New Left Review 119, September–October 2019

Citation preview

119 sept/oct 2019

NEW

LEFT REVIEW

Perry Anderson From Wilson to Bernanke Lola Seaton Experience and Method Benjamin Kunkel Socialists in America Aaron Benanav The Automation Discourse Susan Watkins Philosophizing Gender Robin Blackburn Reform to Preserve? Alain Supiot Kafka’s Contestations Johnny Rodger The Once and Future Library

Editor Susan Watkins Associate Editor Francis Mulhern Editor at Large Tom Hazeldine

Editorial Committee Tariq Ali, Perry Anderson, Kheya Bag, Emilie Bickerton, Robin Blackburn, Robert Brenner, Malcolm Bull, Jacob Collins, Mike Davis, Daniel Finn, Tom Hazeldine, Rob Lucas, Tom Mertes, Francis Mulhern, Dylan Riley, Julian Stallabrass, Jacob Stevens, Tony Wood, JoAnn Wypijewski, Alexander Zevin

Publishing Director Deputy Editor Online Publisher Assistant Editors Subscriptions Editorial Intern

Kheya Bag Daniel Finn Rob Lucas Lola Seaton, Alice Bamford Midori Lake Oliver Eagleton

Address New Left Review 6 Meard Street London w1f 0eg United Kingdom

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Designed by Peter Campbell

new

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review 119

second series

september october 2019



ARTICLES

Aaron Benanav

Automation—Part 1

Alain Supiot

Artist of the Law

Perry Anderson

Situationism à l’Envers? 47

Johnny Rodger

The Vanishing Library

Lola Seaton

Ends of Criticism



REVIEWS

Benjamin Kunkel

Socialists in America

135

Robin Blackburn

Reform to Preserve?

147

Susan Watkins

Beating the Beadles

153

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41

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105

PROGRAMME NOTES Aaron Benanav : Automation and the Future of Work First in a two-part global reappraisal of the linkages between technological advance and capitalist labour-market dysfunction. What light does automation discourse shed on dynamics within the productive economy? Rise of the robots versus industrial overcapacity to explain the worsening crisis of under-employment.

Alain Supiot : An Artist of the Law The testing of opposing ideas and perils of descent into arbitrary power: Kafka’s schooling in the principe du contradictoire as explainer of his prose style and preoccupations, in The Trial and beyond.

Perry Anderson : Situationism à l’Envers? Building on the extended review by Cédric Durand in nlr 116/117, Perry Anderson seeks clues to the politics and method behind Adam Tooze’s Crashed in the author’s wider oeuvre. From the Peace of 1919 to the dollar swap-lines of 2008, the oft-heralded rise of a beneficent American hegemon.

Johnny Rodger : The Vanishing Library Twice consumed by fire and set to be rebuilt anew, in what sense can Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art still be said to exist? Freudian derealization, Cartesian doubt and Gaelic allegory summoned by a resident scholar’s memories of reconstructed timbers and their smouldering remains.

Lola Seaton : Ends of Criticism In response to the recent debate between Francis Mulhern and Joseph North on the means and purposes of literary criticism, Lola Seaton examines the play of method and personal experience in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City and its contemporary rebound in the ‘hauntology’ of K-Punk’s Mark Fisher.

book reviews

Benjamin Kunkel on Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto. A case for the democratic-socialist transformation of the United States, drawing lessons from the failures of the twentieth century.

Robin Blackburn on Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism. A programme to rectify the failings of contemporary capitalism through a return to the pragmatic communitarian politics of ‘the hard centre’.

