Archive for category: Theory

The Global Marxism series organized by SSK in Korea has delivered a number of important presentations and papers on aspects of Marxist economics. I participated in the second round with a paper on the Economics of Modern Imperialism. Recently Hideto Akashi of Komazawa University, Tokyo returned to the fray with a presentation on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

As is well known in the small circles of Marxian economics, leading Marxist scholar, Michael Heinrich, the author of a detailed account of Marx’s Capital, has argued in the past that Marx’s law of profitability is logically faulty: in particular, it is ‘indeterminate’ in that its key categories do not show that profitability of capital must fall. According to Heinrich, “an increasing organic composition as such is not enough to prove a falling rate of profit”.

Moreover, Heinrich argues that, in the last decade of his life, Marx ‘probably’ recognized this and so dropped the law as part of his theoretical arsenal and as providing any basis for a theory of crises under capitalism, instead searching for a theory based on the excess of credit. Marx doubted his own law and instead in the 1870s switched to studying the credit system as a possible cause of crises. Heinrich: “These doubts were probably amplified in the course of the 1870s. In 1875, a comprehensive manuscript emerges which was first published under the title Mathematical Treatment of the Rate of Surplus-Value and Profit Rate. […] it quickly becomes apparent that in principle all sorts of movement are possible. Several times, Marx makes note of possibilities for the rate of profit to increase, although the value-composition of capital was increasing. In the case of a renewed composition of book III, all of these considerations would have had to find their way into a revision of the chapter on the “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”. A consistent regard for them should have led to the abandonment of the “law”. (Heinrich).

When Heinrich first proposed this critique, several authors including myself responded with firm rebuttals, which, in my view, were compelling in refuting Heinrich on both his points: the indeterminacy and Marx’s dispensing with the law. Indeed, I offer a detailed rebuttal of Heinrich’s claim that Marx dropped the law in my recent short book, Engels 200 (see pages 106-111).

But Heinrich’s claims were raised again in questions in the Global Marxism series and Akashi took them up again in his latest presentation. Akashi points out that the most important factor of the law of tendential fall of the general rate of profit is that the rate of profit falls and the quantity of profit increases while, at the same time, the organic composition of capital (ie more investment in means of production relative to employment) is rising. There are some counteracting factors, but these cannot diminish the former sufficiently to cause a secular rise in profitability.

Akashi also argues against Heinrich that after the publication of Capital, Marx did not abandon the law. Akashi cites Marxist scholar Kohei Saito who rejects Heinrich’s interpretation and points out that as late as 1878, Marx was still considering mathematically how the law of profitability would operate. Indeed, Marx tried to integrate the effect of turnover of capital into his argument for the rate of profit: Marx wrote a short manuscript in 1878 entitled “On the rate of profit, Turnover of Capital, Interest and Discount” by editors of MEGA. (MEGA II/14, Apparat p. 697).

Actually, in writing Capital, Marx had considered earlier the role of the turnover of capital. He discussed this with Engels in 1873 (after the publication of Capital), to ascertain the length of the turnover of fixed capital (see my book, Marx 200, pp56-8).

However, in Akashi’s view, Marx’s attempts in 1878 to show the impact of the turnover of capital on the rate of profit did not work. (MEGA II/4.2, p. 252, S. 216), which is why Marx abandoned the attempt. In Akashi’s view, Marx should have adopted a method of consideration based on first equalizing rates of profit to a general one and then applying turnover rates to that. “I supposed Marx should have dealt with capital transfer from industries with a higher organic composition and a slower speed of turnover to those with a lower organic composition and a higher speed of turnover, and then he should have taken the general rate of profit as given.” Once he had a general rate of profit, if he had simulated the equalization of turnover’s effect on the general rate of profit, he would have seen the capital transfer from the industry with lower speed turnover to the industry with higher speed turnover.

Actually, there has been further work by Marxist economists to bring the turnover of capital into the coordinates of the law of profitability. Engels himself began that work with his addition in Volume 3 of Capital – see my Engels 200, pp99-101). Modern accounts can be found from Brian Green, Peter Jones and others. Maito, for example, concludes that “while it (turnover rate) does not affect the sense of the trend (the fall in the rate of profit), it softens the slope” in referring to his calculation of the rate of profit in Japan.

