Archive for category: Theory

One of the most important insights of authentic anarchist philosophy is that the human species is one entity.

Its rich and necessary diversity, we insist, is part of an overall coherence and commonality as a clearly-definable living organism.

This represents a threat to the dogma of the ruling clique, who claim that we would all constantly be at each other’s throats were it not for the firm hand of their top-down control.

While they themselves recognise no borders to their dominion, their divide-and-rule strategy has always involved classifying and separating the rest of us according to “race”, “nationality”, or, indeed, individual self-interest, in a bid to ensure that we remain isolated, divided and collectively powerless.

I have been shocked, therefore, in recent years to see so many anarchists embrace “intersectionality”, sometimes referred to more broadly as identity politics.

This way of seeing the world is, in my view, entirely incompatible with the anarchist vision, to the extent of representing its inversion.

It is founded on the definition of certain individuals as victims, the objects of various kinds of social oppression or domination.

This disempowered human-as-victim apparently only finds points of common interest with other individual members of the species in terms of an “intersection” of oppressions.

This is the opposite of the “big picture” approach at the heart of anarchism, which grasps the enormity of the domination, theft, imposition, duplicity and hypocrisy of the ruling system and hopes to inspire a radical and fundamental revolt which will set humanity free to live otherwise.

The “intersectional” approach instead effectively presents social injustice as a series of separate and very narrow “problems” for which “solutions” could be provided within the framework of the existing system.

If only it could provide “inclusivity” and “equality” for its favoured categories of oppressed victims, then all would be well, pending the discovery of further particular forms of oppression.

Far from being revolutionary, it hides the need for radical and fundamental change behind its limited shopping list of reforms.

My concerns about the intersectional approach have been deepened by the way in which it is so enthusiastically adopted by impact capitalists, who have been funding ostensibly “radical” groups pushing this ideology.

The founder of intersectionality is generally considered to be Kimberlé Crenshaw (pictured), a professor at Columbia Law School in New York, where she set up the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

She is also the co-founder and executive director of The African American Policy Forum, a New York think tank which works alongside the CISPS.

Crenshaw is, additionally, honorary president of the Center for Intersectional Justice in Berlin.

Set up in 2017, it describes its mission as being “to make anti-discrimination and equality policy more inclusive and effective in Europe”.

I have to admit that the word “inclusive” immediately rang alarm bells for me, as it is frequently used by the world of impact investment.

And when I found the CIJ’s list of funders on their website my suspicions were confirmed.

Top of the list of three is Guerrilla Foundation, an organisation thoroughly exposed in this November 2020 article as being engaged, along with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, in promoting impact capitalism under cover of funding “systemic change”.

Second is George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Co-chair of the the Open Society Initiative for Europe in Berlin is none other than Rose Longhurst of the UK’s Edge Fund, whose close connection to impact capitalism I investigated earlier this year.

The third of the three funders is Gemeinnutzige Hertie Stiftung, a German foundation with the rather bizarre twin stated aims of “brain research and strengthening democracy”. More on this dubious organisation later.

The “partners & clients” listed on the Center for Intersectional Justice’s website are also far removed from the anti-establishment politics with which they (like Guerrilla Foundation and Edge Fund) want us to imagine they are aligned.

They include:

Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which in 2003 initiated the Global Atlanticists Network “to nurture the shared ideals of the Transatlantic relationship: democratic values, robust trade, and the NATO alliance rooted in collective security“.

Fulbright Germany: “The only binational exchange organization in Germany with a US focus“.

Human Rights Watch, whose “partners” include investment company Eurazeo plus the Fred Foundation, Oak Foundation and Ford Foundation, all three of which are heavily involved in impact investment.

Center for Feminist Foreign Policy, whose advisory council features Scheaffer Okore, “a thought leader who is currently among 10 global leaders serving on the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers advisory board“.

The Robert Bosch Stiftung, whose Robert Bosch Academy “contributes to building an international network of opinion leaders, decision makers and experts” and whose International Alumni Center in Berlin “offers practical support in the design of impact-oriented networks“.

Thoughtworks, a US tech company which aims to “amplify positive social change and advocate for an equitable tech future” by means of its “social impact strategy“.

Ashoka Deutschland Fellowship, part of the US organisation founded by “godfather of social entrepreneurship” Bill Drayton, and which is deeply connected to impact investment and Klaus Schwab’s Global Shapers.

The CIJ’s founder and executive director Emilia Zenzile Roig (pictured) is in fact an Ashoka Fellow, which means that she (like Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns fame) is paid by them.

A key article on the Ashoka site makes it clear that the task given to Roig and the CIJ is to impose intersectional thinking on a European culture whose humanist values are deeply resistant to its agenda of classification and separation.

We learn that she “wants to change the way discrimination is understood and tackled in European societies”.

In the old world, “the mobilization of intersectionality remains challenging in a context that overemphasizes colorblindness and postracialism.

“The widespread reluctance to face the significance of race and the reality of racism is especially pronounced in Germany which rejects, for historical reasons of the Holocaust, collecting any demographic data on race and ethnicity in connection to crimes”.

Overemphasizing colorblindness and questioning “the reality of race” (ie: being anti-racist) does not sound like a problem to me.

And surely contemporary Germans are quite right to be concerned about attempts to collect data in order to link potential criminality to ethnic identity?

Roig thinks otherwise and her mission is “shifting the anti-discrimination framework towards one where intersectionality is eventually institutionalized”.

Her efforts have been showcased by The Journal of Beautiful Business, the online magazine of “global think tank” the House of Beautiful Business (“a place like no other for intimacy, intelligence, and impact“).

And on November 25 2020 Roig was interviewed in Forbes magazine as part of the Ashoka Contributors Group, under the informative heading of “Entrepreneurs. Insights, how-tos, and stories from the world of social impact”.

More insights into the “world of social impact” to which Roig belongs come from the ‘Clients and Collaborations’ section of her personal website.

There is a certain overlap with CIJ funders and partners. The Hertie empire and Open Society Foundations are listed, alongside Commerzbank and, of course, Ashoka.

Roig collaborates with an organisation called The Engine Room, whose slogan is “accelerating social change“.

Its website states: “The Engine Room helps activists, organisations, and other social change agents make the most of data and technology to increase their impact“.

Another client/collaborator of note is Tommy Hilfiger, a brand of PVH Corp, whose “matching gift program allows our associates to have their philanthropic donations matched by The PVH Foundation to increase their impact“.

