On January 30th, 2007, Platypus hosted its first public forum, “Imperialism: What is it—Why should we be Against it?” The panel consisted of Adam Turl of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Kevin Anderson of the Marxist-Humanist group News and Letters, Nick Kreitman of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Danny Postel of Open Democracy, and Chris Cutrone of Platypus. What follows is an edited transcript of this event; the full video can be found online at <platypus1917.org/2007/01/20/imperialism/>.

The question of imperialism remains obscure on the Left. In light of the continued failure of the anti-war movement to end the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the decline of anti-war protest in the wake of Barack Obama’s election, it seems that the critique of imperialism has not been clarified, but only become more impotent in its opacity. Consequently, the Platypus Review believes that this panel retains its salience.

Opening remarks

Adam Turl: To Marxists, imperialism designates the circumstance whereby economic competition among major capitalist countries, driven by finance capital, large banks, and big corporations, leads to political and military competition. This takes the form of an indirect competition for colonies, zones of influence, and trade networks. Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq—it was not just about seizing oil, but controlling the access to oil of potential competitors to America, such as China. So “imperialism” is not just about bad foreign policy, but the necessity for a ruling class driven by competition to pursue such policies. But what force in society can oppose imperialism? My position is that working class people in the United States, whether they work at an auto plant or in an office, have the power and the interest to oppose imperialism.

Unfortunately, most of the 1960s New Left argued that large segments of the American working class benefit materially from imperialism. I do not believe this argument was ever correct, and it has only grown more implausible with age. The costs of imperialism are borne not only by those that the U.S. oppresses abroad, but also by working class people here at home. The benefits of imperialism are almost entirely accrued by the very wealthy here and by tiny groups of collaborators abroad.

Protesters at an anti-war demonstration.

Working class people identify with imperialist ideology only to their own detriment. It has been a great weakness of the U.S. labor movement that much of its leadership since World War II has identified with the economic interests of major U.S. corporations, ultimately leading to a massive decline of labor rights in America. Although corporations have reaped huge dividends, workers have benefited from neither the theft of Iraqi oil, nor the exploitation of workers around the globe—quite the opposite, in fact. More than 60 percent of the U.S. population has demonstrated repeatedly in polls that they oppose the occupation of Iraq. Imperialism breeds anti-imperialism: The crisis in Iraq, along with the economic crisis facing millions of workers here at home, has bred opposition to the war.

We face this common situation of having to build an anti-imperialist Left. As American workers begin to question the war, is there a Left to offer a position on the war and imperialism that makes sense? Without this, people will believe the commonsense answers pushed by Democrats, who say the war in Iraq is a policy misstep, rather than part of an imperial project in the Middle East connected, among other things, to America’s support of the occupation of Palestine. The Left needs to be rebuilt, and this means creating as large an anti-war movement as possible. With the debacle in Iraq our rulers are facing something of a crisis; now is the time to seize this moment to organize against the war.

Kevin Anderson: Imperialism is a system by which powerful, competing nations are driven to dominate and exploit weaker ones. It is not simply a conspiracy, but a social and economic process rooted in the very structure of capitalism. Modern imperialism seeks to dominate the globe in order to secure markets, cheap labor, and raw materials, a process analyzed by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

Imperialism also has a concrete political and military aspect, but military control is necessary only to secure the access needed for economic imperialism to operate. Imperialism seeks to open up other societies to the penetration of capital, making direct occupation unnecessary and thus uncommon today, which is partly why even some pro-imperialists consider the war in Iraq reckless.

Finally there is cultural imperialism, which has dominated academic discussions of imperialism. Everything from Indiana Jones to the way colonized peoples are typically portrayed legitimates economic and political imperialism. Even elite cultural institutions, such as art museums, in the way they organize artwork—e.g., Egyptian artifacts in the basement and French paintings on the top floor—can reflect a fundamentally racist ideology assuring people of their cultural superiority and right to dominate.

Imperialism strengthens capitalism, but it always engenders resistance. Working people have to fight imperialist wars and thus pay its costs, so they resist; naturally, those directly subject to imperialism also resist. Forms of resistance vary, however, from progressive and emancipatory to reactionary: Take Pat Buchanan, who opposes the Iraq war strictly on isolationist grounds, so as to avoid involvement with “inferior races.” Imperialism is sometimes opposed by reactionary interests abroad, too, from Al-Qaeda to Serbian nationalists. Of course, generally, imperialism is opposed by progressive movements. It is important for anti-imperialists here, and those in countries directly oppressed by imperialism, to be willing to work together. Today, various U.S. organizations support Chiapas and Bolivia. Such progressive anti-imperialists must continue to oppose imperialism, but must also avoid supporting reactionary forms of anti-imperialism. It is not enough to say simply that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Nick Kreitman: Most anti-imperialists today have no program. At the anti-war marches they organize, groups like United for Peace and Justice advance no concrete alternatives. They simply hand you a sticker reading “Troops Out Now.” They do not elaborate on what they want after troop withdrawal, and therefore do not connect this struggle with the question of realizing a more just society. Of course, sovereignty should rest solely with the Iraqis. Yet, even as the war continues, the number of people turning out for protests dwindles because, at least in part, they can see no solution.

The Left needs to resume the responsibility of political leadership, which includes identifying and presenting alternatives to U.S. foreign policy. Only then can we overcome apathy. Unfortunately, the Left has failed to elaborate on what could be done, on what a new Iraq might look like, just as, in the 1990s, we failed to articulate a position on how the U.S. should engage Serbia, which misled people to believe we supported Miloševic.

We need people to articulate alternatives in the long term and to form concrete plans in the short term to end the occupation. Some are interested in this work, but they have not been trying hard enough to lead the movement, to provide solutions that will help us connect with people.

Danny Postel: The Balkan Wars of the 1990s proved confusing for those who, like myself, came of age politically during the Central America solidarity movements of the 1980s, and who were thus anti-imperialist as a matter of course. As Yugoslavia became engulfed in violence, the paradigm inherited from the anti-Vietnam War movement proved insufficient to understand what was happening. Kevin Anderson and I argued that anti-imperialism was obscuring what was critical at that moment. Unfortunately, support for Miloševic on the Left was all too real, drawing in leftists as prominent as Michael Parenti—who helped organize the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Miloševic—as well as Diana Johnstone, Michel Chossudovsky, and Jared Israel.

Many on the Left in the 1990s were led down a dark alley, a situation analyzed thoughtfully in “Against the Double Blackmail,” an essay by Slavoj Žižek written around this time. There, Žižek argued that leftists needed to oppose both Western imperialism and its false antithesis, ethno-fascist gangster capitalism, which does not represent a form of resistance to but, rather, the mirror image of global capital and Western empire.

Since September 11, one can witness in dismay the return of this tunnel-visioned anti-imperialism that had deeply confused the Left about the Balkans. A critical stance toward myopic anti-imperialism has lost ground given the brazenness of the new era of global imperialism represented by the Bush administration. Despite this resurgence of U.S. imperialism, the example of Iran clearly shows the limitations of adopting imperialism as the sole organizing principal of leftist thought. Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often employs the language of anti-imperialism, to the confusion of people on the Left. Some even admire him for it, especially when someone like Hugo Chavez embraces Ahmadinejad, the front man of Iran’s far right, as a “revolutionary brother.”

This is further confused by the fact that the emancipatory demands of Iranian dissidents tend not to be expressed in the idiom of anti-imperialism, but in terms of human rights and secularism, which are undeservedly dismissed as “mere bourgeois rights” by too many Marxists. The Iranian struggle is indeed anti-imperialist, but not to the exclusion of other issues. Student radicals publicly denounced Ahmadinejad for embracing David Duke at a global Holocaust conference at Tehran University [in December 2006]. Those students are saying their struggle is two-fold: It opposes imperialism and internal authoritarianism. Similarly, our struggle should be two-fold. We should struggle against imperialism, to stop the U.S. from attacking Iran, but we should also struggle in solidarity with emancipatory forces in Iran. Anti-imperialism is only half of our equation. It signals what we are against—but what are we for?

Chris Cutrone: Platypus takes its name from the animal because of its incomprehensibility, its resistance to classification. Like our namesake we feel that an authentic Left today would go almost unrecognized by the existing Left or, if recognized, seen only as a living fossil. We focus on the history and thought of the Marxist tradition, but in a critical and non-dogmatic manner, taking nothing for granted. We do this because we recognize our present, the politics of today, as the consequence of the Left’s self-liquidation over the course of at least a generation. It is our contention and provocation that the Left, understood in its best historical traditions, is dead. It needs to be entirely reformulated, both theoretically and practically, at the most fundamental levels.

The issue of imperialism provides a good frame for investigating the present international crisis of the Left. Though problematic for the Left for some time, the issue of imperialism has taken on particularly grotesque forms more recently, losing whatever coherence it had in the past. Today, it betrays symptomatically the Left’s dearth of emancipatory imagination. The present anti-war movement continues to struggle against the latest war by misapplying the template of the Vietnam War and the counterinsurgencies waged by the U.S. in Latin America. There, the U.S. fought against progressive agents for social change. The same cannot be said today. In addition to confusing the past with the present, the Left now tails after the crassest opportunism of the Democratic Party, for whom the more dead in Iraq, the more they can marginalize the Bush administration.

The Left has abdicated responsibility for a self-aware politics of progressive social transformation and emancipation. Instead, U.S. policy and the realities it grapples with are opportunistically vilified. Thus the Left shirks serious reflection on its own inconvenient history, its own role in how we got here. The worst expressions of this can be found in the intemperate hatred of Bush and in the idea, unfortunately prevalent in some leftist circles, that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks.

We in Platypus recognize that leftist politics today is characterized by its despair over the constrained possibilities of social change. Whatever vision for such change exists in the present derives from a wounded narcissism animated by the kind of loathing Susan Sontag expressed in the 1960s when she said, “the white race is the cancer of human history.”[1] The desire for change has become reactionary. The Left has devolved into apologetics for the world as it is, for existing social and political movements having nothing to do with emancipation. Thus the Left threatens to become the new right. Many who consider themselves leftist dress up Islamist insurgents as champions of national self-determination. One recalls Ward Churchill calling the office workers killed on September 11 “little Eichmanns of U.S. imperialism,” or Lynne Stewart, the civil rights attorney, saying that Sheik Abdul Rahman, who orchestrated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, might be a legitimate freedom fighter.

The Left has lost its basic orientation towards freedom, a problem going back at least as far as the 1930s. The perspective the Left once had on the question and problem of freedom has become occluded in the present. Consequently, the Left has largely decomposed into competing rationalizations for a bad reality that the Left, in its long degeneration, has not only failed to prevent, but actually helped bring about. The sooner we stem the rot on the Left the better, but first of all we must recognize the depth of the problem. This is why we in Platypus are dedicated to investigating the history of the Left’s demise, so that an imagination for social emancipation can be regained anew. The Left can only survive by overcoming itself. Seriously interrogating the received political categories on the Left, not least of all imperialism, is essential to establishing a coherent politics with any hope of changing the world in an emancipatory direction. The enemies of social progress have their visions and are pursuing them. Some are more reactionary than others. The only question for us now: What are we going to do on the Left?

Panelists’ responses

Kreitman: At times, the Left can degenerate into supporting ethnic fascism. We should not idealize Muqtada al-Sadr or the Iraqi Islamic Party. We need to figure out how we are going to help a democratic, socialist Iraq emerge out of the current mess. If this just means leaving, that is what we should do. But is pulling out going to solve any of Iraq’s problems? Or will it just give the next president a pretext to return in five years? We need to identify who our allies are and how we can affect U.S. policy to provide the best of all possible outcomes in Iraq.

Turl: With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformations in China, anti-imperialism certainly became more complicated. Nonetheless, opposing the imperialism of one’s own country still overlaps naturally with political support of organizations and countries resisting imperialism. There are two mistakes made by the Left. One is to associate any and all opposition to U.S. imperialism with progressive politics. The other is what Noam Chomsky writes about in Military Humanism, his study of Bill Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Serbia, which actually found support from so-called leftists. The 1990s broke the post-Vietnam reluctance of the U.S. to invade.

I disagree with Chris: I think the Left has more to do than examine our mistakes and despair. The Left is about a process taking place in society, about people radicalizing and struggling against injustice. We need to be engaged with those struggles around the world. There are debates going on in Venezuela today about what the future of that movement should look like. The Left should engage in these debates although, in the U.S., our most important obligation is to stand against our government telling anyone what to do in Venezuela.

Anderson: My interest has always been problematizing what the Left is doing. What alternative to capitalism we offer is connected with the critique of the Left, by the Left. Most would take issue with Ahmadinejad’s comments denying the Holocaust, yet many leftists think talking about such things will distract from organizing the next protest. However, every time we do not explore these critical questions, we lose a chance to clarify what our alternative to capitalism actually is. We imply that our political vision may resemble the world desired by any of the forces opposing imperialism, regardless of those forces’ politics. We have to explore the difficult questions of the Left even as we oppose the occupation of Iraq and affirm our solidarity with progressive movements.

Postel: To clarify, when I said we should be in solidarity with Iranian protesters, I do not just mean, “we Americans.” I mean, we on the internationalist left: activists, people of conscience, progressives. Particularly in America, some leftists think that people outside Iran have no role to play in the Iranian struggles, because they come from an imperialist country. We do have a role to play: to ask people who are struggling, “What can we do for you?” and “How can we help your struggle?” In general, Iranian progressives do not want financial support from the Pentagon or think tanks. What they do want is the support of global civil society, from intellectuals, activists, leftists—that is, from people like us.

Cutrone: The Left is in a bad way when looking at the possibilities for developing a Left in Iraq. Regardless of intention, the U.S. forces in Iraq and the political process that they have protected—the emergence of an Iraqi state through elections—now stand between whatever possibility there is for an Iraqi left, in the long term, and the immediate reactionary opposition from former Baathists, Islamists, and Shi’a paramilitaries. What does it mean to call U.S. policy “imperialist” when, on the ground, that policy is opposed primarily from the right? The Iraqi Communist Party put out a statement saying that, while they were opposed the invasion of Iraq, they now also oppose the reactionary military opposition to the U.S. occupation and the Iraqi government. In other words, they were opposed to the U.S. occupation, but it matters to them how the occupation comes to an end. For, under the current conditions, the U.S. being forced out of Iraq by right-wing sectarians would be a disaster.

The critique of the Left internationally is a form of participation and solidarity on the Left. The Left exhibits some of its worst features on the issue of anti-imperialism. It is constantly trying to figure out where the Left is, what existing group one can point to and say, “This is the Left.” Too often this involves dressing up as “leftist” more or less reactionary opposition forces. In so doing, the Left expresses a conciliatory attitude towards the status quo. Against this, I say the most salient form of support is critique, and this applies to the preceding historical period, as well: The role of the American left during the Vietnam War should have been to critique the National Liberation Front (NLF) in South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese regime.

Q & A

First, the real job of the anti-war movement in the 1960s was not to criticize the North Vietnamese regime, but to stop the genocidal war in Vietnam, and the movement succeeded. These wars are not just about abstract issues debated in graduate papers. Imperialism takes real lives. The ISO, which I am a member of, never had any problems supporting the Sandinistas against the U.S. and Solidarity against the USSR, because we took for granted that nations have the right to self-determination. This means, first, that activists in the advanced world have to be anti-imperialist as a principle, for it is not just about stopping oppression: We should support struggles against the U.S. because, if the forces of imperialism are defeated and weakened abroad, we can better fight for socialism here. Let’s be clear: the “dark alley” mentioned earlier—it was Stalinism. It was the identification, for 60 years, of socialism with totalitarianism and Soviet imperialism. Our task is to redevelop the socialist tradition by unearthing that crap, to make socialism relevant to the millions in this country who want fundamental change.

Cutrone: About Vietnam, during the Tet Offensive the NLF and the North Vietnamese communist regime expended literally thousands of cadres attempting to get the U.S. back to the negotiating table. Is that a form of fighting for social emancipation we can endorse? More broadly, I’m not sure the anti-Vietnam War movement succeeded. To the extent the U.S. was “defeated,” this was surely a Pyrrhic victory for Vietnam in light of the lasting devastation it suffered. Moreover, whether America lost or won militarily, the anti-war movement definitely did not win, as Vietnam presents no repeatable model of social emancipation.

The Left “here” and the Left “there” should be seen more in terms of an integral connection and less as a distant solidarity, which is a bad habit we inherit from the 1960s anti-war movement, expressed today in the idea that somehow the U.S. being defeated in Iraq automatically translates into an objective victory for the Left. This simply is not true, unless you think more Democrats in office is a triumph for the Left.

Anderson: The anti-war movement of the 1960s, which I participated in, had collapsed by the time the U.S. pulled out. Soon after, we had Reagan as president. The greater transformations we hoped to make out of the anti-war radicalism just did not happen. This failure was not simply a matter of America being a big, bad, reactionary country. It was because of all kinds of mistakes on the Left, not the least of which being the near idolatry of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

Turl: You are not going to get a defense of Maoism from me. But still, the anti-war movement of the 1960s forced America out of Vietnam, allowing the Vietnamese people to win. Regardless of the politics of the government in Vietnam that resulted, the U.S. had to remain on the sidelines until September 11. That is a successful movement. Did the movement create socialism? If that is our standard, it will deter our participation in struggles for justice that do not measure up, forcing us into a passive stance.

Kreitman: We on the Left should be wary of trumpeting self-determination as one of our values. In the wake of the 1960s radicalism, defending “national self-determination” sometimes meant that the Left simply threw support to the best armed groups in a particular country, rather than take their politics into account.

The major problem in the 1990s was not that people were cloaking anti-imperialist groups in undeserved left-wing colors, but that the vast majority of leftists were apologizing for U.S. imperialism by supporting U.S.-led “humanitarian intervention.” We cannot, as leftists, afford to cease our support of national self-determination.

Postel: Few leftists believed humanitarianism motivated these U.S. interventions, though some liberal centrists may have fallen for that line. Most of us had a complex position on Western intervention in the Balkans. We who supported the Kosovo intervention, myself included, took that position out of a conviction that the consequences, not the motives, would benefit the Kosovar Albanians, as the Kosovar Albanians themselves argued.

Turl: One must differentiate between the politics of the people ruling the countries bombed by the U.S., and the right of the U.S. to bomb people. We make this distinction all the time in the Socialist Worker. We don’t gloss over the politics of the resistance in Iraq, but we also steadfastly defend the right of Iraqis to resist a foreign occupation and its troops. If there were an occupation of Chicago, I would defend the right of hardcore Republicans to resist that occupation. I wouldn’t care that they were right wing.

This relates to the stance of the Iraqi Communist Party, mentioned earlier. If the U.S. troops stand between the Iraqi Communist Party and obliteration, that is only because the Iraqi Communist Party decided to collaborate with the U.S. occupation and, thus, with the biggest imperial power on the planet. It is untrue that the U.S. stands between reaction and the Iraqi people, or that the U.S. troops are defending a nascent democracy, or whatever the propaganda on the evening news says. Most sectarian violence is created or stoked by America. The U.S. deliberately established an Islamic government in Iraq; next, the U.S. consciously decided to stir sectarian violence after it became clear their proxies, like Ahmed Chalabi, did not have a base in Iraq. After that, the U.S. began siding with different sectarian groups, and it is only then sectarian violence escalates. The longer the U.S. military stays, the more sectarian violence there is going to be and the more reactionary Iraqi politics will become. The only solution is to pull out immediately so that the Iraqis can sort everything out themselves.

Closing remarks

Anderson: Imperialism with a capital “I” lasted from about 1880 until around the 1950s–60s. However, rather than simply ending, colonialism has been replaced by neo-imperialism. So economic and cultural domination persist after political independence, which is why one cannot understand imperialism without talking about capitalism. But, when Lenin wrote his classic work on imperialism ninety years ago, there were five or six competing powers. Since then, capitalism has become simultaneously far more globalized and centralized. The nature of imperialism and capitalism has changed as a result of the emergence of state capitalism, exemplified by the total centralization of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Today, there’s one hyper-power: the United States. In many ways, what exactly these changes mean for anti-imperialism remains unclear.

Turl: Marx argued it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness. Our ideas are informed by the reality of our lives. This is true, yet this relation is also falsified in America: Propaganda is relentlessly pumped into this society to ensure the prevalence of ruling class ideology. Of course, such lies contradict people’s everyday experience. Some people start to see the growing contradiction between what they are told and what they experience. Going through a struggle, a strike or an anti-war movement, catalyzes this change in people’s ideas. A significant example of this process at work now can be seen in Venezuela.

In the 1990s we began to see a resurgence of the Left. Here in the U.S., we had the Ralph Nader campaign and the anti-globalization protests in Seattle. Towards the end of the decade labor activity increased, with the UPS strike marking the first clear labor victory for some time. But this leftward momentum was interrupted by the political fallout of September 11, which was not only a tragedy in itself, but a disaster for the Left. It gave Bush and the rest of the U.S. ruling class the opportunity to wage war. But this is all beginning to change. Millions of people are demanding their rights. As long as people are oppressed, they will fight back and challenge the system. The question now is how to organize that fight. In order to rebuild a Left, we need to oppose our government, the dominant imperial power on the planet, every time it invades, occupies, and murders.

Kreitman: The Left has been in decline for at least a generation, primarily because it has not offered compelling alternatives. In the 1980s, as factories in America closed, there was no Left articulating a new model of how to do things. Workers today are complicit in imperialism, even if it is not in their interest as workers, primarily because the Left really has not provided a compelling alternative politics.

Take the crisis in Darfur. There is mounting political pressure for the U.S. government to send in troops to prevent further genocide. That would be imperialist, in a sense, but the Left has not said what to do instead. So people begin to think it is a matter either of stopping genocide through U.S. military intervention or not stopping genocide, rather than seeing it as a question of how to stop genocide. We need a framework that remains critical of imperialism while also addressing the political issues of the day.

Cutrone: It is all well and good to invoke the slogan, “the main enemy is at home.” But what position should the Left take regarding reactionary forces outside the U.S.? There are falsifications in much of the talk about the violence in Iraq. No matter whose body count one uses, most of the death and destruction in Iraq has been wreaked by the resistance, not the United States. Starting in early 2005, the majority of deaths in Iraq have been due to Al-Qaeda blowing up Shi’a mosques, marketplaces, or recruiting centers. You will hear the statistic that 90 percent of the attacks in Iraq are on U.S. or coalition forces, but the phrase “coalition forces” includes the current Iraqi government, and sectarian violence represents the vast majority of the attacks against it. The Iraqi resistance has nothing to do with national self-determination, much less democracy. One has to be realistic about the goals and responsibilities of the United States. It is fair to hold the U.S. responsible for the security situation in Iraq, but it is certainly not the case that the U.S. is setting off bombs in crowded markets and mosques. Reactionary sectarian groups in Iraq are the ones doing that.

