Archive for category: MARX & PHILOSOPHY

In 2020 Verso presented us with two books by two old rock stars of critical theory and Marxist cultural analysis. In Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations, Martin Jay returns to a field he never left: the first generation of Frankfurt Schools authors, among which he now includes Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. In The Benjamin Files, Fredric Jameson also returns to Walter Benjamin, on whom he wrote, as early as 1969, an article called ‘Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia’. This time, however, Jameson wants to rectify his early misconception of Benjamin as a melancholic – an image he flatly rejects, since we would otherwise miss, he says, ‘the aggressive conversationalist, the alert commentator and diagnostician of the zeitgeist, the ambitious scrivener and journalist, the lover and world traveler’ (69). Jameson successfully brings together these different facets of Benjamin through the different chapters of the book by focusing not only on his most commented texts, but also originally addressing lesser studied pieces. For its part, Splinters in Your Eye is a collection of essays that Martin Jay has written in recent years, most of which have been already published in journals and books, or have been delivered as keynote lectures. The essays cover different themes of the first generation of thinkers from the Frankfurt School and their legacy, ranging from a critical reappropriation of Lukács’ now-famous scorn of them as ‘the Grand Hotel Abyss’, to a tribute to Miriam Hansen and her work on Kracauer; from Leo Löwenthal’s ambivalent position towards the Jewish renaissance, to Walter Benjamin on colour and stamps.

The title of Jay’s book comes from an aphorism of Theodor W. Adorno in Minima Moralia – the book that, interestingly, most often appears throughout these pages, giving title to another chapter (‘In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations’) and informing many others. The aphorism as such says: ‘The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass’, which is a play on words on the warning against judging in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’ What was translated into English as ‘mote’, into German was ‘Splitter’. This is how E. F. N. Jephcott’s translation of Adorno into English ended up with ‘splinters’. Jay celebrates this word choice, because a ‘splinter’ is far more irritating than a ‘mote’ and it is precisely by virtue of this discomfort, according to Adorno, that we may glimpse the truth more clearly. The splinter, though, also permits us to magnify reality. Whereas this can lead to our inability to view the whole, such an exaggeration – if aware of itself – has also the epistemological value of registering the incongruence between idea and object, avoiding thus possible attempts to master reality through conceptual domination. Jay’s disparate essays are brought together by this desire to provide a picture of Critical Theory by looking at the detail and avoid a coherent and normative systematisation (as he, admittedly, did before). While this may sound an excuse to collect his most recent articles together, some of his chapters deal precisely with the work of some members of the Frankfurt School to avoid this conceptual domination – such as chapter 6, on nonconceptuality and the Bilderverbot in Adorno and Hans Blumenberg, and chapter 10, on irony in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.

Martin Jay became known for writing the first history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination (1973). This figure of ‘the historian of the Frankfurt School’ flourishes in the book at least in two chapters. In chapter 2, Jay recounts his experience when writing his thesis and narrates his relationship with Max Horkheimer, Adorno, Friedrich Pollock and Felix Weil, their internal disputes about how they thought that the history of the school should be told and some funny anecdotes about how Adorno and Horkheimer wanted Jay to record their interviews. The other chapter, ‘Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe’, is the one that closes the book. In it, Jay talks about his experience when he found himself as an invited speaker in a TV programme of the Alt-Right National Empowerment Television in 1999. The show supported the claim that the Frankfurt School was the responsible for introducing ‘political correctness’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ to the US, defended in a 1992 unfamous article by Michael Minnicino. This same article, indeed, was the source for the conspiracy theorist Daniel Stulin, who in The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club made the absurd claim that the Frankfurt School was funded by Rockefeller to promote rock, pop and popular culture in order to distract the masses – an allegation that could have been overlooked had it not been endorsed by Fidel Castro in an article in Granma in 2010. As Jay argues, this misappropriation of the Frankfurt School ‘would be laughable were its consequences not so tragic’ (xvii). Indeed, the second part of this final chapter, written as an afterword to the article he wrote for Salmagundi in 2011, reflects on how – and if – the Frankfurt School could be used to counteract not only its own misappropriation, but also the raise of the Alt Right in the US and understand ‘the authoritarian personality’ of Trump. Whereas these two chapters can be considered as ‘anecdotal’, the rest are theoretical engagements with specific themes in the oeuvre of different members of the Frankfurt School. The subtitle of the book, ‘Frankfurt School Provocations’, which may certainly scare away some readers, should not be take very seriously, for Jay’s analyses are rigorous and, if anything, very balanced. Even when he sympathises with his mentor Horkheimer on his problematical defence of bourgeois democracy and cosmopolitan humanism, and he attempts to understand his – even more questionable – justification of the oft-vilified photographic exhibition The Family of Man, Jay is critical enough to highlight Horkheimer’s contradiction with his previous anti-individualism, with the concept of Bilderverbot that he had earlier defended and criticise his imperceptive and universalising understanding of family. In another chapter, ‘Timbremelancholy: Walter Benjamin and the Fate of Philately’, we find out that the ‘melancholic’ of the title is Jay rather than Benjamin. As a long-time stamp collector, Jay is more nostalgic towards the waning interest in philately that Benjamin ever was. Nonetheless, he reads through the utopian potential that Benjamin perceived in them – through the second life, freed from utilitarianism, given by the collector – as a form of redemption.

