Marxism
Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two
The latest movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, has set truly intergalactic box office records, and been globally exalted by movie critics. Dune: Part Two has, of 24 March, hit over US$220 million in the United States domestic box-office, and worm-holed its way to over US$520 million globally. Villeneuve’s latest foray into the harsh world of Arrakis has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, with the film compared favourably to the brilliant Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, while it currently enjoys near-perfect popular and critical reviews.
Dune: Part Two returns us to the story of Paul Atreides, quickly picking up from where Dune: Part One left us, as he enters the harsh desert climate of Arrakis in the company of the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen. In the film, the young Atreides must rally the ‘desert power’ of the Fremen, spurred on by his mother Lady Jessica, to have any hope of exacting vengeance against the brutal Family Harkonnen, who butchered his father Duke Leo Atreides and the rest of his royal House in Dune: Part One. The film depicts Paul gradually mobilising the thousands upon thousands of Fremen warriors across Arrakis against the Harkonnen rulers, and eventually in opposition to Emperor Shaddam IV himself, as his prescient visions reveal that his growing power will lead to an intergalactic holy war, much to the initial fear of himself and the revulsion of Chani, his Fremen comrade and lover.
Much good work has been written on Dune: Part Two as an example, or critique, of the white saviour narrative; a demonstration of interplanetary fascistic war; an exposé of brutal colonial violence; a self-aware Orientalist appropriation of a sandbox of non-Western cultures; a piece that deemphasises the complexity and agency of women from Herbert’s original book; a movie that has noted analogies with the current Israel-Palestine war; and a movie that obviously took inspiration from Islamic and North African and Middle Eastern sources but equally relegates this recognition. Now, in preparation for seeing this movie for the third time at the local IMAX cinema, I wanted to do something a bit different before strolling in, and I swapped the 3D IMAX glasses for my Marxist spectacles to try to understand some key themes of this intergalactic blockbuster… spoiler alert! (for both Marxist theory and Dune: Part Two).
Worming into Dune
On the face of it, Dune: Part Two is quite obviously not a tale that focuses on the working class nor is it one that seems to deal with a recognisable form of capitalism. In the movie, there are evidently subaltern and proletarian-type collective subjects who linger on the margins of the action, such as servants for the lords and ladies of House Harkonnen, Atreides, or Corrino, or such agents who are more central to the narrative, such as the indigenous Fremen themselves. The latter of which we will address separately, below. Further, the galactic political economy of Dune: Part Two is dominated by ‘great houses’ in a brutal, feudalistic structure that stretches across the known universe, and does not seem to resemble any type of capitalism we are familiar with. Thus, it seems that more ‘orthodox’ Marxist accounts of Dune: Part Two, which seek to account for how power over means of production determines the relations of production that subsequently lay the basis for class conflict, is inappropriate. Instead, this piece seeks to foreground a Marxist approach to the philosophy of internal relations that conceives the social world, or Dune’s universe, made up of vast interconnections and relations between, and through, people and the objects that they interact with. The idea with this ontology is to understand how every subject and object in a totality, whether that be a world or universe, holds essential relations to other subjects, objects, or structures that determine themselves and their social position in this totality. As a simple and brief example, Paul Atreides is the Duke of House Atreides because of how others relate to him, and how he relates to others, alongside his presumed dominance of productive, military, or social forces that are all partly constitutive of his social position in the Dune universe. The point is that, then, any change in such intertwined relations can bring a rupture to the underlying logic of broader social structures that are made up of these relations, or equally impact the people that inhabit, and are defined by, them.
This philosophy of internal relations may give us a framework for understanding how aspects of the social universe depicted in Dune: Part Two, such as inter-House rivalries and indigenous subjugation, relate to the broader historically given context of that universe, that of a feudalistic totality, which may reveal the logic that structures these relations – and have some lessons for our own time. As such, let us start with the broader, historically given intergalactic political economy expressed in Dune: Part Two, that of the warring Feudal Houses.
Interplanetary Feudalism
The inter-galactic political economy of the Dune: Part Two universe is clearly feudalistic. The political apparatus is defined by the dominance of ‘Great Houses’, such as the Atreides and Harkonnen, under the signorial power of an Emperor. Notables in these Great Houses establish their own ‘fiefdoms’ on entire worlds, such as that of Arrakis, and there appears to be warrior classes in each House who are obliged to provide their military power to the ruling nobles. Other signs of feudal formations are the return of trade ‘guilds’, such as the unseen space guild that has monopolised transport, or even those of mentats, like Thufir Hawat, or Suk doctors, such as Yueh. While the hidden existence of the public held corporation CHOAM that has monopolised all trade, under the directorship of the Emperor, further suggests that there is no system of capitalism operating in Dune: Part Two.
While it is not remarkable that our current historical formation has given way to a different formation, what perhaps is surprising is that it appears the Dune: Part Two universe has regressed to feudalistic organising structures. However, thinking further on these structuring relations not only unfolds our investigation into how the Houses relate to the sub-altern, such as the Arrakis-based Fremen (addressed below), but allows us to reflect on how our own neoliberal, capitalist social-economic structure could metamorphose into a feudalism like that of Dune: Part Two.
Prominently taking up this argument (minus the reference to Dune) is Yanis Varoufakis, whose most recent book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism argues that the emergence of cloud technology, the enclosure and privatisation of the internet, and the heavy flow of central bank money post-2008, has sparked an epochal shift. Varoufakis makes the point that we all collectively serve the big tech giants for free by creating content, providing data, and other virtual surplus value, in huge networks of value generation that is not tied to any means of production. This service then allows us to ‘live within their kingdom’. This new ‘Technofeudalism’ is argued by Varoufakis as being the new historical formation, which will become more acute as the global economy shifts towards the generation of virtual surplus value that is more and more disconnected from ‘real’ production.
Projecting our current formation of Technofeudalism into the future, the next technological revolution that is widely predicted to transform the underlying social relations is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. Now, this is where the connection with Dune: Part Two becomes interesting. In the world of Dune, thousands of years prior to the movie’s setting (the movie is set approximately 20,000 years from our own time), there was a ‘Butlerian jihad’ against all ‘machines-that-think’; an imperium-wide revolt that destroyed computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots. Linking our Technofeudalist society, as per Varoufakis, to the Dune universe, we can hypothesise that its’ structures had deepened and became hegemonic worldwide, eventually creating the possibilities for space travel and interplanetary colonisation. Then, due to the alienation, deprivation, and social conflict that technofeudalism would entail on a universe-wide scale, the offending technology was destroyed through popular revolt as the intergalactic feudal political structures remained. Hence, we are left with Emperors, Dukes, and Great Houses without the technological fetishisation – maybe Emperor Shaddam IV is a distant, future relative of Mark Zuckerberg?
Indigeneity on Arrakis
The goal of the Imperium on Arrakis, the eponymous planet of Dune: Part Two, is to harvest the planet’s unique spice melange that vitally powers intergalactic space travel. The relation, then, between the Feudal Houses and the planet of Arrakis is one of extraction, which clearly resembles the real-world imperialism of our own colonial powers across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The depictions of the indigenous people on Arrakis furthers the obvious comparison between the Dune timeline and ours; the Fremen people appear culturally similar to traditions in the Middle East, their language is heavily based on Arabic in the Dune book (though the movie scrubs this influence), and their religious beliefs are inspired by Islamic practices (though again, this was much more obvious in the book, with the movie erasing these).
The Fremen are fierce fighters that constantly disrupt the extraction of spice by the ruling Harkonnnens, with the Fremen using spice as part of their diet and a central substance to their religious and cultural life. Then, if the Fremen are so problematic to the imperialists, why do they not simply destroy them? Of course, in Dune: Part Two, several Harkonnen members make loud threats to simply do just that. However, the relation between the Imperium and the Fremen is not purely a one-way extraction; the Fremen presence is vital on Arrakis because they are central to the continuance of spice itself. The Fremen’s stewardship of the gigantic worms, known to them as Shai Hulud, whose presence is fundamental to spice creation, and the Fremen’s own gathering and refinement of the melange, ensures that the Imperium is equally in a dependent relation with this sub-altern collective. Borrowing from Foucault, this insertion of Fremen bodies throughout the spice creation process is a form of biopower that can be controlled. Through the Imperium’s utilisation of deception and religious indoctrination to foster consent, and the application of brute coercion when that fails (Gramsci’s tools of hegemony), the intergalactic empire mitigates their dependence on the Fremen through the typical technics of colonial power familiar to our own time. The prescience of Paul Atreides, in the form of a white saviour trope, understands the dependent relation of the feudalistic Imperium on not just the spice itself, but equally upon the Fremen; and this is why Paul’s militant mobilisation of the indigenous Fremen against the Harkonnen’s quickly brings down the entire Imperium.
