Month: July 2018

Attempts to understand how Karl Marx comprehends “juridification” most certainly lead to dead ends. The concept – or even the noun – does not appear throughout his works. But this absence is not a surprise. First, Marx did not see law as a privileged battlefield for the unfolding of the class struggles. Quite the contrary. Whereas in “On the Jewish Question” citizenship rights are presented as an obstacle to human emancipation because they assume the egoistic property-owner, the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy asserts that legal relations cannot be apprehended in themselves, but only tied to life’s material conditions. Law and rights are, therefore, epiphenomena of the political economy. But there is a second reason why Verrechtlichung is not thematized at all in Marx’s works. The concept is formed alongside the political and legal debates on the Weimar Constitution. It was first mobilized in 1919 by Hugo Sinzheimer – one of the founders of German labor law – in order to address the trade unions’ struggles to self-regulate collective labor agreements and arbitration of labor conflicts, legal issues that were not recognized by formal law at the time (Sinzheimer 1919).

“Juridification” points to a process of transformation: something that was not considered to be legal or integrated into law in a broad sense begins to be considered so. Therefore, there are as many concepts of juridification as there are different conceptions of law. These different versions of the concept address more than the mere expansion or development of law in general. Its genesis is in Weimar for a reason: new legal fields that emerged at the time gave a new meaning to formal equality, recognizing an asymmetric relation not based on privileges as their starting point. Labor and antitrust law are the main examples. Employer and employee, the holder of economic power and those that do not have a dominant position in the market, are subjects of law in unequal relations. Those relationships demand a legal treatment that empowers the most vulnerable side and also present a claim for material equality. Weimar provided one of the first experiences of the legal recognition of such inequalities and of promoting legal and institutional measures in order to foster a new power balance. But juridification is also a specific concept in that it expresses a social tendency of this legal paradigm to all social fields. Talking about juridification is most of the time accompanied by an implicit social diagnosis of the present, and also by its normative evaluation.

At first glance, all those aspects may lead to the conclusion that there is no immediate link between Marx’s theory and juridification. However, if we take a closer look at how Otto Kirchheimer and Jürgen Habermas have formulated their concepts of juridification, we will be able to shed some light on aspects of this specific relation.

Kirchheimer’s conception of Verrechtlichung is directly linked to the diagnosis of a profound change of function [Funktionswechsel] of the rule of law (Kirchheimer 1928). In his view the rule of law ceases to be a weapon of the bourgeoisie against the remnants of nobility. In a reading purposely influenced by The Class Struggles in France (Kirchheimer 1928, 32), Kirchheimer argues that its appropriation by the irrupting working class – who had gained a significant number of seats in Parliament – transformed the rule of law into a line of division [Grenzscheide] organizing the political dispute between the two classes. In Weimar, the rule of law constitutes the core of the formal democracy and, as a dividing line, it did not serve as an instrument for any class in particular: it stood between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (Kirchheimer 1928a). This specific balance of power leads to a situation in which both classes intend to consolidate their conquests into law, especially through the constitution. For Kirchheimer, the Weimar Constitution does not represent a compromise between two opposing Weltanschauungen, but rather a juxtaposition of liberal and socialist values, without any common ground among them. According to Kirchheimer, a very particular power balance is engendered in Parliament, in an account that echoes some of the remarks in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Schale 2006, 51). This is why, according to Kirchheimer, the Weimar Constitution does not present an underlying political decision (Kirchheimer, 1930). In this context, all the political decisions are cloaked with a legal form, and they all enter the legal terrain in order to be considered legitimate in a formal democracy emptied of any political common value. “Man schritt auf allen Gebieten zur Verrechtlichung”, says Kirchheimer in 1928 (Kirchheimer 1928, 36).

For Kirchheimer, juridification stands for a process in which the form of law colonizes every political decision. This totalizing tendency draws an analogy with the Lukácsian reading of the spreading of the commodity-form to all social relations (Teubner 1993, 509; Buckel 2015, 87-91). In direct contrast to Sinzheimer, for whom juridification should guide the labor movement’s path, Kirchheimer’s account of this tendency is eminently negative: juridification is a covering mechanism that displaces the spheres of decision from politics into law. There is no ambiguity here: there is simply no possibility of realizing the socialist values embedded in the Constitution, nor it is even possible to aim for a social democracy through law when politics is neutralized in this manner by formal democracy.

For Habermas, juridification only turns into an important topic in 1981, in the final chapter of his Theory of Communicative Action, as empirical evidence of the colonization of the life-world by the system. Although Habermas is analyzing the post-war welfare state, the legal paradigm that underlies the juridification processes he identifies has its roots in Weimar: he is talking about new legal fields that introduce compensations and recognize vulnerabilities, such as social security law, environmental law, consumer law, and the rights of children and adolescents in the family and in the school. Despite the fact that Habermas understands this type of law as the last movement of several waves of historical juridification, this is his point of departure (Habermas 1981, 522-547).

Habermas’ account of juridification is intended to give concreteness to the overly abstract theory of communicative action and, at the same time, should show how he is updating Marx’s and Lukács’ conceptions of reification (Habermas 1981, 523). The colonization of the life-world by the system should be able to explain reification in late-capitalist societies – and law allows the passage from one side to the other. Law is between system and life-world: at the same time that it embodies systemic elements such as an instrumental rationale that limits freedom, it is also composed by communicative elements that grant spaces of freedom and of justification. At this point, Habermas emphasizes how law contributes to colonization by the system – and not the other way around. The metaphor of the siege [Belagerung] is an expression of that. So, although law is ambiguous – a conception that certainly relies more on Weber than on Marx –, the last wave of juridification is evaluated in a more negative tone. Habermas revised this position in Between Facts and Norms, stressing how law contributes to bringing life-world elements into the system as well.

Today, it might seem that the concept of juridification has become obsolete. There is no imaginable field of life where law can be absent – be it as bringing conflict into court, passing bills, regulations, policies, instituting autonomous self-regulations, or even simply thematizing social relations in the language of rights. When all social relations can be understood through law in its multiple meanings, juridification ceases to be comprehended as a tendency. Some see it as a process with social pathologies and some see it as paradoxical (Honneth 2011; Loick 2014). But the most important fact is that grassroots social movements are expressing demands for juridification in various forms, all over the world. How those struggles are connected to emancipatory potentials is the most important question for critical theory.

 

The term living learning has borrowed from the accumulative experiences and knowledge production of numerous knowledge-based social and political movements in different parts of the world in recent years (Dokuzovic 2016). Living learning, although fluid and “living,” is based on some recurring notions that have been developed by these movements, such as understanding lived experiences and struggles as knowledge, self-education, self-determination, acknowledging all knowledges as equal, focusing on capacity rather than lack, using that capacity to demand rights, and placing the most disenfranchised experiences at the center of struggles. Living learning has heavily drawn from the notion of lokavidya coined by the Lokavidya Jan Andolan (People’s Knowledge Mass Movement) of India,¹ which is understood as a people’s knowledge that includes skills, life experiences, culture, struggle, as well as knowledge disseminated in institutions. The Lokavidya Jan Andolan uses this notion for a struggle against conditions that separate people along knowledge-based hierarchies.

