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Bonapartist Solutions

There is a strong case to be made that the Eighteenth Brumaire still holds the key to understanding contemporary French politics. For Marx grasped that the secret of bourgeois power in France lay in the division between urban and rural popular forces; their mutual fear and loathing benefited a highly concentrated ruling class claiming a universal civilizational mission while establishing an impressively lavish welfare regime catering mostly to those who needed it the least. This model originated in the Directorate, was developed under the first Bonaparte and came to full fruition in 1848.

As Cagé and Piketty point out in Une histoire du conflit politique (2023), a book that sometimes reads like a rerelease of Marx’s classic bolstered by reams of quantitative data, the Bonapartist structure was only really challenged in the early twentieth century by a militant working class led by a Communist Party that forced the political system into a left/right alternation. Since the early 1990s, however, Bonapartism has reemerged stronger than before. In Macron it assumes a classic form. The right of the Rassemblement National and the left of La France insoumise (the ‘extremes’, in the parlance of the quality press) balance one another, while the radical centre – the bourgeois bloc anatomized by Serge Halimi – is free to pursue its own interests, while also claiming to protect the dignity of the nation, wider humanity and now the ecosphere itself. A remarkable political formula, as Mosca would have put it.

This raises an important question. Why can the American capitalist class, certainly the most powerful in history, not reproduce it? The paradox here is that this class has become hamstrung by a party structure that served it well for many decades. Historically, the two-party system split the working class between Democrats and Republicans, with the resulting vertical blocs cemented by a combination of promised concessions and personalist demagogy. Once in power, though, the parties would typically jettison their electoral programmes and tack toward the centre. But what has occurred in the most recent period – a phenomenon related to the rise of what I call political capitalism – are intra-party revolts on both the right and the left, the former significantly more powerful than the later. This turbulence within both parties reflects the wider problem of a capitalist system decreasingly able to deliver material gains to the working class.

This creates a dangerous situation for the rulers in which they cannot easily find a vehicle to re-establish equilibrium. Thus, a set of curious political symptoms have appeared: quixotic third party projects with no chance of success, former Republican operatives trying to recruit upscale conservatives for Biden, retreads from the Bush administration appearing on MSNBC and so on. These are all people who would like to establish an American version of Macronism, but cannot. Why? Because in a political system where the duopoly forces a choice, and where the parties seem paradoxically to be strengthening (one of the strange ways in which the US is Europeanizing just as Europe is Americanizing), it is difficult to reshuffle voter loyalites to allow for a Bonapartist solution. Deprived of this option, the American bourgeoisie is doomed to work within the confines of a party system that has now become a dysfunctional relic.  

Read on: Dylan Riley & Robert Brenner, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, NLR 138.

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Marx or Jefferson?

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

In contrast to Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry. Dividing up land can be both politically liberatory and economically regressive, as the French Revolution demonstrated most clearly. Remember too that Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926), a text which bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction, was written partially as a defence against the accusation that the nascent Italian communist party demanded the breakup of the southern latifundia.

It may be, after all, that Du Bois is best understood neither as a theorist of intersectionality avant la lettre, nor as a Marxist, but rather as a radical and consistent democrat. His ideal political subject was the independent family farmer, able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms. In this Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.

Read On: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregations Sequiturs’, NLR 136.

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Rhythms of History

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who died late last year, was among the great French historians of the twentieth century. A researcher of singular ability and imagination, he trained as a social historian in the Annales tradition, and came to prominence with the publication of Les Paysans de Languedoc (1966), which legitimized his succession to the editorship of the Annales journal, launched by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929. Whereas his predecessor, Fernand Braudel, had widened the geographical sweep of Annales history during his post-war tenure, pushing beyond France to encompass the economic and social activity of the greater Mediterranean world, Le Roy Ladurie returned the focus to rural France. He would go on to undertake a series of methodological experiments in fine-grained, micro-level analysis. At the same time, Le Roy Ladurie developed a form of climate history that sought to grasp the interrelationship between the environment and human society, virtually inventing the field in the process.

He was born in 1929 in Calvados, a sea-facing department of Normandy. His mother, Léontine Dauger, was the daughter of a viscount, his father, Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, was an independent farmer who later became Secretary-General of the Union Nationale des Syndicats Agricoles, a Catholic peasant union that supported agricultural protectionism and allied itself with the agrarian fascist Greenshirts. In 1942, he was appointed Vichy’s Minister of Agriculture and Food Supply, but opposed the regime’s forced conscription of French civilians for labour service in Germany and resigned his post after a few months. Toward the end of the war, he joined a right-wing Resistance group, but was nevertheless arrested as a collaborator during the purges. His son later observed that the French Revolution had never quite reached this part of Normandy, that in many ways its patterns of life were continuous with those of the Ancien Régime.

Le Roy Ladurie studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, then a bastion of communist organizing, and was soon radicalized. Mao’s peasant revolution inspired him to join the French Communist Party, in an experience he described as a ‘conversion, a metanoia’. For his master’s thesis, he chose a suitably ‘politically engaged’ topic, French colonial policy in late nineteenth-century Indochina. It was supervised by Charles-André Julien, a Trotskyist and one of France’s few specialists in colonial history. Another early mentor was Pierre Vilar, a socialist within the Annales fold, who, in his student’s estimation, represented the best in Marxian thought, namely a totalising analysis of social reality that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods.

It was customary at the time for doctoral students in history to be sent to the provinces to cut their teeth in the local archives. In 1953, Le Roy Ladurie was dispatched to Montpellier where he taught for ten years, first in a high school, and later as a junior professor at the University of Montpellier. Like Braudel – his future mentor and a fellow northerner – he was enchanted by the landscape, architecture and history of the Midi. Yet he found Party life more stultifying in the south. As a young militant eager to shake up the PCF’s internal culture, he and others like him were labelled ‘termites’. The Soviet invasion of Hungary soon prompted his exit from the party. With the war in Algeria unfolding, Le Roy Ladurie, wishing to remain politically engaged, founded a political action committee, gathering a contingent of local anti-war activists. The group was eventually absorbed into the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU), a key organization of the French New Left composed of different factions of communist and socialist parties.

In 1963, Braudel offered him a position in the Centre de recherches historiques at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Unable to resist the ‘Braudelian sirens’, Le Roy Ladurie returned to Paris, quitting the PSU in the process. It was at this point, he later reflected, that he chose to put his ‘political conscience on the back burner for a bit’; moving to Paris ultimately provided an opportunity to ‘quietly slip out of my own skin’. A combination of careerism and disenchantment would see Le Roy Ladurie move steadily rightwards over the coming decades.

He arrived back in Paris with a thesis manuscript already exceeding a thousand pages. It would be published in two volumes as Les Paysans de Languedoc. A history of rural life in Languedoc from 1500 to 1800, it was a work of striking erudition and creativity, which stands alongside Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean and Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges as one of the most innovative texts produced by the Annales school. Its main sources were the compoix, property records that allowed Le Roy Ladurie to study ‘the extent, nature and value of landholdings’ over the longue durée. Beginning the work while still a member of the PCF, Le Roy Ladurie had intended to trace the origins of capitalism. But he was led in a different direction: the evidence ‘mastered me by imposing its own rhythms’. It is an apt metaphor, for the book provides a kind of symphonic history, attentive not just to the economic and demographic cycles, but also to culture, psychology and the biological dimensions of human existence.

The picture that emerged from this ‘total history’ was of a society locked into cycles of Malthusian pressures and unable to generate the conditions necessary for the development of capitalism. As the population began to multiply in the late fifteenth century, agricultural production remained sluggish, making growth all but impossible. Le Roy Ladurie discerns frustration at this impasse in the cultural and political spheres – in the preoccupation with heavenly salvation during the Reformation, a rise in anti-tax revolts, the frenzy over the witches’ Sabbaths. In the end, it was the expanding French state that acted to intensify social contradictions, its increasingly muscular tax policies aggravating the problems of underdevelopment, leading to a surge in rural protest in the seventeenth century. Like Tocqueville, Le Roy Ladurie saw the absolutist state as a major engine of social development in the Ancien Régime, though with the crucial difference that he regarded it as a force of instability rather than an instrument of order.

A year later, Le Roy Ladurie published his second thesis, the epic Histoire du climat depuis l’an mil (1967). In many ways a drier exercise, the book sought to establish a rigorous methodology for studying climate history. This involved freeing it from anthropocentric prejudice and discovering data sets that could furnish clear patterns of change. In particular, Le Roy Ladurie hoped to confirm the existence of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe, a period of cooling that lasted from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. He relied on the evidence of wine harvests to trace the fluctuation of temperatures: late harvests showed a high correlation with rainy and cold weather. Though he abstained from passing final judgement, he noted that the process of working through the data would make climate history scientific much in the way ‘alchemy eventually turned into chemistry’. Once climate history established its scientific credentials, he argued, it could move into studying the natural environment’s impact on human civilization, in which case ‘climatic history would become ecological history’ and help shed light on wars, epidemics, migrations and political revolts. In this respect, Le Roy Ladurie’s first two books formed a complementary analytic: from different angles and with different temporal schemes, they surveyed a human world closely bound up with the dynamics of nature.

From these first histories, Le Roy Ladurie generated a complex research programme that branched off in different directions. One was the social history of rural areas in France, with a book produced on tithes in the Ancien Régime, multiple studies of the peasantry and an analysis of conscripts in the early nineteenth-century French army. This last work tabulated reports from medical examiners, which documented, among other things, rates of diseases, malnutrition, goitres, hernias and bad teeth in young draftees. For Le Roy Ladurie, this was a step toward building a bio-ecological history of France. It was in this social-historical mode that he participated in the ‘Brenner debate’ on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Robert Brenner had argued that the origins of capitalism lay in the social-property relations and dynamic class structures of seventeenth-century England, and that Malthusian accounts of the transition, focused on repetitive cycles, failed to capture such dynamism. In his response, Le Roy Ladurie defended his methodology, maintaining that its correlation of production, population, land rent and prices was highly compatible with Marxist analysis. He also challenged what he took to be Brenner’s narrow path to capitalism, one that required the destruction of the peasantry – what Le Roy Ladurie called teasingly an ‘Augustinian view of history’. This, he insisted, underestimated the resilience and ‘remarkable potential of the peasant family model’ as seen in Belgium, Holland, northern Italy and Catalonia during the early era of industrial capitalism.

