Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016)

Historical Materialism 24.
1 (2016) 3–10
brill.com/hima
Introduction to ‘Britain versus France:

How Many Sonderwegs?’
Maïa Pal
Oxford Brookes University
mpal@brookes.ac.uk
Abstract
In memoriam of the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, this piece firstly remembers the
main achievements of her forty years of work. Secondly, it introduces one of her
contributions, ‘Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?’, until now unavailable
in an anglophone publication and reprinted in the present issue. This contribution is
a useful reformulation of her arguments concerning radical historicity, the concept of
‘bourgeois revolution’, and the specificity of French and British state formation and
their political revolutions – in contrast to arguments for a German Sonderweg as an
explanation for the rise of fascism. Wood also provides a fruitful illustration of how
to apply a social-property relations approach to the development of the rule of law in
each of these states, and thus furthers opportunities for debates on the potential of
Political Marxism for understanding contemporary class struggles over rights.
Keywords
history – bourgeois revolution – Sonderweg – social-property relations – rule of

law – state-formation
Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942–2016) was one of the most influential Marxist
intellectuals of our time. Her forty years of work reached beyond the boundaries
of historical materialism and enriched the theory and history of social and
political thought, as well as the history of social relations and institutions from
ancient Greece to late capitalism. Her wide-ranging scholarly interventions
had an immense influence on historical materialism and its various circles.
Wood shaped the course of late-twentieth-century Marxism as a co-founder of
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341450

4 Pal
‘Political Marxism’ – a controversial label that she nevertheless accepted after

it was coined by Guy Bois in his 1978 contribution to the ‘Brenner Debate’.1 For
her, revising Marxist historiography from a political-Marxist perspective was
not an antiquarian or purely scholarly exercise, since ‘thinking about future
alternatives to capitalism requires us to think of alternative conceptions of
its past’.2
Her prolific contributions did not only renew one of the most complex,
debated, and traditionally male-dominated intellectual traditions of the
social sciences and humanities; she also revived some of the most canonical
and controversial debates within that tradition. These include inter alia the
transition to capitalism, the role of the state, the history of political thought,
imperialism, democracy and civil society, and the relationship between theory
and history. Her many-sided engagements and committed scholarship secured
Wood’s personal worldwide standing – within and beyond academia. A gifted
and brilliantly clear writer, she perfected the rare skill of communicating
complex ideas in an accessible and eloquent style. As an inspiring teacher,
she left a plethora of former students praising her ability to make them think
and debate the great orthodoxies as well as to recover obscure and original
subjects. As an editor, she helped colleagues, activists and intellectuals develop
their contributions and thus left Marxism a broader domain than it would have
been without her.
Wood’s death on 14 January 2016 is met with great sadness and represents
a loss for the journal. As a supportive member of the editorial advisory board,
she wrote that ‘the birth of Historical Materialism was a major event, not only
because it provides a unique forum for non-sectarian Marxist debate but
also because it represents a change in the wind, a really promising sign of
socialist renewal.’ She contributed to the very first issue with a defining piece
entitled ‘The Non-history of Capitalism’.3 This ‘potted history’ of the various
approaches to the origin of capitalism reviewed the commercialisation model
and its various critiques from long-term historical sociologists such as Mann
to the Brenner debate and Anderson’s challenge to the history of absolutism.
In her 1996 article, the crucial distinction that shaped her work is set
out as the tension between two ‘narratives’ of Marx: one ‘where history is
a succession of stages in the division of labour’ and where ‘burgher classes
bring about capitalism just by being liberated from feudal chains’; and the
second which focuses on ‘social property relations, especially in the English
1 Bois 1978; Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

2 Wood 2002, p. 8.
3 Wood 1996b.
Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

Introduction to ‘ Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs ? ’ 5
countryside’.4 Patriquin, following Eagleton, highlights how fundamental

this starting point is.5 Wood challenged the orthodox teleology or ‘stagism’
of Marxism by rejecting its laws of technological progress and its overarching
structural categories. Her epistemological focus became rooted in notions
of process and agency, to which the concept of social-property relations
provided a methodological entry point to understanding the history of
capitalist and pre-capitalist social processes and institutions. In other words,
she questioned what Marxism intended to explain, i.e. capitalism as a stage
after feudalism and before socialism, or capitalism as a specific and contested
process of class struggle, and sided with the latter.6
The article we present below returns to some of the debates she outlined
in her 1996 contribution. This drew on her major statement – The Pristine
Culture of Capitalism7 – on the origins of capitalism in its implications for the
status of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ within the divergent trajectories
of early-modern English and French state-formations – a theme revisited
and developed also in Democracy against Capitalism8 and in The Origin of
Capitalism.9 The paper was written in 2007 for a conference at the Otto-
Suhr-Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin, previously available only in a
German edited volume.10 This conference explored the concept of a German
and Spanish Sonderweg (an exceptional long-term path of development), as
distinct from a more ‘normal’ or standard trajectory of capitalist development
associated with Britain and France.
More specifically, the conference discussed whether the peculiarities
of German-Spanish developments – visible in a different conception of an
un-democratic notion of the Rechtsstaat/Estado del Derecho [state of law] –
were rooted in the failure or absence of classical ‘bourgeois revolutions’,
facilitating the descent into either fascism or Franquism. Characteristically,
Wood deflated this question from the outset by suggesting that the classical
notion of bourgeois revolution – both liberal and Marxist – was not even
applicable to the French and English cases. It was an ideal-type, long
undermined by the specialist literatures. ‘I think it is no accident that the
4 Wood 1996b, p. 10.

5 Patriquin 2012, pp. 2–3; Eagleton 2011.
6 ‘What requires explanation is the aberrant, uniquely “autonomous” development of the
economic sphere that eventually issued in capitalism.’ (Wood 1981, p. 86.)
7 Wood 1991.
8 Wood 1995.
9 Wood 2002.
10 Schulze, Berghahn and Wolf (eds.) 2010.

6 Pal
bourgeois revolution keeps eluding us, because it has never been a very helpful
concept’.11 Wood rejected the tendency to essentialise capitalist transitions
in diverse countries revolving around the false move to pit standard cases
against outliers. She argued instead for the radical historicity and case-specific
singularities of diverse trajectories of development.
The problem of bourgeois revolutions is a central concern and runs
throughout Wood’s work. Following Christopher Hill’s early arguments on the
English Revolution,12 the Nairn-Anderson thesis launched in 1964 produced
rich debates for the following decade in the pages of New Left Review.13 These
continued in the 1990s with debates over Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution,14
while Wood’s arguments were further developed in their implications for
international relations by Teschke.15 Accordingly, if the origins of capitalism
are radically specific, then how could subsequent transitions be accompanied
by a fixed definition of ‘bourgeois revolutions’? Today, the problem of bourgeois
revolutions has been significantly reopened by Davidson’s How Revolutionary
Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?.16 The classical ‘bourgeois revolution’ approach
is highly problematic, Wood argues in response to Davidson, as it reproduces the
commercialisation model by arriving at the same conclusion: that capitalism
was inevitable since all social forms prior to capitalism were mere obstacles
to its realisation. She terms proponents of this approach ‘consequentialists’
for being more concerned with capitalism as a result than with its emergence.
This leads them to include ‘not only cases in which capitalism actually was
advanced – for instance, by the triumph of a capitalist landed aristocracy in
England – but also cases where capitalist development was actually impeded
by the revolution’, as in France.17
11 Wood 2016, p. 12.

12 Hill 1940.
13 ‘The original Nairn-Anderson theses rested on two principal assumptions: that the British
decline was special and unique, and that these specific disorders were traceable to the
priority, and consequent incompleteness, of capitalist development in Britain, where a
fundamentally unchallenged early capitalism emerged under the auspices of a landed
aristocracy instead of a triumphant urban bourgeoisie, lacking the complete sequence
of bourgeois revolutions which on the Continent produced more “rational”, bourgeois
states.’ (Wood 1991, pp. 12–13.)
14 Wood 1996a.
15 Teschke 2003 and 2005.
16 See our symposium in a forthcoming issue with contributions by Post and Gerstenberger.
17 Wood 2014: ‘This is most striking in what the consequentialist analysts view as the classic
case of the bourgeois revolution, i.e. the French Revolution – which had the effect of
fettering capitalist development by entrenching peasant property and opening the way
to freer access to state careers for bourgeois officeholders.’

Thus, consequentialists such as Davidson make the mistake of following

the first of Marx’s narratives, that we called previously history as a succession
of stages. They thereby fail to take seriously the specificity of capitalism and
the many ‘Sonderwege’ of European state-formation, which require starting
from the analysis of each society and state’s social-property relations. Wood’s
references to Hill in the piece below are better explained in a short essay she
wrote in 2003.18 In his 1967 work Reformation to Industrial Revolution, Wood
writes that Hill ‘suggested that it [England] was a bourgeois revolution in a
different sense – not that it was the expression of a class struggle between
a rising capitalist class and a declining aristocracy, since there was no such
clear class division in 17th-century England, but rather that the Revolution
had removed certain obstacles to already substantially developed capitalist
relations.’19 This identifies a breach in the classic understanding of bourgeois
revolutions – a breach Brenner later turns into a full schism. Hill’s main
contribution is to point to the development of capitalist relations in England
independently of a bourgeois revolution.
While consequentialists accuse Political Marxists of being ‘eccentrically
narrow’,20 Wood rejects this critique and accuses consequentialists instead
of seeing capitalism everywhere. In other words, they suffer from ‘ahistorical
contingency and absolute determinism’ and from ‘defending the idea of
“bourgeois revolution” less as a historical than a teleological moment.’21 These
tensions between history, teleology and progress are fundamental. Even
among Political (or Capital-centred, à la Charles Post) Marxists, debates are
growing as to whether these categorial tensions can be solved or argued for
a priori in respect of historical contingency and analysis. The Brenner-Post
‘rules for reproduction’ versus the Teschke-Knafo ‘radical agency’ recent debate
exemplifies the challenges inherent in the ‘critical elaboration of bourgeois
categories’ and the meaning of radical historicity.22
What then, following Wood’s essential formulation concerning these cate
gories, is the real meaning of the appearance of these European ‘Sonderwege’?23
18 Wood 2003.

19 Ibid.
20 Callinicos and Royle 2014.
21 Wood 2014.
22 These two positions were presented at the Ellen Wood Symposium held at Birkbeck,
University of London, on 4 November 2015. Papers and audio are available on the Verso
blog website (<www.versobooks.com>).
23 Marx ‘adopted its categories as his point of departure precisely because they expressed,
not a universal truth, but a historical reality in capitalist society, at least a “real appearance”.
The point was to decipher the real meaning of the “appearance”, and this required not the
reproduction but the critical elaboration of bourgeois categories.’ (Wood 1981, p. 69.)

8 Pal
The piece below gives us an indication that Wood maintained at this stage
a historiographical position of constant critique flowing from her insistence on
historical specificity and radical agency. Her aim is to contest explanations of
a ‘dangerous Sonderweg’, i.e. Germany’s descent into fascism as a result of both
the ‘supremacy of [its] state legislation’ and its lack of a bourgeois revolution.24
She does so by going back to the social-property relations that differentiate
state and society in Britain, Germany and France. Her argument is developed
in four broad steps. Firstly, the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ is over-
generalised, ideal-typical and empirically not borne out by the facts. Secondly,
French and English state-formation diverged radically: ‘English and French
parliamentary traditions were as different as their legal systems’.25 Thirdly,
the political revolutions that occurred in Britain and France did not transform
their social-property relations. Finally, their divergent paths reveal that the
pressures for capitalist development on Germany were primarily external, and
that fascism in other countries cannot be eliminated from their parliamentary
histories. Thus, a German or any other Sonderweg, causally connected to either
the absence or failure of a classical bourgeois revolution, is not sufficient to
explain a country’s descent into fascism.
There are fantastically rich points in each of these arguments, deserving
of a more serious and lengthy discussion. For one, through the comparative
analysis of European legal systems in their co-development with contested
social-property relations, Wood provides an original approach to historicising
the rule of law (or État légal and État de droit,26 Rechtsstaat, and Estado del
Derecho). More generally, the key point Wood raises in her conclusion – and
by providing a more intertwined comparative analysis of French, British and
German states – is that the search for Sonderwege is an illusion premised on
the general acceptance of a standard-path. Furthermore, if a Franco-English
standard-path is itself an illusion, and each state and society are unique in
their development, can late-capitalist developments be exceptions to the rule
and converge? Although it might be inconsistent for Wood to conclude that
‘the economic and political development of Europe especially since World
War II has propelled all these states in a similar direction’, this claim could
24 Wood 2016, p. 17.

25 Wood 2016, p. 18.
26 État légal refers to a regime upholding the supremacy of the law [loi] over administrative
and legislative power and is used to describe the French state from the mid-nineteenth
century to the mid-twentieth century. État de droit refers to the shift towards constitutional
regimes where citizens become able to contest the potentially arbitrary supremacy of the
legislative organ of the state.

be discussed further in relation to the illusion or appearance of convergence

produced by European legal systems – a convergence particularly apparent in
their recent anti-terror and anti-migrant policies.27
Thus, the richness of Wood’s legacy consists not only in an enduring and
reliable body of historical and theoretical research, but also in providing us
with crucial tensions with which to explore contemporary class struggles.
In effect, the relationship between states’ ‘legacies of difference’ and a late-
capitalist ‘convergence’ of similarities28 – in the context of the role of legal
systems – could be fundamental to understanding the problem of ‘social rights’.
Since ‘it’s the imperatives of capitalism that make these rights necessary, and
it’s capitalist imperatives that constantly threaten them’, how to disentangle
the appearance of convergence, recover specificity and reclaim rights from
capital is a sine qua non to understanding how state ‘power can and should be
used to challenge those imperatives at home and abroad.’29
References
Aston, Trevor Henry and C.H.E. Philpin (eds.) 1985, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian
Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bois, Guy 1978, ‘Against the Neo-Malthusian Orthodoxy’, Past & Present, 79, 1: 60–9.
Callinicos, Alex and Camilla Royle 2014, ‘This Quarter’s Selection’, International
Socialism, 142, available at: <http://isj.org.uk/this-quarters-selection-spring-2014/>.
Davidson, Neil 2012, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
——— 2013–14, ‘Is there Anything to Defend in Political Marxism?’, International
Socialist Review, 91, available at: <http://isreview.org/issue/91/there-anything-
defend-political-marxism>.
Eagleton, Terry 2011, Why Marx Was Right, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hill, Christopher 1940, The English Revolution, 1640, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
——— 1967, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: The Making of Modern English
Society, Volume 1: 1530–1780, New York: Pantheon Books.
Patriquin, Larry 2012, ‘Introduction: The “Method” of Ellen Meiksins Wood’, in The Ellen
Meiksins Wood Reader, edited by Larry Patriquin, Historical Materialism Book Series,
Leiden: Brill.
27 Wood 2016, p. 28.

28 Wood 2016, p. 27.
29 Wood 2009.

10 Pal
Schulze, Detlef Georgia, Sabine Berghahn and Frieder Otto Wolf (eds.) 2010, Rechtsstaat
statt Revolution, Verrechtlichung statt Demokratie? – Transdisziplinäre Analysen
zum deutschen und spanischen Weg in die Moderne (Teilband 1), Münster:
Westfälisches Dampfboot.
Teschke, Benno 2003, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern
International Relations, London: Verso.
——— 2005, ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the Inter
national’, Historical Materialism, 13, 2: 3–26.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1981, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in
Capitalism’, New Left Review, I, 127: 66–95.
——— 1991, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and
Modern States, London: Verso.
——— 1995, Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— 1996a, ‘Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution: Reflections on the
Brenner Debate and its Sequel’, International Review of Social History, 41, 2: 209–32.
——— 1996b, ‘The Non-history of Capitalism’, Historical Materialism, 1, 1: 5–21.
——— 2002 [1999], The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso.
——— 2003, ‘Christopher Hill and the Recovery of History’, Against the Current, 104:
43–5.
——— 2009, ‘Capitalism and Social Rights’, Against the Current, 140: 28–32.
——— 2012, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from
Renaissance to Enlightenment, London: Verso.
——— 2014, ‘Capitalism’s Gravediggers’, Jacobin, 12 May, available at: <https://www
.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/capitalisms-gravediggers/>.
——— 2016, ‘Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?’, Historical Materialism,
24, 1: 11–29.

brill.com/hima
Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?

Ellen Meiksins Wood
When I started thinking about the theme of this conference and what I had
been asked to do for it, I was struck by one small irony: many years ago, my first
excursion into debates about the history of the English state took issue with
what was then a fairly influential argument on the British left, the so-called
Nairn-Anderson thesis. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn had argued that
Britain was going through an economic crisis because it was a fundamentally
backward economy with an essentially premodern state, and this was because
it had never gone through a proper bourgeois revolution.1 The model revolution
was, of course, the French; but Anderson and Nairn were contrasting Britain
unfavourably to most major Western European states, not excluding Germany,
which was enjoying precisely the kind of economic success that Britain
somehow could not achieve. My argument against the Nairn-Anderson thesis
was, in a nutshell, that Britain, far from being the most backward of the major
European states, was the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.2
Now, at this conference, we are being told that it is Germany, and also
Spain, that never had a proper bourgeois revolution, while both France and
Britain did have one and therefore have more properly-developed democratic
states. I am beginning to think that this is a favourite ploy among European
progressive intellectuals: it is always their own country that did not have a
proper bourgeois revolution, while every other major country did. Until very
recently, I would have said that France is the most notable exception, and that
you would never catch a French intellectual denying the special revolutionary
status of France. But now, even the French seem to be distancing themselves
I am particularly grateful to George Comninel for his comments and suggestions. My thanks
also to Heide Gerstenberger and Detlef Georgia Schulze for their comments on an earlier
version.
1 The Nairn-Anderson thesis was launched in 1964 in the New Left Review. It was developed
in later issues and famously challenged by E.P. Thompson (Anderson 1964; Nairn 1964;
Thompson 1965, reprinted in Thompson 1978).
2 Wood 1991.

12 Wood
from their revolutionary past. So, we are still looking for the elusive bourgeois
revolution, apparently the revolution that never was.
I think it is no accident that the bourgeois revolution keeps eluding us,
because it has never been a very helpful concept. It has never been clear what
it is meant to represent. The identification of bourgeois with capitalist – which
has always been problematic – suggests that the revolution has something
to do with the advancement of capitalism.3 In its earlier forms, it suggested
a class struggle between backward feudal aristocracies and forward-looking
capitalist classes. More recently, we have had to adapt ourselves to all the
historical evidence that no straightforward class struggle between landed
aristocracy and capitalist classes occurred anywhere, not even in France.4 It
might be reasonable to describe the French Revolution as bourgeois – that
is, as a conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy – but it was not about
capitalism. The typical revolutionary bourgeois was not a capitalist or even
a precapitalist merchant but an office-holder or professional, and their
opposition to the aristocracy was not about promoting capitalism but about
challenging aristocratic privilege and access to the highest state offices. The
English Revolution, on the other hand, could reasonably be described as
capitalist, because it was rooted in capitalist property, and it was even led by a
class that was essentially capitalist. But it was not particularly bourgeois. Not
only was there no class struggle between bourgeoisie and aristocracy, but the
dominant capitalist class was the landed aristocracy.
3 There was nothing in the French conception of the ‘bourgeois’ to suggest an identification
with ‘capitalist’, nor was it even synonymous with merchant or trader. While it originally
referred to town-dwellers, it came to refer to a social status between aristocracy and peasantry,
not of noble birth but with more-or-less ‘respectable’, non-menial sources of income. In
pre-Revolutionary France, the ‘bourgeoisie’ would have included everything from merchants
to professionals and office-holders, and great confusion has resulted from the identification
of bourgeois and capitalist, in our understanding not only of the Revolution but of capitalism
in general and its historical processes of development.
4 The classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as a class struggle between a
backward feudal aristocracy and a forward-looking bourgeoisie has been subject to serious
challenge at least since Alfred Cobban argued in the 1950s that France was no longer feudal
by 1789 and that the contending forces in the Revolution could not be distinguished by
class or economic interests (Cobban 1964), followed by a school of French ‘revisionists’,
notably François Furet (Furet 1978). While few historians today would seek to restore the
old conception, there have been serious Marxist alternatives, which take into account
the empirical evidence cited by the ‘revisionists’ but offer a different explanation of the
material interests that divided aristocracy and bourgeoisie, in particular over access to
the lucrative resource of state office (notably Comninel 1987).

Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs ? 13
By now, the old idea of bourgeois revolution has been replaced, at least
among Marxist historians who still employ it, by a much vaguer notion.5
It describes any kind of revolutionary transformation that somehow advances
the development of capitalism or sweeps away obstacles to its advancement,
whatever the class composition or intentions of the revolutionary agents. In
fact, even the outcome of the revolution or its role in removing obstacles to
capitalism is pretty ambiguous. The concept of bourgeois revolution, to the
extent that it survives at all, now covers a very broad and diverse historical
spectrum, from the triumph of a capitalist landed aristocracy in England, for
instance, to the entrenchment of peasant property in France and freer access
to state careers for bourgeois office-holders. In other words, the concept now
hardly refers to anything specific at all. I really think that socialists who still
cling to bourgeois revolution do so less because it illuminates history than
because of its symbolic political meaning. Maybe one could call it a normative,
or even a performative, concept, designating not what is or has been but what
ought to be. But I find it unhelpful even as a programmatic idea, both in itself
and as a model for socialist revolution or any other emancipatory struggle – but
that is another question. What I am suggesting is that the concept of bourgeois
revolution not only fails to illuminate the issues we are dealing with here but
even obscures them. To say that both England and France experienced such
a revolution disguises the fundamental differences between these two cases
and their very different patterns of state-formation. I suppose I am questioning
the basic premise of this conference by arguing that the differences between
England and France are no less significant than the differences between
either one of them and Germany or Spain. If we are looking for a German – or
Spanish – Sonderweg we have to find it somewhere else, but then we could just
as easily talk about a British one.
State-formation in England and France
So let me begin with a sketch of the divergences between English and French
state-formation. The story begins at least as early as the Middle Ages, at a time
when the Frankish empire was disintegrating while the Anglo-Saxon state was
the most effective centralised administration in the Western world.6 England
5 Perhaps the most significant landmark here was Christopher Hill’s explicit repudiation of his
own earlier account of the English Revolution in the old Marxist terms (cf. Hill 1940 and, for
example, Hill 1980).
6 See, for example, Geary 1988.

14 Wood
never really succumbed to what has been called the parcellised sovereignty
of feudalism, while France never completely overcame it, even under the
absolutist monarchy; and the centralising project of the state was still on
the agenda to be completed by the Revolution and Napoleon.
There was a major difference between England and France in the relations
between state and dominant classes – and this, I think, is the really central
point here. In England, even at a time when English law was at its most
ostensibly feudal, and the manorial system was at its height, there was never a
‘parcellisation of sovereignty’, and the monarchy continued to carry forward the
Anglo-Saxon experience of state centralisation. Even the Norman Conquest,
when it brought feudal institutions with it from the Continent, also, and above
all, brought its military organisation, which vested power in a central authority.
The Normans established themselves in England as a more-or-less unified
ruling class, and the central state was always its instrument. Thereafter, the
centralisation of the post-feudal state would long remain a cooperative project
between monarchy and landed aristocracy.7
This was true not only in the sense that the central state would develop
as a unity of monarchy and the landed class in Parliament – nicely summed
up in the old formula, ‘the Crown in Parliament’. The cooperative project also
took the form of a division of labour between the central state and private
property. While legislation and jurisdiction were increasingly centralised, the
aristocracy would increasingly depend for its wealth on control of the best land
and on modes of purely economic exploitation. In this, the English landed class
was markedly different from those Continental aristocracies whose wealth
derived from what Robert Brenner has called politically constituted property
of one kind or another, various forms of privilege, seigneurial rights, the fruits
of jurisdiction or state office. The result of England’s distinctive economic
development was agrarian capitalism, which was ‘capitalist’ in the sense
that appropriators and producers were dependent on the market for their
own self-reproduction and hence subject to the imperatives of competition,
profit-maximisation and the need constantly to improve labour productivity.
In the separation of economic from extra-economic powers, the processes of
state-centralisation and capitalist development, while sometimes in tension,
were closely intertwined.
If the central state controlled political and judicial power to an extent
unparalleled elsewhere in Western Europe, it was not in direct competition
with the aristocracy for access to peasant-produced surpluses. The state
7 Brenner 1976 and 1982; reprinted in Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

evolved not primarily as a means of direct exploitation but as an external

guarantor of social order, which enabled exploitation in the private sphere by
economic means. There were obviously tensions between the landed class and
the monarchy, which would come to a head in the Civil War. But those tensions
had a particular character precisely because of the underlying partnership
between dominant class and monarchical state.
I will come back to what this implies for the rule of law and representative
institutions. But first, let me sketch out the process of state-formation in
France. Here, the monarchy emerged out of feudal rivalry, as one patrimonial
power established itself over others in a context of parcellised sovereignty.
This meant that the monarchical state continued to confront the challenge of
feudal parcellisation, the independent powers and privileges of aristocracy and
various corporate entities. The monarchy certainly did pursue a centralising
strategy with some success, and royal courts did emerge, which, among other
things, could be used to protect peasants from lords (not least, in order to
preserve the peasantry as a source of state taxes). But the dominant class
continued to depend to a great extent on politically constituted property – that
is, on powers of appropriation dependent on political, military and judicial
powers, or ‘extra-economic’ status and privilege; and the state developed as
a competing form of politically constituted property, a primary resource, a
mode of direct appropriation for state office-holders by means of taxation,
which some historians have called a kind of centralised rent. If the absolutist
state was able to undermine the independent powers of the aristocracy,
it did so in large part by replacing those powers with the lucrative resource
of state office for a segment of the aristocracy. The elaborate bureaucracy,
which distinguished France from England, developed not just for political and
administrative purposes but as an economic resource, proliferating offices as a
means of private appropriation through taxation.
So relations between monarchy and landed aristocracy were very different
than in England. In contrast to the close English partnership between the
aristocracy and monarchy, in France the tensions between aristocratic
privilege and monarchical power, between different modes of extra-economic
exploitation, persisted until the Revolution. Although the aristocracy itself
was divided between those with power in the central state and the many
who remained dependent on their privileges and local powers, this division
was fluid; and the centralising project of the state can be characterised as in
large part an attempt to overcome that division by replacing autonomous
aristocratic powers with perquisites and privileges deriving from the state –
for instance, by granting privileged exemption from royal taxation in place of
seigneurial jurisdiction.

16 Wood
The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was keenly interested in access to state office,

and office-holding was the highest bourgeois aspiration. The slogan ‘careers
open to talent’ tells us much about bourgeois class interests, the preoccupation
of the bourgeoisie with expanding its access to office. In fact, it was a threat
to the access they already enjoyed that probably more than anything else
provoked the bourgeoisie into revolution and a confrontation between
bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Even after the Revolution, even after Napoleon,
the state continued to serve this economic function for the bourgeoisie.
One only has to read Marx’s account of nineteenth-century France in the
Eighteenth Brumaire to see how persistent this formation was. He talks about
this immense bureaucratic and military apparatus as a ‘parasitic body’, in which
the bourgeoisie ‘finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form
of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents,
and honorariums’. For this reason, he goes on to argue, the bourgeoisie itself
destroyed ‘the vital conditions of all parliamentary power’.8 (I am not sure,
by the way, that this bourgeois tradition is dead even now, in a culture where
state office is the highest career, with a tradition of mandarinism, dominated
by a hereditary elite of office-holders and their exclusive academies.) The
development of capitalism in post-Napoleonic France was less a product of
internal social-property relations – as it had been in England – than a state-led
response to external geopolitical, military and commercial pressures. It was
not capitalist imperatives generated by existing property relations but rather
the stimulus of war that encouraged the particular course of French industrial
development, and capitalist class relations were more result than cause of that
industrialisation.
Rule of Law and État légal
These different patterns of state-formation make it very problematic to lump

together the English ‘rule of law’ and the French ‘état légal’, not only because
the two legal systems were quite different but also because they played very
different roles in the constitution of the state. It is not only a question of the
difference between English common law and Continental Roman or civil law. In
England, a national system of law, in the form of the common law, established
itself very early as the preferred system of law for all free men, while in France,
there were still approximately 360 different law codes on the eve of the
Revolution, with various seigneurial, local and corporate powers contesting
8 Marx 1937.

jurisdiction with the monarchy, and customary law challenging the supremacy
of state legislation. While the absolutist state succeeded to a considerable
degree in limiting seigneurial and local jurisdiction, jurisdictional conflicts
remained a constant feature of the ancien régime and a major preoccupation
of French courts. The aristocracy and corporate bodies clung to their autonomy
and independence from the national state, while the monarchy continued its
efforts to co-opt and integrate them.
When monarchical absolutism gave way to Revolution, the centralising
project of the state continued; and the French ‘état légal’ evolved as a means
of asserting the power of the central state against fragmented jurisdictions
and independent local powers. This meant, among other things, limiting the
independence of the judiciary and effectively absorbing it into the civil service.
It remained for Napoleon to complete the project begun by the Revolution.
While the judiciary would regain some of its autonomy in the Fifth Republic
of 1958, the historic function of the law in asserting state sovereignty against
autonomous jurisdictions remains a powerful legacy.
The English ‘rule of law’, by contrast, did not represent the assertion of state
power against fragmented jurisdictions. It is certainly true that there were
long-standing tensions between aristocracy and monarchy; and, at least in
the first instance, the common law was the king’s law. But jurisdictional
conflicts between king and barons ended quite early. The common law became
the favoured legal system for the aristocracy as well as for peasants who could
seek protection from the Crown; and the rule of law was understood to mean
that the monarchy itself was subject to the law.
The common law eventually came to represent parliamentary power
against the Crown, with Parliament asserting its supremacy as the interpreter
of common law. In the Civil War in the seventeenth century, the conflict
between monarch and Parliament, common lawyers tended to side with
Parliament, against the prerogative courts allied with the king. But this was
not a case of parcellised jurisdictions asserting themselves against the central
state. On the contrary, it was an assertion of the aristocracy’s essential role in
the partnership that constituted the central state. At the same time, it was a
consolidation of the division of labour between state and property, with the
ruling class not only claiming its share in the public sphere of the central state
but also asserting its power in the private sphere of property. From this point of
view, the issue was less an assertion of public jurisdiction than of private rights.
Despite the role of Parliament in the constitution of the central state, then,
the English ‘rule of law’ can be understood as a means of protecting individual
rights against the state. In this respect, it was directly opposed to the French
état légal as an assertion of state power. But the English defence of rights

18 Wood
against the state meant, in the first instance, protecting the ruling class against
violation by the Crown of its partnership and its division of labour with the
landed class. The rule of law understood as an assertion of rights against
the state was first summed up in Magna Carta, which issued from the dispute
between monarchy and barons: ‘No freeman shall be taken and imprisoned or
disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go upon him nor send
upon him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the
land.’ Magna Carta also began the process of separating the judiciary from
the legislative and executive functions of the state.
This does not mean that the English rule of law, because of its challenge
to monarchical absolutism, was unambiguously more democratic than the
French pattern of legal development. The assertion of state power against
fragmented jurisdictions is not necessarily undemocratic. It can, for instance,
represent a challenge by the legal state to aristocratic privilege. Even in the
case of French absolutism, the Third Estate, including the peasantry, appealed
to the monarchical state in defence against the aristocracy. By contrast, the
English rule of law, in its ostensibly most democratic aspect as an assertion of
individual rights, served to sustain ruling-class power and property.
English and French parliamentary traditions were as different as their legal
systems. Or, to be more precise, England had a long parliamentary tradition,
which preceded the revolution, while in France no such tradition existed
before the revolution. There is, of course, a stark historical contrast between
the unitary national Parliament in England, with its early legislative role,
and the fragmented estates in France, divided by locality as well as corporate
hierarchy, without a legislative function – even on the rare occasions when
they met on the national plane of the Estates-General. The emergence of a
representative legislative body in France had to await the Revolution.
The most striking difference between England and France is that the
interests of the English ruling classes were deeply invested in Parliament from
very early on, while in France, even when estates were replaced by a national
assembly, important sectors of the dominant classes remained opposed to the
Republic, and this continued well into the twentieth century. The revolutionary
transformation created both a new parliamentary tradition and a dangerously
anti-parliamentary, anti-republican formation.
There are, then, significant differences between the English case, in which
ruling-class interests were invested in a national system of law and a unitary
parliament, and those cases, such as France, in which the interests of the
aristocracy, as well as various corporate entities, were historically associated
with particular jurisdictions and opposition to a unified system of national

law. These historical differences left political legacies with long-lasting

consequences.
In France, the Revolution and the establishment of a republic created new
tensions to replace the old oppositions between monarchy and aristocracy, as
well as new divisions within the dominant classes. Reactionary opposition now
took the form of devotion to monarchy and empire, against the republic. But if
opposition to the monarchy on behalf of parcellised jurisdictions was replaced
by support for a monarchical state, the new oppositions still bore the marks
of the ancien régime. The anti-republican forces reflected the long-standing
weakness of the ruling-class commitment to parliamentary sovereignty.
When the alternation between republic and empire finally ended with the
foundation of the Third Republic, it was only because the monarchist majority
remained so divided in its dynastic loyalties that a republican minority just
managed to prevail. But even then the anti-republican challenge persisted,
culminating in the Dreyfus affair; and the threat of an even more anti-
democratic state, perhaps even some kind of military dictatorship, remained
alive well into the twentieth century. It would be fair enough to suggest that
the French republican tradition was more radically democratic than English
parliamentarism; but the other side of that coin was a dangerously anti-
democratic tendency, with a left supporting the republic and a powerful strand
on the right imbued with clerical and militarist anti-republican sentiment.
The instability of the republic, its lack of legitimacy within a segment of the
ruling class, to say nothing of the Church, is as important a fact of French
political history as is the revolutionary republican tradition. At the same time,
the revolutionary tradition, as it was absorbed into the new republicanism,
entered the mainstream of historical memory and political culture.
In Britain, the long history of partnership between aristocracy and central
state, and the role of Parliament as the public face of private property, has
meant that the ruling class has, on the whole, been consistently committed
to parliamentarism. This helps to explain the relative weakness of anti-
parliamentary reaction in modern times. But the other side of the coin is
that the dominant historical narrative and mainstream political culture
have marginalised the truly revolutionary and democratic traditions that
emerged during the English revolution, the tradition of the Levellers, Diggers
and other radical movements. Democratic popular forces were defeated
by the parliamentary oligarchy; and, though their legacy has never completely
disappeared from the British labour movement, the dominant parliamentary
tradition owes more to the victorious propertied classes, and, at least in its
conventional rhetoric, is less radical than French republicanism.

20 Wood
Which Democratic Tradition?
This brings us to the question of individual rights and popular sovereignty, and
whether, or in what ways, the specific processes of English and French state-
formation can be described as democratic. The evidence here is ambiguous
and even contradictory, and the only conclusion I can draw from it is that both
cases, in their different ways, contain both democratic and anti-democratic
potentialities (as is, in the final analysis, also true of Germany). Let me sketch
out a series of paradoxes:
The French Estates in the ancien régime were elected by a universal
manhood suffrage, at a time when the Parliamentary electorate in England was
still restricted. Yet Britain granted a substantial degree of suffrage to women in
1918 (the year German women acquired the vote) and suffrage equal to men
in 1928, while French women would have to wait till 1944.
The French estates in the ancien régime had no legislative power and
presented no serious challenge to monarchical legislative sovereignty, while the
English ‘people’ (however narrowly defined) in Parliament were increasingly
sovereign. This was true even before the final consolidation of Parliamentary
supremacy in 1689, while the contest over sovereignty between the state and
the ‘people’ remained unresolved in France until the Revolution – and even
then precariously.
To complicate matters, the French invoked popular sovereignty long
before the English even allowed themselves to think explicitly in those terms.
During the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, the so-called French
constitutionalists insisted on the people’s rights of resistance to the monarchy.
Yet here, the people who had that right were not individual citizens but
corporate entities, provincial aristocrats and local magistrates, who claimed a
right of resistance in their capacity as office-holders. When they invoked some
kind of popular sovereignty, they did so not as representatives claiming the
state on behalf of the people but as officers asserting their jurisdictional rights
against the state. When the absolutist monarchy professed to represent a general
interest, as opposed to the particularities of these fragmented jurisdictions, it
invoked the concept of state sovereignty against them. It claimed to be acting
on behalf of a more universal corporation than the particularistic corporate
bodies that were challenging its sovereignty.
Privilege in France would continue to be challenged in the name of a larger
corporate community asserting its interests and sovereignty against particular
powers and privilege. There is, in this respect, a continuity between the
absolutist monarchy and the revolutionary ‘Nation’, and successive republics
would continue to assert the sovereignty of the national corporate body. The

Rights of Man were declared, by the Revolution and later republics, more
powerfully than had ever been done in England. But the corporate conception
of the nation has tended to mean that the constitutional status of individual
rights in France has never been unambiguously clear. Because the national
assembly claims absolute sovereignty on behalf of that corporate body, there
is a certain lack of clarity about the rights reserved to individuals. There is also
another interesting residue of the ancien régime’s conception of office and
corporate representation, in the distinctive French practice of permitting local
office-holders to sit in the national assembly while maintaining their offices.
This suggests that their function is to represent not the interests of citizens so
much as those of office-holders.
By contrast, in England the particular formation of the state, the distinctive
relation between aristocracy and monarchy, the unity of Parliament and Crown,
the evolution of a unified system of law on which the ruling class depended to
sustain its property and power, created a system in which corporate principles
were weak. This meant that, from early on, the relation between state and
individual was not mediated by corporate entities, and rights were vested in
the individual rather than in corporate bodies. It is true that Parliament claimed
to represent all individuals – as free men – and to act on their behalf, protecting
their liberties from incursions by the Crown and exercising a right of resistance
on their behalf. Nevertheless, although Parliament for all practical purposes
remained supreme, at least in conception that supremacy was not a claim
to sovereignty against the ‘people’ but rather an expression of Parliament’s
position as the highest court and ultimate defender of the people’s rights.
In fact, the English have tended to avoid the issue of sovereignty altogether
(a thinker like Thomas Hobbes, who, during the seventeenth-century conflict
between monarchy and Parliament, sought to elaborate a conception of
absolute sovereignty for English conditions, has been a striking exception). The
partnership between Crown and Parliament created a delicate balance which
neither side was anxious to upset by claiming ultimate authority; and even
when the conflicts between them came to a head, as the king threatened the
partnership with Parliament, parliamentarians were very slow to invoke their
own sovereignty as representatives of the people. To assert the sovereignty of
Parliament against the king and on behalf of the people threatened to unleash
more dangerous claims to popular sovereignty from the truly radical forces
mobilised by the revolution, without the protection of intermediate bodies
between Parliament and people. A degree of vagueness seemed prudent even
among republican elements in Parliament.
The notion of sovereignty remains unclear in Britain to this day. At the
same time, there are no obvious constitutional checks against the sovereignty

22 Wood
of Parliament. Some commentators have even suggested that Parliament,

and indeed the executive in the shape of the Prime Minister, have assumed
an absolute sovereignty derived from the monarchy. The sovereignty of
Parliament must also raise questions about the inviolability of the citizen’s
rights. Yet, if only because corporate principles have been historically so
weak, the individuality of rights is more deeply embedded in the political
culture and the judicial system.
It might be possible to argue that in Britain both democratic and anti-
democratic elements have to do with the conjoined formation of the state and
capitalism. The division of labour between property and state, between political
and economic power, has permitted, and even encouraged, the development
of formal democracy, while permitting and strengthening class domination. To
put it another way, the state can more easily retain the appearance of neutrality,
even while serving the interests of the dominant class. The effect has also been
to separate political and economic struggles more decisively than elsewhere
in Europe and to direct popular resistance away from the state, to the point of
production. This may help to explain why today the British government, more
than either the French or the German, is able to attack the structure of civil
liberties and rights, in pursuit of the so-called ‘war on terror’, and why the Blair
government could undermine the most democratic aspects of Britain’s legal
traditions, without any significant popular protest.
In France, by contrast, both democratic and anti-democratic elements
derive from the legacy of absolutism. We have already noted some of the anti-
democratic consequences. Yet the same historical conditions have produced a
tradition of popular resistance directed at the state, which is still making itself
felt today with some effect.
Britain and France versus Germany?
Let us, then, return to the opposition between Britain and France, on
the one hand, and Germany and Spain on the other. If what is at stake is
principally the German (and, mutatis mutandis, the Spanish) Sonderweg as an
explanation for the rise of fascism in the latter cases and its absence in the
former, it seems to me that this opposition is problematic. It presupposes that
fascism was not a significant force or a real possibility in either of the other
two cases. I am, to begin with, sceptical about the neat connection between
legislative sovereignty and immunity to fascism; nor am I convinced that
European political revolutions, whether or not we call them bourgeois, erected

insurmountable barriers against fascist incursions.9 I have already suggested

that we should not underestimate the strong potential for some kind of fascism
in France, well into the twentieth century, so let me pursue that point here.
Heide Gerstenberger argued in the discussion at the conference that, while
certain historical conditions were present that made National Socialism a real
possibility in Germany, the possibility was not a necessity and the outcome
could have been different until very late, even as late as the Nazi seizure of
power. To be sure, a fascist triumph was among the possible alternatives, but it
was not a necessary outcome of a specifically German historical process. If we
apply the same principle to France, it seems reasonable to say that, while the
outcome in France was indeed very different, the possibilities of an indigenous
fascism were certainly present.10
Many factors can no doubt be cited to explain why, where fascism was a
real possibility in various European countries, it triumphed in some and not
9 Detlef has suggested to me, in his trenchant comments on my paper, that in England, in
contrast to Germany and Spain, there is no state apparatus, specifically a constitutional
court, which stands above parliament and can declare legislation to be illegal or
unconstitutional. The absence of the ‘supremacy of state legislation’ seems to figure very
prominently in his account of Germany’s dangerous Sonderweg. My argument here will
in a sense bypass this question by suggesting that such institutional differences may not
be the decisive ones, and that even if we accept that France is closer to Britain than to
Germany on this score, there are certain fundamental differences between France and
Britain in the historic role of the state which may be more important for the purposes of
our discussion here.
10 Historians of France were once reluctant to confront the problem of French fascism, but,
especially in the last two or three decades, there has been open and heated discussion.
There are historians who argue that fascism remained marginal in France (for example,
René Rémond: Rémond 1982). Others insist that it was a major phenomenon and even
that the French invented fascism, though it was a tendency of a disaffected left rather
than of right-wing radicalism (notably Zeev Sternhell, for example Sternhell 1983). Robert
Soucy (Soucy 1986 and 1995) in particular has made a powerful argument insisting
on the importance of French fascism and locating it on the radical right. Much of the
debate concerns the meaning of the word ‘fascist’, and whether right-wing authoritarian,
nationalist and militarist groups or para-military organisations in France should be called
fascist. But that such political forces existed in substantial numbers is hardly in question.
It may be that, while Germany, Italy and Spain have not, since World War II, had the
luxury of denying the connection between their conservative traditions and fascism,
the fact that fascism in France never governed means that the French right today can,
simply by definition, refuse any such association. This should not, however obscure the
importance of radical-right forces in France, whatever we choose to call them.

24 Wood
in others. We could, for instance, point out that the economic crisis of the
1920s was less serious in France than in Germany, or that the German state, like
the Italian, was relatively new and correspondingly weak and that dominant
classes in both these cases felt compelled to look elsewhere for protection
against perceived threats from oppositional forces. But maybe the question
should be whether there was any major European power in which fascism was
not within the likely range of possible alternatives. I am inclined to answer
that, if there was any such case, it was Britain – not because of any moral
superiority, nor indeed because of any formal peculiarities in its political and
legal institutions, but because its social-property relations, and its particular
relation between state and society, were different in essential ways not only
from Germany but also from France.
The fact that both Britain and France had some kind of political revolution
while Germany did not may not be as significant in explaining these later
developments as the Sonderweg argument suggests. Before we reach any
judgement about this, we need to look more closely at what these revolutions
accomplished and what they did not. Neither one produced a transformation
of social-property relations, and in both cases the revolutionary changes were,
to a greater or lesser extent, in the nature of the state. But even if we set aside
any formal or institutional differences between the two political formations,
we have to consider the very different roles of the British and French states in
the constitution of social-property relations.
In Britain, social-property relations were essentially capitalist, in the sense
I have already explained, before the English Revolution of the seventeenth
century. Britain was, in fact, arguably the only case in which a capitalist
transformation of social-property relations occurred so to speak spontaneously
and organically, by means of an internal transformation in relations between
appropriators and producers. This meant that the role of the state, even before
the revolution, was already substantially different from Britain’s European
neighbours. The state did not play the same role for the ruling class as a direct
instrument of surplus extraction. It was not, to use Gerstenberger’s phrase,
central to British strategies of appropriation and advancement in the way that
it was for the French. Instead, as has already been suggested, it had increasingly
developed as an external guarantor of social order to ensure the conditions of
private accumulation.
The English Revolution – the whole period from the Civil War in the 1640s
to the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 – had no significant effect in
transforming capitalist forces. Even if we attach great importance to the
settlement of 1689 in establishing parliamentary supremacy, it did little more
than consolidate what was already on the table before the revolution, when
the Stuart monarchy attempted to establish a Continental-style absolutism in a

society where there was little political support and even less social foundation
for any such project. If the old cooperative project between monarchy and
Parliament was increasingly giving way to parliamentary supremacy (and we
should not exaggerate the extent to which this was true even in the eighteenth
century), what remained was the characteristic division of labour between
state and property, the separation of economic and extra-economic powers,
which had marked out Britain from its neighbours.
As for the French Revolution, there were strong continuities between the
ancien régime and the post-revolutionary state. In both cases, as Gerstenberger
also emphasises, the French economy was dominated by small-scale agrarian
production; and in both cases strategies of appropriation were focussed
on the state, and advancement through office was the key to social status.
What the Revolution achieved, she argues, was an end to proprietary offices
and the emergence of a ‘bourgeois’ state, in which, office-holders having been
expropriated, offices could become elements of state administration and
office-holders function as instruments of government. Now, I can certainly
agree that the French Revolution put an end to the proprietary state of the
ancien régime, to state-office as private property; but, for our purposes here,
the important point is that it did not put an end to politically-constituted
relations of appropriation and the centrality of state office as an appropriating
strategy.
What is so striking about the post-Revolutionary period, throughout
much of the nineteenth century in France, is the persistence of the tax/office
structure, in which appropriation took the form of direct surplus extraction by
the state as taxation of peasant producers. Not only did the economy continue
to be based on small-scale agricultural production, but the state continued to
relate to that production as a primary extractor of surpluses and an exploiter
of direct producers, for the benefit of office-holders. The revolutionary change
in the form of the state, even though it put an end to proprietary office, did
not fundamentally transform relations of appropriation between the state
and producing classes. France was certainly unlike Germany in that it had
a revolution; but, as Gerstenberger suggests, in the persistence of strategies
of appropriation and advancement focussed on the state, the similarities
between France and Germany are striking; and in Germany, too, we have to see
this not only as a political fact but as a proposition about fundamental social-
property relations.
The transformation of social-property relations in a capitalist direction took
a different form in both Germany and France than it had in Britain. It was
not the same kind of internal, ‘spontaneous’ and organic process. The primary
pressures for capitalist development in France, as in Germany, came from
outside – commercial, geopolitical and military pressures. The situation of the

26 Wood
German principalities was nicely summed up by Hegel, when he observed that

they were in no position to confront a massive military power like Napoleon’s,
and that what Germany needed was a synthesis of Napoleon and Adam Smith,
a French state and a British economy. That thereafter German economic
development, especially in Prussia and later in a united Germany, was in large
part a military enterprise is hardly surprising. French economic development,
too, had been largely driven by military pressures, and the defeat of Napoleon
not only made clear the military advantage which a victorious Britain had
derived from the economic growth and wealth created by capitalism but also
opened the former Napoleonic empire to the purely economic pressures of
British capitalism in unprecedented ways. In both cases, an ‘administrative’
state responded to those external imperatives to bring about a state-led
development of their economies in a capitalist direction. In a sense, then,
the development of capitalism preceded the transformation of social-property
relations.
This raises the question of what effects the intrusion of capitalism had on
essentially non-capitalist elements in France and Germany. That, of course, is a
very large question, and I certainly do not intend to tackle it here. My purpose
is simply to suggest that looking at social-property relations and the state in
France and Germany in the way I am proposing will affect how we understand
such developments as the rise of National Socialism. This does not contradict
what Gerstenberger says about the possibility of alternative outcomes in
Germany, but it might help to characterise the parameters of the available
alternatives and the forces at work in selecting them.
If, as I am suggesting, the pressures for capitalist development in Germany
were essentially external, and not determined by the dominant social-property
relations at home, we can look at how the intrusion of capitalism, mediated
by the ‘administrative’ state, had a socially-destabilising effect, especially
on elements whose strategies of appropriation and social advancement
were undermined by it. When capitalism undermined the old strategies of
appropriation and created a new relation between the political and economic
spheres, this had very specific effects on social layers still dependent on those
strategies and on the old unity between those spheres. It is in this respect,
above all, that Britain differed from its Continental neighbours.
It is true that German capitalism, even more than French, may have been
well on its way by the second half of the nineteenth century, and historians
now argue that German agriculture was capitalist well before that.11 I have
11 What they seem to mean is that German agriculture began to use wage-labour and
became quite productive; but it is still unclear to me how, or even whether, German

no intention of disputing that point here, but I do think it is fairly safe to say
that the social transformations required to stabilise capitalist social-property
relations – transformations that, in Britain, had occurred organically and over
a long period – were far from complete in Germany. This is true not only in
the sense that significant sections of German society were not fully absorbed
into a capitalist economy. The development of capitalism was destabilising
also for another reason. In a society which had not yet transformed but had
marginalised non-capitalist sectors, and where at the same time the growth
of a restive proletariat seemed to pose an immediate threat, the relatively new
and imperfectly consolidated state seemed far too weak.12
This perspective might also help us to draw connections between the
divergent developments of European states before the twentieth century,
and their more recent convergences. What we may be seeing (apart from the
Amerikanisierung Europas) is, for the first time, the real separation of political
and economic spheres, which represents the development of capitalism and
the possibility of a ‘liberal democracy’ on the political plane that poses little
threat to the economic power of capital.
I have argued here that the English rule of law is, in its origins and evolution,
more different from the French état légal than the theme of this conference
allows; that the French case may in some important respects have more
in common with the German Rechtsstaat; and that these differences and
similarities have had important legacies. Yet for all these historical divergences,
the convergence of Western European states in the age of ‘late’ capitalism and
‘liberal democracy’ is probably more striking than the legacies of difference.
This alone might lead us to question the lasting significance of one or another
Sonderweg. It would, for instance, be hard to sustain an argument that
democracy or civil liberties in Germany are today more at risk than in Britain
or France.
social-property relations on the land subjected landowners to capitalist imperatives,

which allowed them no choice but to maximise profit and constantly to increase labour
productivity. My argument here, however, does not depend on the claim that German
commercial agriculture was not in essence capitalist.
12 It is worth considering that the threat of proletarian revolution always seemed less
serious in Britain in part because, in contrast to the state-led development of Germany,
the state did not present a unified and very visible target to oppositional forces, and
oppositional struggles were more directed ‘at the point of production’, in industrial rather
than political struggles. Capital presents a rather diffuse target, and industrial struggles
without a point of concentration in the state tend to be fragmented. This may help to
explain the differences between British ‘labourism’ and Continental socialism.

28 Wood
It is probably enough to say that the economic and political development of

Europe especially since World War II has propelled all these states in a similar
direction, with or against the currents of their past. Or one might say that the
horrors of the past, especially in the case of Germany, have strengthened
the national resolve never to repeat them. The important thing is that, today,
all these states have in common the power of capital and the need for new
forms of resistance to that very particular form of domination. They also
have in common the need to resist the attacks, by states acting in the name of
democracy, on even the most limited of democratic forms.
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Rémond, René 1982, Les Droites en France, Paris: Éditions Aubier-Montaigne.
Soucy, Robert 1986, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
——— 1995, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939, New Haven: Yale University
Press.

Sternhell, Zeev 1983, Ni droite ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France, Paris: Éditions
du Seuil.
Thompson, Edward Palmer 1965, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in Socialist Register
1965, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, London: The Merlin Press, available
at: <http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5963/2859>.
——— 1978, The Poverty of Theory, London: The Merlin Press.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1991, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old
Regimes and Modern States, London: Verso.

brill.com/hima
Elements of a Historical-Materialist Theory

of Racism
David Camfield
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
david.camfield@umanitoba.ca
Abstract
This article aims to advance the historical-materialist understanding of racism

by addressing some central theoretical questions. It argues that racism should be
understood as a social relation of oppression rather than as solely or primarily an
ideology, and suggests that a historical-materialist concept of race is necessary in order
to capture features of societies shaped by historically specific racisms. A carefully
conceived concept of privilege is also required if we are to grasp the contradictory
ways in which members of dominant racial groups are affected by social relations
of racial oppression. The persistence of racism today should be explained as a
consequence of two dimensions of the capitalist mode of production – imperialism
and the contribution of racism to profitability – and of a social property emergent
from racism: the efforts of members of dominant groups to preserve their advantages
relative to the racially oppressed.
Keywords
Racism – race – privilege – theory – Marxism – historical materialism
Upsurges of racism in many parts of the world today underscore why it is

important for historical materialists to be able to understand this form of
oppression in order to be able to act effectively against it.1 But the ability
1 Thanks to Felix Boggio Éwanjé-Épeé, Susan Ferguson, Todd Gordon, David McNally, Jeffery
Webber, Sheila Wilmot, the editors of Historical Materialism and the anonymous referees for
comments on earlier versions of this article.