In a 2018 report PVH declared it was “again aligning our strategy with the UN Sustainable Development Goals” and that its “Forward Fashion” strategy involved “priorities in areas where we can have the greatest impact and setting targets that are specific, measurable, and time-bound“.

The reference to the UN Sustainable Development Goals will come as no surprise to anyone who has dipped a wary investigative toe into the icy waters of impact capitalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution to which it is allied.

Researcher Alison McDowell explains: “Powerful interests are using the Sustainable Development Goals to mask their plans to remake the world as a digital panopticon.

“Financiers are going to claim they’re doing positive things with their portfolios by configuring asset allocations to align with ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), and that’s where the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals come in.

“It is the sustainability goals that will open the door to smart city infrastructure with facial recognition, cashless economies, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence used to implement broad threat assessments; the threat of natural disasters as well as threats posed by individual dissidents and groups”.

It is significant that Roig is a graduate of Berlin’s Hertie School, until recently known as the Hertie School of Governance, which was founded by the same Hertie Foundation which funds the CIJ.

The Hertie School is a partner in the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN) along with Columbia University in New York, the Business Administration School of São Paulo at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, the University of Tokyo, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, the Institute of Public Affairs at LSE and Sciences Po, Paris.

The GPPN says it exists “to address the most pressing public policy challenges of the 21st century and, as a result, to have policy impact“.

Its website tells us about a new one-year programme which it is “proud” to have launched: a Sustainable Development Goals Certificate!

It says: “As part of the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda, having specialized knowledge and hands-on experience on how to meet the SDGs is in high demand from government agencies, international organizations and private companies.

“The UN 2030 Agenda and SDG partnerships truly represent a global effort from the public and private sectors, at the international and local level, to respond to the most challenging questions of our time”.

Unfortunately, GPPN partner Hertie has lately been failing to respond to one particular challenging question of our time, namely its relationship to its own past.

Hertie Foundation received its substantial funds from the profits of the Hertie chain of department stores.

Georg Karg (pictured here in 1938), in whose memory the foundation was established by his heirs in 1974, got his hands on what was originally Herrmann Tietz & Co during the 1930s, when it was “aryanized” by the Nazis and the original Jewish owners pushed out with minimal compensation.

Explains this article: “The pro-Nazi Dresdner Bank and others simply refused to give the company new credit, claiming back a loan of 14 million Reichsmark. Facing bankruptcy, the Tietz brothers were forced to accept the bank’s condition: handing over the operations to an Aryan management”.

Hertie School was set up by the foundation with the goal of preparing selected students for “leadership” positions in government, business, and civil society.

In 2020, German media reported that almost 150 current and former students had come together to challenge the Hertie empire about its past.

Writes graduate Tobias Bünder: “Sadly, so far the history of the Hertie name has been shared with far too few of these future leaders.

“Many other corporations have done much worse and risen to new heights afterwards (Hugo Boss, for example, got big making SS uniforms). Nonetheless, Karg is definitely not without blame for capitalizing on the misfortune of his former employers during the time of a hateful, anti-Semitic political movement”.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Hertie is having to fend off criticism of its record in the Hitler years, while at the same time funding impact-intersectionality, a 21st century public-private partnership bid to control and exploit human beings by means of cold scientific classification along racial and other divisive lines…

The Marxist philosopher and social scientist Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) authored over 60 books. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that some of these are less well-known than his Critique of Everyday Life (1947), Introduction to Modernity, (1962), or Dialectical Materialism (1940), each of which continues to inform the work of architects, geographers, sociologists, and philosophers. Active as an author for over seventy years, Lefebvre’s oeuvre begins with contributions to the surrealist movement, proceeds with an important translation of Hegel and Marx, and then ranges across metaphysics, rural and urban sociology, critiques of fascism, memoirs, poetry, and literary criticism.

Given the breadth of his interests and the relative obscurity of some of his writings, it is little wonder that few readers have examined Lefebvre’s contribution to philosophy of science. This is especially understandable given that his major work in this area, des Sciences remained unpublished for more than fifty years and only saw the light of day in 2002.[1] It remains untranslated into English. des Science, was written by Lefebvre under the auspices of the French Communist Party and–at that organization’s behest–it attempted to integrate the “insights” of Stalin’s Short Course into Marxian philosophy. Given this mission, one aspect of the work that remains of particular interest to those interested in how ideology affects understanding is the way in which Lefebvre maintains fidelity to Stalin’s seconding of Marx and Engels’ insight that a subject’s social and economic position determines her worldview while simultaneously defending the objectivity of scientific knowledge

Fidelity to these seemingly contradictory epistemological positions sets up an interesting tension. For, insofar as scientists are methodologically rigorous, Lefebvre argues that they tend to produce true or correct knowledge about the world. However, Lefebvre also argued that ideology allows, motivates, directs, and controls scientific research and, further, that ideology informs the public reception of its results.

In negotiating this contradiction, Lefebvre’s work does not resemble the then-dominant position in philosophy of science: logical positivism or logical empiricism, which had it that the problem of subjectivity could be overcome by sufficient methodological rigor and logical analysis. Instead, he prefigures contemporary ideas about scientific practice and knowledge that have been voiced by feminist philosophers of science and social epistemologists over the last three decades. In so doing, his work anticipates standpoint theory, contextual empiricism, as well as methodological pluralism.[2]

Lefebvre finished Méthodologie des Sciences in 1947, at the exact time when the French Communist Party was moving from its endorsement of the “Thesis of the Unity of International Sciences” to that of the “Two Sciences.”[3] As part of a larger theoretical and political distinction which divided the world into two antagonistic camps, this dichotomy was deployed at the beginning of the Cold War in order to differentiate Soviet from Western Science and to prove the superiority of the former. With dogmatic assertion and propaganda directing research and research supporting propaganda and dogmatic assertion, communist scientists and party ideologues contended that ‘bourgeois science’ was unable to provide knowledge of the world as it really is because its method is based on the mistaken, positivist assumption that natural laws are discovered through empirical inquiry into objective facts.

By way of contrast, it was posited that proletarian science is able to discern dialectical processes at work in nature and to know the world truly. Why? Because it recognizes–at its heart–the dialectical relationship between theory and practice.