Susan Watkins on Kate Manne, Down Girl. A moral-philosophical argument for a feminism of the privileged, as first in line for misogynist policing.

contributors

Aaron Benanav: teaches in social sciences at the University of Chicago; see also nlr 48 and 61

Benjamin Kunkel: co-founder of n+1; author of Buzz (2014) and Utopia or Bust (2014); see also nlr 109

Johnny Rodger: at the Glasgow School of Art; author of The Hero Building (2016) and Political Animal (2019)

Alain Supiot: emeritus at the Collège de France; author most recently of The Spirit of Philadelphia (2012) and Governance by Numbers (2017); see also, inter alia, nlr 13, 39, 73, 82

aaron benanav

AU T O M AT I O N A N D THE FUTURE OF WORK—1

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he world is abuzz with talk of automation. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics seem set to transform the world of work. In the most advanced factories, companies like Tesla have been aiming for ‘lightsout’ production, in which fully automated work processes, no longer needing human hands, can run in the dark. Meanwhile, in the illuminated halls of robotics conventions, machines are on display that can play ping-pong, cook food, have sex and even hold conversations. Computers are not only developing new strategies for playing Go, but are said to be writing symphonies that bring audiences to tears. Dressed in white lab coats or donning virtual suits, computers are learning to identify cancers and will soon be developing legal strategies. Trucks are already barrelling across the us without drivers; robotic dogs are carrying military-grade weapons across desolate plains. Are we living in the last days of human toil? Is what Edward Bellamy once called the ‘edict of Eden’ about to be revoked, as ‘men’—or at least, the wealthiest among them—become like gods?1 There are many reasons to doubt the hype. For one thing, machines remain comically incapable of opening doors or, alas, folding laundry. Robotic security guards are toppling into mall fountains. Computerized digital assistants can answer questions and translate documents, but not well enough to do the job without human intervention; the same is true of self-driving cars.2 In the midst of the American ‘Fight for Fifteen’ movement, billboards went up in San Francisco threatening to replace fast-food workers with touchscreens if a law raising the minimum wage were passed. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the bill the ‘robot employment act’. Yet many fast-food workers in Europe already work alongside new left review 119 sept oct 2019

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touchscreens and often earn better pay than in the us.3 Is the talk of automation overdone?

i. the automation discourse In the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, scare stories about automation may remain just idle chatter. However, over the past decade, this talk has crystalized into an influential social theory, which purports not only to analyse current technologies and predict their future, but also to explore the consequences of technological change for society at large. This automation discourse rests on four main propositions. First, workers are already being displaced by ever-more advanced machines, resulting in rising levels of ‘technological unemployment’. Second, this displacement is a sign that we are on the verge of achieving a largely automated society, in which nearly all work will be performed by selfmoving machines and intelligent computers. Third: automation should entail humanity’s collective liberation from toil, but because we live in a society where most people must work in order to live, this dream may well turn out to be a nightmare.4 Fourth, therefore, the only way to prevent a mass-unemployment catastrophe is to provide a universal basic income (ubi), breaking the connection between the incomes people earn and the work they do, as a way to inaugurate a new society. This argument has been put forward by a number of self-described futurists. In the widely read Second Machine Age (2014), Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that we find ourselves ‘at an inflection point— a bend in the curve where many technologies that used to be found only in science fiction are becoming everyday reality.’ New technologies See Edward Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, Oxford 2007 [1888], p. 68. 2 See, respectively, Daniela Hernandez, ‘How to Survive a Robot Apocalypse: Just Close the Door’, Wall Street Journal, 10 November 2017; David Autor, ‘Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 3, 2015, pp. 25–6. 3 Andy Puzder, ‘The Minimum Wage Should Be Called the Robot Employment Act’, wsj, 3 April 2017, Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly, Where Bad Jobs Are Better, New York 2017. 4 This position is distinct from that of techno-optimists, like Ray Kurzweil, who imagine that technological change will generate a utopian world by itself, without the need for social transformation. 1

