Vaclav Smil is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst who currently teaches at the University of Manitoba. His Energy and Civilization: A History contains a number of interesting and sometimes insane facts. Here are a few of them:

• In 1800, New England Farmers (seeding by hand, with ox drawn wooden plows and brush harrows, sickles, and flails) needed 150-170 hours of labor to produce their wheat harvest. This means they needed 7 minutes to produce a kilogram of wheat. By 1900, after the introduction of horse-drawn gang-plowing, spring-tooth harvesting, and combine harvesting, California farmers needed only 30 seconds, a 20-fold increase in productivity.

• The average rate of population for all ancient civilizations appears to start around 1 person per hectare of land. By 1900 the average globally is about 5. By the 20th century there were about 25 people per hectare of land in Egypt, 12 in China, and 3 in Europe.

• Reconstruction of food intakes by poor English and Welsh laborers found that between 1787 and 1796 they consumed, on average, 8.3kg of meat per year. The average American today eats about 97 kg.

• According to an ancient Chinese proverb, the things that people cannot do without on a daily basis include the following: firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, and tea.

• In Eastern Prussia, as late as 1847, a third of the rural population could not afford bread.

• Animals simply walking in circles was perhaps the most widespread form of power production until about the mid-19th century.

• The power generation of a typical 18th century dutch windmill was about 7.5 watts. Wind turbines manufactured today have power ratings ranging from 250 watts to 7 MW.

• At the beginning of the 18th century about 85% of Massachusetts was covered in trees; by 1870, only 30%. Today, it is 62%.

• In premodern China millets, wheat, rice and corn supplied more than four-fifths of all food energy. India was basically identical.

• Mesopotamian diets were short on Vitamin A and Vitamin C, and ancient inscriptions apparently make reference to blindness and scurvy. They ate a diet incredibly high in barley, which was very high-yielding, but lacked these key nutrients.

• By 1917 the British Army relied on over 300,000 horses. Even in World War II, the Wehrmacht mobilized 625,000 horses for its invasion of Russia.

• According to Phillip Paul, one of Napoleon’s generals and notable chronicler of his failed invasion of Russia, part of the provisions Prussia provided to the advancing French army included two million bottles of beer.

• In 1800 the entire world economy consumed about 20 EJ (exajoules—energy equal to 10¹⁸ joules), 98% of which was from burning phytomass (so wood or charcoal). This is equivalent to less than 500 metric tonnes of crude oil. By 1900, energy supply had more than doubled to about 43 EJ, and half of it was now derived from fossil fuels, mostly coal. Between 1971 and 2019 world total energy supply increased from 230 EJ to 606 EJ.

• Watt’s improved steam engine of the late 19th century had a capacity of just over 1KW. By 1900, the largest steam engine had a capacity 30x that—3 MW.

• The two common impressions—that the 20th century was dominated by oil and the 19th dominated by coal—are both wrong. Wood remained the most important fuel before 1900 and, taken as a whole, the 20th century was dominated by coal.

• The first oil tanker (1886) carried just 2300 gross tonnes. By the early 1920s the maximum size came to about 20,000 deadweight tonnes (dwt). The world’s largest oil tanker — the Seawise Giant—was built in 1979 and carried 564,763 dwt before it was eventually retired around 2010.

• Brief interruptions in electricity provision can be expensive. In the US, every hour of lost power amounts to a loss of approximately $10m.

• About 1/5th of all crop residues are still burned as a fuel source, mostly in low-income countries.

• No other energy use offers as much of a payback as higher crops yields resulting from the use of synthetic nitrogen. By spending roughly 1% of global energy, it is possible to supply about half of the nutrients used annually by the world’s crops.

• About 40% of the current global food supply depends on the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process—a process that converts atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia by a reaction with hydrogen using a metal catalyst under high temperatures and pressures. Synthetic nitrogen provides about 70% of all nitrogen inputs in China. In its absence, diets in China would sink to a semi-starvation level. “A whole generation of citizens thought that the carrying capacity of the earth was proportional to the amount of land under cultivation and that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil” (Howard Odum, 1971).

• Food supply in affluent countries is now about 75% higher than the actual need according to basic macronutrient requirements, resulting in food waste of 30%-40% of all food sold.

• Horse’s leg anatomy virtually eliminates the energy costs of standing. All other mammals need about 10% more energy to stand as they do to lie down.

• The Middle Ages was certainly not a period known for technical innovation. Perhaps the most important however was the adoption of the collar harness for draft horses.

• Calculations based on Han dynasty records show that during the fourth century BCE in the state of Wei a typical peasant was expected to provide five family members with nearly half a kilogram of grain per day.

• The world’s heaviest column —the 605 tonnes of Red Finnish granite erected to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napolean—relied on 1700 men simultaneously pulling the column into an erect position.

• Candles convert only about .01% of their chemical energy into light.

There has been a longstanding awareness of the practical and theoretical insufficiencies arising from disciplinary fragmentation, one often book-ended by calls for the reorganization of academic and technical research and the development of a ‘meta-disciplinary’ discourse or methodological orientation. Across the 20th century, this has been reflected historically in three terminological waves: the rise of ‘interdisciplinarity’ in the interwar period, ‘multidisciplinarity’ in a postwar context, and the rise of ‘transdiciplinarity’ after the 60s. Although colloquially used rather interchangeably, they operate in unique conceptual registers. Interdisciplinarity, analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole; multidisciplinarity, draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within the boundaries of those fields; transdisciplinarity meanwhile, integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and in doing so transcends each of their traditional boundaries.1

These waves overlap and do not represent a teleological development as much as they chart the problematization of disciplinary knowledge following the fragmentation of intellectual labor in general, one which across the 20^th century has loosely followed cycles of historical crisis —> disciplinary problematization —> metadiscipline:

As noted by philologist Roberta Frank in her history of interdisciplinarity, as early as 1916 the President of the National Research Council emphasized the importance of fostering "subjects lying between the old-established divisions of science," insisting already in 1914 on "the inter-relationship of the sciences."2 The 1920s in particular saw the introduction of new terms for reciprocal interaction within a total system—one not always already divided up between disciplinary areas traditionally. Von Bertalanffy’s ‘General System Theory’ for example attempts to propose a solution to the problem identified in the book’s first sentence: “modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field.”3 Indeed, the 20^th century saw the production of various ‘systems-theoretical’ perspectives.

The Unity of Science movement campaigned in search of “grand and simplifying concepts”, Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson and others developed ‘Cybernetics’, and Jay Forrester developed ‘systems dynamics’—all were attempts to construct a discourse that managed to avoid what each saw as the siloed conditions of knowledge-production. Already by 1928, English political theorist and economist Harold Laski laments an academic parade of “endless committees to co-ordinate or correlate or integrate.”4

‘Multi-disciplinary’ in a postwar context became arguably the more fashionable term to describe this problematization of disciplinary boundaries, or at least the recognition of the necessity of related disciplines to work together in one fashion or another. This took on significant strategic and practical importance during the Cold War, with the institutional instantiation of this growing inter- and multi-disciplinary emphasis appearing paradigmatically in the form of the RAND corporation.5

It was in the wake of the crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s however that this inter- and multi- disciplinary emphasis reached a kind of fever pitch, birthing the now ever-present multiplication of qualifying prefixes: (inter-, multi-, trans-, de-, anti-, in-, meta- and post-, etc.).6 The term transdisciplinary meanwhile first appears in 1970 at an OECD meeting in Nice.7 Its use only becomes widespread by the 1980s and 1990s. A growing concern with climate change served as a focal point in coalescing a movement for research across (trans) rather than simply between (inter) disciplines and policy focus areas.8

The recent historical-philosophical, environmental, and political discussions around the ‘anthropocene’ for example is testament to its conceptual functioning across different disciplines. By1985 ACLS Report to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Humanities all twenty-eight constituent societies acknowledge a desire to, “transcend disciplinary perimeters, melt boundaries, fill gaps, and escape narrow confines.”9 UNESCO even declared itself ‘a transdisciplinary organization,’10 sponsoring large international research events such as the First World Congress in Transdisciplinarity in 1994.11

In his history of the term, Osborne traces three related but separate trends within the history of transdiciplinarity. First, a ‘systems-theoretical’ perspective with a tendency towards, “a meta-disciplinary form of supra-disciplinarity, embodied in the idea of a common system of axioms for a set of disciplines.”12 Examples here include various forms of Systems Theory, which emphasize the production of methodological perspectives amenable to the sort of integrative education or innovation system not bound by disciplinary divisions.13 Second, a more direct and practically-oriented sociological literature related to science policy, with its focus on “large-scale social problems – mainly generated by environmental factors associated with globalization – but viewed as amenable to scientific solutions.”14 Finally, there is a literature focusing on research related to policy-solutions related to environmental sustainability and health in particular, one grounded in, “a framing emphasis on the non-disciplinary and problem based character of science.”15

All three share an understanding of knowledge as being resolutely practical and problem-based, of the sort arguably typified by Michael Gibbons’ concept of ‘mode-2’ knowledge production.16 Whereas “Mode 1” knowledge is concerned with research aimed at knowledge for its own sake (rather than for the sake of application; similar to the concept of ‘basic research’), “Mode 2” is knowledge aimed to solving practical problems that require the integration of different discrete skills and knowledge.17 As a kind of conceptual forerunner of the literature around ‘the polycrisis,’ the concept of a ‘public policy problem’ from an epistemological standpoint has been understood to be inherently ‘wicked’ since at least the early 1970s.18 For Wittel,

the classical paradigm of science and engineering—the paradigm that has underlain modern professionalism--is not applicable to the problems of open societal systems. One reason the publics have been attacking the social professions, we believe, is that the cognitive and occupational styles of the professions—mimicking the cognitive style of science and the occupational style of engineering—have just not worked on a wide array of social problems. The lay customers are complaining because planners and other professionals have not succeeded in solving the problems they claimed they could solve… The kinds of problems that planners deal with—societal problems—are inherently different from the problems that scientists and perhaps some classes of engineers deal with. Planning problems are inherently wicked.19

Policy problems and transdisciplinarity share epistemological terrain insofar as they both exist across multiple domains and involve not just academic disciplines and the interplay among them, but also practitioners seeking solutions. All three practically oriented strands thus represent a dominant and positive concept of trandisciplinarity concerned with application, proposing policy-based solutions amenable by state policy and, and therefore presupposing, for Osborne at least, “a certain kind of social-democratic, ‘educational’ welfare state, of which it represents a technocratic variant.”20

the established discourse of transdisciplinarity is thus overwhelmingly positive and organizational; it is a discourse of the state, albeit often in practice of state-like entities on a supranational scale, which lacks the means of programmatic enforcement of the classical nation-state. It nonetheless presumes state agency…as the bearer of its practical rationality.21

There is indeed a disjunction between the aims often implied by transdisciplinary discourse (both conceptually and politically), its assumption of a unified nation-state with means of enforcement at a global scale, and the actual uneven distribution of state capacity globally—a distribution often determined by factors outside the control of individual nation-states themselves.22 It is notable in this regard that recent popular terms like ‘polycrisis’ and ‘derisking’ are concepts with origins in transnational UN related institutions. ‘Polycrisis’ has its conceptual roots in the work of complexity theorist Edgar Morin who holds an academic chair at UNESCO,23 while ‘derisking’ makes its first appearance in a research program that was a collaborative effort between the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Deutsche Bank.24

As Osborne points out as well, the dissemination of transdisciplinary discourse has therefore often been at the behest of sponsorship by international organizations. In its more aspirational moments, this disjunction lends the transdisciplinary style more than a bit of the glossy sloganeering common to international agency whitepapers and the non-profit sector; well-intentioned perhaps, but rarely connected to power or concrete forms of enforcement. Transdisciplinary discourse, much like the discourse around solutions to the polycrisis, seems to be a discourse in search of a political subject of action that does not yet concretely exist at a global scale.

While Osborne’s comments above are of course meant critically, its positivity and presumption of state agency is something I want to at least partially retain here, particularly given its relevance to recent debates over state capacity in a US domestic context. Mariana Mazzucato for example has appropriately called for the development of, “a new curriculum for global civil servants, one that eliminates the old-school notions from Public Choice Theory and New Public Management that continue to paint government as, at best, a market fixer, while also convincing many that government failure is more dangerous than market failure.”25

The dominant positive variant of transdiciplinarity is however undoubtedly the result of a focus on ‘holistic’ knowledge production across academic disciplines, orientated towards the production of solutions to ‘real world’ problems, however to the neglect of critical self-reflexiveness regarding questions of concept construction. In Osborne’s terms, it suffers from “an almost complete lack of fundamental theoretical work on the concept of a problem.”

Less common or at least less frequently associated with transdisciplinarity is the post-1960s wave of French and German ‘Theory’ and its influx into Anglo-American universities. Humanities and social science disciplines were in many ways almost wholly transformed following the reception of mid-century French and German thought, despite—or, perhaps, precisely because of—the fact that this transformation took place on theoretical bases that bore little relation to the particular histories of the disciplines which received them.26 The transdisciplinary dynamics internal to thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Guattari, and Latour for Osborne represent a more subterranean and negative (in the ‘critical’ sense) transdisciplinary tradition.27

These are of course some of the denaturalizing, anti-essentialising, and particularising forces that were understood as resolutely anti-empirical as well as corrosive in relation to existing disciplines, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (if not casting doubt on the ‘objectivity’ of the natural sciences). They also represent the kind of discourse those concerned with the practically-oriented forms of transdisciplinary are likely to refuse to engage in, despite the fact that they form a kind of negative side of a broader transdiciplinary trend of which they are a part.

The strictly practically oriented ignore this negative transdisciplinary trend at their own risk, because much of this literature now, at the level of academia at least, often functions more like philosophy than disciplinary philosophy28 in “constituting the most general concepts, to which the most general social and historical problems – the pragmatic basis of the research agenda in social needs – correspond.”29 They might not think they are doing philosophy, but they are.

By 1987, James O’Connor had already described the academic fragmentation of the social sciences as, “fatally weaken[ing] its ability to develop a ‘unified field theory’ of the modern crises of capitalism.”1 Twenty years later, Scottish philosopher Alastair MacIntyre would describe, “the history of this multiplication of disciplines” as, “a history of increasing specialization by scholars.”2 When the UN commissioned an ‘Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential,’ knowledge in general was found to have, “developed at such a rate and in such a way that it is no longer possible for one person to maintain an integrated overview or to provide any viable synthesis of the perspectives of different disciplines.”3 The Encyclopedia has at least managed to limit the number of problems facing humanity to 56,000.4

Technical and scientific research has apparently not escaped this dissolution into siloes. Across six major scientific and technological fields, Park et al. find that research is becoming increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. “Papers, patents and even grant applications, have become less novel relative to prior work and less likely to connect disparate areas of knowledge, both of which are precursors of innovation.”5 While accumulated understanding within individual disciplines promotes discovery and innovation, “engagement with a broad range of extant knowledge is necessary for that process to play out, a requirement that appears more difficult with time.”6 The existing professional necessity of narrowing one’s field of expertise appears to be antagonistic to pathbreaking findings of a more general kind. This fragmentation is simultaneously conceptual and institutional—conceptual in the ‘horizontal’ fragmentation of the academic profession into isolated ‘disciplinary tribes’; institutional in the ‘vertical’ fragmentation of academic work and increasing use of contract university teachers (adjuncts) and research assistants.7

This represents a problem of a much more general sort; what the sociologist Robert K. Merton describes as “trained incapacity.”8 Learning itself changes one’s behavior over time, but this same process of learning can induce maladaptive behavior under changed conditions. John Guillory describes a similar phenomenon in noting the following about specialized knowledge in general: “the very generality of the scenario reinforces its application to the special case, the case of specialized knowledge, and the more effort someone puts into acquiring a particular knowledge or skill, the greater the risk of behavior that responds inflexibly or inappropriately to a change in circumstance.”9

There are historical and political reasons for this fragmentation separable from the perhaps natural development of any intellectual division of labor towards increasing complexity. This includes the rising commercialization of university life and scientific research.10 In the 1960s, basic research spending by the federal government was twice that of the private sector.11 Since, there has been a decades long decline in the share of U.S. research and development (R&D) investment coming from federal government sources.12 Between 2010 and 2018, the share of U.S. private sector R&D expenditures grew from 61% to almost 70%. Over the same period, the federal government's portion dropped from 31% to 22%.13 For Robert Kuttner, this change in the proportion of government to private sector research funding coincides with a broader erosion of the “national innovation system”—one which must now be reconstituted via a robust return to industrial policy. Already by the early 1970s Kuttner identifies, “an increasing disconnect between U.S. technological leadership and domestic production.”14

This increasing disconnection coincides with the age of neoliberalism and the culmination of that so-called ‘golden age of American universities’,15 when there was last some semblance of unity of purpose for educators and university administrators that students are ‘citizens-in-training’ (for whom a ‘liberal arts education’ has a clear utility) rather than merely ‘human capital’ (for whom it is does not). Peter Osborne has dated debates about the unity of the system of relations between academic disciplines to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, paradigmatically in Germany.16 This question was simultaneously philosophical and institutional—relevant both to questions of Truth in a philosophical sense,17 but also to the technical and intellectual capacity of the German Empire. Emily Levine points out that the tension between the idea of the research university as a place for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and as a staging ground for ‘state capacity’ (both at the level of the social, the industrial, and the military/imperial) can be traced to its origins.18 Today, the now dominant emphasis on the preparation of students for the labor market seems to have displaced this tension—mainly because it functions to the detriment of both.

A similar trajectory of fragmentation can be charted at the level of structures of governance—one which begins, once again, in the early 1970s. Neoliberalism may colloquially be associated with the shrinking of the state, but globalization saw the tremendous proliferation of public agencies with discrete regulatory tasks.19 This posed new coordination problems for the implementation of public policy.20 In the wake of economic recession and stagflation, the hierarchical top-down arrangements of the Keynesian state were increasingly regarded as too ‘inflexible.’ A new era of public administration - represented paradigmatically by New Public Management (NPM) – rapidly gained ground. Its first practitioners unsurprisingly emerged in the United Kingdom under Thatcher and in US municipal governments that had suffered heavily from economic recession and tax revolts.21

NPM consists of administrative strategies that are now considered de rigeur: contracting out, competition within the public sector, decentralization, privatization, and the separation of provision and production via polycentric systems of governance.22 This concurrent extension of discrete regulatory agencies and growth of a decentralized, privatized, and sub-contracted administrative apparatus has lent the public sector a particular opacity—one exaggerated by the fact that ‘public sector’ now usually implies an interrelated network of public, non-profit, and private institutions. Kuttner for good reason identifies, “making sure that different agencies and programs are not operating at cross-purposes and that it all adds up to a coherent whole” as the first challenge to implementing the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act as.23 For planned investments in solid state battery production to be effective, the Loans Program Office (LPO) will surely need to integrate the views of supply chain experts to project the market for critical minerals.24 “It’s hard enough to make industrial policy work in a single agency,” he writes, “the new enhanced industrial policies involve coordination across multiple federal agencies; several levels of government (federal, state, county, municipal); multiple technologies; and the intense involvement of the private sector.”25 The entire scenario risks being contradictory, insofar as the ends of a federal agency and private firms are inherently different at fundamental structural level.

At the level of rhetoric, the isolation of specialists has made translating technical knowledge for the offices of the powerful or the public square only more complicated. Trevor Quirk has written about how this is increasingly of interest to the broader public, as depicted in the HBO series Chernobyl or the film Contagion. “Whether under Soviet Communism or the liberal capitalist order,” he writes, “there are no effective mechanisms for bringing the depth of specialized knowledge to public consciousness. The calamities beggar belief because the knowledge that unveils them seems to have been developed in seclusion, secret to all but a collection of elite minds.”26 One manifestation of this lack of mediating function is frequent cross-ideological lamentation regarding the disappearance of the ‘public intellectual’, who had previously played an important (although perhaps exaggerated) mediating role between the academy and the public.27

Trajectories of fragmentation at the level of academic disciplines, scientific and technical research, and structures of governance therefore continue to pose conceptual, institutional, and rhetorical challenges that will only increase in significance given the variety of crises facing humanity today. In this context, it is no wonder why the term ‘polycrisis’ seems to have become so relevant.

The term inherently cuts across academic disciplines, conceptually subsuming interrelated networks of crises (economic, public health, environmental, psychological, social, etc.) that could fall under any number of individual fields. Indeed, if the term polycrisis is to retain any reference to its conceptual origins in complexity theory28 - a discourse which itself attempts to supersede disciplinary knowledge via the construction of a meta-disciplinary perspective – it is already implied by the term. If properly conceptualizing the polycrisis requires convening a multi-disciplinary committee, responding practically via public policy similarly requires the successful negotiation of complex divisions between isolated ministries and regulatory agencies. To shape rather than merely fix markets, the “arms, eyes, and ears of the green state”29 must be able to both institutionally reconcile the various siloes of governance, but also conceptually mediate between (inter-) and across (trans-) an array of theoretical and practical disciplines.30

Theoretical problems have a practical basis. Given the acceleration of scientific, academic, and governmental fragmentation at the level of social practice, in the wake of the crisis of the 1960s there was a qualitative shift in theoretical debates regarding the interrelation of academic disciplines with the problematization of these divisions in general. Rooted in concerns regarding, “the pitfalls of specialization and the compartmentalization of knowledge, a globalized economy, shifts in the center of gravity in knowledge production, the ethics of research, and environmental crisis,”31 ‘transdisciplinarity’ came to function as an umbrella term for various attempts to think ‘holistically’ across these different siloes, both at the level of governance but also at the level academic disciplines. Polycrisis and transdiciplinarity therefore share a general problematic regarding the intricacy of conceptualizing and translating across these different research areas, the term’s history and conceptual architecture should therefore be of interest to those taken by its recent popularity. It is to this history and conceptual architecture that I will turn to in part II.   

“The nature of Marx’s critique of political economy may be indicated elliptically by pointing to the replacement of ‘distribution’ by ‘conditions of existence’ as an analytical focal point."1

An increase in the rate of exploitation (people working harder, longer) leads to more surplus for capitalists.2 Could capitalists (mediated in some way by the state) not just use this surplus to increase employment, leaving workers with more money?3 Perhaps to ‘full’ employment? According to the basic IS-LM ‘Keynesian model,’ increased consumption leads to the growth of the economy in general. So why, exactly, do the Marxists make such a big deal about exploitation? Is economic growth not a positive? Is it not the condition of human flourishing? Is selling one’s labor not the price – quite literally – we pay for this broader, ‘historically unprecedented’ prosperity?

One possible critique of exploitation is a moral one. Capitalism is unfair as it is based upon the unequal exchange of money (in the form of wages) for value-created (by the worker within the labor & valorization process). The obvious remedy to this unfairness is simply to raise wages to the point where they are par or equal with the value-created. Only then would the social situation be fair.

A capitalist would almost certainly respond that, in fact, it has to be unfair, for otherwise there would be no surplus at all.4 It has to be unfair, in other words, as it is due to that unfairness that all the remarkable things around you possible; it is how they are produced; how production is possible—the phone in your hand, to the car you drive, the food that is delivered to you to eat, etc., ad absurdum.5 In this hypothetical fair situation, we can imagine them remarking, how would anyone hire workers in the first place? Would investment not disappear? Would this not leave workers with less money, lower consumption, and destroy the economy as a whole? Would it not destroy their lives? Strangely, somehow unfairness starts to look like the most fair thing of all.

The insufficiencies of this kind of critique of exploitation caricatured above are clear after addressing the specificity of Marx’s concept of labor power. One of the tools Marx gives us to analyze production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus value under capitalism is precisely the way in which the specificity of Marx’s conception of labor power shifts the traditional disciplinary focus of economics away from issues related to ‘distribution’ or even ‘production’ and towards the imperatives that drive capitalism’s reproduction of its own conditions of existence; in particular, the inextricability of both economic and extra-economic forces vis a vis these conditions. To reduce one’s analysis of capitalist production to the former would be to replicate at the level of theory the extent to which capital itself retrospectively posits its own presupposition. This presupposition is labor power. Capitalist social relations, in other words, strive to produce types of individual subjects specific to it, and even those needs and wishes that define them as individual subjects.6

These ‘value-subjects’ – who from their own standpoint are human beings thinking they are participating in ‘Life’ – are, from the standpoint of capital, simply bearers of labor power who, when considered from the standpoint of political economy, appear as always already given. The entirety of their Life, in other words, is treated as if it were a thing.

This discussion is limited primarily to themes in Capital Vol I, so there is no analysis of the real movement of many capitals and their competition. As Crotty points out, Volume I analyses the laws of capitalist production – in particular, the beginnings of a theory of competition – but does so by bracketing (1) the existence of financial markets and (2) the problem of the realization of value;7 i.e., the question of whether there is sufficient monetary demand for commodities which have been produced to be sold at their value;8 i.e., the question of whether there is sufficient monetary demand for commodities which have been produced to be sold at their value.9 The relevant related problem is known as the problem of effective demand.10 For Ricardo, the very act of production itself was enough to guarantee sufficient demand for all commodities to be sold, simply because nobody produces except to sell and nobody sells except to buy something else.11 Marx criticizes this assumption this assumption via the category ‘labor power,’ theorizing crises as related to underconsumption or overproduction as occurring immanently to capitalism as a mode of production.

If there is any concept that captures Marx’s theory regarding the inherently antagonistic nature of capitalist growth it is the falling rate of profit. The pattern of its development and its connection to labor can be summarized in the following way: (1) rising productivity of labor leads to (2) a rising rate of surplus value and (3) a rising real wage. In turn, (4) a falling ratio of production wages to total capital outlays follows directly from a rise in real wages, leading to a decrease in surplus and (5) a falling rate of profit;12 yet, in reducing itself of precisely this use, it robs itself of that which constitutes the surplus value that is its condition of possibility.13 Hence the constant oscillation within capitalism between its absorption and dispersal of labor in the form of a growing and shrinking ‘reserve army of labor;’14 that, “mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements.”15

The easiest way to explain the concept of labor power is to clearly distinguish between two levels of abstraction that in Capital that can at times seem confused: the historical and the logical. As Heinrich points out – at at least one level of abstraction – Marx is concerned with a theoretical analysis of capitalism rather than a historical account of its development, an analysis of a specific historical phase, or the exact empirical nature of the capitalist mode of production as it has and will always exist. “We are only out to present,” as Marx puts it, “the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production in its ideal average, as it were.”16 Marx’s value here is epistemological and lies with the unfinished systematic account he produces of the ‘laws’ operating within capitalism, but within capitalism as a closed system. Of course, actually existing capitalism is not a closed system. No purely capitalist society has existed historically in the same way that no idea exists that is identical with its empirical referent; yet, understanding capitalism as a closed system – as a specific theoretical but not necessarily fully historically actual object – helps to explain economic and historical phenomena in the open systems within which we live. And it is to this open system that we come to labor-power, which as both 'life' and 'work,' exists between “the logical world of commodities…and the historical world of bodies;"17 managing to somehow mediate the ‘law-like’ aspects of economic phenomena and the contingency of empirical history.