From the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, this theoretical distinction between the two types of scientific practice resulted in the denial of the veracity of conclusions reached by European and North American scientists and to the falsification or gross misinterpretation of empirical data obtained by Soviet scientists in their own research.[4] The distinction sometimes led to the Soviet Union’s rejection of practical technological advancements which were based upon the conclusions of Western science as well as to the forced and often disastrous application of proletarian science’s ‘discoveries’ to Soviet industry and agriculture.[5]

When the “Thesis of the Unity of International Sciences” was still in place, the PCF was quite happy to have sympathetic philosophers like Lefebvre developing their own variants of Marxist philosophy. Besides echoing the spirit of unity and liberalization that the Communist Party wished to foster while participating in the post-war government, this type of intellectual work added to the Party’s prestige. During this ephemeral moment, Lefebvre was even explicitly recognized by the Party as representing, “le marxisme vivant.”[6] Given this policy and this approbation, it is understandable how a Party that immediately before the war had banned and destroyed his work for being too Hegelian would, in 1946, offer to publish a proposed eight-volume tome À la lumière du matérialisme dialectique.[7] According to Lefebvre’s outline for the opus, this massive undertaking was to develop Marxist thought from its logical principles through to its applications in science, politics, history, psychology, ethics, and esthetics.[8]

The first volume in the series, Logique Formelle, Logique Dialectique, was published near the end of 1947. According to Lefebvre’s biographer, it was initially well received.[9] However, after the declaration by the Soviet dominated Cominform of the Two Sciences position, the book was attacked in Party organs for its claim that “the dialectic does not abolish [formal] logic.”[10] Despite Lefebvre’s explanation that formal logic represents only one stage in thought’s coming to know itself and his avowal that dialectical logic supersedes it, the fact that he gave formal logic any credence showed him to be “lacking party spirit” and to be petty bourgeois as well.[11] As the Party pointed out to him, what with its principles of identity and of non-contradiction, formal logic was obviously a bourgeois fantasy and was bivouacked in the wrong camp. So then, to give any credence to formal logic’s ability to help us know the world or to establish truth claims was anathema.[12]

By the time Lefebvre received this criticism, the second volume of À la lumière du matérialisme dialectique on the methodology of the sciences had already gone to press.[13] However, after a meeting with a high ranking member of the PCF’s Politburo, during which Lefebvre recounts that he was upbraided for not recognizing that—with the triumph of the proletariat—a new logic existed, Lefebvre withdrew the text from publication. Predicated as it was upon the assumption that the methodologies of the natural and human sciences relied upon formal logic to make inductive and deductive hypotheses about the natural world, he did not feel that its claims were reconcilable with the Party’s insistence that only dialectical logic could make sense of the world.[14]

Because Lefebvre withdrew Méthodologie des Sciences from the Party presses and because his autobiography recounts that he did so when he could see no way to reconcile his understanding of scientific method and of scientific knowledge with that of the Party, it is tempting to read this work as generally consistent with Lefebvre’s unique brand of Hegelian Marxism and as not in any way influenced by Soviet Marxism . However, given the probable period of its gestation (1939-1947) and given that, during much of this time, the Party was consistent in its endorsement of the Short Course, there is reason to suspect that this is indeed his response to Stalin’s theses in “Dialectical and Historical Materialism.”[15] That Lefebvre was exquisitely cognizant of the Short Course and of the Party’s endorsement of its ideas and that the themes and issues explored in Lefebvre’s text seem to echo those of the chapter on “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” would also lend credence to the assertion that the criticism of Stalin’s conclusions and the development of an alternative to them was at least partially Lefebvre’s intent in writing the text.[16]

Of course, given that he was a Party member and firmly committed to communism, the criticisms that Lefebvre delivers of the Short Course in Méthodologie des Sciences are neither explicit nor direct. In fact, he never references Stalin’s text at all.[17] Instead of attacking it frontally (as he would in a preface to the 1969 re-edition of Logique formelle, logique dialectique), Lefebvre describes his objective in the book to be a correction and critique of the two then dominant philosophies of science promulgated by academic philosophers.[18] Consequently, he proposes the dialectical materialist philosophy detailed in Méthodologie des Sciences in contradistinction to and as a compromise between “neo-dialectical” and “logical empiricist” theories of scientific knowledge.[19] As he argues, insofar as “neo-dialecticians” like Gaston Bachelard and Ferdinand Gonseth maintain that scientific concepts produce scientific objects and that these concepts (and objects) change over time purely by force of thought, they are guilty of being excessively conventionalist and insufficiently materialist.[20] At the other end of the spectrum, Lefebvre criticizes logical empiricists like A.J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap, not for being too materialistic, but for being naively materialist.[21] To him, a philosophy of science predicated on the assumption that logic is historically and culturally neutral and that there is a simple correspondence between linguistic signs and natural facts “neglects the historical connection between the real, knowledge, and the living individual.”[22]

Lefebvre positions his own dialectical materialist theory of the production of scientific knowledge somewhere between that of the neo-dialectician and that of the neo-positivist. With the positivists, he argues that material things exist, that scientists work to describe them in their objectivity, and that logic helps them to do so.[23] However, Lefebvre is also aware that a scientist’s social and historical position influences the questions she asks about the natural and social world, the way that she approaches her research, and the way in which the results of this research are interpreted. This bare-bones description of Lefebvre’s theory of the conditions of the production of scientific knowledge neither explains how he thinks objective knowledge of the real world is produced nor does it distinguish Lefebvre’s theory from that of Stalin. However, as it is developed over the course of Méthodologie des Sciences, its innovative take on the relationship between dialectical and historical materialism becomes clear.

Both Stalin and Lefebvre argue that the world (natural and social) develops dialectically and that it is known fully only through dialectical thought. However, it is not apparent to Lefebvre that only proletarians or the Communist Party can possess or advance this knowledge. Rather, inasmuch as scientists are engaged in an investigation of the material real, he argues that they are in the process of discovering objective truths about it. Morally, logically, and observationally rigorous, scientists describe the world as best they can and they tend to describe it correctly.[24] Despite this recognition of the scientist’s prerogative and achievement, the level of social, economic, and technological development of the culture in which a scientist finds herself practicing determines the level of objectivity and truth that she is able to reach.[25] Especially in the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences and mathematics, Lefebvre argues that scientists “present theses that constitute defenses (more or less well disguised) of their interests or of the interests of the limited social group of which they are a part.”[26] How then could such theses be considered objective knowledge? Well, looked at individually and synchronically, they are not. However, as scientists critique one another and as the culture and the economy in which they do their work develops, untrue and subjective theses are progressively overturned and replaced by truer and more objective theories.[27]