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promise an enormous ‘bounty’, but Brynjolfsson and McAfee caution that ‘there is no economic law that says that all workers, or even a majority of workers, will benefit from these advances.’ On the contrary: as the demand for labour falls with the adoption of more advanced technologies, wages are stagnating; a rising share of annual income is therefore being captured by capital rather than by labour. The result is growing inequality, which could ‘slow our journey’ into what they call ‘the second machine age’ by generating a ‘failure mode of capitalism’ in which rentier extraction crowds out technological innovation.5 In Rise of the Robots (2015), Martin Ford similarly claims that we are pushing ‘towards a tipping point’ that is poised to ‘make the entire economy less labourintensive.’ Again, ‘the most frightening long-term scenario of all might be if the global economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality’, leading to the creation of an ‘automated feudalism’ in which the ‘peasants would be largely superfluous’ and the elite impervious to economic demands.6 For these authors, education and retraining will not be enough to stabilize the demand for labour in an automated economy; some form of guaranteed non-wage income, such as a negative income tax, must be put in place.7 The automation discourse has been enthusiastically adopted by the jeans-wearing elite of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates is advocating for a tax on robots. Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard undergraduate inductees that they should ‘explore ideas like universal basic income’, a policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly ‘necessary’ over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.8 Musk has been naming his SpaceX drone vessels after spaceships from Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series, a set of ambiguously utopian science-fiction novels depicting a post-scarcity world in which human beings live fulfilling lives alongside intelligent robots, called ‘minds’, without the need for markets or states.9 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, London 2014, pp. 34, 128, 134ff, 172, 232. 6 Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, New York 2015, pp. xvii, 219. 7 See Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 257–61. 8 Andy Kessler, ‘Zuckerberg’s Opiate For the Masses’, wsj, 18 June 2017. 9 See for example Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward, London 2000, as well as his ‘Notes on the Culture’, collected in Banks, State of the Art, San Francisco 2004. 5

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Politicians and their advisors have equally identified with the automation discourse, which has become one of the leading perspectives on our ‘digital future’. In his farewell presidential address, Obama suggested that the ‘next wave of economic dislocations’ will come not from overseas trade, but rather from ‘the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.’ Robert Reich, former Labour Secretary under Bill Clinton, expressed similar fears: we will soon reach a point ‘where technology is displacing so many jobs, not just menial jobs but also professional jobs, that we’re going to have to take seriously the notion of a universal basic income.’ Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, made the same admission: once-‘stupid’ ideas about technological unemployment now seem increasingly smart, he said, as workers’ wages stagnate and economic inequality rises. The discourse has become the basis of a long-shot presidential campaign for 2020: Andrew Yang, Obama’s former ‘Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship’, has penned his own tome on automation, The War on Normal People, and is now running a futuristic campaign on a ‘Humanity First’, ubi platform. Among Yang’s vocal supporters is Andy Stern, former head of the seiu, whose Raising the Floor is yet another example of the discourse.10 Yang and Stern—like all of the other writers named so far—take pains to assure readers that some variant of capitalism is here to stay, even if it must jettison its labour markets; however, they admit to the influence of figures on the far left who offer a more radical version of the automation discourse. In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that the ‘most recent wave of automation is poised’ to transform the labour market ‘drastically, as it comes to encompass every aspect of the economy’.11 They claim that only a socialist government would actually be able to fulfil the promise of full automation by creating a post-work or post-scarcity society. In Four Futures, Peter Frase See, respectively, Claire Cain Miller, ‘A Darker Theme in Obama’s Farewell: Automation Can Divide Us’, nyt, 12 January 2017; Kessler, ‘Zuckerberg’s Opiate For the Masses’; Eduardo Porter, ‘Jobs Threatened by Machines: A Once “Stupid” Concern Gains Respect’, nyt, 7 June 2016; Kevin Roose, ‘His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming’, nyt, 12 February 2018; Andrew Yang, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, New York 2018; Andy Stern, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, New York 2016. 11 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, London and New York 2015, p. 112. 10