A second line of research brought Le Roy Ladurie into the domain of popular culture. His initial foray, Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975), was based on an archival trouvaille: Inquisition records documenting a bishop’s attempt to stamp out Cathar heresy in a remote southwestern enclave. From these, Le Roy Ladurie was able to reconstruct in ethnographic detail the mental and material world of these secluded peasants. The influence of the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss was evident, for in the absence of both the centralizing state and powerful aristocratic demesnes, the main organizing principle of village life was the local family unit, which dictated social alliances and conflicts. Wheras Le Roy Ladurie’s quantitative histories had tracked long-term shifts and fluctuations, Montaillou appears in a seemingly eternal state of patriarchal-economic relations.

Montaillou sold a quarter of a million copies and was translated into dozens of languages. Two years earlier, Le Roy Ladurie was elected to Braudel’s former chair at the Collège de France, his candidacy supported by Lévi-Strauss and Georges Duby. With a bestseller and a berth in France’s most prestigious academy, he had ascended to the very top of his profession and become the standard-bearer of the ‘third generation’ of Annales.

The next decade would see him widen his study of peripheral mentalités, often in unpredictable ways. In L’Argent, l’amour et la mort en pays d’oc (1980), he analysed a well-known eighteenth-century folktale, Jean-L’Ont-Pris, often taken to be a straightforward description of rural life in the pre-Revolutionary Midi. Le Roy Ladurie refused any realistic interpretation of the récit and offered instead a formidable reading that assembled more than sixty examples of vernacular literature to explore the deeper themes and structures of Languedocian consciousness.

Carnaval de Romans (1979), an account of a massacre of workers in the Dauphiné during the winter festival of 1580, was treated by many as a follow-up to Montaillou, due to the folkloric and symbolic dimensions of the protest. But in many ways, Le Roy Ladurie was investigating new terrain. It was the first time he had studied an urban setting, with its different orders of craftsmen and consular powers. What is unveiled is not a cultural or religious interpretation of the massacre, but – atypically for the Annales school – a political-economic history of class struggle. In Le Roy Ladurie’s telling, a group of local notables had seized control of municipal institutions, availing itself of fiscal privileges and suppressing the popular classes. When a threat arose from the lower orders, the oligarchs launched a pre-emptive attack and killed twenty of the movement’s leaders. Whereas Montaillou appeared frozen in time, Romans was at a critical point in the history of the Ancien Régime, poised between the folk traditions and popular assemblies of the past and the radicalization of oligarchies that would define the struggles of the future and lead to revolution.

The 1980s saw a further rightward drift in Le Roy Ladurie’s outlook, occasioned, at least in part, by the election of Mitterrand. What alarmed him, he wrote in the memoir Paris-Montpellier: P.C.-P.S.U., 1945-1963 (1983), was not so much Mitterrand himself, but rather the Faustian bargain he had struck with the PCF, a party still committed to the ‘totalitarian’ principles of Marxism-Leninism. With fascism defeated, he had come to believe that communism posed the greatest threat to that ‘island of liberty’ known as Western Europe. Le Roy Ladurie’s work underwent a parallel shift. In 1987 came L’État royal, 1460-1610, followed by its sequel, L’Ancien Régime, 1610-1770 (1991). Striking in both instances was the abandonment of the ‘from below’ perspective, which had previously been a unifying principle of his writings. Gone were the peasants, famines, Sabbaths and rural protests, as attention turned to courtly life and high politics. Surprising too was how he tended to identify with the absolutist state in his account (he remarks, for instance, that ‘the War of American Independence was intelligently pursued by the French, despite various reverses on the naval side’). Yet even if at stark variance with the Annales’ tradition, this work nevertheless showed traces of Le Roy Ladurie’s distinctive anthro-historical approach to the Ancien Régime, as when he proposed, in the second volume, to study the exercise of power along the lines of anthropologist Georges Dumézil’s ‘trifunctional hypothesis’, breaking down authority into sacred, economic and martial components.

In 1997, Le Roy Ladurie then published an ethnographic account of court society through the eyes of the Duc de Saint-Simon, whose Memoirs, a classic of Baroque literature, had been a livre de chevet of the historian’s since his teenage years. He argued that the petit duc was the most thoroughgoing proponent of hierarchy that court life had ever known. Historians had mistakenly enlisted Saint-Simon among the modernizers at Versailles, whereas in fact he was ‘an archaic specimen’, ‘a ruin ripe for excavation’. All Saint-Simon’s observations were subordinated to this axial belief: bastardy, which Louis XIV legalized for the purpose of legitimating an heir, could not be tolerated on the grounds that it resulted from a ‘perversion of procreation’; seating arrangements at court had to scrupulously follow the order of ranks.

Had it stopped here, Le Roy Ladurie’s career trajectory would have had a clean arc, moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’, social to political, radical to conservative. But after his retirement from the Collège in 1999, he returned to the climate history he had inaugurated in the 1960s, publishing the massive Histoire humaine et comparée du climat trilogy. In this forty-year interval, Le Roy Ladurie had never stopped collecting data on wine harvests and glaciers, and here he employs this mountain of evidence to produce a detailed and complex longue durée history of human beings’ relationship with the climate. This totalizing eco-history marks the culmination of a life’s work in the furrows of Annales history, and leaves no doubt as to the warming of the planet during the industrial era. As Mike Davis suggested in NLR, Le Roy Ladurie has left behind an intricate map for scholars to puzzle over as they tackle the climate emergency. This would require close collaboration between historians and scientists, and a continued focus on human history as eco-history; or, Annales at its very best.

Read on: Mike Davis, ‘Taking the Temperature of History’, NLR 110.

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Without End

The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.

But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states. Mayer told this origin story so often – and the story has so often been told ­– that I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of a family myth. I see his in-betweenness differently.

I was introduced to Arno as an undergraduate at Princeton by my roommate, the son of the European intellectual historian Stuart Hughes. I don’t know if it was my personality or my connection to Hughes, but for whatever reason, Arno immediately made me feel like family. His writing gives the impression of an old-world Jewish sophisticate, but in his being and bearing, he reminded me of nothing so much as my very non-academic Jewish American family from the suburbs of New York. Arno always asked about parents, children, and grandparents first, before he talked politics or scholarship. He was affectionate, demonstrative, warm. His feelings were as strong as his opinions were sharp. He had passion and presence. He loved to gossip and plot, especially at academic conferences. He kvelled, he complained, he was stocky and short.

That was Arno. That was also his work. If it was in-between, it was not because he hewed to or hailed from the margins. It was because Arno, by disposition and temperament, was always trying to get inside, to get to the centre of things, to connect across the perimeter. Other diplomatic historians studied the relations between states. Arno looked inside of states, at the domestic relations and power struggles within. When he wrote about the French and Russian Revolutions, he turned not to Marx or Lenin but to The Oresteia and the Hebrew Bible, master texts of familial violence and personal vengeance. Where other Marxist historians of the twentieth century spoke of the transition to finance capital and the corporate form, Arno was more impressed by the staying power of the family firm.

His most daring and enduring ideas – that the First and Second World Wars were like the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century; that the history of modern Europe is not one of a rising bourgeoisie but of a regnant aristocracy; that the Holocaust might be compared to the pogroms of the Crusades, a work of detoured ambition, in which a marauding army from the West, crazed and stymied in its quest for the lands of the East, acts out its zeal and frustration on the helpless Jews caught in the way – are not the creations of a contrarian. They are reflections of a spirit seeking to dispel the depersonalizing aura and bureaucratic myths of modernity in favour of more intimate, domestic, familial, and lineal, but no less tractable or terrible, examples from the past.

Those and other ideas once made Arno the most heterodox of Marxists, a practitioner of what he called social history from above. Today, they read like dispatches from the daily news. Take his most important work, The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981). From the moment of its publication, specialists challenged Mayer’s claim that the landed interests of the European nobility, including Britain’s, remained economically and politically hegemonic up through the First World War. Despite those challenges, the book, well, persists. It contains multiple provocations that have come to seem only more pertinent with time.

In his analysis of Europe’s states and empires, particularly their political structures and institutions, Mayer drew inspiration from Engels’s famous claim, in Anti-Dühring, that as early modern Europe came to be ‘more and more bourgeois…the political order remained feudal’. We might take similar instruction from Mayer (and Engels) today. The United States has one of the most archaic constitutional orders of the world, designed originally to protect the interests of the landed, monied, and enslaving classes, the white and the wealthy, from the majority. Not only does that constitutional order still, today, protect and enhance, through the state, older, whiter, more conservative, and more privileged sectors of society. It also is almost completely impervious to the forces and demands of demographic and social change, particularly young people, people of colour and newer immigrants. Of all the constitutions in the world, the American is the most difficult to amend. While scholars and journalists lavish attention on the social dysfunction of America – the racist and other pathologies of the white working class, the refusal of evangelicals to accept truth and facts, the toxic influence of television and social media – they pay less attention to what Schumpeter called the ‘steel frame’ of the political order. That was Mayer’s great theme: the archaic holdover of the social and economic past, how it takes shape and form in the state and its institutions, inviting reactionary, elite but declining, forces to find refuge, succour, position and space. It should be our own.

Nor can the family capitalism discussed in The Persistence of the Old Regime be treated as a European holdover of a feudal past. Thanks to the work of Thomas Piketty, Steve Fraser and Melinda Cooper, we now see family or dynastic capitalism as a fixture of our neoliberal present, a deliberate recreation of a form that was supposed to have been destroyed by two world wars and replaced by the multinational corporations and investment banks of the global economy. Imagined in different ways by Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter ­– scions of that fading central European imperium that Mayer continuously anatomized in his work – dynastic capitalism is the product of elite political moves and countermoves that Mayer thought were intrinsic to all forms of capitalism. Political capitalism, in his telling, is the only kind of capitalism.

