Month: July 2018

In his section on the ‘genesis of the industrial capitalist’ in Capital, Volume I, Marx famously describes Holland as “the exemplary capitalist nation of the seventeenth century” (Marx 1990 [1867], 651).¹ The immediate context is a passage in which Marx fiercely denounces the role of Dutch colonialism in the East Indies (see the entry on the VOC in this collection). However, Marx returns to what is commonly known as the Dutch Golden Age at several other points as well. These passages are often insightful, though of course they do not present us with the latest word regarding the economic history of the early-modern Netherlands (Lourens and Lucassen 1992; Van der Linden 1997; Brandon 2011). They were based on careful reading and note-taking on the economic and political history of Europe from the sources available to Marx, in particular, extensive outtakes from Von Gülich’s five-volume history of trade (Von Gülich 1830-1845; Marx 1983, 245-64, 389-411, and 898-905). The material gathered from contemporary historians and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observers, combined with his own anti-capitalist instincts, sometimes led him to quite hyperbolic descriptions. A good example is his contention that “by 1648, the people of Holland were more overworked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together.” (Marx 1990 [1867], 653). While there is interesting modern research that suggests that Marx was right to note that inequality and the level of exploitation in the Dutch Republic increased significantly during the Golden Age, his comparison with the rest of Europe seems overblown. Nonetheless, if we are willing to read between the lines of his more intuitive descriptions, a rich interpretation of the nature of the Dutch Golden Age emerges. This interpretation is in no way ‘economistic’– a crime of which Marx is often proclaimed guilty. In particular, it gives special attention to the role of the state, warfare, and colonialism in capitalist development.

There is little that is Golden in Marx’s version of the Dutch Golden Age. Its start coincided with the beginning of a cycle of commercial wars between European states, propelled by “the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins.” (Marx 1990 [1867], 651). At its zenith, the Dutch violently dominated the European East-India trade and the commerce between the various parts of Europe. Contrary to schematic representations of this history, Marx did not see Dutch economic success in this period as the achievements of a pure ‘merchant capitalism’ that grew rich from exploiting suppliers and consumers without changing the relation of production. Rather, he stressed the links between trade and plunder abroad and the high level of development of the home economy. The proceeds from “undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.” (Marx 1990 [1867], 653). The main achievement in the field of statecraft with which Marx credits the Holland burgher-administrators who look down on us from the walls of countless art museums was the development of an intricate system of public taxation, debt, and credit, which in itself became a new source of exploitation. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Dutch were outcompeted in the field of manufacture by the English. The Netherlands entered a long period of depression, and Dutch capital started to move across the Channel.

These scattered remarks provide less than a full history, but more than just rudimentary suggestions for an approach towards the rise and decline of the Dutch economy during the Golden Age. They form a possible point of entry from which to think in fresh ways about the transnational nature of the origins and historical development of capitalism itself. Marxist historians of the twentieth century have often tried to capture this history as a neatly separated sequence of national trajectories towards ‘real’ (meaning industrial) capitalism, which only came to full fruition in Britain in the course of the eighteenth century. Such an approach can draw from a particular (mis)reading of Marx’s (1990 [1867], 651) remark that

the different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17^th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.

In this interpretation, ‘momentum’ is understood only in its narrow meaning of ‘instance’ or ‘moment’. The Dutch Golden Age provides the penultimate ‘failed moment’ before English success. It is puzzling how a text that is so dynamic in its portrayal of global interactions, explosive leaps, and complex interplay of forces and tendencies as the historical section at the end of Capital, Volume I, can be read in such a schematic, dull and pedantic way. The passage cited does not necessarily support it. The Latin ‘momentum’ refers not only to ‘moment’, but also to movement, motion, impulse or course; to change, revolution or disturbance; to cause, circumstance or influence.² If we infer the possible meanings from the passage just cited, we might read the sequence of historical capitalisms sketched there in a very different fashion. Each of the states mentioned drew together particular impulses, changes, and influences from the great international swirl of capitalist development that they participated in. The Dutch contribution to this inherently trans-national process was to fuse local patterns of capital accumulation more solidly than had ever been done before with the expansion of world trade and the internationalization of finance, a fusion that relied heavily on state power. The more ‘systematic combination’ of these factors in eighteenth-century Britain could only arise in connection to capital’s advances elsewhere, both in Europe and in the non-European regions subjected or marginalized through colonization, slavery, war, and economic extraction. From a historical-methodological point of view, a re-reading of Marx’s section on ‘the so-called primitive accumulation’ that pays more attention to the Dutch case should not aim for constructing a slightly earlier and marginally different national trajectory towards capitalism, but to dissolve the strange marriage of Marxist historiography and national exceptionalism altogether. The specificity of the English moment, like the Dutch moment, must be understood through capital’s global instantiations. Starting this transnational opening-up from two opposite ends of the North Sea might not seem a very radical step. But it could be when this movement is elongated from one port of entry to another, across oceans.

 

 

 “The N.’s revolutionary history is rich, inspiring, and unknown.”¹ Written by C. L. R. James (1939) in the midst of globally connected struggles against fascism and colonialism, this observation is not primarily a critique of bourgeois historians. Rather, it is directed at the Fourth International and at all the Marxists who, according to James, still have to recognize “the tremendous role played by N.s in the transformation of Western civilization from feudalism to capitalism” (ibid.). Even though Marx himself had emphasized the importance of the European enslavement of people of African descent for the rise of modern capitalism (MECW 6, 167), he remained peculiarly silent regarding the most radical expression of Black revolutionary history: the Haitian Revolution. Marx mentions the Haitian Revolution only in the margins, hidden in the The German Ideology, where he defines it as an anti-colonial struggle for liberation, enforcing the abolition of enslaved labor. Yet the successful uprising of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue does not qualify as a proper revolution in the eyes of Marx, even though it resulted in the overthrow of a colonial plantocracy and in the independence from a revolutionary, yet racist, French Empire. In a polemic, he claims that Max Stirner “imagines that the insurgent N.s of Haiti and the fugitive N.s of all the colonies wanted to free not themselves, but ‘man’” (MECW 5, 309) – a thought Marx refuses. In contrast to Hegel, who in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit had appraised post-revolutionary Haiti as “a state on Christian principles” and as a signifier of Black people’s inherent capability of freedom, Marx, on the other hand, defines the historical role of the newly created “N. republic” as merely having laid out the ground for the abolition of enslavement in the United States (MECW 19, 229). In both cases, Haiti only represents the liberation of people of African descent, not of humankind.

Today, Marx’s dismissal of the revolutionary credentials of the Haitian Revolution permeates most of the critical theories inspired by Marx, which either silence or trivialize it as a marginal event on the periphery of modernity. In contrast, throughout the worlds of the Black Atlantic and the Black Pacific (Shilliam 2015), Haiti has been, and continues to be, a symbol of universal emancipation both in political movements and in counter-hegemonic theory-production initiated and cultivated by Black people and People of Color. It was none other than Paul Lafargue, husband to Marx’s daughter Laura, who declared the Haitian Revolution to be an inspiring example of a radical socialist revolution with an anti-racist agenda. While Marx condescendingly referred to his son-in-law as “African”, “gorilla” or “creole”, who was lacking “English manners” (MECW 42, 315f.), Lafargue himself took pride in his Black ancestry – which, ironically enough, went back to pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. He self-identified as homme de couleur, person of color (Derfler 1991, 53), a political category invented in Saint-Domingue that transcended the racialized matrix of European Enlightenment and colonialism. In a world of institutionalized white supremacy, Haiti was constituted as a decolonial and deracialized republic, making it a safe haven for all indigenous people and people of color endangered and threatened by colonization, enslavement, racist terror, and genocidal violence perpetrated by white people. Historically, this was proven by the mass migration of African-Americans from the United States to Haiti in the 19^th century. Well into the 20^th century, Haiti became a political counter-model to Western liberal capitalist democracy for various anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist liberation movements, from Aotearoa to Vietnam to South Africa.