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thoughtfully explores the alternative outcomes for such a post-scarcity society, depending on whether it still had private property and still suffered from resource scarcity, which could persist even if labour scarcity were overcome.12 Like the liberal proponents of the automation discourse, these left-wing writers stress that, even if the coming of advanced robotics is inevitable, ‘there is no necessary progression into a post-work world’.13 Srnicek, Williams and Frase are all proponents of ubi, but in a left-wing variant. For them, ubi serves as a bridge to ‘fully automated luxury communism’, a term originally coined in 2014 by Aaron Bastani to name a possible goal of socialist politics, and which flourished for five years as a meme on the internet before his book—outlining an automated future in which artificial intelligence, solar power, gene-editing, asteroid mining and lab-grown meat generate a world of limitless leisure and self-invention—finally appeared.14

Recurrent fears These futurist visions, from all points of the political spectrum, depend upon a common prediction of the trajectory of technological change. Have they got this right? To answer this question, it is helpful to have a couple of working definitions. Automation may be distinguished as a specific form of labour-saving technical innovation: automation technologies fully substitute for human labour, rather than merely augmenting human-productive capacities. With labour-augmenting technologies, a given job category will continue to exist, but each worker in that category will be more productive. For example, adding new machines to an assembly-line producing cars may make line workers more productive without abolishing line work as such. However, fewer workers will be needed in total to produce any given number of automobiles. Whether that results in fewer jobs will then depend on how much output—the total number of cars—also increases. By contrast, automation may be defined as what Kurt Vonnegut describes in Player Piano: it takes place whenever an entire ‘job classification has been eliminated. Poof.’ No matter how much production might increase, another telephone-switchboard operator or hand-manipulator of rolled Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, London and New York 2016; Manu Saadia, Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, San Francisco 2016. 13 Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 127. 14 Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto, London and New York 2019. 12

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steel will never be hired. In these cases, machines have fully substituted for human labour. Much of the debate around the future of workplace automation turns on an evaluation of the degree to which present or near-future technologies are labour-substituting or labour-augmenting in character. Distinguishing between these two types of technical change turns out to be incredibly difficult in practice. One famous study from the Oxford Martin School suggested that 47 per cent of jobs in the us are at high risk of automation; a more recent study from the oecd predicts that 14 per cent of oecd jobs are at high risk, with another 32 per cent at risk of significant change in the way they are carried out (due to labouraugmenting rather than substituting innovations).15 It is unclear, however, whether even the highest of these estimates suggests that a qualitative break with the past has taken place. By one count, ‘57 per cent of the jobs workers did in the 1960s no longer exist today’.16 Automation, in fact, turns out to be a constant feature of the history of capitalism. By contrast, the discourse around automation, which extrapolates from instances of technological change to a broader social theory, is not constant; it periodically recurs in modern history. Excitement about a coming age of automation can be traced back to at least the mid19th century. Charles Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures in 1832; John Adolphus Etzler’s The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour appeared in 1833, Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures in 1835. These books presaged the imminent emergence of largely or fully automated factories, run with minimal or merely supervisory human labour. This vision was a major influence on Marx, whose Capital, Volume One argued that a complex world of interacting machines was in the process of displacing labour at the centre of economic life. Visions of automated factories then appeared again in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, before their re-emergence in the 2010s. Each time, they Carl Frey and Michael Osborne originally released their study as an Oxford Martin working paper online in 2013; it was later published as ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 114, January 2017; Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, ‘Automation, Skills Use and Training’, oecd Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, no. 202, 2018. 16 Quoted in Jerry Kaplan, ‘Don’t Fear the Robots’, wsj, 21 July 2017. See also Robert Atkinson and John Wu, ‘False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the us Labor Market, 1850–2015’, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 2017. 15