Where we imagine today’s city as the home of the left, The Persistence of the Old Regime reminds us that the city can be the natural space of the right. At the turn of the last century, European cities, particularly imperial capitals, employed vast numbers in the tertiary sector of commerce, finance, real estate, government and the professions. Members of those sectors, which included much of what we today would call the PMC, often outnumbered the more traditionally recognized ranks of the urban proletariat. Far from generating a cosmopolitan or metropolitan left, they were a breeding ground of the radical right.

Until recently, Mayer’s political geography of the city might have seemed of historical interest only. With Israel’s war on Gaza, it bears re-reading. An alliance has emerged, or simply become visible, in metropolitan centres across America – of wealthy donors from tech, finance and real estate, and their underlings; government officials; university administrators and employees; philanthropists; cultural movers and shakers; local politicians from both parties; and pro-Israel politicos and campus groups – exercising increasing sway over urban spaces of culture and education. These are not the obvious forces of Trumpist reaction – the small business owners or independent car dealerships that leftists have emphasized or the white working class that liberals love to hate. Indeed, many of these individuals contribute to the Democrats and voted for Biden. But they are Mayer’s prototypical sources of reaction, claiming the mantle of victimhood as they enhance the imperial projects of some of the most powerful nations on earth. And they may help put Trump back into office.

Perhaps Mayer’s most proleptic ­– and, not coincidently, least discussed – idea is that of vengeance. It emerged late in Mayer’s career, I think, in his work The Furies (2000). Seeking to counter the revisionist consensus on the French and Russian Revolutions, which held that ideological utopianism fuelled their descent into violence and terror, Mayer claimed that each side of the struggle, the revolution and the counterrevolution, was inspired by a desire for vengeance, to retaliate against longstanding injuries and more recent acts of violence. While the revolutionary side sought to impose what Michelet called a ‘violence to end violence’, to create a new form of sovereignty that would stop the wilding in the streets and bloodshed in the countryside, it soon discovered what Clytemnestra and Orestes realize in The Oresteia: every attempt at one final act of violence only sets the stage for the next.

For years, I read Mayer’s account of vengeance as merely an attempt to salvage utopian thinking from the dead hand of the Cold War. More recently, I’ve come to think of it as an uncanny description of what was to come, of what solidarity and animosity look like after the Age of Ideology or the Age of Revolution or the Age of Utopia has come to an end. Every day, on the internet or in the streets, people are called upon to avenge an act taken against themselves or their team. Every day, a new litany of historical injuries is amassed to explain the previous day’s excess. Every day, a history of mutual loyalty or diffident trust is dissolved to make way for the next day’s excess. No conflict is resolved; no congress is achieved; no constitution is drawn. It is fury without end.

Arno dedicated his life to opposing that world, to finding coherence amid chaos, to extracting a story from sound, to identifying the path forward for the party of movement. That he failed, in the end, to do so, that he wound up reverting to the most ancient texts to explain our most modern predicaments, is a sad and sobering thought. Yet his example may still offer us a way forward. Sartre said that ‘a victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat’. It would be foolish to think that we could simply reverse the predicates and proceed to victory from there. Perhaps we might try a different tack. Might not a defeat described in detail offer the left something akin to what Rosh Hashanah offers the Jews? Not a chance to begin – Burckhardt (not to mention the rabbis) warned against that delusion – but a chance to begin again.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The Figures of Descent’, NLR I/61.

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A Communist Life

‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’

Drawing perhaps on the distant memory of his own youthful Catholic activism, Negri extracts the materialist and humanist kernel of the resurrection of the flesh against all the miserable cults of finitude and being-towards-death. Negri’s lifelong war on the palaces was founded on the conviction that power, potestas, is nourished by a hatred of bodies and fixed in the threefold fetish of patriarchy-property-sovereignty. Its apparatchiks and administrators love that empty syllogism ‘every man is mortal’, which, Negri contends, is at the root ‘of the hatred of humanity, of that hatred that every authority, every power produces in order to affirm and consolidate itself: power’s hatred for its subjects. Power is founded on the introduction of death as an everyday possibility into life – without the threat of death, the idea and practice of power could not obtain. … Power is the continual effort to make death present for life.’

For Negri, freedom was a collective struggle against this lethal power, a fight against the fear of death, against terror, power’s currency. As the communist poet Franco Fortini had it in his rendering of the Internationale, chi ha compagni non morirà: those who have comrades will not die. Beyond the scholarly mastery of the history and theory of philosophy, law and the state, beyond the interminable yet urgent search for the revolutionary subject, beyond the hugely influential phenomenologies of capital’s power – from planner-state to crisis-state to Empire – at the core of Negri’s life and work was the idea that philosophy is inseparable from a practice of collective liberation, or from communism understood as a ‘joyous ethical and political collective passion that fights against the trinity of property, borders and capital’. This passion was something that Toni radiated. If anything marked him out among both militants and scholars, it was a kind of boundless curiosity, a generous desire to learn, in detail, from anyone genuinely involved in a struggle for liberation, which he always saw in the most capacious terms. His was not the cliché of a pacified wisdom – he could be combative, convoluted, contrary. But an irrepressible enthusiasm for liberation granted him a rare unruly youthfulness, even in old age. If wisdom entailed a joyful scorn for the powerful, what Spinoza called indignation, ‘a Hate toward someone who has done evil to another’, then Toni was wise indeed. That joy and that indignation saw him through a decade of captivity and fourteen years of exile, caricature and calumny, as too many from his generation turned state’s witness, literally and figuratively.

Both in print and in person, Toni had a reputation for optimism verging on fancy, especially when it came to his vision of the multitude – forged with his close friend and co-author Michael Hardt in a quartet of books that marked a season in the global left’s intellectual life. Many devotees of the party-form neglected that for Hardt and Negri the multitude is a new name both for mass organisation and for the working class beyond the assembly line. Accusations of naivety also overlooked that Toni – unsurprisingly for someone who experienced the ravages of war as a child and the brutalities of prison as an adult – nursed a deep belief in the need to confront the realities of spiritual and bodily suffering. His essay on the Book of Job and his study of Giacomo Leopardi were both aimed at thinking through poetry’s materialist ability to confront tragedy, pain, nihilism, and to make worlds from the experience of meaninglessness, failure, defeat. While Toni’s Marx was above all the one of the Grundrisse – of ‘real subsumption’ and the ‘General Intellect’ – there is a line from the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 that resonates with this materialist poetics of the body, when Marx writes that man is ‘a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being’.

This passion for a common freedom, lived through suffering but oriented towards a joy defying death, is the point where communism and philosophy, liberation, and ethics, met for Negri – in his writing as in his life. It is no accident that he devoted the very last pages of his autobiography, his parting words, to the fight against the far right that engulfed his own childhood and now threatens to return. The multitude’s weakness and fear, he tells us, is once again making room for a terror that wants the apotheosis of property, patriarchy and sovereignty, that wishes all expressions of joy prohibited. ‘Fascism’, Negri tells us, ‘rests on fear, produces fear, constitutes and constrains the people in fear’. Against fascism’s watchword, ‘long live death’, Toni built a life of thought, comradeship, love and struggle. I can’t think of a better way of honouring it than transcribing the final paragraph of his autobiography:

In the resistance to fascism, in the effort to break its domination, in the certainty of doing so, I have written this book. All that is left, my friends, is to leave you. With a smile, with tenderness, dedicating these pages to the virtuous men and women who preceded me in the art of subversion and liberation, and to those who will follow. We have said that they are ‘eternal’ – may eternity embrace us.

Read on: Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, ‘Empire, Twenty Years On’, NLR 120.

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Loose Threads

Panics over apparently novel threats to freedom of speech are nothing new. Yet, much like anxiety over the state of the youth, the latest free speech crisis is always presented as unprecedented. And as with other moral panics, those sounding the alarm often turn out to have little genuine interest in what they claim to be protecting. The most vociferous opponents of ‘cancel culture’ have been strangely silent – or worse – in recent weeks on the suppression of speech in support of the Palestinians or critical of Israel. ‘Free speech’ has a political function. Elaborate twists, somersaults and pirouettes are performed to make this most sacrosanct of freedoms do the bidding of those who invoke it.

The results can be discombobulating. Censorship is not the answer to speech we don’t like, we are told: fight speech with more speech. But critical speech itself is routinely cast as a form of censorship. Racist speech is protected; speech which criticises racist speech is an attempt at suppression. Meanwhile, it is permissible, indeed routine, to say that ‘the left’, ‘feminists’ or the ‘trans lobby’ are bigots – the real racists, sexists, antisemites – without setting off the free speech alarm. What this amounts to in practice is that calling someone a bigot is an offence against ‘free speech’ when it’s true, but not when it isn’t.

Underlying this discourse is a common-sense idea of free speech, one with roots in liberal theory. What it means to have freedom of speech, in this conception, is simple: nobody stops you from speaking (for example through a law banning or penalising the expression of certain opinions). Restricting speech, in the traditional liberal view, is justifiable only in rare and circumscribed conditions: where speech poses an immediate risk of dire harm; and in particular situations, such as meetings, where we may temporarily stop someone from speaking in order to allow someone else to be heard (the so-called ‘chairman principle’). By contrast, speech must not be restricted on the grounds of its propensity to cause offence (distinguished with somewhat artificial sharpness from the category of ‘harm’), however warranted or painful. While there may be grey areas, this model is attractive because it seems to make free speech a ‘default’ situation: we have it until someone interferes to prevent us from speaking.

