“How the West Came to Rule”: a work for the ages

When Jim Blaut succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2000, he was denied the possibility of completing the third and final installment in a series of books about Eurocentrism. The first two—“The Colonizer’s Model of the World” and “Eight Eurocentric Historians”—were polemical but scholarly rebuttals to a wide range of thinkers, including Robert Brenner. The third was intended to demonstrate that a different kind of history could be written, one that gave the “people without history”—as Hegel put it—their proper due. When I finished reading Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu’s “How the West Came to Rule: the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism” this week, I was left with the feeling that Blaut’s book had finally been written.

“How the West Came to Rule” is a work of towering scholarly erudition combined with deep political insights that must be reckoned with, whichever position you take on a debate that has been ongoing since 1950 when Paul Sweezy critiqued Maurice Dobb’s 1946 “Studies in the Development of Capitalism” in the pages of Science and Society. For Dobb, the transition to capitalism was rooted in contradictions internal to European feudalism while for Sweezy foreign trade was critical. That being said, Dobb’s book could not possibly be mistaken for the much more radical “internal” interpretation of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood. In chapter five Dobb wrote:

In short, the Mercantile System was a system of State-regulated exploitation through trade which played a highly important role in the adolescence of capitalist industry: it was essentially the economic policy of primitive accumulation.

Moreover, there were indirect ways in which the prosperity of foreign trade in the Tudor Age aided industrial development in the ensuing century. Some of the fortunes made by foreign adventurers no doubt eventually found their way into industrial enterprise; while, as we shall presently see, the expansion of overseas markets, especially colonial markets, in the seventeenth century, to some extent acted as a lever to the profitability of manufacture at home.

For Brenner, these sorts of arguments were unacceptable. Capitalism originated in the British countryside in the 16^th century because of a totally contingent set of circumstances that led to lease farming instead of self-husbanding family farms that were typical of other nations such as France. Tenant farmers were forced to compete in the marketplace to increase productivity and generate the profits needed to accumulate capital. Not only was foreign trade extraneous to this development; slavery and colonialism hardly entered the equation. Wood, who tended to be much more categorical in her formulations, put it this way:

This mode of providing for the basic material needs of English society brought with it a whole new dynamic of self-sustaining growth, a process of accumulation and expansion very different from the age-old cyclical patterns that dominated material life in other societies. It was also accompanied by the typical capitalist processes of expropriation and the creation of a propertyless mass. It is in this sense that we can speak of “agrarian capitalism” in early modern England.

Once this “big bang” occurred, everything else fell into place: the industrial revolution, the development of the British empire, and the diffusion of capitalist property relations to the rest of the planet. Any other interpretation was effectively outside of Marxism. That was the only way to interpret Brenner’s use of the term “neo-Smithian” to describe Paul Sweezy in a 1977 NLR article.

After Brenner and Wood staked out their positions, there were challenges from a number of Marxists grouped around Monthly Review including Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein. As “world systems” theorists, they made the case that slavery and colonialism were a sine qua non for the development of capitalism. Until now, the parameters of the debate have followed the pattern established by Brenner/Wood on one side and Wallerstein et al on the other.

Alexander Anievas

Kerem Nisancioglu

All that changed with the timely intervention of Anievas and Nisancioglu who make a convincing case that the terms of the debate have been inadequate to analyze the dynamics at work in the formation of the capitalist system. While Wallerstein was correct to see the importance of colonialism and slavery, he nonetheless accepted the terms of the “internalist” camp, namely that capitalism originated in Britain. Once it was established there, it took advantage of its economic and military superiority to become hegemonic as a “core” exploiting a “periphery”.

But this binary opposition does not take into account the “external” forces that operated on Britain, without which its eventual domination would be impossible. Specifically, “How the West Came to Rule” looks eastward at the Ottoman and Mongol empires whose impact on Europe would be as crucial to the formation of capitalism as oxygen would be to life on earth. Indeed, it was Turkish historian Kerem Nisancioglu’s investigations into the class relations of the Ottoman Empire that inspired Anievas to work on the joint project that culminated in “How the West Came to Rule”. With so much of the Brenner thesis debate revolving around the Western Europe/New World axis for obvious reasons, it was a breakthrough of considerable intellectual and political weight to look toward the east as a way of raising the debate to a higher level.

While many of us are familiar with the impact of Ottoman culture on classical composers, like Mozart who incorporated elements of the Janissary marching band into Piano Sonata number 11 with its final “Rondo alla Turka” movement or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the evidence is much more profound when you look at Holbein’s “Ambassadors” from 1533, the year that Queen Elizabeth was born. At the center of the painting is a Turkish rug that undoubtedly refers to both the threat posed by the Ottomans as well as their value to a transnational economy bursting at the seams of feudalism.

The Turks were rivals to the Hapsburg monarchy that saw Ottoman incursions into Eastern Europe as a mortal threat especially since many of their subjects welcomed a system that was based on a less punishing tax system and that respected local customs. For Nisancioglu, the key determinant of Ottoman influence and power rested on its tributary mode of production that did not conform to the norms we associate with feudalism. (This is a question that has preoccupied me for some years as an amateur student of Turkish history and that grew out of visits to Istanbul over the years with my wife. In a Turkish language class at Columbia University, I once asked the professor for the Turkish word that referred to a feudal lord and he looked at me as if I had two heads.)

Nisancioglu explains that in the Ottoman Empire the peasants were taxed on a basis regulated by officials appointed by the Sultan and thus relinquished a lot less of their surplus product than their European counterparts. While by no means an agrarian paradise, the Ottoman peasant was freer and less exploited. Additionally, the Sultan had power over the local administrators of land—the timars—who had much less power than the feudal lords of Europe. In order to generate the revenue for its court and its potent military machine, the Sultans had no other recourse except to expand geographically and bring new subjects under their domain. So, in essence the Ottoman Empire had a smaller footprint in the territory it absorbed but an ineluctable need to keep expanding in order to support what one Turkish scholar called “the military-agricultural complex”.

The European feudal ruling class also ruled by expropriating the peasantry but political power was far more dispersed with the fiefdoms essentially functioning as independent entities above and beyond the monarch’s control. In order for the monarch to wage war, he or she had to go to merchants and bankers with hat in hand. This is what led to the enormous power of families like the Fuggers. By contrast, Ottoman military expeditions were financed directly out of the Sultan’s treasury which relied on a steady tax revenue. This meant that the mercantile system’s growth was stunted in comparison to Europe.

With little interest in the expansion of a mercantilist sector, the Ottomans neglected opportunities that would have been eagerly exploited by the British or French. For example, after a stunning victory over the Mamluks in 1517, the Turks had an open door to India with its spices. But the Sultan had far more interest in Southeastern Europe with its fertile soil to increase its tax base.

In a direct comparison with the Ottoman Empire, Western Europe was underdeveloped. But seen dialectically, it was this very “weakness” that allowed it to leapfrog Turkey. As the Ottoman Empire was extending its influence and control over vast portions of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, it allowed trading networks to develop without interference from pirates or banditry. With a greater need for mercantile capital, the European feudal elites could benefit greatly from Pax Ottomana. With a safe route into India, merchants could export manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials that were essential to social reproduction such as the spices that could preserve meat or the silk that could be woven into fine garments. Turkey, in effect, was playing the same role that the USA played after Bretton Woods. Nisancioglu describes the process:

Trade and communication between the Ottomans and Europe also assisted in the transmission of social and technological knowledge, leading to a spurt of developments in European manufacturing, particularly those sectors imitating ‘Eastern’ products. The boost in French economic activity following a trade agreement with the Ottomans led to the `proto-industrialisation’ of towns as Marseilles. The competition in silk markets between the Levant and Venice inspired the creation of the hydraulic mill in Bologna which would later be adapted to construct Lombe’s Mill in Derby in the early 18th century—arguably the world’s first fully mechanised factory. Because Ottoman merchants were themselves were active agents in bolstering trade within the Empire and beyond, their own credit system and methods of accumulation such as the simsar monopoly association and mudaraba advance system became woven into the fabric of European commercial relations, prefiguring the ‘complete control of a commodity from production to sales’ that would become the of ‘company capitalism’.

Ottoman hegemony in the Mediterranean had consequences that ultimately made the “agrarian capitalism” hailed by Brenner and Wood possible, although it was never acknowledged in their scholarship. Put succinctly, the English benefited from Pax Ottomana while the Italian city-states were shut out. This meant that the nascent textile industry had easy access to wool, cotton, silk and mohair from the East. Furthermore, England’s isolation from the intra-feudal warfare of continental Europe allowed it to invest far less capital in the military. So pronounced was the “peacetime” dividend that by the 1550s Spain had seven times as men in arms than England. And none of this would have been possible without the open door the Ottomans provided.

With a declining military base, the English aristocracy lacked the means to forcibly extract agricultural surpluses as was customary in Spain or France. Furthermore, the English nobility was socially less stratified than on the continent with the gentry often emerging out of the urban mercantile class. With its burgeoning textile industry that had benefited from Ottoman ties, the displaced peasant was able to make do as a wage laborer in either the new tenant farms or in manufacturing. So when the social property relations that are the hallmark of the Brenner thesis were being born, the midwife was effectively the Ottoman Empire.

If the Political Marxists failed to take the East into account when they developed the theory of agrarian capitalism, it was an even more egregious failure to reckon with the role of slavery in the New World. Typically, when Robert Brenner refers to slavery in his 1977 NLR article, he amalgamates it with serfdom—a form of extra-economic coercion that belongs to the “precapitalist” epoch. However, the particular form that slavery took in the New World was hardly typical of feudalism, which was based primarily on the creation of use values. Slaves produced commodities—exchange value—for the capitalist market. If this distinction was lost on the PM’ers, it was not lost on Karl Marx who observed:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map.

Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846

For Ellen Meiksins Wood, the New World had hardly anything to do with the origins of capitalism, as she explains in the book with that exact title. On page 148, she points to the failure of Spain to develop along capitalist lines despite amassing “huge wealth” from South American mines. By contrast, England took off even though its overseas colonization “lagged behind”. The same thing was true of slavery. Britain certainly did benefit from the slave labor that provided cotton to mills in Manchester but for Spain it was squandered on sugar and tobacco. This analysis, such as it is, was the one that was widespread on the left in the early 1990s from people who had never read Brenner or Wood. To some extent it was a kind of neo-Weberianism that exploited the idea of Spanish indolence.

Perhaps a tendency toward Anglocentrism that is endemic to PM prevented Wood from recognizing that Holland benefited greatly from Spanish colonization. (We should mention that Brenner and Wood differ over whether agrarian capitalism had developed there as well, with Wood in denial.) Holland had traditionally developed much stronger ties to Spain and as such was able to make good use of gold and silver bullion in both manufacturing and banking. Indeed, Karl Marx noted that Holland was “was the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century” in chapter 31 of V. 1 of Capital. This chapter, titled “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”, argues that “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Needless to say, the PM’ers tend to tiptoe around this chapter, regretting to themselves that Karl Marx ever made the mistake of writing it.

Furthermore, the gold and silver from the New World made its way into a variety of financial institutions across northern Europe and helped to lubricate trade with Asia. If England, Holland and French merchants had easy access to capital, it made the import of raw materials critical to early manufacturing possible whatever the fate of poor, indolent Spain. The mercantile capital provided from slavery and other forms of coerced labor in the mines of Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia gave both the Dutch and British East India Companies the leverage they needed to trade with the east and eventually monopolize them. For Wood, these trading companies are written off as “precapitalist”, a facile term that tends to blur more than it clarifies.

While the notion of chattel slavery as being “precapitalist” erodes apace under the impact of major scholarly contributions by Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Walter Johnson, the benefit of Anievas and Nisancioglu is to put the question into the context of historical materialism and specifically Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development. The combination of English capital, American land and African slavery was unprecedented in human history and the reflexive tendency by PM’ers to aggregate it with serfdom can only be described as an intellectual failure of some magnitude. Anievas and Nisancioglu write:

Perhaps most importantly, market competition compelled plantations to operate according to distinctly capitalist rules of reproduction. The maintenance of the plantation was subject to costs and ‘market stimuli’ that constantly demanded renewed and expanding commodity production, where profit maximisation was the cardinal aim. As assets of fixed capital, slaves were ‘put to work’ in the name of profit, or else sold off to someone who would do so. Consequently, at least ‘nine tenths of American slaves were put to commodity production’, in which modern techniques of discipline and violence were deployed to concentrate and mechanise work, as well as accelerate its intensity. Such features meant that the condition of slaves was considerably closer to that the proletarians of England than that of the self-subsisting peasants of feudal Europe. Moreover, planters often made large investments in slave labour that could ‘enhance the productivity of future laborers’, as exemplified by South Carolina’s tidal rice plantations. Elsewhere slavers introduced labour-saving technologies, as in the case of the ginning machine, which in 1794 mechanised cotton cleaning.

Like much of the new scholarship of Baptist et al, Anievas and Nisancioglu hearken back to Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery”, a work that in turn was influenced by CLR James who was critical for helping to make the connection between the Caribbean and England. James, of course, was one of the major Trotskyist thinkers of the 20^th century and surely someone who would be able to see the relationship between apparently opposed modes of production acting on each other dialectally. Rather than seeing slavery and capitalism as rival forms of class exploitation, James and Williams saw them as mutually reinforcing even if at a certain point the contradictions would make them mortal enemies.

When I first encountered the Brenner thesis around 1997 as a result of Jim Blaut’s participation in the Marxism list that preceded Marxmail, my immediate reaction was to evaluate it against Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development as I pointed out in an article posted to the list (this was before blogging existed.)

A key element of Trotskyist thought is combined and uneven development, which first appeared in Trotsky’s analysis of the coming Russian Revolution. As opposed to the narrow “stagist” conceptions of much of the Russian social democracy, Trotsky believed that Russian capitalism and precapitalist forms had a dialectical relationship to each other.

While apparently blessed by having learned about Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development as independent scholars rather than through the school of hard knocks in the Fourth International, there is every evidence that they have mastered it as equals to CLR James. It is a reminder that no matter how quixotic Trotsky’s attempts to build an alternative to the Stalinist movement, his ideas about permanent revolution, fascism, and other big questions in the class struggle remain pertinent.

Throughout “How the West Came to Rule”, there is a constant engagement with the dialectic of combined and uneven development. In a recent discussion of the book, Neil Davidson—another critic of the Brenner thesis—asked the authors whether the theory was necessary for their critique. In a way, that misses the point since all Trotsky was doing is applying Marxism to the Russian class struggle. If he had not coined the term, it would have amounted to the same thing. If you read “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, for example, the same sort of analysis leaps off the page.

The authors offer a succinct presentation of Trotsky’s theory that will be useful to readers that have not gone through the sort of internal cadre training classes I went through forty-five years or so ago. Unevenness refers to different levels of development within a society or between societies, with the plantation system in the Old South or the mixture of the most advanced factories and serfdom in Czarist Russia classic examples. In the latter case, Trotsky noted that Russia stood between Europe and Asia—his way of describing its uneven development: neither fully capitalist or fully feudal.

Combination refers to the ways in which the internal relations of any society are determined by their interaction with other differentially developed societies. In the case of Czarist Russia, this meant adopting the latest industrial technology from Germany or Britain. As the authors make clear, this “leapfrogging” was essential to England’s rise. As a relatively backward and isolated society in comparison to China or India, it used its backwardness as a way of catapulting to a higher stage since it was not burdened by a tributary mode of production that while allowing the Ottomans to rule a vast empire served as well to retard its development.

Finally, the most significant contribution of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu is to reorient Marxism to the proletarian internationalism that was its hallmark before “socialism in one country” became dominant on the left (facilitated to a large degree by thuggery and assassination.)

If my initial reaction to the Brenner thesis was influenced by my reading in Trotsky and CLR James, there was another aspect that troubled me when weighed against my Marxist training. I always considered capitalism a world system just the way I viewed socialism. In my days as an activist in the Nicaraguan solidarity movement, I tried to explain the Sandinista failure in terms of the expectations of the revolutionary movement of the early 20^th century. There was no confusion about that in the time of Marx and Engels. When Engels considered the question “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?”, his answer was unambiguous: “No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.”

If socialism in one country was always an impossibility, it only makes sense to understand how capitalism operating as a global system practically from its inception makes internationalism a necessity. If “agrarian capitalism” always had an insular quality, that’s reason enough to approach world politics from the standpoint of “combined and uneven development”. To paraphrase John Donne, “no society is an island, entire of itself”.

In their conclusion, Anievas and Nisancioglu issue a ringing call for building a revolutionary movement that unites the many against the few in the spirit of the Internationale: “The International Union Shall be the human race.” We end now with their words::

The myriad dilemmas arising from the ‘inter-stateness’ of capitalism, this international dimension inscribed in all forms of development, confronting any revolution was clearly recognised – if not properly addressed – by Lenin. As he commented to fellow Bolsheviks in March 1919, ‘We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside the imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must triumph in the end’. In the field of IR, the apparent fact that revolutionary states quickly adopted the methods of traditional diplomacy and great power politics has been viewed as a striking vindication of the ‘timeless’ wisdom of political realism – a conclusion we clearly reject. But while it would be hopelessly naïve, if not intellectually disingenuous, to subsume an explanation ill the multitude of forces behind any socialist revolution’s ‘degeneration’, revolutionaries travel at their peril without recognition of the socially transformational power of ‘power politics’. And this ‘international’ dimension of development has much broader implications to revolutionary politics more generally.

Take, for example, our argument that the multiple labour processes in different parts of the world were crucial to the formation and subsequent reproduction of capitalism. In the period of the Industrial Revolution, coerced forms of surplus extraction in the Americas and Asia enabled capitalists in Britain to increase rates of exploitation and subordinate labour to the mechanics of the factory. Here the combination of uneven forms of exploitation was constitutive of capitalism’s expanded reproduction, and the real subsumption of labour. In the contemporary period, the divesting machinations of capitalism have continued and expanded into a global system of geopolitical violent and integrated production processes which afford it coercive and disciplining capabilities with an unprecedented international reach. The fluidities of finance capital, ‘just-in-time’ production, and logistics have only sharpened this sociological multiplicity – the international – into a machine of tyranny. Today, as always, wage repression, deteriorating work conditions and anti-strike practices are actively determined by variegated labour processes in different societies across the globe. In these ways, unevenness and combination act as disciplining features that maintains the capital relation as the basis of social existence.

So when considering the challenge of political multiplicity, we must not only connsider the level of ‘many societies’, but also many oppressions, many powers, many struggles, many actors and so on. Historically, sociopolitical differences borne of ‘many oppressions’ or ‘many struggles’ have been understood as something for the Left – and in particular the Party – to negate and sublate into the unity and singularity of revolutionary thought and practice. In this tradition, the programme has been presented as the higher ideological/strategic unity, and the Party the organisational form, in which political differences are ironed out, unity among disparate parts realised, and a homogenous political perspective pursued. In turn, the perspectives constructed by the leadership of parties and organisations are presented as the historical prime mover – the royal road – which simply needs to be replicated everywhere for capitalism to be overthrown. This negation of political difference sought by programmatic organisations generates a form of political autocentrism, and ontological singularity, where any given party or programme is posited as the sole and sovereign author of historical change. In this programmatic approach, difference is something not to be articulated, but destroyed; something to be redirected onto the True Path – where it cannot be redirected – exiled as a ‘bourgeois deviation’.