Another common practice of many knowledge-based movements, which seek equal access to institutional knowledge, is hijacking university knowledge. The Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers movement that has developed since a mass protest in 2005 in Durban, South Africa, has exemplified notions of hijacking university knowledge by electing several members of the movement, along with members of the Rural Network, to attend The University of KwaZulu-Natal to bring back as much knowledge as possible to share throughout the shack-dwelling community in order to strengthen their continued struggles (see Figlan et al. 2009). They have, furthermore, claimed that “struggle is our school” (see Mdlalose 2012)  and invite activists into their “protest universities” such as “the University of Kennedy Road” (see Abahlali 2006). Strategies such as self-education, knowledge-sharing, or hijacking university knowledge have allowed knowledge-based movements to develop more effective tactics for demanding rights, or even for basic survival, as in the two outlined examples.

In Europe, Australia, and the Americas, many knowledge-based struggles have fought for free access to universities as well as archives and other institutions of knowledge production. They have thus focused on fighting austerity measures, which have both introduced and raised tuition fees, as well as developing strategies for self-education and for creating self-determined histories, knowledges, arts, and cultural practices, or forms of hacking and hijacking to gain access to certain content. Some of the radical perspectives that have informed these practices and my use of the term living learning are contrapoder, the undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013), postdevelopment, radical pedagogy, co-research, translocality, feminist ecology, and social justice. These perspectives also closely relate to practices by the Zapatistas of struggles based in life, knowledge, and dignity that veer from explicitly Marxist-Leninist practices of previous struggles (Flood 1999).

The measures which have increasingly restricted access to institutions of knowledge production, such as the aforementioned austerity cuts, consist of a series of global reforms that have been implemented to differing degrees over the last few decades. These reforms have sought to transform education and knowledge by creating enclosures and forms of stratification in institutions that allow for a greater commodification of knowledge. Furthermore, these reforms have prioritized the more “profitable” knowledges, attempting to homogenize teaching/learning approaches and erase traditional, local, communal, or Indigenous knowledges. Consequently, as such reforms focus on economic profitability, one of their major driving forces has been economic crisis, which has also been a driver behind the development of cognitive capitalism.

Many knowledge-based struggles have explicitly fought against tuition fees and many of the tenets of the cognitivization of capital and the accompanying precarization of labor and education. However, living learning has gone beyond the walls of the university, and official institutions of knowledge production, to question the links between life and knowledge in a transforming economic landscape, and the encroachment of capital onto that relationship. Therefore, Marx’s notion of the General Intellect developed in Grundrisse plays a major role in both critical theories of cognitive capitalism and in knowledge-based struggles. However, living learning also takes into account the role of production within the “social factory” – developed by the Italian autonomous Marxist autonomia as well as radical feminists during the 1970s – and applies it to the “knowledge factory”² In other words, living learning departs from the idea that knowledge production takes place well beyond the job site in cognitive capitalism or the walls of the university.³ It acknowledges invisible labor, home-based labor, the productivity of peasants, displaced persons, etc. for a broader perspective for self-empowerment and unified struggle based in common knowledges. Therefore, recognizing the role of diffuse modes of knowledge production and starting out from people’s capacity rather than lack, living learning creates the potential for a stronger struggle based in constituent counter-power than some of its predecessors, whose struggles focused on the formal sector.⁴

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lukács Archive in Budapest was founded after the death of György Lukács (June 1971) in the former home of the philosopher. The apartment was, and still is, owned by the Municipality of Budapest, the inheritor of the Lukács estate. First, let’s take a look at the archive and its history before considering the present threat.

The archive’s library contains the books owned by Lukács. The approximately eight-thousand-piece library is a uniquely rich collection of German, English, and French philosophical and aesthetic works, and a collection of world literature from the 18-20th centuries. The value of this collection stems from the fact that these books contain Lukács’ annotations, cards, and remarks. Further, Lukács’ published books and review-publications in various languages, as well as works about his oeuvre, his historical and philosophical environment, are also available in the archive. In addition, the archive contains a huge number of unpublished manuscripts. Particularly worthy of note are the contents of a suitcase which has been kept in a safe of the Bank of Heidelberg. This suitcase contains Lukács’ manuscripts from before 1917, including the original of his German-language “Heidelberger Ästhetik” (1912-1914). Furthermore, the archives house Lukács’ almost complete pre-1917 correspondence with Leo Popper, Paul Ernst, Ernst Bloch, Emil Lask, and Max Weber; and, most importantly, his post-1945 correspondence with Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Heinrich Böll, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas.

The archive experienced a golden age from the mid-80s to mid-90s: during this time it was working with eight to ten researchers, librarians, and archivists; it maintained close contact with the direct students of Lukács and the members of the Budapest School, who still lived in partial exile. At this time, the archive took over the editing from the Hungarian publisher Magvető and worked closely with the editors of the German publishers Luchterhand. Then the Aus dem Nachlaß series was slowly set in motion, in which significant books and documents appeared, such as the 1910-11 diaries, the pre-work of Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, notes for a planned book on Dostoevsky, a large study written after the Soviet entry into Czechoslovakia in 1968 titled, “Demokratisierung heute und morgen”, and notes and sketches for a work ethics from the later period of his life. Without these publications, we would have much less knowledge about Lukács; today however, these books have been fully integrated into Lukács’ research.

The working conditions of the archive began to deteriorate in the mid-90s, and this has intensified markedly since 2010. In 2012, research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Science (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia or MTA) were reorganized, whereby the archive lost its infrastructure. Since then there has only been one librarian working at the Lukács archives. It became impossible to maintain the standards of work carried out previously so that scientific research, contacts with foreign partners, and research consultations requiring scientific backgrounds, ceased to exist.

We might think that the worsening fate of the archive is a consequence of the philosophical reception of Lukács’ works: the strong anti-Marxist mood in the years before the regime change of 1989, and even more so afterwards, undoubtedly colored the view of Lukács’ philosophy. We also know that Lukács himself was very critical of his youthful work (which secured his world-wide fame). Lukács’ late works, especially those published after his death, received such a significantly negative reception (more people were talking about “nationalization”), that sentiments about his late works were also transferred to his early ones. But this was shown to be an entirely incorrect view once Lukács’ closest students began to explore the early thoughts of the “master”. The Archive closely followed this tradition and did a lot to keep the books of Lukács’ early career as well as his later works available. If the reception of Lukács’ would be handled by a professional framework, we would probably be able to continue this kind of research, but Lukács reception has been subjected to intense politicization since the mid-nineties.

Perhaps it is worth commencing with the fact that many of the leading figures of the democratic opposition, who prepared for the change of regime in 1989, belonged to Lukács’ second-generation students, called the “Lukács Kindergarten”. They created the most affirmative western-oriented democratic party in Hungary, Free Democrats Alliance (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége or SZDSZ).  Dissatisfaction with the change of regime and its attitude towards philosophy began to emerge in the second half of the 90s. At first, an incumbent prime minister said in the second half of the 1990s, in a residential forum: “There are too many philosophers in Hungary”. Many people objected to this statement and its possible implications (such as writer Péter Nádas). Nevertheless, Lukacs became the “ancient philosopher” under attack by this regime, and the Archive was the headquarters of this “ancient philosophy”.