The Benjamin Files is, literally, a book without a bibliography – and I mean this not as an anecdote, but as a definition. Jameson introduces at the beginning his references to Benjamin’s texts, both in German and in its English translation, as if preparing the ground for his own, unmediated reading of Benjamin. There are, nonetheless, a few footnotes, mostly about other authors he cites in his analysis: Baudelaire, Brecht, Adorno, Rosenzweig, Lacan, Michelet, Hölderlin. There is also room for secondary sources on Benjamin. In the footnotes, Jameson suggest us to read Howard Caygill’s Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1997) for a more thorough discussion on colour, praises Michael W. Jennings’ Dialectical Images (1987) for being the only account that highlights the violence of Benjamin’s ‘destructiveness’ and quotes a footnote from John McCole’s Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (1993). That is all. In other words, Jameson refuses to engage with the scholarship on Benjamin, especially recent ones (note the books’ year of publication). Or, rather, he writes from memory. He acknowledges that with nonchalance: ‘Of the commentaries I have read,’ (139) he says to introduce the above-mentioned book by Jennings; ‘as infrequently as [the term aura] appears in his oeuvre (only three times, I believe),’ (165) which is obviously false, since it appears far more times; and, this time on Marx, ‘in his 1872 rewritten version of the opening chapters of Capital, I believe’ (152). This is, of course, the work of a well-established academic who can (so it seems) dispense with the material inconveniences of research. This becomes evident in many parts of the book, for example when he says: ‘We do not know what role gambling played in Benjamin’s own life’ (93). He could have read Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings’ Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, which does address Benjamin’s gambling problems.

Jameson’s reading of Benjamin is a very personal one. And, no doubt, many readers will find refreshing his interpretations and erudite commentaries, which go beyond mere philological analysis. In fact, Jameson excels when discussing literary topics, such as Baudelaire in the context of nineteenth-century French literature and politics, the scholarly debates around tragedy and Trauerspiel that he addresses when analysing The Origin of the German Tragic Drama – which he reads as too limited by the rigid format of an academic dissertation – or when he discusses Benjamin’s practice of minor literary genres such as travelogues, book reviews, newspaper articles, letters and diary entries. In fact, one of the nicest parts of the book is when Jameson analyses a minor article, ‘Epilogue to the Berlin Food Exhibition’, as part of this trend. Other readers, however, will feel disconcerted by some of his remarks. For example, Jameson maintains a few times the dubious assertion that Dialectic of Enlightenment is a Benjamin-inspired book, arriving to say that Benjamin, together with Horkheimer and Adorno, is ‘still caught up in the ideology promoted by bourgeois Enlightenment and formulated in a sharp opposition between reason and the irrational’ (56). More problematical is his limiting reading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ and, more broadly, of Benjamin’s ideas on technology. For example, Jameson argues that the essay is not about film, for ‘no single film is mentioned’ (sic!) (177). He seems especially shocked by the fact that Benjamin does not mention Eisenstein in the essay, assuming that he was first and foremost a fan of Soviet cinema, a point he endorses earlier when pairing Benjamin’s relationship with technology with Dziga Vertov and his ‘triumphant tours of urban Bolshevism’ (21). One thing is clear: Jameson does not understand Benjamin’s critical conception of technology. This is made blatant when he defines ‘first technology’ as the age of the tool and ‘second technology’ as the industrial age (196). The book’s cover, with Gustav Klutsis’ poster design ‘The Electrification of the Entire Country’ (1920), does not help either to revert this opinion, given Benjamin’s unfavourable position towards the uncritical reception of technology in the Soviet Union. Other readers, however, will be more horrified by Jameson’s all-to-easy equation of ‘aura’ with ‘beauty’ (187) or with his very personal assertion that the ‘two great literary figures in Benjamin’s life’ were Baudelaire and Brecht (83), leaving aside none others than Goethe, Proust and Kafka (as well as Calderón, Hölderlin, Rilke, Gide…).

