38 respect for biological diversity is a principle of existence,
32
Marx 1981, pp. 958–9.
33
Maler 1995, p. 245.
34
Jonas 1984, p. 201.
35
See Bloch 1986.
36
Gorz 1992, p. 22. See also Gorz 1990.
37
Foster 2002, p. 80.
38
Lipietz 1996, pp. 186–7. Here we are far from the provocation of Husson 2000,
p. 72: ‘Humanity can live without whales or tortoises, as it has learnt to live without
dinosaurs’. The argument of this Marxist economist is that biodiversity should be
defended not for utilitarian reasons, but in the name of ethical or aesthetic values. Since
this is precisely the position of most ecologists, Husson’s condemnation of the latter
invalidates itself. But it is more important to observe that there is a ne line between
which must take precedence over all others. Lipietz’s rst criticism is exces-
sive, if Marx had reduced the history of humankind to its productive history,
labour would have contained its own end in itself – praxis as opposed to poi-
esis. On the other hand, Marx was doubtless wrong to regard productive his-
tory as human prehistory – the condition of access to true history. The second
criticism is more legitimate. Paradoxically, however, it implicitly posits the
radical incompleteness of an ecology that is not integrated into a perspective
of social transformation.
Ecology integrated into social relations

The theoretical difculties Marxist thought experiences in grasping the eco-
logical question are the mirror image of those that still constitute an obstacle
to integrating ecological struggles into a general struggle against capitalism.
The latter issue inevitably brings to mind Karl Polanyi’s concepts of dis-
embedding/re-embedding, to which O’Connor explicitly refers in order to
theorise a socialist ecology.39
Political ecology nds it difcult to go beyond a limited critique of produc-
tivism, regarding it as simply the pursuit of ‘production for its own sake’, as
Jean-Paul Deléage denes it.40 However, what is required is a critique of pro-
duction whose sole purpose is commodity value for the prot that it contains,
heedless as it is of all the values of justice and of respect for life.
Ecology and value
Awareness of ecological disruption has obliged neoclassical economic theory

to integrate into its models negative externalities attributable to the economic
development of modern societies. Environmental economics has thus become
a rapidly expanding discipline that seeks to reintroduce the social costs gener-
the opinion expressed by Lipietz and that of the extreme current of deep ecology.
Hence the difculty of conceiving a humanism conscious of the need to respect all
life forms, as far removed from a utilitarian anthropocentrism with respect to other
living species as it is from a ‘non-humanist, even anti-humanist normative ethic’ which,
according to J.P. Maréchal (Maréchal 1997, p. 176), would be ‘self-contradictory’.
39
See O’Connor 199?, pp. ?; see also Polanyi 1944.
40
Deléage 1993, p. 12.
ated by environmental degradation into traditional economic calculation. By

internalising its externalities through the market, via taxes or negotiable pol-
lution permits,41 the dominant economics aims to promote the ‘valorisation’
of natural goods, or to determine and take account of the supposedly intrinsic
economic value of nature, which has hitherto (so we are told) been ignored.
But this approach – characterised as weak sustainability, because it banks
on the possibility of replacing exhausted natural elements by manufactured
products – threatens to pervert political ecology, which would allow itself to
misled by the mirage of internalisation, whose problematic contains several
insurmountable theoretical contradictions.
The rst is this: of the social costs generated by polluting productive activi-
ties, only the monetary costs detrimental to other activities can be taken into
account. Furthermore, this limited measure is itself impossible to implement:
rst of all, as Elmar Altvater explains,42 because the exploitation of natural
resources by capitalism establishes a rhythm of utilisation superior to that of
natural cycles; second, following Passet,43 because it involves reducing biolog-
ical time to an economic time through the intermediary of a rate of actualisa-
tion; and nally because, as David Pearce has demonstrated,44 it only involves
a monetary penalty for pollution when the threshold of the self-purication of
ecosystems has been crossed, thus inexorably lowering that threshold.
The impossibility of evaluating unproduced natural elements in monetary
terms, other than by calculating the production cost of their economic exploi-
tation or the production cost of repairing the damage inicted on them, is in
truth attributable to nature possessing no intrinsic economic value, contrary to
what is claimed by neoclassical economists who affect disapproval of political
economy’s traditional neglect of the ‘value’ of nature. Today, several ecologi-
cal theoreticians – in particular, Gunnar Skirbekk, Martinez-Alier, Altvater,
41
The eco-tax derives from an idea advanced in Pigou 1920; and negotiable pollu-
tion permits have been theorised by Coase 1980, who claims that the internalisation
of external effects can be achieved without any state intervention other than the estab-
lishment of property rights, and solely through market negotiation between polluters
and polluted, whatever the initial distribution of rights between them.
42
See Altvater 1991 and 1992.
43
See Passet 1996.
44
See Pearce 1974 and, for an introduction, Harribey 1998.
Leff, and Harribey45 – who situate themselves in the framework of a renewal of

Marxism, have demonstrated that this assertion is utter nonsense. If the light
of the Sun, pure air, and water, or any other resource, condition life, and if
one starts out from the idea that these elements possess an intrinsic economic
value, then it can only be innite. Yet an innite economic value or price for
available goods or services is a nonsense. A logical error of this kind can be
committed because the old Aristotelian distinction between use-value and
exchange-value is rejected by neoclassical economists, who identify the two
notions without realising that use-value is a necessary condition of exchange-
value, but that the converse is not true. By arbitrarily positing an identity
between use-value and exchange-value, one can persuade citizens that the
maximum satisfaction obtained through the use of goods and services takes
the form, and can only take the form, of maximising exchange-value – that is
to say, the commodication of the world. But a single counter-example is suf-
cient to demonstrate the inanity of the thesis that use-value and exchange-
value are identical. The Sun’s light is necessary to make wheat grow and yet
the price of wheat does not contain the ‘value’ of solar light, which has no
meaning. The milk drunk by the baby at its mother’s breast has a use-value
but no exchange-value, whereas powdered milk in a feeding bottle has a use-
value – the same as the mother’s milk – and an exchange-value. Thus, not
all wealth is value – something that Aristotle, Smith and Ricardo had clearly
sensed, and which Marx repeated tirelessly. Contrariwise, what is distinctive
about a negative externality is that it in no way constitutes wealth, whether
individual or collective, and yet it sometimes possesses an exchange-value:
radioactive waste can be an object market exchange for thousands of years
without possessing any utility – other than that of making money. As a result,
a possible price for the right to pollute must not be regarded as an economic
price. It is necessarily a sociopolitical price, deriving directly from the permis-
sible level of pollution determined by society; and this norm itself reects the
balance of forces in society.
Two options are then open to ecologists. Either they leave it up to the mar-
ket to achieve a better allocation of resources by establishing eco-taxes or the
sale of pollution permits – but, in that case, they are led to extend the range
45
See Skirbekk 1974; Martinez-Alier 1992a; Altvater 1997; Leff 1999; and Harribey
1997 and 1999.
of market accounting, which has precisely demonstrated its inability to take

account of biological phenomena, time, and uncertainty. Or, following José
Manuel Naredo,46 they recognise the futility of seeking to objectify natural
things in prices and pursue a different path – establishing measures for natu-
ral resources, and ways of accounting for energy expenditure, on condition
that these are not converted either into a labour-equivalent or into money;
and developing functions of social objectives outside any criterion of prot
maximisation.47
The incommensurability of natural elements and ordinary commodities
therefore precludes applying the labour theory of value to the former.48 The
‘value’ of nature is different in kind from economic value and refers to val-
ues of an ethical order. But this does not discredit the labour theory of value,
whose eld of application has always been – and can only be – that of the
commodity. Unfortunately, ecological literature is full of writings that betray
a misunderstanding of the theory of value of commodities as a theory of the
capitalist social relations governing the production of these commodities. Yet
the labour theory of value contains two points that are fundamental for an
ecological problematic: on the one hand, ‘it is the law of the least effort for produc-
ing a use-value’;49 and, on the other, it is the critique of production for prot at
46
See Naredo 1999. In the current of ‘ecological economics’, and from a post-classical
perspective, see also M. O’Connor 1996.
47
After the French government had rallied to the proposal to create a market in
pollution permits, the opposition hardened between those, like Lipietz (1998 and
1999), who were favourable to it, and those, like Husson (2000), who rmly rejected
the idea. Is this opposition insurmountable, in so far as it would seem that the use
of economic instruments remains a possibility once it is subordinated to political
decision-making? An eco-tax or the price of the right to pollute cannot be market prices
because nature cannot be evaluated. Lipietz is therefore wrong when he asserts that a
market in pollution permits is the best system ‘in theory’, because neoclassical theory
is wrong from beginning to end: it reduces all human behaviour to the rationality of
homo oeconomicus; it proceeds as if the difculty in constructing functions for individual
and collective preferences had been overcome; it ignores the interdependence between
the decisions of agents; it is silent about the fact that it has now been demonstrated
that the existence of externalities prevents the competitive system being Pareto opti-
mal and that the impossibility of assigning a monetary price to nature precludes
the re-establishment of such an optimum by means of a simple eco-tax or a market
pollution permit; it regards the factors of production – including natural factors – as
permanently replaceable; and it conates use-value and exchange-value.
48
We make no reference, obviously, to the so-called utility theory of value advocated
by neoclassical economics, since it is not even a theory of the value of commodities,
but simply a legitimation of the latter’s appropriation.
49
Bidet 1999, p. 295.
the expense of human needs, a reasonable use of nature and, more generally,
social justice. Value theory is therefore at the heart of a general theory inte-
grating ecology and social organisation. Ecological Marxism thus xes itself
the aim of subordinating social activity to use-value.50 This is also the sense
of ecosocialism as dened in the International Ecosocialist Manifesto51 which
was inspired by the proposals of, among others, James O’Connor and Joel
Kovel.52
Ecology and justice
In so far as it clearly identies action to preserve natural equilibria as a com-

ponent of anticapitalist activity, ecology brings to Marxism something that it
had hitherto not taken into account: inter-generational fairness. Social justice
can therefore now be envisaged on two levels: in the present – within contem-
porary societies marked by profound inequalities in terms of power, income,
living and working conditions, access to natural resources, to health care, to
education, to culture; and in time – between different generations, in terms of
access to natural resources.
Lying at the junction between ethics and politics, the relationship between
ecology and social justice contains at least three basic requirements, which are
theoretical and practical in kind.
The rst requirement is to develop a theory of justice that integrates three
dimensions: a critical theory of injustice in the here and now; a theory of a
just society; and a theory for being just in a society that is still unjust. John
Rawls’s theory53 does not satisfy these conditions, because it starts out from
an individualistic conception of the social contract and the co-operation that is
to derive from it. It excludes any idea of regulation other than that performed
by the market order, which is supposed to be efcient. Bidet has shown that
this construct assigns no place to a collective project and, above all, represents
a regression with respect to the Kantian categorical imperative by not formu-
lating a principle of action in favour of immediate greater justice.54 Moreover,
50
Harribey 1997.
51
See Löwy (ed.) 2005.
52
J. O’Connor 1998 and Kovel 2002.
53
See Rawls 1971.
54
See Bidet 1995, pp. 130–5.
as I have argued elsewhere,55 the Rawlsian notion of primary social goods

focusing on right and liberties guaranteed for all should, if it is to have genu-
ine signicance, be extended to the right of access to natural resources and the
right of access to employment, which conditions access to the resources that
are produced.
The second requirement bears on the denition of collective ownership
rights, which is today sorely lacking in a reconstruction of a socialist project,
in the emergence of an ecological project, and, obviously, in an eco-socialist
project. The failure of the state collectivisms – or capitalisms – on the one
hand, and the attribution of the degradation of nature to the absence of pri-
vate ownership of it, on the other, fetter reection on the forms that could be
taken by collective ownership of goods belonging to humanity as a whole –
for example, air, water, and any resource conditioning life. Analyses of private
property rights in nature by the neoclassical economist Ronald Coase, and of
enclosures by the biologist Garret Hardin, proceed to an illegitimate assimila-
tion of collective property to non-property.56 In the opposite camp, proposals
to establish new collective rights in the present and future still remain at the
level of a statement of principles. Thus, Leff refers to collective property rights
in nature that make it possible to reconstruct processes of communal pro-
duction, established while respecting cultural autonomy, in the framework of
social movements.57
If the development of a theory of justice and a theory of collective property
rights is proving difcult, there is one point whose theorisation is easier, even
if its application is tricky. This involves the third requirement for connect-
ing ecology and social justice: sharing productivity gains and allocating them
in the rst instance to a reduction in working hours, so as to improve the
quality of life, rather than to a constant increase in production, once essential
material needs have been satised. It will be observed that here we are once
again dealing with a collective reappropriation – this time, of the wealth cre-
ated – by wresting back the time that capitalism seized hold of at the dawn
of the industrial revolution. Control of their living time by all human beings
and respect for the time that has led to the ourishing and complexication
55
See Harribey 1997.
56
See Coase 1960 and Hardin 1968.
57
See Leff 1999, pp. 99–100.
of living systems – such are the two inseparable terms of a Marxian political
ecology.58
Just as the ecological crisis has not replaced the ‘social question’, given that
they are linked, political ecology has not supplanted Marxism as an instru-
ment for analysing capitalism and as a political project. Political ecology was
not born ex nihilo and it inherits nearly two centuries of social struggle against
exploitation and alienation. As Gorz has shown,59 ecology forms an integral
part of working-class history at two levels: the demand for social justice and
the opposition to capitalist economic rationality. But it diverges from it when
it comes to the myth of innite material progress. That is why, conversely,
traditional Marxism does not exhaust the issues posed by the development of
modern societies.
Epistemologically, the encounter between Marx’s materialist theory and
political ecology is based on a rejection of methodological individualism.
‘Methodological individualism comes up against the insurmountable onto-
logical difculty of taking future generations into consideration’, writes
Martinez-Alier.60 The socio-historical approach to human existence is holist
and the concept of the biosphere is likewise holist. Social relations as inter-
actions in the biosphere are viewed in dialectical fashion. A Marxian politi-
cal ecology or an ecological Marxism will only be constructed if we manage
to overcome the fetishisation of human relations with nature severed from
social relations. Two traps, mirror-images of one another, are therefore to be
avoided: on the one hand, what Jean-Pierre Garnier calls the ‘naturalisation
of social contradictions’61 (a version of an emollient ecologism that denies
the logic of capital accumulation and its consequences for the way in which
human beings appropriate nature); on the other hand, the socialisation of the
contradictions of the destruction of nature (a version of a trivial Marxism that
persists with the notion that the relations of production alone pervert the use
of technology and nature).
58
Numerous theoreticians have explored this path. Readers are referred to Lipietz
1993 and Harribey 1997. Becker and Raza 2000 seeks to integrate regulation theory
and political ecology.
59
See Gorz 1994.
60
Martinez-Alier 1992a, pp. 23–4.
61
Garnier 1994, p. 300.
In negative terms, we can even say that Marxism and political ecology pres-
ent twin defects: for example, Marxism’s propensity for a centralised manage-
ment of society is echoed in Jonas’s belief in the capacity of an authoritarian
government to adopt and impose safety measures; or, to take another exam-
ple, both Marxism and ecology contain numerous currents and have their
respective fundamentalists.
Finally, a major difculty remains to be resolved if a Marxian ecological
paradigm is to progress: which social forces are capable of embodying a dem-
ocratic, majoritarian project for the transformation of society, acting in the
direction of greater justice for the worst-off classes and future generations?
Martinez-Alier cautiously suggests that the social movements are the vectors
of ecological aspirations, because the concentration of wealth increases pres-
sures on natural resources and social demands aimed at improving working
conditions, health, and security oblige capitalists to integrate certain social
costs.62 Moreover, the international dimension of anticapitalist struggle nds
a – natural – extension in the universal demand for a habitable planet for all
living beings. This can only become a reality by establishing a freely agreed
global right, which would be a ‘right to equal use’ in Bidet’s formula.63
It is customarily said that humans are the only living beings to reect on
nature. They are also the only ones to reect on their social organisation and
inect its evolution. For these two reasons, a great responsibility falls to them,
which can form the basis for a new, universalistic humanism.
62
See Martinez-Alier 1992a, pp. 25–6.
63
Bidet 1999, p. 305.
Chapter Eleven
Theories of the Capitalist World-System
Rémy Herrera
The national structures of capitalism operate and

are reproduced locally in the rst instance, through
a combination of a domestic market, where com-
modities, capital and labour are mobile, and a corre-
sponding set of state apparatuses. By contrast, what
denes the capitalist world-system is the dichotomy
between the existence of a world market, integrated
in all aspects except for labour (which is forced into
an international quasi-immobility), and the absence
of a single political order at a global level that is
more than a multiplicity of state bodies governed by
public international law and/or the violence of the
balance of forces. It is the causes, mechanisms, and
consequences of this asymmetry at work in the accu-
mulation of capital, in terms of unequal relations
of domination between nations and of exploitation
between classes in particular, that the theoreticians
of this capitalist world-system endeavour to con-
ceptualise. The latter have in fact produced a com-
prehensive theory whose object and concept is the
modern world as a concrete socio-historical entity
forming a system – that is to say, an assemblage
(Greek systema), structured by complex relations of
interdependence, of several elements of reality into
a coherent, autonomous totality that situates them
and gives them meaning.
210 • Rémy Herrera
Among the representatives of this intellectual current, I shall (to restrict

myself to the essentials) select four major authors: Samir Amin, Immanuel
Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and André Gunder Frank. There seems to be
no point in trying to extract a unitary position from their works, so vast are
their elds of investigation and distinct their sources of inspiration – even if
the impetus given by the Monthly Review team had a very marked inuence
on all of them. It should nevertheless be noted that their scientic approaches
intersect, without ever fully coinciding, in their recourse to a common stock
of theoretical references (basic Marxist concepts, but also the Braudelian one
of world-economy, or the structural-CEPALian or “ECLACian”1 one of centre/
periphery, etc.); methodological premises (a holist explanatory model, a struc-
tural analysis, a combination of history and theory, and so on); intellectual
ambitions (a comprehensive representation of phenomena, an attempt to
combine the economic, the social, and the political, etc.); and political aims
(a radical critique of the planetary ravages of capitalism and US hegemony, a
‘worldist’ bias, the perspective of a postcapitalist society, etc.).
In these conditions, situating these theoreticians, who are unclassiable in
as much as each seems to constitute a sui generis category, vis-à-vis Marxism
is far from easy. Amin has always said that he is a Marxist; and still does. But
his œuvre, which has not uncritically drawn upon theories of imperialism and
pioneering works on under-development like those of Raúl Prebisch or, more
marginally, François Perroux, distances itself very clearly from the ‘orthodox
corpus’ of Marxism. For his part, Wallerstein, who is in the tradition of Fer-
nand Braudel and the Annales school, while also drawing some of his resources
from Ilya Prigogine’s theory of so-called ‘dissipative structures’, proposes a
free reading of Marxism which is so heretical that he seems to leave it behind.
Accordingly, he may appropriately be regarded instead as a ‘systemsist’. As
for Giovanni Arrighi, he belongs to the Marxist school of historical sociology
of the world system. Meanwhile, André Gunder Frank – close to the writings
of Paul Baran on the political economy of growth and certain Latin-American
structuralists – is often ranged among radical ‘dependency theorists’, while
the trajectory of his research, strongly but not exclusively inuenced by Marx-
ism, soon led him to analyses of the world-system.
1
“ECLACian”, from ECLAC, or the Commission for Latin America and the Carib-
bean (CEPAL in Spanish).
Theories of the Capitalist World-System • 211
Marx’s legacy
It remains the case that, among all the intellectual legacies invoked by theo-
reticians of the capitalist world-system, whether neo-Marxist or not, the rst
and foremost source of inspiration is to be found in the work of Marx. Marx
cannot be credited with a nished theory of the world-system, on the general
model of the theory of structure and dynamic of capitalism he furnished us
with. However, by virtue of the richness of the problematics he invites us to
reect on, and the multiplicity of the analytical implications he draws, Marx
made a powerful contribution to laying the theoretical foundations for this
current and stimulating its contemporary reection. In my view, it is therefore
necessary and productive to make a detour via Marx in order subsequently
to return better equipped to a presentation of the main theorisations of the
capitalist world-system.
For it is indeed Marx who paved the way for them. He did so in two ways.
First of all, he criticised the myth of the infallibility of a different system – Hege-
lian philosophy – which, excepting the efcacy of the dialectic, he shattered
in the prolonged labour of constructing historical materialism (the rst break
with Hegel, at the dawn of his reections, can be dated to 1843–5). Next, he
abandoned the vision of the unfolding of history in accordance with a univer-
sal line proceeding from the Eastern world to Western civilisation, which he
called into question in an attempt to preserve Marxism from any economistic-
evolutionist-determinist temptation (the second break with Hegel in Marx’s
nal research of 1877–81).
Marx’s analysis of the accumulation of capital and the proletarianisation of
labour-power makes capitalism the rst globalised mode of production, con-
trasting, on account of its globalisation, with all precapitalist modes of produc-
tion: the tendency to create a world market is included in the concept of capital itself.2
The starting point of capitalism is in fact the world market, which is established
with the generalisation of commodities and the confrontation between money-
capital and forms of production other than industrial capitalism. By means
of primitive accumulation and colonial expansion, the genesis of capitalism,
although geographically situated in Western Europe and historically located
in the sixteenth century, no longer pertains exclusively to Europe. For, if the
2
Marx 1973, p. 408.
space of reproduction of the capital-labour relationship is identied as global,

and not simply national, societies outside Europe nd themselves inserted
into the contemporaneity of the time of capitalism – and violently so.
To my mind, Marx’s theoretical contribution cannot therefore be reduced to
the assertion of the driving force: rstly, of the Western industrial proletariat
in capitalist processes (through the production of surplus-value in the M-C-M
schema and expanded reproduction); secondly, of the advanced countries in
the future triumph of the revolution and construction of communism (which
leads to assimilating capitalism to ‘progress’, certainly dragging individu-
als and peoples through blood and dirt, misery and degradation, but ulti-
mately a ‘progress of bourgeois civilization’, painfully but surely carrying the
contradictions of capitalism to a conclusion);3 and thirdly, of industrial capi-
tal and the sphere of production, as compared with commercial capital and
the sphere of circulation, in identifying the site of exploitation and ‘genuine
capitalism’.
For, in writings that straddle his central work, preceding or following the
publication of Volume One of Capital, Marx also provides not (let me repeat)
a theorisation, but an outline of constitutive elements of a social theory of
the world-system. Among these, which sometimes take the form of cautious
nuances qualifying propositions that are liable to generate confusion (the de te
fabula narratur!, for example), and sometimes that of unresolved uncertainties
in elds which had scarcely been explored by the social sciences of the time
(particularly as regards the evolution of the Russian obschina), I shall select
the following ve elements, all of which are articulated around the axis of the
‘world market’.
Element 1. Marx registers a superimposition of relations of domination
between nations onto relations of exploitation between classes (the speech
on the 1830 Polish uprising in 1847 and the 1848 speech on free trade). This
complicates class struggle, internationalist in essence but national in form,
by a proletariat structurally divided by a criterion of nationality (letters to
Kugelmann and Engels in 1869). Marx would go so far as to maintain that the
revolution in Ireland, where the colonial and national questions fused, consti-
tuted ‘the precondition for any social change’ in England (letters to Meyer and
Vogt in 1870; letter from Engels to Kautsky in 1882). However, this assertion
3
Marx 1976.
would not be transposed beyond the Irish case, either by Marx (to Algeria:
‘Bugeaud’ in The New American Encyclopedia, of 1857), or by Engels (to Egypt:
letter to Bernstein in 1882).
Element 2. Marx stresses and repeats the determination of ‘the whole internal
organisation of populations’ by the world market, its division of labour, and
its ‘inter-state system’ (letter to Annenkov of 1846 and Critique of the Gotha Pro-
gramme of 1875), constraining according to laws which govern them together4
the productive structures of ‘oppressed nations’ destroyed by colonisation to
be regenerated by specialisation in strict conformity with dominant metro-
politan interests (‘The British Rule in India’ in the New York Daily Tribune of
1853). These nations thus end up suffering both from the development, and
from the lack of development, of capitalism. But Marx was never really to
relinquish the idea of ‘progress’ via capitalism (The Communist Manifesto, in
1848; articles on the US in the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850 and Die Presse
in 1861).
Element 3. Marx explains that in England the state is rmly in the service
of the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, because this country, ‘demiurge
of the bourgeois cosmos’, has succeeded in its ‘conquest of the world market’
and is identied with the capitalist ‘core’, exporting its recurrent crises to the
rest of the world and, as a result, cushioning it against the revolutions break-
ing out on the European continent (Class Struggles in France, appeared in 1849).
But if he establishes the connection between the national social structure and
the international dimension in the abstract-concrete shape of the ‘world mar-
ket’ and ‘state system’ (1853 article on revolution in China and Europe in the
New York Daily Tribune), as Jacques Bidet has put it, ‘Marx fails to produce the
concepts of the immediate contemporaneity of the national and the interna-
tional, or the concepts of the system’.5
Element 4. Marx also recognises a similarity between certain modes of
exploitation – of the small peasantry, in particular – and that of the industrial
proletariat (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in 1852). He acknowl-
edges that surplus-value can be extracted even in the absence of a formal
subsumption of labour to capital (‘Results of the Immediate Process of Pro-
duction’, between 1861 and 1863); and that ‘the plantation system, working
4
Marx and Engels 1978, pp. 35–41.
5
Bidet 1999, p. 233ff.
for the world market’ in the United States must be considered a necessary
condition for modern industry6 and productive of surplus-value from its inte-
gration into the process of circulation of industrial capital, as a result of ‘the
existence of the market as a world market’. The same is true, moreover, of
other forms of non-wage relation – those to which Chinese coolies or Indian
ryots, for example, are subjected.
Element 5. Finally, in his letter of 1877 to Mikhailovsky, Marx expressly and
categorically rejects any ‘historico-philosophical theory of the general path
of development prescribed by fate to all nations, whatever the historical cir-
cumstances in which they nd themselves’. And he shows himself capable of
manifestly, albeit gropingly, apprehending ‘singular historicities’ (to employ
Étienne Balibar’s term) – that is to say, the non-linear, non-mechanistic devel-
opment of social formations, which are to be conceived as combinations of
modes of production and differentiated according to their ‘historical envi-
ronments’ (Grundrisse, in 1857–9 and Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, in 1859). Marx is thus ultimately open to envisaging transitions
to socialism different from the ‘long, bloody calvary’ of the capitalist path –
albeit, in the Russian case, under strict conditions, including that of incorpo-
rating the positive contributions of the capitalist system in the West (draft
letters and letter to Vera Zasulich of 1881).7
These clarications, prompted by Marx’s caution and attention to com-
plexity, have all too frequently plunged Marxists into confusion (when they
have not simply ‘forgotten’ them). They should instead be regarded, in and
through the very indeterminacy of successive comparisons, as an opportunity
for reection capable of profoundly renewing Marxism so that it can remain
a way of conceiving the real development of the world and priming its revo-
lutionary transformation.
Samir Amin
The core of Samir Amin’s scholarly contribution consists in his demonstration
that capitalism as a really existing world-system is different from the capitalist
6
Marx 1981, p. 940.
7
Godelier (ed.) 1978, pp. 318–42.
mode of production on a world scale. The central question behind all his work
is why the history of capitalist expansion is identied with a global polarisation
between central and peripheral social formations. The goal of his answer is to
grasp the reality of this polarisation, immanent in capitalism and conceived as
the modern product of the law of accumulation on a world scale, in its totality –
the requisite analytical unit being the world-system – so as to integrate the
study of its laws into historical materialism.
However, while identifying with the methodological perspective of Marx-
ism, Amin sharply distances himself from various interpretations that have
long been dominant within this intellectual current. His originality consists, in
the rst instance, in his rejection of an interpretation of Marx which suggests
that capitalist expansion homogenises the world, projecting a global market
integrated in its three dimensions (commodities-capital-labour). Since imperi-
alism induces commodities and capital to transcend the space of the nation in
order to conquer the world, but immobilises labour-power by enclosing it in a
national framework, the problem posed is the global distribution of surplus-
value. The operation of the law of accumulation (or of immiseration) is to be
found not in each national sub-system, but at the level of the world-system.
Hostile to any evolutionism, Amin also rejects an economistic interpretation
of Leninism which, underestimating the gravity of the implications of polari-
sation, poses the question of transition in inadequate terms. If the capitalist
centres do not project the image of what the peripheries will one day be, and
can only be understood in their relationship to the system as a whole, the
problem for the periphery is no longer to ‘catch up’, but to build ‘a different
society’.
Underdevelopment is therefore regarded as a product of the polarising
logic of the world-system, forming the centre/periphery contrast through a
constant structural adjustment of the latter to the dictates of the capital expan-
sion of the former. It is this very logic which, in the peripheral economies,
has from the outset prevented the qualitative leap represented by the con-
stitution of auto-centred, industrial, national capitalist productive systems,
constructed by the active intervention of the national bourgeois state. In this
optic, the economies appear not as local segments of the world-system, albeit
underdeveloped (and still less as backward societies), but rather as overseas
projections of the central economies – heteronomous, dislocated branches of
the capitalist economy. In the organisation of their production, the peripheries
have been fashioned to serve the accumulation of metropolitan capital, in the

context of a productive system that has become genuinely global and which
expresses the global character of the genesis of surplus-value.
The world-system is in fact based on the capitalist mode of production,
whose nature is expressed in commodity alienation, or the pre-eminence of
generalised value, which subjugates the whole of the economy and of social,
political and ideological existence. The essential contradiction of this mode
of production, opposing capital and labour, makes capitalism a system that
creates a constant tendency to overproduction. In the framework of a model
of expanded reproduction with two departments, Amin shows that the reali-
sation of surplus-value requires an increase in real wages proportional to the
growth in labour productivity, which assumes abandoning the law of the ten-
dency for the rate of prot to fall. Whence a version of the theory of unequal
exchange – distinct from that proposed by Arghiri Emmanuel – as a transfer
of value on a world scale through a deterioration in two factorial terms of
exchange: at the centre, wages increase with productivity; at the periphery,
they do not.
Polarisation, indissociable from the operation of a system based on an
integrated world market of commodities and capital, but excluding labour
mobility, is thus dened by a differential in the remuneration of labour – infe-
rior in the periphery to what it is in the centre – of equal productivity. On
a world scale, Fordist regulation in the centre, conducted by a state enjoy-
ing real autonomy (not so much a social-democratic as a ‘social-imperialist’
regulation, given that 75 per cent of the world’s population resides in the
periphery), involves the reproduction of the unequal relationship between
centre and periphery. The absence of any regulation of the world-system thus
translates into the unfolding of the effects of the law of accumulation, with the
centre-periphery opposition being organised around the articulation between
production of means of production/production of consumer goods (which
denes the auto-centred capitalist economies) and between export of pri-
mary goods/luxury consumption (which characterises the peripheral social
formations).
Given this, polarisation cannot be abolished in the framework of the logic of
really existing capitalism. Amin regards the attempts at development imple-
mented in the periphery, in the variant forms of neocolonial liberalism (open-
ing up to the world market), and radical nationalism (modernisation in the
spirit of Bandung), as well as Sovietism (priority for industrialising industry

over agriculture), not as a challenge to globalisation, but as its continuation.8
Such experiments can only lead to the general ‘failure’ of development – the
‘success’ of a few newly industrialised countries should be interpreted as a
new, deeper form of polarisation. Amin’s critique of the concepts and prac-
tices of development is accompanied by an alternative: delinking. The latter is
dened as subjecting external relations to the logic of internal development,
via state action to select positions in the international division of labour that
are not unfavourable. What then needs to be developed is systematic action to
construct a polycentric world – the only one capable of opening up autonomous
space for the advance of a popular internationalism and making it possible to
effect a transition ‘beyond capitalism’ and to construct world socialism.
The construction of a theory of accumulation on a world scale, reintegrating
the law of value at the heart of historical materialism, also calls for a history of
social formations. Rejecting the thesis of the ‘ve stages’ and the multiplica-
tion of modes of production, Amin identies only two successive stages: com-
munal and tributary – the different ‘modes of production’ nding a place as a
variant of these categories. The social systems preceding capitalism all evince
relations that are the inverse of those which characterise capitalism (with soci-
ety dominated by the instance of power; with economic laws and exploitation
of labour that are not obscured by commodity alienation; and with ideology
necessary for the reproduction of the system that is metaphysical in character,
etc.). The internal contradictions of the communal mode of production were
resolved in the transition to the tributary mode. In tributary societies, with a
differentiated degree of organisation of power (whereby surplus extraction
was centralised by the exploiting ruling class), the same basic contradictions
were operative, preparing the transition to capitalism as the objectively nec-
essary solution. But in the peripheral forms, which are more exible, as was
the case with feudalism in Europe, the obstacles to any transition to capital-
ism offered less resistance. Hence the evolution towards a central form in the
mercantilist era by putting the political instance in the service of capital – and
hence the ‘European miracle’. Amin’s œuvre thus invites historical material-
ism to make a self-criticism of its own Eurocentrism and to full its ‘Afro-
Asian vocation’.
8
Amin and Herrera 2000, 2005.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein likewise seeks to understand the reality of this histori-
cal system that is capitalism so as to conceptualise it globally, as a whole.
Whereas Amin’s approach is explicitly an interpretation of the world-sys-
tem in terms of historical materialism, Wallerstein’s ambition is seemingly
the reverse: elements of Marxist analysis are to be integrated into a systems
approach. In reality, as Wallerstein makes clear, ‘[o]nce they are taken to be
ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves
“underdevelopment,” indeed is based on it, they [Marx’s theses] are not only
valid, but they are revolutionary as well.’9 The world-system perspective is
explained by three principles. The rst is spatial – ‘the space of a world’: the
unit of analysis to be adopted in order to study social behaviour is the world-
system. The second is temporal – ‘the time of the longue durée’: world-systems
are historical, in the form of integrated, autonomous networks of internal
economic and political processes, whose sum total ensures unity and whose
structures, while continuing to develop, basically remain the same. The
third and nal principle is analytical, in the framework of a coherent, articu-
lated vision: ‘a way of describing the capitalist world-economy’, a singular
world-system, as a systemic economic entity organising a division of labour,
but without any overarching single political structure. This is the system that
Wallerstein intends to explain not only in order to provide a structural analy-
sis of it, but also in order to anticipate its transformation. As Étienne Balibar
notes, its whole force consists in its capacity ‘to conceive the overall structure
of the system as one of generalized economy and to conceive the processes of
state formation and the policies of hegemony and class alliances as forming
the texture of that economy.10
For Wallerstein, the capitalist world-economy displays certain distinctive
features. The rst peculiarity of this social system, based on generalised value,
is its incessant, self-maintained dynamic of capital accumulation on an ever
greater scale, propelled by those who possess the means of production. Con-
trary to Braudel, for whom the world since antiquity has been divided into
several co-existing world-economies, ‘worlds for themselves’ and ‘matrices of
9
Wallerstein 1991, p. 161.
10
Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 3.
European and then global capitalism’11 according to Wallerstein, the European

is the only world-economy, constructed from the sixteenth century onwards:
around 1500, a particular world-economy, which at that time occupied a large
part of Europe, could provide a framework for the full development of the
capitalist mode of production, which requires the form of a world-economy
in order to be established. Once consolidated, and according to its own inter-
nal logic, this world-economy extended in space, integrating the surrounding
world-empires as well as the neighbouring mini-systems. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the capitalist world-economy ended up extending over
the whole planet. Thus, for the very rst time in history, there was one single
historical system.12
Explaining the division of labour within the capitalist world-system between
centre and periphery makes it possible to account for the mechanisms of sur-
plus appropriation on a world scale by the bourgeois class, through unequal
exchange realised by multiple market chains ensuring control of workers and
monopolisation of production. In this framework, the existence of a semi-
periphery is inherent in the system, whose economic-political hierarchy is
constantly being altered. The inter-state system that duplicates the capitalist
world-economy is, however, always led by a hegemonic state, whose domi-
nation, temporary and contested, has historically been imposed by means of
‘thirty-year wars’. Like those that it succeeded (the United Provinces in the
seventeenth century and England in the nineteenth century), the US hege-
mony established since 1945 will come to an end – Japan and Europe are
already asserting themselves, with more or less success, as the claimants to
the next global hegemonic cycle. Wallerstein pays minute attention both to
the cyclical rhythms (the ‘microstructure’) and the secular trends (the ‘macro-
structure’) operative in historical capitalism, which stamp it with alternating
periods of expansion and stagnation and, above all, to recurrent major crises:
historically, capitalism entered a structural crisis in the rst years of the twen-
tieth century, and will probably experience its end as a historical system dur-
ing the next century.13
11
Braudel 1985.
12
Wallerstein 1974.
13
Wallerstein 1983.
Giovanni Arrighi
Giovanni Arrighi’s contributions to the theories of the capitalist world-system
concern, among other things, reections on the origins of capitalism, on its
articulation with precapitalist modes of production, on its tight relation with
imperialism, as well as on its present crisis. Arrighi considers that capitalism’s
formation process as modern system of the world totality does not originate in
the predominent socio-economic relations within the great European national
powers (in agriculture in particular), but rather in the interstices that connected
them to one another and to other ‘worlds’, thanks to the late-thirteenth-cen-
tury Eurasian trade. Interstitial organisations have initially taken the forms of
city-states and extra- or non-territorial business networks, where huge prof-
its from long-distance trade and nance were realised. ‘World-capitalism did
not originate within, but in-between and on the outer-rim of these states [of
Europe]’.14 It is here that began the ‘endless’ accumulation of capital.
Most of the studies Arrighi devoted to colonial primitive accumulation
relate to capitalism’s penetration in Africa and to its articulation with commu-
nal modes of production. He specically analysed the effects on class struc-
tures of capitalist forms which appeared there and differentiated their paths
according to the various opportunities encountered by capital, in particular in
its demand for labour (local and migrant, unskilled or semi-skilled workers),
but also as a function of the patterns taken by this penetration (more or less
competitive, capitalistic . . .) – quite differently from what happened in Latin
America for example. Whereas, in tropical Africa, capitalism imposed itself
without formation of a proletarian class, nor even of a bourgeoisie, on the
contrary, South-African workers have been transformed into a proletariat, by
the concentration of lands and mines in the hands of European capitalist set-
tlers, and by expulsion of African peasants, impoverished in the very process
of their integration into the monetary, market economy.15 In both cases, this
capitalism is characterised by a ‘development of underdevelopment’.
Arrighi also directed his efforts towards the reformulation of a theory of
imperialism, to be adapted to present trends of capitalism.16 By resorting to the
concept of ‘hegemony’ in a long-run perspective, he proposes a periodisation
14
Arrighi 1994.
15
For example: Arrighi 1966, 1970.
16
Arrighi 1978.
of history with two criteria: that of hegemonic power and that of the specic
feature of imperialism this power tends to organise. After having achieved its
national construction and tried to dominate a space from Canada to Panama,
under the unifying principle of market, the United States have progressively
reached to organise a ‘formal imperialism’, which secured, within the frame-
work of the hierarchical order it imposed on the world-system, peace between
capitalist countries and their unity against the Soviet Union. Revealed by the
structural accumulation crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, the decline of US
hegemony has to be understood as a transitional process towards the emer-
gence of a new hegemonic power. In this way, the present period of chaos
could be interpreted as the conclusion of a systemic cycle of capitalist accu-
mulation, or the end of a fourth ‘long century’17 – after those of Genoa, the
United Provinces and England –, presenting, in spite of an increase in com-
plexity, similarities with the past cycles, such as the resurgence of nance or a
proliferation of social conicts, but also some singularities. Among the latter,
Arrighi underlines the rise of transnational rms – nancial capital, no more
identied to a single national interest, becomes transnational, emancipating
itself from both productive apparatuses and state powers –, as well as a shift
of accumulation energies away from Europe. From this context, new East-
Asian candidates to the hegemony over capitalist world-system, especially
Japan, start to emerge. The neoliberal step of globalisation tends to bring the
social formations of the centres and the peripheries closer together, connecting
active and reserve armies by exacerbating competition and reducing labour
remunerations. Therefore, workers’ movements have a future, even if their
composition and struggles have signicantly changed over the last decades.
It is thus no surprise in these conditions to see Arrighi’s powerful analytical
constructions usefully and efcectively mobilised against some of the ‘intel-
lectual fashions’ of the neoliberal era (Negri’s Empire among others).
André Gunder Frank

Paul Baran concentrated most of the empirical applications of his challenge
to the progressive role of capitalist expansion (with the stress on extracting
an economic surplus) on the Asian continent. Working in this theoretical
17
Arrighi 1994.
tradition, André Gunder Frank for his part has devoted most of his reections
to Latin America, whose reality (according to him) can only be understood by
going back to its fundamental determinant, the result of the historical devel-
opment of the contemporary structure of global capitalism: dependency. Once
the spheres of production and exchange are regarded as closely imbricated for
the valorisation and reproduction of capital in the context of a single world
process of accumulation and a single capitalist system undergoing transforma-
tion, dependency is no longer perceived simply as an external – ‘imperialist’ –
relationship between the capitalist centres and their subordinate peripheries.
It also becomes an internal – and, de facto, an ‘integral’ – phenomenon of the
dependent society itself.
The underdevelopment of the peripheral countries is therefore to be inter-
preted as an outcome inherent in the global expansion of capitalism, character-
ised by monopolistic structures in exchange and mechanisms of exploitation
in production. Frank’s position is that since the European conquests of the six-
teenth century, integration into the capitalist world-system has transformed
initially ‘undeveloped’ Latin American colonies into ‘under-developed’ social
formations, which are fundamentally capitalist because their productive and
commercial structures are tied into the logic of the world market and subor-
dinated to the pursuit of prot. The ‘development of underdevelopment’ has
its origin in the very structure of the capitalist world-system, constructed as a
hierarchical ‘chain’ of expropriation/appropriation of the economic surpluses
linking
‘the capitalist world and national metropolises to the regional centres . . . and
from these to local centres and so on to large landholders or merchants who
expropriate surplus from small peasants or tenants, and sometimes even
from these latter to landless labourers exploited by them in turn’.18
Thus, at each point in this chain, which stamps the forms of exploitation and
domination between ‘metropolises and satellites’ with a strange ‘continuity
in change’, the international, national and local capitalist world-system has,
since the sixteenth century, simultaneously issued in the development of cer-
tain zones ‘for the minority’ and underdevelopment elsewhere, ‘for the major-
18
Frank 1969, pp. 7–8.
ity’ – in those peripheral margins of which Braudel remarked that ‘human

existence there often conjures up Purgatory or even Hell’.19
The ruling classes of the satellite countries thus strive to maintain these
bonds of dependency on the capitalist metropolises, which install them in a
dominant position locally while giving them status of a ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’,
by means of voluntary state policies ‘of underdevelopment in the economic,
social and political life of the “nation” and the people of Latin America.’20
To illustrate his thesis, Frank looks to the economic history of Latin Amer-
ica, which forms an arresting contrast with that of North America, a ‘sub-
metropole’ controlling a triangular ow of trade from its modern origins.
Neither industrialisation via import substitution (embarked on after the crisis
of 1929), nor the promotion of export industries (reactivated after the Sec-
ond World War), and still less strategies for opening up to free trade (after
independence in the nineteenth century or, more recently, at the end of the
twentieth century) have enabled the Latin American countries to break the
chain of surplus extraction, effected by unequal exchange, direct foreign
investment, and international aid. For Frank, in these circumstances the only
solution to the ‘development of under-development’ for the periphery of the
capitalist world-system is socialist revolution, which is at once ‘necessary and
possible’.21
Theories of the capitalist world-system form one of the richest, most
dynamic, and most stimulating elds of research that Marxism has engaged
in in recent decades. By strengthening both the interactive links between the
economic and the political and the relations between the intra-national and
the inter-national; by reformulating the problems of the periodisation and
articulation of modes of production and of the combination of relations of
exploitation and domination, these modern analyses of capitalism have made
it possible to clarify certain theoretically and politically crucial categories,
which have long been examined within the Marxist tradition – for example,
those of class, nation, state, market, or globalisation. Marxism has manifestly
been considerably enriched in the process, renewing and establishing itself on
19
Braudel 1985.
20
Frank 1972, p. 13.
21
Frank 1981.
more solid theoretical and empirical foundations, which are at once broader
and deeper, non-historicist and non-economistic.
The signicance of these advances, which have been made in a confronta-
tion with critical Marxist economists (like Charles Bettelheim, Paul Boccara,
Robert Brenner, Maurice Dobb, Ernest Mandel, Ernesto Laclau, Paul Sweezy,
and many more), and other intellectual ‘movements’ (structuralism in par-
ticular), must be measured by the real, multifarious inuence exercised today
by the theoreticians of the capitalist world-system. It is evident in the case of
‘neo’- or ‘post’-Marxists in various domains of social science (among others,
Giovanni Arrighi or Harry Magdoff in economics, Étienne Balibar or Jacques
Bidet in philosophy, Pablo Gonzales Casanova in political science, Pierre-
Philippe Rey in anthropology, etc.), or of reformist authors (such as Osvaldo
Sukel, or Celso Furtado, in particular).
Borne along by the ground swell of national popular liberation movements
in the Third World, these theorisations, going beyond theses on imperialism
while retaining them, can ultimately only nd a favourable echo in the Latin-
American, Africa, Arab and Asian countries, which Western neo-Marxist
researchers would gain from working with, at a time when the dominant
neoclassical discourse functions like some new idealist system as a machine
for absorbing heterodox theses and subjecting reality to the necessity of the
established order.
Chapter Twelve
Liberation-Theology Marxism
Michael Löwy
In the rst instance, liberation theology is a set of

writings produced since 1971 by gures like Gus-
tavo Gutiérrez (Peru), Rubem Alves, Hugo Assman,
Carlos Mesters, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff (Bra-
zil), Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (El Salvador),
Segundo Galilea and Ronaldo Muñoz (Chile), Pablo
Richard (Chile and Costa Rica), José Miguel Bonino
and Juan Carlos Scannone (Argentina), Enrique Dus-
sel (Argentina and Mexico), and Juan-Luis Segundo
(Uruguay) – to name only some of the best known.
But this corpus of texts is the expression of a vast
social movement, which emerged at the beginning of
the 1960s, well before the new works of theology.
This movement involved considerable sectors of the
Church (priests, religious orders, bishops), lay reli-
gious movements (Catholic Action, the Christian
student movement, Christian young workers), pas-
toral committees with a popular base, labour, land
and urban pastoral committees, and ecclesiastical
base communities. Without the practice of this social
movement, which might be called a Christianity of
liberation, one cannot understand such important
social and historical phenomena in Latin America
over the last thirty years as the rise of revolution in
Central America – Nicaragua and El Salvador – or
the emergence of a new working-class and peasant
226 • Michael Löwy
movement in Brazil (the Workers’ Party, the Landless Peasants’ Movement,

etc.).1
The discovery of Marxism by progressive Christians and liberation theol-
ogy was not a purely intellectual or academic process. Its starting point was
an unavoidable social fact, a massive, brutal reality in Latin America: pov-
erty. A number of believers opted for Marxism because it seem to offer the
most systematic, coherent and comprehensive explanation of the causes of
this poverty, and because it ventured the only proposal sufciently radical
to abolish it. In order to struggle effectively against poverty, it is necessary to
understand its causes. As the Brazilian cardinal Dom Helder Câmara puts it:
As long as I was asking people to help the poor, I was called a saint.
But when I asked: why is there so much poverty?, I was treated as a
communist.
It is not easy to present an overview of liberation theology’s stance towards

Marxism. On the one hand, we nd a very great diversity of attitudes within
it, ranging from the prudent employment of a few elements to a complete syn-
thesis (for instance, in the ‘Christians for Socialism’ tendency). On the other, a
certain change has occurred between the positions of the years 1968–80, which
were more radical, and those of today, which are more reserved, following
criticisms from Rome, but also developments in Eastern Europe since 1989.
However, on the basis of the works of the most representative theologians
and certain episcopal documents, we can identify various common reference
points.2
Some Latin-American theologians (inuenced by Althusser) refer to Marx-
ism simply as a (or the) social science, to be used in strictly instrumental fashion
in order to arrive at a more profound knowledge of Latin-American reality.
Such a denition is at once too broad and too narrow. Too broad, because
Marxism is not the only social science; and too narrow, because Marxism is
not only a science: it rests upon a practical option that aims not only to under-
stand, but also to transform, the world.
In reality, the interest in Marxism displayed by liberation theologians –
many authors speak of ‘fascination’ – is wider and deeper than borrowing a
1
See Löwy 1996.
2
See Dussel 1982 and Petitdemange 1985.
Liberation-Theology Marxism • 227
few concepts for scientic purposes might lead one to believe. It also involves
the values of Marxism, its ethico-political options, and its anticipation of a
future utopia. Gustavo Gutiérrez offers the most penetrating observations,
stressing that Marxism does not conne itself to proposing a scientic analy-
sis, but is also a utopian aspiration to social change. He criticises the scientistic
vision of Althusser, who
obscures the profound unity of Marx’s oeuvre and, as a result, prevents a

proper understanding of its capacity for inspiring a revolutionary, radical
and constant praxis.3
From which Marxist sources do the liberation theologians derive inspiration?

Their knowledge of Marx’s writings varies greatly. Enrique Dussel is unques-
tionably the gure who has taken the study of Marx’s œuvre furthest, publish-
ing a series of works on it of impressive erudition and originality.4 But we also
nd direct references to Marx in Gutiérrez, the Boff brothers, Hugo Assmann,
and several others.
On the other hand, they show little interest in the Marxism of Soviet manu-
als of ‘diamat’ or of the Latin-American Communist parties. What attracts
them is rather ‘Western Marxism’ – sometimes referred to as ‘neo-Marxism’
in their documents. Ernst Bloch is the most frequently cited Marxist author in
Liberation Theology: Perspectives – Gutiérrez’s major inaugural work of 1971.
In it we also nd references to Althusser, Marcuse, Lukács, Henri Lefebvre,
Lucien Goldmann, and Ernest Mandel.5
But these European references are less important than Latin-American refer-
ence points: the Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, source of an original
Marxism that was Indo-American in inspiration; the Cuban Revolution – a
key turning-point in the history of Latin America; and, nally, the depen-
dency theory – a critique of dependent capitalism – proposed by Fernando
3
Gutierrez 1972, p. 244. It is true that since 1984, following the Vatican’s criti-
cisms, Gutierrez appears to have retreated to less exposed positions, reducing the
relationship to Marxism to an encounter between theology and the social sciences:
see Gutiérrez 1985.
4
See Dussel 1985, 1990 and 2001.
5
In the remarkable work that he has devoted to revolutionary Christianity in Latin
America, Samuel Silva Gotay lists the following Marxist authors among the references
of liberation theology: Goldmann, Garaudy, Schaff, Kolakowski, Lukács, Gramsci,
Lombardo-Radice, Luporini, Sanchez Vasquez, Mandel, Fanon, and Monthly Review:
see Silva Gotay 1985.
Henrique Cardoso, André Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos, and Anibal
Quijano (all mentioned on several occasions in Gutiérrez’s book).6
Liberation theologians – and ‘liberation Christians’ in the broad sense – do
not limit themselves to using existing Marxist sources. In the light of their
religious culture, but also their social experience, they break new ground
and reformulate certain basic themes of Marxism. In this sense, they may be
regarded as ‘neo-Marxists’ – that is to say, as innovators who offer Marxism a
new inection or novel perspectives, or make original contributions to it.
A striking example is their use, alongside the ‘classic’ terms workers or pro-
letarians, of the concept of the poor. Concern for the poor is an ancient tradition
of the Church, going back to the evangelical sources of Christianity. The Latin-
American theologians identify with this tradition, which serves as a constant
reference and inspiration. But they are profoundly at odds with the past on
a crucial point: for them, the poor are no longer essentially objects of charity,
but subjects of their own liberation. Paternalist help or aid gives way to an
attitude of solidarity with the struggle of the poor for their self-emancipation.
This is where the junction with the truly fundamental principle of Marxism,
namely, that ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by
the working classes themselves’ – is effected. This switch is perhaps the most
important political innovation, full of implications, made by the liberation
theologians with respect to the Church’s social teaching. It will also have the
greatest consequences in the domain of social praxis.
No doubt some Marxists will criticise this way of substituting a vague, emo-
tional and imprecise category (‘the poor’) for the ‘materialist’ concept of the
proletariat. In reality, the term corresponds to the Latin-American situation,
where one nds, both in the towns and the countryside, an enormous mass of
poor people – the unemployed, the semi-unemployed, seasonal workers, itin-
erant sellers, the marginalised, prostitutes, and so on – all of them excluded
from the ‘formal’ system of production. The Marxist-Christian trade unionists
of El Salvador have invented a term, which combines the components of the
oppressed and exploited population: the pobretariado (‘pooretariat’). It should
be stressed that the majority of these poor people – like, moreover, the major-
ity of the members of church base communities – are women.
6
On the use of dependency theory by the liberation theologians, See Bordini 1987,
Chapter 6 and Silva Gotay 1985, pp. 192–7.
Another distinctive aspect of liberation theology Marxism is a moral critique

of capitalism. Liberation Christianity, whose inspiration is in the rst instance
religious and ethical, displays a much more radical, intransigent and categori-
cal anticapitalism – because charged with moral repulsion – than the conti-
nent’s Communist parties, issued from the Stalinist mould, which believe in
the progressive virtues of the industrial bourgeoisie and the ‘anti-feudal’ his-
torical role of industrial (capitalist) development. An example will sufce to
illustrate this paradox. The Brazilian Communist Party explained in the reso-
lutions of its sixth congress (1967) that ‘the socialisation of the means of pro-
duction does not correspond to the current level of the contradiction between
the productive forces and the relations of production’. In other words, indus-
trial capitalism must develop the economy and modernise the country before
there can be any question of socialism. In 1973 the bishops and senior clergy
of the centre-west region of Brazil published a document entitled The Cry of
the Church, which concluded as follows:
Capitalism must be overcome. It is the greatest evil, accumulated sin, the

rotten root, the tree that produces all the fruits that we know so well:
poverty, hunger, illness, death. To this end, private ownership of the means
of production (factories, land, trade, banks) must be superseded.7
As we can see with this document – and many more issued from the emanci-
patory Christian tendency – solidarity with the poor leads to a condemnation
of capitalism and therewith to the desire for socialism.
As a result of the ethical radicalism of their anticapitalism, Christian social-
ists have often proved more sensitive to the social catastrophes created by
‘really existing modernity’ in Latin America and by the logic of the ‘devel-
opment of underdevelopment’ (to use André Gunder Frank’s well-known
expression) than many Marxists, enmeshed in a purely economic ‘develop-
mentalist’ logic. For example, the ‘orthodox’ Marxist ethnologist Otavio Guil-
herme Velho has severely criticised the Brazilian progressivist Church for
‘regarding capitalism as an absolute evil’ and opposing the capitalist trans-
formation of agriculture, which is a vector of progress, in the name of the
precapitalist traditions and ideologies of the peasantry.8
7
Obispos Latinamericanos 1978, p. 71.
8
See Velho 1982, pp. 125–6.
Since the end of the 1970s, another theme has played an increasing role in
the Marxist reection of some Christian thinkers: the elective afnity between
the Biblical struggle against idols and the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism.
The articulation of the two in liberation theology has been facilitated by the
fact that Marx himself often use Biblical images and concepts in his critique
of capitalism.
Baal, the Golden Calf, Mammon, Moloch – these are some of the ‘theological
metaphors’ of which Marx makes ample use in Capital and other economic
writings, in order to denounce the spirit of capitalism as an idolatry of money,
commodities, prot, the market or capital itself, in a language directly inspired
by the Old-Testament prophets. The stock exchange is often referred to as the
‘Temple of Baal’ or ‘Mammon’. The most important concept of the Marxist
critique of capitalism is itself a ‘theological metaphor’, referring to idolatry:
fetishism.
These ‘theologico-metaphorical’ moments – and other similar ones – in the
Marxist critique of capitalism are familiar to several liberation theologians,
who do not hesitate to refer to them in their writings. Detailed analysis of
such ‘metaphors’ can be found in Enrique Dussel’s 1993 book – a detailed
philosophical study of the Marxist theory of fetishism from the standpoint of
liberation Christianity.9
The critique of the system of economic and social domination in Latin
America as a form of idolatry was sketched for the rst time in a collection of
texts by the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI) of San José in
Costa Rica, published under the title The War of Gods: The Idols of Oppression
and the Search for the Liberating God, which had considerable resonance. Pub-
lished in 1980, it was translated into seven languages. The viewpoint common
to the ve authors – H. Assmann, F. Hinkelammert, J. Pixley, P. Richard and
J. Sobrino – is set out in an introduction. It involves a decisive break with the
conservative, retrograde tradition of the Church, which for two centuries pre-
sented ‘atheism’ – of which Marxism was the modern form – as Christianity’s
arch-enemy:
The key question today in Latin America is not atheism, the ontological
problem of the existence of God. . . . The key question is idolatry, the adulation
9
See Dussel 1993.
of the false gods of the system of domination. . . . Each system of domination

is characterized precisely by the fact that it creates gods and idols who
sanctify oppression and hostility to life. . . . The search for the true God in
this war of gods leads us to a vision of things directed against idolatry,
rejecting the false divinities, the fetishes that kill and their religious weapons
of death. Faith in the liberating God, the one who unveils his face and secret
in the struggle of the poor against oppression, is necessarily fullled in the
negation of false divinities. . . . Faith is turning against idolatry.10
This problematic was the subject of a profound and innovative analysis in the
remarkable co-authored book by Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert,
Market Idolatry: An Essay on Economics and Theology (1989). This important con-
tribution is the rst in the history of liberation theology explicitly dedicated
to the struggle against the capitalist system dened as idolatry. The Church’s
social teaching had invariably only practiced an ethical critique of ‘liberal’ (or
capitalist) economics. As Assmann stresses, a specically theological critique
is also required – one that reveals capitalism to be a false religion. What does
the essence of market idolatry consist in? According to Assmann, the capital-
ist ‘economic religion’ manifests itself in the implicit theology of the economic
paradigm itself and in everyday fetishistic devotional practice. The explicitly
religious concepts to be found in the literature of ‘market Christianity’ – for
example, in the speeches of Ronald Reagan, the writings of neoconservative
religious currents, or the works of ‘enterprise theologians’ such as Michael
Novack – do not merely possess a complementary function. Market theol-
ogy, from Malthus to the latest document from the World Bank, is a ferocious
sacricial theology: it requires the poor to offer up their lives on the altar of
economic idols.
For his part, Hinkelammert analises the new theology of the American
Empire of the 1970s and 1980s, strongly permeated by religious fundamental-
ism. Its god is nothing other than the ‘transcendentalized personication of
the laws of the market’ and worship of him replaces compassion by sacrice.
The deication of the market creates a god of money, whose sacred motto is
inscribed on every dollar bill: In God We Trust.11
10
Assmann et al. 1980, p. 9.
11
See Assmann and Hinkelammert 1989, pp. 105, 254, 321.
The research of Costa Rica’s DEI has inuenced socially engaged Chris-
tians and inspired a new generation of liberation theologians. For example,
the young Brazilian (Korean in origin) Jung Mo Sung, who in his book The
Idolatry of Capital and the Death of the Poor (1980), develops a penetrating ethico-
religious critique of the international capitalist system, whose institutions –
like the IMF or World Bank – condemn millions of poor people in the Third
World to sacrice their lives on the altar of the ‘global market’ god through
the implacable logic of external debt. Obviously, as Sung stresses in his lat-
est book Theology and Economics (1994), in contrast to ancient idolatry, we are
dealing not with a visible altar, but with a system that demands human sac-
rices in the name of seemingly non-religious, profane, ‘scientic’, ‘objective’
imperatives.
What do the Marxist critique and the liberation-Christian critique of mar-
ket idolatry have in common and where do they differ? In my view, we can-
not nd an atheism in Christianity (contrary to what Ernst Bloch thought), or
an implicit theology in Marx, contrary to what is suggested by the brilliant
theologian and Marxologist Enrique Dussel.12 Theological metaphors, like
the concept of ‘fetishism’, are used by Marx as instruments for a scientic
analysis, whereas, in liberation Christianity, they have a properly religious
signicance. What the two share is a moral ethos, a prophetic revolt, humanist
indignation against the idolatry of the market and – even more important –
solidarity with its victims.
For Marx, critique of the fetishistic worship of commodities was a critique of
capitalist alienation from the standpoint of the proletariat and the exploited –
but also revolutionary – classes. For liberation theology, it involves a strug-
gle between the true God of Life and the false idols of death. But both take
a stand for living labour against reication; for the life of the poor and the
oppressed against the alienated power of dead things. And above all, Marxist
non-believers and committed Christians alike wager on the social self-eman-
cipation of the exploited.
12
See Bloch 1978 and Dussel 1993, p. 153.
Chapter Thirteen
Market Socialism: Problems and Models
Tony Andréani
Are socialism and the market incompatible?

Market socialism has long been regarded as a contra-
diction in terms. If, so as to avoid getting involved in
a theoretical debate about the concept of socialism,
we accept with Weisskopf1 that a socialist society is
characterised by an impulse towards social equal-
ity, genuine democracy, communal ties, and greater
social rationality, then the market seems of neces-
sity to foil it. It creates inequalities, makes economic
democracy difcult, even impracticable (especially
when private property becomes capitalist), secretes
individualistic behaviour, and renders produc-
tion ‘opaque’ (through the price ‘mechanism’) and
‘anarchic’ (by virtue of its decentralised structure).
Despite the failure, and then collapse, of the Soviet
system and ‘real socialism’, which intended – at least
in principle – to meet these objectives, there are still
authors today who maintain that socialism and the
market are incompatible, whether they completely
reject the market and propose to replace it by radi-
cal democratisation and the planning of needs,2 or
accept it in a very partial and temporary fashion,
1
See Weisskopf 1993, p. 121.
2
See Ticktin 1998.
234 • Tony Andréani
while emphasising its corrosive aspects. Contrariwise, some supporters of

market socialism regard the market as an irreplaceable and probably untran-
scendable structure. And, while they acknowledge its defects, they think that
it can be reconciled with public or social-property forms conducive to equal-
ity and democracy, and with regulation that makes it possible to at least limit
its most harmful and perverse effects.
I do not intend here to go into the details of this vast debate, which would
take up all the space allotted to me, but will instead briey refer to the histori-
cal experiences that can be categorised under the rubric of ‘market socialism’,
and then focus on a few models, which will give an idea of the problems that
arise and of attempted solutions to them. I shall merely indicate that, to my
mind, socialism needs to be distinguished from a certain utopian vision of
communism as a society of abundance where work has disappeared; a society
of individuals in perfect solidarity; a society in which calculation is carried
out exclusively in terms of use-values; a society that evaluates and plan needs
a priori; a society with a planned distribution of products, with an impera-
tive planning of output, and with a ‘fully developed democracy’ at the cen-
tral level; and, nally, a vision of revolution that can only be global in scope.
But this in no way precludes reecting on a feasible communism, resting on
different bases (decentralisation and incentive planning; producer autonomy
and the realisation of common objectives; competition and co-operation; indi-
vidual freedom and community; private goods and social goods; evaluation in
value terms and price movements; economic democracy and central democ-
racy – in short, a reconciliation of opposites), which remains the end goal of
socialism. I will add that reading Marx in no way contradicts the idea that
market socialism is a necessary transition.3
I hope readers will forgive me for skipping this vast debate. I believe that at
present the only real alternative to the new capitalism consists in some form
of market socialism; and that the main thing is to nd answers to the inter-
nal obstacles which the historical experience of socialism has revealed and to
assess the responses to them which the ‘models’ seek to provide. In fact, there
exists a considerable literature, Anglo-American for the most part, which is
ignored or unknown in France, of which this text aims to provide at least a
brief survey.
3
See the, to my mind, largely convincing Lawler 1998.
Market Socialism • 235
The theoretical framework

On a theoretical level, market socialism goes back a long way, since its two
main founders offered suggestive sketches of it in 1938 (Lange) and 1946
(Lerner). Their work has given rise to a very important academic debate,
which liberals did not disdain to participate in at the time, particularly Hayek.
There is a paradox here, because these original models of market socialism,
constructed on the basis of neoclassical theory, provided the best possible
illustration of a system capable of realising Walrasian equilibrium and, later,
the famous Arrow-Debreu model of general equilibrium. State committees
were, in effect, best placed to realise supply and demand equilibria, through
price determinations.4 Neoclassical economists have, in fact, had to demon-
strate that it was precisely market imperfections which accounted for the
superiority of the system of private ownership and price determination by
a multiplicity of mechanisms that socialism was ill-placed to employ. Thus,
Stiglitz (subsequently chief economist at the World Bank) explained that, in
the absence of futures markets, incentives are required to pursue the reliable
information which permits risk-taking (bound up in particular with innova-
tion); that the necessary separation between ownership and management (in
place of the single gure of the entrepreneur) dictates control over manag-
ers to prevent them abusing their power over information; and that mecha-
nisms other than price movements exist to inform agents, such as ‘reputation’,
‘contracts’, or ‘negotiation’.5 Private ownership is superior because it sup-
plies proper incentives, proper means of control, and proper procedures for
organising exchange. Private owners of capital in fact only pursue protabil-
ity for their capital and, to that end, are determined to control managers, to
4
In Lange’s model, the central planning ofce announces, as Walrasian auction-
eer, a set of prices for production goods. As in the model of perfect competition, the
managers of public enterprises regard these prices as givens and take their decisions
in such a way as to maximise their prot rate (equalisation of the price to the mar-
ginal cost), while consumers seek to maximise their utility and workers the income
from their labour. On the basis of the information supplied by entrepreneurs about
the variations in their stock, reecting the relations between supply and demand, the
ofce announces a new series of prices for production goods and the process continues
until equilibrium is achieved for all goods. Lange maintained that this procedure of
trial and error would function much better than the competitive market, because the
planning ofce would have a broader knowledge of what occurs in the economy as a
whole than private entrepreneurs. Prots are then distributed by the state to workers
in accordance with democratically determined criteria.
5
See Stiglitz 1993.
incentivise them effectively, and to look out for all opportunities for prot,
whereas the state is more indulgent towards its agents, has preoccupations
other than maximising the prot rate, and is always ready to moderate com-
petition that ultimately obtains only between rms. More generally, neo-insti-
tutionalist theories of the rm,6 which all stress market weaknesses and costs,
likewise attempt to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism; and they will
be closely attended to by theoreticians of market socialism. As we can see, the
debate on market socialism has assumed a new dimension since the initial
works. But it has not enclosed itself in the conceptual framework inherited
from the neoclassical approach.
Without neglecting the contributions of the latter, other currents have
worked in the framework of the Marxist paradigm, while borrowing from
Keynesianism. For some authors, this involves adopting the Langian idea of
ex ante planning, making it possible to carry out a more rational calculation
than the market and to achieve mastery of the economic and social process,
in contrast to the anarchy and crises bound up with the commodity economy.
But the price mechanism would be preserved as an indicator of supply and
demand relations, while planning would be conducted democratically, from
the bottom up: a dual difference with the Soviet system. Albert and Hahnel
thus propose a highly decentralised form of planning, resting on forms of
democracy at the base, with workers’ councils and consumers’ councils real-
ising equilibrium via a mechanism of price signals.7 Devine, in his model of
participatory planning, where rms are owned by their workers, but also by
their clients, suppliers and representatives of local communities and of the
planning committee, likewise proposes a form of calculation based on physi-
cal measurements (workforce, stock inventory) and market indicators (orders,
protability).8 Cockshott and Cottrell go further: they believe that thanks to
second-generation computers, it is possible to calculate the labour value of
products and to adjust prices to them over the long term.9 I shall not go into
the details of these models, which open up some interesting paths. But I will
6
This mainly involves the theory of transaction costs (Williamson), the theory
of property rights (Alchian and Demetz), and the theory of agency ( Jensen and
Meckling).
7
See Albert and Hahnel 1991.
8
See Devine 1988.
9
See Cockshott and Cottrell 1993.
say that, in my view, they encounter some very strong objections as to their
feasibility. The rst is that the democratic procedures they suggest would be
very costly socially and too burdensome for individuals, who would rapidly
become abstentionists. The second is that calculation of the labour values in
the model of Cockshott and Cottrell still appears unobtainable, when one
considers the complexity of products. The third is that even this calculation
necessarily diverges from prices as long as interest is paid on the capital made
available. It seems extremely difcult to dispense with credit at interest if one
wishes to encourage producers to economise resources and make efcient use
of investment (the Soviet system offers a contrario proof of this). Consequently,
it is labour values that can serve as indicators, signalling to the planning bod-
ies what it costs society in terms of labour expenditure to produce some par-
ticular good. That is why, along with most authors, I think that planning can
only take the form of incentive planning, guiding price formation more than
it anticipates it. I shall return to this.
As we shall see, different approaches have led to very different models. In
addition, treatment of the problems is uneven. Thus, some models remain
centred on the most efcient allocation of resources and the motivation of
agents, neglecting (as Devine emphasises),10 another dimension of economic
efciency: the discovery of opportunities and the mobilisation of ‘tacit’
knowledge.
A glance at history
Historically, market socialism made some timid appearances in the Soviet sys-
tem, mainly in the form of a revaluation of the criterion for prot rates – some-
thing that did not have much sense in an economy that was only minimally
a market one and which was non-competitive.11 It was then experimented
with more systematically in certain of the Eastern-bloc countries, especially
Hungary and Poland from the 1970s onwards, and then – very briey – in the
USSR during the Gorbachev period. Now, it must be said that none of these
experiments was successful. By reintroducing market relations between rms
10
See Devine 1988.
11
There did indeed exist a kind of informal ‘administrative’ competition, but it
prevented any true prices.
as well a degree of competition, they reduced some shortages, especially in

the consumer-goods sector. But they did not check the decline of the ‘social-
ist’ economies and even generated new problems at the macro-economic level
(ination, public decits, trade or balance of payments decits). It might be
thought that this failure can be explained by the problems arising from the
transition from a command economy to a market economy; by the fact that
the reforms were carried out too hesitantly and did not go far enough; by the
fact that the party-state in power was utterly unwilling to let go of the levers
of control; by the absence, if not of a multi-party system, then at least of a
genuine public debate on these issues; and, nally, by the fact that the reforms
came too late, at a time when the régime was discredited and the population,
tired of experiments, preferred to resort to the alluring recipes of a capitalism
that it imagined differently. All these reasons must certainly be taken into
account, but they are insufcient to explain the failure. A different historical
experiment in market socialism was conducted in Yugoslavia. It was very
distinct, because it was based on self-management principles and gave full
rein to the market, except as regards the capital market. It yielded excellent
results, but it too ended in failure, the reasons for which were not exclusively
extra-economic. The only exception is China, followed by Vietnam, although
it is too soon to be sure, since the transition to a market socialism is under-
way there. It is nevertheless important to examine how this relative success is
bound up with the fact that the Chinese way differs signicantly from what
was done, for example, in Hungary.
The other experiment in market socialism – but was it not in many respect a
state capitalism? – took place very partially in some Western countries, includ-
ing France. And in a way it conrms, at least in part, the negative or pessimis-
tic diagnosis that has been made – sometimes in good faith – of state-market
socialism. If we set aside the particular case of public enterprises delivering
public services, such enterprises in the competitive sector have frequently been
less dynamic than those in the private sector, in strictly economic terms.
I shall not dwell here on the positive aspects of these socialisms. Such
aspects should not be forgotten and they explain the regret, even nostalgia,
felt by large sections of the populations of the ex-socialist countries which,
without understanding what was happening to them, were cast – sometimes
with extreme brutality – into the transition to a capitalist market economy.
They also explain the attachment to their public services often displayed by
citizens in the Western countries. It is more important to investigate the rea-

sons for these failures. Thus, we can summarise some of the main problems,
and main defects, experienced by state socialism, setting aside the diversity of
the countries and historical circumstances.
The problems to be resolved

The rst problem is the allocation of capital. The initial difculty here is that the
state, sole owner of enterprises and sole shareholder in each enterprise, does
not always allocate capital according to a criterion of ‘economic’ protability.
It is thus often criticised for being lax, or sometimes for being too stringent, as
regards nancial protability (return on capital). Whereas, on capital markets,
private shareholders penalise low protability by selling their shares, and
respond to good prospects for protability by buying them, the state does not
sell itself its own property titles. So this is to criticise it for not behaving like
a capitalist. But economic protability could only consist in claiming a remu-
neration for its own capital similar to that of borrowed capital (determined
by the market in loan capital, just like the remuneration of social shares in co-
operatives, which cannot exceed the average yield of bonds), in which case the
state would behave as a simple lender, taking only a xed share of prots (in
the form of dividends and capital increases). Why is this not most commonly
the case? And why does it not allocate capital between its enterprises by itself
proceeding to a valuation? Why does it not punish them directly, without tak-
ing the detour of the market and share prices on the stock market?
We thus come to a broader difculty: rather than behaving as an economic
agent, as a real owner (in the name of society), the state plays a multiplic-
ity of roles. (1) It uses a percentage of the prots of enterprises (dividends)
for general policy ends – covering decits, administrative expenses, military
expenditure, and so on – rather than simply subjecting its enterprises to taxes
like all other enterprises. (2) It assigns its enterprises ‘social’ objectives from
without, which can come into conict with their pursuit of protability (nan-
cial or simply ‘economic’): for example, job protection or increased wages.
(3) It favours a public enterprise with cheap credit and by rescheduling or
postponing debt, via public banks, if it considers the enterprise to have a stra-
tegic function – and this at the expense of other public or private enterprises.
It thereby deprives itself of the means with which to assess their competitive
position. (4) It intervenes in the last resort, when the enterprise is loss-making,
with aid, grants, or recapitalisation, at the expense of other public enterprises,
which also need capital. (5) It is more sensitive to the pressure exercised by
the wage-earners in a public enterprise than in private enterprises. These
arguments are among those invoked in favour of privatisation.12
A second problem concerns the motivation of agents. Analysis has above all
focused on the relationship between the state and managers. In fact, the state
has an ambiguous relationship with the directors of public enterprises, because
they are civil servants assigned to these duties, and not specialists recruited
on the labour market in managers. This problem has been studied at length in
the economic literature under the rubric of the principal/agent relationship,
borrowed from the theory of ‘agency’. The core of this theory consists in the
notion of an asymmetry of information. An owner who appoints an agent to
take care of her interests is faced with someone who possesses information
and is concerned in the rst instance with her own interests (remuneration,
reputation, good relations with subordinates, etc.). She must therefore keep
a constant eye on her and, in order to do this, regularly demand accounts
(above all, his nancial results). At the same time, she must motivate her by
means of powerful incentives (good treatment, distribution of stock options).
Now, the state (so it is said) is a bad supervisor, because it cannot re one
of its servants like any other wage-earner; and a bad incentiviser, because it
cannot reward her too highly, since that would risk upsetting its other senior
servants, not to mention ordinary wage-earners. For her part, the state man-
ager is aware that she runs no great personal risk, is above all concerned to
earn his minister’s high opinion by meeting her objectives, rather than those
of the enterprise, and knows that, in the event of poor management, the state
will be held responsible and will come to the rescue. How are managers to
be disciplined? This is the question that obsesses the theoreticians of state
market socialism. And the collusion noted between the political authorities
and the directors of state enterprises, both during the reforms carried out in
the ex-socialist countries and in the public sector in Western countries, tends
to vindicate them.
12
Although capitalist enterprise do not forego recourse to state aid!
This set of problems has been referred to by the Hungarian economist Janos
Kornai in a phrase that has been very widely remarked – ‘soft budgetary con-
straints’.13 These are supposedly inevitable when the state is investor, insurer,
and creditor of last resort. The same economist has concluded that private
ownership alone is capable of exercising hard budgetary constraints, ensur-
ing success in economic competition and stimulating the economy, without
yielding when faced with the imperatives of ‘creative destruction’. Market
socialism was manifestly condemned to relative inefciency, dooming it to
extinction in the natural selection of economic systems.
But the problem of motivation cannot be restricted to the issue of budget-
ary constraints. It is also necessary for workers to nd meaning and interest
in their work and to be rewarded for their efforts. This is a crucial question.
For, as supporters of industrial democracy (from various forms of participa-
tion to self-management) stress, this is where the main source of socialism’s
superiority, including as regards efciency, might lie.
The third problem involves entrepreneurial spirit and the active pursuit of inno-
vation. Here again, historical market socialism has proven highly awed. The
state as owner (1) is reluctant to take risks, even though it has all the neces-
sary resources for taking them, in particular because it fears not being able
to halt a project if it turns out to be a bad one; (2) does not encourage inno-
vation, because it is insufciently motivated by nancial gain and takes too
long to make decisions; (3) does not encourage enterprise creation, so as not
to create problems for those enterprises that already exist. These are so many
arguments that once again militate in favour of private ownership and even
capitalist ownership (for, as we shall see, co-operatives are bad at resolving
the problems).
The fourth problem is that of planning: how can it be combined with an
economy in which enterprises are autonomous and concerned with their own
interests? How can material shape be given to something that remains a basic
ambition of socialism, and which is opposed to the blind operation of capital-
ism, even to the social absurdities to which the latter leads today?
13
See Kornai 1980.
Models geared towards the maximisation and egalitarian

distribution of prot
I shall rst of all examine a set of models that attempt to respond to these
questions, but, in my view, incompletely and in accordance with a logic that
remains close to that of capitalism – while presenting, in appearance at least,
the advantage of greater historical feasibility.
Just as Oskar Lange proposed that the plan imitate the market, for these
authors the task is to hit upon institutions that imitate private property, the
capital market, and the market in managers, while maintaining state or at
least ‘public’ ownership of state assets (through a system of ‘coupons’), in
such a way as to ensure more equality than in the capitalist system and to deal
with a certain number of ills of capitalism at the macro-economic level (unem-
ployment, recurrent crises, ‘public harms’, etc.), by ensuring public control
over investment – which is where the market proves defective (for want of
future markets).
The main problem with which these authors are concerned, in the light of
the defects of the Soviet system, is therefore efciency in allocating ‘factors
of production’. The maximisation of the prot rate seems to them the means
par excellence of optimisation. As for incentives for agents, they are highly
sceptical about the virtues of self-management: in addition to problems with
decision-making, they criticise the laxity of the associated workers as regards
investment and restructuring. This is why the traditional hierarchical system,
with some amendments, seems to them to represent a better guarantee of ef-
ciency. It remains to motivate and supervise managers. As in the capitalist
economy, this is the role of the owners, but the ownership is to be social. Two
main routes have been explored. The rst consists in public ownership. How-
ever, since such ownership is to be released from political intervention by
the state, it is the public enterprises that supervise themselves, by means of a
mechanism of interlocking interests, with each enterprise nding it benecial
to watch over the protability of the other’s capital (here, inspiration is derived
from the Japanese and German models, which have proved themselves, albeit
in the context of a private capitalism). The second route is ownership by the
public, the idea for which derives both from the distribution of coupons in the
ex-socialist countries during denationalisation and the distribution of shares
to wage-earners in contemporary capitalism or of ‘popular’ share-owning by
means of investment funds and pension funds.
I shall rst of all present the model that Pranab Bardhan has proposed, tak-
ing the rst route.14 John Roemer offers the following summary of it:
. . . rms belong to groups, each associated with a main bank, whose job
is to monitor the rms in its group and arrange loan consortia for them.
There would be a very limited stock market. Banks would own shares of
rms, and each rm in a group would own some shares of the other rms
in its group as well. The board of directors of a rm would consist of
representatives of the main bank and of the other rms who hold its shares.
The bank’s prots (including its share of rms’ prots in its group) would
return in large part to the government, to be spent on public goods, health
services, education, and so on: this would constitute one part of a citizen’s
consumption of social prots. In addition, each rm would receive dividends
from its shares of other rms in its group, and these would be distributed
to its workers, constituting the second part of the social dividend. Because
a citizen’s income would come in part from the prots of other rms in her
keiretsu, she would have an interest in requiring those rms to maximize
prots, an interest that would be looked after by her rm’s representatives
on the boards of directors of the other rms. . . . If [rms] started performing
badly, [the other rms] would be able to sell their stock . . . to the main bank,
who would have an obligation to buy it. This would put pressure on the
bank to discipline [the rm’s] management.15
I shall next set out in summary form the model that Roemer has presented,
pursuing the second route, in an article and then in a book entitled A Future
for Socialism.16 Enterprises would be nationalised. ‘Clamshells’ would be
distributed in equal quantities to all citizens, who would convert them into
shares in the enterprises of their choice and would receive the dividends until
their death, when they would revert to the state. However, in order to pre-
vent the least well-off among them selling their shares to other people, who
would thereby become large property-owners – this is what happened in the
ex-USSR and the other Eastern countries – individuals could only exchange
their shares (at the price of the clamshells) for different shares, not for money.
This would impel them to keep an eye on the yield of their shares, if not doing
14
See Bardhan 1993.
15
Roemer 1992, p. 269.
16
See Roemer 1992 and 1994.
it themselves, then at least entrusting the task to managers, even by changing

managers. Since shares would not be a way of raising capital, nancing would
derive from credit. It would be provided by public banks that could not trans-
form themselves into merchant banks – that is to say, acquire an interest in the
capital of non-nancial or nancial institutions. Institutional arrangements
would make the public banks independent of the state, but their prots would
largely ow to the Treasury. The banks would oversee the enterprises, the
movement of the clamshells providing them with information about the qual-
ity of their management. As for the management of the enterprises, it would
be appointed by their boards of directors, which would include representa-
tives of fund managers, of enterprises supplying credit, and of employees.
This would ensure good incentives. Moreover, capitalist enterprises would be
authorised, in order to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit. However, when
they reached a certain size, they would be nationalised and their shares dis-
tributed to the public. Finally, the plan would act on investment by indirect
means – mainly by manipulating interest rates.
There is no doubt that these models, supposing they were viable and met
with the popular support required for their implementation, would differ
appreciably from contemporary capitalism. But can we speak of socialism?
Are we not instead dealing with a state capitalism or a ‘popular’ capitalism?
Many arguments lead in this direction.
Marx’s whole endeavour was to show that capital is a social relation, the
gure of the capitalist playing a comparatively secondary role. The purpose of
capitalism is to valorise a money-capital involved in a process of production,
marketing, or credit (today, we would have to say more broadly: nance), by
employing all possible means to obtain the optimal return. In terms of mod-
ern accountancy, this means ensuring the nancial protability of one’s own
capital (as opposed to borrowed capital which, once lent, no longer disposes
of means of action). In the models that I have just considered, it is indeed the
principle of shareholder value that prevails.
In contrast, I would argue that the purpose of socialism is to maximise the
income not of capital, but of labour, once not only the costs of exploitation
but also nancial (and exceptional) costs have been deducted. In this light,
it is clear that the models of market socialism rest on a capitalist foundation.
However, what the market socialists would doubtless reply is that this is of
little importance once the income derived from capital reverts to the workers
either via the state that represents them all, or through the more or less equal
distribution of these incomes. Workers, it will be said, cannot exploit them-
selves. For several reasons, this is false.
This accounting vision, centred on distribution, misunderstands what the
relations of production in the strict sense are (within what Marx calls the
immediate process of production). Maximising capital revenues comes down
to always increasing their share with respect to that of the direct income of
labour or, if one wishes, their share in value added. Workers in the work col-
lective then always work for someone other than themselves, be it the state,
or other wage-earners, or the population as a whole, of which they certainly
form part, but in an abstract and remote fashion (as when they pay taxes).
They only really wear two hats – as workers and property-owners – in co-
operatives. Consequently, it is the whole set of capitalist relations of produc-
tion that is set in motion.
In order to increase capital incomes, workers must be compelled to pro-
duce by all the means that capitalism has employed: the prolongation and
intensication of work; the use of methods directed more towards intensity
than productivity (in Marx’s sense); performance-related or merit pay; creat-
ing internal competition; and so on. Even if the workers elected their own
directors, they could only give those directors their mandate to satisfy share-
holders, who never coincide with them. Otherwise, they would run the risk
of seeing the share-holders withdraw their capital and put their enterprise
in danger. They would thus become heteronomous workers, not having the
choice, for example, of foregoing additional pay in order to increase their free
time or improve their working conditions.
Naturally, the situation is worse if they do not choose their directors, but
have them imposed by the proprietor-state, or by other public rms, or by
the managers of ‘popular’ assets. They nd themselves wholly subject to the
exigencies of exploitation, counter-balanced only by possible counter-powers
(workforce representatives, trade unions, works councils).
In addition, it is clear that the intermediaries between the citizen-owners
and the workers are going to prot from the power they possess to appropri-
ate the largest possible share of the surplus-value that has been produced,
either in the form of high salaries, even of bloated personnel, for the political
authorities and public administrators – without even counting the possible
diversion of a percentage of the dividends to the state budget – or in the form
of high salaries for the managers of the wage-earners’ assets. Here, extortion
turns into literal exploitation.
Finally, the whole system remains dominated at the level of representations
by what Marx calls the ‘capital form’ and its double, the ‘wage form’. In the
eyes of the actors, capital is the vector of value, money naturally and spon-
taneously makes more money, and wages are nothing more than the price
of the factor of labour, a commodity like any other. The whole economy is
immersed in the ‘enchanted world’ of these representations. Here, I pass over
the work of legitimation that will inevitably come (in the name of efciency)
to reinforce this spontaneous ideology and obscure what it might still allow
to emerge.
This is why, to go to the heart of the matter, these models of ‘market’ social-
ism pertain more to a popular capitalism than to socialism. But, in addition,
they make far too many allowances for the market. If (as I believe to be the
case) certain market mechanisms must be allowed to operate for a long time,
and possibly forever, it is also necessary to reduce their eld of operation and
counter their negative effects by contrary mechanisms.
I am not going to examine these models, from which there are certainly
ideas to be drawn, any further. I shall therefore simply say that, constructed
in accordance with the same criteria and the same instruments of efciency as
those of the capitalist system, they run the risk of not matching it, for a benet
that remains decidedly limited (a little more distributive equality), but not
more democracy or community of enterprise. As regards hard budgetary con-
straints, nothing will replace the ferocious competition that private capitals in
pursuit of the highest gains can engage in.
In addition, these models leave the problems of motivating workers in the
performance of their tasks and mobilising collective knowledge virtually
untouched.
Self-management models
Socialisms of the self-management variety represent a much more profound
break with the capitalist system, for two basic reasons: they no longer aim at
capital protability, but at maximising labour incomes (or per capita income);
and they are based on industrial democracy.
The objection often directed against self-management is that it leads work-

ers to look after their ‘own interests’ in the rst instance. This cannot be
denied, but we need to look at all its positive aspects, which seem to me unde-
niable. A collective of workers must ‘see the point of its acts’ and, in particu-
lar, know if it is performing socially useful work (which is not a particularly
selsh, material motivation). Very often, people only see the negative side
of market sanctions, which (it is true) are very useful (they penalise wasted
effort, poorly directed effort, bad management, etc.). But market sanctions
also rewards work that is well done, inventive, well-organised, carried out
at the lowest cost for the consumer (whether a rm or private individual).
Now, self-management is the only system in a position to make workers fully
responsible in this respect. In the second place, it is good that workers should
also receive material compensation for their work, for they would nd it com-
pletely unjust if they did not (we remember, for example, the complaints of
Soviet workers on this score). Certainly, there are all sorts of other reasons
for the success of an enterprise apart from the effort of its members. But it is
impossible to see how material incentives could be wholly dispensed with.
Self-management models offer a solution to some of the problems encoun-
tered by models of state socialism. To the extent that enterprises are autono-
mous from the state, they are no longer subject to its multiple interference,
which disrupts economic calculation and distorts the competitive mechanism.
And, as the directors are elected, they nd themselves under the supervi-
sion of workers, which a priori resolves the problem of the principal/agent,
although in practice thing are much more complicated (all concrete experi-
ence indicates that democracy can remain largely formal). The involvement of
workers also encourages the mobilisation of knowledge. On the other hand,
the problem of capital allocation once again raises major difculties, which
the model seek to resolve in various ways.
These difculties are highlighted by co-operatives and suggest going beyond
a socialism based (to be brief) on a co-operative system combined with cen-
tral planning – the direction in which Marx set out. Co-operatives represent a
decentralised mode of allocating capital. But historical experience shows that
they are bad at resolving the problem of their nancing. They cannot call upon
external capital, because they would have to share control over management
with it, which would be contrary to the self-management principle. Not being
able to apply to nancial markets, they must resort either to self-nancing or
credit. Now, self-nancing presents a certain number of drawbacks, because

workers are hesitant to invest in their own enterprise, not so much as a result
of a lack of foresight that leads them to privilege their immediate income,
as because their contributions in capital are necessary unequal (they do not
stay in the enterprise for the same amount of time), badly remunerated (on
account of the existence of reserves that cannot be shared out), and risky. This
often entails a tendency to under-investment, conrmed by empirical stud-
ies, which might go further in explaining the stagnation of the sector than
the existence of an unfavourable capitalist environment. As for credit, it is
difcult to obtain, in particular because of limited funds and their non-liquid
character.
Self-management socialisms are also threatened by other sources of inef-
ciency, such as a tendency to guarantee job stability more than job mobility
(reluctance to hire, since it is necessary to expand the distribution of income,
and reluctance to re, when it is necessary to part company with associates);
or slow decision-making. But it is easy to show that these drawbacks have
their compensations and it must be reiterated that self-management (‘work-
ing for oneself’, sharing in decisions) brings with it powerful motivations that
are well-nigh absent from capitalism and other forms of socialism. The prob-
lem of nancing and capital allocation remains its Achilles heel.
Finally, self-management socialism, while it encourages equality and com-
munity within the enterprise, can generate signicant inequalities on account
of the difference in results between enterprises. These are not necessarily
bound up with the labour performed or the effort at internal savings, and in
the absence of a centralised form of prot distribution can only be corrected
by regulating the labour market and by traditional forms of redistribution.
The different models are so many attempts to face up to these problems –
primarily that of nancing. We may roughly distinguish between two types
of model: those that resort to a market in property titles and those that only
resort to a credit market.
Thus, in the rst category, Sertel proposes to introduce a market in partner-
ship rights.17 For his part, Estrin imagines an economy in which co-operatives
would rent capital to competitive holding societies, whose shares would be
17
See Sertel 1982.
held by the government and by the self-managed rms themselves, and which
would take responsibility for innovation, research and development, and
exploring the market.18 Here we shall dwell on Weisskopf’s model, because it
seeks to respond in the broadest fashion to the problems raised.19
In order to resolve the key issue of the nancing of assets, Weisskopf has
proposed to combine several sources: credits (loans from banks that are them-
selves self-managed or from other intermediaries); share issues to mutual
insurance funds or foreign investors (who, as in capitalism, would expect
dividends and capital gains when they are transferred), but without these
shares conferring any right to vote; and, nally, investment from workers
themselves, in the form of shares, but likewise without the right to vote and
only transferable to other members of the enterprise when people leave it.
The mutual funds would collect ‘coupons’, allocated to each citizen and only
exchangeable for different coupons – an idea adopted from Roemer. They
would be self-managed and competitive.
As can be seen, this model ingeniously combines two capital markets –
even three when we count foreign share-holders, no doubt introduced in
order to facilitate the economy’s openness to the outside world – which are
highly restrictive and cut off from one another, with the self-management
principle, whereby only labour possesses voting rights. It thus seems to com-
bine all the advantages. The external share-holders have a power of sanction
over the management of enterprises and, more widely, over the work collec-
tives. But this power is indirect (sale or purchase of titles depending on rms’
results); and the system of coupons prevents the concentration of wealth in a
few hands. In the enterprise, the function of worker and the function of share-
holder are distinct and the second cannot encroach on the rst. In addition,
the existence of worker-share-holders prevents hostile takeover bids. The dif-
ferences with capitalism are striking and Weisskopf can afrm that the main
problems of market socialism have been overcome (the problem of supervis-
ing managers is resolved by the activity of workers and the operation of the
market in coupons; that of nancing by multiplying the sources of capital,
which also makes it possible to ward off the risk of under-investment; the
18
See Estrin 1989.
19
See Weisskopf 1993.
problem of capital allocation between enterprises by decentralisation, etc.),

while all its advantages are exploited (worker motivation, relations of trust
between workers and directors, etc.).
However, it is not clear that this combination of a socialism of the ‘public’
and partners – for assigning rights over capital income – with a socialism of
self-management – for determining rights of control – does not operate to
the detriment of the latter. For the logic of share-ownership, even when that
of ‘citizens’ and partners, remains nancial protability; and it necessarily
comes into contradiction with the logic of the workers, centred on maximising
labour income. Certainly, the mutual funds cannot exercise control over rms
with the same stringency as in capitalism (cf. the rules of ‘corporate gover-
nance’). But their power remains considerable and operates in the direction
of prot maximisation. As for the self-management of these funds, it does not
make much difference: the owners of shares will have no more power than,
for example, in a pension fund and the staff in these funds will naturally seek
to maximise their nancial yield. The very principle of share-holding, unlike
credit or even bonds, is that the nancial return of capital is variable and, in
a competitive situation, it is inevitably the highest returns that will attract
investors. The model cannot therefore genuinely overcome the contradiction
between a kind of popular capitalism, whose power is simply limited, and a
socialism whose goal is to valorise labour. However, it must be acknowledged
that such a model possesses a certain advantage: it ensures more equality in
the distribution of prots than purely self-managerial models, if they are not
complemented by devices for reducing inequalities.
A second category of model rests, at the level of nancing, on some form of
credit market. The divergence from preceding models is not insignicant. In
fact, there are no investors here (whether external or even internal) seeking to
maximise the return on their capital. The supplier of capital certainly claims
an interest for the credit extended, but the amount of interest is xed during
the transaction and the provider can exercise no control other than agreeing
and renewing the credit or not. In addition, he does not himself seek to realise
a capitalist prot. Thus, the spirit of these models can be summarised as fol-
lows: labour rents capital and is subject to no other constraint than reimburs-
ing the capital and/or paying interest on it. Moreover, it maximises its own
income.
The model advanced by Schweickart is of this kind.20 Enterprises are

endowed with a social capital, whose value they are obliged to maintain.
They pay a tax on this capital – the equivalent of an interest payment – to
a national investment fund, which serves to nance enterprises and public
services at a national level and to create a fund for the regions (on a per capita
basis), which will do the same at their level. These various investment funds
nance new investments (during enterprise creation) and the net investment
of enterprises already created via banks, which are like second-degree co-
operatives (directed by representatives of their workforces, of the funds, and
of the client enterprises). In the last instance, it is these banks that allocate
capital to enterprises, in accordance not only with a criterion of protability,
but also with social criteria, such as job creation. However, the banks are not
themselves guided by the criterion of protability: they are public institu-
tions, nanced out of taxes, whose members are civil servants, interested only
in the benets.
Remarkable for the simplicity of its operating principle, this model never-
theless meets with various objections. We shall mention two. In so far as the
nancing depends on bodies of an administrative type, allocation by banks
runs a high risk of being distorted by collusion between the management of
rms and bank personnel and by pressure on the political authorities (as was
noted in Yugoslavia). In the second place, the planning of investment runs
into the following dilemma: raising taxes on capital to increase the invest-
ment fund discourages enterprises from investing (since economic protabil-
ity is more difcult to achieve with a higher tax on capital); reducing them
does indeed encourage investment, but dries up the source of enterprises’
nancing.
A second model has been proposed by Marc Fleurbaey.21 Here, the suppliers
of capital are households. But they do not do it directly. They make deposits
and loans with banks (which excludes the possession of shares and bonds),
which themselves open up credit lines to enterprises. The novelty of this model
is that, on the basis of all the arguments put forward by Vanek in favour of
20
See Schweickart 1992 and 1993.
21
See Fleurbaey 1993.
external nancing in order to remedy the defects of the co-operative system,22

it abolishes self-nancing: enterprises no longer have their own funds and
nance themselves exclusively out of credit. As for the banks, they are self-
managed, operating like other enterprises (maximising labour income). The
relationship between enterprises and banks must also be much closer. Since
they take more risks, in that they have no guarantees in the shape of capital
within enterprises, they must exercise much stronger ‘supervision’. The rela-
tionship between banks and households takes the form of a market in loan
capital. This market must adjust spontaneously, by the operation of differ-
ent interest rates, household savings and the nancing requirements of enter-
prises. Fleurbaey’s model also comprises indirect planning, like all the other
models, and original procedures for reducing inequalities: not an inheritance
tax, but a restriction on the size of legacies to children and, as regards wages,
a mechanism of mandatory insurance included in the contracts signed with
banks.
I have proposed a model that is likewise based on nancing enterprises
exclusively through credit, by way of competing, self-managed banks, but
placed under the control of a central fund. There are various forms of the
model, but here is one.23 Household savings are likewise put to use in the
form of savings coupons (alongside the interest payments paid by enterprises
and a stabilisation fund derived from taxes). But they only pass in transit
through banks to supply a national nancing fund, which allocates sums of
credit to banks depending on the quality of their management (management
whose yardstick is always the maximisation of labour incomes). On the other
hand, interest rates are administered (as today with popular savings accounts
in France), whereas credit rates are free. This form therefore rests on a public
bedrock: all loan capital is ultimately centralised and allocated by the fund.
Moreover, the model comprises supervision of the labour market, so as to limit
inequalities in the remuneration of work, and public information networks – a
proposal adopted from Diane Elson24 – in order to reduce market opacity.
Finally, planning is indirect (essentially using differential interest rates and
22
See Vanek 1977.
23
See Andréani 1993, 2004b, and 2005.
24
See Elson 1988.
taxation), but omnipresent. Coupled with an economic policy that is all the
more efcient in as much as the economy functions entirely by credit, plan-
ning allows for some control over spontaneous trends and for more coher-
ent, harmonious and sustainable development. It is also the privileged site of
democratic decisions – the site where the major social choices about working
time, the balance between consumption and investment, income bands, prior-
ity programmes, and so on, are made and implemented.
This survey of the various models of socialism could convey an impression
of ‘laboratory’ research that is far removed from the real movement of his-
tory; and remote, indeed, from the ideas circulating in the social movements
and debated in political parties. They inspire many reservations, attributable
not only to the fact that they break with traditional ideas about socialism, but
also to the fact that they are the work of intellectuals prone to ‘constructiv-
ism’ and oblivious of the complexity of the real world. In contrast, I think that
they are of the greatest interest, because they outline possible alternatives,
without which any critique of the existing system is condemned to archaism,
utopianism, or impotence. It remains the case that, in the current situation,
they often skip over the problem of historical feasibility, of the social forces
capable of embodying them, and of the possible forms of transition, especially
in an open economy. A major opportunity was missed during the crisis of the
historical socialist systems, for reasons that it would take too long to explain
here, but which do not only stem from the feeble imagination of theoreticians
or the sabotage organised by the masters of a triumphant capitalism. And the
predictable crisis of the new capitalism dominated by nance, which is fore-
cast even by numerous analysts who in no way identify with socialism, will
not necessarily afford a new historical opportunity. So it seems to me to be
indispensable that work on the models of socialism should result in concrete
proposals, capable of being realised in the impending conjuncture.
It is obviously possible to conceive the lessons that might be derived from
such modelling in the case of countries where the public sector remains pre-
dominant (at least in industry and services), such as China or Vietnam. But
it also contains suggestions, which are different, for overhauling the public
sector in Western countries (wherever it still retains some signicance), at the
level of both management autonomy and its democratisation and guiding
principles, on the one hand in public services (where protability, even when
it has some meaning, should never be nancial protability), and on the other
in public enterprises in what is called the ‘competitive sector’ (where nancial
protability, if it is to be imposed for various reasons, should be tempered).
One might thus explore the idea of a ‘third sector’ of a self-managed variety.
But all that would exceed the bounds of this contribution.
Chapter Fourteen
The American Radicals: A Subversive Current at
the Heart of the Empire
Thomas Coutrot
At the end of the 1960s, the inuence of critical and/

or Marxist currents in social science grew. But even
economics, spontaneously allied with the forces of
money as it is, was not spared. Within prestigious
academic institutions, famous theoreticians chal-
lenged the very foundations of the Western bourgeois
and imperialist societies. In the United States –
worse still, at Harvard – a group of left-wing econo-
mists, combining undisputed technical competence
and a constant concern for links with social move-
ments, formed itself into an explicitly subversive
intellectual current, claiming the title of ‘radical’.
Since then, the ‘American radicals’ have achieved
the remarkable feat of creating a critical current at
the very heart of the citadel of triumphant neolib-
eralism. The durability and fertility of this current
cannot be understood unless we recognise that it is
the vector both of a theoretical-scientic project and
a political-organisational project. The latter has no
doubt altered over time, but remains explicit in the
approach of its authors – contrary to orthodox econ-
omists, who the deck themselves out in the attire of
pure science in order to justify the existing order and
proclaim it the best possible world.
256 • Thomas Coutrot
A political-organisational project
It was in 1968 – the date is scarcely a coincidence – that the ‘American radicals’
founded the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), an ‘interdisciplin-
ary association devoted to the study, development, and application of radical
political economic analysis to social problems’. The group asserted that it
presents a continuing left critique of the capitalist system and all forms of
exploitation and oppression while helping to construct a progressive social
policy and create socialist alternatives.1
The anchorage of the radical current in the social movements and the critique
of the capitalist system is not only a historical fact: it is also a wholly delib-
erate theoretical orientation. As three of the current’s distinguished gures
explain:
Our approach . . . differs fundamentally from that of many American Keyne-

sians and European right social democrats who are inclined to provide
advice to progressive governments on reforming their capitalist economies.
In contrast to such a ‘top-down’ approach to social change, we are advocating
a strategy that is designed to serve as an instrument for mobilization – to
promote the formation of a popular coalition upon which any program
for progressive change must stand for a serious chance of realization. . . .
In this task a coherent alternative economic program is an indispensable
tool. If this kind of organizing begins to take root, we further believe that a
unied democratic movement pursuing and advancing an egalitarian and
democratic growth strategy would eventually begin to challenge the rules
of the capitalist game.2
Even if (as we shall see) the political perspectives have changed, we can char-
acterise this type of relationship between intellectuals and social movements
as ‘organic’ in the Gramscian sense of the term. The Review of Radical Political
Economics continues to publish regular articles on gender issues and discrimi-
nation of every variety, on the trade-union movement and the class struggle
in the United States and elsewhere, on the political economy of imperialism.
1
This quotation is drawn from the text introducing the URPE, which still features
in the issues of the association’s quarterly journal, the Review of Radical Political Eco-
nomics (RRPE).
2
Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1984, pp. 282–3.
The American Radicals • 257
Every August, the URPE holds a four-day summer university, which mem-
bers attend with their families, engaging in intellectual and sporting activi-
ties. Every January, during the annual meeting of the Association of Applied
Social Science, URPE holds a symposium comprising thirty debates, each of
which involves between one and two hundred participants. In short, the radi-
cals form an intellectual and political current in a class of its own, which keeps
the ame of critical, alternative thought alight in the belly of the beast.
And a theoretical project

According to Rebitzer, ‘[t]hree fundamental ideas distinguish radical political
economy from other approaches in modern economics’: i) ‘[k]ey economic
processes are fundamentally’ political ‘in the sense that they depend, even at
the most abstract level of analysis, on institutional arrangements that enforce
the power and authority of a dominant group vis-à-vis a subordinate group’;
ii) ‘[t]he institutional arrangements that enforce the authority of dominant
groups are less efcient (and/or less just) than some feasible alternative
arrangement’; iii) ‘[e]xisting economic structures are the contingent result of
particular historical developments and threfore have no a priori claim to opti-
mality or efciency’3 – the role of politics in the economy, the desirable nature
of institutional change, and the historically contingent character of economic
structures, these three propositions dene a research paradigm that is utterly
distinct from the dominant paradigm in economics.
Nevertheless, the clear, self-proclaimed Marxist inspiration behind the
radical approach does not prevent it distinguishing itself from the orthodox-
Marxist tradition, in particular by ‘the formal theoretical structure of Marxist
political economy . . . mainly to the analytics of the labor theory of value and
the falling rate of prot’.4 One of the radicals’ main sources of inspiration is
the heterodox-Marxist current of Baran, Sweezy and Monthly Review – par-
ticularly Harry Braverman’s work Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), which
describes and theorises capitalism’s constant tendency to ‘deskill’ work and
expropriate workers’ knowledge. Since the 1940s, Monthly Review has pre-
served a living tradition of independent Marxist analysis in the USA, which
3
Rebitzer 1993, p. 1395.
4
Reich 1993, p. 44.
the radicals have drawn on abundantly. Here, we shall only mention three of
the main elds of their theoretical intervention, which might be said to rep-
resent the current’s theoretical identity card: the segmentation of the labour
market; the social structures of accumulation; and economic democracy.
The segmentation of the labour market: a fertile paradigm

The rst major contribution of the radical North-American current was the
revelation and theorisation of ‘labour-market segmentation’. Following in the
tradition of black and feminist movements ghting discrimination, the radical
economists sought to explain how, contrary to the predictions of mainstream
economics, ‘non-compensatory’ differences (those unexplained by disparities
in productivity, working conditions, and the like) could be maintained in the
long term, rather than being spontaneously absorbed by the laws of the mar-
ket. Thus, neoclassical economists (like Gary Becker) can only explain why
entire categories of worker simultaneously endure hard work, job instabil-
ity, and low wages, whereas others (generally white and male) enjoy stable,
protected, and well-paid employment, by resorting to the pretty grotesque
artice of ‘employers’ taste for discrimination’. The founding text of the the-
ory of segmentation is Doeringer and Piore’s Internal Labor Markets and Man-
power Analysis (1970), which attempted to explain the existence of ‘internal
markets’ – protected spaces within major rms where wage-earners beneted
from automatic careers and regular wage increases. However, Doeringer and
Piore retained their links with mainstream economics. For an explanation,
they looked to the ‘specicity’ of labour processes, which dictated a long
apprenticeship on the job for workers to be efcient. Accordingly, it was in
the interest of the rational entrepreneur to secure this costly manpower by
establishing wage and career rules that were more generous than those of the
external labour market.
It was three of Doeringer and Piore’s students at MIT – Richard Edwards,
David Gordon and Michael Reich – who really launched the radical theory of
segmentation, in an article published in 1975 by the prestigious and highly
academic American Economic Review. Combining their respective work on
racial discrimination, hierarchical control of work in the rm, and the dual
labour market, they dened labour market segmentation as ‘the historical
process whereby political-economic forces encourage the division of the labor

market into separate submarkets, or segments, distinguished by different
labor market characteristics and behavioral rules’.5 The ‘dualism’ theorised
by Doeringer and Piore became the more complex ‘segmentation’ in Edwards
and the rest, comprising at least three segments: a ‘primary’ segment, com-
prising stable, well-paid jobs, which was itself divided into a ‘primary inde-
pendent’ segment containing highly skilled and/or supervisory jobs with
good career prospects, and a ‘primary subordinate’ segment composed of
low-skilled, repetitive jobs; and a ‘secondary’ segment of insecure, badly paid
jobs. The intellectual success of this analysis was such that it rapidly came to
represent a ‘challenge to orthodox theory’,6 which a number of neoclassical
economists were to work on in subsequent years.
Edwards’s group showed how this segmentation was inextricably eco-
nomic and political in character. It accompanied and facilitated the differ-
entiation of the economy into a monopoly sector, comprising large rms in
a dominant position, and a competitive sector of small and medium-sized
enterprises that were dominated and weak. It derived from capitalist political
strategies of ‘divide and rule’, which cultivated and exacerbated ethnic and
gender divisions between categories of wage-earner in order to prevent their
constitution as a collective agent capable of challenging the dominant order.
This socio-economic-historical analysis culminated in what doubtless today
remains the major work of the North American radical school: Edwards, Gor-
don and Reich’s Segmented Work, Divided Workers (1982). In this work, basing
themselves on an in-depth historical analysis, the group indicated the suc-
cession of three modes of operation and organisation of the labour market
in the US: initial ‘proletarianisation’ (1820–80); the ‘homogenisation’ of work
(1880–1920); and the ‘segmentation’ of work (1920–75). The book concluded
with a more ambitious theoretical construction than simply analysis of the
labour market, since it proposed a view of ‘long swings’ of capitalist growth
and a conceptualisation in terms of ‘social structures of accumulation’.
5
Edwards, Gordon and Reich 1975, p. 359.
6
See Cain 1976.
The social structures of accumulation: what about the present?

For Edwards and the others, ample empirical proof – in the tradition of Kon-
dratiev and relayed to Marxist economists by Mandel – demonstrated the
existence of ‘long waves’ in capitalist development lasting several decades.
An expansionary phase, during which conjunctural recessions are brief and
not deep and booms durable, is succeeded by a phase of very slow growth,
with the converse characteristics. However, unlike authors such as Kondratiev
and Schumpeter, who assigned technical factors the main role in explaining
the development and decline of a long wave, Edwards’s group explain these
long-term trends by the development and decline of a set of institutions that
organise and channel class conict in rms and on the labour market, but also
the competition between capitals, the monetary sphere, and so on. Following
Edwards’s works, the co-authors based their analysis on the modes of manag-
ing labour-power in the enterprise. For them, the capital-labour relationship
is the basic social relation and plays a key role in the overall dynamic of capi-
talism. But they expand the eld of their analysis to take account of the inter-
national division of labour, the organisation of the monetary and nancial
system, and North-American domination of the rest of the world (and partic-
ularly of countries producing raw materials) – the ‘Pax Americana’. They also
included in the ‘social structures of accumulation’ the institutions of social
security and the counter-cyclical public policies implemented under the inu-
ence of the post-war ‘Keynesian consensus’. These policies and institutions
ensured citizens a certain protection from the pure logic of capitalist prot
(what they call the ‘capital-citizens agreement’). The erosion of the ‘corporate
system’7 derives at once from the decline of the USA’s international domina-
tion and the collapse of the ‘capital-labour pact’ as a result of the slowdown
in productivity gains, which were themselves caused by social resistance to
Taylorism and increasing assignment of the social and ecological costs of the
drive for prot to large rms.
According to the American radicals, anti-imperialist, social, ecological and
consumer struggles play a central role in explaining the activation of the 1970s
crisis. The afnity with the French regulation school is clear, but the American
radicals pay greater attention to the concrete forms of the organisation and
7
See Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1984, Chapter 4.
control of work, to the heterogeneity and segmentation of the labour mar-

ket, to employer strategies for dividing the working class, and to social and
political struggles. In short, their approach is more directly historicist and
clearly ‘engaged’. Nevertheless, like the French regulationists, the radicals
considerably underestimated the coherence and effectiveness of the Reagan
counter-revolution. It took them a long time to understand that neoliberalism
could generate new social structures of capitalist accumulation, which were
certainly less homogenising and less egalitarian than those of the postwar
period, but nevertheless capable of restoring the protability of investments
on an enduring basis. In the 1980s they consistently denounced Reaganite
policies for their ineffectiveness – doubtless not the main criticism that might
be directed at them. Thus, according to Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf, mon-
etarism would not restore the high, stable prots so essential to long-term
capitalist growth, at least for years to come’.8 And, in 1990, they were still
claiming that the programme for restoring ‘business’ domination would not
result in a viable social structure of accumulation.9 Right up until his sudden
death in 1996, Gordon basically maintained this analysis.10
Only David Houston, in an article of 1992, diagnosed the emergence of
a new social structure of accumulation, resting on the following pillars: (1)
an ‘agreement’ between capital and labour that had switched from ‘negotia-
tion’ to ‘domination’, with anti-union attacks and a considerable reduction
in wage costs, accompanied, for certain wage-earners, by greater autonomy
at work and a stake in the capital of rms; (2) an ‘agreement’ between capi-
tal and citizens based on anti-statist and populist propaganda, chauvinism,
and the extolling of prot at any price; (3) a restructuring of capital by the
closure and relocation of most traditional industries, a switch of accumula-
tion to services, particularly nancial ones, and through the privatisation of
public services (education, police, prisons); (4) a defence of the threatened
hegemony of the USA by means of the World Bank, the IMF, and its exclusive
position as sole super-power, in order to impose its law on recalcitrant rivals.
Houston concluded his short article with this warning: ‘we should not forget
8
Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1984, p. 206.
9
See Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf 1990.
10
See Gordon 1996 and Bowles and Weisskopf 1999.
or underestimate the formidable strength of this SSA’, even if the latter was
‘fraught with contradictions’.11
More recently, the radicals have acknowledged the assertion of a new social
structure of accumulation, but without really producing a detailed analysis
of it.12 It is striking that no article published in the Review of Radical Politi-
cal Economics offers an analysis of the emergence of institutional investors
(pension funds and mutual insurance funds), or of their role in what we now
call in France the nancial or neoliberal régime of accumulation. Reich cer-
tainly cites the works of Ghilarducci, Hawley and Williams, or of Lazonick
and O’Sullivan on the impact of ‘corporate governance’ on wage-earners, but
without dwelling on it. The main works of the radical economists seem in
fact to have shifted both the axis of their alternative proposals and the way
in which they argue for them. The works of the 1980s denounced Reagan-
ism for its brutality and injustice and called for the formulation of radical
social-democratic policies, advocating not only neo-Keynesian public regula-
tion, but above all a revival of accumulation based on an increase in wages,
productivity, and union power. In the 1990s, registering the retreat of egalitar-
ian and democratic ideals, as well as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Bowles,
Gintis and Weisskopf recast their line of argument. Thus, Weisskopf rallied
to the theses of the supporters of ‘market socialism’, rather than the ‘social-
democratic approach’, to achieve socialist objectives.13 More astonishing still
is the evolution of Bowles and Gintis.14
Economic democracy: self-management socialism or productivist

egalitarianism?
The radical economists, in general supporters of a democratic, self-manage-
rial socialism, were nevertheless barely active in the theoretical debates on
the ‘pro-market’ reforms that have followed one another in Eastern Europe
since the 1960s. With collapse of the Wall, a crop of articles appeared in the
Review of Radical Political Economics (as in other Anglo-American Marxist jour-
11
Houston 1992, p. 67.
12
See Reich 1997 and Lippit 1997.
13
See Weisskopf 1992.
14
See Bowles and Gintis 1998.
nals) on the need to reconstruct a model of viable socialism.15 In the current

North-American context, a certain consensus seems to be emerging among
the radicals. Given the hegemony of anti-state ideologies, the social-demo-
cratic road (a classical capitalist accumulation moderated by social policies
and redistributive taxation) and the path of planning, even of a democratic
variety, are unfeasible at the political level. It is therefore necessary to rede-
ne an emancipatory project that totally and unreservedly accepts the role of
market, but on the basis of a radical redistribution of ownership rights: self-
management market socialism. Thus, in a collective work published in the
‘Real Utopias’ project co-ordinated by Erik Olin Wright, Bowles and Gintis
abandon the term ‘socialism’ and formulate what they call an ‘asset-based
egalitarianism’, which assumes complete deconcentration of ownership of the
means of production and the free operation of initiative and the markets. To
conservative supporters of laissez-faire, they object that
there are compelling economic arguments and ample empirical support

for the proposition that there exist changes in the rules of the economic
game which foster both greater economic equality and improved economic
performance. Indeed . . . inequality is often an impediment to productivity
[and] impedes economic performance
– and this for three reasons. In the rst place, ‘institutional structures
supporting high levels of inequality are often costly to maintain’, for
‘states in highly unequal societies are often obliged to commit a large
fraction of the economy’s productive potential to enforcing the rules of
the game from which the inequalities ow.
For their part, rms incur
high levels of expenditure on work supervision and security personnel.