Drawing on our preceding analysis, we would argue that any politics that takes a singular – historically and geographically specific – experience and generalises beyond its own spatiotemporal conditions and limitations, is inherently limited, problematic and potentially dangerous. It is so precisely because it imposes a false universality on the uneven, multiform social experiences of proletarians. Insofar as capitalism has been built on the subjugation and marginalisation of multiplicity – both historically and historiographically – any anticapitalist politics that reproduces this subjugation and marginalisation is not worthy of the name.

Separated at birth?

German tree-hugger featured in NY Times article

Louis Proyect, American tree-hugger and bon vivant

Requiem for the American Dream; Something Better to Come

Despite my disaffection from Noam Chomsky in recent months for his touting Patrick Cockburn’s pro-Assad views on Syria, I found “Requiem for the American Dream” totally absorbing and urge New Yorkers to see it at the Cinema Village where it opens tomorrow. This is a documentary that is pieced together of four years’ worth of interviews with Chomsky interspersed with still photos and newsreel footage spanning around the same number of years that he has been alive (eighty-seven). While I would have found Chomsky’s insights compelling in and of themselves, co-directors Kelly Nyks, Jared P. Scott, Peter D. Hutchison have made what is essentially a talking head film exciting cinema. With a minimalist but powerful film score by Malcolm Francis, “Requiem for the American Dream” makes for a mind-altering tour of American politics that will be as useful for those starting to question the system as it is for grizzled veterans like me.

If nothing else Chomsky’s display of erudition is worth the price of a ticket. He points out that Adam Smith believed that the “principal architects of policy” are those who own the country: the merchants and no matter how “grievous” the impact on others, including the people of England.

He then cites James Madison on the need to maintain a system that is undemocratic as possible in order to protect the interest of the propertied. Madison openly stated that the government “ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

Turning next to Lewis Powell, who before becoming a Supreme Court justice was a hired gun for the tobacco industry, we learn from Chomsky that in 1971 he wrote a confidential memo to the head of the Chamber of Commerce warning about the “threat to the American free enterprise system”. It was a diatribe against the student movement and a call for all out assault to curb democratic rights and promote the kind of neoliberalism that we live under now, which you can read here. It reveals the degree to which the bourgeoisie worried about the masses, even if their fears were as overstated as was ours about our prospects.

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival – survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

The film is structured as a ten-part meditation on the principles of money and power that make the USA a plutocracy. As is customary for Chomsky, there is much more of an emphasis on democratizing the system than in what Karl Marx called concocting recipes for a future society (a sorry feature of ZNet, where Chomsky is held in reverence.) Mostly what comes out of the documentary is a kind of prophetic denunciation of existing conditions that perhaps might owe something to Chomsky’s upbringing in an orthodox Jewish household.

Chomsky’s father was the principal of a Hebrew school and raised his son according to traditional Jewish beliefs. Although his parents identified with the New Deal, various cousins, aunts and uncles were further to the left. Within the extended Chomsky household, various opinions clashed with each other. Against this political backdrop, it was inevitable that he would come to identify with the left, especially since the radical opinions he heard all about him were reinforced by “seeing people coming to the door and trying to sell rags or apples” and ” travelling in a trolley car past a textile factory where women were on strike, and watching riot police beat the strikers”.

The bulk of the young people who became radicalized during the 1930s joined the Communist Party, while a smaller number became anti-Stalinists. And within this minority most joined the Trotskyist movement or the left wing of the Socialist Party, which tended to overlap. There were, however, a smaller number that identified with anarchism or the left communism (sometimes called council communism) that constituted a reaction to the compromises with world capitalism forced on the USSR. Noam Chomsky became part of this current.

Chomsky created an eclectic blend of council communism, anarchism and a left-Zionism that was natural to a Jewish household that retained many traditional beliefs side-by-side with progressive politics. All three influences reinforced each other and produce what appears to be a life-long affinity for small-scale cooperatives against “state socialism.”

Whatever his ideology, Chomsky stands out above all as a riveting critic of the existing system, conveying in his own way what Karl Marx called “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” Although of Jewish ethnicity, Marx was raised as a Christian. Living in a historical epoch where as Yeats put it, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, we should be grateful for the writings of latter-day prophets such as Marx and Chomsky. Put this film on your calendar if you are in NY and look for it when it is available VOD as it surely will be if there is any justice left in the USA.

Although much is made of Richard Linklaeter’s “Boyhood” whose lead actor is seen over a twelve-year period starting from the first grade, I found the film uninteresting—mostly because the characters were uninteresting. It was like watching someone’s home movies as they go on vacation or bowling, and you know what kind of hell that can be. Victoria Alexander, who writes for the Las Vegas Informer and is even more immune to hype than me, concluded her review this way:

Nothing about the family resonated with me. There was no high drama, conflict, or family rage that is so common today in families broken through divorce. Linklater should have filmed a few days every month at our house the year my stepson came to live with us.

And then there is “Something Better to Come”, one of the DVD’s I received in December for consideration by NYFCO. This is a documentary made by Hanna Polak, a Polish filmmaker, and produced by a Danish company. Polak’s film takes place nearly entirely within the confines of a garbage dump called the Svalka that is only 13 miles from the Kremlin, where her subjects live in miserable shacks and eke out a living recycling junk they pluck from the mountains of rubble.

Her main character is Yula, a pretty blue-eyed blonde who we first meet when she was 10 years old. Polak filmed her over a fourteen-year period, showing her interacting with other denizens of these lower depths including her mother who is an alcoholic. She is like most people who end up in the dump, a product of a social system that has little use for those who live at the fringes. Unlike most Russians who may have benefited to some extent from Putin’s spreading around the oil and gas wealth, the people of Yura’s world are the left out and the hopeless.

To Polak’s everlasting credit, she cares about each and every one of them and risks arrest from the authorities who have no interest in seeing the dark underbelly of Russia revealed. Throughout the film we see Polak in a tug-of-war with various men in uniform who warn her not to film anything or else she would be sorry. These are not idle threats in Putin’s Russia.

There is a lot of suffering in the film from disease and hunger but there is also a lot of solidarity that arguably is missing from the winners in Putin’s Russia. Mostly you will be reminded of Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths” that supplies the final words shown on screen as the film ends: “Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come.”

I cannot find any VOD link for the documentary but if you come across one, grab it.

The first was “God’s Children” that was filmed in Quezon’s “Smokey Valley”, about which I wrote:

Hiroshi Shinomiya’s documentary “God’s Children” takes the audience into the lowest levels of hell on earth. It revolves around the lives of Filipinos who eke out a living in search of scrap metal, plastic bottles, etc. at a massive garbage dump near Quezon City called “Smokey Valley,” a sardonic euphemism in line with “Smokey Mountain,” another garbage dump outside Manila whose denizens were featured in Shinomiya’s first film.

 Eighteen thousand families were drawn to Smokey Valley because there were no economic alternatives. During a question and answer period after last night’s screening at MOMA, the director stated that the unemployment rate in Manila for youth now stands at fifty percent.

 In the opening scenes of the film, we discover that a typhoon had ripped through the area in July 2000, causing a landslide of garbage that demolished shacks abutting the dump, killing more than one thousand dwellers. We are reminded of the aftermath of 9/11 as we see rescue crews pulling dead bodies out of the fetid rubble, but with one difference. Given the power relationships that govern this planet in this epoch, nobody ever held memorial concerts or raised millions for these victims of the nameless and faceless terror known as capitalist neo-liberalism.

Like “Something Better to Come”, there is no streaming link for “God’s Children” and–alas–not likely to beone.

Finally, there is “Waste Land”, a Brazilian film directed by Vik Muniz that is more upbeat than the others since those who picked through the garbage (know as catadores) saw themselves as performing a socially useful function—recycling. Coming once again from the lower depths, they show no signs of having accommodated to the degradation that surrounds them in this desperately poor slum. They are proud that they have not resorted to selling drugs or prostitution, two professions that other slum denizens drift into.

The film can be seen for free on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/397079

Town and Tawney

R.H. Tawney

As a follow-up to my articles on formal/real subsumption, I decided to reread Maurice Dobb’s “Studies in the Development of Capitalism”, an economic history of England that I remembered as a useful review of class relations both in the city and countryside. Despite the tendency to associate Robert Brenner with Dobb because both were involved with debates with Paul Sweezy, there is little doubt that Dobb was a lot closer to Sweezy. Indeed, Brenner wrote an article in 1978 titled “Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism” that faulted him for giving too much credit to the towns.

For Brenner, Marxists—including Sweezy and Dobb—have overemphasized trade, particularly between England and other nations. Naturally such trade was what drove the growth of town and city, especially London, since the import of spices, silk, precious metals etc. were key to the handicrafts that emerged under feudalism and became the foundation for formal subsumption. If such goods could be purchased cheaply and through monopoly power, an accumulation of mercantile capital was the logical outcome—that, at least, was the argument.

Brenner rejected such arguments. For example, he wrote in his famous 1977 NLR article:

In sum, Sweezy’s entire account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is based on the implicit assumption that capitalism already exists. This occurs because Sweezy mistakenly believes that trade/towns constitute a sort of capitalism in embryo. The expansion of trade/towns will transmit to the economy as a whole, even one dominated by serfdom, a tendency to self-transformation by means of processes of accumulation and innovation which will inevitably lead to the decline of feudalism (and ultimately the adoption of wage labour), due to the exigencies of the development of the productive forces.

Wood says the same sort of thing:

The tendency to identify capitalism with cities and urban commerce has generally been accompanied by an inclination to make capitalism appear as a more or less automatic consequence of practices as old as human history, or even the automatic consequence of human nature, the “natural” inclination, in Adam Smith’s words, to “truck, barter, and exchange.”

Perhaps the most salutary corrective to these assumptions—and their ideological implications—is the recognition that capitalism, with all its very specific drives of accumulation and profit-maximization, was born not in the city but in the countryside, in a very specific place, and very late in human history.

