George Souvlis: Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual and political formation?

Werner Bonefeld: One of my most important formative experiences was factory work. Studying was
easy in comparison. I studied at the Universities of Marburg, Berlin, and Edinburgh. At Marburg the
Marxism on offer was very dogmatic. It did not encourage people to think for themselves. I left after
two years to continue my studies at the Free University of Berlin. In Berlin a few things came
together, as it were. My favorite Professor was Agnoli, who was one of the most distinguished
Marxists of his generation. He allowed his students to think. He welcomed it. He was a great orator.
Part of the degree programme was to do work-placement. I first worked as a removal man and then
as a research assistant at the West-German teachers union, for which I got paid. Never before had
I earned money by reading and writing (my research was into alternative schooling as opposed to
public provision). I quickly understood the meaning of Marxs insight that to be a productive labourer
in not a piece of luck but a great misfortune. One might add, nor is it an ontological privilege, as a
whole tradition of historical materialism saw it. I studied in Berlin at a time of great restlessness,
from the peace movement to the squatter movement in the early 1980s.

I met Kosmas Psychopedis in Edinburgh during the 1980s. He visited John Holloway. Richard Gunn
and John Holloway were my PhD supervisors. Kosmas was a character, and a good friend.

GS: You were one of the editors of the Open Marxist books. Could we say that the project for
these books was an effort to save the Hegelian dialectic within the Marxist tradition from the
Althusserian structuralist paradigm? To which extent do you believe that this tradition of
Open Marxism is still relevant in the light of new studies (like this of Warren Montag) that
present Althussers Marxism as a Marxism of the conjuncture?

WB: For me the title of the book, Open Marxism, was in homage to my teacher Johannes Agnoli
who had published a book under the same title. It was in large part a discussion between Mandel
and himself. Mandels economistic account was anything but open. The book included also a long
postscript by Agnoli about the purposes of critical thought. I summarized this postscript in my first
publication, Open Marxism, which was published in the first issue the Journal Common Sense,
which at that time was co-edited by Richard Gunn and I. This little paper was really just an attempt
on my part to understand Agnoli, transcribing what I had read what I thought I had learned into my
own words. For some of us the open Marxism volumes, there are three altogether, were an attempt
to save the Hegelian dialectic within the Marxist tradition from the Althusserian structuralist
paradigm, as you put it. It was not really an attempt at autonomism, although it might have seemed
like that. It was an attempt to stop thinking with preformed theoretical instruments about society,
applying preformed ideas to social situations and institutions. Instead it was an attempt at thinking in
and through society, connecting thought with experience. Althusser is a great traditional theorist. For
a critical theory of society, it is important to think against the grain of society so as to understand it
better. Open Marxism either thinks against the grain or it is not open to the constitutive turmoil of
bourgeois society. To put this differently, the existence of class relations does NOT call for a Marxist
class theory, nor does it call for an argument from the standpoint of the working class. It calls for a
critique of class society and for a critique of the capitalistically organized form of labour. Class is a
negative term. It belong to the wrong society. The resolution to class society is the classless society.

The Open Marxism volumes were attempts at freeing Marx from traditional theory, at reconnecting
with critical Marxist currents and renewing Marxism as a negative critique of society.

GS: One year ago before the publication of Open Marxism you edited the book along with
John Holloway, Post-Fordism and Social Form: Marxist debate on the Post-Fordist state. In
the introduction of the book you make an explicit critique of Marxist theories that conceive
of the state and capital not as a terrain of class struggle but as structures. Can you talk a bit
more about your criticisms of the concept of Post-Fordism? To what extent do you believe
that these criticisms are relevant considering the the gradual hollowing out of the state?