Indeed, one might count high levels of unemployment itself as one of the
enforcement costs of inequality, to the extent that the threat of job loss
contributes to employers’ labor discipline strategies: in less conictual
conditions, unutilized labor might be allocated to productive activities.16
The second reason for this link between efciency and equality is that
15
See, for example, Weisskopf 1992 and Schweickart 1992.
16
Bowles and Gintis 1998, pp. 4–6.
More equal societies may be capable of supporting levels of cooperation

and trust unavailable in more economically divided societies. Yet both
cooperation and trust are essential to economic performance, particularly
where information relevant to exchanges is incomplete and unequally
distributed in the population.
And Bowles and Gintis proceed to quote Kenneth Arrow, the major neoclas-
sical economist, who highlights the ‘norms of social behavior, including ethi-
cal and moral codes, [which may be] reactions of society to compensate for
market failure’ (sic).17
Finally, a third factor in favour of greater equality is that, if workers become
the owners of the rm’s capital, this will make it possible to enhance their
incentives to work, and to reduce supervision and maintenance costs, thus
authorising ‘general improvements in well-being (including possible com-
pensation for the former owner)’.18 Faced with such an economistic plea for
a democratic market and a wage-earner capitalism, the philosopher Daniel
Hausman dryly replies that not only is it pointless trying to convince con-
servatives of the productivist merits of egalitarianism, ‘it is also dangerous,
because it obscures the grounds for egalitarianism and thereby undermines
the real case for egalitarian policies’. For ‘[e]quality is of intrinsic moral impor-
tance because of its link to fairness, self-respect, equal respect, and fraternity’.
To construct an alternative societal project on the ideal of greater productivity
is to forget that a good society is ‘not about Nintendo games in every home
and more trips to the Mall’.19 The sociologist Olin Wright goes much further:
‘certain features of the Bowles and Gintis model may have the unintended
effect of themselves systematically eroding community’, on account of the
decisive role allotted to the operation of free competition: ‘Markets may have
certain virtues, but . . . in general they are the enemy of community’.20 No radi-
cally egalitarian reform is politically viable in the end without the endoge-
nous assertion of community norms, vectors of empathy, mutual trust, and
the gradual disappearance of market opportunism.
17
Bowles and Gintis 1998, p. 6.
18
Bowles and Gintis 1998, pp. 7–8.
19
Hausman 1998, pp. 80, 83, 84.
20
Wright 1998, p. 96.
Conclusion
In his historical retrospect of 1993, Michel Reich highlights the radicals’
delay in understanding the Reagan turn: ‘many of us assumed that reducing
government’s role in the economy was contrary to capitalism’s true interest
and that the apparent turn toward laissez-faire would not last long’.21 The
defeat of North-American ‘liberals’ (or, Keynesian centrists), widening the
gulf between centrists and Reaganite ultra-liberals, considerably reduced
the one separating radicals and neo-institutional ‘liberals’. Whereas the latter
(Stiglitz, Solow, Williamson) were developing analyses that explained mar-
ket inefciencies (incomplete information, efciency wages, transaction costs)
and which responded, with neoclassical tools, to the ‘challenge’ of theories of
segmentation, the radicals strove to develop micro-analytical tools and the
use of game theory to formalise their reasoning. The American radicals have
always been empiricists, carefully testing their analyses against the available
historical and statistical data. But, under the pressure of neoclassical academic
circles, and conducing to their rapprochement with the centrist ‘liberals’, they
have gradually tended to reconcile their conceptual tools with those of the
mainstream.
The political switch and theoretical switch have occurred in tandem. As
the radicals came to realise that ‘not all capitalist economies were alike’,22 and
that social-democratic reforms in Europe had constructed models of capital-
ism which were more acceptable than the US model, they evolved towards ‘a
broader acceptance of the role of markets’,23 and increasingly situated them-
selves in the amended neoclassical paradigm. The actual outcome of this
move is the endeavour by Bowles and Gintis to demonstrate the economic
superiority of a wage-earner capitalism over patrimonial capitalism, by using
only standard theoretical tools. Abandoning their tradition of empirical anal-
ysis and original critique of the realities of contemporary capitalism, the main
radical authors seems to have taken refuge in an attempt at a ‘progressiv-
ist’ subversion of the standard micro-economic theory as amended by neo-
institutionalism. The ‘great wall’24 that separated radicals from ‘liberals’ in
21
Reich 1993, p. 46.
22
Reich 1993, p. 48.
23
Reich 1993, pp. 48–9.
24
See Reich 1993.
the 1960s has collapsed with the Berlin Wall – to the extent that it is no longer
clear that deep theoretical differences exist between the most distinguished
radical authors and neo-institutionalists. Were this development to be con-
rmed, the main victim of the rapprochement would doubtless be the radical
current’s capacity for critical and historical analysis, which has today largely
run out of steam. However, given its historical anchorage, we may still hope
that it will be able to take advantage of the new social movements that are
emerging at the beginning of the new century and help to propose new stra-
tegic perspectives.
Chapter Fifteen
Political Marxism
Paul Blackledge
Over the last three decades, Robert Brenner and

Ellen Meiksins Wood have attempted to develop
and defend a revolutionary interpretation of his-
torical materialism which avoids the pitfalls associ-
ated with both orthodox historical materialism and
post-Marxist idealism. They have done so through a
series of brilliant interventions in historical, cultural,
political, social and economic theory that are breath-
taking in both their sweep and originality. As part
of this project they have produced, or have inu-
enced those who have produced, new, exciting and
thought-provoking contributions to many funda-
mentally important historical and political debates.
Above all, Brenner’s analysis of the transition from
feudalism to capitalism has inuenced all subsequent
intelligent interpretations of that process.1 Important
work has also been carried out into areas as diverse
as classical political theory,2 the emergence of the
modern United States,3 the histories of India, China,
and South Africa,4 the birth of political economy,5 the
1
Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985; Brenner, 1985a, 1993, 2001.
2
Wood, 1988; Wood and Wood, 1978.
3
Post 1982, 1995, 1997.
4
Huang 1985 and 1990; Kaiwar 1992 and 1993; Murray and Post 1983; Brenner
and Isett 2002.
5
McNally 1988.
268 • Paul Blackledge
politics of the New Left,6 the nature of the English Revolution,7 the rise of bour-
geois Europe,8 the trajectory of the postwar world economy,9 the nature of the
‘new imperialism’;10 and the nature of the Westphalian state system.11 Com-
menting on just two of these achievements, Perry Anderson has described the
historical element of Brenner’s œuvre as ‘magisterial’, while suggesting that
through Brenner’s analysis of the postwar world economy, ‘Marx’s enterprise
has certainly found its successor’.12 Whether or not we accept Anderson’s
appreciation of their importance, Brenner and Wood deserves serious con-
sideration.13
Political Marxism
The term ‘political Marxism’ was coined by the French Marxist Guy Bois, who,
in a critical response to Brenner’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, argued that Brenner’s thesis
amounts to a voluntarist vision of history in which the class struggle is

divorced from all other objective contingencies and, in the first place,
from such laws of development as may be peculiar to a specic mode of
production.14
Despite this deprecatory pedigree, Ellen Wood enthusiastically embraced the

term political Marxism as a reasonable description of both hers and Brenner’s
work, but denies that the term implies a voluntarist interpretation of history.15
Rather, she insists, political Marxism overcomes the weaknesses of previous
6
Wood 1986 and 1995.
7
Wood 1991; Wood and Wood 1997; Brenner 1993.
8
Mooers 1991.
9
Brenner 1998, 2002, 2004.
10
Wood 2003.
11
Teschke 2003
12
Anderson 1992, p. 58 and 1998, p. v.
13
For some critical commentaries on political Marxism see the essays collected in
Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985, two special issues of Historical Materialism 4 and 5,
devoted to Brenner’s economics, the articles collected in Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol XIX, No. 2, 1999, and Anderson 1993; Barker 1997;
Callinicos 1995, pp. 122–37; Dumenil et al. 2001; Fine et al. 1999; Foster 1999; Harman
1998, pp. 55–112; Manning 1994; McNally 1999; and Blackledge 2002/3, upon which
this chapter is based.
14
Bois 1985, p. 115.
15
Wood 1995, p. 23.
Political Marxism • 269
mechanical versions of Marxism by ‘simply [taking] seriously the principle

that a mode of production is a social phenomenon’.16
Political Marxism delineates itself from traditional interpretations of Marx-
ism in two fundamental ways. First it rejects the classical-Marxist model of
historical change as outlined in Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy. Secondly, and in place of this model, Brenner and Wood
maintain that explanatory primacy in history should be accorded to changes
in the relations of production. Political Marxism, Wood suggests, combines
an application of Edward Thompson’s critique of the crude utilisation of the
base/superstructure metaphor, with Brenner’s alternative account of capi-
talist development. It synthesises these two elements so as to re-establish a
rmer grounding for a non-teleological account of history.17
Wood is keen to reafrm an anti-teleological reading of Marx, and she offers
two reasons for doing so: one scholarly, the other political. The orthodox-
Marxist case, which ascribes explanatory primacy in history to the develop-
ment of the productive forces, assumes, she claims, that a peculiar rationality,
characteristic only of the capitalist mode of production, is a constituent ele-
ment of human nature. Consequentially, in the orthodox model, capitalist
rationality is naturalised in a fashion that both acts as an impediment to our
cognition of the past, and as an obstacle to our realisation of socialist hopes for
the future. Thus, if human history is read as a process leading to the unleash-
ing of capitalist rationality then scholars will fail to grasp the specicity of
capitalist rationality, and politicians will fail to grasp the possibility of its
transcendence.18
Wood also argues that many orthodox Marxists, in applying the base/
superstructure metaphor, collapse historical materialism into
a rigid determinism . . . in the realm of social structure, . . . while the real,

empirical world remains effectively contingent and irreducibly particular.19
Edward Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, avoids this
unpalatable dichotomy, through his insistence that ‘we should not assume any
automatic, or over-direct, correspondence between the dynamic of economic
16
Wood 1995, p. 25.
17
Wood 1999a, p. 59.
18
Wood 1999a, p. 7.
19
Wood 1995, p. 50.
growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life’.20 Indeed, with respect to the
cultural processes operating in England at the turn of the nineteenth century,
he suggests,
it is the political context as much as the steam engine, which had the most
inuence upon the shaping consciousness and institutions of the working
class.21
Elsewhere, Thompson argues that because historical materialism attempts to

study the social process as a totality then it must reject reied conceptualisa-
tions of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ etc.22 Wood suggests that Thomp-
son’s theoretical framework requires
a conception of the ‘economic’, not as a ‘regionally’ separate sphere which

is somehow ‘material’ as opposed to ‘social’, but rather as itself irreducibly
social – indeed, a conception of the ‘material’ as constituted by social
relations and practices. Furthermore, the ‘base’ . . . is not just ‘economic’ but
also entails, and is embodied in, judicial-political and ideological forms and
relations that cannot be relegated to a spatially separate superstructure.23
Thus the base/superstructure metaphor will not do as an adequate frame-

work for interpreting history. Instead, particular social formations must be
analysed historically as evolving totalities.
So, in answer to Perry Anderson’s question regarding the underlying ratio-
nality of Thompson’s decision, after writing The Making of the English Working
Class, to focus his research on the eighteenth century rather than looking for-
ward towards the twentieth, Wood answers that Thompson was attempting
to ‘explain the establishment of capitalism as a social form’, a task to which
Brenner has so forcefully applied himself. By breaking with a crude applica-
tion of the base/superstructure metaphor, Wood believes that political Marx-
ism is true to Marx’s own anti-teleological approach to historical methodology.
She argues that it is Weber’s work, not Marx’s, that can be characterised by its
teleological theory of history, since Weber
20
Thompson 1980, p. 211.
21
22
Thompson 1978, pp. 70–8.
23
Wood 1995, p. 61.
looked at the world through the prism of a unilinear, teleological and

Eurocentric conception of history, which Marx had done more than any
other Western thinker to dislodge.24
Indeed, Weber’s concept of the Protestant ethic ‘cannot account for the “spirit
of capitalism” without already assuming its existence’.25
In this sense, Weber’s approach is, Wood argues, a variation of the ‘commer-
cial model’ of capitalist development; according to which capitalism is associ-
ated with towns and cities, and the triumph of capitalism is associated with
the triumph of the town and city dwellers, the bourgeoisie, over the precapi-
talist country folk.26 In contrast to this model, Wood defends Brenner’s read-
ing of capitalist development as originating in England as a form of agrarian
capitalism: only on the basis of capitalist development in the countryside was
it possible that the towns could take on a capitalist, as opposed to a merely
bourgeois, character. Thus, for the political Marxists, the key task facing those
of us who would desire to develop a clear understanding of the contemporary
world does not lie in a search to discover the basis for the unleashing of the
creativity of the bourgeoisie under feudalism, but rather lies in explaining the
growth of capitalist social relations in the (English) countryside.
From feudalism to capitalism

In a review of Maurice Dobb’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, Brenner argued that Dobb’s thesis ‘continues to be a starting point
for discussion of European economic development’.27 Whatever the veracity
of this claim, it is certainly true that Brenner’s own analysis of the transition
was written, in part, as an attempt to overcome some weaknesses in Dobb’s
argument.28
Brenner opened his review of Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism
by commending Dobb’s break with the ‘transhistoric’ musings of the classical
and neoclassical economists. To them, the peculiar ethos of modern capitalism
24
Wood 1995, p. 146.
25
Wood 1995, p. 164; 1999a, p. 17.
26
Wood 1999a, p. 13.
27
Brenner 1978, p. 121.
28
Wood 1999a, p. 44; Harman 1998, p. 65.
is naturalised as a fundamental attribute of human nature.29 However, while

Dobb insisted that the necessary prerequisites for the transition to capital-
ism included an increase in the productivity of labour such that the change
from serfdom to wage-labour would became economically viable, he did not
explain how such a productivity increase could develop systematically within
feudalism.30 Similarly, he argued that the story of the destructive inuence of
commerce on feudal society ‘can largely be identied with the rise of towns’,
but went on to suggest that ‘it would be wrong to regard [towns] as being, at
this stage, microcosms of capitalism’.31 Furthermore, he failed to integrate his
analysis of the rise of towns in the medieval world into a model of the internal
dynamic of feudalism. He noted several explanations for the rise of towns but
did not attempt to integrate these insights into a rounded theory.32
Moreover, as Brenner argued, because Dobb both equated feudalism with
serfdom whilst simultaneously arguing that serfdom had been superseded
from around the fteenth century, then on his reckoning feudalism should
have been ‘dead’ long before the upheavals of the 1640s. As a consequence of
this, the viability of the concept of a bourgeois revolution in the seventeenth
century was thrown into question.33
In his alternative account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
Brenner argues that capitalism originated not as a result of a victory of the
peasantry over the feudal nobility in the class struggle, and still less the prod-
uct of a rising bourgeoisie, but as an unintended consequence of the class
struggle under feudalism.34
This is not to suggest that Brenner ignores the role of towns in the transi-
tion. For, on the one hand, he argues that his model of the transition from
feudalism to capitalism is premised upon the ‘necessary precondition’ of the
prior development of merchant capitalism in the medieval period,35 and on
the other hand, he placed London’s merchant community at the centre of his
29
Brenner 1978, p. 121; compare to Dobb 1963, pp. 7–8.
30
Dobb 1963, p. 55.
31
Dobb 1963, pp. 70–1.
32
Dobb 1963, pp. 72–5.
33
Brenner 1978, p. 132.
34
Brenner 1985a, p. 30.
35
Brenner 2001, pp. 276 and 289.
analysis of the English Revolution. Nevertheless, Brenner argues that the ‘tra-
ditional social interpretation’ of the transition is untenable,36 because
by the era of the Civil War, it is very difcult to specify anything amounting
to a class distinction of any sort within the category of large holders of land,
since most were of the same class.37
In his essay ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-

Industrial Europe’, Brenner argues that
the breakthrough from ‘traditional economy’ to relative self-sustaining

economic development was predicated upon the emergence of a specic set
of class or social-property relations in the countryside – that is, capitalist
class relations. This outcome depended, in turn, upon the previous success
of a two-sided process of class development and class conict: on the one
hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short-circuiting of the
emerging predominance of small peasant propert.
In France, serfdom was destroyed by the class struggle between peasants

and lords, but the process went beyond that needed for the development of
capitalism, leading instead to the establishment of widespread small peasant
property. In Eastern Europe the peasants were defeated, leading to the rein-
troduction of serfdom. Only in England did conditions evolve that were opti-
mal for the evolution of agrarian capitalism.38 Thus capitalist development in
England, and as a corollary in Europe and the world, was not a consequence
of a victory of the peasantry over the feudal nobility in the class struggle, and
still less the product of a rising bourgeoisie. Rather, capitalism evolved as an
unintended outcome to the class struggle in the English countryside.
In the debate that followed upon the publication of his paper, Brenner
was widely criticised for his deviation from Marxist orthodoxy. However,
in defence of his revisionism, Brenner argues, in ‘Bourgeois Revolution and
the Transition to Capitalism’, that Marx’s works of the 1840s, particularly The
Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and The Poverty of Philosophy, have
at their heart a defective model of the transition from feudalism to capitalism
that was borrowed from Adam Smith. Brenner suggests that Marxists should
36
Brenner 1993, p. 638.
37
Brenner 1993, p. 641.
38
begin to remodel their account of the transition, not from these early works,
but from Marx’s later works, particularly Capital and Grundrisse: for while
Adam Smith developed a powerful account of the nature of capitalism, he
premised this account upon a highly questionable thesis as to capitalism’s
origins.39 In effect, Smith assumed the universality of capitalist rationality,
and therefore in his analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism
Smith looked for fetters to capitalist development within feudalism, rather
than to forces that could facilitate the evolution of rational capitalist indi-
viduals. Brenner quite rightly argues that this is an unsustainable position
given the lack of historical evidence for capitalist behavioural patterns in pre-
modern societies.
Brenner suggests that the model of the transition offered in Marx’s earlier
writings parallel Smith’s approach. One key effect of this methodology is that
the young Marx, like Smith, does not in fact develop a theory of societal trans-
formation; his model of the transition
appears peculiar, for in neither town nor country is anything amounting

to a transformation from one type of society to another actually envisaged.
As for the urban economy, it is, from its origin, entirely bourgeois. . . . As
to rural development, feudalism . . . has no positive role. . . . Finally . . . the
bourgeoisie’s rise to power is quasi-automatic.40
Brenner argues that
if England was, in fact, essentially a feudal society . . . it was necessary to

explain why the rise of trade should have led to capitalist development
rather than the reproduction of the old feudal order. . . . On the other hand,
if English feudalism was on its way to dissolution . . . rural society was
already well on its way to capitalism, and it was necessary to explain why
its landlords were anything but capitalist.41
Brenner concludes this exploratory essay with the argument that a social
interpretation of the transition was still necessary, but that, and this position
39
Brenner 1989, p. 272.
40
Brenner 1989, p. 279.
41
Brenner 1989, p. 296.
is merely implied, the old Marxist concept of a bourgeois revolution should

be rejected.42
Thus, Brenner’s historical methodology is framed around a polemic against
that which he considers to be an ahistoric approach to the issue of the devel-
opment of capitalist rationality. Conversely, he attempts to uncover an expla-
nation for the development of capitalist relations of production, and hence the
evolution of capitalist rationality, rather than assume the universality of this
type of behaviour:
The prevalence of certain quite specic, historically-developed property

relations . . . provides the fundamental condition under which individual
economic actors will nd it rational and possible to follow patterns of
economic action supportive of modern economic growth.43
Therefore
it is only given the prevalence of certain quite specic, historically developed

property relations . . . that the individual economic actors will nd it rational
and possible to follow the patterns of economic actions supportive of modern
economic growth outlined by Adam Smith.44
With respect to English history, Brenner argues that the pattern of class strug-
gle up to and after the period of the Black Death, around 1350, created excep-
tional conditions whereby
the English lords’ inability either to re-enserf the peasants or to move in the
direction of absolutism . . . forced them in the long run to seek what turned
out to be novel ways out of their revenue crisis.45
This new path led towards agrarian capitalism. In this system, large landown-
ers rented out their land to tenant farmers, and this social relationship under-
pinned the move towards a self-expanding economy: only in these exceptional
conditions could ‘Smithian ‘normal’ development take place’.46
In developing his thesis, Brenner outlines a devastating critique of Mal-
thusian explanations of the transition. He does this, not by contradicting the
42
43
Brenner 1986, p. 25.
44
Brenner 1985b, p. 18.
45
46
evidence presented by the Malthusians, but by showing that, in different parts

of Europe, similar demographic trends led in differing directions.47 Moreover,
Brenner argues that these consequences of the various class struggles across
Europe were independent of the economic growth of towns.48 It is in this sense
that Brenner most clearly distinguishes himself from both Smith and Marx.
In France, Brenner argues, the class struggle culminated in the evolution
of small peasant property. Furthermore, French absolutism was closely con-
nected to this type of proprietorship and was a ‘class-like phenomenon’.49
Wood elaborates this point. Absolutism, she argues, represented a ‘centrali-
sation upwards of feudal exploitation’.50 In contrast, the fact that the English
state ‘was not itself the direct instrument of surplus extraction’ set it radically
apart from the non-capitalist absolutist states.51 Moreover, the mercantilist
policies of absolutism could foster the growth of towns and yet have no rela-
tion to capitalism. As she argues,
we may be utterly convinced that, say, the French Revolution was thoroughly
bourgeois . . . without coming a ea-hop closer to determining whether it was
also capitalist. As long as we accept that there is no necessary identication
of bourgeois (or burger or city) with capitalist.52
Developing this mode of reasoning, one of Wood’s former PhD students,

George Comninel, argued, ‘it may be better simply to drop the idea of bour-
geois revolution’.53
As if in response to this reductio ad absurdum of his thought, Brenner replied
in 1993 with a 700-page monograph, Merchants and Revolution, on the English
Revolution.54 Moreover, as the title suggests, he put London’s merchant com-
munity at the centre of his analysis of the revolution. As I note above, in an
80-page ‘postscript’ to this book Brenner argues that the ‘traditional social
interpretation’ of the transition was untenable as the available evidence could
47
48
49
50
Wood 1988, p. 23.
51
Ibid.
52
Wood 1999a, p. 56.
53
Comninel 1987, p. 205.
54
The main body of Brenner’s monograph was based upon his PhD research of
the 1960s.
not sustain the idea of a rising bourgeoisie confronting a feudal aristocracy.55

However, he was convinced that the revisionist challenge to the old social
interpretation was even less compelling, for the revisionists had reduced the
Civil War to a conict over particular individual and group interests within
a general ideological consensus. Against this position, Brenner pointed out
that ‘analogous political conicts over essentially similar constitutional and
religious issues broke out on a whole series of occasions in the pre-Civil War
period’.56 Thus Brenner maintains that a social account of the Civil War is
indispensable, while insisting that the traditional Marxist account of the
revolution is indefensible. Brenner suggests that, while the landowners as a
whole had been transformed into a capitalist class in the previous centuries,
the monarchy maintained its position at the head of the state via a medieval
legacy: monarchs, he argued, ‘were no mere executives, but were great patri-
monial lords’.57 Moreover, ‘the king was largely politically isolated from the
landed class as a whole until the autumn of 1641’.58 Therefore, the fundamen-
tal conict at the heart of the English revolution was between this ‘patrimo-
nial group’, who derived their wealth from politically constituted property
rights, and the rest of the landowning class.
At the heart of this divide was a conict over the nature and role of the state.
Because the landlords had moved towards the production of a social surplus
through capitalist exploitation they no longer required extra-economic forms
of surplus extraction. Rather, they required a state with a minimal, but national
role to protect absolute private property.59 The aristocracy was therefore more
than happy to see the centralisation of state power in the hands of the monar-
chy, while the monarchy was happy to begin the movement towards absolut-
ism, based upon politically constituted property.60 These differing bases for
the evolving consensus on the direction of the development of state power
could only act along the same vector up to a point: specically the
55
Brenner plays something of a slight of hand here by creating a straw man from
what he labels as an ‘amalgamation’ of ideas taken from the work of Hill, Tawney
and Stone. Unfortunately, while he acknowledges that neither Hill nor Stone would
adhere to this model today, he does not attempt to address their mature theses.
Brenner 1993, p. 638.
56
Brenner 1993, p. 648.
57
Brenner 1993, p. 653.
58
Brenner 1993, p. 643.
59
Brenner 1993, p. 652.
60
Brenner 1993, p. 653.
monarchs tended to undertake specic wars – and pursue particular foreign

policies – of which the parliamentary classes could not approve.61
Brenner argues that
whereas capitalism and landlordism developed more or less symbiotically,

capitalist development helped precipitate the emergence of a new form of
state, to which the relationship of capitalist landlords and of the patrimonial
monarchy were essentially ambiguous and ambivalent and ultimately the
source of immanent fundamental conict.62
In effect Brenner’s narrative of the Revolution is the story of how a certain

group of ‘new merchants’ came into conict with the monarchy to the point
of igniting open conict. Traditionally, Brenner argues, England’s merchants
shared ‘a profound dependence on the Crown-sanctioned commercial cor-
porations that provided the foundation for their protected trade’.63 Despite
the arbitrary taxes imposed on this group by the Crown in the 1620s, this
relationship ensured that these merchants played a conservative role in the
Revolution.64 However, from the early seventeenth century a new group of
merchants arose that had a much more contradictory relationship with the
Crown. These ‘new merchants’ were not ‘mere merchants’, as were their tra-
ditional counterparts, but were also actively involved in the process of pro-
duction itself.65 They were so involved because as poorer types, relative to the
mere merchants, they could not enter into the enclosed world of the chartered
merchant associations. This new group in effect could only thrive where the
traditional merchants had failed, for it was here that markets were open. As
members of London’s burgeoning capitalist community they had the experi-
ence to apply themselves practically to the production process in situations
where the traditional merchants, who were merely interested in buying cheap
and selling dear, could not exploit existing producers.66 This new merchant
group did not benet from the élite merchants’ relationship with the Crown.
Moreover, the ‘new merchants’ not only did not share in any of the protec-
61
Brenner 1993, p. 648.
62
Brenner 1993, p. 651.
63
64
65
Brenner 1993, p. 160.
66
tionist benets of the traditional merchant groups, but they did feel all of the
burdens of arbitrary taxation. It was in response to the arbitrary actions of the
Crown that, in the period 1640–2, this group took up leading positions within
the Revolutionary ferment.67
Contemporary politics
The problem of the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not simply
of an academic interest to Brenner. He operates within a heterodox variant
of the Trotskyist tradition, and is an editor of the radical journal, Against the
Current. As such he is directly involved within the socialist movement at a
political level.68 Furthermore, his historical work contains a direct political
message which is perhaps most apparent in his paper, ‘The Origins of Capital-
ist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’. In this essay, Brenner
deployed his model of the origins of capitalism to advance a critique of the
displacement of class struggle from the analyses of capitalist development
and underdevelopment associated with Frank, Wallerstein and Sweezy.69
Concluding his evaluation of their histories of capitalism with a critique of
their political conclusions, he argues that their analyses led to ‘Third-World-
ist’ conclusions, which in turn led to an underestimation of the potential for
socialist transformation in the West.
This perspective must also minimize the extent to which capitalism’s post-
war success in developing the productive forces specic to the metropolis
provided the material basis for . . . the decline of radical working-class
movements and consciousness in the post-war period. It must consequently
minimize the potentialities opened up by the current economic impasse
of capitalism for working-class political action in the advanced industrial
countries.70
In emphasising the class relations at the heart of capitalism, Brenner restates

the classical-Marxist case for proletarian revolution in the West. Indeed in
his internationalist attack on the aims of the USA in the rst Gulf War he
67
Brenner 1993, p. 317.
68
Brenner 1985c; 1991c.
69
70
Brenner 1977, p. 92; Brenner 1991c, p. 137.
concluded with the classical-Marxist call for the American Left to ‘rid itself
once and for all of its lingering elitism – the belief that ordinary people are
incapable of discovering and acting in their own interests’.71 And, as any
Marxist theory of revolution must be rooted within an analysis of the eco-
nomic laws of motion of capitalism, of fundamental importance to his Marx-
ism was the desire to understand the nature of postwar capitalism.
In a series of extended essays, he sought to develop a theory of the postwar
boom and crisis. In the rst of these essays, ‘The Regulation Approach: Theory
and History’, written with Mark Glick, he took issue with the French regula-
tion school’s approach to the cognition of the world economy. Brenner and
Glick criticise both the methodology of the regulationists, and their reformist
political conclusions. Methodologically, Brenner and Glick argue that because
the regulationists’ starting point is the national economy, they are unable to
explain the ‘simultaneous and general character of the crisis on an interna-
tional scale’.72 Politically, Brenner and Glick argue,
since the Regulationists nd the ultimate source of the current crisis in the
crisis of ‘informal involvement’ of workers’ participation . . . it follows that
Lipietz should propose an anti-Taylorian revolution as the way out. This
would bring into being a new class compromise.73
However, since
the source of the current crisis is not a problem of productivity growth, . . .

so an improved rate of productivity increase cannot restore aggregate
protability and prosperity.74
Moreover,
in this situation of ongoing economic crisis, for workers to involve

themselves in ‘team concepts’ . . . will destroy their own ability to defend
their conditions.75
In the second of his major interventions into economic theory Brenner went
beyond a critique of the ideas of others to formulate his own analysis of the
71
Brenner 1977, p. 137.
72
Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 102.
73
74
75
world economy. He begins his 1998 essay ‘The Economics of Global Turbu-
lence’ with a decisive refutation of the dominant supply-side explanation for
the onset of economic crisis. However, it is only when he outlines his own
theory of the crisis that the contradictions of his thought become apparent.
Idiosyncratically, he suggested that an implicit Malthusianism marred Marx’s
theory of crisis.76 In its place, he develops what Perry Anderson succinctly
terms a theory of crisis born of ‘over-competition’:
I offer an alternative approach which takes as its point of departure

the unplanned, uncoordinated, and competitive nature of capitalist
production.77
Thus, Brenner rejects the traditional Marxist account of economic crisis, which
locates capital’s crisis prone tendencies within the production process itself.
In turn, he replaces this account with a model within which capital’s prob-
lems are understood to lie within the realisation process.
Brenner argues that the specicity of capitalism lies in the way that it sys-
tematically encourages the growth of the forces of production. However,
‘given capitalism’s unplanned, competitive nature, realization problems can-
not be assumed away’.78 Further, if capitalists had a perfect knowledge of
their competitors’ actions, and could adjust to the developing situation, then
‘cost cutting technical change poses no problem’.79 However, in the real world
of capitalism, ‘individual capitalist producers can neither control nor predict
the market for their goods’.80 Capitalism is thus characterised not by planning,
but by risk taking and a process of what Schumpeter called ‘creative destruc-
tion’. However, Brenner suggests, ‘Schumpeter may . . . have underestimated
the potentially destructive side of creative destruction’.81
Unfortunately, in neither ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’ nor his more
recent The Boom and the Bubble, does Brenner move to develop explicit strategic
political conclusion from his economic analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Rather, his analysis concludes with a strong critique of optimistic analyses
of the prospects for the US economy: he casts doubts on the possibilities of a
76
77
Anderson 1998, p. iv. Brenner 1998, p. 8.
78
79
Ibid.
80
81
continued US expansion, and suggests that the USA today is in an ominous

position, similar to that of Japan in the late 1980s just before its bubble burst,
and from which a serious risk of a descent into recession is likely; a develop-
ment that would, in all likelihood, set off an international recession.82
Wood has added some political meat to the bones of Brenner’s economic
analysis of modern capitalism. Whereas Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn had
argued on the pages of New Left Review that Britain’s economic woes could
be overcome if her state could be modernised,83 Wood countered with the
argument that it is precisely the ‘pristine’ capitalist nature of the British state
that best explains its economic decline: ‘It is not . . . the gentility of British capi-
talism that has hindered its development but, on the contrary, its unbridled
rapacity’.84 Thus, for Wood, the ght, in England at least, is not against any
elements of the ancien régime, but against capitalism pure and simple.85
In her book The Retreat from Class she argues that, while capitalism is char-
acterised by the separation of the economic from the political, this separation
could be overcome in periods of crisis. Published in 1986, the most obvious
contemporary example of political class struggle in the West was the British
Miners’ Strike of 1984–5. Wood argues that this conict
demonstrated how ‘merely economic’ class struggles, even when their

objectives are limited, have a unique capacity to alter the political terrain
and to unmask and confront the structures of capitalist power, the state,
the law, the police, as no other social force can do.86
Thus, Wood defended the socialist project in the aftermath of one of the big-
gest defeats in British working-class history. Indeed the thesis of her book was
a critique of those post-Althusserian socialists who had rejected the working
class as the potential agency of socialist transformation. Wood, recalling a
phrase from The German Ideology, describes these thinkers as the ‘New True
Socialists (NTS)’.87 She argues that NTS was characterised by its ‘autonomiza-
tion of ideology and politics from any social basis, and more specically,
82
Brenner 2002, pp. 276, 278, and 2004, p. 100.
83
84
Wood 1988, p. 167.
85
Wood 1988, p. 18.
86
Wood, 1986, p. 183. On the forces that mediate against the generalisation of
economic into political conicts see Wood 1995, pp. 44–8.
87
Wood 1986, p. 1.
from any class foundation’. Moreover, she insists that, politically, NTS was
characterised by the ‘repetition of banal and hoary right-wing social demo-
cratic nostrums’.88 In contrast to these arguments, Wood maintains that the
working-class
can uniquely advance the cause of socialism (though not completely achieve
it) even without conceiving socialism as their class objective, by pursuing
their material class interests, because these interests are by-nature essentially
opposed to capitalist class exploitation and to a class-dominated organization
of production.89
Wood ends this book with a discussion of the practical implications of her
criticisms of NTS. One key programmatic policy that she rejects is dogmatic
electoralism: a strategy that is blind to the processes that have over the last
century or so robbed democracy of its social content.90 For, under capitalism,
where the economic and the political are separate, the self-limitation of social-
ist politics to the electoral arena would ensure that socialists would remain
excluded from the real locus of decision making. A socialist strategic perspec-
tive based upon the struggles of the working class could, in comparison, hope
to overcome the dualism between economics and politics.
Wood also rejects the idea of market socialism; for this ideology, she insists,
ignores the fact that capitalist social relations are based upon compulsion
rather than opportunity.91 She believes that this criticism is securely under-
pinned by Brenner’s economic analysis of capitalist crises which both under-
cuts political reformism, and strengthens the case for working-class industrial
militancy; if the crisis of capitalism is a direct consequence of the operation
of market relations then theorists of a ‘third way’ have their regulated market
exposed as a utopia. Furthermore, if crises are not the consequence of the
squeeze of wages upon prots then arguments for the cessation of militant
working class struggles, so as to ameliorate crisis tendencies, are also under-
mined. In contrast to these reformist perspectives, Wood insists that socialists
should foster the ghts for reform within capitalism and attempt to link them
88
Wood 1986, pp. 2, 7.
89
Wood 1986, p. 189.
90
Wood 1986, p. 198; compare to Wood and Wood 1997, p. 136.
91
Wood 1999a, p. 119.
to a broader, if more difcult, struggle against capitalism.92 More generally she

notes, rst, that while socialists should recognise the resilience of working-
class reformism, they should be wary of retreating from revolutionary politics
before its seeming omnipotence;93 while, second, she insists that socialism can
only be achieved, as Marx pointed out, through the self-emancipation of the
working class.94
This model of socialism as the self-emancipation of the proletariat informs
Brenner’s rejection of Stalinism. In ‘The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe’, he
argues that
the bureaucracy has constituted and reproduced itself as a ruling class by

virtue of its ability to take a surplus directly by force from the collectivity of
the direct producers, the working class.95
Thus, he argues, as Stalinism negated the socialist hopes of 1917, its demise
should ll socialists with hope rather than despair.
Conclusion
Political Marxism aims to be more than another academic sub-discipline by
continuing the classical-Marxist tradition of developing theory that might act
as a guide to socialist practice. Whether or not it has succeeded in this aim,
and I have argued elsewhere that the jury is still out on this question,96 it is
surely true that it has proved to be of enormous analytical power, informing a
series of sophisticated historical and political analyses of the modern world.
92
Wood 1999b.
93
Wood 1995, p. 107.
94
Wood 1987, p. 138.
95
96
Blackledge 2002/3.
Chapter Sixteen
From ‘Mass Worker’ to ‘Empire’:
The Disconcerting Trajectory of Italian Operaismo
Maria Turchetto
It is not difcult, in Italy at any rate, to reach lin-

guistic agreement on the term operaismo. There is
no doubt about the main journals around which
this current of thought was formed in the 1960s and
1970s (Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, Potere Operaio);
or about the authors who are its principal represen-
tatives (Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Antonio
Negri unquestionably hold a privileged position
with respect to many other exponents, even when
latter have made very important contributions).1
Today, however, operaismo is more than a school:
it is above all a readily identiable ‘mentality’, an
attitude, and a lexicon. At a distance of some forty
years (it would be legitimate to date the birth of the
movement from the publication of the rst issue of
Quaderni Rossi, in June 1961), a number of basic the-
ses, the use of certain passages from Marx (the well-
known fragment on machines in the Grundrisse), and
some keywords (general intellect, class composition,
autonomy) still function as a powerful apparatus of
1
In this sense, I am in agreement with Damiano Palano’s ‘Cercare un centro di
gravità permanente? Fabbrica, Società, Antagonismo’, in Intermarx <http/www.inter-
marx.com/>. The author reconstructs the the history of operaismo, of which he offers
a good synthesis, as well as an interesting ‘reckoning’ from within.
286 • Maria Turchetto
recognition. Without a doubt, this is more linguistic than theoretical, and

evocative as opposed to genuinely propositional. But it nevertheless serves
as a reference for the various branches of what used to be the ‘movement’
(another keyword) in the 1970s.
In fact, Italian operaismo primarily consists today in this impoverished ref-
erence, in this collection of words standing in for theory, which confers an
apparent unity and identity on confused positions that have gradually become
hostage to cultural fashions or nostalgia. However, this resistance, this capac-
ity to survive and at least suggest a different line of thinking in these dark
times of la pensée unique, attest to an original strength that must be taken
seriously.
The 1960s: the ‘mass worker [operaio massa]’

Let us therefore start at the beginning in the 1960s, with the experience of
the Quaderni Rossi and the group of young theoreticians who ran this journal
(Panzieri, Tronti, Alquati).
In the 1960s, the historical organisations of the working class remained
loyal to the orthodox idea of the ‘progressive development of the produc-
tive forces’, motor of humanity’s march towards communism – a march tem-
porarily checked by ‘the anarchy of the market’ and deected by another
characteristic of capitalism: the iniquitous distribution of social wealth. This
‘productivist’ conception, which construes capitalism as private property plus
the market, counter-posing to it socialism understood as public property and
planning, implies that the capitalist organisation of production is accepted in
the main. By seriously challenging the apologetic vision of scientic and tech-
nological progress that characterised the Marxist tradition, Panzieri’s account
introduced some decisive theoretical premises for a radical critique of this
position. In ‘Plusvalore e pianicazione’ (1964), he wrote:
Faced with the capitalist imbrication of technology and power, the

perspective of an alternative (working-class) use of machinery obviously
cannot be based on a pure and simple reversal of the relations of production
(of property), conceived as an envelope which at a certain level of growth
of the productive forces is supposedly destined to fall away, simply because
Italian Operaismo • 287
it has become too narrow. The relations of production are internal to the
forces of production and the latter are ‘fashioned’ by capital.2
From this viewpoint, science, technology, and the organisation of labour are
released from the limbo of some rational and neutral ‘development of the
productive forces’ in itself. They emerge, instead, as the fundamental site of
the ‘despotic’ domination of capital.
Panzieri’s turn – a veritable ‘Copernican revolution’ against the Marxism
derived from the Third International – led to a reassessment of aspects of
Marx’s analysis that the Marxist tradition had largely abandoned: not only
the passage from the Grundrisse on machines mentioned above,3 but also
(especially in this phase) the themes of part four of Volume One of Capital,
as well as the unpublished chapter on the ‘Results of the Immediate Process
of Production’. Basic categories used by Marx in his analyses of mechanised
industry (the concepts of the formal and real subsumption of labour to capital,
the idea of the ‘subjective’ expropriation of the producers as regards the ‘men-
tal powers of production’, etc.)4 were adopted and applied to the study of
‘neo-capitalism’ and the Fordist factory. The idea took root that the concrete
modalities of the distribution of labour within an organisation whose goal
is the extraction of surplus-value constituted the real heart of the problem.
Hence capitalism was not equivalent to private property plus the market, but
was above all a form of organising labour that found consummate expression
in the norms of Taylorism and Fordism.
It was not only a question of a ‘return to Marx’. The analytical instruments
rediscovered in Marx’s texts served primarily to interpret the processes
underway in Italy – the effects of the accelerated economic development of
the postwar period and migration from the South to the metropolises of the
North – and to develop new and original interpretative categories. Thus were
2
Panzieri 1994, pp. 54–5.
3
The fragment was cited for the rst time by Panzieri in ‘Plusvalore e pianica-
zione’ and was likewise published in the fourth number of Quaderni Rossi in 1964.
Perhaps it should be observed that Panzieri signals in a note how ‘the model of a direct
transition from capitalism to communism’ sketched in the fragment is contradicted
by ‘numerous passages in Capital’ (Panzieri 1994, p. 68).
4
See Panzieri 1994, pp. 47–54.
born the concepts of ‘class composition’ and ‘mass worker’, introduced for the
rst time by Romano Alquati in an article devoted to the Olivetti labour force
at Ivrea.5 The ‘mass worker’ was the new productive subject of ‘neo-capital-
ism’, technically deskilled by comparison with the preceding gure of the
‘craft worker’. He was therefore ‘subjectively expropriated’ and ‘really sub-
ordinated’ to capital and, in addition, socially rootless and politically without
traditions. But the ‘mass worker’ was regarded as the bearer of a very pow-
erful potential for conict. ‘Class composition’6 was intended to express the
bond between the objective technical characteristics evinced by labour-power
at a given historical moment, as a result of its position within the capitalist
organisation of the production process, and its subjective, political character-
istics. It is precisely the synthesis of these two aspects that determines the
class’s potential for struggle.
This theoretical account found a specic reference in the factory struggles
of the 1960s. This period witnessed the emergence of strong opposition to
the ofcial trade-union line, centred on the defence of working-class ‘profes-
sionalism’ – a line that corresponded in the 1950s to an attempt to defend
the bargaining power achieved during the struggles of the immediate post-
war period. The limits of this defensive struggle, based on an unquestioned
identication between ‘professionalism’ and the ‘skills’ dictated by the capi-
talist organisation of labour, emerged precisely when the latter underwent
profound alteration as a result of the large-scale introduction of Taylorist
methods and the assembly line. In the face of these changes, accompanied by
the arrival in the large northern factories of thousands of young southerners
recruited as unskilled labourers, the slogan of professionalism turned into an
instrument that weakened and divided the working class.
Accordingly, the demystication of the slogan of professionalism, the
resumption of the themes of the alienation and deskilling of labour, and the
identication of a levelling down of working-class strata implied by these
phenomena, possessed an obvious practical import during this phase. The
recourse to the inquiry, in which the Quaderni Rossi group placed much faith,
5
See Alquati 1962. In attributing paternity of these expressions to Alquati, I rely
on what Palano says in ‘Cercare un centro di gravità permanente?’.
6
The concept mimics the Marxist concept of the ‘organic composition of capital’,
understood as a synthesis of ‘technical composition’ and ‘value composition’.
helped to further this line of thought and to marry theoretical elaboration

with research on the ground.
This original operaismo – roughly speaking, that developed in the rst num-
bers of Quaderni Rossi – seems to possess everything required to be a good
theory: a theory that has great critical value, produces analytical tools, and
guides praxis.
Factory and society

The wave of working-class struggles that peaked during the ‘hot autumn’ of
1969 seemed to offer an extraordinary conrmation of the theoretical prem-
ises of operaismo. The ‘mass worker’ not only furnished evidence of his exis-
tence, but also conrmed all the hopes that had been lodged in his conictual
potential. Here was a social gure of substance and a politically strong gure,
which could serve as a reference-point for the other movements that emerged
at the time. The mass worker could form the vanguard of an Italian revolu-
tionary movement.
In truth, divisions had already appeared within Quaderni Rossi over the link
between factory struggles and the revolutionary project. In July 1963, Tronti,
Negri, Alquati and others resigned from the editorial board of Quaderni Rossi
in order to set up the journal Classe operaia the following year. Here is what
Panzieri wrote in this connection, with critical reference to Tronti’s texts:
An important aspect of the current situation is the danger of simply taking

the ‘savage’ critique of organisations that is implicit, and often explicit,
in workers’ behaviour . . . for the immediate possibility of developing a
comprehensive revolutionary strategy, ignoring the problem of the specic
content and instruments required to construct such a strategy.7
The continuity between workers’ struggles and revolution established by

Tronti, and challenged by Panzieri, rested on two pillars. The rst was the
particular theory of the link between factory and society that the former had
already set out in the article ‘La fabbrica e la società’8 – a theory that represents
7
Panzieri 1994, pp. xivii–iii.
8
Originally published in Quaderni Rossi, no. 2, 1962, the article was reprinted in
Tronti 1971.
the central kernel of his whole argument. The second was the idea that the
logic of the factory is progressively extended to the whole society – an idea
likewise found, in part at least, in Panzieri, and which was to be variously
shared by all subsequent elaborations of operaismo.
According to Tronti, the relationship between factory and society was
above all one of opposition. For him, the real contradiction of capitalism was
not that between the ‘productive forces’ and ‘relations of production’ theo-
rised by orthodox Marxism, but the contradiction opposing the ‘process of
production’, which unfolds in the factory, to the ‘valorisation process’, which
unfolds in society.9 In society, labour-power presents itself as exchange-value.
In this role, the worker is a slave to the market, an atomised, defenceless, pas-
sive consumer incapable of developing the least resistance to capitalism. In
the factory, by contrast, labour-power is use-value. Although purchased by the
capitalist, it continues to belong as such to the worker, who thus retains his
antagonistic capacity and, when inserted into the mechanism of co-operative
production, can develop it in the form of collective action.
Accordingly, it is the factory – and it alone – that generates antagonism.
But, if this is the case, a problem is posed comparable to that envisaged by
Panzieri in the passage above: the problem of a revolutionary strategy that is
more complex than spontaneous factory struggles. Or rather, the problem is
resolved automatically. Capitalist development in fact gradually extends the
factory to society; and thus the initial opposition between factory and society
is itself destined to be resolved by the supremacy of the former over the lat-
ter. As Panzieri had already put it, ‘the more capitalism develops, the more
the organisation of production is extended to the organisation of the whole
society’.10 For his part, Tronti wrote:
At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes

a moment of the relation of production, the whole society becomes an
articulation of production. In other words, society as a whole lives according
to the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over society
as a whole.11
9
In a rather debatable use of Marxian terminology, Tronti construed the ‘produc-
tion process’ as the sphere of production and the ‘valorisation process’ as the sphere
of circulation of commodities and money.
10
Panzieri 1994, p. 68.
11
Tronti 1971, p. 51.
The similarity of the two formulae in fact conceals signicant differences. For
Panzieri, the extension of the logic of the factory to society basically consists
in an increase in the aspects of economic planning characteristic of ‘neo-capi-
talism’. In this respect, Panzieri proves to be rather in tune with orthodox
Marxism, which interpreted the historical development of capitalism as a
succession of ‘stages’, wherein the initial stage, corresponding to competi-
tive capitalism, was followed by increasingly ‘regulated’ forms: rst of all, the
monopoloy-oligopolistic capitalism of the era when Lenin and Kautsky fash-
ioned a theory of it and then the ‘planned capitalism’ of the present (a concept
that differs not at all from that of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ as employed by
ofcial Marxism). The only criticism of the traditional position, pretty much
taken for granted at the time, consisted in denying that a ‘nal stage’ could be
identied in this development by stages.12
In Tronti’s formulation, the idea of a ‘gradual transformation of society into
a factory’, when closely examined, possesses a different meaning. It desig-
nates not so much greater recourse to forms of regulation and planning, as the
growing subordination to production itself of spheres of social action that are
distinct from production. In seemingly similar formulations, the two authors
were in reality referring to different phenomenologies. In Panzieri, the idea of
a ‘plan’ that extends from factory to society essentially refers to the phenom-
enon of growing capitalist concentration and its effects. In Tronti, by contrast,
the idea of the extension of the factory above all refers to the phenomenon of
the expansion of the service sector in the economy. Against the moderate inter-
pretation of the time, which regarded growth in the employee and service
sector as an expansion of middle strata and thus a diminution of the working
class, Tronti regarded these processes as ‘the reduction of all labour to indus-
trial labour’13 – and hence the generalisation of the wage-labour relation, the
proletarianisation of vast swathes of the population, and the direct subjec-
tion of sectors traditionally regarded as unproductive to the imperatives of
production.
It was Tronti’s interpretation that was going to prevail in the subsequent
development of operaismo, where it played a crucial role. These premises in
fact gave rise to the idea of the ‘social worker’ – a powerful intuition, but also
12
Panzieri 1994, p. 70n.
13
Tronti 1971, p. 53.
a source of ambiguities and, above all, a means of escaping reality to take

refuge in extremism. If the factory encompasses society and extends its logic
ubiquitously, and if the whole social process is now integrated into a single
organic process of production-reproduction, then all the subordinate mem-
bers of society form part of a total ‘social worker’, opposed to a capital that for
its part embodies the whole of ‘direction’.
The 1970s: the ‘social worker’
In the event, it was not Tronti who drew these conclusions. The category of
‘social worker’ took shape in the 1970s, the dark years of the crisis and politi-
cal repression, and formed the core of Antonio Negri’s theoretical elaboration
above all.
Let us rst consider the new context. After 1973, the cycle of working-class
struggle entered into a descending phase. The spectre of economic recession,
rendered obvious by the oil crisis, functioned as a powerful weapon with
which to impose a restructuring of production. The new computer and elec-
tronic technologies were only just emerging and reference was not yet made
to the virtues of the ‘Japanese model’. What was on the agenda was a restruc-
turing primarily conceived as a rationalisation and reorganisation of existing
productive structures, entailing a very heavy price for the working class in
terms of wages and employment. In particular, the system of jobs and skills
was redened, wrong-footing the egalitarianism of the 1960s struggles and
giving a new lease of life to the old trade-union line of defending ‘profession-
alism’. This now assumed an openly reactionary signicance, since it became
the vehicle for imposing a new division within the working class and, above
all, for securing labour mobility. The restructuring effected what might be
dened as a conscious ‘class decomposition’: the technical dismantling of the
former organisation of production was at the same time a political dismantling
of the working-class strength achieved during the earlier cycle of struggles.
On a more general political level, the historical organisations of the Left
remained loyal to the old ‘productivist’ idea. Thus, the proletariat was one
again summoned to raise the banner of ‘productivity’ cast aside by an increas-
ingly ‘parasitic’ bourgeoisie. The PCI of the period extended this ideology to
complete acceptance of capitalist compromises, to the slogan of a ‘producers’
alliance’ (the working class and ‘productive capital’ against the parasitic plun-
dering of capitalism), to ‘austerity’ and the ‘line of sacrices’ that weighed

so heavily in the major working-class defeat of the 1980s. More serious still
was the PCI’s complicity in the project of criminalising dissent, which took a
decisive step at the end of the 1970s with the special laws enacted following
the Moro affair. Potere Operaio, and other movements that identied with the
positions of operaismo, gured among the indicated victims.
In this climate, the operaista group divided along two main lines which,
from attempts to respond to the crisis, gradually turned into veritable lines of
ight: initially, a ight towards other realities, different from the factory; but
ultimately, a ight from reality itself, towards ever more utopian and imagi-
nary dimensions.
The rst line was the one adopted by Tronti: ‘the autonomy of the politi-
cal’. Faced with the increasing difculty faced by working-class struggles and
their tendency to fade – let us recall that, according to this author, they were
the only possible ones – Tronti severed the Gordian knot of the factory-society
relationship, attributing to the state an unexpected ‘autonomy’ from society.
It was therefore a question of reassessing political action as compared with to
workers’ demands and reconquering the terrain of the state, where the ‘work-
ers’ party’ (itself ‘relatively’ autonomous of the corresponding class) could
ratify the conquests of factory struggles at an institutional level. The line of
the ‘autonomy of the political’ was to be rather short-lived, serving above
all to transport a percentage of operaista militants and theoreticians onto the
tranquil shores of parliamentary politics. The upshot of this fairly massive
trahison des clercs was to put paid to revolutionary velleities, but also to any
theoretical originality.
The route taken by Negri – that of the ‘social worker’ – seemed more viable,
at least at the outset. The emergence of this new category, intended to replace
that of ‘mass worker’, is generally dated back to the 1971 article ‘Crisi dello
Stato-piano’. But it was certainly in the second half of the 1970s that the idea
was claried. Although the term ‘state-plan’ evokes Panzieri’s ‘planned capi-
talism’, Negri’s account was in fact much closer to Tronti’s. His analyses cen-
tred above all on the phenomenon of tertiarisation:
Faced with the imposing alterations brought about – or in the process of

being brought about – by restructuring, the body of the working class
becomes distended and [is articulated as a body of social class . . .]. In the
past, the proletariat became workers. At present, we are witnessing the
converse process: the worker is becoming a tertiary worker, a social worker,

a proletarian worker, a proletarian.14
In addition to the Trontian inuence, other sources soon converged in the

thematic of the ‘social worker’. On the one hand, there was Alquati’s research,
which used the term to refer to a new, highly educated political subject – and
hence very different from the unqualied ‘mass worker’, fruit of the processes
of proletarianisation and massication of intellectual labour.15 On the other,
there were the historical studies conducted by the political sciences collec-
tive at Padua University (to which, besides Negri himself, Sergio Bologna,
Luciano Ferrari Bravo and Ferrucio Gambino belonged) – sources of a new
vision of capitalist development and its ‘stages’, which was to become one of
the axes of operaista thinking.
What emerges from these studies is a notion of capitalist development
whose motor is not so much the logic of prot as workers’ struggles. In this
optic, Taylorism and Fordism correspond to capital’s need to liberate itself
from the ‘craft worker’, whose professionalism served as a lever for develop-
ing a powerful potential for struggle.16 On the other hand, the ‘mass worker’
who replaced the ‘craft worker’ certainly seemed at the outset to be one of the
solutions to the problem (the absence of qualications and the rootlessness,
political and social, characteristic of the ‘mass worker’ prevented him conduct-
ing and developing struggle in the organisational forms of the previous cycle
of struggles). Subsequently, however, he would prove capable of expressing a
distinctive capacity for resistance, attuned to the new organisation of labour,
which was more collective and egalitarian, and hence even more dangerous
for capital. Thus, the restructuring of the 1970s was interpreted as bound up
with capital’s need to free itself of the ‘mass worker’: a change that had suc-
ceeded temporarily, given the interruption of factory conicts, but which in
no way precluded hopes that the new organisation of production would give
rise to a new antagonistic subject – the ‘social worker’. Having theoretically
deduced his existence, and abstractly outlined his features, it only remained
to await, in messianic fashion, the concrete appearance of the ‘social worker’.
14
Negri 1976, p. 9.
15
See Alquati 1976.
16
Sergio Bologna, for example, linked the council movement of the immediate post-
First World War period, which was especially strong in Germany, with the gure of
the craft worker. See Bologna 1972, p. 15.
Negri took the implicit determinism concealed in this inverted sequence of

‘stages’, where it is the working class that pressures capitalism into the devel-
opment of technology, to its extreme conclusion. He adds to it a nal stage:
the one prophesied in the celebrated fragment on machines (since Negri,
the citation has become ritual). With enormous technological and scientic
development,
[t]he theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a
miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry
itself. . . . With that, production based on exchange value breaks down.17
Negri is convinced that Marx’s prophecy has already been realised: it is no

longer labour that creates wealth, but science and technology – the general
intellect – whose site is not the factory, but society. Capitalism is already dead,
superseded by its own development, economically useless. It survives as a
sheer will to power, as mere ‘political’ coercion, now disconnected from the
objective of valorisation.
The result is paradoxical, in as much as it leads to a complete reversal of
operaismo’s original positions. On the one hand, the old orthodoxy which
formed the main target of the critiques developed in Quaderni Rossi – the
‘development of the productive forces’ propelling history towards com-
munism – is revived, with the sole difference that in Negri’s position it is
workers’ struggles (not the ‘law of surplus-value’, as Panzieri had it)18 which
compel capital to take the path of technological innovation. On the other
hand, the resistance to capital, originally situated in the sphere of production
and regarded as impracticable in the sphere of commodity circulation and
consumption, is now located in ‘the practices of the reproduction of labour-
power’ – a category that comprises the totality of workers’ behaviour outside
the factory (from consumption to education and the organisation of leisure),19
17
Marx 1973, p. 705.
18
Panzieri 1994, pp. 51ff.
19
See Negri 1977, pp. 310ff. In this text, Negri theorises ‘the autonomy of the
reproduction of labour-power’, arguing that ‘minor circulation’ (the portion of capi-
tal advanced, indicated by L, with which the worker acquires his means of subsis-
tence) is alien to capitalist valorisation: ‘the alien character of L and working-class
consumption . . . assumes not only the possibility of the relative independence of the
consumption, the needs, the use-value of the working class from capitalist develop-
ment, but also the form of an (antagonistic) dialectic on this whole terrain’: Negri
1977, p. 314.
considered to be endowed with autonomy and invested with an immediate

anticapitalist value.
The 1980s: technological utopias

The rehabilitation of technological determinism, as the well as the ight from
the factory dened by the line of ‘the autonomy of reproduction’, were fertile
soil for the reception of the huge advertising hype that accompanied the rst
major wave of diffusion of technologies based on computers and electronics
in the 1980s. The new technologies were approved, with the whole accompa-
nying propaganda apparatus, which was not that difcult to unmask.
The literature that accompanied the advent of the new technologies in the
1980s was in fact blatantly apologetic: optimistic, full of wonderful promises,
directed, like all self-respecting publicity, to the collective imaginary rather
than the production of knowledge. The science concerned with these prob-
lems has rarely approximated so closely to science ction. People competed
in the production of fantastic futurologies and sociologies that ultimately con-
verged in presenting an omnipotent technology confronting a completely mal-
leable society. Omnipotent and good, technology would do what the major
social movements had proved incapable of doing: it would take charge of
redressing all capitalism’s wrongs, or at least the most grave of those of which
it was guilty with respect to humanity and nature. Two myths took shape: the
myth of the future postindustrial society, which took the notion that ‘small
is beautiful’ as far as the dream of a totally atomised society where towns
have disappeared and individuals live in an unpolluted Arcadia, connected
by terminals that allow them to communicate, work, educate themselves, and
do their shopping – an idea that links up with that of ‘immaterial production’;
and the old myth of the ‘end of work’, which generalised the phenomena of
automation and the expulsion of manpower – phenomena that always accom-
pany phases of restructuring – seeing them as the of sign of an imminent, even
current, end to the need to work.
The operaisti like these myths. They like the idea of the ‘postindustrial soci-
ety’, which seems to conrm the old idea of the factory diffused and diluted
in society to the point where it disappears. Naturally, they like the myth of the
‘end of work’: the idea of the pointlessness of capitalist direction – in the sense
envisaged above – happily marries up with that of complete automation,
regarded as already feasible and delayed only by a perverse desire to pro-

long the existing power structure beyond its historically necessary term. In
this optic, capitalist direction is increasingly symbolic, ever more disconnected
from material production and the factory. Ultimately, it is merely a way of
thinking, of representing reality, of generating meaning and linguistic rules,
diffused everywhere and internalised by everyone: ‘intelligent’ workers in the
integrated factory, electronic engineers, managers, intellectuals. All of them,
by the same token, are the ‘cognitive labour-power’ of this system and, at
the same time, ‘a mass intellectuality’ capable of extricating themselves from
it, thanks to exodus of which Paolo Virno, for example, speaks.20 In general,
the operaisti like the terms that fuel the new myths and which they employ in
order to imagine the future antagonistic subjects who will succeed the ‘craft
worker’, the ‘mass worker’, and even the ‘social worker’, who – alas – never
materialised.
With this exercise of the imagination, with this attempt to conjure up by
the power of words the new redemptive subjects who never have the good
grace to exist, the trajectory of operaismo ended in the 1990s. From the ‘mass
intellectual’, who briey ourished during the ephemeral student movement
of 1990,21 to the ‘immaterial worker’,22 and the ‘Immaterial Workers of the
World’, who were due to found a new ‘revolutionary unionism’ and trans-
form the ‘social centres’ into ‘post-Fordist trades councils’,23 operaismo found-
ers in this frantic search for new terms and new slogans: a slave of cultural
fashions and, consequently, of the worst neoliberal politics. In this headlong
ight, Negri is once again in the van: he embraces globalisation, Europe, fed-
eralism, with ever more delirious formulations (‘nomadic federalism’ as a
‘programme of European proletarians’ for the ‘proletarian reappropriation of
administrative space’);24 he even speaks, in connection with the Veneto, of a
‘communal entrepreneurship’:
20
See Virno 1990.
21
The daily paper Il Manifesto the same year launched an ‘Appeal to Mass Intel-
lectuality’. See Il Manifesto, 27 February 1990 (reprinted in Banlieus, no. 1 1997, which
assembles what survives of the operaista camp).
22
See Lazzarato and Negri 1992.
23
See ‘Che te lo dico a fare?’, under the signature ‘Immaterial Workers of the
World’, in DeriveApprodi, no. 18, 1999, pp. 31–9.
24
Negri 1999, p. 45.
Our country, the Veneto, is wealthy and its wealth has been produced by a
communal entrepreneurship. The heroes of this productive transformation
are certainly not only the employers and small employers who sing its
praises today. It is the workers of the Veneto, who have put their effort and
intellect, labour-power and creative power, at the service of all. They have
invested and accumulated professionalism in communal networks, through
which the entire existence of the population has become productive.25
A new ‘producers’ alliance’ comparable to that preached by the PCI during

the ‘years of lead’? Or are we instead to believe that the ‘mass entrepreneur’ is
going to be the new revolutionary subject of the third millennium?
En route, operaismo has become a bad theory: a blocked form of thinking,
which neither produces any critique, nor casts any light on the facts; a conso-
latory ideology, even a veritable hallucination, which makes it impossible to
perceive anything that does not correspond to its desires.
Empire, a postmodern book

There is no doubt that the extraordinary impact of Hardt’s and Negri’s book
Empire opened a new phase in the trajectory of ‘operaismo’. The French edi-
tion opens with the statement that this book is ‘an attempt to write a new
“Communist Manifesto” for our times’. The same claim is repeated in the
feature dedicated to the subject of the ‘Political Manifesto’.26 However, it is
not totally clear as to why Empire should aspire to belong to the genre of the
‘manifesto’ when, as a matter of fact, it takes the form of a new literary genre –
one which is much more in tune with our times. A ‘manifesto’ – be it political,
artistic or philosophical – is, by denition, brief, original and radical. Empire is
something quite different; in fact it is the opposite of a manifesto.
To start with, it is certainly not brief; it is a ‘mammoth’ of a book, almost 500
pages long. Absit iniuria verbis: to be fair, Marx’s Capital is a ‘mammoth’ work
too, in fact much more so; a work which has shaped history (and not only
the history of thought), perhaps even to a greater extent than The Communist
25
Negri 1997.
26
Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 636. I call ‘features’ those short chapters appearing
in italics throughout the book.
Manifesto ever did. But Capital is a rich and systematic work, and as such it
must be read from start to nish, and only in this order, if one is to understand
correctly its structure of argument (it was no accident that Marx gave such a
lot of thought to the issue of presentation, that is, to the difculties of translat-
ing into a sequential discourse a conceptual construction articulated in such a
complex way). Empire bears no resemblance to Capital: leaving aside its size, it
is a lightweight cultural production, inside which readers can ‘navigate’ with
a certain degree of freedom.
What Empire resembles more closely are other, more recent ‘mammoths’
coming in the main from the United States, such as The End of Work by Jeremy
Rifkin, or The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. Empire
shares with such books a strong argument (a clearly exaggerated argument,
it has to be said), a wide-ranging but lightweight narrative, a popularising
tone, numerous but rarely explored references and, above all, the quality of
functioning almost as a hypertext. Indeed, here the strong argument almost
becomes a mantra, so as to function as an easily identiable (and easily
expendable) slogan while, at the same time, becoming a link for accessing
the various sets of arguments in the book that remain relatively independent
from one another. The whole structure of Empire lends itself well to a reading
in chunks and in any order whatsoever, without its fundamental meaning
being affected in any considerable way.
However, the approach I have chosen to take what follows is that of a sys-
tematic reading: in other words from the beginning to the end, in this order.
Given the disturbing contradictions that emerge, it appears that the postmod-
ern genre of the ‘American-style mammoth’ does not lend itself well to this
reading.
A modern grand narrative (or two, or three)

The rst contradiction is the contradiction between the style of this book, which
is clearly postmodern, and its conception of history, which could not be more
modern. Empire’s history is teleological, with a clearly identiable direction (so
much so, that it even allows for predictions) and a dialectical movement in
the most Hegelian sense of the word: a history that marches on through its
beloved Theses, Antitheses and Syntheses, toward its (happy) End. A history
working for good people (that is, for the liberation of the ‘multitude’), in which
in the end the last shall come rst and the ‘poor’27 shall inherit the Earth. A
history in which ‘we are History’, ‘a product of human action’28 (driven by
a powerful and conscious Subjectivity).29 Althusser would have called it the
little drama of the Subject, the Origin and the End, Lyotard a ‘grand narra-
tive’, to all intents and purposes a secularised religion (and not that all secu-
larised either).30 In a nutshell: everything that postmodernist thought has ever
criticised, denied, prohibited.
It should be said that Hardt and Negri do not feel themselves part of post-
modernity but are already well past it; they are, so to speak, post-postmodern-
ists. It is for this reason that they nd ‘postmodernist critiques of modernity’
(under which they group postmodern theorists in the strict sense of the word,
from Lyotard to Harvey; postcolonialist theories like that of Bhabha; religious
fundamentalists and the neoliberal ideology of the world market)31 to be inad-
equate and ultimately useless, since they ‘nd themselves pushing against an
open door’.32 This is so because they attack a logic of power that has already
declined. At any rate, while the most outspoken modern authors are still look-
27
Indeed, from the feature entitled ‘The Poor’, we learn that the ‘multitude’ is made
up of ‘the poor’ – ‘every poor person, the multitude of poor people’ (p. 158).
28
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 237.
29
This claim as to the character of history is contained in the feature called ‘Cycles’,
Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 2379.
30
Despite the value attributed to ‘immanence’, religious inspiration is quite
visible, in the frequent references to Exodus, to Saint Augustine’s Celestial City, to
gnostic suggestions (a symptom of which is the very word multitude – multitudo
is the Latin translation of pleroma). It is also thanks to this point that Empire can be
seen as a widely usable multicultural product. It is good for atheists (thanks to the
ambiguity of the word ‘humanism’, which, in American culture, means in the rst
instance ‘a system of belief and standards concerned with the needs of people, and
not with religious ideas’, and only as a secondary meaning does it denote ‘the study
in the Renaissance of the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans’, see Longman,
Dictionary of English Language and Culture). It is good for believers of various creeds
(who, according to their religion, will be able to interpret the epic of the multitude
as a journey of the chosen people to the promised land, as an episode of salvation,
or as a celestial city for pilgrimage on Earth, or alternatively as the pleroma-multitudo
re-ascending to a divine whole, etc). The Catholic world is well taken care of, since
the hero eponymous with the multitude, the prototype and universal militant, is
none other than St. Francis of Assisi, to whom the nal feature of Empire, ‘Militant’
(Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 41113.) is devoted. But Islamists should not lose heart:
they too have a small place, representatives as they are of postmodernity see Hardt
and Negri 2000, pp. 14650).
31
See Chapter 2.4 ‘Symptoms of Passage’.
32
ing for signs of a decline of the nation-state, Hardt and Negri are already
talking about the decline and fall of that very same Empire,33 which according
to their analysis is about to replace the nation-state (or has it in fact already
replaced it? It is hard to keep one’s bearings in these fast incursions into the
future). Perhaps the dialectics is not postmodern, but, for all we know, it
could well be post-postmodern. Whatever the case, the two authors use it in
large doses.
The history of Western thought presented in Part 2 is all along the lines of a
Hegelian-style dialectics. It is almost a Philosophy of Spirit for North American
consumption, since it is here that the Spirit reaches its apex: not in the Prus-
sian state, but in the Constitution of the United States. This story could be
summed up in the following way.
Thesis: Humanism and the Renaissance. This was a ‘revolution’ in ‘Europe,
between 1200 and 1600, across distances that only merchants and armies
could travel and only the invention of the printing press would later bring
together’.34 The readers should leave aside the question of the dates and all
those encyclopaedias that date the Renaissance in Italy only at the end of 1400.
The ‘humanism’ described here is rather odd, a ‘hybridity’ to use the authors’
language – something that does not quite tally with what we were taught at
school. Looking closer, this Thesis is in turn an Overturning: the overturn-
ing of Transcendence into Immanence, of the creator divinity into productive
humanity.35 According to this, ‘humanism’ was not a handful of men of let-
ters, of scholars of Greek and Latin classics, but rather a ‘multitude’ of genius
atheists like Pico della Mirandola, innovators like Schumpeter’s entrepre-
neurs and productive men like Stakhanov. This ‘multitude’ had an incredible
potential, so it goes without saying that someone would want to prot from
it in the end.
Antithesis: The Enlightenment. From Descartes to Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant
and Hegel . . . Once again, one should not care too much about dates and
33
See Part 4, ‘The Decline and Fall of Empire’, Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 351.
34
35
The greatest champion of this overturning was Spinoza, whose philosophy
‘renewed the splendors of revolutionary humanism, putting humanity and nature in
the position of God, transforming the world into a territory of practice, and afrming
the democracy of the multitude as the absolute form of politics’ (Hardt and Negri
2000, p. 77). To my taste, this is a Spinoza a bit too similar to Feuerbach, but let us
try not to be picky.
denitions. The Illuminists (Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel)

appear as a group of thinkers scheming to create a mundane transcendence,
to keep under control and – if possible – exploit, the industrious multitude
who discovered immanence. The result of their efforts is the modern sov-
ereign state, the ‘transcendent apparatus’ par excellence – ‘God on Earth’ in
Hobbes’ denition.36
From the history of philosophy we now have to jump to that of political
institution, following the evolution of the European states and the creation of
that modernity which identies itself with this history: from the great monar-
chies of the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth-century invention of
the ‘people’, up to the nation-state which purports to rely on consensus but
ultimately degenerates in the totalitarian régimes of the twentieth century.
This goes to show how the Antithesis of power is not sufcient to contain the
Thesis of the multitude.
As we all know, Reason (especially reason of the dialectical kind) is astute
and, in fact, across the ocean it has already succeeded in creating a negation of
the negation or, to be more precise, an Alternative to the Antithesis: Empire. The
exodus of settlers toward the Americas – of a multitude eeing modernity –
‘rediscovers the revolutionary humanism of the Renaissance and perfects it
as a political and constitutional science’,37 laying the foundations for a kind of
sovereignty totally different from that which established itself in Europe. The
American Revolution is a true revolution (unlike its French counterpart) and
the United States (who, lest we forget it, are a federation) are from the outset –
i.e. from the Declaration of Independence – an Empire, not a nation-state.
Moreover, they are an Empire of the Good, or at least of the Lesser Evil.
At any rate, the modes with which power is exercised in the States are dif-
ferent from Europe. For example, let us look at the way Europeans relate to the
natives in the colonies. Theirs is a mode based on cultural dualisms, on antag-
onism between Inside/Outside, Self/Other).38 These are the very sources of
36
Hardt and Negri 2000, see pp. 7783.
37
38
See Hardt and Negri 2000, Chapter 2.3, ‘The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty’
p. 114 onwards. It should be noted that, in this chapter, the use of dialectics is so
extensive (the authors employ it to explain both the modes of colonial rule and the
fooling of the multitude by colonialists), that it results in statements such as: ‘reality
is not dialectical, but colonialism is’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 128). A case of overdos-
ing, perhaps?
modern racism – the ferocity of which we know only too well. But let us look
instead at the way in which American settlers related to Native Americans:
they did not regard them as a cultural Other, but as a mere natural obstacle to
overcome, just like when you fell a tree or remove rocks from the ground to
make room for cultivation:
Just as the land must be cleared of trees and rocks in order to farm it, so
too the terrain must be cleared of native inhabitants. Just as the frontier
people must gird themselves against the severe winters, so too they must
arm themselves against the indigenous populations. Native Americans were
regarded as merely a particularly thorny element of nature.39
Then there is the issue of black people, altogether not such an edifying affair;
not to speak of certain relations with Latin America, so aggressive as to seem
‘imperialist’ rather than ‘imperial’ in the strict sense of the word. And then
came the Vietnam War. . . . It appears then that even our Alternative to the
Antithesis on the other side of the Pond is deeply antithetical it is dialecti-
cal: it has a good and an evil soul. Its evil soul tends to emulate European
imperialist nation-states. This was, for example, the temptation for Theodore
Roosevelt, who ‘exercised a completely traditional European-style imperialist
ideology’.40 The good soul is Woodrow Wilson, who instead ‘adopted an inter-
nationalist ideology of peace’.41 What matters is that the good soul, the truly
democratic soul, has prevailed (in the past, it was Tocqueville who grasped
this; now it is Hannah Arendt who recognises it).42 It is the embodiment of a
sovereignty that does not consist ‘in the regulation of the multitude’ by tran-
scendence, but rather it arises ‘as the result of the productive synergies of the
multitude’.43 Control, if it exists at all, does not follow the principle of repres-
sion, but a ‘principle of expansion’ not dissimilar to that practised in Imperial
Rome. Faced with conicts, the European nation-states react by strengthening
their borders, exasperating the distinction between Inside/Outside, between
Self/Other; the American Empire moves these borders further, turning the
outside into its inside, including the other into the self.44
39
40
41
Ibid.
42
See Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 164.
43
Ibid.
44
See Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 16672.
We now come to the Synthesis: the modern global Empire, which ‘is mate-
rializing before our very eyes’.45 With no more barriers to economic and cul-
tural exchange, with no more distinctions between inside and outside, with
no more spatial restrictions thanks to information technology and internet
communications, Empire is now a non-place.46 The United States does not form
its centre,47 for the very simple reason that a non-place cannot have a centre.
Moreover, the US is not a world leader either, ‘and indeed no nation-state can
today’.48 The United States have indeed inspired the birth of Empire, ‘born
through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project’49 and,
for this reason, let us admit it, they do enjoy a ‘privileged position’.50 But the
US too are themselves absorbed and subsumed – and in the end extinguished –
within a wider logic. Empire is the accomplishment of Wilson’s internation-
alist and pacist project – the crowning and the ultimate Aim of history.
It is where the long journey (lasting nearly a millennium, if you choose to
anticipate humanism by just a tiny bit) through the Thesis (Humanism), the
Antithesis (the European Nation-State) and the Alternative to the Antithesis
(the American Empire), up to the supreme Synthesis of the Empire sans phrase,
in which – true to the rules of dialectics – we shall nd once again the Thesis,
by now nally liberated and living happily ever after.
Capitalism and Empire

A reader with an old-fashioned Marxist background may now wonder where
capitalism is to be found in this history. Well, actually, it is nowhere to be
found in the rst sequence, save for a pithy statement: ‘European modernity is
inseparable from capitalism’.51 Capitalism is the subject of a different story.
The history of capitalism, too, is a history with a capital ‘H’, a ‘grand narra-
tive’. Here it is not so much Hegelian dialectics that is at work, but rather the
‘dialectics between productive forces and relations of productions’ on which
Marxist tradition has fed for so long. As is well known, on the basis of such
45
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. xi.
46
47
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. xiv.
48
Ibid.
49
50
Ibid.
51
dialectics, an evolutionary model of stages of development was built. This is

true both for humankind in its entirety (through an actual evolution, from that
elusive ‘primitive communism’ to the ancient mode of production, and then
from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, until the future realisa-
tion of communism in its true sense, when in the End we shall nd the Origin,
by now in its unfolded form), and for the capitalist mode of production con-
sidered separately (where a biological order is actually at work, in which the
various stages resemble closely the birth, growth, maturity, old age and death
of living organisms). In Part 3 of Empire, we nd ourselves in this second
dimension and we now begin to follow not so much the history of humanity,
but the various stages in the development of capitalism.
Empire does not throw anything away (or very little anyway),52 so, to begin
with, it is a matter of recuperating all that Marxists have already analysed. We
are told that, from its competition stage, capitalism enters into a monopoly stage
(a tendency which Marx had already predicted) and, with it, to imperialism.
As Lenin said, following Hilferding’s analysis but discarding some notions
that foreshadowed Empire – the idea of a world bank – as well as Kautsky’s
‘ultra-imperialism’: ‘If it were necessary to give the briefest possible denition
of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage
of capitalism’.53
Among the theorists of imperialism, Hardt and Negri favour Rosa Luxem-
burg, whose well-known underconsumption theory is here cut back to the
bone (low wages equal low consumption; the growth of organic composi-
tion, with the ensuing reduction in variable capital – ‘that is, the wage paid
the workers’54 – equals even lower consumption, therefore ‘the realization of
capital is thus blocked by the problem of the “narrow basis” of the powers of
52
With a reconstruction that welcomes and appreciates practically all contributions
to Marxist theory, disregarding any difference of interpretation (here there is room
for orthodox Marxism as well as heterodox Marxism, both for Lenin and Kautsky,
for Gramsci, the Frankfurt school, Althusser, for the regulation school). The only
clear ostracism is reserved for the so-called world-system school, and particularly
Giovanni Arrighi, to whom Empire devotes an outraged feature (Hardt and Negri 2000,
pp. 2379). It is not surprising that our two authors should nd hard to swallow the
idea of the cyclical nature and the recursiveness of capitalist dynamics proposed by
this author, for it actually clashes rather violently with the ‘grand narratives’ used by
Hardt and Negri, not to mention the strong subjectivism that has always characterised
the workerist approach.
53
Lenin 1996, p. 89.
54
consumption’)55 and now becomes the main contradiction of capitalism. It is

in this problem that an explanation for all other ‘limitations’ and ‘barriers’ of
capital can be found.56 Anyhow, Luxemburg’s approach lends itself well to
an account of the tendency of capitalism to expand, to the ‘capitalization of the
noncapitalist environment itself’57 and also to an explanation of how, ‘in the
process of capitalization the outside is internalized’.58 (But was not this ‘internal-
ization from outside’ a feature peculiar to the American Empire, nay, the very
thing that distinguished it from European imperialism? This story may well be
not even coherent with the previous one.)
According to Hardt and Negri: ‘Capitalist crisis is not simply a function of
capital’s own dynamics but is caused directly by proletarian conict’.59 What-
ever pushes capitalism forward, eventually the imperialist stage is passed and
a new stage of development begins. Its model is Roosevelt’s New Deal, born
in the US and later exported to all Western countries after the Second World
War. Its features are the economic regulation carried out by the state, as well
as Keynesian policies and the welfare state. And what is this new stage of
development of capitalism called? ‘State monopoly capitalism?’. ‘Fordism?’
Wrong. It is called Empire. All roads lead to Empire, just like once upon a time
all roads led to Rome.
So, we discover that Lenin fooled us when he called imperialism the ‘high-
est stage’ (that is, the last stage) of capitalism. He fooled us knowingly, as he
knew well (after all, did he not know all those ultra-imperialist theses?) that –
faced with the very deep crisis culminating in the First World War – history
could have taken two different paths: Revolution or Empire. He then prevented
the outcome of Empire, so dead set was he on making the Revolution. He
55
See Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 223. It should be said that to attribute to Marx any
reading of the crisis along the lines of underconsumption is – to use a euphemism –
rather reductive.
56
In so doing, Empire puts forward a drastic simplication of workerist lucubra-
tions on the famous passages in Grundrisse, which this school of thought sees as
fundamental and which it subjects to endless as well as obscure exegeses. Dialectical
contradictions, intrinsic barriers, negations of negations: all is reduced to a problem
of underconsumption: ‘all these barriers ow from a single barrier dened by the
unequal relationship between the worker as producer and the worker as consumer’
(Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 222). This is a really bold enterprise and, to me, it deserves
applause (before blurting out ‘but why didn’t you say so before?’).
57
58
Ibid.
59
wanted to make it immediately, before capitalism reached its full maturity.60

Once the Revolution failed, we found ourselves with Empire, with the true
‘highest stage’, for two reasons. Firstly, because in this stage factory discipline
was imposed on the whole of society (good, I see you have spotted the good
old workerist thesis): ‘The New Deal produced the highest form of disciplin-
ary government’,61 ‘a disciplinary society is thus a factory society’.62 Secondly,
because, after the process of decolonisation, we went from the formal subsump-
tion of the world to capital – a feature of the ‘extensive expansion’ of old-style
imperialism to the real subsumption of the world to capital, as capital today
practices an ‘intensive expansion’.63
The end of History?

The end of this story (which is really also the end of all stories or of History
tout court) is that it was really a good thing that Lenin’s plans failed and that,
in the end, Empire was able to develop and expand without any more bound-
aries on the planet. As Hölderlin’s poem goes: ‘Where danger is, grows also
that which saves’.
First of all, Empire shall save us from environmental catastrophe: the ‘real
subsumption’ of the world, i.e. its intensive exploitation actually coincides
with the age of the postindustrial, which as we well know is clean, small and
beautiful. This seems to be the real capitalist response to the threat of ‘ecologi-
cal disaster’, a response that looks to the future’.64
And, above all, Empire has created the antagonistic Subject par excellence,
the most powerful, creative and incredible Militant the world has ever seen:
the social worker, who now replaces the professional worker and the mass
worker of the past. Whereas the professional worker (corresponding to the
‘phase of industrial production that preceded the full deployment of Ford-
ist and Taylorist régimes’)65 was engaged in reappropriating his own produc-
tive labour; and the mass worker (who ‘corresponded to the deployment of
60
See Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 233 onwards.
61
62
63
64
65
Fordist and Taylorist regimes’66 even dared to create ‘a real alternative to the
system of capitalist power’,67 the social worker (corresponding to the phase
of ‘immaterial labor’) can nally express himself ‘as self-valorization of the
human’, realising ‘an organization of productive and political power as a bio-
political unit managed by the multitude, organized by the multitude, directed
by the multitude – absolute democracy in action’.68
Empire shall fall, is about to fall, it is falling, has already fallen! What is the
problem, after all? Deep down it is just a matter of mental attitude: all you
have to do is oppose (as Francis of Assisi – the subject of the last feature in
Empire, ‘Militant’69 was already doing all that time ago) your joie de vivre to the
misery caused by power. Beware, all ye powerful: a smirk will be the death of
you. And you, multitudes, go in peace: the ‘mammoth’ has ended.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
69
Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 41113.
Chapter Seventeen
Marxism and Postcolonial Studies
Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma
It is no easy matter to speak about Marxism and

postcolonial studies, because as a eld of academic
enquiry postcolonial studies has, in general, been
characterised from the outset by a constitutive anti-
Marxism. The supplementarity of the eld to post-
structuralism has often been registered; and internal
‘dissidents’ have identied some of the dening the-
oretical and ideological dispositions in the eld – the
repudiation, not only of Marxism, but of any struggle-
based model of politics; the hostility towards totality
and the aversion to dialectics; the disavowal of all
forms of nationalism, and the corresponding exalta-
tion of migrancy, liminality and hybridity, for exam-
ple – precisely by referring them to poststructuralist
theory. Poststructuralism might indeed be part of the
story here: but the dominant conceptual horizon of
postcolonial studies needs to be grasped more deci-
sively than this. This essay traces the career of post-
colonial studies as an academic eld of enquiry and
examines its founding principles by periodising it
within the key global economic and social transfor-
mations since 1945. It looks at and assesses some of
the central debates within postcolonial studies – the
critique of Eurocentrism; nationalism; subalternity;
the positing of an alternative modernity; and the
retreat from politics to ethics.
310 • Neil Lazarus and Rashmi Varma
Periodising postcolonial studies

Postcolonial studies needs to be situated in relation to the 1970s global eco-
nomic and political crisis that signalled the demise of the social order that
had structured developments worldwide since 1945. Thirty years of explosive
economic growth, marked by signicant gains and the unprecedented dis-
persal of social and political benets to wider populations all over the world
came to an abrupt halt at this moment, as the world system stumbled into
economic recession amidst a general crisis of capitalist accumulation. What
has followed has been a further thirty years marked by the global assertion of
US political hegemony and what Amin has tersely called ‘the logic of unilat-
eral capital’.
The ‘boom’ period (roughly, 1945 to 1975) was marked in the ‘West’ by the
historic achievement of the ‘welfare state’ and a measure of social democ-
racy; but there were also substantial social, political and economic gains in the
‘East’ and the ‘South’. It is important to register some of the successes enjoyed
by newly independent states and peoples in the era immediately following
decolonisation. The achievement and maintenance of secular democracy in
India; Nasser’s stand on Suez in 1956; the popular platforms established by
Castro in Cuba and Nkrumah in Ghana – these were all developments which
red the imaginations of millions of people, placing on to the world stage,
perhaps for the rst time, the principled and resolute gure of ‘Third World’
self-determination. Domestically, many of the newly inaugurated postcolo-
nial regimes undertook ambitious projects intended to improve the livelihood
and welfare of their citizenry.
Yet this advance of social democracy in the formerly colonial world was
extraordinarily tenuous and fragile. The neo-imperial world order that
replaced the older colonial régimes was structured in such a way that the
new régimes in postcolonial states proved unable in general to consolidate
the momentous social advance represented by decolonisation or to sustain
the postcolonial project of democratisation. After 1975 there was not only
insufcient development; growth itself stopped or went into reverse. A sav-
age restructuring of class relations worldwide was set in train, under the sign
of ‘neoliberalism’. In the ‘West’, the practical effects of this restructuring have
been to privatise social provision, dismantle the welfare state, force millions
of people into structural unemployment, and break the back of militant trade
unionism. In the ‘Third World’, the effects have been analogous, but deeper
Marxism and Postcolonial Studies • 311
and worse. Throughout the postcolonial world over the course of the nal
quarter of the twentieth century, Structural Adjustment Programmes became
the favoured means of disciplining postcolonial states, domesticating them
and rendering them subservient to the needs of the global market. They also
became a means of ensuring that postcolonial states retained their peripheral
status, neither attempting to de-link themselves from the world system nor
ever imagining themselves capable of participating in it from any position of
parity, let alone power.1
The two-phased historical schema laid out here (1945 to 1975; 1975 to the
present) provides a necessary sociological preamble to any consideration of
postcolonial studies as an academic eld. This is because the emergence of
postcolonial studies towards the end of the 1970s coincided with the punc-
turing of the postwar ‘boom’ and – one consequence of this puncturing – the
decisive defeat of anticapitalist or liberationist ideologies within the Western
(or, increasingly, Western-based) intelligentsia, including its radical elements.
The consolidation of the eld in the 1980s and 1990s can then be seen, at least
in part, as a function of its articulation of a complex intellectual response to
this decisive defeat. On the one hand, as an initiative in tune with the spirit of
the age, postcolonial studies breathed the air of the general anti-liberationism
then rising to hegemony in the wider society. The eld not only emerged in
close chronological proximity to the end of the ‘Bandung era’ and the collapse
of insurgent ‘Third Worldism’. It has also always characteristically offered,
in the scholarship that it has fostered and produced, something approximat-
ing a monumentalisation of this moment – a rationalisation of and pragmatic
adjustment to, if by no means uncomplicatedly a celebration of, the down-
turn in the fortunes and inuence of insurgent national-liberation movements
and anticapitalist ideologies in the early 1970s. On the other hand, as a self-
consciously progressive or radical initiative, postcolonial studies was, and has
remained, opposed to the dominant forms assumed by anti-liberationist pol-
icy and discourse in the dark years since then – years of neoliberal ‘austerity
and ‘structural adjustment’, political ‘rollback’, and a triumphalist new impe-
rialist rhetoric. Postcolonial studies entered into strategic alliance with the
new social movements that swept across university campuses in the US and
elsewhere, articulating a politics of identity – with reference to race, ethnicity,
1
Larrain 2000; Gwynne and Kay 1999.
sex, and gender – as against class struggle, and privileging a rhetoric of recog-
nition over one of redistribution even as universities were being brought sys-
tematically within the purview of neoliberal calculation and instrumentalism.
The intersections of postcolonial studies and multicultural politics provided
a domain in which radicalism could be espoused within the constraints of a
seemingly undefeatable global order.
The Janus face of postcolonial studies

There are, then, two aspects to postcolonial studies as an academic enterprise,
one accommodationist, the other subversive. In the former guise, the eld
has been governed at a very deep level by the supposition that the decline
of ‘Third-World’ insurgency in the late 1960s and early 1970s was part of a
wider – epochal – shift, heralding, as has often been claimed (and not only
within postcolonial studies itself, of course), the demise of the ‘modern’ forms
of political struggle and identication – liberalism, socialism, secularism,
nationalism, internationalism, etc. – and of the grand sociological categories
associated with them: revolution, unevenness, the nation-state, modernity,
even imperialism. With the collapse of historical Communism and the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marxism itself was pronounced nally dead and
buried.
It is partly due to this apocalyptic understanding of contemporary history,
no doubt, that most scholars in the postcolonial studies eld should have been
so remarkably little interested in work done prior to the emergence of the eld
itself on the very questions that they themselves ostensibly investigate. Why
pay attention to work published before 1975 when all of this work had been
premised on assumptions that had, quite simply, been rendered obsolete by
the ‘epochal’ developments of the late-1960s and early 1970s? The ‘post-’ of
postcolonial studies has in this sense been emphatically the ‘post-’ of post-
modernism: between the new initiative and earlier scholarship there is taken
to have been a clean epistemological break.
In reckoning with postcolonial studies’ image of itself in these terms as
radically new, we must not discount disciplinary explanations. Postcolonial
studies is very much a creature of literature (typically English) and cultural
studies departments, even if it has subsequently found fertile soil to grow in

some other beds of the Humanities garden (history, anthropology, geography)
and even, much more limitedly, in the social sciences. (We should go further
still: the initiative that would come to be known as postcolonial studies ini-
tially assumed critical mass not in literary critical circles abstractly conceived,
but specically in departments of literature in élite universities. Postcolonial
studies was not a ‘bottom-up’ but a ‘top-down’ intervention.) The troping of
power in semiological terms clearly (also) registers a disciplinary disposition.
This has constituted a particular problem for Marxists within postcolonial
studies, since the long history of Marxist or neo-Marxist engagements with
questions relating to colonialism and ‘postcolonialism’, imperialism and anti-
imperialism, racism and nationalism, has been a dead letter for mainstream
postcolonialists. A short list of the kind of work that might be referenced here
would include:
1) early Marxist accounts of ‘non-Western’ or ‘precapitalist’ societies, colo-

nialism and anticolonial revolt (not least, and certainly controversially,
Marx himself on India);
2) classical-Marxist accounts of imperialism (Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg,
Hilferding, etc.);
3) later accounts of imperialism in the contexts of world-systems theory,
development and underdevelopment, and ‘dependency’ (Baran, Cox,
Frank, Furtado, Wallerstein, Arrighi, Amin, etc.);
4) writings by Marxist politico-intellectuals active in anti-imperialist, antico-
lonialist and/or national-liberation struggles (Ben Barka, Cabral, Castro,
Fanon, Guevara, C.L.R. James, Li Ta-Chao, Lin Piao, Sison, Mao, Mariátegui,
E.M.S. Namboodripad, Jayaprakash Narayan, Neto, Nkrumah, Padmore,
Rodney, M.N. Roy, Truong Chinh, etc.);
5) writings by Marxist or socialist scholars, wherever located (Abdel-Malek,
Eqbal Ahmad, Alavi, Chandra, Davidson, Galeano, Habib, Hodgkin,
Kosambi, Rodinson, Sarkar, Worsley, etc.).
A Marxist appraisal of postcolonial studies would therefore need to register

the debilitating loss incurred by the eld in its neglect and ignorance of the
resources suggested in and by this list. It would then also need to challenge
the tendentious and selective reading of Marxism itself that surfaces in so

much postcolonialist scholarship, including in writings by some of the most
inuential theorists.2
The fact that postcolonial studies should have been constituted as an arena
of scholarly production within which the specic investments and stockpiles
of knowledge of Marxist scholars tend to remain unrecognised and underval-
ued has led some Marxists to repudiate the eld tout court, to insist upon its
fundamental irrelevance. But other Marxists have opted for a different strat-
egy. Positioning themselves actively in the eld, they have called for a body
of scholarship capable of registering the actuality of the world system and
the structuring effects of this system (upon consciousness, culture and experi-
ence as well as upon material conditions of existence), by way of opposing
and criticising it. Part of their work in this respect, as Bartolovich has argued,
has involved reactivating the very Marxist heritage that has been actively
disavowed in mainstream postcolonial studies, identifying its theoretical
achievements and pointing to the resources available in its long-term engage-
ment with many of the dilemmas that postcolonialists have raised, invari-
ably without any reference to Marxism. In this capacity, Marxist scholars have
contributed importantly to the elaboration of the progressive or subversive
aspect of postcolonial studies. Conceding to the eld the authentic insights
and advances generated within it, and committing themselves never to fall
behind these, they have succeeded – to some degree, at least – in ensuring that
‘specically Marxist interests and tendencies’ have been given an airing in the
postcolonial discussion.3
Critique of Eurocentrism
The essential gesture of postcolonial studies in its progressive aspect might
be said to consist in the critique of Eurocentrism. At a fundamental level, this
has involved the sustained critique of a specic set of representations – those
famously addressed by Said under the rubric of ‘Orientalism’. Building upon
Said’s canonical formulation of Orientalism as ‘the enormously systematic dis-
2
E.g., Chakrabarty 2000, Lowe and Lloyd 1997, Miller 1990, Prakash 1990, Sere-
queberhan 1997, Young 1990.
3
Bartolovich 2002, pp. 3–4.
cipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce –
the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientically,
and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’,4 postcolonial schol-
ars have done a lot of enormously valuable work on ‘Western’ conceptions of
the ‘non-West’, in which they have been concerned to demonstrate not only
the falsity or inaccuracy of these conceptions but also their systematicity, their
symptomaticity, and their capacity to ground, engender, or constitute social
practices, policies and institutions.
Yet if the attempt to ‘unthink Eurocentrism’5 has been lodged as a foun-
dational aspiration of postcolonialist scholarship, there has been wide dis-
agreement as to what is entailed in and by such ‘unthinking’. A predominant
tendency in the eld has been to situate Eurocentrism less as an ideological
formation (selective, interested, partial, and partisan) than as an episteme (a
trans-ideologically dispersed eld of vision, or conceptual ‘atmosphere’). If we
understand Eurocentrism as an ideology, then it can become subject to critique.
One’s general methodological assumption would be that it is always in prin-
ciple (and indeed in practice) possible to stand outside any given problematic
in order to subject its claims to scrutiny. This, of course, is the classical notion
of critique as encountered in Kant and exemplied most signicantly for radi-
cal scholarship in Marx’s various critiques of bourgeois political economy and
idealist philosophy. It is ideology-critique on this model that had been acti-
vated in anti-colonialist writing and scholarship prior to the advent of post-
colonial studies: in Aime Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, for instance, but
also in the publications of such politico-intellectuals as C.L.R. James, Frantz
Fanon and Walter Rodney (to draw examples only from the Caribbean), and
in the many critiques of anthropology or modernisation theory or develop-
ment studies (not least by practising anthropologists, sociologists and politi-
cal scientists themselves) published during the 1960s and 1970s.
Scholars in postcolonial studies, however, have tended to address Euro-
centrism less in terms of ideology and more as an episteme or intellectual
atmosphere – as, so to speak, the very air that must be breathed by anybody
engaging in questions relating to ‘Europe and its Others’. Eurocentrism
4
Said 1979, p. 3.
5
Shohat and Stam 1994.
emerges on this conceptualisation as an untranscendable horizon governing

thought – its forms, contents, modalities, and presuppositions so deeply and
insidiously layered and patterned that they cannot be circumvented, only
deconstructed. Eurocentrism is in these terms not susceptible to critique, since
it is entailed in the very fabric of disciplinarity, institutionalised knowledge
production, and even ‘reason’ itself, as that concept has come to be under-
stood in the philosophical discourse of modernity. In postcolonial theory, this
way of seeing things has tended to give way almost inevitably to a further
proposition, concerning the constitutive Eurocentrism of all intellectual prac-
tice that stakes a claim to representation. The signature critique of Oriental-
ist (mis-)representation in postcolonial studies has thus increasingly tended
to broaden and atten out into a critique of representation as such. Perhaps
this latter impetus was already latent – even if coincidentally so – in Said’s
Orientalism, with its unstable concatenation of Foucault and ideology critique.
Arguments about the provenance, thrust and implications of Said’s method in
Orientalism continue to rage. Nevertheless it is clear that in the consolidation
and institutionalisation of postcolonial studies during the 1980s and 1990s,
the putative ambivalence of Orientalism in this respect was progressively
‘ironed out’ as scholars in the eld, in step with their colleagues elsewhere
in the circuits of poststructuralist theory, moved to junk the concepts of truth
and thence, by negative association, of ideology too, as so much metaphysical
or essentialist baggage. In the process, the critique of Eurocentric representation
was increasingly subsumed by a critique of representation itself as Eurocentric. The
suggestion is that the desire to speak for, of, or even about others is always
shadowed – and perhaps even overdetermined – by a secretly authoritarian
aspiration.
Nationalism
This suggestion has framed – or indeed dominated – the way in which the
subject of nationalism has tended to be raised within postcolonial studies,
for example. There have been two main lines of argument. The rst is associ-
ated most prominently with Homi Bhabha, who focuses on the propensity of
nationalist discourse to produce and institutionalise a ‘unisonant’ narrative
of the nation. Bhabha himself draws centrally on Benedict Anderson’s semi-
nal argument6 concerning the virtual imagination of community in nationalist

discourse. Anderson had proposed that nation-ness is never a given, histori-
cally xed instance (actuality or value), but one ceaselessly in the process of
being made and remade. Bhabha builds upon this idea: in his work, national-
ist discourse is both unstable and volatile; in the context of anti-colonialism,
moreover, it is mimetic, enacting an ambivalent reiteration of metropolitan
nationalist discourse from which it subtly articulates a difference within the
semiotic space of the same. Bhabha claims to nd in Fanon’s writing a preg-
uring of these themes, but this claim is unconvincing. For, far from represent-
ing an abstract critique of nationalism as such, Fanon’s celebrated treatment
of ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in The Wretched of the Earth was
delivered from an alternative nationalist standpoint. Since Bhabha mistrusts
what he rather dismissively calls ‘naively liberatory’ conceptions of freedom,
he is obliged to misread Fanon on this score: he argues, thus, that Fanon’s
political vision does ‘not allow any national or cultural “unisonance” in the
imagined community of the future’.7 In truth, however, Fanon had commit-
ted himself to precisely such a ‘unisonant’ view of the decolonised nation
in distinguishing categorically between bourgeois nationalism and another
would-be hegemonic form of national consciousness – a liberationist, anti-
imperialist, nationalist internationalism, represented in the Algerian arena by
the anticolonial resistance movement, the Front de Libération Nationale, to
whose cause he devoted himself actively between 1956 and 1961, the year of
his death.
The second line of argument concerning nationalism in postcolonial studies
is associated pre-eminently with Gayatri Spivak, who argues that, no mat-
ter how or where it is raised, or by whom, the claim to speak for ‘the nation’
always entails the simultaneous bracketing and marginalising or silencing of
a variety of popular forms of self-understanding, social practice and strug-
gle – forms that do not articulate themselves in the language and syntax of
national consciousness. The burden of Spivak’s argument is to suggest that
anticolonial nationalism is in all instances an élite conguration. In claim-
ing to represent the aspirations of ‘the people’, anticolonial nationalists of all
6
Anderson 1983.
7
Bhabha 1991, p. 102; see also Bhabha 1994.
stripes posit the nation as an ‘imagined community’ to which all classes and
groups in the society have equal access and to which they all share the same
allegiance. Spivak is perfectly willing to concede that, ideologically speaking,
she nds some of these competing imaginings of the nation vastly more attrac-
tive than others. She insists, however, that the competition between them is,
and remains, fundamentally a competition between élites. Authority in the
representation of ‘the people’ is for her more a function of the relative social
power of the nationalist spokesperson than of any putative ‘identity’ between
nationalist discourse and popular consciousness.
Subalternity
It is on the basis of this general argument that Spivak moves in her work to
offer a theory of subalternity. The work that had initially appeared under the
historiographical imprimatur of the India-based ‘Subaltern Studies’ collective
in the early 1980s had still been committed to the enterprise of recovering
or uncovering the contents and forms of consciousness of ‘the people’, those
spoken of and for in élite representations, but never afforded sanctioned or
public space to speak of and for themselves: the ‘wretched of the earth’, in
Fanon’s famous formula; the ‘people without history’, in Eric Wolf’s. Spivak’s
theory deviates sharply from this project. She denes ‘subalternity’ very aus-
terely as a structured inarticulacy at the élite levels of state and civil society –
such that to be positioned as ‘subaltern’ in any discursive context is to be
incapable of representing oneself within that context. The subaltern is the
object of discourse, never the subject. Subaltern practice, on Spivak’s construc-
tion, cannot signify ‘as itself’ across the divide that separates social élites from
those who are not élite. Within the élite spheres, including that of progressive
anti-colonial nationalism, ‘[t]he subaltern cannot speak’.8 On Spivak’s read-
ing, the actual contents of the social practice of ‘the people’ are always, indeed
denitionally, unrepresentable, whether by artists, intellectuals or political
spokespeople. Whatever is read (that is, represented) as ‘subaltern’ within
élite discourse has for her always-already been made over, appropriated, tra-
duced. It is precisely the irreducible gap between popular practice and its
8
Spivak 1988, p. 308.
(misrecognising) construal in élite discourse that the term ‘subalternity’ des-

ignates on her usage of it.
In an important challenge to Spivak’s theorisation, Benita Parry has argued
that it ‘gives no speaking part to the colonized, effectively writing out the
evidence of native agency recorded in India’s 200-year struggle against Brit-
ish conquest and the Raj’.9 It might be suggested on Spivak’s behalf, perhaps,
that her theory of subalternity is not really a theory of ‘native agency’ at all,
but of the ways in which the social and symbolic practice of disenfranchised
elements of the ‘native’ population are represented in colonialist-élitist dis-
course. The subaltern is for Spivak not a person but a discursive gure in a
battery of more or less integrated dominant social and cultural ‘texts’. Intel-
lectual and political practice – no matter what their ideological character – are,
by virtue of their social conditions of possibility, ineluctably dependent upon
these dominant ‘texts’. To speak of ‘the people’ is therefore inevitably to speak
instead of ‘them’, that is, to silence ‘them’ in the act of speaking of ‘them’ –
even where such speech is intended as an intervention on ‘their’ behalf.
In Representations of the Intellectual, Said speaks of the intellectual as ‘an indi-
vidual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a
message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a pub-
lic’, adding that the fundamental responsibility here is always to ‘represent all
those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug’.10
Spivak’s standpoint does not allow for a practice of representation conceived
in these terms. On her understanding, as Larsen has pointed out, even the
development and articulation of anti-imperialist discourses ‘only make room
within the “Subject” for a third world intellectual, or class (or gender) élite,
still banishing the “subaltern” to the far side of Spivak’s epistemologically
constructed “international division of labor”’.11
The thesis of incommensurability

In postcolonial studies, intellectual representation has, following Spivak, been
taken to be a game of high stakes. The danger has been thought to rest in the
9
Parry 1987, p. 35.
10
Said 1994, pp. 11–12.
11
Larsen 2005, p. 47.
fact that in speaking of or for others (and it is of course the élite spokesperson’s
own relative privilege – schooling, among other things – that has put him or
her in a position to do so and even or especially to think of doing so), one
might unintentionally and unwittingly nd oneself both objectifying ‘them’
and superimposing one’s own élite cognitive maps on ‘them’ as one does so.
The resort, therefore, has been to a consideration of difference under the rubric
of incommensurability. Critics have supposed that if they work on the strategic
assumption that what is ‘other’ to the representing subject is radically and
categorically so, they might be able to put a spoke in the wheel of any unself-
conscious project of representation, at least. Thus O’Hanlon, in her contribu-
tion to the debate on subaltern studies, has suggested that, despite itself, the
progressive attempt to recover popular consciousness has invariably ended
up misrepresenting ‘the people’ by transforming them ‘into autonomous sub-
ject-agents, unitary consciousnesses possessed of their own originary essence,
in the manner which we now understand to be the creation, very largely,
of Enlightenment humanism’s reconstruction of Man’. O’Hanlon speaks of
the fundamental ‘alienness’ of the subaltern from the representing subject.12
This is a denitional ‘otherness’ or incommensurability, of course, intended
strategically to prevent those who take up the burden of representation from
assuming – from their own positions of relative power, relatively untheorised
by themselves – that ‘the people’ are, as it were, ‘just like them’, only contin-
gently poorer or more disempowered, and that, if these ‘people’ were to be
given the opportunity to do so, they would make the same choices and think
the same sorts of thoughts as those doing the representing.
The thesis of incommensurability has been put forward in postcolonial
studies as both philosophically radical and ethically sensitive. But a Marx-
ist critique of it might proceed on either philosophical or political grounds.
Philosophically, it might be argued that the anti-humanism upon which it
rests has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Following Said’s general
example, one could propose that, while it makes for a salutary methodologi-
cal caution, the thesis of incommensurability – the idea that there is a funda-
mental ‘alienness’ between the representing subject and the ‘subject’ being
represented – is no more intellectually defensible than the contrary idea of
12
O’Hanlon 2000, p. 96.
ideologically-secured afnity and communality across and athwart the social

division of labour. Contra Spivak and O’Hanlon, Said insists on the category of
universalism, which betokens for him the suggestions both that ‘certain demo-
cratic freedoms, certain freedoms from domination of one kind or another,
freedom from various kinds of exploitations, and so on, are the rights of every
human being’,13 and also, reciprocally, that every human being has an interest –
in principle, articulable – in these freedoms. Between representing subject and
the ‘subject’ being represented there is for Said, therefore, no necessary or
unforgoable ‘gap’. On the contrary, the whole purpose of political representa-
tion is to forge an identity between the subject and the object of discourse.
The thesis of incommensurability is susceptible to political critique on the
grounds that it is reductionist. The arguments, a) that there is an unforgoable
‘gap’ between subject and object of representation; and b) that this ‘gap’ is
identiable in terms of a power differential, can readily be conceded. But it
is then surely incumbent upon the theorist to specify the precise form(s) of
power involved? Yet postcolonialists arguing for incommensurability have
tended to conceptualise representational power summarily and without for-
mal justication on the model of (colonial) domination. To speak of or on
behalf of another is, in their eyes, to subject that other to one’s authority. In
arguing thus they conate authority and authoritarianism, casting the for-
mer as merely an instance of the latter and promoting an active disregard of
the contents of different (and competing) representations. (If all ‘translations’
violate the integrity of what is translated, then we need not waste much time
arguing over the respective merits and demerits of different translations?)
This is both counter-intuitive and unhelpful. While it is true, for instance, that
Nelson Mandela’s discourse and Hendrik Verwoerd’s are ‘alike’ in guring
‘the South-African people’ as their object and in claiming to speak for them,
this is scarcely the most important point to make about their competing repre-
sentations. To privilege the abstract question of the conditions of possibility of
the generation of ‘truth-effects’ over the concrete question of representational
adequacy is politically disenabling.
13
Said 2004, p. 197.
The turn to ethics

If ‘unthinking Eurocentrism’ has constituted one of the essential gestures of
postcolonial studies, a key modality of that gesture has been the transmu-
tation of the political project of anticolonial struggle and decolonisation into
an ethical one. Bhabha’s recent writing on Fanon, especially, is exemplary of
this process. Since the early 1990s, a number of sharp materialist critiques
of Bhabha’s ‘postcolonialist’ appropriation of Fanon have been advanced, to
cumulating inuence and effect. Macey’s massive biography of Fanon is per-
haps the most decisive of these.14 It demonstrates conclusively that Bhabha’s
construction of Fanon cannot be squared either with Fanon’s actual writings
or with the trajectory of Fanon’s own career, and proposes therefore that there
is no future for the illusion that has been the ‘postcolonial’ Fanon.
In this context, the ‘Foreword’ that Bhabha was commissioned to write in
2005 for a new English translation of Les Damnés de la terre is of interest, since
one looks for some new thoughts about Fanon. At one level, the ‘Foreword’
merely restates Bhabha’s preference for a Fanon who speaks to the psychic-
affective dimensions of anticolonialism as opposed to a Fanon for whom the
anticolonial struggle constituted the means not only to repossess abjected
identity, but to accede to revolutionary subjectivity, and, through resistance,
reclaim land and sovereignty. Bhabha consigns Fanon’s project of revolution-
ary anticolonialism to the dustbin of history. At another level, however, the
Foreword does contain some new ideas, although these are scarcely unprob-
lematical. ‘[W]hat might be saved from Fanon’s ethics and politics of decolo-
nization to help us reect on globalization in our sense of the term?’ Bhabha
asks.15 He evokes Fanon’s commentary on the subjectivity of the colonised
man and woman: these provide us with ‘gures of instruction for our global
century’.16 These gures need not be situated precisely or historicised, evi-
dently: in their universalism they are assimilable to a ‘project of futurity’. The
‘people’ who Fanon himself had represented quite specically as acceding to
revolutionary consciousness in the course of the national-liberation struggle –
he had spoken of the ‘awakening of the people’s intelligence and the onward
14
Macey 2000.
15
Bhabha 2005, p. xi.
16
Ibid.
progress of their consciousness’17– are transformed in Bhabha’s reading into

abstractions that can endlessly and indeed constitutionally signify the condi-
tion of ‘wretchedness’.
In Bhabha’s ‘Foreword’, we can identify a privileging of ethics over politics.
This move is signicant: as the centre of gravity of postcolonial studies has
shifted in recent years, there has been a pronounced turn to ethics. The dis-
avowal of struggles based on class is continued, with emphasis being placed
on the effects of globalisation (more typically upon culture or consciousness
than upon, say, employment) rather than on its determinants or structures.
In concluding his ‘Foreword’, Bhabha proposes what is essentially an abstract
humanism as an alternative third term between socialism and capitalism: he
proposes a global culture of humanitarianism in which the right to equitable
development would be made universal. However, the questions of how this
right might be bestowed or imposed, and by whom, are left unanswered; and
while the evocation of ‘debt relief and forgiveness’ answers to a politics of
recognition, no consideration is given to the mechanisms of redistribution. In
short, as the terms of materialist analysis and critique are transformed into
an ethical, liberal-humanist project, the idea of a critical anti-globalism that
would also be anti-imperialist is eviscerated.
Modernity and ‘alternative modernity’

However politically questionable the shift to ethics might be, Bhabha’s sur-
prising endorsement of human rights and universalism seems to signal a
departure from the earlier discussion of these issues in postcolonial studies,
where they had typically been understood as the products of a blighted colo-
nial modernity. An important debate in postcolonial studies has indeed cen-
tred on the category of modernity. Marxists in the eld have sought to link this
category to capitalism and capitalist development (what, following Jameson’s
usage, might be termed ‘modernisation’). Harootunian, for instance, has pro-
posed that as long as it remains sensitive to the ‘differing inections of the
modern’, the Marxist concept of modernity is capable of ‘[providing] a frame-
work of temporal imminence in which to locate all societies’.18 Harootunian
17
Fanon 1968, p. 188.
18
Harootunian 2000, pp. 62–3.
speaks in this context of ‘peripheral modernities’ – a term that he prefers to

‘alternative modernities’ – as designating a world order ‘in which all societ-
ies share . . . a common reference provided by global capital and its require-
ments’. What is at issue here is an attempt to pluralise modernity – to argue
that because there are multiple determinate experiences of modernity, there
is a need, correspondingly, to produce ‘site-based readings of modernity’.19
The call to pluralise modernity – which has sometimes gone under the rubric
of ‘alternative modernities’ – does not entail the evocation of another ‘time’
or ‘history’ radically different from, or outside, the history of capitalism. It
concedes the idea of a singular modernity20 that is uneven and global even
as it derides the ethnocentrism of the dominant philosophical discourse of
modernity. It is constituted by an attempt to register the multiple ways in
which the non-West produces its own practices and philosophies of moder-
nity, sometimes though not exclusively in response to the sense of modernity
as part of the colonial (and now neocolonial) logic of rule. If modernisation
is understood under the rubric of ‘Westernisation’, then are all ‘non-Western’
forms of modernity alternative to ‘Western modernity’ in the same ways? If
not, then on what grounds do we compare ‘Nigerian’ modernity, say, with
‘Chinese’ modernity? And where, in terms of the articulation of multiple and
proliferating regional, national and local forms of modernity, does the cul-
ture of indigenous peoples t? These are the sorts of question raised within
the conceptual framing of the problematic of ‘alternative modernities’. Ulti-
mately, the question is raised of the very nature of ‘modernity’ itself – is it a
project, an epoch, a discourse, an attitude, a condition, a critique, an abstrac-
tion, or all of the above?
The idea of an ‘alternative modernity’ (in the singular), by contrast, has
emerged as a project of establishing radical alterity through a commitment
to historical difference. What is looked for is an alternative not only to the
Eurocentric supposition that the form(s) assumed by modernity in the ‘West’
are paradigmatic of ‘modernity’ as such, but to the very notion of modernity
itself as that notion has been elaborated in the development of the discipline
of history (in the ‘West’). In the project of ‘alternative modernity’, the terms
‘West’, ‘Europe’, ‘history’, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘modernity’ are conated and
19
Gaonkar 1999, p. 14.
20
Cf. Jameson 2002.
attened. This conation is best illustrated in the critique of colonial ‘govern-

mentality’, in which, as in Chakrabarty,21 an attempt is made to deconstruct
the purported universalism of Enlightenment concepts as part of the project
of ‘provincialising Europe’.
This project involves the necessary disavowal of the Enlightenment con-
cepts of reason, progress, democracy, and secularism, viewed as categories
external to the ‘non-West’. And if colonialism itself cannot be thought of out-
side an intrinsically and unforgoably Eurocentric ‘modernity’, neither can
anticolonialism or struggles for democracy in the postcolonial era. Chakrabarty
writes:
Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human
rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public
and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social
justice, scientic rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European
thought and history.22
Formulations like this represent a stunning concession to ‘Europe’ of some

of the great achievements of humanity, ironically lending intellectual credibil-
ity both to right-wing fundamentalist movements in the ‘Third World’ and
to neo-conservative accounts23 of ‘the world revolution of Westernization’
in the ‘West’.24 Scott goes so far as to argue against the idea that concepts
such as ‘democracy (even a purportedly radical one) should have any par-
ticular privilege among ways of organising the political forms of our collec-
tive lives’.25 While the relationship between intellectual positions and political
practice can be subjected to debate, there can be no doubting the profoundly
anti-materialist orientation in such work. In effect, the postcolonialist invest-
ment in articulating an ‘alternative modernity’ seeks to place ‘non-Western’
cultures outside the history of capitalism – the latter is viewed generically as
part of an instrumentalising, rationalising modernity. By extension, the Marx-
ist critique of capitalism is also consigned to the dustbin of an oppressive
‘European’ modernity.
21
Chakrabarty 2000.
22
Chakrabarty 2000, p. 4.
23
E.g., von Laue 1987, Huntington 1998.
24
See the critical discussion in Lazarus 2002.
25
Scott 1999, p. 156.
The distinction drawn earlier between concepts of Eurocentrism as ideol-

ogy and episteme is again relevant here. The theory of ‘alternative modernity’
involves the repudiation of modernity as episteme. What is emphasised, as
Cooper has argued, is the ‘critical examination of the subject position of the
scholar and political advocate’ rather than modernity as an historical concept
that might explain how ‘the trajectories of a colonizing Europe and a colo-
nized Africa and Asia shaped each other over time’. Cooper maintains that
what he calls the ‘stance’ approach works not merely to ‘obscure the details of
colonial history and the experience of people in the colonies, but the aspira-
tions and challenges posed by political movements in the colonies over the
course of history disappear beneath the ironic gaze that critics have directed
towards claims for progress and democracy’.26
Mainstream postcolonial theory reduces modernity to its Euro-modern-
ist formulations, reason to rationalism, and democracy to imperialism and
colonial dictatorship – and then, understandably if prematurely, disavows
modernity, reason and democracy. The critics implicated fail to think through
the fact that claims to freedom from slavery and colonialism were levelled
historically on grounds that may have had fundamental features in common
with those that produced pro-slavery and colonialist discourse but also dis-
sented sharply from them. From the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth
century to the Indian freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth, from Toussaint
L’Ouverture’s challenge to French ideas of citizenship to Gandhi’s strategic
ironisation of ‘Western civilisation’ as a ‘good idea’ (his tongue-in-cheek sug-
gestion, of course, was that it would be a good idea if the West were to become
civilised!), the history of anticolonial struggle is replete with instances not of
‘alternative modernity’ but of claims made to civic rights, freedom and citi-
zenship on the ground of modernity. To state it more boldly, Enlightenment
values such as freedom and human and individual rights are not transformed
into universally accepted/recognised values only through domination and
imposition (although la mission civilisatrice is inextinguishably part of the
story); instead it is precisely through the agency of the anticolonial struggles
that concepts falsely promoted as ‘European’ are actually demonstrated to be
a common human inheritance. One of the unintended consequences of the
project of ‘alternative modernity’ has been to atten out the history of Europe
26
Cooper 2005, pp. 3–4.
itself – where ideas of secularism and reason were never singularly construed,
or resolute, or, indeed, universally accepted.
Assigning ‘ownership’ of modernity to Europe is a theoretical move that
has debilitating effects on a range of progressive political projects, including
those of ‘Third-World’ or ‘trans-national’ feminism. The dichotomy typically
posed by postcolonial feminist studies – between a dominating ‘universal-
ism’ (feminism as articulated to the paradigms of freedom, emancipation and
autonomy designated as ‘Western’) and ‘alternative modernity’ – makes it
impossible to understand the development of feminist consciousness. Post-
colonial feminists who conceptualise feminism binaristically, either as always
already imported and thus inauthentic, or as embedded in native and tra-
ditional practice (an ‘alternative modernity’), in fact obscure the politicised
relationship between oppression and consciousness.
The repudiation of modernity per se as oppressive and as essentially external
to ‘non-Western’ cultures has led to the production of an avant-gardist histo-
riography that questions history itself. The entire discipline – indeed, discipli-
narity itself – is condemned as oppressive. The paradoxical commitment to
a ‘different’ historical time has led historians like Chakrabarty to reject what
he terms the ‘totalizing thrusts’ or the ‘historicism’ of Marxist historiography,
which on his reading entails a ‘stageist’ view of history and of capitalist moder-
nity (as that which constantly overcomes difference). This totalising historio-
graphic initiative Chakrabarty names ‘History 1’; and he counter-poses to it a
‘History 2’.27 The latter stands outside the process of capitalist development,
interrupting it from time to time. The problem with this elaboration of ‘two
kinds of histories’ is not that its critique of ‘History 1’ is without substance
(although the inferences that Chakrabarty himself draws from this critique
are in excess of what the critique actually demonstrates), but that its presen-
tation of ‘History 2’ is unhistorical! Chakrabarty himself observes that while
‘History 1’ is analytical, ‘History 2’ ‘beckons us to more affective narratives of
human belonging’, providing us with ‘our grounds for claiming historical dif-
ference’.28 Rather than opening up the Marxist theory of history to critique as
promised, Chakrabarty’s account turns to ‘Heideggerian ruminations on the
27
28
politics of diversity’.29 How these ruminations might be thought to substitute

for an ‘analytical’ history – or indeed to accomplish anything that is not plau-
sibly within the compass of ‘analytical’ history – is left unexplained.
‘Alternative modernity’ implicates space as well as time. It claims a space
radically exterior to the spaces of capitalism. As such, it has afnities with
various forms of nativist discourse. In its more progressive versions it lays
claim to the politics of indigenous knowledge and ‘women’s ways of know-
ing’, pitted against ‘modernity’ and its handmaiden, science – the latter seen
to enact an epistemic violence on the life-worlds of native peoples who live
harmoniously outside the grasp of capitalism. The work of intellectuals such
as Ashis Nandy, Gustavo Esteva, Cheikh Anta Diop, Walter Mignolo, and
Vandana Shiva draws upon the politically resonant ideas of ‘difference’ and
‘cultural authenticity’ to construct a thesis of ‘alternative modernity’ whose
own political implications remain uninterrogated. The idea of ‘alternative
modernity’ selectively employs the idiom of progressive utopian thought for
nativist purposes. The necessary critique is supplied by Ferguson, among oth-
ers, in his work on Africa in the neoliberal world order. He writes:
the application of a language of alternative [modernity] to the most

impoverished regions of the globe risks becoming a way of avoiding talking
about . . . and thus evading the question of a rapidly worsening global equality
and its consequences. Forcing the question of Africa’s political-economic
crisis to the center of the contemporary discussion of modernity is a way
of insisting on shifting the topic toward . . . the enduring axis of hierarchy,
exclusion, and abjection, and the pressing political struggle for recognition
and membership in the emerging social reality we call ‘the global’.30
Empire and imperialism

Parry has recently noted ‘the many signs of Marxism’s return to intellectual
life’.31 Her cautious optimism stems in part from the robust debate on Marx-
ism and the contemporary conjuncture generated by the publication in 2000
of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, a book that red and captured the imagina-
29
30
Ferguson 2006, pp. 192–3.
31
Parry 2004, p. 93.
tion and the mood of a global anticapitalist movement on the rise, seeking
to invent a new global commons, as exemplied in the space of the World
Social Forums, the rst of which was held in 2000 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In
the years since the publication of Empire, however, global capitalism has con-
tinued its onward march, and attention has been drawn to the catastrophic
and reactionary event of ‘9/11’ and, more catastrophic still and just as reac-
tionary, the ensuing developments in Afghanistan and Iraq. In these contexts,
and in the absence of a serious commitment to international solidarity along
class lines and a coherent analysis of what exactly is being opposed, Hardt
and Negri’s optimistic declarations seem wildly and implausibly overstated.
Their thesis runs counter to the work of theorists of uneven development in
the ‘Third World’, who point to the rapidly escalating inequalities in the ‘glo-
balised’ world order. There is in Empire, as Parry has pointed out, a ‘spectacu-
lar failure to address the substantive and experiential situations of the settled
populations of the nation-states of Asia, Africa and Latin America’.32 In what
has come to be known as the ‘War on Terror’, moreover, we are patently wit-
nessing, pace Hardt and Negri, a contradictory and powerful recuperation of
imperialism as a mode of organising global politics, a vehicle to re-assert the
superiority of ‘Western’ values and material interests. In a strange reversal,
while ‘liberation’ in the age of decolonisation had meant liberation from impe-
rialism, contemporary discourses on democracy, women’s rights, and human
rights posit imperialism as a precondition for liberation, a position captured
most clearly in the coupling of occupation/liberation with respect to Iraq.
Empire has elicited considerable enthusiasm in postcolonial studies, too,
although it is not for the most part its equivocal allegiance to Marxism that has
been the focus of attention, but rather its preoccupation with deterritorialisa-
tion and border crossings in the presumed aftermath of the nation-state. These
have been taken to conrm and reinvigorate long-standing investments in the
eld. Although a special issue of the agship journal, Interventions, devoted to
Empire, gave central space, under Abu-Manneh’s guest editorship, to Marxist
and materialist criticisms of the book, the fact remains that, for many in post-
colonial studies, Empire has been viewed (and welcomed) as signalling the
obsolescence of imperialism as a cardinal category for understanding capital-
ist development, above all in the contemporary era of ‘globalisation’.
32
Parry 2004, p. 100.
Ironically, it is within the contexts of nation-states and regional entities

that the most serious challenges to imperialist globalisation are taking place.
Throughout Latin America, for example, and above all in the countries impli-
cated in Tariq Ali’s suggestively titled Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope
(2006), we are witnessing a renewed resistance to neoliberalism and to the
United States, clearly identied as the imperialist adversary. To refer to these
examples is not to propose a ‘theoretical’ privileging of the nation-state but to
emphasise the attention to historical specicity and geographical unevenness
that are necessary for any adequate accounting of contemporary realities and
possibilities. Ahmad had made just this point in criticising the undifferentiat-
ing disavowal of nationalism in postcolonial studies as long ago as 1992:
For human collectivities in the backward zones of capital . . . all relationships

with imperialism pass through their own nation-states, and there is simply
no way of breaking out of that imperial dominance without struggling for
different kinds of national projects and for a revolutionary restructuring of
one’s own nation-state. So one struggles not against nations and states as
such but for different articulations of class, nation and state.33
More recently, Marxist theorists have sought to reinvigorate the debate on

world systems, focusing on the primitive accumulation of capital as an ongo-
ing process – what Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – and, in
literary studies, on the questions of ‘world literature’ and ‘Third-World’ aes-
thetics. These debates might well come to strengthen the Marxist hand within
postcolonial studies although there is clearly a danger that, inasmuch as
‘world literature’ is fast becoming another academic buzzword, its potential
to open up new ways of thinking the relationship between capitalism, moder-
nity and aesthetic form will be dissipated. The debate on primitive accumula-
tion speaks of struggle in a more urgent register, referencing the continuing
expropriation of the global (and local) commons by national and transnational
capitalists hoping to pre-empt future crises of capitalist accumulation. The
choice between industrial growth or economic impoverishment, land for poor
farmers and jobs for a surplus urban labour force can perhaps be grasped
within the context of ongoing debates within Marxist theory and postcolonial
studies.
33
Ahmad 1992, p. 11.
We began by sketching the contours of the global economic and social set-
up around the crisis of 1973. Bello suggests that a new crisis of capitalism is
already with us, combining subsidiary crises of legitimacy, neoliberal ideol-
ogy and overextension.34 The anticapitalist movements are confronted today
by the renewed growth of the Right. The list of the different sites of capitalist
collapse – Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, the Asian Tigers and the debt-
ridden African countries – is a sobering one. Even within the heart of global
capitalism, the United States and Europe, there is a deepening recession
marked by over-speculation and overcapacity. The World Bank and the IMF
have been severely discredited. If the previous crisis provided the context
in which postcolonial studies was established as a eld of academic inquiry
whose constitutive elements were anti-Marxist, the present conjuncture might
just, and however belatedly, open up space for speaking of Marxism and post-
colonial studies.
34
Bello 2004.
Chapter Eighteen
British Marxist History
Paul Blackledge
In a recent defence of the relevance of Marxism to

the study of history, Eric Hobsbawm has reminded
us that Marx aimed to provide a basis for under-
standing history as a totality.1
[ T]he new perspectives on history should also

return us to that essential, if never quite realis-
able, objective of those who study the past: ‘total
history’. Not a ‘history of everything’, but his-
tory as an indivisible web in which all human
activities are interconnected.2
Similarly, Brian Kelly, in his Isaac and Tamara

Deutscher Memorial Prize-winning study Race, Class
and Power in the Alabama Coalelds, 1908–21 (2001),
followed John Saville, Alex Callinicos, Elisabeth
Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese in extolling the
totalising ambitions of history from below, and criti-
cising those of its practitioners who have embraced
historical relativism.3 On a related note, Perry Ander-
son suggested that because Trotsky was the rst to
succeed in writing total history, he could lay claim to
being the rst ‘great Marxist historian’.
1
Thanks to Kristyn Gorton for her help with this essay.
2
Hobsbawm 2004.
3
Kelly 2001, pp. 5–6.
No other classical Marxist had so profound a sense of the changing tempers

and creative capacities of the masses of working men and women, pushing
at the foundations of an archaic social order ‘from below’ – while at the
same time pre-eminently able to chart the complex shifts and organised
political forces ‘from above’.4
Alex Callinicos has argued that the necessity of totalisation in the study of his-
tory and society does not arise, as postmodernists would have it, ‘from some
totalitarian urge to dominate and control’. Rather, it emerges
from the fact that . . . the capitalist mode of production . . . operates according to
a logic that is in the most literal sense global, incorporating and subordinating
every aspect of social life everywhere to the drive to accumulate.5
Nonetheless, Marx and Engels were adamant that, while the capital accumu-
lation process provided the basis from which the totality could be understood,
it would be a grave mistake, as Engels famously insisted in a letter to Joseph
Bloch – 21 September 1890, to mechanically reduce processes in the legal and
political superstructure to epiphenomena of developments in the base.
Fortunately, the Stalinist attempt to reduce historical materialism to just
such a form of crude economic reductionism did not become absolutely hege-
monic within the Communist movement. Historians of France and England
especially were blessed with Marx’s historical analyses of these countries
which provided a rich legacy informing the research of a string of later histori-
ans. This was nowhere truer than in Britain, were in the 1950s the Communist
Party Historians’ Group (CPHG) brought together a number of Marxists who
later made their names as amongst the most important historians of the twen-
tieth century. Interestingly, while this group originally convened to inform
the publication of a second edition of a Communist-Party book on English
history, from the earliest moment their work transcended this narrow basis,
and informed all subsequent Marxist historiography. Indeed, in 1986 Edward
Thompson suggested that historians are still ‘exploiting the terrain’ opened by
the ‘breakthrough in British radical history’ associated with the early work of
the historians who came to found this group.6 Two decades later, Thompson’s
4
Anderson 1980, p. 154. Compare to Callinicos 1998, p. 37. See also Blackledge
2005c.
5
Callinicos 1998 p. 36.
6
British Marxist History • 335
point retains all of its pertinence. A trajectory can be traced from the works
of these writers to the joint winners of the 2004 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher
Memorial Prize: Benno Teschke and Neil Davidson. Teschke’s work is deeply
informed by ‘political Marxism’, which developed as a synthesis of the work
of Robert Brenner and Edward Thompson. If Davidson’s Marxism is of a
more classical bent, like Teschke it is informed by Thompson’s thought, but as
critically developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. Given the undoubted importance
of Thompson’s contribution to radical history, this paper will concentrate on
surveying the debates occasioned by his work. If it concludes with a discus-
sion of Davidson’s work rather than Teschke’s, this reects the fact that I have
discussed political Marxism at length elsewhere in this volume.
People’s history
In 1935, Comintern General Secretary George Dimitrov noted that across
Europe fascists were writing national historical myths through which they
hoped to justify their contemporary political project. In response to this devel-
opment, he argued, it was imperative that Communists should challenge
those myths with their own histories of the progressive struggle for democ-
racy experienced within each national state: ‘to link up the present struggle
with the people’s revolutionary traditions and past’.7
Irrespective of the political merits of this programme, historiographically
it opened the door to a series of studies of movements which had sought to
create and deepen democracy. ‘We became’, wrote CPGB historian James
Klugmann,
the inheritors of the Peasant’s revolt, of the left of the English revolution,
of the pre-Chartist movement, of the women’s suffrage movement from
the 1790s to today.8
Nevertheless, while this innovation appealed to the CPGB’s historians, the

novelty of the imputation of the decidedly non-Marxist concept ‘the people’9
into the Marxist lexicon cannot be overstated. Marx’s claim that ‘the history
7
Dimitrov 1935.
8
Schwarz 1982, p. 56.
9
Hill 2000, p. 89.
of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles . . . oppressor

and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another’ would imply,
even to the most cursory reader, that an undifferentiated conception of ‘the
people’ was a concept about which Marxists would have traditionally been
very critical.
While this is true, Raphael Samuel has argued that Communist ‘people’s
history’ provided ‘the groundwork on which Marxist historians have built’
monumental structures.10 From Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of
Capitalism, Leslie Morton’s A People’s History of England and Dona Torr’s Tom
Mann and His Times, to the mature works of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hil-
ton, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, John Saville, and Edward
Thompson et al., the achievements of this group have been praised across the
historical profession. For, despite starting from political decisions originating
in Moscow, it would be wrong to reduce the Marxism of this group to Stalin’s
vulgarisation of the same.11 Indeed, despite the sectarianism of the Commu-
nist Party, CPHG members read and were inspired by, amongst others, C.L.R.
James’s magnicent The Black Jacobins (1938).12 James was a Trotskyist, whose
Marxism was, according to Robin Blackburn, ‘alive to the ways in which the
explosion of political and social contradictions allows the masses to emerge
as makers of history’.13
If James’s, and through him Trotsky’s inuence can felt in the histories pro-
duced by members of the CPHG, it was Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Develop-
ment of Capitalism (1946), which, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, ‘formulated
our main and central problem’.14 The CPHG began to meet formally in 1946
with a view to aiding the production of a second edition of Morton’s A Peo-
ple’s History of England. Morton’s book was among the most signicant intel-
lectual products of the Popular-Front period. In many ways, this book was
also a model of radical historical popularisation. It was written in beautiful
prose with a keen eye for detailed micro-narratives which illuminated the
grand narrative of the people’s struggle for freedom. From the earliest set-
tlers through the revolts against feudalism and the English Revolution to the
10
Schwarz 1982, p. 71; Samuel 1980, p. 37.
11
Samuel 1980, p. 64.
12
Hobsbawm 1978, p. 23.
13
Blackburn 1995, p. 82.
14
Hobsbawm 1978, p. 23.
modern struggles of the industrial age, Morton wove a compelling synthetic

‘history from below’ of England.
Unfortunately, despite the many strengths of this book, it received very
little attention within academia. The same cannot be said of the Hill’s ‘The
Norman Yoke’ (1954), which became, according to Schwarz, the ‘central text’
of the Historians’ Group. In this essay, Hill traced the notion of the Norman
yoke from the seventeenth century – though he suggests that the concept may
have had roots going back to 1066 – through to the birth of the modern social-
ist movement. Interestingly, while Hill argued that Norman-yoke theory – the
idea that the oppressive institutions of the English state were imported at
the time of the Conquest, prior to which ‘the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this
country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through rep-
resentative institutions’15 – became ‘subsumed by theories of socialism’,16 he
did not, as Schwarz implies, suggest a simple continuity between early popu-
lar struggles against absolutism and the contemporary socialist movement.17
Rather, alongside his narrative of radical continuity, Hill stressed important
moments of change:
after 1832 (as after 1660) the theory of continuity became an anti-revolutionary
theory . . . Paeans in praise of the ancient constitution suited those who wished
to preserve the status quo.18
Therefore, while Hill undoubtedly traced a continuous trajectory of demo-

cratic struggle associated with the Norman-yoke theory between the sev-
enteenth and the nineteenth centuries, his was no simple model of upward
evolutionary progress. For Hill was keen to stress the novel role played by
the proletariat in the democratic struggle that developed from the nineteenth
century onwards.
If Hill was the rst to publish a powerful historical justication for this
position, the inspirational Dona Torr outlined the fullest version of this per-
spective. In her Tom Mann and His Times (1956), Torr argued that Mann was a
representative of the ‘newfangled’19 working class of the industrial age, a class
15
Hill 1958, p. 64.
16
Hill 1958, p. 119.
17
Schwarz 1982, p. 70.
18
Hill 2000, pp. 117–19.
19
Torr borrowed this phrase from Marx 1973, p. 300.
that had inherited half a millennium of struggles for freedom.20 For Torr, the
hopes of the nation had come to be embodied in the democratic struggles of
the workers – the class which inherited the mantle and the struggles of ‘the
people’ for the realisation of full democracy.
Socialist humanism and structuralism

Torr’s torch was taken up by members of the CPHG generally, and speci-
cally by her ‘protégé’21 Edward Thompson. In his ‘Socialist Humanism: An
Epistle to the Philistines’ (1957), written after his break with the Communist
Party, Thompson outlined a brilliant and original contribution not just to the
analysis of Stalinism specically, but also to historical materialism more gen-
erally. Thompson characterised his Marxism as a version of socialist human-
ism because it placed ‘real men and women at the centre of socialist theory
and aspiration’, whilst simultaneously reafrming ‘the revolutionary per-
spectives of Communism’.22 The essay opened with the claim that ‘a quarter
of the earth’s surface is a new society, with a new economic structure, new
social relations, and new political institutions’.23 However, despite the novelty
of these social relations, oppression in many varied forms continued as a real-
ity of life in those states: the persistence of oppression, despite the suppres-
sion of private property, convinced Thompson of the falsity of the traditional
Marxist view that all forms of oppression were rooted in economic exploita-
tion. Against such ‘economistic’ models of historical materialism, Thompson
sought to re-emphasise human agency at the heart of his Marxism, and in par-
ticular to reafrm the importance of ideas as the basis for action. This reinter-
pretation of Marxism allowed him to conceptualise both the rise of Stalinism
and the revolt against it in 1956. He explained the anti-Stalinist revolt as the
rebellion of the human spirit against the deadening grip of authoritarianism,
while Stalinism itself had arisen as a reaction against malign ideas within the
Marxist canon.
20
Torr 1956, p. 98.
21
Renton 2004, p. 105.
22
23
Stalinism did not develop just because certain economic and social conditions
existed, but because these conditions provided a fertile climate within which
false ideas took root, and these false ideas became in their turn part of the
social conditions.
Those false ideas were rooted in the classical-Marxist tradition which occa-
sionally tended ‘to derive all analysis of political manifestations directly and
in an over-simplied manner from economic causations’.24 This mistake linked
Stalinism to crude Marxism, as, in their cruder moments, Marx and Engels
understood revolutions as mechanical consequences of the clash between
forces and relations of production, rather than as products of the actions of
real men and women. This weakness in their œuvre was most apparent when
Marx and Engels used the metaphor of base and superstructure to aid their
conceptualisation of reality. Thompson insisted that this was a
bad and dangerous model, since Stalin used it not as an image of men
changing in society but as a mechanical model, operating semi-automatically
and independently of human agency.25
This ‘denial of the creative agency of human labour’, when combined with
working-class ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘moral nihilism’, acted to rob Marx-
ism of its human element and to freeze it into the dogma of Stalinism, which
was itself ‘embodied in institutional form in the rigid forms of democratic
centralism’.26 Developing this point, Harvey Kaye suggests, following Eugene
Genovese, that the British Marxist historians have, collectively, sought to tran-
scend the limitations of both the traditional interpretation of the base/super-
structure model and the crude economistic model of social class.27
According to Thompson, the Stalinist distortion of Marxism could be
explained, in part, as a consequence of the application of the more mechanical
side of Marx’s legacy. However, while Thompson was critical of Stalinism in
practice as well as in theory, he insisted that the Stalinist states were socialist
structures, albeit distorted:
24
25
26
Thompson 1957, pp. 132 and 121.
27
Kaye 1995, pp. 3–4.
the fact that British socialists do not like all the features of this society has no
bearing upon the fact of its existence. It was obviously only short-sightedness
which ever led socialists to conceive of the new society stepping, pure and
enlightened, out of the res of the old.28
To help explain this contradictory phenomenon, Thompson wanted to reclaim

Marx’s dialectical interpretation of progress – ‘that hideous pagan idol, who
would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain’ – and apply it to
the interpretation of Stalinism, such that he explained it as a system that was
simultaneously economically progressive and morally reactionary.29
While the power of Thompson’s interpretation of historical materialism
was realised in his magnicent The Making of the English Working Class (1963),
his political perspectives in the period of the New Left were much less suc-
cessful. Indeed, in 1966, Perry Anderson suggested that that all of Edward
Thompson’s strategic and tactical essays for New-Left publications in the late
1950s and early 1960s could be characterised by
their uniform abstraction, their wandering subjectivism, their inflated

rhetoric, their utter renunciation of any attempt to analyse rather than merely
invoke present realities. Socialism, in them, gives way to a maundering
populism. The categories of this thought are so vacuous and simplistic that
it is difcult to credit that they are those of the same man who could write
such overpoweringly concrete history.30
Fourteen years later, and in a somewhat less polemical register, Anderson

suggested that the ‘remarkably vague’ nature of Thompson’s conceptualisa-
tion of socialist revolution after 1956 was best understood in relation to the
limitations of his break with Stalinism. While the authenticity of Thompson’s
moral critique of capitalism was not in question, his strategic perspective was
inherited almost complete from 1950s’ Communism.31
In an attempt to overcome the strategic limitations of the rst New Left’s
socialism, Anderson penned his own schematic history of England, which
he intended as a historical basis for a more robust English socialist strategy.
His ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ (1964) included a history of the failure of
28
29
Thompson 1958, pp. 98–100.
30
31
Anderson 1980, pp. 190–1.
the British bourgeoisie fully to modernise the British state, and, as a corollary
of this, it was a history of the aristocracy’s successful struggle to maintain its
control over the levers of state power.32
Thompson produced a spirited polemical assault on Anderson’s interpreta-
tion of English history in ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965). A central
criticism Thompson made of ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ was of its norma-
tive structure:
There is, indeed, throughout their analysis an undisclosed model of

Other Countries, whose typological symmetry offers a reproach to British
exceptionalism.
In contrast to this methodology, Thompson insisted that capitalist develop-

ment ‘happened in one way in France, in another way in England’.33
However, it was Anderson’s conceptualisation of class that more than any
other element of his thesis outraged Thompson: Anderson, he wrote, tended
to clothe classes ‘throughout in anthropomorphic imagery’.34 He attened
the struggles for hegemony that had occurred within the proletariat into an
overarching unity, within which Labourism was never seriously challenged.
Class, perceived as a unied it, had two immediate consequences for Ander-
son’s work: rst, it enabled him to ignore the real struggles for hegemony
that had taken place between reformists and revolutionaries within the Brit-
ish labour movement over the preceding century; second, it permitted him
to read-off the attitudes of the mass of workers from the ideologies of their
leaders in the Labour Party and trade-union movement.35 Consequently, ‘his-
tory is attened, stretched, condensed; awkward facts are not mentioned;
awkward decades are simply elided’, in the pursuit of an untenable argu-
ment. While Thompson did not deny that Labourism was hegemonic within
the English working class, he did deny that this hegemony was written in
stone. In particular, he took offence at Anderson’s dismissal of the existence
of minority socialist traditions within the English proletariat.36 In contrast
to Anderson’s schematic history, which had the effect of misrepresenting
32
Blackledge 2004, pp. 18ff; Anderson 1992a, pp. 17–19.
33
34
35
36
crucial periods of struggle, Thompson maintained that ‘we can only describe
the social process . . . by writing history’.37 From that standpoint, Anderson’s
schema was particularly debilitating because he did not investigate any of the
periods of working-class resistance that he briey mentioned. For Thompson,
the schematic structure of Anderson’s history, by focusing on overarching
themes, tended to act as an objectivist apologia for the status quo. The sche-
matic structure of his thesis was therefore not a forgivable vice, given the
overall nature of his work; rather it masked a further shift towards an ideal-
ism in which the past was not simply viewed through the lens of the present,
but was constructed from the ideologies of the present with scant regard for
accuracy. Anderson’s method therefore led to ‘reductionism’ whereby there
occurred a ‘lapse in historical logic by which political or cultural events are
“explained” in terms of the class afliation of the actors’.38
Anderson’s reply to Thompson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’ (1966),
was ostensibly an aggressive defence of his own model of English social
development against Thompson’s criticisms. However, in the text, he both
acknowledged the implicit idealism to be found in ‘Origins of the Present
Crisis’, and noted that there were signs of ‘a counter idealistic trend within
European Marxism of a potentially comparable strength and sophistication’
to the earlier tradition on which he had drawn: ‘Althusser’s work has this
promise’. Nevertheless, by 1972 at the latest, Anderson had been convinced
of Althusser’s idealism, and it is apparent that by the 1970s NLR was no lon-
ger an Althusserian journal.39 Irrespective of this development, Thompson’s
growing anger at the inuence of Althusser on the British Left generally, and
within Anglophone historiography more specically, led him to extend his
earlier polemic against Anderson’s historiography to a general critique of
Althusserian Marxism, within which category he subsumed Anderson and
the NLR.40 The result was Thompson’s passionate defence of the historian’s
craft against any reductionist methodology: The Poverty of Theory (1978).
37
38
39
Anderson 1972.
40
That Thompson was right to detect this inuence is evidenced by the critique of
his and Eugene Genevese’s work made by Richard Johnson (Johnson 1978; compare
with Johnson 1980). The next issues of HWJ carried a stimulating debate centred on
Johnson’s argument with contributions from Keith McClelland, Gavin Williams, Simon
Thompson argued that Althusser came ‘not to offer to modify [Marxism]

but to displace it’.41 Althusser’s epistemology, he argued, ‘consists of an ideal-
ist mode of theoretical construction’ that created a
self-generating conceptual universe which imposes its own ideality upon

the phenomena of material and social existence, rather than engaging in a
continual dialogue with these.42
Althusser confused ‘empirical procedures, empirical controls, with some-

thing he calls empiricism’.43 By contrast, historical materialism, Thompson
observed,
differs from other interpretive orderings of historical evidence not (or

not necessarily) in any epistemological premises, but in its categories, its
characteristic hypotheses and attendant procedures.44
Thompson contended that Althusserianism built on the weaker elements of

Marx’s thought: in Capital, Marx deployed historical concepts to explain capi-
talism, while, in the Grundrisse, his thought remained trapped within the static
structure of political economy.45 It was from within this second tradition that
Althusser arose: ‘Althusser and his colleagues seek to thrust historical materi-
alism back into the prison of the categories of Political Economy’.46 Thompson
saw an ancestor of Althusser’s structuralism in Stalin’s Marxism and Linguis-
tics, and Althusserianism was, like Stalin’s Marxism, a static system which
could not begin to understand history as a process: it was, he argued with
characteristic directness, ‘unhistorical shit’.47 Against this form of structural-
ism, Thompson remarked, ‘I feel myself revert to the poetry of voluntarism’.48
Thompson argued that Marxists should move from the scientic and static
analysis of capital to the historical analysis of capitalism.49 To make this leap,
Clarke, Tim Mason, Gregor McLennan, David Selbourne and Raphael Samuel. See
also Johnson 1981 and Thompson 1981.
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
the historical-materialist method ought to have at its heart the aim of analys-
ing the intentions of actors in real historical time. Additionally, as individu-
als understand their experiences through culture – the middle term between
capitalism and the individual – Marxists were asked to prioritise the analysis
of this sphere in their theoretical work.50
Thompson’s reinsertion of human agency into the centre of Marxist the-
ory was nowhere clearer than in The Making of the English Working Class. In
the Preface to this masterpiece, he defended his book’s ‘clumsy title’ with
the claim that through it he was seeking to convey the sense of class forma-
tion as ‘an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning’.
He noted that his title referred to the working class rather than to the more
‘descriptive term’ working classes, because the analytical power of the former
term would allow him to explain history as a process. However, in contrast to
Stalinist Marxism, he dened class
not as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact

happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
While
class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which

men are born . . . [c]lass consciousness is the way in which these experiences
are handled in cultural terms’.
Where class experience is ‘determined’, class consciousness is not. This human-

ist framework allowed Thompson, rst, to reject wooden Stalinist deductions
of class consciousness from class location; and, second, to examine human
action in its own terms, with the hope that the participants even in failed
struggles will help teach us something of the ‘social evils which we have yet
to cure’. This latter point is used to justify the memorable passage in which he
notes his aim of rescuing
the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weaver,
the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott,
from the enormous condescension of posterity.51
50
51
In contrast to many of the ‘historians from below’ who have followed his lead,
Thompson’s democratic methodology had nothing in common with academic
specialisation.52 Rather, he aimed to unearth the stories of human struggles
for freedom with the goal of informing contemporary socialist practice.53
In Arguments within English Marxism (1980), Anderson responded to
Thompson’s challenge through a threefold critique of The Making of the Eng-
lish Working Class. First, he argued that it was marred by the idealistic thesis of
‘co-determination’, by which Thompson argued that the working class ‘made
itself as much as it was made’; second, Thompson mistakenly had equated
class ‘in and through’ class consciousness; and, third, Thompson had implied
that the process of working-class formation had, essentially, been ‘completed
by the early 1830s’.54
Anderson’s critique of Thompson’s theory of co-determination is perhaps
the most persuasive of the three points. For, despite Thompson’s claim that
class formation was an equal product of both objective and subjective cir-
cumstances, in practice he left largely unexamined the structural side of the
structure-agency couplet and hence proposed a thesis that could not be ‘adju-
dicated’ on given the evidence cited in his book. Anderson noted several con-
textual elements that Thompson had left largely unexplored, including the
impact of the French and American Revolutions, the commercial nature of
London and the ‘spearhead sectors of the industrial revolution’.
Anderson’s criticism of Thompson’s equation of class with class conscious-
ness, centred on the claim that Thompson had made abusive generalisation
from a peculiar history that could lead to voluntarist and subjectivist devia-
tions from materialism.55 Against Thompson’s model of class, Anderson cited
Gerry Cohen’s ‘fundamental work’, which was ‘unlikely to need further
restatement’.56 Third, in contrast to Thompson’s implied claim that the mak-
ing of the English working class had been closed in 1832 Anderson called for
an analysis of the re-making of that class.57
52
Palmer 1990; Thompson 2000. For Marxist criticisms of some of the malign con-
sequences of ‘history from below’ see Saville 1977; Saville 2003, p. 180; Kelly 2001,
pp. 3–15; Callinicos 1998, pp. 37–9.
53
Thompson 1980, pp. 11–12; Anderson 1980, p. 2.
54
Anderson 1980, pp. 31–2.
55
See Ste. Croix 1983, pp. 62ff, and 1984.
56
Ste. Croix 1983, pp. 38–40.
57
Ste. Croix 1983, p. 45.
Whatever the undoubted merits of Anderson’s critique of Thompson’s

voluntarism, his own analysis of the remaking of the English working class
after 1848 smacked of the opposite error of reductionism. In ‘The Figures of
Descent’ (1987), as in ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, Anderson maintained
that the British working class had experienced a ‘deep caesura’ between Char-
tism and the emergence of the Labour Party. He explained the shift from the
two types of politics as a reection of the changing structure of the English
working class. The specicity of the new English working class lay in the con-
trast between its high degree of ‘industrial organisation’ compared with its
exceptionally weak ‘political project’. Politically,
British labour as an organized force was a captive client of the Liberal party
down to the end of the century after which the Labour Party grew as part
of the liberal revival.58
Subsequently, Labour’s path to power was no road of its own making: the
First World War destroyed the Liberal Party, while the Second World War
created the conditions for massive state intervention. The smooth transfer of
power to the Conservatives in 1951 showed just how little the Labour Party
had affected the ‘structures of Britain’s imperial economy’.59
Bob Looker has suggested that ‘read as an account of the Labour Party there
is little new or original here – Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism mapped this
terrain decades ago’. However, Anderson went beyond Miliband in assuming
that Labourism set the ‘structural limits to working-class consciousness and
activity’.60 Whereas previous Marxist analyses of the English working class
had shown the impossibility of the Labour Party seriously challenging the
status quo, Anderson deepened this thesis, to dismiss the potential of English
working-class anticapitalism. This dismissal rested on the claim that ‘the Eng-
lish 1848 closed a history’.61 By this he meant to suggest that the political and
organisational legacy of Chartism was almost nil: the new factory proletariat
had no use for the old ideology. What is striking, therefore, about Anderson’s
analysis of Labourism is the way that it is, rst, founded on a mechanical
model of the relationship of consciousness to industrial structure, while, sec-
58
Anderson 1992b, pp. 157–60.
59
Anderson 1992b, p. 164.
60
Looker 1988, p. 17.
61
ond, it is equated, anthropomorphically, with the politics of the working class

itself. Consequently, in ‘The Figures of Descent’, Anderson appears to reduce
the consciousness of England’s proletariat to the objective co-ordinates of
England’s social structure62 As Bob Looker argued, Anderson
has failed to grasp what Thompson’s analysis of the English working class
clearly demonstrated; the issue isn’t a matter of conceptual distinctions but
of real movements rising through class practice.63
Beyond the linguistic turn