But the main point here is that, as late as 1878, Marx was tinkering with the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall and trying to integrate turnover rates into the equalization of profit rates in different sectors to produce a general ‘social’ average rate of profit. This confirms the view of many of us that Heinrich is wrong, namely that a) that Marx’s law is ‘indeterminate’ and b) that Marx had dropped the law in the period after Capital Volume One was published and Engels should never have included the law in Volume Three of Capital when he edited it.

The Russian-born thinker Raya Dunayevskaya was an important and influential figure on the US radical left. At an early stage, she recognized the need to combine struggles against racism and capitalism — two oppressive structures that were intimately linked.

American thinker Dunayevskaya challenged the premises of established Marxism by promoting a humanist alternative to the myriad forms of alienation that define modern society. (News and Letters Committees)

The upsurge of interest in socialism in recent years has unfolded in a context defined by one of the most massive and creative movements against racist dehumanization in the history of the United States. The movements against police abuse and for black lives clearly suggest that the effort to forge an alternative to capitalism hinges on developing an intersectional Marxism that treats race, gender, and sexuality as seriously as class. So do the ongoing struggles against the sexism and homophobia that has often manifested itself within leftist organizations.

For this reason, one figure in the history of Marxism who has been receiving increased attention is Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–87). Dunayevskaya challenged the premises of established Marxism by promoting a humanist alternative to the myriad forms of alienation that define modern society. As Adrienne Rich put it:

Dunayevskaya vehemently opposed the notion that Marx’s Marxism means that class struggle is primary or that racism and male supremacism will end when capitalism falls. “What happens after” she said, is the question we have to be asking all along.

A Crisis of Marxism

Born in western Ukraine to an impoverished Jewish family in 1910, Dunayevskaya and her siblings fled the country during the Russian Civil War and migrated to Chicago in 1921. Still barely a teenager, she became active in local left-wing politics and joined the youth group of the Communist Party. In 1925, she became active in the American Negro Labor Congress — the first effort of US communists to create a presence in the black community.

After being thrown down a flight of stairs in 1927 for objecting to the party’s condemnation of Leon Trotsky, she spent the next ten years involved in the labor movement as a Trotskyist militant, working with such figures as James P. Cannon, Martin Abern, and A. J. Muste. In 1937, seeking a reprieve from the factional struggles consuming the US left, she became Russian-language secretary to Trotsky during his exile in Coyoacán, Mexico.

Dunayevskaya first emerged as a theoretician following her break with Trotsky in 1939 over his defense of the USSR as a “workers’ state,” even after the Hitler-Stalin Pact gave the green light to World War II. The pact — and Trotsky’s refusal to rethink his view of the USSR in the light of it — was a tremendous shock, since it indicated that the very meaning of “socialism” had become so degraded as to justify the gravest of crimes.

She responded by embarking on an economic analysis of the nature of the USSR, arguing that socialists had been wrong to presume that abolishing private ownership of the means of production necessarily leads to a free society. She wrote in 1940:

The determining factor in analyzing the class nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class or are state-owned, but whether the means of production are capital, that is, whether they are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers. The Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise.

The USSR, she concluded, was neither “socialist,” nor a transitional society between capitalism and socialism, as Trotsky had argued. It was “state capitalist.”

The fundamental issue, Dunayevskaya held, isn’t whether property is privately or collectively owned. It is whether relations between people are established in which they cease to be treated as things.

This designation of the USSR was controversial enough. But Dunayevskaya went further, taking issue with Stalinism’s left-wing critics — whether that meant Trotsky or his estranged disciple Max Schachtman, who defined the USSR as a “bureaucratic collectivist” system — for likewise holding that property forms define the nature of society. Property is a product of labor, and property forms concern relations between things.

The fundamental issue, she held, isn’t whether property is privately or collectively owned. It is whether relations between people are established in which they cease to be treated as things. By not recognizing that public or state ownership does not deprive the means of production of their character as capital, Marxists were failing to keep their fingers on the pulse of human relations.

