The Sense of an Ending

Mar 10, 2023

JAMES LIVINGSTON

Three recent books combine theoretical sophistication and historical method in ways that enable us to rethink majority rule and thus re-imagine the future of democracy. And the most searching of the three calls into question whether that future is compatible with capitalism as we have come to know it.
Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin Press, 2023)
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
Pranab Bardhan, A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries (Harvard University Press, 2022)

NEW YORK – The great bourgeois revolutionaries who invented modernity, from John Milton to James Madison to Abraham Lincoln, didn’t know they were laying the foundations of capitalism. To be sure, they understood that a money economy – a social system animated by the impending commodification of everything, even labor power – was laying waste to inherited, mostly parochial hierarchies, redefining liberty and making the idea of equality a live option. But they would be appalled by a global civilization in which the market is the measure of all things, where everyone finally has a price and each must buy the right not to die. No one would be more horrified than Adam Smith, the philosopher-king of the Scottish Enlightenment and the first court poet of bourgeois society.


The leading intellectuals of our time, by contrast, know that capitalism as most of us have experienced it is now in its death throes, and that what comes after strongly resembles the mode of production most people call socialism. They know such things because Karl Marx – like Hegel an admirer of Smith – taught them how to understand modernity as that stage of civilization in which commerce would make constant change, transition itself, an everyday fact of life: “All that is solid melts into air,” as the Communist Manifesto put it. Just as capitalism superseded feudalism, so capitalism would somehow, some day, give way to something else, because neither its spirit nor its social content reflected fixed properties of human nature.1

Meanwhile, because the avowed Marxists, at least firebrands like Lenin and Mao, have taught today’s leading intellectuals that the transition from capitalism to socialism would require a revolution, they have learned to fear what seems, especially now, to be an impending if not inevitable future. Their consequent silence on the subject explains why it’s easier for the rest of us to imagine the end of the world than to plan on, and prepare for, the end of capitalism.

But Marx himself wasn’t so sure that capitalism would end with the overthrow of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or even armed struggle. As he saw it, “the abolition of capitalist property from within the bounds of capitalist production itself” was the obvious result of corporate capitalism, founded on the twin pillars of joint-stock companies and modern credit, both of which separated ownership and control of private property. A new “socialized mode of production” was already nascent.

In the United States nowadays, Republicans seem to agree: “woke” corporations and “traitorous” Democrats are imposing socialism – a “radical left” agenda – on the real America, which doesn’t cotton to welfare, public health and education, abortion, gay rights and same-sex marriage, gender pluralism, environmental protection, immigrants, or gun control. All of these policies are of, by, and for the snotty coastal elites and native-born people of color in the cities.

So, as the end of capitalism and the prospect of socialism have obtruded on normal, everyday political discourse, our very own transition question has become more or less unavoidable. Leading intellectuals have responded accordingly, by explaining – or trying to – where the transition might lead and what both the disintegrating past and the impending future have to teach us.
OLD REPUBLICANS

The situation confronting today’s intellectuals is, then, comparable to that which Madison faced in the spring of 1786, when he was reckoning with both the surprising success and probable demise of the American Revolution. Since 1774, when the Continental Congress instructed the colonies to start writing constitutions, the revolution had been animated by local assemblies, town meetings, state militias, and a torrent of constitutional drafts that produced radical experiments like Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, a body elected by mere taxpayers (white males only, of course) rather than property-owning freeholders.

The Articles of Confederation were a diplomatic compact of sovereign states so conceived, not a blueprint for a modern nation-state, because there was no central authority that could demand compliance with its policies (the Continental Congress had no monopoly on the force of arms) or overrule laws enacted under the new constitutions. Nor had anyone conjured an identity for “Americans,” a body politic which transcended local boundaries. The States were not yet United.

By the mid-1780s, this dispersal of power among the states had devolved into what Thomas Jefferson called an “elective despotism,” or what Madison perceived, from a more distant intellectual remove, as a dearth of republican legitimacy, that is, a lack of justification for majority rule. His question had become: what, exactly, is the point of insisting on the sovereignty of the people, as against the state or the government (whether embodied in a benevolent monarch, a scrupulous minister, or a duly elected parliament), if the laws they enacted were as destructive of natural right as any tyrant’s arbitrary command?

The two great innovations of the revolution thus far were this unprecedented insistence on the locus of legitimate power “out of doors” and the correlative notion that liberty was impossible in the absence of equality. But what if equality permitted, or even promoted, the tyranny of majorities?

Madison knew that the traditional resources of the statesman – prudence, custom, and reason – offered no answers, so he ransacked the thin, scattered history of republican governments, to see if earlier experiments composed a usable past. To his astonishment, they did not. Every previous republic had tried and failed to escape the corrosive social effects of historical time embodied, literally and metaphorically, in “commerce,” which typically manifested as class divisions and conflict.

At that point, the rights of persons and the rights of property, what Madison called “the two Cardinal objects of Government,” had become the terms of an either/or choice, and the outcome was invariably decided in favor of property by property owners. In every case, “the poor were sacrificed to the rich,” Madison lamented, putting an end to popular government.

How could a republic avoid this fate? Madison’s solution was to enlist historical time – “commerce,” development, and class division and conflict – in the creation and stabilization of republican government, by “extending the sphere” of the polity to take in more diverse populations and interests, and by devising a constitutional structure that made the rights of persons and the rights of property the terms of an undecidable choice. He modified the sovereignty of the people – he divided them against themselves – in order to postpone or prolong the formation of majorities, not to thwart them.

In doing so, Madison made equality the fundamental condition of liberty. It was a radical departure from received wisdom, and it made for the kind of change that was so revolutionary that Americans still doubt and debate it more than two centuries later, almost always by invoking “the founders,” whether reverently or ruefully.

OUR MADISONIAN MOMENT

Martin Wolf, Francis Fukuyama, and Pranab Bardhan have put themselves in Madison’s place, by publishing manifestos that combine theoretical sophistication and historical method in ways that enable us to rethink majority rule and thus reimagine the future of democracy. All three acknowledge that the parasite called neoliberalism has just about killed off its capitalist host by spawning authoritarian alternatives with global appeal. And all three adopt the unfinished American experiment as the template for the new thinking they propose. Each quotes Lincoln to define democracy, and two actually cite Madison to address the possibility of “civic” rather than ethnic nationalism in managing the diversity that inevitably follows from economic globalization.

But Wolf goes much further than Fukuyama and Bardhan, not so much auditioning for Madison’s role as reprising it. His book offers both a brilliant summary of the received wisdom concerning the troubled relationship between democratic politics and free markets – a difficult marriage, as he puts it – and a radical departure that combines unfettered imagination and extraordinary erudition to summon a different, less contentious kind of partnership

.

Fukuyama, who identifies as a right-wing Marxist in the tradition of the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, has written the least ambitious of the manifestos. He aims merely to restate and clarify the claims of “classical” liberalism, then test them against recent criticisms from the left and the right. The result is a “fair and balanced” treatment of the doctrinal triangulation, but one which leaves the reader wondering for most of the book where the author stands.

Indeed, it is only in the book’s last two chapters that the “need to restore liberalism’s normative framework, including its approach to rationality and cognition” is announced as the real agenda. The key word here is “restore.” Fukuyama seems to think that, when compared as theories of governance, the alternatives residing in the various critiques of liberalism just don’t measure up: they’re intellectually inferior as well as practically unworkable – and obviously so. But he acknowledges that the right-wing, ethno-nationalist, religiously inspired alternatives have actual or potential majorities waiting on their enactment.

By this accounting, the right learned its new know-nothing parochialism from the radical left’s critique of liberalism’s “primordial individualism,” from its valorization of particular group experience as against Enlightenment universalism, and from its mistrust of the scientific method that both forms and reflects modern liberal rationality. The middle ground, where classical liberalism survives – barely – as paleo-conservatism, has been hollowed out by intellectual incursions from the left and the right. And even here, only the “traditionalist” variant of conservatism, represented by the likes of Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, the self-exiled (to Hungary) conservative polemicist Rod Dreher, and Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, seems to be intellectually alive. Fukuyama won’t let us mistake classical liberalism for modern democracy, but he insists that by enabling free markets, it authorizes autonomous individuals and thus the possibility of a politics informed by equality and the consent of the governed.

Fukuyama’s invocation of Lincoln tellingly concludes his discussion of these “traditionalists,” Vermeule, Dreher, and Deneen, in keeping with the suspicion he shares with them of majority rule as the measure of legitimate governance, and the doubts he shares with them about the strictly utilitarian logic of neoliberalism. Lincoln rejected Stephen A. Douglas’s program of “popular sovereignty,” which allowed the majority of settlers in the federal territories to decide whether slavery would be lawful there, for two reasons. First, it excluded most of the heirs to that frontier legacy of free land, a vast population composed of generations to come. Second, it violated what Fukuyama would call the normative, regulative principle at the heart of the liberal American experiment, expressed in the imperative phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.”

Lincoln insisted that the South did not have the right to do what is wrong – to enslave human beings by making property of them – regardless of the majorities it could muster in the electorate, the Senate, or the Supreme Court. Fukuyama likewise insists that neither the utopian neoliberals nor the right-wing populists, the true believers in the church of capitalism, have the right to do what is wrong – to suspend the individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and rationalism inherent in the liberal tradition – even if they represent solid majorities.

