Historical Materialism, Volume 18, Number 4, 2010

Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–38

brill.nl/hima

Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’* Charles Post Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York [email protected]

Abstract The notion of the labour-aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working-class conservatism and reformism. Despite its continued appeal to scholars and activists on the Left, there is no single, coherent theory of the labour-aristocracy. While all versions argue workingclass conservatism and reformism reflects the politics of a privileged layer of workers who share in ‘monopoly’ super-profits, they differ on the sources of those super-profits: national dominance of the world-market in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), imperialist investments in the ‘colonial world’/global South (Lenin and Zinoviev), or corporate monopoly in the twentieth century (Elbaum and Seltzer). The existence of a privileged layer of workers who share monopoly super-profits with the capitalist class cannot be empirically verified. This essay presents evidence that British capital’s dominance of key-branches of global capitalist production in the Victorian period, imperialist investment and corporate market-power can not explain wage-differentials among workers globally or nationally, and that relatively well-paid workers have and continue to play a leading rôle in radical and revolutionary working-class organisations and struggles. An alternative explanation of working-class radicalism, reformism, and conservatism will be the subject of a subsequent essay. Keywords labour-aristocracy, imperialism, class-consciousness, monopoly, competition, wage-differentials

* The author would like to thank Robert Brenner, Sheila Cohen, Sam Farber, Mike Parker, Jane Slaughter, Teresa Stern, and Charles Williams for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Special thanks to Kim Moody and Anwar Shaikh for their general comments and their help with obtaining data on the weight of foreign direct investment in world- and US-investment (Moody) and on the US-profits earned abroad as a percentage of total US-profits and domestic US-wages (Shaikh). I am also grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft from the editorial board of Historical Materialism, and for comments from four reviewers for the journal (Colin Barker and David Camfield, who identified themselves, and two others who remained anonymous). Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Office of Academic Affairs, Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY, for a faculty publication-grant that allowed me to revise this article for publication. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550596

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In the past fifteen years, there has been a resurgence of working-class resistance in the developed capitalist social formations. After nearly twenty years of employer- and government-attacks on wages, hours, working conditions and social-welfare provisions, workers in the industrialised world have begun to fight back. Starting with the French public-sector strikes against pensionreforms in 1995, through the general strikes that swept the rest of Europe and Canada in the late 1990s, to the victory of the student-worker coalition’s struggle against the French youth-employment law in 2006 and factoryoccupations against lay-offs, broad layers of workers have begun to challenge neo-liberalism in the heartlands of global capitalism. Even US-workers, often considered the least radical and militant in the industrialised world, launched a number of struggles in the 1990s – the Staley, Caterpillar and Bridgestone/ Firestone strikes of 1994–6, the GM parts-workers strike of 1996, the United Parcel Service strike of 1997, the New York City transport-workers strike of 2005, and the 2008 sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago.1 Despite these manifestations of militant resistance, reformist and even outright conservative politics still grip the majority of workers in the global North. The broad outlines of Marxist theory tell us that capitalism creates it own gravediggers – a class of collective producers with no interest in the maintenance of private ownership of the means of production. The capitalist system’s drive to maximise profits should force workers to struggle against their employers, progressively broaden their struggle, and eventually overthrow the system and replace it with their democratic self-rule. Historical reality seems to challenge these basic Marxist ideas. While living and working conditions for workers in the global North have deteriorated sharply since the late 1960s, the result has not been, for the most part, the growth of revolutionary consciousness and organisation. Instead, we have seen reactionary ideas – racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, militarism – strengthened in a significant sector of workers in the advanced capitalist countries. Since the late 1970s, nearly one-third of voters in US unionhouseholds have voted for right-wing Republicans.2 Explaining this paradox has been a crucial challenge for Marxists. For the past half-century, a widely accepted explanation of working-class conservatism has been the ‘dominant-ideology’ thesis. Put simply, the control by the capitalist class of various ‘ideological apparatuses’ – the schools and media, most importantly – has led the working class and other subordinate groupings 1. Ashby and Hawkins 2009; Kutalik 2006; Moody 2007. 2. New York Times 2004.

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to actively embrace conservative capitalist ideologies. In the work of ‘neo-Gramscian’ thinkers (whose ideas have little relationship to that of the Italian revolutionary), ruling-class ideological hegemony equals the acceptance of capitalist ideas by the vast majority of the exploited and oppressed. In the past two decades, the ‘hegemony/dominant-ideology’ thesis has been subjected to devastating and convincing criticisms.3 Recently, an older explanation of working-class conservatism has been revived among radical thinkers in the global North – the theory of the labouraristocracy. In the past decade, scholars and activists have again argued that super-profits, derived from either imperialist investment in the global South or corporate monopoly, and shared with a segment of the working class, is the source of enduring working-class racism and conservatism in the US and other industrialised capitalist societies. Rod Bush’s study of black nationalism in the US uses the theory of the labour-aristocracy to explain the persistence of white working-class racism: In the core zones (the so-called developed countries of North America, Western Europe, and Japan), which by definition has captured a disproportionate share of the benefits of the system, the upper stratum of the working class has often united with the petty bourgeoisie seeking upward mobility, while taking a defensive position toward the lower working class (as well as other low-ranking groups throughout the world-system).4

Important groups of activists, in particular those working with low-wage workers, are also drawn to the theory of the labour-aristocracy. Four members of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), a workers’ centre organising mostly ‘low-wage/no-wage’ workers of colour in the San-Francisco area, argued that: Another feature of imperialism that distinguishes it from earlier eras of capitalism is the imperialist powers’ creation of a ‘labor aristocracy.’ The dominant position of the imperialist nations allows these nations to extract super-profits. The ruling elite of imperialist nations use some of the super-profits to make significant economic and political concessions to certain sectors of that nation’s working class. Through higher wages, greater access to consumer goods and services and expanded social wage such as public education and cultural institutions, the imperialist elite are able to essentially bribe those sections of the working class. . . . 3. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980; Scott 1985, Chapter 8. While Abercrombie, Hill and Turner present a devastating critique of the ‘dominant-ideology’ thesis, they concede – incorrectly in our assessment – that the dominant ideology partially incorporates the working class in ‘late capitalism’. 4. Bush 1999, p. 19.

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C. Post / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 3–38 For a contemporary example of this, all we have to do is look at the 2004 presidential elections. Statistics show that working class whites in the United States voted overwhelmingly for George W. Bush in an election that could be read as a referendum of the empire’s war on the Iraqi people. An analysis that solely focuses on class would suggest that working class whites had and have an interest in opposing a war that, if nothing else, is costing them billions in dollars. But clearly that ain’t what happened. Working class whites voted overwhelmingly in support of the war on the Iraqi people. The majority of working class whites, despite their own exploitation, tie their own interests to white supremacy and the dominance of ‘America’ in the world.5

A major problem in the assessment of this theory – and perhaps one of its appeals – is that there is no unified theory of the labour-aristocracy among Marxists. Thirty-five years ago, Gareth Stedman-Jones noted:6 In most Marxist writing, the use of this idea [the labour-aristocracy – C.P.] has been ambiguous and unsatisfactory. Its status is uncertain and it has been employed at will, descriptively, polemically or theoretically, without ever finding a firm anchorage. . . . [T]he term has often been used as if it provided an explanation, without ever finding a firm anchorage. . . . But it would be more accurate to say that it pointed toward a vacant area where an explanation should be. . . . Indicative of its lack of precision is the elasticity of the stratum of the working class referred to. . . . The methods by which the labour aristocratic strata are said to have been bought off have been almost as various as the personnel included within it . . .7

Despite its diverse forms, all of the variants of the labour-aristocracy thesis agree on two key-points. First, working-class conservatism is the result of material differences – relative privileges – enjoyed by some workers. Workers who embrace racism, nativism, sexism, homophobia and pro-imperialist patriotism tend to be those who earn higher wages, experience more secure employment, and have access to health-care, pensions and other forms of the social wage.8 Second, the source of this relative privilege (‘the bribe’) is a sharing of higher-than-average profits between capitalists and a privileged labour-aristocracy.

5. Browne, Franco, Negron-Gonzales and Williams 2005, p. 46. 6. Stedman-Jones 1975, pp. 61–2. 7. Similar criticisms are made in Barbalet 1987, McLennan 1981, Moorehouse 1978 and Moorehouse 1981. 8. The social wage is provided, either through state-administered social-welfare programmes, as in most advanced capitalist societies, or through collectively-bargained ‘private welfare-states’ within unionised industries in the US.

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The three main variants of the labour-aristocracy thesis differ in their identification of the source of these ‘monopoly super-profits’. The first version, presented in a series of letters by Marx and Engels,9 argues that British capitalists accrued higher-than-average profits from their ‘industrial monopoly’ in the world-market of the mid-nineteenth century. These super-profits allowed British capitalists to recognise the skilled workers’ craft-unions and accept their restrictive apprenticeship-practices, which, in turn, enabled the labour-aristocracy to secure a rôle in supervising less-skilled workers, higherthan-average wages, and more-secure employment. In the early-twentieth century, Lenin10 and Zinoviev11 put forward the second version, arguing that a minority of well-paid workers in the industrialised countries shared the super-profits their capitalists derived from the exploitation of low-wage workers in the ‘colonial world’. The most recent version of the theory12 recognises that the volume of profits derived from imperialist investment in the global South are insufficient to explain differences in wages, benefits and job-security among workers in the global North. Instead, they locate the source of the relative privilege in super-profits derived from the workings of ‘monopoly-capitalism’. From this perspective, the higher-than-average profits earned by monopolistic corporations are shared with their workers, at the expense of workers in smaller, more-competitive firms. The theory of the labour-aristocracy is neither a theoretically rigorous nor factually realistic explanation of working-class reformism or conservatism. We will begin by examining the three variants of the labour-aristocracy thesis – the Marx-Engels theory from the mid-nineteenth century, the Lenin-Zinoviev version from the early-twentieth century, and the Elbaum-Seltzer variant from the 1980s. Our critique, which incorporates earlier Marxist arguments,13 begins with an evaluation of the claim that British capitalists’ global industrial dominance allowed the emergence of craft-unionism and a privileged layer of skilled workers in Victorian Britain. We then examine the argument that super-profits extracted from workers in the global South underwrite a bribe in the form of higher wages for a minority of the working class in the global North. Finally, we assess the claim that limits on competition flowing from industrial concentration in key-sectors of the economy produce super-profits that are shared as higher wages with unionised workers. Our critique of the 9. Strauss 2004a presents a useful summary of Engels’s writings. 10. Lenin 1970 and 1974. 11. Zinoviev 1983–4. 12. Elbaum and Seltzer 1982 and 2004. 13. See Tony Cliff (Cliff 1957), Samuel Friedman (Friedman 1983), Marc Linder (Linder 1985), Ernest Mandel (Mandel 1984) and H.F. Moorehouse (Moorehouse 1978 and 1981).

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theory of the labour-aristocracy ends with a brief review of the actual history of radical working-class activism in the twentieth century.

The labour-aristocracy thesis I – Marx and Engels For Marx and Engels, the English working class of the early-nineteenth century had produced the model of a class-conscious labour-movement. Blending together Jacobin democratic-political radicalism and workplace-militancy, the English working class had ‘made itself ’ – moving from illegal workplace-union organisation to Chartism, the first, independent, working-class political movement – in less than fifty years.14 The defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s issued in a period of working-class retreat and conservatism – ‘the un-making of the British working class’.15 By the late 1850s, Marx and Engels were trying to explain how and why the most revolutionary working class in Europe had become its most conservative in the course of a decade. In a series of letters between themselves and their supporters, Marx and Engels grappled with the growing conservatism of the British workers’ movement – the dominance of unions of skilled workers which were indifferent, if not openly hostile, to the organisation of the unskilled majority of the working class, and the craft-unions’ support for the capitalist Liberal Party rather than an independent socialist or workers’ party. In an 1885 essay, which was incorporated into new prefaces to his classic The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels argued that the roots of the growing conservatism of the British labour-movement was the emergence of a labour-aristocracy of skilled workers in cotton-textiles, iron, steel and machine-making.16 He argued that these workers had been able to establish craft-unions, regulate the labourmarket through apprenticeship-programmes, and secure higher wages and stable employment. British capitalists’ dominance of the world-economy – their monopoly of industrial production on a world-scale in the third quarter of the nineteenth century – produced super-profits that allowed them to concede relatively higher wages and employment-security to a small minority of workers. The resulting relative privilege, especially when compared with the 14. Thompson 1963 details this process. 15. Moorhouse 1978, p. 61. 16. Engels 1892. Corr and Brown make two important points about Marx and Engels’s discussion of the labour-aristocracy. First, both Marx and Engels, despite their criticisms of the British craft-union leaders, were defenders of trade-unions and strikes – unlike most contemporary socialists. Second, while Marx tended to use the term ‘labour-aristocracy’ in a descriptive fashion, Engels attempted to provide an analytical basis – Britain’s ‘industrial monopoly’ – for the concept after Marx’s death in 1883 (Corr and Brown 1993, pp. 39–45).

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mass of poorly-paid workers who faced recurring bouts of unemployment, explained the growing conservatism of the British labour-movement. In the 1950s, Eric Hobsbawm produced a detailed, empirical study of the labour-aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain.17 While not explicitly addressing Engels’s claims that British industrial capital’s dominance of the world-market allowed the consolidation of a layer of relatively well-paid and securely employed workers, Hobsbawm traces the development of a new labour-aristocracy of skilled workers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Older, pre-industrial crafts mechanised or experienced ‘subcontracting, putting-out and general sweating’, throwing the mass of the artisanal craftsmen into the ranks of the unskilled. A new layer of skilled workers in new industries such as cotton-textiles and metal-working ‘where machinery was imperfect and depended on some significant manual skill’18 emerged. It was these workers who were best able to establish exclusivist craftunions that used apprenticeship ‘to make their labour artificially scarce, by restricting entry to their profession’.19 Apprenticeships and other exclusionary practices allowed the labour-aristocrats to secure higher wages and more-stable employment. The relative privilege of the craft-workers in textiles and metalworking, achieved at the expense of less-skilled workers, was the social base of ‘labour-Liberalism’. In the early 1970s, John Foster expanded on Hobsbawm’s analysis of the emergence of a labour-aristocracy of skilled industrial workers in nineteenthcentury Britain.20 Following Engels, Foster argues that the ‘liberalisation’ of British capitalist rule after the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s was founded on Britain’s global economic dominance, including an increased export of capital-goods in the form of machinery.21 British capital’s industrial monopoly promoted a radical restructuring of production and the consolidation of a new skilled labour-aristocracy in the cotton-textile industry, machine-making and mining. These workers were not only better-paid and more-securely employed, but were partially integrated into capitalist management through their rôle in 17. Hobsbawm 1964. Corr and Brown point out that Hobsbawm’s work on the ‘labouraristocracy’ was intended to provide a Marxian alternative to the mainstream sociological literature of the 1950s and 1960s which argued that the workers in the industrialised capitalist societies had become ‘embourgeoisified’ by adopting the values and norms of the middle class (Corr and Brown 1993, pp. 54–7). 18. Hobsbawm 1964, pp. 282–3. 19. Hobsbawm 1964, pp. 290–1. 20. Foster 1974, Chapter 7. 21. Foster, at times, confuses the export of capital-goods (textile-machinery) with the export of capital – the internationalisation of capitalist social-property relations through productive investment.

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supervising less-skilled workers. In particular, the rôle of skilled machinists (‘engineers’), cotton-spinners and mining check-weightman as ‘pace-setters’ in production made them co-exploiters of labour with capital. The labouraristocrats preserved their economic position through craft-unionism, apprenticeship and the exclusion of the unskilled from the labour-movement. Their embrace of the capitalist Liberal Party went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of their economic privilege and their integration into the ‘cultural orbit of the bourgeoisie’22 through Church-attendance, adulteducation, consumer-cooperatives and temperance-societies.23

The labour-aristocracy thesis II – Lenin and Zinoviev V.I. Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev’s analysis of the crisis of European socialism during and immediately after World-War I produced a new version of the labour-aristocracy thesis. Lenin and Zinoviev were shocked when the leaders of the European socialist parties supported ‘their’ capitalist governments in the First World-War. The victory of ‘opportunism’ confounded Lenin and Zinoviev, who had written off ‘revisionism’ (Edward Bernstein’s challenge to classical Marxism in 1899) to the influence of the middle classes – downwardlymobile shopkeepers, artisans and intellectuals – in the workers’ movement. They believed the orthodox Marxist leadership of the socialist parties and unions had long ago vanquished the revisionist challenge. Both expected that the European socialist leaders would fulfil their pledge, ratified at numerous congresses of the Socialist International, to oppose their ruling class’s wardrive with strikes and social disruption. Lenin and Zinoviev revived Engels’s notion of the labour-aristocracy to explain the collapse of European socialism. While Britain’s industrial monopoly in the world-market had ended in the late-nineteenth century, the new imperialism – based on the export of capital, rather than commodities – produced a new labour-aristocracy. Lenin introduced his explanation for the victory of opportunism in the socialist and labour-movements in ‘The Collapse of the Second International’: The epoch of imperialism is one in which the world is divided among the ‘great’ privileged nations that oppress all other nations. Morsels of the loot obtained as a result of these privileges and this oppression undoubtedly fall to the share of

22. Foster 1974, p. 223. 23. Morris 1988 summarises historical research published after Foster’s that tends to support the latter’s claims.

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certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie and to the working-class aristocracy and bureaucracy.24

This segment ‘represents an infinitesimal minority of the proletariat and the working masses, form an insignificant minority of the proletariat and of the toiling masses’ whose ‘adherence . . . with the bourgeoisie against the mass of the proletariat alliance with their “own” national bourgeoisie, against the oppressed masses of all nations’ was the social basis of reformism and conservatism in the working class. Lenin located the economic foundation of the labour-aristocracy in the super-profits generated through imperialist investment in the ‘colonial’ world – Africa, Asia and Latin America, what we today refer to as the global South.25 According to his 1920 preface to Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism: Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the ‘advanced’ countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert. This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism.26

Zinoviev, in a lengthy analysis of German Social Democracy, argued ‘it cannot be denied that for a certain minority of skilled workers, for the labor aristocracy, a few crumbs may fall off from the imperialist table’.27 The majority of the ranks of German Social Democracy, the largest working-class party in the world before 1914, came from this layer of well-paid, skilled industrial

24. Lenin 1974, p. 220. 25. Lenin recognised that the vast majority of the imperialist export of capital – foreign direct investment – flowed from one advanced capitalist country to other advanced capitalist countries in the early-twentieth century, as it does today. However, his theory of the labour-aristocracy argued that the source of the ‘bribe’ was the super-profits expropriated from workers in the ‘colonial’ societies. 26. Lenin 1970, p. 667. 27. Zinoviev 1983–4, p. 182.

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workers – who ‘served the big bourgeoisie as the best means of introducing bourgeois ideas into the laboring masses’.28 Neither Lenin nor Zinoviev reduced the imperialist ‘bribe’ to higher wages alone. Both pointed to greater security of employment, and greater access to cultural resources, education, and social benefits as key-elements of the relative privilege of the labour-aristocracy. These material privileges were derived, first and foremost, from the higher-than-average profits accrued from imperialist investments in the global South. While they focused on relatively well-paid skilled industrial workers and their craft-unions as the core of the labouraristocracy in the early-twentieth century, Lenin and Zinoviev recognised that the growing full-time officialdom of the mass Social-Democratic parties and unions were also an important source of reformism and conservatism in the working class. However, they believed that the growth of the labour-officialdom was another manifestation of capitalists sharing imperialist super-profits with a small minority of the working class.

The labour-aristocracy thesis III – Elbaum and Seltzer The Lenin-Zinoviev version of the labour-aristocracy theory, with its emphasis on capitalists and workers in the global North sharing the fruits of the superexploitation of workers in the global South, faced serious empirical challenge by the 1970s. On the one hand, there were major empirical problems (see below) with Lenin and Zinoviev’s claims that higher wages and more-secure employment for a significant minority of workers in the imperialist countries comes from the super-profits earned from the exploitation of lower-paid workers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. On the other hand, the labouraristocracy could not be restricted to the declining numbers of skilled industrial workers and their craft-unions in the advanced capitalist countries. In the early 1980s, Max Elbaum and Robert Seltzer attempted to salvage the theory of the labour-aristocracy by providing a new, and more sophisticated theoretical and historical foundation.29 Elbaum and Seltzer assert that the emergence of monopoly-capitalism allowed large corporations that dominate key-branches of industry to earn super-profits, which they share with their workers in the form of secure employment, higher wages and benefits. With the consolidation of monopoly-

28. Zinoviev 1983–4, p. 168. 29. Elbaum and Seltzer 1982 and 2004. Strauss 2004b presents the same argument as Elbaum and Seltzer.

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capitalism, almost all unionised workers employed by the large corporations became part of the labour-aristocracy: . . . significant numbers of US industrial workers have stood in a position of relative privilege vis-à-vis large numbers of other workers in other countries, but also to many workers in this country. In terms of stability of employment, wage levels, access to pensions and health care, etc., the general condition of industrial workers, especially those in monopoly industries, has been much better than the condition of workers in the marginal industries, in the retail trades and service sectors, the agricultural proletariat, and among the growing numbers of permanently unemployed and underemployed.30

Elbaum and Seltzer argue that, prior to the rise of large corporations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, capitalism was in its competitive stage. Under competitive capitalism, most branches of industry saw a large number of relatively small firms competing with one another through pricecutting. If any particular firm or industry began to experience higher-thanaverage profits because of the introduction of new machinery, it was relatively easy for its competitors to either adopt the new technology or shift investment from industries with lower profits to industries with higher profits. Through this process of competition within and between branches of production, new technology was rapidly diffused and capital easily moved between different sectors of the economy, resulting in uniform technical conditions within an industry, and equal profit-rates within and between industries. According to Elbaum and Seltzer, Marx’s analysis of the equalisation of the rate of profit31 applied to the competitive stage of capitalism: In the era of competitive capitalism, profits above the average rate, i.e., surplus profits, were generally spasmodic and temporary. They were usually derived as a result of technological advances that enabled a capitalist to reduce costs below the industry average, or entrepreneurial skills that opened new markets. However, an abnormally high rate of profit by an individual firm, or in a particular branch of industry, was soon undermined by an inflow of capital seeking the higher rate of profit or by the relatively rapid adoption of cost-cutting innovations by competitors. 32

The rise of large-scale corporations in the twentieth century created obstacles to the equalisation of profit-rates. Oligopoly – where a small number of firms dominate a given industry – replaced competition. Specifically, the enormous 30. Elbaum and Seltzer 1982, p. 85. 31. Marx 1981, Part Two: ‘The Transformation of Profit into Average Profit’. 32. Elbaum and Seltzer 2004, p. 27, n. §.

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cost of new capital’s entering these industries (automobile-manufacture, steel, etc.) – the barriers to entry – allow these firms to limit competition and sustain above-average profits in several ways. These barriers to entry prevent the rapid diffusion of new methods of production within an industry and block the movement of capital from lower- to higher-profit industries, creating superprofits for the monopoly-corporations. Finally, barriers to entry and restricted competition allow corporations to raise prices above their prices of production, securing super-profits for the largest firms in the economy. Competition does not disappear under monopoly-capitalism, but tends to operate primarily in those sectors of the economy where large numbers of relatively small firms continue to predominate. Cut-throat competition and the rapid depression of above-average profits to the average rate persist in the competitive sectors (garment, electronics, etc.) of the economy. There, the small scale of investment necessary to start a competitive firm lowers barriers to entry and allows a large number of small firms to survive. The result is a ‘dual economy’, with two distinct profit-rates: In the monopoly stage of capitalism, the tendency to form an average rate of profit still exists, since monopoly doesn’t obliterate competition in the system as a whole. But it is modified by monopoly power. Therefore, the surplus value of society is distributed both according to size of capital through inter-industry competition (which yields equal profit on equal capital as in competitive capitalism); and according to the level of monopolization (which yields monopoly super-profits). Monopolies receive both the average profit and monopoly superprofit. Consequently, there arise the phenomena of a relatively permanent hierarchy of profit rates ranging from the highest in the strategic industries with large-scale production and the strongest monopolies, to the lowest in weaker industries with small-scale production, intense competition and market instability.33

The monopoly-industries’ higher than average profit-rates allow these firms to provide higher-than-average wages and benefits and secure employment for their workers. By contrast, competitive industries earn average (or belowaverage) profit-rates and doom workers in these industries to below-average wages and benefits, and insecure employment. According to Elbaum and Seltzer, unions in the monopoly-sector of the economy, where the absence of competition creates super-profits, negotiate a ‘bribe’ in the form of higher wages, more-secure employment, pensions, and 33. Elbaum and Seltzer 2004, p. 27, n. §. While Elbaum and Seltzer do not acknowledge the source of their theory of monopoly-capitalism, their arguments bear a close relationship to the theories found in Baran and Sweezy 1966, and Gordon, Edwards and Reich 1982.

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health-insurance. Given the realities of racism and national oppression, white workers tend to be over-represented in the monopoly-sector of the economy, while workers of colour tend to be over-represented in the competitive sector. The labour-aristocracy is no longer made up primarily of skilled industrial workers, as was the case in the early-twentieth century. For Elbaum and Seltzer, the more highly-paid workers in the unionised monopoly- and public-sector constitute a contemporary labour-aristocracy, whose higher wages derive from a sharing of higher-than-average profits with their own capitalists.34

British capital’s global ‘monopoly’ and craft-unionism One of the difficulties in evaluating the labour-aristocracy theory is the various forms the relative privileges of this stratum of the working class take historically. Engels, Hobsbawm, Foster, Lenin, Zinoviev, Elbaum and Seltzer are very clear that the ‘bribe’ – the sharing of super-profits between capitalists and the labour-aristocracy – does not merely take the form of higher wages, but greater job-security and access to pensions, health-care and the like. With the exception of wage-differentials, it is difficult to quantify these other forms of relative material privilege. Thus, our evaluation of all three variants of the labouraristocracy theory will focus on whether or not wage-differentials among workers in the advanced capitalist countries can be explained either by Britain’s dominance of key-branches of global production in the late-nineteenth century, by profits from investments in the global South, or by the degree of industrial concentration. The first problem with the claims that Britain’s dominance of global industrial production created a conservative labour-aristocracy after 1850 is the difficulty in establishing the forms of their relative privilege. Foster argues that a key-element of the labour-aristocracy’s relative privilege and conservatism was its rôle in production – that skilled workers in cotton-textiles, metalworking and mining collaborated with capital in setting the pace of labour for unskilled workers. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the rôle of skilled workers as supervisors was a new development that could explain the emergence of a labour-aristocracy after 1850. Prior to 1830, skilled workers were supervisors and pace-makers in mining, pottery, iron-working, textiles and

34. Elbaum and Seltzer 1982 presents a fairly detailed discussion of the composition of the ‘labour-aristocracy’ in the US since the Second World-War, which is essentially the same as what Gordon, Edwards and Reich 1982 labels as the ‘primary labor market’ under monopolycapitalism.

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construction.35 While engineering workers in machine-building and metalworking acted as ‘pace-making’ supervisors of unskilled workers before the 1880s, the evidence for skilled textile-workers or miners acting as task-masters is much weaker.36 In mining, the ‘check-weight man’ position – a union-miner who, independently of management, determined the amount of coal that miners produced – was in no sense a supervisory position. In cotton-textiles, employers often hired entire households, assigning skilled adult men to supervise unskilled women and children from their household. After 1850, management sought to undermine the supervisory rôle of skilled workers and consolidate the power to direct workers in their own hands in both metalworking and cotton-textiles. For Engels and Hobsbawm, the ability of craft-unions to enforce apprenticeship was decisive to winning higher-than-average wages and greater employment-security.37 However, there is considerable evidence that even the strongest unions of skilled workers in cotton-textiles and metalworking were unable to maintain control over the training and supply of skilled labour in the second half of the nineteenth century. The technological transformation of the labour-process – the introduction of new and more complex machinery – and the resultant deskilling of labour, combined with employer-hostility to the craft-union’s ‘restrictive practices’, led to a radical decline in the portion of unions that maintained apprenticeships.38 By 1900, less than one per cent of all British unions maintained apprenticeshipprogrammes.39 Nor is there clear evidence that skilled workers’ higher-than-average wages translated into higher annual household-incomes and a stable place in the labour-aristocracy. Numerous authors point out that, while skilled workers in craft-unions did earn higher-than-average wages, craft-unions were unable to secure stable, year-round employment for all of their members.40 Nor were these unions able to preserve working conditions and pensions for their members, many of whom were ‘as much . . . as . . . the unskilled worker, at the 35. Corr and Brown 1993, pp. 64–5; Thompson 1964, pp. 243ff. 36. Stedman-Jones 1975, pp. 61–9; Moorehouse 1978, pp. 69–70, 72–3. 37. Moorehouse argues that the strength of apprenticeship-programmes was not a central element of Hobsbawm’s analysis (Moorehouse 1978, p. 67). However, Hobsbawm is very clear that apprenticeship was central to the higher wages and more secure employment enjoyed by the labour-aristocracy (Hobsbawm 1964, pp. 290ff.). 38. Linder 1985, pp. 48–56, 89–91; Pelling 1968. 39. Linder 1985, p. 53. Matsumura’s 1983 study of lead-crystal (‘flint’) glassmakers in the mid-nineteenth century demonstrates that the successful defence of apprenticeship relied on employers’ inability to introduce new machinery that effectively deskilled labour. 40. Linder 1985, pp. 93–8; Moorehouse 1978, pp. 67–8; Pelling 1968.

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mercy of injury, unemployment and old age’.41 Studies of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century working-class family-structure in Britain conclude that periodic unemployment and frequent short-range social mobility in and out of skilled employment make it impossible to identify a durable layer of labour-aristocrats.42 There is also considerable evidence that the wage-differentials enjoyed by skilled workers were declining in the 1870s and 1880s. Firstly, wages for all workers in British industry, skilled and unskilled, fell throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Secondly, wage-differentials between and within industries were also declining in this period. On the one hand, wage-differentials between industries declined as large numbers of workers shifted from ‘sweated’ nonmechanised trades to mechanised industries. On the other hand, wagedifferentials within industries also abated, as the numbers of female and juvenile workers employed in less-skilled work shrank. In sum, there is little evidence of a relatively permanent layer of workers in Britain in the latenineteenth century who enjoyed durable higher wages and employmentsecurity.43 Finally, there is little empirical evidence that British capital’s dominance of global industrial production explains the wage-differentials – no matter how fleeting and temporary – skilled workers enjoyed in the cotton-textiles and metal-working industries.44 Britain’s relative domination of the world-market ends in 1870 – at the very height of the purported political and ideological influence of the British labour-aristocracy over the British working class. After 1870, US- and German producers successfully challenged British domination in consumer-goods, iron- and steel-production, machine-making, and shipand railroad-building. More importantly, British industry’s profits from exports cannot account for the average wage-differentials of skilled metalworkers. The profits earned through the export of British machinery divided by the number of skilled metal-workers ‘would not have amounted to the average weekly wage of an engineer in Manchester in 1871’.45 Looking at the total profits from British foreign investment in 1867, Linder concludes: If the assumption is once again made that one-quarter of this amount would have been available for redistribution to a labor aristocracy, little more than eight pounds sterling would have accrued to each labor aristocrat in England and

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Moorehouse 1978, p. 67. Thompson 1978, pp. 125–34. Linder 1985, pp. 61–2, 89–93. Linder 1985, pp. 70–5, 78–80. Linder 1985, p. 80.

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The wage-differentials that did exist, on the basis of skill and between different branches of industry, were not unique to nineteenth-century British capitalism and can be explained without reference to a purported ‘industrial monopoly’. Wage-differentials between skilled and unskilled labour is a ‘permanent feature of the labor market under capitalism’.47 The value of the production and reproduction of skilled labour-power is greater than that of unskilled labourpower, due to the greater time and human labour required to train skilled workers. Thus, wage-differentials between skilled and unskilled workers are a feature of all capitalist industries and societies, no matter what the relative competitive position of an individual capitalist or a group of national capitalists. Similarly, different levels of labour-productivity explain intra-industry wagedifferentials – in particular between industries with different levels of mechanisation. As Linder argues, ‘rising productivity and hence profits appear to offer a much more plausible interpretation of branch-specific higher wages’.48 In fact, most profit and wage-differentials that are attributed to ‘monopoly’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are the product of capitalist competition creating different levels of mechanisation within and between industries.

