Month: July 2018

Hegel, or at least this is the impression we get of him as we browse through the Wissenschaft der Logik, wasn’t exactly your average funny guy, that much is clear. Yet there’s actually a lot of humor and ironic wit to be found in notoriously difficult works such as the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Similarly, the work of Marx is considered solemn and serious, simultaneously a work of high theory and a moral and political condemnation of the grave injustices of the capitalist system. Yet throughout his work Marx also showed himself a great literary satirist of capital and its protagonist class, the bourgeoisie. In To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson attributed to Marx “the satanic genius of the satirist” (1940, 256) and crowned him the greatest ironist since Jonathan Swift, whose Directions to Servants can be read as a user manual for domestic class struggle.

However, whereas Hegel’s witty remarks appear at most as an aside – a brief moment of comic relief in between two twisting movements of the Dialectic and thus remaining external to the System – in Marx satirical deconstruction seems to penetrate much further into the method of critical exposition itself, marking an immanent and constitutive moment thereof (Gandesha and Hartle 2017). This immanence of satirical laughter in the practice of philosophical critique is one important characteristic separating the German idealism of Hegel and his younger followers from Marx’s materialist understanding of society. Given that literary form is never merely an ornament to thematic content, but is interwoven and expressive of it, just as the content in turn dialectically informs the mode of its presentation (or Darstellung), how does Marx’s satirical rhetoric link up to the larger project of establishing a historical-materialist world view?

In an essay on the literary status of Marx’s Capital, Keston Sutherland argues that style cannot be separated from the critical thrust of the work as a whole: “Marx was the author not simply of a theory of capital and of social existence under capital but also of an immensely daring and complicated satire of social existence under capital […] in which risks and failures of style are arguments in themselves, irreducible to theoretical propositions.” (2011, 5). Woven through the formal schemes of Capital are Marx’s descriptions of the exploitation of labor as a Dantean inferno where “all is cruel discomfort, rape, repression, mutilation and massacre, premature burial, the stalking of corpses, the vampire that lives on another’s blood, life in death and death in life.” (Wilson 1940, 313).

The laborious cutting off of the scientific concept of capital from its satirical and bodily grotesque staging largely defines much of the subsequent reception of Marx, not in the least those committed to working out a proper “Marxist” method and theory, Sutherland argues. The impulse to arrive at the pure theoretical essence of Capital by thinkers such as Louis Althusser proceeds by filtering out and eliminating the rhetorical force of Capital qua literary performance intended to critically affect, shock, disgust and transform its readers. These readers are not abstracted as “rational persons” as in the liberal-humanistic tradition, nor idealized as principally open to the communist case as in orthodox Marxism – but rather as duped and malleable, two-faced actors in the capitalist tragi-comic play that Marx sets out to describe, in a way that presumes a post-naïve conception of theoretical discourse as part of a permanent conflict over the meaning and constitution of the social world, even when materialist critique rehearses social contradiction without pretending to resolve it.

In contrast to recognizing the import of literary style in Capital, the impulse to get at its pure conceptual essence by Althusser and others, Sutherland observes, is ultimately still a bourgeois and idealist desire that, neutralizing the uncomfortable uncanniness of reading Marx as he journeys through history and its various modes of production, succumbs to that philosophical desire for Form that Marx mocks, and that a materialist method was to overcome by forcing thought to turn against itself, to violently bend its Icarian upward movement, to face the dirt head on. Part of this violence is self-inflicted, in that critique cannot exclude itself from its own destructive, cannibalistic moment. Through satire it turns against itself, tearing at its own outside until it reaches philosophy’s imaginary center, inciting “the hatred of philosophers for those blind realities that are as insensitive to philosophical categories as rats gnawing books” (Bataille 1985, 35).

Sutherland discusses several recurring instances of satirical invective in Capital. He analyzes at length Marx’s use of the term Gallerte (which translates as “gelatinous mass”) to provide a grotesque image of life under industrial capitalism as a supplement to the more scientific category of abstract labor time. The collectivized chains of laboring bodies represent a massive ‘expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, and so on’. Gallerte signifies this formless, monstrous mass of perfectly quantifiable and exchangeable commodities. Another concept Sutherland considers to be of an essentially satirical nature is that of fetishism (which is one of the concepts in Capital Althusser will attempt to downplay as pre-scientific). By showing that the modern world of capitalism is possible only through the establishment of the commodity as a fetish, Marx inverts the smug truism, in the false consciousness of the enlightened citizen, that he – and with him European civilization as a whole – has finally overcome the crude, cannibalistic and superstitious primitivism of non-western social forms; the infantile, speechless speech of the barbarian being the necessary counterpart to Kant’s Mündigkeit, as the inhuman that negatively delineates the human from without. The work from which Marx borrows this term is representative of the misplaced superiority complex that Marx satirically undermines by applying it to the colonizers: de Brosses’ Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches (1760).

For Marx, however, the fetish is real precisely insofar as it is an illusion. It would not do justice to this paradox of the “objective appearance” to attribute to the hidden abode of production more ontological primacy than the stage on which bourgeois ideology plays out. If anything, for Marx the latter is more real, given that what counts as real is always already a projection by the stage, of its supposed outside, such that the stage erases itself as excluded from the reality it constructs, a result of which being that the reality appears to retrospectively determine the stage as its illusionary outside. But this is precisely why Marx’s own entrance on the stage of ideology counts: the literary trope of the hidden abode is one of his most powerful props, a theatrical asset in one of philosophy’s most influential productions. The mask is the metaphor or symbol that captures this curious epistemological threshold, where neither the image that the mask projects nor the underlying face that it hides is primordially real or given. Rather, it is only the structure of dissimulation that the mask in its inherent duplicity inscribes that is real. Just as, when unmasked, the mask stands exposed as projecting its own reality as external to itself, so any invocation of reality remains trapped in its own referential logic and can only be an effect of another mask.

One does not, to return to the first paragraph, simply “browse through” Hegel’s work as one would with an illustrated magazine at the dentist’s. Instead, such works are laboriously studied. Additionally, my choice to refer to the German rather than English titles of Hegel’s works satirically flags the German language as pompous and pretentious– mocking the ostensive display of cultural and academic capital implied in fetishizing the text’s language of origin. Marx’s choice for using “bourgeois” over the more conventional “Bürger”, besides signaling the crucial difference between bourgeois and citoyen, produces a similar effect from a German-English perspective, where French signifies the language of pretense and free-floating Philosophy par excellence.