If we actually care about the democratic self-determination of people around the world, we cannot ignore the fact that in a place like Iraq the Left has no hope if the insurgency forces perpetrating most of the violence succeed in their aims. It is simply false to say that the U.S. has instigated or perpetuated most of the inter-ethnic violence. The U.S. has tacked back and forth between the Shi’a and the Sunni precisely in order to prevent one side from getting the upper hand and delivering greater violence upon the other. The Left must recognize reality if it wants to be able to change it. This is not to offer apologetics for the U.S. military, but to assert that we must oppose what the U.S. is actually doing, and cease deluding ourselves. To pretend America invaded Iraq just to kill Iraqis only serves to evade the greater political questions of our time. I do not support the United States; however, I strive to be as clear as possible about what I am opposing, and that I oppose it from the Left. | P

Transcribed by Brian C. Worley

ONE FINDS QUITE A BIT OF NAME-CALLING among the innumerable articles and blog posts written in criticism of Hugo Chavez and his government. Although most of this invective is not very illuminating, one article by a young, Colombian, Trotsky-ish labor organizer describes Chavez perfectly in two words: a “postmodern Bonapartist.”

Chavez, his Bolivarian Revolution, and his project of “21st Century Socialism” are postmodern in the sense that they exist in a discontinuity, in an amnesiac disconnect, with the modernist project of social and political emancipation that started with the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century and withered and died sometime in the late 20th century. Since this project of freedom is inseparable from the politics of the revolutionary socialist Left, to say that Chavez’s politics are postmodern is simply to say that they are post-Left. He is not a liberal. Nor is he a Marxist. He has never theorized or organized proletarian revolution like Marx and Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin, or Trotsky did. He has never even advocated for a “people’s war” like Mao or Che. One hesitates even to brand him a Stalinist. While Stalinism was, in Trotsky’s words, “the great organizer of defeats” for the working class, one would be hard pressed to call Chavez a “great organizer” of anything of such historical significance. Indeed, he is best thought of as more effect than cause. While Stalinism made Marxism into a dogma, the only dogma of the Bolivarian Revolution is whatever notion happens to cross Chavez’s mind at the moment. Chavez’s ideology is so versatile there is seemingly nothing it cannot take on board. From time to time, it even makes gestures in the direction of LGBTQ and women’s rights. This, however, should not be seen as anything more than mere posturing, since in Venezuela abortion is still illegal, and Chavez embraces numerous openly homophobic allies such as Evo Morales, Fidel Castro, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There are no coherent, historically self-aware principles to the politics of Chavismo. It is bricolage, a precarious construction: Some ’30s vintage Pop Frontism mixed together with a little ’90s anti-globalization, molded upon an armature of ’60s-style developmentalist Third Worldism, and then sprinkled with equal parts “communitarian” participatory democracy, “multiculturalism,” and ascetic anti-consumerism. (A touch of anti-Semitism is added as and when necessary.) Although this incoherent composite can sometimes be cynical and performative, more frequently it tends to be semi-conscious and nearly involuntary—made up of vestigial impulses whose purpose has been forgotten, having been inherited from an older political project, now decomposed beyond recognition.

The historical discontinuity between Chavez’s politics and the revolutionary Left of the 20th century is not only theoretical or ideological; it is also practical. Chavez the politician emerges from no labor background or popular movement. He hardly participated in any leftist organizations before being elected president in 1998. In fact, the Left in Venezuela was dead and buried long before he appeared on the scene.

The story of revolutionary politics in Venezuela is short and dismal. In the late 1950s, the Communist Party of Venezuela [CP] formed a popular front with the Social Democratic Party of Democratic Action [AD] to defeat a military dictatorship and to establish, for the first time, a representative democracy in the country. But the communists were soon abandoned by their erstwhile allies. AD and the Christian Democratic Party [Copei] joined forces to exclude the communists from Venezuela’s political life. At this juncture, some of the more impatient communists, galvanized by events in Cuba, armed themselves and took to the hills. The guerrilla war that followed, planned with the help of Che Guevara himself, was a disaster. Many young leftists died, the CP was criminalized, and Moscow, largely responsible for this turn of events, scolded the revolutionists for getting lost in their dreams of Cuba. Anti-imperialist “national liberation” fighting between guerrillas and the Venezuelan government continued into the mid-1970s, having now little to do with socialist politics. Meanwhile, the CP shriveled as its cadre began its exodus into Eurocommunist-style parties or “third way” social democracy.

It was not until the late 1980s, years after this Cuban-inspired hara-kiri, that Chavez stepped onto the Venezuelan political stage. From the beginning his political career was ideologically unengaged and organizationally disconnected from the history of the Venezuelan Left. But, in fact, this discontinuity is one of the traits that gives Chavez his appeal, especially for his American and European supporters. This is because Chavez seems to stand at a remove from the Left’s sordid history of failure. He appears to offer a fresh start to the intellectually and politically exhausted, while also letting them have it both ways. For although Chavez basks in the fresh air of ahistoricism, he never ceases to piously, if disjointedly, rehearse all the old certainties and comforts. “21st Century Socialism” is appealing because it authorizes its supporters’ unwillingness to reflect upon the failures of its 20th century predecessor without denying them the moral self-satisfaction of remaining true to the good old cause.

Supporters hold up cutouts of Chavez at a rally.

Hugo Chavez came of age in the 1970s and 80s as a military man who believed that the decaying institutions of the Venezuelan government could only be fixed by a strong dose of military discipline. His early ideas of national regeneration had little to do with anti-imperialism and still less to do with socialism. At the time of his failed coup in 1992, they amounted to the belief that the causes of poverty and suffering in Venezuela were the result of nothing more than bureaucratic corruption, so that all that was needed was a strong hand to make the state into a more equitable and efficient redistributor of its wealth.

The young Chavez was right about one thing: In the late 1980s, the Venezuelan state was decaying. The old clientelistic petro-state, which for three decades had produced little political freedom but great stability and a relatively high standard of living, was corroding from within due to corruption and loss of revenue resulting from falling oil prices. The subsequent delegitimization came to a head in 1989 with the explosion of popular anger called the “Caracazo.” The debt crisis of the 1980s forced the newly elected Carlos Andres Perez government to restructure the country’s economy along neoliberal lines and to accept an IMF package that caused a sharp and sudden rise in the cost of living. On the day of the Caracazo, people from the slum city of Guarenas woke up to find they could no longer travel to work because bus fares had doubled overnight. Arguments over the new fares became fights, fights became riots, and riots became massive protests and widespread looting in the neighboring capital city of Caracas. The government cracked down hard and the frenzy of state violence that ensued was of a magnitude such as Caracas had never seen. In the end, some 3000 people were killed, most of them at the hands of Venezuelan security forces.

Despite its tragic dimensions, such a spontaneous, unfocused and disorganized uprising can hardly be called a political movement. And yet, American and British Chavez enthusiasts treat the Caracazo as if it was, as if the rioting masses in Venezuela, who had never heard of Chavez at this point, had somehow been clamoring for a Bolivarian Revolution back in 1989. But the Caracazo was no proletarian uprising, nor even an anti-globalization movement; it was a hopeless rebellion against hopelessness, a desperate protest against the desperation that flowed from Venezuela’s rapidly worsening economic situation and bankrupt political system.

The attempt to turn the Caracazo retrospectively into a proto-Bolivarian mass movement derives from anxiety at the fact that no social movement led to or culminated in the Bolivarian Revolution. When he won the 1998 election six years after his failed military coup, Chavez was not the popular leader of a social movement. He was popular because Venezuela’s political system had lost all legitimacy. People lacked faith in state institutions. Unsurprisingly then, in 1998 Chavez’s support was not drawn exclusively from the working poor, but came from all social classes. Voters responded to Chavez’s message that, as a strong executive, he would be able to shake up corrupt state institutions and save the nation. Chavez’s road to power was thus Bonapartist in that he presented himself as the ideal Venezuelan national who is necessary to reorganize a state in crisis, someone who would discipline decadent elites and facilitate reconciliation between social classes. Yet the qualification of “postmodern” should be added to this Bonapartism because, unlike Napoleon III or Benito Mussolini, Chavez was not the product of the failure of an emergent revolutionary Left. Rather, he is the result and expression of the creeping decay characteristic of a political order vacated by the Left.

At the time of his bungled military coup in 1992, Chavez was no socialist. Nor had he become one when he won the election in 1998. He was still not a socialist when, from 2002 to 2004, sectors of the ruling class banded together with a large majority of Venezuelan organized labor in an attempt to topple him, first by a military coup, then by organizing a lockout of the oil industry, and finally by demanding a recall referendum. The reason for their hostility was not that they feared that Chavez was becoming a socialist or that he might establish a socialist state; they were simply alarmed that his reckless spending, his power-driven nationalization projects, and his unpredictable interventions into legislative matters were producing an environment that was bad for business.

Critics and supporters alike recognize that it was not until the aftermath of the recall referendum of 2004 that Chavez began to move steadily leftward. Only then did he adopt the new rhetoric of “Socialism of the 21st Century.” In the aftermath of the coup and lockout debacles of 2002–03, Chavez’s popularity had hit its lowest point. He had become weak, his attitude towards his enemies conciliatory. But in the months leading up to the referendum, he discovered a new form of opportunism to rapidly increase his support, especially among the urban poor. A few months before the vote, while flush with income derived from the post-Iraq invasion spike in oil prices, Chavez embarked on a massive program of social spending that targeted sectors of society known as the “ni-ni’s” (neither-nors). These were poor or lower-middle class people who did not feel strongly about the government one way or the other. The device was highly successful and it taught Chavez a lesson he has not forgotten: He could outflank his enemies and maintain his grip on power not through appeasement, but by polarizing Venezuelan society through radical rhetoric and programs for which he alone was responsible.

From 2005 on, Chavez was able to seriously weaken the opposition by making support for the regime a precondition for benefitting from the government’s petrodollar largesse. At the same time, more frequently than before, Chavez took recourse to intimidation and direct attacks against his regime’s opponents. While the most widely publicized case of this new aggressive attitude, the shutting down of the right-wing anti-Chavez TV station RCTV, was itself an unwarranted assault on free speech, other manifestations of this new willingness to intimidate opponents were even more sinister. There was, for example, the “Lista Tascón,” a database of the 2,400,000 people who signed the petition for the recall referendum. Many on this list were fired from their jobs, banned from working in the public sector, and denied issuance of official documents. Use of these and similar techniques of polarization accompanied the change of strategy that Chavez announced at the 2005 World Social Forum to begin work towards a new “Socialism for the 21st Century.” It seems, then, that the radicalization of Chavez’s discourse after 2004 is little more than part of the regime’s more aggressive and polarizing approach. Like the clientelistic spending and the electoral bullying, the turn from nationalist Bolivarianism to “21st Century Socialism” is an instrument of the regime’s larger strategy to foster a “with us or against us” political atmosphere in Venezuela. Those who oppose Chavez, from the Right or from the Left, are no longer just traitors to the nation, but also traitors to socialism and agents of American imperialism.

“21st Century Socialism” and the “revolutionary process” Chavez has spoken about for more than five years now consists primarily of intermittent and radical gestures disguising a system that is very similar to the old pre-Chavez welfare petro-state. Venezuela remains a mixed economy in constant need of foreign investment. This is evident from the way the government continues to avidly court potential American investors. This is also demonstrated, more perniciously, by the government’s practice of aggressively cracking down on inconvenient labor activism, such as the recent intimidation of protesting workers from Mitsubishi, a firm with which Chavez’s regime has many close ties. The bourgeoisie has not been expropriated, nor will it be. Aside from Chavez’s now complete control of the key petroleum industry, expropriations have been primarily symbolic or have served as means of punishing political enemies. They have not significantly changed the economy. As an article in The New Yorker put it in 2007,

If this is socialism, it’s the most business friendly socialism ever devised… The U.S. continues to be Venezuela’s most important trading partner. Much of this business is oil: Venezuela is America’s fourth-largest supplier, and the U.S. is Venezuela’s largest customer. But the flow of trade goes both ways and across many sectors. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter to Venezuela, responsible for a full third of its imports. The Caracas skyline is decorated with Hewlett-Packard and Citigroup signs, and Ford and G.M. are market leaders there. And, even as Chavez’s rhetoric has become more extreme, the two countries have become more entwined: trade between the U.S. and Venezuela has risen thirty-six percent in the past year.[1]

There is no dictatorship of the proletariat here, and the government certainly has no intention of “withering away.” In fact, Chavez’s state functions more or less like the old AD and Copei regimes, projecting its power through the selective, top-down redistribution of oil wealth. The difference is mainly rhetorical. Chavez makes poverty relief programs into “missions”; welfarist measures like economic stimuli for small businesses and the building of housing projects are rebranded as “revolutionary” institutions of a “new social economy.” Of course these initiatives, notably the relief missions, are most welcome to those who benefit from them. They have had significant success in alleviating extreme poverty, particularly through subsidized food and free healthcare. Were the Chavista regime to dissolve, this much needed aid might cease. But this should not obscure the fact that these programs render their beneficiaries politically powerless. Because they are intended to be politically demobilizing, this generosity comes at a very steep price. Besides, the anti-poverty initiatives have proven difficult to sustain, decreasing substantially since the economic crisis of 2008. If there were to be a significant fall in oil prices, a situation the regime has not yet suffered, the aid would probably vanish altogether without its recipients being able to do much about it. This is not socialism overcoming the tyranny of poverty. It is a charity that, for the moment, has remained affordable and politically beneficial to a government that holds all the cards.

Other programs, the ones that are actually supposed to empower the “people,” are even more problematic. This is especially the case with the “communal neighborhood councils.” It seems that Chavez has keyed in to the fact that it has become fashionable on the contemporary “Left” to replace the working class with the “community” as the agent that will overcome capitalism, and to replace internationalism with localism. The regime represents the neighborhood councils as a new form of “communal participatory democracy” destined to overcome the “elitism” of bourgeois representative democracy. These councils are localized organizations, strictly party affiliated and exclusively funded by the state, where a group of families from a neighborhood are selected to lead community work on neighborhood development and local infrastructure. Their political scope is extremely limited: They make decisions on repairing streets or building houses, all the while remaining completely dependent on the state. In this environment, “participatory democracy” simply consists of the elimination of the secret ballot and thus the monitoring of opposition within the councils. Ultimately, these organizations have been a boon for Chavez, since a law has recently been passed in which Chavez’s government can overrule decisions made by local elected officials such as mayors. Since Chavez is in complete control of these councils, they have become a useful tool for him to keep disgruntled officials in check, whether they are members of his own party or affiliated with the opposition.

Then there are the cooperatives, which are also touted as the basis of the new “social economy.” Despite the rhetoric of non-capitalist, “endogenous” development, these cooperatives function chiefly as sources of cheap, temporary labor for the public sector. Small groups of workers are given financial and logistical support to enter into short-term contracts with private companies, but as often as not they end up working for PDVSA, the state oil company. Since members of these cooperatives are legally not considered workers, but self-employed associates, their labor is exempt from labor laws and subject to super-exploitation. As a result, they are often paid less than minimum wage. The cooperatives go out of business or lose government patronage if they attempt to improve their conditions.

The fact that enthusiastic observers of Chavez’s “revolutionary process” see such initiatives as the way to overcome capitalism says more about the observers’ understanding of capitalism than it does about the process itself. For such enthusiasts, capitalism equals the Washington consensus and IMF-enforced neoliberalism. In their imagination, a charitable, paternalistic state that constantly violates workers’ right of association seems to have replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat as the road to socialism. This is especially shameful for self-avowed Marxist supporters of Chavez such as Tariq Ali and Alan Woods, who are either not paying attention or just playing stupid with respect to El Comandante’s approach to labor.

Noam Chomsky visits Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Chavez has been an enemy of union autonomy and organized labor from day one. As early as 1999, he suspended all collective bargaining in the public administration and petroleum sectors. The state has frequently intervened in union elections, and refused to recognize leadership unsupportive of the government. Even before they backed the coup attempt, Chavez tried to destroy the old AFL-CIO affiliated Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV). More recently, he has succeeded in strong-arming the National Union of Workers (UNT) to surrender their autonomy and join his newfangled United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). As with the Mitsubishi case, Chavez showed his willingness to use the police to put an end to politically inconvenient mobilizations, strikes, and factory takeovers. As he put it with cynical bluntness in one speech, “We need the party and we need the unions, but we can’t let each do as they please. Unions are just like parties, they want autonomy and they want to make decisions. This is not right, we didn’t come here to fumble around. We came here to make a revolution.” When UNT joined Chavez’s party it crippled the union for years, and today the leaders who opposed the union’s surrender of autonomy have been purged. At the moment, the UNT, now headed by Chavista organizers, is considering dissolving itself altogether. To replace it and other unions, Chavez now proposes a new program of “workers councils” which, despite their revolutionary-sounding name, will be no more than servile government organizations meant to monitor and ultimately eliminate the authority of pesky labor activists. Autonomous political action by the working class is, at this point, under a full-scale assault in Venezuela.

The Bolivarian Revolution christens everything it does with high-sounding revolutionary names. Union-busting government organizations get the name of “workers councils,” party-dependant neighborhood associations become “participatory democracy,” and unfinished housing projects in depopulated areas are trumpeted as visionary “socialist cities.” Chavez has renamed the familiar tools of holding onto power, by drawing heavily upon the vocabularies of 20th century socialism. This has been most obviously the case with the regime’s use of the language of anti-imperialism. Chavez’s clownish anti-American antics, such as calling Bush the devil, and saying he had “left a smell of sulfur” at the UN, are just so many desperate publicity stunts to get negative attention from Washington. Chavez needs the American threat. It is an awkward situation for him that there are no serious plans for U.S. invasion, and that the days have passed when the Venezuelan Right was strong enough to ask Washington for support like it did in 2003. A diffuse state of emergency is a critical element of the regime’s political effectiveness. If Chavez becomes a non-issue for the U.S., it will become more difficult for him to wield anti-imperialist rhetoric, to blame the opposition for all that goes awry, and to demonize his opponents as agents of imperialism—a practice that reached its absurd nadir when the Chavista UNT organizers accused the Trotskyist labor leader Orlando Chirino of working for imperialist counterrevolution.

From what standpoint does one criticize a “socialist” regime that threatens striking workers with arrest and prosecutes labor leaders who seek to maintain union independence? From what standpoint do we oppose a military strongman who has called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “brother revolutionary”? Despite the obvious opportunism, ideological incoherence, and anti-labor politics of the regime, the question of whether it is possible to oppose Chavez from the Left is not cut and dried. Although Chavez’s regime is indeed an obstacle for truly emancipatory politics in Venezuela and around the world, it is difficult to even point this out when such an emancipatory politics has ceased to exist. As things stand, it is as if the only perspective from which to point out the incompetence, authoritarianism, corruption, and most of all, the hypocrisy of the regime, is from a desire to return to the incompetent, authoritarian, and corrupt neoliberal order that preceded it. And as things stand, such a return is the only possible result of the end of Chavez’s rule. Must the Left simply hold its nose in solidarity for what might or might not be the lesser of two evils? Should it just be glad and thank the heavens that something somewhere looks remotely like its distorted memory of what socialist revolution used to be?

Seasoned personages of the anti-capitalist Left are aware that their politics have run out of steam, and that self-deceiving optimism is the only option. In his book Pirates of the Caribbean, the 1960s radical Tariq Ali depicts Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Evo Morales as a new “axis of hope” against the evils of the Washington Consensus. Meanwhile, Z Magazine contributor Gregory Wilpert continues to maintain his website venezuelanalysis.com, which reads like little more than the American public relations page for the Chavista bureaucracy. The International Socialist Organization’s Lee Sustar routinely publishes articles in support of Chavez’s PSUV and its Stalinist tactics of absorbing or destroying every other leftist organization. And Parecon author Michael Albert found no problem in signing Chavez’s farcical call for a 5th International, presumably failing to notice that among the parties invited was Mexico’s PRI, infamous for its 71-year long iron grip of the country and, among its many crimes, the notorious massacre of hundreds of protesting students in October of 1968.

For someone familiar with the history of revolutionary politics it is tempting to reproach sycophants as traitors of “real Marxism” or of “authentic socialism.” Certain Trotskyist groups would even go so far as to call these self-deceivingly optimistic intellectuals petty bourgeois anarchists, revisionists, Shachtmanites, Pabloists, or some such deviation. Unfortunately, the truth is more prosaic: the sycophants are not ideologically deviant. They are simply exhausted. They have come to terms with the fact that revolutionary anti-capitalist politics have ceased to exist as a material force in the world and are ready to grasp at the next best thing—their simulacrum. Bolivarian “21st Century Socialism” is the socialism that today’s “Left” deserves. It is the socialism that makes sense in a world where the Left is dead. It is an adequate representation of the state of emancipatory politics today.

The question stands: If authentic internationalist Marxism is dead, from what standpoint does one launch a critique of Chavez and his followers without joining the Venezuelan opposition nostalgic for neoliberalism? The only answer is history: The consciousness that the present has fallen short of what once seemed politically possible, and that this possibility could once again become available. The knowledge that there was once such a thing as an international Left that was able to intervene, transform, and lead social movements around the world in the direction of the overcoming of capitalism. The awareness that the mass politicization of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has put the word “socialism” on the lips of hundreds of thousands of working people, will end up as yet another wasted opportunity if such a Left is not reconstituted.

Admittedly, this standpoint is not much to start with. It is clearly not as immediately gratifying as the self-deceiving “optimism” of supposedly Marxist publications such as the International Socialist Review and the Monthly Review. But the game they are playing is no more than a spectator sport. Cheering for team Chavez is a way for such post-mortem leftists to hold on to dear life. It is how they justify their existence and convince themselves that they are still serving a purpose: The good fight is still being fought; even if they are helpless, they can be complacent in this helplessness, since they can always look at the next populist strongman or, even better, wait for the next American invasion of a Third World country to give them a new lease on life. But if we are to reconstitute an international revolutionary Left, the first step will be to stop kidding ourselves. People continue to struggle, but the struggle to overcome capitalism has not really been sustained. Revolutions with a hope of actually overcoming capitalism around the world are now a distant memory, at best. The current changes in Venezuela cannot contribute to any real revolution until a genuine Left challenges the regime that has instituted them. But such a feat will be impossible if we do not finally get it into our heads that the fatalistic slogan, “¡Patria, socialismo o muerte!” means the exact opposite of the visionary words, “¡Proletarios de todos los países, uníos!” | P

1. James Surowiecki, “Synergy with the Devil,” The New Yorker, January 2007, <www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/01/08/070108ta_talk_surowiecki>.