This is my Desert. My Arrakis. My Dune.
The over-dependence on spice as a central resource in the known universe in Dune: Part Two is not only intensely destabilising for the feudalistic political economy of the Imperium, but also illustrates the rapacious relations between Dune’s future humanity and the ‘external’ nature. Indeed, the underlying philosophy that provides the foundations of the Imperium’s approach to nature is strikingly similar to our own. The ontological, Cartesian dualism of Human/Nature has informed our understanding of the relations between humanity and nature during the Age of Capital, which has meant that capital has greedily metabolised the ‘free gift’ of ‘Cheap Nature’ across the world – up to a point where in 2024, the earth is on the parapet of untenable global warming, mass species death, and the end of life itself. What we see in Dune: Part Two is that the transition to Technofeudalism in the not-too-distant future and the opening of space travel has temporarily erased these ecologically destructive tendencies and contradictions of capital, geographically displacing them to all know corners of the universe.
Without reformation, the feudalism that has then persisted in Dune: Part Two over the course of thousands of years, which still sees the ‘Human’ as entirely separate to an external ‘Nature’ (which the Fremen are often categorised into, as most indigenous populations have in our time), has depleted the entire ecology of the universe. The violent extraction of spice from Arrakis is a case-in-point, with increasingly destructive sandstorms and unliveable conditions, but we also see evidence of this on other planets, too. Such as the Harkonnen home world of Giedi Prime, which has had such brutal industrialisation that the level of photosynthesis is catastrophically low, artistically captured in Dune: Part Two with infrared, black-and-white monochrome shots of the planet.
Similar to our own time, in the Dune: Part Two universe there is no recognition of the importance of the deep, intertwined relations between humanity and the nature that surrounds us. The Fremen live in the harsh conditions on Arrakis and have not only survived but thrived through an intense, respectful interconnection with the natural environment that they live within – this is not an external connection, but fundamentally an internal one between Fremen and the planet. In Dune: Part Two, the life of the Fremen within the desert is dismissed by the Great Houses, evidenced by the Harkonnen’s referring to them repeatedly as ‘rats’; and similarly to our time, indigenous ecological knowledge gained through living with the land has been equally disdained and violently rejected by colonial practices and knowledge forms. The story of Dune: Part Two reminds us of the fundamental, internal interconnections that we have with nature and the world around us, which is not separable from the political, social, and economic practices that we have chosen to determine our, rapidly deteriorating, livelihoods.
Removing my Marxist spectacles at the end of Dune: Part Two, I am struck with the resonance that the movies’ messages have for our own historical juncture. Particularly, the importance of a philosophy of internal relations does not diminish, despite the vast scale on which the inter-galactic story of Dune unfolds. Seeing our potential, post-Technofeudalistic future in Dune: Part Two, reminds me that we also have to ‘think’ the present, past and speculative futures together as an integrated, internally-related whole, if we have any chance of addressing the various poly-crises we are faced with. In the words of Lady Jessica, Reverend Mother in Dune: Part Two:
‘You cannot see the future without seeing the past’.
The post Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – review
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn dissects intellectual battles within Cold War liberalism through six key figures: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Teasing out their complex relationships with Enlightenment ideals, historicism, Freudianism and decolonisation, Moyn’s masterful group biography sheds light on the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare, writes Atreyee Majumder.
In his most recent book, Samuel Moyn provides a set of intertwined intellectual profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, especially post-WWII era: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Before I read Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, I had never come across the term Cold War liberalism. As Moyn clarifies, the term was coined in the 1960s by enemies of liberal ideas (presumably from within the Free World) emerging at the time, blaming “domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes”. Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Interestingly, all the scholars in Moyn’s study except for Karl Popper are Jewish intellectuals of the post-Holocaust era or are children of American Jewish immigrants. An Austrian émigré in England, Popper was born Jewish but later converted to Lutheranism. Moyn takes great care not to reduce their loyalty to a certain iteration of liberalism to their religious identity (111). He employs an interesting writing strategy whereby he establishes a grapevine of conversations among these six figures and their various compatriot liberals. For instance, Shklar appears as a sharp critic of Hannah Arendt in Chapter five, while Berlin provides a corrective to Shklar’s rejection and blaming of Rousseau for sowing the roots of the red spectre with which the free world was confronted with in the twentieth century.
The first two chapters elaborate on Shklar and Berlin who have divergent attitudes towards the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Rousseau. Both are critical of the Enlightenment to the extent that they find themselves amplifying liberalism’s state-limiting function over its dimension of emphasising creative agency of the individual. They differ on the extent to which the Enlightenment could be held responsible for the rise of the Red Scare. It is in the Karl Popper chapter (Chapter Three) that the plot thickens, as Popper rejects “historicism” by way of rejecting Hegel and his infusion of the idea of progress with Christian “inevitabilism” (77, 80). As Moyn narrates, Popper held that history, if embraced, would mean the inevitable progress as argued for Hegel and later, in Marx’s terms, would lead to a communist version of progress that would usurp liberalism’s dominance. This anxiety made Popper reject the category of history itself. In fact, Jacob Talmon, the “slavish follower” of Popper, described “the idolization of history” as a “nineteenth century novelty” (80).
It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west
The book reaches a crescendo in the last two chapters on Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, respectively. It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west; those that claimed the word ”freedom” for colonised populations. As a reader from the postcolony, I found it instructive to read Moyn’s discussion of Arendt’s ambivalence about reconciling her liberalism with the growing liberalisms of the former colonies. In an insightful section at the end of the Arendt chapter (137-8), Moyn discusses how nationalisms of these fledgling nations were objects of suspicion for Arendt and the Cold War liberals while they were eager to embrace the cause of Israel’s nationalism. In the final chapter we witness Lionel Trilling’s strange embrace of Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Trilling wanted to render a reformed liberalism – one that wasn’t so naïve and shocked at crisis or evil in the world. Moyn writes of Trilling’s use of Freud in working out his own theory of liberty and liberalism (152):
“…..Freudianism affected the theory of liberty. It turns out that people are constrained in the control they can win from the passions, and therefore in the freedom they should have in their self-making. They must use what autonomy they can gain in pitiless struggle with their own proclivities in the service of self-control.”
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism […] could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism, Moyn speculates, could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold; Moyn writes that “he rationalized out of it a new liberalism” (153) – a kind of “survivalist” one. Trilling’s move for a reformed and less idealistic liberalism marked liberalism’s slow shift towards the right.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare. Moyn also makes clear that these figures are not particularly worried about the institutional arrangement that will bring about such actualisation of freedoms and hence, their version of liberalism. Moyn often uses the term neoliberal and I understand that his usage is quite different from the commonplace social science use of that word – which is a political form accompanying the condition of late capitalism. Hence, I would have liked Moyn to delineate his specific use of the term. Moyn does discuss, especially, in the chapter on Hannah Arendt (Chapter Five), the discomfiture of the Cold War liberals with the rise of new nations across the globe, claiming for themselves the political and social goods of liberalism through their own interpretation of what these might entail. He especially mentions, David Scott’s indictment of Arendt for her erasure of Haiti (138). A blind spot about the rest of the world seems to have existed among the Cold War liberals, which Moyn could have explored further. Finally, I was curious about whether Western Marxism – of the Althusser variety (I believe many of them are writing at the same time as Althusser in the 1960s) – were at all in the conversations that the Cold War liberals engaged in. If so, how would they respond to the Althusserian idea that “freedom” as ideology that hides actual class relations in the name of a pleasurable political ideal which thereafter encodes their worlds of desire? Nonetheless, Liberalism Against Itself is an illuminating and, at times, counterintuitive account of the intellectual wars internal to liberal establishment while it was under attack during the Cold War.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: DidemA on Shutterstock.
Class Struggle in the 21st Century
Whoever keeps posting Karl Marx quotes on the breakroom bulliten board needs to stop.– Management Engage yourself with consequential reflections about labor and class struggle in the 21st century with these (not just thought but also action-provoking) five superb books: — Anderson, Elizabeth. 2023. Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers […]
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Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge – review
In Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, Maged Mandour challenges simplistic views of the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, when mass protests against the government forced then-president Ḥosnī Mubārak to step down. Mandour examines power shifts and the military’s consolidation of authority over the past decade of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s presidency, offering a nuanced intervention on post-revolutionary Egypt’s socio-political dynamics, writes Hesham Shafick.
Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge. Maged Mandour. Bloomsbury. 2024.
It takes me by surprise that we have already passed the 13th anniversary of Egypt’s revolution on January 25th 2011. Many theories and scholarly prints have been produced that try to make sense of how things unfolded after that day. The rise and fall of a structural “revolutionary situation”, the interplay between key local power centres, changing global dynamics, the or simply the work of talented tricksters are some of the many explanations proffered. Notwithstanding their differences, they all have one thing in common: singling out an external villain, a counterrevolutionary force(s), which mustered enough authority to override a once hopeful revolution.
In Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, Maged Mandour refutes such a presumption of a dramatic distinction between victims and villains, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. In doing so, he joins a cluster of critical thinkers, led by Gramscian political economists Brecht de Smet and Roberto Roccu, who stress the analytical necessity of understanding revolutions as “war(s) of positions” in which multiple actors exchange seats – be these ideologies, cultural codes, or political power – to formulate a new hegemonic, or “semi-hegemonic”, order. This reading paves the way for an understanding of the “post-revolution” collapse as a product of the revolutionary repertoire itself.
Mandour joins a cluster of critical thinkers […] who stress the analytical necessity of understanding revolutions as ‘war(s) of positions’ in which multiple actors exchange seats […] to formulate a new hegemonic, or ‘semi-hegemonic’, order.
In my own work, I took a cue from such thinking to co-author a series of articles that reconceived of the January 25th movement as a moment that brought together a working class motivated by their socioeconomic grievances, a middle class motivated by liberal aspirations, and a military elite motivated by their greed (see “A fascist history of the Egyptian revolution” I, II, & III). These were all temporarily assembled to push back against a malignantly growing police state. The first day of protests was thus selectively chosen to be the policy holiday – January 25th.
After three days of street fighting, the police were forced to retreat. And since then, Tahrir and other protest squares turned into physical assemblies of the three participating sections of society. But it did not take long for the middle class and military to override the working class. The workers’ demands were sidelined, even vilified, as “fractional” and “divisive”, facilitating a popularly backed military crackdown on factory protests. That was in the very early days of the revolution, a few months after the police retreat. Immersed in the utopian moment of overthrowing the police state, the middle class failed to observe the emergence of an even more dangerous armed regime, one which is far more powerful and, ironically because of their backing of the revolution, or more precisely its middle-class pillar, more popular.
Immersed in the utopian moment of overthrowing the police state, the middle class failed to observe the emergence of an even more dangerous armed regime
This re-conception of the post-revolution military regime – led by former minister of defence and head of military intelligence President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi – as a product of the revolutionary repertoire, rather than an independent counterforce, is, we argued, a game changer to analysts and activists alike. For if Sisi’s regime is a counterrevolutionary junta that overthrew the revolutionary movement by force, then the revolutionary response should be straightforward: keep pushing! It is therefore crucial to understand the nature of such a regime in relation to the revolution, not only to make sense of the startling concurrence of seemingly contradictory popular chants like “ya geshna enzel ehmina” [Oh our Army, rise and protect us] and “Yasqot Yasqot hom el ‘askar” [down, down with the military regime] in the same protest, but also to determine the strategies that can produce revolutionary outcomes in such a peculiar context.
Mandour does not focus on the January 25th revolution, but rather Sisi’s regime as a product of a prolonged of which January 25th and its ensuing coup regimes of 2011 and 2013 were mere symptoms.
It is from this lens that I welcomed Mandour’s account with excitement. Mandour does not focus on the January 25th revolution, but rather Sisi’s regime as a product of a prolonged of which January 25th and its ensuing coup regimes of 2011 and 2013 were mere symptoms. Passive revolution refers to an ongoing sociopolitical process where dominant elites keep maintaining their control through selective and temporary co-optations with variant classes, each of which eventually wind up pacified and sidelined. In this account, the revolution, the military regime, and their temporary coalition under Sisi’s rule, were a continuity of social reshuffles that attempted to constitute a political order in the vacuum created after the collapse . (For more on post-Nasser hegemonic vacuum, see Sarah Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt, reviewed here.)
In 1967, Mandour explains, Nasser not only lost his war with Israel on the Sinai Peninsula; he lost the package of ideological promises of Pan-Arabism, Arab-Socialism and postcolonialism that built his mandate. However, some of this regime’s structural legacies remained intact: military supremacy, a police-hijacked state, and a de-politicised middle class. Emptied of their ideological enablers, three social clusters found themselves in a power scramble, in which “soldiers, spies, and statesmen” – as Hazem Kandil eloquently puts it – would every now and then “solicit mass popular support” to leverage one of the three actors over the others (85).
Fast-forward to Egypt Under El-Sisi: the same actors remain at play, now producing a different type of regime. In 2013, Sisi rose to the fore with a promise to bring back the “unity” of the Egyptian middle class, popularly perceived to be disrupted by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of January revolution. Here, “unity” is conceived of as “sameness” and hence disrupted by the appearance of that was for so long forcefully kept at the margins, even officially abandoned from political participation – the Muslim Brotherhood (55). Utilising the popular frustration caused by this disruption, Sisi garnered the support of the middle class through a very simple promise: returning the national identity; in other words, getting rid of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The first post-coup regime was headed by middle-class technocrats with the military pulling strings behind the scenes.
The first post-coup regime was headed by middle-class technocrats with the military pulling strings behind the scenes. This arrangement was, however, far from stable. As Niccolo Machiavelli has stated: “there is nothing proportional between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed.” Realising that, the military apparatus, spearheaded by Sisi himself, administrated a crackdown on its middle-class power-sharers, crushing contenders and allies alike. It did so through multiple means, articulately described in Egypt under El-Sisi, which fall under three mutually reinforcing policy categories – legalisation of repression, displays of bloodshed, and the military capture of the economy. Repressive laws were passed with a violent state crackdown on any public dissent. This facilitated further violence by granting it a legalised status. In turn, this dynamic granted the military both the legal and the armed control over the most lucrative markets within the Egyptian economy, which further enhanced the officers’ loyalty to the regime, facilitating further violence. Such a vicious cycle eventually led to the middle-class becoming, once again, sidelined; this time with no other significant regime actors at play, and hence no need for co-opting any social class whatsoever. The result was, Mandour describes, a first of its kind military dictatorship that feels no political obligation towards any other actor; neither security partners nor any social class – no spies, no statesmen, just soldiers.
Egypt Under El-Sisi claims to be a narrative of the rise of a military dictatorship and the demise of the traditional post-Nasserist liberal autocracy. But the book’s relevance goes far beyond that, especially to students of Gramsci and post-Marxist critical thought.
Egypt Under El-Sisi claims to be a narrative of the rise of a military dictatorship and the demise of the traditional post-Nasserist liberal autocracy. But the book’s relevance goes far beyond that, especially to students of Gramsci and post-Marxist critical thought. The book’s analysis of post-January 25th politics in Egypt points to an exceptional form of “passive revolution” which has no class of beneficiaries other than the military itself. Its structural arrangement looks like a product of a typical military coup, except that it is not. In fact, the regime outset, always relied on popular mobilisation, despite the absence of the mobilised class and its agenda from all aspects of policymaking.
That is the main question the book leaves us with, one that encourages further empirical research, but also conceptual enquiry into the possibility of a semi-hegemonic arrangement that lacks not only ideological underpinnings, but even structural foundations. No doubt, the starting point for such an analysis would be Gramsci’s “passive revolution”, but how could this revolution be possible without a class of beneficiaries? Perhaps the answer lies beyond the structural analysis Gramscian paradigms proffer, and one should rather look into superstructural instruments by which the masses could be deceived to recurrently act against their best interest.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image Credit: mehmet ali poyraz on Shutterstock.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis – review
In Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano unpacks the rise of contemporary far-right movements that have emerged amid capitalist crises and appropriated liberal freedoms while perpetuating systemic forms of violence. According to Dimitri Vouros, Toscano’s penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. Verso. 2023.
Observing the leftwing populism that emerged after the 2007 financial crash, a perceptive critical theorist may have predicted that this hope-inspiring movement would quickly be reintegrated into the neoliberal order. They might further have predicted that a counter-revolution would arise in the vacuum left by the failed leftist movement and as a reaction to continuing economic difficulties. Indeed, in the last decade the rise of the populist right has been both steady and near universal.