This adds to the more general rule that words from languages other than the primary language of the text tend to invoke their own conventionality and, by implication, that of language as such, rather than acting as the self-erasing, transparent vehicle for their referent, as words are supposed to do for them to achieve any kind of ideological effect. The same effect is achieved by the mixing of different genres and rhetorical repertoires. Most people think that the etymology of satire refers to the satyr, a Greek Dionysian mythical figure, but it actually traces back to satura, which means to mingle or mix (different artistic genres, forms of speech, etcetera). (Ullman 1913). Marx’s Capital is a satire in this etymological sense too, as factory reports, newspaper articles, long forgotten scientific tracts, philosophical systems, jokes, proverbs and anecdotes, ancient myths, are all dragged into the same whirlwind of chapters, sections and overly elaborate footnotes.

This deconstruction of the “signifying effect” of discourse – the magic convergence of words with things – by emphasizing the conventional and contingent character of language, forcing it to fold back onto and so partly undo itself, is also one of the main effects of satire, especially in its use of parody. Appropriating an established literary form from without, forcing it to become self-reflexive, and dismantling its magical powers of (dis)simulation, parody reveals any argumentative structure to depend on a seemingly infinite repertoire of rhetorical tropes, sophisms, metaphors and analogies. As such, parody is profoundly anti-philosophical, at least in the Platonist and Christian traditions, which assume as a necessary condition of truth the eradication of the materiality of language, its transcendence of rhetoric and style toward the Idea. Instead, satirical parody constantly invokes and lives off precisely this, its own materiality and that of the discourses it mimics and parasitizes.

Seen in this light, Marx’s use of the French bourgeois has the critical effect of showing that what this term refers to is far from given and must be constructed as an object of critique through the very satirical gesture that suspects its deflected existence. ‘It is tempting to doubt that the bourgeoisie was a definable entity at all’ – ironically, it is with this observation that Peter Gay concluded his massive five-volume work The Bourgeois Experience (1984–1998). But the bourgeoisie is an especially classless class in that it does not seem to need or want to recognize itself as a class, at least not in the way of the ruling classes that went before it. “I find it hard to understand why the bourgeois dislikes to be called by his name … kings have been called kings, priests priests, and knights knights; but the bourgeois likes to keep his incognito.” (B. Groethuysen, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France, as cited in Moretti 2013, 6).

But this refusal of self-identification as a class, I would argue, is paradoxically constitutive of its very identity and functioning as a class. The identification of the bourgeois with its own class is “displaced” in the psychoanalytic sense, either onto a fictitious middle class or onto the plane of generic humanity, so that when the bourgeois says “we” he never means “we, the bourgeoisie”, but “we, humanity”, “we, the people”. This displacement of one’s identity as the ruling class, and the concomitant evacuation of power from the realm of public representation, presents a unique problem for the practice of ideology critique. Although the task of critique is still to unmask the image the bourgeois falsely upholds of himself, here it is in fact the absence of a clear image, of a delimited class identity, that must be countered, by constructing such an image through which the bourgeois is forced to become, for himself, part of the class that he refuses to identify with. Always stalling reconciliation, satirical invective is one of many critical tools at Marx’s disposal for generously inviting the bourgeoisie to finally become what it is – and suffer from it.

 

If our task is to propose a theoretical and historical model best suited for understanding the origins of the oppression of women under capitalism, then we should without a doubt consult Marx. Although we cannot speak of a systematic analysis of the oppression of women in any of Marx’s work, his explanatory methodological framework is key for a feminist analysis of women’s oppression. Marx’s critique of the trans-historical assumptions of classical political economy, his definition of the specificity of capitalist societies as a “collection of commodities”, as well as his account of the circulation of capitalist production and reproduction as a whole, are fundamental elements of social reproduction theory (SRT). Starting from these theses developed by Marx in Capital (Marx 1982), SRT focuses on one specific aspect of the relation between productive and reproductive labour which is left under-theorised and undeveloped in Marx. What we are referring to are the implications of Marx’s famous theory of the circular course of capital, which describes how surplus value is created through the processes of production and reproduction. It is exactly this theory that serves as a starting point for SRT because it provides an entry into the “tacit” issue on the link between the market and household relations. Following from the above, the goal of SRT is to grasp also what is not “visible” in the process of production – it asks what kind of processes enable a worker to show up at her workplace and examines the conditions of her existence and the social processes related to those conditions.

In order for society to survive it needs to reproduce. SRT points out that ‘reproduction’ may allude either to the process of the regeneration of the conditions of production which enable society to survive, or to the regeneration of humankind. Rosa Luxemburg in her Theory of Accumulation (Luxemburg 2015) explains that reproduction is repetition, a ‘renewal of the process of production’, hence implying that the regular repetition of production is the general precondition of regular consumption and human existence (Čakardić 2017). In what way do we use these kinds of Marxist premises while thinking in terms of SRT?

If we use the example of classic industrial labour in the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist secures through the market the means needed for the operation of a factory and the workers’ wages. Wage labour enables the working class to secure/consume the items and services necessary for life – like food, clothes, covering household expenses – however, those needs are met in the household, not on the market. Moreover, in order to eat, one needs to take into account the preparation of food; if one buys clothes, they need to be washed and maintained; and, also, physical care needs to be provided to elderly members of the family or children. Unlike labour in the ‘productive’ sphere of society, domestic labour belongs to the ‘reproductive’ sphere. Both capitalists and labourers consume food, one way or another, prepared at home; their clothes must be washed, or they depend on some other kind of reproductive labour. Therefore, their life and work in the productive sphere is mediated through a range of activities belonging to the domestic sphere. SRT claims that this structural and spatial gap between the reproductive and productive spheres of society indicates the fundamental reason for the oppression of women in capitalism. On what basis can we make this claim? 

Following tradition, historically, the reproduction of the working class is undertaken by women outside the productive sphere, and is unpaid. It essentially refers to three interconnected processes: a) the regeneration of workers and their livelihood; b) the maintenance of non-workers which relates to the care of children, the elderly and the unemployed in general; and c) childbirth as the reproduction of new labour force. This indicates the ontological level of the problem: activities not defined as labour (food preparation, cleaning, care, breast-feeding, giving birth), and lacking any market value, are not considered labour. The mathematics is clear here: if the labour in question is transferred to, for example, a capitalist with an employee, she would be obliged to organise a range of activities, investing time and money into procuring services which are traditionally free and a burden to the household.

