Bangladesh will maintain support for Rohingya refugees, says Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus has vowed to continue supporting the Rohingya refugees and the garment trade in Bangladesh. Yunus, who took office after a student-led protest.



Muhammad Yunus pledges continued support for Rohingya refugees and garment trade.

Agence France-Presse
Dhaka,UPDATED: Aug 19, 2024 

In ShortYunus took office after a student-led revolution ousted Sheikh Hasina
Bangladesh's garment industry accounts for 85% of its $55 billion annual exports
Yunus returned from Europe this month

Bangladesh will maintain support both for its immense Rohingya refugee population and its vital garment trade, Nobel laureate and new leader Muhammad Yunus said Sunday in his first major policy address.

Yunus, 84, returned from Europe this month after a student-led revolution to take up the monumental task of steering democratic reforms in a country riven by institutional decay.

His predecessor Sheikh Hasina, 76, had suddenly fled the country days earlier by helicopter after 15 years of iron-fisted rule.

Setting out his priorities in front of diplomats and UN representatives, Yunus vowed continuity on two of the biggest policy challenges of his caretaker administration.

"Our government will continue to support the million-plus Rohingya people sheltered in Bangladesh," Yunus said.

"We need the sustained efforts of the international community for Rohingya humanitarian operations and their eventual repatriation to their homeland, Myanmar, with safety, dignity and full rights," he added.

Bangladesh is home to around one million Rohingya refugees.

Most of them fled neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 after a military crackdown now the subject of a genocide investigation by a United Nations court.

The weeks of unrest and mass protests that toppled Hasina also saw widespread disruption to the country's linchpin textile industry, with suppliers shifting orders out of the country.

"We won't tolerate any attempt to disrupt the global clothing supply chain, in which we are a key player," Yunus said.

Bangladesh's 3,500 garment factories account for around 85 percent of its $55 billion in annual exports.

Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microfinance, credited with helping millions of Bangladeshis out of grinding poverty.

He took office as "chief adviser" to a caretaker administration -- all fellow civilians bar two retired generals -- and has said he wants to hold elections "within a few months".

Before her ouster, Hasina's government was accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of her political opponents.

She fled the country on August 5 to neighbouring India, her government's biggest political patron and benefactor, when protesters swarmed into the capital Dhaka to force her out of office.

'Hundreds were killed'

"Hundreds of thousands of our valiant students and people rose up against the brutal dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina," Yunus said during his address, at times visibly emotional.

"She fled the country, but only after the security forces and her party's student wing committed the worst civilian massacre since the country's independence," he added.

"Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured."

More than 450 people were killed between the start of a police crackdown on student protests and her ouster three weeks later.


'Dictatorship'

A UN fact-finding mission is expected in Bangladesh soon to probe "atrocities" committed during that time.

"We want an impartial and internationally credible investigation into the massacre," Yunus said on Sunday.

"We will provide whatever support the UN investigators need."

Yunus again committed to hold free and fair elections "as soon as we can complete our mandate to carry out vital reforms in our election commission, judiciary, civil administration, security forces, and media".

"The Sheikh Hasina dictatorship destroyed every institution of the country," he said.

He added that his administration would "make sincere efforts to promote national reconciliation".

Interim govt chief Yunus accuses Sheikh Hasina of destroying every institution of Bangladesh

In their efforts to stay in power, Sheikh Hasina's dictatorship destroyed every institution of the country. The judiciary was broken. Democratic rights were suppressed, says Yunus

PTI

Dhaka

 Published 18.08.24

Muhammad Yunus.

Bangladesh's interim government chief Muhammad Yunus on Sunday accused deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina of destroying every institution of the country in her efforts to stay in power as he promised to hold a free, fair and participatory election as soon as his government completes the "mandate" of carrying out "vital reforms." Hasina, 76, resigned and fled to India on August 5 following a massive protest by students against a controversial quota system in government jobs.

After Hasina's ouster, 84-year-old Yunus took oath as the Chief Adviser of the interim government on August 8.

“In their efforts to stay in power, Sheikh Hasina's dictatorship destroyed every institution of the country. The judiciary was broken. Democratic rights were suppressed through a brutal decade-and-a-half long crackdown," United News of Bangladesh quoted Yunus as saying through his Press Secretary Shafiqul Alam.


His comments came as he briefed diplomats stationed in Dhaka for the first time since the interim government's inception.

Yunus said he took over a country which was in many ways a complete mess.


He emphasises on required reforms in the Election Commission, judiciary, civil administration, security forces and media.


The chief adviser said elections were rigged blatantly and generations of young people grew up without exercising their voting rights.


“Banks were robbed with full political patronisation. And the state coffer was plundered by abusing power,” Yunus said, adding that they will also make sincere efforts to promote national reconciliation.


Yunus said they will undertake robust and far-reaching economic reforms to restore macroeconomic stability and sustained growth, with priority attached to good governance and combating corruption and mismanagement.


He said the top priority of the interim government would be to bring the law and order situation under control.


“We will be close to normalcy within a short period, with the unwavering support of our people and patriotic armed forces,” Yunus said.


The police force has also resumed its operations. The armed forces will continue to serve in aid of civil power as long as the situation warrants.


“Our government remains pledge-bound to ensure the safety and security of all religious and ethnic groups,” he said.


Bangladesh saw a spike in violence against members of Hindu communities following the fall of the Hasina-led government.


Yunus said the interim government will hold a "free, fair participatory" election as soon as it completes the "mandate" to carry out "vital reforms." He said they have also made it a priority to ensure justice and accountability for all the killings and violence committed during the recent mass uprising.


He said they will uphold and promote all their international legal obligations, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law.


"Our government will adhere to all international, regional and bilateral instruments it is a party to. Bangladesh shall continue to remain an active proponent of multilateralism, with the UN at the core," Yunus said.


"Our government will nurture friendly relations with all countries in the spirit of mutual respect and understanding and shared interests," he said.