It was Black Marxism that prominently put forward the idea that the Haitian Revolution was indeed not a mere instance of individual emancipation – the transformation of colonized and enslaved people of African descent into free men and free laborers, as Marx had claimed –, but a crucial step in the universal emancipation of humankind. According to James (1939), the formerly enslaved revolutionaries, who had been classified as “movable property” by the Code Noir, were, in fact, “black proletarians”. The Caribbean plantation complex, which had been based on a proto-proletarian division of labor, at the same time enabled the political organization of the enslaved population as revolutionary subjects. By destroying this complex, the “Black Jacobins” became the vanguard of universal emancipation, staging the first socialist revolution in world history (James 1938). However, what James performs in his book Black Jacobins as an epic of emancipation is not the mere integration of Black revolutionary politics into a conventional Marxist frame. Rather, he changes the frame itself by decentering the white, Euro-American urban proletariat that had been thought of as the only revolutionary subject and the embodiment of universal emancipation. By writing the history of the Haitian Revolution as the history of a revolution proper, Black Marxism thus deconstructs the “North Atlantic universals” (Trouillot 2002) and the “white mythologies” (Young 2004) that are prevalent in conventional Marxist and even post-Marxist theories.

While Susan Buck-Morss (2000) continued to study the hidden connection between the Haitian Revolution and Hegel – a connection that for the first time had been examined by Pierre Franklin Tavares (1990) –, post-Marxist interpretations of the Haitian Revolution gained momentum in the run-up to its bicentenary in 2004, leading to a so-called Haitian Turn. This intellectual shift in North American academia re-centers the Haitian Revolution and includes it in the history of Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolution (Joseph 2012). Although post-Marxists no longer outright ignore the Haitian Revolution, they unreflectingly incorporate it in their canon of a particular Euro-North American Marxist thought, which masks its implicit whiteness as an assumed universality. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000, 118), for example, compare the iconic revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture with Marx, stating that both were global utopian thinkers, with Toussaint translating the rhetoric of Enlightenment’s universalism and the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen “into practice”. In a similar vein, Slavoj Žižek (2008, 208) describes the events of Saint-Domingue as “a key supplement” to the French Revolution. According to him, the Haitian Revolution was “clearly ‘ahead of its time,’ ‘premature,’ and as such doomed to fail” (ibid., 392). Instead of questioning the epistemological and political conditions of their theoretical practice, the post-Marxists inscribe the Haitian Revolution into a grand narrative of European Enlightenment and the bourgeois French Revolution. In doing so, they do not take seriously the autonomous struggles for, and conceptions of, emancipation brought forward by the enslaved people themselves. Not only that, they also do not recognize the importance of colonialism, enslavement, and racism as specific forms of domination and exploitation that are more than a mere momentum in the dialectics of class struggle.

At this point, the contributions of Black Marxism are vital. From the vantage point of Black Radicalism – a body of social and political theory rooted in the lived experiences and in the genealogies of resistance of Black people on their forced journey from Africa to the Americas –, Black Marxism rethinks Marxist theory from scratch. Cedric J. Robinson (1983) places the Haitian Revolution in the theoretical framework of a “racial capitalism”, which suggests an intertwining of class and race in the transatlantic history of colonial and racist violence. Likewise, in The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois reflects the centrality of race as a fundamental category of domination, oppression, and exploitation on a global scale and even after the formal abolition of enslavement when he predicts that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colorline” (Du Bois 1903, 31). In the midst of the anti-colonial revolutions of the 20^th century, Frantz Fanon states that “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (Fanon 2004, 5). Similarly, the central aim of the Haitian Left after the foundation of the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, bringing together intellectuals such as Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, was to understand the interlocking, but also contradictory, logic of race and class domination (Smith 2009). Trying to integrate racism, capitalism, and neo-colonialism, Haitian Marxism thus made an important contribution to a Marxist grammar of political economy and a Marxist critique of modern capitalist society that is still largely unacknowledged.

It is obvious that the Haitian Revolution has remained mostly unnoticed in critical theories of the global North up until today. But we cannot tell a solely heroic story of this revolution. While anti-racist struggles are being ignored most of the time in what Charles Mills (2003) calls a “White Marxism”, this rings true even more for the revolutionary struggles fought by Black women. The celebration of the Haitian Revolution as a moment of universal emancipation within the narrative logic of a masculinist, heroic storyline obscures the contradictions of this revolution in the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The fact that the newly created republic was founded on the subordination and exclusion of Black women underlines the importance of Black Marxist feminism as a critical social theory (Hill Collins 1990) – even more so as the Left today puts forward polemics against what is often called “identity politics”, accusing the theorization of different positionalities of being a strategy of social division. In her response to this accusation, Selma James, a Jewish socialist feminist thinker and activist married to C. L. R. James, claimed that “if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left” (1974: 92). Envisioning a democratic revolutionary socialism therefore does not only require a social and political theory that is aware of the intersectionality of different forms of oppression and exploitation. It has to start from the Black feminist insight that, as Angela Davis (2016) puts it, emancipation is only imaginable as the common practice of an “intersectionality of struggles.”

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Vanessa Eileen Thompson for our ongoing discussion of Black feminism and for bringing to my attention the work of Selma James. I am also thankful to Felix Trautmann, Aaron Zielinski, and the editors of Krisis for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

 

 

“Incidentally, another thing I have at least been able to sort out is the shitty rent business”, Marx wrote to Engels in a letter from Summer 1862 which gave account of the chronic misery of his family’s living conditions. Marx, notoriously incapable of keeping accounts, had mentioned the burden of rent and placations of the landlord in earlier messages. Paying rent was as equally vexing for Marx as it is for many of today’s renters. In the letter, however, he tackled something he considered different: “I had long harboured misgivings as to the absolute correctness of Ricardo’s theory, and have at length got to the bottom of the swindle”. (Marx 1984, 380–81). The groundwork for his theory of ground rent was later laid out in the third volume of Capital (Marx 1981). It would go beyond the scope of this note to fully unfold his theory of ground rent. The main achievement of the concept, to put it in a nutshell, was a theory that connects to the labour theory of value:¹ a socially distinct class of landlords rents out land, and claims higher profits for the advantages for production of one plot of land over another in the form of differential rent; socially determined by the profitability of the land, it reflects historical modes and relations of production. Moreover, Marx complements the concept of differential rent by so-called absolute rent: because of it being private property, rent is conditioned by the class of landlords holding a monopoly over scarce land. As such, the theory of ground rent shows that in capitalism, production involving land of any sort is turned into a business just like any other.

Rent is central when it comes to housing – not only because housing, too, follows the logics of capital accumulation in capitalist societies, but because rent has been key in determining who is living where and how. In spite of this aspect, which has been inscribed into processes of urbanization at least since the industrial revolution, Marx contributed little to the topic of residential living.

Housing, however, gave cause for another seminal text in a Marxist tradition: in the early 1870s, Engels published a polemic entitled “The Housing Question” (Engels 1872). It was written as a reaction to reformists who discussed the miserable residential conditions of the unpropertied classes as the central Social Question, allegedly best solved by equipping workers with home ownership. Unfolding major lines of the debate, Engels rejected the argument as ineffective, and moreover as a mere tactical distortion: the social question was not to be found in housing, but in the ownership of the means of production. For Engels, the misery of housing was little more than a secondary evil. With this and Marxists’ focus on the production side of the economy in mind, housing – or, more generally speaking, reproduction and everyday life –  lived in the shadows of the factory and the division of labour for the following decades. Following the epistemological shift towards neoclassical economics, depoliticised supply-and-demand models took over theories of ground rent as sole explanations also in the field of urban studies.

The renewed interest in housing over the last decades started not least from the actual developments taking place in urban areas. Running out of other investment opportunities, in many cities since the 1970s capital turned towards urbanization and housing. Considering today’s economic developments, housing actually accounts for a major part of capital accumulation which keeps the global capitalist economy running. More than ever before, the progressive commodification of housing rendered buildings as something to invest in rather than to live in. This aroused the attention of various disciplines contributing to urban research: critical urbanists showed that mainstream economics is incapable of explaining the mechanisms of housing. Linking Marxist theory with other concepts of power and oppression, critical urban theory uncovered the processes underlying housing and its stabilizing and destabilizing effects as part of a wider economic and political project. 