Jameson’s reading of Benjamin is not a selective analysis of this or that work, or this and that theme in his oeuvre. He aspires to portray a whole picture of Benjamin. Jameson develops this analysis through nine chapters which are loosely thematic, allowing him to digress through his oeuvre. The vague titles (e.g. ‘Wind in the Sails’, ‘The Spatial Sentence’, ‘Nature Weeps’, ‘Space and the City’), and the division of chapters in sections only headed by Arabic numerals (clearly emulating Benjamin), bear witness to this purpose. The result is a discursive reading of Benjamin’s anti-systematic thought that probably tells us more about Jameson and his way of reading than about Benjamin himself. The latter may also apply to Martin Jay (as to many well-established authors). However, the difference is clear. Whereas Jameson goes freestyle and intends to paint a totalising portrait of Benjamin, Jay is more cautious and limits himself to ‘details’ of a greater whole. Admittedly, his enterprise is less risky and original (at the end, the book is a collection of already published articles), but this also allows him to be more rigorous in his approach. The eleven chapters of Jay’s book can perfectly be read separately, although – if done together – one will find some pleasure in recognising the late Jay’s particular interests in the Frankfurt School authors, especially in his detailed reading of Minima Moralia. I must admit that both books are enjoyable to read and entertaining for anyone interested in Critical Theory. However, it must also be warned, The Benjamin Files will be more welcome by Jameson followers than by Benjamin fans.

Under capitalism, life is work and work is life. To imagine a world beyond it is sheer blasphemy. Yet, a growing number of titles over the past decade have begun to do just that. They have promised, at the very least, a more critical analysis of work. Capitalism, they say, is in an intractable crisis: the crisis of work. The goal now is not simply the liberation of labour but, rather, the liberation from labour. Among these titles, we can now include Alastair Hemmens’ The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord. Hemmens differs in many respects from other recent critiques of work. He avoids techno-utopian speculation and in the few moments universal basic income is mentioned, it is given short shrift. Furthermore, the tradition of French anti-work theory he surveys – Fourier, Lafargue, Breton and Debord – has, in large part, been neglected or only superficially referenced within contemporary critiques of work (4). Whilst Hemmens provides an insightful and often unique approach to his analysis of French anti-work theory, he is concerned primarily with one single problem: how might we take the critique of work literally? (14).

Hemmens finds the resources for such a critique in the Marxian tradition of Wertkritik and the ‘critique of value’ school ‘associated with the German-language journals Krisis and Exit!’ (Ibid). As such, this book serves as a useful introduction to a tradition that remains relatively obscure to English readers. Drawing on the work of critical theorist Robert Kurz, the central philosophical claim of the book is ‘that there are really only two possible ways of understanding and approaching the critique of work’ (6). Hemmens dubs one approach the ‘phenomenological mode of analysis’ (Ibid) and the other as the ‘categorical critique of work’ (194). The former, following Kurz’s distinction, is indebted to the ‘exoteric’ reading of Marx and the latter to the ‘esoteric’ reading. The clear advantage of this distinction is that it does not search in vain for a ‘true’ Marx who just so happens to lend legitimacy to one’s own position, instead arguing that aspects of ‘both approaches can be found’ (6) within his work. A potential disadvantage, nevertheless, is that through installing this opposition one risks foreclosing thinking through Marx’s apparent contradictions.

In the ‘exoteric’ side of his work, Marx is said to be the ‘political economist par excellence’ who adopts a ‘progressivist and positivistic conception of labour and the development of productive forces from bourgeois idealism’ (9). I will not go into a detailed dispute here on whether this really is an accurate description of any side of Marx’s work. Suffice to say, the sense in which Marx acted as the ‘political economist par excellence’ is extremely dubious to me. Nevertheless, ‘exoteric’ Marxism – understood more broadly as a tradition in which ‘Marx is believed to have ‘corrected’ political economy by revealing the ‘theft’ of the full value of the workers’ labour that is carried out by the capitalist class’ (13) – is certainly a useful description of long-standing misinterpretations. As Hemmens rightly argues, such a description wrongfully envisages capitalism ‘to be primarily a system of personal domination’ (Ibid). Hemmens contends that ‘exoteric’ Marxism results in a phenomenological critique of work which proceeds on the basis of ‘an empirical, historical, ethical and moral critical analysis’ (6). Work as such is assumed to be unproblematic but ‘might become so under certain conditions’ (Ibid). Because an implicitly positivistic analysis begins from a critique of empirically perceived objects, ‘“work” per se could never be the object of critique, only specific phenomena that fall under its rubric’ (7).