Following Stalin, Lefebvre does suggest that some social groups (and therefore the scientists that come from these groups) achieve a higher degree of objectivity due to the social formation that produces them. The lesson that Lefebvre draws from this is not, however, that one social group, the working class or its representatives, finds and possesses objective knowledge while other groups merely reproduce prejudice. Rather, he contends, the recognition that social prejudices influence and distort scientific theses demands that every thesis be examined for its ideological biases and that every scientific discipline self-consciously reflect back on the conditions of its own production. So that this self-critique might be performed simultaneous to scientific research, Lefebvre argues that philosophers specializing in materialist dialectics be assigned to units of scientists; that way, the prejudicial assumptions undergirding the scientists’ hypothesis and leading to a lack of objectivity might be pointed out and avoided.[28]

Despite Lefebvre’s call for dialectical materialist philosophers to police scientists, he does have a fairly robust and sophisticated sense of scientific practice as well as a respect for the work that scientists perform. This sense and this respect stand in stark contrast to the way in which the PCF treated actual scientists like Marcel Prenant and Jacques Monod at the time.[29] Given his Hegelian orientation, it is no surprise that Lefebvre sees the activity of scientists as basically a dialectical one. In the course of their activity, scientists propose theories about the way in which the world works. With their research, they then “demand” or force the world to try to prove that this theory is an illusion by encouraging it to produce facts that challenge the theory’s veracity. If such concrete facts emerge, the first tendency of the scientist is to incorporate these facts into the existing theory by inventing a corollary or sub-theory that explains them. However, if the facts cannot be so incorporated, then this forces a complete theoretical re-working; the original theory is abandoned and a new one that can account for the facts is introduced.[30] According to Lefebvre the history of science is the history of this dialectical movement from the abstract to the concrete repeated ad infinitum and its result is the progressive amelioration of knowledge.[31] This improvement is not, however, just an evolution in thought as the “neo-dialecticians” would claim. Rather, in the process of interacting with the material real, scientists come to know the real objectively, that is, in its actual dialectical development as a series of contradictions.[32]

In this claim and in his description of scientific practice, Lefebvre seconds the Party’s metaphysical stance that nature itself is dialectical. However, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to maintain that only the proletariat can have knowledge of this truth. In his account, knowledge of this truth is obtained retrospectively by the methods of Historical Materialism and is accessible to any and all who would inquire into the history of political economy.[33] With these universalist conclusions, it is no wonder that Party officials balked at publishing Méthodologie des Sciences at a time when they were calling for orthodoxy among Party members and when this orthodoxy included an endorsement of the two sciences position.

After withdrawing Méthodologies des Sciences from publication, Lefebvre never again attempted such a critique. In fact, soon after abandoning the text and the eight-volume project, he published a self-critical essay to atone for the sins he had committed against Marxism-Leninism in his work on logic and the dialectic.[34] However, this imposed exercise did not alter his consistent positions. Though for a time he curtailed his more heterodox statements on Marxist philosophy and retreated to literary analysis, Lefebvre never gave up the argument that Marxism was a philosophy of human liberation and that this liberation could be accomplished by scientific, cultural, and artistic means.

William S. Lewis is a Professor of Philosophy at Skidmore College.

[1] Henri Lefebvre, Méthodologie Des Sciences (Paris: Anthropos, 2002).

[2] Wenda K. Crasnow Sharon, Wylie, Alison, Bauchspies and Elizabeth Potter, “Feminist Perspectives on Science,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2018 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/feminist-science/.

[3] Slava Gerovitch, “‘Russian Scandals’: Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Early Years of the Cold War,” The Russian Review 60, no. 4 (2001): 550.

[4] Vadim J Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Boulder, Colo.; Oxford: Westview, 2004), 239–67.

[5] David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 140–42.

[6] Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle (Paris: A.M. Métailié, 1988), 117.

[7] Henri Lefebvre, À la lumière du matérialisme dialectique I, I, (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1947); Henri Lefebvre, Logique formelle, logique dialectique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1982), 11–12.

[8] Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle, xix–xx.

[9] Rémi Hess, “Introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Méthodologie Des Sciences,’” in Méthodologie Des Sciences (Paris: Anthropo, 2002), xx. Anglophone reviews were mixed: Vivian Jerauld McGill, who would be fired by Hunter College in 1954 after refusing to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee praised it. Lewis S. Feuer condemned it on logical grounds but argued that it is suggestive sociologically. Lewis S. Feuer, review of A La Lumière du Matérialisme Dialectique. I. Logique Formelle, Logique Dialectique, by Henri Lefebvre, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10, no. 4 (1950): 591–93, https://doi.org/10.2307/2103431; Richard T. Hull, “Biography: Vivian Jerauld McGill,” The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series, January 1, 2013, https://doi.org/10.5840/apapa2013378; V. J. McGill, “A La Lumière Du Matérialisme Dialectique. Vol. I. Logique Formelle, Logique Dialectique,” The Journal of Philosophy, January 1, 1949, https://doi.org/10.2307/2020124.

[10] Hess, “Introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Méthodologie Des Sciences,’” xx.

[11] Hess, xx.

[12] Lefebvre, Logique formelle, logique dialectique, v–vi.

[13] This is according to his account in La Somme et Le Reste recounted in Hess MS, Rob Shields maintains in his bibliographie that the sciences book was done first, in 1940 and was censored.

[14] Hess, “Introduction to Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Méthodologie Des Sciences,’” xxii–xxiii.

[15] Though many letters were exchanged between the two friends and collaborators during World War II, there is no evidence in the correspondence between Norbert Guterman and Lefebvre held at Butler Library, Columbia University showing that he made progress during the war on the grand project described in À la lumière de la marxisme.

[16] Philippe Buton, “Le Parti Communiste Français et le Stalinisme au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” Journal of Modern European History 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 67, https://doi.org/10.17104/1611-8944_2004_1_58.

[17] An omission that would make one suspect his endorsement of the document given that at the time it was de riguer for Party members to cite the text in every philosophical analysis.

[18] Lefebvre, Logique formelle, logique dialectique, v–liii.

[19] Lefebvre, Méthodologie des sciences, 2, 198.

[20] Lefebvre, 2–4, 80-81,192.

[21] Lefebvre, 85, 188.

[22] Lefebvre, 198.

[23] Lefebvre, 19–44.

[24] Lefebvre, 20–21.Méthodologies des Sciences, 20-21

[25] Lefebvre, 22.Méthodologies des Sciences, 22

[26] Lefebvre, 22.Méthodologies des Sciences, 22

[27] Lefebvre, 15–16.

[28] Lefebvre, 7.

