Spinoza, Life and Legacy




Jonathan I. Israel
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023. 1313 pp. $ 49.95
ISBN 978-0-19-885748-8

Reviewed by Vesa Oittinen

About the reviewer
Vesa Oittinen is Professor emeritus at Aleksanteri Institute/University of Helsinki. …


Several Spinoza biographies have been published since Jacob Freudenthal’s classical exposition of which the most recent have been those by Gullan-Whur (1998) and Nadler (1999). But Jonathan Israel’s tour-de-force outdoes them all, not only by its sheer volume (over 1300 pages!) especially thanks to its meticulous survey of Spinoza’s background, the Dutch political history, and his intellectual life in the seventeenth century. As Israel himself notes in the preface to his book, ‘there cannot be a comprehensive biography of Spinoza not enmeshed in analysis of the deep-seated religious and political tensions and conflicts of the Dutch Golden Age as well as the central issues debated by its philosophers, scientists, religious leaders and statesmen’ (v).

Israel’s biography offers a plethora of detailed information so that the reader might think that this is the definitive biography of Spinoza, after which there remains at most only some minutiae to add. However, so admirable Israel’s prestation is, one gets the impression that the main hero of the story is not Spinoza, but Spinoza’s age. There are long passages in which Israel deviates for tens of pages to descript phenomena of secondary importance without mentioning Spinoza at all. He gives an excellent picture of the epoch, which forms the background for understanding Spinoza’s thought, but does not delve very deep in the actual philosophical problematics we encounter in his works. Maybe it is too much demanded that he should do both things; all depends on what one expects from a biography. The book proceeds in chronological order and explains Spinoza’s intellectual development in exchange with his political and social milieu.

What astonishes the reader positively is that Israel has found so much to tell about Spinoza’s personal circumstances. The common opinion yet today is that Spinoza was a loner who led a secluded life with few if any notable events. The more recent research has already begun to dismantle this picture of a solitary Jew in the fringe of the established society, but Israel manages to crush the legend convincingly. As he remarks, Spinoza ‘was an activist believing revolutionary sedition in certain circumstances and places’ where there already existed a tradition of restricting the monarchical power, as in the Netherlands.

There is an antinomy in Spinoza’s political thought: on the one side, a democratic conviction and antipathy to monarchy and religious authority, but on the other side, the insight that there does not exist a revolutionary subject mature enough to carry out the desired changes dictated by reason in the political and social structures. According to Spinoza, most of the people, the so-called multitudo, were more or less incapable to grasp the truth of philosophy and thus their own true interests. The irrational ‘multitude’ should, therefore, be excluded as far as possible from the revolutionary scenario Spinoza proposes (109-110). A standard Marxist interpretation of this situation would be that the Dutch capitalism, in the 17th century still at its mercantile stage, was not yet developed sufficiently to produce its gravedigger, the proletariat. Indeed, this is the position that for example many Soviet scholars have taken. But Israel is not a Marxist and so he acquiesces with leaving the problem open. However, Israel is quite right in viewing the multitudo as a problem for Spinoza, as an obstacle on the way to a rational politics for obtaining the common good. The contrary interpretation of the multitudo as an active, unmediated and revolutionary collective subject, made famous by Antonio Negri, is clearly too optimistic. Spinoza would not have shared it, in every case not after he had in 1672 experienced the bestial lynching of the de Witt brothers by an infuriated mob. The story goes that Spinoza would have rushed to the scene of the atrocity and post up a placard with the text Ultimi barbarorum, but was prevented by his landlord Van der Spijck, who was afraid of the consequences (884).

The problematic perspectives of a democracy in 17th century Netherlands explain quite sufficiently why Spinoza restricted his activities in a smaller circle of congenial enlightened friends. This began in the 1650s, when Spinoza was ‘embarking on the most decisive and formative phase of his life’ (328). His Latin teacher Franciscus van den Enden was one of the central figures at this early stage. Spinoza discussed his philosophical ideas with other members of the ‘collegium’ (as it was called in Latin). A letter from his friend Simon de Vries from 1663 attests that the circle was reading the propositions of a text which was to become Spinoza’s main work, the Ethics. However, after his death in 1677, the publishers of his Opera posthuma decided that it is advisable to conceal the existence of such a radical group. Undoubtely, this move did contribute to the later legend of Spinoza as a reclusive thinker.

It is important to know this background of Spinoza’s philosophy, since it gives us new keys to its interpretation. The standard reading of the Ethics has seen in it a metaphysical theory starting from general definitions concerning God, His attributes, the human mind, and proceeding from these to more specific questions of philosophy. Already Leibniz took this stance. His correspondence reveals that he was very curious to get the manuscript of the Ethics yet before it was printed, and when he finally received the book, his sole interest was focused on the two ‘metaphysical’ initial parts of the Ethics. Of the remaining three parts, which dealt with the right way of life and human freedom, he made no notes at all. It is apparent that Spinoza’s final goal was not to focus on metaphysics as an end in itself. The two first parts of the Ethics deliver only a sketch of the general principles, on the basis of which Spinoza was able to develop his radical vision of human emancipation and freedom under the guidance of reason. This fact explains why there are so many lacunae and open questions in Spinoza’s metaphysics which have embarrassed later scholars – in fact, already Leibniz was embarrassed and noted: ‘une étrange Métaphysique, pleine de paradoxes’ (a strange metaphysics, full of paradoxes).

The primacy of practical philosophy is further seen in the fact that Spinoza interrupted his work on the Ethics in 1665. This earlier, incomplete version of the Ethics consisted of three parts instead of the five in the final makeup. The reason for the interruption of work on theoretical philosophy was the outbreak of a war between England and the United Provinces, which led Spinoza to ‘fix his new focus on politics, how to secure social stability and theology’s role in the society’ (510). Spinoza was ‘keenly aware … that monarchical tyranny allied to contempt for the toleration and republican system of the Dutch now imperiously dominted the European scene, laying toleration, freedom of expression, and republican thinking under siege’ (515). These considerations moved him to begin to write a book on the foundations of human society, on which he worked the latter half of the 1660s. The book was finally published in 1670 with the title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, anonymously and with a fictitious publisher’s name. The book received a ‘double response’: immediately after its publication it was furiously condemned by political and ecclesiastical authorities, but soon it proved that to refute Spinoza’s arguments was much more difficult than expected. ‘Whole armies of theologians at home and abroad failed to come up with anything concrete or scathing in reply’ (774). Even such a non-ordinary mind as Leibniz was deeply alarmed because he could not find convincing counter arguments against Spinoza’s ideas.

What, then, did Tractatus teach? The book is a critique of religious intolerance, in which Spinoza uses above all the early history of the Jews as an example. His thorough knowledge of Hebrew renders authority to his analyses of the passages from the Old Testament, on which he builds his argumentation. The Tractatus presents the same philosophical ideas as the yet unpublished Ethics: the Holy Scripture must be interpreted only in the light of reason, and so it turns out that there are no miracles nor supernatural things, but everything in the world obeys only the laws of nature. God does not want or aspire anything, but acts only according to the laws of his own nature. The people, however, have all kinds of prejudices and false ideas concerning God and religion, and so the task arises to make them conscious of the precepts of reason. Further, Spinoza insisted that democracy is the best type of government.

Already at the outset when the Tractatus was published, many readers thought that Spinoza’s theory of the state or the commonwealth is similar to that of Hobbes. This was understandable, since Hobbesian ideas were courant in the Dutch republican milieu of the age. However, as Israel notes, a closer look reveals a wide gulf between Spinoza and Hobbes. Although Hobbes famously defined religion as a form of superstition approved by the state, he never explicitely rejected the idea of revelation and thought that the Bible is divinely inspired. Further differences can be discerned in the political philosophy. For Spinoza, only those who act according to reason can be called free, whereas for Hobbes the freedom consists of absence of personal constraint. Where Hobbes has a negative concept of freedom, Spinoza has a positive one.

It is a pity that Israel seems not to know Remo Bodei’s excellent book Geometria delle passioni (1991), where the comparison between Hobbes and Spinoza is carried further than Israel does, but quite in the same spirit. As Bodei shows, Spinoza’s views on the commonwealth and the perspectives of human agency are a direct antithesis to what Hobbes teaches. Spinoza is optimistic as to the perspective of human liberation. We are not hopelessly chained to our passions, since ‘the human mind can have adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God’ (Eth. II prop. 47) and thus has the possibility to overcome false ideas and illusions. Hobbes for his part thinks of men as nasty beasts struggling against each other and concludes that only the iron hand of a monarchical rule can keep in line the destructive impulses coming from the human nature itself. These different ‘anthropologies’ have, as Bodei notes, palpable practical consequences. For Spinoza, the state exists in order to guarantee the liberty of its members; for Hobbes, the state is there to engender fear.