However, if Anderson’s conceptualisation of the relationship between class
consciousness and class structure seemed too reductive, he was right to recog-
nise idealistic tendencies inherent in Thompson’s model. As Bryan Palmer
suggested in a generally appreciative discussion of Thompson’s work; ‘the
theoretical claims of Thompson and [Raymond] Williams were all too easily
incorporated into the emerging orthodoxy’ of the linguistic turn in the 1970s
and 1980s.64
The idea that the social world is irredeemably discursive such that there
can be no privileged vantage point from which we might grasp ‘real’ underly-
ing relations was forcefully argued in Britain by the historian and ex-Marxist
Gareth Stedman Jones in Languages of Class (1983). Stedman Jones suggested
that historical enquiry should begin from a realisation that language is not
to be understood simply as ‘referring’ back to some ‘primal anterior reality’.
Following the logic of this suggestion, he argued, rather than attempt to look
through language to underlying real interests, historians must ‘study the pro-
duction of interest, identication, grievance and aspiration within political
language themselves’:
language disrupts any simple notion of the determination of consciousness

by social being because it is itself part of social being. We cannot therefore
decode political language to reach a primal and material expression of
62
63
Looker 1988, p. 27.
64
Palmer 1990, p. 210.
interest since it is the discursive structure of political language which

conceives and denes interest in the rst place.65
The Marxist historian Neville Kirk responded to this challenge to historical

materialism by pointing out that Stedman Jones’s method was ‘idealistic’
because it ‘effectively dissolves reality back into language’.66 Similarly, Sam-
uel insisted, ‘the historical record cannot be read only as a system of signs’, for
historians must look beyond language if they are to measure ‘words against
deeds’.67 Commenting on Stedman Jones’s reading of Chartism, Dorothy
Thompson argued that
I nd it difcult to believe that anyone who has worked in the archives
and has studied the published and unpublished language of the Chartists
can fail to see that the idea that above all united them into a nation-wide
movement was the belief that there was a profound unity of interest between
working people of all kinds.68
Likewise, in his 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (1987), John
Saville found that he could only make sense of Chartism by going beyond
those interpretations, such as that made by Stedman Jones, which concen-
trated on its, formally, moderate political demands. Saville argues that it was
precisely because the demands for the People’s Charter were rooted in an
underlying class struggle at the point of production that Chartism both had a
mass working-class base, and also generated such a popular and reactionary
middle-class response:
the outstanding feature of 1848 was the mass response to the call for special
constables to assist the professional forces of state security. This was the
signicance of 1848: the closing of ranks among all those with a property
stake in the country, however small the stake was.69
In reasserting the concept of material interest, Saville et al. re-engaged with

the problem of how to relate ideas to social structures without succumb-
65
Stedman Jones 1983, pp 20–2.
66
Kirk 1997, p. 333. For other Marxist criticisms of Stedman Jones see Kirk 1996;
Foster 1985; Callinicos 2004, pp. 143ff.
67
Samuel 1992, pp. 245–6.
68
69
Saville 1987, pp. 224–7.
ing to reductionism. The answer articulated by political Marxism, as I have

suggested elsewhere in this volume, is that properly understood, and when
synthesised with the work of Robert Brenner, Thompson’s approach offers
a powerful basis both from which to comprehend the past and upon which
to found a contemporary revolutionary politics. Conversely, Alex Callinicos,
Neil Davidson, Chris Harman and Brian Manning70 have recently argued that
attempts by political Marxists to conceptualise the English Revolution speci-
cally, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism more generally, without
reference to changes in the forces of production has resulted in an inadequate
model of the formation of the modern world. For example, Manning criticised
Neal and Ellen Wood’s study of political ideas in the seventeenth century
thus:
Viewing the aristocracy as already a capitalist class before the revolution

is too simple. It diverts attention from where capitalism was actually
developing among large farmers and elements in manufacturing and how
that relates to the revolution. And it leaves little room for assessing the
ways in which the revolution actually did facilitate the development of
capitalism.71
Similarly, he criticised Brenner’s account of the Revolution both for ignoring

the growth of industry in the decades that led up to 1640, and for overempha-
sising the growth of capitalist farming amongst the aristocracy before in the
same period. Interestingly, Manning did write that Brenner’s empirical nd-
ings, relating to the role of merchants within the revolution, cohered with his
own much more classical thesis that it was the ‘middling-sort’ who drove the
revolution. He suggested that the growing importance of this group should
be related to the development of industry; and because Dobb stressed this
development, his model was better able than Brenner’s to explain why ‘indus-
trial districts – not all of them – provided a main base for the parliamentarian
and revolutionary parties’.72 Following Dobb, therefore, Manning argued that
70
Harman 1998; Callinicos 1995; Davidson 2005; Manning 1994.
71
Manning 1997, p. 29.
72
Manning 1994, pp. 84–6; Manning 1999, p. 50.
the English Revolution could best be understood as a bourgeois revolution

located within a framework dominated by ‘the rise of capitalism’.73
Neil Davidson has similarly insisted that the development of the productive
forces must be at the centre of any adequate Marxist account of the transition
from feudalism to capitalism.74 With regard to the concrete case of the Scottish
bourgeois revolution, Davidson has convincingly shown, in his Discovering
the Scottish Revolution (2003), that it is possible to conceptualise a sophisticated
political narrative of events within a complex rendering of the base/super-
structure model. Davidson’s understanding of Marxism is indebted to Alas-
dair MacIntyre’s early Marxist writings, which Thompson described being ‘of
the rst importance’ to historians.75 Interestingly, the essay to which Thomp-
son referred, MacIntyre’s ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, was intended as
a rectication of some of the limitations of Thompson’s ‘Socialist Humanism’
in the wake of criticisms by other members of the New Left in the 1950s.
In this essay, MacIntyre aimed at deepening Thompson’s humanism
through the medium of a reinterpretation of Marxism. The Stalinist insis-
tence that history’s general course was predictable rested, or so MacIntyre
insisted, on a misconception of the role of the base/superstructure metaphor
in Marxist theory. What Marx suggested when he deployed this metaphor
was neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship. Rather, he utilised Hege-
lian concepts to denote the process through which the economic base of a
society provides ‘a framework within which superstructures arise, a set off
relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel
of human relationships from which all else grows’. Indeed, MacIntyre wrote
that in ‘creating the basis, you create the superstructure. These are not two
activities but one’.
Thus, the Stalinist model of historical progress, according to which politi-
cal developments were understood to follow automatically from economic
causes, could not be further from Marx’s model. For, in Marx’s view, ‘the
crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the
73
Manning 1999, pp. 45; 51. For a general overview of Manning’s contribution to
a Marxist understanding of the English Revolution and the transition from feudalism
to capitalism see Blackledge 2005.
74
Davidson 2005.
75
economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to

superstructure’.76
Whether or not one accepts something like MacIntyre’s reinterpretation of
the base/superstructure metaphor or Thompson’s alternative, Davidson’s
and Teschke’s works, alongside many others, are testament to the continued
power and vitality Marxist historiography in the Anglophone world.
76
MacIntyre 1998, p. 39. For more on MacIntyre’s early Marxism see Blackledge
2005b. For sophisticated defences of the base/superstructure metaphor see Harman
1998 and Callinicos 2004.
Chapter Nineteen
Developments in Marxist Class Analysis
Vivek Chibber
Introduction
During the eforescence of Marxist theory during
the 1960s and 1970s, class analysis emerged as one
of the central objects of debate and discussion. Those
years were among the most fecund in the twentieth
century for the development of scholarship around
class issues. It was certainly the only time in West-
ern academia that the concept came to occupy a
central place across the disciplinary divide. This
was a direct expression of the growth of interest in
Marxism among a new generation of students com-
ing out of the many social movements of the 1960s.
As student interest in exploring Marxism exploded
across the academic spectrum, so did an interest in
the concept most centrally associated with that tradi-
tion. By the 1990s, this interest had either ebbed sig-
nicantly, or had transmuted into a shift away from
the Marxist variant of class analysis, toward more
fashionable avatars steeped in cultural and discur-
sive commitments. To the extent that an interest in
class analysis, of a recognisably Marxist kind, can
be found in Anglo-American academia, it exists in
somewhat small and isolated pockets. Perhaps the
one discipline where scholarship concerned with
354 • Vivek Chibber
class has maintained a signicant foothold is in Sociology, though here too, it

is nowhere near as popular as it was a generation ago.
We will examine developments in class analysis along three dimensions
central to its deployment as an analytical and political category: class struc-
ture, the labour process, and class formation/class struggle. Class structure
refers to the location of social agents in the basic property relations, or produc-
tion relations of an economic system. The labour process refers to the organisa-
tion of production, in which is produced the surplus that the dominant class
appropriates from the direct producers. Class formation refers to the process
through which agents located in differed classes organised around their inter-
ests. Class struggle is what happens when agents engage in the contentious
pursuit of their interests.
Class structure
The concept of class structure has always been at the very heart of Marxist
theory. Even though Marx was not alone in seeing class as critical to the basic
dynamic of capitalism, he is the only modern thinker to build his social theory
around the concept. It is therefore somewhat surprising that careful interro-
gations of its basic properties and its internal coherence as a concept were
hard to nd among twentieth-century Marxists before the New Left. Debates
at the time of the Second and Third Internationals revolved far more tightly
around empirical and political issues. The concern with unpacking what
class denotes, at a fairly high level of generality, was simply not very visible
among Lenin’s contemporaries. Its prominence among late twentieth-century
theorists is undoubtedly a product of their environment: the fact that they
were typically housed in universities, where the mainstream opinion regard-
ing class concepts ranged from scepticism to outright hostility. The develop-
ment of class theory in this setting required a simultaneous clarication and
defense of the concept against its critics.
In this newer generation of theorists, there is little doubt that the most sig-
nicant stream of work has been produced by the American sociologist, Erik
Olin Wright. Starting with the publication of Class, Crisis, and the State in 1978,
Wright has produced a steady outpouring of scholarship on the logic of class
as a concept, as well as an extremely ambitious cross-national survey of class
structure. The project has been remarkable not only for its ambition, but for
Developments in Marxist Class Analysis • 355
the stamina with which Wright has stuck to a consistent research agenda. The
central elements of this project have been two closely related questions: rst,
what the properties of class structure are at the highest level of abstraction,
and second, how it can be concretised in a fashion that is both empirically
adequate – so it captures the most important observable tendencies in the
contemporary setting – and theoretically consistent – so theoretical adjust-
ments to empirical ndings are not in tension with the abstract denitions of
the concept.
The basic class concept
At the highest level of abstraction, class structures are dened by the distri-
bution of the means of production – the productive assets – in a society. The
degree of control that agents exercise over the means of production deter-
mines the range of strategies they available to reproduce themselves. Con-
sider the difference between the following scenarii: one in which an agent
has no productive assets at all, leaving him with just his physical powers, and
another in which the agent owns a plot of land, or directly produces some
commodities that can be sold on the market. The rst case will have little
choice but to nd some way of earning money, typically by offering to work
for someone else; the second, because of his ownership of productive prop-
erty, has the option of escaping the burden of working for someone else. Dif-
ferent ownership situations bring about quite dissimilar sets of choices. As
Wright summarises this principle, ‘what you have determines what you have
to do’ to make a living.
It is important to note that property relations do not automatically gen-
erate class relations. They do so only when they assign power over assets
unequally, so that one group of agents can enforce claims on the productive
activities of another. When the former group can actually live on the claims it
makes on the labour of the latter, Marxists regard it as a relation of exploita-
tion, and hence, a class relation. The fact that productive assets are distributed
unequally means that one class can exploit another; the precise enumeration of
those rights will determine how the one class exploits the other. So, for exam-
ple, the fact that rural landlords under feudalism enjoy superior but not abso-
lute rights over land means that they can claim some of their tenants labour as
rent; but because their claims are not absolute, and peasants also have partial
rights to the land through custom, lords must wield the threat of physical
force to realise their claims. In capitalism, by contrast, the exploiting class
does not have to rely centrally on a direct use of coercion to extract labour.
The fact that one group has no direct access to productive assets means that
the only reasonable option open to them for survival is to hire themselves
out to others for work, in exchange for money; for this, they actively seek out
those in society who do possess productive assets. Thus, there is an extraction
of labour effort in both feudalism and capitalism. But whereas in feudalism,
it is the exploiter who must seek out the exploited, in capitalism it is the other
way around. And whereas in feudalism, the exploiter must rely on the use of
force – or the threat of force – in capitalism, the labouring class has no choice
but to offer itself up for exploiting. As Marx observed, the ‘dull compulsion of
economic relations’ replaces the interpersonal coercion of feudal times.
The preceding discussion carries two central implications. The rst comes
from exploitation being central to class. Exploitation occurs when one group
lives of the labour of another, by either directly forcing work out of them, or
by forcing them into a situation where they have to offer their work to the
potential exploiters. The process of exploitation thus creates an interdepen-
dence between the two groups; but this interdependence is, at its very core,
an antagonistic one. The fact that there is some measure of coercion involved
in the process means that the exploited always resent their situation – hence
the antagonism. But the dominant group must not only exercise power over
the labouring group, it must also take some responsibility for the latter’s well-
being. Exploiters need the exploited. Class thus generates an antagonism, but
it is one that must be contained so it can be reproduced. Classes constantly
struggle against each other, but they also reproduce each other.
A second implication of the concept is that, since class structures set the
strategies that agents must follow to reproduce themselves, qualitatively dif-
ferent class structures will generate very distinct patterns of social reproduc-
tion. This leads to a foundational principle for Marxist theory: societies with
qualitatively different class structures ought to be seen as entirely different
social systems, with entirely different logics of economic reproduction, differ-
ent mechanisms for income distribution, and quite distinct aggregate devel-
opment patterns. This is true at any given point in time: at any moment in
history, regions with different basic class structures should be expected to
exhibit very distinct systemic properties. But it is even more potent as an axis
for historical periodisation. In different historical epochs, social reproduc-

tion has been governed by very distinct class structures – different modes of
production – which have generated recognisably different ‘laws of motion’,
to use a favorite phrase of Marx. Hence, human history can be divided into
distinct epochs, each characterised by its own basic class structure, and its
own laws of motion. Class thus becomes not only a principle of differentiat-
ing between agents, or groups of agents, but also a means of differentiating
historical epochs.
The past two decades or so have witnessed some very ambitious efforts to
cash out this claim for class structures as markers of epochal breaks. In the
classical schema proposed by Marx, Eurasian history could be broken into
at least three distinct social formations, three epochs distinguished by their
modes of production – classical antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism. Marx
suggested that each of these had its own laws of motion, but, famously, he
only made progress on elucidating the laws of capitalism. The older forms
were left largely untouched, but for some very provocative observations. The
most ambitious attempts by twentieth-century Marxists on this score came
during the 1980s. For antiquity, we have Geoffrey de. Ste Croix’s monumental
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, which, despite its title, ranged all
the way to the fall of Rome.1 Ste. Croix’s work was not only recognised as an
instant classic as a purely historical account; it was also hailed as one of the
most theoretically sophisticated works of Marxist sociology, as it carefully
showed just how the class relations of antiquity generated a particular devel-
opment logic – distinct from the social systems that followed it historically.
And around the same time, American historian Robert Brenner developed a
highly inuential analysis of medieval feudalism, showing with exemplary
clarity just what the ‘laws of motion’ of the feudal economy were.2 And, more
importantly, he showed more clearly than any other Marxist before him, how
feudalism exhibited entirely different economic dynamics than capitalism,
based on the way that its class structure generated a distinct micro-logic for
economic actors.3 By the 1990s, Marxist theory could justly claim to have come
1
Ste Croix, 1981.
2
Brenner 1976; Brenner 1982.
3
Brenner 1985.
some distance toward demonstrating Marx’s basic intuition about relation

between class and historical differentiation.
Dealing with Complexity
On the basic concept of class, as dened above, there was and remains a wide-
ranging consensus among Marxists. Problems begin when we confront the
reality of occupational structures in capitalism, which do not reect the simple
two-class schema laid out in the abstract conceptualisation. Most pointedly,
there is a thick layer of positions which seem to fall somewhere in between
the position of worker and capitalist. Developing a conceptual apparatus that
incorporates this reality, in a way that is consistent with the more general cri-
teria for class laid out above, has been an overriding concern of contemporary
Marxists. If class is dened by coercive appropriation of labour effort, what is
the class position of actors who are in the middle strata?
There have been two general responses to this challenge. One is to make the
argument that many of the positions in the middle class are really just more
complex forms of the basic class relations of exploiter and exploited. Hence,
though these positions may seem to be neither capitalist nor worker, this is
misleading. On closer inspection, they can be assimilated into this more basic
structure, so that, for the most part, the basic two-class schema does end up
mapping on to the empirical realities of capitalism.4 Another, more common
response, has been to recognise that middle strata are irreducible to one of
the two fundamental class positions. This is the approach favoured by Nicos
Poulantzas, Guglielmo Carchedi, and Erik Olin Wright.5
Wright’s arguments on this score have been the most inuential, and are
worth examining in more detail, since they have evolved over time. The basic
idea to which he has remained committed is that occupations in the middle
class are so dened because they simultaneously embody elements of both the
workers and capitalists. So, whereas one solution is to insist that positions in
between capitalist and worker are actually more complex forms of either one
or the other, Wright proposes that they are simultaneously one and the other.
Middle-class occupations thus combine aspects of the worker with aspects of
4
Loren 1978; Fredman 1973.
5
Poulantzas 1978; Carchedi 1977; Wright 1978.
being a capitalist. The most obvious example is the ‘owner-operator’ in agri-

culture – the independent farmer – or the independent artisan in urban sec-
tors. In both cases, the actor possesses the means of production like a capitalist
does, but also has to directly put these implements to work as wage-labour-
ers do. Hence, she has a managerial position, but she manages – herself. She
works for a living, but she ‘is her own boss’, as the saying goes. More complex
forms are supervisory positions within a rm, such as middle managers. In
this case too, they embody aspects of the fundamental class positions. Manag-
ers directly control the labour of others in their supervisory capacity, as do
capitalists; yet, they do not own the means of production. They are employed
by capitalists, sometimes for a wage, and are working only at their employer’s
pleasure. In this respect, they are like workers. In both cases, the owner-oper-
ator and the middle manager, the class position has been described in a man-
ner that is consistent with the more abstract denition – they are in the middle
because they embody those elements that dene a worker and a capitalist.
Finally, because they objectively share in the properties of both classes, they
have interests that are also pulled in both directions. Hence, Wright refers to
them as ‘contradictory class locations’. This is meant to capture the dictum
that the middle class does not generate a political programme of its own, that
its politics cannot be predicted outside of the political conjuncture. Since it is
pulled both toward the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which way it leans
will depend on facts about the political scene.6
The labour process

The labour process occupies a central place in Marxist class theory, because
of the underlying centrality of exploitation. This link is not a conceptual one:
there is nothing in the concept of exploitation that necessarily leads to an
examination of the labour process. The connection is based on an empirical
fact about capitalism – that the pressure on capitalists to increase the rate of
surplus extraction leads to an intensication of control and domination within
the rm, at the level of the shop oor. In order to drive down costs to meet
6
Wright 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995. The broader conceptual apparatus in which this
insight has been located has shifted over time for Wright, But the commitment to
seeing the middle class as sui generis, and as comprised of conicting elements, has
remained steady.
competitive pressures, capital is forced to constantly reorganise the internal

division of labour, as it brings in new technology and new work relations. This
is because, in capitalism, the labour process is actually organised by capital
itself. Feudal class relations, in contrast, left the labour process largely in the
hands of peasants. The intensity and the quality of work therefore remained
out of the hands of the lordly surplus extractors. To secure an increase in
the rate of surplus extraction, lords did not have the option of manipulating
the actual organisation of work. They had to renegotiate the terms on which
peasants handed them their seasonal harvest, or their labour services – which
typically required threats and force. Thus, in the two systems, the use of inter-
personal coercion occupies a very different place. Capitalists can rely on the
worker’s own circumstances to get her to commit to work; but once she comes
to work, the pitch, intensity, and care of her work is undetermined. To affect
these, managers take direct control over the labour process and exert control
over its details – through dominating the worker. In feudalism, lords cannot
rely on the peasants’ circumstances to get them to work for the lord. Coercion
is required for this very fact. Once they consent to give some of their labour
to the lord, the actual process of work is left in their hands. The place of coer-
cion is thus neatly reversed in feudalism and capitalism – located within the
labour process in one, and outside it in the other.
Precisely because production is organised by capitalists and their lieuten-
ants, they are forced to devise ways to better extract labour effort from their
employees. And this, in turn, involves a reduction of the employees’ auton-
omy on the shop oor, their subordination to ever-increasing and changing
demands. The result is that the class antagonism at the macro level within
capitalism is reproduced at the micro level, within the workplace, as employ-
ers and employees lock horns around the organisation of work. Class struggle
within capitalism thus extends from the detailed organisation of work to the
distribution of resources at the level of the social system as such.
The work that made this point most dramatically, showing with great
drama and air how capital extended its control over the labour process over
the twentieth century, was Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, per-
haps the most widely-read Marxist work of the 1970s.7 It had always been a
staple of radical theory – Marxist as well as non-Marxist – that the employ-
7
Braverman 1974.
ment relationship was a conictual one. Braverman made this argument

much more specic by zeroing in on the central instrument through which
managers ensured their domination over labour: the drive to reduce worker’s
control over the labour process by deepening the division between mental
and manual labour. This in turn was secured by an ongoing effort to reduce
the level of skill associated with any particular job classication. The progres-
sive deskilling of labour has two critical consequences favorable to capital: it
removes the only leverage that workers possess as atomised sellers of labour-
power – their possession of scarce skills; and it also reduces their ability to
hinder management’s dictation of the pace and intensity of work. Whereas
craft production rests on the worker’s possession of signicant autonomy to
set the pace of her own work, the usurpation of her knowledge of the produc-
tion process makes possible the shift to industrial production – and the reduc-
tion of the worker to a mere appendage of the machines she is operating.
In Braverman’s argument, management’s drive to dominate workers on
the shopoor was built into capitalist production. Starting in the late 1980s,
however, a stream of literature appeared that argued against any such deter-
minism. Perhaps the most heralded of such work came from an MIT project
to study the effect of changing technologies on industrial relations. In The
Machine that Changed the World, James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos
suggested that new production designs and the increasing skill requirements
in manufacturing had made possible a new era in industrial relations.8 In this
new régime, shopoor despotism was not only unnecessary, but counter-pro-
ductive. In order to take advantage of the possibilities created by new tech-
nology, managers had to elicit the creative abilities of their employees and
enter into a co-operative relation with them. Instead of the old, rigid system
of production-line work associated with Fordism and Taylorism, you would
now have groups of workers collected into small teams, which handled mul-
tiple tasks and poured their creative energies into solving problems – a sys-
tem that became known as ‘lean production’. The lines between managers
and production line workers would have to be obliterated, and co-operation
would replace conict as the organising principle for production. The authors
took their inspiration from a particular understanding of Japanese industrial
8
Womack et al. 1990.
relations, and predicted that this nimble, synergistic approach would soon
become the standard practice in American industrial production
By the early 1990s, this line of research had produced a ood of literature
expressing enthusiasm about the possibilities offered by this new approach,
and recommending that the old industrial relations apparatus built up in the
US over the past half-century – based on collective bargaining, union repre-
sentation, and an assumption that the employment relation was an adversarial
one – be dismantled and replaced by a new system premised on a mutuality
of interests between labour and capital. It was especially popular among pro-
gressive scholars of labour and industrial relations. Apart from its empirical
base, it drew upon a powerful sentiment among progressive intellectuals, to
the effect that traditional Marxist approaches were too rigid in their under-
standing of capitalism, and too ‘objectivist’ about interests – there were no
objective interests ‘out there’, to which politics had to be adjusted. Rather,
interests were endogenous to institutional and organisational settings. It was
thus mistaken to assume that the labour-capital conict was built into the sys-
tem because of their objective interests. There was every possibility, the argu-
ment went, that the two actors could coalesce around a joint project, which
was positive-sum with regard the outcome.
This line of analysis seemed to spell the death of Braverman’s inuence. But
almost immediately, a response was offered by some labour intellectuals that
undercut the argument’s main elements. Interestingly, the rst response did
not come from within academia. It came from labour strategists and journalists,
most notably Kim Moody, Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter. Associated with
the Detroit-based labour publication Labor Notes, they showed in great detail
that, far from opening a new era of industrial relations, lean production actu-
ally intensied the deskilling and the speed-up associated with Taylorism.9
Lean production was not much different from Taylorism in its aims, but
it was much more skilled in its propaganda. Though it took academia some
time to catch on, Parker and Slaughter were eventually followed by a rapid-
re release of critiques of lean production, buttressed with more evidence of
the gap between rhetoric and reality. It was found that the new techniques,
where employed, resulted more often than not in more speed-up, more stress,
less autonomy, and more ‘bench-marking’ – pitting employees against one
9
Parker and Slaughter 1988.
another so that the fastest times became the norm to which all workers had
to perform.10
In 1997, Ruth Milkman published one of the most detailed studies of lean
production in Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century,
and Kim Moody released his Workers in Lean World. While these books fur-
ther undermined the case for jointness and the promise of the new work rela-
tions, they also marked, in retrospect, a surprisingly quick end to the debate.
Whereas the scholarly enthusiasm for post-Fordism and lean production had
been at an extraordinary high in the early nineties, it had largely dissipated
by the end of the decade, perhaps under the weight of the mounting evi-
dence complied by its critics. This did not signal by any means a resurgence
in Marxist approaches to industrial relations or a rejuvenation of Braverman’s
line. The general turn away from traditional class analysis continued largely
unabated, and has since. What it did signal was that, at least for the time
being, one very ambitious challenge to Braverman’s conceptualisation of the
labour process had lost steam. The fundamental conclusion of his work – that
the relation between capital and labour is intrinsically antagonistic, and this
antagonism is reproduced on the shopoor – seems to still have traction.
Class formation and class struggle

The nal aspect of class analysis to consider is the problem of class formation
and class struggle. This is perhaps where there has been the greatest turn
within radical scholarship. During the 1970s, and even into the ’80s, there
was a concerted effort at recovering the conictual history of labour-capital
relations. These were the years when, under the inuence of E.P. Thompson,
Herbert Guttman, and David Montgomery, labour history experienced a veri-
table explosion of interest in Anglo-American academia. But for the most part,
there was a lack of connection between those Marxists working on political
economy and the labour process on one side, and those working on labour
history on the other. Among the latter group, there was, from the start, a much
greater valence given to culture and ideology – reected in the fact that among
social historians, the inuence of Thompson and Guttman continued to grow
through the eighties, even as the stature of Marxism was declining. This no
10
Grenier 1988; Babson 1995; Berggren 1993; Graham 1995.
doubt reected the enormous weight the two pioneering historians placed on
cultural mediation, and even on cultural construction. Hence, while someone
like Braverman stressed capital’s built-in drive to deskill labour, and labour’s
ubiquitous resistance to it, the inuence of this approach never extended very
deeply into social history – where contingency, context, and malleability were
stressed much more than the unrelenting pressures of capital accumulation.
Labour history did not take long to start expressing an impatience for the
Marxist insistence of a connection between class structure and class forma-
tion. If class formation depended critically on workers’ consciousness of
their situation, and if this consciousness was mediated by the discourses in
which workers were steeped, then surely an interest in class formation had
to concentrate rst and foremost on the problem of culture, ideology, etc.? If
workers organised against capital only if they perceived their commonality
with others, then surely a focus on identity was of the rst order – what were
its roots, whence did it emerge? Not surprisingly, the conclusion of much of
this research was that there was no necessary relation between occupying the
position of a worker in the class structure, and internalising it as ones primary
identity. Why, then, privilege class as an identity? This line of argument gen-
erated a subtle shift in radical analysis from looking at class as a something
that structures the actual range of strategies that actors can pursue, to a focus
on it as a kind of identity. Naturally, once it is re-conceptualised in this way,
there is no reason to give it any more prominence as a structuring principle
than any other identity.
The notion that class depended on identity, and that such identities were
hard to come by, made for a general disillusionment about the whole Marxist
programme. The unease was given plenty of succour by the fact that, as the
worries about class formation were setting in, the political power of labour
organisations was beginning to ebb across much of the capitalist world. It
seemed to offer proof that Marxists vastly overestimated the importance of
class as a critical factor in political life.
The noteworthy aspect of this whole line of reasoning was that it concen-
trated its focus, almost without exception, on one class – workers. But all the
while that this class was being declared unt for travel, the other end of the
class divide, capital was reconstituting itself as a political actor in the most
spectacular fashion; even more, it was using its organisational muscle to wage
one of the most intensive attacks on labour that had been witnessed in the
twentieth century. Hence, in the very years when social history was writing
an obituary for Marxist class analysis, a class war of remarkable proportions
was being waged in the Atlantic world.
The political constitution of capital during these years did not go entirely
unnoticed among radical scholars. It was captured and studied with great care,
mostly by American sociologists. Starting in the mid-1980s, several scholars
produced a stream of analysis on the New Right, which showed its base in the
American corporate class. There were two aspects to this work. First, it exam-
ined the organisational basis for capitalist political action. The core political
actor was taken to be nancial rms, which were able to act as co-ordinators
because of their wide connections to the entire corporate structure. But added
to this was the presence of a small group of CEOs and managers, who sat on
several corporate boards and served as an interlocking directorate, straddling
several sectors, and hence organisationally able to rise beyond the narrow
interests of one rm or one sector.11 The second dimension studied was the
means by which these power centres mobilised their resources to shift the
balance of power. Here, the key mechanism was nancial donations to politi-
cal candidates, funnelled through Political Action Committees (PACs).12 The
peculiarity of the American electoral system is that it is overwhelmingly run
on private funds. This made it relatively easy for a highly mobilised capital-
ist class to channel its inuence to the political arena, as its nancial prowess
simply overwhelmed that of labour. This scholarship continues to grow and
deepen, and has provided a rich analysis of how capital has organised around
its interests, and then stamped them on the political scene.
The most important consequence of the business offensive, at least with
regard to the issue of class formation, was a massive decline in the level of
unionisation within American labour. From a high of about 36% after the
Second World War, union density declined to just over 10% by the middle
of the 1980s – basically as a result of intensied resistance by employers.13
Underlying this shift in class strategy was a precipitous decline in the econ-
omy-wide rate of return on investment, which set in during the late 1960s. As
businesses across the country found their prot rates declining, they set about
11
See Mizruchi 1996 and Burris 2005 for surveys.
12
Burris 1987; Salt 1989; Akard 1992; Jenkins and Eckert 2000.
13
Goldeld 1987.
dismantling many of the postwar institutional supports for labour that, in

happier times, they had learned to live with. In part this was accomplished by
shifting location, from the traditional heartland of manufacturing in the Mid-
west, to the non-unionised South. But, even more importantly, they dug in
their heels in the daily struggle on the shopoor – resisting new unionisation
drives and breaking some of the key strikes of the decade.14 By the late 1990s,
workers in the US were so demoralised that, even as unemployment dropped
to its lowest levels in two decades, wages hardly recovered at all – a sign that
workers were too cowed to demand raises, even in tight labour markets.
Conclusion
Despite the general turn away from class analysis in radical circles, there has
been much work done in the are over the past two decades, and it still contin-
ues to progress. There is no denying that Marxist theorisation of class is richer
and more sound today than it was at the start of the Reagan-Thatcher era.
Still, if we look to the future, there is some reason to worry. There is a clear
generational gap in the enthusiasm for Marxist theory among intellectuals,
with much of the most interesting work still being done by stalwarts of the
New Left. Younger scholars have neither shown as much interest, nor pro-
duced as much. This will most likely show up as a noticeable decline in the
quantity and quality of theorising by the second decade of the millennium.
There is also a conspicuous unevenness in production along the disciplin-
ary frontier. Class theory has, for the time being, established a toe-hold in
American sociology, and also geography, but has been retreating along much
of the remaining intellectual landscape. Perhaps most conspicuous has been
its decline among historians. Much of the most innovative work on class was
produced, understandably, by a new generation of labour historians during
the 1970s and ‘80s. But labour history has, like much of social history more
generally, lost its enthusiasm for studying the themes central to Marxist the-
ory. To the extent that it still soldiers on, the eld is largely dominated by the
study of discourse and identity formation. One consequence of this, which
seems to have gone unnoticed by practitioners, is that there has been very
little progress on the themes opened up by Robert Brenner and G.E.M. de
14
Moody 1988.
Ste. Croix – the study of the internal dynamics of precapitalist formations and
long-term change more generally. Indeed, the most heralded work on these
themes in recent years has been by non-Marxist theorists, and offered as an
explicit critique of the Marxist framework.15 Apart from the work of Brenner
and de Ste. Croix, one cannot point to much original scholarship produced by
Marxists on feudalism, or on antiquity, in the past two decades.
In the study of politics, there has also been a similar retreat. To take but one
example, there are still very few studies of the rightward shift of the Dem-
ocratic Party since the 1970s, despite the general recognition that this shift
was a critical component of the assault on labour and the welfare state. The
analysis of how the New-Deal era came to an end is thus woefully incomplete.
While there are a large number of studies on how the Democrats were forced
to accommodate labour and other oppressed groups in the 1930s, there is no
parallel study of how and why it came to attack them after the 1970s. Every
four years there is a vigorous debate among American progressives on how
to orient to the Democrats – but still no detailed study of their transformation
after the Carter presidency.
Hence, while progress in class analysis has been signicant, the momentum
behind it is weaker now than at any time in recent memory. The balance-sheet
is therefore somewhat mixed. Whether, and to what extent, there is surge of
interest in it again will depend on broader social and political conditions. But
in the event that such an interest should re-emerge, it will have a sold founda-
tion of research and theory to build upon.
15
Bin Wong 1997 Pomeranz 2000.
Chapter Twenty
New Interpretations of Capital
Jacques Bidet
Capital proposes an ‘economic’ theory. Yet the rein-

terpretations I shall be referring to derive from the
work of philosophers. The reason for this paradox is
that Marx treats economics not as an abstract, ahis-
torical discipline, but as a social science grasping
economic phenomena in their imbrication with the
social, technological, juridical and political system as
a whole. As well as Marxian economics, these rein-
terpretations therefore also involve the social theory
it presupposes, in all its epistemological and philo-
sophical implications.
They are motivated by the major political and
social movements, cultural changes and theoretical
innovations of recent decades. They represent reac-
tions on the part of intellectuals against the readings
that used to be considered orthodox in the ‘work-
ing-class movement’. They operate in their own par-
ticular way, by testing and re-translating the Marxist
theoretical legacy into contemporary philosophical
forms.
We can distinguish three main orientations. First,
the continuation of the Hegelian tradition, especially
around the Frankfurt school, in Germany, but also in
Italy, France, Central Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.
Second, a current I shall refer to as that of historical
materialism, which is particularly active in France,
especially via the Althusserian school. Finally, and most recently, the group of
analytical Marxism, which attests to the inuence of Marxism in Anglo-Ameri-
can culture.
Work in the human sciences on the concepts of Capital

Philosophers do not broach Capital (or at least they should not) without also
having in mind the work of Marxist economists, sociologists and historians.
In these new contexts, the latter, each in their own domain, have also reinter-
preted this theory by applying it to new situations, reworking its concepts, or
taking up its classical problems.
In economics mention must be made of a wide variety of works on monop-
oly capitalism (Baran and Sweezy, Boccara, Mandel);1 on the world system and
unequal exchange (Emmanuel, Amin, Gunder Frank, Wallerstein, Arrighi);2
on imperialism (Chesnais, Harvey);3 the solutions offered by Gérard Duménil
and Duncan Foley to the problem of the ‘transformation of value into pro-
duction prices’;4 works geared towards political ecology (O’Connor, Altvater,
Martinez-Alier, Harribey),5 an alternative economics (Gorz),6 self-manage-
ment (Schweickart, Andréani),7 or different ‘models of socialism’ (Elson,
Blackburn).8 In research involving Capital there have also been interventions
by the regulation school (Aglietta, Lipietz, Boyer);9 American radical eco-
nomics (Bowles and Gintis);10 and the neo-Ricardianism derived from Sraffa
(Benetti and Cartelier).11 Also worthy of note is the concept of ‘cognitive capi-
talism’ recently proposed by followers of Toni Negri.
The Frankfurt school, involving a close combination of Marxism and soci-
ology, has prompted re-examination of the question of labour starting from
Capital, as has Italian operaismo. Marxian class analysis has been revived by
1
Baran and Sweezy 1966; Boccara 1973; Mandel 1976.
2
Emmanuel 1972; Amin 1970; Frank 1970; Wallerstein 1980; Arrighi 1990.
3
Chesnais 1997; Harvey 2001.
4
Duménil 1980; Foley 1986.
5
O’Connor 1993; Altvater 1992; Martinez-Alier 1987; Harribey 1998.
6
Gorz 1991.
7
Schweickart 1993; Andréani 2001.
8
Elson 1993; Blackburn 2004.
9
Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1983; Boyer 1986 and 1995.
10
Bowles and Gintis 1988 and 1998.
11
Sraffa 1960; Benetti and Cartelier 1975. See also Dostaler 1985.
New Interpretations of Capital • 371
Bourdieu, who expands the Marxian concept of reproduction; by Erik Olin

Wright in the context of analytical Marxism;12 and by the pursuit of work
on the working class (Bottomore and Brym, Pialoux and Beaud),13 divisions
among wage-earners (Bihr, Duménil and Lévy),14 the commodication and
subjection of labour (Burawoy, Lebowitz),15 domestic labour and sexual social
relations, and the evolution from Taylorism to Fordism and post-Fordism
(Coriat, Coutrot, Linhart),16 up to the age of generalised computerisation (Loj-
kine) and ‘exibilisation’ (Vakaloulis).17
And we should also take into consideration the immense labour of histori-
ans, from Annales to works on the working class (Thompson),18 the origins of
capitalism (Bois, Wood),19 the history of the family (Seccombe),20 and so on.
There are also anthropological analyses of the theory of modes of produc-
tion, of which Capital furnishes the paradigm, by Emmanuel Terray, Maurice
Godelier and Claude Meillassoux.21 Not to mention the reection of jurists
on the foundations of the theory of law (an issue posed, from Pashukanis
onwards, on the basis of Capital), and, recently, on the juridical nature of the
wage-earning class (including, outside Marxist ranks, by Supiot).22
A philosophical interpretation should be capable of revealing why Marx’s
theory is capable of generating such a profusion of work.
Dialectical interpretations
The MEGA – the complete edition of Marx and Engels’s works begun in
1927 – furnished the indispensable instrument for the study of the genesis
and overall interpretation of Capital (Rubin, Rosdolsky, Il’enkov, Vygotsky).23
The publication of the Grundrisse (in 1939–41) was to play a signicant role in
12
Olin Wright 1985 and 1997.
13
Bottomore and Brym 1990; Pialoux and Beaud 1999.
14
Bihr 1989; Duménil and Lévy 1994 and 2003.
15
Burawoy 1985; Lebowitz 1992.
16
Coriat 1990; Coutrot 1999; Linhart 1991.
17
Lojkine 1992; Vakaloulis 2001.
18
Thompson 1963.
19
Bois 2000; Wood 1999.
20
Seccombe 1992 and 1993.
21
Terray 1972; Godelier 1970; Meillassoux 1975 and 2002.
22
Supiot 1994.
23
Rubin 1972; Rosdolsky 1977; Il’enkov 1982; Vygodskij 1973 and 1976.
the specically philosophical interpretation. In this initial outline, written in

1857–8, Marx develops his programme of a ‘critique of political economy’ by
constant recourse to the categories of Hegel’s logic. However, in the course of
various successive drafts, up to the publication of the rst edition of Volume
One in 1867, a second edition in 1873, and a French edition between 1872 and
1875, this philosophical conceptual system was progressively marginalised.
An enormous labour of exegesis will tend to restore it, to comment on Capital
and explain it on the basis of this original approach and in the light of the
philosophy of the young Marx.
The philosophical exegesis of Capital was revived in the West in the intellec-
tual and political context of the late 1960s, particularly by disciples of Adorno:
Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, and Helmut Reichelt.24 Various study
groups and works devoted to Capital then appeared (Haug, Göhler).25 A vast
eld of research, dialectical in spirit, also opened up in Italy and is still active
today, combining, in accordance with the Gramscian tradition, philosophy
and politics and often marked by the inuence of Lukács: Claudio Napo-
leoni, Mario Dal Pra, Alberto Gajano, Enrico Grassi, Roberto Finelli, Stefano
Garroni, Alessandro Mazzone, Roberto Fineschi.26 Likewise in France, in a
similar spirit, there is the work of Jacques D’Hondt, Solange Mercier-Josa,
Lucien Sève, Ruy Fausto, Emmanuel Renault and Jean-Marie Vincent.27 A cur-
rent more explicitly inspired by Lukács developed in Central Europe with
Karel Kosik, István Mészáros and Agnes Heller.28 Other works, particularly
South-American ones inspired in part by liberation philosophies, like those
of Enrique Dussel, can also be related to this context.29 In addition, there is an
important Japanese school (from Kôzô Uno, who used the dialectic in an orig-
inal way, to Hiromatsu, Uchida, etc.), bound up with an interest in Marxism
dating back to the 1930s and the inuence of German philosophy.30 Several
studies make it possible today to understand these works as a whole – in par-
24
Schmidt 1971; Backhaus 1997; Reichelt 1970.
25
Haug 1974; Göhler 1980.
26
Napoleoni 1973; Dal Pra 1977; Gajano 1979; Grassi 1979; Finelli 1987; Garroni
1997; Mazzone 2001; Fineschi 2001.
27
D’Hondt 1972; Mercier-Josa 1980 and 1999; Sève 1980; Fausto 1986; Renault 1995;
Vincent 1973 and 1991.
28
Kosik 1976; Mészáros 1970; Heller 1976.
29
Dussel 2001.
30
Uno 1980; Hiromatsu 1974; Uchida 1988.
ticular, those by Michael Heinrich31 and, above all, Roberto Fineschi, as well
as the monumental dictionary published by Wolfgang Fritz Haug since 1994.
These authors react on the one hand against the logico-historical reading
that was prevalent, in the context of a certain (triumphalist) philosophy of
history, within political Marxisms endowed with authority; and, on the other,
against the often rather pragmatic reading of economists. They had the merit
of foregrounding the exigency of a ‘logical’ – that is, theoretical – interpreta-
tion of Capital, as did the Althusserians in the same period, albeit with differ-
ent philosophical references.
This reading, notably in Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, priori-
tised the text of the rst edition of 1867 over that of the second (1873), some-
times presented as the result of a ‘popularisation’ by Marx. The rst, ‘esoteric’,
more philosophical exposition was then opposed to the ‘exoteric’ exposition
of the later version, which alone supposedly corresponded to Marx’s ‘dialecti-
cal method’. The model taken as a reference-point for interpreting Capital was
thus to be found in the Grundrisse. The starting-point was what is referred to
as the ‘contradiction’ – Widerspruch – between use-value and exchange-value
in the 1867 version. It was stressed that the intention of Marx’s exposition was
to demonstrate that the market, far from being what it presents itself as – a
space of interaction between rational individuals – constitutes an alienated
social relationship, where use-value is imprisoned in the abstract objectiv-
ity of value, with labour becoming indifferent to its content. At the centre of
analysis is the ‘reduction of concrete labour to abstract labour’ generated by
the market. In this optic, it is the examination of ‘simple circulation’ that con-
stitutes the starting-point for the logical exposition of capital, the object of Part
One: one starts from the market understood as a general system of exchange,
with the monetary expression that involves, abstracting from the specically
capitalist relation of production, which will be the object of Part Three. And
this starting-point, as we shall see, is what gives impetus to the interpretation
as a whole.
Thus, emphasis is laid on the fact that Marx’s theory is a ‘theory of the
value-form’, of value as a social form – a thesis sometimes turned against
the ‘labour theory of value’, which is allegedly substantialist. Advanced by
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the notion of ‘real abstraction’, which refers to the fact
31
Heinrich 1990.
that it is not only a question here of abstract forms of thought, but that these
dene the reality of the social relation, is adopted to impart full signicance to
this ‘reduction of concrete labour to abstract labour’, which thus refers to the
real domination of concrete labour by abstract labour. This approach prompts
consideration of money, in its abstraction, as a social relation constitutive
of capitalist society. It endows commodity fetishism with a potent realistic
meaning: what is involved is not merely an intellectual phenomenon, but the
very condition of modern humanity, in the circumstances of capitalism as a
society governed outside its control by the market. And this theme is pursued
in the analysis of the specically capitalist social relation, as Marx sets it out in
Part Three, making it possible move beyond a reading in terms of the quanti-
tative extraction of a surplus. In effect, it makes it possible to understand that
exploitation is also a relation of domination, but with this peculiarity when
compared with previous class systems that it is geared to the accumulation
not of use-values, but of abstract wealth – surplus-value – regardless of its con-
crete content. This reveals that capitalism is not only contrary to the interest of
the workers whom it exploits, but heedless of the effects of material produc-
tion on the population as a whole and on nature.
If the general orientation of readings that highlight the dialectical element
might legitimately be summarised thus, we can understand why they have
been able to play a stimulating philosophical role in the Marxist critique of
capitalism, helping it to supersede incomplete representations of the capi-
talist relation – both its quantitative reduction to the simple extraction of a
surplus and its formal, qualitative representation in terms of domination. It
foregrounds a problematic of abstraction, which demonstrates the full poten-
tial radicalism of Marx’s critique of commodity and capitalist alienation, its
singular contemporaneity at a time when capitalism is revealing its power by
producing needs themselves and capturing desires – that is, demonstrating its
capacity to appropriate the very denition of use-values, in accordance with a
logic that imperils the elementary conditions of humanity’s prudent conduct
of itself in its relationship with ‘nature’, with production ultimately turning
into destruction.
This brief, ideal-typical summary does not refer to an established ‘doctrine’
common to the ‘Hegelian’ orientation, whether inspired by the Frankfurt
school or based on autonomous relays. It simply seems to me that these are
the terms in which, over and above the contribution of any particular author,
we can represent the general spirit informing it and account in principle for
the subversive stimulus it continues to have among new generations, ensur-
ing communication between the Marxist tradition and contemporary currents
challenging consumption and production, from situationism to the critique of
work, everyday life, culture and ecology. It is a precious heritage, nothing of
which must be lost.
Such work on the Marx-Hegel relationship is also to be found in a num-
ber of Anglo-American authors. In particular, we can mention the works of
Thomas Sekine, Bertell Ollman, Fred Moseley (with contributions by Smith,
Murray and Reuten), Chris Arthur, and Mark Meaney.32 Several of them
have adopted the title of a ‘new Hegelian Marxism’. Some, like Arthur, have
assigned themselves a more specic project, under the rubric of the new dia-
lectic. They propose to base themselves on the ‘systematic’ dialectic of the
Logic for interpreting Capital, understood as a theory of the capitalist ‘system’
(see the chapter devoted to them by Jim Kincaid in the present work). This
hypothesis is fairly old (cf. the work of Fineschi), but here it is the object of
a systematic development to the point of perfect virtuosity (see Sekine). It is
true that dialectical forms, whether explicit or underlying, are omni-present in
Capital. Such philosophical exegesis therefore illuminates a number of facets
of Marx’s theorisation. What remains problematic is the idea that the general
matrix of a ‘science of logic’ is to be discovered at the same time in a ‘theory
of the capitalist mode of production’. And this is so even if certain analogies
are clear. The counter-proof is furnished by the fact that the correspondence
between the respective concepts of the Logic and those of Capital are, depend-
ing on the author, the object of utterly divergent, mutually exclusive interpre-
tations – something that tends to render the project as such problematic.
In the Hegelian register we should also mention other research, like that
of Colletti, who nevertheless ended up coinciding with the positions of Pop-
per;33 or of Denis, who rejects the theory of Capital, preferring the dialectic of
the Grundrisse.34 But other philosophies are also called upon – for example,
phenomenology, notably in the work of Henry, who offers a reading of Capital
rmly anchored in the preparatory texts and those of the young Marx, and
32
Sekine 1984–6; Ollman 1992 and 2005; Moseley 1993; Arthur 2002; Meaney 2002.
33
Colletti 1973 and 1980.
34
Denis 1980.
centred on the opposition between abstract labour and the organic subjectiv-
ity of individual praxis.35 As for Derrida’s intervention, with the gure of the
‘spectre’ it makes Marx’s text pass the test of its deconstructive critique.36 Refer-
ring to Spinoza and Deleuze, Negri has proposed a stimulating problematic in
terms of the ‘power of the multitude’ that nevertheless marks a considerable
distance from the concepts constitutive of Marxian analysis, beginning with
those of value and production, which Negri believes to be called into question
by the generalisation of intellectual, supposedly ‘immaterial’ labour.37
Problems with a Grundrisse-style interpretation

A certain number of problems attach to the Hegelianising approach in so far,
at any rate, as it draws its inspiration for the interpretation of Capital from
the Grundrisse. First of all, there are grounds for doubting that the best way
to explain the nal text is take the initial ‘rough draft’, however brilliant, as
the key. When one proceeds thus, one tends to explain the result by its sup-
posed ‘sources’. One ignores the fact that when Marx wrote a new version on
the same subject, it was in order to correct the previous one. One also tends to
neglect the fact that what occurs in his case is what happens to every genuine
researcher: he discovers something other than what he was looking for. In
his process of development, in reality Marx proceeds like any other inven-
tor: faced with problems he still only vaguely understands, he strives with
the formal resources of his culture. Thus, both for his general plans and his
particular analyses, he draws at each step on the Hegelian instrumentarium,
with a view to recognising the new theoretical spaces it glimpses and formu-
lating the theoretical questions that gradually appear to him. Such is the role
of experimentation in theoretical research. Thus, when, as is regularly appar-
ent from one draft to the next, Marx abandons a certain number of concepts,
distinctions and sequences inspired by Hegelian logic, we must always ask
whether he did not have good grounds for so doing. This does not mean that
Marx turned his back on Hegel. Every page of Capital contains a wealth of
precious philosophical determinations, which refer to classical German phi-
35
Henry 1976.
36
Derrida 1994.
37
Negri 1991; Hardt and Negri 2000 and 2004.
losophy, modern political philosophy, even to Aristotle. But the dialectical

performance evident in the research texts does not authorise regarding them
as theoretically superior. On the contrary, we must ask why, in the gradual
course of his research, Marx abandoned a certain number of dialectical resorts
and whether his reasons were sound.
In particular, a decisive alteration in the exposition occurs between the Grun-
drisse and Capital. The draft – Rohentwurf, as German commentators gladly say –
is divided into two parts: the ‘chapter on money’, which deals with ‘simple
circulation’, and the ‘chapter on capital’, which deals with capitalist produc-
tion. An analogous division is found in the nal work, between Part One of
Volume One (‘Commodities and Money’) and the rest of Volume One. But
this resemblance conceals a major innovation: Part One of Capital no longer
deals with simple circulation (or ‘simple’ – i.e. precapitalist – production), but
with commodity production as such (according to its concept), or the ‘market’,
but dened in abstraction as a commodity system of production-circulation.
There thus emerges a new problem – the relationship between commodity
production, with its juridico-political conditions, and specically capitalist pro-
duction, which is dened by Part Three. In other words, a double thesis: the
capitalist economy cannot be dened as a ‘market economy’; the concept of
commodity economy is distinguished from that of capitalist economy. From
this initial result of Marx’s analysis we cannot draw any direct conclusions
about the possible place of the market in a postcapitalist economy. The ques-
tion is simply posed, rendering the prospect of basing socialism on the aboli-
tion of the market less self-evident.
Because they do not take account of this decisive advance in Marx’s theo-
retical elaborations, interpretations of Capital based on the Grundrisse gener-
ally tend to impute immediately to the market what pertains to capital, to the
capitalist market. Part of the critique in the name of ‘abstraction’ thus misses
its true target, which is capitalism, where the process of production has as
its object (as Marx explains) abstract wealth as such – something that can-
not be said of commodity production according to its concept, expounded in
Part One. Moreover, in its nal draft, the latter in fact excludes the notion of
‘contradiction between use-value and value’ at this level and integrates the
concept of abstract labour into a rational representation.
Finally, it is very difcult for purely dialectical interpretations to escape the
charge of a ‘dialectic of history’. This tendency, it is true, can be observed in
the very text of Capital, which begins with the gure of the market – inter-indi-
vidual rationality – to end with that of socialism, understood as socio-central
rationality, based on devised organisation.
The tradition of historical materialism

It was precisely an ‘anti-Hegelian’ reaction in this sense which, from the
1960s onwards, provoked the emergence of a new current in France around
Althusser and his followers – in particular, Étienne Balibar and Pierre Mach-
erey.38 The most signicant subsequent works in this optic are doubtless those
of Balibar on historical materialism and Marx’s philosophy. Throughout the
world, researchers were to some extent to identify with this new reading of
Marx in philosophy and the human sciences. It should be noted that at the
same time there was developing in Italy, with della Volpe, an attitude simi-
larly occupied with the scientic character of Marx’s œuvre; and an episte-
mological current, made famous by Ludovico Geymonat, persists today with
Mario Cingoli or Franco Soldani.39
The emergence of the Althusserian current attested to a similar distanc-
ing from the more or less ofcial Marxism of the period and its philosophy
of history. It seems to me correct to refer to it as the ‘current of historical
materialism’, rather than conne it to the epithet of ‘structuralist’. It was in
fact the inheritor of a whole context connecting part of the French philosophy
of the period to materialist traditions dating back to the Enlightenment and
Spinoza, which are expressed in a variety of different forms in the epistemol-
ogy of Bachelard and Canguilhem and the parallel research of Lévi-Strauss,
Bourdieu, Foucault or Lacan. In particular, it helped to put Marxism and
the themes of these authors (epistemological break, structure, reproduction,
unconscious, etc.) in league with each other and thereby establish new, fertile
philosophical links between Marxism and the social sciences. What Althusser
challenged was the representation of a society as a totality expressive of itself
in each of its moments, which is realised in a fantastical dialectic of history.
He thus guided research towards more prudent strategies, which consider
38
Althusser 1965; Althusser et al. 1996; Althuser and Balibar 1970; Balibar 1974 and
1995; Macherey 1979. See also Duménil 1978.
39
Cingoli 1996; Soldani 1992 and 2002.
particularities, overdeterminations, discrepancies, and conjunctures in their

own right.
The work of the Althusserian tradition often tends to disturb economists
rather than inspire them with condence (that is why, despite the distance,
they often prefer to turn towards Hegelianising interpretations, thinking it
possible to discover a ‘bit of soul’ in them, as we say in France). As regards
Capital, Althusser in fact inaugurated a more distanced way of posing ques-
tions about this work, privileging discontinuities, trial and error, ruptures. He
encouraged people to register the difference between philosophical categories
and ‘scientic’ categories – a necessary condition for the analysis of the rela-
tionship between these modes of rationality. More generally, the leitmotif of
an ‘epistemological break’ between the young Marx and the mature Marx is in
stark contrast to the very widespread tendency to believe that there is such a
thing as ‘Marx’s thought’, present in all of his writings, such that one text can
always be explained, claried or commented on by means of another; and also
to the tendency to be concerned exclusively with the issue of the ‘progressive
construction’ of his system. In short, Althusser encouraged a transition from
the ‘interpretation’ of Capital to the question of the requisite revisions of it.
The intervention of analytical Marxism

Anglo-American analytical Marxism emerged in the 1980s out of a political
impulse from the previous decade, as is explained by its founder G.A. Cohen,
who felt compelled to account for Marxism in terms of analytical philosophy –
in his view, the only legitimate kind of philosophy.40 It focuses on the problem
of the variety of forms of explanation (functional, causal, intentional) pro-
posed by Marx and the necessity of analysis in terms of rational individualism.
It prioritises two ‘theses’. The rst is the ‘primacy of the productive forces’: at
each level of their development, their specic nature is said to explain which
relations of production are required for their employment. The second thesis
is the ‘correspondence’ between these two terms: the relations of production
that are established are those which function positively for the development
of the productive forces. The ensuing debate, marked by the intervention of
40
Cohen 1978.
Jon Elster,41 focused in particular on the grounding of the rst thesis, which
Cohen linked to the rationality of human beings in social relations in general;
and on the meaning to be given in the second thesis to the notion of function-
ality, which cannot be dened in socially neutral fashion: the individuals or
groups that launch themselves into the most appropriate type of domination
prevail over the others in as much as they succeed in both stimulating the
development of production and appropriating the social power inherent in it.
This analytical research is conducive to clarifying debates on the explanation
of major epochal changes, like that of the ongoing globalisation, and more
broadly on the relations between the intentional and the unintentional, on the
share of human initiative in historical processes.
The economist John Roemer has advanced a ‘general’ theory of exploitation
and class, which furnishes elements for a reworking of Capital.42 He generalises
the approach on two levels: on the one hand by drawing a parallel between
exploitation through unequal exchange and through the wage relation, and
on the other by comparing ‘capitalism’, based on property differentials, and
‘socialism’, marked by skills differentials. His approach has inspired the
sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who analyses these two types of class relations
within capitalism.43 In the context of analytical philosophy, Marx’s theory of
exploitation has also been examined as a ‘theory of justice’ and highlighted
as such.44
Despite the problems that prevent this form of non-dialectical thinking
from embracing Marx’s programme, particularly as a result of the resonance
of methodological individualism, it has helped to clarify and put back on the
intellectual agenda a set of questions, especially concerning exploitation and
class theory.
General perspective: the meta/structural interpretation

We can, it seems to me, link up these various lines of research. At least, this is
the project I have developed in the spirit of historical materialism.45
41
Elster 1985.
42
Roemer 1982.
43
Wright 1985 and 1997.
44
Cohen 1995.
45
Bidet 1999, 2004 and 2007.
The concept of ‘epistemological break’ must be applied to the relationship

between the Grundrisse and Capital. This results in reading Part One of Capital
Volume One with all the rigour of analytical Marxism and construing it (as
do consistent Marxist economists) as the exposition of the abstract model of
rational production in a market – on the basis of private property, hence in
conditions of competition. These are the conditions in which concrete labour
is ‘reduced’ to abstract labour, meaning in the rst place, at this level of anal-
ysis, that ‘socially-necessary labour-time’ determines exchange-value in the
last instance. But what is involved is not merely a gure of rational social
understanding [Verstand]. For Marx stresses that what is presupposed here
is the liberty-equality-rationality of exchanging producers: in other words, a
presupposition of (juridico-political) reason – Vernunft – as much as of (eco-
nomic) understanding. But it seems to me that such a gure is coherent only
if dialectically developed. For such partners cannot be considered free-equal-
rational if they acknowledge themselves to be subject to a natural common
law – that of the market. They can only mutually posit themselves as such on
condition that they dene themselves as those who together develop the law
to which they submit. And this social centrality concerns both political rea-
son, in accordance with the tradition of democratic political philosophy, and
economic understanding, in accordance with the institutionalist, realist posi-
tion that opposes to the neoclassical dogma of the market the complementary
character of two primary, antagonistic forms of social co-ordination: market
and organisation.
Thus is realised Marx’s basic theoretical thesis, according to which the pecu-
liarity of the modern form of class consists in the fact that it is founded on a ratio-
nal-reasonable social relationship – the market – by turning it into its opposite
sense: the exploited and oppressed worker being declared to be inscribed in a
relationship of free, equal and rational exchange; being ‘posited’ as such. But it
is only realised only by being sublated [aufgehoben]. This supposition, this ‘posi-
tion’, can in fact only be coherently formulated in accordance with the complex
gure (irreducible exclusively to the market, as Marx would have it), which
constitutes the genuine modern ction on whose basis we must begin the expo-
sition of the modern form of production and society. It contains the two ‘poles’
of the inter-individual and the social-central, according to the two ‘faces’ of the
economic and the juridico-political. Thus, Marx’s theory is fully embraced, but
adopted on a ‘broader’, more realistic and more dialectical basis.
This initial ction – the ‘Eden of the rights of man and the citizen’ referred
to by Marx in Part One – possesses a merely ambiguous form of existence,
an ontological status that only a dialectical analysis makes it possible to con-
ceive, being contradictorily posited by the dominant as what is and by the
dominated as what should be. Like the juridico-political relationship of pro-
duction for exchange that is Marx’s starting point, it is only ever posited as
the universal social form by being transformed into its opposite, in a situa-
tion where property, which governs the market, and competence, which gov-
erns the organisation, are always already unequally distributed – and this in
conditions that reproduce the asymmetry between those who posses noth-
ing but their labour-power and those who share in property and the employ-
ment of capital. Such is the dialectical relationship that obtains between the
structure of capitalism, understood as a class structure, and its presupposition.
Analysis must begin with it, with this abstract moment that merits the name
of ‘metastructure’. (And Marx, in his ‘narrow’ framework, had already dem-
onstrated that the theory of exploitation cannot be expounded without having
constructed the theory of value – that is, the theory of the logic of commod-
ity production.) But this presupposition is only posited by the development of
capitalism.
The logic of capital is the logic of the accumulation of abstract wealth; the
logic of the working population is that of concrete wealth, of forms of free and
equal existence, collectively devised. The inherently revolutionary character
of the modern form of society stems from the fact that exploitation and domi-
nation can only be exercised in the regime of modernity – that is, the ofcial,
common declaration of liberty-equality-rationality, which is such as to pro-
voke constant class struggle over the control and purpose of production.
The metastructure is therefore only ever posited in the structure. Yet this
dialectical circularity is not to be construed as a structural phenomenon, as if
the practices of agents merely corresponded to a position in a social structure.
Social practices and social struggles, which alone ultimately impart determi-
nate content to this situation of modernity, to this contradictorily invoked
liberty-equality-rationality, always intervene through events, with the ten-
dencies of this structure, in the uncertain conditions of conjunctures. If the
global concept contains a dialectical circularity, which stems from the fact that
the positions of liberty-equality-rationality are historically renewed in the
class struggle, the historical tendencies wherein practices are asserted cannot
be the object of some dialectical deduction from the capitalist structure: they
unfold in line with the course of technological changes which, following the
unintentional accumulation and conjunction of intentional actions, arrive at
intervals to call into question the relations of production. The dialectical ele-
ment is therefore to be understood in the non-dialectical context of a history
in which we can intervene, even though it remains, beyond our projects, a
natural history that escapes the grasp of any dialectic. Contrary to the dialecti-
cal materialism of the old orthodoxy, the dialectical element is subordinated
to the regime of historical materialism.
This realist perspective corrects the logico-historical, teleological bias that
mars the exposition of Capital. The writing strategy of Volume One in effect
locates the market at the logical commencement of the exposition and culminates
in the organisation as its historical result, fruit of the gradual concentration of
capital, leading to great oligopolies which, with a working class educated and
organised by the very process of production, form the prelude to the revolu-
tionary transition to the universally devised organisation. This perspective,
which presses the democratic organisation of the whole of social existence
against the multiform domination of the capitalist market, is a strong point in
the Marxian legacy. Yet it must not lead us to forget that market and organisa-
tion, which are the two complementary forms of the rational co-ordination of
social production, constitute – converted into their opposites – the two inter-
connected factors of class in the modern form of society. This forms the basis
for more productive relations with the work of Marxist economists, with con-
temporary political philosophies and sociologies (by way of examples, read-
ers are referred to the articles on Habermas and Bourdieu in this work), and
with the whole of the movement that seeks the revolutionary transformation
of modern society (and here readers can refer to the ‘Keys’ proposed in the
introduction).
Chapter Twenty-One
The New Dialectic
Jim Kincaid
In recent years, the logical construction of Marx’s

Capital has been the focus of much new research and
controversy in the anglophone world.1 In this work, a
leading role has been played by a group of European
and American scholars whose distinctive approach
to the reading of Capital is widely referred to as the
new dialectics or the new dialectic. As we shall see,
the individuals involved vary greatly in the ways in
which they read Marx and the new dialectic is not
a unied theoretical tendency. What its exponents
have had in common since they began collaborative
work in 1991, has been a shared belief that in under-
standing the organisation and movement of the argu-
ment of Capital, Marx’s use of elements drawn from
Hegel’s two books on Logic should be a central focus
of attention. In addition, as Fred Moseley explained
in the ‘Introduction’ to the rst of a series of volumes
of essays by new dialectic scholars, the contributors
agreed that Engels’s logical-historical interpretation
of Capital needed to be rejected. Moseley writes that
according to Engels,
1
My thanks to Pete Green for many discussions, and to Terry Dawson for skillful
guidance in the reading of Hegel.
386 • Jim Kincaid
Marx’s logical categories in Capital correspond to an idealised periodisation

of the actual process of history. The clearest and most inuential aspect of
this interpretation is its assumption that the subject of Part 1 of Volume 1
is not capitalism but rather a precapitalist ‘simple commodity production’,
in which producers own their own means of production and there is no
wage labour.2
Thus, the new-dialectic programme began with the rather bold claim that
Engels had misunderstood Capital.3 Though Marxism is widely seen as essen-
tially a theory about history and historical change, the new-dialectic approach
insists that Capital itself is not organised as an historical work. In this the new-
dialectic scholars were guided by Marx’s own account. Marx records that dur-
ing the winter of 1857–8, when he was writing the rst draft of Capital (the
Grundrisse), it was a rereading of Hegel’s Science of Logic which helped him
to make a decisive breakthrough both in his analysis of capitalism and in the
method he would use to present his argument.4 On 16 January 1858, in a letter
to Engels, Marx announced that, after ‘overdoing very much my nocturnal
labours’, (fuelled by, ‘nothing stronger than lemonade . . . but an immense deal
of tobacco’),
I am discovering some nice arguments [hübsche Entwicklungen]. E.g. I

have completely demolished the theory of prot as hitherto propounded.
What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment [Methode des
Bearbeiters] was Hegel’s Logic. . . . If ever the time comes when such work
2
Moseley (ed.) 1993, p. 1. The other new-dialectic collections so far published are:
Moseley and Campbell (eds.) 1997, Arthur and Reuten (eds.) 1998, Campbell and
Reuten (eds.) 2001, Belloore and Taylor (eds.) and Moseley (ed.) 2005.
3
Also rejected was Engels’s interpretation of dialectic as a general vision of the
nature of the real world, stressing changes of quantity into quality. The new dialectic
is not interested in what happens when kettles boil, nor in other ontological features
of the dialectical-materialist tradition, such as that reality is a unity of inherent con-
tradictions, or that change takes place via negation of the negation. See Bottomore
1992, pp. 142–3, for a useful short summary of the theory of dialectical materialism.
Rees 1998 offers a modern defence of the ‘old’ dialectic – the dialectic of nature and
of history in a tradition derived from Engels. Rees, however, disassociates his position
from Soviet variants and favours a Lukácsian inection.
4
Hegel wrote two versions of his Science of Logic – the longer version rst published
in 1812–16 and a shorter version in 1831. It was the longer version which Marx reread
in 1858, but he also used the shorter logic in the 1860–3 period during which he was
writing the second draft of Capital.
The New Dialectic • 387
is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 printers sheets

making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method
[das Rationelle an der Methode] which Hegel not only discovered but also
mystied [mysticirt hat].5
The time never did come when Marx was able to write a sustained account of
the rational dialectic. But it is of great signicance that he mentions Hegel’s
Logic in direct connection with one of the central and fundamental new
insights of Capital – Marx’s revolutionary theory that the source of prot was
unpaid labour-time. This letter was written just at the moment, early in 1858,
that, in the nal section of the last Grundrisse notebook, Marx wrote down
the sentence which later was to become the starting-point of Capital, Volume
1: ‘The rst category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the
commodity’.6 As is made clear in the Introduction (written the previous year)
to the Grundrisse manuscript, he had originally intended to start Capital with
a general review of processes of production, consumption, distribution and
exchange in human societies. But, after looking again at Hegel’s Logic, the
decision was taken to start the work by assuming the capitalist mode of pro-
duction in full operation, and then to move immediately to examine the cat-
egory of commodity as a form of appearance which encapsulated the essential
nature of capitalism. Thus the rst sentence of Capital,
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails

appears [erscheint] as an immense collection of commodities: the individual
commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore
begins with the analysis of the commodity.7
Thus, the capitalist mode of production is introduced at the very start of

Capital, but Marx does not, as the reader might expect, then move directly
5
Marx and Engels 1983, p. 249. A printers sheet would contain sixteen book-size
pages. The new-dialectic approach was also inuenced by Marx’s statement in the
rst draft of Capital that, ‘it would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let the eco-
nomic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were
historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one
another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which
seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development’.
Marx 1973, p. 107.
6
Marx 1973, p. 881.
7
Marx 1976, p. 125.
388 • Jim Kincaid
into an explanation of how capitalism works. Instead, he slowly and pains-

takingly explores a series of more elementary categories – commodity, use-
value, exchange-value, money and labour. All of these feature in many types
of precapitalist society, which is why Engels was misled into thinking that the
early sections of Capital deal with societies which predate industrial capital-
ism. Why is it that the category of productive capital is itself subject to a labori-
ous and indirect process of theoretical production taking more than a hundred
pages of Capital?
In Capital, there are phases of historical narrative – for example the section
at the end of Volume 1 on the primitive accumulation of capital. There is also
on occasion, massive use of empirical evidence, such as on the working day.
However, these are strictly subordinate to an account of capitalism as a self-
sustaining system of interdependent elements. What the new-dialectic group
of scholars have argued is that Hegel’s Logic was a vital inuence in Capital
because Marx learned from it a method of developing an argument in which
the essential mechanisms of capitalism as a system could be explained in
terms of interdependence and dialectical necessity.
Scientic categories in Hegel’s Logic

From Marx’s student days, the period of his rst deep immersion in Hegel’s
work, he saw the latter as essentially a theological writer. The central concern
of Hegel’s philosophy is a cosmic ‘superspirit’ which he calls Geist: ‘the real-
ity which we perceive as nite subjects is the embodiment of Geist or innite
subject’.8 But Hegel’s Geist is not a Very Big Divine Person who has created
the world from outside. Geist is rational thought in action, not some kind of
spooky gure. As Marx puts it,
for Hegel, the process of thinking [Denkprozess], which he even transforms

into an independent subject [i.e. active agent], under the name of ‘the Idea’,
is the creator of the real world [der Demiurg des Wirklichen] and the real
world is only the external appearance of the Idea.9
8
Taylor 1975, p. 225.
9
Marx 1976, p. 102.
Thus, Hegel is a pantheist, and both the natural world and the course of human
history are portrayed by him as an expression of the creativity of Geist. Geist
is not a static, transcendental gure, externally organising the development of
the universe – but a Spirit which immanently develops itself in and though
the historical evolution of the natural world and of human history. Hegel is an
idealist, but he is not a mystic. He is scornful of people who try to connect to
and understand the Divine Spirit via mystical contemplation. Since Geist is the
spirit of rational thought, what is needed is the scientic study of the natural
and the social worlds – to explain their structures, the way these develop over
time, and the meaning of that development. Hegel also insists that the sort
of science needed is dialectical. He studied intensively and wrote much about
the natural sciences of his period – especially physics.10 But he condemned
much contemporary scientic work as the mere collection of empirical facts.
He rejected such ‘knowledge’ as abstract and lifeless. Only a science which
itself develops as a theoretically integrated body of knowledge is capable of
articulating truths about a world which develops historically, through time,
and in all its manifestations, is an expression of divine rationality.11
A number of aspects of dialectical science, as practised by Hegel, are espe-
cially relevant to Marx’s Capital. Marx saw capitalism as a system of interde-
pendent elements and processes:
in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes

every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus
also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system.12
Certainly, Hegel is fundamentally a theological thinker, but in his Logic com-

ments about God are very sparse. There is however a great deal about math-
ematical questions such as the nature of the calculus, and about concepts such
10
See Hegel 1970, a three-volume work on the natural sciences which Marx studied
when writing his dissertation, the topic of which was a comparison of the physics
of Epicurus and Democritus and the philosophical implications of their theoretical
differences.
11
Recent developments in the natural sciences put into question the received wisdom
which counterposes Hegelianism and scienticity in Marx’s political economy. The
trajectory of physics since Einstein, and the development of non-linearity, complexity
and emergence as major paradigms in the natural sciences, have encouraged a more
sympathetic reappraisal of the scientic character of Hegel’s dialectics. See Houlgate
1998, and Cohen and Wartofsky 1984. For a brief but favourable comment on Hegel’s
critique of Newtonian science, see Prigogine and Stengers 1984, pp. 89–91.
12
Marx 1973, p. 278.
390 • Jim Kincaid
as system and causality as these are used in physics and biology. In research
published in the late 1960s and 1970s, a number of West-German philoso-
phers challenged the traditional view of Hegel’s Logic as a theological work,
and elaborated, what one of them, Klaus Hartmann, called a non-metaphys-
ical reading of the work.13 This approach was further developed by David
Kolb, Terry Pinkard and other scholars.14 What they identify in Hegel’s work
on Logic are attempts to establish the way in which thought must work if it is
to produce an intelligible reconstruction of the real world. Hegel’s Logic is a
systematic examination of the categories which science and philosophy need
to understand the universe in a rational and scientic way. Hegel’s logic, ‘is
not a collection of metaphysical claims. It is a study of the categories that must
be used in thinking’.15
Hegel is not simply some 19th century romantic listening to his own
incantations of the World Spirit but a philosopher concerned with working
out the logical relations between all the different ways in which we
experience things and talk about that experience.16
In his two works on Logic, Hegel lays great stress on the order in which catego-
ries are introduced. The principle he adopts is to deal rst with simple, general
and abstract categories. As these are shown to be inadequate to understand
the world (because too abstract and insufciently precise) more complex and
more concrete categories are derived and claried. Hegel’s Science of Logic is
divided into three main sections. Book 1 is called Being and deals with the
concepts which thought uses in providing a descriptive account of what is
immediately there in the world. When we talk about things we can state how
big they are, or how many of them there are. Here, Hegel says, we are using
the category of quantity. Or we can ask what are the specic characteristics of
things. The general category being used here is that of quality. Or we can think
about the limits of things or processes – whether things have denite bound-
13
See Hartmann 1972. Also often called an ontological reading of Hegel’s Logic. Other
major West-German discussions of Marx’s Capital in relation to Hegel’s account of
the logic of categories included Backhaus 1969 and Reichelt 1970. Heinrich 2001 is a
later, and notably innovative work, within the same tradition.
14
There are outstanding commentaries on Hegel’s Logic in Pinkard 1985, pp. 85–109,
and in Kolb 1986, pp. 38–95.
15
Kolb 1986, p. 43.
16
Pinkard 1985, p. 109.
aries, a beginning and an end, or whether they are continuous and ongoing
processes. Here, thought uses categories of the nite or the innite. Later, the
categories of unity and plurality (the one and the many) are covered, and also
those of attraction and repulsion as these gure in Newtonian physics. Thus,
in the book of Being, Hegel is examining categories which are used simply to
describe the world. Moreover, although the categories discussed come in con-
trasting pairs, there is no intrinsic interconnection between the two members
of each pair. There is either one of something or many of it – similarly quantity
is quite different from quality. These categories have a large presence in Capi-
tal. Marx counterposes exchange-value as sheer quantity to use-value as the
qualitative dimension of commodities. In the overall architecture of Capital
Marx deals rst with capital as one, i.e. capital-in-general and exploitation of
labour. In the second half of the work he deals with capital as many – i.e. with
competition and protability.
Book II is called Essence, and deals with more complex ways of reconstructing
the world in thought. It also examines concepts which come in pairs, but here
each term is interlinked with its partner. There is a interdependence between
the concepts of cause and effect, and between form and content. Hegel gives
a great deal of attention to the couplet, essence and appearance, and essence
is considered so important that it is used as the title of Book II. Essence is the
basic nature of something. This is different from the way a thing appears in its
everyday empirical existence. Caterpillars look different from butteries – the
essence here is a creature which develops from one into the other, and can be
thought of as expressing its inner essential nature in and through its succes-
sive forms of appearance. To explain and make sense of the world, thought
must nd ways of getting beyond appearances to underlying reality, that is,
to essence. But Hegel is no Platonist, and does not consider that appearances
are simply forms of illusion or contingency which must be unveiled in order
to arrive at essence. There is no mystical direct route to essence in Hegel.
What is required, he says, is the careful empirical study of phenomena, and
hard rigorous thinking which reconstructs what must underlie appearances.
And, since appearances are often at variance with essence, the essential nature
of an object can only be established by a chain of necessary argument. But, to
achieve this, thought must move restlessly between essence and appearance,
trying to interlink the two dimensions of reality with arguments which iden-
tify necessary connections.
392 • Jim Kincaid
The other oppositions which Hegel deals with in the Essence section are sim-
ilarly interdependent – determinations of reection, Hegel calls them – instances
in which the meaning of each category is reected in that of its partner. Other
binaries which are discussed are: form/matter; form/content; whole/parts;
inner/outer. There is also a sequence which covers the series: contingency,
possibility, necessity and actuality. All of these categories gure in various
ways as important elements in the conceptual narrative which Marx develops
in Capital.
Book III of Hegel’s Logic is called Begriff [conceptuality], the capacity of
thought to grasp the most complex forms of organisation in the world. Here, for
example, Hegel examines ways of explaining the mechanical cause and effect
sequences identied by physics, the patterns of reaction studied in chemistry,
and the concept of life as used in biology. He discusses the concepts we use
to describe living subjects, individuals who are capable of self-conscious and
self-managed development – concepts such as need, self, feeling, and pain.
In the Begriff section of Hegel’s Logic, there is heavy emphasis on systems
which are characterised by integrated organic structures.17 To explain these
Hegel gives much attention to the syllogism. In this gure there is an amal-
gamation of three elements. The opposition between Universal, and the Par-
ticular which was one of the binary oppositions which Hegel deals with in the
Book of Essence, is overcome, in a new more complex structure in which the
two are retained, but blended into a higher and more complex whole which
includes a new dimension – Individuality. The term syllogism names this inte-
grated blend of these three dimensions and I will say more about this later.
The process of ‘overcoming’ which leads to the new higher order structure
Hegel calls Aufhebung.
The new-dialectic reading of the Hegel-Marx connection

There is general agreement among the new-dialectic group of scholars that,
in Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a system, he made large use of elements
drawn from Hegel’s systematic-logical account of scientic categories. There
17
Hegel does not have the modern conceptualisation of system at his disposal,
and much of the difculty of this section of his text arises as he struggles to nd a
language to describe processes such as feed-back or homeostasis.
is in Capital a sequence of argument which moves from a general and abstract

summary of the essence of the system – that is, the commodity as a contradic-
tory combination of use-value and exchange-value – to a fully developed and
concrete description of capitalism as driven by competition and protabil-
ity, fuelled by surplus-value extracted from labour, equipped with nancial
markets, organised internationally, subject to the ups and downs of the busi-
ness cycle, and to stresses which arise from tendencies for the rate of prot to
decline.18
Capital is presented by Marx both as a process and a social relation. It is
a process in which sums of money capital are changed into means of pro-
duction and wages. Then commodities are produced and surplus-value cre-
ated by the hours of labour for which no wages are paid. As the commodities
are sold, capital is transformed back into money form, enlarged by surplus-
value if things have gone according to plan. Capital is also seen as a relation
between its owners and labour, both directly as a source of surplus-value,
and indirectly in that the machines and raw material used in production are
stored-up labour.
It is common ground in the new-dialectic reading of Capital that Marx
enlists the help of Hegel’s Logic to organise his argument as a series of moves
involving some kind of necessity. Just as capitalism is being portrayed as a sys-
tem of interdependent and necessary processes, so an explanatory and criti-
cal account of such a system must itself be developed as a chain of necessary
dialectical arguments. But the question of what sort of necessity is one which
divides the new-dialectic scholars themselves. It is also a point on which crit-
ics of their approach have fastened. The complaint has been widely expressed
that the new critics are saying that Marx used a chain of necessary derivations
to lead to conclusions which are then mechanically and externally projected
onto the real operation of capitalism. For example Alex Callinicos attacks,
‘ultra-Hegelian Marxists who argue that Marx derived the concrete structure
of the capitalist mode of production from the concept of capital itself’.19 The
18
These themes in Capital are examined in two of the most useful contributions
which the new dialectic scholars have made, namely the collections of essays on
Capital, Volume II (Arthur and Reuten (eds.) 1998) and on Capital, Volume III (Camp-
bell and Reuten (eds.) 2001). On the latter work, see Green 2005 for some important
points of criticism.
19
Callinicos 1998, p. 98.
394 • Jim Kincaid
new-dialectic emphasis on conceptual derivation is severely condemned by

Callinicos:
At worst this substitutes dialectical wordplay and scholastic commentary

for the analysis of concrete social formations; at best it has a tendency to
reduce Marx’s method to a purely conceptual dialectic.20
What sort of necessity drives Marx’s dialectical argument?

Against such criticism, the new-dialectic work of Patrick Murray offers a lucid
defence. What the critics fail to appreciate is that if political economy is to
be both scientic and critical, it requires the deployment of arguments based
on dialectical necessity. Murray examines with meticulous care the ways in
which Marx drew on the discussion of essence and appearance in Book II of
Hegel’s Logic. The key difculty in science, as Marx saw it, was that only the
empirical surface appearances of phenomena are available for scrutiny. From
these, underlying and hidden relationships and forces must be inferred. Thus,
as noted earlier, arguments based on some kind of necessity must be devel-
oped to explain the nature of underlying determinants which are operative.
But, for Marx, the validity of such arguments about essence is always subject
to empirical conrmation. This means a fully developed scientic account
must include explanations of why appearances are as they are, and why they
can be deceptive. Marx writes that, ‘all science would be superuous if the
form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence’.21 The rate
of prot, for example, is the, ‘visible surface phenomenon’, but underlying
prot is surplus-value, and this is, ‘the invisible essence to be investigated’.22
Another example: on the surface, it seems that the value of commodities is
determined by the combined contribution made to production by the three
factors of capital, labour, and land. The empiricism of mainstream economics
takes such a proposition to be self-evident. As I noted above, it was the Hege-
lian logic of categories which in the winter of 1857–8 helped Marx to construct
the sequence of argument in support of the labour theory of value – one of the
20
Callinicos 1998, p. 98. Here Callinicos is endorsing the critique of new dialectic
in Rees 1998, pp. 108–18.
21
Marx 1981, p. 956.
22
Marx 1981, p. 134.
decisive scientic and political paradigm shifts of Capital. Marx himself at one
point suggests the Copernican revolution as a model for political economy.
A scientic analysis of competition is possible only if we can grasp the inner

nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are
not intelligible to any but him who is acquainted with their real motions,
motions which are not perceptible to the senses.23
In Capital, Marx interweaves two strands of argument – the book is both a cri-
tique of the categories of classical political economy, and a critical account of
how capitalism works. The two strands are deeply interconnected. The essen-
tial inner nature of capitalism is such that it generates appearances which are
misleading and at variance with underlying reality.
Even the work of the greatest of the classical political economists, Ricardo,
is ideological because it does not trace out the mediations which link essence
to surface appearances. Ricardo is attacked by Marx because he does not use
a correct scientic method to establish underlying essential structures and
relationships, and the reasons why these create a misleading surface appear-
ance. The difculty here is not simply one of penetrating through illusions
to underlying reality. What appears on the surface may be an illusion, but it
need not be. Price is a category of the surface, and there is nothing unreal or
illusory about prices. To establish a chain of connection between the prices
at which commodities are sold and an underlying essence of labour-time
requires a process of abstracting from a large number of complicating inu-
ences to establish what is fundamental. The underlying determinants of value
cannot be arrived at by simple empirical procedures. It is not possible to
move by empirical, factually based arguments from rates of prot to the rates
of surplus-value which underlie them. Marx noted the difculty which politi-
cal economy faced in comparison with chemistry, ‘in the analysis of economic
forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power
of abstraction [die Abstractionskrafte] must replace both’.24
New-dialectic scholars stress that the category of money is introduced
by Marx in a way which is quite different from the usual explanations in
mainstream economics textbooks which start with the function of money as
23
Marx 1976, p. 433.
24
Marx 1976, p. 90.
396 • Jim Kincaid
a convenient means of exchange. Marx’s argument is, rather, that it is the

contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of the commodity
which gives rise to the category of money. Use-value is linked to the natural
sensory qualities of the commodity, but value is a social property of commodi-
ties and can only appear in the relationship of commodities to each other.
Money develops as a necessary form which allows the contradiction between
the natural form of the individual commodities and their form as values to be
overcome – though the contradiction is not got rid of, but merely displaced to
other ontological levels.25
The scientic deployment of categories interconnects with the politics of
Marx’s text. Arguments based on necessity are used by Marx to challenge
the way in which bourgeois economics projects the categories of capitalist
society as natural and universal. By tracing the patterns of interdependence
of the particular elements and processes of capitalism as a system, Marx is
establishing the historical specicity of those components. Marx is challeng-
ing the ideological use of general denitions which allow economists to say,
for example, that capital is universal in human societies. He notes, for exam-
ple, the argument in classical political economy that that, even in the earliest
human societies, means of production were used – the stone to throw at the
animal being hunted, the stick to reach fruit in trees.26
Arthur has emphasised the importance of negation in shaping the sort of
necessity which propels Marx’s dialectical argument forward. Here, Arthur
acknowledges the important work of Roy Bhaskar. In a powerful critique of
empiricism and positivism, Bhaskar attacks what he calls their ontological mono-
valence. In contrast, Bhaskar advocates ontological stratication as a paradigm
which allows for what he calls real negation. ‘It connotes, inter alia, the hidden,
25
‘The further development of the commodity does not abolish these contradictions,
but rather provides the form in which they have room to move’. Marx 1976, p. 198.
See Kincaid 2005 pp. 95–8 for a discussion of Marx’s thesis that exchange-value is
represented (and necessarily so) in money as a use-value. This gives rise, in turn, to a
contradiction between capitalism’s drive to increase protability by evolving cheap
forms of money, such as cheques or electronic transfers, and the need of capital for a
stable monetary medium in which value can be preserved, passed to other owners,
or used as a measure of value in contracts. There is a perceptive account of Marx’s
treatment of money by Martha Campbell in Campbell (ed.) 1997, pp. 89–120.
26
The point is made in Marx 1976, p. 291. See Murray 1988, especially pp.
121–9 and 228–32, for a searching exploration of Marx’s attacks on dehistoricisation
in economics.
the empty, the outside, desire, lack, need . . . It is real negation which drives
the Hegelian dialectic on’.27 Thus Marxism contains, as part of its scientic
character, a critique of capitalism and the basis of a practice of transformative
negation. The ontology in terms of which Bhaskar theorises the Marxist proj-
ect is complex and contains three interrelated dimensions: the real, the actual
and the empirical. As implemented by Marx in political economy, the real is
the concrete, an account which interlinks essence and appearance, and treats
appearances as real, even if often illusory. Marx does not conne his science
to what is empirically and immediately actual and present. His attention is
constantly focused on change and on emergent forces. The rational dialectic,
Marx writes,
includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous

recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every
highest developed form as being in a uid state, in motion, and therefore
grasps its transient aspect as well.28
Pinkard, Kolb and others have traced the presence in Hegel’s text of two
interlinked patterns of argument.29 Firstly, a progressive dialectic, which is the
forward movement from abstract to more concrete concepts. Hegel’s claim
is that the principle of advance is dialectical necessity. Progression is driven
by thought’s dissatisfaction with the contradictions which abstractions give
rise to, or with the emptiness and poverty of detail when things are specied
abstractly. Abstract concepts when looked at critically, are revealed as con-
tradictory. For Hegel, contradictions are a source of movement and change.
Bhaskar explains the forms of necessity which are employed, as follows:
27
Bhaskar 1993, p. 5. It is one of the merits of Bhaskar’s work that he argues cogently
for a vision of the social sciences in which they incorporate a practical dimension aim-
ing to abolish social ills. His argument is that, as medical science is organised round a
conception of health, or engineering aims to build structures which do not fall down
unexpectedly, so a social science like political economy should be committed to the
creation of just, democratic and sustainable societies.
28
Marx 1976, p. 103. For an outstanding brief introduction to the many forms of
dialectic within the theoretical tradition of Marxism, see Bhaskar 1992, pp. 143–50. As
well as the methodological (epistemological) dialectic which I have been discussing
here, Bhaskar also reviews the ontological dialectic and the dialectic of history.
29
These scholars also identify in Hegel a third pattern, the architectonic. This
specifies determinate negation as controlling the moves which categories make
vis-à-vis each other. So far as I am aware, no one has yet suggested that Marx uses
any similar architectonic.
398 • Jim Kincaid
For Hegel truth is the whole and error lies in onesidedness, incompleteness
and abstraction; it [error] can be recognised by the contradictions it generates,
and remedied through their incorporation in fuller richer, more concrete
conceptual forms. . . . The Hegelian dialectic progresses in two basic ways:
by bringing out what is implicit, but not sufciently articulated, in some
notion, or by repairing some want, lack or inadequacy in it.30
Contradictions can arise either in reality or in thought, but, contrary to a scur-

rilous rumour (promulgated, for example, by Karl Popper) for Hegel, neither
thought or the material world are inherently contradictory. In both, contra-
dictions arise, but are experienced as intolerable, and generate pressures to
nd ways of resolving contradictions. Here, for example, is the process which
Hegel calls Aufhebung – the emergence of higher forms in which contradic-
tions are attenuated by being reconstructed as part of a more complex whole.
For Hegel, wherever contradictions arise, they are a source of instability and
change whether in the material world or in thought.
The sort of necessity that gives direction to a new dialectic type of argu-
ment is not the sort to be found in formal logic: if A = B, and B = C, then A
= C etc. It is probabilistic in character. It is akin to natural necessity, a term
employed within the realist tradition in philosophy of science to refer to proc-
esses occuring in the natural or social world which have a high degree of
probability of producing a given outcome.31 There is a deep, though usually
indirect linkage, in Marx between the necessary progression of a dialectical
argument and the processes which he sees as operating with natural necessity
in the capitalist system. Here, there are two main types of situation. Firstly,
where action is subject to what Marx calls ‘the silent compulsion of economic
relations’.32 Secondly, where there is greater scope for alternative strategies
but where the economic action of agents is subject to laws of selection, for
30
Bhaskar 1992, p. 143.
31
See Harré and Madden 1975 for a critique of Hume on causality, and the lucid
development of a theory of natural necessity and causal powers. For a remarkable
Marxist development of this approach, see Bhaskar 1993, Chapter 2.
32
The use of direct extra-economic force to ensure labour supply becomes
exceptional once capitalism is fully developed – i.e. after peasants have been made
dependent on wage-work by being deprived of their land. There are then, ‘masses
of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power . . . the silent compulsion of
economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker’.
Marx 1976, p. 899.
instance, capitalists are free to operate their businesses with any sort of ef-
ciency or inefciency they choose – but, if the latter, they then risk being put
out of business.
Marx’s argument is Capital is often said to move from abstract to concrete.
In fact, the pattern is more complex. The narrative of Capital is not a continu-
ous unilinear journey from an abstract to a concrete account of capitalism, but
more like a spiral, in which there is a repeated return to an underlying level
of abstraction, though one which is specied in increasingly complex ways.
Thus, for example, Capital starts with the commodity as a general and abstract
category – dened simply as goods and services produced for sale. But Marx
ends Volume I with a chapter in which the commodity is presented as not
only the product of capital, but as one of the forms taken by capital in its pro-
ductive circuit. In addition, necessity has entered the analysis. The capitalist is
under pressure to sell commodities produced because there is a wage bill to
meet, and inputs to buy in order to continue in business.33
As Rosdolsky stresses in his great commentary on Marx’s political econ-
omy, fundamental to the architecture of Capital, is the distinction between
capital-in-general and many capitals.34 Throughout Volume I and most of
Volume II of Capital, Marx makes the enormous abstraction of leaving aside
the division of capital into individual competing rms. This allows him to
focus on the relation between capital and labour, and to clarify the origin of
prot in surplus-value, or the value created by workers during the proportion
of their working time which is unpaid. When, towards the end of Volume II,
Marx turns to examine capital as many capitals in competition, this is not a
move which follows on from the capital-in-general abstraction, but represents
a return to a new abstract starting-point. The two great oppositions on which
the argument of Capital is founded – capital versus labour, and capital versus
capital – are depicted as interlinked, but also as both constitutive of the capi-
talist mode of production, and thus as requiring separate levels of analysis.
Callinicos argues correctly that
33
For reasons which are still not clear, this important chapter (known as the
Resultate) was not published by Marx himself in any of the three editions of Volume
I which appeared before his death. This major text is to be found in Marx 1976, pp.
943–1084.
34
Rosdolsky 1977, especially pp. 41–50.
400 • Jim Kincaid
Capital does not trace the manner in which a simple essence (value) is both
manifested and concealed, but uncovers a complex structure involving levels
which are both interdependent and irreducible to each other.35
Begriff logic in Hegel

In Hegel’s Logic, the sphere of Essence, with its unresolved binary oppositions
is the terrain of the negative dialectic. But, for Hegel, the negativity of Essence
is only a way-station on the road to the culmination of his logic, the funda-
mental shift from Essence into the sphere of Begriff logic. Here, the tensions
and oppositions of Essence logic nd reconciliation in higher, more complex,
and harmonised structures. Thus, the second stage of negative dialectic (unas-
similated otherness) is overcome in a third stage of organic integration. In
Begriff logic, the conceptual structures of subjectivity and agency are dened
and explored. And in a nal move, Hegel ends his Logic with a discussion
of conceptuality itself, as having the capacity to grasp and comprehend the
organic forms of self-conscious life. One of the major debates in the new dia-
lectic group has been about the role of Hegel’s Begriff logic in Marx. A brief
review of the radically opposed views of Tony Smith, Patrick Murray and
Christopher Arthur on this question will make clear some of the broader theo-
retical differences which divide the exponents of the new dialectic.
Marx and the syllogism
Tony Smith considers that Marx was profoundly inuenced by the syllogistic
patterns which inform and organise the Begriff section of Hegel’s logic. Indeed
the whole tenor of Smith’s widely discussed book on The Logic of Marx’s ‘Capi-
tal’, published in 1990, is a relentless quest for syllogistic arguments in Marx’s
political economy. Smith is an unusual gure, who holds an unfashionable
belief that the continuing power and relevance of Marx’s thought arises
directly from the Hegelian elements in Marx’s work. He is strongly opposed
35
Callinicos 1982, p. 129. In a important paper Fine, Lapavitsas and Milonakis 2000
argue correctly, against Tony Smith, that Marx does not treat capital-in-general as
abstract, and contrast it with a concrete of many capitals. Rather, a fully concretised
account of the system must trace the interrelations between these two dimensions
of capital.
to the view, advanced by Althusser and by the school of analytical Marx-

ism, that Capital marks a radical rejection of Hegel’s inuence. Smith iden-
ties Hegel as himself a strong critic of the nascent capitalism of his time,
though one who sees his own work as a contribution to moral and intellectual
regeneration. Smith depicts Marx as developing a deeply Hegelian version of
a materialist critique of capitalism. What Smith aims to prove is that Marx’s
Capital, in its method of argument, was essentially faithful to Hegel – and,
in particular, that the critical power and the scientic coherence of Capital
derives from repeated use of the syllogism which traces the active processes
in the social world through which organic entities construct themselves, by
combining dimensions of universality, particularity and individuality.
Smith’s starting-point is that ‘dialectical logic is nothing more than the set
of rules which operate when transitions from simple and abstract categories
to complex and concrete ones are made’.36 In Smith’s explanation, there are
three stages in a dialectical sequence. First, we begin a with category which
emphasises what objects or processes have in common, a stage of simple
unity. It is simple because differences within the object which the category
refers to are, for the time being, ignored and abstracted from. For example,
in all societies there has to be a mechanism for allocating labour. Marx once
noted that this was something obvious even to a child.37 In Stage 2, the cat-
egory is modied to emphasis differences in whatever is covered by the initial
category. For instance, there are a variety of ways in which the allocation of
social labour can be carried out. By communal tradition, by having a state
which directs labour, or, as in a capitalist economy, by rms making indepen-
dent decisions about what their workers will produce, and then nding out in
the marketplace whether or not they have made protable use of the labour
they employ.
Stage 3 of a dialectic – Begriff logic – combines the two previous stages of
unity and difference into a new higher-order category. Marx notes near the
start of Capital the possibility of a form of society in which a free association
of producers could determine the allocation of their labour in production for
need, not prot. In a socialist society, labour would be allocated to production
36
Smith 1993, p. 97.
37
Marx letter to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868.
402 • Jim Kincaid
on the basis of a democratically agreed plan to use production to meet col-

lectively identied needs.
It is Smith’s claim that the essential structure of the argument of Capital is
formed by varaints of such syllogistic patterns. For example he argues that
the rst major section of Capital concentrates on capital in production, and to
the relation between capital as a simple abstract (capital in general), and the
labour it exploits. The second section, which starts near the end of Volume 2,
deals with capital in the form of many capitals and the competition between
them. And, in the nal section, Marx moves on to explain the distribution of
surplus-value – this being, in Smith’s view, a third stage, combining the rst
two stages into a more complex syllogistic structure.
Murray and the wooden sword of Hegel
As against Smith, Patrick Murray insists that, in analysing capitalism, Marx

does not make use of a third-stage logic of reconciled opposites. He argues
that in Hegel the completion of the syllogism by the use of a Begriff logic is
indissolubly linked to Hegel’s project of social reform and class reconcilia-
tion.38 Marx is out to abolish, not preserve in a higher form, the oppositions
and contradictions of capitalist society. Murray nds in Capital the same sort
of intransigence which characterised Marx’s early critique of Hegel’s politi-
cal philosophy.39 In an argument which, as Murray points out, is central in
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx notes that the law-making power of state
is seen by Hegel as the syllogistic mediator between the empirical singular-
ity (civil society) and the empirical universal (sovereign principle). Murray
quotes Marx’s summary of the way in which Hegel uses the syllogism to rec-
oncile social oppositions:
one can say that in Hegel’s development of the rational syllogism the whole
transcendence and mystical dualism of his system comes to the surface.
38
See also Pinkard 2000, an outstanding biography of Hegel which has, as one of
its main themes, the close relation between Hegel’s philosophy and his commitment
to social reform.
39
The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Marx and Engels
1976.
The middle term is the wooden sword, the concealed opposition between
universality and singularity.40
Hegel’s attempted reconciliation is based on verbal trickery, and is no more

than an empty boast – a wooden sword. The truth is that Hegel’s state tran-
scends civil society without transforming its logical atom, the abstract egois-
tic individual. Murray is quietly scathing about the supposed reconciliation
effected in the syllogism: in Marx,
the logic of essence poses irreconcilable conicts rather than a necessity

differentiation that pushes on to higher unity. Third parties, such as heaven,
the state, or money, signal submerged conict, not achieved harmony.41
Murray’s argument is that, throughout Capital, Marx remains on the terrain

of the oppositions and tensions of Essence logic. Contradictions may be dis-
placed from one form to another, but they are not subject to any sort of Auf-
hebung, or reconciled assimilation into a higher organic totality. Capitalism
is to be abolished by social action, not verbal manoeuvres – real swords, not
wooden ones. And, since Capital is a scientic text, Murray insists, as I have
noted earlier, that the crucial opposition which structures its narrative is that
of surface appearances versus underlying processes.
The term negative dialectic is now indelibly associated with the name and
work of Adorno. And with good reason. Deeply inuenced by his friend Wal-
ter Benjamin, Adorno powerfully explored the problems posed by a thought
which explores oppositions and contradictions, but which refuses to attempt
any kind of reconciliation. To do this, they considered, was to produce an
implicit endorsement of the injustices of the capitalist system. ‘Dialectics is the
ontology of the wrong state of things’, Adorno writes.42 Adorno believed that
there was a deep interconnection between: (1) the claim of abstract concepts
to cover the concrete particularity of the objects they refer to; (2) the domi-
nation of abstract exchange-value over the use-values of commodities; and
(3) the domination of the individual citizen by the abstract capitalist state.43
Although Adorno is an adherent of the commodity-fetishism school and his
40
Murray 1993, p. 41, Marx and Engels 1975, p. 84.
41
Murray 1993, p. 41.
42
Adorno 1973, p. 11.
43
There are valuable accounts of these themes in Jameson 1990, and Jarvis 1998.
404 • Jim Kincaid
critique of capitalism is focused on exchange, rather than on capital, political

economy has still much to learn from his theorisation and mode of presenta-
tion of negative dialectic.
Christopher Arthur and capital as dominating automaton
There is, however, a third perspective on Marx’s use of Begriff logic, that of
Christopher Arthur. His position is that Marx uses Hegel’s reconciled Abso-
lute Idea as a gure which expresses precisely the reied nature of a system
dominated by capital. Arthur points out that there are two views of Hegel to
be found in Marx. His exoteric view is the one I discussed earlier, Hegel as an
onto-theologist, ‘conceiving the real as the product of thought’.44 But Marx’s
esoteric view is that Hegel is a secret empiricist. Hegel’s dialectic is an upsid-
edown alienated mode of thought, in which abstractions lord it over their
empirical instances.45 Capitalism is also a topsy-turvy system, one in which
products are dominative over the workers who made them. Arthur writes
that, both in Hegel’s Begriff and Marx’s concept of capital, we encounter,
alien pseudosubjects that subjugate real individuals. From this perspective,

dialectical logic is a perversion of thought, but this is exactly what makes
it a suitable method for understanding the perverted reality that is
capitalism.46
Arthur is a distinguished representative of the value-form tradition in Marx-

ist scholarship.47 In a crucial passage early in Capital, Marx noted that his
political economy was fundamentally different from that of Adam Smith or
David Ricardo because it did not ‘treat the form of value as something of
indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself’.48 For
Arthur, the crucial moment at the start of Capital is Marx’s assertion that in
capitalist exchange, the use-value of commodities is set aside and commodi-
ties count only as so much exchange-value. Arthur takes this to mean that, at
44
Marx 1976, p. 101.
45
Hegel seems to argue, in effect, that the concept ‘lion’ takes precedence over
actual particular lions.
46
Arthur 1993, p. 29.
47
Also exemplied in the new-dialectic group by Geert Reuten. See Reuten 1989.
48
Marx 1976, p. 174.
this stage in the argument, commodities exist only as the mere empty form of
exchangeability. As Marx develops the concept of money, the formal empti-
ness of the exchange relation is redened as a relation in which commodities
exchange for amounts of the abstract substance of money. Thus the emptiness
of exchange now nds expression in the pure blank abstraction of money as
incarnation of value. The next stage, as Arthur reads Capital, is the build-up of
sums of money-capital which are then transformed into means of production
and wage-labour. In the processes of industrial production and the extrac-
tion of surplus-value from labour, capital nds a source of self-expansion
and power which enables it in time to establish dominance over the world
economy. Thus, starting as pure form, value transforms itself into the material
reality of a self-perpetuating system of exploitation, but one which remains
essentially determined by the initial emptiness of the value-form. For Arthur,
the value-form expresses an ontological emptiness which lies at the heart of
capitalism. Value as capital becomes
an unnatural form that clings vampire-like to labour and feeds off it . . . . an

ontological vampire that bloats its hollow frame at our expense.49
This is the basis of the homology which Arthur traces between Hegel’s Logic
and Marx’s Capital. Hegel’s Logic starts with the emptiest possible abstrac-
tions – Being (simple is-ness) and Nothing (is-not-ness). The Logic ends, as I have
noted, by constructing, in its nal sections, the systematically interrelated
concepts required to comprehend the most complex realities which both sci-
entic thought and everyday thinking have to deal with. For example, what is
covered by terms like ‘life’ or ‘person’. Thought also has attained the self-suf-
ciency of being able to think about thinking. Thus, the homology with capi-
tal which Arthur identies. The impersonal abstractions of Hegel’s logic, and
the patterns of necessity which dene it, can express and explain the domina-
tion of humanity by an economic system which is driven by the imperative of
protability and sheer accumulation.
Arthur’s homology thesis has proved highly controversial, but he has devel-
oped and defended it with clarity and considerable scholarly authority. Many
of his critics concede that his account articulates a set of themes which have
49
Arthur 2002, pp. 157 and 167.
406 • Jim Kincaid
a strong presence in Capital.50 Marx does at times use metaphysical language

to suggest how capitalism operates as a reied system, and how capital is a
thing-like automaton whose domination creates inverted and dehumanised
forms of society which logic can help grasp and explicate. However Arthur’s
vision of capital as Hegelian Idea has been widely attacked and on many
grounds. For example, critics have questioned the way in which the value-
form approach marginalises the category of use-value. The effect is to soften
the use-value versus exchange-value contradiction and make it external to the
commodity. There is too strong a focus on value-form as it is established in
exchange rather than in production, and the material realities of labour process
and exploitation are given insufcient weight. There has been a widespread
rejection of Arthur’s contention that Marx was wrong to introduce the cat-
egory of labour right at the start of Capital as determinant of the value of com-
modities. Arthur believes that the category of labour should not have been
introduced until much later on, and as the only logically possible answer to
the problem of where surplus-value comes from. However Arthur’s critics
hold that in asserting labour as an initiating category, Marx’s is making a
move which exactly denes the line of difference between him materialism
and the idealism of Hegel. Politically, Arthur is uncompromising, and fol-
lows Marx in portraying capital as a vampire feeding of surplus-value. But, in
Capital, enormous attention is also given to the competition between capitals.
By focusing too much on capital in general and its relationship with labour,
Arthur gives too little attention to competition (or capital as many vampires)
and thus to Marx’s consequent analysis of protability, accumulation and the
laws of motion of capitalism.51
50
For critiques of Arthur’s value-form Marxism, see Smith 2003, and the symposium
by a number of scholars, and including a reply by Arthur in Historical Materialism, 13,
2, pp. 27ff. The value-form approach is a major variant of the broader commodity-
fetishism reading of Marx, which derives from two classic works, Lukács 1971 and
Rubin 1973. The commodity fetishism interpretation of Capital has been extended
and developed in innovative ways in the work of Moishe Postone. See Postone 1996,
and also the thorough critical examination of this remarkable work from a wide
range of differing theoretical viewpoints in Historical Materialism, 12, 3, pp. 43–283,
published in 2004.
51
See Kincaid 2005 for a more detailed discussion of these criticisms.
Tony Smith and historical agency
One of the questionable aspects of Arthur’s work is the way in which social
agency is monopolised by the dominating power of capital-in-general.52 This
issue is explored in much more scientically promising ways by Tony Smith.
This is somewhat paradoxical, given that, of new-dialectic philosophers under
discussion here, it is Smith who is most deeply imbued with Hegelianism. But
Smith has a clear vision of social action which is guided by constraints – logics
which select and shape action in patterned ways. For example, Smith inter-
prets Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as arguing that,
given the social form dened by the category ‘property’, it is necessarily

the case that social agents acting within this social form will tend to act in
such a way that the social form dened by the category ‘contract’ would
come about’.53
Thus, for Smith, ‘the key element in a transition from one categorial level to
the next involves the behaviour of social agents’.54 If a given social form, ‘nec-
essarily generates structural tendencies leading social agents to institute a dif-
ferent social form’, then this is the sort of necessity which dialectical logic
claims to identify and to track, since then, ‘the necessity of the derivation is
materially grounded in the practice of social agents’.55 Smith insists that, ‘tran-
sitions in dialectical social theory demand microfoundations’, a point which
he says is missed by the school of analytical Marxists when they criticise
dialectical logic as lacking an account of individual motivation.56 In Arthur’s
account, dialectical progression can be read off from the manoeuvres of the
Hegelian dialectic which mimes the development of capitalism as a reied
system. Smith insists, however, that we need a theory based on material prac-
tices, not automatic logic.
52
Though Arthur does also recognise long-term limits to the viability of capital-
ism, which he sees as depending on working-class willingness to continue supplying
surplus-value, as well as on ecological conditions which capitalism is undermining.
53
Smith 1993, p. 19.
54
Smith 1993, p. 25.
55
Smith 1993, p. 20 and 25.
56
Smith 1993, p. 34.
408 • Jim Kincaid
Hegel did not deduce the nature of capitalism from his logic of the concept,
but rather his studies of capitalism led him to assert that the logic of the
concept is exemplied in the capitalist order.57
Smith worries that any reading of Capital based only on capital as agent will
produces a reied depiction of the system. He points out that commodities do
not beget money of their own accord:
‘commodity’, ‘money’ and ‘capital’ have then indeed become alien forces
dominating the human community. But they are not things. They are
constituted in and through social relations, however alien from social control
these social relations have become. In themselves they lack both independent
metaphysical status and any causal powers.58
Moreover, at a concrete level of analysis, the agency of capital is implemented

by individual rms and owners of capital. It is towards the end of Volume
II of Capital and throughout Volume III that Marx deals with many capitals
and the patterns of competition. Smith’s concern for micro-agency has led
him to produce valuable work on recent developments in the capitalist world
economy. For example on the intensication of international competition in
the industrial sector of capitalism in the latter part of the twentieth century
and consequent patterns of deskilling and speed-up in the major industrial
countries, and the rapid growth of industrial production in large parts of the
developing world.59 More recently, Smith has written a powerfully argued
book which uses Hegelian-Marxist frameworks of dialectical logic to analyse
a range of explanatory models of the structure and workings of the interna-
tional economy. He examines, in turn, neoliberal, democratic cosmopolitan,
and Marxian models. The book ends by sketching out a possible structure for
a socialist world economy.60
57
Smith 1993, p. 29.
58
Smith 1993, p. 27.
59
Smith 2000.
60
Smith 2006.
Evaluating the new-dialectic approach

The new-dialectic approach to Marx’s Capital has produced a remarkable lit-
erature of creative scholarship and lively controversy. But it has a number
of limitations which it is hoped will be addressed in future research. It is,
for example, surprisingly parochial. So far, no one has produced a sustained
examination of the powerful tradition of German work on the logical con-
struction of Capital, and compared it systematically with the themes explored
in the anglophone new dialectic literature.61 There has been a similar neglect
of the large and complex body of work on the Hegel-Marx connection which
has been produced by Japanese scholars.62
The most frequently expressed criticism of new-dialectic explorations of
the Hegel-Marx connection is that they substitute conceptual derivation for
historically based empirical research. In a well-argued variant of this line of
criticism, Alfredo Saad-Filho concludes that,
new dialectic is insufcient and potentially misleading because it aspires to

reconstruct the reality purely through concepts, even though the concrete is
historically grounded and, therefore, irreducibly contingent. The concrete
can be analysed theoretically only if historical analysis belongs within the
method of exposition.63
Only a few brief comments are possible here about the large questions raised
in Saad-Filho’s criticism. In fact, in their best work, the new-dialectic schol-
ars spend little time on the exploration of pure concepts. As I have tried to
show, concepts are scrutinised for their clarity and precision in grasping the
essential nature of capitalism and in allowing its dynamics to be scientically
reconstructed in ways which reect the necessary logics of the operation of
the system. The objectives of the new-dialectic writers are generally limited
and precise, and no claim is made to offer accounts of the detailed histori-
cal evolution of capitalist society. They have tried to clarify how and why
Marx organised the argument of Capital in the strange way that he did. They
61
See especially Backhaus 1997, Reichelt 2001, Heinrich 2001.
62
The leading inuence in Japan Marxist scholarship has been the work of Kozo
Uno (1897–1977). For useful surveys of Japanese interpretations of Capital, see Sekine
1997 and Albritton and Sekine 1995.
63
Saad-Filho 2002, p. 19. See also Callinicos 1998, and the denunciation of new
dialectic in Rosenthal 1998.
410 • Jim Kincaid
have taken seriously Marx’s thesis that the topsy-turvy reality of capitalism
requires a distinctive set of categories, linked by a logic involving dialectical
necessity. Where they do make bold claims is in arguing that such categorial
logics can be used to model the patterns of constraint and pressures in the
operation of capitalism as a system.
Certainly there are questions to be raised about the concept of system as it
gures in new-dialectic literature. In focusing on synchronous analysis rather
than historical narrative, the new dialecticians have been able to explore the
imperatives and dynamics of capitalism as a system while making no claims
about the operation of necessity in historical change. They are thus able to
avoid condent assertions and predictions about future developments in the
history of capitalism. Their approach explicitly rejects the kind of teleology
which has done so much to discredit the received tradition of orthodox Marx-
ism as a serious science.
Nevertheless it is true, I believe, that the new-dialectic scholars have not
sufciently dened the relationship of their project to approaches focusing
on historical narrative and empirical contingency.64 Even when clarifying the
structure of systems, and the conditions for their scientic analysis, histori-
cal narrative is necessary. Systems are subject to processes of formation and
disintegration. Their structure evolves in response to internal and external
threats to their viability. Marx himself endorsed a denition of dialectical
method as analogous to the methods of dealing with system and change in
evolutionary biology:
most important all is the precise analysis of the series of successions, of

the sequences and links within which the different states of development
present themselves . . . every historical period possesses its own laws. . . . In
short economic life offers us a phenomenon analogous to the history of
evolution in other branches of biology.65
We can accept that Engels was wrong to claim that the crucial early chap-
ters of Capital, Volume I are organised round a historical sequence in which
simple commodity production is replaced by the capitalist mode of produc-
tion. But Engels was right to hold that a fully developed Marxist political
64
Though see Reuten 2000.
65
Marx 1976, p. 102.
economy is historical in its essence. As I have noted, new-dialectic work has

been limited by insufcient attention to the logics of capitalist competition.66 In
the general body of new-dialectic work, attention is concentrated on the fun-
damentals of value theory. The laws of motion of the system are not a central
concern. There is little exploration of the law of value – the concrete logics of
competition and selection (operating with particular severity in crises) which
shape the widely varying institutional structures of industrial and nancial
capitalism and set the conditions for class struggle, state formation, and the
organisation of the world market.
66
A partial exception is Tony Smith. But his work, though outstanding, remains
rather constricted by the syllogistic frameworks he so frequently employs. These are
inadequate to grasp the many displaced forms of the law of value – e.g. as imple-
mented by allocation of capital by the banking and nancial systems, or by agencies
such as the IMF and World Bank. For further discussion of competition and the law
of value as allowing integration of systemic and historical logics in political economy,
see Kincaid 2005.
Chapter Twenty-Two
States, State Power, and State Theory
Bob Jessop
There has been a major renewal of Marxist work on

state theory in the last thirty years. This has been
prompted by the crisis of the national state and its
typical forms of intervention in the 1970s; the chal-
lenge to Eurocentric theorising caused by the eco-
nomic success of Japan and other Asian powers;
liberation from the deadening effect of ofcial Marx-
ist-Leninist doctrines after the Soviet Union col-
lapsed; the emergence of new forms of government,
governance, and governmentality; the reciprocal
interaction of ‘globalisation’ and the restructur-
ing and recalibration of state apparatuses; and new
sources, stakes, and forms of social resistance to the
logic of accumulation on a world scale. Thus contem-
porary Marxist analyses not only explore conven-
tional themes and approaches in state theory but are
also addressing many new issues, developing new
theoretical and political arguments, and critically re-
evaluating classic texts and approaches.
Re-reading the Marxist classics

Marx’s and Engels’s work on the state comprises
diverse philosophical, theoretical, journalistic, par-
tisan, ad hominem, or purely ad hoc comments. The
changed political conjuncture and the continuing
414 • Bob Jessop
(but still incomplete) publication of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe have

prompted critical re-evaluation of Marx’s theoretical and political analyses and
Engels’s own contribution to their development. While this has transformed
our understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy and revealed his
concern with political ecology, it has also prompted new interpretations of his
critique of the state and politics.1
The same sort of re-reading can be seen in traditional Marxist approaches to
the state, which have generally been organised around four main axes. First,
economic reductionist analyses sought to explain state forms and functions
in terms of more fundamental economic structures, interests, and struggles –
thereby ignoring the specically political dimensions of the state and their
implications for state power. Contemporary Marxism generally eschews crude
economic reductionism, but there is still much interest in the path-dependent
co-evolution of different forms of state and ‘varieties of capitalism’ – at the
risk of reifying national capitalisms as so many independent forms of capi-
talist organisation rather than locating them within a broader, ‘variegated’
world market.2
Second, a certain ‘historicist’ voluntarism emphasised the transformative
potential of autonomous political class struggle without paying due regard
to the strategically selective institutional legacies of political structures. While
there is now more appreciation of how forms and institutions ‘make a differ-
ence’, celebration continues of mass movements, the ‘multitude’, and autono-
mous, self-organising, and decentred collective wills as key forces in political
revolution and the dismantling of the ofcial state apparatus. Two inuential
works in this vein were Hardt and Negri’s post-operaist identication of the
‘multitude’ as the new revolutionary subject operating inside the heart of the
new imperial beast (see below) and Holloway’s ‘open-Marxist’ argument that
it would be possible for autonomous, self-organising groups to assume con-
trol of social life without reconstituting the state machine and state power.3
1
Artous 1999; Cowling and Martin 2002; Draper 1977–1986; Fineschi 2006; Mac-
Gregor 1996; Panitch and Leys 1998; Teeple 1983; Texier 1998; Thomas 1994; Wells
1982.
2
Albritton et al., 2001; Bischoff 2003; Candeias and Deppe 2001; Hoffman 2006;
Nitzan and Bichler 2002.
3
Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Holloway 2002.
States, State Power, and State Theory • 415
Third, inspired particularly by Marxist-Leninist doctrine but drawing on

detailed empirical research, there were many interesting ‘state monopoly
capitalism’ analyses of how the ties between monopoly capital and the state
exclude other capitalist groups and the subordinate classes and of how impe-
rialist rivalries and world-market integration were promoting the develop-
ment of international state monopoly capitalism. While such analyses are less
prominent at the national level (despite the rise of blatant neoliberal and neo-
conservative attempts to deploy state power in an open class war in favour of
capitalist interests), research has expanded massively on the internationalisa-
tion of the state, the development of a transnational class, and the expansion
of various types of international apparatus and international régime tied to
transnational capital.4
Fourth, following the end of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and the
rise of mass politics, there has been increasing interest – associated especially
with Western Marxism and critical cultural studies – in the development of
authoritarian statism, whether normal or exceptional in character, and the
increased importance of the mass media in the organisation of economic,
political, and ideological class domination. This theme has also been taken up
and explored in an increasingly sophisticated body of Marxist and marxisant
work on authoritarian mass parties, plebiscitary democracy, the mediatisa-
tion of politics, the importance of ‘soft power’ in the overall exercise of state
power, and the increasing tendency towards new forms of exceptional state.5
Key insights of Marxist revival

Turning from thematic to more theoretical issues, the best work in the 1970s
and 1980s, especially in the German-speaking world, formulated three key
insights into the state that have continued to inuence contemporary Marx-
ist work. First, against the usual functionalist and reductionist temptations,
some West-German Marxists explored how the typical form of the capitalist
state actually caused problems for capital accumulation and political domina-
tion rather than securing its overall functionality in these respects. For the
4
Altvater and Mahnkopf 1999; Bonefeld and Holloway 1996; Hirsch 1995; Jessop
2002; Panitch 1994; Poulantzas 1975; Robinson 2004; Wissel 2007.
5
For example Poulantzas 1978; Scheuerman 2004.
416 • Bob Jessop
state’s institutional separation from the market economy, a separation that

was regarded as a necessary and dening feature of capitalist societies, results
in the dominance of different (and potentially contradictory) institutional log-
ics and modes of calculation in state and economy. There is no certainty that
political outcomes will serve the needs of capital – even if (and, indeed, pre-
cisely because) the state is operationally autonomous. For it then becomes
subject to politically-mediated constraints.6 This conclusion undermined
previous concerns with the ‘relative autonomy’ of the capitalist state in the
sense that the state would (or should) have precisely that degree of auton-
omy necessary to secure the needs of capital and pointed instead towards
the importance of the structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas and,
hence, of competing economic and political imaginaries and continuing strug-
gles over accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic visions that
continually shape (and reshape) the state apparatus, views about the nature
and purposes of government, and state power. In short, it highlighted the
importance of the complex, contingent interplay of social struggles and insti-
tutions, marking a return to the work of the founding fathers.
Second, Marxist theorists began to analyse state power as a complex social
relation. This involved studies of different states’ structural selectivity and
the factors that shaped their strategic capacities. Attention was paid to the
variability of these capacities, their organisation, and exercise and their dif-
ferential impact on state power and states’ capacities to project power into
social realms well beyond their own institutional boundaries. As with the rst
set of insights, this also led to more complex studies of struggles, institutions,
and political capacities.7 Discussion went beyond the stale issue of ‘relative
autonomy’ to include variable state capacities and the modalities of exercise
of state power. A key gure in this regard was Poulantzas, who claimed to
have completed the unnished Marxist theory of the state in proposing that
the state, like capital, is a social relation.8 But the same insight, even if not
formulated so explicitly, can be found in many other postwar studies as well
as in the work of the classical-Marxist thinkers, such as Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Bauer, and Gramsci.
6
Artous 1999; Hirsch 2005; Wood 1981b.
7
Barrow 1993; Jessop 1990.
8
Poulantzas 1978.
And, third, abandoning base-superstructure arguments, Marxists dis-

covered the specicity and effectivity of semiosis, discourse, language (and
mass media) in shaping the political imaginaries at the heart of the state and
political struggle. As subject positions, identities, and interests are no longer
regarded as self-evident but are held to depend on specic practices of subjec-
tivation [assujetissement] and particular conjunctural horizons of action, there
has also been increasing interest in specic narrative, rhetorical, or argumen-
tative features of state power as well as of class relations and identity politics.9
Thus case studies of policy-making suggest that state policies are discur-
sively-mediated, if not wholly discursively-constituted, products of struggles
to dene and narrate ‘problems’ that can be addressed in and through state
action. The impact of policy-making and implementation is therefore closely
tied to their rhetorical and argumentative framing and this is a crucial area for
the exercise of soft power through struggles for hegemony mediated through
the mass media, mass organisations, and, increasingly, new networked forms
of communication.
Formal vs functional adequacy

Building on the revival of Marxist form-analysis in the critique of political
economy, there has been a growing interest in state forms and functions,
especially given the crisis of the national state-form in the last thirty years.
Marx had argued that the modern (capitalist) state was distinguished by the
institutional separation of the political sphere from the prot-oriented, mar-
ket-mediated economy. He particularly highlighted the formal adequacy of
the modern representative state based on rational bureaucracy and universal
suffrage for consolidated capitalist social formations. Thus economic agents’
freedom to engage in exchange (belied by the factory despotism within the
labour process) is matched by the freedom of individual citizens to determine
public policy (belied by the state’s subordination to the logic of capital).10
Marx had also identied the basic contradiction at the heart of this formally
adequate type of capitalist state, namely, that it relied on the continued will-
ingness of the property-owning minority to accept the political rule of the
9
Jessop 2002; Müller et al. 1994; Neocleous 2003.
10
Marx 1975, 1978; cf. Artous 1999; Hirsch 2005; Jessop 1990, 2002.
418 • Bob Jessop
majority on the condition that the propertyless majority continued to accept

the economic rule of the property-owning minority. This contradiction could
be managed, as Gramsci among others noted, insofar as the state apparatus
in its broadest sense operated to organise a capitalist power bloc and to dis-
organise subordinate classes and other subaltern forces.11 Only in this way
could the normal (or bourgeois-democratic) form of capitalist state serve to
promote the interests of capital and, at the same time, to disguise this, ren-
dering capitalist political domination relatively opaque due to the complex
mediations involved in the exercise of state power. When a normal type of
capitalist state is established, political class domination is secured through the
dull routines of democratic politics as the state acts on behalf of capital, but
not at its direct behest. Unsurprisingly, given the contradiction at the heart of
the democratic constitution, this is also a fragile political régime. For its stabil-
ity depends on the continued willingness of the dominated classes to accept
only political emancipation rather than press for social emancipation and/or
on the willingness of the dominant class(es) to be satised with social domi-
nation (i.e., with the de facto subordination of the exercise of state power to the
imperatives of capital accumulation) rather than press for the restoration of
their earlier monopoly of political power.
The mere presence of the constitutional state and representative democracy
does not secure the expanded economic and extra-economic reproduction of
capital. Because forms are the strategically selective medium through which
the contradictions and dilemmas of the capital relation develop, there is a
permanent tension between form and content. Continuing action is required
to ensure that form and content complement each other and prove functional
for capital accumulation and political class domination. This problem may be
overcome in the short term through trial-and-error experimentation; and it
may be solved in the medium- to long-term through the mutual selection and
retention of complementary forms and contents. Those policies get selected
that correspond best to the dominant forms; and forms will be selected that
are most adequate to the overall logic of capital accumulation. In short, con-
tent is selected by form, form is selected by content.
Other work has been more concerned with the functional adequacy of pre-
vailing state institutions, regardless of their form. This concerns the capacity of
11
Gramsci 1971b.
a state in capitalist society to secure the economic and extra-economic condi-

tions for accumulation in a given conjuncture. It focuses on how policies come
to acquire a particular content, mission, aims, and objectives that are more-or-
less adequate to expanded reproduction in specic conjunctures through spe-
cic strategies and policies pursued by particular social forces. This does not
mean that the state form is irrelevant but, rather, that its strategic selectivities
do not directly serve to realise the interests of capital in general. More atten-
tion goes to the open struggle among political forces to shape the political
process in ways that privilege accumulation over other modes of societalisa-
tion and to the changing balance of forces in order to show how political class
struggles and their outcomes are mediated and condensed through specic
institutional forms in particular periods, stages, and conjunctures regardless
of whether these forms corresponded to the capitalist type of state.
Territoriality and historical constitution

A revival of interest in the historical constitution of the modern state and
inter-state system has seen detailed studies of the classical polity, feudal
states, absolutism, early-modern state formation, and the development of
the Westphalian system (allegedly set up by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648
but realised only stepwise during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Of
crucial signicance here is the question of changing forms of the territoriali-
sation of political authority and their role in facilitating the development of
the capitalist world market and an inter-state system favourable to capital
in the context of pre-existing forms of state organisation. The development of
the capitalist form of state in Europe and its gradual displacement of dynas-
tic state forms involved the intersection of politically organised coercive and
symbolic power, a clearly demarcated core territory governed by a state based
on the rule of law, and a xed population on which political decisions were
deemed to be collectively binding.12 Thus the key feature of the modern state
is the historically variable ensemble of technologies and practices that pro-
duce, naturalise, and manage territorial space as a bounded container within
which political power is then exercised to achieve various, more or less well
12
Teschke 2003.
420 • Bob Jessop
integrated, and changing policy objectives.13 Nonetheless the Westphalian

system, which is so often taken-for-granted and involves formally sovereign,
mutually recognising, mutually legitimating national states exercising sov-
ereign control over large and exclusive territorial areas, is only a relatively
recent institutional expression of state power. Other modes of territorialising
political power have existed, some still co-exist with the Westphalian system,
new expressions are emerging, and yet others can be imagined.14
A provocative thesis in recent work on the historical constitution of the
modern state is the argument that the state is polymorphous15 or polycon-
textural.16 Criticising the view that states in capitalist societies are necessarily
capitalist in form and function, Mann argued that the state’s organisation and
capacities may be primarily capitalist, military, theocratic, or democratic in
nature according to the balance of forces, especially as these affect the state
ensemble and its exercise of power. Its dominant crystallisation as one or
other of these four forms is contestable and varies conjuncturally. Much the
same point is made when Taylor distinguishes between the state as a capitalist
state (‘wealth container’), a military-political apparatus (‘power container’), a
nation-state (‘cultural container’), and a welfare state (‘social container’).17 To
this, we could add the state as a patriarchal state (‘the patriarch general’). In
short, there is no guarantee that the modern state will always (or ever) be
essentially capitalist and, even when accumulation is deeply embedded in
their organisational matrix, modern states typically consider other functional
demands and pressures from civil society when promoting institutional inte-
gration and social cohesion. Whether it succeeds in this regard is another
matter. Adopting this approach entails looking at actually existing state for-
mations as polyvalent, polymorphous crystallisations of different principles
of societal organisation that can crystallise in different ways according to the
dominant issues in a given period or conjuncture, with general crystallisa-
tions dominating long periods and specic crystallisations marking particular
situations.
13
Escolar 1997; Foucault 2004; Scott 1998.
14
For example, Beck and Grande 2007; Friedrichs 2001; Segesvary 2004; Shaw 2000;
Voigt 2000; Ziltener 2001.
15
Mann 1986.
16
Willke 1992.
17
Taylor 1994.
The scope for alternative crystallisations also highlights the importance

of the historical semantics of state formation and the variability of political
imaginaries. Indeed, whatever the precise origins of the different components
of the modern state (such as the army, bureaucracy, taxation, legal system,
legislative assemblies), their organisation as a relatively coherent institutional
ensemble depends crucially on the emergence of the state idea. Thus state
discourses have played a key role in the separation of the political sphere
from other institutional orders and, whether as mystication, self-motiva-
tion, or self-description, continue to shape the state as a complex ensemble of
political relations linked to their respective social formations. The discursive
as well as material constitution of the boundary between state and civil soci-
ety enables state managers to deploy that movable boundary in the exercise
of state power. It also shapes the ways in which other political actors on the
political scene orient their actions towards the ‘state’, acting as if it existed; and
struggles over dominant or hegemonic political and state imaginaries have a
crucial role in shaping the nature, purposes, and stakes of government.18
New forms of political domination