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were accompanied or shortly followed by predictions of a coming age of ‘catastrophic unemployment and social breakdown’, which could be prevented only if society were reorganized.17 To point out the periodicity of this discourse is not to say that its accompanying social visions should be dismissed. For one thing, the technological breakthroughs presaged by automation discourse could still be achieved at any time: just because they were wrong in the past does not necessarily mean that they will always be wrong in the future. More than that, these visions of automation have clearly been generative in social terms: they point to certain utopian possibilities latent within modern capitalist societies. The error in their approach is merely to suppose that, via ongoing technological shifts, these utopian possibilities will imminently be revealed via a catastrophe of mass unemployment. The basic insight on which automation theory relies was described, most succinctly, by the Harvard economist Wassily Leontief. He pointed out that the ‘effective operation of the automatic price mechanism’ at the core of capitalist societies ‘depends critically’ on a peculiar feature of modern technology, namely that in spite of bringing about ‘an unprecedented rise in total output’, it nevertheless ‘strengthened the dominant role of human labour in most kinds of productive processes’.18 At any time, a breakthrough could destroy this fragile pin, annihilating the social preconditions of functioning market economies. Drawing on this insight—and adding only that such a technological breakthrough now exists—the automation prognosticators often argue that capitalism must be a transitory mode of production, which will eventually give way to a new form of life that does not organize itself around work for wages and monetary exchange.19 Taking its periodicity into account, automation theory may be described as a spontaneous discourse of capitalist societies, which, for a mixture of structural and contingent reasons, reappears in those societies time Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs: America’s Debate Over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981, Baltimore 2000, pp. 305–7. See also Jason Smith, ‘Nowhere to Go: Automation, Then and Now’, Brooklyn Rail, March–April 2017. 18 Wassily Leontief, ‘Technological Advance, Economic Growth, and the Distribution of Income’, Population and Development Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1983, p. 404. 19 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� Keynes had a similar reaction to his own discovery that no mechanism in capitalist economies automatically generates full employment. See his ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930)’, in Essays in Persuasion, New York 1932. See also William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, London 1944, especially pp. 21–3. 17

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and again as a way of thinking through their limits. What summons the automation discourse periodically into being is a deep anxiety about the functioning of the labour market: there are simply too few jobs for too many people. Proponents of the automation discourse consistently explain the problem of a low demand for labour in terms of runaway technological change.

Declining labour demand If automation discourse appeals so widely again today, it is because, whatever their causes, the ascribed consequences of automation are all around us: global capitalism clearly is failing to provide jobs for many of the people who need them. There is, in other words, a persistently low demand for labour, reflected not only in higher spikes of unemployment and increasingly jobless recoveries—both frequently cited by automation theorists—but also in a phenomenon with more generic consequences: declining labour shares of income. Many studies have now confirmed that the labour share, whose steadiness was held to be a stylized fact of economic growth, has been falling for decades (Figure 1). These shifts signal a radical decline in workers’ bargaining power. Realities for the typical worker are worse than these statistics suggest, since wage growth has become increasingly skewed towards the highest earners: the infamous top one per cent. A growing gap has opened up not only between the growth of labour productivity and average wageincomes, but also between the growth of average wages and that of median wages, with the result that many workers see a vanishingly thin slice of economic growth (Figure 2).20 Under these conditions, rising inequality is contained only by the strength of redistributive programmes. Even critics of automation discourse such as David Autor and Robert Gordon are disturbed by these trends: something has gone wrong with the economy, leading to a low demand for labour.21 See Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, ‘Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay’, epi Briefing Paper 406, September 2015; Paolo Pasimeni, ‘The Relation Between Productivity and Compensation in Europe’, European Commission Discussion Paper 79, March 2018. 21 See David Autor, ed., ‘Paradox of Abundance: Automation Anxiety Returns’ in Subramanian Rangan, Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business and Society, Oxford 2015, p. 257; Robert Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton 2016, p. 604. 20

Figure 1: Labour Share of Income, G7 Economies, 1980–2015 % 73

Japan Italy USA Germany

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France G7 Canada UK

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Source: oecd Compendium of Productivity Indicators, 2017, Chapter 1, Figure 1.8.