For the literal critique of work, Hemmens turns to ‘esoteric’ Marxism, and the ‘critique of value’, in order to demonstrate the superiority of a categorical critique of work. As Hemmens puts it, labour is ‘not a neutral fact of all social life […] rather it is a historically specific social form that establishes the grounds for an impersonal, subjectless, and abstract domination that gives a historical “directionally dynamic” character to phenomenological reality’ (16). Work as a general category for all ‘abstract expenditure of human energy’ (194) is only understandable, Hemmens argues, from within societies held under the sway of the value-form. From the perspective of a categorical critique of work, the phenomenological analysis is limited insomuch as it cannot contend with work and labour as real abstraction. Similarly, Hemmens argues, it is beset with the ‘philosophical baggage’ (7) of much modern thought. The dizzying array of baggage here includes but is not limited to: positivism and empiricism, enlightenment theories of the subject, Cartesian dualism, the proletariat as capitalism’s gravediggers, ‘homo-faber’ as human nature, and Marx’s concept of ‘species-being’. Having foregrounded this distinction between two differing possible critiques of work, Hemmens deploys it as means to assess the contemporary relevance of the French anti-work theorists. As he states clearly, they are relevant today because ‘they contain, to a greater or lesser degree, elements of a ‘categorical’ critique of labour’ (33). It is a cruel irony that the work of these French thinkers remains relevant only insomuch as it lives up to the work of a German critical theorist, i.e. Robert Kurz. This is not a criticism, we can agree that this is almost always the way one should assess French philosophy. Perhaps this reviewer differs on which German we should choose.

Throughout his readings of Fourier, Lafargue, Breton and Debord, Hemmens gives a clear and accessible account of the importance of their anti-work sentiments to their overall projects. He sheds new light on the centrality of this aspect of their work and in so doing provides a compelling re-assessment of their respective projects. Fourier is given due credit for his influence on the tradition of anti-work French thought, with Breton having been a ‘great reader’ of his (107). Furthermore, Hemmens does not rehearse the now well-worn Marxist criticisms of Fourier as too ‘unscientific’, ‘utopian’, etc. (72). Rather, he attempts to demonstrate how Fourier’s critiques of work, which views modern work as ‘intrinsically at odds with human being and […] an affront to the very order of the universe’ (47), are undermined by his commitment that any utopian society would aim ‘to realise the most rational and utilitarian expenditure of the energy contained in the social body’ (71). A further critique made, in which the influence of Moishe Postone is evident, notes how Fourier ‘is one of the forerunners of modern Antisemitism’ (65). Hemmens points to Fourier’s uncritical embrace of ‘the idea of the separation of society into “productive” and “unproductive” persons’ (65) and his analysis of how this contributes to Antisemitic discourse is a timely intervention at a moment when the rise of a far-right politics of resentment coincides with the ‘crisis of work’. Of all the theorists assessed, there is no doubt that Fourier, though an important interlocutor for his successors, contributes the least to a critique of the category of labour as such (47).

Lafargue, Breton and Debord are seen to be somewhat more successful in their contributions to a categorical critique. Though, at times, they too are let down, in Hemmens’ opinion, by an uncritical reification of capitalism’s ‘social ontology of labour’ (14). Hemmens, nonetheless, highlights the aspects of their work which could prove fruitful for contemporary critiques of work. Lafargue’s position that ‘“work”, and not “God”,’ is the ‘true object of worship in contemporary society’ (86), is a powerful rejoinder to those who see capitalism as a purely secular force. Elsewhere, Debord’s characterisation of the spectacle as ‘nothing other than the economy developing itself for itself’ (145) chimes with the ‘critique of value’ and the acknowledgement that under the domination of the value-form ‘an impersonal, abstract and quantitative social form organises society and not the human beings themselves’ (144). So far, so good. It is in Hemmens’ treatment of Breton and the surrealists, however, where the philosophical shortcomings are most evident. To be clear, this is not to say that Hemmens does a bad job of detailing Breton’s anti-work commitments. It is Hemmens’ seduction by surrealist fantasies with which we might take issue. In my view, this is what constitutes the fundamental shortcoming of the whole book.

Hemmens shares the surrealist desire to overcome both the ‘vision of mankind as homo faber’ and the ‘very distinction between subject and object’ (131). To paraphrase André Gorz, farewell to the species-being! When Hemmens does criticise Breton – this is characteristic of his criticism of Fourier, Lafargue, Debord and Marx too – it is on the basis that he ‘accepts the notion that labour is a material necessity’ (119). Hemmens argues that this refers to a ‘broad, and meaningless, definition of labour as the fact that people have to feed, clothe and shelter themselves’ (Ibid). Underlying Hemmens’ anti-positivist critique of labour lies a dogmatic positivism. Against mediation, against concrete universality, against generalisation per se, Hemmens prefers the minutia of particularity and immediacy. Humans are material, living beings. That people have to ‘feed, clothe and shelter themselves’ implies that the human has needs regardless of the specific historical and social mediation of those needs. What Hemmens misses is that the very concept of need introduces a split into the subject and the split between subject and object. A minimal definition of the human as a socially labouring, producing and consuming animal is not necessarily an unwelcome inheritance from ‘Enlightenment philosophy’ (8), nor a reflection of the value-form’s domination; it is the basis on which Marxist critique stands. By taking the critique of work to its limits, Hemmens has demonstrated, in my view at least, the limits of the critique of work.