We know the downside of large-scale investment in real estate: the creation of scarcity in developed land, rising rents, less affordable housing, and the gradual dissolution of neighbourhoods. We have witnessed the exacerbated version of these drawbacks through the rapid financialization of the rental market over recent decades – with indebtedness, disinvestment in the housing stock to induce renters to move and make space for those paying more, displacement of lower-income populations, and evictions as its consequences. Housing, it turns out, has served as a key technology, an apparatus, for governing populations. Rent – or tenure, more generally speaking – is but one aspect in an ensemble of mechanisms through which the restructuring of contemporary urban life takes place, complemented by other aspects ranging from the role of reproductive labour to forms of cohabitation, from the division of the domestic sphere from the public, to construction regulations, to architecture and the built environment. Moreover, processes of stratification and exclusion within housing cannot be confined to income alone, but also operate along the intersecting lines of class, race and gender.

Against this background, however, housing has also become a major cause of discontent. Affected by the transformation of urban cohabitation, this discontent has taken on various forms, from anti-eviction campaigns, to rental protests or attempts to strengthen affordable rents and create new social housing. With the appraisal of the role of everyday life in general, housing has definitely stepped out of the shadow of the factory: far more than a “secondary evil”, the right to housing is no longer postponed to the future but is one of today’s manifold struggles.

 

 

Despite increasing geopolitical and geo-economic rivalry, the further exploitation of natural resources and the use of global sinks are considered as the basis of global capitalist development and the overcoming of its various crises. Behind this stands a global consensus about the attractiveness of modern capitalist everyday practices: what we call the “imperial mode of living” (hereafter IML; cf. Brand & Wissen 2017; 2018).

The concept of the IML highlights a fact that has been emphasized by Marx and Marxist thinking: capitalism implies uneven development in both time and space as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western production model. The logic of liberal markets since the nineteenth century, and especially since World War II, has been normalised through its unconscious reproduction in everyday practices. This is a main driver of the ecological crisis.

The IML implies that people’s everyday practices, including individual and societal orientations, as well as identities, rely heavily on: (i) the unlimited appropriation of resources; (ii) a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystems and sinks; and (iii) cheap labour from elsewhere. The availability of commodities is organised through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces as they have been inscribed in international institutions. The concrete production conditions of the consumed commodities are usually invisible.

In the global North the IML contributes to safeguarding social stability. Moreover, it provides a hegemonic orientation in many societies of the global South. In recent years, it has been partially globalised. A large group of “new consumers” (Myers & Kent 2004) has emerged in countries like China, India, and Brazil. However, the IML is not socially neutral. People with relatively high levels of education, incomes, and environmental consciousness tend to use more resources than lower classes.

In conceptualising the IML we benefit from, and build upon, various theoretical concepts in the tradition of Marx. The starting point is that the capitalist mode of production is expansive and geared towards increasing surplus value, production and consumption. This goes hand-in-hand with an extension of the capitalist (world) market and a capitalist valorisation of ever more areas of life.

Theoretically, we refer to various neo-Marxist approaches:

(a) Political ecology emphasises the unequal appropriation of nature. The ecological crisis is understood as a medium and a result of an unequal distribution of power along the lines of class, gender and ethnicity. Consequently, the key to overcoming the ecological crisis is neither the market nor technological innovation but the struggle against social power and domination. Democratising “societal relations with nature” (Görg 2011) and rejecting exclusive property rights—in support of, say, extractivist practices or privatisation of genetic resources—is not only an aim in itself but also a means of ecological sustainability. An important component of such transformation would be the overcoming of destructive patterns of production and consumption which are at the heart of the IML.

(b) Regulation theory attempts to highlight the temporary coherence between the historical development of a mode of production and distribution on one hand, and a mode of consumption on the other (the regime of accumulation), which is safeguarded by a range of institutional forms that together constitute a mode of regulation (Jessop & Sum 2006). Aglietta argued in his seminal work that after World War II the emergence of a working-class mode of consumption, centred around standardised housing and automobile transport, became “an essential condition of capitalist accumulation” (Aglietta 1979, 154). This is an important factor for the generalisation of wage labour in Fordism (Huber, 2013 links fossil capitalism and the wage relation). It points to the social spread of the IML, which had been an upper class-phenomenon before the rise of Fordism (Brand & Wissen 2018, chapters 2 and 4).

(c) The concept of hegemony originated in the writings of Antonio Gramsci (1929-30). A hegemonic (i.e. broadly accepted and institutionally secured) mode of living is deeply rooted in the everyday practices of people and safeguarded by the state. As a consequence, domination (along class, gender, race, international and post-colonial lines) is then largely accepted by the dominated. Hegemony can imply different modes of living. However, alternatives remain at the margins and may gain strength mainly in situations of crisis. Modes of production and consumption that become hegemonic in certain regions, or countries can be generalised globally through a “capillary” process, i.e. in a broken manner and with considerable gaps in time and space. This process is associated with concrete corporate strategies and interests in capital valorisation, trade, investment, and geopolitics; with purchasing power; and with dispositions of an attractive mode of living that predominate in, and diffuse into, many societies.

(d) Feminist economics, ecofeminism and other feminist social sciences make important contributions to a broader understanding of economies and societies (Biesecker & Hofmeister 2010; Salleh 2017). Beyond the formal economy, capital investment, financial markets, and wage labour there are other structures and processes which are the preconditions for the functioning of the formal economy that is mediated by money. Predominantly, children are raised and the elderly are cared for outside the formal market economy.

(e) Practice theories are a cornerstone for the concept of IML (Jonas 2017). They argue that social practices are shared behavioural routines that are constituted by sets of interconnected elements. The elements include: social and political institutions, socio-technical configurations such as physical infrastructures, available knowledge, and prevailing symbolic orientations and forms of power. Environmentally detrimental social practices, such as driving a car, are hard to steer intentionally and to manage or influence via consciousness-raising campaigns.

Since the financial collapse of 2008 the IML has constituted an important element of societal consensus. In the capitalist centres of the world system, the reproduction of wage-earners has been challenged by neoliberalism. However, the costs of reproduction can be reduced through enhanced access to globally-produced commodities traded in liberalised markets that exploit labour elsewhere, i.e. by increasing relative surplus value in the global North. This process occurs along structural lines of class, gender and ethnicity but it is broadly accepted, and its deepening is a crucial strategy of crisis management.

Furthermore, the IML is unevenly universalised in many countries of the Global South. There, development is defined as capitalist modernisation with a more or less selective world market integration, and this is broadly accepted by elites and urban middle classes. Some regions of the global South have adopted the IML through rapid economic growth due to industrialisation and proletarisation, as in China, and the development of a globally oriented service economy, as in India.

Ecological crisis phenomena – like the loss of biodiversity and climate change –have been caused by the spread of industrial production and consumption patterns. These create conflicts over resources and the use of land, geopolitical tensions, and intense capitalist competition. Exclusive access to resources, guaranteed by contracts or through open violence, and the externalisation of social-ecological costs that the use of these resources entails, are the conditio sine qua non of the global North’s mode of production and living, and constitute its imperial character.

In sum, the concept of the IML helps to understand:

1. Why, despite the crisis of neoliberal imperial globalisation, resource- and energy-intensive everyday practices persist and continue to have severe socio-ecological consequences;
2. how forms of living are closely linked to the dominant mode of production and capital’s valorisation strategies, politics and structures of the state, and prevailing orientations and dispositions of action;
3. why environmental politics is largely ineffective and why we experience a severe “crisis of crisis management”. The very structure of national and international politics is deeply linked to the dominant mode of production and living;
4. why (neo-)imperialist strategies with respect to natural resources and sinks have recently gained importance;
5. that in the current economic crisis, the challenge is to develop and strengthen resistance and alternatives to dominant crisis politics and to promote a fundamental socio-ecological transformation;
6. how countering the hegemonic IML by transforming modes of living can be a starting point but that such transformation requires the blocking of unsustainable capital and state strategies.

 

As far as I know, the word Infrastruktur never appears in the writings of Karl Marx.

Marxists have sometimes substituted “infrastructure” for “base” in the famous “base and superstructure” couplet derived from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis (Basis) on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite form of social consciousness” (Marx 1972, see Wuthnow 1993). In popular usage, infrastructure tends to connote physical systems and structures, especially those that facilitate transportation, communication, and the provision of services, but its resonance with the Marxist category of Basis is instructive. Just as the economic base of society is comprised of material relationships – wage relations, property relations, class relations – as much as it is of material objects, contemporary infrastructure studies take for granted that the “peculiar ontology” of infrastructures “lies in the fact that they are things and also the relation between things” (Larkin 2003).