An interesting claim made by Israel is that it was Spinoza, not Rousseau as generally assumed, who first coined the concept of ‘general will’ as one of the keys to his entire system (760). This claim can insofar be substantiated as for Spinoza it was the Reason that defined the ‘common good’, which often was not in concord with the individual wills determined by all kinds of passions and illusions but all the members of the society should follow it . However, the reader becomes soon aware that Israel has a strong bias against Rousseau, a bias known already from his earlier works on the history of the Enlightenment. He notes that Rousseau had taken his concept of volonté générale from Spinoza via Diderot, but accuses him that this form of general will is not based on reason as in Spinoza, but ‘on common sentiment, the instinct and feelings of the people’ (768). It remains unclear how big the difference between Spinoza and Rousseau actually is in this case, since Spinoza, too, insisted in Tractatus that the political leaders have to use the products of imagination as tools in order to steer the people’s opinion towards rational forms of conduct.

In discussing Rousseau’s ideas Israel comes to assert Spinoza’s importance for the subsequent European history of ideas. Spinoza’s ‘general will’ is purely secular and materialist in the same manner as expounded by Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Condorcet, Destutt de Tracy and Volney (766). We come here to Israel’s well-known thesis that there exists two main currents in the Enlightenment thought of the 18th century: the moderate and the radical Enlightenment. While for example the English empirists Locke and Hume belonged to the moderate wing, the names just listed form the tradition of radical Enlightenment. The singularity of Israel’s position consists in the claim that Spinoza, and almost exclusively Spinoza, is the progenitor of radical Enlightenment ideas. In his previous books Israel has put forth this thesis with a great pondus, but in his Spinoza biography he has somewhat toned down the claims. Nevertheless, Spinoza was ‘the prime framer of the terms and concepts forming the underground opposition to the mainstream Enlightenment’ (1206). His critique of religion and insistence on rationality had ‘an undeniable centrality in the European Early Enlightenment’, although modern scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge it (1211).

This assertion is problematic at least in two ways. First, there is the risk that if all important innovations of the Enlightenment thought are reduced to Spinoza’s thoughts, he grows to such an overtowering figure in the modern history of ideas that it does not respond to the real historical facts. Already the existence of the radical circles of free thinkers in which Spinoza participated and which Israel himself describes in extenso, tell the story that the radical ideas that formed the foundation of next century Enlightenment were in much result of a collective work. Furthermore,Israel understands the radical Enlightenment in a peculiarly restricted way. Not only Rousseau is excluded, but even the Jacobins of the French Revolution — Robespierre and Saint-Just have, according to him, nothing to do with Enlightenment at all. From the names of the representants of the radical Enlightenment he lists it becomes soon obvious that they are representative above all for the Girondist fraction during the French Revolution, that is, the bourgeoisie. Should we really conclude from this that Spinoza is the philosopher of the bourgeoisie only?

4 April 2024

ReferencesRemo Bodei 2018 Geometry of the Passions Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Jacob Freudenthal 1927 Spinoza. Leben und Lehre Oxford: Oxford University Press
Margaret Gullan-Whur 1998 With Reason: A Life of Spinoza London: St. Martin’s Press
Steven Nadler 1999 Spinoza: A Life Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21452_spinoza-life-and-legacy-by-jonathan-i-israel-reviewed-by-vesa-oittinen/

The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Strauss and Rand





Larry Alan Busk

Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2023. 276 pp., $105.00 hb
ISBN 9781666929638

Reviewed by Matt McManus
About the reviewer
Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan 

For many decades now, anti-foundationalism has been a very popular position on the academic left. Influenced by an array of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, many have argued that ideas of justice, reason and universalism were conceptually flawed at best and dangerous at worst. These thinkers all stressed how bellicosely universalistic conceptions of reason and morality served as the ideological basis of Western and Soviet imperialism, the emergence of the disciplinary carceral state and neoconservative military interventionism. Rather than run the risk of repeating these errors, the left needed to adopt a position of depthless skepticism towards any system that sought to instantiate itself through power. To the extent we put forward a constructive political programme, it would need to be focused on a micropolitics that gradually enacted big change through small and very particular forms of activism.

In his new book The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory, Marxist theorist Larry Alan Busk asks us to question this intellectual transition and to stop ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. While acknowledging the dangers of appealing to Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason and ‘intelligent design’, Busk claims that ‘if our ambition is to create a world in which everyone has enough to eat, in which no one is victimized for arbitrary reason, in which structural conditions do no keep most in a state of poverty and a select few in preposterous opulence, and in which we can look forward to a habitable climate future and an ecologically sustainable level of material comfort, then appeals to the figures of progress are inevitable’ (25). His main argument for this is that, curiously, the repudiation of ‘figures of progress’ so emblematic of much critical theory, brought it squarely and comfortably into line with the main thrust of reactionary philosophy.

The Enlightenment was a moment of triumph for many of the progressive and revolutionary forces which had been developing for many generations. Radicals like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft attacked the ancien regimes as contrary to ‘common sense’ and basic reason, stressing the transparently ideological character of mythological justifications for aristocratic inequality. In Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, political theorist Don Herzog stressed how conservatives were shocked that ancient conceptions of the great hierarchical ‘Chain of Being’, which held that God and nature intended everyone to have their place, not only failed to resonate by provoked mockery from Enlightenment radicals. Edmnund Burke sneered that the philosophes wanted to strip away ‘all the pleasing illusions’ that elevated a man or a woman into a king or queen and made subordination easy, and recommended we infuse ‘sublime principles’ onto those who’d been erected above others. In response, Mary Wollstonecraft accused him of having a ‘moral antipathy to reason’ who’d excuse injustice on the perplexing basis that the injustice had gone on for a such a long time that we ought to excuse and even revere it.

Busk stresses how this deep wariness of Enlightenment’s ambition to remake the world permanently stamped the reactionary tradition, down through its greatest twentieth century thinkers à la Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss and Ayn Rand.

Busk points out how Schmitt was deeply skeptical of both the liberal and Marxist belief in reason, holding instead that our basic moral beliefs were ‘secularized theological concepts’ organized into myths. On that basis Schmitt felt that the fascist myth propagated by Mussolini and later Hitler had an


advantage over socialist myths because the ‘former is more effective: more emotionally resonant, more “irrationally” powerful, and above all, more historically successful. This is, in fact, the most consistent criticism of Marxist politics that Schmitt undertakes-he does not criticize it for being false or immoral, only for lacking the imaginative power capable of unifying and mobilizing the masses, at least relative to the affective charms of nationalism (63).

Michael Oakeshott was similarly critical of ‘rationalism’ in politics, arguing that it is an illusion that there are ‘correct’ answers to practical questions that can be settled by an appeal to either facts, norms or history. Over and against those, like the British utilitarian socialists, who proposed to reinvent society to promote the human good, Oakeshott endorsed a conservatism wherein we ‘enjoy what is present and available regardless of its ability to satisfy any want.’ While superficially benign, Busk stresses how in concrete terms Oakeshott’s anti-rational conservatism led him to express deep reservations about women’s suffrage till near the end, and then only endorsing it because near the end of his long life Oakeshott acknowledged women’s voting was an established part of the British ‘tradition’ – it had nothing to do with ideals of ‘rights’ or ‘justice’.

Undoubtedly, the heart of the book is Busk’s deep chapter on Hayek, which constitutes one of the richest attempts to answer the Austrian economist from a Marxist perspective. Busk points out how Hayek argued that we need to see society as evolving through a process of ‘natural selection’ rather than the result of conscious, rational design. Hayek was famously critical of both Nazism and the communist command economies for attempting to ‘plan’ entire societies, failing to recognize how the complexity required to understand society enough to organize planning far outstripped anything of which human mind was capable. Busk points out that there is nonetheless a deep ‘logical hole in Hayek’s argument’ (116). That is, for Hayek,


societies evolve through a process of natural selection, and inhibitions in old arrangement provoke new ones to emerge and develop. Socialism, however, is not treated as a natural outgrowth of other social forms – it is only an aberration of the intellect. He establishes justification-by-existence, but the project of intelligent design remains unjustified in spite of its existence. Likewise, this positivistic criterion, which legitimates a political system insofar as it is established, not insofar as we can imagine it, does not prevent him from imagining a liberal utopia. He declares at once that the human ship is guided by winds that we cannot control and that we should self-consciously try to change course (116).

This is indeed a serious problem in Hayek’s position which even other libertarians have acknowledged. While he endorsed an evolutionary rather than planning oriented approach to society, Hayek unfailingly insisted that there must be a major role for the state to play in establishing the conditions for market society, ‘designed’ new kinds of constitutional orders that would put constraints on democratic will, and even called for the introduction of markets in states which had previously been non-capitalist. Whatever else one thinks, this blurs the boundaries between evolution and planning which Hayek elsewhere makes central to the argument against socialism. For all that, Busk could have spent more time dealing with the more nuanced dimensions of Hayek’s thinking. While Busk acknowledges that ‘Hayek and company advanced a perfectly coherent (which is not to say compelling) critique of socialist planning’, he doesn’t address many of the specific epistemic underpinnings of Hayek’s position (115). This is more important than may seem because, as some of the more sophisticated commentaries have pointed out, there is an undeniable sense in which Hayek follows Marx in being an heir to the German critical tradition, a tradition which, following Kant and Hegel, has been uniform in stressing the limitations of utopian rationalism. A deep dive into this problem is a necessary one for socialists seeking to answer Hayek comprehensively. As is a response to his own acknowledgement that a certain kind of welfarism was compatible with capitalism, particularly once one abandoned the meritocratic mythologies characteristic of earlier liberalism.