Figure 2: Productivity-Wages Gap, oecd Countries, 1995–2013 140

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Labour productivity Real average wage

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Real median wage

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100 1995

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Note: 1995=100. Source: oecd Economic Outlook, Volume 2018, Issue 2, Chapter 2, Figure 2.2. Employment weighted average of 24 countries, including Finland, Germany, Japan, Korea, United States, France, Italy, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, uk, Australia, Spain, Czechia, Denmark, Hungry, Poland, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Israel and Slovakia. For detailed information, see the oecd Economic Outlook.

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Is automation the cause of the low demand for labour? I will join the critics of automation discourse in arguing that it is not. However, along the way, I will also criticize the critics—both for producing explanations of low labour demand that only apply in high-income countries and for failing to produce anything like a radical vision of social change that is adequate to the scale of the problems we now confront. Indeed, it should be said from the outset that I am more sympathetic to the left automation theorists than to their critics. Even if the explanation they offer turns out to be inadequate, the automation theorists have at least focused the world’s attention on the problem of a persistently low demand for labour. They have also excelled in actually trying to imagine solutions to this problem that are broadly emancipatory in character. In Jameson’s terms, the automation theorists are our late capitalist utopians.22 In a world reeling from the ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, rising inequality, recalcitrant neoliberalism and resurgent ethno-nationalism, the automation theorists are the ones pushing through the catastrophe with a vision of an emancipated future, in which humanity advances to the next stage in our history, whatever that might mean (or whatever we want to make it mean), and technology helps to free us all to discover and follow our passions. That is true in spite of the fact that—like many of the utopians of the past— the actual visions these latest utopians offer need to be freed from their largely technocratic fantasies of how social change to a better future might take place. Major shifts in the forms of government intervention in the economy are adopted only under massive social pressure, such as, in the course of the 20th century, the threat of communism or of civilizational collapse. Today, policy reforms could emerge in response to pressure coming from a new mass movement, aiming to change the basic makeup of the social order. Instead of fearing that movement, we should see ourselves as part of it, helping articulate its goals and paths forward. If that movement is defeated, maybe the best we will get is basic income, but that should not be our goal. We should be reaching towards a post-scarcity world, which advanced technologies will certainly help us realize, even if full automation is not achievable—or even desirable. 22 See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York 2005.

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The return of automation discourse is a symptom of our era, as it was in times past: it arises when the global economy’s failure to create enough jobs causes people to question its fundamental viability. The breakdown of this market mechanism today is more extreme than at any time in the past. This is because a greater share of the world’s population than ever before depends on selling its labour or the simple products of its labour to survive, in the context of weakening global economic growth. Our present reality is better described by near-future science-fiction dystopias than by standard economic analysis; ours is a hot planet, with microdrones flying over the heads of the street hawkers and rickshaw pullers, where the rich live in guarded, climate-controlled communities while the rest of us wile away our time in dead-end jobs, playing video games on smartphones. We need to slip out of this timeline and into another. Reaching towards a post-scarcity world—in which all individuals are guaranteed access to whatever they need to make a life, without exception—can become the basis on which humanity mounts a battle against climate change. It can also be the foundation on which we remake the world, creating the conditions in which, as James Boggs once put it, ‘for the first time in human history, great masses of people will be free to explore and reflect, to question and to create, to learn and to teach, unhampered by the fear of where the next meal is coming from’.23 Finding our way forward requires a break between work and income, as the automation theorists recognize, but also between profit and income, as many do not. In responding to the automation discourse, then, I will argue that the decline in the demand for labour is due not to an unprecedented leap in technological innovation, but to ongoing technical change in an environment of deepening economic stagnation. In the second part of this contribution, to be published in nlr 120, I contend that this fall in labour demand manifests not as mass unemployment, but rather as mass under-employment, not necessarily a problem for the elites. On this basis, I mount a critique of technocratic solutions, like basic income. I offer a thought-experiment of how we might imagine a post-scarcity society that centres on humans, not machines, and project a path of how we might get there through social struggle, rather than administrative intervention. But first, in Part One, I provide a diagnosis of the James Boggs, ‘Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party’, in Stephen Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, Detroit 2011, p. 219.