It wasn’t that socialists were wrong to oppose private ownership of the means of production and anarchic market relations, Dunayevskaya believed. Rather, they had become so fixated on these questions that they overlooked the alienated conditions of life and labor that made such property relations possible.

Alienation, she argued, is not just about the separation of the product from the producer — the fact that workers produce more value than they obtain in wages. This imbalance was the consequence of being alienated from one’s own activity, both at work and in our relations with other people (and with nature) outside of the workplace. As Marx stated:

Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labor, of the external relation of the workers to nature and to himself … though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labor, it is rather its consequence.

The unequal distribution of property, income, and resources is the necessary result of alienated human relations, not the other way around. Marx penned those words in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — known as his Humanist Essays. Dunayevskaya discovered these writings, which were virtually unknown in the English-speaking world at the time, during her research on the Russian economy, and was the first to publish parts of them in English.

The unequal distribution of property, income, and resources is the necessary result of alienated human relations, not the other way around.

The discovery of Marx’s humanist critique of alienation did not merely influence her economic analysis of the USSR. It also led her to a wider understanding. Dunayevskaya came to see that Marxists had struggled to integrate issues of race and gender oppression into an anti-capitalist perspective because their economism and objectivism blocked them from addressing the dehumanized forms of interpersonal relations that define modern society.

Race, Class, and Dialectics

Dunayevskaya’s involvement in anti-racist movements extended, in the 1940s, to her work with C. L. R. James in the Johnson-Forrest Tendency (JFT). This was a dissident grouping in the US Workers’ Party which promoted an analysis of the USSR as a state capitalist society. Its name derived from the respective pseudonyms of James and Dunayevskaya.

Issues of race and racism were integral to the JFT’s work. Most Marxist groups at the time saw anti-racist struggles in terms of demands for civil rights that would be achievable within capitalism, but the JFT held that such struggles were pivotal to any effort to transcend capitalism.

Since racial determinations had shaped class relations ever since the inception of American “civilization,” fighting against racism would enable workers and other oppressed groups to find their voice. On these grounds, they argued for the independent validity of anti-racist struggles by black Americans, in opposition to those who viewed them as secondary or ancillary to the general class struggle.

This standpoint did not entail downplaying class struggle: on the contrary, it led to a deeper understanding of it. Borrowing from Marx’s use of questionnaires to gain insights into the thoughts of workers, the JFT found that many workers in their own time were increasingly concerned, not just with the inequitable distribution of the proceeds of labor, but also with their alienated conditions of labor. This reflected a heightened level of consciousness which undermined the traditional view associated with Lenin that workers were only capable of attaining “trade union consciousness” through their own endeavors.

For Dunayevskaya, groups of Marxist thinker-activists remained crucial — not to take over and control movements, but to raise awareness, in active dialogue with those movements, of what constitutes a viable alternative to capitalism.

This in turn led the JFT to question the crude materialism which had characterized much of Marxism after Marx. Along with Grace Lee Boggs, who joined the JFT shortly after its founding, James and Dunayevskaya engaged in intense studies of Hegel and his impact on Marx — as well as the German philosopher’s relevance for contemporary politics. This was in part spurred by Dunayevskaya’s first English translation of Lenin’s 1914 work, “Abstract of Hegel’s Science of Logic,” in which the Russian Marxist made the following statement:

Cognition not only reflects the objective world, but creates it … in this most idealist of Hegel’s works there is the least idealism and the most materialism.

The JFT can be considered the first group of Hegelian-Marxists in the United States — a fact often overlooked in accounts of that tradition.

The JFT’s emphasis on spontaneous class and race consciousness eventually led it to break from the concept of a vanguard party and leave Trotskyism behind. Yet emerging differences over alternatives to that concept explained the group’s ultimate breakup. For Dunayevskaya, groups of Marxist thinker-activists remained crucial — not to take over and control movements, but to raise awareness, in active dialogue with those movements, of what constitutes a viable alternative to capitalism.