One of the odd aspects in trying to explain Marx’s ‘General Formula for Capital’18 is that it can be hard to clearly delineate a beginning. We all know that the formula is M – C – M’, but how is it that the process starts with money? If value’s substance is labor, how does the capitalist arrive with money in the first place? Should Marx have begun with labor? The very first sentence of chapter 4 on the general formula begins with the sentence: “the circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital.”19 And the only way commodities circulate is via money; however, is money not just a representation of value qua price?20

Marx presupposes the basic social positions of buyers and sellers as he unfolds the logic of capital for the reader. Marx’s order of presentation in other words is not limited simply to a full systematic account of the social form and economic dynamics capital itself poses as ideal vis a vis a heterogenous set of actually existing social contexts, but phenomenologically stages for the reader the way in which capital itself, in order to go through its cycle of accumulation, requires something given for these positions of buyers and sellers to even be able to be presupposed. This presupposition – i.e., that which is constituted by the forces of capital but is not captured in capital’s own idealized models of itself – is both the historical but also ongoing [i.e., contemporary] production of labor power. Marx’s critique of political economy is that it simply treats labour power as if it can be relied upon as somehow available a priori, without recognition of the extra-economic [social & historical] forces that create it.21

In any case, these ‘extra-economic’ forces constituting the reproduction of capitalism’s conditions of existence in the form of the production of labor power are multiple. Kristin Munro, for example, has pointed out the extent to which “it is necessary to tie the household and household production to the dynamics of production and reproduction in capitalist society.”22 While sharing with Quick the emphasis on necessity of unpaid household labor as an input into a household production process that also relies on commodities purchased with money from waged work – both of which are necessities for the life of the worker qua bearer of labor power – Munro, following Postone, rejects the ‘traditional Marxist’ conception of class struggle as involving, fundamentally, the attempt to recapture a portion of the value created their labor, while the capitalist class uses the state as an instrument to allow for the continued ‘theft’ of the surplus on behalf of the capitalist class.23 For Munro, Quick, in examining capitalism from the standpoint of wages and unwaged labor (i.e., household production, historically carried out by women), refrains from examining how this labor relates to the larger whole; refrains, in other words, from examining, “how the household itself and the breadth of household production relates to the whole of capitalist society;" in particular, their implication in the reproduction of capitalist society writ large.24

Jason E. Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation is the fourth in the Field Notes series published by Reaktion Books in association with the Field Notes section of the journal The Brooklyn Rail, both edited by Paul Mattick Jr. Currently a faculty member in the Graduate Art Department at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Smith is a frequent contributor to the journal. His previous writing and translations are largely political/art-theoretical in character, including translations of Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Tiqqun. Smart Machines, therefore, marks something of a shift for Smith into theoretical territory dominated largely by historians and economists (one might not expect, for example, the author of the preface to Bifo Berardi’s Soul at Work to have written the book in question here).1 To it he brings a certain conceptual sophistication.

Smith opens with a useful chapter, “A Little History of Automation,” shifting into a broadly journalistic and justifiably cynical account of our present economic moment before challenging aspects of this analysis via recourse to value-theoretical categories from Karl Marx’s Capital (1867). He concludes with sketching political implications at the level of class struggle—drawing in particular on James Boggs, for whom already in the 1960s the true political challenge to capitalist hegemony lay not with traditional trade unions nor at the ballot box but with “surplus people,” those thrown between precarious employment and superfluity by the burgeoning servant economy, this “world of outsiders on the margins of the wage relation” (p. 148). Like Boggs, Smith expresses convincing skepticism about contemporary optimism over the rebirth of trade unionism. Upon concluding the book, readers will likely be curious how, or if, Smith and Boggs differ.

Previous commentators have described Smart Machines as “at times convoluted and difficult to untangle” (Jack Copley and Alexis B. Moraitis) or “less tightly structured” (Gary Roth), at least relative to a book with which it will inevitably be compared: Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work (2020).2 While Roth’s characterization seems more accurate than Copley and Moraitis’s, any lack of clarity seems to stem less from issues of textual presentation or organizational structure and more from the task Smith sets himself. The conceptual territory Smith attempts to mediate in 150 pages is variegated and complex, dealing with material often split between discursive contexts and intellectual-historical and disciplinary traditions. The most marked of these is the value-theoretical concerns of the Marxian critique of classical political economy and economics as a discipline. There are therefore unavoidable obstacles for both Smith and the reader. Some have to do with conceptual complexity, but many exist simply at the level of terminology because different concepts take the same term. Successfully navigating these obstacles can be particularly tricky for a general audience insofar as one has to simultaneously avoid having recourse to extensive exegeses of Marx and make reference to him. More generally, though, Smith shows how this value-theoretical discourse can yield productive insights at the level of more generic economic concepts. He does this repeatedly—often with impressive elegance—but because of both the conceptual complexity of the terrain and equivalent terminology, it can at times be difficult to track how the discourses overlap (or do not) given the way Smith is forced to cycle through the terms.

A common conception of our current capitalist crisis—if it is indeed a crisis—is that of a crisis in the realization of value.3 Stavros Tombazos’s Global Crisis and the Reproduction of Capital (2019) is a sophisticated example. Tombazos begins from a divergence of the rate of profit from the rate of capital accumulation—a dynamic expressed in the upward trend in the ratio of surplus value/net investment in fixed capital or empirically in an increase in the ratio of the net operating surplus of a given total economy to the net investment in fixed capital. For Tombazos this divergence has distracted from more traditional “orthodox” Marxian concerns with the falling rate of profit. Tying capitalist crises in general to arrhythmias in the schemas of reproduction outlined in volume 2 of Capital, Tombazos’s is a complex rendering of what might at first seem a version of the underconsumption thesis. Benanav’s analysis meanwhile relies on something of a more straightforward articulation of underconsumption. Following Robert Brenner in arguing that industrial overcapacity has led to underconsumption causing a crisis in realization, Benanav wants to show how job creation slows following a deceleration of economic growth in a generic sense. It is this deceleration caused by overcapacity rather than job destruction following technological innovation that forms the axis around which his Automation and the Future of Work revolves: namely, global labor under-demand. While Tombazos certainly draws on a value-theoretical discourse, neither Tombazos nor Benanav really need to mediate the conceptual gap between value-theoretical and generic economic discourses, much less distinguish between them. For fairly straightforward reasons, it is generally unnecessary for those adhering to the underconsumption thesis to distinguish between, for example, the different concepts of labor productivity internal to these discourses—and further, what counts as productive labor and what does not—precisely because the problem lies with realization rather than with production.

Smith’s Smart Machines is an alternative to both the underconsumption thesis and the characterization of the crisis as one tied to the realization of value, although due to the length of the book and his focus on automation, it is probably more accurate to say that he brackets aspects of these theoretical disputes (which has to do broadly with the relation of finance to capital accumulation and the “tie” between money and value, in particular, whether it has been “cut”).4 Smith is clear in his characterization of the contemporary crisis in capitalist accumulation as being grounded in the growth of “unproductive” labor relative to “productive” labor. The theoretical sources for the specific claim regarding this divergence are Fred Moseley (The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States [1991]) and Paul Mattick Sr. (Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? [1983]). Beyond these two notable examples, Smith—to my knowledge—is unique in his approach. Because he grounds his argument in this divergence, Smith is forced to grapple with the disjunction between the two discourses, for in precisely what sense is some labor productive and some not? Differing conceptions of value and productivity are relevant here both because the distinction between the two is central to his argument and because they illustrate the subtending complexity of the terrain.

In terms of value, within the broadly neoclassical economic tradition, for example, value is synonymous with price, meaning the value of a given input or output is simply measured in monetary terms. Marx’s concept of “value,” which follows from his critique of classical “substantialist” labor theories of value, is more conceptually opaque. It has a relation to price but is definitively not reducible to it. The point here is not to offer some definition of Marx’s concept of value as grounded in—to use the Marxian jargon—abstract labor, but it is to point out that all critiques that conflate the two (which happens if one reads value as in every case implying price, rather than where, such as in volume 1 of Capital, they are assumed as equal, thus the inane idea that Marx thinks price is determined by socially necessary labor time) are less wrong than they are unaware of what they are critiquing.

In terms of productivity, for Marx, the productivity specific to social relations determined by capital is the production of surplus value.5 Production in this historically specific sense exists at a different level of abstraction than what Marx calls “production in general”—the production of use values for consumption. Production in this latter general sense is, for Marx, transhistorical (occurring under capitalism and otherwise). While every social form reproduces itself via the production of use values for consumption, the specificity of capitalism is that use-value production (that is, what people need to consume to survive and reproduce themselves) occurs via the production of exchange values. When Marxian commentators refer to the labor process as being double-sided or something of the sort, what they are referring to is how the labor process under capitalism is, for Marx, simultaneously this labor process (in the latter transhistorical sense) but also a valorization process (in the former historically specific sense of being productive of surplus value).

Smith is particularly insightful when unfolding the generic economic concept of “labor productivity.” From the standpoint of economic analysis, labor productivity is simply a quantitative measurement of output per unit of input: where the numerator is measurable output, the denominator is units of labor time. To measure the rate of productivity of a given firm involves dividing the output of a firm in money terms by the amount of labor required to generate it. Now at the level of the value-theoretical concept of “surplus value,” however, there is no relation between how much a business owner pays a worker as a wage and the value created by labor in the production process. This is worth repeating. For Marx—and for Smith—there is no relation between how much a business owner pays and the actual amount of value a worker creates within the given timeframe of that working day. This is because what the owner pays for is a commodity—a worker’s labor power. What matters in this exchange is the value (and here we can also say price) of labor power on the labor market. Engineers do not earn higher wages because their work creates more value than lower-skilled laborers. They earn higher wages because of the cost of inputs involved in producing said highly skilled laborer (the commodities for the worker to maintain their body, high levels of education, recurring technical qualifications, limited supply as compared to jobs requiring lower levels of skill, etc.,) go for a higher price on the labor market. The labor market therefore appears within generic economic analysis as a series of equal exchanges between owners of commodities: the worker owns their labor power, the capitalist owns money.

The specificity of capitalist exploitation is expressed via the concept of surplus value. Surplus value arises in the differential between the cost that a business owner pays a worker to participate in a labor process for the duration of time as stipulated in a contract and the amount of value the labor actually produces in the “valorization process.”6 The relevant difference, in other words, is between the value of labor power and the value which that labor power valorizes while working. These are completely different magnitudes. “One of the great errors of both spontaneous and theoretical accounts of the wage,” Smith writes, “is to imagine it is determined by the amount of value contributed by this or that worker in the production process” (p. 123). Thus Smith shows how this value-theoretical discourse can yield productive insights at the level of more generic economic concepts, for it is a framework through which to think the relation (or, more to the point, the lack of relation) between labor productivity and wage share.

At a higher level, Smart Machines is a critique of both techno-dystopian (robots will take all the jobs) and techno-utopian (and therefore work will no longer be necessary) tendencies that dominate public discussion about automation in general. For Smith, both standpoints “share the assumption that advanced capitalist economies are currently experiencing, or poised on the cusp of, a thoroughgoing, machine-driven transformation whose primary effect will be the sudden surge of labor productivity and economic growth.”7 Beyond the complexity regarding the relation between the value-theoretical and economic discourses and Smith’s immanently critical approach to the latter, this technological stagnation is the most obvious takeaway from the book at the level of rhetoric and economic argumentation.

In terms of the economic argument, Smith gives three interrelated reasons for the relative insignificance of new forms of automation on labor productivity. First is the existence of types of work that require “an intuitive, embodied, and socially mediated form of knowledge or skill” unable to be replicated by machines, many of which fall under the nebulous heading of “services” (p. 11). Various forms of care work are obvious examples, as is teaching, but Smith provides illuminating illustrations. Readers will likely be curious what more Smith might add, in light of Zoom, with regard to the power he attributes to a teacher’s strike due to, as he points out, the key role teachers play within the social division of labor. The way that the dispersion and disaggregation of these work processes recompose the traditional terrain of class struggle is important for the later more politically inflected sections of the book influenced by Boggs. The critical pressure Smith places on the category of “services” makes for one of the most illuminating sections of the book. Services as a general statistical category “obscures more than it clarifies” insofar as it essentially defines negatively anything other than manufacturing (p. 80). The heterogeneity of the category, in other words, borders on rendering its function as a classificatory term nearly meaningless at the level of statistics. And while for obvious reasons Smith has to avoid slipping constantly into exegeses of Marx, the more Marxologically inclined may be slightly surprised to find mention of neither Marx’s own definition of a “service” in Capital (as “nothing other than the useful effect of a use-value, be it that of a commodity or that of labor”) or his critical discussion of “what the category of service must render to economists like JB Say and F. Bastiat” in the earlier Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.8 This is particularly the case because it occurs within Marx’s discussion of the distinction between the labor and valorization process—squarely where Smith aims a key aspect of his intervention.

Second is the continued availability of cheap labor in advanced economies (and one could likely expand the argument to much of the rest of the world), which functions to disincentivize automation. When faced with the option of hiring cheap labor or shouldering the time lag involved in the cost of some expensive investment in fixed capital, business owners will choose the former, thus deterring businesses more broadly from automating labor processes. Smith, however, adds an additional layer, namely, that “the excess of labor that prevents the mechanization or automation of one particular sector is itself the result of an ‘excess’ of automation in another sector” (p. 131). Colloquial conceptions of automation tend to occur along a single vector: a machine is invented, it is adopted within a sector, it displaces workers. Of course, with every innovation, new sectors inevitably develop to produce precisely that innovation (some machine is invented that displaces workers in one sector, increasing labor demand in the sector producing the rare earth metal on which the machine is dependent). Further, the use of labor-saving technology in one industry can create surplus labor in another industry, thus preventing technological innovation and the adoption of machinery in that second industry.

Third is a steady decline in private investment in the kinds of fixed capital one would need to reverse the decline in profitability Smith identifies. Here he draws extensively on the work of J. W. Mason, with the most interesting section being his discussion of accounting practices. Recently changed accounting conventions allow companies to count spending on intellectual property production as investment spending: “existing data for private investment now incorporate expenditures targeting the protection of revenue flows secured through legal title to technologies and processes, rather than the invention or refinement of newer, more efficient labor processes or organization schema” (p. 47). Contemporary measurement of private investment, therefore, mixes dynamic sorts of investment that are the condition of significant increases in productivity but also types of investment that may increase stagnation if this legal stranglehold on the adoption of technological innovation functions to create uncompetitive markets. The level of private investment is likely even lower than it appears on paper.

In terms of how this question appears on paper, Smith continues in a longer line of critics who express a skepticism in general regarding the accuracy of economic observations—at the level of both their discovery and their presentation. This is a line traceable to Oskar Morgenstern’s 1950 On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, a source Paul Mattick Jr. has drawn on to make similar observations about not only mainstream economics but also the way that “economic Marxism participates in the general theoretical chaos of economics as a field.” For Mattick, the epistemological difficulties in empirically accounting for certain economic observations are such that “even an imaginable calculation of Marx’s profit rate [is] an impossibility.”9 For Smith as well, “there is no prevailing standard by which the profit rate is measured, or even for defining it,” and “for this reason ... the rate of business investment remains the best, if still indirect, indicator of prevailing levels of profit across the economy” (p. 96).

The question of the falling rate of profit is so loaded it would be impossible to untangle the various complications and epistemological problems internal to the debate that surround it. This is the case even apart from the question of whether it is feasible to accurately measure, much less how to do so (which revolves around complex and technical discussions over the calculation of the value of fixed capital stock), or even whether it is necessary to measure empirically to prove the law is economically actual at all. Questions about the relation of economics as a discourse to methodological commitments about social ontology are relevant here but beyond the purview of this review. Simpler questions exist at the level of the temporality of the category, however. Is it a category operative at a cyclical level? Is it operative at the level of long wave cycles like those of Nikolai Kondratieff? Insofar as Marx’s phrase in chapter 13 of volume 3 of Capital is “the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”—and, as Smith is keen to point out, there are counter-tendencies—what is the difference between a law and a tendency? Should it be distinguished from a trend? Peter Osborne has pointed out how Marxist crisis theory is haunted by a disjunction between the general-historical character of the concept of “crisis” in its modern form (which includes the notion of crisis as a condition of possibility of transition to a new mode of production) and the conjunctural and comparatively narrow focus of Marx’s own “theory of crisis” as a theory primarily of periodic crises.10 Indeed, how can any cyclical crisis be the crisis insofar as it is, precisely, cyclical?

The relevant point of emphasis for Smith, however, is how he grounds a fall in profitability in the rising ratio of unproductive to productive labor. The Marxian terrain here remains largely volume 1 of Capital, but Smith draws extensively from the Grundrisse (published posthumously, 1939) in particular (although, as Roth has pointed out, he could have drawn as well on parts of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value [published posthumously, 1905-10]). It should be noted that Smith’s general critical approach is not simply to slam one set of concepts into another. He is at his most perceptive and illuminating when he enters the concepts of generic economic discourse only to unfold aspects of conceptual indeterminacy even according to their own criteria. The book serves as a kind of object lesson of this for a general audience.

Regarding the generic economic concept labor productivity, for example, Smith contrasts the traditional concept (of output over labor time) with labor productivity measured in the production of physical units, pointing out the complicated relationship between the two. An increase in productivity in this latter physical sense leads to a decrease in the former sense, given a change of prices. Rising productivity as measured in physical units can, in other words, be offset in the latter sense by a fall in prices. From the standpoint of an actual business owner though, labor productivity appears not as a calculation of measurable output over labor time but as a measurement of output (numerator) over the cost of labor (denominator). What matters ultimately to the business owner is the cost of labor power. Lowering wages or reducing the total number of employees functions to raise the productivity of labor (measured in money terms) by lowering unit labor costs. Indeed, regarding wage stagnation, Smith positions himself simultaneously against the orthodox economic interpretation that explains the increase or decrease in wages due simply to the supply and demand of labor, but also the, broadly speaking, leftist/heterodox position that attributes wage stagnation simply to shifts in class power—where wage stagnation is understood as wage suppression. For Smith, however, to grasp wage stagnation in mere political terms misses “the most decisive factor in the decades-long leveling off of wages: the dramatic tapering off, over the same period, of gains in the productivity of labor” (p. 61). In a similar critical move, Smith turns to the measurement of labor productivity as a question of the production of physical outputs, noting the incoherence in comparing different types of physical outputs because of their qualitative diversity: “shoes don’t have much in common with car mufflers, either in terms of end uses or how they are made” (p. 86). Of course, as Smith points out, there is a way to measure them but only if you measure their value (in the generic economic sense) in money terms. To compare between sectors, economists, therefore, must divide output as expressed in money terms. In the Marxian jargon, money functions as a universal equivalent.

This necessity produces unavoidable distortions. Measuring labor productivity in money terms means excluding “all laboring activities that produce use-values but no exchange-value: activities like childcare and meal preparation performed by families that are necessary for the functioning of the economy as a whole ... these activities produce ‘output’ to be consumed, but because this output has no market price it does not, strictly speaking, count as economic output” (p. 87). Like other forms of production, household production relies on commodities purchased with money from waged work; these are necessities for the life of a given worker if they are to function as labor power for a capitalist to purchase at all. Those familiar with social reproduction theory will be aware of the extent that it is necessary to think about household production in relation to the dynamics and reproduction of capitalist sociality. The economic activity constituting these relations are not—and simply cannot—be registered by a category like labor productivity insofar as they are not remunerated via a wage.

Smith notes a kind of inverse distortion that follows from trying to measure the productivity of an “enormous number of wage-earning activities, almost always defined as ‘services,’ primarily performed for the sake not of producing this or that commodity but in order to facilitate the buying and selling of other commodities.” In Marxian terminology, these are jobs within the sphere of circulation and therefore sit outside the immediate production process. These are activities that, for Smith, “can be bought and sold on the market, and therefore have an exchange-value; but they produce no recognizable use-value at all.” For Smith, examples of these activities involve cashiers (“who can be said to circulate value” but not produce it) and security guards (“whose job is to ensure that property changes hands in situations where money is tendered in exchange for it”). Interestingly, Smith includes financial activity—the specific examples he gives are activities like real estate sales, insurance provision, and investment brokers selling securities (equities, mortgages, derivatives)—as an example of this “problematic type of service production” (p. 87).

It is hard to square Marx’s own definition of a “service” as “nothing other than the useful effect of a use-value, be it that of a commodity or that of labor” with the idea that, for example, the action of a cashier has an exchange value but does not consist of or effect a use value, despite the fact that they might not produce a use value in the sense of a commodity qua physical object. This perhaps follows from Smith seeming to rely not on Marx’s critique of the concept of service but rather on Adam Smith’s definition of “service labor” as “a paid economic activity whose ‘product generally perish[es] in the very instant of [its] performance,’” where the acts of production and consumption coincide, as understood in opposition to productive forms of labor that “‘fix and realize [themselves] in a vendible commodity’: a discrete object that can be detached from the body of both the producer and/or consumer, and be sold or transferred to another owner at a later date” (p. 78). The relevant question here is whether or not the productivity of labor in the Marxian value-theoretical sense has anything to do with this concept of “materiality.” As Michael Heinrich puts it in his own discussion of commodities, services, and the physicality or not of each: “what is relevant here is the act of exchange, not the fact that physical objects are being exchanged. Services can also be exchanged and therefore become commodities. The difference between a material product and an ‘immaterial’ service consists solely of a different temporal relation between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed ... in the case of a service ... the act of production is concurrent with the act of consumption.... The difference between services and physical objects consists of a distinction of the material content; the question as to whether they are commodities pertains to their social form, and that depends upon whether objects and services are exchanged.11

Wherever one stands on the issue, the discussion opens out into a broader one, which will not be settled here, that has to do with precisely which labor processes count (or do not) as productive in the value-theoretical sense, and how these processes overlap with actually existing forms of employment and how productive they are (or not) in the labor productivity sense. The issue of productive versus unproductive labor is not an unimportant question; however, exaggerated emphases on productive capital by some Marxists—as if this is a sort of unadulterated capitalism untainted by finance—can serve to veil the important connection between finance and capital accumulation. By the end of Marx’s volume 3 of Capital, we learn that capitalism simply cannot function without credit allocation. There may be times where finance serves the interests of financiers more than they serve production in any sort of general sense, but this is different than saying financial services are unproductive. The seeming dismissal of financial activity in general as a “problematic type of service production,” for example, points in this direction. In general, however, the content of which jobs are productive and unproductive seems to matter less for our purposes here than the form of the argument and critical orientation of Smith’s analysis. In terms of his analysis, it will be useful to briefly compare it with Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work.

Automation and the Future of Work is best described as Brenner from the standpoint of labor, bookended by a positive utopianism based on distinguishing between “the realm of necessity” and “the realm of freedom”—a distinction Benanav attributes to thinkers ranging from Marx and Thomas More to Étiene Cabet and Peter Kropotkin.12 Its value seems largely to be the very cogent summarization replete with extensive empirical evidence of Brenner’s Marxian insights regarding overcapacity in a form fit for readers of The Economist. Aspects are already mentioned above; however, a basic glossing of the Brenner story involves industrial overcapacity following the unprecedented growth occurring in the middle of the twentieth century, killing the possibility of a similar explosion of growth in its aftermath. Job creation slows following a deceleration of economic growth, and it is this deceleration rather than job destruction following technological innovation that leads to a global jobs crisis driven by labor under-demand.

Given this stagnation, labor floods the “heterogenous service sector, which accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of total employment in high income countries, and the majority of workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa.” Benanav uses William Baumol’s division of the entire economy into a technologically stagnant (services) and technologically innovative (industry) sector to explain both stagnation in productivity growth with reference to “Baumol’s cost disease.” Baumol’s argument runs something like the following: following the adoption of technological innovation, labor is ejected from the innovative sector to the stagnant sector with its “much lower rates of productivity growth,” slower precisely because they are resistant to innovation. Because of these slow rates of productivity, services become ever more expensive relative to goods, leaving the service sector to rely on income effects for its expansion, thus “the growth of demand for services depends on the growth of incomes across the economy.” There is, therefore, “a clear link between the global expansion of this stagnant economic sector and the ever-worsening stagnation of the world economy.”13

What is at issue for Smith, however, is not simply a divergence in productivity between a technologically progressive and stagnant sector but rather a divergence between the growth of unproductive and productive work in the value-theoretical sense, placing downward pressure on the profit rate. This “rising proportion of the labor force working in circulation and supervision [that is, unproductive] represents an increasing cost to the system as a whole” insofar as “a significant portion of the wage bill includes personnel who perform activities that do not produce value” and whose “wages must be paid out of surplus value produced by productive workers elsewhere in the economy” (p. 101). All of this follows logically, although again the extent to which finance or money capital mediates precisely this gap between surplus value and wages—and even further, how the relationship is mediated by the state—tends to hover somewhere outside the frame. It is also not entirely clear whether supervisory labor should be seen as productive or unproductive. In Theories of Surplus Value, for example, Marx writes that “included among these productive workers ... are all those who contribute in one way or another to the production of the commodity, from the actual operative to the manager to the engineer.”14 In Marx’s volume 3 of Capital, the labor of supervision and management is described in similar terms, although within the terms of a transhistorical concept of “cooperative labor”: “all labor in which many individuals cooperate necessarily requires a commanding will to coordinate and unify the process, and [also] functions which apply not to partial jobs but to the total activities of the workshop, much as that of an orchestra conductor. This is a productive job, which must be performed in every combined mode of production.”15

This is tangential to what is of particular importance here, namely, how, whereas Benanav uses Baumol’s cost disease to explain stagnation in productivity and therefore economic growth, Smith, after critically interrogating—as we saw above—the distortions arising in measuring productivity in the generic economic sense (which is the sense Benanav relies on for his analysis), sees reflected in the growth of unproductive versus productive labor a crisis in capitalist accumulation leading to a fall in the profitability of capitalist firms in general. These are two quite substantially different critical approaches latent beneath descriptive similarities. Further, insofar as it is value that defines the historical specificity of capitalist production—a specificity not captured by generic economic measurements of either productivity or growth—it seems that it is precisely these kinds of value-theoretical categories that one would need to think practically the realm of necessity and a realm of freedom with which Benanav concludes his book.