This review is my effort to return the gift Cleaver bestowed onto me, a gift he shared with thousands of other students in his decades of teaching Marx. His gift is repeated here in 33 Lessons on Capital almost as I received it so many years ago during the decade I spent studying with him. Studying Marx with Cleaver was not about learning an ideology but rather how to master an analytical tool to read, reread, invert, and go to battle with capitalism. This tool has a shelf life which I could only hope is short lived. Cleaver’s autonomist marxism, constructed as it were after Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is designed to become obsolete once we get past capitalism. If marxism is a tool for analyzing and fighting capitalism, 33 Lessons on Capital is an essential handbook.

At 519 pages, 33 Lessons on Capital appears daunting. But once you settle in and get through the most difficult section on Part One of Capital, which is actually the second part, you will be generously rewarded. Cleaver was brought to UT-Austin in response to demands by students that the Economics Department hire someone to teach Marx. He answered the students’ demands with dedication, teaching Marx for decades to conservatives, liberals, capitalists, socialists, cynics, and identity politics radicals alike. Cleaver placed himself at the disposal of countless student movements and our own graduate student unionization effort, deftly refining his pedagogy in both the classroom and theory on the campus halls. 33 Lessons on Capital is the product of his lifelong passion and commitment, organized precisely to not merely make Marx’s Capital eminently understandable but accessible and—most importantly—useable in the class struggle.

As the title makes clear, volume I of Capital has 33 chapters and eight parts. Cleaver takes each part and chapter in turn with a critical twist—he begins most importantly with the end, Part Eight, “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This unorthodox logical organization works. Each part begins with a brief overview of each chapter and their key concepts along with an “Outline of Marx’s Analysis”. Cleaver then provides his “Commentary” on Marx’s key concepts drawing from a broad swath of Marx’s gigantic universe of writings.

Cleaver focuses on three critical themes running through all of the commentaries. The first two are why capitalism is a system of control based on the endless imposition of work and the continued relevance of Marx to the exploitation of both waged and unwaged workers, such as “housewives” and students, today. The last theme is why the class struggle is fundamentally a struggle against work in which workers use both unions and self-organization to struggle in such a way that it has forced concessions from capitalism, triggered crises, and potentially ruptured its domination of all life with work. These struggles, Cleaver reminds us, can be understood as the dynamic interplay between capital’s plan, or the technical composition of capital, and the working class struggle, or working class recomposition. To the degree that capital prevails, a class composition is imposed restoring production and control. Ultimately, it is possible that workers prevail not in merely recomposing their own power but entirely rupturing and transcending capitalism in order to realize the infinite possibilities of existence (125).

Reminiscent of the same way Cleaver taught Marx to us decades ago, he starts with Part Eight, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” the place where Marx ends Volume I. The reason is solid: Capitalism begins with the endless accumulation of a class of workers through the process of the enclosures at home and abroad in the form of internal and external colonialism. This dispossession from the means of subsistence serves as the driving force for the formation of a class of workers with nothing to sell but their own labor power. Cleaver upends Marx’s logical progression through Capital to make a point: capitalism is not merely a system of exploitation but a system that survives and grows through the endless imposition of work. To understand Marx’s insight it’s critical to begin at the violent inception of capitalism: colonialism, the enclosure of the commons, and the creation of a working class. In order to break up the feudal domination of labor tied to the landlord, enclosures in England ripped the peasants from the land, their means of subsistence, and created a class of workers with nothing to sell but their labor.

The enclosure is the “original sin” of capitalism, creating by deadly force not merely a class of waged but also unwaged workers. As Cleaver (55) argues, “Although primitive accumulation has often been defined as the creation of a waged proletariat, we have seen how that very process also involved the creation of the unwaged, from vagabonds through slaves to housewives and children”. Herein lies the crux of Cleaver’s reading of Marx. The circuits of production, wages, and money hide the golden elixir of capital: unwaged labor. To illustrate how Marx laid the theoretical foundation for understanding the continuing relevance of unwaged labor as the source of all surplus value and profit, Cleaver finds it imperative to begin with primitive accumulation, the process which highlighted, according to Marx (1976 [1867], 916), how “force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one”.