Chris Cutrone

AT THE LEFT FORUM 2010, held at Pace University in New York City in March, Cindy Milstein, director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, spoke at a panel discussion on anarchism and Marxism, chaired by Andrej Grubacic, with fellow panelists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Andrew Curley. The topic of Milstein’s talk was the prospect for the “synthesis of anarchism and Marxism” today.[1] The relation between anarchism and Marxism is a long-standing and vexing problem, for their developments have been inextricably intertwined.

Milstein began her talk by remarking on the sea-change that had occurred over the course of the last “10–20 years,” in which the “default pole on the Left” had gone from “authoritarian to libertarian,” so that now what she called “authoritarian perspectives” had to take seriously and respond to libertarian ones, rather than the reverse, which had been the case previously. Authoritarian Marxists now were on the defensive and had to answer to libertarian anarchists.[2] Milstein commented on her chagrin when she realized that a speaker she found favorable at a recent forum was in fact from the ISO (International Socialist Organization), because the speaker had “sounded like an anarchist.” For Milstein, this was important because it meant that, unlike in the past, the Left could now potentially proceed along essentially “libertarian” lines.

Milstein offered two opposed ways in which the potential synthesis of anarchism and Marxism has proceeded to date, both of which she critiqued and wanted to surpass. One was what she called the prevalent “anarchistic activism” today that found expression, for example, in the Invisible Committee’s 2005 pamphlet The Coming Insurrection and in the rash of campus occupations at the height of the recent financial crisis. While Milstein praised aspects of this contemporary expression of a certain anarchistic impulse, she expressed concern that it also replicated “the worst aspects of Marxism, its clandestine organizing and vanguardism.” Milstein found a complementary problem with the Marxist Left’s attempts (e.g., by the ISO, et al.) to “sound anarchist” in the present circumstances, for she thought that they did so dishonestly, in order to recruit new members to Marxism. The way Milstein posed these problems already says a great deal about her sympathies and actual purpose in posing the question of a potential synthesis of anarchism and Marxism. For, in her view, whereas the anarchistic Left of the Invisible Committee and campus activists makes an honest mistake, the Marxists have more nefarious motives.[3] Milstein’s critique of the contemporary anarchistic politics expressed by the Invisible Committee’s manifesto and associated ethic of “occupy everything” was that, in its extreme emphasis on “autonomy,” it is subject to what she called “individualist nihilism,” and so lost sight of the “collective.”

Milstein sought to reclaim the moniker of the “Left” exclusively for a revolutionary politics that does not include social democratic or liberal “reformist” political tendencies. (She made a special point, however, of saying that this did not mean excluding the history of “classical liberalism,” of Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others, which she still found relevant.) Her point was to raise the question of how it might be possible to achieve a non-authoritarian or “libertarian” version of “socialism,” or anti-capitalism informed by Marxism. Milstein identified the problem, common to both Marxism and present-day forms of anarchism, as the failure to properly prefigure an emancipated society of “libertarian socialism” in revolutionary politics. Marxism, on this view, retains a crucial role to play. Milstein asserted that anti-capitalism was the sine qua non of any purported revolutionary politics. According to Milstein, what was missing from contemporary anarchism, but which Marxism potentially provided, was the “socialist,” or revolutionary anti-capitalist dimension that could be found in Marx’s critical theoretical analysis of capitalism in Capital. To Milstein, this was the key basis for any possible rapprochement of anarchism and Marxism.

It is therefore necessary to address the different conceptions of capitalism, and thus anti-capitalism, that might lie behind anarchism and Marxism, in order to see if and how they could participate in a common “libertarian socialist” anti-capitalist politics, moving forward.

Historically, anarchists have complained of the split in the First International Workingmen’s Association, in which the Marxists predominated and expelled the anarchists. The history of the subsequent Second or Socialist International, which excluded the anarchists, was peppered with anarchist protest against their marginalization in this period of tremendous growth in the revolutionary socialist workers’ movement.[4] The crisis in the Second International that took place in the context of the First World War (1914–18) saw many former anarchists joining the radicals Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky in forming the Third International at the time of the Russian, German, Hungarian and Italian working class revolutions of 1917–19. (For instance, the preeminent American Trotskyist James P. Cannon had, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, been an anarchist militant in the Industrial Workers of the World.)[5] To be sure, there were many anarchists who remained inimical to, sought to compete politically with, and even fought militarily against Marxism throughout this later period (as in the case of the Russian Civil War), but the splits and realignments among anarchists and Marxists at that time have been a bone of contention in the history of revolutionary socialism ever since then. These two moments, of the First and Third Internationals, are joined by the further trauma of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, in which Marxists again fought anarchists.

So how does this “ancient history” appear in the present? Milstein is content to continue a long tradition among anarchists and “left” or libertarian communists and socialists, in which anarchism is opposed to Marxism along the lines of libertarian versus authoritarian politics. But is this indeed the essential, crucial difference between anarchism and Marxism?

Although Milstein approached the question of a present-day synthesis of anarchism and Marxism in an apparently open way, her perspective was still that of a rather dogmatic anarchism, adhering to principles rather than historical perspectives. What Milstein offered was the possibility, not of a true synthesis, but rather of re-assimilating Marxism back into its pre- and non-Marxian or “socialist” historical background.

Two figures of historical anarchism not mentioned by Milstein in her talk, but who can be regarded in terms of the emergence and further development of Marx’s own perspectives on capitalism and socialism, are, respectively, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76). Marx’s thought responded in its initial stages to the formulation of socialism by Proudhon, who was perhaps the most influential socialist at the time of Marx’s youth. Bakunin, on the other hand, started out as an admirer of Marx’s work, completing the first Russian translation the Communist Manifesto while also attempting to undertake a translation of Capital (the latter project was abandoned unfinished).

One figure Milstein did mention, Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), who taught her anarchism, was a famous critical interlocutor with Marxism, writing the New Left pamphlet Listen, Marxist! (1969, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 195-244). Bookchin was himself a former Marxist, first as a mainstream Third International Communist, later a Trotskyist, before ultimately turning to anarchism out of disenchantment with Marxism. More precisely, it was disenchantment with the practice of Marxist politics that motivated Bookchin’s turn to anarchism. Like her mentor, Milstein’s approach appears to be motivated by a Marxist anti-capitalism in theory and a libertarian anarchist politics in practice. But how does this relate to the actual historical differences between anarchism and Marxism, in both theory and practice?

Marx’s critique of capital was formulated and emerged strongly out of his critical engagement with Proudhon’s “anarchist” socialism. Proudhon could be considered the first “libertarian socialist.” Proudhon in fact invented the term “anarchism.” He also famously coined the phrase “property is theft.” Proudhon, like Marx, engaged and was influenced by not only British political economy and French socialism, but also Hegelian philosophy. Proudhon admitted to having only “three masters: the Bible, Adam Smith, and Hegel.” Marx’s personal relationship with Proudhon was broken by Marx’s critique of Proudhon’s 1847 book, System of Economical Contradictions: or, The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx’s book-length critique was titled, in his typically incisive style of dialectical reversal, The Poverty of Philosophy. It is significant that Marx worked towards a critique of Proudhonian socialism at the same time as he was beginning to elaborate a critique of the categories of political economy, through the case of Proudhon’s 1840 book What is Property?, in the unpublished 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.

By addressing Proudhon’s opposition to capital as symptomatic, and trying to get at the shared presuppositions of both capitalist society and its discontents, as expressed by Proudhon, Marx attempted to grasp the historical essence of capital more fundamentally, and the possibility of capital being reproduced in and through the forms of discontent it generated. This meant taking a very historically specific view of capital that could regard how the prevailing forms of modern society and its characteristic forms of self-understanding in practice, and their discontents, in political ideology, shared a common historical moment in capital. Proudhon’s thought, Marx argued, was not simply mistaken, but, as an acute symptom of capital, necessitated a critical understanding of what Proudhon was trying to grasp and struggle through. Marx’s “critique of political economy,” and attempt to “get at the root” of capital in “humanity itself,” as a historical phenomenon, can thus be said to have begun with his critique of Proudhon.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his children (1853), painting by Gustave Courbet.

For Marx, Proudhon offered not the overcoming, but rather the purest expression of the commodity form in capital, in the call to “abolish private property.” The unintended effect of the abolition of property would, according to Marx, actually render society itself into one great “universal capitalist” over its members. For Marx understood “capital” as the contradiction of modern society with itself.[6] Just as each member of capitalist society regarded himself as his own property, a commodity to be bought and sold, so society regarded itself as capital. As Marx put it, in the 1844 Manuscripts,

Karl Marx in 1839.

Communism is the position as the negation of the negation [of humanity in capital], and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.[7]

This is what Proudhon, according to Marx, did not recognize about “socialism.”

It is precisely such historical specification of the problems of capital and its discontents, and of any purported attempts to get beyond capital, that distinguishes Marx’s approach from that of anarchism and non-Marxian socialism. In his critique of capital and its discontents, Marx did not pose any principles against others, abstractly, but rather tried to understand the actual basis for the principles of (anti)capitalism from within.

This relates to Marx’s later dispute with his erstwhile admirer Bakunin. Bakunin was most opposed to what he believed to be Marx’s and Marx’s followers’ embrace of the “state” in their concept of political revolution leading to socialism. Where Bakunin, in characteristic anarchist manner, claimed to be opposed to the state per se, Marx and his best followers — such as that great demon for anarchists, Lenin,[8] in The State and Revolution (1917) — sought to grasp the necessity of the state as a function of capital, seeking to attack the conditions of possibility of the need for something like state authority in capital itself. Departing from regarding the state as an invidious cause of (political) unfreedom, Marx and the best Marxists sought to find out how the state, in its modern, capitalist, pathological, and self-contradictory form, was actually an effect of capital. The difference between Marxism and anarchism is in the understanding of the modern capitalist state as a historically specific phenomenon, a symptom, as opposed to a transhistorical evil.

Milstein’s mentor Bookchin provides a good example of this kind of problem in anarchism with respect to historical specificity in opposition to capitalism. Opposed to the individualistic “egoism” of Proudhonian anarchism and of others such as Max Stirner,[9] Bookchin sought to find an adequate form of social life that in principle could do away with any pernicious authority. Bookchin found this in the idea, taken from Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), of local communitarian “mutualism,” as opposed to the tyranny of the capitalist state. For Bookchin, the anarchist opposition to capital comes down to a matter of the most anthropologically appropriate principle of society. (It is notable that Noam Chomsky offers a similar anarchist perspective on human nature as inherently socialist.)

Milstein’s diagnosis and prescription for what ails today’s Left is concerned with its supposed lack of, or otherwise bad principles for, proper political organizing, in terms of both an adequate practice of anti-capitalist revolutionary politics and the emancipated society of “libertarian socialism” towards which it strives.

The eminently practical political issue of “how to get there from here” involves an understanding and judgment of not only the “how” and the “there,” but also the “here” from which one imagines one is proceeding. The question is whether we live in a society that suffers from bad principles of organization, extreme hierarchy, and distantly centralized authority, or from a deeper and more obscure problem of social life in modern capitalism that makes hierarchy and centralization both possible and indeed necessary. Where Marx and a Marxian approach begin is with an examination of what anarchism only presupposes and treats a priori as the highest principle of proper human social life. Marxists seek to understand where the impulse towards “libertarian socialism” originates historically. Marxists consider “socialism” to be the historical product and not simply the antithesis of capitalism. Marxists ask, what necessity must be overcome in order to get beyond capital? For socialism would be not simply the negation, but also the completion of capitalism. Marx nonetheless endorsed it as such. This was the heart of Marx’s “dialectical” approach to capital.

By contrast, for Milstein, following Bookchin, socialism differs fundamentally in principle from capitalism. The problem with Marx and historical materialism was that it remained too subject to the exigencies of capitalism in the 19th to early 20th century era of industrialization. Similarly, the problem with the historical anarchism of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin was that it had not yet adequately formulated the proper political principles for the relations of the individual in society. Bookchin thought that the possibility for this had been achieved in the late 20th century, in what he called “post-scarcity anarchism,” which would allow for a return to the social principles of the traditional human communities that had been destroyed by capitalism and the hierarchical civilizational forms that preceded it.[10] Even though Bookchin thought that Marx’s fundamental political perspective of proletarian socialism had been historically superseded, he nevertheless found support for his approach in Marx’s late ethnographic notebooks.[11]

On the contrary, an approach properly following Marx would try to understand and push further the aspiration towards a socialist society that comes historically as a result of and from within capital itself. Rather than taking one’s own supposed “anti-capitalism” simply as given, a Marxian approach seeks—as Marx put it in a famous 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge calling for the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” including first and foremost the Left[12]—to “show the world why it is struggling, and [that] consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.”[13]

For Milstein, the problems afflicting today’s “anti-capitalist movement” can be established and overcome in principle a priori. According to Milstein, the Left must only give up its “individualistic nihilism” and “conspiratorial vanguardism” in organized politics in order to achieve socialism. This means Marxists must give up their bad ideas and forms of organization and become anarchists, or “libertarian socialists,” if they are to serve rather than hinder the revolution against capital.

But, as the young, searching 25 year-old political radical Marx wrote (in his 1843 letter to Ruge),

In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For . . . the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion . . . among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. . . . [However] we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old. I am therefore not in favor of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their ideas. In particular, communism is a dogmatic abstraction and . . . only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of . . . Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism. And by the same token, the whole principle of socialism is concerned only with one side, namely the reality of the true existence of man. . . . This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. . . . Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing . . . consciousness obscure to itself. . . . It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.[14]

Marx counterposed his own unique perspective sharply against that of other “socialists,” whom he found to be unwittingly bound up in the categories of capital against which they raged. This has remained the case for virtually all “anti-capitalists” up to the present. Marx grasped this problem of anti-capitalism at the dawn of the epoch of industrial capital that arose with the disintegration of traditional society, but to whose unprecedented and historically specific social and political problems we continue to be subject today.

Marx departed from anarchism and other forms of symptomatic “socialism” with reason, and this reason must not be forgotten. Marx’s task remains unfinished. Only this “clarification” of “consciousness obscure to itself” that Marx called for can fulfill the long “dream” of anarchism, which otherwise will remain denied in reality. | P

2. It is unclear by her “10–20 year” periodization whether Milstein meant this negatively, with the collapse of Stalinism or “authoritarian/state socialism” beginning in 1989, or positively, with the supposedly resurgent Left of the “anti/alter-globalization” movement exemplified by the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the World Social Forum starting in 2001 at Porto Alegre, Brazil. Milstein was probably referencing both.

3. Ever since the Marx-Bakunin split in the International Workingmen’s Association or First International, anarchists have characterized Marxists as authoritarians hijacking the revolutionary movement.

4. See James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (New York: Praeger, 1956).

5. See Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left 1890–1928 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

6. For example, Proudhon advocated replacing money with labor-time credits and so did not recognize, as Marx noted early on and elaborated in detail later in Capital, how, after the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of machine production, labor-time undermined itself as a measure of social value.

7. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 93. Also available online at <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>.

8. Lenin wrote, in “Left-Wing” Communism — An Infantile Disorder (1920) that,

[D]riven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism . . . anarchism is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another — all this is common knowledge. . . .

Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities complemented each other. (Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), 559–560.)

9. See Max Stirner, The Ego and its Own (London: Rebel Press, 1993). Originally published 1845. Sometimes translated as The Individual and his Property.

10. See Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1970); “Beyond Neo-Marxism,” Telos 36 (1979); and Toward an Ecological Society (1980).

11. These writings by Marx are also the subject of a recent book by the Marxist-Humanist Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

12. Elsewhere, Marx wrote, “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies; and in maintaining this our position we gladly forego cheap democratic popularity.” (“Gottfried Kinkel,” in Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-Ökonomische Revue No. 4, 1850. Available online at <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/04/kinkel.htm>).

13. Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge (September, 1843), in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 12–15. Also available online at <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>.

14. Marx, letter to Ruge.

Hussein Ibish and Joel Kovel with Richard Rubin

On February 23, Platypus hosted an event entitled Which Way Forward for Palestinian Liberation? in which Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism and frequent commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and Hussein Ibish, political analyst and senior fellow at The American Task Force on Palestine, answered questions posed by Richard Rubin of Platypus. An audience question and answer session followed. Below is an edited transcript of the event. The Platypus Review encourages readers to listen to the full audio of the event, available online at http://platypus1917.org/2010/04/04/which-way-forward-for-palestinian-liberation/.

Richard Rubin: Many people would question whether a debate on the one-state versus the two-state “solution” for Israel-Palestine is worthwhile. They feel the focus should be on Israel’s violation of human rights and that raising the question of whether one should strive for one state or two is at best a distraction and at worst divisive, since it highlights internal Palestinian divisions. Why then, from your different standpoints, is this an important discussion to have?

Joel Kovel: We must keep in mind what is essential. Otherwise one gets caught up in symptoms and fails to address underlying processes. The Israeli occupation is not accidental. It has a law of motion that can be discerned if you take into account the history of Israel itself. So, clarifying aims is a matter of gaining perspective, really. You cannot gain any real perspective unless you are willing to commit yourself to certain ends and adopt the means consonant with those ends.

A Palestinian laborer praying at a construction site in Gilo, a Jewish settlement on land captured in 1967 and annexed to the municipality of Jerusalem. Israel did not include East Jerusalem in the current settlement freeze. The Wall and the West Bank town of Bethlehem are seen in the background.

Hussein Ibish: If you are involved in Palestinian national liberation for decades, as I have been, then it is clear that to have an effective political program you need a clear and well-defined goal. Without it, you can have no coherent strategy, and, without a coherent strategy, you cannot be effective. Things will just be random and ad hoc, and whatever momentary victories take place end up getting lost in the ether. So the question, “What is our actual goal?” is crucial.
Of course, there are organizations that will not take a stand. For example, the US Campaign to End the Occupation claims to be agnostic, so as not to alienate any potential activists. But the effect of such agnosticism has to be recognized. It means that such organizations can have no serious policy role or direct political effect. At best, they will only have an indirect effect, because they limit their work to public education.
If you are interested in affecting the Obama administration’s policy, rather than changing attitudes in the next 50 years among the general public in the United States, then one must be clear about goals. I am interested in policy now. There is a fierce urgency to ending the occupation as soon as possible. Let me delineate a scenario. You represent an organization that takes no position on the one-state/two-state question. You go to see a senior legislative aid in the office of your Congressman, and they ask, “You have two minutes. What do you want? What is your policy goal?” You will not get far if you begin a response with, “Well, umm…well you see…” So, honestly, if you are content with just raising awareness about the evils of Israeli policy, there is no problem with not taking a stance. But if you have a broader ambition, a political ambition, then it is simply inadequate.

Kovel: I think that there is a distinction between Ibish and myself that has to do with perspective. He is talking about work in Washington, work on policy. I think what he is saying is necessary, but very insufficient. I have a project which is longer range. For me the important thing is to consign Zionism to the dustbin of history, along with the divine right of kings. I do not think the world, certainly not that part of the world, can be made a better place unless Zionism is brought down.
So, the core of my opposition to two states is two-fold: First, it fails to provide Palestinians with genuine sovereignty and control over their own lives, producing instead a Bantustan. Second, it perpetuates Israel as a Zionist entity. If two states means the perpetuation of Israel as a Zionist state, then I oppose it.

Rubin: Are you saying if a two-state solution were possible, you would oppose it on the grounds that it leaves Israel as a Zionist entity? If that is the case, then it seems to me that you are saying something very different than Hussein’s work is necessary, because Hussein is working to end the occupation immediately.

Kovel: Hussein and I have a substantive difference. I do not want the situation to reach the stage it reached in apartheid South Africa; we do not have a true apartheid situation yet, but that may be on the horizon. That will come when Palestine becomes a Bantustan. Striving to make Palestine into a Bantustan is not to me a worthy goal.

Ibish: I am not working to make anywhere like a Bantustan. There is no group of serious Palestinians who are interested in the trappings of sovereignty without sovereignty. They would never agree to anything like that as a permanent agreement. What exists now is a temporary agreement and Palestinians are not satisfied with it, which is why they are not signing it.

Rubin: There are two anxieties about the two-state solution. On the Israeli side there is the oft-expressed fear that a Palestinian state would be a base for attacks against Israel. This fear is reinforced by a Palestinian discourse that speaks of liberation in stages. On the other side, Palestinians fear that a Palestinian state would be little more than a kleptocracy, one that would steal from its citizens, lack real sovereignty, and collaborate in the perpetuation of the occupation behind the mask of an internationally recognized pseudo-independence. Are either or both of these anxieties justified?

Kovel: I do not think the first anxiety is justified. It is just paranoid Israeli propaganda. The second is obviously justified—just look at the people who signed on to the “roadmap.” These people want a Palestinian authority to administer the police and the garbage disposal, not to exercise real power.

Rubin: One of those was Yasser Arafat. Are you saying the Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO] collaborates with the occupation?

Kovel: Well I think the Oslo Accords were an experiment, one that has failed wretchedly. Now we need to start rethinking things.

Ibish: I think that is right. The people doing the most far-reaching rethinking are actually in the cabinet of the PA [Palestinian National Authority], particularly Salam Fayyad. The state- and institution-building program, in order to end the occupation, is the best idea anyone has had in at least 15 years. And the Israeli elite cannot decide if it is interesting or terrifying. They have no idea how to react.
As to the question, I do not think either fear is completely irrational. I agree with Professor Kovel that the second is more rooted in reality, given the asymmetries of power involved. There are genuine concerns, especially among Palestinians, that the state that they are being offered is not and will not become a Bantustan.
I would only add that there would be serious fears attached to any potential one-state arrangement, if such a thing were plausible—which it is not. That is to say, under such circumstances, Palestinians might hope to exercise political power through the ballot box. But they would face a much richer, better educated, and better organized Jewish plurality possessing much stronger national institutions. As for Jewish Israelis, again, I think that the anxiety would be reversed. So the question is whether there is a discourse or model that can prevent a single-state arrangement going the way of the two models that actually exist in practice. The mandate period under the British witnessed mounting communal violence leading to civil war and ethnic cleansing, and the occupation speaks for itself: It is nightmarish for Israelis and completely unacceptable for Palestinians. So, the track record of political unity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not very reassuring, for either party.