[Toscano] sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe
In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano, who has been instrumental in the resurgence of Marxist and materialist sociocultural analysis over the past twenty years, offers an important theory of fascism for our current historical juncture. He sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe. The measured, lapidary style of Toscano’s argument, which draws on the 20th century’s “rich archives” of antifascist thought (155), most of it Marxist or marxisant, treats the deep, structural aspects of the political often ignored by other analyses. He does this by leaning on a style of literary-philosophical excavation and elucidation more often found in classical critical theory like that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
One of the marks of fascism is to amalgamate seemingly incompatible positions. Indeed, it is a complex phenomenon, “scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials”, including many currents on the left (155). Toscano does not follow mainstream political theory in conflating fascism with totalitarianism, command economies, and brute force. He argues that late fascism is “disanalogous” with historical fascisms. Instead, he focuses on the implicit forms of violence and repression – colonial, racial, sexual, and gender-based – that inform late fascism. This kind of hidden violence becomes especially noticeable, and acute, when capitalism faces financial and other crises.
As well as developing the idea that reactionary ideologies emerge out of capitalist crisis, notably as the co-option of working-class movements by the right as soon as the opportunity arises, Toscano notes the role capitalist exchange relations play in the epistemological foundation of fascist-adjacent ideologies. Yet the most original thesis in the book is that the touted freedoms of liberalism and free-market capitalism are also appropriated by late fascism. In fact, late fascism is only nominally attached to liberal ideals such as “individual action” and “free speech”. Its claim to be on the side of the individual and their political agency is clearly false, its objective really being to reproduce prior forms of subjection and create new forms of subjugation. Jessica Whyte has also suggested a similar dissimulation in the neoliberal support for human rights.
The rapid rise of this ideology may also be tied to online culture, although Toscano avoids elaborating on the political ramifications of this development. Instead, he gives a historical outline of classical Marxist arguments against reactionary thought and movements. As the subtitle of his book indicates, understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism. Toscano writes, “Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism” (158). Yet understanding fascism as a tendency within capitalism that merely continues what critical theory calls “identity thinking” is part of a critical venture “inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with grim regularity” (158).
Understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism
Four key ideas explain late fascism. Firstly, it “cannot be understood without the “fascisms before fascism” that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system”, namely, the political and economic domination of the world by Europe, peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries, made possible by the material exploitation of its various colonial strongholds. Secondly, it can only be understood “across axes of race, gender and sexuality”. Thirdly, it includes the “desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilizational, demographic and existential”. Lastly, it involves “the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom” (156-57). These four aspects of late fascism are developed in some detail with a breadth that will satisfy anyone interested in the history of antifascist thought and resistance.
Each chapter provides a different window onto the ideology of fascism and explains why understanding it is imperative. The first chapter looks at the temporally destabilising aspects of fascist ideology, with its archaisms, anachronisms, and wrong-headed projections of majestic, uncorrupted futures. The second focuses on the dynamics of capitalism and race, mainly how the Black liberation struggles of the 1960s provide a template for understanding the racial nature of capitalism, with its continuing repression of minorities and punitive carceral system. The third chapter provides an overview of how the populist right appropriates the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom and toleration for its own purposes. It inverts such individualism, supporting the dominant narrative of equality; namely, the freedom to accumulate property and social power (the latter being skewed along racial and sexual lines, ie, white, male or heteronormative).
The fourth chapter, the most difficult, looks at the political subterfuge manifested by the “real abstractions” within a totalised exchange society. The references to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Henri Lefevbre are especially illuminating. These latter two authors argue that capitalist ideology views everyday social relations upside down, as first pointed out by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism and alienation. The central point is that the ends of capital and profit are prioritised over labour, the labourer being merely a commodity on the market, and ensuring capital accumulation.
Toscano demonstrates how the ‘scavenger ideology’ of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger.
The fifth chapter deals again with temporality but this time through the philosophical understanding of “repetition”. Toscano singles out and censures Martin Heiddeger’s fundamental ontology”, which is concerned with “being” and the naturalised historical subject, as leading to a reactionary, “counter-revolutionary” politics. Toscano demonstrates how the “scavenger ideology” of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger. This danger is magnified by its ability “to weaponise a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energise different class fractions, thereby capturing, diverting and corrupting popular aspirations” (110).
Based on a reading of the writings of the Italian Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi, the sixth chapter deals with the far right’s version of the philosophy of religio mortis, a fascination with myth, sacrifice, and death, but updated for a technological (and now digital) era. Drawing on the idea of a “micropolitical antifascist struggle”, as found in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, the last chapter deals with the ambivalent erotics of fascist ideology, arguing that the libidinal introjection of violence reinforces various forms of social power. Here, Toscano also draws on the feminism of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, claiming that the Nazi “antipolitical politicization of women” (148) resonates with current modalities of “fascist feminism” that seek “to violently secure and affirm a normative, if not necessarily heteropatriarchal, figure of woman, and which invests desire and libido in its narratives about the imminent threat of the erasure of women and even feminism by ‘gender ideology’ and ‘transness’” (150).
Toscano’s archaeology of 20th-century antifascist theory is an essential springboard for understanding the current political moment. It is a boon for those thinkers and activists interested in human emancipation and the struggle for real, rather than merely abstract, freedom. It alerts them to the threat posed to such projects by that deeply prejudicial ideology that arises alongside capitalism in crisis – late fascism.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Alexandros Michailidis on Shutterstock.
Reconstructing the labour theory of value: An interview with Duncan Foley (Part 2: The Capitalist Law of Exchange)
David Calnitsky and John Clegg: In Part 1: On the Commodity Law of Exchange you described the “commodity law of exchange” as an essential starting point for Marx’s theory of value. However, you don’t think it is sufficient to understand value under capitalism. Why not?
Duncan Foley: The commodity law of exchange expresses the abstract conditions in which an economy of independent producers who own or produce their own means of production would self-organize through monetary market exchange. The key idea of Smith’s “long-period method” is the formation of “natural prices” as averages of market prices over many cycles of production that equalize the “advantages and disadvantages” of the various branches of production. The advantages consist mainly, though not exclusively, of the money income the producer receives, and the disadvantages consist mainly, though not exclusively, of the effort required to acquire the skills necessary to the branch of production and to carry on production. Under the commodity law of exchange, natural prices are enforced by the movement of producers (assumed to be freely mobile) between branches of production, and make it possible to staff all the branches. These natural prices include the costs of the means of production, but not a markup on those costs to provide a profit.
Capitalist commodity production, by contrast, is carried out by capitalist firms that own the means of production and charge a profit rate on them, and by means of wage labor. Both of these changes in what Marx calls “social relations of production” lead to modifications of the commodity law of exchange. The “advantages” of a branch of production from the point of view of a capitalist firm consist primarily of the profitability of production, and, as Adam Smith points out, specifically the profit rate. The “disadvantages” are the capital investment required to carry on production in any branch. The wage labor contract is an exchange of a money wage for “labor-power”, the capacity of workers to add value to the means of production by producing useful goods and services. Like the independent producers in the commodity law of exchange, wage workers under the ideal conditions of “perfect mobility” are free to move among available employments, and as a result will tend to equalize the “advantages and disadvantages” of different employments in all branches of production. The advantages to the wage laborer of employment are primarily, though not exclusively, the money wage from that employment, and the disadvantages are primarily, though not exclusively, the effort required to acquire the skills required for the job and to accomplish the work. Mobility of labor as a result tends to equalize the ratio of labor effort to the money wage across the system of capitalist production.
Because the wage falls short of the money equivalent of the labor effort capitalists extract from their workers, there is a fund of “unpaid labor effort” created in the production process, which is the source of the pool of money surplus value capitalist firms (and other claimants of surplus value such as landlords and intellectual property owners) compete for. But because mobility of labor tends to equalize the ratio of labor effort to the money wage across the system, it also enforces an equivalence between labor effort and money value added at the level of the system as a whole. As a result, in the aggregate, money value added is proportional to labor effort, as is the case in the commodity law of exchange: competition among capitalist firms and other claimants to money surplus value redistributes the money surplus value but cannot change its total. This is the capitalist law of exchange. The ratio of money value added to labor effort is the Monetary Expression of Labor Time.
In the commodity law of exchange each independent producer is a miniature model of the system as a whole, with a common ratio of money income to labor effort. In the capitalist law of exchange the money surplus value an individual capitalist firm may appropriate through competition can deviate sharply from the unpaid labor effort that firm extracts in production. The extreme example is landowners who in Ricardian terms produce nothing and exploit no labor, but participate in the appropriation of money surplus value in the form of land rent.