But things are not nearly so tidy as they seem. The liberal conception trails loose threads: pull at any one of them and the whole thing threatens to unravel. One of these concerns the chairman principle. The right to speak without being drowned out by the speech of others only makes sense in specific contexts where you have a legitimate expectation of speaking and being heard – in a debating chamber, perhaps, but not during a concert or a firework display. This suggests that the apparently pristine principle of free speech is something far more pragmatic and conventional. Also implicit in the chairman principle is an acknowledgement that freedom of speech is more than the freedom to make noises: others need to be able to hear us. Freedom of speech is the freedom not just to make words but (to borrow from the philosopher J. L. Austin) to do things with those words.

Here is another loose thread. To be able to do anything with our words, we need not only to be heard but to make ourselves understood, in at least the minimal sense of that term. And how we are understood may be affected by, among other things, what people say about us (or people like us). Doesn’t speech about women, immigrants or benefits claimants – not to mention anarchists, Marxists, even social-democratic ‘Corbynistas’ – do this all the time, in numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways? As Catharine MacKinnon has put it, ‘speech acts, acts speak’, and one of the things speech does is affect what others can do with their speech. Our sayings and doings constantly combine to restrict, as well as enable, each other’s speech. Our ability to ‘speak’ in the sense that matters – meaning not the mere production of words but the achievement of some further, inherently social act of communication – is in fact always dependent on power relations.

Seen this way, freedom of speech is not a default condition that prevails unless it is obstructed or suspended. Against this backdrop, we may still discuss the merits and demerits of different ways of managing speech, from censorship and libel law to boycotts or no-platform policies. But the point is that there is no coherent scenario of unrestricted speech, understood as the absence of interference. This is so at odds with how we are accustomed to think about freedom of speech that it will seem to many that it simply cannot be right, that it must be a form of hyperbole to say that speech can restrict speech. Yet if speech is about more than uttering words, it becomes possible in principle to speak of freedom of speech being infringed by interventions that limit what our speech can do. Caroline West makes this point vividly using a thought experiment: suppose a government were to install a chip in the brains of its citizens, enabling it to switch off those citizens’ ability to understand language whenever certain views are being expressed (or when members of certain groups are speaking); we would not hesitate to call this a restriction on free speech, regardless of the fact that, in this scenario, citizens can still say whatever they like – and even, albeit in a thin and useless sense, be ‘heard’.

Yet it might be argued that West’s example only counts as a case in which free speech is being infringed because a definite entity (the government) is intentionally blocking the understanding or ‘uptake’ (in Austin’s lexicon) of speech. But where agency is diffuse and cumulative (as, often, with speech about immigrants, women or Corbynistas), so that no particular intervention or agent can be identified as solely responsible, it cannot sensibly be said that anyone’s freedom of speech has been compromised. This reveals another hanging thread in the liberal understanding of free speech. The so-called ‘negative’ conception of liberty first distinguished by Isaiah Berlin identifies freedom with the absence of external restraint. As applied to speech, this negative conception holds that speech is free so long as it is not subject to any external restriction, such as a government ban, as opposed to an ‘internal’ restriction such as inarticulacy. So far, so common-sense. 

But the line between being prevented and being unable is not so clear in practice. Someone who is too ‘inarticulate’ to make herself understood, for example, might alternatively be described as having been prevented (by education policy, say) from acquiring the skills that would render her speech intelligible and effective, or as being excluded by hegemonic standards of linguistic ‘correctness’. And why should external interference have to take the form of a one-off act by a clearly identifiable agent? If several companies pollute a river over many years, no single act can be blamed for the death of the fish (or the residents of a town downstream), but that does not make it tenable to claim that they merely ‘died’ from natural causes.

The distinction, central to the idea of negative liberty, between being impeded and being ‘merely’ unable, is often used to maintain the semblance of freedom in situations of powerlessness: nobody is stopping you from travelling – too bad you can’t afford the ticket; nobody is stopping you from sleeping indoors – too bad you can’t afford the rent. In the case of freedom of speech, the question becomes: why care only about whether we are ‘stopped’ from speaking, rather than asking what we can do about a society in which – in large part thanks to the concentration of wealth and access to the means of dissemination of opinion – some people are able to do a great deal with their words while others can do very little?  

Those on the political right, along with most liberals, overwhelmingly purport to endorse the standard, narrowly negative conception of free speech. They typically have no truck with talk of megaphones and the marginalisation of certain groups and perspectives in the media, or with the idea that the speech of some might ‘silence’ that of others, all of which they regard as just more soft-brained snowflakery. Yet in the fray of the free speech wars, the orthodox notion of free speech underlying these responses is often forgotten or discarded. For the right, almost anything – criticism, protest, factual correction – can be construed as an attack on ‘free speech’. Suddenly, it seems, speech can silence after all. Something similar occurs on the left, too. Whereas the right operates with a narrow conception of free speech, but drops it when convenient for ideological combat, some on the left disdain the narrow conception, but then invoke it in battle with the right. In the face of the right’s claims to have been ‘silenced’ or ‘cancelled’, the reply is often: boohoo, so you had your book contract withdrawn / got called nasty names. Nobody’s actually stopping you from speaking . . .

This may draw attention to the right’s double standards, but the riposte risks falling into an inconsistency of its own and endorsing the dominant model of free speech as absence of restriction rather than effective power. On this alternative understanding of free speech, by contrast, pointing out that nobody has actually been prevented from speaking when they are ‘no-platformed’, ‘cancelled’ or simply criticised, cannot be the end of the story. If I find that, due to my criticism of Israel, many institutions and organisations are unwilling to employ me, invite me to speak, or publish what I write, then it would be entirely appropriate to see this as a threat to my and others’ freedom of expression: I cannot, in this scenario, speak freely on certain subjects without subjecting myself to an unacceptable risk of unacceptable penalties; and nor can others, to whom my fate may serve as an example of the costs of dissent. Even if I could eventually find a job or a publisher, this might or might not wholly restore my power to do things with my words, and it would not mean that this power had not been damaged in the first place.

Similarly, on this more capacious conception of free speech – understood not merely as the absence of external restrictions, but as the ability to intervene effectively in the world with words – the idea that certain kinds of critical speech might restrict their targets’ ability to communicate successfully is not inherently confused, mistaken or metaphorical. Speech can and does silence: for example, through lies, smears and distortions that can make it difficult or impossible for us to make ourselves heard. The upshot of this need not be sympathy for those styled as free speech martyrs, many of whom see their public profiles and general ability to do things with their speech grow. But the left response is on firmer ground when it highlights the disingenuousness of certain claims of silencing by working with an expanded conception of freedom of speech and insisting that the withholding of platforms to speak be seen in this wider context. That people sometimes become more influential as a result of persecution does not mean they were not really persecuted. Nevertheless, when a purported instance of silencing leads to its victim becoming a cause célèbre, this can tell us something about the position of that person or their views in relation to power (even if what it tells is not always straightforward).

Are no-platforming and other restrictive measures all right so long as they are cases of ‘punching up’ – deployed against the powerful and those with the loudest voices? This isn’t satisfactory, either. Flat-earthers are marginalised and ridiculed; is it wrong to deny them speaking invitations since this is ‘punching down’? Only at the cost of absurdity. Is free speech then a matter of getting the platforms you deserve? The notion that the power of speech should be proportionate to its merit sits uneasily with the way in which we conventionally think about this freedom, because it begins to blur the fêted distinction between how we evaluate the content of an expression and our defence of the liberty to express it – one summed up in the renowned gloss on Voltaire (often mischaracterised as a direct quotation), ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. At the extreme, we end up saying that free speech is the freedom to say true things, or things judged to fall within the bounds of the (politically, morally or empirically) ‘reasonable’.

Yet if we instinctively reject that position, it’s not clear that the supposed content-neutrality of freedom of speech can survive scrutiny – nor that we really believe in it as much as we say we do. Is it a coincidence that those who defend the ‘free speech’ of those accused of racism tend to be those who are unconvinced that the speech is racist? Or that part of the point of defending ‘free speech’ on Israel is to resist charges of antisemitism regarded as cynically employed to suppress criticism? This pattern suggests that Voltaire’s separation, between how we evaluate speech and what we say about freedom, is not hard and fast. What we make of a given statement cannot only influence how we regard the prospect of the restriction of a speaker’s power to express it. It can also affect our judgement about whether a given response counts as a restriction, as an instance of ‘silencing’, in the first place.

Take smears. Clearly, the power of a person’s speech can be diminished if they are shunned and condemned, and this is so regardless of whether they really are a racist, a crank, or merely the victim of a witch-hunt. But it makes a difference whether the case is a smear, or one of legitimate criticism. This affects our view not only as to whether the loss of power is warranted, but also on the extent and nature of the loss. The notion of ‘uptake’ is central here. If my speech is misrepresented in a smear, then I may become unable to achieve basic uptake, to communicate my meaning effectively: my speech is received through a distorting filter, however hard I may try to circumvent it or compensate for it.  By contrast, critical speech which exposes genuine racism (for example) does not block its reception – and might actually enhance the speech power of its target in a sense (albeit not one the target is likely to find pleasing), insofar as it contributes to that target’s speech being understood for what it is.

Trading the artificial simplicity and false neutrality of the liberal view for one attentive to the workings of power might seem like a risky move; the prospect of departing from the safety of liberal norms always gives rise to fever dreams of totalitarian bogeymen, even when those norms are in reality anything but safe for most. As with any nightmare, this is not an ex nihilo invention: it is true that the language of power relations and oppression, ‘silencing’ and ‘safety’, is sometimes invoked to justify practices which are at best strategically unwise and at worst politically and humanly destructive. Yet far from a lapse into authoritarianism being the price of transcending the liberal model of free speech, there are grounds for regarding the malaises associated with a politics of ‘safety’ as symptomatic of the uncritical embrace of liberal modes of thinking which centre on the sovereign individual, and which treat problems like racism and sexism as contaminants of individual souls.