WB: The terms fordism and post-fordism were part of the academic Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist had
moved on from the terms affluent society and corporatism. After post-fordism it moved on to
globalization, then neoliberalism, and now I hear post-neoliberalism and/or ordoliberalism is the
phrase of the time. Zeitgeist thinking is commercialized scholarship. The job of the scholar is to
reveal the hidden truth of the constituted social relations. The post-fordist analysis picked up on
certain elements of reality and combined them into a theoretical model and it then proceeded to
assess the distance between reality and this theoretical model. The analysis identified the social
conflicts as means of transition from the fordist model to the post-fordist model. The social relations
appeared thus as the agents of definite structural transformations from this model of society to
that model of society. The contemporary modeling of the social relations as post-neoliberal or
ordoliberal works within the same analytical frame.

GS: The next study you published has the title The Recomposition of the British state
during the 1980s. Why do you think that the thatcherite project succeeded? In what ways
did it transform the British state? Do you believe that there was a direct continuation of
Thatchers project by the Blairite Labor governments?

WB: The book rejected the use of the terms Thatcherite and Thatcherism. It analysed the both role
of the British state in the transformation of the world market conditions of price and profit, and the
role of world market conditions in the transformation of the British state. The incoming Thatcher
government presided over a very deep recession in the early 1980s and governed in the context of
the global debtor crisis the so-called lost decade in Latin America and a process of crisis-ridden
disassociation between money as capital and money as claim on future capital. The Thatcher
governments restructuring of British society was part of this process. Blairs Third Way might well
be seen as a direct continuation of these processes. It is hard to find new beginnings in history;
these so-called zero hours. The Blair government took over from the Major government, which had
succeeded the last Thatcher government. Neither Major nor Blair started with an empty canvass.

GS: Another central topic of your work is money. In what way is the financialization of global
economy that took place in the 1980s connected to the ongoing crisis? Do you find
continuities between the crisis of 1973 and this of 2008?

WB: Yes. Financialisation is the term that describes the dissociation between money as capital and
money as claim on future capital. Mandel discussed this dissociation in the early 1980s as an
upside-down pyramid. This is quite a nice way of illustrating this dissociation. That is credit-
superstucture accumulates ever-growing claims on future surplus value. Innate to this accumulation
is the transformation of the claim on future exploitation into a fiction, at which point there is a run,
ostensibly into quality, that is, something real and tangible. Traditionally, financialisation, this upside-
down pyramid of social wealth, is seen as specific to our times, an exception to the rule. I am not
sure that this is right. I think it is innate to the dynamic of the capitalist form of wealth, of money that
begets more money. Indeed, it might as well be that the post-war period was an exception brought
about by destruction on massive scale.

GS: The past few decades many on the left seem to treat in only superficial
terms the analysis of the state apparatus and consequently how any left party can interact
with the bourgeois state. The recent ideas on the EU of Toni Negri is one example of this
theoretico-political tendency. Can we change the world without taking state power? Also,
and connected to this, what do you think about Negris recent ideas about a social and
democratic Europe and his support for neoliberal and undemocratic parties like Syriza?

WB: I dont know whether Syriza is neoliberal and undemocratic. It is important not to think through
labels. It is important to think through society and to recognize the state as the political form of
society and this is an antagonistic society in which a class is tied to work to make ends meet. The
question of human emancipation is therefore not how to govern the social antagonism. Rather, it is
the question of how to end the social antagonism. What, therefore, do we need to know about our
society and its state. What would it mean to change the capitalistically organized form of our social
reproduction. What is the social character of wealth in a society governed solely by human
purposes? What can we hope for?

GS: Your most recent study, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On
Subversion and Negative Reason is a sustained and comprehensive exposition of political
economy from its incipient formulation in Marxs work. Can you tell us a little more about
this work?

WB: The critique of political economy amounts to the critique of the established relations of social
reproduction. There can be nothing more fundamental to the understanding of society than the
manner in which it organizes its metabolism with nature. How does our society meet our basic
needs: clothing, food, shelter, warmth etc. And what is the character of wealth in our society? If
wealth is money as more money, then really the satisfaction of human needs is a mere sideshow
in fact, this sideshow is what the class struggle is all about. It is struggle for the means of
subsistence, the satisfaction of needs. Class struggle is not the struggle for socialism. It is a
struggle for material security. The circumstance that the class tied to work has to struggle to make
ends meet posits a devastating judgment about bourgeois society.