32 Camfield
of historical materialism to provide an adequate account of racism is widely

questioned among anti-racist analysts. In light of the widespread inattention
to racism or inadequate analysis of it in the Marxist tradition, this scepticism
is not unreasonable.
Frantz Fanon once famously suggested that ‘Marxist analysis should always
be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem’;2
I believe that this is also true whenever racism is concerned. There is plenty
of evidence that historical materialism can be expanded in this way. As Betsy
Esch and David Roediger maintain, ‘Marxism has produced the best tools for
understanding race and racism.’3 Unfortunately, all too often these are not put
to use. Moreover, many would agree with critical race theorist Charles Mills’s
observation that ‘while I am sympathetic to the claim that historical materialism
ultimately provides the most promising theoretical tool for understanding the
genesis and persistence of racism, that does not mean that I am not also aware
of the many problems there have been in Marxist attempts to theorise race in
its multidimensionality. So this seems to me more of a project in progress than
a successfully completed one.’4
The objective of this article is to contribute to this project by addressing the
most basic questions that confront it, questions which historical materialists
have rarely treated head-on: how ought we to understand the concepts of racism,
race and privilege, and how should the persistence of racism be explained?
I argue that racism should be theorised as a distinct phenomenon rather than
in terms of a less specific category inherited from classical Marxism, and that
it is best understood as a social relation of oppression rather than as solely
or primarily an ideology. Ever since the genesis of racial oppression various
historically-specific racisms (which it is beyond the scope of this article to
analyse) have been part of the mutually mediating matrices of social relations
of which societies have been composed. Against those who reject all talk of
race, I suggest that a historical-materialist concept of race is necessary in
order to capture features of societies shaped by racism. A carefully conceived
2 Fanon 1968, p. 40. In referring to Fanon, I do not mean to equate colonialism and racism,
which are distinct forms of oppression. Colonialism involves one society conquering another
and then ruling over it. Where it exists today it is always interwoven with racism. However,
racial oppression frequently exists in the absence of colonialism (although the presence of
racially-oppressed populations within imperialist countries obviously arises out of histories
of colonialism). This article does not attempt to take up the interlocked colonialism and
racism inflicted on indigenous peoples (see Lawrence and Dua 2005 and Sharma and Wright
2008).
3 Esch and Roediger 2014.
4 Mills 2009, p. 272.

Elements of a Historical-Materialist Theory of Racism 33
concept of privilege is also required if we are to grasp the contradictory ways

in which members of dominant racial groups are affected by social relations of
racial oppression. Finally, the fact that racism remains a very real feature of the
contemporary world should be explained as a consequence of two dimensions
of the capitalist mode of production – imperialism and the profitability of
racism – and of a social property emergent from racism, namely the efforts
of members of dominant groups to preserve their advantages relative to the
racially oppressed.
By refining and presenting key theoretical tools, I hope to encourage more
people who do historical-materialist research to put them to use and to
stimulate discussion about how best to integrate anti-racism into our analyses.
Consequently, this article aims to engage all who do historical-materialist
research on the contemporary world and on historical settings in which
racism has been present, not just those whose research focuses on racism.
To acknowledge some delimitations, this contribution is developed on the
basis mainly of English-language texts produced within advanced capitalist
countries by writers primarily concerned with questions of social structure
(rather than philosophy or cultural representations). It is also mainly concerned
with racism within these countries.5 It proceeds from two assumptions: first, in
spite of the value of some existing historical-materialist work on the subject,
most of the inherited Marxist tradition does not deal with racism adequately,
and, second, better answers to basic theoretical questions can help remedy this
weakness. To provide such answers, historical materialists need to draw on the
best previous work in our tradition and draw on theoretical insights developed
in other traditions, stretching but not breaking from historical materialism.6
Before proceeding, it is worth considering a prominent objection to
the claim made by Esch and Roediger to which Mills also declares himself
sympathetic. Some critics argue not just that existing historical-materialist
attempts to understand racism have fallen short but that historical materialism
is inherently incapable of dealing with racism in an adequate way. Notable
here is Cedric Robinson, whose Black Marxism aims to excavate the ‘Black
radical tradition’. Robinson contends that Marxism is inescapably a product
of Western civilisation, one of whose ‘ordering ideas’ has, since the feudal era,
been ‘racialism: the legitimation and corroboration of social organisation as
natural by reference to the “racial” components of its elements’. As a result,
5 However, this approach can readily be used in other settings in which racial oppression is
practised by a dominant group whose identity is not white (for example, Hindu fascism in
contemporary India, to use one reviewer’s example).
6 I discuss this approach in Camfield 2014.

34 Camfield
‘the deepest structures of “historical materialism,” the foreknowledge for its

comprehension of historical movement, have tended to relieve European
Marxists from the obligation of investigating the profound effects of culture and
historical experience on their science.’7 Historical materialism is, he claims, an
economic-reductionist theory that is unable to reckon properly with matters of
ideology, culture and consciousness, including how the ‘particularistic forces
of racism and nationalism’ shaped the development of capitalism.8
Robinson’s writing on Marxism raises a host of issues; I will limit myself here
to the question of whether historical materialism is inherently incapable of
being reconstructed to deal with racism. This is Robinson’s view, yet he offers
no direct and detailed engagement with core concepts of historical materialism
in order to demonstrate its alleged incapacity. This is what would be required
to sustain his claim; identifying weaknesses in the thought of Marx, Engels and
other Marxists is not enough. Historical materialism as a theoretical approach
cannot be equated with what Marx or any other Marxist wrote, even if this
habit has been common among both its would-be practitioners and foes.
Black Marxism was published in 1983, the year after the publication
of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, a milestone in
anti-racist historical-materialist analysis.9 Yet Robinson does not examine this
book or Stuart Hall’s work on racism that influenced it.10 Nor does he scrutinise
the contributions of non-European Marxists such as Jose Carlos Mariategui,
Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney11 or other work that demonstrates a
concern with developing theory to understand the specificities of non-
European societies. But, given Robinson’s concern with ideology, culture and
consciousness, perhaps the most remarkable absence is any consideration of
Gramsci’s theoretical contributions. In addition to the lack of attention to core
concepts of historical materialism and the limited review of theorists working
in this tradition, Robinson’s case can also be questioned on methodological
grounds. Its positing of deep structures of civilisational thought that persist
at a level beneath that at which people socially produce and reproduce the
means of life and life itself separates consciousness from existence. This is
an idealism that resembles the target of Marx and Engels’s critique in The
7 Robinson 2000, p. 2. See also Robinson 2001.

8 Robinson 2000, pp. 66, 10–11.
9 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1982.
10 Hall 1980.
11 The latter two are cited in Robinson 2000 but their contributions are not considered in
relation to its verdict on historical materialism.

German Ideology.12 Considering these failings,13 it is not difficult to conclude

that Robinson fails to provide a compelling case that historical materialism is
irredeemable when it comes to understanding racism.14 I therefore proceed to
consider the most basic question to which an anti-racist historical materialism
needs to be able to provide a well-developed answer.
What is Racism?
In addition to an anti-imperialism that over the years became increasingly

radical ‘just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear
direction’,15 Marx had some perceptive insights about a few realities of his day
that we can readily understand as racism even though they were not identified
in those terms at the time. He famously observed in 1870 that
Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a

working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and
Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as
a competitor who lowers his standard of life . . . He cherishes religious,
social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude
towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the Negroes
in the former slave states of the USA . . . This antagonism is the secret of
12 Marx and Engels 1970.

13 In addition, the discussion in Black Marxism of what Robinson sees as racial thinking
in feudal Europe does not stand up well in light of more recent historical studies
(see Bethencourt 2013), and its treatment of the history of capitalism has major problems
stemming from the commercialisation model found in the work of Pirenne, Braudel and
Wallerstein (see Wood 2002 and Brenner 1977) on which it draws. My reference here
to Wood and Brenner should not be interpreted as an uncritical endorsement of their
perspective on the origins of capitalism, which I see as very important (see Dimmock
2014) but insufficient. For a discussion of some ‘international determinations and
conditions’ missing from the work of Brenner, Wood and many others influenced by
them, see Anievas and Nisancioglu 2013.
14 Robinson’s focus is ultimately more on Marxian socialism as a politics of liberation than
on historical materialism as a theoretical approach. Although obviously of tremendous
importance, this and Robinson’s political alternative (whose utopian-socialist character
is very evident in Robinson 2001) are beyond the scope of this article.
15 Anderson 2010, p. 244. On these dimensions of Marx’s thought, see Anderson 2010, Achcar
2013 and Pradella 2015.

36 Camfield
the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It

is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.16
However, Marx did not theorise racism as such or recognise that, since its
emergence, societies have been socially organised by racism as well as by
relations of class (and by those of gender and sexuality).17
In the broadest terms, we can identify five ways that racism – understood
just for the moment in a loose sense as the domination experienced in the
modern era by non-Europeans, people of non-European ancestry and Jews
at the hands of Europeans and people of European ancestry, as distinguished
from earlier forms of subjugation and religious persecution (a more precise
definition is developed below) – has been conceptualised among historical
materialists. The first three approaches do not accord racism much specificity
and subsume it into existing categories, which are sometimes combined.18 It
is these understandings that we find in classical Marxism in its heyday.19 The
other two approaches, which are more recent, attempt to deal with racism as
a distinct phenomenon.
Super-exploitation
Some Marxists have treated racism as fundamentally a matter of an exceptional
level of class exploitation inflicted on a particular population. This view was
present, for example, among early Communists in the US20 and one current
within the ‘New Communist Movement’ in the US in the 1970s. According to a
publication of one group within that current, racism is ‘the super-exploitation
of black people’ and ‘Race is only one aspect of labor/capital class conflict.’21
As one commentator has written, this position ‘acknowledges the specificity
of Afro-American oppression beyond general working-class exploitation, yet it
defines this specificity in economistic terms.’22
16 Marx and Engels 1975, p. 222.

17 The effort in Paolucci 2006 to show that there are concepts of Marx’s that are vital to the
analysis of racism evades the issue of what is not found in Marx’s work.
18 For example, see Bonacich 1999.
19 For example, see Communist International 1983, Reed 1920, Stewart 1985, Trotsky 1978.
20 See Reed 1920.
21 The New Voice 1975.
22 West 1988, p. 19.

National Oppression
This approach treats racism as a manifestation of the oppression of one
nation by another, a phenomenon familiar to historical materialists from Marx
onwards.23 This was how the Sixth Congress of the Communist International
(1928) characterised the condition of African-Americans.24 More recently,
Theodore Allen has argued that national oppression exists when ‘social control
depends upon the acceptance and fostering of social distinctions within the
oppressed group’ rather than on denying such distinctions. This, he suggests,
was the case in Britain’s Caribbean colonies and in Ireland after Catholic
Emancipation.25
Denial of Democratic Rights

Prior to the development of efforts to grasp racism as a distinct phenomenon,
which stemmed from the rise of anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles from
the 1950s through the 1970s, it was very common to consider racism in terms
of the denial of rights established in capitalist democracies. For instance, in
1933 Max Shachtman condemned the ‘vast code of white master class laws,
written and unwritten, [that] operates to keep the American Negro in an
inferior social, economic and political position’, adding that ‘The abstract
democratic equality for the Negro which was written into the Constitution
three generations ago has remained on paper.’26
Ideology
In Caste, Class, and Race, Oliver Cox raised the level of historical-materialist
discussion of racism by attempting to distinguish what he called ‘race relations’
from other phenomena. ‘What then is the phenomenon, the beginnings of
which we seek to determine? It is the phenomenon of the capitalist exploitation
of peoples and its complementary social attitude.’ Dubbing ‘race prejudice’
as ‘an attitudinal instrument of modern human, economic, exploitation’
dating from European colonialism in the Americas after 1492, he argued
it was ‘propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose
of stigmatising some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the
group itself or its resources or both may be justified.’27 This, in spite of its very
real weaknesses, was an effort to theorise racism as such in a historical and
23 Löwy 1998.

24 Naison 1983, pp. 17–19.
25 Allen 1994, pp. 241, n. 11, 36.
26 Shachtman 2003, p. 40.
27 Cox 1948, pp. 321, 330, 393.

38 Camfield
materialist way, avoiding ahistorical theories of inter-group enmity and the

‘substitution of the history of a system of rationalisation for that of a material
social fact.’28 It contends that racism is an ideology justifying exploitation.
This understanding of racism as a ruling-class instrument has contemporary
exponents, and has been strikingly echoed by Robert Young.29
Anti-imperialist struggles and anti-racist organising within imperialist
countries during the Long Boom, above all the African-American freedom
movement, stimulated new historical-materialist efforts to comprehend
racism. A notable effort to theorise racism as ideology was made by Stuart Hall.
‘It is clear’, Hall argued,
that ‘racism,’ if not exclusively an ideological phenomenon, has critical

ideological dimensions. Hence, the relative crudity and reductionism of
materialist theories of ideology have proved a considerable stumbling
block in the necessary work of analysis in this area. Especially, the analysis
has been foreshortened by a homogenous, non-contradictory conception
of consciousness and of ideology.30
Hall strove to provide an alternative to economic-reductionist conceptions

of racism and to those that treat racism as one of a number of independent
factors that shape events. Suggesting that Althusser supplemented by Gramsci31
provided the theoretical resources for a non-reductionist historical-materialist
approach to racism, he noted ‘there is as yet no adequate theory of racism
which is capable of dealing with both the economic and the superstructural
features’ of ‘racially-structured social formations’ ‘while at the same time giving
a historically-concrete and sociologically-specific account of distinctive racial
aspects.’32 Hall emphasised that such a theory would need to apply ‘the premise
of historical specificity’ to study ‘historically-specific racisms’. It would need to
bear in mind that ‘one cannot explain racism in abstraction from other social
relations – even if, alternatively, one cannot explain it by reducing it to those
relations.’33 He proposed that ‘One must start, then, from the concrete historical
“work” which racism accomplishes under specific historical conditions – as
a set of economic, political and ideological practices, of a distinctive kind,
28 Cox 1948, p. 321.

29 See Young 2006, p. 38.
30 Hall 1986, p. 26.
31 On Hall’s interpretation of Gramsci’s use for the study of racism, see Hall 1986.
32 Hall 1980, p. 336.
33 Hall 1980, pp. 336, 337.

concretely articulated with other practices in a social formation.’34 It was this

approach that informed the influential historical-materialist studies of racism
in the UK produced by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.35
Writing in the wake of Hall’s contributions, which he faulted for not
pinpointing ‘what the many different racisms have in common qua racism’,36
Robert Miles proposed that racism be understood strictly as ideology, identified
by its content, and rigorously distinguished from ‘exclusionary practice’. Miles
and coauthor Malcolm Brown suggest that ‘the precise definition of ideology
is not important’, although they stress that racism is ‘an ideology because it
represents human beings, and social relations, in a distorted manner’. ‘Rather,
it is the content of this ideology that is important.’37 Racism signifies
some biological and/or somatic characteristic(s) as the criterion by which

populations are identified. In this way, these populations are represented
as having a natural, unchanging origin and status, and therefore as being
inherently different. . . . Second, one or more of the groups so identified
must be attributed with additional (negatively evaluated) characteristics
and/or must be represented as inducing negative consequences for
(an)other group(s). Those characteristics or consequences may be either
biological or cultural.38
Connected to this approach is a concept of racialisation: the ‘process by

which meaning is attributed to particular biological features of human
beings, as a result of which individuals may be assigned to a general category
of persons that reproduces itself biologically. This process has a long history
in precapitalist and capitalist societies’.39 Thus racism is ‘a particular form of
(evaluative) representation that is a specific instance of a wider (descriptive)
process of racialisation.’40 Whether particular exclusionary practices involve
racism demands specific investigations; ‘exclusionary practices that result
in disadvantage for racialised groups cannot be assumed to be determined
34 Hall 1980, p. 338.

35 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1982.
36 Miles and Brown 2003, p. 63. This coauthored book is a revised edition of Miles 1989,
hence my reference in the text to this as Miles’s perspective. Miles discusses his work in
an interview: Ashe and McGeever 2011.
37 Miles and Brown 2003, pp. 8, 9, 8.
38 Miles and Brown 2003, p. 104.

40 Camfield
wholly or in part by racism.’41 Miles’s approach has an enduring influence

within academic Marxism in the UK.42
Social Relation of Oppression

The Black Power movement in the US also generated a way of theorising the
specificity of racism which does not treat it as solely or primarily a matter
of ideology. Conceptualising racism as a form of oppression – as distinct
from class exploitation and alienation – is the hallmark of this approach,
which has not been theoretically elaborated to the same extent as racism-
as-ideology. However, many of its adherents would agree with the general idea
that oppression exists when ‘groups within and across classes, identified by
ascribed characteristics, are subjected to specific discriminatory practices’ and
that racism is a unique instance of oppression.43
Robert Blauner’s Racial Oppression in America was a significant text of
its time in this regard. For Blauner, racism should be understood as racial
oppression, which involves ‘a dominant group, which thinks of itself as distinct
and superior, rais[ing] its social position by exploiting, controlling, and keeping
down others who are categorised in racial or ethnic terms.’44
Blauner’s work displays sympathy to historical materialism rather than
using historical-materialist concepts; he openly acknowledged that in his
book ‘racial oppression and racial conflict are not satisfactorily linked to the
dominant economic relations nor to the overall distribution of political power
in America.’45 In the same period, avowed Marxists were also advancing ways
of understanding racism that aimed to go beyond limited inherited notions of
super-exploitation, national oppression and unequal rights by identifying
racism as a specific form of oppression and which did not conceptualise it
as ideology. For example, in 1967 Noel Ignatin emphasised that ‘the practice
of white supremacy’ provided the ‘material basis’ of ‘the ideology of white
chauvinism’.46
Ignatin’s cothinker Theodore Allen later argued that racial oppression is
a system of social control that ‘depends upon the denial of the legitimacy of
social distinctions within the oppressed group’.47 Alex Callinicos’s claim that

42 For example, Carter 2007; Carter and Virdee 2008.
43 Bakan 2008, p. 249.
44 Blauner 1972, p. 22.
45 Blauner 1972, p. 13.
46 Ignatin 1976, p. 1.
47 Allen 1994, p. 241, n. 11.

‘racism exists where a group of people is discriminated against on the basis

of characteristics which are held to be inherent in them as a group’ is a less
restrictive way of characterising the specific distinguishing feature of racism
as oppression.48 Étienne Balibar’s assertion that ‘racism is a social relation’
makes explicit an idea that is generally implicit in this approach.49
The Concept of Race
In addition to divergent views on the nature of racism as a social phenomenon,

disagreement exists around the concept of race. There is overwhelming
agreement among anti-racist social researchers that there is no biological basis
for any notion of race.50 However, there is no unanimity about how to answer
the question of whether a concept of race understood as referring to a product
of society has any legitimacy. Both historical materialists and other critical
analysts of racism are divided between those whom Mills dubs eliminativists,
who believe ‘race should be seen as comparable to “phlogiston” ’ (an element
supposedly released during combustion whose existence was disproved by the
chemist Lavoisier in the eighteenth century) and purged from our theoretical
vocabulary, and anti-eliminativists who redefine race ‘so it refers to one’s
structural location in a racialised social system . . . [w]ithout implying any
biological referent.’51
The anti-eliminativist case suggests, in Roediger’s words, that ‘race is
itself a critically important social fact . . . Race also defines the consciousness
of commonality uniting those oppressed as a result of their assumed
biology, perceived colour, and alleged cultural heritage, as well as the fellow
feeling of those defending relative privileges derived from being part of
[a] dominant . . . race.’52 Hall argues that race is ‘the modality in which class is
“lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form
in which it is appropriated and “fought through”.’53 From a different anti-
eliminativist angle, Allen maintains that ‘it is not “race” in general that must
be understood, but the “white race,” in particular; so the “white race” must be
48 Callinicos 1992, p. 6.

49 Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 41.
50 For a good critical discussion of this and ‘the new racial science’, see Roberts 2011.
51 Mills 2012.
52 Roediger 2008, p. xii.
53 Hall 1980, p. 341.

42 Camfield
understood, not simply as a social construct, but as a ruling class social control
formation.’54
Arguing for eliminativism, Miles and Brown ‘do not deny that the structure
of social stratification can be and is racialised’ but argue that when race is
used in social explanation ‘what needs to be represented as a social process
and explained is reconstructed as a social fact that can be used to explain
other social facts’.55 Similarly, Robert Carter rejects the concept because of
its dubious history and because ‘the discrediting of its ontological referent –
races of human beings – leaves it without an object’. It is, Carter contends,
‘impossible to formulate a research question using it that is capable of being
answered.’56
Elucidating Racism as a Social Relation of Oppression
It is my contention that the most promising way to develop a stronger

historical-materialist approach to racism is to theorise it as a social relation of
oppression with an anti-eliminitativist understanding of race. At the outset it
is useful to identify two foundational guidelines for any adequate historical-
materialist approach to racism. First, care must be taken to avoid retaining
residual naturalist or transhistorical notions. For example, at one point Hall
suggests that ‘the question is not whether men-in-general make perceptual
distinctions between groups with different racial or ethnic characteristics,
but rather, what are the specific conditions that make this form of distinction
socially pertinent, historically active.’57 This suggests that racial characteristics
define groups prior to historically-specific social processes of racialisation.
Second, there must be no minimisation of racism. One version of this is the
downplaying of the impact of racism on racially oppressed persons or of
racism’s social significance.58 Another is the diminution of racism’s ontological
status. This is evident in Mike Cole’s stark assertion that ‘it is capitalism, not
white supremacy, that is a structural system of oppression’.59 Such ontological
claims treat racism as literally less real, in Cole’s case as an epiphenomenon
54 Allen 1998.

55 Miles and Brown 2003, pp. 7, 91.
56 Carter 2007, p. 446.
57 Hall 1980, p. 338.
58 See the examples discussed in Roediger 2006.
59 Cole 2009, p. 258. For a similar position, see Carter 2007, p. 448.

of capitalism, and are conducive to the minimisation of racism’s social and

political importance.
Those preliminaries aside, why should we treat racism as a social relation
of oppression? I believe there are both historical and logical grounds for
choosing this as an approach. In his recent historical work Racisms, Francisco
Bethencourt argues that the evidence does not support ‘the idea that the theory
of races precedes racism – a relatively consensual view among historians’:
‘classification did not precede action’.60 Consistent with this is Barbara Fields’s
important observation that ‘people are more readily perceived as inferior by
nature when they are already seen as oppressed’.61 Although Bethencourt’s
definition of racism as ‘prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with
discriminatory action’62 is inadequate, for reasons that will become clear
below, his point that racial ideology did not precede racist practices suggests
one reason why treating racism as ideology in the manner of Hall and Miles
is not the best way to proceed.
Another is, simply, that a materialist method should prioritise human
activity, while recognising that social being is always and everywhere con
scious, intersubjective and linguistic. Historical materialism should not merely
invert an idealist elevation of ideas (or discourse) over matter, although this
habit has unfortunately been common in the history of Marxism. Rather, it
should follow Marx in rejecting the dualism of material and ideal altogether
and asserting the unity of consciousness and human individuals, so that
social existence and social consciousness are seen as an internally-related
ensemble. Within that unity, there is a hierarchy of determination: bodies are
prior to or determinate of thought. ‘Starting from the standpoint of objects,
of the non-conceptual, materialist critique resists all idealist moves to absorb
the object into concepts.’63 Such methodological premises do not prevent us
from recognising the importance of racist ideology. However, they do suggest
that racism should not be theorised primarily in terms of ideology.
Along with these general reasons for choosing the social relation of
oppression approach over that of racism-as-ideology, it is also worth addressing
some problems in the versions of the latter developed by Cox, Hall and Miles.
Cox’s instrumentalist theory ‘assumes that the capitalist class as a whole
benefit[s] from racism’, whereas racism’s effects may be contradictory for at
least some capitalists. It also portrays racism ‘as inauthentic to the working
60 Bethencourt 2013, p. 3.

61 Fields and Fields 2012, p. 128.
63 McNally 2001, p. 74.

44 Camfield
class, something externally imposed by the ideological dominance of the

ruling class. This [is] not only sociologically unpersuasive, but it discourage[s]
serious consideration of racism within the working class, since the real sources
of such racism [are] held to be the ruling class and its functional need to
manage the conditions of labour exploitation.’64
The emphatic separation by Miles of ‘exclusionary practice’ from racism
as ideology has the unfortunate consequence of distancing racism as he
defines it from the material realities of what Bethencourt dubs ‘discriminatory
action’. If racism involves the ideological signification of a group on the basis
of allegedly natural characteristics and the identification of negative qualities
or consequences, then it is possible to say that racism exists in the absence
of any significant ‘exclusionary practice’. In Miles’s terms, a system of ‘anti-
white’ beliefs present among a profoundly-marginalised and impoverished
community of recent African immigrants in a European country could qualify
as racism; this detaches racism from any considerations of social power. Even
more troubling is the difficulty that Miles’s separation creates for identifying
racism when ‘biological and/or somatic’ characteristics are not, or not
explicitly, ‘the criterion by which populations are identified’65 in ideology. For
example, Miles and Brown quite consistently conclude that ‘Islamophobia is
not to be regarded as an instance of racism’.66 However, Fanny Müller-Uri and
Benjamin Opratko make the important point that ‘anti-Muslim racism works
by essentialising cultural difference, that is to say the construction of Islam as
a static, homogenous and characteristically different culture’,67 a point whose
broad significance will be taken up below.
Satnam Virdee’s praise for Hall’s contributions of the 1970s and early 1980s
as ‘a genuine tour de force’ and ‘the intellectual high point of scholarly work
that was sparked by the mass protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s’68 is
merited. However, they are not without significant weaknesses. Hall’s theory is,
as Miles contends, imprecise about what makes racist ideology racist. Although
Hall is not uncritical of Althusser’s conception of ideology, his own theory,
like Althusser’s, is ultimately missing the important dimension of ideology-
critique found in Marx (and also in Gramsci), which Hall ‘erroneously reduces
to a critique of “false consciousness” ’.69 As a result, it does not engage with
64 Carter 2007, p. 435.

67 Müller-Uri and Opratko 2013, p. 12.
68 Virdee 2010, pp. 144–5.
69 Rehmann 2013, p. 188. See also the excellent discussion of Althusser on pp. 147–8.

Marx’s insights about how capitalist social relations generate ‘ “socially valid,
and therefore . . . objective thought forms” . . . which are reproduced directly
and spontaneously as “current and usual thought forms” ’.70 The influence
of Althusser also explains why Hall is also ‘unable to capture analytically
how the class struggle, especially its intensification, may contribute to the
destabilisation of well-entrenched racialised subjectivities.’71 These specific
problems along with those common to all versions of racism-as-ideology take
us back to the need for an alternative approach.
What, then, of theorising racism as a social relation of oppression? While
references to oppression by Marxists are longstanding, the development
of a distinctive meaning for the term began as a response within advanced
capitalist countries to the rise of new movements, among women, people
who experience racism, and others in the 1960s. Activists in these eruptions of
self-organisation all stressed their experience of forms of domination other
than class exploitation and developed ideas to understand these. Oppression
was the problem for which liberation was the solution. This term is preferable
to others, such as discrimination and prejudice, because of its stronger
connotations and its implication that the harm done is systemic and structural,
quite often ‘as a consequence of . . . the normal processes of everyday life’.72
In spite of their many important insights, non-Marxist theories of oppres
sion do not offer a concept of oppression in general that can be used in
historical materialism. This is because they almost always treat class as a
form of oppression, consider forms of oppression as involving exploitation
akin to class, or do both.73 This is clear in, for example, Iris Marion Young’s
discussion of ‘Five Faces of Oppression’,74 which posits exploitation as one of
these faces, thereby subsuming it under an overarching notion of oppression.
Such theories are unable to capture the distinctive differences between class
exploitation and the phenomena I consider as forms of oppression; the same
problem also occurs in Marxist work that fails to make a rigorous distinction
between exploitation and oppression. Class, anchored in the extraction of
surplus labour, has historically always been mediated by gender oppression
70 Rehmann 2013, p. 43.

71 Virdee 2010, p. 147. For the historical analysis of racism and class struggle in the UK in the
1970s that supports this claim about Hall, see Virdee 2000.
72 Young 1990, p. 41. Frye 2003 was an important theoretical contribution in this regard.
73 For a discussion of the second of these problems in Christine Delphy’s feminist theory,
see Arruzza 2013, pp. 92–7.
74 Young 1990, pp. 39–65. The same problem occurs in Cudd 2006 and Frye 2003.

46 Camfield
and often by other forms of oppression.75 But not all members of an exploited
class must also be oppressed; consider the condition of higher-paid white male
able-bodied heterosexual workers in advanced capitalist countries today, who
endure exploitation and alienation but not oppression.
There is no truly adequate conceptualisation of oppression in general to
be found in the many historical-materialist efforts to understand the forms
of oppression to which feminist, anti-racist, national-liberation, lesbian and
gay, indigenous and other movements draw attention and that do distinguish
exploitation from oppression. For the sake of intellectual precision and clarity,
I propose that oppression is best understood to mean systemic harm, arising
from social practices, inflicted on a group that is not constituted on the basis of a
common relationship to social production. Racism, sexism and heterosexism are
qualitatively different instances of this general phenomenon.
Callinicos’s contention that oppression ‘on the basis of characteristics which
are held to be inherent in . . . a group’76 is the defining feature of racism begins
to capture what distinguishes this form of domination. Unlike Miles, Callinicos
appreciates that biological or somatic references are not essential features of
racism. Unlike Allen’s insistence that racial oppression involves ‘the denial
of the legitimacy of social distinctions within the oppressed group’,77 which
entails that racism does not exist where oppressors recognise the legitimacy of
high-status strata among the oppressed, Callinicos is not excessively narrow.
Yet what Callinicos says of racism is also true of other forms of oppression,
such as patriarchy, heterosexism and the oppression of people with disabilities,
in cases where members of the oppressed group in question are seen to have
relevant inherent characteristics. Thus his contention is not sufficiently precise.
It is therefore helpful to consider the conclusion reached by George Fredrickson
at the end of Racism: A Short History, acknowledged by Bethencourt as the ‘first
general history of racism in the Western world’.78 Fredrickson writes that ‘we
might say that racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity
dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences
that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.’79 Fredrickson’s suggestion has
a number of strengths. It is certainly better than Bethencourt’s view of racism
as ‘prejudice concerning ethnic descent coupled with discriminatory action’80
75 On the historical inseparability of class and gender, see Coontz and Henderson 1986.
77 Allen 1994, p. 241, n. 11.
79 Fredrickson 2002, p. 170.

because it foregrounds what amounts to oppression, rather than prejudice and

discrimination. It also grasps that the differences alleged to exist are treated
as not only inherited, as Bethencourt notes and Callinicos does not, but also
inherent, a feature missed by Bethencourt. Fredrickson’s conception tells us
more about who suffers from racism than Callinicos’s. It is compatible with
Müller-Uri and Opratko’s argument that
Historically, the construction of racist difference has always been about

the essentialisation of socio-cultural differences that allegedly express
themselves in biological characteristics, but only tendentially and always
precariously. This brings us to see that while these cultural differences
should tendentially be linked to bodily markers, racist discrimination
does not stop where this isn’t possible. This can be illustrated through
many historical and contemporary examples where strategies of artificial
visibilisation were necessary, such as the yellow badge/star of David in
Antisemitism.81
However, Fredrickson’s reference to ethnicity – a concept ‘that emerged into

social-science parlance in the 1950s as a way of avoiding the concept of race
(while often holding on to much of its baggage)’82 – is unfortunate, since the
meaning of this vexed term is not clarified.83
Building on Fredrickson, I believe that the following conceptualisation best
fits the global historical evidence: racism is the oppression of a multi-gender
social collectivity on the basis of differences (not limited to those surrounding
sexuality or impairment) that are treated as inherited and unchangeable. This
captures the defining feature, the oppression of communities of persons on
the basis of differences that are, in practice, considered inherent and inherited,
without limiting the differences in question to those that are supposedly
biological.84 It also clearly differentiates racial oppression from patriarchal
oppression, heterosexism and the oppression of people with disabilities, which
81 Müller-Uri and Opratko 2013, p. 10.

82 Nirenberg 2014, p. 39.
83 On some problems with ‘ethnicity’, see Sizwe 2013.
84 Two readers for the journal questioned the claim that racial oppression always involves
the essentialisation of differences, citing the treatment of migrants and of African-
Americans seen as mired in a ‘culture of poverty’. I believe the history of racism suggests
that essentialisation of differences is a defining feature of this form of oppression. This
essentialisation happens both in practice and in how racially-oppressed groups are
presented ideologically; we should not limit ourselves to the latter. It is also possible for
migrants to experience xenophobic oppression that is not racist in character.

48 Camfield
frequently involve the essentialisation of socially-constructed differences

in the oppressed group. Beyond this minimal characterisation, there is not
much that can be said about the content of racial oppression in general. As
Hall has argued, we should think in terms of ‘historically-specific racisms’ and
avoid positing ‘a common and universal structure to racism, which remains
essentially the same, outside of its specific historical location’.85
One point that can, however, be made about racial oppression in general is
that its existence does not require that it always be consciously perpetuated.
Carter’s claim that ‘racism requires racists’ needs to be qualified.86 Drawing
on concepts of Andrew Sayer, he argues that most manifestations of racism
(which, following Miles, he considers an ideology) are ‘identity-sensitive
mechanisms’, not ‘identity-neutral mechanisms’ whose functioning does not
depend on the identities of agents.87 While it is evident that many practices of
racial oppression do indeed involve conscious actions by people in dominant
groups directed against members of racially oppressed groups, Carter’s
sweeping claim is questionable. Many anti-racist activists have stressed
that what matters most when dealing with racism are effects, not people’s
intentions. Impersonal practices carried out without racist intent can and
frequently do reproduce racial oppression. Consider the example of rules for
university admission that prohibit reference to racial identity in applicants’
personal statements and its consideration in admissions decisions. Such rules
prevent members of racially oppressed groups from referring to important
life experiences, including disadvantages encountered, without which their life
stories may be ‘both incomplete and incomprehensible’.88 In so doing, they can
be objective barriers to access to university education for persons who belong
to racially oppressed groups whose members are less likely to graduate from
university. University staff who are committed to anti-racism but required
to implement such rules thereby reproduce racism. Similarly, laws that ban
people wearing ‘ostentatious’ religious items from accessing services or being
employed in certain positions perpetuate anti-Muslim racism against Muslims
who wear headscarves regardless of the consciousness of those who enforce
such legislation.89 In considering racism, we should be attuned to harmful
effects on members of groups defined by differences that are treated as
inherited and unchangeable, rather than focused on subjective racist intent.
85 Hall 1980, pp. 336, 337.

86 Carter 2007, p. 450.
87 Carter 2007, pp. 448–9.
88 Carbado and Harris 2012, p. 206.
89 Zemni 2011.

To make the best use of this understanding of racism, we need a historical

materialism whose social ontology is more multidimensional than Marx’s.
Racism, like patriarchy and heterosexism, is not an epiphenomenon of class.
Forms of oppression constitute the mutually-mediating matrix of social
relations that is social reality at the same time as it is constituted by class.
Racism, like other forms of oppression, operates simultaneously with class,
both in the subjective experiences of individuals (at the level of identities) and
in the objective happening of social processes.90
The absence of such an ontology leads to a theoretical downgrading of
racism. This is not always formulated explicitly, but Carter provides a very clear
example:
Marxism, in arguing that human beings make history but not in circum
stances of their own choosing, acknowledges a distinction between the
contexts in which people find themselves and the efforts of those people
to change or reproduce those contexts. The forces shaping these contexts
are the social relations of production; these . . . define the context within
which all forms of social inequality are generated. . . . [T]he social relations
of production refers to emergent, and relatively enduring forms of social
relation; racism to ideas and ideology, to the forms of thought developed
in response to, and in the effort to manage, these social relations.91
Here the forces that condition the contexts of human agency are literally
reduced to relations of production, while racism is merely ideas and definitely
nothing like a ‘relatively enduring . . . social relation’. From this perspective, it
is difficult to imagine that racism could be very significant in shaping social
processes in time. In this way, theoretical downgrading opens the door to an
underestimation of racism’s political importance.
Race and Racialisation
Should this theory of racism be accompanied by a concept of race? There

is general agreement among historical materialists that race has no basis
in nature. Historical-materialist proponents of eliminativism concur with
Carter that the concept should simply be discarded because the natural-
scientific demonstration that human races do not exist ‘leaves it without an
90 Kelley 1997 is just one of many studies that support this claim.
91 Carter 2007, pp. 447–8.

50 Camfield
object’.92 However, holding this position creates difficulties when it comes to

analysing particular features of societies in which racial oppression is part of
the interlocking matrix of social relations.93 The eliminativist position can also
create ‘immense problems relating to political practice’94 when, as in the case
of Miles, it leads to a questioning of anti-racist mobilisations organised around
the racial identities of racially oppressed groups, although eliminativism does
not necessarily lead to such a conclusion.
Where racism exists, societies come to possess features that are a certain
set of what Paul Taylor designates as ‘institutional facts, facts that depend
for their existence on constitutive networks of social conventions’, which
‘assign meaning’ to them. ‘Races and racial identities’, Taylor maintains, are
such ‘institutional facts’. They are ‘created and sustained’ by practices that
‘assign meanings to human bodies and bloodlines’.95 Races can be understood
as ‘probabilistically defined populations’ that are ‘brought into being by the
practices of racial identification’, which link ‘certain bodies and bloodlines to
certain social locations and modes of treatment’.96 A ‘racial identity is a way of
specifying someone’s location on a racialised social terrain’.97 Himani Bannerji
helpfully describes race as ‘no more or less than an active social organisation,
a constellation of practices motivated, consciously and unconsciously, by
political or power imperatives with implied cultural forms – images, symbols,
metaphors, and norms that range from the quotidian to the institutional.’98 All
this suggests that the concept of race does indeed have an object – not, of course,
in nature, but in certain phenomena of social ontology. A critical concept of
race is a tool for the analysis of these phenomena, important institutional facts
generated by racial oppression and anti-racist resistance. The eliminativist
refusal of such a concept leads to problems in understanding such realities.
For this reason, then, there are good grounds for using a historical-materialist
concept of race in the analysis of societies in which racial oppression exists, to
capture aspects of social relations that exist in and through racism.
92 Carter 2007, p. 446.

93 The term ‘interlocking’ should be understood in this article as synonymous with mutually-
mediating, and distinct from the idea of intersection (which suggests the coming together
of externally-related phenomena rather than inner-relatedness within a social ontology
of internal relations).
94 Virdee 2010, p. 31.
95 Taylor 2009, p. 185.
96 Taylor 2004, p. 117; Taylor 2009, p. 185; Taylor 2004, p. 117.
97 Taylor 2009, p. 186.
98 Bannerji 2005, p. 149.

To highlight the ways in which persons and social relations acquire racial
meanings, the concept of racialisation is useful. In Miles’s usage, racialisation
refers to ‘instances where social relations between people have been
structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such
a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities’.99 But in
keeping with the understanding of racism argued for here, there is no reason
to embed biology in this way. At issue are differences (not limited to those
surrounding gender, sexuality or impairment) that are treated as inherited
and unchangeable. Thus we can say that racialisation happens when racism
exists and the meanings linked to differences derived from it are assigned to
persons or things. As Virdee suggests,100 historical materialists can benefit
from drawing on Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial-formation theory.
For Omi and Winant, race is a ‘concept which signifies and symbolises social
conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies’ and
racial formation is ‘the sociohistorical process by which racial identities are
created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed’.101 Yet, as Nikhil Pal Singh
argues, their ‘identification of race as primarily a question of social meaning –
even when that meaning has been understood to be productive of “structures”
of inequality in wealth, employment, housing, law enforcement, and the
like – continues to operate within a methodological discourse that imagines
the category of race as something that can ultimately be precipitated out of
social relations, rather than as something that is constantly made and remade
as a social relation’102 or, to put it in a manner consistent with the position
developed here, as a dimension of an oppressive social relation. Singh’s astute
observation takes us back to the starting point of racism as a relation of
oppression, without which racialisation would not happen.103
Where racism exists as a social relation of oppression, all social relations that
are mediated by it become racialised to at least some degree. Consequently,
racial formation happens, producing what Sadri Khiari calls ‘social races’:
‘hierarchically-ordered social groups that think of themselves and oppose
each other as races, demarcated by imagined and reified differences’.104 Races

100 Virdee 2010, p. 157.
101 Omi and Winant 2015, pp. 110, 109 (emphasis removed).
102 Singh 2012, pp. 285–6.
103 For Miles, racialisation is not connected in any way to oppression. Miles sees racialisation
happening in ancient Greece (Miles and Brown 2003, pp. 100–3), where racial oppression
was absent, as is evident from Bethencourt 2013 and Fredrickson 2002.
104 Khiari 2009, p. 21 (my translation).

52 Camfield
in this sense are historical formations cross-cut by other social relations

including those of class, gender and sexuality, and existing simultaneously
and in the same social spaces as class and other formations generated by a
matrix of mutually-mediating relations. The emergence of the ‘white race’ –
a reactionary development of world-historical importance – can be located
in the cauldron of gendered class conflict and dispossession of indigenous
people in English colonies in North America and the Caribbean in the 1600s.
In colonies of the southern coast of the Atlantic Ocean, rulers responded to
unrest among subaltern Europeans and Africans directed both at them and
indigenous people by imposing life-long and hereditary enslavement upon
Africans, policed by Europeans of all classes, thereby creating a ‘new regime
that sought to set poor people apart from each other much more clearly on
the basis of “race” ’.105 Although racial oppression has been reorganised in
many ways since then and processes of racial formation have reconfigured
whiteness, Allen’s claim that the white race originated as a ‘ruling class social
control formation’106 is well-founded. This brings us to the question of how
historical materialists should conceptualise the effects of membership in a
dominant race on its members.
Privilege
In the 1960s, some US Marxists, inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of the

history of the US South after the Civil War in Black Reconstruction, began to
argue that people socially categorised as belonging to the white race in the US
received privileges as a consequence of their racial location. These ‘material and
spiritual privileges’ underpinned the ‘white chauvinism’ that was ‘the greatest
ideological barrier to the achievement of proletarian class consciousness,
solidarity and political action’107 in the US. The original formulators of this
perspective, Ignatin and Allen, did not draw the conclusion that the white
section of the US working class had no revolutionary potential. Nor did some
of the other socialists who developed different interpretations of the analysis.108
105 Roediger 2008, p. 6. Roediger 2008 provides a recent synthesis of the historical literature,
including Allen 1997.
106 Allen 1998.
107 Ignatin 1976, pp. 150, 149. Michael Staudenmaier (Staudenmaier 2007) states that the term
‘white-skin privilege’ was first used by Theodore Allen in a 1965 speech.
108 For example, Smith 2007. The history of US Marxist studies of whiteness is surveyed in
Roediger 2011.

However, some radicals who adopted the concept of white-skin privilege, such
as the current in Students for a Democratic Society that became the Weather
Underground, did reject white workers as a force capable of fighting for radical
change – a fact that helps explain the vociferousness of debate around the
concept of white privilege in the 1970s.109
During the 1980s, after the revolutionary left formed by participants in the
movements and struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s had gone into steep
decline, the term ‘white-skin privilege’ spread among sections of the left in
the US and beyond.110 But now the phrase was increasingly detached from any
kind of historical-materialist understanding of society and change in the US
or anywhere else. Some people have also generalised the idea of privilege as
‘unearned advantage’ to refer to any and all forms of social inequality. Because
today the term ‘privilege’ is used with significantly different meanings by
adherents of very different theoretical and political positions, it is a mistake to
create an amalgam dubbed ‘privilege theory’, as some critics have.111 Doing so
lumps together variants of historical materialism, critical race theory, liberal
analytical philosophy and other perspectives.112 This polemical technique is
especially problematic because a clearly conceptualised concept of ‘privilege’
can be a valuable tool for historical materialism.
The idea of privilege is used today by some non-Marxists to refer to any
differential of social condition. This is a kind of generalisation of a stratification
conception of class, and like the latter it is fundamentally arbitrary. Instead of
illuminating determinate relations of exploitation and oppression it obscures
them with a logic of infinite differences between individuals. Even when
it is used in a way that is linked with a more social and relational notion of
oppression, ‘privilege’ is often associated with an emphasis on the interpersonal
dynamics of oppression rather than systemic dynamics, and with the absence
of a conception of social totality.113
Nevertheless, historical materialism needs a concept to analyse the
advantages that members of dominant races experience because of how they
are positioned by social relations of racial oppression. When these advantages
109 Staudenmaier 2007. See Geier and Gerson 1972 for a critique of ‘white-skin privilege’
politics within SDS.
110 Staudenmaier’s suggestion (Staudenmaier 2007) that ‘the adoption of the white skin
privilege concept by a segment of the white feminist movement was the catalyst for the
general diffusion of the idea within the white left over the course of the 1980s’ is plausible.
111 For example, Choonara and Prasad 2014.
112 Consider Ignatin 1976, Smith 2007, Mills 2009 and Cudd 2006.
113 D’Arcy 2014; Smith 2013; Tietze 2014.

54 Camfield
are not scrutinised, the conditions of members of dominant races are assumed
to be the norm from which the conditions of the racially oppressed are
deviations; the latter are treated as significant but the former are not. Marxists
who reject any use of the concept of privilege can acknowledge the obvious fact
that, as two put it, ‘life for black workers is often significantly harder than for
white workers’.114 However, they are left with no theoretical tool for exploring
how white workers are affected by the material differentials that make their
lives relatively easier.
A carefully specified concept is needed to examine this reality. In general
terms, privilege should be taken to mean advantages relative to the conditions
of an oppressed group that are conferred on members of a dominant group as a
consequence of how they are positioned by a social relation of oppression. Note
that there is no suggestion that privilege is voluntarily chosen or that it can
be freely discarded by individuals. Nor is the claim that these advantages
are unearned. This is a common view of privilege, but it rests on untenable
assumptions that are traces of the ideology of meritocracy. It implies that
some advantages are acquired purely by individual effort and have nothing
to do with social conditions (‘earned’) – an idealist and voluntarist view – and
others are assigned by social conditions (‘unearned’). In reality, no individual
acquires or fails to acquire anything outside of social conditions. Each form of
oppression produces privileges for persons in the oppressor group. However,
because the members of an oppressing group are divided by class and usually
by other relations of oppression, the character of privilege is highly variable. An
interlocking matrix of social relations produces a complex pattern of privilege;
most members of the working class today are conferred at least one form of
privilege, however minimal (consider, for example, the lives of heterosexual
Latinas working for wages in the US without legal immigration status).
The scope and significance of racial privilege has varied enormously; class,
gender and other relations powerfully mediate its distribution. Consequently
it needs to be analysed concretely. For instance, the advantages conferred on
middle-class German citizens classified as Aryan by Nazi legislation that barred
Jews from practising law, medicine and other professions were substantially
different from those obtained in the 1930s by non-Jewish would-be doctors
in the US, where many medical schools had quota systems that limited the
admission of Jewish students.115 But it is the impact of privilege on the working
class that has been the flashpoint of debate among historical materialists.
It is often argued that because racism divides the working class and weakens
working-class power it leads to lower wages for white workers, and so ‘at most
114 Choonara and Prasad 2014.

115 Sokoloff 1992.

what white workers receive is the imaginary solace of being members of

the superior race.’116 This evades the contradictory reality of racial privilege. The
traditional socialist claim that racism divides, weakens and economically
harms the working class as a whole, including workers who do not face racism,
is very well-supported by theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence.117 Yet
it is also the case that racial oppression confers privilege on workers assigned
to dominant locations in racial hierarchies, and that the relative advantages
that accrue to them as a consequence are material as well as psychological;
some of what Du Bois referred to as ‘a sort of public and psychological wage’
is not merely ‘imaginary solace’.118 Preferential access to information about
job openings, treatment in competition for employment, jobs with better
pay and conditions, and promotion are not imaginary. Nor is preferential
treatment by landlords, service providers, business owners and the police.
How should such relative advantages be evaluated? Allen insists that white
privilege is real but not in the ‘day-to-day real interests of the white workers’,
which lie in ‘the development of an ever-expanding union of class conscious
workers, white and black’.119 It is, in his words, ‘poison bait’. Although this
view has been challenged by those who follow the Weather Underground and
maintain that racial privilege deprives white workers of radical potential, it is
well-founded. The ability of white members of the working class to meet
their needs and flourish as human beings is fundamentally constrained by their
place within capitalist relations of production. Their interests, like those
of all workers, are objective: that which helps them to meet their needs and
flourish is in their interests. The limited and relative advantages provided by
racial privilege are not in white workers’ interests because racial privilege
weakens and harms the entire working class. This is similar in some ways to
how competition between workers engaged in piece-work lowers average
wages but can allow some individuals to make higher than average wages.
Michael Lebowitz’s conclusion that ‘[r]ather than separation and competition,
only combination and cooperation yields the optimum solution for workers’
applies in both cases.120
Unfortunately, racial privilege is an obstacle to white workers understanding
what their interests are. Its materiality underpins what, in the US context,

117 Lebowitz 2003, pp. 157–60, pinpoints the issue in theory. Three of many empirical studies
are Du Bois 1935, Szymanski 1976 and Goldfield 1997.
118 Du Bois 1935, p. 700.
119 Allen 1967, p. 174.
120 Lebowitz 2003, p. 85. My argument about interests is also influenced by Callinicos 1987,
pp. 129–33.

56 Camfield
George Lipsitz terms the ‘possessive investment in whiteness’,121 which affects

white workers as well as whites of other classes. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
argues, privilege ‘has a deleterious effect on the development of working-class
consciousness’. It
necessarily complicates the fight against racism because it convinces

white workers that they have something to lose by not being white –
which, of course, is true. If they did not get some advantage – and with it,
the illusion that the system works for them – then racism would not be
effective in dividing . . . workers.122
As this suggests, a carefully-specified historical-materialist concept of privilege

used in the analysis of concrete situations can provide a more dialectical
understanding of a contradictory reality that is one aspect of social relations
of racial oppression.
The Persistence of Racism
In order to be intellectually persuasive, a historical-materialist theory of racism

must be able to explain the persistence of racism in the contemporary world.
Being able to explain the historical origins of racial oppression is less vital;
genesis and persistence are distinct issues. For present purposes, it is sufficient
to proceed on the basis of the very well-supported claims that racial oppression
did not exist for most of human history and that capitalist colonialism was
extremely important in forging racial oppression and diffusing it globally.123
The key question in dealing with the persistence of racism is not how racial
oppression is reproduced, though it is vital to be able to show this in order
to avoid falling into functionalism;124 racism is reproduced in a myriad of
ways in various situations, as has been demonstrated in detail by anti-racist
researchers. Nor is it a question of locating a ‘material basis’ for racism, since
such a framing of the problem assumes that racism is an ideology rather than
a social relation. Rather, the question is why does racial oppression remain a
major feature of matrices of social relations in the contemporary world?
121 Lipsitz 2006.

122 Taylor 2013.
123 Fredrickson 2002, Bethencourt 2013, Roediger 2008 and Allen 1997 support these claims.
124 On which, see Sayer 1987.

Some critical race analysis, influenced by poststructuralism, does not go

beyond identifying the pervasiveness of ‘race thinking’ – as Sherene Razack
puts it, ‘a structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving
and the undeserving according to descent’.125 While this phenomenon is both
real and significant, naming it does not explain the persistence of racism in a
way satisfactory to defenders of any kind of materialism. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
offers a materialist explanation that is widely shared among contemporary
anti-racist researchers:
Racial structures remain in place for the same reasons that other
structures do. Since actors racialised as ‘white’ – or as members of the
dominant race – receive material benefits from the racial order, they
struggle (or passively receive the manifold wages of whiteness) to
maintain their privileges. In contrast, those defined as belonging to the
subordinate race or races struggle to change the status quo (or become
resigned to their position). Therein lies the secret of racial structures and
racial inequality the world over. They exist because they benefit members
of the dominant race.126
This explanation has more than a grain of truth to it, as I will argue. However, it is
inadequate because it fails to identify any connection between specific features
of capitalism and the persistence of racism or to make distinctions about who
benefits from racism and how. But some historical materialists deny that this
kind of explanation has any validity whatsoever. Callinicos argues that ‘the
Marxist claim’ is that ‘the forces and relations of production, a complex set of
historically developed and changing powers, explain relations of domination.’127
There are two problems with this approach. The first is that it equates an
explanation of the origins of a form of oppression with an explanation of its
persistence. I believe that the genesis of racial oppression can be explained
by historical analysis of forces and relations of production. However, as
Mills argues, ‘genealogy does not necessarily translate into continuing causal
pre-eminence’.128 The second is that it treats forms of oppression as generating
no properties that contribute to their own persistence. However, there is
considerable evidence that they do. This is why Esch and Roediger contend
that ‘understanding racism necessitates a separate and distinct perspective on
125 Razack 2008, p. 8.

126 Bonilla-Silva 2003, p. 9.
127 Callinicos 1990, p. 163.
128 Mills 2003, p. 164.

58 Camfield
power relations beyond the terms of class’. For example, they suggest that ‘racist
acts are sometimes or maybe often acts of racial empowerment, rather than of
class disempowerment’129 – an insight that many Marxist accounts of racism
and white workers do not acknowledge because they lack a concept of racial
privilege. While it is better to treat such acts as often being about both
‘racial empowerment’ and ‘class disempowerment’ rather than one or the
other, Esch and Roediger’s point about the limits of treating racism as
explicable solely with reference to the forces and relations of production is
clear. In their spirit, I suggest that racism’s persistence today can be explained
as flowing from three deeply-rooted features of contemporary society that are
interwoven in reality but analytically distinguishable: imperialism, the profits
of racism, and efforts to defend or enhance racial privilege.
Imperialism
Imperialism is an essential dimension of the capitalist mode of production.
The system develops in an uneven and combined manner both in time and
space, with ‘spatial cycles of development at one pole and underdevelopment
at another’.130 This is a consequence of differential profits, which can lead to
‘a self-reinforcing process that gives rise to privileged concentrations of high-
productivity capital’.131 The ensuing domination of the globe by capitalist
imperialism has been interwoven with racism almost from its inception.132
A result of this fact has been histories in which, as Susan Ferguson has argued,
People become [negatively] racialised insofar as they are associated . . .

with other socio-geographic spaces. The ‘other,’ of course, is relative –
and determined largely by the historical configuration of geo-political and
social relations. . . . So while people are necessarily ‘territorialised’ by
matter of their birth (we are all born and live somewhere), they are only
racialised as a function of how their location figures in the broader
socio-geo-political ordering of capitalism.133
Today imperialism reproduces, Winant writes, ‘a worldwide pattern of

employment discrimination, violence, morbidity, impoverishment, pollution,
129 Esch and Roediger 2014.