Can you say more about the social transformations involved in the move from the commodity to the capitalist law of exchange?
The very success of the division of labor and commodity production in increasing real incomes tends to enlarge the scale of each branch of production. The wealth of individual producers becomes insufficient to finance the means of production required, and at the same time the scale of production dictates larger teams of producers in each production process. As Marx makes much clearer than Smith, these factors tend to lead to the appropriation of the means of production as the property of capitalists who are not the direct producers, while the direct producers (workers) tend to become wage laborers hired by the capitalist proprietor of a firm. This transformation of what Marx calls the social relations of production (whether we think of it as primarily theoretical, or possibly historical) has major consequences for the analysis of the division of labor and commodity production.
In principle large-scale production might be organized either in the form of a capitalist firm that owns the means of production or through worker cooperatives that would finance large-scale means of production through some type of credit arrangement. If we look at the history of the division of labor, a relatively small sector of worker cooperatives has in fact coexisted with capitalist production. This sector never disappears completely, but also does not exhibit any tendency to grow and displace the dominant capitalist organization of production. Marx seems to have had an ambivalent attitude toward worker cooperatives, and focuses his analytical attention on the workings of commodity production organized by capitalist firms.
How does this transformation give rise to a new law of exchange?
There are two broad sets of consequences of the social relations of production that organize the division of labor through capitalist firms that own the means of production, control the process of production, and hire labor in exchange for wages.
In the commodity law of exchange where individual producers own or produce their own means of production, the decision to pursue any branch of production depends on the balance of advantages (primarily money income) and disadvantages (primarily labor effort and training) in one branch compared to others. When capitalist firms organize production, however, it is the capitalist owners of the means of production or their agents who decide what branch of the division of labor to pursue, and, as a result, where labor and other resources will be directed. One of Smith’s remarkably far-reaching theoretical insights was that the goal of a capitalist owner of means of production would be the maximization of the profit rate, the ratio of profits to the value of capital tied up in production. This contrasts with the goal of the independent producer in the commodity law of exchange, which is to maximize the ratio of money income to labor effort.[1] Smith argues that the general principle of equalization of advantages and disadvantages in the employment of money as capital financing means of production will lead to the tendency for profit rates to be equal in different branches of production. The logic is exactly the same that Smith uses to analyze the commodity law of exchange system: capitalists will move their capital out of employments with lower than average profit rates and into employments with higher than average profit rates. The result will be a rise in the profit rate in sectors capital is leaving due to diminished competition, and a fall in the profit rate in sectors capital is entering due to increased competition, a process tending to equalize profit rates.
The organization of the division of labor through capitalist firms that own the means of production and hire labor in exchange for wages also has important implications for workers. Wage workers are free (in principle and abstractly, as Smith indicates with the phrase “perfect liberty”) to choose their employments, just as the independent producers in the law of commodity exchange are free to choose the branch of production to pursue. Wage workers, moreover, face the same balance of advantages and disadvantages as independent producers: the advantage of any employment is the money wage income it provides, and the prime disadvantage is the labor effort the worker is required to expend to keep the job.
How does the mobility of wage labor in the capitalist law of exchange differ from the mobility of independent producers in the commodity law of exchange?
Marx distinguishes between labor-power, the capacity to do useful labor for which wage workers are paid wages, and labor effort itself, which is what produces a useful and exchangeable product. The ratio of (externally unobservable) labor effort to money wage income is a measure of the degree of exploitation of workers in any particular employment. According to Smith’s principle of equalization of advantages and disadvantages, labor that is mobile, and thus free in principle to move from one employment to another under capitalist relations of production, will tend to equalize the rate of exploitation in different employments. This leaves considerable freedom for the natural prices of individual commodities to adjust through competition to equalize rates of profit over the branches of production in the division of labor. As I read it, the Marx manuscripts Engels published as the first two books volume 3 of Capital represent Marx’s reformulation of Smith’s long-period reasoning incorporating his distinction between labor-power and labor effort.
Thus the capitalist law of exchange version of the labor theory of value depends on the operation of both of Smith’s long-period principles of equalization through competition and the mobility of capital and labor. The mobility of capital tends to equalize profit rates, while the mobility of labor tends to equalize rates of exploitation. The equalization of the rate of exploitation across the system of capitalist commodity production is the key to the principles of the conservation of labor effort in the value of the net product, and the conservation of unpaid productive labor effort in the system-wide monetary surplus value. Attempts to understand Marx’s theory that rely only on the logic of the equalization of the rate of profit inevitably fall short of explaining these principles. John Cogliano has made important contributions to our understanding of Marx’s theory as a development of both sides of Smith’s long-period analysis.
This is an interesting feature of your interpretation. Most Marxists emphasize the equalization of the rate of profit, but on your account the equalization of the rate of exploitation is just as important. What are the implications of this second equalizing tendency?
Regardless of what relative prices of commodities are, workers face the immediate tradeoff of money wage income for labor effort, and their mobility will tend to equalize the ratio of money wage income to labor effort across the productive system. If the degree of exploitation tends to uniformity over all branches of production, then a single degree of exploitation will tend to characterize the system of capitalist commodity production as a whole, just as a single ratio of money to labor effort characterizes the system of commodity production by independent producers governed by the commodity law of exchange.
If we knew this degree of exploitation we could measure the labor effort in the system as a whole by multiplying the total wage bill by that degree of exploitation, thereby computing an index of the monetary equivalent of the total labor effort. Marx calls the difference between this monetary index of labor effort and the wage bill “surplus value”. In effect, workers receive compensation in the form of the wage for only a fraction of the total labor effort they expend. The uncompensated or “unpaid” labor creates a fund from which capitalists can realize surplus value in various monetary forms as profit, rents, interest, and the other phenomena that are the subject of the rest of the manuscripts comprising the remainder of volume 3 of Capital. The key conclusion for Marx was that the exploitation of productive labor was the source of monetary surplus value in a capitalist commodity-producing economy.
Another way of putting this is to regard the money value of the net product (equivalent to value-added) as the monetary equivalent of the total productive labor effort: the wage bill is the money equivalent workers receive for the paid fraction of their labor effort, and the difference between the money value of the net product and the wage bill is monetary surplus value to be realized in competition among capitalists and other claimants, such as landowners and owners of intellectual property in various forms as profit, interest, rent, royalties, and the like. This is the starting point of the New Interpretation Gérard Duménil and I independently formulated in the 1970s and published in the early 1980s. Other previous scholars including Joan Robinson, John Eatwell, and Bertram Schefold had formulated similar or equivalent interpretations of Marx’s reasoning already, and I. I. Rubin’s thinking in my reading points firmly in this direction.
The capitalist law of exchange appears to differ greatly from the commodity law of exchange in these respects, in what sense are they still related?
The capitalist law of exchange retains some of the key features of the commodity law of exchange version: the Monetary Expression of Labor Time continues to translate between labor effort and the money value of net output at the level of the system as a whole, and the aggregate surplus value is the monetary equivalent of the unpaid productive labor effort. Furthermore, the system is just as much a system of allocating labor (and other) resources among the branches of production as it is a system for determining long-period natural money prices, and each of the two aspects of the system work only because of the other.
But there is an important difference, in that in the commodity law of exchange system each producer expending labor effort and receiving on average a proportional money income is effectively a scale model of the whole system of commodity production, but the individual capitalist firm may not be a scale model of the whole system of capitalist commodity production. In particular the part of the aggregate pool of surplus value appropriated by a particular capitalist firm as profit is not necessarily proportional to the unpaid labor effort extracted in the course of that firm’s operation. The extreme case of this is the Ricardian landowner, who hires no labor-power at all, and contributes nothing to the pool of unpaid labor effort, but shares in the pool of money surplus value in the form of rent. The capitalist law of exchange is a generalization of the commodity law of exchange at the level of the system as a whole, but not at the level of the individual capitalist firm.
What role does competition play in the capitalist law of exchange?