Imperialist investment, wages, and profits Over thirty years ago, Ernest Mandel rejected the Lenin-Zinoviev variant of the labour-aristocracy theory.49 He noted that profits earned by US-based transnational corporations in the global South ‘constitutes a negligible sum compared to the total wage bill of the American working class’. Has ‘globalisation’ and the growth of direct transnational investment in the global South changed the volume of profits from these investments? Do higher-thanaverage profits from investments in Africa, Asia and Latin America account for wage-differentials among workers in the industrialised countries today? Imperialist investment, particularly in the global South, represents a tiny portion of global capitalist investment even today, in the era of globalisation.50 Foreign direct investment made up only 5% of total world-investment prior to 2000 – 95% of total capitalist investment took place within the boundaries 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Linder 1985, p. 81. Field 1978–9, p. 70. Linder 1985, p. 80. Mandel 1984, p. 19. Moody 1997, Part I; Moody 2002; Moody 2004.

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of each industrialised country. Nearly three-quarters of total foreign direct investment flowed from one industrialised country – one part of the global North – to another. Less than 2% of total world-investment flowed from the global North to the global South. It is not surprising that the global South accounted for only 20% of global manufacturing output, mostly in labourintensive industries such as clothing, shoes, automobile-parts, and simple electronics. The rapid growth of transnational corporate investment in China in the last decade has changed this picture, but only slightly. Foreign direct investment as a percentage of global gross fixed-capital formation jumped from 2.5% in 1982, to 4.1% in 1990 to 9.7% in 2005. The percentage of foreign direct investment flowing to the global North fell from 82.5% in 1990 to 59.4% in 2005. However, the global South still only accounts for less than 4% of global fixed-capital formation.51 While China has led the growth of transnational capital-accumulation, the bulk of the capital invested in China remains in labour-intensive manufacturing – the low and medium end of transnationalcorporate organised global-production chains.52 Data for profits earned by US-companies overseas do not distinguish between investments in the global North and global South. For purposes of approximation, we will assume that the 25% of US-foreign direct investment in labour-intensive manufacturing in Africa, Asia and Latin America prior to 2005 earned profit-rates above those earned on the 75% of US-foreign direct investment in more capital-intensive production in Western Europe, Canada and Japan. However, it is unlikely that the profit-rate on investments in the global South is more than double that in the global North. If that were the case, much more of foreign direct investment would flow consistently to the global South. It is not unreasonable to assume that no more than half of the profits earned abroad by US-companies are earned in the global South. Assigning 50% of foreign profits of US-companies to their investments in the global South probably biases the data in favour of claims that these profits constitute a significant source of total US-wages. Even accepting such a biased estimate, the data in Table I and Graph I indicate that Mandel’s assertion that profits earned from investment in the global South make up a tiny fraction of the total wages of workers in the global North continues to be true. Total profits earned by US-companies abroad exceeded 4% of total US-wages only once before 1995 – in 1979. Foreign profits as a percentage of total US-wages rose above 5% only in 1997, 51. World Bank 2006, pp. 296–99. 52. Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2006.

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Table I: Foreign profits as percentage of total US-profits and domestic US-wages, 1948–2003 Year

1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Foreign Profits as % of Total US-profits

Foreign Profits as % of US-wages

Year

Foreign Profits as % of Total US-profits

Foreign Profits as % of US-wages

5.69% 5.73% 5.19% 5.57% 6.15% 6.07% 6.50% 6.14% 7.44% 7.95% 7.56% 6.42% 7.51% 7.77% 7.56% 7.55% 7.50% 7.00% 6.43% 6.93% 7.51% 9.01% 11.37% 10.86% 11.50% 15.91% 20.75% 14.89%

1.87% 1.80% 1.82% 1.92% 1.87% 1.72% 1.82% 2.01% 2.15% 2.16% 1.89% 1.89% 1.99% 2.04% 2.13% 2.20% 2.26% 2.23% 1.98% 1.95% 2.05% 2.11% 2.17% 2.30% 2.50% 3.30% 3.47% 2.91%

1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

14.24% 13.73% 14.96% 22.59% 26.43% 19.40% 20.72% 17.93% 16.35% 16.02% 17.39% 18.36% 19.06% 21.00% 22.37% 20.15% 19.28% 19.12% 19.80% 21.06% 20.36% 20.98% 21.04% 24.23% 30.12% 30.56% 28.74% 29.70%

3.01% 3.03% 3.22% 4.16% 3.90% 3.06% 2.83% 3.00% 3.03% 2.87% 2.82% 3.18% 3.60% 3.60% 3.66% 3.35% 3.29% 3.57% 3.93% 4.59% 4.78% 5.08% 4.33% 4.85% 5.12% 4.55% 5.11% 6.04%

Sources: Corporate Profits from NIPA Tables 6–16 B-D: line 2, Domestic Industries; line 6, Receipts from Rest of the World; Employee Compensation from NIA Table 1.13, line 6, Compensation of Employees.

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Graph I: Foreign Profits as Percentage of Total US-Profits and Domestic US-Wages, 1948–2003 35.00% 30.00%

Foreign Profit as % of Total U.S. Profits US-Profits

25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% Foreign Profit as % of Domestic Wages

5.00% 0.00% 1948

1954

1960

1966

1972

1978

1984

1990

1996

2002

Sources: Corporate Profits from NIPA Tables 6–16 B-D: line 2, Domestic Industries; line 6, Receipts from Rest of the World; Employee Compensation from NIA Table 1.13, line 6, Compensation of Employees.

2000 and 2002, and rose slightly over 6% in 2003. If we hold to our estimate that half of total foreign profits are earned from investment in the global South, only 1–2% of total US-wages for most of the nearly fifty years prior to 1995 – and only 2–3% of total US-wages in the 1990s – came from profits earned in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Such proportions are hardly sufficient to explain the 37% wage-differential between secretaries in advertising agencies and machinists working on oil-pipelines, or the 64% wage-differential between janitors in restaurants and bars and automobile-workers.53 What is the impact of imperialist investment in the global South on profits and wages in the global North? In the third volume of Capital, Marx recognised that foreign investment was one of a number of ‘countervailing’ tendencies to the decline of the rate of profit.54 Put simply, the export of capital from the global North to the global South, especially when invested in productionprocesses that are more labour-intensive than those found in the advanced capitalist countries, tends to raise the mass and rate of profit in the North. 53. Osburn 2000, p. 36, Table I. 54. Marx 1981, Chapter 14, Section 5.

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Table II: Annual percentage change domestic and foreign US-profits, 1949–2003 Year

Change Domestic Profits

Change Foreign Profits

Year

Change Domestic Profits

Change Foreign Profits

1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976

–7% 20% 12% –6% 1% –3% 22% –5% –1% –10% 24% –6% 1% 14% 8% 10% 14% 7% –3% 6% –7% –19% 16% 11% 2% –19% 24% 19%

–6% 11% 18% 4% 0% 4% 17% 15% 6% –16% 9% 11% 5% 11% 8% 9% 7% –2% 5% 14% 13% 8% 11% 17% 33% 14% –14% 14%

1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

16% 9% –13% –20% 23% –13% 25% 20% 4% –6% 12% 14% –7% –1% 6% 9% 13% 10% 12% 13% 9% –9% 0% –18% –13% 19% 14%

12% 18% 32% 3% –15% –4% 11% 11% 1% 4% 17% 18% 5% 7% –7% 4% 12% 14% 19% 9% 12% –8% 17% 13% –11% 11% 18%

Source: Corporate Profits from NIPA Tables 6–16 B-D: line 2, Domestic Industries; line 6, Receipts from Rest of the World.

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There is some evidence that foreign profits – from investments in both the global North and global South – constitute an important counter-tendency to declining profits in the US. Profits earned abroad by US-companies as a percentage of total US-profits (Table I and Graph I) have risen fairly steadily since 1948, rising from a low of 5.19% in 1950 to a high of 30.56% in 2000.55 The proportion of US-profits earned abroad jumped sharply after the onset of the long-wave of stagnation in 1966, jumping from 6.43% in 1966 to 18.36% in 1986. Even more indicative is the relationship between annual percentagechanges in domestic and foreign US-profits (Table II). In a number of years (1967–70, 1972–4, 1978–80, 1986–90, 1994–5, 1997–2001, 2003), the annual percentage-change for foreign profits was higher than the annual percentage-change for domestic profits. In some of these years (1967, 1969– 70, 1974, 1979–80, 1989, 1998, 2000–1), total profits earned in the US declined while total profits earned abroad increased. Higher profits result in higher rates of investment across the economy in the industrialised countries. More investment eventually brings a growing demand for labour (within limits set by investment in newer, more capitalintensive technology), falling unemployment and rising wages for all workers in the industrialised capitalist countries. Put simply, imperialist investment in the global South benefits all workers in the global North – both ‘aristocratic’ steel, automobile, machine-making, trucking and construction-workers, and lowly-paid clerical, janitorial, garment- and food-processing workers as well. As Ernest Mandel put it, ‘the real “labor aristocracy” is no longer constituted inside the proletariat of an imperialist country but rather by the proletariat of the imperialist countries as a whole’.56 The real labour-aristocracy includes poorly-paid immigrant-janitors and garment-workers, African-American and Latino poultry-workers, as well as the multi-racial workforce in automobilemanufacture and trucking.57 55. Clearly, US-corporations earn above-average profits on these investments. However, these higher-than-average profits are the result of the combination of low wages and labour-intensive techniques common in the global South, rather than the transnationals’ monopolistic position in the world-market. 56. Mandel 1984, p. 19. 57. Some exponents of the labour-aristocracy thesis have argued that ‘unequal exchange’ – the ability of firms in the global North to obtain raw materials, components, consumer-goods (clothing, electronics, etc.) and foodstuffs from the global South below their value – is the basis of the ‘imperialist bribe’ to the ‘labour-aristocracy’ of the advanced capitalist countries. Specifically, they argue that ‘unequal exchange’ lowers the cost of inputs (raw materials, components), elevates profit-rates in the North by lowering the cost of inputs (raw materials, components), and reduces the cost of food and consumer-goods, increasing the living standard of some workers (Emmanuel 1972). The question of ‘unequal exchange’ in the capitalist worldeconomy involves a variety of theoretical and technical-measurement questions which are beyond

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Clearly, these benefits accruing to the entire working class of the industrialised countries from imperialist investment are neither automatic nor evenly distributed. Rising profits and increased investment does not necessarily lead to higher wages for workers in the absence of effective working-class organisation and struggle. During the post-World-War II long wave of expansion, the industrial unions that emerged during the mass-strike wave of 1934–7 were able to secure rising real wages, both for their own members and the bulk of the unorganised working classes. However, since 1973, the labour-movement in the US and the rest of the industrial countries has been in retreat. In the US today, real wages for both union- and non-union workers have fallen, and are about 11% below their 1973 level, despite strong growth beginning in the mid 1980s.58 Higher-than-average profits have accrued, first and foremost, to capital, allowing increased investment; and to the professional-managerial middle class in the form of higher salaries. Nor are the benefits of increased profitability and growth due to imperialist investment distributed equally to all portions of the working class. As we will see below, capitalist competition produces and reproduces wage-differentials within the working class in the global North. The racial-national and gender-structuring of the labour-market results in women and workers of colour being concentrated in the labourintensive and low-wage sectors of the economy. The benefits all workers in the global North reap from imperialist investment in the global South are clearly outweighed by the deleterious effects of the expansion of capitalist production on a world-scale. This is especially clear today, in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Contrary to the claims of Hardt and Negri,59 industry is not ‘footloose and fancy-free’ – moving from one country to another in search of the cheapest labour.60 However, the removal of various legal and judicial obstacles to the free movement of capital has sharpened competition among workers internationally, to the detriment of workers in both the global North and South. The mere threat of moving production ‘offshore’, even if the vast majority of industrial investment remains within the advanced capitalist societies, is often sufficient to force cuts in wages and benefits, the dismantling of work-rules, and the creation of multithe scope of this essay (see Shaikh 1979 and 1980a). Granting the reality of ‘unequal exchange’, the notion that it produces benefits only for a minority of workers in the global North is not tenable. Again, all workers in the global North – from the most poorly to the best paid – would benefit from ‘unequal exchange’. They would benefit from elevated profit-rates and the resulting increase in accumulation and demand for all labour-power. Similarly, lower-cost consumer-goods and food ‘affects the standard of living not only of a minority “aristocracy of labor” but the whole of the working class of the industrial countries’ (Cliff 1957, p. 4). 58. Mishel, Bernstein and Allegretto 2005, Chapter 2. 59. Hardt and Negri 2000. 60. Post 2002.

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tiered workforces in the US and other industrialised countries. Neoliberalism’s deepening of the process of primitive accumulation of capital – the forcible expropriation of peasants from the land – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, has created a growing global reserve-army of labour competing for dwindling numbers of full-time, secure and relatively well-paid jobs across the world. Put simply, the sharpening competition among workers internationally more than offsets the benefits of imperialism for workers in the global North.61

Monopoly, super-profits and wage-differentials Elbaum and Seltzer argue that the super-profits that account for the material privileges of the labour-aristocracy could not be ‘reduced to excessive profit gains from “overseas investment”’.62 Instead, super-profits resulting from monopoly – industrial concentration and the limitation of competition in key-sectors of the economy – produce higher-than-average wages and moresecure employment for a labour-aristocracy of unionised workers. This claim is also open to empirical challenge. During the long boom of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, certain branches of production enjoyed stable, higher-than-average profits and wages apparently because of the rise of oligopolies. However, as the long boom turned into the long stagnation that began in the late 1960s, these same oligopolistic industries faced persistently lower-than-average profits and sharpened competition both at home and abroad. By 1980, the impact on wages, employment-security, and working conditions was apparent. According to Howard Botwinick: the ‘eternal’ core [‘monopoly’-industries – C.P.] was beginning to show more and more evidence of peripheral [‘competitive’ industries – C.P.] behavior. Industries like steel and auto were experiencing serious profitability crunches and were becoming more and more interested in lowering the wages and working conditions of their primary work force. In addition to relocating to low-wage areas, core firms were successfully extracting serious concessions in wages and working conditions from their work forces. Even more distressing, a ‘secondary’ labor market was developing within the factory gates of these core firms as two-tiered wage packages were increasingly introduced on a wide scale.63

As early as the mid-1970s, statistical studies of the relationship between industrial concentration and profit- and wage-differentials began to challenge the central empirical claims of the monopoly-capitalism thesis. In the early 61. Bronfenbrenner and Luce 2004. 62. Elbaum and Seltzer 2004, p. 24. An acceptance of the notion of ‘monopoly’ mars the otherwise excellent critique of the labour-aristocracy thesis in Corr and Brown 1993, p. 49. 63. Botwinick 1993, p. 45.

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1980s, Willi Semmler reviewed the existing literature on industrial concentration and profit-rate differentials and carried out his own statistical analysis for the US- and West-German economies since the Second WorldWar.64 He found a correlation between industrial concentration and profitrate differentials before 1970. However, he also found sharp profit-rate differentials between and within concentrated industries in this period. In other words, profit-rate differentials had multiple causes before 1970 – not simply the absence or presence of competition. When Semmler examined profit-rate differentials in the 1970s and early 1980s, the correlation between industrial concentration and higher-than-average profit-rates all but disappeared. Instead, ‘differentials of profit rates are significantly related to the productivity, capital/output ratios, and unit wage costs of each industry’.65 Howard Botwinick’s study of wage- and profit-differentials reviewed the literature published since Semmler’s work was completed, and found similar patterns.66 Industrial concentration, again, could not explain profit- and wagerate differentials. Not only were factors like labour-productivity and capitalintensity of production more important in accounting for profit- and wage-differentials, but many of the highly concentrated industries that had experienced higher-than-average profits prior to 1970 were experiencing lowerthan-average profits in the 1970s and 1980s. More recent studies have confirmed the absence of a strong correlation between industrial concentration and higher-than-average profits and wages. Instead, profit and wagedifferentials were rooted in the differences in labour-productivity and capitalintensity of production.67 The empirical problems with the monopoly super-profits argument – so central to the Elbaum-Seltzer variant of the labour-aristocracy theory – are rooted in the very notions of monopoly and oligopoly.68 The claim that the existence of a small number of large firms in an industry limits competition, allowing higher-than-average profits and wages, is derived from neoclassical economics’ vision of ‘perfect competition’. For neoclassical economists, perfect competition – which allows instantaneous mobility of capital between branches of production, uniform technology, equal profit-rates and wages – exists only when a large number of small firms exist in a market. Any deviation is oligopoly – a form of ‘imperfect competition’ that creates obstacles to 64. Semmler 1984. 65. Semmler 1984, p. 127. 66. Botwinick 1993, pp. 155–70. 67. Blanchflower, Oswald and Sanfey 1996; Troske 1999; Osburn 2000; Lane, Salmon and Speltzer 2001. 68. Zeluck 1980; Botwinick 1993; Semmler 1984; Shaikh 1980b.

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capital-mobility, different techniques, and higher-than-average profits and wages. The notions of perfect competition and oligopoly/monopoly are both conceptually and empirically flawed. Perfect competition is an ideological construction – an idealisation of capitalist competition that makes the existing economic order appear efficient and just. Real capitalist competition – from the birth of capitalism in English agriculture in the sixteenth century, through the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the emergence of the transnational corporations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – has never corresponded to the dream-world of perfect competition. Capitalist competition is fought through what Marx called the ‘heavy artillery of fixed capital’ – constant technological innovation, taking the form of the increasing mechanisation of production. Older investments in fixed capital, even if they no longer allow a particular firm to reduce unit-costs and raise its profit-margins and rates, cannot be abandoned immediately in favour of new and more efficient machinery. According to Botwinick: Given the presence of fixed capital investment, however, new techniques cannot be immediately adopted by all firms in the industry. Because fixed capital generally requires prolonged turnover periods, new techniques will be adopted primarily by those capitals that are in the best position to do so. Thus, although new capitals will enter the industry with ‘state of the art’ equipment and other existing capitals will gradually begin to replenish and expand their productive facilities with the latest techniques, older, less efficient capitals will also tend to live on for many years. This is particularly true within prolonged periods of rapid growth. . . . Rather than creating identical firms, competition therefore creates a continual redifferentiation of the conditions of production.69

Put simply, competition – not its absence – explains the diversity of technical conditions of production and the resulting differentiations of profit- and wage-rates within and between industries throughout the history of capitalism. The higher wages that workers in unionised capital-intensive industries enjoy are not gained at the expense of lower-paid workers abroad or a sharing of monopoly super-profits. Instead, the lower unit-costs of these industries make it possible for these capitals to pay higher-than-average wages. However, as we have seen over the last thirty years, only effective worker-organisation – unions that are democratic, militant and practise class-solidarity – can secure and defend these higher-than-average wages. Racial-national and gender-inequalities can also be understood in their relationship to the profit and wage-differentials created through capitalist 69. Botwinick 1993, p. 131.

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accumulation and competition. Race, nationality and gender structure the employment-queue – the order in which capitalists hire workers – in capitalist societies. White and male workers are at the front of the employment-queue, while women and workers of colour are at the rear. Different industries, with diverse technical conditions of production, profit-rates, and wages, thus recruit workers from these racially- and gender-defined sectors of the working class. In general, women and workers of colour tend to be overrepresented in labour-intensive, low-wage sectors, while white and male workers tend to be over-represented in the more capital-intensive, higher-wage sectors. Thus, race, nationality and gender do create a stratified working class as workers are distributed into branches of production that competition and accumulation – not monopoly – continually differentiate in terms of technique, profitability, and wages and working conditions.

The labour-aristocracy and working-class struggles in the twentieth century Whatever the theoretical and empirical problems with the economics of the labour-aristocracy thesis, its defenders still claim that well-paid workers have generally been more conservative than lower-paid workers. A systematic review of the history of the workers’ struggles in the global North in the past century does not bear out the claim that well-paid workers are generally conservative and poorly-paid workers are more radical. As John Kelly argued, ‘[h]istorically, the most class conscious and militant sections of the working class have often been those whose earnings, job security and status placed them in a position of relative privilege relative to many of their fellow workers’.70 Lenin himself, in one of his polemics with the Russian ‘economists’, recognised: The history of the working-class movement in all countries shows that the bettersituated strata of the working class respond to the ideas of socialism, more rapidly and more easily. From among these come, in the main, the advanced workers that every working-class movement brings to the fore, those who can win the confidence of the laboring masses, who devote themselves entirely to the education and organization of the proletariat, who accept socialism consciously, and who even elaborate independent socialist theories.71

Even the original British labour-aristocrats – the skilled cotton-textile and engineering workers – demonstrated their capacity for industrial militancy. 70. Kelly 1988, p. 165. 71. Lenin 1964, p. 283.

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Skilled workers in nineteenth-century Britain were capable of both determined (though ultimately unsuccessful) resistance to their employers and broader class-wide action with unskilled workers in the 1850s and 1860s. In the 1860s, a minority of these workers also began to tentatively embrace a politics, although not explicitly socialist, independent of the Liberals.72 Put simply, the British labour-aristocrats’ relationship with their employers and the state was not as uniformly ‘class-collaborationist’ as many accounts assert.73 The restructuring of the capitalist labour-process that began in the 1880s radically altered the social and political position of well-paid, skilled industrial workers in North America and Europe. The requirements of capitalist competition and profitability compelled capitalists across the industrialising world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to attack skilled work through ‘scientific management’ and the introduction of new techniques: unless the forms of capital accumulation assumed by any particular branch has been such as to render the retention of entrenched skills reconcilable with competitive branch profitability, firms have been forced to revolutionize the skill structure and, where necessary, to combat the unions resisting the transformation.74

In machine-making (‘engineering’) and other metal-working industries, skilled workers faced longer hours, falling wages and re-organisation of work that ‘had given the skilled man some control over his work environment.’75 The introduction of turret-lathes, the universal drilling machine and the grinding machine in machine-making, combined with time-motion studies and the subdivision of tasks, radically reduced the distance between the skilled ‘labouraristocrats’ and the majority of the working class in the years preceding the First World-War.76 72. Moorehouse 1978, pp. 67–8; Musson 1976, pp. 347–9. Musson 1976 goes as far as to argue that the decline of Chartism after 1848 did not mark as sharp a turning point in British labour-struggle and politics as Hobsbawm, Foster and others claim. See Foster’s 1976 reply to Musson. Corr and Brown 1993 (pp. 67–70) argue that the long boom of the 1850s and 1860s promoted the emergence of reformism in the British working class in two ways. First, it allowed for rising wages and some level of craft-union stability without threatening profitability. Second, the post-1848 expansion of capitalism and the deepening of the real subsumption of labour to capital in the production-process undermined pre-Marxian working-class radicalism that envisioned an easy return to artisanal control of production. 73. There is also substantive evidence that the skilled workers maintained a cultural independence from both the unskilled workers and the Victorian middle classes. See Crossick 1976. 74. Linder 1985, p. 110. 75. Gluckstein 1985, p. 52. 76. Gluckstein 1985, pp. 51–5; Morris 1988, p. 4.

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As the process of deskilling and reskilling continually restratified the working class in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, skilled industrial workers often led militant struggles that included the unskilled mass-workers.77 These struggles often put these skilled workers at odds with the more conservative leaders of their unions, who were committed to labourmanagement co-operation and willing to make concessions to their employers. The mainstream-leaders of the European labour- and socialist parties generally supported the trade-union leaders, facilitating the transformation of the skilled workers’ industrial militancy into political radicalism. Mitchel describes the process in Germany before the First World-War: Certainly we have evidence that on many crucial questions the working classes revealed that they were prepared to go further than the men who led them. As early as 1889, and as late as 1913, workers went on strike against the wishes of the unions, and in the interval between these two dates they had shown that they were as interested in political agitation as in promoting their economic welfare. Each time, however, both party and unions, convinced that the pursuit of Socialist aims by provocative action would be injurious and fatal, imposed restraints. On purely economic issues, workers in various industries in 1913 and 1914, including the powerful Metalworkers’ Union, were expressing profound dissatisfaction with union leadership and demanded structural reforms to give the rank and file a greater voice in decisions.78

The radicalisation of skilled industrial workers went furthest in early twentiethcentury Russia. The bulk of the membership of the Bolsheviks were the bestpaid, most urbanised industrial workers in the Russian cities – the skilled metal-workers in the largest factories. Lower-paid workers, like the predominantly female textile-workers, were generally either unorganised or apolitical (until the beginnings of the revolution) or supported the reformist Mensheviks.79 In fact, the mass-base of the left, antiwar-wing of the pre-First World-War socialist parties and of the postwar revolutionary-communist parties was relatively well-paid workers in the large metal-working industries. These workers led militant struggles against speed-up and deskilling that, after 1914, became political struggles against conscription and the War. German Communism became a mass-movement when tens of thousands of well-paid metal-workers left the Independent Socialists and joined the Communists in 77. Linder 1985, Part II; Geary (ed.) 1989. 78. Mitchel 1971, pp. 99–100. 79. Bonnell 1983, Chapters 9–10. See also David Mandel’s two-volume work, Mandel 1983 and 1984.

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1920. The French and Italian Communists also became mass-parties through the recruitment of thousands of well-paid machinists who led the mass-strikes of the postwar-period. These highly-paid workers were also over-represented in the smaller Communist parties of the US and Britain.80 Put simply, the workers that Lenin and Zinoviev believed were the social foundation of reformism in the early twentieth-century socialist movement in fact dominated the ranks of the revolutionary and internationalist wing of the labour-movement. Well-paid and often skilled workers in large-scale industry continued to play a leading rôle in mass-upsurges throughout the twentieth century. During the CIO-upsurge in the US during the 1930s, relatively well-paid, stablyemployed workers in the automobile, steel, rubber and other mass-production industries spearheaded the creation of industrial unions that united skilled and unskilled, highly-paid and poorly-paid. Well-paid and skilled workers often led these organising drives and were, again, over-represented in radical and revolutionary organisations in the US during the 1930s.81 Well-paid and securely employed workers were also in the vanguard of proto-revolutionary mass-struggles in France (1968), Italy (1968–9), Britain (1967–75), and Portugal (1974–5).82 In the US, relatively ‘aristocratic’ workers in trucking, automobile-manufacture, telecommunications, public education and the postal service were at the centre of the wildcat-strikes that shook US-industry between 1965 and 1975.83 In France in 1995, workers in telecommunications, public transport, postal services, health-care and education led the public-sector strikes that mounted the first successful workers’ struggles against neoliberalism.84 In the Autumn of 2004, automobileworkers, some of the best-paid in Germany, stood up to layoffs, defying their own union-leaders in an unofficial strike. In the US during the past decade, relatively poorly-paid workers (janitors, hotel-workers, and grocery-clerks) have engaged in strike-actions much more frequently than relatively wellpaid workers. However, better-paid workers with secure employment – from UPS-workers in 1997 to New York City transit-workers in 2005 – have not been absent from militant workplace-struggles. Nor is this pattern of militancy and radicalism among relatively wellpaid workers limited to the global North. Contrary to claims that urbanised, securely employed industrial workers in the global South constituted a labour-aristocracy allied to transnational and domestic capital, these workers 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Broué 2005, Gluckstein 1985, Harman 1982, Hudson 2003. Davis 1986. Kelly 1998, pp. 97–102. Brenner, Brenner and Winslow (eds.) 2010. Singer 1999.

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have often been in the lead of major anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles.85 In Chile between 1970 and 1973, and Argentina between 1971 and 1974, well-paid metal-workers engaged in industrial struggles and took the lead in mass-mobilisations against the military and the Right. Metalworkers in San Paolo, the highest-paid and more securely employed workers in Brazil, led mass-strikes in the 1970s that created the United Workers’ Confederation (CUT) and eventually the Workers’ Party (PT) in the early 1980s. Similarly, it was the highest-paid workers in South Africa – in mining, automobile-manufacture, steel – whose struggles in the 1970s created the radical and militant Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), and its successor the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). It was these workers who were able to build upon workplace-organisation and power in the political struggle against apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s.86 Clearly, the industrial militancy that skilled and better-paid workers displayed in the past century cannot be reduced to a defence of the relative privileges of a narrow segment of the working class, at the expense of other workers at home and abroad. While all working-class struggles under capitalism begin with a specific group of workers attempting to defend their position against specific employers, successful battles require a broadening of the struggle to include all workers in a firm, workers in the same industry and workers nationally and, at times, globally. The experience of widening and successful economic struggles has always been the basis for a minority of workers embracing radical, revolutionary and internationalist politics.87 As Ellen Meiksins Wood argues: . . . it is profoundly misleading to impose a rigid discontinuity between the ‘lesser’ forms of ‘merely’ economic struggle and more directly political assaults on the capitalist order, not only because the larger struggles have always grown organically out of the smaller oppositions, but, more fundamentally, because both are rooted in the essential antagonism of interest between capital and labor. There is, in other words, no clean caesura, either historically or structurally, between these forms of opposition.88

By contrast, the forces in the labour-movement, in particular its full-time officialdom, that defend ‘sectionalism’ – defense of one group of workers at the expense of others, at home and abroad – have also tended to defend labour85. Arrighi and Saul 1968 first developed this analysis for Africa. See Peace 1975 for an excellent critique and Saul’s 1975 response. 86. Seidman 1994. 87. Luxemburg 1971. 88. Wood 1986, p. 185.

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management co-operation – class-collaboration – in both the workplace and politics.89 It is not surprising that relatively well-paid and securely employed workers have been at the centre of the most militant and radical workers’ struggles of the last century. These workers tend to be concentrated in large, capitalintensive workplaces that are often central to the capitalist economy. These workers have considerable social power when they act collectively. Strikes in these industries have a much greater impact on the economy than workers in smaller, less capital-intensive workplaces (garment, office-cleaning, etc.) Workers in such industries are also often the first targets of capitalist restructuring in periods of falling profits and sharpened competition. Finally, these workers often have a greater commitment to the collective defence and improvement of their jobs than the lower-paid. While lower-paid and lesssecurely employed workers have and do organise and struggle with their employers, they are more likely than better-paid and more securely employed workers to attempt to improve their conditions of life by individually seeking better jobs.

Conclusion The theory of the labour-aristocracy fails as an explanation of working-class reformism and conservatism. Firstly, the absence of competition – resulting from Britain’s global-industrial dominance in the nineteenth century, imperialcolonial investment in the global South, or industrial concentration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – cannot explain wage-differentials among workers nationally or internationally. Wage-differentials are the results of capitalist competition and accumulation, and reflect either real skill-differences, or, most commonly, different conditions of production – relative mechanisation. Secondly, wage-differentials cannot explain working-class consciousness and action. Attempts to read working-class consciousness from objective structures and conditions are a form of vulgar materialism: The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated. . . . The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionizing practice.90 89. Moody 1997 and 2007. 90. Marx 1941, p. 83.

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Put another way, the labour-aristocracy thesis not only misidentifies the source of wage-differentials among workers (imperialist or monopoly ‘super-profits’), it attempts erroneously to derive working-class reformism and conservatism from these wage-differentials. The elaboration of an alternative explanation of working-class reformism and conservatism will be the topic of a forthcoming essay. Briefly, the objective structure of capitalist social-property relations make possible varied forms of working-class conscious praxis – working-class conscious behaviour and action.91 While collective mass-struggle against capital is the basis for working-class political radicalisation, the roots of reformism can be located in the separation of workers under capitalism from the means of production. Working-class collective organisation and activity is necessarily episodic, for the simple reason that workers must sell their labour-power in order to survive, and thus cannot continually engage in struggle. The episodic character of the class-struggle produces both a layer of full-time officials within the labour-movement and prolonged periods of working-class passivity – the social foundation for reformism. The roots of working-class conservatism are found in the constant competition among workers as individual sellers of labour-power. In the absence of effective, collective class-organisation, workers are pitted one against another – on the basis of race, gender, nationality – for jobs, promotions, education and housing. This competition among workers provides the social environment for the development of racism, sexism, nativism and other conservative ideas among workers. Whether workers radicalise, accept reformism or embrace conservativism is not determined in ‘a sphere of mere contingency and subjectivity set apart from the sphere of “objective” material determinations’, but shaped by ‘the complex and often contradictory historical processes by which, in determinant historical conditions, class situations give rise to class formations.’92 In other words, which form of consciousness develops in what sections of the working class historically depends upon forms of social practice.

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91. Fantasia 1995. 92. Wood 1995, pp. 81, 83.