130 Smith 2006, p. 192.
132 I say almost, because British capitalism’s imperialist domination of Ireland was not racist
in character in its earliest years.
133 Ferguson 2008, p. 52.

and unequal exchange’. This is ‘a global system of social stratification’ that

‘correlates very well with racial criteria: the darker your skin is, the less you
earn; the shorter your life span, the poorer your health and nutrition, the
less education you can get.’134 Even if we set aside the contentious issue of
unequal exchange and assert the huge importance of class divisions within
imperialised countries,135 Winant’s correlation still matters. Even when
explicitly racist ideology is absent today, imperialism reproduces ‘an already
racialised structural distribution of property and economic power . . . which is
the product of the long history of global racialised dispossession’.136 Moreover,
imperialism today frequently operates in ways that treat the populations of
imperialised countries as different in inherent and unalterable ways. This
makes their oppression by imperialism racial in character. While in the
twenty-first century the differences used to mark imperialised populations are
not always posited explicitly as ones of inferiority, imperialised populations
are in practice routinely treated as essentially culturally deficient. This can
be seen in the neoliberal ideology of international development’s depiction
of the people of imperialised countries as mired in irrational culture.137 The
treatment by imperialist state officials of Muslims and Arabs as essentially
pre-modern, religious and irrational is another case in point.138 Such racialised
imperialist practices and ideologies are also influential within the borders
of imperialist countries; they powerfully condition how state managers
structure immigration controls and politically administer the portions of
their populations who have migrated from imperialised countries or who are
descended from such migrants or enslaved ancestors.139 This in turn has a broad
influence on the ideological environment in advanced capitalist countries.
The Profits of Racism

The mediation of capitalism by racism almost from its very beginning140 that
was registered in the preceding paragraph can also be seen in the history of
134 Winant 2004, pp. 134, 135.

135 This is my preferred term for countries oppressed by imperialism.
136 Gruffyd Jones 2008, p. 924.
137 Taylor 2010. The move from an identification of people’s culture as the problem to
essentialising their alleged cultural qualities in practice is an easy one because of the
pervasiveness of racist ideological conceptions of people of colour.
138 See Razack 2008, Fekete 2009 and Kumar 2012.
139 Much the same can also be said about the treatment of indigenous people in colonial-
settler states. On capitalist state power and racism, see Gordon 2007.
140 The development of capitalism in England between 1400 and 1600 (Dimmock 2014)
occurred prior to the emergence of racism in England’s colonies.

60 Camfield
how production has been socially organised. The massive use of racialised
African slavery and Asian indentured migrant labour was succeeded in the
twentieth century by new flows of immigration from imperialised countries.
Today these flows increasingly involve migrants from imperialised countries
engaging in unfree or highly precarious wage labour. As Ferguson and David
McNally note,
What is unique about the neoliberal period, therefore, is not that

[negatively] racialised labour-power is appropriated from the peripheries
of the global system. That has been a constant of the capitalist mode of
production. Instead, the key development has been the massive expan
sion of the global labour reserve as a result of the most accelerated and
extensive processes of primitive accumulation in world history.141
Across the history of capitalism, then, employers have often dealt with working
classes stratified by racial hierarchies (and simultaneously by divisions rooted
in patriarchal and other forms of oppression), which they have frequently
cultivated directly or indirectly.142 They have done so and often continue to
do so in large part because racism is conducive to higher profitability. This is
true in a number of ways. First, a workforce divided by racism is less able to
resist managerial control, which allows employers to extract more effort from
workers. Second, labour-market competition among workers divided by racism
can result in workers placed lower in a racial hierarchy being willing to work
for lower wages and/or in ways preferred by employers than workers ranked
above them in the racial order.143 This can extend to workers at the bottom of
a racial hierarchy being willing to take jobs that other workers are unwilling to
do because the work is seen as so undesirable. It is possible for employers
to successfully ‘use race as a sorting mechanism in their pursuit of increased
productivity’, with particular skills or capacities linked to specific racial groups,
thereby reducing training costs.144 Finally, the weakening of the social power of
the working class (not simply solidarity at the point of production) by racism
facilitates capitalist profitability.145 It is admittedly easier to argue convincingly
141 Ferguson and McNally 2014, p. 9.

142 Roediger and Esch 2012 examines the racial management of labour in the US into the
early twentieth century in detail.
143 Mason 1995.
144 Chibber 2013, pp. 141, 140. Chibber refers to occupational skills, but the linguistic and
cultural competencies of labour-power are equally relevant.
145 See footnote 117. Reich 1981 is a rare attempt by a radical political economist to empirically
demonstrate the contribution of racism to capitalist profitability.

that the existence of racism contributes to profit-making than to show that this
in part actually explains the contemporary perpetuation of racial oppression;
the latter is important in order to avoid functionalist explanations of racism’s
persistence. Nevertheless, the frequency with which employers use perceived
racial identity as a sorting mechanism in dealing with job applications and
play workers off against each other along racial lines lends support to this
claim. So too does the widespread opposition of capitalists and their political
advocates to measures that would substantially improve the bargaining
power of racially oppressed workers in labour markets, such as granting
citizenship or permanent-resident status to non-status migrants and those
with temporary residency rights and instituting effective anti-racist reforms to
employment law.146
Efforts to Defend and Enhance Racial Privilege

The third force responsible for the perpetuation of racial oppression is not an
aspect of the forces and relations of production in capitalism, although it is
interwoven with them. It is the one that has been least recognised in historical-
materialist explanation due to the simple absence or conscious rejection of
a concept of racial privilege. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that efforts
by members of dominant social races, to use Khiari’s term, to preserve their
advantages relative to the racially oppressed play a role in the persistence of
racism. While such attempts to maintain both the material advantages and the
less tangible compensations conferred by oppression are not, as Bonilla-Silva
suggests, ‘the secret of racial structures and racial inequality’, they definitely
are a factor. Failing to recognise this results in weaker analysis and detracts
from the appeal of historical materialism to many anti-racists. Omi and
Winant’s concept of racial project – ‘simultaneously an interpretation,
representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an
effort to organise and distribute resources (economic, political, cultural) along
particular racial lines’147 – can be used to place particular mobilisations to
defend or expand privilege within a broader array of forces configured with
respect to racial oppression in a given society. Such projects, which are often
cross-class formations, can themselves be analysed, following Gramsci, as part
of hegemonic blocs of social forces.
There is no shortage of examples of efforts to defend or expand privilege
perpetuating racial oppression. It is common for white workers to respond
to competition for jobs in ways that harm racially oppressed workers. This is
a response rooted in the material differentials of privilege and the absence
146 Oreopoulos 2011; Roediger and Esch 2012, pp. 205–12; Longhi 2013.
147 Omi and Winant 2015, p. 125 (emphasis removed).

62 Camfield
of a compelling practical alternative based on anti-racist working-class

solidarity.148 It is also conditioned by state action.149 A historical example with
far-reaching consequences is the white-supremacist assault on the newly-
acquired citizenship rights of African-Americans and other Reconstruction-
era reforms in the US South, whose methods included terrorism and guerrilla
warfare. This was both the enactment of a cross-class racial project to enhance
white privilege and a successful attempt to restore the hegemonic class-
power of the former slave-owning planters.150 More recently, campaigns to
roll back affirmative action in the US and employment equity in Canada are
not difficult to analyse as defences of privilege articulated in the language
of ‘colour-blindness’ and opposition to ‘reverse racism’. In the US, these have
included referendum victories against affirmative action in California in 1996,
Washington in 1998, Michigan in 2006, Nebraska in 2008 and Oklahoma in
2012. In Canada, opposition to the just-enacted employment-equity legislation
of the Ontario New Democratic Party government contributed to the victory of
hard-right Conservatives in the 1995 provincial election and the rapid repeal
of the law.151 Mobilisations against multiculturalism policies and the presence of
Muslims in the public sphere are also moves to defend or enhance privilege that
shore up racism. The racial advantages at stake here are often miniscule or
nonexistent in material terms, no matter how meaningful they are to some
white citizens of all classes. Demands in Western Europe, the US and Canada
that official representations of national culture reaffirm its whiteness are a good
example, as is the ban on the building of new mosque minarets in Switzerland.
However, the advantages are sometimes more substantial: consider policies in
European countries that prohibit the wearing of ‘ostentatious’ religious items.
These have the effect of barring Muslims from some jobs, which in terms of
racial privilege mainly serves to advantage white workers. Of course, all such
relative advantages are corrosive for working-class solidarity and therefore
antithetical to the interests of all workers, but such is the contradictory nature
of privilege as poison bait.
Inadequate theory does not always lead to problems in political practice,
and the weakness of the radical left today means that the negative political
148 Brenner and Brenner 1981 identifies the logic behind ‘attempts by stronger sections of the
working class to defend their positions at the expense of weaker sections’.
149 For example, as one reviewer pointed out, both major political parties in the US have
usually catered to white hostility to affirmative-action measures but neither has pressed
seriously for major pro-worker reforms to labour law.
150 Du Bois 1935, pp. 670–709; Roediger 2008, pp. 110–19.
151 Roediger 2008, p. 207; Saloojee 2000.

effects of inadequate theories of racism are not easily documented. However, as

a reminder of the political significance of the theoretical questions with which
this article has dealt it is worth concluding with a note about one country where
a sizeable radical left does exist, France. In September 2014, a poll reported that
for the first time the leader of the fascist Front National (FN), Marine Le Pen,
would win the presidency in a second-round contest against current president
François Hollande of the Socialist Party.152 The rise of FN support is directly
connected to the growing extent to which national identity, immigration
and the place of Islam in French society have become central political issues
in the country, an outcome achieved by the efforts of the forces (of which
the FN is just one element) pursuing a reactionary racial project.153 Neither the
radical left as a whole (including both its anti-neoliberal and consistently anti-
capitalist wings) nor any of its components have been able to intervene in this
dangerous political process in a way that effectively challenges the appeal to
white workers of this project and its political definition of what matters. Much
of the blame for this failure lies with the influence within the radical left of
politics that are not guided by a strong understanding of racial oppression and
white privilege in France.154 Here, alas, the politics of theory are not difficult
to interpret.
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brill.com/hima
Alain Testart (1945–2013): An Evolutionist in the

Land of the Anthropologists
Christophe Darmangeat
Université Paris Diderot
christophe.darmangeat@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Abstract
Alain Testart (1945–2013) was one of the major social anthropologists of his time. He
left behind a considerable and original body of work dealing with social structures and
their evolution which afforded keys to the reinterpretation of archaeological material.
A one-time self-professed Marxist, he had abandoned this theoretical framework
many years ago. Nevertheless, since they tackle questions that are crucial to those who
want to understand the past in order to change the present, his writings are a precious
source of information and of thought-provoking reasoning.
Keywords
Testart – social anthropology – archaeology – prehistory – social evolution – materialism –

Marxism
The French anthropologist Alain Testart passed away in 2013, leaving behind
an œuvre that is as original as it is impressive, and which no one who seriously
wants to understand the evolution of pre-historic societies can ignore. The
last of his works appearing during his lifetime, Avant l’histoire – l’évolution des
sociétés de Lascaux à Carnac [Before History: The Evolution of Societies from
Lascaux to Carnac] – which Gallimard published soon before his death, in
its prestigious ‘Bibliothèque des Sciences Humaines’ series – finally made his
name somewhat more well-known. This book brought together some forty
years’ worth of research in a vast synthesis reconstructing the evolution of
human technique, ideology, art, and, above all else, social structures, from the
Upper Paleolithic period to the heart of the Neolithic age. This monumental

72 Darmangeat
work borrows from archaeology as from ethnology, from sociology as from the
philosophy of science; and there can be no doubt that it will remain a landmark
text, given the questions of method that it raises and the new light that it sheds
on various different subjects.
Yet it will also remain the first movement of an unfinished symphony; the
second volume, which would have proceeded from the Neolithic period to class
societies, will never see the light of day. Thus ended a life of research which,
from the outset, was organised around one central ambition: to understand
and reconstruct the evolution of society, more particularly of societies without
writing, while steering clear of the pitfalls on which his predecessors had
run aground.
Hunter-Gatherers, Inequality and the Neolithic Revolution
Many scientific discoveries were born of the desire seriously to examine

facts that had until then been considered simple exceptions to some well-
established rule. And the same goes for Alain Testart’s first great work Les
chasseurs-cueilleurs ou l’origine des inégalités [The Hunter-Gatherers or, The
Origin of Inequality] (1982), which reconsidered the equation of societies’ mode
of food supply and their social structures. Indeed, it had long been accepted
that hunter-gatherers were characterised by economic egalitarianism; it was
with the ‘Neolithic revolution’, to use the expression coined by V. Gordon
Childe – that is, the more-or-less combined emergence of agriculture and
animal husbandry – that the first wealth-inequality supposedly arose.
Yet even if we do not mention those hunter-gatherers like the Indians of the
Great Plains or certain Siberian peoples who were in reality first and foremost
farmers, breeding horses or deer (and thus, logically, being non-egalitarian),
some societies fit poorly into Childe’s schema. A typical example of this is the
inhabitants of the Pacific North-West coast, the strip of territory stretching
from northern California to the south of Alaska between the Pacific Ocean
and the Rocky Mountains. There were peoples living in permanent villages
there at the moment of their contact with the West, even though they
were authentic hunter-gatherers wholly ignorant of agriculture and animal
husbandry. They stored the salmon they caught en masse during spawning
season by drying them, thus allowing them to survive the off-season. And these
societies developed pronounced social inequalities. Slavery was widespread
and they elaborated a sometimes very extensive system of honours – for
example, the Kwakiutl, a tribe of barely 10,000 members (the same one that
bequeathed ethnology the term potlatch, the name of the festival in which

Alain Testart ( 1945–2013 ) 73
each person’s place was confirmed) thus featured a scale of some 658 titles, in
an intricately ordered hierarchy.
Traditionally, these settled hunter-gatherers were termed ‘a complex case’
and de facto excluded from the general schema holding that the Neolithic
revolution was a watershed between egalitarian and non-egalitarian societies:
no one knew precisely how to class them.
Similarly, we could note that not all cultivators developed even elementary
forms of economic inequality: for instance, the cassava growers in the Amazon
lowlands, or certain among the tribes of New Guinea.
Thus a compelling conclusion imposes itself: namely, that the birth of wealth
inequalities was not linked to the birth of agriculture and of animal husbandry,
but another variable. That is, the storage of food on a significant scale.
Such storage was unknown in egalitarian societies, whether they were
‘classic’ hunter-gatherers or tropical cultivators, who since they grew tubers
did not need to conserve grain in accordance with the seasons. Conversely,
non-egalitarian societies are those in which food provision relies essentially on
resources that are stored, be these societies made up of cultivators or of settled
hunter-gatherers.
And the text did not stop at that, going on to explore the chains of causality
that were at work behind these phenomena.
Modes of Production in Egalitarian Societies
These initial results – already remarkable on their own account – opened the
way to a further study. Indeed, Testart’s monumental 1986 work Communisme
primitif – économie et idéologie [Primitive Communism: Economics and Ideology]
sought to distinguish among the different modes of production that operated
within economically egalitarian societies. Rejecting the idea according to which
such a notion is meaningless in societies that do not feature exploitation, the
author argued that:
Marx said that ‘What distinguishes the various economic formations

of society – the distinction between, for example, a society based on
slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour – is the form in which
this surplus is in each case extorted from the immediate producer’. In
writing these lines, Marx was only thinking of class societies, and this
formula applies to them only. For other societies, we ought to say ‘What
distinguishes the various economic formations of society is the form in
which in each case a surplus is not extorted’. To theorise societies without

74 Darmangeat
exploitation is to seek out the specific forms in which the immediate

producers managed to appropriate all that they produced.1
His work thus counterposed two fundamental types of nomadic hunter-

gatherers: their Australian forms, on the one hand, and all the rest (Inuits,
Bushmen, and so on) on the other. In Australia, the hunter’s prey was not his
own property: rather, because of obligations linked to matrimonial customs,
the right to it belonged to his parents-in-law. Everywhere else, however,
the hunter could keep what he had caught. Even if this were then widely
distributed, it would be a gift made at the whim of its owner, who had much
greater freedom of action than in the Australian case and would earn prestige
from making such a donation. This contrast in the structures of production
and distribution also had its echoes in other dimensions of social life: thus the
Australian tribes were frozen into relations of dependency that constrained
their members throughout the entire length of their lives. Each people
was subdivided into a certain number of strictly exogamic groups (halves,
sections . . .) and each individual was a tributary of a complementary group
such that they could find a spouse. On the ideological plane, other tribal
sub-groups were charged with rituals designed to reproduce the animal or
vegetable species whose consumption was specifically forbidden to them.
Thus on every plane – economic and matrimonial, real and ideological – and
contrary to other egalitarian societies, the Australian mode was organised in
terms of mutual dependency among the different tribal subdivisions.
Testart used this contrast among the different modes of production in
order to explain the economic dynamism of the corresponding societies.
In the ‘individual’ mode of production proper to the Inuits, Bushmen, and so
on, the hunter had a stake in what his activity produced, and, consequently,
in technical progress. In the Australian mode of production in which the
hunter was by definition dispossessed of the game he caught, he had no
incentive to increase his productivity.
Testart thus explained that the reasons for what he saw as the Australian
continent’s rejection of technical progress resided in its social structures.
Even when the Aborigines in the Torres Strait were in contact with Papuan
populations knowledgeable about the bow and agriculture, they did not adopt
these innovations, instead choosing to continue hunting with spears. Though
some peoples did remain hunter-gatherers also in other parts of the world,
this was due to environmental obstacles. Everywhere that agriculture was
possible, it sank roots; hunter-gathering only survived in the least hospitable
1 Testart 1986, pp. 54–5.

environments, and even there it did make use of the bow. In Australia,
conversely, agriculture and a fortiori the use of the bow were technically
possible: but the obstacle to them was the result of social factors.
He revisited and deepened this thesis in Avant l’histoire: the cave paintings
of the Upper Paleolithic period (including, among others, those of the Chauvet
and Lascaux caves) as well as the stagnation in its techniques across many tens
of thousands of years, were here interpreted as so many elements indicating
that Magdalenian societies were structured according to the Australian model.
Toward a General Classification of Societies
As we have said, Alain Testart occupies a special place on the chessboard of

social anthropology.
He did not cease to proclaim himself an evolutionist,2 which alone
proved enough to marginalise him. In France at least, this discipline is still
dominated by structuralism; references to Marxism have almost completely
disappeared, and for decades it has been caught up in a fierce, almost
unanimous hatred for anyone who dares to speak of social evolution.
Yet Alain Testart was equally opposed to the two principal traditions of
evolutionism, that is, both that of its nineteenth-century founders and the
mainly American ‘neo-evolutionism’ born in the 1950s.
He reproached both of these traditions for reasoning on the basis of
concepts that are too vague to be of any practical use. For historical reasons,
evolutionist social thought developed in a way wholly at odds with its genesis
in the biological domain. When it came to the living world, the theory of
evolution had to battle to defeat the evidence in favour of fixism; and the
theory could only be elaborated once a rigorous classification of organisms
had been established. Evolutionism in the social sciences proceeded the other
way around, taking evolution to be a self-evident fact that it attempted to
contemplate without even having a solid classification of the different social
structures. This problem runs so deep that even a century-and-a-half later, and
despite the immense mass of documentation that has been gathered, there has
still been not one serious attempt to organise this ethnographic material and
to draw a rigorous, exhaustive typology of social forms from it.
Yes, American neo-evolutionism did have the merit of bringing the
evolutionist problematic to the forefront in a period when it had almost been
banished from view. Nonetheless, in Alain Testart’s eyes it repeated the majority
2 See Testart 1992 in particular.

76 Darmangeat
of its predecessors’ methodological failings. Its classification of societies into

four types (in the most common version, bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states)
is too crude to clarify anything, and worse still, it cannot be refined, because
it totally ignores the institutions and customs that structure these societies,
namely the object of ethnology: the role of goods in social relations, types of
kinship, matrimonial allowances, political structure, and so on. We could add
to Testart’s arguments by saying that the neo-evolutionists have themselves
sometimes deplored the insufficiencies of their social categories, and tried
(in vain) to remedy this, for example, by proposing to subdivide chiefdoms
into ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ ones.3
Alain Testart also thus considered it of indispensable importance to gather
together the factual and conceptual elements necessary for the elaboration of
an alternative to neo-evolutionist categories: in his Éléments de classification
des sociétés [Elements of the Classification of Societies] he presented what he
termed merely a ‘wholly initial outline’4 of these, though even this was a highly
accomplished effort compared to what had existed beforehand.
The density of this short volume was only matched by its ambition, in that
it drew up a typology of the ensemble of human social forms, summarised
in a table at the end of the book. The author forcefully underlined one of his
dearest convictions: that far from being simple and uniform, the structures of
classless societies were much more diverse than those of class societies, just as
in the animal kingdom invertebrates are far more numerous in type than are
vertebrates.
Testart then went on to deepen the reflection he had begun in other works:
we are here particularly thinking of his desire to identify and characterise the
different modes of goods transfer, which culminated in his 2007 work Critique
du don [Critique of the Gift].5 The sharp line of argument in this work brought a
decisive blow to traditions stretching back to the likes of Marcel Mauss and Claude
Lévi-Strauss, in which the primitive world was perceived uniformly as the reign
(in their respective accounts) of gift or of exchange.
Here we ought to open up a parenthesis, and advance the suggestion that
amidst Testart’s many justified criticisms of neo-evolutionist categories,
his Éléments de classification des sociétés did also address some rather more
questionable attacks against them, for example when it reproached them for
3 See, for example, Timothy Earle in Johnson and Earle 2000.

4 Testart 2005, p. 5.
5 See the English translation of its first chapter, carried out by Susan Emanuel and Lorraine
Perlman, and now posted on the site of Hau journal: <http://www.haujournal.org/index
.php/hau/article/view/94/314>.

a classification system tantamount to a biologist ranking the species as ‘big,

medium or little’.6 We think it would be more appropriate to compare them
to someone classifying animals according to those with complex brains,
simple brains or none at all. Indeed, neo-evolutionist categories are directly
inspired by a very real tendency in social evolution, namely for it to produce
ever larger, more hierarchically-ordered and more differentiated organisations,
just as the evolution of the living world has produced organisms with ever
more developed nervous systems. Neo-evolutionism’s error of method was to
believe that the identification of a (quantitative) tendency was sufficient for
the construction of pertinent categories for its classifications, and that this
would thus save it from having to reflect on (qualitative) structures. Societies
cannot be classed and understood on the basis of their ‘level of integration’
alone (this concept being so central to neo-evolutionism, and yet remaining
so poorly defined), just as organisms cannot be classed and understood on the
basis of the level of development of their nervous system only, independent of
the other characteristics of their anatomy.
To get back to the classification that Alain Testart elaborated, it divided
societies into three main groups. ‘World I’ was that of societies without
wealth, which were thus egalitarian on the economic terrain. Their essential
characteristic was that it was not possible to free oneself from a social obligation
by payment in goods. Whether one wanted to get married or compensate for
a murder, the only payment was to make a payment in kind: a period of work
that was either temporary (bride service) or life-long, or the spilling of the
murderer’s own blood. The turn to ‘World II’, societies that had wealth but
not classes, came about through the emergence of payments that met social
ends: the bridewealth and wergild (the ‘blood money’). ‘World III’ is the world
of societies that do have classes, where the means of production (in the first
place, land) can be appropriated in a fully private manner.
Each of these worlds was, in turn, subdivided into narrower categories.
World II, in particular, which comprises the greater part of the societies studied
by ethnology, was broken down into three sub-groups according to the nature
of these societies’ political structures (the implications of which affected the
whole of social life). Thus Testart distinguished ‘ostentatious plutocracies’ –
societies without formal political organisation, where it was wholly normal for
the wealthy to see themselves as invested in collective responsibilities; ‘semi-
states’, democratic societies (essentially in North America) or societies based
on lineage (in Africa) with non-state political institutions; and finally, Africa’s
6 Testart 2005, p. 14.

78 Darmangeat
‘royal societies’, structured as states but nonetheless lacking in classes because

access to the land was still a right for each member of the community.
Moreover, each of these principal social types was, in turn, subdivided into
numerous variants, which it is impossible here to summarise in just a few lines.
Yet no matter how demanding this classification stage may be, it can
nonetheless only be the prelude to an attempt to attain a scientific vision of
social evolution. It is still necessary to establish the chronology of succession
of the different types here identified, and this task can only produce results
if we have a clear understanding of the material relics that these various
different societies left behind. This is the other great reproach to which
nineteenth-century evolutionism exposed itself: in neglecting archaeology,
and instead contenting itself with a temporal ordering of the present societies
that it imprudently termed ‘survivals’ – almost uniquely on the basis of mere
logical deduction – this evolutionism was, in Alain Testart’s view, speculative
and ‘imaginary’.7 And while neo-evolutionism did try to avoid this trap, it, too,
failed, because of the weakness of its social typology. In this sense, its relative
success among archaeologists, who happily adopt its categories, was but an
illusory victory.
It is no chance thing that in recent years Alain Testart’s works have awakened
most interest among archaeologists. Firstly, because his analyses have often
given them the feeling that they finally have at hand a sharp interpretative
framework capable of posing their discoveries in an unexpected light. And
furthermore because Alain Testart himself repeatedly showed the way on
this front.
Archaeological Studies
Two of the texts that Testart devoted to directly archaeological questions seem
worthy of particular attention.8
The first, La servitude volontaire [Voluntary Servitude] (2004) looks like a
detective novel: having found many ethnological accounts mentioning the
strange practice whereby after the death of an important person, other people
were put to death and buried in his company, the book undertakes a round-
the-world tour of tombs in order to identify the occurrences of this practice.
7 Testart 2012, p. 48.

8 Here, for want of space, we will not mention the numerous articles, conferences and
collections on which Alain Testart worked in collaboration with renowned archaeologists
(almost all of them in French, by force of circumstance).

Naturally, the purpose of meandering the planet compiling this inventory was
simply to mark out the crime scene. Who are these powerful people whose
demise must lead to the death of others? Who are these people who are put
to death? What social bonds link them together, and in what societies do we
find this practice? This question allows us to cast aside the lazy (and fallacious)
interpretation of these executions in terms of ‘sacrifice’, and to unlock the true
nature of this phenomenon.
Here, then, we see the emergence of a type of society marked by profound
inequalities: any society that kills people merely on account of the fact that a
powerful person has just died being anything but egalitarian. But these are also
societies without states (or if there is a state, it is archaic in form); because the
state, once it was consolidated, everywhere engaged in a fight against these
practices, as many historical proofs demonstrate.9
We will now leave behind archaeological, ethnological and historical analysis
and get down to sociological reasoning, addressing the central thesis of this
work. Indeed, the victims buried in the company of important people were
subordinates close to them: spouses or particular servants. But they were also
and above all slaves or dependents upon which relied these figures’ protection:
Alain Testart thus saw the constitution of these ‘military entourages’ based on
personal relationships as being both a major factor in the decomposition of
the tribal order and the germ of the state, at least in its despotic form.
Here, Testart was continuing reflection in which he had already engaged
in several of his texts, notably those gathered in the 2001 collection L’esclave,
la dette et le pouvoir [The Slave, Debt and Power], which brought into relief
the central role of two institutions. Firstly, the bridewealth, as we already
mentioned: this custom, which was so commonplace in primitive societies,
compelled the future husband to pay sometimes considerable sums to his
prospective parents-in-law in order to acquire rights over his wife. Yet the
payment itself was far from being everywhere uniform. And that is not to
mention the societies of World I (without wealth), which, by definition, knew
nothing of this practice. Others practised it only in a moderate manner, limiting
its impact. Elsewhere, conversely, the sum to be paid out was considerable and
could even indebt men across many generations.
The second institution – which had no a priori connection to the first –
was debt slavery, practiced by only a fraction of World II societies. However,
a detailed data-gathering exercise concerning over four hundred peoples
around the world allowed Testart to establish that the set of societies where
9 See also ‘Pourquoi la condition de l’esclave s’améliore-t-elle en statut despotique?’ in Testart

2001a.

80 Darmangeat
debt slavery existed was entirely internal to the group with the toughest
demands concerning the bridewealth. Testart saw this as a fundamental line
of demarcation between societies that accepted – or even provoked – the
subjection of certain of their members for economic reasons, and those of a
more ‘democratic’ character where the community was protected from such
a fault line.
Testart conjugated these elements in order to bring out an unprecedented
hypothesis with regard to the emergence of the state in the first of these two
groups of society:
Fidelities, friendships, links between individuals, servile dependence: all

this was present in the first states – non-bureaucratic states – but also in
countless pre-state societies. That a loyal follower or a slave was ready to
die for his master or his patron incontestably provided a firm assurance
and a certain power to this latter, the extent of which depended only on
the number of people who followed and served him so well . . . After all,
what is simpler than to imagine that a man who had loyal followers ready
to do anything to please and serve him, and loyal to his person alone,
would disarm everyone else and arrogate for himself and for those to
whom he delegated his interests the exclusive right to judge internal
conflicts and to wage armed expeditions against the outside world –
that is, putting an end to the state of latent warfare that reigns in any
non-state society, establishing civil peace and at the same time setting
himself up as absolute master? How could these personal fidelities not
have engendered personal power? How could they not have led to the
birth of the state, at least in its despotic form?10
The combination of archaeological and ethnological data is also at the heart

of another of Testart’s works, his 2010 book La déesse et le grain [The Goddess
and the Grain] (2010), which concerns Neolithic Europe and in particular the
emblematic site at Çatalhöyük.
Alain Testart brings into relief the imprecise analyses that underlie
traditional interpretations representing this site in terms of the worship of a
‘mother-goddess’ and a ‘bull-god’. In a masterclass of comparative ethnology,
he compares the bull skulls decorating the Çatalhöyük habitations to the
remains that decorated the wealthy abodes of certain South-East Asian
societies. Though there was a religious dimension to this, it here takes second
10 Testart 2004b, p. 81.

place to the social dimension: these architectural elements (a large part of

which came from real animals) were first and foremost of ostentatious value,
in order to commemorate the generosity and munificence of those individuals
who would, on certain occasions, publicly distribute part of their fortune in
order to feed the community.
The egalitarianism that is generally attributed to the Çatalhöyük society
thus emerges from this analysis rather tarnished. But the book also questions
this society’s supposed pacifism. The most widespread hypothesis with regard
to the remodelled skulls conserved by the inhabitants of this village maintains
that they bear witness to a worship of ancestors. And the famous fresco
depicting vultures tearing apart headless corpses is generally seen as the sign
of a rather singular religious cult. Rejecting such interpretations, which are
founded on too-hasty comparative analogies, Alain Testart argues that this was
in fact a warlike society that, rather more banally, kept the heads of its enemies
as trophies and abandoned their decapitated bodies to scavenging animals.
The image of Neolithic societies that emerges from this discussion is
far from the currently widely-accepted vision; but it also unlocks a rigorous
methodology for the analysis of archaeological material and for comparative
studies of ethnological data. Testart would revisit this methodology, giving it
greater definition, in one of the most innovative and persuasive chapters of his
Avant l’histoire.
Alain Testart and Marxism
Having called himself a Marxist at the beginning of his career, Testart openly
abandoned this reference in the late 1980s. Nonetheless, we might allow
ourselves to think this renunciation as being more formal than it was real. That
is not to say that Testart remained a Marxist without knowing it (which would
be a rather ludicrous hypothesis); rather, in many senses the Althusserian
version of Marxism that he upheld in his first works already contained the
germ of his later development away from historical materialism.
In Le communisme primitif [Primitive Communism], the only one of Testart’s
works in which he made a detailed assessment of the record of Marxist
anthropology, he accused it – from Engels onward – of having neglected to
study primitive societies’ production relations. Only a very small number of
works – Terray’s and Rey’s treatment of certain African societies – provided
any exception to this; but the most emblematic figures, like Godelier and, even
more so, Meillassoux, here faced sharp criticism: ‘the principal limit of [their]
thought . . . resides in their common incapacity to conceive what a production

82 Darmangeat
relation is’.11 Indeed, he reproached Meillassoux not only for his cavalier
treatment of ethnographic data, but also for reducing production relations to
a simple technical consideration: ‘there is no mention of the social relations
that men form in their productive activity, and the economic is reduced to
the productive forces alone’.12 Godelier, for his part, contenting himself with
overly vague generalities on the fluidity of bands or the inevitable dispersion
of hunter-gatherer populations, was accused of emptying out the content of
Marxist concepts and failing to pin down the specificities of how primitive
societies were organised: ‘With Godelier . . . the term “mode of production” is a
marker of style – of Marxist style – denuded of any operative value’.13
As we have said, Le communisme primitif was wholly devoted to
demonstrating the existence of two opposed types of production relation
among economically egalitarian societies, and to theorising this. Independently
of the soundness of its results, this scientific project seems to be a fully
justified one, and Testart certainly cannot be criticised for having tried to do
the spadework on a terrain that had hitherto hardly been explored at all.
Conversely, the version of historical materialism within which his research is
inscribed is far from above criticism; for it could not but lead him ultimately to
abandon any reference to Marxism. Testart explained that when the majority
of Marxist anthropologists de facto ignored the relations of production, this
resulted from their gravely mistaken view of historical materialism that
considered the productive forces as the determining factor of social evolution.
This ‘primacy of the productive forces’ ought to be seen as a ‘fundamental
perversion at the hands of Soviet Marxism’14 and rejected as such. It represented
the ideological form of the ruling bureaucracy’s dominion in the USSR, this
latter having an interest in avoiding all discussion of production relations
in order to draw a simplistic equation between industrial development
and building socialism. However, Testart did not limit himself to rejecting – and
rightly so – the opinion that the level of the productive forces necessarily
determines a particular form of production relations: he made a further step,
a much less legitimate one, in characterising ‘the idea of any correspondence’
between the two as ‘inane’.15
In fact, Testart was here opposing his own, inverse caricature of historical
materialism to the one that that ignored the relations of production by
11 Testart 1985, p. 41.

12 Testart 1985, p. 34.
13 Testart 1985, p. 42.
14 Testart 1985, p. 25, an idea revisited and developed in the subsequent pages.
15 Testart 1985, p. 28.

focusing on the productive forces only. His caricature posed the relations of
production as being the prime – and, ultimately, only – determining factor. In
this perspective, the productive forces merited only the attention that ought to
be given to a mere effect.
But in so doing, Testart saw himself as introducing ‘an extremely radical
conceptual reorganisation’16 of Marxist categories. In particular, he took his
cue from those passages in Marx devoted to feudalism, and which explained
that the relation of exploitation required a prior relation of domination.17 For
Testart, these lines signalled the failure of historical materialism: as Marx
himself had confessed, in feudal society the economic relations had to be
deduced from extra-economic relations, and not the other way around.
As such, in order to save what could be saved of Marxism, the explanation
of social structures would have to make recourse not only to the relations of
production but furthermore to some other so-called ‘fundamental’ social
relation that conditioned them, too.18 Even though this theoretical innovation
could have still have been situated within a Marxist framework, it seems as if
the countdown for Testart’s break with Marxism had already begun. The logic
of things unerringly led him to conserve only this ‘fundamental social relation’
as an explanatory factor, and to loosen the last knots still attaching this latter
to Marxist concepts.
In this sense, the ‘general sociology’ subsequently elaborated by Testart,
which sought the key to all the spheres of social life (including the economy) in
this hypothetical ‘fundamental social relation’, represented continuity far more
than a break with his earlier works. This theory was the basis for his unfinished,
16 Testart 1985, p. 13.

17 ‘It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the
“possessor” of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production
of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear
as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free; a lack
of freedom which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary
relationship. The direct producer, according to our assumption, is to be found here in
possession of his own means of production, the necessary material labour conditions
required for the realisation of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence.
He conducts his agricultural activity and the rural home industries connected with it
independently. . . . Under such conditions the surplus labour for the nominal owner of
the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the
form assumed may be. . . . Thus, conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack
of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as its accessory,
bondage in the true sense of the word’. From Marx 1998, pp. 376–7.
18 Testart 1985, pp. 12–13.

84 Darmangeat
monumental text Les Principes de sociologie générale [The Principles of General

Sociology], only the first two volumes of which – dealing with this ‘fundamental
social relation’ and the political sphere, respectively – were ever published, in
electronic form on his website.19
Having thus turned his back on historical materialism, and although
occasionally paying homage to the profundity of Marx’s perspectives, Alain
Testart did not shy away from mounting polemics against Marx, in pages that
were not always among his most memorable. In particular, in the Démocraties
et despotismes [Democracies and Despotisms] volume of Les Principes de
sociologie générale, it is hard to tell precisely which caricature of Marxism this
text is trying to refute; we could also mention his Moyen d’échange, moyen de
paiement; des monnaies en général et plus particulièrement des primitives [Mode
of Exchange, Mode of Payment; Currencies in General, and More Particularly
those of Primitive Society],20 which, alongside its illuminating insights with
regard to primitive money, mounts a rather underwhelming attack on the
labour theory of value.
Nonetheless, it would be utterly mistaken to stop at this point, imagining
that Testart’s renunciation of Marxism means that his research is thus by
definition unable to bring anything to Marxism. Need we even remind
ourselves that Marx himself could not have nourished his reflection other than
by leaning on the results achieved by hundreds of non-Marxist authors? Such
a rigorous and erudite analysis of the evolution of societies as Testart’s, even
if organised around certain erroneous concepts, has proven far more fruitful
than works that although more orthodox are happy to stay on the terrain of
commonplaces that often stand far from scientific truth.
Some Critical Considerations
As we have just seen, not all of the developments made in Testart’s colossal
œuvre are as appealing as others. Some seem to have made a decisive step
forward for the social sciences: to name but a few, the identification of the key
role of storage in the evolution of social structures; the fundamental distinction
between societies within and without wealth; the typology of primitive
societies (however provisional its results); or his methodological lessons on
the interpretation of archaeological facts. Others, conversely, provoke more or
less serious doubts.
19 They have since been taken down, probably in view of a future paper edition.
20 In Aux origines de la monnaie (Testart 2001b).

Such is the case, for example, of his counterposition of the Australian and
other types of societies without wealth; even if Australian societies did, indeed,
contrast with Inuit or Bushmen’s societies in many aspects, it is nonetheless
rather more difficult to see these differences as being key to the dynamics of
their technical progress. The idea that hunter-gatherer societies might have
been structured by various different relations of production is certainly not
an absurd one; it even represents a very promising line of research, breaking
with a long tradition according to which the common traits of these societies
allow us straightforwardly to label them as having a ‘domestic-communist’ or
‘forager’ mode of production and end it there. The problem resides not in the
question that Testart raised, but his answer to it.
I think that Testart, getting carried away by his intuitions, rather too hastily
enrolled those elements that served his thesis and neglected those that
contradicted it. The social relations of aboriginal Australia were doubtless far
from being so uniform as the author of Avant l’histoire wants to present them.
And even at the level of deduction, it is hard to understand why a system that
denied the hunter ownership of his prey would ipso facto destroy any incentive
to increase his productivity; the well-performing hunter would manifestly
enjoy the same prestige in Australia as anywhere else. It is even harder to
understand why this system provided any less of an incentive than that in
other parts of the world which cast a taboo over the hunter’s prey and forbade
him to consume it himself. Finally, and though it is impossible here to take
forward this discussion in any detail, it is far less certain that Australia rejected
technical progress than the author of Communisme primitif thought; similarly,
the elements on which he bases his comparison of Australian social relations
and European Magdalenian society seem rather precarious.21
At another order of reflection, we might perhaps be reticent in following
Alain Testart in his characterisation of the ‘royal societies’ of Black Africa, such
as the Yoruba or Abomey monarchies. These societies, which incontestably did
have states, were, however, organised around a land-property regime typical
of that continent (and, more generally, of ‘World II’), in which one could only
own a piece of land on condition that one worked it (by oneself, or through
the intermediary of a dependent). Thus here we do not find individuals
monopolising uncleared or fallow land, or the existence of a proletarianised
peasantry – these two conjoined phenomena, so commonplace in the West
from the time (at least) of Solon’s Athens onward. Making the land-property
regime the determining criterion of the existence of social classes, Testart was
21 On this score, I refer the reader to the various posts on my blog at <http://cdarmangeat
.blogspot.com> and to my 2016 article, written with Jean-Marc Pétillon.

86 Darmangeat
able, in passing, to stick a thorn into the side of the Marxist theory of the state
in concluding that these African ‘royal’ societies had a state and yet did not
have classes.
I do not know whether the impossibility of such a combination ought to
be set up as some absolute principle; but in any case, it seems that in practice
our conclusion on this point is almost entirely dependent on our definition
of social classes – a problem well-known to all those who want to define
the Soviet society of the twentieth century. Here, Testart opts for a rather
narrowly juridical approach; we could retort that in a society where part of the
population (the state hierarchy) occupies a privileged position from both
the political and economic points of view, and whose massive recourse to
slavery allows it entirely to detach itself from productive labour, then we clearly
are speaking of a class society – even if it appears to be of an original type, and
doubtless an archaic one, as compared to its more conventional homologues
founded on private land-property such as we know it.
And Materialism?
We cannot finish without mentioning two works that touch on the question of
materialism, albeit without using the word itself.
The first is a rather old text, Testart’s Essai sur la division sexuelle du travail
chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs [Essay on the Sexual Division of Labour among
Hunter-Gatherers] (1986). Rejecting the narrowly naturalist explanation, he
sought to demonstrate that constraints linked to pregnancy and maternity
cannot account for the series of prohibitions that almost universally prevented
women from using sharp weapons and hunting big game. This salutary
corrective effort nonetheless ended up with a rather unsatisfying conclusion
that seems to attribute these prohibitions to purely ideal causes (a ‘blood
ideology’ that was to one degree or another universal among all peoples)
and denied objective factors any determining role.22 This tendency towards
idealism found its echo thirty years later in L’amazone et la cuisinière [The
Amazon and the Cook], a short work published posthumously in 2014 that
22 I had the space to develop this critique and outline an alternative explanation in a
few pages of my 2012 book Le communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était [Primitive
Communism Is Not What It Was]. All the same, we cannot hide away from the fact that the
origins of the sexual division of labour – a distinctive trait of the human species – remain
largely obscure. For example, prehistorians have proven unable to date with any certainty
its apparition in the evolutionary line leading to homo sapiens.

revisited this question by insisting on its repercussions on contemporary

societies.
However, we get a wholly different impression from his magisterial 2006
work Des dons et des dieux [Gifts and Gods], which brought into relief the
parallelism between the social structures and religious thought of each of
the three sets of primitive societies. North America was characterised by the
importance of gifts; South-East Asia by debts; and Australia by its relations of
dependency linked to its kinship system. Testart could thus emphasise that
the form that religion took could be explained only by the real social relations,
even if it was no mere copy of these latter:
[Religion] selects the most significant among all those transfer relations
that men make among themselves, within the real situation . . . It
organises its worship in function of the chosen transfer and its model:
here, you give and receive; there, you pay off your debts and duties
through sacrifice; and in the third case you neither give nor receive, nor
pay anything off . . . It conceives its imaginary beings in function of the
chosen transfer: since gifts do not allow anything but a simple hierarchy
of honours, the spirits are superior but no one is dependent on them;
in another case, since the insolubility of debts demands an inescapable
dependency, the spirits are not only superior, but beings on which
humans depend; and in the third case, since a symmetrical reciprocity
cancels out any particular dependencies at the global level, there are not
even any supernatural entities superior to and independent of men.23
Reading this extraordinary exposition, we cannot help but regret the lack of
any systematic study of religion capable of embracing the ensemble of its
forms and generalising these conclusions.24
Conclusions
Alain Testart’s writings have a quality rarely found in the social sciences: they
are lucid, get straight to the point, and never drown his argument in vague
or esoteric vocabulary; his point is always clearly made. Whether or not we
agree with them, whether they awaken enthusiasm, doubt or resistance, they
23 Testart 2006, p. 149.

24 Testart was going to devote a volume of his Principes de sociologie générale to this question.
Perhaps a posthumous publication would at least in part fill this lacuna.

88 Darmangeat
always give us something on which to reflect. Doubtless, a certain number

of his arguments require serious amendments, or should even be rejected
pure and simple. But his writings pose new questions by the dozen, and it
is by journeying down unexplored paths that we can answer these. To what
extent, for example, should the new social classification for which his writings
militate be modified or refined? How can or must we rethink this classification
in terms of modes of production? What precise articulation can we establish
between storage, the passage from ‘bride service’ to ‘bridewealth’, and the turn
from World I to World II? How and why did the transition from World II to
World III take place – that is to say, how and for what reasons was the land-
property typical of class societies, and its corollary, rent, instituted? In what
sense do advances in our knowledge of the emergence of the state provide
for new perspectives with regard to how it relates to the formation of classes?
These, among many dozens of others, are the questions that Alain Testart’s
œuvre poses to social anthropology and thus to Marxism.
At a time just after the birth of social anthropology, Marx and Engels avidly
scrutinised its first results in order to integrate these into their own conception
of the world, such that ‘due regard [could] be paid to the present state of
science’.25 Let’s hope that today’s Marxists prove able to do the same, taking
hold of this work, cutting off any dead branches and rectifying its errors, in
order to draw on it and advance their understanding of the social evolution of
the past – all the better to prepare the future.
References
Cauvin, Jacques 1994, Naissance des divinités, naissance de l’agriculture, Paris: CNRS.
Darmangeat, Christophe 2012, Le communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était – aux
origines de l’oppression des femmes, Paris: Smolny.
——— and Jean-Marc Pétillon 2016, ‘Structures sociales et blocages techniques dans
l’Australie aborigène. Quelques éléments critiques’, Techniques & Cultures, 64.
Johnson, Allen W. and Timothy Earle 2000 [1987], The Evolution of Human Societies –
From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Marx, Karl 1990, Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 27, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
——— 1998, Capital, Volume III, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 37, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Testart, Alain 1982, Les chasseurs-cueilleurs ou l’origine des inégalités, Paris: Société
d’Ethnographie (Université Paris X-Nanterre).
25 Marx 1990, p. 203.

——— 1985, Le communisme primitif: Economie et idéologie, Paris: Maison des Sciences
de l’Homme.
——— 1986, Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-
cueilleurs, Paris: EHESS (Cahiers de l’Homme).
——— 1992, ‘La question de l’évolutionnisme dans l’anthropologie sociale’, Revue
Française de Sociologie, 33: 155–87.
——— 2001a, L’esclave, la dette et le pouvoir: Etudes de sociologie comparative, Paris:
Errance.
——— 2001b, ‘Moyen d’échange/moyen de paiement: Des monnaies en général et plus
particulièrement des primitives’, in Aux origines de la monnaie, Paris: Errance.
——— 2004a, La servitude volontaire, Volume I, Les morts d’accompagnement, Paris:
Errance.
——— 2004b, La servitude volontaire, Volume II, L’origine de l’État, Paris: Errance.
——— 2005, Éléments de classification des sociétés, Paris: Errance.
——— 2006, Des dons et des dieux: Anthropologie religieuse et sociologie comparative,
Second Revised Edition, Paris: Errance.
——— 2007, Critique du don: Études sur la circulation non marchande, Paris: Syllepse.
——— 2010, La déesse et le grain: Trois essais sur les religions néolithiques, Paris: Errance.
——— 2011, ‘Les modèles biologiques sont-ils utiles pour penser l’évolution des
sociétés?’, Préhistoires Méditerranéennes, 2: 1–18.
——— 2012, Avant l’histoire: L’évolution des sociétés, de Lascaux à Carnac, Paris:
Gallimard.
——— 2014, L’amazone et la cuisinière, Paris: Gallimard.
Texts Available in English

Unfortunately, rather little of Alain Testart’s work has been published in English.
Nonetheless, several articles are available, principally relating to the classification of
hunter-gatherers and the importance of storage to social evolution:
——— 1982, ‘The Significance of Food Storage among Hunter-gatherers: Residence

Patterns, Population Densities, and Social Inequalities’, Current Anthropology, 23:
523–37 [with comments].
——— 1987, ‘Game Sharing Systems and Kinship Systems among Hunter-gatherers’,
Man, 22: 287–304.
——— 1988, ‘Appropriation of the Social Product and Production Relations in Hunter-
gatherer Societies’, Dialectical Anthropology, 12: 147–64.
——— 1988, ‘Some Major Problems in the Social Anthropology of Hunter-gatherers’,
Current Anthropology, 29: 1–31 [with comments].
——— 2013, ‘Reconstructing Social and Cultural Evolution: The Case of Dowry in the
Indo-European Area’, Current Anthropology, 54, 1: 23–50.
——— 2013, ‘What Is a Gift?’ [chapter translated from Critique du don], Hau, 3, 1.

brill.com/hima
Introduction to Henryk Grossman, ‘The Value-Price

Transformation in Marx and the Problem of Crisis’
Rick Kuhn
School of Sociology, Australian National University
Rick.Kuhn@anu.edu.au
Abstract
Whereas most previous and later discussions of Marx’s transformation of values

into prices of production have focused on his mathematical procedure, Henryk
Grossman addressed the logic of its place in the structure of Capital. On this basis
he criticised underconsumptionist and disproportionality theorists of economic crises
for inappropriately basing their accounts on the level of analysis of the value schemas
in the second volume of Capital. Such a criticism cannot be made of Grossman’s and
Marx’s explanation of systemic crises in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to
fall. Grossman’s article still provides insights into Marx’s analysis of capitalism and his
theory of economic crises, unsurpassed in the subsequent literature.
Keywords
Capitalism – transformation problem – economic crisis – Henryk Grossman – Henryk

Grossmann – Karl Marx – Marxism – method
The transformation of values into prices of production, in Volume III of

Capital, was a vital step in Marx’s exposure of the anatomy of capitalism and
the laws of capital accumulation. In ‘The Value-Price Transformation in Marx
and the Problem of Crisis’, Grossman dealt with the fundamental context and
I am grateful to Peter Jones, Michael Roberts, David Meienreis and Historical Materialism
referees for comments on earlier versions of this Introduction. Without Mary Gorman’s
practical and emotional support my work on Grossman and much else would have been
impossible.

92 Kuhn
significance of the transformation and its implications for theories of economic

crisis. While the issue at stake has been the coherence of Marx’s entire analysis
of capitalism, almost all of the controversy over the transformation has been
preoccupied with the narrower question of the theoretical adequacy of his
mathematics. This was the case both before Grossman’s essay was published,
as he pointed out, and subsequently to the present. So his article is not
merely of historical interest; it remains an important reference point for the
contemporary evaluation of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the explanation
of its systemic economic crises.
Neglect and misinterpretation have been the main responses to Grossman’s
work, including among Marxists. The following article will appear in the first
of four large volumes of works by Henryk Grossman, most of which have
not previously appeared in English. They will be published in the Historical
Materialism book series. This project will provide much readier access to
Grossman’s writings, making their strengths more available to contemporary
Marxists and helping to overcome ignorance and distortion of his contributions.
The first volume will contain essays, monographs, encyclopaedia entries
and correspondence that deal primarily with economic theory. Subsequent
volumes will be a collection of writings that are mainly concerned with
politics, starting with works Grossman wrote as a leader of the Jewish workers’
movement in Galicia (the Austrian-occupied province of Poland) before World
War I, through to his Leninist outlines and evaluations of Social Democracy
and Bolshevism in the early 1930s; an unabridged translation, by Jairus Banaji,
of his The Law of Accumulation; and works on economic history, including a
critique of Max Weber’s account of the relationship between Protestantism
and the rise of capitalism and a substantial book on Austrian trade policy and
Galicia in the eighteenth century. A very large majority of the translations
have already been completed but much editorial work remains for me to do,
particularly on The Law of Accumulation and the economic-history volume.
When the ‘The Value-Price Transformation in Marx and the Problem
of Crisis’ appeared in the journal of the Institute for Social Research in
Frankfurt am Main in 1932, Henryk Grossman had already been living there
since late 1925. Born in 1881, he had grown up in a bourgeois Jewish family in
Kraków, apparently only a generation or two away from the shtetl. Despite his
background, he became a socialist at school and was the most prominent leader
of the Jewish socialist workers’ movement in Galicia, while still a university
student. In 1905, he was the founding secretary and principal theoretician of
the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia (JSDP), which split from the
nationalist Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia. Grossman maintained a
relationship with the JSDP when he moved to Vienna to continue his studies

Introduction to Henryk Grossman 93
in late 1908, after completing his first degree in the middle of that year. During
World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army, initially in the field and
later as an economist in the War Ministry. Blocked from a career in Vienna after
the War by the racist citizenship policies of the coalition government of the
new rump-Austrian republic, under the chancellorship of the right-wing Social
Democrat Karl Renner, he moved to Warsaw in 1919.
In the new Polish Republic, Grossman became a senior official of the Central
Statistical Office and joined the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland. The
Free University of Poland appointed him to a full professorship in economic
policy in 1922 but he was forced from the country, after a series of arrests
and periods of imprisonment for his Communist associations and political
activity. He took a post at the Marxist Institute for Social Research, associated
with the University of Frankfurt. This was arranged for him by Carl Grünberg,
the Institute’s first director, who had been his academic mentor in Vienna.
Grossman’s years in Frankfurt were his most intellectually prolific. While not
a member, he was a sympathiser of the Communist Party of Germany, as well
as the Communist International and Soviet Russia. The disastrous policies of
the party, under Moscow’s guidance, in the period before the Nazis took power
in January 1933 led him, for a period, to adopt a very critical attitude towards
official Communism. In 1929, still politically close to the KPD, he published the
work for which he is still, deservedly, best known, The Law of Accumulation and
Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being also a Theory of Crises.1 His essay on
the value-price transformation continued themes in this book and was, in part,
a response to critics of it.2
Discussion of Marx’s explanation of the relationship between the values,
reflecting the amount of socially necessary labour embodied in them, and
the market prices of commodities began in 1896, two years after Engels
published the third volume of Capital. The Austrian professor Eugen Böhm-
Bawerk claimed that the argument in Volume III was unsatisfactory. Ladislaw
Bortkiewicz in 1907 maintained that Marx’s explanation was internally
inconsistent and offered his own solution to this transformation problem.3
His solution made the standard assumption of mainstream economics
that economic processes take place simultaneously. It also sought to refute
important corollaries of Marx’s approach to the issue. In his path-breaking
monograph of 1941, Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of
Dynamics, Grossman demonstrated that the assumption of simultaneity and
1 Grossmann 1992.
2 For a detailed account of Grossman’s life, see Kuhn 2007.
3 Bortkiewicz 1949; Bortkiewicz 1952.