He called upon their trade and investment partners to maintain their trust in Bangladesh for economic prosperity.


“Bangladesh stands at the crossroads of a new beginning. Our valiant students and people deserve a lasting transformation of our nation. It is a difficult journey and we need your help along the way. We need to fulfil their aspirations. The sooner the better,” he said, adding that they have to create opportunities to build a poverty-free and prosperous new Bangladesh.


“We believe all our friends and partners in the international community will stand by our government and people as we chart a new democratic future,” said Yunus.


Yunus paid deep respect and homage to all those valiant students and innocent people who made the supreme sacrifice.


“Students of no other countries in our recent memory had to pay so much a price for expressing their democratic aspirations, dreaming a discrimination-free, equitable and environmentally-friendly nation where human rights of every citizen are fully protected,” he said.


He sought the international community’s support to rebuild Bangladesh.


On the Rohingya issue, he said the interim government will continue to support the million-plus Rohingya people sheltered in Bangladesh.


"We need sustained efforts of the international community for Rohingya humanitarian operations and their eventual repatriation to their homeland, Myanmar, with safety, dignity and full rights," Yunus said.

He said the interim government looks forward to maintaining and enhancing Bangladesh’s contributions to the UN peacekeeping operations

Despite improvement in situation, minorities in Bangladesh remain worried

By Ariful Islam Mithu
Aug 18, 2024
HINDUSTAN TIMES


Leaders of minority communities met interim government head Muhammad Yunus on August 13 and raised concerns about attacks on their homes, businesses, and temples


Dhaka: Attacks on homes, businesses, and places of worship of religious minorities across Bangladesh have come down significantly over the past week, though these communities remain worried because of sporadic incidents of violence in different parts of the country

.

Bangladeshi Hindus protesting against the violence that has taken place against their businesses and homes after Sheikh Hasina’s ouster (AFP Photo)

Minorities in Bangladesh, mainly Hindus, who make up eight per cent of the population of nearly 170 million, faced attacks after former premier Sheikh Hasina stepped down and fled to India on August 5 following a month-long uprising against her regime in which at least 650 people died.

Amid a power vacuum, the homes, places of worship, and businesses of religious minorities were attacked in parts of Bangladesh on August 5. Hindu temples were attacked and vandalised in Dhamrai in Dhaka, Natore, Kalapara in Patuakhali, Shariatpur, and Faridpur, while homes were attacked in Jessore, Noakhali, Meherpur, Chandpur, and Khulna. Some 40 shops owned by Hindus were vandalised in Dinajpur.

The interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus assumed office on August 8, three days after the law and order situation completely broke down and there were no police personnel to protect the people.

Ashish Kumar Sarkar, an assistant professor at Ataikula Madpur Amena Khatun Degree College in Pabna district, said, “During that time when there was no government, we were in a situation where we didn’t know whom to call if anything happened.

“But now different political parties have given us assurances. As a result, we are now somewhat reassured,” he said. “The police are on duty, and army soldiers are patrolling the streets. We have someone to call on.”

However, Sarkar said Hindus are still facing attacks at some places. He believes some Hindus were attacked because of their affiliation with Hasina’s Awami League party, while some attacks on homes and businesses were carried out for the purpose of looting.

“The law and order situation has improved to some extent, but we haven’t completely overcome our fears,” said Sarkar.

Leaders of minority communities met Yunus on August 13 and raised concerns about attacks on their homes, businesses, and temples. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called on Yunus to ensure the safety and security of minorities and also expressed concern about the security of Hindus during his Independence Day speech.

On Friday, Yunus dialed Modi and assured him of the security of all minorities in Bangladesh.

A Hindu businessman in Dhaka, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told HT that he felt more secure now than a week ago. Hindus are regaining confidence slowly, though they continue to have concerns because of isolated acts of violence. “But I can say there is a significant improvement even though our worries have not gone away,” the businessman said.

Every year, Hindus organise processions to celebrate Janmashtami, the festival marking the birth of Lord Krishna. This year, the festival falls on August 26. “If people feel safe, people will join in the celebratory processions. The police will have to create an environment so that people feel safe,” said the businessman.

Minority community leaders too said they continue to be worried despite a fall in reports of attacks on Hindus.

“We aren’t in a good condition, and our worries haven’t ended yet,” said Rana Dasgupta, general secretary of the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Oikya Parishad. He alleged minority members are being forced to resign from government offices and colleges and as members of local government bodies.

“The forced resignations began on Saturday and are still going on in schools, universities, and city corporations in some places,” said Dasgupta. He said between 12pm and 3.20pm on Saturday, he received five phone calls about such forced resignations. However, he declined to give details.


Members of the Christian and Buddhist minorities said they were not very worried, though several homes of Santhals were attacked in Dinajpur and Rajshahi districts and a church was vandalised in Narayanganj.

Joyanta Rozario, a drama director, said the homes of Christians in Dinajpur’s Biral area, Rajshahi’s Tanore area, and a church at Narayanganj were vandalised. “Though Bangladesh is going through political instability, I don’t think I have to be worried about it for the time being,” said Rozario.

Noted musician Bartha Barua, a Buddhist who expressed solidarity with the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement and organised a concert at Dhanmondi in Dhaka during the protests, said some isolated incidents were occurring, but these were the handiwork of “opportunists. ” Communal harmony in Bangladesh is “good enough,” he said, adding, “I don’t consider myself a minority, never.”

Decoding China: Seizing the moment in Bangladesh

Dang Yuan

DW

August 16, 2024

The political upheaval in Bangladesh presents China with a golden opportunity to expand its influence in South Asia and undercut India's ambitions.

Chinese companies built the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Tunnel in Chattogram in 2023

Image: Salim/Xinhua/picture alliance

On International Children's Day in 2023, Alifa Chin received a letter from China's President Xi Jinping. "I wish you every success at school. Live your dreams," Xi wrote to the now 14-year-old who lives in the Bangladeshi port city of Chittagong. "If you want, you can study medicine in China later to help other people," he added.