The capitalist law of exchange is compatible not only with the principle of profit rate equalization through competition, but also with other patterns of distribution through competition, such as land rents and intellectual property incomes. Marx’s theory explains the origin of system-wide surplus value in system-wide exploitation of labor separately from the exploitation of labor in individual capitalist firms. Marx refers to this separation in saying that competition is the mechanism through which the imperatives of the capitalist system are imposed on the individual capitalists. I think what he means by this is that while it is to the competitive interest of each capitalist firm to exploit its labor as much as it can by increasing the intensity of labor effort and reducing money wage compensation, two competitive effects put limits to the individual firm’s exploitation of labor. Other capitalist firms will adopt the same methods to the degree that they can, thereby lowering their costs and lowering the price of the produced commodity, thereby reducing the returns to excess exploitation toward the system-wide average. At the same time, workers will tend to move from firms imposing a higher rate of exploitation toward other firms to the degree they can, limiting the access of firms imposing higher than average rates of exploitation to labor-power. These competitive forces tend to shift the extra surplus value potentially appropriated in the individual firm into the pool of system-wide surplus value.
From this point of view every individual capitalist firm, like landowners who appropriate surplus value without exploiting labor at all, is a free-rider on the capitalist system as a whole. Even the largest individual capitalist firms see the system-wide pool of surplus value as effectively infinite in relation to their profits. In a global economy with a net product of over $100 trillion per year, the pool of surplus value is likely to be on the order of $50 trillion per year, while no capitalist firm has profits of even $1 trillion per year. There are powerful incentives for individual capitalists to seek methods to increase the exploitation of their own workers, but in the end their efforts primarily bolster the system-wide pool of surplus value. Marx explains these points in his discussions of absolute and relative surplus value in volume 1 of Capital.
The fact that surplus value has its source in the exploitation of productive labor is unlikely to make much difference to individual capitalist firms, although it can become important at the level of large regional or national economies where economic policies are contested. Marx’s theory of value envisions the competition of individual capitalist firms in ways that are not so different from what he called “vulgar economics”, though as Anwar Shaikh has emphasized, Marx steers clear of the fantasies of “pure” or “perfect” competition that sanitize the often brutal reality of competition by looking at it only as a benign process of social resource allocation.
The system-wide character of capitalist exploitation suited Marx’s own political position, which was the advocacy of system-wide change of social relations of production through revolutionary action led by proletarian parties, very well. Because Marx thought the problems of class society could ultimately be resolved only by thorough-going system-wide change, and thought that centralized political institutions were adequate to manage a system-wide change, he saw no problems in an analysis that located exploitation primarily at the level of the system as a whole. The implications of his discoveries for those of us living with a very different view of the available real alternative systems of organization of social production are less comforting.
We’d like to turn soon to the question of revolution and alternatives to capitalism, but first we’d like to return to some of the issues with the labor theory we discussed in Part 1 of this interview. Since the capitalist law of exchange has more moving parts there would seem to be more ways reality might violate the assumptions of the law. How does one apply the law to the real world?
As Marx explains in the very helpful Introduction to the Grundrisse, applying theoretical concepts to real-world problems often raises seemingly insuperable problems. Some of these problems arise because people perceive the world in terms that are inconsistent with the classical political-economic approach: for example, for many people individual human differences seem essential to understanding social outcomes like wealth and class. In these cases there is not much to be said except to wonder what genuine alternative explanations are available. In many cases, however, the problems concern what Marx called the “level of abstraction”.
What Marx means by the concept of level of abstraction is subtle. An example may help. Smith’s and Marx’s theories of value assume mobility of labor (which tends to equalize the rate of exploitation). But in the real world, despite fairly widespread legal and institutional guarantees of freedom of movement of workers from one job to another, there are clearly many significant obstacles to the free movement of labor. Within national economies there may be licensing and certification requirements for some professions; labor unions or professional societies may impose requirements of apprenticeship or educational level; some ethnic groups may effectively discriminate against others in ways that limit free mobility of labor; gender and racial discrimination can have similar effects. In the global economy, transportation costs and immigration restrictions limit free mobility of labor and very likely prevent the equalization of rates of exploitation. In the face of these glaring empirical discrepancies with the assumptions of the Smith-Marx theory, many people decide that the theory is a pure abstraction with little relevance to concrete social reality.
Another stumbling block is that the Smith-Marx framework often has sharp conclusions that are not in agreement with what the person using it wanted to find out to begin with. For example, because of the long-period focus on, well, the long period, it predicts that many forms of policy intervention in the economy will have small or no effects in the long run, because they will be eroded by gradual but inexorable adjustments of behavior to restore natural prices. Within Marx’s framework attempts to raise after-tax wage incomes by taxing surplus value will be offset by lower pre-tax wages, since Marx’s theory is that worker’s after-tax wages settle at a historically and socially determined subsistence level. This implication is unsettling to many on the left who are heavily invested in redistribution as a goal of policy.
Marx addresses these concerns straightforwardly in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. He argues that the understanding of social phenomena consists of reconstructing them as the intersection or layering of many determinations. In this process the fundamental abstractions, if they reflect the human institutions and behavior underlying the phenomenon, continue to be relevant as the ground on which further, more concrete, determinations rest. For Marx the equalization of the rate of exploitation is a fundamental tendency of a capitalist-commodity producing system, even if it is frustrated by legal and practical obstacles to the completely free mobility of labor. We see this in flows of migration in response to persistent differences in rates of exploitation among regional economies, and black markets in human trafficking. Similarly, the equalization of the rate of exploitation over time in an economy with free mobility of labor is not instantaneous: at any moment some employments will have higher rates of exploitation than others, reflecting deviations of market money wages from natural wages. But again, the underlying tendency in this case expresses itself in specific further phenomena: strikes against low-wage employers, the emergence of educational institutions that hope to provide entry to high-wage employments for their students, and the like.
Most people associate the term “exploitation” with low or declining living standards, and for that reason it is sometimes seen as a key driver of revolution. But exploitation in the Marxian sense is compatible with relatively high and rising living standards. Is there indeed a gap between the technical and lay usage of the word? If so can they have the same moral implications?
The world “exploitation” in ordinary language has two somewhat different connotations. Between human beings “exploitation” connotes an unequal and unfair appropriation of something that belongs to one person by another. In Marx’s theory the capitalists as a class exploit workers in this sense by appropriating unpaid labor time in the form of money surplus value including profit, rents, and interest. We also speak of “exploiting” natural resources, such as deposits of ores, which generally involves investing in order to access the resource and mobilize it for social use. Capitalism also exploits labor in this sense, which sometimes involves investment in workers’ capabilities through public education, public health and sanitation, and social welfare safety nets. Over much of the history of capitalist development wages have risen roughly at the same rate as labor productivity, keeping the rate of exploitation roughly constant. In this type of “trajectory a la Marx” as Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have called it, the fruits of economic development are at least shared between workers and capitalists, despite capitalists appropriating unpaid labor, and the standard of living of workers improves roughly in line with their productivity. The disruption of this pattern of distribution in the neoliberal period starting in the 1980s in most advanced capitalist economies has exacerbated the growth of inequality and destabilized the political consensus between capital and labor on which the burst of prosperity after the Second World War rested.
The point where the “moral” and the “instrumental” connotations of the word “exploitation” come into conflict seems to me to be the same as the point at which revolutionaries need to explain their plans for organizing a social division of labor without exploitation. Is it through worker cooperatives interacting on markets, through some kind of central planning under democratic political control, or a system based like the “open source” movement in computer programming that depends on the voluntary participation of producers in production and the free distribution of the product?
This interview has raised as many questions as it has answered. But now that we have clarified your reconstruction of Marx’s theory of value we’d like to return to the question with which we began: why do you think these core features of Marx’s theory have proved so controversial?
As we discussed in part 1, many commentators on Marx, including, for example, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, John Bates Clark, Paul Samuelson, and others, set out to prove that his theory of exploitation is incorrect. In general these critiques rest either on a rejection of one of the premises of the Smith-Marx long-period theory (for example, Böhm-Bawerk rejects the assumption of the ultimate fungibility of social labor, and J. B. Clark implicitly adds a full-employment assumption to support the marginalist theory of distribution) or on a misunderstanding of the questions that Marx thought the theory of value could address (for example, Samuelson misses the point that the question is the origin of surplus value at the level of the system as a whole, and sees it as a fallacious theory of equilibrium pricing of commodities). On the other hand, various defenders of Marx’s position have differed sharply and even violently among themselves. Some, like Rosa Luxemburg, want to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of capitalist exploitation, which is not Marx’s point. Isaac Ilyich Rubin ultimately paid with his life for his fidelity to Marx’s theory of commodity production and the concept of abstract labor fungible among branches of production. The heat arises because Marx’s theory does hold together and constitutes a troubling and devastating criticism of capitalist social relations without putting forward a framework for supplanting it. There is real political power in Marx’s discourse, as the ability of the Soviets to deploy Marxist language in Orwellian fashion as one of the main props of their power demonstrated.