Thinking about freedom of speech as an effective power does not have determinate practical implications, but that is not the same as entailing indeterminacy or committing us to a fuzzy, case-by-case approach. There may be good reasons, in various areas of life, to operate with firm, practical principles. But we need not – and have no good reason to, and have good reason not to – rest these on unexamined or misleading concepts. It may be that thinking about free speech with proper attention to questions of power leads us toward practical postures which resemble or overlap with the relatively ‘hardline’ positions advocated (at least in theory) by some on the right, by libertarians of right and left, as well as by some liberals. If anything, an approach appropriately attuned to power will be less willing than the liberal approach to countenance restrictions of speech by entities like the state, which, once no longer viewed through the idealising lens characteristic of liberal political philosophy, reveals itself as in no way to be trusted.

The apocryphal Voltaire should be supplemented with an extension of the apocryphal Emma Goldman: if speech changed anything, they’d make it illegal. But that liberal rights like the formal freedom of speech and the right to vote are hollow does not mean we don’t have every reason to protest their removal or erosion. You can deny that the UK, for example, is a ‘democracy’ in the full sense of the word, yet still object when the government disenfranchises people through voter ID laws. Equally, we cannot really be said to have freedom of movement in a country where many people simply cannot afford to go anywhere; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t object if the government attempted to enact coercive restrictions on our movement of the kind that Israel has long imposed on Palestinians. The point – which means both that erosions of formal freedoms are to be resisted and also that formal freedoms are not enough – is to bring closer a world in which we have real power over our lives, a world that seems ever further away. 

Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘Rules of the Game?’, NLR 123.

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Psycho-Politics

As if demonstrating that the repressed does return, politics has erupted in the supposedly apolitical world of American psychoanalysis. An advocacy group, Black Psychoanalysts Speak, and a documentary film, Psychoanalysis in El Barrio, seek to redress the racial and class biases of analysis. Unbehagen, a psychoanalytic list-serve, features a roiling debate over whether it is necessary to match the analyst’s gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation with the patient’s. The American Psychoanalytic Association itself has been shaken by political recriminations, purges, resignations and denunciations. An article by Donald Moss, published in the association’s journal, provided the catalyst in this case. According to its abstract:

 Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has – a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable and perverse.

The reaction to the article was sharply divided. Some saw it as a valuable extension of psychoanalytic theory, while others believed it neglected vital determining factors of racialization, such as deindustrialization, union discrimination and the inequities of the real estate market. In response to the controversy, an internal body, the Holmes Commission, was entrusted to ‘investigate systemic racism and its underlying determinants embedded within APsaA, and to offer remedies for all aspects of identified racism’. Among the repercussions has been a debate over anti-Semitism precipitated by a speaking invitation to a controversial Lebanese psychoanalytic therapist, which led to the resignation of the President of the Association, Kerry Sulkowicz.

These developments are noteworthy in themselves, but they also raise wider questions about the relation between psychoanalysis and politics. What is striking about the politicization of contemporary psychoanalysis is the extent to which it conforms to the liberal identitarianism, sometimes termed ‘wokeness’, prevailing in the broader culture, which views systematic wrongs such as racism as emanating from individual psyches, along the model of sin. This marks a sad detour for a current of thought that provided a genuine alternative to moralism. Yet the stakes are greater than psychoanalysis per se. They concern the prospects for a twenty-first century Left that can encompass a non-reductionist conception of the relations between the social world and individual psychology. Recent years have also seen a certain resurgence of psychoanalytic thinking on the American Left. Sam Adler-Bell, co-host of the podcast Know Your Enemy, traces this to the defeat of Bernie Sanders. ‘There’s an inward turn’, he speculates: ‘maybe this purely materialist analysis of people’s motivations doesn’t give us what we need to make sense of this moment’. A new journal, Parapraxis, describes itself as a ‘psychoanalytically oriented supplement to radical critique and historical materialism’, promising to uncover ‘the psychosocial dimension of our lives’.

To address this, we need to consider the intertwined histories of socialism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Socialism’s core contribution was the idea that democracy and individual freedom could not be achieved without countering capitalism in significant ways. By uprooting the peasantry and gathering workers together in cities, industrialization created the basis for a revolutionary movement. Less often remarked is that this same process transformed the family. Previously, the family had been the primary locus of production and reproduction, and hence the individual’s sense of identity was rooted in his or her place in both work and the family. Industrial capitalism separated paid work from the household. The consequences were twofold. First, the separation helped give rise to a new gender order among the emerging bourgeoisie based on the cult of true womanhood, which implied that women’s suffering endowed them with moral authority. Second, the separation contributed to loosening the bonds that tied individuals of both sexes to their place in the family, giving rise to the idea of a personal life – an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labour.

Understanding that modern capitalist society is based not simply on the rise of industry, but also on the withdrawal of production from the family, helps clarify the contributions and blind spots of these three emancipatory currents. Socialists tended to reduce culture and psychology to the economy. Focused on political economy they left the family and personal life to psychoanalysis and to feminism. Psychoanalysis and feminism in turn focused on the family, neglecting its relation to the capitalist economy. In the sixties, a predominant view on the left was that psychoanalysis was apolitical or ‘individualistic’. But in fact, it was political in a different way, focused not on capital vs labour, but rather on the freedom of the individual from internalized forms of authority, including those targeted by the democratic revolutions, such as tradition, lord/servant relationships and the church, all of which Freud loosely tied together as paternal law. Over time, especially by the sixties, those influenced by psychoanalysis turned their attention to other forms of internalized authority, particularly racism and sexism, as well as forms of shame and guilt specific to capitalism, deference to supposed scientific knowledge, doxa and, of course, deference to psychoanalysis itself.

In general, psychoanalysis did not directly confront institutions, but rather worked indirectly, through its effects on individuals. In this way it reflected the new experience of personal life, which was presupposed by Freud in the theory of the unconscious. According to that theory, the ideas or stimuli that came to the individual from society or culture were not directly registered but were dissolved and internally reconstituted in such a way as to give them personal, even idiosyncratic, meanings. As a result, the inner lives of modern men and women were organized through symbols and narratives that had become personal or idiosyncratic; psychical life could be interpreted but not reintegrated into a previously existing whole. In this view, a person’s race, gender or nationality doesn’t simply translate into their intrapsychic world, but rather is refracted through the contingencies of their personal life. This meant that politics entered the consulting room in terms of its meaning for the individual patient, rather than in the service of a political programme. Far from being defined by any given political ideas, psychoanalytic practice was open-ended, non-utilitarian and unpredictable.

For several decades, the potential contribution of psychoanalysis to radical politics was not widely appreciated. One reason is that psychoanalysis was not oriented to an identifiable sociological group, such as the working class, but rather to new, historically specific possibilities for personal emancipation, which capitalism promised but could not deliver. The limits of psychoanalytic politics also reflected the psychical or cultural reductionism built into the separation of the family from the economy. That separation gave rise to new ways of thinking about history and politics centred on the role of psychology in understanding both individuals and groups or masses, but these tended to be argued in themselves, rather than as part of a broader social theory. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the 1960s rebellions – in which women and issues of personal life were central – played a key role in redefining the politics of psychoanalysis.

This shift began with black intellectuals who drew on psychoanalysis to elucidate the inner costs of racism. Sociologist Horace Cayton, describing his own psychoanalysis, wrote that while he had begun with the idea that race was a ‘convenient catchall’, a rationalization for personal inadequacy, he ended up understanding that race ‘ran to the core of my personality’ and ‘formed the central focus for my insecurity’. ‘I must have drunk it in with my mother’s milk’, he added. Richard Wright, deeply shaped by psychoanalysis, claimed ‘that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure’. Fanon, a Freudian psychiatrist, wrote:

I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects…I took myself far off from my own presence…What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.

Such works were never intended to replace analyses of segregation and the plantation system, but rather to complement, deepen and complicate them. The result was Freudo-Marxism, in which individual psychology and social theory were each given their place. Other efforts to strike that balance included reinterpretation of the Reformation (Erik Erickson, Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm), and works on mass society and mass culture (Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Christopher Lasch, Richard Hofstadter, Herbert Marcuse).

The sixties efforts to produce a non-reductive understanding of the relations of the social and the psychical were short-circuited. Although the cult of true womanhood was long dead, many women remained suspended between two different approaches to the family: first, that the family, and personal relations more generally, were women’s special – moral – realm and, second, that sexual and personal emancipation required freedom from the family. The result was a deep ambivalence toward psychoanalysis, which was at least as consequential in shaping attitudes as the very real sexism of American psychoanalysts. What carried the day was feminists’ forthright expression of the extent of women’s suffering, and the profound sense of the injustice of a male-dominated society. The result was that the ambivalence was resolved negatively. This resolution informed two books that in 1970 announced the birth of second wave feminism: Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex. For Millett, Freud was the leader of a counter-revolution against feminism, waged under the banner of penis-envy. Firestone redefined penis-envy as power envy and replaced Marx and Engels’ idea of a dialectic of class with a dialectic of sex, according to which the rule of men over women and children was the driving force in history. Both books sought to replace psychoanalysis with feminism. Gayle Rubin famously called psychoanalysis ‘feminism manqué’.

Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) marked a new turn in the encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis. Mitchell was a socialist ­– and an editor of NLR influenced by Fanon and by the existential psychoanalysis of David Cooper and RD Laing. The question that concerned her was how women live in their ‘heads and hearts a self-definition which is at core a definition of oppression’. In 2017 she recalled:

it was my fascination with the rabid anti-Freud stance of the first American feminists in the second half of the nineteen-sixties that made me go to the British Museum library to read Freud’s five articles on women. Instead, I read twenty-three volumes of his translated work non-stop. Psychoanalysis and Feminism was the result. I had found what I wanted – some way we could think about the question of the oppression of women.

Her book criticized second wave feminism for having gotten ‘rid of mental life’. For them, she lamented, ‘It all actually happens… there is no other sort of reality than social reality’.