Busk’s analysis of right-wing thought is always illuminating and fresh, and is a welcome contribution to the growing array of sophisticated left-wing interpretations of the right. What’s sure to be more controversial is his spicy claim that contemporary left theory is a ‘mirror’ to its right-wing counterpart, internalizing many of the same arguments about needing to be skeptical of reason, not hope for too much and focus on militant particularism over structural transformation. The consequences are dire. For Busk, it means that ‘the Right has no real opposition, but only a reflection. If our opponent has already anticipated all of our moves, at a certain point we are no longer playing against this opponent-we are merely pushing the pieces around in a performative display, going through the motions of a process whose outcome, defeat, is determined in advance’ (50). Grim stuff.

This argument is being made more and more forcefully in a number of different quarters. Some are even more explicit than Busk. In his excellent The Seduction of Unreason, philosopher Richard Wolin sardonically points out how generations of critical theorists abandoned Marx and socialism in the mid-century and rushed to embrace figures associated with the German ‘Conservative Revolution’ à la Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger. The result was a left that turned on the very Enlightenment heritage it had once advanced. In a very different register, historian Samuel Moyn’s latest book Liberalism Against Itself argues that twentieth-century liberals, shocked by the Holocaust and Soviet atrocities, also chose to abandon the more ambitiously egalitarian goals of their doctrine. Ironically this took place amongst liberal intellectuals at the very moment when liberal politicians, often inspired by democratic forms of socialism, were constructing the welfare states that brought the ideal of a free and equal society closer to realization than any other. Internalizing arguments about the limitations of reason and human nature long propagated by conservatives, Moyn argues Cold War liberals came to agree with Hayek that the best which could be hoped for was a neoliberal society with a very minimal floor of economic redistribution. The hopes of a liberal socialist like Mill or Irving Howe gave way to the pessimism and ultimately cynicism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

It is undeniably possible to push it too far. Anyone who has spent any time with the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ or ‘race realist’ crowd knows that the potential of Enlightenment rhetoric to validate reactionary politics is alive and well. We cannot throw out the insights and caution of critics like Adorno, Foucault or Spivak through an uncritical return to faith in a left-Enlightenment. But Busk is absolutely right that such a return is needed, and needed now. For too many decades the intellectual left has retreated into ‘trashing’ and criticizing in lieu of offering an inspiring alternative to the status quo. There will always be a place for this critical disposition, but it must once more be complemented by an optimism of the will and an ambition of the intellect. During what he entitled the ‘Age of Reason’, Thomas Paine declared the intelligent men and women had it in their power to rationally make the world anew. That power is still the left’s if we want to grasp it.

7 May 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21504_the-right-wing-mirror-of-critical-theory-studies-of-schmitt-oakeshott-strauss-and-rand-by-larry-alan-busk-reviewed-by-matt-mcmanus/

Marxist Archeology Today: Historical Materialist Perspectives in Archeology from America, Europe and the Near East in the 21st Century



Ianir Milevski (ed)

Brill, Historical Materialism Book Series, Vol. 296, Leiden/Boston, 2023. 334 pp., $185 hb
ISBN 9789004679030

Reviewed by Brant Roberts
About the reviewer
Brant Roberts is an aspiring historian based in Mexico City. 

Archeology has always been a political science. Since its inception the field has attempted to trace our lineage as a species along the lines of identity, territory and culture. Though often portrayed as a discipline slightly closer to the hard sciences than historiography, it is much closer to its distant cousin in the social sciences than towards anything resembling an empirical practice. Having given an additional boost to nationalist positions of all stripes, archeology is embedded in politics and was shaped by the political systems from which it emerged. It has shaped not only how we imagine our shared past but also our collective present. One need only look at the now popular image of Napolean Bonaparte staring at the Sphinx in Egypt to analyze how he imagined his role in history in relation to that grand ancient monument and the history of empire from which it emerged. In short, archeology has always been linked to the ambitions of empire. All of these factors call for a counter-position to the predominant methodologies and has emerged within Marxist archeological circles as the recently published Marxist Archeology Today: Historical Materialist Perspectives in Archeology from America, Europe, and the Near East in the 21st Century.

The aim of Marxist Archeology Today is to present what the field of archeology can learn from Marxist theory and what Marxists can learn from archeological methods. It offers critiques of an older archeology rooted in orientalism, positivism and other reactionary currents still scraping for life within the humanities. Moving from ancient sites in Mexico and Peru to Palestine and beyond, the book covers large areas of debates and places. Wearing their thesis on their collective sleeve, each of these chapters manages to provide new insights for how we can analyze archeology through Marxist theory while maintaining important archeological practices which still reign within the field.

Chapter one covers ‘Work and Subsistence in Preceramic Groups of Southeastern Mexico’. On the surface this seems a rather pedantic subject, but is quite revealing of how this new form of social archeology attempts to historicize hunter-gatherer societies in contrast from how it has been done in the past. Unfortunately however, it does not start well. The authors begin by misquoting Karl Marx: ‘According to Marx, “work is the source of all wealth and all culture”. Under this principle, we start from the idea that archeological materials and contexts are the result of past human work (or objectified work in the form of ‘material culture’)’ (41). Marx famously issued a corrective to this quote, which had been falsely attributed to him in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: ‘Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.’ Curiously, the footnote for this false quote is labeled: Marx 1979, although in reviewing the bibliography, no such source exists, and thankfully was not cited again.

Aside from this surprising blunder, the essay is still rather interesting in its ability to apply Marxist theory to both artefacts and to debates around social reproduction within the archeological community through an analysis of the Santa Marta rock shelter in southeastern Mexico. At one point the authors offer a succinct analysis of their methodology: ‘By evaluating the characteristics of the artefacts and their relations with the archeological context, it is possible to establish the basis of how these materials are inserted into daily life and to establish the elements that charaterise its mode of production.’ (68) The application of this thesis is rich in possibilities for how archeologists can analyze ancient sites of human life within a Marxist framework.

Chapter three is titled ‘An Exceptional Case of the Urban Revolution? A Marxist Perspective on the Preclassic Maya’ and falls short in its approach. First, there is no urban revolution to speak of in regards to class struggle, and the term ‘revolution’ refers more to the move from sedentary communities to largely productive, urban ones – more evolution than revolution. Second, inspired by Louis Althusser, it attempts to lay out an aleatory materialist perspective in analyzing the preclassic Mayan period as a way to distinguish the universalist approach of New World and Old World historiography dealing with pre-capitalist societies as leading towards inevitable capitalist development, no matter the hemisphere. In spite of this there is already a great deal of work that has largely rejected that universalist notion through Marxist theory. One need only cite Samir Amin’s Global History: A View from the South, where he historicizes the ancient world systems and their particular forms of development. Or even consider the many writings of Immanuel Wallerstein and the role of world-systems theory – that neither Amin, nor Wallerstein, were cited anywhere in this book is surprising in this regard. It is astonishing that the author moved to use aleatory materialism (albeit in a creative manner) to historicize the preclassic Maya since the approach is largely unnecessary when there are works already dealing with the idea that particular ancient societies often formed their own modes of production separately from others and did not naturally produce capitalist social relations.

In chapter five, the writers claim that ‘the study of objects brings us closer to social relations without intermediaries (oral and/or written). Therefore, archeological research is more transparent than historical sources that may contain biases or partitions.’ (138) Strangely, the writers do not consider their approach to have any potential pitfalls and attempt to separate archeology from historiography. Even though the drive towards using Marxism as a potential science – separate from history as a field of knowledge – is worthwhile, one would doubt that it already is a science in relation to archeology in particular or that it is without potential bias. While no historiography is without its reactionary tones, it seems pointless to pursue an archeology outside of its historical context.

It is well worth noting the important criticisms of apologists of the Roman Empire, ancient Greece and much of classical antiquity latent within chapter six. Scholar Steve Roskams deploys his Marxist archeological interpretation as ideological counter-insurgency against the prevailing narratives of empire and modernity in a manner that would make Edward Said proud. Roskams’ use of Marxist theory in analyzing the slave mode of production within ancient Roman and Greek society is useful for both archeologists and historians of the period.

Perhaps the most important chapter of the book deals with acclaimed archeologist Vere Gordon Childe and the founding of Latin American Social Archeology (LASA). In presenting the foundation of LASA, scholar Marcelo Vitores points to how it was influenced by Marxist analysis within the context of mid-twentieth century political upheaval across the region and how it grew to be an influential methodology at a time when archeology was still deeply rooted in conservative ideology. The scholars who followed in Childe’s footsteps were influenced by the Cuban Revolution, rejected French structuralism which was deeply in vogue at the time of their writing, and at many conferences across the Americas they attempted to reformulate historical materialism in their practice of archeology. Much of their work laid the groundwork for this book.