[1] The independent producer counts the acquisition or production of means of production as part of the labor effort: as a result, although means of production are present in the commodity law of exchange system, the producers do not compute their costs using the principle of compounding profit rates of return.
The post Reconstructing the labour theory of value: An interview with Duncan Foley (Part 2: The Capitalist Law of Exchange) appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Podcast: A rough guide to anti-politics
By @Dr_Tad
I recently appeared on the Living The Dream podcast hosted by Jon Piccini (@jonpiccini) and Dave Eden (@withsobersenses), talking about the concept of anti-politics that Elizabeth Humphrys (@liz_beths) and I developed over the last five years here at Left Flank. I also responded to some of the misunderstandings and criticisms of the concept.
As Jon and Dave wrote on the blog The Word From Struggle Street, “Tad argues that politics is increasingly detached from society and what this means and how communism as ‘the real movement’ can and should related to politics. Tad argues that this analysis has serious and devastating implications for what we call The Left and Activism. We debate if there is any role, before the emergence of social movements, for the agency of anticapitalists.”
You can listen here Download this episode (right click and save)
Or subscribe via iTunes here.
Jon and Dave are currently trying to raise some cash to improve their recording capabilities. You can donate here.
Suggested further reading:
- On anti-politics in general (with Liz Humphrys): https://leftflank.wpengine.com/2013/10/31/anti-politics-elephant-room/
- On anti-politics and neoliberalism (with Liz Humphrys): https://oxfordleftreview.com/olr-issue-14/tad-tietze-and-elizabeth-hymphreys-anti-politics-and-the-illusions-of-neoliberalism/
- On Greece: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/syriza-referendum-podemos-austerity/
- On Australia: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/labor-tony-abbott-rudd-gillard-shorten/
- On Trump: https://leftflank.wpengine.com/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/
- On recuperating politics: https://leftflank.wpengine.com/2017/02/03/why-better-politics-cant-make-anti-politics-go-away/
- The Piping Shrike on Corbyn: http://www.pipingshrike.com/2017/06/the-confusions-of-anti-politics-uk-edition-an-update.html
The post Podcast: A rough guide to anti-politics appeared first on Left Flank.
Why better politics can’t make anti-politics go away
A recent think piece by Spiked!’s theoretical guru, Frank Furedi, is an attack on the idea that anti-politics is any kind of solution to the current breakdown in authority of the political system. It’s worth examining Furedi’s case because it aligns with anti-anti-politics arguments currently found on the Left in its softer and more radical variants. It is also worth dissecting to clarify what this blog means by anti-politics, and why attempts to renovate politics are likely to fail.
Furedi correctly notes that for increasing numbers of people the ways of looking at politics that dominated the 20th Century, tied up with party affiliations and traditional social group loyalties, no longer make any sense. Further, while this has been a long-run process, it is not until recently that responses utilised by political elites to manage this decline — for example the technocratic turn of the 1990s — have given way to a more serious popular response rather than the passivity of “TINA” (Margaret Thatcher’s infamous pronouncement that “there is no alternative”).
What is missing is any sense of why politics may have exhausted itself and failed to come up with sustainable new ideas for a revival. Given Furedi’s Marxist roots what is striking is the lack of a social explanation for the decline of the old political order, which was organised around rigid notions of class and nation and divided along a Left/Right continuum.
This comes through in Furedi’s critique of identity politics and the Left’s “cultural turn”. He agrees with how the social movements of the 1960s and 70s rejected some “Western” traditions; i.e. “worship of hierarchy, and patriarchal and paternalistic practices”. But he argues they threw the baby out with the bathwater by also attacking “values of loyalty, sovereignty, tolerance and liberty”. It is hard to know from his argument how one would choose which bits of these traditions to keep or eject, except for Furedi’s arbitrary lumping of the second list with the Enlightenment (itself somewhat arbitrary, given the mixed inheritance the Enlightenment bequeathed). Why are these values inherently better than the cultural or identity politics Left’s (alleged) dismissal of them?
While it is certainly true that cultural and identity politics were ways of dealing with the apparent loss of the political system as a place where one would engage to drive social change, it is not clear why an assertion of certain values is any kind of alternative to that loss.
Absent from Furedi is any sense about an anchor that might hook what is progressive and reactionary to something based in social reality.
Indeed, the values Furedi describes hark back to an illusion, the notion that in the past politics itself could drive fundamental social change in a positive sense. Such ideas were acutely criticised by Marx when the Enlightenment was still something of a going concern. Furedi’s “loyalty, sovereignty, tolerance and liberty” correspond closely with what the French revolutionaries called “the rights of man”, or what more recently are recognised as “civil rights”, at least on paper, in liberal democracies. Marx made a searing critique of the limits of such rights in his famous essay “On The Jewish Question”. In setting out the difference between merely “political emancipation” (emancipation in relation to the modern state) and “human emancipation” (genuine human freedom), Marx argued that the very basis for such rights was a society of competing self-interested individuals, which rested on the social basis of (bourgeois) private property, and which necessitated an alienation of individuals’ private lives from their lives as citizens (i.e. part of the political community):
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves. (MECW 3: 164)
In effect Furedi is harking back to a world where Enlightenment values only got as far as the limits set by the antagonism between civil society and the state, itself underpinned by the antagonistic “war of all against all” in civil society.
It is this uncritical approach to the opposition between the social and political spheres in modern capitalist society that leads Furedi to attack anti-politics:
It is tempting to think that anti-politics offers a positive alternative to an exhausted, self-serving political establishment. In fact, it merely offers a negative critique of the status quo. Anti-politics is not directed at a particular party or interest but at the very idea of politics. Its premise is that politics as such is futile. It is sceptical of the capacity of citizens to achieve positive results through political mobilisation. It doesn’t only criticise politicians — it indirectly attacks representative democracy and the citizens who operate within it.
For Furedi it is not that there is a fundamental problem with politics but that “political clarity is lagging behind the demands of the [populist] moment” reflected in the UK vote for Brexit and the election of Trump. The problem with Trump is not so much that he is using anti-politics to leverage political power (an understandable product of the moment) but that he is too steeped in the failed politics of recent decades to renovate politics properly. Further, when Furedi contends that anti-politics “indirectly attacks representative democracy and the citizens who operate within it”, he is arguing that social change can only be properly carried out in one approved location — the very circumscribed sphere around the political state.
Furedi’s argument thus connects with two positions increasingly present in left-wing discussion of the crisis of politics. The first, put by some left-wing social democrats and most of the Marxist Left, is that we need a politics that is sufficiently populist and mass-based to have wide appeal and provide the basis for taking state power. It is this view that leads to the interminable squabbles on the Left over exactly which points of unity and which lines of division are need to carve out the correct Left project — whether it be Owen Jones’s calls for a new Left populism to challenge the populism of the Right, or arguments by US Marxists about what kind of socialist organisation is needed in the era of Sanders and Trump. One might think that Greece’s disastrous Syriza experiment (see here, here and here for an obituary) would have chastened them, but one can always argue — as Furedi does in defence of his own version — that the lines of political recomposition were not the correct ones.
The second position, more common on the soft Left, is the demand that politics is properly limited to a narrow field of activity, that of “representative politics”. It could be seen in the Australian Left’s successful campaign to prevent a plebiscite on same-sex marriage, in part justified by the claim that civil rights should be the exclusive preserve of elected representatives and not the voting public. It can also be seen in critiques of the “new populism” (for example the widely-read arguments of Jan-Werner Mueller) which identify liberal democracy as needing to be narrowed down to electing representatives and having unelected sections of the state exert “checks and balances” to restrain the will of the majority, allegedly to protect minority interests. While Furedi would reject such a narrow a conception of politics, it seems clear this would only be because he wants to revive representative politics with mass participation whereas critics of the new populism are resigned to a lack of mass participation and so want to better insulate representative structures from the public. Furedi’s fellow Spiked! contributor Brendan O’Neill has fleshed out this aspect of argument in a more recent criticism of Trump, written in the form of an open letter to the US leader:
Your pose as the anti-politician, the man who hates the political class, is getting wearisome. It has crossed the line from criticism of the establishment, which is good, into a trashing of politics itself, of the very business of people getting together and talking and voting in order to make things happen. When will your anti-politics shift into a conviction that you alone should decide how things should be run? That’s the logical conclusion to anti-politics, whether it takes the form of demagoguery (you) or technocracy (Hillary).