Chin was born on a Chinese navy ship in 2010. It was a difficult birth. Her mother had a heart condition and she had to be transferred from the maternity clinic to the Chinese hospital ship, which was making a regular stop off Bangladesh at the time.

Doctors on the vessel performed an emergency operation, and both mother and baby were fine.

Her father was so thrilled that he named his child "Chin," the Bengali word for China.

And the girl later called the midwife "the Chinese mom."

An all-round strategic partnership

Xi's charm offensive aimed to bring the people of China and Bangladesh closer together. "China and Bangladesh have always been good neighbors and good partners," wrote Xi in his letter to Chin.

Bangladesh is of strategic importance to China. Its location in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean means it is ideally situated for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Xi's signature project aimed at boosting China's economic and political influence by implementing a raft of infrastructure projects and trade networks worldwide.

Post-Hasina Bangladesh grapples with anti-Hindu violence  02:17

Bangladesh, with its 172 million people, offers a huge market in the region for China's export-oriented economy.

However, Beijing also sees competitive disadvantages.

Bangladesh shares a land border with only two countries: Myanmar — which is plagued by civil war and from where hundreds of thousands of the long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority have fled to Bangladesh — and the South Asian giant India, with which Bangladesh shares a 4,096-kilometer border.

China took a clear line in its response to the recent ouster of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the formation of an interim administration. "We want to further develop the 'all-round strategic partnership' with the new government in Bangladesh," said a spokeswoman last week.

China's use of the term "all-round strategic partnership" implies a close and trusting relationship, something that Beijing uses when it refers to its ties with nations such as France, UK or Spain.

China uses an even better "comprehensive strategic partnership" to describe its relations with Germany.

Goods and weapons for Dhaka

China has been Bangladesh's largest trading partner for 12 years in a row. "China has built 12 roads, 21 bridges and 27 power plants in Bangladesh," Yao Wen, China's ambassador to Bangladesh, said during a BRI event in Dhaka in September 2023. "Chinese companies have created 550,000 new jobs here."

Chinese companies, for instance, are currently building the 48-kilometer-long, four-lane urban highway around Dhaka. The project, worth €360 million, is scheduled for completion in 2025. The six-kilometer-long road-and-rail bridge over the Padma, Bangladesh's largest river, was also built by China. It is the longest bridge in South Asia and, according to local media, could boost the country's economic growth by 1% per year.

Bangladesh upheaval is posing challenges to neighbor India  02:24

When it came to defense ties, China supplied 72% of the weapons Bangladesh needed between 2019 and 2023, according to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank focusing on global conflict and security.

China played a key role in the construction of the "BNS Sheikh Hasina" naval base south of Chittagong. The base was inaugurated in 2023 and has space for six submarines and eight warships.

Beijing had also supplied two submarines (BNS Nabajatra and BNS Joyjatra, commissioned in 2017) as well as a significant proportion of frigates and corvettes to the Bangladeshi navy. Satellite images show that the submarines built in China have already been stationed there for a year.

"China's ties to the base may go well beyond its construction," according to a report published by the US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

"A senior Bangladeshi official acknowledged that Chinese personnel would also be involved in training Bangladesh's submariners on how to operate the submarines and the new base, although few details have been shared publicly."

Balancing act between India and China

During her 15-year rule, Hasina learned to balance Bangladesh's ties between the two Asian powers.

As a reliable partner, she did not want to upset New Delhi. But she also wanted to win over China.

After her controversial re-election in January 2024, she first visited India, then weeks later China. And since a mass uprising forced her to flee the country, Hasina has found refuge in India.

Bangladesh is the first South Asian country to officially join the BRI.

Days before her resignation in the wake of the student-led protests, she had announced, immediately after her trip to China, that she wanted to award the multibillion-dollar Teesta river restoration project to Indian companies, even though Chinese firms also took part in the tender.

The Teesta originates in the Himalayan region and flows first through India and then Bangladesh.

Does Bangladesh need a fresh start? Investigative journalist David Bergman speaks with DW  04:03

Competition stimulates business. In principle, the idea is absolutely right. However, India's home advantage is dwindling. The "India Out Campaign" is in full swing throughout South Asia, not just in Bangladesh. Overall, the region is currently undergoing radical change. There have recently been changes of government even in Nepal and the Maldives.

The communist Khadga Prasad Oli and his new government have been in power in Nepal for four weeks, and he wants to build roads and other infrastructure — with China's help — in the Himalayan nation.

His plans earned praise in his own country, but aroused suspicion in India.

In the Maldives, President Mohamed Muizzu had campaigned with the slogan "India out," and after his inauguration in November 2023, he called for the withdrawal of Indian troops in the island nation and increasingly turned to China as an ally.
China as a 'balancing power' in South Asia

"India's 'Neighborhood First' policy was seen as a counter to China's efforts to garner influence in the region, notably through its Belt and Road Initiative, which has also raised India's ire," political scientist Tasse Walker wrote for the Australian think tank Lowy Institute.

"However, the vast amount of money Beijing is willing to pour into infrastructure and investment proposals is often tempting for smaller South Asian states," she noted, pointing out that, "in Bangladesh, China and Chinese firms have invested an estimated $7 billion, while in the Maldives, the figure stands at $1 billion. This has fueled geopolitical competition with India, which has its own border dispute with China."

"A changing socio-political landscape in South Asia, combined with the economic growth of smaller states within the region, has potentially destabilising effects for India," said Walker.

She described China is a "balancing power" in South Asia and a "counter-hegemony to India."

Bangladesh: 'No democracy without Awami League and BNP'  05:04

"That is, where India cannot fill the needs of smaller South Asian states, China exists as a powerful, tempting actor creating economic and political competition within the region. These smaller states are no longer solely reliant upon India as a partner, being able to look elsewhere for foreign investment and large-scale trade. This carries the potential to deepen the rift between India and China."

This article was originally written in German.