At a more rhetorical level, those looking for a positive vision or reaffirmation of technology’s ability to drag humanity out of its existential trench should look beyond Smith’s Smart Machines. Whereas Benanav at least sees “the resurgence of the automation discourse [as] a response to a real trend unfolding across the world: there are simply too few jobs for too few people,” Smith takes a more cynical approach to technological evangelism writ large.16 Sentences like “the signal technological breakthrough of the past two decades—the circulation of images across networked computer terminals—represents little more than the splicing together of these two long-extant technologies” or “the technologies characteristic of the past two decades ... have been concentrated in entertainment and leisure: toys, not tools” are frequent (pp. 42, 43). The “meager results of the third industrial revolution” are described as “a tsunami of infantilizing gadgets that double as tracking collars” (p. 44). “The ‘true’ advances,” he writes, “have been in the domination of the labor process by employers: their ability to coerce more labor out of a given hour by means of refinements in supervision, oversight, and workplace discipline” (p. 113). Readers familiar with Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War (2016) will be familiar with the general thrust.

In connecting technological innovation to forms of discipline and control, Smith continues in a longer line of American Marxists, such as Harry Braverman, who, like Marx, understand technological innovation to be not simply productive of social and economic relations but produced by social and economic relations as determined by capital. “It is not pure technique that interests us,” as Braverman puts it, “but the marriage of technique to capital.”17 For Smith as well, and insofar as the production of surplus value involves coercion and discipline—via, for example, increased intensities of work within a given time frame due to discipline or surveillance—no one should be surprised when even the most banal technological advancement includes some coercive or disciplinary aspect. The lengths even some Marxists will go to concoct complex theorizations of the neutral or non-neutral relation of technological innovation to capitalism and vice versa is rather spectacular when compared with what a category like relative surplus value implies. Innovations in workplace discipline and surveillance simply are productive innovations insofar as they create the conditions for an increased intensity of work. If one accepts the legitimacy of relative surplus value as an analytical category, disciplinary control and the productivity of surplus value are two sides of one coin. This insight—which Smith seems more than aware of—makes the characterization of supervisory labor as unproductive particularly puzzling.

Marxists can certainly argue interminably about what is and what is not productive and unproductive labor, but the content of this debate seems tangential to what is so impressive about Smith’s book: the way he brings to bear some of the most important methodological and conceptual difficulties posed by Marx for a general audience. In 150 pages, Smith intervenes simultaneously within that Marxian discourse but also—more important—allows its insights to unfold vis-à-vis those concepts of a more generic economic kind without simply posing the former in open confrontation with the latter. In letting the concepts speak for themselves, Smith adopts what is very likely a more sustainable approach to an important academic but also political task: depicting for a general audience a value-theoretical discourse and the light it can shed on an economic discourse of a more generic variety whose truth is too often taken simply as given.

This is republished via H-Net. The original review can be found here: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/8119034/harvey-smith-smart-machines-and-service-work

Thanks to the expansion of steam shipping, railways, and the introduction of communications technologies like the telegraph, the late 19th century saw incredible changes in the speed and spatial arrangement of capitalism. In a rather stunning note to Capital Vol III, Engels writes, “the colossal expansion of means of communication—ocean-going steamships, railways, electric telegraphs, the Suez canal—has genuinely established the world market for the first time.”1 If, as Tony Smith has argued, “the category ‘world market’ is implicit in each and every major theoretical level of Capital,”2 (if, in other words, Marx assumes a ‘world market’ as a condition of ‘capitalism’ presented as a theoretical model), than the world market properly speaking appears on the historical scene only after the publication of his analysis of capitalism—and yet a historical condition of capitalism is, precisely, a ‘world market.’ The unorthodox periodization that might follow places the beginning of capitalism not in the 15th and 16th centuries, but in the late 19th century.

Strange situation; however, lest this escape into a debate about periodization, the point here is to emphasize the way in which the physical conditions of exchange affect velocities of circulation; how the materiality of those systems mediating an entire global network of exchange relations establishes limits within which capital finds itself that it then attempts to supersede. These qualitative aspects help determine its ‘turnover time.’ Usually associated with the lifespan of fixed capital, the concept turnover time traditionally refers to the period of time where a piece of equipment can be in use; i.e., the total amount of time over which its value is transferred to products and returns to the capitalist as money. Engels though uses it in a much broader sense:

“the whole earth has been girded by telegraph cables. it was the Suez canal that really opened the Far East and Australia to the streamer”; “the turnover time of world trade as a whole has been reduced to the same extent (from months to weeks…) and the efficacy of the capital involved in it has been increased two or three times more.”3

In his 1977 classic The Visible Hand, Alfred Chandler famously explored this development via the history of railroads and the telegraph in the continental US 4 Originally a constellation of six firms, by 1866, Western Union had become the dominant telegraph company in the US, with yearly messages sent over its lines increasing from 5.8 million in 1867 to an astonishing 63.2 million in 1900. Over the same period, transmission rates fell from an average of $1.09 to 30 cents per message. Proving the importance of this communication infrastructure to the expansion of American capitalism, “Western Union was the first nationwide industrial monopoly, with over 90% of the market share and dominance in every state.”5 Regulation at a state and federal level was essentially futile.

The vast spread and consolidation of the telegraph network had a major impact on financial markets. The expansive telegraph network, “simply made possible the emergence of efficient, nationwide markets.” As JoAnne Yates puts it, “for the first time, market participants in distant parts of the country could interact almost instantaneously to gather information and make transactions.”6 The ability to coordinate pricing in New York led to the disappearance of hundreds of exchanges that had arisen across the country over the course of the 19th century.

In his A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, Jairus Banaji points out how Marx was, “perfectly aware of these ‘material’ influences, of the way use-value as such could acquire economic significance.”7 While capitalist accumulation certainly runs up against obstacles imposed on it by the natural environment (which, in turn, it then attempts to supersede), the emphasis here is much broader and, in a sense, rather banal—the materials that make up transportation and communications technology function to mediate the speed and scale of accumulation, and therefore there is a vast ‘use-value’ stratum playing a determining role at the level of economic form.8 Probably the most famous expression of this can be found in the Grundrisse:

“The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange—the means of communication and transport—become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange—of the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time—becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.”9

Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier—and through this process of destruction produces the ‘physical conditions of exchange’ (indeed, is there a more capitalist dynamic than construction via destruction?). In driving beyond every physical qualitative barrier in general the fantasy it poses for itself is the escape from qualitative mediation at all. This process of destruction produces a new spatial and temporal arrangement.

It is of course important to note that to view a commodity from the standpoint of its use-value is here not some sort of normative stance. It is not meant to be a judgment about its proper or 'most productive' use. It just means to view it from the standpoint of its qualities—its specific physical characteristics. Thus when Marx introduces the concept he writes, “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value, but this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”10

‘Usefulness’ here should therefore not be confused with a rendering of particular subjective preferences in the present; i.e., the concept of utility. The physical and material emphasis of the concept ‘use-value’ here stands for something temporally broader, including physical characteristics that are currently present in the object, but also those that might come to have social meaning in the future. In the case of magnetism, “[its] property of attracting iron only became useful once it had led to the discovery of magnetic polarity.”11 Certain materials, in other words, may become useful in new ways in the wake of technological discovery, but these new uses remain based on physical characteristics that have always been present in the object itself. Use-values make up the world of commodities' qualitative and material sub-stratum.

The economic doxa of the business press takes it for granted that technological innovation only becomes socially actual in a generalized fashion under certain conditions. Innovation does not in other words merely follow from ingenious invention. Clocks capable of measuring time in homogeneous units for example pre-date their widespread use. In his Politics of Time, Peter Osborne relates both the broad acceptance of ‘clock time’ and the rapid development of transport and communications technology to the imposition and generalization of a particular form of time under capitalist modernity:

“With capitalism came the homogenization of labour-time: the time of abstract labour (money, the universal equivalent), the time of the clock. And with the rapid development of transport and communications in the course of capitalist development in the nineteenth century (the railways and the telegraph) came the beginnings of a generalized social imposition of a single standard of time."12

There were certainly historical precursors to this generalized quantifiable continuum, such as Chinese water clocks dating to the 8th century13 or the equal blocks of time regulating life in Benedictine Monasteries.14 That time could be measured in homogenous units however did not alone allow or lead to the more efficient or effective arrangement of societies such that, all of the sudden, after its invention, everyone was able to be ‘on time;’ rather, the form of time measured by clocks became both widespread and naturalized when a particular social and economic compulsion to measure time in equal units became sufficiently generalized and, indeed, imposed upon forms of temporality that had been previously socially-determined in different ways (such as those determined by agricultural rhythms, religious rituals, etc).

It is of course tempting and even occasionally politically productive to emphasize the more romantic aspects of usefulness; to point out how the diversity of concrete aspects of an object is lost or forgotten when rendered equivalent by the logic of exchange; to argue for organizing economic production around the production of use-values rather than production of commodities for profit. A recent example is Cedric Durand’s association of the Left in general with what he calls the “revenge of use-values;” with the idea of democratically organizing production not for profit for the satisfaction of human needs.

“Unlike those monopolistic intellectuals favoring a regressive ‘techno-feudal mode of production’, or those in the investment community expecting economic dirigisme to engineer a rebound of accumulation, the left wants something else: after decades of commodity delirium, a turn to democratic planning—channelling investment according to social need and ecological boundaries—would be the revenge of use value.”15

This is all well and good, however the 'revenge of use-values' I want to emphasize is of a different kind. It is one which, in another guise, has been at the forefront of economic commentary and commented upon now almost ad nauseum: the economic effects (both real and imagined) of supply-chain disruption during the COVID pandemic. I emphasize both real and imagined because the perception alone of supply chain issues will effect investment decisions. As Claus Offe has put it in another context, “the power position of private investors includes the power to define reality…whatever they consider an intolerable burden in fact is an intolerable burden which will in fact lead to a declining propensity to invest…the debate about whether or not the welfare-state is ‘really’ squeezing profits is thus purely academic because investors are in a position to create reality — and the effects — of a ‘profit squeeze.’”16

In the Marxian jargon, this return of supply chains to economic consciousness is an instance of the use-value ‘form determination’ of value creation; a kind of return of the repressed of those qualitative physical limits that always shape and limit the form of accumulation and value-augmentation in historically specific ways.

The nature of our current historically specific arrangement undoubtedly comes out of a broader response by capital to the economic crisis of the early 1970s, and increases in speed and turnover are certainly one way to solve a crisis of profitability. Insofar as capital is itself not a physical object but a movement17 and increases in the speed of this movement lead to increases, intensifications, and more concentrated periods of circulation (a drive to more rapidly move through cycles of M – C – M’) is just as central to ‘capitalist growth’.18 Following the movement of capital and production processes in search of cheaper labour necessitated more fluid connectivity and the management of supply-chains across far-flung territories. In his Planetary Mine, Martin Arboleada argues this logistics revolution of the latter half of the 20th century, “has deliberately and decisively blurred the boundaries between making and moving – production and distribution.”19

Economic elites themselves have more recently adopted an increasing focus on speed and interconnection.20 According to the World Economic Forum, “there are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent.”21 While descriptions of 'economic growth' are usually associated rhetorically with expansion, there is here an added emphasis on intensification and interconnection. This is neither a departure nor pablum, but perfectly consistent with the growth imperative of capitalist accumulation. In a rather literal sense, ‘growth’ occurs not simply by creating more goods to sell to new markets, but by intensifying or speeding up the existing circuits of both commodity and monetary circulation.

Beyond communications and transportation technology there is, to use Banaji's phrase, one other major “lubricator of velocity," one which very recently has come to the fore of economic consciousness in a similar way: the banking system.22 "The link was clearly seen by Marx," Banaji writes, "when he implied that the development of the credit system helped sustain a more rapid turnover of commercial capital." The discounting of bills of exchange certainly played a major role in financing both larger volumes of trade and a greater fluidity of circulation.23 For Banaji, "the new commercial methods that came into vogue during the 1860s revolved essentially around a more rapid velocity of circulation."24 The destructive effect that this had on existing networks of international merchants should not be underestimated.

Destruction through disintermediation is the central theme here. To illustrate this kind of destruction, Banaji references the autobiography of a Greek merchant named Dimitros Velekas. It is worth quoting in full:

“the most important reason [for] the disappearance of those merchant houses was the change that occurred in trading itself. Half a century before[,] the electric telegraph and the telephone [had not brought] the most distant countries in direct communication through instant understanding. The goods were loaded on sail vessels and months went by until they arrived [at] the port of consumption. In the meantime, the owners of the cargoes had enough time to speculate, by observing the fluctuation of the market. At that time the merchants depended on their own capital and on the credits of their correspondents; therefore, their transactions were very limited, but the dangers were also fewer than today, and moreover the merchants were more conservative. Today the growth of global trade has brought an increase of the number of banks; the banks concentrate maximum capital, which has to be invested (wherever it can be) . . . That way the turnover of dealings increased immensely…today one could say that commerce aims mainly to the gain of a small profit from big and rapid enterprises, which are continually repeated. The few merchants who succeeded in applying the new system are still trading in a profitable way. The old Greek trade does not exist anymore and those old merchant houses, where new generations of merchants found work in succession, are now dissolving, causing national damage.”25

In the sequel entry I’ll argue that while the return of the spectre of supply chains represents the revenge of use-value ‘form determinations’ on everyday economic consciousness (one which represses the very real and physical ‘use-value’ mediation of the process of value creation), the popularity of bitcoin is an ideological expression of this same fantasy of disintermediation, but at the level of the banking system; at the level of monetary circulation rather than commodity circulation. What may seem like two disconnected concerns are in fact deeply ideologically intertwined. The theoretical articulation of this force of disintermediation is probably represented paradigmatically in the thought of Nick Land, who connects the practical possibilities of bitcoin to previous theorizations of ‘accelerationism.’

This is a re-post of a previously published article for Legal Form on January 3rd, 2022. It can be found online at https://legalform.blog/2022/01/03/harvey-forrester-rawls/. A special thank you to Rob Hunter & Jasmine Chorley-Schultz for their editorial assistance.

I.

According to the Marxian critique of the social-contractual tradition, the latter is ahistorical. Whether through recourse to a ‘state of nature’ or to an ‘original position,’ this political philosophical tradition depends upon the erasure or abstraction away from the historical conditions of possibility of what appears as, ex post facto or, by way of a thought experiment, the ‘consent of the governed.’ For example, towards the end of Part Two of the first volume of Capital, Marx locates the very terrain of liberal political philosophy in the ‘sphere of circulation;’ that ‘very Eden of the innate rights of Man…the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.’1

For Marx, ‘simple circulation’ functions as the ideological and methodological abstraction upon which classical political economy—the object of his critique—is constructed. While readers of Part One of Capital may initially be tempted to interpret his description of the ‘value-form’ and the ‘process of exchange’ as a ‘base’ determining some concept of freedom or equality (or even Justice) at the level of some ‘superstructure’, it is important to recognize that this sphere of circulation—with buyers and sellers of commodities operating according to their free will, each contracted as free persons, and each equal before the law—is itself thoroughly ‘superstructural’. It should therefore not be mistaken for an entity that actually exists empirically, or even a historical state out of which society has subsequently developed.

It is this ideological and methodological abstraction, however, which not only provides classical political economy with the methodological ground upon which it conceives of capitalist production, but also, for Marx, ‘provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour.’2 This ‘free-trader vulgaris’ makes a particular assumption: that participants in market relations engage in exchange on equal terms. The concepts of equality, freedom, and property that follow from this model of ‘simple circulation’ depend on there being a specific type of commodity owner with only one commodity to sell—their labour-power. This rather convenient ideological presupposition—one which is simultaneously constituted by the forces of capital but is not captured in capital’s own idealised models of itself—is the historical and ongoing production of labour-power. More specifically, it conceals entirely the ongoing social-institutional production of certain types of human beings amenable to capitalist production—human beings who certainly do not bear any necessary resemblance to the free individuality internal to the classical ‘liberal subject’. Marx’s critique of classical political economy is therefore that it simply treats labour-power as though it can be relied upon to be available a priori, without recognising the social and historical forces that produce it and their history.3

II.

Aspects of a historical critique of Rawlsian liberal political philosophy are identified by Katrina Forrester in her recent monograph, which provides a sweeping account not only of John Rawls’ thought and his intellectual and historical context, but also takes a rather extraordinary inventory of the responses it prompted—from other liberal egalitarians, communitarians, neoliberals, conservatives, and so on. Throughout, Forrester particularises and historicises liberal egalitarianism by identifying both its historical conditions of possibility and its contemporary political limitations. In an accompanying essay, Forrester describes how, after Rawls, ‘liberal philosophers dispensed with older arguments and concerns—about the nature of the state, political control, collective action, corporate personality, and appeals to history,’4 as well as the way in which, ‘objections to the universalist presumptions of American liberalism were understood as identitarian challenges to equality, rather than as critiques informed by the history of imperialism and decolonization.’5

‘Now that the claims of the end of history seem not only complacent but mistaken,’ she writes, ‘the political role of his philosophical liberalism is more uncertain.’ In the face of social and historical regression and the crumbling of a particular liberal edifice, capital-H History—the philosophy of which, after the announcement of its end, increasingly appeared at best metaphysical and, at worst, an instance of theology – increasingly seems back on the agenda.

However, Forrester deals with an issue more fundamental than an intellectual-historical account or historical critique of Rawls, his context, and his influence. This is the possibility and political relevance of political philosophy itself after the political and intellectual exhaustion of the liberal egalitarian tradition. At the root of this exhaustion are two stories about the history of twentieth-century political thought. The first story locates Rawls at the origin of the rebirth of political philosophy as a discrete discipline. In the wake of the Second World War, political philosophy, properly understood, was unable to theorize about justice and utopia, and all but dead.6 This lasted through the 1950s and 1960s. The field was reborn with the 1971 publication of Rawls’ Theory of Justice, providing a conceptual vocabulary for a re-established discipline.7 ‘Political philosophers’, as Robert Nozick put it, ‘must either work within Rawls’ theory, or explain why not’.8

The second story is a familiar one: in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and increasingly approaching horizon of extinction due to climate change, it became increasingly difficult to extract Rawls’ Theory of Justice from the ‘post-war consensus’ with which it coincided. As libertarianism and neoliberalism gained political ground in the 1980s, and in the wake of the ‘liberal universalisms [that were] contested across the human sciences’,9 Rawls’ thought—so this story goes—increasingly came to function as a philosophical defence of the welfare state at the moment of its dusk, offering a philosophical justification for what had already begun to dissolve.

III.

What political work—if any—one expects from philosophy will depend on one’s concept of it. Forrester stresses the particular importance of Wittgenstein’s and J. L. Austin’s ‘ordinary language philosophy’ on the thinking of the early Rawls and its influence on Rawls’ fundamental state-skepticism—one that goes unnoticed in the popular figuration of Rawls as an arch-philosophical defender of social democracy. Despite Wittgenstein’s own description of Oxford as a ‘philosophical desert’,10 under his influence postwar British philosophy saw, in Forrester’s words, ‘a new generation of philosophers develop a view of morality as something that existed in the world that could be studied using induction and observation.’11

Forrester brilliantly shows how Rawls transposes Wittgensteinian insights regarding linguistic usage onto his own conception of the relation between government and civil society. In examining Rawls’ own interest in game-based metaphors for the state, Forrester locates a fundamental state-skepticism—one she also ties biographically to Rawls’ traumatic experience as an infantryman in the Pacific Theatre—that the social-democratic interpretation of his thought has hidden from view.12 For Rawls, ‘society is like a game’, one which, as Forrester writes, ‘was not centrally directed. If it were, society would be more like ‘an army’ than a game…laws and government were there to ensure the game did not break down.’13

One of the expectations of this ‘ordinary language philosophy’ was the eventual genuine dissolution of philosophical problems (rather than solution, for these were not real problems).14 If philosophical problems are understood to be conceptual, and all conceptual issues have to do with linguistic custom, close enough analysis of linguistic custom and usage entails their dissolution. There is nothing in the world itself that is problematical—much less contradictory.15 Trouble arises in our way of speaking and use of concepts, and the job of the philosophy is to ensure proper use to, ‘ensure the identity and stability of the system, by preventing unorthodox moves within it.’16 The true origins of philosophical problems, in other words, exist at the level of logical rather than historical genesis.

Forrester foregoes a critically reflective analysis of this philosophical form—one that, she argues, was so influential to Rawls’ thinking.17 Instead, she focuses on historically grounding the way in which an increased faith in philosophy’s ability to change the world was constructed in the wake of political philosophy’s Rawlsian rebirth—much akin to the increased philosophical faith in the disappearance of philosophical problems by ordinary language philosophy. She convincingly shows how Rawls’ political thought was built not only on a particular set of assumptions limited to a specific historical moment about social and political life in postwar America, but also on a fixed political vision that left certain ideas behind—like the nature of the state, collective action, and the relation between history and philosophy.18 As Jedediah Purdy points out, Rawlsians emphasized consensus-seeking deliberation, legalistic formulations of political problems, and a focus on individual ethics in the face of the horrors of history; but they largely did not address questions regarding the role of conflict in constituting social relations, notions of power and the substantive theorisation of the state, the relation of capitalism to democracy, and the role of the history of racism and colonialism in shaping American society.19

Forrester agrees with this critique while maintaining a politically ambivalent relation to Rawls, and to liberalism more generally. Forrester’s central contention is that liberal egalitarianism is simultaneously radical and conservative: radical, because the distributive justice that follows from his principles appears now as almost utopian (even socialistic) from the standpoint of the present; and conservative, because, much like classical political economy, it is grounded on principles that it insists already exist.20

So, on the one hand, ‘the Rawlsian vision looks no more capable of fully making sense of the current conjuncture than it did during the crisis of the 1970s’. But on the other hand, it is precisely the fact that it ‘did not move beyond postwar liberalism and did not fully accommodate itself to the post-1970s era [that is] is one of its strengths.’ That Rawls’ thought is ‘uniquely under-affected by the denaturalising, anti-essentialising, and particularising (one is tempted to add here historicising) movements that gained ground in the second half of the twentieth century’ leaves it ‘uniquely well placed’ to connect ‘universal and maximalist principles to psychologically realistic accounts of what people are like, both individually and collectively.’21 Forrester finds herself in the odd spot of locating political philosophy’s radicalism in its conservatism.

IV.

Exactly what is ‘ordinary’ about the concept of ‘ordinary’ internal to ‘ordinary language philosophy’ might have been more obvious to its originators at Oxford than it was to anyone else. Though perhaps one can see how this ordinariness might be contrasted with the comparatively unordinary babble of foreigners—particularly if they are French. At almost the same time as the publication of Rawls’ Theory of Justice in 1971, new intellectual influences—precisely those denaturalising, anti-essentialising, and particularising ones—entered Anglo-American academies. Humanities and social science disciplines in Anglo-American universities were in many ways wholly transformed following the reception of mid-century French and German thought, despite—or, perhaps, precisely because of—the fact that this transformation took place on theoretical bases that bore little relation to the particular histories of the different disciplines which received them.22

The name for this transformation has been retrospectively called ‘Theory’, but has also been termed, with varying degrees of relevance, accuracy, and redundancy, ‘critical theory’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘Western Marxism’, ‘critical Marxism’, and, now more notoriously, ‘cultural Marxism’. These are of course some of the denaturalizing, anti-essentialising, and particularising forces that uniquely under-affected political philosophy, yet out of these influences arose a conceptual vocabulary that could be used to think through much of what Rawls is now seen to have left out. The widespread influence of Foucault in cultural studies, sociology, intellectual history, literary theory, and anthropology (but not liberal egalitarian political philosophy)—particularly in terms of his theorisation of power—is but one paradigmatic example.

‘Theory’, of course, resembles philosophy insofar as philosophy is construed as a kind of meta-discipline. At the same time, it is self-evidently separate from disciplinary philosophy. This is the case even though much of what informs ‘Theory’ is itself often predicated upon critiques of what was understood as philosophy as itself a self-sufficient discipline.23 Yet disciplinary ‘philosophy’ as it exists in Anglo-American universities24 much like the ‘political philosophy’ Forrester describes, and lauds, for its impermeability—proved itself largely unalterable by these theoretical imports. One way to survive this foreign deluge was to mark itself out as distinctive via a divide between itself and what it termed ‘continental’. Christoph Schuringa has argued that the origins of this now broadly accepted distinction lie in the act of designation of an out-group by ‘analytic philosophers’ themselves, allowing those on one side of an invented divide to treat ‘a wide array of disparate approaches as if they belonged together—phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, as well as forms of “theory” that think of themselves as anti- or post-philosophical.’25 Indeed, these were theoretical forms which analytic philosophy, having insulated itself from the rest of philosophy in order to constitute itself as philosophy per se, then turned around and treated as unphilosophical, not realising that their status as unphilosophical—insofar as they were based on critiques of hitherto existing philosophy—was, in part, the point.26

V.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, ‘The Limits of Philosophy’, Forrester discusses the inescapable capaciousness of post-Rawlsian political philosophy, describing how his numerous critics somehow always end up occupying the same theoretical terrain.27 She gives a rather extraordinary catalogue, glossing the critiques of Michael Walzer, Judith Shklar, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell, and Michael Sandel—all of whom ‘published critiques of philosophy, liberalism, or both’.28 For these critics, ‘liberal philosophy…misunderstood psychic and ethical life. And it neglected the realities of morality, community, and politics’. Others examined include Stuart Hampshire’s critique of rationalism,29 Bernard William’s critique of utilitarianism and, more generally, the critique of rule-bound morality,30 Stanley Cavell’s critique of morality as a game and his challenge to the suggestion that practices and forms of life were like settled institutions,31 among others. These are just a few, and the chapter is littered with references that put these figures in fascinating and productive conversation with each other.

While these critiques were understood as standard alternatives to Rawlsian liberalism, ‘the irony was that they ultimately aided the remaking of political philosophy in Rawls’ shadow.’32 Rawls’ focus on morality, for example, was mirrored by his critics, who fought for their own alternatives on the same terrain. The communitarian critics framed their critiques in terms of distributive justice. Even Marx reappeared, ‘defanged and made compatible with liberalism’.33 ‘It is the very capaciousness of Rawlsian liberalism’, Forrester writes, ‘its capacity to domesticate and defuse alternatives’, that led so many of its allies and critics to remain within its frame. Liberal egalitarianism had been thus reduced to simply an ‘ethical vision made up of fragile individuals and social selves’ and a ‘philosophy, and a politics, with a less ambitious reach’.34 For Forrester, in Rawls’ wake, both liberal egalitarians and their critics were left without broad enough accounts of the different modes of social and economic life or their potential transformation, thus the ‘limits of philosophy.’