In the late seventies and eighties, some feminists, gays and, to a lesser extent, people of colour became analysts, therapists or psychiatric social workers. They did not, however, for the most part join Mitchell in returning to Freud. Rather, they transformed psychoanalysis into the so-called relational paradigm, which focused not on the individual unconscious but on interpersonal relations. Based on Winnicott’s famous aperçu, ‘there is no such thing as a baby’ – i.e., the mother is always present – relational psychoanalysis was a compromise formation, combining a mother-centred paradigm, practical introspection and a new code of behaviour. Psychoanalytic feminists substituted ‘gender’ for ‘sex’, thus jettisoning the psychoanalytic theory of motivation, without putting another in its place. Melanie Klein’s theory of unconscious object relations, largely if not wholly consistent with Freud, was misrepresented as interpersonal or relational. Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin prioritized gender difference and idealized attunement and other female-associated, interpersonal skills. For others, the unconscious disappeared into a phenomenology of intimate relations, such as flirting, kissing, tickling and being bored or into a micro-sociology of insults and injuries.

The relational turn substituted an ethical theory of interpersonal relations for the unconscious. This contributed to what is today known as ‘wokeness’. What happens in the absence of a theory of the unconscious is projection. All evil and wrong is seen as coming from the outside. The theory of penis-envy was unpleasant, painful and even wrong, but its very structure included an effort to elucidate how women might have mobilized their aggression against themselves. When individuals lack even the concept of an intrapsychic life, much less access to it, they will project their aggression and other ‘bad’ feelings outward, generating the need for trigger warnings, moral judgements posted next to paintings, Deans and Provosts who play the role of police officers, for definitions of the university – and the New Left – as a rape culture. This idea that aggression comes from the outside works very well with the liberal/market paradigm, which is founded on an equilibrium model and denies that there is any aggression within the market system, and that any problems must be external – coming from the state, monopoly or China. The denial of aggression leads to moralism, based on the idea – which stems from the cult of true womanhood – that victimhood bestows moral authority. Here, the intrinsically duplicitous structure of capitalism shows itself in the realm of morality.

The demand for recognition may be read as the political counterpart to the relational turn. The overwhelmingly negative reaction of feminists to Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979) signalled the triumph of a newly minted Hegelian ‘recognition theory’ over Freudian self-reflection. In that book, Lasch viewed the demand for recognition as a symptom of an attention-based society, in which processes of mirroring and idealization prevailed. Yet to his feminist critics he was an advocate of a passé and ‘masculinist’ ideal of autonomy, and only that. Meanwhile, responding not to feminism but to Germany’s trauma of the Nazi years, Jürgen Habermas dismissed Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempts to combine Freud and Marx in favour of a paradigm based on intersubjectivity, democratic dialogue and communicative action, rooted in American pragmatism and social psychology. These currents were brought into relation with feminism by Axel Honneth, who argued that the demand for recognition, in the Hegelian sense of Anerkennung, is the master key of justice. The result was a new notion of ‘critical theory’, which replaced Freudo-Marxism: Winnicott stood in for Freud and Talcott Parsons stood in for Marx.

Let us now return to our nineteenth-century roots, when the withdrawal of production from the family created the modern demand for personal freedom, understood as something beyond the economy. Surely Marx, who read everything, and embraced the work of non-socialist thinkers like Charles Darwin and Lewis Henry Morgan, as well as that of monarchists like Honoré de Balzac, would have been fascinated by Freud, Fanon and Mitchell among others. As we learn from post-colonialism about the nation, we need to think about the family in terms of combined and uneven development. Bringing into one institution the most backward elements of society and the most visionary possibilities, the politics of the family is combustible. The forced separation between forms of personal emancipation, such as women’s liberation, antiracism and identity politics on the one hand, and socialism on the other, took place in the 1960s when the three emancipatory currents – socialism, feminism and psychoanalysis – were closest to being united.

The alternative to wokeness, finally, is not the abstract, liberal separation of the individual and the political, but rather the interdependence between the individual and the collective. All human beings have basic material and social needs that can only be met collectively. This is what socialists have historically understood. But the individual’s needs cannot be reduced to the collective; they are also internal, psychological and personal. Hence the logic of the idea of psychoanalysis complementing socialism. A revitalized psychoanalysis, galvanized by the rediscovery of the personal character of the unconscious, would greatly deepen our explorations of human freedom – in psychotherapy, in the arts and in public discourse ­– and would be a natural ally for a revitalized socialist politics. Meanwhile, there is always a place for moral reformation, even under socialism – just not within psychoanalysis.

Read on: Juliet Mitchell, ‘Psychoanalysis and Child Development’, NLR I/140.

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Embracing Failure

Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’

Born to a working-class family in Rome, Tronti studied philosophy at Sapienza under Della Volpe in the 1950s, when he became a partisan of the PCI. Led to question the orthodox Marxism he absorbed from the party after the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, and inspired by Della Volpe’s attack on positivism, Tronti began to criticize dialectical materialism as a form of naïve metaphysics. He took the view that classical Marxism was at once too historicist and evolutionary, and too oriented to a far-off future. What was needed was not a theory of history but a ‘science’ of present-day realities. ‘Marxism’, he would write in Workers and Capital, ‘has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.’

In the early sixties, he joined a group of sociologists who, profoundly influenced by Max Weber and led by the socialist Raniero Panzieri, founded Quaderni Rossi (1961–66). The first of several spirited, short-lived operaist publications, the journal was devoted to the study of postwar Italian capitalism and aimed to galvanize the rebellious workers in the country’s industrial north. Noting the close imbrication of capitalism and industrial progress – as Panzieri argued, ‘the two terms capitalism and development are the same thing’ – the aim of their research was to study workers’ efforts to become autonomous from and even halt that development. This critique of productivism became the premise of Classe Operaia (1963–67), which Tronti launched along with the historian Alberto Asor Rosa and the philosopher Antonio Negri.

Focusing on Fiat’s enormous plants in northern Italy – a cornerstone of the economy – the Quaderni Rossi circle argued that factory, society and state had become tightly interconnected; industry was fundamentally a political tool deployed to control labour and standardize society. As a result of the growing dominance of industry, society was becoming what Tronti called ‘an articulation of production’: ‘the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domain over the whole society.’ Yet the tentacular reach of manufacturing and the importance of industrial workers also gave shop-floor struggle broader social significance and immediate political potential. The conflicts underway inside the factories were therefore not only between the needs of labour and the imperatives of the firms, but between workers and the state itself. At this pivotal conjuncture of Italian capitalism, Tronti contended, workers in key industries had the strategic power to reshape the state. A ‘vision of the part, to see the whole’, operaismo insisted that the refusal of productive labour – through absenteeism, strikes and other industrial actions of the period – was a threat to the system as such.

Above all, operaismo mounted a profound critique of work, one that questioned the place of labour in our lives. In a world in which the assembly line seemed to foreshadow the standardization of society, ‘the only plausible present-day minimum programme for the working class challenges for the first time the whole of productive activity that has hitherto existed. This challenge will abolish work. And in so doing it will abolish class domination.’ This was the basis of Workers and Capital’s admonishment of socialism, along with capitalism: both were systems that viewed ‘society as a means and production as an end’. In ‘all the upheavals of the past’, Tronti noted, ‘the type of productive activity was left intact. It has always exclusively been a question of the distribution of productive activity, redistributing labour to new groups of people’. To abolish work did not mean eradicating productive activity tout court, but it implied the difficult – perhaps impossible – task of dismantling an economy where the end of production was production itself. Only then would the ground be laid for a world with many ends.

The call for a ‘working-class struggle against work’ became a slogan, some would say a cliché, embraced by the new generations dreaming of a life free from drudgery, who often came into conflict with the PCI. But although it was among the emerging social movements that Workers and Capital found its most devoted readers, Tronti was not aiming to assemble a ‘new left’, nor did he endorse any of the myriad groupuscules operating outside the Communist Party. He was critical of the PCI’s ‘national-popular’ path and of the institutions of the classical workers’ movement (capitalism, he observed, ‘no longer manages its own ideology but has the workers’ movement manage it in its stead’). But he continued to believe in the need for a left government in the interest of workers, and for a mass politics anchored in parliament. Alluding to Machiavelli, Tronti insisted late in life that ‘the class remained the Prince, the primacy was still the struggle, but in order to try to give them a winning outcome, the instrument of the party was needed.’

In the 1990s, Tronti became a senator for the Partito Democratico, the successor to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra, which had evolved out of the dissolution of the PCI in 1991. His elevation to the commanding heights of the political apparatus was an emblem of what the workers’ movement had achieved during the economic boom of the postwar era. Yet by this time, deregulation and globalization had undermined the use of legislative power for progressive reforms, and many old comrades criticized Tronti for failing to appreciate that parliament was an ineffectual arena for social change. In another operaist journal, Contropiano (1968–71), Tronti had written that there is ‘capitalist economic development on the one hand and workers’ political power on the other – two forces . . . in a long war in which we can see neither the end nor who the victor will be.’ Ultimately, he seemed to accept that capitalist development had triumphed. In a late interview he came close to embracing failure: ‘I am defeated, not a victor. The victories are never final. But we have lost – not a battle – but the war of the twentieth century.’

*

Despite its lasting fame, Workers and Capital has often been interpreted as belonging to a distinct, operaist phase of Tronti’s work. His early interest in working-class subjectivity and his optimism about the industrial militancy of the sixties are sometimes contrasted with his later emphasis on what he termed ‘the autonomy of the political’: the need to consolidate the struggles in the factories through the power of the state, passing laws defending the interests of workers against the imperatives of the market – instituting worker self-management, shortening the working day, raising wages. Yet as students of Tronti’s work such as Franco Milanesi and Gigi Roggero remind us, this overlooks the essential unity of his oeuvre. As Tronti himself would later insist, it was operaismo that ‘discovered the autonomy of the political’. Meanwhile, the political realism, even pessimism, made explicit toward the end of his career, was firmly rooted in his early writings. One member of Classe Operaia, Rita di Leo, recalled Tronti remarking to her in 1966 that ‘We are left to explain, you why capitalism keeps winning, and I why socialism still cannot make it.’ In a 2001 preface to Workers and Capital, he insisted that ‘in spite of everything, in spite of the transition through the culture of crisis, of European nihilism, of the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, there was still too much historicism, too much progressivism, too much faith in the final victory of good over evil’ in what he enigmatically called the domain of history.