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Moody, Kim 1997, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy, London: Verso. —— 2002, Personal correspondence with the author, 15 May. —— 2004, Personal correspondence with the author, 23 October. —— 2007, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below, London: Verso. Moorehouse, H.F. 1978, ‘The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy’, Social History, 3, 1: 61–82. —— 1981, ‘The Significance of the Labour Aristocracy’, Social History, 6, 2: 229–33. Morris, R.J. 1988, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in the British Class Struggle’, Recent Findings of Research in Economic and Social History, 7: 1–4, available at . Musson, A.E. 1976, ‘Class Struggle and the Labour Aristocracy, 1830–1860’, Social History, 1, 3: 335–56. New York Times 2004, ‘Compilation of Exit Polls, 1972–2004’, available at: <www.nytimes. com/packages/pdf/politics/20041107_px_ELECTORATE.xls>. Osburn, Jane 2000, ‘Interindustry Wage Differentials: Patterns and Possible Sources’, Monthly Labor Review, 132, 2: 34–46. Peace, Adrian 1975, ‘The Lagos Proletariat: Labour Aristocrats or Populist Militants?’, in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, edited by Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pelling, Henry 1968, ‘The Concept of the Labour Aristocracy’, in Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Post, Charles 2002, ‘Review of Empire’, Against the Current, II, 99: 33–6. Saul, John S. 1975, ‘The “Labour Aristocracy” Thesis Reconsidered’, in The Development of an African Working Class: Studies in Class Formation and Action, edited by Richard Sandbrook and Robin Cohen, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Scott, James C. 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. Seidman, Gay 1994, Manufacturing Militancy: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985, Berkeley: University of California Press. Semmler, Willi 1984, Competition, Monopoly and Differential Profit Rates, New York: Columbia University Press. Shaikh, Anwar M. 1979, ‘Foreign Trade and the Law of Value: Part I’, Science & Society, 43, 3: 281–302, available at: . —— 1980a, ‘Foreign Trade and the Law of Value: Part II’, Science & Society, 44, 1: 27–57, available at: . —— 1980b, ‘Marxian Competition versus Perfect Competition: Further Comments on the So-Called Choice of Technique’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 4, 1: 75–83, available at: . Singer, Daniel 1999, Whose Millenium: Theirs or Ours?, New York: Monthly Review Press. Stedman-Jones, Gareth 1975, ‘Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution’, New Left Review, I, 90: 35–69. Strauss, Jonathan 2004a, ‘Engels and the Theory of the Labour Aristocracy’, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 25, available at: . —— 2004b, ‘Monopoly Capitalism and the Bribery of the Labour Aristocracy’, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 26, available at: . Thompson, Edward P. 1963, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage Books.

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Thompson, Paul 1978, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Troske, Kenneth R. 1999, ‘Evidence on the Employer-Size Wage Premium from WorkerEstablishment Matched Data’, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 81, 1: 15–26. Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1986, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism, London: Verso. —— 1995, Capitalism Against Democracy: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Bank, 2006, World Development Report, 2006: Equity and Development, Washington, DC: World Bank. Zeluck, Steve 1980, ‘On the Theory of the Monopoly Stage of Capitalism’, Against the Current, I, 1, 1: 44–52. Zinoviev, Gregori 1983–4 [1916], ‘The Social Roots of Opportunism’, New International, 2: 99–135.

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brill.nl/hima

On the ‘Philosophical Foundations’ of Italian Workerism: A Conceptual Approach Adelino Zanini Department of Economics, University of Ancona, Italy [email protected]

Abstract This article explores some of the crucial conceptual dimensions of Italian workerist Marxism [operaismo], identifying both its underlying impetus and its limits in particular interpretations of Marxian concepts. Particular emphasis is placed on the manner in which the focus of workerists such as Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri on living labour, antagonism and class-composition can be understood in terms of a philosophy of subjectivity founded on a Marxian conception of difference. Keywords antagonism, class-composition, difference, Negri, workerism, subjectivity, tendency, Tronti

1. Mapping workerism This critical note may seem too ambitious. However, I would hope that the very simple aim which characterises my approach does not appear misconceived. In short, with the term ‘foundations’, I am not referring to the multiplicity of historiographical, historical, and philosophical aspects that defined the development of Italian workerism [operaismo] in all its complexity. More simply, I would like to discuss what is well-known, and, perhaps more importantly, shared or ‘common’, in workerist thought, in the period from the mid-sixties to 1979: from Mario Tronti’s Operai e capitale 1 to Antonio Negri’s Marx oltre Marx.2 Such a ‘categorial’ choice is obviously based on an historiographical assumption that would require adequate elucidation, because it concerns nothing less than the differences that qualify, in political terms, the ‘distance’ which existed between the beginning of the sixties, 1968, and 1977

1. Tronti 1966 (reprinted in Tronti 1971). 2. Negri 1979a; English translation Negri 1991a. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550604

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in Italy. In fact, my starting point assumes as given the ‘long’, Italian anomaly,3 which has been discussed so many times, and, for this reason, I do not intend to insist on it again. However, putting aside the Trontian interpretation of 1968 as a mere conflict about modernisation – as such, not comparable with the workers’ struggles of the beginning of the sixties4 – at least two aspects should be recalled here. Firstly, in Italy, 1968 had a long gestation and a long duration, characterised by a socially-hegemonic workers’ struggle. The latter informed and legitimised the theoretical innovation of workerism. Secondly, if it is true that the Italian ’77–movement, in political terms, represented the end of the ‘long’ seventies, it is also true that it inaugurated a new political phase, in which the workerist innovation revealed itself as no longer adequate,5 notwithstanding the fact that its instruments were able to decode the changes taking place.6 On the other hand, my choice of approach, at least in the first instance, rests upon the simple conviction according to which it would be incorrect to move from an excessively broad a posteriori historicisation, thanks to which it would then be possible to trace back to workerism everything that surrounded it. Denigrators and apologists alike have shared this error. For both, workerism 3. Zanini and Fadini (eds.) 2001, pp. 15–9. 4. Tronti 2008a, pp. 30–5. 5. To understand the social and political complexity of the events that occurred in 1977, it is necessary to consider, first of all, the chronology: the ‘long’ seventies produced, in the Italian scenario, a mix of different and sometimes contradictory tendencies which, starting from the radicalism of 1968, gave shape to a diffuse political instability. In macro-political terms, we might say that, because the demands for innovation were utterly ignored by the ruling political class, they produced a social ‘explosion’ whose clearest and most destructive (but by no means most radical) manifestation was terrorism. A new set of countercultural movements, feminism, the intersection between old, political-organisational forms and a fresh approach to the media, definitive detachment with respect to the tradition of the workers’ movement and its parties, the abandonment of their ‘values’, the apologia for the ‘absence of memory’ and the claim for the concreteness of the ‘immediate’ – all this should be considered in order to understand why the movement of ’77 constituted an unrepresentable multiverse, whose new radicalism brought the ‘long’ seventies to an end. However, in the long run, it was unable to face the situation generated by an economic context which was realising its ‘third industrial revolution’, by simultaneously utilising information-technologies, work from home, the destruction of welfare, political repression, and so on. Thus, what, in the first instance, was really a social ‘explosion’ – which could be understood in terms of the experience matured during the seventies – increasingly became an overall ‘implosion’, dominated by fear, cynicism, opportunism. That is, by the ‘ambivalence of disenchantment’ (Virno 1996). With respect to this ambivalence, the workerist approach, as well as every other political instrument belonging to the noblest tradition of ‘die “andere” Arbeiterbewegung’ (the other worker’s movement, as Karl Heinz Roth called it), turned out to no longer be adequate. 6. From markedly different vantage-points, see Negri 1976; Negri 1978; Bologna (ed.) 1978. For a more general overview, see Wright 2002.

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is characterised by a (bad) philosophy of history; it has the features of a ‘school’ rather than those pertaining to a current of thought crossed by different intersections. Consequently, its main, lasting characteristic would not consist in the capacity to forge concepts; it would seem instead to lie in a sort of hypostatisation of the mechanisms of reproduction of subjectivity. Certainly, workerism sometimes has been exactly this – but only sometimes. I do not believe that workerism ended even before the publication of the journal Contropiano; but, from that point onwards, the workerists of the first generation made reference to Marx’s thought in very different ways.7 While some of them affirmed that Marx’s actuality consisted in the possibility of transforming his critique of political economy into a direct instrument for workers’ struggle (this was the basis on which Potere Operaio8 exerted its fundamental political, and theoretical rôle), others addressed their attention directly to the great, European culture of Krisis, intended as the real turningpoint in Western thought,9 of which the tradition of the workers’ movement was assumed to be a fundamental pillar. It was not by chance that the culture

7. After the publication of the first volume of Quaderni Rossi, as a result of different judgements concerning the political significance of 1962’s big strike at Fiat in Turin, a rift in the editorial collective of the journal took shape. As a consequence, Classe operaia was founded in 1964 by those who – within and around the collective of Quaderni Rossi – had argued that the 1962 strike had opened an entirely new revolutionary path in the Italian political scenario. Not by chance, Classe operaia was not merely a theoretical journal, but a tool for political intervention. The new periodical lasted until 1967, when a new one was published: Contropiano, launched in January 1968. However, soon after the publication of the first volume, a new rift occurred among the founding editors, because of their very different political judgements about the events of ’68. From the very beginning, Mario Tronti was not directly involved in the Contropiano editorial board, thus, after Toni Negri’s withdrawal, the journal was directed solely by Alberto Asor Rosa and Massimo Cacciari (see Mangano 1989). According to Tronti (Tronti 2008b, p. 5; Tronti 2008a, p. 609), all of this served to confirm that, in actual fact, the ‘completion’ of the workerist experience had already occurred with the end of Classe operaia. 8. Potere Operaio was the political movement which, starting from 1969, organised – autonomously from and against the traditional parties of the Left – the workerist area on the basis of the so-called ‘linea di massa’ (mass-line). Of course, the new movement was only partially constituted by the workerist activists of the sixties. In the meantime, a newer and younger generation came to the fore. After the dissolution of the movement (at the Meeting of Rosolina in 1973), a part of Potere Operaio remained active – in particular in the Veneto region – and, thanks to the valorisation of the political experience developed by the Collettivi politici in the mid-seventies (see below, footnote 13), it constituted one of the pillars upon which Autonomia operaia organizzata rested. 9. Starting from 1964, thanks to the research carried out for the journal Angelus novus, Massimo Cacciari advanced a significant rethinking of the themes characterising ‘negativ Denken [negative thought]’ from Nietzsche onwards. His investigations gave shape to a concept of the ‘crisis of modern rationality’, subsequently elaborated in Cacciari 1976. See Cacciari 2008, pp. 831–5.

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of Krisis became one of the distinctive traits of Italian philosophical research during the eighties, with mixed results. As is well-known, workerism’s pre-eminence arose thanks to a variety of reasons – many of which, perhaps too many, were extra-theoretical10 – which permitted a (not always) legitimate, but very often incorrect historicisation and homogenisation, in spite of the fact that workerism, in terms of political philosophy, was far from being an homogeneous product.11 For the same reasons, a clearer, historiographical delimitation is necessary. I am not interested in identifying a supposedly ‘pure’ tradition. I am perfectly aware that we are dealing with an ensemble of common elements. But if we want to talk about a well-defined tradition of thought considered as a part – albeit a very anomalous one – of the Western Marxism of the sixties, we have to keep in mind, not only its specificity, but also the fact that we are talking about a delimited and closed tradition. A similar judgement is not intended to question the theoretical significance of workerist thought. On the contrary, I should like to underscore, for example, the relevance of its ‘method’; but its undoubted fecundity is not sufficient justification for saying that, apart from its internal ruptures and the great transformation generated starting from the end of the sixties, there is only one workerist tradition. The very development of so-called postworkerism – which is, in reality, the expression of various lines of thought – stands to confirm what I am saying. Given these premises, this critical note will simply be devoted to the discussion of some key-concepts that can be traced back to a fundamental ‘rational abstraction’: that is, difference. This latter, widely present in Marx’s work,12 characterised the complex development of Italian political radicalism. Actually, the ‘emphatic use’ of expressions such as autonomia operaia [workers’ autonomy] and soggettività operaia [workers’ subjectivity] was diffused well before the birth of collettivi politici [political collectives].13 It is not by chance 10. I am referring to the political persecution which followed the so-called ‘Inchiesta 7 Aprile’, the massive legal persecution of militants in the so-called area of autonomy (including many ex-members of Potere Operaio), named after the date in 1979 of the police raids that took place simultaneously in Padua, Milan, Rome, Rovigo and Turin, and led to the arrests, among many others, of Negri, Alisa Del Re, Oreste Scalzone, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, and Nanni Balestrini. 11. See the interviews collected by Borio, Pozzi and Roggero (eds.) 2002. 12. See Zanini 2008, Chapter 2. 13. As previously stated, after the dissolution of Potere Operaio, from 1974 to 1975, the greater part of the Veneto-activists started a debate which led to the consolidation of a new political organisation, named Collettivi Politici del Veneto per il Potere Operaio. Their politicalorganisational structure rested upon a regional territorial rooting, in which a paradigmatic rôle was attributed to the precariato [non-guaranteed workers]: that is, the labour-power employed in the new production-cycle of the so-called fabbrica diffusa [‘diffused factory’]. On the other hand,

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that those expressions were used by the same sindacato dei consigli [councils’ union]14 during the first half of the seventies – and I am referring to the unions to which workerism addressed its radical critique. From a theoretical point of view, workerism represented, first of all, a new reinterpretation of Marx, formulated without regard to the Western-Marxist tradition, and based on an innovative way of interpreting the dynamics of class-conflict in Italy after the hard transition that followed the end of the Second World-War. In that context, characterised by a severe crisis, a new political subjectivity, even less satisfied with the old rhetoric of the Italian Communist Party, was taking shape.15 The central nervous systems of these new social processes was constituted by the big industrial cities, upon which converged the transversal migratory influxes coming from the south and the north-east of the country.16 For different reasons, by that point, the political rôle of the worker-cadres who had managed the passage toward the postwar reconstruction-period was exhausted. Thus, the centre of the political scene was progressively occupied by a new class-composition, no longer linked to the practical abilities previously acquired. Thereupon, a young, migrant, unskilled, labour-power, with its generic capacity to transform its specific use-value into surplus-value, became the main actor of the new mass-production processes, in which the socialisation of labour-power was an indispensable condition.17 It was within this scenario that Raniero Panzieri and the editorial group of the journal Quaderni Rossi focused their attention,18 by showing how the socialisation of this labour-power was directly linked to its experience in the big manufacturing firms, in which labour-power perceived itself as working class. It is true that, with regard to this affirmed identity, a rift in the group soon emerged, as a consequence of a different way of understanding the sociological relevance of the same ‘workers’ inquiry’.19 Nevertheless, what was a similar political approach also characterised areas outside Veneto. Although the political nuances were sometimes relevant, it should suffice to recall the research carried out, in the Milan metropolitan area, by the journal Quaderni del territorio. 14. In Italy, at the end of the sixties, the expression sindacato dei consigli [councils’ union] referred to the new workers’ struggle organisation, whose main political structure was represented by consigli di fabbrica [factory-councils], in particular of the big factories. Factory-councils made possible new forms of political conflict, without determining an irreversible rupture in the tradition of the unions. According to workerist thought, their political limits stemmed precisely from their incapacity (autonomously) to organise workers’ autonomy. 15. Lanzardo 1979. 16. Alasia and Montaldi 1975. 17. Alquati 1975. 18. See Various Authors 1975. 19. See Rieser 1965; Asor Rosa 1965 (reprinted in Asor Rosa 1973).

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explicitly stated both by Panzieri and Tronti was the conviction that they were facing a new process of capitalist development (a ‘planned’ process),20 one of whose inescapable elements was a fresh round of workers’ socialisation. From this conviction, a judgement was derived, according to which workers’ struggle was first of all characterised by its irreversible autonomy. It was obviously given within capitalist development, but the latter was described as if it were subordinated to the dynamics triggered by the working-class struggle. In Tronti’s words: And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class-struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working-class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.21

Within this reverse-temporal sequence, which was defined on the basis of the theoretical experience of Quaderni Rossi, we can simultaneously observe all the merits and defects of workerism interpreted as a Marxist current of thought placed outside Marxism itself. We can also locate within this ambit the ‘posthumous’ quarrel on the ‘autonomy of the political [l’autonomia del politico]’ – as we shall see later. In short, regarding this complex scenario, I am only interested in focussing on the traits which, putting aside the reasons that caused the political rupture within the Quaderni Rossi group, the birth of Classe operaia, etc., paved the way towards a new historical and political koiné.

2. Future-past The fundamental idea from which we have to start is that of separation,22 difference; that is, we have to begin by considering the idea according to which the working class – as it is the only holder of living labour, ‘the only living, active, and productive element of the society’23 – expresses, from an historical point of view, an ab-solute (from the Latin, ‘to make separate’) interest, which cannot be mediated. 20. Panzieri 1973 (reprinted in Lanzardo (ed.) 1973); Tronti 1963 (reprinted in Tronti 1966 ). 21. Tronti 1971, p. 89. 22. Mezzadra 2000. 23. Tronti 1971, p. 19.

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Introducing Operai e capitale, Tronti wrote: The possibility and the capacity for synthesis is still in the hands of the workers. The reasons are easy to grasp. Synthesis today can only be unilateral; it can only be a self-aware class-science, the science of a class. On the basis of capital, the whole can only be understood by the part. Knowledge is tied to struggle. . . . The fact is that being on the side of the whole – man, society, the state – can only lead to a partial analysis; it can only allow you to understand detached parts, losing overall scientific control.24

Such a unilateral synthesis is understandable on the basis of a particular process, whose nature rests upon the specific ability to transform in actu what is only in potentia. If we analyse, in Marxian terms, the capital/labour-power exchange, what emerges is that the worker’s use-value is not materialised in a product, it ‘does not exist apart from him at all, thus exists not really, but only in potentiality, as his capacity [Fähigkeit]’.25 What is common to all commodities is objectified labour, and their common denominator is represented by their being exchange-values. In this sense, the only thing distinct [der einzige Unterschied ] from objectified labour ‘is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity’, ‘as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker’.26 However, the fact that nonobjectified labour is one of the components of exchange generates a specificity that exchange cannot explain. Exchange cannot explain the anomaly according to which, as a result of the specific transaction occurring between capital and labour-power, the use-value of the latter, its potential capacity, creates a difference that cannot be recognised before its manifestation as multiplication, produced by labour-as-subjectivity [Arbeit als Subjektivität]. Therefore, between an exchange in general and the specific capital/labour-power exchange, there is an Unterschied, a difference, whose interpretation requires the unilateral synthesis mentioned above. In the exchange between capital and labour, the first act is an exchange, falls entirely within ordinary circulation; the second is a process qualitatively different from exchange, and only by misuse could it have been called any sort of exchange at all. It stands directly opposite exchange; essentially different category.27

24. 25. 26. 27.

Tronti 1971, p. 14. Marx 1993, p. 267. Marx 1993, p. 272. Marx 1993, p. 275.

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What renders the capital/labour-power exchange a qualitatively different category, a non-exchange, a merely apparent exchange, is a sort of indispensable oxymoron. It is assumed that the proprietor of the labour-power is ‘the free proprietor [ freier Eigentümer] of his own labour-capacity’, that he will always sell ‘for a limited period only’. Hence, it is assumed that the proprietor of the labour-power and the proprietor of the money are ‘equal in the eyes of the law’. At the same time, however, one should admit that the former is ‘compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power which exists only in his living body’.28 The separation [Trennung] of property from labour appears as the necessary law of the exchange between capital and labour-power. Labour ‘is not-raw-material, not-instrument-of-labour, not-raw-product’; rather, it is ‘the not-objective itself in objective form’, that is, ‘only an objectivity coinciding with his immediate bodily existence [unmittelbaren Leiblichkeit]’: Labour not as an object [Gegenstand ], but as activity [Tätigkeit]; not as itself value, but as a living source of value. [Namely, it is] general wealth (in contrast to capital in which it exists objectively, as reality) as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action. Thus, it is not at all contradictory, or, rather, the in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity [als Subjekt und als Tätigkeit].29

What is particularly interesting to underline here is the fact that, as it is the expression of a living body [lebendige Leiblichkeit], labour-power exists as commodity. That is, not in spite of, but because it is labour-as-subjectivity. Thus, a qualitatively different process implies the natural capacity inherent to living labour, which transforms in actu what is only in potentia. Such an ability expresses a difference, upon which a historically determined multiplication [Vervielfältigen] is founded; it expresses a valorisation-process that stems from labour-as-subjectivity. Nevertheless, following some careful interpretations,30 it is important to note here a textual ambiguity in the Grundrisse (which was later removed from Das Kapital ), also because, starting from Operai e capitale (1966), the theoretical structure of workerism rested, in a significant sense, exactly upon this supposed ambiguity: namely, the identification between living body and labour-as-subjectivity. In short, workerism would have carried out a doubly equivocal interpretation of Marx: firstly, by assuming that ambiguity; secondly, by ignoring its correct solution. And all this would have led to emphasising 28. Marx 1990, pp. 271–2. 29. Marx 1993, p. 296. 30. See Bellofiore 2008, p. 28.

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the identification or, better still, the unacceptable ‘flattening’ intrinsic to the same ambiguity. Provided that the existence of such an ambiguity could be admitted, I limit myself here to observing that workerists were quite conscious of this supposed ‘flattening’,31 but they implicitly laid claim to it by famously attributing to the Grundrisse immense relevance, if not even a primacy with respect to Das Kapital. Surely an adequate re-examination of this question would require the awareness that, in saying this, we are simplifying theoretical paths which, over the years, were re-formulated and re-thought in very different ways.32 Nonetheless, what I would stress is that in the workerist interpretation, the ‘natural capacity’ inherent to ‘living labour’ is not only an aspect that characterises the labour-process as such. Living labour, its being a living body, implies labour-as-subjectivity, not only because the difference expressed by living labour transforms in actu what is only in potentia,33 but also because it is supposed immediately to be able to express its own collective, political essence within the capitalist valorisation-process. This is why workerism was charged with being a ‘philosophy of history’,34 whereas it was more precisely a political philosophy of modernity, in which capitalist development becomes subordinated to the working-class struggle.35 In this, workerism manifested its innovative character – including its limits, of course. It is exactly from here that stems Tronti’s aforementioned reverse-temporal sequence, according to which it is labour-as-subjectivity that generates capitalist development. The subjectivity of living labour appears to be adequately explicable once capitalist development has reached its apex. As Tronti wrote: The point at which the degree of political development of the working class, overtook, for a set of historical reasons, the economic level of capitalist development, remains the most favourable site for the swift opening of a revolutionary process. On condition that we are dealing with working-class and capitalist development in the scientific sense of two social classes, in the epoch of an already-attained maturity.36

This affirmation makes clear why workerist theorists argued for the paradigmatic value of US-workers’ struggles (it should be sufficient to recall their 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

This is clearly underlined by Tronti 2008a. See Negri 2008; Tronti 2008a. See Virno 1999. Tronti 2008a, pp. 601–2. Tronti 1971, p. 89. Tronti 1971, p. 23.

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numerous writings on the topic), although Tronti’s own ‘theory of the middlepoint’ relativised that affirmation, when he asserted the possibility of catching, starting from a point itself in movement, the point situated further ahead – intending this latter not as an extrinsic telos, but, rather, as the intrinsic tendency of things to come.37 It is important to note here the way in which the concept of difference shows itself as explicitly linked to the concept of tendency. Both of them give rise to a crucial relationship, on which, for example, Negri insisted repeatedly between 1971 and 1979. ‘Antagonism of the tendency’, ‘method of antagonisttendency’: these are the key-words which describe a historical hermeneutics, devoted to identifying in the ‘determined abstraction’ what is definable as ‘practically true’ 38 – that is, what tendentially comes true. In a different way, we could say that capitalist development always prefigures its own crisis, which is, in turn, constantly produced by workers’ struggle. The medium between development and crisis is represented by the money-form: it constitutes the precondition that makes it possible to acquire the specific use-value of labourpower. M–C means, first of all, ‘money as wage’, because it implies, from the very beginning, ‘the laws of appropriation or of private property’, and thus the social and historically determined exclusion reaffirmed by the ‘semblance of exchange’ between capital and labour-power.39 As a consequence, according to the workerist point of view, the commodity-form is primarily interpreted as the representation of the relationship between objective and subjective conditions of production, separate from the heuristic (but very problematic) account of the nexus between ‘theory of value’ and ‘commodity-money’. In fact, if it is true that, on the one hand, the commodity-analysis makes it possible to emphasise the particular use-value of living labour,40 on the other hand, the same analysis seems to be no more than a tacit assumption within the M–C–M' process, whose result (namely, the difference between M and M') constitutes the true starting point. This is clear in Negri’s reasoning: the contradiction that money registers is the one between labour-value as the general equivalent of commodity-exchange and the conditions of social production dominated by capital – on the one hand, money as the determination and particular measure of the value of labour-power sold on the free market; on the other, opposed to it, the social character of the production that capital has appropriated and which it has transformed into its own power over social labour, 37. Ibid. 38. Negri 1974b; Negri 1979a. 39. On this theme, the comparison with the so-called ‘theory of monetary circuit’, developed in Augusto Graziani’s seminal works, is very interesting. See Graziani 2003. 40. Tronti 1971, pp. 162ff.

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the totality of social movement become autonomous, power autonomised and standing above individuals. . . . The ‘chapter on money’ tracks this tendency until it shows that money – after having mediated its private figure in the general process of production – as the index of an antagonism which, having emerged dialectically from exchange, posited as a function of exchange and as its general mediation, is now intensified into an irresolvable, violently critical relation between the socialisation of production and the arbitrariness of its representation in terms of measure, equivalence, delegation [rappresentanza].41

Here, we can note the decisive importance of the Grundrisse in workerist thought.42 Nothing seemed to explain better than the money-form the very essence of the capitalist mode of production and, therefore, the development/ crisis nexus within the world-market. As Sergio Bologna noted, the pace of the expansion of the monetary system was faster than that of the diffusion of the industrial system, and the monetary system appeared in Marx’s eyes as the embodiment of the world-market in its concrete materiality.43 To come quickly to the point, in the crisis/monetary-form nexus, the law of value could be interpreted ‘from the viewpoint of a stage of capitalist development now in its maturity’.44 (Incidentally, it is worth noting that the most accurate analyses concerning the monetary storm of the seventies had been produced precisely by Sergio Bologna and the journal Primo Maggio, in particular with regard to the themes concerning the evolution and composition of public expenditure in Italy). As Negri wrote: The exceptional importance of this attack of the Grundrisse on money, considered as an eminent form of the expression of the law of value, is not nevertheless bound only to the immediate character of the critique. There is another point to be considered right away; it is that the social relation underlying this making extreme of the relation of value is not envisaged from the point of view of synthesis, but from the point of view of antagonism. . . . Under the form of money, the law of value is presented (1) in crisis, (2) in an antagonistic manner, and (3) with a social dimension.45

Thus, the nexus between crisis and money-form is not only fundamental, but also foundational, because it shows, starting from M–C, the crisis of the law of value intended as ‘measure’. As Tronti underlines, it is the existence of the class-relationship which makes possible the transformation of money into 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Negri 1974b, pp. 8, 11–2; and see Negri 1979a. See Negri 1979a. Bologna 1974 (English translation in Bologna 1993, p. 64, n. 14). Bologna 1974, p. 31, n. 13. Negri 1979a, pp. 35–6; English translation in Negri 1991a, pp. 24–5.

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capital; and this transformation entails the critical relationship between development and crisis. Nevertheless, once the issue is posed in these terms, it raises a crucial question. If it is in fact true that workerism constantly underlined the centrality of the ‘workers’ inquiry’46 – namely, the research on the organisation of the labour-process within the big manufacturing firms, from which the definition of technical class-composition was derived – how can we explain the emphasis put on the valorisation-process and political class-composition, very often stressed apart from the concreteness of the labour-process? In workerist jargon, technical class-composition was the result of the relationships between labourpower, machinery, production-times, as grasped from the workers’ point of view, in an analysis that viewed the factory-system in terms of its contradictions. Was it not that technical class-composition which had made possible a specific, political class-composition – that is, the inner relations of labour-power and the ways in which they autonomously organised themselves against the limits and constraints of capitalist production – as a result of the workers’ struggles that had matured within the Fordist firm? Surely, we can explain the ever-more explicit emphasis put on the valorisation-process and political class-composition by taking into account workerism’s insistence on the so-called ‘high points’ of capitalist development, which would be characterised by the presence of a labour-power directly conceived as working class (it was from here, not by chance, that derived the endless dispute about political and organisational forms, and, as a result, the repeated emergence of different evaluations of the Leninist tradition). Although this insistence may seem simplistic – in particular, when it is founded on the primacy of Marx’s unpublished works as against his published ones – it is perfectly consistent with the rôle played by the money-form in workerist theory, in particular in what concerns the monetary character of the non-equivalent exchange between capital and labour-power. In short, all this requires a specific way of understanding the immediate, political significance of the struggle against wage. Tronti wrote: Therefore for Marx it is beyond doubt that the class-relation already exists in-itself [an sich] in the act of circulation. It is precisely this which reveals, which brings out, the capitalist relation during the production-process. The class-relation [Klassenverhältnis] precedes, that is to say provokes and produces, the capitalist

46. As Sergio Bologna wrote: ‘Romano Alquati is the main figure behind a Marxian approach to workers’ enquiry. He laid down the methodology of conricerca [joint research] with Romolo Gobbi and Gianfranco Faina.’ (Bologna 2003, p. 135.)

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relation [Kapitalverhältnis]. Or rather: it is the existence of the class-relation that makes the transformation of money into capital possible.47

From an historical point of view, the class-relation is the result of so-called primitive accumulation. As Marx points out, the ‘capital-relation presupposes a complete separation between the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realization of their labour. As soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly extending scale’.48 According to Tronti, this is a crucial point: Because usually Marx is made to say exactly the opposite, and it is in current ‘Marxist’ usage to say the opposite: that is, that only from the capitalist relation of production there emerges the contrast, the antagonism of classes . . . so it is capital that makes classes, or rather, that transforms the old classes into contrasting agglomerates that are at once new and always the same. . . . Is it therefore as sellers of labour-power that waged workers constitute themselves for the first time into a class? We believe it is possible to answer ‘yes’.49

In sum, ‘a social mass forced to sell its labour-power is also the general form of the working class’.50 All this had already been explained in the first book of Capital, starting from the twofold character of labour-power51 given that ‘the first antagonistic figure taken by the worker is that of seller of labour-power; but it also true that in this figure that of producer of surplus-value is already presupposed’.52 Hence, within the capitalist process of production – as Marx points out – the ‘process between things’ manifests itself for what it is: a relation of exploitation of living labour on the part of dead labour – the capitalist form of commodity-production.53 The labour-process is no longer distinguishable from the valorisation-process, as the labour socially necessary to pay the wage is fused, from the beginning, to an additional quantum. The capacity of labour-power makes possible what in the interaction between objective and subjective conditions is only in potentia. The potential capacity of labour-power generates a valorisation-process that is historically determined, as a result of the subjectivity of living labour. This is a ‘multiplication’ constituted by ‘one single, indivisible labour process. Work is not done twice, once to produce a useful product, a use value, to convert the means of 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Tronti 1971, p. 149. Marx 1990, p. 874. Tronti 1971, p. 149. Ibid. Tronti 1971, p. 123. Tronti 1971, p. 148. Cf. Tronti 1971, pp. 162–8.