[29] Yann Kindo, “L’affaire Lyssenko, ou la pseudo-science au pouvoir.,” Contretermps, avril 2009, https://www.contretemps.eu/affaire-lyssenko-pseudo-science-pouvoir/; Deniz Uztopal, “La réception en France du lyssenkisme, les scientifiques communistes français et la conceptualisation de la « science prolétarienne » (1948-1956),” Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, no. 122 (January 1, 2014): 121–41.

[30] Lefebvre, Méthodologie des sciences, 38–39.

[31] Lefebvre, 41.Méthodologies des sciences, 41

[32] Lefebvre, 41.Méthodologies des sciences, 41

[33] Henri Lefebvre, “Auto-Critique,” La Nouvelle Critique 4 (March 1949): 43–44.

[34] Lefebvre, “Auto-Critique.”

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.

In my view, there are two great scientific discoveries made by Marx and Engels: the materialist conception of history and the law of value under capitalism; in particular, the existence of surplus value in capitalist accumulation. The materialist conception of history asserts that the material conditions of a society’s mode of production and the social classes that emerge in that mode of production ultimately determine a society’s relations and ideology. As Marx said in the preface to his 1859 book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

That general view has been vindicated many times in studies of the economic and political history of human organisation. That is particularly the case in explaining the rise of capitalism to become the dominant mode of production. Now there is new study that adds yet more support for the materialist conception of history. Three scholars at Berkeley and Columbia Universities have published a paper, When Did Growth Begin? New Estimates of Productivity Growth in England from 1250 to 1870. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jsteinsson/papers/malthus.pdf

They attempt to measure when productivity growth (output per worker or worker hours) really took off in England, one of the first countries where the capitalist mode production became dominant. They find that there was hardly any growth in productivity before 1600. But productivity started to take off well before the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when England became a ‘constitutional monarchy’ and the political rule of the merchants and capitalist landowners was established. These scholars find that, from about 1600 to 1810, there was a modest rise of the productivity of the labour force in England of about 4% in each decade (so 0.4% a year), but after 1810 with the industrialisation of Britain, there was a rapid acceleration of productivity growth to about 18% every decade (or 1.8% a year). The move from agricultural capitalism of the 17^th century to industrial capitalism transformed the productivity of labour.

The authors comment: “our evidence helps distinguish between theories of why growth began. In particular, our findings support the idea that broad-based economic change preceded the bourgeois institutional reforms of 17th century England and may have contributed to causing them.” In other words, it was the change in the mode of production and the social classes that came first; the political changes came later.

As the authors go on to say, “an important debate regarding the onset of growth is whether economic change drove political and institutional change as Marx famously argued or whether political and institutional change kick-started economic growth”. The authors don’t want to accept Marx’s conception outright and seek to argue that “reality is likely more complex than either polar view.” But they cannot escape their own results: that productivity growth began almost a century before the Glorious Revolution and well before the English Civil War. And “this supports the Marxist view that economic change contributed importantly to 17th century institutional change in England.”

The other interesting aspect of the paper is that the authors try to measure the impact of population growth on productivity and wages. In the early 19^th century, Thomas Malthus argued that it was impossible for productivity growth to rise sufficiently to enable workers to increase their real incomes, because higher incomes would lead to increased births and eventually over-population, scarcity of food and famines etc, then reducing the population and incomes again.

The authors note that before 1600, there is evidence to support the Malthusian case. The period from 1300 to 1450 was a period of frequent plagues — the most famous being the Black Death of 1348. Over this period, the population of England fell by a factor of two resulting in a sharp drop in labour supply. Over this same period, real wages rose substantially. Then from 1450 to 1600, the population (and labour supply) recovered and real wages fell. In 1630, the English economy was back to almost exactly the same point it was at in 1300.

The reason that the Malthusian argument has validity before 1600 is that there was little or no productivity growth; so livelihoods were determined by labour supply and wages alone. Pre-capitalist England was a stagnant, stationary economy in terms of the productivity of labour. But so was the impact of the Malthusian over-population theory. The authors found that Malthusian population dynamics were very slow: a doubling of real incomes led to a 6 percentage point per decade (0.6% a year) increase in population growth. That implied that it took 150 years for a rise in real incomes to drive up population sufficiently to cause a reversal in income growth.

But once capitalism appears on the scene, the drive for profit by capitalist landowners and trading merchants encourages the use of new agricultural techniques and technology and the expansion of trade. Then productivity growth takes off at a rate increasingly fast enough to overcome the slow impact of Malthusian ‘overpopulation’. Indeed, with industrial capitalism after 1800, the growth in productivity is 28 times higher than the very slow negative impact of rising population on real incomes.

Thomas Malthus

This confirms the view of Engels when he wrote: “For us the matter is easy to explain. The productive power at mankind’s disposal is immeasurable. The productivity of the soil can be increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.” Umrisse 1842

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/michael-roberts/engels-200/paperback/product-y9pzdr.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Before capitalism, feudal societies stumbled along with their economies ravaged by plagues and climate. For example, the Black Death of 1348 engulfed English society for more than a year, claiming about 25% of the population. For three centuries after the Black Death, the plague would reappear every few decades and wipe out a significant share of the population each time. So real wages in England were mainly affected by these population changes and the consequent size of the labour force (if, as argued above, at a very slow rate).

But under capitalism, productivity rose sharply and the level of real wages was no longer determined by the weather or pandemics but by the class struggle over the production and distribution of the value and surplus value created in capitalist production in agriculture and industry. One of the features of the rise of capitalism from 1600 that the authors point out is the increase in the working day and working year – another confirmation of Marx’s analysis of exploitation under capitalism.

The authors note that as capitalism started to move from agricultural production to industry, in the latter half of the 18^th century, real wages in England fell slightly despite substantial productivity growth. They cite one potential explanation, namely “Engel’s Pause,” i.e., the idea that the lion’s share of the gains from early industrialization went to capitalists as opposed to labourers.

Engels’ pause and the condition of the working class in England

The authors are reluctant to accept that Engels was right, preferring a Malthusian explanation in the late 18^th century (having just rejected it). Moreover, they think real wages started to grow as early as 1810, before the period of the 1820-1840 cited by Engels as a ‘pause’. But anyway, we can see that the gap between productivity and real wages widened sharply from the beginning of industrial capitalism to now. Surplus value (the value of unpaid labour) rocketed through the early 19^th century.