Given the crisis of the national state-form that had become naturalised through
the Atlantic-Fordist-Keynesian welfare states, export-oriented developmental
states, import-substitution industrialisation strategies in Latin America and
Africa, and the more general desire for national self-determination in the
wake of decolonisation and the decomposition of the Soviet Bloc, interest has
grown in the implications of globalisation for the national territorial state.
Theory and research have moved well beyond the initial views that globalisa-
tion would fatally weaken the national state or leave it largely unchanged and
have generated various accounts of the rescaling, recalibration, and reorienta-
tion of the state apparatus. There is still no consensus within, let alone beyond,
Marxist scholarship on what, if anything, is replacing national states.
Hardt and Negri19 achieved short-lived fame for their claim that a new
but still precarious postnational, postimperialist, postmodern state form was
emerging. This was a global ‘Empire’ based on self-organising, networked
18
Cf. Bartelson 1995, 2001; Mitchell 1991.
19
Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004.
422 • Bob Jessop
forms of power premised on a conception of ‘imperial right’ and liberal

interventionism oriented to universal human values, permanent peace, and
social justice. This imperial network was taking the form of a three-tiered
pyramid of power dominated by the United States, with a series of middle-
ranking national states occupying the middle layer, and other states below
it. The obvious tension between the unicity of Empire and the plurality of
actually existing national states is resolved through the exercise of its hege-
monic power by the USA over other states in the interests of maintaining
Empire as a whole rather than in pursuit of its immediate, economic-corpo-
rate, imperialist interests. America’s capacity to ll this role derives from its
unique historical development and its association with capital’s immanent
drive to expand and to internalise every ‘outside’ so that collective biopoliti-
cal body of world society is subsumed under its logic. Hardt and Negri also
argued that, with the increasing importance of an immaterial bio-economy
and the general intellect, the industrial proletariat, to the extent that it still
exists, has lost its hegemony in the class struggle to the multitudinous masses
of an expanded proletariat and the ‘poor’. As this Empire gets formed, the
prospects for revolution are enhanced. The multitude has nowhere to hide
because economic power is now exercised by the global monetary system,
political power is exercised through police actions and imperial control ori-
ented to local effectiveness, and cultural power is mediated through global
networks of communication that integrate the symbolic with the biopolitical
in the service of imperial power. But a multitude of acts of resistance against
economic globalisation and Empire will trigger shock waves throughout the
system and lead to the emergence of counter-globalisation, counter-Empire
strategies. This prediction was challenged historically by the re-assertion of
American imperialism shortly after the book’s publication but there were also
many logical and theoretical objections to Hardt and Negri’s grand narrative
despite its obvious appeal in identifying the totality of the dispossessed (the
‘multitude’) as the self-organising force of revolutionary transformation deep
within the emerging empire. In particular, Hardt and Negri overlooked the
continuing signicance of major conicts between different fractions of capi-
tal, between different regions and scales of capital accumulation, and differ-
ent strategies (including their quite different implications for the differential
integration-exclusion of sections of the proletariat, however dened).
Shaw has argued that we are witnessing the tendential emergence of a
global state, i.e., a multi-tiered global political organisation that is seeking to
reorder the global world around issues of security as well as accumulation.20

On closer inspection, this global state is actually a ‘Western Conglomerate
State’ organised in the Western hemisphere under US domination and seek-
ing to order the rest of the world; and its major institutions (such as the World
Bank, International Monetary Fund, G-8, and United Nations) are not neutral
bodies but heavily implicated in the contested exercise of transnational class
powers.
Various scholars have argued that the principal change that is occurring is
the transnationalisation of the state apparatus as one or both of two processes
occur. First, the institutional and strategic distinctions between national states
and transnational state apparatuses are disappearing as each national state
(a) aims to integrate its economic space and capitals operating within it into
the world market on the most favourable conditions possible and (b) is per-
suaded, induced, or coerced by the dominant neoliberal forces to secure the
conditions for neoliberal accumulation on a global scale.21 Second, just as the
exercise of state power in national states reects an institutionally-mediated
condensation of social forces, so the exercise of power in transnational appa-
ratuses reects a second-order condensation of power among national states
and the respective balances of power.22 More generally, Jessop, following Pou-
lantzas,23 suggests that the restructuring of the state is characterised by three
trends and associated counter-trends which, together, imply that the national
state remains an important political force in a changing world order.24 The
three trends comprise: the de-nationalisation of statehood, the de-statisation of
politics, and the internationalisation of policy-making; and the three counter-
trends comprise: the enhanced role of the state in interscalar articulation, the
shift from government to meta-governance to continually reorder the rela-
tionship among different forms of governance, and the increased struggle
for hegemony and dominance over international policy régimes and policy
implementation.25
20
Shaw 2000.
21
Gowan 2000; Overbeek 1993; Panitch 1994; Robinson 2004; Science & Society
2001–2.
22
Altvater and Mahnkopf 1997; Brand and Goerg 2003; Hirsch 2005.
23
Jessop 2002, 2007, following Poulantzas 1975, 1978.
24
For a good overview, see Nordhaug 2002.
25
Jessop 2002.
424 • Bob Jessop
An interesting real-time experiment for testing different arguments about

the transformation of the state is provided by the European Union as a state-
in-the-process-of-becoming. There are at least ve different accounts of its
character as an emerging form of state: liberal intergovernmentalism – the
EU is an important site for traditional international conicts between national
states; supranationalism – it is a potential rescaled national state that is gradu-
ally gaining the same capacities and competences as a traditional national
state; a network state – powers are being redistributed among diverse of-
cial, economic, and civilian actors that must co-operate to produce effective
policies; multi-level governance – a multi-tiered, multi-stakeholder political
arrangement has developed with a tangled hierarchy of powers; and multi-
scalar meta-governance in the shadow of postnational statehood.26
Some new themes

Notwithstanding declining interest in the more esoteric and abstract modes
of state theorising that dominated the 1970s and early 1980s, substantive criti-
cal research on states and state power exploded from the 1990s onwards. The
crisis of the national state form in advanced capitalist social formations has
led to new theoretical concerns that are growing more urgent. These include:
the historical variability of statehood (or stateness); the relative strength or
weakness of states; the changing forms and functions of the state; issues of
scale, space, territoriality, and the state; the future of the national state in an
era of globalisation (see above); and the rise of governance and its articulation
with government.
There has been growing interest in factors that make for state strength. Inter-
nally, this refers to a state’s capacities to exercise authority over events and
social forces in the wider society; externally, it refers to the state’s power in the
inter-state system. This concern is especially marked in recent theoretical and
empirical work on predatory and/or developmental states. The former are
essentially parasitic upon their economy and civil society, exercise largely the
despotic power of command, and may eventually undermine the economy,
society, and the state itself. Developmental states also have infrastructural
and network power and deploy it to in allegedly market-conforming ways.
26
For a critique of these views, see Jessop 2007.
Unfortunately, the wide variety of interpretations of strength (and weakness)

threatens coherent analysis. States have been described as strong because they
have a large public sector, authoritarian rule, strong societal support, a weak
and gelatinous civil society, cohesive bureaucracies, an interventionist policy,
or the power to limit external interference. In addition, some studies run the
risk of tautology insofar as strength is dened purely in terms of outcomes. A
possible theoretical solution is to investigate the scope for variability in state
capacities by policy area, over time, and in specic conjunctures.
The restructuring of the state has prompted growing interest in the forms
and functions of the capitalist type of state and of states more generally. This
can be studied in terms of the state’s role in: (a) securing conditions for pri-
vate prot – the eld of economic policy; (b) reproducing wage-labour on a
daily, lifetime, and intergenerational basis – the eld of social policy broadly
considered; (c) managing the scalar division of labour; and (d) compensating
for market failure. On this basis, Jessop27 characterises the typical state form
of the postwar advanced capitalism as a Keynesian welfare national state. Its
distinctive features were an economic policy oriented to securing the condi-
tions for full employment in a relatively closed economy, generalising norms
of mass consumption through the welfare state, the primacy of the national
scale of policy-making, and the primacy of state intervention to compensate
for market failure. He also describes the emerging state-form in the 1980s
and 1990s as a Schumpeterian workfare postnational régime. Its distinctive
features are an economic policy oriented to innovation and competitiveness
in relatively open economies, the subordination of social policy to economic
demands, the relativisation of scale with the movement of state powers down-
wards, upwards, and sideways, and the increased importance of governance
mechanisms in compensating for market failure. Other types of state, includ-
ing developmental states, have been discussed in the same terms.
Recent work on globalisation casts fresh doubt on the future of national ter-
ritorial states in general and nation-states in particular (see above). This issue
is also raised by scholars interested in the proliferation of scales on which sig-
nicant state activities occur, from the local through the urban and regional to
cross-border and continental co-operation and a range of supranational enti-
ties. Nonetheless initial predictions of the imminent demise of the national
27
Jessop 2002.
426 • Bob Jessop
territorial state and/or the nation-state have been proved wrong. This reects
the adaptability of state managers and state apparatuses, the continued impor-
tance of national states in securing conditions for economic competitiveness,
political legitimacy, social cohesion, and so on, and the role of national states
in co-ordinating the state activities on other scales from the local to the triad
to the international and global levels.
The increased signicance of governance, that is, networked forms of
self-organisation rather than hierarchical forms of command and control, as
opposed to government; and their role within the overall exercise of class and
state powers. States have generally relied in varying degree on market mech-
anisms, planning and command, networks, and solidarity to pursue state
projects and at stake in this debate is the changing weight of these different
mechanisms and their forms of co-ordination. Governance operates on differ-
ent scales of organisation (ranging from the expansion of international and
supra-national régimes through national and regional public-private partner-
ships to more localised networks of power and decision-making). Although
this trend is often taken to imply a diminution in state capacities, it could well
enhance its power to secure its interests and, indeed, provide states with a
new (or expanded) role in the meta-governance (or overall co-ordination) of
different governance régimes and mechanisms.28
Interest in governance is sometimes linked to the question of ‘failed’ and
‘rogue’ states. All states fail in certain respects and normal politics is an impor-
tant mechanism for learning from, and adapting to, failure. In contrast, ‘failed
states’ lack the capacity to reinvent or reorient their activities in the face of
recurrent state failure in order to maintain ‘normal political service’ in domes-
tic policies. The discourse of ‘failed states’ is often used to stigmatise some
régimes as part of inter-state as well as domestic politics. Similarly, ‘rogue
state’ serves to denigrate states whose actions are considered by hegemonic
or dominant states to threaten the prevailing international order. Moreover,
according to some radical critics, the USA itself has been the worst rogue state
for many years.29
Closely linked to this interest in government, governance, and meta-gover-
nance is a tendency for a Marxist rapprochement with Foucauldian work on
28
Messner 1998; Slaughter 2004; Zeitlin and Pochet 2005.
29
For example Blum 2001; Chomsky 2001.
governmentality – prompted in part by the later Foucault’s growing interest

in the role of the state as a site for the strategic codication of power rela-
tions and his work on governmentality as a distinctive type of statecraft that
complements more micro- and meso-level forms of disciplinary power. In
contrast to his earlier hostility to theorising the state and his emphasis on the
micro-physics of power, Foucault turned to raison d’état, statecraft, and state
projects. Combined with his heuristically powerful analytics of power, this
has provided the basis for research that synthesises in different ways Marxist
and Foucauldian themes.
There is also interest in the changing scales of politics. While some theorists
are inclined to see the crisis of the national state as displacing the primary
scale of political organisation and action to either the global or the regional
scale, others suggest that there has been a relativisation of scale. For, whereas
the national state provided the primary scale of political organisation in the
Fordist period of postwar European and North-American boom, the current
after-Fordist period is marked by the dispersion of political and policy issues
across different scales of organisation, with none of them clearly primary.
This in turn poses problems about securing the coherence of action across dif-
ferent scales. This has prompted interest in the novelty of the European Union
as a new state form, the re-emergence of empire as an organising principle,
the prospects for a global state.30
The state as a social relation and the ‘strategic-relational

approach’
An innovative approach to the state and state-building has been developed by
Jessop and others in an attempt to overcome various forms of one-sidedness
in the Marxist and state-centred traditions. His ‘strategic-relational approach’
builds on Poulantzas’s claim that the state is a social relation. For, ‘like “capi-
tal”, it is . . . a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of
such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed within
the State in a necessarily specic form’).31 Jessop suggested that this claim can be
reformulated as follows: the state is not a thing but a social relation between
30
See, for example, Beck and Grande 2005; Brenner 2004; Shaw 2000.
31
Poulantzas 1978, pp. 128–9, italics in original.
428 • Bob Jessop
people mediated through their relation to things;32 or, again, the state is not
a subject but a social relation between subjects mediated through their rela-
tion to state capacities. More precisely, this approach interprets and explains
state power (not the state apparatus) as a form-determined condensation of the
changing balance of forces in political and politically-relevant struggle. It fol-
lows that the exercise and effectiveness of state power is a contingent product
of a changing balance of political forces located within and beyond the state
and that this balance is conditioned by the specic institutional structures and
procedures of the state apparatus as embedded in the wider political system
and environing societal relations.
Thus a strategic-relational analysis would examine how a given state appa-
ratus may privilege some actors, some identities, some strategies, some spa-
tial and temporal horizons, and some actions over others; and the ways, if
any, in which political actors (individual and/or collective) take account of
this differential privileging by engaging in ‘strategic-context’ analysis when
choosing a course of action. This approach also introduces a distinctive evo-
lutionary perspective into the analysis of the state and state power in order
to discover how the generic evolutionary mechanisms of selection, variation,
and retention may operate in specic conditions to produce relatively coher-
ent and durable structures and strategies. This implies that opportunities for
re-organising specic structures and for strategic reorientation are themselves
subject to structurally-inscribed strategic selectivities and therefore have path-
dependent as well as path-shaping aspects. For example, it may be necessary
to pursue strategies over several spatial and temporal horizons of action and
to mobilise different sets of social forces in different contexts to eliminate or
modify specic constraints and opportunities linked to particular state struc-
tures. Moreover, as such strategies are pursued, political forces will be more
or less well-equipped to learn from their experiences and to adapt their con-
duct to changing conjunctures. However, because subjects are never unitary,
never fully aware of the conditions of strategic action, never fully equipped
to realise their preferred strategies, and may always meet opposition from
actors pursuing other strategies or tactics, failure is an ever-present possibil-
ity. This approach is intended as a heuristic and many analyses of the state
32
Cf. Marx 1976, Chapter 23.
can be easily re-interpreted in strategic-relational terms even if they do not

explicitly adopt them or equivalent terms.33
To translate this account into concrete-complex analyses of specic politi-
cal periods, stages, or conjunctures requires the study of three interrelated
moments: (1) the state’s historical and/or formal constitution as a complex
institutional ensemble with a spatio-temporally specic pattern of ‘structur-
ally-inscribed strategic selectivity’; (2) the historical and substantive organi-
sation and conguration of political forces in specic conjunctures and their
strategies, including their capacity to reect on and respond to the strategic
selectivities inscribed in the state apparatus as a whole; and (3) the inter-
action of these forces on this strategically-selective terrain and/or at a dis-
tance therefrom as they pursue immediate goals or seek to alter the balance of
forces and/or to transform the state and its basic strategic selectivities.
33
Jessop 2002, 2007.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Marxism and Theories of Racism
Robert Carter
It is a commonplace now to observe the declin-

ing inuence of Marxism on the social sciences in
Europe and America, its armies in dismal retreat
before the advancing forces of postmodernism and
relativism, its Enlightenment weaponry – the belief
in the application of reason to human affairs and in
the pursuit of objective knowledge, the commitment
to social transformation – scattered and blunted. In
the local disciplinary battleeld constituted by the
sociological analysis of racism and ethnicity, casual-
ties have been particularly high: a cursory internet
search reveals the extent to which Marxist analy-
ses of racism have fallen into desuetude, a striking
contrast to the situation of twenty years ago. I shall
suggest that there are three principal reasons for the
waning interest within Western universities over the
past decade or so in Marxist accounts of racism and
ethnicity. Firstly, Marxist theories have rarely chal-
lenged the notion of race itself and, in so far as they
have failed to do so, they have reproduced many of
the shortcomings associated with its use in orthodox
social science. Marxists have largely failed to iden-
tify a distinctively Marxian view of the phenomena
of race and ethnicity. This is ironic in view of the
second reason, namely the advance of postmodern-
ism. Whilst it can be acknowledged that the term
432 • Robert Carter
postmodernism covers a wide range of sympathies, in the social sciences its

most far-reaching effect has been seen in the rise of a species of relativism and
a corresponding ‘loss of nerve’, to use Goldthorpe’s expression,1 in the epis-
temic claims of social research. Marxism, with its concern with social trans-
formation and its commitment to scientic, materialist theory, has thus found
itself increasingly peripheral to the academic social sciences, which in turn
often regard Marxism as discredited or anachronistic. Finally, political devel-
opments, particularly the global pre-eminence of US interests since 9/11, the
‘War on Terror’, and the response to these developments by those who are the
targets of US policy, have shifted the interest of sociologists to issues of iden-
tity politics, multiculturalism and religion, topics for which many consider
Marxism to be ill-suited because of its putative unconcern with matters of pol-
itics, subjectivity and ideology. I shall deal with each of these reasons in turn
before concluding with an assessment of Marxism’s resources for responding
to them.
1. Marxism and concepts of race

Classical gures in Marxism such as Marx and Engels, Kautsky, Luxemburg,
and Trotsky unsurprisingly wrote little that addressed specically the issue
of racism (although they had a good deal to say about imperialism, colonial-
ism and nationalism and the ways in which these relations affected the views
held by the working classes of the imperial states of the colonised; Marx and
Engels’s discussion of British rule in India and Ireland are two cases in point).
The interest of Marxists in the analysis of racism only emerges as signicant
in the 1930s and 1940s and principally in response to the efforts of black
Americans to challenge racism and discrimination in the USA. W.E.B. DuBois
(1868–1963) and O.C. Cox (1901–74) were key contributors to the development
of a distinctively Marxian view of racism. An early anti-racist activist and
co-founder of the NAACP, DuBois’s views were decisively shifted towards
Marxism by the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and his subsequent visit to the
USSR in 1927 (although he did not join the US Communist Party until 1961, at
the age of 93). He became a powerful critic of imperialism, arguing that a nec-
essary condition for proletarian revolution was the uprising of the exploited
1
Goldthorpe 2000.
Marxism and Theories of Racism • 433
classes in Africa, South America and the Far East. For DuBois, the problem of
what he called the ‘color line’ remained the greatest obstacle facing the world
Communist movement; indeed, the failure to transcend this line would be
catastrophic for the future of humankind:
The proletariat of the world consists not simply of white European and
American workers but overwhelmingly of the dark workers of Asia, Africa,
the islands of the sea, and South and Central America. These are the ones
who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury and extravagance.
It is the rise of these people that is the rise of the world.2
Unlike DuBois, Cox never became a member of the Communist Party, but his
work on capitalism and racism, particularly Caste, Class and Race rst published
in 1948, was highly inuential. For Cox, racism functions as the rationalisa-
tion or ideology of capitalist exploitation, with the capitalist using racism to
keep labour freely exploitable. Racism and colour prejudice, for Cox, is not
simply an antipathy towards others based on somatic features, but ‘rests basi-
cally upon a calculated and concerted determination of a white ruling class to
keep peoples of color and their resources exploitable’.3 Signicantly, the func-
tion of racism in constraining the conditions under which the exploited class
labours also imparts to it a certain autonomy since racism becomes an emer-
gent cultural resource such that ‘both exploiters and exploited for the most
part are born heirs to it.’ Cox’s model is therefore not an example of a Marxism
in which superstructural forms (such as racism) are merely epiphenomenal
reections of the economic base. The starting point for an understanding of
racism remains the class relations of capitalism, but only the starting point,
since racism once established becomes a contextual condition of action for
subsequent social actors, shaping their plans, alignments and ambitions and
thus inuencing class formation.
Nevertheless, Cox’s model is not without difculties. To begin with it
assumes that the capitalist class as a whole benet from racism, a claim that
might be queried not only for its assumption of a unitary class with a homo-
geneous (and identiable) set of interests, but also for the presumption that
racism necessarily benets this class. Partly as a consequence of this view, Cox
2
DuBois 1939, p. 54.
3
Cox 1972, p. 214
argued that the ruling class was the only beneciary of racism; the working
class had no investment in racism as an ideology since it divided them against
themselves and ssured their unity in the face of ruling class oppression.
However, working-class racism remained an indubitable fact of US politi-
cal life and so Cox found himself compelled to adopt a ‘false-consciousness’
approach as a means of explaining the presence of something which, at least
in Cox’s terms, operated clearly against the interests of the working class.
Racism was seen as inauthentic to the working class, something externally
imposed by the ideological dominance of the ruling class. This was not only
sociologically unpersuasive, but it discouraged serious consideration of rac-
ism within the working class, since the real sources of such racism were held
to be the ruling class and its functional need to manage the conditions of
labour exploitation.
Although I have argued against regarding Cox’s analysis as crudely reduc-
tionist, it does illustrate some of the shortcomings of Marxist approaches to
racism. Moreover, his analysis, with its concentration on the social relations
of the workplace, offers little scope for exploring racism in other contexts or
considering its connections with other forms of social division, such as gender
and religion, which may not be primarily workplace-based. Despite the rec-
ognition of racism as an emergent cultural form, Cox himself only intermit-
tently pursued its implications. Others have been more consistent.
2. Gramsci, hegemony and the politics of racism

In developing his notion of hegemony, Gramsci recognised the critical role of
ideas in social action. He insisted that the dominant class in modern capitalist
societies ruled as much by consent as it did by coercion and that this was in
signicant measure attributable to the limited ideational resources available
to the dominated. These limits were secured through obvious means such as
widespread censorship and restricted access to education, but also indirectly
through the persistence of ‘common sense’ as a source of meaning in every-
day life. In seeking to account for their experience of the social world, people
routinely drew on a reservoir of traditional ideas that directly or indirectly
reafrmed the class hierarchies and other social divisions of capitalist society
and served to secure the ideological hegemony of the ruling class.
Nevertheless, there were, for Gramsci, important practical limits to the
dominance, or hegemony, of ruling-class ideas. Firstly, such hegemony is in
a signicant sense the product of a cultural and political effort on the part of
the ruling class and its intellectuals – hegemony has to be brought about and,
once brought about, it has to be maintained against, for instance, radical crit-
ics and oppositional ideas generally. Secondly, the limits to any hegemonic
project are set by the systemic imperative to reproduce the conditions of capi-
tal accumulation. So although hegemony is primarily cultural and political, it
nevertheless has to sustain the legitimacy of a particular set of capitalist eco-
nomic relations; these relations have to carry a practical legitimacy in every-
day terms for both the rulers and the ruled (both of whom, but for different
reasons, need to be assured that exploitation and inequality are the necessary
basis of economic growth and expansion).
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony introduces a more dynamic view of the rela-
tion between capitalism and ideas, one in which the realms of culture and
politics are more loosely connected to economic relations than in the work
of the classical Marxists and of DuBois and Cox. Hegemony is not secured
in an automatic sense by the social relations of production; instead it is the
outcome of political and ideological struggles between dominant and subor-
dinate groups. Not only does this imply that hegemony is unstable, but also
that, in so far as cultural and political struggles are discursively construed,
social groups and collectivities may understand their political interests in a
variety of ways. The older notion of a homogeneous bourgeoisie confronting
an equally homogeneous working class is undermined; indeed, the need for
hegemony itself arises precisely from the inability of the social relations of
production to generate a coherent and unifying understanding of class inter-
ests and a corresponding basis for group unity.
By stressing the cultural and ideological basis of collective organisation
and mobilisation, Gramsci initiates an important shift of emphasis in Marx-
ist theory. The concern with the functional role of ideas in the maintenance
of capitalism (through the misrepresentation of class inequalities as ‘race
inequalities’, for example) moves aside in favour of an interest in how people
make sense of the social world at the level of lived experience and how their
resources for doing so may be organised by the politically powerful.
It was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) under Stu-
art Hall that began systematically to apply Gramsci’s insights to the analysis
of racism. However, these insights were powerfully mediated in the UK by
the work of the French Marxist, Louis Althusser. Althusser’s own reading of
Gramsci’s work was inuenced by the structuralism in vogue in the 1960s and
early 1970s.4 Deriving from the work on language carried out by the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism’s central principle was that cul-
tural forms, belief systems and ideologies can best be understood as systemic
wholes, whose meaning was generated by their immanent structural rela-
tions. This led Althusser to insist on a fundamental distinction between sci-
ence and ideology; Marxism itself becomes a scientic analysis of capitalism
as a system. One consequence of this is the diminished role of social agency,
exemplied in Althusser’s stiffening of Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony into
the more deterministic notion of ‘ideological interpellation’. In this process
of interpellation, individuals are transformed into particular sorts of human
subjects (for example, as ‘men’ or ‘women’, as parents, as consumers or as
‘part of the community’) through recognising themselves in forms of ideo-
logical representation (rather in the way that adverts for cars appeal to us as
a particular type of consumer or ideas about nationhood appeal to us as a
certain type of person). For Althusser, the reproduction of society is as much
about ideology as it is about economics,5 and this was to be a central element
in the approach developed by Stuart Hall and his colleagues.
3. Hall, Gilroy and the poststructuralists

Policing the Crisis, which was published in 1978, sought to develop an account
of the rise of an authoritarian politics of immigration and ‘race’. Hall and his
colleagues at CCCS argued that a ‘moral panic’ about the crime of ‘mugging’
was being used to secure a new form of political hegemony in 1970s Britain,
one in which ideas about race were a central feature. The crisis of hegemony,
in the CCCS view, had been brought about by the social dislocations gener-
ated by the efforts of post war British capitalism to adjust to a post-Fordist
reorganisation of the global economy. The CCCS approach represented a sig-
nicant advance on earlier Marxist formulations of the relationship between
class relations and racism: not only did it retain the customary strengths of
Marxist analyses – the emphasis on the systemic, international character of
capitalism and on the political consequences of class conict – but it also
4
Dews 1987; Benton 1977.
5
Joseph 2006.
recognised the key role played by ideational resources in shaping forms of

hegemony. Thus the key reworking of what was a systemic crisis of British
capitalism, primarily arising from adjustment in the context of decolonisa-
tion to a new global order, into a political and moral crisis about ‘race’ was in
considerable measure facilitated by an antecedent body of ideas about race,
colour and colonialism which were a legacy of British imperial rule.
Here then was a Marxist account in which ideology was accorded a key
role. Moreover, following Gramsci, the emphasis was on the effects of ideol-
ogy not just at the level of social classes and the state, but at the level of popu-
lar consciousness. The powerful signier ‘race’ was able to gather together a
bundle of ill-formed and inconsistent notions about somatics and nationhood
and fashion them into a powerful political commitment to a ‘white Britain’.
Margaret Thatcher’s ‘populist authoritarianism’ exploited this to widen her
appeal to working-class voters in the face of her advocacy of neo-liberal eco-
nomic policy likely to have a severe impact on working-class living standards.
Yet this account still left unspecied the processes and mechanisms by means
of which a ‘crisis of capitalism’ (and it was not obvious in what sense capital-
ism was in a ‘crisis’, or even what sort of crisis this might be) came to be neces-
sarily expressed in terms of ‘race’.
Unsurprisingly in view of this, Policing the Crisis left an ambiguous legacy.
On the one hand, it gave rise to a view of the concept ‘race’ as expressive of
all those forms of politics that were organised or construed around notions
of race. Paul Gilroy’s work6 is probably the most well-known using this view
of race. One of the chief defects of Gilroy’s approach has been to further the
use of race as an analytical category within social research (although his more
recent work has indicated his own unease with concepts of race as analyti-
cal categories); this in turn has inhibited the thoroughgoing critique of it that
has hampered the development of a compelling Marxist account of the rela-
tionship between racism and capitalism. On the other hand, Policing the Cri-
sis encouraged a concern with the ideological, but one strongly inuenced
by Althusser’s notion of interpellation. Interestingly, this led to a disregard
for the specicity of notions of race similar to that of the Gilroy position:
the historical content of race ideas was less important than the power of
6
Gilroy 1987, 1993, 2001.
such ideas to create particular types of human subject. More signicantly,

it encouraged an exiguous view of human subjectivity which was to leave
Marxism ill-equipped to respond to the concerns about identities that
emerged in the late 1990s.
These and other points were raised by a consistent Marxist critic of the
CCCS, Robert Miles. In a series of writings during the late 1970s and the 1980s,
Miles7 uncompromisingly insisted that the concept of race was an ideological,
not an analytical category, and that its use in social research and in Marx-
ism ensured its social reproduction whilst generating obfuscatory theory. In
any case, argued Miles, Marxism (or political analysis more generally) did
not need a notion of race; the object of analysis should be racism. Against
the CCCS, Miles argued for a restricted concept of racism – as an ideology
deploying a concept of race – and insisted that the relationship between racist
ideologies and social action was not straightforward. So, for instance, empiri-
cally demonstrable inequality of outcome, in say, housing allocation or levels
of unemployment, could not be interpreted as necessarily being the result of
racism. Miles also favoured the use of the term racialisation to refer to the
process ‘by which meaning is attributed to particular biological features of
human beings, as a result of which individuals may be assigned to a general
category of persons which reproduces itself biologically’.8 Thus, black work-
ers in the 1980s were characterised by Miles as a racialised fraction of the
working class, an indication of the extent to which Miles himself had been
inuenced by the same structuralist tradition as the CCCS, albeit by the work
of Poulantzas rather than Althusser.
The Miles-CCCS debate dominated academic discussion of these topics dur-
ing the 1980s in the UK, (the extent of its impact elsewhere is less certain). The
axial principle of the discussion was the relationship between class relations
and racism and it held great interest to Marxists because of this. The work
of Balibar and Wallerstein represented another approach to this relationship.
The inuence of Althusser is evident in the move away from considering the
development of capitalism within a mode of production to considering it in
the context of a social formation. An important consequence of doing this is
7
Miles 1982, 1987, 1989, 1993.
8
Banton 1998, p. 184
that all aspects of class struggle, including those previously seen as ‘merely’
superstructural, must be regarded as playing a determining role in the con-
guration of the relations of production. For Balibar and Wallerstein, this
entails attention not only to the organisation of the labour process and the
reproduction of labour-power itself broadly understood, but also the cultural
formation of the labouring classes. And here, under the inuence of Foucault,
they move beyond notions of ideology as understood in earlier Marxist work
to insist that
The very identity of the actors depends upon the process of formation and
maintenance of hegemony. . . . The universalism of the dominant ideology
is therefore rooted at a much deeper level than the world expansion of
capital and even than the need to procure common rules of action for all
those who manage that expansion. It is rooted in the need to construct, in
spite of the antagonism between them, an ideological ‘world’ shared by
exploiters and exploited alike.9
Racism is a central element of this ideological world.

Viewing racism in this way enables Balibar and Wallerstein to loosen pro-
ductively the relationship between politics and economics. ‘For my part’,
notes Balibar, ‘I do not believe that racism is the expression of class structure;
rather, it is a typical form of political alienation inherent in class struggles in
the eld of nationalism, in particularly ambivalent forms’.10 So this is to be
a particular form of loosening, an extending of the leash; the leash itself is
kept rmly in place by two other claims which place Balibar and Wallerstein’s
approach rmly in the camp of structuralist Marxism. Firstly, racism (along
with sexism) retains its functional role within capitalism:
if one wants to maximize the accumulation of capital, it is necessary

simultaneously to minimize the costs of production (hence the costs of labour
power) and minimize the costs of political disruption (hence minimize – not
eliminate, because one cannot eliminate – the protests of the labour force).
Racism is the magic formula that reconciles these objectives.11
9
10
11
Implicit in this formulation is a second claim, characteristic of many struc-

turalist-Marxist analyses of racism, that racism has an agency of its own: it
‘inscribes itself in practices . . . in discourses and representations’,12 ‘racism sees
itself . . .’,13 and ‘racism constantly induces . . .’14 (emphases added). However, the
notion that racism magically works to minimise the costs of production and of
political disruption is undermined by these authors’ own subtle accounts of
the tensions between racism and nationalism, and of the ways in which these
are shaped by people’s historical experiences and by developments within
global capitalism.
Within the space of ve years or so, this concern with class relations in
debates about racism and ethnicity had receded, erased by the rise of post-
modernist and poststructuralist concerns with identity, subjectivity and dis-
course. One effect of the Miles-CCCS debate lingered: the hesitancy about
using the term race, expressed in the collar of scare quotes which usually
accompanied its appearance in texts.
4. Postmodernism and poststructuralism: race triumphant

The concerns with ideology and hegemony that characterised the work of
the CCCS were taken up in a political context that saw a growing disillu-
sionment amongst academics and researchers with Marxism. In the study
of racism this disillusionment took the form of a closer concern with social
and personal identity and the effort to understand the apparent continuing
appeal of ideas about race, ethnicity, nationalism and so on. Added force was
given to this concern by a series of political conicts – in many of the states of
the former Soviet Union, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and else-
where – which were represented by many Western commentators as ethnic
conicts. Consequently, Marxism found itself sidelined as academic interest
shifted to the question of racial and ethnic identities and cognate themes
such as multiculturalism, religion and democracy.
12
13
14
Ibid.
A key feature of this shift was the unwillingness of many Marxists to exam-
ine critically notions of race and ethnicity, which made it difcult to develop
a distinctively Marxist position on these matters. For example, Callinicos’s
1993 account of the relationship between ‘race and class’ does not go beyond
a reworking of Cox with the addition of the more recent view that races are
‘invented’ or constructed. Yet this latter insight is not incorporated theoreti-
cally into an analysis of racism. Instead, racism is
not a matter of the ideas in people’s heads, but of oppression, of systematic

inequalities in power and life chances stemming from an exploitive [sic]
social structure. . . . Revolutionary Marxists . . . regard racism as a product
of capitalism which serves to reproduce this social system by dividing the
working class.15
This usefully outlines the core elements of what we might term the orthodox-
Marxist theory of racism and class relations: racism is not simply an ideo-
logical phenomenon but refers also to structural inequalities; it is a product of
capitalism and therefore its removal is dependent on the removal of capital-
ism; and its chief function is to divide the working class. Ethnicity only gures
here as a modern mutation of racism, employing a ‘rhetoric of cultural differ-
ence’ to the same ends of justifying discrimination on the basis of characteris-
tics held to be inherent in the oppressed group.16
This is also the case with the work of Sivanandan. In several books,17 but
more signicantly in the journal Race and Class, he has elaborated a distinctive
neo-Marxist position that has consistently sought to link racism with globali-
sation and contemporary politics18 whilst trying to explore the ideological and
political tensions to which racism gives rise. Sivanandan thus provides a more
nuanced political account of contemporary forms of racism than is sometimes
found in Marxism, but his use of concepts such as race and ethnicity remains
indistinguishable from that of Callinicos.
One consequence of this inattention to concepts of race and ethnicity in the
orthodox-Marxist approach is that it has allowed the emergence of a radical
race perspective to go unchallenged. There are several aspects to this new
15
16
17
Sivanandan 1991, 1981.
18
Sivanandan 2006.
politics of race, but its general position is to emphasise the social reality of
beliefs about race and ethnicity, and on the basis that therefore ‘race matters’,
to defend forms of group politics based on notions of racial or ethnic identity.
There is a serious danger here that notions of race come to be entwined with
notions of culture and the unalterability of race comes to be the unalterabil-
ity of cultures too. Since cultures (and races), in this view, exist more or less
independently of politics, a robust notion of social agency is no longer pos-
sible. Theorists inuenced by postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas have
added to this extinction of agency through the notion of racism as a discourse.
Let me illustrate these claims with some examples.
The work of Goldberg19 exploits the idea, shared with Callinicos, in which
racism refers both to an ideology and to social practices, but exploits it in a
distinctly un-Marxist direction by identifying what he terms ‘the racial state’.
In Goldberg’s account, race is a product of modernity and its need to account
for, to know and to control ‘Otherness’; in modernity ‘what is invested with
racial meaning, what becomes increasingly racially conceived, is the threat,
the external, the unknown, the outside’.20 Race is also a form of crisis manage-
ment, a means of containing the threat of the diverse and the different:
The racial state, the state’s denition in racial terms, thus becomes the racial
characterization of the apparatus, the projects, the institutions for managing
this threat, for keeping it out or ultimately containing it . . .21
This depiction rests on a commonsense understanding of race, and as such

reproduces it as a reied form, but it also conceives of race as a practice, as
something done to some people by others. (It is always possible to do this
with race precisely because the meaning of the term is so indeterminate). The
racial state becomes a behemoth stubbornly resistant to political intervention
and change:
In states that are racially conceived, ordered, administered, and regulated,

the racial state could be said to be everywhere. And simultaneously seen
nowhere. It (invisibly) denes almost every relation, contours virtually
all intercourse. It fashions not just the said and the sayable, the done and
19
Goldberg 2002.
20
Goldberg 2002, p. 23.
21
Goldberg 2002, p. 34
doable, possibilities and impermissibilities, but penetrates equally the scope

and quality, content and character of social silences and presumptions. The
state in its racial reach and expression is thus at once super-visible, in form
and force and thoroughly invisible in its osmotic infusion into the everyday,
its penetration into common sense, its pervasion (not to mention perversion)
of the warp and weave of the social fabric.22
On this view, as Goldberg acknowledges, the racial state is as much ‘a state

or condition of being as it is a state of governance’. Such a state is the normal
form of the modern state, according to Goldberg, and leads him to identify
current global arrangements as a ‘racist world order’.23 Here, the term race
(and its cognates racial, racism) has lost specic meaning; once race is every-
where (with the racial state) it is, of course, nowhere since it is impossible to
identify. The political consequences of this position are dire: should anyone
be foolhardy enough to challenge this ‘super-visible . . . and thoroughly invis-
ible’ mammoth, their chances of succeeding must be accounted meagre.
There are less malign analyses drawing on unreective, commonsense
meanings of race, particularly in the USA. Three perspectives have domi-
nated recent work: Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality and white-
ness studies. Each in their different ways rests on an uncritical use of the
concept of race.
CRT emerged in the 1990s from a critique of legal theory in the US, which, it
was claimed, had neglected questions of race. Using the concept in much the
same fashion as Callinicos, it drew the opposite conclusion to him, uncompro-
misingly insisting that race should be at the fore of legal and social analysis
and that racial liberation should be the most signicant objective of emancipa-
tory struggle.24
To some extent, the epistemology of CRT drew upon another theoretical
development, that of intersectionality. The notion of intersectionalty had its
origins in feminist responses to the assumption often made, in politics as well
as social science, that the subject of history was the white male. This concep-
tualisation of human experience, feminists argued, was one which did not
recognise or acknowledge the distinctiveness of women’s experiences, and
22
23
24
Delgado & Stefancic 1999.
especially the ways in which gender differences powerfully shaped these

experiences. This positing of a distinctively women’s experience created the
opportunity for further reection on the particularity of people’s experience
and the consequences of this for their self-understanding or identity. In par-
ticular, writers such as DuBois25 and Zora Neale Hurston26 identied and
deliberated upon the impact of racism on one’s sense of self.
In the 1990s, a number of feminist writers developed these insights,27 argu-
ing that theories of racial inequality that fail to incorporate gender into their
frameworks were insufcient for understanding the lives of women who suf-
fer from racism (just as for CRT theories of legal inequality that fail to incorpo-
rate race are insufcient). However, the emphasis on the intersection of race,
class, and gender moves beyond simply including race in research on gender
or including gender in studies of race. Intersectional approaches maintain
that gender and race are not independent analytical categories that can sim-
ply be added together.28 Rather, intersectionality theorists argue that ‘race is
“gendered” and gender is “racialized”, so that race and gender fuse to cre-
ate unique experiences and opportunities for all groups – not just women of
color’.29 Class, in this perspective, is similarly ‘raced’ and ‘gendered’.
The emphasis on identity and self-understanding central to both CRT and
to intersectionality theorists is shared by those who have advocated the study
of whiteness. An early inuence was the work of Kovel,30 but the most well-
known contribution has been Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness, originally pub-
lished in 1991 and republished as a revised edition in 1999. Roediger explicitly
considers the relationship of Marxism and racism, arguing that Marxist histo-
rians have been seriously neglectful of: ‘the role of race in dening how white
workers look not only at Blacks but at themselves’;31 ‘the pervasiveness of
race’; and ‘the relationship between race and ethnicity’.32 Marxists, in short,
have largely ignored the ‘white problem’, namely ‘why so many workers
dene themselves as white’.
25
DuBois 1973.
26
Neale Hurston 1991.
27
See, for example Collins 1999, Essed 1991, Glenn 1999.
28
King 1989, Weber 2001.
29
Browne and Misra 2003, p. 488.
30
Kovel 1984.
31
Roediger 1991, p. 5.
32
Roediger 1991, p. 6.
Roediger’s work raises some interesting and difcult questions for Marx-
ists,33 but, as I have already indicated, Marxist interpretations of race, rac-
ism and ethnicity have made themselves vulnerable to these charges partly
because of their foot-shooting reluctance to critically engage with the concept
of race. Predictably perhaps, Roediger describes some recent Marxist efforts
to rethink the commitment to the notion of race as a ‘retreat from race and
class’.34
5. Can Marxism explain racism?

Despite the neglect into which Marxist analyses have slipped, in this conclud-
ing section I want to argue that Marxism has the resources for a plausible
account of racism and ethnicity. However, in order to realise these, it would
need to resolve a number of key questions. For expository purposes, these
may be loosely grouped under three headings: the concepts of race and eth-
nicity; the relationship between racism, ethnicity and class relations; and the
role of social agency.
a) The concepts of race and ethnicity
Whilst Marxists continue to use these terms, they will nd if difcult to escape
the theoretical muddles characteristic of much analysis of racism and ethnicity
and will fail to exploit the distinctiveness of Marxist theory. The case against
the use of the concept race in social science is well established35 and it need
only be summarised briey here.
The central difculty with the term race as a social-science concept is that
its referent is indeterminate. This does not imply that that all social-scientic
concepts must have a referent that is objective, in the sense that there is no dis-
pute about what is meant when the term is used; after all, terms such as social
class, bureaucracy, rationalisation or globalisation are used in a variety of
ways by social scientists. Rather, to become part of the conceptual repertoire
33
For an excellent discussion of, and response to, these see Allen 2002
34
Roediger 2006.
35
See, for example, Miles 1989, 1993; Banton 1998, Carter 2000, Darder and Torres
2004, Hirschman 2004.
of social science, a term must have, to use Desrosières’s phrase,36 a ‘mean-

ing that holds’, that is to say, a meaning defensible within the vocabulary
of social science itself (does this concept improve upon existing ones by, for
instance, formulating problems in a new way or by exposing other concepts
as partial?) and one that refers to a feature, or features, of the social world
that cannot be grasped other than through this concept. The concept of race
fails on both counts: its origins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science
to refer to biologically distinguishable human groupings renders it unsuited
to the language of social science, whilst the discrediting of its ontological
referent – races of human beings – leaves it without an object. The case of
ethnicity as a concept is perhaps less straightforward. Nevertheless, writers
such as Banton, Fenton and Brubaker37 are surely right to argue that, like the
concept of race, it has no consistent referent and serves only to obscure socio-
logical explanation.
The difculty of employing a concept of race in social research is that it is
impossible to formulate a research question using it that is capable of being
answered. No one, as Michael Banton38 has remarked, has ever seen another
person’s race (just as no one has seen another person’s ethnicity), yet research
is routinely formulated on the basis that race or ethnicity are social variables
whose meaning is sufciently stable for them to be investigated.
Against this, I want to suggest that race and ethnicity be regarded as con-
cepts used in the description of human social differences; both are constitu-
ents of various propositions or claims about the world made by lay persons
and sociologists. Whether the concepts are a signicant constituent of such
propositions or claims, and whether they are explicitly formulated, will often
be matters for empirical judgement. Such judgements are difcult, for a vari-
ety of reasons: people frequently disguise their motives, mostly intentionally
but sometimes not; they may not be able to formulate their ideas in a readily
accessible way; and the relation between behavioural outcome and motiva-
tional intent is commonly opaque.
These empirical difculties notwithstanding, race and ethnicity are forms
of social description; they are, if you like, social constructions, in the sense
36
Desrosières 1998.
37
Banton 1998, 2000; Fenton 2003; Brubaker 2004.
38
Banton 1988.
that they are the products of human efforts to describe the world. Like all
such products, ideas about race and ethnicity have the potential to become an
ideational resource: once they become a part of society’s circuits of commu-
nication (as ideas of race did during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)
they become available to social actors with access to those circuits, who may
deploy them in pursuit of a range of vested interests. In the course of doing
this, people may work such ideas up to become elements of formal proposi-
tions (‘black people are inferior to white people’, ‘foreigners should not have
jobs in our country’); these, in turn, may be elaborated into world views such
as Nazism or ethno-nationalism (and world views themselves afford all sorts
of ideational opportunities); and once discursively established in this way,
such ideas may become powerful ways of ‘making up people’.39 In this way,
racism, ethnicism, culturalism may all have material effects, becoming, for
example, the basis of institutional arrangements, of legal enactments, of rules
for hiring and ring employees and so forth. Racism may here develop into
an axis of social differentiation (but note: one that requires racists to ensure its
maintenance and reproduction).
None of the above claims, it seems to me, are incompatible with a Marxist
view of ideology and consciousness that stresses the central role of human
agency and which regards such agency as the crucial mediator of structural
forms and forces. However, they do insist upon a particular view of social
description and especially the role of such descriptions in the vocabularies
of social science (and Marxism, in so far as it makes claims to be a scientic
account of the social world). This means abandoning the concepts of race and
ethnicity as sociological concepts.40 Doing so allows a reformulation of the rela-
tionship between racism and class relations.
b) The relationship between racism, ethnicity and class relations
Marxism possesses a distinctive resource for challenging conventional socio-

logical accounts of ‘race and class’, namely the analytical dualism of structure
and agency present in its more dynamic versions. Briey, Marxism, in argu-
ing that human beings make history but not in circumstances of their own
39
Hacking 2002.
40
This is emphatically not to dismiss their centrality to many lay accounts, although
see Fenton 2006 for a sceptical view.
choosing, acknowledges a distinction between the contexts in which people

nd themselves and the efforts of those people to change or reproduce those
contexts. The forces shaping these contexts are the social relations of produc-
tion; these are emergent from human social practice but are irreducible to
individuals and subject to only partial discursive penetration (as Marx him-
self noted, if the world were transparent there would be no need for science).
On this account, the social relations of production are antecedent to particular
historical individuals and dene the context within which all forms of social
inequality are generated. Here, ‘race’, or, more properly, racism, cannot have
an equivalence: the social relations of production refers to emergent, and rela-
tively enduring forms of social relation; racism to ideas and ideology, to the
forms of thought developed in response to, and in the effort to manage, these
social relations. Class relations and racism refer to different types of social
object.
Ironically, the commitment of some Marxists to the notion of race has muted
the force of these insights and has encouraged the use of reied categories
such as ‘ethnic group’ and ‘race’. Yet the insights are a powerful source for a
post-race social science. Let me give one example, using the work of Sayer,41
to illustrate the point.
Distinguishing analytically between structure and agency allows each to
be considered as abstractions. Considering capitalism as an abstraction in this
way enables one to identify what is essential or necessary to capitalism for it
to be described as such, what minimal conditions need to be fullled for an
empirical case to be classied as capitalism (as opposed to, say, feudalism).
Conversely, this process also allows identication of those features that are
historically contingent to actually existing capitalism rather than a structural
necessity for it; they do not dene capitalism qua capitalism but are contin-
gently co-present for various reasons (such as pre-existing capitalist social
relations of production in the case of certain types of gender relations).
Sayer develops this distinction between necessary and contingent elements
to propose a further analytical distinction between what he terms ‘identity-
neutral’ and ‘identity-sensitive’ mechanisms. Identity-neutral mechanisms,
in Sayer’s terms, are those mechanisms whose operation is not necessarily
dependent upon any aspect of the identity of social actors. To be a police
41
Sayer 2005.
ofcer merely requires you to be over ve feet eight inches, it does not require
that you see yourself rst and foremost as a tall person; to labour in a factory
requires only that you have the necessary dexterity or experience to oper-
ate the machinery, it does not require that you be a woman or white or see
yourself as in the vanguard of the proletariat. Many forms of capitalist social
relations are indifferent to whatever identities individuals may cherish for
themselves. They are structural determinants in the sense that they are not
reducible to the wills of individual agents.
Identity-sensitive mechanisms, on the other hand, rest upon the identi-
cation of relevant identity attributes, excluding those who do not possess
them. Most forms of racist and sexist discrimination are identity-sensitive
mechanisms, where gender or colour (or language, religion, place of origin
and so on) either facilitate or disqualify one’s participation in certain types of
social relations or access to resources. Identity-neutral and identity-sensitive
mechanisms are everywhere in interaction, but their interdependence is only
contingent, a feature often overlooked in both class reductionist accounts of
inequality and in postmodern, identitarian ones. This ‘contingent co-presence
of identity-neutral and identity-sensitive mechanisms in determining inequal-
ities’ suggests that the causes of class and gender differences are radically
different, and that, though ‘economic relations are always socially embedded –
which in our society inevitably means in ways that are gendered, ‘raced’,
etc. – it does not follow that identity-neutral dimensions are not also present,
any more than the fact that birds can y means that gravity is suspended’.42
The distinction between identity-neutral and identity-sensitive mechanisms
is an important one for disentangling the confusion about ‘race and class’. Let
me draw out two pertinent implications.
Firstly, and importantly, the distinction strongly suggests that ‘. . . progress
in eliminating these cultural, identity-sensitive forms of domination and
exclusion need not wait upon nding a successor for capitalism’.43 Secondly,
whilst the subjective experience of class is not a necessary condition of the
(re)production of economic class in capitalism (though it contingently affects
its course), the subjective experiences of, and identication with, ‘being black’
or ‘being a woman’ are necessarily constitutive of ‘racial’ or gender differences
42
Sayer 2005, p. 87.
43
Sayer 2005, p. 89.
because such differences are ascriptive in character: ‘racism is a necessary

condition for the reproduction of ‘race’, but class-ism is not a necessary condi-
tion for the reproduction of class’.44 Racism requires racists; class relations do
not require class-ists.
Again, none of this is incompatible with Marxism, but such a nuanced
account is difcult once conventional notions of race or ethnicity are invoked.
As I have already argued, one of the major consequences of invoking these
categories is that race and ethnic groups come to be regarded as cultural pre-
givens, existing outside of politics. Instead of conceding this point, Marx-
ists should be advancing a political account of group formation, that is, an
account which sees groups as the products of the pursuit of interests within
social contexts. This is not instrumentalism, since interests here have a moral
or normative dimension – they have agential force only when they come to
be valued by people. In other words, to understand inequalities, domination,
competition and resistance we need to examine why they should matter to
people.
c) The question of agency
The questions of what matters to people and why are empirical ones, yet
often they are overlooked or assumed once terms such as race or ethnicity
are employed. Or rather, what matters to people is inferred from their race or
ethnic grouping or from their ‘whiteness’. Archer has referred to this strategy
as ‘the myth of cultural integration’,45 whereby culture is dened as a com-
munity of shared meanings, thus eliding the ‘community’ with the ‘mean-
ings’; to belong to this ethnic group or that racial group by denition meant
sharing certain meanings about what mattered, about how the world was to
be understood and so on. Culture and community are here regarded as mutu-
ally constitutive and this makes it exceedingly difcult to develop a political
account of group formation, let alone one that is sensitive to the complexi-
ties of human commitments and social action. Seeking a historical-materialist
understanding of human life entails rejecting the ‘myth of cultural integra-
tion’ and the assumptions associated with it. In particular, the notion that
44
Sayer 2005, p. 94.
45
Archer 1988, p. 99.
cultures exist more-or-less independently of what states and politics do

because they are in some sense prior to politics lends itself readily to the
treatment of groups as units in a world of their own making, not as actors
doing things to reproduce or modify social contexts. Such a view is inimical to
a radical or Marxist analysis of racism.
Conclusion
I have argued that the quiescence of Marxism within current debates in
Europe and the USA about racism, ethnicity, multiculturalism and identity is
due in some measure to its complicity with a sociological vocabulary of race.
This has not been a good deal for Marxism: on the one hand, it has seen race
concepts ourish within the ambit of various forms of postmodernism and
poststructuralism, encouraging ever denser forms of theoretical and political
mystication; and on the other, Marxism itself has frequently found itself at
odds with the sorts of dominant analyses which rely centrally on concepts of
race and ethnicity. As with class collaboration, so with conceptual collabora-
tion: the powerful always come out on top. In refusing to challenge concepts
of race and ethnicity, by taking them at their everyday, common-sensical,
face-value meaning, Marxists have forfeited one of their traditional strengths:
the development of a critical analysis of racism and ethnicity that encom-
passes both the world of empirical appearances and the generative relations
responsible for these. There are signs that the process of developing forms of
Marxism able to do this is under way,46 but it requires a critique of Marxism’s
use of concepts of race and ethnicity as much as a critique of sociology’s use
of them. And that is a tall order.
46
See, for example, work by Meyerson 2001, Virdee (forthcoming) and Darder and
Torres 2004.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Historical Materialism and International Relations
Frédérick Guillaume Dufour
Researchers from the historical-materialist tradition

made major contributions to the eld of international
relations during the last two decades. Among other
things, they contested the American eld of interna-
tional relations’ theoretical and historical account of
the concepts of balance of power, the sovereign state,
hegemony and the international division of labour. With
respect to the Marxist tradition, contemporary his-
torical materialism seeks to come to terms with the
problematic character of techno-deterministic expla-
nations, of teleological conceptions of history and of
functionalist economism. Meanwhile, strategies to
address these issues are not consensual. My survey
of these contributions and achievements will focus
on the inuence and legacy of two theoretical trends
in international relations theory: neo-Gramscianism
and political Marxism. In each case, I will minimise
the intra-paradigmatic differences for the purpose
of the overview. They are, nonetheless, signicant
on questions of theoretical priorities and empirical
emphases.
1. Neo-Gramscianism
It is more suitable to designate a Gramscian-inspired
group of scholars in international relations, than a
454 • Frédérick Guillaume Dufour
neo-Gramscian theory. This group evolves around the groundbreaking work

of Robert W. Cox. It embraces contributions from Stephen Gill and the Amster-
dam school (Kees van der Pijl, Otto Holman and Henk Overbeek) and other
scholars such as Mark Rupert, Adam David Morton, Andreas Bieler, Isabella
Bakker, Craig N. Murphy, André Drainville and Matt Davies. Aside from
Antonio Gramsci, it has been inuenced by a variety of gures from Fernand
Braudel, Nicos Poulantzas and Giovanni Arrighi to Suzanne Strange and the
École de la régulation. The coherence of the Gramscian-inspired constellation is
found in the application of Gramsci’s theory and concepts to the analysis of
global politics. The concepts of hegemony, historical bloc, passive revolution,
organic intellectual, and civil society include some of the ideas used by these
scholars.
1.1. The critique of positivism and neorealism
During the beginning of the 1970s, Robert W. Cox sought to identify the limita-
tions of mainstream accounts of international organisations and international
politics. In the late 1970s and during the beginning of the 1980s, he offered a
major epistemological, ontological and normative critique of the mainstream
schools of international relations.1
At the ontological level, Cox and the Gramscian-inspired literature con-
demn neorealism’s reication of structures and processes of international
relations. Neorealism marginalises the problématique of social change and his-
torical transformations in favour of an emphasis on predictability, stability
and reproduction of existing world orders. Neo-Gramscianism makes a sharp
break away from this ontological tradition. Neo-Gramscians argue that spe-
cic processes and issues of global politics must be analysed in relation to
historical structures: particular congurations of a world order, social relations of
production and forms of states. The global political economy is a totality char-
acterised by profound open-ended processes of structural transformations.
Thus, its ontology needs to be constantly recaptured and revisited.2 In the
Gramscian-inspired literature, Mark Rupert has probably been the rst to
1
Cox 1976; 1981.
2
Cox 1976, 1987; Gill 1990; Murphy 1994; Overbeek 1990; Overbeek (ed.) 1993;
Rupert 1995; van der Pijl 1984, 1999.
Historical Materialism and International Relations • 455
emphasise the importance of grounding the analysis of the state-society com-

plex and the inter-states system on a historical ontology informed by a Marx-
ist critique of alienation and fetishism.3 In their recent work, Isabella Bakker
and Stephen Gill have reformulated the Coxian ontology in an attempt to
ground it on a historical dialectic: ‘We see these [world orders, forms of states
and production] not as levels as such, but as different moments in the con-
stitution of a contradictory totality of world order’.4 This reformulation testi-
es as to the attempt to move away from a mechanistic interpretation of the
Coxian ontology which would reduce it to a web of mechanically interact-
ing ideal-types. Also signicant in the latest work of Bakker and Gill is the
effort to incorporate a broadly dened dimension of social reproduction in the
Gramscian ontology.
At the epistemological and normative levels, neo-Gramscianism defends a
conception of the relation between theory and practice anchored in Antonio
Gramsci’s conception of the organic intellectual. Academics are inuenced by
their social location in the labour process of a historical structure and they con-
tribute to its reproduction or transformation by the formulation of hegemonic
or counter-hegemonic ideas. They participate in the construction of the inter-
subjective structures of ideas of a world order. Cox denounces the mainstream
accounts of international relations’ self-portrayal as value-neutral. His reex-
ive stance toward theoretical activity is crystallised in the distinction he makes
between problem-solving theory and critical theory. Whereas the rst limits itself
to solving problems in a given world order, the second is concerned with
understanding the historical origins of a world order. This enables critical the-
oreticians to provide emancipatory alternatives to the world order anchored
in the everyday practices of resistance. Since, ‘theory is always for someone
and for some purposes’, the role of critical theory and organic intellectuals is
to highlight these purposes and unmask the structures of power that theory
consolidates, reproduces and reies. This critique of problem-solving theory
proposes an historical approach to the transformation of world orders, and
it aims to demystify institutions that traditional approaches take for granted.
This project of demystication starts with the problématique of hegemony.
3
See Rupert in Gill 1993; 1995, pp. 14–38.
4
Bakker and Gill 2003, p. 25.
1.2. Hegemony and comprehensive concepts of control
Gramsci argued that in states with an important state-society complex, the

terrain of revolutionary struggle had to be civil society, the vast range of cul-
tural, educational and religious institutions, which participated in the every-
day life production and reproduction of common sense. Civil society is the
terrain where a long-term war of position has to be fought by the working
class in alliance with progressive social forces in order to form a counter-
hegemonic bloc. Cox adapts this argument to the analysis of world orders. He
conceives the development of capitalist international relations as the succes-
sion of different historical structures where hegemony is reproduced or trans-
formed through the interactions of ideas, institutions and material capabilities.5
National and transnational social forces emerge from and are transformed by
social relations of production. Their actions can transform both the forms of
states and world orders. Hegemony depends on the capacity to articulate and
orient common sense at the national and global levels through powerful inter-
national institutions6 and material capabilities such as the mass media.7 Hege-
mony relies both on coercion and consent. A coherent historical bloc, claries
Gill, cannot emerge in the absence of ‘a large degree of political congruence
between “sets of relations of force”‘.8 Likewise, world hegemony ‘has for its ori-
gin the outward expansion of the internal or national hegemony, established
by the dominant or ruling class within the most powerful state’.9 The concept
of hegemony, nonetheless, has been addressed in uneven ways by the Grams-
cian literature.
The Amsterdam school, in particular Kees van der Pijl, addresses hege-
mony through the notion of comprehensive concepts of control. Before entering
in contact with the work of Cox and Gill, the Amsterdam school was already
concerned with the analysis of the internationalisation of capital, the labour
process and the fractioning of the ruling class. The notion of comprehensive con-
cepts of control, notes van der Pijl, ‘seeks to capture the unity (again, a broader,
meditated historical/transformational rather than immediate unity) of the
5
Cox 1981; 1987.
6
Gill 1990; Murphy 1994.
7
Davies 1999.
8
Gill 1990, p. 44.
9
Gill 1990, p. 47.
interests of fractions of capital and the need to impose the discipline of capital
on society at large’. In the analysis of hegemony, the notion refers to:
the projects of rival political alliances which on account of their appro-

priateness to deal with current contradictions in the labour, intersectoral/
competition, and prot distribution processes, as well as with broader social
and political issues, at some point become comprehensive, crowding out of
others by their greater adequacy to a historically specic situation – until they
themselves unravel in the course of further development and struggle.10
The concept seeks to bring to light the political articulation, rather than the
mechanical connection, of a hegemonic project and a strategy of accumula-
tion. Another distinctive feature of this school’s examination of processes of
hegemonic formation is its emphasis on the role of the managerial class.11
In a different vein, Stephen Gill presents a study of the transformation of
hegemony since the 1970s in American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission.
According to Gill, the widely held argument that the United States entered
a phase of hegemonic decline during the 1980s was misplaced. He describes
this period as a ‘crisis of hegemony’ characterised by ‘a struggle over the de-
nition of “national interests” and the conduct of American Foreign Policy in
the 1970s and 1980s’.12 The crisis led to a restructuring of American power
orchestrated through international social forces such as the Trilateral Com-
mission, rather than its decline:
What has been developing in the 1970s and 1980s is a shift away from an
international economic order of economically sovereign states and national
political economies, linked together primarily by trade ows, towards what
I call a transnational liberal economic order. In this ascending order, capital
ows and interpenetrating investments are fusing the world economy into
a more integrated whole.13
It resulted in a transnationalisation of American hegemony channelled through

the structural power of capital at the international level.14 These processes led
10
van der Pijl 1998, p. 4.
11
See for instance, van der Pijl 2005.
12
Gill 1990, p. 7.
13
Gill 1990, p. 88.
14
Gill 2003, pp. 102–15.
to the consolidation of an austere state-society complex during the 1980s

and favoured the imposition of a new constitutionalism: a political and legal
framework exposing states to the increasing pressures of disciplinary neoliber-
alism, panopticism and market civilisation.15 In the last decades, Gill’s work has
emphasised the ways in which the constitutional embedding of the neoliberal
agenda made it possible for new dimensions of social reproduction and social
life to be commodied.16
Rupert presents a third contribution to the analysis of hegemony during the
postwar period, which emphasises the role of class relations in the interna-
tionalisation of the state. In Producing Hegemony, he criticises the Gramscian-
inspired literature for neglecting the role and form of domestic production in
the making of world hegemony, that is the historically specic form of class
compromise emerging in the US with Fordism. Rupert notes:
the exercise of US global power was shaped by the historically specic ways
in which mass production was institutionalized, and by the political, cultural,
and ideological aspects of this process at home and abroad.17
His recent work offers an examination of the diverse and contradictory social
forces opposing globalisation in the US during the 1990s. He presents a
nuanced picture of this opposition, highlighting proximities between the far
Right and segments of the Left, and thus, the need to develop a progressive
common sense that is sensitive to the politics of class, gender and race.18
With respect to their analysis of transformative agencies, these contribu-
tions are distinct from Gramsci’s in one respect. Gramsci identied the party
as the modern Prince that is able to organise and channel transformative prac-
tices in a progressive direction. However, contemporary Gramscian-inspired
scholars seek transformative agency in transnational social forces such as the
antiglobalisation movements, global unions and the World Social Forum.19
Progressive transformative agencies need to connect local resistance to global
politics.
15
Gill 1995a.
16
Bakker and Gill 2003.
17
Rupert 1995, p. 2.
18
Rupert 2000.
19
Cox and Schechter 2002; Gill 2000; Harrod and O’Brien 2002; Drainville 2002;
Rupert 2000; 2003.
1.3. Globalisation and the new constitutionalism
Robert W. Cox did not present an historical revision of the relation between
capitalism and the inter-state system; this task has been tackled in the recent
work of van der Pijl. Pijl argues that capital found a proper space for expan-
sion in the Lockean Heartland of capitalism, the English state, where fractions
of capital are organised along a transcendent comprehensive concept of control
and under a self-regulating market. The Lockean Heartland exercised geopo-
litical pressures on the contending Hobbesian states which recourse to state
led strategies of development and formulate national interest along the
lines of their ruling class.20 Contrary to the Lockean heartland whose mode of
expansion is transnational, the mode of extension of the Hobbesian states is
international.21
With regards to the analysis of recent developments in the global politi-
cal economy, most neo-Gramscians locate a structural change in the historical
structure of the postwar world order during the 1970s and 1980s. Cox refers
to this shift, occurring during the 1970s with the increasing transnationalisa-
tion of production and capital circuit, as a transition from Fordism to post-
Fordism.22 With this transition, states increasingly served as a ‘transmission
belt’ for transnational social forces in the process of forging a world order. All
the while, Cox argues, most national and local social forces lost in part their
agential power to the benet of transnational capitalist forces. According to
Cox, the internationalisation of the state at the centre of the process of globali-
sation of production and nance brought about a spatial reconguration of
capitalism. This entailed that categorical distinctions between centre, periph-
ery and semi-periphery ceased to refer to geographical locations and tended
to transcend societies.23 Some argue that the inherent logic of this process of
globalisation should lead to the consolidation of transnational classes and
eventually to a global state.24 Others interpret the necessity of a ‘double move-
ment’, à la Polanyi, similar to the ‘self-defence of national societies against the
market’, but at the global level.25
20
van der Pijl 1998, pp. 64–88.
21
For a periodisation of this dynamic see van der Pijl 1998, p. 85.
22
Cox 1987; van der Pijl 1998.
23
Cox 1992.
24
Burbach and Robinson 1999.
25
See Cox 2001; Gill 1995b.
During the last decades, neo-Gramscian researchers have built on, devel-
oped and expanded Cox’s work in different directions. They have incorpo-
rated elements of feminism,26 of the analysis of civilisations,27 and of ecological
studies.28 They have provided critical analysis of international law,29 of the
role of international organisations in industrial changes,30 of struggle between
fractions of capital,31 regionalisation,32 global governance,33 immigration poli-
cies,34 (in)security,35 the mass media36 and political resistance.37
Meanwhile, this literature has been challenged. Critiques of Gramscian-
inspired international theory developed both inside and outside this group
of scholars. Major disagreements came from ‘open Marxism’ – Peter Burn-
ham and Simon Clarke. Burnham argued that both Cox’s articulation of the
concepts of relations of production, forms of states and world orders, and
his articulation of the relations between institutions, ideas and material capa-
bilities are problematic. He contends that the relations between these ele-
ments are presented in a multi-directional and reciprocal fashion that fails
to develop anything beyond a ‘version of Weberian pluralism oriented to the
study of the international order’.38 Other critics argue that the Coxian-inspired
presentation of the contemporary state as a ‘transmission belt’ of the neolib-
eral agenda of transnational social forces underplays the states’ role in the
production of this world order.39 It overestimates the role of ideology and
ideas in social changes40 and does not recognise the fractured nature of the
neoliberal project.41 Likewise, it fails to acknowledge the role of social forces
26
Peterson 2003; Bakker and Gill 2003.
27
Cox and Schechter 2002; Gill 1995a.
28
Cox and Schechter 2002.
29
Gill and Law 1988; Cutler 1997.
30
Murphy 1994.
31
van der Pijl 1984, 1998; Overbeek 1990, 1993.
32
Bieler and Morton 2001.
33
Egan 2001; Rupert 2003.
34
Pellerin 2003; Overbeek and Pellerin 2001.
35
Cox 1993b; Bakker and Gill 2003, Chapters 3 and 8–11.
36
Davies 1999.
37
Gill 2000; Drainville 2002.
38
Burnham 1991, p. 77.
39
Burnham 1991, p. 86; Panitch 1994, 1996.
40
Burnham 1991, pp. 79–80; see also Shilliam 2004.
41
Drainville 1994.
resisting the imposition of this agenda and the unevenness of the process of
internationalisation of the state.42
2. Political Marxism
The development of political Marxism and the theory of social-property rela-
tions stem from the work of historian Robert Brenner on the transition to
capitalism. Ellen M. Wood and George C. Comninel further developed the
theoretical foundations laid out by Brenner both empirically and theoreti-
cally. Since the 1990s, Justin Rosenberg, Benno Teschke and Hannes Lacher
drew upon Wood and Brenner’s arguments to revisit central problématiques of
international-relations theory such as the social and geopolitical dynamics of
capitalism, and the genesis of modern sovereignty, globalisation and uneven
and combined development.
2.1. Brenner and Wood
The work of Brenner emerges as strikingly different in the heterodox group

of analytical Marxists. It is empirical, historical, and comparative all at once.
Brenner’s work proceeds from an analysis of social-property relations in order
to understand comparative social developments, forms of states, demographic
trends and relations of power. In this respect, he breaks with approaches that
focus on productive forces or individual choices. Contributions of political
Marxists to international-relations theory have extended this theory to the
study of geopolitics, sovereignty and territoriality.
Brenner’s articles on the social origins of agrarian capitalism in pre-industrial
Europe emphasise how the balance of class forces and social-property rela-
tions led to the development of signicantly different social trends in precapi-
talist and capitalist Europe.43 Once more, the focus on social-property relations
and balance of class forces breaks away from approaches that overplay the
importance of the world system, world order or productive forces. Brenner
reconstructs the following causal chain. Specic social-property relations and
balance of class forces bring about different antagonistic rules and strategies
42
Egan 2001.
43
Brenner 1976, 1982, 1985a, 1990b, 1991.
of social reproduction. In turn, the interaction of these different antagonisms

lead to often unintentional trajectories of social development. Different social-
property relations, he emphasises, evolve neither systematically nor in a lin-
ear way from one to another. They are not a structure from which another
structural outcome can be derived by conceptual necessity. A given social-
property régime, capitalist or precapitalist, is characterised by specic social
contradictions, but the ultimate outcome of these contradictions is a matter
of historically specic balance of class power. Brenner’s argument challenges
three inuential views. First, he breaks away from the Malthusian explana-
tion of development through an emphasis on demographic trends (Le Roy
Ladurie). Second, he challenges Wallerstein’s explanation of the emergence
of capitalism through an emphasis on the modern world-system. Finally,
Brenner questions the economistic account of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism which emphasises the removal of the ‘obstacles’ to capitalist devel-
opment in precapitalist Europe (Guy Bois).
Reconstructing the comparative developments of social-property régimes
in Europe, Brenner, and later on Ellen M. Wood, George C. Comninel and
Colin Mooers, highlight the regional and national specicities of these devel-
opments. They focus on how different rules of reproduction of power develop
in England, France and the Holy Roman Empire after the breakdown of feu-
dalism. These scholars note that while manorialism continues to structure life
in England, seigneurialism emerges in other regions of the continent. Finally,
they underscore the different strategies of reproduction of social power that
arise in different parts of Europe. Whereas capitalist reproductive strategies
emerge in England, France and Prussia become enmeshed in absolutist strate-
gies of social power reproduction.44 This research programme claries impor-
tant paradoxes in Marxist social theory. The latter, for instance, struggles to
account for the fact that both Spain and Portugal, though sometimes consid-
ered to be the rst imperialist and capitalist states, were far behind in pro-
cesses of industrialisation and urbanisation during the nineteenth century.
However, the theory of social-property relations arrives at the conclusion that
these states were not capitalist during the fteenth century. Marxist social
theory also had difculty explaining why despite its ‘bourgeois’ revolution,
capitalist development in France lagged far behind that of England during the
44
Brenner 1995b; Comninel 1990, 2000; Wood 1991; Mooers 1991.
nineteenth century. Here, the theory of social-property relations concludes

that the revolution was bourgeois, but not capitalist.45 While all these cases
pose problems to classical-Marxist historiography, Brenner, Comninel and
Wood argue that they need not if one begins by distinguishing between pre-
capitalist and capitalist rules of social reproduction. In the rst case, exploita-
tion is directly anchored in political domination, while in the second, even
though processes of exploitation and domination are politically constituted,
the moment of exploitation becomes indirect. This distinction brings about a
critique of the commercial model of capitalism and of the conceptual associa-
tion of the capitalist class with the bourgeoisie.
2.2. The critique of the commercial model of capitalism
The critique of the commercial model of capitalism was formulated in the

work of Robert Brenner and developed by Wood in The Origins of Capitalism.
According to Brenner and Wood, many theories of the development of capi-
talism, from Paul Sweezy’s to Immanuel Wallerstein’s, shared a Smithian com-
mercial model of capitalist development. According to this model, the take-off
of modern economic growth was made possible by the growth of commerce.
Indeed, the growth in commercial activity pushed individual economic actors
to adopt capitalist strategies of reproduction and increased the division and
specialisation of labour.
Three critiques are addressed to this model. First, it takes for granted that
sooner or later the development of capitalism is inevitable. Its development
is the necessary outcome of a teleological process, insofar as capitalist devel-
opment had to ‘wait’ for several obstacles to be removed in order for it to
nally come to, or achieve, its complete maturity.46 Therefore, Wood claries,
what needs to be explained: the emergence of capitalism is already presup-
posed in some embryonic or proto-form. Hence, the model is circular, and it
tends to conate cause and effect. Second, because it emphasises the devel-
opment of commerce rather than the emergence of a distinct social relation,
the model reconstructs the emergence of capitalism as a quantitative rather
than qualitative process. Thereafter, it locates the development of capital-
ism essentially in the sphere of circulation at the international level rather
45
Comninel 1990; Teschke 2005.
46
Wood 2002; Teschke 2005, p. 10.
than at the level of social relations. Braudel, for instance, identies a series of
mechanisms of sophistication of capitalism from the Italian city-states to the
American superpower. However, none of these mechanisms of sophistica-
tion introduce a qualitative shift at the level of social relations.47 Third, in its
neo-Weberian and neorealist variances, the model considers capitalism as a
purely economic category. Political Marxism argues precisely the opposite:
capital is a social relation and its emergence has profound implications on a
broad range of social processes – including processes of state formation and
geopolitical dynamics.
2.3. The separation of the economic and the political in capitalism
According to Wood, the distinctiveness of capital as a social relation is that it

is the rst social relation of domination which can potentially operate entirely
through the mediation of the market. While former relations of domination
linked necessarily the economic moment of surplus extraction and the politi-
cal moment of domination, capital does not. Slavery, serfdom, absolutism
and other precapitalist social-property régimes implied the fusion of the eco-
nomic power of exploitation and the political power of domination. Absolut-
ist politics and mercantilist economic doctrines worked hand in hand while
monopolistic strategies of accumulation were granted by the state and secured
through military force. Capital as a social relation differs from the previous
strategy of geopolitical accumulation:
Capitalism is a social relation between persons in which all ‘factors of

production,’ including labour-power, have become commoditised and
where production of goods for exchange has become market-dependent
and market-regulated. On this basis, capitalism does not mean simply
production for the market, but competitive reproduction in the market
based on a social-property regime in which property less direct producers
are forced to sell their labour-power to property-owners. This separation
of direct producers from their means of reproduction and their subjection
to the capital relation entails the compulsion of reproduction in the market
47
For this critique see Rosenberg 1994, p. 40; Teschke 2003, pp. 129–50; Wood
1984, 2002.
by selling labour-power in return for wages. This social system is uniquely

dynamic, driven by competition, exploitation and accumulation.48
The capitalist state enforces the separation of the economic power of exploita-
tion and the political power of domination. This does not imply that the state
is entirely autonomous. What it does imply, claries Lacher, is that the state
is autonomous enough to reproduce this institutional separation.49 A state’s
capacity to impose this institutional separation in order to pursue its own
interests at the international level follows a capitalist rationality.
A major geopolitical implication of the emergence of this social relation in
rural England is that precapitalist strategies of political accumulation, includ-
ing the compulsive force of political accumulation through territorial expan-
sion, were slowly replaced by the emergence of a new form of hegemonic
reproduction. In theory, the latter is not incompatible with political coups
orchestrated from outside in the name of the sovereignty of the people and war
in the name of liberating a people from tyranny.50 Therefore, the implication
of the argument on the separation of the economic and political powers is not
that capitalist rms are not in principle close to the political power; they are,
and obviously they weigh on the elaboration of foreign policy. The point is
that with the development of capitalism, strategies of geopolitical accumula-
tion ceased to be the states’ prima ratio; rst, because they became too costly;
second, because they were no longer intrinsically linked to a strategy of accu-
mulation of surplus.51
2.4. Modern sovereignty
In The Empire of Civil Society, Justin Rosenberg introduced Wood’s work in

the eld of international relations. Here, Rosenberg reconstructed the rela-
tion between different social relations of production and geopolitical strate-
gies of reproduction of power. He criticised the neorealist and neo-Weberian
separation of the economic and the political in international-relations theory.
Yet, he did not explicitly endorse Brenner’s conception of capitalism. Rosen-
berg builds on the work of Wood, Simon Bromley, Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Wolf
48
Teschke 2005, p. 11.
49
Lacher 2005, p. 41. See also Wood 1981b.
50
Wood 2003.
51
This argument is developed at length in Teschke 2003.
and Trotsky in order to challenge a-historical lieux communs of international-

relations theory and history. He questions and rejects the so-called modernity
of the Treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht. Rather, he argues that the politi-
cal context of both treaties was still characterised by premodern strategies of
political accumulation having little or nothing to do with the modern anony-
mous and impersonal strategies of the ‘balance of power’. Hence, it was nei-
ther Westphalia nor Utrecht that brought about the modernity of international
relations, but the development of capitalism toward the end of the nineteenth
century. It was capitalism, he argues in The Empire of Civil Society, that created
the separation of the political and the economic. In turn, it was this sepa-
ration that enabled liberalism, as the purely economic ction of inter-state
reconciliation through commerce, and realism, as the purely political form of
mediation of relations between states through the mechanisms of balance of
power, to emerge simultaneously, thus embodying the Janus’ faces of modern
international relations.52
After The Empire of Civil Society, Rosenberg has consistently argued that the
ahistorical theory of the balance of power must be abandoned in favour of
Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development. The rst task of such
a theory would be to explore the consequences of the fact that ‘the develop-
ment of backward societies took place under the pressure of an already exist-
ing world market, dominated by more advanced capitalist powers’.53 This
peculiar dynamic should lead one to abandon a unitary conception of the
sovereign state as the central unit of analysis of international relations. Rosen-
berg notes with respect to this that:
we cannot begin with a logical model of homogeneous states: the variety of

political forms is simply too great. We would have to begin instead with a
historical analysis which reconstructs the uneven and combined development
of capitalism which has produced such a variegated world of states.54
Moreover, Rosenberg presents the theory of uneven and combined develop-

ment as a challenge to the sociological tradition’s lack of theorising the inter-
national and its privileging of ahistorical forms of static analyses.55
52
Rosenberg 1994, p. 150; 1996, p. 14.
53
Rosenberg 1996, p. 7.
54
Rosenberg 1996, p. 8.
55
For these recent developments see Rosenberg 2005, 2006.
It was Benno Teschke who introduced the theory of social-property relations

in the eld of international relations.56 His work was the rst to systematically
explore the implications of Brenner’s theory for international-relations theory
since Brenner’s critique of neo-Smithian Marxism in 1977. Teschke proposes
an analysis of pre-1648 geopolitics that comes to terms with the mainstream
theorisation both of medieval geopolitics and of the meaning of 1648. Extend-
ing the work of Brenner, he employs a diachronic and synchronic comparative
strategy to reconstruct the historically specic relations between social-
property régimes and their attendant strategies of reproduction that gov-
erned different geopolitical dynamics. Teschke aims to remedy two limita-
tions that he identies in Rosenberg’s work. First, he questions Rosenberg’s
inclination to identify structurally determined links between social-property
régimes and geopolitical dynamics, rather than identifying phases of transi-
tion between both. Second, he challenges the argument that the international
system had achieved a mature capitalist form during the nineteenth century.
Adopting an explanatory strategy that stresses periods of transition, Teschke
grounds the qualitative shift to the rst modern and capitalist state in England
between the Revolution of 1688 and 1713. Meanwhile, the emergence of Eng-
lish capitalism slowly imposed its geopolitical pressures and dynamics onto
the Continental, absolutist states. It co-existed with precapitalist states and
precapitalist geopolitical dynamics slowly forcing them to stretch or adapt
their capacities of geopolitical accumulation in order to withstand the com-
petitive pressures of the rst capitalist state. Teschke’s explanatory strategy
seeks to reconstruct the national, international and global historical processes
through which specic capitalist property relations that emerged in England
slowly imposed their rhythm on other states.
In a series of recent contributions, Hannes Lacher develops the probléma-
tique of the social origins of modern territoriality.57 He sees limitations in
The Empire of Civil Society insofar as it offers no systematic explanation of
why the modern state system only became possible with the emergence of
capitalism. Hence, Lacher contends that Rosenberg underestimates the depth
of the system of sovereign territorial states to the territorial dynamics of the
56
Teschke 1998; 2002; 2003.
57
Lacher 2002; 2003; 2005.
absolutist era.58 Lacher and Teschke argue that there are no intrinsic reasons
why capital as a social relation would systematically generate and contribute
to the reproduction of a system of sovereign nation-states. The modern state
system inherited a territorial dynamic from the absolutist era, but nothing
guarantees that it will survive. Lacher argues that capital as a social relation
encourages the systematic development of the commodity-form, which in
principle, tends toward the global. However, he notes, precisely because the
emergence of capital imposed from the start a globalising social dynamic on
modern geopolitics, the framing of the debate between realists and globalists
in international relations is misleading. According to Lacher, modern interna-
tional relations contained international and global dynamics from the start.
The co-existence of these simultaneous dynamics and strategies of reproduc-
tion of power is obscured by teleological attempts to explain the transition
from a Golden Age of sovereign states to an emerging Global Age.
Rosenberg and Teschke’s contributions draw our attention to the premod-
ern nature of the 1648 geopolitical context. Teschke and Lacher’s work offer
an important analysis of the legacy of absolutist geopolitics on the historical
formation of modern geopolitics. They question the conceptual necessity of a
relation between the expansion of capital as a social relation and the repro-
duction of the modern state system.
2.5. Capitalism, globalisation and uneven and combined development
Historical understanding of the changing dynamics of geopolitical régimes

beneted from the work of political Marxists in comparative history. Over the
last decades, however, the contributions of Rosenberg, Teschke and Lacher –
though distinct – share the aim of developing an historical account of geo-
politics in the compared histories of social-property régimes. There is an
underlying preoccupation in Rosenberg’s ambition to explore the potential of
Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development; in Teschke’s endea-
vour to develop accounts of social revolutions and transitions to capitalism in
different social, historical and geopolitical contexts; and in Lacher’s project of
revising the intertwined relations between the national, the international and
58
Lacher 2005, pp. 28, 30.
the global since the beginning of the modern era. All of these research projects
are preoccupied with the need to enrich the comparative historical agenda
of political Marxism with an historically informed and socially differentiated
theory of geopolitical or international relations.
Teschke contends that most Marxian-inspired models of social history lack
a systematic theorisation of international relations.59 The price to pay for the
absence of such theory is signicant:
this theoretical xation on exclusively national dynamics and its concomitant

invocation of comparative history fundamentally fails to problematize
the fact that these plural roads towards capitalism do not run in parallel
and mutual isolation, neither chronologically, nor socio-politically, nor
geographically. In fact, they constantly, to stretch the metaphor, ‘cross each
other’ in the wider force eld of the international.60
Teschke argues that political Marxism lacks a theoretical account that comes to
terms with the ‘geopolitically mediated development of Europe as a whole –
a perspective that is fully alive to the constitutive role of the international in
historical development’.61 Ultimately, he sums up:
we need to come to terms with the nationally specic and diachronic, yet
cumulatively connected and internationally mediated nature of ‘capitalist
transitions’ within the framework of socially uneven and geopolitically
combined development.62
An important question for the future of international relations is whether the

expansion of capital as a social relation will bring about the end of the sov-
ereign state system or whether both will reinforce each other? Teschke and
Lacher have both argued that the system of territorial states did not emerge
with capital as a social relation, but rather that it is a remnant of European
absolutism. Both argue that there is no conceptual reason why the expansion
of capital would not sooner or later bring about the formation of a global state:
‘Indeed, I have argued that the form of statehood that corresponds to the
59
Teschke 2005, p. 4.
60
Teschke 2005, p. 7.
61
Teschke 2005, p. 4.
62
Teschke 2005, p. 13.
concept of capital is the global state’.63 Such a process should not be equated
with the current phase of ‘globalisation’, however. Lacher notes:
while a global state is an essential requirement for the successful continuation

of capitalist globalization, it cannot be presumed that such a process will
indeed take place. While there are, indeed, discernible movements towards
global state-formation, there are equally strong movements towards political
fragmentation.64
Criticisms of The Empire of Civil Society have evolved around three issues. I
will conclude by noting how political Marxists have addressed these criti-
cisms since then. First is the argument, here reformulated by a critique of
Rosenberg, that ‘the underlying constituents of sovereignty, of raison d’État
and ultimately of the modern state lay in capitalism’.65 Teschke and Lacher
have systematically dealt with this issue by stressing the imprint of absolut-
ism on the territoriality of the modern state-system.66 Second is the argument
that the system of states was capitalist as a whole in the nineteenth century.67
Rosenberg distanced himself from this argument and his reorientation toward
the theory of uneven and combined development seeks to come to terms with
this issue.68 The third is that The Empire of Civil Society lacks an emphasis on
agency of international relations.69 This emphasis on agency was deployed
in The Myth of 1648.70 Tensions between the research projects of those who
try to internationalise political Marxism are important. Yet, judging from the
proliferation of recent work in this tradition, it should lead to lively debates
over the next decades.
63
Lacher 2005, p. 45.
64
Lacher 2005, p. 46; for a similar analysis see Teschke 2003, pp. 262–8; see also
Wood 2003.
65
Arifn 1996, p. 130.
66
Teschke 2003; Lacher 2003; 2005.
67
Arifn 1996, p. 131; Teschke 2003.
68
See the recent debate between Rosenberg and Callinicos, Rosenberg 2007.
69
Arifn 1996, p. 132–3.
70
Teschke 2003, pp. 57–60.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Marxism and Language
1. Paradox
1.1. The question of Marxism and language is the
site of a paradox, with important, and mostly nega-
tive, theoretical and political consequences. On the
one hand there no theory of language to speak of
within Marxism; even more regrettable (for it could
be argued that language, being the object of an inde-
pendent science, the science of linguistics, lies out-
side the scope of Marxism), there has not been an
ongoing debate within Marxism about questions
of language, as there has been, for instance, about
aesthetics. Whereas the bourgeoisie has always been
aware of the importance of the question of language,
has always employed armies of specialists, deployed
specialist discourses (for instance about the impor-
tance of ‘communication’), and has always made
sure that it dominated key institutions, such as the
school or the media, in which the dominant ideology
in the matter of language reigned, if not unopposed,
at least with assured success. On the other hand,
however, we do nd within Marxism what almost
amounts to a tradition of thinking about language: a
number of Marxists have broached the question of a
Marxist philosophy of language, not always directly
and explicitly (Vološinov is an exception), but more
472 • Jean-Jacques Lecercle
often en passant – the revolutionary struggle imposes its priorities, and unfor-
tunately language is never one of them. The result is the bare outline of a
tradition, which remains mostly submerged.
1.2. There are historical reasons for such a situation. The founding fathers
have left us only a few hints, and they belong either to the young Marx, in
the 1844 Manuscripts or in The German Ideology, where language is famously
dened as ‘practical consciousness’, not to mention the cryptic marginal com-
ment, ‘language is the language of reality’, or to the aging Engels: there is
a celebrated passage in the Dialectics of Nature, where the myth of the origin
of language in collective work is formulated. Not to speak of the marginal
comment in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, where the formula, ‘history of
thought = history of language’ is surrounded by a square surrounded by a
circle.
But the main reason for this sad state of affairs is Stalin’s intervention, On
Marxism in Linguistics, a series of articles in Pravda, later issued as a pamphlet
with a number of letters to inquiring comrades. Stalin’s objective was to put
an end to the domination in Soviet linguistics of the school of Nikolai Marr.
Marr, a late convert to Marxism, had produced a number of theories, of a
highly fantastic nature, about the origin and development of language. Hav-
ing converted to Marxism, he sought to prove that language was a superstruc-
ture, to be revolutionised with the political revolution. Stalin’s pamphlet is
characterised by a form of common sense (he pointed out that in the USSR the
revolution had been victorious for more than thirty years, but that the Russian
language had not been signicantly affected), which, with hindsight, can be
read as a capitulation to the dominant bourgeois ideas about language. The
following four theses are central to his argument: 1) Language is not a super-
structure. 2) Language is an instrument of communication that benets the
whole people. 3) Language is directly linked to production. 4) Language is not
a class phenomenon. The rst thesis pre-empts any serious Marxist discussion
of language; the second reproduces the main thesis of the dominant ideology
about language, the addition of ‘which benets the whole people’ only add-
ing a populist avour; the third thesis seeks to take us back within the orbit of
Marxism; whereas the fourth develops the rst, with the same consequence.
The effect of this intervention, in the conjuncture in which it occurred, was
twofold: it was greeted with a sigh of relief by the academic linguists who
happened to be also members of the CP (for instance M. Cohen in France) – it
Marxism and Language • 473
came to them as a breath of fresh air after the leftist errors of the ‘proletarian
versus bourgeois science’ debate and the disaster of the Lysenko affair; but it
also stied any independent thinking about language in Marxist circles for
at least a decade. And it is not certain that, even in the case of Marr and his
slightly mad ideas about language, Stalin’s commonsensical strictures were
entirely apposite: Marr’s disciples played a leading role in the description and
salvage of minority languages in the Soviet republics, and Vološinov’s appre-
ciation of Marr appears to have been sincere. The net result, however, was
that a specic Marxist elaboration of the question of language was avoided.
1.3. One can take the work of Althusser as an example of this, as an embodi-
ment of the paradox. Apart from a few elements on the use of language in
Lacan, his intervention on the question of language is limited to a footnote
in the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay, in which he notes the errors of
linguists, who tend to treat language as transparent because they ignore the
effects of ideology. In fact the criticism could almost apply to Althusser him-
self, although in an inverted form: the limits of his concept of ideology are
due to his neglect of the role of language, whose ghost haunts his texts, in
the two stages of the development of the concept. In the rst stage, the essay
of humanism in Pour Marx, ideology is already dened as necessity as much
as error – allusion as much as illusion. But the sign, or symptom, that we are
dealing with an ideological proposition is linguistic: ideology reveals itself
in the practice of punning [jeu de mots]. Thus, the bourgeoisie celebrates free-
dom in two senses: the real sense of the freedom of enterprise on which the
capitalist system is based, and the imaginary sense in which every human
being is free – a claim immediately denied by the existence of exploitation
and its consequent oppression. So that, in the second stage of the theory, the
‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay, although language is never mentioned,
it can be usefully reintroduced in the system of concepts, in so far as speech-
acts are excellent candidates for insertion into the chain of interpellation that
goes from institution (apparatus) to ritual, from ritual to practice, and the
result of which is the transformation of the individual into a subject:
apparatus ¬ ritual ¬ practice ¬ speech-act ¬ subject
And it soon becomes clear that interpellation, which in the famous primal
scene of interpellation occurs through linguistic hailing, involves a language
component at all its stages, that the process is in fact pervaded by language,
so that the proposition that ideology is language need not be restricted to the
work of Barthes (it is explicitly stated in the Collège de France lectures on
‘le neutre’): discourses are constituent parts of institutions (a university does
not consist only in buildings and students), rituals have a strong discursive
component, practices are always-also linguistic practices. This aspect of
the theory, which was developed in the work of Judith Butler, allows for a
concept of counter-interpellation: the subject, through her own speech acts
(for instance, by returning to the sender the hate speech that aggresses her)
counter-interpellates the language that interpellates her.
1.4. The question of language, however, was not always ignored or avoided
by Marxists. We can briey sketch the lineaments of a tradition. This would
start with the Bakhtin circle and the seminal work of Vološinov, and would
include Vygotsky on language and thought, the work of Gramsci, who was a
philologist by training and whose notebook n° 29 is devoted to the question of
grammar, Tran Duc Thao on the origin of language, the Marxist semiotics of
language as labour and as market in Rossi-Landi, Sohn-Rethel’s critique of epis-
temology and the division between intellectual and manual labour, Pêcheux’s
semantics and theory of discourse, J.J. Goux’s numismatics, R. Lafont’s prax-
ematics, R. Balibar on French as a national language and the treatment of lan-
guage in the school apparatus, Henri Lefebvre’s book on language and even
Bourdieu, in spite of his earnest claim not to be a Marxist. And I would like
to single out the chapter on language in Raymond Williams’s Marxism and
Literature, much inuenced by both Vološinov and Gramsci, and an essay by
Pasolini, devoted to ‘a poetical approach to the question of Marxism in linguis-
tics’, an obvious answer to Stalin’s commonsense view of language, inspired
by the historicism of the Italian tradition, and especially by Gramsci’s concept
of language as conception of the world and practical philosophy.
2. Marxism and the critique of the philosophy of language

The rst interest of a Marxist positioning the eld of language is not, as the title
of Stalin’s pamphlet suggests, that it allows an intervention in the eld of lin-
guistics (there is a science of linguistics that should be left alone by Marxists)
but that it provides a critique of the dominant ideas about language, in other
words that it gives us a Marxist philosophy of language both in its critical
and its constructive aspects. And the dominant ideology about language can
be formulated in one proposition: ‘language is an instrument of communica-

tion’. This, in turn can be spelt out in the six following principles. The rst
is the principle of immanence, which is central to the structuralist versions of
linguistics: it states that the explanation of the workings of language must be
sought in language itself, and not outside it – thus deliberately ignoring both
the speaker and the context. The second is the principle of functionality. It states
that language has functions, and that its main function is communication,
that is the exchange of information. The third is the principle of transparency.
It is a consequence of the second principle and states that language, being a
mere instrument, must make itself forgotten, must not obtrude. The fourth
is the principle of ideality. Language is divided between an abstract ideal sys-
tem and its actualisation inspeech of writing (you have recognised Saussure’s
dichotomy of langue and parole, or Chomsky’s dichotomy of competence and
performance): the consequence is that, as a system, as langue, language has no
material existence and belongs to Popper’s third world of ideas. The fth is
the principle of systematicity. It states that the study of language is the study of
a system: parole is too idiosyncratic and messy to provide an object of study –
which, of course, reinforces the principle of immanence. The sixth and last
principle is the principle of synchronicity: the system is a synchronic entity, it
is not subject to history and time, or rather, since it is only too obvious that
language is a historical phenomenon, the history of language is deemed irrel-
evant or marginalised under the name of ‘diachrony’.
2.2. It is clear that my six principles that support the main research pro-
grammes in linguistics are far more complex and explicit that the simple state-
ment that language is an instrument of communication. But dominant ideology
is an articulated structure that operates at three distinct levels. It operates at
the elementary level of common sense, where its strength is due to the fact that
it states the obvious, what goes without saying, and need not therefore be
explicitly formulated and defended. It is only when we try another formula-
tion, such as ‘language is a weapon’, or ‘language is an expression of affect’,
that we realise that there is a philosophical position behind the obvious. But our
six principles show that dominant ideology also operates at the level of what
Althusser, in his course of lectures for scientists, calls a spontaneous philosophy
for scientists, the set of beliefs that scientists hold unquestioningly, because
they are deemed too general or too vague to be the object of an explicit exposi-
tion: my six principles belong to that category. And they support a third mode
of operation of the dominant ideology, in the explicit philosophy of language

that spells out and consciously supports the dominant ideas about language.
A Marxist position in the eld of language must engage the dominant ideol-
ogy at all three levels: it must, in the manner of Barthes, expose the mythical
nature of linguistic common sense; it must provide alternative principles and
determinations for a concept of language; and it must provide a critique of the
explicit philosophies of language that dominate the eld.
2.3. Thus, while supporting Chomsky’s political positions in their strong
opposition to imperialism, a Marxist will criticise his research programme,
which is by far the most inuential worldwide. She will resist the methodologi-
cal individualism that the programme involves (grammatical competence is
situated in the mind/brain of the individual speaker). She will denounce the
reication that reduces a practice, the practice of language in interlocution to
a series of ‘things’, a ‘Universal Grammar’, a ‘Language Acquisition Device’,
inscribed in the neurone circuits or the genetic programme of the speaker. She
will therefore oppose the naturalism that reduces a social practice to its mate-
rial basis in the human brain, and the ahistoricism that, by making language a
natural endowment of the species, reintroduces the quasi-eternity of human
nature (the only time involved is the time of the evolution of the species)
and explicitly denies any relevance to historical time in the eld of language.
Whereby it appears that such a programme combines a form of reductive
materialism (what the Marxist tradition calls ‘vulgar’, or ‘mechanical’ mate-
rialism) and rank idealism (language is a faculty of the human mind/brain,
and it is innate: this combines the theory of knowledge of Plato’s Meno with
a form of Leibnizian monadology) – the dominant aspect of the contradiction
is, of course, idealism.
2.4. We nd a second example of the dominant ideology in the eld of
language in Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action and general
pragmatics. This research programme is of immediate interest for a Marxist,
as it is presented as a critique and reconstruction of historical materialism,
which seeks to preserve its emancipatory impulse, by moving from work to
communication as foundation of human societies. The advantage of such a
position over Chomsky’s methodological individualism (for methodological
individualism may be defended in some elds, but certainly not in the eld of
language: there is no way I can treat language as the composition of the ratio-
nal decisions of individual speakers) is that it starts from the social: the very
structure of language, according to Habermas, presupposes agreement, or at

least a tendency towards it. The disadvantage is that the social so conceived
becomes irenic, a site for polite debate and unselsh agreement (Habermas,
of course, does not deny the phenomena, and is fully aware that not all social
or linguistic encounters are eirenic in such a way: his propositions, he claims,
are transcendental, even if ‘weakly’ so). Against this, a Marxist, for whom
all history is the history of class struggle, will maintain that language, like
society, is agonistic. What Habermas describes is in fact a form of linguistic
communism: his structural tendency towards agreement through debate is
a situation devoutly to be wished, except of course that it has nothing struc-
tural about it, and all the characteristics of a Kantian idea of reason, what we
should struggle for as a long-term objective. In fact, a Marxist will tend to his-
toricise Habermas’s philosophy of language, show that there is a ‘Habermas
conjuncture’, which is the conjuncture of post-Nazism and post-Communism,
the climax of which occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but which in the
present period of a return to blatant imperialism is no longer relevant. Haber-
mas himself, a strong believer in international institutions, had to recognise
that the sequence of events that led to the war in Iraq had little to do with a
structural tendency towards agreement through discussion.
2.5. A Marxist position in the eld of language must therefore operate a
systematic change of point of view. It is not sufcient, for instance, simply to
invert the six principles that support the dominant philosophy of language,
and suggest a principle of non-immanence (language is of the world and in
the world), or a principle of opacity (language never lets itself be forgotten, it
obtrudes): inversion does not allow us to leave the eld. I suggest that this
change in point of view should take the following ve forms. First, a Marxist
position in the eld of language will adopt the point of view of process, not
‘things’ or ‘facts’: avoiding the fetishism that characterises the dominant phi-
losophy of language involves, for instance, treating language not as a system
but as a system of variations. Second, it will adopt the point of view of the
collective, as opposed to the individual speaker: the speaker is spoken by her
language at the very moment when she believes she speaks it, she must learn
to inhabit a language that is exterior and anterior to her. Our point of view,
therefore, must be the point of view of social interaction, as in Habermas.
Thirdly, it will adopt the point of view of historicity: the time of language is not
the eternity of human nature, or the arrested time of evolution, but the time of
human history. A language is a monument of the life of a society, it inscribes it

in its words, phrases and grammatical markers, it is the repository, as Gramsci
claims, of conceptions of the world. Fourth, it will adopt the point of view of
totality. This, as Lukács has taught us, is the best protection we have against
the operation of fetishism. We must therefore substitute the dialectics of parole
and langue (if we keep those terms, which will soon prove to be inadequate)
for their separation and the consequent reication of both object (language
as system and structure) and subject (the speaker as owner of her language,
which she uses as an instrument). Lastly, a Marxist position will adopt the
point of view of rapport de forces, the point of view of agon as opposed to eirene.
Rather than co-operative interaction, the origin, or main function, of language
will be seen as the establishment of a system of places, contemporary with the
emergence of the division of labour, the result of which is the interpellation of
individual into subjects and the distribution of hierarchical social positions.
Such a change in point of view has actually occurred in Marxists theories of
language, for instance in the work of Vološinov.
3. Marxism and the philosophy of language: Vološinov

3.1. Since Volosinov’s work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), is
the only full-edged exposition of a Marxist position in the eld of language
that the tradition has given us,we must expect to nd in it the two moments
of the Marxist approach, the critical and the reconstructive moments. And we
do nd a critique of linguistics and the philosophy of language, under the two
headings of subjective idealism (Humboldt is the main object of the critique)
and abstract objectivism (associated with the name of Saussure): language as
energeia rather than ergon insists of the processual aspect of linguistic interac-
tion, but it ends up treating language as an aesthetic object, with the method-
ological individualism that such a romantic notion of creativeness implies;
whereas the positivist reduction of langue to a xed code, to a system, pre-
cludes any conception of language as practice and ignores the active creation
of meanings which is at the heart of such practice.
3.2. The constructive aspect of Vološinov’s work involves the reinterpreta-
tion of a number of familiar concepts, such as the concept of sign (conceived
as the site of the process of meaning in the course of social agon), of ideol-
ogy (the Russian term denotes not a system of ideas but a social and cultural
activity), of word (which is the name for the sign in so far as it takes part in a
process of meaning, and inscribes a social practice) and of consciousness. The
last concept is the most important, as it involves a critique not only of Saus-
sure but also of Freud (made explicit in Vološinov’s essays on Freudianism):
for him, consciousness is not the source of language and action that it is in
the idealist tradition, but the interiorisation of the exterior, that is of linguis-
tic interaction. The centre of consciousness is inner speech, the private is an
effect of the public, and the individual is always preceded by the collectivity
of speakers engaged in interlocution.
But the development of an original Marxist position also needs the creation
of new concepts, for instance the concept of the pluri-accented sign (every sign
is the site of a multiplicity of virtualities of meanings, and it sediments the
history of their actualisation in various interlocutions), of refraction (a concept
familiar to readers of Bakhtin, which stresses the grounding of language in
the social context, yet seeks to avoid the reductionism of the classical-Marx-
ist concept of reection) and of inner speech, or interior monologue. The last
concept is perhaps the most interesting, and the least expected in a Marxist
text (the Greek and scholastic tradition of logos endiathetos has petered out,
and contemporary cognitivists prefer to talk in terms of mentalese): it seems
to belong rather to literary theory than to linguistics or Marxism. But it is, as
we have seen, the result of the inscription of the inversion of the inner and the
outer, and the monologue consists in fact in a plurality of competing voices.
3.3. The result is a Marxist philosophy of language which can be briey
summed up in the ve following theses. 1) Language cannot be restricted to
langue as system, which is merely an abstraction and an instance of fetishism.
2) If language is not an abstract system, it is because language is a concrete
human practice, a continuous process actualised in verbal interaction. 3) As
a result, the laws of language development and evolution are social rather
than psychological. This excludes any form of methodological individualism
or intentionalism (the theory that ascribes the meaning of the utterance to the
intentions of meaning of the individual speaker). 4) Language creativeness
is not ‘rule-governed’, as in Chomsky. The constraints on the production of
utterances are ideological: they concern the interpellation of individuals into
subjects and the consequent counter-interpellation (here I am aware that I
translate Vološinov in a later theoretical language). 5) This last thesis sums up
the rst four: the structure of the utterance is social, and actualised only in the
social interactions of the community of speakers: any form of immanent, or

‘internal’ linguistics is rejected, and the core of the study of language is a form
of what we now call pragmatics.
4. Post-Marxism and language: the case of Deleuze and Guattari

4.1. The relationship between Deleuze and Guattari and Marxism is ques-
tionable, at best indirect and certainly complex. Yet it can be argued that they
operate a systematic shift of a number of key Marxist concepts (from modes
of production and productive force to régimes of signs and ows of libidi-
nal energy; from history to geography, from work to desire, from ideology
to assemblage – machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages
of enunciation; from party, qua ‘subjected group’ to the ‘subject group’ one
nds in more open movements; from molar to molecular analysis of social
phenomena). And they explicitly engage with Marxism in the fourth plateau
of Mille Plateaus, where they read Lenin’s pamphlet on slogans and derive
from it a critique of the ‘four postulates ‘ of linguistics that a contrario contains
the elements of a new philosophy of language which cannot leave Marxists
indifferent.
4.2. In July 1917, Lenin, who is hiding from arrest in the country, found the
time to write not a treatise on language but a pamphlet on slogans. His aim
was to persuade his comrades that the conjuncture of the slogan ‘All Power
to the Soviets’ was now exhausted, and that the most urgent task was to pre-
pare from the violent overthrow of the provisional government. But the pam-
phlet’s interest goes beyond the conjuncture, important as that conjuncture
turned out to have been. It sketches a theory of slogans and of their performa-
tive nature, of the force (in pragmatics it is known as the ‘illocutionary’ force
of an utterance) that they exert. And it does so by noting three aspects of the
illocutionary force of the right slogan: it identies the moment of the conjuncture
(on 4 July 1917, the rst, peaceful, stage of the revolution is nished); it names
the political objective that corresponds to the moment and it condenses and
embodies the concrete analysis of the concrete situation: without the right slo-
gan the revolution must fail. The consequences of this analysis go far beyond
the question of the revolution: they concern a theory of meaning and a phi-
losophy of language. For Lenin implicitly uses a concept of meaning as linked
to a rapport de forces in a determinate conjuncture (meaning is the result not of
co-operation but of struggle); as a result, an utterance is not a description of a

situation but an intervention within it (it can modify the said rapport de forces);
the right slogan is not true but just, that is adapted to the conjuncture in which
it intervenes; yet Lenin does use the word ‘truth’: the revolutionary activist
must tell the truth to the people: but such truth is an effect of the just slogan, of
its adjustment: in pragmatic terms, the illocutionary force of the right slogan
exerts a perlocutionary effect of truth in the conjuncture; lastly, the concept
of meaning implicitly used here is a political concept and language becomes a
political phenomenon.
My reading of the Lenin pamphlet anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s read-
ing: they interpret the effect of the new slogan in terms of incorporeal trans-
formation (a term Deleuze derived from his reading of the Stoics). And they
add that the slogan does not only exert a performative effect in the situation,
but contributes to the constitution of the class that, as a result of its adop-
tion, will seize power. This enables them to introduce the concept of collective
assemblage of enunciation as an ontological mixture of bodies, institutions
and discourses.
4.3. And they draw the consequences of this analysis that Lenin, who had
other cares, was not able to draw: they proceed to a systematic critique of
linguistics, according to what they call its ‘four postulates’: (1) ‘Language is
informational and communicational’; (2) ‘There is an abstract machine of lan-
guage that does not appeal to any extrinsic factor; (3) There are constants or
universals of language that enable us to dene it as a homogeneous system;
(4) Language can be scientically studied only under the conditions of a stan-
dard or major language. One can recognise in those postulates the explicit
version of the dominant ideology of language. And the negative formulation
of the postulates (which is clearer in French as the sentences are in the condi-
tional mood: ‘le langage serait informative et communicatif’) conceals positive
theses that make up a full-edged philosophy of language. It can be summed
up in the following theses. (1) The basic form of the linguistic utterance is not
he declarative sentence but the slogan; (2) The basic type of discourse is not
direct speech, which is supposed to refer to the outside world and transmit
information about it, but indirect speech; (3) The basic eld for the study of
language is not phonology (as in the structural school of linguistics) or syntax
(as in Chomsky), but pragmatics; (4) Speech-acts in so far as they are slogans,
exert a force, and enjoy a specic efcacy, which takes the form of incorporeal
transformations. (5) The source of utterances does not lie in individual speakers
but in collective assemblages of enunciation; (6) Language is not a homogeneous
system because it is riddled with contradictions. The main contradiction
opposes the major dialect or use of language and a host of minor dialects or
usages.
4.5. It is clear that we are very close to a Marxist philosophy of language:
their insistence on the slogan as the original form of utterance is inspired by
their reading of Lenin; their version of pragmatics is political; they insist on
the material efcacy of the speech-acts that constitute language (the concept
of ‘incorporeal transformation’ does not deny the materiality of the speech-
act, at least not for the Marxist who is familiar with the thought that ideas
have material efcacy when they move the masses); and their insistence on
the contradictions within language turns language into a collection of social,
historical and political phenomena. In the eld of language, the post-Marxism
of Deleuze and Guattari turns out to be very close to classical Marxism.
5. Theses for a Marxist philosophy of language

5.1. It now appears that the body of Marxist thought about language is consid-
erable. It does not amount to a coherent and explicit tradition, but it enables us
to suggest the rst elements of a Marxist philosophy of language. The political
urgency of such a philosophy has already been noted: the political centrality
of the ideology of communication in the political life of contemporary bour-
geois democracies, with its directors of communication, unashamed spin and
blatant manipulation of media hypes, need hardly be stressed. And merely
inverting the main tenets of this dominant ideology is not enough. We need a
number of positive theses for a Marxist philosophy of language.
5.2. The most general, foundational thesis is that we must treat language as
a form of praxis. The return to such a term, systematically used by Gramsci,
but abandoned by Althusser for the concept of ‘practice’ must be justied.
Language as we conceive it can hardly count as an example of practice (unless
we treat it as an instrument of communication, we can hardly claim that in
speaking we transform the raw material of ideas into the nished product
of the utterance, using words and rules of grammar for our tools). So we are
going back to the Aristotelian distinction between theoria, poiesis (which corre-
sponds to our ‘practice’) and praxis, dened as the collective action of human
communities. And we are indeed going back to Aristotle, to the opening sec-
tion of his Politics, where he denes man as a political animal in so far as he is
a speaking animal. In this original sense, language is indeed a form of praxis,
as it is the medium in which political action takes place. But, further than
this, language is also what exerts material force, allows ideas to acquire such
force when they capture the masses because such ideas nd their only mate-
riality in the words that do not so much translate or express them as consti-
tute them. It will come as no surprise that a school of post-Marxist thought,
a scion of Italian operaismo, as exemplied in the work of Virno and Marazzi,
claims that language, in what they call the post-Fordist stage of capitalism, is a
direct productive force: the worker at that stage is also, qua worker, a speaker,
and an important part of his work consists in communication (with complex
machines, with the whole structure of the production process). As a result of
which he is no longer a mere producer but a language virtuoso.
5.3. The general statement that language is a form of praxis, however, is
not sufcient, even at the post-Fordist stage. This foundational thesis must
be developed through positive theses. I borrow them from my own work, A
Marxist Philosophy of Language. There are four of them: language is a historical
phenomenon; language is a social phenomenon; language is a material phe-
nomenon; language is a political phenomenon.
The rst thesis has two aspects: language has a history, and language is
history. For language, of course, has a history, which must be retrieved from
structuralist neglect: there is no synchronic understanding of the value of
grammatical markers without taking note of the complex history that has
produced their present meanings. And it appears that the various strands or
layers of language have their independent historical rhythm, as in Althusser’s
conception of the social structure as a whole: the lexicon changes very fast
(there are generational dialects), syntax changes more slowly, but it is subject
to historical change. Hence the need for the Marxist to develop a historical
semantics, such as the one sketched in Raymond Williams’s Keywords, or to
re-read Vygotsky historical account of concept formation in the child. But lan-
guage also is history, if we accept Gramsci’s contention that every language
contains a conception of the world: language is potted, or sedimented, his-
tory: Williams’s Culture and Society is informed by such a notion of language.
The second thesis, that language is a social phenomenon seems to go
without saying, except that it enables the Marxist to leave methodological
individualism, and effect the reversal that makes consciousness the effect,
through interiorisation, of public, social interlocution. The question, ‘Who
speaks?’, will no longer receive the obvious answer (‘why, the speaker, of
course’), but a less intuitive one, such as: ‘it is language that speaks the speaker
who believes she speaks it’, or: the sender of the utterance is not an individual
subject but a collective assemblage of enunciation (slogans, if we decide after
Deleuze and Guattari that they are the basic form of utterances, are never
individual utterances). This thesis is also a means to approach the question of
the relationship between language and ideology, for instance by inserting the
speech-act in the Althusserian chain of interpellation (and counter-interpel-
lation).
The third thesis stresses the material element of language. This materiality
of language is already stressed in The German Ideology, where Marx reminds us
that ‘man possesses “consciousness”, but not inherent, not “pure” conscious-
ness. From the start the “spirit” is aficted with the curse of being “burdened”
with matter.’ So the Marxist will pay attention to the origin of the utterance in
the human body. And, in so doing, he will draw on the work of the American
Marxist David McNally. But the question remains, ‘which body is involved
in language?’, and there is more than one candidate: for Chomsky, it is the
biological body; for Merleau-Ponty, or for Lakoff and Johnson, it is the phe-
nomenological body, or a version thereof; for psychoanalysts, especially of
the Lacanian persuasion, it is the erotic body; the interest of McNally is that he
introduces what he calls the ‘labouring’ body, which is closer to the favourite
themes of Marxists and feminists alike. The advantage of his position is that
it grounds language in the materiality of the world, in the shape of the speak-
er’s body, but that it also allows a wider form of materialism, with which the
Marxist is familiar, the materialism of institutions, rituals and practices.
The fourth thesis has an obvious aspect that I have already dealt with: lan-
guage is indeed the medium of politics, especially democratic politics (the
importance of naming is stressed in the works of Balibar or Rancière). But it
also has another aspect: language is the object of politics, there are politics of
language and language policies, and the question of language is intimately
linked with the question of nationality. There are such things as linguistic
imperialism or colonialism and glottophagy (to use L.J. Calvet’s concept). Not
to mention linguistic sexism: Western feminists have been singularly success-
ful in their struggle against masculinist uses of language and in favour, for
instance, of the introduction of epicene pronouns (which are not marked for
gender).
5.4. So a number of classical-Marxist concepts will be adapted to language:
we shall talk of linguistic conjuncture, of linguistic class struggle, of linguistic
imperialism. But the major concept, and this will be my concluding thesis is
that of linguistic interpellation: the main function of language (if this term still
applies) is not communication but subjectication/subjection, the interpella-
tion of individuals into subjects, and the counter-interpellation by the inter-
pellated subjects. We have come a long way from Stalin’s common sense.
Figures
Chapter Twenty-Six
Adorno and Marx
Jean-Marie Vincent
Theodor W. Adorno is highly renowned. But although

he is well known, it is not clear that he is genuinely
recognised for what is essential about him. A stub-
born legend has it that his work is primarily that of
a philosopher with a passion for aesthetics and liter-
ary criticism, who turned aside from Marxism after
the Second World War by abandoning any prospect
of social transformation. In reality, if Adorno did
indeed break with the Marxisms that emerged after
Marx, he did not renounce the idea of a society freed
from exploitation and oppression. It might even be
said that his whole œuvre, even in its most aesthetic
manifestations, is centred on a search for adequate
means of emancipation and liberation following the
historical failures of the workers’ movement.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, these failures are set
in the more general context of the development of
the culture of the bourgeois era – the self-destruc-
tion of reason with its renunciation of the project of
creating meaning between, and, for human beings.
For Adorno, the workers’ movement and Marxists
have themselves been trapped in this regressive spi-
ral, this transformation of reason into mythology.
Thus, the theory of emancipation itself needs to be
resumed and rethought. In this radical reform, Marx
himself must not be spared, for a ‘hidden positivism’
490 • Jean-Marie Vincent
can be detected in him – positions on science and on the import of the critique
of political economy that require clarication. Marx had indeed discerned a
second nature in capitalist social relations, and especially in what he called
‘real abstractions’ (capital, value, the market). But he was unable to counter
the inuence of this second nature on thought processes and ways of perceiv-
ing social reality with sufcient vigilance. The critique of political economy –
an enormous, unnished labour – sometimes veers towards a positive science
of the economy in search of laws of a very traditional sort.
However, these slips do not invalidate Marx’s enterprise. On the contrary,
it needs to be continued and taken further, by working on it and from it. In
fact, the reference to Marx remains constant in Adorno, even if it is not very
frequent in a whole series of his writings. It is also implicit in the sociologi-
cal work carried out from the 1940s onwards and conceived as an ambitious
critique of the social sciences, using analytical tools forged by Marx: market
abstraction, commodity fetishism, abstract labour, and so on. Over and above
any notion of a critical sociology, Adorno undertakes to deconstruct socio-
logical theories in their blind spots and, at the same time, to deconstruct the
empirical world as a social world of necessary appearances. Adorno’s aim
is to set xed categories in motion, on the grounds that they fall foul of the
illusion of their own immediacy, because they conceive themselves as master-
ing an unproblematic reality. He therefore wishes to introduce mediations
where none are currently to be found, to demonstrate the distortions present
in concepts, their inability to dene the relations between the general and the
particular; and, more precisely, to demonstrate the domination of a particu-
laristic generality over the particular (or the singular) under the appearances
of simple transitions from one to the other. The subject of capitalist society
is parasitised by an abstract sociality that permeates its consciousness and
unconscious alike. Human beings are socialised not only in inter-individual
relations, but also by their relations to social relations that are external to
them – social relations between social things (relations between capitals, com-
modities, and the dynamics of valorisation); and they struggle in relations of
competition, in processes of evaluation-assessment, that escape them. In fact,
socialisation by abstract sociality overdetermines all social bonds and forms
of sociability.
According to Adorno, this antagonistic socialisation inevitably creates
relations of confrontation between individuals, a constant struggle to secure
Adorno • 491
an advantageous position in the elds of valorisation and power relations.