Marxist feminism has tackled the problem of social reproduction in various ways and therefore we cannot speak about one unified SRT tradition. Feminists supporting the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign, close to the Marxist autonomist tradition in a dual-system manner, offered one approach.¹ A second (materialist) approach is found in Christine Delphy’s characterisation of social reproduction as a series of actions within the domestic sphere, which she sees as a separate mode of production (Delphy 1980). Finally, Lise Vogel offers a ‘unitary’ approach, in which social reproduction is taken to mean the simultaneous reproduction of both the labour force and class society (Vogel 2013). It is also worth recognizing that socialist-feminist approaches, for example that of Aleksandra Kollontai or Rosa Luxemburg, also offered an important account of the relation between productive and reproductive work.² The main difference between the autonomist Marxist-feminist tradition, based on dual-system theory, and the unitary approach suggested by Lise Vogel, is in the understanding of surplus value. Unlike dual-system theory, Lise Vogel rightly argues that reproductive labour does not produce surplus value, only use-values. Despite the afore-mentioned difference, it is important to note that even if the domestic-labour debate established a view of domestic work as productive labour and a process upon which the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole depends, this debate undoubtedly served as a springboard for establishing a ‘unitary’ analytical framework to theorise domestic labour as an integral part of the capitalist mode of production.

What is also important for SRT is that it treats the question of (multiple) oppression (gender, race, sexuality) in a direct relation to capitalist production rather than in the fashion of an “add-on” strategy which treats oppression through a functionalist lens. To put it succinctly, SRT is a sort of methodology used to explain labour and labour power under capitalism, by which we further develop Marxist theory and use its implications for applying SRT to our current conjuncture.³

 

Introduction

Marx refers to the social republic during two periods: the 1848 Revolutions and the 1871 Paris Commune. In both of these contexts, Marx uses it to refer to a republic where the working class holds political power. However, in the former context he uses the social republic to refer to the working class taking charge of the bourgeois republic and turning it towards social emancipation; in the latter context he adds the idea that the working class transforms the political institutions of the bourgeois republic in order for it be an appropriate vehicle for achieving social emancipation.

Other terms used by Marx to distinguish his preferred republic from the bourgeois republic, include the “republic of labour” and the “red republic”. All of these terms should be seen as roughly equivalent to the better-known phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”.¹ In the conclusion, I briefly consider some interpretive and political advantages of using the social republic compared to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The 1848 Revolutions

The term social republic came to particular prominence amongst radicals during the 1848 Revolutions. It formed half of the popular slogan “the Democratic and Social Republic (la République démocratique et sociale)”, which became the rallying cry for socialists and republicans fighting for a republic that would both institute universal male suffrage and go beyond political reform and address the social question (Agulhon 1983, 164–165; Jennings 2011, 56; Sperber 2005, 206–207; and Pilbeam 1995, 215–218).

Marx argues that when the French Republic was declared in February 1848 each class interpreted the republic in its own way. The working class wanted a “social republic”, the petty bourgeoisie a “democratic republic”, and the bourgeoisie a “bourgeois republic” (Marx 1979 [1852], 109, 181-182).² Marx argues that the underdevelopment of the working-class in 1848 meant that the workers’ social republic stood little chance against its competitors, and it was therefore decisively crushed during the June Days uprising. Marx thus claims that the “social republic [only] appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy” of things to come (Marx 1979 [1852], 181). Instead, the starring role in the revolutionary drama was played by the victorious bourgeois republic. Marx maintains that this republic secured the economic and political interests of the capitalist class, and thus merely replaced the rule of the king with the rule of the bourgeoisie. He condemns the “bourgeois republic [as] the state whose admitted purpose is to perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labour.” (Marx 1978 [1850], 69).

The Paris Commune

The events of the Paris Commune provided a striking example, for Marx, of the working-class finally being in a position to take political power. He thus notes that while the “cry of ‘Social Republic’” in 1848 could only signify a “vague aspiration after a Republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class-rule, but class-rule itself”; in 1871 the “Commune was the positive form of that Republic” (Marx 1986a [1871], 330-331). The social republic appears a number of times in Marx’s discussion of the Commune, most prominently in a short section of the first draft of The Civil War in France entitled “Republic only possible as avowedly Social Republic” (Marx 1986b [1871], 497), where he claims that,

a Republic is only in France and Europe possible as a “Social Republic”, that is a Republic which disowns the capital and landowner class of the State machinery to supersede it by the Commune, that frankly avows “social emancipation” as the great goal of the Republic and guarantees thus that social transformation by the Communal organisation.

Marx here makes four main points about the social republic: (a) political power is held by the non-capitalist and non-landlord classes;³ (b) it aims at social emancipation; (c) the state is replaced by a Commune; and (d) social emancipation is facilitated by the state’s transformation into a Commune. It is this final point, that the social republic “guarantees…social transformation by the Communal organisation” that is the key innovation in Marx’s idea of the social republic. Marx argues that using the existing political institutions of the bourgeois republic would frustrate the aim of social emancipation. As he says, the “working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”, since the “political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.” (Marx 1986a [1871], 328; Marx 1986c [1871], 533).⁴

Marx argues that the social republic differs from the political institutions of the bourgeois republic, by (i) replacing representative government with popular delegacy, through imperative mandates, representative recall and frequent elections; (ii) subordinating the executive branch to the legislature; and (iii) placing the state’s organs under popular control by making them elected, accountable and deprofessionalised (Leipold, forthcoming). Marx argues that through these institutions the Commune had “supplied the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions.” (Marx 1986a [1871], 334).

Conclusion

I suggested in the introduction that ‘the social republic’ plays a similar role in Marx’s thought as the more famous term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Viewed from contemporary eyes, there is some interpretive and political advantage to the social republic over the dictatorship of the proletariat, since the latter term has fallen prey to two subsequent developments that have obscured its initial meaning. First, the term ‘dictatorship’ has evolved from originally referring to the Roman Republic’s constitutional provision for an individual to be temporarily granted extensive (but still limited) power during state emergencies, to describing autocratic rule that is permanent and constitutionally unconstrained (Draper 1986, 3:11–16; Nippell 2012). Second, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has become inextricably associated with the one-party state and the restriction of political and civic freedoms. The social republic avoids this ideological and historical baggage. It allows us to see more clearly that Marx believed that achieving social emancipation required properly democratic institutions.

 

 

The first attempt of workers to associate among themselves

takes place in the form of

combinations.

Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (1847)¹

 

In capitalist society today, the common names both the means of production

and the forms of life.

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Assembly (2017)

 

Social unionism is a question of combination; and a combination is a matter of building alliances, coalitions between different entities that are unified around a common (cause).