Yet if his pessimism was latent from the outset, the utopian strain in Tronti’s thinking endured, even as he appeared to concede an utter defeat. Tronti postulated a ‘choice between history and politics: two legitimate horizons, but which each stand for a different class’. Capitalist history is nothing but the development of the global market; politics, on the other hand, is the attempt to arrest its course according to the needs and desires of the exploited. Tronti insisted that ‘politics stands against history’, and never stopped hoping for an organization that could subdue ‘the rhythm of the machine’. To stand with one’s back against the future, as Walter Benjamin had pictured it, facing what Tronti called the ‘body of history’ was for him ‘the soul of politics’. History has no soul, since souls – interior lives – belong to individuals, and in a world of dashed expectations and numbing alienation, our inner lives become political precisely because we are trapped in a history that promises no way out.

This anti-historicist line of thought had paved the way for Tronti’s studies of anthropology and theology beginning in the 1980s. His turn to theology may seem surprising given his rebuke of what he saw as the eschatological fantasies and millenarian expectations of the 1960s, though he was not alone among operaists in finding inspiration here. Negri lauded John Paul II and has often returned in his work to the Second Vatican Council and Francis of Assisi, while Sergio Bologna wrote a dissertation, recently reissued, on the antifascism of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a founder of the dissident Protestant movement Die Bekennende Kirche in 1930s Germany. In a discussion in 1980, Angelo Bolaffi noted that the weakness of the left consisted in the fact that it had produced a ‘theology of revolution’. To this Tronti responded without hesitation: ‘Precisely because there has been a failure of revolution in the West, revolution has become theology.’ For Tronti, theology was an attempt to rethink the possibility of politics in a period that offered no salvation, and to find meaning amid exploitation, suffering and the seemingly quixotic attempts to resist them.

Writing in Bailamme, a journal of spirituality and politics Tronti launched in 1987, he clarified the spirit of his anti-historicist politics by quoting the theologian Sergio Quinzio: ‘The meaning of this whole historical adventure is in its progress towards destruction so that the kingdom of God may be established’. This kingdom, which in the Gospel of Luke is said to be ‘within you’, was for Tronti a specific way to view and engage with the world. By this point, his perspective had also expanded beyond industrial capitalism to the longue durée of class oppression; he became increasingly interested in the category of the poor. Memory also became important for him: as a ‘weapon’, a means ‘to combat the present’, by linking us, not to history itself – the way things turned out – but to prior attempts to alter its course, inspiring us to change the present even if we cannot yet discern a better future.

Simone Weil once remarked that the Marxian notion that mass struggle was a ‘paradise-producing mechanism’ is ‘obviously childish’. In 2019 Tronti reflected that if the operaisti had initially been ‘outside and against’ the traditional workers’ movement, and then ‘inside and against it’, it was now time for a posture of ‘beyond and against’ – to transcend the conflicts between Western capitalism and Eastern socialism, something the PCI always refused to do. He wrote that ‘the working class was too much a product and part of industry, too much cause and negation of modernity, too much thesis and antithesis of a historical dialectic’ to resist capitalist development. The workers’ movement had never sought to alter ‘the type of productive activity’ that Tronti thought had rendered the socialism of the 20th century a terrible copy of capitalism. In an essay collected in Con la spalle al futuro (1992) he even suggested that ‘perhaps the working class couldn’t become a ruling class. And, consequently, perhaps the insurmountable limit of the experiment of socialism is not found in the backwardness of material conditions, in the isolation of the project, in the reality of war, internal and external, and much less in the iniquity or mediocrity of men’. The problem might be that it is impossible to rule over history.

Yet if, as Weil also suggested, ‘the idea of weakness as such can be a force’ – visible in the need of masses and minorities to struggle for their dignity – it might be possible to view victory and failure in a different way, one suggested by Tronti’s work taken as a whole. He was a speculative and in a sense even mystical thinker, who maintained that in a world where capitalism never seems to move beyond itself, an escape might nevertheless be found. The conflicts between ‘the body of history’ and ‘the soul of politics’ – over the meaning of our lives and the systems of production and reproduction that shape our existence – might not promise salvation. But they can, according to Tronti, produce a people who do not care for victory in this kingdom of history where only the rich and powerful count. The remnants of lost utopias can still confront the forces that reduce the end of productive activity to production itself. To embrace failure, then, is not to give up, but to reject the nihilistic idea that the good life is a victorious life, rather than one that begins to reshape our idea of happiness in the here and now.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

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A Message From the Emperor

Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.

Ezra Pound, A lume spento (1908).

The Emperor, so a parable runs, has sent a message to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun; the Emperor from his deathbed has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded the messenger to kneel down by the bed, and has whispered the message to him; so much store did he lay on it that he ordered the messenger to whisper it back into his ear again. Then by a nod of the head he has confirmed that it is right. Yes, before the assembled spectators of his death – all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and on the spacious and loftily mounting open staircases stand in a ring the great princes of the Empire – before all these he has delivered his message. The messenger immediately sets out on his journey; a powerful, an indefatigable man; now pushing with his right arm, now with his left, he cleaves a way for himself through the throng; if he encounters resistance he points to his breast, where the symbol of the sun glitters; the way is made easier for him than it would be for any other man. But the multitudes are so vast; their numbers have no end. If he could reach the open fields how fast he would fly, and soon doubtless you would hear the welcome hammering of his fist on your door. But instead how vainly does he wear out his strength; still he is only making his way through the chambers of the innermost palace; never will he get to the end of them; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that nothing would be gained; the courts would still have to be crossed; and after the courts the second outer palace; and once more the stairs and courts; and once more another palace; and so on for thousands of years; and if at last he should burst through the outermost gate – but never, never can that happen – the imperial capital would lie before him, the centre of the world, crammed to bursting with its own sediment. Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.

Franz Kafka, ‘An Imperial Message’ (1919).

1883: Marx dies, Kafka is born. A metaphor that describes, explains, hints at, in its own way comprehends, indirectly expresses the following fact: it is only with the weapon of political irony that these days one can combat the tragic seriousness of history. The messenger, with his message, has not left the imperial palace; he has set off, but is still entangled in the long sequence of rooms, in the arrangement of successive courtyards, in the infinite outer houses, the inner staircases and then the other palaces, crowded with things, events, masses, institutions, guards, crowds and brawls. An impenetrable tangle. A space-time in continuous flux and change. It is this we call, this that is, modern capitalism.

The messenger has not escaped the palace, but, as he passes by, has created a disturbance within. Parts of the message have, in the meantime, been received, inspiring fear in the princes and hope in the people. It is already something, an occurrence that’s far from insignificant. All this demonstrates that the messenger had to leave, that his message was necessary. He has not completed the mission. And yet the fact that he attempted it has provoked an awareness of how things really stand: one that will be passed down to those who follow. This event is irreversible: you might argue that it was mistaken, you might forget it ever happened, but neither attitude can be sustained for long. The message was not delivered, nonetheless the message was not lost. This is what we are here to say. And were that the only thing left for us to do, it would be enough simply to know, and make known, that we have lived well.

The first letter of John the Evangelist: he whom we heard, he whom we beheld, he whom we contemplated and whom our hands touched, here, we declare unto you. And these things speak we unto you, that our joy may be complete. The start of the first century and the start of the twentieth to some extent resemble one another. The fulgurant beginning, the messianic message, the eschatological perspective that ‘shows unto you that eternal life’; against which a hard, tragic reaction – war, crisis, slaughter – returns us to the hundred-year peace: an operation of restorative innovation (a new name for the conservative revolution).

What is the workers’ movement missing? There were Desert Fathers. They were not listened to. But this is not their task, to be listened to in their own time. No, it is rather the seed cast into the field of the future. But in order that the plant comes forth, grows, bears fruit, and that the fruit not be lost, something else is needed. What is the message missing? I know it’s scandalous to even think it: what is missing is the Church form. That, it must be said, was attempted but did not succeed. The Revolution requires the Institution: to last not decades but centuries. This is the Church. To be conserved in time, for those to come, the liberatory event, always a momentary act – the taking of the Winter Palace – must be given a form. The transmutation of force into form is politics that persists, and then – only then – does it become history, comprehensive, complete and undiminished. And it is necessary to know, woe betide those who do not know it, that history, before the institution that contains it, is a permixta of good and bad.

It was Agamben who thought to go back to the young Ratzinger, reader of the Liber regularum, a work of the fourth-century Donatist heretic Ticonius. Ratzinger lingers on the Liber’s second rule, De Domini corpore bipartitio, ‘on the twofold body of the Lord’. I find this doctrine of the corpus bipartitum interesting for thinking the political. The body of the Church, insofar as it is the body of the Lord, has two sides, a ‘left’ and a ‘right’, guilty and blessed. Its two faces are found in the Scriptures: fusca sum et decora, says the bride of the Song of Songs, ‘I am black and comely’. The bride of Christ, the Church, has within itself as much sin as grace. Agamben writes:

Ratzinger emphasies the difference between this thesis and Augustine’s, who nonetheless has clearly drawn inspiration from it for his idea of a Church permixta of good and evil. ‘[In Ticonius] there is not that clear antithesis of Jerusalem and Babylon, which is so characteristic of Augustine. Jerusalem is at the same time Babylon, it includes it in itself. Both constitute one sole city, which has a “right” and a “left” side. Tyconius did not develop, like Augustine, a doctrine of the two cities, but that of one city with two sides’.

No one should think of relating these two sides to the left and the right that we nowadays discuss in the bar or between which we decide at the ballot box. This is a very serious matter. If even unto the Last Judgement there is a Church of Christ and a Church of the Antichrist, let alone in history a State of the righteous and a State of the wicked, then the good and the bad must exist not just in the same body politic, but in the very body of the Political. As Hegel said before Marx, whosoever wants die Weltändern, to transform life, must first of all come to terms with that ineliminable and irresolvable mysterium iniquitatis of the human condition and, with peace in their heart, struggle without hope of a definitive revelatio at the end of days. Kafka:

Great, tall commander-in-chief, leader of multitudes, lead the despairing through the mountain passes no one else can find beneath the snow. And who is it that gives you your strength? He who gives you your clear vision.