94 Kuhn
the failure to accommodate the use-value aspect of commodities were alien

to Marx’s theory and fundamental flaws in bourgeois economics and Marxist
theories influenced by it.4
What became known as the ‘Bortkiewicz solution’ – along with the myth,
originally expressed in Stalinist and Social-Democratic reviews of The Law
of Accumulation, that Grossman was a mechanical thinker who argued that
capitalist accumulation was leading to the system’s final breakdown – was
most effectively disseminated in the English-speaking world by Paul Sweezy’s
The Theory of Capitalist Development, first published in 1942.5 Although there
have been a variety of criticisms of Bortkiewicz’s solution, it was long and
widely accepted amongst Marxist and non-Marxist economists, especially
at universities. Since the 1970s, more Marxist economists have offered a
range of variant or alternative approaches to the transformation problem.
Advocates of a ‘temporal single-system interpretation’ of Marx’s procedure
for transforming values into prices have persuasively defended the coherence
of Marx’s own treatment of the transformation and hence his labour theory
of value, analytical method and theory of economic crisis, grounded in the
tendency for the rate of profit to fall.6 Grossman was not, however, concerned
in his article on the transformation with Marx’s mathematical procedure.
The starting point in Grossman’s discussion of the transformation of values
into prices was the logic that underpins the structure of Capital and the method
of successive approximation [Annäherungsverfahren]. After dealing with
capitalism’s most basic features at a very abstract level, achieved by means of
a series of simplifying assumptions, Marx progressively lifted them to explain
further aspects of concrete reality. Grossman had dealt with this method in a
series of earlier works, paying particular attention to its implications for Marx’s
account of how crises, arising from the growing organic composition of capital,
were intrinsic to capitalist production, and the division of surplus value into its
phenomenal forms.7 In this essay, he focused on the place of the reproduction
schemas in Capital Volume II and the discussion of the general (or ‘average’)
rate of profit and prices of production, that is the value-price transformation,
in Volume III.
4 Grossman 2015.
5 Sweezy 1942, pp. 109–28.
6 This summary of the controversy draws particularly on Kliman 2007, which is also the most
extensive exposition of a temporal single-system interpretation.
7 Grossman 2000, p. 171; Grossman 1924; Grossmann 1928, pp. 183–4; but especially Grossmann
1992, n.b. pp. 29–31 and Grossman 2013.

Marx’s schemas in Volume II assumed that commodities exchanged

at their values and that there was a uniform rate of surplus value in
the two departments of production. Consequently, the rates of profit in the
departments differed. The rate of profit was lower in the more capital-intensive
department I, producing means of production, than in department II, which
makes means of consumption. According to Marx, the value schemas had
some historical validity.8 Under precapitalist commodity production, when
there were substantial obstacles to the movement of capital among branches
of production, profit rates were not generally equalised across industries. But,
with the emergence of generalised commodity production that characterises
the dominance of the capitalist mode of production, this was no longer the case.
The schemas contradict the contemporary reality that, where monopoly is not
an issue,9 rates of profit tend to be similar across industries and commodities
do not exchange at their values but at prices of production which reflect the
general rate of profit.
The redistribution of surplus value across industries in the formation of
a general rate of profit that gives rise to prices of production has, Grossman
noted, an important political implication. The transformation gives each
capitalist an interest in the exploitation of the entire working class, because
the profit they make may derive not only from their own workers but also from
those in other industries.
The equalisation of profit rates occurs through competition, an important
feature of the real world excluded from the first stages of Marx’s analysis of
value and surplus-value. Grossman noted, in one of his important, content-
packed footnotes, that competition was introduced in Volume III of Capital, in
the discussion of the transformation of values into production prices. He also
demonstrated that, according to Marx, value is determined prior to circulation
and is not affected by competition, i.e. the realm of circulation.10
According to Marx, competition operates to establish the average rate
of profit and prices of production through the movement of capital among
industries. Faced with lower rates of profit if commodities are sold at their
8 Cf. spurious criticisms of Engels for his contention that Marx’s method was at once logical
and historical, e.g. Heinrich 2012, p. 30.
9 Marx 1981, pp. 278–9.
10 Footnote 37. There have been controversies amongst Marxists over the issues of Marx’s
treatment of competition and the related concept of ‘capital in general’, and the determina-
tion of values prior to the sale of commodities. For very useful defences of Marx’s approach
to the former see Mosley 1995 and 2002; and to the latter, Carchedi 2011, pp. 85–114, and
Moseley 2013.

96 Kuhn
value, capitalists in capital-intensive industries will tend to look for investment

opportunities elsewhere and their output of commodities will decline. The
short supply will result in the prices of these commodities being bidded up
and a deviation between their resulting prices of production and values.
Through the mechanism of the exchange of commodities among industries at
their prices of production, more surplus value is realised in capital-intensive
industries than was produced in them and their profitability improves. In
labour-intensive industries, higher initial profit-rates lead to capital inflow,
expanded output and prices of production below values. The deviation
between prices of production and values in particular industries tends to be to
the extent necessary to equalise rates of profit in all industries at the general
rate.11
Prices of production were not, for Marx, the end of the story of
transformation. Grossman, following him, outlined the necessity of further
transformations, starting with prices of production, to take into account
not only the formation of the general rate of profit in production, but the
general rate of profit including commercial capital, the effects of the credit
system, and ground rent. Commodities’ market prices fluctuate around these
multiply-transformed values. Prices deviate from values but in consistent, if
complicated, ways. Furthermore, commercial profit, interest, ground rent and
unproductive investment associated with their appropriation of a proportion
of surplus value slow down productive accumulation.
Having explained the significance of the transformation, Grossman
criticised the most influential Marxist theories of economic crisis. He devoted
most attention to Rosa Luxemburg’s approach, because he had great respect
for her revolutionary politics and affinity with her insistence on the intrinsic
nature of crises under capitalism and the system’s tendency to break down.
The ‘neo-harmonists’ such as Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, on the other
hand, argued that disproportion in production could be overcome by means
of government policy and, particularly in Otto Bauer’s case, that capitalism
was characterised by a tendency to equilibrium, i.e. a major capitulation to
bourgeois economics.
Luxemburg dealt only with value schemas, even though the division
of surplus value into distinct revenue streams has direct bearing on her
contention that a purely capitalist system will break down because a portion of
the surplus value it produces, in the form of consumer goods, cannot be sold.
Her conclusion depended on the assumption, derived from the value schemas,
that there is no transfer of surplus value between departments of production.
11 Marx 1981, pp. 296–8.

Yet this is precisely what occurs through the formation of prices of production
and the average rate of profit.
In their accounts of economic crises, Hilferding and Bauer also relied on
value schemas in which rates of profit vary across industries, even though it is
prices of production and the average rate of profit which regulate production
and accumulation, and the transformation means that crucial proportions
differ between value and production-price schemas. Bauer attempted to
refute Luxemburg by demonstrating that proportional, crisis-free growth, in
which surplus value is fully realised, was possible. He did so by arbitrarily
reallocating surplus value from one department to another. The transformation,
which brings about a redistribution of surplus value among departments of
production through exchange, renders this illegitimate procedure redundant.
Hilferding’s extensive discussion of bank and financial capital likewise failed
to go beyond value schemas, even though these are only concerned with
productive capital and that at a high level of abstraction.
Explanations of crisis in terms of underconsumption (Luxemburg) and
disproportionality (Hilferding and Bauer) are flawed because their analyses
are conducted at the level of value rather than price-of-production schemas.
They failed to go beyond the theoretical framework of classical political
economy, which had grasped the reality of the formation of the general rate
of profit but had been incapable of explaining it. A further crucial weakness
in Luxemburg’s argument was the Ricardian assumption that surplus value
cannot shift between departments of production because of the natural form12
of the commodities in which it is embodied.
Grossman’s work on the transformation also gave rise to a university course,
documented in unpublished student notes, and an unfinished manuscript.
These included critical and detailed surveys of hostile assessments of Marx’s
value theory and addressed procedures for calculating the transformation. He
did not publish anything on the calculation of the transformation, however,
which suggests that he was not entirely satisfied with his reasons for endorsing
Marx’s approach.13 But he extended his critique of the Ricardianism of many
economic theorists who identified themselves as Marxists in ‘Marx, Classical
Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics’.14 In that substantial essay, he
12 Luxemburg 1913, p. 311, uses the term ‘objective form’. Luxemburg’s assumption that the
objective form and quantity of commodities constrain the movement of surplus value
between departments of production can be identified with the broader, mistaken frame-
work which Kliman calls ‘physicalism’ (Kliman 2007, pp. 13, 35); also see Moseley 1993.
13 Grossman 1932; Grossman 193?.
14 Grossman 2015.

98 Kuhn
emphasised the alien equilibrium assumptions, including the simultaneity of

economic processes, shared by bourgeois economics in both its classical and
contemporary forms, that had been imported into Marxism. As later critics of
such assumptions have pointed out, they underpin not only the arguments
of neo-Ricardian and neoclassical critics but also those of most ‘Marxists’ for
rejecting Marx’s transformation procedure and explanation of the crisis-prone
nature of capitalism in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.15
Grossman was the first to give prominence to Marx’s explanation of the
inherently crisis-prone nature of capitalism and its tendency to break down
on the basis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall that results from the
logic of capitalist production (rather than distribution or exchange). In reviews
of The Law of Accumulation, Arkadij Gurland accused Grossman himself
of relying on Bauer’s value schemas;16 and Hans Neisser charged him with
ignoring the transformation of values into prices of production.17 Grossman’s
approach was, however, immune from these criticisms. His value schemas,
unlike Bauer’s, did not deal with separate departments but aggregates across
the whole of commodity production. A tacit response to these criticisms, in
another long and important footnote, pointed out that he was concerned with
primarily general crises of over-accumulation that affect all spheres.

For society as a whole, ‘the distinction between values and prices of
production loses all significance’, since here the dimensions of the two
are identical.18
The transformation makes the vital step of introducing the average rate of
profit into his analysis but, according to Marx’s own procedure, total surplus
value is the same as total profit, the total value of all commodities and their
total price of production are identical, as are the value and price of production
rates of profit. While the formation of the general rate of profit is preliminary
to the discussion of the ‘The law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit’
in the third volume of Capital,19 Marx’s (and Grossman’s) account of the
15 See Carchedi 2011, pp. 53–130; Freeman 2010; Kliman 2007; and Moseley 1993.
16 Gurland 1930, pp. 79–80.
17 Neisser 1931, pp. 73–4.
18 His footnote references Grossmann 1929, pp. 107, 211. In the abridged English translation
(Grossmann 1992) the first passage Grossman referred to is missing, while the second has
been condensed. For Grossman’s responses to other criticisms of his account of Marx’s
crisis theory see Grossman 2014, pp. 76–85.
19 Marx 1981, pp. 241–313, 317–38.

law is unaffected by the transfer of surplus value between departments of

production and the disparity between the values and prices of production
of particular commodities, and subsequent transformations. This is not the
case for all the ‘counteracting factors’. It is important, Grossman stressed, to
conduct analyses of economic crises on as real a basis as possible, in particular
taking the general rate of profit and prices of production into account. And
indeed Marx did discuss the counteracting effects that arise from foreign
trade and the rise in share capital.20 In the very substantial third chapter of
The Law of Accumulation, Grossman himself presented extensive discussions
of counteracting factors that arise at more concrete levels of analysis beyond
introduction of competition and the establishment of the average rate of profit
and production prices.21
Theories that explained economic crisis in terms of underconsumption
or disproportionality, that is, ultimately in the sphere of the circulation
of commodities, should have embraced one of Marx’s most important
breakthroughs in the understanding of capitalism by taking the value-
price transformation, which had immediate implications for their theories,
into account. Instead, Luxemburg, Hilferding, ‘Bukharin and other theorists
of communism’ leapt from value schemas to much more concrete levels of
analysis, notably discussions of imperialism, finance and state policy.
Bukharin drew heavily on Hilferding and, by 1932, although still very well-
known, he was a vulnerable and marginal figure in the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union. At this stage Grossman identified politically with the international
Communist movement and the Soviet Union. But he had not succumbed
to the general subordination of Marxist theory to orthodoxies decreed in
Moscow. Criticising Bukharin was therefore safe but Grossman’s phrase could
entail rejection of official Stalinist economics, whose custodian from 1930 was
Jenö Varga. Despite his proclaimed hostility to Luxemburg, in accord with
the international Communist line since 1924 (to which Bukharin’s critique of
Luxemburg’s economics, including the idea that capitalism had an economic
tendency to break down, contributed),22 Varga’s theory of economic crises
drew heavily, but without acknowledgement, on her underconsumptionist
arguments.23 Grossman had described Varga, before he became Stalin’s
authoritative lieutenant in economics, as one of the ‘epigones of Marx’ and
20 Marx 1981, pp. 344–8.

21 Grossmann 1992, pp. 142–201 passim.
22 Bukharin 1972, especially pp. 269–770.
23 Day 1981, pp. 148–51, 187, 202–11.

100 Kuhn
Varga’s misconceived review of The Law of Accumulation, published in Russian

and German, was savage.24
Today, leftist opponents of austerity overwhelmingly adhere to
underconsumptionist and/or disproportionality understandings of, and
approaches to dealing with, economic crises. In order to resolve the problem
of economic stagnation, they call for greater state regulation of both demand
and investment, especially increased control over financial activity. This is true
of both Keynesians25 and many Marxists.26
In contrast to the work of the most influential Marxist economists of
previous decades of the twentieth century, Grossman’s essay emphasised
that prices of production and the average rate of profit are a crucial link in
establishing the relationship between the labour theory of value and reality.
This link was absent in classical political economy and had been established
by Marx. Before Grossman, discussions of the value-price transformation were
preoccupied with Marx’s mathematical procedure. Its implications for crisis
theory were not considered. Despite Marx’s own statements and Grossman’s
reminder, the preoccupation with methods of calculation has continued27 and
the broader significance of the transformation story has been little explored
since then. Many of the ideas Grossman subjected to effective criticisms in
his article are still widespread, while the positive aspects of his (and Marx’s)
analysis are particularly relevant during the current period of intense class
struggles in parts of the world and profound global economic instability.
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Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of Capital’, in Sweezy (ed.) 1949.
24 Grossmann 1992, p. 186; Varga 1930a, 1930b.

25 For example, Krugman 2009 and 2012; Quiggin 2010; Keen 2011; Varoufakis 2013.
26 Amongst the most prominent Marxist proponents of underconsumptionist theory today
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not addressed Grossman’s critiques of underconsumptionism and have wilfully perpetu-
ated the myth that he had a mechanical theory of capitalist breakdown, despite extensive
contrary evidence in his own publications, including the book itself and responses to
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Also see Lapavitsas 2012; Flassbeck and Lapavitsas 2015; and, more polemically, Budgen
and Lapavitsas 2015. Also see Roberts 2015, a telling response to Lapavitsas.
27 See the persuasive resolution of the ‘transformation problem’ in Kliman 2007.

——— 1952 [1907], ‘Value and Price in the Marxian System’, International Economic
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Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
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London: NLB.
Flassbeck, Heiner and Costas Lapavitsas 2015, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in
the Eurozone, London: Verso.
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Consequences, New York: Monthly Review Press.
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System!’, Monthly Review, 61, 11: 44–56.
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interprétation de sa pensée, Warsaw: Bibliotheca Universitatis Liberae Polonae.
——— 1932, ‘Das Problem der Durchschnittsprofitrate in der modernen
volkswirtschaftlichen Theorie’, original Folder 37, in 1997 Folder 62, Archiwum
Polski Akademii Nauk.
——— 193?, ‘Zum Abschluss des Streites um die Wert-Preisrechnung im Marxschen
System’, typed-up student’s notes, original Folder 40, in 1997 Folder 63, Archiwum
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——— 2000 [1922], ‘The Theory of Economic Crisis’, in Research in Political Economy,
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——— 2013 [1929], ‘The Change in the Original Plan for Marx’s Capital and Its Causes’,
translated by Geoffrey McCormack, Historical Materialism, 21, 3: 138–64.
——— 2014 [1932], Fifty Years of Struggle over Marxism: 1983–1932, translated by Rick
Kuhn and Einde O’Callagahan, Carlton South: Socialist Alternative.
——— 2015 [1941], Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics,
translated by Rick Kuhn, Carlton South: Socialist Alternative.
Grossmann, Henryk 1928, ‘Eine neue Theorie über Imperialismus und die soziale
Revolution’, Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 13:
141–92.
——— 1929, Das Akkumulations- und Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalistischen
Systems. (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie), Leipzig: Hirschfeld.

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——— 1992 [1929], The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System:
Being also a Theory of Crises, translated and abridged by Jairus Banaji, London: Pluto
Press.
Gurland, Arkadij 1930, ‘Absatz und Verwertung im Kapitalismus: Zur neueren
Diskussion des Zusammenbruchsproblems’, Klassenkampf, 4, 3: 75–83.
Heinrich, Michael 2012 [2004], An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s
‘Capital’, translated by Alexander Locascio, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Keen, Steve 2011, Debunking Economics – Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The
Naked Emperor Dethroned?, London: Zed Books.
Kliman, Andrew 2007, Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of
Inconsistency, Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books.
Krugman, Paul 2009, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, New
York: Norton.
——— 2012, End This Depression Now!, New York: Norton.
Kuhn, Rick 2007, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism, Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Lapavitsas, Costas 2012, Crisis in the Eurozone, London: Verso.
Luxemburg, Rosa 1913, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen
Erklärung des Imperialismus, Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts Paul Singer.
——— and Nikolai Bukharin 1972, The Accumulation of Capital – An Anti-critique and
Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, translated by Rudolf Wichmann,
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Marx, Karl 1981 [1894], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 3, translated by
David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moseley, Fred 1993, ‘Marx’s Logical Method and the “Transformation Problem” ’,
in Marx’s Method in Capital: A Re-examination, edited by Fred Moseley, Atlantic
Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press.
——— 1995, ‘Capital in General and Marx’s Logical Method: A Response to Heinrich’s
Critique’, Capital & Class, 19, 2: 15–48.
——— 2002, ‘Hostile Brothers: Marx’s Theory of the Distribution of Surplus-value in
Volume III of Capital’, in The Culmination of Capital: Essays on Volume III of Marx’s
Capital, edited by Martha Campbell and Geert Reuten, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
——— 2013, ‘Critique of Heinrich: Marx Did Not Abandon the Logical Structure’,
Monthly Review, 1 December, available at: <http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/
critique-heinrich-marx-abandon-logical-structure/>, accessed 21 October 2014.
Neisser, Hans 1931, ‘Das Gesetz der fallenden Profitrate als Krisen- und
Zusammenbruchsgesetz’, Die Gesellschaft, 8, 1: 72–85.
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available at: <https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/greece-keynes-
or-marx>, accessed 22 March 2015.
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Economy, London: Dennis Dobson.
——— (ed.) 1949, Karl Marx and the Close of His System and Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism
of Marx, New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
Varga, Eugen 1930a, ‘Nakoplenie i krakh kapitalizma’, Problemi ekonomiki, 3: 31–62.
——— 1930b, ‘Akkumulation und Zusammenbruch des Kapitalismus’, Unter dem
Banner des Marxismus, 4, 1: 60–95.
Varoufakis, Yanis 2013, ‘Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant
European Crisis’, Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World, available at:
<http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/12/10/confessions-of-an-erratic-marxist-in-the-
midst-of-a-repugnant-european-crisis>, accessed 22 March 2015.

brill.com/hima
The Value-Price Transformation in Marx

and the Problem of Crisis
Henryk Grossman
1 Concrete Reality as the Object and Goal of Marx’s Research
The task of all science is the exploration and understanding of the concretely
given totality of phenomena, of their interconnections and their mutations.
The difficulty of this task is that phenomena are not immediately identical
with the essence of things. The exploration of the essence constitutes a
precondition for understanding the world of appearances. Marx, in opposition
to vulgar economics, seeks to identify the ‘hidden essence’ and the ‘inner
connection’ of economic reality;1 this is not to say that he is not interested in
concrete appearances. On the contrary! Only appearances present themselves
to consciousness, which means that – purely methodologically – their hidden,
essential ‘core’ can only be accessed through the analysis of appearances.2
But the concrete appearances are important to Marx not only because
they are the starting point and the medium for understanding the ‘real
movement’. They are, rather, the very objects that Marx ultimately wants to
identify and understand in their interconnection. By no means does he simply
want to restrict himself to the exploration of the ‘essence’ while ignoring the
phenomena. In fact, the essence, once identified, has the function of enabling
us to comprehend concrete appearances. This is why Marx strives to find ‘the
law which governs these phenomena’, i.e. ‘the law of their variation’.3
Only phenomena in themselves and without the context of the ‘hidden
essence of things’ are, according to Marx, incomprehensible and ‘prima
[Originally published as Grossmann 1932a. The editor is grateful to Fred Moseley for his
advice, particularly on the concepts of cost prices and prices of production. This essay, along
with many others on economic theory, will appear in the first of four volumes of Grossman’s
works to be published in the Historical Materialism Book Series.]
1 Marx 1981, p. 956.
2 Marx 1981, p. 311.
3 From a Russian review quoted by Marx (Marx 1976, p. 100).

106 Grossman
facie vulgar’. But it would be a disastrous mistake – falling into the opposite
error of vulgar economics – if economic science contented itself with the
‘hidden essence’ of the things that have been discovered, without finding
the way back to concrete appearances with whose explanation we are, after
all, concerned, that is, without reconstructing the many mediations between
the essence and the form of appearance! Marx therefore regards this path
from the abstract to the concrete as ‘obviously the correct scientific method’.
Here ‘abstract determinations’ lead, ‘by way of thinking to the reproduction of the
concrete’ because ‘the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete
is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it
as a mental concrete’.4
By using a concrete example, Marx shows that it is not enough to reduce
the values created in industrial production to the general law, i.e. to state ‘that
commodity values are determined by the labour-time they contain’. This is
because empirical processes in the sphere of circulation, e.g. the influence of
commercial capital on the commodity prices, which are visible in practice,
show ‘phenomena which, in the absence of a very far-reaching analysis of
the intermediary stages of the process, seem to presuppose a purely arbitrary
determination of prices’ so it appears that ‘the circulation process as such
determines the prices of commodities, and that this is within certain limits
independent of the process of production’, that is, of labour time. Therefore,
in order to demonstrate the illusion of this appearance and to establish the
‘inner connection’ between the phenomenon and the ‘actual process’ – which
is ‘a very intricate thing and a work of great detail’; ‘it is one of the tasks of
science to reduce the visible and merely apparent movement to the actual
inner movement’,5 ‘just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are
intelligible only to someone who is acquainted with their real motions, which
are not perceptible to the senses.’6
The decisively important ‘task of science’ is thus to find the ‘mediations’, the
‘intermediary stages’, which lead from the essence to the concrete phenomenon.
Without these intermediaries the theory, i.e. the ‘essence’ of things, would be
in contradiction with concrete reality. Marx rightly scorns those ‘theorists’
who lose themselves in unrealistic constructs. Only ‘[t]he vulgus has therefore
concluded that theoretical truths are abstractions which are at variance with
reality.’7
4 Marx 1986, p. 38 [Grossman’s emphasis].

5 Marx 1981, p. 428; Marx 1976, p. 710.
6 Marx 1976, p. 433.
7 Marx 1992, p. 72.

The Value-Price Transformation in Marx 107
The structure of Marx’s Capital and the procedure of successive

approximation he applies there, as I have shown,8 also conform to Marx’s
basic methodological idea, which finds its most concise expression in the
construction of his reproduction schema. Applying numerous simplifying
assumptions, the ‘journey’ from the concrete towards the abstract is
undertaken there. The given world of appearances, the concrete partial
forms in which surplus value appears in the sphere of circulation (profit of
enterprise, interest, commercial profit etc.) are ignored and the entire analysis
of Volumes I and II of Capital focuses on aggregate value and surplus value,
on their creation and their changes in size, in the processes of production and
circulation. The ‘mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation’
is thus excluded.9 While the purpose of the analysis in Volumes I and II of
Capital was to research the creation of surplus value as the essence of the total
economic process, the following task – and, as Marx expressly emphasises,
this constitutes the purpose and the content of Volume III – was to construct
the ‘inner connection’ between the ‘essence’, which had been discovered,
and the form of its appearance, the empirically given forms of surplus value.
That is, ‘[o]ur concern is rather to discover and present the concrete forms which
grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole. In their
actual movement, capitals confront one another in concrete forms.’10
Here, in Volume III, the simplifying assumptions previously made (e.g. the
sale of commodities at their value, the exclusion of the sphere of circulation and
competition, treating surplus value in its totality, excluding the partial forms
into which it divides itself) are dropped. Subsequently, in this second stage of
the procedure of successive approximation, the mediations thus far neglected
are taken into consideration, step by step, and the concrete forms of profit
(ground rent, interest, commercial profit etc.) are dealt with. Only in this way
is the circle of Marx’s analysis completed and proof is provided that the labour
theory of value is not an unrealistic construct but that it indeed constitutes
‘the law of phenomena’, i.e. the foundation which enables us to explain the real
world of appearances. Marx formulates this basic methodological idea with
unmistakable clarity when he says: ‘In Volumes 1 and 2 we were only concerned
with the values of commodities. Now [in Volume III] . . . the price of production
of the commodity has also developed, as a transformed form of value.’11 ‘The
configurations of capital, as developed in this volume, thus approach step
8 Grossmann 1992, pp. 29–31; Grossman 2013, p. 152.

9 Marx 1981, p. 729.
10 Marx 1981, p. 117 [The first emphasis is Grossman’s].
11 Marx 1981, p. 263.

108 Grossman
by step the form in which they appear on the surface of society, in the action
of different capitals on one another, i.e. in competition, and in the everyday
consciousness of the agents of production themselves.’12
2 The Contradiction between the Value Schema and Reality
If, as we have shown, the reproduction in thought of concrete reality is the goal
of Marx’s research then the function of Marx’s reproduction schema within
Marx’s research method is readily apparent: it does not claim that, by itself, it is
a representation of capitalist reality. It is only an element in Marx’s procedure of
successive approximation that together with simplifying assumptions (which
are the basis of the schema) and subsequent modifications (giving rise to
progressive concretisation) constitute an indivisible whole. Without the other
two, each of these three parts by itself consequently loses all significance for
understanding the truth and can therefore only constitute a preliminary stage
of understanding, the first step in the procedure of successive approximation
of concrete reality.
Once this character of Marx’s reproduction schema is clear, it is apparent
that it is only an aid to our thought and is not a representation of concrete
processes. There can also, then, be no doubt about the character of the
individual elements out of which the schema is constructed – value, surplus-
value, different profit rates in the individual spheres of production. As I have
shown elsewhere, surplus value is a real quantity.13 This is only true, however,
for society as a whole in which values and prices, and therefore surplus value and
profit, are quantitatively identical. Matters are different as regards individual
spheres of production. Within these, in capitalist reality, we do not have values
but prices of production which diverge from them. There are not quantities
of surplus values but of profits. In short, the values and surplus-values that
figure in the reproduction schema are, from a quantitative perspective, not
categories of reality; they are not immediately given in the world of capitalist
reality. They are, rather, assumptions which initially contradict reality, that
are chosen arbitrarily for the methodological purpose of simplification. Let
us examine values first. Is it still necessary to recall that for Marx the sale of
commodities at their values only has the character of a preliminary theoretical
assumption, but that Marx did not claim anywhere or at any time that this
assumption accords with reality? In Volume I of Capital, he explicitly says ‘We

13 Grossmann 1992, p. 103.

assume here that the capitalist sells the commodities he has produced at their
value.’14 – ‘I assume . . . that commodities are sold at their value.’15 In the second
volume too, Marx emphasises the theoretical character of this premise when he
writes, ‘In Volume 1 . . . it was assumed . . . that the capitalist sells the product at
its value.’16 But nowhere is it claimed that this assumption accords with reality.
Rather, the opposite is said, that this assumption diverges from and is, prima
facie, in apparent contradiction with reality. With exceptional clarity Marx
even states in Volume I of Capital that the circulation of commodities at their
values is an assumption that holds true only in the theoretical, ‘normal course’
that he assumes, ‘in so far as’ and ‘provided’ that the phenomenon proceeds ‘in
its purity’. ‘In its pure form, the circulation process necessitates the exchange
of equivalents, but in reality processes do not take place in their pure form.’17
Here, then, the ‘pure’ process is counterposed to reality. Only in the former
but not in the latter are the commodities exchanged at their values. So, in a
letter to Kugelmann of 11 July 1868, Marx with his typical sarcasm flagellates
the confusion of theoretical assumptions for experience that is frequently
apparent in bourgeois economics. ‘The vulgar economist has not the slightest
idea that the actual, everyday exchange relations and the value magnitudes
cannot be directly identical.’18
On innumerable other occasions in all three volumes of Capital as well as
Theories of Surplus Value, Marx reiterates that in reality commodities are not
sold at their values but at prices of production while ‘the prices of production
of most commodities must differ from their values.’19 For this very reason,
he polemicises against David Ricardo’s claim that commodities are sold at
their values: ‘This is the first erroneous assumption. . . . Only in exceptional
circumstances are commodities exchanged at their value.’20 And, against Adam

16 Marx 1978, p. 428.
18 Marx 1988b, p. 69 [Grossman emphasises ‘actual’].
19 Marx 1910b, p. 91. [Grossman’s emphasis, quoting accurately from this, Karl Kautsky’s edi-
tion of Theories of Surplus Value. Kautsky here and in the other relevant passages that
Grossman quotes from Theories of Surplus Value had changed ‘cost prices’ in Marx’s origi-
nal manuscript to ‘price of production’. This was because Marx used the term ‘cost price’
in Theories of Surplus Value for what he termed ‘price of production’ in Capital Volume
III where ‘cost price’ meant the cost of inputs, i.e. c+v. For the literal translation of the
original text, see Marx 1992, p. 272; also see note 6, p. 548.]

110 Grossman
Smith, he says, ‘as I shall show later, even the average price of commodities is
always different from their value.’21
What has been said here about value is true of surplus-value too. We have
surplus values in the reproduction schema but not in reality. Surplus value is
‘invisible’ while in the reality of capitalism only different forms of profit such
as profit of enterprise, interest, commercial profit, and ground rent occur. The
surplus values represented in each sphere of production of the reproduction
schema are therefore only preliminary assumptions which do not correspond
with reality. The same is finally true of the profit rates visible in the schema. In a
reproduction schema based on values, in other words, on the assumption that
commodities are sold at their values, there have to be different profit rates in
each of the departments. The experience of the capitalist system, conditioned
by competition, shows that in reality a tendency for the different profit rates in
the individual spheres to equalise, to form a general, i.e. an average rate of profit,
prevails. This process is immanent to the concept of prices of production: ‘the
existence and concept of price of production and the general rate of profit it
involves rest on the fact that individual commodities are not sold at their values’,22
as, conversely, ‘the mere existence of a general rate of profit necessitates prices
of production that differ from values.’23
Hence the reproduction schema, in which only values, surplus-values
and different profit rates in the individual spheres of production feature,
initially contradicts concrete reality. The theoretical, preliminary character of
the reproduction schema and particularly the assumption that commodities
exchange at their values is thus clear. Real processes play out quite differently
to those in the reproduction schema. And it is not, indeed, a matter of their
accidental or temporary deviations from the processes represented in the
schema, which can be disregarded by science. Rather, the real process of
reproduction is fundamentally different from that represented by the schema.
The deviations of prices from values as they occur in reality are not merely
temporary fluctuations, as is the case, e.g. with market prices; on the contrary,
the transformation of values into prices of production that actually occurs
‘creates PERMANENT DEVIATIONS FROM VALUES.’24 In the schema, the
surplus values produced in the individual spheres are realised in them. It is
very different in reality. In the long run, it is not the surplus values that are
realised but the average profit, which continuously deviates from them.
21 Marx 1988a, p. 400 [Grossman emphasises ‘from their value’].

23 Marx 1989, p. 402.

‘[A]ll capitals, whatever the surplus value they themselves produce, tend to
realise in the prices of their commodities not this surplus value, but rather
the average profit.’25 ‘The theory of value thus appears incompatible with the
actual movement, incompatible with the actual phenomena of production,
and it might seem that we must abandon all hope of understanding these
phenomena.’26
3 Prices of Production and the General Rate of Profit as ‘Regulators’

of Capitalist Reproduction
To understand the capitalist mechanism, however, it does not suffice to state

that the value schema of the reproduction process and the categories of
surplus value as well as the particular profit rates in the individual spheres
of production do not correspond with reality. We have to ask: which categories,
then, determine the character of capitalist reality and are of decisive
importance for the ‘real movement’ of the capitalist mechanism? Marx’s
answer to this question – and it constitutes the content of the third volume of
Capital – is well-known. It is not values, assumed in theory, but the empirically-
given prices of production which form the objective centre of gravity around
which everyday market prices oscillate. For concrete movements of capital, the
empirically-given general average rate of profit is decisively important, rather
than the theoretically different profit-rates assumed in the schema.
‘There is no doubt, however’, Marx says, ‘that in actual fact, ignoring
inessential, accidental circumstances that cancel each other out, no such
variation in the average rate of profit exists between different branches of
production, it could not exist without abolishing the entire system of capitalist
production.’27 Marx says that this general rate of profit is ‘the driving force in
capitalist production’.28 ‘This average profit’ should be understood ‘. . . as
is the case in the capitalist mode of production, as the overall regulator of
production’.29 It is ‘the law . . . governing capitalist production’.30 For the
same reason, for Marx, ‘the basic law of capitalist competition . . .’ is ‘the law
that governs the general rate of profit and the so-called prices of production
25 Marx 1981, p. 274.

27 Ibid. [Grossman’s emphasis].
30 Marx 1981, p. 959.

112 Grossman
determined by it’.31 Finally Marx believes that ‘the movement of this equalisation
[is the foundation] on which the whole of capitalist production depends’.32 For
not values but prices of production ‘are the actual averages governing market
prices’, i.e., they are the point around which real market prices oscillate: ‘Market
prices rise above these governing production prices or fall below them’33 since
‘it is not values but rather prices of production differing from them that form
the governing average prices in each sphere of production.’34
‘Regulating average prices’, however, means nothing else than that, in the long
run, production price and not value constitutes the condition for reproduction.
As Marx explicitly states, it ‘is in fact the same thing that . . . Ricardo [calls]
“price of production” or “cost of production”, and the Physiocrats “prix
nécessaire” . . . because in the long term it is the condition of supply, the condition
for the reproduction of commodities, in each particular sphere of production.’35
But there is more! The practical importance and relevance of the general rate
of profit will become even more clearly apparent when we consider that it forms
the basis of the community of economic class interests among entrepreneurs. For
if commodities were exchanged at their values, each entrepreneur would only
be interested in the exploitation of the workers he personally employs and his
profit would be identical to the surplus value that ‘his’ workers produce. Only
the transformation of surplus value into the general rate of profit ensures ‘that
each individual capitalist, just like the totality of all capitalists . . . participates
in the exploitation of the entire working class as a whole, and in the level of
this exploitation; not just in terms of general class sympathy, but in a direct
economic sense, since . . . the average rate of profit depends on the level of
exploitation of labour by capital as a whole.’36
If we remain in the schema, where commodities are sold at their values and
hence there are different profit rates in individual spheres, then competition
and its result – the fact of regulation by prices of production – are not
considered.37 And the average rate of profit, which is the ‘driving force’ – ‘on
which the whole of capitalist production depends’ – is lost!
31 Marx 1981, pp. 127–8 [Grossman’s emphasis].

32 Marx 1981, p. 566 [Grossman’s emphasis and interpolation].
34 Marx 1981, p. 1013; cf. Marx 1981, pp. 302, 308, 967, 1000, 1009, 1022 [Grossman’s emphasis].
36 Marx 1981, pp. 298–9 [Grossman’s emphasis].
37 The objection of Fritz Sternberg (1930) to my conception of value, that it ‘neglects the
importance of competition under capitalism’, turns matters on their head. It is not I who
has overlooked competition. It was, in fact, not considered in the course of the entire
30-year debate over the problem of accumulation and crisis. Mr Sternberg indeed speaks

Since, however, such a value schema does not and cannot tell us anything
about prices of production and the average rate of profit as a whole, it is obvious
that it can explain just as little about the individual partial forms of profit,
which arise from the division of surplus value. It is not suited to ‘present the
concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered
as a whole.’38 The existence of all these forms of profit is inconsistent with the
value schema and therefore not immediately explicable from the standpoint of
the value theory which underlies it.
That is to say, the value schema only encompasses productive capital, that
engages in the production of value and surplus value, but not money and
merchant’s capital that operate in the sphere of circulation. Hence, if industrial
producers sell commodities at their values, i.e. at ‘value prices’39 quantitatively
identical to values (as happens in the value schema), the existence of
commercial profit, i.e. the profit of merchant’s capital that does not engage in
of the necessity of taking competition into account but does it just as little as other authors,
from [Michael] Tugan-Baranowsky to [Nikolai] Bukharin, since all of them operate with
a schema that only knows values. The very concept of value, however, includes diversity of
profit rates in individual spheres and, therefore, also the exclusion of competition since
‘it is only the competition of capitals in different spheres that brings forth the production
price that equalises the rates of profit between those spheres’ (Marx 1981, p. 281). If one
treats crises primarily as partial, resulting from disproportionality between the individual
spheres – as in the works of the authors mentioned – then it is absolutely necessary to
consider competition, i.e. the tendency of profit-rates to equalise. This is not the case in
my book, which attempts to explain the primarily general crises of over-accumulation
that affect all spheres. For society as a whole, ‘the distinction between values and prices
of production loses all significance’, since here the dimensions of the two are identical
(cf. Grossmann 1929, pp. 107, 211).
Just as incorrect is the further objection that the effects of competition are already
contained in values, because competition determines value, i.e. socially-necessary labour
time. This conception is absolutely irreconcilable with the essential foundations of
Marx’s theory of value. In fact, the function competition fulfils for values is not consti-
tutive but merely declaratory. It does not determine socially-necessary labour time but
only registers it after the fact. Competition, after all, plays out on the market, i.e. in the
sphere of circulation. Values, however, are created in the sphere of production, they there-
fore precede all competition. ‘The value of a commodity’, Marx says, ‘is expressed in its
price before it enters into circulation, and it is therefore a precondition of circulation and
not its result’ (Marx 1976, p. 260; cf. Marx 1987, p. 350). The Physiocrats François Quesnay
and Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Rivière already knew that commodities have an exchange
value before they enter the market to be exchanged (cf. Marx 1981, p. 260, and Oncken
1902, p. 370).
38 Marx 1981, p. 117 [Grossman emphasises ‘concrete forms’].

114 Grossman
production at all, becomes an insoluble riddle. ‘At first appearance, pure and
independent commercial profit seems impossible so long as products are sold
at their values.’40 ‘The principles about value formation, profit, etc. derived
straight from the examination of industrial capital cannot be applied directly
to commercial capital.’41 As long as we restrict ourselves to the investigation of
value, a large and important portion of the phenomena of capitalist reality –
the profit of commercial capital – particularly in its international form, i.e. the
appearances of the world market and global trade, remains inexplicable.
However, the transformation of values (value prices) of the schema into
prices of production and also the equalisation of the different profit rates in
the individual spheres of the schema into the general rate of profit would by
no means suffice to explain the existence of commercial profit. We would
merely be taking into account productive capitals, i.e. those contributing
to the creation of surplus value in the formation of the general rate of profit and
the transformation of value prices into prices of production. Such a process
of equalisation would therefore only be ‘our first consideration’ of the general
rate of profit but by no means its ‘finished form’.42 Commercial capital, which
has no part in the creation of surplus value, still remains to be considered. To
explain the existence of commercial profit yet another stage in the procedure
of successive approximation would be necessary, to ‘supplement’ the first
process of equalisation of productive capitals alone with ‘the participation of
commercial capital in this equalisation’, i.e. by a second-order equalisation.43
Only in this way can the ‘finished form’ of the profit rate be attained, after prices
of production have been given a ‘more accurate definition’44 and been modified
into ‘commercial prices’,45 which presents the original average profit-rate
‘within more closely defined limits than before’.46 We see that if the concrete,
empirically-given form of commercial profit is to be understood, the value
schema has to be modified by the procedure of successive approximation in
a number of ways. Under the premises of the value schema, i.e. without these
intermediary steps which lead from ‘value prices’ via ‘prices of production’ to
the phenomenon of ‘commercial prices’, the existence of commercial profit
would be neither possible nor comprehensible.
40 Marx 1981, p. 447.

44 Marx 1981, p. 398.
46 Marx 1981, p. 336.

But that is not all! There is the further circumstance, that the course of the
accumulation process, as presented in the value schema, is powerfully modified
by the existence of commercial profit, i.e. by the transformation of values into
prices of production and then commercial prices.
For it is evident that the portion of the surplus value shown in the value
schema which accrues to commercial capital as profit and is accumulated in
the sphere of circulation (the commercial buildings of trading companies,
office fittings, operating capital etc.) constitutes a ‘deduction from the profit
of industrial capital’47 and ‘proportionately reduces the scale on which the
capital advanced functions productively.’48 This portion of surplus value is
excluded from future accumulation of productive capital, as presented in the
value schema, and is no longer involved in the creation of surplus value. It does,
however, participate in the distribution of profit. Both facts, the reduction in
the active side and the increase in the passive side, slow down the pace of the
accumulation of industrial capital pro tanto.49 ‘The bigger commercial capital
is in comparison with industrial capital, the smaller the rate of industrial
profit.’50 At the same time, it is clear that the existence of commercial profit
transfers a portion of surplus value – from Rosa Luxemburg’s standpoint part
of the ‘unsaleable remainder’51 of surplus value – from the sphere of production
to the sphere of circulation. The conversion of value prices into production
and commercial prices consequently disturbs all of the ratios calculated in the
value schema!
What has been said here about commercial capital is literally true, and for the
same reasons, of money and bank capital. This capital, too, functions exclusively
in the sphere of circulation, and indeed participates in the distribution but
not in the production, of surplus value. If commodities were sold at their
values, i.e. if industrialists retained all of the surplus value they initially
appropriated, then ‘upon that supposition, merchant’s capital and banker’s
capital would be impossible’,52 since it would make no profit.
Finally, on the basis of the value schema, not only the existence of interest
but also interest-rate movements are impossible. ‘The rate of interest is related
to the profit rate in a similar way as the market price of a commodity is to its
value. In so far as the rate of interest is determined by the profit rate, this is
47 Marx 1981, p. 400.

48 Marx 1978, p. 211.
49 [‘to that extent’]
50 Marx 1981, p. 400.
51 Luxemburg 1913, p. 308.
52 Engels 2001a, pp. 228–30.

116 Grossman
always through the general rate of profit and not through the specific profit
rates that may prevail in particular branches of industry. . . . The general rate
of profit, in fact, reappears in the average rate of interest as an empirical, given
fact.’53 ‘In this sense’, it is stated elsewhere, ‘interest is governed by profit, and
more precisely by the general rate of profit.’54 In a value schema with different
profit rates in the individual spheres of production and its aggregate surplus
value, neither the existence of an interest rate nor its movements can be
explained, nor can bank and financial capital, to which [Rudolf] Hilferding
ascribes a decisive significance in capital’s most recent development.55
And the same is true of ground rent, in its modern, capitalist form which
‘only exists in a society the basis of which is the capitalist mode of production.’56
The existence of ground rent is impossible to explain on the basis of a value
schema, i.e. under the assumption that commodities are sold at their values.57
The discussion above has made it sufficiently clear that the categories
presented in the value schema, value, surplus-value and different rates of profit
are not of immediate, decisive importance for understanding the concrete
process of capitalist production. On the contrary, the important categories
are those not encompassed by the schema: prices of production, profit and its
partial forms, and finally the general average profit-rate. These categories must
be awarded primacy for the immediate understanding of concrete capitalist
production, precisely because the average rate of profit is the ‘regulator’ and the

54 Marx 1981, pp. 481–2.
55 [Hilferding 1981.]
57 Because absolute rent is merely a ‘surplus profit’, i.e. an ‘excess over and above the
AVERAGE PROFIT’ (Marx 1993, p. 332); also Marx 1989, p. 271; Marx 1981, pp. 297, 918.
‘If then the value of agricultural produce is higher than the price of production deter-
mined by the INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE profit would be, the excess of this value over the
price of production constitutes the absolute rent. But in order that this excess of value
over price of production can be measured, the price of production must be the prius; it
must therefore be imposed on agriculture as a law by industry. . . . Rent . . . cannot possi-
bly be explained if industrial profit does not regulate AGRICULTURAL profit’ (Marx 1992,
p. 289). ‘If we are to speak of an excess over the average profit, this average profit must
first be established as a measure and, as is the case in the capitalist mode of production,
as the overall regulator of production’ (Marx 1981, p. 918). The existence of an absolute
ground rent cannot, therefore, be explained by a value schema in which this regulator
does not exist.

‘driving force’ of this production and because the whole capitalist movement
rests on the equalisation of different profit rates.58
If one recalls this state of affairs, it becomes clear that a value schema which
lacks all of these real categories, on which real capitalist movement rests,
allows us to recognise the tendencies of historical development, in other words
‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’ as Marx already presents it in the
first volume of Capital.59 But it is not at all suited to reproduce in thought
the concrete forms of the movement of capital. This is precisely why deductions
based on the value schema regarding proportionality or disproportionality of
individual spheres of production are not conclusive and at least premature.
4 The Value Schema as an Historical and Theoretical Point

of Departure
If we allocate the role of the regulator and driving force of capitalist production
to the categories provided by experience – prices of production, average profit
rate and general rate of profit – this raises the urgent question: what function,
then, do values fulfil? Is not a reproduction schema based on values irrelevant if
it does not provide an adequate depiction of capitalist commodity production
and does not immediately apply in the real world? Such a conclusion would be
mistaken. Despite the reality of prices of production, values retain their central
significance, indeed, as Marx stresses, in two respects:
1. They are an historically primary form, valid for the epoch of simple, i.e.
precapitalist commodity production of independent producers – artisans,
peasants – ‘as long as the means of production involved in each branch of
production can be transferred from one sphere to another only with difficulty’,60
i.e. as long as there are legal or material barriers to the movement of capital
which hinder the formation of a general rate of profit.61 Only in this period
of simple commodity production is the exchange of commodities at their
(market) values not only a theoretical assumption but an actual occurrence,
in the sense that values form the centre of gravity for the daily fluctuations of
market prices.62
58 Marx 1981, pp. 368, 918.

60 Marx 1981, pp. 278–9.
61 Marx 1981, p. 298.
62 Marx 1981, p. 279.

118 Grossman
2. Under capitalist commodity production, on the other hand, the previous

function of values in the exchange is modified. Commodities now exchange
at prices of production which differ quantitatively from values, while values
only fulfil the function of a theoretically primary factor, from which prices of
production are derived. Prices of production are the regulator of the scope
of production under capitalism, they determine the movement of capital,
i.e. the steady injection and withdrawal of capital in individual spheres of
production and, therefore, of the distribution of aggregate social capital.
They and not values are therefore responsible for the proportionality or
disproportionality of this distribution. While bourgeois economics accepts
prices of production as a fact without investigating their origins any further,
Marx proves that prices of production must be derived from values, that
without such a derivation ‘the general rate of profit (and hence also the
price of production of the commodity) remains a meaningless and irrational
conception.’63 If average profit is to be discussed, then the components from
which the average is calculated must be known. ‘Without this, the average
rate of profit is the average of nothing, pure fancy.’64 Only in this sense does
the law of value govern the movement of commodity prices under capitalism.
In individual spheres of production, that does not prevent prices of production
rather than values from constituting the centre around which daily market-
prices fluctuate65 and ‘at which they are balanced out in definite periods’.66
Furthermore, prices of production and not values regulate production, its
scope and the distribution of capital, They, therefore, directly determine the
very elements that are of crucial significance for understanding crises, insofar
as these can be attributed to disproportionality in the distribution of capital.67
63 Marx 1981, p. 257. [Grossman also cited Marx 1989, p. 416, which should have been the
reference for the next quotation, here.]
64 Marx 1989, p. 416; Marx 1992, pp. 273–4. [Grossman mistakenly cited Marx 1981, p. 277,
for the quotation and included the next sentence in it. The next sentence is, however,
a paraphrase of text on that page. The additional reference, to Marx 1992, pp. 273–4, seems
more relevant to the previous quotation.]
65 It is, consequently, incorrect when Karl Diehl, in what seems like a concession to Marx,
acknowledges that, within Marx’s schema, incongruence between the values and the prices
of individual commodities is justified and necessary, yet then claims ‘Marx decisively
assumes that labour value is the gravitational centre of average market prices’ (Diehl 1898,
p. 6), and likewise as late as Diehl 1921, p. 96.
66 Marx 1981, p. 280.
67 ‘The entire capitalist production process, moreover, is governed by the prices of products.
But the governing prices of production are themselves governed in turn by the equalisa-
tion of the rate of profit and the distribution of capital among the various spheres of social

We see that the sale of commodities at their values does not occur in
capitalist reality. ‘The exchange of commodities at their values . . . thus
corresponds to a much lower stage of development than the exchange at prices
of production, for which a definite degree of capitalist development is needed.’68
Capital accomplishes the equalisation of different profit rates in the individual
spheres of production more easily ‘according to how advanced capitalist
development is in a given national society’.69
What has been said so far makes it clear that the line of argument of Rosa
Luxemburg and her followers but likewise that of Hilferding and Otto Bauer
had to fail from the outset, because they undertook to demonstrate (or to
refute) the capitalist law of crises by means of a schema that only knows
the sale of commodities at their values and which is therefore, according
to Marx, only the expression of a ‘lower stage’ of development, namely that
of precapitalist commodity production. For this reason, they ignored the
production-price schema that governs developed capitalist production, and
thus the very elements, such as prices of production and average profit,
which are decisive for the proportionality or disproportionality of capital
distribution in developed capitalism. The real categories which regulate the
whole mechanism are disregarded; attention is only given to categories which
are unreal (different profit rates) and which – if they were realised – would
inevitably ‘abolish . . . the entire system of capitalist production’!70
The deficiencies of such an approach are clear. If the contradiction,
discussed earlier, between value theory and ‘actual phenomena of production’,
i.e. between the value schema and capitalist reality, is to be resolved, then
the analysis of the capitalist reproduction process cannot remain at the level
of the value schema with its different profit rates. Then it actually has to be
regarded as a ‘theoretically primary factor’. Using value theory and therefore
the value schema merely as a starting point for an analysis, with the help of
a series of intermediary stages, we can find the bridge that leads us to real
phenomena, i.e. to prices of production and the average profit rate. In short,
the value schema must be transformed step by step, through multi-level,
successive approximations into a production-price schema. ‘It is evident that
the emergence, realisation, creation of the general rate of profit necessitates
roduction which is appropriate to that equalisation. Thus profit appears in this case as
p
the principal factor not just of the products’ distribution but also of their actual produc-
tion’ (Marx 1981, p. 1022).
69 Marx 1981, pp. 297, 281 [Grossman’s emphasis].
70 Marx 1981, p. 252.

120 Grossman
the transformation of values into prices of production that are different from
these values.’71
In the second volume of Capital Marx does begin his analysis of the crisis
problematic with a value schema. But his line of argument at this level
of abstraction, removed from and initially in contradiction with reality, is
not and cannot be conclusive. It has a merely preliminary character and
will be completed by the theory of Volume III of Capital, the theory of the
transformation of values into prices of production. In Marx’s analysis, the value
schema constitutes only the embryonic form, the first stage in the procedure of
successive approximation, which can only mature into the price form through
a series of metamorphoses!
Marx’s value schema restricts the analysis to only the creation of value
and surplus value as a whole, i.e. the form in which they emerge from the
process of production, so that competition and the influences of the sphere of
circulation on the distribution of this surplus value are not considered at this
stage. Subsequently, however, the elements previously excluded must be
considered. Thus the analysis of the creation of surplus value in the process
of production must be supplemented by the analysis of its distribution in the
process of circulation by means of competition.
The following conclusion for the crisis problematic – in so far as it relates to
the mutual relations of dependency and proportionality among the individual
spheres of production – which also indicates the course of further research,
emerges from what has been said above. If the analysis of the law of crisis is
to be conclusive about capitalist reality then it must not be restricted to the
value schema, the first stage in the procedure of successive approximation, but
must occur at all stages and also be demonstrated through a production-price
schema.
5 The Crisis Problematic and the Lessons of Volume III

of Marx’s Capital
The research agenda formulated so far, however, stands in blatant contradiction

with the actual history of the treatment of the crisis problematic in the Marxist
camp. ‘[E]mpty tradition’, Marx says, ‘is more powerful in political economy
than in any other science’.72 We will see that this is true not only of bourgeois
economics but also, just as much, of the political economy of Marx’s epigones.
71 Marx 1910a, p. 161 [Grossman’s emphasis; cf. Marx 1992, p. 69].
72 Marx 1993, p. 259.