Yet the relation between history and philosophy internal to political philosophy’s own self-understanding is apparently so confounding that no less an authority than the Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy suggests their separation.35 ‘The history of political philosophy spans two different disciplines, history and philosophy…it is essential to keep the two separate,’ the editor writes—as if philosophy could keep history separate from itself in the first place.36 It can be easy to forget that the received divisions between intellectual disciplines is largely a nineteenth-century institutional phenomenon, and whether one locates their origins to the beginnings of the ‘classical age’, the medieval university, or the European Enlightenment, the history of intellectual disciplines is more discontinuous than the stories they tell themselves about themselves.37 That the forms disciplines take are constituted by historically specific social relations is something that even disciplinary purists are willing to point out—often book-ended by a nod to the need for interdisciplinarity. A more difficult idea to accept is that these same relations are also constitutive of what a discipline takes as its object of analysis. These relations, in other words, do not simply constitute the form of a discipline but the object a discipline takes as specific to itself.

Throughout In the Shadow of Justice, Forrester pays particular attention to the multi-disciplinary set of intellectual influences that shaped Rawls’ thinking. These include legal studies and constitutional law, the theory of constitutional choice in the work of economists like Frank Knight and Friedrich Hayek,38 the thought of the neo-Keynesian Richard Musgrave, and game theory; as well as the thought of Freud, Levi-Strauss, Melanie Klein, among others. To become contemporary, Forrester encourages political philosophy to adopt Rawls’ own interdisciplinary orientation—‘to begin their search anew…to look to social theory, history, and political struggle as much as to law and economics, as Rawls himself did’.39 Such a turn, she believes, might assist political philosophy in ‘giving up its naturalised assumptions and viewing certain forms of argument and justification as bound to a political moment that has passed,’ so that ‘philosophy might do new political work—not only of justification but of persuasion’.40

VI.

The question of which philosophy—and more importantly, the critique of philosophy—goes largely unasked. True, Forrester references the way in which political theory—as opposed to political philosophy—‘in part followed the already established divide between “continental” and “analytic” theory’,41 but refusing to problematise this divide further leaves those disciplinary divisions that form the ground of the interdisciplinarity Forrester encourages as simply given. Deeper questions about ‘philosophy’ and its critique—that strange entity that is simultaneously a discipline, meta-disciplinary, but also trans-disciplinary (producing concepts used across disparate disciplines, as Rawls himself shows)42 —tend to hover indeterminately somewhere in the background.

Indeed, on occasion it is even unclear whether Forrester is referring to philosophy as such, or to philosophy of a more explicitly political kind. In the final paragraph of the chapter immediately prior to ‘The Limits of Philosophy’, we read how, after challenges to widen the scope of political philosophy’s basic structure following the ‘denaturalising, anti-essentialising, and particularising movements that gained ground in the second half of the twentieth century’43 —particularly those relating to race and gender—‘political philosophers looked from the rules of the game to the ethos of the players, but still few asked who controlled and managed the teams.’44 The penultimate sentence of the paragraph then reads, ‘the horizons of philosophers were shaped by defences and critiques of the market, and so, likely nearly everyone else, many misdiagnosed the changes they were living through.’45 The opening of the chapter on ‘The Limits of Philosophy’ begins, ‘by the 1980s, the new philosophy was under attack.’46 The next sentence: ‘while liberal egalitarians grappled with the ideas of the New Right, a number of critics rejected both Rawls and the approach to political philosophy he was taken to represent.’47 Later on in the same paragraph we read how, from the standpoint of its critics, ‘liberal philosophy…misconstrued the nature of the self and human agency.’48 This is in a span of three pages.

From the standpoint of narrative and argumentative clarity, Forrester should be forgiven for the oscillation. Within the context of the broader set of concerns raised by the book, the reader is not left confused as to what it is she is referring to. However, the ease with which she oscillates between philosophy and political philosophy across In the Shadow of Justice—despite her own fascinating intellectual-historical analysis of Rawls’ own use of philosophy—indicates a lack of critical reflection on the specific form of the former and its determination of what now counts as ‘political philosophy’ writ large. One wonders whether such reflection would pose too difficult a challenge to Forrester’s continued faith in the discipline—one which she maintains despite the elegance of her own critique. On the one hand, she tracks the influence of a certain form of philosophy on Rawls’ thought as a whole—thereby historicising, particularising, and critiquing it. Yet on the other hand, the political philosophical rebirth via interdisciplinary and historical turn with which she concludes seems to leave hanging the question of whether what political philosophy understands as philosophy is not partly constituted to avoid precisely what it is Forrester encourages.

VII.

Perhaps there is a third story about Rawls’ influence on the history of twentieth-century political thought: one in which his ultimate success has been the provision of a political-theoretical equilibrium insulating Anglo-American political philosophy, not only from the breakup of an historically specific unanimity at the level of actually existing politics (no matter the conflict that may or may not have upheld it), but also from forms of political thought that appeared to it as non-philosophical.

Indeed, here we can return to Marx. If classical political economy is the discourse that concerns itself with an economic realm stripped of its own historical and legal determinations, then political philosophy is the discourse that concerns itself with a theory of justice on the assumption that one could do so without reference to the history of legal and economic form. For classical political economy, a model of exchange between equal units within the sphere of circulation is possible by abstracting from the distinction between commodity owners who own money and able to employ labour (capitalists), and commodity owners whose only commodity to sell is their body and their time—i.e., their labour power (the working class). Classical political economy ‘forgets’ the inequality subtending all bourgeois equality. In the Rawlsian social-contractual tradition, the ‘original position’ qua thought-experiment replaces the fictitious primordial condition of equal exchange, but its function is the same. In the first instance, theoretical analysis is replaced by imaginary history. In the second instance, theoretical analysis is replaced by a game. Through this lens, the ‘ideological function’ of political philosophy writ large becomes one of obfuscation. ‘We need a Marxist political philosophy’ is a thought that has spawned countless urgent re-thinkings, but one wonders whether Marx—that critic of philosophy who nevertheless saw the need to critically reflect on its forms—would have thought ‘Marxist political philosophy’ a contradiction in terms.

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This is a re-post of a previously published article for Legal Form on in January, 2022. It can be found online at https://legalform.blog/2022/01/03/harvey-forrester-rawls/

When Robert Heilbronner composed his Future as History (1960), you could write passages like the following without being accused of metaphysics:

“as individuals we move into the future on the mingled accident and design of our lives. As a society we move into the future on the grand dynamic of history. It is this grandiose design which we must discover if we are to comprehend the meaning of struggles of our time.”1

That one shouldn’t shy away from the philosophy of history — that History does indeed have a structure, if not a design — is one of the whole premises here (such a ‘totalizing’ view would certainly trouble Robin Blaser though—see below), however Heilbronner (perhaps because he was born to German Jews, albeit wealthy ones) is keen to point out the uniquely optimistic philosophy of history held by Americans is not one historically shared by the rest of the world:

“in the case of the rest of the world, the absence of a native optimism mirrors an experience very different from ours. The future over most of mankind’s experience has not been that benign and congenial environment which we unthinkingly anticipate it to be, but has been formidable and overwhelming, unalterable and often unanswerable.”2

One wonders whether it is still difficult for Americans to, “imagine a state of mind that such an exposure to history might have given rise to.”3 Surely yes, in a sense at least. It does seem that the collective American psyche takes, at best, something of a hysterical relation to the experience of communing with Historical Events (whether it be 9/11, the financial crisis, or the Covid pandemic) after an extended period of continental (and sometimes even psychic) isolation and parochialism. At the same time—the horizon of contemporary experience does actually seem defined by looming existential catastrophe. What form that communion with catastrophe actually takes is much more highly differentiated and uneven then whatever the standard eschatological imagination finds itself concocting in its darker moments, although it would be cruel I think to take solace in that. History does indeed appear as if it is, “less and less something we make, and more and more something we find made for us.”4 Why that is true in a phenomenological sense but also whether that is in fact actually true are two important but separate questions.

In any case, I cannot recommend the book highly enough. Much like the rest of his work (in particular, his incomparable Worldly Philosophers) Heilbronner shows a capacity for analytical compression while maintaining readability; synthesizing complex and powerful ideas into an approachable form. While there appears to have been a reprint of the first edition published in 1968, the book is — of course — now out of print.

I arrived at the Argosy annual sale in December a few hours late so I imagine I missed the good stuff. I did find some stragglers, like a first edition Harper Collins of Jacques Barzun’s opus From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Civilization, 1500-2000, the scope of which is surely matched only by the ambition of the author. Arguably the closest thing America has had to a Gibbon, Barzun was one of the main proponents of ‘cultural history’.

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Beyond Wolfgang Abendroth’s A Short History of the European Working Class and his essay ‘The Problem of the Social Function and Social Preconditions of Fascism,’1 almost nothing written by the key scholars associated with the West German Marburg School has yet appeared in English. Even for English speakers familiar with twentieth century German Marxism, it is likely not even the most famous ‘Marburg School,’ a name it shares with the Neo-Kantian philosophical movement led by Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp.2 In a funny historical irony, while this earlier Marburg school was known and criticized for its overly abstract theoreticism, the other Marburg school, as Lothar Peter shows, prided itself on almost exactly the opposite.

Originally appearing in 2014 to rather extensive reception in Germany, Peter’s Marx on Campus, now available in English, has gone largely unreceived. There was an interview with Lothar that initially appeared in French in Contremps and then translated by Loren Balhorn for Historical Materialism,3 as well as an essay in Jacobin on Abendroth specifically,4 however it has essentially been passed over by sociological journals or even English academic publications associated with Marxism. This is surely partly because of its introductory quality, consisting mainly of accounts of the major trends within the school chronologically arranged.

Marx on Campus however is particularly notable as the first appearance of a book in English dedicated to the subject. Describing the school as a ‘victim of historical amnesia,’ the aim of the volume is, as Peter puts it, ‘to remedy this circumstance by describing for the reader of the Marburg School helped to keep the critique of capitalism and society alive during a period in (West) German history when such critique earned its proponents more outrage, scorn, and rejection then it did reputation or public recognition’ (xii). Much of the book is therefore descriptive and straightforward in a narrative sense, successfully showing the Marburg School to be a genuine ‘epistemic community’ and giving a useful account of both its development, summary descriptions of its major works, and the career arcs of the major names with which it is associated. It is also a wonderful history in miniature of the various obstacles Marxist study faced in West Germany more broadly.

The most notable representative is of course Wolfgang Abendroth, a constitutional lawyer and political scientist and the ‘intellectual protagonist of the renaissance of Marxism and the student movement in the Federal Republic in 1968’ (36). Fellow Marburg school member Franke Deppe referred to Abendroth as not only an ‘organic intellectual of the workers movement,’ but as an ‘intervening socialist intellectual.’ For Jurgen Habermas, Abendroth represented a ‘partisan professor in the country of followers,’ going so far as to dedicate his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to him as a doctorate thesis in Marburg in 1962. At that point, the ‘too left wing’ appearing Habermas was — at least as Peter tells it — not permitted by Theodor W. Adorno to finish his thesis in Frankfurt.5

Abendroth’s classic A Short History of the European Working Class for example was guided by two fundamental ideas: (1) the normative connection between socialism and democracy, and (2) the need for political unity between the social-democratic and communist wings of the worker’s movement (35). His general historiographical perspective was broadly that of ‘social history,’ akin to Arthur Rosenburg’s Democracy and Socialism as Peter points out, as well as the methodologies explored more systematically by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jurgen Kocka, associated with the Bielefeld School.6 Abendroth also launched an introduction to political science that became a reference point for the discipline as a whole, although one which reframed ‘political science’ as ‘political sociology.’ As Peter puts it, ‘rather than ascribing to the state and it’s institutions an independent existence sui generis and restricting analysis to the immanent functioning thereof, political sociology was obliged to explore the relationship between the political as such and the structure of society’ (36).

Other notable examples of the Marburg School include Werner Hoffman and his conceptual and intellectual-historical reconstruction of Marxist theory best captured in his Industrisoziologie fur Arbeiter, as well as the thought of Heinz Maus, who had previously served as a research assistant of Max Horkheimer. ‘Similar to Abendroth,’ Peter writes, ‘[Hoffman] sets himself apart from the conservative cultural pessimism that resonated among critical intellectuals of the period by stressing the enormous potential of modern technology to facilitate humanity’s emancipation of social coercions’ (65). Despite retaining what they understood to be a classically Marxist account of the role of automation, Hoffman and Maus were certainly more optimistic about the liberatory potential of technology than the sort of critique of instrumental reason typically associated with the Frankfurt School. All three, ‘remained utterly convinced of the epistemological validity of the dialectical method and the central categories of Marx and Engels work’ (66). They were, in other words, much less revisionist as it relates to the traditional framework of Marxism inherited via debates between the German Social Democratic and Communist parties, while representing a separate trajectory from the ‘Orthodox’ Soviet Marxism of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Other members include Frank Deppe – whose focus remains largely sociological, covering problems related to, ‘trade unions […] the social and political orientation of the intelligentsia and intellectuals, as well as the field of higher education policy’ (91) – as well as George Fulberth and Jurgen Harrer’s work on the history of Social Democracy and German Communist Parties within Europe in Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie, a volume that built on Abendroth’s own Augstieg and Krise der deutzschen Sozialdemokratie.

Common to Deppe, Fulberth and Harrer was an attempt to historically explain and, in some sense, heal the repeated divisions between revolutionary and reformist politics dividing the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ left. Important as well are Reinhard Kuhnl’s studies of fascism. Rejecting the sorts of theories of totalitarianism that dominated postwar thinking on the subject (such as Ernst Nolte’s The Three Faces of Fascism), for Kuhnl, ‘fascism constituted an (albeit exorbitant) element in the historical continuity of bourgeois capitalist society rather than it’s negation, even if it suspended the principles of parliamentary-democratic legitimation of the state order in a terroristic faction’ (100).

The major points of contestation or theoretical interest have largely to do with Peter’s framing of the comparison between the Marburg School and Frankfurt School as being divided between, on the one hand, a practical, political and conjectural focus and, on the other, a focus on questions related to culture, individual and collective subjectivity, and philosophical inquiry. For Peter, the Frankfurt School conducted what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called ‘artistic critique,’ the study of the subjective coercions of capitalism, alienation and objectification.7 Abendroth and his intellectual lineage, by contrast, conducted ‘social critique’: the analysis of economic, social and political conditions for transforming capitalist society through a socialist workers’ movement allied with the left-leaning intelligentsia.

This seems overly schematic, particularly when considering the self-understanding of concepts like ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ to those who were apparently practitioners of the former; however, it is useful to make as a point of contrast. Their respective reactions to the eruption of the student movement in the late 1960s is representative. Unlike the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, Abendroth first and foremost traveled with the movement of the broader left. As early as the first page of the preface, Peter is eager to point out that despite the common association of the Frankfurt School with ‘critical theory,’ the Marburg school was surely an example as well, but one which, ‘embodies a wholly different type of relationship between theory and practice’ (xi).

Indeed, for the Anglophone world, the affiliation of ‘critical theory’ and West Germany will immediately call to mind names like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin or even Habermas, but certainly not Abendroth, Hoffmann, Maus, Deppe or Kuhnl. The Frankfurt School (both in real terms and as bogeyman) has certainly been influential in an English-speaking context, as well as, rightly or wrongly, setting the terms for what ‘critical theory’ (and also, strangely, ‘Marxism’ more broadly) is largely understood to entail, particularly in an American context. Within West Germany however, as Ingnar Solty puts it in the introduction, ‘one could argue that the Marburg School altogether had as many if not more students and followers […] than the Frankfurt School and exerted at least as much if not more and deeper influence on the West German Left and West Germany society in general’ (1). Although disparate in a contemporary context, Peter shows this influence to still be in existence today.

For Solty, members of the Marburg school, ‘stayed truer to their current core’s epistemological and praxis-political principles’ as compared with ‘the increasingly conservative post-war thought of Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,’ Jurgen Habermas’ linguistic turn to American pragmatism and the ‘neo-idealism of Axel Honneth’s philosophy of recognition and “socialism”’ (2). Peter for example compares Abendroth’s focus on the utilization of Marx’s theory to investigate contemporary social relations in terms of their political mutability with what he understood as ‘the growing tendency towards an abstractification in Marxist theory and the kind of “seminar Marxism” growing increasingly prevalent since 1968 that pursued a categorical fetishisation of Marx divorced from empirical reality’ (54).

Abendroth and the Marburg school more generally were indeed focused on the concrete at the level of theoretical focus and the specific political situation in West Germany. The orientation of Abendroth and the school he inspired was much more specific, present-oriented, conjunctural and modest. Abendroth reached the apex of his career as a highly influential public intellectual between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, focusing primarily on strengthening the left wing of the workers’ movement and other democratic forces in a specifically practical sense, as well as theoretically via the application of Marx’s epistemological categories to actually existing sociological and historical problems.

Critical reflection on his own epistemological or historical conditions of possibility however appears to have been outside his intellectual range. ‘Though all three had faced persecution under the Nazis, no long-term cooperation ever came to pass between Horkheimer, Adorno, and Abendroth. They all invoked Marxism, but their respective understandings of science were simply too opposed to one another’ (Peter 2020). Indeed, not just their respective understandings of science but also of critique. For Kant, ‘transcendental critique’ was, after all, an inquiry into theoretical conditions of possibility, and insofar as ‘critical theory’ retains this legacy, the Marburg School’s location within it is of some question.

As Peter puts it, Abendroth ‘neglected to produce a broader, systematic theoretical treatise because he consistently prioritized the practical-political relevance of his work over foundational research’ (35). ‘A more intensive engagement with the original works of Marx and Engels,’ Peter writes, ‘would only begin relatively late in life, following the conclusion of World War II’ (53). Even more generally, Peter points out that the Marburg school ‘have produced no fundamental theoretical or methodological innovations in the social sciences since the 1980s, and aside from isolated interventions […] exhibited remarkable indifference to an epistemological or methodological reflection of their own activity’. The Marburg school however did not so much reject the kind of retreat to philosophy – if it can be called that – but argued on a different plane of abstraction. ‘Their research,’ Peter writes, ‘is of an exclusively theoretical and empirically secondary-analytical nature’ (157).

Given this more concrete, conjunctural and ‘secondary-analytical’ focus, the lack of global reception or interest in the Marburg school outside Germany and the lack of affiliation with ‘critical theory’ more broadly is perhaps unsurprising. Concrete analyses are, after all, concrete, and applicable within a specific conjuncture, one which passes. One of the ironies of critical-theoretical reflection of a more abstract sort is precisely its lack of specificity, thus its eventual reception and remolding for different contexts in different places, often in ways at cross-purposes with the author’s original intentions. Yet our own intellectual moment – and what separates it from that of both the Frankfurt School and Abendroth – is defined precisely by a distinct lack of Marxist secondary-analytical work on contemporary social problems that the Marburg School does so well to represent, and which Peter shows to be very much present despite difficult ideological circumstances. Further translation into English of the works associated with the Marburg School certainly would serve as an inspiration in this regard. It also might put into relief the more reflective critical-theoretical forms of so-called ‘artistic critique’ that are the more popular mode du jour, for surely anything resembling a healthy left-intellectual culture requires both primary and secondary-analytical forms of analysis in abundance.

This is an edited version of a review already published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/20801_marx-on-campus-a-short-history-of-the-marburg-school-by-peter-lothar-reviewed-by-bo-harvey/

I.

To conclude Part I, I suggested that a more interesting way for critics of capitalism to think about the ‘polycrisis’ debate is less in terms of the question, "why the term capitalism and not the term polycrisis" but rather, "of what use is the term polycrisis to an analysis of capitalism?" or, in particular, "what might the popularity of polycrisis say about the weaknesses of current critical analyses of capitalism?” Answering the latter demands a symptomatic reading, especially if the conceptual breadth of both terms represents a broader crisis of reference in the concept ‘crisis’. Importantly, this includes a crisis in the Marxist concept of a ‘capitalist crisis’, such that simply replacing ‘polycrisis’ with ‘capitalism’ risks being not as analytically helpful as critics of capitalism imagine it to be.

However this is not an issue that can be resolved by simply returning to Marx and finding a ‘theory of crisis’. That Marx’s writing does not actually contain a unitary, systematic, or explicit ‘theory of crisis’ is surprisingly agreed upon, even amongst Marxists. For James O’Connor, “no single or dominant concept or theory of crisis may be found in Marx’s own works.”1 For David Harvey, "how to understand crisis formation remains ... by far the most contentious issue in Marxian political economy.”2 For Simon Clarke, “Marx does not offer a theory of crisis as such…this makes it impossible to extract and present ‘Marx’s theory of crisis.’”3 “It is a remarkable feature of Marxist crisis theory,” Clark writes, “that orthodoxy should shift so fundamentally and yet so unselfconsciously:”

“At the turn of the century the orthodoxy was a rather vague disproportionality theory, with crises being attributed to the anarchy of the market. By the 1930s Marxist orthodoxy had become rigidly under-consumptionist. During the 1970s the theory of the falling rate of profit had become the canonical theory of crisis. At each stage it was generally assumed that the dominant theory was the authentic theory of Marx.”4

“To each crisis,” as Peter Osborne puts it, “its own revival of Marx’s ‘theory of crisis.”5 So it seems. Each moment of seeming instability in global capitalism becomes, “a window onto the permanent crisis of Marxist political thought;” an expression of a relentless, “desire to displace the politics of social transformation onto economic events.”6 Except only in the latest iteration, the response seems to be arguably less productive than a return to primary sources. Adopting an impulse to classify crises into types almost ad infinitum, the recent reaction to the supposed economism of traditional or orthodox Marxism7 has largely been the vast pluralization of types of capitalisms (‘surveillance capitalism', ‘fossil capitalism,’ ‘disaster capitalism,’ ‘carceral capitalism,’ etc.), one which bears a striking formal resemblance to the fragmentation of academic social science which, as James O’Connor has argued, “fatally weakens its ability to develop a ‘unified field theory’ of the modern crises of capitalism.”8

II.

Of course one way to resolve a permanent crisis at the level of thought is to claim the crisis is permanent in actuality; to propose that capitalism has itself entered a state of ‘permanent crisis.’ This type of formulation however manages to rob the term ‘crisis’ simultaneously of its Greek etymological roots in the concept krinõ (meaning to cut, select, decide, or judge), its roots in medicine (where it implies the life-or-death stage in the development of a disease, at which point a decision had to be made), but also, most importantly, “the politically crucial aspect of the traditional idea of crisis: namely, the conception of crisis as a decisive turning point in a process, a point at which a decision must be made.”9 Never mind that, for Marx, “permanent crises do not exist.”10

This idea that economic crises in turn expose a broader crisis in Marxist political thought will be explored in future entries—in particular Osborne’s idea that, “the historical concept of crisis registers an aporia in the historical concept of politics;” one which, “runs far deeper than Marx’s work, down to the bedrock of all philosophico-historical concepts of political practice.”11 The debate over ‘polycrisis’ would therefore register in miniature and in a more contemporary fashion a broader and older issue about the fundamentally historical character of the concept of ‘crisis’, as well as its relation to the possibility of acting politically in a historically meaningful way, one which Marxism has inherited as well.

For now though, as it relates to the conceptual origins of ‘polycrisis’, there are some (thankfully) simpler subtending issues that should be addressed about the Marxist philosophy of history and its relation to the term’s conceptual origins, at least vis a vis its usage by Tooze. This is particularly important insofar as a critique of a specific conception of the Marxist philosophy of history seems to have motivated his turn to the concept of ‘polycrisis.’ “A concept of polycrisis that is not merely redundant,” as he recently put it, “must rest on a more or less explicit philosophy of history.”12

Indeed, a disinterest in the philosophy of history is not an uncommon one amongst historians of a certain sort and generation. Arguably what makes Tooze a particularly insightful and interesting contemporary historian is his particular concern for it. Two notable papers here come to mind. The first is from 2012 and written with Stefan Eich.13 This is a critique of Max Weber’s ahistorical and formalistic concept of history in the classic ‘Politics as a Vocation’ essay, as well as an account of the broader crisis of German Historicism in the 1920s. The second is a 2015 lecture by Tooze on Foucault’s Security, Territory, and Population.14 The essay on Weber is particularly interesting for its reference to otherwise arcane debates within Neo-Kantianism, to which I will very likely have to return in future entries; however, my interest here for the moment is more basic and connects to Tooze’s concern with the philosophy of history in writing of a less formal and academic kind.15

III.

In Chartbook 165, after offering a summary explanation of the Marxist philosophy of history and its possible role in explaining the current, as it were, ‘polycritic conjuncture,’ Tooze writes, “Marxist friends will no doubt be tempted to say that it all boils down to capitalism and its crisis-ridden development. But, by the 1960s at the latest, sophisticated Marxist theory had abandoned monistic theories of crisis.”16 Guney Isikara’s reading is that Tooze is, “explicit that one should avoid the use of grand narratives, or, in line with that, the designation of the capitalist mode of production as the root cause of the radical challenges upon us.”17 Positioning himself as the defender of a certain Marxist orthodoxy, ‘polycrisis’ for Isikara arrives to displace ‘postmodernity’ as the successor to a series of modern conceptions of history defined by linear developmental conceptions of temporality. So for Tooze, whereas the crisis of the 1970s could at least be explained with reference to a single cause, “it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause”18 for today’s crisis/crises; hence, ‘polycrisis.’

Importantly, Tooze is more ambivalent and refuses to offer anything close to a blanket rejection, writing rather suggestively that, “this isn’t to say that Marxist theory might not be able to offer an answer, but, to be convincing, it would be a Marxist theory of complexity and polycrisis, something towards which thinkers like Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall pointed the way.” An essay by Tooze on Althusser would certainly be an interesting intervention.19

Indeed, one way to frame Marxism as an intellectual tradition has been as a species of modernism from which we have now departed (for we have moved forward, rather linearly one is tempted to add, into ‘postmodernity’)20, thus leaving it perhaps insightful, but cordoned off politely alongside other dated evolutionary conceptions of unilinear temporal development. Modernity according to this understanding is too complex – both as a concept and as a historical phenomenon – to be reducible to dynamics determined by the logic of capital.

To say this reading is wrong in any kind of straightforward sense would be too simple, however the exact extent of its accuracy aside—according to this understanding, Marx is a thoroughly modern theorist, and his materialist and 'stagist' philosophy of history resolutely modern in the sense that it provides a grand narrative based on the crisis-ridden development of the capitalist modes of production.