The Fidesz government, which came into power in 2010, not only took up this tradition but also brutalized the attack on the Lukács Archive as well as the person of György Lukács. It is well-known that this party’s goal is a complete cultural-political rearrangement of Hungary, where such re-organizations have both right-wing and left-wing traditions. However, the true goal of Fidesz’ ideology is a nationalistic course. Therefore, government departments and media sometimes engage in a fierce attack against Lukács and his students: such as the “philosophical scandal” of 2011 (cf. Bohannon 2011; Hockenos 2013), which in fact meant the persecution of, and threats to, philosophers. But its symbolic peak was reached in the spring of 2017 when the statue of Lukács was removed from the Szent István Park in Budapest (despite widespread protests).

It may well be that the fate of the Archive will be the extension of the fate of the sculpture; the advocates of closure refer to technical arguments above all: archival materials need to be digitized (and this requires them to be transported, while their return is not guaranteed), and the expense of maintaining its former home. The struggle is still ongoing, but it is possible that the political intentions and justifications of these arguments will lead to Hungary losing one of its most significant philosophical and scientific institutions and monuments. The moment I am finalising this very entry (May 24th, 2018) I receive the bad news that all locks of the Lukács Archive have been replaced by the Hungarian Academic Library so that the Archive’s former employees can no longer enter the building. I am afraid that this is the end of the famous archive.

Marx’s famous portrait of the lumpenproletariat is one of the most celebrated set-pieces in a work (The Eighteenth Brumaire) and an oeuvre that at times approaches contemporaries like Dickens, Balzac, or Hugo in its social-literary verve:

Alongside ruined roués with questionable means of support and of dubious origin, degenerate and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, procurers, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème. (Marx 1990, 75)

But Marx’s evident glee in depicting the lumpenproletariat is untainted by sympathy. In the Manifesto he and Engels had already warned that this “passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society,” even when it is “thrust into the movement by a proletarian revolution,” “is more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues.” (Marx and Engels 1967, 92). So it was no surprise that in the chaos of 1848-49, the corrupt and thuggish Louis Bonaparte, “Chief of the Lumpenproletariat,” was able to organize this “scum, offal, and refuse of all classes” behind him (Marx 1990, 75).

Marx coined the word lumpenproletariat in response to Max Stirner’s characterization of the lower social orders as “Lumpe,” a term that was at once social (from “rags” or “ragged” – whence picturesque contemporaneous renderings of lumpenproletarian as “ragamuffin”) and moral (Lump meant “knave”) (Draper 1978, chapter 15). Stirner’s dismissive characterization of the masses stood in a long tradition, from the Roman proletarius to Burke’s “mob” and Hegel’s “rabble” (Pöbel). Marx of course sought to redeem the masses, but he did so by hiving off the potentially heroic proletariat from the dregs below. In so doing, he gave Lumpen a third meaning beyond Stirner’s descriptive and moral senses: it came to designate a remainder, the residuum of the lower classes once the cream of the proletariat had been skimmed off. Shorn of this political-historical core, the detritus emerges as even less redeemable and more dangerous than it had appeared in its original theorization. Thus, even if Marx introduced an important innovation by extending the lumpen to the highest reaches of society – in The Class Struggles in France he refers to the corrupt finance aristocracy as “the lumpenproletariat reborn at the very pinnacle of bourgeois society” (Marx 1978, 39) – it is hard not to agree with those who detect in his animus against the lumpenproletariat echoes of the fear and disdain the propertied had always directed toward their inferiors (Bussard 1987).

Marx’s division between an organized, redemptive proletariat and its disorganized, unreliable remainder lies at the heart of the war waged over the concept ever since. Its first and best-known battle was of course opened by Mikhail Bakunin – the “lumpen prince,” according to Engels – who sought to claim for his own cause “that great mass, those millions of the uncultivated, the disinherited, the miserable, the illiterates, whom Messrs. Engels and Marx would subject to their paternal rule”:

that eternal ‘meat’ (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, ‘dregs of society’) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the ‘riff-raff,’ that ‘rabble’ almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution. (Bakunin 1971, 294)

Bakunin in effect accuses Marx and Engels of what we might today call ‘victim blaming’ and ‘respectability politics,’ and of abandoning what should be the left’s true constituency. He feasts on their leftovers, promoting these cast-offs to the role of popular-revolutionary subject, the people of the people. He thereby outflanks Marx on the left, presenting himself as more popular, democratic, and inclusive – a mantle taken up not just by anarchists but by all those who align themselves with the plebs and the subaltern.

In the long debate between Marxism and anarchism, the question of the lumpenproletariat has most often been understood as a choice of revolutionary subject: those constituted by the movement of capital or those cast off by it, the industrial working class or the wretched of the earth. This is how the question was usually taken up in the twentieth century, especially by revolutionaries who lacked recourse to a large, organized working class. Lenin and Mao viewed the lumpenproletariat strategically, stressing the importance of the floating class of paupers who had not been absorbed by capitalism, but also recognizing its need for revolutionary guidance (Löwy 2005, chapter 4). Frantz Fanon, whose Wretched of the Earth contains the most important twentieth-century discussion of the lumpenproletariat, accords it a special place in anti-colonial struggle. Given its numbers in the late (now post-)colonial world and its motility – the fact that it could furnish either shock-troops for the revolution or foot soldiers for its repression – the mass of deracinated peasants thrown into the cities would decide the fate of national liberation: “the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood” (Fanon 1991, 130).

But we should observe that Bakunin, Fanon, and others who sought to redeem the lumpenproletariat were not only exercising strategic flexibility or developing a new revolutionary politics. They were also seizing on a central ambiguity of Marx’s theorization of the proletariat. For the universal revolutionary significance of this class is at bottom a function of its special relationship with capitalism: the industrial proletariat is uniquely placed to overthrow the bourgeoisie because it is its determinate negation, positioned at once to overcome and to conserve the system it has built, which it alone can destroy while preserving its technical advances. This status as capitalism’s victim as well as its creation pushes the proletariat in contradictory directions, as is clear in the divergent senses in which the bourgeoisie is said to be producing its own grave-diggers in the Manifesto: on the one hand, the imperatives of profit and competition force the bourgeoisie to drive the proletariat into penury, to the point that it has nothing to lose but its chains; on the other, the imperatives of production force the bourgeoisie to organize the proletariat, preparing it to take over (Marx and Engels 1967).

The proletariat thus oscillates between two poles, neither of them propitious for its world-historical role: an absolutely immiserated working class would be too weak to make a revolution; a thoroughly organized one would be too integrated to want one. Both of these possibilities have been borne out historically. Again and again, capitalism, especially during periods of crisis and at its margins, has reduced those subject to it to poverty, emigration, and even starvation, rendering them indistinguishable from the lumpenproletariat. In Capital, Marx would depict the continuous production of an ‘industrial reserve army’ – a notion already developed by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) – as intrinsic to capitalism (Marx 1976, chapter 25). Yet the development of the working class as an effective force depended on its discipline, organization, and integration into capitalist production. There can be no better illustration of the political implications of this than the history of the party that can claim direct descent from Marx, the German Social Democrats. From Bernstein’s revisionism to Bad Godesberg to its latest internal debates, the SPD has always had to balance the workers’ interest in overcoming capitalism with their more immediate interest in capitalism.¹

This oscillation was meant to be resolved as the proletariat became aware of its position, interests, and opportunity. This typically takes the form of a conversion experience, as, for instance, in the self-creation of Malcolm X or Ali la Pointe. Without their rebirth and self-transformation, performing, as it were, on themselves the same hiving-off that Marx effected in theory, they would have remained Malcolm Little and Ali Ammar – directionless petty criminals rather than the revolutionary heroes and martyrs they became. Yet this suggests that the difference between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat rests not just on circumstances, but on a choice. Would it be too much to extend a version of this analysis to Marx himself? As portrayed in Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx and reported by visitors to his London households, the shabby gentility that Marx and Jenny never managed to transcend was always essentially bohemian – the impoverished, provisional, dislocated condition that for him epitomized the lumpenproletariat, but that Enzo Traverso argues has characterized the lives of revolutionary artists and intellectuals from Courbet to Trotsky, Benjamin, and Marx himself, in their uncertain anticipation of a coming revolution (Traverso 2016, chapter 4).