As spiked argued in May last year, everyone who believes in the potential of politics to change society for the better should be worried about you being president. What we need now is not cynicism or a ‘saviour’: we need a real, democratic political culture that engages as many people as possible in a debate about the future. Stop sneering at politics; be a proper politician.
For all of Spiked!’s claims to stand for human freedom, this represents a warning against letting the political order break down too much; a defence of the political order against popular sentiments that go too far.
This blog has long maintained that today’s anti-political moment is the product of a breakdown in the social bases of the political order — its parties, institutions, associated organisations and practices. The era of mass politics that started to unravel in the last few decades of the 20th Century had provided the material basis for ideas that people’s social interests could be won within the political sphere (even if, for the most part, they couldn’t). With the decline of civil society organisations (e.g. trade unions, mass parties, civic associations) that provided a social weight to the activities of the political class, that appearance has increasingly broken down, making more obvious the detachment and antagonism between the public and its political representatives.
Three separate but related phenomena become more obvious in such a period. First, the general stance of detachment from and hostility to politics in civil society becomes more widespread and intense, affecting not just those with least to gain from the system but infecting the socially privileged also, who no longer see the system as functional or responsive. Second, politicians emerge who seek to leverage anti-political sentiment for their own political projects. Such players can come from various points along the ideological spectrum (from a right-wing Trump to a centrist Beppe Grillo in Italy to the left-wing Podemos in Spain) but, in the end, they can no more drive serious social change than could the old parties whose decline they take advantage of. Both the first and second phenomena are inescapable features of modern life because of the separation between civil society and state is a permanent feature of capitalism, even if modified during a past era of mass politics. But there is no question they are more prominent now in the wealthy liberal democracies than at any time in living memory.
Third, there is the possibility of social struggles that directly challenge politics itself, by challenging the state’s rule “over against” society. While these have been at best embryonic in recent times (Spain’s 15M movement the clearest example, for all its limitations), they might be considered the beginnings of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” that Marx and Engels described social revolution as being; that is, a “revolution against the state”.
Only the third phenomenon can be considered to point in a progressive direction, precisely because it is about society asserting itself against the existence of a separate political sphere. To fulfil their promise such struggles would also have to overcome the capitalist social relations that pit individuals in civil society against each other, but that is a discussion for another post.
Furedi argues: “The radical supporters of anti-politics overlook that the flipside of anti-politics is TINA — an acceptance of the world as it is. For without politics people are reduced to passive objects, shaped by fate.” He gives no sense that social forces are needed to profoundly change society, and that political activity underpinned by social passivity simply reproduces the current malaise. Hence he collapses into a tired and unconvincing call for a “battle of ideas” for the values he prefers. More bizarrely he claims that the dead weight of institutions like “schools, universities, popular culture, the media” is more powerful than the countercultural populist surge. Perhaps that argument would’ve rung true 30 years ago, but if the Brexit and Trump votes showed anything it was a lack of deference to the expertise and cultural authority of “schools, universities, popular culture, the media” that was in operation — a fact Furedi acknowledges but quickly forgets.
The problem is not the need for a battle of ideas to shape a better political culture all the better to involve the mass of people, but the need for social forces to move in their own interests — not to reinject the political sphere with some socially-relevant justification, but to end the existence of an alien political sphere altogether. When Furedi argues that people should once more feel that “being a citizen matters”, he is effectively enforcing what Marx called “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right”, where human freedom is reduced to merely political emancipation. This is a formula pitched at the development of a new political class, more sensitive and culturally attuned to the banal capitalist values of the masses it rules over.
It would be a tragedy if future social struggles ended up accepting such profoundly self-limiting strictures.
The post Why better politics can’t make anti-politics go away appeared first on Left Flank.
Revisiting the Debate on Open Marxist Perspectives
Opening Pandora’s Box?
In a recent article co-authored with Pınar Donmez and published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, we seek to reassess a debate between a heterogeneous body of scholarship, referred to as ‘open Marxism’, and its critics. While we generally prefer the term open Marxist perspectives (OMPs) to highlight the variety of scholarship in this approach, the common factor among them is an emphasis on openness: the idea that the content and form of class struggle is not pre-determined and a commitment to the continuous (self-) examination of theoretical foundations of approaches in the quest to grasp the dynamics of the former.
However, its critics generally consider this broad group of authors a cohesive whole and treat the analytical sin of an individual as a sin of the church. Responses from within OMPs have similarly upheld the divisive tone that has led to the current impasse. As such, the debate has become deeply unproductive, bordering on acrimonious. This debate, which could provide a vehicle for the assessment and advancement of critical social inquiry across all its strands, we argue, can be helped by the inclusion of the theoretical constructs offered by OMPs, particularly the emphasis placed on openness.
We do not suggest that criticisms/disagreements directed to individual perspectives on either side should be sidelined or neglected. If anything, their continued presence moves the debate forward. But we propose that they should not overshadow the common basis on which these radical perspectives stand. In this vein, we make a defence of OMPs and hope to encourage a spirit of solidarity within the debate – one that radical approaches in International Political Economy/International Relations scholarship, as well as actual practices and struggles of emancipation, so urgently need in the context of the deepening crisis of capitalism.
In Defence of Openness
In the paper, we engage with four criticisms directed at OMPs:
- A reluctance to offer a historicised account of the emergence of capitalism
- The rejection of historical periodisation
- State-centrism based on a functionalist account of the state
- A deterministic account of revolutionary change
These criticisms, which have strong historical antecedents, found their most recent iteration in the works of Andreas Bieler, Ian Bruff and Adam David Morton. The origins of the debate can be traced back to the 1970s, and the state derivation debate, particularly Colin Barker’s critique of John Holloway and Sol Picciotto’s form-analysis, so crucial to OMP accounts of the state.
The four criticisms made against OMPs need to be taken seriously as they identify the potential pitfalls within Marxist theorising on state and social relations and indeed offer insights in enhancing the explanatory power of OMPs. Yet they also rely on a number of problematic assumptions and uncharitable interpretations in our view. In the first instance, for example, we argue that the critics of OMPs have presented a shared challenge within Marxist theorising of state and social relations as a problem particular to open Marxist perspectives. The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a peculiar blind spot that not only raises historical questions about highly contingent social developments but also problematises when one mode of production became another. For open Marxism’s critics, OMPs have a totalising ontology through which everything is reducible to capitalist social relations and, as such, nothing can be explained with reference to events that historically preceded capitalist social relations.
This criticism takes the form of the development of the modern state system. Open Marxism’s critics take the view that capitalism was born into a state-system that already existed; however, OMPs, relying on form-analysis, offer the view that capitalist social relations necessarily transformed the state(s). While a political entity we might recognise as a state existed prior to capitalism, it is not the state we know today. The problem in communication here leads to OMPs’ critics claiming that OMPs deny the existence of the state prior to capitalism.
From our perspective OMPs do not deny the existence of the state prior to the development of capitalism, nor do they argue that the state exists independently of social relations, but instead that the state only exists in and through temporally and spatially conditioned social relations. The value of an open Marxist perspective derives from understanding such contingent social developments in terms of the inherent contradictions of capitalist social relations. This criticism also connects to the absence of the historical periodisation of capitalism in open Marxist analyses; a criticism that derives from open Marxist authors’ desire to emphasise historical contingency rather than abstracting it as a period of time. We wish to emphasise that OMPs as well as their critics discuss and engage with the forms and functions of the state and assess these dynamics across historical periods in their conceptual frameworks and social empirical enquiry. Speaking of forms, functions, periods, however, does not necessarily entail functionalism, historicism or periodisation.
We link these four criticisms to the value of openness within open Marxism, which derives from a reliance on historical enquiry: an acknowledgement that only the study of history can reveal to students of social relations the ways in which class struggle, unfolding in unexpected and challenging ways, can and has manifested. This aspect of open Marxist thought can be seen as clearly grounded upon Marx’s own writings on historical materialism and therefore a shared starting point for both perspectives under discussion here.
Judean People’s Front? We’re the People’s Front of Judea!
Ultimately, the paper argues that OMPs and their critics have a lot to gain from constructive engagement with each other. Previously, however, this debate took the form of an at-best uncharitable or at-worst vicious engagement that merely led to loss of dialogue among radical scholars whose goals were the same: critical social inquiry, the demystification of social relations and the promotion of struggles/strategies of emancipation. We retain the hope that this paper goes some way towards restoring a previously productive discussion.
The post Revisiting the Debate on Open Marxist Perspectives appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).