Arguably the most radical version of this view is that of Moishe Postone. For Postone, the retrospective projection of a specific temporality of linear development to History in general is itself specific to capitalism; one determined by the paradigm of infinite growth it poses. "History, understood as an immanently driven directional dynamic, does exist, but not as a universal characteristic of human social life. Rather, it is a historically specific characteristic of capitalist society that can be, and has been, projected onto all human histories."21 The discipline of history is in a way defined by this homogenous and blank form of chronological temporality (the 'time of historicism'), which imposes a form of empty time (understood as the succession of the new) onto collective forms of otherwise subjective (and socially determined) forms of temporality.22

To put this in an even more jargonistic fashion—the subject of the structure of History in any kind of universal sense is necessarily not actually human subjects (either as individuals, peoples, nations, or states—precisely because these are not universal) but rather Capital, because Capital simply is and historically has functioned as that unique force constituting the entire world (and therefore ‘humanity’ in a universal sense) as a subject of a (singular) movement of historical development, a terrain of politics (geopolitically), as well as an object of experience (phenomenologically).23

These are themes I will inevitably return to, however in Part III I’ll explore a different avenue; one that has already been explored not by a figure associated with post-60s Marxism or ‘neo-Marxism,’ but rather an earlier figure with whom Tooze is certainly familiar given his role in Tooze’s 2015 book on the interwar period The Deluge: Leon Trotsky.24 Specifically at issue is his concept of ‘combined and uneven development’ as explored in Michael Lowy’s 1981 The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution.25

12

Chartbook

Chartbook #192 On deglobalisation and polycrisis

Following a panel at Davos on deglobalisation and a flurry of comment about polycrisis, I picked up those themes in my monthly column for the FT. Thanks to my lovely editors, the piece was squeezed into the paper on Tuesday. In this newsletter I want to tease out some of the points buried in the compressed version of the op-ed. The passages in quotes ar…

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3 years ago · 80 likes · 14 comments · Adam Tooze

15

In a recent new entry on the topic (the proliferation of which is getting slightly exhausting) John Ganz asks whether the concept is, “really of a qualitatively higher order than previous conceptions of post-history or post-modernism? Those also question the possibility of a single, overarching explanation of the world and talk about the exhaustion and frustration of our self-conceptions.”

Unpopular Front

Have you heard about "the polycrisis," yet?

You may have read or heard about “the polycrisis” somewhere in recent days. It was the big buzzword at the World Economic Forum at Davos this year. Apparently, the French sociologist and complexity theorist Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern coined the term in their 1999 book…

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3 years ago · 46 likes · 23 comments · John Ganz

‘Polycrisis’ is I think a much more interesting concept than ‘postmodernism’, if only because ‘crisis’ is a better term through which to read the specific temporal and historical structure of modernity than the term ‘modernity,’ and certainly crude understandings of ‘modernism’. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

16

Chartbook

Chartbook #165: Polycrisis - thinking on the tightrope.

This weekend I launched my new monthly column in the FT with a short piece about the idea of polycrisis. Polycrisis is a term I first encountered when I was finishing Crashed in 2017. It was invoked by Jean-Claude Juncker to describe Europe’s perilous situation in the period after 2014. In the spirit of “Eurotrash”, I rather relished the idea of picking …

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4 years ago · 77 likes · 24 comments · Adam Tooze

18

Chartbook

Chartbook #130 Defining polycrisis - from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix.

In Chartbook #73, back on January 21st this year, I proposed Krisenbilder - crisis pictures - as a way of making sense of what then looked like a complicated pattern of stresses around the world scene. I proposed the schematic because it seemed a useful way of mapping interconnected forces in a heuristic way. As it turned out, it succeeding in capturing…

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4 years ago · 94 likes · 27 comments · Adam Tooze

“The misunderstood idea in Das Kapital is the idea that “abstrakt menschliche Arbeit” is a “bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.” (MEGA II.8: 70) One reason why this idea in Das Kapital has been misunderstood by readers of Capital is that it is not present in Capital. Moore and Aveling translate Marx’s phrase as “human labour in the abstract…a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour.” (MA: 45) Fowkes writes “human labour in the abstract…merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour.” (F: 128) These are mistranslations that cannot adequately be described as mere shortcomings in style; as this division of my article will show, they utterly transform the meaning of one of Marx’s most important ideas and the thinking that it makes possible.”1

I just finished reading Gary Indiana’s recently published collected essays from 1984-2001 (Fire Seasons) as well as his first novel Horse Crazy and Resentment, the first of his detective trilogy. This prompted me to revisit this essay by Christian Lorentzen in Art Forum. Lorenzen’s essays are wonderful précis, however I think they tend to underplay just how funny and irreverent Indiana is. Take this passage from Resentment, which is Indiana at his most Pynchonian, and also foreshadows Indiana’s broader interest in fame, as charted in his The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt.

The best brief essay on Indiana meanwhile is surely Tobi Haslett’s introduction to Horse Crazy. “AIDS in Horse Crazy,” Haslett writes, “is an assault on intimacy, a kind of hyperbole for how hard it is to connect. But it’s also history—history coming into crashing contact with human life, human weakness. AIDS draws and patrols the line between people; it crumbles the body and poisons love” (8).

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‘Polycrisis’ is a concept best popularized by Adam Tooze. According to a report from the Cascade Institute however it can be traced to French complexity theorist Edgar Morin1—who currently holds the (…wait for it…) UNESCO Chair of Complex Thought.2 The report quotes Morin’s 1999 book, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the new Millennium:

“There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.”3

Here’s the more formal definition given by that Cascade Institute report:

“We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects…A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks.”

Tooze notes that his initial encounter with the term came via Jean-Claude Juncker, who used polycrisis to describe Europe’s perilous situation in the period after 2014.4 “I found the idea of polycrisis interesting and timely,” Tooze explains, “because the prefix ‘poly’ directed attention to the diversity of challenges without specifying a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.” Thanks to Tooze, the term has been more broadly adopted to describe the present series of economic, social, and environmental crises as fundamentally interconnected. It even made the stage at Davos5—this despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the contradictory structure traceable to Morin’s original formulation (“there is no single vital problem,” yet simultaneously, “the general crisis of the planet is the number one vital problem”)…

Tooze gave a condensed formulation in a recent opinion piece for the Financial Times published in late October 2022.

“With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis. A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”6

Extreme complexity. High nonlinearity. A whole that is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. Readers are presented in brief with some of the basic concepts of ‘complexity theory;’ in particular, the concept of ‘emergence’. In his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind, George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical definition, where emergent properties or substances ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them.7

Following this line via complexity theory, ‘polycrisis’ in a strict sense would mean not simply the adding together of different crises and treating them as one (the ‘there’s lots of things going on’ definition), but rather a system that is ‘emergent’ out of their interaction and interrelation—a crisis greater than each specific crisis added together. A world subsumed by polycrisis becomes a kind of nightmarish ‘emergent system,’ the roots of which are irreducible to a single cause, thus the necessity of those maps and charts best captured by Krisenbilder ("crisis pictures").8

II.

The term of course already has its critics, as well as those who seem to not want to grapple or even toy with its conceptual origins or this stricter specificity of meaning, either in the work of Tooze or otherwise.9 As eventually happens to every concept, 'polycrisis' has now surely escaped the bounds of its origins, with it reaching broad enough purchase that it is difficult to blame them.

Noah Smith, for example, argues that the crises the term sets out to describe aren’t necessarily related, and thinks what we are dealing with here is simply an example of the availability heuristic—people think there are all these crises because we often read about them. Media fear-mongering surely exists, however it is an interesting move to conclude an essay ostensibly about how 'polycrisis' is a bad concept with almost the exact inverse of it. Smith, “doesn't see a 'polycrisis' but a 'polysolution,’” a statement he makes in a section genuinely titled 'Dark Brandon vs. the Polycrisis.'10 Gary Indiana once wrote that documentarian Errol Morris possessed, “a definite flair for turning humans into talking sea cucumbers obsessed with philosophical or historical matters clearly beyond their intelligence.”11 Smith is the opposite of that - a sea cucumber with a flair for convincing readers he is obsessed with historical and philosophical matters, thus managing to pass as a human being. His analysis occurs at such an analytical altitude and high level of generalization it probably precludes him from even being wrong. Some of the cavalier dismissals fall into this category, which can be broadly divided between 'this is fake' and 'this is just History happening again.'12

A more worthwhile critic is Guney Isikara, who argues that ‘obscure jargon’ like ‘overlapping emergencies’ (a term adopted by the UN)13 and ‘polycrisis’ function primarily to conceal the way in which these crises are determined by capitalist social relations. While I’m not sure the jargon is obscure (it combines a term everyone has a colloquial sense of with a Greek prefix everyone should be familiar with, although the seemingly contradictory nature of Morin's original formulation about 'vital problems' might prove Isikara correct about its fundamental opacity), there does seem to be a distinct lack of explicit mention of capitalism in a determining role vis a vis these interlocking and connected crises.14

It is certainly the case that self-censorship for more frictionless consumption can be mistaken for ideological obfuscation, which is itself different than genuine analytical much less political difference. What I think can be said with just a minimal amount of charity however is that Tooze or the authors involved in the (excellent and worthwhile) ‘The Polycrisis’ series for Phenomenal World would surely claim that, of course, capitalism plays some sort of determining role.15

Not to emphasize a very simple point—but it all seems to depends on what one means by capitalism and how well the term can serve as a conceptual container for this multi-variate proliferation of crises. For Tooze, ‘capitalism’ is too narrow or, more specifically, ‘monistic’ (this is explored in more detail in Part II). Hence the usefulness of a term like ‘polycrisis’—with its emphasis on diversity.16 But perhaps the more perplexing issue for Marxist critics of polycrisis is not so much the narrowness of the rival term capitalism, but the opposite: conceptual breadth.

III.

If one of the issues with polycrisis is its abstract conceptual circumference (in other words, if it is too broad to possess much analytical specificity; too open to conceptual determination), one has to wonder how much specification is gained simply by instead subsuming the complex of economic and non-economic (social, environmental, moral, etc) problems under the term capitalism which - while certainly possessing the advantage of being the recipient of over a century of theorization and political-rhetorical invocation - arguably finds itself struggling with a similar issue regarding conceptual width.

"The inflation of ideas,” Perry Anderson once wrote about the ‘indeterminate extension’ of the concept Feudalism, “like coins, merely leads to their devaluation."17 If the recent history of a publisher like Verso is any example, the analysis of capitalism has proliferated into so many types — the concept has been asked to hold the analytical weight of so many different aspects — that the force of the term has surely been devalued at the level of analytical exactitude. This is a normal phenomenon. Concepts always take leave of their origins in a way that isn't reducible to the intention of the original thinker. Thus the meaning of a concept is never merely reducible to its origin, but also includes the history of its various interpretations as well; even, and sometimes especially, the interpretations which might be wrong or at odds with the intended meaning of the original author.

At the level of rhetoric meanwhile, there is a significant disjunction between the regular occurrence of the term capitalism and its analysis within certain academic, intellectual, and even media circles, and its relative lack of use on the political stage. The analysis of capitalism is simultaneously rhetorically and politically urgent, but often either scholastically tedious or too all encompassing so as to be vague.

Indeed, over a decade after the financial crisis of 2008, hardly an introduction to a radical monograph can go without mentioning the rebirth of interest in Marx. One wonders how long this can last. If the lack of mention of capitalism in the 90s was replaced by a proliferation of analyses after 2008, this proliferation is now increasingly confronted by an anxiety among critical analysts that if any term other than capitalism or a type of capitalism18 gains some purchase it represents an analytical and political threat. It is difficult not to read this symptomatically as a reaction to the analytical exhaustion of analyses of capitalism in the wake of this post-2008 proliferation, now nearly 15 years ago.

In any case, the more interesting question for Marxists here I think is not, "why the term capitalism and not the term polycrisis" or vice versa (partly becuase there will always be terms of analysis that obfuscate capitalism in a capitalist society, as constant as the attempt should be to displace them), but rather, "of what use is the term polycrisis to an analysis of capitalism?" or even, "what might the popularity of polycrisis say about the weaknesses of current critical analyses of capitalism?” In other words, I want to argue that there might be more to this whole polycrisis phenomenon than simply being another instance of ideological obfuscation by left-liberals who are not willing to go far enough. After all, for Adorno, "the determinable flaw in every concept necessitates the citation of others...insistence upon a single word and concept as the iron gate to be unlocked is also a mere moment, though an inalienable one."19

In part II, I’ll take a closer look at the way Tooze himself traces the origins of the concept in some of his chartbook entries, as well as the critique of pre-60s Marxism that seems to have led to his interest and use of the term.

4

Chartbook

Chartbook #165: Polycrisis - thinking on the tightrope.

This weekend I launched my new monthly column in the FT with a short piece about the idea of polycrisis. Polycrisis is a term I first encountered when I was finishing Crashed in 2017. It was invoked by Jean-Claude Juncker to describe Europe’s perilous situation in the period after 2014. In the spirit of “Eurotrash”, I rather relished the idea of picking …

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4 years ago · 77 likes · 24 comments · Adam Tooze

8

“A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”

Chartbook

Chartbook #130 Defining polycrisis - from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix.

In Chartbook #73, back on January 21st this year, I proposed Krisenbilder - crisis pictures - as a way of making sense of what then looked like a complicated pattern of stresses around the world scene. I proposed the schematic because it seemed a useful way of mapping interconnected forces in a heuristic way. As it turned out, it succeeding in capturing…

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4 years ago · 93 likes · 27 comments · Adam Tooze

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Noahpinion

Against "polycrisis"

“Hypodermics on the shore/ China’s under martial law/ Rock & roller cola wars/ I can’t take it anymore” — Billy Joel One term I see used increasingly often in the econ opinion-sphere is “polycrisis”. This term was invented by some French folks in decades past, but it has recently…

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4 years ago · 136 likes · 56 comments · Noah Smith

I. Modes of reason, modes of governmentality

For reason to secure unified and systematic knowledge Kant presents three regulative principles in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason: (1) the principle of homogeneity, (2) the principle of specification, and (3) the logical law of the continuum of species of logical forms and its transcendental presupposition, the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.1

Similarly, in his lectures on ‘governmentality,’ Foucault presents a “historical schema”2 of ‘governmentality’ also in three modes: (1) the legal mechanism, (2) the disciplinary mechanism, and (3) the security apparatus.3 For Foucault, all three modes are different expressions of the same ‘ugly word’ — ‘governmentality’ — that can vary in intensity depending on the historical moment.

In both cases one cannot clearly delineate one mode from another.4 Just as in reference to his three regulative principles Kant describes how “the last [continuity] arises by uniting the first two [homogeneity and specification],” the same is the case for the security apparatus in reference to the legal and disciplinary mechanisms.

What I want to argue is that Foucault’s ‘historical schema’ functions with respect to governmentality the same way Kant’s regulative ideas function with respect to reason. The interest of Kantian reason is therefore identical to the interest of governmentality. They are homologous; one is a transcendental argument made at the level of politics regarding the condition of possibility of ‘civil society’ (subtended by ‘the state’), the other is at the level of the condition of possibility of experience. Both deal fundamentally with ‘the problem of the series,’ its management, and the projection of a systematic unity granting order and coherence.

II. The problem of the series

What is this ‘problem of the series’ to which reason and governmentality are supposedly solutions? For Kant, human reason is faced with a demand for unity in the face of a seemingly infinite series of correlations encounters in the world of appearances.5 This demand is best expressed in the following passages:

It is indeed difficult to understand how there can be a logical principle by which reason prescribes unity of rules unless we also presuppose a transcendental principle whereby such a systematic unity is a priori assumed to be necessarily inherent in the objects…We must therefore, in order to secure an empirical criterion, presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary.6

But this logical maxim can only become a principle of pure reason through our assuming that if the conditioned is given, the whole series of conditions, subordinated to one another—as series which is therefore itself unconditioned—is likewise given, that is, is contained in the object and its connection.7

This demand for systematicity is a principle in the transcendental sense as it neither prescribes, determines, nor constitutes any object in the field of appearances. It is that which must be presupposed for concepts to secure empirical criterion at all. For Kant, finite human subjects with ‘sensible’ rather than ‘intellectual’ intuition necessarily act as if an unconditioned unity has already been given by making a rational and practical assumption of the unity of appearances.

In line with his ‘Copernican revolution,’ the unconditioned unity is therefore given to nature by reason and is not already an objective characteristic of nature itself: “reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws.”8 The series of correlations in experience and the inability to ascend at any final determination therefore necessitates assuming an a priori regulative unity. The three modes referred to in section I are the specific modes in which this demand is articulated.

Foucault meanwhile argues that ‘governmentality’ is, “organized by reference to the problem of security, that is to say, at bottom, to the problem of the series.”9 Just as human reason initially encounters the never-ending series of unorganized correlations, governmentality encounters, “an indefinite series of mobile elements: circulation, x number of carts, x number of passers-by, x number of thieves” etc.10 The implicit demand is to establish the conditions of possibility for the management and control of these "mobile elements," the projection of unity and systematicity onto them, and the subsequent articulation of a division between “society” and the “state.” Foucault describes, “a specific field of naturalness peculiar to man... which will be called civil society, [that] emerges as the vis-à-vis of the state [or governmentality].”11

While the problem of the series in the Foucauldian context is mentioned specifically in his initial description of the mechanism of security, we will see how each mode of governmentality offers alternative solutions to the problem of the series and, in so doing, ascends to an “estimate of probabilities” that is only possible after a field of naturalness (‘civil society’) has been projected onto it. It is this projection that typifies the security apparatus—the mode of governmentality par excellence.

III. Law & homogeneity

Kant expresses reason’s demand for unity first of all in the form of a logical maxim: “find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the understanding, with which its unity will be completed.”12 The first interest of reason is therefore a tendency to ascend in pursuit of the unconditioned. For Kant it is intrinsic to reason that it has a “propensity to overstep all boundaries”—to keep ascending to the final condition. This propensity manifests itself in the problem of taxonomic classification:

a certain systematic unity of all possible empirical concepts must be sought insofar as they can be derived from higher and more general ones: this is a scholastic rule or logical principle, without which there could be no use of reason, because we can infer from the universal to the particular only on the ground of the universal properties of things under which the particular properties stand.13

Kant defines this propensity as the principle of homogeneity as it asserts the “sameness of kind in the manifold under higher genera,”14 which is representative of that speculative tendency of thought that is “hostile to differences in kind,”15 and concerned primarily with universality.16 It is this yearning for a universal condition that is the peculiar fate of reason, for when reason extends and finds security in “principles that overstep all possible use in experience,”17 it finds itself awash in illusion, the liberation from which is possible through critique.18

Relevant to the specific purpose here is that when faced with the unorganized manifold of phenomena, the tendency of reason according to the principle of homogeneity is to move higher and higher towards a universal category applicable to the entire domain of phenomena—to act as if the infinite diversity of phenomena can be classified perfectly and completely.

There is a similar principle of ascension at work in Foucault’s description of the legal mechanism. The solution to the disorder presented by the problem of the series from the perspective of law is that of prohibition applicable within a specific domain or territory; via, “the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited.”19 Said legal structure is certainly universal in that it applies to all elements—or rather, legal subjects—within a given space or territory. Just as the presupposition of the unity of reason is, “that of the form of the whole of cognition, which precedes the determinate cognition of the parts and contains the conditions for determining a priori the place of each part and its relation to the others,”20 the presupposition of law is a form (a space or territory) and the violent delineation of a legal territory.

The function of the legal mechanism is therefore to “give greater definition to things that are prohibited.”21 Law focuses with greater and greater precision on prohibition through either an increase in the number of laws or the continual refinement of the legal structure itself. The tendency is therefore to perpetually ascend to a (Sisyphean) situation of complete codification or refinement. It is perhaps for a similar reason that Kant chooses to introduce the interest of reason to ascend to the unconditional as analogous to “an ancient wish – who knows how long it will take until perhaps it is fulfilled – that in place of the endless manifold of civil laws, their principles may be sought out; for in this alone can consist the secret, as one says, of simplifying legislation.”22

At the time of Kant’s first critique in the late 18th century, the Prussian Legal Code did not just regulate civil law. With a legal code of 19,000 different legal provisions, the genuiney hope of Prussian authorities was the perfect and total regulation of social life through law.23 Kant’s designation of the dogmatic rationalist metaphysicians as ‘despotic’ is intertwined with this idea that the rationalist metaphysical position leads to kind of despotism by law at the level of philosophy via the conviction that law can prohibit perfectly and completely.24 Another way to phrase this would be to argue that the legal mechanism starts from the perspective of disorder and asks itself, ‘what are the conditions of possibility of complete order?’ and answers by the attempt to ascend to that universal legal principle that will provide such conditions.

IV. Discipline and Specification

The logical principle of reason Kant opposes to the law of homogeneity is the law of specification which, “has its aim the systematic completeness of all cognitions, if, starting with the genus, I descend to whatever manifold may be contained in it, and thus in this way seek to secure extension for the system.”25 It is still concerned with taxonomy, but, as it were, attempts to classify by moving in the opposite direction. “Every genus requires different species, and these subspecies, and since none of the latter once again is every without a sphere…reason demands in its entire extension that no species be regarded as in itself the lowest.”26

The interest of reason is therefore, “content in respect of the manifoldness of species.”27 Whereas the law of homogeneity is concerned solely with the form of the concept applicable to the manifold of phenomena, the tendency of specification is to grasp the infinite manifold not via a universal form that, if you like, stands above it, but to “constantly seek to split nature into so much manifoldness that one would almost have to give up the hope of judging its appearances according to general principles.”28

The principle of homogeneity is therefore despotic insofar as it is hostile to difference, while the principle of specification taken to its conclusion would not allow reason to approach nature at all, as reason, “must approach nature with its principles in one hand.” To make the homologous argument within the realm of law, reasoning exclusively according to the principle of specification would be to give up on the search for that “ancient wish.” Insofar as it realizes the futility of complete codification, it gives up on the very idea of codification at all. It is in precisely this sense that Kant describes the philosophical position of skepticism as anarchic and its practitioners as, “shatterers of civil unity.”29

The interest of the law specification is therefore the determinacy of the content of the manifold. It is this dual-tendency of reason to ascend according to the principle of homogeneity and descend according to the principle of specification that is ‘the dialectic of pure reason’ explored in the Transcendental Dialectic section of Kant's first critique.

Compare this ‘principle of specification’ to the way Foucault describes discipline as that which, “functions to the extent that it isolates a space, that it determines a segment.”30 “In the system of law,” as Foucault puts it, “what is undetermined is what is permitted; in the system of disciplinary regulation, what is determined is what one must do, and consequently everything, being undetermined, is prohibited.”31 If we take law in this specific instance to have a primarily negative function—it is concerned with what one cannot do—we can say the function of discipline is positive in the sense that its focus is on how conduct conducive to order can be prescribed to a given series of mobile elements; i.e., to determine the content within a constructed space.

Discipline, “regulates everything…allows nothing to escape.”32 From a disciplinary perspective it is not enough just to leave a given element to itself (or it may disobey); rather, its concern is with the particular elements and their construction and production of elements given a norm. Thus Foucault’s aim in Discipline and Punish is to show how the prison qua panopticon functions not simply as a mode of punishment, but as paradigmatic for a whole series of institutions whose function is to create or produce certain types of subjects—‘docile bodies’ optimal for schooling, factory work, military regiments, etc.33 The disciplinary mechanism attempts to ‘fill the gap’ left by the impossibility of complete legal regulation so that the possibility of an element that disobeys is negated through the determination of those very elements.

Whereas the legal mechanism is concerned with universal principles as the condition of possibility of order, discipline is concerned with the specification and determination of the variety of particular elements. Discipline is concerned with the production of particular elements rather than the form these elements obey, in the same sense that the interest of the principle of specification is concerned with the determinacy of content rather than universal domain under which lie the manifold of phenomena.

V. Security and continuity

Through the “systematic connection”34 of the two arises a third logical law, one which, “offers a continuous transition from every species to every other through a graduated increase of varieties”35 and therefore “prepares the field for the [faculty of the] understanding.” The combination of diversity and homogeneity and the affinity that arises out it guarantees the systematicity of reason; i.e., a field of vision whereby phenomena appear unified and within which concepts can be deployed. However this field only appears as if it arises after the combination of homogeneity and specification. The third logical law itself must presuppose that phenomena always already appear unified; it presupposes what Kant calls the transcendental law of the continuity of nature.36 This systematicity is therefore not constitutive of phenomena; rather, “systematic unity (as mere idea) is only a projected unity”—a necessary projection onto phenomena that is the condition of possibility of cognition.

I have tried to show how both the legal mechanism outlines a territory and functions negatively in the sense that it enforces certain prohibitions, as well as how discipline functions positively insofar as its interest is in determining or producing types of subjects that will act as if certain conduct are already prohibited. For Foucault, that which differentiates the apparatus from security from the legal or disciplinary modes is that security “let’s things happen” in the sense of laisser-faire.37 Why can the security apparatus afford to do so?

Towards the end of the lectures on Security, Territory, and Population, Foucault provides an historical outline of political thought with regard to ‘nature.’ For Foucault, medieval political thought, broadly speaking, defined good government and a well ordered kingdom as part of a greater cosmological-theological order; where ‘society’ is a reflection of some theological great chain of being.38 With the advent of the monarchical principle of raison d’etat and that of the 'modern state’ arises a “new reality with its own rationality…a non-naturalness, an absolute artificiality.”39 For Foucault, it is the rational management of this 'new reality with its own rationality' which is the modern realm of politics (politiques) par excellence.

“The politiques were those who said: Let’s leave aside this problem of the world and nature; lets look for the reason intrinsic to the art of government; let’s define a horizon that will make it possible to fix exactly what should be the rational principles and forms of calculation specific to an art of government.”40

The specific actually existing institutional correlate of raison d’etat is, for Foucault, the police and their specific, “interest in what men do…in their activity, their ‘occupation.’”41 Yet with the economistes—and the subsequent shift in view of the state from guarantor of order to a “regulator of interests”42—there arises a new naturalness not, “of the processes of nature itself, as the nature of the world, but a process of naturalness specific to relations between men, to what happens spontaneously when they cohabit, come together, exchange, work, produce…”43 In other words, a field of naturalness qua society (‘civil society’) which functions according to the natural functioning of equilibrating forces if the state “lets things be.”

What is important however is that the condition of possibility of this field of ‘new naturalness’ are precisely those legal and disciplinary mechanisms discussed previously. It is only insofar as law controls the series of elements at the level of prohibition and the disciplinary apparatuses produce elements conducive to order that naturalness can then, retrospectively, remerge in the form of civil society where, “the good of all will be assured by the behaviour of each when the state, the government, allows private interest to operate, which, through the phenomena of accumulation and regulation, will serve all.”44 The 'all' to which this new naturalness is inservice here comes in the form form of the health of a specific population.