At first, the significance of the reproduction schema developed in Volume II of

Capital for the crisis problematic was not recognised at all. In a review of the
second volume published in Die Neue Zeit in 1886,73 Karl Kautsky identifies
the reasons why, in his estimation, this volume was of less interest to the
working class than the first. Only the production of surplus value in the factory
was important. The further question of how this surplus is realised is of more
interest to the capitalists than to the working class. And, on the occasion of
the publication of the third volume of Capital ten years later, Eduard Bernstein
uncritically repeats the same judgement, even in part using the same words, in
a summary of the whole of Marx’s principal work which was then concluded.74
The practitioners of the movement have often only read the first volume and
for decades have not laid hands on the other volumes. ‘As you want to have
a grind in prison at Capital 2 and 3’, Engels wrote to Viktor Adler, as late as
16 March 1895, ‘I will give you a few hints to make it easier’.75 Hilferding speaks
accurately of the ‘analyses in the second volume of Capital’ being ‘largely
ignored’ until the publication of [Mikhail] Tugan-Baranowsky’s book in 1901,76
and adds: ‘Tugan-Baranowsky deserves credit for calling attention to the
significance of these investigations for the problem of crisis in his Studies on
the Theory and History of Industrial Crises in England. The curious thing is that
this needed to be pointed out at all’.77
With the publication of Tugan-Baranowsky’s book, there was a turn to the
opposite extreme. Whereas the significance of the reproduction schema for
the problem of crisis had not been recognised at all until then, now – as I
have shown elsewhere78 – it is exalted in the most effusive manner, ascribed
‘objective social existence’ and regarded as an exact representation of the
capitalist reproduction process. Conclusions about processes in capitalist
reality are now drawn directly from the relations in the reproduction schema!
So Rosa Luxemburg, for example, says ‘we now have to ask ourselves what
significance the schema of reproduction, that has been analysed, has for
reality’.79 Her answer is that the exact ratios of Marx’s schema form the
‘universal and absolute foundation of social reproduction’, not only for
73 Kautsky 1886, p. 164.

74 Bernstein 1894–5.
75 Engels 2001b, p. 468.
76 Hilferding 1981, p. 243.
77 Hilferding 1981, p. 420; Tugan-Baranowsky 1901, part of which had been translated:
Tugan-Baranowsky 2000a and 2000b.
78 Grossmann 1932b, pp. 153–4.
79 Luxemburg 1913, p. 76.

122 Grossman
a capitalist but also for a socialist and in fact any planned economy!80 In a
planned socialist economy production would correspond exactly to the ratios
of the schema. Rosa Luxemburg states, further, that ‘a capitalist economy lacks
such planned organisation of the total process. Consequently[!], nothing runs
smoothly according to a mathematical formula, as it appears in the schema. On
the contrary, the circuit of reproduction proceeds with continual deviations
from the relations of the schema’.81 ‘With all these deviations, however, the
schema presents a socially necessary average, around which these movements
occur and which they time and again approach after they have moved away
from it’.82
The matter is no different according to Otto Bauer. For him too, the value
schema presents a state of balanced equilibrium between capital accumulation
and population around which the circuit of real reproduction oscillates. In
reality there may be continual cyclical deviations from the schema’s state of
equilibrium because the apparatus of production exhibits over-accumulation
or under-accumulation in relation to population growth. At the same time,
however, there is a tendency inherent in the capitalist mode of production
which – if ‘only through great crises’ – ‘automatically [cancels out] over-
accumulation and under-accumulation, with the accumulation of capital
adjusting again and again to the growth of population’83 i.e. the real movement
tends towards the theoretically calculated state of equilibrium represented by the
schema.
In striking contradiction to Marx’s theory of the regulating function of the
average rate of profit and prices of production, developed above, and to the
theory that it is not values but their transmuted form, prices of production,
which constitute the gravitational centre for fluctuations in market prices, Rosa
Luxemburg and Otto Bauer ascribe this function to values. Unlike Marx, they
both regard the relations of the schema not just as a first stage in the procedure
of successive approximation but as an immediate reflection of reality.
80 Luxemburg 1951, pp. 85, 103–4, 130. [This translation, by Anges Schwarzschild, of
Luxemburg 1913, is unsatisfactory in places. Where that is the case, new, more accurate
translations from the German original have been provided. Where Schwarzschild’s trans-
lation has been used and her terminology diverges from the translations in the Penguin
editions of Marx’s Capital, her texts have been modified. The term ‘diagram’, for example,
has been replaced with ‘schema’.]
81 Luxemburg 1913, p. 76 [Grossman’s emphasis and interpolation].
82 Luxemburg 1913, p. 77 [Grossman’s emphasis].
83 Bauer 1986, pp. 106–7. [This translation has been modified, as indicated by the square
brackets. In its original form it seriously distorted the meaning of Bauer’s text by render-
ing ‘aufhebt’ as ‘generates’; see Bauer 1913, p. 872.]

This divergence in the understanding of the value schema, by Marx on

the one hand and Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer on the other, has further
ramifications for the analysis of the crisis problematic. The reproduction
schema developed in Volume II of Capital with its values and, in the absence
of competition, unequalised, different rates of profit does not correspond with
reality. If value theory is not to contradict but to explain real phenomena, then –
in accordance with Marx’s theory in the third volume of Capital – values must
be transformed into prices of production with the help of competition, i.e. a
‘number of intermediary stages’84 must be developed which lead to the general
rate of profit and, finally, to the empirically given forms of profit (interest,
ground rent, commercial profit). By ascribing real-world validity to Marx’s
preliminary, methodological assumption that commodities are sold at their
values and thus by regarding the value schema as a reflection of reality, Rosa
Luxemburg and Otto Bauer from the outset exclude the necessity of transforming
values first into prices of production and, further, into commercial prices from the
circle of their problematic. They disclaim the method of successive concretisation
of the relations presented in the schema, the method of increasing the accuracy
of the reproduction schema. According to Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer,
there is no need to approximate the understanding of reality, step-by-step,
since the schema already reflects reality!
It is therefore only a logical consequence of this disastrous error that, for
Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer, not only the problem of the value-price
transformation but also the connected problem of the general rate of profit
and the problem of the transformation of surplus value into the specific
forms of profit (commercial profit, interest etc.), that is, the whole theory of
the third volume of Capital, do not exist! They remain within the ‘embryonic
form’ of the value schema, at a stage of abstraction far removed from reality,
without entering into the ‘metamorphoses’,85 i.e. the path which leads to the
successive approximation of concrete capitalist reality. It is self-evident that, as
a consequence of this fatal misconception of Marx’s method, the connection
between the problem of the value-price transformation and the problem of
crisis can be neither seen nor dealt with.
What, then, is this connection and the specific function of the calculation of
prices? To show this, we turn to Rosa Luxemburg’s formulation of the problem.
Her critical analysis of Marx’s reproduction schema led her to the result that
within such a schema – insofar as there are different organic compositions
of capital in its two departments – the complete sale of commodities, i.e.
84 [Marx 1989, p. 401.]

85 [Marx 1976, p. 154.]

124 Grossman
equilibrium, is not possible because ‘with every year . . . a growing excess of
means of consumption must arise’.86 ‘This unsaleable remainder of surplus value
in department II is even greater in view of the rising productivity of labour,
because this ‘indicates a much larger excess of unsaleable means of subsistence
than arises from the extent of this excess, in terms of value’.87
Let us assume that Rosa Luxemburg had succeeded in proving this. What
would she have demonstrated? Only the circumstance that an ‘unsaleable
remainder’ arises in department II of the value schema – i.e. under the
assumption that the commodities are exchanged at their values. But we know
that this assumption does not accord with reality. In the value schema, which
is the foundation of Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, there are different rates of
profit in the individual spheres of production. In the absence of competition,
these do not equalise. This, too, contradicts reality where, as a consequence
of competition, there is a tendency for different rates of profit to equalise to
the general rate of profit. How cogent are Rosa Luxemburg’s conclusions –
the demonstration of an unsaleable surplus of consumer goods – in relation
to reality, when they are deduced from a schema that has no validity in the
real world? Since competition leads to the transformation of values into prices
of production and thus to a redistribution of surplus value among the individual
branches of industry in the schema, which necessarily results in a modification
of the previous relations of proportionality between the individual spheres of
the schema, it is extremely possible and likely that a surplus of unsaleable
consumer goods in the value schema subsequently vanishes in the production-
price schema and that, conversely, an original equilibrium in the value schema
turns into disproportionality in the production-price schema. The deficiency of
the line of argument which is restricted to analysis of merely the value schema
and which operates with values and different profit rates instead of prices of
production and the general rate of profit is evident. Rosa Luxemburg herself
says, ‘Thus social capital and its counterpart, the whole of social surplus value,
are not merely real quantities, having an objective existence, but, what is more,
the relation between them, the average profit, guides and directs the whole
process of exchange . . . by the mechanism of the law of value which establishes
the quantitative relations of exchange between the individual kinds of
commodities independently of their specific value relationship.’ The average rate
of profit is, after all, the guiding force so that ‘every capital is in fact treated
only as part of a common whole, the whole of social capital, and assigned
the profit to which it is entitled, according to its size, out of the surplus value


wrested from society, regardless of the quantity which this particular capital
has actually created’.88
According to Rosa Luxemburg’s account, the average profit rate governs all
commodity exchange. Nevertheless, she investigates the question of whether
complete exchange is possible by using a schema which knows no average profit.
Can one imagine a greater contradiction? Furthermore, if, as Rosa Luxemburg
states, the relations of exchange among individual commodities in reality takes
place ‘independently of their special value relations’, if each capital realises
not the quantum of surplus value it produced but merely receives the average
profit in proportion to its size, then Rosa Luxemburg concedes indirectly that
her theory of the necessity of the realisation of surplus value is wrong. So she
indirectly admits that commodities are exchanged not at their values but at
prices, namely prices of production, which permanently deviate from their
values since, according to Marx, ‘the average rate of profit . . . alone determines
the prices of production’.89 After all, in Marx’s system equal average profits and
prices of production, which deviate from values, are correlative concepts! It is
therefore self-evidently a logical contradiction that Rosa Luxemburg identifies
no consequences for the subsequent course of her own analysis from her own
assertion of the empirical fact of average profit and its central governing role;
that she does acknowledge the existence of average profit rate but equally
insists on the proposition that commodities are exchanged at their values!
The section of her book quoted above is also the only one where she speaks of
average profit and, in a disguised form, of prices of production. But nowhere is
this insight put to use in the analysis of the problem of crisis.
Rosa Luxemburg herself apparently sensed that the value schema is a
construction distant from reality, when she wrote about the relationship
between the third volume of Capital and the theory of value in the first
volume, in her Anti-Critique: ‘For the doctrine of average profit, one of the most
important discoveries of Marx’s economic theory, is central to its argument.
This alone gives concrete meaning to the theory of value in the first volume.’90
She insists here that not the value theory of the first volume but rather
only the prices of production and the average profit of the third volume
have ‘meaning in reality’. In her book on Accumulation as well as in her Anti-
Critique, however, prices of production are not mentioned once, and the false
premise is maintained that the exchange of commodities between I (v+s) and
II c at their values is not merely a methodological assumption but actually

89 Marx 1910a, p. 78 [cf. Marx 1989, p. 444].
90 Luxemburg 1972, p. 73 [Grossman’s emphasis, except for ‘average profit’].

126 Grossman
occurs in capitalist reality! So she says, for example, that the need for means
of consumption in department I of the schema, as expressed by the variable
capital and the surplus value of this department, can only be met out of the
produce of department II, ‘indeed can only be obtained in exchange for the
value equivalent of the produce of department I’.91 Even in her last book,
published posthumously, she claims that ‘[a]ll commodities are exchanged at
their values.’92 This self-contradictory statement of Rosa Luxemburg, which
causes her to fall for the worst errors of vulgar socialism, is no coincidence.
It stems from her false conception that the natural form of surplus value
is given once and for all and determines its function either as means of
production in department I or as means of consumption in department II.
These predetermined functions make, according to Rosa Luxemburg, any
transfer of surplus value (in total or in part) from department I to department
II impossible. Rosa Luxemburg believes that transfers of surplus value fail for
another reason, namely the equivalence of exchange relations between the two
departments.93
This claim inevitably leads Rosa Luxemburg to negate the whole content of
the third volume of Capital and specifically the theory of prices of production
and the emergence of a uniform rate of profit. Her verbal concession that
the theory of average profit, ‘one of the most important discoveries of Marx’s
economic theory’, is the centrepiece of the third volume cannot conceal
the truth that she has abandoned the theory of average profit; rather, this
abandonment is underlined when Rosa Luxemburg identifies the only means
by which a uniform, average profit can emerge as impossible. Let us recall the
circumstances of Marx’s schema of simple reproduction:
I 4000 c + 1000 v + 1000 s = 6000 profit rate = 20 per cent

II 2000 c + 1000 v + 1000 s = 4000 profit rate = 33 per cent
We therefore see that if we abide by the value schema, with its exchange of
equivalents, in other words the equivalent exchange of 1,000 v + 1,000 m from
department I for 2,000 c from department II, then Marx’s theory of prices
of production is ignored and there must be different profit rates in the two
departments. The profit rate in department I is 20 per cent, that in department II
is 33 per cent. How can the same rate of profit – in this case, 25 per cent –
91 Luxemburg 1951, pp. 128, 340–1; Luxemburg 1913, p. 311 [Grossman’s emphasis].
92 Luxemburg 1925, p. 239 [Grossman’s emphasis]. Similarly, Eduard Heimann says, ‘On the
market, quantities of commodities of equal value are exchanged’ (Heimann 1922, p. 10).
93 Luxemburg 1951, pp. 340–1.

emerge in both departments of Marx’s schema? It seems almost banal to point

out that this is only possible through the emergence of prices of production,
that is the circumstance that the commodities of department I are sold to
department II above their values whereas the commodities of department II,
insofar as they find their way to department I, are sold below their values. Only
because department I receives more for the (v + m) = 2,000 value units which it
sells to department II, namely 2,250 value units, can there be the same rate of
profit in both departments. In this way, part of the surplus value of department
II is transferred to department I in the process of exchange. Only thus can
department I attain a larger profit (namely, 1,250) than it initially generated
(1,000 s), which results in a profit rate of 25 per cent on the 5,000 C outlayed.
In department II, instead of the initial surplus value (1,000 s) only a profit of
750 remains, which results in a profit-rate of likewise 25 per cent on the 3,000
C outlayed.
From what has been said, it is furthermore clear that the tendency for
profit rates to level out, through the transfer of a part of surplus value from
department II to department I, shakes the foundations of Rosa Luxemburg’s
theory of the ‘unsaleable surplus of consumer goods’ in department II. Her
‘unshakeable position’ (Sternberg)94 proves to be a soap bubble that bursts on
contact with reality. If Rosa Luxemburg had really wanted to prove her idea
of an unsaleable remainder of consumer goods then she would have had to
demonstrate her proof not only on the basis of the value schema but also
within the production-price schema. She would have also had to show that
such an unsaleable remainder would result after the average rate of profit
emerged.95 She never demonstrated, nor even attempted to demonstrate such
a proof.
94 [Sternberg 1926.]

95 In Otto Bauer’s well-known reproduction schema, each department makes 10,000 c and
2,500 v from its surplus value available for the purposes of accumulation in the first year
of production. The actual accumulation is a different matter. In department I it amounts
to more – namely, 134,666 c and 53,667 v – and in department II to less – namely, just
85,334 c and 51,333 v. This means that Bauer reallocated a share of surplus value ear-
marked for accumulation in department II to department I, without, however, having
been able to give any scientifically plausible reason to justify this reallocation. Helene
Bauer’s attempt to save this procedure by indicating that such a reallocation occurs by
means of credit must be considered a naive excuse [Bauer 1929]. Reallocations by means
of credit – however great their role may be in reality – are impermissible in the theoretical
analysis of the reproduction process. After all, it is one of the many simplifying assump-
tions of Marx’s reproduction schema that it abstracts from credit. The very purpose of the
schema is to show the exchange relations between its two departments and to investigate

128 Grossman
The tendency for profit rates in different branches of production to level

out is an observation confirmed by experience which has been unanimously
recognised by theorists from various scientific schools over the course of a
century. It was already regarded as a fact by Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.
Marx, too, refers to it as an ‘empirical, given fact’,96 a ‘practical state of affairs’.97
‘Observation of competition – the phenomena of production – shows that
capitals of equal size yield an equal amount of profit ON AN AVERAGE.’98 Nor
has this levelling tendency of capitalism, conditioned by competition, been
disputed by more recent theorists such as Böhm-Bawerk and others.99
The schools only disagree over the nature of the explanation of this fact,
and the post-Ricardian school, specifically, collapsed in face of the challenge
of this explanation, because it could not reconcile the fact of the uniform rate
of profit with the labour theory of value. This is the point at which Marx’s
historical greatness became apparent. Through his theory of the divergence of
prices of production from values, he was able to explain the fact of the uniform
profit rate, which prima facie contradicts the law of labour value, on the basis
of this law of value. Rosa Luxemburg, in defiance of all experience, denies
the possibility of the transfer of a part of surplus value from department II to
department I, consequently the possibility of the establishment of prices of
whether complete sale is possible. It is not permissible to change the initial assumptions
after the fact, once one has encountered difficulties in solving the problem. This is why
Fritz Sternberg could claim an all-too-easy triumph over Bauer. Even if the reallocation of
a share of surplus value from department II to department I was an inexplicable difficulty
for Otto Bauer, over which he stumbled, from the conception advocated in the text it is
not only permissible and justified but necessary. The fact that there are different profit
rates in the departments of Bauer’s schema (in department I, p = 29.4 per cent; in depart-
ment II, p = 38.4 per cent) has been overlooked in the previous discussion. If the same,
i.e. average, rate of profit of 33.3 per cent is to be constructed, then the amounts transferred
from department II to department I must not be, as Otto Bauer holds, 5,833 (4,666 c and
1,167 v) but 6,667. And this transfer is facilitated by means of exchange! Certainly this is an
unequal exchange where the commodities of the two departments are not exchanged at
their values but at their prices of production. [Bauer 1986. Grossman did not copy Bauer’s
figures in the second sentence of this note accurately. They are corrected here.]
97 Marx 1981, p. 270.
98 Marx 1992, p. 258.
99 Thus Eugen Böhm-Bawerk says that the assumption ‘which is indubitably corroborated
empirically, is that earnings on capital are subject to an averaging process’ (Böhm-Bawerk
1959, p. 303). Likewise, Siegfried Budge: ‘Experience shows that profit rates . . . tend to
equalise, that they are balanced in the imaginary equilibrium state of economic activity,
equalised in the “static” economy’ (Budge 1920, p. 6).

production, and insists that commodities exchange at their values within the
individual spheres. She is consequently incapable of explaining the average
rate of profit on the basis of the labour theory of value. Although she rigidly
adheres to the law of value, in fact she abandons the foundation of Marx’s
theoretical system at this point. It is impossible to account for a uniform rate of
profit on the assumption that commodities exchange at equal values between
the spheres of production. But instead of dismissing the false assumptions
that ‘exchange at equal values’ takes place between the two departments of
the schema and, further, that a transfer of surplus value from department II
to department I is impossible, in order to be able to explain the facts, Rosa
Luxemburg sacrifices the facts and prefers to uphold the false assumption of
exchange of commodities at ‘equal values’! With a stroke of the pen the whole
of Marx’s theory of uniform average profit, according to Rosa Luxemburg
herself ‘one of the most important discoveries of Marx’s economic theory’, is
wiped from the face of the earth.
6 Instead of Advance beyond Marx – Regression Back to Ricardo
What we have said above about Rosa Luxemburg’s treatment of the crisis
problematic is quite literally true of all Marxist theorists who have engaged
with the problems of crisis and accumulation. However strange this may
sound, it is nevertheless a fact that in the course of the entire debate over
the possibility of the uninterrupted development of the capitalist process of
production, inaugurated 30 years ago by the publication of Tugan-Baranowsky’s
book, no-one has so much as posed the essential problem: to demonstrate the
crisis problematic at all stages of the procedure of successive approximation.
Whether it is the neo-harmonists Kautsky, Hilferding and Otto Bauer, or Rosa
Luxemburg and her followers, or finally [Nikolai] Bukharin100 and other
theorists of communism, all have treated the problem only at the level of its
inception, by means of the value schema, which knows values, surplus-value
and different profit rates. Instead they should have substantiated their analyses
and conclusions on the basis of a production-price schema, which presents the
regulating categories of prices of production, competition, and the average
rate of profit. Whether one argues for the necessity and inevitability of crises
under capitalism, or, as the neo-harmonists do, for the possibility of crisis-
free progress, it is clear that any deductions drawn from a value schema must
be premature and inconclusive. What could the analysis of a value schema
100 [Bukharin 1972.]

130 Grossman
possibly tell us about the necessary proportionality or disproportionality of

commodity exchanges under capitalism when the proportional relationships
so meticulously calculated in the value schema are later overturned by the
tendency for profit rates to equalise and by the necessary redistribution of
surplus value this causes! None of the theorists named above has identified,
even mentioned in a single word, let alone engaged with the importance and
consequences for the crisis problematic of the transformation of values into
prices of production.101
Bourgeois economics since Ricardo and Malthus has acknowledged the
‘practical state of affairs’102 of the uniform rate of profit. But neither the classical
nor the post-Ricardian school have been able to reconcile this fact with value
theory. They strayed into a theoretical dead-end as they were forced either to
sacrifice the theory to the facts or the facts to the theory.103 This contradiction
between theory and facts, the impossibility of deducing the general rate of
profit from the abstract labour theory of value eventually led to the demise
of the post-Ricardian school, and Marx correctly indicates the cause of the
school’s dissolution in his epitaph, ‘Elaboration of the general rate of profit. . . .
Failure to understand the relation between values and prices of production.’104
101 This is even true of Isaac Illich Rubin who concedes ‘Thus the labour theory of value and
the theory of production prices are not theories of two different types of economy, but
theories of one and the same capitalist economy taken on two different levels of scientific
abstraction’ (Rubin 1973, p. 253). Although, according to Rubin, prices of production are a
more concrete level of abstraction than values, he investigates neither the problem of the
transformation of values into prices of production nor its implications for the crisis prob-
lematic. The same is true of numerous other authors, such as Diehl (Diehl 1898); Mikhail
Ivanovich Tugan-Baranowsky (Tugan-Baranowsky 1905, particularly p. 174); Ladislaus
Bortkiewicz (Bortkiewicz 1952 and 1907); and more recently Hans Zeisl (Zeisl 1930); as
well as Emil Walter (Walter 1930). They all centre their interest on the problem of the
calculation of values and prices. But they deal with it exclusively in order to find out how
far Marx’s deduction of prices of production from values is correct and compatible with
his labour-value theory. None of these authors have recognised the importance of the
value-price transformation for the crisis problematic.
102 Marx 1981, p. 270.
103 According to Marx ‘[t]his confusion on the part of the theorists’ is that ‘all economics up
till now has either violently made abstraction from distinctions between surplus-value
and profit, between rate of surplus-value and rate of profit, so that it could retain the
determination of value as its basis, or else it has abandoned, along with this determina-
tion of value, any kind of solid foundation for a scientific approach, so as to be able to
retain those distinctions which obtrude themselves on the phenomenal level’ (Marx 1981,
pp. 268–9).
104 Marx 1910b, p. 280 [Grossman’s emphasis; cf. Marx 1992, p. 373].

He raises the specific accusation against Ricardo that he ‘postulated’ a general

rate of profit, in accord with reality, without inquiring ‘how far its existence
is in fact consistent with the determination of value by labour-time’, while in
fact ‘prima facie, it contradicts it, and that its existence would therefore have
to be explained through a number of intermediary stages’.105 This is why Marx
stresses the ‘scientific inadequacy’ of Ricardo’s method because it leads him to
‘erroneous results’. It consists of Ricardo ‘begin[ning] with the determination
of the magnitude of the value of the commodity by labour-time and then
examin[ing] whether the other economic relations and categories’ correspond
with or contradict that value. The inadequacy of this method therefore arises
‘because it omits some essential links and directly seeks to prove the congruity
of the economic categories with one another’.106
By reconstructing these ‘intermediary stages’ and reconciling the labour
theory of value with the facts through his theory of the formation of a
general rate of profit and of the transformation of values into production
and commercial prices, Marx advanced economic theory beyond the point at
which the post-Ricardian school collapsed.
And precisely this specific result of Marx’s theoretical research vanishes
from the entire previous discussion of the problem of crisis and accumulation.
It exists just as little for Rosa Luxemburg as for Otto Bauer, Hilferding or
Bukharin. All of their analyses remain in the sphere of the value schema which
is removed from reality, without being concerned that this schema is only
the first approximation of reality, which does not represent this reality itself.
They fail to see that, without the ‘intermediary stages’, the schema is not an
appropriate means for the investigation of the developed capitalist mode of
production and of those concrete forms, in which capitals confront each other
‘in their actual movement’. As Engels correctly says in his Preface to the second
volume of Capital, the ‘investigations of this Volume 2 . . . are simply premises
for the material of Volume 3, in which the final results of Marx’s presentation of
the process of social reproduction on the capitalist basis are developed.’107 The
presentation of the process of reproduction on the basis of the value schema
in the second volume of Capital, therefore, contains only the premises of a line
of argument whose conclusions only follow in the third volume of Capital, in
the theory of the transformation of the value schemas into production-price
schemas. Only this theory completes Marx’s chain of thought and concludes
the procedure of successive approximation, after it has passed through all
105 Marx 1989, p. 401.

106 Marx 1989, p. 390 [Grossman emphasises ‘omits some essential links and’].
107 Engels 1978, p. 102 [Grossman’s emphasis].

132 Grossman
its stages and arrived at concrete reality. It is, needless to say, peculiar that
the discussion of Marx so far has been guided not by an understanding
of the totality of Marx’s line of argument in all its stages but only by ‘premises’,
i.e. the value schema, ripped out of this coherent chain of thought. Instead
of developing Marx further, as the theorists named above believed they were
doing, they all return to the point at which the post-Ricardian school stalled
and finally collapsed around 1850, the ‘Failure to understand the relation
between values and prices of production.’108
Translated from German by David Meienreis
Edited and annotated by Rick Kuhn
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391–4.

brill.com/hima
Rosa Luxemburg’s Global Class Analysis

Marcel van der Linden
International Institute of Social History
mvl@iisg.nl
Abstract
How did Rosa Luxemburg, in her The Accumulation of Capital and other writings,
analyse the development of the working class and other subordinate classes under
capitalism, and how did she view the relationship between these classes and those
living in ‘natural economic societies’? Following primary sources closely, the present
essay reconstructs and evaluates Luxemburg’s class analysis of global society. It is
shown that Luxemburg pioneered a truly global concept of solidarity from below,
including the most oppressed – women and colonised peoples.
Keywords
Rosa Luxemburg – capitalist expansion – natural economy – colonialism – solidarity
…
The notion of a European cultural community is completely alien to the
class-conscious proletariat’s thought. The cornerstone of Marxist social-
ism is not European solidarity, but international solidarity, encompassing
all parts of the globe, all races and peoples.
Rosa Luxemburg1
1 Luxemburg 1911b, p. 503.

136 van der Linden
Although Marx paid serious attention to the non-capitalist communities of

his time (for example, in his studies of the Russian Obshchina or the Indian
village community), Rosa Luxemburg was the first outstanding Marxist who
analysed systematically the confrontation between pre-capitalist communities
and an invading capitalism.2 From around 1907 on, while working on her
unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, Luxemburg authored a variety of
manuscripts, including ‘Slavery’ and ‘The Middle Ages’.3 She examined several
economies in the final book-manuscript, such as the Australian Aborigines
(‘Australian natives’), the Botoró in Brazil, the KhoiSan (‘Bushmen’) in the
Kalahari Desert, the Mincopies in the Andamans and the Inca Empire.4
Unlike most of her contemporaries, who dismissed these forms of economy as
backward, Luxemburg not only pointed out that they were actually extremely
flexible and adaptable; she also highlighted how communist ownership of the
means of production in them produced ‘the most productive labour process
in society and the best material guarantee of their continued existence and
development’ for extended periods. Although she gradually became aware of
their inherent contradictions, these types of societies, which had steadfastly
withstood the pressure of ‘hundreds of years . . . of conquest, domination
and exploitation’, were only being changed into shapeless ‘rubble tips’ by
their contact with capitalism.5 Precisely because she, unlike most of the
theorists of imperialism of her time, took pre-capitalist societies so seriously,
she also considered the people who were forced to suffer under the yoke of
capitalism. ‘For Rosa Luxemburg, “land”, “raw materials” or “spheres of capitalist
investment” simply do not exist. She sees a globe that is populated, invigorated
and cultivated by the most diverse peoples and tribes, who are made into
“land”, “spheres of capital investment” and “sales markets” by brute force.’6
The influence of Luxemburg’s ethnographic and historical studies is
also clearly evident in her 1913 magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital,
as well as in the ‘Anti-critique’ that she later appended to the text in its
2 For Marx and Engels’s ethnological studies, see Krader 1972 and Anderson 2010. This is not
to deny, of course, that since their day there have been many Marxists who continued the
work of these founding figures. Probably the first of these was Luxemburg’s contemporary
Heinrich Cunow (1862–1936), the Social-Democratic autodidact who for a few years
following the November Revolution ran the Berlin Museum of Ethnography. But his writings
were ethnographic in the traditional sense and dealt with pre-capitalist communities only as
isolated civilisations. See also Florath 1988.
3 Bundesarchiv Berlin, Nachlass Rosa Luxemburg, NY 4002/16; Ito 2002.
4 Luxemburg 1925, pp. 593ff, 652ff.
5 Luxemburg 1925, p. 688; see Hudis 2006, p. 78.
6 Neusüß 1985, p. 290.

Rosa Luxemburg ’ s Global Class Analysis 137
defence. Both works are imbued with respect for cultures and peoples based
on natural economies. Naturally, Luxemburg did not hesitate to mercilessly
analyse exploitation within pre-capitalist societies. Luxemburg saw the global
expansion of capitalism as an extraordinarily powerful process that – if it
prevailed and succeeded in capturing the entire world – would perish by itself.
However, long before this, the resistance of the proletariat in the capitalist
world – as well as of the peoples in the regions that were not yet capitalist –
would probably halt its full development. As she put it in her speech at the
Paris Congress of the Socialist International in 1900: ‘It is becoming more and
more likely that the collapse of the capitalist system will not occur through an
economic crisis, but through a political crisis brought about by world politics.’7
In the present essay I will follow primary sources closely to reconstruct
and evaluate Luxemburg’s class analysis of global society. In so doing, her The
Accumulation of Capital will of course play a major role, but I will consciously
read this book in a narrow way. I am not going to deal with the consideration
that Luxemburg’s central assertion that capitalism constantly requires ‘non-
capitalist strata and countries’ in order to expand, and that consequently this
reading may have rendered her take on Marx’s Capital significantly limited.8
For me, this simply expresses the empirical observation that the sale of goods
produced under capitalist conditions to non-capitalist layers and countries
provided a significant contribution to the growth of the system. Conversely,
it also expresses how food and raw materials produced under non-capitalist
conditions reduced the cost of wage goods and circulating capital in the
capitalist parts of the world. The Indian historian Irfan Habib correctly states:
In exchange for its products, both those that compete with those of
non-capitalist economies and others which the non-capitalist sector
cannot produce, the capitalist industry itself requires in return products
that for technical reasons it cannot produce at all, or can only produce at
very high costs. This happens because peasant agriculture often succeeds
in producing food crops (wage-goods) and raw materials . . . at lower
cost since it can sustain itself with very low returns. Or, again, because
climatically certain food crops and raw materials may be produced only
where peasant agriculture prevails, as was the case in the nineteenth
century with rice, sugar, cotton (outside of the slave plantations of the
West Indies and the United States), oilseeds, jute, etc.9
7 Luxemburg 1900c, p. 809.

8 Luxemburg 2003, p. 332; Luxemburg 1913f, p. 301.
9 Habib 2003, p. 13.

138 van der Linden
Regardless of whether Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation is correct or not,

we cannot write the history of the working class under capitalism without
also considering the producers and consumers who were not, or not yet fully,
integrated into capitalism. Whether capitalism would have actually collapsed
without these non-capitalist producers is another matter.
So now we can get to the crux of the matter: how did Luxemburg, in her
Accumulation of Capital and other writings, analyse the development of the
working class and other subordinate classes under capitalism, and how did
she view the relationship between these classes and those living in ‘natural
economic societies’? Although the literature on Luxemburg is extensive, as far
as I know this issue has not yet been systematically dealt with. First I will briefly
set out her vision of the major trends of development in the capitalist world
and the integration of non-capitalist areas. Then I will turn to her global class-
analysis, followed by her analysis of social conflicts and coalitions. Finally,
I will offer some further thoughts. Mindful that in the past Luxemburg’s
thought has often been unjustly simplified, I will often quote her extensively.
Direct and Indirect World-Capitalist Expansion
The Accumulation of Capital represents the culmination of a learning process

that unfolded between 1890 and 1913. In her early publications, Luxemburg had
already focussed attention on the extremely dynamic, expansive and, indeed,
predatory character of capitalism. In 1898 she noted that the world market
was becoming ‘narrower and narrower’ as a result of production growing
more quickly than the new markets. This ensured that competition became
increasingly unrestrained: not only between capitalists, but also between
nation states.10 1871 was the year of change. After this date, the hegemonic
position of the United Kingdom began to be gradually dismantled. This also
entailed a weakening of the dominant role of British industry. At the same
time, Germany and the United States were moving up the ranks – ‘first-rate
powers’ which were now competing for ‘domination of the world market’.11
This intensified international competition continually led to the subjugation
and integration of pre-capitalist regions. All non-capitalist countries and
peoples were ‘torn to shreds, to be gradually digested by capitalism’.12 Thus it
was not only ‘capitalist exploitation and oppression’ that was being ‘carried

12 Luxemburg 1911d, p. 28.

to all corners of the earth’, but also ‘rebellion’, leading to ‘the revolutionary
awakening of the Orient’.13 Contradictions mount in this ‘terminal phase’:
‘at home between capital and labour, and abroad between capitalist states’.14
As early as 1899, Luxemburg showed how ongoing expansion would
inevitably run up against limits, as a result of capitalism subjugating the
whole world and dividing up all its regions in the foreseeable future. The
inevitable consequence would be stagnation, because ‘as soon as capitalism
has encompassed the entire globe – and this will almost be achieved once
and for all with the division of Asia – as soon as the international economic and
political contradictions thus reach tipping point, capitalism will be at the end
of its tether. As long as its heir, the socialist proletariat, is not mature enough to
accept its historical inheritance, then capitalism can only continue to atrophy.’15
Before it gets to this stage, however, there is constant change in the power
relations between different capitalist countries. Driven by competition, capital
shifts from one country to the next, constantly transforming the international
division of labour in the process.16 As a result, the political situation becomes
extremely unstable.
Britain responded to its loss of power with rapid colonial expansion. In
the 1880s it swallowed up Egypt and moved, ‘blow by blow’, into Central and
Southern Africa. In the late 1890s, England waged the Boer War. ‘Thus, it was
precisely in the past few decades that we saw British imperialism expand to its
full size.’17
German capitalism was a late developer and only began its journey in the
‘formative period’ after 1871.18 It arrived in ‘the world with an evil conscience,
and the sour mood of a hangover’, because ‘even in the cradle it was not allowed
to dream the innocent dreams of youth’.19 Making up for lost time in terms of

14 Luxemburg 1913a, p. 193.
15 Luxemburg 1899d, p. 364. Luxemburg’s argument is similar to the explanation offered by
Marx in a letter to Engels, dated 8 October 1858: ‘The proper task of bourgeois society
is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on
that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and
the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process.’ Therefore,
in his opinion, ‘on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly
assume a socialist character.’ (Marx 1983, p. 345.) See the critical commentary on this in
Mészáros 1995, p. 35.
17 Luxemburg 1913e, p. 284; see also Luxemburg 1914b, p. 436.

140 van der Linden
accumulation, the regime concentrated its economic power into huge banks
and cartels.20 The result of this expansionist trend was the Morocco Affair
(1911), which saw Germany plunge ‘into the limitless dangers of imperialism’.21
The United States quickly developed ‘from an export market for European
industry into a capitalist export state’ that competed with European capitalism
everywhere.22 On the basis of rapid economic growth, and driven by the desire
for further expansion, the United States began to develop into an imperialist
power. ‘With the conquest of the Philippines, the United States also crossed
the threshold and became a world power’.23
Where capitalism had not yet fully developed, other powers in addition to
the ‘big three’ also played a role. Despite their relative underdevelopment, they
attempted to hold their own in the global power struggle. This is quite clearly
the case with Russia, a country that combined highly developed industry with
extremely backward agriculture. As the government ‘coddled’ the Moscow
business class with ‘all kinds of donations and favours’, capital was pampered
and thus suffered from a ‘profit hypertrophy’. It felt ‘neither the desire nor
the need to expose itself to the harsh weather of the world market and thus
was satisfied with ordinary profits’.24 Therefore it was the state that was the
driving force behind expansionism, not business. ‘While in most capitalist
states, industry – to the extent that the limits of the domestic market become
too narrow for it – pushes the government to acquire new export markets
through conquest or treaties, in Russia, conversely, the Tsar’s policies see
industrial exports as a way of making the Asian countries marked for political
booty first of all economically dependent on it.’25 The regime’s aspiration is to
‘Europeanise Russia socially and economically in order to politically preserve it
as an Asiatic state’.26
Another important, yet even less-developed power was the Ottoman Empire.
Here too, large parts of the economy were ‘archaic’ and doomed to collapse,
but at the same time no real capitalism could develop organically from
the existing money economy, and the extensive bureaucracy looted the people
‘professionally’. Overwhelmingly, attempts at reform had only worsened the
situation for the agrarian population. The result was the transformation of rent

25 Ibid.

in kind into rent in money, a random fiscal system and unclear land-tenure
relations.27 The downfall of the multinational state thus became almost
unavoidable. With prescient insight, twenty-five years before the establishment
of the Turkish republic, Luxemburg wrote: ‘The foundations of Turkish
despotism are being undermined. Yet the foundations of its development into
a modern state are not being laid. It must therefore perish, not as a form of
government, not as a state, and not through class struggle, but through the
struggle of nationalities. And what this will create is not a regenerated Turkey,
but a series of new states, cut from Turkey’s womb.’28 Territorial rivalry – not
only amongst the advanced capitalist states, but also with powers that were
not yet capitalist – grew under the pressure of these developments. Thus
Russia and Britain fought over Persia’s ‘new booty’.29
The Integration of the Non-capitalist Milieu
From the outset, that is to say long before the end of the nineteenth century and
throughout its continued expansion, capitalism promoted a struggle against the
non-capitalist milieu. This happened first in Europe, with the struggle against
feudalism’s serfdom economy and guild crafts, then moved outside of Europe
against societies that varied in development, from small groups of hunter-
gatherers to formations based on small-scale commodity production.30 Four
economic factors drove capitalism’s struggle against the natural economies:
‘1. To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive forces
such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones and ores,
products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc. 2. To “liberate” labour power and
to coerce it into service. 3. To introduce a commodity economy. 4. To separate
trade and agriculture.’31
The Direct Appropriation of the Productive Forces

Trade in commodities took too long to gradually decompose the non-capitalist
economies, so the appropriation of the productive forces often occurred
through violence, through ‘the systematic destruction and annihilation

31 Luxemburg 2003, pp. 349–50; Luxemburg 1913f, pp. 317–18.

142 van der Linden
of all the non-capitalist social units.’32 Thus the Indian ‘communist village
community’, which despite being invaded by the Persians, the Scythians and the
Arabs, had endured for thousands of years, was destroyed by the British within
a few dozen years.33 In a similar fashion, from 1830 the French colonialists
in Algeria had attempted to ‘civilise’ the old Arab-Kabyle socio-economic
institutions.34 The destruction of the natural economy went hand in hand
with ‘the decimation, indeed the extermination, of whole tribes of people.
This process has accompanied capitalist development from the discovery of
America through to the present day: think of the Spanish in Mexico and Peru in
the sixteenth century, the British in North America in the seventeenth century
and in Australia in the eighteenth century, the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago,
the French in North Africa and Britain in India in the nineteenth century, the
Germans in South-West Africa in the twentieth.’35
The ‘Liberation’ of Labour-Power

As it expands across the globe, capital cannot be satisfied with white workers
alone. It requires ‘unrestricted disposition over the labour-power of the
whole globe’. But capital generally encounters these ‘non-white’ workers in
traditional, pre-capitalist production relations, from which they have to be
‘freed’. The importance to capital of acquiring necessary labour-power from
non-capitalist societies becomes a concrete problem in the form of the
so-called labour question in the colonies. A range of ‘soft power’ techniques are
deployed to solve this question, to free labour-power under the command of
capital by ending its subordination to other social authorities and conditions
of production. In the colonial countries, these attempts result in the strangest
hybrids of the modern wage-system and primitive power relations.36
The Introduction of the Commodity Economy

Because in all natural forms of production ‘production only goes on because
both means of production and labour power are bound in one form or another’,37
capital strives to integrate labour-power into the commodity economy. ‘Capital
requires to buy the products of, and sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist
strata and societies.’38 To this end, railroads, telegraph wires, canals etc. are

35 Luxemburg 1921, pp. 482–3.

built. But how can capital induce non-capitalist peoples to buy its goods? Here
too, violence is often used, as exemplified by the Opium Wars which ‘opened
up’ China to trade with British goods.39
The Separation of Agriculture from Industry

In natural economies, agriculture and handicraft are intertwined. Capital
must destroy this relationship to facilitate its efforts to turn peasant families
into consumers of its goods (such as textiles). Its aim is to homogenise
factory-produced commodities to serve a large, country-wide market.40 For
Luxemburg, a model was the United States, where even at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, small and medium-scale farmers could meet most of their
family’s needs themselves and thus get by ‘almost without money’. However,
following the Civil War between 1860 and 1865 this situation changed, and they
increasingly felt compelled to purchase food and clothing, etc.41
Such a gradual transition from natural economy to capitalism occupies three
phases: at first the natural economy is undermined, then a struggle against
the (petty) commodity economy takes place, and finally capital becomes
dominant.42 The continuing integration of non-capitalist strata and countries
is essential to European capital, as is shown by the development of industry in
the 1890s. ‘[R]aw cotton from the slave states of the American Union’ and ‘grain
(a means of subsistence for the English workers) from the fields of serf-owning
Russia’43 were essential to maintain the production of the British textile
industry, as was ‘the cotton crisis in England resulting from the disruption to
Plantagenkulturen by the American war of secession, or the crisis in European
canvas weaving by the interruption to the supply of flax from peasant Russia
which was a consequence of the war in the East.’44
The importance of non-capitalist production is even more significant
if we ‘recall that imports of corn raised by peasants – i.e. not produced by
capitalist methods – played a vital part in the feeding of industrial labour,
as an element, that is to say, of variable capital.’45 Conversely, a considerable
39 Luxemburg 2003, pp. 367–74; Luxemburg 1913f, pp. 335–42. While accepting the possibility
that people could want commodities of their own accord and without compulsion,
she does not seriously investigate this. See her remark: ‘But abroad, where capitalist
production has not yet developed, there has come about, voluntarily or by force, a new
demand of the non-capitalist strata.’ (Luxemburg 2003, p. 407; Luxemburg 1913f, p. 373.)

144 van der Linden
portion of the British cotton industry’s turnover came from the sale of cotton
fabrics to ‘the peasants of India, America, Africa and so on’. But it is not just
consumer goods that are sold to the regions of the world yet to be integrated
into the capitalist world – so too are the means of production. Thus, ‘in the first
half of the nineteenth century’, British industry supplied ‘materials for the
construction of railroads in the American and Australian states’. Likewise,
the German chemical industry provided means of production, such as dyes,
which were sold en masse to countries in Asia, Africa etc. that were not engaged
in capitalist production.46
Class-Formation and Stratification on a Global Scale
Naturally, Luxemburg considered the capitalists and the workers to be the main
classes in the global capitalist system because ‘despite being hostile brothers’,
they were ‘actually children of one and the same formation – capitalism’.47 In
Luxemburg’s work, the bourgeoisie is above all an abstraction, a character-
mask whose guise is ‘the capitalist class’. Nowhere does she analyse the ‘thorny
and self-denying existence’ of the bourgeoisie and its ‘necessary luxuries’.48
Of course, she pays more attention to the development of the working class,
since this is after all the first exploited class – unlike the slaves or peasants –
that can seize power and open the way to socialism.49
As a result of industrialisation in Europe, North America and Australia, as
well as the gradual industrialisation of Asia and Africa, the global working
class rapidly grew in size.50 But the wage workers do not form a homogenous
mass, they consist of many layers. In her later works, Luxemburg distinguishes
between a ‘top layer of better-off industrial workers’, a ‘layer of unskilled
agricultural proletarians constantly streaming from the country into the town’,
‘semi-rural irregular occupations, such as brick manufacturing and work on
the land’, and the ‘broad lower strata of the reserve army’.51
While capital accumulation increases the size of the working class,
other factors (whether they are directly or indirectly associated with such
accumulation) have an opposite effect. World War I brought about the ‘mass

47 Luxemburg 1895–6, p. 49.
48 Luxemburg 1921, p. 423.
51 Luxemburg 1925, pp. 764–5.

destruction of the European proletariat. Never before had a war wiped out
entire social classes of people. . . . Millions of human lives . . . were destroyed,
millions were crippled. But of these millions of people, nine-tenths were
working people from the town and country.’52 It was precisely this vanguard of
the international proletariat in the most highly developed countries that was
decimated; World War I thus turned out to be ‘not simply a grand murder, but
also the suicide of the European working class.’53
During these processes of growth and contraction, the composition of the
working class constantly changed. Technological change tended to simplify
labour and thus render it less skilled. One indication of this was the proliferation
of female and youth labour as a result of the ‘displacement of skilled workers
by unskilled workers’.54 But this trend also became visible in other ways. Thus
the transition from sailing to steam-ships saw the traditionally fearless and
daring sailors give way to ‘average workers’.55
In its hunt for cheaper labour, capital constantly tries, over and over again, to
replace sections of the working class by others that can produce more cheaply.
Thus, in 1900 Luxemburg wrote, ‘lately, a new form of capitalist exploitation is
being tried – jail and workhouse labour – such as in the production of baskets
and cigars, for example.’
This clearly created downward pressure on wages.56 With ‘modern domestic
industry capital has invented a clever way for proletarian children to be
exploited by their proletarian parents.’57 And a heap of misery lies behind
ostensible self-employment. It is highly likely that ‘the income gained from such
“self-employment” is less than the average wage, while the precariousness of
such an existence is often greater than that of a wage worker’. The ‘independent
trader’, whether they employ an assistant or not, is thus a ‘natural ally in the
class struggle’.58
But, unlike most other Marxist theorists of her time, Luxemburg also factored
in the position of working women. Female domestic labour may indeed be
‘a gigantic accomplishment of self-sacrifice and effort’, but for capitalism it is
‘mere air’. This is because, ‘as long as the domination of capital and the wage
system lasts – only work that creates surplus value and generates capitalist

56 Luxemburg 1899e, p. 595.

146 van der Linden
profit is considered to be productive.’ From this point of view, ‘the dancer in

the music hall, whose boss pockets profit generated by her legs, is a productive
worker, whereas all the toil of the wives and mothers of the proletariat within
the four walls of home is considered to be unproductive activity.’59
Luxemburg situated the development of the bourgeoisie and the working
class against the much broader backdrop of global social relations. In general
terms, her analysis of the behaviour of the classes in a world context can be
summarised as follows (Figure 1):
Children Women Men

The capitalists/bourgeoisie
Joint consumers of surplus value

and workers’ wages
Capitalist Core areas of
Working class global capitalism
The petite bourgeoisie

The lumpenproletariat
The peasantry
Precapitalist
Non-capitalist
class societies The periphery of
global capitalism
Primitive Communism
Figure 1 Luxemburg’s view of the global class structure in the early twentieth century.
In the parts of the world dominated by capitalism, many classes or layers

emerge, of which a considerable section has not yet been integrated into
capitalism, particularly the peasantry. In the non-capitalist parts of the world,
there exist both primitive-communist and pre-capitalist societies, the latter
with their distinctive contradictions between the ruling and the labouring
classes (slaves, serfs etc.). Luxemburg did not devote equal attention to these
different classes and layers.

Joint Consumers of Surplus Value and Workers’ Wages

Alongside the capitalists and the workers, there is also ‘a host of other people:
the landowners, the salaried employees, the liberal professions such as
doctors, lawyers, artists and scientists. Moreover, there is the Church and its
servants, the Clergy, and finally the State with its officials and armed forces.’60
All these groups live at the expense of the two main classes: the landowners
are ‘consumers of rent, i.e. of part of the surplus value’; the liberal professions
were reconciled to the consumption of ‘bits’ of surplus value; the clergy partly
derives its income from surplus value and partly ‘from the workers, i.e. from
wages’; officers and armed forces are maintained by rates and taxes, which are
‘levied upon either the surplus value or the wages.’61
The petite bourgeoisie, in the long run threatened by capitalism’s tendency
to concentration, assumed an ‘intermediate position’ between the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie; the proletariat is the leading element and the petite
bourgeoisie its ‘incidental appendage’.62 The petite bourgeoisie is politically
unreliable, it sways ‘towards one direction, only to then sway towards the other’.
In the 1907 Reichstag election they made ‘common cause’ with the bourgeoisie,
but in other situations they supported the workers’ movement.63
Luxemburg characterised the lumpenproletariat in extremely negative
terms. So it is that, in 1906, she spoke of a counter-revolutionary layer ‘which
stands below the proletariat, the layer of propertyless social parasites, such as
prostitutes, professional criminals, all kinds of dark and accidental existences.’64
In 1910, she refers to the lumpenproletariat as ‘thieves’, ‘bandits’ and ‘thugs’.65 In
a text that remained unpublished during her lifetime, ‘On the Russian Revo
lution’, she wrote: ‘The lumpenproletarian element has a deep adherence to
bourgeois society . . . as a social waste that grows particularly at times when the
walls of the social order are collapsing.’66
When it came to social relations in pre-capitalist class societies, Luxemburg
introduced a distinction between situations in which trade had no significant
influence on social life and those where it did. Thus she says that: ‘As long as the
slaves were needed in the home, slavery still had a patriarchal, mild character.’

61 Luxemburg 2003, p. 107, also pp. 274, 328; Luxemburg 1913f, pp. 105, 249, 297; and
Luxemburg 1921, p. 426.
62 Luxemburg 1900–1, p. 64.
65 Luxemburg 1910, p. 470.
66 Luxemburg 1918, p. 361, footnote.

148 van der Linden
Only with the growing influence of trade, when slaves were forced to produce
commodities for the market, did ‘inhuman drudgery begin for the slaves’.67
A similar change occurs in bondage relations, which initially had been relations
of guardianship: ‘when the nobility became acquainted with the comforts of
money, payments and duties for the purposes of trade were increased more
and more, the bondage relation became serfdom, the peasant was oppressed
to the extreme.’68 Primitive communism, which had a vestigial existence in
Algeria, India etc., and in which kinship ties play a major role, is ‘the general
typical form of human society at a certain level of human development’ and its
very existence punctures ‘the old idea of the eternity of private property’.69 Its
existence was a danger for the bourgeoisie, because it established a connection
between the ‘stubborn resistance’ of the colonial ‘natives’ on the one hand,
and ‘the new gospel of the revolutionary impatient energy of the proletarian
masses in the old capitalist countries.’70
Coalitions and Struggles
Global capital conducts a constant struggle, not only between its different
constituent parts for raw materials and export regions, but also against the
global working class and non-capitalist layers and peoples. This struggle
is ruthless and, where necessary, extremely violent. Following the Franco-
German war of 1870–1, there was no armed conflict in Europe for forty years.
But, as Luxemburg wrote in 1911, this in no way meant that capitalism had
become peace-loving. On the contrary, Europe could only avoid war ‘because
European issues and interests are now being fought out on the ocean, not in
the European backwater.’71 The sham peace in Europe would soon be over.
Three years before the outbreak of World War I, she noted: ‘Today, the flames of
war lick the shores of Europe, a conflagration threatens to erupt.’72 Ironically,
the expansion of imperialism that had previously facilitated the peaceful
period in Europe was at the same time the development that threatened a new
explosion. As she noted in the ‘Anti-critique’: ‘the circle of development begins
to close – the decisive battles fought out in those areas that were the arenas of
67 Luxemburg 1925, p. 725.

68 Luxemburg 1925, pp. 725–6.
69 Luxemburg 1925, p. 604.
70 Luxemburg 1925, p. 613; cf. Löwy 1968.

expansion rebound against the countries that started them. Imperialism thus
re-repatriates catastrophe from the periphery of capitalist development back
to its starting point.’73
And when war broke out again, her view was that this was not simply a
European or North Atlantic war, but a conflict that also affected the global
South. The numerous colonies were drawn into the general conflict by the
attempt of ‘every belligerent state’ to ‘occupy the enemy’s colonies or at least
to initiate an uprising’ there.74 Thus Germany’s enemies ‘incited negroes, Sikhs
and Maoris to war’ – people who ‘in today’s war’ almost play ‘the same role as
the socialist proletarians in the European states’.75
Capitalist expansion engendered horrific massacres. A revolting example
of German colonial barbarism was General von Trotha’s mass murder of the
Hereros, in what is now Namibia, between 1904 and 1905. Luxemburg frequently
returns to this outrage, but she does so most extensively in a 1911 speech:
The Herero are a Negro people that has for centuries sat on soil that
it fertilised with its own sweat. Their ‘crime’ was that they did not sub
missively hand over their homeland to the predatory knights of industry
and white slave-holders, that they defended this homeland against
foreign invaders. In this war also, German weapons covered themselves
in glory aplenty. Mister von Trotha issued the famous command: ‘every
negro who turns out to be armed will be shot’ – no quarter would be
given. The men were shot, women and children were driven in their
hundreds into the burning desert, and in the murderous Omaheke the
wreath of their seared bones fades – a glorious wreath to German arms!76
Because capital expands by force and strives to destroy the natural economies,
the ‘primitive societies’ have no choice other than ‘opposition and fight to the
finish – complete exhaustion and extinction’.77 But more advanced societies
defend themselves too, as it turned out in the revolutions in Persia (1906),
in Turkey (1908) and China (1911), and in the revolutionary ferment in India,
Egypt, Arabia, Morocco and Mexico.78 For Luxemburg, the Chinese revolution
had above all an emblematic significance, as this country had been a model of
73 Luxemburg 1921, pp. 520–1.