There is therefore a ubiquitous violence, open or masked, in social relations
and a structured symbolic universe in which others represent a permanent
threat. Tendencies to aggression and self-aggression continually traverse
the unconscious of individuals and cloud consciousnesses, diverting them
from an accurate perception of things and social relations and, as a result,
of what is really at issue in society. Already permeated by economism and
thereby rendered abstract, politics risks descending into irrational and mur-
derous conicts at any moment. Consequently, collective action, invariably
dominated by organisational bureaucrats, tends to be transferred from the
usual objectives to assaults on minority, powerless sections of society. Even
limited democratic debate becomes impossible and politics destroys itself
by taking the form of a life-and-death struggle against a mythical enemy.
Cracks open in the fragile barriers of civilisation through which modern bar-
barism surges, with all its unsuspected potential. As Adorno says with ref-
erence to Auschwitz, the catastrophe has occurred and humanity has since
lived in a kind of barbarous normality (or ordinary barbarism) made up of
brutality and incivility. It is oblivious of the fact that behind this dubious nor-
mality an even greater barbarism is only waiting to be unleashed, because the
whys and wherefores of Auschwitz have not been properly understood and
assimilated.
This is why Adorno cannot share a certain optimism characteristic of
Marx – especially the latter’s condence in the positive import of manifesta-
tions of resistance to capitalism. At bottom, the basic antagonism between
capital and labour is blind for Adorno; and the class struggle rarely takes a
direction conducive to social transformation. This implies posing the issue,
not posed by Marx, of the struggle against capitalist society’s blinding connec-
tions or structures of blindness. It also means examining, over and above the
particularistic domination of generality and real abstractions, the modalities
of the intellectual division of labour, the formalism of scientic practices and,
last but least, the culture industry. To link all this together, Adorno adopts an
old theme of Horkheimer’s: knowledge is a social relation. In other words, the
production of knowledge is not a simple activity derived from the intellectual
capacities of individuals: it refers to a whole social organisation of intellectual
exchange and cognitive processes. Thinking is always social, employing cogni-
tive techniques and instruments that have been produced socially in response
to social imperatives. This is what is masked by the various types of scien-

tic formalisation when they reduce the problem of producing knowledge to
logical constructions, decontexualising thought processes. In this way, crucial
issues can be repressed: the issue of the genesis of cognitive processes; of the
social demand that lies behind the construction of objects of knowledge; of
the effects on social relations; of the determination of intellectual activities
(the intellectual division of labour, the divide between intellectuals and non-
intellectuals, and so on). As a result, there is just as much production of igno-
rance as of knowledge. For Adorno, this no doubt explains many people’s
ambivalent reactions towards science. On the one hand, it offers security
because it brings technological progress that can be invested libidinally. On
the other, it is a source of anxiety on account of the dangerous nature of its
applications in a capitalist context, which refers to a basic feature which is
unthought: its submission to the dynamic of valorisation.
Contrary to what many have claimed, and continue to claim, Adorno did
not conclude that there is no way out and that the only thing to do is to await
better days. On the contrary, he thought that there was an urgency to theo-
retical work, an imperative to intervene radically on cognitive processes and
demonstrate their one-sided, utterly erratic operation. The urgency was all
the greater in that knowledge production is increasingly important in social
production and social existence and because theoretico-practical, as well as
technological, development take pride of place. But one must be aware that
mere denunciation of the mediatisation of thinking would be impotent. In
reality, it is necessary to intervene on all fronts where modes of thought and
ways of apprehending society crystallise. Critique must be rendered at once
internal and external. It must be immanent – i.e. not deriving from without –
and embrace what it wants to subvert, so as to reveal the aws and dead-
locks of that which believes itself to be rigorous. At the same time, it must be
transcendent, demonstrating the untenable character of the status quo and of
the reproduction of what currently exists. The starting point of such work is
necessarily subjective. More precisely, it involves subjectivities working on
themselves, in order to escape paralysing cognitive apparatuses, to cast off
the yoke of ready-made thought and position themselves in an external
relationship to it. However, such distantiation must necessarily be followed
by the development of theoretical structures of observation and elaboration
that are practically opposed to mediatised thinking. This assumes collective
Adorno • 493
co-operation and collaboration over and above solitary reection. Critical

theory has to struggle against the compartmentalisation and fragmentation of
thought into separate domains or disciplines.
Philosophical reection is obviously central for Adorno and he defends
it against all those who proclaim its replacement by some form of linguistic
analysis or some way of disposing of problems. However, like Marx, he rejects
the idea that it can be self-sufcient and capable of legislating on all types of
knowledge. When it conceives itself as such, and believes that it is philosophia
perennis or prima philosophia, philosophy in fact contributes to the reproduc-
tion the intellectual division of labour and thus to social reproduction as a
whole. However, it must not succumb to the illusion that it can immediately
convert itself into praxis. On the contrary, as theory it must confront other the-
oretical practices, in order to criticise them and to problematise itself. In par-
ticular, it must confront the social sciences, which are invariably enclosed in
positivism, but rich in empirical material loftily ignored by philosophers. The
empire of sociology is an unproblematised empirical world – that is to say, a
world taken as a set of indisputable data. Yet it is not a heteroclite, arbitrary
assemblage, constructed solely by the subjectivity of researchers. In its oscilla-
tion between holism and methodological individualism, objectivism and sub-
jectivism, structuralism and constructivism, sociology indicates the difculty
of dening social relations and the modes of individuals’ incorporation into
them. It does not succeed in striking a balance between the general and the
particular, the static and the dynamic, the psychological and the social. In the
form of unacknowledged symptoms, it reveals the disequilibria, the disconti-
nuities that shape society, and the supremacy of uncontrolled processes that
disorient individuals and social groups in their practices.
This observation is crucial: the upshot is that there can be no unity of theory
and practice. The practices stuck fast in conjunctures of subjection are not
readily accessible to theory and theory cannot claim to nd direct material in
practice. In order to theorise wisely, it is necessary to be in a state of constant
tension with practices, while not rejecting them disdainfully. In fact, one must
enter into their blind, groping logic in order to disrupt and disturb them. The
main objective of theory cannot be to guide action. It must above all seek to
rouse people, to release them from the fascination exercised by the phantas-
magorias of commodities – that is to say, by the market apparel of processes of
submission bound up with valorisation. Critical theory must not be a theory
of practice or practices – their mere reexive extension. In its confrontation

with the empirical world and elds of activity, it must make itself a secondary
reection – that is to say, come to terms with itself as a practice to be subjected
to critique, as a theoretical practice of research employing intellectual instru-
ments. But it must also express itself as a quest for change, as an intervention
on behalf of different social relations. Construed thus, critical theory cannot
be uninterested in the practical construction of intellectual institutions and
groupings. It is not a solitary critique, but a constant confrontation with other
theoretical practices.
On the basis of such considerations, the Institute of Social Research returned
to Frankfurt. Neither Horkheimer nor Adorno wanted to fashion an academic
œuvre, still less to settle down comfortably in the academy. Adorno, in par-
ticular, was anxious to test the techniques rened in the United States for
investigating the ‘authoritarian personality’ on a new terrain: Germany after
Hitler. The main goal of their enterprise was to assess the impact of Nazism
and its collapse on Germans in the West, and at the same to test the prospects
for democracy. At the outset, they were not very optimistic about the likely
results. For them, society’s self-enclosure was virtually complete, sealed by the
expansion of the culture industry, the decline in inter-capitalist competition,
and the advance of state intervention. In this connection, Horkheimer tended
to refer to an administered world where freedom of movement, characteris-
tic of early capitalism (at least for certain social strata), was in the process of
disappearing. He concluded that the room for manoeuvre was continuing to
narrow and that it was therefore necessary to advance cautiously.
Horkheimer’s pessimism was contradicted, at least in part, by events. From
the outset, the Institute met with manifest success as well as avowed hos-
tility. It destabilised the sociological profession, which was already far from
self-condent, because it offered both a sociology that was highly developed
empirically as well as theoretically, and a critical re-examination of the past
that countered tendencies to cover it in oblivion. It practised a sociology
that was utterly untraditional and disrupted many routines – those of the
Geisteswissenchaften and of an empiricism employing old-fashioned methods.
According to some observers, it created an atmosphere of civil war in the
social sciences. Even if the suggestion is somewhat exaggerated, it is true that
the Institute exercised ever more inuence during the 1950s and 1960s, to the
great annoyance of its opponents. The research it organised was varied and
Adorno • 495
creative and its sociology teaching at Frankfurt University enjoyed increasing

success.
In the debates in the German Sociological Association, interventions by
Horkheimer, but especially by Adorno, had very considerable resonance.
They began to be perceived as a sort of unclassiable current, strongly marked
by German thought of the most classical variety, but tracing strong lines of
demarcation vis-à-vis it, while seeking to open up new lines of theoretical
work.
It would be paradoxical if Marx had been absent from these debates and
this civil war. And in fact, he was very present – less as a supplier of positive
theories than as a destabiliser of the theoretical eld. Despite his errors – the
penetration of elements of positivism or scientism into the critique of politi-
cal economy, for example – he provided key weapons for penetrating the
immediate appearances and false obviousness of capitalist society, notably
thanks to his accounts of the commodity as a social relation, the abstraction of
exchange (its domination by value or valorisation), and the transformation of
what was most important about human activities into abstract labour. These
theses became all the more signicant in Adorno as he gradually abandoned
the theses defended by Horkheimer in ‘The Authoritarian State’ in 1941. For
him, the false totality represented by capitalist society is neither static, nor
one-dimensional. It is shot through with unforeseeable, irregular dynamics
that destructure and restructure social relations and individual situations.
In a 1962 seminar, Adorno was quite explicit on his relationship to Marx:
he identied him as the rst great theoretician of critical theory and stressed
the importance of the theory of fetishism for understanding valorisation as an
abstract conceptualisation of social relations. He brought out some of Marx’s
uncertainties, particularly in relation to Hegel, but credited him with not fall-
ing into a problematic of the revolutionary subject and class consciousness
(characteristic of Western Marxism). In conclusion, he noted that Marx had
left unresolved many problems, which had not been taken up by those who
claimed to be his successors. He thus implicitly accepted that the task of con-
temporary critical theory was to continue Marx differently, by tackling these
unresolved problems. But none of this could be done from the outside. What
was required was an immanent critique – that is to say, one that started out
from the difculties and impasses of Marx’s theory, while trying to under-
stand them better than Marx himself had been able to. For example, it was not
possible to remain at the level of phenomena of alienation: it was necessary to

penetrate the effects of the commodication of social or inter-individual rela-
tions, as well as of objectivity, much more deeply. For a left Hegelianism or a
variant of ethical humanism was insufcient. As for problems of power, they
must not be abstracted from the reproduction of existence, of what happens
by way of bodies, in everyday relations, in relationship to objects, to time and
space. The abstract conceptualisation of social relations did not only take the
form of cognitive processes that escape human beings, it was also inscribed in
the process of abstraction of corporeality and materiality, in their condition-
ing in the service of the conditioning of labour-power.
Marx’s œuvre must therefore not be reduced to a narrow conception of
the critique of political economy. It must be expanded, surmounting disci-
plinary compartmentalisation and cognitive barriers in order to undermine
the dictatorship of real abstractions. However, to attain this objective, criti-
cal theory cannot think the negative totality directly – that is to say, think it
abstractly. It must multiply partial illuminations, establish itself in the most
varied domains, dismantling borders. As Adorno put it, to exhibit the truth,
it must think in constellations, organise a convergence of different intellectual
endeavours on developing the mediations that lead to the abstract totality. It
follows that the genuinely critical thinker, while not claiming to be universal,
cannot simply be a specic intellectual (in Foucault’s terminology): he must
explore a great deal in order to discover new paths. When Adorno engages
in literary criticism, this is not the activity of an aesthete, but the meticulous,
professional, strenuous labour of someone who wants to identify the impos-
sibility of being human in an inhuman world as accurately as possible (see,
for example, his commentaries on Beckett’s Endgame). The same spirit inspires
his many writings on music. Their technical difculty can frequently prove
off-putting, but it would be wrong to perceive them as the expression of a sort
of élitist avant-gardism. In reality, the writings on music are an exploration
of the possibilities that art contains for resisting the exhaustion of the avant-
gardes and nding, even in debased forms, ways of reacting against com-
modication by transgressing the boundaries between genres. The fraying of
forms, their contamination by forms borrowed from distant genres, furnish
new means for making ways of living in society seen or heard differently; and
for transcending, by way of the unexpected, the xed intentions of those who
fashion works of art.
Adorno • 497
Basically, the dispersion of Adorno’s works is only apparent, for his many
initiatives are coherent and complementary. Without a doubt, many of those
who came into contact with him in one way or another did not always grasp
the signicance of his work in its full range. But many understood, at least
partially, that they were in the presence of a revolutionary, utterly unconven-
tional intellectual endeavour. The impact of this theoretical practice without
any real precedent was, of necessity, ambiguous. There were misunderstand-
ings, occasionally rash interpretations, and some uninformed enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, a terrain, albeit certainly a limited one, was worked in depth;
intellectual processes were set in motion, which themselves had political con-
sequences. This is particularly clear in the student world, where a not insignif-
icant minority recognised itself both in critical theory and in an organisation,
the association of socialist students (SDS). Adorno himself was perfectly
aware of this and he also knew that he was in the process of preparing a new
reception of Marx’s œuvre – one far removed from the old orthodoxies (Com-
munist and social-democratic). The SDS’s publications did indeed propagate
a critical reception of Marx’s work by acknowledging its unnished character
and ambiguities and by developing new examinations of it. Moreover, it was
under the inuence of Adorno (more indirect than direct) that the Frankfurt
SDS group opposed the activism of other SDS groups (some of them inu-
enced by orthodox Communism), while participating in campaigns against
the presence of former Nazis in the state apparatus or against atomic weap-
ons, and doing educational work in the trade unions.
The ambition of the leadership group in the SDS was limited at the out-
set:1 to strengthen democracy and counter the authoritarian tendencies pres-
ent in some social strata. But it was quickly outstripped by the organisation’s
success. For many, the SDS gradually came to embody radical opposition to
the forces of the Federal Republic. Various anti-conformist currents formed
around it, which were heterogeneous in their outlook and conduct. In addi-
tion, it collided head-on with the student radicalisation that followed the
mass expansion of German universities. The rapid growth in members in
fact destabilised the whole organisation, which was drawn into increasingly
bruising confrontations with the ruling powers over anti-imperialist activities
1
See an account of the seminar in Backhaus 1997, pp. 501–13.
(against the American intervention in Vietnam) and action against the ways
in which universities were governed. The anti-authoritarian current around
Rudi Dutschke, which advocated direct action (non-terrorist, illegal action),
assumed greater importance and disrupted the leadership’s orientation and
structure. The divergences over the analysis of the situation were not insignif-
icant. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, a student of Adorno’s but close to the anti-authori-
tarians, believed that the authorities were adopting a harder reactionary line
which would threaten democracy in the short term. Accordingly, he thought
that the student movement must do everything to counter the reactionary
offensive and supplant a failing, even complicit, social democracy.
Adorno’s attitude during this period is often presented as fundamentally
hostile to the student movement.2 Did he not have the students who were
occupying the Institute expelled by the police? In reality, his reactions were
ambivalent, at once favourable to the student movement and critical of it.
Adorno could not but appreciate the democratic thrust of the movement, its
refusal to throw a veil over the Nazi past, its way of shaking the conven-
tions and hypocrisy of the reigning morality. On the other hand, he was very
sceptical about the movement’s ability to overcome its infantile disorders,
its impatience, its underestimation of the obstacles it faced, its tendency to
mythologise violence, its temptation to wish to change the world without
really interpreting it, and its fetishisation of subjectivity at the expense of
objectivity. He glimpsed the dangers of activism – that is to say, of an atheo-
retical practice that was consequently blind to the pathologies of action in
contemporary society. According to Adorno, part of the student movement
was prey to collective hallucinations. As can be seen from his correspondence
with Herbert Marcuse on the issue, for him there could be no question of sub-
scribing to student initiatives and actions whose orientation he did not share.3
A concern for personal comfort was certainly not absent from this remote
attitude. But it would do Adorno an injustice if we forgot the fundamental,
predominant reasons.
Nevertheless, Adorno’s abstention was not innocent and was even para-
doxical. At the very moment when critical theory was hailed as a movement
2
On this period, see Demirovic 1999.
3
See Adorno’s correspondence with Horkheimer and Marcuse in Horkheimer
1996.
Adorno • 499
which, even if minoritarian, was nevertheless a mass movement with original

features, it could nd nothing better to do than withdraw to quarters. In a
word, it did not seek to theorise the effects of its theoretical practice in the
academy and the intellectual world – and this in a social context where the
production of knowledge was assuming increasing importance. Adorno criti-
cised the students’ collective actions, but he did not take the trouble to attempt
a determinate negation of them, by indicating the paths to be pursued. If the
students’ collective actions were one-sided, it was necessary to try to explain
on what conditions they could become multilateral or rather multi-dimen-
sional – that is to say, directed not only towards multiple objectives, but also
towards the positioning of groups and individuals within action and towards
its transcendence by employing new social logics and new social links. If the
student actions were marked by many political deciencies in their strate-
gic and tactical approaches, it needed to be shown that different orientations
were possible. Yet politics is virtually absent from Adorno’s reections. We
nd it, obviously, in the critique of Nazism and in texts that broach the weak-
nesses of democracy. But all that is far from constituting a developed theory
of politics in collective action and of collective action in politics. Following in
the tracks of Marx, Adorno had a rm grasp of the dependency of politics on
economics and economism, but he placed it under the aegis of a sociology of
domination largely adopted from Weber.
By proceeding in this fashion, he did not tackle the utterly decisive question
of the articulation of politics with the organisation and circulation of power in
social relations and society. Politics is not reducible to exchanges between the
state and social groups, and still less to a bureaucratic administration of rela-
tions of domination and citizenship. It has something to do with what Foucault
calls the micro-physics of power – that is to say, mechanisms of discipline and
surveillance and the resistance they provoke. This theme of resistance (and
its many forms) is obviously crucial for understanding how politics might be
unlocked, how people might see through state performances and the biased
representations that social groups and individuals give of themselves in polit-
ical sparring. In fact, resistance to oppression and exploitation invests numer-
ous domains – cognitive relations, relations in rms, relations between the
sexes, expressive relations. On condition that they are polyphonically linked
in constellations, forms of resistance are potentially levers for undermining
individual and collective action, for overcoming feelings of powerlessness in
face of the machine-like organisation of capital, for desiring lives different

from those that are currently lived. Politics must cease to be a defence of inter-
ests (which can only operate in favour of the dominant interests of capital)
and become the unveiling of abstract social relations and a struggle for their
reconstruction.
However, the revival of politics and collective action will not occur from
scratch. It involves a critical re-examination of the past of the workers’ move-
ment, a sort of duty to take stock, which, over and above the denunciation of
crimes and errors, will endeavour to analyse the processes that led to catas-
trophes and to the expanded reproduction of capital. In the rst instance, it is
necessary to criticise the fact that the workers’ movement, in its overwhelm-
ing majority, has not proved capable of breaking with the narrow and sub-
ordinate forms of politics peculiar to capitalist society. Certainly, large-scale
battles have not been wanting, any more than crises with revolutionary con-
sequences. But the political expressions given to them have remained largely
prisoners of tutelary and paternalistic organisational forms. The masses have
invariably been asked to rally in semi-passive fashion to orientations and
apparatuses that were autonomous from them. Parties and unions were con-
structed in the chinks and interstices of the institutionalised world of politics.
They have adopted many of its practices and failings: hierarchical systems
of material and symbolic rewards and a ritualisation of collective action. To
this must be added the fact that representations of the process of social eman-
cipation have scarcely gone beyond the stage of more or less mythologised
narratives – that is to say, they have not been able to trigger new cognitive
processes and help create new social bonds. The degree of innovation in the
politics of the workers’ movement was not completely insignicant. But it
was insufcient to enable it to practise politics differently, so as radically to
recast it.
Adorno never tackled this complex of problems, prisoner as he was of an
unduly general conception of domination. He was easily satised with a
uid, unexplained concept of totalitarianism to characterise the Soviet Union.
This lack of analysis of the social, cognitive and symbolic processes that led
to the construction of pseudo-‘real socialism’, and then to the submission of
a large part of the workers’ movement to a veritable process of social coun-
ter-emancipation, subtracted a whole dimension of social and political reality
from examination. It makes it possible to understand Adorno’s silence on the
Adorno • 501
future to be constructed: he saw the horizon darkened by a fragile Western

democracy, a possible resurgence of Nazism, and the threat of Communist
totalitarianism. He did not perceive what was going on under the surface of
Soviet monolithism and he therefore did not see all the indications or counter-
indications that could be drawn from more developed analyses – particularly
for a new conception of politics. Basically, for him, there were far too many
tendencies towards a standardisation of the world and a progressive cloud-
ing of social relations. Here we nd some of the ambiguities and hesitations
already visible in the analysis of capitalism. Adorno knew that oppression
and exploitation come from afar. But he wondered whether the catastrophic
continuity of history (Benjamin) was modulated in major discontinuities. One
sometimes has the impression that he construes capitalism as an essential
break with many pasts and a reorganisation of part of these pasts by selection
and assimilation to the present and the temporality of capital in incessant,
endlessly new syntheses. The absorption of the past thus renders its recon-
struction uncertain. It can now hardly be grasped other than via traces and
ultimately pertains more to an archaeological endeavour than to vast histori-
cal syntheses contributing to a universal history. This is how we might inter-
pret certain critical remarks on the philosophy of history. But, at other times,
discontinuity is denied, in favour of a continuity of domination (domination
over nature and humanity).
These ambiguities and oscillations obviously represent serious obstacles to
any determinate negation of capitalist relations at a theoretical level. Critical
theory à la Adorno did not link up adequately with the critique of political
economy; and the abstraction of exchange [Tauschabstraktion] was insuf-
ciently conjugated with the movement of abstract labour and many capitals –
that is to say, with the metamorphoses of the value-form. As a result, it was
not able fully to explain the mode of existence and functioning of this upside
down world, which is forever prostrating itself before the new idols engen-
dered by real abstractions. In many respects, Adorno went further than Marx
and detected the economism that persisted in Marx’s critique of economism.
But he was unable to avoid several dead ends. He went beyond Marx, but at
the same time he fell short of the founder of the critique of political economy.
This is the paradox that requires reection in order to restore vigour to critical
theory.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Louis Althusser, or the Impure Purity of the
Concept
François Matheron
The fate of Louis Althusser’s work today is a

remarkable one. Abruptly rescued from oblivion
by the publication of his autobiography L’avenir
dure longtemps in 1992, it has since been enriched
by several volumes of unpublished texts, together
with the republication of texts long unavailable in
the bookshops. Thus, the conditions seemingly exist
for a critical re-examination of Althusser’s thought,
as suggested by the numerous works, articles, and
conferences devoted to it. For many reasons, this
is not quite what has happened. Over and above
rather sterile polemics about the respective statuses
of the ‘acknowledged œuvre’ and the posthumous
œuvre; over and above the highly sensitive issue of
the relations between the biographical and the con-
ceptual; over and above disputes about inheritance
and resentments towards the man and the master;
over and above the excesses of a psychiatric com-
mentary indifferent both to the texts and the ‘case’,
an observation must be made: the eld of Althus-
serian studies has still not been constituted. Thus,
there is no detailed study of Althusser’s position
in the history of Marxism, in philosophy, in the his-
tory of philosophy or epistemology, even in the his-
tory of French philosophy. For this kind of approach
504 • François Matheron
generally assumes a comprehensive assessment,1 at least an implicit one,

which Althusser’s œuvre precisely seems designed to discourage. How can
one assess an œuvre that was forever destroying itself? How can one assess an
œuvre that is so heterogeneous, where magnicent lightning ashes sit along-
side shocking theoretical barbarities? How can a text as stimulating as the
famous ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ be reconciled with the
‘rather terrifying’ ‘Sur la reproduction des rapports de production’, of which
(minus a few details) it is nevertheless only a fragment? If retreat to the aca-
demic form of the commentary seems impossible, the same can be said of
the invariably rather lazy project of separating the wheat from the chaff, of
distinguishing between ‘what is living and what is dead in the œuvre of Louis
Althusser’. Difcult to inscribe in historical continuity, this œuvre is, in truth,
irredeemably enigmatic. It is as if, behind the many proud announcements
of discoveries, there is a profoundly aporetic framework that condemns all
attempts at reading to generalised uncertainty. As we know, Althusser pro-
gressively destroyed the theses he had constructed. Disquieting in itself, this
conceals another phenomenon, which is much more disturbing: there is not
a single Althusserian concept that is not, at bottom, immediately modied
by its opposite.2 By way of a few limited examples, we shall seek to show
that such is indeed Althusser’s fundamental gesture; and that it is inextricably
bound up with his greatness and his misery.
If Althusser’s life is forever stamped by the seal of tragedy, his work is
irrevocably placed under the sign of paradox. First of all, there is the paradox
belatedly revealed by the tragedy itself: that of the autobiographical writing.
As is well known, autobiography is, to say the least, absent from Althusserian
philosophy, in which analysis of the ‘interpellation of individuals as subjects’
disqualies in advance the specular illusion characteristic of the autobio-
graphical project – such as it was practised by Althusser at least. Obviously, it
can be argued in the face of all the evidence that such a paradox is unrelated
to Althusser’s theoretical writings. It can also be claimed, more subtly, that
what is involved is striking conrmation of the Althusserian conception of
ideology: no one – not even Althusser – was able to escape the trap of specu-
1
The only attempt of this kind is that of Gregory Elliott (Elliott 1987), which
predates the appearance of Althusser’s unpublished texts. However, see the new
edition, Elliott 2006.
2
In a quite different language, this is one of the lessons of the magisterial study
by Yoshihiko Ichida 1997.
Althusser • 505
larity.3 But this only succeeds in displacing the paradox. The autobiographical
dimension is in fact manifestly present at the heart of certain of Althusser’s
major theoretical texts, like ‘Freud and Lacan’ and especially Machiavelli and
Us. His work on Machiavelli began in January 1962, right in the middle of a
very serious depression that ended in three months’ hospitalisation. Com-
menting on this course in a letter of 29 September 1962 to Franca Madonia,4
Althusser stated that he was interested in Machiavelli because he identied
with him, discovering in his work what he regarded as his own problem –
how to begin from nothing:
When I think about it now . . . in developing Machiavelli’s contradictory

requirement, I was actually talking about myself. The question I was dealing
with – how to begin from nothing the New State that is nevertheless absolutely
indispensable and demanded by a profound aspiration (which, in reality, did
not have, could not nd, did not see a way of being realised and satised) –
was mine.
And Althusser adds:
In developing this theoretical problem . . . I had an hallucinatory sense (of

an irresistible force) of developing nothing other than my own delirium. I
had the impression that the delirium of my course coincided with (and was
nothing other than) my own subjective delirium . . .: I had the impression that
the delirium of my course (objective delirium) uniquely coincided with
something in me that was delirious.5
It could not be more clearly stated that Althusser’s relationship to his theoreti-
cal object is here perceived in terms of identication.
Obviously, this commentary is only one commentary among others; and it
would be naïve to take it for the truth of its relationship to its object: a posi-
tion of principle that is especially justied in the case of Althusser, whose
3
See Albiac 1997. For a directly opposed point of view, see in the same volume
Moulier Boutang 1997.
4
See my introduction to Althusser 1995a. The extraordinary correspondence
between Althusser and Franca Madonia extends in the main from November 1961
to 1967. Whilst in no sense a theoretical correspondence, it does clearly bring out
the singularity of Althusser’s relationship to his theoretical objects, to the extent that
much of Althusser’s philosophical writing is only really intelligible in the light of
this correspondence.
5
See Althusser 1998a, pp. 221–6.
autobiography is rather disappointing in this regard. And we can also add, as

he himself did in The Future Lasts a Long Time,6 that the relationship of a dis-
course to its objects is different from the subjective relationship of the ‘author’
to these objects, which, moreover, are not the same. However, the reality is
not so simple. For far from being restricted to a few texts that are ultimately
private, this subjective dimension is paradoxically present, with a blinding
presence, in Althusser’s most ‘theoreticist’ work, Reading ‘Capital’ – especially
in the theory of the ‘symptomatic reading’ developed in the Introduction,
which is wholly devoted to the clarication of the project contained in these
introductory sentences:
We read Capital as philosophers, and therefore posed it a different question. . . .

we posed it the question of its relation to its object, hence both the question
of the specicity of its object, and the question of the specicity of its relation
to that object. . . . To read Capital as philosophers is precisely to question the
specic object of a specic discourse, and the specic relationship between
this discourse and its object; it is therefore to put to the discourse-object unity
the question of the epistemological status which distinguishes this particular
unity from other forms of discourse-object unity.7
A whole generation of readers has been captivated by this virtuoso text, where
Althusser simultaneously deals with Marx’s reading of the classical econo-
mists, the Althusserian reading of Marx, and a reading of reality through the-
oretical practice in which the relation to reality becomes highly problematic.
The concept of symptomatic reading is used to analyse Marx’s reading of the
‘text of classical economics’. At rst sight, Althusser tells us, Marx made do
with revealing the lacunae of Adam Smith (or of Smith-Ricardo) behind the
apparent continuity of his discourse: Smith quite simply failed to see what
was already there, whereas Marx saw it. Everything thus boils down to a
subjective relationship of the more-or-less clear-sighted vision of an already
given object. At the same time, however, Marx writes something quite dif-
ferent: what classical economics does not see is what it has itself produced;
6
‘Only now do I think I see clearly what my relationship with Marxism was about.
And once again I am not concerned with the objectivity of what I wrote, and hence of
my relationship to one or more objective objects, but with how I related to an object
as an “object-choice” – in other words, an internal, unconscious object’ (Althusser
1993, p. 212, translation modied).
7
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 14–15.
Althusser • 507
and in the lacunae of its discourse must be seen the symptoms of a change of
problematic produced without classical economics being aware of it: ‘what
classical political economy does not see is not what it does not see, but what it
sees’. And if it does not see it, it is because it is attached to its old problematic,
which prevents it from seeing that it has ‘completely changed the terms’ of
the problem. As interpreted by Althusser, Marx identies the defective use of
the term ‘labour’ as the symptom of a different discourse, which is invisible
because excluded. In the event, Smith produced a correct answer to a question
(What is the value of labour-power?) that was not posed because it could not
be; and Marx’s whole effort consisted in re-establishing the question. In such
conditions, the invisible does not depend on the greater or lesser acuteness of
the knowing subject:
The sighting is thus no longer the act of an individual subject, endowed with
the faculty of ‘vision’ which he exercises either attentively or distractedly; the
sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is the relation of immanent
reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its
problems.8
And thus we arrive at that other ‘reading’, which is the labour of knowledge,
to which Althusser devotes the bulk of his Introduction to Reading ‘Capital’.
The explicit target is the ‘empiricist conception of knowledge’, construed
in the broadest sense. In fact, this sense is extremely broad, since it encom-
passes the totality of classical theories of knowledge, including philosophies
that are seemingly as non-empiricist as those of Plato, Descartes, and Hegel.
In the fth course of his philosophy course for scientists, Althusser divided
theories of knowledge into two major tendencies: formalism and empiricism.
However, he only gives two examples of approaches that are strongly marked
by formalism: that of Kant, in whom, however, ‘empiricism is ultimately
dominant’; and that of Leibniz, where it is formalism that is ‘dominant’.9 But,
insofar as Marx’s break with the ‘religious myth of reading’ takes the form
of a rejection of the Hegelian conception of expressive totality, which is itself
connected to Leibniz’s philosophy by Althusser, we are entitled to consider
that, for him, empiricism predominates in classical theories of knowledge as
8
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 25.
9
Althusser 1995a, p. 279.
a whole. According to Althusser, the principal characteristic of empiricism is

that it does not distinguish between the real object and the object of knowl-
edge and conceives knowledge as an abstraction in the literal sense of the
word: the object of knowledge is supposedly part of the real object – essential
reality as opposed to inessential reality. Thus, there is only a single object, of
which knowledge is supposedly the vision; and the sole function of the theory
of knowledge is to provide a guarantee of the possibility of this vision. As is
well known, Althusser’s work in epistemology is wholly constructed against
such an approach, in two main directions: rejection of the very idea of a guar-
antee, which is by its very nature ideological; and insistence on the distinction
between the real object and the object of knowledge. Science does not work
on real objects, but on objects constructed by it, whose relationship to the real
objects is, for the time being at least, bracketed. It is therefore not a question
of asking by what right science is possible, but of investigating the structure
of theoretical practice, the process of production of knowledge, which occurs
wholly ‘in thought’ (hence the term ‘theoretical practice’, the famous ‘crite-
rion of practice’ being strictly internal to theory). Such is the Althusserian
‘purity of the concept’: not the product of an empirical purication, which
would subsequently only demand to return to reality, but a concept situated
in an adequate relationship to an object of knowledge produced by theoreti-
cal labour – a concept unfolding its specicity in order to produce what Marx
called a ‘concrete-in-thought’. The specicity of Marx’s discourse – an epis-
temology of the concept conceived as a veritable weapon against any form
of pragmatism – is thus that it breaks with a conception of knowledge as the
transparency of a given object – that is to say, with what Althusser calls ‘the
yearning for a reading at sight’, to which he counter-poses a conception of
reading and knowledge as production.10
A relatively clear relation to an object thus seems to emerge from the analy-
ses of Reading ‘Capital’, which can be assessed as such quite independently
of Althusser’s relationship to the object Machiavelli. However, once again,
the reality is much more complicated. The theory of symptomatic reading in
fact acquires a strange resonance when compared with what Althusser wrote
to Franca Madonia on 21 February 1964, at the very moment when he really
began his reading of Capital:
10
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 16 and 34.
Althusser • 509
There’s something rather strange, when I think about it. For several months
I’ve lived with an extraordinary capacity for live contact with some profound
realities, sensing them, seeing them, reading them in beings and reality at
sight. I’ve thought about this extraordinary thing, in thinking of the situation
of the few rare beings whose name I revere – Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud – and who must have possessed this contact in order to write what
they left behind. Otherwise, I don’t see how they could have lifted this
enormous layer, this tombstone that covers reality . . . so as to have the direct
contact with it that burns in them for all eternity.11
It is difcult not to be thrown by such an assertion, which is literally contra-

dictory with the analyses of Reading ‘Capital’, where the critique of ‘reading
at sight’, immediately followed by a reference to Spinoza, is preceded by the
following prediction with Foucauldian accents:
However paradoxical it may seem, I venture to suggest that our age threatens
one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most
dramatic and difcult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning
of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading. . . .
And contrary to all today’s reigning appearances, we do not owe these
staggering knowledges to psychology, which are built on the absence of
a proper concept of them, but to a few men: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.12
These are the same names to whom the letter to Franca attributed the ability
to read ‘at sight’. How is such a contradiction to be explained? The simplest
thing, obviously, would be to set it aside and foreground the distinction in
principle between a theoretical text and private correspondence. But to do this
would be to lose sight of the main thing.
When Althusser wrote the letter to Franca, his epistemology was, in the
main, already constituted, even if the notion of ‘symptomatic reading’ had
not yet made its appearance. And we may assume that he already had a sense
of the basic difculty that would be expounded in Reading ‘Capital’: quite
simply, the problem of the relationship between knowledge and reality with
which the Introduction concludes. Advancing on highly treacherous terrain,
Althusser multiplies his warnings:
11
12
But we have gone far enough in this work for a return to the difference
between the order of the object of knowledge and that of the real object to
enable us to approach the problem whose index this difference is: the problem
of the relation between these two objects (the object of knowledge and the
real object), a relation which constitutes the very existence of knowledge. I
must warn the reader that we are here entering a domain which is very
difcult to approach. . . .
Here we meet our greatest difculty.
Here we run the greatest risks. The reader will understand that I can only
claim, with the most explicit reservations, to give the rst arguments towards
a sharpening of the question we have posed, and not an answer to it.13
And the text goes on shying away from the issue. It must rst of all be shown
that what is involved is not of a theory of knowledge, but the production of
the ‘knowledge effect’: not by what right is knowledge possible, but by what
mechanism does the labour of knowledge precisely produce knowledge, and
not something else?14 It must then be shown that it is not a question of recon-
structing the effect by way of a genetic process, by reference to an original
knowledge effect, to an ‘original ground’, to the various phenomenological
representatives of the search for guarantees: the knowledge effect must derive
from the actual structure of the knowledge mechanism. But Althusser, bereft,
obviously, of a Spinozist theory of knowledge of the third kind, does not man-
age, and does not even seek, to answer his question and engages in what must
be called a denegation. Each mode of appropriation of reality
poses the problem of the mechanism of production of its specic ‘effect’, the
knowledge effect for theoretical practice, the aesthetic effect for aesthetic
practice, the ethical effect for ethical practice, etc. In each of these cases we
13
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 51–3 and 61.
14
See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 61–2. Althusser compares this question with
that of the production of the ‘society effect’, in an assertion whose comical tone is the
most reliable index in him of a headlong ight: ‘what Marx studies in Capital is the
mechanism . . . which gives this product of history, that is precisely the society-product
he is studying, the property of producing the “society effect” which makes this result
exist as a society, and not as a heap of sand, an ant-hill, a workshop or a mere collec-
tion of men’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 65).
Althusser • 511
cannot merely substitute one word for another, as ‘dormitive virtue’ was
substituted for opium.15
This is indeed a denegation, for the adequacy of knowledge to reality is mani-

festly unthinkable within the problematic deployed by Althusser. There then
remains recourse to direct contact with reality – i.e. ‘reading at sight’ – for
better or worse. For Althusser had precisely explored all its traps. As all his
correspondence attests, he knew that that the danger was a constant head-
long ight;16 he knew that everything depended on the quality of the vision,
but at the same time acknowledged himself to be incapable of writing in
other conditions.17 If a contradiction does exist between Althusser’s relation
to Machiavelli’s text and the theory of reading expounded in Reading ‘Capital’,
it must be seen as the unsustainable tension affecting the whole Althusserian
œuvre. And we are thus led to accord the following statements, which an unin-
formed reading would doubtless regard as psychologising chatter, their full
signicance:
And this afternoon, precisely, thinking about some friends who possess
‘genius’ and who have taken on gigantic works, it appeared to me obvious
how balance (or imbalance – or the more or less articial balance out of
which they’ve constructed a protection) can impact on their theoretical output,
I mean on the correctness (or falsity) of their theoretical inspiration. Even in
this domain, contact with the reality of the things they study is governed
and determined remotely, but decisively, by their mode of contact with the
ordinary things in life – that is to say, by their own contact with their own
balance, that is to say, by the contact or lack of contact they have with their
truth . . . this proves that there aren’t two types of relationship with reality
(rational and emotional), but only one.18
15
16
Among dozens of possible examples, let us cite this extract from a letter to Franca
of 19 January 1962, commenting on his course on Machiavelli: ‘It’s typical: headlong
ight – promising mountains and marvels on the author – to compensate for my
incredible difculties entering into contact with my subject’ (Althusser 1998a, p. 156).
Jacques Rancière has justiably stressed the ‘practice of blunt statement’ in Althusser
which, in a different sense from that set out here, pertains less to a circumstantial
expedient than the basic contradictions of his thought (see Rancière 1993).
17
Seemingly without exception, all Althusser’s major texts were written very rapidly,
even if they were then revised at length. As soon as the gestation period lengthened,
the result was disappointing.
18
Letter to Franca of 23 October 1962, in Althusser 1998a, p. 257.
Here is perhaps to be found one of the secrets to the Introduction to Read-

ing ‘Capital’, written with such intensity: far from simply opposing the hal-
lucinatory dimension evoked above, it represented something like an attempt
to ward it off. And yet, in typically Althusserian fashion, this conjuration
assumed precisely the form that it was intended to ward off: it would scarcely
be an exaggeration to say that in Marx Althusser read on sight the rejection of
any reading on sight. This is a peculiar discrepancy which perhaps lies behind
a fair few Althusserian paradoxes – as if it was always a question at root of
warding off demons.
In these circumstances, how do things stand with the ‘purity of the con-
cept’, whose imperative in a sense encapsulates the approach of Althusser, or
at least of the author of For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’? If what has been said
above is right, it is clear that in Althusser such purity of the concept is very
precisely modied by its opposite: its modality is that of the impurity of the
concept.
Let us return for a moment to Althusser’s relation to Machiavelli. In a letter
to Franca dated 26 January 1962, we come across the following astonishing
statements:
I even sketched a description of Machiavelli’s consciousness, his will to

realism in contradiction with his ‘derealising’ situation (to have hit upon
this word was the solution: thus giving the impression that there was
something there to understand which I didn’t succeed in expressing in
a conceptual, clear, exhaustive fashion, but saying at the same time that
there was nevertheless something to sense and understand, identifying a
presence that did not manage to grasp itself . . .), and then, thinking about
this formulation again, I was extraordinarily and ironically struck by the
fact that, in the guise of the supposed consciousness of Machiavelli, I’d
spoken about myself. . . . This is perhaps why, when I celebrated the mystery
of Machiavelli’s consciousness with these words, something like the silence
of religious revelations came over my audience.19
Much might be said of the vocabulary used by Althusser here. This description
of a course as if it were a religious service seems, at rst sight, to underscore
its inadequacies: the word that supplies a presence, or allows it to be seen,
19
Althusser • 513
appears to supervene for want of the concept. Althusser insisted at length

on the specicity of the concept, on the difference, for example, between the
‘knowledge effect’ and the ‘aesthetic effect’. Thus, in his ‘Letter on Art’ of 1966
he writes:
The real difference between art and science lies in the specic form in which
they give us the same object in quite different ways: art in the form of
‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’ or ‘feeling’, science in the form of knowledge (in
the strict sense, by concepts).20
Given such a denition, which clearly seems to imply the superiority of the
concept, whatever Althusser might say of it elsewhere, the course on Machia-
velli possibly pertains more to art than to knowledge. It is, however, difcult
not to note that most of the major Althusserian concepts exhibit precisely the
characteristics attributed here to the inadequacies of the Machiavelli course.
The concepts of theoretical practice, structural causality, overdetermination,21
conjuncture, ideological state apparatus, when they are effective, are always
handled by Althusser in such a way as to make present, as if before our eyes,
the reality that is being evoked. In this respect, the central text of For Marx
is doubtless the article on Bertolazzi and Brecht, where Althusser gives (or
re-gives) us sight of what he had already seen in the production by the Pic-
colo Teatro.22 This impure purity of the concept lies behind the dazzling effect
produced by certain of Althusser’s texts, those where the tension takes form,
is embodied in a ‘style’ unlike any other.23 But it is equally at the heart of
an imbalance that might be called structural, producing the collapse of other
texts, where the purity and the impurity of the concept serve only to neu-
tralise one another.
As is well known, the theme of the purity of the concept is directly bound up
with the sharp break established by Althusser between science and ideology,
and, more generally, with the primacy of theory ceremoniously proclaimed
20
21
The author of these lines still recalls with emotion the extraordinary evocative
power of the analysis in ‘Contradiction and Overdermination’ of the encounter and
‘fusion’ of contradictions.
22
See also ‘Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract’ (Althusser 1971, pp. 209–20), where
Althusser gives us sight of what he elsewhere calls the ‘absent cause’ or ‘structural
causality’.
23
In his preface to the new edition of Pour Marx (Althusser 1996c), Étienne Balibar
legitimately refers to ‘a sort of lyricism of abstraction’.
by the whole of his œuvre.24 At a time when people were often Communist and
intelligent but not Marxist, or Communist and Marxist but not intelligent, or
even – sometimes – Marxist and intelligent but not Communist, it was nally
becoming possible to be all three at once: a Communist intellectual producing
a discourse on Marx that was on a par with the theories which commanded
the intellectual eld at the time. The seminars organised by Althusser at the
École normale supérieure on the young Marx (1961–2), on the origins of struc-
turalism (1962–3, with two talks by Althusser on Foucault and Lévi-Strauss),
on Lacan (1963–4),25 and nally on Capital, played a primary role here – work
behind the scenes that emerged into the full light of day with the simultane-
ous publication of For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ during the autumn of 1965.
In one gesture, Althusser dismissed the superseded gures of the philosophi-
cal eld (especially Sartre) and the totality of marxisant discourses – or French
ones at any rate – as strictly unacceptable in the new conditions (and par-
ticularly what stood in for theory in the French Communist Party). And the
restrained lyricism of the Preface to For Marx, its rejection of the imaginary
debt of not being proletarian, sounded as a veritable summons to the forma-
tion of a battalion of Marxist theoreticians. Such was the meaning explicitly
assigned by Althusser to the Leninist thesis, adopted from Kautsky, of the
importation of Marxist science into the workers’ movement.26 In a duplicated
text dated 20 April 1965, which was widely diffused at the time, Althusser
justied his project on the basis of the disastrous consequences of the period
of the ‘personality cult’ during the Stalin era:
The effects of dogmatic politics as far as theory is concerned can still be

felt today, not only in the residues of dogmatism but also, paradoxically, in
24
Althusser never really changed on this point, which he even accentuated. The
primacy of science in the 1960s, which is already a primacy of philosophy, was suc-
ceeded by the absolute primacy of philosophy in the enigmatic texts of the 1980s. Thus
we read in the 1985 ‘Thèses de juin’: ‘Be aware that the main task today hinges on the
ideological class struggle – that is to say, in relationship with philosophy. Above all,
in philosophy. . . . And this is why (and not for the trivial tactical reasons that were
staring people in the face at the time), I have always said since 1965: “everything
depends on philosophy”. Which means: everything depends on the class struggle in
philosophy’ (IMEC archives, p. 13).
25
See Althusser 1996a and 1996b.
26
Subsequently, Althusser totally rejected this idea, regarding it as a kind of emblem
of his ‘theoreticist deviation’. See, for example, in 1978, Chapter 4 of ‘Marx dans
ses limites’: ‘Marxist theory is not external but internal to the workers’ movement’
(Althusser 1994b, pp. 371–87).
Althusser • 515
the often anarchic and confused forms assumed by attempts of numerous

Marxist intellectuals to regain possession of the freedom of reection and
research of which they were deprived for so long. . . . What is most painful –
and directly expressed in these . . . essays – is how the period of the ‘cult’,
far from contributing to their formation, on the contrary, prevented the
theoretical formation of an entire generation of Marxist researchers, whose
work we cruelly miss today.27
Accordingly, Althusser more or less tells us, today it is a question of doing

scientic work. But, for a Marxist intellectual, this involves subscribing to the
scienticity inaugurated by Marx: hence the imperative, at the same time as
the Lacanian ‘return to Freud’, of a return to Marx over and above Marxism –
that is to say, in the rst instance, to the birth of Marx:28 to the opening of
the ‘continent of history’, otherwise referred to as ‘historical materialism’.
It has justiably been said that in a sense the break represents ‘Althusser’s
philosophical object, the one that distinguishes his philosophy’ – although
it must immediately be made clear that this object was reworked to such an
extent that it ended up emerging from the process virtually unrecognisable.29
Whatever Althusser’s subsequent development, even in his last texts (those
of 1986) he never gave up asserting a difference in kind between science and
ideology – to which he never stopped adding that, however clear this opposi-
tion in principle, science is constantly menaced by its opposite, to the point
of sometimes being indissociable from it in practice. If Althusser ended up
accepting that elements which, to his mind, were ideological (particularly the
language of alienation) were more present in Capital itself that he had wished
to concede, he always claimed that this changed nothing when it came to
the main point: historical materialism, and all science with it, is inaugurated
by a rupture with its ideological prehistory and only developed by repeating
this break. While history is a process without a subject, a beginning, or end(s),
27
‘Theory, Theoretical Practice, and Theoretical Formation. Ideology and Ideologi-
cal Struggle’, in Althusser 1990, p. 21. Althusser never received a reply to his request
for publication of this text in Cahiers du communisme. Much of Rancière 1974 consists
in a violent critique of it.
28
See the letter to Franca of 13 December 1962: ‘You cannot know . . . what an extraor-
dinary spectacle it is to be present at the birth of Marx’ (Althusser 1998a, p. 296).
29
Balibar 1993, pp. 81–116 thus distinguishes between ve major moments in Althus-
ser’s elaboration: ‘the break before the break’; ‘the break named and identied’; ‘the
break generalized’; ‘the break “rectied”’; and ‘the break dispelled’.
science may have no subject, but it denitely does have a beginning – even an
absolute beginning. However, as has been noted, the beginning formed by the
break is sometimes presented in profoundly paradoxical terms.30 If the Intro-
duction to Reading ‘Capital’ does not explicitly deal with the break, the latter
is what is involved in the notion of ‘symptomatic reading’. What, according
to Althusser, does Marx do when he reads the discourse of classical econom-
ics and breaks denitively with it? We have seen the answer: he produces the
question that Adam Smith had already answered without knowing it. This
comes down to saying that the break is affected by the modality of continuity.
Jacques Rancière provides an explanation for this:
Althusser is perhaps less interested by the break itself than by what gives
rise to it – even at the price of rendering it, in the last instance, unthinkable:
the closely woven fabric of good/bad answers to posed/unposed questions,
which is the space of science and community – community as a site of
knowledge and science as the power of a community.31
This is a convincing explanation. Althusser is, in fact, haunted by the fear of

the letter ‘without an addressee written by Marxist intellectuals to communist
proletarians who do not know that they are its addressees’. In this respect, it
is perfectly true that one of the keys to the Introduction to Reading ‘Capital’ is
the moment when, after have set out his project of a symptomatic reading of
Marx’s text, Althusser shifts abruptly to a reading of what he calls the ‘practi-
cal works’ of Marxism, the
still theoretically opaque works of the history of the workers’ movement,

such as the ‘cult of personality’ or the very serious conict which is our
present drama.32
And Rancière is not wrong to add, a little cruelly, that
a Stalinist camp or a Vietnamese maquis are works awaiting the questions that
will make it possible to read them, but already embedded in the common
fabric of knowledge.
30
See Rancière 1993. See also Matheron 1997.
31
Rancière 1993, pp. 55–7.
32
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 34. The conict in question is the Sino-Soviet
conict.
Althusser • 517
Despite everything, the world is ‘a continuum of questions and answers that

give rise to antagonism and imparts meaning to it’.33 However, the explana-
tion is one-sided, for Althusser is just as interested by the break as by continu-
ity: this is even one of the constitutive tensions in his work.
The concept of the break forms part of a much broader theme that runs
through most of Althusser’s writings: solitude and beginnings; or, more pre-
cisely, the solitude of beginnings. We nd it as early as the Foreword to Mon-
tesquieu (‘No one went before him in this adventure’) and in the Conclusion
(‘this man who set out alone and truly discovered the new lands of history’).34
We nd it in connection with Lenin, ‘absolutely alone, against everyone, in an
apparently lost cause’.35 We nd it par excellence whenever Althusser speaks
of Machiavelli. We nd it a hundred times in connection with Marx, particu-
larly, with all its ambivalence, in what is virtually the nal word of Althus-
ser’s contribution to Reading ‘Capital’: ‘Alone, Marx look around him for allies
and supporters. . . . As for us, we can thank Marx for the fact that we are not
alone’.36 But it is clear that Althusser is speaking here of himself in the rst
instance, as someone who (if his own words are to be believed) never recog-
nised any contemporary apart from his friend Jacques Martin. The image of
solitude in Althusser must be taken seriously, for far from being reducible to
a form of pathos, it belongs to a constellation that gives this conceptualisation
its particular tenor. In fact, he treats solitude in the same way that he treats
the beginning or the void: in and through multiple variations, we witness a
perpetual inversion of the for into the against – the requisite task is simultane-
ously an impossible task; what is to be warded off is what is to be established.
This position, which he went on fashioning and reworking, was encountered
by Althusser from 1962 onwards above all in Machiavelli, with whom – to
an even greater degree than in the case of Spinoza or even Marx – he never
stopped identifying.
In Machiavelli and Us, Althusser attributes a decisive role to Chapter 9 of
Book I of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius: ‘it is necessary to
be alone to found a new republic or completely reform it’ – that is to say, the
thematic of the ‘New Prince in a New Principality’.
33
Rancière 1993, pp. 64, 62.
34
Althusser 1972, pp. 14 and 107.
35
36
In order to derive a state from nothing, the founder must be alone: that
is to say, be everything: omnipotent – omnipotent before the void of the
conjuncture and its aleatory future.37
For Althusser, Machiavelli’s project is an absolute beginning dictated by the

Italian political situation: a ‘political void [which] is simply an immense aspi-
ration to political being’.38 An extremely rich material – Italian virtù – awaits a
form. But this form does not arrive and its advent is unpredictable, for Machi-
avelli as for anyone else. It depends upon an aleatory encounter between the
fortuna and the virtù of an absent subject who is to be constituted. While it is
not possible to go into detail here on this interpretation of Machiavelli, and
still less to try to assess its pertinence,39 it is necessary to stress the apparatus
put in place by Althusser, characteristic of the way of ‘thinking in extremes’
that he precisely claims to have borrowed from Machiavelli. A veritable circle
of limits is in fact marked out for us: the conjuncture is purely empty, the sub-
ject who must ll this void is wholly absent. Between the two, any transition is
thus, at least for now, strictly impossible. However, called for by the conjunc-
ture, the transition is at the same time strictly necessary. Such, in Althusser’s
view, is ‘Machiavelli’s endeavour to think the conditions of possibility of an
impossible task, to think the unthinkable’.40 And, in order to dispel any ambi-
guity, let us make it clear that this is not a question of some dialectical synthe-
sis: the task is indeed at once wholly imperative and utterly impossible.
We must not be misled. Althusser is not simply analysing a borderline situ-
ation characteristic only of the Italian political conjuncture and Machiavelli’s
thought. If he accords such importance to Machiavelli, it is because he views
him as the embodiment of a problem that is above all his own. For Althusser
passionately wanted to begin, and begin alone, but in such conditions that this
beginning appeared impossible to him from the outset and forever thereafter.
In this sense, he tells us, it is necessary to begin everything all over again:
with a few rare exceptions, the Marxist tradition is, as it were, rendered void.
(Aside from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and – occasionally – Gramsci, Marxist
references in Althusser’s texts are fairly rare and most of the time pretty impre-
37
38
39
See on this point Negri 1993.
40
Althusser • 519
cise).41 But this theoretical recommencement could not be purely speculative.

Even, and perhaps especially, in his ‘theoreticist’ phase, Althusser sought to
produce political effects. If everything needs to be recommenced theoreti-
cally, it is also – and Althusser knew it ten years before What Must Change in
the Party (1978) – because it is necessary to recommence everything politically.
Naturally, however, he did not say it, for this is precisely what was impossible
for him. Althusser’s attachment to a veritable ontology of the workers’ move-
ment, and even the international Communist movement, prevented him from
posing head on the crucial question of the identication of political subjects.
In such conditions, the ‘detour of theory’42 takes an extremely sophisticated
form, closely connected to Althusser’s analysis of what he calls ‘Machiavelli’s
theoretical dispositive’.
Basically, Althusser tells us in Machiavelli and Us, there are two radically dif-
ferent kinds of ‘theoretical space’. The rst is that of ‘pure theory’: the space
of any science, including political science and (we may assume) historical
materialism. The other space is that of ‘political practice’ – by which is to be
understood theory subjected to the primacy of political practice:
the rst – theoretical – space has no subject (the truth is valid for any and
every subject); whereas the second possesses meaning only via its possible
or requisite subject, be it Machiavelli’s New Prince or Gramsci’s Modern
Prince.43
41
On occasion, they can be frankly fanciful – for example, the allusion to the Frank-
furt school contained in the ‘The Humanist Controversy’ (Althusser 2003, p. 222).
42
I borrow this phrase from the sub-title of the book by Gregory Elliott cited above,
without, however, sharing all its author’s analyses. If it seems to me to be true that the
most important political effects were produced by his ‘theoreticist’ writings, I certainly
do not believe that the indisputable effects of closure of Althusser’s public discourse
at the beginning of the 1970s (philosophy as ‘in the last instance, class struggle in
theory’) are attributable to his openness to Maoism. Or, more precisely, if they are
indeed in one sense, it is in so far as Althusser decided from 1969 henceforth to situate
himself strictly within the French Communist Party and to conrm his political break,
which was anyway already consummated, with the Maoist groups. Such was the basic
meaning of the publication in L’Humanité on 21 March 1969 of his article ‘How to
Read Marx’s Capital’, whose key is doubtless the succession in the same sentence of
the names of Marx, Lenin and . . . Maurice Thorez (Althusser 1969, p. 304). Besides, it
does not make great sense to separate Althusser’s œuvre into chronological slices. If
the beginning of the 1970s is indeed that of an extreme closure, characteristic of the
Reply to John Lewis, it is also that of the greatest openness – of Machiavelli and Us. In
truth, in Althusser, closure is never very far removed from freedom.
43
And the difference between the spaces does not coincide with that between
the objects: Althusser’s sole interest here is political thought and these two
spaces are mutually exclusive. Machiavelli’s great originality is to have
deconstructed the space of pure theory. Telescoping several traditional theses
that are in principle contradictory (for instance, that of the unchanging course
of things and that of their constant change), he undermines the dispositive
of ‘political science’ from within. He does not apply universal rules to the
analysis of a particular case; on the contrary, he subjects the formulation of
rules to the exigencies of a task to be performed. He thinks ‘under the con-
juncture’ – which is quite different from simply analysing a particular con-
juncture. Here Althusser posits a difference in kind between reecting on the
conjuncture and reecting in the conjuncture: the different elements of the
conjuncture are no longer objective data on which theory reects, but ‘become
real or potential forces in the struggle for the historical objective, and their
relations become relations of force’.44 Such is the veritable ‘concrete analysis
of a concrete situation’ that Althusser discovers in Machiavelli. Its major fea-
ture is that it arranges at its centre an empty place, destined to be lled by a
subject, whether individual or collective. It is impossible not to realise that
this ‘strange vacillation of theory’ is, in the rst instance, Althusser’s decon-
struction of his own theoretical dispositive – something that he expresses in
a formula full of implications: ‘the space of pure theory, assuming it exists’.
For this ‘space of pure theory’ is manifestly that of the purity of the concept
developed in Reading ‘Capital’. But it would be quite wrong to regard this as a
belated category,45 contemporaneous with the self-criticism of the ‘theoreticist
period’. The analyses contained in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’,
written in 1962, sufce to avert such a simplistic view.
Over and above its grasp of Machiavelli’s texts, the essential thing about
this analysis is the radicalism of the oppositions outlined by Althusser.
Between the two spaces there is in fact an absolute contradiction, with no
possible resolution. It is impossible to be in both at the same time; and a third
space seems inconceivable. In addition, the second dispositive is character-
44
45
It is very difcult to date the formula precisely: the manuscript is crowded with
corrections at this point. Above all, Althusser’s reection on Machiavelli was a virtually
uninterrupted process from 1962 and helped mould some of his analyses of the thought
of Marx and Lenin – specically those in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’.
Althusser • 521
ised by an accentuation of the void. In Machiavelli, Althusser tells us, the

place of the subjects is absolutely empty. As a result of Italian specicity, no
one can predict which subject will ll this void – a negative that nevertheless
has its positive counterpart. In any event, we know that it will not be any of
the Italian princes currently living. But this is denitely not a question of an
Italian exception. In this type of dispositive, the place of the subjects is always
empty, always fashioned to be lled by future subjects, including in France
in the 1960s. This is why Althusser is fascinated by Machiavelli. However,
it is precisely here that things become complicated. For if everything, in a
sense, prompts Althusser to think that the conjuncture is empty, and that the
place of political subjects is unoccupied, a different tendency draws him in
completely the opposite direction: the place of the subjects is always already
occupied by a completely hypostatised working class embodied by the Com-
munist Party.46 This leads him to an extremely signicant formula: if the space
of a conjunctural analysis only makes sense if it arranges a place that is empty
for the future, Althusser hastens to add: ‘I say empty, though it is always
occupied.’47 In the case of Machiavelli, it is difcult to see how this place could
be occupied. In contrast, however, we can see it very clearly when the formula
is applied to the French situation. To adopt his own terms, Althusser too is
seeking to ‘think the unthinkable’. He is setting himself a task that appears to
him to be as imperative as, and even more impossible than, the one Machia-
velli set himself. And it is here that the ‘space of pure theory’ reappears, in
highly paradoxical form.
In 1967 Althusser formed a politico-theoretical group around him called the
‘Spinoza group’,48 which was modelled, including as regards pseudonyms,
on the more-or-less clandestine organisations common at the time. If the
existence of the group was contemporaneous with the initial self-criticisms
of ‘theoreticism’, it is no less illuminating about Althusser’s general relation-
ship to his theoretical work. In a note of July 1967 ‘on the politico-theoretical
46
As we know, for some years Althusser maintained a certain political ambiguity
as to what was to be understood by the ‘party’: de facto party or de jure party? But
over and above this ambiguity, which was rapidly dispelled, the main thing was this
hypostatising of the ‘working class’.
47
48
Althusser’s archives contain a massive le on the ‘Spinoza group’, including
numerous notes taken by Althusser during its meetings.
conjuncture’, we thus nd the language used to describe the theoretical space
peculiar to Machiavelli:
It happens that we possess a certain number of denite resources, which we

alone possess. It happens that as a result of this provisional privilege we are
the only ones able to occupy an empty place: the place of Marxist-Leninist
theory and, more precisely, of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
In a context where the place of political subjectivity is ontologically occupied,

it is as if Althusser is proceeding here to a spectacular displacement. On the
one hand, thinking in the conjuncture in the manner of Machiavelli is impos-
sible today: such is the meaning of the comparison between Marx’s Manifesto
and that other manifesto represented by Machiavelli’s Prince. We are today
still in the horizon opened up by Marx’s Manifesto, addressing a working class
that is already ontologically constituted. There remains a typically Althus-
serian solution: constructing the ‘space of political practice’ in the form of its
opposite. ‘Pure theory, supposing that it exists,’ would thus not be straight-
forwardly contradictory with ‘thinking in the conjuncture’. Instead, at present
it would be its only possible form, although in truth fundamentally impos-
sible. In other words, it would be the modern form of Machiavelli’s ‘impos-
sible possibility’. We can then understand the extraordinary tension affecting
Althusser’s ‘theoreticist’ texts – the tension we encountered in connection
with ‘reading at sight’, but which is wholly absent, for example, from a work
like Reply to John Lewis, where we can hardly hear anything but a ceaseless
summons to order entirely submerged by the ontology of the proletariat. But,
at the same time, we can understand the extent to which this position was
difcult to maintain in the long term, as is attested by another passage in the
note ‘on the politico-theoretical conjuncture’, where Althusser broaches the
question of the relationship of members of the Spinoza group to the French
Communist Party: ‘in the case of those who are in it, stay in the party; in the
case of those who are not, do not join it’.
We could multiply examples. Doubtless there is not a single Althusserian
concept that is not, in one way or another, profoundly modied by its opposite.
Unquestionably, there is no Althusserian project that could not be character-
ised as an attempt to think the unthinkable, to think the conditions of possibil-
ity of an impossible task. The project of a symptomatic reading of Marx’s text
thus wholly partakes of this dimension. On the one hand, it involves produc-
Althusser • 523
ing a Marxist philosophy that is not to be found in Marx’s œuvre – in other

words, inventing it. On the other hand, however, this philosophy is in Capital
in the ‘practical state’. Once again, symptomatic reading serves to think the
beginning in the form of the non-beginning, but this time in duplicate fashion.
For what is involved here is the text of Capital; and the symptomatic reading
cannot really be the same as the one practised by Marx on Adam Smith. And
if Marx’s text sometimes answers questions that have not been posed, ‘with
a little patience and perspicacity we can nd the question itself elsewhere [in
Marx] . . . or, on occasion, in Engels’s immediate comments on Marx’.49 This
leads us to one of the central issues confronted by Althusser: the guarantee.
As we know, Althusser struggled throughout his life against the notion of
the guarantee, whether epistemological or ontological, justiably stressing
the enim of the Spinozist statement: ‘Habemus enim ideam veram’. But this
struggle would never have occurred if it had not been waged against internal
demons in the rst instance. Precious few thinkers, to use a language that is
not Althusser’s, have imparted such intensity to the idea of science without a
foundation; and equally few have been so surrounded by the myriad traps of
the foundation and the guarantee. Althusser captures this perfectly in a letter
to Merab Mamardachvili of 16 January 1978:
I can see as clearly as daylight that what I did fteen years ago was to
fabricate a decidedly French little justication . . . for the claim of Marxism
(historical materialism) to present itself as science. Ultimately, this is (was,
because I’ve changed a bit since) in the distinguished tradition of every
philosophical enterprise as guarantee and support. . . . I half believed in it,
like any ‘bold’ spirit, but the portion of distrust was necessary to the other
half, in order to write.50
Like the letters addressed to Franca, this text, in which bitterness and disil-
lusionment predominate, cannot be taken for the truth of the œuvre, espe-
cially given that it is relatively late. Opting completely to overlook what was
the most striking aspect of his œuvre, from the rst line to the last, Althusser
nevertheless describes the other aspect of his work with remarkable lucid-
ity, taking the analyses developed in his Elements of Self-Criticism, but already
49
50
Althusser 1994b, p. 527.
sketched as early as 1966, to their extreme conclusions. And nothing better

expresses the painful complexity of Althusser’s relation with the notion of
guarantee than these lines, published in Cahiers marxistes-léninistes in April
1966, but naturally never reprinted in any of his books:
Since there cannot be any other ‘guide’ above dialectical materialism, we

can understand why Lenin attributed the character of a veritable ‘political
partisanship’ to the adoption of a scientic position in philosophy– that
is to say, recognised in it a decisive, vital importance. We can understand
that, dedicated to this role, dialectical materialism demands the highest
consciousness, the greatest scientic rigour, the greatest theoretical vigilance –
since, in the theoretical domain, it is the last resort, the last possible instance,
for human beings who, like Marxists, are liberated from the myths of divine
omniscience or the secular form of religion: dogmatism.51
It is far from clear that Althusser ever entirely extricated himself from the
snares of the guarantee, as indicated, for example, by a book like Reply to
John Lewis, right up to the last texts on aleatory materialism, where the perva-
sive notion of the void seems to occupy the position of a paradoxical guaran-
tee. But it is certain, on the other hand, that Althusser’s most beautiful texts
are precisely those where the tension between guarantee and non-guaran-
tee takes shape in a style. In this sense, ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ is perhaps
Althusser’s most emblematic text, encapsulated in the denition of philoso-
phy as the ‘emptiness of a distance taken’: a magnicent formula that is at the
same time untenable. From the ‘emptiness of a distance taken’ to the ‘class
struggle in theory’ is doubtless only one step. But it is a step that crosses the
abyss separating Althusser from himself. For if the question of the guarantee
is at the heart of Althusser’s thought, it is because it is not only epistemologi-
cal, but perhaps above all ontological; and because Althusser is torn between
an ontology of the void and an ontology of the plenum.52 And here we must
51
Althusser 1966, p. 122. This passage is extracted from one of the versions of a
kind of manual on the principles of Marxism and the ‘union of theory and practice’,
which is itself a reworking of a duplicated text, ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice and
Theoretical Formation. Ideology and Ideological Struggle’, dated April 1965. The 1966
version is virtually identical to that of 1965, apart from the addendum on ‘political
partisanship’, which simultaneously changes everything and nothing.
52
See Matheron 1997.
Althusser • 525
at least evoke one of the most disquieting aspects of Althusser’s thought: his
relationship to the Stalinist corpus. A simple overview of the reception of
Althusser’s writings immediately confronts us with a paradox. On the one
hand, their publication was received as a manifesto for freedom – very pre-
cisely as what Althusser himself called a ‘left critique of Stalinism’.53 On the
other hand, however, Althusser was perceived by others – and sometimes by
the same people – as a restorationist. This accusation was directed at him by
a few representatives of the enlightened Right, such as Raymond Aron den-
ing the Althusserian enterprise thus: ‘how to restore a fundamentalism after
de-Stalinization and the relative success of neo-capitalism?’54 – and, what is
more, a fundamentalism for philosophy agrégés at the École normale supéri-
eure. But it was mainly formulated by internal enemies. Althusser, and the
Althusserians with him, were thus attacked by an increasingly important
fraction of the revolutionary movement, and particularly by some of his for-
mer students who had become Maoists,55 as an agent for the restoration of
order delegated, or at least used, by the Communist Party. And he was, in
addition, widely seen as a neo-Stalinist, both by the totality of anti-Stalinist
revolutionary groups and by an important section of the ‘international Com-
munist movement’ – the section explicitly targeted by Althusser’s polemic
against humanism.56 If this criticism is disconcerting for anyone who com-
pares the Althusserian dialectic with Stalinist ‘diamat’, it cannot for all that be
reduced to a sheer aberration. Althusser always claimed never to have been a
Stalinist. If the claim can only induce a smile today,57 it does not thereby inval-
idate the idea that Althusserianism represented a ‘left critique of Stalinism’.
53
Even if the formula puts us rather too much in mind of the illusion, shared by
many Althusserians, that Maoism represented a ‘left critique’ of Stalinism, it should
not be situated on the same level. In the latter case, it was a question of reconciling
a hypothetical practical critique of Stalinism by the Chinese Communist Party with
its rejection of any theoretical critique.
54
Aron 1969, p. 85.
55
See, for example, Rancière 1974.
56
It is impossible to give an account here of the precise tenor of these debates, in
which the most ‘humanist’ were often the most virulent former Stalinists – which
largely explains Althusser’s characterisation of the ‘Stalininian deviation’ as the
‘economism/humanism pair’.
57
To be convinced, it is sufcient to read the writings of the young Althusser in
Althusser 1997.
A reading of the texts published by Althusser58 nevertheless dictates caution.

In For Marx, he continued to offer discrete but nevertheless real praise to Sta-
lin, who had had the great merit of eliminating the negation of the negation
from the ‘laws of the dialectic’. And he went much further in 1967, in a text
entitled ‘On Theoretical Work’, which subsequently completely disappeared
from view:
A discourse like Stalin’s little treatise (on dialectical and historical material-
ism) . . . treats its object by a pedagogical method. It expounds the fundamental
principles of Marxism clearly, and in a generally correct manner. It offers
the essential denitions, and above all makes the essential distinctions. . . .
But it exhibits the great defect of enumerating the principles of Marxism,
without demonstrating the necessity of their ‘order of exposition’ (Marx) –
that is to say, without demonstrating the internal necessity that links these
principles, these concepts.59
While we must take into account an element of coquetry here, an ambigu-

ous wink to the French ‘Marxist-Leninist’ groups, and political provocation
towards Communist Party leaders, it is impossible to make do with such an
explanation. For this type of reference, which in Althusser always assumes
the aspect of a coup de force, in fact functions as an ontological indicator. It
abruptly asserts that, over and above all the ruptures, commencements and
recommencements, the end of all guarantees, we are still, despite everything,
in the horizon of the guarantee. The text that has just been quoted was initially
intended to serve as a preface to a manual of Marxism-Leninism that was
reworked several times, on the basis of the duplicated instalment ‘Theory,
Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation. Ideology and Ideological
Practice’ of April 1965. This is a fascinating work for anyone who reads it, for
in it we witness the transition from one conception of philosophy to another,
via the temporary notion of a philosophy ‘of a scientic character’: neither
a science nor something different from science. A gripping work, in which
the imperative of a theoretical formation, indispensable for ensuring the cor-
rectness of what the Communist tradition called ‘ideological struggle’, leads
58
Not to mention an unpublished work like ‘La reproduction des rapports de
production’, today available in Althusser 1995b.
59
Althusser • 527
Althusser to produce a concept that is difcult to integrate as such into his

own problematic – ‘ideology of a scientic character’:
For the first time in history, we can thus be present at the birth of a
radically new phenomenon: the constitution of a transformed ideology,
because produced by the action of scientic principles on existing ideology: the
constitution of a new ideology that is ideological in its form and increasingly
scientic in its content.60
But a desperate work, like all the other Althusserian projects of this kind,
in that it aims to compete with Stalinist ‘diamat’ on its own ground: that of
an ontology of the working class and the party. On this ground, obviously,
Althusser was defeated from the outset.
In the image of his own life, Althusser constructed his whole œuvre in
the dimension of catastrophe. For better or worse, he always saw to it that
his concepts are undermined from within by their opposites, and thus con-
stantly threatened with immediate collapse. At the end of this trajectory, there
remains something like a incredible tension of the concept, characteristic of a
style unlike any other – or rather, of one of Althusser’s styles. For there were
in fact several styles, bound up with projects that everything in a sense sepa-
rates and yet unites. If the real catastrophe supervened when the violence of
the ontology of the party asserted itself, the tension of the concept is never
very far off. Conversely, when the tension of the concept is asserted, the vio-
lence of the ontology is always subjacent. Althusser can at one and the same
time write Reading ‘Capital’ and ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical
Formation’, Reply to John Lewis and Machiavelli and Us. He can simultaneously
practice symptomatic reading and reading at sight. At all events, the theoreti-
cian of the purity of the concept always wrote under the régime of the impu-
rity of the concept.
60
Untitled manual on the principles of Marxism (1966–7), IMEC archives, p. 121.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn1
Alberto Toscano
If there is a crisis of Marxism, it is the crisis of a

politics, of a politics for communism, what we
call, strictly speaking, Marxist politics.2
Marxist origins and post-Marxist chimeras

Much of today’s radical political theory is the off-
spring of a crooked dialectic of defeat and reinven-
tion. Many of the dening traits of recent theoretical
writings on the Left are obscured if we fail to address
how they emerged out of a reckoning with the fail-
ure or distortion of Marxist politics, and, moreover,
if we disregard the extent to which they often retain
an underlying if ambiguous commitment to the
Marxist impulse whence they arose. The manner of
taking leave from the organisational and theoreti-
cal tenets of Marxism, in whatever guise, can speak
volumes about the present resources and limitations
of contributions to political thought that drew initial
sustenance from it. This is certainly the case with the
work of Alain Badiou, whose complex relationship
1
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Belgrade journal Prelom. I thank
Ozren Pupovac and the editors for the initial stimulus to formulate these arguments,
and for their comradeship.
2
Sandevince 1984c, p. 10.
530 • Alberto Toscano
to his own Maoist militancy and to Marxist theory has recently become the
object of rich and detailed investigations, above all in several essays by Bruno
Bosteels. Bosteels’s characterisation of Badiou’s approach in terms of ‘post-
Maoism’3 already suggests that Badiou’s intellectual biography stands at a
considerable remove from the entire ‘post-Marxist’ tendency, chiey encapsu-
lated in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and persuasively
dismantled in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Retreat from Class.4 Having said that,
the effects of a common ‘poststructuralist’ theoretical conjuncture, along with
a departure from a Hegelian-Marxist preoccupation with dialectics and social
ontology, might lead one to suspect that ‘the theoretical edices of Laclau and
Badiou are united by a deep homology’.5 This ‘deep homology’ – which Slavoj
Žižek identies in the notion of a contingent, subjective rupture of ontological
closure (or of any totality) – is nevertheless offset by a fundamental diver-
gence, to the extent that ultimately, Badiou’s
‘post-Marxism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the fashionable

deconstructionist dismissal of the alleged Marxist ‘essentialism’; on the
contrary, he is unique in radically rejecting the deconstructionist doxa as a
new form of pseudo-thought, as a contemporary version of sophism.6
Rather than either homology, or frontal opposition, it might be more precise

then to argue that Badiou’s post-Maoism and the post-Marxism of Laclau and
his ilk intersect in manners that generate a kind of ‘family resemblance’, but
that, when push comes to shove, they are incommensurable, born of diver-
gent assessments of the end or crisis of Marxism. Their theoretical trajectories
connect many of the same dots but the resulting pictures differ radically. In
order better to delineate the specic difference of Badiou’s project, and of the
problems that spurred it on, this chapter will examine the period between the
highest speculative product of Badiou’s heterodox Maoism, Théorie du sujet
(1982), and the cornerstone of his mature work, L’Être et l’événement (1988),
in particular the book Peut-on penser la politique?, published in 1985, which is
to say contemporaneously with Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony. I claim that
3
Bosteels 2005a. Bosteels’s acute analyses of Badiou’s political thought will soon
be brought together in the book Badiou and Politics. See also Badiou’s comments on
Maoism in a recent interview with Bosteels, Bosteels 2005c, pp. 241–6.
4
Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Wood 1998.
5
Žižek 1999, p. 172.
6
Žižek 1998.
Badiou • 531
this hitherto underexamined moment in Badiou’s theoretical production is

rich with insights about the guiding parameters of his further work, but also
contributes to a broader reection on the fraught relationship between con-
temporary radical political theory and Marxism.7
Like many post-Marxists, and indeed anti-communists, Badiou condemns
the ‘metaphysics’ that haunt Marxist politics. In a Heideggerian pastiche,
he even describes Marxism-Leninism as the ‘metaphysical epoch of Marxist
political ontology’.8 Most deconstructions of the Marxist canon have looked
for such a metaphysics in Marx’s supposed reductionist economism or in an
imaginary constitution of the social, and of class antagonism in particular,
whose correlate would lie in the putative transparency of a post-revolution-
ary polity.9 While some of these points may be gleaned from Badiou’s texts
from the mid-1980s, the emphasis is rmly on a conceptual dyad that persists
to even greater effect in more recent works like Metapolitics. This is the distinc-
tion between politics and the political. At the heart of Badiou’s call to counter
the supposed crisis of Marxist thought by its ‘destruction’ and ‘recomposi-
tion’, is the thesis that Marxism has succumbed to the homogenising political
ction that imagines the possibility of measuring, anticipating and represent-
ing political action. In this regard, ‘the political has never been anything but
the ction which politics punctures through the hole of the event’.10 One’s ini-
tial impression is of a substantial overlap with Laclau in terms of the notions
of working class, proletariat or people as ctions of social cohesion, empty
signiers wherein political action would seek its guarantee. Indeed, the fun-
damental political ction for Badiou is that of the ‘alliance of the social rela-
tion and its measure’.11 But Badiou does not draw from this the customary
post-Marxist lessons regarding the intractable plurality of discursively gen-
erated identities and the need for hegemony. He is far from espousing the
post-Marxist mix of strategic populism, sociological description, discursive
ontology and de facto liberalism. Rather, the assault on social ctions and the
7
For further thoughts on the periodisation of Badiou’s work, see Toscano 2006a.
8
Badiou 1984, p. 8; Badiou 1985, p. 61.
9
See Laclau 1991.
10
Badiou 1985, p. 12.
11
As the treatment of the concept of ‘state’ in Being and Event suggests, measure is
equated by Badiou to representation. I have dealt with some of the problems incum-
bent on Badiou’s theory of the state – especially the obstacles it poses to a thinking
of capital and capitalism – in Toscano 2004b.
suspension of Marxism’s foundational commitment to a critique of political

economy are viewed by Badiou as the occasions for a renovation, and a kind
of purication, of the politics of emancipation.
Marxism, according to Peut-on penser la politique?, is unable to subject to
critique its own critique of political economy,12 thereby distorting its origi-
nal political impetus, and binding it to the mediations of economy and soci-
ety.13 Marxism’s retention of the categories of totality and system is accused
of imprisoning the encounter and creation of a politics in the ction of the
political.14 The political is what occludes the hiatus between state and civil
society, representation and presentation. The aim of politics should not lie in
the creation of a new bond; the inconsistency of the social does not open onto
periodic and formally identical disputes over its content, but on the idea of
an autonomy and heterogeneity of politics, which exists at a remove from any
relational dialectic:
[W]hat is dissipated is the thesis of an essence of the relations internal to

the city, an essence representable in the exercise of a sovereignty, be it the
dictatorship of the slaves, even if the relation is that of civil war within the
class structure.15
Grasping this theme of detotalisation in Badiou’s struggles with Marxism and

its social ontology is crucial to an understanding of the development of his
later work. Behind the ontology of the multiple of Being and Event and the
attempt philosophically to establish the basis for a politics of radical equal-
ity divorced from any notion of the Whole lies Badiou’s experience of, and
response to, the crisis of Marxist politics in the 1980s.16
So, while there might appear to be a convergence or homology between
Badiou and post-Marxist positions around a certain anti-essentialism, what
12
Badiou 1985, p. 14.
13
In this regard, Badiou’s emphasis in the 1980s on retaining a commitment to ‘Marx-
ist politics’ should be related to his conviction that the critique of political economy
is tributary to a politics of emancipation, or to what he elsewhere calls ‘communist
invariants’ (see Toscano 2004a). On the secondary status of the critique of political
economy to Marxist politics, see Badiou 1982, p. 296.
14
Ibid.
15
Badiou 1985, p. 13.
16
Besides the initial meditations on the One and the Multiple in Being and Event,
perhaps the key text to evaluate Badiou’s break with the category of totality is ‘Hegel
and the Whole’, Badiou 2004, pp. 221–32. For a discussion of the possibility of thinking
capitalism within Badiou’s detotalised ontology, with specic reference to his concept
of ‘world’ from the recent Logiques des mondes, see Toscano 2004b.
Badiou • 533
results from Badiou’s own suspicion towards the very idea of a totality of social
relations is in a link between (social) inconsistency and (political) events that
still seeks to maintains an emancipatory, rationalist reference to transmissible
principles and a communist reference to generic equality.17 The ‘destruction’
of that political ction that Badiou diagnoses within ‘metaphysical’ Marx-
ism is not an opportunity to afrm the pluralism of political struggles, but
rather a chance to argue simultaneously for their singularity (as irreducible to
a dialectical totality) and their sameness (as struggles for non-domination or
equality). Badiou insists, during this period, in writing of the ‘recomposition’
of Marxism, putting his work under the aegis of ‘Marxist politics’ because of
what he views as the unsurpassable character of the Marxist hypothesis, the
hypothesis of a politics of non-domination irreducible to the state. In Peut-on
penser la politique? we can thus observe, in a quasi-deductive manner, the pas-
sage from an internal dislocation of Marxism to the ‘metapolitical’ thinking
of the event that will determine Badiou’s further intellectual production: ‘the
determination of the essence of politics, unable to nd a guarantee either in
structure (inconsistency of sets, unbinding), nor sense (History does not make
a whole), has no other benchmark than the event’.18
Minimal Marxism, or, the insistence of equality

Thus, Badiou does not offer an immanent critique of Marxism as a science
of capitalism and revolution, but displaces what he regards as core Marxist
principles to a dissimilar practical and theoretical framework, where politics
and philosophy are ‘desutured’.19 In this transitional period of his work, the
aim is to bolster the retention of a minimal Marxism that conjoins the political
hypothesis of non-domination with the rational identication of the sites of
subversion, without thereby committing political practice to an instrumental,
revolutionary or programmatic framework. Such a stress on the subjective ele-
ment in Marxist politics differs markedly from the post-Marxist preoccupation
with subject-positions and the hegemonic recongurations of identity. The
anti-essentialist discursive ontology of the (empty) social is alien to Badiou,
17
On Badiou’s rationalism, see Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, ‘Aleatory Ration-
alism’, in Badiou 2004.
18
Badiou 1985, p. 67.
19
Badiou 1999, pp. 61–8.
whose concern, as demonstrated quite consistently even in more recent books

like his Ethics, does not lie in the political interplay of identity and difference.
Rather, Badiou’s thought works at the juncture between, on the one hand,
the fact of identity-and-difference as a feature of the status quo, or what he
calls the encyclopaedia of knowledges,20 and, on the other, the production of
the Same.21 Despite the deceptive resonance, this is not to be confused with
the two logics of Laclau and Mouffe, differential and equivalential. Why?
Because, in the latter, these two logics remain transitive to one another and
map out the transcendental horizon of political contention, whilst, in Badiou,
the production of sameness in the political eld – the production of equality
rather than equivalence – is a real production of truth that does not involve the
strategic rearrangement and occupation of discourse (what Badiou would call
‘the language of the situation’), but requires instead an organised subtraction
or separation from its manner of structuring and stratifying our experience of
the world.
Instead of shifting from the terrain of classical revolutionary politics, that
of (the seizure of) political power, to that of discourse, Badiou’s development
is marked by the attempt to consolidate and purify the collective subject of
politics. In a distinction that would surely strike the likes of Ellen Wood as
spurious – to the degree that it circumvents class – for Badiou it is not the
state but ‘proletarian capacity’ that lies at the heart of Marxist politics. Por-
traying the question of class struggle as a crucial node in the so-called crisis
of Marxism, and reecting on the possibility of a ‘party of a new type’, Paul
Sandevince (a.k.a. Sylvain Lazarus) writes in Le Perroquet (the publication of
Badiou’s group, the UCFML, between 1981 and 1990), that: ‘For Lenin, the
essential is not struggle, but “antagonism against the entirety of the existent
political and social order”.’ Lenin’s declaration is then read as a warning
against the logic of the absorption of the party into the state, whilst the ‘other
path’ involves assigning ‘the process of politics to the masses/State contradic-
tion grasped in terms of consciousness [conscience]’.22 This is one of the sources
20
Badiou 2006, pp. 327–43.
21
Badiou 2001, pp. 25–7.
22
Sandevince 1984, p. 5. UCFML refers to the ‘Groupe pour la formation d’une
Union des communistes de France marxiste-leniniste’. In 1985, the UCFML disbanded
and was succeeded by L’Organisation politique, a non-party organisation, whose
basic theses can be accessed at L’Organisation politique 2001. See Hallward 2003 and
Bosteels 2005a for detailed accounts of Badiou’s militancy.
Badiou • 535
of Badiou’s own continuing insistence on politics viewed not as strategy for

power, or a way of ordering the social, but as an organised practice of thought
(a ‘truth procedure’ in the later work). The link between the hypothesis of
non-domination, the egalitarian and organised capacity for thought, and a
separation from the state thus appears as one of the key tenets of this self-
described ‘Marxist politics’.
This gives us an inkling as to why the appellations post-Maoism or post-
Leninism (the one favoured by the various authors in Le Perroquet)23 are more
tting than post-Marxism. Having already stipulated that Marxist politics is
not the consequence of a critical analysis of capitalism, but is rather the means,
within capitalist conditions, for the production of communism, the direction
taken in the 1980s by Badiou and his comrades is primarily born out of the
crisis of the Marxist political subject (the party), and not, as with ‘traditional’
post-Marxism, out of a critique of the metaphysical tenets and sociological
shortcomings of Marxism as a science of capitalism. If Badiou’s Théorie du sujet
had declared that the every subject is political and that subject equals party,
what is at stake in this period (approximately 1982–8) which hovers between
the option for a ‘party of a new type’ and that of ‘politics without a party’?
Fredric Jameson has argued that Marxism qua science of capitalism gives
rise to post-Marxism at moments of systemic crisis.24 Whatever the links
between such crises and the forms taken by political organisation, for Badiou
it is the party qua subject which is the focus of the crisis, not the ability of
Marxism to cope with the vicissitudes of the mode of production. Indeed,
Badiou is rather sanguine about the Marxist understanding of capitalism, and
does not seem to think that Marx has really been surpassed in this domain. In
any instance, he is immunised against the stance according to which the fail-
ure of social ontology or economic analysis would debilitate Marxist politics.
He mocks this very possibility in a vicious piece caricaturing the ‘old Marxist’,
the one who waits for the proper study of ‘social formations’ before acting,
who thinks that ‘one of these days the “workers’ movement” will give us
something to talk about’.25 To the contrary:
23
This is argued in particular in Sandevince 1984a.
24
Jameson 1997.
25
Peyrol 1983, p. 5. In Peut-on penser la politique?, Badiou puts the point as follows
‘Communist politics must be wagered upon: you will never deduce it from Capital’
(Badiou 1985, p. 87). Of course, it could be argued that far from signalling a caesura,
Marx starts, absolutely, not from the architecture of the social . . . but from
the interpretation-cut of a symptom of social hysteria, uprisings and
workers’ parties. . . . For the symptom that hystericises the social to be thus
grasped, without pinning it to the ction of the political, proletarian political
capacity – as a radical hypothesis of truth and a reduction to ction of every
foregoing notion of the political – must be excepted from any approach via
the communitarian and the social.26
Marxism beyond self-reference

Badiou is renowned today as a philosopher of the event, conceptualised as
a drastic break with the status quo and catalyst for new truths and new sub-
jects. But could we speak of events of closure, failure, saturation, and not
just novelty and truth? Badiou grounds his treatment of the ‘destruction and
recomposition’ of Marxism in what he calls ‘the end of referents’, a position
presaged by an article by the same title in Le Perroquet, penned by Sande-
vince.27 To the extent that ‘Marxism alone presented itself as a revolutionary
political doctrine which, if not historically conrmed . . . was at least histori-
cally active’ it cannot evade a reckoning with its concrete incarnations.28 These
are synthesised by Badiou in terms of three primary referents: (1) the statist ref-
erent: the actual existence of Marxist states, as emblems of the possible victory
of a Marxist politics, and of ‘the domination of non-domination’;29 (2) wars of
this ‘long wager’ (p. 90) is a feature of Marx’s own thinking, which never advocated
such a chimerical ‘deduction’. See Kouvelakis 2004. The idea of Marxism as promoting
a ‘deduction’ of politics from the critique of Capital runs the risk of converging with
the ‘straw-Marxism’ denounced by Wood. See Wood 1998, p. 187.
26
Badiou 1985, p. 20. This rethinking of the notion of capacity, it should be noted, is
‘eventally’ bound to the Polish workers’ movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
See the section of Peut-on penser la politique? precisely entitled ‘Universal meaning of
the Polish workers’ movement’, Badiou 1985, pp. 45–8, as well as Lebovici 1983.
27
There is a sense in this article, and others from Le Perroquet, of a political ‘return
to Marx’, a (re)commencement of Marx that would sublate the Leninist experience.
Sandevince 1984c, p. 10. But see especially UCFML 1983. The whole issue, under the
heading ‘Un Perroquet-Marx’, marking the hundredth anniversary of Marx’s death,
is devoted to these questions.
28
Badiou 1985, p. 26.
29
Badiou 1985, p. 27. Post-Leninism is thus dened by the break with ‘reason of
state’ in all its forms, a break that draws its sustenance from the founding drive of
Marxism itself: ‘It is not the State which is the principle of universality of Marxist
politics, but rather the communist process in the deployment of class struggles and
revolutions’. Sandevince 1984c, p. 10.
Badiou • 537
national liberation as another emblem of actually victorious Marxist politics,

and the ‘fusion of the national principle and the popular principle’30 in the
invention of new ways of linking politics and war; (3) the workers’ movement,
especially in its incarnation in ‘working-class parties’ with an explicit Marxist
reference, ‘mixed gures of a distant revolutionary Idea and the proximity of
an oppositional activity’.31
Yet again, it is not the critical or analytical force of Marxism qua science of
capitalism that is paramount, but the collapse of its specicity as a revolution-
ary thinking and politics that was historically manifest and fundamentally
‘self-referential’ – meaning that its manifestations were, to various degrees,
homogeneous with its theory. Though Badiou will never repudiate what he
calls the ‘eternity of communism’,32 what is at stake here is the historicity of
Marxism and the impossibility for Marxism to continue to draw any value
from its actual history in the present. As Badiou puts it, ‘its credit has run
out’.33
Not only has Marxism lost its historical foothold, it no longer serves as an
internal referent for nascent forms of emancipatory politics. This is what is
meant by the expatriation of Marxism, the key aspect of a crisis which Badiou
deems must be ‘destructively’ traversed – we should recall that for the Badiou
of Théorie du sujet, the becoming of a subject, and of a proletarian subject espe-
cially, is intimately linked to its own destruction, so that the call to be heeded
here is for Marxism to truly subjectivise itself, after having gone through
the subjective destitution of its referents. In a piece from 1983, Badiou thus
declares:
Today, the referents of Marxist politics are not Marxist. There is a funda-
mental delocalisation of Marxism. Previously, there was a kind of self-
reference, because Marxism drew its general credit from states that called
themselves Marxist, from wars of national liberation under the direction of
Marxist parties, from workers’ movements framed by Marxist unionists. But
this referential apparatus is gone. The great mass historical pulsations no
longer refer to Marxism, after, at least, the end of the Cultural Revolution
30
Badiou 1985, p. 28.
31
Badiou 1985, p. 29.
32
Badiou 2003, p. 131.
33
Ibid.
in China: see Poland, or Iran. Therefore, there is an expatriation of Marx-

ism. Its historical territoriality is no longer transitive to it. The era of self-
reference is closed. Marxism no longer has a historical home. All the
political referents endowed with a worker and popular life are, with
regard to Marxism, atypical, delocalised, errant. Any orthodox Marxist
today will object that the Polish movement is national and religious, that
the Iranian movement is religious and fanatical, that there is nothing there
that fundamentally matters for Marxism. And this orthodox Marxism
will be nothing but an empty object in the process of the destruction of
Marxism.34
This theme of expatriation thus permits Badiou to maintain, albeit in a prob-

lematic register, the reference to ‘worker and popular life’, as well as the com-
munist hypothesis of non-domination, in the face of some of the very events
that served as grist to the post-Marxist mill.
By thinking in terms of the dislocation of Marxist politics and the tentative
invention of new forms of political consciousness, Badiou can turn the politi-
cal conjuncture of the 1980s – the death throes of historical Communism and
the ashes of heterogeneous movements of revolt – into an opportunity for
the recomposition of a politics of emancipation.35 Crucially, this is not done in
relation to a return to logics of electoral alliance or the articulation of group
demands beyond the working-class referent, but in view of the possibility of
a new workers’ politics at a distance from the state, a non-classist, non-sys-
temic experience of proletarian capacity. Instead of saluting the vacillation
of Marxism as a chance for singing the praises of political plurality, Badiou
proposes to seize it as the opportunity for a further purication and consoli-
dation of emancipatory politics. The wager then is to look for the traits of a
new politics of anti-statist emancipation in these mass symptoms, these ‘hys-
terias’ of the social. Though it transcends the limits of this chapter, it would
34
Badiou 1984, p. 1. Badiou also refers to this issue in terms of the separation of
Marxism from the history of the ‘Marxisation’ of the workers’ movement, now that
Marxism is no longer ‘a power of structuration of real history’, meaning that politics
may be freed from ‘the Marxied [marxisée] form of the political philosopheme’.
Hence the radical caesura vis-à-vis the previous sequence of Marxist politics, and the
proposal of the gure of (re)commencement. See Badiou 1985, pp. 5–9.
35
Another crucial moment is of course to be registered in the death-knell of the
trajectory begun in the Cultural Revolution. See Bosteels 2005a and Badiou’s Le Monde
piece on the trial of the Gang of Four, Badiou 2005a.
Badiou • 539
be fruitful to follow the attempts – ultimately frustrated by the religious and

populist sclerosis of the Polish and Iranian situations – made in Le Perroquet
to track moments of organisational invention and worker capacity in non-
Marxist political scenarios. Contrary to post-Marxism, which welcomes, in the
rise of ‘new social movements’, a radical-democratic pluralism beyond uni-
versalist36 and communist hypotheses, Badiou’s post-Leninism is committed,
from the 1980s onwards, to producing a metapolitical framework for thinking
the persistence of communism as a minimal, universalising hypothesis even
in political scenarios where the name ‘communism’ is anathema.
Of liberals and renegades: between modern and

contemporary politics
The requirement that the destruction and recomposition of Marxist politics be
internal – dictated neither by its supposed explanatory shortcomings nor by
extraneous moral or historical evaluations – is motivated by an appraisal of
the subjectivity that dominates the post-revolutionary restoration of the vir-
tues of liberalism and parliamentary democracy.37 As Badiou provocatively
suggested at a recent symposium on Logiques des mondes, all of his work can
be placed under the sign of a confrontation with the betrayal of emancipa-
tory politics.38 The peculiarity of the reactive (or renegade) subjects who, from
the mid-1970s onwards, publicised the return to liberty on the basis of their
own failures derived from their experience of the crisis of Marxism merely
as the subjective discovery of an objective fact: the fact of the impossibility
of emancipation (the nouveaux philosophes are here emblematic). This turn is
acerbically crystallised by Badiou in the typical utterances: ‘we tried, it was a
catastrophe’ and ‘I fail, therefore I am’. But, for Badiou, all that such failures
and disasters prove is that resolute opposition to existent society is a ‘dif-
cult’ problem. Just like a mathematician who fails in a proof does not thereby
36
According to Laclau and Mouffe, ‘there is no radical and plural democracy
without renouncing the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of
a privileged point of access to “the truth”, which can be reached only by a limited
number of subjects.’ Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 191.
37
Badiou’s condemnation of the past two decades as a new post-revolutionary
‘Restoration’ is summed up in Badiou 2007.
38
On Badiou’s understanding of non-emancipatory or anti-universal subjectivities,
see Toscano 2006b.
declare as inexistent the problem that proof stemmed from, so a political mili-
tant does not make failure into either a necessity or a virtue:
So that what is presented to us as a conjoined progress of morality (liberating

us from the totalitarian phantasm) and of realism (seeing the objective
virtues of the existent state of things) is in fact a confession of incapacity.
The essence of reneging is incompetence.39
Badiou here intervenes directly in the anti-Marxist philosophy of the liberal

Restoration, anchored as it is in the defence of the ‘negative liberties’ at the
heart of parliamentary democracy (or capitalist parliamentarianism, as he will
later dub it). He repeats the idea of a termination or exhaustion of the Marxist-
Leninist sequence, of its specic conguration of political activity.40 But he
contends that antagonism to the status quo is still at the heart of any politics
of emancipation. Moreover, a return to the Enlightenment thematic of lib-
erty is simply insufcient, since the question of equality, which determines
the ‘current stage of the political question’, cannot be evaded. The issue, in
wake of what Badiou dubs the Marxist-Leninist ‘montage’, is how to practise,
under the conditions of a non-despotic state, a politics whose axiom is equal-
ity: a contemporary politics beyond the modern juxtaposition between the
state of right and law (parliamentary constitutional liberal democracy) and
tyranny. We cannot turn away from ‘contemporary’ politics, initially marked
by the entrance of the signier ‘worker’ into the political eld, for the sake
of a merely ‘modern’ anti-despotic politics of liberal democracy. Following
Badiou’s risky ‘de-socialisation’ of Marxism, however, equality must not be
thought in terms of the equality of ‘material positions’ (‘economistically’),
but in strictly political terms. The maxim of equality becomes the following:
‘what must the world be such that an inegalitarian statement is impossible
within it?’
Using a common Lacanian distinction, Badiou here draws a crucial dif-
ference between the modern politics of liberty, which, ever since Saint-Just,
functions in a symbolic register as a form of non-prohibition, and a contem-
39
Badiou 1987a, p. 2. See also the section in Peut-on penser la politique? entitled ‘The
reactive meaning of contemporary anti-Marxism’, Badiou 1985, pp. 48–51.
40
‘It is certain that [the Marxist] montage is exhausted. There are no longer socio-
political subjects, the revolutionary theme is desubjectivated, History has no objective
meaning. All of a sudden, the antagonism of two camps is no longer the right projec-
tion for global hostility to existing society’. Badiou 1987a, p. 3.
Badiou • 541
porary politics of equality, whose aim is to engender the real impossibility

of inegalitarian statements (this will remain the chief trait of Badiou’s later
concept of the generic). What is surprising here, especially in terms of the ear-
lier commitment to a communist dialectic of destruction, is the idea of a com-
plementarity between the politics of liberty and the politics of equality, along
with the stipulation of the general problem of equality in ‘times of peace’, as
detached from the revolutionary problematic of power, war and the state. As
Badiou writes: ‘under the general conditions of a non-despotic state, how can
one think and practise a politics whose overarching philosophical category is
equality?’41 A politics of equality, in this framework, works within the sym-
bolic politics of prohibition for the sake of an equality that is real but which
the symbolic order relegates to impossibility (Badiou’s position repeats here
the Lacanian link between the Real and the impossible).
Two problematic consequences ensue from these considerations. The rst is
that politics cannot be primarily or directly concerned with the betterment of
the polity itself, for ‘politics must be thinkable as a conjoined excess over the
state and civil society, even if these are good or excellent’.42 The second lies
in the implicit suggestion that the politics of emancipation, having rescinded
the project of power (in short, the dictatorship of the proletariat) is externally
conditioned (‘in times of peace’) by a kind of liberal frame. We can register
here the entire ambiguity of Badiou’s later conception of ‘politics at a distance
from the state’43 – a position that maintains the antagonism against ‘existing
society’ and, to an extent, the problem of how to change it, but combines this
seemingly stark antagonism with the toleration of the symbolic framework
provided by the very same society: ‘We therefore continue to demand modern
freedom (symbolic according to non-prohibition) from within which we work
towards contemporary equality (real, according to the impossible)’.44 Is this
to say that Marxist politics can only persist from within a liberal envelope?
Can we ‘reformulate from within politics the synthetic vision of the backwards
and nefarious character of our society and its representations’ and maintain
the ‘difcult’ problem of ‘changing existing society’, if we do not unequiv-
ocally pose and seek to resolve the problem of the tension between liberty
41
Ibid.
42
Badiou 1985, p. 20.
43
Badiou 2005b, pp. 150–1.
44
Badiou 1987a, p. 3. See also Badiou 1992, p. 248.
(in the state) and equality (in politics), together with their mediation by
issues of power, authority and, most importantly, exploitation? To put it
otherwise, can a post-Leninist radical politics of equality really afford to be
post-revolutionary?
Towards a refutation of political idealism

At times, Badiou’s 1980s ‘expatriation’ of Marxism, which already presup-
poses a disarticulation of Marxist politics and the Marxist critique of political
economy, seems to dissolve the consistency of the Marxist project, casting
doubt on the very possibility of holding onto the term ‘Marxism’. After all, will
not Badiou, in Metapolitics, peremptorily declare that ‘Marxism doesn’t exist’,45
in the sense that its political instances – its ‘historical modes’ to use Lazarus’s
terminology – are absolutely inconsistent, non-totalisable? And yet, through-
out the 1980s, prior to the publication of Being and Event, Badiou retains the
liminal validity of the notion of ‘Marxist politics’, at least in the sense that it is
only by rigorously undergoing its destruction (and not its ironic deconstruc-
tion) that a new politics of emancipation will be ‘recomposed’. What is at
stake in this retention, in extremis, of the name of Marxism? If anything, the
now moribund anglophone vogue for post-Marxism was driven by a rejec-
tion of the articulation between social class and revolutionary politics, which
reduced the idea of the proletariat to a mere contested and hegemonically
posited identity among others. Yet again, despite surface similarities, the
move beyond class operated by Badiou and his cohorts is based on a political
judgement, that is on the idea of a lost efcacy of the ‘classist’ mode of poli-
tics (dominated by the category of contradiction, and the transitivity between
society and politics).46 Badiou thus declares that there are more things in the
crisis of Marxism than anti-Marxism can dream of – in the main because
anti-Marxism merely registers an objective crisis without being able to think
through its primary, subjective aspect.47 Moreover, while Badiou is forthright
about the exhaustion of the working class as a socio-political class (making no
45
Badiou 2005, p. 58.
46
See Lazarus 2005.
47
Badiou 1985, p. 51.
Badiou • 543
such claims for the end of social class per se), he is equally insistent that no
emancipatory politics can bypass workers.
This plea for a minimal Marxism can be observed in two steps. The rst
involves what Badiou, explicitly harking back to the Kant of the Critique of
Pure Reason, calls a ‘refutation of idealism’. If Marxist politics is detached from
the social as the ‘place of bonds [le lieu des liens]’, what prevents the kind of
idealist pluralism according to which any site and any subject, unbound from
the requirements of transitivity with an ordered and ontologically grounded
social structure, can be the locus or bearer of emancipation? Badiou is very
aware that, having abandoned a dialectics of social latency and political sub-
jectivation, he cannot depend on the ‘substantial presupposition’ of a politi-
cal privilege of workers. Yet he knows that a maximal interpretation of his
political axiomatic could lead to viewing the emergence of a political sub-
ject as possible at any point in the social eld, as in the pluralist ‘idealism’
of most post-Marxist theories. To counter this prospect, Badiou proposes the
minimal inscription of the egalitarian wager-intervention on an event in what
he calls ‘pre-political situations’.48 Whilst this minimal, anticipatory interreg-
num between politics and the social does not allow a pre-emptive construction
of political subjectivity (for instance, the party of the working class), it per-
mits, by analogy with Kant, a merely negative reductio ad absurdum of the
maximal claim of political contingency (namely, that any subjects can arise
anywhere).
Forbidding himself any substantive resort to social ontology, Badiou never-
theless wishes to argue that to evade ‘worker singularities’ in the formation of
a political subject would be to suppose that a politics of emancipation could
deploy itself without including in its trajectory any of the places or points
inhabited by the dominated. Whence the following ‘theorem’:
Political intervention under current conditions . . . cannot strategically avoid

being faithful to events, whose site is worker or popular. Let us suppose
that it can . . . it would follow that this politics could deploy itself without
ever including in its immediate eld places where the mass (whatever its
number) of the dominated . . . materially exists, i.e. in factories, in the estates
48
‘I call pre-political situation a complex of facts and statements in which the collec-
tive involvement of worker and popular singularities is felt, and in which the failure
of the régime of the One is discernable’. Badiou 1985, p. 76.
in the banlieues, in immigrant housing, in the ofces of repetitive IT work.

Especially if we consider factories, the exception would be radical, since
we can easily establish that factories are separated from civil society and
from the moderating laws that sustain its social relations. According to
this supposition, the politics of non-domination would only exist, for the
dominated themselves, in the form of representation, since no event giving
rise to an intervention would include them in terms of its site.49
The point is not simply that an emancipatory politics must include the low-
est rungs, the excluded, the oppressed, but that they and their ‘site’ must
be directly involved – in other words ‘presented’ – by the emergent politi-
cal subject. Otherwise, we remain at the level of state representation. So, this
refutation of idealism does not simply attack (or literally reduce to absurdity)
the ‘new social movements’ ideology according to which emancipation may
take place anywhere, anytime, by anyone. It also undermines any notion that
the dominated may be represented in a political programme without partaking
of political action themselves. It is moving from this idea of a pre-political
‘site’, and warding off both an idealist pluralism and any kind of ‘speculative
leftism’,50 that Badiou will then seek to provide a metaontological solution
to these problems of Marxist politics in Being and Event, showing the extent
to which his major work remains anchored in the concepts and orientations
hatched in the period of his turn away from Marxism-Leninism.
From the hidden abode of production to the factory as

event-site
Starting from the refutation of anti-worker political idealism, Badiou initially
develops his theory of the event-site – a crucial component of his mature phi-
losophy – in terms of the factory and of the worker as the subjective gure of
politics. This is the second step, as it were, in the argument for a Marxist poli-
tics that would be capable of surviving its own metaphysical destitution. In
‘The Factory as Event-Site’, a text published in Le Perroquet in 1987 and origi-
nally intended for inclusion in Being and Event, we encounter both a potent
distillate of Badiou’s overall doctrine and his last explicit attempt to defend
49
Badiou 1985, pp. 81–2.
50
See Bosteels 2005b.
Badiou • 545
a notion of Marxist politics.51 My arguments hitherto have sought to demon-

strate the internal theoretical and political necessity leading to this work on
the event-site and, in so doing, to show how Badiou’s intimate confrontation
with Marxism is at the very foundation (albeit a vanishing one, since he even-
tually chose to omit this ‘example’ from his major work) of the project crystal-
lised in Being and Event, and more recently prolonged in Logiques des mondes.
Far more than any of the other texts in Le Perroquet, this excised fragment
of Being and Event pleads for a return to Marx (and Engels), leaving aside the
matter of post-Leninism. Badiou puts his meta-ontological and metapolitical
investigation under the aegis of two conceptual inheritances of the Marxian
thinking of worker politics, which the attempt to ‘recompose’ a Marxist poli-
tics seeks to weave together. These are the void, which in the Marxist appara-
tus is connected to the specicity of the proletarian subject (having nothing to
sell but his labour-power, the proletarian is the bearer of a generic capacity),
and the site, which Badiou links to Engels’s inquiries into the localised condi-
tions according to which exploitation is organised and countered. In a pithy
declaration, Badiou denes his philosophical undertaking precisely in terms
of a different articulation, a different dialectic, of these two terms, one that
moves beyond the ‘ctions’ of orthodox Marxism:
at the very heart of the objectivist version of the necessity of a worker

reference, we encounter two terms, the void and the site, which as we will
see only acquire their full meaning once we decentre them toward the
subjective the vision of politics.52
By asserting that a political event can only take place if it takes into account
the factory as event-site, Badiou aims to provide a kind of minimal objectiv-
ity (that is, another refutation of idealism) without making the intervention of
politics and of political subjectivation transitive to a socio-economic dynamic.
As he puts it:
The paradoxical statement I am defending is nally that the factory . . .

belongs . . . to the socio-historical presentation (it is counted-as-one within it),
but not the workers, to the extent that they belong to the factory. So that the
51
Badiou 1987b.
52
Ibid.
factory – as a workers’ place – is not included in society, and the workers (of
a factory) do not form a pertinent ‘part’, available for State counting.53
This is the sense in which the factory is not the hidden abode of a production
that could be reappropriated and disalienated, but a pre-political site ‘at the
edge of the void’ (at the edge of the unpresented fact of domination), into
which politics can intervene. The correlate of this notion is that the (prole-
tarian) void itself is detached from an expressive logic of (dis)alienation and
reconnected to the notion of a production of the Same, a production of com-
munism no longer immanently bound to a communism of production.54 It is
on the basis of the speculative trajectory laid out in ‘The Factory as Event-
Site’ that Badiou can then reassert his (contorted, heterodox, errant) delity
to Marxism:
Reduced to its bare bones, Marxism is jointly the hypothesis of a politics of

non-domination – a politics subtracted from the statist count of the count –
and the designation of the most signicant event sites of modernity, those
whose singularity is maximal, which are worker sites. From this twofold
gesture there follows that the intervening and organised experimentation
of the hypothesis must ceaselessly prepare itself for the consideration of
these sites, and that the worker reference is a feature of politics, without
which one has already given up subtracting oneself from the State count.
That is the reason why it remains legitimate to call oneself a Marxist, if one
maintains that politics is possible.55
To the extent that Badiou’s subsequent work remains more or less wholly
consistent with the research programme exposed in this 1987 article, we could
consequently hazard to read it as an attempt to think Marxism ‘reduced to its
bare bones’.
By way of conclusion, I would like to touch on two problems that are espe-
cially acute in this phase of Badiou’s thought and which might be seen to
resonate with some of his more recent work. The rst concerns the manner
in which Badiou remains faithful to a certain Marxian intuition about prole-
53
Ibid.
54
On the question of the transitivity between society and the political, and the
distinction between the communism of production and the production of sameness
(or production of communism), see Toscano 2004.
55
Badiou 1987b.
Badiou • 547
tarian subjectivity and its political vicissitudes. Badiou, after all, denes the
continuity-in-separation between the legacy of Marx and his own recomposi-
tion of Marxism as follows: ‘we (re)formulate the hypothesis of a proletar-
ian political capacity’.56 However, the refutation of idealism and maintenance
of the ‘worker reference’ in other texts seems to demand the evacuation of
any pre-political subjective privilege accorded to workers per se (politics must
touch on their sites, but they are not latent political subjects qua workers).
Can the void of the situation be equated with a political capacity? And if this
capacity is only the retroactive effect of a post-evental intervention (the politi-
cisation of the factory axiomatically prescribes that ‘workers think’) is the
term ‘capacity’ really viable, considering its inescapable links to notions of
disposition and potential and to the theory of (dis)alienation? I would suggest
that Badiou’s philosophical conceptualisation of the concept of the generic in
Being and Event may be read as an attempt to transcend the tensions in his ear-
lier ‘Marxist politics’ by maintaining the link between the void, equality and
the subject but dispensing with any latency whatsoever.57
The second problem concerns the impetus behind emancipatory politics.
Badiou obviously wishes to purify and politicise the concept of equality,
sever its dependence on merely material criteria. But, in his allergy to the
socialising ctions of orthodox Marxism, he appears to step back from con-
temporary criteria of politics to merely modern ones by framing his entire
vision of Marxist politics in terms of the politico-philosophical concepts of
exclusion, domination and representation. In a manner that is perhaps most
obvious in the section on the ‘ontology of the site’ in ‘The Factory as Event-
Site’, Badiou seems to deny the possibility that the concept of exploitation may
be an uncircumventable touchstone of any contemporary politics. As I have
suggested elsewhere, the difference between a politics at a distance from the
state and a politics against capital might lie in the fact that the latter cannot
be encompassed by the question of representation, to the extent that capitalist
power, while reliant on mechanisms of representation, also works ‘directly’
on singularities themselves, in ways that cannot be easily mapped in terms
56
Badiou 1984, p. 8.
57
At the same time, I think that Badiou’s farewell to political anthropology may be
somewhat premature. For an initial statement of this problem, see Power and Toscano
2003. See also Power 2005.
of exclusion, invisibility or domination.58 This is precisely what is at stake

in the concept of value in the critique of political economy, a concept that I
would suggest cannot be easily harnessed by the logic of re/presentation and
whose links to subjectivity and antagonism cannot be ignored. The resulting
(and rather formidable) challenge would be to combine the direct politicisa-
tion of exploitation that characterises Marx’s own work,59 with some of the
meta-ontological and metapolitical guidelines provided by texts such as ‘The
Factory as Event-Site’. A traversal of the logic of exploitation and its effects on
our thinking of political subjectivity would also allow us to ward off the pos-
sibility of an ‘aristocratic’ solution, distantly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s
republican and councilist advocacy of the autonomy of politics against the
disastrous impingements of the ‘social question’.60 This would perforce oblige
us to confront head-on one of the most arresting questions raised by Badiou’s
‘expatriation’ of Marxism: is contemporary politics (the politics of positive
equality) compatible with the continuation of modern, statist politics (the pol-
itics of negative freedom)? Or must it risk being ‘anti-modern’, and work on
equality not just at a distance from, but against the state? This is not to suggest
that Marx, like a political Odysseus, may soon be repatriated, and that we,
faithful Penelopes warding off our post-Marxist suitors, can nally recognise
him under unfamiliar garb. More modestly, let us suggest that Badiou’s con-
nection between the expatriation of Marxism and the (re)commencement of a
Marxist politics under the aegis of the void and the site is a salutary alterna-
tive to the quarrels between antiquarian ‘old Marxists’ and treacherous new
liberals, as well as a unique philosophical platform from which to (re)think
Marx’s politics.
58
See Toscano 2004b. This article also seeks to delve into the tensions and contra-
dictions in Badiou’s conceptualisation of capitalism and his apparent indifference to
the critique of political economy.
59
See Kouvelakis 2004, as well as Massimiliano Tomba’s ‘Differentials of Surplus-
Value’, Historical Materialism (forthcoming).
60
Arendt 1963, especially Chapter 6: ‘The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost
Treasure’.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Revolutionary Potential and Walter Benjamin:
A Postwar Reception History
Esther Leslie
Reception context: West Germany,

1968 and after
Assessments of Walter Benjamin’s proximity to Marx-
ism alter depending on the where and when of the
assessor. For example, in West Germany, following
1968, there was little doubt that Benjamin’s work rep-
resented a contribution to Marxist scholarship, if an
unconventional one. He was also called on as a guide
to political praxis. The mobilised students of the late
1960s took their lessons from him in pirate editions.
The specically 1960s’ rediscovery of Benjamin by the
cadres of social revolt is encapsulated in their image
of him with photocopier in one hand and joint in the
other. An embellishment of the image might include
a Kalashnikov or bomb – Andreas Baader of the Rote
Armee Fraktion would cite Benjamin in the coming
years, for example drawing on ‘On the Concept of
History’,1 in his ‘Letter to the Prisoners’ from 1976.2
Out of this, and sometimes in critical dialogue with
it, there were signicant neo-Marxist appropriations
1
Benjamin 2003.
2
See Markner 1994.
550 • Esther Leslie
of him too, perhaps most notably in the work of Jürgen Habermas. Haber-
mas’s essay ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism’, published
rst in German in 1972 was a keynote statement.3 It located Benjamin as an
exponent of ‘redemptive criticism’, in contra-distinction to ‘ideology-critique’
or ‘consciousness-raising’ criticism. Redemptive criticism had no immanent
relationship to political praxis. Habermas’s was an effort to wrest Benjamin
away from any instrumentalist uses to which the student movement might
put him.
Much of the debate of Benjamin’s legacy in these years focussed on ques-
tions of art and aesthetics, with an emphasis on the relationship between tech-
nological reproduction of art (as analysed in Benjamin’s 1930s essay ‘The Work
of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’) and art’s autonomy, as
forwarded by Adorno in his critical engagement with Benjamin. Under exam-
ination was the interpretation of the ‘politicisation of art’ and the ‘aestheticisa-
tion of politics’, as forwarded by Benjamin in the epilogue of his ‘Work of Art’
essay. Key texts included Heinz Paetzold’s Neomarxistische Ästhetik (1974) and
Helmut Pfotenhauer’s Ästhetische Erfahrung und gesellschaftliches System from
1975.4 Through the 1970s in West Germany, Benjamin was used to establish
parameters for Marxist, neo-Marxist or materialist engagement in a highly
politicised scholarly eld, where the legacy of communist practice and theory
from the period prior to the Third Reich was re-discovered, examined and
contested.
Bernd Witte’s contribution in 1975 analysed Benjamin in relation to his
antagonist in the eld of literary studies, Georg Lukács.5 A new ‘materialist’
literary theory was proposed on the basis of Benjamin’s critique of Lukács.
Benjamin was seen to provide writers and artists on the Left with a vocabulary
for art and culture that did not share the assumptions of the socialist realism
with which Lukács was associated. Socialist-realist directives ranked the intel-
ligibility of content above form. At its most basic, socialist realism advised that
the content of the picture or the story had to be clear, unambiguous, delivered
through ‘realist’ means and present the inexorable rise of a heroic working class
and peasantry. Lukács, in line with socialist realists, advocated nineteenth-
3
Habermas 1972.
4
Paetzold 1974; Pfotenhauer 1975.
5
Witte 1975.
Benjamin • 551
century paragons of realist style such as Balzac and Walter Scott. Socialist-
realist initiatives recommended the return to traditional forms of oil paint-
ing and novel writing. Walter Benjamin’s analyses were directed against this
course. He was a theorist of modernity. He believed that the modern age had
thrown up new modes and media of representation, and, for any contempo-
rary engagement in art, whether overtly political or not, these were forms that
needed to be explored. He regretted the way that the development of social-
ist realism repressed a post-revolutionary wave of technological and formal
experimentation in art, restoring old models of culture with their disempower-
ing modes of reception, which expected audiences to stand in reverential awe
before ‘great works’. Benjamin, largely, though not without qualication, cel-
ebrated the progressive function of technical reproducibility in art. He mapped
the implications of technological reproduction in art on art production more
widely, pinpointing analogies between technological and technical-formal
innovation. This work of Benjamin’s contributed in the period following the
Second World War to a burgeoning critical and media theory, as evinced the
work of Hans Magnus Enzenberger with his forwarding in 1970 of the poten-
tially liberatory uses of the photocopier within the ideologically-stultifying
‘consciousness industry’.6
In addition, for the critical generation of intellectuals after 1968, Benjamin
was a role model because of his lack of acceptance by the academic system
in his lifetime. Christoph Hering, in his book from 1979, Der Intellektuelle als
Revolutionär, presented his rendition of Benjamin’s thought as written for
the students in revolt who were seeking modes of revolutionary praxis, not
academic sophistry.7 Indeed, Benjamin with his paedogogical writings could
serve as a guide to the critique of education, as evidenced by two ‘pirate-
editions’ of Benjamin’s ‘Communist Paedogogy’ in 1969 and 1974.8 Reference
was made to Benjamin’s explicit attacks in the late 1920s and early 1930s on
scholarly investigation as the pursuit of apparently non-committed positions,
supra-political commentary and the vague class-unspecied project of freedom
and a new human order.
6
Enzensberger 1970.
7
Hering 1979, p. 11.
8
Benjamin 1969 and Benjamin 1974.
From 1972 to 1989, the stakes of Benjamin’s legacy were debated thoroughly
as volume after volume of the thirteen-part Collected Works appeared, replete
with expansive scholarly apparatus, omissions, inclusions and editorial steer-
age. As the aftershock of social movements abated, so too did the use of Benja-
min as model for Marxist praxis, though praxis is not necessarily the decisive
factor, and Hans-Heinz Holz, who delivered a rare radio lecture on Benjamin
in the GDR in the 1960s, noted that Benjamin ‘was a speculative metaphysician
and as such was a Marxist’.9 By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, a strain
of melancholy was identied in Benjamin’s thought and work. His melancholy
was seen to parallel that of a disaffected Left. The more they experienced impo-
tence, the more Benjamin usefully articulated that impotence. Or he was cas-
tigated for it as proponent of ‘radical chic’ and a ‘Prussian snob and Jewish
melancholic’, in Marx-biographer Fritz Raddatz’s estimation in 1979.10
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Benjamin continued to be attributed to a Marx-
ist milieu, in the main, at least one that stretched to incorporate the neo-Marxist
approaches of critical theory – unsurprisingly given the situating of the edito-
rial work on the Collected Works under the auspices of the T.W. Adorno archive.
Rather than the question of whether Benjamin is a (neo)Marxist, the question
arose of the meaning and relevance of Marxism. In 1992, former ‘New Leftist’
Otto Karl Werckmeister castigated Benjamin’s outmodedness for pursuing an
‘obsolete’ Marxism. Equally, for Werckmeister in his 1997 study Linke Ikonen.
Benjamin, Eisenstein, Picasso – Nach dem Fall des Kommunismus,11 Benjamin, the
archetypal exile, ipped into an iconic exemplar of the useless and privileged
academic, remote from political action, mirroring the ways in which Marxism
had accomodated itself to a purely academic stance in West Germany from
the 1970s onwards. Benjamin allowed cultural-materialist analysis without
real social consequences.12 In 1992 Bernd Witte likewise distanced himself from
Benjamin, under the inuence of the ‘present historical moment’, that moment
being ‘the catastrophic collapse of Marxism as a factor which determines the
course of history’, signalling ‘the disappearance of the last transcendent goal’.13
9
His radio lectures are reworked and developed in Holz 1992.
10
Raddatz 1979, pp. 183–213.
11
Werkmeister 1997.
12
Werckmeister 1992, p. 172.
13
See Witte 1992.
Benjamin • 553
Such tendencies in the interpretation of Benjamin can be related to the crisis of

condence on the Left in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Reception context: France and Trotskyism

In France, in contrast, there was a signicant reception of Benjamin as a
productive political thinker amongst writers of a Trotskyist inection. Dan-
iel Bensaïd, in Walter Benjamin: sentinelle messianique. A la gauche du possible,
from 1990, emphasised Benjamin as revolutionary thinker by focussing on
the critique of progress in Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.14 A simi-
lar undertaking can be found in Michael Löwy’s Walter Benjamin; Avertisse-
ment d’incendie – Une lecture des thèses ‘Sur le concept d’histoire’, from 2001.15
Both authors foregrounded Benjamin’s rejection of progress and his warn-
ings about the dangers of barbarism, if the non-guaranteed social revolution
is not forthcoming. The resultant Marxism is an ‘open’ or ‘heterodox’ Marx-
ism, shed of any determinist elements that have attached to Marx’s doctrine.
Benjamin’s messianism is not seen as contrary to Marxist concepts – and nor
indeed is romanticism, which Löwy pinpoints as the third great inuence on
Benjamin’s thought. All three inuences offer signicant impulses for criticis-
ing the present capitalist world and for allowing the imagination of absolute
and potentially sudden change. Löwy’s approach recombined the conspicu-
ous project of the ‘Benjaminiana’ of the last quarter-century, which argued
that in as much as Benjamin was a Jew, he was less a Marxist. In as much as
he is drawn to Marxism he can do so only by wrestling with his Jewishness.
With Löwy’s analysis, no longer was Benjamin forever torn between the mes-
sianic and the materialist.16 In the early 1990s, Löwy associated Benjamin’s
stance with liberation theology.17 Löwy’s reading of ‘On the Concept of His-
tory’ likewise built up an association between real political movements and
Benjamin’s thought. Revolutionary heroes of the oppressed (such as Zapata,
Sandino) are discussed in the context of a Benjaminian ‘history from below’
and collective memory. Löwy responded to the ways in which Benjamin’s
history always sought the outow of the past in the present: ‘The materialist
14
Bensaïd 1990.
15
Löwy 2001.
16
For one of many examples see the concluding sentiments of Gilloch 1996.
17
See, for example, Löwy 1992.
presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state’.18
Equally, it attempted to open up the possibilities that existed in the past but
were missed.
Reception context: the anglophone world from materialism to

postmodernism
In English-speaking countries, especially the US, the relationship of Benjamin
to Marxism is more contested. Gershom Scholem’s presentation of Benjamin
in close relation to Jewish mysticism had a signicant inuence on the manner
in which Benjamin was received, certainly in the 1980s, after the publication
of Scholem’s memoir, Walter Benjamin; Story of a Friendship, in the imprint of
New York Review of Books in 1981.19 Scholem castigated Benjamin’s Marxism
as misguided and indeed the weakness to which he ultimately lost his life:
he should have chosen Zion, Hebrew and Judaism. Elsewhere, he described
Benjamin as ‘a theologian marooned in the realm of the profane’.20 In addi-
tion, Scholem perceived Benjamin rst and foremost as a metaphysician of lan-
guage, absorbed in mystical accounts of linguistics, in the tradition of Hamann
and Humboldt. Dominant streams in anglophone humanities scholarship
in the 1980s and 1990s were able to nd productive relationships between
Benjamin’s language theory and poststructuralist thought, and, subsequently,
Heideggerianism. Nevertheless, in the English-speaking world, a variety of
scholars have asserted an afnity between Benjamin’s method and Marxist
approaches in the years following 1968. Indeed Benjamin’s initial introduc-
tion to a wider British public – as a theorist of mass reproduction in art –
occurred through the vectors of Marxism in John Berger’s mass-selling book
and accompanying TV programme, Ways of Seeing (1972).
The match of Benjamin with Berger made sense. Like Berger, Walter Ben-
jamin was not an academic. He tried to make a living as a critic, and, in the
Weimar Republic, he broadcast lectures on the radio, frequently for children.
Clearly his own life circumstances directed him into the world and questions
of popular enlightenment and entertainment. Theorists and practitioners,
18
Benjamin 1999a, p. 471.
19
Scholem 1981.
20
Scholem 1976, p. 187.
Benjamin • 555
especially those outside the university (media workers and artists) adopted
Benjamin as a left mascot, and a materialist who could recommend directions
for cultural production that broke with traditional ‘élite’ structures. This con-
text could usefully evoke Benjamin’s own concern with the changing status
of the intellectual and the artist over the period of industrialisation. Several of
his major studies tracked the changing fortunes of the artistic and intellectual
avant-garde in nineteenth-century France. He wanted to understand the ways
in which the avant-garde originally a rebellious force is skewered by the
contradictions of capital. The failure of social revolution and the inescapable
law of the market breed a hardened hoard of knowledge-workers condemned
to enter the market place. This intelligentsia thought that they came only to
observe it – but, in reality, it was, says Benjamin, to nd a buyer.21 This set
off all manner of responses: competition, manifesto-ism, nihilistic rebellion,
court jestering, hackery. The ‘Work of Art’ essay and ‘The Author as Pro-
ducer’ (1934) were intended as investigations of the prospects for critical left
intellectuals in the modern age, nding strategies that would avoid pressures
on artists to be individualistic, competitive and promoters of art as a new
religion. Critical and alternative cultural practice in the 1970s and 1980s drew
fruitfully on these two texts, which were widely anthologised.
Through the 1980s and 1990s this materialist and paedogogic version of Ben-
jamin was largely overwritten in the UK, replaced by an image of Benjamin
inected by the priorities of feminist and postmodernist scholarship as they
have loomed in cultural studies, art history and sociology and visual culture.
In the US, in the same period, left-wing interpretations of Benjamin placed him
in the context of the Frankfurt school, most notably in the work of Susan Buck-
Morss.22 Otherwise he was and still is drawn into debates within cultural stud-
ies, which at its more Marxist articulation takes its cue from Fredric Jameson,
who referred to Benjamin in his investigation of the ideological functions of
art and the utopian impulses lurking in popular culture in his book The Politi-
cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.23 In both contexts, schol-
ars turned increasingly to those aspects of Benjamin’s work concerned with
consumerism – and the historical home of the consumer, the city.24 Interest
21
Benjamin 1973, pp. 170–1.
22
See Buck-Morss 1977 and Buck-Morss 1989.
23
Jameson 1981.
24
See Cohen 1993; Marcus and Nead 1999.
shifted away from cultural production and critique towards consumption and
commentary. At the height of postmodernism, attempts were made to yoke
Benjamin’s researches into the urban scene to assaults on Marxist historical
materialism via a fascination with consumption.25 In accentuating consump-
tion, production slid out of view, peculiarly – for Benjamin’s curiosity, certainly
in the last fteen years of his life, was directed at questions of production, from
questioning determinants on the production of art to the aesthetic demands
raised by the Soviet avant-garde practice known as production art to reec-
tions on modes of industrial production and the experience of labour. In his
great study of shopping – the Arcades Project – consumption is set in relation
to the totality of industrial capitalism of which it is a part, along with political
movements, technologies, urbanisation and so on.
The arcades are, for Benjamin, a microcosm of historical potential and disap-
pointment, of promise and betrayal. They encapsulate the promises of bountiful
provision, of luxury for all, of international contact and exchange. The arcades
were swallowed up in the Haussmannisation of Paris. Haussmannisation, a
modernisation project inaugurated by Emperor Napoleon III, was the name for
the construction of vast boulevards designed to confound barricade-building
by rebellious workers and to enable the swift passage of state vehicles from one
part of the city to another to quell rioters. Georges Haussmann, appointed as
the prefect of the Seine between 1853 and the Emperor’s fall in 1870, aimed
in his replanning to move the working classes and the poor out of the city
centre to the East and to remodel the West for the bourgeoisie. The objective
was to ush out the hidden haunts of low-life where bohemia and plotters and
politicos had once gathered and in which they had barricaded themselves. For
Benjamin, Haussmann was a city-destroyer. Reaching between past and pres-
ent, he claims: ‘Haussmann’s work is accomplished today, as the Spanish war
makes clear by quite other means’.26
By his time of writing, Benjamin’s object of study – the Paris arcades – had
already become unfashionable, and, in part, obliterated, which makes the
Arcades Project a piece of history writing in the sense which Benjamin loves best.
The ruined hopes of the past dimly remembered from his own childhood
loom into greater visibility in his historical construction. Benjamin, inuenced
25
A key statement is McRobbie 1992.
26
Benjamin • 557
as he was by surrealism, unearths impulses, objects, dreams, wishes and mat-

ter that has decayed. Benjamin notes:
We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past
into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and
one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary
potential of these ‘precursors’ explode in the present.27
Arguably, his writings on lm and technological culture are also an attempt
to redeem or make explode the revolutionary potential of forms, a possibility
that inhabits them but is impeded by capitalist relations of production.
In the wake of writing a blurb for the Harvard edition of the Arcades Project,
former situationist T.J. Clark published a provocatively titled essay in 2003:
‘Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?’28 Here, he articulates the position, as he
sees it, of a number of scholars and indeed acquaintances of Benjamin who
saw the inuence of Marxism on his work, specically The Arcades Project, as
detrimental. Marxism, it is said,
muddied, multiplied, and mechanized the project’s original outlines; so that

nally, essentially, Marxism can only be seen as a cancer on Benjamin’s work
– on what should have become the last and greatest of surrealist grapplings
with the nineteenth century, a settling of accounts with all the mad dreams
of Grandpa and Grandville and Victor Hugo.29
Clark is not fully identied with this position, but nds a mode of distancing
Benjamin from any close engagement with Marxism:
No doubt the de-Marxication of Benjamin is annoying. But it would be

playing into the hygienists’ hands simply to reverse their emphases and
exclusions, and replace one cardboard cutout with another. A ‘Red Benjamin’
to ght it out with ‘Benjamin, Prophet of the Holocaust’ or ‘Benjamin, the
Father of Cultural Studies’? God forbid. I believe the fairest verdict on
Marxism as a mode of thought in the Paris book is that it is pervasive,
vital, and supercial.30
27
28
Clark 2003.
29
Clark 2003, p. 31.
30
Clark 2003, p. 41.
Clark’s evidence of this is that Benjamin’s reading in Marxism came from

introductions and anthologies, and that he copied out ‘hoary’ passages from
‘Marxist scripture’, and this ‘like a slow learner kept after school’. His skim-
ming was productive but remains only a surface-glance. The advantage of
superciality was, according to Clark, that he remained immune from both
‘High Stalinism’ and ‘Frankfurt school’ method. Still, Clark concedes that
Benjamin’s reading in Marxism deepened as the 1930s progressed and there
are particular ways in which Marxism is generative. The Marxist concept
of abstract labour-power comes to be crucial: the nineteenth century is pre-
sented as a society in which abstraction and the ‘forced equivalence of the
unequal’31 is ever more prominent. Furthermore, Benjamin enhances Marx-
ism by his critical intervention. Breaking towards the end of his life with a
certain seduction by the commodity and the class-neutral idea of a ‘collective
consciousness’ in which the utopian dreams of progress are embodied in the
commodity-clutter of arcades and department stores, Benjamin wakes up to
the negative side of historical movement and Marxism is all the better for it.
Clark quotes from the Arcades Project:
It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to

show what a historical materialism would be like which has annihilated
within itself the idea of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every
reason to distinguish itself from bourgeois habits of mind.32
One of the main impulses of Benjamin’s work in his nal years is to present
a ‘dark, inconsolable history of the proletariat’,33 which breaks with any sort
of automatic idea of progress ensured by technological advance and by the
diffusion of enlightenment ideals, as much as by the intervention of the Party
which is to guarantee redemption.
While aspects of Clark’s analysis are helpful, it does not accurately represent
Benjamin’s full engagement with Marxism and it operates with a peculiarly
scholastic notion of what it means to understand and apply Marxist method-
ology. A glance at Benjamin’s biography lls in some details and shifts the
debate such that Marxism might be understood also as something like a eld
of possibility, and not simply something to be pursued academically.
31
Clark 2003, p. 46.
32
Benjamin 1999a, N 2:2. Cited in Clark 2003, p. 43.
33
Ibid.
Benjamin • 559
The biographical context: did Benjamin read Marx?