"Decoding China" is a DW series that examines Chinese positions and arguments on current international issues from a critical German and European perspective.

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 THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING REDUX

Ernest Mandel
Hope and Marxism: Historical and Theoretical Essays



Resistance Books, London, 2023. 306 pp., £15.00 pb
ISBN 9780902869417

Reviewed by Fabian Van Onzen

About the reviewer
Fabian van Onzen received his PhD from the European Graduate School 

Some of Ernest Mandel’s finest work on Marxist theory and revolutionary politics appeared in the form of short articles. Hope and Marxism collects eleven of Mandel’s most significant articles and provides an excellent introduction to his thought.

The first article, ‘Althusser Corrects Marx’ (1969), represents Mandel’s contribution to the Marxist humanism debate. Althusser argued that Marx underwent an epistemological break in the 1860s, in which he abandoned the humanism of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and broke from Hegelian idealism. In ‘The Causes of Alienation’ (1970), Mandel shows that there was no epistemological break between the young and old Marx, but ‘an important evolution, not identical repetition, in Marx’s thought from decade to decade’ (40). A product of Marx’s humanism was the concept of alienation, which shows that working people under capitalism are alienated from the product of their labour, from each other and from themselves. Four features of alienation appear in a more mature form in Capital, which include the separation of the worker from the means of production, the generalisation of the sale of labour-power, the product belonging to the employer rather than the worker, and the loss of labour’s creative content. Mandel’s exposition is helpful and relevant, as many working people today are alienated through working uncreative, meaningless jobs that provide little satisfaction. For many, work is ‘something which is not productive or creative for human beings but something which is harmful and destructive’ (45).

Mandel argues that the solution to alienation is not more leisure time, for consumption is often just as alienated as production. In a way similar to Sweezy and Baran in Monopoly Capital, Mandel notes that through marketing and planned obsolescence, capitalists constantly render us dissatisfied in order to generate the desire for new products. Our relation to other people are also alienated and mediated by the commodity-form, for Mandel notes a tendency to treat people through socially defined functions (i.e. customer, student, client, patient, etc.). Alienation can only be overcome by socialism, which results in a planned economy that has abolished commodity production and private ownership of the means of production. Mandel denies that former socialist countries like the USSR, East Germany and Cuba managed to fully abolish alienation, insofar as they were transitional social formations that had eliminated capitalist property relations but had not ‘abolished the division of society into classes, they still have different social classes and different social layers’ (52). While life was materially better in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the bureaucratic deformation of political and social life resulted in similar patterns of alienation as witnessed in the capitalist world.

In ‘Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy’ (1977) and ‘A Critique of Eurocommunism’ (1979), Mandel examines reformist currents in the communist movement. He engages with a text from Engels (1870), who argued that the workers movement in Germany should utilise elections in order to agitate for socialism and win millions to revolutionary Marxism. Whereas Engels viewed parliamentary election as a tactic of a larger revolutionary strategy, his followers in the SPD, such as Bernstein, used it to argue for a non-revolutionary parliamentary road to socialism. Mandel emphasises that Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few figures who took a clear stance against electoralism and warned that it would fail ‘if the masses were not trained well in advance in the politics of extra-parliamentary action as well as routine electoralism and purely economic strikes’ (58). Taking inspiration from the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg advocated for a mass workers strike and predicted that the SPD party bureaucrats would oppose such actions in order to maintain their parliamentary privileges. Mandel notes that because the Second International was under the command of party bureaucrats, the masses became passive. This passivity enabled the leaders of the SPD and other Second International parties to call for the ‘defence of the fatherland’ during the First World War.

Luxemburg agitated for a party with a clear programme, which would intervene in workers’ struggle to ‘ensure that on the day of the revolution the party would be the driving force of the proletariat and not its bureaucratic hangman’ (71). While the article is helpful in allowing us to appreciate Luxemburg’s contributions to Marxist politics, it is somewhat reductive and does not bring out the rich debates that took place in the Second International of which Luxemburg was a major participant. These debates, recently compiled by Mike Taber in Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism and Under the Socialist Banner, show that while the SPD did later develop in an extremely opportunist direction, the debates around parliamentarism and war were far more complex than Mandel’s account. In Taber’s work we see a wide cast of characters who took a range of positions on party-building, strategy and tactics, elections and socialism.

Mandel further explores reformism in ‘A Critique of Eurocommunism’ (1979), which explores the eurocommunist current in the French (PCF), Italian (PCI), Spanish (PCE) and Japanese (JCP) communist parties. Eurocommunism was a current in the 1970s, in which communist parties engaged in coalitions with other socialist parties and social movements in order to seize state power through parliament. In the PCF and PCI, this resulted in major revisions to established party doctrine, such as removing ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ from the programme and sharp criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy in order to appeal to more voters. They adopted the anti-monopoly strategy, which sought to unite trade unions, small business owners, oppressed peoples movements and even sections of the bourgeoisie against ‘monopoly capitalism’. If elected, the Communist Party would expropriate monopoly property, strengthen union power and delink from the global capitalist system.

Mandel views eurocommunism as a continuation of the Popular Front strategy pursued by the Third International in the 1930s, in which communist parties around the world formed alliances with the national bourgeoisie in order to protect democracy against fascism. As the PCF, PCI, PCE and JCP had all become hugely powerful organisations by the 1970s that could garner millions of votes, Mandel notes that a bureaucracy emerged within bourgeois parliaments with special privileges. He claims that the reason why they adopted a critical attitude towards the USSR was not in order to honestly break from Stalinism, but because the parliamentary CP bureaucracies had shifted their allegiance towards the bourgeoisie. Just like in the period of the Popular Front, the eurocommunist parties abandoned revolutionary Leninism in order to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and gain special privileges. While he views the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Bukharin in the eurocommunist period as positive, Mandel analyses eurocommunism from within the Trotskyist paradigm and compares it to the opportunist turn of the Second International.