Infrastructure also bears the qualities of what Marx described as constant capital: “that part of capital which is represented by the means of production, by the raw material, auxiliary material and the instruments of labour [which] does not, in the process of production, undergo any quantitative alteration of value” (Marx 1978, 202). Infrastructure is constant capital in the sense that it remains in place so that labour, which comes and goes, can continually or repeatedly generate value.

Together, these two oblique references suggest the defining characteristics of infrastructure.

The first is that infrastructures are social relationships materialized. Marx calls our attention to the manner in which capitalist relations are invested in, materialized as, and reproduced by infrastructure in the form of constant capital, but the same applies to nearly every other relationship of inequality, exploitation and domination we might wish to consider. It is not a coincidence that the recent turn to infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities was initiated by a feminist. When Susan Leigh Star describes infrastructure as “a substrate…part of the background for other kinds of work,” she implies the subordinate status of women – as providers of the reproductive and restorative labour that regenerates the productive labour (and citizenship) of men—that has persisted throughout modern western history (Leigh Star 1999, 38). Women, which is to say gender relations, were the first form of constant capital, the first infrastructure (Federici 2012). Similarly, relationships of exploitation and disparity between the Euro-American metropole and the Global South were and are materialized in infrastructures of slavery, colonial extraction, production, circulation, and the imposition of sovereign violence (Larkin 2008). Slavery, imperialism, and colonialism (including settler colonialism) operate by transforming racialized peoples and their geographies into infrastructure (Jabari Salamanca 2016). Infrastructures are thus social relations in material form, and so are a primary site for materialist analysis.

The second defining characteristic of infrastructure, suggested by its status as constant capital, is a temporal orientation towards repetition, continuity and duration. Infrastructure is what is expected. It is memory made concrete. In satisfying expectations, infrastructure recedes into the invisibility of routine. This is true even in settings where a lack of certain kinds of infrastructure has, itself, become infrastructural (Simone 2004). In this sense, infrastructure reifies, transforming the social relations it embodies into things that appear to be just there, beyond the social and outside history.

Nevertheless, infrastructure remains irreducibly political, because it distributes and concentrates resources and advantage, enables and disables mobility (including migration), organizes spatial and temporal relations, and manifests inequality and power. Under conditions variously named globalization, neoliberalism, and the network society, infrastructure is the medium by which capital becomes the state, and by which the state accomplishes itself as an organizer of flows and bases of identity (Easterling 2014). Our friends The Invisible Committee are helpful here:

What is it that appears on euro banknotes? Not human figures, not emblems of a personal sovereignty, but bridges, aqueducts and arches […] As to the truth about the present nature of power, every European has a printed exemplar of it in their pocket. It can be stated in this way: power now resides in the infrastructures of this world […]. Contemporary laws are written with steel structures and not with words […]. [P]ower consists in infrastructures, in the means to make them function, to control them and build them. (Invisible Committee 2015, 83-85).

Herein lies one of the many contradictions that constitute infrastructure as historical and political, as opposed to merely technical. In one sense, infrastructure recedes into the invisibility, repetition, and durability of routine, reifying and concealing the contingent social relations it materializes. This is its primary function vis-à-vis capital. However, there are also occasions when infrastructure becomes punctual, when it stands out and is made visible, even thematized. This happens when states and their capitalist partners explicitly invoke infrastructural innovation, renovation and expansion as proof of their legitimacy and promote infrastructure as an object of ideological investment. It happens when public or collective systems of social infrastructure (schools, hospitals, parks, the wireless spectrum, etc.) are withdrawn from the commons and privatized or commodified. It also happens in moments of infrastructural failure—blackout, interruption of service, delayed connection, decay, unexpected detour—when the social relations materialized by infrastructure are suddenly exposed (Bennett 2005). Such failures are often technical, but they can also be political, as when the gap between infrastructural forces and infrastructural relations is made sensible through political action.

This suggests a third defining characteristic of infrastructure: it is dialectical, a medium of transformative, and even revolutionary, potential (Boyer 2017). Infrastructures are the prevailing social relations materialized, and they contain all the contradictions characteristic of those relations, contradictions that can burst forth at any moment. This means that infrastructure is a medium of political struggle, a struggle over which relationships will repeat, continue and endure in material form which will be contested, and a struggle over the possibility of alternative relationships and infrastructures. As Deborah Cowen observes, infrastructures materialize both empire and resistance:

Infrastructure connects a range of political conflicts which might otherwise seem disparate and discrete: crises surrounding the rights of refugees and the provision of asylum in a world of thickening borders; crises of indigenous peoples’ lands and sovereignty in the face of transnational extractive industries; crises regarding local livelihoods in an economy organized through speed and flexibility in trade across vast distances; crises of water infrastructure in Black and Indigenous communities; crises of police and carceral violence that breed profound distrust in the core institutions of the state for communities of color. At the center of these struggles are the [infrastructural] systems engineered to order social and natural worlds (Cowen 2017).

The line that joins the struggles of indigenous peoples, poor migrants, precarious workers, and incarcerated Black populations is the organization of inequality and capitalist power by infrastructure. In its materiality, infrastructure gathers resistant, fugitive political experiences and energies that might otherwise tend towards fragmentation, isolation and dissipation. As the class struggle composes itself, it is likely that infrastructure will be a key medium of that composition.

 

 

There are several ways of approaching the question of universality in Marx. And it is impossible to do this without considering, at the same time, some implications that Marxism has had for this concept. The starting point can only be negative: what universality is not.

The concept of universality has often been superimposed on that of universal history. In this way, it is the universal character of the concept of history that also guarantees the normative character of political universalism. An example in the liberal field is gradualism, according to which there is a universal concept of freedom, which, however universal, remains trapped in the gap between the latent universal and its actualization. From this perspective, entire populations can be kept in the “waiting room of history,” (Chakrabarty 2000) waiting to be ready for freedom. In the Marxist field, we find a similar conception. Pivoting on a stadial conception of universal history, non-capitalist modes of production and non-state political forms have been defined as pre-capitalist, pre-modern and pre-political. Marxism of the Second and Third International, pursuant to a normative philosophy of history, set itself the task of accelerating the phases towards the final stage of socialism, thereby justifying the destruction of the rural forms of self-government and imposing on so-called backward countries an ordeal through the historical stages that lead to socialism. Thus, a crash course towards capitalism was imposed on rural, as well as other, populations, generating conflicts and frictions still visible today.

Another way of understanding universalism emphasizes its polemical nature. If capital produces its own universalism in terms of abstract labor, commodification, and exploitation, alternative universality would take shape in reactive and polemical terms, by generalizing the common condition of exploited as constituting a common front against a common enemy. This type of universalism was at the basis of the holy war against imperialism declared by Zinoviev at the Baku Congress in 1920. This concept of the universal overcomes local differences by producing identity pursuant to its juxtaposition to another universal. A long tradition of Western Marxism held that the struggle against imperialism or the real universality of capital already constituted the common ground for the universalism of the oppressed. But what this universalism does is to conceal differences in the name of a binary opposition toward a bad universal to be fought. Unless one ascertains that those differences re-emerge in inverse proportion to the intensity of the polemical opposition put in place between universals.

This does not mean that we must give up on universality. It means that we must free it from the philosophy of history and from the binary oppositions in which it is bridled. It means, in part, that we must also free it from the excess of theory that imprisons it in those binary oppositions and, instead, begin digging into the real historical material. This can be done by actually looking at Marx from the margins, without “the master-key of a general historic-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical” (Shanin 1983, 136).

A double move can be made starting from Marx and the tradition that refers to his name. A first move was made by Vera Zasulich when, on February 16, 1881, she wrote to Marx to ask his opinion on the Russian rural communities. According to the Russian Marxists, these communities constituted an obstacle to progress towards socialism and, therefore, deserved to disappear or be destroyed. Marx replied that his theory “provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it […] has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia” (Shanin, 124). Marx showed himself to be closer to the populists than to the Marxists. This letter was hidden by Plekhanov so that one of the possibilities opened by Marx and the communist tradition was marginalized. But this underground current was not entirely quashed. It continued to flow and to conflict with the dominant current.