(In 1847, in the final chapter of the Poverty of Philosophy Marx made a case for worker combinations against Proudhon, socialists, and economists. Combination was how workers first connected among themselves, and permanent combinations in the form of trade unions acted as protective shields, both of which made combining a political act. And yet, Marx hesitated: unless a new society arises, there will be no real change. That hesitation, how the two moments are going to be, well, combined, is a foundational probe and it is where this entry takes its cue. After nearly two hundred years of unionism, and almost five decades of social unionism, with numerous attempts to unite labor movements together with social movements, the question of combination still lurks around Marx’s initial hesitation. If the post-2010 movements of swarming multitudes and tentacular encampments on city squares were prefigurative of the-social-and-the-political-to-come, what role would combining play, if any?).

Combination is an act of merging through the recognition of otherness. To combine presupposes discerning eyes, cuts, and separations. A consideration of who is going to be combined with whom in order to achieve whatever desired result in whichever struggle is how a combination is made / assembled. As such, it is the product of an accumulative gesture accompanied by an anticipation that more and variety make combinations / assemblages better, stronger.

(Thus combination grounds itself in preconceived identities (factory worker, sweatshop worker, housewife, student…), preformed spaces (shop floor, public square, cubicle…), and already existing groups (communities, unionists, political activists…)).

Combinations embody deliberation, but, most often, calculation. Who is going to be combined with whom in which form. As such, they are integral to the world of strategy and tactics. But who is going to be the decision-maker; the combination-maker?

(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their latest book Assembly, criticize social unionism on the basis that alliances between labor and social movements were formed as external alliances where it was the union leaders who decided on the political strategy; not the constituents, (read: combinants). Against this model they suggested that all organizational structures should ground themselves in social production, around the commons; where the multitude and not the union leadership should define what the long-term strategy is going to be. Resolving Marx’s hesitancy with a pragmatic gesture, they do not dispense of social unionism: as of today it is where the precariat, the unemployed, and the community members could come together with the labor movement, reformulating the general strike as a social strike (Hardt & Negri, 147-150).)

It is doubtful whether the multitude is in need of combining; or combination can be the operative concept for the multitude. It is the aleatory encounters, mutual aid and care, and communing together within the common that gathers the multitude; and a recognition of singularity and heterogeneity — “From each according to its abilities to each according to its needs”  (Marx 1875).² Not because it is a more authentic, natural, ecological, and/or sustainable option of dwelling; or because this is the programmatic prelude for correcting all that is ill in the world; nor is there a specific combination to unlock all these. Multitude recognizes that in order to thrive, it is no longer in need of a combinatory mentality that arrives either in the many shapes of the capital-form (combining labor-powers, labor- power with machines, machines with other machines, machines and labor-power with products, products with spaces, and so on…), or via the representative practices of political parties or union leaders, practices of cutting and connecting. Multitude as the centaur (the singular monstrous body) could (and should) decide upon the path it is going to set before itself. Social production, production of the social, production with/in the social is what signifies the livelihood of the multitude.

(In trying to resolve his hesitation, one point Marx stressed in the Poverty of Philosophy was what Hardt and Negri refer to as the affirmation of the common in Assembly. Marx wrote, “Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social”).

We now know that combination is no longer on the table. Strategy is about deciding how to affirm the common, and how to gather the multitude. That is where the contemporary hesitation lies.³

 

 

 

 

The historiographical intervention of the Indian Subaltern Studies Group took as their targets elite and nationalist accounts of the transition from colonialism to nationhood. However, they also included in their interventions a corresponding critique of Marxist analyses of the transition to nationalism. As Gyan Prakash argues “When Marxists turned the spotlight on colonial exploitation, their criticism was framed by a historicist scheme that universalized Europe’s historical experience” (Prakash 1994, 1375). Subaltern Studies thus also found a place within the field of Postcolonial Studies’ critique of Europe-centred analyses of history, politics and identity. The critique of Marxism targeted the Marxist reliance on “mode-of-production narratives” couched in terms of a “nation-state’s ideology of modernity and progress” which resulted in an inability to take seriously “the oppressed’s ‘lived experience’ of religion and social customs” (ibid., 1477).

At the same time, as the term “subaltern” indicates, the Group’s relation to Marx and Marxist thought was also one of a critical engagement with Marx’s historical and theoretical understandings of the political transformations in societies undergoing colonial exploitation. The place of Antonio Gramsci is crucial here, in particular his writings on Italian history during the complex political processes which constituted the Risorgimento (Gramsci 1992). Thus read more generously and with nuance, Subaltern Studies could be seen as having a relation of critical intimacy with Marxist thought rather than an outright rejection of all of its analyses. This is clear in the Marxist and Leninist language employed by Ranajit Guha, the Group’s founder, who argues that “the working class was still not sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness as a class-for-itself” (Guha 1988, 42), and the “historic failure of the nation to come to its own (sic)” (ibid, emphasis in original) is evidenced in the failure of a democratic revolution “under the hegemony of workers and peasants (ibid., 43). Similarly, Partha Chatterjee’s influential “More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry” offers a historical and comparative analysis of the complex power relations set into motion among different classes (and class fractions) in which a Foucauldian analysis is combined with a reading of the Grundrisse to underscore the “differential impact on pre-capitalist structures” including “destruction, modifying them for surplus extraction, bolstering pre-existing social structures” (Chatterjee 1988, 388).

Two aspects of the relation between Marx and the Subaltern Studies group can be identified here. First, the explanations of historical transformation from colonialism to the nation-state; and second, the peculiar form of identity of the subaltern classes who are defined in opposition to the colonial and national elites. The first issue involved the necessity of transforming the “mode-of-production narrative” to include the complexity of transformations in pre-capitalist structures such as caste, religion and community which resulted in a sustained engagement with forms of “pre-modern” mobilization including magic, religion, rumour, and caste. Here however, the presumed split between Marxism’s inadequacy with dealing with such issues, and the groups own interventions, must be nuanced by the fact that within the pages of the volumes of Subaltern Studies Marxist historians were invited to articulate their own understandings of the relation between caste, class and community for example. Asok Sen’s reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire in Volume V of Subaltern Studies, for example, underscores that Marx’s historical writings on the peasantry comprise a far more sophisticated understanding of the complex links between emergent power-blocs and strategic political alliances between the peasantry, the (petit-) bourgeoisie and owners of capital in the transition from feudal to capitalist economies (Sen 1987, 207; see also Chaudhury). A wholescale rejection of “Marxist” thought implied in some formulations, such as by Prakash, seem thus unwarranted. Guha himself in his landmark essay “Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography” deploys Marx’s nuanced reading of the global expansion of  capitalism in the Grundrisse to situate his own historiographical critique of elite histories of Indian nationalism (Guha 1992).