While I was mainly interested in finding out whether Dobb historicized the formal to real subsumption process, which would have meant looking at how handicrafts were superseded by manufacturing, etc., I was intrigued to see this reference to how the townsmen (bourgeoisie, in other words) became landed gentry—a kind of reversal of what might be expected:

Similarly, agriculture in the sixteenth century was under-going an important, if partial, transformation. It was a century, on the one hand, of extensive investment by city merchants in the purchase of manors; and while most of this appear to have been either speculative in intention or with the object of drawing rents from leases rather than of enjoying the profits of farming the land, instances were not altogether uncommon of capital being sunk in improvements and of the estate being worked with hired labour as a capitalist farm.

Whoa, I said to myself after reading this paragraph, that is really interesting. So city merchants were buying manors—I didn’t know that. Someone who might have made a killing on the London streets making hats or boots then went out and bought a bunch of land. Was there a possibility that this explained the transformations in the countryside? When an early capitalist invests in land, it was no doubt motivated by the same kind of acquisitiveness that led him to corner the market in hats or boots—or so it would seem.

In his discussion of these trends, Dobb cites R.H. Tawney’s “The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century” that was written in 1912 and available on Project Gutenberg. (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40336/40336-h/40336-h.htm). Tawney was a Christian Socialist and strongly influenced by Max Weber. He is also someone that Brenner cited favorably on behalf of his own theory in “Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe” so that might give him some credibility.

Part two of Tawney’s book is titled “The Transition to Capitalist Agriculture” and is obviously relevant to the topic under discussion. Tawney views the enclosure act as critical to the rise of capitalism: “The development of the textile manufactures, which for two centuries were the chief source of English wealth, could not have taken place without the production of cheap supplies of raw material, and the growth of the towns was dependent on the saving of labour from agriculture.” This certainly sounds consistent with Political Marxism, the notion of towns relying on labor-saving large farms. But there’s a larger framework for all this—the Tudor epoch as a “commercial age”:

The age is a commercial one in the more fundamental sense that large economic changes are initiated by classes and individuals. Foreign trade grows enormously in the early years of Henry VIII., though certain branches of it suffer a temporary set back at the end of the reign. The use of money, of which during the first quarter of the century there was a shortage, begins in the middle of it to spread throughout all classes. The industry which for the next three centuries is to be the chief manufacture of England becomes firmly established. Under the influence of widening markets, trade separates from trade. Within single industries there is an increasing subdivision of labour; many links intervene between the group supplying the raw material and the group which hands the finished article to the consumer; a special class of capitalist entrepreneurs appears to hold the various stages of production together, to organise supplies, and to find markets. Side by side with the development of manufacturing industry goes a development in the organisation of finance. In the woollen industry men buy and sell on credit. In tin-mining and coal-mining they sink shafts with borrowed capital. The first joint-stock companies are established in the middle of the century with capitals of from £5000 to £20,000. There is a regular money market in London, there are bill brokers, arbitrage dealings between it and the Continent, adventurers who take advantage of the increasing fluidity of capital to speculate on the difference in the rates at which it can be borrowed in the Low Countries and in England. By the end of the century London has partially ousted Antwerp as the financial capital of Europe.

In the second place, the social arrangements of England are such as to make it certain that this increasing activity will react almost immediately on agriculture and on agrarian relationships. There have been countries where a sharp line has been drawn between trade and agriculture, where the landowner could not engage in trade without degrading himself, where the tradesman could not buy up the noble’s land. But this has never been the case in England. In that precocious island the Lombards had hardly settled in Lombard Street, when Mr. Pole’s daughters discovered that the fine shades flourished their finest in country air, and there was a market for heiresses among the English aristocracy long before Columbus had revealed to Europe the Eldorado of the New World. From a very early date the successful merchant has bought dignity and social consideration by investing his savings in an estate. The impecunious gentleman has restored the falling fortunes of his house by commercial speculations, of which marriage into a merchant family, if not the least speculative, is not the least profitable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century both movements were going on simultaneously with a rapidity which was before unknown, and which must be explained as the consequence of the great growth of all forms of commercial activity. The rise of great incomes drawn from trade had brought into existence a new order of business men whose enterprise was not confined to the seaport and privileged town, but flowed over into the purchase of landed estates, even before the secularisation of monastic endowments made land speculation the mania of a whole generation. Great nobles plunged into commerce, were granted special trading privileges, and intermarried with the rising middle-class families who were often better off than themselves. In all ages wealth allies itself with wealth, and power with power. As soon as the appearance of rich merchant families creates a fresh and powerful interest in society, the old social system and the new coalesce, and each learns from the other—the merchant how to make a display as a landed proprietor and a Justice of the Peace, the old-fashioned landlord how to cut down expenses and squeeze the utmost farthing out of his property in the best City manner. Even if the political and economic environment had remained unchanged, the mere formation of commercial capital and of a moneyed class could hardly have failed to work a slow revolution in agrarian relationships.

This chronicle of what happened in the sixteenth century is obviously more consistent with Dobb than Brenner/Wood and—might I add—with reality itself. There was an interpenetration of town and country with the town arguably taking precedence. This essentially was Ernest Mandel’s view as well:

It is in the evolution, from the sixteenth century onward, of these local markets supplied essentially out of the surpluses of producers of use-values, into great metropolitan markets, that we must look for the origin of agricultural capitalism. The prodigious development of urban centres like London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, etc., upset the relations of supply and demand as regards agricultural produce. These great cities concentrated within their boundaries a considerable proportion of the national population in the case of London, 10 per cent of the British population from the end of the seventeenth century and 20 per cent by the nineteenth century. The supply of foodstuffs to these populations depended no longer merely on the neighbouring agricultural areas, but on a large proportion of the entire agricultural production of the whole country. This tended to level out agricultural prices on the national scale, and this in the sense that the prices paid in the metropolitan area became the basis for the national price of wheat.

Thereby, contrariwise to what happened in the local markets of the Middle Ages, the areas with big wheat surpluses which were near the capital could sell their wheat dearer than remote areas where there was a shortage (allowing for transport costs). After the metropolitan market the next stage, achieved in a single century, was the world grain market: London attracted not only the wheat needed for its own feeding but also all the wheat intended for export, for maximum valorisation on the markets of the world.

The appearance of vast metropolitan markets from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward was accompanied by a complete reversal of the food-supply policy of the big towns. For these it was no longer a question, as in the Middle Ages, of restricting the price of foodstuffs by every means. On the contrary, it was a question of ensuring by every means an adequate supply of foodstuffs for the town at any price.” It was in this sense that the metropolises played the part of an apparently unlimited market, thus fostering the introduction of capitalism in agriculture. No longer were only the surpluses of rural production sent to the town; the maximum possible amount of wheat was sent, so that often the country people were reduced to subsistence level.

The movement for the enclosure of common land was stimulated not only by attractive prospects for sheep-raising but also by very high prices of wheat. The appearance of the metropolitan market and the ending, for the agricultural producers, of free use of the soil (i.e., the introduction of capitalism in agriculture), were intimately linked together. The importance of this stimulus can be judged if one considers that, from 1500 to 1800, the price of wheat in Britain rose from index 100 to index 275, and in France from index 100 to index 572, whereas the prices of metals and textiles rose by only 30 per cent during the same period.

In the same epoch, the rationalisation of agriculture, the transition from the three-field system to the planting of crops which restore the soil’s fertility, and the growing use of chemical fertilisers, increased, first in Flanders, Holland and some parts of Germany, then later in Britain and France, the minimum funds needed by a farmer if he were to take advantage of this miraculous manna of rising agricultural prices. From the end of the eighteenth century one needed, in England, to dispose of a minimum capital of £5 an acre in order to exploit an arable farm, £8 an acre for a mixed farm, and £20 an acre for a cattle or sheep farm. The ownership of capital thus became the condition for any viable agricultural enterprise, however modest. In this way all the conditions for the penetration of capital into agriculture were realised.

–Marxist Economic Theory, V. 1, pp. 274-275

The Zika pandemic and the FMLN

News is spreading rapidly about the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus that causes birth defects when a pregnant woman is bitten by an infected insect—specifically microcephaly that afflicted one of the characters in Todd Browning’s “Freaks”.

Like many of the diseases that are becoming epidemics in the global South, it is a product of poverty, climate change and the destruction of natural habitat. The most infamous examples are heretofore have been AIDS and the Ebola virus but now Zika looms as the latest pandemic threat.

Zika is related to dengue, yellow fever, and the West Nile Virus that are all transmitted from infected mosquitos. Ironically and tragically, one of West Nile’s victims was Walter Contreras Sheasby, a Green Party activist and Marxmail subscriber who died in 2006. Scientific American wrote about the connection between the climate change that the Greens campaign against and the increased danger of West Nile in 2009:

The higher temperatures, humidity and rainfall associated with climate change have intensified outbreaks of West Nile virus infections across the United States in recent years, according to a study published this week.

One of the largest surveys of West Nile virus cases to date links warming weather patterns and increasing rainfall–both projected to accelerate with global warming–to outbreaks of the mosquito-borne disease across 17 states from 2001 to 2005.

Peter Hotez, a physician based in Houston, is now concerned that the same factors that have made Zika a pandemic in Brazil and El Salvador now threaten his own city:

Hotez attributes the rise of Zika and other related viruses to climate change, human migration and poverty. As temperatures have risen, mosquitoes can thrive in new areas, bringing such viruses to previously unaffected populations. As people have become more mobile, both through immigration and worldwide travel, viruses can hitchhike to new regions.

Poverty, he says, provides the perfect conditions for mosquitoes to thrive and infect new victims. Hotez points to economically depressed areas of Houston.

“You see dilapidated housing, houses with no window screens, no air conditioning,” he said, “garbage and refuse that allow mosquitoes to breed, discarded tires on the side of the road.”