In a further critique of eurocommunist politics, ‘On the Class Nature of the Capitalist State’ (1980), Mandel argues that socialist transformation is impossible through elections. He distinguishes between state power and state management. Following Lenin, Mandel views the capitalist state as an instrument of repression that is necessary for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. While the bourgeoisie always holds state power in a capitalist state, other classes can manage the state in certain social formations. For example, in the period of fascism in Germany and Italy, sections of the petty-bourgeoisie managed the capitalist state in order to crush the workers movement through organised terror. Mandel concludes that if the eurocommunists were to get elected into power, they would manage the capitalist state for the bourgeoisie until they were no longer useful and then be overthrown, as happened in Chile in 1973 with Pinochet’s coup.

Despite being non-revolutionary and a major cause of the liquidation of many communist parties around the world, eurocommunism had a leftist current within it led by Nikos Poulantzas. Poulantzas was critical of the eurocommunist strategy but could appreciate some of the questions it raised and the ways it engaged with non-communist movements like feminism. For example, the eurocommunist parties drew significant attention to the nature of the capitalist state in a way that Lenin, Trotsky and other Third International figures did not. While Mandel briefly engages with Poulantzas in his longer work From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, his approach is to dismiss him by claiming that Poulantzas veered too much from Marxist orthodoxy. Such an attitude prevents Mandel from integrating new theory into Marxism, which he treats as a fully worked-out doctrine.

In ‘We Must Dream’ (1978), Mandel engages with the work of Ernest Bloch, who is known for his introduction of utopianism and revolutionary vision into communist thought. Mandel argues that Bloch’s category of hope is a fundamental aspect of all revolutionary movements that gives ‘it an energy and driving power, which cannot arise exclusively from the defence of daily material interests’ (115). Those who have dedicated their life to the fight for a communist, classless society are often inspired by a vision which the most fundamental defeats cannot break. This communist faith anticipates something without any current existence, but is materially possible and therefore inspires revolutionary praxis. Revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral and Maurice Bishop were able to gain the trust of millions of people not solely on the basis of their programme, but because they provided an emancipatory vision and showed the way to achieve it.

Hope and Marxism illustrates the incredible depth of Mandel’s thinking over a period of 25 years. It is a fine collection of essays that gives helpful overview to Mandel’s thought during the seventies and eighties. It is a great book for those who are new to Marxism and eager to see certain threads on how Marxists have approached electoral politics, the capitalist state and socialist revolution.

10 February 2024

ReferencesMike Taber (ed) 2023 Reform, Revolution, and Opportunism and Under the Socialist Banner (Chicago: Haymarket Books).


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21371_hope-and-marxism-historical-and-theoretical-essays-by-ernest-mandel-reviewed-by-fabian-van-onzen/

State Capitalism and Development in East Asia since 1945




Owen Miller (ed)

Brill, Leiden, 2023. 283 pp., 133€ hb
ISBN 978-90-04-25190-8

Reviewed by Erwan Moysan

About the reviewer
Erwan Moysan is a PhD student at Cardiff University currently working on Marxist critiques of the More


State Capitalism and Development in East Asia since 1945 is a book with chapters by authors from the United Kingdom, South Korea and Germany, with backgrounds in economics, politics and history, edited by Owen Miller. It analyses the development of East Asia, encompassing China, Taiwan, both Koreas and Japan. It does so through the lens of the Marxist theory of state capitalism understood broadly as the theory that holds that ‘the state is always an integral part of the capitalist system: capital accumulation cannot occur without the state and the capitalist state cannot exist without capitalism’ (4-5). The degree of state involvement can vary from country to country, with at one end of the spectrum states that avoid direct involvement in business and at the other states acting as collective capitalists. Except for the opening and closing chapters, each chapter is dedicated to an East Asian country.

Owen Miller and Gareth Dale introduce the book’s theoretical framework, subscribing to Tony Cliff’s theory of state capitalism. Cliff viewed the Soviet Union as one big firm, although rather than competing internationally with exchange values, he saw the USSR as competing with use-values through the arms race. While Miller and Dale recognise that there are other theories of state capitalism, they declare Cliff’s theory ‘the most detailed analysis of state capitalism in the Soviet Union’ (6). This is debatable. For example, Cliff, like many theorists of state capitalism, viewed Soviet state capitalism as more advanced than Western capitalism. By contrast, there were other authors in the same time period, like Amadeo Bordiga, who saw Soviet capitalism as inferior to that of the West. The contributors to this book themselves see state capitalism as the form of capitalism the Soviet Union and East Asia adopted in order to ‘catch-up’ to the most advanced capitalist economies. Cliff’s followers have largely reworked his theory, not in the least in this very book by spreading the theory to East Asia, and this is to their credit. But it also makes their affirmation all the more bizarre. Authors throughout the book refer to Cliff’s theory, but it is not always clear whether they are referring to Cliff’s view or that of his successors.

On one hand, Cliff’s successors not only recognise that labour-power taking the form of a commodity is a core feature of capitalism, but they go further than most theorists of state capitalism and recognise that competition between capitals is also a core feature, especially international competition. While some theorists, such as Paresh Chattopadhyay, acknowledge the significance of competition, nevertheless, they often confine themselves methodologically within the framework of the nation. What distinguishes the authors of the book from state capitalism theorists that also recognise the importance of competition is that they insist that the law of value does ‘not apply strictly to market-mediated competition, with socially necessary labour expenditure determined a posteriori, after goods have exchanged and sales numbers and prices have signalled the degree to which labour time expended was in fact socially necessary’ (12). Micheal Haynes, in the book’s closing chapter, also suggests that there can be value without market exchange, commenting that ‘the fetishism of commodity fetishism’ is the ‘Marxist version of the conventional obsession with markets’ (237). Both chapters try to justify this position by noting that capitalists anticipate in the realm of production on the basis of past circulation. On this basis, they abruptly leap to the conclusion that the law of value thus also applies to state-mediated competition, notably arms production, because it is based in a similar moment of anticipation, with the moment of realisation being war. In short, they affirm that market competition is not the only form of capitalist competition. This is unconvincing. The market cannot be abstracted away from Marx’s critique. Value being the exchangeability of the product of labour, the notion of a law of value without the market is nonsensical. As the book itself notes, if the anticipation is wrong, the punishment can be severe. Which undermines their entire point. Potential value is not value. It only becomes so through the ‘test’ of market exchange. The position is all the stranger given the authors must be aware that it is not necessary to affirm it in order to speak of state capitalism or imperialism.