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production into products, and the second time to produce value and surplusvalue, to valorise value’.54 Here, two different results are simultaneously reached, through a singular labour. Obviously, the ‘twofold nature of the result [Doppelseitigkeit]’ can only be explained by the twofold character [Doppelcharakter] of labour:55 There is, however, the following specific distinction [spezifischer Unterschied ] to be pointed out here: Real labour is what the worker really gives to the capitalist as equivalent for the part of the capital that has been converted into wages, for the purchasing price of labour. It is the expenditure of his life force [Lebenskraft], the realisation of his productive capacities, his movement, not the capitalist’s. Viewed as a personal function [ persönliche Funktion], in its reality, labour is the function of the worker and not of the capitalist. Viewed from the point of view of exchange, the worker is what the capitalist receives from him in the labour process, not what the capitalist represents towards him in the same process. This therefore stands in contrast to the way the objective conditions of labour, as capital, and to that extent as the existence of the capitalist, confront the subjective condition of labour, labour itself, or rather the worker who works, within the labour process itself.56

The expenditure of vital energy, its movement, its being a personal function, are so because the living labour ‘is a fluid magnitude, in the process of becoming – and therefore contained within different limits – instead of having become’.57 The juxtaposition between objective and subjective conditions subsequent to the exchange generates the subsumption of a fluid-magnitude, which is the manifestation of the vital function [Lebensäußerung] of labourpower. What in the labour-process is a means to a determined aim, in the valorisation-process becomes a means that subsumes the vital manifestation of labour-power: It is not a matter of living labour being realised in objective labour as its objective organ, but of objective labour being preserved and increased by the absorption of living labour, thereby becoming self-valorising value, capital, and functioning as such. The means of production now appear only as absorbers of the largest possible quantity of living labour. Living labour now appears only as a means for the valorisation and therefore capitalisation of existing values.58

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Marx 1975, p. 400. Marx 1990, p. 307. Marx 1975, p. 391. Marx 1975, p. 393. Marx 1975, p. 397.

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The objective conditions are not mere passive instrumenta, but, rather, the means that command living labour. They make possible its involvement in the process of its objectivation; but to the extent that past labour valorises itself, it becomes a process in itself. To the extent that past labour sets living labour to work, it becomes a process in itself, it valorises itself, it becomes a fluens that creates a fluxion. This absorption of additional living labour is past labour’s process of self-valorisation, its real conversion into capital, into self-valorising value, its conversion from a constant magnitude of value into a variable magnitude of value, value in process.59

In this process, the manifestation of the vital energy of living labour and its movement manifest themselves as capital. ‘Only through the conversion of labour into capital during the production process is the pre-posited quantity of value, which was only δυναμει capital, realised as actual capital ’.60 The transformation of money into capital (M–C–M') is therefore possible as the result of a specific transformative action that the use-value of living labour – an ensemble of physical and intellectual attitudes – exerts upon the dead labour that, in turn, from thing becomes process, a fluxio within the sphere of the valorisation-process, since it is the result of the manifestation of the vital function of living labour. Therefore, we can trace back to the workerist interpretation of this theoretical passage in Marx the different questions concerning the relationship between technical and political class-composition. Certainly, this relationship has very often been simplified, if not hypostatised. In particular, it generated the endless discussion that, inside and outside the workerist line of thought, followed Negri’s definition of ‘social worker’,61 at the moment in which, after 1973, massive layoffs of labour caused a global disarticulation of the previous technical class-composition and a consequent territorial redistribution of valorisation-processes. Surely, Negri’s definition disregarded many of the causes and effects which followed a well-defined, historical defeat of the Western working class. However, his definition interpreted, although in a very forced way, an incipient and genuine tendency, which, in subsequent years, would be widely discussed – even if in a very different way and, it goes it without saying, apart from any ‘subversive’ ends. At any rate, if we attribute to the same old cattivo maestro [bad teacher] every merit and blame, we will never understand the question. Regarding this, 59. Marx 1975, p. 402. 60. Marx 1975, p. 423. 61. Negri 1979b.

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it suffices to recall the debate that followed the Italian translation of Harry Braverman’s Labour and Monopoly Capital.62 For much of the Italian Left, that book seemed to be a very decisive work, which deserved the greatest approval; in workerist eyes, vice versa, it appeared as a clearly dated book – the very idea of monopolistic capital seemed inadequate – unable to understand the rôle of workers’ subjectivity.63 Briefly, the limits of Braverman’s book were traced back to the underlying interpretation of the ‘degradation of labour’ intrinsic to the capitalist labour-process; a perspective from which it became impossible to explain, within the valorisation-process, the ‘feedforward-function’ played by the workers’ struggle. Put differently, when we admit the identity between living labour and the working class, notwithstanding some relevant interpretative differences, the primacy of the valorisation-process follows. The rôle played by the labourprocess is not disregarded. More simply put, it is affirmed that the functioning of the capitalist production-process as a whole requires, not so much the degradation of labour (implied by the labour-process), as the socialisation of labour (implied by the valorisation-process). From the same reasoning is also derived the political character of the antagonistic relationship between relative surplus-value and the relative wage; a relationship which, following in the footsteps of Roman Rosdolsky’s interpretation,64 played a fundamental rôle in workerist thought.65 Thus, fundamental is the conceptual deepening that such a relationship requires and that only the theory of surplus-value as ‘a measure of difference’ allows one to spell out. The evaluation of this ‘measure’ is possible only on the grounds of expanded reproduction, which involves what Marx defines as the derealisation-process of labour [der Entwirklichungsprozeß der Arbeit]. It is here where living labour ‘posits itself objectively, as its own not-being [als ihr eignes Nichtsein] or as the being of its not-being [oder als das Sein ihres Nichtseins] – of capital’.66 In short, there is a strict interconnection between difference and excess; and this connection is established by a separation, a division inherent to a specific social relation of production. This explains why Marx insisted upon the fact that ‘the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite’. In effect, the semblance of exchange between capital and labour-power – its being mere form [bloße 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Braverman 1974. Gambino 1979. Rosdolsky 1968. Negri 1974a; Negri 1979a. Marx 1993, p. 454.

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Form], non-exchange [Nicht-Austausch] – is not only confirmed, but it confirms, in turn, that the fundamental precondition of the social relation of production can only be represented by the separation between property and labour.67 When this social relation is traced back to the relationship between relative surplus-value and the relative wage, the latter shows its antagonistic nature. For the same reason, according to workerist theory, the law of value expresses, not a measure, but a dismeasure. Since its essence is political, it establishes a pure and simple command. This is clearly stated by Tronti: ‘Explicating how the law of value imposes itself ’: according to Marx’s indications, this remains the task of working-class science [scienza operaia]. On one condition: that this explication not be ensnared in the phoney contradictions of economic science. How the law imposes itself is a problem of the political organisation of the class-relation.68

Similarly, Negri wrote: But, having reached certain scales of accumulation, this process [the relative wage] is no longer measurable, its parameters are no longer based on the law of value but on the times and forms of its extinction. . . . [C]apital is forced to nullify proportion, that is to determine it only through its command. All the other ‘objective’ determinations of the setting of the wage fall away . . . only command remains.69

The wage-struggle, sustained by the mass-worker’s refusal of work, becomes political struggle. Let’s be clear, we’re not speaking here of the general tendencies that the understanding of necessary labour impose upon capitalist development in the direction of the fall of surplus-value. We’re speaking of a surplus of refusal to directly valorise capital which today can be identified in a general manner . . . from within class-behaviour.70

The reference to Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ is fundamental here and, at the same time, very problematic.71 Nevertheless, at least for the first generation 67. Marx 1990, p. 729. 68. Tronti 1971, p. 225. 69. Negri 1974a, pp. 134–5. 70. Negri 1974a, p. 123. What in this text was only sketched out – self-valorisation – would later become crucial for Negri. See Negri 1978. 71. See Zanini 2008, pp. 191–200.

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of workerists, the Marxian ‘Fragment’ was, first of all, if not merely, a fragment on machinery interpreted as fixed capital; and its importance derived from the problems raised by the relationship between development (of fixed capital) and crisis (of the law of value). The ‘general intellect’ itself was essentially understood as the outcome of a manifest ‘disproportion’ in the organic composition of capital, a catastrophe, even as communism in the making,72 but always following the hermeneutic path disclosed by Panzieri (albeit neglecting his own perplexity and circumspection).73 Hence, the basic ‘motto’ (and, according to the most severe critics, the ‘epitaph’) of the first generation of workerists was the following statement from the Grundrisse: The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value.74

Therefore, taking in due account the limits of this critical note, we may summarise the historical-analytical path of workerism in two main points. i) As it is the only holder of living labour, the working class manifests an ‘absolute’ or separate interest, a unilateral synthesis, the only one which is, historically, thinkable. This foundational statement legitimises the workerist insistence on the so-called ‘high points’ of capitalist development, characterised by the presence of a labour-power that is already working class, since classrelations exist already in the sphere of circulation, an sich, in themselves, given that, in Tronti’s words, which we have already cited, ‘a social mass forced to sell its labour-power is also the general form of the working class’. As a result, nothing better than the evolution of the money-form (M–M') can unravel the essence of capitalist class-relations, and, consequently, the nexus between development and crisis. ii) If it is true that labour-power exists as a specific commodity since it is a living body, this happens, not in spite of, but because it is labour-as-subjectivity. Therefore, the identity between living labour and the working class seems to be a fortiori correct. From the same deductive chain descends the primacy attributed to the valorisation-process and political class-composition, starting from the money-form. And, once this primacy is synthesised in the relationship between relative surplus-value and relative wage, the (dis)proportional nature 72. Negri 1971, pp. 27–9. 73. Panzieri 1964, pp. 285–6, n. 76 (reprinted in Lanzardo (ed.) 1973). 74. Marx 1993, p. 705.

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of the latter reveals its antagonistic political essence. As a result, the law of value is codifiable as simple political command. Albeit with different nuances, both Tronti and Negri would come to this conclusion. Subsequently, the story would turn out to be a different one. Were one to say that, only from this point onwards, workerist theoretical research was focused on the ‘problem of the state’ – and I am referring, of course, to the Italian events following 1977 and the debate devoted to political repression, etc. – this statement would be partial, if not incorrect. Let us simply recall the earlier works concerning the crisis of the planner-state,75 Keynesianism, and the constitutionalisation of labour.76 And, even before that debate, one would have to consider that, in the workerist tradition in the midseventies, a pivotal rôle was played by the discussion concerning the relationship between the new class-composition, public expenditure, and wage-form;77 a discussion that followed the territorial redistribution of the valorisationprocesses generated by the great layoffs mentioned above.78 From then on, in fact, the wage-form was related, no longer to the refusal of labour expressed by the mass-worker, but, rather, to the right of income-as-revenue claimed by the growing number of non-guaranteed workers.79 Nonetheless, if it is true that the Italian ’77-movement, in political terms, represented, simultaneously, the end of the ‘long’, Italian seventies and the beginning of a new political phase, it is also true that all this gave rise to ‘another story’, because the experience of the first workerist generation had, in the meantime, already ended. Nevertheless, although with a little strain, one could affirm that there was a point of synthesis, which represented also a sort of obligatory, although ‘posthumous’, passage.80 I am referring here to the comparison between the so-called ‘autonomy of the political’ – as theorised by Tronti at the beginning of the seventies81 – and the ‘autonomy of the social’, theorised in the meantime by Negri. Whereas the first concept of ‘autonomy’ – coherently with the prior idea of ‘entryism’ in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) – affirmed that the working class, and thus its difference, should have had to transform itself into the leading class within the capitalist state (to become-state, farsi Stato); the latter, on the contrary – through the idea of ‘displacement of subject’82 –

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

Negri 1974b. Various Authors 1972; Negri 1977, pp. 27–98. See Zanini 2009. Negri 1978, pp. 31–5. Magnaghi 1976. Bologna (ed.) 1978; Various Authors 1981. Tronti 2008a, pp. 15–6. Tronti 1977 (the texts collected in this volume were written in 1972). Negri 1979a, and Negri 1980a.

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pursued the social radicalisation of the same class-autonomy.83 Surely, considering the transformations that had occurred in class-composition, that ‘displacement’ ran the risk of producing an entity devoid of any relationship – as Negri himself acknowledged soon afterwards.84 Nonetheless, from the Trontian perspective, and within the relationships now established between party and class, the rôle of ‘class-autonomy’ appeared absolutely undetermined. What did it really mean to ‘put politics in command’? Did it mean the postponement of the ‘economic’ with respect to the ‘political’, in order to achieve a political hegemony over capitalist innovation? Undoubtedly, what was under discussion was not (only) the old question concerning the rôle of the PCI, but, rather, the possible articulations of different political meanings of ‘class-autonomy’ after the ‘long’ Italian 1968. Whilst Tronti reasserted that the transformation, via the PCI, of working-class autonomy into class-leadership was the ultimate, only and positive way out from the siècle ouvrier 85 – because a different, political escape appeared as unthinkable and working-class defeat seemed more than probable – Negri, by insisting on the transformation of the ‘mass-worker’ into the ‘social worker’, was outlining, in terms of self-valorisation, the last step to be reached by a political class-composition formed within/without the final scenario of the Fordist big firm. Both perspectives tended to define a coherent outcome for an idea that, in reality, had only remained the same until the mid-sixties. In fact, afterwards, the meaning of ‘class-autonomy’ was understood in very different ways – as testified by the fragmentation that characterised the evolution of the groups comprising the extra-parliamentary Left, including Potere Operaio.86 For this reason, in my opinion, we may see in this final contrast the ‘posthumous’ closure of the experience of the first workerist generation, at the moment in which the outcomes of the capitalist counter-revolution were mature, and the historical defeat of the Italian working class accomplished.87 It is not by chance that, from here on, Negris’s Spinozist concept of the multitude88 became, firstly, synonymous with the ‘displacement of subject’, and, secondly, ended up by absorbing and substituting it.89 All this paved the way for a new conceptual story, fierce in its continuity, but unavoidably different. Here, we 83. Negri 1980a. 84. Negri 1980b. 85. It is important to recall here the works published by Tronti, beginning in 1980: Tronti 1980; Tronti 1992; Tronti 1998. 86. See the critical remarks by Bologna 2008, p. 728. 87. Polo and Sabattini 2000. 88. Negri 1981. 89. See Zanini 1982, pp. 71–87.

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may surely find the wealth of a ‘long’ tradition of thought: the workerist style.

3. A political philosophy of modernity In a very synthetic form, and on the basis of the periodisation proposed herein, I think it is reasonable to assert that, starting from the concept of difference, the theoretical evolution of the thinking of the first workerists may be understood according to three Marxian conceptual couplets: namely, commodity-form/money-form, labour-process/valorisation-process, and relative surplus-value/relative wage. The interpretation of living labour as working class (which expresses the Marxian labour-as-subjectivity) makes it then possible to introduce a fresh, conceptual couplet: technical and political class-composition. Taking into due account the Italian historical scenario, what emerges is an argumentative line, that, starting from the money-form, reaches the wageform. The focal point of this argumentation is represented by the valorisationprocess, expressed by a changing, political class-composition, which characterises the core of the ‘high points’ of capitalist development. Given the above, the law of value is nothing other than a form of command, because the valorisation-process consists of a process of exploitation of the specific difference that qualifies labour-power. This exploitation involves the de-realisation of labour. It is here that living labour ‘posits itself objectively, as its own notbeing or as the being of its not-being – of capital’.90 However, all this does not compromise the ‘essence’ of living labour itself, which is necessarily assumed, by capital itself, as a living body, as an epochal, political subject: the working class. Thus, the point of arrival reasserts the starting point – and the parabola of the first workerist generation is accomplished. It is not by chance that in the middle of the events of 1977 – an historical context very different if compared with the city-factory theorised by Tronti in the sixties – at the moment in which the reasoning about the new forms of social conflict required an explicit, fresh, political stance, the cleavage within the old workerist group went well beyond the well-known divergences stemming from the entryist strategy.91 What appeared to be untenable was the previous interpretation of the concept of difference when compared with the new class-composition, within which

90. Marx 1993, p. 454. 91. Grotesque, and exactly for this reason absolutely significant, is Asor Rosa 1977.

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the working class was no longer the Trontian ‘rude razza pagana [rough pagan race]’. Regarding the workerist tradition of thought, can we talk about ‘philosophical foundations’? In spite of everything, my answer is positive, even if it may seem contradictory. In fact, if it is true that workerism was, first of all, a well-defined, historical form of political militancy, both radical, as well as intellectually sophisticated; nonetheless, it produced and solidified a non-contingent, modern, political philosophy of social conflict. This is the reason why its intellectual influence has been and remains so long-lasting; just as it has been able to change over the years, evolving and becoming a globally acknowledged theoretical and political point of reference. What is the key-point in this matter? I think it is represented by the constitution of an antagonistic philosophy of subjectivity (not of the subject), based on an immanent concept of difference, non-reducible to ‘an(other)’ history of philosophy. There is nothing better than Tronti’s recent retrospection to clarify the point in question: Panzieri accused me of ‘Hegelianism’, of ‘philosophy of history’. This reading, and the accusation that underlies it, will often return; after all, Hegelianism was a real factor, it was effectively there, always had been; while this idea of a ‘philosophy of history’ absolutely did not. . . . Ours was not a theory that imposed itself from outside on real data, but the opposite: that is, the attempt to recover those real data, giving them meaning within a theoretical horizon.92

Therefore, those ‘real data’ were not traced back to an impossible ‘philosophy of the working class’, but to the contingency that characterised the figure of the mass-worker,93 to its historically determined difference, interpreted according to a particular reading of Marx, freed from historicist fetters, drawn from a specific, but epochal, historical context, maintained and generalised, although that concept eventually faded away. Possibly, all this may sound today like yet another way of chanting the ‘magnificent and progressive fortunes’ of the ‘Working Class’ intended as the ‘Hegelian Spirit’. In reality – Tronti says – the mass-worker was not a ‘bearer of history’, but of politics. The ‘difference’ stemmed from here. Nonetheless, according to many critics, this philosophy of subjectivity would later reveal the ambiguity of workerist thought, regardless of its lasting (dis)continuity: from Fordism to post-Fordism, from the working class to the multitude. This is not my opinion, provided that one recognises, first of all, 92. Tronti 2008b, pp. 601–2. 93. Tronti 2008a, p. 10.

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that, starting from a certain point in time, we are faced with a many-faceted thought: not only because workerism has never existed as a monolithic group, but also because it followed different theoretical paths over the years. A serious and balanced assessment has to evaluate to what degree workerism constituted a radical, political action founded on a truly innovative Marxist perspective. And in doing so, one also has to consider that fifty years ago, a large part of Italian Marxism was indeed a ‘dead dog’, which an injection of generous Gramscianism would not have been sufficient to revive. Exactly for this reason Panzieri’s work has shown itself to be so fundamental, just as – from a philosophical, political, and economic point of view – an updated concept of difference remains absolutely.

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Magnaghi, Alberto 1976, ‘Il territorio nella crisi’, Quaderni del territorio, 1: 15–29. Mangano, Attilio 1989, Le culture del Sessantotto. Gli anni sessanta, le riviste, il movimento, Pistoia: CDP. Marx, Karl 1975 [1864], ‘Results of the Direct Production Process’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Volume 34, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1990 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— 1993 [1939/53], Grundrisse, edited and translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mezzadra, Sandro 2000, ‘Operaismo’, in Enciclopedia del pensiero politico, edited by Roberto Esposito and Carlo Galli, Rome: Laterza. Negri, Antonio 1974a, ‘Partito operaio contro il lavoro’, in Bologna, Carpignano and Negri 1974. ——1974b, Crisi dello Stato-piano. Comunismo e organizzazione rivoluzionaria, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1976, Proletari e Stato, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1977, La forma stato, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1978, Il dominio e il sabotaggio, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1979a, Marx oltre Marx. Quaderno di lavoro sui Grundrisse, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1979b, Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale. Intervista sull’operaismo, edited by Paolo Pozzi and Roberta Tommasini, Milan: Multhipla. —— 1980a, Il comunismo e la guerra, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1980b, Politica di classe: il motore e la forma. Le cinque campagne oggi, Milan: Machina libri. —— 1981, L’anomalia selvaggia. Potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1991a, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, London: Pluto Press. —— 1991b, The Savage Anomaly: the Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, translated by Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. —— 2008, ‘A Class-Struggle Propaedeutics, 1950s–1970s’, in Casarino and Negri 2008. —— 2009, Il lavoro nella Costituzione, Verona: Ombre corte. Panzieri, Raniero 1964, ‘Plusvalore e pianificazione’, Quaderni Rossi, 4: 257–88. —— 1973 [1961], ‘Relazione sul neocapitalismo’, in Lanzardo (ed.) 1973. Polo, Gabriele and Claudio Sabattini 2000, Restaurazione italiana, Rome: Manifestolibri. Rieser, Vittorio 1965, ‘I “Quaderni Rossi” ’, Rendiconti, 10: 270–88. Rosdolsky, Roman 1968, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’, Frankfurt-Vienna: Europäische Verlagsanstalt-Europa Verlag. Trotta, Giuseppe and Fabio Milana (eds.) 2008, L’operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Dai ‘Quaderni Rossi’ a ‘Classe operaia’, Rome: Derive Approdi. Tronti, Mario 1963, ‘Il piano del capitale’, Quaderni Rossi, 3: 44–73. —— 1966, Operai e capitale, Turin: Einaudi. —— 1971, Operai e capitale, Second Edition, Turin: Einaudi. —— 1977, Sull’autonomia del politico, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1980, Il tempo della politica, Rome: Editori Riuniti. —— 1992, Con le spalle al futuro, Rome: Editori Riuniti. —— 1998, La politica al tramonto, Turin: Einaudi. —— 2008a, ‘Saggio introduttivo’, in Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008. —— 2008b, ‘Testimonianza’, in Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008. Various Authors 1972, Operai e stato, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1975, ‘Raniero Panzieri e i Quaderni Rossi ’, aut aut, 149–50: ??–??.

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—— 1981, Crisi delle politiche e politiche nella crisi, Naples: Pironti. Virno, Paolo 1996, ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. —— 1999, Il ricordo del presente. Saggio sul tempo storico, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Wright, Steve 2002, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 2002. Zanini, Adelino 1982, Filosofie del soggetto. Soggettività e costituzione, Palermo: Ila Palma. —— 2008, Economic Philosophy: Economic Foundations and Political Categories, translated by Cosma E. Orsi, New York: Peter Lang. —— 2009, ‘La costituzione del lavoro. Una discussione con l’autore’, in Negri 2009. Zanini, Adelino and Ubaldo Fadini (eds.) 2001, Lessico postfordista. Dizionario di idee sulla mutazione, Milan: Feltrinelli.

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brill.nl/hima

Le Capital Amoureux : Imaginary Wealth and Revolution in Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love Duy Lap Nguyen Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine [email protected]

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between revolution and corruption in Jean Genet’s accounts of the Palestinian movement in his final work, Prisoner of Love. For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the actions of a revolutionary subject as an empty impersonation, performed for the actual ends of acquiring personal power and fortune. Rather, it exposes the ‘pretension’ inherent in the revolution it undermines as well as in the accumulation of value (for which the revolution is betrayed). For Genet, the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership makes manifest the imaginary character of both devotion to a revolutionary cause and greed for the commodity-fetish (value). Corruption, in other words, betrays revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ attempts to destroy. Keywords J. Genet, Prisoner of Love, Palestinian movement, commodity-fetishism, performativity

In Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet describes revolution, as well as its agents, as the products of an ‘imaginary activity’, a collective fantasy about the destruction of an ‘imaginary wealth and power’ that exists only in the daydreams of the dispossessed, a dispossession that is itself imaginary, insofar as it is defined against the image of privilege and luxury: Because they never owned anything, the fedayeen imagined the luxuries they wanted to rid the world of. That’s what I meant – what I wanted both to say and to conceal – by the ‘quiet periods’ . . . the daydreams people have to work off somehow when they’ve neither the strength nor the opportunity to make them come true. It’s then they invent the game of revolution. . . . Then our preoccupation with merely imaginary wealth and power is supposed to help us to create weapons with which to destroy real wealth and power when we meet them. . . . Some of the fedayeen asked me to bring them the works of Karl Marx back from Damascus. In particular Das Kapital. They didn’t know he wrote it sitting on his backside on pink silk cushions – wrote it in fact to fight against the soft pink silk, and soft © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550613

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mauve silk, and against little tables and vases and chandeliers and chintz, and footmen and portly Regency commodes.1

Like all revolutionary daydreams, Capital, according to Genet, is directed against an imaginary (as opposed to a real) object. Whatever the historical accuracy of Genet’s account of the conditions under which Marx produced Capital, his remarks draw attention, nevertheless, to a central inconsistency, if not contradiction within the text: the apparent persistence of a concept of revolution as a moment of demystification and historical awakening, in which a mass of individuals, dispossessed from the land as well as the traditional bonds which once determined its distribution and use, is ‘at last compelled to face with sober senses [its] real condition of life, and [its] real relations with [its] kind’;2 the persistence, in other words, of a conception of revolution as a moment of objective recognition, in the context of a critical analysis of the commodity, money and capital as forms of ‘imaginary wealth and power’,3 as the products of a practical misrecognition – ‘necessary illusions’4 in which ‘the definite social relation between men . . . assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between things’.5 This paper attempts to pursue this paradox (of which Marx himself was well aware)6 – in which dispossession figures as a condition for both the emergence 1. Genet 2003, pp. 119–20. 2. The Communist Manifesto, in McLellan (ed.) 1977, p. 223. 3. ‘The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, quite distinct from their palpable and real bodily form; it is therefore a purely ideal or notional form. Although invisible, the value of iron, linen and corn exists in these very articles: it is signified through their equality with gold, even though this relation with gold exists only in their heads, so to speak. . . . Since the expression of the value of commodities in gold is a purely ideal act, we may use purely imaginary or ideal gold to perform this operation.’ Marx 1990, pp. 189–90. 4. Balibar 1995, p. 60. 5. Marx 1990, p. 165. 6. In a letter to Engels, for example, Marx describes his characterisation of capitalism – as tending, historically, toward the inevitable expropriation of the capitalist class by the expropriated ‘mass of the people’ – as a ‘subjective’ and ‘tendentious’ conclusion, one which he was ‘perhaps bound and obligated to assume in view of his party position and his past’. According to Marx, this ‘ultimate outcome . . . of the present social process’ (the expropriation of the class of expropriators by a revolutionary subject, radicalised by its dispossession) ‘bears absolutely no relation to [the] real development’ of the analysis in Capital, a critical analysis which, in Marx’s words, ‘sounded the death-knell to all socialism by the book, i.e. to utopianism, for evermore’ (McLellan (ed.) 1977, p. 493). What this suggests is that, for Marx, the concept of a revolutionary subject, constituted on the basis of the recognition of its objective condition (dispossession), is inconsistent with a critical analysis of social relations in capitalism as objective ‘forms of appearance’ (Marx 1990, p. 677). According to Étienne Balibar, this inconsistency accounts for the virtual disappearance of the ‘proletariat’ from the text of Capital. Marx’s use of the term (notably in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and the section on the ‘Historical Tendency of

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of a demystified political subject, as well as the mystification of the commodityfetish itself – through a reading of Genet’s reflections on the Palestinian fedayeen. In Prisoner of Love, the paradox appears, in a particularly striking manner, in Genet’s discussion of ‘corruption’ among the Palestinian leadership as an act in which ‘devotion’ to the ideals of a revolutionary movement is ‘betrayed’ by a desire for money (the universal form of the commodity-fetish itself, the material image of an ‘imaginary wealth’ which Marx referred to as ‘value’). For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the acts of a revolutionary agent as an empty performance or pretence, staged for the actual purpose of accumulating personal fortune or power. Rather, it reveals what Genet describes as the inherently ‘imaginary’ nature of the act of revolt, as well as the exchange of commodities. Corruption, in other words, exposes the ‘pretense’ inherent in the revolution it appears to betray, as well as in the accumulation of value or wealth, for which it betrays it. For Genet, what the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership makes manifest, therefore, is the imaginary character of both commitment to a revolutionary cause (‘proven’ as real through a life-and-death struggle which, for Genet, proves to be difficult to distinguish from thrill-seeking or ‘playing’ with death), and the exchange of commodities (through which the identical value of incommensurable objects, in Marx’s words, is legitimately ‘proven’ or ‘earned’). Corruption ‘betrays’ revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ seeks to destroy. This paper begins with a reading of Genet’s account of revolution as an imaginary activity, performed by a ‘natural sham’, or spontané simulateur, playing the rôle of a revolutionary subject. It proceeds, in the following section, to a discussion of Marx’s analysis of the exchange of commodities, interpreted as another form of imaginary behaviour, based on what Marx describes as the ‘self-evident’ ‘absurdity’ of an imaginary substance of wealth (value) which makes incommensurable objects comparable (and therefore exchangeable). This section of the paper will also examine Genet’s conception of the spontané Capitalist Accumulation’), despite its apparent incompatibility with the critical method employed in Capital, suggests a symbolic gesture of solidarity toward a political movement which Marx could neither completely endorse nor betray, publically, in his writing. In Balibar’s words, the references to the proletariat in Capital constitute a ‘symbolically affirmed continuity’ with the Communist League: ‘[T]he term ‘proletariat’ is the ‘bridge’ which makes it possible to quote significant passages of the Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy in the footnotes. Thus, such references constitute the beginnings of what, from 1870 on, will become “historical materialism”. However, on account of this very fact, the references to the “proletariat” accentuate the difficulty in holding together, without aporia or contradiction, historical materialism and the critical theory of Capital, although these “two discoveries” . . . constantly interfered with each other’ (Balibar 1994, p. 127).

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simulateur in relation to Marx’s analysis of value, as a practical fiction which underlies the actions of agents or subjects in the process of exchange. I argue that Genet’s account of revolutionary subjectivity, as a ‘spontaneous simulation’ between persons, should be understood with reference to Marx’s conception of the commodity-fetish, as a ‘fantastic . . . relation between things’ in which objects ‘come on stage’, and perform as agents or actors in place of human subjects. For Marx, the commodity constitutes a form of mystification which serves, paradoxically, to ‘demystify’ social identity (or subjectivity), thereby rendering its inherently imaginary character apparent, practically as well as historically. The final portion of the paper proposes an interpretation of Genet’s reflections on ‘corruption’, as an act involving the entanglement (or mutual ‘betrayal’) of revolutionary struggle and commodity-exchange, one that exposes the different forms of ‘spontaneous simulation’ which constitute the revolutionary subject as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which it opposes.

Prisoner of Love : revolution as imaginary performance In Prisoner of Love, Genet provides an account of revolt and revolution that implicitly calls into question the ‘myth’ of class-consciousness, an account which underscores what Étienne Balibar has described as ‘the irreducible split between a class condition and a mass movement’.7 For Genet, ‘man’ is a subject that is opaque to itself, defined by a lack of self-transparency that engenders a ‘need to create not only signs but [to] complete and compact images masking a reality that may consist in absence of being. The void’.8 Sex, even before it emerges into consciousness, is probably the most widespread phenomenon in the living world. . . . Another perhaps less universal function is the desire, more or less conscious in every man, to create an image of himself and propagate it beyond death. . . . From Greece to the [Black] Panthers, history has been made out of man’s need to detach and project fabulous images, to send them as delegates into the future . . .9

7. Balibar 1994, p. 179. According to Balibar, the ‘myth’ of class-consciousness assumes a ‘mimetic relation’ between the proletariat conceived as subject and object, as the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘working class’, a correspondence between an objective condition and a collective consciousness of that condition. 8. Genet 2003, p. 302. 9. Genet 2003, p. 301.

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‘Man’, according to Genet, is an image-creating animal, a subject which spontaneously constitutes itself through the production of spectacle, a spontané simulateur. This subject, however, is never identical to the images it produces, a non-identity or ‘absence of being’ which gives rise to the desire to propagate images. The relation between subjects, therefore, is defined implicitly by Genet as a circulation of images which ‘masks’ a ‘void’, a lack of a self-image that is constitutive of both the subject and the object of the exchange (and this includes, of course, Genet’s relation to his own literary object in Prisoner of Love, as an individual whose life is ‘nothing but a blank sheet of paper . . . folded into something different’, providing an account of events that are ‘written on the void, an artifice superimposed on nothingness, and is the white page . . .’)10 Revolutionary movements, Genet suggests, emerge when an image assumes a ‘social function’, ‘detaching’ itself from ‘the man concerned and from any group or act’, and becomes ‘exemplary (that is, unique) and active’, not as ‘a source of imitations, but as a starting point for actions’.11 The image becomes a ‘Name’, an image that has become unique, ‘exemplary and active’, and that can project itself across time and space; ‘a surname, a first name, a family tree, a country, an ideology, a party, a grave . . .’12 Like the image from which it is derived, the ‘Name’ is not a mask that conceals a subject, but rather a ‘reality that may consist in absence of being’. The names of revolutionaries circulate as the ‘starting point for actions’, masks which are used in what Genet describes as theatrical stagings of revolt and rebellion, worn by nameless actors and performers; a circulation of revolutionary noms de guerre: The number of noms de guerre was astonishing. False names were originally intended to conceal a fighter; now they adorned him. His choice was a pointer to his fantasies, which were paralleled by such designations as Chevara (a contraction of Che Guevara). . . . Every name was a thin, some times transparent, mask beneath which there was another name, another mask . . . through which could be glimpsed a further name . . .13

The nom de guerre, then, is a kind a revolutionary equivalent to the nom-dupère, a ‘paternal signifier’ that conceals ‘a void [in the subject] that exceeds every possible symbolic identification’;14 a mask that does not distinguish or

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Genet 2003, p. 5. Genet 2003, p. 302. Genet 2003, p. 71. Genet 2003, p. 36. Žižek 1993, p. 79.