Rubin: Let’s talk further about the fears surrounding a one-state solution. Israeli Jews would presumably be in the minority, although a very large minority. Would they not be oppressed by Palestinian Arabs? Is there no reason to fear the contrary as well, namely that Palestinians would be dominated by Israeli Jews, who would wield superior economic power?

Israeli construction workers build Israel's 8-meter high separation wall cutting the West Bank off from East Jerusalem.

Kovel: The current situation is unsustainable. It has to change one way or another, probably in a direction that we cannot confidently predict. What we have to do is try to provide the best possible circumstances for such changes as are bound to occur, to try to ensure that they occur in a beneficial way. This is why the one-state solution is less a political program than it is a strategic goal. No outcome is worthwhile unless it is grounded in universal human rights. And these rights are incompatible with the logic and ideology of Zionism. It is going to be very challenging, but the momentum already exists for the abolition of Zionism. Obviously, it is a long way from being ushered off the stage of history, but Zionism is caught up in innumerable internal contradictions, particularly post-Gaza. People are panicking because of its loss of legitimacy and ostracizing effects. Israel is moving toward the condition of South Africa in the latter part of the 1980s. In this context, we have to uphold the hope of a genuine alternative, one grounded in universal human rights.

Ibish: Those are all noble sentiments, but I see matters a little differently. To me, the imperative of ending the occupation is in everybody’s interests, especially the four million people who live under occupation in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. This cannot wait on the elimination of Zionism. It is unreasonable to put the liberation of the occupied territories on hold in favor of this much bigger project that speaks to humanity and serves some kind of cosmic interest. The occupation is too onerous, and too dangerous, to be subordinated to this other project.
It is also inaccurate that we have no foresight into the future. On the contrary, we can anticipate the most likely developments. Actually, treating this as a question of one state or two is misguided in the first place. It is not as if the Palestinians and Israelis have many options. Rather, they are faced with a fairly stark binary here: either have a two-state agreement to end the conflict and end the occupation, however imperfectly, or else perpetuate the conflict. A two-state agreement would certainly be an improvement, particularly for the people who live under occupation. Failing this, the likely scenario is certainly not a single state, but continued warfare.

Kovel: Very quickly, I want to emphasize that I by no means want to defer the ending of the occupation. I think of the one-state program not as a means of ending the occupation, but as a strategic goal that embodies universal human rights. Incidentally, this means opposition to the religious fundamentalisms thriving on both sides.

Rubin: I find this confusing. Many people will say “of course we cannot defer ending the occupation,” and yet they also say, “we favor a one-state approach.” But it would seem that if one adopts the program of a one-state solution, then one must drop the program of ending the occupation as quickly as possible. Wouldn’t ending the occupation necessarily entail the withdrawal of the Israeli military and the formation of a Palestinian state?
Hussein, could you be more specific about what you mean by a two-state solution? Because the notion of a two-state solution is rather vague. People have very different notions of what it would look like.

Ibish: Yes, you are right about that. The question facing the Palestinians in terms of national strategy is this: Is it worth continuing the war and the occupation to try to secure something that cannot be achieved in the foreseeable future? The fact that one element of international law cannot now be realized is no argument for failing to achieve others that can be.
And let me just say one thing about the refugees. People do not recognize the benefits that a Palestinian state would have for them. While it is true that the Geneva Initiative does not grant the right of return, the refugees would certainly have compensation as a result of this deal. They would also have a state in which they can find refuge. For the ones in Lebanon, this is potentially a matter of life and death. They will have an advocate on the international stage, a passport, and a nationality for the first time. None of this is a panacea. Nor does it correct all past injustices. But it is better than nothing, which is what Palestinian refugees have had since 1948.

Rubin: How do you think a two-state solution would affect each of the three parts of the Palestinian community: refugees, people in the occupied territories, and Palestinian citizens of Israel?

Ibish: The only plausibly achievable liberatory political objective for all of them is ending the occupation, creating a state, and going forward from there. All Palestinians would benefit from this to one extent or another—even prisoners.

Kovel: Regarding the Palestinian diaspora, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions for Palestine campaign [BDS] signals not just a way of delegitimating Israel and weakening the foundations of the Zionist entity, it is also a way to bring together people in the Palestinian diaspora and the occupied territories. I am very impressed with some of the people working on that.

Rubin: Speaking of BDS, there seems to be a studied ambiguity in the way it is formulated. Some use BDS as a means of pressuring Israel to end the occupation, while others view it as a means by which to delegitimize Zionism and the Israeli state. It would seem to me that this ambiguity might weaken the campaign’s effectiveness. How effective do you think BDS is as a strategy?

Ibish: I am not against boycotts in theory, but they work best when targeted at the occupation and the structures of the occupation. So, for example, the Norwegian divestment from the company that makes the sensors installed all along the wall in the West Bank is great. It hits hard. The more amorphous stuff we have seen is less effective. Moreover, I am skeptical that a wide range of major American institutions will ever divest from Israel.

Rubin: What about academic boycotts?

Ibish: American academic institutions are not going to boycott Israel. And while boycotts can cause real economic pain, they are inadequate as the primary tactic in a national struggle between two ethno-national groups. Israel is not going to be brought to its knees by boycotts.

Kovel: Certainly, boycotts cannot bring down the state of Israel. But the divestment campaign can perform an essential function in the building of a broad movement against Zionism. And it is already happening. The last year has been very promising. Spurred by the debacle, the horror, of Gaza, we saw for the first time significant numbers of people, including Jewish people, take part.
There are groups, such as the Al Adala Society, which I work with in New York. There are groups of young people, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, who are coming together and they are fired up. They are doing remarkable things. The other day in Brooklyn, they did a marvelous thing against the Israeli ballet. They got dressed up in Israeli flag-colored tutus and pranced around the street. It appealed to the imagination and is moving in a good direction. Now we do not know how far that is going to go, but it is freaking Israel out. Any major social transformation goes through ups and downs and periods of stagnation and despair. If you keep the momentum going, gradually at first but with exponential growth, it takes on force.

Ibish: I think almost all of that is right. I would make only one addendum to it: Most, if not all, of the major success stories of the BDS campaign are not what they seem to be. The people who supposedly divested, almost to an entity, say they did not. So you have the attribution of a statement to a group that says, “We are not making that statement.” Still, I agree that there is a momentum here which, if channeled in the right direction, could become powerful. And all branches of the Palestinian movement favor boycotts, though there is disagreement about what to target. Even the PA is leading a boycott of settlement goods and trying to get things like the wall-sensor company and other companies boycotted.

Rubin: At the core of the one-state/two-state debate, there appears to be a dispute about the nature of Zionism. The one-state position seems to be that Zionism is an inherently racist, expansionist project with which no accommodation is possible. Those who uphold the two-state position (except, of course, for Zionist two-staters) tend to have a more nuanced attitude towards Zionism that distinguishes among its different forms. They hold that there are strains of Zionism with which accommodation is possible. How should those interested in Palestinian liberation understand and approach Zionism today? Joel’s answer seemed to be that it is dying.

Kovel: Oh, it is not dying—but it is wounded. The challenge is to kill it off. While there are any number of Zionisms, there is one crystalline truth: Zionism is neither coherent nor effective until it becomes linked with state power. Once this happens and it becomes joined with legitimated violence, then it can do its will, which is to eliminate everything non-Jewish from the land of historic Palestine. This cannot be accommodated.

Ibish: Zionism is a very interesting political problem. But ending the occupation and achieving peace with Israel are still the Palestinian national goal. What confronts the Palestinians is not an abstract political theory of Zionism, but the Israeli state. You can say the Israeli state is motivated, ultimately, by Zionism. But the fact is that Israel now exists independently of Zionism as such, and has a momentum of its own.

Rubin: In the debates during the French Revolution regarding the emancipation of the Jews, the liberal Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre uttered the indelible phrase “To the Jews as individuals everything. To them as a nation, nothing.” The notion that Jews should have full civil and religious rights but no national rights was long held, with few exceptions, as axiomatic among left-wing thinkers. Article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter also asserts that Judaism is a revealed religion but not a nation. For a long time this was the Palestinian attitude. But should this rejection of national rights for Jews be maintained? If one recognizes the Jews as a national community, how does this affect the question of one versus two states? If one regards them as a national community and one is for a one-state program, would it be a binational state and what would that mean? Or are you for just a secular democratic state?

Ibish: There are two national movements, but one does not recognize the legitimacy of the other. The only way around that is to have two national projects side by side. Until such a time, the only ways I can imagine practically achieving a one-state outcome is through an almost unimaginably horrific mutual decimation and exhaustion, which I, for one, abhor. The other way is to have two states. Subsequently, these might voluntarily merge, over time, because it makes sense. There are real reasons for people who believe in one state, ultimately, to be sympathetic to the two-state agenda of ending the occupation now. There is no contradiction between a one-state aspiration for the far future and a two-state solution now.

Kovel: There is something fundamentally flawed about the very idea of a Jewish nationalism. From the very beginning, it lacked any integral relationship to a place. Its relationship to a place was always mythical.
Because there was no Poland to go back to, the Zionists had to express their nationalism through expropriation of another’s territory. Nationalism and settler colonialism, which inevitably bred racism, built the Israeli state. This is not a reasonable entity because, among other things, Israel’s nationalism has in recent decades been nourished in a bizarre relationship to the US that guarantees it full impunity. This goes back to the destruction of the USS Liberty, which was never even investigated. Such impunity reinforces other violent, paranoid, and exterminatory impulses. Think of the nuclear arsenal. Think of how they want to make war with Iran, which does not have nuclear arms yet. Here is that very pathological kind of nationalism that has so infused the Zionist project and the Israeli state. The Israeli state started off socialist in orientation. Now it is virtually fascist.

Rubin: If one accepts your dire portrayal of Israel, doesn’t that make a one-state solution even more impossible? You are saying that these people are psychotic racists with nuclear weapons—but we are all going to live peacefully together?

Kovel: I do not know how we can live with them, frankly, but what am I supposed to say? The best program is to mobilize the forces of human rights and delegitimate the Israeli state piece by piece, to gradually break it away through migration, etc., and to work in this country, ending the grip of the Israel lobby on U.S. policy.

Rubin: The shift within the PLO toward the two-state project seems to have begun sometime in the mid-1970s, and by the 1990s it had become the virtual consensus. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada we have seen some Palestinians return to earlier modes of speaking. What accounts for this in your view?

Ibish: There are no Palestinian political factions that have taken up the one-state argument. It is not a factor in the internal Palestinian debate. What accounts for the rise of this is that the Second Intifada was quite vicious and caused a great deal of pain on both sides. In consequence, everyone reassessed of what kind of peace was possible and desirable. In Israel, this produced a swing to the right. Among Palestinians in the occupied territories, the main effect was the rise of Islamists, mainly Hamas. Even the secular nationalists during the Second Intifada, such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (those were Fatah) began to employ religious rhetoric so as not to be outbid on religious legitimacy by the Islamists. The rise of one-state rhetoric among pro-Palestinian advocates in the West reflects the same kind of negative re-evaluation. I do not think it is a return exactly, though the rhetoric is very reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. Some people even call for a return to the “Three Nos”: “No negotiations, no peace, no Israel.” But the form is slightly different. Certainly there is a return to the strident nationalism that characterized the 1960s and 70s. But it comes from a place of pain, from the experience of the Second Intifada, and, more broadly, from 16 years of fruitless negotiation. Palestinians have seen a peace process that is all process and no peace, even as the number of settlers doubles every few years. Watching the occupied territories get eaten up, bit by bit, by the occupation has led many to conclude that diplomacy is pointless and a two-state agreement impossible.
Most pro-Palestinian one-state advocacy begins with the assertion that a two-state solution is impossible. This is rooted in perfectly truthful descriptions of a critical mass of settlements, settlers, and other topographical and administrative changes imposed on the territories by the occupation. The implication here is that those things are fait accompli, and can never be changed or reversed, whereas, in fact, they are of course the product of political will and can be reversed or adjusted through a redirection of political will. This is the best metric for assessing the viability of a two-state agreement, the question of political will. The overwhelming majorities of Palestinians and Israelis both want the same thing; they both want a two-state agreement. The problem is that they also do not think it will happen and they do not believe the other side can be worked with.

Rubin: Joel, in your book on overcoming Zionism, I found it disturbing that you quote the Old Testament, the Talmud, and employ the phrase “Judaic being.” You even include an anecdote about your own alienation from the synagogue in your youth. So there is a sense that you see many of the negative aspects of Zionism as arising from some deep Jewish history. The question is, if one adopts that attitude, which I would disagree with, isn’t saying “overcoming Zionism” in some way a request for people to overcome Judaism?

Kovel: There is an existential fissure, a rupture in Jewish history. Zionism is about Judaism. The Jewish people made a terrible decision to build that state in the first place. It was not theirs to begin with, and the decision has caused a lot of harm. I think the Jews have to give up the idea of Jewish exceptionalism and the notion that they are entitled to this land, which they are not.
There is a striking political change in the new generation. Younger Jewish people are increasingly ill at ease with Zionism. The older the Jewish person, the more they are existentially tied to Zionism.

Ibish: This is in the United States. In Israel something similar may be happening, but Zionism is being supplanted by Israeli national identity. Though divorced from Zionism it is existential and no less difficult to deal with.

Kovel: And this national identity is tending towards fascism. The task of the Jewish people is to reflect and reassess. Thus far they have not measured up to it.

Ibish: Again, this argument about Zionism is one that Jews should have, but it is extraneous to the question of Palestinian national strategy.

Kovel: We disagree. What obstructs positive change is Zionism.

Rubin: The question that I was raising concerned the way your argument implies that the negative aspects of Zionism come from deep Jewish history, as opposed to an understanding of Zionism as a modern political phenomenon that is not rooted in an ancient Jewish history or a Jewish way of being. But, let’s leave that aside. In the United States, after the Second Intifada, we have seen the rise of various liberal and left Jewish groups focusing on Israel-Palestine and US policy. Some of these, like Brit Tzedek v’Shalom [aka, Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace] and J Street chose to describe themselves as pro-Israel and pro-Peace, whereas others such as Not In My Name, Jewish Voice for Peace, and American Jews for a Just Peace, avoid the term pro-Israel. Some are even explicitly anti-Zionist. What is your attitude towards them and how do you distinguish among them?

Kovel: The more anti-Zionist, the better.

Ibish: I am ecumenical about this. I want to meet with, talk to, and work with anyone who wants to end the occupation. You want to end the occupation, I want to talk to you. I have nothing to say to an organization like the ZOA [Zionist Organization of America]. I have nothing to say to Hamas, either. If you want to end the occupation, let’s do it. That is where I draw the line.

Rubin: Dr. Kovel, you are an avowed Marxist. How do class divisions within both Israeli and Palestinian society affect the conflict? Also, you do not highlight any connection between overcoming Zionism and overcoming capitalism. Is there any real connection between capitalism and the struggle over Israel-Palestine? Or are questions of socialism and capitalism essentially irrelevant to this particular conflict, in your view?

Kovel: My book takes this up, but in an understated way. It is not foregrounded for tactical reasons. The relevant example is South Africa. What happened there is simple: A deal was cut whereby the South African bourgeoisie was allowed to retain power in exchange for siding with Mandela’s African National Congress [ANC]. In effect, the ANC said, “you give us the national political arena that we need and you can run the economy. We will integrate you with global capital.” Forty percent of the people were thus immediately declared useless because they do not generate surplus value. So, there was hell to pay. Now, obviously there are big differences between Israeli capitalism and South African capitalism. South Africa is a powerhouse with huge reserves and an industrial base. Israel is a casino capitalist country with fancy high-tech military industries.

Ibish: Teasing out the element of class in the Palestinian struggle, the Palestinian reality, and the Palestinian future, is really very daunting and complicated. But there are a few things worth noting. First is that the case against global neoliberalism should not be deployed in relation to the question of the occupied territories. There is something much more urgent in the occupied territories than neoliberalism. The occupation supersedes that problem and is much more elemental. There are people with no passports, people with no country. There are people who live under different laws than the people of another ethnicity who live next door to them. There are checkpoints. The whole society is stifled. So, while neoliberalism is something to keep in mind, it is neither the cause nor the solution of the occupation.
That said, class divisions among Palestinians are a serious problem. A lot of the refugees and the ordinary people of the occupied territories come from the old peasant and working classes and, certainly, they get instrumentalized by the Palestinian elites. This is something that, unfortunately, has always been a hallmark of this struggle, but it has been superseded by something else. The PA order in the West Bank and the Hamas order in Gaza have produced new social classes and new ruling elites dependent upon themselves. Two things are happening simultaneously. One is what the PA government is doing with the state institution building, structured around the prime minister’s office under the president’s protection. They are creating a new independent administrative structure which, eventually, will give rise to another new social class. This is a challenge to the existing new social class, that is, the cadres of Fatah that have control over patronage, money, contracts, etc. There is a lot of resistance to it from the upper cadres of Fatah, because it seeks to strip patronage and privilege from people ensconced in the party and to render institutions more meritocratic. That is in the West Bank. In Gaza, you have something completely different, the rise of a new social class centered around Hamas rule. One thing people now say in Gaza is, “If you want justice, you’d better have a beard.” Hamas is constructing an authoritarian, drifting toward a totalitarian, structure. The lack of freedom is extraordinary. One of the striking things about the sex scandal that is going on in the West Bank is not that there is a sex scandal surrounding a politician. This is shocking to Palestinians, who are a very conservative people, but these things happen. But what the Arabic language press has noted is that such a scandal cannot happen in Gaza, because there is no free press there to put it out, discuss it, have a controversy, etc. So, there is a rise of a new deeply authoritarian and puritanical social class in Gaza that is really very troubling. It is something that Palestinians absolutely have to deal with. These are new social dynamics and they are potentially very dangerous.

Q & A

Before 1948 there was space for radical politics rooted in neither ethnic nor religious nationalism. Are there groups in Palestine today that we can look toward whose politics are not religiously or ethnically based?

Ibish: Yes, at least two different kinds, but they are both marginal. The first is that of traditional intellectual leaders. They lack political force and organization, but their politics are, if not radical, at least influenced by radicalism. People like Hanan Ashrawi and the Abdul Shafi family and Mustafa Barghouti and people like that are certainly influenced by international Left discourse. They are a traditional quasi-radical leadership. What they do is more rhetorical and discursive. The other space where you find this is in the nonviolent protest movement in the West Bank. Admittedly, this is taking place in an environment shaped politically by the PA, with the approval and support of Salam Fayyad and Mahmoud Abbas. The nonviolent protesters have targeted the wall and some of these protests have been effective. They are clearly supported by the PA, but this movement also has a sort of Gramscian, decentralized, grassroots quality. It approaches politics. It has been very effective in the limited context of specific villages and has forced the Israelis to actually reroute the wall in one instance. This deserves support. They are nascent groups and one can only hope that they grow.

Kovel: There was a group called Matzpen, a group of Israeli Trotskyists, Fourth Internationalists. They mostly live in England now. The Alternative Information Center is also very good. They did a study on Israeli universities, showing how every major Israeli university actively takes part in the occupation. Opposing this has nothing to do with obstructing academic freedom. Every institution, every university in Israel is doing work for the IDF [Israel Defense Force] and it is good that there are people studying it.
There are also the military resisters in Israel. There is an ominous division within the military, the dominant institution in Israeli society. Increasingly, the lower echelons of the military are influenced by hard right-wing religious forces, while the refuseniks and others resist their government. They should be supported.

Kovel, if you do not want the Palestinians expelled, you want peace, and you are calling for a single state, doesn’t that mean expelling the Jews?

Kovel: That is a big problem that has to be worked out. I want to underscore what I said earlier, that we should not minimize just how awful the situation has been. But nobody in this room made it that way, though we have to deal with it. According to polls, as many as 15 percent of Israeli Jews say they would emigrate if the Palestinians came to power. They would still have a very substantial minority, though the censuses overstate the number of Jews in Israel.

Ibish: Yes. There are about 700,000 or so Jewish Israelis who are citizens but who reside primarily somewhere else. They are all counted, whereas almost none of the Palestinians who live somewhere else are counted.

Kovel: A single state solution would probably require a kind of protectorate of interested powers guaranteeing the safety of the people there for an extended period of time, until they can work out their peace and reconciliation process, which will take a long time.

We are far from a solution to the Israel-Palestine issue. My question is historical: How do you understand how we have reached this point? Moreover, where can we look now to find actual political solutions? Where is the Left in all this?

Ibish: Which Left? There is the Arab Left, the Western Left. It is very complicated. But first, how we got here. Historically, the diplomatic process has been completely mismanaged by all the parties, particularly by the United States. It has not addressed, much less remedied, the asymmetry of power between the two parties. Without international pressure it is politically almost impossible for Israeli leaders to actually follow through on commitments made to Palestinians. They renege on them, because they have the power to do so.
One of the places I think you can really look for hope, at the moment, is the state- and institution-building agenda. It is the Palestinian answer to the settlements and is both unilateral and constructive. If sustained over a period of years with financial and technical support from around the world and political protection from the United States, it will change the strategic equation completely. It asserts and adopts the responsibilities of self-government without Israeli permission, simply by doing it unilaterally.

Kovel: I cannot urge strongly enough the importance of organizing in this country against the destructive relationship currently existing between the US and Israel and mediated by the so-called “lobby.” If we change the balance of influence in this country, there will be very rapid and dramatic changes in Palestine. | P

Transcribed by Gabriel Gaster

Is the funeral for the wrong corpse?

Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain

Hal Foster is a prominent critic and art historian who contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review, and The Nation. He is also an editor of October. In the fall of 2009, he sent out a questionnaire to 70 critics and curators, asking them what “contemporary” means today. Foster notes that the term “contemporary” is not new, but that “What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment.”[1] 35 critics and historians attempted to answer to the problems implied in this observation.

Bret Schneider: About the What Is Contemporary? survey that appeared in the journal October this past fall—I am interested to learn your motives in surveying critics and curators in this way, i.e. by questionaire. It seems to imply some bewilderment, or maybe even discontent with the recent heterogeneity of contemporary art. What was at stake for you in this questionnaire?

Hal Foster: Perhaps it was fueled by discontent, but bewilderment also played a part. For my generation contemporary art seemed to have a special purchase on the present; the sense that art is an index of the moment appears lost in today’s profusion of practices. That is a source of discontent for me. As for bewilderment, well, that could just be another name for ignorance.

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, a major work of the Russian avant-garde, at the “Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10” in Petrograd in 1915.