Earlier in the lectures Foucault refers to “the game of liberalism” as one which involves, “not interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course...basically and fundamentally it means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself.”45

Just as, for Kant, the condition of possibility of systematicity arises out the dialectic of reason—i.e., its concern for (1) homogeneity qua domain and universality and (2) diversity qua content and particularity—the condition of possibility of the artificial naturalness of contemporary civil society arises out of (1) a legal mechanism concerned with domain and universality in the form of law and (2) a disciplinary mechanism concerned with the construction of particular orderly elements, the circulation of which is facilitated by the police. It perhaps for this reason that Foucault describes the state as “the regulatory idea of governmental reason.”46

VI. Enlightenment & Critique            

This movement from myth (the cosmological-theological order held together by a great chain of being) extirpated by novel forms of reason (such as that wielded by the politiques) in the interest of the production of a ‘new naturalness’ qua civil society (as asserted by the economistes) is also articulated in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Frankfurt School more generally, wherein Enlightenment rationality liberates us from an omnipotent and heterogeneous nature only to enslave us to the objectification of both nature and man.

“Civilization,” for Adorno & Horkheimer, “is the victory of society over nature which changes everything into pure nature.”47 In terms of the totalitarianism of enlightenment reason, there is a sense then in which Foucault furnishes a kind of historical narrative for the process of disenchantment articulated by Adorno & Horkheimer, who locate the kernel of this disenchantment in Kant's philosophy. Hannah Arendt too, in her discussion of Hobbes’s state of nature, argues, “this new body politic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it.”48 Civil society becomes the systematic projection of ‘artificial naturalness’ whose function is the control a given series of elements.

What I have tried to show is that the interest of each mode of governmentality is homologous to each principle of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic; however, one might speculatively reverse this procedure and attempt to locate Kant’s critical philosophy within this Foucauldian chronology of governmentality. The historical conjuncture at which Kant’s first critique appears (1781) is, after all, precisely that era of the explosion of the disciplinary mode of governmentality and the birth of the discipline of political economy. The question might then become in what sense is the Kantian philosophical mode of critique related to, or perhaps, a mere reflection at the level of philosophy of this historical juncture.

Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ was, after all a critique of all hitherto philosophy—an attempt at precisely a “discipline of pure reason,” as he himself admits. Indeed, Kant admonishes those who might deny critique any positive function as being precisely akin to claiming that, “the police are of no positive utility because their chief business is to put a stop to the violence.”49 For Kant, after all, illusion is natural and inevitable for reason, for, “even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, [it] will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction.”50 The principles of reason therefore must be regulative; i.e., they must act as a sort of balance between the competing forces of reason; between that of the dogmatic rationalists and that of the anarchic sceptics.

Towards the end of the lecture on the 22nd of March, Foucault announces, “a new theoretical and analytical strata, this element of political reason, is force…we enter a politics whose principal object will be the employment and calculation of forces.”51 If we take the first critique to be a sort of “metaphysics of the balance of forces of reason,” is not Kant’s idea of voluntary servitude embodied in the ‘public use of reason,’ that “balance of forces” at the level of society par excellence? To put it another way, are the disciplinary and legal mechanisms not responsible for the production of historical conditions of possibility of this seemingly reasonable voluntary servitude, after which government can “let things be” and calculate its own actions around the calculation of an average (as in that of the economistes).

Can one then be surprised that, unlike the Kantian critique which is a critique of hitherto philosophy, that a critique of the security apparatus—of the production and circulation of subjects—had to necessarily take the form not of a critique of philosophy, but of political economy; in other words, of economists who determine those statistical averages around which the social is governed?

Despite the expulsion of Marxists from Japanese universities in the 1930s and postwar US occupation, when Makoto Itoh began studying economics at the University of Tokyo in 1955 Marxism was arguably the dominant school of thought. This would shift as scholars returned with Neoclassical and Keynesian perspectives picked up in the US and Europe, however the dominance was such that he could write as late as 1980 that, ‘in terms of quantity, the numbers of Marxian and neoclassical economists were evenly matched’ (11). Precisely how this relatively successful institutionalization of Marxist thought within the Japanese university system shaped this period of Marxist theory remains, in English at least, relatively unexplored.

Japanese Marxism in its Unoist instantiation however is a fascinating milieu precisely because of the academic-institutional integration that sets it apart from the Soviet, Western Marxist and Anglo-American trajectories. This includes sophisticated and consistent enough engagement with Capital such that readers should not find outlandish Itoh’s claim that, ‘Japanese studies of Capital may be safely said to be the most advanced in the world’ (45). ‘At a time when only a handful of Marxists were allowed to teach at the very fringes of West German universities,’ Jan Hoff writes, ‘the systematic study of capitalism was “mainstream” in Japan and occupied a strong place at the center of academia.’ (2014) Given the relative increase in academic Marxism over the past decade in English, it might be a supposed scholasticism or academicism which goes a long way towards explaining recent English language interest in Uno and Japanese Marxism more generally. Indeed, if there has been a single figure within this Unoist tradition that has been semi-widely received in English it is Itoh. His Basic Theory of Capitalism (1988) was subject to lengthy reviews by Simon Clarke and John Bellamy Foster and he was co-author with economist and former left-wing Greek MP Costas Lapavistas.

The first chapter of Itoh’s Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan offers an intellectual-historical survey of competing economic schools of thought in Japan generally, covering the dominance of the Classical and German Historical school in the decades following the Meiji restoration, through the interwar debates on the Japanese capitalism between the Kozo-ha and Rono-ha, to the postwar emergence of the Uno school of which Itoh is a professed adherent. Itoh describes how the curriculum at the University of Tokyo began with ‘Economic Theory I’ based on Marx, before moving to ‘Economic Theory II’, which followed the Neoclassical school. In describing a situation that seems a far cry from the contemporary Anglo-American one, ‘most Japanese neoclassical economists,’ Itoh writes, ‘were at least aware of Marxist viewpoints on various problems’ (29).

Beyond the initial intellectual-historical chapter, Itoh discusses Marx’s theory of value in chapter two, Marx’s theory of market value in chapter three, Marxist theories of crisis in chapter four and then a final chapter on the inflation crisis of the 1970s. There he makes some interesting claims regarding the specificity of the effectiveness of Keynesian inflation policy from a US perspective insofar as, ‘inflational policy by means of currency control originates in the highly nationalistic attempt to relieve the effect of the great depression of the 1930s by the segregation of foreign and domestic relations’ (155). For Itoh, initial attempts at Keynesian inflationary policy were suitable to a US context because the US was largely economically self-reliant and able to afford this kind of segregation between domestic and international concerns. With the end of WWII and the rise of a global division between a ‘free’ and ‘Socialist’ bloc, a less segregated US economic policy functioned to bolster this ‘free bloc’ via the extension of a global dollar system and leveraging of American financial capital, however this positioned the well-being of American workers and middle-class downstream from the health of global capitalism writ large. In this geopolitical and economic context, readers may find the serpentine context for recent interest in Keynesian social democracy as a domestic political-economic project.

The crux of the book has to do with the relation between the production of value by abstract labor specific to capitalism and the necessity of economic crises, for ‘without such a systematic theory we cannot clarify the logical necessity of cyclical crises, which reveal the contradictory nature of capitalist economy in all its interrelations’ (93). Itoh sets himself up as explicitly Marxist insofar as he takes the inevitability of crisis as a basic principle immanent to capitalist economic relations no matter the forms of state intervention. In his excellent compendium of Marxian theories of crisis, Clarke has characterized the Uno school’s model of crisis more generally as, ‘rest[ing] on a model of monopoly capitalism based on monopolistic product markets and a competitive labor market, so that competition in the labor market replaces competition in product markets as the spur to innovation’ (Clarke 1994: 70). The general model of accumulation is one where stable technological innovation leads to a stable rate of profit eventually destabilized by rising wages forcing a wave of labor-saving innovations. What is important here however isn’t rising wages in general associated with the classic ‘profit squeeze’, but rather the ‘overaccumulation with respect to labor power.’ For Itoh, ‘Marx’s theory of crisis must be completed as a theory of excess capital wherein the notion of overproduction of capital is in relation to the laboring population’ (154).

Because accumulation typically takes the form of the increasing mechanization of production, a generic Marxian standpoint might find no issue for capital accumulation in a shortage of labor power availability insofar as, by displacing workers via mechanization, capitalism creates its own reserve army of labor. For Itoh however the key ratio determining the relationship between accumulation and unemployment is between the organic composition of capital resulting from mechanization and the rate of exploitation, for if the increase in the former is not associated with an increase in the latter, little stops the use of less mechanized but more labor-intensive methods of production. Business owners, in other words, will choose cheap labor over investments in mechanization if it means maintaining higher profit rates. There is no tendency to innovation ex nihilo. If the rate of accumulation is greater than the rate of growth of labor power at the level of demography however (or, to use a related economic measure ‘labor force participation’), the prospect of a labor shortage means rising wages for those laborers remaining as part of the laboring population provoking a crisis. For Itoh, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall therefore does not manifest directly, but is rather guaranteed at the level of a basic principle via overaccumulation with respect to labor power.

Indeed, for Clarke, prior to the 1930s, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall was understood primarily as a secular rather than periodic law operative in the long run having little actual significance to Marxian theories of economic crisis such as those of Kautsky, Hilferding or Luxembourg. The tendency to periodic crises was connected to the growing mass of profits; with the centralization and concentration of capital rather than with the slowing rate of capitalist profitability generally. The situation changed in the 1970s and the delinking of Marxian underconsumption theories and Keynesian demand management (hitherto seen largely as two-sides of at least a similar coin) with the perceived failure of Keynesian policy to deal with stagflation; to deal with, in other words, a decline in the rate of profit not associated with deflation but with inflation and a rise in unemployment. Of course, every crisis is marked by a fall in the rate of profit, yet common to both underconsumptionist and disproportionality standpoints however is the claim that this tendency is a result of a crisis rather than its cause.

This changed in the 1970s. To explain falls in the rate of profit accompanied by inflation, Marxists increasingly rendered the rate of profit as a cause rather than consequence of crisis. The idea that the tendency for the profit rate to fall was a secular tendency irrespective of state or inter-state mediation via economic policy, more popular for obvious reasons given the failures in managing stagflation, thus turned debate into arguments about the causes of such a fall. The 1970s essentially saw a re-playing of debates that had arisen in miniature in the 1930s; namely, attributing the erosion of profits as the result of rising wages or the result of a rising ‘organic composition of capital’ and the increase in capital-intensive technological innovations. In the eyes of the latter, the former was largely ‘Neo-Ricardian’ given the emphasis on distributional changes (whether via union or worker militancy or changes in the laboring population and/or labor participation) – and therefore reformist. In the eyes of the former, the latter were ‘fundamentalists’ for their ‘orthodox dogma’ surrounding the tendency of the profit rate to fall.

The point here for this brief yet incomplete run-through of such a history is Clarke’s description of Itoh’s crisis theory as, ‘a complex synthesis of neo-Ricardian, falling rate of profit, and disproportionality theories, each pertaining to a different phase of the [business] cycle’ (Clarke 1994: 71). Specifically, the way in which, ‘unlike almost all other falling rate of profit theorists, he [Itoh] does try to show how the fall in the rate of profit leads to a crisis.’ Marx had shown that the source of increased demand lay in the purchase of means of production and labor power by the capitalist as the capitalist sought to expand his capital by reinvesting his surplus value. From a disproportionality perspective, provided that the appropriate relations between the various branches are maintained, capital faces no barrier to the realization of its expanded product. Crises instead arise out of disproportionality between branches of production rather than by its absolute expansion. From a disproportionality perspective therefore, production can expand infinitely whatever the state of the market for consumption by expanding the production of the means of production. Adherence to a disproportionality perspective is important politically, insofar as capitalist accumulation faces relative limits vis a vis the relations between branches of production rather than any absolute limit that follows from its contradictory structure.

For Itoh, proving the logical necessity for the overaccumulation of capital via arguments over accumulation with respect to labor power is itself insufficient to answer important questions related to capitalist crisis, such as why over accumulated capital can’t be laid aside as ‘unused’, or why capital can’t slow down the pace of its own accumulation as the profit rate falls. Having already shown the logical necessity of crisis in the overaccumulation of capital with respect to labor power at the level of production, the way the credit system mediates capitalist competition at the level of circulation functions as the other half of his theory. Itoh’s theory is Neo-Ricardian because of his emphasis on wage increases due to the overaccumulation with respect to labor power. It is ‘disproportional’ because of his focus on the credit system and its relation to moving idle capital in, out, and between various branches of production.

Marx’s comments on the credit system are famously incomplete. Some can be found in Part V of Capital, Vol. III, a section which ‘seldom has been treated as an indispensable part of Marxian crisis theory except in the Japanese Uno School’ (109). Itoh attempts to further formalize and concretize Marx’s incomplete remarks to prove the inevitability of capitalist crisis at the level of a basic formal principle. In this section, readers will find fascinating comments about the creation of money by banks and its connection to production, as well as, perhaps most importantly, his emphasis on an analysis of capitalist circulation and production as being the sine qua non of an analysis of capitalist crisis. ‘The essential weakness of the excess commodity theory,’ as he puts it, ‘stems from its basic effort to look for capital’s difficulties not within the process of production. In contrast, the excess capital theory in Capital shows how “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself” (Capital Vol II 250), moving through the processes of both production and circulation’ (107).

Following Uno, the act of conceptual abstraction with the aim of elucidating a basic formal principle is a recurring theme throughout. While the function of the credit system is, ‘to utilize idle capitals or to shorten the production circulation period in the turnover of capital’ (109), the principle of the credit system, ‘should be abstracted from those outside factors [such as money capitalists and other depositors outside the ranks of industrial and commercial capitalists] in order to clarify the substantial function of the credit system, which is to facilitate the setting in motion of idle elements of capital which necessarily result from the turnover of capital’ (110).

It is in this act of abstraction where, for Clarke, Itoh runs into trouble. As Clarke puts it rather briskly, ‘the cause of the crisis is not the fall in the rate of profit, but the failure of the fiscal and monetary authorities to check the inflationary over-expansion of the boom which leads to the erosion of profit, a failure which arises because his theory abstracts entirely from the state’ (Clarke 1994: 71). Indeed, while the extent of its effect is debated, monetary policy and central banking surely have a role to play in this ‘setting in motion of idle elements of capital’, from which Ito does indeed abstract. Clarke here repeats a version of a common critique that the methodological ground of the Unoist approach in general is overly abstract. A general charge – from Lange, to Clarke, to Bellamy Foster – is that Unoist perspectives (including Itoh’s) partake in a fundamental fetishizing of purely abstract theoretical frameworks.

In general, for Itoh as well as Uno, this act of abstraction to arrive at a ‘basic principle’ is a necessary rather than sufficient measure in terms of constructing a Marxian framework. A sufficient framework of analysis would encompass Uno’s three levels of abstraction: (1) the extraction and reconstruction of the purely logical; (2) a ‘middle theory’ of the stages of world capitalist development; and (3) empirical analysis of capitalism as it occurs in historically specific contexts. For Uno, the epistemological warrant for the purification of the social and historical in general of all non-capitalist, non-economic interferences resides in the self-abstracting properties of Capital itself.

Rendered in a Polanyian register, the specificity of capitalism as an economic form is, according to Uno’s reading of Marx, precisely its ‘disembeddedness’ from the social, such that the division between ‘the social’ and ‘the economic’ is itself a result of capital’s logic of self-abstraction. Capitalism therefore becomes the historical condition of possibility of a specific social-scientific discipline called economics. For Uno then, Marx’s critique of political economy is not Archimedean point or alternative system of categories from which to mount a critique of hitherto political economy, but rather a set of categories that purports to follow capital’s own self-abstraction to its conclusion: the total disembeddedness and then subsumption the social by the economic in general. The question of what to do methodologically with ‘the state’ vis a vis this disembeddedness is an issue not only faced by many Marxists but perhaps even by Marx, particularly given the indeterminate role the state plays within the framework of Capital.

The relevant charge here seems to do more specifically with economism, which one is tempted to locate in the intellectual-historical circumstances of the institutionalization of Marxian economics within economics departments in Japan. Marx’s critique of classical political economy, but also economic discourse more generally, is of course partly historical, where a model of exchange between equal units within the sphere of circulation is possible only by abstracting from the distinction between commodity owners who own money and can employ labor (capitalists), and commodity owners whose only commodity to sell is their body and time. It ‘forgets’ the history of the institutional, social and legal forces that function as the model’s condition of possibility. No wonder then that Marx makes some of his most powerful comments about the state in his abridged account of that historical process in Capital – in the section on primitive accumulation.

Yet whether formalistic, functionalist, ahistorical or not, what makes Uno and Itoh’s discourse unique in the history of Marxism is precisely the concerted effort in a specific institutional context to mediate Marx’s value-theoretical insights with the then contemporary economic discourse. This might offer, perhaps optimistically, a kind of discursive bridge to Marxism within the discipline of economics, but even further, one route out of the disciplinary cul de sac that is ‘economics’ strictu sensu when it comes to an analysis of capitalism as a historically specific economic form and mode of social reproduction. Beyond the uniqueness of his theory of crisis or his account of the history of twentieth century Japanese economics, Itoh’s book and the Unoist tradition more broadly is well-worth engaging with for this reason.

15 February 2022

References

• Clarke, Simon 1994 Marx’s Theory of Crisis London: St. Martin’s Press.

• Hoff, Jan 2014 Internationalizing Marx: An Interview with Jan Hoff Viewpoint Magazine 24 May https://viewpointmag.com/2014/05/21/internationalizing-marx-an-interview-with-jan-hoff/

Previously published as a review in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19970_value-and-crisis-essays-on-marxian-economics-in-japan-by-makoto-itoh-reviewed-by-bo-harvey/

Makoto Itoh
Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan

Second Edition, Monthly Review, New York, 2020. 296 pp., $29.00

English language readers may know Stavros Tombazos for his Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital, a reading of the core concepts of all three volumes of Capital as falling under different conceptions of time or temporality – the ‘linear time’ of production of Vol I, the ‘circular time’ of circulation of Vol II, and the ‘organic time’ of their unity in Vol III (Tombazos 2015). While framed as a Marxian analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and slow recovery, Global Crisis and Capitalist Reproduction is also an empirically oriented investigation into the economic dynamics of the deflationary, recessionary and austerity tendencies of global capitalism since the 1970s, of which the 2008 crisis was an expression.

At a general level, Tombazos draws on his conception of economic crisis as outlined in Time in Marx; namely, that in each case, capitalist crisis is an instance of ‘organic arrhythmia’. ‘Healthy growth’, as it were, presupposes a relative equilibrium between the rhythms of the three circuits of money capital that make up Marx’s ‘reproduction schemas’ in Capital Vol II, where the circuit of money capital pertains to the rhythm of valorization, the circuit of productive capital pertains to the rhythm of accumulation, and the circuit of commodity capital pertains to the rhythm of the realization of value.

Tombazos’s analysis of 2008 is inextricable from his analysis of a broader structural obstacle in value augmentation since the 1970s. The 2008 crisis was predominantly a crisis in the realization of value (an arrhythmia in the circuit of commodity capital) while the crisis of the 1970s was a crisis of decreased profitability (an arrhythmia in the circuit of productive capital). Global Crisis and the Reproduction of Capital can be summarized as an analysis of the ongoing crisis in the realization of value that is a resulting negative externality of capital’s own relative success in solving a crisis in profitability (the crisis of the 1970s), but at the expense of the social development traditionally associated with capitalist growth.

Methodologically, Tombazos isolates three specific sections of Capital as having particular explanatory value with regard to the crisis of 2008: the first four chapters of Vol II (containing the analysis of industrial capital), the chapters of the same volume analyzing the ‘reproduction schemes of capital’, and the analysis of the relationship between industrial capital and money capital developed in Vol III.

The core empirical arguments in chapters two and three (‘Profitability, Accumulation, and Industrial Capital’ and ‘Private Consumption, Wage Share of GDP and Reproduction Schemas’) leverage the threefold distinction between circuits of industrial capital in Vol. II (i.e. money capital, production capital, and circulation capital) while chapter four (‘Money Capital, Fictitious Capital, and ‘Toxic Capital’) draws on Marx’s analysis of money capital as distinct from industrial capital in Vol. III. Chapter five (‘Economic Policies and Economic Perspectives’) focuses on policy responses to the conjuncture and in particular, on negative rates as an attempt to save the Euro. “Economic policies prevented the collapse of the financial system and in Europe saved the Euro,” he writes, “but did not lead to an exit from the crisis’ (61). This is the case globally insofar as 2008, ‘is the most serious episode of the same long-term downward wave that began in the 1970s. It is the crisis of the capitalist reaction and the neoliberal response to this crisis of the 1970s’ (84). These middle chapters are likely navigable only by those familiar both with mainstream and Marxian political economy. They are however book-ended by a more approachable introduction and conclusion, as well as helpful ‘abstracts’ that summarize the contents of each chapter.

In an extension of the theoretical presupposition of Palgrave’ Insights Into Apocalypse Economics series – which takes as its premise the thesis that neoliberal economic policy dating from the 1980s has not only failed to rejuvenate the prosperity of the post-WWII ‘golden age’ economy, but has generated a widening spectrum of pathologies threatening humanity – Tombazos describes contemporary world capitalism as, fundamentally, ‘trapped in the same fundamental contradiction since the late 1960s: It refuses to offer what society is asking for’ (83). Institutions deviate from neoliberalism in the present only as much as needed to ensure the neoliberal horizon is the only future. This ‘colonization of the future’ is – as we will see – not merely operative at the level of collective imagination.

Marxist debates on crisis have historically been dominated by discussions about the falling rate of profit. For Tombazos however, this singular focus has obscured a different but related dynamic fundamental to an understanding of the specificity of capitalist social reproduction in the neoliberal era; namely, the increasing divergence of the rate of profit and the rate of capital accumulation, where the sorts of long-term investments in fixed capital that have usually constituted the boom and bust nature of the ‘business cycle’ are increasingly less sensitive to increases in profitability. This is reflected in the upward trend in the ratio of surplus value/net investment in fixed capital (alternatively expressed as an increase in the ratio of the net operating surplus of a given total economy to the net investment in fixed capital). Capital’s response of this problem has been decreasing levels of surplus investment in fixed capital, opting instead to search for other outlets for value augmentation. The short term begins to dominate the long term here, and the question becomes what happens to this surplus capital that, in a previous era, went toward fixed capital investments.

Starting from the empirical observation that in the US, Japan and EU there is an increase in the ratio of private consumption to wage share of GDP, Tombazos argues that the excess surplus not invested in fixed capital ends up largely as easy loans to working class households borrowing to consume; i.e., as debt. Adjusting Marx’s expanded reproduction schema to account for the borrowing of workers, Tombazos shows how borrowing at low interest rates proves an effective outlet for surplus value unable to be realized through investment in fixed capital in the short term. Borrowing of course stimulates consumption and consumption has a positive effect on investment and employment.

Yet Tombazos describes this expansion of money capital in the form of borrowing as ‘structurally unstable and from the outset has an expiration date.’ This instability is grounded in the fact that the borrowed amount increases not simply due to the excess of surplus value diverted from longer-term fixed capital investment to working class debt, but due to the interest that accrues on a loan. Debt servicing therefore rises as a share of wages. As he puts it, ‘the financial system of the neoliberal period has allowed the massive “transfer” of future demand by wage earners in the present time through the rising of debt, whose servicing increasingly undermined the disposable part of their wages for consumption’ (7). If debt is simply a claim on the value of future wages (and government bonds therefore a claim on the value of future taxation), the (real or imagined, but certainly politically actual) ‘expiration date’ rapidly approaches as soon as markets begin to doubt whether the accumulated rights on those wages will ever be redeemed.

Tombazos goes on to describe the extent to which financial derivatives and other instruments of securitization made possible by various policies of deregulation facilitate the easy transfer of surplus formerly invested in longer-term fixed capital investments into loan capital. These instruments were originally conceived as risk management tools. The sale of securities consisting of different types of loans functions to decrease the risk profile of the riskiest loans (i.e. the non-servicing loans) through the distribution of these loans (and their risk) to a ‘generalized Other;’ i.e., to the financial system writ large. For Tombazos, this spread of ‘toxic’ capital has the effect of increasing the opacity and complexity of the global financial system generally for. Risk becomes more difficult to detect insofar as the risk assumed by creditors reappears systemically.

The shifting around or generalization of risk is of course not synonymous with its disappearance. We have moved ‘from a system where the granting of a loan meant the assumption of the underlying risk […] to a system that ostensibly decouples the loan from that risk through the sale in the form of a financial derivative product’ (7). One way to reduce the ‘toxicity’ of the accumulated rights over future wages – i.e. to guarantee the horizon of increased profitability through loan capital, usually through the issuance of government debt – is essentially to dismantle the welfare state, insofar as states, through their interventions to rescue the financial system, undertake to rescue these ‘toxic’ values by transferring the cost to the taxpayer. This is the political level at which, for Tombazos, ‘class struggle’ is operative. Neoliberalism does not only ‘refuse to offer what society is asking for,’ it turns against society to save itself.

Peter Osborne has pointed out how Marxist crisis theory – which itself, probably not coincidentally, found a renaissance in the 1970s – is haunted by a disjunction between the general-historical character of the concept of crisis in its modern form (which includes the notion of crisis as a condition of possibility of transition to a new mode of production) and the conjunctural and comparatively narrow focus of Marx’s own ‘theory of crisis’ as a theory primarily of periodic crises (Osborne 2010). This is a disjunction Tombazos seems well aware of when he opens his book by distinguishing between ‘periodic’ and ‘structural’ crises. ‘Marx himself dealt only with periodic crises, since the discussion on long-term economic waves, which presupposes a relatively long capitalist history, began after Marx’s death’ (2).

Yet insofar as ‘permanent crises do not exist’ (Marx 1989: 497), one wonders whether ‘crisis’ is the relevant term for the so-called post 1970 ‘structural crisis’. If the ‘historic nature’ of the crisis is precisely due to that fact that ‘exiting the crisis cannot be achieved by deepening neoliberalism or partially revising it, a policy “summed up” by a relatively tighter supervision of the banking system’(69) – if there are, in other words, no policy solutions other than social regression to the structural crisis of neoliberal capitalism that can, on the one hand, untangle the web of ‘toxic’ capital while, on the other, avoid the crisis in the falling rate of profit that subtends it – one wonders wonders if the crisis is really capitalism’s (in its economic form) at all.