Regardless, Miller and Dale do an excellent job of catching anyone unfamiliar with state capitalism up. The state is not only understood through its fundamental roles within capitalism – imposing a social order between capitals and between capital and labour, establishing general conditions of production and representing national capital on the world stage – but also historically. The capitalist state has always been involved in capital accumulation. While the degree of this involvement varies according to country, all are subject to the capitalist dynamics identified in Capital. Miller and Dale identify the premises of state capitalist theory in Marx and Engels, notably in Capital, Anti-Duhring and their criticisms of Ferdinand Lassalle and Adolf Wagner. They also summarise quite well the analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution at the origin of the theory. A good summary of Japan’s state-directed development is also given.

Kim Ha-young takes us through the trajectory of North Korean state capitalism, from growing faster than South Korea in the first decades of its existence to the crisis of the 1990s. After describing how the Soviet occupation dissolved the working-class organisations that emerged from the liberation of Noth Korea from Japan in 1945, she depicts the firm labour discipline that was introduced. These policies, such as labour passports, severely punishing absenteeism, differential wages and piece rates, were identical to those employed under Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. And much like in the Soviet Union, workers struggled against these measures and were able to work around them, due to the advantage labour shortage gave them. Indeed, in both countries rapid growth was achieved through the transfer of labour from agriculture to industry. However, this sort of growth cannot last. North Korea’s extensive growth prioritising heavy industry over consumer goods and agriculture eventually reached a limit. There was an attempt to grow the consumer goods industry, which could have incentivised labour, but with the 1973 global crisis among other factors North Korea found itself isolated and unable to pivot. Today, on the surface the state maintains the appearance of an omnipotent state capitalism, while simmering below ‘is a vigorous market system of private trading companies and even manufacturers, usually disguising themselves as state enterprises’ (43).

Perhaps the highlight of the book is Kim Young-uk’s chapter on Mao’s China. It demonstrates, with a wealth of empirical material, that China pursued a policy of flexibilisation of labour, for both permanent and temporary workers, that primitive accumulation of capital took place and that even though China’s participation in international exchange was limited at the time – because bureaucrats were constantly comparing Chinese labour to Western labour by using international monetary values – international competition was nonetheless ‘nearly always the decisive factor in how and where living and dead labour was put to use within China’ (143). To support this latter point, they note, quoting Isaak Rubin, that ‘in capitalism, before producers compare labour through money in the actual process of exchange, they have already equalised their products with a determined quantity of money’ in consciousness (142). However, in regard to the theoretical problem outlined earlier, it should be noted that Rubin clarifies in that same passage that ‘the equalisation must still be realised in the actual act of exchange’ (Rubin 1973: 70). In any case, this does not change the fact that international competition shaped the Chinese economy in this indirect way.

The book’s goal is to expand state capitalism theory from being specific to so-called ‘socialist’ countries as part of a broader understanding of the relationship between state and capital. State capitalism should indeed move away from being a narrow concept but the other pitfall of stretching the concept needs to be avoided too. For example, it is hard to see how the South Korean state defending ‘severe exploitation’ (164) is specifically state capitalism as opposed to capitalism as usual. Regardless, Jeong Seongjin’s chapter on South Korea illustrates one of the book’s biggest strengths, namely an understanding that each country’s development is not isolated, but is part of the world capitalist system. In the post-World War II, US permanent arms economy, military expenditure counteracted, for a time, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The high growth rates without crises of post-war Japan and West Germany were possible only because of the US-driven permanent arms economy, notably via the Korean War. Similarly, although South Korea’s state capitalist development started in the 1950s, it really took off with the Vietnam War. US dollars, compensating South Korean cooperation in the Vietnam War, financed an export-oriented industrialisation, establishing a triangular trade pattern in which Korea imported means of production from Japan and exported most of its products to the US.

Tobias ten Brink offers a description of China’s 21st century state-permeated capitalism. While the last decade is not covered, he shows that the Chinese state today is not a monolith but is in competition with itself, notably since the decentralisation of the 1980s. The complex relations between state, party, bureaucrats, domestic capitalists and foreign capitalists are also detailed. Notably, he shows that the dichotomy between private and state property is not useful when analysing Chinese firms.

Throughout the book, developmental state theory is criticised, with state capitalism theory demonstrated to be superior. Lee Jeong-goo’s chapter is dedicated to criticising developmental state theory on its own grounds and shows that the theory not taking into account class and exploitation is the source of its weakness. Developmental state theorists fail to understand the state as a class institution and instead see it as neutral or autonomous. Thus, they fail to understand, for example, how the Chinese state acts as a collective capitalist.

Finally, Micheal Haynes notes that the error equating socialism to state property reduces capitalism to private property, whereas the distinction is alien to Marxists. Moreover, there is a grey zone between the private and state sectors. He describes state capitalism as a ‘catch-up’ economy based on technological emulation and the movement of labour from countryside to towns. Success is not guaranteed, as seen with North Korea. A core feature of such economies, like the Soviet economy, is their difficulty with technological innovation. He shows that while Japan and South Korea have caught up, China still has a way to go and is less technologically innovative than sometimes believed. Haynes argues that the development of East Asia is an example of uneven development, with its growth stifling development in other regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa. The capitalist system is one of global competition.

This book was many years in the making and, overall, successfully draws from state capitalism theory to show how the narrowing relation between state and capital is behind East Asia’s development.