The ‘lumpen’ can thus serve to designate not only, as in Marx’s original theorization, a remainder the proletariat and its agents will shed on their way to revolution, but also a double that will continue to haunt them so long as the revolution remains unachieved. This situation, where the boundary between the revolutionary classes and their unsettling shadow is at the margin undecidable, can be expected to persist as long as capitalism continues to give birth to new forms of wealth and squalor, organization and chaos. For the time being, then, there is no reason to imagine that the progressive classes will cease merging with, and emerging from, their miserable, dangerous, lumpen Other – or that revolutionaries and intellectuals will transcend their ‘bohemian’ existence on the fringes of the capitalist order, however comfortably ‘bourgeois’ it may at times be.

The recent ascendency of the ‘plebs’ and the ‘multitude’ over the ‘proletariat,’ and of ‘revolt’ and ‘insurrection’ over ‘revolution,’ suggests that we have crossed over from a Marxian period to, at best, a democratic or anarchist one. There is now a proliferation of lumpen status, as formerly secure employees are pushed into precarious careers as ‘self-entrepreneurs’ – a form of disorganized organization, and the First World equivalent of the ‘informal sector’ that has long held sway in the economies of the global South. Today it is surely easier to identify with Marx’s fears of the lumpen elements at all levels of society, along with the political swindlers that feed on them, than with his hopes for transcending the conditions that produce them. If there is anything encouraging to take from the concept’s history, it may be that this need not rule out a revolutionary change for the better, even if it assuredly cannot guarantee one.

 

 

One of the most enduring and oft-repeated criticisms against postcolonial theory is that in objecting to the universalizing categories of Enlightenment theories as Eurocentric and inadequate in understanding the practices, experiences and realities in the non-European world, postcolonial critique is ontologizing the difference between the West and the East. If, as claimed by proponents of theories of universalism, humans share common needs and interests independent of historical, cultural and economic differences, then the postcolonial effort to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000), and provide particular histories of different contexts, is rendered questionable. Furthermore, any critique of the Enlightenment and its violent legacies is read as symptomatic of forfeiting emancipatory politics, while justifying an exoticization of the East as different.

Against the claim that the non-European world simply follows in Europe’s footsteps, postcolonial scholars seek to understand disparate operations of modernity by tracing the divergent emergence of cultural, political and economic practices and institutions globally. They argue that the non-Western world does not simply mimic Europe, so Western theories of studying capitalism and modernity, although relevant, are nonetheless inadequate in understanding the postcolonial world (Chakrabarty 2000). Although profoundly inspired by Marx, many postcolonial scholars critiqued the universalist assumptions of historical materialism which claimed that colonial capitalism would expand from Europe to the rest of the world and function uniformly worldwide. It emphasizes the point that taking the West as the norm for the rest of the world, onto which Enlightenment and Marxist categories were projected, disregards and silences the realities and experiences in the postcolonial world. However, in highlighting the distinctiveness of the postcolonial world, postcolonial theorists are charged with denying the universal validity of emancipatory norms such as justice, democracy and human rights, which are presumably underpinned by common universal interests shared by all human beings irrespective of culture, race, gender, sexuality, religion, or other differences.

The recent accusation by Vivek Chibber that postcolonialism is anti-Enlightenment repeats this gesture. His book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) can be read as yet another attack on postcolonial theory in the defense of Marxism, along the lines mounted by Aijaz Ahmad (1992), Arif Dirlik (1994), San Juan, Jr. (1996), and Benita Parry (2004). Chibber (2013, 2) accuses postcolonial scholars of trying to replace Marxism in providing an adequate theory for a radical political agenda, while perpetuating Orientalism in their claim that capitalism and modernity developed differently in the postcolonial world.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, in Chibber’s view (2013, 101ff.), rejects a “universal history of capital” because the distinctive forms of power-relations that emerged in the post-colony were not the same capitalist power-relations that emerged during European modernization. Chakrabarty exemplifies this by focusing on disparate political domains, particularly among the subaltern classes of India, which are different from the normative model of European capitalist cultures and political systems. Challenging Chakrabarty, Chibber retorts that capitalism’s universalization does not require homogenization of social diversity or cultural differences, but rather that capitalism can accommodate and sustain cultural or religious diversity (2013, 130-131). Chibber further argues that the claim that in resisting capitalism subjects draw on local cultures and practices, does not imply there are not shared basic needs like food, housing and shelter which motivate all people universally (ibid, 199-200). In Chibber’s view, in arguing that when peasants in India engage in collective action they have a unique “psychological disposition” which is culturally different to that of Western peasants, the Subalternists¹ are endorsing the same kind of cultural essentialism they accuse the colonizers of perpetuating (ibid, 179; 192;, 208). In his view, in treating indigenous and tribal communities as being motivated by traditional and cultural differences instead of by basic needs, one risks exoticizing them, and threatens the Enlightenment notion of universal interests. Chibber firmly believes that upholding a universal theory of human agency, as offered by both the Enlightenment and Marxism, allows anchoring democratic politics in shared global norms, while circumventing orientalism (ibid).

In his response, Bruce Robbins (2014) points out that while making the Marxist case against postcolonialism, with a sole focus on cultural diversity, Chibber disregards economic diversity, thereby failing to explain the different varieties of capitalism. In his rejoinder Partha Chatterjee (2013, 74-75) argues that the problem addressed by Subaltern Studies is not the difference between West and East, whether psychological or cultural, as claimed by Chibber, but rather that the dissolution of the peasant classes in capitalist Europe was contrary to their continued reproduction under capitalism in the non-European world. Chatterjee explains that despite seeming similarities, Subaltern Studies is different to the Marxist project of “History from Below”, for unlike the disappearance of the peasantry in the period of the rise of capitalism in Europe, the inevitable dissolution of peasants in agrarian societies in the non-European world took another trajectory (ibid). Capitalism did not universalize in contexts like India because, rather than abolishing semi-feudal practices of labour, these were harnessed by the colonial state, subsequently generating capitalist formations quite distinct from that of free wage-labour. Thus Western capitalist modernity did not universalize itself because it failed to fundamentally transform antecedent modes of production in the non-European world. Challenging Chibber, Chatterjee explains that getting one’s European history right is not going to help solve the problems of historical change in the non-Western world (ibid, 75). Chatterjee further warns that in claiming political action derives from basic universal human nature, Chibber uncritically endorses the principles of the contractarian school of liberal political thought (ibid, 74).