And yet what is this all a crisis of? In his recent Crisis as Form (Osborne 2022: 38), Osborne I think offers the most succinct formulation:

“It is part of the core concept of crisis as the moment of decision within a transitional process (at its limit, in the medical origin, a transitional process within illness from life to death), that it cannot be permanent. What is increasingly referred to as ‘permanent crisis,’ then, is no longer technically a crisis, but a new and terrible form of social reproduction…capitalist crisis is always a crisis in the consistency of the social itself…in brief, what was crisis has become a new general form of the social.”

22 April 2020

This is an edited version of a review originally published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17948_global-crisis-and-the-reproduction-of-capital-by-stavros-tombazos-reviewed-by-brendan-harvey/.

• Marx, Karl 1989 Theories of Surplus Value Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books

• Osborne, Peter 2010 An Increasing Topicality Radical Philosophy 160 (March/April)

• Osborne, Peter 2022 Crisis as Form London: Verso

• Tombazos, Stavros 2015 Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital Chicago: Haymarket Books

I very much enjoyed your article in NLR 128, March-April 2021 ‘Paradigm Shifts,’ a fascinating comparison of Biden’s American recovery plan and the EU’s New Generation package vis a vis this so-called shift to a post-neoliberal era. I did have one minor – although perhaps theoretically relevant – quibble with your clarification of an American sports metaphor. This is the baseball metaphor Joe Biden invokes to discuss how the solution to income inequality in American society is supposedly already “in our wheelhouse.” The quotation reads:

“When you have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it ferments political discord and basic revolution. It allows demagogues to step in and blame ‘the other’…you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins. But the truth of the matter is, it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living would change. Nothing would fundamentally change.”

You then very helpfully clarify the phrase for an international audience, describing ‘it’s all within our wheelhouse’ as “a baseball term, suggesting a comfortable position from which to hit a home run.” This is true. The ‘wheelhouse’ does indeed describe a comfortable position out of which might arise a home run, but what is ‘comfortable’ here is not simply the positioning of the batter, but the positioning of the ball in an ideal location over which the batter stands. The ‘wheelhouse,’ in other words, is not just a question of body positioning, it is also the position within a given batter’s ‘strike zone’ that gives the hitter the best chance of hitting with power. The batter is broadly static as they stand over this area (hence their ‘batting stance’ – although I should mention the history of strange and at times comedic batting stances. Compare, for example, the erect, giraffe-like stance of former Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Craig Counsel who hardly bends his knees, with the low wide-legged crouch of former Houston Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell).

The choice of metaphor is perhaps not without political meaning, for what Biden implies is that the batter (here, individuals within American society) can maintain fundamentally the same ‘stance’ to ‘hit a home run’ (achieve freedom, equality, etc.). And it can do so precisely because the possibility of equality is already ‘in our wheelhouse,’ because of the way we (American society) already stand. American society and political class do not need to ‘change its batting stance.’

Lest I, uh, overextend the metaphor, what is unique about the ‘strike zone’ is that it is not straightforwardly formal or identical across all batters. It is not, in other words, pre-established, but dependent on the individual size (for example, their height) and stance of a given batter. Major League Baseball’s 1988 definition of the strike zone describes it as, “that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the top of the knees. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball." The question of the positioning and physical make-up of the batter, in other words, determines what is a ‘strike’ or a ‘ball’, as judged by the umpire who stands behind him. Who the pitcher, catcher, and umpire might be in this now definitively overextended metaphor may require further reflection.

A critique of Biden’s metaphor from the standpoint of the structural (some might say ‘constitutional’) obstacles to the possibility of equality in ‘American democracy’ however, might point out that American society simply does not possess a framework of rules that are, on the one hand, genuinely equally distributive of opportunity (strike zones pertain to each individual specifically, based not only on their bodily characteristics, but on their choice of stance) while retaining a consistent structure (the framework of a strike zone always remains). Obviously in practice there is relatively little variability in the body type of major league baseball players when compared to variability of starting social positions.

The point remains I think that perhaps American society is structured by the rules of a game with a different logic.

I.

Born Christopher St. John Sprigg in 1907, Christopher Caudwell left school at 15 to become a journalist. He eventually ran an aeronautics publishing company with his brother, edited one of its technical journals, and designed gears for motorcars. According to the historian Helena Sheehan, Caudwell became interested in Marxism in 1934 and wrote his first major book at a blistering rate of 5000 words per day.1 Prior to Illusion & Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (published posthumously in 1935 which, at least for a time in the middle of the 20th century, was seen as a classic in British Marxist aesthetics) he wrote 7 detective novels and edited a collection of ghost stories. This was all before the age of 27.

He was killed at 30 fighting in Spain, manning a machine gun post covering retreating volunteers in the British Battalion of the International Brigade. His posthumous work includes the collection Studies in a Dying Culture – which includes essays on Freud, HG Wells, TE Lawrence, and George Bernard Shaw, alongside essays with titles like “Love,” “Beauty,” “Liberty,” and “Man in Nature” – a book about the crisis Newtonian physics that followed the introduction of relativity theory, Crisis of Physics, an unpublished book about the history of biology, and a study of English bourgeois literature. When Caudwell is discussed or referenced nowadays (or at least in the last three decades) – which is admittedly rarely (and its notable that the most sophisticated book on Caudwell, at least according to Paul Browne, is in German) – he functions as an almost platonic ideal of the Marxist autodidact, someone simultaneously encyclopedic in the width and breadth of their knowledge, unburdened by the disciplinary distinctions of the academy, but also burdened precisely by the indeterminacy of that same autodidacticism. Terry Eagleton described his intellectual situation as,

“Insulated from much of Europe, intellectually isolated even within his own society, permeated by Stalinism and idealism, bereft of a “theory of superstructures,” Caudwell nonetheless persevered in the historically hopeless task of producing from these unpropitious conditions a fully-fledged Marxist aesthetics. His work bears all the scars of that self-contradictory enterprise: speculative and erratic, studded with random insights, punctuated with hectic forays into and out of alien territories, and strewn with hair-raising vulgarities.”2

For EP Thompson, this characterization was nothing but myth-making, and as Paul Browne argues, the extent of this mythmaking becomes clear when one compares what Eagleton has to say about Caudwell to the description of pre-Althusserian Marxists in Althusser’s own preface to For Marx; where, “the evocation of the isolated intellectual hero engaged in an historically hopeless struggle against enemies internal (Stalinism and Idealism) and external (the lack of recognition by bourgeois academics) merely serves to place Althusser and Eagleton in the role of true pioneers.”3

When not tempered with a kind of astonished ambivalence – EP Thompson for example described him as, “a shooting star across England’s empirical night... a premonitory sign of a more sophisticated Marxism [that would come in the 60s]...[a] fire: a consciousness too bright and self- consuming.”4 Across the board, Caudwell is critiqued for the fundamental indeterminacy of his analysis. In the same sentence that he describes him as the best-known critic of his day, Raymond Williams described Caudwell as having, “little to say about literature which is interesting” and perhaps more devastatingly, described him as, “not even specific enough to be wrong.”5

While it would be impossible to deny the naïveté of some of Caudwell’s statements – as well as the sweeping form they often take (best compared to the sensation of reading the work of the most gifted stoner undergraduate conceivable) – for Paul Browne, “hectic forays into and out of alien territories only makes sense if one accepts the academic division of labor as insurmountable.” The index to Illusion & Reality contains 500 titles from half a dozen European countries and over a dozen academic disciplines. To judge it at all, one would need to convene an interdisciplinary committee.

II.

When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Institute for Social Research in 1931- just a few years prior to Caudwell’s writing of Illusion and Reality – his inaugural address described ‘the current intellectual situation’ as one in which ‘traditional disciplinary boundaries have been called into question.’ “The question today,” as Horkheimer puts it, “is to organize investigations stimulated by contemporary philosophical problems in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration.”6 This was to become, not simply the Institute for Social Research, but ‘The Frankfurt School,’ with a research agenda that arose out of not only a diagnosis of the insufficiency of any individual discipline in addressing the social and historical ‘whole,’ but, in particular, the insufficiency of philosophy, a position stated classically in Adorno’s own inaugural address “The Actuality of Philosophy.” “Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real."7 This fact necessitated a turn to an interdisciplinary materialism, which seems to be what the name and goal of Critical Theory now (somewhat flailingly) attempts to subsume.

‘Theory’ is of course something of a loaded classificatory choice: first because it distinguishes itself from ‘philosophy’ and second because of its implicit articulation of the problematic of disciplinarity. As Peter Osborne has argued, it is the transdisciplinary not interdisciplinary functioning of certain concepts – i.e., their functioning across (not between, or even over and against) specific intellectual disciplines – that causes Theory both to resemble philosophy insofar as philosophy is construed as a kind metadiscipline, at the same time that it is self-evidently separate from disciplinary philosophy.

More specifically though, as Osborne points out, much of ‘Theory’ is, if not ‘properly’ philosophical, at least predicated on critiques of existing disciplinary philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In the French context, this is the structuralist critique of Sartre’s existential post-Hegelianism and the subsequent post- structuralist critique of structuralism. In the German context, this is the Frankfurt School of critical theory’s taking up the task of Hegelian philosophy – as conceived in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – as modified by Marx’s critique of Hegel.8 That is, as modified by the Marxist critique of philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline, which, famously, pushes Marx away not only from philosophy and its critique, but to the critique of something else—political economy. Indeed, debates about Marx for good reason played a central role in the mid- century transformations in both contexts.

Of course the third in the traditional triumvirate of European philosophical and intellectual cultures missing here is Britain, and perhaps for good reason. The epistemological position stereotypically understood as British is empiricism, a philosophical standpoint that seems to contain within it precisely the refutation of the autonomy of reason that one can find in Kant (German) or Descartes (French), with its fundamental reliance on the idea that perception and sensation are the sole source of human knowledge.

Geoff Pilling has pointed out that it is one of the ironies of British philosophical intellectual history that the same empiricism that lay the foundation for the philosophical materialism of 17th and 18th century did the same for the idealism of Berkley & Hume. The proposition that sensation alone is the source of knowledge is connected, in other words, both to the denial of the objectivity of the external world (subjective idealism), but also the denial of the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge of that external world (skepticism).9 What both have in common is the idea that the logical categories of thought (either philosophical or scientific) are only schemes which we use for the organization of sense-data. In other words, they are wholly subjective. It precludes, in other words, the idea that concepts are themselves constituted objectively.

Marx’s critique of Ricardo is relevant here as an example of this emphasis on the origin of knowledge rather than its form. While, in Marx’s view, Ricardo correctly saw in labor the source and measure of value, he failed to consider the form assumed by labor that is specific to the capitalist mode of production (“abstract labor”). This is a form of labor that finds its specificity in the abstraction from the qualitatively diverse concrete laboring activities that is, transhistorically, productive of use-values. Abstract labor, however, is not constituted by a form of abstraction that occurs in the mind. As Michael Heinrich explains,

“abstract labor is not visible, only a particular concrete labor is visible, just as the concept ‘tree’ is not visible...but as with the term ‘tree,’ abstract labor is an abstraction, but a completely different kind of abstraction. Normally abstractions are constituted in human thought...but in the case of abstract labor, we are not dealing with a ‘mental abstraction’ but with a ‘real abstraction,’ by which we mean an abstraction that is carried out in the actual behavior of humans, regardless of whether they are aware of it.”10

Traditional conceptions of subject and object here, are thrown for something of a loop, insofar as the act of abstraction is not reducible to the domain of the former.

IV.

At a moment of particular tension in EP Thompsons’s “Poverty of Theory” – where Thompson attempts to offer his own philosophical critique of Althusser’s conception of the relationship between the knowledge of the real and the real itself — Thompson criticizes Althusser for eliding the fact that the real can only become an object of epistemological inquiry at the point when it enters within the field of perception or knowledge. Essentially he’s accusing Althusser of confusing the empirical with empiricism. The accuracy or not of Thompson’s critique aside – what is notable is that Thompson turns to none other than Caudwell as an authority on the question. In the essay on Althusser, Thompson selects just two sentences – “object and subject, as exhibited by the mind, come into being simultaneously...knowing is a mutually determining relation between knowing and being” – but in his essay on Caudwell he selects a large bit on Caudwell’s conception of dialectical materialism which is worth reading at length:

“Object and subject, as exhibited by the mind relation, come into being simultaneously. Human body, mind, and human environment cannot exist separately, they are all parts of the one set...we can say that relations seen by us between qualities in our environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all the entities of physics) existed before the subject-object relationship implied in the mind. We prove this by the transformations which take place independent of our desires. In this sense, nature is prior to mind and this is the vital sense of science. These qualities produced, as case and ground produce effect, the synthesis, or the particular subject-object relationship which we call knowing. Nature was therefore produced by the mind. But the nature which produced mind was not nature ‘as seen by us,’ for this is important into it the late subject-object relationship called ‘mind.’ It is nature known by us, that is, as having indirect and not direct relations with us. It is nature in determining relation with, but not part of, our contemporary universe. Yet, by sublation, the nature that produced mind is contained in the universe of which the mind relation is now a feature; and that is why it is known to us. Such a view reconciles the endless dualism of mentalism or objectivism. It is the universe of dialectical materialism.”

Whether the quotation provided does in fact reconcile the dualism of mentalism or objectivism; rationalism or empiricism; idealism or materialism can be left aside, but what is remarkable – and this is something Thompson himself comments upon – is the intensity with which Caudwell explored, on the one hand, the materiality of thought and, on the other, the ideality of nature—or, to put it another way, the materiality of subjectivity and the ideality of objectivity.

While prominent British Marxist authorities like Maurice Cornforth, Francis Mulhern, and EP Thompson in particular have all agreed that Caudwell’s thought suffers from a, “certain deforming weaknesses, and in particular the analytic preference for binary oppositions;”11 these binary oppositions are simplistic only when looked at in isolation from each other. Caudwell understood well the necessity of grasping certain concepts in terms of ‘reflection determinations,’12 the type articulated in Book II of Hegel’s Logic. The more Hegelian inclined will call this grasping something ‘dialectically’ but if you’re allergic to this Hegelian vocabulary (as the Althusserians in the audience very well might be) or suspicious of its occasional sophistry (a perhaps legitimate suspicion) you can simply replace ‘dialectically’ with ‘the need to think together with;’ i.e., the idea that some concepts are simply incoherent without being thought in relation to their opposite—they are co-constitutive.

All of this from a thinker whose entire knowledge of German Philosophy was derived from Engels, Lenin, Bukharin, and Deborin. Illusion & Reality contain no references to Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, or Feuerbach. The Grundrisse was not published until he died, and he had no knowledge of either the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts or The German Ideology. Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Lefebvre—all of these names would have been completely foreign to him. This makes it rather astounding that Caudwell would zero in on the “Theses on Feuerbach” – with its interpenetration of subject & object – as the core of Marx’s thought.

V.

Caudwell’s exploration of, on the one hand, the materiality of thought and, on the other, ideality of nature bears a rather striking resemblance to Marx’s theory of fetishism—which describes simultaneously the materialization of social relations (where social relations appear as the relations between things) but also describes material objects (i.e., commodities) which seem to act very much with the agency of subjects. For Ricardo the demands made of human beings by commodity production are not the result of some a historically specific mediation and distribution of social labor, but are determined by the ‘natural laws’ (i.e., ahistorical laws) of the market—laws which political economy seeks to describe; however, Marx’s critique of these supposedly natural laws of economic motion, is not merely via some formal comparison to some different object that lies outside the purview of its categories of analysis. Marx held that the categories discovered by classical political economy do actually describe objective phenomena – they are not mere mystifications – what Marx criticizes political economy for is the ahistorical and unreflective relation they had to their own disciipline, for they could not grasp that their own science had emerged and developed – indeed, could only be possible – under certain historical conditions; namely, the fact that commodity production was becoming the dominant mode of production.

That the form disciplines take are constituted by specific historical and social relations is something even disciplinary purists are willing to point out, as long as this acknowledgement is book-ended with a nod to the sort of inter-, multi-, post-, meta- or any number of the prefixed qualifications we so often say we need more of. A more difficult idea to accept is that these same social relations are also constitutive of a given discipline’s intellectual content. That is to say, it is not merely the form of study – understood as the determinative conceptual borders of a specific discipline - that is the result of social relations of institutionality, but this is the case as well for the very object at which any disciplinary form takes aim.

To return to Caudwell – with his mix of grandiosity, immaturity, and transdisciplinary conceptual arsenal – would mean to at least remind ourselves of a standpoint that does not view the intellectual division of labor as insurmountable, but to truly take the social whole as one’s object of analysis.

Gavin Walker – one of a few scholars bringing Japanese value-form debates to bear in English – has described how, ‘in the twentieth century, it could easily be argued that the most Marxist country on earth was postwar Japan. Not in terms of a form of government of course, but in terms of a formal intellectual culture’ (Walker 2019: xiii). Scarcely a requirement in economics departments today, Marx’s Capital was in many postwar Japanese universities. At the Tokyo University of the 1950s – a kind of post-Imperial feeder school for Japanese bureaucrats – the curriculum included translation of Capital’s three volumes as well as Theories of Surplus Value. This establishment of Marx inside the university system – as well as debates within the Japanese Communist Party – left Japan with a thriving mid-twentieth century Marxian intellectual scene, one which has hardly been received in English. When it has, its reception has been mediated via the figure of Kozo Uno – at whom Samezo Kuruma’s Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money is largely directed.

The translation and publication of the book marks an important intellectual-historical addition, illuminating once again for English-language readers the sophistication of a value-form theoretical framework appearing 30 years prior to the Neue-Marx Lekture. A major figure in the history of Japanese Marxism through his affiliation with the Ohara Institute for Social Research in Osaka Suruma engaged in close cooperation with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow where he helped edit and compile the Japanese-German Lexicon of Marxist Political Economy. It was at this institute where Suruma and Uno participated in monthly readings of Marx. Nowhere to be found in Kolakowski’s definitive compendium Main Currents of Marxism, Jan Hoff has located Kuruma’s discussion of the architectonic of Marx’s critique of political economy within the broader context of its reception in the period immediately previous to WWII, which include Rubin’s elaboration of value theory in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, Henryk Grossman’s treatment of Marx’s critique of political economy, and the theoretical disputes between Hajime Kawakami and Kazuo Fukumoto (Hoff 2017: 220-221).

Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money includes Kurmua’s Theory of the Value Form and Theory of the Exchange Process, originally published in 1957, and Part I of his 1979 Theory of Money. The hardcover edition by Brill is a substantially revised version of an English translation self-published in 2008. Theory of the Value Form and Theory of the Exchange Process is itself composed of three essays that appeared separately in the Hosei Economic Review in 1950-1951, with the fourth appearing in 1955 as a transcript of a lecture. The fourth essay (appearing as Part I) offers a systematic account of Kuruma’s own views while the three essays that follow are framed in terms of Kuruma’s disagreement with Uno over the relation of the ‘theory of the value-form’ to the ‘theory of exchange.’ Part II is an interview on different topics where Kuruma expands on his own views and offers responses to challenges to it. Beyond the debate with Uno, large parts of the text function as a particularly granular – and not introductory – commentary on the first four chapters of Capital, Vol I. One comes away grasping the particular intensity with which Kuruma truly battled to grasp its opening sections, but also the extreme sensitivity to value-theoretical concerns internal to mid-twentieth century Japanese Marxist debates.

Kuruma’s basic concern is to grasp the relation between ‘theory of the value form’ and the ‘theory of the exchange’ vis a vis Marx’s theory of money. ‘Both theories seem to revolve around how money is generated, but the manner in which Marx carries out his analysis in each is completely different’ (28). This confusion arises from the way Marx orders the initial chapters of Capital, Vol I. Recall that Part 1 Chapter 1 of Capital is divided into four sections: (1) ‘The Two factors of the Commodity: Use Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value)’, ‘The Twofold Character of the Labor Represented in Commodities’, ‘The Value Form, or Exchange Value’, and ‘The Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret’. These four sections are followed by Chapter 2 (‘Exchange Process’) and Chapter Three (‘Money, or the Circulation of Commodities’). ‘Money’ appears in the third section of Chapter 1 on the value form, the fourth section on the fetish character of the commodity, and then in Chapter 2 on the exchange process. Kuruma’s struggle is to articulate the relation between the three mentions of money and then the formal ‘theory of money’ as presented in Chapter 3. For Kuruma, ‘Marx analyzes the how of money in the theory of the value form, and the why in the theory of the fetish character, whereas in the theory of the exchange process he examines the question through what’ (54). So whereas the ‘theory of exchange’ takes into consideration the role played by the commodity owner as a desiring agent, this role is abstracted from in the ‘theory of the value form’. This stance Kuruma takes against Uno, who – according to Kuruma – holds that the value form cannot be understood in abstraction from the desire for the commodity. Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money is Kuruma’s defense and full articulation of his position and critique of Uno, the latter of whom was largely dominant within mid twentieth century Japanese debates on the value-form.

As Lange describes it, the question really is on where the mediating function of money between two different commodities takes place. Does it follow from the practical act of exchange, or has it already taken place through the act of abstraction from the specific form of labor that was necessary to produce different use-values? (Lange 2014: 17). The following question therefore serves as a kind of anchor for the entire text: can Marx’s theory of the value-form be understood in abstraction from the want of the commodity owner? That the subject of the structure of capitalistic social form – which is always an ‘abstraction in action’ (Marx 1992: 185) – might be difficult to represent topologically at all is not broached.

Perhaps no two levels of abstraction are as flatly confused by interpreters of Marx’s discourse as the historical and the logical. Anyone familiar with this confusion will wonder what sort of genesis Kuruma has in mind. Appropriately, it is not the historical development of money in any simple sense. ‘Some have mistaken the development of form in the theory of the value form for a historical development’ (174). And yet neither does Kuruma adhere to the ‘logical’ approach either, which sees Capital arranged ‘as a Hegelian self-development of a concept’ (175). Kuruma’s position is in this sense a kind of dual-critique, against the ‘motive force’ he (somewhat gnomically) claims is at work both within the obviously misplaced historical reading (which sees Marx as making a historical argument about the origin of money out of barter), but also the ‘purely logical’ reading depicting the presentation of categories in Capital as proceeding according to a logical unfolding. ‘Instead of looking for a motive force, I think we can be satisfied with what Marx wrote at the end of the analysis of each form regarding the form’s defects and the significance of the shift to the subsequent form’, as he puts it. ‘There is no shortcut around – or beyond – the difficult analysis of the commodity’, he writes. “[W]e have no choice but to grapple with the four theories presented in the first two chapters’ (21). We have, in other words, to grapple with Marx as written. Kuruma takes this stance against the task of reconstruction, with which Uno burdens all future Marxian analysis – holding that properly Marxian analysis had to be conducted at three separated and distinct levels of abstraction: (1) the extraction and reconstruction of the purely logical, (2) a ‘middle theory’ of the stages of world capitalist development, and (3) empirical analysis of capitalism as it occurs in historically specific contexts.

Between abstracting from the desire of the commodity owner and not will likely be interpreted by readers as another version of the distinction between ‘form analysis’ and ‘an analysis of economic action’, or perhaps as another version of social-theoretical debates over appropriate theories of social form and its objective and/or subjective constitution, in particular the relation between structure and agency or the battle between ontological structuralism and ontological individualism. According to the general Marxian critical standpoint, economic theory understood as ‘bourgeois’ begins by falsely an a priori natural rationality of economic actors. This is then contrasted with Marx’s form-oriented approach, where this rationality is unveiled as determined by the dictates of a certain form-determination; namely, the imperatives of value-augmentation, pursuit of profit, etc. Fifty years after Suruma, Chris Arthur will critique of Uno from this standpoint; namely, that we must entirely abstract from owners and their proposals in deriving the forms of value at the level of abstraction of Marx’s first chapter (Arthur 2006: 33). Kuruma here would lie on the properly ‘Marxist’ side, with Uno relegated to recapitulating some bourgeois standpoint.

Following Suruma’s characterization of Uno’s position, it certainly seems questionable whether one should abandon Marx’s strict separation of the analysis of the value-form and the analysis of the actually existing behavior of commodity owners. Heinrich, for example, maintains that the form-analysis and exposition of the exchange process – where the latter takes into account the actions and decisions of commodity owners – are indeed located at two levels of abstraction. At the same time, he is ultimately critical of Marx’s inclusion of the ‘money-form’ into the analysis of the ‘theory of the value-form’ (a revision which only appears first in the popularized appendix to the first edition of 1867), since such a strict separation can no longer be maintained within the context of an altered theoretical context. As Hoff notes, this position should be distinguished from Uno’s approach, in which commodity owners play a systematic role from the beginning; i.e. starting from the simple form of value (Hoff 2017: 219).

The question of where these different levels of abstraction begin and end according to Marx’s order of presentation seems a less interesting question than the difference between two approaches to Capital as a text. While the whole terrain of Kuruma’s book is defined by the correct interpretation of Marx, Uno is very explicit in his aspiration to provide more than an exposition of Marx’s position. For Uno, Marx’s primary value is epistemological and scientific, lying with the unfinished systematic account he produces of the ‘laws’ operating within capitalism, but within capitalism as a closed system. The production of this closed system as a theoretical object – consisting of the systematic interrelation and interconnection of logical categories in Capital as a whole – is Marx’s ‘scientific’ value. Actually existing capitalism, of course, is not a closed system, so no purely capitalist society identical with its logical form has actually existed historically. Understanding capitalism as a differentiated historically actual object however requires grasping capitalism as a purely theoretical one. Uno’s ‘re-write’ of Capital – Principles of Political Economy – is written from precisely this standpoint. It eliminates from it all that pertains to its historical emergence or the supposed determinateness of its historical development.

More specifically, we know that Marx begins with the commodity because it is the most basic ‘value form’ of capital, yet – and this is central to Uno’s argument – the way he introduces labor makes it appear as if this substance of value is revealed in the relationship between two commodities. The fact that a commodity expresses its value in the use value of another commodity demonstrates logically that there is indeed some substance grounding the social commensurability of otherwise materially diverse use values. It is the ‘money form’ – not money as an empirical object – that is the necessary logical expression of this substance. Yet at this early point in the elaboration of the categories, according to Uno, one cannot definitively confirm that it is in fact labor. In other words, the category of labor and its relation to value is – from the standpoint of the unfolding of this purely logical theoretical object – prematurely introduced. For Uno, the introduction of labor is possible only within the introduction to and discussion of ‘industrial capital,’ precisely because the latter is the only form of capital – unlike merchant or interest-bearing – which has the capacity to produce all use values always already as value-objects with total and complete indifference to their function as specific use-values. That is the historically specific aspect of industrial capital that renders other forms ‘antediluvian’ (Marx 1991: 728). Industrial capital has this capacity precisely via its unique capacity for the commodification and subsumption of labor – which appears to it as a commodity ‘labor power’ – where capital subsumes, in other words, the entire ‘metabolic’ relation of human beings to nature (Marx 1976: 283). This premature introduction – from the standpoint of Uno’s purely logical reconstruction – has led to all sorts of interpretive confusion regarding the specificity of industrial capital vis a vis capital’s other forms. Whatever one makes of Uno’s approach, he aspired to be a thoroughly independent theorist, one building on but not simply recapitulating Marx’s own arguments or – perhaps more important – the political and/or phenomenological reasons for why Marx chose to present Capital in the order he did. This, it seems, is an entirely different terrain than Kuruma’s, much of who’s intellectual life revolved a rather heroic attempt at reading and interpreting Marx exactly as written, under the assumption that there might be nothing to reconstruct at all.