Although each of the chapters provides insightful inquiries into the development of a Marxist archeology, one would expect an essay dealing with the use of satellite imaging and the general relation of the field to technology used to unearth new sites across previously unknown locations. It seems odd that this Marxist current has not attempted to reverse the flippant theory of fully automated luxury communism towards archeology in asking the more productive question of what role this new technology could play in analyzing the ancient past, what role Marxist archeologists could play within it and what the implications might be.

Finally, although the book was published less than a month prior to the October 7th Palestinian guerilla military operations against Israel, it seems impossible now to think about a Marxist archeology which does not include an analysis of both the national question and the agrarian question, each of which are fundamental hallmarks of Marxist theory in regards to thinking through the history of class struggle. Viewing land from this socio-political perspective should certainly be a crucial component for any future Marxist archeology in regards to the still raging colonial situations in Palestine, North America, the north of Ireland, Australia and other places.

It is well worth noting that Marxist Archeology Today was clearly written for archeologists and those well-schooled in Marxist theory, so some precaution should be taken for the general reader as the book was not written for a popular audience – though this is less a matter of discursive pyrotechnics than it is of dense content. Even so, this does not diminish the significant accomplishment of putting together such an important volume for future research into Marxist archeological methodology. And thankfully the book is less an exercise in theory than it is in advocating for concrete archeological practice. The writers keep their arguments succinct with their aim in developing archeology towards a new future. Marxist Archeology Today is not only groundbreaking for the field, it is also an opportunity for Marxists to learn from archeology and how we can shape the practice to our own advantage.

21 May 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21511_marxist-archeology-today-historical-materialist-perspectives-in-archeology-from-america-europe-and-the-near-east-in-the-21st-century-by-ianir-milevski-ed-reviewed-by-brant-roberts/

The Adventures of the Commodity: For a Critique of Value

Anselm Jappe

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2023. 232 pp., £85.00 hb
ISBN 9781839763465

Reviewed by Pedro H. J. Nardelli
About the reviewer
Pedro H. J. Nardelli is Full Professor at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Finland,


In the late 1980s, a few critical theorists from Germany created a journal called Krisis: Kritik der Warengesellschaft, proposing a different reading of Marx’s mature works to build a radical critique of capitalist society. Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Ernst Lohoff and Claus Peter Ortlieb are probably the most known names. After internal disagreements, the group split in 2004, giving origin to another journal called Exit!. Their extensive writings have been mostly published in German, while many of them have been translated to other languages like Portuguese. Yet somehow, surprisingly, not many of their writings are available in English. Anselm Jappe’s The Adventures of the Commodity helps to fill this gap for the anglophone world as this book (first published in French in 2003) can be read as systematic presentation of the main theoretical contributions of this strand of Marxism.

In the preface prepared for this edition, Jappe justifies the importance of the book after the twenty years of its initial publication: as we still live in a capitalist society, the critique of its basic categories and of its fetishist social dynamic emerging therefrom is still relevant. By dealing with the essential attributes of capitalist society, ‘the critique of value’ is claimed to offer both a solid ground to assess the recurrent waves of crises in capitalism as well as a fixed point against positions that claim to be anti-capitalist but cannot go against and beyond capital’s fundamental categories like (abstract) labour, money and the commodity.

The introductory chapter presents the background of the book in its day: struggles against globalization and recurrent stock market instabilities mostly in developing countries. Like today, most explanations (from the far left to the far right) are uncapable of providing a robust critique; they lack a conceptualization of the social totality. Following Marx’s Capital, Jappe indicates that the analysis must start with the commodity because it is the ‘germ cell’ of capitalist society, and thus, contains in such a simple form the main contradictions of the more developed, complex forms that are specific of the totality of this mode of production. Another important point advanced in the introduction is the twofold character of the late works of Marx, existing one exoteric Marx and another esoteric Marx. The former is ‘the theoretician of modernization, the “dissident of liberalism” (Kurz), a representative of the Enlightenment who wanted to perfect industrial working society under proletarian leadership.’ (5) The latter is the one who critically assesses the basic categories of capital, starting from the commodity form. This distinction highlights the existing differences of Marx’s own historical time, in his interventions in the emerging workers’ movement and in his in-depth analysis of the logics of capital. In this case, Jappe argues that the exoteric Marx was important, but his main line of thought dated. Jappe then defends the understudied esoteric Marx as the one whose validity perseveres. Hence the critique of value to be presented in the book is posed in stark contrast with traditional Marxism, but similar to few other Marxist authors that have centred their work from the value form and the critique of the basic categories of Capital.

The first chapter deals with the commodity and its dual nature (13): use-value and value. Jappe reviews the first sections of Marx’s Capital (the second German edition) which contains an explanation of the commodity as a social relation that enables things produced by humans in specific processes to be exchanged. The secret is that commodities of different types, when exchanged, are equivalent, that is, they have the same value in a ratio proportional to the socially necessary labour time for their particular production (with the specific techniques available). Value then has a social form of exchange of equivalence, measured in ratios of labour time. As in Marx, Jappe stresses that the labour measured by time is abstract labour, with ‘abstract’ referring to the lack of concrete determinations in the specific characteristic of the actual labour process to produce different useful things (use-values). Through this operation, the human labour performed in capitalist society is then represented in value form and then constitutes the money form as a ‘real abstraction.’ This is claimed as the fetish that organizes capitalist society, which is not just a collective fantasy, but indeed the material way that social relations are determined and formed. In contrast to interpretations that posit value as embodied labour, Jappe contends that value defines an ontological domain through universal abstractions, which in turn are in contradiction with concrete reality. These tensions between the abstract and the concrete is claimed to be the most important feature of capitalist society, already present in its most elementary form: the commodity. This is how Marx moves from the C-M-C circuit towards the capitalist M-C-M´, and thus defines a mode of production that abstract labour requires to be materially accumulated as abstract wealth (materialized as money). This in turn demands more and more living labour so that capital, as self-valorising value (i.e. money that creates more money), can be sustained ad infinitum. But this is impossible or, following Marx, this mode of production is ‘mad.’

Chapter two traverses another controversial topic: labour as a specific capitalist phenomenon. Jappe first reminds us that labour-power is the only commodity that can create value while producing more value than it is worth. Rereading Marx, this phenomenon only occurs because the capitalist acquires the labour-power of the worker, which is paid with its value (i.e. the cost of its reproduction, which may include its family, in a specific place and time). However, while capitalists buy the labour-power for its true value, they materially receive more as the labour-power is usually exchanged for periods of time. The time that is above the period associated with value of labour-power is the origin of surplus value. This fact brings theoretical and practical challenges. Jappe tells us that with orthodox Marxism and other related strands, the focus of both theory and practice is placed on the class struggle between labour and capital. Examples of workers’ unions in the present but also in the past which struggle for more rights (i.e. to become fairly integrated within bourgeois society) offer a typical example of an instrumental use of Marx’s Capital to support fairer wages or shorter working days, as well as civil rights. More radical readings aim at the elimination of capitalists but keeping the workers as workers, and in this case, planning would be the way to rationally organize the division of labour. Jappe’s radical critique targets the fundamental category of labour, as represented in value and then in money, such that ‘[i]t is only in capitalism that labour as such has become the synthesizing principle of society.’ (75). Convincingly, the author vindicates abstract labour not only as capitalist but also as having an ontological dimension; labour is as such a particular activity outside other social practices and relations (in contrast to other modes of production) and specific to capitalist society. This implies that a Marxist theory, constructed upon the esoteric Marx, must criticize labour, rather than defend labour against capital.

Chapter three synthesizes the first two in a profound analysis to relate value theory and the crises theory in Marx. The core of the argument is that the dynamics of the capital as self-valorising value forms a tautological process, where individual capitalists compete among themselves, aiming at higher profits. This creates a tendency to increase the share of fixed capital in comparison to variable capital (i.e. living labour, which worth reminding is the only source of value and surplus value). To maintain the mass of profits with a tendency of decreasing prices, more and more commodities need to be produced. This leads to a systemic, unavoidable tendency that labour, which is the basis of value, is pushed out of the production process. In thought-provoking pages, Jappe maintains that value ceases to be a trustworthy representation insofar as value-productive living labour significantly decreases its relevance at the social level. At the same time, the value form as the totalizing bond of capitalist society maintains itself: ‘Far from disappearing, the value form, although “objectively” superseded, increasingly enters into collision with the material content it helps to create.’ (85) From this standpoint, Jappe marks a position in still open controversies within Marxist circles, namely the validity of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as indication of a final crisis of capitalism, the ecological limits of capitalist mode of production, the question of unproductive labour, the role of democratization, the growth of the ‘service sector’ and the importance of credit and fictitious capital. It is a dense chapter that touches very important points, illustrating the alleged pessimism of the critique of value, whose theorists defend the thesis that capitalist society has entered a terminal crisis with logical, fundamental limits since the seventies.