Before he proceeds to highlight the central role of unwaged labor to capital and the central role of unwaged workers in class struggle, Cleaver first turns to his signature theoretical argument: capitalism is a system of endless imposition of work. This long-overlooked reading of Capital as analysis of a system of domination based on the endless imposition of work and the colonialization and subordination of all life to work is at the heart of autonomist marxist (mistakenly referred to as “workerist”) analysis. Marx (1976 [1867], 717-18) himself makes this point most vividly in a long ignored passage in which he describes the “the individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital”.

Continuing his life’s work to demystify Marx’s “labor theory of value,” Cleaver (174) argues that “value” is not a thing but a relationship: “Value is work-for-capital as social control”. The endless imposition of endless work is the fundamental relationship of capitalism. The more work that can be imposed, the more value that is created. In other words, the value of work to capital is that it maintains control by forcing us to work (207). Refuse work and no value is created, and the system of control breaks down. Elsewhere, Cleaver observes the possibility of rupturing the role of work as value, as control.

As Cleaver (717-18) reads Marx, the consumption of the workers’ labor power in the production of commodities is only made possible by the hidden unwaged labor. The production of labor power available to capital occurs in the home and the classroom in the form of both repairing and disciplining new submission to endless work. Cleaver’s analysis is a distinct departure from the long denigration of reproductive labor as somehow “outside” capitalist relations or subordinated to the struggles of waged workers. Rather, Cleaver (196) argues, they are the key to the struggle to transcend capital.

Cleaver’s objective in expanding Marx’s analysis of capitalism to the unwaged is not merely an academic exercise, but rather to provide a fuller understanding of what he called the “class composition,” or the current relations of production, the organization of work, and the make-up of the working class, both waged and unwaged. Class composition is the outcome of capital’s response to previous class struggle, reorganizing production, increasing the organic composition of capital by introducing new technology, reducing necessary labor either by increasing absolute (lengthening work time) or relative (increasing productivity by raising the intensity of work) surplus value, rationalizing work, and deskilling labor. All of this is intended to reduce its reliance on labor or shifting its exploitation somewhere else in the global supply chain where workers are more pliable, unorganized, and weak. “Such reorganization of work has not only increased productivity but has also constituted an ever more prevalent strategy for dealing with workers.” (italics in original, 276). It can be understood as capital’s strategy for purging itself of a reliance on unruly workers.

For Cleaver, this technical composition is ever changing in response to workers’ struggles against work, domination, and exploitation. The fatal risk to capital emerges from attempting to do away with unruly workers through automation and other technology that Cleaver (450) and the other members of the short-lived journal of the same name coined “zerowork” (see http://www.zerowork.org/):

a rising organic composition of capital…is the dangerous consequence of this capitalist strategy: a declining need for labor to produce wealth, a decline that undercuts capital’s inability to impose work and can inspire the rejection of any need for capitalists as managers of production.

While the tactics are ever changing, capital’s strategy to impose a new technical composition and restore control remains the same. Today we see the central role of AI to incessantly gather data that informs new tactics for maintaining control over labor. Among these are app or platform-based labor management strategies that rely on the incessant collection of algorithmic data by tracking worker productivity in real time. The equivalent in education is web-based learning management systems and remote conferencing apps in on-line education that have exploded in use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing management with the capacity for ubiquitous data collection and tracking, this threatens to become a genie that will be very difficult to put back in the bottle once the crisis passes.

Rising productivity, Cleaver reminds us, was capital’s response to successful wage and hour struggles by better organized workers. Post-depression wage-productivity deals exchanged higher wages and shorter work days/weeks/life for control over the intensity and organization of work. This so-called Fordist deal, provided capital breathing room in order to shift from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value production. New tactics and strategies were deployed elsewhere in the global factory to develop a new technical composition, eventually returning to reimpose the new post-Fordist relations of production on these previously successful workers.

Cleaver reframes capital’s search for a new technical composition as part of the ebb and flow of the class struggle in which understanding the current class composition and how we arrived at it informs workers’ new tactics, strategies, and objectives for recomposing working class power in order to relaunch and circulate the struggle on a new terrain. As class struggle surges during the pandemic 33 Lessons on Capital has arrived right on time.

Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin has recently been the subject of new scholarly work in English. Released by the wonderful PM Press, Morris’s book is in a way then prescient, late, and timely all at once. Prescient because it was written in 2004, anticipating the growth of interest in anarchism post-Occupy by a decade. Late, not because it fails to consider key literature published in the intervening decade, but more so because, published as it was 12 years after it was written, the debates that frame the text – both in terms of the secondary literature it draws upon and the conceptual vocabulary it mobilizes – have shifted substantially from where they were in the mid-2000s (I’m referring specifically to the text’s framing in relation to American cultural-academic debates on postmodernism/poststructuralism). This shift is also discernible in relation to the text’s framing of the debate between anarchism and Marxism. ‘Post-Marxism’ is dismissed simply via reference to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s (1999) Retreat from Class. To describe how in Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Derrida, ‘one searches in vain among their opaque and obscurantist writings for any real social and political alternative to capitalism’ (19) is one thing, but to reduce ‘post-Marxism’ to the ‘French Poststructuralists’ seems more flagrant. Morris’s book is timely as well though. In this moment of increased interest, Morris offers a comprehensive assessment of Kropotkin’s thought that largely does what it sets out to do: offer a critical introduction to Kropotkin while ‘affirm[ing] the contemporary relevance of this much-neglected scholar and political activist’ (13).