Of course, any present is made up of many presents. One of the definitions of contemporary is not that we are all in the same time, but that many times coexist at once. We live in a plurality of moments, and I am ill at ease with the relativism that such a temporality implies. There used to be a way in which contemporary art was still connected to prior art as well as to its own moment. That, too, does not seem to be powerfully the case anymore. This is why I framed the questions in the survey around two models that appear dysfunctional now: modernism/postmodernism and avant-garde/ neo-avant-garde. This framing was also an avowal of my relative distance from contemporary art, which is odd for a person who, for a long time, was active as a critic.

Omair Hussain: I am interested in the discussion of times when contemporary art was seemingly a more acute expression of its contemporary moment, but also understood itself as expressing and reflecting upon an entire history of art making. If, by contrast, contemporary art today can be characterized as both pluralistic and lacking in historical awareness, how do you perceive the relationship between these two attributes? Is contemporary plurality antithetical to historical consciousness?

HF: One excellent response to the survey speaks to this question. Kelly Baum, a young curator at Princeton, argues that the heterogeneity of art today actually performs the greater heterogeneity found in the social field at large. Rather than chaotic, then, it represents the dispersal that characterizes societal relations today. In this view plurality does not invalidate contemporary art as an index of the present but guarantees it. This take is interesting, but it is also a little sophistical—and it gives art too much of a pass.

What drew me to contemporary art originally was the way it seemed both to engage the historical field and to access the contemporary moment. Art history suggested that if you could follow a line, say, from the 19^th century to the present, you might grasp the very trajectory of history. That was an illusion, of course, but a powerful one; it was an ego trip, too, to imagine you could surf the dialectic in this manner. Yet it made for a historical consciousness on the part of particular artists and critics that is not so evident today. The terms have changed, and the October questionnaire was a way to get at how the old terms no longer function, and to see what new terms might be taken up in their place.

BS: Why did you not ask any artists to participate in the “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’”? What was the significance of asking only critics and curators? Do you think that this domain is where the problems of contemporary art are best addressed, and if so, why, considering the current interest in decentralizing art discourse? What does the lack of response from curators express?

HF: I did not ask artists because I felt it was not their problem really—that it bore more heavily on critics, historians, and curators. At first I was puzzled as to why more curators did not respond. It is likely this silence speaks to an anxiety in institutions dedicated to contemporary art, but I can only guess. Certainly in the discipline of art history the contemporary is putting great pressure not just on the modern field but also on other fields. If you are trained in traditional Chinese or Indian art history, say, you might think that contemporary art, with the great pull of the market, has distorted your field.

BS: Could you clarify the ways in which art of the past had a purchase on its own historical moment? This implies that there was some sort of cohesive promise or at least some guiding principles. If there was once a promise of contemporary art, what was it?

HF: By the late 1930s, with Stalinism in particular, there was the sense that radical innovation in society was thwarted, but that it might be continued elsewhere, in the realm of culture—“to keep culture moving” is how Clement Greenberg put it in 1939. It’s an idea that comes out of the disappointments of 1917, out of a long history of the failure of radical politics in the 20^th century. In this way the Trotskyist notion of “permanent revolution” was displaced onto advanced art, and in large part it kept the idea of the avant-garde alive in the postwar period (Michael Fried argued this point in 1965). If the political seemed to be thwarted somehow, maybe the idea could be preserved within the sphere of the artistic. Yet even in that formulation there was already a reactive, or at least a conservative, displacement from politics to art.

Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) is located on the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Built of black basalt rocks and earth from the site, the artist created a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counter-clockwise into the water.

BS: There has been a lot of theorization about the avant-garde being a project committed to breaking down the barriers between art and life. Do you see this characterization as valid, and if so, what have been effects of that project?

HF: That idea that the avant-garde aimed to break down the division between art and life was never my understanding, at least as far as most movements were concerned. That is an idea that critics like Peter Bürger supported, but it is just not specific enough.

BS: You called it a “romanticized” view somewhere.

HF: Yes. Nevertheless, it is not untrue for some avant-gardes. Certainly there was a desublimation of art in Dada, but its effects were very ambiguous. Did it produce a politicization of art or an aestheticization of much else? That is the old question, and I cannot answer definitively. Later, if a breakdown of the division between art and life did occur, it occurred in the interests of the culture industry, not of anything else. That recuperation, too, is an old story now, and for a long time artists have developed other projects in its wake.

OH: Yet I think the problem is raised anew by new social art practices and relational aesthetics, art practices that are still very much concerned with the breakdown of boundaries between art and the everyday. How do you understand the curious persistence of that mission within contemporary art today? If that project is continued, what do you foresee as the repercussions for art as a specific genre of production?

HF: My sense is that one cannot decide once and for all between artistic autonomy and social embeddedness. It is a tension that should persist. Sometimes I am on the side of Adorno, and sometimes I am opposed. It depends on the situation. To me that is not opportunistic, it is simply being responsive. Even if the autonomy of art is always only semi-autonomy, it is important to insist on. Otherwise art becomes instrumental, which is problematic even if that means it is an instrument in the hands of progressive artists.

One thing that strikes me about relational art is that it treats art spaces like a last refuge of the social—as if social interaction had become so difficult or so depleted elsewhere that it could only happen in the vacated spaces of art. It was such a sad take on the state of sociability at large. I also felt that, for all its worthy attempt to work against the spectacular basis of contemporary art, there was a way in which it posed participation as a spectacle of its own. I suppose I am more interested in practices that use art as a guise or ruse for other practices altogether, such as pedagogy, say, or politics.

BS: It seems like there has been a return to Adorno in your recent writing. For instance, in your essay “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,”[2] you begin with an Adorno quotation that posits the uncertainty of the existence of art, and continually recall Adorno throughout the essay, replacing “philosophy” with “art” when quoting his famous line from Negative Dialectics, “philosophy lives on because the moment of its realization has been missed.” Have you made a return to Adorno in your recent writing? If so, what pressures of the contemporary moment is that a reaction or response to?

HF: My first edited book was The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), which was explicitly anti-Adornian. As it was concerned to posit a “postmodernism of resistance,” it was mostly Gramscian in its view of cultural politics. That was right for its moment, but as the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism became routine, the attack on autonomy became counterproductive. Most of the relevant institutions, from the academy to the art museums, absorbed the blows and gave them back with redoubled force. At that point it was important to insist on disciplinary difference again. All these positions are time-sensitive and site-specific. Again, it is not opportunistic to move from position to position; it is often necessary—and sometimes dogmatic not to do so.

BS: To return to this non-art aspect of recent artist talks, and supplementary discourse—what you suggest in your book The Return of the Real, is this neo-avant-garde shift from addressing “intrinsic” concerns within art to confronting the “discursive” problems of art. In the absence of a cohesive avant-garde or neo-avant-garde, can this confrontation take place? If the neo-avant-garde has somehow “run into the ground” can there still be a persistence of this kind of shift from intrinsic concerns to discursive problems?

HF: I think there can be, but the connection to prior attempts to make these articulations has become attenuated, and that makes it all the more difficult. My concern here might be dismissed as merely territorial—that is, I care about these prior attempts because I am an art historian. It might have little or no bearing on contemporary practice; for the most part that is not how work is generated today. For a while in the 1990s and 2000s many artists returned to certain moments in the 1960s and the 1970s; there was an attempt to establish a further “neo” relation to that neo-avant-garde. But that seems faded now. Ultimately what concerns me is that if we do not have some terms in common for contemporary art, it is hard to determine what is at stake and of value in it. That is as directly as I can put the problem.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Hotel Democarcy installed at “Art Unlimited” in Art Basel in 2003.

BS: If the contemporary moment is disconnected from the history of the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, where do you locate the breaking point? Would you attribute it to the moment in the 1960s when Debord and the Situationists deliberately attempted to break with modernism?

HF: That was part of it. Obviously, Debord broke with the artistic side of the avant-garde project, but his moment could allow such a gesture. As the 1960s developed, there was an immense expansion in art, one that provoked Adorno’s worry about the end of art. Think of the heterogeneity of an artist like Robert Smithson alone: It is only articulate against the foil of a rigid idea of what counts as art. Smithson had such a foil. Do artists now? Perhaps it might not matter anymore if work has a historical connection. Maybe that is just no longer the point. But, if so, consider what is lost. Not so long ago art not only “made it new” but also made things count, or made the attempt to count. Art was conceived as an intervention, one that might revalue other interventions too. The goal was to be radical in terms of history as well. If that ambition has faded, that to me is a loss.

BS: What is your interest in Dada? On the one hand, you acknowledge that the contemporary moment is both largely disconnected and uninterested in the history of modern art. Yet, in your writing, you seek to return particular modernist moments, like Dada.

HF: Maybe this contradicts what I just said. There is a Dada spirit in some work today, if you think about artists like Thomas Hirschhorn and Isa Genzken. In part, they have led me to look back again at Dada. But I do not see their work as “neo-Dada.”

BS: Can this connection be characterized by recent styles of “the unmonumental” and is that problematic?

HF: Is it already a style? Too bad. Shows like “The Unmonumental” at the New Museum throw a lot of different work together. Some is indeed neo-Dada, but some is not. Again, some is Dadaist in spirit in this sense: it practices a mimesis, an exacerbation, of the awful conditions of capitalist society, as a form of critique. Historically, it has to do with Hugo Ball far more than Duchamp or Fluxus.

BS: I was curious about whether or not artists like Isa Genzken or Thomas Hirschhorn self-identify in this vein of “unmonumental” or neo-Dada. There is a general reception of this art today that frames the work as a polemic against the purported monumental qualities of modernism. This polemic seems to project sweeping and vague notions of a grand narrative onto modernism. But that projection seems to be in opposition to your view of modernism, a view that does not perceive modernism simply as a unified, cohesive movement.

HF: Yes. For me it is a mistake—an old postmodernist mistake—to monumentalize or to totalize modernism. And sometimes these artists do that. Genzken does it, for example, in her work on the Bauhaus. But as an artist she is not obliged to be historically precise. Hirschhorn, on the other hand, is clear about his commitments—not just his political commitments but also his artistic commitments.

BS: In “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you discuss Rosalind Krauss’s idea that postmodern art incorporated modernist art and “trumped” it at the same time. You go on to suggest that today postmodern art is being trumped in turn. In what ways is postmodern art being trumped? By what?

HF: This is what I had in mind when I said postmodernism has become routine. In the first moment, postmodernism’s attempt to reach out beyond given forms and disciplines was progressive in all kinds of ways, and in her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” Krauss provided one map of these moves. (It was a particular map, a structuralist grid; it was unconcerned with historical process or social connection.) What happened is that over time those moves became routine. To move into the space of architecture, for example, became easy, almost automatic, even decorative. In short, the expanded field imploded, and artists had to reposition.

OH: I wonder if you perceive any relationship between a once-radical gesture become routine and the nature of the initial gesture itself. Was there something about the way in which these artists of the 1960s attempted to break with modernism that could be seen as consequential to the ineffectuality of postmodernism? Or does its failure lies outside of the control of artists?

HF: That is a good question and a difficult one. It is incumbent on artists to anticipate as much as possible how their work will be received and positioned. But, after a certain point, it is not in their control to do so. Could one have foreseen that interdisciplinarity would become routine? Maybe not. Did Daniel Buren have to become a decorator? No. And so on.

OH: Yet there seems to be a qualitatively different type of rupture in that moment than in previous modernist moments. With formal innovation serving as the primary project of the modernist avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde was often concerned with the institutions of art. Is there a relationship between the neo-avant-garde’s rejection of modernism’s formal concerns in favor of institutional concerns and the falling out of that project today? In retrospect, what have been the successes and failures of the neo-avant-garde project? When we look back on “Sculpture in The Expanded Field” from the culture industry which has absorbed and routinized it, did this ideology clarify previous “missed” moments like modernism, for example, or dismiss them ?

HF: My distinction between an avant-garde focus on conventions and a neo-avant-garde focus on institutions was too neat. Conventions both imply and require institutions, and if you change forms radically enough, as the Russians did a century ago, you also change institutions. Of course, the avant-garde moment was one of revolutionary change at large, in a way that, arguably, the neo-avant-garde moment was not.

Hugo Ball reciting sound poetry in cubist costume at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich in 1917.

I still find helpful an old essay by the historian Perry Anderson that discusses the conditions of the historical avant-garde. First, there was a rigid academy to be resisted. Then there was a technological transformation to be addressed. Finally, there was a socialist revolution to be engaged. In his account—it is schematic—they drove the historical avant-garde, in its many varieties, in the moment of World War I. For the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s those conditions no longer obtained, but new ones provided an analogous context nonetheless. If there was not an art academy to resist, there was a mass-media culture to contest. If there was not a second industrial revolution to address, there was a post-industrial transformation to consider. And if there was not a socialist revolution to engage, there were struggles of other kinds to join somehow—postcolonial, racial, sexual. These forces persist, and the need to develop forms and institutions accordingly also persists. So, in principle, the avant-garde project should be alive and well. Why does it not seem so? Is it my myopia—or is it blocked by other forces? Probably both.

BS: You speak of a kind of historical trajectory, with the shift from the avant-garde to the neo-avant-garde marked by a shift in objects of reaction and resistance. How do you understand the contemporary moment in relationship to this trajectory? What are the “objects of resistance and reaction” for contemporary art? Are artists reacting to or cohesively resisting anything? Is an organized resistance or reaction still important for an art in the culture industry?

HF: In The Anti-Aesthetic I argued that there was a shift from the transgressive to a resistant model of the avant-garde. Maybe that language needs to be revised. For several years now there has been talk about the post-critical, but I do not buy it. The young artists and critics I know are very concerned with critical projects. They simply approach the critical in different ways.

On the one hand, it is a moment to insist again on the semi-autonomy of art as a basis of critique, and to find, in art making, models of subjectivity and sociality that are blotted out elsewhere in the culture. That seems crucial to me: There are sensuous and cognitive experiences that art still allows and that screen culture does not. On that score, then, art now and art forever. On the other hand, one might argue that all this does not matter anymore, that all that is left to art is to use art as a disguise or ruse with which to do other things—to be activists or educators or hackers or whatever. That argument makes sense to me too. And no doubt there are positions in-between. But unless young artists, critics, and curators develop the terms for these options, nothing much will be developed at either extreme or in the positions of mediation in-between.

OH: In reference to the two poles you have established— art as the sensual and cognitive, and art as disguise for activism and participation—does the latter endanger the former?

HF: Of course they challenge each other. That is part of the point! But they are the terms of a debate at least, if they could be made precise. It is not to decide one way or the other, it is to develop each position agonistically. That is a debate that is needed, it seems to me.

BS: What is suggested here is that maybe the current social climate is so changed that it cannot allow for the radical systemic rethinking for which avant-garde art was pivotal. But, conversely, I also get the impression that through your writing you would not be writing about Dada if you did not think that maybe this situation is not so much different…that maybe it is actually a lot less changed than we think it is? What are the possibilities for art to have a purchase on the present? How far removed are we from the historical possibilities presented by past avant-gardes?

HF: It is easy to make claims about the end of this, that, and the other thing. That kind of nondialectical dialectic is very seductive because it is, weirdly, very triumphal in its defeatism. Certainly, innovative art, if not radical art, is not as central to the society as it once was, but that does not mean the project is kaput. The forces of amnesia have not won out altogether! I do not think this project is dead, by any means. I would not continue to do what I do if I did. There are art practices that do have effects beyond the art world. I think there are exhibitions that have effects that cannot be anticipated. It is what artists want to make of those historical episodes, if anything at all.

Another opposition we talked about that seems really crucial is, to what extent is it important for contemporary art to be reflexive historically, to draw on the past, and to transform the past. I think either position could be argued right now. It should be argued right now. And if these debates could be articulate enough, there will be effects. Not only in art, but elsewhere.

BS: Yet, in “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you also characterize the contemporary moment as having a ghostly or spectral quality. What is your interest in this spectral aspect and why are past moments still “living on” and open to interpretation by today’s artists?

HF: My interest in the spectral is not a melancholic lament about the end of art. It is to suggest that, rather than fixate on stories of rupture and death, we think about other narratives, ones of living on or after, of creative aftermath. For me the spectral has the force of the revenant, the figure that returns to surprise, even to haunt. I am very interested in the afterlives of the modern, as art historians like Aby Warburg were interested in the afterlives of the classical. That was what was at stake in the essay. It was not to say, “Oh, dead body, how sad.” It was to say, “Wow, this dead body is not so dead. It is alive in ways we do not recognize.”

BS: In response to what you characterize as “an allergy” to grand narratives, in “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” you suggest that maybe we should not simply dismiss grand narratives, that perhaps they contain something necessary. What is significant to you about grand narratives? What about this moment expresses a need to return to broader historical purview, or at least reevaluations?

HF: The polemic against grand narratives became a doxa of the postmodern. But I think Habermas was largely right in his debate with Lyotard: There are values in the project of modernity that should not be thrown out altogether. Certainly narratives are oppressive when they are only grand. But we all need stories to make sense of what we do. There is no project without a story that situates our actions. Finally, as Jameson argues, postmodernism is not the end of narrative: It is a new chapter in the grandest of all modern narratives, the history of capitalism.

BS: Has the project of replacing a paradigm of grand narratives with one of more local, specialized, micropolitics proved itself to be equally ineffective in dealing with the present as a failure of previous hopes in the history of capitalism?

HF: I do not know, but I do not think so. I think the microalternative is only problematic when it becomes so micro that it is atomistic in an identitarian way and lacks any articulate connection to other stories, other projects, other struggles. But I do not think that is necessarily the case. How that is made articulate in art criticism or history seems to be a really important project. To do that in the space of the contemporary, which is more and more vast every day, or so it seems, is very difficult to do. I think, to go back to form-discourse-institution connection—that would be an extraordinary project for a collective, or for a school to entertain, to really sit down and work through some of these questions seriously. | P

[2] Hal Foster, “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2003), 123–144.

Bhaskar Sunkara

ONE HAS TO ADMIRE THEIR PERSISTENCE. Labor Notes, the flagship journal of the domestic labor Left, professes itself to be “the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back into the labor movement.” Though stylistically about as riveting as the phonebook, for more than three difficult decades Labor Notes has critically observed and recorded organized labor’s endemic corruption, democratic shortcomings, and gross ineptitude in organizing workers in the private sector, where today only 7.2 percent of Americans are unionized. In a typically journalistic manner, most of these problems are blamed on the perfidy of individuals: union staffers and leaders insufficiently committed to class solidarity and grassroots participation. Similarly, the striking decline in union strength is attributed to deindustrialization and the hypermobility of global capital in the neoliberal age. What is needed, according to this standard Labor Notes narrative, is new currents within the labor movement to bring to power more dynamic actors capable of meeting the challenges of the new century. In his new book Solidarity for Sale longtime labor activist Robert Fitch begs to differ.

“Corruption,” Fitch argues, “flows from the retarded development of American unions, which still haven’t broken out of nineteenth-century models of labor organization” (ix). Modern labor’s rot began at its genesis, Fitch claims. It derives from the exclusionary craft unionism initiated by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). A century ago unskilled workers, minorities, and women were willfully neglected, while mainstream unions opposed even the most rudimentary social democratic legislation to benefit the wider working class. The famous AFL president Samuel Gompers even opposed eight-hour workday legislation on ideological grounds, differentiating the AFL from European unions that he saw as “espousing an effeminate social welfare philosophy as well as a primitive egalitarianism” (40). The AFL was concerned with wages. The mixture of this self-interested “business unionism” and the conditions in certain sectors of the economy like the textile industry, where craft unions predominated and employers were numerically small enough to be cajoled, facilitated the rise of job-control unionism. This rendered workers subservient to union officials doling out jobs, which in turn reinforced an insular culture of loyalty predicated upon fear rather than solidarity. Though defended by many progressives, Fitch sees this uniquely American development as noxious, making domestic unions highly susceptible to penetration by organized crime.

Stretches of Fitch’s account read like a crime-noir novel. Questioning the founding narrative of big labor, a tale that conveniently begins with the struggle for the eight-hour day and ends with the New Deal, Fitch airs dirty laundry with the cheek of a muckraking journalist. While such tales of the corruption and mob-dealings of figures like Sam Parks, Cornelius “Con” Shea, Jimmy Hoffa, and Ron Carey are not entirely ignored by other members of the labor left, they are typically consigned to the realm of anecdotal gossip. In Fitch’s narrative, these are not just the failings of unsavory individuals, but of structurally compromised institutions.

But “job control” is far from a universal feature of domestic unionism. A more fundamental flaw is the functioning of unions as de facto fiefdoms, a result principally of a system of exclusive jurisdictions. For instance, New York City District Council of Carpenters Local 608 is absolute in its rule over much of New York City; it claims the right not only to represent, but to tax everyone who seeks work in carpentry there. The union’s sway is guaranteed by a corporatist pact with capital and the state. When a union makes an agreement with an employer, it is automatically validated by the government with a bargaining certificate, giving the union what amounts to an effective legal monopoly in the carpentry labor market. Fitch argues that “jurisdictional monopolies produce both the powerful and uncritical adhesion of the insiders to their union boss and the weak sense of union identity on the part of the remainder, who become purely nominal members” (329). Rank-and-file workers understandably do not see their unions as belonging to them and are cut off from other workers beyond their jurisdiction, stunting their potential politicization. Debate at the local level, a feature of any vibrant movement, is stifled, generating a top-down movement with grassroots pretensions.

Unlike the stronger European movement, American labor is built around a virtual closed shop, compulsory unionism unknown elsewhere in the world. Though unions cannot technically require membership as a condition of employment, in most states under “union shop” rules, workers are compelled to join the union within their first month on the job. Also uniquely American is the exclusive-bargaining clause in union contracts. This clause prevents workers from selecting the union of their choice. This more than anything else is what explains rapid expansion of the Teamsters in the 1930s: Rather than from their organizing acumen, it resulted from their willingness to offer substandard contracts to bosses threatened by more militant, less corrupt CIO organizers. For decades, men like Hoffa served as capital’s accomplices, undermining militants who opposed the sellout of labor’s rights.

But even in its death throes, the American labor left argues that labor’s fate depends upon preserving the status quo. It refuses to ask itself the question, Why, then, has the European labor movement been more effective without these idiosyncrasies? Is their bourgeoisie of a kinder disposition or their leaders less susceptible to the blandishments of management? The editors of Labor Notes, in the back cover copy of their well-circulated pamphlet Democracy Is Power, argue that a voluntary system, contrary to the automatic dues system of the United States that sustains our labor gentry, would promote an “individualist and consumeristic approach,” where “people could decide whether to pay dues or not based on whether they personally received services they felt were worth the money.”[1] This is utterly ludicrous and reprehensible in a book whose stated aim is to “show what member control really looks like, and why it is crucial to labor’s future.”[2] It demonstrates the fact that this breed of reformer operates within the same conservative paradigm as those they claim to oppose. The much-trumpeted Union Democracy movement is too narrowly focused to be of any long-term consequence. It is a symptom of the Left’s dilapidated state that “radicals” do not have the confidence to believe that, under conditions of free discussion and debate, they would be able to sway workers towards the politics of solidarity and class consciousness. This lack of confidence cannot be understood without examining both developments within the capitalist mode of production and the disappearance of the Marxian left over the past decades.