It is certainly the case that Benjamin encountered communism before he
encountered Marxism. Benjamin’s rst met Scholem in 1915 at a lecture by
the socialist Kurt Hiller and at a subsequent meeting Scholem gave Benjamin
a copy of the rst issue of Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring’s journal Die
Internationale: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis des Marxismus, which Benjamin
thought ‘excellent’.34 From this point on, Benjamin remained in contact with
the theoretical eld of communist ideas. Both men also had some exposure to
what activism might mean, at least for others. Scholem’s brother, Werner, and
Benjamin’s brother, Georg, were leading communists in the 1920s. Benjamin’s
next major encounter with communist thought aped that of a number of his
generation. Escaping an expensive existence in Berlin in 1924, in Capri he read
the most important book for his generation of disaffected intellectuals, Georg
Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. He was impressed by Lukács’s philo-
sophically adroit combination of theory and practice and he was drawn to
the ‘political praxis of communism’ as a ‘binding position’, though he knew
that there must come tensions between Lukács’ Hegelian dialectics and what
he conceived as his own tendency towards nihilism.35 On that same sojourn
he met Asja Lacis. A letter to Scholem mentioning this ‘most remarkable
acquaintance’ described her as a Bolshevik Latvian, a gentile, who acted and
directed, and with whom he chatted long into the night.36 His next letter to
Scholem repeated the news – he told of meeting a Russian revolutionary
from Riga, ‘one of the most outstanding women’ he had ever met.37 He also
noted that through her he had gained an ‘intensive insight into the actuality
of a radical communism’, a ‘vital liberation’, even though it disturbed his
work and his ‘bourgeois rhythm of life’. In practical terms, Lacis provided a
context for his developing thought. Through her, prospects opened of publi-
cation in Moscow and a dialogue with the Soviet intelligentsia.38 From Benja-
min’s perspective, further engagement with Marxism and Marxist scholarly
method promised a context for his work. In late May 1925 Benjamin wrote
to Scholem about his miserable nancial circumstances and the ‘deeply
34
35
Benjamin 1995b, p. 83.
36
37
38
deplorable collision of literary and economic plans’. He noted that if his jour-
nalistic efforts turned sour he would ‘probably accelerate’ his
involvement in Marxist politics and – with the view in the foreseeable future
of going to Moscow at least temporarily – join the party.39
In 1926, domiciled in Paris, he continued to apprise himself of current Marx-

ist debates. His small Paris library, he noted, was ‘mainly composed of com-
munist things’.40 He read Trotsky’s Where Is England Going?’ He followed the
controversy unleashed by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, with criti-
cal contributions from Rudas and Deborin41 and he enthused over the debates
initiated by Bogdanov and Bukharin on a ‘general Tectology’, or the universal
science of organisation, which considered the commonalities in the human,
biological and physical systems. Benjamin was intrigued by this ‘fragmentary
rst attempt at a Marxist universal history’.42 It was at this time that he man-
aged to get a commission to write 300 lines on Goethe ‘from the standpoint of
Marxist doctrine’ for the New Great Russian Encyclopaedia.43
At the end of 1926 he went to Moscow to be by the side of an ailing Lacis.
Another motive was to witness life under the Communist Party. The end of
the 1920s saw ferocious struggles over ofcial economic, social, political and
cultural positions. The opposition was experiencing its nal but vigorous gasps
and it was clear to Benjamin that ‘the restoration’ had begun and ‘militant com-
munism’ was being suspended.44 Criticisms of the Soviet Union made joining
the Communist Party undesirable. Benjamin continued however to engage in
debate with communists and he published in communist journals such as Das
Wort. He spent much time with Bertolt Brecht, who to an extent shared his
interest in and critical stance towards Soviet Communism. Through Brecht,
Benjamin met the Marxist Karl Korsch.
On various occasions Benjamin had to defend his method. For example, in
a letter to the Swiss critic Max Rychner, on 7 March 1931, Benjamin agreed
with Rychner that his work had nothing in common with philistine commu-
nist approaches, but he was concerned, however, to emphasise that his own
39
Benjamin 1995c, p. 39.
40
41
Lukács 2000.
42
43
44
Benjamin 1986, p. 53.
Benjamin • 561
position also relied on materialist insight. His path to a materialist conception

came not from communist brochures but rather through the best bourgeois
studies in literary history and criticism of the last twenty years. Even before
his closer acquaintance with Marxist method, he had worked dialectically,
and cited his book on baroque tragic drama as example. But what he did not
know at the time of its composition, though it became clearer soon after, was
that ‘from my very particular position on the philosophy of language, there
exists a relay – however strained and problematic – with the viewpoint of dia-
lectical materialism’.45 This was because he strove to focus his thought always
on those objects in which truth was most compacted, which meant ‘not the
‘eternal ideas’, not ‘timeless values’, but there where historical study ushers in
cotemporary revelation.46 He disassociated his thought from ‘the Heidegger
School’, with their ‘profound circumlocutions of the realm of ideas’, in order
to place himself closer to the ‘scandalous and coarse analyses’ of the Marxist
Franz Mehring, who, like him, sought in literature ‘the true state of our con-
temporary existence’. He also conceded that he had
never been able to research and think other than in, if I might say it in this
way, a theological sense – namely in accord with the Talmudic teaching of
the 49 levels of meaning in every passage of the Torah.47
But the recognition of the ‘hierarchies of meaning’ was more present in

the most clichéd communist platitudes than in the apologias of bourgeois
profundity.48
Debate on what being a Marxist might mean continued through the 1930s
as he engaged in more or less defensive argument with representatives of the
Institute for Social Research, in the pages of whose journal he wished to place
various projects. As Clark suggests, Benjamin’s self-stated aim in this time
was to contribute to and enhance Marxist method, which had blind spots. He
agreed, for example, at one point, with Adorno’s criticism of some prepara-
tory work on the Arcades Project. While the project had to be secured against
Marxist objections, it had to be acknowledged that it attempted something
new, namely the ‘genuine abandonment of the idealist image of history with
45
Benjamin 1995d, p. 18.
46
47
48
Benjamin 1995d, pp. 19–20.
its harmonising perspective’, a harmonising that Marxists too might carry

out.49 Benjamin’s was a history told from the perspective of ruination, includ-
ing the ruination of old models. Renement of his Marxist understanding was
a task for the summer of 1935. It was now that he informed Adorno that he
had begun to read the ‘alp grey’ mass of Marx’s Capital, Volume One.50 As
Clark suggests, this is late in his life and scholarly development. But it is to
be understood against the backdrop of many years of more personal engage-
ment and encounters with communism and communists, inside and outside
the CP, as well as reading other relevant gures such as Trotsky, to whom
he returned in 1932 and 1933.51 Benjamin’s famous ‘Work of Art’ essay from
the mid-1930s and his proposed lecture for a communist circle ‘The Author as
Producer’, from 1934, were investigations into the prospects for contemporary
critical-left culture workers. He examined strategies that would avoid the pres-
sures on artists to be individualistic, competitive or promoters of art as a new
religion or an evasion of the ‘political’. He evaluated artists’ efforts to work out
cultural forms that could not be recuperated by fascism. He assessed what the
new mass cultural forms – radio, lm, photography, photomontage, worker-
correspondent newspapers meant in the wider scheme of the social world,
and how facts such as mass reproduction change humans’ relationship to cul-
ture of the past and the present. Such work contributes extensively to Marxist
aesthetics.
Heterodoxy in context
Benjamin’s nal ‘testament’, the theses on the concept of history, have been read
as a signal of disillusion with the Left and resignation from efforts to change
the world. However, others have approached these as the attempt to compose
Marxist materialist theory in a tremendously violent world, during the ghast-
liest days of working-class defeat. Benjamin is, indeed, dispirited, for, at the
moment of writing, the proletariat is not proving itself to be the struggling,
conscious class. The German working class has been corrupted by the opinion,
promoted by Social democracy, that it is they who were swimming with the
49
Benjamin 1995e, p. 109.
50
Benjamin 1995e, p. 111.
51
Benjamin • 563
stream of technological development.52 In fact, the world working class has

been sold down the river, and split apart through fascism and nationalism.
And revolutionaries have allowed their energies to be sapped in strategic deals
and misplaced alliances. ‘On the Concept of History’ is Benjamin’s reckoning
with social democracy, Stalinism and bourgeois thought, none of which have
been able to prevent the disaster of fascism. Social democracy had engaged in
deals with the political establishment and with capital, just as the Communist
Parties entered into a pact with Hitler. There is reason for despair – despair is
not a result of Benjamin’s tragic disposition, as Scholem and others suggested.
It is objective. But the theses offer hope too, or at least they attempt to formu-
late a way of thinking that may be of use for a revived revolutionary prac-
tice. Benjamin is clear: ‘The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling,
oppressed class itself.’53 Just as in the analysis of reproducible art, the accent
is on the mass as active participants in their culture and history. And he adds
that, in Marx, this last enslaved class is the avenger that completes the task
of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. Throughout the
theses, the emphasis is on the intimate connection between struggle, histori-
cal practice, and knowledge, theory. Liberation can come only after breaking
with some of the inherited modes of thinking the world in terms of automatic
progress, crisis as exception and history as objective unfurling towards an
ever-better future that never arrives – modes that could neither foresee nor
prevent fascism.
It was just such heterodox thinking – rejecting Communist-Party orthodoxy,
rejecting inherited scholastic modes of thinking, rejecting bourgeois analyses –
that appealed to a number of Marxist (Trotskyist) thinkers in the UK in the
1980s and after. In the early 1980s, Benjamin’s thinking was compared to that
of Trotsky. Cliff Slaughter contended that of all the major writers on litera-
ture and art who have adhered to Marxism, only Walter Benjamin and Leon
Trotsky remained true to the fundamental legacy of Marx.54 Terry Eagleton’s
Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981) attempted to draw
some analogies between the literary and historiographical method of Trotsky
and Benjamin.55 This association is reprised very briey in the conclusion to
52
53
54
See Slaughter 1980.
55
See Eagleton 1981.
his subsequent study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, though not in the chapter
on Benjamin, which, reecting then dominant concerns, is titled ‘The Marxist
Rabbi’.56 Some ten years later Esther Leslie made analogies between the two
men in her study Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, not only in rela-
tion to prognoses and recommendations for art and history writing, but also in
terms of a theory of experience.57 Like Bensaïd and Löwy, Leslie’s work joins in
the debate over the meaning of Benjamin’s nal piece of writing, ‘On the Con-
cept of History’. Mike Wayne described this effort in a review on the website
Cultural Logic:
Leslie effectively recovers what many have read as Benjamin’s disillusioned

parting of the ways with Marxism, for the authentic revolutionary traditions
of Bolshevism. The ‘Thesis’ is centrally concerned to critique the Stalinist
Marxism which holds that there is an objective historical teleology in which
the victory of the working class is guaranteed. And it is also concerned to
critique Social Democracy which also assumed that historical progress and
reform will unfold automatically within the parameters of capitalism. On the
eve of the Second World War, these philosophies of history are thoroughly
bankrupt. The struggle in the present is also, for Benjamin, a struggle
to redeem the forgotten past of its misery, its broken hopes, its waste.
Benjamin understands the past ‘from the perspective of lost opportunities,
now potentially viable.’ This concept of redemption is one sense in which
Benjamin mobilises the discourse of theology, which others have read as
evidence of a burgeoning religiosity to replace his dying Marxism.58
A recent European-American contribution to Marxist theory has evoked Ben-

jamin as part of its contemporary re-imagining of the revolutionary project.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire quotes from Benjamin’s 1931
vignette ‘The Destructive Character’.59 The poverty of experience obliges the
barbarian to begin anew, that the new barbarian ‘sees nothing permanent.
But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere’. For Hardt and Negri, the
‘new barbarians’ ruin the old order through afrmative violence and they
propose for the progressive nature of barbarism following the collapse of the
56
Eagleton 1990, p. 378.
57
Leslie 2000, pp. 228–34.
58
Wayne 2001.
59
Benjamin 1999b, pp. 541–2.
Benjamin • 565
Soviet Union a migrant barbarian multitude – former ‘productive cadres’

who desert socialist discipline and bureaucracy in a bid for freedom.60 Their
barbarism manifests in modes of life – their bodies transform and mutate to
create new posthuman bodies, uid both in sexuality and gender ascription,
cyborgish and simian, bodies that are ‘completely incapable of submitting to
command’, and ‘incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to
the regulations of a traditional sex life’. There is a technological supplement
to this. Hardt and Negri write: ‘The contemporary form of exodus and the
new barbarian life demand that tools become poietic prostheses, liberating us
from the conditions of modern humanity.’ And these protheses are, according
to Hardt/Negri, in a Benjaminian spirit, those of the ‘plastic and uid terrain
of the new communicative, biological, and mechanical technologies’. Hardt
and Negri’s Benjaminian barbarian is misconceived. This uidity and self-
modication, arguably, misapprehends Benjamin’s ‘positive concept of bar-
barism’, for this relates to art’s producers and consumers and is strategic and
negational – that is to say it operates in contradictory relation to the points of
tension, rather than setting up a parallel utopian existence. Benjamin’s pos-
itive concept of barbarism has less to do with an effortless prosthetic use of
technologies to modify bodies, owing in the direction of capital’s own unfold-
ing and posthuman dreams of immortality. It has more to do with a scornful
appropriation of technologies and the techniques they suggest for strategic
purposes of representation in pursuit of collective liberation.
Conclusion
Marxism’s relationship to Benjamin over the past forty years has been varied,
complex and generative. Benjamin’s own thinking accounts for this fertile pro-
cess. One of Benjamin’s enduring theoretical contributions involves the ques-
tion of tradition, legacy, how things – specically knowledge and the historical
past – are handed down. He observed the ways in which the reception of objects
or ideas is accented by the ruling political exigencies of the moment. For Ben-
jamin, a historical materialist may be able to evade this pull of dominant ideol-
ogy. This is what Benjamin meant by the task of the historical materialist being
60
to ‘brush history against the grain’.61 His argument is that historical materialists
do not just go with the ow, accepting the supercial but convenient explana-
tion. Rather, the historical materialist disturbs the pile, seeking and exposing
the roots that join events and things to the structure that cradles or crushes
them. Apart from providing a total understanding that does not separate out
economics, politics, cultural form and so on, such a process also disturbs ways
of telling history – brushing history itself against the grain, because it refuses
to take it as something that is completed, closed, past. In this case, the past-
ness of Benjamin is impossible, and his contribution to current disputes in
Marxism and beyond still ongoing.
61
Chapter Thirty
Critical Realism and Beyond:
Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectic
Alex Callinicos
For some twenty years now, critical realism – the

body of philosophical doctrines and arguments
developed by Roy Bhaskar – has served as a rallying
point for radical theorists in the English-speaking
world who wish to escape from empiricism without
falling prisoner to postmodernism. By concentrat-
ing on Bhaskar’s major work of the 1990s, Dialectic,
which attempts a dramatic and ambitious extension
of his earlier ideas, I seek to here offer an appraisal
of his achievements and of their relevance to social
theory.1
A realist epistemology
Bhaskar’s project emerged fully formed in his
remarkable rst book, A Realist Theory of Science
(1975). This took the form of an intervention in the
debates among anglophone philosophers of science.
The dominant empiricist model of science, in the
1
Bhaskar 1993. All citations in the text are from this book. Andrew Collier pro-
vides an admirable introduction to Bhaskar’s earlier work in Collier 1994, including
a useful biographical sketch (pp. 262–3). An earlier version of the present paper was
published in French in Actuel Marx, 16 (1994), and appeared in English as University
of York, Department of Politics Working Paper No. 7. I am grateful to Mark Evans
for all his help.
form elaborated by the Vienna Circle and its followers, was by the late 1960s
under increasing critical pressure. The most inuential controversies focused
on the problem of scientic revolution: whatever their differences, Kuhn,
Lakatos, and Feyerabend were agreed that the systematic replacement of
one body of theoretical concepts by another could not be interpreted along
empiricist lines. But an important debate developed around the concepts of
causality and of scientic laws shared by the empiricists. These were lineal
descendants of Hume’s reduction of causation to constant conjunction: ‘We
have no other notion of cause and effect but that of certain objects, which
have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been
found inseparable.’2 The very inuential analysis of causality developed, for
example, by Donald Davidson, a philosopher whose work, in other respects,
pulls away from empiricism, treats it as a relationship between events.
The claim, central to the Humean view, that causation involves no neces-
sary connection between events, but depends merely on the fact that events
of one type are ‘always conjoin’d’ with events of a second type, came under
increasing attack in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. Thus Bhaskar’s
doctoral supervisor Rom Harré argued that the Humean ‘regularity theory’
was unable to give an adequate account of the nature of scientic laws. Con-
stant conjunctions observed in the past could be the result of mere accident.
Scientic laws could only attain the genuine universality on which their law-
like status depended if the connections they posited were the result of some
‘natural necessity’. Developing ideas of Locke’s, Harré sought to ground this
necessity in the powers inherent in the nature of the material objects making
up the natural world. A causal explanation necessarily involves ascribing to
some thing or things the ‘material liabilities’ to bring about certain effects.
This is not to explain the sleep induced by opium by its dormitive virtue, since
the ascription of causal powers is an a posteriori hypothesis formulated on the
basis of empirical investigation into an object’s ‘real essence’.3
Plainly, this analysis of causal powers implies that nature has a structure
which is not necessarily visible on the surface of experience. Hence Andrew
Collier calls Bhaskar’s development of Harré’s arguments ‘depth realism’.4
2
Hume 1970, p. 141.
3
See, for example, Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III.vi.a.
4
Collier 1994, pp. 5–6.
Bhaskar • 569
Perhaps the decisive step he took beyond Harré was to distinguish between
open and closed systems. The world, he argued, consists of ‘generative mech-
anisms’ – the structures which produce the events registered in the ux of
human experience. Since these mechanisms are plural, they interact with each
other. The interference of other mechanisms means that, in general, no mech-
anism has the effect which it would have on its own. A law-like statement
ascribing causal powers to something involves a claim about the operation
of a generative mechanism if it were left undisturbed. Scientic laws thus
identify tendencies in the world. Since the working of mechanisms is usually
disturbed, these tendencies are typically unfullled; nevertheless, the mutual
interference of mechanisms has effects – in the shape of events – which scien-
tic investigation can trace back to their inherent tendencies. The world is thus
an open system, in which ‘causal laws [are] out of phase with patterns of events
and experiences’. Human intervention in nature, typically in the form of sci-
entic experimentation, is usually necessary in order to isolate the conditions
under which a specic mechanism can operate undisturbed. Another way of
characterising this kind of articial situation is to call it a closed system, i.e.
one ‘in which constant conjunctions occur’. Thus the constant conjunctions
of events which Humeans claim are so common a feature of experience as
to provide the basis of the regularities in which (they believe) scientic laws
consist turn out to be exceptions from the normal course of nature, resulting
from human practice itself:
In a world without men there would be no experience and few, if any

constant conjunctions, i.e. had they been experienced [,] Humean ‘causal
laws’. For both experiences and invariances (constant conjunctions of events)
depend, in general, upon human activity. But causal laws do not. Thus in a
world without men the causal laws that science has now as a matter of fact
discovered would continue to prevail, though there would be few sequences
of events and no experiences with which they were in correspondence. Thus,
we can begin to see how the empiricist ontology in fact depends upon a
concealed anthropocentricity.5
It thus begins to become clear why Bhaskar calls his theory realist. The world
revealed by the scientic discovery of causal laws is ‘a multi-dimensional
5
Bhaskar 1978, pp. 33, 34, 35.
structure independent of man’. Any epistemology which seeks to give a phil-

osophical account of the nature of this process of discovery presupposes an
ontology in the sense of ‘a schematic answer to the question of what the world
must be like for science to be possible’. Empiricism and idealism alike deny
this primacy of ontology over epistemology. They are thereby guilty of the
‘epistemic fallacy’, that is, they assume that ‘statements about being can be
reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge’. Bhaskar,
by contrast, distinguishes rigorously between the transitive and intransitive
dimensions of science. The former embraces ‘the antecedently established
facts and theories, paradigms and models, methods and techniques of inquiry
available to a particular scientic school or worker’: but ‘the intransitive
objects of knowledge . . . are the real things and structures, mechanisms and
processes, events and possibilities of the world: and for the most part they are
quite independent of us’.6
Bhaskar’s realism implies that the intransitive dimension of science is onto-
logically prior to the transitive. Yet he seeks to justify this position by means
of an analysis of human practice, and more specically of scientic experi-
mentation. This analysis focuses on the claim we have already encountered,
that experiment consists in human intervention in the course of nature in
order to make possible the constant conjunctions of events that the mech-
anisms postulated by scientic theories will produce if left uninterfered
with. It follows not only that the Humean account of causation is incorrect –
there must, as Bhaskar puts it, be an ‘ontological distinction’ between ‘causal
laws’ and ‘sequences of events’, but that the mechanisms identied by well-
corroborated theories operate even where human practice does not act to
create closed systems:
In short, the intelligibility of experimental activity presupposes that a

constant conjunction is no more a necessary than a sufcient condition for
a causal law. And it implies that causal laws operate in their normal way
under conditions, which may be characterized as ‘open’, where no constant
conjunction or regular sequence of events is forthcoming.7
6
Bhaskar 1978, pp. 21–2, 28–9, 36, 44.
7
Bhaskar 1978, p. 33.
Bhaskar • 571
This, however, amounts to an ontological claim, namely that, insofar as sci-

ence successfully postulates causal laws, it has an intransitive dimension, con-
sisting of mechanisms irreducible to the events which they help to generate
and which we encounter in experience. And this presupposes, in turn, the
possibility of a non-human world, i.e. causal mechanisms without invariances
and experiences. The analysis of one human activity thus implies a particular
account of the world, one which paradoxically highlights the independence of
that world of all human activity. Bhaskar called his position ‘transcendental
realism’ in part because of the analogy he sees between this argument and
the transcendental arguments Kant uses to establish the objectivity of the cat-
egories of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, though
he differs from Kant in arguing that the world exists independently of, but
is accessible to human knowledge, Bhaskar agrees with him in treating that
knowledge as ‘a structure rather than a surface’. And there is also perhaps
the feeling that Bhaskar has developed a position which avoids the extremes
of empiricism and idealism, just as Kant sought to escape a choice between
Hume and Leibniz. Thus, for transcendental realism, ‘science is not an epi-
phenomenon of nature, nor is nature a product of man’.8
One crucial feature of the world presupposed by science, according to
Bhaskar, is that it is stratied. The behaviour of a particular mechanism in
general is to be explained by postulating the existence of another mechanism
at work at a ‘lower-order’, more fundamental level of being. These mecha-
nisms form strata. Strata in general have the property of emergence. That is,
while each is rooted in the mechanisms operative at the lower level(s), it can-
not be reduced to them. Every stratum has causal powers which can only be
explained by theories specic to it.9 This analysis does not merely serve to
prohibit the reduction of ‘higher-order’ sciences to ‘lower-order’ ones such
that of biology to physics, but helps ground Bhaskar’s attempt to capture the
specicity of the human sciences, developed chiey in The Possibility of Natu-
ralism (1979). As the book’s title suggests, he is concerned to defend ‘an essen-
tial unity of method between the natural and the social sciences’. Naturalism
follows from the falsehood of methodological individualism. ‘Society is both
the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced
8
Bhaskar 1978, pp. 25, 35.
9
See Collier 1994, Chapter 4.
outcome of human agency.’ Social structures therefore cannot be reduced to

the mere consequences of individual actions; on the contrary, these actions
presuppose structures, and scientic inquiry is necessary in order to isolate
the latter’s workings. The analogy between the natural and human sciences is
not, however, complete:
Society . . . is an articulated ensemble of tendencies and powers which, unlike

natural ones, exist only as long as they (or at least some of them) are being
exercised; are exercised, in the last instance via the intentional activity of
men; and are not necessarily space-time invariant.
The ontological distinction between generative mechanisms and the events

they produce is thus only partially present in the human world, since society
is ‘a structure irreducible to, but present only in its effects’. It follows that
social scientists cannot, through experimentation, create closed systems in
which to test their generalisations. The human sciences are thus radically non-
predictive. Furthermore, since social structures depend on intentional human
activity, their investigation has an irreducible hermeneutic dimension involv-
ing the discovery of the reasons for individual actions.10
Much of the content of Bhaskar’s philosophy of social science was not espe-
cially original. There are, for example, close parallels between his conception
of ‘the duality of structure’, that is, its role as both the condition and outcome
of practice, and Anthony Giddens’s account of the ‘duality of structure and
action’, developed independently at much the same time.11 Bhaskar’s ver-
sion was, however, undergirded by a forcefully argued and genuinely origi-
nal account of the nature of science itself. It was perhaps for this reason that
critical realism (the name the combination of Bhaskar’s ‘transcendental real-
ism’ and his ‘critical naturalism’ in the social sciences gradually acquired)
emerged as an intellectual tendency in the English-speaking world. Its attrac-
tion lay in the fact that it is authentically anti-empiricist – as much of A Realist
Theory of Science is taken up with criticism of empiricist epistemologies as is
devoted to elaborating Bhaskar’s alternative – while vigorously insisting on
the objectivity and knowability of the world at a time when various forms of
scepticism were gaining ground in the social sciences thanks to the inuence
10
Bhaskar 1979, pp. 3, 43, 49, 50.
11
Bhaskar 1979, pp. 43–4. An interesting comparison can be made with Giddens
1976, and Giddens 1979.
Bhaskar • 573
of Kuhn and Feyeraband on the one hand, and of Derrida and Foucault on the
other. Critical realism won support especially among left-wing researchers in
a variety of disciplines, making possible the regular meetings of the Stand-
ing Conference on Realism in the Human Sciences, and, more recently, of the
conferences organised by Bhaskar’s Centre on Critical Realism.
The diffraction of dialectic

It was plain from the start that Bhaskar is a philosopher of the Left. Themes
from Althusser’s writings are detectable in Bhaskar’s earlier works. Thus the
account of the transitive and intransitive dimensions bears a strong family
resemblance to the distinction drawn in Reading ‘Capital’ between the thought
object and real object of a science.12 Similarly, Bhaskar’s conception of social
structure as irreducible to, but present only in, its effects recalls Althusser’s
concept of structural causality. Bhaskar indeed has acknowledged Althusser
as ‘the foremost Marxist inuence’ on A Realist Theory of Science, and described
him as ‘the best and most advanced Marxist in the philosophy of science’.13
Dialectic, however, provided him with the opportunity to situate himself more
generally with respect to the Marxist tradition.
Bhaskar’s aim in this book is, however, considerably more ambitious – ‘[t]he
dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism’,14 its development
into a ‘system of dialectical critical realism [which] constitutes a second wave
of critical realism’.15 This radical extension of Bhaskar’s earlier arguments in
effect takes as its starting point Marx’s critique of Hegel. This does not mean
that he simply reproduces Marx’s arguments. Bhaskar highlights the pecu-
liar role of the law of non-contradiction in Hegel, which acts as ‘a norm he
covertly accepts, while seeing it ubiquitously violated as the mechanism that
powers his dialectic to its nal glaceating repose’. Contradictions emerge only
to cancel themselves in the Hegelian dialectic as opposites are transformed
from positive contraries simultaneously present and actual . . . into negative

sub-contraries now simultaneously actual and absent, but retained as
12
See Collier 1994, pp. 52–4, for a discussion of the similarities and differences
between Althusser’s and Bhaskar’s conceptions of science.
13
Qu., Elliott 1987, p. 331 n. 6.
14
Bhaskar 1993, p. 2.
15
Bhaskar 1993, p. 301.
negative presences in a cumulative memory store, as the dialectical reader’s

consciousness or the path of history moves on to a new level of speculative
reason.
It is the experience, described in retrospect, of the rise and fall of successive

contradictions, that constitutes the dialectical process for Hegel. Thus ‘Hege-
lian dialectic . . . is never simultaneously dialectical and contradictory. The
materialist dialectic is.’16 ‘Real dialectical contradictions’ of the kind anal-
ysed by Marx involve the co-existence of aspects of a totality which are at
once intrinsically related but ‘tendentially mutually exclusive’;17 their resolution
requires the intervention of practice to secure ‘the non preservative negation
of the ground’ of this contradictory totality,18 and not, as in Hegel merely the
opposites being ‘retrospectively redescribed as moments of a transcending
totality’, which amounts to their ‘analytical reinstatement’.19
The signicance for Bhaskar of Marx’s critique of Hegel is twofold. In the
rst place, it gives rise to ‘the materialist diffraction of dialectic’20: ‘Marx’s cri-
tique of Hegel’s philosophy of identity permits a plurality of dialectical con-
gurations, topologies, perspectives and inscapes which it would [be] idle to
suggest could be captured by a single formula.’21 This leads Bhaskar to isolate
what he calls ‘Four Degrees of Critical Realism’, but which are perhaps best
seen as four dimensions of this diffracted dialectic, each with its own distinc-
tive concepts, scientic applications, and philosophical problems. The rst
(‘1M’) is, roughly speaking, the domain of Bhaskar’s original philosophy of
science, involving concepts such as ‘differentiation, change, alterity’, and rep-
resenting the moment of irreducible non-identity which Hegel sought unsuc-
cessfully to efface. The second (‘2E’) is ‘the narrowly dialectical moment’,
involving, inter alia, ‘the ideas of negation, negativity, becoming, process, n-
itude, contradiction, development . . ., spatiality, temporality, mediation, reci-
procity’ employed in sciences such as cosmology and ‘human geo-history’.
The third (‘3L’) is concerned with ‘totalizing motifs’, the concepts exploring
the connections between human beings’ theoretical understanding of, and
16
17
18
19
20
21
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 173–4.
Bhaskar • 575
practical engagement in the world. That engagement itself is the object of the
fourth dimension of Bhaskar’s pluralised dialectic (‘4D’), where ‘we seek to
achieve the unity of theory and practice in practice’.22 Thus, ‘[a]t the beginning
of this new dialectic, there is non-identity – at the end, open, unnished total-
ity,’ a thorough disruption of the self-identity of Hegelian Spirit.23
This multiplication of dialectics, while it starts from Marx, takes Bhaskar
well beyond him. Too often, Marx is too far from, or too close to, Hegel. Thus
the latter’s inuence leads Marx into a rejection of ethical thought which
serves ‘to render him (and the majority of subsequent Marxists) impervious to
the need for a William Morris-type moment of positive concrete utopianism
to stand alongside Marx’s negative explanatory critique’ of capitalism.24 At
the same time, breaking with the Hegelian notion of a ‘preservative dialectical
sublation’ which incorporates the cancelled moments of the process within the
nal totality leads to Marx’s ‘failure . . . to come to terms with the material . . .
presence of the past (and, to a degree, of the intrinsic outside)’. Stalinism, in
seeking to build socialism in one country, ignoring the material constraints
imposed by ‘global intradependence [sic] and the presence of the past’, repre-
sented an extreme version of this failure. It can, therefore, ‘be given Marxian
credentials, however much Marx would have loathed the outcome’.25
Bhaskar remains nevertheless indebted to Marx in a second respect. The
exposure by the young Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of
the ‘tacit complicity’ between speculative idealism and classical empiricism
provides Bhaskar with the leitmotiv of his own critique of the Western philo-
sophical tradition from Parmenides and Plato onwards.26 Much of Dialectic is
devoted to an exposure of three mutually reinforcing errors which, in differ-
ent forms, run through this tradition, and are responsible for its characteristic
‘irrealism’ (by which Bhaskar presumably means what is more conventionally
called anti-realism, or idealism, the denial of the existence of a world indepen-
dent of, but knowable by thought). The rst we have already encountered, the
‘epistemic fallacy’, which by treating statements about being as statements
about knowledge effects the reduction of ontology to epistemology. This
22
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 8–9.
23
Bhaskar 1993, p. 3.
24
Bhaskar 1993, p. 345.
25
Bhaskar 1993, p. 350.
26
functions merely to cover the generation of an implicit ontology, ‘actualism’,

which denies the existence of a stratied world of mechanisms, and reduces
reality to the actual, that is, to experience and the events encountered in it.
Closely related to this error is a second, that of ‘ontological monovalence’,
‘the generation of a purely positive, complementing a purely actual, notion of
reality’, involving the denial of any place to negation; its effect is ‘to erase the
contingency of existential questions and to despatialize and detemporalize
(accounts of ) being’.27
Finally, there is ‘the operation I have dubbed “primal squeeze”, the elimina-
tion of the middle term of scientic theory or, more importantly, its intransi-
tive object and ontological counterpart, natural necessity’. Neither empiricism
nor idealism have a place for ‘empirically controlled critical scientic theory’,
the former replacing it with ‘naturalistically given sense-experience’, the lat-
ter with ‘parthenogetically self-generating philosophy’.28
Power and desire

Since philosophical errors apparently take so universal a form, that of this
‘unholy trinity of irrealism’,29 the question naturally arises of whether there
is anything common to the dialectical variants distinguished by Bhaskar. One
can in fact identify two unifying factors, one broader than the other. The most
fundamental dialectical category is that of ‘real negation’, ‘real determinate
absence or non-being’.30 The existence of such an absence, however, is not a
stable state of affairs, but provides the impulse to remove it. Thus ‘dialectics
depends upon the positive identication and transformative elimination of
absences. Indeed, it just is, in its essence, the process of absenting absence.’31
Real negation has, for Bhaskar, a privileged ontological status. Against the
doctrine of ontological monovalence he insists that ‘the negative has ontologi-
cal primacy’.32 Indeed, he tells us at the beginning of Dialectic, ‘by the time we
27
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 4–5, 7.
28
29
Bhaskar 1993, p. 111.
30
Bhaskar 1993, p. 5.
31
32
Bhaskar • 577
are through, I would like the reader to see the positive as a tiny, but impor-
tant, ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity’.33
I return below to the arguments Bhaskar provides in support of this claim.
But consider rst this apparent anomaly. If, as Bhaskar claims, ‘[n]on-being
is a condition of possibility of being’,34 why is there a tendency to eliminate
it? Whence the impulse to absent absence, if absence is ontologically prior to
presence? The only answer he gives to this question is specic to the human
world. In general, Bhaskar seems to regard the dialectic as operative in nature
as well as in society. Indeed at one point he states that ‘there is nothing
anthropomorphic about the dialectic presented here’.35 It is true that he also
says ‘there cannot be a global dialectics of nature (qua being), where some
dialectical categories like negation will, while others like reexivity will not,
apply to it’.36 The clear implication of his overall treatment is, however, that
the dialectical category of negation does apply to the whole of being, physi-
cal as well as human: thus Bhaskar has quite a friendly discussion of Engels’s
often derided three dialectical laws.37
At the same time, however, the dialectic ‘is built around a hard core’ which
‘could not apply in an entirely inorganic world’. This is ‘the logic of freedom’.38
The major premiss of Bhaskar’s argument here seems to be ‘the denition of
dialectic as absenting absence’.39 Its minor premiss is a specication of the
concept of absence: ‘any ill can be seen as a constraint and any constraint as
the absence of a freedom’.40 It follows that dialectic involves ‘absenting most
notably of constraints on desires, wants, needs and interests. Foremost among
such constraints will be those owing from power2 relations’.41 By ‘power2
relations’ Bhaskar means those ‘expressed in structures of domination, exploi-
tation, subjugation, and control’, as opposed to ‘power1’, ‘the transformative
capacity analytic to the concept of agency’.42
33
Bhaskar 1993, p. 5.
34
35
Bhaskar 1993, p. 304.
36
Bhaskar 1993, p. 338.
37
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 150–2.
38
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 373–4.
39
Bhaskar 1993, p. 173.
40
Bhaskar 1993, p. 182.
41
Bhaskar 1993, p. 175.
42
Dialectic thus acquires an ethico-political dimension, and Bhaskar offers

a variety of generalisations of the above argument whose aim is to allow us
to ‘go from primal scream to universal human emancipation’,43 that is, from the
expression of the most elementary desires to the demand for an ‘eudaimonis-
tic society’, in other words, ‘a society oriented to the free development and
ourishing of each and all, and of each as a condition for all’.44
Bhaskarian dialectic thus acquires an anthropological specication as the
‘inner urge that ows universally from the logic of elemental desire (lack,
need, want or desire). It manifests itself wherever power2 relations hold
sway’.45 Crucial here is the assumption that ‘absence is paradigmatically a
condition for desire’, since ‘desire presupposes an absence, viz. of the inten-
tional object, in Brentano’s sense, of the desired’.46 This is, of course, a familiar
left-Hegelian conception of desire; its locus classicus is the dialectic of master
and slave in the Phenomenology, or rather Kojève’s interpretation of this dialec-
tic, from which Lacan transposed it into psychoanalysis. Challenging all such
anthropologies is Deleuze’s and Guattari’s great anti-dialectic of desire. The
Lacanian treatment of desire as negative, as lack, is one of the main targets of
L’Anti-Oedipe, which conceptualises desire instead as positive and produc-
tive. Yet, in Mille Plateaux, they confront a problem identical to one that faces
Bhaskar’s version of the dialectic. Despite their very different conceptions of
desire, Deleuze and Guattari on the one hand, and Bhaskar on the other hand
posit a conict between desire and power. For the former, the deterritorialising
impulse of desire bursts out of the connes of any given assemblage [agence-
ment]; for Bhaskar, the dialectical drive – ‘absenting constraints on absenting
ills’ – is ‘implicit in the most rudimentary desires’.47 This raises the question of
the basis of the power-relations themselves: whence this tendency to conne
or constrain desire? Deleuze and Guattari give no very satisfactory answer to
this question. Bhaskar does not consider it all. Perhaps this is because there
is no general answer to it. Maybe ‘power2 relations’ have a variety of causes,
some of them historically specic. But if this is the case, it seems like a signi-
cant restriction on a theory whose universal ambitions are evident.
43
Bhaskar 1993, p. 180.
44
Bhaskar 1993, p. 264.
45
Bhaskar 1993, p. 299.
46
Bhaskar 1993, p. 242.
47
Bhaskar 1993, p. 382.
Bhaskar • 579
The temptations of transcendental philosophy

These difculties are of the sort one is likely to encounter in any work dis-
playing the ambition and intelligence that Dialectic does. They do not affect
the fertility of Bhaskar’s ideas or the breadth of his horizons. But the book
has one more unexpected weakness, and one that is more serious than rst
appears. To speak frankly, it is abominably written. Neologisms and idiosyn-
cratic uses of familiar terms proliferate till they form what verges at times on a
private language. Arguments are illustrated by gures whose frequency and
complexity obscure rather than instruct. And, all too often, Bhaskar’s prose
becomes clogged by what seems like the irresistible need to say everything,
to add to some specic assertion references to connected considerations and
qualications till the original point is in danger of being lost. Perhaps this is a
temptation of all dialectical thinking, which Bhaskar rightly sums up as ‘the
art of thinking the coincidence of distinctions and connections’.48 But the danger
of trying to say everything is that one ends up saying nothing.
Often, Bhaskar’s dreadful prose does not succeed in obscuring the nature of
his arguments. Sometimes, however, style does affect substance, and for the
worse. For one thing, various subjects are merely touched on. For example, it
is clear that Bhaskar has some extremely intriguing ideas about the nature of
space and time, which are relevant both to important contemporary debates
in cosmology and to social theory (hence his tendency to rebaptise Marxism
as ‘[geo-]historical materialism’).49 Unfortunately, these ideas are presented
only in a number of passages scattered through the book, and in so condensed
a form that it is extremely hard to arrive at any very precise understanding of
them. It is tempting to conclude that the topic of space and time were better
dealt with in a much more systematic way, or omitted altogether.
Perhaps, from a strategic point of view, of more seriousness is the way in
which many of Bhaskar’s most important arguments are very brief. Bhaskar’s
attempt to show that the negative, in the sense of determinate absence, has
ontological priority over the positive offers a particularly important example
of this tendency to rush his arguments. In fact, a variety of different arguments
are deployed in support of the priority of the negative over the positive. Many
are interesting, for example, the claim that ‘a world without voids (absences),
48
Bhaskar 1993, p. 180.
49
that is, a “non-clumpy” material object world . . . would be a world in which

nothing could move or occur’,50 though this rather Epicurean thought seems
more like an a posteriori generalisation from the development of physics than
any sort of a priori truth. But consider the following, slightly earlier passage:
the identication of a positive existent is a human act. So it involves the

absenting of a pre-existing state of affairs, be it only a state of existential
doubt. This may be taken as a transcendental deduction of the category
of absence, and a transcendental refutation and immanent critique of
ontological monovalence.51
QED. These three sentences make up the sum of this ‘transcendental argu-
ment’. This is cause for concern, and not only because it looks as if Bhaskar
is begging the question at issue by assuming that change is to be understood
primarily as absenting. For it is merely one instance of Bhaskar’s tendency to
offer what he calls ‘transcendental arguments’, often of comparable brevity
and for similarly controversial conclusions.
The nature of transcendental arguments has been well brought out by
Charles Taylor:
The arguments I want to call ‘transcendental’ start from some feature of our
experience which they-claim to be indubitable and beyond cavil. They then
move to a stronger conclusion, one concerning the nature of the subject or
his position in the world. They make this move by a regressive argument,
to the effect that this stronger conclusion must be so if the indubitable fact
about experience is to be possible (and being so, it must be possible).52
Thus Kant’s transcendental deduction proceeds by seeking to establish that

the very possibility of conscious experience depends on the ability to treat
individual impressions as states of a coherent and enduring self underlying
experience, and that this in turn requires the application of the categories of
the understanding, which transforms these impressions into the structured,
enduring, and causally governed world of appearances. A transcendental
argument is thus, as Taylor puts it, a chain of ‘indispensability claims’, each
of which is a priori and ‘not merely probable, but apodeictic’. It is the fact that
50
Bhaskar 1993, pp. 45–6.
51
52
Taylor 1978/9, p. 151.
Bhaskar • 581
these claims concern experience that gives them these characteristics: ‘this is
held to give us an unchallengeable starting point. For how can one formulate
coherently the doubt that we have experiences?’.53 The indubitability of the
starting point is in effect (and provided that each indispensability-claim is
well made out and properly connected to the others in the chain) transferred
to the conclusion.
Do Bhaskar’s purported transcendental arguments have these properties?
Surely not. Consider, for example, his most important transcendental argu-
ment, from the nature of experimental practice to the distinction between
open and closed systems, and hence to the existence of generative mecha-
nisms irreducible to human experience. The starting point – scientic experi-
ment – lacks the required indubitability. For one thing, the kind of elaborate,
theoretically-driven interference in nature characteristic of the modern sci-
ences, is evidently not a universal feature of human existence. For another,
Bhaskar’s starting point is not even the actual experimental practice of work-
ing scientists but rather a particular description of that practice. Arguably, this
description presupposes what Bhaskar seeks to prove: is not the distinction
between open and closed systems implicit in the claim that experimentation
produces sequences of events which do not naturally occur?54 But, even if his
argument is not circular, it is not transcendental in the required sense, since
it starts from a particular description of scientic practice whose irreducible
element of interpretation makes it, not indubitable, but disputable.
How damaging is this criticism for Bhaskar’s project? It may not have much
of an effect on the substance of his philosophy. Indeed, for what it is worth,
I think much of what his critical realism – and indeed its recent dialectical
extension – asserts is true. The deation of its transcendental pretensions is,
nevertheless, important for two reasons. First, it highlights the danger in the
proliferation of quick-kill arguments from a priori premises to conclusions
embodying substantive and controversial generalisations about the world
that is such a distressing feature of Dialectic. Secondly, it draws attention to
one striking feature of Bhaskar’s philosophy since it rst burst onto the scene
53
Taylor 1978/9, pp. 159–60. Bhaskar sometimes shows he is aware of this feature
of transcendental arguments: see, for example, Bhaskar 1993, p. 103. Collier, however,
is not: see Collier 1994, pp. 20ff.
54
See David-Hillel Ruben’s critique of transcendental realism in Ruben 1977, esp.
p. 101, and Bhaskar’s reply in Bhaskar 1978, pp. 255–60.
in 1975. Although he claimed for philosophy only the modest role assigned it
by Locke of serving as ‘the under-labourer, and occasionally as the mid-wife,
of science’, in fact his development of transcendental realism involves quite a
strong claim about what philosophy can establish about the world by a priori
means.55
In A Realist Theory of Science, this takes the form of a philosophical demon-
stration of the existence of a stratied and structured world independent of
humankind. Dialectic displays the same ambitions. Bhaskar denes ‘dialecti-
cal arguments as transcendental arguments establishing, inter alia, ontological
conclusions’.56 It is clear that the most important of these conclusions concern
the social rather that the physical world. Indeed, we are promised a sequel,
Dialectical Social Theory, which will give an account of ‘what a truly dialectical
critical social realist social science would look like and of how it may come
to ground naturalistically generated substantive criteria for a feasible society
oriented to the concrete singularity of each as condition for the concrete sin-
gularity of all.’57 This may imply, comfortingly, that some of Bhaskar’s more
compressed ‘proofs’ are in fact promissory notes that will be cashed out in full
arguments sometime in the future.
But this passage also raises, more acutely, the question of Bhaskar’s rela-
tionship to Marxism. The description just cited of the future emancipated
society recalls, of course, Marx’s famous reference in the Manifesto to com-
munism as a society where ‘the free development of each is the condition of
the free development of all’. In this respect, the passage is fairly typical of
Bhaskar’s treatment of characteristically Marxian concepts and themes: fairly
concrete and clear propositions are translated into more abstract, and, all too
often, less perspicuous formulae. The problem here is not Bhaskar’s substan-
tive criticisms of Marx. Those cited above are specic enough, and merit seri-
ous debate in their own terms, but there is nothing especially new about them.
More to the point, they do not in any very obvious way depend on the philo-
sophical apparatus of dialectical critical realism. One does not, for example,
have to sign up to Bhaskarian epistemology to think that Marx may have been
wrong to have dismissed the utopian-socialist tradition.
55
56
Bhaskar 1993, p. 107.
57
Bhaskar 1993, p. 370.
Bhaskar • 583
Yet Bhaskar plainly believes that embedding Marxism within critical dia-
lectical realism will strengthen it substantially. The closest that he comes to
an argument to support this belief is when he claims that Marx’s critique
of Hegel ‘depends upon epistemological materialism, asserting the existential
intransitivity and transfactual efcacy of the objects of scientic thought’.58 He
goes on to suggest that in Marx’s mature thought the dialectic substituted for
the realist epistemology that he needed but lacked.59 But, even if we were to
grant that A Realist Theory of Science was the necessary philosophical comple-
ment of Capital, it does not follow that either critical realism or its dialectical
extension provides Marxism (or indeed any other social theory) with substan-
tive content it would otherwise lack. The implication to the contrary present
both in Bhaskar’s reliance on transcendental arguments and in his followers’
attempts to develop critical-realist ‘approaches’ to specic topics in or aspects
of social theory is evidence of overinated philosophical ambition.
More specically, such an enterprise confuses the propositions that form
the conclusions of philosophical arguments with what Lakatos called the heu-
ristic of scientic research programmes.60 Each research programme has its
own set of theoretical guidelines dening the problems it seeks to address, its
methods for approaching them, and possible strategies for overcoming anom-
alies. While philosophical reasoning – and, indeed, much looser metaphysi-
cal ideas – may help to inspire what goes into such a heuristic, the latter can
in no way be deduced from the former. Whatever insights dialectical critical
realism may offer scientic researchers, philosophical argument cannot sub-
stitute for the processes of theory-construction and empirical inquiry specic
to individual sciences. The mistaken belief that it can seems likely to lead
in the human sciences to a kind of decaffeinated Marxism in which all that
is interesting and controversial in historical materialism is submerged amid
a vague mass of speculation. A more consistent naturalism, which stressed
more strongly than Bhaskar does the continuity between philosophy and the
sciences and the former’s dependence on the latter, could protect him from
the extravagant claims for philosophy into which he is sometimes tempted,
58
59
60
Lakatos 1978, I.
and provide a more secure basis for the many valid insights and fertile ideas
this challenging and original philosopher has to offer.
Addendum
This assessment of Bhaskar was written in 1994. One then could envisage var-
ious intellectual trajectories that might emerge from the stimulating shambles
of Dialectic. But none could have predicted the course Bhaskar has actually
followed. His most recent book From East to West is in two parts.61 The rst
announces a further extension of critical realism – to ‘transcendental dialecti-
cal critical realism’. This ‘transcendental radicalization’ involves in particular
‘a new realism about transcendence and God’.62 God is both transcendent and
immanent: more specically, ‘he/she/it’ is immanent in the nite human self.
The roots of social oppression and alienation lie in alienation from the self:
this more fundamental alienation is overcome when the self breaks loose from
the attachments that bind it to particular desires and fears and imprison it in
the cycle of reincarnation, and recognises its identity with God. The second
part narrates fteen of the lives passed by one such self, culminating, it seems,
in Bhaskar himself, whose task is ‘to reconcile and resynthesize the opposites:
East and West, male and female, yin and yang, reason and experience, fact and
value, mind and body, heaven and earth’.63
Bhaskar stresses the continuities between this astonishing turn taken by his
thought and his earlier writings. Certainly old concepts are put to new uses.
His distinction between the real and the actual – i.e. between the events made
possible by causal mechanisms and those events encountered in experience –
now allows him to extend the real to include ‘deities and avatars . . . and angels’
and ‘the denizens of the astral and causal worlds, including discarnate souls’.64
There is perhaps scope for the bafed reader to try and detect the sources of
this turn in Bhaskar’s earlier work – for example, the ambiguities noted above
that are generated by his insistence on treating dialectic as both as universally
operative and as ‘the logic of freedom’. But there seems little prot in such
a search. As with Althusser’s murder of his wife (though, of course, with
61
Bhaskar 2000.
62
Bhaskar 2000, p. x.
63
Bhaskar 2000, p. 149.
64
Bhaskar • 585
far fewer dreadful human consequences), Bhaskar’s discovery of Eastern

religion cannot be deduced from the logic of his earlier philosophy but must
have arisen from contingencies of his life into which it would be inappropri-
ate to inquire. The most that one can say is that it has long been true that the
critical realism movement around Bhaskar displayed certain unhealthy cult-
like qualities: perhaps, in this respect, being helped to change consciousness.
The fact remains that we are confronted here with a major tragedy. A lead-
ing philosopher of the Left has committed intellectual suicide. Bhaskar claims
now to be seeking ‘an integration of some of the insights of the New Age and
the New Left movements’.65 But this is little consolation. He also adapts one
of his old slogans – reclaiming reality – and now proposes both to ‘reclaim and
re-enchant reality’.66 But precisely what we do not need is any re-enchantment
of contemporary reality but, rather, a brutally clear and stark critical analysis.
Plainly, Roy Bhaskar will no longer be contributing to this enterprise. His
new writings will nd new readers – though they may be rather bafed by
the unfamiliar references they contain to the philosophy of science and the
dialectical tradition. Others will have to continue, as best they can, the philo-
sophical project to which Bhaskar has made such an important contribution.
Books such as A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism will
remain an important reference point. But Bhaskar will no longer be one of our
company. He has taken a different path.
65
Bhaskar 2000, p. 149.
66
Bhaskar 2000, p. 5.
Chapter Thirty-One
Bourdieu and Historical Materialism
Jacques Bidet
Bourdieu has produced a conceptual system whose

relationship with Marx’s is enigmatic. It involves a
similar terminology: capital, reproduction, classes,
and so on. In often analogous terms, it analyses
modern forms of domination, providing a critique of
them that is emancipatory in intent. It thus displays
a theoretico-political ambition which recalls that of
a ‘theory of praxis’. However, it realises it in a body
of competing axioms – those of a ‘general theory of
practice’. So how are these two conceptual universes
related to one another?
I shall not seek an answer to this question in
Bourdieu’s references to Marxism, which remain
internal to his own problematic, but in a comparison
between it and Marx’s problematic. I shall advance
the following thesis: Bourdieu takes over the ‘gen-
eralist’ ambition of Marxism, but in terms of a ‘soci-
ology’ – a theory of social relations – not those of a
‘historical materialism’, whose distinctive feature
is that it takes the complex of the relations between
social relations and productive forces as its object.
In this sense, it involves a regional programme as
opposed to a general one, which neither possesses
the same ambitions, nor contains the same risks, as
the Marxist programme, and which cannot prompt
either the same kind of examination or the same
expectations.
The general programme has everything to learn from regional knowledge.

And ‘Marxism’, in this sense, lives on ‘sociology’. However, here I shall leave
to one side Bourdieu’s most valuable contributions – particularly his ‘theory
of the production of symbolic goods’. If it is legitimate to focus on the project’s
‘limits’, on what it cannot offer, it is because it presents itself as a ‘general’
project – that is to say, as taking up a challenge in the face of which Marx-
ism has supposedly proved decient. I would like to show why things are
not so simple. On the other hand, I also want make it clear that Bourdieu’s
work offers some remarkable contributions to the programme outlined by
Marx and, specically, to a materialist theory of modern society: not only
various ‘additions’ to Marxism, but some crucial indications for its critique
and revision.
I shall therefore examine how Bourdieu retranslates a number of Marx’s
concepts into a different space, whose specic properties I shall study. Ulti-
mately, my standpoint is not that of a supposedly standard Marxism, but of
the ‘meta/structural’ problematic, inscribed in a ‘historical materialism’, pro-
posed in Théorie générale.
Bourdieu does not thematise ‘capital’ as a process in the manner of Marx: he under-
stands it primarily as a differential endowment. In Bourdieu, the terminology of
‘capital’ and its ‘reproduction’, construed as a class relationship, clearly articu-
lates a claim to impart a new meaning to the words. To Marxism, which alleg-
edly offers a picture of modern society, its dynamics and contradictions, based
exclusively on the concept of ‘economic capital’, Bourdieu counter-poses the
existence of another factor, which he assigns the same epistemological status
in this respect: ‘cultural capital’. He thus proposes a map of ‘the space of social
classes’ on the basis of these two components. On the ordinate, according to
the volume of capital, we nd the dominant above and the dominated below.
On the abscissa, according to the type of capital, we have economic capital on
the one hand and cultural capital on the other. A population – broken down
according to profession (that is, by its link to the ‘relations of production’),1
to which a certain level of income and education is attached, as well as vari-
ous overdeterminations such as sex, age, ethnicity, region, religion, and so
on – is thus distributed in a ‘space of class conditions’, on the basis of which
struggles between classes and class fractions can be understood.
1
See Bourdieu 1984, pp. 106–7.
Bourdieu • 589
But Bourdieu also uses this terminology more widely: in general, ‘capital’
is the ‘resource’ specic to each eld. Thus, we have a ‘political capital’, a
‘religious capital’, a ‘sporting’ or ‘mathematical’ capital, and so on. What is
thus referred to is ‘symbolic capital’. The social space is conceived as a com-
plex of spheres of activity, whose specic stakes, although given in a struggle
between partners, do not pertain to a mere relationship of force, but always to
a legitimate relationship. In traditional societies, the ‘credit’ of the powerful is
sustained by honourable behaviour and ostentatious expenditure. In modern
society, each eld possesses its own criteria of excellence, inherent in its dis-
tinctive rationality, which characterise a specic ‘capital’.
However, this does not involve relative autonomy, since the highest ‘legit-
imacy’ is expressed in state law, which, among other things, sanctions the
‘mechanisms’ whereby legitimate titles are attributed and guaranteed and
social positions dened. We are thus led to the Weberian treatment of law as
belief, which could be related to a certain Marxism:
law does no more than symbolically consecrate – by recording it in a

form that renders it both eternal and universal – the structure of power
relations among the groups and the classes that is produced and guaranteed
practically by the functioning of these mechanisms.2
However, this cannot be reduced to the mere de facto legitimation of the issue
of legitimacy, which will resurface in classical fashion as universalisability.
The notion of ‘capital’ thus serves several uctuating purposes, which
are sometimes intermingled (cultural capital, qua legitimating, is sometimes
referred to as ‘symbolic capital’). A highly resonant matrix nevertheless
dominates, which distributes individuals into classes according to their capi-
tal, envisaged in the two ‘patrimonial’ components of property and culture.
Capital is understood here as an endowment, as an asset, in the sense of John
Roemer and Erik Olin Wright’s analytical Marxism – as a differential endow-
ment and, in this sense, as a relation. It remains to discover what connection it
has with capital as a process, such as Marx constructed the concept.
What Bourdieu commonly understands by ‘reproduction’ is not, in Marxian fash-
ion, the social process peculiar to a form of society that reproduces it. It is the ‘renewal’
of agents in their original social position, in as much as it reproduces the structure.
2
Bourdieu 1990, p. 132.
Marx analyses reproduction within the ‘process of capitalist production’. The

latter reproduces its material presuppositions, in terms of concrete factors of
production and in terms of value; and its social presuppositions, which are the
existence of a class tied to the condition of wage-labour and a class that owns
the means of production, and hence the enduring cleavage between them,
which denes this structural form. The latter possesses both its functional
aspect and its contradictory aspect, which are developed throughout Capital.
Reproduction thus conceived has external conditions of possibility: it implies
the existence of superstructural institutions that ensure (in a class confronta-
tion) implementation of the juridical, political, and ideological presupposi-
tions of the production relation.
The reproduction analysed by Bourdieu involves neither the structure, nor
even the superstructure, in Marx’s sense of the terms. It is usually construed
as a circular process: structures are internalised by agents in the form of habi-
tus that govern their practices, which underly a structural order, itself a genera-
tor of habitus. We shall call this model HPSH.
The crucial moment is education, often identied as that of reproduction
(see Bourdieu and Passeron’s 1970 book of that title). Habituses are certainly
‘structured and structuring dispositions’, but their ‘structuration’ is not due
exclusively to the structural context: under the spur of inter-generational fam-
ily solidarity, it is encouraged by an active process of education. The school, in
as much as it is a class school, takes over from the family in producing a dif-
ferentiated culture, wherein everyone acquires the mastery of the conditions
that are those of their class of origin.
The analyses of Bourdieu and his colleagues are of an impressive original-
ity and power in this respect. They deal with culture as re-produced by educa-
tion, the practices of educators, and the process of formation of differentiated
aptitudes. They demythologise the ideology of natural gifts. They unmask
the artice by showing that the cultural arbitrary is unconscious; that educa-
tion is oblivious of its own genesis; that the consecration of the elect derives
its legitimacy from the fact that, superior titles only being accorded to those of
the inheritors who most distinguish themselves in this process of distinction
(following a series of cumulative tests), socially proclaimed excellence seems
to be attributable their own person.
The differentiated reproduction of the range of habituses, which extends
from various dominated habituses to various dominant habituses, thus in itself
ensures the overall reproduction of a differentiated social space of aptitudes.
Bourdieu • 591
It reproduces the social space itself in its class complexity. Even if like does not
exactly reproduce like, their diversity reproduces social diversity, and their
distance social distance, which is domination.
Or, at least, it ‘contributes’ to it. In fact, it forms a pair with another process –
that of ‘economic reproduction’, construed as the renewal of inheritance,
which is the other component of endowment capital. Bourdieu thus discloses
‘strategies of reproduction’ – that is, of inter-generational renewal – of an
inheritance of culture and wealth and, correlatively, of honour and power,
whether on the terrain of ethnology (Kabyle peasantry) or sociology (major
French employers).
This analysis of reproduction differs in two related respects from Marx’s.
On the one hand, it does not involve – or not expressly, at any rate – the
reproduction of the social system. The problematic of the ‘eld’, deriving from
the Weberian tradition, directs attention to the particularity of each ‘sphere’
(and to the relations, especially of homology, between them), rather than to
the system as such, as a relation between its parts, in its functionality, its logic,
its dynamics, and its contradictions. The concept of ‘practice’, whose distinc-
tive object is indicated in its constitutive categories (stake, belief, illusio, strug-
gle, preservation/subversion, specic investment, eld effect), in its founding
link with that of habitus, has as its horizon the eld, in its ‘relative autonomy’,
not the social system as a whole. Thus, the ‘political eld’ is understood as
the space of interaction between ‘politicians’, the ‘mathematical eld’ as that
between mathematicians, and so on.
On the other hand, it exclusively concerns ‘social relations’, including those that
Bourdieu characterises as ‘relations of production’, not the ‘productive forces’.
Bourdieu’s programme – the ‘theory of practice’ – is thus a ‘sociology’, which dif-
fers from a ‘historical materialism’, whose particular challenge is to link economy and
history.
As is well known, what is at stake in theories of reproduction is an under-
standing of historical development. In the Marxian schema, simple repro-
duction is conceived as the condition of a process of social transformation
referred to by the term expanded reproduction. Described as capable of
reproducing itself, the structure ‘capital’ in fact contains the conditions of its
self-development. It exists as such only in the conditions of competition for
prot, which gives rise to capitalist concentration, technological progress, and
so on. The concept of structure opens onto that of its history, to the point of its
supposedly inevitable detonation.
The Marxian idea of reproduction is thus understood as a problematic of

the relationship between ‘relations of production’ and ‘productive forces’:
In the social production of their life, men enter into denite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which
correspond to a denite stage of development of their material productive
forces. . . . At a certain stage of their development, the material productive
forces of society come into conict with the existing relations of production. . . .
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.3
Let us call this model PFRP. Each of its concepts poses numerous problems,
which cannot be considered here. Let us simply note that this model is in no
way a historical teleology: in itself, it announces no end; the transformation of
the ‘productive (-destructive) forces’ does not form part of some grand proj-
ect of homo faber; it comes to pass as a mixture of the intentional and the un-
intentional, whereby human beings are in history rather than making it. Let
us note that its object is an analysis of the relationship between social physics
and social dynamics and the issue of a conscious common intervention in this
dynamic: the distinctive object of a ‘theory of praxis’.
Bourdieu’s programme lies outside such considerations. The horizon of his
HPSP model is the repetition of the same. History only enters into it in round-
about fashion, by way of the category of ‘conjuncture’. Habituses are called
upon to operate in endlessly new conjunctures, different from those that con-
stituted them, and hence with different structuring effects. But where do these
conjunctures come from? The question seems to be tacitly transferred to the
discipline of history (informed, obviously, by the ‘theory of practice’). But
what sort of science is involved? Is its object dened by that which escapes
‘practice’?
The Marxist problematic of praxis, implied in the PFRP model, takes as
its challenge thinking the relationship between history and economy in non-
‘economistic’ fashion, the Marxian category of ‘labour in general’ articulating
the question of its socially-necessary time and that of social use-value – that is to
say, denition of its ends in terms of culture and identity. By contrast, the the-
ory of ‘practice’ counter-posed to it by Bourdieu appears to be a pure science
3
Marx and Engels 1969, pp. 503–4.
Bourdieu • 593
of social relations, which refers the economic to a different discipline. Is this a

science of the productive forces? Obviously, Bourdieu understands that eco-
nomics cannot be enclosed in the abstraction of the homo economicus, but must
be integrated into the historical eld of the social sciences. However, at the
same time, he constitutes praxiology, science of practice as relation, science of
social relations, into a ‘general theory’, for which the ‘productive forces’ con-
stitute an external environmental datum. But how can we understand ‘prac-
tice’, in its capacity for self-distantiation – as human practice – outside of the
dialectic between the claims of control and appropriation and the historically
dynamic technical conditions over which they are asserted?
In another respect, however, Bourdieu’s research goes beyond this frame-
work. Thus, in his Kabyle ethnological studies, he shows how honour alone,
symbolic capital, mobilises the productive-reproductive springs of the social
system of production. More broadly, we observe that ‘the space of class con-
ditions’ is that of differential endowments, differences in social power; and
that the problematic of ‘elds’ thus denes a set of cleavages, stakes of social
struggle, which, in their homology, mark out a general cleavage: a divi-
sion between those who hold sway over the social world, monopolising the
material and cultural means of this ascendancy, and those who do not. In
this whole section of his work, and the research that it prompts (for instance,
in The Weight of the World), Bourdieu powerfully analyses in its ‘sociologi-
cal’ dimension – as a ‘social relation’ – the very process of ‘capital’: a process
of appropriation/dispossession of places, times, jobs, knowledge, and signs.
The issue of the ‘productive forces’ – of the relations between the intentional
and unintentional at the general level of social practice – nevertheless remain
in the background. They are not the object of Bourdieu’s sociological analysis,
which is not articulated with this object either. This represents a repression
whose conditions and effects remain to be analysed.
Bourdieu thus operates at the intersection of the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘essence’, in
the sense Marx attributes to these terms in Capital.
Contrasting the essence, or the relationship between classes, with the phe-
nomenon, or the relationship between individuals, Marx polemicises against
‘vulgar’ conceptions that claim to account for the historical process in terms
of inter-individual relations, such as competition. In his view, the individual
moment is certainly just as ‘essential’, but it is only conceived in the context
of generally dened structures. And class condition is not measured by the
comparative ‘volume’ of capital that individuals possess, but – a vast prob-

lem, obviously, which is irreducible to its juridical aspect – by the owner-
ship or non-ownership of the means of production: the ‘essential’ cleavage
of the class relation and class struggle in the PFRP context. The logic of sur-
plus-value is imposed on individuals as the logic of their practice. But, at the
same time, it governs the (productive-destructive) dynamic of the productive
forces, which periodically renews – regardless of the intention of individuals,
behind their backs – the overall stake of the class relation, the historical hori-
zon of practice.
Bourdieu most certainly takes account of a context of ‘class condition’. He
accords epistemic priority to the objective moment of structure over the sub-
ject moment of practical aim. And he cannot be criticised for taking individual
practice as his special object. Moreover, by comparison with Marx, having
assimilated subsequent ethnological and sociological culture, he expands the
eld of analysis: what is at stake in practical confrontation is as much cultural
capital as economic capital. The competition between pupils characterised by
their family habitus and, in the inter-generational dimension, between fami-
lies pertains to the same (‘phenomenal’) level of analysis as competition on
the market. And, as we shall see, Bourdieu presses the analysis to the point
where classes, fractions, and other groups emerge that confront one another in
terms of interests, aims, and strategies. Methodologically speaking, however,
the analysis is maintained at a level below the decisive point – the relation-
ship between the productive forces and the relations of production: the place
where the intentional and the unintentional, structure and tendency, ‘capi-
tal’ as process and as historicity, and hence the possibility of taking distance
from it, coincide. Not that in Bourdieu the sociological data are not always
considered in their historical singularity, studied in their context and evolu-
tion, or that historico-political concerns are not evident; they increasingly are.
But what is missing is an appropriate conceptuality. The category of ‘con-
juncture’ alone imparts some motion to the HPSH paradigm: a chance move-
ment, which does not warrant any historical projection. In order to envisage a
‘theory of practice’, however, in addition to the construction of social spaces
(‘constructed’ class versus ‘mobilised’ class, passim), we must also (whatever
the risks) accept the need to ‘construct’ historicity, in the knowledge that the
concept of event forms part of such a construction (what can happen in a
given structural order?). The profound ‘mobilisation’ of classes can be con-
ceived only from the standpoint of the motives and goals that they can give
Bourdieu • 595
themselves in an understanding of the relationship between class relations

and productive forces, grasped in its longue durée.
The distinctiveness and fertility of the ‘theory of practice’ is that it is prac-
tised at the intersection of the phenomenal and the essence in the sense given
these terms by Marx. However, it fails to consider the ‘essence’ for itself – the
structure and eld of the tendencies and possibilities that belong to it. With-
out this, practice cannot be understood as praxis – that is to say, according to
the requisite distance from the claims of the doxa.
Within these limits, however, Bourdieu makes the phenomenal the operator of an
‘essential’ relationship: he makes the struggle between agents in the eld the operator
of a class struggle.
The ‘theory of practice’ provides resources for reecting on collective action.
It highlights class habitus, interests, and strategies. It involves an interface
between agents who can be characterised not only by their individual fea-
tures, but also by their class situations and habitus. Thus, in the social institu-
tions particular to each eld, classes confront one another. These are instances
of class. The homology of the different elds, which imparts the same unequal
opportunities to class habitus, and thereby indenitely reduplicates the rela-
tion of domination, gives the latter its consistency, its properly hegemonic
capacity.
The theorisation of a cultural arbitrariness, and of its imposition as sym-
bolic violence, denes cultural reproduction as the reproduction of a class
relation. What is reproduced is a difference that contains the conditions of a
domination. A dominant class monopolises higher forms of knowledge only
in particular cultural modes that its members have internalised since early
infancy, which schools exalt and retranscribe, and wherein it identies its cho-
sen ones, who always enjoy a head start and amass successive victories which
ultimately designate them as holders of the titles to be conferred. This is all
the more the case in that their economic condition has facilitated a climate of
‘leisure’, which alone makes possible the distant relation to culture distinc-
tive of scholarly culture. Symbolic violence resides in this serene innocence
of a class confrontation that is unaware of itself, inheritance passing itself off
as natural excellence. There is no calculation in this: the masters themselves
share the same common sense as to what is ‘distinguished’.
In this sense, the theory of culture and education established by Bourdieu
and his colleagues (without it being possible here for me to consider the
contribution of each of them) is an essential contribution to historical
materialism. Previous critical theories stressed the monopolisation of

knowledge. The approach in terms of habitus, distinction, ‘relation to culture’,
directs us towards a more radical critique of the system, which lays bare the
‘cultural’ mechanisms of social segregation and its legitimation. This is a legit-
imate reproduction, because it is concealed in the form of the success of the
most ‘gifted’ – in fact, the most fortunate of the inheritors, those endowed with
sufcient assets. And it is a ‘statistical’ reproduction, not an automatic one,
ltered and sublimated by exams and competitions, which ensures reproduc-
tion of the system of positions. In this sense, Marx showed that competition,
whereby the ‘best prevail’, obscures the fact that in the ‘capitalist process of
production’, despite some capitalists disappearing and others emerging, the
capitalist structure is reproduced, identical to itself. In competition between
individuals, Bourdieu likewise reveals a class struggle.
The instances particular to the various elds are thus designated as class
institutions. Bourdieu is repelled by ‘apparatuses’, which announce ‘the
worst kind of functionalism’.4 But he admirably described the . . . ‘machine’ for
classifying:
the educational institution . . . is able to function like an immense cognitive

machine, operating classifications that, although apparently neutral,
reproduce pre-existing social classications.5
The sociology of education is treated as a sociology of class power. Just as,

according to Marx, exploitation is concealed beneath the wage exchange, so,
according to Bourdieu, subjugation is concealed beneath the formal equality
of institutions. On these presuppositions, the state that possesses a ‘monopoly
of legitimate symbolic violence’6 is a class state.
In this respect, Bourdieu makes a powerful contribution to a general theory of
modern society.
In fact, an approach in terms of a dual endowment of agents, whose lim-
its we have noted above, is nevertheless pertinent. This (so it seems to me)
must be related to the fact that in modern society the class-relation operates
specically through the two mediations of the market and bureaucracy (and,
4
5
6
Bourdieu • 597
more generally, the organisation, in the sense given this term by institutional
economics); and that, correlatively, the state, supreme operator of these two
class factors and their interface, likewise guarantees two sorts of titles: those
of ‘private property’ and those of ‘competence’ (in Bourdieu’s socio-critical
sense). On this dual terrain, Bourdieu complements Marx with Weber, in
addition mobilising the Weberian categories of the sociology of religion in
order to name the work of the state educational institution – a theologico-
political junction.
It is, it seems to me, this duality of the domination of the modern human
being, in as much as he is to all intents and purposes dominated as a ‘free
man’, which is translated into that of endowment capitals, which locates social
agents and social groups on the map of ‘class conditions’. One of the strengths
of the analysis is the construction of ‘social qualication’, in its antinomic ten-
sion between class cultural arbitrariness and ‘autonomous’ excellence – where
‘autonomy’ refers to exclusive submission to the universal criteria of science
for science’s sake and of art for art’s sake, foreign to the values and embel-
lishments of economic or political power. In this way, Bourdieu deciphers the
whole set of public and private institutions that are actually capable of confer-
ring ‘titles’ – that is to say, distinctions, whatever they may be, which have
advantages, prerogatives, rights or recognition attached to them – as institu-
tions of a class state, a site of class confrontation. Ambiguous ‘qualications’
and ‘skills’, which are vectors of class domination.
As a result of this dualistic reference, Bourdieu’s problematic, so it seems to
me, has manifest afnity with an opinion widely diffused in political philoso-
phy and political sociology, which regards the intertwined pair of the mar-
ket/bureaucracy as the typical form of modernity. In Théorie générale, I have
proposed an interpretation of it that I call ‘meta/structural’. Accordingly,
beyond the ‘non-mediation’ of speech, two mediations irresistibly unfold that
are polar opposites and yet indissociable, dened by Marx as the a posteriori
and a priori modalities of productive co-operation: the market and the organ-
isation (bureaucracies, hierarchies, and so on), correlative to the competing
claims of the so-called liberty of the Ancients and the so-called liberty of the
Moderns – claims which are always-already ‘converted into their opposite’.
In fact, in capitalist modernity market and organisation, productive forces as
social modes of co-operation, are factors which, in their complex imbrication,
give rise to class relations, in as much as they are relations of production.
Because he excludes consideration of the ‘productive forces’ from his eld,

Bourdieu cannot adequately include the ‘relations of production’ in it either.
Consequently, nor can he take the dualistic gap illustrated by the conjoint
reference to two ‘species of capital’, the economic and the cultural, to its ulti-
mate conclusions. Nevertheless, his thematic opens powerfully onto such a
bi-polar vision of class domination in modern society, which is less one-sided
than Marx’s. (It will be observed that the notion of ‘relational capital’, often
evoked as a third term, is deduced in meta/structural analysis from primary
factors: ‘mediations’, whether market or organisational, are never discon-
nected from ‘immediate’ relations – particularly those generated by the fam-
ily on the market ownership side of the equation, and by the school on the
bureaucratic organisation side.) It is not that Marx did not possess an acute
sense of bureaucratic domination (his whole critique of the state attests to
it). But he lacked certain operative concepts to this end, which Bourdieu has
helped to develop.
However, Bourdieu tends – in line, at least, with the resonance of his HPSH
scheme – to go no further than a study of this process of reproduction outside of the
process of production.
In fact, he apprehends this cultural-bureaucratic dimension – the ‘state
nobility’ – in a privileged fashion, starting from the educational institution that
produces the hierarchy of habitus and ‘skills’. However, we cannot dispense
with considering it on the basis of the social process of production itself, in that hier-
archical production reproduces hierarchy, supposed delegation to the centre
relegates the executants, endlessly renews the separation between rulers and
ruled, analogous to that between owners and non-owners characteristic of
the capitalist production process according to Marx. Thus are constituted the
differences and distances that give rise to differentiated, hierarchical titles of
‘qualication’, which in turn overdetermine these hierarchical relations (but
do not possess the character of original determinant attributed to them by the
conceptual framework of ‘inheritance’). These titles are produced by the state
educational machinery, in the sense of class state, which guarantees them in
the same way as property titles. Here, we are indeed dealing with two pro-
cesses (market/organisation) that are linked in polar fashion in a single pro-
cess, co-involved in the modern class-form.
The privilege Bourdieu accords education in social reproduction gives his
theory its Durkheimian tonality. Regardless of whether he makes it the repro-
Bourdieu • 599
duction of a relation of domination (à la Weber), or a class domination (à la

Marx), he cannot avoid elaborating his analysis at a remove from the ‘essen-
tial’ site: the process of social production as an articulation of relations of
production and productive forces. What remains unsatisfying in Bourdieu’s
analysis is thus a xation on the structures of transmission of (endowment)
capital, whereas reproduction, in its cultural and economic dimensions alike,
is immanent in the social process of production as a whole, which is reproduced
as a process that separates those who, by their market pre-eminence (property)
or organisational pre-eminence (‘skill’), monopolise practical control over the
means of production (of exchange, information, etc.), and those who are dis-
possessed of it.
This analytical shortcoming manifests itself in Bourdieu’s difculty in deal-
ing with an ‘economic eld’. The very idea that such a ‘eld’ exists, char-
acterised by its ‘particular form of interest’ – ‘economic interest’ – and by a
particular mechanism – the ‘economic mechanism’ – is precisely what Marx
deconstructs in his critique of political economy, by exploding the ideological
unity of a univocal purpose of economic activity: wealth. The very concept of
‘capitalist mode of production’ refers to the fact that the purposes of use-value
(concrete wealth) and of prot (abstract wealth) are separated. It dissolves the
doxical unity of the supposed specic resource – the ‘value-peculiar-to-the-
eld’ – to which the idea that ‘the criterion of value is a stake in the struggle’
makes only oblique reference.7
Even so, Bourdieu not only draws on important research in the sociology
of work and specically on ‘domination in labour’,8 imperative for the pro-
gramme of ‘historical materialism’, but demonstrates that he can contribute
towards a better understanding of the relationship between sociology and
economics. In Les Structures sociales de l’économie (2000), the notion of (eco-
nomic) eld, as turned against the individualist metaphysics and ‘scholas-
tic’ abstraction of the neo-classical economists, and that of habitus, likewise
in accord with various institutionalist traditions from Veblen to Commons,
Chandler to Polanyi, demonstrate that they can be mobilised in an analysis
of oligopolistic strategies and their struggles in the national space for con-
trol of the state. In this context, globalisation emerges as the constitution of a
7
Bourdieu 1984b.
8
See Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 114, 1996.
universal, de-statised economic eld, under the dominance of nance capi-

tal and its speculative logic, awaiting new bodies that are capable of ‘gen-
uinely universal ends’.9 Bourdieu’s distinctive programme – an economic
anthropology – thus tends to converge with that of the circumambient neo-
Marxism. But it must then be combined with theoretical tools different from
those generally employed by Bourdieu.
The HPSH approach tends to represent the social structure of ‘power’ (at
the summit) on the basis of its supposedly homological relationship with the
educational structure. For historical materialism, the ‘productive forces’ com-
prise both technical knowledge (in its dialectical link with various sciences),
as the art of arranging mechanisms in nature, and social know-how, co-
operative knowledge. In this sense, market and organisation pertain to the
productive forces – ‘limited’ rationality, which equally qualies these forces
as ‘destructive’. In as much as it is social, this rational know-how is insepa-
rable from rules. Human beings do not co-operate except according to cer-
tain rules that ‘impose themselves’, in the antinomy of the dual sense of this
term, or without invoking what is supposedly reasonable. These ‘modes of
co-operation’ thus constitute the interface of the productive forces and the
relations of production. They represent ‘relations of production’, but not in
the full sense in which the of themselves constitute the specic class relations
of a ‘mode of production’, as a self-reproducible class structure. Thus, the
market and organisation do not play the same role in antiquity, in the ‘feudal’
mode of production, or in capitalism. If capitalist modernity is dened, as I
have said, by the metastructural interference of the market and organisation,
it is characterised by an essential bi-polar division, on the basis of which we
can perceive not only general class confrontation, but also the bi-polarity of
the dominant class – the recurrent potential cleavage between its two con-
stitutive fractions, according to the two class factors (which are imbricated
and intersecting, but conceptually distinct and connected) of property and
‘qualication’, both of them being arbitrary social endowments, whose titles
are guaranteed by the state.
Yet this primary-polar cleavage within the dominant class, evoked in
Bourdieu by way of the two forms of endowment capital, is, despite every-
thing, relatively disqualied, in favour of a second cleavage, internal to the
9
Bourdieu • 601
sphere of qualication: between scientic-cultural qualication, recognised in

academic hierarchies, and managerial qualication, which is attached to eco-
nomic and political power. This second (intra-cultural) cleavage, maintained
by family habitus, has its guarantor and condition in the summits of the edu-
cational system, between the ‘autonomous’ pole of higher education (of the
Écoles normales supérieures variety, site of art and knowledge) and its ‘het-
eronomous’ pole (of the École normale d’administration, Hautes études com-
mercielles, or Sciences po variety, where the values of economic and political
power prevail). It can be referred to the temporal/spiritual duality of the pro-
cess of domination, to the dialectical tension between these spheres, charac-
teristic of the exercise of power, particularly in the modern era. This gives
rise to interesting investigations, which nevertheless intersect rather problem-
atically with the supposed cleavage in the dominant class, often evoked by
Bourdieu, between a ‘dominant fraction’, which holds economic power, and a
‘dominated fraction’, responsible for intellectual and cultural functions.
The problem is created by the supposed homology between the ‘eld of
schools of power’ and the ‘space of power’, and also with the ‘social space’ as
a whole, such as it is illustrated, for example, in a series of diagrams that refer
to one another.10 In reality, the putative homology between the two spaces
is highly suspect. In fact, only the summit comprises this cleavage between
two cultural criteria (autonomous/heteronomous culture). This intra-cultural
cleavage cannot be taken as reecting the one I have referred to as ‘essential’,
which results from the duality of the mediations, market and organisation –
modern class-factors which, as such, govern ‘the space of power’ (the ‘heter-
onomous’ schools prepare people for functions combining knowledge-power
that is as much commercial as organisational).
In short, it is important to discern within the dominant class a primary dual-
ity, based on the metastructural antinomy between two ‘poles’ (market intra-
individuality/organisational centricity), or between two interfering ‘fractions’,
one of them endowed with ‘ownership capital’ (market mechanism), while
the other is endowed with ‘qualication capital’ (an organisational, bureau-
cratic mechanism peculiar to rms and administration in general); and a
10
See in Bourdieu 1996, pp. 267–8, diagrams 13, ‘the social space’ (which is based
on Bourdieu 1984, pp. 128–9), and 14, ‘the space of institutions of higher education’
(which is itself claried by diagram 3, p. 145).
second duality, corresponding to the antinomy of domination, which is cashed

in the duality of qualication procedures between the school of power (its
direct exercise, characterised as economico-political) which trains manag-
ers, and the élite schools, which form intellectuals, artists, and scientists. I
therefore maintain – and this is not the place to argue the ins and outs of the
thesis – that Bourdieu is not justied in superimposing these two cleavages.
This superimposition in fact tends to represent society on the basis of the
school; and its fate on the basis of the gure of the intellectual.
This leads to a Kantian teleological view of emancipation, which cannot take the
place of reection on the alternative opened up by Marx. This concept of domina-
tion, which can be referred to Weber (the capacity to make oneself obeyed),
and which concentrates social power in a ‘eld of power’ situated at the sum-
mit of society, translates into a concept of history and politics that gives the
elite and its ‘autonomous’ fraction more than their due.
This privileged consideration of a division of labour between two types of
the dominant – one set of them devoted to economic-administrative domi-
nation, the other to symbolic domination – is in fact the prelude to a certain
philosophy of politics and history. Symbolic capital, whereby economic and
political domination is ensured, assumes a legitimation that can only be per-
formed by autonomous cultural institutions, with criteria independent of
any temporal power. The only thing that can be acknowledged as legitimate
is a form of rule devoted to society’s universal interests. And Bourdieu’s
thesis is that there is a productive tension here: domination can only be exer-
cised by denying itself; and this is an opportunity that must be grasped by the
dominated.
This thesis is not unambiguous, for it oscillates between reference to those
below, who cannot tolerate arbitrariness, and reference to the servants of
autonomy, whose particular interest is supposedly the universal. It recalls
Habermas’s thesis on the virtues of the scientic community. But Habermas
makes this exigency of universality a property of ordinary language (the
‘illocutionary’ proposition – that of the communicative relation in general –
always presents a triple claim to truth, to justice, and to authenticity) – that
is to say, of ordinary human beings, natural supports of this universality, and
not a property of the particular category of scholars.
It is true that Bourdieu is not to be criticised for emphasising the emanci-
patory potential of knowledge and, in particular, of sociological knowledge.
Bourdieu • 603
In Leçon sur la leçon, he legitimately stresses that ‘knowledge is emancipa-

tory when it unveils operations that owe some of their efcacy to the fact
that people are ignorant of them’.11 The peculiarity of struggle in the scientic
eld is that victory is supposed to go to those who demonstrate the validity
of their analyses and demonstrations. The excellence recognised in it is the
capacity to produce the truth. The practice of sociology can thus ‘help render
us ever so slightly the masters and possessors of social nature’,12 by making
us aware of all the forms of fetishism. And the text ends with the ‘faith’ of
the sociologists in the ‘emancipatory powers’ of social science as a ‘science of
symbolic power capable of restoring to social subjects control over the false
transcendencies that ignorance is forever creating and recreating’.13 This Pas-
calian wager – more strictly formulated than the Kantian reason for hope,
marked by liberalism – opens into a historical teleology that commits us to a
self-emancipatory practice. It will be observed that it only involves a ‘wager’.
But we might ask if it does not grant the man of (social) science, in as much
as his putative particular interest is the universal interest – wager within the
wager – an exorbitant privilege.
Correlatively, in so far at least as it tends to restrict analysis to the sociological
dimension of ‘social relations’, falling short of their relations to the ‘productive-
destructive forces’ – the ‘metabolic relationship’ between humanity and nature
referred to by Marx – it, unlike historical materialism, lacks an epistemologi-
cal orientation towards a programme for a revolutionary alternative. This, it is
true, poses more generally the question of a ‘Marxist’ sociology or economics
(i.e. which can be referred to historical materialism), as regional disciplines by
denition, compared with a ‘general theory of practice’, which is the true chal-
lenge of Marxism – thinking human nitude in its innite entirety. We should
not make groundless accusations against a ‘general theory of practice’ for not
being historical materialism. We shall simply question it about the indications
it gives of dismissing the project of historical materialism, while claiming that
the only thing which is scientic and legitimate is a programme that is theo-
retically and politically less ambitious.
11
12
13
Chapter Thirty-Two
Deleuze, Marx and Revolution: What It Means to
‘Remain Marxist’
Isabelle Garo
‘I think Félix Guattari and I have remained

Marxists.’1
Introduction
Against the lifeless backdrop of France’s current
intellectual scene – and considering the weighty
silence that falls upon all those who dare to step out-
side the mould – Deleuze stands out as one of the last
major writers, a creative philosopher, original, even
subversive. In any case, he appears as a marginal
academic gure, linked to anti-establishment left-
wing movements of which he was, however, never
an active militant. He always refused to disown
May ’68 as well as Marx and, right to the end, asso-
ciated himself not so much with revolution as with
a constant, stubborn apologia for what becom-
ing-revolutionary is or could be, avoiding any
backsliding and rejecting all totalisations. Up until
the 1990s he claimed the necessity of ‘resistance to
the present’,2 and sang the praises of ‘anger with the
1
Deleuze 1995, p. 171.
2
Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 108.
606 • Isabelle Garo
way things are’,3 but he was and remains a well-respected, even revered, phi-
losopher; his lectures at Vincennes were always packed and the retail success
of his books, however taxing or voluminous they may be, persists to this today.
For this reason, it would be misguided and supercial to oppose a nostalgic
portrait of a generation of ‘committed’ writers, for the main part deceased –
Foucault, Deleuze, Châtelet, Althusser, Castoriadis, Badiou, etc. – to the
expanding desert of today’s normalised academic thought, which has dis-
owned Marx, reduced May ’68 to a student carnival, made the word revolu-
tion sound ridiculous and obscene, and obliterated anything to do with the
will for transformation or even anything that is merely critical, on a political
and ideological level. On the one hand, the political commitment of the pro-
tagonists of that time was of a complex kind and marked a turning point,
namely in its opposition to Sartre and the mode of intellectual commitment he
embodied and theorised,4 as well as by rejecting the Marxist doctrine upheld
by the French Communist Party (PCF) and the repulsive image of Marxism
projected by the ‘socialist’ states. On the other hand, we can observe the scat-
tered signs of a renewed interest in the work of certain thinkers of this gen-
eration (particularly Deleuze and Foucault), an observation that is indeed
incompatible with the notion of a denitively buried era and which testies,
rather, to a complex continuity, to a legacy that is paradoxical and problem-
atic but nonetheless real.
Indeed, Deleuze’s continued presence as a vital gure on the contemporary
intellectual scene is almost surprising, as he gives rise to conferences, pub-
lications, special issues – not only to celebratory commentaries but also to a
re-engagement with and a pursuit of his work, occasionally to a new form of
activism, and to a relative but genuine academic re-assessment. This raises a
3
Deleuze 1995, p. vii.
4
From this perspective, the 1972 conversation between Deleuze and Foucault
entitled ‘Intellectuals and Power’ presents itself as a political manifesto: theory is
a praxis but ‘local and regional, as you say: non-totalising’, as Foucault replies to
Deleuze (Deleuze 2004, p. 207). The Marxist or Marxist-inected theme of the alliance
between theory and practice is both maintained and rejected through the refusal of
any global or totalising conception. Far less marked than Foucault’s, Deleuze’s political
commitment basically came down to his involvement with the Groupe d’information
sur les prisons (GIP) and to his support for the comedian Coluche’s 1980 presidential
campaign. On the other hand, the repudiation of traditional forms of intellectual com-
mitment strikingly combines with a ‘proletarian’ phraseology. Thus, Deleuze concludes
the interview as follows: ‘every partial revolutionary attack or defence . . . connects up
with the struggle of the working class’ (Deleuze 2004, p. 213).
Deleuze • 607
question: how are we to apprehend the fact that the current retreat from a cer-
tain mode of political commitment, the virtual waning of radical alternatives
to capitalism, is accompanied by the continued project of another conception
of politics or the political, for which May ’68 represents the call or the begin-
ning, for Deleuze as well as for others of his generation? Where is the break to
be located and was there really a break in the rst place? In other words, did
Deleuze’s conception of revolution emerge at the end of a trajectory where all
revolutionary prospects had collapsed? Or, instead, during the process of the
redenition of revolution as micrological and micro- or infra-political? Or, at
the beginning of a new historical sequence that cancels out these two diagno-
ses and suggests the need of breaking with the break of the 1960s?
In any case, the facile picture that traces our decadence back to ’68 is de-
nitely inappropriate,5 even though it turns on its head the diagnosis of its
ercest attackers, such as Ferry and Renaut. Rather, what still needs to be
considered is how such a complex and contradictory transition from one
part of that generation to ours may have taken place, a transition that not
only signals a break and a decline but just as much the ongoing collapse of
theoretical-political Marxism since the mid-1970s, when the effects of a relent-
less struggle against its representatives combined with its growing sterility.
This collapse is wholly compatible with the proliferation of the name ‘Marx’,
and immediately led to a redenition of the ‘revolution’, as Deleuze dem-
onstrates in exemplary fashion. Thus, what should be grasped is a kind of
dislocation. And this change of perspective is indeed related to the ingenuity
of Deleuze’s teeming œuvre and inseparable from the political and intellectual
context in which it is inscribed.
There are many reasons for this: not just the ideological and political
transformation from the 1960s to the 1990s, but also the irruption of an eco-
nomic crisis that challenged the social compromise and a certain conception
of state action and its reformist and regulating capacities. This was a brutal
and lasting economic sea-change, marking the collapse of Keynesian social
policies that proved incapable of averting it, but also the end of the Ford-
ist interlude. Ultimately, this also signalled a crisis of Marxism itself: the
5
In a 1980 interview, Deleuze himself suggests such a reading, referring to the
‘sterile phase’ of the present, and setting it against the previous period: ‘After Sartre.
The generation to which I belong was, I think, a strong one (with Foucault, Althusser,
Derrida, Lyotard, Serres, Faye, Châtelet, and others’ (Deleuze 1995, p. 27).
fossilised preservation, or even the reworking by some, of a theoretical-

political legacy and approach in any case failed to gain the popular support
that would have at least enabled it to maintain its signicance as an energis-
ing political intervention and the bearer of real prospects of change. In short,
during this period everything conspired to make of ‘Marx’ a name that some
considered repellent and others obsolete, but also a reference that would
henceforth be necessarily philosophical, only allowing the virtues and weap-
ons of his critique to re-emerge on a theoretical terrain.
Because Marxism did not remain on the theoretical-political ground, and
proved incapable of re-conquering it, it gradually waned and found itself
forcefully excluded from the realms of higher education and publishing. Yet
this process was shadowed by the retention of a reference to Marx, accom-
panying an often underground reworking which was echoed in Deleuze’s
thought. However, Deleuze did not provide the conceptual tools for grasping
the conditions and implications of such a reworking of Marx.
Yet the point is not to read Deleuze’s œuvre only as an effect of its context,
rstly because he was an actor in his own right, but also because his thought
provides a truly original and complex way of engaging with Marx which in
turn, and in a non-reductionist fashion, casts light on the wider context of the
ideological and theoretical shift. Deleuze was born in 1925 and belonged to the
generation that experienced the Liberation; he witnessed the radical changes
affecting the social and political landscape, accompanying and participating
in these transformations himself through analyses that severed any connec-
tion between theory and direct involvement in the workers’ struggles.6
This is why, ultimately, when Deleuze uses the word ‘revolution’, it is
less to be understood as an objective than as challenge to the term’s very
meaning. The word thus becomes a faint echo, a ickering reference – both
maintained and sublimated – to the 1968 events alone, read not as a partial
6
Félix Guattari, far more than Deleuze, kept up throughout his life an intense
political activism: at rst a Trotskyist and the leader of the oppositional group Voie
communiste from 1955 to 1965, he participated directly in the anti-colonial struggles,
then gave his support to Italian autonomia, founded the CINEL in 1977 to explore
‘new spaces of freedom’ and in the eighties joined the environmentalist movement,
theorising ‘ecosophy’. To this list, of course, we must add his anti-psychiatric action,
namely his collaboration with Jean Oury at the La Borde clinic. The books he wrote
with Deleuze are the ones that most saliently display a political dimension and main-
tain a revolutionary theme.
Deleuze • 609
political failure, but as the successful substitution of becoming for history.

1968 thus appears as the closure, exhaustion and reorientation of the entirety
of revolutionary history, assimilated to that which by its nature comes to a sad
end.7 ‘They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing
two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s
revolutionary becoming’ – May ’68 having been dened a few lines above
as ‘an irruption, of becoming in its pure state’.8 This is why the Deleuzean
question of revolution should be placed at the heart of this seismic shift:
still rooted in the sinking ground of political commitment, (using Bergson,
Nietzsche and Whitehead as well as Marx) Deleuze migrates to the correla-
tively re-emerging ground of a renewed metaphysical approach, as a hence-
forth postmodern thinker of ows as well as an icon of insubordination . . .
This is why the answer Deleuze gave to Toni Negri in 1990 deserves atten-
tion: ‘I think that Guattari and I have remained Marxists’.9 We must try to
read this statement in a manner that preserves its full complexity, its ambigu-
ity even. It is to Deleuze’s credit that he never took Marxism for granted. But,
in his works, the word never had a well-dened meaning (he is very much
like Foucault in this sense). It often refers to a certain political and theoretical
conguration behind which we can discern the presence of established politi-
cal forces, notably the PCF, and a mode of involvement or comradeship, but of
which nothing is said either. And it is a question of ‘remaining’. For a thinker
of becoming, remaining cannot be a very stimulating objective but, at most,
a slightly disenchanted and necessarily sceptical stance. On reading the rest
of Deleuze’s statement, we learn that ‘remaining a Marxist’ also means that
‘we think that any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capital-
ism and the ways it has developed’.10 In a way, a great deal has already been
stated here, which testies to Deleuze’s profound loyalty towards a political
past that is not explicated – and which, in this sense, cannot be a legacy. But it
7
This diagnosis is restated and further developed in the video-interview Abécédaire:
‘All revolutions fail. Everybody knows it, but people act as if this a new discovery.
You have to be stupid!’. Deleuze indistinctly evokes the Soviet, English, American
and (1789) French, Algerian revolutions. Further on, regarding May ‘68, he adds:
‘I am a rm believer in the difference between History and Becoming! It was a
becoming-revolutionary without a revolutionary future’ (‘G comme Gauche’, in
Deleuze and Parnet 1996).
8
Deleuze 1995, p. 171.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
also reveals a radical shift onto the terrain of ‘political philosophy’ – a project
utterly foreign to Marx’s – and a concern with what political philosophy can
understand by revolution and what it may have to say about it.
I. Capitalism and ows

In order to further examine this question, it may be useful to consider the
economic aspect of Deleuze’s account of capitalism, and how it reveals the
ontological underpinnings of his notion of revolution. Indeed, an ontology of
ows and becoming surfaces here more clearly than anywhere else, even if
it pervasively and deeply structures Deleuze’s thought. But, even if Deleuze
positions himself in terms of a study of what he calls production, he never
offers an economic analysis as such. This is despite his frequent use of eco-
nomic categories to which he confers a metaphorical meaning that is far wider
and far more ambiguous than either their technical meaning or the Marxist
denition with which they are frequently but allusively reconnected.
The reasons for this run deep. Anti-Oedipus, published in 1973, and A Thou-
sand Plateaux, published in 1980 – the two parts of a single work entitled Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia – set out to dene contemporary capitalism, expressly
rejecting any dissociation between base and superstructure, or between an
economic reality and the various social and individual dimensions that go
along with it. This is a Marxist thesis if ever there was one! But the proclaimed
rejection of the reductionist argument seems to conceal another tendential
reduction of production to exchange, of politics to practices of state repres-
sion and control, of social contradictions to mechanical assemblages. This
reduction is all the less visible in that it is coupled with the extension of the
term ‘production’ to individual desire and the correlative multiplication of
its occurrences. But, in this case, in contrast to the simplications of doctrinal
Marxism, the refusal to separate base and superstructure (i.e. to distinguish
them) seems to culminate in the base crashing against the superstructure, in
the attening of reality onto its concept, of revolution onto ‘revolution’, that is
of politics onto ‘political philosophy.’
In effect, opposition to the capitalist order abandons the themes of ideol-
ogy, alienation and class struggle for that of desire. In spite of their afnity
with Freudo-Marxism, Deleuze and Guattari reject Wilhelm Reich’s analy-
sis, which seems to maintain desire and social life as parallel and possibly
Deleuze • 611
overlapping instances. Neither Freud nor Marx then, nor Freud and Marx,
but the simultaneous critique of both. What they want to think is rather a
‘desiring production’ or ‘the coextension of the social eld and desire’.11 And
it is precisely here that the singularity of a mode of conceptual invention that
is just as much a philosophical style becomes apparent: because generating
a coherence between desire and the social is by no means straightforward.
And because the two concepts are not related through a common causality,
their correlation requires a conceptual operator that metaphorises one and
the other, and one through the other, thereby establishing the correspondence
and synonymy that authorises the constant shift from one to the other. This
operator is the notion of ow, which runs through Deleuze’s work as a whole
and tends to reduce any historical reality to a vital process and an exchange
of energy.12
On the specic terrain of the economy – whether we are dealing with the
ancient city, the Germanic commune, or the feud – the apologia of ows
accompanies the explanation of capitalism as an ‘emergence of decoded
ows’ against their previous coding.13 It is a question of replacing an analysis
in terms of determinate historical contradictions, that of Marx, with one in
terms of parallel, generalised, and almost interchangeable lines of ight. All
of a sudden, the political sphere in the guise of the state nds itself strangely
separated out and opposed to commercial ows. If we pause on this point,
we can register another theoretical consequence, which is truly staggering.
For the only perspective that such an analysis of capital opens onto is that
of a sustained and accelerated ‘deterritorialisation’ of the commercial ows of
capital! In fact, if there are no contradictions, or class struggles as bearers of
the prospect of another social and economic formation, we cannot but always
remain with the ows, and with the sole alternative of either articially block-
ing them or freeing them further.
The notion of deterritorialisation risks revealing itself to be, both ultimately
and on the economic terrain, a synonym for deregulation, whose effects have
nothing emancipatory about them. Nevertheless, it is precisely here that the
theme of revolution re-emerges, in the most paradoxical fashion:
11
12
Alain Badiou uses Deleuze’s notion of life as the focus of his critique of a political
conception that is losing its specicity. On this question, see Thoburn 2003.
13
But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the
world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a
curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be to go in
the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the
market, of decoding and deterritorialisation? For perhaps the ows are not
yet deterritorialised enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of
theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw
from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche
put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.14
Reading these lines, we are allowed to wonder if the apologia of ows does
not converge above all with the most radical and anarchistic liberal themat-
ics, namely those of someone like Hayek – despite the fact that Deleuze says
nothing explicit about this matter, even if he clearly relies at times on the mar-
ginalist theory of neoclassical economics,15 without ever asking himself about
its compatibility with Marxian theses.
Thus the revolution is always the obverse of an essentially morbid stati-
cation, as if Deleuze’s work functioned as an echo chamber of the gradual
failure, at the cusp of the 1970s, of Keynesian policies of increased public
spending, a failure which is not analysed but metaphorically referred back
to the blockage, arrest and asphyxiation of that which lives and circulates:
economic knowledge and the critique of psychoanalysis combine in an aston-
ishing theory of ows and of what obstacles them, a new version of a dualism
that lays claim to universal historical validity:
The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and
is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and
deterritorialisation, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies
are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an
overcoding and reterritorialising unity, and the unfettered ows that carry
them toward an absolute threshold. . . . There is an oscillation between the
14
Deleuze and Guattari 1984, pp. 239–40.
15
Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 437–440. Daniel Bensaïd reminds us that the project
of replacing labour-value with ‘desire-value’ can rst be found among the neoclassical
authors, namely Léon Walras and Charles Gide (Bensaïd 2004, p. 283).
Deleuze • 613
reactionary paranoiac overcharges and the subterranean, schizophrenic and

revolutionary charges.16
In a capitalism of ows, every prospect of planning is horrifying17 and reso-

nates with a martial socialism. But Deleuze does not pursue an analysis that
would bring him manifestly too close to liberal theses on this subject, despite
the fact that he says nothing explicitly about them. In the end, the only ‘true’
revolutions would remain at the level of the micro-economy that describes
them, albeit situated on another terrain: they too would be micro, invisible,
barely thinkable, as Deleuze insists in an interview with Toni Negri we have
already alluded to. While the diatribe against the market is evident, Deleuze
displays a certain pessimism and denes minorities by their power of inven-
tion: ‘a minority is not a model, it is a becoming, a process’. The process has
been displaced from the economic toward the political, understood in an
extremely restricted sense and, in so doing, it has become singular, creative,
and rare, more Nietzschean than ever: ‘A people is always a creative minority,
and remains one even when it acquires a majority’.18
Extending the analysis through the description of societies of control that
replace disciplinary societies, following a distinction borrowed from Foucault,
Deleuze afrms that the forms of resistance also change: ‘Computer piracy
and viruses . . . will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called
“sabotage”’.19 It would be difcult to signify more clearly without stating it
that neither directly productive work nor the working class or waged workers
are any longer at the centre of the analysis or of the epoch. The interview con-
cludes with the apologia for events irreducible to their conditions and with
the creation of ‘vacuoles of non-communication’ as the only remotely concrete
goal. The theme of revolution is revealed as lacking any possible anchor in
an analysis of labour or social conicts, and is transported toward mores and
art, writing and philosophy. What is more, the retention of the revolution-
ary theme only serves better to highlight the collapse in the midst of which
it continues to radiate, like a prospect which is decidedly more poetic than
political.
16
17
18
Deleuze 1995, p. 173.
19
Deleuze 1995, p. 175.
II. Reading Marx with Nietzsche

Deleuzean ontology is here a thinking of becoming, of the élan, of life, which
is considerably in excess to the question of the economy but both envelops
and displaces it. Bergson and Nietzsche are its substantial allies. In the Anti-
Oedipus, they are spoken of far more rarely than Marx and Freud. But the treat-
ment reserved to Marx is of a very particular nature: never commented on as
such, by an author who is nevertheless considered a master in the art of eru-
dite and original, academic and unnerving reading. Reading Deleuze’s most
original works, it is as if, compared to other gures, the fantasmatic presence
of Marx were the most constant one, and as if, at the same time, the prolifera-
tion of imprecise references and general propositions prohibited a systematic
reading, an explicit analysis, a sustained critique. Looking more closely, the
mention of Marx is the index of a twofold approach: on the one hand, he is an
indisputable and afrmed guarantee, on the other, he is the occasion to recall
misunderstandings, blockages and limits which are peremptorily asserted.
The relationship to Marx thus reveals itself to be extremely complex. The
laudatory reference to Marx, which is an important aspect of Deleuze’s thought
at a time when Marx is pilloried by the nouveaux philosophes and his death is
declaimed by Jean-Marie Benoist20 is not devoid of courage, or, for this very
reason, of political signicance. But, rather than being linked to a specically
political stance, this signicance largely stems precisely from the opposition
to an external context which condemns any relationship to Marx. We must
also add to this well-known position other remarks that briey preceded it,
but which are far more substantial and wholly different in tone. Thus, in the
course of 28 May 1973, Deleuze elucidates the three differences that separate
Guattari and him from what he calls ‘Marxism’. The rst difference is that
‘Marxism poses problems in terms of need; on the contrary, our problem is
posed in terms of desire’. The second concerns ideology : ‘there is no ideol-
20
In 1970, Jean-Marie Benoist published Marx est mort. In 1977, Bernard-Henri
Lévy’s La barbarie à visage humain (Barbarism with a Human Face) (in which Deleuze
and Guattari are precisely ngered as Marxists) and André Glucksmann’s Les maîtres
penseurs (The Master Thinkers) appeared in its wake. Deleuze reacted vigorously and
immediately to the operation of political and media promotion of the ‘new philoso-
phers’, placing it in the context of the great fear elicited by the prospect of an electoral
victory of the united Left, Communists included. This is a very fertile recontextualisa-
tion, but it remains limited in a sense, since it focuses on the short-term analysis of
the presidential elections.
Deleuze • 615
ogy, there are only statements that organise power’. And the third involves
the characteristic double movement of Marxism, of recapitulation and devel-
opment. Deleuze adds: ‘I think that these three practical differences make it so
that our problem has never been that of a return to Marx. Rather, our problem
is that of forgetting, including the forgetting of Marx. Yet in forgetting some
small fragments rise to the surface’.21
How can the afrmation that one has ‘remained Marxist’ be accompanied
without contradiction by this strange assertion of the shipwreck of Marxism?
In order to dispel this paradox, we must understand how ‘remaining Marx-
ist’, rather than signifying the retention of a theoretical reference to be used
and studied as such, is above all a political marker, in the restricted sense of
the term, which functions in the rapidly changing period from the 1960s to
the 1990s, and does so in a variable manner: having started as the synonym
of an inscription in a philosophical eld where the reference to Marx and to
Marxism is constant or at least trivial, from the mid-1970s onwards, and even
more in the 1990s, the assertive mention of an allegiance suddenly appears as
the refusal of an abandonment or a repudiation, at the very time when these
have turned into the ideological norm. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari
are among the rare intellectual gures of that moment who display a stubborn
resistance to the spirit of the times, and their declarations of Marxism are to
be understood as an unmitigated refusal to accompany this brutal change of
direction and to follow the example of the cynical and liberal conversions of
some ex-soixante-huitards.
But despite this refusal to become turncoats, Deleuze and Guattari’s refer-
ence to Marx is far from indicating an adherence to any kind of Marxist tra-
dition. And it is here that the memory of Marx, which sometimes resembles
a kind of retinal after-image, can precisely and non-contradictorily coincide
with his ‘forgetting’. That a name and some concepts escape this forgetting
only further illustrates the ebb, the general retreat of a conceptuality and of
a certain denition of theoretical-political work, through the retention of the
reference to the very one (Marx) who sought to push such a denition for-
ward. This afrmation can rely on two aspects of Deleuze’s thought. On the
one hand, the way in which the mention of Marx’s writings and concepts
is carried out in his work, especially in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. On the
21
Deleuze 1973.
other, we indeed nd in Deleuze a theory of forgetting, which elucidates this

complex relationship to Marx.
With regard to forgetting, the Deleuzean conception of history draws on a
very determinate source: Nietzsche, of course, who makes forgetting into a
central and well-developed concept. It is obvious that the entire conception
of desire draws on this reading, combined with that of Spinoza, in order to
think the power and productivity of being, rejecting anything that smacks of
a separation into stratied instances, of the division between superstructure
and infrastructure (even if Marx speaks of base), of power opposed to desire.
In so doing, Marx and Nietzsche become compatible, commensurable, not so
much in light of the politics that they inspire (and Deleuze never envisages
Nietzsche in terms of a form of commitment which was nevertheless quite
real),22 but because of their common taste for philosophy, the play of their
shared ontologisation which evades their properly historical anchoring: com-
pared to the one attributed to Marx, Nietzsche’s metaphysics can thus appear
as promising far more liberation and harbouring a far superior subversive
charge.
It is through a metaphorical game of contrasts that Nietzsche – an analogi-
cal philosopher if there ever was one – allows Deleuze to turn Hegel into the
foil of all the theories of life and power, which are grasped from the luminous
perspective of desire and not on the terrain of the biologistic and reactionary
vitalism that they nevertheless draw much of their inspiration from!23 It is the
height of paradox – though obviously very seductive because of the appar-
ently audacious anti-doxa that it carries – to view dialectics as a thinking of
ressentiment, as the very philosophy of the unhappy consciousness which
according to Deleuze represents for Hegel himself the tutelary gure of his
entire œuvre. The care lavished on the reading of Nietzsche compares badly
with the casualness with which the portrait of a reactive and ultimately nihil-
ist Hegel is painted.
More generally, such an approach allows Deleuze to evade the fact that
Hegelian negation is by no means a mysterious negating power aiming at dis-
solution, but determinate negation, a moment of the thing itself and therefore
a principle of its concreteness. The consequence of the Deleuzean condemna-
22
See the monumental study of Nietzsche by Domenico Losurdo (Losurdo 2003).
23
On this point, see Steiner 2001.
Deleuze • 617
tion is that the Marxian criticism of the Hegelian dialectic itself falls under the
blows of a critique so devastating that it does not even seem necessary to stop
and consider it. For Deleuze, it is Stirner who nally reveals himself as the one
who leads the dialectic back to its proper place, that of a procedural sophis-
tics. In Stirner, it is the ego that destroys everything: in this sense ‘Stirner is
the dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic’.24 His merit
is to have understood that the dialectic ultimately refers only to the ego, and
it is on this terrain that Marx intervenes in his turn:
Marx elaborates his famous doctrine of the conditioned ego: the species and
the individual, species being and the particular, social order and egoism
are reconciled in the ego conditioned by social and historical relations. Is
this sufcient? What is the species and which one is the individual? Has the
dialectic found its point of equilibrium and rest or merely a nal avatar,
the socialist avatar before the nihilist conclusion? It is difcult to stop the
dialectic and history on the common slope down which they drag each
other. Does Marx do anything but mark the last stage before the end, the
proletarian stage?25
There is no way around it, the dialectic is dragged into an overpowering cas-
cade of negations, which makes it so that, whether subjective or objective, it
succumbs to the self-destruction of which it is merely the unconscious and
imprudent discourse.
III. Revolution, history, philosophy

Here again, the extremely general nature of Deleuze’s words enables him
to construct an anti-dialectical motif he can integrate anywhere, appearing
regularly throughout his work and determining to a great extent his read-
ing of Marx. As he writes: ‘What I most detested was Hegelianism and
dialectics’.26 As a consequence, what should be performed is either a ‘libera-
tion of Marx from Hegel’,27 or a critique encompassing Freud, Marx, and the
24
Deleuze 1983, p. 161.
25
Deleuze 1983, p. 162.
26
Deleuze 1995, p. 7.
27
Deleuze 2004, p. 145. When confronted with an interlocutor surprised that no
concessions are made for Hegel, while a conservative philosopher like Bergson is
bourgeoisie on account of their common conception of history. In the former

case, Deleuze argues that Althusser has undertaken that task, while in the lat-
ter, his critique becomes so devastating that ‘remaining a Marxist’ no longer
seems really feasible, except if it means remaining inane and slightly embit-
tered. In fact, for Deleuze, there are two notions, distinct though profoundly
entangled, that should be attacked: the notion of development, and that of
memory. As Deleuze states:
In Marxism, a certain culture of memory appeared right at the beginning;

even revolutionary activity was supposed to proceed to this capitalisation
of the memory of social formations. It is, if one prefers, Marx’s Hegelian
aspect, included in Das Kapital.28
Along with this astonishing ‘capital’ of revolutions, memory is again juxta-

posed by Deleuze to the Nietzschean apologia of forgetfulness.
With obvious respect but concealed antagonism, Deleuze constantly stands
close to Marx’s work. We can read this in light not only of the relentless cri-
tique undertaken by Deleuze but also of that kinship which he simultane-
ously lays claim to and denies. This leads Deleuze to be far less interested in
the texts of Marx than in producing a counter-thought, a counter-Marxism,
that for fundamental theoretical and political reasons has nothing to do with
an anti-Marxism or another Marxism. In that respect, ‘remaining a Marxist’
should mean constructing an analysis as close to Marx as possible but featur-
ing a perpetual alteration of him, inventing other words and other concepts
at all the nodal points of the Marxian analysis of capitalism. It is precisely at
this level that Deleuze’s equally contradictory and complex relationship with
philosophy, politics, and the university becomes apparent.
Depending on the cases, Deleuze undertakes the explicit dismissal of cer-
tain cardinal notions ascribed to Marxism or elaborated by Marx, carries out a
more nuanced but never quite accurate critique of other notions, or advocates
granted honours, Deleuze responds: ‘Why not Hegel? Well, somebody has to play
the role of traitor. What is philosophically incarnated in Hegel is the enterprise to
“burden” life, to overwhelm it with every burden, to reconcile life with the State
and religion, to inscribe death in life – the monstrous enterprise to submit life to
negativity, the enterprise of resentment and unhappy consciousness. Naturally, with
this dialectic of negativity and contradiction, Hegel has inspired every language
of betrayal, on the right as well as on the left (theology, spiritualism, technocracy,
bureaucracy, etc.)’ (p. 144).
28
Deleuze 2004, p. 277.
Deleuze • 619
the removal without further ado of certain concepts – in particular dialectics,

materialism, alienation, class struggle, communism. Such a dismissal and critique
draw the lineaments of another philosophy and a completely different under-
standing of politics and revolution. Starting from as close as possible to Marx
or a certain conception of Marxism, it aims at subverting its meaning by shift-
ing, displacing, or upsetting statements deemed too impoverished or simple.
There is nothing questionable as such in the approach itself except the silence
it generates as regards the operations it carries out. But though it produces a
singular form of theoretical invention – the hallmark of Deleuze’s thinking
is its undeniable richness – it can nevertheless be confronted with its own
propositions, not only to the persistent declaration of Marxism, as we have
seen, but to a certain denition of thought activity and its relation to practice,
to a denition of philosophy, and hence also to a type of political commitment
or non-commitment.
It is interesting to linger again upon the stylistic devices occasioning this
specic theoretical invention and the basis for this displacement, in particular
as far as Marx is concerned. As we have remarked, Deleuze’s thinking often
works through analogies, shifts, displacements, to such an extent that it results
in a singular form of writing and a recognisable style, which are just as much
a way of thinking. Deleuze does not construct a system but displaces, gener-
alises and metaphorises, suggests and circumvents, alludes, surveys and aes-
theticises.29 This produces the overall impression that staggering discoveries
are at stake in his writing, particularly for all the texts using heavily ‘Marxist’
terms, as they become suddenly endowed with new brilliance and fascinating
depth, at the same time as they await comprehension. Here and there, one
comes across a Marxism that is easy to identify through key terms – which
are less concepts than mere signals – yet the selfsame terms are immediately
rendered unrecognisable and unprecedented by the incorporation of foreign
concepts disrupting their ordinary and ‘well-known’ logic. In Anti-Oedipus
for instance, we can read the following:
In brief, the ows of code that are ‘liberated’ in science and technics by the
capitalist regime engender a machinic surplus value that does not directly
29
Perry Anderson notes that a distinctive trait of French thought lies in its literary
virtuosity, which he sees as grounded in the rhetorical tradition conveyed by élite
institutions – khâgnes and the école normale (Anderson 2005, pp. 19–20).
depend on science and technics themselves, but on capital – a surplus value

that is added to human surplus value and that comes to correct the relative
diminution of the latter, both of them constituting the whole of the surplus value
of ux that characterizes the system.30
If ‘machinic surplus value’ is considered as a theoretical innovation capable

of offering a major and denite objection to the Marxian understanding of
value, it requires greater elaboration; but if it represents an approximation,
it provides a mere impression that the thinking underlying this kind of state-
ment constitutes a powerful innovation.31 Yet this merely claimed complexity,
the wagered assertion of what had until then not been understood or even
noticed – and above all not by Marx or ‘Marxism’ – creates the impression that
the text is more literary than analytical, fraught as it is with ashy intuitions
that neglect any patient argumentation, and moreover that the innovative
pose sometimes replaces any rigorous construction.
Conclusion
What is philosophy? The whole of Deleuze’s work seems obsessed with this
question, insofar as its persistent classicism constantly verges on its own
denial, and insofar as subtle referencing is presented as an invention and
rediscovery: ‘the concept itself abandons all reference so as to retain only the
conjugations and connections that constitute its consistency’ or also ‘the con-
cept is dened by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency,
but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the
same time as it is created’.32 If such statements tackle the materialist question,
for that very reason they also engage with the relation to politics, which sur-
prisingly enough is remarkably absent in the late work What Is Philosophy?,
which nevertheless contrasts philosophy with art and science. That is why for
Deleuze revolution is primarily a concept, transferring the political question
30
31
Félix Guattari, who developed the notion of ‘machinic surplus value’, denes it
as a generalised expense of energy that subsumes the Marxian analysis in terms of
labour-time. Yet the analysis remains just as vague from the standpoint of its properly
economic details.
32
Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 90 and p. 22.
Deleuze • 621
onto a metaphysical ground while still playing with its concrete resonances,
and dramatising an ontological serenity through the distant but violent and
blunt echoes that such a word stills carries in contemporary France. But we
can go even further: in the end, the Deleuzean paradox proves to be rather a
contradiction crossing his thought without really taking root in it, percolating
through the whole spectrum of contemporary social, political, and ideological
reality, and feeding back on it.
In fact, there is no question of accusing Deleuze of guilty renunciations.
This would entail overlooking the extent to which the persistence of the theme
of revolution in theory relies on the building of alternatives that go beyond
theory. In that regard, his work should only be read through a breaking away
from the notion of the autonomy of philosophical discourse and neutrality
from the university institution where its teaching is located, margins included.
The main achievement of Deleuze lies, in a sense, in maintaining an ambition
to protest, along with a protest vocabulary, witness his frequent and positive
references to Marx, despite the fact that he belongs to a time of crisis and
reversal for Marxism. Forsaking the mummied certitudes of ofcial Marx-
ism and a grandiloquent leftism, he endeavours to keep open the perspective
of a critique of capitalism and the refusal of all forms of conformism during
a time when many contrary endeavours attempt to close the door, to exorcise
the ghost of ’68, and from then on, to dene political commitment in terms of
a kind of salon anti-totalitarianism and professional abhorrence of Marx – a
real political commitment but one that allows no space for any alternative,
hence blandly introduces itself as ‘death of ideologies’ and rejection of ‘ideas
of blood’.33
Nevertheless, the Deleuzean possible has never been a project and remains
an abstract possibility of alternative life-choices.34 In the exergue for Nego-
tiations, Deleuze asserts that philosophy is not a power, and for that reason,
‘philosophy can’t battle with the powers that be’, but should limit itself to a
guerrilla warfare passing through each and everyone of us,35 innitely pushing
off the horizon of a real historical overcoming. Is this a return to philosophical
33
‘It should be admitted that the idea of socialism and communism has become
an idea of blood’, Pignon and Rigoulot 1982.
34
See, on this particular point, Zourabichvili 1998, pp. 338–40.
35
Deleuze 1995, p. vii.
Proudhonism?36 At any rate, this analysis has met with huge agreement at
all times both past and present. As mentioned earlier, this prognosis can be
attributed, on the one hand to the history of French society since ’68: its mul-
tifarious mutations, the complex movement of its struggles, the oscillations
of consciousness on the part of its various actors, and the PCF’s incapacity
to understand the extent of ’68, as well as its refusal to support the workers’
protest beyond the mere dimension of trade unionism. On the other hand,
there is also the parallel incapacity of leftist movements to take part in the
construction of a hegemonic front, closing themselves into a form of activism
without prospects. The right wing and the whole of the ruling class recovered
much quicker and quite easily managed to rally a share of ex-leading gures
of the student protest scene. Meanwhile, the CFDT was politically very active
and evolving from different forms of reections – particularly those produced
within the framework of the journal Esprit – so it worked out the perspective
of a self-managed ‘second Left’ so efciently that it rapidly appealed to and
recycled another layer of ’68 actors in the framework of a ‘new look’ social
democracy. The economic crisis that broke out at the beginning of the 1970s
accelerated the process of political reconguration and enabled the progres-
sive rise of neoliberal arguments and choices, changed the management of
the critique of work, and saw a new mode of accumulation emerge. The divine
surprise that saw the lightning break-up of the ‘socialist’ countries initiated a
one-sided revision of the previous social contract, prior to the nal assault on
the state. The process has continued and has now accelerated, notwithstand-
ing moments of powerful mobilisation and protest of which the most recent
developments are the movement of 1995 and the victory for the No in the
European constitutional treaty referendum, and this remobilisation has been
strongly crippled by the crisis of the ‘Left’ and the ongoing reconguration of
trade unions . . .
Those facts are well known and despite this excessively linear and incomplete
summary, it appears to us that the continuity with the 1960s is simultaneously
self-evident and complex. From this standpoint, the ‘political philosophy’ of
Deleuze, which may seem outlandish at rst sight, is in fact very signicant
element of a complex history, particularly the history and teaching of philoso-
36
Marx dubbed Proudhon a ‘living contradiction’, in ‘On Proudhon (Letter to J.B.
Schweitzer)’, Marx and Engels 1987.
Deleuze • 623
phy in France – propounding and displacing contemporary political issues

but failing to conceptualise precisely their nature because of its very power-
lessness and vocation. Now, as to the actuality of Marx and relevance of the
word ‘revolution’, Deleuze recongures its import and displaces its meaning
to such an extent that they are no longer intended as instruments for appre-
hending the real and the ferments of current developments, but aim rather at
accompanying their very political withdrawal in a faint nostalgia: they aim
at being discursive events which are quite paradoxical considering that, in
the end, the word ‘revolution’ resounds with the obsolescence of its global
design, and that the reference to Marx coincides with the desertion of its elds
of research and intervention. If the question of commitment is transformed, it
is not thematised in any other way than under the banner of its most modest
miniaturisation – alleged to be more efcient – producing a specic micro-
politics of specic intellectuals. Work and its current transformations are no
longer research objects, even if the questions of organisation and machines
still touch on its deserted domain and disputed centrality. In that respect,
while the role of the state is radically and quite precisely redened accord-
ing to a logic which is politically decisive to understand, it is only thought
through the lines of a universal history, in which it is above all opposed to
the market, precisely at the time when the ruling class resorts to this selfsame
state to organise the dazzling expansion of the market!
Paradoxically enough, the maintained relation Deleuze entertains with
Marx is the most helpful tool for perceiving the withdrawal of a certain con-
ception of theoretical work that Marx promoted. Taking a philosophical and
conceptual turn, the mention of Marx still breaks a stiing taboo, but it also
marks the academic, editorial, mediatic, and political decline and rejection of
a form of thinking which was meant to be signicant, even in, or especially
on the basis of its political consequences which were supposed to testify to
its very efciency. And it is this very paradox which turns out to be a lively
contradiction: for the term ‘revolution’ expresses and persists in expressing
this unity of a thought and its historical aim, beyond and despite all forms of
conceptual mutation, because of the political force retained by its very nam-
ing. Even though an echo is not a concept, and even less so a project.
This is precisely where the ambiguity of the Deleuzean use of the word
lies, on the ground of an unprovable unity between a theory in the making
and a sought-out practice, well beyond what is said about it in the works of
Deleuze and Guattari: revolution is not a concept, also and mostly because it
exceeds any form of conceptualisation, and because the word remains lled
with a dialectic which proves to be ineliminable, whatever one may think.
In that sense, maintaining a reference to Marx and to the word ‘revolution’,
at the same time as the prospect of its concrete realisation is declining and
collapsing, continues to designate its void but also its lack, to delineate its
site and assert its urgency, to somehow maintain its actuality and prompt a
revival which should not be merely philosophical, but must remain grounded
in theory. After all, to extend the Deleuzean metaphor, we can remark that
what keeps surfacing in this way, fragmentary and barely recognisable, con-
tinues to arouse curiosity and pointing at the directions that should be further
explored! Deleuze may also be read in that perspective today.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jacques Derrida, ‘Crypto-Communist?’
Jason Smith
We parted for personal and political reasons.

Political reasons: more and more, he became a
fellow-traveler of the Communist Party.
– Philippe Sollers1
It was very difficult not to join the Party. It

was extremely difcult for someone on the Left
(need I remind people that I’ve always been
on the Left?) to be thought of only as a crypto-
Communist or a fellow-traveler.
– Jacques Derrida2
During the decisive month of what is still known

only as ‘May ’68’, Jacques Derrida was not ‘on the
barricades’.
To begin to understand Jacques Derrida’s relation
to Marx and the Marxist tradition, it is no doubt best
to start not from the history of his textual engage-
ments, strategic alliances and missed ‘encounters’
with a hardly homogenous movement taking place
under the sign ‘Marx’, but with a concrete situation.
I will come back to the texts, lots of them and soon.
We should rst listen to what Derrida says about
his role in the most important political upheaval in
1
Quoted in Clément 1995.
2
Derrida 1993b, p. 199.
626 • Jason Smith
France since the Liberation. In a 1994 interview with Maurizio Ferraris given
the title A Taste for the Secret (Specters of Marx had been published one year ear-
lier), Derrida briey recalled his attitude toward the opening moments of the
revolt, initiated largely by students within the universities during the month
of March. Derrida had reservations. This is not necessarily remarkable.3 What
is remarkable is the set of references – I do not say authorities – Derrida has
recourse to in explaining his reticence. After reminding his interviewer that,
‘rightly or wrongly, my heart was not “on the barricades” ’, he immediately
tries to account for his disheartened response, one that suggests a participa-
tion without belonging to the movement (I was there, but my heart was not in
it), by emphasising what he calls the ‘rhetoric of spontaneity’ (‘the liberation
from any sort of apparatus, party or union’) marking much of the student
movement:
In 1968 I had the impression that the action of the students (which was not that
of the workers) to provoke a revolution was unrealistic, and that it could have
dangerous consequences. . . . What really bothered me was . . . the spontaneist
eloquence, the call for transparency, for communication without relay or
delay. . . . The mistrust with regard to all those things that I witnessed in
1968 corresponded not only to a philosophical-political position, but also
what was already, for me, a kind of crypto-communist inheritance, namely the
condemnation of ‘spontaneism’ in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? In rereading
Lenin’s texts recently, in an altogether different context, I rediscovered this
critique of spontaneism.4
Not Marx, Lenin. This explanation would require a long, patient response,
taking into consideration the pragmatics and the strategy of this utterance
as much as its objective content. Let us recall two things, two contexts. Only
a year before this interview, Derrida had just published Specters of Marx,
his long awaited ‘encounter’ with Marxism (my own essay’s sole task is to
complicate this rather pat story), a book that itself represents an interven-
tion within a very determined historical conguration (theoretical and politi-
3
Indeed, a large segment of the French intellectual class had ‘reservations’ about
the student movement or, at the very least, the students’ tactics. Among Derrida’s
‘friends’, many were not ‘on the barricades’: Philippe Sollers, Louis Althusser, Jean
Genet, for example.
4
Derrida 2001a, p. 50; my italics.
Derrida • 627
cal). The moment he recalls, however, is perhaps even more complex. Before
1971, and especially in the years 1968–71, Derrida’s philosophical work is
best understood not only as an autonomous practice – it will always be that,
too often to the detriment of the work or its effects – but as triangulating
between two other poles within the Parisian theoretical scene: a very close
relationship with Philippe Sollers and the journal Tel Quel, and a more dis-
creet, more clandestine tie (one that does not exclude antagonism) with the
work of Louis Althusser. That is to say, two gures whose role in the events
of May and in particular the initial student revolt were hardly enthusiastic.
Tel Quel, at the time closely allied with the French Communist Party (PCF)
and its cultural apparatus (this alliance would last until 1971), was not only
reluctant to support the student movement without qualications, but was
also actively opposed to the interventions of the Union des écrivains and the
Comité d’action écrivains-étudiants (which included Blanchot, Marguerite
Duras, Robert Antelme and others). Althusser, once again in the hospital, was
completely absent from the events.
What to make of Derrida’s account? It is, in parts, indistinguishable from
the ofcial PCF line at the beginning of the events: isolation of students from
workers (‘not that of the workers’), this isolation in turn meaning the revolt
might only be a ‘provocation’ that, precipitating a confrontation with the
state, would function as a pretext allowing the Gaullists to crush legitimate
opposition (popular support of the working masses) and strengthen their
own hand. It is true that the Right secured a landslide victory in the June
1968 elections. It is undeniable, however, that this language is couched in
what are very classical, orthodox ‘Communist’ terms.5 The term ‘unrealistic’
is particularly jarring. On the walls of Paris one could read ‘Soyons réalistes,
demandons l’impossible!’ – and who more than Derrida has, after Heidegger,
Bataille and Blanchot, analysed the necessary inscription of the impossible
within every ethico-political act or wager? What is an historical event if not
the sudden suspension of the opposition between possible and impossible?
Can there be an event if it can be accounted for by the objective conditions of
5
It is, indeed, not far from the language of Georges Marchais’s editorials in
L’Humanité, general secretary of the PCF during the events of May, excluding con-
siderations of tone.
628 • Jason Smith
an historical moment, if it can be deduced from the given relations of force in

a determined, concrete situation?
If the language Derrida adopts in the rst part of this citation can easily be
assimilated to the phraseology of the Party – rendering him an ‘objective ally’
of the PCF against the student provocation – it is the second half of the pas-
sage that is more interesting. At issue is ‘spontaneity’ or rather, ‘spontaneist
eloquence’ and the denunciation of institutions (like the party or unions). It is
the rhetoric of spontaneity that Derrida dislikes most. Rhetoric: the elevation
of spontaneity to the status of a value, an operation that conceals the divisions,
stratications, ‘delays’ and mediations at the heart of an immediate relation
to self. For spontaneity is another name for the immediate presence to self of
a subjectivity in actu, coinciding with itself in the vitality of its upsurge or its
insurrection. It is another name for what Husserl called the ‘living Present’
of temporalisation, the ‘absolute beginning’ that – this is from Husserl’s The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness – ‘does not come into existence
as that which is generated but through genesis spontanea’.6 To this spontaneity
Derrida opposes the notion of the institution. From his earliest work on Hus-
serl, beginning in the early 1950s, ‘institution’ (or, in the language of Husserl
and Heidegger, Stiftung) has signied nothing less than memory, relation,
trace in general, the very possibility of history itself. It will be necessary to
denounce, subject to critique, deconstruct even this or that given institution in
the name, always, of an institution ‘to come’ – not in the name of an absence
of mediation or representation, or in the name of ‘direct’ democracy.
Derrida does not invoke Husserl here. He invokes Lenin. And he invokes
Lenin in order to emphasise a certain difference between the moment of nar-
ration (1994, just after Specters of Marx) and 1968, namely that today he is able
to assume a ‘crypto-communist inheritance’ that a quarter of a century before
still remained a secret, from Jacques Derrida most of all. What this means,
what the term ‘crypto-communism’ means, is not at all clear here, nor should
it be. It seems to be a name Derrida uses to designate or seal his own inabil-
ity to account for or recount, in the language of political ‘responsibility’, just
exactly what his relation to Marxism and ‘communism’ was or will have been.
6
Husserl 1964, p. 131; quoted in Derrida 1967b, p. 93. Althusser contends that it is
not the spontaneity of the masses that Lenin opposes, but rather the rhetoric (to use
Derrida’s word) or ‘ideology of spontaneity.’ This distinction would require a great
deal of elucidation (Althusser 1969, p. 254).
Derrida • 629
Repression, denial, foreclosure? An ‘incorporation’ that, refusing to assimilate

this inheritance, expels it inward to remain, encrusted and encrypted, as a
foreign body within his work?7 And what is the relation between this secret
encounter with Marxism – secret even to Derrida himself – and Derrida’s
own characterisation of a communism ‘to come’, a New International, whose
mode of existence or appearing is allied with the secret if not the conspiratorial
secret society, ‘a still discreet tie, almost secret . . . hardly public even if it is not
clandestine’?8
The following pages are by no means meant to provide a denitive account
of Derrida’s relation to Marx and Marxism. To the contrary, they merely seek
to establish and formalise some of the conditions – methodological, historical,
philological, theoretical – within which such a discussion can begin to take
place. Derrida was neither a Marxist, nor a communist, nor a member of the
French Communist Party, nor even more generally a member of the ‘move-
ment’ that emerged in 1968 and persevered until 1977–8. But this is not what is
in question here. To be sure, a truly historical account of Derrida’s philosophi-
cal and political trajectory, in particular from the years 1952 to 1976, would
be able to establish any number of alliances, complicities and solidarities with
the communist Left and, indeed, the French Communist Party, provided the
complexity of the angles and the mediations are accounted for. To truly ask
after the nature of Derrida’s ‘involvement’ with Marxism would, however,
require a discourse of a great deal more theoretical rigour, beginning with a
critical reection on the very terms in which the question is to be posed: what
is an ‘encounter’? What is an ‘alliance’? What is a ‘crypt’, a ‘secret?’ What, or
who, is Marx? What is the relation between Marxism and the French Com-
munist Party?
What is a communist?
* * *
There is a practice specic to philosophical or theoretical discourse. Reading a

text is not reducible to an analysis or explication; reading is rst of all a prac-
tice or a strategy of intervention. This conception of philosophy is one Derrida
shares with his longtime colleague and friend, Louis Althusser. It is an image
7
On the difference between incorporation and introjection, and the idea of the
‘crypt,’ see Derrida’s ‘Fors’, in Abraham & Torok 1986, pp. xi–xlviii.
8
Derrida 1993, pp. 141–2.
630 • Jason Smith
of thought that compels us to recognise that the eld of conceptual elabora-

tion is always overdetermined politically, in the broadest sense of the term; as
a result, the reading of a philosophical text must be characterised as a complex
act insofar as it is structured by a series of decisions and wagers that can never
be justied or accounted for by reasons internal to philosophy itself. This act
that has no purely theoretical justication is therefore a political prise de parti,
one that delimits and reframes a philosophical corpus on the basis of relations
of force that cannot be said to simply belong to the immanent organisation of
a given theoretical articulation. Derrida’s text in particular requires this sort
of intervention. Especially at a moment when, following his death in 2004, the
fate of his text suddenly seems open to a kind of strategic appropriation or
inection that might retroactively reorient how we read his entire philosophi-
cal trajectory. Brutally put: now is the moment when it is suddenly possible
to reinscribe Derrida into the space of what we might call, in the most general
sense, a materialist conception of philosophy. Indeed, we might even consider
the situation of Derrida’s text as being roughly analogous to that of Hegel’s
after his death. There is a struggle and a divide, a war of appropriation over
a signature and a legacy – an emerging fault between a right and left Der-
ridianism. This requires not only a strategic conception of reading, but the
willingness to submit this text to a certain naïveté and a certain violence. Such
violence is perhaps the sole ‘salvation’ Derrida’s text will know.
To begin such a reading, the rst gesture required is to disperse the consen-
sus that has developed around Derrida’s relation to Marxism. This consensus
takes the form of an historical scansion, organised around two dates: 1971
and 1993. The story, pat as it is, goes something like this. In the 1971 interview
‘Positions’, conducted by two members of a Tel Quel on the verge of passing
from an alliance with the PCF to a very unorthodox Maoism, Derrida is pres-
sured into explaining, openly and with precision, the relationship between
deconstruction and dialectical materialism. Derrida’s response suggests a
possible articulation or ‘ajointement’, but one that cannot be ‘immediately
given’ and is therefore ‘still to come’.9 Silence for two decades. Two decades
of intense political polarisation, the Union of the Left and the Common Pro-
grammme, the humanist ‘reaction’ of the late 1970s, the nal victory of the
Socialists in 1981, the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’. Then, in 1993, the
9
Derrida • 631
publication of the long-awaited encounter with Marxism and the specicity

of the Marxist text in Specters of Marx – a book that is in fact highly ambivalent
with regard to the history and promise of the dialectical-materialist tradition,
as many ‘Marxist’ readers were to discover.
There is something to this story. But consider this: immediately after the
publication of the 1971 interview, Derrida distances himself from Tel Quel at
the very moment the journal breaks its alliance with the PCF. Meanwhile, Der-
rida develops a relationship with the PCF-aligned journal Les Lettres françaises,
edited by Louis Aragon and Jean Ristat. With the end of Les Lettres françaises
in 1973, Derrida begins to publish in Digraphe, edited by Ristat (who remains
in the PCF today) and hosting many writers from Tel Quel (Jean Ricardou,
Jean Thibaudet, Maurice Roche – for example) who chose not to break with
the PCF. In 1974, Philippe Sollers denounced what he called the ‘alignment
of Derrida and his clientele with the positions’ of the PCF, specically ‘con-
cerning its position on the Union of the Left and the Common Programme’.10
More important than these anecdotal and perhaps opportunistic – supposing
we were to take Sollers seriously – engagements, however, are the series of
seminars that Derrida gives over the course of 1972 to 1976. That is, in the four
years immediately after his remark that an encounter with Marxism was ‘still to
come’. A partial summary of the content of these lecture courses, all of them
housed in the archives at the University of California, Irvine, would reveal
the following:
a) 1972–3, ‘Religion and Philosophy,’ consisting of eight sessions, of which
the rst two are devoted to Marx (28 pages). Though much of this course is
devoted to Kant and Hegel, the analysis of these authors takes place within
10
‘It is no coincidence that the party and the university have recuperated those
among or around us who were the most reticent about Marxism as well as psy-
choanalysis’ (Sollers 1974, pp. 136–7). Derrida was already suspected, in late 1971,
of wanting a rapprochement with La Nouvelle Critique and, by extension, with the
cultural wing of the PCF; now, no less than three months after the denitive break
with Sollers and Tel Quel in January 1972, a special issue of the PCF-aligned journal
Les Lettres françaises is devoted to Derrida was published. In the March 29–April
4, 1972 issue (issue 1429), Jean Ristat organised a group of ‘hommages’ to Derrida
whose number included Barthes and Genet, among others. The issue appeared on
the occasion of the publication of Derrida’s La Dissémination, and it was understood
by Sollers as, according to Forest, Derrida’s being ‘“recuperated” by the PCF’ (Forest
1995, p. 403). Perhaps in response to these homages gathered by Ristat, Tel Quel’s
Bulletin d’informations du Mouvement de juin 1971 will respond in April 1972 with
an ‘O mage à Derrida’.
632 • Jason Smith
a Marxist framework. The rst session of the course addresses Marx and
the critique of religion in the third 1844 Manuscript, The German Ideology and
the IVth Thesis on Feuerbach. The second session is entirely concerned
with what Derrida calls the ‘religious analogy in Marx’s discourse on ideol-
ogy,’ with particular attention paid to Marx’s analysis of the genesis of the
commodity-form in the famous section of the rst chapter of Capital on the
fetishism of the commodity and its ‘secret’. Much of the analysis of the rst
chapter of Capital (on the ‘secret’ of the commodity-form and the matrix of
ideology) found in this seminar is reproduced with only minor modications
twenty years later – in Specters of Marx.
b) 1974–5, ‘GREPH (the concept of ideology in the French ideologues)’. This
seminar, concerned with the history and structure of the ‘institution’ of phi-
losophy in its particularly French conguration as well as the question of the
‘right to philosophy’ offers – despite its title – readings of Gramsci, Althusser
and Marx. An entire session is devoted to an analysis of Althusser’s essay on
‘ideological state apparatuses’ and in particular on the notion of ‘reproduc-
tion’, with particular emphasis on Althusser’s contention that in ‘mature’ cap-
italist societies it is the ‘educational ideological apparatus’ that is ‘dominant’
(rather than the Church). The last two sessions (40 pages) are devoted to the
relation between Marx and Destutt de Tracy (the French ‘idéologue’) as well
as the relation between ideology and the division of labour.
c) 1975–6, ‘Theory and Practice’. Almost the entire rst half of this semi-
nar – 4 sessions – is devoted to the relation between theory and practice in
Marx (in particular in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’) and the evolving status of
this relation in the work of Louis Althusser. One session concerns Althusser’s
denition of theory, practice, theoretical practice and the ‘Theory of prac-
tice’ in ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’; another two are devoted to a reading of
Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and the ‘new’ denition of philosophy Althusser
proposes in Lenin and Philosophy.
d) 1976, ‘Seminar for GREPH on Gramsci’ (one session).
If, then, it will be necessary in the coming years11 to take these texts into
consideration in order to evaluate the exact relationship Derrida’s work main-
tains with the Marxist tradition, we must in turn de-emphasise, it seems to
11
Éditions Galilée has recently begun the process of publishing Derrida’s seminars.
The English translations will appear with the University of Chicago Press.
Derrida • 633
me, the importance of Specters of Marx in this history as well. Not only because
this text should no longer be understood as a belated – two decades, and not
until the end of the ‘really existing’ Marxism of the Communist International –
and disappointing rallying to the ‘cause’ of Marxism. To the contrary, it would
be just as easy to read this text, as Derrida invites us to do at many points, as
open break with the entire history of Marxism as such. In this text we read that
the ‘spirit’ of Marxism that Derrida is evoking or conjuring up in Specters is to
radically distinguished or demarcated from
the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systematic, metaphysical,

or ontological totality (notably to its ‘dialectical method’ or to ‘dialectical
materialism’), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social
class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected
or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian
monstrosity).12
What is most remarkable about Specters of Marx is, in fact, its articulation
of the problem of justice in its relation – suspensive and conictual, but not
destructive – to law. But, for this very reason, Specters of Marx might best be
read less as a performative intervention in the Marxist tradition and its ‘fun-
damental concepts’ than as a continuation of one of Derrida’s most important
texts, his 1989 essay ‘Force de la loi’, on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Vio-
lence’: the rst moment in Derrida’s text when the ‘contamination’ between
justice and law will be laid out.13 This conict will be at the heart of Derrida’s
work over the last fteen years of his life, and will orient the vast majority of
his conceptual work, be it on hospitality, cosmopolitanism, or ‘democracy to
come’. Rather than choosing to elaborate post-deconstructive mutations of
those concepts belonging to what is called ‘dialectical materialism’ – labour,
mode of production, the state, the party – Derrida brackets the entire system
of Marxist categories in order to inscribe Marx’s text itself into a problematic
of justice that is never articulated in any satisfactory way in the language of
Marx himself.
12
Derrida 1993a, pp. 145–6, my emphasis.
13
Derrida 1994. ‘Force of Law’ was originally presented, in a different form, at a
colloquium at Cardozo Law School in October 1989, and was initially published in
English in 1992.
634 • Jason Smith
These considerations, then, compel us to direct our attention to a phase of

Derrida’s career that precedes the two dates (1971, 1993) that normally punc-
tuate the story of Derrida’s relation to Marx. The remainder of this essay will
pay particular attention to Derrida’s earliest work on Husserl as well as his
very complex relationship to Louis Althusser in the late 1960s. What follows,
of course, in no way pretends to be conclusive. To the contrary, what is neces-
sary today – for us – is to start over, to begin again and map out a strategic
line in the coming war over the name ‘Derrida’. Why, after all, would it be
necessary to abandon an ally, perhaps only a fellow traveler, to the predations
of Reaction?
* * *
On 23 June 1966, Louis Althusser gave a lecture at the École Normale Supéri-
eure on what he called the ‘theoretical conjuncture of current French phi-
losophy’. Althusser wanted to draw a ‘map’ of the theoretical eld that is
a ‘structure’ as well as a battleeld, a conguration that is also a balance
of power in which competing forces struggle for ‘domination’, he says, in
an ideological and theoretical struggle. The map he draws, then, depicts a
combat undertaken by Marxist theory (both the science of historical mate-
rialism and dialectical materialism, which has a ‘scientic character’ but is
not, strictu sensu, a science)14 in a war involving three theoretical formations
and two fronts. On one front, a battle against the reactionary spiritualist
tradition of philosophy among whose contemporary representatives num-
ber Paul Ricoeur and the recently deceased Merleau-Ponty. On the other, a
battle against a ‘critical and rationalist idealist’ line that draws on Kantian
and Husserlian resources but which also includes, Althusser says, a series
of names that belong to what in France is called the ‘epistemological’ tradi-
tion, concerned with a critical examination of the foundation of the sciences,
with a particular emphasis on the genesis and historicity of scientic insti-
tutions and practices. This group – including Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré
and Canguilhem – also belongs to this idealist line, we are told, save one
‘extremely important nuance’. Whereas they ‘often attach themselves
consciously [par conscience] to the tradition of critical idealism . . . an entire
14
This text, ‘Conjuncture philosophique et recherche théorique marxiste’ (Althusser
1995, pp. 407–30), is clearly a transitional text between the rst and second ‘deni-
tions’ of philosophy.
Derrida • 635
portion of their work in fact leans in another direction’.15 Two pages

later, he will note that the work of this group holds certain ‘keys’ to ‘our
future’, a future Althusser identies with a ‘new materialist problematic’.
After specifying that the keys to this new materialist problematic will come
from the actual practice if not the explicit, conscious philosophical theses of
this group, Althusser concludes: ‘this struggle poses strategic and tactical
problems, in particular the problem of alliances in the theoretical and ideo-
logical struggle’.16
Althusser’s lecture was meant for Marxist philosophers. But in the audi-
ence that day, according to one version of the manuscript, was a group that
Althusser calls ‘our philosopher friends who are non-Marxist, but interested
in Marxism’. He then singles out one friend in particular who is in attendance:
‘mon ami Jacques Derrida’. Althusser notes that Derrida is not there, how-
ever, only out of friendship. What is at stake is the possibility of an ‘alliance’
in the current theoretical and ideological struggle and, perhaps, a ‘new mate-
rialist problematic’.
In a ‘dialogue’ with Élisabeth Roudinesco published almost forty years later,
Derrida discussed his earliest work at the École Normale Supérieure on Hus-
serl, focusing in particular on the historicity of the scientic or logicomath-
ematical object. After Derrida sent a copy of his 1962 Introduction to Husserl’s
Origin of Geometry to Althusser, he received a response that indicated, accord-
ing to Derrida, an interest in the possibility of an ‘alliance’ between a certain
stratum of Husserlian phenomenology and Marxism:
Like certain Marxists in his circle, or, on the other hand and in a different
way, like Trân-Duc-Thao, [Althusser] perceived (strategically) a possible
15
Althusser 1995, p. 416. Derrida, in his turn, will draw the same map: ‘In the rst
years of my philosophical studies, when I began to read and write on Husserl, at the
beginning of the 1950s, after the introduction of phenomenology by Sartre and Mer-
leau-Ponty, I felt the need to pose the question of science, of epistemology, starting
from phenomenology, what Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in a certain way never did.
Consequently, I wrote my rst essays on Husserl by orienting them towards ques-
tion of scientic objectivity and mathematics: Cavaillès, Tran-Duc-Thao, and also the
Marxist question’ (Derrida 2003, p. 20). The language of the ‘map’ and its implied
‘fronts’ returns in Derrida’s own description of his earliest work, the 1954 mémoire on
Husserl’s concept of genesis. Speaking of his interest in Thao and Cavaillès rather than
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: ‘on the philosophical and political map starting from which,
in the France of the 1950s, a student in philosophy tried to orient himself’ (Derrida
1990, p. viii). Note that the philosophical and the political are here indissociable.
16
636 • Jason Smith
alliance between Husserl’s transcendental idealism – notably in its genetic

and epistemological dimension – and a new Marxist problematic. I wasn’t
far from thinking so myself, though in a different way.17
The language of this passage is notable for its proximity to that of Althusser
in 1966. What is again proposed is a strategic ‘alliance’ that would articulate
together a certain reading of Husserl emphasising questions of science (its
foundations and origins, its genesis and its history) and the possibility of what
is here called not a ‘new materialist problematic’ but a ‘new Marxist problem-
atic’. But it is important to emphasise that the status of this articulation is, in
the last instance, political and strategic in nature, rather than philosophical.
Whether the alliance is unwitting and, as one says, ‘objective’, determined
by a unique political and philosophical conjuncture, or whether it is avowed,
taking the form of a more or less secret ‘conjuration’ (as Derrida puts it in
Specters of Marx), what governs such a relationship in the nal instance is a
convergence between two forces with no institutional or substantial links
that, before the necessities of battle, enter into a complicity in which no ruse
is off-limits.
Political and not philosophical – in the last instance. I insist upon the ques-
tion of the ‘alliance’ because I want to underline in what sense Derrida’s rela-
tion to Marxism in general – both dialectical materialism, Marxist philosophy,
as well as the ‘science’ of historical materialism and the critique of political
economy – cannot be understood. Trân-Duc-Thao’s 1951 book Phénoménologie
et matérialisme dialectique treats the relationship between Marxism and tran-
scendental idealism in strictly philosophical and, indeed, dialectical terms:
Marxism or dialectical materialism is nothing less than the ‘solution’ to the
contradictions and antinomies that Husserl rigorously formulates throughout
his work. Dialectical materialism is therefore the logical result of the internal
17
Derrida 2001b, p. 170. The letter Derrida refers to in this interview has now been
published, but seems to makes no reference to a ‘possible alliance’ between Husserl
and Marxism. Cf. Mallet & Michaud 2004, pp. 109–10. Nevertheless, ‘Lenin and Phi-
losophy’ will speak of an ‘objective alliance’ between Husserl and Lenin: ‘. . . Husserl,
at that time Lenin’s objective ally against empiricism and historicism – but only a
temporary ally and one who could not meet him, for Husserl, as a good “philoso-
pher,” believed he was going “somewhere”’ (Althusser 1971, p. 49). And yet, what
is so remarkable about a text like ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’, published only
three years after Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, is that Husserl wages war
on both historicism and theoreticism.
Derrida • 637
contradictions of Husserlian idealism, a result that is at once the ‘dépassement’

of the transcendental problematic and both the completion and annulment of
philosophy as such. Such a relation is described in the idiom of dialectical
and speculative logic, a movement in which dialectical materialism emerges
necessarily out of the objective contradictions of Husserl’s own text. As a
result, Thao can argue that the analyses undertaken in the generally unread
second half of his book (what he calls the ‘dialectic of real movement’) take
place ‘entirely on the plane of dialectical materialism’. In his 1954 mémoire on
the problem of ‘genesis’ in Husserl’s philosophy, Derrida maintains that this
denitive surpassing of Husserlian idealism has the odd effect of returning
Thao to a pre-phenomenological metaphysics that is not rigorously dialecti-
cal enough, a worldly genesis founded on a concept of ‘matter’ that is ‘not
animated by the dialectic’.18 The dialectical overcoming of the transcenden-
tal problematic results, then, in what Derrida calls a ‘relapse [retomber]’ that
abandons the ‘transcendental purity of the dialectic’ revealed in the practice of
Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions (of temporalisation, intersubjectiv-
ity and the ‘hyletic’ layer of the sensible), if not in his theoretical formulations:
‘We must reject Trân-Duc-Thao’s conclusions which . . . after having gotten as
close as possible to the transcendental purity of [Husserl’s] dialectic, relapse
into the difculties posed by a “worldly” genesis and a materialist dialectic’.
In a certain sense, Derrida argues that Thao’s method is not dialectical
enough, because the logic or scheme of ‘dépassement’ is not a truly dialectical
movement, a movement that is disclosed only through placing the dialectic
itself between phenomenological brackets. The term ‘purity’ here – the word
is almost a synonym for transcendental – indicates how much more complex,
indeed, how much more dialectical the relation between transcendental-
ity and the dialectical method is than the scheme presented by Thao.19 The
practice of phenomenological bracketing is never undertaken to disqualify or
18
Derrida 1990, p. 32. Derrida 1990, p. 257 n. 8.
19
This theme of the relation between the transcendental and the dialectical returns
in Glas, specically in the analyses of Hegel’s ‘sister’ (Antigone, the sister, and his
own). There he speaks of an ‘element excluded from the system that assures the
space of possibility of the system. . . . The transcendental has always been, strictly
speaking, the transcategorial, what cannot be received, formed, terminated in any
of the categories internal to the system. The vomit of the system. And if the sister,
the relation brother/sister represented here the transcendental position, ex-position?’
(Derrida 1981, p. 227).
638 • Jason Smith
‘negate’ a given philosopheme or category but to purify it or, in another philo-

sophical idiom, to draw a line of demarcation internal to the term, staking
out or re-marking a distance between the worldly and transcendental faces of
the concept. This ‘purity’ of the dialectic that is more dialectical than dialecti-
cal contradiction itself (in its wordly, metaphysical or speculative form), is
referred to in Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry as an ‘authentic
dialeticity’ that is a dialectic between the dialectical and the non-dialectical:
The dialecticity of genesis . . . is precisely and abundantly described by Husserl

at different levels, even though the word itself is never pronounced. We
have seen how the ‘activity’ of consciousness at the same time precedes and
comes after a passivity; that the movement of primordial temporalisation, the
ultimate foundation of all constitution, was dialectical through and through;
and that, as is the case with every authentic dialecticity, it was nothing but
the dialectic between the dialectical – the indenite, mutual and irreducible
implication of protentions and retentions – and the non-dialectical – the
absolute and concrete identity of the Living Present, universal form of all
consciousness.20
Only a phenomenological method can arrive at this pure dialecticity, only the
resources and techniques of the epochè can suspend the functioning of every
worldly or determined mode of the dialectical in order to bring out an origi-
nary or authentic dialecticity.
If, in 1954, Derrida argues that Tran relapses into a pre-phenomenological,
non-dialectical philosophy of matter, in 1962 Derrida will in turn sketch out
the contours of what Althusser calls a ‘a new materialist problematic’. Once
again, it is question of purity, a question of drawing a front internal to a con-
cept through a philosophical act: a single category divides in two. In a long
footnote at the close of the Introduction, Derrida speaks of a ‘pure materiality
of the Fact’ that would mark the absolute limit of phenomenological idealism –
an idealism that always transforms the fact into an ‘example’ of an eidos rather
than understanding it in its materiality and singularity – but would be accessi-
20
Derrida 1962, pp. 157–8. The dialectical movement described here is therefore
the dialectic between the dialectical – irreducible implication of traces – and the
transcendental, the ‘universal form’ of the living present. In a text on Artaud from
1967, Derrida differentiates between the ‘horizon of the dialectic’ and the dialectic of
a ‘conventional Hegelianism’ (Derrida 1967a, p. 364).
Derrida • 639
ble only by ‘exhausting’ phenomenological discourse and all of its techniques,

methods, only by taking phenomenology to its own extreme and forcing it to
indicate, silently, its threshold:
But only a phenomenology can lay bare the pure materiality of the Fact, by
passing to the limit of eidetic determination and by exhausting itself. Only
such a phenomenology can avoid the confusion between pure facticity with
one of its determinations.21
This materiality, what remains of matter after it has been puried or even
‘purged’ of every worldly or positivistic determination, would be a material-
ity that is dialectical and temporal through and through. Such is the project of
the early Derrida: an examination of the history of a science in order to arrive
a new concept of ‘history’ that insists on both a ‘pure’ dialecticity and a ‘pure
materiality of the Fact’. A new materialist and dialectical problematic, if not a
dialectical materialism.
In the same year Derrida published his Introduction in which this labour on
the notions of dialecticity and materiality is undertaken, Althusser published
a text – the famous ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ – that attempts to
locate the specicity of a properly materialist dialectic in its difference from
Hegel’s speculative logic. The target here is less Hegel, however, than a cer-
tain stratum of Marx’s own discourse, namely the tendency to reduce the
complexity of social antagonisms to mere manifestations (or ‘expressions’)
of a simple, fundamental contradiction. This simplication of class antago-
nisms to the directness of frontal opposition corresponds to what Hegel, in
the Science of Logic, called the ‘sharpening’ of difference, its renement into
the pointedness of sheer, frontal opposition, with none of the blunting effects
of multiple conicts and the obliquity of their interaction:
Thinking reason, however, sharpens, so to say, the blunt difference of diverse

terms, the mere manifoldness of representation, into essential difference, into
opposition. Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point
of contradiction do they become active and lively towards one another,
21
Derrida 1962, p. 169, note 1: ‘Mais seule une phénoménologie peut dénuder la
pure matérialité du Fait en se rendant au terme de la détermination eidétique, en
s’épuisant elle-même. Seule elle peut éviter la confusion de la pure facticité avec telle
ou telle de ses determinations.’
640 • Jason Smith
receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation

of the self-movement and spontaneous activity [Lebendigkeit].22
To this Hegelian logic of position and opposition, to this reduction of antago-

nism to the clean demarcation of a front, Althusser calls on Lenin’s analysis
of the ‘extremely unique situation’ of the 1917 revolution in order to develop
a theory of overdetermined contradiction, the sudden merging of otherwise
extremely differentiated social forces and class interests: that is, a theory of
revolutionary rupture.
On a purely formal level, Althusser’s philosophical strategy with regard to
Hegel anticipates Derrida’s own, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In a July 1971 interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta (pub-
lished in Promesses, a satellite journal of Tel Quel), Derrida stresses that the
‘conictuality of différance’ was rst mobilised specically, as was the case in
Althusser, against the Hegelian determination of difference as contradiction.23
Such a conictuality is irreducible to opposition and therefore not prey to
speculative or political mediation. It is a conictuality that determines differ-
ence neither as contradiction and opposition, nor as a mere diversity of posi-
tions that are, as Hegel demonstrates, indifferent to one another and therefore
not yet in conict with one another.24 Neither opposition nor mere diversity,
the conictuality of différance therefore takes place in ‘almost absolute prox-
imity to Hegel’,25 since the distance taken from the logic of contradiction does
not result in another determination of difference, but its overdetermination (to
use Althusser’s term). There is, therefore, nothing that distinguishes différance
from contradiction, no new determination grafted onto the term that would
permit the difference between them to appear as such, no new predicate or
mark allowing us to measure, from within the closure of the philosophical
eld, the distance taken from Hegel. The intervention here is political, not
philosophical.
I emphasise this purely formal resemblance between the strategies of
Derrida and Althusser’s with regard to Hegel in order to bring into relief a
22
Hegel 1969, p. 442.
23
24
Hegel 1969, pp. 418–24: ‘the indifference’ of the merely diverse. Of course, many
of the critiques of Althusser’s ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ accuse him of
empiricism, another name for the indifferent difference of the merely multiple.
25
Derrida • 641
decisive difference: by 1963, Derrida will no longer use the term ‘dialectics’
or its variant ‘dialecticity’. On the one hand, it should be emphasised that the
non-dialectisable conictuality of différance must be considered in relation to
the thematics of violence and of force that dominate Derrida’s work in the
1960s. Différance is an economy of violence – even an ‘économie-de-guerre’26 –
that, because it is a question of differentials of force, cannot be identied with
the fundamentally logical category of ‘contradiction’. Différance is, in short,
both more and less violent, more and less conictual than dialectical contradic-
tion. If, at the level of philosophical analysis, the two operations are very simi-
lar, Althusser, working within the framework of the Communist Party and
as a Communist in philosophy, must ‘save the name’ dialectics by isolating
the singularity of the Marxist dialectic, purging it of non-Marxist elements
that have grafted themselves onto Marxist theory. Derrida, in his turn, aban-
dons the conceptual chain dialectics-position-opposition-contradiction. In
the 1971 Positions interview, Derrida is asked by Jean-Louis Houdebine to
explain the distance he has taken from the terms dialectic and contradiction.
Asked whether a ‘materialist prise de position’ in philosophy does not neces-
sarily require a commitment to the ‘double motif of “matter” and “contradic-
tion”,’ Derrida responds by arguing that ‘[the] conictuality of différance . . . can
be called contradiction only on the condition of demarcating it [la démarquer]
by means of a long work on Hegel’s contradiction . . .’.27 In short, the Althus-
serian operation.
Houdebine’s reference to a materialist prise de position is accompanied by
a reference to Lenin and, implicitly, to Althusser’s February 1968 text ‘Lenin
and Philosophy’.28 I will conclude with this text and what I consider to be
Derrida’s relation to it, but, for the moment, it is necessarily to underline that
in the years 1967–72, Derrida asserted that deconstruction is a strategic opera-
tion and a practice that is never neutral but, to the contrary, always inter-
venes in highly determined theoretical conjunctures in order to transform
26
Derrida 1972a, p. 11. It cannot be emphasised enough the extent to which the
reection on difference Derrida undertakes in the 1960s is also a reection on conict,
violence and even ‘war’ – the irreducibility of a violence that is the condition for
phenomenality as such, an ontological or transcendental violence that is structural
and therefore unavoidable.
27
Derrida 1972b, pp. 60–1; my italics.
28
Houdebine’s explicit reference is to a much weaker text of Philippe Sollers, ‘Lenin
and Materialism’, published in 1970 in the issue 43 of Tel Quel.
642 • Jason Smith
the ‘conictual and subordinating structure’ within which it intervenes.