21 February 2024

ReferencesIsaak Rubin 1973 Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (Montreal: Black Rose Books).


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21391_state-capitalism-and-development-in-east-asia-since-1945-by-owen-miller-ed-reviewed-by-erwan-moysan/

Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A Study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis, and the Situationists

Vasilis Grollios

Routledge, New York and London, 2024. 206 pp., £130 hb
ISBN 9781032556772

Reviewed by Dimitri Vouros
About the reviewer
Dimitri Vouros is a scholar interested in theories of democracy and sovereignty


The connection between Marxism and critical theory has always been fraught. Hiding this connection may have served a political purpose for the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. There is evidence that Walter Benjamin’s writings were edited by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer to tone down his overtly Marxist language, presumably so the school, while in exile, could maintain its social standing in Western academia. For later generations such self-censorship was no longer necessary. Yet, something of this censorship continues in certain strains of critical theory, especially those that focus on everything except what Marx spent most of his energies pursuing – political economy. Have critical philosophers forgotten that bourgeois economists hold the theory of money and exchange to be a thoroughly natural one, the economy as ‘second nature’ to use a formulation of Georg Lukács?

Vasilis Grollios’ Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory presents an alternative view of society and the economy to that pursued by many recent critical theorists. He describes the view of Open Marxism, of capitalism as a mode of production in which illusion and fetishism dominate human life. Grollios’ book investigates the ideological trappings of capitalist society and its inversion of human values into economic ones. It formulates a theory of why ‘traditional’ viewpoints in political philosophy and economics end up promoting unfreedom and alienation in everyday life. To this end, Grollios emphasises the Marxist underpinnings of critical theory properly understood and presents the contours of a non-dogmatic dialectical philosophy.

Continuing themes from his last work Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, Grollios pursues detailed reinterpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis and the Situationists Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. Grollios places these authors in conversation Marx. He presents a view of Marxian epistemology often overlooked by recent scholarship. He underscores Marx’s methodological endeavours that point to the ‘real abstractions’ of the capitalist mode of production and the reduction of labour-power and labour-time to the totalising valuations of the market.

One aim of Grollios’ book is to place the ideology of pecuniary individualism under suspicion. Since capitalism reduces material and social relations to exchange value, bourgeois notions of subjectivity invariably lead to alienation and various limitations on human flourishing. In essence, what we take to be everyday life is informed and driven by the imperatives of the market. This view is first found in Marx, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857-58 and the first section of the first volume of Capital. The Marxist tradition, which wished to join theory to practice, often sidestepped these insights or found them politically inexpedient. It was largely critical theory that retrieved them from possible oblivion. Yet similar insights into monopoly and late capitalism, not only its external mechanisms, but also the way its reifications informed society more generally, were downplayed by later critical theorists. Arguably it was Jürgen Habermas’ influential theory of communicative action that began this forgetting of the social significance of abstractive economic categories. The turn to ‘recognition’ in third-wave Frankfurt School critical theory has only deepened this nescience.

Like Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Moishe Postone before him, Grollios has retrieved the significance of Marx’s thought on fetishism and the real abstractions of the market for philosophy and political theory. He proves that what Max Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’ reproduces a topsy-turvy understanding of the relation between capital and capitalism’s subjects. Indeed, Grollios pursues a ‘corporeal materialism’, and asks why workers are still being cajoled into navigating the various fetishes of commodity capitalism and subjected to its deleterious effects in their daily life. Grollios also shows how critical theory has not spent its interpretative energies, that much can still be gleaned from twentieth-century thinkers like those dealt with in his book. The relationship between the illusive totality of capitalism and the alienated worker is still relevant, against trends in different theoretical directions, including Foucauldian discourses of power and biopolitics and Lacanian/Post-Marxist theories of symbolic power. In fact, Grollios argues that theory needs to return to the concrete social consequences of capital accumulation, to an understanding of how workers’ free time is expropriated by capitalism’s unceasing search for surplus value. For Grollios, fetishism is ‘a general phenomenon in which, while people attempt to earn a living in a society where “time is money” rules, they end up creating social forms, such as value as money, or the state, or the bourgeois form of democracy that they cannot control and towards which they feel alienated’ (47).

In the first chapter, Grollios reads Nietzsche, unusually, as an ally of critical theory. It is true Nietzsche had a substantial influence on the Frankfurt School and its understanding of capitalist society. Yet most recent thinkers in the Continental tradition have focussed on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and nihilism. They have certainly not reckoned with all his insights into politics and society. What Grollios offers is not a Marxist critique of Nietzsche – à la Georg Lukács’ Destruction of Reason – but an assessment of what is still valuable in his criticism of life and work under capitalism. Just like the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche ‘holds a dialectic between appearance/fetishized form and content/essence/alienation in everyday life’ (24). What is especially relevant for Grollios is Nietzsche’s insight into how the creative and liberating aspects of labour and the everyday are rendered superfluous by the market logic of capitalism.

The next chapter refreshingly passes over much of the scholarly literature that has been written about Walter Benjamin the ‘cultural critic’. Such commentaries largely miss the point of Benjamin’s critique of capitalism. Grollios argues that Benjamin ‘belongs to the first generation of Critical Theory and that his ideas take place in the frame of Marx’s Capital’ (61). Using concepts such as ‘determinate negation’, ‘corporeal materialism’, ‘the spellbound, topsy-turvy character of capitalist society’, ‘negative dialectics’ and ‘non-identity-thinking’, Grollios presents Benjamin’s striking characterisations of social production and reproduction and shows what they mean for the inner life of the worker (61). Grollios homes in on commodity fetishism, especially the reification of consciousness and the eternalisation of technical production, a hellish dream Benjamin calls a ‘capitalist phantasmagoria’ (63-64). The ‘corporeal materialism’ of Benjamin comes out in his description of unsavoury aspects of the industrial lifeworld. Benjamin’s perspectives on art and literature are important, but mainly because they alert the reader to fetishized aspects of industrial and post-industrial society. Key for Benjamin is the ‘eternal return’ of commodity capitalism and the way it alienates subjects both from the products they make and from a flourishing human existence. It is for this reason that the motifs of myth, boredom, death and fashion recur in Benjamin’s works, above all his unfinished Arcades Project. The mediation accomplished by capital between things and people can be described in terms of ‘reification’ which, in one essay, Benjamin says not only ‘clouds relations between human beings, but the real subjects of these relations also remain clouded’. This leads ineluctably to the ‘deformation’ of various bureaucratic vocations (93).