A VIEW FROM BELOW

Bardhan is less certain of that legacy, partly because he studies those parts of the world, particularly South Asia, where liberalism was never a birthright because it arrived as a foreign import, a dimension of colonial rule. He is also much more attuned than Fukuyama to the possibility that the centrifugal social logic of classical liberalism fueled the nihilism common to neoliberalism and authoritarian populism. An economist by training and occupation, Bardhan is more interested than Fukuyama the political theorist in the politics of the impending transition from capitalism to social democracy, and more cognizant than Wolf the economic journalist of how inequality registers in populist revolts as cultural resentment.

The great virtue of Bardhan’s approach is that this transition appears as an untidy, ongoing, even measurable process, rather than a distant prospect to be outlined, for now, as a theoretical model. Half of the book is devoted to close scrutiny of the social-democratic possibilities and policies that already reside in and flow from existing practices, in both rich and poor countries (Bardhan, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, was chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics and is an esteemed authority on the political economy of India). In this sense, it usefully complements Fukuyama’s skeletal intellectual anatomy of liberalism; for it proposes that liberalism’s ethical principles – its normative claims – are still as palpable today in our present historical circumstances, in the political ruins we call neoliberalism and populism, as they were at their origin in the seventeenth century.

Bardhan’s most intriguing chapter, “The Slippery Slope of Majoritarianism,” is also the shortest: at only eight pages, it could pass for a footnote. But it’s here that he makes the two claims that announce the book’s originality. On one hand, he suggests that the origins of democracy lie in a welter of competition, either between elites and subaltern social strata or among elites themselves. Both prototypes play out as ideological struggle over civil rights, as per Madison’s “Cardinal objects of Government,” because each party to the resulting social contract had enough leverage to threaten the others’ standing. On the other hand, he fleshes out the idea that such competition has been, and can continue to be, ethnic and/or religious, that is, cultural, both at its source and in its expressions, whether in rich or poor countries. This idea can be read as a corrective or a supplement to Wolf’s emphasis on the broadly economic causes of subaltern resentment and revolt, which have led us to the brink of democracy’s global extinction by majoritarian means.
PERSONS AND PROPERTY

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is the most searching of the three books – or any other study of our current condition – because it is the most pointed in asking a contemporary version of Madison’s question, and the most ecumenical in canvassing possible responses that are consistent with the freedoms specific to modern market societies. Wolf’s version of the question could be paraphrased as follows: If markets (“commerce”) are essential to both liberty and equality as we have come to understand them since the advent of capitalism, and if neoliberalism has reduced liberty to an individual’s license to profit from the exploitation of anything, thus blocking the once-broad avenues to equality, what kind of markets would reconcile the rights of property and the rights of persons, and, in so doing, serve the cause of democracy?

The assumption here is of course that majorities are not the sole measure of democracy. As Madison and Lincoln often insisted, only the consent of the governed – their willingness to abide by the laws they have participated in making, directly or by virtue of their citizenship – can ensure the legitimacy required by the modern republican standard of equality before the law. Otherwise, the states that imposed the terrorist yet constitutional and majoritarian Jim Crow regime on Black people in the post-bellum South could be defined as democratic polities.

The age of democratic capitalism, according to Wolf, commenced about 1870 and ended around 1980. By his accounting, then, capitalism has continued to develop since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dismantled the postwar Keynesian consensus in the West and Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled communism in the East, but democracy has stalled. In fact, capitalism in the West has by now devolved to a baroque, rentier stage (Wolf abjures the label of neoliberalism) recalling the grotesque caricatures of the late nineteenth century, when bloated monopolists were rendered as vampires or cephalopods, all teeth or tentacles. Meanwhile, the growth of democracy has been stunted by the rise of state/authoritarian capitalism in Eastern Europe and Asia (particularly in China), and of angry, ethno-nationalist populism in Britain and the US.

As with Bardhan’s book, the bulk of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is devoted to a programmatic outline of ways to reinvent the system, not to “restore” some lost golden age, or to reinstate the first principles of free enterprise, or otherwise to treat the past as prologue to an acceptable, inhabitable future. Wolf is more ambitious than that, and, in view of the actually existing crises he charts so relentlessly and meticulously, from climate change to the con game we know as the banking system, he has no choice. But he cloaks his radical ideas in the persona and language of a centrist, buttoned-down journalist out to save capitalism from its excesses, not to promote revolutionary change.

No one should be fooled by the sheep’s clothing. Like Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, and Willem Buiter, a former chief economist at Citigroup and currently one of the world’s leading authorities on central banking, Wolf thinks that private control of bank assets is an absurdity. Magnified by “elite malfeasance” in every other sector of the globalized economy, this is warrant enough to complete the socialization of private property foretold in the formation of joint-stock companies that separated ownership and control of corporate capital. In effect, he implores us to act on Marx’s insight into the revolutionary possibilities of corporate capitalism – that is, into the “socialized mode of production” it made possible, and now necessary, as the solution to a worldwide crisis of democracy.

This conclusion will no doubt seem ridiculous to most readers of The Financial Times, where Wolf has presided as an associate editor for three decades, sometimes sounding like the cheerleader-in-chief for globalization. But consider his summary of our situation:

“The insecurity that laissez-faire capitalism generates for the great majority who own few assets and are unable to insure or protect themselves against such obvious misfortunes as the unexpected loss of a job or incapacitating illness, is ultimately incompatible with democracy. That is what Western countries had learned by the early to mid-twentieth century. It is what they have learned again over the last four decades. Only autocracy, plutocracy, or some combination of the two is likely to thrive in an economy that generates such insecurity and a polity that shows such indifference.”

Moreover, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism offers a vision of the future that is radical because it gives priority to democracy (the rights of persons) over capitalism (the rights of property). And yet it is also practical, because it enlists markets in the recreation of citizenship. Wolf’s notion of citizenship carries echoes of the classical republican (Aristotelian) kind, because it entails a “positive” definition of freedom: liberty consists not merely in the absence of external constraint, as per modern liberal (utilitarian) ideals of “negative” freedom, but in access to the resources necessary for a “fulfilled life.” Accordingly, he posits “an economy that allows citizens to flourish in this way” as the condition of equality, and thus democracy.

Wolf refuses to call what comes of this vision socialism, because, like Bardhan and presumably Fukuyama, he still equates socialism with Soviet-style central planning and statist command of all resources. No matter. Call it peas and carrots: it still rhymes with hope rooted in the knowledge that the social, economic, and intellectual changes we desperately need to solve the crisis that now besets us are already underway, already within our grasp. This book is a record of them. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism never says that the choice before us is either socialism or barbarism. But it comes close enough to suggest that the moderate Martin Wolf has become just the radical we need to address our own transition question.

Neglect the insights of women, particularly in economics, and society suffers. At PS’s next virtual event, What Economics Is Missing, Minouche Shafik, Dani Rodrik, Vera Songwe, and others will debate how to create the conditions for achieving genuine inclusivity in economics.




JAMES LIVINGSTON
James Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers University, is the author of six books, including Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (Cornell University Press, 1986), and the forthcoming The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008 (University of Chicago Press).

 

CLASS WAR's new bulletin:

Class struggle in times of Plague Inc.

“War against the virus” is the continuation of the 

permanent war waged against us

THIS IS AN EXCERPT SEE THE WHOLE ISSUE HERE
https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/class-war-11-2020-capitalism-kills/
http://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/wp-content/uploads/class_war_11-2020-en.pdf

Class struggle in times of Plague Inc.