Jappe proceeds to discuss the commodity as a historical phenomenon in different societies and as the fetishized, metaphysical mode of organization of capitalist society. Following a formal analysis based on Hegelian logic, the author contends that the simple commodity relation already contains its further development in more complex forms, moving from the abstract to the concrete, where the more complex forms are derived from the internal contradictions of simpler forms. Remarkable here is the argument that ‘capitalism is realized metaphysics, the true realism of concepts dreamed of by the scholastics.’ In this case, the strength of the esoteric Marx is that the main categories of the capitalist mode of production are indeed idealist, yet ‘constitute an appropriate description of modern society’ (107) because they are idealistic categories. Jappe therewith demonstrates that incipient commodity exchanges within history are not the same under capitalism, yet have always contained the latent potential to become it. It is worth mentioning that many critiques see this ‘logical determinism’ as problematic, but Jappe rightly argues that capitalism as a mode of production is not the necessity of a teleological historical process. However, once it emerged and dominated social relations through its abstractions, the logic of the commodity will indeed act as developmental ‘iron’ laws. Yet for all this, capitalism is not eternal, and the critique of value assesses that for more than fifty years, value has entered a terminal crisis.

Chapter five focuses on forms of fetishism found in other societies, further reinforcing the specifics of the commodity form and value in capitalist society, but also indicating its similarities with other forms in primitive social organizations based on sacred symbolism. The concluding parts of the book serve to indicate the materiality of social organizations not based on labour, commodity and value (and markets). Moreover, Jappe criticizes leftist programs as reformist at best, and the failure of Marxists from the past and the present to move beyond labour. In an argument not completely dissimilar to Althusser’s aleatory materialism, Jappe states clearly that socialism or communism is not the necessary outcome of the end of capitalism. More probable is a generalized barbarism with few isolated islands of well-being. On the other hand, the future after capitalism is not by any means already defined, and this offers the possibility of another mode of production: ‘It is therefore well worth reassessing Aristotle’s idea of the “good life” as the real purpose of society, for such an idea is diametrically opposite to the service of the fetish-god of money.’ (165).

In summary, the English translation of The Adventures of the Commodity provides a necessary introduction to the critique of value for the anglophone world, a correct assessment of the complex dynamics of capitalist society at its most fundamental level. The logical approach offers a reliable means of diagnosing current tendencies in a society constrained by certain logical perimeters imposed by the capitalist mode of production. While the use of some Hegelian logic may challenge readers unfamiliar with it, the line of thought systematized by Jappe seems necessary as an analytical tool for understanding our social reality.

28 June 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21566_the-adventures-of-the-commodity-for-a-critique-of-value-by-anselm-jappe-reviewed-by-pedro-h-j-nardelli/

Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate

Rob Hunter, Rafael Khachaturian and Eva Nanopoulos (eds)

Palgrave MacMillan, Cham, Switzerland, 2023. 279 pp., $129.99 hb
ISBN 9783031361661

Reviewed by Tony Smith

About the reviewer
Tony Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science (emeritus) at Iowa State Universi



Marx’s presented his critique of political economy as a systematic ordering of the essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production. The first part of the original project, a ‘Book on Capital’, eventually became the three volumes of Capital we know today. The projected ‘Book on the State’ remained unwritten, although valuable clues to its content are scattered in Marx’s drafts and publications. Marx also critically assessed concrete state forms and activities in his political essays and newspaper articles.

Subsequent Marxian state theorists have attempted to interpret, revise or extend Marx’s legacy in their writings. Marxism and the Capitalist State ranks with the best of these works, clearly illustrating the great strengths of Marxian critique compared to mainstream and non-Marxian heterodox state theories. Main themes include: 1) Marx’s own perspective on the capitalist state, 2) the contributions made by subsequent theorists, 3) distinguishing features of contemporary states and 4) the implications of Marxian state theory for political practice, each outlined below.

In their introductory overview (‘Reopening the State Debate’), the editors provide an extremely helpful summary of Marx’s writings on the state. Important details of Marx’s position are examined in the other contributions. The authors in this collection broadly agree on the content of his crucial claims and on their continuing validity.

Firstly, the capitalist state is not merely a variant of a transhistorical form of political organization existing for millennia. As Rob Hunter expresses forcefully, the state form today must be comprehended in its historically specificity as a capitalist state (‘The Capitalist State as a Historically Specific Social Form’).

Additionally, the capitalist state, however, is not an instrument used by capitalists to further their interests. The owners and controllers of capital are in a ceaseless competitive war preventing any of them from being able to establish and maintain the general preconditions for the reproduction of capitalist society (Nate Holdren, ‘Social Murder: Capitalism’s Systematic and State-Organized Killing’, 190; Michael McCarthy, ‘Beyond Abstractionism: Notes on Conjunctural State Theory’, 217). The reproduction of capitalist society, then, requires an institutional agency not limited by the particular interests of particular capitalists. It requires a capitalist state. This does not mean that the capitalist state is ‘neutral’, capable of furthering any social end equally well. It is not merely a state in capitalist society. It is the state of capitalist society, an essential point emphasized throughout the book. More precisely, it is the ‘political’ form taken by the social relations defining capitalist society.

Capitalist production and exchange is a profit-driven system, devoted to the transformation (valorisation) of money value (M) initially invested in the production of commodities (C) into a return of greater monetary value (M′) from their sale, with M′ forming the basis for a new M, and so on without limit. ‘Capital’ refers to this valorisation process M-C-M′ as a whole, maintaining its identity from one completed circuit to the next. Since society as a whole is subjected to the impersonal valorisation imperative (‘M must become M′!’), we can speak of capital’s impersonal domination of society, with capital’s end, valorisation, having systematic priority over human ends (Chris O’Kane, ‘The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social Theory of the State’, 241).

Marx explains the valorisation process in terms of the difference between the monetary value workers receive (the wage) for selling their labour power for a period of time to those who own and control investment capital, on the one hand, and the monetary value the collective workforce creates during that period, on the other. This makes capitalism, no less than feudalism or slavery, a system of class exploitation. (Jasmine Chorley-Schulz interestingly extends Marx’s discussion of the exploitation of living labour to an account of the class position of soldiers in ‘Soldiers and the State’. Just as the social relationship of exploitation results in the combined power of cooperating workers appearing in the fetish form of a power of capital, the combined power of soldiers appears in the alien form of a coercive power of the capitalist state (126-129).

The capitalist state must establish and maintain the general preconditions for the reproduction of both the impersonal domination of capital and class exploitation. Holdren draws out a profound implication: the capitalist state is complicit in what Engels termed ‘social murder’. Occupational injury and illness, famine, poverty, addiction, unsafe consumer products, public health shortcomings, ecological devastation and so on, are not accidental occurrences due simply to evil capitalists or negligent state officials. They are systematic in a social world where what is good for capital has priority over what is good for human beings. The stark but unavoidable conclusion is that ‘all versions of capitalism will tend to generate depoliticised mass killing of working-class people’ (186).

Finally, Marx’s theory of the state culminates in the thesis that no political reform or set of reforms can free a capitalist society from impersonal domination and class exploitation. A revolutionary rupture from capitalism – and the capitalist state – is required. (Hunter’s essay, a superb analysis of the implications of Marx’s theory of social forms for state theory, makes a truly compelling case for this conclusion.)

The introduction also offers a concise summary of the work of major Marxian state theorists since Marx’s day (7-11). Alyssa Battistoni presents a succinct summary of the views on the state of Marxian environmental theorists such as James O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster (‘State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene’). Kristin Munro (‘Socially Reproductive Workers, ‘Life-Making’, and State Repression’) and Chris O’Kane forcefully reaffirm the main claims about the state in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, avoiding the notorious obscurity of Adorno’s own writing. Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno (‘From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State’) summarize the core of Poulantzas’ influential theory of the state. Michael McCarthy examines the evolution of Poulantzas thought in detail, arguing that his later work fails to escape from the functionalist perspective of early writings. Numerous authors explicitly acknowledge the influence of the immediately previous generation of Marxian theorists, highlighting especially the important contributions of Moise Postone, Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld.

The summaries provided in the collection are, of course, no substitute for reading the works summarized. But they do convey the intellectual richness of the Marxian tradition and are a helpful guide to further study.

Throughout the collection, a wide range of features of the contemporary capitalist state are considered. Alyssa Battistoni examines the contemporary capitalist state’s capability of responding to the environmental crises. Her typology of different Marxian positions on this issue greatly illuminates on-going debates and deserves to be widely known (41-44).

Rafael Khachaturian’s ‘Crisis, Social Reproduction, and the Capitalist State: Notes on an Uncertain Conjuncture’ explores state policies in the response to the Covid pandemic. Priority was quite obviously given to the restoration of capital accumulation over social care. Systematic bias in access to care on the basis of race, gender and geography was no less obvious. Khachaturian’s paper also explores the rise of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, a ‘crisis regime of permanent exception’, showing how the decreased importance of political parties and legislative bodies relative to bureaucratic administration and executive powers erodes the state’s legitimacy (86).