The Aedes mosquitoes that carry Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya, like to breed in standing water closer to humans. While local health departments spray for mosquitoes during the spring and summer, it’s primarily targeted at the Culex mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus. Those mosquitoes tend to fly longer distances and are active at night.

Aedes mosquitoes are daytime biters and aren’t likely to be affected by the spraying efforts.

Today’s NY Times reported on the drastic measures now being proposed by the government of El Salvador. It is urging women to forgo having children for the next two years until the disease comes under control. Like elsewhere, and probably even more so, El Salvador is the perfect breeding ground because it is so poor. A third of the population lives under the poverty line.

The vice minister of health does not think that avoiding pregnancies is such a bad idea. The Times reported him stating: “The country is the most densely populated country on the entire continent. It wouldn’t be all that bad if we had a reduction in births.”

The Times also mentions the crime epidemic in El Salvador, with poverty and the Zika pandemic virtually constituting a plague on the level visited on the Egyptians in the Book of Exodus. “One community leader said that a government clinic in his neighborhood shut down three months ago after repeated threats from the gangs, the kind of conditions that experts say make it harder to treat and combat the virus.”

As it so happens, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the current president of El Salvador, is a member of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) that I helped organize support for in the early 1980s as a member of Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). If you would have told me that in 2016 the FMLN would be in power in order to have people like this vice minister of health making such outrageous statements, I would have resigned. I guess I am fated to end up supporting revolutionary movements that end up adopting neoliberal policies. For the sectarian left, the answer is easy. Just build your own toy Bolshevik party and issue denunciations from within your pristine redoubt.

If the NY Times runs articles on Zika or gang warfare in El Salvador, the reader would have no idea that Washington is imposing its trade policies on this small and weak nation that have been intended to pressure the FMLN to function just like the puppet government it supported in the early 1980s. When the left squawks about SYRIZA carrying out PASOK type policies, it really needs to look at the overall picture. From Vietnam to El Salvador, imperialism has a way of taming insurgent governments as NACLA reported in March 2015:

El Salvador’s long civil war between savagely repressive U.S.-funded military forces and a leftist guerrilla army ended in 1992. But while the peace accords ended the “war of bullets,” said labor leader Wilfredo Berríos, “the political, social, and economic war began again,” and “under the rules of the right, the rules of capitalism, and the rules of the United States.” In this context, the triumph of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front)—the former guerrillas—in the last two presidential elections is quite remarkable. The victories of Mauricio Funes in 2009 and Salvador Sánchez Cerén in 2014 have threatened to disrupt the Salvadoran government’s historic pattern of compliance with U.S. interests. Yet as Berríos’s comments imply, forces opposed to progressive change retain great power to shape “the rules” of the game—even under FMLN governance.

The Obama administration has sought to ensure the adoption of corporate-friendly policies in El Salvador by conditioning Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) development aid upon a slew of neoliberal reforms that include privatization, the relaxation of business regulations, and the enforcement of trade provisions that privilege U.S. corporations. Since 2011, the U.S. “Partnership for Growth” has provided the overarching framework for advancing these policies. According to the State Department, the program aims to “promote a business-friendly institutional environment” and “catalyze private investment.”

The “Partnership” exemplifies a more general U.S. strategy in Latin America. Since 1998 the region has elected roughly a dozen left-of-center presidents who explicitly reject U.S. intervention and neoliberal economics. In response, the United States has tried to institutionalize neoliberal policies that can constrain future governments regardless of political affiliation. In effect, Washington has sought to mitigate the danger of elections by insulating economic policy from democratic input. As the FMLN’s experience in El Salvador suggests, these left-of-center governments are heavily constrained by forces opposed to progressive change. However, both government choices and popular struggle also help to shape policies on the ground.

“El Salvador is arguably our closest friend in the Western Hemisphere,” wrote U.S. ambassador Charles Glazer in 2007. At that point, the ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) party had controlled the Salvadoran government for almost two decades. ARENA was closely linked to the right-wing death squads that had murdered tens of thousands of peasants, students, workers, and religious people in the 1970s and 1980s. After the war, the party continued to enjoy strong U.S. support because of its enthusiasm for neoliberalism, its support for the 2003 Iraq invasion, and its militarized approach to both crime and dissent.

Although Mauricio Funes’ 2009 election threatened a change, the new president tried hard to preserve an amicable relationship with Washington, and the White House reciprocated. The U.S. Embassy’s current Economic Counselor, John Barrett, said that “Funes came in with a lot of good will,” which was “one reason why” the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) “stepped up with a lot of new funding.” The Obama administration soon sought to solidify the relationship through the Partnership for Growth, formally inaugurated in November 2011. As part of the Partnership, in September 2014 the Obama administration renewed a $461 million MCC development grant to deliver $277 million in additional funding for education, infrastructure, and other projects. The country’s poverty and unemployment levels—reflected in the high level of migration northward—made the government, and most Salvadorans, eager to get this money.

However, the United States also mandated a long list of policy changes relating to security, governance, and economic policy. Among the most unpopular, a Public-Private Partnership (P3) law allows for private investment in state-controlled segments of the economy like infrastructure and services. A substantial share of the $277 million in the second MCC aid package will be devoted to these projects. The law reduces legislative control over investments and transfers key oversight duties to PROESA, the Export and Investment Promotion Agency, which is nominally within the executive branch but includes leaders from the Salvadoran business world. Many popular organizations denounce such arrangements’ impact on public accountability, highlighting how representatives of business and the right are trying to create an autonomous entity to run the water sector as a sly path to privatization (though FMLN legislators have so far succeeded in excluding water from the list of services subject to P3 investments).

In mid-2014 the U.S. Embassy announced another notorious condition, demanding that the government cease a program that supports peasant agriculture by buying and distributing corn and bean seeds from small farmers and cooperatives. A U.S. Embassy press release argued that the procurement process was not “open,” as required under the 2004 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and therefore violated El Salvador’s “obligations” to “the international community”—namely the ARENA-linked importer of Monsanto seeds that had previously controlled most of the market. Massive domestic and international outcry forced the U.S. government to back down, but the demand itself reflects a main objective of U.S. policy, as elaborated by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman: “to open global markets for U.S. goods and services” and “enforce America’s rights in the global trading system.”

Read full article: https://nacla.org/news/2015/03/16/war-other-means-el-salvador

US and Jordan demand Southern Front rebels stop fighting Assad, cut off “support”

Syrian Revolution Commentary and Analysis

By Michael Karadjis

According to two articles attached below this post, a number of changes have been taking place in southern Syria, where the Southern Front (SF) of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) holds sway over much of Daraa and Quneitra provinces, and shares a border with Jordan, through which the US, Saudi Arabia and Jordan itself attempt to exercise sway over the situation.

The first article (https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/NewsReports/566514-daraa-rebels-ordered-to-stop-fighting-syria-regime-report) claims that the Military Operations Room (MOC) in Amman, Jordan, through which these countries have contact with the SF, has ordered the SF to stop fighting the regime, and even to avoid the more patchy conflicts with ISIS (merely because ISIS has so little presence in the south), and instead to make war against Jabhat al-Nusra. The second article (http://www.mei.edu/content/article/has-jordan-acquiesced-assad-regime-offensive-southern-syria) describes how the Kingdom of Jordan, where the MOC is based, is coordinating with both the US and…

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Upton Sinclair speaks

In 1934 Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat, just like Sanders is doing today except that Sinclair was the party’s nominee after having won 3 times as many votes in the primary than his opponents combined. In 1992 Greg Mitchell wrote about his EPIC campaign, the acronym for End Poverty in California, in a book titled “The Campaign of the Century”. So unlike other bourgeois electoral campaign I always assumed that it was a 3rd party bid because Sinclair was for abolishing capitalism, not reforming it. It is useful to use the EPIC campaign as a benchmark for Sanders’s campaign this year. From Mitchell’s book:

It was 10:45 P.M. in Washington and New York, 9:45 in the Midwest, and 7:45 in California when Upton Sinclair, who was already packing his bags for the trip east, delivered his first nationwide radio address, originating from KHJ in Los Angeles. Until the past few days, the Sinclair campaign had received little notice nationally. Sinclair himself was a famous author, but what was he known for? Exposing the meat-packers, defending Sacco and Vanzetti, producing an Eisenstein film. What did that have to do with running for office and leading a social movement called EPIC? The author of The Jungle was portrayed by many in the press as a dangerous, demagogic champion of the underdog. Was he another Huey Long or Father Coughlin? And if he was, was that good or bad? With the New Deal faltering, anyone promising to end poverty, even in one notoriously eccentric state out West, deserved a listen, and so millions of Americans—bankers, breadliners, and Brain Trusters alike gathered around their radio sets to find out whether Upton Sinclair embodied their fondest hopes or their deepest fears, or perhaps a little of both.

“I have been asked to explain to you the political movement which has just achieved such an extraordinary victory in the state of California,” Sinclair began. “I did not make this victory, it has been made by the people of our state. It is a spontaneous movement which has spread all over the state by the unpaid labor of tens of thousands of devoted workers. They were called amateurs but they have put all the professional politicians on the shelf. In less than a year they have built a movement which has carried a state of more than six million population. It has been called a political miracle and the rest of the states will wish to know what it means.

“We confront today the collapse of an institution which is worldwide and age-old,” Sinclair exclaimed in his pinched, nasal tenor, with just the suggestion of a lisp, sounding a bit like a patrician Jimmy Cagney. “Capitalism has served its time and is passing from the earth. A new system must be found to take its place, and that event is the same thing to our society as childbirth is to the individual: The child may be born, but both child and mother may perish in agony.

“Consider what has happened in Germany. An obscene demagogue has seized power; a great civilized nation has fallen into the hands of gangsters. Liberty is at an end and the most scientifically advanced of modern states is sliding back into the dark ages. Do not think that was an accident! Do not attribute it to the magic of a demagogue’s tongue. Those events in Germany were planned, they were bought and paid for. It is the steel kings of Germany who have seized the country and prevented a new birth of freedom for the people.