Chibber, following universalists like Nussbaum, claims that human aspirations are not culturally constituted, but rather that common interests and basic needs, like the universal human need for physical wellbeing, are fundamental characteristics of human nature (2013: 197). This completely disregards the incisive critique, made particularly by postcolonial feminists, that such universalizing gestures disregard disparate historical configurations of family, community, society, and state that differently frame practices, vulnerability, as well as agency, in the postcolonial world. Furthermore, by arguing that in the future, subalterns, who in his view share a common political consciousness, will inevitably fight for “liberal democracy” in order to preserve or enhance their physical well-being (ibid, 179), Chibber ignores the question of ideology and the discontinuity between interests and desires, a key issue addressed by Gayatri Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

As pointed out by Hall (1996), postcolonial studies drew on poststructuralist ideas of difference and contingency precisely because of certain shortcomings in Marxist theories, a point which is conveniently disregarded by Chibber. The biggest fault in Chibber’s text is that he stages postcolonial theory as necessarily antagonistic with Enlightenment rationality. If, as claimed by Chibber, the logic of capital is indeed universal and its proliferation in post-feudal and postcolonial societies produces a “universal history of class struggle”, then how can one explain the great many varieties of capitalism with very different contexts and historical experiences of political economy? One also needs to account for how the same commodities are produced and consumed under different conditions, but which also simultaneously compete in local and global markets.

In her review, Spivak (2014, 188) points out that, from Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the Risorgimento to W.E.B Du Bois’ writings on the Pan-African movement, the very notion of subaltern social groups was not intended to describe an “international proletarian”, but sections of society which capital’s universal logic failed to assimilate. “Class” differences intersected with racial, religious, gendered, and historical differences resulting in varied proliferations of capitalist systems. Spivak further points out that Chibber’s claim of “race-free” and “gender-free” resistance across cultures disregards the relationship of the internationalism of the labour movement to colonialism (ibid). In contrast to Chibber’s universalist romantic utopian leftist narrative, Spivak, drawing on Gramsci, argues that subaltern social groups are not unified and cannot unite until they become a state (ibid, 193). In heroizing the subaltern classes and making them part of the universal proletarian class, Chibber seamlessly integrates them within “the same history as Europe” (ibid, 197). Spivak, moreover, diagnoses Chibber’s position as part of a larger tendency to allow only for a Western-focused Marxism (what Spivak calls “Little Britain Marxism”), which delegitimizes other Marxisms (ibid).

Finally, the larger question is not one of “Marxism or Enlightenment versus postcolonialism”, but is rather one of how to use the categories developed by Marx, or for that matter Kant or Hegel, to analyze situations these thinkers neither experienced nor foresaw. This would entail being a Marxist or Enlightenment scholar in divergent ways under conditions of geopolitical and historical difference; as Spivak puts it: “The sun rises at different times upon the globe today” (ibid, 195).

 

I did a complete diagnosis of my sickness.

I wanted to be typically black – that was out of the question.

I wanted to be white – that was a joke.

And when I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me.

They proved to me that my effort was nothing but a term in the dialectic.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

 

The conservative, and even reactionary, potential of Hegel’s philosophy has been frequently brought to the foreground. It is patent that he espoused highly detrimental views towards women, African and Asian peoples for example, and his overall philosophical project is seen by some as aiming at a justification of the status quo. It is equally indisputable, however, that Hegelian thought was quite often relied upon (if not uncritically) by thinkers eager to transform the existing social order – Marx and the Marxist tradition being arguably the most remarkable case. But the critical appropriation of Hegelian philosophy is not the prerogative of advocates of a proletarian revolution. Representatives of anti-colonialism¹ and feminism, for example, have also relied upon a reshaped dialectic to formulate their own approaches to social domination and resistance. Within anti-colonialism, the work of Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon provides a remarkably rich and pregnant broadening of traditional interpretations of both Hegel and Marx.

The figure of the Master-Slave (or Lord-Bondsman) relationship, as presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit, holds a privileged place in this respect.² In Hegel’s famous passage, the achievement of an independent self-consciousness is seen not only as an intersubjective process, motivated by a desire for recognition by the other, but also as an essentially conflictual one: each consciousness strives to assert its self-certainty, initially, through the exclusion and elimination of all that is other; each thus seeks the death of the other, putting at the same time its own life at stake. This struggle to the death can lead either to the complete annihilation of one consciousness (or both), whereby the process of mutual recognition will never be complete, or to one consciousness surrendering to the other in the face of fear of imminent death, thus becoming the slave (Knecht). The other becomes the master (Herr), since he showed no fear of death and thus has not degraded himself to the level of mere physical existence. The master however depends on the slave – not only for the satisfaction of his material needs, but also for his recognition as an independent being. His self-sufficiency is hence only apparent. The slave, by contrast, becomes aware of himself as an independent self-consciousness by means of the transformative, fear-propelled labouring of the natural and material world.

The fact that this passage has so often appealed to subversive, critical thinkers can be referred not least to Hegel’s assertion that the slave has a (potential) advantage over the master. While Marx did not address this specific passage in detail,³ a reading of such a figure inspired by Marx is certainly recognizable in the works of, among others, Kojève and Sartre, two key figures in the intellectual climate of post-war France – and for Fanon as well. Central to this approach is an analogy between the Hegelian slave and the worker under capitalism. If for Hegel the slave’s cultivating labour is what makes him an independent being, so the proletarian, analogously, can only free himself from class domination upon the realization that he is the real subject of production. Beyond Hegel, however, this approach requires that the proletariat act upon this realization, enforcing, through class struggle, the recognition of his independent being by the ruling class – hence leading to a classless, emancipated society.

For Fanon, however, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (Fanon 2004, 5). In line with this remark, his reading of the Master-Slave dialectic brings new elements to the foreground. The conflictual and intersubjective model of human subjectivity-formation developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit is recast by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, but the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic works in his 1952 book as a contrasting foil rather than as a model for the relation between the settler and the colonized, the white master and the black slave. And this is for at least two reasons. First, Fanon notes that the black man has been freed from slavery and recognized as a person without a struggle to the death: “The black man is a slave who was allowed to assume a master’s attitude. The white man is a master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table” (Fanon 2008, 194). The black man’s recognition is merely legal, thus formal and incomplete. Solely through struggle, in Fanon’s view, will the black man achieve real recognition. The only solution for the black man working in the sugar-cane plantations in Martinique is to fight, “because quite simply he cannot conceive his life otherwise than as a kind of combat against exploitation, poverty, and hunger” (ibid., 199). Fanon thereby gives an emancipatory twist to social struggle: for Hegel, the struggle is what posits the asymmetrical relation between the self-consciousnesses in the first place; for Fanon, on the contrary, the power asymmetry is prior to the struggle that can lead to real reciprocal recognition.

If the only way to liberation is struggle, the second sense in which Fanon departs from Hegel can help in explaining what prevents such struggle from taking place. While Hegel’s slave turns away from the master and towards the object (i.e. his creative work), the black man turns away from the object and towards the master; he wants to be like his master, which makes him even “less independent than the Hegelian slave” (ibid., 195). The colonized black subject is socialized in a world where the white man is the identification model of everything that is good, pure, and active, and thus shares the collective unconsciousness of the European. Hence, “[a]fter having been a slave of the white man, he enslaves himself” (ibid., 168). Fanon thereby introduces a psychoanalytically construed ideological dimension, that he calls ‘alienation,’ which under the social-historical circumstances of colonialism blocks the dialectical movement from developing toward the struggle that could lead to reciprocal recognition.