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disguise, but rather designates the place of an empty political ‘meaning-tocome’ (‘a pointer to his fantasies’),15 a revolutionary daydream that recedes into the horizon of the past and the future. The nom de guerre is not a personality or a persona, but an expectation, an aspiration, an image animated by a desire ‘project[ed] into a future no less absent than the present’.16 The ‘name’, then, does not simply produce the person; rather, it is assumed by the subject in a performative manner, as the object of an ‘anticipatory identification’.17 The subject ‘becomes what it already is’ by assuming a ‘symbolic mandate’ given by the paternal signifier.18 But not only does the subject ‘overtake’ itself in its ‘anticipatory identification’ with the revolutionary image it will become, it also precedes itself by ‘retroactively grounding its own reasons’, positing its own genealogy, its own revolutionary origins in a kind of inverted and circular act of parentage or procreation.19 The revolutionary assumes the revolutionary ‘mandate’, fulfilling an obligation to the dead, an imaginary ancestry that is simultaneously honoured and ‘revealed’ in the very act of revolt: What I saw at once was that every ‘nation’, the better to justify its rebellion in the present, sought proof of its own singularity in the distant past. Every uprising revealed some deep genealogy whose strength was not in its almost non-existent branches but in its roots. So that the rebels springing forth everywhere seemed to be celebrating some sort of cult of the dead.20

Images projected into the past and the future, then, provide ‘proof ’ of the existence of a ‘nation’ in the present; the circulation of images establishes a genealogy, an imaginary relation to the dead, to a virtual (revolutionary) ancestry that confers the mandate of rebellion upon the living, imposing a revolutionary project which creates a revolutionary subject in the place of an 15. Žižek 1993, p. 78. 16. Genet 2003, p. 302. 17. For Genet, then, the revolutionary subject is not simply assigned a place within an already-established revolutionary tradition; in Lacanian terms, the revolutionary does not, in Žižek’s words, merely ‘wait for a symbolic place to be allotted to [it]’. ‘The image’, as Genet explains, is not ‘active as a source of imitations, but as a starting point for actions which, though they’ll be thought to be through and for it, will in fact be against it’ (Genet 2003, p. 302). 18. ‘[B]y means . . . of the signifier which “means” only the presence of meaning, we are able as it were to “overtake” ourselves and, in an anticipatory move, establish our identity not in some positive content but in a pure self-referential signifying form alluding to a meaning-to-come. Such is, in the last resort, the logic of every ideological Master-Signifier in the name of which we fight our battles: fatherland, America, Socialism, etc. – do they not all designate an identification not with a clearly defined positive content but with the very gesture of identification?’ (Žižek 1993, p. 78). 19. Žižek 1993, p. 74. 20. Genet 2003, p. 37.

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‘absence of being’. In the act of revolt, images ‘joined together . . . make up both memory and history’. For Genet, then, ‘the Palestinian revolution was no ordinary battle to recover stolen land’, it was a ‘metaphysical revolt’, waged by a people whose revolutionary condition, whose dispossession, was produced by the very struggle to reverse it: ‘as far as I could see, their land – Palestine – was not merely out of reach . . . it never existed. Vestiges of it remained, very distorted, in old people’s memories’.21 In that sense, revolution, for Genet, does not arise out of a moment of demystification, in which a subject recognises itself in its own condition of oppression and struggles to acquire the means to abolish both its oppression and itself. Rather, it is a moment of misrecognition, in which a revolutionary consciousness emerges in the attempt to realise a revolutionary image it mistakes for itself. Revolution, in other words, is a moment of fantasy or selfmystification, a collective ‘daydream’ rather than a moment of historical awakening.

Amorous capital: commodity-exchange as imaginary activity Marx’s analysis in Capital suggests a shift in perspective from his earlier writings: from a critique of capitalism from the point of view of a potential revolutionary class-subject (the proletariat) – from the standpoint, in other words, of the ‘real conditions’ and ‘relations’ to which this subject is reduced as a result of its dispossession, of the ‘decompos[ition of ] the old society throughout its depth and breadth’22 that accompanied the expropriation from the land – to an analysis articulated from the perspective of what would seem to be ‘the old society’ itself; an analysis, moreover, in which the ‘real conditions’ and ‘relations’ – or more precisely, the categories of political economy that form the basis for the historical-materialist conception of history (productive labour, exchange, etc.) – become the very objects of the analysis itself. Marx, in other words, appears to turn away from a mode of analysis in which ‘religious and political illusions’ are unveiled from a demystifying, ‘materialist’ perspective, toward a critique of the ‘mystical character of commodities’, as viewed from the apparent vantage-point of a premodern society,23 one to which Marx returns by means a kind of imaginary journey back in time: 21. Genet 2003, p. 125. 22. Marx 1990, p. 928. 23. I do not mean to suggest here that Marx, in his later writings, adopts the normative standpoint of a premodern society. Marx emphatically insists, in both the Grundrisse and Capital, that a critical perspective on capitalism requires a criterion immanent to capitalism itself. Nevertheless, Marx’s analysis seems to imply that such an immanent perspective is consistent, in

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Let us now transport ourselves . . . to the European middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent. . . . Personal dependence here characterises the social relations of production. . . . But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. . . . No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour.24

In this section, Marx not only brackets the question of class, but presents a description of the commodity (the ‘fantastic form’ assumed by labour and its products in capitalism) from something like the perspective of a visitor from the past, in particular, from a society in which class (or more precisely, forms of ‘personal dependence’, or domination and exploitation) form the actual basis of the society itself (the hypothetical feudal society to which we have been transported). From this perspective, social forms in capitalism appear as ‘relations between men’ that assume the form of a ‘relation between things’, in which ‘personal’ domination and exploitation – the Hegelian relation of lordship and bondage – is ‘disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour’; or, to borrow Marx’s phrase from the Manifesto, in which the ‘religious and political illusions’ which once ‘bound man to his “natural superiors” ’, appear as ‘illusions’ that now ‘bind’ objects to each other in the exchange of commodities. Just as the sovereignty (or ‘independence [Selbstständigkeit]’) of the lord appears as the latter’s natural attribute in relations of ‘personal dependence’, so, in the act of exchange, value appears, not as a relation, but as an intrinsic property of objects, or, more precisely, of the commodity that serves as an equivalent to another (that is, the commodity that, in the exchange-relation, ‘reflects’ the value of another commodity):

some ways, with the perspective of non-capitalist societies, in particular, that of ancient and feudal societies.This is evident from the fact, for example, that Aristotle is referenced, in Capital, as a source for the very distinction between use- and exchange-value, as well as the ‘syllogisms’ that appear in the chapter on the circulation of commodities (C-M-C, M-C-M', etc.) (Marx 1990, pp. 253–4, 267). Marx’s analysis of machinery, moreover, opposes the perspective of nineteenth-century political economy on the division of labour (which ‘is only able to view the social division of labour . . . as a means of producing more commodities [and] . . . accelerating the accumulation of capital’) to that of Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle (‘who are exclusively concerned with quality and use-value’) (Marx 1990, p. 486). For a discussion of the relationship between Marx’s critique of capitalism and ancient philosophy, see Meikle 1995 and McCarthy 1990. 24. Marx 1979, p. 77.

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The value of objects – like the sovereignty or self-worth [wert] of an individual – is the product of an imaginary relation in which the value of one object is ‘reflected’ in the ‘bodily form [naturalform]’ of another, as the result of a process of misrecognition: In a certain sense, a man is in the same situation as a commodity. As he does not enter into the world in possession of a mirror . . . a man first sees and recognizes himself in another man. Peter only relates to himself as a man through his relation to another man, Paul, in whom he recognizes his likeness. With this, however, Paul also becomes from head to toe, in his physical form as Paul, the form of appearance of the species man for Peter.26

For Marx, then, ‘identity and alienation are strictly correlative’.27 The imaginary identification of objects that occurs in the act of exchange rests on a practical misrecognition of their qualitative differences – an ‘equation of the incompatibles’ – in which one object ‘sees’ its value in another. Objects, in other words, can be identified (and hence, exchanged) only by overlooking their physical non-identity, in a relation that mediates only by masking, or that masks in order to mediate. The exchange of commodities, therefore, involves a kind of practical suspension of belief – a ‘self-evident’ ‘absurdity’ that, according to Marx, is nevertheless adhered to in practice – an intentional fiction or falsehood which organises ‘real’ social practices.28 To borrow Genet’s expression, subjects, in the act of exchange, are ‘charmed’, but not ‘convinced’, by the value of objects, ‘attracted but not blinded’ – they behave, in other words, like prisoners of love.29 The notion of the subject implied in Marx’s analysis of the commodityform, then, is similar to what Genet refers to as the spontané simulateur ; not only as a figure whose alienation is a condition of its identity, but also as a subject whose constitutive lack of identity necessitates its own self-alienation. In Genet’s terms, the spontané simulateur is a subject defined by a ‘void’, a ‘hollowness’ that gives rise to a need for self-alienation, to a desire ‘more or less 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Marx 1979, p. 139, n. 1. Marx 1990, p. 144, n. 19. Žižek 1994. p. 25. Marx 1990, p. 169. Genet 2003, p. 217.

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conscious in every man, to create an image of himself ’, in order to mask a ‘reality that may consist in absence of being’. The spontané simulateur, then, is an impostor. Its inherent lack of identity, however, makes its imposture ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’. Its spontaneous production of false (self-)images is the basis of its ‘real’ identity. As in the exchange of commodities, moreover, it is precisely the lack of identity, constitutive of the spontané simulateur, that motivates its imaginary identification with others. Hence Genet describes his own relationship with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians not in terms of a kind of a convergence of revolutionary ideals (‘how can you make a comrade of an ideology?’),30 but, rather, as an identification with ‘impersonations’, false (self-)images that reveal a mutual lack of identity (and hence a common need for ‘impersonation’), irreducible differences mediated by an imaginary relation, subjects bound together by the reciprocal recognition of a shared ‘absence of being’, masked by spontaneous simulations of self: If the Black Movement was regarded as a sort of impersonation . . . and if I entered into it as simply and naively as I’ve described . . . then it was because I was recognized as a natural sham [spontané simulateur]. . . . [W ]eren’t [the Palestinians] too more or less openly recognizing me as a natural sham? Even if I risked annihilation by being present at actions of theirs which were only shams, wasn’t I already non-existent because of my own hollow non-life?31

As Genet points out, moreover, the imaginary relations, established by the simulateur, are practical in their effects. Or, more precisely, perhaps, they produce practical effects because they are explicitly imaginary, because they compel others, in practice, to recognise their imaginary character: Changing sex doesn’t consist merely in subjecting one’s body to a few surgical adjustments: it means teaching the whole world, forcing upon it, a change of syntax. Wherever you go people will address you as ‘Madame’ or ‘Mademoiselle’; they’ll stand aside to let you go first, the driver will hand you out of your cab . . .32

The transsexual does not produce immediate changes in other people’s behaviour, but, rather, forces a ‘change in [the] syntax’ of behaviour; the simulateur imposes an awareness of its imaginary character, by compelling others to establish a relationship in practice with an ‘impersonation’. The transsexual forces others to behave in a manner contrary to their conscious 30. Genet 2003, p. 307. 31. Genet 2003, p. 172. 32. Genet 2003, p. 173.

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awareness of ‘her’ fictional status; that is, to act ‘as if ’ the impersonation or performance were real. The transsexual compels others to impersonate, to ‘play along’, and hence to become themselves impersonations, and thereby to see themselves as spontaneous simulations. Like the exchange of commodities, then, relations between subjects in Prisoner of Love are based on a fiction which organises ‘real’ social practices, a ‘self-evident absurdity’ that mediates other and self on the basis of a practical misrecognition.

The demystification of identity and value But if identity and value for Marx arise out of similarly imaginary processes, forms of practical misrecognition, these processes do not, in Marx’s analysis, exist independently of each other. ‘Economic’ processes are not merely analogous to inter-subjective relations. Capital is not a comparison of identity and value, but rather, in a sense, a critique of the latter from the standpoint of the former; a critique of one type of social (and imaginary) relation from the perspective of another kind of social relation, one that is, in some sense, incompatible with the other; an analysis of a ‘social relation between things’ from the perspective of ‘relations between men’, in which the predominance of the former precludes the predominance of the latter, or, more precisely, in which one type of imaginary relation operates in lieu of the other (‘For the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality’).33 As Marx explains, moreover, the predominance of one relation (and hence its obviation of the other) also has the effect of ‘demystification’ – of ‘revealing’ or making apparent the fictional or imaginary character of the other relation (or, better perhaps, of making the other appear imaginary). Hence, according to Marx, the ‘inequality of men’ in Greek society prevented Aristotle from recognising the equality of things (their common value), as well as that of the labour which produces them;34 the predominance of a relation of ‘inequality between men’ (‘relations of personal dependence’) precluded a relation of ‘equality between things’, and hence the fetishism of commodities: for Aristotle, ‘[s]uch an equalisation [of unlike things] can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes” ’.35 33. Marx 1979, pp. 81–2. 34. Marx 1990, p. 152. 35. Marx 1979, p. 152. Emphasis added.

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What this implies, however, is that ‘demystification [Entgötterung]’ cannot be understood as a process of recognition (of the ‘real conditions’ and ‘real relations’), as a transition from a state of illusion (religious, legal, political, moral, etc.) to the state of objective awareness. Rather, for Marx, ‘demystification’ designates a process of displacement and transposition, in which one form of misrecognition is projected onto another, or rather, in which one form of misrecognition occurs in the place of another ; a kind of shift of the burden of illusion, from impersonation to an anthropomorphism in which the products of labour ‘come on stage [auftritt]’, and perform as actors in the place of men.36

Imaginary revolution and wealth In his reflections on corruption among the Palestinian leadership, Genet considers what might be described as the disorienting effects and consequences that result from the convergence and collision of these two types of imaginary relations, in which their opposing aims, motivations and objects become entangled, or, more specifically, in which a desire for (social) recognition – the effect of a ‘relation between men’ – is confused for a desire for value – the effect of a relation between things: It’s natural that . . . some of [the] leaders [of the fedayeen] should be corrupted through handling kilos of unused greenbacks. When a revolutionary movement meets with success, such things become proof that one was in on it from the start. It’s difficult to distinguish total devotion to a cause from a quest for position, ambition for money and power.37

For Genet, corruption is not an act that exposes the ‘real’ motives of the Palestinian leaders, a moment of unmasking in which the latter’s devotion or self-sacrifice is at last revealed for what it was ‘from the start’ – a cover for selfinterest or greed. Rather, Genet describes the effect of money as a kind of belated ‘change of syntax’: the misappropriation of money retroactively transforms or recodes the original aims and intentions of the revolutionary movement, making it ‘difficult to distinguish total devotion to a cause from a quest for position, ambition for money and power’. In that sense, money essentially creates the motive (greed) that it appears simply to expose; it determines what it pretends merely to define, simultaneously 36. See Derrida 1994, pp. 125–76. 37. Genet 2003, p. 139.

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producing the very lack or desire that it expresses, reveals or represents. In Marx’s terms, money, for Genet, is ‘not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed’.38 ‘Corruption’, then, entails a kind of transposition, the projection of a ‘particular form of the drive’ (greed)39 onto past actions and behaviours – actions that were motivated by different aims and intentions – such that ‘greed’ now appears to precede the very object that produced it, as always-already subtending the ‘original’ aims and intentions of the movement; intentions which seem, in retrospect, as so many ‘official statements’ or excuses. The new desire, then, comes to occupy the place of the ‘original’ while transforming the latter into a mask, an image or ‘pretense’ which disguises an ‘ambition for money and power’. What this suggests is that, for Genet, greed is not an originary drive, lurking in the interior of the subject, and waiting for an appropriate object through which finally to disclose its existence. Greed is not a primordial instinct, whose deferral, misrecognition or sublimation is the ‘cause’ of revolutionary ‘daydreams’ or ideals – ideals that can then be unmasked in order to arrive at the more primary human motivation, such that self-sacrifice can be reduced to self-interest, ‘total devotion to a cause’ to ‘ambition for money and power’, a desire for recognition (from the other) to a desire for objects. Nor is greed understood as a destructive individual impulse which must be harnessed or curbed by a social movement in order for it to accomplish its collective aims and objectives. Rather, Genet’s account would appear to conform to Marx’s description of greed as the ‘product of a definite social development, not natural [but] historical ’.40 The object of this historical drive, moreover, is no less the result of the deferral, misrecognition or sublimation of human desires than devotion to a political purpose. For Marx, money is an imaginary object (the ‘representation of wealth’) ‘which possesses all pleasures in potentiality’, but for which the ‘subject must sacrifice all relationships to the objects of particular needs, must abstain, in order to satisfy the need of greed for money as such’.41 Like the revolutionary ‘cause’, therefore, money is a social (and hence imaginary) object, in which the subject misrecognises its own desires. Revolutionary ideals, therefore, are not betrayed by human nature (or the inability to suppress it). Rather, for Genet, ‘corruption’ is the betrayal of 38. 39. 40. 41.

Marx 1973, p. 222. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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revolutionary ideals for other ideals, for other images, the ‘corruption’ of one image or ‘daydream’ by another: What made the fedayeen supermen was that they put the predicament of all before their own individual wishes. They would set out for victory or death. . . . It must have been then that they were beset by the temptation to betray, though I think they almost always resisted. . . . When I thought of the wealth accumulated by many of the Palestinian leaders it struck me that all that furniture, all those carpets and dresses were really a kind of glossy magazine, the kind with photographs of country houses and antique armchairs that people day-dream over. Is it treachery to flick through a magazine? . . . And what if you only do it a few times a year?42

For Genet, then, it is not the desire for wealth that undermines revolutions, but, rather, the desire for the image of wealth. Greed is as imaginary as the ‘total devotion’ it betrays (or rather that it ‘reveals’ as imaginary). The desire for revolution on the part of the Palestinian leaders (a revolution which is ‘in danger of becoming unreal through rhetoric, images on screen’, of becoming a ‘spectacle’ of itself that exists only ‘to produce more stories and pictures’ for newspapers and magazines)43 is betrayed by a desire, not for material possessions or things, but rather for their material image in the form of money and glossy photographs. The desire for one type of image (the image of objects) supplants another (the image of recognition or status). By exposing devotion as a disguise for greed, money, therefore, merely exposes a mask which conceals another mask; one ‘sham’ is unmasked by another. By altering the meaning or perception of the motives and drives which animate the revolution, money, Genet suggests, also transforms, retroactively, the ‘syntax’ of revolutionary struggle itself, transforming the character of the process or practice through which the latter’s object (or ‘cause’) is achieved. ‘Heroic deeds’, carried out in the name of the revolution, become a ‘pretense, a good or bad imitation that unobservant eyes [take] for the real thing’,44 while the ‘Name’ (status or recognition) that these deeds confer upon the agents who perform them (the martyrs and revolutionary heroes) is reduced to a ‘brand-image’.45

42. Genet 2003, pp. 313–14. 43. Genet 2003, p. 317. 44. Genet 2003, p. 171. 45. ‘Was the [Black] Panthers’ failure due to the fact that they adopted a “brand image” before they’d earned it in action?’ (Genet 2003, p. 97).

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Genet describes this process by means of a comparison between two types of ‘misappropriation’: the misappropriation of identity and the misappropriation of money. Is that worse than thinking yourself a fedayee when you’re only one by your own choice, wearing the appropriate costume and keffiyeh and even soul for no more than a few hours in a lifetime? Isn’t a Westerner amusing himself in that way much the same as a warrior taking his ease in a country mansion that to all intents and purposes exists only on glossy paper? To be a fedayee for a moment when you haven’t had to endure a fedayee’s woes is like wearing a forged medal. . . . What about those who misappropriate money in order to ward off the temptation to betray, while remaining in the revolution, with all its responsibilities and risks? Which is worse? The man who diverted money in order to divert the temptation to betray, or the one who chose wealth for its own sake?46

Genet, the ‘Westerner’, assumes the identity of the fedayee ‘by choice’, rather than ‘earning’ it through a necessary or unavoidable life-and-death struggle (‘victory or death’), a struggle which, according to Hegel, must be endured in order for the subject to ‘prove [Bewähren]’ its existence (to earn its recognition as an independent subject), both to itself and the other (‘[T]hey must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves.’);47 a struggle which, in the case of the fedayeen, is ‘designed to prove to both themselves and to the Jewish Zionists that even though they were only Palestinians they really were turning into creatures of flesh and of spirit . . .’48 But, to acquire recognition (from the Other) without ‘risking one’s life’ (without assuming the ‘responsibilities and risks’ that come with it), without ‘proving’ oneself, is, in Genet’s words, ‘like wearing a forged medal’ – an aim that is not the object of ‘total devotion’, but rather an object of ‘love’ (not the revolutionary ‘cause’ itself, but the ‘glare given off by all rebellions’),49 an object to which Genet is ‘attracted but not blinded’, ‘charmed’ but not ‘convinced’: I didn’t belong to [the revolution], never was in it, my body was in it; my spirit was in it. Everything was in it at one time or another; but never my total belief, never the whole of myself.50

But, as Genet points out, to identify in this manner is also to ‘betray’. To identify (or rather to misappropriate an identity) is to impersonate; not only to 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Genet 2003, pp. 313–14. Hegel 1977, pp. 111–19. Genet 2003, p. 321. Genet 2003, p. 86. Genet 2003, p. 105. Emphasis added.

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enjoy a recognition that one does not deserve, but also to make to a mockery of the identity that one assumes, to transform recognition into an image or an imitation of itself, a copy or a counterfeit which depreciates the value of the original. In the case of the corrupt Palestinian leaders, meanwhile, the misappropriation of money (money that has not been ‘earned’) has the effect of transforming an unavoidable life-and-death struggle into something like a freely-chosen enterprise or adventure. Money provides the leaders with the ‘choice’ of either ‘remaining in the revolution, with all its responsibilities and risks’, or pursuing ‘wealth for its own sake’ – of earning recognition or earning money. The lifeand-death struggle, then, is reduced to a form of ‘amusement’ or thrill-seeking (‘Revolution seen as a sort of speleology, or an expedition up an unclimbed face of the Jungfrau’),51 driven by other ‘reasons for rebellion’ which undermine the very ‘cause’ to which the revolutionaries still pretend to adhere: ‘a love of physical confrontation, together with an underlying desire for self-slaughter, for glorious death if victory was impossible’.52 The struggle, then, is no longer a struggle for recognition, but becomes, on the one hand, a struggle for the sake of struggle (a struggle for its own sake), and, on the other, a struggle for the very ‘negation’ of recognition itself: ‘[D]eath is the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the requisite significance of actual recognition’.53 As such, for the Palestinian leaders, the status or recognition that the struggle confers becomes another ‘forged medal’ or ‘brand-image’. Hence, for Arafat (in Genet’s representation at least), the aim of the revolution is the establishment of a Palestinian homeland, a country in which, were it to exist, he would probably never choose to live: [T]he revolution is in danger of becoming unreal through rhetoric, images on screens. . . . Our battles are in danger of turning into poses – they look heroic, but in fact they’re performed. But what if our play were interrupted, forgotten[?] . . . But aren’t you in the revolution to get your land back? I’ll probably never live there . . .54

51. 52. 53. 54.

Genet 2003, p. 313. Ibid. Hegel 1977, p. 112. Genet 2003, p. 317.

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Impersonation and counterfeit money One striking feature of Genet’s comparison, however, is its apparent lack of symmetry; if social recognition is depreciated by its misappropriation, one might expect for the misappropriation of funds to, in some way, devalue money, rather than diminishing the rôle or the position of the individual who misappropriates it. The parallel that Genet establishes, in other words, seems to imply a missing term, a counterpart to the ‘forged medal’ that would not merely be the image of money (photographs of expensive furniture and country-mansions); for while money and medals are both objects that, in Marx’s words, measure the ‘worth of individuals’,55 medals, unlike money (to use Marx’s description of precapitalist forms of material wealth) presuppose ‘an essential relation between the individual and the [object], in which the individual in one of his aspects objectifies himself in the thing, so that this possession of the thing appears at the same time as a certain development of his individuality’.56 Money, on the other hand, ‘does not at all presuppose an individual relation to its owner . . .’ (Hence, as Genet points out, the money, misappropriated by the Palestinian leaders, could just as well as have been deposited in Swiss bank-accounts instead of being converted into conspicuous country-mansions.) Money is the ‘possession of what lacks individuality, since this social [relation] exists at the same time as a sensuous, external object which can be mechanically seized, and lost in the same manner’.57 But, in that sense, money, unlike recognition, cannot be diminished by its misappropriation. Money that is ‘mechanically seized’, rather than ‘proven’ or ‘earned [Bewährt]’ through the practice of exchange, remains money.58 What seems to be missing, therefore, is something like a pecuniary equivalent to the practice of ‘impersonation’, an ‘impersonation’ that would devalue the object (rather than the subject) that it imitates; a monetary version of the simulated struggle, or the revolutionary thrill-seeking that Genet describes, a fictitious act of exchange in which an imaginary currency changes hands.

55. Marx 1973, pp. 230–1. 56. Marx 1973, pp. 221–2. 57. Marx 1973, p. 222. Also see Marx 1973, p. 210. 58. ‘The subjects in exchange exist for one another only through these equivalents, as of equal worth, and prove themselves to be such through the exchange of the objectivity in which the one exists for the other . . . as equals, at the same time also indifferent to one another; whatever other individual distinction there may be does not concern them; they are indifferent to all their other individual peculiarities . . . Although individual A feels a need for the commodity of individual B, he does not appropriate it by force, nor vice versa, but rather they recognize one another reciprocally as proprietors, as persons whose will penetrates their commodities.’ (Marx 1973, pp. 242–3.)

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Such an exchange, in fact, appears in another section of the book, one in which Genet recounts two stories which take place during the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, both of which involve encounters between the different parties engaged in the conflict. The first is an account of an Israeli spy who disguises himself as a Palestinian madman in order to infiltrate the Muslim area of West Beirut. The impersonation is a convincing one: He spoke Arabic with a Palestinian accent. . . . The kids who made fun of him and the parents who pitied him all called him the Madman. . . . He stank all over. . . . He’d sleep anywhere so long as it was out of the wind, wrapped up in a single blanket. He begged, and when he swore he said a lot of nasty things about the Israelis . . . Early on 15 September 1982, Israeli tanks entered West Beirut. . . . [T]he people of Beirut were surprised to see the Madman in the leading tank.59

In the second story, a group of Lebanese truck-drivers discover a cache of counterfeit dollars in an underground-workshop built by the Palestinians, money which the drivers use to bribe Israeli soldiers to allow them to cross the border into Lebanon: At the time the [Israeli] military patrols wouldn’t let Lebanese trucks through to the north – to Beirut, for example. . . . And so the fun began. A Lebanese truck driver would show the soldier on duty a bundle of dollars, the soldier would say a firm ‘no’, the driver doubled the bundle . . . the soldier snatched the dollars and pocketed them, then turned his back so as not to see the truck drive off. So thousands of forged dollars crossed the frontier, to the delight of the soldiers, the lorry drivers, and the people of Beirut. . . . The imitation dollars went into the real pockets of real Israeli soldiers, who wound up either as prosperous citizens or in prison . . . The enemy allowed a certain amount of collusion. It wasn’t anything positive. It was a lull in which each party thought it had got the better of the other.60

The two stories are not simply different examples of ‘impersonation’. While the first is an account of an impersonation – in which a relation is established between the different parties in the conflict on the basis of a misrecognition (an imaginary relation with practical effects), in the second, forgery essentially ‘diverts’ the need for impersonation; a fictitious act of exchange takes place instead of a struggle for recognition, objects ‘impersonate’ in the place of people.

59. Genet 2003, p. 167. 60. Genet 2003, p. 170.

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The transaction between the truck-drivers and soldiers is conducted without a mutual acknowledgement of identity (the soldier ‘turned his back so as not to see the truck drive off ’). The soldiers ‘see’ (or rather, misperceive) the money while ignoring the (national) identity of the drivers. A misrecognition of things (the counterfeit money) occurs instead of a misrecognition of persons (as in the case of the Israeli spy). Rather than a confrontation between (political) subjects, a life-and-death struggle through which the recognition of a sovereign-territorial boundary is imposed, what occurs instead is a transaction that is carried out largely in silence (‘A Lebanese truck driver would show the soldier on duty a bundle of dollars . . .’), in which objects speak on behalf of their owners, an imaginary dialogue that Marx records in Capital: If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values.61

In this ‘natural intercourse’ between objects, money ‘earns’ its recognition as ‘the lord and god of the world of commodities’,62 ‘proving’ its exalted position among the products of labour by becoming their universal equivalent; or, in the case of the counterfeit money, by becoming the image of, and thereby commanding, the services (and loyalty) of the Israeli soldiers. An imaginary struggle between objects mediates and obviates a struggle between subjects, a relation between things is established in lieu of a ‘relation between men’. Unlike the earlier account of corruption (among the Palestinian leaders), moreover, the exchange between the drivers and the soldiers not only uncovers the latter’s devotion as a pretence or a disguise (unmasked by their collusion with the enemy), it also reveals the imaginary character of the objects that mediate the exchange (the counterfeit dollars), or, rather, the imaginary character of the object which the latter impersonates (‘real’ money). An anthropomorphism, which exposes an act of impersonation, is itself exposed by a forgery. What this forgery discloses, however, is not money as a ‘mask’ for productive labour (labour as the ‘secret identity’ of money), since the latter, in this case, is simply a mask for another mask: an impersonation of ‘honest work’ – forgery and treason – activities that are not only ‘unproductive’ (that is, do not produce ‘value’), but which, in fact, diminish value through the circulation of fake 61. Marx 1990, pp. 176–7. 62. Marx 1973, p. 222.

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e ng ha c Ex

Money

le gg u r St “Love”

Recognition

N

“Corruption” (Diverting money to divert betrayal)

le gg u t -s on N

“Forged Medal”

Devotion

ge an h xc -e on

Counterfeit Money

Figure 1

coin: not the ‘exchange of labour for labour’, but an exchange of non-labour for non-labour.63 The forgery, then, does not reveal a content (labour), disguised beneath a form (money, value) (the ‘discovery’ of which, as Marx explains, ‘by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour’),64 but, instead, foregrounds the imaginary character of the process that produces the disguise, a practice through which incompatible objects and activities are equated, ‘proven’ to be equal, and which produces ‘self-evident’ ‘absurdities’ like the identification of counterfeitmoney and collusion, impersonation and forgery. If the exchange of a forgery for an act of collusion or treason does not, in Genet’s words, represent ‘anything positive’, in terms of a political solution to the situation of the expropriated and the oppressed, neither does it condemn the inevitable failure of revolutionary ideals. Rather, such imaginary performances, for Genet (in which the misrecognitions underlying political struggle and economic exchange are ‘diverted’ by being themselves misrecognised), seem to indicate the possibility of different kind of political practice of the dispossessed – a politics of ‘corruption’ and ‘love’ that would neither be ‘proven’ in the political struggles that constitute the identity of a nation or a people, nor ‘betrayed’ by the appropriation of money which has not been ‘earned’ through the equal exchange of commodities. Such a practice, perhaps, would be one in which dispossession would figure neither as a presupposition for the emergence of a demystified political subject, nor as a 63. See Marx 1990, p. 197. 64. Marx 1990, p. 167.

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condition for the mystification of the commodity-form. In contrast to the aims and objectives of a revolutionary movement, its possibility would lie not in a ‘future no less absent than the present’, but rather in the ‘quiet periods’ which give rise to the revolutionary ‘day-dreams’ of the dispossessed – ‘lulls’ in the ‘game of revolution’ and commodity-exchange in which the objects of greed and devotion alike are ‘betrayed’ by their misrecognition. For Genet, such practices, finally, seem to offer the image of another kind of political community, based neither on a relationship between men nor a social relation between things – a community of ‘collusion’, composed of impersonations and forgeries, prisoners of love, daydreaming of an imaginary revolution and wealth.