Grollios also emphasises the importance of Benjamin’s revolutionary theory of history. For Benjamin, ‘messianic time’ can override idols like the state and the individual. Indeed, as Grollios states, ‘[t]he leap of past events out of history into the present is likened by Benjamin to “the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”’ (99). Grollios reads Benjamin as an anarchist and as standing against orthodox (and Leninist) historical materialism. He uncovers an Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ in Benjamin’s methodology. (Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ is something of a leitmotif in this book.) One-dimensional, identity thinking, the kind that naturalises the material and social relations under universal exchange society needs to be subjected to dialectical critique. Given that bourgeois epistemologies and logics sacrifice all to the economy and to its limiting temporalities, dialectical thinking must seek to deconstruct, dereify, and demystify them. For Grollios and other exponents of left-communism, historical instances of ‘actually existing socialism’ merely reproduce these logics in a new guise, a ‘state capitalist’ one (192-193).

The brunt of Grollios’ critique is aimed at those views that seek to compromise on the promise, the one implicit in Western philosophy, of a disalienated existence and work life. Read with such an emancipatory end in mind, Marx is shown to argue that communist freedom is possible only if workers are no longer treated as wage slaves, if they are freed from all economic constraints. As Grollios points out, this entails a completely new relationship to things, to commodities, to time and to labour. Finding such renewed social relations is impossible through party politicking, and unlikely to follow a general revolutionary upheaval. Class warfare does not guarantee the emancipation of the proletariat. One needs to interrupt capitalism where it really matters, by finding ‘cracks’ in its imposing edifice and changing workers’ very relationship to labour. This is the true form of protest for our time according to Grollios and other Open Marxists like John Holloway: ‘Cracks open, and revolution takes place when we deny the mask displaying ourselves as “personifications of economic categories” and revolt against the rule of money, against capital’ (55).

In chapter three, Grollios finds in Castoriadis’ philosophy a stepping stone to a new kind of political thinking about autonomy. But Castoriadis comes under fire for not having correctly understood Marx’s position on labour and alienation; in fact, he is ‘essentially much closer to traditional theory and bourgeois philosophy than has been believed’ (119). During his lifetime, Castoriadis was struggling against the consequences of Leninism, the failure of the dictatorship of the proletariat to effect real change and indeed other problems with articulating a class struggle under a constantly morphing social structure: ‘In Castoriadis’ theory, classes are not formed from below, from people’s productive activity, they are not a perverted form of our doing […] They are formed from above. However, this is a nonmaterialist, undialectical and therefore uncritical theorizing of class’ (126). While Open Marxism is anticipated by Castoriadis in some places, he nevertheless fails to pose fundamental questions about our daily life that lead to political action in the present. Grollios argues that when we succumb to the view that abstractive bourgeois logics do not exist in any meaningful sense, as Castoriadis does, one is (falsely) liberated to pursue political philosophy for its own sake. Additionally, Castoriadis theorizes the state ‘as a separate and relative autonomous instance’ and further ‘accuses Marx of ignoring this fact’ (139). A similar criticism can be made of Hannah Arendt’s mature political philosophy. Like Castoriadis, she fails to read Marx as formulating a critique, as opposed to offering a predictive description, of political economy, turning instead to superficial readings of Marx’s materialist interpretation of labour. Both Arendt and Castoriadis ultimately return to Aristotle and the ancient polis to settle accounts with capitalism and its illusions. Castoriadis ‘does not identify the concept of the double character of the labour which lies hidden in the commodity, and neither does he recognize the fact that contradiction and struggle are ingrained in the essence of our existence in capitalism’ (129). Nevertheless, Grollios appreciates Castoriadis’ formulation of the social imaginary and the need to reimagine the modern polity, to find a completely new and different footing for current society (146-147).

The last chapter is a distillation of the French Situationists’ critique of capitalism and ‘commodified time’ (154). Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord write eloquently about the subjection of citizens to a barrage of images, about the mediatization of consciousness: ‘Capital in Debord and the Situationists is not the amount of money accumulated waiting to be thrown again into production for profit to be produced but a social relation made up of fetishized social forms-images that originate in alienated-objectified labour’ (155). Capitalism hopes to endear people to the illusion of the totality. The modern ‘spectacle’ and its effects leads to the naturalisation of commodity exchange, to various false notions about what constitutes value in life and to a new form of temporality. Debord holds that ‘spectacular time is the illusorily lived time’ (166), that the ‘spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living’ (174). The Situationists, as Grollios presents them, do not pursue a reduction to the economic in the last instance, but rather a way of alerting us to the compromised epistemological foundation ­of the modern subject, relying as it does on the inversion of the value-form. Since fetishism is ingrained in all life under capitalism, where consumers are unwittingly beholden to the illusions of the market. The key idea here is that ‘fetishization [is] a process whereby people are turned into zombies of capital/spectacle’. The main consequence of this is that ‘class struggle is not only on the streets […] but also runs through ourselves, our bodies and souls’ (179). The only possibility for freedom is finding a way beyond such illusions. For Grollios, this means being attentive to the cracks that open in capitalism, by capitalising on the moments of what Adorno called the ‘utopian images’ in the everyday against capital’s myths, and by finding fresh opportunities to disrupt the status quo.

1 March 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21422_illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory-a-study-of-nietzsche-benjamin-castoriadis-and-the-situationists-by-vasilis-grollios-reviewed-by-dimitri-vouros/

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/