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underlying causes of the decline in demand for labour. This involves a detour to consider the fortunes of the global manufacturing sector and the competitive dynamics at work in labour’s ‘deindustrialization’.

2. labour’s global deindustrialization Automation-discourse theorists recognize that, if technologically induced job-destruction is to have widespread social ramifications, it will have to eliminate employment in the vast and variegated service sector, which absorbs 74 per cent of workers in high-income countries and 52 per cent worldwide.24 They therefore focus on ‘new forms of service-sector automation’ in retail, transportation and food services, where ‘robotization’ is said to be ‘gathering steam’ with a growing army of machines that take orders, stock shelves, drive cars and flip burgers. Many more service-sector jobs, including some that require years of education and training, will supposedly be rendered obsolete in the coming years due to advances in artificial intelligence.25 Of course, these claims are mostly predictions about the effects that technologies will have on future patterns of employment. Such predictions can go wrong—as for example when Eatsa, an automated fast-food company which employed neither cashiers nor waiters, was forced to close most of its stores in 2017.26 In making their case, automation theorists often point to the manufacturing sector as the precedent for what they imagine is beginning to happen in services—for in manufacturing, the employment-apocalypse has already taken place.27 To evaluate the theorists’ claims, it therefore makes sense to begin by looking at what role automation has played in World Bank, World Development Indicators. Within the global economy, many of these service workers are employed informally, earning incomes by picking through trash, or selling food out of pushcarts, in the sort of jobs that could already have been eliminated with 20th century technologies: supermarkets, big-box retailers, refrigerated trucking, etc. 25 Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, London 2015, p. 184. Routine intellectual activities, even highly skilled ones, are apparently proving easier to automate than non-routine manual jobs, which require more dexterity than machines presently possess. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 28–9. 26 Tim Carman, ‘This Automated Restaurant Was Supposed to Be the Future of Dining. Until Humanity Struck Back’, Washington Post, 24 October 2017. 27 See for example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 30–1; Ford, Rise of the Robots, pp. 1–12. 24

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that sector’s fate. After all, manufacturing is the area most amenable to automation, since on the shop floor it is possible to ‘radically simplify the environment in which machines work, to enable autonomous operation’.28 Industrial robotics has been around for a long time: the first robot, the ‘unimate’, was installed in a General Motors plant in 1961. Still, until the 1960s, scholars studying this sector were able to dismiss Luddite fears of long-term technological unemployment out of hand. Manufacturing employment in fact grew most rapidly in those lines where technical innovation was happening at the fastest pace, because it was in those lines that prices fell the fastest, stoking the growth of demand for the products.29 Industrialization has long since given way to deindustrialization, and not just in any one line but across the manufacturing sectors of most countries.30 The share of workers employed in manufacturing fell first across the high-income world: manufacturing employed 22 per cent of all workers in the us in 1970; that share declined to just 8 per cent in 2017. Over the same period, manufacturing employment shares fell from 23 per cent to 9 per cent in France, and from 30 per cent to 8 per cent in the uk. Japan, Germany and Italy have experienced smaller but still substantial declines: in Japan from 25 per cent to 15 per cent, in Germany from 29 per cent to 17 per cent, and in Italy from 25 per cent to 15 per cent. In all cases, the declines were eventually associated with substantial falls in the total number of people employed in manufacturing. In the us, Germany, Italy and Japan, the overall number of manufacturing jobs fell by approximately a third from postwar peaks; in France, by 50 per cent and in the uk, by 67 per cent.31 It is commonly assumed that deindustrialization must be the result of production facilities moving offshore. Yet in none of the countries Autor, ‘Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?’, p. 23. Eileen Appelbaum and Ronald Schettkat, ‘Employment and Productivity in Industrialized Economies’, International Labour Review, vol. 134, no. 4–5, 1995, pp. 607–9. 30 Unless otherwise noted, statistics in the rest of this section are drawn from Conference Board, ‘International Comparisons of Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labour Cost’, last updated July 2018, and ‘Total Economy Database’, last updated November 2018. 31 Note that manufacturing is one part of the larger industrial sector, which typically includes mining, construction and utilities, and which has also seen declining employment shares, mostly but not exclusively due to job loss in manufacturing. 28