The second issue of subaltern identity, and its recovery through historiographical research, came in for sharp critique from many quarters including a feminist and deconstructive analysis by Gayatri Spivak, and from a more broadly materialist and Marxist perspective by Dipankar Gupta and Rosalind O’Hanlon (Spivak 1988; Gupta 1985; O’Hanlon 1988). Guha’s understanding of subaltern resistance as “the politics of the people” occupying “an autonomous domain [which] neither originated from elite politics nor [whose] existence depend[ed] on the latter” (Guha 1988, 40) was problematic, because it seemed to foreclose a relational analysis of how subaltern politics operated through external constraints and opportunities, as well as strategic linkages with other forms of social power. In fact, Chatterjee’s essay had foregrounded precisely this complex relational understanding of power which made claims of an autonomous subaltern identity problematic. Dipankar Gupta’s critique of Guha underscored the dangers of ethnicized formulations of autonomous peasant identity which relied on the “independent organizing principle of the insurgent’s mind” (emphasis added) as the motor of historical change (Gupta 1985, 9). Developing Gupta’s critique, O’Hanlon argues that such an idealist claim to autonomous subaltern identity “shuts off the whole field of external structural interaction and constraint” within which the politics of the people operated (O’Hanlon 1988, 202). It is precisely here that a materialist and Marxist critique of identity becomes relevant since such a critique exposes the humanist and liberal conception of human agency often implied in formulations of subaltern identity. In O’Hanlon’s words: “we are left with the unfortunate, and I think unintended, impression, that the historiographical issue at stake is that of man’s freedom as against the determining power of his external world. But this very juxtaposition, of the free man as against the man determined, is itself an idealist conception, in which the mode of existence of the unitary subject-agent is never called into question” (ibid.).

The problematic question of subaltern identity, and the complex processes of political transformation involved in the transition from colonialism to nationalism, thus emerge less as points of fundamental divergence between Subaltern Studies and Marx. Rather, a productive form of critical intimacy best describes how the limitations and opportunities of both strands of thought could contribute (and interrupt) each other.

The political slogan “there is no alternative”, also called the “TINA-Principle” or just “TINA”, is widely attributed to Margaret Thatcher. Some think it was coined by Herbert Spencer.¹ This might be true, but it does not matter. The slogan belongs to Thatcher. There is even one, mostly admiring (and quite boring), biography that goes by this slogan as a title (Berlinski 2008). Of course, there were uncountable thinkers in the history of political thought who subscribed to this idea long before Margaret was born. A student of this particular intellectual history could start with Parmenides’ idea that change is impossible and follow the probably rather boring story from there. However, there is one twist in this tale that amounts to a quite nice example of the irony of (intellectual) history. One prominent figure in the camp of advocates of TINA is none other than Karl Marx. Like Margaret Thatcher, Karl Marx seemed to believe that there is no alternative to certain political developments and outcomes that simply will take place – no doubt of it. Of course, Thatcher and Marx had rather different ideas about what it is that is without alternative and they also had different ideas about why it is that this is inevitable.

It is worthwhile to dwell a bit on those two subtle differences. To be sure, the reason for this is not that Thatcher will turn out to be a devoted Marxist in disguise on a mission to subvert the political system and advance the advent of a revolutionary class. That would just be too good to be true. What is important is the way in which those differences reveal an even starker contrast to contemporary leftist critics of neoliberal globalization, who reject the TINAprinciple. It raises the question of how those critics relate to more traditional Marxism. Susan George, for instance, thinks that “there are thousands of alternatives” and the activist organization ATTAC used to adopt the slogan “another world is possible”, meaning that it is up to us, the people, to decide how the political world should look.² While the latter slogan does not directly oppose Marxism, it has a rather voluntarist and quite idealistic ring to it that contradicts classical Marxist historical materialism. In his rejection of idealism the original Marx might be closer to Thatcher than to some of his contemporary admirers. That alone makes it important to look at the two crucial differences between Thatcher and Marx.

The first difference between Marx and Thatcher is obvious. Thatcher thought that there is no alternative to neoliberal reform. She was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek and believed that only the chaotic working of maximally liberalized markets can bring stability and prosperity. Functionalistic attempts of government regulation are bound to fail and to lead to totalitarianism. Thatcher was also, and maybe contrary to Hayek, willing to accept the specific form of oligarchism that comes with neoliberalism. Marx, on the other hand, believed that there is no alternative to proletarian revolution.³ The contradictions in capitalism create an antagonism between the two classes of, first, proletarians, the owners of nothing but their labor power, and, second, capitalists, the owners of all other productive factors. Once the proletarians, driven by their material deprivation, realize that they are exploited, they are bound to organize politically and overcome the resistance of capitalists to social change by revolution. This is all well-known and it is easy to argue that both Thatcher and Marx turned out to be wrong.

Thatcher is wrong in believing that stable political systems of welfare capitalism or market socialism are impossible. Quite obviously, the obstacles respective reforms are confronted with are politically created by conservative elites using their diverse powers to defend their privileges. This resistance can be overcome (Jones 2014). Marx is also wrong, because there is not one form of capitalism and one form of communism, but a variety of political and social systems, and it is at least conceivable that societies can transform by political reform and civil struggles instead of bloody revolutions. So it seems that our contemporary critics of globalization are right and that it is possible, as Mao allegedly once said in a moment of clarity, to “let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. This could be the end of the story, but it is not. It might be that the post-Marxist reformist critics of globalization laughed too soon.

It is still possible that Marx or, for what it is worth, Thatcher, are right in another respect. To see this, it is important to understand not only what they thought it is that is without alternative, but also why they thought so. In the case of Thatcher there is no real answer. She used the TINA slogan as a political tool, without any explanatory theory behind it. She might rely on the argument brought forward by Hayek that every kind of government intervention into liberal markets will inevitably lead to a totalitarian regime (Hayek 2007). However, empirically and conceptually this argument has been proven to be wrong, and more than this she does not offer (Schweikart 2011). To be sure, nowadays many people add more elaborated arguments, stating that competitive markets force market players to maximize their profits and political regulators to respect this natural or law-like functionality of markets. But in fact purely competitive and policy-directing markets are not forces of nature or expressions of transcendental laws. Maybe the existing social structure of market societies depends on giving them as much room as possible. But this existing social structure is also not a necessity. It can either be reformed or replaced.