By pointing (1) to the structural-objective inequality between white settler and black native that exists prior to any emancipatory combat, and (2) to the ideological-subjective distortion of the black man’s sense of personhood that tends to block the very onset of social struggle and dialectical movement, can Fanon be said to have solely ‘slightly stretched’ Marx’s theory?

Fanon’s criticism of Sartre in Black Skin, White Masks encapsulates, as it were, the complex relation between anti-colonial activism and Marxism, and can shed some light on what is at stake here. In his 1948 ‘Black Orpheus,’ Sartre takes the notion of race as subjective, relative and particular, as “the weak stage of a dialectical progression” that will only resolve itself in the objective, positive and universal notion of class (Sartre apud Fanon 2008 111, 112). Fanon is left exasperated with his friend, this “born Hegelian” who “had forgotten that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness” (Fanon 2008, 111). Sartre forgets moreover, says Fanon, “that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man,” adding that “[t]hough Sartre’s speculations on the existence of ‘the Other’ remain correct […], their application to a black consciousness proves fallacious because the white man is not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master, whether real or imaginary” (ibid., 117).

While in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Sartre rejects his earlier downplaying of anti-colonial activism,⁴ the tensions between the latter and the official Left in France grew even stronger during the Algerian War of Independence. In the conclusion of his last and most influential book, Fanon states that workers in the metropole were reticent in supporting the liberation of the colonies because they “believed they too were part of the prodigious adventure of the European Spirit.” Fanon then exhorts his fellow anti-colonial militants to – literally and metaphorically – leave Europe: “Comrades, let us flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo” (Fanon 2004, 237). In this sense, Fanon is urging colonized peoples to turn their backs on their masters and to engage in an experiment of creative protagonism and radical imagination. His book’s last sentence hence reads: “For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (ibid., 239).

It is crucial to note, however, that Fanon does not argue for the abandonment, from a particularistic perspective, of the Marxist account of dialectics and class struggle. Quite the contrary: he insists that Marxist intellectuals and activists live up to their universalistic claims, expanding their scope beyond the particular experience of the European, white working class. For this reason, Fanon cannot be considered an advocate of identity politics in any narrow sense, but rather a proponent of a strong humanist universalism, which inscribes him within the broad Left-Hegelian dialectical tradition.

In any case, more than a mere ‘slight stretch’ of hegemonic Marxism, Fanon’s oeuvre shows us that racialized colonialism is an integral, and not merely incidental, part of Western capitalism – a theoretical movement that critically destabilizes any stage-like narrative of historical development. After all, capitalism without racism or colonialism has only existed in the thought-experiments of those who forget Marx’s admonitions against purely logical abstract categories. From this perspective, to decolonize Marxism does not mean to ‘add colour’ (quite literally, in this case) to an otherwise untouched framework. It means rather to be able to see that colour has played, from the outset, a key role in the very composition of that framework.

 

 

It is time to stop seeing the different roles we may play in social movements

as a divide between activists and academics, and see it instead as an

important and necessary division of labor.

(Mitchell 2005, 454)

 

Militant research is defined as “the place where academia and activism meet in the search for new ways of acting that lead to new ways of thinking” (Bookchin et al. 2013, 4). This search would require innovation in order “to write a new story without falling into the old patterns” (ibid. 31). Different voices using the concept (several with ties to the visual-arts world) provide accounts of participation in different tasks within social organizations and movements. The essence of militant research is to make visible a group identity and/or a commitment. For some, the concept is about introducing epistemic or methodological changes to ordinary academic practice. In this sense, the range of dualities involved in the academia-activism distinction (thinking versus acting, passive versus active) contributes to the illusion of apparent incompatibility or mutual isolation. Thus, while direct action would be possible only through activism, intellectual work appears as the exclusive task of the academy, without intervention in practical problems. Assuming the polarity of such spheres leads to a series of arguments that must be contested, as the absence of intellectual work within social organizations and movements, or the invalidity or nullity of work carried out by university researchers and professors in order to achieve radical social change. This dichotomy avoids a fundamental issue: how work is divided either in society or within social movements. For Marx and Engels, the allocation of labor and its products (like property) is obviously unequal and oppressive: individuals do not choose what they would like to do because these tasks are fixed by the social class to which they belong. Only through revolution is it possible to eliminate the conditions of class society, which means ending private property and work under the current division of labor (Marx and Engels 1998, 51-54). In the following, I argue that we must understand academic and activist work not as something divided, but as different aspects of the revolutionary praxis (Mitchell 2005, 450), complementary and mutually needed, as well as undetermined by the subjects themselves.

 

The notion of theaters posed by David Harvey is useful for distinguishing the multiplicity of spaces of thought and action from which one may work towards society’s radical transformation (Harvey, 2000). This implies influencing different scales and spaces of life, from individual actions to the collectivization of the desire for change. In this regard, interconnections between different theaters are necessary to reinforce insurgent political practices, looking for universal alternative referents in order to transcend particularisms. As a theater, the university would be a mediating institution between the particular and the universal (ibid. 243-244). Collective understanding that the precarious conditions result from budget cuts to public educational services may turn into social movements. Because of its several impacts in everyday life, direct action is motivated by the socialization of the experience of exploitation of university professors and research workers (the so-called academics). Direct action may consist, for instance, in the occupation of university places and goods, with active participation of the students.¹ Other practices will also require unmasking uncontested logics, a project involving time and dedication, which like other tasks carried out by academic workers, can be unpredictably urgent and time-consuming. As Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 (2007), taking education out of the hands of the dominant class will require enormous work. Accepting the importance of this work must involve considering both its scope and limitations. Such endeavor demands for the opening of spaces for social criticism.²

Undoubtedly, direct action in social organizations and movements is very important: there is a need to solve the urgent problems of real people.³ But we must understand that many of these actions are exhausting and extend beyond the programmatic purposes of activist groups. We must keep in mind that many of the tasks historically undertaken by organizations and social movements are the result of the outsourcing of the so-called ‘social costs’ to popular organizations, which are now supposed to provide welfare (Herrera 2017). In reaction, academic research must contribute to the agenda-setting of social struggle (Hassenteufel 2010), making the contradictions of daily life visible, and forcing the state and society to recognize them. Social criticism that aspires to a radical transformation requires empirical verification, data collection, and evidence, and it should also think about how to reach popular audiences.⁴ Our work must anchor its roots in everyday life, it must be “a more mundane enterprise that reflects earthly interests, and claims” (Harvey 2001, 116). We may only aspire to a different order of things by starting from the existing materiality, not from idealistic speculations. Future alternatives must depart from the earth to the sky, they require disciplined work, firmly tied to research, in order to form ourselves and to educate – all of this, of course, in combination with other militant practices.

 

 

 

 

 

Marx and Engels were not moral philosophers, but they had a unique and firm point of view about morality, which would today be understood as moral pluralism. It provides a distinctive analysis and interpretation of morality, which distinguishes itself explicitly from moral monism, moral universalism, moral particularism, and moral relativism.