Indeed, it is possible to bridge Marx’s letter to Zasulich with another letter – that written on October 24, 1956 by Aimé Césaire to Maurice Thorez, who, at the time, was the secretary of the French Communist Party. In that letter, Césaire denounced the paternalism of the Communist Party’s members, “their inveterate assimilationism; their unconscious chauvinism; their fairly simplistic faith, which they share with bourgeois Europeans, in the omnilateral superiority of the West; their belief that evolution as it took place in Europe is the only evolution possible, the only kind desirable, the kind the world must undergo” (Césaire 2000, 149). Finally, denouncing the “emaciated universalism” that suppresses the multiplicity of particular and alternative paths of development, Aimé Césaire presented an alternative vision of universalism, based on solidarity that respects the particulars. With that letter Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the Party. It is along these different coordinates and with these letters, which are all the while political statements, that the legacy of insurgent universality takes shape.

Insurgent universality is an experiment with time, space, and politics. If one casts off the dogma of the philosophy of universal history, the enormous political and economic material that constitutes the present ceases to be organized in terms of advanced, backward or residual forms. Rather, it becomes an interweaving of temporalities that recombine in the moment of an insurgency. As happened in Russia with the rural commune when populists and Socialist Revolutionaries tried to combine the forms of local self-government and collective ownership of the peasant communities with the workers’ councils. As was the case during the Paris Commune when the Communards referred to “archaic” and medieval forms of local self-government to reconfigure them in a socialist sense. These experiments must be investigated not in the abstract, but by digging through the temporal layers of existent historical material.

Insurgent universality is an experiment that, by creating new institutions and reactivating others from the past, reconfigures political space. Its scale is neither the nation nor world democracy. Its universalism is not given by spatial extent, but by a way of practicing politics. It is about the third institutional dimension beyond the binary opposition of constituent and constituted power. It is not stuck in the reaction to power.

If universalism is potentially valid for everyone, even those who do not want to be subsumed, as, historically, the Russian peasants during the revolution and the non-European populations during anti-colonial struggles were, the insurgent universality is open to anyone who questions his or her position in a given order and acts to change the entire order.

The logic of the former universalism is still colonial. It presupposes unity to produce new unity. And this always depends dialectically on an alterity towards which it must be possible to trace exclusions and juxtapositions. Insurgent universality, instead, has freed itself from this obsession with unity and with -isms. It is an experiment with the democratic excess of the plurality of powers. And it is the incompleteness of this experiment, not the experiment in itself, that is shared. This is the meaning of the beautiful image given to us by the Zapatistas in their 1996 Fourth Declaration: “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” Insurgent universality begins with this plurality of worlds, authority, and forms of self-government; it begins with equal access to politics in the form of assemblies and groups; it begins with the Communard’s universalization of politics and property.

 

 

Marx has never, to the best of my knowledge, dealt directly with intellectual property, which is the relations and dynamics of ownership established through copyright, patent and trademark law. Rather, he focused on science, in particular on what we would call today “research and development” (R&D), which is those elements of techno-scientific innovation most directly related to the production process. He understood science as a social phenomenon organized under capitalism as wage labor, like most other activities in the production process. This, to some degree, reflects the historical circumstances of the mid 19^th century. The distinction between basic and applied science was not yet fully developed, and the copyright industries were economically relatively insignificant and trademarks barely established.

Still, within a broadly Marxist viewpoint, three main perspectives can be mobilized to help understand the current role that intellectual property plays, both in the expansion of capitalism as well as in challenges to it: accumulation by dispossession, alienated labor, and general intellect.

The notion of “accumulation by dispossession” was recently introduced by David Harvey as a way to re-conceptualize Marx’s treatment of “original” or “primitive accumulation”, the process by which resources came under the control of capital for the first time. As Marx pointed out, this was often a violent process, because most of the time the resources in question were embedded in preexisting social relationships that had to be broken-up by capital in order to accumulate them. The waves of enclosures that transformed the countryside in Great Britain during the 18^th and early 19^th century is an often-cited example of this. Land, previously organized by villagers as commons, was converted into private property, often for grazing sheep to produce wool for the textile industries. In this process, villagers were expelled from the land and forced into the city, entering the capitalist economy as proletarians. Similarly, the destruction of existing social relationships as a precondition for accumulation was a major incitation of colonialism. For Marx this was a one-time process, setting the stage for capitalist expansion. Harvey, on the other hand, stresses that this is an ongoing process and a core element of capitalism in all of its periods, including the present one. One of the means by which this process is carried out today is the establishment of new IP rights. As Harvey notes,

wholly new mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession have … opened up. The emphasis upon intellectual property rights in the WTO negotiations (the so-called TRIPS agreement) points to ways in which the patenting and licensing of genetic materials, seed plasmas, and all manner of other products, can now be used against whole populations whose environmental management practices have played a crucial role in the development of those materials. Biopiracy is rampant and the pillaging of the world’s stockpile of genetic resources is well under way. (Harvey 2004)

IP, then, plays an important role in the expansion of capitalism by converting concrete and embodied knowledge – often produced and cultivated by communities without any notion of individual ownership – into privately-held assets. This is, again, a violent process, and IP can be understood as enacting “epistemic violence”, that is, providing categories for conceptualizing the world that devalue other epistemic orders and their respective definition of cultures, people and ways of being. For example, by recognizing exclusively individual ownership and denying all rights based on communal production and care. Major struggles by local farmers and indigenous communities have erupted all over the world. Since 2003 in Peru, NGOs and the government have been fighting against “biopiracy” by US and Japanese companies that were granted patents for medicinal properties of the Maca root, known for centuries to the local population. In 2012 additional patents where sought by Chinese companies, forcing new, complex and costly legal battles upon the Peruvian government. Despite a few cases, in which patents where withdrawn (such as an infamous US patent on “Basmati rice lines and grains”), such an accumulation by dispossession through IP law is generally successful strategy for expanding capitalism.

The second notion relevant to contemporary practices of IP is “alienated labor”. For Marx, alienation, most generally, is the result of the separation of the product from the producer, highlighting a major difference between artisanal and industrial work. In the first case, the artisan sells the product of his/her labor, whereas the industrial worker sells his/her labor-power and has no claims on the products of his/her labor. The notion of alienation might seem ill-fitting in respect to intellectual property and in particular to copyright. In liberal theory, copyright is understood as a way of establishing a strong relationship between producer (author) and product (work). In the continental European (droit d’auteur) tradition, this link is supposed to be unbreakable as certain claims, such as the right to be named as author and to have the integrity of the work respected, are inalienable. The more utilitarian Anglo-Saxon copyright, on the other hand, contains the notion of “works for hire” on which the original author loses all rights to the work by selling his labor power.

In practice, however, such legalistic differences are mostly negligible. In most cases, producers of copyrighted works produce them under contractual frameworks which transfer all rights to their employers. Or, they find themselves in such an uneven relationship with the copyright industries that their contractual freedom is mostly formal, and their capacity to negotiate favorable terms eventually is limited to that of any person who needs to sell his or her labor power to survive.

In contrast to “dispossession” and “alienation”, notions which are well-developed and relatively straightforward, the concept of the “general intellect” is much more fragmentary. It became widely discussed only recently, most importantly by post-workerist theories of cognitive capitalism (Virno 2001). Marx used it only once, in Grundrisse (Notebook VII), where he briefly sketches the importance of distributed knowledge which he sees embodied in the “social individual” (that is, the person as a set of capacities which are produced socially, for example, through education), in machinery and in advanced forms of social organization. At some point, when the capital and knowledge embedded in machinery, and in the processes of their use, passes a certain threshold, simple wage labor, measured by the hour, is no longer adequate to measure the value produced. The separation of production and reproduction, typical for the industrial organization of labor, breaks down and the workers’ full social and intellectual capacity come into play.

In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

This, however, produces a contradiction, as Marx noted immediately.

On the one side, then, [capital] calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.