74 Luxemburg 1918, p. 361, footnote.

150 van der Linden
peace and political stability for so long. Luxemburg spoke of a ‘global turning
point’.79 ‘Did you not grow up with the idea that the great Chinese empire, that
pigtailed colossus in the East, is an exception to all historical laws, that it is a
country where all the storms of history break at its frontiers?’80 An even more
special place was Russia in the revolution of 1905 to 1907, because it already
signalled ‘the period of transition from capitalist to socialist society’.81
Under these circumstances, working-class internationalism assumes two
forms: solidarity with the rebellious people from societies characterised by
natural economies and working-class solidarity across national borders.
The time when workers thought they were able to avoid global politics and
economics is over. ‘Today every male and female worker has to say to themselves
that nothing happens in global politics which does not have an impact on their
own interests. When the negroes in Africa are suppressed by German soldiers,
when in the Balkans the Serbians and Bulgarians murder Turkish soldiers and
peasants, when in the Canadian elections the Conservative Party suddenly
gains the upper hand and smashes the dominance of the Liberals, in all these
cases male and female workers have to say to themselves that this is about
their cause, that their interests are at stake.’82 As for solidarity with people
living in the non-capitalist world, as far back as 1899 Luxemburg noted that:
‘With colonial policy . . . the working class finally condemned in principle the
violent domination of foreign countries and nations.’ Luxemburg consistently
supported with great dedication the campaigns against the imperialist
interventions in West Africa, Morocco, China, etc.83
Also, she was clear that directly material considerations meant that the
mutual solidarity of workers themselves dictated that struggle could not accept
state borders. The economic dependence of workers in one country on the
workers of other countries manifested itself at an early stage, and already found
expression in the international trade-union action in favour of worker-safety
measures.84 But above and beyond this there are also more general political
interests that hang in the balance. ‘Socialism is an international endeavour’
that connects the workers ‘of various countries and various parts of the globe’
and points ‘towards their task: the abolition of capitalism.’85 However, this
79 Luxemburg 1911f, p. 81.

81 Luxemburg 1906a, pp. 9–10.
82 Luxemburg 1913b, pp. 212–13.
83 For example, Luxemburg 1900b, pp. 801–2.

international solidarity confronts at least two fundamental problems. The

political struggle can only be conducted within the bounds of national states,
because in their daily struggle, workers in different countries cannot form a
common political party, but have to organise themselves separately in each
state.86 In addition to this, the balance of power between the classes constantly
changes within and between countries. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, the level of development of proletarianisation influences the workers’
consciousness and capacity for organisation. It turned out, for example, ‘that
the craft character of the work force, even if it is, on the one hand, a great
obstacle to enlightenment in the sense of the modern class movement, has on
the other hand the certain advantage of facilitating organisation.’87 Secondly,
the internal stratification of the working class is significant. Only ‘the upper
layer of the better-off workers’ can be organised in trade unions.
And finally, the layers of the reserve army, i.e. ‘the unemployed facing irregular
employment, domestic industry, and the casually-employed poor’ completely
elude organisation. In general it can be said: ‘The greater the hardship amongst
and strain on a layer of the proletariat, the less scope there is for trade unions
to influence them.’88 In addition to this there is the problem that trade-union
actions reinforce differentiation amongst the proletariat, because they ‘raise
out of poverty the upper vanguard of the industrial proletariat capable of
organising, condensing and consolidating them. Thus the distance between
the upper and lower layers of the working class becomes greater.’89
Trade-union organisation is only accessible to the ‘upper layer of better-
off industrial workers’. Generally, the ‘lower layer of unskilled agricultural
proletarians constantly streaming from the country into the town’, as well as
the ‘semi-rural irregular occupations, such as brick manufacturing and work
on the land’, and ‘the broad lower strata of the reserve army’, are outside of
the unions.
Thirdly, the relationship between workers and other subaltern classes
influences the balance of forces. In 1907, Luxemburg noted that, in Germany,
‘ever more numerous layers of not only the rural proletariat but also of
small farmers are thronging to social democracy.’ This proved how ‘when it
is said that the peasantry is a class of uniformly reactionary petit bourgeois
throughout, then to some extent this is dry and lifeless schematism’.90 During
86 Ibid.
88 Luxemburg 1925, pp. 764–5.
89 Luxemburg 1925, p. 765.

152 van der Linden
the first Russian revolution too, the peasantry was ‘an objectively revolutionary
factor’.91 On the other hand, a few years later she predicted that in post-WWI
Russia: ‘Both social classes – the petite bourgeoisie and the peasantry – who
today are following the proletariat, will overwhelmingly stab it in the back to
some extent, supported by the lumpenproletariat.’92
Fourthly, the level of the workers’ movement does not necessarily rise with
the development of capital accumulation. The German workers’ movement,
for example, is more advanced than the British movement. While the former
grew big and powerful, the latter was ‘impotently’ paralysed between the poles
of ‘socialist sects’ and ‘reformist working-class politics’. Ferdinand Lassalle
was to be thanked for the German head-start, because ‘his caesarean section
severed the working class from the bourgeoisie once and for all’.93
Finally, the power of the workers’ movement also depended on its country’s
position in the world system: Britain’s then-current decline is described as of
the utmost importance for the labour movement in Britain, just as once was
its undivided rule over world trade. As the forms of trade evolve, the British
bourgeoisie gradually refines its methods of struggle against the working
class. Some very important recent straws in the wind show that in Britain ‘the
harmony of capital and labour’ is being damned and a ‘new page in the history
of the class struggle is beginning’. The strike that ended in defeat and the
lockout of mechanical engineers from 1897–8 was a sign of things to come.94
Through combined and uneven development, the ruling class sometimes
succeed in actively or passively making good use of the working class. ‘No war
is possible without the responsibility of the mass of people, be this through
warlike enthusiasm or at least through submissive tolerance.’95 If it is badly
led, and if it ‘stubbornly avoids an intensification of the class struggle’, a mass
proletarian party can foster this apathy.96 Such pacification can be of some
worth to the radical left in solidarity and anti-war campaigns. Of course,
the ultimate aim is the social revolution; but it is important that we do not

92 Luxemburg 1917, p. 280.
93 With this note, Luxemburg creates the impression that individuals make history. A few
pages later, however, she qualifies this impression: ‘German Social Democracy would have
come into being with or without Lassalle. Yet the fact that the German proletarian class
party already appeared at the gates with such radiance and splendour 50 years ago, more
than two decades before all other countries, and acted as a role model for them, is thanks
to Lassalle’s life work and his maxim: “I dared!”.’ (Luxemburg 1913c, p. 220.)

understand this to mean ‘pitchforks and bloodshed’: ‘A revolution can also

proceed in cultural forms, and if one revolution had a prospect of doing so
then it is precisely the proletarian revolution; because we are the last people
who resort to violent means, who could wish for a brutal revolution. But such
things do not depend on us, but on our opponents.’97
In Conclusion
In the first decades after Marx’s death, when Marxists spoke of international
solidarity they were almost always referring to solidarity between workers, and
mainly their vision was limited to Europe and North America. Rosa Luxemburg
was the first Marxist who tried to develop a truly global concept of solidarity
from below, with particular attention to the most oppressed – women. The
fact that this attempt was incomplete, and that subsequently, with the benefit
of hindsight, we can assess many things much better, reduces her merits only
marginally.
A. While Marx and her Marxist contemporaries tended to assess the
destructive and violent aspects of capitalist expansion in an ambivalent
fashion, Luxemburg placed more emphasis on the purely negative aspects of
this development: the misery of many men, women and children who were
uprooted and had become its victims. For her, primitive accumulation was
not a stage that preceded actual capitalist development (as Marx said in the
wake of Adam Smith’s thoughts on previous accumulation), but a process that
endured throughout the entire history of capitalism. ‘At the time of primitive
accumulation, i.e. at the end of the Middle Ages, when the history of capitalism
in Europe began, and right into the nineteenth century, dispossessing the
peasants in England and on the Continent was the most striking weapon in
the large-scale transformation of means of production and labour power into
capital. Yet capital in power performs the same task even today, and on an even
more important scale – by modern colonial policy. It is an illusion to hope
that capitalism will ever be content with the means of production which it can
acquire by way of commodity exchange.’98
B. Luxemburg’s great empathy for the lot of the oppressed and exploited
occasionally means that she contradicts herself. This is very clear in the case
of the lumpenproletariat. We have seen how, fully in line with Marx, she
considered these substrata to be a kind of historical waste-product. But as

98 Luxemburg 2003, p. 350; Luxemburg 1913f, p. 318; cf. Bush 2005, pp. 99–100.

154 van der Linden
soon as she describes specific examples of the lumpenproletariat, the tone

changes. One example is an essay on a homeless shelter in Berlin in 1912. There
she states:
The workers themselves, especially the better-off, the organised, like

to believe that, all in all, the proletariat’s existence and struggle occurs
within the limits of decency and decorum. Was ‘immiseration’ not
shown to be nothing but grey theory a long time ago? Everyone knows
that there are shelters, beggars, prostitutes, secret police, criminals and
‘nocturnal elements’. But all that is generally seen as something distant
and foreign. . . . A wall stands between the righteous workforce and those
outcasts. One rarely thinks of the misery that grovels in dirt on the other
side of the wall.99
And no worker is . . . safeguarded from the shelter. If today he is
vigorous, honest, hardworking – what will become of him tomorrow if he
is sacked because he has reached the fatal limit of forty years of age,
a point at which the boss declares him to be ‘useless’? What if tomorrow
he suffers an accident that cripples him and turns him into an old
beggar?100
And in her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, Luxemburg noted:

‘Every industrial worker who is crippled at work, or has the misfortune of
turning sixty, has a one-in-two chance of descending into the lower layer
of bitter poverty, into the “Lazarus layer” of the proletariat.’101
C. Luxemburg assumed that the incorporation of the strata that were not
yet capitalist would lead to the total destruction of the old socio-economic
structures. Indeed, non-capitalist relations could continue to exist as hybrid
components under capitalism. How exactly this could happen was extensively
discussed by anthropologists in the 1960s and ’70s, including in the debate
on the articulation of modes of production.102 This notwithstanding, to this
day the mechanisms illuminated by Luxemburg continue to be useful building-
blocks for the theory of capitalist incorporation.103
D. Luxemburg not only considered the working class as the revolutionary
subject of capitalist society in the strict sense, but other groups too. ‘In the

101 Luxemburg 1925, p. 765.
102 See the overview in Foster-Carter 1978.
103 Bodemann and Allahar 1980.

first instance, the proletariat consists of wage earners as the exploited and
oppressed class sans phrase; but it also consists of layers of the population
with an economically ambiguous character, such as the petite bourgeoisie and
the small peasants who, insofar as they have proletarian interests opposed to
their exploiters and class domination of the state, can certainly be involved
in the agitation of social democracy’.104 At the same time, in her theoretical
analysis she excluded from the revolutionary subject groups that according
to more recent studies of underdeveloped capitalism were not always
counterrevolutionary at all. This is especially true of the lumpenproletariat.105
E. Luxemburg stressed that the task of the working class is to act in
solidarity with the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles of the people in
the natural economies, but she understands this solidarity to be a one-sided
activity. It never occurred to her to directly establish contact with those who
took part in the Herero uprising. In this respect she was following what was
the generally accepted behaviour: ‘Even Bebel expressed his satisfaction in the
Reichstag about the fact that he had never been “tempted” to inform himself
directly on the spot regarding the colonies. There were no Social-Democratic
correspondents in the colonies, and until 1912 no systematic collecting and
evaluation of information. Africans and Social Democrats remained strangers.’106
Rosa Luxemburg clarified the outer limits of the Marxism of her time by
taking seriously the subjugation and resistance of ‘natural economic societies’,
by analytically linking it to the exploitation and struggle of the working class
under capitalism. Not until the first years after the Russian Revolution were
further steps made.
Translated from the German by Benjamin Lewis
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brill.com/hima
Review Articles
Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the

Politics of Class by Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn,
A Review
Tad Tietze
University of New South Wales
t.tietze@unsw.edu.au
Abstract
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has, until recent years, exercised almost unchallenged
hegemony over Australian Left and working-class politics. Tom Bramble and Rick
Kuhn have ambitiously crafted the first Marxist history of the party in over 50 years,
deploying an analysis of its material constitution as a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ to
underpin arguments for a revolutionary socialist alternative. From its emergence
in class struggles of the late nineteenth century, to its early electoral successes,
to multiple internal crises and splits, and its more recent role in driving neoliberal
restructuring, the party’s contradictory character is analysed with clarity. However,
despite containing much suggestive material, key issues – including the party’s
unparalleled success despite its betrayals, failures and crises; radical challenges from
within and without the party; the nature of its appeal to reformist consciousness; the
shape of Marxist and Left debates about the ALP; and the party’s centrality to a wider
sphere of politics in capitalist society – remain thinly theorised, thereby inadvertently
weakening the authors’ case for a revolutionary alternative.

162 Tietze
Keywords
social democracy – Marxism – Australian Labor Party – history – strategy – working

class
Tom Bramble and Rick Kuhn, Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the
Politics of Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) emerged rapidly in the late 1880s and early
1890s, going on to form the world’s first national labour government in 1904.
The initial attempt to found an electoral formation for the labour movement,
through a call in May 1887 by the Australian Socialist League, did not advance
far. Once trades and labour bodies began to devote resources and funds to
the project, concerned in part by the militancy of capital in the closing decade
of the century, the initiative quickly took hold. Colonial- (later state-) based
parties were formed – in Queensland in 1890 and New South Wales (NSW) in
1891. In the same period, a series of important industrial disputes was crushed.
Defeats of strikes by shearers, maritime workers and miners, all in the early
1890s, saw the conditions won over the previous period of militancy all but
wiped out. Despite this, or perhaps in part because of it, the labour movement’s
electoral arm cohered and its vote quickly increased. It was a profoundly swift
and successful emergence when compared internationally. As historian Stuart
Macintyre noted, at the same time ‘Continental socialists could trace a lineage
of more than half a century for their workers’ parties and yet they . . . remained
on the margin of politics, in Australia Labor had achieved office while still in
its adolescence’.1
Since that time, the fortunes of the ALP have been the subject of great interest
locally and internationally. For the longest time this curiosity was centred on
the party’s early success and centrality to Australian politics. However, the last
few years has seen a renewed intensification of interest, but this time reflected
in a series of books and essays seeking to analyse the party’s malaise and, in
many cases, providing prescriptions for party reform and renewal. A particular
focus has been the stellar rise and ignominious collapse of Kevin Rudd’s
federal government of 2007–10. Rudd’s presidential-style electoral campaign,
known as ‘Kevin ’07’, saw sitting Prime Minister John Howard lose his seat and
a humiliating defeat for his conservative Liberal Party. Rudd was the victim of
a backroom coup to replace him with his deputy Julia Gillard, who then failed
1 Kirk 2011, p. 54.

Labor ’ s Conflict 163
to revive Labor’s faltering electoral standing and almost lost the 2010 election,
having to form a minority government (relatively unusual under Australia’s
electoral system). The new government limped from crisis to crisis and ended
not with further renewal but Rudd’s return, which saw him lead the party to
a heavy but not catastrophic defeat in late 2013. Contributions to the debate
have ranged from insider accounts of the disastrous electoral campaigns2 to
limp Third Way policy tracts,3 and from premature celebrations of the death
of neoliberalism4 to early post-mortems of the breakdown of inner-party
structures and processes.5
The conjuncture exercising so much attention is one in which Australia’s
oldest political party, one of the most electorally successful social democratic
parties in the world over the last century, is suffering from a shrinking
voter base and membership, a crisis of identity, and destabilisation through the
emergence of a significant competitor to its Left in the shape of the Australian
Greens.
In this context the appearance of a detailed, meticulously-researched critical
history and analysis of the ALP is to be welcomed. This is what Tom Bramble
and Rick Kuhn have delivered. Bramble follows on from his post-WWII history
of the Australian trade union movement,6 while Kuhn is best known for his
Deutscher Prize-winning intellectual biography of Henryk Grossman as well as
editing two books championing class analysis of Australian society.7 Accounts
of the ALP of any theoretical orientation tend to focus on either specific
sections of the party, politicians’ biographies, or particular phases of history.
By way of contrast, Bramble and Kuhn have produced the only systematic
analysis of the party’s origins, history, composition and social role, utilising a
broadly Marxist framework, of the past 50 years.
Labor’s History: Class, Capital and Nation
Bramble and Kuhn introduce their account, in the first chapter, by critically
surveying a range of theoretical approaches to the ALP and reformist political
parties, contrasting them with their own framework of examining the party’s
2 Howes 2010; Hawker 2013.

3 Dyrenfurth and Soutphommasane (eds.) 2010.
4 Manne and McKnight (eds.) 2010.
5 Cavalier 2010.
6 Bramble 2008.
7 Kuhn 2007; Kuhn (ed.) 2005; Kuhn and O’Lincoln (eds.) 1996.

164 Tietze
‘material constitution’ as a ‘capitalist workers’ party’. Chapter 2 depicts how

the ALP’s origins lie in economic crisis and intense class struggle ending in
brutal state repression of striking workers in the latter years of the nineteenth
century. This led union leaders and activists to conclude that economic
struggle was not enough and that they needed to intervene directly in politics.
The authors contend that the combination of strong identification with class
organisation, and economic and industrial setbacks, tipped the balance in
debates about what kind of workers’ party should be built in favour of one
that saw participation in the state as a substitute for class struggle from below.
This led the new-born colonial Labor parties to accept many of the dominant
elite ideologies of the day, including racist populism later codified in the White
Australia Policy. Furthermore, self-declared socialist currents tended to be
small and usually envisaged the socialist project in terms of state regulation
and nationalisation rather than workers’ power. Within a couple of years of
Federation in 1901 every new Australian state had its own Labor Party, which
also came together to contest national elections. Not only did the ALP comprise
organised intervention of the trade union bureaucracy into parliamentary
politics, but mechanisms of ‘caucus [party-room] solidarity’ were soon
established to bind politicians to the party machine and the union structures
that stood behind it (pp. 30–3). In 1904 Labor briefly formed a minority
government at the federal level, the first labour government anywhere in the
world. And by mid-1915, ‘Labor ruled at the federal level and in all states except
Victoria’, making it the most successful working-class party in the world to that
day (p. 33). The ALP often appealed more to nascent Australian nationalism
and its origins in British imperial society than to the class interests its founders
had purported to represent, and this led Labor to commit wholeheartedly
to Britain’s war effort in 1914. However, as the war became unpopular, Labor
split over the issue of conscription in 1916, with the union-dominated party
machine expelling the prime minister and his pro-conscription supporters.
The impact on the Australian Left of an upsurge of working-class militancy
and the influence of the Bolshevik revolution – and how it pushed the ALP
leftward after the War – is illustrated in Chapter 3. The party adopted ‘the
socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’ into its
platform in 1921, a formal commitment to socialism that was to be observed
mainly in the breach (p. 43). When the Great Depression struck, Labor had
just taken office federally and Prime Minister Jim Scullin swiftly moved to
implement harsh austerity measures. NSW Labor Premier Jack Lang opposed
the austerity plan and pushed for a mildly expansionary economic policy. The
clash led to another split in the party, concentrated in Lang’s home state
where the Premier commanded the support of almost the whole party and

union movement. Lang rode popular radicalisation as a counterweight to the

pressure from banks and the federal government, but was eventually sacked by
the state governor. The federal Labor government was itself routed at the next
election.
Despite these convulsions, the ALP soon recovered organisationally and
electorally. Chapter 4 shows how, during the Second World War, the party was
able to take over federal government when the conservatives under Robert
Menzies fell into disarray. Under the leadership of erstwhile revolutionary and
anti-war activist John Curtin, Labor was able to bind unions to the war effort.
Curtin reoriented Australian foreign policy towards emerging US hegemony.
As the war progressed, there were unofficial strikes in response to wartime
hyper-exploitation and an explosion of militancy after the war’s end. The
postwar Labor government pursued economic development but fell well short
of the kinds of social reforms famously delivered by its British counterpart at
the time. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) took advantage
of widespread workers’ discontent and industrial struggles to increase its
influence in union politics. This culminated in a Communist-led miners’ strike
in 1949, with Labor PM Ben Chifley sending in troops to defeat the workers.
Soon after, Labor lost the federal election to the conservatives, reconstituted
by Menzies under the banner of the Liberal Party. In the fallout, Menzies
tried (and failed) to use growing anti-Communist sentiment to have the CPA
banned, while shadowy right-wing ‘Industrial Groups’ were formed inside the
unions and ALP to combat Communist Party influence. The latter eventually
caused another Labor split in several states in 1955, as the mainstream union
bureaucracy moved to end the right-wing threat to its domination. The split,
together with the social stability and rising living standards of the long postwar
boom, cemented the Liberals’ record run of 23 years in federal government.
In Chapter 5 the authors pause to note how all the key features of Labor’s
material constitution – the relationship between union leaders, the party
machine, the parliamentarians, party members and supporters – were
entrenched by the 1960s.
As Chapter 6 shows, rising prosperity and the shift in working-class
composition towards white-collar and semi-professional sectors led to pressures
on the ALP to adapt its internal structures to meet electoral exigencies. Federal
leader Gough Whitlam led the charge in combating recalcitrant left-wing
union-based sections of the party organisation. Whitlam won in 1972 with
the conservatives’ postwar project in a state of utter exhaustion and sections
of the ruling class (including a young newspaper proprietor named Rupert
Murdoch) backing change. But Whitlam also had the support of the unions,
which had scored a major victory in 1969 by beating back anti-strike laws

166 Tietze
with a near general strike over the jailing of union official Clarrie O’Shea. This
unleashed a wave of industrial struggle, which provided another substrate for
left-wing radicalisation that was happening around the Vietnam War, student-
struggles and emerging Aboriginal, women’s and gay liberation movements.
Whitlam’s heroic status rests in part on his whirlwind introduction of a series
of modernising and progressive reforms, including equal pay for women, sole-
parent pensions, free tertiary education, a semi-nationalised health service,
and land rights for Indigenous people. Bramble and Kuhn delineate the limits
of Whitlam’s radicalism, as against a trend among left-wing writers to lionise
his achievements. But the Whitlam legend also rests on how his administration
fell into disarray as the first major postwar recession hit Australia in 1973,
exacerbating stagflation that he was then unable to bring under control, and
culminating in the government having its finances blocked by the Senate (upper
house). The parliamentary deadlock was resolved by the Governor-General
sacking Whitlam in November 1975. The ‘coup’ provoked a wave of protest,
and for a moment it appeared that the political polarisation in Canberra might
spill over into social radicalisation. However, union leaders and ALP politicians
were able to maintain control, and once the election campaign was reduced to
consideration of the government’s contradictory and chaotic record, Whitlam
was defeated by Malcolm Fraser’s conservatives in a landslide, having also lost
the support of most of his elite backers.
The defeat further pushed the ALP’s approach towards one of cautious
social reform and the need for ‘wage restraint’, as described in Chapter 7. While
Labor was in opposition, unions resisted wage controls and this culminated
in a ‘wages breakout’ after 1980, quickly followed by a second deep postwar
recession that destroyed tens of thousands of jobs in manufacturing, the
sector of industry most affected by militancy. Labor – now under former
national union leader Bob Hawke – was swept into office in 1983 on a platform
of reuniting a polarised nation, getting inflation under control, creating jobs
and increasing the ‘social wage’ (especially through a new ‘Medicare’ national
health system), as well as reviving industry through state planning. This was to
be the high point of Labor’s political success, as the party won five elections in
a row. Social peace and opposition to inflation were enshrined in an ‘Accord’
between unions and government, which was based on centralised negotiations
rather than industrial disputation. It was wildly successful, although not in the
way its many supporters in the unions and the Left had anticipated. Real wages
declined at the same time as Labor introduced a full suite of neoliberal reforms –
financial deregulation, large-scale privatisations, reintroduction of university
fees and ever-tighter restrictions on welfare benefits. Despite rhetoric they
would only stick with the Accord if it delivered for their members, the unions

clung to it through wage cuts, falling unionisation, the destruction of militant

unions, and the use of the military to break a pilots’ strike. Workers’ ‘sacrifice’
was rewarded with a deep recession and high unemployment. Unable to stem
the slide in Labor’s support, Hawke was replaced by his Treasurer, Paul Keating,
in 1991. Keating then pulled off a surprise victory in 1993, ironically opposing his
conservative opponent’s platform of even harsher neoliberal reform. However,
a jobless recovery from recession ensured that Keating was defeated in 1996 by
John Howard.
As Chapter 8 shows, despite Howard’s considerable problems in his first
two terms of office, Labor was unable to re-emerge from the wilderness
in 1998 and then went backwards in 2001 in the shadow of 9/11 and the
invasion of Afghanistan. The latter election had also followed an escalation in
brutal government policy towards asylum seekers, a policy that had already
intensified under Keating, who had introduced mandatory detention of boat
arrivals. Labor was also in lockstep with Howard on the War on Terror, only
briefly and half-heartedly opposing the invasion of Iraq but then retreating
once the war started. An important consequence was the emergence of the
Greens as the first significant electoral force ever to consolidate to the left of
the ALP. There was some Labor revival after Howard overreached following
a fourth election win by introducing labyrinthine legislation aimed at tying
unions up in legal knots. Unions ran a political campaign for workers’ rights
and Howard’s apparent invincibility faded. The ALP then chose popular
shadow foreign minister Kevin Rudd as leader and he helped Labor cruise to
victory in 2007.
The authors demonstrate in Chapter 9 how hopes for meaningful social
reforms from Rudd to match his new-look political approach would soon be
disappointed, as he settled into a kind of technocratic managerialism alongside
symbolic gestures such as a government apology to Indigenous people who
had been stolen from their families by authorities in previous decades. He also
presided over massive state intervention to protect Australia from the global
financial crisis, while improving his credentials as a progressive by penning
an essay attacking neoliberalism, at the same time as Nicholas Sarkozy and
Gordon Brown were making similar public arguments.8 But his government
started to lose popularity in early 2010 when it dropped his centrepiece climate-
change policy, and he was pressured into standing down for Julia Gillard, after
manoeuvres by the ‘faceless men’ of the union-affiliated ALP factions. Gillard
rapidly made clear she would move the party rightward to correct its problems,
a strategy that led to Labor almost being bundled out after a single term, and
8 Rudd 2009.

168 Tietze
only saved by Gillard’s ability to stitch up a deal with the Greens (coming off
their highest-ever vote) and conservative Independents to form a minority
government.
Bramble and Kuhn’s historical narrative breaks off at this juncture. In the
final chapter they conclude that despite considerable changes to its social base
the ALP remains in essence a capitalist workers’ party, before considering a
series of alternative political projects.
A Capitalist Workers’ Party
The central thread running through Bramble and Kuhn’s historical account is
their theorisation of the ALP as a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ (p. 20). In developing
this conception they draw on Lenin’s writings regarding the ALP and British
Labour Party.9 They point out that most Labor leaders have envisaged the party’s
role as ‘civilising’ capitalism within the framework of the Australian nation,
using a mix of state intervention and market mechanisms rather than seeking
its overthrow. In order to construct a distinctively Marxist critique, the authors
argue that behind nation, state and market lie ‘class relations of capitalism’.
Not only do capitalists rule in the workplace, through economic mechanisms,
and ideologically through the media and educational institutions, but through
the machinery of the state. They argue the capitalist nature of the state is
guaranteed in a number of ways: First, through the intermingling of state and
business personnel. Second, through the economic interdependence of the
private sector and the state. And, third, because ‘the internal bureaucratic and
authoritarian hierarchies of the Australian state mirror those of corporations’
(pp. 9–10).
In this way, they conclude, while the ALP may have a distinctive policy style, it
is no different from the conservative parties (or the Greens) in its fundamental
objective of running the capitalist state in the national interest. However, they
maintain, Labor does have a distinctive relationship – via the trade unions –
with the working class. It is this that makes it not just another capitalist party
but also a workers’ party, albeit one that is committed to pursuing change
within existing social institutions (p. 11).
9 The authors quote from a 1942 translation of Lenin’s ‘In Australia’ (1913) that describes the
ALP as a ‘liberal workers’ party’, which they see as interchangeable with ‘bourgeois workers’
party’. However, the more commonly used 1977 translation has this as ‘liberal Labor Party’.
Lars Lih (personal communication) points out that the original Russian could be interpreted
either way. On British Labour see Lenin 1965.

The question arising from this analysis is why, if Labor’s actual record in
relation to its working-class base is so disappointing, did the vast majority of
workers – including the most class-conscious – support it as ‘their’ party for
most of the last century? Bramble and Kuhn argue that this is a matter of class
identification: ‘Just as devoted supporters continue to support their football
club when it plays badly or loses, loyal Labor voters could not contemplate
casting a ballot for a conservative team’ (p. 13). Additionally, the language,
ideas and policy programmes deployed by the ALP, and especially the Left
within it, has connected with the ‘sense of powerlessness and class grievance
generated by the material reality of working class life’ (ibid.). This identification
is underpinned by the link between the party’s two key social components –
the politicians and the trade-union officials. However, both these groups are
rendered conservative by their material privileges relative to ordinary workers
and their social role in mediating between labour and capital. Both groups,
therefore, have a material interest in the continuation of the capitalist system
and its state (pp. 14–18). Despite more recent changes, the authors see both
an essential continuity in the ALP’s ‘material constitution’ and significant
discontinuities as the relative weight of the party’s constitutive elements
changes with economic conditions and the balance of the class struggle.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Bramble and Kuhn have performed an invaluable service in constructing a

coherent socialist case against the Labor Party. The relative dearth of such
efforts, especially in recent decades, has meant that debates on the Marxist
Left have often focused on specific aspects or periods of the party’s ideology
and behaviour in a manner that is abstracted from a more general historical-
theoretical frame. Their considerable achievement necessarily makes this the
beginning of a contemporary discussion of the nature of the ALP rather than
a final word, and it is in that spirit that I want to raise the following questions
and disagreements. My concerns focus on their theoretical formulations and
selection of historical material.
Labor’s Conflict uncompromisingly demonstrates the ALP’s fundamentally
pro-capitalist character in spite of its social basis in the trade unions.
Furthermore, Bramble and Kuhn posit that Labor’s current problems are rooted
in its essential character as a capitalist workers’ party, but that the changes
of the last four decades have exacerbated these. The party’s membership is
much less working-class; the influence of MPs, party-machine operators and
union leaders has become much greater compared with the rank-and-file

170 Tietze
membership; the union leaders’ own influence has decreased due to the
decline in union membership and confidence; the party has lowered its
reform horizons to the point that it is no longer seen by the capitalist class as
a threat to its interests; the party organisation has become wealthier and less
reliant on trade-union finances; its primary vote has continued to decline; and
ideological divisions within the party (especially along factional lines) have
largely vanished (pp. 185–6).
With the ALP in such a parlous state, Bramble and Kuhn examine internal
party reform, building-up the Australian Greens and involvement in a new Left
social-democratic party such as Germany’s Die Linke as possible alternatives.
They reject each in turn as incapable of breaking with the core problems of
Labourist politics, and counterpose to these the need to build a revolutionary
socialist party, schooled in Marxist politics, that can intervene when the
tide of class struggle turns (pp. 186–93). It is this strategic perspective that
informs Labor’s Conflict, but which raises a series of issues the book is unable
to adequately address. In particular, for a book that proclaims the necessity
of transcending and defeating the politics that Labor represents in Australia,
there is little sense such a project is possible except as an article of the authors’
faith and political conviction. Instead the parade of Labor’s failures and the
lack of effective working-class challenges to it creates a sense of the inevitability
of Labourism when this is the opposite of what the authors intend.
Explaining Labourism’s Success
The central paradox of Labor’s Conflict is how the ALP’s appalling record sits
uneasily alongside the party’s remarkable record of electoral success and
political influence for over a century, even despite being shaken by major social
crises and party splits. It is a record of achievement that seems utterly resistant
to the baleful succession of crimes and right-wing betrayals documented by
Bramble and Kuhn, and which has – at least until more recently – kept a tight
grip on the allegiance of a majority of workers as well as drawing sections of the
radical Left towards operating beneath the party’s shadow. The authors never
satisfactorily explain the ALP’s ability to hold onto working-class allegiances
beyond its organisational ties to unionised workers and its ideological appeal
to their ‘contradictory consciousness’ under capitalism (p. 192).
The very structure of the book reflects this weakness. Important Left and
Marxist debates about the nature of the ALP are passed over in brief while
a barrage of historical data – some obscure – is used in what seems to be an
attempt to remove the scales from the eyes of the non-Marxist reader and

convince them that the only alternative is social(ist) revolution. Unlike the
intellectuals who wrote Labor’s Conflict and who know how bad Labor is, and
despite their statements that workers’ consciousness can change on a mass
scale in the course of the class struggle, Australian workers come across as
utterly duped by Labourism. If the most class-conscious workers most strongly
identify with the ALP (at least electorally) what hope then for a project of
revolutionary transformation of Australian society?
To sustain this Bramble and Kuhn downplay the tactical flexibility available
to Labor politicians to cohere the party’s social base. I cite two examples to
illustrate this. In the first, the authors write of the Whitlam Opposition prior
to 1972:
Labor’s attitude to strikes while in opposition was indicative of the

political environment at the time – the Party’s leaders sought to ride
the tiger, the better to rein it in. In opposition, [Shadow Industrial
Relations Minister Clyde] Cameron defended the right to strike against
the penal powers. But this was not the same as encouraging strikes. Far
from it. ALP leaders portrayed the Party’s links with the trade unions
as the means by which it could more effectively restrain working class
militancy than the Coalition. (p. 87.)
Yet as Ashley Lavelle has made clear in his exhaustive study (referenced by the
authors) of Labor in opposition, party MPs and even Whitlam himself shifted
rapidly towards supporting and even encouraging strike action:
Thus, as early as 1968, Senator James Ormonde concluded: ‘Strikes, plus

parliamentary action, are the best way to get things done for those people
who still work for a living’. In the wake of the O’Shea dispute, even the
right-wing Lance Barnard conceded that the belief common amongst
unionists that more could be achieved through industrial rather than
parliamentary action, was not without substance, even if it ignored
the need for a Labor government to implement health, education and
housing reforms crucial to workers’ standard of living. Jim Cavanagh
suggested that ‘strike action to stop the profits of employers . . . is the only
action that the employer seems to understand when workers are under
government domination’. Don Cameron referred to the case of shift
workers in the cement manufacturing industry in South Australia: ‘The
employees in that industry asked me how they were going to get an extra
week’s leave . . . I said: “The only way you will get it is to go on strike. You
will not get it any other way”.’ . . . Clyde Cameron argued that the ‘strike

172 Tietze
is the only weapon for which the opponents of labour have real respect’,
listing landmark gains . . . as achievements won directly through strike
action.10
In the second example, Bramble and Kuhn acknowledge that Labor Premier
Jack Lang was able to mobilise mass working-class support for his challenge
to the federal Labor Government’s austerity programme during the Great
Depression. Lang’s actions led to the most significant split in the party’s
history, with Lang Labor organisations being set up in several states. Yet in their
haste to demonstrate the limits of Lang’s project – the government made quite
daring reforms to soften the impact of the crisis on sections of its working-
class social base, but without seriously challenging capitalist control over the
economy – Bramble and Kuhn end up downplaying the significance of a major
left-wing split.
Disappointingly, Bramble and Kuhn give only a schematic description of
the forces involved, in particular the way that Lang’s ascension to the Labor
leadership rested on his connections to left-wing unions which had until the
onset of crisis in 1929 been pursuing militant industrial action. The authors
reference Geoff Robinson’s recent revisionist account of Lang’s government, but
they essentially ignore his detailed consideration of the complex mechanisms
of transmission of class pressures, reducing Lang’s reforms to being made
‘under pressure from the unions and the working class’ (p. 49). Robinson
outlines several key processes. First, radical union officials turned to a political
solution – a radical reforming Labor government – in the face of the enormity
of the economic crisis and resultant collapse in industrial struggle. Second,
because they were under direct pressure from their members, the officials
continued to exert strong pressure within the ALP to keep Lang focused on
progressive reforms, and so despite their commitment to the government were
willing to risk both a split and tensions with Lang himself. But, finally, their
more radical position on the crisis was not enough to break free of the political
limits of the ALP (or a left-wing split) capturing the existing state for radical
ends, including in some cases getting tied up in the workings of the state, for
example being recruited to draft legislation.11
The point of these two examples is not to exaggerate the radicalism of
Labor politicians’ or union leaders’ words and actions, but to understand that
workers’ allegiance to Labor represents more than just a matter of class identity
or contradictory consciousness. Rather, it is to grasp how the ALP has been
10 Lavelle 2004, pp. 86–7.

11 Robinson 2008.

and remains a political focus mediated through complex, formal and informal,
networks of social relations including its crucial strategic relationship to the
state. This is Labourism as a set of durable political institutions rather than as
mere ideology.
Labourism and Australian Politics
The ALP has, moreover, been central to the institutional shape of Australian
politics as a whole. For instance, the rival protectionist and free-trade parties
that existed at the beginning of last century rapidly moved to settle their
differences once the ALP’s electoral strength became apparent.12 Unfortunately,
Labor’s Conflict does not explicitly address why bourgeois politics was so
quickly dominated by Labourism – whether it had more to do with the social
weight of the unions or the historically-weak bourgeois political traditions in
British colonies that had developed through state intervention much more
than private enterprise.13
Labor’s hegemonic position also shaped the development of more
radical political formations. While Labor’s Conflict rejects a variety of non-
revolutionary alternatives to the ALP, the authors engage surprisingly briefly
with the history of dissenting left-wing currents inside and outside the party
that garnered significant working-class support. This is particularly stark when
the authors come to describe another feature of the Lang era, ‘the most serious
left wing in the Party’s history, the Socialisation Units, [which] agitated for
“socialism in our time”.’ (p. 47.) Despite its mass character in NSW and political
importance, they devote fewer than three pages to the phenomenon. Yet this is
surely a key episode in understanding the possibilities and limits of a radical
socialist project within the party (pp. 50–3).
There is also little about the Communist Party’s relationship with the
ALP. Bramble and Kuhn do not mention the early CPA’s Comintern-inspired
entryism into the NSW Labor Party, and only pick up the thread to briefly
criticise Third Period sectarianism (leaders of the Socialisation Units, for
example, were called ‘left social fascists’) (p. 53). Key debates in the Comintern
over the approach Marxists should take towards Labor and how they impacted
on the Australian party are not mentioned. The CPA’s rapid growth in the
Depression and WWII is only described as background to the subsequent anti-
Communist manoeuvres within Labor and the unions. At its peak the CPA
12 Griffiths 1998.

13 See Beilharz 1994 for a discussion of the latter point.

174 Tietze
had 20,000 members and significant roots inside the working class, including
leadership positions in key unions. While electorally unsuccessful, Communist
militants worked closely and competitively with Labor supporters in the midst
of important struggles. Yet little is said of the relative strengths and weaknesses
of this work.
Similarly, the CPA’s shift from leading militant industrial action in the 1960s
to providing the intellectual and organisational framework for drawing union
militants towards alternative economic strategies resting on wage restraint
by the late 1970s is mentioned but not analysed. Especially through the
Communists’ control of the main manufacturing union, there was a process
of adapting union policy to a project of resolving the economic crisis through
a strategic (and allegedly temporary) compromise with the state and capital
designed to expand industry and deliver a social wage in the place of direct
wage rises. British economist Stuart Holland’s work on socialist plans – later
central to Tony Benn’s vision of a radical Labour Party during his run for the
deputy leadership in the early 1980s – was widely read and became influential
in Left thinking about the crisis. Networks of intellectuals and union leaders
outside the ALP but oriented on it laid the basis for the later success of the
Hawke government in convincing union activists to accept sacrifice in the
national interest. For many activists influenced by these discussions, the
Accord was seen as the first step towards some kind of socialist transformation
of society. Even before Whitlam’s dismissal, Marxist political economists Bob
Catley and Bruce McFarlane could both attack Whitlam for his pro-market
‘technocratic Laborism’ while excitedly declaring that the crisis meant ‘the
unions for the first time have been forced to discuss how to run the country’.14
The omission of such debates is curious given that Kuhn previously criticised
alternative economic strategies from a Marxist standpoint, especially as they
became increasingly hegemonic in radical-left thinking in the late 1970s and
early 1980s.15
Also passed over are more trenchant New Left critiques, like Marxist historian
Humphrey McQueen’s work on the social origins of the ALP’s chauvinism and
pro-imperialism in what he claimed was the distinctively petit-bourgeois
character of the colonial-settler state’s working class or, later, his attempt to
situate it in a novel periodisation of the development of Australian capitalism.16
His lines of inquiry also raise the question of why changes to Australian
14 Catley and McFarlane 1975, p. 265.

15 Kuhn 1982.
16 McQueen 1970; McQueen 1986.

capitalism and its working class have not more seriously threatened the party’s
basic constitution, which was formed in a radically different historical period.
In their concluding assessment of the material basis of Labor’s most recent
troubles another weakness in the ‘capitalist workers’ party’ schema becomes
clear. While the formulation focuses on the internal balance of ALP politics
on the basis of concretely examining the balance of economic conditions
and class forces, it says much less about the relative efficacy of representative
politics in shaping Australian society in different historical periods. Thus,
the decay of Labor’s traditional base is treated as weakening the hold of the
union leaders on the party but not as qualitatively undermining the party’s
efficacy in incorporating subaltern groups into the functioning of the state.
One consequence is that the Greens party is criticised as not being a real
alternative without the historic and practical political significance of such a
major disruption to Labor’s traditional base being considered.17
Bramble and Kuhn note the downward trend in ALP votes since the last
high-point of the 1980s, but their schema emphasises the party’s stability as the
focus of reformist consciousness, as opposed to the possibility of institutional
unravelling. Such an unravelling seems to have progressed in the period
after the book concludes its narrative, with ALP support falling to lows not
seen since the Great Depression in NSW, Queensland and Tasmanian state
elections – and in national opinion polling while Gillard was leader – despite
Australia having avoided recession after the global financial crisis. That is,
without a sharp change either in economic conditions or the balance of the
class struggle, the ALP has stared into the electoral abyss in a way matched only
by social-democratic parties in Europe in the context of having implemented
austerity, such as in France, Spain or (most dramatically) Greece. The
Australian example suggests that in fact the political weaknesses of reformist
parties through the neoliberal era may not represent merely the latest swing of
the so-called ‘political cycle’ but a secular hollowing-out of the political system
that dominated the twentieth century, with potentially dramatic consequences
for how more radical projects for social change are likely to develop – including
the rise of openly ‘anti-political’ movements and parties.18
By focusing on Labor’s internal constitution, then, Labor’s Conflict is a
book on Australian politics that lacks a theory of politics in general. Perhaps
more surprisingly for a Marxist account it also fails to engage with Marx’s
own critique of politics and the state, developed in detail in his early writings,
and which served as the jumping-off point for his later anatomisation of civil
17 For an alternative view, see Tietze 2010 and 2013.

18 Humphrys and Tietze 2013.

176 Tietze
society via a critique of political economy. In those texts, mostly written in the
period 1842–7, there is a sophisticated theory not only of the structure and
dynamics of politics in capitalist society, but also a method of penetrating
beneath the separation of civil society and state characteristic of modernity.19
In these writings Marx subjects early liberal political theory – such as that
developed by Hegel – to searching criticism and uncovers how it reproduces at
the level of thought the abstraction of real social relations in the political state,
so that the state appears to represent the general interests of society when in
fact it acts in its own particular interests as the state of a civil society made
up of competing private interests. In the process Marx criticises the limits of
popular sovereignty, representative democracy, political and legal equality,
and the inability of politics to correct fundamental social ills.20
Application of some of these arguments to the specific historical and
institutional features of the Labor Party may have helped illuminate the
limits of the Labourist project in terms of delivering for the social interests
of the working class beyond a recitation of its historical failure to do so. It
may also have allowed for a richer and clearer picture of exactly what kind of
social alternative would be needed to break through the conservatising grip
of bourgeois politics on the workers’ movement. Instead there is a tendency
towards an instrumental and reductionist account in Labor’s Conflict, where
politics reflects in relatively unmediated form the class interests of the
bourgeoisie, such as when the reader is repeatedly served variations on the
theme of Labor putting the interests of the capitalist class/capital/capitalism
first (pp. 16, 18, 58, 64, 67, 68, 71, 81, 117, 143, 182, 183, 184). In fact, as the Left
debates of the 1970s showed, the motivation of many (if not most) of the
people around the left of the ALP and unions was how to use entry into
the state as a way to take the whole of society forward in a period of social and
political instability and crisis. This can be seen in the aforementioned example
of Labor leaders’ willingness to encourage industrial action from opposition
before 1972, behaviour too radical to fit neatly into Bramble and Kuhn’s model
of a capitalist workers’ party. The point is that politicians were willing to argue
for workers’ self-activity against employers and even against the legal limits set
on such activity by conservative governments, precisely because the ultimate
resolution of these issues would have to be a political and legislative one
under a Labor government. Once Whitlam was in office, workers (and their
union leaders’ inability to rein in their claims) became a barrier for the state to
overcome in governing Australian society as a whole – a capitalist society that
19 Colletti 1975; Teeple 1984; Thomas 1994.

20 Marx 1975.

needed to reproduce itself for its state (and that state’s political class) to also
have its interests preserved.
Further, while Bramble and Kuhn’s observation that workers’ reformist
consciousness has roots in social relations of production (‘economics’) is
abstractly correct, it does not explain why such consciousness does not always
lead to support for Labor-style parties. It is here that Labor’s Conflict could have
benefited from comparing the Australian experience with similar and different
scenarios overseas. Indeed, the ALP is often seen as a model with which to
contrast arrangements such as that in the United States where openly bourgeois
parties are the only mainstream choices.21 This could also have led to further
interrogation of the specificities of class structure, patterns of class struggle
and statal incorporation of workers’ organisations and interests at the level of
centralised industrial arbitration, legal structures and political opportunities.
A more systematic critique of the democratic bourgeois politics to which
the ALP is committed would also have guarded against a tendency to present the
most right-wing arguments and actions by Labor leaders as representative of
the party overall (a tendency which starts in the Introduction via the cautionary
tale of Trotskyist turned union boss turned neoliberal state treasurer Michael
Costa). Labor’s Conflict is unlikely to shift the views of those committed to a
parliamentary road to socialism, who will continue to be able to claim that
alternative choices were available to Labor leaders and that the problem is
that a more principled or left-wing kind of leadership was needed. Finally, to
Marxists and other leftists who would prefer entry into or close relations with
parties like the ALP because that is where the majority of workers have tended
to look politically, Labor’s Conflict provides no guidance as to what alternatives
they have except the narrow project of building up Marxist forces in relative
isolation from Labor politics until a change in the balance of class forces
transpires. Greater critical engagement with each of these rival views would,
in my view, have strengthened the book’s central argument.
Conclusion
The ALP in particular and Labourism more generally are historically pro-
capitalist phenomena, and it is in making this clear that Labor’s Conflict
makes a vital contribution. The book’s strengths are in its clear exposition of
this record and in suggesting a materialist explanation for this state of affairs,
21 See, for example, Archer 2010.

178 Tietze
in particular the proposition that the party is trapped within a foundational

contradiction as a capitalist workers’ party.
Where the book is weaker is in synthesising this analysis with more specific
understandings of the patterns of political struggle, within the sphere of
parliamentarism and inside the working class more generally. In their rush
to dismiss reformism the authors fall short of satisfactorily explaining its
hegemonic status, both ideologically and in terms of the way it has adapted
itself to a (political) sphere of struggle that cannot be reduced to the internal
constitution of the ALP or the rhythms of the industrial action. There is
much rich and suggestive material in their account, although at times this
produces cognitive dissonance when the historical processes do not match the
theoretical architecture.
Bramble and Kuhn correctly argue that a ‘serious challenge to Labor can,
therefore, only emerge from a wave of working class struggle and the confidence
that this can bring.’ (p. 193.) They effectively imply that the combination of
a revolutionary organisation of sufficient size and ripened conditions will be
enough to do the job. Yet because this aspect remains undeveloped and, further,
is unconnected with a more rounded Marxist critique of politics, a teleological
air hangs over the disappointments and tragic outcomes they describe. It is a
surprisingly pessimistic outlook for a book that is premised on contributing to
a serious alternative to Labor’s disastrous repetition-compulsion.
References
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Beilharz, Peter 1994, Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade in
Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bramble, Tom 2008, Trade Unionism in Australia: A History from Flood to Ebb Tide,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——— and Rick Kuhn 2010, ‘Making Capitalism Acceptable? The Economic Policy of
Australian Social Democracy since the 1970s’, Marxism 21, 7, 4: 306–38.
Catley, Bob and Bruce McFarlane 1975, ‘Technocratic Laborism – The Whitlam
Government’, in Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, Volume
One, edited by E.L. Wheelwright and Ken Buckley, Sydney: Australia and New
Zealand Book Company.
Cavalier, Rodney 2010, Power Crisis: The Self Destruction of a State Labor Party,
Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Colletti, Lucio 1975, ‘Introduction’, in Marx 1975.

Dyrenfurth, Nick and Tim Soutphommasane (eds.) 2010, All That’s Left: What Labor
Should Stand For, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
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Howes, Paul 2010, Confessions of a Faceless Man: Inside Campaign 2010, Melbourne:
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Present, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kuhn, Rick 1982, ‘Alternative Strategies: Left Nationalism and Revolutionary Marxism’,
Journal of Australian Political Economy, 12/13: 93–109.
——— 1993, ‘The Limits of Social Democratic Economic Policy in Australia’, Capital &
Class, 17, 3: 17–52.
——— 2007, Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism, Chicago: University of
Illinois Press.
——— (ed.) 2005, Class and Struggle in Australia, Frenchs Forest: Pearson.
——— and Tom O’Lincoln (eds.) 1996, Class & Class Conflict in Australia, Melbourne:
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dissertation, School of Politics and Public Policy, Griffith University, Brisbane,
available at: <https://www120.secure.griffith.edu.au/rch/file/4389fdc1-e1a4-5457-
925d-237c48598b8e/1/01Front.pdf>.
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Collected Works, Volume 31, Moscow: Progress Publishers, available at: <https://
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm#fw6>.
——— 1977 [1913], ‘In Australia’, in Collected Works, Volume 19, Moscow: Progress
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13.htm>.
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Neo-Liberalism & the Urgency of Change, Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda.
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Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, Revised Edition, Ringwood:
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Robinson, Geoff 2008, When the Labor Party Dreams: Class, Politics and Policy in NSW,
1930–2, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing.
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Teeple, Gary 1984, Marx’s Critique of Politics, 1842–1847, Toronto: University of Toronto
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——— 2013, ‘A Change in the Order of Things’, Overland, 212: 19–27.

brill.com/hima
Republicanism and the Irish Left

Daniel Finn
Independent Researcher
danfinn2@gmail.com
Abstract
The Irish national revolution of 1916–23 left behind a partitioned island, with a
northern segment that remained part of the United Kingdom and a southern ‘Free
State’ – later to become a Republic – that was dominated by conservative forces. Most
of those who had been involved in the struggle for national independence peeled off
to form new parties in the 1920s, leaving behind a rump of militant Irish republicans.
Sinn Féin and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army, would pose the greatest
threat to political stability in the two Irish states. Although the Irish left has historically
been among the weakest in Western Europe, repeated attempts have been made
to fuse republicanism with socialism, from the Republican Congress in the 1930s to
the Official Republican Movement of the 1970s and ’80s. At present, Sinn Féin poses
the main electoral challenge to the conservative parties in the southern state, while
holding office in a devolved administration north of the border. Eoin Ó Broin’s Sinn
Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism offers an assessment of these efforts from
a leading Sinn Féin activist who maintains a certain critical distance from his own
party’s approach, while The Lost Revolution by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar and INLA:
Deadly Divisions give comprehensive accounts of two earlier left-republican projects.
Keywords
Ireland – IRA – Sinn Féin – imperialism – nationalism – left parties – guerrilla

warfare
Eoin Ó Broin, Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism, London: Pluto
Press, 2009

182 Finn
Henry McDonald and Jack Holland, INLA: Deadly Divisions, Dublin: Poolbeg
Press Ltd., 2010
Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA
and the Workers’ Party, Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2009
European officials have taken to presenting Ireland as a success story among

the nations of the Eurozone periphery. Their praise for Ireland is an implicit
rebuke to the citizens of Spain and (especially) Greece, who have shown a
greater propensity to march, strike and occupy public space since the crisis
began.
This image of an acquiescent citizen-body cheerfully shouldering a burden
of private bank debt that was plainly not theirs to bear does not fully accord
with reality. Electoral turbulence has borne witness to the volatility of popular
opinion. Fianna Fáil, the most successful political party in modern European
history, was decimated in the first post-crisis election, falling from 77 seats
in 2007 to 20 four years later and losing all but one of its seats in the capital,
Dublin. In the election that followed, support for the two government parties,
Fine Gael and Labour, fell by 23 per cent. Fianna Fáil staged a modest recovery,
but the combined vote of the two centre-right parties fell below 50 per cent for
the first time (during the last prolonged recession in the 1980s, their average
score was 79 per cent). Support for left-wing parties has risen sharply, albeit
from a low historic base. From the autumn of 2014 onwards, the conservative
establishment has also had to confront a vibrant protest movement against
water charges.1 The strongest political challenge to the pro-austerity consensus
has come from Sinn Féin, a party which eludes most of the familiar categories
of West European politics.
This is what makes Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism such a
valuable work. While previous studies of left-wing republicanism have been
the work of unsympathetic historians,2 in this case we have a view from the
inside. The book’s author, Eoin Ó Broin, is a long-standing Sinn Féin activist
who was elected to the Irish Dáil as MP for the Dublin Mid-West constituency
in 2016. It is not the first time a prominent Sinn Féin member has published a
book outlining their political vision. Yet there is a marked difference between
the readable expositions of party policy delivered by Gerry Adams3 and the
critical, reflective approach taken by Ó Broin in this work. The contrast can
1 Finn 2015.
2 English 1994; Patterson 1997.
3 Adams 1986; Adams 2005.