“And now we have the same breakdown in the United States. The same poverty and insecurity. The same unemployment and suffering, the same Wall Street kind of bond slavery. Can we free ourselves or will Wall Street give us a dictator and fasten the chains about our ankles for a generation, and perhaps forever? Can democracy work? Can the peo-ple use its instruments in their own interest or can they be fooled and lied to and frightened away from their goal?

“We have put a plan before the people,” Sinclair said, his voice insistent but rarely wavering in pitch or volume. Whatever his words, lie was no fire-and-brimstone preacher, no Mussolini, no Huey Long.

“We have shown them the way out of the depression. We have made it as simple as possible. We have made it gradual so as to be painless. We are not proposing to replace the whole collapsing system by a new one all at once. We are proposing the first step, a trial stage.

“We say to the voters: There are half a million persons in our state out of work. They cannot be permitted to starve. These persons can never again find work while the present system endures. They are being supported by public charities, and the burden of that is driving the state to bankruptcy and the taxpayers to ruin. There is no solution to this problem except to put these unemployed at productive labor, to make them self-sustaining, to let them produce what they are going to consume and so take them off the backs of the taxpayers.

“That is the simple proposition. There can be no valid objection to it. But the whole power of vested privilege rises up against it. Why is this? The answer is because they are afraid of the precedent. They are afraid the plan will succeed, and show the unemployed how to produce for use instead of for profit. It will put into the minds of the unemployed the idea of getting access to land and machinery by the political method, by the use of their ballots. And once they get access to good land and modern machinery they will produce so much, they will make such comfort and plenty for themselves, that they will never again be content to support the parasites of Wall Street.”

Sinclair explained the foundations of the so-called EPIC plan. “There are a couple of thousand factories in our state standing entirely idle and the rest are working less than half time,” he asserted matter-of-factly. “Many of these concerns are running into debt, and to them the state of California will say, ‘We offer to rent your factories. Keep your organization going, call in your workers, and run your machinery under the supervision of the state.’ The workers will turn out goods and they will own what they have produced.

“The farmers of California, meanwhile, are producing huge quantities of foodstuffs for which they cannot find a market. The farmers are losing their land because they cannot pay their taxes. To these farmers the state will say, `Bring your foodstuffs to our warehouses and you will receive in return receipts which will be good for your taxes.’ The farmers will eagerly comply and the food will be shipped to the cities and made available to the factory workers in exchange for the products of their labor. These products will go out to the stores in the farmers’ communi-ties and be exchanged for more of the farmers’ goods. So we will get going, by the credit power of the state, a new system of production in which Wall Street will have no share.”

The EPIC plan also called for the establishment of what Sinclair referred to as land colonies. “All around our cities and towns are tracts of land which speculators have been holding out of use,” he insisted. “They also cannot pay their taxes and will be glad to rent the land to the state. The state can furnish machinery, and the unemployed can go to work and grow their own food, making gardens where now are patches of weeds.

“The possibilities of this system once started are beyond any man’s imagining. We are going to have to tax the great corporations of our slate to make up the present deficit. If we make these taxes payable in services and goods, we shall have lumber, cement, and other building materials out of which our people can make homes. We shall have heat, light, and gas for our offices and stores, and power for our factories.

“Our opponents have told you that all of this is socialism and communism. We are not the least worried, because we note that Mr. Hearst has been cabling from Europe that President Roosevelt’s policies are also communism,” Sinclair said, playing his FDR card at last. “Our enemies’ efforts to crush this movement by lies and intimidation are not merely an attack upon me in California, they are a preparation for the scrapping of the New Deal at the presidential election of 1936. Make no mistake about the meaning of the decision which you are going to make in November. The news has gone out to the whole country, and if the Democratic party of California adopts the EPIC plan, it will mean hope, courage, and guidance to the unemployed of all our forty-eight states.

“All my life I have believed in the people. All my life I have insisted t hat democracy could be made to work. The years since the world war have been years of cynicism and heartsickness. But all through these years I have stood by my faith, in spite of all ridicule. I have believed in the people, and the one thing the people of California have done for me is to vindicate that faith, out of which my life and books have been made.

“Our opponents have told you that we cannot put this plan through,” Sinclair confessed, his maiden speech as a national political figure drawing to a close. “Let me answer just this: If you should give me a chance to end poverty in California, and if I should fail to do it, life would mean nothing to me thereafter. All that I have taught all through the years would be without meaning. Believe me, and stick by me, and we together shall not fail!”

 

Once again on the formal/real subsumption question

Definitely not found in a medieval guild

In my post on “Anglocentrism and the real subsumption of labor”, I mistakenly attributed Marx’s discussion of formal and real subsumption to the Grundrisse. It actually is contained in “The Results of the Direct Production Process”, which is part of a third draft of Capital that Marx wrote between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, and is based on a plan Marx made for the work in December 1862. After reading it, I find myself troubled by how it fits into Marx’s more general analysis of the exploitation of labor in light of his statement:

Just as the production of absolute surplus value can be regarded as the material expression of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, so the production of relative surplus value can be regarded as that of the real subsumption of labour under capital.

Returning once again to Charles Post’s reference to Marx’s definitions of the two forms of subsumption, you find what is commonly understood as “handicrafts”, the most elementary form of labor exploitation that emerged out of the bowels of feudalism:

As long as capital’s subsumption of labor was formal and the actual labor-process was in the hands of skilled artisanal wage earners—legal-juridical forces was necessary to ensure the sale of labor-power and capital’s ability to command production. [emphasis added]

Skilled artisanal wage earners is obviously the words that would describe men and women who worked in “cottage industries” spinning wool and making garments out of the raw materials supplied by an early capitalist, one that Marx considered rooted in usury. The next step would be gathering all of these artisans under the same roof and paying them a wage to make garments with both machinery and raw materials supplied by the capitalist. With their skills, they conceivably could go into business for themselves as many surely did.

In “The Results of the Direct Production Process”, Marx describes the world in which “formal subsumption” operated:

Finally, the relation of capitalist and wage labourer can replace the master of the guild type and his journeymen and apprentices, a transition accomplished in part by urban manufacture at its very beginnings. The medieval guild relation, which developed in analogous form in narrow circles in Athens and Rome as well, and was of such decisive importance in Europe for the formation of capitalists on the one hand, and of a free estate of workers on the other, is a limited, not yet adequate, form of the relation of capital and wage labour. There exists here on the one hand the relation of buyer and seller. Wages are paid, and master, journeyman, and apprentice confront each other as free persons. The technological basis of this relation is the handicraft workshop, in which the more or less skilled manipulation of the instrument of labour is the decisive factor of production.

In between such a relatively primitive form of class relations and that of “real subsumption”, there is a huge gap:

We already noted when considering machinery, how its introduction into one branch brings about its introduction into others, and at the same time into other varieties of the same branch. Mechanical spinning, for example, leads to mechanical weaving; mechanical spinning in the cotton industry leads to mechanical spinning in wool, linen., silk, etc. The wider employment of machinery in coal mines, cotton manufactures, etc., made necessary the introduction of the large-scale method of production into machine manufacture itself. Leaving aside the growth in the means of transport required by this mode of production on a large scale, it is on the other hand only the introduction of machinery into machine manufacture itself — particularly the cyclical prime motor — which has made possible the introduction of steamships and railways, and revolutionised the whole of shipbuilding. Large-scale industry throws as large a mass of human beings into the branches not yet subjected to it, or creates in these branches as large a relative surplus population, as is required for the conversion of handicrafts or of the small, formally capitalist business into a large-scale industry.

So, on one hand you have formal subsumption with its quaint guilds and skilled artisans turning out garments by the dozens each day like something you would see in London circa 1450. On the other, with real subsumption you have the “wider employment of machinery” that makes possible the production of thousands of garments each day in an age when the same advances are yielding the modern steamship and railway lines that can transport them to markets.

If you want to produce 12 shirts a day in the world of formal subsumption, the recourse is to lengthen the workday. This is called the creation of absolute surplus value. If you want to double production in the world of real subsumption, you introduce mechanical looms and a division of unskilled labor that makes the process even more efficient, such as having some men or women assigned to dying and others to operating the machines and still others to putting the finished product into boxes.

After having read “The Results of the Direct Production Process” the other day, something nagged at me. I hadn’t read Capital in over forty-five years but the chapter on the creation of absolute surplus value, where the term formal subsumption appears nowhere, seemed to have little to do with the guilds of the late middle ages and much more to do with what William Blake called the “satanic mills”. Sure enough, a rereading this morning confirmed my suspicions. There’s a section in chapter ten titled “Day and Night Work. The Relay System” that hardly sounds like what was going on in Tudor England.

The Relay System was the term Marx used to describe keeping factories going 24 hours a day: “To appropriate labour during all the 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production. But as it is physically impossible to exploit the same individual labour-power constantly during the night as well as the day, to overcome this physical hindrance, an alternation becomes necessary between the workpeople whose powers are exhausted by day, and those who are used up by night.” That doesn’t sound like any medieval guild I’ve heard of. In fact, it sounds much more like Chinese factories today.

Nor does it sound like the small-scale operations of handicrafts or early manufacturing:

Mr. J. Ellis, one of the firm of Messrs. John Brown & Co., steel and iron works, employing about 3,000 men and boys, part of whose operations, namely, iron and heavier steel work, goes on night and day by relays, states “that in the heavier steel work one or two boys are employed to a score or two men.”

As it turns out, Wikipedia has an entry on this guy’s business, which was founded in 1844. By 1859 it was producing rails for the rapidly expanding railway industry that Marx referred to as an exemplar of real subsumption. Like most leading edge factories in the steel business, John Brown and Co. used the Bessemer process. Does the Bessemer process sound like it belongs to the world of formal subsumption with its handicrafts and skilled artisans? I don’t think so.