 The sources of value creation are no longer limited to the time and place of work but extend across all aspects of social life. The means of confining these social forces is intellectual property law. It allows the attribution of products of a collective social process to a single person and transforms them into commodities that can be produced or acquired by capital. The hours invested in the production process are no longer the basis for the value of the product. The assignment of value becomes more fluid, allowing the high-skilled labor under cognitive capitalism more freedom, whereas exploitation intensifies for low-skilled labor. However, intellectual property can confine, yet it cannot resolve the contradiction.

Building on an understanding that productive forces, at least partially, now depend on distributed cooperation, mass intellectuality, and social life in its entirety, a diverse set of social movements are working towards resolving this contradiction in favor of post-capitalist forms of production, a peer-to-peer economy based around the sharing of free knowledge, tools and social forms of cooperation. (Bauwens et al. 2017). The resurgences of the holistic notion of the commons, re-articulated in respect to knowledge resources and urban space, points to the ambition of these movements and the depth of their challenge by overcoming certain forms of private property and social organization built on top of it. (Vercellone et al. 2015). However, capitalist actors, too, not only try to confine but resolve the contradiction between collective sources of creativity and the private form of intellectual property necessary for its appropriation. They drop the distinction between production and reproduction. They do so by providing infrastructures that are enabling collective dynamics through “sharing” and “collaboration” across all domains of social life. These infrastructures, however, are optimized to extract data from unpaid social (re)production and to extract surplus by manipulating these dynamics (through advertising and platform design) in their favor. In effect, this doesn’t solve but merely displaces the contradiction from the area of intellectual property, to that of control over data.

Feminist theory since the 19^th century criticized inequality and power relations between women and men, the exclusion of women from labour markets, from social and political citizenship, from political decision-making and from cultural organisations. The political aim of the women’s movements around the globe was and still is to overcome structures, institutions, norms and discourses responsible for the discrimination of women. The gendered division of labour in capitalist societies, i.e. the inequality between wage labour and unpaid, privatised care work, but also inequality due to the generativity of women (for instance reproductive rights), family legislation and social policies, have been identified as sources of gender discrimination.

Marxist-feminist theories of the early second-wave feminism since the 1970s were aware of the “unhappy marriage” between Marxism and feminism (Hartmann 1979); Marxist theory has been side-lining women’s political claims and women’s interests by identifying them as secondary in the struggle to overcome capitalist exploitation and domination; patriarchy was seen as a “side”, or secondary, contradiction of capitalist societies. Nevertheless, early Marxist-feminist theorists (e.g. Eisenstein 1979) paved the way to integrate gender domination in a critical analysis of capitalist production and class struggle by highlighting the role of the family in capitalist reproduction. These concepts stressed the analytical interconnectedness of class and gender and demanded an emancipatory strategy targeting both class and gender for tackling their domination.

Black feminists in the US since the 1980s criticized race discrimination and claimed that anti-racism is important for any emancipatory theory and strategy (hooks 1982; Combahee River Collective 1995/1978). Referring to this literature, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) coined the term “intersectionality” by using the metaphor of intersecting axes of inequality. The concept of intersectionality suggests the inextricable interconnectedness of different forms of discrimination and oppression – due to gender, race, class, but also sexuality, age, and religion. These structures of discrimination – and privilege – are mutually constitutive and impact on identities and social positions of people. To move beyond a “mono-categorial perspective” (Collins 2015, 5) and to develop strategies of emancipation, the interrelatedness and reciprocity need to be recognized, conceptualized and analysed. Prioritizing one of these structures of domination and social inequality – be it sexism, patriarchy, racism, classism, capitalist exploitation, or homophobia – prevents a full understanding of power constellations. Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 20) refers to this complexity as a “matrix of domination”.

Hence, the concept of intersectionality highlights the concurrence of structures of domination without claiming that they can be reduced to one cause. However, feminist theories of intersectionality claim that discrimination due to gender, class, race, and sexuality are shaped in new ways in western modernity, i.e. since the 18^th century and the emergence of a capitalist mode of production and bourgeois societies. Intersectionality also points to differences between women and challenges the notion of a homogeneous group of women with similar interests.

While by the early 2000s a “blizzard” of publications on intersectionality occurred, one of the burning questions remained unanswered: how do the different structures of domination and inequality interact? In order to develop intersectionality as an analytical concept Leslie McCall (2005) identifies three different approaches: an anticategorial or deconstructive approach, an intracategorial approach, which analyses only intersections within one category, and an intercategorial approach to interlocking systems of discrimination and power, focusing on the whole complexity of intersections. While the latter is the most advanced approach, the others are also able to highlight how domination and inequality interact.

Politically, the concept of intersectionality criticizes identity politics and suggests alliances between different emancipatory and social justice movements – women’s and queer movements, anti-racist movements, and organisations of the worker’s movements such as trade unions and leftist parties. Political intersectionality therefore also suggests that ‘sisterhood’ as a political strategy of different groups of women is possible.

However, recently also exclusionary forms of intersectionality are used in political discourse – especially in order to exclude migrants in western societies: the intersection of gender and religion, for instance, is instrumentalised by right-wing actors for blaming Muslim men who are constructed as not fitting to western societies due to their patriarchal attitudes.

Moreover, the concept of intersectionality is reflected in anti-discrimination policies, such as the European Union anti-discrimination directives, implemented since the turn of the century. EU regulations target the “big six” forms of discrimination – gender, religion or belief, disability, sexual orientation, age, race or ethnic origin. Class is missing in the EU world – as social equality is seen as a problem of the member states. Criticism of intersectionality uses this example to suggest that the concept serves a neoliberal agenda and side-lines feminist and class struggles – a just critique especially in times of austerity and authoritarianism in the EU and some of its member states.

 

What are we to make of the stubborn association, even confusion, of Marxism and Jacobinism? From Jacob Talmon to François Furet, enemies of the two tendencies have long insisted on conflating them in order to condemn them together (Talmon 1952; Furet 1991). This equation of Jacobinism with Marxism – extended to their historical trajectories, so that Robespierre equals Lenin equals Stalin – has been wielded by critics to discredit not just Communism as a continuation of the Revolutionary Terror, but, beyond that, any project of radical social transformation (Losurdo 2015). Pointing to Marx’s many explicit criticisms of the Jacobins has never been enough to dispel this error. My proposal is that the misidentification persists because it contains deeper truths concerning Marx the author and Marxism as a historical-political project, which always remained, despite themselves, in a sense deeply Jacobin.

A basic difficulty in refuting the misidentification of Marxism with Jacobinism is that the latter existed sensu stricto only from 1789 to 1794, with the Society of the Friends of the Constitution and the Friends of Liberty and Equality. Ever since, Jacobinism has lived on as a ghostly inspiration, a recurrent desire to take up the spirit of the French Revolution that has assumed diverse and sometimes contradictory forms, from conspiratorial radicalism (Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui) to the triumphant republicanism of the Third French Republic (Vovelle 1999). While the outlines of a Jacobin political philosophy can be assembled from the writings of Robespierre and Saint-Just, its canon consists of occasional writings composed on the fly, under the pressure of events. Reconstructions by its many critics and fewer supporters nonetheless converge on a number of core commitments.

As a doctrine, Jacobinism is rationalist, individualist, and humanist. It combines ethical idealism and a belief in the paramountcy of citizen virtue with republicanism and patriotism, a basis in natural law and natural rights (including the right to property) with legalism and constitutionalism, and strong universalism with an equally strong insistence on popular sovereignty. Jacobinism seeks the broadest possible freedom and equality now, with the state as the indispensable agent of the popular will. As a politics, it represents an attempt to conquer the state and use it to transform society on behalf of the people (Guilhaumou 2002). In its content as well as its tactics, Jacobinism is an expression of what Marx in On the Jewish Question called ‘political emancipation,’ carried to its most radical conclusions. Insofar as Marx’s work, beginning in 1843, develops out of a critique of the limits and contradictions of this political emancipation (along with natural rights, bourgeois citizenship, civic equality, etc.), Jacobinism represents the negative foundation on which ‘Marxism’ was built.