References Balibar, Étienne 1994, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, translated by James Swenson, London: Routledge. —— 1995 [1993], The Philosophy of Marx, translated by Chris Turner, London: Verso Books. Derrida, Jacques 1994 [1993], Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge. Genet, Jean 2003 [1986], Prisoner of Love, translated by Barbara Bray, New York: New York Review of Books. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1977 [1807], Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, George 1990, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and NineteenthCentury Political Economy, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McLellan, David (ed.) 1977, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, First Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meikle, Scott 1995, Aristotle’s Economic Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl 1973 [1939/53], Grundrisse, edited and translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— 1979 [1867], Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume 1, edited by Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York: International Publishers. —— 1981 [1894], Capital, Volume 3, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— 1990 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Žižek, Slavoj 1993, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. —— 1994, ‘How Marx Invented the Symptom’, in Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, London: Verso Books.

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brill.nl/hima

Moral Dilemmas and Broken Promises: A Historical-Philosophical Overview of the Nonviolent Movement Domenico Losurdo University of Urbino (Italy) [email protected]

Abstract Great historical crises oblige us to choose not between violence and nonviolence, but between two different forms of violence. Nonviolent movements are no exception to this rule. In the US, with the outbreak of the War of Secession, the Christian-nonviolent movement was obliged to choose between the violence of the Union-army (which ultimately imposed on the South an abolitionist revolution from above) and the violence of slavery. With the outbreak of World-War One, Lenin chose revolution, while, in India, Gandhi became the ‘recruiting agentin-chief ’ for the British army. At that moment, he struggled not for the general emancipation of colonial peoples, but only for the co-optation of the Indian people under the ruling races, and this co-optation was to be gained on the battlefield. While in the past, in spite of their mistakes and oscillations, the protagonists of nonviolence (Gandhi, Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, etc.) were an integral part of the anticolonialist movement, today nonviolence is the watchword of imperialism, which tries to discredit as violent its enemies and challengers. Keywords anticolonialism, co-optation, emancipation, imperialism, nonviolence, violence

1. War, revolution and the ‘seriousness of the negative’1 A festive atmosphere marked the outbreak of the First World-War, especially in Germany. Photos from the time show young people hurrying to enlist with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for an erotic encounter. The appeal of this ‘great and wonderful war’, to use Max Weber’s definition, was also felt by leading intellectuals and broad sections of the population. One highprofile witness, Stefan Zweig, described the spiritual climate in Vienna on the 1. This essay contains some of the themes and reflections subsequently collected and developed in my book, La non-violenza. Una storia fuori dal mito (Losurdo 2010). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X550622

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days immediately after the outbreak of war as follows: ‘each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank and language were swamped at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity.’2 As the country had to face an arduous challenge, it became necessary to unite the people in one voice, creating a fusion of existences and consciences that had never previously been attempted. Soldiers everywhere hastened to the front willing to sacrifice their lives, but, in Germany, more than in any other country, the dominant philosophy and culture celebrated ordeal-by-combat and death-defying acts as spiritual exercises with the power to release the individual from the banality and vulgarity of everyday existence. While the War was still in its infancy, and before Italy became involved, Benedetto Croce expected it to lead to ‘a regeneration of present social life’. However, when everyone realised that what was really awaiting them in the trenches was mud, strict regimentation and death, the harrowing massexperience that followed put paid to this spiritual climate. It is true that, on the other side of the Atlantic, immediately after the end of hostilities, Herbert Hoover, an important representative of the American government and future president, said that the recently terminated conflict had served to carry out the ‘purification of men’, but this was a late and largely contrived revival of an idea that was, by now, a distant echo in the conscience of men.3 Not even the initial triumphal victories of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg twenty years later managed to revive the same level of enthusiasm as in July–August 1914. To the satisfaction of postmodernists, committed to deriding the concept of progress, the frequently tragic nature of major historical experiences means that they leave deep-set marks and teach lessons learnt to varying degrees. We need to insist on the highly tortuous nature of historical processes, but, in the final analysis, use of the term ‘progress’ implies recognising both man’s ability to learn and the irreversibility of historical time, the fact that it is impossible to return to a time predating the historical experiences which marked entire generations of men. The spellbound atmosphere of July–August 1914 will never be repeated, as disenchantment intervened and left its mark. War can no longer be welcomed as a celebration or spiritual exercise, or as a necessary positive step in the shaping and development of men. To borrow an expression from Hegel, the experience of the ‘seriousness of the negative’4 can no longer be erased. 2. Zweig 1943, p. 173. 3. For Germany, see Losurdo 1991, Chapter 1; for Croce and Hoover, see Losurdo 1997, Chapter 2, Section 3. 4. Hegel 1969–79, p. 24.

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The same can be said for the Russian Revolution. At the time, the fall of tsarism and the February-Revolution were heralded as a form of resurrection, which Christian circles and influential sectors of Russian society expected to lead to total regeneration. They foresaw the emergence of a closely unified community, the breakdown of the division between rich and poor, and even an end to theft, lies, gambling, blasphemy and drunkenness. The same phenomenon repeated itself a few months later. ‘This is the very realisation of the fourth psalm of the Sunday vespers, and the Magnificat: the powerful cast from their throne and the poor man lifted from his hovel’ is how one fervent French-Christian observer (Pierre Pascal) welcomed the October-Revolution, while, outside Russia, a young Ernst Bloch predicted the collapse of ‘merchant morals that praise the evilest aspects of human nature’, and the ‘transformation of power into love’.5 The collapse of an old régime that had become universally hated, and the end of a period of bloodshed that had become intolerable to everybody in October awakened a naïve form of enthusiasm. However, this could not withstand the emergence of contradictions and bloody conflicts within the new order. Here, too, the experience of the ‘seriousness of the negative’ left an indelible mark. The beginning of the twentieth century was characterised by wars and revolutions that all promised to achieve a state of perpetual peace by implementing their different methods. In other words, violence was used to guarantee the eradication of the scourge of violence once and for all. Although marred by massacres, the joint expedition by the major powers to repress the Boxer-Rebellion in China in 1900 was celebrated by the French General Frey as the materialisation of the ‘dream of idealist politicians – a United States of the civilised world ’, the advent of a world no longer delineated by national boundaries and characterised by conflict between states.6 In reality, although the horrors of the First World-War were still fresh in the collective mind fourteen years later, this was not the reason why the influence of the ideology we have just outlined declined. In Italy, Gaetano Salvemini used the following idea to petition Italy to enter the recently launched war: ‘it is necessary that this war kill war’. It was not acceptable to desert ‘the war for peace’, to borrow the expression used as the title of the article cited here.7 This was the same ideology of entente that would later be consecrated by Wilson for

5. See Losurdo 2008, pp. 56–7, 67. 6. Cited in Lenin 1955–70c, p. 684. 7. ‘La guerra per la pace’, originally published in L’Unità, 28 August 1914. See Salvemini 1963, p. 361.

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US-intervention (and which is still proclaimed by the White House in a slightly modified form). Lenin rejected such rallying cries, and had no trouble showing how they clashed with reality to a formidable extent. However, he did advocate revolution against war and also promised to achieve a state of perpetual peace, albeit at the end of a different process starting with the global removal of the socio-political system in which the phenomenon of war had become deeply rooted. When analysing the tragedies that characterised the twentieth century and the promises that both wars and revolutions failed to deliver, the words of Karl Valentin, cabaret-artist and friend of Brecht, spring to mind: ‘Even the future was better in the past’.8 The future no longer seems radiant enough to be able to justify the violence (whether in the form of war or revolution) required to achieve it. We should stress that we are not witnessing the collapse of ‘grand narratives’. Although the way that postmodernists challenge the idea of progress is somewhat contradictory, actual progress is really no more than a myth. An infuriating present-day narrative states that perpetual peace can be achieved by spreading democracy, which destroys the foundations of war once and for all on a global scale, even if this is to be accomplished through military strength. It is in the name of such an improbable prospect that devastatingly bloody ‘international police-operations’ are launched. However, although these wars are promoted and transfigured by a huge, sophisticated multimedia-network, they are no longer able to command the massenthusiasm of the past. There is one further aspect to consider. The disappointment caused by the development of events in the twentieth century has led to a frame of mind and outlook which could be summarised as follows: instead of postponing the practice of nonviolence to a somewhat problematic socio-political future, would it not be better to start practising it on an individual basis in the present? It is easy to understand this ‘conversion’, but it is unfortunate that it has not been preceded by a serious historical overview. We know all about the blood and tears that have tarnished plans to transform the world through war or revolution, implemented with a range of different methods and results, but what do we know about the difficulties, defeats and full-blown tragedies experienced by the movement inspired by the ideal of nonviolence?

8. In Magris 2007, p. xii.

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2. ‘Nonviolence’ and fluctuations in the definition of violence: the American Peace Society Groups embodying this predilection first emerged in the United States in 1815, perhaps on the wave of tiredness caused by the recently finished war with Great Britain or, more generally, by the long cycle of wars resulting from the conflict between the old régime and revolutionary-Napoleonic France. These groups united in 1828 to found the American Peace Society and the even more radical New England Non-Resistance Society. The main manifesto of this pacifist-Christian movement was expounded in a book, War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ, published some years before by David L. Dodge. The position assumed was clear: ‘The spirit of martyrdom is the true spirit of Christianity’ and any act that contradicted the Gospels should be considered ‘criminal’, therefore including any form of violence.9 The institution of slavery, which played a fundamental rôle in Southern states, was also condemned on the same grounds as the expression of violence and violent oppression by man against man.10 This stance is hardly surprising, as slavery had long been justified on the basis of the right of war that the victor exerted over the defeated party (Grotius was especially relevant in this respect). In opposition, writers such as Rousseau spoke out against slavery precisely because they saw it as the continuation of the state of war. On the basis of these premises, the pacifist movement went hand-in-hand with abolitionist agitation for some time in the USA. The indissoluble bond between the two causes was cemented by the war that the United States had waged against Mexico shortly before the mid-nineteenth century; after conquering Texas and annexing it to the North-American Republic, the victors reintroduced slavery, which had been abolished during the War of Independence against Spain. This was a moment of glory for the American Peace Society, as events seemed to bear out their political manifesto and ideology in full. However, the first symptoms of crisis appeared just a few years later, when a stance had to be adopted on the revolution that had spread across Europe in 1848. With regard to France, the upheaval led to the definitive abolition of slavery in the colonies and the advent of a republic in the cities, committed to relaunching the hopes and promises of perpetual peace dating back to the French Revolution in 1789. However, unlike on the occasion of the war between the USA and Mexico, there was a parting of the ways between 9. Ziegler 1992, pp. 3, 21, 30–1. 10. Ziegler 1992, p. 48.

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pacifist and abolitionist forms of commitment, as a violent revolution was required to sanction the abolition of slavery and raise the peace-flag. Unsettled by this new situation, the American nonviolence-movement resorted to subterfuge. This consisted of welcoming the results without assuming a position on the revolution that had produced them. The reasoning was that the American Peace Society had been founded in the first place to avert wars between states, while the wave of disorder raging in Europe took the form of a series of civil wars.11 Dismissed to the best of their abilities in 1848, these political and moral dilemmas reappeared in more acute form nine years later. After the Sepoys, the colonial troops of the British Empire in India, had rebelled, the government in London responded with repressive measures that were no less fierce, or perhaps even fiercer, than the original rebellion. However, the dominant ideology focused exclusively on denouncing the ‘horrors’ of the rebels. Tocqueville provided a good example of this by feeling that a return to ‘barbarity’ in India ‘would be disastrous for the future of civilisation and for the progress of humanity’. The leading country in the West at the time was therefore called upon to act forcefully to re-establish public order in the colony: ‘in our day almost nothing is impossible for the English nation, if it employs all its resources and all its will’.12 Another leading exponent of the liberal tradition, Thomas B. Macaulay, went even further: The cruelties of the Sepoy natives have inflamed the nation to a degree unprecedented within my memory. . . . There is one terrible cry for revenge. . . . The almost universal feeling is that not a single Sepoy within the walls of Delhi should be spared; and I own that is a feeling with which I cannot help sympathising.13

Marx’s reaction to the ‘catastrophe’ was quite different. While recognising that the rebels were responsible for some horrendous acts, he derided the one-sided moral indignation that proponents of colonialism and superior western civilisation indulged in: ‘However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India’. The English were seen to continue to exercise a remorseless ‘power of life and death’, and often boasted of the foul deeds they were responsible for in their letters: ‘Not a day passes but we string up from ten to fifteen of them [non-combatants]’ or ‘we hold court-martials on horseback, 11. Ziegler 1992, pp. 112–26. 12. Letters to Henry Reeve, 2 August 1857 and 30 January 1858, in Tocqueville 1954, pp. 230, 254. 13. See Losurdo 2005, Chapter 10, Section 3.

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and every nigger we meet with we either string up or shoot’. The ‘fun’ that all this procured is quite clear. On the other hand though – as admitted in a letter published in The Times – ‘the European troops have become fiends when opposed to natives’.14 What position did the American Peace Society adopt? The majority reasoned along these lines: even if British rule in India had illegitimate origins, the governors were nevertheless obliged to maintain order and ensure compliance with it. In other words, the rebels were in the wrong for resorting to violence, for not obeying the laws in force and, in the final analysis, for being outlaws and criminals. It was therefore not a question of war, but, rather, a clash between common delinquency and the forces of law-and-order. Consequently, lending support to the latter did not jeopardise the pacifist cause or the cause of a movement founded with the aim of fighting a specified form of war, namely armed conflict between countries. This may seem like a repeat of the stance adopted in 1848, and there was indeed an element of continuity in the refusal to include civil and colonial wars in the definition of war. At the same time, it is also important to highlight a strong element of discontinuity. While the revolutionary movement had been seen in a favourable light nine years previously, although support had been somewhat reticent, in 1857 there was open declared support for the forces of repression, responsible for a form of violence that, at least in keeping with Marx’s critique, was perhaps even more ferocious and less justifiable. Not surprisingly, the result was a painful split; the sister-organisation set up in England, the London Peace Society, did not identify with the American Peace Society’s stance. In disassociating themselves, the term ‘war’ was used quite explicitly to describe the conflict in India, therefore denouncing the violence committed by the English government too.15 This was certainly a more balanced position, yet although their position of impartiality and neutrality also condemned certain elements of colonial rule (the brutality of repression) together with the rebellion, colonial rule itself was still not included in the category of violence. The analysis of this chapter in the history of the nonviolent movement is extremely enlightening: as proclamation of the unconditional ethic of love made it difficult to assume a position in the series of conflicts that occurred, those guided by the general principle of nonviolence tended to focus their criticism on the violent rebellion of the oppressed.

14. Marx and Engels 1955–89d, pp. 285–7. 15. Ziegler 1992, pp. 127–8.

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3. ‘Nonviolence’ and the intensification and increase in violence: the American Civil War This first crisis in the pacifist movement that developed on both sides of the Atlantic was followed by another, far more serious quandary. The Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the USA in 1850, allowing Southern masters to recover slaves who had taken refuge in the North. It meant that even free black people risked being forced into slavery if they were accused of being fugitive-slaves. When the forces of law-and-order attempted to implement this law, they clashed with a resistance-movement that included the abolitionists, resulting in fairly serious riots where blood was sometimes shed. The dilemma faced by the American Peace Society was as follows: how far can nonviolence go against a law which may be reprehensible but was nevertheless enacted by a legitimate authority, and how much support can be given to black slaves trying to escape slavery by taking refuge in Canada? In other words, what position should be adopted on the matter of a civil war that started off latent but became evident just a few years afterwards in Kansas? This time the clash between partisans and opponents of the institution of slavery did not stop halfway, and both parties resorted to violence. Adherence to the principle of nonviolence started to waver even among followers of the American Peace Society. The situation came to a head with the outbreak of the American Civil War. Initially, some members of the pacifist movement petitioned the Union to abstain from resorting to arms and tolerate the ‘peaceful’ secession of the slave-states (their critique of violence focused more on the war than on the institution of slavery). However, after the Battle of Fort Sumter, when the Confederation started hostilities by launching a military attack and conquering the Union-emplacements positioned in the area, the American Peace Society largely restored its unity by firmly siding with Lincoln. Even in this case, a movement dedicated to spreading the cause of nonviolence justified its choice by resorting to a familiar reasoning strategy: the conflict was not seen as war, but as rightfully repressing a criminal rebellion. Rather than soldiers in the true sense of the word, the soldiers of the Union were viewed as policemen acting to serve public order. The irony of this perspective is that it was a ‘police-operation’ on a scale never seen before, with the participation of hundreds of thousands of men and battles that raged on for years over a huge area of the country and involved an enormous amount of bloodshed. We can now add that, although it was not deemed worthy of war-status, it was nevertheless a conflict that produced more American victims than the two world-wars put together.

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It is, however, perhaps better to focus on another paradox. The worry about loyalty to the principle of nonviolence prompted the majority of members of the American Peace Society to see the expedition against the South merely as an attempt to re-establish public order. Therefore, if the Union-soldiers were just policemen, it followed that the Confederate soldiers were common delinquents who had to be punished by the justice-system even after the armed conflict had finished. It thus came to pass that the pacifist movement rejected any measure of clemency towards the defeated party, especially towards the President of the Confederation. Nonviolence had somehow been turned around, transformed into an even worse, extended form of violence. This dialectic sometimes assumed greatly disturbing proportions. Let us return to the dilemmas that emerged on the eve and at the start of the American Civil War. They were a cause of particular torment to Charles Stearns, one of the most fascinating and uncompromising figures in the nonviolent-abolitionist movement. He refused to join the militia in 1840, and even refused to pay the fine imposed on him for evading his duty, thereby ending up in prison. Unlike other exponents of the movement who were more flexible or pragmatic, Stearns considered it to be unacceptable, not only to resort to violence in the strict sense of the word, but also to use any kind of ‘non-injurious physical force’; he countered the legitimation of war in the Old Testament with the ethic of loving your enemies in the New Testament. However, a profound dilemma emerged in 1856, after the enactment of the law on runaway-slaves, and above all after the clashes in Kansas: could the nonviolence-followers look on without reacting to the expansion of slavery, the capture of runaway-slaves or the enslavement of free black people, not to mention the wounding and death of those who tried to oppose all of this? Stearns decided to pass the point-of-no-return, even though he felt that he had not done so. He maintained that a violent response to violence had become inevitable and was indeed already underway, and that, in any case, the Union’s target consisted of totally abhorrent individuals: in the final analysis, they ‘are not men but wild beasts’, who need to be confronted and eliminated in the same way as ‘lions and tigers’.16 As we can see, the worry regarding loyalty to the principle of nonviolence against human beings was resolved by dehumanising the enemy. It may have preserved the formal coherence of the cause, but did nothing to reduce the amount of violence. Stearns did not seem even remotely aware that similar concepts to the ones he used were employed in the genocide of Native Americans. 16. In Ziegler 1992, pp. 116–17.

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However, not everyone in the American Peace Society agreed. Others more frankly acknowledged the inevitability of the use of violence under those circumstances, along with the violation of the general principle of nonviolence. As the situation that had developed was exceptional, a sharp contradiction emerged between two equally hard-and-fast and similarly indispensable principles, one of which had to be chosen. This reasoning was taken up by a woman from a Quaker-background, Angelina Grimke, who took a stand on the law regarding runaway-slaves and the resulting intense conflict by observing: Although the shedding of human blood is utterly abhorrent to my mind . . . yet the tame surrender of a helpless victim up to the fate of the slave is far more abhorrent. . . . In this case, it seems as though we are compelled to choose between two evils, and all that we can do is take the least, and baptize liberty in blood, if it must be so. . . . I now entirely despair of the triumph of Justice and Humanity without the shedding of blood. A temporary war is an incomparably less evil than permanent slavery.17

The difficulties and dilemmas that the profession of nonviolent faith always encounters as soon as it has to face a major historical crisis have come to the fore once again. Here, however, it might be better seen as a paradox: inasmuch as it rejected all compromises and refused to rethink its principles, the nonviolent movement eventually criminalised and even dehumanised the figure of the enemy, with the result that it gave even more impetus to violence and, moreover, a form of violence bereft of rules.

4. Gandhi: between nonviolence and imperial loyalty Current supporters of nonviolence take their inspiration from Gandhi more than from anyone else, so it is worth moving our focus on to him. During his life, the leader of the Indian independence-movement had to contend with three main wars. The first of these was the Boer War from 1899 to 1902, which saw troops from the British Empire clash with the Boers, Dutch settlers in South Africa. Although their rôle was limited to rescuing and transporting wounded English soldiers, Gandhi and his Indian supporters took part in the conflict as volunteers and were even awarded military decorations. Starting from the premise that English rule was beneficial on the whole, Gandhi declared: ‘Our ordinary duty as subjects, therefore, is not to enter into the merits of the war, but, when war has actually broken out, to 17. In Ziegler 1992, p. 134.

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render such assistance as we possible can’. He felt that ‘inaction’ by the Indians would have been ‘criminal’ and would have distanced the prospect of achieving independence with the blessing of the British government.18 It should be added that although Gandhi’s rôle was limited to supporting the British army without ever directly taking up arms, at the same time he also proudly noted that ‘a large and splendid Corps composed of nearly eleven hundred Indians left Durban for the front’, in order to help the British army, which at least in the initial stages of the War suffered ‘reverse after reverse’.19 It is difficult to consider such an attitude as a model of nonviolence! Indeed, it was so far removed from it that Gandhi expressed admiration, not only for the military virtues of the English, who ‘were fighting valiantly on the battlefield’, but also for those of the enemy: ‘Every Boer is a good fighter’ and ‘they do not need elaborate drilling, for fighting is a characteristic of the whole nation’. Similarly, when they see their liberty threatened they are ready to ‘fight as one man’ ‘valiantly’. The women were also described as ‘brave’, and demonstrated that they ‘were not afraid of widowhood and refused to waste a thought upon the future’.20 Therefore, instead of being condemned for what it was, as soon as violence became a synonym for bravery and heroism, it was valued independently from the war-objectives pursued (even though it was violence committed or supported by an entire population, including the women). It is a short step from this to Kriegsideologie, the ideology of war adopted by Germany during the First World-War . . . Ignored by Gandhi, the terrible onslaught of violence that characterised the policies of both the Boers and the English in different ways was instead highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg. She saw the former as representatives of ‘out-dated slavery on a petty scale’,21 engaged in deporting, enslaving and even killing the native population, while the latter posed as protectors of the natives, but did not hesitate to sacrifice them in their alliance with the Boers after achieving their real goals of accumulating capital and expanding the British Empire. Therefore, a comparison between Gandhi (a champion of nonviolence) and Luxemburg (who did not hesitate to justify revolutionary violence) produces an unexpected result: the former legitimised war-violence on both sides, or at best viewed it indulgently, while the latter condemned it virulently and denounced it as the continuation of a policy that was synonymous with horrible violence long before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War.

18. 19. 20. 21.

‘Satyagraha in South Africa’ (1928), in Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 62–3. Gandhi 1969–2001c, pp. 65, 67. Gandhi 1969–2001c, pp. 17–18. Luxemburg 2003, p. 393.

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When the First World-War broke out some years later, Gandhi undertook to recruit five hundred-thousand men for the British army and went about it with such fervour that he wrote to the Viceroy’s private secretary: ‘I have an idea that, if I became your recruiting agent-in-chief, I might rain men on you’.22 Similarly, when addressing fellow countrymen who were reluctant to go off to fight and die to serve the interests of the occupying colonial power, he said: ‘We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms’. Otherwise, he said, ‘if the empire perishes, with it would perish our cherished hopes’.23 Far from adhering to policies of nonviolence, here Gandhi encouraged completely unsuspecting country-folk to participate in a conflict taking place thousands of kilometres away, which was seen as a senseless massacre by the diverse supporters of the anti-military revolutionary movement that he was assembling. The champion of nonviolence thereby made a major contribution to the strengthening and consolidation of the United Kingdom’s warmachine: ‘in the autumn of 1914, around a third of British forces in France were from India’, and, by the end of the War, a million Indians had fought after completing a long journey. Thanks also to Gandhi’s preaching, these soldiers ‘were not reluctant conscripts; they were in fact all volunteers, and enthusiastic volunteers at that’. In short, out of the three multi-ethnic armies deployed in the War by Russia, the Hapsburg Empire and Britain, only the latter managed to maintain basic discipline until the carnage came to an end.24

5. War as a test of ‘manhood’, or carnage: Gandhi and the Bolsheviks During the course of both the Anglo-Boer War and World-War One, Gandhi encouraged people to contribute to the war-effort by adopting a rhetoric which needs to be analysed. He took a hard line against those who were reluctant to line up against the Boers in case they eventually came out victorious, maintaining that such considerations were simply a sign of ‘effeminacy’.25 The same tough approach was adopted during the First WorldWar towards compatriots who expressed doubts over the sense in taking part in a massacre carried out by a movement that advocated nonviolence: ‘there can be no friendship between the brave and the effeminate’, while those who 22. 23. 24. 25.

Letter to J.L. Maffey, 30 April 1918, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, p. 12. ‘Appeal for Enlistment’, 22 June 1918, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 83–4. Ferguson 2004, pp. 255–6. ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, in Gandhi 1969–2001c, p. 63.

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were ‘utterly unmanly’ were considered a breed apart. He felt it was necessary to obtain ‘the ability in the fullest measure to strike’26 before renouncing it. By taking part in the large-scale war – continued Gandhi – ‘we help the Empire’ and at the same time, ‘learn to defend India and to a certain extent, regain our lost manhood’.27 The aim was therefore to shake off the ‘reproach of effeminacy’ once and for all. It was felt that this result could not be achieved unless the spirit of sacrifice inspired the whole community as well as the combatants: ‘To sacrifice sons in the war, ought to be a cause not of pain but of pleasure’. Women were also called to adhere to the vision as follows: ‘they should not be alarmed by this appeal but should welcome it’. When thinking of their sons, they should never lose sight of one essential point: ‘If the recruits die on the battle-field they will make themselves, their village and their country immortal’, and their example would be followed straightaway afterwards by other recruits.28 There is some similarity between this appeal to parents to sacrifice their sons and the previously-seen praise for Boer women who ‘were not afraid of widowhood’, which brings us back to the matter of ambiguous motives in the ideology of war in the West. Tucholsky presented them as follows in 1927: ‘The evangelical pastors were flanked in the war by another human species that never tires of sucking blood: a certain social class, a certain type of German woman’. While the massacre assumed increasingly terrible proportions, she sacrificed ‘sons and husbands’ and complained that there were not ‘enough [of them] to sacrifice’.29 The condemnation of violence on principle can only be seen with regard to the relationship between the Indian people and the British Empire. Indian peasants became conscious of this duplicitous attitude to some extent – as the Gandhi-biography that I am referring to here reveals – and a few days after being ‘urged to be nonviolent even against the most brutal British officers’, they mutinied when they heard the appeal to enlist in the British army.30 This made no impression on Gandhi. He recognised that he was ‘recruiting mad’, but did not back down at all: ‘I do nothing else, think of nothing else, talk of nothing else and therefore feel ill-fitted to discharge any presidential function, save one on recruiting’.31

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Letter to S.K. Rudra, 29 July 1918, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, p. 159. ‘Appeal for Enlistment’, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 85–6. Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 86–7. Tucholsky 1985, p. 267. Chadha 1997, p. 230. Letter to B.G. Horniman, 12 August 1918, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, p. 190.

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Although Gandhi welcomed the First World-War as a test of virility and an essential part of development and growth for both the individual and the entire population, it was condemned and branded with language more pungent than ever by a wide variety of supporters of the revolutionary movement inspired by Marxism and communism. To give just a few examples, Stalin spoke of ‘wholesale slaughter of the man-power of the nations’, Bukharin of ‘an enormous death-dealing machine’, and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht of ‘genocide’. For a final consideration, we will quote Trotsky, who felt that ‘the work of Cain of the “patriotic” press’ of the two opposing sides was ‘irrefutable proof of the moral decadence of bourgeois society’. Indeed, the concept of ‘moral decadence’ could not be ignored, when humanity was seen to be sinking back into ‘blind, shameless barbarism’. The result was the spread of a ‘contest of bloodthirsty madness’ to use the most advanced technology for war-related purposes. It was ‘scientific barbarism’ that used humanity’s great discoveries ‘only to destroy the foundations of civilised social life and annihilate mankind’. All the good things that had produced civilisation descended into bloodshed and muddy trenches: ‘health, comfort, hygiene, familiar everyday relations, friendly contact, professional duties and in the final analysis the seemingly indestructible rules of morality’. For some time, soldiers on the two opposing sides tried to counter all this by practising fraternisation, which was warmly received by both Lenin and Stalin, with the latter in particular claiming that it was ‘mass-fraternization on the battle-fronts’ and the ‘new ties of fraternity among the peoples’ that put an end to the war and carnage.32 It seems that Gandhi was not concerned with the idea of fraternisation, which, in any case, would have clashed with his commitment to recruit soldiers and provide cannon-fodder for the British government.

6. An expansion of the concept of violence and loss of direction Instead of stopping Gandhi from actively and effectively promoting participation in a terrible war, the ideal of nonviolence became an extreme and extended form of the concept of violence in his hands. This is what emerged from a well-known piece of writing at the end of 1909, which pointed an accusing finger at ‘cursed modern civilization’ or ‘wretched modern civilization’, a ravenous ‘tiger’ that could not stop devouring men, a

32. On ‘fraternisation’, see Lenin 1955–70b, p. 328; for a general overview, see Losurdo 2008, pp. 242–5.

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‘monster’ that was now threatening India too.33 It was an indictment that spared nobody, not even the British parliament, which was seen as having done nothing to remedy a tragic situation rife with violence. Instead, dominated as it was by the selfishness of the privileged classes and mercantile spirit, the British parliament was likened to a ‘prostitute’. The electoral base had been broadened in 1833 by granting political rights to sectors of the population that had previously been excluded, but Gandhi felt that this result had been ‘obtained by using physical force’, ‘violence’, and even ‘brute force’.34 This is the first expansion of the concept of violence: it is true that the 1833 Reform Bill had been preceded by Chartist unrest, but it is not really appropriate to speak of ‘violence’ or ‘brute force’. However, Gandhi’s expansion of the concept of violence went further than this: the railways, industry, the use of cars, urbanisation and the destruction of traditional rural society all became synonymous with subjugation, enslavement and violence. Not even medicine was safe from his virulent condemnation and was seen as pernicious, given that by striving to cure men it killed ‘thousands of animals’ in experiments and even practised ‘vivisection’.35 His final verdict was that modernity was significantly worse and more violent than the world that had preceded it. With its religious wars or wars fought in the name of religion, and violence committed by thugs in robbing and murdering their victims, the dark side of traditional society was seen as minimal compared to the barbarism spreading from the West and threatening to swallow up India too. ‘There is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of [modern] civilization’ by its ‘scorching flames’.36 On the basis of this overview, reiterated ten years later (with just the removal of the word ‘prostitute’ to refer to the British parliament),37 and on the basis of this undifferentiated condemnation of the ‘violence’ intrinsically embedded in modern civilisation, it was difficult for Gandhi to find his bearings in the contradictions and conflict that characterised the twentieth century. This explains the ingenuity and uncertainty that he demonstrated with regard to fascism and Nazism. His letter to Romain Rolland on 20 December 1931 is enlightening in this respect. The opinion expressed about Mussolini is especially eye-catching: ‘many of his reforms attract me’; he is particularly impressed by ‘his opposition to super-urbanization’ and his measures ‘for the 33. 264. 34. 35. 36. 37.

‘“Hind Swaraj” or Indian Home Rule’, in Gandhi 1969–2001a, pp. 280, 285, 255, Gandhi 1969–2001a, pp. 256, 287. Gandhi 1969–2001a, p. 278 and passim. Gandhi 1969–2001a, pp. 265–6. Chadha 1997, p. 165.