The “golden age” of social democracy has become a figure of nostalgia on the labor left. The 1970s saw industrial nations face the intersection of weak growth and persistent inflation. Capitalism could not cope with low unemployment rates and the wage demands of militant unions. The neoliberal restructuring, far from an insidious Friedmanite plot, was rooted in real contradictions and succeeded on its own terms. The working class was restrained, inflation stabilized, and profit rates restored. Much of the labor Left seeks to re-wage those battles, futilely attempting to reverse the present historical trajectory. The complacent labor leadership, conforming their politics to “Third Way” centrist currents, understands the folly of this better than do many rank-and-file activists. The only way forward out of the present historical impasse is a recovery not only of labor movement dynamism, but, even more importantly, of anticapitalist politics. Without a political Left and its post-capitalist vision there is little to galvanize radicals, much less the wider working class.

Yet despite the social democratic trappings, Fitch’s proposed solution is essentially radical:

Well-rooted, venerable institutions rarely change much because of internal opposition. Martin Luther would have probably not have gotten far if he kept his protest within the Roman Catholic Church.

Warlord systems are especially well adapted to resisting change. For centuries, ruling Afghan and Somalian clans have controlled the good bottomlands, trade routes, smuggling operations, and so on. The resources enable them to recruit selected fellow clan members as clients—chiefly as fighters. Those who aren’t in the clan are deprived by the system. They don’t vote. To include them would be an attack on the entire system. (328)

Fitch recommends a few piecemeal reforms to those fighting within the labor movement, such as the creation of a new and more democratic union press, cutting the number of union officials and transitioning to a model more reliant on volunteer labor, instituting term limits, and allowing union members, not leadership, to decide which politicians get their dues. But, beyond these concrete recommendations, Fitch argues that in order to truly rebuild American unions, radicals must begin at the beginning. “The periods of creativity and growth in the American labor movement,” Fitch writes, “have always come when trade unions were challenged from outside—in the 1930s with the rise of the CIO, in the Progressive Era by the Wobblies, and, above all, during the era of the Knights of Labor in the mid-to-late nineteenth century” (337).

Some will question Fitch’s emphasis. His provocative stories of union corruption contrast markedly with standard left-liberal accounts that downplay it, focusing instead on America’s rich history of employer violence and legal obstructionism. More dubious is his closing call for a “historic compromise” between labor and capital in which the latter would give up resistance to worker representation in turn for unions giving up their right to monopoly representation. Though such an arrangement might be in the broad class interest of workers, the nature of the contemporary bourgeoisie and the entrenched labor institutions Fitch devotes the previous 338 pages to reproaching makes the prospect for any such compromise rather remote. The author also seems to reproduce some of his foes’ romantic yearnings for the virtues of 19^th century “republicanism” and lacks the global emphasis that not only the principle of revolutionary internationalism, but basic trade union struggle in the neoliberal age, demands.

Fitch’s analysis of the structures of American unions is pitched at a sufficiently structural level as to strike activists currently embedded in the “union democracy” movement as either irrelevant or, if they are convinced by it, disillusioning. If the problem lies at the heart of labor and the task is to begin anew, where are the social forces on the contemporary left capable of such a transformation? Are they even on the horizon? Nevertheless, resistance to capital can only be bolstered by accounts like Solidarity for Sale that contest the reassuring bulletins we have come to expect from the “labor left.” Demoralized by the apparent intractability of the impasse, today’s radicals would do well to internalize the words of A. Philip Randolph, so often echoed by Bill Fletcher, Jr., “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.” Real solidarity will not come easy or without risk. Nor will it come without a renewed commitment to independent class organization. | P

[2] Ibid.

Sunit Singh

Born in Martinique in 1925, Frantz Fanon saw action with the free French army in WWII before going on to study psychiatry at Lyon. He died of leukemia related complications in Bethesda, Maryland in 1961. After resigning as médecin-chef at the psychiatric clinic in Blida, Algeria in 1957, Fanon worked for the anti-colonial Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). The French war in Algeria lasted from 1954-1962.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that there is a new English translation of Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs [1952], hereafter BSWM), since in this first book, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) himself believed that the fight against racism had nowhere found more succor than in the United States. Fanon poetically describes the shorn “curtain of the sky” over the battlefield after the Civil War that first reveals the monumental vision of a white man “hand in hand” with a black man (196). Yet while blacks continue to remain segregated under Jim Crow, the situation for the French man of color haunted by liberal metropolitan racism, is rather different. He remains locked in an existential struggle for recognition, unaware that freedom means “when there are no more slaves, there are no masters” (194). Fanon contends in BSWM that there is no more insidious obstacle than racism to the realization of our species capacities or the completion of the historical dialectic. Of course this claim only makes sense if racism is treated, like in BSWM, as a symptom of capitalism. That is, even The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre [1961], hereafter W of E), fails to achieve the depth of analysis in BSWM.[1] The Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was presumably speaking about W of E in the quip that “every brother on a rooftop” in the 1960s was able to recite Fanon. For no one quoting BSWM can miss its incisive rebuke of black militancy as proffering a chimeric freedom or its bold claim about alienation as the exclusive privilege of a certain class of blacks. “Fervor,” the narrator in BSWM poignantly remarks, “is the weapon of choice of the impotent” (9 CLM).[2] The awful truth that no one, except a handful of academic leftists interested in presenting BSWM as an anti-humanist phenomenology,[3] reads this book anymore indicates the depth of the sea change in attitudes about race on the Left. But if the utopian interracial schema of BSWM speaks to us at all, this is a consequence of the peculiarity of the US as a “nation of nations,” where the experience of racism raises the dilemma of freedom with acuteness.

The historic importance of W of E to the New Left overshadows the brilliant analysis of racism in BSWM.[4] Even the appearance of a new translation on the scene scarcely alters the conditions of this elision. His latest translator, Richard Philcox, in his afterword to the retranslation of W of E, explains the relevance of—or rather, expresses the contemporary confusion about—Fanon thus: “We cannot forget the martyrdom of the Palestinians when we read…‘On Violence’….We cannot forget the lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth, who still stream to Europe from Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the countries of the former Eastern bloc, living on the periphery in their shantytowns.” As Philcox laments, “[there are those who] still unreservedly and enthusiastically adopt the thought characteristics of the West.”[5] The Freud-Marx confluence in BSWM sits at odds with this politically naïve anti-imperialism. No doubt this at least partially explains why the new translation elicits a tepid foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah. More pointedly, Appiah reads three themes as shared across both works—a critique of “the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis,” a bid to reckon accounts with Negritude, and a concerted effort to develop a “philosophy of decolonization”—as if these formed a triptych. However this is no more than a trompe l’oeil. The concern with “disalienation” in the first book is non-identical with anxieties about “decolonization” in the latter: Whereas BSWM analyzes the wretchedness of racism under capitalism, W of E recoils from the task of pushing through what, in the conclusion to BSWM, is referred to as the “pathology of freedom” by virtue of its close identification with Third Worldism. On the other hand, the foreword seems apposite to this new translation, since the choices that Philcox makes in trying to render into English the peculiarity of the French in BSWM often coincide with the interpretation Appiah advances on the thematic unity of Fanon’s oeuvre. Hence, in its endeavor to restore some of the philosophically inflected categories (particularly in the fifth chapter), the new translation mirrors a wider historical trend privileging a descriptive phenomenology of race over a psychoanalytic interpretation.[6] The manner in which the new edition assumes the onus of parsing the French words nègre or noir (“black/the black man,” “negro,” or “nigger”) tends to blunt the affective charge of “negro” as well as the rhetorical use of “nigger” by preferring to update—although by no means always—these epithets with the more innocuous “black” or “the black man.” Part of the issue is that the French uses a number of words to express the gray scale that distinguishes black skin from white, “the Creoles, the Mullattoes, and Blacks,” (la békaill, le mûlatraille et la négraille), that in English are collapsed into “black/black man” or the more pejorative “negro/nigger.” Nevertheless, the cumulative effect is that the newer version shrouds a claim at the heart of BSWM: Blacks as much as whites share the connotations or stereotypes associated with what is “black,” so that the “nigger” is always someone else, somewhere else.[7] The new, “more accurate” translation painstakingly reconstructs the specificity of the numerous cultural references in the text, its idiosyncratic use of medical jargon, and its loanwords from existentialism. But these virtues are limited by the fact that it lacks the apparatus of a critical edition with which to adjudicate matters of nuance. Despite its infelicities, the older translation by Charles Lam Markmann, first issued in 1967, seems more aware of its intended audience; its age captures quaintly the historical texture of BSWM. The older translation was, in an important sense, more aware of the stakes of BSWM.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of modern psychoanalysis, was a key influence in the theory of racism and black disalienation that Fanon develops in Black Skin, White Masks.

“The black man,” confesses the didactic narrator in the introduction, “wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (xiii). This attempt to “achieve the rank of man” is complicated by the fact that under capitalism we share a common lot—alienation. Moreover, in the case of the black man, this alienation results in a double bind, the “first economic, then the internalization or rather epidermalization of this inferiority” (xv). Genuine disalienation, the narrator contends, “implies a brutal awareness of such socioeconomic realities,” but a solution to racism needs to be “found on the objective as well as the subjective level,” since “reality demands total comprehension” (xv). An individual black man, in other words, can no more overcome racism by desperately plunging himself into the “black hole” of a mythic or cosmic black civilization as if it is simply a matter of the “salvation of the soul” than a neurotic can will himself to health with knowledge alone (xv). After all “what is so often called the black soul is a construction of white folk” (xviii). There is then another uncomfortable realization tied to this conclusion that the totality—capitalism—must itself be transcended: “There is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white” (202). But, paradoxically, the obverse, that whiteness is the flipside of blackness, is false. This is the central claim of BSWM that stands at both ends of the book. For the black man, admits the narrator, offers “no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (90).

BSWM starts with the observation that the isomorphic relationship between the races results in “a massive psycho-existential complex” (xvi). A “cure” can only be had if one analyzes racism as a symptom. Fanon argues that “only a psychoanalytic interpretation” can transfigure the significance of the symptom so as to make life more livable. That is, if we bracket the socio-structural causes of racism, then we can attack the psychopathology of race. Anti-black racism often serves to alibi poverty or class differences, but to confuse anti-black racism as the cause of structural disparities is to misunderstand the particularity of modern racism, which is also why a psychoanalytic explanation of racism differs from a sociological one, despite the fact that its object of analysis is the same. A psychoanalytic treatment of racism takes as its concrete concern the affective satisfaction that blacks as well as whites obtain from anti-black racism. One manifestation of this “double narcissism” is that the “white man is locked in his whiteness, the black man in his blackness” (xiv). Fanon thus develops an analysis of racism rather than race—the naturalization of race is the object of this critique. The role of the analyst is to assist the analysand to “‘consciousnessize’ his unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification, but also to act along the lines of a change in social structure” (80). To simply identify oneself politically as either black or white is to eschew the hard work of analysis.

The ambitiousness of BSWM is rooted in its attempt to deal with the ways in which the psychical or fantastical reality of race might be more consequential than the empirical one. Because the connotations with the color black are purely negative, blacks share the stereotypes as much as whites, so disalienation can never mean a simple negation of what is black. Jean-Paul Sartre had made a similar claim about anti-Semitism, which, in a sense, “overdetermines” the Jew. Assimilation, nevertheless, eludes the black man, who is burdened with the “fact of blackness,” with history. Here the new translation substitutes “the lived experience” of the black man for the “fact of blackness.” Now “the lived experience” is much closer to the French l’expérience vécue, itself a translation of Erlebnis from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Lived experience (Erlebnis), which is made up of acts (being-in-the-world) in which consciousness/the body that is faced with the world/other, differs from the notion of experience (Erfahrung) at the heart of Bildungsroman or self-development. But while there is no ahistorical “fact” of blackness, Erlebnis remains a descriptive category in BSWM, which means it cannot be arrayed against cumulative experience or Erfahrung. Fanon as a Martiniquan who is a French citizen does not feel himself to be black, subjectively, but then the realization comes that objectively, the Martiniquan is seen as black. This “fact” comes as an existential shock to Fanon. He writes, in the words of the old translation,

I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”…But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help build it together. (112 CLM)

If we compare the last bit of this passage in the new translation its valence is suddenly more opaque: “I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania” (92). Absent from the new translation are the tom-toms (le tympan), which still somehow deafen the narrator, even when the verb défoncer means to batter or smash in. How, one might ask in exasperation, is one to decipher the reference to “Y a bon Banania,” an advertisement for a French chocolate drink mix that uses a grinning black caricature that is not unlike Aunt Jemima, without so much as a footnote?

These issues aside, the realization that one is black induces “nausea,” shame, and it locks the black man in an infernal circle that makes it impossible for “either side to obliterate the past once and for all” (96, 101). But much like the Jew who once stood in as the symbol of humanity, the black man is now forced to do the same; the struggle for disalienation carries within it the emergent universal category of man. The black man thus finds himself faced with the task of transcendence. He is only a rational subject whom others can recognize in spite of this blackness. However the extent to which the black man is an object of racism he cannot be a subject. “The black man is a toy in the white man’s hands” (119). Elsewhere, quoting René Étiemble, the narrator observes, “the white man will always be able to find a specious argument: shameful, dubious, and thus doubly effective” (149). There is then a bad-faith quality to racism that delivers it its affective charge. And Fanon is interested in inquiring: What kind of a subject (with a weakened or hyper-cathected ego) needs the affirmation of the other?

The only way out of this dual narcissism is to liquidate history so that one can recognize that what is attributed to the other is what one should attribute to oneself. The book ends with the words: “Was my freedom not given to me to build the world of you? At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness” (206, translation modified). Fanon urges that the same affect that is enlisted in racism (which, when it is negative and destructive is what we refer to as authoritarianism) is, when it is turned inside out, the dynamic invested with the hope of destroying racism—the denied, twisted investment in the other that racism plays on is the same affective source for the obliteration of racism! The interracial utopian vision in BSWM is that this transformation needs to occur within the context of capitalism. This is what it means that “whiteness” is the black’s “destiny.” Fanon attempts to hook the temporal core of psychoanalysis explicitly to the Marxist conception of emancipation.

Disalienation will be for those Whites and Blacks who have refused to let themselves be locked in the substantialized “tower of the past.” For many other black men disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive….In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future. (201)

Here, in order to underscore the idea that overcoming the narcissism at the core of racism requires one to break the repetition compulsion of the neurotic symptom, Fanon cites The Eighteenth Brumaire to the effect that the socialist revolution draws its poetry from the future. His emphasis on the role of the individual fits this interpretation: On the one hand, the fact that individuals mediate society means racism can be overcome in future based on the elements that are already available; on the other hand, “race” is a reified category that identifies individuals with society.[8] “I am not a prisoner of History….I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention in life….And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom” (204–205).

BSWM makes it clear that emancipation from the psychopathology of racism would mean emancipation from “History” which is itself the manifestation of capital. The collapse of the utopian framework of BSWM in W of E amounts to an affective disorientation over what is versus what ought to be the relationship between the struggles against oppressions of various kinds that are reproduced in the context of capital, that therefore also contribute to its reproduction, in the struggle to overcome capital. As the narrator in BSWM cautions, “[a] long time ago the black man acknowledged the undeniable superiority of the white man” (202). This superiority was synonymous with capitalism, but insofar as the aim of the black man shifts from trying to achieve a “white existence” to “culture,” so much the worse. He asks in frustration: “What am I supposed to do with a black empire?…I am French. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, and the French,” “[all] I wanted…[was] to be a man among men” (179, 92). After all, “I should like nothing better” than to drown in “the white flood composed of men like Sartre and Aragon,” since as a man “the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass” (179, 200). The fact is often overlooked, in light of the uncritical enthusiasm for Third World nationalism in W of E, but Fanon supported départementalisation over independence for Martinique after World War II. His call to arms in W of E, “come comrades…let us flee this stagnation [of Europe] where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo,” fit a wider trend on the Left which sought to locate the future of socialism in Third World movements. This shift, which renders the utopianism of BSWM implausible, is useful negatively, in provoking a critical recognition of the ways in which the Left abandoned the aim of emancipation. The limitations of a spatial “fix” to the temporal dynamic of capital are all the more salient in light of historical failures of decolonization to achieve autonomy or autarky in the ex-colonies. These failures obscure, putting it simply, what the black narrator of BSWM advocates, namely the rejection of ontology. The Arab like the black Martiniquan had the right to refuse being in the name of becoming. Yet the reification or naturalization of race is surely what Fanon’s final prayer in BSWM is intended to stave off: “My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions” (206). It is thus in the poetry of BSWM rather than in the fervent cries of W of E that Fanon represents what the Left should aspire to be, namely “hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”[9] | P

[2] All references to the older translation by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) are indicated by the abbreviation CLM.

[3] . See Homi K. Bhabha’s influential essay “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 40–65.

[4] W of E was lauded by the New Left Islamist Ali Shariati as an inspiration for the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Yet Fanon the Marxist probably stood no chance once the mullahs turned their ire against their leftist counterparts who were treated as atheistic interlopers in their revolution. Fanon is also often remembered as a mujahid (warrior) of the Algerian War. However there is no space in the martyrologies of the Arab-Islamist FLN for Fanon. He occupies a liminal space even in Martinique, where Aimé Césaire, the chief theorist of the negritude movement Fanon critiqued in BSWM, made it clear: “He chose. He became Algerian. Lived, fought and died Algerian.” Even within France the “68ers” completely overlooked Fanon in their enthusiasm for the “revolutions” then afoot in China and Vietnam. For more on the ambivalent ways in which Fanon is remembered see the excellent biographical work by David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Picador, 2000).

[5] Richard Philcox contributes an afterword, “On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice,” to The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 241–251.

[6] A more complete consideration of the awkward relationship between existentialism and phenomenology in BSWM is beyond the remit of this review, but if the earlier Markmann translation was weighted toward existentialism, in the new edition Philcox sometimes veers in the opposite direction. For example, in the conclusion, Fanon writes, “Je suis solidaire de l’Etre dans la mesure où je le dépasse” (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952], 186). Markmann had translated this as “I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it,” capturing the reference to Sartre’s L’Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness [1943]), whereas Philcox translates this sentence much more freely as “I show my solidarity with humanity provided I can go one step further” (229 CLM; 204).

[7] We should be thankful that the translator breaks the model first adopted in his retranslation of W of E, where “negro” is substituted with “black man” whenever the speaker refers to West Indians or Africans and “nigger” is retained only when the colonizer refers to the same, or else the entire thrust of BSWM would be lost.

[8] For a suggestive article on this subject, see Amanda Armstrong, “On the Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and Emancipatory Politics” Platypus Review 2 (February 2008).

[9] Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (Indianapolis: Bob-Merrills Company, 1904), 90.

Bret Schneider

THE NEW TRANSLATION AND REPUBLICATION of Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music is a further clarification of modernism, necessitated by the latest discontents with postmodernism’s vulgarization, which keeps it at a fictitious distance. Perhaps as his remedy for the most fragmented part of the whole of the arts, namely music, translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has in recent years been steadily reintroducing Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy to English readers.[1] The republication of Philosophy of New Music continues this process, further introducing readers to Adorno’s complex aesthetic theory, also elaborated recently in Current of Music, which embodies Adorno’s aesthetic hopes for the early emergence of radio transmission. Republishing Philosophy of New Music serves the purpose of clarifying a nexus of art history where the relationship between aesthetics and theory could have been drastically reformulated.

Autrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), whose works Adorno considers at length in Philosophy of New Music.

Philosophy of New Music is one of Adorno’s more obscure, niche analyses. Split into two sections comprising intricate dissections of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, it is tighter and less ambitious than Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer around the same time. However, New Music can be understood as Dialectic’s complement, its object being entangled with that of the culture industry critiqued generally in the more famous volume from the same period. Operating in an inverse way, Philosophy of New Music seeks to exacerbate and expose the same symptoms from within modernist music itself. American readers may have a difficult entry into the text, not only because the writing styles itself on Schoenberg’s esoteric manner of composition, but also because of Adorno’s object of critique, the historical complications provoking the European modernist avant-garde. The text pays strict attention to Schoenberg’s music technique, while delving into historical comparisons to previous composers like Richard Wagner and the regressive, constrictive trajectory implied by their music styles. The volume also incorporates some of Adorno’s most sustained ruminations on the changed significance of the musical “material,” one of Adorno’s most pivotal and least understood concepts for approaching new music as a response to rapidly changing social conditions. As a concept, it seeks to articulate possibilities emanating from the split in idealization and materialization in art—possibilities we now identify as reaching a climax with the music of the mid-century avant-garde that Adorno anticipated.

Philosophy of New Music thwarts the tired criticism of Adorno’s writing as elitist, ambiguous, generalizing, or abstract. His critique of Schoenberg adheres so meticulously to the composer’s actual technique that, in the process, he demonstrates the ability of objective analysis to destabilize an already contingent aesthetic construction by way of acute specificity. Early on, Adorno attacks status quo criticism of avant-garde music: “Amongst the reproaches that [mainstream critics] obstinately repeat, the most prevalent charge is the charge of intellectualism, the claim that new music springs from the head, not the heart or the ear….[Such criticisms] are put forward as if the tonal idiom were itself given by nature….The second nature of the tonal system is an illusion originating in history” (13). Already discernible are the grounds for his more well-known critiques of mass deception through pop music. The simplistic charge of elitism leveled against Adorno’s critique emerges out of bourgeois radical culture itself and represents a failure to comprehend the complicated forms of new music’s material reckoning with tonal idiom. It thus implies an exhaustion of that history’s potential. Bourgeois society’s inability to listen to Schoenberg manifests a disintegration of historical consciousness and the surprising reification of a history (tonal progression) which seemed the very opposite of stasis. For Adorno, a dogmatic concretizing of this tonal illusion pre-echoes the same consciousness pop music is a response to, as its development is bound up in both radical and mainstream aesthetics. This is elaborated in the section “Radical Music Is Not Immune,” where—in a style which itself reflects the formal contortions of modern artists like Schoenberg who “realize total enlightenment in themselves, regardless of the cunning naïveté of the culture industry”—Adorno asserts that “they also simultaneously make themselves like the internal structure of what they oppose and enter into opposition with their own intentions” (16). A relentless train of self-contained, monolithic statements like these, poetically mobilized to question their own truth content, forms the pointilist mimicry that comprises the whole of the Schoenberg analysis. Likewise, the literary technique of connecting immense paragraphs sans line-breaks (identical in form to Samuel Beckett’s contemporary novel trilogy, which Adorno admired) echoes the calculated and monotonous historical transformation from a dynamic music to one of stasis: “the music no longer presents itself as being in a process of development” (50).