Marx thought that labor is the only really productive factor and that therefore capitalists have to exploit it in order to generate a profit for themselves. This claim is contested, to put it mildly. But this is not the core of his argument for the inevitability of revolution in any case. All this argument requires is the weaker claim that there is an antagonism between capitalists and proletarians, that the former use their power to take unfair advantage of the latter, and that the only way to overcome this antagonism is by force, because capitalists will not agree to social change, at least not to the degree that would be acceptable to proletarians. At first sight this particular TINA argument also seems to be wrong, because a more reformist social contract seems possible, as the example of the history of Europe and its welfare states shows. This, then, is also what contemporary post-Marxist critics of globalization aim for on a worldwide scale. So, was Marx as wrong as Thatcher?

The surprising answer, as the Chinese Communist revolutionary Zhou Enlai would say, is that it is too early to tell. The argument for a suspension of final judgement is obvious. Rosa Luxemburg has already shown that despite some international efforts, Marx and most bourgeois Marxists were too focused on Europe, on nation states, and on the agency of their own class (Luxemburg 2000). They simply were too impatient for change to come. However, maybe Immanuel Wallerstein and his world-systems theory is right in arguing that economic globalization is a necessary precondition for a truly proletarian revolution (Wallerstein 2004). Just think of the hundreds of millions of Chinese workers witnessing the rise of the new rich in their own country. Think of the hundreds of millions of excluded Indians forced to live under the oppression of the still functional caste system. Think of the hundreds of millions of exploited Africans and Latin Americans looking to the North and the fruits of their travails. When those billions embrace their political agency, then it might just be that there is no alternative for humankind to finally submit to the will of those who were dominated for centuries. And then who has the last laugh?

 

When going over the remarkably few discussions of the university as an institution in Marx’s writings, one is struck by how much importance he attaches to it as being tasked with forming and shaping the minds and habits of society’s educated classes, who, due in part to their educational privileges, are destined to become members of society’s ruling class. Marx is not particularly interested in a detailed examination of the university and how it fulfills its aforementioned role of producing and reproducing the ruling class. Rather, he ascribes that role to it by subsuming it under his categories of the economic and political, which are brought together in his conception of ideology. Put simply, universities produce the creators of ideology, which in turn are an expression of the ruling class’ ownership of the means of production. As Marx states in The German Ideology, “[t]he class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” (Marx 2010 [1845-46], 59). In a remarkable passage following shortly after, Marx describes a split in the ruling class emanating from this division between material and mental production. On the one hand, there are the intellectuals who occupy institutions of ‘mental production’ like the university, and on the other, there are those who work in the sphere of ‘material production’. It is worth quoting this at some length, as it goes to the core of Marx’s conception of the university as an institution with a crucial functional, reproductive role within his broader conception of capitalism. Moreover, it also reveals the contemporary significance of it for debates concerning the university and its potential for being a site of radical emancipatory politics. Marx goes on to say:

The division of labour […] manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this class. (Marx 2010 [1845-46], 59-60)

Marx’s pessimistic view, that universities are essentially institutions of mental (re)production whose products are intellectuals perfecting the illusions of the ruling class about itself, is reiterated in his later work as well. While discussing the measures taken by the Paris Commune, he favorably refers to the establishment of “free universities [italics in original]” which are “no longer State parasites”, that is, tools in the hands of the ruling class (Marx 2010 [1871], 474). This also provides a clue as to how he imagines the cleavage between the intellectual and its “active” other in the ruling class can be resolved: by cutting off the university from its functional, reproductive role in capitalist society and its ties to the state. But for Marx this requires a revolution from outside the ruling (and hence also intellectual) class, namely by the proletariat—which, while it may find allies among intellectuals, must remain wary of their fickle, collaborationist nature. After all, intellectuals occupy a structurally distinct position from the proletariat in capitalist society, with the latter having no ownership over any means of production, while the former make their living from their ownership of the mental means of production. Marx’s distinction between these two different kinds of means of production is not often commented upon, yet it offers a key insight into his pessimistic view of the role of the university, and by extension intellectuals, as a distinctive social class in the praxis of emancipatory politics.

Is this pessimism warranted, and what is its relevance for contemporary debates concerning the university and the intellectuals it produces? The pessimistic thesis derived from the structural position of intellectuals within the broader capitalist system has had prominent recent and contemporary adherents, notably Noam Chomsky (2008) and Pierre Bourdieu (1988).¹ But attempts have also been made to take a more optimistic approach, while maintaining elements of the structural critique of intellectuals and their institutional role. A prominent expression of this perspective can be found in Sartre’s A Plea for Intellectuals (1975), wherein he accepts the structural impediments standing in the way of intellectuals—and by extension the university—to be on the side of emancipation, but argues that it is possible to transcend these by constantly working toward adjusting one’s structural position, gearing it toward the subaltern (Sartre 1975, 261-262). How exactly is this to be achieved by the intellectual? According to Sartre, two elements are required, which directly engage with Marx’s pessimistic account:

(1) Perpetual self-criticism: he must not confound the universal – which he practices as a specialist in the field of practical knowledge […] with the singular efforts of a particularized social group to achieve universalization. If he poses as the guardian of the universal, he lapses at once into the particular and again becomes a victim of the old illusion of the bourgeoisie that takes itself for a universal class. He must strive to remain aware of the fact that he is a petty-bourgeois breaking out of his mould, constantly tempted to renourish the thoughts of his class. Thus an intellectual cannot join workers by saying: ‘I am no longer a petty-bourgeois; I move freely in the universal.’ Quite the contrary; he can only do so by thinking ‘I am a petty-bourgeois; if, in order to resolve my own contradiction, I have placed myself alongside the proletariat and peasantry, I have not thereby ceased to be a petty-bourgeois; all I can do, by constantly criticizing and radicalizing myself, is step by step to refuse—though this interests no one but myself—my petty-bourgeois conditioning.’ […]

(2) A concrete and unconditioned alignment with the actions of the underprivileged classes. […] How can a specialist in universality best serve the movement of popular universalization? Both in his capacity as one who can never be assimilated, and remains excluded even during violent action, and as a divided consciousness, that can never be healed. The intellectual will never be either completely inside the movement (thus lost within a too great proximity of class structures) nor completely outside it (since as soon as he begins to act, he is in any case a traitor in the eyes of the ruling class and of his own class, one who uses the technical knowledge they allowed him to acquire against them). Outlawed by the privileged classes, suspect to the under-privileged classes (because of the very culture he puts at their disposal), he can begin his work. (Sartre 1975, 261-262)

One could argue that the democratization of education over the course of the twentieth century, which greatly expanded access to the university for those with working-class and other subaltern backgrounds, along with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which opened up space for more ‘radical’ intellectuals of the kind described by Sartre to join faculties and, at times, become influential within certain academic disciplines,² there may be good reason to be more optimistic about the role of the university today. Whichever view one takes on the university and its potential for acting as a site for radical emancipatory change, one has to engage and grapple with Marx’s powerful analysis on the subject.