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peasant class’, inspired by a ‘passionate love for his people’. This benevolence is explained by the fact that he saw fascism as synonymous with a return to rural life and a rejection of the much-hated modern industrial civilisation. However, this was not the main issue. Although forced to recognise the ‘iron hand’ that Mussolini used, Gandhi immediately added: ‘violence is the basis of Western society’.38 The expansion of the concept of violence and the condemnation of violence on principle have made it difficult or impossible to assess different forms of violence separately. This was confirmed by the fluctuations that Gandhi demonstrated during the course of the Second World-War. On 2 July 1940, while the threat of Nazi-invasion was hanging over England, he wrote an open letter, ‘To every Briton’: I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings.39

Are we witnessing a rejection of violence now characterised by rigour and coherence, an about-turn from the stance taken during the Anglo-Boer and First World-Wars? In actual fact, in a letter to the Viceroy dated 27 July 1944 – in the meantime, the fortunes of the War had swung round in the intervening four years, turning decidedly against the Third Reich – Gandhi explicitly offered ‘full cooperation in the war effort’ of Great Britain, provided that the latter issued an immediate statement in favour of Indian independence.40 The key to understanding Gandhi’s attitude in these years lies in the disappointment he felt as a result of the fact that Indian involvement in the First World-War had made little contribution to promoting the cause of national independence. Indeed, just after the victory-celebrations had died down, in the spring of 1919, Great Britain was responsible for the Amritsarmassacre, which not only cost hundreds of unarmed Indians their lives, but subsequently led to terrible nationwide racial degradation, such as the fact that inhabitants of the city were subjected to the ‘humiliation of crawling on all fours to and from one’s home’. This abasement ‘was not to be forgotten’.41

38. 39. 40. 41.

Gandhi 1969–2001d, p. 297. Gandhi 1969–2001e, p. 387. Gandhi 1969–2001h, pp. 239–40. Brecher 1961, p. 38.

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This explains Gandhi’s tendency to assume a neutral or fence-sitting stance during the Second World-War, as there were no concrete concessions from the British government: ‘I do not wish well to India at the expense of Britain as I do not wish well to Britain at the expense of Germany’, or ‘I do not wish that the British should be defeated, nor do I wish the defeat of the Germans’.42 Gandhi did not appreciate the British Empire’s claim that it was representing the cause of liberty in the fight against the Third Reich: ‘I assert that in India we have Hitlerian rule however disguised it may be in softer terms’, as well as: ‘Hitler was “Great Britain’s sin”. Hitler is only an answer to British imperialism.’43 In addition to the indignation over the hypocrisy and ingratitude of the British government, these judgements were also influenced by a profound misunderstanding of the phenomena of fascism and Nazism. This can be seen most notably in two letters written in May 1940: ‘I do not want to see the Allies defeated. But I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and he seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed . . .’, while Hitler ‘might even have been a friendly power as he may still be’.44 This statement is even more surprising if we consider firstly that the invasion of France was in full swing at the time, and, above all, the fact that the systematic elimination of Polish intellectuals and the operation sometimes termed the ‘Polish holocaust’ had been raging for months. We can now try to sketch out an overview of the second chapter in the history of the nonviolence-movement after the first one featuring the American Peace Society. Gandhi’s loyalty to his professed principles was far more fleeting than the American pacifists’, but, by contrast, the Indian leader never developed the inauspicious dialectic that led to the criminalisation and even the dehumanisation of the enemy in an attempt to comply with the principle of nonviolence right to the end. Nevertheless, there were also some perverse effects: given that ‘war [was] itself a crime against God and humanity’, it followed that ‘Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini’.45 This is further demonstration of the rule whereby

42. Letter to The Times of India of 10 February 1941, in Gandhi 1969–2001f, p. 61; ‘My Sincerity’, January 1942, in Gandhi 1969–2001g, p. 479. 43. ‘Answers to Questions’, 25 April 1941, in Gandhi 1969–2001f, p. 200; interview given to Ralph Corriston in April 1945, in Gandhi 1969–2001i, p. 223. 44. Letter to Amrit Kaur, 15 May 1940, in Gandhi 1969–2001e, p. 219; letter to Lord Linlithgow, 26 May 1940, in Gandhi 1969–2001e, p. 253. 45. Interview given to Ralph Corriston in April 1945, in Gandhi 1969–2001i, p. 223.

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the outright condemnation of violence makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish between its different manifestations and modalities. Herein lies the paradox: while Gandhi resolutely undertook to support Great Britain during the 1914–18 imperialist war, sometimes doing so enthusiastically, he was uncertain about the legitimacy of the use of violence at precisely the time when the need to use it should have been clear, as it was a question of tackling an explicit plan to decimate and enslave the ‘natives’ of Eastern Europe and the ‘final solution’ of the Jews. Once the War was over, Gandhi atypically went as far as to indirectly justify armed combat against English colonial rule by paying tribute to Subhas Chandra Bose, who was prepared to fight alongside the Axis-Powers if it meant achieving independence: Subhas was a great patriot. He laid down his life for the country. He was not by nature a fighter but he became commander of an army and took up arms against a great empire. The soldiers of that army included Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and Christians. He never considered himself only a Bengali. He had no use for parochialism or caste distinctions. In his eyes all were Indians and servants of India. He treated all alike.46

In this case, even violence committed by those who had fought alongside Hitler was condoned!

7. Tolstoy and Gandhi At a certain point in his life, Gandhi came across Tolstoy and sent him a letter in October 1909, thereby starting a series of correspondence that ended abruptly the following year when the great writer died. The two figures are often juxtaposed, but how far is this comparison valid? Let us see how Tolstoy described the national resistance of the Russian people against the Napoleonic army. Peasants would rather burn hay than sell it to the occupying troops at an advantageous price. Already generally suffering from hunger, the French soldiers were hit from behind in a series of rapid ambushes. An unequal asymmetrical struggle developed: The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of fencing was the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier and snatched up the cudgel was the Russian people. . . . Napoleon felt this, and from the time he took 46. ‘Speech at Prayer Meeting’, 23 January 1948, in Gandhi 1969–2001j, p. 293.

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up the correct fencing attitude in Moscow and instead of his opponent’s rapier saw a cudgel raised above his head, he did not cease to complain.47

Not surprisingly, the peasants and country-folk turned out to be less sophisticated than the well-mannered officers and soldiers in the invading army. This made no impression on Tolstoy, though, and instead he paid a passionate tribute to the resistance-movement: And it is well for the people who . . . at the moment of trial, without stopping to ask what rules others have observed in similar cases, simply and nimbly pick up the first cudgel to hand and deal blow after blow until the resentment and revenge in their souls give way to contempt and compassion.48

With War and Peace, Tolstoy undoubtedly provided us with the finest and most effective literary text for understanding armed resistance and asymmetrical warfare, organised by a population, above all the peasant-class, against a more powerful, better-armed occupying army (at the time, Napoleon had one of the most formidable military machines around). Although Tolstoy converted to nonviolence in 1880, some years after the publication of War and Peace, certain fundamental differences between these two frequently-compared figures still persisted even after this date. As he died in 1910, four years before the outbreak of the First World-War, the latter cannot be used to compare the Russian writer to Gandhi, an active large-scale recruiter of his fellow countrymen to the ranks of the British army. However, on the occasion of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy’s reaction was a far cry from the patriotic (or imperial) loyalty that Gandhi would show ten years later. Instead, he condemned the War and imperialist dispute, and, in a certain sense, welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1905, whose origins stemmed from the fight against the War and which he called on to ‘destroy the existing order’, although ‘not by force’, but ‘by disobedience’.49 Later in his essay, ‘The Meaning of the Russian Revolution’, Tolstoy appealed directly to Indians not to ‘submit to the Power which demands their participation in deeds of violence, always connected with the taking of human life’, not to enlist and not even to pay any ‘taxes to be used for violence’.50 This was advance criticism of the stance taken by Gandhi during the First World-War. 47. Tolstoy 1978, p. 1216 ? 48. Tolstoy 1978, p. 1216. 49. Tolstoy 1985, p. 541. On his reaction to Russia’s defeat to the Japanese, see Tolstoy 1985, pp. 537–8. 50. Sofri 1985, p. 60.

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We can pause here to make a more general observation. Although Lenin criticised Tolstoy heavily for not having supported the Russian Revolution in 1905, he also gave him credit for having expressed in his works ‘the desire to get rid of the past’ and, more specifically, ‘the striving to sweep away completely the official church, the landlords and landlord government, to destroy all the old forms and ways of landownership, to clear the land, to replace the police-class state by a community of free and equal small peasants’.51 It would be difficult to make the same assertion with regard to Gandhi, who, as we have seen, would have sought to leave untransformed premodern Indian society. Lenin criticised ‘Tolstoyan’ ideas for being synonymous with ‘abstention from politics’ and personal retreat aimed exclusively at ‘moral self-perfection’.52 Although the term ‘Tolstoyan’ had already become a byword for ‘antimilitarist’ in the years and even decades before the First World-War,53 it became synonymous with ‘defeatist’ (and therefore almost with ‘Bolshevik’) immediately after the February 1917 Revolution, when, for example, the defeat of the ‘Tolstoyans’ was welcomed by those in France who hoped that the Russian Republic was going to intensify its war-effort.54 A short time afterwards, the West also became aware of the extent of the crisis and the exhaustion caused by war in the huge country that had overthrown tsarist autocracy, and in Il Popolo d’Italia on 17 June 1917, Mussolini expressed his indignation over the fact that ‘the Russian revolution’ had ‘fallen under the close influence of Lenin and distanced itself from Tolstoy, a monopoly of the “peacemongering” Soviet from Petrograd’.55

8. Gandhi, Bonhoeffer and the young Lukács Although Tolstoy and Gandhi’s professions of nonviolent faith had a different background of cultural references and were practised to varying degrees of coherence, their stances were both strongly motivated by religion. It may therefore be interesting to compare them with other figures who were, in some way, prompted to reject violence by their religious consciences. We have already mentioned Angelina Grimke, a fervent Quaker-militant and pacifist who took a firm stand in support of the Union and its army during 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Lenin 1955–70a, pp. 203, 201. Lenin 1955–70a, pp. 200–3. See, for example, Roosevelt 1901, pp. 27–8. In Ferro 1980, p. 24. Ferro 1980, p. 23.

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the American Civil War, as she realised that making a choice between two different kinds of violence had become unavoidable. The great Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer reached a not-dissimilar conclusion in Germany during the Second World-War. It was not an easy choice for Bonhoeffer to fight Hitler with any means available, including a plot to kill him: ‘Baldwin was right when he said that there was only one greater evil than violence and that this was violence as a principle, as a law and a standard’. The onset of the Third Reich and its expansionist frenzy created a situation of danger quite without precedent. Therefore: ‘The extraordinary necessity appeals to the freedom of the men who are responsible’ and so individual ‘responsibility’ needed to be assumed, given that ‘in either case man becomes guilty’.56 Jesus was seen as having been fully aware of all this: He is able to enter into the fellowship of the guilt of men and take the burden of their guilt upon Himself. Jesus does not desire to be regarded as the only perfect one at the expense of men; He does not desire to look down on mankind as the only guiltless one while mankind goes to its ruin under the weight of its guilt. . . . He does not wish to acquit Himself of the guilt under which men die. . . . As one who acts responsibly in the historical existence of men Jesus becomes guilty.57

The imitation of Christ may therefore involve the choice of violence if the circumstances are tragic. There is a clear contrast here with Gandhi, who, at more-or-less the same time, invited the British people to welcome Naziinvaders with open arms, before committing himself to the practice of nonviolent resistance! Bonhoeffer adopted objectively contentious words against this attitude and those who ‘find a place of refuge in a private virtuousness’.58 In reality, ‘it is only at the price of an act of self-deception that he can safeguard his private blessedness against contamination through responsible action in the world’. This is the attitude – insists the Protestant theologian – of the ‘fanatic’, who ‘believes that he can oppose the power of evil with the purity of his will’.59 In conclusion he said:

56. 57. 58. 59.

Bonhoeffer 1995, pp. 208, 209. Bonhoeffer 1995, pp. 209–10. Bonhoeffer 1995, p. 49. Bonhoeffer 1995, p. 48.

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D. Losurdo / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 85–134 If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility he detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence. . . . He sets his own personal innocence above his responsibility for men.60

It is worth noting that the young Lukács argued in a similar way when he decided to support the Bolshevik October-Revolution, influenced by the horrors of the carnage of the First World-War. In asserting the inescapable nature of ‘guilt’ and in appealing to ‘seriousness [Ernst]’, ‘conscience [Gewissen]’ and the ‘sense of [moral] responsibility [Verantwortungsbewußtsein]’, he declares with Hebbel that: ‘Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me – who am I to be able to escape it?’.61 As a result of the conviction regarding the inescapable nature of guilt, the young Lukács embraced the revolutionary struggle against the socio-political system that he accused of being responsible for the carnage, while Bonhoeffer plotted against Hitler’s régime and met his end on the gallows.

9. Anticolonial revolution, nonviolence and appeals to the dominant power Gandhi made a different choice, but can it be explained exclusively in nonviolent terms? On the occasion of each of the three wars that the Indian leader had to contend with, we have seen him either support the British Empire in one way or another without ‘enter[ing] into the merits of the war’, as he himself underlined, or declare that he was ready to support it if the British government promised to grant India independence. The picture is now starting to take shape. If we examine the history of the colonial debate in the West, we see the emergence of three different positions. On one side, there were those who supported the civilising mission of the big powers, and, on the other side, there were the few who supported nationalliberation movements even in the colonies. There was, however, a third position which called for reform from on high in order to eliminate the ‘abuse’ of colonialism and smooth the way for the subsequent independence of the colony. It is this third position, with the changes made necessary by the move from the West to India and the colonial world, that found its ultimate expression in Gandhi. Indeed, he underlined the largely beneficial nature of English rule and could not think of independence without approval from London, approval 60. Bonhoeffer 1995, p. 210. 61. Lukács 1973, p. 11.

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that needed to be earned through a combination of persuasion and pressure. Therefore, while, on one hand, there was participation in the Empire’s wareffort (aimed at persuading the rulers that Indian people deserved home-rule because of their loyalty and bravery), on the other hand, there was an emphasis placed on pressure from below. The latter, however, could never be stretched to breaking point, and, therefore, forms of violent conflict had to be avoided. Although the pressure-phase rejected violence against the British government, the persuasion-phase contemplated the use of violence as long as it was not carried out against Britain, but, rather, alongside Britain against the enemies of the Empire. We must now pose a question: to what extent was this political line successful? In other words, was Indian independence really the result of the movement dedicated to nonviolence? Britain’s capitulation and relinquishment of its Empire must be seen against a backdrop of huge upheaval that started with the Second World-War, in particular the defeat inflicted by the Red Army on the Third Reich’s plan to build what Hitler often termed the ‘German Indies’ in Eastern Europe. The premature end to the ‘German Indies’ sounded the death-knell for the ‘British Indies’ too. In addition, the anticolonial movement found further support as a result of the rivalry between the major imperial powers. During the War, Japan supported the cause of the independence-movement, in the shape of Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), in order to weaken Britain. It is also interesting to see what happened after the defeat of Japan. The British government wanted to punish the ‘traitors’, the Indians who had fought alongside the Japanese enemy, but did not manage to do so for the very simple reason that: ‘for all Indians, regardless of their political orientation, INA soldiers were real heroes’.62 However, we have already seen how Gandhi paid tribute to Bose, the leader of the armed revolt that won over ‘no fewer than 20,000 men from the Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese following the surrender of Singapore’. We can therefore understand why the British wanted to punish those who had betrayed their oath of loyalty to the Empire, but, by then, ‘the British were no longer able to punish a direct rebellion, not even in the vital sector of the armed forces’. This is backed up by another serious episode: ‘On 18 February 1946 in Bombay, sailors in the Indian navy mutinied, took possession of the majority of warships in the port and, while the city was under threat from the cannons on their ships, a group of mutineers went

62. Torri 2000, p. 604.

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ashore and attacked the English soldiers in the garrison’. In this case too, ‘the English were forced to promise impunity to the mutineers’.63 Granting India independence, therefore, became an inevitable step, all the more so because Britain could not count on the support of any allies; even America was impatient, partly because it was involved in removing the final obstacles hindering the creation of a world-market under its leadership, and partly because it feared the emergence of an independence-movement broadly influenced by communists and socialists. This fear became even more acute as the revolution led by Mao Zedong spread across China. Therefore, the conquest of independence by India cannot be separated from the unrelenting liberation-movement of colonial peoples in general. This developed on a global level and had an especially strong influence in Asia, spurred on by the defeat inflicted on Hitler’s plan to create the German Indies, and more generally by the defeat suffered by the three countries (Germany, Italy and Japan) that had been most committed to the relaunch and radicalisation of the colonial tradition. In this way, Stalingrad and the Long March contributed far more to Indian independence than Gandhi’s nonviolent initiatives. Even if we overlook the huge shows of military strength on an international level to focus exclusively on the British Indies, we should ask whether the transformation really happened without violence or bloodshed. Unfortunately, with the outbreak of the conflict that eventually led to the formation of India and Pakistan, the end of British rule ‘proved just a curtain-raiser to the war of extermination which began after independence on both sides of the border, when refugee trains sometimes arrived carrying just bodies’,64 and ‘the biggest example of forced migration at worldwide level in the century’.65 In a clearly self-interested way, Churchill even spoke of a ‘frightful holocaust’.66 Gandhi admittedly did his best to stop or limit the violence, but he ended up as a victim of it. Therefore, a serious historical overview of the movement he inspired and led cannot adopt an abstract approach to this catastrophe, just as it cannot fail to analyse the defining features of the country of which Gandhi was the founding father. The India that resulted from ‘nonviolent’ agitation was most definitely not a country that stands out for its pacifism. It inherited the Anglo-Indian imperial army and, immediately after the declaration of independence, deployed it or threatened to deploy it in order to annex the regions and 63. 64. 65. 66.

Torri 2000, pp. 600, 605. Sarkar 1989, p. 434. Torri 2000, p. 606. Churchill 1974, p. 7722.

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principalities which wanted to maintain their independence or be incorporated into Pakistan. Even before the assassination of Gandhi, India sent ‘airborne troops to the Kashmir valley’, to ensure control of it against the express wishes of the local population.67

10. From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama? Nonviolence as an ideology of war For a long time, the liberal West saw Gandhi in a far-from-favourable light. Above all, we can see the contempt in which Churchill used to speak about the ‘seditious fakir’, a ‘miserable little old man who had always been our enemy’, an ‘old rascal’,68 who wants to take possession of what Churchill feels belongs to Britain and ‘stands for the expulsion of Britain from India’ and ‘the permanent exclusion of British trade from India’.69 The customary imperial arrogance was also sometimes loaded with racist overtones, best shown by this outburst from 1931: It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding halfnaked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.70

Regardless of whether the independence-movement used violence or nonviolence, Churchill felt that it was important to adopt any means necessary to combat it. In 1932, he welcomed the implementation of measures in India that were more drastic than any that had been required ‘since the Mutiny’,71 referring to the Sepoy-rebellion and bloodthirsty repression that had aroused Marx’s indignation. Even in the present day, Churchill’s trademark-tone has still not disappeared completely. One historian-journalist, who uses the columns of leading newspapers in the USA and the West in general to welcome the return of colonialism (‘Colonialism’s Back – and Not a Moment Too Soon’),72 expresses the following opinion of Gandhi: ‘He was a year older than Lenin, with whom he shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Torri 2000, pp. 621–5. In Ferguson 2004, p. 276, and in Chadha 1997, p. 388. In Chadha 1997, p. 302. In Chadha 1997, p. 300. In Chadha 1997, p. 323. Johnson 1993.

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crankiness he had much more in common with Hitler, his junior by twenty years’.73 When compared to Lenin, the leader of the Indian independencemovement receives the same treatment reserved for Bolshevism, which, from the perspective of conformist historians and journalists, is closely associated with Nazism. However, the main trend in the dominant ideology is now very different. At the beginning of the Cold War, after the hate and contempt nurtured in particular by Churchill for the ‘subversive’ ‘oriental’ enemy of the British Empire and Western civilisation had been forgotten, Gandhi rose to the rôle of apostle of nonviolence to counter the revolutionary liberation-movements of colonial peoples that were spreading throughout Asia and the rest of the world. In this way, Gandhi quite unexpectedly became the antithesis of Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and Arafat. A further, more decisive, move in the realm of Realpolitik then took centrestage. Gandhi’s legacy as the champion of non-violence has been embraced in the present day by the fourteenth Dalai Lama, as shown by an incessant multimedia-campaign. Indeed, in his struggle for the independence or semiindependence of Tibet, he not only declares that he wants to adhere to the principle of the sacred nature of life, but he also makes explicit use of Gandhian concepts, for example when he advocates transforming Tibet ‘into a zone of “Ahimsa”, a Hindi term used to mean a state of peace and nonviolence’.74 This statement was made before the Committee for Human Rights at the US-Congress in 1987, and two years later the fourteenth Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace-Prize. The recognition which Gandhi was never granted has already been achieved by his presumed heir. What, however, is the real story? This emerges clearly from two books written or co-written by two CIA-officers (of varying degrees of seniority). The first of these worked with the Dalai Lama for decades and expresses his admiration and devotion to the ‘Buddhist leader preaching nonviolence’. He expresses the point of view embodied by his hero in the following terms: ‘If there is a clear indication that there is no alternative to violence, then violence is permissible’. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to distinguish between ‘method’ and ‘motivation’: ‘In the Tibetan resistance against China the method was killing, but the motivation was compassion, and that justified the resort to violence’. Similarly, the Dalai Lama, as quoted and admired by the CIA-officer, justified and even celebrated American participation in the Second World-War and Korean War, as they were conducted ‘to protect 73. Johnson 1983, p. 521; on Paul Johnson, see Losurdo 1996, Chapter 3, Section 9. 74. Dalai Lama 2008.

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democracy, liberty, and freedom’. These noble ideas continued to inspire Washington during the Vietnam-War, even if, on this occasion, the results were unfortunately not on the same high plane as the intentions.75 On this basis, there is clearly perfect harmony with the CIA-officer, who makes a point of being photographed with the Dalai Lama in a friendly, affectionate pose. Indeed, he is keen to point out that he is not a fan of ‘firearms’, just like the venerable Buddhist master, but is resigned to approving and promoting the use of them only when it becomes inevitable to do so.76 Therefore, when reread in light of the teachings of the Nobel Peace-Prize winner, nonviolence would appear to have become the doctrine of inspiration of the CIA! The myth of the Dalai Lama was finally debunked by officers from the same agency feared all over the world. He fled from Lhasa in 1959, marking the achievement of ‘an objective of American policy for almost a decade’. When he crossed the border between China (Tibet) and India, he appointed one of the Tibetans who helped him escape as general, while two others used the radio provided by the CIA to send the agency an urgent message without further ado: ‘send us weapons for 30,000 men by airplane’.77 However, although the Tibetan rebellion had already been prepared before 1959 with the launch of weapons and military equipment in the most inaccessible areas of Tibet,78 it was destined to fail. This was despite the sophisticated training provided to the guerrillas, the fact that they had an ‘inexhaustible arms warehouse in the sky’ (the weapons parachuted down from US-planes) at their disposal and the opportunity they had to make use of a safe area behind the frontline over the Chinese border in the Mustang base (in Nepal). Consequently, the commandos who infiltrated from India achieved results that were ‘generally disappointing’ and ‘found little support among the local people’. In short, the attempt to sustain ‘a large-scale guerrilla movement by air in Tibet had proven a painful failure’ and ‘[b]y 1968 the guerrilla force at Mustang was aging’ and was unable to ‘recruit new men’. As a result, the USA was forced to abandon the undertaking, which disappointed the Dalai Lama bitterly: ‘He ruefully noted that Washington had cut off its support for political and paramilitary programs in 1974’.79 It is therefore difficult to see the Dalai Lama as Gandhi’s successor. The only vague analogy that can be drawn is with the Gandhi of the First World-War, who undertook to recruit Indian soldiers for the British army 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Knaus 1999, pp. x, 313. Knaus 1999, pp. x, 274. Knaus 1999, p. 178; Conboy and Morrison 2002, p. 93. Knaus 1999, pp. 225, 154–5. Knaus 1999, pp. 281, 235, 292, 312; italics author’s own.

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with the hope of earning gratitude from London. India has inherited the ambition to remove Tibet from China in some way from Great Britain:80 grouped together in a purpose-made corps (the Special Frontier-Force), Tibetan guerrillas fought under the leadership of the Indian army during the brief Sino-Indian Border-Conflict in 1962 and then during the IndoPakistani War a few years later. In two photos taken in June 1972 we see the Dalai Lama, together with Indian general Sujan Singh Uban, go over and harangue none other than the Special Frontier-Force, after having given his ‘approval’ regarding its involvement in the war against Pakistan just a few months before.81 The Dalai Lama’s support of the Indian nuclear-armament policy can be seen in a similar light. The collaborative relationship with the USA has played an even more important rôle. In addition to the brutal embargo imposed by Washington and the persistent sabotage or terrorist-operations launched from Taiwan, the Tibetan revolt formed part of the CIA-strategy as a way of ‘forcing Mao to divert his already stretched resources’ and to provoke the collapse of the People’s Republic of China. Although their main objective was not achieved, China was nevertheless weakened, and, in addition, the United States ‘benefited from the intelligence gathered by the [Tibetan] resistance forces’. Furthermore, the CIA and American army were able to experiment with ‘new kinds of equipment – aircraft and parachutes, for example’ and ‘new communications techniques’, as well acquiring valuable experience. As a result, the ‘the lessons learned in Tibet’ could then be put into practice ‘in places like Laos and Vietnam’.82 Therefore, far from adhering to nonviolence, the fight inspired by the Dalai Lama, or, in any case, carried out in his name, served as a general rehearsal for one of the most barbaric wars in the twentieth century. So how can the current prevalent myth be explained? Once again, the CIA-officer that spent decades in contact with the leader of the Tibetan independence-movement helps to provide the answer. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the CIA received instructions to conduct, not only ‘paramilitary operations’ against China, but also ‘psychological warfare’.83 The plan underwent further fine-tuning following the 1959 revolt; the ‘psychological strategy group’ invited the Eisenhower-administration to ‘keep the rebellion going as long as possible and give it maximum emphasis in all public 80. 81. 82. 83.

Knaus 1999, p. 256. Conboy and Morrison 2002, pp. 247–8. Knaus 1999, pp. 215, 316; Conboy and Morrison 2002, p. ix. Knaus 1999, p. 63.

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information media’ and ‘the CIA had hired a public relations firm to help the Tibetans publicize their case’.84 The basic orientation of this psychological warfare had already been expounded in the first years of the Cold War, and its aim was ‘to rally Asia’s Buddhists against Chinese Communist expansion’.85 As Communism was associated with violence, it was opportune to counter it with Buddhism and its nonviolent connotations. From this moment on, a ‘screen’ of nonviolence started to surround the figure of the Dalai Lama.86 However, it was not only the leader himself that underwent a dazzling transformation, but also the whole world that he embodied. Premodern, prerevolutionary Tibet thus became a magical place, where slavery, servitude, the violence of the ruling class and indeed all forms of violence disappeared. In reality, far from being an idyll, Lhasa in the ‘good old days’ was more similar to ‘Florence under the Borgias’, featuring violence intertwined with plots and intrigue.87 In all this there is not even the slightest trace of the current dominant myth; psychological warfare, public-relations companies and Hollywood (which had already played a pivotal rôle during the Cold War) are deft hands at performing miracles. Following in the Dalai Lama’s footsteps, but with a decidedly more radical stance, the Tibetan Youth Congress advocated the use of arms and a return to guerrilla-warfare, duly unleashed with help from Washington. Gandhi was still held in high esteem though, and they quoted the stance he adopted against cowards.88 Finally, by drawing inspiration from both Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, groups that profess to be left-wing – such as the Transnational Radical Party in Italy led by Marco Pannella – not only label national-liberation movements (like the Palestinian resistance) as bloody and bloodthirsty, but go even further. In order to counter these movements, unaware of the lesson of nonviolence and falling prey to homicidal totalitarian inclinations, the same self-styled ‘radicals’ regularly support wars promoted by Washington to export ‘democracy’, with particular emphasis on wars waged by Israel against its Arab neighbours, above all the Palestinians. Does lending support to the American-Israeli wars contradict the principle of nonviolence? The ‘radicals’ once again find an easy source of inspiration in Gandhi, who supported the war-effort of the British Empire and silenced his opponents by accusing them of being cowardly and even ‘effeminate’.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Knaus 1999, pp. 181, 204. Knaus 1999, p. 88. Knaus 1999, p. 236. Knaus 1999, p. 24. Goldner 1999, p. 386.

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‘Nonviolence’ has now been transformed into an ideology of war (albeit a cold one, for the time being), but this is not all. For an entire period of history, the criticism of violence has been closely linked, although sometimes in a contradictory way, to criticism of the West. This was the case for the American Peace Society, who denounced the enslavement of black people perpetrated by the West, and for Tolstoy, who condemned ‘imperialism’ and warned against the rearmament-race among major powers, which soon led to the catastrophe of the First World-War. The same can also be said for Gandhi, who, at times, did not hesitate to liken Churchill to Hitler, thereby comparing British and Nazi-‘imperialism’. Nowadays, however, the proclamation of the ideal of nonviolence goes hand-in-hand with a celebration of the West, which stands as the guardian of man’s moral conscience and therefore feels empowered to unleash ‘humanitarian’ embargoes and wars all over the world.

11. Nonviolence and the inability to identify and limit violence Fortunately, on other occasions compliance with the ideal of nonviolence has continued to be taken more seriously and seen less as a self-serving undertaking. Recently, Fausto Bertinotti (former leader of the Communist Refoundation Party and President of the Chamber of Deputies) adopted the concept of nonviolence in an attempt to emphasise how much has changed since the days of twentieth-century communism. In his eyes, terrorism and war are two sides of the same coin (violence), so it follows that all armed acts of Iraqi or Palestinian resistance should be included in the category of terrorism, even in the case of military targets. Are we now witnessing a coherent vision? Bertinotti positions his profession of nonviolent faith in a context of the philosophy of history that it is worth exploring further: It was said that ‘God died in Auschwitz’. This was a way for believers and nonbelievers alike to say that a repeat of such violence was unimaginable. However, Hiroshima followed soon afterwards, a form of violence practised by those who had defeated Nazism. This transformation was both dramatic and terrible, as violence aimed at beating death led to even more death. So was Hiroshima legitimate? We can say that it was, because it was less destructive than Auschwitz and Nazism, and because Nazism basically consisted of destruction, systematic oppression and the general use of violence. Auschwitz is its cathedral, its true colours in the form of genocide. Hiroshima is not. This is the difference and it is an important one. The objective of Hiroshima was not annihilation. Instead, it was a terrible violent way of opposing it.89 89. Bertinotti 2004a, p. ii.

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This is really twisting what happened in terms of both history and logic. In this way, the atomic bombings, carried out when the War in Europe was already over and Japan was about to surrender, become a ‘way of opposing’ Auschwitz. However, the most important aspect is the legitimisation, however circuitous it may be, of the annihilation of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki), thereby legitimising an act now considered to be ‘terrorist’ by leading American historians and at the time branded as ‘barbarous’ by one of the most senior officers in the American military administration, Admiral Leahy.90 Therefore, a supporter of nonviolence turns out to be even more unscrupulous than a war-professional! However, our intention here is not to direct irony against a single figure. Instead, it should be noted that, once again, the nonviolent movement has not managed to keep its promise to renounce violence unconditionally and steadfastly. In this case, the promise is sensationally ignored at precisely the moment when a historical overview is being drawn. Let us now turn our attention to the present and take the example of a country subjected to military occupation after having been attacked and invaded in violation of the UN-Charter (such as Iraq). What does it mean in concrete terms to fight on two fronts, against the war on one side and against armed resistance (a synonym for terrorism) on the other? The condemnation of the war is clearly linked to the past (it is an act which has already been carried out and has turned into military occupation), while the condemnation of armed resistance is instead linked to the present, branding as terrorists those who practise it in order to rid themselves of military occupation. It is a position that acknowledges what has happened, namely the fact that violence has already been committed. In the final analysis, the category of violence features armed resistance to occupation more prominently than the occupation itself, even though it is only the continuation of violence and terror unleashed by war. If we now turn our attention to Palestine, we see that those who proclaim the principle of nonviolence tend to target most of their criticism at the victims. Instead, the decades of military occupation and the process of expropriation and colonisation of the victims’ land, which is still in progress, protected by a formidable military apparatus lurking in the shadows, are either ignored completely or pushed into the background. Moving beyond the confines of the Middle East, let us take a look at the overall international situation. The great philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed that: ‘the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the

90. See Losurdo 2007, Chapter 1, Section 3.

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contrary’.91 In light of this consideration, it is as if the USA had declared war on an unspecified number of countries, which must endure daily terror inflicted by a superpower explicitly laying claim to the sovereign right to attack them and even annihilate them. Let us now change our focus from a military to a strictly economic framework and peruse Foreign Affairs, the unofficial magazine of the Department of State. After the collapse of ‘real socialism’, in a world united under American hegemony, the embargo in Iraq constitutes the perfect weapon of mass-destruction. Although it was officially imposed to prevent Saddam from having access to weapons of mass-destruction, it ‘may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history’ put together.92 Therefore, in the current international situation, Washington can decimate the population of an enemy-country without needing to fire a single shot. With things as they are, the perspective that only identifies violence in openly-declared war and ‘terrorism’ comes across as inadequate and misleading. However, the definition of terrorism seems to be equally inadequate and misleading, as it is only identified with ambushes or desperate acts carried out by the Iraqi or Palestinian resistance-movements. There has been a clear regression since the time of Marx. We have understood nothing about his theory of violence if we limit ourselves to seeing him as a philosopher who argued that violence is inevitable for a given period of history. This is only one aspect, so let us also consider the other: In the history of the real world, as everyone knows, conquest, subjugation, robbery, murder – in a word, force – play leading roles. But the gentle science of political economy has always clung to idyllic notions.93

These ‘idyllic notions’ first need to be unmasked to understand the framework of violence that runs throughout the system, both in terms of home-affairs and international relations. Only after this has been done can we understand why Gandhi has become a member of the self-righteous brigade even after having physically repulsed the champion of the British Empire and Western civilisation. Thanks above all to the support he gave to the British government during the First WorldWar (conducted by the Triple Entente as a war to expand democracy and uproot the roots of war once and for all), Gandhi is now put forward as a 91. Hobbes 1996, pp. 88–9. 92. Mueller and Mueller 1999. 93. Marx and Engels 1955–89f, p. 742.