GS: The past few years have seen a rise of new rightwing parties globally. What do you see
as at the root of this phenomena, and the decline of political liberalism.

Anti-austerity is not a monopoly of the left. The idea that right-wing rejection of austerity expresses
a perverted anti-capitalism is ridiculous and most dangerous. The left is kidding itself. Left wing
causes do not have some sort of primacy in the struggle for material security. Anti-capitalism comes
in many guises. What happens if the revolution that ends capitalism is a theodicy? If by political
liberalism you mean the ideas of tolerance, rule of law, citizenship, human rights etc., then political
liberalism has to be defended especially when it is under attack by the rackets of the right and the
ticket thinking of populist resentment. The rule of law is preferable to the lynch mob.

GS: You have described the idea of a progressive form of nationalism as an entirely
regressive phenomenon. Could you elaborate more on this? Do you not think that the
nationalist movements in Catalonia and Scotland contain any potential emanicipatory
content?

WB: None whatsoever. Catalonia and Scotland might liberate themselves respectively from Spain
and England. That does in any manner change the conditions of social reproduction, as set out
earlier. It does not transform Catalonia or Scotland into classless societies. It changes the situations
in which social reproduction takes takes place. A dependent labourer from Glasgow, say, has more
in common with a dependent labourer from Newcastle than with the Lord of Buccleuch. The
identification of individuals with some transcendent values of the nation is regressive. It stinks of soil
and blood.

GS: Since 2008, their has been huge political changes particularly an opening up of the
centre ground. Do you think far-right parties, as much as the left, can gain from this?

WB: = Yes, they can. Often they do not need to because the mainstream battles for the far right
voter. I understand Sarkozy proposes internment of whoever is suspected or might be suspected as
a sympathizer of Islamic causes to cut off Le Pen. Syriza employs Germanophobic argument to
nationalize friends and foes. Which country has been unaffected by the tide of right-wing populism?
We are witnessing the political fall out from 2008, that is, the critique for humanity has trans-
morphed into a critique for the nation. It takes great courage to stand up and be counted to prevent
the critique for the nation from asserting itself as bestiality unbound. I am not sure about the critical
meaning of empire and imperialism. What do you propose? More of this and less of that? The
failure of US hegemony asserts itself most clearly in the bloodbath of the middle-East.

GS: You have said that you believe the European Union to be a post-democratic form of
economic governance that has its origins in the ordoliberal tradition that analytically
separates the liberal and democratic parts of the state. Could you talk a bit more about this?

WB: Ordoliberalism distinguishes between unlimited mass democracy and liberal democracy. In
liberal democracy, democracy is tight to liberal principles. The EU was never constituted as a mass
democracy. Its institutional principles work quite properly as for the attainment of liberal-democracy.
In this manner it integrates and indeed strengthens the liberal character of the liberal-democratic
state. In the case of Greece, the Greek state has become an executive state of Euro requirements.
With insolvency sovereignty stops. The German elite acts most rationally. One might not like what it
does but that does not mean that it acts irrationally. The idea that the governing strata of a major
capitalist economy would act rationally only if they were to do the bidding of its left critics is absurd.
For the left, Germany is the villain at the heart of Europe. Having found its scapegoat, no further
critical enquiry into the condition of Europe is required, seemingly. The German elite do not want to
antagonize or replace the US. For them US hegemony is great for their own security. It is also in-
expensive.

What needs to understood is the condition of Europe, not its situation. The Zeitgeist is all too willing
to find scapegoats. The Zeitgeist does not ask about the conditions of social reproduction, from the
form of social wealth and the production of this wealth to the state as the political form of
capitalistically organized social relations. It does not look into the eye of the storm. It looks on the
bright site and puffs itself up with moral rectitude. The Zeitgeist agrees that nobody should go
hungry again. Yet, it does not dare to spell out that the abolition of hunger requires a change in the
mode of production. The Zeitgeist offers scapegoats and easy solutions. In this manner it mocks
those who struggle to make ends meet.