Year 2019 was a year of worldwide class movement of the scale and intensity not seen for decades, perhaps since the wave of revolutionary struggles in sixties and seventies. The capitalist normality of business as usual had been profoundly shaken by myriads of protests, strikes, riots and in some places even military and police mutinies. Hundreds of thousands of angry proletarians had taken to the streets of Chile, France, Lebanon, Iraq, Haiti, Hong-Kong, Iran, India, Colombia and many other places. For many communist militants these movements represented a breath of fresh air. On this momentum we were watching riots in Sao Paulo, Recife, Rio or even subway occupation in New York or protests against polluting business in Wenlou in Pearl River Delta with a lot of anticipation that these are the signs that the proletarian wildfire is spreading further and starting to engulf these huge centers of the accumulation of Capital. New Year came and the movement was showing no signs of losing energy. On the contrary, new eruptions were appearing almost every week in yet another city, region, country… And then, three months into 2020 it all came abruptly to halt. Or so it seemed.
We do not claim, as some do, that Covid-19 pandemic as such is a hoax or propaganda of the State, fabricated in order to crush and silence the class movement and to re-forge the “social peace” and inter-class united front against the “common enemy”. But in practice, it brings exactly the same effects. As the Covid-19 pandemic is spreading around the world, so are the repressive measures of the State against the proletariat with massive curfews, ban on gatherings, hacking of the Smart Phones in order to “trace the virus”, updates of face-recognition software behind the omnipresent CCTV cameras to recognize faces of people wearing a medical mask, sealing the borders, etc. Hand in hand with those measures comes a bourgeois ideological narrative of a struggle for the common good, of the need to stay calm and patient, while “our national heroes” on the front line wage a battle against “the invisible enemy”. And make no mistake, the narrative says, these heroes are not just doctors and nurses treating the Covid-19 patients, but also cops guarding us “for our own good”, “philanthropists” like Bill Gates or Elon Musk with their visionary solutions to save us all (while still making “few” bucks along the way) or media reporters bringing the new analyses and reports on number of dead to the confined masses.
We also cannot claim for sure that Covid-19 was deliberately created in a lab as a weapon, although there is a long history of military-scientific complex of the capitalist State doing precisely that: from experiments with Syphilis in Tuskegee, through outbreak of Marburg virus out of “Cold War” virologist lab in Germany, up to the development of Bubonic Plague bacteria carried by war-heads in Soviet Union, and not to mention the famous Wuhan Institute of Virology (and its lab P4), one specialization of whose is precisely the research on… coronaviruses, and which fueled so much the fertile imagination of some conspiracy milieus, it is clear that infectious diseases have their firm place in Capital’s murderous arsenal. Most probably Covid-19 originated in one of the wild animals sold at a food market and mutated to human transmittable strain. But whatever is its origin, what creates the conditions for spreading of infections is the very nature of the capitalist society – centered around densely populated urban hubs, poles of accumulation of Capital and trade links between them serving the circulation of resources, commodities and workers, including future workers (students) and workers in a process of reproducing their labor power (tourists).
As Capital’s accumulation inevitably also represents accumulation of misery, each such agglomeration contain overcrowded neighborhoods, public transport vehicles, factories and offices where production logic makes it impossible to protect oneself, a health care system that is only designed for a purpose of “quickly fixing workers”, etc. Of course due to modern transportation we are all required to travel further, faster and in higher numbers than any time before. And as the situation in Brazil shows us, even bourgeois can spread the virus with their leisure or business trips. Yes, everyone can potentially catch the virus, this is a grain of truth in a bourgeois propagandist fable, that: “We are all in it together”. When these billionaire bastards spread the virus to their nanny or Bolsonaro himself on a public meeting, it will be once again proletarian neighborhoods that it will decimate.
Of course it is a proletarian who is once again given free and democratic “choice” of getting sick with Covid-19 or going hungry and homeless or being brutalized by repressive forces or all of the above. But this time imposition of this terror does not come so smoothly for Capital and its State. The pandemic and related lock-down had initially a huge pacifying effect on the raging proletarian movement, but at the same time it clearly exposed the inhumanity inherent to this society based only on generation of profit at all human costs. We are supposed to believe that measures imposed by the State are meant for our protection. We are irresponsible hooligans, when we take to the streets to oppose their law and order, when we meet to discuss and organize ourselves or when we are looting supermarkets, yet when we travel to work in a bus full of coughing people or when we sit shoulder to shoulder by a conveyor belt or by an office desk, we are somehow vaccinated by the surplus value that we produce. The reality is simple: it has always been in the interest of Capital to make us “social distance” in order to cripple our ability to organize ourselves for class struggle, but not when it needs us to produce commodities, and/or to reproduce social peace and therefore the capitalist social relation, through the mediated cooperation. Face to face with this fallacy, it did not take long before the lock-down propaganda started to crumble and class resistance started to erupt again.
In Italy, it first started with prison mutinies all around the country when visits had been banned. At the same time, no means of protection against the disease had been provided to prisoners. Violent confrontation with guards and cops hit twenty-seven prisons, with prison in Modena practically destroyed. Guards were taken hostage and some prisoners managed to escape. At least seven prisoners had been murdered. State propaganda will later shamelessly claim that their deaths were due to drug overdose.
Soon after that, a wave of wildcat strikes swept across the country, when workers of many industrial companies including FIAT and Arcelor Mittal (ex-Ilva) demanded and in many cases successfully imposed the immediate closure of the factories. This was followed by strikes in supermarkets and strikes of food delivery workers demanding protective equipment and sanitation. Trade unions first openly opposed these strikes for undermining the economy, only to later pathetically give some of them “their blessing” when the struggle was over. Meanwhile in Southern Italy, which is less affected by the actual infection, but where curfew pittance is even smaller and food distribution is crumbling, occasional confrontations with cops and looting of supermarkets threaten to grow into “hunger riots”. But it did not end with Italy.
All around the world, prisoners are among the most severely impacted by this double inhuman reality of the deadly disease and repressive measures of the State, because of the overcrowded conditions and isolation inside the prisons. Whatever they did to be thrown in jail, whoever they are prisoners are essentially proletarians persecuted by the capitalist society for disrespecting to some of them its holiest fetish (i.e. private property), while most of the others are cynically locked down for disregarding the conventional and legal process of appropriation of desirable commodities. Generally speaking, they are locked up for breaking the monopoly of violence usurped by the State, after being pushed into fratricide bloodshed by the social contradictions and alienation inseparable from the capitalist modus operandi: “property is theft” and vice versa. They were among the first who have risen up against the new social control measures, against further atomization and dehumanization and separation from their loved ones. Against the extraordinary high rate of Covid-19 mortality due to the disgusting and unhealthy environment they are forced to live in. Despite the horrible State violence and the little organized solidarity from outside, all around the world, they were among the first to break the enforced “social peace” of the lock-down and to fight the guards and special police units, to burn down the prisons, to try to escape and reach the comrades outside. This was also the case in Colombia, Venezuela, France, Argentina, USA, Brazil, Lebanon, Russia, Iran, etc. In this sense, they represented through their social practice (at a specific time and under particular circumstances) a spark of the current and upcoming class movement; they embodied the driving force of our class, what our class is called upon to do for its liberation. They have cut through the numbing curtain of the “public health” propaganda and have shown to the rest of the class the naked reality we are facing and how to fight against it.
And a surge of wildcat strikes, riots and looting is re-emerging across all the continents – in France, Cameroon, USA, Indonesia, Kenya, Colombia, Lebanon, Venezuela, Chile, India, Russia, Belgium, Turkey, Iran, Senegal… to name just a few. Although the movement is still far weaker and more sporadic than before the pandemic – because of the repression, more sophisticated social control or fear of contracting the disease, the social contradictions that gave birth to the last wave are still here and are bound to get even more extreme in the coming months.
In Lebanon as elsewhere in the world, the proletarian anger has been boiling under cover of lock-down measures since March to finally spill over in the form of an uprising in Qoubbeh prison in Tripoli on April 8th. Soon after, the streets of many cities all around the country again filled with angry protesters. This time, huge but largely pacifist demonstrations that formed a big part of the 2019 movement are replaced by smaller, but determined and violent confrontations. The militant proletarian current that had been always present in the movement has resurfaced and it again chooses the targets belonging to our class enemy – burning down banks, police stations, military check-points and vehicles, looting the supermarkets, etc.
Let’s note in passing an important element: the fact that the proletariat, in its struggle against exploitation and more particularly in its struggle against the increase in the rate of exploitation, is targeting through direct action the banks and financial institutions of national and international capitalism, this is a fundamental thing that we do support. Now, the fact that some militant structures are developing a whole theory that comes to personify Capital through the disgusting face of the bank and financial capital, and therefore to straddle the workhorse of denouncing “bancarization”, “financial oligarchy” and “plutocracy”, this is yet another thing and we cannot follow them on this dangerous terrain whose consequence is about diverting the proletariat from its struggle against the very foundations of the capitalist society and ultimately denying our communist critic on the totality of what exists. Definitely the proletariat is the irreconcilable enemy of money but the latter is nothing but an abstract form expressing the exchange value and it cannot in any way be amalgamated with the very essence of Capital and its social relations…
But let’s go back to the development of our class struggles in times of pandemic. As we were writing this text, the murder of George Floyd by cops in Minneapolis has proved to be the last straw that broke the camel’s back and massive demonstrations against State violence and misery are spreading across USA, with daily riots, attacks on police stations, on bourgeois media, looting of commodities, blocking of highways, etc. and had forced Donald Trump to hide in a bunker. With years of accumulated anger and the reality of crushing poverty, cynical attitude of the government to handling of Covid-19 pandemic and 40 millions of unemployed, there seems to be no calming on the horizon.