 

 

 

 

The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; VOC) was founded in 1602. It was a private company with extensive state support, monopoly rights to the Dutch-Asian spice trade, and far-reaching prerogatives to wage war and make treaties and alliances. The VOC became the instrument for the violent subjection of many parts of Asia to Dutch commercial interests until the end of the eighteenth century. It laid the foundations for the colonial regime of the Dutch in Indonesia that lasted well into the twentieth century. Without mentioning its name, Marx discussed the VOC and its legacy in a brief but powerful passage at the end of Capital, Volume I. After citing the British colonial administrator Thomas Stamford Raffles’s judgement that the history of Dutch rule in Asia was “one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness”, Marx continues:

Nothing is more characteristic than their system of stealing men, to get slaves for Java. The men stealers were trained for this purpose. The thief, the interpreter, and the seller, were the chief agents in this trade, native princes the chief sellers. The young people stolen, were thrown into the secret dungeons of Celebes, until they were ready for sending to the slave-ships. An official report says:

“This one town of Macassar, e.g., is full of secret prisons, one more horrible than the other, crammed with unfortunates, victims of greed and tyranny fettered in chains, forcibly torn from their families.”

[…] Wherever [the Dutch] set foot, devastation and depopulation followed. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, in 1750 numbered over 80,000 inhabitants, in 1811 only 18,000. Sweet commerce! (Marx 1990 [1867], 651-652).

Marx mentions the VOC explicitly in Capital, Volume III, as part of his historical observations on merchant capital. Here he says that if one wants an example of the way in which merchant capital operates in places where it directly controls production, one should look at “the colonial system”, especially “the methods of the old Dutch East India Company” (Marx 1967 [1894], 329). As in the earlier passage, it is clear from the context that Marx’s reason to single out the VOC was his perception of the cruel and exploitative character of this company.

The process of knowledge collection behind those passages in itself gives an interesting starting point for reading Marx ‘from the margins’. Marx took extensive notes from the first volume of Raffles’s 1817 History of Java (Raffles 1817) while in London in 1853.¹ At this time, he developed a great interest in colonial and semi-colonial societies, leading to his famous articles on India and China for the New York Daily Tribune. Many have rejected Marx’s articles on India from this period – or at least the years before the 1857 Sepoy uprising – for ascribing a ‘progressive’ role to colonialism. Nevertheless, it is clear from what Marx took from Raffles, that even at this early stage his willingness to see Western capitalism’s penetration into Asia as ‘necessary’ for future development was always circumscribed by his acknowledgement of the brutal and devastating impact that it had. In his “The British Rule in India”, Marx quotes a passage from Raffles saying that “The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects with less regard or consideration than a West-India planter formerly viewed the gang upon his estate, […] employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contributions, the last dregs of their labour”. Against Raffles, who berated the Dutch only to the advantage of the English, Marx pointed out that the British Rule in India is “only an imitation of the Dutch” (Marx 1979 [1853], 126).

Equally interesting is the special attention payed by Marx to slavery under the VOC. It should be kept in mind that the Dutch government abolished slavery in the East Indies as late as 1860, merely seven years before the publication of Capital, Volume I. Despite this late abolition, Dutch historians have all but neglected the role of slavery in the VOC empire until very recently (Van Rossum 2015). In contrast, Marx elevated it to a central plane. One simple explanation for his attentiveness to this issue is that it helped him to expose the violent origins of capitalist development, an objective that runs through Marx’s entire discussion of “the so-called primitive accumulation”: “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.” (Marx 1990 [1867], 620). What better way to illustrate the hypocrisy of the capitalist, than laying at his doorstep the thoroughly discredited system of slavery? After all, this was not only the moment of abolition in the Dutch East and West Indies, but also, more epoch-making, in the American South through the Civil War, and of the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire. An outspoken opponent of slavery, Marx never missed his chance to emphasize capital’s complicity in it.

Generations of readers after Marx have interpreted those famous lines of Marx primarily as comments on capital’s recent antecedents. However, an even more potent re-reading might be possible; for throughout the famous chapter in which Marx discusses the cruelty of Dutch colonialism and slavery, he leaves clues that suggest he did not see this type of violence merely as a stepping stone for ‘modern’, developed capitalism, but as one of its contemporary companions. Stressing this continuity, Marx writes: “Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modern Industry” (Marx 1990 [1867], 656). Simultaneity is also implied in his famous comment that “[w]hilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the trans-formation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation” (Marx 1990 [1867], 658-9). Is it a coincidence that when turning to the history of the VOC, Marx also especially highlighted the fate of “the young people stolen”? Starting from his sparse remarks on the VOC, we can see not only Marx’s acute interest in the global nature of exploitation and accumulation, but also his attentiveness to the threads that connected capitalism’s history to its present.

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best as he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1981, 311).

 

The most popular image of political agency has been shaped according to the Western, white, privileged, heterosexual, colonial, male Self, rightly criticized by Gayatri Spivak as a figure that not only always strengthens itself while promising its own dismantlement, but also – and perhaps more importantly – as one always producing its “others” in a catachrestic process of self-restructuring practice (Spivak 1999). According to this image, to which the Marxist historiography and theory of revolution is no stranger, resistance should be seen as a masculine, heroic form of agency, in which the right is unambiguously discernible from the wrong, and wins, usually in a “David vs Goliath” style. Contrary to this description, the weak – and here another strand in Marx’s texts comes to mind – are usually strong in numbers, their agency being far from heroic, their ethical qualities are precariously unbalanced and hybrid, their gender – a trouble, and their origins – unholy.