Most important, the study refutes the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, namely human ‘civilisation’ is one of gradual progress with changes coming from wiser ideas and political forms constructed by clever people. Instead, the evidence of productivity growth in England shows “sharp and sizable shifts in average growth” supporting the notion that “something changed.” i.e., that the transition from stagnation to growth was more than a steady process of very gradually increased growth.” On the gradual Whig interpretation, the authors conclude that “the results do not support this view of history.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334831075_The_Whig_interpretation_of_history

Also, the study shows that, as sustained productivity growth began in England substantially before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it was not the change in political institutions that led to economic growth. On the contrary, it was the change in economic relations that led to productivity growth and then political change. “While the institutional changes associated with the Glorious Revolution may well have been important for growth, our results contradict the view that these events preceded the onset of growth in England.”

As Engels put it succinctly: “The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

The authors cannot avoid reaching a similar conclusion. As they say: “Marx stressed the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He argued that after the disappearance of serfdom in the 14th century, English peasants were expelled from their land through the enclosure movement. That spoliation inaugurated a new mode of production: one where workers did not own the means of production, and could only subsist on wage labour. This proletariat was ripe for exploitation by a new class of capitalist farmers and industrialists. In that process, political revolutions were a decisive step in securing the rise of the bourgeoisie. To triumph, capitalism needed to break the remaining shackles of feudalism…. Our findings lend some support to the Marxist view in that we estimate that the onset of growth preceded both the Glorious Revolution and the English Civil War (1642-1651). This timing of the onset of growth supports the view that economic change propelled history forward and drove political and ideological change.”

The development of capitalism in agriculture and in trade laid the basis for the introduction of industrial technology that led to the so-called industrial revolution and industrial capitalism. The Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain around 1800 because “innovation was uniquely profitable then and there”. As real wages rose, there was an incentive to exploit the raw materials necessary for labour saving technologies in textiles such as the spinning jenny, water frame, and mule, as well as coal burning technologies such as the steam engine and coke smelting furnace. Labour productivity exploded upwards. There was staggering rise in investment in means of production relative to labour. According to the authors, from 1600 to 1860, the capital stock in England grew by a factor of five, or 8% per decade.

Industrial capitalism had arrived, and along with rising productivity came increased exploitation of labour and the ideology of ‘political economy’ and bourgeois institutions of rule.

Frederick Engels was Karl Marx’s closest friend and collaborator. In the light of the ongoing ecological crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, Engels’ Dialectics of Nature takes on a new significance.

Publisher’s preface Marx’s writings have sometimes been misrepresented. Many consider them to be no longer relevant for the 21st century on the mistaken assumption that he was obsessed only with class and had little appreciation of how issues of gender, racism and colonialism inter-related with class and the struggle for human emancipation. But as Kevin […]

In Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism its author, Ashley J. Bohrer, presents a tour de force, offering and contributing to a wide-ranging debate that has occupied left academic and activist audiences for some time now. Indeed, intersectionality, once a catchword, has become one of the major lenses through which scholars in social theory, political science, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory and philosophy reflect on our contemporary situation not only nationally, but also globally. Reflections and theories about identity, the intersection of identities in the context of oppression, exploitation and difference are so vast that one needs to be a specialist to oversee the entire debate. In this vein, Bohrer’s book achieves the impossible, insofar as it considers a vast amount of contemporary literature on Marxism, intersectionality and the relation between the two. Bohrer calls this approach the ‘“maximalist’ approach.’ (Bohrer and Souvlis 2020) For a reader who is not familiar with the entire scope of the debate, such as this reviewer, the book is very enlightening and provides a helpful guide for understanding how these two sides of the contemporary left can be brought together.

The complexity of the debate is unfolded in seven chapters that are divided by three sections within which Bohrer reconstructs the shared histories of Marxism and intersectionality (section I), presents detailed analyses of the debates and clashes between both groups of scholars (section II) and opens up extended ways of engagement with both (section III). Readers who are somewhat familiar with the history of intersectionality can safely jump over the introductory chapter (called chapter zero) in which Bohrer outlines nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to the contemporary debate. Via short summaries Bohrer presents the positions of main authors, such as Claudia Jones and W.E.B. Du Bois, main approaches, such as standpoint theory, the Jeopardy Approach and Latinix Feminism, a short history of political activism, and authors who directly influenced contemporary discussions, such as the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Davis. The next four chapters discuss definitions, postulates and specific aspects of intersectionality, and reconstruct Marxist critiques of intersectionality as well as intersectional critiques of Marxism. These chapters are very well organized, and the main points are forcefully presented. Bohrer argues that both critiques have their shortcomings and are largely based on either reductive readings or basic misunderstandings. The last chapters deal with specific issues that are of importance for further developments and seen from a philosophical point of view, they are central to this work, as the author focuses (1.) on the relation between exploitation and oppression, (2.) on the concepts of dialects and contradiction, as well as (3.) on difference, solidarity, and coalition building.

Though the concept of capitalism is announced in the title of the book, it is not always clearly developed or framed in the author’s treatment, which may be due to the absence of an engagement with (contemporary) political economy or a theory of society. On the one hand, Bohrer argues that ‘intersectional histories refuse to name a singular cause for the multi-dimensional, contradictory, internally variant, and historically-dependent relations between the various forces in matrices of domination’ (114), while on the other hand, stating that ‘capitalism plays an important structural role, even if it does not play a unilateral or universal role’ (Ibid). What exactly is meant by ‘structural role’ remains unclear to such an extent that – despite the awkward tendency to reduce ‘Marxism’ to the topics of class and exploitation – it is not always clear in which sense agents are constituted within capitalist social organization. Bohrer therefore often speaks of capitalism as a ‘factor’ among others and, as a consequence, it is challenging to understand the concerns and claims of the text within the critical context of a larger theory of society in which exploitation and oppression are related in specific ways to social totality. Agents understood as the outcome of intersecting identities are the clear focus of Bohrer’s reflections, but the reader wonders how these subjectivities are constituted in relation to social totality, especially since the author does not really offer a theory that explains the most fundamental concept of intersectionality, namely, the concept of identity (with the exception of pp. 252-3). Definitions such as ‘identity as multi-pronged, group based, historically constituted, and heterogenous’ (93) do not help much in the effort to genuinely grasp the concept philosophically. Given the lack of a material social theory and political economy, as well as the focus on agents and their identities, concepts that are important for a theory of subjectivity under conditions of capital accumulation, such as technologies, state apparatuses and knowledge as a direct productive force, one wonders whether the book’s real intellectual horizon is a theory of justice based on ‘deep interpretations of all systems of oppression’ (224). It is admirable how Bohrer tries to be sensitive to and to recognize an almost infinite list of differences and identifications. However, the discussions overall seem to be more in line with a philosophy of recognition rather than a materialist theory of society for which not only a critique of political economy would be needed, but so, too, would a sober analysis of habitus as well as ideological and disciplinary state apparatuses. For example, the author’s worry about ‘sexist norms, heterosexist understandings of femininity and gendered (and racialized) social reproductive labor’ (210) seen ‘through the matrix of domination’ (118) seems to be a worry about injustices encountered in the form of norms; i.e. norms that regulate identifications that agents are forced to take on in capitalism. How these norms are habituated or constituted – aside from repeated references to the multiplicity of oppressive practices – is not clear. The ‘devaluation of black and brown lives’ (210) or the predominant ‘European heterosexist and white supremacist form of thinking’ (219) could be more properly addressed by a theory of recognitional justice, at least as long as these misrecognitions and matrixes of dominations are not connected to a materialist theory of society or theory of subjectivity.