To understand, what this pandemic and related curfew means for social and economic conditions of this society and why it is potentially a point of no return, we have to take a little bit closer look on the capitalist “business as usual”.
In order to realize profit a capitalist has to sell his commodities on the market, commodities that realize thus their value, the value that is crystalized within them during the process of production. As he has to constantly compete with other capitalists for it, he has to try to sell his commodities cheaper than competitor. To keep their rate of profit, they have to constantly push lower the production unit cost of the commodity. This can be done by lowering of labor costs (the well named “variable capital”) – e.g. to push down a worker’s hourly wage. However the wage of a worker cannot be squeezed under the minimal level necessary to allow him to physically survive and also to reproduce his labor force. The only other choice for the capitalist is to try to increase the productivity of a worker, to make him produce more commodities for the same time period, or in other words to increase the rate of “unpaid labor” provided by the latter. This way a capitalist can pay fewer workers to produce the same amount of commodities. The amount of labor a single worker can perform for a given time period also cannot grow forever, but it is determined by the physiological limits of a human body.
A capitalist can overcome this problem through automation – through replacing as much human labor as possible with machines. The worker then becomes more and more just an appendage to the machine, loading the resources and unloading finished products, controlling their quality, repairing and maintaining the machine, etc. while the machine is autonomously spitting one product after another. This allows an individual capitalist to lower the production unit price of a commodity and through selling more units of this commodity at a lower price to conquer a larger part of the market than his competitors.
This capitalist loses this advantage however, at the moment his competitors introduce the same technological innovations and new lower price of a commodity becomes a new average. The only logical way forward for him then is to repeat the whole cycle. The problem is that by getting rid of workers and replacing them with machines, this capitalist has decreased the ratio of living labor (which is the only one that can be exploited to generate surplus value and therefore a profit – i.e. workers) to dead labor (which on the contrary requires investments to keep it running – i.e. machines). As all factions of Capital follow the same logic, at a certain point the average rate of profit (in a given region or globally) drops under the level necessary for the investment to restart this cycle. The final option, in an attempt to postpone an inevitable crisis, is to take out a loan– i.e. a monetary expression of the profits promised to be realized in the future.
This brings us back to the reality of pandemic, of global lock-down and the realization of many bourgeois factions (and their creditors) that there is no future profit waiting for them. Not only most of them were not able to produce their commodities, but with many workers (who are also primary consumers of commodities in capitalism) losing their jobs now or in a near future and with further deepening of general misery, there will be nobody to buy them. Bankruptcies of many businesses are popping up like mushrooms after the rain and soon the banks and insurance companies will follow. As the majority of the world is either still under at least partial curfew, or is waking up from it into a reality of boarded-up shop-screens, the Holy Cow of the Economy is ailing from the Foot and Mouth Disease.
Global bourgeoisie is beginning to split into two ideological alliances, depending on their economical and strategical interests. The first one was either able to scrape more profit from the lock-down situation or had savings that allowed it to temporarily postpone it and bet on “new” strategies in social control to keep the proletariat off of the streets and safely under bourgeois ideological dominance. It is aligned with the sectors that can make their workers work from home over the internet, that deliver the goods and services to the consumers trapped at home or provide medical and pharmaceutical services.
Of course the military-industrial complex also falls into this category. Military spending is not only not decreasing during the pandemic, but on the contrary many national factions of the global State are investing heavily to both their social control capacity (further police and border guards militarization, new spy software, etc.) and murderous capacity (fighter jets, tanks, missiles, etc.). It is clear that this is a preparation for repression of the anticipated class struggle or for an attempt to hijack it and turn its participants into cannon fodder in yet another capitalist war. With ever present competition between USA, China and Russia as well as many smaller powers, the peril of the global inter-bourgeois war grows every day. Especially as the bourgeoisie of these countries will find it more attractive as a mean to channel the proletarian anger at home.
The second alliance has been affected much more, its profit is in free fall and it wants to restart the business immediately, even if it takes few millions of dead workers. Either way, the proletariat is expected to make sacrifice for “common good” – e.g. to support the continuation of the capitalist society of misery, exploitation, alienation and oppression.
Covid-19 pandemic has blown off the bourgeois masquerade and has uncovered the deep structural crisis of capitalism. We can already see the unemployment skyrocketing as millions of workers are being fired in US, Europe, Russia, Brazil, India, etc. and we can expect this trend to continue in the future months. The proletarian reaction seems to be inevitable and just a matter of time.
But our class enemy is not going to wait with folded arms. The State violence and terror will intensify along with increasing utilization of the digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to control the labor force and to suppress any expression of proletarian resistance. As our homes will on much larger scale than ever before become part of our workplace, so will our exploiters and their State develop further means (technical, social, legislative, etc.,) to spy on us, to control us even at home. Hand in hand with that comes an ideology of “new technical revolution” and “Industry 4.0”, trying to convince us that we should support and embrace the development of AI and automation and capitalist progress in general because “it will make the work of all of us easier”. Even if those robots are meant to accelerate disposal of us as a labor force and leave us with no means to sustain ourselves. This tendency inevitably creates a reaction of our class, which materializes into “modern or digital Luddite” movement opposing the automation and the adoption of AI in a context of resistance against capitalist progress. Unfortunately, this movement is often co-opted by primitivist social-democracy that instead of expropriating the digital means of production and repurposing them for the needs of proletarian struggle, push for a vulgar rejection of the technology and leave it solely to our class enemy to weaponize it against us.
As usual, we can expect a whole range of pacifying techniques used by every variation (“socialist”, “communist”, “anarchist”, unionist, left- and right-wing, ethnic) of the social-democracy – which is nothing but a bourgeois organization for the workers. Some of these techniques have a long history of being used to weaken and divide the proletarian movements in the past, to scare off, co-opt, separate, isolate, disorganize us, they will appeal to our “common sense”, threaten us with unemployment, pit us against each other based on the national, racial, gender, religious, political, etc. lines, they will promise us breadcrumbs and invite us to participate in the organization of our own exploitation. We can see it clearly for example in the pacifist and divisive approach of career activists from Black Lives Matter movement, co-opting the movement against State violence in USA. “Green” bourgeois faction – fronted by groups like “Extinction Rebellion” (that should be renamed more properly “Extinguish Rebellion”) and backed by Big Energy investors – will get more active and will aggressively try to sell us a program of “individual green choices” and “support for sustainable alternatives” as a false solution to the capitalist catastrophe. Last but not least, there is always a possibility of a second wave of the pandemic, and many other pandemics in the future as further exploitation of the nature will uncover new pathogens like for example the anthrax and other “giant viruses” that would resurface on earth when the deep frozen soils of the permafrost where they are contained since centuries and millenniums will melt down as a result of the warming climate). But this time global bourgeoisie – armed with a new scientific knowledge and vaccines, with newly equipped repressive forces and with new methods of social cooptation – will be prepared to efficiently and selectively weaponize it against the movement of our class.
So, what does this new normal of capitalist status quo mean for us communists and for the proletarian movement as whole? How to struggle against the inhumanity of Capital and its State and for a global human community while at the same time protect ourselves and our comrades from the deadly disease? It turns out that the movement is already able to organically grasp this issue and in practice come with solutions through class self-organization. Protection against the Covid-19 is being produced by the proletarian movement itself, just like other means necessary for sustaining of struggle (food, medicine, weapons, shelter, etc.) have always been produced by past proletarian movements. Doctors and nurses on strike or in other way involved in the struggle supply the masks and disinfection, face shields are being 3D-printed and distributed, and so are food and medical supplies looted from supermarkets – in USA, in Lebanon, in France… We have to stress that there is a need to catch and develop this energy in order to broaden it to counter-strike all murderous means the Capital unleashes against our movement besides diseases – guns, tanks, chemicals, spying, arrests and isolation, starvation, propaganda…
It is more and more clear that whole this curfew episode was just a temporary break in the activity of our class, that instead of smothering it, it served rather as a pressure cooker and stripped away all the pretense of the bourgeois society to reveal the bare bones of the capitalist contradictions. Now we once again stand on the crossroad of history. The end of this pandemic may be coming soon, but the pandemic of capitalist catastrophe can only deepen. The decade that lies ahead of us may be the most brutal in human history with global generalization of war, poverty, destruction of nature and disease and maybe the end of human race or it can be a period when whole this inhumane society will be ripped apart in a revolutionary class struggle.
• Let’s organize ourselves against the global State and all its murderous arsenal including diseases! We have to put an end to the police killing, maiming and arresting us! We have to practically resist the attempts of the State to starve us into submission by expropriating all the necessities, by expropriating the land, by expropriating the means of production!
• Let’s develop means – physical, electronic, organizational, programmatical – to protect the movement! We have to come prepared! Or better said we have to go where the State is not waiting for us! We have to “be water”! We have to denounce and attack the toxic pacifism of the social-democracy! We have to denounce and attack the defenders of private property!
• Let’s oppose every attempt of the bourgeoisie to turn us into cannon fodder in the capitalist war! We have to organize together with our proletarian brothers and sisters in uniform sent to suppress our movement to break their ranks and turn their weapons against their own commanders!
• Let’s spit in the face of all the bourgeois ideologues trying to divide us with their myriad of positive identities, symbols and flags to defend!
Against the Sword of Damocles of the capitalist catastrophe hanging over our heads we oppose the insurrectionary revolutionary struggle for Communism!
# Class War – Summer 2020 #