Yet it would hardly be Marxist to stop at criticizing this ideology and program in ideological or even programmatic terms. For Marx and Engels, Jacobinism, and indeed the French Revolution as a whole, were of interest as historical phenomena and incomplete anticipations of the communist revolution to come. They accordingly considered these phenomena diagnostically, finding in them lessons for future struggles. In the references to ‘Jacobinism’ scattered throughout their texts of the 1840s and after, the term functions as shorthand principally for two things: the ‘bourgeois revolution,’ undertaken to throw off the feudal estates and the absolutist state; and the attempt to force by political means a revolutionary change for which the social bases have not yet been laid – a usage often conjoined with, or replaced by, ‘Babouvism’ and, after 1848, ‘Blanquism’.

In both respects, Jacobinism amounts to what could be called politicism: the (false) belief that politics alone, in the form of state power wielded by a revolutionary elite, can impose freedom and equality on society from above. Jacobins (Babouvists, Blanquists, etc.) identify with the cause of ‘the people’ and aim to wield state power on their behalf, yet they cannot do so because they lack a proper understanding of, and practical relation to, the social forces on which, as Marx discovered, all politics is based. Thus, even when these revolutionaries in a sense speak for the popular classes and seek to advance their interests – in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx calls the Blanquists the “only real leaders of the proletarian party” (Marx 1990, 15) – they will do so in vain, ending at best in the violent flailing against society that marked the original revolutionary Terror (Higonnet 2006).

This is why for Marx Jacobinism, however left, popular, radical, or democratic it becomes, remains ‘bourgeois’: it envisions a messianic redemption of the popular classes through the heroic intervention of a revolutionary elite, a wise and virtuous force outside and above the masses. As great as Marxism’s ideological and programmatic distance from Jacobinism is, the underlying divide between them concerns the relationship of politics to history. Contra Robespierre or Saint-Just, Babeuf, Buonarroti, or Blanqui, Marx understood the coming revolution as consisting not simply of seizing the helm of a bourgeois revolution and steering it further, as the Jacobins had tried and failed to do, but of making a revolution on new social bases. The crucial Marxist departure from the Jacobin tradition is the idea that revolution must somehow grow out of society itself. Politically, this means that the emancipation of the proletariat can only be the work of the proletariat.

Yet critics like Talmon and Furet are not entirely wrong to associate Marxism and Jacobinism, even if they are, textually speaking, incorrect. This is not because of any doctrinal filiation between the two projects, whose understandings of rights, nature, individualism, and the state are irreconcilable. What they have in common is rather a problem, which Marxism inherits from Jacobinism and neither has been able to solve: the problem of conjugating politics and history, of making a revolution not simply within but ahead of history. For, despite all the efforts of Marx, Engels, and their later interpreters to turn Marx’s thought into a philosophy or a science, its revolutionary element always consisted in the imperative of accelerating history, of standing at the limit of present possibilities and giving history a push.

For this reason, the depiction of Lenin as the growth of a Marxian seedling that had been germinating since Robespierre – essentially the analysis that Furet inherits from a century of anti-Marxism – is not just the expression of an anti-revolutionary ideology, even if it is that as well. It points to the question of revolutionary politics, and specifically of using force and vanguardist agency to bring about social change. This is why it is ultimately insufficient to draw a line between a good (democratic) Marx and a bad (Jacobin) Lenin, even if this, too, is not exactly wrong. To be sure, Luxemburg and Trotsky denounced the Bolsheviks’ ‘Jacobinism,’ as did Gramsci in the early 1920s (even if he reversed his position under the sign of Machiavelli in the 1930s), while Lenin was happy to don the Jacobin mantle (Löwy 2005, chapter 4). But it is clear that Marx himself was quite open to overthrowing the old society by political means, with the quintessentially Jacobin instruments of a party (even if it was to have no interests other than those of the working class) and a state (even if it was to be swiftly converted into a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then to wither away once its work was done).

Marxists have never entirely disarmed the question of Jacobinism, then, because this question, precisely as that of the political form of a social revolution, has always been internal to Marxism as a revolutionary project. What makes Marxism in most of its varieties ‘Jacobin’ is its untimeliness, its commitment to a transformation for which society has never been ready. To the extent that ‘forcing’ such a transformation on society by means of a party and a state was for Marx the deeper content of Jacobinism, he never ceased being, despite himself, a kind of Jacobin. It is therefore hardly surprising that Marxist or Marxian thinkers today who seek to revive its revolutionary impetus (Žižek in Robespierre 2012; Dean 2015; Hallward 2009) have done so by taking up such Jacobin motifs as sovereignty, the party, virtue, and the will of the people.

This is the deeper truth behind the last major public battle waged over Marxism, Jacobinism, and the legacy of the French Revolution, which took place between Furet and Michel Vovelle, the distinguished Communist historian and Chair of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, on the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Since 1989, commentators have awarded a decisive victory to Furet, as seems to be confirmed by the global hegemony of (neo)liberalism over the subsequent decades (Kaplan 1995). Yet here the sort of historical reserve Zhou Enlai counselled concerning the French Revolution is advisable. For what was really at stake in this contest, as both Furet and Vovelle saw, was not simply Jacobinism but rather the question of revolution as a question. Furet sought to close the question, to put a definitive end to the Revolution; Vovelle sought to keep it open. The current state of the ideology and world order Furet hoped to enshrine as an unsurpassable horizon, liberal capitalism, may be enough to suggest that it is still too soon to say who will turn out to have been right.

Where the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin agree is that a sort of Jacobinism will persist in Marxian politics as long as there is a will not to submit to the logic of evolution and reform, but to use political action to escape the apparent fatalities of history. But any attempt to revive the link between Jacobinism and Marxism – in Vovelle’s sense, as a question that can and must remain open – must be subject to a distinctly Marxist kind of critical-historical labor. Latter-day Jacobin Marxists cannot simply reverse the signs and dig up the legacy of the French Revolution where the liberals would bury it. Instead, they should follow Marx and draw all the lessons from the Jacobin (Bolshevik, Maoist…) failures. For Marx the task was to explore how and why Jacobinism was unable meet the challenges of its day and ill-equipped to meet those of his. There are good practical-historical as well as theoretical reasons for not trusting the party or the state as the expression of a unified popular will, believing in natural rights that need only be given constitutional form, or imagining a neat reconciliation of national sovereignty and universal emancipation. If the question of revolution is one we inherit from Marx as he did from the Jacobins, it is one for which twenty-first century answers will have to be found.

 

In the Spring of 1843, the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer published two articles on “Die Judenfrage”, which were an intervention in a then current debate on the promise and limits of Jewish emancipation, as well as a step in the critique of Hegel’s ideas on the state, religion and civil society (Bauer 1843a; 1843b). Responding to Hegel’s idea that the state had replaced organized religion as the embodiment of ethical life, the Young Hegelians tried to overcome the Hegelian limitation of a sacralized state without an ethically organized civil society. Bauer and his pupil Karl Marx were therefore first of all concerned with a critique of religion. In order to enjoy a truly rational freedom, humanity should reject not only the Christian state, but also the religious prejudices within society. Their aim to propagate these ideas in a new journal, devoted to atheism, came to nothing, and in 1842, shortly after Marx had followed Bauer to the University of Bonn, the latter was dismissed from the university because of his subversive ideas, leaving Marx without a mentor and forcing him out of academia. Marx accepted a position as an editor of the Rheinische Zeitung which made him the pivot of radical thought in Germany. It brought him into conflict with the Prussian censor, but also led to a growing distance from Bauer as a result of the latter’s support to Die Freien. This was a group of radical critics of religion, whose manuscript Marx refused to publish, not only because Marx no longer believed in religion as a subject in its own right, but also because he feared anti-religious tracts would anger the authorities and endanger the Rheinische Zeitung (Rosen 1977, 131-132; Stedman Jones 2011, 564). Marx’s response to Bauer in “Zur Judenfrage”, published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, confirmed that mentor and pupil had gone different ways, but it also revealed a crucial divide between a cultural and a social-economic critique that remains a festering wound in leftist thought to the present day.