Maher and Aquanno examine a particular case of bureaucratic administration in ‘From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State’. They describe how the U.S. Federal Reserve is both integrated with the capitalist economy and insulated from democratic pressures. The Fed proved to be insulated from executive state power as well as when the Trump administration proved unable to assert presidential authority over it. Another theme of this chapter is how the increasing power of the financial sector and Central Banks is not in tension with industrial capital, pace the view of many heterodox economists. The allocations of the financial sector have intensified disciplinary power over the working class to the benefit of industrial capital. (This theme is developed further in their important recent book, The Fall and Rise of American Finance).

The actions by the Fed and other Central Banks in response to the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic are instances of the ‘war-emergency paradigm’ examined in Eva Nanopoulos’ essay (‘To Embrace or To Reject: Marxism and the “War-Emergency Paradigm”’). She argues that the war-emergency paradigm is ‘a prevalent, if not the de facto, mode of governing of the capitalist state’, even if financial crises and epidemics make it also ‘an expression of our current age of capitalist catastrophe’ (159).

In ‘“Bursting Asunder the Integument”: Democracy, Digitalization, and the State’, Dimitrios Kivotidis discusses how the digital revolution has enhanced the reactionary powers of the bourgeois state to monitor citizens and manipulate public opinion. He argues convincingly that targeted advertising, misinformation and digital echo chambers all contribute to the political disorganization of workers by promoting a ‘fragmented, empiricist understanding of social and political phenomena […] incompatible with the comprehensive and holistic viewpoint that is the prerequisite for a conscious critique of capitalism and pursuit of a radical alternative’ (63-64).

Kristin Munro’s essay (‘Socially Reproductive Workers, “Life-Making,” and State Repression’) considers the role of state workers in social services such as health care and education. She presents a powerful Marxian response to social reproduction theorists who fail to adequately appreciate how these services contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist economy.

As noted above, all authors in this collection accept the practical imperative to move to a new stage of world history where the impersonal domination of capital and the exploitation of the capital/wage labour relationship are overcome. All agree that this involves overcoming the capitalist state. Nonetheless, some affirm that it is possible, in the meantime, for progressive movements to successfully struggle for laws and public policies furthering the interests of workers, the poor, those facing environmental risks and so on, even if these laws and policies are bound to remain profoundly limited, distorted and subject to reversal in capitalism. The most vehement defence of this ‘class struggle’ perspective is presented by Michael McCarthy. He grants the strong tendency for the capitalist state to put the needs of capital accumulation before other concerns. He insists, however, that a tendency is not a certainty (224). Starting from Poultanzas’s description of the state as a strategic field, McCarthy argues for a greater scope of political contingencies than the functionalist residues of Poultanzas’s own state theory allow. Despite the limits of capitalist democracy, successful struggles within these political institutions can restructure power relations in society in ways that benefit workers and the oppressed (227). Khachaturian agrees: ‘It is quite likely that the state will play a role within the transition to any emancipatory political project (no matter how remote this possibility seems today)’ (94). Alyssa Battistoni similarly insists that the ‘urgency of climate change renders it imperative to engage with institutions as they presently exist’ (32).

In the contrasting ‘structuralist’ position, the salient fact is simply that the capitalist state is never not a manifestation of capitalist social relations. Apparently progressive state laws and policies that are adopted do not offer an escape from those social relations. Kivotidis, for example, writes that ‘the adverse effects of digital capitalism on social consciousness cannot be ameliorated within the confines of bourgeois institutions through regulation and “radical reforms”’ (54). If adverse effects cannot be ameliorated, social actions aiming at reforms have no point. O’Kane similarly asserts without qualification that ‘anti-capitalist political movements that enter the political sphere of capitalism are absorbed and depoliticized’ (245). If that is their inevitable fate, Marxists should not support them. While Munro acknowledges that the role of state workers in health care and education is contradictory, their primary role in her account is to ‘perpetuate the antagonism and social misery inherent to capitalism’ (178). Why should Marxists join political struggles to improve access to quality health care and education if it means perpetuating antagonism and misery? Praxis needs instead to be revolutionary, ‘smashing’, rather than working within, the capitalist state (Kivotidis 55, 69). If revolution is impossible in the given context, the only acceptable alternative is an unrelenting critique of capitalism as a negative totality and the capitalist state’s role in reproducing that totality.

Holdren’s essay reminds us that the questions at issue here were already posed in Capital. Nineteenth-century struggles in England to limit the length of the working day were successful. Did this reform benefit workers? Marx’s answer is ‘yes’ in many profound respects. Having the time to recover from work, nurture children, deepen other relationships, become informed about community issues and so on, is better than having to work 16-hour days! In other equally profound respects, however, the answer must be an emphatic ‘no’. After state legislation imposed limits on the production and appropriation of absolute surplus value from extensions of the working day, representatives of capital introduced new technologies and forms of labour organization enabling relative surplus value to be produced and appropriated. As a result, capital’s impersonal domination and the class exploitation of wage labour were renewed and reinforced. Those who see the capitalist state as a site of struggle can appeal to the former aspect of Marx’s writing, while adherents of the ‘structuralist’ position find ample textual support in the latter.

There is, I think, considerable truth on both sides. When workers struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, they remain within a capital/wage labour relationship of domination and exploitation. When these and other progressive struggles are successful to some degree, the illusion that the shortcomings of capitalism can be overcome in some new variant is likely to strengthen. What is not illusionary is capital’s amorphousness. In response to successful progressive reforms, it will mutate to pursue new opportunities for commodification, monetarisation and valorisation opened up by the reforms. As Holdren writes, ‘[a]cting within state institutional channels tends to encourage social struggles to express themselves in ways that do not disrupt the operation of the valorisation imperative, let alone threaten to end capitalism’ (203).

On the other hand, however, the revolutionary change called for opponents of ‘radical reformism’ requires a mass revolutionary consciousness that simply does not exist at present. Insisting on revolution nonetheless also ‘do[es] not disrupt the operation of the valorisation imperative, let alone threaten to end capitalism’. Hoping as O’Kane does that a sufficiently compelling negative dialectic will illuminate how ‘objective and subjective dimensions of negative totality rel[y] on each other’, and thereby ‘break “the spell” of identification and awaken a global subject that would negate negative totality’ also does not seem adequate (237). Why would even the most powerful account of how the objective structures of capital and the subjective dispositions of those trapped within them reinforce each other awaken a global subject dedicated to negate such an all-powerful negative totality? Wouldn’t a compelling description of being trapped in a closed totality foster accommodation, cynical opportunism, stoic resignation or despair? If pursuit of even the most radical reforms risks reinforcing the reign of capital, doesn’t renouncing progressive social movements in the name of a critique of negative totality run precisely the same risk?

In my view, the salient theoretical point here concerns the distinction between ‘totality’ and ‘totalizing’. A totality incorporates everything apparently ‘other’, reducing it to no more than a moment of itself. When Marx refers to capital as a ‘dominant subject’, this might suggest that he sees capital as a totality fully subjecting the social world to its imperatives (Commodify! Monetarize! Valorise!). This would make the development and mobilization of human capabilities either a form of capital (‘variable capital’) or a ‘free gift’ to capital. But this is only one component of Marx’s concept of capital. It is also the case that capital is a mere empty form, completely lacking powers of its own. What appear as the powers of capital are nothing but the collective creative powers of social individuals (and the mobilized powers of nature, science, our shared cultural heritage and so on) in an alien form:


In exchange for his labour capacity as a given magnitude [that is, a wage] he [the worker] surrenders its creative power, like Esau who gave up his birthright for a mess of pottage […] [T]he creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital and confronts him as an alien power’ (Marx 1986: 233).

Capital’s immanent drive to be a totality is always frustrated by this dependence on ‘the creative power of labour’. From an ontological standpoint, then, capital cannot be the totality it wants to be, so to speak. It parasitically depends on an ‘other’ that is ‘inside’ it. Capital is an objective contradiction, at once an Absolute Power and an Absolute Nothing.

But while capital cannot be adequately conceptualized as a closed totality, it is very much a totalizing power, capable of forcing the surrender of workers’ creative powers. As Hunter notes, we know what compels this surrender: separation from the objective preconditions of human life, the means of production and means of subsistence (261, 268). This core theoretical claim of the critique of political economy has an important practical implication: challenges to this separation are at least implicitly challenges to capitalist society.