This denition of philosophy as a practice of intervention is an Althusse-
rian formulation. Indeed, it was between 1966 and 1968, at the very moment
Althusser suggests a possible alliance between Marxist philosophy and Der-
rida, that a working group at the École Normale Supérieure that included
Balibar, Macherey and Badiou among others began to develop this ‘second’
denition of philosophy that will be presented in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’. To
put it as crudely as possible, I would go so far as to say that, in these years and
in this very complex and overdetermined theoretical conjuncture, Derrida’s
denition of deconstruction is Leninist. I am not even certain he would have,
provided there were time and space allotted for all the reservations he would
have proposed, simply rejected this formulation.29 But the relation between
these two strategies of intervention must be posed with more precision.
There are three moments in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, that should be isolated
if we are to address this question.
1) Most analyses of this text have not underlined the extent to which the
notion of philosophy as a practice of intervention is modelled on the inter-
vention of the analyst in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. The relation
between philosophy and politics is described as an economy of repression
and ‘denegation’ (that is, Verneinung), whereby the political position of a phil-
osophical thought is only allowed to appear in the form of a symptomatic
denial and misrecognition. Such an economy or structure is analogous to the
clinical structure of neurosis and its traits (‘rumination’, the priority of the
question, the compulsive repetition of the same inversions of terms within a
relative stable structure). The task of dialectical materialism is therefore iden-
tied with the analytic act – dialectical materialism is cast as ‘cure’ to phi-
losophy’s neurosis. Such an act on the part of the analyst or the philosopher
takes the form not of a production of new knowledge or the introduction of
novel interpretation, but a minimal and yet decisive dislocation of the prevail-
ing relations in the structure. Lenin’s denition of philosophy represents a
29
In his 1975–6 Seminar ‘Théorie et Practique’, Derrida devoted an entire session
(around 20 pages) to an analysis of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? In the same seminar,
we also nd a long discussion of Althusser’s ‘Sur la dialectique matérialiste’. These
texts can be consulted at the UC Irvine Special Collections.
Derrida • 643
rst, ‘wild’ analysis of the neurotic structure of philosophy, an intervention

that ‘fai[t] bouger quelque chose’.30
2) The second moment is the rather elegant formulation of the distinction
between science and philosophy: the former ‘unites’, the latter ‘divides’.31 This
distinction recalls Mao’s demarcation of antagonistic contradictions from non-
antagonistic contradictions, between philosophy as a practice of division – the
one divides in two – and the mediation of non-antagonistic contradictions.
Philosophy divides because it has no object and, therefore, no history. The sci-
ences have a history: a moment of inauguration or Stiftung, the production of
a new object and the opening of a eld of research, the beginning of a history
that is both fundamentally open, subject to enormous variations, inventions
and discoveries, while always maintaining the unity of a history, since all of
these discontinuities take place within the horizon determined by the struc-
ture of the object itself. Philosophy has no history precisely because it cannot
rely on the consistency of the object of science to guarantee the open unity of
its history, that is, the accumulation, capitalisation and constant ‘progress’
of a determined scientic eld. In short, scienticity is always founded on a
minimal consensus concerning the nature of the object one is discussing, a
consensus or unity within which all debate, innovation, and the production of
new predicates takes place. In turn, philosophy is the eternal enemy of discus-
sion, debate and conversation, since these ‘synthetic’ activities, resulting in
the production of new knowledges, require a consensus as their condition.
3) The entirety of ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ is an explication of this Mao-
like slogan (science unites, philosophy divides), and the text’s best-known
formulations – philosophy dened as ‘drawing a line of demarcation’ and
as the ‘void of a distance taken’ – will give a needed precision to this brutal
distinction. What is necessary, then, is to dene the place of philosophy in the
30
Cf. Althusser 1995, pp. 353–4: ‘On appellera « pratique philosophique » (II) une
pratique de la cure philosophique. Dans la « cure philosophique, » comme dans la
« cure analytique », il s’agit de « faire bouger » quelque chose. . . . Cette pratique (II)
a pour objectif la « guérison » de la névrose philosophique. . . . Lénine a « donné la
parole » à l’inconscient philosophique. . . . Cure « sauvage », car Lénine a seulement
appelé ce lieu par son nom . . .’.
31
Althusser 1971, p. 26. Is it strange that the rst lines of the Genet column in Glas
appear to cite the Maoist slogan ‘one divides in two’? ‘Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt
déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes se divise en deux’ (Derrida
1981, p. 1). The expression is repeated on several occasions throughout the book.
644 • Jason Smith
topological relation both to the sciences and the ideological struggle. Since
philosophy has no object and therefore no history, it must be dened as the
‘strange theoretical site where nothing happens’ – that is, where no knowledge
or historical acquisitions are produced and sedimented, nothing ‘new’ discov-
ered or invented in the course of an open history. Philosophy’s site is strange
because it does not belong to the system of places and regions articulated in
a specic theoretical conjuncture (or ‘topique’, as Althusser will sometimes
say, using the Freudian term). As with the analytic act in the clinical practice
of psychoanalysis, the philosophical act consists in a mere displacement of
the relations between the elements of a constituted conjuncture, tipping the
balance of power in one direction rather than another. Such an act can only be
identied by the trace it leaves in the existing asymmetrical and hierarchical
structure, since it appears only through its effects, through the displacement
it forces. This is why philosophy is identied with the nothing, or a ‘void,’
and yet it has real effects: like Spinoza’s ‘cause’, it is not only immanent in its
effects, but is nothing outside them.
The concluding formulation Althusser hits upon is mysterious: philoso-
phy is only the ‘the simple fact of demarcation [le simple fait de se démarquer],
therefore, the void of a distance taken [le vide d’un distance prise]’. It is impor-
tant to note here that what is prise in this phrasing is not a punctual posi-
tion, but a distance. What is designated is therefore not an act of positing
or a thematically formulated position, but the movement of a spacing. This
spacing or distancing – this Ent-fernung – is identied with the void precisely
because nothing happens in this movement other than the ‘se démarquer’
of a philosophical concept, signier or ‘mark’, in such a way the elements of
given conjuncture are spaced in a novel conguration. Derrida, in his turn,
describes the practice of deconstruction as an intervention that does not, as
I have already underlined, remain neutral, but takes side in a specic theo-
retical conjuncture, a given ‘violent hierarchy’. Being partisan in philosophy
means choosing or taking one of the terms in the structure, using it as a lever
of intervention to displace the given relations of force in a ‘conictual and
subordinating structure’. Because philosophy has no language or object of its
own, it must necessarily appropriate one of the already existing terms of the
conguration and transform or dislocate the relatively stable existing relations
of force. Philosophy, then, adds nothing to the already existing conguration
of forces. It is nothing more than an act of leverage, a strategic appropriation
Derrida • 645
that must seize one of the already constituted marks in order to ‘immediately
demarcate it [pour l’en démarquer aussitôt]’,32 that is, to perform an operation of
‘re-marking’ or a ‘double science’ of the ‘double mark’.33
At the close of his long interview with Houdebine and Scarpetta, Derrida
denes what he has been calling deconstruction’s ‘practice of the écart’ as
a movement of spacing, a ‘spacing that designates nothing, nothing that is,
no presence at a distance [l’espacement ne désigne rien, rien qui soit, aucune
présence à distance]’.34 The question that I would like to pose is, then, simply
this: where is the line of demarcation between this ‘spacing [that] designates
nothing’ and the philosophical nothing that, according to Althusser, is not a
position but a distance taken? Who will draw the line of demarcation between
these two practices of spacing, between the demarcation and the strategy, the
science – albeit double – of the ‘re-mark’?
32
Derrida 1972b, p. 81; my italics.
33
Derrida 1972a, p. 10.
34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Foucault, Reader and Critic of Marx
Roberto Nigro
In the following pages, I would like to sketch out

some directions for research. Rather than present-
ing a possible or impossible summary of Foucault’s
relationship to Marx’s œuvre, I wish to suggest some
signposts for future work. My hypothesis is simple.
Foucault’s work is marked from beginning to end
by a confrontation with Marx. However, I suggest
distinguishing between two levels: Foucault’s actual
confrontation with Marx and Foucault’s potential
confrontation with Marx. These two levels are not
opposed to one another like night and day; nor they
prompt musings on an opposition between what is
the case and what one would like to be the case. I
seek a basis for the development of the second level
in the rst, even if what is at issue is, in my opinion,
to be found in the potential confrontation. I believe
that by posing to Marx questions that derive from
Foucault, and to Foucault issues that emerge from
Marx, we can discover new aspects of the works in
question and thereby discover new routes for con-
temporary reection.
By way of introduction, I would like to clarify
certain points. It is futile to imagine that Foucault’s
œuvre is traversed from one end to the other by
a ‘systematic’ confrontation with Marx. This does
not mean that it is impossible to envisage an effort
648 • Roberto Nigro
to reconstruct, step by step, the Auseinandersetzung between Foucault and

Marx (the German word seems to me to express what is at stake more clearly,
since it retains the dual sense of comparison and confrontation). But we should
also be aware that the roads which lead Foucault to Marx resemble labyrinths
more than they do straight lines.
I shall summarise the issues involved in this confrontation in three points.
First, it means asking how heavily Marx’s work weighs in Foucault’s. Sec-
ondly, we need to ask which Marx Foucault takes up in his analyses; what
Foucault excludes from his work; and why he privileges one track rather
than another. Thirdly, although Foucault’s œuvre does not make it easy to
distinguish between its author’s struggle with Marx and his struggle with
Marxism, it is preferable to differentiate the two. I believe that while Fou-
cault acknowledge a kernel of Marxism in which Marx’s discourse was also
involved, he tried at various points in his work to position Marx at a remove
from Marxism.
Throughout his philosophical career as well as his biographical trajectory,
Foucault’s confrontation with Marx and Marxism was twofold. He rejected
Marxism qua knowledge inscribed in the rationality of the Western world and
sought to show that this knowledge constructed a system of power that he
could not but refuse. Any Marxism committed to the system of power was
rejected by Foucault. Hence his unease over, and mistrust of, the Marxist dis-
course dominating his epoch, which appeared to him to be a reverse sign of
the same power mechanism. It seems to me that the words accompanying his
response to the question, ‘What is to be put in place of the system?’, clearly
convey this orientation: ‘I think that to imagine a different system actually still
forms part of the system’.1 If we regard Foucault’s œuvre as an attempt not to
seal thought up in a closed system, but to confront it with a kind of innite
supersession whereby it avoids the trap of identity, we can understand why,
from a certain point onwards, he came to mistrust ‘like the plague’ any Marx-
ism that turned into a system. For Foucault, it was a question of using Marx
like a toolbox and not seeking the lost meaning or revealing the true meaning
of Marx’s words.2 For him, as for us, interrogating Marx meant interrogating
the ‘matter’ of his thought and taking all the risks involved in such an enter-
1
‘Par-delà le bien and le mal’, in Foucault 1994b, pp. 233–4.
2
See ‘Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarrasser du
marxisme’, in Foucault 1994c, p. 611.
Foucault • 649
prise, including failure. For Marx is not to be read in order to mythologise

him or to make him survive the test of time. Foucault worked to detotalise
the image of Marx – which is a way of saying that he wanted to use Marx for
certain purposes, without completely subscribing to him.
In reading Foucault’s œuvre, we can see the extent to which Marx was a con-
ceptual character with several masks for him. Marx is sometimes presented
as a friend, sometimes as the enemy, and often as both at once. That is why if
Foucault approaches Marx, he distances himself just as often, attributes masks
to him, thinks with him without citing him, cites him in order to criticise him
or those who would appear to be his followers, but who seem to Foucault to
resemble his ‘dreadful gnomes’ – especially since he was troubled by his era’s
copious references to Marx. His modesty and mistrust of the overly familiar
kept him from directly confronting Marx.
My aim is not to stage the possible confrontation between the authors in
order to make them say what they did not say. I would like to examine what
remained unsaid, positioning myself between what they did and did not say,
so that they impel us to say what they could not say. The following pages do
not claim to provide an exhaustive analysis. I sketch a series of stages, which
proceed from the supersession of humanism and exclusion of Hegelianism
to the confrontation with the Marx to whom Foucault refers – that is to say,
the theoretician of the articulation of practices. In conclusion, I shall sketch the
new theoretical concerns about Marxism that mark Foucault’s work from the
second half of the 1970s.
Nietzsche, Heidegger and Althusser:

the supersession of humanism
In order to situate Foucault’s theoretical debut, we must rst of all return to
Nietzsche and Heidegger and then consider the role played by the thought
of Althusser. There are many reasons for this. Here I shall conne myself to
a few formulations from these authors, so as to identify the limbo in which
Foucault’s reection is situated.
If Nietzsche stressed the absolutely historical character of the human
being,3 Heidegger, taking up such meditations, sought to pose the ontological
3
See Nietzsche 1997.
problem of history.4 For him, an understanding of the essence of historical-

ity leads not to an anthropology, but to an ontology. Thus, Heidegger aban-
dons an analysis of man as man, proceeding to an ontological reection on the
mode of being of existence as Dasein. Subsequently, following the Kehre, Hei-
degger also abandoned this approach: he deliberately set aside any reference
to the role of Dasein for an interpretation of being.5 For him, understanding
man comes round to understanding being. That is why, he tells us, we are on
a level where there is principally being.6 This way of thinking, going beyond any
humanism, likewise abandons any category bound up with subjectivity and
objectivity, for Heidegger does not pose the question of who man is, but how
he remains in the opening of being that Heidegger calls his ek-sistence.7
By a different route, Althusser likewise contributed to the supersession
of humanism. Taking up the issue of Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism, he
wrote:
It is impossible to know anything about men except on the absolute

precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced
to ashes. So any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration
of a theoretical anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes,
theoretically.8
Althusser emphasised that, in rejecting the essence of man as a theoretical

foundation, Marx expelled the philosophical categories of subject, empiri-
cism, and ideal essence from all the domains where they held sway. He
also stressed the displacement effected by Marx, when he replaced the old
individuals-human essence pair by new concepts such as forces of produc-
tion, relations of production, and so on.
It is not difcult to trace this starting from Marx’s work. In the Grundrisse,
Marx sketches an analysis that is increasingly focused on the relations of pro-
duction and the productive forces. One senses a kind of fascination in him
when he prepares to describe the mutual, many-sided dependence of indi-
4
See Heidegger 1962, pp. 444–9.
5
See Heidegger 1988.
6
See Heidegger 1993.
7
See Heidegger 1988. And See Schürhmann 1982, where readers will nd a detailed
analysis of Heidegger’s trajectory before and after the Kehre.
8
Althusser 1969, pp. 229–30.
Foucault • 651
viduals, ‘indifferent to one another’, which ‘forms their social connection’.

Marx shows that:
The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and
the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and
objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another,
but as their subordination to relations which exist independently of them and
which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals.9
Marx is increasingly interested in the operation of the social mechanism and

in its power.
Escaping Hegelianism: Foucault as follower of Nietzsche

We are very familiar with the importance that Foucault attributes to the reec-
tions of these authors. At a time when he was in the process of distancing him-
self from Hegelianism and the many forms it can take, reading (among many
others) Heidegger, Nietzsche and Althusser functioned as the only means of
access to a quite different culture.10
From its inception, Foucault’s thought enables us to think the connections
between the problems posed by these authors. Although it does not have pre-
cisely the same theoretical concerns, it is situated in the same constructive
space.11 Foucault’s rst work bore the stamp of a reection on rationality and
9
Marx 1973, pp. 156–7.
10
See ‘Le retour de la morale’, in Foucault 1994d, p. 703, where he claims that ‘my
whole philosophical development has been determined by my reading of Heidegger.
But I recognise that it’s Nietzsche who prevailed’. See also ‘Structuralisme et post-
structuralisme’, in Foucault 1994d, pp. 431–8; ‘Entretien with Michel Foucault’, in
Foucault 1994d, pp. 41–62; and ‘Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal’, in Foucault 1994a,
pp. 513–18, where he asserts: ‘our task is to free ourselves denitively from human-
ism’ (p. 514). I am not claiming to mark a direct liation between these two intel-
lectual currents and Foucault’s reections. Moreover, it is necessary to stress much
more rmly than I can here the distinction between recourse to Nietzsche during the
1960s, when it was a question of escaping the dominant phenomenology of the time,
and during the 1970s, when Nietzsche played a fundamental role in the confronta-
tion with certain Marxist currents. See Ansell-Pearson 1991 and, on the subject of the
relationship between Foucault and Heidegger, Dreyfus 1994.
11
In order to avoid the idea that the links between these themes are produced in
linear fashion in Foucault’s work, I would like to refer to Pierre Macherey’s article
‘At the Sources of Histoire de la Folie’. The author analyses these Foucauldian begin-
nings very closely. Macherey bases his interpretation on the rectication that occurred
between 1954 and 1962, when Foucault prepared to republish his book Maladie mentale
formed part of a eld of complete renewal of perspectives on these general

major themes.12 Foucault’s books – particularly L’Histoire de la folie or Les Mots
et les choses – appeared
at the beginning of the major controversies that marked a complete renewal

in ways of thinking and writing inherited from the immediate post-war
period, with the simultaneous problematization of narrative realism,
philosophies of the subject, continuist representations, historical progress,
dialectical rationality, and so on.13
Obviously, there were various stages in this phase of his intellectual develop-
ment. Pupil of Hyppolite, Foucault had crossed the road that led from Hegel
to Marx. He had immersed himself in psychological studies to such an extent
that the label of psychologist stayed with him in academic circles until 1968.
The philosophical problem of anthropology haunted his thought at the same
time as the horizon of Daseinanalyse attracted his interest. Thus, when he
wrote his rst book, he became involved in a theoretical revolution that led
him to reject any philosophy based on a concrete horizon of anthropological
reection on man. To this end, he had followed the critique of Binswanger
and recognised that the project of anthropology must be capable of situating
itself in opposition to all forms of psychological positivism which exhaust the
signicance of man in the reductive concept of homo natura. The supporting
surface of anthropology had to be replaced in the context of an ontological
reection whose main theme was presence to being, existence, Dasein.
After all, the man-being (Mensch-sein) is only the actual, concrete content
of what ontology analyses as the transcendental structure of Dasein, of
presence to the world.14
et personnalité under the new title of Maladie mentale et psychologie. Macherey shows how
the reference to Nietzsche and Heidegger in the latter replaces references to young
Marx in the former. He adds that ‘by displacing the idea of a psychological truth of
mental illness towards the idea of an ontological truth of madness, this rectication
leaves intact the presupposition of a human nature, even if the latter arises from a
poetic evocation instead of from a positive knowledge’ (Macherey 1998, p. 92).
12
See Macherey 1992, pp. iii–vi.
13
Ibid.
14
‘Introduction’, in Foucault 1994a, p. 66.
Foucault • 653
Moreover, Foucault recognised that Nietzsche represents the point where any
interrogation of man ends, for it is in the death of man that the death of God
is consummated. Foucault wrote:
The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the eld of philosophy
reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: der
Übermensch.15
Foucault posed the question of whether man, in his forms of existence, was
the only way to arrive at man. This approach impeded any philosophical
humanism, any philosophy based on a problematic of human nature.
These problems were to haunt Foucault’s rst attempt at a historical inquiry,
which does not escape the literary fascination of the subject. Histoire de la folie
is a work that can be read on several levels. Many questions run through it.
Foucault queries the status accorded to the mad in European societies between
the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. He asks
how these strange characters – madmen – began to be perceived in a society.
Histoire de la folie deals with a classic problem – the eternal debate between
reason and unreason. This complex work is marked by a dual movement.
On the one hand, Foucault reects on the link between reason and unreason
on the basis of literary or philosophical experiences. On the other, he reworks
the concept of man in order to reect on the historical relationship between
reason and unreason. At the time of Histoire de la folie, Foucault assumed the
existence of a species of living, voluble, visible madness that the mechanics
of power and psychiatry had thereafter repressed and reduced to silence.
This text, which ponders the power of exclusion, is not far removed from
the meaning of the Nietzschean experience of tragedy. Just as, for Nietzsche,
the deadly struggle between the Dyonisiac and the Apollonian ends with the
death of tragedy, the power of darkness yielding to the light of Socratism, so
for Foucault these nocturnal powers fade before the truth of the sun. And,
as with Nietzsche, these beginnings were only a step on the path that led
him to distance himself from any notion of depth. For Foucault, this begin-
ning would only last for a while: he too would come to understand that mad-
ness (as Blanchot wrote) did not constitute a fundamental experience situated
15
Foucault 2007c, p. 130.
‘outside history, of which poets (artists) have been, and still can be, the wit-
nesses, the victims or the heroes’.16
With these references, I am endeavouring to show how, via Nietzschean
and Heideggerian critique, Foucault situated his examination at a consider-
able remove from any Marxism as well as any Hegelianism. Foucault’s endea-
vour consists in detaching himself from any anthropological truth of man, of
any dream of an end to history, which is the utopia of causal thought systems.
For him, Nietzsche had ‘burned for us . . . the intermingled promises of the
dialectic and anthropology’:
He took the end of time and transformed it into the death of God and the
odyssey of the last man; he took up anthropological nitude once again,
but in order to use it as a basis for the prodigious leap of the superman;
he took up once again the great continuous chain of History, but in order
to bend it round into the innity of the eternal return.17
Foucault’s struggle with Marx takes shape as a rejection of the path pur-
sued by a certain Marxism after Marx: it is a refusal of dialectical culture – a
refusal whose high point is to be found in Nietzsche’s intellectual experience.
Nietzsche showed that the death of God signied the disappearance of man,
since
man and God had strange kinship relations, they were at once twin brothers
and one another’s father and son, so that, with God dead, man could not
but disappear at the same time, leaving behind him the dreadful gnome.18
In Nietzsche’s tracks, Heidegger likewise grasped the end of the dialectic,

while trying to recover the fundamental relation to being in a return to Greek
origins. Foucault also cites the examples of Russell, Wittgenstein, and Lévi-
Strauss, in order to show how a non-dialectical culture has emerged in utterly
distinct elds. He thus distances himself from an interpretation of Marx in
which history seems to play a negative role. History
16
Blanchot 1986, p. 15.
17
Foucault 1970, p. 263. An important reference in the context of readings of
Nietzsche is unquestionably Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), which
helped free people from dialectical thinking.
18
‘L’homme est-t-il mort?’, in Foucault 1994a, p. 542.
Foucault • 655
augments the pressures of need, . . . causes want to increase, obliging men

constantly to work and to produce more and more, although they receive
no more than what is indispensable to them to subsist, and sometimes a
little less. . . . In this way the number of those maintained by History at the
limit of their conditions of existence ceaselessly grows; and because of this,
those conditions become increasingly more precarious until they approach
the point where existence itself will become impossible . . . according to the
Marxist interpretation, History, by dispossessing man of his labour, causes
the positive form of his nitude to spring into relief – his material truth is
nally liberated.19
The dialectic in a sense promises man that he will become an authentic, true
man. It promises man to man. Freeing oneself from this culture means no lon-
ger reasoning in terms of morality, values, reconciliation. This means freeing
oneself from a whole series of postulates that govern this discourse: releasing
oneself from the sovereign subject and the concept of consciousness;20 from
that of the author and the idea of a continuous history. All these elements are
interconnected:
Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function

of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may
be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without
restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject
– in the form of historical consciousness – will once again be able to
appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at
a distance by difference, and nd in them what might be called his abode.
Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making
human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and
all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system,
time is conceived in terms of totalisation and revolutions are never more
than moments of consciousness.21
19
Foucault 1970, pp. 260–1.
20
See ‘What Is an Author?’, in Foucault 1994a, pp. 789–820. On this subject, it is
necessary to analyse the inuence on Foucault of the works of Georges Bataille and
Maurice Blanchot. See Warin 1994 and Prély 1977.
21
Foucault 1972, p. 12. See also ‘Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle
d’épistémologie’, in Foucault 1994a, pp. 699–700.
Here Foucault is pondering the epistemological mutation in the concept of

history which, he says, has yet to be completed. It is also important to stress
that he dates the point at which this epistemological mutation began back
to Marx. He emphasises that the theme of a global history has played a con-
stant role since the nineteenth century: it involved ‘preserv[ing], against all
decentrings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin gures of anthropol-
ogy and humanism’.22 The role played by Marx was quite different, for Marx
had decentred history through his historical analyses of the relations of pro-
duction, economic determinations, and the class struggle. It had been neces-
sary to anthropologise Marx, make him a historian of the totality, rediscover
him as a proponent of humanism, in order to check the decentring he had
effected – in the same way that people had been led to interpret Nietzsche in
terms of transcendental philosophy and to reduce his genealogy to a search
for the origin:
All the treasure of bygone days was crammed into the old citadel of this
history; it was thought to be secure; it was sacralized; it was made the last
resting-place of anthropological thought; it was even thought that its most
inveterate enemies could be captured and turned into vigilant guardians.
But the historians had long ago deserted the old fortress and gone to work
elsewhere; it was realised that neither Marx nor Nietzsche were carrying
out the guard duties that had been entrusted to them.23
Towards a genealogy of the technologies of power

From the 1970s, Foucault’s theoretical work shifted. According to him, as a
result of circumstances and particular events, his theoretical interests changed.
In particular, he was led to interest himself in the problem of prisons: ‘This
new preoccupation offered itself as a veritable escape from the lassitude I
was experiencing in the face of literary matter.’24 Throughout his career, Fou-
cault never stopped reinterpreting his work. In the numerous interviews he
gave, which double the size of his œuvre, he tried to identify the themes that
were his theoretical concern as his research progressed. His retrospective
22
Foucault 1972, p. 12.
23
Foucault 1972, p. 14.
24
‘Je perçois l’intolérable’, in Foucault 1994b, p. 203.
Foucault • 657
glance is always situated at the level of the reection that accompanies it. This
means that he constantly tried to impart a new meaning to his work or to
displace what was at issue in it. Although, in following Foucault, there is the
risk of losing track of the breaks, the ruptures, the leaps that accompanied the
development of his research, his interviews nevertheless indicate the emer-
gence of certain concepts. Thus, he says that in the 1960s he had sought to
retrace how
a certain number of institutions, setting out to function in the name of reason

and normality, had exercised their power over groups of individuals, in
relation to forms of behaviour, ways of being, acting or speaking, constituted
as anomaly, madness, illness, etc. At bottom, I’d constructed nothing other
than a history of power.25
And it is in the same direction that his research continued during the 1970s.
Let us add that Foucault subsequently came to regard the analysis of subjec-
tivity as the thread that ran through his research:
I instead sought to produce a history of the different modes of subjectivation

of human beings in our culture; in this optic, I’ve dealt with three modes
of objectication that transform human beings into subjects.26
Simplifying my reading, it seems to me that Foucault’s theoretical output in

the 1970s can be divided into two parts: the rst, spanning the rst half of
the decade, concludes with the publication of Surveiller et punir; the second
begins with the publication of La Volonté de savoir. The early 1970s witnessed
an increased interest on Foucault’s part in Marx’s historical research. In his
own way, he examines the genealogy of capitalism. When he tackles the issue
of the penal system, he begins to take a growing interest in the control mecha-
nisms created by modern society. In a new swing of the pendulum, he attends
to institutions and practices that are, in a sense, situated below the thresh-
old of expressivity. Foucault shows that from the beginning of the nineteenth
century a whole series of institutions functioned on the same model, obey-
ing the same rules – i.e. a mechanism of surveillance in which individuals
were attached to a punitive, correctional, or sanitary apparatus. Hospitals,
25
‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, in Foucault 1994d, p. 82.
26
‘Le sujet et le pouvoir’, in Foucault 1994d, p. 223.
asylums, orphanages, colleges, approved school, factories, and so on formed

part of a major social form of power that was established at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, and which was doubtless one of the operating condi-
tions of industrial, capitalist society.27 Foucault stresses that capitalism was
not able to function with a system of political power indifferent to individu-
als. He argues:
There came a time when it was necessary for everyone to be effectively

perceived by the eye of power. When, in the division of labour, there
was a need for some people who were capable of doing this, and others
who were capable of doing that; when there was also a fear that popular
movements of resistance, or inertia, or revolt would emerge to disrupt this
whole capitalist order that was in the process of being born, then a precise,
concrete surveillance over all individuals was required. . . .28
If Marx describes the West’s economic take-off with reference to the pro-
cesses that made capital accumulation possible, Foucault stresses the means
of managing the accumulation of human beings, which made a political
take-off possible with respect to traditional forms of power. The accumula-
tion of human beings cannot be separated from the accumulation of capital. It
would not have been possible to resolve the problem of accumulating human
beings without the development of an apparatus of production capable both
of maintaining and utilising them. Conversely, the techniques that made the
cumulative multiplicity of human beings useful accelerated the dynamic of
capital accumulation. At a less general level, the technological mutations in
the apparatus of production, the division of labour, and the development of
disciplinary processes were intimately related. Each rendered the other pos-
sible and necessary; each served as a model for the other.
Foucault demonstrates that the disciplines are techniques for ensuring the
regulation of human multiplicities. They are enrolled in the task of making
the exercise of power as cheap as possible and seeing to it that the results of
this social power are pushed to maximum intensity and extended as far as
possible, without failures or gaps. The aim of the disciplines is to increase
27
See ‘Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons’, in Foucault 1994b, p. 431.
28
‘Le pouvoir, une bête magnique’, in Foucault 1994c, p. 374. See also ‘L’impossible
prison’, in Foucault 1994d, pp. 20–43 and ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’, in Foucault
1994b, pp. 306–15.
Foucault • 659
both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. This triple
objective responds to a well-known historical conjuncture: the major demo-
graphical spurt of the eighteenth century and the growth of the apparatus of
production. With respect to demographic expansion, the disciplines present
themselves as an anti-nomadic procedure. They consist in a set of tiny techni-
cal inventions that made it possible to increase the utility of multiplicities by
reducing the drawbacks of power. For Foucault, the real, corporeal disciplines
constituted the substratum of formal, juridical liberties. Thus, he can assert
that the Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the dis-
ciplines. The extension of disciplinary methods forms part of a broad histori-
cal process: the development at approximately the same time of many other
technologies – agronomic, industrial, economic. Among these technologies,
according to Foucault, panopticism has been largely ignored. The history of
the West is marked by the invention of systems of
domination of an extreme rationality. It took a long time to arrive at this,

and still more time to discover what lay behind it. A whole set of goals,
techniques and methods falls within it: discipline reigns in schools, the
army, the factory.
Foucault adds: ‘The power of reason is a bloody power’.29

Foucault’s research into disciplinary power, the society of control, the birth
of the punitive society outline the genealogy of modern state power. By pin-
pointing a series of technologies for governing bodies and individuals, it indi-
cates the emergence of the modern form of subjectivity. This intersects with
the research pursued by Marx in Capital. In both cases, the genealogy of capi-
talist society is traced from viewpoints that are not mutually exclusive, but
which are integrated in describing the process of accumulation of forces of
production and forces of political power. Foucault claims that it was not until
the nineteenth century that it was known what exploitation was, but there
was still hesitation on the subject of power. He stresses that we know approxi-
mately who exploits, where the prot goes, through whose hands it passes,
and where it is re-invested, whereas we are still ignorant of what power is.
He states:
29
‘La torture, c’est la raison’, in Foucault 1994c, p. 395. It is clear that a detailed
analysis of all these themes is to be found in one of the most important works written
by Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).
And Marx and Freud are perhaps insufcient to help us to know this
extremely enigmatic thing – at one visible and invisible, present and hidden,
invested everywhere – that is called power.30
Although the respective œuvres of Marx and Foucault can be used to recon-
struct the genealogy of modern, capitalist, Western society, they cannot be
superimposed. I believe that the Foucauldian reading of Marx contains points
of interest, but also some lacunae. To read Marx, Foucault proposes an optic
that accentuates some aspects of his own work – particularly those that revolve
around the relations of force, class struggle, and violence that run through
society. According to Foucault, Marx analysed the real functioning of power:
It seems to me that we can nd the basic elements of an analysis of this

kind in a certain number of texts. . . . We can obviously also nd them in
volume one of Capital. . . . In the rst instance, what we nd there is that
there is not one power, but several powers.31
Foucault’s Marx describes the emergence of a social eld through rules of

pure immanence. All the elements that produce a social eld are produced
there themselves as they produce it. There is not a certain prior social order,
which is applied to individuals from without. Relations of force, the class war,
different technologies of production or power – these produce a social eld
that is not established once and for all. In this analysis, there is no trace of
teleology. Everything develops beyond good and evil, without there being
someone behind the curtain ultimately controlling the mechanism.
Foucault devotes himself to attending to the roar of battle that resounds
throughout society. He is interested in grasping the different forms of gov-
ernment, ever changeable, that emerge on this terrain. But, contrary to Marx,
he does not seek to grasp the difference in perspectives, values, ways of life,
desires, of which each subject engaged in struggle is the bearer. Nor does
he concentrate on analysing the possible forms, albeit incomplete, to which
each battle might give rise. In history, he seeks neither hidden meanings nor
possibilities, but the positive forms that crystallise in each epoch. A whole
area, clearly present in Marx, involving the various and changing forms of
social exploitation eluded him, even if he tried to encompass it and extend
30
‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’, in Foucault 1994b, p. 312.
31
‘Les mailles du pouvoir’, in Foucault 1994d, p. 186.
Foucault • 661
it through the analysis of the microphysical forms of power with which the
social eld is striated.
From technologies of government to technologies of the self

During the 1970s, Foucault’s theoretical and political work was drastically
altered by the issue of social change and the revolution in forms of existence.
He tried to give a response to the questions posed by his age. That is why,
starting from the second half of the 1970s, he began a new critique of Marxism
and of possible readings derived from Marx’s œuvre. In this respect, La Volonté
de savoir is an emblematic text, for it represents the beginning of the devel-
opment of a new critique of Marxism. It is important to stress that Foucault
discovered a common epistemological root between Marxism and Freudian-
ism and it was on this couple that he was subsequently to practise his cri-
tique. Balibar has written that, with this critique, Foucault wished radically to
question the self-evidence and efcacity of a certain leftism or revolutionary
utopianism.32
When Foucault works around the concepts of ‘domination’, ‘direction’, and
‘government’, while trying to dene a theory of state apparatuses, his theo-
retical aim is to criticise the idea of a repressive society (dubbed, on several
occasions, the Reichian hypothesis). His work had long had the aim of freeing
the eld of epistemology from any opposition between the true and the false,
reality and illusion, the scientic and the non-scientic, the rational and the
irrational. He sought to exclude the risk of regarding the concepts of domina-
tion, dominant ideology, and subjection as involving an opposition between
illusion and reality. This did not mean that these notions had no meaning
or value. But the problem had to be posed in terms of practices constituting
domains, objects and concepts within which the oppositions between scien-
tic and non-scientic, true and false, reality and illusion could take effect.33
This had been true of his attempt to read Marx. In Freudo-Marxism he once
again identied a risk. As Balibar has written:
32
See Balibar 1997.
33
See Michel Foucault, ‘Du gouvernement des vivants’: course at the Collège
de France of 9.1.1980, in the Fonds-Foucault, library of IMEC, Paris, audio document
C 62 (01) b 2127/995.
Freudo-Marxism is an inversion of the values expressed by powerful

institutional apparatuses. It inspires contestation in these apparatuses,
struggles whose importance Foucault acknowledges. But the main thing for
him is to ponder the extent to which they really break with the discursive
formation that they denounce.34
Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis, which includes all the vari-
ants of Freudo-Marxism, in Reich as in Adorno or Marcuse, is elaborated at
the same time as he retraces the genealogy of raison d’état at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, by recourse to the concept and notion of govern-
ment. The notion of government seems to him to be more operative than
power, for it enables us to pinpoint the procedures that have made it possible
to lead men, to rule them, without it being necessary to postulate a theory or
representation of the state.
These analyses of governmentality, the art of governing human beings, and
the genealogy of raison d’état were not pursued to their conclusion by Fou-
cault.35 His reections on Freudianism, as well as the events that marked the
end of the 1970s, led him to a closer consideration of the problem of technolo-
gies of the self – i.e. the set of subjective practices that shape subjects.
Foucault must have believed that tracing a genealogy of the forms of sub-
jectivity might counterbalance the stress he had laid on the issue of the objec-
tive relations of power. The changes in aesthetic and political sensibility at the
end of the 1970s denitely contributed to reinforcing his view that ‘we must
refer to processes that are much more remote if we want to understand how
we allowed ourselves to be caught in the trap of our own history’.36
34
Balibar 1997, p. 284.
35
See Foucalt 2007a and Foucault 2007b for analyses of the objective technologies
of power; and the continuation of the courses at the Collège de France from 1980 to
1984 as regards the analysis of technologies of the self. See Foucault 2005.
36
‘Omnes et singulatim. Vers une critique de la raison politique’, in Foucault 1994d,
p. 136.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Beyond the Crisis of Marxism:
Gramsci’s Contested Legacy
Fabio Frosini
1. Historicism, anti-historicism,
post-historicism
Discussion and research on Gramsci have for a long
time been a predominantly Italian issue, or rather a
question intrinsic or mainly referring to the history
of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). It has seemed
obvious then, for a whole generation of studies on
Gramsci, to link his legacy to the history of the party
that he had helped to found. In turn, this has meant
that studies dedicated to Gramsci always had a dou-
ble register: historical reconstruction and political
evaluation walked hand in hand, or rather historical
reconstruction was always functional to a given idea
of how to use Gramsci’s thought in contemporary
contexts. This line of interpretation has been char-
acterised by highly distinctive periods, correspond-
ing almost exactly to the various moments of Italian
politics and culture. Yet, at least one unifying trait
might be identied in the whole period running
from the immediate postwar period until the disso-
lution of the PCI in 1991. This trait derives from the
way in which Togliatti prsented, at least from 1949,
the question of Gramsci’s legacy as ‘thinker and man
664 • Fabio Frosini
of action’,1 that is, as a great intellectual – heir to the ‘national’ tradition of Ber-
trando Spaventa, Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce – who was also a Com-
munist politician. The self-evidence of the link between being an intellectual
and being a Communist was part of a precise political strategy of Togliatti’s.
It aimed to conquer the sympathy and support of Italian intellectuals without
asking them to put into question their idealistic and historicist education. His-
toricism, in fact, worked paradoxically as a meeting point for differentiated
philosophical positions; historicism understood, of course, in terms generic
enough not to question the theoretical matrix of anyone. Gramsci’s thought
itself was thus reduced to a variation of Benedetto Croce’s historicism.2
In this way, Togliatti achieved at least two things: rst, he linked the name
of Gramsci closely to the politics of his own party, and second, at the same
time, allowed non-Marxist intellectuals to participate in the elaboration both
of Gramsci’s legacy and of the cultural politics of the PCI. The result is what
I have called the unifying trait of all readings of Gramsci until the beginning
of the 1990s: in the changing interpretations, there was always a remarkable
incomprehension of the specic theoretical problem and the related question
of a Weltanschauung. What remains alive and vivid of Gramsci is, on the one
hand, the exemplary model of a communist ghter and, on the other, his abil-
ity to rethink Marxist schemata from a ‘national’ point of view, thus unshack-
ling himself from doctrinal and ‘ideological’ approaches. Gramsci was thus
duly entered into the ‘chronicles of Italian philosophy’,3 becoming a key ref-
erence point in the ‘national culture’.4 It might thus be said that, by imposing
a strongly anti-theoretical and ecumenical imprint on the ‘ofcial’ reading of
Gramsci, Togliatti fullled what Benedetto Croce had anticipated in his 1947
review of the Letters from Prison published by Einaudi when he wrote that ‘as
a man of thought he was one of us’, in Joseph Conrad’s sense, re-read in the
light of a universal, ‘cathartic’ and ‘lyrical’ function of culture and history.5
1
This is the title of an essay of 1949, now published in Togliatti 2001, pp. 131–50.
2
On the ‘Croceo-Marxisms’ of the 1950s and 1960s see Rossi-Landi 1982, p. 115.
3
This is the title of an inuential work by Eugenio Garin 1955, with numerous
later editions.
4
See also by Garin 1958, pp. 3–14. By the same author, see also in the same direction
Garin 1967, pp. 119–43; and Garin 1969, pp. 37–73. All these texts are now gathered
together in Garin 1997.
5
Croce 1947, p. 86. The expression ‘one of us’ is picked up with approval by Garin
1958, p. 9.
Gramsci • 665
It might be said then that the common element that Gramsci’s followers
could not or would not put into question is precisely that universalistic func-
tion of intellectuals as ministers of truth, a perspective that loses sight of the
link between partiality and truth so clearly identied in the Notebooks and
consigns Gramsci’s legacy wholly into the hands of ‘ofcial’ high culture. It
thus cannot come as a surprise if every radical movement of social and politi-
cal struggle in Italy from the 1970s to the 1990s was ercely alien and hostile
to Gramsci, always taken as the ofcial version of ‘Gramscianism’:6 from the
group of the Quaderni Rossi gathered around Raniero Panzieri, through the
operaismo of the 1960s and the 1970s, to the Nietzscheanism of the movement
of 1977,7 there is a continuing incapacity to grasp the ontological radicality of
the Prison Notebooks, namely the fact that they build on the double premise of
the critique of every universalism and of the link between truth and politics,
both elements that those movements discovered and elaborated with the aid
of non-Marxist theoretical instruments rst, and then later on with the aid of
postmodernism.
These movements represent an instance of the more general crisis of his-
toricism in Italy. Confronted with these phenomena, ofcial ‘Gramscianism’
reacted in the rst instance with a stubborn defence of the old approach (per-
haps adequate to the rural Italy of the 1950s but gain a purchase in a more
industrialised country), or with an attempt to update the old doctrine through
the introduction of new topics. Among these were such themes as ‘civil soci-
ety’ or ‘Gramsci, theoretician of superstructures’ (as in the workshop organ-
ised by the Istituto Gramsci in 1967 with the title Gramsci and Contemporary
Culture);8 the admission of a partial obsoleteness of Gramscian historicism (in
reality: of the historicism of ofcial Gramscianism) and an accompanying vin-
dication of a ‘return to Marx’ on the basis of the old epistemological Marxism
of Della Volpe, or of the new structuralist approach of Althusser;9 or, nally,
6
This circumstance has been cleverly highlighted by Baratta 1987. Cf. in general
Liguori 1996, pp. 172–8. See the update in Liguori 2005, pp. 7–36.
7
The case of Toni Negri, from the erce anti-Gramscianism of 1973, pp. 77–83, to
the affected recovery of Gramsci as anti-Stalinist ghter in the recent Negri 2005 is
exemplary in this regard. On the period 1977–9, see Liguori 1996, pp. 195–7.
8
See Liguori 1996, pp. 138–43.
9
See Liguori 1996, pp. 107–9 and 132–8. Cf. Badaloni 1971. A valuable (and biased)
reconstruction of these events can be found in the ‘Introduzione generale’ by Nicola
Badaloni in Badaloni 1987, pp. 161–2.
a strong updating and correction of the historicist framework of Gramsci’s

thought in the light of new political and theoretical approaches.10
This slowly transforming picture collapsed into rapid disbandment dur-
ing the 1980s, when the whole Communist and neo-communist movement in
Italy, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, suffered a sudden retreat.
The relation between Gramsci’s legacy and the politics of the PCI was sev-
ered. This moment had been pregured during the 1970s, with the complete
exhaustion of historicism as a reference point, and the break-up of the trian-
gle culture-party-intellectuals. In fact, the regular decennial workshop of the
Istituto Gramsci was dedicated in 1977 to the topic ‘Politics and History in
Gramsci’, stressing the politicological nature of Gramsci’s discourse. The cate-
gories mostly used in the papers of the workshop were organic crisis, passive
revolution, intellectuals, rationalisation, hegemony; all in relation to Gramsci’s
peculiar redenition of the state and his related analyses of fascism and Amer-
icanism.11 If we compare these studies with those from the previous decade,
the focus of attention has moved from the (unique) historical process to the
(various) ramied networks of the exercise of power, from the intellectual
as bearer of a Weltanschauung to the intellectual as civil servant and profes-
sional (in the sense attributed by Weber); from civil society as the alternative
to Marxist economism12 to civil society as the structured ground where forces
exert power. The result is an increased emphasis on the antithesis between
Gramsci’s conception and the idea of the state as the ‘executive committee of
the bourgeoisie’. The state is, rather, the concrete form in which society exists
in all its articulations, in an intertwined relation between ‘social’ and ‘politi-
cal’ which leaves no room for any instrumentalist or utilitarian conception.13
It is far too easy to note how this reading coincided with the politics of the
‘historic compromise’, on the basis of which the PCI was about to enter gov-
ernment. It is far more interesting to notice the objective character of this pas-
10
From this point of view, Nicola Badaloni’s passage from Badaloni 1962 to Badaloni
1975 and Badaloni 1988 is noteworthy: the topic of historicism remains always at
the core of his approach, but it progressively breaks free from any reference to the
humanist centrality of the ‘subject’ in historical transformations.
11
Cf. above all de Giovanni 1977, pp. 221–57; Mangoni, 1977, pp. 391–438; Vacca
1977, pp. 439–80; Cerroni 1977, pp. 127–60; De Felice 1977, pp. 161–220; Buci-Glucks-
mann 1977, pp. 99–125; Bodei 1977, pp. 61–98.
12
This was, in the nal analysis, the sense of the famous paper of Bobbio 1969,
pp. 75–100.
13
This is the key topic of an important book by Buci-Glucksmann 1975 that antici-
pates the most important topics of the workshop of 1977.
Gramsci • 667
sage: it announces indeed with great sensitivity the end of the Fordist cycle of
‘progressivism’, based on intervention, assistance and repression policies and
centred on the dialectic of capital and labour; it opens the discourse on post-
Fordist politics of internal control and of multiplication of work forms with
the loss of the distinction between work and life.14
It is not coincidental that the Gramscian category of ‘passive revolution’
acquires a central role in the workshop of 1977, marking the passage from
a conictual model to another where conict is constantly re-integrated by
mechanisms of control and regulation. This passage was summarised and
polarised a few years later (in 1984) by Leonardo Paggi in the introduction to
his Le strategie del potere in Gramsci:
It is the unforeseen development of the political struggle that urges Gramsci

to rethink radically the Hobbesian problem of order, thus performing the most
successful attempt up to date to liberate Marxism from a naively conictualist
model of interpretation; and from here stems the acknowledgement and
acceptance that any social and power order can survive as long as agreement
and consensus on a series of norms and values, common to various and
contrasting social strata, manage to curb the dividing and disintegrating
effects of social conict.15
As we can see, the category of ‘passive revolution’ is here almost identied

with that of ‘hegemony’. The result is that the abandonment of the catastrophist
model of the Third International – which is, in substance, the import of the
category ‘passive revolution’16 – is read in the light of the primacy of stability
over instability. ‘The role of subjectivity’, which in the young Gramsci was ‘the
determining element in the acceleration of the historical process’, becomes
‘the most important source of endurance of the old power structures’.17
But, in this way, the historical passage of the 1970s is overturned, because it
becomes a mere occasion for the transformation of the parties of the workers’
14
On this period see in general Fanini and Zanini (eds.) 2001.
15
Paggi 1984, p. x. Paggi maintains, also theoretically, the substitution of philosophy
with political science in his essay ‘Da Lenin a Marx’ in Paggi 1984 (but rst published
in 1974), pp. 427–98.
16
See Q 15, 17, p. 1774; Q 15, 56, pp. 1818–19; Q 15, 62, p. 1827. References are from
Gramsci 1977a, using the internationally accepted standards. Q (Quaderno) stands for
the Notebook followed by the number of the notebook, followed by the number of
the paragraph and of the pages according to the Italian critical edition.
17
Paggi 1984, p. ix.
movement into parties of government, thus eliminating the dialectics between

conict and control that can be thought through the category of ‘passive revo-
lution’. In fact, the ‘passive revolution’ does not mark the passage from a con-
ictualist to a consensual model, but the resolution of the dichotomy between
‘crisis’ and ‘stabilisation’ in a conception in which policies of control (what we
call today ‘governance’) and social conict, persistence and transformation, or
in Gramsci’s words ‘restoration’ and ‘revolution’, might be thought together,
without one term excluding the other.
This category, in short, has a completely different heuristic import; in fact,
during the 1990s, in those places where capitalist modernisation has been
most intense, a new reading of Gramsci has developed, focusing on the
notions of passive revolution, the translatability of languages, hegemony
and civil society. These notions are seen as the key elements in the analysis
of widespread power and control. This analysis does not eliminate the issue
of conict though; it is re-presented on a different level and in a new form.
The question of language, a key issue in the Notebooks as a now classic work
by Franco Lo Piparo once argued,18 is at the centre of numerous analyses of
hegemony and ideology,19 while ‘the translatability of languages and national
cultures’ has been linked to hegemony,20 and thus to politics and economy,
that is, with praxis.21 There is also extensive research on passive revolution
that highlights its capacity to rethink the topic of revolution in the frame-
work of the twentieth century.22 There is no univocal nexus between crisis and
revolution; on the contrary, crises are continuously re-absorbed into regula-
tion mechanisms. But this does not mean that stability prevails over crisis; on
the contrary, it means that crisis is generalised, that it becomes inseparable
from the stability and the continuity of the capitalist market.23 If the Notebooks
are read in this way, abandoning any ‘historicist’ temptations, it means that
they not only allow but indeed require a productive confrontation with anti-
18
Lo Piparo 1979.
19
See, for example, Ives 1998, pp. 34–51; Ives 2004b, and Ives 2005, pp. 455–68.
20
Cf. Tosel 1981, pp. 235–56, in particular pp. 235–45.
21
Cf. Frosini 2003b, pp. 29–38.
22
Cf. Vacca 1999; Burgio 2002, pp. 88–97; Voza 2004, pp. 189–207.
23
See Gramsci 1977a, Q 15, 5, pp. 1755–9, entitled ‘Past and Present. The Crisis’.
Gramsci • 669
dialectical approaches, such as those of Althusser or Foucault, that only few

years ago seemed utterly incompatible with Gramsci.24
2. A worldwide Gramscian web

The decade of Gramscian studies between 1978 and 1986 has been called the
‘low season’.25 This critical misfortune is closely linked to the ultimate crisis of
the unstable balance between communist politics, the politics of the intellectu-
als, and slowly declining Italian historicism. The workers’ movement in Italy
suffered a persistent historical defeat and the relationship between Gramsci’s
thought and the PCI was denitively terminated. This termination implied
not only the lack of interest of Italian intellectuals regarding Gramsci. It coin-
cides, in fact, with two vitally important events that cannot be neglected by
anyone who considers Gramsci’s legacy to be irreducible to the merely schol-
arly dimension or, conversely, simply to the life of a political party. The cycle
1978–86 is, indeed, the period in which the critical edition of the Prison Note-
books, nally published in 1975 after a long preparation,26 started to produce
its effects. This laid the basis for the resumption of Gramscian studies from
the early 1990s until today. This resumption – and this is the second event that
must be taken into account – is not only Italian, nor European: in fact, already
during the 1980s – thanks especially to the critical edition and to a felicitous
anthology in English27 – Gramsci’s thought experienced a worldwide diffu-
sion. Among others, there were translations of the Prison Notebooks into Eng-
lish, Spanish and Portuguese (in addition to those into French and German).
In an article published in 1987,28 Valentino Gerratana noticed favourably the
‘spontaneous’ character of this propagation; Eric Hobsbawm remarked that
Gramsci was one of the most known, read and studied Italian authors in the
24
On Althusser, see Robelin 1992, pp. 85–95, and Finelli 1997, on Foucault see
Balibar 1992, pp. 259–69; and Kouvelakis 1996, pp. 83–94.
25
Liguori 1996, pp. 198–221.
26
See Gerratana 1967, pp. 240–59; Gerratana 1970, pp. 455–76; Gerratana’s Preface
to Gramsci 1977a; Rinascita/Il contemporaneo 1975.
27
Gramsci 1971b. And, later on, Gramsci 1995.
28
Gerratana 1987, p. 5.
world;29 and in 1989 the Foundation Istituto Gramsci of Rome organised a

large international conference dedicated to studying this phenomenon.30
It is from this turning point that we have to come to terms with the good
fortune of Gramscian studies, which is no longer only Italian. We refer, obvi-
ously, to studies about Gramsci but also more generally the ways in which the
impulse arising from reading Gramsci has been variously valued and used
in different contexts. Los usos de Gramsci is the title of a book by Juan Carlos
Portantiero, who in 1981 discussed the ways in which Gramsci was read and
adapted to the Latin-American context.31 It would be equally correct to speak
of the good fortune of Gramscian studies in the English and North-American
cultures,32 in the cultural studies promoted by Stuart Hall,33 or in the use of
‘subalternity’, ‘civil society’ and ‘hegemony’ by the South-Asian subaltern
studies group or by an author such as Gayatri C. Spivak,34 and so on and so
forth. It would be far too easy to note the approximate and frequently indirect
character of the knowledge that these authors have of Gramsci. What really
matters is the fact that, in a moment of crisis not only of Marxism but of the
whole culture of emancipation, freedom and personal liberty, Gramsci is still
being read, studied and translated all over the world. His categories have
demonstrated a vitality that transcends his epoch and also his personal cul-
ture; and this turns Gramsci not only into a classical author of Marxism or of
philosophy, but into a source of suggestions and perspectives for the critique
of the contemporary world.
As for the rest, two further points should be underlined. First of all, since
the end of the 1990s, there seems to be a resumption of Gramscian studies also
in Italy. Secondly, on the international level, there is a gradual denition of
quality standards for Gramscian studies that might help to rene critically the
approach of neo-Gramscianism. This is an effect of the presence, also outside
Italy, of prominent and inuential scholars who represent reference points for
29
Hobsbawm 1987.
30
Righi (ed.) 1995 with essays by 27 scholars from 4 continents. See also Hobsbawm
1995.
31
Portantiero 1981. Portantiero had rst given the title ‘Los usos de Gramsci’ to
his introduction to the anthology Gramsci 1977b.
32
See, for example, Martin (ed.) 2002.
33
A fertile critical interaction with this current is represented by Baratta 2003, in
particular pp. 181–5.
34
Spivak 1988, pp. 271–313. A re-assessment of the import and the limits of Gramsci
for subaltern studies can be found in Buttigieg 1999, pp. 27–38.
Gramsci • 671
the areas in which they live and work, namely, Carlos N. Coutinho in Brazil or
Joseph A. Buttigieg in the United States. Buttigieg and Coutinho are members
of the International Gramsci Society, an association founded in 1997 under
the chairmanship of Valentino Gerratana, which brings together Gramscians
from all over the world.35 The resumption of Gramscian studies in Italy is also
to be attributed, at least partly, to the activities of the IGS.36 In 2000, this organ-
isation initiated an on-going workshop on the lexicon of the Prison Notebooks
and published in 2004 the rst fruits of these labours: a volume that collects
thirteen essays on key categories of the Notebooks, ranging from ‘Americanism
and Fordism’ to ‘Translation and Translatability’.37
3. Philology and politics

Another signicant event of the 1980s was the publication in 1984 of Gianni
Francioni’s L’ofcina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei «Quaderni del carcere».38
Francioni, who had advanced some ndings in the conference organised by
the Istituto Gramsci in 1977,39 arrived in his book at an ensemble reading
of the structure of the Notebooks that makes the most of the critical edition
of Gerratana, pointing out the main characteristics of Gramsci’s method of
work and trying to assign a date as precisely as possible to all the notes of the
Notebooks. L’ofcina gramsciana opened a new season in Gramscian studies,
a season in which Togliatti’s approach to Gramsci was denitely cancelled.
Togliatti, together with Felice Platone, had published the Prison Notebooks in
six thematic volumes between 1948 and 1951.40 It was a huge mediation: a
mediation, rst of all, between Gramsci’s thought and Togliatti’s, and, more
generally, a mediation between Gramsci’s thought and Italian culture.41 This
35
See <www.italnet.nd.edu/gramsci>.
36
See <www.gramscitalia.it>.
37
Frosini and Liguori (eds.) 2004, with contributions by Giorgio Baratta, Derek
Boothman, Giuseppe Cospito, Lea Durante, Fabio Frosini, Guido Liguori, Rita Medici,
Giuseppe Prestipino, Pasquale Voza.
38
Francioni 1984. On the topics discussed in this chapter see in general Liguori
1999, pp. 217–32.
39
Francioni 1977, pp. 369–94.
40
Gramsci 1948; Gramsci 1949a; Gramsci 1949b; Gramsci 1949c; Gramsci 1950;
Gramsci 1951.
41
Togliatti’s correspondence regarding the rst edition of Gramsci’s Letters from
Prison and the Prison Notebooks is now available in Daniele 2005.
mediation aimed to render the Notebooks immediately productive in the Italian

culture and politics of the day, at the cost, however, of redening the ensem-
ble prole of the text. The text was thus ordered in categories that followed an
acceptable and accredited taxonomy of knowledge, whereas Gramsci’s work
method consisted rather in calling that taxonomy into question.42 Second, the
text was treated as a complete work, nished and denitive. A certain level of
elaboration of the text – that which was considered to correspond the most to
the intentions of the author – was taken for publication while all the previous
elaboration was cancelled from the published text. In fact, although Gramsci
was tempted on several occasions to order the materials of the Notebooks, he
never arrived at any denitive conclusion. It is thus only by re-opening the
workshop of Notebooks, in their provisional quality as a work in progress,
that we can understand not only their problematic character but also the
whole innovative capacity of the thought that they capture.43 Necessary to
this re-opening was, of course, the publication of the critical edition, which
L’ofcina gramsciana elaborated further and in greater depth. It has thus become
possible to access the text with a diachronic and not systematic approach,
which allows us to follow the formation and progressive denition of the
analytical categories of Gramsci, through changes, second thoughts and sharp
inversions.
On the basis of this historical turning point, the discussion about the struc-
ture of the Notebooks has turned almost immediately into a debate on the
expediency of a new critical edition,44 a debate that has concluded with the
launch of the National Edition of the Works of Antonio Gramsci. This edition
will publish together with the Notebooks all the writings preceeding Gramsci’s
imprisonment and Gramsci’s correspondence.45 This initiative, which must
surely be welcomed, runs the risk of drawing attention away from the real
42
This aspect was emphasised by Mordenti 1989, pp. 413–28; and more recently
Mordenti 1996, pp. 553–629. See also Monasta 1985.
43
Cf. Frosini 2000, pp. 108–20; Frosini 2003a, pp. 21–76.
44
Cf. Francioni 1992, pp. 85–186 and Istituto Gramsci Informazioni 1992, pp. 69–84,
with statements by Nicola Badaloni, Sergio Caprioglio, Giuseppe Vacca, Renzo Mar-
tinelli, Dario Ragazzini, Rita Medici, Lucia Borghese, Joseph A. Buttigieg, Luciano
Canfora, Gianni Francioni, Leonardo Paggi, Michele Ciliberto, and Marcello Mustè.
45
The ‘Commission for the National Edition of the Works of Antonio Gramsci’
was set up by a decree of the Ministry of Culture in December 1996. In 2007 the
rst volume of the Notebooks was published, which contain the Translation Notebooks
(Gramsci 2007).
Gramsci • 673
novelty of the discussion about the structure of the Notebooks. When it is

stated, as it has been, that we must speak of Gramsci today as ‘we speak of
Plotinus’,46 philology is exchanged for a practice of neutralisation, scientic
stringency for disengagement, the classical nature of Gramsci’s thought for its
non-actuality.47 The discussion about the structure of the Notebooks, launched
by the publication of the critical edition, has indeed the opposite value of
combining these two moments, restoring the text in its full force to politics.
This principle is valid, as we said before, regarding the discovery of the work-
in-progress nature of the categories of the Notebooks; but it is also valid – and
it is of no minor importance – in relation to the text as a whole, to its form and
to its literary quality.
In an important essay dedicated to these issues,48 the ‘constitutive incom-
pleteness’ of the research presented in the Notebooks, the fact that they are ‘by
nature [. . .] un/terminable’, was seen as the unavoidable consequence of a writ-
ing that in an ‘absolutely and typically twentieth-century’ manner aspired to
‘reect wholly the world outside the prison and its problems’.49 Philology thus
re-opens the relationship between the texts and politics, between words and
praxis: the formal consideration of the Notebooks sheds light on the leaning of
the text towards what, in the content of the Notebooks, is thought of as irreduci-
ble to a merely ‘theoretical’ reection. Maybe a global reading of Gramsci will
be possible only if we manage to fully apprehend the unevenness between
the text and the world, and the constitutive incompleteness of ‘theory’,50 thus
realising that this is not postmodernism, nor post-communism, but the way in
which Gramsci resumes and radicalises Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’.
4. Partiality and truth

A reconstruction of the discussion about Antonio Gramci and his legacy
in more recent years must have the courage to assume a partial point of
view. First of all, this partiality is determined, obviously and unavoidably,
46
Paggi, in Istituto Gramsci Informazioni 1992, p. 79.
47
See Gerratana 1997, pp. xi–xxvi.
48
Mordenti 1996. See also Mordenti 2007.
49
Mordenti 1996, p. 613.
50
See Buttigieg’s Introduction, in Gramsci 1991, pp. lvi, lxxii–lxxvi; Wagner 1991
and Buey 2001, pp. 129–84.
by the preferences and limitations of the writer: preferences and limitations

regarding both the ways of reading and the chosen topics within Gramsci’s
thought. It is also determined, almost mechanically, by the huge amount of
critical literature on Gramsci, whose ow has increased in the last twenty
years in a way that allows us to speak of a world-wide Gramsci renaissance.51
But this partiality is particularly determined by a much more important rea-
son, closely related to the nature of our subject matter: it springs unavoidably
from the nature of Antonio Gramsci’s thinking, which is both, contemporane-
ously and inseparably, theoretical and practical, philosophical and political.
In this peculiar characteristic it encloses – and thus renders unavoidable – a
capacity of division and of rupture that comes over again and again.
It must be noted that this peculiarity is due not only to the fact that Gramsci
was a Marxist; nor does it depend mainly on the special emphasis that he put
on the concept of ‘praxis’ as the centre from which the whole idea of a Marxist
philosophy should be reconstructed. Marxism, in fact, has always been tra-
versed by the relations between philosophy and politics, between the under-
standing of real processes and intervention in them, between the criticism
of ideology and the science of history and politics. Yet only with Gramsci
does this relation become the point of view from which one might explain both
Marxism and any other philosophy. The urgency with which Gramsci insists
in the Prison Notebooks on the ‘unity of theory and practice’ cannot be under-
stood as a ‘theoretical’ standpoint (in the sense attributed to ‘theory’ in the
‘Theses on Feuerbach’), but it must be rightly interpreted as the displacement
of philosophy onto a new terrain, a terrain in which thought is always, struc-
turally, a standpoint involved in a network of forces and theoretical-practical
relations; the standpoint is conditioned by the network and, in turn, reacts
upon it.
But this philosophical novelty cannot be separated from the biography of
Gramsci, which in an absolutely original manner – compared to any other
Marxist of the 1920s – conjugates political and theoretical work.52 This is not
a value judgement at all, but an empirical observation from which one must
51
The Gramsci Bibliography, edited by John M. Cammett, Francesco Giasi and Maria
Luisa Righi, now available on line (<http://213.199.9.13/bibliograagramsci>), is
constantly updated, and includes almost 16,000 titles.
52
This peculiarity is underlined by Paggi 1970, pp. xlv–xlvi, where we nd an
illuminating confrontation between Gramsci’s Leninism and that of Lukács.
Gramsci • 675
start if we want to grasp what is really at stake when we discuss the legacy
of Antonio Gramsci. It is well-known that in 1911 he entered the Faculty of
Arts of the University of Turin, where he studied humanities with the inten-
tion of obtaining a degree in linguistics. But, already around 1917, his main
activity was political journalism and the leadership of the local group of the
Italian Socialist Party. In 1921 he took part in the foundation of the PCI, and
from the outset he directed its journal. In 1924 he became Secretary General of
the Party until his arrest in November 1926. The texts of this period – mostly
articles and political documents – portray a young socialist intellectual who,
stimulated by the most vivid cultural challenges of his time (among them,
Benedetto Croce, and especially Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General
Linguistics), becomes a prominent Communist leader, in touch with all the
most outstanding politicians of the Third International, and nally imprint-
ing on the Party he leads an original physiognomy that somehow mirrors the
originality of his own personality.
Now, if we compare the 1914 writings to those of 1926, we can notice a
decisive passage. The young socialist journalist thinks at rst that ‘philoso-
phy’ (which he mainly understands as secular immanentism) is on its own
capable of becoming an instrument for liberating people from prejudices and
forming a critical and independent mass point of view. It is, after all, an ide-
alistic conception of the autonomous capacities of philosophy, as expansive
and revolutionary. This conception sees philosophy as an independent power
that might be ‘invested’ in life to modify it; and, in fact, Gramsci’s activity
from 1914 to 1918 might be characterised as a ‘cultural’ struggle to defeat the
positivistic and mechanical Weltanschauung dominant in the socialist milieu
and to replace it with a new philosophy of freedom, of history, of energy and
will (in short, a mixture of Bergson, Sorel and Croce).53 At the time, Gramsci is
not at all interested in Marxism as defence of some orthodoxy (just think of his
article ‘The Revolution Against Capital’), but in what Marxism as philosophy
might represent in the conquest of autonomy and historical subjectivity for
the working class: philosophy is that specic ‘power’ capable of awakening
consciousness and thus producing revolutionary action.
Yet these years are equally marked by another element, in strong opposi-
tion to the rst one. The ‘culture’ that the proletariat has to make its own
53
On the young Gramsci’s struggle for ‘culture’ see Garin 1969, pp. 38–55.
is not deemed by Gramsci to be a closed and denite doctrine, that has to

be merely propagandised and imposed on consciousness. On the contrary, it
is a principle of critical liberation whose propagation requires other means,
which converge with workers’ so-called ‘spontaneity’ and integrate it not in
a mechanical but in a dialectical manner. All this is translated into an intense
‘educational’ activity, that Gramsci understands as a practice of collective dis-
cussion, the construction of spaces free from the hegemony of the dominant
ideology, and the formation of new ideological relations between forces dif-
ferent from those of the capitalist bourgeoisie. From 1914 onwards, Gramsci
dedicated himself to promote the setting up of various study and education
groups: from the ‘club of moral life’ in 1917, to the ‘school of culture’ in 1919,
or the institute of workers’ culture in 1921, and the party school in 1925. It is
clear from the denominations that, from 1917 to 1925, there are some changes
in the framework of strong ideological continuity: a progressive radicalisation
in relation to ‘bourgeois culture’, and a certain ‘organisational’ stiffening, both
understandable in the context of the onset and rst organisation of the inter-
national Communist movement, which rendered ideological dispute, espe-
cially against socialist reformism, much more acrimonious. In these years, we
can nd some passages in Gramsci modelled on the Bukharinian distinction
between ‘bourgeois science’ and ‘proletarian science’.54 Yet it is important to
notice something else: it is in these pages that we nd the decisive passage to
a new conception, for the moment only implicit, of the status of philosophy
as coinciding with the organisation of ‘human knowledge relations’. In other
words, it is a reformulation of the status of philosophy in line with the unity
of theory and practice, and it is to the explicit formulation of this conception
and to the identication of its ‘practical’, that is, political consequences that
Gramsci dedicates, after all, the Prison Notebooks.55
54
As for example the following: ‘Not an “objective study” nor a “disinterested
culture” can nd a place in our ranks; nothing that resembles the normally accepted
education issues according to the humanistic, bourgeois conception of the school. We
are a struggle organisation [. . .]. Study and culture are for us nothing but the theoretical
awareness of our immediate and ultimate aims, and of the way to put them in action.’
(‘La scuola di partito’, in Gramsci 1971a, pp. 49–50). Cf. Bucharin 1977, pp. 7–11.
55
Cf. Q 10 II, 6iv, p. 1245: ‘Reduction of all speculative philosophies to “politics”, to
a moment of historical-political life; the philosophy of the praxis conceives the reality
of human relations of knowledge as an element of political “hegemony” ’.
Gramsci • 677
This is the passage to a much more complex conception of the relations

between philosophy and reality, a conception in which politics – as organisa-
tion of practical and theoretical, material and ideological relations – becomes
the real network for the existence of ideologies and thus philosophies, which
are ideological products themselves, even if strongly rationalised and central-
ised. The rst formulation of the notion of ‘hegemony’ in the period 1925–6
corresponds to this development: hegemony is the political organisation of
ideology, the way to make ideological relations real, that is, effective.56 And
Marxism is outlined as the theory-practice of hegemony, in the sense that it
is theoretically aware of the hegemonic character of every ideological reality.
Consequently, it inserts itself in the ideological relations as a partial point of
view, as a political force that works actively in the criticism of the dominant
hegemony. This awareness causes the dichotomy orthodoxy/heterodoxy
to lose all meaning in relation to Marxist theory. In the Notebooks, in fact,
Gramsci writes:
The concept of ‘orthodoxy’ must be renewed and reinstated to its real origins.
Orthodoxy must not be sought in this or the other of Marx’s disciples, in
this or that trend linked to currents alien to Marxism, but in the concept
that Marxism is enough in itself, it contains in itself all the fundamental
elements, not only to construct a total conception of the world, a total
philosophy, but also to give life to a total practical organisation of society,
that is to become an entire, total civilisation.57
This reduction of orthodoxy to philosophical autonomy implies the vanishing

of the issue itself, because orthodoxy does not have a content of its own but
is identied with the critical attitude that derives, in turn, from the criterion
of praxis, that is, from the way in which the unity of philosophy and politics
is reected in Marxist philosophy and determines its relation to truth. Ulti-
mately, orthodoxy is the conscious partiality of the Marxist point of view, its
conscious nitude.
These are, then, the reasons for the unavoidable partiality of the reconstruc-
tion of the debate about Gramsci. The various interpretations of Gramsci must
be questioned, selected and judged on the basis of their capacity to bring to the
56
See the essay ‘Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale’, written in 1926, in
Gramsci 1971a, pp. 137–58.
57
Q 4, 14, p. 435.
surface, from different points of view, the structural peculiarity of the point of
view assumed by the philosophy of the praxis: the fact that the philosophy of
the praxis is a ‘philosophy-politics’. Gramsci writes that:
In its theory, Marxism cannot be confounded or reduced to any other

philosophy: it is original not only because it overcomes previous philo-
sophies, but especially because it opens a completely new track, that is, it
renews from end to end the way philosophy is understood.58
Gramsci does not have in mind a passage from philosophy to politics59 (and,
in fact, he rejects the idea that the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach should be
read thus),60 but a completely new way of thinking philosophically (and of
thinking philosophy). If this is not duly taken into account in the interpreta-
tion of the Notebooks, they will certainly come out trivialised. If the Notebooks
are read as if they were a ‘book of philosophy’ (a ‘book’ that, as we saw, was
in fact never written) it is certain that the result would be the underlining of
the feeble theoretical coherence of Gramsci’s thought, or its non-philosophical
character,61 or its lineage to some school or another of the history of philoso-
phy, in a vision of substantial continuity. When we consider the ‘interpre-
tations’ of Gramsci, we must learn to notice the fact that a whole series of
readings – that we might dene as ‘academic’ – are fundamentally erroneous,
and that nothing or almost nothing can be gained from them. Their evalua-
tions might be negative or positive,62 but they will always remain external to
the dynamic of Gramsci’s thought.
58
Q 4, 11, p. 433.
59
As Lepre 1978, pp. 28–9, understands on the basis of the interpretation of Lucio
Colletti: Gramsci’s Marxism would be then a no-longer-philosophy, ‘transformation’
of the world, and no longer ‘reection’ on it.
60
Cf. Q 10 II, 31, p. 1270: ‘The 11th thesis: “Philosophers have only variedly inter-
preted the world; it is now time to change it”, cannot be interpreted as a rejection
of any kind of philosophy, but only as annoyance about philosophers and their
“parrot-talking” and the energetic statement of a unity of theory and practice’.
61
Cf. Colletti 1974, pp. 3–28, in particular p. 25, who reduces the Notebooks to ‘a
“sociological” study of Italian society’. The same opinion was expressed by Sasso
1991.
62
See, simply as examples: Finocchiaro 1988; Kanoussi 1999, pp. 349–64; Kanoussi
2000, pp. 81–7; Sasso 2003, pp. 351–402.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Falling Short of Marx – Habermas
Jacques Bidet
Habermas occupies a signicant, emblematic posi-

tion today as the philosopher of social democracy.
Defending a standpoint that is progressive and
emancipatory, powerful and original, for many he
represents the most plausible position following the
putative collapse of Marxism. Because of the way in
which he connects philosophy and social science, he
continues the impulse of Frankfurt-school critical
theory and, indeed, Marx’s original ambition. And
he fascinates the inheritors of a Marxism from which
he has gradually distanced himself.
If we wish to understand the nature of this
estrangement, a genealogical work is required that
goes back to his rst, explicitly marxisant writings
and deciphers the original difference on the basis of
which the divergences were to develop. Here I shall
conne myself to trying to take the measure of the
‘loss’ that attaches to it. I believe myself to be fully
authorised to do this in that I have set out in two
books the immense interest of Habermas’s work for
a critique of Marxism and the stimulus he provides
for its recasting.1
1
See Bidet 1990 and 1999.
1968: Towards a Rational Society/Knowledge and Human Interests

Marx is constantly referred to in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962),
which evokes the Marxian perspective of emancipation.2 Theory and Practice
in 1963 devoted a chapter to ‘Marxism as Critique’,3 to the materialist thinker
who inscribes his philosophy of praxis, revelation of man to himself as the
subject of history, in the objective tendencies of the crisis of capitalist society.
But the rst genuinely original developments are to be found in two works
published in 1968.
Many of Habermas’s subsequent views are anticipated in Toward a Rational
Society. In it, Weberian modernity is reviewed negatively à la Marcuse (tech-
nology is social domination) and inscribed in a dualistic reinterpretation à
la Parsons, which counter-poses the ‘institutional framework’ or ‘life-world’
to ‘sub-systems of rational-purposive action’ (SSRPA). The latter, which
emerged at the dawn of the neolithic age and took shape in ‘traditional societ-
ies’, become predominant in modernity, delegitimating the old body of beliefs
and values. In the rst – liberal – age of modern times, the ideology of mar-
ket equality (formal right) still stood in their way. But in ‘advanced capital-
ism’, marked by state intervention and the fusion of science and technology,
it becomes obsolete. Under the banner of a productivist ideology, the sub-
systems invade the whole eld, depoliticising social existence. Habermas thus
assigns himself the task of examining this technocratic legitimation, which
can in fact only justify its scientic pretensions by positioning itself in the
space of ‘public, unrestricted discussion, free from domination’ – that is to
say, by comparing itself with a quite different ‘conception of rationalisation’,
based on ‘unrestricted communication’.4
However, the way in which Habermas constructs the problem to be resolved
is open to question. By translating the pair ‘productive forces/relations of
production’ into ‘labour/interaction’ not only does he strip the second term of
its specic content, but he recasts the rst term. In fact, he attributes to Marx
the idea that
the capitalist mode of production can be comprehended as a mechanism

that guarantees the permanent expansion of subsystems of purposive-
2
See Habermas 1989, pp. 12–19
3
See Habermas 1988, pp. 195–252.
4
Habermas 1971, pp. 118–20.
Habermas • 681
rational action and thereby overturns the traditionalist ‘superiority’ of the

institutional framework to the forces of production.5
In thus identifying ‘labour’ with ‘rational-purposive action’, Habermas oper-

ates a surreptitious conceptual revolution from the outset. For Marx’s con-
cept of labour does not apply to the one-sided adequacy of means to an end
[Zweckrationalität], but to the bilateral relationship between end and means.
Labour in general is not only abstract labour characterised by an ‘economy
of time’ for a given end. It is also, and correlatively, concrete labour, with a
view to a determinate use-value, where use assumes a social norm. Labour is a
means gauged by an end, but which is ‘stripped of meaning’ only with respect
to the meaning that it imparts to the end it pursues. It is a rational activity
only with respect to an end that is posited as reasonable. And Marx’s whole
endeavour consists in showing how, in the conditions of capitalism, these two
terms are dissociated, because its concrete purpose – its end as use-value – is
threatened by the prot motive, which is the particular goal of capitalism, an
‘abstract’ purpose pursued for its own sake, whatever the consequences for
humanity and nature – in other words, the effects in terms of use-value. Marx
thus deconstructs the notion of ‘purposive rationality’, dismantling the ideo-
logical unity of the categories of ‘production’, productivity, or ‘productive
force’. Capitalist production is not ‘production’ tout court: it is dened by a spe-
cic, contradictory tension between these two ends. The concept of ‘sub-systems
of rational-purposive action’ restores the ideological unity of the category
of ‘productive force’, the articial unity that was shattered by Marx’s analy-
sis. Habermas can thus attribute to ‘labour’, in as much as its quintessence is
embodied in the commodity-form of the ‘sub-systems of rational-purposive
action’, the burden that Marx makes capital as such bear, at the same time as
he legitimates the market as the consummate form of productive rationality.
The Habermasian category of labour as purposive action certainly pos-
sesses a critical intention and signicance. Paradoxically, however, it neu-
tralises itself because it crystallises this social relation in terms of ‘system’, in
accordance with an epistemological model adopted from the natural sciences.
It thus refers to the epistemological horizon of the neoclassical economists, to
the homo oeconomicus for whom (as we shall see) Habermas ultimately reserves
5
a considerable role in his meta-theory. A public juridico-political instance,

‘anchored’ in the life-world, is certainly articulated with this systemics of eco-
nomic practice. However, it remains external to the economic relation, whose
operative concepts are developed autonomously, as the object of an economic
science.
The Habermasian devaluation of the Marxian theory of labour is also
apparent in his adoption of a fairly widespread, albeit erroneous and basi-
cally trivial, interpretation of the ‘labour theory of value’, which associates it
with the idea of ‘simple labour’ as unit of measurement. Marx’s problematic
supposedly loses its relevance with the development of science and technol-
ogy, which represent
an independent source of surplus value, in relation to which the only

source of surplus value considered by Marx, namely the labor power of
the immediate producers, plays an ever smaller role.6
By dismissing the ‘labour theory of value’ (which, in reality, presupposes

labour-power replete with knowledge, irreducible to the immediate relation
of production), Habermas trivialises the theory of surplus-value, which con-
sequently can no longer be invoked as a theory of extortion, since it lacks
the analytical presuppositions; or, a fortiori, as a theory of abstraction (of ‘bad
innity’, of the drive, by accumulating prot, to amass endless power at the
expense of humanity and nature), since this has already been attributed –
which is a quite different thing – to the ‘system of the economy’ as such, to its
historical ‘rationalisation’ as a sub-system of rational-purposive action.
In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas distinguishes between the
philosophical themes of the young Marx and the substance of Marx’s research
(leading to Capital). On the one hand, Marx makes labour the transcendental
category, ‘world-constituting life activity’: a positivist’ conception that ‘lacks
precisely th[e] element of reection [in the Fichtean sense] that characterises a
critique’ and constitutes a retreat to ‘a frame of reference restricted to instru-
mental action.7
On the other hand, ‘[a]t the level of his material investigations . . . Marx
always takes account of social practice that encompasses both work and inter-
6
7
Habermas 1978, pp. 28, 47.
Habermas • 683
action’ and hence refers to the world of ‘norms’ and ‘communicative action’ –
and this specically in terms of ‘class struggles’ or of an interaction between
subjects as classes directed towards ‘discussion free from domination’.8
In reality, on the second point it is Habermas who attenuates Marx’s prob-
lematic. For Marx, labour is interaction. His economy is political. In contrast, the
sub-system of rational-purposive action is a Janus-faced concept, of Weberian
stamp: on the socio-critical side, it evokes social domination; on the rational
side, it takes over the liberal tradition of homo oeconomicus. Thus is heralded a
critique of economics that will remain external to its object.
As for the ‘philosophical conception’, Habermas argues (repetitively) that
Marx could have found the correct route in the young Hegel – through the
‘dialectic of morality’ set out in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, which
culminates in reconciliation.9 This is an unusual philosophical solution, which
assigns Marx’s dramaturgy of classes a horizon that is congured in terms of
relations between individuals: the struggle for recognition. Not that this is to be
rejected. But it is not applicable to the class relation as such. A different Hege-
lian gure – that of ‘master and slave’ – would have been more adequate.
However, far from ending in reconciliation, it concludes with the redundancy
of the master, with his abolition, representing the abolition of classes. Con-
trariwise, the ‘dialectic of morality’ terminates in mutual recognition, commu-
nication ‘restored’, between the classes – one of which, however, dominates
the other.
Thus are foreshadowed the ambiguities of ‘unrestricted communication’.
1973: Legitimation Crisis

Legitimation Crisis attests to the impact of Marxism in this phase. In order to
analyse the ‘crisis of advanced capitalism’, Habermas looks to the Marxist
concept of social formation for clarication, but . . . in the terms of Parsons
and Durkheim. The problems of ‘systems integration’, of the regulation of
self-regulating sub-systems, manifest themselves in a crisis of ‘social integra-
tion’: the consensus formative of normative structures is collapsing; society is
becoming anomic . . .
8
Habermas 1978, pp. 53, 55.
9
See Habermas 1978, pp. 55–6.
Habermas registers the end of liberalism and increasing state interven-

tion in the economy, in order to compensate for the economic weaknesses of
the market. What is emerging is ‘an altered form of production of surplus-
value’, which is based on the public sector of production, education, scientic
research – ‘a quasi-political wage structure which expresses a class of compro-
mise’, ‘a growing need for legitimation of the political system, which brings
into play demands oriented to use values’ in competition with capital’s needs
for exploitation.10
This system, caught between the exigencies of laissez-faire and those of
bureaucratic planning, is encountering a crisis of rationality. The economic
having lost its autonomy, the contradiction between classes and the issue
of legitimacy are transposed to the state, which confronts non-generalisable
interests.11 The old legitimations have ceased to be beyond dispute and ‘the
stabilization of validity claims can succeed only through discourse’.12 But
the political régime – a purely formal democracy that stimulates consumer-
ism and a retreat into private life – no longer produces anything more than a
exchange between benets from above and mass loyalty.
This exercise in line with a Eurocommunist agenda, with which the author
seems to be in broad agreement, would ultimately be rather banal, were it not
for the fact that it ends with a third chapter that goes beyond the problem-
atic of legitimation to legitimacy: ‘truth’. Therewith emerges the deontological
challenge, to which Habermas will devote detailed attention in much of his
subsequent work. However, it will be noted that this critical problematic is
immediately weakened by a different one, which is interwoven with it: an
irreducible functionalism, whose key concept is ‘compromise’, which comes
into play as soon as supposedly non-generalisable particular interests appear
on the horizon.
10
Habermas 1976, pp. 53, 55.
11
See Habermas 1976, p. 70.
12
Habermas • 685
1976: A Reconstruction of Historical Materialism

This work appeared in French in 1985 under the title Après Marx – a difference
that illustrates the ambiguity of the enterprise: reconstruction or deconstruc-
tion? Neo-Marxism or post-Marxism?
The Weberian impulse remains decisive: historical development is con-
strued as a process of ‘rationalisation’. But Piaget’s genetic psychology autho-
rises a positive inection: the hypothesis of a phylo-ontogenesis parallelism
supplies the leitmotiv of the ‘reconstruction’. This opens up a ‘cognitivist’
path to a prospect of communicative emancipation, which will subsequently
take concrete form in a re-working of post-Wittgensteinian linguistics.
Firstly, the technical element of the productive forces cannot be regarded as
the ‘motor of social development’:
The development of . . . normative structures is the pacemaker of social

evolution, for new principles of social organisation mean new forms of
social integration; and the latter, in turn, rst make it possible to implement
available productive forces or to generate new ones, as well as making
possible a heightening of social complexity.13
Habermas thus intertwines historical materialism and ‘an internal history

of spirit’,14 of individual and social reason, subjective and objective spirit, in
accordance with the polarity of its modes of activity and institutional forms,
in the unity of its cognitive and normative functions. This is a ‘reconstruction’
construed in accordance with the programme of the ‘reconstructive sciences’,
whose object is a rational reconstruction of universal competences of a tran-
scendental kind. The preservation of a Marxist vocabulary barely conceals the
profound subversion of its content.
The productive forces/relations of production pair, constitutive of the
infrastructure, thus acquires a quite different meaning. Here ‘productive force’
refers to the rational potential of the producers in a particular era. As for the
economic ‘relations of production’, they are successively constituted by kin-
ship in primitive societies, by domination (which means mainly the state)15 in
traditional societies, and by the market in capitalist society.
13
14
Ibid.
15
The superstructure is to be understood as the ‘institutional core’ that per-

mits ‘social [soziale] integration’: ‘[b]y social integration, I understand, with
Durkheim, securing the unity of a life-world through values and norms’.16 A
crisis occurs when this core proves incapable of solving ‘the problems that con-
front the system’. For this crisis to issue in a superior form of society, it is not
enough for the productive forces – ‘the instrumental and strategic domain’ –
to develop. Also required is a process of education of the species ‘in the
dimension moral-practical consciousness’17 – something only made possible
by world visions that anticipate new relations of production. ‘In the concepts
of historical materialism this means that the dialectic of forces and relations of
production takes place through ideologies.’18
Secondly, this reinterpretation of the Marxist topography goes hand in
hand with a more fundamental reorganisation, which integrates the para-
digm of historical materialism into an evolutionist matrix. The most important
distinction counter-poses a logic and a dynamic. The logic of development,
which involves the stages of evolution of the species, refers to the psychoge-
netic model. The dynamic of development, which is related to periodisation
and the process of transition from one epoch to another, refers to historical
materialism.
The stages are theorised by analogy with those described by genetic psychol-
ogy: a pre-conventional stage, marked by a certain lack of distinction between
the natural and social worlds; a conventional stage, in which people reason
on the basis of common values and principles; and a post-conventional stage,
where the latter become the main subject of controversy. But the various dimen-
sions of social existence – the ‘systems of action’, the ‘visions of the world’, and
‘juridico-moral institutions’ – do not materialise along with these stages of devel-
opment. It is only after the neolithic age, in ‘archaic states’, that conventional
rationality comes wholly to govern institutions. And the post-conventional
stage, which emerges in ‘developed civilisations’ marked by the expansion of
universal religions and philosophy, within ‘world views’, is only fully estab-
lished in the modern epoch. And it is to historical materialism that Habermas
16
Ibid.
17
18
Habermas • 687
looks for an understanding of the process which leads from one epoch to the
next, in accordance with the aleatory paths of historical contingency.
We thus observe a tension between two approaches. The rst employs a
combined mechanism of two distinct paradigms: one for logic (‘logical’ stages,
essential moments in the development of reason, or of the species); and the
other for dynamics (modes of production, forming the sequence of ‘historical’
epochs, crucial landmarks in the history of humanity). The second tends to
characterise epochs on the basis of the categories of evolutionary logic: systems
of action, forms of identity, of identication and demarcation of the ego, types
of world view, of law and morality.
The theory of evolution does not of itself provide the concepts of the forms
peculiar to each epoch, or the principles of mutation. The categories of history
retain their irreducible character:
In its developmental dynamics, the change of normative structures remains

dependent on evolutionary challenges posed by unresolved, economically
conditioned, system problems and on learning processes that are a response
to them. In other words, culture remains a superstructural phenomenon,
even if it does seem to play a more prominent role in the transition to new
developmental levels than many Marxists have heretofore supposed.19
However, in the end (so it seems to me), the categories of the ‘logic of evolu-
tion’ prevail over those of ‘historical dynamics’ (and the materialist theory
of history). In effect, it is they that determine the substantive quality of the
stages, of which they order the course and prescribe the ultimate term.
Thirdly, a Parsonian representation of society thus tends to supplant the
Marxian topography. Societal [gesellschaftliche] integration is supposedly
achieved according to the two modalities of social [soziale] integration, inspired
by Durkheim, and systems [systemische] integration, illustrated in particular
by Luhmann. One corresponds to the immediate solidarity of the ‘life-world’
and the other to the detour via the ‘media’ – the ‘sub-systems’ of money
(market) and power (administration). Social antagonism is thus retranslated
into the cleavage between two modes of integration and its supersession is
announced in the irreversibility of evolution.
19
It is the reversal triggered by the psychogenetic schema that will allow

the operational deployment of the philosophico-linguistic schema and, as a
result, the realisation of the Weberian schema of a general history as a process
of rationalisation. Ontogenesis thus supplies the ‘key’ to phylogenesis.20
Habermas undermines the Marxian concept of the juridical, by endowing
it with an immediately consensual tonality. The moment of social contradic-
tion, which in Marx overdetermines (and counter-determines) the moment
of functionalism, in this sense is attenuated by the prevalence of the notion
of ‘integration’, as a general category of inter-individual relations in society:
Marx revised in conformity with Durkheim. And, although Habermas occa-
sionally indicates that he is fully aware of class domination, this tends to dis-
appear to the margins of his account. Revealingly, the notion of domination is
interchangeable with that of the state: Marx revised in line with Weber.
The operator of the transition from one paradigm to the other, from history
to evolution, is the functionalism that makes social institutions ‘functions’ of
existence, of its development: ‘
Law and morality serve to regulate action conicts consensually and thus to
maintain an endangered inter-subjectivity of understanding among speaking
and acting subjects.21
This is their ‘specic function’. This is a recurrent theme, given vivid expres-
sion in Clausewitzian fashion: they represent ‘the continuation of communi-
cative action with other means’.22 Marx, by contrast, postulates that they are
(just as much) an inversion into its opposite, the free and equal discourse of
exchange turning into the right – and violence – of exploitation. Habermas’s
critical functionalism situates historical materialism in an irenic perspective.
He consigns violence to contingency, or at least subjects it to a ‘logic of evolu-
tion’ – that of the emergence of morality and law, which are not specically
a matter of relations between classes. The distinctive concepts of historical
materialism – those of class domination and exploitation – only feature nega-
tively, in the form of the ‘problems confronting systems’ and the legitimation
they demand.
20
See Habermas 1979, p. 116.
21
22
Habermas • 689
Overlooking the negative, Habermas understands the mode of produc-

tion of a society as that of the reproduction of its existence. Marx’s analysis
inscribed it within the limits of the reproduction of class relations, vectors of
violence and death: mode of domination and of reproduction of this domina-
tion – mode of destruction.
1981: The Theory of Communicative Action

Here, Habermas reconsiders Marx analytically one last time, xing an inter-
pretation that will henceforth simply be presupposed.
He corrects the Weberian matrix of a modernity that has fragmented into
autonomous spheres under the predominance of abstract rationality in two
respects. He formalises it in three orders – science, law and morality, art –
which he refers to three forms of rationality: truth, justice, and authenticity.
And he lays a bridge between them by showing that they are in fact subject to
the common schema of argumentation and hence, de jure, to a higher form of
action: communicative action. The paradigm of discourse, of discursive inter-
subjectivity, whose guiding thread is furnished by reecting on post-Wittgen-
steinian pragmatics, thus takes over from that of labour.
It is appropriate, however, to consider the treatment to which Habermas
subjects the Marxian analysis of labour. The specicity of market relations
supposedly consists in the fact that the use-value of commodities is ‘trans-
formed’ into exchange-value and concrete labour is thereby ‘transformed’
into ‘abstract labour’. This ‘transformationist’ formulation licences a surpris-
ing allocation of concrete labour to the theory of action and of abstract labour
to systems theory:
On the one hand, labor power is expended in concrete actions and

cooperative relationships; on the other hand, it is absorbed as an abstract
performance by a labor process that is formally organised for the purposes
of valorisation. . . . as an action it belongs to the lifeworld of the producers,
as a performance to the functional nexus of the capitalist enterprise and of
the economic system as a whole.23
23
The peculiarity of the market, dened on the basis of the ‘medium’ of money,
is that it ‘does not in its very denition disadvantage anyone involved in
his calculation of utility’.24 In this systemic context, human beings maintain
a purely instrumental, objectifying relationship, which ‘reies’ the whole of
personal and communal life. The ‘pathologies’ of modern society are there-
fore to be sought on the side of market abstraction.
In short, the market is the best and the worst of things. However, what is
lacking here is a dialectical concept of the relationship between this best and
this worst: that of the relationship between market and capital developed by
Marx, which assumes precisely what Habermas rejects – the labour theory
of value. In it value signies expenditure of labour-power and the capitalist
relationship is understood as appropriation, mobilisation, and consumption
of labour-power and prot as an accumulation of abstract wealth, a power
that is ceaselessly sought for its own sake.
It is not that Habermas is ofcially antipathetic to such a view of things. But
his conceptualisation is conducted in terms that disarticulate and neutralise
the relevant concepts of this ‘political-economy’. One cannot assign concrete
labour to the life-world and abstract labour to the economic ‘system’, for these
two categories form a rational unity in the concept of the commodity. And the
distinctively capitalist relationship is to be understood as an internal tension,
an immanent contradiction, in this unity, and not (except by Biblical hyperbole)
as some inconceivable ‘transformation of one into the other’.
In place of a theory, Habermas offers us a ‘critique’ of capitalist society, on
the basis of the categories of reication and alienation. These categories suit
him precisely because they are disjunctive: human being or thing, the ego or
its other, counterposable in the same fashion as life-world and systems-world.
In this conceptual context at least, such a thematic is incapable of articulating
a process of domination which is not that of an object over a subject, or a ‘sys-
tem’ over agents, but of subjects (or classes) over one another. Habermas, who
has worked so hard for the transition to inter-subjectivity, thus reverts to the
subject-object paradigm that he rejects.
This objectication of the two ‘sub-systems’ separates economics and poli-
tics from one another in liberal fashion. And one cannot but be astonished at
its consequences. Legitimation Crisis in 1973 advocated a public sector of ‘pro-
24
Habermas • 691
duction of collective commodities’.25 In reality, this position would sit ill with
a general approach that identies economy and market. The Theory of Com-
municative Action aligns itself with the idea of an ‘indirect form’ and ‘refracted
mode’ of state intervention.26
1985: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Taking up the thread of his writings of 1968, Habermas situates Marx in the
tradition of German philosophy, structured by the gure of the subject that
realises itself in an object. For the ‘philosophy of reection’, up to Hegel, the
subject is constituted and becomes self-conscious in the works of culture.
For the ‘philosophy of praxis’, which refers beyond Marx to ‘Western Marx-
ism’ as a whole, the process of self-creation is realised through productive
practice. However, this is supposedly a mere variant of the philosophy of the
subject, certainly directed towards reversing the modern alienation of labour,
towards a practical emancipation by a reversal in the labour-form, but, pre-
cisely as such, incapable of representing anything other than ‘the purposive
rationality of the acting subject’, or a pure ‘cognitive-instrumental rationality’,
doubled by the illusory dream of a revolution abolishing the ‘functional sub-
systems’ and absorbing the whole of social existence into ‘the horizon of the
life-world’.27
To György Markus, who objects that use-value contains ‘the context of its
use and the needs whose satisfaction it serves’, is a ‘social dimension’ – and
that productive praxis is thus mediated by norms that ground rights and obli-
gations – Habermas believes he can respond as follows: this clearly demon-
strates that what is required is ‘a clear analytic separation between “technical”
and “social” spheres’, ‘technical-utilitarian rules’ and ‘social norms’. And he
concludes that ‘practice in the sense of norm-governed interaction cannot be
analysed on the model of the productive expenditure of labor power and the
consumption of use-values’.28 This is manifestly a misinterpretation, since
what is at issue here is not the consumption but the production of use-values –
25
26
27
Habermas 1987b, pp. 65, 67.
28
Habermas 1987b, pp. 79–81.
two distinct processes that are separated by the social (norm-governed, and so
on) division of labour.
At the root of all this is always the same blind spot in the Habermasian per-
ception of ‘Marxism’. The concept of ‘expenditure of labour-power’ (which
does not pertain to physiology, but to ‘sociology’) is not reducible to a mono-
logical relationship between a subject and the object he produces, for it calls
up that of ‘consumption of labour-power’ by those who ‘set to work’ (inter-
action as a class relation) and the antagonistic context of the social motiva-
tions and ‘reasons’ of labour.29 The technical and the social can certainly be
distinguished analytically. But Habermas does not stop there: he makes the
economy a ‘sub-system’ structured by a purely technical rationality, whose
functional logic is that of the market (or money). He thus ctively realises this
analytical distinction. He identies as the culmination of the historical pro-
cess of rationalisation, as the very stamp of modernity, the (alleged) fact that
‘production’ pertains to a purely systemic functionality, on which delibera-
tion can only intervene from without. He thus goes back on Marx’s essential
contribution. The theory expounded in Capital ceases to make sense when the
juridico-political parameters (liberty-equality-rationality of the exchangers
dialectically opposed to the subordination-exploitation of wage-labour) are
disjoined from the technical-economic element, which cannot be expressed
outside of them. Such technical categories as those of ‘socially-necessary
labour-time’ or ‘value of labour-power’ are determined in the ‘class struggle’ –
a social category laden with normative subtleties. Contrary to Marx’s anti-
liberal and anti-positivist breakthrough, Habermas’s conceptual intervention
once again separates and disjoins economics and politics. Obviously, this does
not mean that for him there is no relation between them, or even that politics
does not in some sense have to govern economics. But he conceives the pri-
macy of politics only within limits dened from the outset by the supposed
relationship of ontological exteriority. The consequences of this epistemological
option will emerge in full at the end of this trajectory, when Habermas comes
to propose a politics.
29
See Bidet 1999, pp. 211–12.
Habermas • 693
1992: Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse

Theory of Law and Democracy
In Between Facts and Norms, following other research focused on law and
morality, from Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983) to Justi-
cation and Application (1991), Habermas formulates his ‘politics’. The public
space of law is deployed therein as an intersection between the life-world and
the functional sub-systems of economy and bureaucracy.
I have shown elsewhere that this theorisation of the media derives from
Marx, who in the Grundrisse distinguished between two mediations: the mar-
ket and the organisation. Marx can be criticised for burdening the latter with
unfounded expectations. Nevertheless, he indicates the correct path when he
shows how the market ‘medium’ is transformed into its ‘opposite’, into a class
relation: the ‘transformation of money into capital’ – that is to say, of market
relations into capitalist relations, or the ‘transformation’ of the functional sys-
tem into a class structure.30
By comparison with Marx, Habermas represents a regression in that he
anchors his reection in the moment of the ‘media’, basically regarded as sys-
temic and functional. The structural category of class is certainly not rejected;
it even resurfaces from time to time, in allusive and euphemistic fashion. But
it has lost its strategic position, as a result of the abandonment of the con-
stitutive presupposition – the ‘labour-use theory of value’31 – without which
the concepts of exploitation, class, reproduction, abstraction, and so on pos-
sess only an evanescent status. The Marxian thesis of class domination gives
way to the idea that the ‘functional powers’, the ‘social powers’ of the mar-
ket, administration, social organisations come to colonise the life-world, the
model sociality. What disappears is the tragically realistic Marxian view of
the social machinery that reproduces classes, placing some on top, and others
at the bottom; of the fundamental juridical and symbolic violence which per-
tains to the class state – that is to say, the political eld as a battleeld. With
Habermas, the class struggle mutates into misunderstanding. Henceforth the
point is to arrive at a ‘good’ understanding, not to change the world. A cri-
tique of systemic effects replaces the critique of the effects of (class) structure. It is
therefore not fortuitous if the repressed question of social classes now gures
30
See Bidet 1999, p. 912ff.
31
See Bidet 1999, p. 232.
exclusively in the guise of the issue of the ‘compromises’ that they can reach
between themselves.
The theory of compromise, which accedes within supposedly universally
admissible limits to the purely strategic game of the capitalist actor, is in fact
an essential part of the Habermasian solution to the crisis of politics. It is satis-
ed if the social partners, who differ in terms of power and inuence, agree to
submit to a procedural order based on an equal sharing of rationally argued
discourse. This, it is true, involves practical, material, and cultural presuppo-
sitions, which dene the status of the citizen. And it is clear that for Habermas
(as for Rawls) legitimate action to establish such a status is not limited to using
discourse. But the communicative critique limits what can be demanded to
the requirement of communication and negotiation.32 From the outset it aban-
dons everything else to unprincipled ‘compromise’: without any other prin-
ciple than that of pursuing a discourse of negotiation equally shared between
the powerful and the rest. To show that this precisely involves a ‘performative
contradiction’, which a universal pragmatics should not entertain, and that
a quite different ‘principle of universality’ is needed, would require further
explanation.33
1996: The Inclusion of the Other

It remains to evoke the many reasons why reading Habermas particularly
recommends itself to those who partially recognise themselves in the Marxist
tradition. On the one hand, and while it is true (as I have suggested) that it
is at the cost of serious ‘losses’, Habermas is without a doubt the author who
most resolutely takes up the ‘encyclopaedic’ programme of Marxism: that of
rooting the political project in a coherent concept combining philosophical
anthropology and social science. On the other hand, it is an understatement
to say that he illustrates more clearly than Marxism has done traditionally
the need for a positive conception of political democracy. As we can see from
the dialogues that are taking shape with the Gramscian (Stefano Petrucciani),
Lukácsian (György Markus), or Anglo-American traditions (notably via New
Left Review), Habermas’s account of the cleavages between law, morality and
32
See Bidet 1999, p. 931.
33
See Bidet 1999, p. 914.
Habermas • 695
ethics is of a kind to stimulate investigations that have emerged only slowly

in Marxism – particularly as a result of the inadequacy of its concepts of the
state, nation, and humanity. The theoretical reorganisation that he proposes,
oriented towards the idea of communication as an experiment in which the
triple imperative of truth, justice and identity is experienced, can be under-
stood, or adopted, as the precise argument of communism. Habermas’s last
major work, The Inclusion of the Other, published in France in 1998 under the
title of L’intégration républicaine, continues his earlier reections on this ter-
rain. The most innovative text concerns ‘perpetual peace’. It certainly repeats
shortcomings that were noted earlier – in particular, the lack of a properly
materialist foundation for the political universalism it proclaims. The repres-
sion of the principle according to which ‘the Earth equally belongs to every-
one’ – the implicit clause of the ‘principle of discussion’, since any discussion
bears on a certain use of the world, which in the last resort concerns all human
beings34 – weakens his discourse, which euphemises the imperialist matrix.
However, by demonstrating the ineluctable emergence of a supra-national
public space and the embryo of a global state, Habermas opens up the pros-
pect of a planetary citizenship, relay of the ‘Internationals’ and a challenge for
the future.
34
See Bidet 1999, p. 622.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst
for Totalisation
Stathis Kouvelakis
It is widely agreed that Fredric Jameson is the major

Marxist theoretician in the English-speaking world
today and also a key gure in the massive intel-
lectual constellation dubbed ‘postmodern’. How
is it, then, that the impact of an œuvre characterised
by a commentator of Perry Anderson’s stringency
as the ‘culmination’ of the Western-Marxist tradi-
tion,1 has hitherto remained marginal in Continental
Europe and utterly negligible in France? No doubt
the answer is to be sought in the formulation of the
question itself. Jameson’s dual claim to fame in the
English-speaking world, and especially the United
States (his identication with Marxism as a reference
and the postmodern as an object) is precisely what
explains his lack of success in Continental Europe.
In fact, Jameson established himself as a protagonist
in intellectual debate on an international scale in the
1980s, at the point when Marxism was collapsing in
its heartlands of Latin Europe and when, particularly
in France, a violently anti-Marxist, revanchist neolib-
eralism was rife. As for the topic of postmodernism,
which propelled Jameson towards a considerably
1
wider public than the audience for Marxism, while the French dimension
is essential (notably Lyotard and his La Condition postmoderne, published in
1979), it remained a predominantly anglophone and, more specically, Amer-
ican debate.
In reality, the emergence of the ‘Jameson phenomenon’, whose break with
the Occidento-centrism of earlier Marxism is not the least of its specicities,2
represents one of the symptoms of the shift that Anderson signalled in the
early 1980s as a reversal in the basic coordinates of the geopolitics of the theo-
retical eld:
the traditionally most backward zones of the capitalist world, in Marxist

culture, have suddenly become in many ways the most advanced.3
So it as if the discrepancy of the past had been cancelled, with the most
advanced zone of the capitalist world – especially the United States – coin-
ciding for the rst time in history with the appointed terrain of an ‘emergent
Marxism’, in the academy at least.
Such a reversal, which obviously coincides with the reassertion of American
economic and military hegemony across the planet, could not have occurred
without a decisive impact on the conguration and, in a sense, the very tex-
ture of the Marxism in question – especially in its relationship to political
practice and its ‘exterior’ in theory. Simplifying to the extreme, it may be said
that, conrming a version of the law of uneven and combined development
in theory, the preservation of an intransigent radicalism and professed con-
tinuity with the ‘great tradition’ of classical Marxism has been paid for by a
fairly radical recasting of the lines of demarcation within the contemporary
theoretical Kampfplatz. Far from being limited exclusively to Jameson, these
tendencies nevertheless assert themselves with especial clarity in his work.
Indeed, it is difcult to hide the fact that this œuvre takes the form of a
paradox – at least, we may wager that it might appear thus to non-anglo-
phone readers, who are used to certain types of intellectual specialisation
and division. Rather than the exposition of a doctrine or system, what we
are dealing with in Jameson’s case is the operation of a major interpretative
2
See Anderson 1998, pp. 74–5. China and South-East Asia form a strategic part of
Jameson’s project, both as subject of study and as a site of reception of his work. See
Hardt and Weeks 2000, p. 6.
3
Jameson • 699
machine, capable of ‘digesting’ virtually anything, or alternatively, a sort of

insatiable ‘desire for theory’, borne alone by a seemingly boundless syncre-
tism, combined with an intellectual curiosity whose breadth is unmatched in
the history of cultural studies. Jameson certainly situates himself resolutely
within Marxism. Author of one of the rst studies of Sartre published in the
United States, some years later he offered a landmark introduction to the set
of major authors in what he called the ‘dialectical tradition’. In it, Sartre was
to be found alongside Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse Bloch, and Lukács – an
unprecedented endeavour to link the French and German traditions.
Jameson’s major work, The Political Unconscious, to which the follow-
ing pages are devoted,4 and which sets out his own version of Marxism in
condensed form, signicantly expanded this apparatus of liation – and in
‘truly scandalous’ fashion from a European,5 and even more so a French, per-
spective. It did so both within the Marxist tradition, via a confrontation and
assimilation between the ‘dialectical current’ and the work of Althusser;
and outside it, in the direction of what is referred to as French ‘structuralism’
and ‘poststructuralism’ in the anglophone world. And it extended even fur-
ther, since in the book we nd the main continental philosophical currents,
from phenomenology (Heidegger and Husserl), from which Jameson adopts
the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘sedimentation’, to psychoanalysis (especially
Lacan), and the hermeneutic or interpretative ‘models’ that have been devel-
oped in the specic eld of literary studies (Gadamer and Ricoeur, obviously,
but also Frye and Greimas). ‘His clear objective’, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has
quite rightly observed, ‘is to construct a tradition’6 – as much (it might be
added) as it is to open up the theoretical eld, and more widely still American
culture, to the whole Western critical tradition. Marxism has pride of place in
this project, on condition that it is itself tirelessly resituated and reconceived
4
I have deliberately opted to approach Jameson by way of the foundation of his
project which, notwithstanding various inections, is highly consistent, rather than
through a sectoral thematic, however important – especially as the main source of
Jameson’s recent celebrity. Moreover, as Sean Homer notes, ‘the publication of The
Political Unconscious clearly marks [his] arrival and the emergence of Jameson as a
major theoretician in his own right’: Homer 1998, p. 36.
5
Homer 1998, p. 62. William Dowling goes so far as to say, without any polemical
intent, that the originality of Jameson’s approach consists exclusively in this ‘original-
ity-in-synthesis’: Dowling 1984, p. 14.
6
Lecercle 1987, p. 86.
in an ensemble that far exceeds it, but in which it is summoned to occupy a

sovereign position.
A dialectical hermeneutic
As readers advance through the pages of The Political Unconscious, they have
the impression not so much of working their way through a systematic con-
ceptual exposition (despite the theoretical density of the rst chapter, which
takes up a third of the book), as of witnessing a dynamic process, an endeavour
announced from the text’s opening words as the imperative of historicisation.7
It operates on textual/cultural objects, or rather on their interpretation. For the
reception/reading of an object has ‘always-already’ occurred through a prism
comprising a tangle of eminently historical interpretations, structures, and
mental schemas: ‘our object of study is less the text itself than the interpreta-
tions through which we attempt to confront and to appropriate it’, given that
‘texts come before us as the always-already-read’.8 Jameson rmly rejects any
approach conned to so-called ‘formal’ analysis, which would disregard the
exigencies of ‘self-reection’ – of explaining the standpoint of the subject in
history and social practice:
Every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own

existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary
must be at the same time a metacommentary as well. Thus genuine
interpretation directs the attention back to history itself, and to the historical
situation of the commentator as well as of the work.9
This does not involve counter-posing Marxism to different models of inter-

pretation (psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, etc.), but means assign-
ing the latter an indisputable but local validity, reserving for Marxism the
status (dened by Sartre) of ‘untranscendable horizon’. As a theory of history,
Marxism is the ultimate meta-commentary, with history itself constituting the
ultimate, untranscendable horizon of any interpretation and, consequently,
any hermeneutic model. Historical materialism thus possesses resources that
7
‘Always historicize! This slogan . . . [is] the one absolute and we may even say
“trans-historical” imperative of all dialectical thought’ (Jameson 1983, p. 9).
8
Jameson 1983, pp. 9–10.
9
Jameson 1988a, p. 5.
Jameson • 701
enable it to subsume ‘such apparently antagonistic or incommensurable crit-

ical operations’, thanks to its superior theoretical fertility (‘the priority of a
Marxist interpretative framework [will be argued] in terms of semantic rich-
ness’): it is the only one capable of rising to the totality, to the ‘dialectical or
totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understanding’.10
The hermeneutic structure proposed, whose elaboration and aesthetic
sophistication will already have been sensed by readers, is formed as an artic-
ulation between several levels of approach (or interpretative horizons) to an
object or structured set of textual/cultural objects. If, before proceeding to
a more detailed exposition, we had to summarise it in one sentence, with-
out fearing oversimplication once again, we might say that the individual
textual object (a novel, a tale, and so on) is initially grasped as a symbolic act
in relation to a political-punctual conjuncture; in a second phase, as part (or
parole) of a collective class discourse (or langue), which is ideological in character;
and nally – the last stage of the analysis – as a complex form situated in his-
tory understood as a sequence and coexistence of a multiplicity of modes of
production.
The rst hermeneutic moment is one in which individual textual objects are
perceived as so many imaginary/formal resolutions of real contradictions.
The formal schemata in question designate so many extensions of the social
into the formal/aesthetic eld. By means of an internal analysis at the formal
level, the interpreter’s task is to bring out ‘a determinate structure of still prop-
erly formal contradictions’,11 so as subsequently to arrive at their ‘resolution’,
still by formal means that need to be situated in the political-historical horizon
peculiar to this level. Hence there is no confusion with a supercial sociolo-
gism or historicism, which regards the textual object either as a duplication
of reality (the celebrated ‘reection’), or as a mere reference to a ‘context’ that
is still external to the object itself. Rather than ‘context’, Jameson prefers to
speak of ‘sub-text’, dened as the immanence of the Real in language.12 The
point is to achieve a grasp of the production of aesthetic/narrative form from
within; and such is the task that the category of ideological ‘act’ – the inven-
tion of imaginary/formal solutions to insurmountable social contradictions –
10
Jameson 1983, p. 10.
11
12
I shall return shortly to this function of the Real, where the upper case indicates
the Lacanian reference.
is charged with: ‘language manages to carry the Real within itself as its own
intrinsic or immanent subtext’.13
This understanding of ideology, which assigns practices primacy over the
categories of consciousness, makes it possible to clarify two pairs of notions
that represent so many typical pitfalls for the use of this concept not only
within the Marxist tradition, but also outside it, namely, ‘imaginary/real’ and
‘solution/act’. The risk entailed by the rst is a devaluation of the Imaginary
as ‘unreality’. Moreover, Marx was not a stranger to this, both in his under-
estimation of the ideological, assimilated to the phantastich and hence to the
‘unreal’, and in his lack of a theory of the imaginary.14 Contrariwise, Jameson
expands this conception of the constitutive role of the imaginary, which
unquestionably owes much to the Lacanian tripartition between Imaginary/
Real/Symbolic,15 by investing the terrain of formal analysis (while refusing
to remain enclosed in it), insofar as it can demonstrate that the ‘literary or
aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the
Real’.16 But here the Real is to be construed as History – not that of the indi-
vidual subject retraced by psychoanalysis, and still less a mere aggregate of
empirical factors, but History in the upper case: the absent centre that eludes
all representation, that can be grasped only through its effects, with which
individual and collective praxis is forever colliding17 – an obstacle that is all
the more formidable when praxis claims to circumvent it.
The formal act thus reorders reality – now understood in the sense of
empirically available, historically situated material – in a specic manner.
The antinomies identied by an analysis of form prove to be the ‘symptoms’
of something more profound: in fact, as use of the Greimassian semiotic rec-
tangle (an instrument revealing, in the chemical sense of the term, ‘repressed
or realised possibilities’ among the set of combinations of a textual sequence)
will establish, they dene a ‘closure’ and ‘limitation’ that distinguish ideology.
13
Jameson 1983, p. 81. The ‘models’ of such an approach cited by Jameson are
Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of the facial decorations of the Caduveo Indians in Tristes
Tropiques and of the Oedipus myth in Structural Anthropology.
14
See Labica 1987, pp. 22–34.
15
See in this connection the essay ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’, in Jameson
1988a, pp. 75–115. In the event, Lacan is also read through his redeployment by
Althusser, especially in the concept of ‘absent cause’.
16
17
‘History is what hurts’: Jameson 1983, p. 102.
Jameson • 703
And these in turn must be reconceived as a projection of contradictions inher-

ing in social relations.18
The second interpretative ‘level’ involves a displacement of the individual
text, such as it has been regarded up to now, towards the collective discourse
of which it is a constitutive part. The object will now be considered as the
‘parole’ pertaining to a ‘langue’ which is a ‘class langue’, an ideological code
always dened ‘as a function of social class’.19 The minimal units of this lan-
guage are ‘ideologemes’, furnishing material that systematised cultural dis-
courses subsequently assume the task of reinvesting and transforming.
Here, however, things become complicated. The language in question can-
not in fact be assimilated to any sign system, in as much as the concept of class
that it brings into play is a relational concept from the outset, and even a very
particular relational concept, since it asserts itself constitutively as a relation
between antagonistic classes. As Bakhtin had already indicated,20 the ‘multi-
accentuation’ of the ideological sign under the impact of class struggle is
precisely what makes it possible to think the historicity of a semiotic sys-
tem. As a result, ‘the very content of a class ideology is relational’ and ‘class
discourse – the categories in terms of which individual texts and cultural
phenomena are now rewritten – is essentially dialogical in its structure.’ The
Bakhtinian concept of the dialogical is ‘essentially an antagonistic one’, for ‘the
dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses ght it out
within the general unity of a shared code’.21
There are then two possibilities: either to foreground the dialogical char-
acter of the form and restore its antagonistic, subversive, political element
(in line with the cited analyses of fairy tales by Ernst Bloch or of black slave
religion by Eugene Genovese); or, on the contrary, to highlight the unity
of the ‘master-code’ within which contradictions are inscribed, and which
‘thus characterizes the larger unity of the social system’, the cohesion of each
mode of production. Thus, there is ‘a cultural dominant or form of ideologi-
cal coding specic to each mode of production’.22 The thesis in fact requires
reformulation if it is not to betray its author’s intention and lapse back into an
18
See Jameson 1983, p. 83.
19
Ibid.
20
See Voloshinov 1973, pp. 83–98.
21
22
Jameson 1983, pp. 88–9.
exercise in classicatory typology that is scholastic and utterly sterile. Where,

wonders Jameson, is Milton, for example, to be allocated: ‘within a “precapi-
talist” or a nascent capitalist context’? Formulated thus, the question is virtu-
ally meaningless and contributes nothing to an understanding of this author
and his œuvre. In reality, it must be recognised that
every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted

in the overlay and structural coexistence of several modes of production all
at once, including vestiges and survivals of older modes of production . . . as
well as anticipatory tendencies.
It follows that
texts emerge in a space in which we may expect them to be crisscrossed

and intersected by a variety of impulses from contradictory modes of
production all at once.23
In order to transcend the unity of the master-code, which (let us recall) is not
the framework, discovered at last, of a consensus, but the expression of the
‘structural limitation’ peculiar to ideology, it is necessary to take the ultimate
step and proceed to the third level of the hermeneutic structure: that of ‘cul-
tural revolution’ and ‘the ideology of form’. Let us clarify something of what
is at issue in these two notions, starting with the second. The ideology of form
is dened as
the determinate contradiction of the specic messages emitted by the varied

sign systems which coexist in a given artistic process as well as in its general
social formation.24
The coexistence of a multiplicity of sign systems refers to the insurmountabil-

ity of the antagonism between the various modes of production or tendencies,
communism not being a mode of production that is contained in germ in capi-
talist relations, but a dominated tendency internal to these relations – a mode
of production ‘to come’, if one likes, thereby eluding, like the Real of History,
any representation and any pre-constructed image.
For its part, the ‘cultural revolution’ is to be understood as an extended
process immanent in each mode of production (or each determinate articula-
23
24
Jameson 1983, pp. 98–9.
Jameson • 705
tion between modes of production), and not conned exclusively to periods

of ‘transition’ in the strict sense from one mode to another. This process con-
stantly structures and transforms the values, discourses and habitus anchored
in the everyday, continually shakes up the accumulated layers of the ‘matrix
ideology’, through antagonisms between and within modes of production,
through class struggle. Openly ‘transitional’ moments are thus included in
cultural revolutions, which nevertheless exceed them, in the sense, for exam-
ple, that the ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’ refers not only to the moment
of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but to the much broader
phenomenon referred to by Weber as the ‘spirit of capitalism’. In this sense,
they are only ‘the passage to the surface of a permanent process in human
societies, of a permanent struggle between the various coexisting modes of
production’.25
An articulated combination of these three interpretative horizons, Jameson’s
construction represents an enterprise in ‘totalisation’ without equal in Marx-
ism, and doubtless well beyond it, sustained by a tenacious project of ‘tran-
scendence’ (in the abolition/preservation sense of Aufhebung) of the opposition
between intra-Marxist and extra-Marxist theoretical traditions alike. Its ‘master-
narrative’ doubtless represents the most signicant challenge, at the level
of theoretical elaboration at least, both to the ‘end of grand narratives’ pro-
claimed by the postmodernist current – one that is all the more signicant in
that it aims to incorporate the truth articulated by the latter – and to the cri-
tique of Hegel and the Hegelian-Marxist tradition initiated by Althusser.
The result of a prolonged confrontation with the theses of the master of
the rue d’Ulm, The Political Unconscious ends up according them a pre-emi-
nent position – the categories of the Hegelian tradition in Marxism retaining
only a local validity – while subjecting them to the test that would doubtless
have seemed least desirable to their author: inscribing them, as good Hege-
lian method dictates, in the ‘dialectical tradition’ with which they precisely
intended to effect a break. The operation in fact has a dual thrust. On the one
hand, it is the guiding concepts of the Althusserian deconstruction of Hege-
lian Marxism – for instance, ‘overdetermined contradiction’, ‘history as a pro-
cess without a subject or goal’, ‘structural causality’, ‘efcacy of an absent
cause’ – that to a large extent structure the ‘concrete analyses’ of literary texts
25
(Balzac, Gissing, Conrad, romance). In return, however, these same concepts

are treated in historicist fashion, which leads to the conclusion that, far from
being opposed, intra-modal analysis (roughly speaking, à la Althusser) and
inter-modal sequence (roughly speaking, à la Hegel or Lukács) mutually pre-
suppose one another. Yet the second can only be represented, or expounded,
in the form – which is an empty form of Darstellung – of a teleologically ori-
ented narrative, yielding a ‘properly Marxian “philosophy of history”’.26
Seductive and audacious, inconceivable even within the co-ordinates of
‘Western Marxism’, such an undertaking not unnaturally poses problems. In
particular, it may be wondered whether it does not simply reinstate the dual-
ity of diachrony and synchrony, re-establishing the prerogatives of ‘meta-nar-
rative’ in its traditional form (continuist and pre-Hegelian, if one wishes) as a
genesis and succession of various ‘forms’ – especially of literary forms, since
it is essentially they that are at issue in The Political Unconscious – succeeding
one another in a homogeneous, linear historical time.27 Thus, throughout the
book it is the possibility of presenting a ‘genealogy’ of the various literary
genres examined (essentially romance and the novel) that is the real object of
the exercise. To bring out these diachronic perspectives, Jameson adopts the
Husserlian notion of ‘sedimentation’. A literary form supposedly carries as
such an ideological charge that persists (is sedimented), and which can coexist
with other elements when this form is adopted in a new historical context. In
Lecercle’s judgement, Jameson’s solution is ‘clever’, but ‘not wholly convinc-
ing’. In his view, Jameson
overestimates the continuity of literary forms, underestimates the rupture

created by a change in historical conjuncture, and thus runs the risk of
lapsing back into tradition building, which is a traditional form of intellectual
history.28
26
27
See Jameson 1983, p. 139f.
28
Lecercle 1987, p. 91. Jameson has himself disavowed the formulation of the ‘suc-
cession of modes of production in history’ as forming a single narrative, insisting on
the fragmentary and discontinuous character of this ‘narration’ (See Kouvélakis and
Vakaloulis 1994).
Jameson • 707
The dialectic, ultimate utopian horizon