The moral pluralism of Marx and Engels claims that there exist plural and diverse moralities in human societies, rather than one single or simple morality. There are therefore various moral phenomena, moral opinions, moral principles and forms of moral knowledge in human history and in the world today. These are distinctive and differ from one another so dramatically that they cannot be reduced to, or depicted as the representatives of, one morality. Accordingly, moral plurality appears not only as the divergence of morality among different nations or ages – as Engels says in Anti-Dühring: “the conceptions of good and evil have varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have often been in direct contradiction to each other” (Engels 2010, 86) – , but also as huge moral gaps between, and even serious moral conflicts among, different classes or social groups in the same nation or age. That is why Marx, in The Critique of the Gotha Program, raises the following set of inquisitive questions: What is ‘fair’ distribution? Do not the bourgeois assert that present-day distribution is ‘fair’? And is it not, in fact, the only ‘fair’ distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? […] Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about ‘fair’ distribution?”(Marx 2010, 84). If moralities in human societies are plural and diverse, rather than being one eternal morality, as Marx and Engels maintain, then it is impossible for people to come to a complete and comprehensive moral consensus in a class society; and also impossible to find or construct any universal moral principles in the current global system based on nation-states. According to Marx and Engels, there are no natural or eternal moral conceptions and claims at all. Those moral ideas or theories which used to be thought of as universal and absolute ones, such as justice, equality, property, and rights, are actually either representatives of class interests or products of transient and impermanent historical phases. Moral imperatives such as “Thou shalt not steal”, which seem to survive all ages, will disappear in a classless society without private property.

According to Marx and Engels, the plural and diverse moralities in human societies are not particularistic. Of course, from the perspective of Historical Materialism, the morality in a certain society which is regarded as the product of its existing economic relations and social structure, is a particular one that has been growing and functioning locally. While in a class-divided society any morality of a class is suitable only for the class itself and can be interpreted as a particularity, as an ideological form it always strives to be universal and to be accepted and recognized by all social classes. In this sense the morality of a class society is a particular one, but not a particularistic one. Moreover, for Marx and Engels, the class society was still open to the possibility of a non-particular morality, because they believed that the proletarian morality contained revolutionary forces and future orientations, which would historically endure. When and only when a society “has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life”, “a really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above recollection of them becomes possible” (Engels 2010, 88).

According to the moral pluralism of Marx and Engels, morality in human societies is plural and diverse, without giving rise to relativism. It is a common mistake to interpret moral pluralism as moral relativism. One of the reasons for this confusion is that both concepts take the diversity and variety of morality for granted and place emphasis on them. However, in contrast to moral pluralism, moral relativism makes the additional claim that the various moralities are incommensurable and cannot be compared effectively to show which are better or worse. In this way, it is natural for moral relativism to assert that all moralities in human societies are equally good, or equally not good. But Marx and Engels were not moral relativists because they would not accept this assertion. According to their Historical Materialism there are plural moralities in different societies or ages, but there is only one dominant morality in each society or age, that which is established within its specific historical and local perspective. This means that the diverse moralities and their social backgrounds cannot be valued with equal weight, since the advocators for any specific morality have to stay within that one moral standpoint. For Marx and Engels, morality is not an independent idea or view, but one of the social phenomena in the superstructure that are based on relations of production and developments of the forces of production. Against this background the dominance of some kinds of morality can be justified by the progressiveness of their economic base and social background. In this sense, a capitalist morality may be argued by the bourgeoisie as being better, while a socialist morality would be championed by the proletariat; however, the real foundations determining which is better are not actually derived from these different arguments, but from the different modes of production represented and supported by them. From a Marxist perspective, there are rational grounds for seeing the proletarian morality as prior to the bourgeois one, and the socialist morality as prior to the capitalist one. There is, therefore, no space for any kind of relativism within the Marxist framework.

In the contemporary debate, moral monism and universalism are difficult to justify when encountering plural moral phenomena and facts in modern societies, and most people are not prepared to accept moral relativism or particularism as it does not contribute towards making a moral consensus in a global era. Therefore, new explanations have to be found for understanding the ways in which human morality exists. As a description and interpretation of morality, moral pluralism not only refutes moral monism and universalism, but also moral particularism and relativism. It is possible for us to accept moral pluralism and, at the same time, show our morality as being better, as long as we unite in solidarity with the class which represents the progressive mode of production.

 

“The Commune was the definite negation of that State power, and, therefore, the initiation of the social Revolution of the nineteenth century,” Karl Marx wrote in the first draft of “The Civil War in France,” (Marx 1974, 249) composed during the Paris Commune. The Commune of 1871 was not a sudden insurrectionary event, emerging from nothing, a spontaneous filling of state power after the Thiers government fled to Versailles. It was the “definite negation of that State power”, the rising of social unrest, strikes, and new forms of assembly over the second half of the 1860s. Hundreds of assemblies, each with up to a thousand participants, successively changed the social glue in the quartiers, and transformed daily life and modes of living in Paris and other French cities into an ecology of social revolution.

140 years later, in 2011, another movement of assembly spread through a significantly larger geopolitical space, from Arab North Africa through the Occupy movement in the United States to later occupation movements in Istanbul, Yerevan and Hong Kong. The most sustainable development of this social ecology, however, occurred in Spain, that is, in one of those European countries in which the multiple crises of 2008 bore the most severe effects. May 15, 2011 (15M) occurred as a mobilization in almost all Spanish cities, as a direct consequence of a call to rally by Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!). The demonstrators stayed on and occupied the central square of their city, and they started camps. Not for a night, not for a week, not even for a month, but for longer, up to 90 days. Collective moderation, lasting care work, the further development of the specific sign language, and the methodology of radical inclusion created for hundreds of thousands of people an intensive experience of self-organization in multiplicity. 

An important success factor of the camps of the summer of 2011 rested in the fact that even as the occupations and assemblies in the various cities dissolved after some weeks, this did not mean they simply disappeared: they took on a new form, and spread themselves out into the different parts of the city. And while in 2014 a new party, Podemos, focused on the EU, and subsequently more and more on the national space, from the beginning of 2015 platforms and confluences were created in which the social movements around 15M, the PAH (the platform of those affected by mortgage, which played a decisive role in the genealogy of the current Spanish municipalisms), the mareas and social centres set themselves up at the level of the city and city administrations. With a view to the June 2015 municipal elections in Spain, a municipalist movement from below was established that extended across the country. Despite various names (Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid, Cádiz Si se Puede, Zaragoza en Común, Participa Sevilla, Málaga Ahora, etc.) and differing aims, these platforms shared their reference to the principles and methods of the 15M movement and some other concepts and preoccupations: the question of debt, the re-municipalization of services, city planning that would work against the gentrification and touristification of Spanish cities, and the guarantee of social rights, especially with respect to housing and education.

The way the municipalist movement relates to the municipalities cannot be described as a subject/object relation, as a revolutionary subject that seizes possession of its object of desire. At its best, it does not take over the vessels emptied through the hollowing-out of representative democracy, the corrupt parties, or bureaucracy. Instead it changes the institutional form itself, the modes of subjectivation and instituent practices. It is a “negation of State power” in the sense that it happens before and beyond linear notions of development from a social movement to its institutionalization.

Not only in Spain, but in such different places as Napoli, Zagreb or the municipalities of Rojava, more or less radical experiences are popping up when the interest in them and in a neighbourly discourse continuously increases: Rebel Cities, fearless cities, sanctuary cities, Stadt für Alle, anti-gentrification and tourism-critical initiatives, urban commons and urban undercommons, the right to the city. These experiences are less about the sudden emergence of left parties and platforms, or about the strategic victories in concrete voting periods. Beyond the mere dichotomy of movement and institution, what was and still is at stake with the Paris Commune as well as the municipalist movements is not the taking over of the institution without further ado, but rather experimenting with a new institutionality, with instituent practices and constituent processes.