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who wrote the ballets The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913). In Stravinsky’s highly structured compositional techniques, Adorno identifies a regressive tendency.

The first part of the book, “Schoenberg and Progress,” introduces the issue of musical style as the hardening against suffering briefly alluded to in Dialectic of Enlightenment. “What radical music knows is the untransfigured suffering of men whose powerlessness has so increased that it no longer permits semblance and play” (37). Schoenberg’s music, in its strict form and restrictive technique, itself expresses the decline of human subjectivity, allowing it to surface only with dire earnestness. Schoenberg’s music embodies Adorno’s modern art philosophy. It exemplifies the true art he so intensely argued for, in contradistinction to the false ideology “innervated” in Stravinsky’s restoration, which allowed a “binding quality” back into the work. Better a rigorous, elitist art exposing the true, complicated bleakness of declining subjectivity than a fantasized, populist escapism. Though neatly divided into two opposed sections, Schoenberg and Stravinsky each express for Adorno the same individual-consuming “apparatus” of society.

Stravinsky represents all the regressive, destructive complications of a solidarity desperate to maintain the illusion of identity. To Adorno, Stravinsky’s music is a calculated mechanism of meandering unintentionality and impressionist lightness (differing from Schoenberg’s heavy sound masses). As a mass ornamentation, it summons the audience to rally together to annihilate their own subjectivity. Adorno dissects how Stravinsky’s music embodies modernism’s paradoxes, incorporating a romanticized primitivism while retaining an impressionist ephemerality of rapidly changing styles. Ritual and sacrifice are significant problems in Stravinsky’s music, and Adorno describes their manipulative function in quelling individual subjectivity, a function that is only heightened by Stravinsky’s mastery of a style that is both the culmination of history and also ironically its own nihilistic undoing. Adorno notes the ubiquitous trend when he suggests that Stravinsky unwittingly strikes the same nerve as the psychologist C. J. Jung: “The search for musical equivalents to the ‘collective unconscious’ prepare for the transition to the establishment of the regressive community as a positive achievement” (121). The same regressive impulse extends to the identification with nature in music: “The pressure of reified Bourgeois culture incites flight into the phantasm of nature, which then ultimately proves to be the herald of absolute oppression. The aesthetic nerve quivers to return to the stone age” (113). Almost unflinchingly, the reader can freely associate Stravinsky’s ritualist spectacle with reprises of the same in contemporary culture (Lady Gaga’s primitive masks embedded in a stylized futurism, and the neo-pastoralism now prevalent in “experimental” drone and electronic folk music, not to mention precious back-to-the-land motifs in contemporary art).

The delusion that Adorno articulates is the same delusion we share today. For this reason, Philosophy of New Music is a primary historical artifact for gleaning the impetus of earlier stages of still-crystallizing collective grotesqueness. At first, readers may interpret this text as mere analysis, uncritically adopting the back-cover’s claim that the book somehow represents Adorno’s “manifesto.” But the more the reader grapples with the criticism the volume contains, the more she begins to understand that this text is more than anything else a manifesto on how criticism could actively participate in and clarify artistic concerns, immanently complicating solidarity between theory and practice. That the text has collected so much dust, and that when divorced from its hopes of intellectual action the manifesto socially degrades into the pure “theory” we today (mis)understand it to be, embodies the tragic failure of Adorno’s emancipatory modernism. | P

Stefan Dietl

In a rally of over 4,000 protesters in Frankfurt last June, German students hold up a banner reading in English, “Bailout education, not just the banks.”

“DIESER HÖRSAAL IST BESETZT!” (“This lecture hall is occupied!”) In November and December 2009, signs bearing such slogans were found on doors at over 60 German universities. For the second time that year, a broad student movement managed to gain public attention for its demands. Protests at the University of Vienna kicked off what became a Europe-wide solidarity wave. In Germany, the Viennese protest first triggered occupations in Heidelberg, Münster, and Potsdam, after which students at many other institutions also became involved. In most cases, the biggest or most central lecture halls were taken, and tens of thousands of students marched through the streets. The reactions of the different university administrations ranged from immediate eviction (e.g., in Marburg) to negotiations via a press spokesperson (in Jena) to direct dialogue with protesters (in Gießen). For the most part, university administrators and local authorities tolerated the occupations, so that the strongest criticism arose from students opposed to the strikes. Only around two percent of the entire student body participated actively in the sit-ins; of these, dozens lived and slept in the lecture halls, forming working groups, drafting resolutions, and engaging in negotiations. “Strike collectives” were organized according to strictly anti-authoritarian principles with an eye towards the prevention of emerging hierarchies. Publicly visible action peaked on November 24^th when students protested a national conference of university rectors and then again on December 10^th where protests were held outside an education ministers’ conference in Bonn. On some German campuses strike activities continued on an almost daily basis until mid-December. Where students attempted to maintain building occupations over the holidays they were forcibly evicted. On Christmas Day in Munich, for instance, police blocked the entrance to occupied buildings, cutting off food supplies and thereby forcing the strike to a halt. At a handful of campuses, strikes continued for a time after the winter holiday.

What triggered these protests? The website www.bildungsstreik2009.de (“Educational Strike 2009”)[1] called for a struggle against the commodification and pro-market orientation of education in favor of more self-actuated forms of learning. More concretely, striking students opposed admission restrictions and tuition fees. The deteriorating conditions of universities were attributed to the so-called Bologna Process, a neoliberal initiative that aims at creating a more competitive European Higher Education Area with a harmonized three-cycle system (bachelor’s-master’s-doctoral) and greater curricular and evaluative standardization. Uniting different student representatives, www.bildungsstreik2009.de argued in the run-up to last year’s “hot autumn” that the earlier strike wave in June had accomplished little: There were no modification to the Bologna system, no nationwide abolition of tuitions, no revision of school reforms.

It is difficult to say to what extent the movement has accomplished its goals. For, despite having served at times as the effective organ for the movement, www.bildungsstreik2009.de did not, and does not, represent any formal leadership of the movement as such. During the protests themselves, the site published no joint statements, serving rather as a point of intersection where decentralized collectives could link their wikis and websites, and share Twitter posts. Because of the decentralized nature of the movement itself, it is difficult to establish the common positions or strategies of the protesters. Nevertheless, looking at the different resolutions and events reveals definite patterns and allows one to formulate at least a tentative answer to the question of whether the student movement in Germany helped lay the foundations, in however modest a way, for a future emancipatory politics.

Truly emancipatory politics will eventually overcome the capitalist logic of accumulation and replace it with social forms capable of the satisfaction of human needs. In order to make emancipatory politics attainable, however, theory, practice, and organization are necessary. An internationalist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist youth movement uniting apprentices, students, the unemployed, the precariously self-employed, and young workers will only be the first step in this direction, and the need for this first step is all the more compelling given the global economic crisis. In Germany, our priority must lie in fighting emerging authoritarian tendencies. Here we are confronted with gradual but significant increases in the state’s use of emergency powers, a growing involvement of the military in government decision-making, illegal information sharing between different government departments, and the slashing of social welfare programs. If these trends continue, the scope for emancipatory politics will be drastically curtailed. Ending this disenfranchisement and stopping the reconstruction of coercive apparatuses are therefore crucial.

With the declaration “Self-determination in life and study,” this image has become a commonplace of the signs and posters on display during the German students’ protests for educational reform.

Any political movement must be measured against the standard of whether or not it constitutes an emancipatory point of departure—that is, whether or not it takes us a step further towards a society without exploitation, oppression, and misery. In the case of the 2009 student movement in Germany, the question is doubtful, since, instead of laying the foundations for emancipatory politics, a major part of the student movement in Germany can be described as reformist, elitist, and de facto nationalist. While there are some counter-tendencies, they are not dominant and do not characterize the movement as a whole.

First, respecting the reformist-elitist character of the movement, it must be acknowledged that most criticism of the pro-market orientation and commodification of the German university floats free of any analysis of the role of education in bourgeois society. Rather, such criticisms are inspired by Humboldtian idealism, evoking older educational models in which the cultivation of the “spirit” was appreciated more than it is now in the age of the “turbo degree.” Student protesters shy away from acknowledging the fact that “turbo studies” form an integral part of current economic conditions and represent the state’s response to the necessities of capital. They shy away from the recognition that, regardless of whatever other purpose it may serve, students require education as employment credentials in a capitalist labor market.

The protesters’ reluctance to ground their demands in an analysis of the present purpose and character of university education explains why the word capitalism was scarcely mentioned in their resolutions. Explicit acknowledgment and analysis of the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois education systems were silenced by the argument that such talk would deter less radical students or result in the protests’ not being taken seriously. This reluctance matches the widespread objections by many student representatives to broader social demands. They repeatedly emphasized that the movement was not chasing after utopian dreams, but rather aiming for palpable improvements in education. In this vein, they often distanced themselves from the student movement of the 1960s. Their protest, they were careful to observe, was not about changing the world or “the system.” It should not, therefore, be confused with the protests of past generations. Today’s European student radicals seek concrete changes in a clearly defined domain.

Those among the students who vigorously advocated for a strategy that would highlight the expansion of commodification to all domains of human life nevertheless supported the tactic of zeroing in on the educational system first. Criticism of social relations was relegated to reading circles and alternative lectures, or else it was simply postponed for the times one was not involved in the “real work” of realpolitik. The students failed to grasp how the improvements in education that can actually be realized within the system are limited. It does, of course, make a difference for the subjective well-being of students whether the bachelor’s degree has to be obtained within 6 or 8 semesters, and whether one is restricted to a fixed schedule or can also include non-degree courses of personal interest. However, reforms of this nature do not directly address the social function of state education. The role of the education system in this society is to produce an unqualified and semi-qualified mass together with a small, but highly qualified elite. The latter are necessary to provide a functional and ongoing national innovation system generative of high levels of generic knowledge that can then be readily exploited by industry.

Demands for improvements within current social relations are driven by one thing above all: the desire to come out on top in the social selection process. This implies the students’ widespread, tacit acceptance of the function of education, namely selection. And those in the student movement who openly denounce admission mechanisms are confronted with a dilemma: The politicization of debates about admission as well as the education system as such is unpopular among many of the protesters themselves. Freedom from ideology is enshrined in this student movement. Protesters categorically resist being “instrumentalized” or “manipulated” by political groups. To the protesters, taking any stance on greater social issues means that one is merely recapitulating “dogmas of the past.” When points made in debate are identified as part of a “political program,” they are rejected on the grounds that only “authentic” thoughts are permitted. For instance, when in Regensburg a member of the German radical group Die Linke pushed for linking the students’ protest to demands for broader social transformation, he was suspected of merely campaigning for his party, and consequently silenced. Needless to say, this depoliticized and anti-intellectual attitude leaves little space for discussing anything but very narrow reforms at one’s own university. Only thus, the protesters reason, can one safely avoid “political manipulation”—when, in reality, politics are avoided in toto.

The only accepted “political reference point” of the current student movement in Germany is the human rights argument: Education is a basic right for everybody! Unfortunately, both the human as well as the civic right to education is, like any rights conceded by capitalist states, bound to the fulfillment of certain duties, whether one agrees or not. In this case, the right to education is granted only to the extent that the educated apply the skills and knowledge gained through the bourgeois educational system for the good of bourgeois society.

The reformist and elitist character of the most influential segment within the contemporary German student movement is manifest by the near total absence of demands for the abolition of the gymnasium system (selective secondary schools) or demands for unrestricted admission to universities, from janitor to junk collector. The students are, of course, perfectly aware that admission to the university is not available to all. As of 2006, only 35.5 percent of the total population had ever enrolled in college courses, with roughly a third of this number completing university degrees. Still, the protesters do not object to the limited number of admissions so long as they are not denied admission and the selection process can be deemed fair.

Fortunately, positive counter-tendencies exist: Some of the protests voiced solidarity with trade unionists, the unemployed, school kids, apprentices, and migrants. Numerous letters of solidarity and “strike” donations arrived at the lecture halls, while, for their part, students sought dialogue with representatives of other organizations. Today, local networks helping merge social struggles on and beyond the campus continue to develop, and a call has been issued for a central demonstration around the slogan “Uni für alle” (“University for all”). Here, at least, activists are posing the question of making education open to everybody, not just making it easier for those who have already gained admission.

But despite these more radically egalitarian tendencies, the student movement in Germany overall exhibits an unmistakable reformist-elitist character, for reasons that are not hard to grasp: Many of the student protesters have already self-identified with the purposes of the German ruling class. Which is to say, their hopes are pinned on joining its ranks. Such an attitude, of course, is unsurprising in itself. After all, few of the students are working class, and the selection function is the main role of educational systems in bourgeois society. Some succeed in competition, others do not. Better education in bourgeois society is, first and foremost, a business interest for the state, which wants to accrue professional talent within its national borders. Better education means a more efficient German professional class and, therefore, greater German capital. Most students who participated in the protests wanted better education. If this means nothing more than better education for the business sectors of Germany in its competition with other nations, then the students, however extreme and spectacular their tactics, are hardly making radical, emancipatory demands.

It comes as no surprise, then, that German politicians, whose vocation is to advance Germany in the international arena, applaud the pluck of these future elites. Scarcely a politician in Germany, regardless of orientation, failed to support the students in their demands for better education. The only reason why explicit concern about Germany’s well-being was not actually prefaced to every student resolution in 2009, as was done in the educational strikes the year before, is because of the overall consensus on this point. Students do not have to point out that they were protesting for Germany: Everybody already knows. Politicians, deans, journalists, and students all agree that Germany has to hold its own and that education is an important enticement inducing capital to locate there. The student strikes are a healthy expression of Germany’s restless (dis)content with the status quo and the potential for creative innovation in the rising generation of professionals. The widespread support in the media and among politicians is therefore unsurprising. Education officials agreed to revisit certain parts of the bachelor’s/master’s system. Some university administrations made minor concessions. As long as the students continue to argue the interest of the nation in their appeals, they will be caught within a framework of de facto nationalism. The students can only overcome this perspective if they situate the education system within the predominant social relations of our time and conceive of their movement as part of a broader social struggle across nations.

Most within the “strike collectives” would repudiate any claim they are tacitly nationalist. Yet, because discussions of theory were discarded in favor of activism and “ideological freedom,” this nationalist position prevailed. However, now that the broad student movement consists mainly of scattered anti-fascist groups, the call for a “University for all” demonstration at the end of January clearly represents a turn for the better: “Instead of appealing to the welfare-cutting, excluding surveillance state, we need to take to the streets together and fight to turn the school into our school, the university into a university for everyone, the [process of] social production into one satisfying everybody’s needs—life into self-determined life.”[2]

Radical intellectuals advancing emancipatory politics are anything but the norm in the modern university. Students contribute to broader social struggles not because of, but despite their university degrees. Indeed, the same holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of society as well. In his plea “For Public Sociology,” Michael Burawoy comments wryly on the effects of the education system: “It is as if graduate school is organized to winnow away at the moral commitments that inspired the interest in sociology in the first place.”[3] Our hopes lie with the critical theorist described by Horkheimer in “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “The abstract sociological concept of an intelligentsia which is to have missionary functions is, by its structure, an hypostatization of specialized science. Critical theory is neither ‘deeply rooted’ like totalitarian propaganda nor ‘detached’ like the liberal intelligentsia.”[4]

Universities are not, in and of themselves, a privileged source of emancipation, and in their own struggle students should join with those interested in more than student politics. On a few campuses, students gained permanent “free spaces for critical thinking,” and local networks for broader causes are emerging. These alliances should refrain from representing themselves as apolitical and anti-intellectual, even at the risk of diminished participation. Until this happens, those looking for collaborators in the project of re-establishing the Left will find that their recruitment prospects among the German student movement remain constricted. | P

[2] Bundesweiter Bildungsstreik, “Die Uni Gehört Allen,”.

[3] Michael Burawoy, “For Public Sociology” (American Sociological Association Presidential Address, University of California, Berkeley, 2004).

[4] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), 223–224.

Chris Cutrone

Gillian Rose (1947–1995), professor and philosopher.

GILLIAN ROSE’S MAGNUM OPUS was her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).[1] Preceding this was The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978), a work which charted Rose’s approach to the relation of Marxism to Hegel in Hegel Contra Sociology.[2] Alongside her monograph on Adorno, Rose published two incisively critical reviews of the reception of Adorno’s work.[3] Rose thus established herself early on as an important interrogator of Adorno’s thought and Frankfurt School Critical Theory more generally, and of their problematic reception.

In her review of Negative Dialectics, Rose noted, “Anyone who is involved in the possibility of Marxism as a mode of cognition sui generis . . . must read Adorno’s book.”[4] As she wrote in her review of contemporaneous studies on the Frankfurt School,

Both the books reviewed here indict the Frankfurt School for betraying a Marxist canon; yet they neither make any case for the importance of the School nor do they acknowledge the question central to that body of work: the possibility and desirability of defining such a canon.  As a result both books overlook the relation of the Frankfurt School to Marx for which they are searching. . . .  They have taken the writings [of Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno] literally but not seriously enough.  The more general consequences of this approach are also considerable: it obscures instead of illuminating the large and significant differences within Marxism.[5]

Rose’s critique can be said of virtually all the reception of Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

Rose followed her work on Adorno with Hegel Contra Sociology.  The book’s original dust jacket featured a blurb by Anthony Giddens, Rose’s mentor and the doyen of sociology, who called it “a very unusual piece of work . . . whose significance will take some time to sink in.”  As Rose put it in The Melancholy Science, Adorno and other thinkers in Frankfurt School Critical Theory sought to answer for their generation the question Marx posed (in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts), “How do we now stand as regards the Hegelian dialectic?”[6] For Rose, this question remained a standing one.  Hence, Rose’s work on the problem of “Hegelian Marxism” comprised an important critique of the Left of her time that has only increased in resonance since then.

Rose sought to recover Hegel from readings informed by 20th century neo-Kantian influences, and from what she saw as the failure to fully grasp Hegel’s critique of Kant.  Where Kant could be seen as the bourgeois philosopher par excellence, Rose took Hegel to be his most important and unsurpassed critic.  Hegel provided Rose with the standard for critical thinking on social modernity, whose threshold she found nearly all others to fall below, including thinkers she otherwise respected such as Adorno and Marx.

Rose read Marx as an important disciple of Hegel who, to her mind, nevertheless, misapprehended key aspects of Hegel’s thought.  According to Rose, this left Marxism at the mercy of prevailing Kantian preoccupations.  As she put it, “When Marx is not self-conscious about his relation to Hegel’s philosophy . . . [he] captures what Hegel means by actuality or spirit.  But when Marx desires to dissociate himself from Hegel’s actuality . . . he relies on and affirms abstract dichotomies between being and consciousness, theory and practice, etc.” (230–231).  In offering this Hegelian critique of Marx and Marxism, however, Rose actually fulfilled an important desideratum of Adorno’s Marxist critical theory, which was to attend to what was “not yet subsumed,” or, how a regression of Marxism could be met by a critique from the standpoint of what “remained” from Hegel.

In his deliberate recovery of what Rose characterized as Marx’s “capturing” of Hegel’s “actuality or spirit,” Adorno was preceded by the “Hegelian Marxists” Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch.  The “regressive” reading proposed by Adorno[7] that could answer Rose would involve reading Adorno as presupposing Lukács and Korsch, who presupposed the revolutionary Marxism of Lenin and Luxemburg, who presupposed Marx, who presupposed Hegel.  Similarly, Adorno characterized Hegel as “Kant come into his own.”[8] From Adorno’s perspective, the Marxists did not need to rewrite Marx, nor did Marx need to rewrite Hegel.  For Adorno the recovery of Marx by the Marxists — and of Hegel by Marx — was a matter of further specification and not simple “progress.”  This involved problematization, perhaps, but not overcoming in the sense of leaving behind.[9] Marx did not seek to overcome Hegel, but rather was tasked to advance and fulfill his concerns.  This comports well with Rose’s approach to Hegel, which she in fact took over, however unconsciously, from her prior study of Adorno, failing to follow what Adorno assumed about Marxism in this regard.

Two parts of Hegel Contra Sociology frame its overall discussion of the challenge Hegel’s thought presents to the critical theory of society: a section in the introductory chapter on what Rose calls the “Neo-Kantian Marxism” of Lukács and Adorno and the concluding section on “The Culture and Fate of Marxism.”  The arguments condensed in these two sections of Rose’s book comprise one of the most interesting and challenging critiques of Marxism.  However, Rose’s misunderstanding of Marxism limits the direction and reach of the rousing call with which she concluded her book: “This critique of Marxism itself yields the project of a critical Marxism. . . .  [P]resentation of the contradictory relations between Capital and culture is the only way to link the analysis of the economy to comprehension of the conditions for revolutionary practice” (235).  Yet Rose’s critique of Marxism, especially of Lukács and Adorno, and of Marx himself, misses its mark.

One problem regarding Rose’s critique of Marxism is precisely her focus on Marxism as a specifically “philosophical” problem, as a problem more of thought than of action.  As Lukács’s contemporary Karl Korsch pointed out in “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923), by the late 19th century historians such as Dilthey had observed that “ideas contained in a philosophy can live on not only in philosophies, but equally well in positive sciences and social practice, and that this process precisely began on a large scale with Hegel’s philosophy.”[10] For Korsch, this meant that “philosophical” problems in the Hegelian sense were not matters of theory but practice.  From a Marxian perspective, however, it is precisely the problem of capitalist society that is posed at the level of practice.  Korsch went on to argue that “what appears as the purely ‘ideal’ development of philosophy in the 19th century can in fact only be fully and essentially grasped by relating it to the concrete historical development of bourgeois society as a whole.”[11] Korsch’s great insight, shared by Lukács, took this perspective from Luxemburg and Lenin, who grasped how the history of Marxism was a key part, indeed the crucial aspect, of this development, at the time of their writing in the first years of the 20th century.[12]

The most commented-upon essay of Lukács’s collection History and Class Consciousness (1923) is “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” written specifically as the centerpiece of the book, but drawing upon arguments made in the book’s other essays.  Like many readers of Lukács, Rose focused her critique in particular on Lukács’s argument in the second part of his “Reification” essay, “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought,” neglecting that its “epistemological” investigation of philosophy is only one moment in a greater argument, which culminates in the most lengthy and difficult third part of Lukács’s essay, “The Standpoint of the Proletariat.”  But it is in this part of the essay that Lukács addressed how the Marxist social-democratic workers’ movement was an intrinsic part of what Korsch had called the “concrete historical development of bourgeois society as a whole,” in which its “philosophical” problem lived.  The “philosophical” problem Korsch and Lukács sought to address was the “dialectic” of the political practice of the working class, how it actually produced and did not merely respond to the contradictions and potentially revolutionary crisis of capitalist society.  It is because of Rose’s failure to grasp this point that her criticism of Marx, Lukács, and Adorno amounts to nothing more than an unwitting recapitulation of Lukács’s own critique of what he called “vulgar Marxism,” and what Adorno called “positivism” or “identity thinking.”  Lukács and Adorno, following Lenin and Luxemburg, attempted to effect a return to what Korsch called “Marx’s Marxism.”