Just like the rest of the world, we were caught unprepared by the pandemic of Covid-19 and the related lock-down that affected our organizational capacity. We were unable to finish the publication of our materials on the rapidly developing global class movement that shook the world in 2019 and the first months of 2020. For this reason, we are publishing our text here as “an appendix” to our analysis of new “post-Covid” reality. We are convinced that not only is it important to embrace, celebrate, analyze and learn from this high tide of the class struggle yesterday, but that it is intimately related to the tsunami tomorrow.

By way of an afterword…

“War against the virus” is the continuation of the permanent war waged against us

Throughout this bulletin, we didn’t spend too much time on the seriousness or not of the Covid-19 epidemic, transformed into a pandemic by our masters and according to official figures (i.e. those of our class enemies: the State of the capitalists and its medicine) has already infected several million people across the planet and led directly or indirectly to the death of several hundreds of thousands of people. We don’t care about all these pseudo debates about masks and lock-down that touch only on a superficial aspect of the Covid-19 issue, i.e. its management by the various governments (bourgeois, by definition), and whose unique obsession is the growth of Capital and its rate of profit. On the other hand, we know full well that the effectiveness of generalized lock-down appeals more to the ruling class in terms of control and domestication of the “dangerous classes” (to use the expression of our enemies), in terms of counterinsurgency measures (even as a preventive measure) against an exploited class that has been more than greatly restless in recent months.
What we do know very well too is that the bourgeoisie and its State are permanently at war against us, against humanity, against the proletariat in struggle. We have known for too long, as we have directly and historically suffered from it in our flesh, that capitalism was built on piles of corpses and that there is no reason for it to stop doing so. Since capitalism has emerged globally as the dominant social relation, as a synthesis and dialectical overcoming of all previous social relations, it has done nothing but affirm and underpin its domination through war. This is all the more true in times of major crisis, which is only a moment of the permanent crisis of the capitalist mode of production, of its multiple internal and mortal contradictions, the most important of which is obviously the existence of the proletariat as an exploited and therefore revolutionary class, not to mention the tendency of its rate of profit to fall, which pushes capitalism to increasingly squeeze the exploited class, and to wage war on it.
And in this sense, we could easily paraphrase the military strategist Clausewitz for whom “war is a mere continuation of politics by other means” by asserting in our turn that the “war against the virus” is, for the capitalist class and its State, the continuation of the permanent war waged against us, against the future gravedigger of Capital.
Of course, the hundreds of thousands of officially recorded deaths attributed to Covid-19 (not to mention those who could very well be so as a result of the measures of repression and isolation that have been imposed) don’t represent enough surplus labor force to be eliminated; it is not with this “small” bloodletting that capitalism will find the way back to profits that it believes to be unlimited. No, what capitalism still needs (and more than ever before) is a real shock, a “cleansing” the likes of which humanity has never experienced in its history. This is more than a necessity so increasingly superheated are the contradictions of this deadly social relation, which are threatening to blow up the boiler of profits and therefore of our exploitation if pressure is not released very quickly. What capitalism needs is a massacre, a rapid and effective destruction of a large number of productive forces: both dead labor (machines) and living labor (proletarians).
Basically, if we are called and mobilized on the front line of the future military war which, like all wars, will be a war against our class, therefore a class war, it is up to the proletariat to no longer allow itself to become docilely recruited as cannon fodder after having been, just as submissively, factory fodder, or simply labor fodder… and democracy fodder!
In any case, beyond the health, medical, economic and social causes of the pandemic (and therefore its origin), what this “health crisis” has revealed or confirmed to the world is the totally anxiety-producing world that capitalism is throwing us into, which can only live and develop by producing anxiety (here in the face of the illness), fear and terror, and this has always been the case. Just look at these last 75 years (i.e. the time of three generations who know each other and live side by side, and share memories, thoughts and criticisms) to find traces of the permanence of this anxiety-producing environment: after the massacres of the two world wars (which in fact constituted only one war cycle interrupted momentarily by revolutionary eruptions), we were promised peace and happiness, after the “valleys of tears” it would finally be the time of the “valleys of honey”, of course at the cost of the exhausting work of reconstruction. Then came the bipolarization of the world, the “Cold War” and the threat of using atomic weapons for four decades (“nuclear fire”), “the West” was under the threat of “the Reds” while in the East the “fascist plot” against the “socialist homeland” was denounced. Once the mythical era of the postwar boom was dismantled, whose material existence has been overblown by ideology and propaganda, “the crisis” became the permanent leitmotif of speeches, along with pollution, diseases (AIDS, mad cow disease, cancers, etc.) and now “the apocalypse” of global warming, destruction of the planet, rising sea levels as a result of melting glaciers, disappearance of thousands of living species, the whole thing “at the speed of a galloping horse”…
Who wouldn’t react to all this joyfulness by popping antipsychotic drugs, committing suicide or being slaughtered in one or another capitalist war!? Capitalism oozes death and destruction and terror…
Now, other questions also continue to haunt us about this “war against the virus”, questions to which we are far from having all the answers. For example, we can’t help but show our contempt about the soothing narrative of the ruling class, which is bewildering us with the “unquestionable” reality of the pandemic, whereas we all know very well that the state of health emergency is a more refined form of the “classic” security emergency: any resistance is assimilated to an attack on the lives of others, of the most vulnerable, on the survival of the “community”, as a selfish refusal to “show solidarity”. On the other hand, the various governments at least initially tended to underestimate the events as to do otherwise would have pushed them to stop the normality of the system, this normality which is expressed through this sordid reality that some “yellow vests” in France have denounced with the triad “Work, Consume and Shut your Mouth!”
Some people claim (in so doing, whether they like it or not, they are the useful idiots most required by capitalism) that the State has been forced by the development and the severity of the pandemic to impose the lock-down and thus to shut down entire sectors of economy in order to “save human lives”, in accordance with the “social contract” and “its mission” which consists of “protecting” its citizens… First of all, let us recall that initially, the various governments imposed on capitalists that teleworking should be the rule in the sectors of activity (tertiary service, services…) where it was possible. Whereas almost all the industrial sectors deemed to be “non-essential” continued to run “at full capacity” (“business as usual”!!!), a large minority of struggling proletarians who did not want to risk being contaminated at work held a large number of wildcat strikes, mainly in the USA and Italy but also all over the world. Secondly, and more fundamentally, capitalists never gave a damn about human life, especially if it is abundant, redundant and in surplus (according to their criteria). The whole history of humanity is proof of this tragedy.
And finally, the so-called “shutting down the economy” as our exploiters did – although initially exacerbating the systemic problem in the immediate accumulation of profits – does not nevertheless constitute an inescapable and antagonistic obstacle to the affirmation of the global and historical needs of social peace and valorization of capitalism. The “crisis of Covid-19” is not the crisis of capitalism as such, which long predates it; the Covid-19 only exacerbated it and revealed the scale of the flaws in this totally inhuman system. In times of crisis, capitalists have no alternative but to “downsize”, to lay off, to close down unprofitable companies, to destroy… in order to start a new cycle of valorization. The lower the economy can fall, the higher it can rise and fill the pockets of the capitalists with new juicy profits.
Finally, we would like to address one final point, that of “conspiracy theories” which can be declined in at least two versions: on the one hand, those who claim that everything is being hidden from us, that there are many more deaths than we are told, that the virus is spreading in even more insidious ways than what is admitted… At the other end of the spectrum of “conspiracy theories” are those who claim that the whole Covid-19 story is a “big lie”, the pandemic does not exist and it is not the virus that kills but capitalism, which turns out to be a tautology that pushed to the absurd would make it possible to affirm that proletarians are not massacred during wars but by capitalism “in general”!
Fundamentally, capitalists do not lie to us, on the contrary they tell the truth, their class truth, because truth is not neutral in itself. There are two classes, two languages, and two truths, theirs against ours… But for some people, all this would be nothing more than a plot hatched by the capitalists to “organize a genocide against humanity”…
Why Capital would need so strongly a “fake” virus, why would it need to artificially create a “fake” pandemic in order to prepare war and “genocide” against humanity whereas simply a real and genuine virus would be much more efficient for all those purposes. War is the best way to kill massively surplus of proletarians but with new progress and technics like chemical war, bacteriologic war, phosphor bombing, etc. ad nauseam, the efficiency of the capacity of destruction by Capital is much more exponential…
We would like to debunk once and for if possible all these conspiracy theories, which are in the end only a new and more spectacular version of the everlasting police vision of history about an omnipotent and omniscient State, which also sees in the ranks of the most fighting proletarians nothing else than “provocateurs” who objectively serve the interests of Capital, whereas they are precisely those who rise up and go to barricades (although we know that the latter, although necessary, are not enough to overturn history). What we want to denounce here is the social function of conspiracy and its alter ego anti-conspiracy: both are the two jaws of the bourgeois trap that aims to make us leave our class terrain in favor of this police vision of history. Some want to explain everything by conspiracy and machinations of the ruling class; others refuse to consider that conspiracies can exist! It should also be noted in passing that the State has an unfortunate tendency to use the label “conspiracy” as an ideological weapon to control the narrative and discredit any social criticism of its dictatorship…
So, what about the capitalists who are “plotting against us”, for example via their top secret Bilderberg Club!? The World State of capitalists (which has nothing to do with the common “world government” that the followers of “conspiracy theories” put forward) is organizing, planning, coordinating and centralizing always more effectively all the counterinsurgency measures necessary to maintain their social order. And if It takes place away from the limelight, with some discretion, and even in structures other than the Bilderberg Club or the Club of Rome: it is “the normal order of things”, it is the vanguard of the exploiting class that defends its order. The problem with “conspiracy theories” is that they work like an old broken clock: it still gives the exact time, but only twice a day!
And against this, against this normal order of things, the revolutionary proletariat, the communist minorities (whether in the past they were called “socialists” or “anarchists” or whatever), in other words humanity has always sought to conspire against its masters, to organize conspiracies (hello Babeuf and Buonarroti), secret societies (hello Blanqui, Bakunin, Marx), to set up plots to support insurrectional processes, in short, to work and act as a party. “Conspiring is breathing together” (Radio Alice, Bologna, Italy 1977), and that is what organized minorities have been trying to do in Lebanon or in Belarus or even in the United States for the past few weeks (in the den of the clay-footed colossus that constitutes “the first power in the world”) in the wake of the waves of struggles that have affected almost every continent in recent months… More than ever before, in these times of rising struggles and resurgence of proletarian initiative in the permanent class war, we claim the necessity to organize the struggle, to develop it, outside and against the legality of the exploiters, and therefore to plot and conspire to achieve the work of destruction of capitalism, its State and thus its democracy!!!
Communists do not deny the existence of the disease, they do not claim that the pandemic is a lie but on the contrary communists fight the State and its medicine as class enemies. And since capitalism is the fundamental cause of diseases, we ought to use the disease as a weapon and to turn it against the capitalist society…
“Live Free or Die!”
Class War

About this blog

• 
  Internationalist...

  Blog of the Internationalist Communist Tendency.

  We are for the party, but we are not the party or its only embryo. Our task is to participate in its construction, intervening in all the struggles of the class, trying to link its immediate demands to the historical programme; communism. http://www.leftcom.org/en/about-us

Marx vs. the Machine

Kate Milberry

I'm going talk more about Marxs contribution to the study of technology, as well as his ideas on the relationship b/w sociological and economic analyses of technology. But I'm going to do this with the help of Donald MacKenzie. Just so  you know.

MacKenzie, in chapter 2 of his book Knowing Machines, details Marxs account of the way the machine was made stable, highlighting how social relationships (within which production occurs) impact production technology  indeed are a major factor in the shaping and success or failure of technical systems. This jives with Marxs insistence that, when analyzing markets, one must remember capital is not a thing, but a social relation b/w persons which is mediated thru things.”