March–April 1917: as Kafka sent the message, Lenin wrote the April Theses. February had brought the bourgeois democratic revolution. ‘Dual power’ was in effect: the Provisional Government, which had overthrown the Romanov dynasty, coexisted with the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which harked back to the Petrograd Soviet of the 1905 revolution. Lenin had just completed and despatched from Dadaist Zurich his Letters from Afar. To Stockholm, then through Finland, in a sealed railway carriage, with the agreement of the German authorities – an ingenious tactical use of the enemy – he had arrived in Russia. At the Tauride Palace, where the Petrograd Soviet held their meetings, he speaks to a meeting of Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Independents. He reads them the April Theses:

The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie – to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants. […]

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses. […]

Not a parliamentary republic – to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step – but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom.

Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy [for publication in Pravda Lenin notes ‘i.e., the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people’].

The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker. […]

Confiscation of all landed estates.

Nationalisation of all lands in the country, the land to be disposed of by the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The organisation of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants. The setting up of a model farm on each of the large estates (ranging in size from 100 to 300 dessiatines, according to local and other conditions, and to the decisions of the local bodies) under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies and for the public account.

The immediate union of all banks in the country into a single national bank, and the institution of control over it by the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.

It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. […]

Our demand for a ‘commune state’ [note by Lenin: ‘i.e., a state of which the Paris Commune was the prototype’]. […]

Change of the Party’s name [note by Lenin: ‘Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party].

Here is the message: ‘The tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’. And here is the messenger, who departs on his mission, with Marx’s whisper in his ears, repeated with exactitude. Carr retells the story of that meeting in which Lenin read the April Theses for the first time:

Bogdanov interrupted with cries of ‘Delirium, the delirium of a madman’; Goldenberg, another former Bolshevik, declared that ‘Lenin had proposed himself as candidate for a European throne vacant for 30 years, the throne of Bakunin’; and Steklov, the editor of Izvestiya and soon to join the Bolsheviks, added that Lenin’s speech consisted of ‘abstract constructions’ […]

Lenin’s speech was attacked from all sides, only Kollontai speaking in support of it; and he left the hall without exercising his right of reply. On the same evening he re-read the theses to a gathering of Bolshevik leaders, and once more found himself completely isolated.

Pravda published the theses on 7 April 1917, but the following day a statement by the leadership signed by Kamenev stressed that the theses constituted only ‘the personal opinion of Lenin’, and the same day the Petrograd party committee rejected them with 13 votes opposed, two in favour and one abstention.

These are the first signs of the difficulties that the political message will encounter in navigating the palaces of history. But this time – ‘November sixth is early, November eighth is too late’ – the message ultimately arrived at its destination. Miracles also exist in politics. And fortunately myth continues to transmit them. From that day, future humanity will conserve it in their memory. Therefore it’s possible! It is possible to reverse power, between the low and the high: those who are above, below; those who are below, above. Certainly, the messenger is ‘a vigorous, indefatigable man’, as Giulio Schiavoni puts it in his translation, ‘a robust, tireless man’ according to Rodolfo Paoli. ‘If he meets with resistance, he points to the symbol of the sun imprinted on his chest. He proceeds more quickly than anyone else’, we read in one version. And ‘if he is obstructed, he points to his chest on which is a symbol of the sun, and proceeds more easily than anyone else’, we read in the other.

Is that all? No, not for this alone was it a victory. For the bourgeoisie the revolution led to wars, those of Napoleon. For the proletariat war led to the revolution, that of Lenin. The dialectic of revolution and restoration functioned differently in the histories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In the first, restoration came quickly, but the revolution won in the long run. The opposite occurred in the second: the revolution lasted, even if not sufficiently for its needs, but restoration was the definitive result; perhaps it could never have happened otherwise. So it was written.

‘The tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution’ was an eschatological message. It fits into the eternal history of salvation, sacred and not secular. It is the oppressed who rise up. Not homme, but humanité in revolt. With this message, and this messenger, it was translated into political action. For the first time. This is why its victory was irresistible.

If the message whispered in the ear does not find the messenger to bear it with power, making his way by force through the crowd, then it doesn’t arrive, doesn’t escape the tangle of palaces. The great, and for this reason tragic, event of the twentieth century, has taught us this. Instead, it is only the messenger who bears no message that arrives, because he is let through. We are being taught this lesson by the minor, comic event labelled the twenty-first century. Here, the prophecy has been fulfilled: the medium is the message. The messenger is the proclamation. Only nothing is allowed to come and go, democratically; never something. The catastrophe is that everything remains as it is. Nihilism amounts to everything being accepted as it is. Perhaps Russia was the only soil capable of welcoming that seed, the only space-time where the idea could have become history. Russian spirituality is what explains, deep down, that divine madness that was the proletarian October.

De Tocqueville caught some slight glimpse of the future. Communism in Russia and democracy in America are the two vast islands upon which the Modern, on its long journey, washed up. Provisionally, because other islands on other continents are still emerging. And today, one of these two great ships has arrived in port, while the other has foundered. Democracy has been realised and made a world of itself. Communism has been frustrated and turned itself into a dream. But the Russian revolutionary impetus and the practical American spirit remain two opposed choices in life, two alternative forms of existence. And I feel like saying something that is today scandalous: that freedom lies in the former, not the latter. I will add, repeating myself, a contentious assertion: naturally one can become free passing through many routes, but in the twentieth century I consider having been a communist the royal road. Speaking for myself, I know that I would never have the freedom that I feel, inside myself, without having passed through, in my thought and my life, the historic experience of communism.

Translated by Rees Nicolas.

This text originally appeared as ‘Un messaggio dell’imperatore’, in Dello Spirito Libero: Frammenti di vita e pensiero, Rome 2015.

Read on: Mario Tronti, ‘Our Operaismo’, NLR 73.

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An Activist Practice 

I admired Caitlín Doherty’s recent ‘A Feminist Style’, and I disagreed strenuously with almost every line of it. There is no conflict between these two sentiments, and one of the era’s most unfortunate tics is its insistence on interpreting every conflict as evidence of disrespect. There are certainly cases in which we politely praise a piece of writing solely as a way of genuflecting to the requisite social forms, but I want to emphasize that this is not such a case. Doherty’s argument is ambitious, her style (ironically) is exhilarating, and her willingness to question shibboleths – and hold the darlings of the literary world to account – is refreshing. Nonetheless, I remain unconvinced.

Her argument runs as follows. Contemporary feminist theory is boring, so boring that a generation of would-be feminist intellectuals has turned backwards, towards the iconic thinkers of the second wave. Hence the incessant cycle of revival and rediscovery, in which the celebrity intellectuals most active in the sixties and seventies are rehabilitated and effused over. The intellectuals in question, most recently Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag, tend to emphasize the centrality of female suffering – and, as a result, feminist politics has been reduced to a thin lamentation, divorced from any material programme.

My most trivial objection is that I am less cynical about the uses and abuses of Sontag and Dworkin. The recent publication of a collection of Sontag’s essays about women, in which she is openly ambivalent about the feminism of her era and hostile to movement poster-child Adrienne Rich, hardly amounts to an attempt to canonize Sontag as an emblem of the second wave. As for Dworkin, it may be that she is extolled as a stylist not because anyone wishes to reduce feminism to gesture, but simply because she is a great stylist. To commend Dworkin’s writing is not to imply that feminism is always and only a matter of a fancy prose (although as I have argued elsewhere, perhaps it sort of ought to be).

Broadly, however, I think Doherty is right that contemporary feminism is dull and unimaginative. We might assess the movement’s prospects either in terms of the activism it inspires or the theories it produces. I am most comfortably in agreement with ‘A Feminist Style’ when it comes to the philosophical poverty of contemporary feminism’s theories. Of course, there are still feminist intellectuals worth reading (Nancy Fraser comes to mind), but it is true that, on the whole, feminist thought is less invigorating than it once was, that there is little ‘engagement with the totality of the experiences of women, qua women, by a new generation of political philosophers’ as Doherty writes. It is also true that the female intellectuals we tend to canonize are too often flattened into symbols – although it is Joan Didion, not much of a feminist by any measure, who has been most thoroughly converted into a slogan on a tote bag. Alas, by far the most visible strain of feminism in the contemporary West is the gospel of girl bossery, evangelized by sleek entrepreneurs like Sheryl Sandberg.  

But I think feminism, as an activist practice, is more robust than Doherty gives it credit for. She makes barely any mention of the #MeToo movement and is unduly dismissive of recent organizing for reproductive freedoms. ‘The closest feminism has come in recent years to a mass mobilisation is in the domain of reproductive rights – no longer the terrain of one gender, but the grounds on which a person might be feminised, a verb which in contemporary usage means to exist at the sharp edge of precarity, removed from economic productivity, overwhelmed by the burdens of reproduction’. I’m not sure what else we should be mobilizing around at a moment when abortion rights, at least in America, are so imperilled. And make no mistake: feminist efforts to equalize abortion access in the wake of Dobbs – activists distributing contraceptive pills along underground networks, by securing funding for travel to states where there is still a right to choose, and more – have been nothing short of heroic.

Perhaps more centrally, though I agree with Doherty that much of today’s feminist thinking is uninspired, I do not accept her diagnosis of what ails it. She writes that ‘a focus on the negative experiences of womanhood – however broadly and ecumenically defined ­– will yield a negative feminism: participation credentialled on the basis of suffering’. But isn’t an articulation of collective suffering the basis for any successful mass movement? There is a reason that we have abandoned some of the more maudlin products of the 70s, namely the mushy hippies claiming that our wombs put us in touch with the earth, and retained the more pessimistic Dworkin. What is femininity, at its core, but institutionalized disadvantage? And what is feminism, at its core, but the attempt to expose gender as a nightmarish farce?

Read on: Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’, NLR 56.