In fact Marx refers to the Bessemer process in V. 3 of Capital as a key breakthrough in the productivity of labor:

The chief means of reducing the time of production is higher labour productivity, which is commonly called industrial progress. If this does not involve a simultaneous considerable increase in the outlay of total capital resulting from the installation of expensive machinery, etc., and thus a reduction of the rate of profit, which is calculated on the total capital, this rate must rise. And this is decidedly true in the case of many of the latest improvements in metallurgy and in the chemical industry. The recently discovered methods of producing iron and steel, such as the processes of Bessemer, Siemens, Gilchrist-Thomas, etc., cut to a minimum at relatively small costs the formerly arduous processes.

I think that Marx probably understood that there is no Chinese wall between the creation of absolute and relative surplus value as he pointed out in chapter 16 of V. 1 of Capital that is titled “Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value”:

From one standpoint, any distinction between absolute and relative surplus-value appears illusory. Relative surplus-value is absolute, since it compels the absolute prolongation of the working-day beyond the labour-time necessary to the existence of the labourer himself. Absolute surplus-value is relative, since it makes necessary such a development of the productiveness of labour, as will allow of the necessary labour-time being confined to a portion of the working-day. But if we keep in mind the behaviour of surplus-value, this appearance of identity vanishes. Once the capitalist mode of production is established and become general, the difference between absolute and relative surplus-value makes itself felt, whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value. Assuming that labour-power is paid for at its value, we are confronted by this alternative: given the productiveness of labour and its normal intensity, the rate of surplus-value can be raised only by the actual prolongation of the working-day; on the other hand, given the length of the working-day, that rise can be effected only by a change in the relative magnitudes of the components of the working-day, viz., necessary labour and surplus-labour; a change which, if the wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, presupposes a change either in the productiveness or in the intensity of the labour.

In plain language, Marx is saying that if profits are declining in a highly mechanized factory, the capitalist will use “extra-economic” coercion to make sure that the workers conform to the treadmill norms of the above mentioned Relay System:

Right now, in Shanghai, China, a factory owned by the Taiwanese Pegatron Group is pushing out millions of units of the iPhone 6s for Apple. There, its young production workers toil six days a week in 12-hour shifts. Each day they are paid for 10 and half hours of work, not counting 15 minutes of unpaid meetings. The mandatory overtime shift runs from 5:30 pm until 8:00 pm. Most workers will not eat dinner before doing overtime because the 30-break given for a meal is not enough time.

Before overtime pay, workers making the iPhone earn only the local minimum wage of $318 per month, or about $1.85 per hour. This is not a living wage. Even if the factory did not mandate overtime as it does, workers would still depend on their 60-hour workweeks to get by.

After their long shifts, workers take a 30-minute shuttle bus back to their dorms where up to 14 people are crammed into a room. Mold grows pervasively along the walls. Bed bugs have spread throughout the dorm, and many workers are covered in red bug bites.

The problem with the Political Marxists is that they are essentially “stagists” without even realizing it, all the more ironic since Post and Brenner are members of an organization that is led by veterans of either the SWP or the IS, two groups that were the best representatives of American Trotskyism. This whole idea of consigning formal subsumption and the creation of absolute surplus value to a virtual pre-capitalist stage as Brenner does in his 1977 NLR article is wrong. Capitalism began at the point when commodity production began to become universal. Workers across the planet were involved with the emerging system, from slaves in Mississippi to textile workers in Liverpool. If they have trouble understanding that, Marx did not:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map.

Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, 1846

 

 

The Revenant; The Hateful Eight

“The Revenant” and “The Hateful Eight” have some things in common. Alejandro González Iñárritu and Quentin Tarantino, their respective directors, are widely considered to have “indie” credibility, pushing at the barriers of Hollywood but not breaking them. The two films are nominally Westerns but like just about all that are made nowadays wear their “revisionist” colors proudly. Finally, I came to them with low expectations since their directors’ last two films—“Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” and “Django Unchained”—were major disappointments. Despite “Birdman” receiving the Academy Award for best film in 2014, I was unimpressed:

The film plays with notions of art versus commerce but only in the most superficial way. I suppose if you’ve never seen Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels” or Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt”, “Birdman” might pass muster. My misfortune is to be old enough to have seen such films in my youth and being spoiled by the experience.

The less said about “Django Unchained” the better. In fact I walked out on it after fifteen minutes. When Django shows up at slave-owner’s plantation wearing a powder-blue costume that appeared to be borrowed from a low-budget production of “Don Giovanni”, my patience wore out. I guess my logic fetish got the better of me.

“The Revenant” shares the title of a good B-movie from 2009 about an Iraq war veteran who rises from the dead as a combination zombie/vampire and begins killing drug dealers in Los Angeles. The word revenant means someone who returns from the dead, a term that can apply to Jesus Christ as well, I suppose.

The revenant in Iñárritu’s film is a trapper named Hugh Glass (Leonardo Dicaprio) who is mauled nearly to death by a Grizzly bear at the beginning of the film and left for dead by John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), one of his comrades. When Glass’s son, a product of the marriage to his Pawnee Indian wife, struggles with Fitzgerald as he prepares to abandon his mortally wounded father, Fitzgerald plunges a knife into the youth and kills him.

The film is based on a true-life incident that took place in 1823 when a trapper named Hugh Glass was mauled by a bear in South Dakota and then practically crawled his way back to Fort Kiowa some two hundred miles away. Like the character in “The Revenant”, his comrades abandoned him.

Much has been made about the film’s inaccuracies, starting with Glass’s marriage to a Pawnee woman as well as the quest to take mortal revenge on John Fitzgerald. It seems that there was no evidence for such a marriage and that Glass’s interest in catching up with the man was only to retrieve the flintlock rifle he absconded with in the course of abandoning Glass.

Few critics, however, noticed one of the most egregious inaccuracies—the film being set in places utterly unlike the rolling hills of South Dakota where Plains Indians like the Pawnee, the Lakota and the Arikara (whose bloody attack on the trappers begins the film) built their nomadic settlements in pursuit of the bison and other game native to the grassy region. Instead it was set in locations such as the Canadian Rockies that were visually striking but about as distinct from South Dakota as could be imagined.

Iñárritu’s depiction of the Indians is par for the revisionist course. At one point, when the Arikara are haggling with French trappers over a trade involving hides they stole from Glass’s expedition for guns and horses, the chief is angered by a Frenchman telling him that he is asking for too much. The chief reminds him that compared to the animals and land they have stolen, they are asking for very little.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of the film, one that I found totally riveting from beginning to end. Mountains make for spectacular landscapes and having a son killed puts flesh on the revenge plot skeleton. John Ford took liberties with the story of a white girl being kidnapped and raised as a Comanche. This does not detract from the artistic quality of “The Searchers”, does it?

At least one critic complained about the weakness of the revenge angle since the confrontation between Glass and Fitzgerald is limited to about ten minutes in the finale with little build-up. But this was not a film primarily about revenge. It was about survival against impossible odds, having much more in common with the vastly underrated “All is Lost” that starred Robert Redford as the sole occupant of a damaged yacht slowly sinking in the middle of the ocean.

Or even “Backcountry”, another very good B-movie equal to the 2009 “The Revenant”, that tells the story of a young man and woman who are attacked by a bear on a camping trip in a rugged and mountainous state park. One might even surmise that Iñárritu was inspired by this film since some of his dazzling camera work looks a lot like “Backcountry”, with mesmerizing shots of tall trees seen from a camera pointed vertically straight toward the sky as if the cameraman was lying on his back.

If I admit to being not much of a Iñárritu fan, I am even less of one for DiCaprio, the overexposed perpetually squinting pretty boy. There’s nothing pretty about him in this film. He is a tortured and anguished wraith of a man with a long beard that could easily be a comfortable home for fleas and the early signs of middle age not disguised by makeup. As you sit glued to your seat wondering how he can manage to surmount each obstacle put in his path, you are reminded that this is all good cinema is about. Good story-telling with compelling characters.

They say that “The Revenant” and DiCaprio are inside track favorites for Academy Awards. I might have made other picks myself (and did) but I can recommend this film as a visceral experience that will remain with you long after walking out of the local Cineplexex where it is likely still showing.

This is a spoiler alert for “The Hateful Eight”. Since revealing the “surprise” ending (not that much of a surprise actually) is essential to understanding how Tarantino went wrong, I have no choice but to reveal it.

Unlike “Django Unchained”, I managed to stick around to the film’s conclusion. Although Tarantino’s goal was to continue in the same vein playing with racial themes (that’s the only way to describe it), the new film was relatively free of logical inconsistencies of the sort that drove me from the first. This is not to say that it was realistic, only that it operated within the framework of a given genre.

Like “Django Unchained”, bounty hunters are the lead characters in this post-Civil War Western. One is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel Jackson); the other is John Ruth (Kurt Russell) who is transporting a woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) on a stagecoach to Red Rock, Wyoming where she will be hung for the crime of murder. Ruth is on his way to Red Rock during a heavy blizzard (just like one on the American east coast as I am writing this review) with his prisoner when he runs into Major Warren in the middle of a road with four dead bounties of his own. It seems that his horse has gone lame and he had to abandon it. Oh, did I say that the film was relatively free of logical inconsistencies? Here is one. How in the world did Warren ever transport four dead bodies on the saddle with him?

Once he joins Ruth and his captive on the stagecoach, they exchange shoptalk about bounty hunting in the patented Tarantino style rather like Samuel Jackson and John Travolta in buckskin. A few minutes further down the road, they run into a man named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who is trying to hitch a ride to Red Rock where he has been hired to be the town’s sheriff. Why is he on foot? Tarantino makes no effort to explain. As it happens, Mannix is a veteran of the Civil War having fought in a Confederate militia. This leads to all sorts of combative verbal jousting between him and Warren that stops short of violence. Tarantino’s strategy throughout is to use the aura of violence to create a mood of expectation, especially against the backdrop of a blinding blizzard.