The text begins with an introduction and brief biographical note and is split into four sections: (1) The Theory of Anarchist Communism, (2) Ecology and Social Ethics, (3) Historical Studies, and (4) Anarchism. The first contains Kropotkin’s practical suggestions on economic life and education, the second his metaphysics of nature and his social ethics, the third a summary of historical studies  – including the role of the modern state and Kropotkin’s work on tribal societies – and the fourth is devoted to anarchism as a movement and political tradition. The logic of their arrangement and development is not entirely clear, but each section serves to introduce the reader to Kropotkin’s views on a whole range of topics: the French Revolution and the Paris Commune; his critique of prisons and theory of integral education; his theory of mutual aid and ethical naturalism; his discussion of Anarchism’s relation to political terrorism and to Anarcho-syndicalism, and a broader discussion on the relation between Kropotkin’s anarchism and poststructuralism. Morris helpfully contextualizes Kropotkin’s thought through comparisons to liberal (Gray), social-democratic (Giddens), and Marxist (Bourdieu) social theoretical frameworks. The paradigmatic examples all ‘take for granted the present institutional framework, as defined by representative democracy’ (18). In general, Morris’s authorial standpoint is incisive and detailed but also broadly considered, negotiating the sometimes difficult terrain between exposition and criticism, all while succeeding in emulating Kropotkin’s own accessible style. And while his account lacks the rich historiographical and intellectual historical context of Ruth Kinna’s recent work on Kropotkin, readers familiar with the existing literature will find it a fluent and considered discussion of his thought. Those unfamiliar will appreciate Morris’ attempt to pose Kropotkin’s Anarchist social-scientific framework alongside the usual suspects.

Morris is at his best when offering correctives to previous readings, specifically against those who have interpreted Kropotkin’s thought as primitivist, naturalistic, or teleological. Morris castigates (often convincingly) numerous authors for either repressing the extent of Kropotkin’s influence, passing off his ideas as their own (often on a tray of false novelty), or neglecting him as a source altogether (only to go ahead and contribute similar formulations). Morris describes how Kropotkin anticipated Foucault in his analysis of the state as a regulating force of all aspects of social life (57), the way in which Kropotkin anticipated Peter Singer’s proposal for a Darwinian Left (167), as well as the extent to which Kropotkin’s own ontology anticipated the sorts of formulations offered as novel by Complex Systems Theory (114).

Indeed, that for Kropotkin, harmony is simply a ‘provisory adaptation’ possible only, ‘under one condition; that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions,’ is a worthy consideration for those who accuse anarchists as being simple utopians. It also contains an implicit critique of the social contract grounding liberal political theory – where social structure, rather than being constituted by any a priori agreement, is actually constituted and reproduced thanks to a variety of competing forces.

More broadly, for Morris, Kropotkin advocates an ‘ecological worldview’ and a metaphysics of nature very different from the mechanistic conception of the universe broadly accepted at the end of the 19th century. Morris’s point about the return of such mechanistic conceptions, in particular within the field of sociobiology is a fascinating one, although he’s not the first to notice this. David Graeber (2004: 16) describes sociobiology as essentially an answer to the question posed by Kropotkin to Social Darwinism – why is it that successful species are those that cooperate most effectively (Graeber, 16). Given that Morris does so well to note both the relevance of Kropotkin’s thought across a number of disciplines and the way in which disciplines simultaneously neglect but repeat his insights, it was slightly disappointing not to find a more in-depth discussion of Kropotkin’s thought – indeed, of anarchist theory in general – in relation to the general problem of disciplinarity and the intellectual division of labor.

Alongside biting but largely in-good-faith broadsides, Morris describes the influence Kropotkin had on subsequent intellectuals, both anarchist and otherwise. He also provides useful summaries of the major 19th century debates Kropotkin participated in: with Lenin, with Marx, and with fellow anarchists. Morris goes to great lengths to dispel the colloquial understandings of Kropotkin as some sort of figure oscillating between saint (a good man but society will never be made of men like him) and terrorist/idealist (a confusion of anarchism and vulgar nihilism). I say ‘vulgar’ because, as Kinna claims, nihilism may have had more of an influence on Kropotkin’s thought than Morris lets on. Morris limits his discussion to Kropotkin’s rejection of Nietzsche and Stirner, rather than the way in which the broader nihilist intellectual movement in 19th century Russia may have influenced his thought, as Kinna convincingly argues.