One of Marxs big ideas is this: with the advent of large-scale mechanized production, social relations molded technology, not vice versa. The determinist reading of Marx views the forces of production as technology itself. But the forces of production also include labour power, people, skills, knowledge. Indeed, Marx always afforded agency to workers, stressing that what was specific to human work was that it was conscious: people as much as machines make human history.

Marx defines the machine as a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs w/its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did w/similar tools.” With the machine began the Industrial Revolution: it undermined the basis on which manufacturing workers had resisted emergent capitalism. Whereas in manufacture, the organization of the social labour process was purely subjective (a combination of specialized workers), the machine system of large-scale industry was a totally objective organization of production, which appears to the worker as a pre-given material condition of production.

The machine contributes to valorization via correlative surplus value the reduction in labour time required to produce the equivalent of the workers wage generates an increase in surplus value accruing to capitalist. Thus the machine liberates capital to accrue absolute surplus value; by undermining skilled workers, by drawing new sectors into the labour market, by threatening/generating unemployment, the machine “is able to break all resistance to lengthening the working day. Alienation of the collective and intellectual aspects of work achieves its technical embodiment in the machine. Further, the machine embodies the power of the capitalist: science + natural forces + mass of social labour converge in the system of machinery, which represents the power of the master. Thus, capitalist social relations achieve technical embodiment in labour process

For Marx, the conditions of work represent the means of production in their social form as capital; the means of production therefore employ the worker instead of the worker employing the means of production. This was the goal under manufacture and handicraft labour BUT its only w/machinery that this inversion acquires technical reality. Not surprisingly, then, the worker regards the machine is a direct threat; it is capitals material form. Indeed, the connection b/w class struggle and technical innovation was part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution in 19th c. Britain. Skilled labour, especially, stubbornly resisted the discipline of factory work. Marx links worker recalcitrance directly to technical innovation, which was a response to and a weapon against working-class revolt. New machinery did not always increase efficiency or profit but DID reduce the capitalists dependence on highly skilled and paid labourers with minds of their own. Marx thus concludes that Luddism was, in fact, a working class critique of machinery.

Marxs account of the machine is an attempt to theorize the social causes of organizational and technical changes in labour process (how perfect for a “social shaper” like MacKenzie!). For example, technical changes in the steam engine resulted from shifting relations b/w capital and labour as a result of new labour legislation that shortened the working day. While machines were more efficient than human muscle power, there was still the need to squeeze more from the worker during the shortened period

Again, Marx stresses that capital is not a thing (e.g. not a sum of money or commodities) but comprises social relations b/w persons mediated through things. Thus the relation b/w capitalist and worker consists of wages, hours of work; the law and the state; supervision discipline, culture, collective organization, power, conflict and so on. Here MacKenzie points out a weakness in Marxs understanding of this: the social relations of production (w/in which technology develops) are not just b/w worker and capitalist but also worker and worker. That is, relations b/w men and women workers, older and younger, workers, and likely immigrant and native workers must be accounted for.

He lists three ways the split b/w male and female workers influences technological production: 1. New machinery caters to highly unskilled and low-paid worker, always women (and children), who initially displace the highly skilled male workers (left over from days of manufacture). 2. Some skills, like sewing, were considered womens work, and learned at home. There was no need, therefore, to automate this process. Such work was entirely unregulated and devastatingly underpaid and because in the home, isolated, with little to no chance for workers to organize. 3. Skilled, all-male unions marshaled their power to keep at least some control over the new technology and defensively keep women out of their organizations.

At this point, MacKenzie asks a Feenbergian question: Does the design of machinery reflect the social relations w/in which it develops? Marx equivocates on this, he says, sometimes treating machines as victims of capital and not in their design inherently capitalist. Nonetheless, a specifically capitalist form of production emerges, including at the technological level. This is a rather orthodox interpretation, then, one that accepts that social relations impact the pace of technical change (e.g. mechanization was spurred by valorization-imposed needs to displace skilled workers and their power to resist) BUT denies that those relations influenced the design of technical artifacts.

If technology is neutral, and the system of social organization corrupt, then progressive social change will occur simply by changing how society is organized. No need to worry about the technological infrastructure, which can, apparently, be coopted, adapted and reconstituted. Substitute a workers government for the capitalists government, add water and presto! A workers utopia.

MacKenzieâs social shaping self concludes by suggesting that understanding how social relations interact with technical design turns on the contingency of design, and the need to identify where and how things could have been different. This leaves only one (albeit burning) question: why one design was chosen over another. Indeed.

So… is this enough Marx for you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Comps, Feminist critique, Marx. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s Art, Politics, and the Psyche

A LOCAL TEXT FROM EDMONTON WHERE THE U OF A IS LOCATED

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s

Art, Politics, and the Psyche

AUTHOR: Steven Harris, University of Alberta

DATE PUBLISHED: January 2004

AVAILABILITY: Available

FORMAT: Hardback

ISBN: 9780521823876

This volume examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the development of the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Steven Harris analyzes the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize their diverse concerns through the invention, in 1931, of the "object" and the redefining of their activities as a type of revolutionary science. He also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art

Review

"Excellent...an example of how good art history can be. Thorough research of primary sources and intelligent grounding in social history is accompanied by genuinely illuminating interpretations of specific works." CAA Reviews

"A strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s." Pop Matters

"It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of how and why surrealism changed in the 1930's."

Linda Steer


Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche

GOOGLE BOOKS

Steven Harris
Cambridge University Press, Jan. 26, 2004 - Art - 342 pages
This volume examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the development of the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Steven Harris analyzes the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize their diverse concerns through the invention, in 1931, of the "object" and the redefining of their activities as a type of revolutionary science. He also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art.

CAA BOOK REVIEW 

June 11, 2004

Steven Harris Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the PsycheNew York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 340 pp.; 35 b/w ills. Cloth $108.00 (0521823870)

Robert Linsley

CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2004.45

Steven Harris’s new book on Surrealism is excellent. It is refreshing to see the politics of Surrealism properly acknowledged, and, at the same time and as part of the same argument, to see the aesthetics that underwrote those politics correctly assessed. In Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche, Harris tracks an extremely rich and nuanced discourse between Surrealism and the French Left, a series of debates virtually unknown in Anglophone culture; he also nicely lays out his arguments in clear and readable prose. But the real issues at stake in this discourse are difficult to convey to a contemporary audience bred on the simplistic and misleading accounts of Surrealism found in much of the literature. Virtually all histories of Surrealism on this side of the Atlantic persist in viewing it as an art movement, and in looking at Surrealist works as if they were only art. Though Surrealist research often resulted in art, it did not start that way. For any understanding of the potentials of modern art, of modernism’s past dreams and future possibilities, it is crucial to consider fully what the Surrealists were trying to do.

As an avant-garde movement, Surrealism aimed to surmount the anodyne role of art as a provider of “spiritual” experiences that make a false life bearable, and to overcome the specialist function of the artist. These goals were frequently and plainly stated in manifestos and articles in Surrealist publications, but mainly expressed in the Surrealist artworks themselves. The most critical social position was presented in sensuous form, in an appeal to the imagination and the poetic faculty, not in the dry and all-too-literal polemics that we are familiar with today. A failure to realize this might be one of the reasons why Surrealism is not entirely understood today. Harris performs the task of elucidation that we evidently need, makes very concrete and illuminating readings of enigmatic and ambiguous works, and traces a chronology of Surrealist activity that allows all the points and sharpened edges in its polemic to emerge to the touch once more.

The Surrealists wanted to understand the relation between subjectivity and the world, between the inner and outer realms of experience. On the surface, their quest seems too general, too vague to generate useful answers; yet the importance of line of research is that it has political and aesthetic and psychological ramifications. It can reduce to matters of artistic technique (an artwork might be constructed according to an objective system or be the product of a series of decisions by the artist), or to problems in interpretation (such as the question of how much weight to give to intention), but for the Surrealists the fundamental issue was the role of the intellectual in modern society. This issue also set the music for the Surrealists’ complicated dances with the French Communist Party. 

The great merit of Harris’s book is that it brings forward the philosophical researches of André Breton and the others, most profoundly their speculation on the connection between mind and matter. The question was left unsolved—perhaps it is unsolvable—but for the Surrealists it was capable of generating concrete outcomes. Harris argues that the Surrealists based their investigations most importantly on Hegel, particularly his notion that, in both the romantic and modern eras, art must become knowledge. This notion so contradicts the popular, widely disseminated view of Surrealism that it deserves a double take. The Surrealists saw their activity as research into the operations of the mind, in order to understand how the imagination works; they did not want to traffic in obscurities. Judging from Harris’s bibliography (of studies published mostly in French), some work has been done on Hegelianism in Surrealist thought, and therefore the subject is not Harris’s main focus. Yet, as the author suggests in his introduction, the recent interest in Georges Bataille, fostered partly by the editors of October, has brought with it a one-sided derogation of Breton and an obscured appreciation of his critical and dialectical appropriation of Hegel. The Surrealists were not in any way idealist; their Hegelianism was materialist, Marxist, and, one might even say, negative. In other words, there may be more similarities between Breton and Theodor Adorno than first meets the eye. The Surrealists were not looking for false resolutions, but for openings toward the future.