Unable to make it to Red Rock, the stagecoach stops at a lodge called Minnie’s Haberdashery where they run into a group of characters that completes the ensemble casting. One is a former Confederate General named Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern); another is a Brit (Tim Roth) who claims to be headed to Red Rock where he has been contracted to hang Daisy Domergue, a Mexican named Bob (Demián Bichir) who is in charge of the lodge in Minnie’s absence and, finally, a cowboy played by Michael Madsen. All of the actors turn in the kind of performances we expect from a Tarantino film, especially Roth and Madsen who are part of Tarantino’s stock company. Unfortunately, Tarantino directed Bichir to speak in a “I don’t have to show you my stinkin’ badge accent”, all the more regrettable given that Bichir is Mexican.

Once everybody is under the roof of Minnie’s Haberdashery, you might as well be watching a staged play. Tarantino, ever the genre-bender, said he was inspired to make the film based on TV Westerns of the late 50s and early 60s that inevitably gathered together men and women in an enclosed space such as a saloon or a ranch-house as the tension mounts. He might have been subconsciously influenced by “Key Largo”, another film (actually based on a Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson) that pulled together an ensemble cast to wait out a hurricane in a hotel.

But unlike “Key Largo”, where the tension is the result of a growing confrontation between good guy Humphrey Bogart and gangster Edward G. Robinson, there are no white hats or black hats in “The Hateful Eight”—that is until the final fifteen minutes or so when we learn that Roth, Bichir and Madsen are part of Daisy Domergue’s gang determined to free her. (Her brother played by Channing Tatum is hidden in the basement.) So for the better part of 187 minutes, we see all of these characters exchanging the typical Tarantino repartee without the slightest indication that they will eventually end up in a bloody shootout in close quarters. If you enjoy Tarantino dialog, this film might be for you.

MAJ.WARREN How’s life been since the war?

GEN.SMITHERS Got both of my legs. Got both of my arms. Can’t complain.

MAJ.WARREN Got a woman?

GEN.SMITHERS Fever took her beginning this winter.

MAJ.WARREN Me, I never went in for a woman regular.

GEN.SMITHERS In my day no one asked you if you went in for it. You just did it.

MAJ.WARREN What was her name?

GEN.SMITHERS Betsy.

I’ll stick with Maxwell Anderson:

Johnny Rocco [Robinson]: There’s only one Johnny Rocco.

James Temple [Bogart]: How do you account for it?

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don’t you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Sure.

James Temple: What’s that?

Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.

Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh …

Frank McCloud: He wants more, don’t you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!

James Temple: Will you ever get enough?

Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?

Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won’t. You, do you know what you want?

Frank McCloud: Yes, I had hopes once, but I gave them up.

Johnny Rocco: Hopes for what?

Frank McCloud: A world in which there’s no place for Johnny Rocco.

Anticapitalism can only be global in scope — the real purview of the “transition debate”

In the course of writing about the Brenner thesis for the better part of 20 years, I have heard questions about the relevance of the debate to contemporary politics—including I should add from myself. When I found myself writing, for example, about the importance of the turnip in the agrarian economy of 17^th century England, I could not help but wonder if I would be better off researching logging and ranching incursions into indigenous regions of the Amazon rainforest instead. As it happens, Alex Anievas and Kerim Nisancioglu, the authors of the monumentally important and deeply researched “How the West Came to Rule”, have demonstrated in their conclusion that the 17^th century growth of capitalism worldwide and today’s struggles are related. Not only that, in making this point they also connect it with the need for a worldwide revolutionary party that both forsakes petty and sectarian self-interests but returns to the original vision of proletarian revolution as a global endeavor as this excerpt makes clear.

* * * *

The conquest, ecological ruin, slavery, state terrorism, patriarchal subjugation, racism, mass exploitation and immiseration upon which capitalism was kilt continue unabated today. The violent past explicated in this book was therefore not merely a historical contingency, external to the ‘pure’ operation of vital, or a phase of ‘incompleteness’ out of which capitalism has emerged or will emerge. Rather, these practices and processes are ‘constitutive’ in the sense that they remain crucial to capitalism’s ongoing reproduction as a historical social structure. This should remind us that capitalism is neither natural nor eternal: it has been historically constructed by annihilating or subsuming other non-capitalist — ways of life. But, moreover, these pointers should alert us to the possibility of ridding ourselves of a mode of production that continually reproduces such histories of violence, oppression and exploitation.

As such, we believe the arguments presented in this book raise a key issue that must be placed at the heart of any transformative emancipatory politics —the issue of political or societal multiplicity. Far from being a matter of purely of scholastic concern, this missing ‘international theory’ has a number of political implications. We would therefore argue that this issue is anything but an abstract one, since as we have argued, the interjection of the intersocietal is a permanent condition of the way in which states, communities, and individuals shape their lives politically. And indeed, political challenges to capitalism have often identified the ‘universality’ or ‘totality’ of capitalism as the basis on which it should be challenged and overcome. This serves as an important warning against any endeavour to build ‘socialism in one country’; anticapitalism can only be global in scope.

We agree with this, and an obvious implication of our calls for an inter-nationalist counter-history of capitalism is that an internationalist politics of anticapitalism is a necessity. However, the content of this internationalism is not self-evident, and requires working out — and, of course, not through theory alone but also through struggle. Insofar as ‘the international’ was central to the emergence and reproduction of capitalism, we should be critical of political positions that treat this internationality — the system of multiple nation-states as an empty vessel that simply needs to filled with communist or socialist content. Indeed, the very internationality of capitalism might well prove fundamentally antithetical to communist politics under certain circumstances. For if the ‘forgotten’ history of the social sciences — and, in particular, the discipline of International Relations — has been crucially implicated in confronting the dilemmas of social disorder and revolution wrought by the international spread of capitalist social relations and empire, the subaltern history of 20^th century revolutionary politics has been imbricated with the constraints imposed by the ‘inter-stateness’ of capitalism on the potenties emancipatory projects for social transformation.

That capitalism emerged in conjunction with – and in fact perpetuates – a world divided into a multiplicity of interactive, heterogeneous states has held enormous significance for revolutionary politics. For in the process of attempting to build socialism by taking state power and harnessing it to this end, Marxist-inspired revolutions have all too often been transformed into their very negation. Rather than constructing the emancipated society of the future, in which the political state dissolves into a free association of self-governing producers, the trajectories of self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ societies witnessed the intensive perfection of the oppressive state apparatus they had originally sought to destroy. Hence, the creation and consolidation of revolutionary states ‘perhaps best dramatizes the ‘centrality of interstate relations and war’ to modern development.’

The myriad dilemmas arising from the ‘inter-stateness’ of capitalism, this international dimension inscribed in all forms of development, confronting any revolution was clearly recognised – if not properly addressed – by Lenin. As he commented to fellow Bolsheviks in March 1919, ‘We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside the imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must triumph in the end’. In the field of IR, the apparent fact that revolutionary states quickly adopted the methods of traditional diplomacy and great power politics has been viewed as a striking vindication of the ‘timeless’ wisdom of political realism – a conclusion we clearly reject. But while it would be hopelessly naïve, if not intellectually disingenuous, to subsume an explanation ill the multitude of forces behind any socialist revolution’s ‘degeneration’, revolutionaries travel at their peril without recognition of the socially transformational power of ‘power politics’. And this ‘international’ dimension of development has much broader implications to revolutionary politics more generally.

Take, for example, our argument that the multiple labour processes in different parts of the world were crucial to the formation and subsequent reproduction of capitalism. In the period of the Industrial Revolution, coerced forms of surplus extraction in the Americas and Asia enabled capitalists in Britain to increase rates of exploitation and subordinate labour to the mechanics of the factory. Here the combination of uneven forms of exploitation was constitutive of capitalism’s expanded reproduction, and the real subsumption of labour. In the contemporary period, the divesting machinations of capitalism have continued and expanded into a global system of geopolitical violent and integrated production processes which afford it coercive and disciplining capabilities with an unprecedented international reach. The fluidities of finance capital, ‘just-in-time’ production, and logistics have only sharpened this sociological multiplicity – the international – into a machine of tyranny. Today, as always, wage repression, deteriorating work conditions and anti-strike practices are actively determined by variegated labour processes in different societies across the globe. In these ways, unevenness and combination act as disciplining features that maintains the capital relation as the basis of social existence.

So when considering the challenge of political multiplicity, we must not only connsider the level of ‘many societies’, but also many oppressions, many powers, many struggles, many actors and so on. Historically, sociopolitical differences borne of ‘many oppressions’ or ‘many struggles’ have been understood as something for the Left – and in particular the Party – to negate and sublate into the unity and singularity of revolutionary thought and practice. In this tradition, the programme has been presented as the higher ideological/strategic unity, and the Party the organisational form, in which political differences are ironed out, unity among disparate parts realised, and a homogenous political perspective pursued. In turn, the perspectives constructed by the leadership of parties and organisations are presented as the historical prime mover – the royal road – which simply needs to be replicated everywhere for capitalism to be overthrown. This negation of political difference sought by programmatic organisations generates a form of political autocentrism, and ontological singularity, where any given party or programme is posited as the sole and sovereign author of historical change. In this programmatic approach, difference is something not to be articulated, but destroyed; something to be redirected onto the True Path – where it cannot be redirected – exiled as a ‘bourgeois deviation’.

Drawing on our preceding analysis, we would argue that any politics that takes a singular – historically and geographically specific – experience and generalises beyond its own spatiotemporal conditions and limitations, is inherently limited, problematic and potentially dangerous. It is so precisely because it imposes a false universality on the uneven, multiform social experiences of proletarians. Insofar as capitalism has been built on the subjugation and marginalisation of multiplicity – both historically and historiographically – any anticapitalist politics that reproduces this subjugation and marginalisation is not worthy of the name.