From this perspective, social movements struggling to direct investments in means of production towards social ends, to expand access to means of subsistence (in the broadest sense of the term, including education and health care) on the basis of social needs, and to create a social space to advocate for both can in principle be affirmed from a Marxian standpoint. Marx defended freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and representative bodies on these grounds, as Nanopoulos notes (153-4). Marx’s defence of child labour laws is worth quoting in this context:


They [the working class] know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts. (Marx 1985: 189)

Other considerations support this conclusion. When collective struggles for reforms are successful, confidence in the collective power of people to change the social world may grow. When these successes prove limited and distorted, as they invariably will, new social movements aiming at less limited and less distorted results may arise. When those struggles fail or lead to only severely limited and distorted successes themselves, those engaged might conclude (correctly!) that the root problem lies with the property and production relationships of capitalism. In the right circumstances, a revolutionary political consciousness could possibly develop on the requisite mass scale.

There are, of course, no guarantees that will occur. Even worse, the pursuit of reforms may well foster the illusions of reformism and rejuvenate capital by opening up new paths of accumulation. Nonetheless, mass revolutionary consciousness is surely a necessary condition for radical social change. There are strong practical reasons for Marxists to be wary of theories of the state that in effect rule out the possibility of that condition being met by assuming from the start that capital’s power is all-encompassing. It is, I think, preferable to agree with Nanopoulos that pursing a specific political reform in a particular time and place is a pragmatic matter (152).

The editors honestly note that many important topics are not considered adequately in this collection, including race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and gender, the interstate system, migration and statelessness, constitutional democracy, alternative political forms taken by the capitalist state and violence and conflict in geopolitical relations (4). State funding of research and development that private capitals find too risky or too long-term to fund themselves can be added to this list, along with that state-bestowed intellectual property rights that enabling immense private profits to be appropriated on the basis of publicly funded R&D. But no single collection of essays should be expected to cover the full range of theoretical and practical issues regarding the capitalist state. What can be found in this book is more than enough to make it an immensely valuable contribution to Marxian theory. And more than enough to confirm Hunter’s assertion in the book’s final sentences:


The abolition of capitalism does not consist in the affirmation of fetishized conceptions of law or the state. Instead the abolition of capitalism is the creation of an alternative society – one in which collective decision-making, production validated through planning rather than exchange, and the freedom of each premised on the freedom of all will obtain in social forms wholly unlike those that presently constitute our misery (269-270).

24 June 2024

ReferencesKarl Marx 1985 Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 20 (New York: International Publishers).
Karl Marx 1986 Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse] Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28 (New York: International Publishers).


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21552_marxism-and-the-capitalist-state-towards-a-new-debate-by-rob-hunter-rafael-khachaturian-and-eva-nanopoulos-eds-reviewed-by-tony-smith/

The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital




Beverley Best
Verso, New York, 2024. 358 pp., $29.95 pb
ISBN 9781804294802

Reviewed by Carlos Velasquez


Former Greek Finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, recently adhered to the belief that we no longer live under capitalism. Bewildered by the contemporary forms that capitalist relations of production take, he argues that platforms have extinguished the labour-capital relation, and that we now inhabit a ‘techno-feudalist’ order. In overlooking what is continuous, what remains at the core of the two systems he identifies, Varoufakis misses the forest for the trees, or the base for the superstructure, contributing, thus, to the noise and turbulence of an already blurred reality. Beverley Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, is a beacon in this world. By advancing both a rigorous and original reading of Capital Vol. 3, Best illuminates the dynamics that govern and determine capital’s phenomenal forms, clarifying a muddled present and reminding us that, despite wishful thinking, we still live under capital.

The elucidation of the contemporary moment in The Automatic Fetish, as well as the proposal for the interpretation of the third volume of Marx’s Capital, is grounded on a straightforward premise: that the ‘determinism of the base/superstructure metaphor orients and coheres the analysis in Capital III’ (2). As Best explains, base determines superstructure, not the converse. The social relations that constitute capital’s base must always take a concrete form in the world as it actually is. Yet the ‘capitalist base disappears into the superstructure’ (4) while remaining the force of gravity that determines the form’s movement. On that account, Best proposes that ‘Capital III is a book about ideology’ (336). It is a work that looks to demonstrate how the movement of capital mystifies the ‘the essential character of capital’s movement’ (8). In other words, through the analysis of its different social forms and transformations – from surplus-value to profit, from profit to interest and rent – we find that these expressions, in their concrete manifestation, are mystified and reified. They appear as automatic subjects or essential conditions, burying, thus, the living-labour that constitutes them. Best defines this dynamic of obfuscation as capital’s ‘perceptual physics’ (9).

Through development of this notion, of the concept of ‘perceptual physics’, Best advances a fundamental contribution to the development of a Marxian conception of ideology. She does so by articulating both a concept of ideology as a process of subject formation, alongside consideration of ideology as a modality of capital’s reproduction, as inversion. By defining capital’s movement, its mandate to abstract and mystify as ‘perceptual physics’, Best is able to convey ideology not as something restricted to the superstructure or a false interpretation of reality, but on the contrary, as the consequence of capital’s dynamic, that subjectivity is constituted through participation in economic relations, by encountering the forms that value takes, for ‘capital, in its reproduction as both a system of exploitation and a mode of domination, is a dynamic of social content and social form that is also a mode of representation – the production of particular distorted appearances that stabilize into a generalized “common sense”’ (84).

As a companion to Capital Vol. 3, The Automatic Fetish follows the structure of Marx’s work as it emphasizes the dynamic of capital’s ‘perceptual physics’, what we could consider as a retracing of the steps for conveying a process of continuous separation of the forms of appearance from the source of new value. The first part of the book addresses this problem of estrangement and of the mystification of surplus-value more directly by explicating its transformation into profit and then, its further development by which profits are reified and converted into autonomous objects in the evaluation of their rate. In describing Marx’s critique of this process, Best underlines the dynamic unity or coherence of this tendency. Through her reading of Marx, we see how the collapsing of the organic composition of capital into cost price, and the consequential reification of the latter as the natural requirement for profit, are all part of a chain of obfuscation that is set in motion through the initial process of introducing value into the concrete world. It is from this very first instance, the capitalist social relation, that the dynamic of repeated and continuous inversion of subject and object, the fetishization of capital’s social forms as value-creators, is ignited (29).

In her description of this movement towards the reification of social relations, Best focuses on Marx’s critique of capital’s tendency towards crisis, the fact that ‘[c]apital carries on by breaking down’ (45). However, she adds to the comprehension of this tendency by first underlining the fact that while capital generates the production of surplus, it also ‘negates the actualization of abundance in the absolute development of production and consumption’ (131). She therefore proposes to think of capital precisely as the negation of abundance, not as the hinderance of the means of achieving it, but in terms of the constriction that production and circulation for the sake of capital imposes upon the satisfaction of human needs. Then, following this initial argument on the cause of crisis, Best proposes an innovative interpretation of Marx’s critique by arguing that in his evaluation of the development of an associated mode of production, Marx ‘scatters’ a series of speculative deductions which look to show how the advancements in production and circulation imposed by capital, if disengaged from the capital’s gravitational pull, could provide the means for a future of generalized abundance. Best therefore argues that the transition into post-capitalism ‘will be a matter of developing through, as opposed to against, capital’s inbuilt portals to another “non-existent but non-fictional”, higher because intentional, form of social modality’ (130). Hence, Best characterizes the dialectical manner of Marx’s critique as utopian, as a form of ‘speculative materialism’ (193).

In reviewing the transformation of profit into merchant profit, interest and rent, Best interestingly qualifies these changes as ‘decompositions’. Such a characterization has to do with the fact that with the movement to any of these subspecies of profit, we reach the instance of ‘pure form’ and ‘pure fetish’. The initially mystified object, profit, is then itself obfuscated as it is forced to take the shape of commercial profit, interest or rent. We arrive, thus, at the instance where money makes money, where ‘what is hidden is not simply the role of living labour in production but, the mediation by the entire production process itself in capital’s expansion’ (177). The pinnacle of this dynamic of fetishization is then achieved with the form of interest-bearing capital, the ‘automatic fetish’ (184), under which interest, as a sort of natural, independent and absolute object, appears to inherently produce profits. Here again, Best foregrounds the utopian dimension of Marx’s analysis, since the absolute form of abstraction represented by interest-bearing capital is also considered as a portal towards a world beyond capitalist production. The conception of profits as completely separated from the process of production allows us to think of manufacturing decoupled from production price. Furthermore, this form of absolute decoupling overturns notions of the requirement of capitalist management and strengthens Best’s idea that ‘for Marx, the social form of interest-bearing capital and its socialization in the credit system signal, on an immediate level, nothing less than the real (but unrealized) abolition of the capitalist and, on a deeper level, that of the capitalist mode of production’ (186).

It is then, in the analysis and untangling of the section on ground-rent where Best clearly traces and manifests the methodological operation of of value critique. While threading and clarifying Marx’s complicated arguments towards the demystification of land as a value producing entity, the author explains and displays the dynamic of Marxian critique as one that operates in terms of ‘representation and exposition’ (287). Value, just like gravity, can only be measured and mapped in relation to the force it applies upon other objects. To understand that this force exists, we cannot speak of it only in the abstract or focusing exclusively on the immediate object. The process of unveiling the invisible pull effected by value can only be achieved through demonstration, by mapping how value’s continuous disappearance into its surface expressions is not a marginal outcome of its action, but the central premise of its operation.