In examining Rose’s critique of Lukács, Adorno, and Marx, and in responding to Rose’s Hegelian interrogation of their supposed deficits, it becomes possible to recover what is important about and unifies their thought.  Rose’s questions about Marxism are those that any Marxian approach must answer to demonstrate its necessity — its “improved version,” as Lukács put it, of the “Hegelian original” dialectic.[13]

The problem of Marxism as Hegelian “science”

In the final section of Hegel Contra Sociology, in the conclusion of the chapter “With What Must the Science End?” titled “The Culture and Fate of Marxism,” Rose addresses Marx directly.  Here, Rose states that,

Marx did not appreciate the politics of Hegel’s presentation, the politics of a phenomenology [logic of appearance] which aims to re-form consciousness . . . [and] acknowledges the actuality which determines the formation of consciousness. . . .  Marx’s notion of political education was less systematic than [Hegel’s]. (232–233)

One issue of great import for Rose’s critique of Marxism is the status of Hegel’s philosophy as “speculative.”  As Rose wrote,

Marx’s reading of Hegel overlooks the discourse or logic of the speculative proposition.  He refuses to see the lack of identity in Hegel’s thought, and therefore tries to establish his own discourse of lack of identity using the ordinary proposition.  But instead of producing a logic or discourse of lack of identity he produced an ambiguous dichotomy of activity/nature which relies on a natural beginning and an utopian end. (231)

Rose explicated this “lack of identity in Hegel’s thought” as follows:

Hegel knew that his thought would be misunderstood if it were read as [a] series of ordinary propositions which affirm an identity between a fixed subject and contingent accidents, but he also knew that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in propositional form.  He thus proposed . . . a “speculative proposition.” . . .  To read a proposition “speculatively” means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate. . . .  From this perspective the “subject” is not fixed: . . .  Only when the lack of identity between subject and predicate has been experienced, can their identity be grasped. . . .  Thus it cannot be said, as Marx, for example, said [in his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (1843)], that the speculative proposition turns the predicate into the subject and therefore hypostatizes predicates, just like the ordinary proposition hypostatizes the subject. . . . [Hegel’s] speculative proposition is fundamentally opposed to [this] kind of formal identity. (51–53)

Rose may be correct about Marx’s 1843 critique of Hegel.  She severely critiqued Marx’s 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach” on the same score (230).  What this overlooks is Marx’s understanding of the historical difference between his time and Hegel’s.  Consequently, it neglects Marx’s differing conception of “alienation” as a function of the Industrial Revolution, in which the meaning of the categories of bourgeois society, of the commodity form of labor, had become reversed.

Rose’s failure to register the change in meaning of “alienation” for Marx compromised her reading of Lukács:

[M]aking a distinction between underlying process and resultant objectifications[,] Lukács was able to avoid the conventional Marxist treatment of capitalist social forms as mere “superstructure” or “epiphenomena;” legal, bureaucratic and cultural forms have the same status as the commodity form.  Lukács made it clear that “reification” is the specific capitalist form of objectification.  It determines the structure of all the capitalist social forms. . . .  [T]he process-like essence (the mode of production) attains a validity from the standpoint of the totality. . . .  [Lukács’s approach] turned . . . away from a logic of identity in the direction of a theory of historical mediation.  The advantage of this approach was that Lukács opened new areas of social life to Marxist analysis and critique. . . .  The disadvantage was that Lukács omitted many details of Marx’s theory of value. . . .  As a result “reification” and “mediation” become a kind of shorthand instead of a sustained theory.  A further disadvantage is that the sociology of reification can only be completed by a speculative sociology of the proletariat as the subject-object of history. (30–31)

However, for Lukács the proletariat is not a Hegelian subject-object of history but a Marxian one.[14] Lukács did not affirm history as the given situation of the possibility of freedom in the way Hegel did.  Rather, following Marx, Lukács treated historical structure as a problem to be overcome.  History was not to be grasped as necessary, as Hegel affirmed against his contemporaries’ Romantic despair at modernity.  Rose mistakenly took Lukács’s critique of capital to be Romantic, subject to the aporiae Hegel had characterized in the “unhappy consciousness.”  Rose therefore misinterpreted Lukács’s revolutionism as a matter of “will”:[15]

Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness is an attempt to give [Marx’s] Capital a phenomenological form: to read Marx’s analysis of capital as the potential consciousness of a universal class.  But Lukács’s emphasis on change in consciousness as per se revolutionary, separate from the analysis of change in capitalism, gives his appeal to the proletariat or the party the status of an appeal to a . . . will. (233)

Nonetheless, Rose found aspects of Lukács’s understanding of Marx compelling, in a “Hegelian” sense:

The question of the relation between Capital and politics is thus not an abstract question about the relation between theory and practice, but a phenomenological question about the relationship between acknowledgement of actuality and the possibility of change.  This is why the theory of commodity fetishism, the presentation of a contradiction between substance and subject, remains more impressive than any abstract statements about the relation between theory and practice or between capitalist crisis and the formation of revolutionary consciousness.  It acknowledges actuality and its misrepresentation as consciousness. (233)

What is missing from Rose’s critique of Lukács, however, is how he offered a dialectical argument, precisely through forms of misrecognition (“misrepresentation”).[16]

This is why the theory of commodity fetishism has become central to the neo-Marxist theory of domination, aesthetics, and ideology.  The theory of commodity fetishism is the most speculative moment in Marx’s exposition of capital.  It comes nearest to demonstrating in the historically specific case of commodity producing society how substance is ((mis-)represented as) subject, how necessary illusion arises out of productive activity. (232)

However, the contradiction of capital is not merely between “substance and subject,” but rather a self-contradictory social substance, value, which gives rise to a self-contradictory subject.[17]

Rose’s critique of the “sociological” Marxism of Lukács and Adorno

Rose’s misconstrual of the status of proletarian social revolution in the self-understanding of Marxism led her to regard Lukács and Adorno’s work as “theoretical” in the restricted sense of mere analysis.  Rose denied the dialectical status of Lukács and Adorno’s thought by neglecting the question of how a Marxian approach, from Lukács and Adorno’s perspective, considered the workers’ movement for emancipation as itself symptomatic of capital.  Following Marx, Lukács and Adorno regarded Marxism as the organized historical self-consciousness of the social politics of the working class that potentially points beyond capital.[18] Rose limited Lukács and Adorno’s concerns regarding “misrecognition,” characterizing their work as “sociological”:

The thought of Lukács and Adorno represent two of the most original and important attempts . . . [at] an Hegelian Marxism, but it constitutes a neo-Kantian Marxism. . . .  They turned the neo-Kantian paradigm into a Marxist sociology of cultural forms . . . with a selective generalization of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. (29)

But, according to Rose, this “sociological” analysis of the commodity form remained outside its object:

In the essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács generalizes Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism by making a distinction between the total process of production, “real life-processes,” and the resultant objectifications of social forms.  This notion of “objectification” has more in common with the neo-Kantian notion of the objectification of specific object-domains than with an “Hegelian” conflating of objectification, human praxis in general, with alienation, its form in capitalist society. (30)

Rose thought that Lukács thus undermined his own account of potential transformation: “Lukács’s very success in demonstrating the prevalence of reification . . . meant that he could only appeal to the proletariat to overcome reification by apostrophes to the unity of theory and practice, or by introducing the party as deus ex machina” (31).  In this respect, Rose failed to note how Lukács, and Adorno following him, had deeply internalized the Hegelian problematic of Marxism, how Marxism was not the (mis)application but the reconstruction of the Hegelian dialectic under the changed social-historical conditions of capital.  For Rose, Lukács’s concept of “reification” was too negative regarding the “totality” of capital, which she thought threatened to render capital non-dialectical, and its emancipatory transformation inconceivable.  But Rose’s perspective remains that of Hegel — pre-industrial capital.

Hegel contra sociology — the “culture” and “fate” of Marxism

Just before she died in 1995, Rose wrote a new Preface for a reprint of Hegel Contra Sociology, which states that,

The speculative exposition of Hegel in this book still provides the basis for a unique engagement with post-Hegelian thought, especially postmodernity, with its roots in Heideggerianism. . . .  [T]he experience of negativity, the existential drama, is discovered at the heart of Hegelian rationalism. . . .  Instead of working with the general question of the dominance of Western metaphysics, the dilemma of addressing modern ethics and politics without arrogating the authority under question is seen as the ineluctable difficulty in Hegel. . . .  This book, therefore, remains the core of the project to demonstrate a nonfoundational and radical Hegel, which overcomes the opposition between nihilism and rationalism.  It provides the possibility for renewal of critical thought in the intellectual difficulty of our time. (viii)

Since the time of Rose’s book, with the passage of Marxist politics into history, the “intellectual difficulty” in renewing critical thought has only gotten worse.  “Postmodernity” has not meant the eclipse or end, but rather the unproblematic triumph, of “Western metaphysics” — in the exhaustion of “postmodernism.”[19] Consideration of the problem Rose addressed in terms of the Hegelian roots of Marxism, the immanent critique of capitalist modernity, remains the “possibility” if not the “actuality” of our time.  Only by facing it squarely can we avoid sharing in Marxism’s “fate” as a “culture.”  For this “fate,” the devolution into “culture,” or what Rose called “pre-bourgeois society” (234), threatens not merely a form of politics on the Left, but humanity: it represents the failure to attain let alone transcend the threshold of Hegelian modernity, whose concern Rose recovered. | P

2. Rose, The Melancholy Science (London: Macmillan, 1978).

3. See Rose’s review of the English translation of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973) in The American Political Science Review 70.2 (June, 1976), 598–599; and of Susan Buck-Morss’s The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (1977) and Zoltán Tar’s The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Horkheimer and Adorno (1977) in History and Theory 18.1 (February, 1979), 126–135.

4. Rose, Review of Negative Dialectics, 599.

5. Rose, Review of The Origin of Negative Dialectics and The Frankfurt School, 126, 135.

6. Rose, The Melancholy Science, 2.

7. See, for instance, Adorno, “Progress” (1962), and “Critique” (1969), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 143–160 and 281–288.

8. Adorno, “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 6.

9. See Georg Lukács, Preface (1922), History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971):

The author of these pages . . . believes that today it is of practical importance to return in this respect to the traditions of Marx-interpretation founded by Engels (who regarded the “German workers’ movement” as the “heir to classical German philosophy”), and by Plekhanov.  He believes that all good Marxists should form, in Lenin’s words “a kind of society of the materialist friends of the Hegelian dialectic.” But Hegel’s position today is the reverse of Marx’s own.  The problem with Marx is precisely to take his method and his system as we find them and to demonstrate that they form a coherent unity that must be preserved.  The opposite is true of Hegel.  The task he imposes is to separate out from the complex web of ideas with its sometimes glaring contradictions all the seminal elements of his thought and rescue them as a vital intellectual force for the present. (xlv)

10. Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923), in Marxism and Philosophy trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008), 39.

11. Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy,” 40.

12. See, for instance: Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution? (1900), in which Luxemburg pointed out that all reforms aimed at ameliorating the crisis of capital actually exacerbated it; Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902), in which Lenin supposed that overcoming reformist “revisionism” in international (Marxist) social democracy would amount to and be the express means for overcoming capitalism; and Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906), in which Trotsky pointed out that the various “prerequisites of socialism” not only developed historically independently but also, significantly, antagonistically.  In The State and Revolution (1917), Lenin, following Marx, critiqued anarchism for calling for the “abolition” of the state and not recognizing that the necessity of the state could only “wither away” as a function of the gradual overcoming of “bourgeois right” whose prevalence would persist in the revolutionary socialist “workers’ state” long after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie: the state would continue as a symptom of capitalist social relations without capitalists per se.  In Literature and Revolution (1924), Trotsky pointed out that, as symptomatic products of present society, the cultural and even political expressions of the revolution could not themselves embody the principles of an emancipated society but could, at best, only open the way to them.  For Lukács and Korsch (and Benjamin and Adorno following them — see Benjamin’s 1934 essay on “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Schocken, 1986], 220–238), such arguments demonstrated a dialectical approach to Marxism itself on the part of its most thoughtful actors.

13. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xlvi.  Citing Lukács in her review of Buck-Morss and Tar on the Frankfurt School, Rose posed the problem of Marxism this way:

The reception of the Frankfurt School in the English-speaking world to date displays a paradox.  Frequently, the Frankfurt School inspires dogmatic historiography although it represents a tradition which is attractive and important precisely because of its rejection of dogmatic or “orthodox” Marxism.  This tradition in German Marxism has its origin in Lukács’s most un-Hegelian injunction to take Marxism as a “method” — a method which would remain valid even if “every one of Marx’s individual theses” were proved wrong.  One can indeed speculate whether philosophers like Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno would have become Marxists if Lukács had not pronounced thus.  For other Marxists this position spells scientific “suicide.” (Rose, Review of The Origin of Negative Dialectics and The Frankfurt School, 126.)

Nevertheless, Rose used a passage from Lukács’s 1924 book in eulogy, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought as the epigraph for her essay: “[T]he dialectic is not a finished theory to be applied mechanically to all the phenomena of life but only exists as theory in and through this application” (126).  Critically, Rose asked only that Lukács’s own work — and that of other “Hegelian” Marxists — remain true to this observation.

14. See Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 171–175:

The class meaning of [the thoroughgoing capitalist rationalization of society] lies precisely in the fact that the bourgeoisie regularly transforms each new qualitative gain back onto the quantitative level of yet another rational calculation.  Whereas for the proletariat, the “same” development has a different class meaning: it means the abolition of the isolated individual, it means that the workers can become conscious of the social character of labor, it means that the abstract, universal form of the societal principle as it is manifested can be increasingly concretized and overcome. . . .  For the proletariat however, this ability to go beyond the immediate in search for the “remoter” factors means the transformation of the objective nature of the objects of action.

The “objective nature of the objects of action” includes that of the working class itself.

15. Such misapprehension of revolutionary Marxism as voluntarism has been commonplace.  Rosa Luxemburg’s biographer, the political scientist J. P. Nettl, in the essay “The German Social Democratic Party 1890–1914 as Political Model” (in Past and Present 30 [April 1965], 65–95), addressed this issue as follows:

Rosa Luxemburg was emphatically not an anarchist and went out of her way to distinguish between “revolutionary gymnastic,” which was “conjured out of the air at will,” and her own policy (see her 1906 pamphlet on The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). . . .  [Later Communist historians have burdened her] with the concept of spontaneity. . . .  [But her’s] was a dynamic, dialectic doctrine; organization and action revived each other and made each other grow. . . .  It may well be that there were underlying similarities to anarchism, insofar as any doctrine of action resembles any other.  A wind of action and movement was blowing strongly around the edges of European culture at the time, both in art and literature as well as in the more political context of Sorel and the Italian Futurists. . . .  [But] most important of all, Rosa Luxemburg specifically drew on a Russian experience [of the 1905 Revolution] which differed sharply from the intellectual individualism of Bakunin, [Domela-]Nieuwenhuis and contemporary anarchism.  She always emphasized self-discipline as an adjunct to action — the opposite of the doctrine of self-liberation which the Anarchists shared with other European action philosophies. (88–89)

The German Left evolved a special theory of action. . . .  Where the German Left emphasized action against organization, Lenin preached organization as a means to action.  But action was common to both — and it was this emphasis on action which finally brought the German Left and the Russian Bolsheviks into the same camp in spite of so many serious disagreements.  In her review of the Bolshevik revolution, written in September 1918, Rosa Luxemburg singled out this commitment to action for particular praise.  Here she saw a strong sympathetic echo to her own ideas, and analyzed it precisely in her own terms:

“With . . . the seizure of power and the carrying forward of the revolution the Bolsheviks have solved the famous question of a ‘popular majority’ which has so long oppressed the German Social Democrats . . . not through a majority to a revolutionary tactic, but through a revolutionary tactic to a majority” (The Russian Revolution)

With action as the cause and not the consequence of mass support, she saw the Bolsheviks applying her ideas in practice — and incidentally provides us with clear evidence as to what she meant when she spoke of majority and masses.  In spite of other severe criticisms of Bolshevik policy, it was this solution of the problem by the Bolsheviks which definitely ensured them the support of the German Left. (91–92)

The possibilities adumbrated by modern sociology have not yet been adequately exploited in the study of political organizations, dynamics, relationships.  Especially the dynamics; most pictures of change are “moving pictures,” which means that they are no more than “a composition of immobilities . . . a position, then a new position, etc., ad infinitum” (Henri Bergson).  The problem troubled Talcott Parsons among others, just as it long ago troubled Rosa Luxemburg. (95)

This was what Lukács, following Lenin and Luxemburg, meant by the problem of “reification.”

16. As Lukács put it in the Preface (1922) to History and Class Consciousness,

I should perhaps point out to the reader unfamiliar with dialectics one difficulty inherent in the nature of dialectical method relating to the definition of concepts and terminology.  It is of the essence of dialectical method that concepts which are false in their abstract one-sidedness are later transcended (zur Aufhebung gelangen).  The process of transcendence makes it inevitable that we should operate with these one-sided, abstract and false concepts.  These concepts acquire their true meaning less by definition than by their function as aspects that are then transcended in the totality.  Moreover, it is even more difficult to establish fixed meanings for concepts in Marx’s improved version of the dialectic than in the Hegelian original.  For if concepts are only the intellectual forms of historical realities then these forms, one-sided, abstract and false as they are, belong to the true unity as genuine aspects of it.  Hegel’s statements about this problem of terminology in the preface to the Phenomenology are thus even more true than Hegel himself realized when he said: “Just as the expressions ‘unity of subject and object’, of ‘finite and infinite’, of ‘being and thought’, etc., have the drawback that ‘object’ and ‘subject’ bear the same meaning as when they exist outside that unity, so that within the unity they mean something other than is implied by their expression: so, too, falsehood is not, qua false, any longer a moment of truth.”  In the pure historicization of the dialectic this statement receives yet another twist: in so far as the “false” is an aspect of the “true” it is both “false” and “non-false.”  When the professional demolishers of Marx criticize his “lack of conceptual rigor” and his use of “image” rather than “definitions,” etc., they cut as sorry a figure as did Schopenhauer when he tried to expose Hegel’s “logical howlers” in his Hegel critique.  All that is proved is their total inability to grasp even the ABC of the dialectical method.  The logical conclusion for the dialectician to draw from this failure is not that he is faced with a conflict between different scientific methods, but that he is in the presence of a social phenomenon and that by conceiving it as a socio-historical phenomenon he can at once refute it and transcend it dialectically. (xlvi–xlvii)

For Lukács, the self-contradictory nature of the workers’ movement was itself a “socio-historical phenomenon” that had brought forth a revolutionary crisis at the time of Lukács’s writing: from a Marxian perspective, the working class and its politics were the most important phenomena and objects of critique to be overcome in capitalist society.

17. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

18. See Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 93–110:

According to [Marxian] theory, history is the history of class struggles.  But the concept of class is bound up with the emergence of the proletariat. . . .  By extending the concept of class to prehistory, theory denounces not just the bourgeois . . . [but] turns against prehistory itself. . . .  By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being, [the critique of] political economy became the critique of history as a whole. . . .  All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory. (93–94)

This means, however, that the dehumanization is also its opposite. . . .  Only when the victims completely assume the features of the ruling civilization will they be capable of wresting them from the dominant power. (110)

This follows from Lukács’s conception of proletarian socialism as the “completion” of reification (“Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness):

The danger to which the proletariat has been exposed since its appearance on the historical stage was that it might remain imprisoned in its immediacy together with the bourgeoisie.  With the growth of social democracy this threat acquired a real political organisation which artificially cancels out the mediations so laboriously won and forces the proletariat back into its immediate existence where it is merely a component of capitalist society and not at the same time the motor that drives it to its doom and destruction. (196)

[E]ven the objects in the very centre of the dialectical process [i.e., the political forms of the workers’ movement itself] can only slough off their reified form after a laborious process.  A process in which the seizure of power by the proletariat and even the organisation of the state and the economy on socialist lines are only stages.  They are, of course, extremely important stages, but they do not mean that the ultimate objective has been achieved.  And it even appears as if the decisive crisis-period of capitalism may be characterized by the tendency to intensify reification, to bring it to a head. (208)

19. Rose’s term for the post-1960s “New Left” historical situation is “Heideggerian postmodernity.”  Robert Pippin, as a fellow “Hegelian,” in his brief response to the Critical Inquiry journal’s symposium on “The Future of Criticism,” titled “Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing” (Critical Inquiry 30.2 [Winter 2004], 424–428), has characterized this similarly, as follows:

[T]he level of discussion and awareness of this issue, in its historical dimensions (with respect both to the history of critical theory and the history of modernization) has regressed. . . .  [T]he problem with contemporary critical theory is that it has become insufficiently critical. . . .  [T]here is also a historical cost for the neglect or underattention or lack of resolution of this core critical problem: repetition. . . .  It may seem extreme to claim — well, to claim at all that such repetition exists (that postmodernism, say, is an instance of such repetition) — and also to claim that it is tied somehow to the dim understanding we have of the post-Kantian situation. . . .  [T]hat is what I wanted to suggest.  I’m not sure it will get us anywhere.  Philosophy rarely does.  Perhaps it exists to remind us that we haven’t gotten anywhere. (427–428)

Heidegger himself anticipated this result in his “Overcoming Metaphysics” (1936–46), in The End of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): “The still hidden truth of Being is withheld from metaphysical humanity.  The laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness” (87).  Elsewhere, in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), Heidegger acknowledged Marx’s place in this process: “With the reversal of metaphysics which was already accomplished by Karl Marx, the most extreme possibility of philosophy is attained” (433).