Humanism and Alienation

Dunayevskaya’s 1958 work Marxism and Freedom was the first book-length treatment of Marxist-Humanism. Its preface stated:

This book aims to re-establish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called “a thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism” … Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing.

It served as the basis of the first of several Marxist-Humanist organizations, News and Letters Committees, founded by Dunayevskaya along with Charles Denby, a Black Detroit autoworker.

Dunayevskaya followed Marxism and Freedom with many works over the next three decades: American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard (1963), Philosophy and Revolution: from Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao (1973), Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1981), and Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution (1985). She consistently argued that the realities of our times made a revolutionary humanist perspective essential for both theory and practice.

According to Dunayevskaya, the many unfinished and aborted revolutions since 1917 showed that Marxists would pay a hefty price for relying on hierarchical and elitist forms of organization while neglecting the need for a thoroughgoing reorganization of human relations before and after the seizure of power. A philosophical reconstruction of Marxism based on Marx’s humanism became imperative.

Although a number of thinkers came to be associated with socialist humanism over the years, Dunayevskaya’s approach differed from many others in two important respects. Firstly, she did not ground humanism in an essentialist or ahistorical view of human nature, but in actual forces of revolution. She called it “a movement from practice that is itself a form of theory.”

Mass freedom struggles, Dunayevskaya held, were not simply a force to be harnessed in the name of “making” the revolution. They raised theoretical questions that had to be heard, absorbed, and developed — such as “When does my working day begin and end and why do I have no say in it?” “Why am I seen not as a person but in terms of a racial stereotype?” or “Why does the person who claims to love me still treat me as an object?” Such questions posed by new social movements compelled Marxists to broaden their view of the entire emancipatory project.

Dunayevskaya placed great emphasis on the struggles of rank-and-file workers against automation. She argued that they raise the question, ‘What kind of labor should people perform?’

In this spirit, Dunayevskaya placed great emphasis on the struggles of rank-and-file workers against automation. She disagreed with the view of Herbert Marcuse, with whom she carried on a lengthy correspondence. Marcuse saw such struggles as an impediment to progress, or a failure to understand that the replacement of living labor by capital provides the material basis for socialism. She argued that they raise the question, “What kind of labor should people perform?”

It wasn’t simply the fact that automation made work more alienating. The underemployment and permanent unemployment to which it gave rise also made life outside the job site more alienating. Long before “deindustrialization” had become a household word, Dunayevskaya focused on how the drive for greater automation was turning social life itself into a kind of factory.

Dunayevskaya’s attentiveness to the impact of capitalism on the fabric of everyday life influenced her view of struggles against racism and sexism. She embraced the Civil Rights Movement, beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, as signaling the beginning of the “Black Revolution” in America. This was at a time when many leftists saw it as simply asking for a bigger slice of the capitalist pie. What did signs like “I Am a Man” held up by many African-American protesters of the 1960s — which reemerged in recent anti-police protests as “I Am a Woman” and “I Am Trans” — signify, if not the affirmation of a kind of humanism?

As Dunayevskaya wrote in a discussion of Black women’s struggles in 1985:

To grasp the Black Dimension is to learn a new language, the language of thought, Black thought. For many, this new language will be difficult because they are hard of hearing. Hard of hearing because they are not used to this type of thought, a language which is both a struggle for freedom and the thought of freedom.

The Value Theory of Labor

The second divergence between Dunayevskaya and the majority of socialist humanists was this. While most other discussions of Marx’s humanism focused on his early writings, Dunayevskaya held that its most profound expression could be found in his most “mature” work, Capital.

Scholars often presume that Marxism is a radical variation on David Ricardo’s labor theory of value, in the sense that Marx drew from the theory an argument that surplus value should be redistributed from capitalists to workers. However, this is misleading. Marx took issue not just with the unequal distribution of value but with the very existence of value, which is wealth expressed in money.

‘Value,’ for Marx, was the expression of a peculiar form of labor in which individuals were subjected to abstract forms of domination outside of their control. It was a product of dehumanized social relations.