Harris does not pursue the Hegelian strand as far as I, for one, might wish. Among other things, I came to the book to gain a better understanding of where the Surrealists thought the boundaries of consciousness lay. That topic, however, might belong more to the 1920s and the theoretical context of Breton’s novel Nadja. As the book’s title indicates, Harris’s period is the 1930s, and so inevitably must entail a close study of the political discourse of the movement. But if his study manages to put the Bretonian core of Surrealism back on the table in an unfamiliar way, namely through its politics, it also opens up an extremely rich body of aesthetic and political thought virtually unknown in the English-speaking art world. For myself, I knew that Salvador Dalí was an important thinker, but I did not realize how rigorous, how polemical, and how taken up with the political agenda of the group, at least in his early period, he was. Likewise, I have some familiarity with Roger Callois from reprints of his writings in October, but also without an inkling of the real nature of his importance at the time. But the real surprises were Claude Cahun and Tristan Tzara.

Tzara, the former Dadaist who famously declared that “thought begins in the mouth,” turns out to be a committed Marxist who broke with Surrealism because he felt that automatism had degenerated into mystification. According to Harris, “The waking dream is for Tzara … consciously Hegelian in its attempt to synthesize and incorporate the rational and the irrational in a new mode of thought” (128). Cahun is even more surprising. Her photos are now well known and she is generally seen as a Cindy Sherman avant-la-lettre, but as Harris demonstrates, she was one of the sharpest, most passionate and literate of leftists, as well as a strong presence at the center of the Surrealist group. Her writing must now be essential in any history of twentieth-century art and theory.

Cahun appears here not as a photographer, but as a writer and maker of objects. Harris’s book is built around the Surrealist object, whether assemblage, found, or readymade. He focuses on two important occasions: objects published and discussed in the December 1931 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, and in the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objets, held in May of 1936 at the Galerie Charles Ratton (the latter perhaps the central moment in his history). Harris tracks changes in the conceptualization of the object in Surrealist literature, but he also shows how the objects themselves constitute interventions in an ongoing debate. Furthermore, he has evidently studied the works closely and consequently has a lot of very interesting things to say about how they are made and what they mean.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is an example of how good art history can be, and it reaches this level because thorough research of primary sources and intelligent grounding in social history is accompanied by genuinely illuminating interpretations of specific works. It is rare that an art historian today can marshal the whole orchestra so that all the sections play together and in tune. It is the tuning that is crucial, by which I mean an ear for the note that matters, in a text or a work. If I have one criticism of Harris’s book, it is that his prose is not perfect music—but that is excusable considering the constraints and pressures of a graduate dissertation. In comparison to any other example of that genre that I have read, Harris’s book is superior. It covers a lot of material without losing focus; it does justice to the specificity of the artwork without losing sight of the politics that surround it; the writing is polemical and participates in current debates while maintaining a scholarly posture defended by rigorous historical argument. This book deserves to be noticed, and read.

Robert Linsley

Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo

From edition 2005 Issue 3

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s

Published: SEPTEMBER 14, 2005

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche. By Steven Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 328 pages. 35 b+w illustrations.

Whether due to a sense of convenience or to partisan docility, too many intellectuals regard and represent the social revolution as either completed or unrealizable. It is time to rise up against such a misunderstanding of the realities that surrounds us, and of the determinism that governs them. (225)

Cited in the journal Clé

November or December 1938.

In his new book, adapted from his doctoral dissertation from the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta art historian Steven Harris analyzes one of the most complex and fraught moments in the history of the avant-garde and of twentieth century art in general. Harris’s primary intent “is to understand the development of surrealist thought and activity at a moment when, in its second period from 1929-1939, it was able to catch a glimpse of what the implications of its radical aesthetic project might be, at the time of its most active and searching attempt to synthesize Hegelian aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism.”(2) What is notable about Harris’s approach to surrealism is that, unlike other writers on the subject, he attempts, largely successfully, to weave together the Hegelian, psychoanalytic, and Marxian themes in his own methodology, thus illuminating the cultural and political significance of surrealism, especially for the members of the group allied with André Breton. Harris’s analysis diverges not only from the Kantian-inflected interpretations of surrealism found in such diverse writers as Jürgen Habermas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Clement Greenberg but also from the more heavily psychoanalytic approach found within the writers around the journal October. While the secondary literature on surrealism has been rapidly expanding in the past two decades, Harris’s book is such a welcome addition to the literature thanks to his desire to focus, not just on the formal aspects of the objects produced by surrealists or on the politics of the surrealists, but rather on the twin poles of art and politics in a constant productive tension with one another. While bearing a superficial similarity to certain transgressive and hybridizing strategies in postmodernist and post-colonialist critiques Harris’s foregrounding of the Hegelian element in both his analysis and methodology declares his distancing from the theoretical models of the recent past.

An example of both the similarities and differences within the modernist-postmodernist debates on the question of the avant-garde and surrealism is captured in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard. In perhaps his most widely read essay dealing with questions of aesthetics and the avant-garde, entitled “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” Habermas summarized the diverse approaches within surrealism to overcome and level the barriers between art and life, fiction and praxis, appearance and reality to one plane or “the attempts to declare everything to be art and everyone to be an artist, to retrace all criteria and to equate aesthetic judgement with the expression of subjective experiences – all these undertakings have proved themselves to be sort of nonsense experiments.”   Surrealism makes two strategic errors from Habermas’s perspective: first, failure of the surrealist revolt arises when the attempt to integrate the autonomous cultural sphere into life disperses its contents but there is no resultant emancipatory effect. Secondly, Habermas argues that the focus of the surrealists on dissolving the sphere of the aesthetic-expressive merely replaces one abstraction with another precisely because “a reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification cannot be overcome by forcing just one of those highly stylized cultural spheres to open up and become more accessible.”   Harris, by foregrounding the Hegelian aspect of the surrealists, demonstrates that Breton is emphasizing the imagination over the rational but not merely advocating “nonsense experiments”. In the combination of psychoanalysis and Hegel, the surrealist objects of the mid-1930s reveal that “the use of Hegel becomes the occasion for the end of art anticipated in his own aesthetics (as art becomes reflection), but this occurs through a reinvestment of desire in the object, rather than through a more conscious, rational approach. Art does not become pure Idea as it approaches philosophy; rather, it retains a sensual dimension through the poetic imagination, to which it returns with the aid of Freud, in a contestation of the purity and autonomy of modern art.”   In his analysis Harris, reveals the inadequacy of Habermas’s formulation of surrealism, in particular, and by broader implication the limitations of his understanding of the role of art and the avant-garde within modernity.

By contrast, in the work of the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard the work of the avant-garde art practices are valued for their ability to explore the sublime but sideline the Hegelian impetus of the surrealist avant-garde to hold onto the tension between the artistic and political realms. Lyotard argues, “Burke’s elaboration of the aesthetics of the Sublime, and to a lesser degree Kant’s, outlined a world of possibilities for artistic experiments in which the avant-gardes would later trace out their paths.”   In opposition to Habermas advocacy of the communicative role outlined for the aesthetic-expressive sphere, Lyotard advocates for the avant-garde to abandon “the role of identification that the work previously played in relation to the community of addressees.”   The avant-garde becomes wedded to an investigation of the `unrepresentable’ within the Kantian notion of the sublime or, as Lyotard himself argues, “our business is not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be represented”.   Lyotard attacks both Hegel and Habermas at the end of his essay on “What is the Postmodern” by arguing that “it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language-games (which, under the name of faculties, Kant knew to be separated by a chasm), and that only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel) can hope to totalize them into a real unity.”   Hegel and Habermas are pilloried for their willingness to embrace the terror of such totalizing errors. I would argue that Harris’s investigations into the surrealist object reveal a more nuanced understanding of surrealism and the avant-garde than that of either Habermas or Lyotard in re-establishing the legitimacy of the Hegelian dimension in the surrealist object as neither a “nonsense experiment” or as merely an exploration of the sublime.

Given the intensity of the debates over the legacy of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts over the last three in recent decades on the relationship between art and politics, Harris adroitly balances the nuances of politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. In his analysis, Harris places his emphasis on an immanent engagement with his subject, thus enabling him to see in surrealism an important exploration in the attempt to found another culture. In other words he notes, in the 1930s, “[surrealist] art was no longer simply art, the production of rarefied commodities for connossieurs,” but actually, “reconceptualized as a kind of science – that other autonomous sphere of human endeavour – as a form of experimental research contributing to a greater knowledge of human thought.” “Art would no longer be,” in Harris’s words,” what it had been hitherto, a separate art belonging to a dying culture, but would realize itself in becoming something that would make a real contribution to the present and the future, both in re

alizing its true nature as unconscious thought – the source of imagination, in this psychoanalytic understanding – and in the interpretation of such works in the interests of knowledge.”(3)   Harris places the emphasis on an imminent critique of surrealism while yet maintaining the dynamic inter-action between art and politics. This is an indication, perhaps, of Harris’s greatest departure from one of the most significant schools of thought on surrealism; that of the October group of critics and historians. While he acknowledges the important work of Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Denis Hollier,   Harris is very careful to emphasize his own perspective, residing more on the side of the historical and dialectical as opposed to the more `theoretical’ and psychoanalytical approach of the New York critics. For example, from Harris’s perspective, Foster’s symptomatic reading of Surrealism leaves out “the movement’s inter-textual relation to art and literature of its time, and its valorization of science as a supersession of these categories.” (117) Harris especially challenges the work of Krauss and Hollier for its uncritical acceptance of Georges Bataille’s description of the surrealists as `Icarian idealists’ in relation to his own `base materialism.'(9) Thus on the important questions of surrealism’s relation to modernism, the role of sublimation or desublimation, or its use of poetry, Harris’s analysis is an important and valuable departure from the October group’s analysis and procedures.