Republicanism and the Irish Left 183
be seen in the bibliographies offered by Adams and Ó Broin: while the Sinn
Féin leader drew on the work of left-wing writers sympathetic to the goals of
Irish nationalism, Ó Broin includes some of its sternest critics. Sinn Féin and
the Politics of Left Republicanism is far more than an affirmation of traditional
republican perspectives: it represents one of the first serious attempts to answer
the revisionist challenge in Irish historiography without simply endorsing
its claims.
‘Revisionism’ in the Irish academy has directed its fire at nationalist
orthodoxy since the 1970s, presenting a view of modern Irish history that
gives internal factors precedence over the machinations of the British state.
While some of its polemical thrusts had a salutary effect, the positive impact of
the revisionist school has long since been outweighed by a tendency to absolve
Britain of responsibility for its interventions in Irish affairs. Ó Broin deserves
credit for advancing a perspective that gives due weight to internal sources
of conflict and division without removing British agency from the picture.
As a corrective to the revisionist school, however, Sinn Féin and the Politics of
Left Republicanism is constrained on two fronts. Firstly, it has been conceived
by Ó Broin as a study of left-wing republicanism, not as a general account of
modern Ireland, and is necessarily selective in its coverage of Irish history as
a result. Secondly, and more importantly, the book is almost entirely based on
secondary material. Although this does not negate its value, there are points
where Ó Broin, while disputing the interpretation of the revisionists, is too
dependent on their scholarship. Sinn Féin . . . is best seen as an initial venture
into a field that will have to be supplemented by original research.
Connolly’s Legacy
While the first section of the book is devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century nationalist movements, Ó Broin dates the ‘arrival of left republicanism’
proper to the close of the nineteenth century and the emergence of James
Connolly on the Irish political scene. This periodisation is dubious and runs
against the grain of Ó Broin’s subsequent arguments. While Connolly was
fully committed to the goal of Irish independence, which he considered an
essential part of any socialist programme for the island, he did not identify
with the republican tradition as such. Connolly spent most of his adult life
as a full-time labour activist, only joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood a
few weeks before the Easter Rising that carried him to his death. His decision
to join the IRB was a matter of convenience, allowing him to participate fully
in the conclaves that decided on strategy for the Rising. Future left-republican

184 Finn
activists would come to socialism via republicanism, yet Connolly followed the
opposite trajectory, and never embraced the Fenian school of politics in toto.
The role played by Connolly in the Rising has long been the most controversial
episode in his career, dividing the opinion of biographers: while Desmond
Greaves saw his alliance with non-socialist republicans as an embrace of
stages-theory avant la lettre,4 Austen Morgan presented it as a departure from
the socialist tradition to embrace romantic bourgeois nationalism.5 Ó Broin
rightly dismisses both interpretations: the picture drawn by Greaves of a
Connolly who favoured alliances with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ to complete
the first stage of the Irish revolution owed far more to the doctrine of the
CPGB – of which he was a lifelong member – than it did to Connolly’s own
writings, while Morgan was wrong to speak of a bald contradiction between
nationalism and socialism in the Irish context. Connolly’s decision to join
forces with the IRB was a tactical move dictated by the narrowing of political
horizons after the defeat suffered by the Dublin labour movement in 1913 and
the general capitulation of European socialism the following year: ‘Caught in
the specific political moment, with the available options limited to participating
in an alliance with advanced nationalists and republicans or remaining on the
margins of what was becoming one of the central dynamics of Irish politics,
Connolly’s political instincts drove him towards rebellion.’6 He would certainly
have preferred to strike a blow against British rule with a political organisation
wholeheartedly committed to socialism, but his failure to construct such a
vehicle over the previous two decades dictated a coalition with the IRB.
That failure is explained by Ó Broin largely as the result of a flawed
ideological template, which combined Second International Marxism with
the Fenian demand for independence yet overlooked the agrarian character of
Irish society and rendered Connolly’s project incapable of mobilising support.
There is some merit in the charge, but Connolly had more to say about rural
Ireland than one would gather from Ó Broin’s account, and the futility of
his endeavours is exaggerated in these pages. Ó Broin dismisses Connolly’s
three outings as an electoral candidate, giving the number but not the
percentage of votes won: as one reviewer has noted, ‘far from being paltry
failures, those figures represent votes of 21 per cent, 19 per cent and 37 per cent
respectively, support any socialist would be proud of’.7 He has rather more to
say about Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party (a marginal group which
4 Greaves 1987.
5 Morgan 1989.
6 Ó Broin 2009, pp. 93–4.
7 Connaughton 2009.

never had much more than 80 members) than about the Irish Transport and
General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), a powerful syndicalist force which Connolly
and Jim Larkin led into confrontation with the Irish bourgeoisie.
Both sides in the Dublin lock-out of 1913 understood it as a contest that
would determine which class held the initiative under the expected Home
Rule parliament. Ó Broin refers to ‘the failure of either the ISRP or Connolly’s
other investments to become anything resembling an important national
political force’, and claims that ‘Connolly’s political life ended as it had
started, advocating a marginal ideological position, connected primarily with
organizations that had little popular support or meaningful political impact.’8
This judgement can only be sustained if we ignore the ITGWU, which was
knocked back but not finished off by the employers’ victory in 1913, entering
into a phase of dramatic growth during the revolutionary period which
followed Connolly’s execution.
The Two Souls of Left Republicanism
The true arrival of left republicanism can be more usefully dated to the
final phase of the national revolution. While there were socialists active in
the movement for national independence – notably Peadar O’Donnell, the
Donegal IRA commander who would become the dominant figure of inter-war
left-republicanism – they had little impact on its overall direction: O’Donnell
switched from trade-union agitator to guerrilla chief without any direct
articulation between the two roles. It was after the split in the nationalist
movement provoked by the Anglo-Irish Treaty that one of the leading anti-
Treaty republicans, Liam Mellows, urged his comrades to shift leftwards.
Mellows would soon go before a Free State firing squad, and his Jail Notes were
mainly influential after his death: while the Civil War of 1922–3 lasted, most
Treaty opponents eschewed commitments of the sort Mellows was demanding.
Ó Broin notes the contrast between Connolly and Mellows, which he
considers representative of an enduring dichotomy in left-wing republican
thought. While Connolly was ‘in the first and final instance, a Marxist’ for whom
‘national independence was a means to an end, namely socialist revolution’,9
Mellows was a much more conventional Fenian:
8 Ó Broin 2009, pp. 101, 105.

9 Ó Broin 2009, p. 294.

186 Finn
His radicalization did not come from an understanding of the relationship

between capitalism and Empire, from readings of socialist literature or
involvement in working-class struggle, but from the disappointment at
the outcome of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. What became clear to Mellows,
while in jail, was that when the independence movement split, it split as
much on class lines as anything else. His response was to encourage the
mobilization of the country’s dispossessed to the cause of the republic.
For Mellows, socialism was a means to an end, namely nationalist
revolution.10
For this very reason, it makes little sense to identify Connolly as the progenitor
of left republicanism, although he certainly provided many intellectual
resources for republicans contemplating a left turn. For Connolly, the idea
that one could tack left or right depending on the broader context would have
been perverse. That option remained open to Mellows, however, with national
independence as his guiding star.
The first attempt to win over the republican movement to a left-wing
perspective was made by Peadar O’Donnell in the late 1920s, following the
departure of Éamon de Valera and his supporters to establish Fianna Fáil.
O’Donnell’s own path from the ITGWU to the IRA put him closer to Connolly
than to Mellows, and there was no doubting the strength of his personal
commitment to socialism. Yet O’Donnell’s apparent success – the IRA agreed
to launch a political party, Saor Éire, with a clear anti-capitalist programme –
masked the continued dominance of a pragmatic centre in the movement.
Its leader Moss Twomey was willing to give O’Donnell and the IRA’s left wing
a chance to prove the merit of their strategy, but when the launch of Saor
Éire was met by a ferocious Red Scare, the centre got cold feet and dumped
the entire project. O’Donnell and his supporters soon decamped to launch the
Republican Congress as a separate organisation.
Ó Broin is correct to describe the Congress as ‘a profound break with the
strategic direction of left republicanism from the mid-1920s’.11 Its assertion
that ‘a Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a
struggle that uproots capitalism on its way’ placed the new organisation on the
same ground as Connolly. Although there was no reason per se why graduates
of the Fenian tradition would find it impossible to make such a comprehensive
break, it was telling that many of the leading figures in the Congress had cut
10 Ó Broin 2009, pp. 294–5.

11 Ó Broin 2009, p. 138.

their political teeth in the working-class movement. The Congress began

impressively – Ó Broin cites membership estimates ranging between 6,000 and
10,000 – but did not last to the end of the decade.
A damaging split at its first major conference divided the movement, with
camps forming around two main issues: whether the Congress should declare
its goal to be a ‘Workers’ Republic’, and whether it should organise as a broad
front or as a party. Yet sheer exhaustion among its leaders after two decades
of hectic political work may have been as much of a factor in the decline of
the Congress. Ó Broin is surely right to conclude that a significant left-wing
challenge to Fianna Fáil during its first decade in office was never on the cards,
given the success of de Valera’s party in forging a broad social coalition of the
Irish working and middle classes, rural and urban, behind its banner. Yet while
the Republican Congress was in no position to bid for power, its failure to
produce a lasting organisational legacy constitutes one of the great ‘what ifs’
of twentieth-century Irish history: in time, a section of Fianna Fáil’s popular
base would become disillusioned with its drift towards conservative politics,
but the socialist republicanism of the Congress would not be available as an
alternative pole of attraction. Instead, de Valera was challenged by Clann
na Poblachta, which attempted to revive the early Fianna Fáil project in the
late ’40s. Bearing the same contradictions as the original model, yet facing a
much more crowded political landscape, the Clann was soon absorbed into the
conservative mainstream and withered into irrelevance.
The Return of Left Republicanism
Left-wing republicanism of any sort was absent from the Irish political
scene until the 1960s, when the IRA’s new chief-of-staff Cathal Goulding
returned to the ideas of Peadar O’Donnell after the failed Border Campaign of
1956–62. Goulding’s project is usually discussed as a preliminary to the birth
of Ó Broin’s movement, the Provisionals. Yet for a time, the Provisional claim to
the republican legacy was fiercely disputed by two rival groups, the Official IRA
and the Irish Republican Socialist Party. These are the subjects respectively of
The Lost Revolution and INLA: Deadly Divisions, the only books published thus
far to give a comprehensive account of their histories.
Deadly Divisions is a new edition of a hard-to-find book first published in
1994, the work of two Northern Irish journalists with excellent sources within
republican circles. The Lost Revolution has been produced by two younger
writers: Millar is a reporter, Hanley an academic historian whose main previous

188 Finn
work was an account of the inter-war IRA.12 This partially reflects a passing
of the torch from journalism to academia in the study of republicanism during
the 1969–97 conflict, as archival records become available to supplement
traditional source materials. The Lost Revolution makes far more extensive
use of such records than Deadly Divisions: McDonald’s updating of the latter
book – Holland passed away in 2004 – is purely chronological, and he does not
seem to have drawn on British government papers which have been released
since the first edition. Both works are largely descriptive, abstaining from the
detailed analysis and evaluation which characterises Ó Broin’s effort.
The splits which saw three organisations – the Provisionals, the Official IRA
and the IRSP – emerge from the ’60s republican movement were all determined
by events in Northern Ireland. The main field of IRA activity had shifted north
over time: while the primary focus of the inter-war movement had been
opposition to the Free State established by the Treaty, the Border Campaign had
concentrated on challenging British rule in the North. The partition settlement
of the 1920s which created the Northern Irish statelet left a large, disaffected
nationalist minority within its boundaries. They were the victims of systematic
discrimination at the hands of the Unionist government, which had at its
disposal a paramilitary police force and a legislative tool – the Special Powers
Act – that gave it virtually unlimited authority to stifle opposition.
The sectarian divisions of Northern Ireland posed a major difficulty for
left-wing republicans. The goal of uniting ‘Catholic, Protestant [Anglican] and
Dissenter [Presbyterian]’ in a common struggle for national independence
was inherited by modern republicanism from its icon Wolfe Tone, leader
of the eighteenth-century United Irishmen. Tone’s Jacobin movement had
actually managed to win a good deal of support in Protestant Ulster before it
was drowned in blood by the Crown authorities, but no separatist group had
made any such inroads in the century-and-a-half since. James Connolly left
an ambiguous intellectual legacy on the subject. Two contrasting answers to
the northern conundrum were available in his work: the credo of the United
Irishmen could be retained and reformulated in Marxist terminology, making
it essential to win support from working-class Protestants if partition was to be
ended; or it could be dismissed as an irrelevance. There was also a third option,
one that was furiously rejected by Connolly: to accept the Union and seek to
advance the cause of labour within the existing constitutional framework.
That approach had been followed by the Northern Ireland Labour Party and
even by the local Communists, whose influence in the trade-union movement
was more than negligible. Yet at this point it was anathema to republicans,
12 Hanley 2002.

including those who followed Goulding’s embrace of socialism. The ‘Workers’

Republic’ sought by the ’60s IRA was expected to include every inch of the
island’s territory.
Although support for the IRA’s leftwards turn was unevenly distributed
throughout the movement, the commitment of Goulding and his main allies
was unequivocal. This was far more than a tactical turn of the kind sanctioned
by Moss Twomey in the late ’20s. Goulding aimed to build a revolutionary-
socialist party that could overthrow capitalism in both parts of the island
from within the shell of the IRA. While this goal implied a much more serious
engagement in open political activity, it did not necessarily require any
dilution of the movement’s long-standing military role. The southern activist
Seamus Costello, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a leftist, politicised
republicanism, delivered the traditional speech on behalf of the IRA at Wolfe
Tone’s grave in 1966. He concluded by asserting that ‘the robber baron must
be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich himself and
retain his ill-gotten gains, namely force of arms . . . we must organize, train
and maintain a disciplined armed force which will always be available to strike
at the opportune moment.’13
Had its field of operations been confined to the South, the Gouldingite
IRA might have remained on the margins of Irish politics. It was the strategy
adopted by the movement north of the border that shook the foundations of
both Irish states. Republican activists were central to the formation of a civil-
rights campaign modelled on the US movement. The demand for civil rights
bypassed traditional anti-partitionist rhetoric, focusing on the sectarian and
discriminatory character of the northern state. Republican involvement in
such a campaign could be rationalised in two very different ways. On the one
hand it could be seen as an agitational tool that would rouse the nationalist
population if the Unionist government responded to modest calls for equality
under British rule with repression. In contrast, it could be understood as an
achievable programme that would create a new and more hospitable climate
in which republicans could work for broader goals – including Irish unity. At
the time, such distinctions were not as clear as they would become in hindsight,
and it was quite possible for individuals to waver between the two perspectives
on civil-rights agitation. Yet ultimately a choice would have to be made.
Within a remarkably short space of time, the civil-rights marches had
triggered the island’s biggest crisis since the 1920s. When police officers joined
with freelance unionist mobs to attack demonstrations, Northern Ireland was
pushed to the brink of civil war. The inter-communal violence of August 1969,
13 McDonald and Holland 2010, p. 10.

190 Finn
with Catholic areas of Derry in open revolt against the state and hundreds
of families driven from their homes in Belfast, prompted London to send in
the British Army. Although initially welcomed by Catholics as a protective
force, British soldiers soon developed a toxic relationship with nationalist
communities, as London’s policy of propping up the Unionist government
required aggressive action to impose ‘law and order’ on the turbulent minority.
For traditionally-minded republicans, this was a heaven-sent opportunity. The
Provisional IRA had been formed in the autumn of 1969 by those unhappy
with Goulding’s leadership of the movement: its army council bitterly accused
Goulding of running down the IRA and leaving Catholics defenceless the
previous August.
As the Provos moved from defensive to offensive tactics, the Official IRA was
under pressure to demonstrate that it, too, could bare its teeth. Some of its
main activists – notably Seamus Costello – would have agreed with the Provos
that the civil-rights campaign had served its purpose: now that the state had
exposed its true nature, a revolutionary struggle against British rule could
begin. The young recruits who flooded into the Official IRA as the new decade
began often thought the same way (albeit on a more instinctive level). Yet the
formal policy of Goulding’s movement was to seek reform of the northern state
and the full implementation of the civil-rights demands. There was little room
in this vision for a full-scale military campaign.
Wavering between these positions, the Official IRA adopted a policy of
‘defence and retaliation’: OIRA volunteers could take military action to protect
their areas and strike back against the Army, but would not move on to the
offensive. In practice such distinctions were hard to make: as one former
member of the OIRA leadership told Hanley and Millar, ‘there was so much
to retaliate for, there was so much defence, we couldn’t keep up, we were
effectively in an unplanned chaotic armed struggle without having decided to
be in one.’14 The Officials tried to revive the civil-rights campaign, arguing that
marches would prove more effective than bullets. When British paratroopers
fired on a demonstration against internment at the beginning of 1972, killing
thirteen civilians, it seemed likely that the Officials would adopt militarism
wholeheartedly: their initial response was to bomb the Paratroopers’ HQ
(the first republican bombing on British soil) and shoot a leading Unionist
politician. Within months, however, the OIRA had called a unilateral ceasefire,
and began winding down its military wing to concentrate exclusively on
political agitation.
14 Hanley and Millar 2009, p. 172.

Many years later, Goulding was to conclude that ‘we were definitely right,
but right too soon’15 in the decision to call a halt to the OIRA campaign.
A comparison with the Provos is instructive. When Gerry Adams nudged the
Provisional IRA towards a ceasefire in 1994, the political wing of the movement
had been established as a viable force since the early ’80s, giving republican
activists an alternative channel for their energies. The IRA campaign had
dragged on for more than two decades and it was becoming ever more difficult
to believe that victory was imminent. Even so, Adams had to acquiesce in the
short-lived decision to resume armed struggle two years later to avoid losing
control of the movement altogether, before a second, lasting ceasefire was
called in 1997. Goulding had none of these advantages: the political wing
of Official republicanism possessed no significant weight (its first electoral
outing in the North came a year after the ceasefire), and war-weariness had
yet to leave its mark. The civil-rights movement was now little more than an
Official front organisation, with radicals peeling off to concentrate on military
action and moderates departing for the safer ground of parliamentary politics.
It is hardly surprising that the Official ceasefire was followed by a major split
and the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, under the leadership
of Seamus Costello.
In keeping with their general approach, neither Deadly Divisions nor The
Lost Revolution devote much space to analysing the basis of the Official-IRSP
split (nor does Ó Broin: while Sinn Féin . . . contains a useful assessment of
the Officials, the IRSP only receives a couple of sentences). The rupture is
generally attributed to a disagreement about the utility of armed struggle, with
Costello and his supporters favouring a return to war. This is perfectly true,
but it neglects the underlying issue, a divergence of opinion about Protestant
Ulster which dictated varying strategies. For the Officials, partition could
only be ended through persuasion, by detaching a segment of working-class
Protestant opinion from the unionist bloc. Northern Ireland would first have to
be reformed and ‘normalised’, creating space for class politics to emerge. This
perspective seemed illusory to Costello: the IRSP did not consider it necessary to
win over Protestants from any class to its programme, deeming it imperative
to fight for an immediate British withdrawal and national reunification.
Costello argued that ‘normal’ class politics would never develop as long as
partition remained in place; in the meantime, a military campaign to destroy
the northern state was required. The founding conference of the IRSP was also
used to establish its military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA).

192 Finn
After parting company, both the Officials and the IRSP carried their
respective positions to a reductio ad absurdum. In the case of the Officials,
a desire to comprehend the unionist outlook was transmuted into a largely
uncritical endorsement of unionist ideology. Some of the movement’s leading
intellectuals were strongly influenced by the theoretical output of the British
and Irish Communist Organization, a peerlessly bizarre groupuscule whose
members were known as ‘Orange Marxists’ on account of their staunch
support for the unionist position in Northern Ireland (and surely the only self-
described ‘anti-revisionist’ sect to have won the praise of Enoch Powell). By the
1980s, the Officials – now repackaged as the Workers’ Party – would combine
vitriolic attacks on the Provos and the middle-class nationalism of the SDLP
with strong support for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Northern Ireland’s
position within the UK. This dramatic ideological shift made it virtually
impossible to retain support among working-class nationalists, while there
was little compensatory backing from the Protestant working class.
South of the border, however, the Officials had a more substantial impact,
for a time at least. By the end of the 1980s, there were seven Workers’ Party
TDs in the Dáil – six of them elected in Dublin constituencies, where the
party had overtaken Labour. In the course of abandoning traditional republican
perspectives on the northern conflict, the Officials had also discarded their
established view of the southern economy. Having previously condemned
Fianna Fáil’s break with protectionism in the 1950s and deplored the influx
of trans-national corporations that followed, they now saw foreign capital as
a progressive force in Irish society, creating the industrial proletariat that the
domestic bourgeoisie had been incapable of nurturing. Again, the influence of
BICO’s theoreticians was very much in evidence: Bill Warren, whose polemics
against dependency theory presented much the same case for economies of
the Global South,16 had been a member of the group. The finer details of this
analysis probably counted for less in establishing a political base than the
effective campaigning style that was developed by the party; neither could
protect it against the deluge of 1989. Eurocommunist in its domestic approach
but Brezhnevite when it came to international affairs, the Workers’ Party
was disorientated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and lost its bearings
altogether. A splinter group which took most of the parliamentary wing soon
merged with Labour, while the rump Workers’ Party has soldiered on, sharing
the politics of the Greek and Portuguese CPs though lacking their social weight.
Meanwhile, the IRSP/INLA became a purely militarist organisation which
viewed unionists as reactionary colons and was implicated in sectarian attacks
16 Warren 1980.

on Protestant civilians. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s the INLA was consumed
by violent internal feuding, while the IRSP was allowed to wither on the vine.
The dysfunctional character of the movement is well illustrated by an incident
recalled in Deadly Divisions. Seán Flynn, a Belfast IRSP leader, was elected to
Belfast city council during the 1981 hunger strike on a platform supporting the
republican prisoners. Gerard Steenson, a central figure in the Belfast INLA,
ordered him to hand over his seat to one of Steeson’s allies. When he refused,
INLA members loyal to Steenson attempted to kill him. Unsurprisingly, Flynn
ended up resigning both his seat and his membership of the IRSP.
Neither trajectory was pre-destined from the outset. Both organisations
were deeply marked by the feud which erupted soon after the IRSP’s birth.
The Officials lost their most senior Belfast commander, Billy McMillen; after
McMillen’s death, Seamus Costello was effectively a dead man walking, and
was killed by the OIRA in 1977. While Costello was still alive, his party had
lost the support of activists with a background in the Marxist left whose best-
known spokesperson was Bernadette McAliskey, the former civil-rights MP.
McAliskey pointed to the organisational flaws of the republican tradition,
noting the difficulties this would pose for any left-republican project:
The building of a working-class movement requires mass organization

on an open basis, with decisions being reached by rational argument and
full discussion, policy coming from the rank and file and being reflected
by the leadership. Because of its clandestine and militaristic nature,
participation in ‘the Movement’ demanded the exact opposite. Since the
survival of the organization, the safety, at times, of its members, depended
on personal loyalty, secrecy, unquestioning acceptance of directives
from above, it was virtually impossible to envisage the development of a
democratic mass organization from within.17
Costello brushed aside her call for the military wing to be subordinated to
political leadership. After his death, the INLA became a law unto itself, its
members generally holding unarmed political activity in contempt. Costello’s
desire to blend armed struggle with political action was neglected by the
movement he founded, but offered a template that was taken up by the Provos
under the leadership of Gerry Adams: as Holland and McDonald write,
Costello’s vision ‘was very much what Provisional Sinn Féin became from
the mid-1980s onwards . . . the kind of popular activism espoused by Costello
and developed by him in the council chambers of Bray was a forerunner of
17 McDonald and Holland 2010, pp. 103–4.

194 Finn
Provisional Sinn Féin’s own brand of nationalist working-class advocacy that

sprang up after the hunger strikes.’18
Although the Officials abandoned the militarism of the old IRA, they
never lost the organisational habits noted by McAliskey. Ironically, the forms
of traditional republicanism made it easier to discard its content: the policy
changes which saw the Officials reverse their former positions were driven
by a handful of party intellectuals and implemented largely behind the back
of the membership. Bloody clashes with the IRSP and the Provos made it
easier to win acceptance of a mutation that would distance the Officials from
insurrectionary republicanism. And it was a short distance from the military
centralism of the IRA to the ‘democratic centralism’ of Marxist-Leninist
orthodoxy.
Sinn Féin and the Left
The departure of the Officials and disintegration of the IRSP did not mark the
end of the left-republican tradition. The early history of the Provisionals had
been characterised by hostility to the ‘extreme socialism’ of the Official IRA,
with some of its communiqués possessing a strongly McCarthyite flavour. This
aversion to left-wing ideology was not shared by the younger northern Provos
who coalesced around Gerry Adams and displaced the old leadership of the
movement from the late ’70s on. Ó Broin’s assessment of Provo leftism is what
gives his book much of its immediate relevance. It is rare to find such frank
criticism of one’s own movement offered in public – even if that criticism is
sugared with generous praise for Sinn Féin’s accomplishments.
Ó Broin’s critique bases itself on the distinction between Connolly
and Mellows. The Provos, he contends, placed themselves firmly in the
latter tradition: ‘The national struggle was defined as Sinn Féin’s “primary
objective”, with democratic socialism relegated to the status of an “ultimate
objective” . . . the priority of the national over the social was always embedded
in the party’s ideology and strategy.’19 Long before the IRA ceasefire and the
peace process, Adams had divided the Irish revolution into two stages, with the
struggle for socialism to be postponed until full national independence had
been won. Following Desmond Greaves, he wrongly attributed this conception
to James Connolly.20 As a result, ‘the party’s socialism has been ambiguous,

19 Ó Broin 2009, p. 296.
20 Adams 1986.

underdeveloped and at times contradictory’.21 Ó Broin also describes an

organisational culture, rooted in the IRA campaign of the ’70s and ’80s, where
‘discipline and loyalty are often more highly valued than critical debate and
internal democracy’.22
Combined with the peculiarities of the two Irish states, the result has been a
movement with a split personality. North of the border, the peace process and
the Belfast Agreement have replaced ‘people’s war’ and the armed struggle as
Sinn Féin’s favoured tools for achieving national unity. With the stages-theory
no doubt lurking somewhere at the back of their minds, Adams and Martin
McGuinness have paid their respects to Wall Street and the White House
without a hint of embarrassment. The party has now completed a full term
in office with the neoliberal unionists of the DUP, administering Northern
Ireland’s devolved government within the financial limits set by London.
Doubly constrained from launching any radical reforms by their coalition
partners and the broader constitutional framework, the northern segment of
Sinn Féin shows little sign of chafing under its bonds. The party has been more
willing to clash with the DUP over cultural issues of interest to nationalists, such
as the status of the Irish language, than over economic issues of interest to the
working class. The main exception to this rule was the stand-off over welfare
cuts that generated considerable political friction in 2014–15, but which ended
in a climbdown by Sinn Féin’s northern leadership. The longer Sinn Féin has
spent immersed in the governing institutions, the more its leading cadres have
come to develop a material interest in their perpetuation – a process that has
been ably described by Kevin Bean in his study of the party’s evolution since
the 1980s,23 which traces the roots of this incorporation to the pre-ceasefire
period, when republican activists were gradually pulled into state-funded
community projects and recast as ‘political entrepreneurs’.
In the South, however, Sinn Féin has positioned itself to the left of the Irish
Labour Party, and gained support primarily as a voice of working-class protest.
While the Provos traditionally portrayed the southern state as a neo-colony
under the thumb of British imperialism, they have worked in recent years
on the implicit assumption that stage one of the Irish revolution has already
been completed in the South. This may be a unique instance of a movement
which has adopted a version of stages-theory trying to implement both stages
at the same time: unsurprisingly, it has led to much confusion. The northern
leadership of Sinn Féin intervened before the 2007 general election in the
21 Ó Broin 2009, p. 308.

22 Ó Broin 2009, p. 304.
23 Bean 2007.

196 Finn
South to push their southern comrades towards the political centre: a long-
established policy on corporation tax was scrapped in the final fortnight of the
campaign to leave open the possibility of a coalition with Fianna Fáil.
This was more than a superficial wobble. The Irish corporation tax-rate of
12.5 per cent has been elevated to cult status by opinion-formers in the South;
those who question its utility risk the same opprobrium that was directed
at economists who predicted a crash-landing for the property market. The
contribution that trans-national corporations make to the Irish economy
is greatly exaggerated by its status as a tax haven – the effective tax rate
for companies like Google and Microsoft is usually well below 1 per cent,
on declared profits that bear no relation to the productivity of their Irish
subsidiaries – but appeasement of foreign capital remains a central plank of
the southern ideological consensus. By genuflecting towards this cult, Sinn Féin
demonstrated their reluctance to challenge the Irish brand of neoliberalism on
its chosen ground.
As Ó Broin notes, the result was a major setback for the party’s southern
strategy, with expected gains dissolving into thin air. Another olive branch to
the establishment was proffered in September 2008, when Sinn Féin initially
voted to support Fianna Fáil’s bank guarantee. The party then tacked back to
the left and chalked up its best electoral performances since the 1920s, opposing
the EU-IMF deal imposed on the Irish state and proposing a radical economic
agenda. On the face of it, Ó Broin’s call for Sinn Féin to ‘develop and defend our
platform as a radical, left-wing republican party’24 had been accepted by the
Provo leadership. Yet the move was a tactical one. The deeper ideological shift
which he demands of the movement has not been made:
Sinn Féin needs to abandon the key ideological formulation that has
underpinned left republicanism since Mellows. We need to end the
hierarchy of objectives implied in the party’s ideology, policy and
strategy, and develop a new articulation of left republicanism that fully
integrates the national and socio-economic aspects of our struggle.
Failure to do so will ensure that our commitment to social and economic
change will also take second place and function as a subordinate strategic
imperative to that of political and constitutional change. The proposition
that national reunification is a prerequisite for the advancement of
democratic socialism is not only mistaken but falsely holds out the hope
of advancement of the national agenda in the short term.25
24 Ó Broin 2009, p. 283.

25 Ó Broin 2009, pp. 303–4.

This is the crux of the matter. Sinn Féin’s volte-face on tax before the 2007
election was dictated by its hunger for cabinet office. The party leadership
appears convinced that if Sinn Féin ministers are serving in government on
both sides of the Irish border, a major step towards national unity will have
occurred. In fact, the symbolic value of such a development would be much
greater than its practical import: Northern Ireland would remain firmly
anchored in the UK, and meetings between Sinn Féin politicians in cross-
border institutions would have about as much constitutional significance as
the presence of Green cabinet ministers from Scotland and the Irish Republic
at gatherings of the British-Irish Council. The single-minded pursuit of this
chimera can only result in the political emasculation of Sinn Féin.
The years to come are more likely to see a dilution of Sinn Féin’s programme
than the radicalisation called for by Ó Broin.
References
Adams, Gerry 1986, The Politics of Irish Freedom, Dingle: Brandon.

——— 2005, The New Ireland, Dingle: Brandon.
Bean, Kevin 2007, The New Politics of Sinn Féin, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press.
Connaughton, Maeve 2009, ‘What’s Left of Republicanism?’, Red Banner, 38: 2–9.
English, Richard 1994, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish
Free State, 1925–1937, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Finn, Daniel 2015, ‘Water Wars in Ireland’, New Left Review, II, 95, 49–63.
Greaves, Desmond 1987, The Life and Times of James Connolly, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Hanley, Brian 2002, The IRA, 1926–1936, Dublin: Four Courts Press.
——— and Scott Millar 2009, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the
Workers’ Party, Dublin: Penguin Ireland.
McDonald, Henry and Jack Holland 2010, INLA: Deadly Divisions, Revised and Updated
Edition, Dublin: Poolbeg Press Ltd.
Morgan, Austen 1989, James Connolly, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ó Broin, Eoin 2009, Sinn Féin and the Politics of Left Republicanism, London: Pluto Press.
Patterson, Henry 1997, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA, London:
Serif.
Warren, Bill 1980, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, edited by John Sender, London:
Verso.

brill.com/hima
Revolutionary Politics in Twentieth-Century China

A Review of Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China: Essays in
Honor of Maurice Meisner
Kenneth J. Hammond
New Mexico State University
khammond@nmsu.edu
Abstract
Maurice Meisner was an important scholar of twentieth-century Chinese history,

whose work focused on the ideological and bureaucratic dimensions of the People’s
Republic and its origins in the upheavals of the first half of the century. This review
considers a Festschrift including contributions from eight former students of Meisner,
with articles on a wide array of topics across the period from the 1920s to the early
twenty-first century. Strengths and limitations of Meisner’s work and his legacy are
presented in conjunction with reflections on the underlying issues of the nature of
contemporary China and its role in the world, and some related recent scholarly
debates on the Left.
Keywords
Maurice Meisner – China – political economy – utopianism – bureaucracy – capitalism
Catherine Lynch, Robert B. Marks and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Radicalism,

Revolution, and Reform in Modern China: Essays in Honor of Maurice Meisner,
Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2011
The People’s Republic of China plays an increasingly important role in the

global economy, and looms ever larger in the political and military discussions
of the contemporary world. Critical to a serious understanding of China today
is the question of the nature of the Chinese political and economic system,
and how the current complex of institutions, interests and political culture has
been constituted and developed, especially over the past sixty-plus years. How

Revolutionary Politics in Twentieth-Century China 199
should the history of the twentieth-century Chinese Revolution be seen, and

what have been the key factors in the unfolding of that epic narrative? What
are the class forces at work in China today, and how have they emerged from
the struggles of the recent past? Is China a capitalist system, or might some
other category be better used, and if so how can such a system be best labelled?
What lessons can be drawn from China’s modern historical experience for
those seeking a path to a more just and equitable society? Many scholars have
devoted their attention to these issues over the years since the founding of the
PRC in 1949, and they remain especially vital for the Left, as the 2010 Historical
Materialism symposium on Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing indicates.
I will return to some of the issues and arguments raised in the symposium
below. The volume under review here is dedicated to Maurice Meisner, one of
the more subtle and serious of the non-Marxist intellectuals who have sought
to comprehend the magnitude and significance of the Chinese Revolution, and
whose work has left a legacy which others, both Marxists and non-Marxists,
can draw upon and respond to in ongoing efforts to deepen and refine our
knowledge and clarify our analyses.
Meisner and His Work
Maurice Meisner died in January 2012 at the age of 80. He left behind a body
of scholarship on modern China which makes significant contributions to
understanding the complexities and contradictions of China’s political history
over the past six decades. Unlike most Western scholars of Chinese politics
since 1949, who have seen political life in China as largely the story of conflicts
within an elite divorced from the lives of ordinary Chinese, Meisner took
seriously the role of the masses in political affairs.1 He also gave credence to
the claims of ideology on the thought and action of both leaders and ordinary
individuals. He produced what became a widely used text, Mao’s China
and After: A History of the People’s Republic, as well as important studies of
Li Dazhao, work on the era of Deng Xiaoping, and a late biography of Mao
Zedong, along with numerous essays and articles.
Meisner’s willingness to accept the reality of Mao’s and other political
actors’ arguments, to deal with the reasoning put forth in support of socialist
development as genuine and legitimate, gave him an ability to analyse
1 Representative examples would be Roderick MacFarquhar’s multi-volume study of the

origins of the Cultural Revolution (MacFarquhar 1974, 1983 and 1997), and Frederick Tiewes’s
Politics at Mao’s Court (Tiewes 1990).

200 Hammond
the dynamics of Chinese political life which was missed by most outside
investigators. A good example is in addressing the problems of the Great Leap
Forward. This campaign to accelerate agricultural collectivisation, increase
production and accelerate the attendant process of capital accumulation
through the mobilisation of the rural and urban working masses ended
in severe setbacks for the Maoist developmental line, resulting in a food
crisis which saw large numbers of Chinese die as a result of malnutrition or
starvation, and which led to dramatic changes in the leadership of the party and
the state. Mao’s chief critic, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, was demoted
and removed from active participation in party affairs. Mao was also forced to
give up the day-to-day oversight of party activities and surrender the position
of President, which was taken up by Liu Shaoqi.
Western accounts of the Great Leap Forward, and the version of events
embraced by the current neoliberal leadership in Beijing, have tended to
portray the Leap as an unmitigated disaster brought about by Mao’s reckless
voluntarism and disregard for the consequences of his policies. Meisner’s
appraisal is more sober and takes into account the complexities of the system
and the conflicts within the party which ultimately were the root of the failure
of the Great Leap. In 1977, in the original edition of his text on the history of
the PRC, he wrote,
The political functions which Maoists assigned to the communes in

theory, and the realities of communization, posed a grave challenge to
the existing party and state bureaucracies. Had the People’s Communes
actually developed in the manner Maoists originally envisaged, centralized
political power in China would have been fundamentally undermined –
much in the way Marx had attributed to the Paris Commune the potential
to restore to the producers those social powers which had been usurped
by the state. The antibureaucratic implications of communization were
unmistakable, and bureaucrats with vested interests in the pre-Great
Leap order soon began to respond to the threat.2
This analysis places the Great Leap Forward squarely within the ‘struggle
between two lines’ which shaped the history of China from 1949 to the final
victory of the Dengist reformers in 1978. It reflects Meisner’s basic approach
to modern Chinese history, seeking to understand events within the actual
context of social and political conflict and the overall challenges of socialist
development. This is not, however, to say that Meisner was himself a socialist
2 Meisner 1977, p. 241.

or communist, nor that he entirely endorsed Mao’s vision for China. His
willingness to take the politics of socialism as genuine did not imply his own
endorsement, nor position him as a participant in a common struggle.
In fact, while he clearly did admire Mao’s passion and dedication, for Meisner
the bottom line on Mao and his revolutionary vision is that Mao was a utopian.
In 1982 he published a collection of eight essays under the title Marxism,
Maoism and Utopianism, in which he put forward his assessment that Mao’s
goals were ultimately unattainable.3 The judgement of Mao and Maoism as
utopian essentially dismisses the consequences of his actions as well-intended
but unrealistic, and clears the ground for the emergence of Deng Xiaoping and
his associates as pragmatic reformers going beyond the constraints of ideology.
Meisner spent most of his professional career at the University of Wisconsin
in Madison. Over more than twenty years he taught a large number of graduate
students, many of whom have gone on to establish themselves as scholars
of modern China in universities around the United States, in Canada and
South Korea. The volume under review here is a Festschrift originating in
a conference held at Madison in 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of
the events at Tiananmen in 1989. It includes eight essays on a wide range
of subjects from the early days of the communist movement in China to the
current literature on the twenty-first century ‘rise of China’. All the authors
are former students of Meisner, yet they have clearly developed their own
distinctive views on modern Chinese history. Some have remained quite close
to Meisner’s work, especially emphasising the ‘utopian’ interpretation of Mao
and the impossibility of real revolutionary socialism, while others have moved
to more materialist perspectives or have focused their essays on the post-Mao
era and critiques of the current neoliberal regime. A consideration of some
key themes and approaches, and of some relevant recent scholarship on the
topics being discussed, will yield an overview of much of the mainstream of
contemporary China studies.
Underlying Concepts
The first three essays are devoted to exploring some of the key concepts in
Meisner’s approach to modern Chinese history; nationalism and individualism,
utopianism, and the construction of the idea of the peasant as illuminated
through the rhetorical category of ‘women’. In each of these the authors argue
that large analytical structures such as the nation and/or the individual, the
3 Meisner 1982.

202 Hammond
ideal of a utopian society, or the radical agency of social groups like women or
farmers are central to an appreciation of how the Chinese Revolution could
develop and succeed. The emphasis in these opening chapters is very much on
the subjective and the psychological, though always with an eye to how these
concepts had practical impacts on real social struggles.
The volume opens with a historical essay by Sooyoung Kim, of Kookmin
University in Seoul. Her subject is the early Marxist Chen Duxiu, and especially
his thinking in the period before the rise of Marxist study-circles leading to
the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Kim examines the
relationship between nationalism and individualism in Chen’s thought,
and concludes that in the period between 1904 and 1918 Chen was primarily
concerned with the cultural and psychological dimensions of China’s dilemma.
Kim writes that for Chen, ‘real nationalism . . . is psychological nationalism’,
and that the critical task facing Chinese was the ‘formulation of new ethics and
morals’ (p. 25). Kim does not carry her study beyond 1918, so she makes no effort
to address Chen’s Marxist views as he became part of the movement to create
a communist-revolutionary party in China. Chen developed a Marxist analysis
which eventually brought him close to the views of Trotsky, and which came
to emphasise the development of China’s national economy and the need for
radical transformation in the material conditions of life as a precondition for
any new ethical order.
The argument that nationalism was central to Chen’s thought is not
misplaced, however. Throughout the revolutionary and socialist periods of the
twentieth century the communist movement in China was closely intertwined
with nationalism; whether in the resistance to Japanese aggression in the years
from 1937 to 1945 or in the campaigns of socialist construction between 1950
and 1976, patriotic elements were deployed alongside Marxist ideology as part
of the party’s mobilisational strategy. The origins of this nationalist dimension
to Chinese revolutionary theory and practice can be discerned, in part, in Kim’s
analysis of Chen Duxiu’s early writings and activities. Lin Chun, in her careful
analysis of the changes taking place in China in the years since the death of
Mao, argues that a nationalist drive to develop China as a modern industrial
economy with a moderately prosperous society is actually an element of
continuity within the radical rupture of the Dengist reform era.4 Kim’s
essay suggests that this continuity in fact permeates the revolution from its
earliest days.
4 Lin 2006.

Catherine Lynch follows Kim’s opening chapter with one of the more
problematic contributions to this volume. Her chapter, ‘Radical Visions of
Time in Modern China: The Utopianism of Mao Zedong and Liang Shuming’,
makes a strong argument, building on Meisner’s precedent, that Mao’s views
and actions were utopian from as early as 1919, and that the Great Leap Forward
was the apotheosis of his utopianism gone awry. Lynch compares Mao’s ideas
to those of Liang Shuming, a moderate rural socialist whose thought blended
elements of Confucianism, Buddhism and Western reformism. She finds that
both had visions of change in China which were rooted in fantasies that could
only be seen as utopian.
But this characterisation seems to be self-defining. The concrete items
Lynch mentions as utopian have to do with such goals as decreasing the
disparities between rural and urban standards of living, relying on the peasants
as a driving force in revolutionary politics, or Liang’s view that the material
comforts of Western capitalism were based on the systematic exploitation
of human labour centred in the urban factory milieu. Lynch goes on to
characterise Mao’s politics as a ‘reach for the impossible’ and as a function of
his ‘extreme voluntarism’ (p. 39). She then contrasts this to what she asserts
is the orthodox Marxist position that there is ‘no place for the active will’ in
political or social action, since all of history is simply driven by deterministic
forces (ibid.). On the other hand, later in the essay Lynch shifts her argument
to focus on Marx’s ideas about human liberation, citing his assertion in the
Communist Manifesto that the creation of a socialist society would bring about
‘an association, in which the free development of each is the precondition for
the free development of all’ (p. 42). The aspirations of both Mao and Liang
Shuming are thus assimilated to a putative utopianism which could never have
been realised.
Yet it is not clear why these ideas or policies should be seen as utopian in
the first place. Lynch’s position seems to be that any kind of actual radical
transformation in social or political life is simply impossible, and that to
endeavour to bring about such change inevitably leads to failure and tragedy.
This is of course the official view of Mao and the socialist period within the
leadership of the Chinese Communist Party today, as enshrined in the 1982
assessment of Mao’s role in history as 70% good and 30% bad, with the bad
elements concentrated in the period after 1957. It reinforces the image of
the Dengist reformers as ‘pragmatists’ in contrast to the foolish and doomed
wishful thinking of the Maoists. Lynch’s conflation of Mao’s revolutionary
socialism and Liang Shuming’s rural reconstruction suggests that any course
of change in China which did not rely on the capitalist market was sure to

204 Hammond
fail, and that the years of struggle and sacrifice which built the core of China’s
socialist economy were in essence a waste of time and a diversion from the
inevitable necessity of primitive accumulation through market mechanisms.
Lynch’s argument is articulated through an abstract metaphysics of time,
claiming that Mao and Liang both had views of social change which were
detached both from historical reality and from a firm grounding in how events
flowed in the real world. The argument seems somewhat contrived as a means
of suggesting that Mao and Liang dreamed of a time that could never be, a
‘euchronia’ like the utopia they envisioned. But these arguments seem rooted
not in a consideration of the actual material realities and political-economic
possibilities of China in the twentieth century, but rather in the need to
repudiate the possibility of revolutionary change and the necessity to take the
only realistic path, the capitalist road.
Tina Mai Chen’s chapter following Lynch’s moves in a very different
direction. Chen is concerned with the categories of ‘peasant’ and ‘woman’ in
Mao’s revolutionary theory, and develops a complex argument which in some
ways gives priority to the peasant path, seeing it as fundamental to the political
success of the revolution. It was that very success which allowed the new
People’s government to put in place the Marriage Law of 1950, which made
profound changes to the status and rights of women in the People’s Republic. But
Chen’s point is in fact more subtle and insightful. She argues that understanding
the place of ‘woman’ in Mao’s strategy, ‘. . . is not a question of adding women
to the list of those to be liberated’, but that, rather, ‘it entails an appreciation
of the ways in which women in different guises and social positions haunted
the very formation of peasant as a category.’ (p. 73.) Chen sees the ideal figure
of the peasant as representing a wide range of subject-positions in various
modes of exploitation. The position of women as an oppressed group within
traditional and semi-colonial Chinese society overlapped with and reinforced
the basic generic oppression which drove the movement for revolutionary
liberation. The revolution sought not to liberate a checklist of discreet social
subsets, but envisioned the liberation of the peasants as the centre of gravity
of a comprehensive transformation of China’s social and economic being. This
position of the peasant as the critical formation in Chinese society was the
primary expression of Mao’s application of Marxism to the concrete conditions
of China, and entailed the conceptualisation of the peasants as proletarian
surrogates in an overwhelmingly agricultural economy.
Chen is emphatic that this conceptualisation, and the elaboration of
the role of women which she has delineated, was not merely an exercise in
theoretical speculation. She notes, ‘[t]here was a practice that evolved and had
consequences for the lives of millions of peasants and women, and for which

Mao, as the leader, . . . bears responsibility. At the same time Maoist theory

sought to imagine a world in which the collective forces of men and women,
peasants and workers, were continuously reiterated.’ (ibid.) She concludes
with a reflection that in the post-Mao era the hopes for human liberation have
increasingly been denied historical relevance.
Managing the Country: Minorities and Environment
The establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 meant that the Chinese
Communist Party, and the new state system it established, had to take on
the management of a vast and populous country facing massive challenges.
Struggling to come to grips with the task of feeding the people while building a
new socialist order, all in the context of an insecure global security environment,
the new government had to find ways to stabilise its territory, and to launch
large-scale, rapid programmes of economic development. These gave rise to
new problems, some of which are the subjects of the next two chapters, on the
complex relationship between the Han-dominated central government and
the local administration in Tibet, and on the ways in which China’s efforts to
feed its people and develop its economy have impacted its environment.
An intricate set of relationships which developed in the course of
revolutionary struggle and the years of building socialism in China was that
between the Han majority and the national minorities. Lee Feigon takes up
perhaps the most challenging of these in his chapter, ‘Mao and Tibet’. While the
chapter opens with the reiteration of some rather banal sentiments about the
ways in which Tibet has been perceived by Chinese, both at the governmental
and social level, and repeats some popular but often groundless myths about
the situation in Tibet, Feigon soon settles into a very solid and well thought-
out study of how the linkages between the new government of the People’s
Republic and the local authorities in Tibet developed in the 1950s and into
the 1960s. He focuses much of this discussion on the individual relationship
between Mao Zedong and the Dalai Lama. He also presents a careful rehearsal
of the international manoeuvring of the British as they sought to bring Tibet
into their own colonial orbit in the early twentieth century.
The narrative which is at the centre of Feigon’s chapter is that of the years
between 1950 and 1959, when Mao and the Dalai Lama actually worked towards
the common goal of preserving Tibet as a stable regional component of the
PRC. Mao championed a policy line which gave Tibet significant autonomy
and maintained the authority of the Dalai Lama’s local government, in which
the Dalai Lama recognised the legitimacy of the central government and

206 Hammond
acknowledged that Tibet was, for all practical purposes, a part of the multi-
ethnic state of the People’s Republic.
These efforts came to a disastrous end in 1959 when rebellions, fuelled in
part by the clandestine actions of the CIA, which trained Tibetan guerrillas in
Colorado and infiltrated them into Tibet through Nepal, destroyed the careful
balance which Mao and the Dalai Lama had managed up to that time. With the
level of political tension within China proper at a fever pitch due to the stresses
of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was unable to develop an effective policy to
smooth out the rupture between Tibetan monastic authorities and the Chinese
PLA’s concerns with frontier security. Even after the rebellion, however, Tibetan
leaders like the Panchen Lama still worked to find accommodations with the
central government. In the early 1960s Mao continued to write and speak about
the relationship with Tibet in basically conciliatory ways. The upheavals of the
Cultural Revolution in Tibet have been studied closely by Melvin Goldstein,
Ben Jiao and Tanzen Lhundrup, and Feigon notes that their research has shown
that ‘much of what occurred in Tibet was not the result of struggles between
Tibet and the central government or even between Tibetans and Han. It was a
struggle between local power holders that was not ethnically based.’ (p. 99.)5
Feigon concludes his essay by recalling a conversation he had with the Dalai
Lama in 1992, in which the Dalai Lama spoke positively of Mao, and noted
that in the years since Mao’s death the tensions in the relationship between
China and Tibet had grown more extreme. Feigon comments, too, that ‘[i]t
should not be surprising that policies towards Tibet have become more severe
during the reform period, a time in which . . . China developed the highest level
of inequality of any country in Asia.’ (p. 100.)
While Feigon’s essay is strongly centred on the role of Mao, Robert Marks’s
following chapter on the environmental history of twentieth-century China
presents a much more institutionally-oriented treatment of the dynamics of
modern Chinese history. ‘Chinese Communists and the Environment’ traces
the pattern of human interaction with the natural environment through the
history of the People’s Republic, and in fact makes a strong argument that
the PRC, both in the socialist period and in the reform era, followed policies
and patterns which can be extended back into the imperial age over several
centuries. Marks makes clear that when the CCP assumed state power in 1949 it
inherited an economy and society in tatters, and an environmental crisis which
was little understood or even recognised at the time. In the period of socialist
construction, and even more so in the ensuing era of reform and opening to the
world, environmental damage continued and accelerated as the development-
5 Goldstein, Ben and Lhundrup 2009.

oriented leadership sought to create a modern industrial economy and raise

material standards of living for hundreds of millions of people. In the course
of this the air, water and soil were heavily polluted, and environmental stress
and degradation became a background feature of daily life.
Marks uses the story of China’s forests as the centrepiece of his account.
He begins with the recognition that deforestation is a process almost as old as
Chinese civilisation itself, and that the long arc of China’s environmental history
is largely defined by the spread of intensive grain cultivation, and the attendant
reduction in the area of natural forest.6 The very success of China’s agricultural
development has meant that forest has disappeared from much of the country.
Despite this, when the PRC was established in 1949, ‘[e]xtensive forests still
stood in the northern reaches of Manchuria, in Yunnan to the southwest, in the
border region of western Sichuan and eastern Tibet, in southern and central
Fujian, in the border of northwestern Hubei and northeastern Sichuan, and
in parts of the Qinling Mountains in southern Shaanxi and northern Sichuan.’
(pp. 108–9.) These altogether only accounted for between five and nine per
cent of China’s land area.
Over the ensuing six decades there were three ‘great cuttings’, periods when
large amounts of forest were felled as part of rapid-development programmes.
Marks identifies these as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and
a more sustained process through the era of Dengist reforms. He argues that the
management of forest resources was entirely subordinated to developmental
goals, and that Mao and other leaders had a mistrust of bourgeois science
which sadly led them to ignore arguments for a more careful management
of timber. In the reform era, however, there has been a public commitment
to sustainable management of forests on the part of the central government,
and massive reforestation campaigns have been launched on more than one
occasion. Marks points out that these well-intentioned policies have been
compromised by both sloppy implementation, and more seriously by the
market-driven growth of the last thirty years, which has overridden most other
concerns with its focus on immediate yields and rapid capital accumulation.
The picture Marks paints is bleak indeed, and he refrains from trying to
soften the blow in his conclusion. He reiterates the long historical trajectory
of deforestation and of environmental damage overall, from imperial through
Republican and Communist times, with the continuing power of the market
constituting an ongoing threat now and in the foreseeable future. He does note
the presence within Chinese tradition of environmental consciousness, and
acknowledges that ideas from ancient sages like Mencius could be used as part
6 For a comprehensive treatment of this history see Elvin 2006.