First of all, “Zur Judenfrage” was a highly controversial contribution to the debate on Jewish emancipation. The essay still preoccupies Marx commentators today. Some see it as testimony to the messianic core of the Marxist program. In this vein, Karl Löwith argued that it “is the old Jewish messianism and prophetism – unaltered by two thousand years of economic history from handicraft to large-scale industry – and Jewish insistence on absolute righteousness which explains the idealistic basis of Marx’s materialism” (Löwith 1949, 44). This interpretation was first presented by the French Bernard Lazare, who in L’antisemitisme. Son histoire et ses causes (1894) had argued that Marx was a “talmudiste qui fit de la sociologie […] animé de ce vieux materialisme hébraïque.” (Lazare 1894, 346). As a Jew, he occupied one of the two poles of capitalist society: “À Rothschild correspondent Marx et Lassalle; au combat pour l’argent, le combat contre l’argent, et le cosmopolitisme de l’agioteur devient l’internationalisme prolétarien et révolutionnaire.” (Lazare 1894, 343). Even though Lazare and others after him were right to point out that many Jews were attracted to the socialist movement, there is according to Enzo Traverso, one of the more recent commentators on Marx and the Jewish Question, nothing in Marx’s predominantly Lutheran and liberal cultural background that would justify the assumption of some millenarian Wahlverwandschaft between his program and Jewish eschatology (Traverso 1997, 38-9).

However, the reference of Lazare to two poles of Jewish involvement in capitalism points to another interpretation of Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage”, as a manifestation of leftist antisemitism (and in so far as Marx had adopted this position, a symptom of Jewish self-hate). Especially in the final part of the essay, in which he claimed to reveal “the actual, worldly Jew, not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew”, Marx uses classical antisemitic tropes: “What is the worldly religion of the Jews? Huckstering [der Schacher]. What is his worldly god? Money.” (Marx 1843, 169-170). The final sentence of “Zur Judenfrage” sounds positively horrifying: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” (Marx 1843, 174). With this position, Marx fell into step with earlier socialists, like Charles Fourier, who had argued that “the Jew is, so to speak, a traitor by definition” (quoted in Silberner 1946, 248). It had an ominous resonance in the work of later social critics, such as the German Otto Glagau, who in the 1870s blamed the Jews for the collapse of the European stock exchange markets in 1873, and in Deutsches Handwerk und historisches Bürgertum (1879) argued that “die soziale Frage ist die Judenfrage”, calling upon all working men to unite against exploitation and the degradation of human labor, particularly against the hateful domination of “a foreign race” (Volkov 2012, 86). Together with Wilhelm Marr, who had introduced the term ‘antisemitism’ in Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (1880), Glagau became a central figure in the antisemitic movement of the 1880s, described by the leading German socialist, August Bebel, as “der Sozialismus der dummen Kerls” (Battini 2016, 7).

At first sight, though, Marx appears to sketch a more benign perspective for Jews, at least more promising than Bauer’s outlook. The latter’s essays were a response to the spread of Jewish emancipation decrees in the German lands. After the Austrian Toleration Patent which Emperor Joseph II issued in 1782, and the emancipation of the French Jews in 1791, Jews had received equal citizenship (Staatsbürgerschaft) in the French-occupied Confederation of the Rhine, but also in Prussia (1812), Württemberg (1828), Hessen (1833) and Hannover (1842). Each of these decrees were contested: in 1808, Napoleon issued his so-called Infamous Decree, restricting their rights, no longer on the grounds of religious intolerance, but on the basis of public order, which Jews were said to disturb by their role as money lenders and their apparent nuisance to non-Jewish society. At the Congress of Vienna Jewish emancipation was also a controversial issue, leading to an article in the constitution of the German Confederation of 1815 declaring that its “Federal Assembly will deliberate on how in the most uniform way possible the civic improvement of those confessing the Jewish faith in Germany is to be effected”, yet until an agreement was reached “those confessing this faith will retain the rights already granted to them in the individual federal states” (translation by Vick 2014: 185). The formulation of the article indicates the influence of Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781), which gave a strong impetus to Jewish emancipation, yet framed it in terms of their “civil improvement”, suggesting that emancipation could only succeed in combination with a civilizing mission.

Bauer intervenes in this debate with a scathing criticism of the ambition to emancipate the Jews by granting them equal citizenship. While Christianity was able to adapt to the separation of state and church by privatizing religious practices, Jews could only be emancipated by rejecting Judaism altogether. The reason was that Christianity, notably in its Protestant manifestation, was based on faith, which was ultimately private, while the Jewish religion was based on law and therefore irreducibly public: “Der Jude z.B. müßte aufgehört haben, Jude zu sein, wenn er sich durch sein Gesetz nicht verhindern läßt, seine Pflichten gegen den Staat und seine Mitbürger zu erfüllen, also z.B. am Sabbat in die Deputierten­kammer geht und an den öffentlichen Verhandlungen teilnimmt.” (Bauer 1843a, 65). Reminiscent of contemporary arguments against dual nationality and of the suspicion that Muslims in Western Europe would give priority to the Quran over the constitution, Bauer argued that Jewish emancipation is a sham, because Jews would be unable to prefer the state laws over their own Covenant without giving up their Jewishness.

Marx criticized Bauer for presenting a theological argument, differentiating between Jews and Christians, yet failing to reflect on the notion of ‘political emancipation’ as the separation between a public sphere of the state, and a private sphere of civil society. Marx proposed to “break with the theological formulation of the question” (Marx 1843a, 169) and to understand the Jewish question as an expression of the “general question of the time”, namely the relation between political and human emancipation (Marx 1843a, 149; see Peled 1992). Political emancipation, expressed first of all in the separation of Church and State, makes religion an instance of “the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference.” (Marx 1843a, 155). Political emancipation is therefore only a halfway-house: the Hegelian ethical state remains incomplete as long as civil society is divided by both privatized religion (already initiated by the Reformation) and by private interest. The “Jewish question” thus revealed the “sophistry of the political state itself”: political emancipation resulted in a bourgeois, dressed in “the political lion’s skin” of the “citoyen” (Marx 1843a, 154). Political emancipation covered the material inequality of civil society, which only could be overcome by a truly human emancipation.

The arguments in “Zur Judenfrage” have often been interpreted as contributions to Marx’s general intellectual development, preparing his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1844) and his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), both written shortly after “Zur Judenfrage”. From that perspective, Marx’s remarks on Jews were merely illustrations of a more general point, or as Marx states: the sophistry of the state is “not personal” (Marx 1843a, 154). However, it seems that more than a simple illustration of a philosophical point is going on in Marx’s poisonous remarks, such as his claim that “the Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations.” (Marx 1843, 170).

Firstly, these qualifications belie the claim that Marx wants to analyze the Jewish question from a social point of view, that is, of the material interests within civil society. As Traverso observes, Marx took a very partial view of the role of Jews in European society, assuming that all were rich merchants, disregarding the millions of poor rural Jews in Eastern Europe. The Ostjuden not only failed to fit the picture Marx drew, but also developed their own brand of “Bundist” socialism, which entertained more messianic elements than Marxism ever did (Traverso 1997, 60-76).

Secondly, the centrality of the Jewish question in Marx’s analysis of the sophistry of the political state draws the attention to a persistent tension in leftist thought between cultural identities and social interests. This has always been a contested issue, from Otto Bauer’s rejection of a “naïve cosmopolitanism” in the socialist movement, drawing attention to “the fact that the workers are also national” (Bauer 2000, 417-420), to Tony Judt’s lament that the leftist movement since the 1960s had abandoned their social responsibility by allowing “’identity’ to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity. From here it was but a short step to the fragmentation of radical politics, its metamorphosis into multiculturalism.” (Judt 2010, 88). The most recent debate around Mark Lilla’s (2017) critique of identity politics as the abandonment of the working classes by the left is only a last instance of a controversy that started with Marx’s “Zur Judenfrage”.

However, Marx’s analysis can also inform us of the pitfalls within this debate. While most, and perhaps in the end also Marx, saw this as an either/or issue, forcing a choice between a theological and a sociological approach, between the politics of class and the politics of identity, in “Zur Judenfrage” Marx still treats the relationship between culture and class on more equal terms. One has to swallow the antisemitic tinge of a remark like “the monotheism of the Jews is therefore in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law.” (Marx 1843a, 172). But it points to a vision that sees both religious pluralism and social egoism as two instances of the division of civil society. For Marx the failure of political emancipation was its disregard of a privatized civil society, in which both cultural enmities and social inequalities were treated as private matters that only could be solved through competition. In the most charitable reading, Marx’s argument in “Zur Judenfrage” is that in overcoming egoism, both in a cultural and in a social sense, truly human emancipation is possible.