Harris has composed the book in five chapters beginning with a key investigation of the prototypical surrealist objects in 1931 which embody, as Harris notes, “the first moment of the object’s invention in relation to the imperative to go `beyond painting.'”(6). However, Harris reminds us that it is vital to remember that “the object still bore a critical relation to cubist assemblage; the claim to be an avant-garde position was manifested precisely in this `au-dela’.” Therefore Harris rightly asserts, “It is the objects’ critical relation to the dominant categories of art making that is important here, rather than their mere rejection; there is an attempt to sublate what are understood to be the progressive aspects of modern art – in particular, the principle of collage and the experimental nature of prewar modernism – into the object, which is understood at the same time to be antiformal and antiaesthetic in its rejection of the claims for autonomy made by the partisans and practioners of modern art.”(6) However, by seeking to go beyond painting and traditional aesthetics surrealism required an alliance with a potentially revolutionary political avant-garde to effect a reconciliation between art and life. Harris documents in his second chapter the difficult task of the surrealists in the 1930s to achieve recognition as an avant-garde in the cultural sphere by the leaders of the revolutionary avant-garde in the Communist Party of France. Without this recognition the surrealists pretensions to being a new revolutionary avant-garde would dissolve. Harris highlights in chapter three the effort to reframe the surrealist object as scientific research, as opposed to aesthetic experimentation, which challenged the unity of the movement and even the definition of what surrealism was meant to represent. Chapter four focuses upon the break with the Communist Part in 1935 and the relationship between surrealism and the Popular Front.   Finally, a key moment for the expression of the surrealist approach to the tension between art and politics, the exhibition of surrealist objects in the Exposition surréaliste d’objects, is the focus of the fifth chapter entitled “Beware of Domestic Objects: Vocation and Equivocation in 1936”. Lacking access to the revolutionary avant-garde but desiring to remain critical, the interrelationship of art and dream so essential to surrealist aspirations remains, especially in key objects like Jacqueline Lamba’s and Andre Breton’s Le Petit Mimétique, “but it no longer promises the reconciliation of rational and irrational, nor the overcoming of art in a generalized creativity for which the object would furnish a model.” Criticality is salvaged but at a tremendous price; “its preservation as a separate activity somewhat paradoxically represents a delay in the reconciliation of art and life.”   However, as Harris notes, shortly thereafter, “once surrealism resituates itself within the field of modern art,” the surrealist project becomes “unviable in the present.”(218)   

The emphasis of Harris’s self-declared dialectical and immanent critique of surrealism is on weaving the two poles of art and politics into a more sophisticated relationship with one another than has hitherto been attempted by art historians. He foregrounds the productive tension between art and politics in a manner that has important ramifications for the future study of surrealism but also for contemporary art production that wishes to explore the range of questions concerning the relationship of art to the political raised in such an intelligent manner by the surrealist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Harris targets exactly the crucial moment within the history of surrealism that signals the shift, “from a confidence in the self-sufficiency and superiority of an autonomous, unconscious thought process (such as is expressed in automatic writing and other surrealist techniques), to an acknowledgement of the interdependence of thought and the phenomenal world. This was in keeping with an imperative shared by many revolutionary intellectuals in the 1930s to make thought active, to relate the hitherto separate spheres of thought and action, action and dream, a separation that had been understood to be the hallmark of a separate, modernist art and literature since the time of Baudelaire.”(2) However, I believe that, in the aftermath of decades of intellectual combat between modernists and postmodernists, and especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Iraq, what is most welcome in Harris’s analysis of surrealism are the questions concerning the fraught relationship between culture and politics that he raises in a new and provocative way. These questions have been ignored for too long by too many art and cultural historians as well as producers of contemporary art because of the antipathy of many modernists, postmodernists, and poststructuralists towards Hegel and what they regard as the authoritarian and homogenizing meta-narratives of his approach. Perhaps this book signals, at last, an awakening to the critical efficacy and non-totalitarian potential of a combined Marxist, Hegelian, and psychoanalytic approach to culture and politics that momentarily bloomed in the 1930s. Is the surrealist object, as outlined by Harris, any more viable today than it was in the cataclysm of the 1930s? This question has yet to be resolved.      

David Howard is an Associate Professor of Art History at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

This entry was posted in Miscellaneous and edition 2005 Issue 3 . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics and the Psyche by Steven Harris
Patricia Allmer  28 Jun 2004

"A strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s." Pop Matters

The co-option of the movement into modern mass culture is overwhelming, a testament to its genuinely threatening force.




SURREALIST ART AND THOUGHT IN THE 1930S

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Length: 340
Subtitle: Art, Politics and the Psyche
Price: $90 (US)
Author: Steven Harris
UK PUBLICATION DATE: 2004-02
AMAZON

The art object lies between the sensible and the rational. It is something spiritual that appears as material.

Hegel's Poetics and the beginning of Breton's 1935 lecture 'Situation Surréaliste de l'Objet'

Surrealism was arguably the only truly revolutionary art movement of the 20th century. Contemporary culture, from advertising to pop videos to film to political spin to t-shirts, repeatedly uses Surrealist devices, methods, and iconography. The co-option of the movement into modern mass culture is overwhelming, a testament to its genuinely threatening force. Steven Harris, assistant professor of Art History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, tries in Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s to reposition the movement in some of its original contexts.

The book researches Surrealism in its second period, from 1929-1939, and offers long and detailed scholarly engagement, attempting to capture thirties Surrealism as a collaborative movement, as well as shedding light on Surrealist attempts and failures at bringing together and synthesising Hegelian aesthetics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. As this might suggest, this is a demanding but rewarding work, shedding new light on a perennially popular area of art history.

Recent writings on Surrealism have, to a large extent, focused on Surrealism's preoccupation with psychoanalysis, as well as the analysis of Surrealism's own "unconscious." The leading figures and, perhaps, initiators of this trend are the group of art theorists linked to the journal October. Formed in 1976, October members such as Rosalind E. Krauss, Hal Foster and Denis Hollier have revolutionised the art historical world by introducing post-structuralist theories into modern thinking on art.

Part of Harris's project is to argue with October's psychoanalysis of Surrealism (specifically their reliance on the controversial theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), some of which, he suggests, "runs counter to some of the movement's own claims." Harris argues that Surrealism is a dynamic field in which theoretical constituents (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Hegelianism) battle, causing friction between each other as well as interacting in centrifugal and centripetal ways through "Hegelianising psychoanalysis" and "Freudianising Marxism."

Another argument with the October group is their positioning of French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille as a Surrealist. Instead, Harris argues that Bataille becomes, in the 1930s, "materialist in antithesis to Surrealism's projected idealism, realist in antithesis to its Surrealism, and antidialectical in opposition to its dialectics," whilst his 1930 essay on Surrealism "is too often accepted uncritically as an adequate description of Surrealism."

The Surrealist object -- things found or recovered from flea-markets, junk shops, even from the gutter, and reinvested with aesthetic importance -- lies for Harris at the heart of Surrealism in the 1930s, and embodies "many of the aspirations of the group in this period." The Surrealist object, the first of which was Alberto Giacometti's highly erotic Boule Suspendue in 1931, and which attained its most significant moment in the Exposition surréaliste d'objets in 1936, becomes in Harris's book a fragment encapsulating and telling the story of Surrealism's second period.

It is the evidence of an attempt to move beyond painting: "The Surrealist object is … situated beyond the traditional artistic categories of painting or sculpture, and it participates in the logic of a scientific activity that would also be disruptive and revolutionary, as an activist intervention allied to (but not identical to) the activities of the political avant-garde." Following this, his theoretical elaborations never lose sight of the Surrealist object, as object of investigation and revelation. His arguments are underlined by detailed interpretations of objects offered by a wide range of artists such as Claude Cahun, Valentine Hugo, Man Ray, Juan Miró, Oscar Dominguez, Méret Oppenheim and André Breton.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is concerned with the Surrealist attempt to integrate or synthesise art into life. Harris explores the movement from an original "overcoming of the separation of art and life in a 'poetry made by all, not by one'" to the end of this aspiration by 1938, where the "overcoming of art is exchanged for the persistence of art." Here the Surrealist object is seen as the "object of the object," as the "leading example offered by the Surrealists of this art that would no-longer-be-art... since in their understanding it was a realization and an articulation of the relation between subject and object, action and dream."

One criticism of Harris's book is its lack of geographical range. For example, he remains very focussed on Surrealism in France, and manages to go 321 pages without mentioning Belgian Surrealism and its relation to and conceptualisation of the Surrealist object as understood by French Surrealist artists. So, for example, René Magritte produced numerous objects from 1931 onwards, such as his painted plaster cast Les Menottes de Cuivre (1931), his painted casts of Napoleon death masks L'Avenir des Statues (c. 1932) or his painted bottles like Femme-Bouteille (1940). Questions such as how these objects differ from, relate to, enrich or challenge the specifically French conceptions of the Surrealist object are never addressed.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s is a rigorously written and highly academic book, which redirects attention from a principally psychoanalytical approach to understanding Surrealism, positing instead an evolving, dynamic movement caused by the interaction of often contradictory theoretical forces. Harris relentlessly returns to the different arguments he sets out in the book, and through this he links them together into a strong, well-illustrated analysis and a highly complex picture of Surrealism in the 1930s.
SURREALIST ART AND THOUGHT IN THE 1930S STEVEN HARRIS