Because Best manages to both advance a coherent and original interpretation of Marx’s Capital Vol. 3, while at the same time using Marxian methodology as a process of unveiling to make sense of value’s contemporary forms of superficial manifestation, The Automatic Fetish ought to be considered not just as a companion to Capital Vol. 3, but as guide to the dialectical formulation that constitutes Marx’s critique. Therefore, just like Fredric Jameson’s characterization of Capital Vol. 1 as a book about unemployment allowed for a reconsideration of the work, Beverley Best’s claim that Capital Vol. 3 is a book about ideology constitutes the emergence of a new and comprehensive understanding or Marx’s critique of capital.

12 July 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21578_the-automatic-fetish-the-law-of-value-in-marxs-capital-by-beverley-best-reviewed-by-carlos-velasquez/

The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital


Reviewed by Jacob Spenser Wilson

About the reviewer
Jacob Spenser Wilson is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. 


Capitalist crises cannot only be measured by its catastrophic effects on society, but also by the reception of their most staunchest critique: Karl Marx’s Capital. Many have pointed out that the rising interest in Marx’s magnum opus seemingly coincides with capitalism’s deepest moments of crisis, as if it suggests discontent with the present system. With much attention given to volume one or the many drafts to which it culminated, until recently there has remained little attention to the subsequent volumes of Capital. Beverly Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, contributes to this growing resurgence and gap by taking Marx’s value theory and using it to read volume three. This work is nothing short of a masterful reading of Marx’s form-analysis and defends the continued relevance of Marx’s work in the twenty-first century.

In a critical and methodological reading, Best uproots ‘capital’s hidden, inner movement and the identification of its historical conditions of emergence’ to study what she calls ‘capital’s perceptual physics’(9). Her work responds immediately to critics of value-form theory who conceive of it as a narrowed reading of the first few chapters of Capital, demonstrating how Marx’s initial investigation of value and its forms undergird the whole of Capital. Her argument hinges on the centrality of volume three for the critique of political economy, which she argues is ‘a theory of a particular movement that generates new percepts – a movement arising from collective uncoordinated activity that, over a couple of centuries of objectification through repetition, produces a particular appearance of things that launches a specific world history’ (326). In short, she takes the concept of fetish and asks what economic forms it distorts once capital is moving through its M-C-M’ circuit.

As Best shows, it is one thing to analyze the fetish-character of capital in the ideal-average scenario that Marx constructs at the beginning of volume one, but quite another to analyze fetishism in volume three where there ‘is both a broadening and a focusing of the concept’ (48). In building this analysis, Best gives one of the most detailed accounts of the consequences of capital’s fetishized forms inherent in its movement for the study of political economy. By placing value-theory at the center of volume three, Best is able to draw radical conclusions for the study and critique of economics and how the law of value maintains the coherent core of Marx’s project.

The book is organized as a companion to volume three and is made up of two sections which trace out the internal dynamics of capital’s ‘perpetual physics.’ The first section deals with the rate of profit, the fetish of the rate of surplus-value, to showcase how production, competition and finally crisis distort and contort the misery of the production process into a blind pursuit of M-M’. Best begins with the category of cost price to show how it ‘is the initial category from which all others will derive’ (23). Cost price, ‘a disciplining objective appearance’, is essentially the cost incurred by the capitalist to produce a commodity (18-19). It becomes the basis for competition since as long as a commodity is sold above the cost price, it can be sold below its value allowing for competitors to undersell and take a bigger share of the market. From this initial obfuscation, Best demonstrates how capital’s movement obscures the source of surplus-value, the subsumption of labor-power to ever increasing productivity, which as a result makes capitalist’s pursuit of profit a rational outcome in a commodity producing society. As she says, ‘[f]rom the standpoint of the capitalist, the only calculation of concern is rate of profit – the immediate form of appearance that today dictates global production and commerce across the world market’ (36). In short, Best demonstrates how the creation of surplus-value is obscured by the machinations of the economy as capitalists pursue profit as if money can magically double itself.

The second section deals with the metamorphosis of profit, following ‘Marx’s exposition of the decomposition of profit into the surface forms of industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, and ground rent’ (137). It is ultimately an examination of the forms of profit that obscure the ‘hidden abode of production’ across the M-C-M’ circuit, concealing the costs incurred on the lives and bodies of workers. Best unravels the deep irrationality that drives the capitalist pursuit of profit across industries, from agriculture and industrial production, finance and commerce in this theoretically dense yet prescient analysis. Part of the charm of the book is following Best’s excavation of these fetish forms and how they distort perceptions to pursue appearances, while the essence of the matter is driven by the subjugation of the working class to the few. The consequences of the movement of capital are vast, and to preserve people’s own experience, following Best’s exposition, I will highlight two key parts of the book: Marx’s theory of crisis and the analysis of ground-rent.

The chapter on crisis foregrounds capitalism’s dialectical identity as creative destruction. In recent years, this idea of crisis as an internal mechanism to ensure its reproduction has gained a lot of traction. What Best offers, in reading volume three, is an interpretation of crisis as an internal dynamic of capitalism itself, instead of an aberration of equilibrium. In Best’s own words, crisis is ‘the means by which capital displaces the obstacles it erects between itself and its singular objective’ (123). Yet it is not simply a negation of an obstacle that characterizes capitalist crisis; it is a negation of a contradiction by way of a contradiction: the universality of separation. This contradiction, expressed through crisis, is one of capitalism’s oldest conditions, and Best highlights how separation undergirds capitalism’s crisis tendency to render certain sectors superfluous in order to grow other sectors of the economy, to increase its flexibility to build regimes of accumulation. In this light, crisis at once tears down its own boundaries to erect new ones that it will eventually be forced to confront down the road of history. What lies behind this creative destruction, as Best describes, ‘entails precarity, unemployment, poverty, illness, gendered and racialized violence, and social exclusion’ of proletarians the world over (130). The movement of capital invokes a complicated question about the crisis tendency of capitalism into a simple one: why must capitalists instrumentalize humanity as a means to an end, that is, money that begets more money?

Ground-rent, the fetish form of landed property, occupies a significant chapter in the book and for good reason. The Financial Times recently published an article noting the significant increase in market value of arable land in the United States, causing private-equity to lead the charge in adding this asset to their portfolios. This phenomenon stands in stark contradiction to the many experiences of family-run or small farmers and ranchers in the US who, in many cases, are facing the heightened competitive pressures of an increasingly industrialized agricultural production, thus going out of business, paying more taxes and rent, as well as producing commodities for the market rather than for need. Marx, according to Best, provides the key to understanding this situation with the idea that ground-rent obscures the productivity of living labor as the source of surplus-value (250-251). The consequence is that ground-rent can increase even as the productivity of labor decreases, the prices of agricultural commodities goes up and the rate of profit demonstrably declines for agricultural production on a global scale. These tendencies arise from the movement of capital and, as Best says, ‘the virtually infinite ways in which human beings can be in metabolism with land are subordinated to the exigencies of the capital-labour relation – that is, to the law of value’ (243). Ground-rent shows itself as a form of social domination that subordinates land to the control of landowners for the sole purpose of making money from money. It renders land into a means for a ridiculous end, when agricultural products like food are produced not to satisfy hunger but again, to generate profit for landowners.

It is hard to disagree with Best’s work given its thorough reading, careful argument and clarity in demonstrating Marx’s internal coherence. Yet we might doubt Best’s assertion that Capital is, among many other things, ‘not a study of capitalist society, it is a book about how to think the material conditions of what might come after’ (341). While the task of critique is to comprehend the present in order to build a meaningful alternative to human society, uncertainty as a necessary mediation for its construction could be defended. While it is appealing to posit a latent kernel to be excavated for a future society, particularly after forty years of capitalist counterrevolution, we might nevertheless wonder what possibilities would be closed off if this were the case. Certainly, we need to understand and critique capitalist society in order to draw a path forward from its retched depths, and in so doing theorize alternatives. But we should also recognize the limits of our own imagination as it is determined by this base.

Despite this very minor point, The Automatic Fetish makes a strong case for why people should grapple with Marx’s work in its entirety and as an incomplete work that requires its application to the current political conjuncture. Best illuminates how the movement of capital produces dizzying heights and hidden surfaces that make capital’s reproduction possible. While the book gives focus to volume three, it draws much needed attention to all three volumes, which needs to be done if we are to adequately understand the value of Marx’s work. Best’s work recovers Marx’s essential critique of political economy, which revolves around its subordination of humanity to mere means for the ultimate end of making more money. Readers ought to sit with the book and work through it alongside Marx’s Capital. Its difficulty will reward the careful reader who applies its findings in the analysis of our present conjuncture, bringing economic science down to earth to show why another world is and must be possible.

17 June 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21544_the-automatic-fetish-the-law-of-value-in-marxs-capital-by-beverley-best-reviewed-by-jacob-spenser-wilson/