As depicted by James Scott, the weapons of the weak are ordinary, and demand persistence rather than strength (Scott 1985). In peasants’ protests, in long marches and peaceful sit-ins, articulation is rather basic and the pronunciation of postulates usually does not meet the highly bourgeois requirements formulated in the classical theories of the transformation of the public sphere (Habermas 1989). The weak sometimes constitute forms of counterpublics, they are genuinely “counterpublics of the subaltern” – of those whose emergence and marginalization take place simultaneously. Nancy Fraser discussed feminist counterpublics as an example of what she called “subaltern counterpublics”, but she never mentioned the catachrestic structure of subaltern (Fraser 1990). The concept of weak resistance emphasizes the oppression and resistance, the appropriations and dissimulations always present in the process of the making of the subject of other. Weak does not mean impossible. It means resisting.

As we might remember, the new beginnings in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thinking are not marked by heroic masculine figures claiming their rights by fighting for them (Deleuze 1977). They actually start in a Kafkaesque moment of deception and weakness, in confrontation with an overwhelming fear or danger, where what is scariest is perhaps the possibility of literally anything happening. The little song the boy depicted by Deleuze and Guattari starts singing marks a transformation, begins a new constellation, a new assembly. It is not a triumphant anthem of a new nation opposed to a clearly defined enemy. It is a silent tune aimed at survival, not at victory. And yet things unfold in an unprecedented way. These are risky practices, of a deeply ambivalent character – Deleuze and Guattari comment: “This synthesis of disparate elements is not without ambiguity. It has the same ambiguity perhaps, as the modern valorisation of children’s drawings, texts by the mad and concerts of noise.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1981, 350). They also suggest a particularly weak character of territorializing practices, arguing that “we can never be sure we will be strong enough, for we have no system, only lines and movements” (ibid.). Territory, here, refers to a new constitution, a response to fear, and initiates a new entity and agency without the hegemonic claim.

The new territory should be imagined as one beyond private and public. The new territory is still or “always already is” common (see Hardt and Negri 2009). This means it belongs to everyone, but it also means it is ordinary, not exceptional. In this, it reminds us of those always already situated in positions of precarity for the Western subject to emerge (Lorey 2015). Weak is also the connection between generations of the marginalized, as in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, where the messianic image of redemption is hijacked to serve the disappropriated masses and to reinterpret the legacy of historical materialism. The weak resistance is therefore one that presents itself as a new territory, as the unexpected reconstitution of the dark matter of the excluded suddenly presenting its agency on the stage of history.

 

 

Whiteness signifies a comprehensive social positionality within capitalist, racialized, patriarchal societies and is part of a structural equipment to dominate, categorize and order the world. The centuries-old system of racism has generated effective power structures and archives of dominant knowledge wherein whiteness is used to mark the so-called ‘other’ without marking the so called ‘self’. (Cf. Piesche & Arndt 2011, 192). Since the unmarked marker defines him*herself as ‘neutral’ and creates what is called the ‘norm’, whiteness remains unnamed in its processes to construct racialized ‘other/s’ and demarcates this void through explicit and implicit parameters. Bearers of whiteness benefit from discriminatory categories of differences which have been implemented as an increasingly globalized matrix of domination and norm/alization.¹

In order to discuss socially established norms that cause or promote racism, critical whiteness serves as an important analytical category to detect and specify hierarchical constructions of whites and whiteness as ‘self’, ‘(f)actual’, ‘true’ in relation to constructions of Black people/People of Color and Blackness/Brownness as ‘other’, ‘bogus’, ‘invalid’. Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) aim at shifting the focus back to the unmarked marker. Combining an analytic approach and a conceptual as well as methodological apparatus, they provide the possibility to analyze racializing processes in an intersectional manner by connecting the consequences of both epistemic and physical violence of categorical hierarchies acted out by white people.

Given the historical and regional background of CWS – an area of research that evolved as an offshoot from Black Studies and Critical Race Theory in the late 20^th century mainly in U.S. academia – it is important to keep clearly in mind that critical whiteness first and foremost contains a Black collective knowledge of survival. From the times of enslavement on, Black people have shared and conveyed data, information and expertise “gleaned from close scrutiny of white people. It was not a way of knowing that has been recorded fully in written material” (hooks 1992, 338). It was, however, a crucial and fundamental knowledge about both the atrocities of colonialism and slavery, the power of ordering and categorizing, and the impact of racialization. The purpose of this knowledge “was to help black folks cope and survive in a white supremacist society” (hooks 1992, 338). At the same time it created a powerful foundation for theorizing the interconnections of race and social privilege, of “white ignorance” as a particular yet very influential group-based systemic miscognition, and of “white innocence” as a cultural paradox that describes the seemingly contradictory concurrence of denying racial discrimination and colonial violence on the one hand, and of acting out racism, prejudice and degradation on the other.²

As an intellectual intervention, a theoretical concept and a transdisciplinary field, critical whiteness has been pioneered by African American scholars and writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920), James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time, 1963) and Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992). Morrison’s critical effort, especially, created a boom in this field. As a writer and a Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University she called on her own academic discipline to understand that ‘race’ does not simply ‘occur’ when Black characters or respective authors are discussed, but rather functions as an overall narrative matrix shedding an unerring light on power structures, hierarchies, positionalities, and imaginaries in current Western societies.

For the last decade, Critical Whiteness Studies have become more visible in Western Europe. Unfortunately though, corresponding intellectual and/or academic developments are not particularly promising. In contrast to the U.S., where the field is deeply rooted in and informed by a collective experience of Black diasporic people, and as such always has been a vital constituent of activism and political practice, critical whiteness approaches in Germany were either quickly shrugged off as irrelevant for local contexts, misinterpreted as ‘elitist’ and ‘overly theoretical’, or simply overtaken by white scholars who prefer to actively exclude Black activist-scholars and activist-scholars of Color.³

This holds partly true also for white leftist and white feminist circles which is all the more regrettable since an intersectional focus on whiteness – one that interweaves race and gender and class and other discriminatory social categories with reference to Marxism – was offered already as early as the early 1980s. Black feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis (Davis 1981) and Gloria Joseph have shown “why racism must be addressed specifically and consistently as an integral part of any theory of feminism and Marxism” (Joseph 1981, 93; emphasis added). They demonstrated how the material conditions of slavery have determined not only specific relations between Black men and women within white Western patriarchy, but also the relationship of Black male and female individuals to labor within the U.S. post-/enslavement society.

It is necessary and challenging to re-read intersectional Black feminist notions on both whiteness and Marxism. The critical and complex analytical approach might not only bring up a lot of novel political topics, it could also significantly shift the focus of Marxist discussions, help us to de-universalize generalizing notions about, for example, ‘the capitalist world’, ‘the working masses’ or ‘the character of labor’, and to originate a field of political thought that is informed by many perspectives and shaped by inclusive epistemologies and practices.