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champion of democratic interventionism (for example by the Radical Party in Italy), and therefore also a champion of the export of armed ‘democracy’. However, the centrist stance he assumed with regard to the colonial question and the ambiguous nature of the principle of nonviolence he advocated also form the starting point for those today, even on the Left, who want to weaken or eliminate the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. The development of events on two recent occasions are a good illustration of this. In the summer of 2007, a large number of British universities called for a cultural boycott of Israel as a mark of protest against the permanent oppression inflicted on the Palestinian population, while, at the beginning of 2008, Palestinian writers and various organisations incited a boycott of bookfairs in Paris and Turin because they had decided to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of Israel. These two pacifist initiatives were launched in support of a population that has become the epitome of a martyr-people, subjected to this condition by a country increasingly often compared to racist South Africa (even by figures such as Brzezinski and Carter). However, the champions of nonviolence stood out for the explicit stand they took against the boycotts: the Dalai Lama in the case of the initiative by English universities94 and Bertinotti on the occasion of the Turin BookFair. Finally, it is also important not to neglect another detail: branding any form of armed resistance against occupation (whether in Iraq or Palestine) as terrorism means placing indiscriminate violence against a civil population on the same level as armed resistance against the aggressor’s occupying troops, which is perfectly legitimate in terms of international law and the UN-Charter. Therefore, while the oppressor’s violence is simply sidestepped, the rallying cry of the general unconditional rejection of violence is not even able to curtail the violence inflicted on the oppressed. These are the fundamental limits of the nonviolence-movement as it stands, limits that have already clearly emerged with some regularity in the first two chapters of its history.

12. A doctrinal view of major historical crises The condemnation of violence on principle presupposes a doctrinal view of major historical crises, as if they allowed time for reflecting calmly over the advantages and disadvantages of armed conflict and pacifism. Real life is 94. See the International Herald Tribune’s coverage of 4–5 August 2007.

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quite different from this, as the example of the October-Revolution in Russia clearly shows. It put an end to a war in Russia, during which attempts to fraternise by soldiers on opposing sides were suppressed by force, as all of them were expected to either be ready to kill or be killed under any circumstances. Deserters were handed over to the firing squad, or, rather, the firing squad was already there waiting to execute offenders, even targeting military units that had showed a poor level of combative spirit and had demonstrated insufficient zeal in killing and laying themselves open to the risk of death. Despite the lack of ammunition, the Russian General Staff did not hesitate to order the artillery to act against units suspected of cowardice. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, in Canada, the machine-gun was called into action to suppress an uprising by ‘deserters’ protesting against forced conscription with pistols and rifles.95 The origins of the OctoberRevolution lay in the need to make a choice. However, this choice was not between violence and nonviolence, but, rather, between the violence of the imperialist war on one side and the violence of the revolutionary war against imperialism on the other. A year later, the same tragic choice was imposed on those who took their inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution to end the War in Germany and Austria, and depose the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties, who were still resisting or refusing to comply with this solution. The same dialectic reappeared on the occasion of the Second World-War, where Italy provides a good example. Partisan-resistance was fuelled by young people who refused to enlist in the Salò-army and took to the mountains. In this case too, a choice between two different types of violence became necessary: they could either act as cannon-fodder at the service of Mussolini’s republic and, above all, the Third Reich, or fight by taking up arms to eliminate Nazism and fascism. These dilemmas continue to present themselves to varying degrees even in the present day. In an issue of the International Herald Tribune from December 2003, we can read an extremely enlightening description of the last war against Iraq. When the occupying forces encountered major difficulties in controlling the situation, they decided to ‘make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating’ (through terrorist-style bombings and other similar revengetactics).96 Let us analyse the wording used by the American newspaper: the

95. Losurdo 1996, Chapter 3, Section 3. 96. Filkins 2003; on this matter, see Losurdo 2007, Chapter 1, Section 5.

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strikes are not only against military or political opponents of the new régime, but also against ‘ordinary Iraqis’ going about their everyday lives. The latter are not targeted because they are real or suspected supporters of the resistancemovement, but because they have not helped the invader to eliminate it. In these circumstances, some form of co-operation with violence becomes inescapable, whether it is deployed by the occupying forces or perpetrated by the resistance-movement (which often develops spontaneously). This is even more relevant in Palestine, where people are forced to pay an even higher price for ‘not co-operating’ with the policies of expropriation, colonisation and military occupation pursued by Israel. The doctrinal nature of the condemnation of violence on principle is confirmed by the fact that, during major historical crises, even fervent supporters of the principle of nonviolence often end up acknowledging the need to compromise with regard to its absolute nature. This is what happened in the USA when the law on the capture of runaway-slaves was enacted and the American Civil War was launched. At a time when a choice had to be made between the violence that enslaved and tormented black people and the violence aimed at defeating the slave-states, and potentially at abolishing slavery, Angelina Grimke, the militant Quaker from the American Peace Society that we have previously encountered, came out clearly in favour of the second option in the tragic moral dilemma. We have also seen how a leading Christian theologian conspired to organise an attempt to assassinate Hitler during the Second World-War. Bonhoeffer saw this violence as the only way to put an end to an even bigger and more deadly form of violence, namely the war unleashed by the Führer to decimate and enslave the ‘indigenous population’ of Eastern Europe. Our conclusion is that historical crises of varying degrees of acuteness have forced people to choose between different forms of violence. The real nature of the dilemma can be denied by asserting the absolute and unconditional character of the principle of nonviolence, but this is only possible by indulging in contradiction and abstraction. Throughout his life, Gandhi shrank away in horror from any suggestion of armed uprising by the Indian people against colonial rule, but did not see the support he gave or promised to the end under certain conditions for the wars conducted by the British Empire as a contradiction of the principle of nonviolence. Furthermore, when India was granted independence, Gandhi did not consider dismantling the army or the police-force, as their actions were not even included in the category of violence.

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13. Resentment, violence and catharsis The far-from-flattering overview of the history of the nonviolent movement outlined thus far does not mean that we are avoiding a task that is now overdue. The more acute awareness of the ‘seriousness of the negative’ acquired through tragic experience in the twentieth century has forced us into a major rethink on the issue of violence. Which methods should be adopted in this rethink? Let us start by rereading Marx. When he stated that ‘revolution is the locomotive of history’ and ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one’,97 we were essentially being presented with a statement of fact. Tocqueville had already explained ‘why great revolutions will become more rare’ in the title of a central chapter in Book Two of ‘Democracy in America’, but, if we look at the century or century-anda-half following the year in which the French liberal made this claim (1840), we realise that it could well have been the period with the biggest number of revolutions in the history of the world. Indeed, it was precisely all this upheaval that changed the face of the world so radically at such an astonishing speed. Eight years after the aforementioned text was published, the ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ forecast and aspired to proletarian revolution (or ‘bourgeois revolution’ liable to be transformed into ‘proletarian revolution’), ‘agrarian revolution’ and ‘national emancipation’ against a system that exuded violence, not only because it had been founded on social and national oppression, but also because it raised the danger of ‘the industrial war of extermination between nations’.98 At least as far as this point is concerned, it is clear that Marx and Engels had a far-sighted view. On the other hand, the following extract from The German Ideology seems more questionable: ‘this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’.99 Once again, the idea of a show of arms as a formative moment for man seems to be emerging, albeit in a different way. Here, we see the collapse of the ‘seriousness of the negative’, which is also an intrinsic factor for revolution, as the history of the twentieth century confirmed in such a tragically eloquent way. Sorel’s works were characterised by decidedly disquieting tones, but his Reflections on Violence, published in 1908, was more influenced by Nietzsche, 97. Marx and Engels 1955–89c, p. 85; Marx and Engels 1955–89f, p. 779. 98. Marx and Engels 1955–89b, pp. 492–3, 485. 99. Marx and Engels 1955–89a, p. 70.

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and above all by Bergson, than by Marx. The positive rôle played by violence in history was not underlined with regard to Jacobinism (severely condemned by Sorel, thus following in Tocqueville’s footsteps), or the revolution in Russia that had broken out a few years earlier, or even with regard to the uprisings that were raging in the colonial and semicolonial worlds (such as the Mahdi in Sudan, the Boxers in China and the national movement in the Philippines that tried to shake off American rule after having overthrown the Spanish). Indeed, all this was absent from Sorel’s work. He made theoretical references to a future proletarian revolution, but, in practice, the violence he advocated was an expression of intolerance towards mediocrity and the anonymity of a world marked by the advent of the masses and mass-political parties. In this way, a typical leitmotif of anti-socialist culture was revisited and reinterpreted in a ‘revolutionary’ key. Admittedly, when the fourth edition of his book was published eleven years later, Sorel derided the philistine nature of the Triple Entente for having imposed a deadly embargo on Soviet Russia and, at the same time, having branded the Bolsheviks as barbarians and heirs of the ‘Nordic’ barbarism of William II’s Germany. However, this did not alter the terms of the problem or modify the overall meaning of Reflections on Violence. Violence played a very different rôle for Marx and Engels. To understand how, let us start by posing a question: how should the most advanced Western culture react to the horrors of colonialism? In the second half of the eighteenth century, two Enlightenment-philosophers, Raynal and Diderot, saw revolution as the inevitable consequence of the increase in the phenomenon of runaway-slaves, and described it thus: [A]ll that the negroes lack is a leader courageous enough to carry them to vengeance and carnage. Where is he, this great man, that nature owes to its vexed, oppressed, tormented children? . . . He will appear, do not doubt it. He will show himself and will raise the sacred banner of liberty. This venerable leader will gather around him his comrades in misfortune. More impetuous than torrents, they will leave everywhere ineffaceable traces of their just anger. Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, all their tyrants will fall prey to iron and flame. The American fields will be transported with drunkenness from the blood that they have been awaiting for so long, and the bones of so many unfortunates, piled up for three centuries, will shake with joy. The Old World will join its applause to that of the New. Everywhere people will bless the name of the hero who re-established the rights of the human species, everywhere monuments will be erected to his glory. Then the Code Noir will disappear, and the Code Blanc will be terrible, if the victors consult only the law of revenge!100

100. Raynal 1981, pp. 202–3.

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Some years later, when welcoming the uprising of black slaves in Saint Domingue, Percival Stockdale, an English abolitionist, included a poem first published in a 1773 pamphlet, calling on slaves to ‘rush with resistless fury on their foes’ and ‘of their pale fiends exterminate the race’.101 It is difficult to find such an appeal for ‘resentment’, ‘retaliation’ and ‘revenge’, which completes the process of ‘carnage’ and the extermination of the oppressors and becomes inebriated on their ‘blood’, in the tradition that takes its cue from Marx and Engels. In any case, there do not seem to be other examples of this view, whereby revenge by the oppressed does not entail destroying the slave-system but, rather, overturning it to the detriment of the oppressor, substituting the ‘white code’ for the ‘black code’. In order to be successful, a revolution must be able to identify its main enemy and build the broadest possible front against it so that immediate feelings of ‘retaliation’ and ‘revenge’ can make room for reasoning and rational analysis of the forces in play and the methods and objectives of the revolution. As Gramsci said, revolutionaries cannot achieve their aims without going through a process of ‘catharsis’.

14. Hannah Arendt and her critique of Fanon, Sartre and the anticolonial revolutions Let us start by looking at a negative model. In 1969, when underlining the great ‘successes’ achieved by ‘politics of nonviolence’ in the USA, ‘especially in the field of civil rights’, and regretting the fact that ‘the adherents of nonviolence are [now] on the defensive’,102 Hannah Arendt felt it necessary to redress the balance with regard to the paean to the liberating violence of oppressed, humiliated colonial peoples presented in the writings of Fanon and Sartre. As well as effectively highlighting and eloquently pillorying the ‘rhetorical excesses’ of the two authors,103 and instead of targeting individual authors and figures, this harsh critique attacked the anticolonial revolutions themselves on the basis of Mao’s oft-quoted statement that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.104 Its meaning should be clear: the army plays a central rôle in the state-system, so a colonial people who want to establish themselves as an independent national state have to construct an independent army. In Arendt’s view, however, the protagonists of the massive 101. 102. 103. 104.

In Geggus 1982, p. 127. Arendt 1970, p. 14. Arendt 1970, p. 20. Quoted in Arendt 1970, p. 11.

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struggle that led an ancient civilisation (and more than a fifth of humanity) to throw off the colonial or semicolonial yoke became proponents of a blind, indiscriminate form of violence. This interpretation appears to be even more unfounded if we reflect on the fact that Mao insisted on the importance of economic advancement even before winning power, as Washington wanted to reduce China to a state whereby ‘her only way out is to live on U.S. flour’, and thus ‘to become a U.S. colony’.105 Consequently, military victory would have been fragile and inconclusive without victory in the struggle for agricultural and industrial production. The repudiation of the Chinese Revolution formed part of a broader context. According to Arendt, little could be expected from the victory of ‘National Liberation Movements’. She arrived at this conclusion by looking at history: ‘The rarity of slave rebellions and of uprisings among the disinherited and downtrodden is notorious; on the few occasions when they occurred’ they became ‘nightmares for everybody’.106 It would be easy to remember the epic black slave-revolution in Saint-Domingue led by Toussaint Louverture and the decisive rôle it played in dismantling the institution of slavery in the American continent, but, for Arendt, a grassrootsrevolution launched by the slaves themselves or the peoples enslaved by colonialism was something which was either impossible or pernicious. It is true that Arendt condemned American intervention in Vietnam, but the basis of her critique was not recognition of an oppressed people’s right to conduct a revolution, but, rather, realisation of the cost and far-reaching damage caused by the War in the imperialist metropolis itself. Her following statement is extremely significant: If you look at the history of revolutions, you will see that it was never the oppressed and degraded themselves who led the way, but those who were not oppressed and not degraded but could not bear it that others were.107

Together with the struggle of colonial peoples in the strict sense of the term, the struggle of Afro-Americans was also viewed with mistrust or detachment. The nonviolence-movement for civil rights emerged in 1958–9, demanding, among other things, the desegregation of schools and imploring the federal authorities to intervene to achieve this objective. Arendt objected to this and said that: ‘enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation’,108 on 105. 106. 107. 108.

Mao Zedong 1969–75, p. 453. Arendt 1970, p. 21. Arendt 1972, p. 167. Arendt 2000, p. 235.

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the grounds that integration established by law and obtained through the intervention of federal troops in the South was in itself an act of violence. Protest started to take on an increasingly radical form. This was already evident in Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech, when he evoked the ‘dream’ of racial integration and equality. Although he passionately professed his nonviolent faith, he also denounced the ‘appalling condition’ of black people and the ‘unspeakable horrors of police brutality’.109 In the following years, the more radical sectors in the movement started questioning the problematic balance of this stance, but this was not only because of the persistent violence of state-institutions and social relations. The burden of the war in Vietnam became an increasingly pertinent issue and begged the question of how commitment to nonviolence could be coherently upheld in a situation with forced conscription, compelling young men to fight in a far-off country and kill or be killed. Arendt, however, had no doubts: ‘Serious violence entered the scene [in the USA] only with the appearance of the Black Power movement on the campuses’.110 Let us move forward to 1969. Relying on the account published in a leading Western newspaper, this is the kind of treatment that black people were still subjected to in the USA in this period: In the 60s more than 400 black men in Alabama were used as human guinea pigs by the government. These syphilis sufferers were not treated as the authorities wanted to study the effects of the disease on a ‘sample of the population’.111

President Clinton was forced to apologise for this episode in 1997. However, according to Arendt’s claims, the only people responsible for the violence were the Afro-Americans themselves, or at least the most radical Afro-American militants. As we can see, the critique of violence here is really a critique of revolutions and anticolonial movements. At this point, the attack on Fanon and Sartre can be seen in a new and disturbing light. Arendt completely ignored the fact that the paean to the liberating violence of oppressed, humiliated colonial peoples was, in fact, a response to the theory and practice of dehumanisation and decimation or annihilation of colonial peoples inflicted by colonialism.

109. In Hofstadter and Hofstadter (eds.) 1982, pp. 450–1. 110. Arendt 1970, p. 18. 111. Cited in Losurdo 2007, p. 118.

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15. Recognition or co-optation? A comparison between Gandhi and Fanon Is the catharsis implicit in the theory of revolution inspired by Marx and Engels no longer present in the work of Fanon and Sartre? Arendt focused more on the latter, but special reference should instead be made to the former. This is because Fanon provided Sartre with a source regarding the issue of the liberating violence of colonial peoples. Fanon wrote: ‘Racism, hatred, resentment, and the “legitimate desire for revenge” alone cannot nurture a war of liberation. . . . [H]atred is not an agenda’.112 As we can see, the moment of catharsis had not been forgotten, but Fanon also provided us with an extremely crude statement: ‘At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex’.113 It would, however, be hasty to see Fanon as a proponent of the redeeming effectiveness of violence in itself. For a start, he did not indiscriminately target the colonised for being naturally attracted to the cause of anticolonial revolutions: ‘Some members of the colonialist population prove to be closer, infinitely closer, to the nationalist struggle than certain native sons’.114 However, national-liberation movements that really want to succeed not only have to clearly limit the target of their revolutionary violence, but also, at a certain point, have to know how to orchestrate the transition from the military phase to the political-economic phase of the struggle. Therefore, in order to provide a real economic and political context for the independence won by military strategy, the newly-independent country has to escape from its state of underdevelopment. Dedication to work and production therefore take the place of bravery in battle, and the figure of the worker, whether skilled or not, supersedes that of the guerrilla. In capitulating, it is as if the colonial power was saying to the revolutionaries: ‘If you want independence, take it and suffer the consequences’, and in this way ‘the apotheosis of independence becomes the curse of independence’. It therefore becomes necessary to know how to respond to this new challenge, which is no longer military in nature: ‘It requires capital, technicians, engineers and mechanics, etc.’.115 In other words, to some extent, Fanon foresaw both the stalemate in many African countries that did not manage to move from the military phase to the economic phase of the revolution and the turnaround that occurred in

112. Fanon 1967, p. 89. 113. Fanon 1967, p. 51; on this matter, see Balibar 2001, pp. 1303–4 (English translation in Balibar 2009), Bertinotti 2004a, p. iii, and Bertinotti 2004b, p. 284. 114. Fanon 1967, p. 95. 115. Fanon 1967, pp. 54, 57.

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anticolonial revolutions in China and Vietnam, to name but two. Once again, we can reiterate the consideration previously made with reference to Mao: the indiscriminate celebration of violence for its own sake is still a long way off. Therefore, we are left with the crude and, at first sight, even repugnant formulation that we have already seen. How can this be explained? The answer lies in the experience of the long, interminable period of colonial rule with its dehumanising practices. Thanks to their crushing military superiority and total control over the ideological system, for a long time the oppressors managed to drum a sense of irreparable inferiority and impotence into their victims, and the white supermen appeared to be surrounded by an aura of invincibility. Precisely for this reason, rather than attempting a rebellion which would have been doomed to fail from the start, for a long time black slaves preferred to inflict violence on themselves: the practice of suicide and the killing of newborn babies were major episodes in the ordeal suffered by black people for centuries. On other occasions, the victims imagined that a merciful divinity could make them invulnerable to the firearms of the invaders and white masters. As a result of this illusion, between 1889 and 1890 the Native Americans managed to make a final gesture of resistance, even though they were on the verge of annihilation. The same misconception explains how, around ten years later, and thousands of kilometres away in China, the Boxers squared up to their ultra-powerful and otherwise unstoppable enemy, who had invaded, overpowered and humiliated their country. These phenomena can still be seen today, albeit in a slightly different form. Examples are the practice of suicide-attacks (historically very familiar to slaves), above all in Palestine and the Middle East, and the fact that these ‘martyrs’ expect to achieve immortality and reach heaven (a variation on the invulnerability that Native Americans and Boxers thought they could obtain by practising magic).116 Fanon’s claim that violence ‘rids the colonized of their inferiority complex’ should be read in this historical and anthropological context. Terrible acts have been committed recently in Iraq and Palestine by both sides, with disrespect occasionally shown towards the corpses of fallen enemies. This is clearly a practice which must be condemned unconditionally. However, it does not mean that we cannot adopt different approaches to analyse the ideological, political and even existential backgrounds to these abhorrent acts, which vary on a case-by-case basis. It might be useful here to recall some of Marx’s writing: when answering accusations levelled at the 116. See Losurdo 2007, Chapter 1, Section 11.

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‘incendiarism’ committed by the Paris Commune, he made a distinction between ‘the vandalism of defence in despair’ and ‘the vandalism of triumph’.117 The considerations he made regarding the Sepoy-Rebellion are also especially relevant. Marx noted that in China and India acts of infamy had been committed by both the colonial power and the people subjected to aggression and military occupation. However, while, on one side, the colonial troops practised ‘mere wanton sports’, using violence as a form of entertainment to find confirmation of their pre-eminence and superiority over the natives, on the other side, there was an explosion of ‘wars of insurrection, of nationalities, of races, and above all of religion’ unleashed by oppressed peoples. They practised a blind, savage form of violence in a desperate attempt to erase the mark of inferiority stamped by the dominant colonial power and achieve the recognition tenaciously denied to them.118 Let us now return to the Middle East in the present day. On one side, we have the victors in the framework of a regular army, looking down on the Untermenschen with boundless contempt, and treating them as inferior subhuman beings from the height of their technological and military superiority and the conviction that they represent a superior civilisation. A song sung by an American soldier eloquently bears witness to this attitude. It was widely available on the internet, but I am quoting it from Corriere della Sera. It praised the killing of an Iraqi girl and a small crowd was seen applauding: ‘The blood sprayed from between her eyes. And then I laughed maniacally’. This is because the Arabs ‘should have known they were fucking with a Marine’.119 On the other side, we have the Iraqis and Palestinians outside the framework of a regular army, giving vent to the long series of humiliations they have had to suffer as presumed Untermenschen by sometimes attacking fallen American or Israeli soldiers. Violence directed at an enemy-corpse is barbarism under any circumstances. The fact remains, however, that, in one case, it is the expression of the desire to reduce the colonised people to the status of Untermenschen, while, in the other, it constitutes a crude, primitive attempt by the colonised people to wipe out this dehumanising inequality. In the former case, blind uncontrolled violence is the negation of recognition, while, in the latter case, it is the warped, desperate form that the struggle for recognition assumes. A mature revolutionary movement must condemn ignoble, degrading practices right across the board, but the maturity of the movement is also measured by its

117. Marx and Engels 1955–89e, pp. 358–9. 118. Marx and Engels 1955–89d, pp. 285–86. 119. See Losurdo 2007, Chapter 1, Section 9.

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ability to evaluate barbaric violence in a different way, while continuing to condemn it unreservedly. It is interesting to draw a comparison between Gandhi and Fanon with regard to the relationship between violence and the struggle for recognition. Grouping them together may seem paradoxical and even provocative, but, upon careful examination, common ground shared by the two authors clearly emerges. Gandhi wrote that: ‘The British have the great vice of depriving a subject nation of its self-respect’,120 while Fanon observed: ‘The colonized . . . took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society but also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes’ and that the oppressor instils ‘in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order’.121 On a more strictly military level, the colonised people are branded as cowards. Therefore, in order to achieve recognition, they are forced to throw off this accusation too, one which has now been internalised and has thereby become an obstacle to the recovery of self-respect. Gandhi continued as follows: Only equals can be partners. There can be no partnership between the cat and the mouse, between the ant and the elephant. . . . With this cowardly fear in us, how can we be the equals of the British?

Therefore, ‘as long as we are not free from the fear of the military, so long we cannot be regarded as equal partners with Englishmen’.122 This is why Gandhi invited his compatriots to insist on enlisting in the imperial army during the First World-War, even in the event of the British government interposing obstacles. This is an essential point: ‘The British are a nation of heroes. They will recognise heroism’,123 the heroism of a people who, as we know, Gandhi called on to shed their ‘effeminacy’ once and for all and demonstrate their male courage and ‘manhood’. Using different language, Fanon spoke of the revolutionary ‘violence’ of the colonised as ‘the absolute praxis’.124 Both Gandhi and Fanon saw violence as the way to earn recognition, through active and even heroic participation in war. However, while the former felt that violence should target the enemies of the Empire from which

120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

‘Appeal for Enlistment’, in Gandhi 1969–2001b, p. 86. Fanon 1967, pp. 89, 4. Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 80, 83. Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 85, 82. Fanon 1967, p. 44.

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recognition was desired, the latter felt it was a question of attacking the coloniser. How can this difference be assessed? The stance assumed by Gandhi can be placed in the context of a very precise tradition, which was defined above all by events in the USA after the end of the nineteenth century. Subjected to all kinds of humiliation, discrimination and persecution in the South, Afro-Americans tried to gain recognition by fighting on the frontline during the Union-Wars. As a result, certain groups started to pay tribute to the bravery shown by black soldiers in the Battle of Wounded Knee.125 This idea became increasingly prevalent in subsequent larger-scale wars. In this way, Afro-Americans aimed to achieve emancipation by accepting to become cannon-fodder for objectives which were not theirs or, in the case of Wounded Knee, even by implementing a policy of disemancipation and annihilation to the detriment of the Native Americans. In this sense, we should speak about an ambition to co-opt rather than a struggle for recognition (recognition sought and earned to the detriment of others). On the occasion of the Anglo-Boer War, Gandhi spoke about the Boer people with great fondness and emotionally underlined the ‘indescribable sufferings’ to which Boer women were subjected, locked up by the English in ‘concentration camps’. Nevertheless, he invited his fellow countrymen to line up alongside the British Empire, ‘not to enter into the merits of the war’ and to demonstrate their ‘manhood’ and even their ‘heroism’.126 Emancipation was pursued to the detriment of a third party, a people whom Gandhi had also openly admired. Furthermore, on the occasion of the First World-War, he called upon India to ‘offer all her able-bodied sons as a sacrifice to the Empire’, the same Empire ‘of which we aspire, in the near future, to be partners in the same sense as the Dominions overseas’.127 The aim was to follow the statute of the white dominions and enjoy the same home-rule that they did, but a general emancipation-plan was notable by its absence. For example, there was no reference to African or Middle-Eastern colonies, or any reference to the fact that by liberating the white community from any form of external control and obstruction, home-rule in Australia and New Zealand had given rise to the extermination of the indigenous people. In terms of a general emancipation-plan, there was also no general critique of colonial rule or violence. This is the radical difference with respect to Fanon (and the communist movement).

125. Litwack 1998, p. 463. 126. Gandhi 1969–2001c, pp. 18, 63. 127. Gandhi 1969–2001b, pp. 7–8.

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In the final analysis, Gandhi’s policy was a request for co-optation addressed to the British government for the benefit of the Indian population. Not by chance, he had proclaimed his ‘faith in the British Empire’ since the time of the Anglo-Boer War and constantly put forward the figure of the Englishman as an example to his fellow countrymen. He dismissed doubts over participation in the war against a heroic people who might, in the end, even have been victorious as follows: Would an Englishman think for a moment what would happen to himself if the English lost the war? A man about to join a war cannot advance such an argument without forfeiting his manhood.128

Although Gandhi’s approach became more radical in later years, he never fully overcame this initial fundamental limit. This explains the peculiar phenomenon that is currently in full swing in India, whereby strong fundamentalist movements recognise the legendary Indo-Aryans as the original population of the country and call on people to recover and reassert their genuine identity by throwing off any established external influences. Identification with the Englishman has thus turned into identification with the Aryan ideology he professed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

16. An ambiguous watchword unable to keep its promises The main feature that emerges from the historical-philosophical overview we have outlined is the extreme vagueness of the concept of nonviolence. Is it synonymous with an appeal to all nations to disarm completely and dismantle their armies and police-forces? An appeal for nonviolence has little meaning unless it attacks the state-run bodies that are qualified to inflict violence. However, even if they are attacked, the appeal is in fact no more than an invitation to every nation to abandon its nation-status. Weber’s classic definition of a state as the entity that possesses the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is well known. However, the difficulty is not even overcome if condemnation of violence is limited to targeting wars between nations and the armies that fight them; we have seen how major figures and groups in the American Peace Society considered the American Civil War to be a simple police-operation. On the other hand, colonial wars have often been presented as international police-operations throughout history, and the wars launched by the United States to uphold its global 128. Gandhi 1969–2001c, p. 63.

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Empire maintain this tradition. Indeed, they have an even greater need for this ideological cover. The current most prominent advocates of nonviolence are members or associates of left-wing groups. Should we therefore ask Cuba to dismantle its army? It would hand victory to the violence inflicted in the past in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and still in progress today, not only through sporadic attempts at terrorism, but, above all, through a deadly economic embargo and threatening military pressure. This pressure is already a form of warfare, as we saw previously by drawing on Hobbes’s accurate analysis. Therefore, an appeal to Cuba for disarmament would really constitute a form of support for the military, diplomatic and economic pressure and the American war-inprogress. Nonviolent militants may well be satisfied with the purity of their conviction from an ethical point of view, but, if we conduct analysis based on the ethics of responsibility (the reference-set of ethics for understanding the field of political relations and conflict), they come across as anything but innocent and pure in moral terms. The significance of the spread of the theory of nonviolence on the Left is different from how it first appears. A book whose title invites us to Change the World Without Taking Power129 has recently enjoyed great success in left-wing circles. Upon more careful analysis, the watchword ‘nonviolence’ takes shape as the renunciation of conquest and power-management. The unilaterally catastrophic overview of twentieth-century Communism has thus prompted an escape from history and politics and a conversion to a religion disguised to varying degrees. There is no need to set all this against Lenin, but it is worth returning to Bonhoeffer at this point: Political action means to perceive responsibility. It cannot happen without power. Power enters the service of responsibility.130

Does the religion of nonviolence at least manage to limit violence in emancipation-movements, even if it does not manage to do so with imperialist and reactionary violence? The answer is that it does not. We have seen how major figures and groups in the American Peace Society salvaged their good ‘nonviolent’ consciences in the mid-nineteenth century by respectively criminalising and dehumanising the rebelling Indians and participants in the secession of the Southern slave-states. This dialectic, whereby the unconditional condemnation of violence has the final effect of boosting and worsening it, was also evident throughout the twentieth century. It is worth noting that current 129. Holloway 2002. 130. Bonhoeffer 1958–74, p. 477.

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watchwords have recaptured the most emphatic illusions of the communist movement, which for so long promised a society where all forms of violence and power would disappear after a transition-phase of dictatorship, and where the ‘transformation of power into love’ would occur, to repeat the young Bloch’s previously-seen formulation. However, this vision, which even brands a constitution-plan as bourgeois (by implying the permanence of the state and therefore also of violence and power) and automatically devalues any idea of limiting power, played such a destructive rôle in Soviet Russia and the ‘socialist field’ that it extended and in the end exacerbated both the state of exception and the violence in it.131 In addition to reaffirming an oppressed people’s right to make an autonomous choice over the methods of their struggle for emancipation, a move away from the messianic expectation that all forms of physical force will disappear is also an essential requirement for placing an effective restriction on violence and power. Translated by Frank Gordon.

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