In addition, Bohrer’s tendency to focus on domination via oppression and exploitation leads to the rejection of the argument that we need to make a distinction between the logic of capital and ‘capitalism’ as the term that refers somehow to the whole. Though I agree with Bohrer’s attempt to push exploitation and oppression on even ground, I still would argue that capital ultimately constitutes social reality and the totality of capitalism, especially if we mean by the latter a form of social organization that is globally based on the same principles. The point is precisely that the basic categories of political economy are the same everywhere, even if they get actualized and develop differently in different cultural and national contexts. While we find a myriad of combinatory identities and identity positions through a variety of exploitative and oppressive practices, we only find one social reality constituted as a totality that establishes the realm in which these practices can take place. As Marx puts it in Capital, capital ‘announces an epoch’ by which he means the unity of one social formation. Bohrer’s argument that the separation of capital and capitalism presupposes a separation of history and logic (188) fails, since it is undeniable that history and logic go hand in hand empirically, even if, in theory, we nevertheless make this distinction. To be sure, making this theoretical distinction permits us to synchronize all empirical elements as belonging to one social formation and social whole, and while it is true that in synchronizing these elements, we see that capital cannot be disconnected from exploitation and oppression especially inasmuch as capital is a real dynamic, this does not mean that we do not need to draw a sharp distinction between practices of oppression and the logic of capital; for value/capital is the social form that all entities take on, including agents whose productive capacities capital mobilizes for its own purposes via particular identities. Whereas a theory of society can give us constitutive categories, intersectionality can help us understand how agents must live through the contradictions of capital experience and react in many varied and nuanced ways within this whole. It is certain that ‘capitalism takes a variety of shapes and forms, responds to a variety of conditions, and encounters a wide variety of constraints and resistances’ (213) and that ‘an adequate theory of capital requires rapt attention to the multiplicity of formations that constitute it’ (203). Just as it is self-explanatory that capitalism cannot ‘explain or cause’ (163) all forms of agency, so is it the case that a single theory cannot make sense of all ‘choices, actions, thoughts, opportunities, and sacrifices made by people’ (163). However, this ‘dizzying set of capitalist arrangements’ (145) presupposes that the referent of ‘capitalism’ refers to one ‘X’ that takes a variety of shapes; i.e. it ideally presupposes one theory; this assumes, though, that we do not want to fall back onto nominalist strategies, historicist relativism or empty pluralizations that do not help us to grasp the reality, such as when Bohrer claims that ‘[s]ocial antagonisms should always be figured as pluri-vocal, multiplicitous, and, what is more, unpredictable and contingent’ (213), that social contradictions should allow for a ‘plethora of outcomes, arrangements, and compromises’ (214), or that there are not singular causes for ‘the multi-dimensional, contradictory, internally variant, and historically-dependent relations between various forces in matrices of domination’ (114). Indeed, this is dizzying!

In this vein, the author’s attempt to lump together a variety of authors under an identity labeled ‘Marxism’, especially if we take into account the theoretical range and global presence of Marxism, is problematic, to say the least. Moreover, Bohrer seems to have an ‘activist’ understanding of Marxism and although movements are understood as the major source of theory, and theorizing may be understood as a form of praxis, praxis is nevertheless understood as something external to theory. In this connection let us be reminded that Capital was not written for the laboring class (who would need to be addressed in different kinds of publications); rather, it was written against the ruling class and their classical economist and philosophy representatives with the goal of positioning Marxist theory and philosophy within the theoretical and philosophical discourse of Marx’s time. The hope was that, in turn, this would also lead to a reflection that theorizing cannot take place in some kind of neutral space. As a consequence, theory as praxis means that theory must be carried out as a critique of ideology and not as a form of activism. Similarly, the goal of contemporary Marxist theory and philosophy should be seen in the attempt to establish itself as a position that can demonstrate its own superiority over other positions in the fields of epistemology, ontology and ethics. As a result of Bohrer’s ‘practicist’ approach to theory, it is difficult to understand where the author stands in this field, insofar as it is not clear against which theory Bohrer’s ‘intersectional Marxism’ is directed, unless, perhaps, it is intended to position itself against certain forms of thinking based on specific identities, such as liberal feminists or white binary males.

Finally, though the book is extremely strong in its precise, clear and far-reaching reconstruction of authors and debates, its basic theoretical concepts remain vague because essential philosophical questions are not properly engaged. For example, what is identity?, what is a category (which is still presupposed for terms such as ‘intra-categorial’ or ‘inter-categorial’)?, and what is subjectivity? – these are but a few of the foundational philosophical questions that need to be addressed for the important considerations of this text to be fully analyzed. Indeed, the idea that overlapping identities constitute subjectivities remains weak, as long as we do not embed it within phenomenological or ontological frameworks. A statement such as intersectionality is an ‘ontological approach that accounts for complex subjectivity’ (90) remains empty without these antecedent or complementary philosophical considerations.

In addition, one could – and perhaps should – argue that it is philosophically problematic to identify who one is with what one is. Furthermore, even the last echo of what was once a universalist vision of a classless society as a society of human individuals evaporates in the author’s desire to recognize infinite chains of difference that fixate human beings in what they are rather than what they could be. Put with Sartre, the idea of a self that can be observed under the intersectional magnifying glass is itself bad faith, insofar as one could argue that an individual always transcends all identities. In the end a theory of social subjects that is constructed on the basis of identities is modeled after neoliberal desires since as agents seem to live in an abstract universe of identifications rather than in factories, schools, ghettos, camps, farms, homes, on ships or in political institutions.