A commodity’s value, Marx stressed, was not determined by the actual number of hours taken to produce it, but by the average amount of time necessary to do so. This abstract average, which he called socially necessary labor time, imposed its will on the producers regardless of their needs or desires. “Value,” for Marx, was the expression of a peculiar form of labor in which individuals were subjected to abstract forms of domination outside of their control. It was a product of dehumanized social relations.

Socialism represented the abolition of value production through the creation of new human relations in which individuals would freely organize their time instead of having it organized for them by the market or the state. As Dunayevskaya put it:

Marx’s primary theory is a theory of what he called “alienated labor” and then “abstract” or “value-producing” labor … hence it is more correct to call the Marxist theory of capital not a labor theory of value, but a value theory of labor.

In recent years, there has been a challenge to the emphasis of traditional Marxism on property forms and exchange relations from a number of Marxist value-form theorists, including the German Neue Marx-Lektüre, the school of systematic dialectics, and the late Moishe Postone. They have argued that this approach neglects the growing dominance of abstract labor and socially necessary labor time.

However, the value-form theorists have become so fixated on abstract forms of domination that they reach a despairing conclusion, according to which the logic of capital overpowers the resistance of workers or any kind of subjective human agency. In the process, they pass over the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of value production. It is no accident that few of these thinkers have had much to say about racism or sexism and the forms of resistance that have arisen against both oppressions.

Dunayevskaya took a different approach. If we grasp that Capital’s object of critique is alienated forms of human praxis, she believed, we will become more attentive to forms of alienation that may have no direct relation to economics, including forms of sexism and racism that may be even more dehumanizing than class oppression.

Philosophy and Organization

Dunayevskaya’s effort to reconstitute Marxism as a philosophy of revolution stemmed from a crisis that was confronting efforts at social transformation in her own time. The freedom movements of the late 1960s did not result in a single revolution. Even in France, the authorities could put down the near-revolution of 1968 without firing a shot.

Nor were such problems limited to “the West.” Frantz Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth that if the Afro-Asian revolutions did not move toward what he called “a New Humanism,” they would find themselves trapped by the pincers of neocolonialism. The phenomenon of a counterrevolution emerging from within the revolution itself was not confined to the USSR under Stalin. A much more recent example came when the Marxist-Leninist faction in Grenada’s New Jewel Movement assassinated Maurice Bishop, the revolution’s democratic socialist leader, in 1983. This made it easier for Ronald Reagan to order the US invasion of Grenada that year.

Dunayevskaya’s effort to reconstitute Marxism as a philosophy of revolution stemmed from a crisis that was confronting efforts at social transformation in her own time.

Such realities led Dunayevskaya to delve deeper into the work of Hegel and Marx toward the end of her life. She wanted to explore the question of how anti-capitalist movements can avoid stopping at the first negation of existing society. Her original interpretation of Hegel in Philosophy and Revolution, which centers on the category “Absolute Negativity as New Beginning,” reflected this focus. So did her examination of Marx’s last decade in Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution.

This was a period in which Marx turned his attention to the non-Western world and highlighted the fact that women had greater freedoms in many pre-capitalist societies than they enjoyed today. Dunayevskaya’s study of Rosa Luxemburg contained a fascinating discussion of her feminist dimension. It also took issue with a claim made by Frederick Engels in his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Engels attributed what he called “the world-historical defeat of the female sex” to the rise of private property. Starting from the assertion that patriarchy had been born from private property, he went on to assume that the former would end with the abolition of the latter. This argument is hardly sustainable in the light of twentieth-century experience. Dunayevskaya concluded that even the greatest Marxists who came after Marx fell short of his liberatory perspective, which she termed “a philosophy of revolution in permanence.”

Today’s world differs in many respects from the one experienced by Dunayevskaya, who died in 1987 as she was working on a new book about the “Dialectics of Organization.” However, she speaks directly to the most important problem facing us today — how we can envision a viable alternative to capitalism. As she wrote in 1981:

The myriad crises in our age have shown, over and over again, from Russia to China, from Cuba to Iran, from Africa to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, that without a philosophy of revolution, activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for … what is needed is a new unifying principle, on Marx’s ground of humanism, that truly alters both human thought and human experience.

by Paul Cudenec

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.