Morris locates the foundation of Kropotkin’s anarchism in his scientific work, particularly in relation to Mutual Aid. The discussion of Mutual Aid is comprehensive and draws useful parallels to the development of evolutionary theory. Morris certainly displays an extensive and competent grasp on the relevant scientific debates. It is somewhat notable then that the actual content of Kropotkin’s geographic work isn’t discussed at more length. Insofar as, for Kropotkin, sociality is prior to human society (where, ‘sociality pervades all nature’ and is a distinctive feature of animal life (14)) what are the political theoretical implications of such a position in relation to – to use Catherine Malabou’s phrasing – the ‘space between biological and symbolic life’ (Malabou, xv)? We know from the recent German publication of Marx’s notebooks on ecology that Marx was well aware of 19th century natural-scientific debates, particularly on the topics of soil erosion and deforestation. This is all to say that Morris’s text is not the place to find any grand philosophical confrontation between the Marxist and Anarchist traditions.

When it comes to philosophical confrontations, it is Morris’s reading of poststructuralism’s relation to anarchism – particularly as it relates to Foucault – that deserves specific consideration. This is discussed at length in ‘The Poststructuralist Critique of Anarchism’ (p. 207-220), but is sprinkled throughout the text. Morris mounts a defence of Kropotkin against  post-structuralist critiques of classical anarchism’s definition of power. These critics – Todd May (1994) in particular – contend that Kropotkin and the classical anarchist tradition were largely blind to more subtle forms of power, insofar as they viewed power negatively; as having to do primarily with the state and taking the form of oppressive prohibition, rather than being in any way ‘productive.’ Morris seeks to defend Kropotkin from this charge, but does so not via a critique of postanarchist readings of Foucault, but through a critique of Foucault’s ‘rather totalizing theory of power’. ‘Kropotkin recognized the intrusive nature of the modern state,’ Morris writes, ‘and he was not simply anti-statist but challenged all forms of hierarchy and domination that curtailed the free development of the person’ (28) Once Morris successfully critiques Foucault’s theory of power as totalizing, he thinks he can sidestep the point about power being productive, relying instead on a critique of Foucault’s extension of power dynamics to all social relationships. This involves positioning Kropotkin as some sort of Habermasian liberal. ‘Like other anarchists,’ Morris writes, ‘Kropotkin always made a clear distinction between capitalism and government (state), and society, between what Habermas describes as ‘systems’ and ‘life-world’’ (70). ‘Kropotkin’s essential conception of revolution,’ for Morris becomes, ‘the replacement of state institutions based on hierarchy and coercion with voluntary relationships,’ which sounds a lot like the replacement of state with society, where society is constituted by mutual aid and voluntary relationships and the state by domination and hierarchy. Without going into the multiple intellectual historical genealogies constituting the philosophical concept ‘subject’ (Cassin, 2014), the problem here – and this is a problem shared by Jim Mac Laughlin’s book on Kropotkin as well – is one regarding the historical constitution of political subjectivity. ‘Kropotkin never conflated subjectivity with subjection … human subjectivity and social life are dialectically interrelated,’ (183) he writes, yet social life and the state also interact dialectically. To phrase it differently- the logic of ‘the state,’ while perhaps not totalizing, is not reducible merely to prohibition via law, for this would be to reduce it to its negative function. Morris is aware of this, but appears to not fully account for the fact that its logic is positive in the specific sense that certain types of political subjects are produced through, in Foucault’s terms, a variety of ‘disciplinary institutions’ (schools, prisons, military barracks, etc). If it is the totalizing effect of Foucault’s analysis (where power is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere) that is the issue for Morris, it is precisely its obverse – namely, the conceptual atemporality of Foucauldian resistance; that ever present vitalist feature where living being as living being is, imbricated and constituted by power relations, always already moving to get free – that expresses an elective affinity with Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid, which is mysteriously latent and always on the horizon. One wonders to what extent the impulse towards mutual aid can survive this positive and productive aspect of ‘the state’ and its logic, much less the ability of this impulse to confront the change of political scale in the 21st century.

‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again’. This quotation from Andre Gide serves as Brian Morris’s epigraph (6). Upon completion, one leaves with the impression that what Kropotkin has to say should be – and will need to be – said again. And indeed, Morris’s central aim in the book is not simply to prove Kropotkin’s contemporary relevance, but show the way in which Kropotkin anticipated and offered expositions of arguments that, decades after his death, would be treated as novel. On his own terms, he succeeds. There are, however, grander left-philosophical confrontations that lie outside the purview of the text worth exploring much further.