Despite the schemas of reproduction in Capital, Vol II and the sections on banking capital and interest-bearing capital in Vol III arguably being the sections of the book with the most contemporary relevance in the midst of the current long ‘recovery’ from the 2008 crisis, what is clear is that engagement with Capital often remains philosophically and economically enthralled with the first few chapters of the book. The obsession in English language literature on Capital – particularly of a left-philosophical variety – with re-reading the opening of Vol I will be so familiar to anyone even vaguely versed in the literature it can be difficult to avoid the topic of pathology. If Marxian or other heterodox economists like to conveniently ignore that Marx’s thought in Capital is precisely a critique of political economy, the more critical-theoretical and philosophically sophisticated and culturally-critical can hardly avoid stumbling before they try to even get out of the gate. This is, of course, partly the nature of the thing. ‘[That] every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences’, Marx warns the reader in the first edition preface, ‘to understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest difficulty’ (Marx 1976: 89). Greatest difficulty indeed. However, to steal a bit – the philosophers have only read Vol I; the point is to read all three.

Despite its intellectual-historical value, the translation of Kuruma’s book will certainly do nothing to abate this centrality granted to Vol I, yet what is crucially but often not explicit in the debate between Kuruma and Uno are more contemporary concerns surrounding what sort of text Capital is and from what standpoint it should be read. It is with this question in mind that Kuruma’s Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money can be most interestingly read.

A version of this review has been previously published at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18918_marxs-theory-of-the-genesis-of-money-how-why-and-through-what-is-a-commodity-money-by-samezo-kuruma-reviewed-by-bo-harvey/

There are some interesting discussion in the comments, including a note from scholar Chris Artur.

12 March 2021

• Arthur, Christopher J. 2006 Money and Exchange Capital & Class 90 Autumn

• Hoff, Jan 2017 Marx Worldwide: On the Development of the International Discourse on Marx Since 1965 Chicago: Haymarket Books.

• Lange, Elena Louise 2014 Failed Abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kozo’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form ,” Historical Materialism 22.1

• Marx, Karl 1976 Capital Vol I London: Penguin.

• Marx, Karl 1992 Capital Vol II London: Penguin.

• Marx, Karl 1992 Capital Vol III London: Penguin.

• Walker, Gavin 2019 Karatani’s Marx Marx: Towards the Center of Possibility London: Verso.

Fascinating not simply as one of the few non-European authors to meet relatively widespread reception on the contemporary continental philosophical scene, Kojin Karatani’s original insights into historical, political and philosophical problems range from Marx’s critique of political economy to Japanese literature, from the philosophy of history to Freud. Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy is the seventh book by Karatani translated into English and, alongside Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud, one of two released in 2017.

Just as Karatani exists simultaneously inside and outside contemporary European continental philosophy, given the long standing presence of Athens in the Western political and philosophical imagination, Karatani’s reorientation of ‘Greek Philosophy’ towards Ionia here (located in what is today Turkey) complicates ‘Greek philosophy’s’ status as ‘Western’. This is all the while that Karatani, by upholding its centrality, reaffirms a ‘Greece’ that is, historically and often rhetorically, essentially a Neo-Aristotelian Renaissance, Enlightenment, German Romantic and Western Chauvinist fantasy.

Isonomia though, in the first instance, presents Greek thought as a contest between Athens and Ionia. Where Athens remains caught in the struggle over arche, rule, or sovereignty, Ionia – and Isonomia or Isonomy – finds a way to escape that logic. Isonomy comes from the Greek Isos (equal) and nomos (law or custom). Herodotus and Thucydides used to term to describe a kind of government, but the two most important modern interpretations come from Frederick Hayek and Hannah Arendt. For Hayek, the concept begins in Cicero and is rediscovered in eleventh century Bologna, migrating into sixteenth century England where it comes to mean equality of persons under the law. It is however Arendt’s reading that is most relevant for Karatani. There, isonomy’s specificity is its lack of arche (as in, anarchy, democracy, aristocracy, etc.), denoting a lack of governmental situation of ‘no rule.’ For Arendt, it is precisely the lack of an arche that defines the Greek polis – the lack of distinction between rulers and ruled.

Karatani’s position is Arendt’s position, but substitutes Ionian isonomy for the Athenian polis. Karatani uses Ionian thought in general as an example for thinking through what is perhaps the liberal political problem par excellence; namely, the conflict between freedom and democracy, between the freedom of individuality and democratic homogeneity. On the one hand, individual freedom endangers equality between individuals. On the other, equality among individuals endangers individual individuality.

Karatani describes the problem of liberal democracy in the following way: ‘modern democracy is a composite of liberalism plus democracy […] it attempts to combine […] two conflicting things, freedom and equality. If one aims for freedom, inequalities arise. If one aims for equality, freedom is compromised’ (40). As it was for Schmitt, the ‘inescapable’ contradiction between liberalism and democracy (between identity [democratic homogeneity] and difference [irreducible individuality], the One and the Many, Unity and Multiplicity, etc.), is not simply operative at the level of political discourse, but is of course theological and philosophical as well. For good reason then, Ionian ‘natural philosophy’ operates, for Karatani, simultaneously on theological, political and natural-scientific registers. Here, Ionian thought should be understood as fundamentally, ‘an understanding of ethics and human existence from the standpoint of physis,’ where, in Spinozist fashion, ‘the world and human beings were themselves equally physis or nature’ (38). His attempt to locate a separate ethical-philosophical tradition in Ionia that is not reducible to the goings on of the polis – where, ‘true ethics cannot come from within the polis, but rather only from the cosmopolis’ (78) – should be read as a worthwhile contribution to the various theorisations of cosmopolitanism.

Yet despite Karatani’s own description of the inability to transcend the liberal-democratic, Ionia is the intellectual historical standpoint from which to resolve it; or rather, the standpoint from which one must stand to aim at resolving it. ‘If Athenian democracy is the forerunner of today’s bourgeois democracy (parliamentary democracy),’ he writes, ‘Ionian isonomy provides the key to a system that can supersede it’ (38). ‘The key to a system’ – nothing less is at stake in Isonomia.

That is the political bent. More broadly though, Isonomia consists of remarkable re-readings of canonical figures in Greek philosophy. For the expert in Greek philosophy and the more casual reader alike, Greek thought will certainly appear anew. Readers familiar with Karatani will encounter the incisive and syncretic form of theorising also found in Architecture as Metaphor and Transcritique. Indeed, Karatani is that rare thinker for whom the content of ideas is more challenging than their mode of presentation. Yet, however novel and fascinating his account of the development of Greek thinking from Thales to Plato is, Karatani’s theoretical horizon in Isonomia is not limited to the disciplinary confines of either intellectual history or Greek philosophy. The entire work is subtended by Karatani’s attempt to salvage an Ionian politics for the present world-historical moment.

This salvaging operation follows from the theoretical framework established in Karatani’s 2014 The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Indeed, the full theoretical force of Isonomia will be more immediately accessible to those familiar with the larger philosophy of history that grounds it. For good reason, Isonomia does include a helpful appendix summarising the relevant points. Karatani’s shift from ‘modes of production’ to ‘modes of exchange’ – where exchange, as it was for Moses Hess, is not reducible to ‘economic’ exchange but encompasses a more general category of social intercourse that functions both as a straightforward critique of Marxist economic determinism and of the ‘relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure’ which, in an attempt to overcome a historically determinate economism meant, ‘supplementing the theory of economic determinism [the critique of political economy] with knowledge derived from such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology and political science’ (Karatani 2014: 10).

Those familiar with the ‘thought of 1968’ will easily recognize who Karatani has in mind. For Karatani, this ‘late Marxist’ turn resulted in, ‘a tendency to underestimate the importance of the economic base’ and, ‘the loss of any totalizing, systematic perspective for comprehending the structures in which politics, religion, philosophy, and other dimensions are interrelated’ (Karatani 2014: 11). It is the loss of this perspective that, in Karatani’s estimation, has led to political paralysis and the abandonment of any attempt to find a way to supersede existing conditions. The rediscovery of Ionia is an integral step in recovering such a perspective.

Karatani exists in a long line of post-Althusserian thinkers who attempt to found a definition of modern or contemporary politics by harkening back to the pre-modern. Indeed, apart from the fascinating intellectual historical work Karatani accomplishes in Isonomia, at issue here is fundamentally the mediating relation of politics and historical theory – a question that hovers over the entirety of Isonomia. For Karatani, the fundamental flaw of the relative autonomy position is that its eschewal of any attempt to compose systematic theoretical accounts grounded in economic analysis has led to political paralysis. It is therefore a systematic theoretical account – an account of the entire ‘structure of world history’ – that is the condition of possibility of effective political action.

Karatani should take credit for taking as his starting point what we all know but don’t like admitting is true: that there is crisis in the capacity of established theoretical frameworks to produce, simultaneously, thinking that is both adequate epistemologically and inspirational of effective and historically meaningful acts of political practice. With the supposed decline of ‘grand narratives,’ the idea of actually mediating political conjunctures with a ‘Theory of World History’ so as to arrive at effective political action has become something to be, at best, chuckled at and at worst, castigated for merely recapitulating the sorts of universal and totalising narratives that are supposedly oppressive in and of themselves. Political praxis often seems stuck between fact and value; between the reliance on the deduction of certain laws of history (an ‘objective’ and ‘apolitical’ scholarship and its inverse, historicism) and appeals to principles regardless of analyses which equate political praxis with ethical conduct. Yet one wonders, in light of the simple fact of geopolitical integration – of the unprecedented compression of space and time that is constitutive of modernity – what sort of actuality Ionian politics can even hold.

Key to Karatani’s reading of Ionian philosophy is that it should be understood from the perspective of physis, stressing as it does the self-motion of matter and the inseparability of matter and motion. At the social level, for Karatani, this means that ‘the individual existence of human beings is inseparable from their mobility […] without the possibility of movement, there is no individual’ (131). ‘Individual choice is only possible,’ he further writes, ‘where individuals are not subject to tribal affiliation and free to move to another place if they so wish’ (132). In fact it is precisely because of Ionia’s status as a colonial city that enables this freedom of movement. Obviously there are troubling political implications here, which are well commented upon elsewhere (Kaur 2018).

To be emphasised here however is not the troubling colonial politics, but rather what Paul Valéry has described as ‘the sizes, areas, and masses involved, their relations, the impossibility of localizing anything, the prompt repercussions, all will more and more impose a policy very different from the existing one’ (Valery 1962: 116). Specifically, what is Ionian freedom of movement in light of this change of scale, of this impossibility of localizing anything? More broadly, what is there left of concepts of politics that, however grounded they are in a systematic theory of world history, don’t take into account the specificity of modern politics as opposed to its Greek counterpart?

However one answers that question, Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy is a deceptively complex work that offers numerous transdisciplinary insights for the philosophically initiated and uninitiated alike. And while its true value may be its intellectual historical angle – namely, its fascinating re-presentation of the history of Greek philosophy – Isonomia is a very worthwhile part of Karatani’s broader effort to offer readers an illuminating systematic perspective from which to view our contemporary political and philosophical situation.

13 June 2019

This version has been lightly edited for publication here. A version of this review was previously published by Marx & Philosophy Review of Books. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17019_isonomia-and-the-origins-of-philosophy-by-kojin-karatani-reviewed-by-brendan-harvey/

• Karatani, Kojin 2014 The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange Durham: Duke University Press

• Karatani, Kojin 2017 Nation and Aesthetics Oxford: Oxford University Press

• Kaur, Nardina 2018 Before Democracy Radical Philosophy 2.02 https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/before-democracy

• Valéry, Paul 1962 On History History and Politics New York: Pantheon Books

That which separates ‘revolutionary’ political practices from those which are merely ‘resistance’ and therefore reproductive of some status quo hover over left-political discourse. Riots, strikes, electoral participation – all hav

e and will continue to be argued as either. Judgment will be dependent on the specificity of the moment, one’s theoretical standpoint, and what is at stake for the lives of those rendering judgment.

While questions about the feasibility and ultimate purpose of any political strategy are common to political ideologies across the spectrum, the form of this question as it recurrently presents itself to the left did not simply drop from the sky. It rather conceptually inherits, as Howard Caygill tries to show, a division between two post-Kantian political-philosophical strands: one dominant and associated with the Kantian modal category of ‘possibility’, and another more subterranean, associated with the Kantian modal category ‘actuality’.

These two post-Kantian strands hover in the background of his recent collection of essays, Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy of Resistance. The following review will be twofold: (1) summarize key aspects of Caygill’s thought that pertain to topics of interest to those curious about the relation between Marx, left politics, and philosophy and (2) situate Caygill’s thought within a specific philosophical lineage, one which poses a challenge to the self-sufficiency of philosophy as an independent discipline both in its invented ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ forms.

The collection is titled Force and Understanding for good reason, a name it shares with the third part of the first section (‘Consciousness’) of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Following Hegel’s critique of ‘Sense-Certainty’ and ‘Perception’, in the ‘Force and Understanding’ section Hegel stages the dialectical movement between the absolute flux of appearance (force) and the understanding’s attempt to render this flux stable as a single object via self-legislation (law). For Kant of course, it is only through this self-legislation that the subject can reflect upon the unity of the single object and its multiple properties, such that the object now corresponds with the analysis of the possibility of objects of knowledge in the context of a Newtonian theory of natural science – i.e. according to certain predictable mechanical laws. By the end of the section however, the reader finds themselves in the ‘inverted world’ immediately preceding the Phenomenology’s second section ‘Self-Consciousness’.

Throughout the collection Caygill’s thought seems to sit in the interregnum between, on the one hand, this flux of forces and their infinite instability and variability and, on the other, reason’s capacity for legislation and stability – either via legislation by the state or by consciousness. The status of this ‘either’ is important for it might be more appropriate as an ‘and’. The legislative imperatives of subjective consciousness and of the state appear, if not identical, as conceptually homologous.

Caygill urgently thinks the social and political content of philosophy – to the point where it would not be inaccurate to describe his relation to it as ambivalent – despite the dominant disciplinary form of philosophy’s tendency to act hermetically sealed. This ambivalent relation to philosophy – and philosophy’s own ambivalent relation to that which it constitutes as non-philosophical (and vice-versa) – is a constant theme throughout the collection which, for the first time, collects a series of his essays written over a thirty-year period, hitherto scattered among often hard to find publications.

The earliest of these dates to 1991 (‘Affirmation and Eternal Return in the Free Spirit Trilogy’), where Caygill interprets the eternal return of Nietzsche’s middle period as arising out of a ‘crisis of judgment’ which should be understood, ‘in Kantian terms, [as] a “statement” of the “enigma” or “puzzle” of liberation, and not it’s “solution”’ (112). The latest (‘XR: Thinking Resistance at the End of the World’) dates to 2019 and features an analysis of the theoretical and organizational sources of Extinction Rebellion. Caygill wonders whether the pure (and, in his view, indeterminate) positivity of the equation of joyful life-affirmation and ‘civil resistance’ he identifies in its theoretical sources marks the extent to which, ‘the discourse of resistance has reached its limit when mobilizing in the face of the grave and increasingly conspicuous threat of incrementally catastrophic climate change’. He concludes ambivalently: ‘either the forms of resistance currently emerging in the context of ecological struggle marks it’s radical metamorphosis into a new phase or the perceived stakes of human and wider species extinction remain too high to be left to resistance alone’ (451). Readers will inevitably wonder if something less life-affirming and joyful lies beyond.

Caygill reads several thinkers from the vantage point of an aporia. ‘The Return of Nietzsche and Marx’ for example reads the choice often presented between the two as ‘largely a reflex of an opposition between Marxists and Nietzscheans, one which has very little to do with the differences between two bodies of work’ (28). In both thinkers’ analysis of the crisis of the subject of modernity, they each face a ‘return’ that constantly threatens to undo the grounds of their respective projects. In Marx, this appears as the figure of ‘revolution’; in Nietzsche, ‘eternal return.’ ‘The problem of return has implicitly determined both the depths and the heights of the twentieth-century understanding of Nietzsche and/or Marx’, he writes, ‘even the lower reaches of the either Marx or Nietzsche “debate” is informed by the distinction between the “revolutionary” or “reactionary” character of the preferred thinker, overlooking that both terms are compounds of the Latin equivalent of wieder, namely re-: re-action, re-volution’ (29). It is this crisis of return that, for Caygill, leads to the similar incompleteness of each thinkers’ oeuvre – one often attributed to the contingency of biography.

For Caygill however this incompleteness is rather a reflection of ‘the impossibility of completing a text that would both analyze and evoke a crisis of return […] both texts are interrupted at the same moment, at the cross between crisis as diagnosis and prescription, between analysis of a condition and the provocation of a decision’ (30). This difficulty – perhaps impossibility, hence aporetic – in knowing ‘return’ in both cases is framed in fundamentally post-Kantian terms: of time and subjectivity. Much of the essay therefore considers Kant’s analysis of the return of the law and its relation to time through the lens of both thinkers. ‘Both mark the struggles of a subjectivity striving to constitute itself through taking responsibility for its constitution of time’ (35).

In ‘The Spirit of Resistance and its Fate’, Caygill provides his reading of Hegel’s ‘Force and Understanding’ section from which the collection takes its name. Foregrounding ‘resistance’ once again, Caygill describes the way in which the phenomenological transition from consciousness to self-consciousness ‘is perhaps not recognized as a meditation upon resistance […] it shows Hegel appealing to infinity as a deus ex machina in order to break out of the opposition of resistance and counter-resistance working itself through the play of active and reactive forces.’ The reason for this deus ex machina: ‘the need to move from the modal posture of actuality to those of possibility of necessity’ (391). Caygill here reads Hegel as staging the two differing post-Kantian strands against one another. In his essay ‘Philosophy and the Black Panthers’ we encounter this post-Kantian bifurcation once again:

‘the dominant lineage passed from an emphasis on the modal category of possibility to the problem of the realization of freedom: Fichte, Schiller and Hegel worked through this revolutionary lineage dedicated to realizing freedom. The other, less well known, line of descent passed through Johann Kiesewetter, Kleist and above all Clausewitz, emphasizing the modal category of actuality and the problem of opposed force or resistance’ (371-372).

Caygill identifies a unique clarity regarding the philosophical form of this distinction in the thought of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. From an intellectual historical standpoint, Newton and Seale’s theories of political tactics and strategy become the proper philosophical inheritors of this less well-known post-Kantian lineage, albeit with an ambivalent – if not directly critical – relation to existing philosophy.

While for Caygill Hegel is the figure synonymous with the realization of freedom in the face of actuality, Clausewitz is the archetypal philosopher of actuality qua actuality – of that realm where there is no necessary (much less necessarily possible) resolution at all. There is simply a play of forces between entities of varying capacities. Some of Caygill’s most startling and suggestive historical-philosophical comments more broadly are made in the two essays on a thinker less associated with philosophy than with military strategy, ‘Politics and War: Hegel and Clausewitz’ and ‘Clausewitz & Idealism’. In the former, Caygill compares the early Hegelian articulation of the relationship between civil society and violence in The German Constitution (1802) and the System of Ethical Life (1802) – where the ethical politics of the ‘speculative community’ is characterized by the recognition and assumption of responsibility for its own violence (66) – to the relation between civility and violence as articulated in his Philosophy of Right (1820).

The Philosophy of Right of course begins with an abstract concept of freedom that increases in conceptual determination as the text progresses through accounts of responsibility, intention and the good, to those of family, civil society and the state. That Hegel takes abstract freedom as a starting point at all represents ‘the removal of the recognition of violence from the foundation of the state’, a recognition that Hegel himself had made in The German Constitution. With violence ejected from the field of political philosophy proper to it, violence ‘becomes the abstract reflex of an abstract freedom put to the service of the largely amoral, technical manipulation of experts’ (68). The cost of Hegel’s starting point in The Philosophy of Right, in other words, is the displacement of the imperial violence of the state that Hegel himself identified as the state’s historical condition. ‘By not properly acknowledging the violence in its freedom, the philosophy of right can be inverted into a philosophy of violence. By not owning their violence, the legal, moral and political categories of right are made vulnerable to it; instead of integrating the management of violence into civility, it is freed from civil control by being made the province of experts who are in but not of civil society’ (75), i.e. the military, but also the police.

“Civil society […] is police work’, as he puts it in the following essay ‘Perpetual police?’ Drawing on Hegel and Clausewitz to discuss NATO’s fuzzy distinction between its military and police involvement in Kosovo, the question of temporality reappears but this time regarding their respective distinctions between the military and the police. Hegel and Clausewitz ‘shift the point of difference between war and police from the topological distinction of the exercise of violence inside and outside the sovereign state to that of temporality. War is a present and compressed, police a deferred and distended expression of violence’ (81). The object of policing ‘is not a discrete subject but a condition of turbulence’ (81). Via a comparative analysis of the articulation of the relation between violence and civility, Caygill charts the disappearance of the institution of the military and the police from modern philosophy in general, leading to its reappearance as non-philosophical in Clausewitz, whose texts are traditionally read as mere manuals of military strategy.

Caygill challenges this reading of Clausewitz as mere military strategist again in ‘Clausewitz & Idealism’ by reinserting him into the history of philosophy as an authentic post-Kantian philosophical figure, a suggestion traced to Hermann Cohen. For Caygill, Clausewitz represents ‘a deviant strain of post-Kantian philosophy distinct from that of Fichte, Schiller, and Hegel, one that preserves a fidelity to the actuality of force rather than the possibility of freedom’ (411).

This ‘fidelity to the actuality of force’ reappears in the later Kant himself as described in Caygill’s essay on Kant’s Opus Postuum. As opposed to the trilogy that makes up the critical philosophy, this is the text Kant himself considered ‘his chief work, a chef d’oeuvre’. Caygill traces ‘a revolutionary – but also consistent – departure for Kant’s thought’ (233) from the critical philosophy to the Opus. In a particularly fascinating section Caygill recounts Kant’s critique of Newton.

For Kant, Newton secretly smuggles a metaphysical concept of force precisely to bridge the transition between the ‘metaphysical principles’ and the mathematics of physics – precisely the ‘gap’ in the critical philosophy addressed by Kant (234). The principle of force functions as a metaphysical concept allowing Newton to bestow upon mathematics the ability to prescribe laws to nature a priori. It is in this sense that, for Kant, Newton ‘made his most important conquest by means of philosophy, not mathematics’ (238). Even further, ‘natural philosophy’ of the kind practiced by Newton is constituted on the whole, for Kant, by a logical fallacy; namely, ‘the amphiboly of making philosophy and metaphysics into a branch of mathematics’ (236). Connecting this fallacy with the relentless reduction of social ontology to mathematics within the ‘social sciences’ would be an interesting task.

In any case, Caygill shows how this engagement with Newton provoked Kant to identify limitations in his own definition of matter in 1786 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, that is, as defining matter as the moveable in space. In place of this ‘mechanical’ concept of matter in the Opus Postuum, we instead find a ‘dynamical’ one, defined as ‘that which makes space an object of the senses.’ This shift in definition has drastic consequences for the edifice of the entire critical philosophy, for that which makes space into an object of the sense (i.e. matter) itself becomes force. (239) The implications for Kant’s previously constructed Transcendental Aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason will be obvious for all familiar.

That the collection illustrates a unique attendance not simply to the non-philosophical mediation of philosophy, but also the process by which philosophy itself defines that which is non-philosophical, should be seen as a hallmark of Caygill’s thought. One is even tempted to describe him less as a philosopher than as a kind of pioneering cartographer of the transdisciplinary functioning of concepts strewn across the intellectual division of labor. Whichever designation one chooses, such an orientation seems a necessary condition for thinking philosophically today in a way true to its name.

The general set of philosophical problems Caygill has spent the last three decades probing can at least be partly traced to philosophical challenges that follow from Gillian Rose’s unique Hegelianism. In his introduction, Stephen Howard describes how ‘Rose sought a deliberately “difficult” renewal of the Hegelian notion of the absolute, while dissolving any hope of dialectical resolution of the irredeemable contradiction she identified therein […] for Rose politics is the attempt to think the Absolute’ (3). Caygill’s thought seems to define itself both positively and negatively in relation to this unique Hegelianism, and the first essay in the collection, ‘Gillian Rose 1947-1995: Art, Justice, and Metaphysics’, will be an important source for tracing its roots.1

Its publication marks the first appearance of Caygill’s beautiful inaugural memorial lecture following her tragic and untimely death. In it Caygill not only offers a summary her thought and mourns her death, but also mourns, ‘the unique intellectual circumstances of the University of Sussex of the 1970s and 1970s that sustained the development of her thought […] The Melancholy Science (1976), Hegel Contra Sociology (1981) and Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) [which are] memorials to that unique institution and cultural moment’ (19). Sussex in the 1970s was staffed by a generation of European scholars marked by the direct experience of Nazism, the Second World War and the Stalinist fate of Marxism. It was a moment of European import into British thought, one which would shape the British philosophical landscape. The entire environment at Sussex lent Rose’s thought ‘a sense of urgency and risk: they were not just academic exercises’ (20). One can certainly say the same of Caygill’s.

Whether or not Caygill is, in fact, ‘to be counted among the great thinkers of our time’, or, as described by J.M. Bernstein, ‘one of the two or three leading practitioners and exponents of European philosophy in the UK’, I’m probably not qualified to judge, however what is clear is both Caygill’s stunning and wide-ranging erudition – one which understands its terrain not simply from the assumed standpoint of philosophy, but from that rare standpoint that mediates the philosophical with the non-philosophical – and the fact that he deserves to be far more widely read.

23 June 2021

Howard Caygill is currently Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University. I studied with Howard between 2015 and 2017. Much of my own concern with the ‘transdisciplinary functioning of concepts strewn across the intellectual division of labor’ has been inspired by him, but also the philosophical environment at the Centre. Peter Osborne’s work has also been important in this regard. Both were students of Gillian Rose.

This version has been slightly edited for publication here. The review can also be found can be found at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19323_force-and-understanding-writings-on-philosophy-and-resistance-by-howard-caygill-reviewed-by-bo-harvey/