‘[A]ll ideology . . . including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class conscious-
ness, is in its very nature Utopian’,29 Jameson claims, at the risk of provoking
a scandal. This is so not despite – but precisely because of – its function in
perpetuating class domination, because the latter consists in the afrmation of
collective solidarity. In general, we have seen that since the ‘organic solidar-
ity’ manifested by the ‘collectivity’ forms the ‘essence’ of the social relation, it
appears logical to conclude that ideology – ‘class consciousness’ or ‘group sol-
idarity’ – is by its very nature utopian, since utopia is itself simply the image
of ‘the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless
society’.30 ‘Figurations’ of an emancipated society, utopias are inherent in the
representations secreted by any society shot through with class antagonism.
And, if we accept that the ideologies of the dominant are not – or at least not
necessarily, or even mainly – mirrors wherein they seek to atter themselves
but, above all, ‘mirrors held up to the others, to the dominated’,31 then it must
be concluded that, in order to succeed in its function, any ideological con-
guration necessarily incorporates elements of utopia, if only in an extremely
debased form. To put it differently, any ideology is an ideology ‘of the weak’
to the precise extent that it ‘reects’, in the Hegelian sense, the fact of their
domination and the traumatic burden that it conceals. On this point, Jameson
very pertinently recalls the analyses by Bloch and Adorno and Horkheimer
of the utopian impulses present in even the most degraded forms of ‘mass
culture’ or in an ideology as foul as anti-Semitism; and one might add to this
Étienne Balibar’s analysis of racism as a ‘humanism’.32
However, like the ideology from which it is indissociable, and paradoxical
as it might seem, utopia is above all a matter of practice; and it is in this sense
that Jameson proposes to dene the utopian text as a ‘praxis’ of a particular
type:
It is possible to understand the Utopian text as a determinate type of

praxis, rather than as a specic mode of representation, a praxis that has
less to do with the construction and perfection of a someone’s ‘idea’ of a
29
Jameson 1983, p. 289.
30
Jameson 1983, p. 291.
31
Labica 1987, p. 115.
32
See Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, pp. 63–4.
‘perfect society’ than it does with a concrete set of mental operations to be

performed on a determinate type of raw material given in advance, which
is contemporary society itself – or, what amounts to the same thing, on
those collective representations of contemporary society that inform our
ideologies just as they order our experience of daily life.33
Utopia discloses the ambivalence within collective practice in so far as it

embodies a form of praxis which, in the very endeavour to assert itself as the
allegory of a different social form, succumbs to representation and is in a way
transformed into its opposite – into a mode of neutralisation, as opposed to
resolution, of real contradictions.
The true object of the utopian narrative is therefore its avowed failure: the
confession of a failure, individual and collective, to produce a vision of the
Other, to ‘overleap one’s time’ (to adopt Hegel’s formulation). This is why
the ultimate image of utopia – concrete vector (or presentable in narrative
mode at least) of the spirit of communism, strict counterpart to the history
experienced by humanity as a nightmare from which there is no escape – is
duty bound precisely to abolish any representation internally, to break with
representation. The name of this utopia-beyond-utopia is none other than the
dialectic. But it in turn cannot, any more than can any other textual operator,
elude the test of the historicist hermeneutic.
At a rst level, the dialectic refers to a precise mode of intervention in the
conjuncture, which is theoretical initially – directed against empiricism and
the refusal of theory aunted by ‘the peculiar linguistic habits of the philoso-
phers of the Anglo-American School who, working without books after the
example of Socrates, turn their minds carefully inside out like old packets in
order to see what practical examples may be found here’.34 But it is also politi-
cal, in as much as the dialectic is spurred on by the methodological imperative
of totalisation, which registers the unrepresentable character of the totality in
order tirelessly to relaunch the labour of historicising interpretation, to the
point of producing those ‘cognitive mappings’ that are capable of removing
the constraints which cause the present to stumble over its own internal pos-
sibilities. Such an imperative dictates struggling against the fragmentation of
33
Jameson 1988b, p. 81.
34
Jameson 1972, p. 207.
Jameson • 709
the dominated classes and their struggles imposed by late capitalism, espe-
cially in the North-American context, which is now partially converging with
the dominant trends in Europe. More profoundly, however, the ‘persistence
of the dialectic’ refers to its very status such as it appears in the light of the
ultimate hermeneutic horizon that it discloses. Neither a priori method, nor
universal science, the dialectic refers to ‘the anticipation of the logic of a col-
lectivity which has not yet come into being’35 – that of the classless society
embodied in human beings’ struggle for their liberation.
The encounter between Jameson’s project and the debate on postmoder-
nity, which was in no sense either spontaneous or predetermined, is neverthe-
less inscribed in the precise point where the History revealed by the ‘political
unconscious’ crosses history in the present and politics tout court. Is it conceiv-
able that this endlessly expansive interpretative machine could not capture,
and in a way regard as its greatest challenge, what is asserted precisely as its
denial, its maximum point of resistance: the ‘end of grand narratives’, the col-
lapse of historical meaning, the celebration of the supercial and ephemeral?
With the hindsight afforded by the passage of time, we can say that the
wager has been won: Jameson’s intervention in the fray of postmodernism,
which has produced decisive and, in a sense, irreversible effects,36 has indeed
functioned as a tremendous relaunching of the theoretical project as a whole.
The encounter with the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, as Jameson denes
postmodernism, has rejuvenated this dialectical and historicist set of instru-
ments and, at the very heart of the imperialist centre, won him an audience
that is now comparable only with that of the major gures in the Western-
Marxist tradition. That an event of this magnitude should have occurred even
as the historical defeat of the mass movement for self-emancipation super-
vened to terminate the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm) clearly indi-
cates that the ‘political unconscious’ of our time is far from having produced
all its effects.
35
Jameson 1983, p. 286.
36
It is no exaggeration to say that there is a before, and an after, the publication
in 1984 in New Left Review of the essay on ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism’ (reprinted in Jameson 1991).
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Henri Lefebvre, Thinker of Urban Modernity
Stathis Kouvelakis
Henri Lefebvre’s discovery of ‘modernity’ – a term

he did not coin, but to the establishment of whose
theoretical pedigree he made a signicant contri-
bution1 – seems fully to conrm Fredric Jameson’s
thesis that modernity can only be perceived as such
from an ‘exterior’ which is identied with a ‘pre-
modern enclave’;2 or, more precisely, as an enclave
facing its imminent modernisation, the devastating
effects of its absorption into a world which, in the
space of a nal instant, it can confront in the man-
ner of the ‘not yet’. In this sense, the primal scene,
whose repetition and displacements punctuate the
long course of Lefebvre’s life and thought, is none
other than that of the ‘crucied sun’ which he him-
self retraced in some justly famous pages of La
Somme et le reste.3 An urban adolescent on holiday in
Navarrenx – the maternal village, embodiment of the
traditional universe – and immersed in a rural world
that is at once oppressive and communal, archaic
1
See the pioneering endeavour of Lefebvre 1995. In particular, Lefebvre distin-
guished between modernity and modernism, the former referring to the self-reexive
moment of an epoch, while the latter constitutes its dominant cultural phenomenon.
Modernity appears as the ‘shadow’ cast over bourgeois society by the failure of revo-
lution, at once a compensatory substitute and the ineliminable trace of vanquished
hopes.
2
See ‘Marxism and Modernism’ in Jameson 1998.
3
See Lefebvre 1989, pp. 251–66.
and festive, is gripped by a primal fear at the sight of a disc stamped with a
cross erected on a monument at the side of a country path: it is the ‘crucied
sun’. And, via this allegory of religion’s oppressive function, he comes to feel,
rather than understand as such, the internal gulf constitutive of the traditional
social order, which is in the process of disappearing. The trauma at the centre
of it, Lefebvre will discover later, refers to the destruction of a life-experience
that is older still – an ancient pagan, solar, festive tradition, shattered by feu-
dal power and its austere ofcial religion. However, they will never entirely
be rid of this prior form, which will nd refuge in the subterranean strata of
social existence, rising to the surface during each interruption of its normal
course: festivals, carnivals, popular revolts.
With the aid of the retrospective obviousness typical of biographical con-
structions, it would doubtless not be difcult to ‘rediscover’ in the shock cre-
ated by the discrepancy between two contradictory orders of experience the
thematic core which the subsequent œuvre will seek to unfold – especially
that ‘ambiguous, distrustful and fascinated, lucid and forewarned curiosity’4
which Lefebvre brought to bear on a triumphant modernity. This curiosity
underlay what Lefebvre himself referred to as a ‘new romanticism’5 – an
unstable, ambivalent and, by that very token, productive mixture of nostalgia
for the past and enthusiasm for novelty, of active rebellion and a desire for
harmony and reconciliation.
This is what is reactivated and revived during the traumatic shock – an obvi-
ous repetition of the primal scene6 – triggered by the construction, towards
the end of the 1950s, of the new town of Mourenx alongside the Navarrenx of
Lefebvre’s childhood and adolescence: the reection on space and the urban
phenomenon has its source here – in the brutal intrusion of an aggressive
4
Lefebvre 1989, pp. 258–9.
5
See the nal ‘prelude’ in Lefebvre 1995 (pp. 239–388), entitled ‘Towards a New
Romanticism?’.
6
The violence transpires more clearly in the freer, more settled terms of an inter-
view that long postdates the event, than in the contemporary analysis of it in the
nevertheless decisive chapter ‘Notes on the New Town’ (1960), in Lefebvre 1995,
pp. 116–26: ‘at one point I saw a town being constructed, with extraordinary brutal-
ity: the town was decided in high places, the bulldozers arrived, the peasants were
traumatised – it was a drama in the country: Mourenx. It was then that I got down
to studying the urban phenomenon. I witnessed the creation of a new town on the
spot’ (Lefebvre 1983, p. 56).
Lefebvre • 713
modernity, effected by an anonymous and normalised ‘machine for inhabit-

ing’, functional for the needs of capitalism and carefully planned from above
by the postwar technocratic state. And this modernity coexists in the order of
non-contemporaneity, which is constitutive of modern experience,7 with the
spatial sedimentation of a form of a communal, aesthetic existence that has
endured for centuries. Even so, stresses Lefebvre, it is in the unprecedented
experience generated by the impersonal, repetitive machinery of Mourenx, in
the conicts and expectations created in it, that the limited character of tradi-
tional existence can be dissolved and a horizon of genuine emancipation for
the men and women of modern times opened up.
Emancipation through the urban experience

The everyday – the town – the urban – re-production – space: here, in approxi-
mate order, are the sequences of the enactment of emancipation, conceived
by Lefebvre as the advent of ‘total man’,8 the universal communion of indi-
viduals liberated from alienation. Yet this sequence is in no sense equivalent
to a linear evolution. And while it is true that is de jure inscribed in a certain
philosophy of history, it is predominantly as a general framework, an alle-
gorical narrative of potential emancipation, which allows Lefebvre to revive a
conceptual labour of constant historicisation and specication of the dynamic
towards humanity’s disalienation and totalisation.9
As regards the continual interest knowledge has in emancipation, the rst
thing to investigate is the pair œuvre/product, in as much as it expresses two
aspects of ‘production’ – itself at the centre of social existence. Production,
Lefebvre adamantly insists, must be understood in the ‘broad sense’ – that of
a total praxis. It is not restricted to
the activity that fashions things in order to exchange them. There are œuvres
and there are products. Production in the broad sense (the self-production
7
‘Notes on the New Town’ begins with this sentence: ‘A few kilometres from the
tower blocks of the new town lies the sleepy old village where I live. Just a few min-
utes from my timeworn house, and I am surrounded by the derricks of a building
estate without a past’ (Lefebvre 1995, p. 116).
8
On the theme of the ‘total man’, directly derived from a re-reading of the young
Marx and Feuerbach, see Lefebvre 1968, pp. 148–66.
9
See Lefebvre 2002, pp. 180–93 and Lefebvre 1991, pp. 76–7.
of human beings] implies and includes that of ideas, representations,

language. . . . Thus, production excludes nothing, nothing that is human.10
Production is an image of the ‘concrete universal’,11 which nds the realisation

of its internal purpose in the œuvre rendered transparent to conscious praxis.12
Closer in this to the Promethean gesture than, for example, ‘objectication’ in
the late Lukács,13 production nds initial fullment in everyday life; then in
the town – that œuvre par excellence14 – which allows the œuvre to recapture its
meaning;15 and, nally, in space, synthesis of the œuvre and the product,16 nal
gure of the totality.
This is where a second conceptual pair, directly connected with the previ-
ous one, comes in: the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value,
invoked in order to provide a specically Marxist anchorage for the ‘grand
narrative’ of humanity’s alienation and imminent emancipation. Towns and
urban reality are an œuvre, for they pertain to use-value:
exchange-value and the generalisation of commodities through industrial-

isation have dislocated towns and urban reality, refuges of use-value, germs
of a potential predominance and revalorisation of use.17
This position, constantly reiterated,18 has important consequences, particu-

larly in the analysis of the contradictions peculiar to urban space: ‘use resists
stubbornly: ineliminably. The ineliminability of the urban centre plays a cru-
cial role in the argument’.19 Use, previously dominant in the immediate unity
of the natural community, but negated by the predominance of commodity
exchange, resurfaces thanks to the negation of its negation: in a ‘form’ that
10
11
Lefebvre 1990, p. 15.
12
See Lefebvre 2002, p. 156.
13
The root of the difference between Lukács and Lefebvre is doubtless to be sought
in the unequal weight they assign labour: basis of social being for the former, it is
subordinate to aesthetic creation for the latter.
14
15
16
‘In and of itself, social space does not have all of the characteristics of “things”
as opposed to creative activity. Social space per se is at once work and product – a
materialisation of “social being” ’ (Lefebvre 1990, pp. 101–2).
17
Lefebvre 1974a, p. 14.
18
See, in particular, Lefebvre 1974a, pp. 86–9; Lefebvre 1974b, p. 30; and Lefebvre
1974c, p. 204.
19
Lefebvre • 715
‘cannot disappear’.20 For it is a ‘pure’ form, totally autonomous from the ‘con-
tent’ of which it is the ‘receptacle’.21 Dened as ‘meeting point, the site of
assembly, simultaneity’,22 it ‘generates’ its own object:23 a ‘potential’ object
always orientated towards its fullment – urban society.
Use, whose reality is restored to us by this form with demiurgic proper-
ties, is dened with the help of a third pair, contained in the two preceding
ones: art/work. Art is the ever living model of the active appropriation of
reality through the production of œuvres – precisely artworks.24 The adoption
of the theme, dear to German idealism, of the ‘realisation’ of art through its
fusion with life and everydayness must be understood in its opposition to the
relativisation of work, regarded as an activity that produces, in the ‘narrow’
and ‘reductive’ sense, ‘things’25 or ‘products’. An impersonal production, con-
demned to remain such, whereas the creation of ‘oeuvres is unintelligible if it
does not depend upon human subjects’,26 work is historically superseded by
the universalisation of the urban form, which, before our very eyes, is taking
over from industrialisation.
The sequence of the categories (œuvre/product, use/commodity, art/work)
thus circumscribes a major dialectical sequence, which totalises the meaning
of ‘universal history’ in these three moments. Alternatively put, this allegori-
cal narrative deploys a possible narrative presentation of the transition ‘from
nature to abstraction’,27 and thence to the concrete universality of ‘human
plenitude’, realised in the primitive community and doubly lost in the alien-
ation and ‘real abstraction’ of the state.28 At the very heart of the alienated
present, it reveals the ‘conception of, and desire for, a plenitude (nite and
relative, but “total”)’ borne by ‘urban rationality’.29 Lefebvre, it is true, rejects
the hasty identication of ‘what is possible’ with an ‘eschatology’ and rejects
‘traditional nalism’.30 History nevertheless unfolds in a temporal continuum,
20
21
Lefebvre 1974b, pp. 159–60.
22
Lefebvre 1974b, p. 159; and See Lefebvre 1974c, p. 121.
23
Lefebvre 1974b, p. 164.
24
See Lefebvre 1974a, pp. 119, 139, 142; and Lefebvre 1990, pp. 128, 349.
25
26
27
28
29
30
See, respectively, Lefebvre 2002, p. 73 and Lefebvre 1974b, pp. 93–7.
graphically represented by a spatio-temporal axis proceeding from origins

to the End,31 where the potential contained in the present at once assures us
of the direction of this evolution and of the image of the future foreshad-
owed thus.32 If the break is not a guaranteed certainty, but a ‘possibility’,33 the
historical narrative delivers up a ‘meaning’34 that allows us to see the urban
‘on the move since the Origin, in the vicinity of the initial zero’.35 The tran-
scendence/realisation of this historicity culminates in the ultimately restored
beautiful Totality which, under the auspices of the conscious mastery of social
transparency, reunies ‘art, technique, knowledge’, ‘science and utopia, real-
ity and ideality, conceived and lived’.36
As a result, urban society takes the form of a kind of Aufhebung (aboli-
tion/supersession) of the social relation as such. Its representation oscillates
between ‘the very concrete and positive idea of a history which has at last
been orientated, directed and mastered by knowledge and willpower’37 – that
is to say, an image of collective control that issues in the disappearance of the
political, assimilated to the withering away of the state38 – and a communion
between universal individuals (‘total men’) in the realm of ‘enjoyment’ and
‘non-work’.39 Thanks to the conjoint abolition of work, the state and politics,
the creative freedom of Subjects, the Festival, and ‘ludic centrality’ unfold
unchecked, recreating at a higher level the immediate unity of nature, every-
day life, and enjoyment which was characteristic of the original Festival spe-
cic to rural communities.40 It is no accident if we discover in the Navarrenx
of Lefebvre’s childhood, albeit in a form limited by an archaic social order,
the same features this projection attributes to the emancipated society of the
future: a quasi-monadological, organic unity (a seashell ‘has slowly secreted
31
See Lefebvre 1974a, p. 79.
32
See Lefebvre 1974b, p. 35.
33
34
‘What is possible forms part of reality: it gives it its meaning – that is to say, its
direction and orientation’: Lefebvre 1974b, p. 64.
35
36
Respectively, Lefebvre 1974a, p. 119 and Lefebvre 1990, p. 60.
37
38
This thesis is constantly reiterated. In addition to Lefebvre 1978, we might signal
Lefebvre 1991, pp. 91–2; Lefebvre 1974c, p. 153; Lefebvre 1973, p. 29; and Lefebvre
1990, p. 416.
39
See Lefebvre 1974b, p. 47; Lefebvre 1972, pp. 65–9; and Lefebvre 1973, p. 20.
40
Lefebvre • 717
a structure’)41 – a collective œuvre that integrates the functional and the aes-
thetic, a spatial diagram based on the non-separation of social sites and
activities.
Lefebvre thus immerses us in the great romantic dream: the transcendence
of the separations brought about by the triumph of bourgeois society as a
fullment of the promises contained in the premodern past – the dream of a
community of existence embodying the fusion of the aesthetic principle, the
ludic principle, and the ‘artistic’ principle of subjectivation. This is a dream
at the heart of modernity if, in accordance with Lefebvre’s own suggestions,
we understand the latter as the shadow cast by the experience of the failure of
revolution. Moreover, this is why the ‘prelude’ that closes the Introduction to
Modernity, tellingly entitled ‘Towards a New Romanticism?’, concludes, per-
fectly logically, with the founding gesture of any modernism: the appeal to
a new avant-garde, whose portent is situationism.42 What must be stressed
is that this dream, like any other narrative subjected to equivalent narrative
constraints, does not occur without ambiguities and aporias, which we must
now try to explain.
The urban: a false promise?

In reality, the categories that govern Lefebvre’s narrative are directly trans-
posable (and, in fact, transposed) from one object to another – from the every-
day to the urban, from space to globality, from one historical period and type
of society to those that preceded, and those that will succeed, it. Foreign to the
logic peculiar to a specic object of knowledge, they often seem to pertain to a
particular type of discourse, wherein history is invoked only in order to illus-
trate a sequence of self-development of the concept: a philosophy of history,
or rather (to take up a distinction of Lukács’s),43 on history. Concrete analy-
ses will thus often be diverted towards roads without an exit, interrupting
the exploration of fertile tracks that have previously been sketched. We shall
examine more closely two sources of aporiae that directly affect the problem-
atic of urban space: the opposition between use-value and exchange-value
41
42
See Lefebvre 1995, p. 343ff.
43
Lukács makes it the distinguishing feature of the ‘bad abstraction’ of utopian
narratives: See ‘Moses Hess and the Problem of Idealist Dialectics’ in Lukács 1972.
and the aetheteticisation of everyday life as the paradigm of an emancipated

society.
To start with, what is involved in the ‘contradiction between use-value
and exchange-value’? And, furthermore, granted that we nd ourselves in
the context of commodity relations (where an exchange-value and a use-value
therefore exist simultaneously), why is there a contradiction? After all, the
commodity is a unity of exchange-value and use-value, the second referring
to the material support required by the rst. And this is what makes com-
modity exchange a rational activity: what is aimed at through the expendi-
ture of labour-power crystallised in an exchange-value, itself possessed by an
exchanger, is the utility of the product possessed by another exchanger. The
general form of value – the universal equivalent (money) – ensures the ade-
quate expression of values, the general exchangeability that provides access
to all the use-values produced.44
There are, then, two options: either the town, pre-existing the domination
of capitalist relations, is ‘commodied’ and thereby becomes an object of
commodity exchange, which only possesses meaning on account of the use
obtained from it. This is how things stand, for example, with the tourist-type
consumption of rehabilitated urban centres, compensation in nostalgic mode
for the destruction of the historic town.45 Alternatively – the second option –
the term ‘use’ refers to something other than the use obtained in the context of
commodity exchange and in fact this is what Lefebvre suggests: not ‘any use
whatsoever, but a “qualitative” use, which is already social appropriation,
and as such in contradiction with commodity logic’.46 A use inherent in the
‘second nature’ fashioned by the urban,47 which refers to the anthropological
attributes posited by the two other conceptual pairs (the creative freedom of
human beings designated by the oppositions oeuvre/product, art/work).
In this case, the pair use-value/exchange-value as dened by Marx (and
independently of whether a ‘contradiction’ exists between the two terms) is
manifestly inadequate, for it can only refer to the two indissociable aspects of
44
For an overall demonstration, see Bidet 2000, pp. 220–2.
45
‘The urban centre thus becomes a high-quality consumer product for foreign-
ers, tourists, people from the periphery, suburbanites. It survives thanks to this dual
role: place of consumption and consumption of place’: Lefebvre 1974a, p. 21. See also
46
See Lefebvre 1974a, p. 89 and Lefebvre 1974c, pp. 204–5.
47
Lefebvre • 719
one and the same social activity: commodity exchange. It has no pertinence
as regards an ‘external contradiction’, which refers to the opposition between
two antagonistic ‘social logics’: between commodity relations (with their dual
aspect: use-value and exchange-value) and an alternative appropriation based
on socialised use.
We now nd ourselves faced with a crucial aporia in Lefebvre’s categories,
which affects his very denition of the urban. If the urban is, in essence (the
term is by no means fortuitous), in contradiction with market and capital-
ist rationality, it is because it is posited as a pure form: encounter, assembly,
simultaneity. The potential negation of distance it makes possible allows the
‘deterioration of social relations’ due, precisely, to ‘distance’ to be avoided.48
While ‘creating nothing’, the urban form makes ‘everything ow’, for ‘noth-
ing exists without convergence, proximity – that is to say, relations’.49 No doubt.
However, except in the immutable world of ‘essences’, the relations in ques-
tion can be of any sort: slavery, exploitation, destruction or . . . emancipation.
This is where use, ‘qualitative’, socialising use, intervenes. How is it, in turn,
dened? Indeed, as we have just seen, in the same way as the ‘urban form’,
by the same attributes and qualities.50 Here we are caught in a circular form of
reasoning with no way out: the ineliminability of the urban is based on use,
which is itself equivalent to the urban form, the latter being what denes the
urban as such.51 This vicious circle is readily explained when we realise that
the urban is assimilated to a form prior to any social determination, in so far
as it is called upon to play the specic role in the sequence of universal history
outlined earlier – that of embodying an image of the singular universal.
Let us now turn to Lefebvre’s version of the aesthetic critique of capitalism
and, more broadly, of alienated forms of social life. The resumption of the
project of the ‘realisation’ of art in its reunication with the totality of social
life is intended, among other things, to contest a reductive and ‘productivist’
vision (in the sense of centred on productive activities) of a future socialist
48
See Lefebvre 1974b, pp. 159–60.
49
50
For example, ‘some inhabitants reconstruct centres, use places in order to restore
meetings, even if they are derisory. The use (use-value) of places, of moments, of dif-
ferences, eludes the exigencies of exchange, exchange-value’: Lefebvre 1974a, p. 86.
51
On this point, see Manuel Castells, who observes that Lefebvre thus cancels any
causal relationship between the form (the town) and human creation (Castells 1975,
p. 122).
society. Consequently, Lefebvre forms part of a rich romantic tradition, which

is prevalent in classical Marxism, beginning with Marx himself. As is strongly
suggested by certain famous passages in the Grundrisse,52 art – a ‘higher activ-
ity’ and form of ‘actually free labour’, to adopt Marx’s formulations – nds
itself promoted to the rank of central, if not unique, activity in an emancipated
society.
Now, once we search in the here and now for a real vector of this future
kingdom of the artwork, it has to be observed that the constant and growing
aestheticisation of capitalist relations tends very rapidly to surpass the seem-
ingly most subversive cultural demands, by ‘realising’ them in its fashion.
More than a mere ‘recuperation’, there is a deep cultural logic at work here,
fed by a multiform staging of the everyday, which aims to displace and neu-
tralise real contradictions through practices of passive, symbolically gratify-
ing consumption of images and participation in the proliferating culture of the
urban happening. ‘Already the urban space affords city folk dynamism, the
unforeseen, possibilities, and encounters. It is a spontaneous theatre, or it is
nothing’, wrote Lefebvre in 1968.53 But the representation proposed is in great
danger of being the generalised spectacularisation, the unchained phantas-
magoria of the commodity fetish, offering city dwellers pushed towards the
periphery enjoyment of the spectacle of their own dispossession of the city.54
Lefebvre’s optimism, which is not wanting in lucidity as to the real meaning
of this ‘nostalgic consumption’, seems to be based on the socialising virtues
attributed to the ‘urban form’. However, the spectacle’s assembly of atomised
individuals pertains more to the solitude of modern crowds referred to by
Baudelaire, than to the now vanished mode of socialisation of the old urban
districts.
Lefebvre’s attempts to furnish a positive representation, a ‘realistic image’,
of the emancipatory potential of ‘realised art’ are scarcely convincing: the
architecture of R. Boll,55 which some might nd unduly neo-Mussolinian;
or the Montréal universal exhibition in 1967, which is supposed to illustrate
the ‘ideal’ – postmodernist avant la lettre – of the ‘ephemeral city, a perpetual
52
See Marx 1973.
53
54
Readers might usefully refer to Walter Benjamin’s analyses of Haussmanian Paris
(already!) in Benjamin 1973, pp. 157–76.
55
See Lefebvre 1974c, p. 270.
Lefebvre • 721
work by its inhabitants, themselves mobilised for and by this work’.56 Was
this ‘magnicent city, where everydayness was reabsorbed into the Festival,
where the urban transpired in its splendour’,57 anything more than one of
those urban spectacles – organised, what is more, by an ultra-liberal munici-
pality58 – supported by major nancial companies? The primacy accorded to
the aesthetic seems (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin) closer to the aesethicisa-
tion of political practice than to the politicisation of aesthetics. Bofl’s his-
toricist pastiche and Montréal’s ‘urban ephemera’ appear to be the illusory
promises of an ‘ideal’ that the postmodern age will take charge of transform-
ing into (sur)reality.
Was Lefebvre precisely a postmodernist avant la lettre? Obviously, it all
depends on what is meant by the term, whose polysemy and capacity for con-
fusion seem at rst sight to afford its only possible denitions. If, however, we
decide to opt for the intelligibility of the postmodern authorised by Jameson’s
intervention, might we conclude that Lefebvre’s aesthetic ideal pregures, in
its ambiguities, the ‘cultural logic’ of late capitalism and its dehistoricised,
multi-fragmented ‘hyper-space’? On this point, a small backwards glance
is required. As Lefebvre himself said and repeated, it was indeed the shock
created by a certain modernism, combining extreme functionalism and the
glorication of the state, notably at the level of the symbolic and urban monu-
mentality, that prompted his interest in the urban phenomenon.
The predominance of this modernism has quite rightly been linked to the
rise of a new social stratum – the ‘technocrats’ – that is the organic support
of this voluntarist policy of intervention in town and country, which it
would perhaps be appropriate to designate by the term ‘spatial Keynesianism’.
Lefebvre was liable to be attracted by certain aspects of the postmodernist cri-
tique of this modernism – for example, at an architectural level – which might
recall his own thematic: critique of functional standardisation (blocks of coun-
cil housing or towers à la Mies van der Rohe); rehabilitation of the symbolic
and ludic function; and references to ‘history’ via ‘quotations’ from the past
or vernacular traditions. Is he then to be regarded as a spokesman for the new
petit-bourgeois strata, formed in the atmosphere of 1960s ‘cultural protest’,
56
57
58
See Castells 1975, p. 52.
eager for ‘standing’ and ‘quality’ consumption – especially of old stone – and
who, following the breakdown of the Keynesian compromise, have taken
over from the austere technocracy of the era of postwar reconstruction?
Lefebvre’s indulgence towards an apologetic postmodernism, despite the
‘culturalist’ ambiguities of his analyses, in the main involves a misunder-
standing. With their stress on the critical and utopian dimension of art, their
delity to the exigency of truth posited by Hegelian aesthetics, his aesthetic
options are profoundly modern. They are at the antipodes of the liquidation
of historical depth, the blurring of spatial reference-points, the pure surface
play that characterises postmodern ‘hyper-space’.59 As for the ludic dimen-
sion, Lefebvre’s Festival is not reducible to any disabused, nihilistic nod, to the
facilities of eclecticism, and to the vampirisation of the past. More profoundly,
Lefebvre never abandoned the ambition of changing the world, swapping it,
for example, for a change in the way in which the world is contemplated. If he
emphasised the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, he never separated them
from real practices and appropriation, which affect the foundations of social
relations. Thus, he was able to perceive, at least in part, the possibility of a
recuperation by the dominant logic of elements – particularly cultural ones –
that were supposed to contest it. The ‘pseudo-Festival’, he lucidly observed,
only apparently leaves the everyday. It extends it by other means, by a

sophisticated organisation that combines everything – advertising, culture,
arts, games, propaganda, work regulations, urban existence . . . and the police
keeps a watchful eye, supervises.60
A politics of the possible

Formulated in abrupt fashion, the thesis I propose to develop here is the fol-
lowing: Lefebvre’s aporiae are not unproductive, in as much as his thinking
about space retains a critical signicance and an analytical fertility that ren-
der it still contemporary. As a preliminary to discussion of it, examination
of this thesis requires an ideal reconstruction of the approach around a few
key propositions. Such an exercise might seem disloyal to a thought which,
59
See Jameson 1991, especially his analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel and other, more
‘experimental’ postmodern spaces ( Jameson 1991, pp. 38–45, 96–129 and 154–80).
60
Lefebvre • 723
opting for the virtues of the fragmentary and the ‘informal’, was wary of sys-
tematic exposition. It carries with it the risk of a certain over-simplication
and compression of the development of Lefebvre’s thinking. Since it never-
theless seems to me to be difcult to do without them, unless we are to restrict
ourselves to a few generalities, I shall provisionally formulate the following
hypotheses:
1) The town is an inscription on the ground of the fundamental social rela-

tions of a mode of production. Generally speaking, each mode of pro-
duction produces a space that is peculiar to it: it is inscribed in space by
combining varied spatial practices.
2) The production of space is not a passive reection, external to social rela-
tions: it refers to a dimension, decisive because constitutive, of the processes
of their overall reproduction, which is also, at the same time, the spatial
reproduction of their contradictions.
3) Space, and especially urban space, thus constitutes the terrain where
antagonistic social forces are deployed – a new front in the class struggle.
4) An issue in struggles, space is consequently a site of increasing interven-
tion on the part of the instance which, through its regulation of conicts,
enables the re-production of the general conditions of class domination:
the state and its apparatuses, particularly the apparatuses of the local state
(town and country planning, regional councils, municipalities).
5) The process of production of space mobilises a set of spatial practices, of
representations of space, and of imaginary relations (the spaces of repre-
sentations) – or, in Lefebvre’s terms, the ‘perceptual’, the ‘conceptual’, and
the ‘experiential’. Each level possesses its own effectivity within the total-
ity formed by the fundamental relations of the mode of production and the
spatial practices that are constitutive of them.61
6) The spatialisation of the contradictions of the mode of production opens
up the question of possibilities: through a strategy and a politics contribut-
ing to the development of struggles for the social appropriation of space.
61
This particularly sensitive issue lies behind all the readings that see to annex
Lefebvre to a theoretical postmodernism. On this controversy, see Harvey 1989a,
pp. 262–3 and Soja 1989, pp. 76–9. In French, readers can refer to the studies by Dear
1994 and Hamel and Poitras 1994.
7) Just as the production of space has been a key issue for the survival of
capitalism, so the ‘test of space’ is unavoidable for any attempt at a revolu-
tionary transformation of social relations. No transition is possible without
a specic social practice – i.e. without the ‘creative destruction’ of state
and capitalist centrality, without collective reappropriation of the town
and space, and without a transformation in ways of living.
Needless to say, none of these propositions is self-evident. On one side, the

technocratism and positivism that were dominant in urban thinking pre-
sented space as neutral, a mere framework and physical receptacle for human
activities; and the political interventions that occurred there as rational and
placatory. On the other, the Marxist vulgate, conned to economism and
workerism, ignored urban and spatial problems, except from the reductionist
standpoint of ‘housing’. Moreover, the traditional organisations of the work-
ers’ movement proved enduringly incapable of investing these new sites of
confrontation with capitalist and state practices.
The opening to the urban and space offered Lefebvre a productive exit from
the project of the critique of everydayness, which he had undertaken since the
morrow of the Liberation, and whose germ in fact dates back to the 1930s.62
The paths opened up allowed him to leave behind the rather speculative and
abstract accounts into which, announcing inquiries whose object is hard to
make out, the second volume of the Critique of Everyday Life seemed to be get-
ting bogged down. They also facilitated – and this is far from negligible for
someone who always strove to inscribe his thought in an endeavour to renew
Marxism – combining the research object with real political practices: those of
the urban movements that developed in the wake of the struggles of 1968 in
France and throughout the world.
Lefebvre’s analyses unquestionably need to be resituated in the histori-
cal period that gave birth to them (1968–74): the nal prosperous moments
of intensive (Fordist) accumulation and an auspicious conjuncture for social
struggle and critical theoretical production, especially of Marxism. Hence,
inevitably, certain limits and a generally optimistic tone which, to say the
least, seems dated now. The period that began towards the end of the 1970s,
marked by a succession of defeats for the workers’ movement, a retreat by the
62
See Trebitsch 1991.
Lefebvre • 725
‘new social movements’, and the stabilisation of new modes of capital accu-
mulation, would profoundly transform the landscape, especially the urban
landscape.
The Keynesian city of the era of ‘growth’, with its technocratic myths and
the austerity of its modern town planning, was succeeded by the ‘entrepre-
neurial city’,63 adapted to the new economic, social and aesthetic environment
of triumphant neoliberalism. The entrepreneurial city impelled a profound
reorganisation of the internal space of towns. The recovery of urban centres
revalorised by privileged fractions of the so-called ‘middle classes’ proceeded
in tandem with the extension of impoverished zones, often with shifting bor-
ders, where the ‘losers’ of the new era were concentrated: a sub-proletariat
of the ‘excluded’, popular and working-class strata (especially those issuing
from ‘minorities’ or from ‘immigration’).
The gentrication of town-centres is to be related to the intensied forms
of inter-urban competition: investment in ‘culture’ and sites of ‘upmarket’
consumption (the conference centres, cultural facilities, sporting complexes
or business centres are now legion), and renovation of a built environment
that was appreciating in value, aimed to satisfy the ‘qualitative’ aspirations of
the ‘new middle strata’ (neo-bourgeoisie, higher fractions of the intellectual
strata). But they also aimed to recreate a new form of ‘urban cohesion’, unit-
ing the totality of inhabitants around the ‘image’ and the spectacle of – and in
– the town. Given that the spectacle and the image proved weak, or at least
insufcient, when it came to preserving ‘social cohesion’, multiform state
intervention (conict regulation and, where necessary, violent repression)
proved indispensable for maintaining order, neutralising the threats and fears
that haunted the postmodern town (criminality, riots, zones of informal eco-
nomic activity, and so on).
This development continued certain broad trends in capitalist urbanisa-
tion highlighted by Lefebvre: the intensication of class segregation in space
and the transfer of working-class and popular strata, and hence the increased
spatial polarisation that accompanied the rise of the new intermediate strata,
whose role in the formation of consumption norms and the social base of
63
On this point, we take up the arguments of Harvey 1989a, pp. 256–78; Harvey
1989b, pp. 141–97; and Soja 1989, pp. 157–89.
the dominant social bloc was already glimpsed.64 The explosion of cultural
politics certainly exceeded his predictions and even, as we have already sug-
gested, ‘realised’ the aspiration to the aestheticisation of the everyday and
the urban that he shared. This does not mean that he totally misjudged the
ambiguities. From the consumption of the urban spectacle65 to the recupera-
tion of leisure66 and the festival by culture and entertainment industry,67
Lefebvre discerned a ‘a contradiction, specic to this society, between expul-
sion (of whole groups towards the spatial, mental and social periphery) and
integration (which remains symbolic, abstract and “cultural”)’.68
By contrast, Lefebvre’s theses on the growing role of state intervention in the
spatial reproduction of the relations of domination were to be fully conrmed
in the post-Keynesian era. In particular, they make it possible to understand
why, despite its anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism in no way betokens ‘less
state’, but the redeployment of forms of state intervention precisely under the
impetus of the progressive dismantling of the institutional compromises of
the previous period. More than ever, the state, whose decentralisation mul-
tiplies the modalities of its presence, ensures the unity and overall organisa-
tion of space,69 articulates the varied and contradictory practices of the sphere
of social reproduction.70 And, above all, the state asserts itself by ‘pacifying’
the social eld, by regulating its internal conicts.71 Its ideological function is
crucial. The increasing institutionalisation of ‘urban policy’, notably by the
creation of an urban ministry, accentuates two phenomena that Lefebvre had
highlighted. State intervention is extended under the impact of a deepening in
the contradictions of space: the contradiction between global space, produced
at a world level by a capitalism that no longer has any borders, and the local
space of accumulation of private capital.
The accentuation of class polarisation in space triggers repressive unica-
tion and control.72 Added to this is the effect of fetishisation created by state
64
65
66
Lefebvre 1974c, p. 177 and 1973, p. 32.
67
68
69
70
71
See Lefebvre 1978, pp. 259–62, 308–14.
72
See Lefebvre 1972, p. 153 and Lefebvre 1978, pp. 308–10.
Lefebvre • 727
activity itself, which gives a ‘spatial’ appearance to problems attributed to

something specic to ‘towns’ or, above all, its ‘inner-city areas’ as such, which
is only a spatial expression of the dominant social relations. As Lefebvre rmly
insists, the contradictions of space ultimately refer to something other than
themselves.73 To reduce them to a so-called ‘spatial pathology’, whose ‘cure’
is taken in hand by the state and its auxiliaries, simply conveys the function of
naturalisation of social antagonisms, and hence of the preventive disorganisa-
tion of resistance, performed by the action of state apparatuses.
The seamless continuity of discourses and practices, during a succession
of ‘alternations’ at the top in France throughout the last two decades, offers
striking conrmation of the dual dimension assumed by the state’s increased
presence in and through the urban. Generally speaking, the key idea that runs
through Lefebvre’s writings – that the study of spatial congurations is a con-
dition of any serious analysis of social relations and, thereby, of any attempt
to transform them – has been amply conrmed by the recent development of
post-Fordist capitalism. The fact that his proposals have been taken up and
taken further by a signicant number of Marxist and radical researchers, for
the most part outside France,74 is an unmistakable sign of their impact and
fertility.
73
‘Spatial practice regulates life – it does not create it. Space has no power “in itself”,
nor does space as such determine spatial contradictions. These are contradictions of
society – contradictions between one thing and another within society, as for example
between the forces and relations of production – that simply emerge in space, at the
level of space, and so engender the contradictions of space’ (Lefebvre 1990, p. 358).
74
See Soja 1989, pp. 43–93 and passim.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Kôzô Uno and His School: A Pure Theory of
Capitalism
Jacques Bidet
Kôzô Uno (1897–1977) studied economics at Tokyo

University, where several young teachers had
already been won to Marxism. From 1922 to 1924,
he stayed in Berlin and basically devoted himself
to studying Capital. Appointed to teach political
economy, on his return to Japan he abstained from
the debate that opposed the Kôza and Rônô schools
and was already looking for a basis to transcend it.
He became wedded to the idea that Lenin’s and Hil-
ferding’s works, focused on a determinate phase in
the history of capitalism, were not situated on the
same level as those of Marx. The latter not only
referred to a different epoch, but posited a more
theoretical object, seeking to construct the concept
of a pristinely capitalist society. Arrested in 1938,
Uno was freed in 1940. In 1947, he became profes-
sor of political economy at the Tokyo Social Science
Institute, which had just been created. Now began
the period of his most important publications. But it
was only in the 1960s, with the decline of Stalin-
ist inuence, that he gradually established himself
as the head of the most important Marxist school
in Japan. And to this day his inuence remains
pre-eminent.
His most signicant work, Keizai Genron (1964), was translated into English
by Thomas Sekine in 1980 under the title Principles of Political Economy: Theory
of a Purely Capitalist Society. A rst version in two volumes (1950 and 1952)
had already had a great impact.
Uno’s particular conception of ‘scientic socialism’ led him to separate (the
better to unite them) practice and science. The latter possesses its own criteria
and objects. In order to develop, it has no need of an external ‘viewpoint’, not
even that of the proletariat. It does not advocate socialism; it seeks to iden-
tify its conditions of possibility. Wholly devoted to this task, Uno did not
regard himself as a ‘Marxist’ in the strong sense of the term implied by politi-
cal engagement and activity, but as a simple man of science. No doubt this
position must have made Marxism acceptable to the academic establishment.
At the same time, it led to a rigorous theoretical project that would furnish
the principles for an intervention in the most concrete, burning debates. On
the basis of the ‘international Marxism’ of the rst decades of the twentieth
century and an enormous modern culture, Uno developed an independent
line of research. As with contemporary avant-garde Japanese aesthetics,
there is nothing exotic about it. Uno’s initiative intersects with analogous
concerns – both Hegelian-dialectical and epistemological – that emerged in
Europe at the same time, among economists and philosophers alike. But it
displays exceptional originality and coherence. The work is vast and con-
tinued in the research of a whole school. The present chapter concentrates
exclusively on Uno’s Principles of Political Economy – the only work translated
into English – and relies on a few studies published in European languages.
This indicates the modesty of my undertaking and signals possible misunder-
standings in advance. But it is only appropriate that a dialogue with Japanese
Marxism should be started.
Kôzô Uno’s epistemological project

So far as I am aware, Uno is the only theoretician of signicance (or at least
the rst, given that his followers have taken up the task) whose project was
to reformulate the exposition of the ‘theory of capitalist society’ in conformity
with an adequate order of exposition, with a necessary beginning, development,
and end. Such was Marx’s project in Capital. And we are better informed
today of the theoretical reasons underlying his concern to introduce each of
Uno • 731
his concepts at the appropriate moment.1 Their denition and signicance are
determined by the precise position they occupy in the exposition. Paradoxi-
cally, the task of attending to the requisite order of explanation has been left
to the authors of manuals, to popularisers and teachers. Uno quite rightly
denes it as essential. And his Principles are nothing other than a methodical
version of Capital.
The need for such a project gradually became clear to Uno as a result of
the discrepancies between Marxist discourses referring to different levels of
analysis. Uno distinguishes between three theoretical levels.
The rst is the ‘theory of a purely capitalist society’, dealt with by Uno’s Prin-
ciples. Marx’s Capital provides the essential elements. But Uno aims to give his
exposition an adequate form. He eliminates anything that does not pertain to
a structural denition – everything that concerns the historical emergence and
development of capitalism. He excludes anything that is not specically eco-
nomic in character. He articulates his exposition in line with a ternary logical
form that manifestly refers to Hegel’s Logic. In this framework, he positions
each of the constitutive categories of the capitalist mode of production in its
proper place.
The second level is the ‘theory of stages of capitalism’. Uno distinguishes
between three epochs – mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism – which
are characterised as three moments in the development of the relationship
between the forces and relations of production. This periodisation and its
general spirit might seem traditional enough. However, Uno seeks to formu-
late its principle more rigorously. With each stage, a type of production and
a form of capital capable of realising accumulation are combined. Cor-
responding to domestic production (for instance, of wool) is commercial capi-
tal; to the factory age (for example, cotton production), industrial capital; and
to heavy industry (for example steel), nance-capital. After 1917, a new epoch
begins, with the emergence of socialist societies that alter the internal course
of capitalism.
The third level is concrete history – the history of particular societies, grasped
in their specicity, their distinctive historical-cultural context, the sequence of
their conjunctures.
1
See Schwarz 1978.
The theory of purely capitalist society

Uno’s theory of purely capitalist society is divided into three parts, each of
which contains three sections: Circulation (or 1. commodity; 2. money; 3. capi-
tal); Production (or, 1. process of production of capital, 2. process of circulation
of capital, 3. process of reproduction of capital.); and Distribution, or (1. prot;
2. rent; 3. interest).
As we can see, this tripartition differs from that proposed by Marx. While
the categories are the those of Capital, they are subject to a reorganisation that
sometimes alters their meaning appreciably.
Part One – ‘Circulation’ – corresponds to Parts One and Two of Volume
One. But we note an alteration of the utmost importance: according to Uno,
the category of labour-value, which Capital introduces straight away, can only
be introduced in Part Two (‘Production’). The rst route from the commod-
ity to capital therefore starts out from a strictly formal approach to value,
dened as the ‘homogeneity’ of commodities, such as it manifests itself in the
act of exchange. Uno endeavours to show that such a value implies its uni-
versal expression in money form; and he proposes an original version of the
well-known path leading from the ‘simple’ form to the ‘developed’ form and
the ‘general’ form. He denes the ‘simple’ expression of the value of a com-
modity in the use-value of another commodity as a ‘subjective evaluation’
on the part of its owner. Owners of commodities thus tend to express their
value in the use-value of the various goods they desire, depending on what
they are prepared to give in order to acquire them. The formation of a market
assumes the supersession of this diversity of expression and the emergence
of one commodity as universal equivalent, convertible into any other com-
modity that is desired. Such, schematically, is Uno’s version of the genesis of
money. It differs from that of Marx, the immediate object of whose analysis is
the articulation of the ‘form’ of value with its ‘substance’: labour-value. Here
we remain in the sphere of ‘desire’ and ‘evaluation’ – in short, of comparison
between use-values.
From money we are led dialectically to capital – to merchants’ capital rst
of all, which is simply the commercial use of the money-commodity, or ‘buy-
ing cheap and selling dear’; and nally to industrial capital. It emerges that
capital
Uno • 733
cannot secure a rm foundation for its value-augmenting activity unless it

goes a step further . . . capital must produce a commodity of higher value
than that which it has purchased.2
It remains to demonstrate how this is possible.

Part Two – ‘Production’ – corresponds to the rest of Volume One and to
Volume Two of Capital.
Uno casts the argument in an original form: he derives the necessity of the
category of labour-value from an analysis of the capitalist production process.
In order for his labour-power to endure, the wage-earner must receive the
equivalent of an output corresponding to the time required for its reproduc-
tion – for example, a wage of $3 representing six hours of work. For these
$3 he must receive 6 hours’ output from capitalists in the consumer goods
sectors. If he received less, the employers of his branch would lose out, since
they sell 6 hours’ output at $3. In short, the coherence of the capitalist system
assumes that products exchange according to the socially-necessary labour-
time required for their production. Labour and capital mobility, characteristic
of the industrial capitalist order, ensures that this is indeed the norm govern-
ing exchange.
Furthermore, Uno reorganises the content of Volumes One and Two. Thus,
he expands the eld of the section on reproduction. In it, he regroups the set
of structural problems dealt with by Marx in Volume One: the issue of accu-
mulation, he explains, cannot be considered earlier, because it assumes that
the notions of xed and circulating capital have been introduced (in the sec-
tion on Circulation). Uno can thus conjointly tackle the issues of the organic
composition of capital and relative overproduction as elements of cyclical cri-
sis. In addition, he stresses the theoretical need to differentiate endogenous
forms of overproduction from those bound up with the relationship between
capitalism and other forms of society. As for the reproduction schemata, he
believes that they are intended to ‘show how the basic process of capitalist
production can be formulated in terms appropriate to the social material basis
common to all societies’.3 Against theoreticians who derive capitalist crisis
2
Uno 1980, p. 15.
3
Itoh 1980, p. 137.
from a surplus of commodities, Uno maintains (and had done so since 1932)
that these schemata cannot demonstrate the inevitability of crisis.
The third part – ‘Distribution’ – corresponds to Volume Three of Capital. Let
us focus on two points.
Uno offers an especially rigorous analysis of the tendency for the rate of pro-
t to fall. In particular, he once again shows how, in his analysis of ‘counter-
tendencies’ to this law, Marx intermingled endogenous and other elements.
Since the latter concern the relations between capitalist society and different
types of society, they cannot pertain to the pure theory of capitalism.
Uno proposes an interpretation of cyclical crises in terms of overaccumula-
tion of capital, in line with an approach that integrates the relations between
employment, wages, prots, and interest.4 During the expansionary phase, he
explains, capitalists are impelled to engage not in innovation, but in extensive
development, by employing new wage-earners – until the point when, as a
result of the growing demand for labour, wages increase and eat into prots.
There thus occurs a ‘condition of excess capital’, wherein the accumulation of
additional capital yields no additional prot. The fall in the prot rate triggers
an increase in interest rates. And it is only when the crisis has broken out that,
in the depressive phase, new methods are introduced as a new surplus pro-
duction develops. In his Value and Crisis, Makoto Itoh relies on an expanded
version of this model.
Pure theory and real history

Uno’s texts on the stages of capitalism and on contemporary society have not
as yet been translated from the Japanese. However, we possess three works,
very different in character, which give us some access to the more general
views of the Uno school: the books by Itoh, Sekine and Albritton.
Robert Albritton’s book A Japanese Reconstruction of Marxism (1986) is the
only work currently available that presents Uno’s theory in its various aspects
and compares it with the different perspectives of ‘Western Marxism’ (Lukács,
Althusser, Colletti).
The articulation between ‘stages’ and purely capitalist society is based on
the idea that the latter denes a system in which the law of the market com-
4
See Uno 1980, pp. 87–9.
Uno • 735
pletely and directly governs production. In the rst age of capitalism, capi-
tal’s control over production is only indirect, because production is still that
of the former domestic economy. In the age of liberalism, the model is fully
realised, the light industrial production characteristic of it being fully attuned
to the exigencies of a competitive market structure. With imperialism, it is
the type of production that changes in the rst instance: the need for sizeable
xed capital and heavy, long-term xed assets calls for the establishment of
‘nance-capital’. The law of the market retreats in the face of state interven-
tion, which is protectionist and aggressive.
Albritton offers some clarication of the signicance of the distinction
between analytical levels. A study of petty-commodity production of cot-
ton in Uganda at the beginning of the twentieth century5 involves a careful
distinction between what pertains to the general form of capitalist relations
of production, the particular stage of its development (imperialism, with the
partition of Africa, the establishment of a periphery, and so on), and the spe-
cic historical context (cultural, technical, etc.). Likewise with the study of
crises. Highly distinct types of necessity attach to these three levels. The order
of pure theory is that of strictly necessary relations – for example, between
commodities and money, wages and surplus-value, value and production
prices. At the level of stages, the ‘material contingency’ of particular forms
of use-value intervenes. The necessity characteristic of real relations and the
propositions that encapsulate them (for instance, between heavy industry
and nance-capital) cannot be of the same kind. There is even less possibil-
ity of formulating necessary relations when dealing with a properly ‘histori-
cal’ study, which considers a singular phenomenon with its extra-economic
dimensions and conjunctural situation.
We may add that for Albritton, as for Uno, Marx’s theory is essentially valid
for capitalism and that the notion of historical materialism as a ‘science of his-
tory’ based on the notion of ‘mode of production’ is explicitly rejected. In this
extensive sense, Marxism is conceived as an ‘enlightened ideology’,6 based on
the only thing that merits the title of ‘science’ – the pure theory of capitalism.
To this general presentation Albritton adds a more personal contribu-
tion, concerning the conception of the superstructure in the pure theory. In
5
See Albritton 1986, pp. 122–4.
6
Sekine 1984, p. 4.
doing so, he takes up a project of Uno’s, which neither he nor his successors
accomplished.7 This is a difcult undertaking, because if the market wholly
regulates such a society, the state seems superuous. Albritton believes he
can resolve the problem by suggesting that the Rechtsstaat, mediator between
legal subjects linked by contractual relations, corresponds to a ‘purely capital-
ist society’:
[t]he capitalist state form must be derived from the legal subject posited by
the circulation of commodities and not from the realm of production where
class always lurks behind the factory walls.8
The state is said to manifest itself as a relation of domination at the level of the
stages and history.
Professor at York University in Canada, Thomas Sekine (to whom Albritton
refers constantly) is the principal mediator between the Unoist tradition and
European and American Marxism. Translator of Uno, he has appended to the
author’s text a study of his epistemology. Moreover, he has published a mon-
umental work, The Dialectic of Capital (1984 and 1986), whose 500 pages form
a methodical commentary on the Principles of Political Economy. Sekine refor-
mulates the theory in the language of modern mathematics and brings out its
underlying Hegelian framework. To this day, Sekine’s book is the standard
reference on Uno’s œuvre for Western readers. Its ambition is considerable.
Sekine aims to show that Uno has strictly modelled the plan of his treatise on
that of Hegel’s Logic and to display this correspondence term by term: Circula-
tion = Being, where: commodity = quality, money = quantity, capital = money.
Then Production = Essence, where: production of capital = foundation, circula-
tion of capital = appearance, reproduction = [effectivity]. Finally, Distribution
= Concept, where price of production = subjective concept, prot-rent = objec-
tive concept, prot-interest = Idea.
Each point is argued at length by Sekine, who presses beyond to a third tri-
adic level. There is nothing surprising about this bi-univocal correspondence,
he explains, for Capital occupies the same place in Marx’s theory as does the
Logic in Hegel’s. It deals with the concrete universal synthesised theoretically,
as opposed to its historical empirical realisation. Only Marx replaces the Abso-
7
See Mawatari 1985, p. 407.
8
Albritton 1986, p. 154.
Uno • 737
lute Subject by capital.9 The difculties seem to me to be legion here, arising

not so much from Sekine’s text, whose dialectical subtlety appears innite,
but (as we shall see) from Uno’s own views on the nature of the adequate
exposition of the theory.
Makoto Itoh’s work Value and Crisis (1980) is quite different in style. The
author, an economics professor at Tokyo University and one of the acknowl-
edged leaders of the Uno school, offers an original account of crisis theory.
In a recent article by Matawari, readers will nd a detailed balance-sheet of
the research conducted and the results obtained by the Unoists.10 Uno is cred-
ited with having reformulated a certain number of basic notions in an original
fashion: measure of value, money, reproduction, price of production, credit,
interest, crises. These indications stimulated a veritable research programme,
on the basis of which a whole generation of authors has worked.11 Study has
also focused on the ‘stages’, intersecting here with a different problematic that
emerged very early on in Japan and independently – that of ‘world capital-
ism’, according to which capitalism developed as a world system from the
outset. But it is obviously the analysis of contemporary society that forms the
ultimate object of this reection. Tsutomu Ouchi’s book, State Monopoly Capi-
talism (1970), of which a brief survey exists in English,12 was at the centre of
the discussion. It is based on the Unoist approach to crisis as a result of over-
accumulation of capital, bound up with a fall in prots related to the increase
in wages and lagging productivity. However, today this view is challenged
from within the school itself.
Theory and dialectics in Kôzô Uno

Uno’s theorisation, it seems to me, contains numerous problems. It has been
amply discussed in Japan;13 and it might be assumed that all the arguments
have already been aired and that we are arriving at the discussion rather
belatedly. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be useful to re-open it, for it refers
9
Sekine 1984, p. 35.
10
See Matawari 1985, pp. 407–8.
11
Matawari 1985, pp. 413–16.
12
See Ouchi 1982.
13
See Otani and Sekine 1987.
to some genuine problems in Marx’s theory, which the solutions advanced by

Uno, even when they have to be declined, serve to bring out.
The rst difculty stems from the plan of exposition of the ‘pure theory’.
Uno declares himself a supporter of a theoretical, not a historical, plan. He
therefore dismisses the idea that the exposition should begin with ‘simple com-
modity production’, which has never existed as a system reproducing itself
endogenously. For this reason, he prunes from Part One of Capital anything
that relates to production, thus radicalising the approach of the Grundrisse,
which starts from ‘simple circulation’ understood as the surface of capitalist
society. As we have seen, Uno only broaches production (and labour-value)
in his second part. In reality, however, it seems to me that he falls back into
a different type of historico-logical approach, which leads ‘dialectically’ from
commodity to money, to money hoarding, to commercial capital, and then to
industrial capital. Or rather, the spring of this dialectic is, alternately, that of
the discursive constitution of a given structure in its coherence (for instance,
no commodity system without general equivalent) and that of a histori-
cal dynamic, wherein cumulative processes prepare the way for qualitative
changes. Thus, the money amassed is available for a commercial purchase:
‘money becomes capital’.14 And this prepares the way for industrial capital,
for capital can only ensure its own foundation by taking a ‘further step’, by
producing a commodity of greater value than the one it purchased.15
This approach, which foregrounds structural description on the basis of
a historicising suggestion, seems to me to be a regression compared with
the one that Marx settles on in Capital, where the rst moment tends to be
dened as that of the market as structure of commodity production in general
(not precapitalist). This point is crucial today.16 We need to know whether the
market, as relation of production, belongs specically to capitalism and can
only develop in capitalism; or whether, on the contrary, it constitutes a more
general matrix, able to exist in a specic way in different types of society. The
issue would be settled if it could be demonstrated that this concept of market
can be developed in a categorially autonomous fashion. Uno closes this path:
he ‘dialectically’ identies the market form and capitalism.
14
Uno 1980, p. 12.
15
See Uno 1980, p. 15.
16
See Bidet 2000.
Uno • 739
The second difculty concerns the Unoist conception of the purely capitalist
economy as an economy regulated exclusively by the market – that is to say,
one in which individuals are ‘moved’ by the laws of the market, by imper-
sonal relations of sheer self-interest, understood as purely objective relations
between things. We would then have the capitalist valuing the worker as a
means of production with its denite cost and productivity on one side, and
the worker maximising his interest as a consumer on the other. The system as
a whole would be ‘self-determined’ in the sense of ‘self-regulating’.17 Related
to this is the reference to an abstract labour that is understood as impersonal
and simple and, consequently, mobile.18 The ‘class struggle’ would there-
fore be external to the theory of the purely capitalist society. In Uno’s view,
this pure theory can enlighten us on the eventuality, the inevitable character
of class struggle, but the latter remains outside its eld. It certainly denes
exploitation as appropriation of the product of labour by the capitalist, but it
takes it as an objective datum. Its own object is the description of the system-
atic relations connected with it – for example, the denition of the impact of a
variation in one element on the system’s other elements (such as the impact of
a reduction in working hours on the prot rate). However, it might be that the
signicance of the concepts introduced by Marx stems from the fact that they
are politico-economic in the strict sense: the ‘socially-necessary labour-time’
for production is itself determined in a social confrontation.
This denition of pure theory leads to a paradoxical articulation of the
economic and the political. If the market regulates, there is no need for the
state. Sekine goes so far as to write: ‘The state clearly is an institution alien to
capital.’19 Albritton seeks a middle way that allots the determinations of the
Rechtsstaat to the pure theory and those of the state as apparatus of domina-
tion to the theory of stages. This position is untenable. What Albritton under-
stands as the Rechtsstaat is the set of juridico-political determinations inherent
in commodity relations as such.20 But the ‘pure’ theory of capitalism as a
theory of capitalist exploitation implies that of a class state. In this sense, the
contradiction between Rechtsstaat and class state must be posited as internal
to a ‘pure’ theory.
17
Albritton 1986, p. 40.
18
See Uno 1980, p. 34.
19
Uno 1980, p. 154.
20
See Bidet 1987a and 1987b.
This difculty leads to a nal one: that of the articulation between pure
theory and the theory of stages. An oscillation between two positions can
be observed. Either there is a tendency to identify the situation dened by
the pure theory with that realised by nineteenth-century liberalism, which
in some sense is the classical phase. Or the pure theory is treated as the set of
necessary relations internal to the capitalist structure as such. Dening pure
capitalism by free competition conduces to the rst interpretation; excluding
class struggle to the second. As the latter hardly seems acceptable, we are
led back to the rst hypothesis, which attenuates the problematic of a ‘pure’
theory.
Whatever these uncertainties, it remains the case that Uno’s enterprise
reveals the urgency of various theoretical tasks, in respect of which the Marx-
ist tradition exhibits many failings.
In the rst place, there is the need to distinguish between the exposition of
the general structure of capital and the exposition of the general history of
capitalism. Marx certainly posited the principle of such a distinction, observ-
ing that the theory of capital was a precondition for the theory of its gen-
esis (‘primitive accumulation’). But a full study of the articulation of the two
general problematics has not been carried out. It can only be conducted if
the requirement of conceiving the structural totality on the one hand, and
the historical totality on the other, as genuine theoretical objects (and not as
mere raw material for paedagogical or encyclopaedic exposition) is accepted.
In their way, this is what the schools of pure theory and ‘world capitalism’
do. This exigency is far from having been acknowledged in the Marxist
tradition.
Secondly, there is the need for an adequate order of exposition, without
which the categories remain undened and the relations between the differ-
ent structural levels (for instance, between market and capitalism) remain
indeterminate.
Thirdly, we need an approach to the historical curve of the capitalist
phenomenon starting out from its most ‘profound’ structural element: the
market – with the conclusion (seemingly highly simplied by Uno) that what
challenges the primacy of the market also puts capitalism itself in question.
Uno doubtless failed to meet any of these objectives satisfactorily. Yet he
posed such problems in sufcient depth to inspire a re-elaboration of most of
the major theoretical and historical themes of Marxism.
Chapter Forty
Raymond Williams
1
Raymond Williams’s relationship to Marxism went
through two phases, separated by a long interlude.
The rst was natural. It followed the contours of his
class origins. Born in 1922 in a rural region of Wales,
son of a Labour Party railwayman who was active
in the 1926 General Strike (Williams describes this
episode in his best novel, Border Country), his politi-
cal engagement in the British workers’ movement
was, in a sense, natural. This phase culminated with
his arrival at Cambridge University in 1939, where
he joined the most active of the far-left groups, the
Young Communists, and began his career in politi-
cal and cultural journalism. In this period, Williams’s
Marxism was that of the Third International, deter-
minist and dogmatic, and fed into a reductionist cri-
tique of the dominant liberal and reactionary trends
in his discipline of literary studies. It was not long
before Williams found these simplications irksome.
After the War, in which he served in eld artillery,
he did not renew his membership of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, but remained loyal to his ori-
gins, becoming one of the British intellectuals from
a working-class background viscerally attached to
left-wing ideas – to their social origin. Politically,
he was situated on the left of the labour movement. Intellectually, he was

inuenced by the school of literary criticism associated with the journal Scru-
tiny (around F.R. Leavis), which combined close reading with an attempt to
reconstruct the canon on ethical bases (Leavis’s best-known work was entitled
Revaluation). The school was also concerned with popular culture (albeit in
disapproving mode): Williams would remember this excursion off the beaten
track.
The second phase began with the early 1960s. At the time, Williams was
known as an historian and theoretician of culture. He studied literature not
as a succession of great works – a canon – but as a cultural formation, deter-
mined by the history of the society in which it was inserted and determining
it in return. This shift was of the greatest importance in that it subsequently
gave rise to the discipline of ‘cultural studies’, of which Williams must be
considered the creator. He was already the author of two authoritative works,
Culture and Society (1957) and The Long Revolution (1961). These books contain
references to Marxism, but somewhat in the fashion of a nostalgic passing
acknowledgement. The situation changed radically towards the mid-1960s – a
period in which British Marxism underwent a spectacular revival. First of all,
because a core of indigenous Marxist historians began to produce outstand-
ing works (for instance, E.P. Thompson, a friend of Williams, with his The
Making of the English Working Class in 1963), but above all because on the ruins
of the British Communist Party – abandoned after 1956 by the majority of its
intellectuals – there arose a New Left, highly inuential among intellectuals,
whose organ was New Left Review. Thanks to this journal, resolutely inter-
nationalist in the cultural sphere, the British intelligentsia discovered Conti-
nental Marxism in its numerous varieties: courtesy of it, Lukács, Goldmann,
Adorno, Gramsci, Althusser, and many others were translated and published.
Williams participated in this development. He was a member of the editorial
committee and wrote in the Review, whose positions he defended against the
temptations of Anglocentric involution (from which Thompson, for example,
was not immune: cf. his violent attack on Althusser). At the same time, he
resumed political activity, and joined the Labour Party and the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament. For Great Britain and its left-wing intellectuals (of
whom Williams is archetypal), the 1960s (the ‘swinging sixties’) were prosper-
ous years, both politically (election of a majority Labour government under
Harold Wilson) and culturally (avant-garde theatre from Osborne to Pinter;
Williams • 743
the Beatles; a prestigious cinema). Williams situated himself on the left of this
Left: he resigned from the Labour Party because it was pursuing right-wing
policies; in 1966, he participated in the solidarity campaign with Vietnam;
and he was the editor of the May Day Manifesto, a political statement of the
non-Communist radical Left. It was also in 1961 that he quit teaching in adult
education (this professional experience nourished his theory of culture) and
began to teach English literature at Cambridge University. There followed
some classic academic studies, especially on theatre: Modern Tragedy in 1966,
Drama from Ibsen to Brecht in 1968, and The English Novel from Dickens to Law-
rence in 1970.
However, what marked Williams’s work in this decade was a return to
Marxism, but a return enriched by his reading of Goldmann, Althusser and
Gramsci. The concepts of ideology and hegemony appeared in his writing
and ‘Marxied’ his key concept of culture. A personal version of Marxism
emerged, characterised by a form of humanism (his sympathy for Althusser
reached a limit here) and a rejection of determinism (nding support in Gold-
mann and Gramsci, but also in Althusser, he rejected the vulgate of unlinear
determination of the superstructure by the base): in short, a typically Anglo-
American Marxism – that is, libertarian – stressing the capacity of agents
to alter their conditions of existence, rather than social and cultural deter-
minants. This Marxism, which is Williams’s contribution to the tradition,
ran counter to the dominant ‘structuralist’ version. Without slipping into a
beatic humanism of the Garaudy variety, Williams, whose positions on this
issue were close to Thompson’s, emphasised the action of the individual sub-
ject against the constraints of structures, the imbrication of the personal and
the political, and the central position of cultural and ideological formations in
the social totality.
In the following decade, this conception of Marxism enabled Williams to
make theoretical advances of major signicance in two elds: that of culture
(after Communications in 1962, Television: Technology and Cultural Form in 1973,
Keywords in 1976, and Culture in 1981); and that of literary theory (Marxism
and Literature in 1977 and The Country and the City in 1973). This is the respect
in which Williams’s œuvre matters to the Marxist tradition and has worn well
with time. The last years of his life saw the publication of collections of arti-
cles (Problems in Materialism and Culture in 1980 and The Politics of Modernism
in 1989), characterised, inter alia, by a robust defence of modernism and the
avant-garde against the recent postmodernist wave. Raymond Williams died

in 1988 at the age of 66.
2
Raymond Williams was, in the rst instance, a theoretician of culture. In this
area, his inuence, combined with that of Richard Hoggart and the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham (directed for a
time by another Marxist theoretician of culture, Stuart Hall), was immense.
He paved the way for an entirely new discipline, in terms of subject-matter
(para-literature, the media, fashion, popular arts) and methods (analysis of
cultural formations, concerned not so much with works as their social condi-
tions of production). And the shift that he thereby effected in return drasti-
cally altered his original discipline – literary studies – both in Great Britain
and the United States (where his inuence combined with that of Foucault
to give birth to what is called ‘cultural materialism’ – a term coined by him).
Textual and historical studies retreated in favour of ‘critical theory’ and new
critical perspectives (feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism, gay criticism).
Williams was not the only source of these developments, which drastically
redrew the eld (and sometimes provoked bewilderment). But his theory of
culture was a major contributor to them.
This began with Culture and Society, seemingly a study in literary history,
which opens with a famous account of the four modern senses of the word
‘culture’: (1) a state of mind (the fact of being ‘cultivated’); (2) the intellectual
development of society as a whole (people refer to ‘high culture’); (3) the set
of the arts (assigned to a ministry of the same name); and (4) a total way of
life – material, intellectual, and spiritual (reference is made, for example, to
the culture of the Dogon people). These four meanings do not represent an
arbitrary slicing up of a semantic eld: they sketch out a history, whose devel-
opment in Great Britain from the end of the eighteenth century to the pres-
ent is traced by Williams, in parallel with that of other keywords: ‘industry’,
‘democracy’, ‘class’. Here we glimpse Williams’s basic method, which is a his-
torical semantics, painstakingly retracing the complex intellectual history of a
society through that of its keywords. This rst book, which was still Leavisite
in inspiration, thus describes a British tradition, and still awards pride of place
to T.S. Eliot (Notes Towards a Denition of Culture) and George Orwell, rather
Williams • 745
than to Marxism. A single chapter, entitled ‘Marxism and Culture’, discusses

the Marxist theories of the 1930s, which have today sunk into oblivion (but
it at least has the advantage of making amends for an injustice by devoting
several pages to the Marxist aesthetician, Christopher Caudwell). In reality, it
still reects the sway of a certain idea of literature as the heart of culture (for
Leavis, D.H. Lawrence’s œuvre was the highest expression of high culture).
The second book, The Long Revolution, pursued this path, but also effected the
strategic displacement mentioned above. In it, culture is understood through
the concept of experience. Culture is what determines and informs the experi-
ence of the subject; it is through experience that the subject appropriates cul-
ture, makes it living, and enriches it. Literature occupies an important place
in this experience. By reading literary texts, my experience is constituted, in
as much as it is not solipsistic but social, public and not private. But it is not
the only site of experience and hence not necessarily the privileged form of
culture. Like other forms of existence, it contributes to constructing human
reality. In fact, there is in Williams an anticipatory echo of what would today
be called constructivism (cf. Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of
Reality, which likewise appeals to Marxism by way of the sociology of knowl-
edge). ‘[A]ll our experience is a human version of the world we inhabit’:1 here
we detect an echo of the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt.
But The Long Revolution also operates a strategic displacement, whereby
Williams moves closer to classical Marxism and founds cultural studies. The
second part of the book is devoted to an institutional history and critique, in
the vein of the ‘social history’ in which the British excel. The chapter titles
might seem banal today, but they were not at the time: the role of the educa-
tional apparatus; the history of the reading public; the popular press; ‘Stan-
dard English’ (this is the rst appearance of what has become a rich linguistic
tradition in Great Britain, proximate to Marxism – for instance, Fairclough’s
Language and Power – in which we hear Bourdieusian accents avant la lettre);
the social history of the notion of the author, but also of dramatic forms. The
third part is a historico-political analysis of the situation of Great Britain in the
1960s (a theme that at rst sight pertains more to a Central Committee report
than a treatise in literary history). We thus realise that we have graduated
1
Williams 1961, p. 34.
from the Leavisite concept of ‘revaluation’ to that of ‘revolution’ (in the condi-
tions and means of cultural production), even if it is characterised as ‘long’,
different social strata and cultural formations having their own peculiar his-
tory. We have shifted from analysing the œuvre and the intended meanings
(the culture) of its author – that is to say, from literary history as a history of
œuvres and movements, to that of institutions, of forms as embodiments of
institutions, and of different types of medium: in short, to the analysis of the
collective conditions of production of works. This continued with Communica-
tions and Television, where Williams, anticipating the discipline today known
as media studies, places the media at the centre of the analysis – even if his
analysis in Communications is now dated, for want of an explicit Marxist theo-
risation and undue reliance on American empiricist sociology.
In the nal phase, when Williams was explicitly Marxist, the concept of
culture remained at the centre of his concerns and was not conated with that
of ideology (despite the reproach by Terry Eagleton, the leading British Marx-
ist literary critic). Marxism and Literature begins with a denition of the word
‘culture’ in terms of ‘cultural materialism’ – a category invoked in response
to the aporiae of the reduction of superstructure to base – that is to say, as the
name of a constitutive social process, producing general ‘forms of life’ that
have a material origin, but in which the subject fashions the experience of his
or her reality. The book proceeds to a programmatic description of a Marxist
sociology of culture, whose key concept is ‘structure of feeling’, to which I
shall return.
3
One aspect of Williams’s œuvre is generally neglected. Yet it is essential, for it
underlies all the others: the analysis of language. It is easy to see why it has
been neglected. Williams was formed within a culture in which linguistics
occupied a marginal position. He only read Saussure later and was distrustful
of what he had read (he spoke of Saussurean reductionism). As for Chomsky,
his inuence had not yet made itself felt and this was to the advantage of
Williams, whose implicit philosophy of language is at the antipodes of the
Cartesian innatism and speculative psychology of faculties that underlines
the cognitivist programme. Moreover, as is well known, the Marxist tradition
long neglected the question of language, making do with endless quotations
Williams • 747
from The German Ideology, or from the solid good sense of the pseudo-Stalin
(Marxism and Linguistics). At a time when the discipline was still very much in
limbo, Williams therefore had to put together a historical semantics that seems
to me still to be of the very greatest interest today.
The idea is simple. Language (or rather a natural language, in a historical
conjuncture) is the sedimentation of the history and culture of the community
of its speakers. It is a question not only of recognising that words have a his-
tory (etymology exists for that purpose), but of arguing that they are solidi-
ed history and that they help to make history. In linguistics, such a position
will readily be taken to be reactionary. Formalism has triumphed, synchrony
has been elevated to the status of a principle, and Saussurean langue is today
regarded as a stock of rules, not of words. Williams, who pays no attention to
linguistics (this is what distinguishes him, in literary criticism and outside it,
from structuralism), proposes a philosophy of language that has a pedigree
(for instance, in Horne Tooke, the Jacobin philosopher of language of the late
eighteenth century – see his Epea Pteroenta, or the Diversions of Purley). For him,
words are the embodiment of the collective experience that makes up a cul-
ture: it is through words that the subject constitutes her experience in so far as
it is irreducibly individual (it is I who speak) and collective (I speak with the
words of the tribe; I am therefore also spoken by them). In this respect, Wil-
liams’s treatment of the concept of culture is revealing: he provides no stipu-
lative denition of it. In truth, he provides no denition full stop. Instead, he
describes the weaving of the historical threads that constitute its meaning.
Williams’s theory of culture is, in the rst instance, an uncovering of the his-
tory of the word ‘culture’.
This is why Keywords (whose sub-title is ‘A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society’) is not a minor excursion in dictionary-writing, but the heart of Wil-
liams’s theory of culture and society. (This insistence on the role of language,
of vocabulary, is typical of postwar British culture – see, for example, the
Wittgensteinians, for whom philosophical problems are basically grammati-
cal problems.) He began the book as a terminological appendix to Culture and
Society, which the publisher rejected for reasons of space. He only published
it after much rumination in 1976, at the moment when his theory of culture
had reached maturity. In it, he dened the specicity of his intervention in the
theoretical discussion of the 1970s, in particular within Marxism, by dening
his conception of historical semantics:
The kind of semantics to which these notes and essays belong is one of the
tendencies within historical semantics, where the theoretical problems are
indeed acute but where even more fundamental theoretical problems must
be seen as at issue. The emphasis on history, as a way of understanding
contemporary problems of meaning and structures of meaning, is a basic
choice from a position of historical materialism rather than from the now
more powerful positions of objective idealism or non-historical (synchronic)
structuralism. This is an exploration . . . not [of] a tradition to be learned, nor
a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings which, because it is ‘our
language’, has a natural authority, but as a shaping and reshaping in real
circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a
vocabulary to use, to nd our own ways in, to change as we nd it necessary
to change it, as we go on making our own language and history.2
Here we are at the heart of Williams’s thinking and we can understand why
language plays such a crucial role in it. His overriding concern is the subject’s
capacity to alter her conditions of existence, to change the world, and hence
to construct personal experience in, with, and against a collective experience.
This is the natural situation of speakers appropriating the language in order
to express their meanings in it.
This conception of language has immediate consequences for literary criti-
cism. It allows Williams to expand the concept of style and to apply it outside
the literary or even artistic eld (something that has had an impact on cul-
tural studies: cf. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture). For Williams, style is not only
the characteristic of an individual way of appropriating the language, but a
collective form of parole, expressing the fact that, for generation after genera-
tion, the way speakers inhabit their language changes, with changing histori-
cal conditions of production of utterances. At the same time, each speaker,
in the style of their generation, constructs her own style. As we can see, here
style is another name for the place where the individual is articulated with
the collective.
2
Williams 1976, pp. 20–2.
Williams • 749
4
Despite the displacement that gave rise to cultural studies (I am not sure that
Williams would take pride in some of his American offspring), the privi-
leged terrain of his reection was literature. This is where he began and this
is where, in his mature phase, he produced what is perhaps his masterpiece:
The Country and the City. And this is where he developed his most celebrated
concept – ‘structure of feeling’.
We shall begin once again with the notion of style: the content of a collective
style, which marks the historicity of language, is a ‘structure of feeling’. It is
there that subjects conduct their individual appropriation of the collective cul-
ture and this is where they construct their reality, in interaction with other sub-
jects and with the institutions that constrain this construction. The structure
of feeling is what constitutes the experience of the subject. The expression is
deliberately paradoxical; it is the very embodiment of the paradox that I have
already described and which is at the heart of Williams’s thinking. Stage left,
we have feelings, experienced by individuals, whose experience they consti-
tute (‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specically affec-
tive elements of consciousness and relationships: not feelings against thought,
but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present
kind, in living and inter-related continuity’).3 Stage right, we have structures,
which have a collective existence, are embodied in the collective medium that
is language, and which are therefore public, the object of relations and ten-
sions, and intervene in the construction of relations of forces (‘[w]e are . . . de-
ning these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specic internal relations,
at once interlocking and in tension’).4 The result is Williams’s dialectic of the
social and the individual, the private and the public:
We are also dening a social experience which is still in process, often indeed
not yet recognised as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even
isolating, but which in analysis . . . has its emergent, connecting, and dominant
characteristics, indeed its specic hierarchies.5
3
Williams 1977, p. 132.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
This is the concept that shapes The Country and the City, a history of English
literature conceived as a tradition (a concept dear to Eliot, such as his ‘Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent’ – but which is given a new content here: the
series of structures of feeling): that of the relations between city and country.
It is difcult to do justice in a few lines to this panorama, which analyses
the sequence of works, genres and styles within the history of the social rela-
tions between country and city, from poems celebrating country houses that
constitute English pastoral in the seventeenth century, up to the city of the
1930s, such as it appears in the novels of George Orwell (to whom Williams
devoted a study in 1971). For there is in fact a literary reection on the city in
mid-century England, a Marxist version of which is to be found in the novels
of Patrick Hamilton.
5
Experience, tradition, style, structure of feeling, culture: these are rather
unusual Marxist concepts. They justify the description of Williams’s œuvre as
neo-Marxism. But he would doubtless have rejected it, for he was strict about
principles. In any event, they have the great advantage of restoring centre-
stage what Marxist analysis has habitually expelled to the margins: language,
literature, and culture. And they furnish an original solution – one much more
faithful to the sources than the reconstructions, inspired by methodological
individualism, of Anglo-American analytical Marxism – to the problem of
the relations between the individual and the collective, the personal and the
political, the superstructural and the infrastructural. Since his death in 1988,
Williams’s reputation has certainly waned: a certain abstractness of style and
conceptual imprecision account for this. He produced no systematic exposi-
tion of his thought that does not take the form of popularisation. Enthusiasts
for cultural studies and cultural materialists, who owe him an enormous debt,
have divested themselves of him as a historical gure, to whom it is enough
to raise one’s hat. It is normal for epigones to wish to kill the father. But it is
him, with his venerable white beard, who will always hold the attention of
the sculptor.
Notes on Contributors
Tony Andréani is professor emeritus of political science at the University of

Paris-Saint-Denis. He is the author of Le socialisme est (à)venir (2 vols, Paris,
2001–2004).
Jacques Bidet is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris-

Nanterre. His recent publications include Explication et reconstruction du
‘Capital’ (Paris, 2004), Exploring Marx’s Capital (Leiden, 2007) and, with Gérard
Duménil, Altermarxisme: Un autre marxisme pour un autre monde (Paris, 2007).
Christopher Bertram teaches philosophy at the university of Bristol and was,

until recently, the editor of Imprints. He is the author of Rousseau and the Social
Contract (London, 2003).
Paul Blackledge teaches social and political theory at Leeds Metropolitan

University. His recent publications include Reections on the Marxist Theory of
History (Manchester, 2006).
Alex Callinicos is Professor of European Studies at King’s College London.

His recent publications include An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge, 2003)
and Resources of Critique (Cambridge, 2006).
Robert Carter teaches sociology at the University of Warwick. He is the author

of Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research (London, 2000)
and, with Alison Sealey, of The Limits of Language: Applied Linguistics as Social
Science (London, 2004).
Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University. He is the author

of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton,
2003).
Thomas Coutrot is a researcher at the DARES (Paris) and the author of

Capitalisme ou démocratie (Paris, 2005).
752 • Notes on Contributors
Frédérick Guillaume Dufour is postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the

Université du Québec à Montréal. He has been visiting scholar in international
relations at Sussex University and at the Center for Social Theory and
Comparative History (UCLA).
Gérard Duménil is senior researcher at the CNRS (France). His recent publi-
cations include Capitalism Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (London,
2004, with Dominique Lévy).
Fabio Frosini is a researcher in philosophy at the university of Urbino. He is

the author of Gramsci e la losoa. Saggio sui ‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Rome, 2003)
and the co-editor, with Guido Liguori, of Le parole di Gramsci. Per un lessico dei
‘Quaderni del carcere’ (Rome, 2004).
Isabelle Garo teaches philosophy in Lille. She is the author of Marx, une cri-
tique de la philosophie (Paris, 2003).
Jean-Marie Harribey teaches economy at the University of Bordeaux IV and is

currently chair of ATTAC France. His recent publications include La Démence
sénile du capital: Fragments d’économie critique (Bordeaux, 2004).
Rémy Herrera is a researcher at the CNRS (Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne,

University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne). He is coordinator of the World
Forum for Alternatives (presided by Samir Amin).
Michel Husson is a researcher in political economy at the IRES in Paris. He

is the author of Les casseurs de l’Etat social (Paris, 2003) and the Le grand bluff
capitaliste (Paris, 2001).
Bob Jessop teaches sociology at the University of Lancaster. His recent pub-
lications include The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge, 2002) and State
Power (Cambridge, 2007).
Jim Kincaid is a researcher in political economy. He edited the symposium

on Christopher J. Arthur’s ‘The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital’ in Historical
Materialism 13/2 2005.
Stathis Kouvelakis teaches political theory at King’s College London. He is

the author of Philosophy and Revolution. From Kant to Marx (London, 2003)
and the co-editor, with Sebastian Budgen and Slavoj Žižek of Lenin Reloaded.
Towards a Politics of Truth (Durham, 2007).
Notes on Contributors • 753
Jean-Jacques Lecercle teaches linguistics and literature at the University of

Paris-Nanterre. He is the author of A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Leiden,
2006).
Dominique Lévy is senior researcher at the CNRS (France). His recent publi-
cations include Capitalism Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (London,
2004, with Gérard Duménil).
Neil Lazarus teaches English and comparative literatures at the University of

Warwick. His recent publications include Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial
Studies (Cambridge, 2002) and the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary
Studies (Cambridge, 2004).
Esther Leslie teaches political aesthetics at Birkbeck College (London). Her

recent publications include Walter Benjamin (London, 2007).
Michael Löwy is an emeritus researcher at the CNRS and teaches at the

EHESS. His recent publications include Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s
‘On the Concept of History’ (London, 2006).
François Matheron teaches philosophy in Paris and is the editor of Louis

Althusser’s Ecrits philosophique et politiques (2 vols, Paris, 1994–1995).
Roberto Nigro teaches philosophy at Michigan State University and is the

editor of Michel Foucault, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Los
Angeles, 2007).
Gérard Raulet teaches the history of ideas in Germany at the University of Paris
Sorbonne. His recent publications include Positive Barbarei. Kulturphilosophie
und Politik bei Walter Benjamin (Münster, 2004) and Critical Cosmology. Essays
on Nations and Globalization (Lanham MD, 2005).
Jason Smith has taught at Occidental College and California Institute of the
Arts, and currently teaches philosophy at the Art Center College of Design.
He is working on a manuscript on Jacques Derrida.
André Tosel is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nice. His recent publi-
cations include Etudes sur Marx (et sur Engels) (Paris, 1996) and Les marxismes
du 20 e siècle (forthcoming in 2008).
Alberto Toscano teaches sociology at Goldsmith College (London). He is the

author of The Theatre of Production: Philosophy And Individuation Between Kant
And Deleuze (London, 2006).
754 • Notes on Contributors
Maria Turchetto teaches political science at the University of Venice and the
editor of Althusseriana, the journal of the Italian Louis Althusser Association.
Rashmi Varma teaches postcolonial literatures and theory and feminist

theory at the University of Warwick. Her most recent publications include the
co-edited McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women Writing Globally in English (2007),
and an essay on feminist theory and critical race studies in The Cambridge
Companion to Feminist Theory (2006).
Jean-Marie Vincent (1934–2004) was Professor of Political Science at the

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Index
1789 see French Revolution liberation theology and 226–7

1917 see Russian Revolution Mao and 518, 519 n. 42, 525
1968 see May ‘68 on philosophy 643–4
9/11 329, 432 Sève on 71
sources 518
Abensour, Miguel 69 Spinoza group 521–2
Abu-manneh, Bashir 329 Stalin and 513–4, 525–7
academic Marxism see Marxism, Tosel on 40
academic WORKS: For Marx 512, 513, 526;
accumulation 110–1 Reading ‘Capital’ 506–12, 516,
Actuel Marx xiv–xv, 68 517, 520, 527, 573; Reply to John
Adorno, Theodor 83, 157, 159, 489–501, Lewis 519 n. 42, 522, 524, 527
662, 699, 707 Altvater, Elmer 201
Benjamin and 561–2 America see Latin America; USA
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with American radicals 256–66, 370
Horkheimer) 144, 147–9, 152, 158 Amin, Samir 210, 214–7, 310, 612
Frankfurt school and 143–4 analytical Marxism see Marxism,
Negative Dialectics 403–4 analytical
Afganistan 329 Anderson, Benedict 316–7
Africa 220 Anderson, Perry 81, 92, 93, 94, 270, 281,
Against the Current 279 282, 333, 698
Aglietta, Michel 175, 178–80, 182, 186–8 on Brenner and Wood 268
Ahmad, Aijaz 330 on England 340–1
Albert, Michael 236 on Mann 90–91
Albritton, Robert 734–6, 739 on Jameson 697
aleatory materialism 70 Thompson and 340–347
Algeria 317 Trotsky and 83–4
Ali, Tariq 330 Andréani, Tony 51
alienation 164, 651 Annales school 210
Alquati, Romano 288, 289, 294 Antelme, Robert 627
Althusser, Louis 25, 60, 70, 83, 93, 144, anthropology 167, 652
176, 177, 370, 401, 482, 503–27, 573, 584, anti-capitalism 207, 229, 329
649, 651, 665, 669, 743 anti-globalisation 37–8
‘crisis’ of Marxism and 28–9, 30–32 anti-humanism 650, 651 n. 10, 653
Derrida and 627, 629, 632, 634–5, Aragon, Louis 631
639–45 Archer, Margaret S. 450
on dialectics 639–40 Arendt, Hannah 76, 168, 303, 548
English debates about 82–3, 342–3 Aristotle 482–3
Gramsci and 435–8 Aron, Raymond 525
Hegel and 378–9, 639 Aronson, Ronald 89, 94
Jameson and 705–6 Arrighi, Giovanni 210, 220–1
La Grassa and 67 Arrow, Kenneth 264
legacy of 49–50 art 550, 715, 720
Lenin and 639–40, 524 Artaud, Antonin 638 n. 20
802 • Index
Arthur, Chris 396, 404–7 biosphere 206

asset-based egalitarianism 263–4 Black Death 275
Assmann, Hugo 230–1 Blackburn, Robin 336
attack on Iraq see Iraq, attack on Blanchot, Maurice 627, 653
Attali, Jacques 179 Bloch, Ernst 40, 50, 59, 64, 71, 145, 163,
avant-garde 19, 555 199, 227, 232, 699, 703, 707
Bloch, Joseph 334
Baader, Andreas 549 Bobbio, Norberto 58, 59
Backhaus, Hans-Georg 373 Boll, Ricardo 720–1
Badaloni, Nicola 54–5 Bogdanov, Alexander 560
Badiou, Alain 69, 529–48, 642 Bohrer, Karlheinz 149
on Marx 536 Bois, Guy xiv, 268, 462
Bakhtin, Mikhail 703 Bonss, Wolfgang 145, 148–9
Bakker, Isabella 455 Bosteels, Bruno 530
Balibar, Étienne 33 n. 39, 50, 70, 71, 75, Bottomore, Tom xii
217, 484, 642, 661–2, 707, 438–40 Bourdieu, Pierre 7, 15, 383, 587–603, 745
Banton, Michael 446 Bowles, Samuel 261, 262, 263–4
Baran, Paul 210, 221–2, 257 Boyer, Robert 175, 176, 179–84, 187
Baratta, Giorgio 66 Braudel, Fernand 210, 223, 464
Bardhan, Pranab 243 Wallerstein on 217–8
Barthes, Roland 474, 476 Braverman, Harry 360–2, 363, 364
Bartolovich, Crystal 314 Brecht, Bertolt 514, 560
base/superstructure 269–70, 339, 350–1 Brenner, Robert 84, 87, 124, 135, 335,
Deleuze on 610, 616 349, 357
Habermas and 686, 687 Anglo-Marxism and 91–3
Williams on 743, 746 international relations and 461–3
Bauer, Otto 180–81 on origins of capitalism 271–84
Beffa, Jean-Louis 187 on pre-capitalism 366–7
Bello, Walden 331 political Marxism and 267–9
Benjamin, Walter 63, 71, 73, 149, 403, Teschke and 467
501, 549–66, 699, 721 Brentano, Clemens 578
Adorno and 561–2 Brubaker, Roger 446
Arcades project 556–8 Brunkhorst, Hauke 161
Derrida on 633 Buck-Morss, Susan 555
Trotsky and 563–4 Budapest school 167–9
‘Work of Art’ essay 550, 555 Bukharin, Nikolai 560, 676
Benjamin, Georg 559 Bürger, Peter 151
Benoist, Jean-Marie 614 Burgio, Alberto 63–4, 66
Bensaïd, Daniel 68, 71, 73–4, 195, 553, Burkett, Paul 192
564 Burnham, Peter 460
Bensussan, Gérard xii, 30, 49 Butler, Judith 474
Benton, Ted 192, 193, 198
Berger, Peter 744 cadres 15, 119
Berger, John 554 Callinicos, Alex 334, 349
Bergson, Henri 609, 614, 675 on Capital 399–400
Berlin Wall see USSR, collapse of on Hegelian Marxists 393–4
Bernstein, Eduard 26–7, 29, 34–5 on race 441–2
Bhabha, Homi 316–7, 322–3 Calvet, L.J. 484
Bhaskar, Roy 396–8, 567–85 Câmara, Dom Helder 226
Bidet, Jacques 68, 71, 94, 193, 195, 197, Cambridge school see Keynesianism
207, 213 capital
collapse of USSR and 74–6 not an agent 408
versus dialectics 69–70, 72 cultural/symbolic 588–9, 602
Rawls 204 productivity of 97
Tosel on 49 capitalism
Binswanger, Ludwig 652 agrarian 271–3
bio-diversity 199–200 as not bourgeois 276
Index • 803
crises of 98, 107–11, 113, 331, 733–4 in USA 432

Deleuze on 610–3, 619–20 see also Comintern; Gramsci; Lenin;
economic/political separation and Russian Revolution; Trotsky
466 Comninel, George 276, 462–3
as idolatry 230–1 competition 103–4, 399, 406, 411, 596
monopoly 415 over-competition 280
named 37 compromise 694
Negri on 295 see also historic compromise
spirit of 271 computers see new technology
as structure 14, 16 Comu, Auguste 69
Wood on 464–5 conjuncture 20
Carchedi, Guglielmo 358 Conrad, Joseph 664
Carling, Alan 135 Consiglio, Franco 66
Caudwell, Christopher 744 consumption 556
CCCS 435–8, 744 contradiction
Césaire, Aimé 315 Althusser on 639–40
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 325, 327 Bhaskar on 573–4
Chartism 346, 348 Derrida on 640–1
China 4, 5, 7, 8 Cooper, Fredrick 326
Chomsky, Noam 474, 476, 479, 481, 746 Coriat, Benjamin 184
Christianity see liberation theology; Costa Rica see DEI
Protestant ethic Cottrell, Allin 236–7
city/town 555, 720–1, 723 Cox, O.C. 432, 433–4, 435, 441
civil society 670 Cox, Robert W. 454–6, 459–60
Civil War see English Revolution CPHG 334–8, 742
Clark, T.J. 557–8 critical realism 567, 572
Clarke, Simon 460 Croce, Benedetto 664, 675
class 336, 353–67, 593–4 CRT 443–4
Bourdieu on 588–9, 594–7 cultural materialism 744, 746, 750
see also middle class; working class Cultural Revolution 537, 538 n. 35,
class struggle 116, 740 704–5, 746
Cliff, Tony 84, 93 cultural studies 415, 742, 744–5, 749,
CND 742 750
Coase, Ronald 205 culture 19
Cockshott, Paul 236–7 cyber theory see new technology
Cohen, G.A. 21, 83, 90, 132, 141, 345
analytical Marxism and 85–6, 123–8, Daly, Herman 198
134–7, 379–80 Darwin, Charles 126
on normative question 88–9 Davidson, Donald 568
Colletti, Lucio 53–4 Davidson, Neil 335, 349–51
Collier, Andrew 568 Dawson, Terry 385 n. 1
Comintern 335 de Ste Croix, G.E.M. 91
commodity 408 de Tracy, Destutt 632
see also value, use/exchange Deborin, Abram 560
commodity fetishism 230–1, 495 decline in rate of prot see fall in rate of
communications 4 prot
communism 695 deconstruction 530, 630, 641–2, 644–5
see also Eurocommunism; USSR Deleuze, Gilles 578
Communist Party 5, 34 DEI (Departmento Ecumenico de
Brazilian 229 Investigaciones) 230–2
British 80 Delbraccio, Mireille 69
see also CPHG Deléage, Jean-Paul 200
disappearance of 41–2 Deleuze, Gilles 21, 605–24
European 46 delinking 217
French see PCF Della Volpe, Galvano 53, 64, 83, 665
Italian see PCI democracy 7, 69, 335, 338
Russian 559–60 as Eurocentric 325
804 • Index
Democrats (USA) 367 versus historical materialism 126–7,

dependency 222, 227–8 135–6
Derrida, Jacques 7, 11, 78, 82, 573, Emmnanuel, Arghiri 216
625–45 empiricism 567–8
différance 640–1 as anthropocentric 569
as Leninist 642 energy 197
versus May ‘68 626 Engels, Friedrich 27, 69, 410–1, 577
Specters of Marx 626, 628, 631–3, 636 letter to Bloch 334
Descartes, René 746 Moseley on 385–6
desire 578, 610, 614, 616 on state 413–4
deterritorialisation 611 English Literature 312–3
Deutscher,Isaac 83 English Revolution 271, 349–50
Devine, Pat 236, 237 Enlightenment 8, 705
Dewey, John 79 entropy 193, 197
dialectical materialism 48, 55, 72, 631, Enzenberger, Hans Magnus 551
639, 642 epistemological break (Althusser) 379,
Benjamin on 561 381, 515–6, 650
Trân-Duc-Thao on 636–7 in Foucault 649, 656
dialectics 19, 40, 381–3 essence/appearance 391, 394–5
Deleuze on 617 Esteva, Gustavo 198
Derrida on 637–41 Estrin, saul 248–9
ethics and 578 ethics 72, 137, 170, 197, 204, 227, 232,
Hegel and 389–90 264, 322–3, 575, 578, 695, 742
Jameson on 708–9 Fanon and 322–3
Marx on 410–1 Lukács and 165–6
negative 400, 403–4 EU 424, 427
new see new dialectics Eurocentrism 31, 41, 217, 314–6, 413
poststructuralist assault on 524, event (Badiou) 536, 544–5
639–41, 668–9, 705 everyday life 167–8, 724
différance (Derrida) 640–1, 655 evolution 126, 410
Dimitrov, George 335 exchange value see value, use/exchange
Dobb, Maurice 80, 349–50 existentialism 144
Brenner on 271–2
Dockès, Pierre 181 factory
Doeringer, Peter 258–9 Badiou on 543, 545–6
Dubiel, Helmut 148 Foucault on 658
Dubois, W.E.B. 432–3, 435, 444 Fairclough, Norman 745
Duménil, Gérard 15, 68 fall in rate of prot 88, 104–6, 108, 134
Duras, Marguerite 627 Fanon, Frantz 313, 315, 317
Durkheim, Émile 598, 683, 686, 687, Macey versus Bhabha on 322
688 fascism 335, 563
Dussel, Enrique 227, 230, 232 Fehér, Ferenc 167, 168
Dutschke, Rudi 498 feminism xi n. 1, 6, 15, 18, 327, 555
Dworkin, Ronald 88 Fenton, Steve 446
Ferguson, James 328
Eagleton, Terry 92, 563, 746 Ferraris, Maurizio 626
ecology xiii, 6, 15, 16–7, 19, 114, Feyerabend, Paul 568, 573
189–207, 370 Finelli, Roberto 66
accountancy of 202–3 Fineschi, Roberto 66
see also ecosocialism; nature Fischbach, Franck 70
economism 338–9 Fleurbaey, Marc 251–2
ecosocialism 204–5 Fordism 178, 180–83, 185, 216, 287, 294,
Edwards, Richard 258–60 306, 361, 421, 667, 724
egalitarianism 263–4 post-Fordism and 459
Eliot, T.S. 744, 750 Foster, John Bellamy 192, 199
Elson, Diane 252 Foucault, Michel 7, 76, 15, 316, 499, 514,
Elster, Jon 21, 92, 86, 124, 128, 380 573, 647–62, 669
Index • 805
Deleuze and 606, 609, 613 Gordon, David 258–9

Frankfurt school and 147, 158–60 Gorz, André 195, 199, 206
on prisons 656–60 Gramsci, Antonio 31, 39, 40, 66, 85, 163,
on state 426–7 171, 418, 437, 458, 478, 482, 663–78,
in UK 85 694, 743
Francioni, Gianni 670–2 80s revival 669–70
Francis of Assissi 308 biography 675–6
Frank, André Gunder 210, 221–4, 229 Derrida and 632
Frank, Manfred 146, 147, 279 France and 48
Frankfurt school 71, 82, 143–61, 369, on hegemony 434–6
374, 494, 497, 558, 679 international relations and 454–6
see also Adorno; Benjamin; Friedeburg; renaissance of 674
Horkheimer; Marcuse revival in Italy 52–3
French Communist Party see PCF as unread 70–1
French Revolution 25, 705 see also Hall, Stuart; neo-Gramscians
Freud, Sigmund 76, 479 Granel, Gérard 70
Balibar on 662 Green, Pete 385 n. 1, 393 n. 18
Foucault on 660 Greimas, Algirdas 699, 702
Friedeburg, Ludwig von 143, 148 Grundman, Reiner 194
Friedman, Milton 138 Guattari, Félix 481–2, 484, 578, 605, 609,
Frosini, Fabio 66 624
Frye, Northrop 699 Gulf War (1991) 279
Fukuyama, Francis 299 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 227
Guttman, Herbert 363
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 699
Gandhi 326 Habermas, Jürgen 7, 11, 34, 94, 144,
Garnier, Jean-Pierre 206 146, 151–7, 161, 168, 169, 383, 476–7,
Garo, Isabelle 70 679–95
Geist 388–9 on Benjamin 550
gender 13 Bidet and 74, 75
general intellect 56, 57 Foucault and 158–9
Genovese, Eugene 339, 703 Frankfurt school and 151–7
gentrication 725 on poststructuralism 147
geography 366 habitus (Bourdieu) 592, 595–6, 598, 599,
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 192 601, 705
Gerratana, Valentino 669, 671 Hahnel, Robin 236
Geymonat, Ludovico 55 Haldon, John 91
Giddens, Anthony 572 Hall, Stuart 82, 435–8, 670, 744
Gill, Stephen 455–6, 457 Hamilton, Patrick 750
Gilroy, Paul 437 Hardin, Garret 205
Gintis, Herbert 262, 263–4 Hardt, Michael 328–9, 414, 421–2, 564–5
Glick, Mark 280 Empire (with Negri) 66–8, 298–308
global warming 190 Harman, Chris 84, 93–4, 349
globalisation xii, 16, 44, 100, 170, 190, Harootunian, Harry 323–4
221, 297, 329, 421, 425, 458 Harré, Rom 568
capitalism and 468, 211–2 Harribey, Jaen-Marie 202
Hardt and Negri on 66–7 Hartmann, Klaus 390
Lefebvre on 48–9 Harvey, David 330
Mészáros on 171–2 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz xii
a thousand Marxisms and 60–2 Hausman, Daniel 264
Glucksmann, André 47, 614 n. 20 Haussmann, Georges 556
God 584 Hayek, Friedrich 80, 86, 235, 612
Godelier, Maurice 51, 198 heaven 403
Goethe, Johan Wolfgang 560 Hebdige, Dick 748
Goldberg, David T. 442–3 Hegedus, Andras 168
Goldmann, Lucien 743 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 20, 40,
Goldthorpe, John H. 432 70, 146, 164, 211, 706
806 • Index
Althusser on 639 Houdebine, Jean-Louis 640, 641, 645

capital and 385–94 Houston, David 261–2
Colletti on 53 humanism 48, 707
Deleuze and 616–7 see also anti-humanism
Foucault and 651–2, 654 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 478
Habermas on 683 Hume, David 568, 569, 571
on labour theory of value 391 Hungarian Revolution (1956) 80, 81
Logic 385–93, 400–403, 736 Hurston, Zora Neale 444
Marx on 386–8, 573–4, 583 Husserl, Edmund 634–8, 699, 706
master/slave dialectic 578
Uno and 731 idealism 634–5
hegemony 434–5, 456, 458, 667–8, 670, see also immaterial production;
670, 677, 743 irrealism
Heidegger, Martin 46, 51, 65, 70, 150, ideology 436, 677, 743, 746
165, 531, 554, 654, 699 as utopian 707
Benjamin on 561 Deleuze on 614–5
Chakrabarty on 327–8 idolatry 230–1
Foucault and 649–51 IMF 261, 331, 411
Heller, Agnes 167–70, 172 immaterial production 4
Henri-Lévy, Bernard 47 immaterial worker see under working
Hering, Christoph 551 class
Hilferding, Rudolf 305, 729 imperialism 305–6, 329, 432
Hill, Christopher 80, 82, 337 state and 330
Hiller, Kurt 559 see also Negri, Tony, Empire;
Hinkelammert, Franz 230–1 postcolonialism
historical materialism 4, 17, 369, 378, inequality 189
380, 383, 515, 634, 636 Institute for Social Research 143, 146,
Benjamin on 565–6 561
Bourdieu and 588, 603 see also Frankfurt School
Cohen and 85–6, 90 intellectuals 665
Habermas and 144, 685, 686, 688 Benjamin on 555
progress and 558 collapse of USSR and 41–2
Schmidt on 145 organic 455
Thompson on 343 interest rates 115–6
rejected by Uno 735 international relations 453–70
Williams on 747–8 economic/political separation in 465
history 335, 366, 410–1 Internet see new technology
Adorno on 501 interpellation (Althusser) 11
Foucault on 654–5 intersectionality 443–4
see also CPHG; historical materialism; IR see international relations
people’s history Iran 538–9
Hobbes, Thomas 459 Iraq 329, 477
Hobsbawm, Eric 80, 82, 333, 465, 669, Ireland 212–3
709 irrealism 575–6
on collapse of USSR 44–5 Isaacs, Harold 80
formation 92–3 IT (information technology)
Hoggart, Richard 744 see new trechnology
Holloway, John 414 Itoh, Makoto 734, 737
Holz, Hans-Heinz 552
homosexuality 18 Jackson, Stevi 15 n. 1
Honneth, Axel 145, 148–9, 158–61 James, C.L.R. 80, 313, 336, 315
Hook, Sidney 79 Jameson, Fredric 31, 94, 323, 535, 555,
Horkheimer, Max 491, 494, 495, 707 697–709
Dialectic of Enlightenment postmodernism and 92–3, 709
(with Adorno) 147–9, 152, 158 Jauss, Hans Robert 150
Frankfurt school and 143–6, 149, Jay, Martin 149
152–3, 157 Jessop, Bob 423, 425, 427–9
Index • 807
Jonas, Hans 198–9 Lenin on 472, 480–1

Jones, Daniel 361 Marx on 472
Jung Mo Sung 232 other Marxists on 474
justice 204, 633 Stalin on 472–3, 485
Volosinov on 478–80
Kalecki, Michael 181 Williams on 746–8
Kant, Immanuel 315, 580–1 see also linguistic turn
Badiou and 543 Larsen, Neil 319
see also neo-Kantianism Latin America 222–3, 330
Kautsky, Karl 27, 305 see also liberation theology
Kaye, Howard 339 Latouche, Serge 198
Kelly, Brian 333 law 152, 154–7
Keynes, John Maynard 80, 99 Lawrence, D.H. 744
Keynesianism 181, 187, 236, 306, 421, Lazarus, Sylvain see Sandevince, Paul
425, 612, 722, 725 Leavis, F.R. 742
Kidron, Michael 84 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 699
Kirk, Neville 348 on Jameson 706
Klugman, James 335 Lefebvre, Henri 29, 48–9, 71, 711–27
Kojève, Alexandre 578 Leff, Enrique 202, 205
Kolb, David 390, 397 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 571
Kondratiev, Nikolai 179, 260 Lenin, V.I. 16, 31, 42, 55, 57, 71, 72, 83,
Kornai, Janos 241 305, 534
Korsch, Karl 29, 79, 560 Althusser on 524, 640, 641–3
Kosik, Karel 177 Derrida and 642
Kouvelakis, Stathis 69 Hardt and Negri versus 306–7
Kovel, Joel 204, 444 Husserl and 636 n. 17
Krahl, Hans-Jürgen 498 on language 480–1
Krushchev’s secret speech (1956) 81 on Poincaré 24 n. 3
Kuhn, Steve 568, 573 Uno on 729
What Is to be Done? 626, 632
La Grassa, Gianfranco 67 Lerner, Abba P. 235
Labica, Georges xii, 49, 69 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 514, 654
Labor Notes 362 Lévy, Bernhard-Henri 614 n. 20
labour 165 Lévy, Dominique 15, 68
Habermas on 681–2, 689–90, 692 liberalism 39, 41, 43–4
immaterial 376 as barbarism 78
Negri on 295 Losurdo’s critique 60
see also segmentation liberation theology 225–32, 553
labour theory of value 53, 87–8, 102–3, Linebaugh, Peter 91
394–5, 406, 739 linguistic turn 168, 347, 417
abandonned by Habermas 682, 690, linguistics see language
692, 693 Lipietz, Alain 175–8, 182, 187, 199–200
Labour Party (UK) 341, 346 Locke, John 76, 459, 568, 582
Labriola, Antonio 27, 78 Lojkine, Jean 77
Lacan, Jacques 82, 514, 699, 578, 702 long waves/swings 259–60
Badiou and 540–1 Looker, Bob 346–7
Lacher 465 Losurdo, Domenico 60, 62–3, 66, 68
Lacher, Hannes 467–70 Lowenthal, Leo 82
Lacis, Asja 559, 560 Löwy, Michael 50, 71, 553–4, 564
Laclau, Ernesto 85, 530, 531, 534 Luckmann, Thomas 744
Ladurie, Le Roy 462 Luhmann, Niklas 154, 158–9, 161, 687
Lakatos, Imre 568, 583 Lukáks, György 40, 50, 59, 63, 64, 71,
Lange, Oskar 235, 242 79, 93, 163, 478, 559, 560, 694, 699, 706
language 471–85 Benjamin and 550
Althusser and 473–4, 475 Lefebvre and 714
Deleuze and Guattari on 481–2, 484 Mészáros and 170–71
Engels on 472 self-criticism of 164
808 • Index
Luporini, Cesare 54 world-system theory and 211

Luxemburg, Rosa 29, 83, 180, 305–6, WORKS:
559 Capital 385–7, 391, 393, 395–6,
Lyotard, Jean-François 154, 159, 698 399–406
Bidet on 8, 10–14, 19
Machiavelli 505, 508, 512–3, 517–22, 527 Kouvélakis on 26
Macey, David 322 La Grassa on 67
Macherey, Pierre 642, 651–2 n. 11 studies of Capital 369–83
MacIntyre, Alasdair 335, 350–1 Grundrisse 56, 285, 287, 371–2, 376–7,
Madonia, Franca 505, 508, 512 386–7, 650–1, 720
Maler, Henri 70, 199 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique
Malthus 185–6, 197, 280, 462 of Political Economy (Zur Kritik) 269
Brenner on 275–6 The German Ideology (with Engels) 747
managers 117–9, 359 Marxism
Mandel, Ernest 83, 178, 260 crisis of xi, 3–5, 23–5, 28–34, 529, 539,
Mann, Michael 90–91, 420 542, 608
Mann, Tom 337 academic xii, 91–2, 558
Manning, Brian 349–50 analytical 63, 86–7, 92, 123–41, 370,
Mao Zedong 42, 47, 643 379–80, 380–1, 401, 407, 589, 750
Maoism 83, 518, 519 n. 42, 525, 530, 630 as dead 39, 552
see also Cultural Revolution as historicist/economist 224
Marcuse, Herbert 82, 145, 149, 152, 498, decaffeinated 583
662, 680, 699 ecological 204
Mariátegui, José Carlos 227 Hegelian 374–6, 385–411, 385–94
market 111–3, 169, 170, 381, 383 heretical 69
Habermas on 690 open 414, 460
ideology of 9–10 orthodox xiii
in pollution 202–3 persistance of xi
Roemer on 138–40 political 267–84, 335, 349
Uno on 738–9, 740 international relations and 461–5,
market socialism 233–54, 262 469, 470
in Eastern bloc 237–8 rational-choice (RCM) 86–7, 133–6
Wood on 283 return in Germany 145
Markus, György 167, 168, 172, 691, 694 revival of 328–9
Marr, Nikolai 472–3 spectral 11, 24
Martin, Jacques 517 structuralist 378–9
Martinez-Alier, Juan 193, 196, 201–2, Western 81–3, 93, 227, 415
206, 207 see also Budapest school; communism;
Marx, Karl Communist Party; dialectics;
Adorno and 489–90, 493, 495 dialectical materialism; Engels;
availability of writings 43 Frankfurt school; historical
Balibar on 662 materialism; neo-Gramscians;
Biblical imagery in 230 neo-Marxism; post-Marxism;
Foucault on 660 Regulation school
Habermas on 680 Masaryk, Tomas G. 26, 28
Hobsbawm on 333 mass worker see under working class
on Hegel 386–7, 388–9, 402–3, 573–4, Massé, Pierre 176, 183
583 Matawari 737
as Malthusian 280 materialism see aleatory materialism;
as normative 88 dialectical materialism; historical
on nationalism 212–3 materialism
on nature 192, 199 see also idealism; irrealism
postcolonialism and 315 May ‘68 40, 605, 606, 607, 608–9
on religion 632–3 aftermath 622
as leading to Stalin 575 Derrida and 625
on state 413–4, 417–8 McNally, David 484
as toolbox 648 Mehring, Franz 559, 561
Index • 809
Mercier-Josa, Solange 69 class and 118–9

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 634 Gill on 457–8
Mészáros, István 167, 170–72 neo-Marxism xiii, 228
middle class 358–9 neostructuralism 146
Miles, Robert 438 see also poststructuralism
Milkman, Ruth 363 new dialectics 385–6, 392–5, 400, 409–10
Milliband, Ralph 346 new economy 98
Milton, John 704 New Left Review 81, 282, 342, 694, 709
Miners’ Strike (UK, 1984–5) 282 n. 36, 742
Mitterand, François 47 New Philosophers 47
Mamardachvili, Merab 523 new technology 296, 304, 544
modernity/modernism 711, 721 Nietzche 149–50, 159
alternative 323–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 159, 609, 612, 613,
Williams and 743–4 614
money 114, 385–6, 403, 408 on forgetting 616
Montgomery, David 363 Foucault and 649, 651, 653–4, 656
Monthly Review (USA) 80, 210, 257 habermas on 149–50
Moody, Kim 362, 363 in Italy 665
Mooers, Colin 462 nihilism 65–6, 559
morals/morality 137, 229, 232, 264 non-being see void
Habermas on 688 North America see USA
see also ethics nouveaux philosophes 84, 614
Morris, William 575 Novack, Michael 231
Morton, Adam David 336–7 Nozick, Robert 136
Moseley, Fred 385
Mouffe, Chantal 85, 530, 534 O’Connor, James 192, 195–6, 204
mugging 436 Odum, Howard 197
multitude 67, 300, 376, 414, 422 Offe, Clause 157
Münster, Arno 50, 71 O’Hanlon, Rosalind 320, 321
Murray, Patrick 394, 402–3 oil crisis (1973) 292
Oldrini, Guido 63
N30 see Seattle protest Olin Wright, Erik 263, 264
Nairn, Tom 281 ontology 40, 570–1, 575–6, 580, 649–50,
Naredo, José Manuel 203 652
nationalism 316–8 Deleuze on 614
Marx on 212–3 deontology and 684
natural limits 198 Lukáks on 163, 165–6
nature 192, 199 open Marxism see Marxism, open
see also ecology Operaismo 55, 57, 66, 285–308, 370, 483,
Nazism 447, 494, 497, 499 665
negation/negativity 396–7, 576–7, 579, Orientalism 314–6
640 Orléan, André 184
see also void Orwell, George 744, 750
negative dialectics see dialectics, Ouchi, Tsutomu 737
negative over-competition 280
Negri, Antonio 21, 70, 221, 285, 289,
370, 376, 609, 613 Paetzold, Heinz 550
Benjamin and 564–5 Paggi, Leonardo 667
Empire (with Hardt) 66–8, 298–308, Palmer, Bryan 347
328–9, 414, 421–2 Panzieri, Raniero 56, 57, 286, 289–91,
versus reformism 57–8 293, 295, 665
social worker and 292–5 Paris 1968 see May ‘68
Negt, Oskar 157 Parker, Mike 362
neo-Gramscians 453–6, 459–60 Parry, Benita 319, 328, 329
neo-Kantianism 27 Parsons, Talcot 680, 683, 687
neo-liberalism 99–101, 114, 172–3, 261 Parti Communiste Français see PCF
as attack on workers 364–5 party see Communist Party
810 • Index
Passeron, Jean-Claude 590 Poulantzas, Nicos 358, 416, 423, 427,

Passet, René 193, 201 438
PCF 72, 175, 176, 606, 609 poverty 189
Derrida and 627–31 see also poor
May ‘68 and 622 power
PCI 41, 52, 54, 56–7, 58–9, 66, 292–3 desire and 578
Gramsci and 663–4, 666, 669, 675 Foucault on 657, 659–61
historical compromise 666 Prebisch, Raúl 210
see also Rifondazione Prestipino, Giuseppe 64
Pearce, David 201 Preve, Costanzo 59, 64–6, 67
peasants 273, 276 Prigogine, Ilya 193, 210
Péguy, Charles 73 privatisation 5, 205
people’s history 335–6 productivity 70, 97
Perroux, François 210 prots 118
Petrucciani, Stefano 694 see also fall in rate of prot
Pfotenhauer, Helmut 550 progress 558, 563
Phéline, Christian 177 proletariat 546–7
phenomenology 638–8, 651 n. 10 Protestant ethic 271
see also Husserl; Merleau-Ponty Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 622
philosophy Przeworski, Adam 124, 132–3, 135, 136
Althusser on 643–4 psychoanalysis 25
Derrida on 644–5 public/private 13–4
Piaget, Jean 685
Pinkard, Terry 390, 397 Quaderni Rossi 52, 56, 285, 288–9, 295,
Piore, Michael 258–9 665
Piparo, Franco Lo 668 Quiniou, Yvon 77
planning 241–2
Platone, Felice 671 racism 707
Podolinsky, Sergei 197 as agency 440, 442
Poland 538–9 capitalism and 433–4
Polanyi, Karl 200, 459 feminists on 444
political economy hegemony and 436–8
in Badiou 548 Marxism on 431–4, 451
radical see American radicals Sayer on 448–50
political Marxism see Marxism, political as unscientic 445–7
pollution 202–3 Raddatz, Fritz 552
poor 228 radical political economy see American
see also poverty radicals
Popper, Karl 41, 47, 53–4, 55, 86, 398 RAF see Rote Armee Fraktion
Popular Front 80 Rancière, Jacques 69, 484, 516
Portantiero, Juan Carlos 670 rationality 144
Porto Alegre see World Social Forum Raulet, Gérard 50, 71
post-Marxism xiii, 7, 26 n. 7, 530–1 Rawls, John 7, 34, 59, 74, 88, 136–7, 140,
Badiou and 530–3, 538, 542–3 204–5, 694
Bernstein and 34–5 RCM see Marxism, ‘rational-choice’
postcolonialism 309–331 Reagan, Ronald 84, 231
postmodernism 46, 90, 93, 312, 431–2, see also neoliberalism
567, 665, 744 Reaganism 261, 262, 265
Frankfurt school and 150–2 Real Utopias 263
Jameson and 697–8, 705, 709 Rebitzer, James 257
Lefebvre and 720–2 Rechtsstaat 9, 156
Marxism and 431–2 Rees, John 394 n. 20
racism and 451, 555–6 Regulation school 175–88, 370
poststructuralism 309, 554, 699 American radicals and 260–1
in Germany 146–8 Brenner and Glick versus 280
Habermas on 147 Reich, Michael 258–9, 262, 265, 610–1,
publishing and 147 661, 662
Index • 811
Reichelt, Helmut 373 Scarpetta, Guy 640, 645

religion 300 n. 30 Schmidt, Alfred 145, 157, 192
Renault, Emmanuel 68, 70 Schmitt, Karl 57
reproduction 589–92 Scholem, Gershom 554, 559, 563
revolution 17, 26, 69, 640 Scholem, Werner 559
Deleuze on 608–13, 620–1, 623–4 Schumpeter, Joseph 280, 425
Foucault on 655 Schwartz, Yves 50–51, 77–8
information 98 Schwarz, Winfried 337
passive (Gramsci) 667–8 Schweickart, David 251
subjective 55–6 Scott, David 325
as undying 20 Seattle protest (30 November 1999)
see also Cultural Revolution; English 37–8
Revolution; Hungarian Revolution; segmentation 258–9, 261
French Revolution; May ‘68; Russian Sekine, Thomas 730, 736–7, 739
Revolution self-management 246–50, 254, 262
Ricardo, David 87, 102, 109, 395 semantics 748
Rice, Michael 259 Sen, Amartya 88, 140
Ricoeur, Paul 634, 699 September Group 123–41
Rifkin, Jeremy 299 Sertel 248
Rifondazione 66 Sève, Lucien 48, 71–2, 73
rights 7, 156 Sève, Murat 66
Ristat, Jean 631 share-owning 242–4, 264
Robelin, Jean 49, 71, 76–7 Shaw, Martin 422
Robinson, Joan 181 Simon, Herbert 136
Rodney, Walter 313, 315 situationists 557
Roediger, David 444–5 Sivanandan, Ambalavaner 441
Roemer, John 87, 88, 92, 124, 135, 136, Skirbekk, Gunnar 201
243, 380, 589 Slaughter, Cliff 563
on exploitation 128–32 Slaughter, Jane 362
on market socialism 138–9 slavery 213–4
Roos, Daniel 361 Smith, Adam 8, 273–4, 275, 463, 523
Roosevelt, Theodore 303, 306 Smith, Tony 400–402, 407, 411 n. 66
Rorty, Richard 93 social costs 200–201, 207
Rosdolsky, Roman 399 social movements 207, 225, 255
Rosenberg, Justin 465–8, 470 social science 226
Rosier, Bernard 181 Bhaskar on 572
Rote Armee Fraktion 549 social worker see under working class
Roudinesco, Élisabeth 635 Socialist Realism 550
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 8 society 134
Rudas, Lazslo 560 sociology 53, 90, 354, 366
Rupert, Mark 454–5, 458 Bourdieu and 587
Russell, Bertrand 654 Frankfurt school and 494–5
Russian revolution (1917) 41, 306–7, 640 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 373
Rychner, Max 560–1 Solidarnosc see Poland
Sollers, Philippe 625, 627, 631
Saad-Filho, Alfredo 409 Sorel, Georges 23, 25, 27, 29, 675
Sachs, Wolfgang 198 South America see Latin America
Said, Edward 314, 319, 320 Soviet Union see USSR
Samuel, Raphael 336, 348 space 723–7
Sandevince, Paul 534 Spinoza, Baruch 20–21, 57, 76, 616
Sartre, Jean-Paul 41, 71, 514, 606, 699, Althusser and 521–2
700 Spivak, Gayatri C. 317–9, 321, 670
Saussure, Ferdinand de 82, 474, 478, Sraffa, Piero 87
536, 746, 747 Stalin 42, 747
Saville, John 348 Stalinism 575
Sayer, Andrew 448–50 Althusser and 343
scarcity 127 Benjamin on 563
812 • Index
Budapest school on 169 Anderson and 81

Derrida and 626–8 Wood on 269–70
economism and 338–9 time 48, 74
Thompson on 338–44 Togliatelli, Palmiro 40, 52, 663, 671
see also Trotsky Tooke, Horne 747
state 116, 134, 403, 739 Torr, Dona 337–8
Bobbio on 58 Tosel, André 33, 69, 70
Brenner on 277–8 totalitarianism 169
Deleuze on 611–2, 623 Touboul, Hervé 70
emergence of 15–6 town see city/town
Engels on 413–4 Trân-Duc-Thao 635
global 427, 469–70, 695 transnationalism 221
globalisation and 4–5 transnationals 4–5
imperialism and 330 Tronti, Mario 57, 285, 286, 289–91, 293
Lefebvre on 48 Trotsky, Leon 80, 83, 94, 333–4, 560, 562
Marx on 413–4, 417–8 Benjamin and 563–4
postnational 424–5 international relations and 466, 468
as social relation 427–9 Trotskyism 93, 279, 553, 563
state-capitalism 171–2 see also Bensaïd; Cliff
state theory 413–29 Tugan-Baranovsky, Mikhail 180
Ste. Croix, Geoffrey de 357, 366–7 Turchetto, Maria 57
Stedman Jones, Gareth 347–8 Twin Towers attack see 9/11
Stiglitz, Joseph 235–6
Stirner, Max 617 Uganda 735
Strachey, John 79 UN 17
structuralism 82, 144, 176, 178, 343, 699 unemployment 110–1
Gramsci and 435–6 unionisation 365–6
Sève on 48 Uno, Kôzô 729–40, 409 n. 62
Williams and 747–8
see also poststructuralism URPE (Union for Radical Political
students 353 Economics) 256–7
subalternity 318–9 use value see value, use/exchange
subjectivity 657, 662 USSR 7, 8, 560
superstructure see base/superstructure Adorno and 500–501
surrealism 557 collapse of 4, 5, 32, 39, 60, 67, 89, 140,
Sweezy, Paul 80, 257–8, 279, 463 284, 312, 413, 477, 564, 622, 630
syllogism 392, 400–403 American radicals and 262–3,
265–6
Taylor, Charles 420, 580 Badiou on 537–8
tectology 560 thousand Marxisms and 41–5
Tel Quel 627, 640 as state-capitalism 171–2
Derrida and 630–1 Thompson on 338–40
teleology 19, 410 utopia 7, 27, 65, 89, 227, 582, 661
television 746 as ethical 575
Tertulian, Nicolas 50 Jameson on 707–8
Teschke, Benno 335, 351, 419 n. 12, Jonas versus 198–9
467–70
Texier, Jacques 68, 69 Vadée, Michel 70
Thao see Trân-Duc-Thao value
Thatcher, Margaret 47, 84, 437 labour-value 732
Third International 7, 43, 56 use/exchange 202, 373, 391, 396,
Third Worldism 16, 279, 311 714–5, 717–9
see also postcolonialism
Thompson, Dorothy 348 van der Pijl, Kees 456–7, 459
Thompson, Edward 80, 82, 334, 338–46, van der Veen, Robert 138
349, 350, 351, 363, 742 Van Parijs, Philippe 87, 124, 137–8
Althusser and 83 Vanek 251–2
Index • 813
Veca, Salvatore 59 Wilson, Woodrow 303, 304

Velho, Otavio Guilherme 229 Witte, Bernd 550, 552
Veneto 297 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 70, 654, 747
Vernadsky, Vladimir 193 Wolf, Eric 318
see also biosphere Womack, James 361
Vietnam War 303, 498, 743 women 228
Vincent, Jean-Marie 51, 69 Wood, Ellen M. 134, 276, 349, 461, 530,
Virno, Paolo 297 534
void 518, 545, 643–4 on capitalism 464–5, 462–4
Bhaskar on 579 Manning on 349
see also negativity political Marxism and 267–71
Volosinov, Valentin 471, 473, 478–80 on working class 282–3
von Hayek, Friedrich 47 Wood, Neal 349
Vygotsky, Lev S. 474, 483 working class 8, 95, 364
Benjamin on 562–4
wages 366 Deleuze and 606 n. 4, 608
Wallerstein, Immanuel 50, 210, 279, immaterial worker 297
462, 463 Marx on 17–8
on racism 438–40 mass worker 288–9, 294, 297
on world economy 218–9 social worker 291–4, 297, 307–8
War on Terror 329, 432 Wood on 282–3
Wayne, Mike 564 see also Operaismo
Weber, Max 14, 65, 90, 164, 169, 680, working hours 205
688, 689 World Bank 231–2, 261, 331, 411
in Adorno 499 World Social Forum 329, 458
in Bourdieu 589, 597, 599, 602 world system theory 209–24
Wood on 270–1 Wright, Erik Olin 15, 84, 87, 92, 93, 124,
Weisskopf, Thomas 233, 249, 261, 262 132, 380
Wellmer, Albrecht 150–2, 157, 159 on class 91, 354–5, 358–9
Werckmeister, Otto Karl 552
Western Marxism see Marxism, Western Yugoslavia 238, 251
Westphalian system 419–20, 466
Whitehead, A.N. 609 Zizek, Slavoy 530
Williams, Raymond 82, 347, 474, 483,
741–50

Critical Companion To Contemporary Marxism

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Introduction: Marxism, Post-Marxism, Neo-Marxisms .......................... xi

Chapter One A Key to the Critical Companion to Contemporary

Chapter Two The Crises of Marxism and the Transformation

Chapter Three The Development of Marxism: From the End

Chapter Four Whither Anglo-Saxon Marxism? ..................................... 79

Chapter Five Old Theories and New Capitalism: The Actuality of

Chapter Six Analytical Marxism .............................................................. 123

Chapter Seven The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory:

Chapter Nine The Regulation School: A One-Way Ticket from

Chapter Ten Ecological Marxism or Marxian Political Ecology? ........ 189

Chapter Eleven Theories of the Capitalist World-System ................... 209

Chapter Twelve Liberation-Theology Marxism .................................... 225

Chapter Thirteen Market Socialism: Problems and Models ................ 233

Chapter Fourteen The American Radicals: A Subversive Current

Chapter Fifteen Political Marxism ........................................................... 267

Chapter Sixteen From ‘Mass Worker’ to ‘Empire’:

Chapter Seventeen Marxism and Postcolonial Studies ........................ 309

Chapter Eighteen British Marxist History .............................................. 333

Chapter Nineteen Developments in Marxist Class Analysis .............. 353

Chapter Twenty New Interpretations of Capital ................................... 369

Chapter Twenty-One The New Dialectic ............................................... 385

Chapter Twenty-Three Marxism and Theories of Racism ................... 431

Chapter Twenty-Four Historical Materialism and International

Chapter Twenty-Five Marxism and Language ...................................... 471

Chapter Twenty-Six Adorno and Marx .................................................. 489

Chapter Twenty-Seven Louis Althusser, or the Impure Purity

Chapter Twenty-Eight Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn .... 529

Chapter Twenty-Nine Revolutionary Potential and

Chapter Thirty Critical Realism and Beyond: Roy Bhaskar’s

Chapter Thirty-One Bourdieu and Historical Materialism ................. 587

Chapter Thirty-Two Deleuze, Marx and Revolution: What It

Chapter Thirty-Three Jacques Derrida: ‘Crypto-Communist’? ........... 625

Chapter Thirty-Four Foucault, Reader and Critic of Marx .................. 647

Chapter Thirty-Five Beyond the Crisis of Marxism: Gramsci’s

Chapter Thirty-Six Falling Short of Marx: Habermas .......................... 679

Chapter Thirty-Seven Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst

Chapter Thirty-Eight Henri Lefebvre, Thinker of Urban

Chapter Thirty-Nine Kôzô Uno and His School: A Pure Theory

Chapter Forty Raymond Williams .......................................................... 741

Notes on Contributors .................................................................................. 751

Bibliography .................................................................................................. 755

Index ............................................................................................................... 801

Periodically proclaimed to be dead, or on its way back, Marxism and, more

taneously convey a diversication of the philosophical identity of Marxism,

take the measure of reworkings of Marxism throughout the world, in differ-

A Companion for a different world

Crisis of socialism, crisis of Marxism

The crisis of Marxism that marked the end of the

domination, holds exclusive sway. It is the consignment of the greatest num-

The resistance and resurgence of Marxism