In closing, on the one hand, the book reaches a level of complexity and inclusivity that we rarely see in a field in which many authors are desperately trying to defend their intellectual territory, but on the other hand – and here’s the paradox – it comes dangerously close to losing any focus on the very particular systematic issues that need more theoretical or argumentative treatment. The reader should not get these critical remarks wrong: despite the reviewers’ quibbles, Bohrer’s book is an impeccable achievement in terms of clarity and complexity that should be read by everyone interested in the relation between Marxism and intersectional theorizing.

Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature is an extremely interesting book—enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating.

In the fourth part of CARR Senior Fellow, Dr Henry Mead’s, series on Hegel and Fascism, the author takes a look at how echoes of the idea of the fall circulated beyond Hegel – showing inspiration in fascism as well as religious and secular theories.

The Myth of the Fall within Hegelian Thought

As noted previously in this series on Hegel and Fascism, Hegel saw the actions of “Great Men” in history as the product of a larger pattern of forces – the product of “the cunning of reason”. This determinism, what Popper attacked as “historicism”, is of course compatible with recent attempts to define fascism, in a flexible ‘ideal type’, as a form of “palingenetic ultranationalism”.

This theory of history is anticipated to some degree in Hegel’s Phenomenology, which at times seems to connect its account of the emergence of a specific consciousness with historical events in a kind of cosmic bildungsroman. The connections are not sustained or explicit, however. Moreover, the analogy between the spirit’s progress and world-historical time was not drawn fully until the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, published from student notes posthumously in 1835. This tells the story of human civilisation as a correlation to the emergence of the world-spirit. The stage of divided consciousness that sets Hegel’s dialectic moving in his first major work is replicated in the ‘system of falls’ that mark history. Yet, as Cyril O’Regan notes, the fall motif is not just a grand, framing pattern in history, but recurs several times in various historical stages. There are multiple movements from unity into disunity, as required by the dialectic’s move from proposition to contradiction – before resolution in a higher unity. These disruptions could be hurtful, savage, causing long spans of pain and suffering before achieving their resolution. The expulsions of the Jews, the deterioration of the middle ages, and the religious wars of the Reformation, were all – in Hegel’s mind – explicable as necessary stages in a developmental growth. As he notes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History:

“The History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom… That the History of the World… is the realization of Spirit, this is the true Theodicy, the justification of God in History… What has happened and is happening… is essentially His Work…”

Fascism & the Hegelian Form of Order

Although Popper’s work has long been treated as a polemical distortion of Hegel’s main assertions, more recent accounts of an ‘ideal type’ of Fascism certainly match the Hegelian form. In his major study of the Marxist tradition, Leszek Kolakowski traced the dialectic’s descent from Neoplatonic patterns and its return into more recent manifestations. Moreover, a long-standing tradition of scholarship on ‘political religion’ has made the same point, most notably in works by Eric Voegelin, Emilio Gentile, Michael Burleigh, and John Gray among others.

The pattern was, to use Roger Griffin’s phrase, essentially palingenetic; it involved a narrative of birth, degeneration, and rebirth; or, alternatively, of wholeness, division, and a higher wholeness. The dialectic itself exemplifies a deeper three-beat rhythm that runs through Romantic literature, and is paradigmatic of Fascist and Nazi imagery of pre-modern unity, civilizational rise (also a corruption), and then a final formation into a renewed, and purged unity. Yet it was not exclusively a fascist form. Hegel’s philosophy became a touchstone for liberals and socialists too from the 1880s through to the interwar period.

The Influence of the Hegelian Form of Order & Other Modern Writers

Hegel, as Karl Löwith and many others has shown, was one of many modern writers to propose a pattern in human history. German Enlightenment and Romantic writing was full of echoes of an essentially Neoplatonic myth of fall and return. In a classic study, M.H. Abrams offers an exhaustive survey of such motifs in a mass of literary and philosophical works. The shape of the argument – the explanation of man’s divided nature, both socially and psychologically, and the path back to re-unity – comes to the fore in Gotthold Lessing’s ‘The Education of the Human Race’ (1780). Herder developed the idea, and Friedrich Schiller (in his 1795 ‘Letters on Aesthetic Education’) refined the idea of the necessary fall: “It was civilization itself… which inflicted this wound upon modern man”; but the “fragmentary specialization of human powers” through which “individuals … suffer under the curse of this cosmic purpose” was necessary.[1] This was a felix divisio, as Abrams puts it (p. 211), for as “little as individuals might benefit from this fragmentation of their being, there was no other way in which the species as a whole could have progressed.” (Schiller, p. 39; quoted in Abrams, p. 211). The works of Jakob Böhme, the Lutheran mystic who stressed the necessity of the fall in the movement towards heaven, were also important to Schelling, Holderlin, and Hegel, whose conversations at the Tübingen seminary produced the first Idealist system. Within the pattern of the bildungsroman there lies a version of Christian eschatology which, some historians argue, can be traced back to much earlier texts on one hand, and forward into Marxism and other secular political philosophies on the other.

Marx and Hegel

Indeed, the historical pattern Hyndman attributed to Hegel was an ancient one. As the Marxist scholar, G.A. Cohen, puts it: “This rhythm of primitive whole, fragmentation, and reunification asserts itself widely in Western thought. It beats not only in Hegel and… in Marx, but in much religious doctrine, in the Christian triad of innocence, fall, and redemption, in Aristophanes’ account of love in Plato’s Symposium, in some psycho-analytic narrations of the genesis of the person, and—seminally for German philosophy of history— throughout Schiller”. (Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978), , p. 21). Referring to this sequence in intimate relations, Hegel wrote in his fragment ‘On Love’ that “the process is: unity, separated opposites, reunion.” Later in the Phenomenology, he describes the movement as “sensuous consciousness”, “understanding”, and “Reason”. The “Hegelian generalisation of the evolution from unity to disintegration back again to unity on a higher plane”, would be inherited by Marx, in “a dialectical progression from a state of undifferentiated unity, through a stage of differentiation without unity to a stage of differentiated unity”.[2] The motif of rebirth in fascism involves, as Griffin puts it, the loss and the recovery of a sense of transcendence. To achieve this, there will be sacrifices on a grand scale; something to which the annals of world history can attest.

[1] For details of Lessing’s and Herder’s texts, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 203-4. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p.33.

[2] David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 18.

Dr Henry Mead is a Senior Fellow at CARR and Research Fellow at Tallinn University. See full profile here.

© Henry Mead. Views expressed on this website are individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect that of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). We are pleased to share previously unpublished materials with the community under creative commons license 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives).

‘Research for this article was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant (TAU17149) “Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe’.

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From Defensive Traits to Participatory Ego States

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