208 Hammond
of a modern movement of ecological activism. But the inertia of the past is

especially powerful in the interaction of human and natural orders, and the
environmental salvation of China will be a task requiring massive commitment
and sustained activity on the part of leaders, masses and international friends.
After the Revolution: What Is China Now?
The three concluding essays are principally focused on the period since the
death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent course of ‘reform and opening to
the outside’. These are in some ways the most important chapters, as they bring
the question of the nature of the current Chinese system most clearly into view.
Thomas Lutze’s contribution to this volume is placed as the sixth chapter,
yet his subject and his careful treatment of it makes it perhaps the most vital
essay of the set. Lutze’s topic is ‘Post-Socialist Capitalism in Rural China’, and
his chapter engages seriously with all the complexities that title implies. He sets
out immediately to define his terms and set the parameters of his discussion.
‘Post-socialist capitalism is a social formation wherein the capitalist mode
of production has become predominant in a society that had previously
undergone a socialist revolution.’ (p. 134.) He delineates the nature of the
ruling elite in present-day China as being composed of three subsets, first
what he calls bureaucrat-capitalists, those party and state officials and their
families who have used their privileged access to power and public assets to
enhance their own wealth and power; second, comprador-capitalists, meaning
those who have built collaborations with foreign capital through joint ventures
and other forms of shared investment; and third, entrepreneurial capitalists,
those who have managed to accumulate significant wealth in the course of
rapid market development. Lutze emphasises that this is the reality behind the
Dengist slogan of socialism with Chinese characteristics. One can only note
that this is the actual fulfilment of Mao Zedong’s prediction that Deng and the
‘pragmatists’ would take China down the capitalist road.
There are some minor areas of concern in Lutze’s argument. He may, for
example, overstate the degree to which any lingering element of socialism has
been purged from the economy. He argues that the State Owned Enterprises
have been all but eliminated, and that the financial crisis of 2008 was in some
ways the final blow for them. But SOEs have to some extent revived in the
years since the meltdown, and now constitute a major source of central and
local government revenues. This does not invalidate Lutze’s analysis, but does
suggest that there may yet be some leverage within the system to pursue a
revival of true socialist development.

Lutze invokes the gross inequality which has emerged in the reform era, and
shows how this has been the direct result of policies undertaken in the name
of promoting rapid development of the productive forces. This process is itself
mapped out most clearly in William Hinton’s collection of essays, The Great
Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989, which Lutze prominently cites.7
He traces the revival of capitalist practices in the 1980s and ’90s and shows,
as many scholars have failed to note, that the roots of capitalist revival can
be found in the long traditions of petty capitalism stretching back at least to
the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The unleashing
of market forces in the countryside allowed patterns of exploitation and of
primitive capital accumulation, which had flourished in China’s early-modern
era, to return in the new context of globalisation. He also contrasts the results
of market-driven development with the gains which had been made in rural
society during the socialist period, citing the work of Li Minqi, Han Dongping
and Gao Mobo on the achievements of the people’s communes and the
Cultural Revolution in bringing educational and health services to hundreds
of millions in the countryside.8
While Lutze’s analysis is strong and clear, it may be that he is too pessimistic
about the social dynamic within China in the early twenty-first century. He
makes a powerful case for the dominant role of capitalism in present-day
economic and social life. But his characterisation of China as post-socialist
may obscure certain dynamics which offer some hope of future changes with
a reinvigorated period of class struggle. Two recent studies by Ching Kwan
Lee and Hsiao-hung Pai have highlighted the ongoing militancy of both urban
and rural workers in the reform era, and the creative ways in which they
have used the legal and institutional legacies of the socialist period to bolster
their activities and embolden their movements.9 The militancy and class-
consciousness of workers and farmers in China may in fact be enhanced by the
stark nature of the neoliberal capitalism which dominates the state. Lutze’s
rendition of the hegemonic power of capital in the decades since the death of
Mao is compelling, but may not constitute the complete end of the revolution.
The oppressions of daily life in the reform era, and how ordinary people
respond to them, is the subject matter of a powerful and little-known movement
of documentary film makers in China, and three examples of this genre are the
focus of Paul Pickowicz’s chapter. Pickowicz has a well-established reputation
as a scholar of Chinese cinema, but in this chapter he ventures into new
7 Hinton 1990.
8 Li 2008; Han 2008; Gao 2007.
9 Lee 2007; Pai 2012.

210 Hammond
territory. As digital film technology has become more affordable and more
widely available, it has become possible for many individuals who were not
part of China’s official film establishment to make independent films. Many
of these have been intensely ‘local’, dealing with specific communities and
the problems they face. Filmmakers have sometimes been able to work in
their own communities, or have been willing to spend the time necessary to
integrate themselves into existing communities to the point where they are
able to win the trust and cooperation of the group.
The three films Pickowicz examines are These Dogs Belong to All of Us, by
Zhang Zhanqing, Better to Live than to Die, by Chen Weijun, and Red Snow, by
Peng Tao. The first two are straightforward documentaries. The last is a feature
film, but one which is so local and topical that Pickowicz considers it part of
the same cinematic phenomenon as the others. These Dogs Belong to All of Us,
made in 2003, is about the brutal sport of dog-fighting in a small village in
Henan province. It starkly portrays the harsh details of the sport, and puzzles
over the engagement with this violence on the part of ordinary farmers,
families and young people of both sexes. There is no attempt at judgement
or explanation, simply the presentation of a reality of rural life which rarely
gains the attention of the outside world. Better to Live than to Die, also made in
2003 and also filmed in rural Henan, deals with a subject which has been the
focus of considerable attention by the outside world, but in ways which depart
from the usual responses of urban sophisticated society. The film investigates
one family in an ‘AIDS village’, one of the communities in Henan where large
numbers of people became infected with the HIV virus through donating blood
at public clinics, a process which continued even after the local authorities
became aware of the contamination and infection which was spreading. Chen
Weijun chronicles the deaths of four out of five family members, and the
struggle of the fifth, a young girl, to take on the tasks of managing family life
while her parents and siblings pass away around her. It is her calm acceptance
of the horrors taking place in her home which is the centrepiece of the film,
not as a triumphant transcendence, but as an incomprehensible response to
an overwhelming situation. Peng Tao’s Red Snow, completed in 2006, takes a
different approach to dealing with the problems of rural society by presenting
a fictional tale, set in the years of the Cultural Revolution, but actually focusing
on the hardships and challenges of life on an isolated farm for a widow whose
husband and son have both been killed. The interplay of characters as men
from outside the local area arrive on the scene and contend with each other
for the widow’s attention, and her minimal resources, provides another set of
insights into the brutal conditions which continue to plague backward areas in
China even as the big cities glitter in their consumer glory. Red Snow ends with

multiple murders and attempts at covering up the truth, and provides an apt
parallel to the fate of much of rural China in the era of reform.
Pickowicz concludes his chapter with an epilogue critical of more
mainstream filmmakers whose work has tended to romanticise rural life and
present the farmers as hardy survivors on the path to a brighter future through
economic development. This kind of mythologising is the mainstream of
official filmmaking, and represents the expression in the superstructure of the
neoliberal ideology guiding the party and state in the present period.
The final chapter in this collection departs significantly from all the others.
Bruce Cumings has devoted his academic career largely to the study of Korea,
and North Korea in particular. He leaves his comfort zone in this essay to take
on the literature of ‘China’s Rise’, which is so popular in airport bookstores
and newspaper book-review columns in the early twenty-first century. The
kernel of Cuming’s argument is that the hype over the supposed rise of China
as a new superpower is more about American concerns over their own future
global dominance than about any realistic assessment of China’s economic or
military capabilities. Cumings notes, quite correctly, that China’s rapid growth
has still brought it only to a point where its overall economy is half the size of
that of the US, and on a per capita basis China remains a poor country indeed.
The shiny urban face which the PRC has been able to present to the world
in Beijing, Shanghai and other mega-cities is not a mere façade, but obscures
the poverty and blight which is still characteristic of large swathes of rural
society. The gap between the pundit’s hype and reality is at its greatest in the
area of military power. American anxieties are ludicrous when the actual level
of funding and equipment for the PLA is taken into account. The promotion
of an image of a rising China about to challenge the United States for global
hegemony serves the interests of the defence industry and of the American
capitalist class more broadly. Cumings’s arguments here are similar in many
ways to those of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, which will be discussed in the
conclusions below.
None the less, while Cuming’s basic point is certainly valid, his passionate
hostility to America’s imperial hegemony may have led him to overlook some
important aspects of the literature he so vehemently rejects. Perhaps most
problematically in regard to the work of Giovanni Arrighi, and by extension the
California School historians Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong.10 Arrighi’s
work, including The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing,
has sought, among other things, to situate the current period of economic
development using market mechanisms in China within a centuries-long
10 Arrighi 2007; Arrighi 2010; Pomeranz 2001; Wong 2000.

212 Hammond
pattern of capitalist development, first in Europe, then in the United States, and,
with considerable evidence, now shifting to Asia, and especially China. Cumings
seems excessively dismissive of Arrighi’s historical arguments, ridiculing the
idea that China might have given rise to proto-capitalist developments as long
ago as the Song dynasty (960–1279) despite the voluminous scholarly literature
on this in Chinese, Japanese and English which has accumulated over the
past thirty and more years. Arrighi’s argument is not that China is undergoing
some spectacular rise which will make it a menace to American global
dominance, but rather that after a prolonged period of Western pre-eminence
in global economic life the diffusion of industrial technology in tandem with
a reinvigoration of deeply-rooted mechanisms of petty capitalism in Chinese
society is bringing China back to a level of participation in world-economic life
which matches its place as the most populous country in the world. Cumings’s
powerful and appropriate antipathy to American imperialism has clouded his
judgement in regard to important aspects of what is happening in China today.
To recognise the historical antecedents of contemporary Chinese market
dynamics is not to embrace the imperialist fantasies of American irredentists.
It is better to have a reasonable appreciation of the forces contributing to the
growth of China’s capitalist-reform era in order to understand how popular
movements of resistance and transformation might be able to challenge it,
as in Lutze’s and Marks’s chapters, than to simply lump together all voices
commenting on the obviously-significant developments taking place in China
at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Conclusions
Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China is a very mixed bag. It

reflects the contradictions and limitations of its inspiration, the scholarship
of Maurice Meisner, but it includes several chapters which go beyond those
limitations in valuable ways to bring us insights and analyses of modern China’s
history and contemporary political situation. Understanding China today is a
profoundly challenging task. This volume, while a patchwork of varying quality,
is none the less very much worth the time and effort to read. Making sense of
the issues raised here is a profound undertaking, and neither Meisner’s own
work nor the varying interpretive paths taken by his former students pursue
some of the more significant implications of their own research. There is
certainly no clear consensus on these matters on the Left, but discussions
such as those in the 2010 Historical Materialism forum on Giovanni Arrighi’s

work mentioned at the beginning of this review have sought to develop more
comprehensive characterisations of contemporary China.
Central to such an understanding is the question of the fundamental nature
of the Chinese political-economic system. Meisner’s preliminary analysis of the
Great Leap Forward, quoted above, draws our attention to heart of the matter,
which is the emergence, within the structure of the Chinese Communist Party
and the state system of the People’s Republic, of an increasingly alienated
and self-protective bureaucratic elite in the first decade after Liberation. The
‘struggle between two lines’ which unfolded from the late 1950s through the
end of the 1970s saw the failure of efforts led by Mao Zedong and others to
find a path to mass supervision of the party and government, and ended with
the triumph of Deng Xiaoping’s bureaucratic faction, the successors of which
continue to lead China down some form of capitalist road in the early twenty-
first century. The exact nature of this road remains a matter of intense debate.
Some analysts, such as Au Loong Yu and his co-authors in China’s Rise:
Strength and Fragility, argue that China is a bureaucratic-capitalist state, in
which private capital has become the dominant force and which has totally
subordinated the working class to its rule.11 Others, including Arrighi in Adam
Smith in Beijing have argued that contemporary China retains important
structural features from the socialist period that will allow it to develop a
market economy which is not fully capitalist, and which will provide spaces for
a more balanced mode of development taking into account not only the quest
for capital accumulation but also the interests of workers and farmers. The
significance of China’s thirty-year period of socialist construction, even given
the bureaucratic distortions which plagued political life during those years,
needs to be further clarified and evaluated. As noted above, writers such as
Ching Kwan Lee and Hsiao-hung Pai have argued that workers in today’s China
do function within a legal and cultural system unlike those of other societies
in periods of rapid industrialisation, in a political environment shaped by the
era of socialist development.
It is not only the legacy of the socialist period under the People’s
Republic which needs to be taken into account in considering the nature
of contemporary China. Although the work of scholars such as Kenneth
Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong, and Robert Marks’s work on environmental history
in the book under review and in his new monograph, has been recognised as
reshaping our understanding of China’s historical economy and its relative
level of development, much more work needs to be done in tracing the
11 Au (ed.) 2013.

214 Hammond
course of China’s early-modern history, going back not just to the eighteenth
century, but to the great commercial era of the middle and late Ming, and
the initial commercial revolution of the Song.12 How these early-capitalist
developments shaped China’s historical itinerary, and how social and economic
structures eclipsed by the long confrontation with Western imperialism and
the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century have contributed to the
rapid adoption of market reforms over the last 35 years, are critical questions
which have by no means been adequately explored.
One final theme arising in Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern
China, and which was taken up by Leo Panitch in his contribution to the
Arrighi forum (as well as in his recent book with Sam Gindin), is China’s
emerging role in the global system.13 Arrighi himself argued that China might
be about to succeed the United States as the next hegemonic centre of a new
regime of accumulation, though not without a long period of sometimes-
chaotic transition. Panitch soundly rejects this, as does Bruce Cumings in the
volume under review. Both Panitch and Cumings see American imperialism,
with its economic power augmented and perpetuated by its military hyper-
dominance, as continuing to occupy the leading role in global affairs for the
foreseeable future. Here again a longer historical perspective on China’s past
may help clarify things. Recent work on East Asian international relations in
the early-modern period, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century,
by scholars such as David Kang supports the image of China, even in periods
of expansive prosperity, as being largely a continentally-focused power, and
suggests that, to the degree to which historically-transmitted strategic cultural
orientations can be credited, it is unlikely China will seek to replace the US as
a military power in the wider world. It may be better to consider the whole
question of China’s ‘rise’ rather as one of a global economy which has seen
a prolonged process of Western imperialist power backed by both industrial
and military asymmetries dominating the rest of the world now returning to
a more multi-centric distribution of wealth and power, with China playing a
strong but not dominant or hegemonic role.
Clearly, questions of the nature of the contemporary Chinese state and
economy, their historical experience, and the role(s) that China will play in the
coming era are likely to remain hotly debated in the next few years. The work
of scholars such as Maurice Meisner and his students can be of significant
value in considering some aspects of China’s recent history. But broader and
12 Marks 2012.

13 Panitch and Gindin 2012.

more materially-grounded studies, taking into account both the deep history
of modernity in China and the complex path of economic and political
developments across the last 65 years, remain too few and far between.
References
Arrighi, Giovanni 2007, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century, London:
Verso.
——— 2010, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times,
Updated Edition, London: Verso.
Au, Loong-Yu (ed.) 2013, China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility, London: The Merlin Press.
Barmé, Geremie R. 2014, ‘Tyger! Tyger! A Fearful Symmetry’, The China Story, 16 October,
available at: <http://www.thechinastory.org/2014/10/tyger-tyger-a-fearful-symmetry/>.
Elvin, Mark 2006, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Gao, Mobo C.F. 2007, Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China, Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Goldstein, Melvyn, Ben Jiao and Tanzen Lhundrup 2009, On the Cultural Revolution in
Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Han, Dongping 2008, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese
Village, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hinton, William 1990, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989, New
Lee, Ching Kwan 2007, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Li, Minqi 2008, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, New
Lin, Chun 2006, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, Durham, NC.: Duke University
Press.
MacFarquhar, Roderick 1974, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Volume 1:
Contradictions among the People, 1956–1957, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 1983, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Volume 2: The Great Leap Forward,
1958–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 1997, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Volume 3: The Coming of the
Cataclysm, 1961–1966, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marks, Robert B. 2012, China: Its Environment and History, Lanham, MD.: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Meisner, Maurice 1977, Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic, New York: The
Free Press.

216 Hammond
——— 1982, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays, Madison, WI.: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Pai, Hsiao-hung 2012, Scattered Sand: The Story of China’s Rural Migrants, London:
Verso.
Panitch, Leo and Sam Gindin 2012, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political
Economy of American Empire, London: Verso.
Pomeranz, Kenneth 2001, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Teiwes, Frederick C. 1990, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in
the Early 1950s, Armonk, NY.: M.E. Sharpe Inc.
Wong, R. Bin 2000, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European
Experience, Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press.

brill.com/hima
Migration and Neoliberalism: Creating Spaces of

Resistance
A Review of Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers
of the Political by Anne McNevin
Simon Behrman
University of East Anglia
s.behrman@uea.ac.uk
Abstract
Anne McNevin’s book provides a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the
plight of irregular migrants in the context of neoliberal hegemony. It combines detailed
analysis of contemporary movements that resist the ever-increasing controls over
borders and movement, together with critical assessments of a range of contemporary
theorists on the question. McNevin’s central argument is that neoliberalism not only
delineates the migrant subject in various ways, but also traps activists into replicating
many harmful assumptions about ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving’ migrants. She
further argues for a resurrection of the political subjectivity of migrant communities,
by both exploiting the crisis engendered at the nexus of neoliberal economics and the
sovereign subject, and resisting the framework set by those paradigms.
Keywords
Migration Studies – refugees – neoliberalism – sovereignty – citizenship
Anne McNevin, Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of

the Political, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011
The plight of irregular migrants of all sorts is a highly depressing fact of modern
political life. Wars and poverty continue to force millions of people every year to
seek refuge and a better life elsewhere, while Western states which are mainly

218 Behrman
responsible, directly or indirectly, for these catastrophes tighten their borders,

and in other ways make resettlement within their territory more restrictive.
Australia’s Pacific Solution, the EU’s Fortress Europe and the US’s Operation
Hold-the-Line are just some of the more recent and visible manifestations
of this trend. The political class of the Western world are engaged in a race
to trump one another in how tough they can be on preventing ‘illegals’ from
compromising national sovereignty and security. A vitriolic media in turn eggs
them on. But perhaps most disturbingly, they often appear to be supported by
a plurality, if not an outright majority, of the general population.
The malaise is further reflected in much academic work on the subject, and
among NGOs working in the field. Pessimism is the order of the day, along with
a moralistic approach that merely laments the shift in attitudes, the venom
of government policies and the spitefulness of the media. The situation of
irregular migrants appears so desperate, so without hope, that the most that
can be done is to expose the injustices and make pleas for more humane
treatment.
Anne McNevin’s book adds much valuable information on the contemporary
degradation of the refugee and migrant. But her work reaches deeper than
most, and engages with some of the recent developments which have both
degraded the experience of being an irregular migrant, and offer hope for
transcending the constructs that are responsible for this. Her work focuses on
three areas. First, the manner in which neoliberalism has ruptured notions
of belonging in relation to the nation-state. Second, McNevin seeks to uncover
the ways in which irregular migrants can transform themselves from the
objects of cynical sovereign powers into active subjects of their own liberation.
This she does through the lens of recent political movements such as the Sans
Papiers in France, and the mammoth mobilisation that took place in the USA in
2006 in favour of regularisation for migrant workers. Third, she interrogates the
strategies of these movements for their pitfalls and possibilities as challenges
to existing paradigms of citizenship and belonging.
Globalisation and the ‘Performance’ of Sovereignty
The insecurities of neoliberalism give rise to attempts at reassertion of the

sovereign subject through ‘performative’ acts of border control and distinctions
between citizens and non-citizens. For McNevin, ‘Irregular migrants have
become scapegoats for a series of rapid transformations that rupture long-held
certainties about where and with whom our political cleavages and affiliations
lie.’ (p. viii.) The rapid rise of far-right nationalist parties such as Pauline

Migration and Neoliberalism 219
Hanson’s One Nation in Australia is an expression of ‘an anxious population

insecure in the face of an apparently unstoppable globalizing trajectory and
in need of reassurance about more familiar forms of territorial control.’ (p. 76.)
Post-9/11, these economically-driven insecurities were joined with anxieties
associated with border security against terrorist ‘outsiders’. Both of the elements
thus combined in framing the ‘uncertain shape of a deterritorialized world’
(p. 77). At the same time, what McNevin refers to as the ‘neoliberal state’ is faced
with its own dilemma. State sovereignty is grounded in territorial control and
its duties to those who are themselves rooted within that space – the citizenry.
But the rise of neoliberal globalisation, with its emphases on the free
movement of capital and the inevitable trumping of domestic norms by global
markets, creates tensions at the heart of the traditional ideas of sovereignty
and citizenship. Territorial control begins to leak in the face of multinational and
finance-capital’s ability to disrupt the smooth functioning of domestic orders.
For workers, the sense that ‘their’ state will act to protect jobs and the standard
of living in the face of competition from other states has been seriously eroded.
One solution to this is the reassertion of the border. The frontier remains an
entity over which the nation-state, by definition, retains absolute control. Thus
the policing of this line always re-establishes the fact of sovereign authority –
what McNevin refers to as the ‘performance’ of sovereignty.
Each act of interdiction, arrest, incarceration, and deportation helps

to re-establish the meaningfulness of territory in spite of a globalizing
age and to reinforce the naturalness of the citizen-state-territory
constellation. (p. 59.)
At the same time, such ‘performances’ play to the desire of workers to see ‘their’
state protect ‘their’ space. Thus governments make a play at demonstrating
loyalty to their own citizen-workers and, simultaneously, creating a greater
sense of ‘us’ through the reassertion of the border as keeping the alien ‘them’ out
(p. 78). The result of this is that the tide of globalisation is kept, at least partially,
at bay. The fact that these performances are merely fictional representations of
reality, i.e. the impossibility of absolutely controlling borders, especially those
such as the USA’s 3000-mile frontier with Mexico, and the false notion that
restrictions on immigration lead to better conditions for ‘indigenous’ workers,
does not detract from the fact that such performances create useful narratives
to counteract the fears engendered by rampant neoliberalism.
Indeed, as McNevin argues, insofar as capital is gaining more freedom
from the nation-state, this process is being facilitated by the state itself. The
proliferation of legislation in recent decades, which frames the liberalisation of

220 Behrman
capital movements, is in fact testament to the on-going power and relevance

of the state. So, it is not state power per se that has been lost, rather it is the
democratic aspect and the pursuit of social justice that has been sacrificed in
the interests of freer capital flows. This is one of the central arguments of the
book. It is offered as a nuanced explanation for the degradation of irregular
migrants that does not slip into the postmodern dismissal of the nation-state
as of relevance in a globalised world.
McNevin also makes the crucial point, often overlooked, that the neoliberal
project of abolishing trade-controls and the statist concern with strengthening
control at the border are complementary rather than antagonistic. In Chapter 5,
taking as her example the US/Mexican border, she argues that if the US
government’s project of ensuring the deportation of all ‘illegals’ were actually
carried out, assuming this to be even logistically possible, it would hobble
huge swathes of the US economy in industries such as agriculture, hospitality
and construction. The fact is that crucial sectors of US capital are dependent
upon not merely migrant labour, but also the much cheaper and more easily
manipulated labour of irregular migrants. For capital, a major benefit of
neoliberal globalisation is the ability to source the cheapest possible labour in
an international market. For certain industries this can be achieved by moving
operations to the Global South. But for many others such as those mentioned
above, this is not possible. Citizen and legally-regulated labour, used to a
certain standard of living and protected by labour laws, however minimal,
creates a floor for wages and conditions. But for those without regularisation
and thus excluded from the protection of the law, capital has access to an even
more profitable source of labour.
But, as we are all-too-well aware, the pay and conditions of legally-regulated
labour is itself often of an abysmally low standard. McNevin warns against
seeing regularisation, a key demand of the migrant-labour movement that
arose in the US in 2006, as a panacea. Indeed, the ‘amnesty’ proposals floated
at the time by the Bush administration centred on a guest-worker programme
that would have imposed high taxes and other fees on migrant workers, and
allowed only a tortuous route to permanent residency let alone citizenship. In
other words, the plan would have merely institutionalised the insecurities and
hyper-exploitation of migrant labour.
Yet McNevin makes the common mistake of overstating the novelty
of neoliberalism’s effects on population movements. This reflects a more
widespread problem in the current literature on refugees and other migrants,
namely the tendency to argue that we have witnessed in recent decades
unprecedentedly large population movements. Of course, in absolute terms,
with a much larger global population, and the technology that allows people

to travel greater distances at faster speeds, numbers are higher. But relatively
speaking there is nothing new about significant population shifts. For example,
in the first six weeks of 1939 around 500,000 Spanish refugees crossed into
France, in the period 1880–1920 over 20 million immigrants arrived in the
US, and at the end of the seventeenth century over 200,000 Huguenots came
to England over the course of just a few years. With this last example, taken
in proportion to today’s UK population the equivalent number of incomers
would be around 4 million people. One could go all the way back to Ancient
Greece, where there were frequent large movements of people, often whole
towns and cities, as a result of the incessant inter-state wars of the Hellenes.
What is new today are the ubiquitous effects of capital, the nation-state and
law. It is this unholy trinity that has made the mass movement of people a
problem, not the fact of movement itself. Globally-hegemonic capital, which
both creates an impulse for labour movement and requires restraints to control
that movement, has brought with it two phenomena of the past century,
the refugee/illegal migrant as juridical subject, and controlled borders as the
norm. Moreover, from the late-nineteenth century onwards the nation-state
ideal became highly racialised. The first significant border controls in the US
(1882) and UK (1905) were the results of, respectively, anti-Chinese and anti-
Semitic reaction. More recently, the whipping-up of fear of mass migration has
been in response to the ‘new refugee’ phenomenon beginning in the 1970s. For
the first time mass forced migration was not just inter-regional, but global, and
thus involved large numbers of non-white and poor migrants from the Global
South arriving in Europe, Australia and North America.
McNevin’s analysis does foreground some of these new tendencies in forced
migration. So, for example, she highlights a study by Nicholas De Genova
which argues that what we are witnessing is an illegalisation of the means
by which people are able to move across borders (p. 24). The radical restructuring
of the economy by neoliberalism, and its impact on labour markets and migrant
workers in particular, is a central theme of the book. McNevin’s argument is that
concomitant insecurities wrought by neoliberalism are driving the process of
illegalisation of migrant workers. And it is at the nexus of citizenship that these
two forces meet. The result is the creation of ‘new kinds of subjects – from
neo-liberal citizens to illegalized outsiders’ (p. 26). The neoliberal citizen
replaces the ‘warrior citizen’. The former can be defined as that which has
‘less to do with nation-state membership and more to do with flexibility and
adaptability within a global political economy.’ (p. 129.) The latter, a concept
developed by Jean Bethke Elshtain, frames a citizen as one who is prepared
to fight and die for their country. The warrior-citizen is a reflection of a classic
state ideology based on territorial sovereignty and conquest.

222 Behrman
McNevin argues that the neoliberal state has transformed understandings

of citizenship in its own image (p. 60). Again, there is no doubt as to the
element of truth in the description of this development. The ‘market citizen’
is a peculiar beast that has been much discussed in the context of the recent
evolution of EU citizenship, whose terms are almost entirely set by those of the
market, specifically the supply of and demand for labour across old national
boundaries within the EU.1 But the ‘value’ of citizens has, throughout the
history of capitalism, varied according to their ability to remain actors within
the market for commodities, especially in terms of their own labour power.
Over 150 years ago Marx demonstrated in his critique of the ‘rights of man
and citizen’ the extent to which the creation of subjects of equal rights within
the state facilitated the more effective and subtle domination of capital over
labour.2
But, as with the rest of her analysis of the neoliberal state, McNevin points
out how new paradigms have not completely supplanted the old – the warrior-
citizen is still very much a part of contemporary narratives of citizenship (viz.
the ‘war on terror’). Instead, the security of being part of the warrior gang of
this or that nation-state has been undermined by the insecurities of a hyper-
globalised market for labour:
In the neo-liberal era, those who cannot adapt to a flexible labour market
are seen to suffer the consequences of their own individual choices . . .
[T]he substantive benefits of citizenship begin to shift from ‘unproductive’
nationals to better market performers. (p. 64.)
For those, such as the world’s 45 million refugees, who fall outside both these
axes of citizenship, of national belonging and market value, the situation is, as
McNevin writes, indeed ‘grim’ (p. 64). And herein lies the problem of resistance
movements of irregular migrants that trumpet their value as workers and
contributors to the local economy: it excludes those who are unable, through
physical infirmity, trauma or lack of marketable skills to be of value to capital.
McNevin is spot-on to warn that
such a strategic move might have the effect of further tightening borders
against an even more demonized class of irregular migrant in order to
counteract the increased mobility of suitable labour. (p. 67.)
1 See Everson 1995.

2 Marx 1975.

At the same time, resistance movements on the part of those who are placed
in a precarious relationship to citizenship are themselves producing ‘new
subjectivities – residents who are neither “illegal aliens” nor citizens, but
something else within a spectrum of political belonging that challenges
the authority of citizenship as we know it.’ (p. 27.) This is achieved by their
insistence on their right to be where they are because of their role as workers
within the local economy and their social place within local communities. Alain
Badiou has encapsulated the principle underlying this claim in the slogan that
‘everyone here is from here’.3 McNevin is again quick to argue against those
who claim that the nation-state is being superseded by ‘transnational norms’.
The nation-state is still very much in control when it comes to defining the
subject of citizenship. Moreover, globalisation necessitates the ‘proliferation of
sovereign borders’, and thus the two structures – neoliberal globalisation and
the nation-state – are inseparable (p. 42).
The Neoliberal State and the Reconfiguration of Space
McNevin argues that the narrative which posits a strong nation-state with clearly
defined borders and territorial control, versus a (post-)modern diminution
of the state at the expense of rootless capital, sets up a false dichotomy. The
classical state-formation epitomised in the Treaty of Westphalia has always
been a malleable form in relation to capital. The establishment of private
companies, operating outside domestic laws, which spearheaded colonialism
were, McNevin asserts, precursors for contemporary Special Economic Zones
(SEZ), areas of economic activity exempt from the norms of commercial or
employment law (p. 52). Likewise the contemporary concern with stringent
methods of territorial control has its roots in the nineteenth century with the
development of passports, surveillance and the birth of modern police forces
(p. 57). But it is the story of Westphalia that retains a significant hold over the
imagination. In other words, the image of a strong state with secure borders
and, at least, limited control over the economy may be a fiction, but it is one
which continues to have purchase over our collective psyche. Therefore, in
an age when the certainties of the story of Westphalia are being challenged
more than ever, states are practising the politics of border control with
ever more determination in an effort to convince us, and perhaps themselves,
that the anarchy of the market can be tempered by judicious application of
sovereign power.
3 Hallward 2002.

224 Behrman
Too often it is assumed that there is an inherent conflict between the desire
of states to resolutely police the border, and the desire of capital, or at least
certain sections of it, to ease the flow of cheap migrant labour. But McNevin
makes the crucial point that actually these two interests converge in the practice
of border-policing. By restricting access to migrants, while understanding
completely that the phenomenon of migrant flows will continue regardless,
states collude in the manufacturing of workers whose status will be irregular,
illegal and thus precarious. And an irregular migrant makes for a vulnerable
and cheap worker, which of course benefits capital. McNevin writes,
It is thus entirely plausible to interpret the intermittent policing of

irregular migrants as a strategy of neo-liberal governance that works
in tandem with restricted access to licit forms of migration to produce
irregular subjects. (p. 56.)
At the same time, the neoliberal pursuit across the globe to drive down wages
and unravel workers’ rights finds in the state a willing and able partner.
In short, McNevin draws a picture of global neoliberalism where the
nation-state is complicated but not subsumed, and where ‘global openness’
is constantly hitting against the fact of the nation-state. It is at the border,
the frontier between the nation-state and the global polis, that these tensions
are played out. In order to fully grasp the contemporary policing of borders,
we need, McNevin argues, to develop a ‘multidimensional spatial lens’
encompassing territorial sovereignty and global market-forces (p. 91). Irregular
migrants have become the objects of this process. The urgent task if they are
to be rescued from their degraded state is the resurrection of their political
subjectivity.
The Resurrection of the Political Subject
For McNevin, the movements of the sans-papiers and that of the undocumented
migrants that swept the USA in 2006 offer the possibility of the rehabilitation
of the irregular migrant as a political subject. Moreover, she argues, the very
fact of the illegal crossing of the border, or of working and living without legal
residency, challenges the fact of the nation-state, and complicates notions of
citizenship and belonging. This is true only up to a point. There have been
irregular movements of people for as long as there have been states. Indeed,
the fact that these people can be classed as ‘irregular’, ‘illegal’, ‘undocumented’
etc. is itself testimony to the continued relevance of the sovereign state. The

borders that are drawn between these groups and citizens are a function of
the nation-state. There is also the danger that we can fall into a hackneyed
postmodernist celebration of the migrant as embodying a progressive
cosmopolitanism. For refugees and those fleeing poverty and environmental
destruction, they are not ‘performing’ anything but a quest for survival; a quite
different experience from that of the traveller or the well-heeled literary exile.4
However, McNevin is careful to avoid these pitfalls. She does not romanticise
the plight of her subject. She makes the distinction between the cosmopolitan
businessman, at home in the air, with access to two or more languages, traversing
cultures with ease in the pursuit of profit, what the New York Times has glibly
referred to as ‘refugee entrepreneurs’, and those who are forced into a much
less glamorous attempt at survival (p. 62). Rather than globalisation heralding
a new cosmopolitan norm, instead ‘migration [has become] more hierarchical,
we are witnessing the illegalization of certain kinds of migrants as a bulwark
against citizens’ vulnerabilities’ (p. 5). This insecurity of the citizenry stems
from the rhetoric and the effects of neoliberalism. The anxieties perpetuated
by ever-faster transformations in everyday life by forces over which we have
no control leads to an ever-greater reliance on notions of stability such as the
rights of citizenship as against others, and the necessity to restrict and control
population movements into host communities. In other words, as the ideology
of neoliberal globalisation insists on the race to the bottom for the cheapest
labour, and the claimed ability of capital to come and go as it pleases, so any
sense of security has been eroded for workers across the globe. The function of
the irregular migrant is to offer a flesh-and-blood target of resentment for this
systemic development.
McNevin is also clear that it is not the fact of crossing the border which
ruptures the ideology of the nation-state (a romantic illusion beloved of
the postmodernists) but rather it is ‘irregular migrants’ acts of contestation’
in the form of political movements for recognition within the host state which
mark ‘a new frontier of the political’ (p. 5). These movements are crucial in
obviating the overstated, if sympathetic, picture of irregular migrants as victims
of globalisation. Victimhood obscures the potential for agency; resistance
reveals it. But, again, McNevin is careful to analyse the form in which these
movements stake their claim. The attempt by the emergent movements to
assert their value as workers and as contributors to the economy of the host
state can cut two ways. Yes, it challenges the rhetoric of indolent migrants as
a drain on resources. It can also help to foster links between migrants and the
rest of the working class of the host state. Yet, on the other hand, it serves to
4 For an excellent critique of this type of romanticism, see Kaplan 1996.

226 Behrman
further stigmatise those irregular migrants who are unable to work, or who
find themselves with skills for which there is no demand. Furthermore, it plays
into the idea that migrants only have rights insofar as they are economically
‘useful’. It reinforces the idea that it is up to migrants to prove their value.
Such is the underlying basis for the proliferating use of the points system for
immigration. Thus it frames the migrant identity completely within the terms
of the commodity. Or as McNevin puts it, they ‘risk weakening other claims to
citizenship and legal residence in nonmarket terms’ (p. 8).
This last point raises an interesting question. Can citizenship or any other
form of legal status be reconstituted outside of the commodity form? The
Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis argued convincingly that the legal subject
and the commodity form are inextricably linked.5 And as Phillip Marfleet has
shown in Refugees in a Global Era, the plight of forced migrants is inseparable
from the existence of the nation-state.6 So long as we live in a world dominated
by the political economy of capitalism and bordered territorial sovereignties,
law and the citizenship/foreigner binary are here to stay. The historical
example that McNevin deploys in order to argue for the potential of those
at the margins to reshape notions of citizenship is the slave rebellion of the
1790s in what is now called Haiti (p. 94). This movement helped influence and
expand the concept of citizenship that was being developed in revolutionary
France at the time. This is true to an extent. However, two points distinguish
this from the contemporary situation. First, such an intervention was possible
precisely because the upheavals in France made concepts of the political, the
nation and belonging fluid and highly contestable. Second, the destruction of
the slave mode of production and the establishment of the modern ‘rights
of man and citizen’ were not only compatible but also complementary. Today,
however, and as McNevin does acknowledge elsewhere in her book, citizenship
is itself bound up with the modern nation-state and the needs of capitalism. In
other words, reconfiguring citizenship beyond the exclusionary is not possible.
So, then, what is possible in the present circumstances?
McNevin rejects notions of the political which are ‘inarticulable by
conventional means’ (e.g. Hardt and Negri) even though they are more likely
to be able to resist co-option and regulation. Instead, we need to find ways of
asserting the political in ways that are ‘recognizable in social terms’ (p. 97). In
other words, a form of resistance is needed that does not simply ignore the
practical and ideological limits set by hegemonic capitalism. Instead, McNevin
5 Pashukanis 1989.
6 Marfleet 2006.

proposes rupture at the level of ideas, with a more nuanced strategy at the
level of politics (p. 98). She is absolutely correct to prioritise political strategy
and contestation as the keys to transformative change. This is refreshing in the
context of a body of literature that tends either to restrict itself to the call for
more legal rights, or to the glorification of those at the margins as bearers of a
transformative being. In essence, McNevin is arguing for a strategy that does
not posit reformist traps versus revolutionary dreaming, but instead seeks to
open up cracks within notions of citizenship and belonging that can help shift
the terrain in favour of irregular migrants, whilst always remaining vigilant as
to the limitations that govern such categories.
The Sans Papiers that emerged as a movement in France in the mid-1990s
exemplify the difficulties in maintaining such a balance. Their original claim
during the occupation of the Saint-Bernard Church in 1996 included the
following,
We have made ourselves visible to say that we are here, to say that we are
not in hiding but we’re just human beings. We are here and we have been
here a long time. We have been living and working in this country for
many years and we pay our taxes. In the files of the Saint-Bernard people
you will find wage slips, income declarations . . . (Quoted at p. 105.)
McNevin sees this assertion as cutting across discourses of illegality by

establishing belonging that goes beyond any form of legal status. Further, their
campaign used dress, music and other expressions of their culture to assert
‘both cultural difference and belonging’ (p. 107). The claim that ‘we are here’,
and of their value as workers and contributors to the domestic economy cuts
against the placing of themselves as ‘antisocial lawbreakers’ (p. 110). But at the
same time, by framing their worth in terms of productivity and the payment
of taxes they fall into the trap mentioned above, of playing into established
ideas of belonging within the nation-state and of value in a market economy.
Framing their demands in terms of their market value has allowed the French
government to agree to regularise the status of those sans-papiers who work in
sectors where there is a labour shortage. But what about the others? To their
credit, the Sans Papiers have resisted this distinction by insisting that the trade
unions deal with their cases beyond issues of just work, but also those of need.
Nonetheless, this points up the dangers of framing belonging in terms of being
economically productive members of the community. It also serves to divide
them from those migrants and refugees who, for whatever reason, cannot work
or who work within the black economy.

228 Behrman
But, perhaps, the most important aspect of the struggle of the Sans
Papiers is the reassertion of themselves as agents in shaping their destinies.7
McNevin is absolutely correct to focus on this aspect of the struggle in framing
new discourses on irregular migration (pp. 112–13). This is partly to do with
making themselves visible and demonstrating their contribution to the ‘host’
community. However, recent statements from the movement which highlight
the reasons for their flight from their home countries assert their agency in
a way which encompasses all irregular migrants, whether economically
productive or not, and ignores the boundaries of the usual discourses on
forced migration which tend to place its subjects at the level of mere victims.
[We] have chosen to leave Africa . . . we always decided to move . . . we want

a possibility, we wanted to keep our future in our hands . . . we wanted
to free ourselves from a system of exploitation which has no borders.
(Quoted at p. 112, emphasis added.)
It is here, in these types of contestation, that McNevin identifies new forms

of subjectivity, which can rupture the concepts of citizens and outsiders; the
migrants construct themselves as ‘active agents in their own political futures’
(p. 112). And in doing so, they raise themselves up as equal subjects with the
politically-endowed citizen. This, in my opinion, is the crucial element in
developing the potential for unity between citizens and non-citizens in the
struggle for social justice against the ravages of the market.
Irregular Migrants and the State of Exception
McNevin frames her discussion of the Sans Papiers in terms of steering a path
between on the one hand a utopian vision of a global citizenship trumpeted
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and on the other hand the ‘pessimism’ of
Giorgio Agamben’s picture of sovereign power’s capacity to collapse citizenship
and the homo sacer into one another (pp. 95–6). I think she is correct to point
out the romanticisation of Hardt and Negri of the experience of migration
and of the notion of citizenship. But she has a mistaken understanding of the
core of Agamben’s idea of the state of exception. This is a shame, as I believe
that her work complements Agamben’s project of exposing the manner in
which those pushed to the margins of society, of which refugees are a prime
7 For excellent in-depth studies of this movement and its impact in terms of reconstructing/
resurrecting political agency, see Blin 2005 and Siméant 1998. And for first-hand accounts of
the movement from leading participants, see Cissé 1999 and Diop 1997.

example, have found themselves stripped of all forms of subjectivity except

that of ‘bare life’, that is, existence.8
For one thing, Agamben does not argue that the rule of law is ‘abandoned’
(p. 95). It is instead the subject who is abandoned by law. As he writes in State
of Exception,
It is as if the juridical order [il diritto] contained an essential fracture

between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme
circumstances, can be filled only by means of the state of exception,
that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law
[la legge], as such, remains in force.9
Abandonment suggests being simply left outside of the law, but, if I understand
Agamben correctly, there is no genuine ‘outside the law’ in a state of exception.
Thus abandonment can be experienced as such – refugees, for example, being
left outside of the protection of human rights, civil law etc. – but the state
of exception in fact leaves no-one outside, as law collapses into life and vice-
versa. Instead, he is at pains to show that in cases as diverse as Nazi Germany,
Guantanamo Bay and refugee-detention centres the law is never abandoned,
but only ever suspended. Yet, and here is the crucial point, the law remains
in force. That is, the moment that sovereign power, itself constituted by law,
enacts the state of exception, it does so in a juridical move. These apparent
spaces of ‘lawlessness’ are in fact the ultimate expressions of legally-
constructed sovereign power. McNevin, in fact, provides an excellent example
of this process. At the beginning of the century the Australian government
declared that several of its offshore territories such as the Christmas, Ashmore
and Cartier islands were no longer part of the Australian migration zone. Thus
anyone arriving there can no longer claim refugee status. They are instead
deemed to be an ‘offshore entry person’, and therefore have no legitimate claim
for refugee status under international law. On the one hand, the Australian
government is creating ‘disaggregate[ed] rights-bearing identities’ (p. 87). Yet,
on the other hand, these asylum-seekers are retained within the grip of the law.
That is, they are detained, processed and usually deported through a juridical
process. The legal loophole into which these refugees fall is itself juridically
defined. The subject of such suspensions of the law is held up by Agamben to
be increasingly representative of potentially any member of the community.
In other words, as the logic of the security state gradually erodes many of the
norms of the liberal-democratic state, so governments are apt to rely on states
8 See Agamben 1998, in particular the chapter ‘Biopolitics and the Rights of Man’.
9 Agamben 2005, p. 31.

230 Behrman
of exceptions to deal with any number of challenges. Well-known examples

include the use of anti-terrorism legislation to restrict the right to protest, and
the securitisation of refugee policy. Thus, when McNevin accuses Agamben of
dismissing completely the benefits of citizenship, she slightly misses the point.
It is not so much the case that the position of the stateless is no worse than
that of citizens, it is that the apparent dividing-line between the status of the
two is not as secure as we might imagine. The fact is that increasingly the space
in which the former faces sovereignty in all its naked power is expanding to
include the latter.
McNevin repeats a familiar but inaccurate charge that Agamben’s work is
pessimistic and lacking as a guide to ‘transformative politics’. It is true that
Agamben’s work is rooted in genealogies rather than prescriptive models. I also
agree with McNevin that a real weakness in Agamben’s work is the absence
of any picture of resistant agency from below. However, many critiques have
a value simply in the fact of pointing out and/or explaining the iniquities
of the present. Agamben, arguably, is an insightful voice in this respect. His
work provides a necessary corrective to the debilitating legalism that pervades
much human-rights politics and activism. His work provides a powerful tool
for understanding the pitfalls of much current agitation for a return to the
rule of law, or for enhancements of legal rights as antidotes to the juridical
effects of the ‘war on terror’. As such, Agamben’s work can be a guide out of
that particular cul-de-sac. Moreover, in the final pages of State of Exception
Agamben makes a case precisely for the need to ‘halt the machine’, and for a
‘pure law’ along the same lines as Walter Benjamin’s ‘divine violence’.10 One
may find this insufficient or problematic, as indeed I do, but it clearly shows
Agamben’s commitment to a ‘transformative politics’, even if he is unwilling or
unable to spell it out. His work is only pessimistic if one retains illusions in the
rule of law as itself a vehicle for radical change.
McNevin’s brief dismissal of Agamben is disappointing precisely because
his work offers much that is pertinent to McNevin’s project of breaking the
construct of legal/illegal that has come to define discourses on irregular
migrants. In critiquing reliance on regularisation as a primary aim of the
movement of irregular migrants in the US, McNevin makes a point that
I believe fits very closely with Agamben’s critique of the modern liberal state,
[The] point of transition from ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’ migrant holds no

guarantee of escape from precarious working conditions and an insecure
future. Legality and illegality are merely statuses deployed as strategies
10 Agamben 2005, p. 87; Benjamin 2009.

of governance that mask broader hierarchies of mobility that determine

access to many substantive rights. (p. 126.)
Whilst I lament this missed opportunity to utilise such an important

contemporary theorist, it should not detract from what is, overall, a very
impressive book. It provides a highly sophisticated understanding of the
forces at work in degrading the existence of hundreds of millions of irregular
migrants today. And this is linked to a careful and well-argued analysis of
the movements which are challenging this. An academic book, so clearly
written, which provides such excellent analysis of the often-obscured political
movements of one of the most marginalised groups in society, whilst also
suggesting strategies for transformative change, is a sorely needed addition to
what is already a large body of literature on migration.
References
Agamben, Giorgio 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
——— 2005, State of Exception, translated by Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Benjamin, Walter 2009, ‘Critique of Violence’, in One Way Street and other Writings,
translated by J.A. Underwood, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Blin, Thierry 2005, Les Sans-papiers de Saint-Bernard: Mouvement social et action
organisée, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Cissé, Madjiguène 1999, Parole de sans-papiers, Paris: La Dispute.
Diop, Ababacar 1997, Dans la peau d’un sans-papiers, Paris: Seuil.
Everson, Michelle 1995, ‘The Legacy of the Market Citizen’, in New Legal Dynamics of
European Union, edited by Jo Shaw and Gillian More, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hallward, Peter 2002, ‘Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice’, Culture Machine, 4, available
at: <http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/271/256>.
Kaplan, Caren 1996, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement,
Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Marfleet, Phillip 1996, Refugees in a Global Era, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, Karl 1975, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Early Writings, translated by Rodney
Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Pashukanis, Evgeny B. 1989, Marxism and Law: A General Theory, translated by Barbara
Einhorn, London: Pluto Press.
Siméant, Johanna 1998, La cause des sans-papiers, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

brill.com/hima
Notes on Contributors
Simon Behrman
is Lecturer in Law at the University of East Anglia, and Visiting Professor at LUISS
University in Rome. His research focuses on critical and historical approaches
to asylum and refugee law. His recently completed PhD thesis investigates the
antagonistic relationship between asylum and law from antiquity to the present
day. Simon has published articles on the theoretical underpinnings of the
refugee subject, policing, and the work of Giorgio Agamben. He is a member of
the editorial board of the journal Refugee Watch. His current research projects
include work on the Sans-Papiers, climate refugees, and asylum policy in South
Asia. [s.behrman@uea.ac.uk]
David Camfield
is an Associate Professor of Labour Studies and Sociology at the University
of Manitoba. He is the author of Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the
Workers’ Movement (Fernwood, 2011) and is currently writing an introduction
to anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism, about which he recently
published an article in Critical Sociology. [David.Camfield@umanitoba.ca]
Christophe Darmangeat
is lecturer in Economics at Paris Diderot University. His first book (Le
communisme primitif n’est plus ce qu’il était – Smolny, 2012) reconsidered
Engels’s theory of the origin of male domination in the light of twentieth-
century discoveries in anthropology and archaeology, and set out a Marxist
alternative. He has since published two other books and several articles, dealing
with social evolution and the different forms of domination and exploitation
in primitive societies. His personal blog may be found at <http://cdarmangeat.
blogspot.com>. [christophe.darmangeat@univ-paris-diderot.fr]
Daniel Finn
is deputy editor of the New Left Review. He received his doctorate in history
from University College Cork for a study of republicanism and left-politics
in modern Ireland. He is working on a book on the same topic. [danfinn2@
gmail.com]

234 Notes on Contributors
Henryk Grossman
wrote The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System and
numerous other studies in Marxist economic theory, economic history, politics
and the history of science. He was a founding leader of the Jewish Social
Democratic Party of Galicia and later a member of the Communist Workers’
Party of Poland. A member of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am
Main from 1925, he was its preeminent economist. After the Nazis took power
in Germany, he lived in Paris, London and New York, before taking up a chair
at the University of Leipzig in 1949. He died in 1950. His article in this issue is
one of many that will be included in the first volume of his works, edited by
Rick Kuhn, to be published in the Historical Materialism Book Series. Most of
these have not previously been translated. The first full translation of The Law
of Accumulation will be a later volume in the collection. Other writings by him
are available at <www.marxists.org/archive/grossman> and <www.marxists
.org/deutsch/archiv/grossmann>.
Kenneth J. Hammond
is professor of East Asian and Global history at New Mexico State University.
His research focuses on political and intellectual culture in early modern and
contemporary China. He is the author of Pepper Mountain: The Life, Death and
Posthumous Career of Yang Jisheng, 1516–1555 (Routledge, 2007) and the co-editor,
with Jeffery Richey, of The Sage Returns: Confucian Revival in Contemporary
China (SUNY, 2015). He has been a research fellow at the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences in Beijing and the International Institute for Asian Studies
in the Netherlands. His current interests are ‘Left Confucianism’ and social-
justice movements in twenty-first century China, and the urban cartography of
early modern Beijing. [khammond@nmsu.edu]
Rick Kuhn
is a member of Socialist Alternative in Canberra. He wrote Henryk Grossman
and the Recovery of Marxism, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2007;
co-authored Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class with
Tom Bramble; and edited Class and Struggle in Australia. He is an Honorary
Associate Professor in Sociology at the Australian National University.
[Rick.A.Kuhn@gmail.com]
Marcel van der Linden

is Senior Fellow of the International Institute of Social History, Professor of
Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam, and President
of the International Social History Association. He is author, editor or co-editor

Notes on Contributors 235
of some forty books, including Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey
of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (Brill, 2007; Haymarket, 2009; Chinese
and South-Korean editions, 2012), Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global
Labor History (Brill, 2008; Brazilian edition, 2013; German edition, 2016); and
Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century
(Brill, 2013; Haymarket, 2014), edited with Karl Heinz Roth. [mvl@iisg.nl]
Maïa Pal
is a Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She
received her PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex in
2013 on a historical sociology of public international law. She recently joined
the journal’s Editorial Board and is a member of the Political Marxism research
group at the University of Sussex. [mpal@brookes.ac.uk]
Tad Tietze
is Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Psychiatry at the University of New South
Wales and a practising public hospital psychiatrist, both in Sydney, Australia.
He runs the political blog Left Flank at <http://left-flank.org/>, which has been
focusing on the global rise of anti-politics. He was also co-editor (with Elizabeth
Humphrys and Guy Rundle) of On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism
and Europe (Elguta Press, 2011). His writing has appeared widely, including
in The Guardian, Oxford Left Review, Overland, Australasian Psychiatry, and
Critical and Radical Social Work. He also writes on electronic music for Resident
Advisor <http://www.residentadvisor.net/>. [t.tietze@unsw.edu.au]
Ellen Meiksins Wood

(12 April 1942–14 January 2016) was a leading political theorist and historian.
She taught political science at Glendon College, York University, from 1967 to
1996, after receiving her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in
1970. After retiring she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada. Ellen
published eleven monographs – two co-authored with Neal Wood – and three
edited volumes. Democracy against Capitalism, The Origin of Capitalism and
Empire of Capital are landmarks texts that contributed to founding Political
Marxism. She published extensively in a range of publications including
Studies in Political Economy, History of Political Thought, Political Theory, Review
of International Political Economy, Journal of Agrarian Change, Historical
Materialism, Sciences Humaines, Monthly Review, Against the Current, London
Review of Books, New Left Review and Socialist Register. She was on the editorial
committee for Against the Current, New Left Review (1984–93) and Socialist
Register (1996–2009), and an editor for Monthly Review (1997–2000).

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Historical Materialism 24.

Introduction to ‘Britain versus France:

history – bourgeois revolution – Sonderweg – social-property relations – rule of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341450

‘Political Marxism’ – a controversial label that she nevertheless accepted after

1 Bois 1978; Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

countryside’.4 Patriquin, following Eagleton, highlights how fundamental

4 Wood 1996b, p. 10.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

11 Wood 2016, p. 12.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

Thus, consequentialists such as Davidson make the mistake of following

18 Wood 2003.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

24 Wood 2016, p. 17.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

be discussed further in relation to the illusion or appearance of convergence

27 Wood 2016, p. 28.

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 3–10

Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341452

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

State-formation in England and France

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

evolved not primarily as a means of direct exploitation but as an external

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was keenly interested in access to state office,

Rule of Law and État légal

These different patterns of state-formation make it very problematic to lump

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

law. These historical differences left political legacies with long-lasting

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Which Democratic Tradition?

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

of Parliament. Some commentators have even suggested that Parliament,

Britain and France versus Germany?

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

insurmountable barriers against fascist incursions.9 I have already suggested

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

German principalities was nicely summed up by Hegel, when he observed that

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

social-property relations on the land subjected landowners to capitalist imperatives,

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

It is probably enough to say that the economic and political development of

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 11–29

Elements of a Historical-Materialist Theory

This article aims to advance the historical-materialist understanding of racism

Racism – race – privilege – theory – Marxism – historical materialism

Upsurges of racism in many parts of the world today underscore why it is

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341453

of historical materialism to provide an adequate account of racism is widely

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 31–70

concept of privilege is also required if we are to grasp the contradictory ways

Historical Materialism 24.1 (2016) 31–70

‘the deepest structures of “historical materialism,” the foreknowledge for its

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341450

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341452

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341453