 

According to Agnes Heller, the concept of needs “plays the hidden but principle role” (Heller 1976, 27) in Marx’s thought. Marx never defines ‘need’, but uses it as a value category judged differently throughout his work. The most important category of value for Marx is ‘wealth’, which acts as the condition for the unfolding of human needs. It serves as the ground for the free development of all aspects of the self, so Marx criticises the capitalist mode of production through the positive valuation of a humanity ‘”rich in needs’”(Heller 1976, 43-7). Taking this as a starting-point avoids the too-easy division between the ‘early’ and ‘later’ Marx. As Heller points out, Marx’s later critique of political economy presupposes the category of need from his earlier humanist philosophy (Heller 1976, 38). This suggests that Marx’s anthropological distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘socially produced’ needs remains in place throughout his writing, but with different points of emphasis.

For the young Marx, the natural needs for food, warmth, clothing, and shelter differ from those of animals because humans and animals produce differently. Animals produce things only when physical needs compel them to. Human beings, however, produce even when it is not necessary. In doing so, we push back and socialize nature, but we only truly produce when we are free from physical need (Marx 1975, 329). Thus, capitalism unnecessarily reduces social needs to meet the mere need for survival. Heller, however, points out that ‘natural’ needs have a socially-produced character, so only social needs exist, but nature remains “the existential limit to the satisfaction of needs” (Heller 1976, 33).

The mature Marx modifies the social/natural distinction, beginning with a circular definition of need. The commodity is a thing which “satisfies human needs” (Marx 1990, 125). Heller observes that “[s]atisfaction of a need is the sine qua non of any commodity” (Heller 1976, 23) because there is no value (exchange-value) without use-value (need-satisfaction), but use-values (goods) can exist without value (exchange-value) if they satisfy a need (which is what defines a use-value). Since use-values satisfy needs, workers sell their use-value (labour-power) to meet the systemic need for the production of surplus-value and the valorisation of capital. Capitalist social relations cease to exist if labour-power does not produce surplus-value and the capitalist does not buy labour-power. Thus, under capitalism, labour exists only to satisfy “the needs of self-expansion of existing values” at the expense of the labourer’s own needs for development (Marx 1990, 620-1).

Needs became a popular topic of discussion among ‘Marxist humanist’ thinkers working on Marx’s anthropological categories. The concept is used in various context-specific projects, such as defending the humanistic Marx against McCarthyite and Soviet distortions (Fromm), and criticising the false needs created by post-war consumer society (Marcuse), the ‘official Marxism’ of Eastern European regimes (Heller), and the welfare state (Nancy Fraser).

For Fromm, Marx’s highest aim is humanity’s spiritual emancipation and the full realisation of our individuality (Fromm 2004, 2). To illustrate this, Fromm distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ needs based on Marx’s distinction between fixed ‘drives’ and merely relative ‘appetites’ (Fromm 2004, 51, 24). Our drives (hunger, sexual urges) are an integral part of human nature, but their form and relation to their object is culturally determined. Appetites are not integral but tied to the mode of production of a given society. For example, the need for money generated by the expansion and production of needs in capitalist society becomes “the inventive and ever calculating slave of the inhuman, refined, unnatural, and imaginary appetites” (Marx 1975, 358-9).

For Fromm, artificial needs for consumer goods restrict our individuality by playing on the appetites. This alienates us from our real needs by reducing our relation to the world to use and consumption, turning us into a “self-conscious and self-acting commodity” (Marx 1975, 336). Fromm thinks our real need to become fully developed human beings can only be satisfied socially. Our creative self-realisation—as individuals and species-beings—requires us to open ourselves to others and the world with love and solidarity. This reveals the inseparability of subject and object as we become reconciled with others and, by extension, humanity is reconciled with nature (Marx 1975, 347).

Like Fromm, Marcuse distinguishes between true and false needs (Marcuse 2002, 7), but with a slightly different emphasis. For Marcuse, the difference is between ‘vital’ (food, clothing, housing) true needs and ‘one-dimensional’ false needs. Meeting our true needs is the condition for satisfying all our needs, individually and collectively. False needs seem like they are tailored to us, empowering us to make autonomous choices by appearing to flatten differences of race and class. Really, however, false needs offer only “repressive satisfaction” (Marcuse 2002, 9), forcing us to conform to a repressive society. Their satisfaction allows capitalist society to equalise social distinctions and flatten critical thinking, reabsorbing all opposition to stabilise the system by satisfying the false needs it has itself created (Marcuse 2002, 10).

Marx denied that the working classes would identify with capitalism. Marcuse, however, thinks consumerism has integrated them into new forms of social control. This impedes the development of a truly rational social order by transforming the structure of the human personality so we recognise ourselves in the things we buy (Marcuse 2002, 11). To challenge this, Marcuse thinks that individuals must determine their own needs for themselves when they are free from repressive conditions. However, deciding on true needs requires us to know what they are without being manipulated. Liberation involves recognising and rejecting the system of false needs, replacing it with a new system of true needs.

Agnes Heller certainly argues that we should reject manipulated needs, but she thinks that social change can only come through the development of ‘radical needs’—basic needs for creative self-objectification and community. Capitalist society creates these needs, and they are necessary for it to function. However, radical needs are essentially unsatisfiable within capitalist society, which impoverishes our needs by reducing them to the “need to have” (Heller 1976, 57). This generates the antagonistic force of radical needs. The dominant classes experience the need for ever-increasing quantities of private property and money, while the working classes are deprived of every need in order to satisfy the need for survival. However, Heller thinks that working classes are no longer the exclusive bearers of radical needs.

Nancy Fraser’s use of empirical data and case-studies houses an implicit theory of need (Fraser 1989). Fraser avoids identifying real, artificial, or radical needs. Instead, she focuses on ‘needs talk’, an ambiguous discourse about needs that is neither inherently emancipatory not repressive. This allows her to distinguish between ‘thin’ basic needs and ‘thick’ service or policy needs that can only be debated in relation to thin needs. ‘Needs talk’ is the medium for political debate between groups unequally equipped with discursive and non-discursive resources. In liberal societies, these groups compete to establish their needs, legitimate them, and render them hegemonic. Thus, Fraser’s aim is to politicise the interpretation of needs in the face of two challenges: the ambiguous sphere of the ‘social’, and the welfare state’s ‘juridical-administrative-therapeutic’ apparatuses (JAT).

The ‘social’ is the space in which needs can be politicized. It has the advantage of expanding what counts as ‘political’ and encompasses ‘runaway’ needs that domestic and market institutions cannot define. However, the social is also where successfully politicized needs are translated into bureaucratically-manageable claims administered by the JAT. The JAT is an impersonal bureaucracy that interprets our needs for us by separating them from our rights. Welfare claimants are required to interpret their own needs in terms of predetermined criteria—often laden with gendered assumptions—and offered corrective ‘therapeutic’ solutions that privatise socially-produced problems. Fraser’s solution is that we become able to interpret and retranslate our needs into social rights, struggling for the meaning and political status of our needs.