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named above has manufacturing job loss been associated with declines in manufacturing output. Real value added in manufacturing more than doubled in the us, France, Germany, Japan and Italy between 1970 and 2017. Even the uk, whose manufacturing sector fared worst of all among this group, saw a 25 per cent increase in manufacturing real value added over this period. To be sure, low- and middle-income countries are producing more and more goods for import into high-income countries; however, deindustrialization in the latter cannot simply be the result of productive capacity moving to the former. In the scholarly literature, deindustrialization is therefore ‘most commonly defined as a decline in the share of manufacturing in total employment’, regardless of corresponding trends in levels of manufactured output.32 This definition moves in step with automation theorists’ core expectations: more goods are being produced but by fewer workers. It is on this basis that commentators typically cite rapidly rising labour productivity, rather than an influx of low-cost imports from abroad, as the primary cause of industrial-job loss in advanced economies.33 On closer inspection, however, this explanation turns out to be inadequate: no upward leap has taken place in manufacturing productivity levels.34 On the contrary, manufacturing productivity has been growing at a sluggish pace for decades, leading Robert Solow to quip, ‘We see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.’35 Automation theorists discuss this ‘productivity paradox’ as a problem for their account—explaining it in terms of weak demand for products, or the persistent availability of low-wage workers—but they understate its true significance. This is partly due to the appearance of steady labourproductivity growth in us manufacturing, at an average rate of around Fionna Tregenna, ‘Characterizing Deindustrialization: An Analysis of Changes in Manufacturing Employment and Output Internationally’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 33, no. 3, 2009, p. 433. 33 In the scholarly literature, see for example Robert Rowthorn and Ramana Ramaswamy’s oft cited paper, ‘Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications’, imf Working Paper 97/42, 1997. In the press, see Eduardo Porter, ‘Is the Populist Revolt Over? Not if Robots Have Their Way’, nyt, 30 January 2018. 34 The intuition here is that if automation were taking place, the manufacturing sector would paradoxically see rapidly rising levels of labour productivity, even as more and more workers were actually being expelled from the production process: output per worker would soar, making it seem as if the people who still had jobs were working at an incredibly efficient pace. 35 Quoted in Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, p. 100. 32

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3 per cent per year since 1950. On that basis, Brynjolfsson and McAfee suggest, automation could show up in the compounding effects of exponential growth, rather than an uptick in the growth rate.36 However, official us manufacturing growth-rate statistics are over­ inflated, for example in logging the production of computers with higher processing speeds as equivalent to the production of more computers.37 On that basis, government statistics claim that productivity levels in the computers and electronics sub-sector rose at an average rate of over 10 per cent per year between 1987 and 2011, even as productivity growth rates outside of that sub-sector fell to around 2 per cent per year over the same period.38 Since 2011, trends across the manufacturing sector have worsened: real output per hour in the sector as a whole was lower in 2017 than at its peak in 2010. Productivity growth rates in manufacturing collapsed precisely when they were supposed to be rising rapidly due to industrial automation. Correcting manufacturing-productivity statistics in the us brings them more into line with trends visible in the statistics of other countries. In Germany and Japan, manufacturing-productivity growth rates have fallen dramatically since their postwar peaks. In Germany, for example, manufacturing productivity grew at an average annual rate of 6.3 per cent per year in the 1950s and 60s, falling to 2.4 per cent since 2000. This downward trend is to some extent an expected result of the end of an era of rapid, catch-up growth. However, it should still be surprising to the automation theorists, since Germany and Japan have raced ahead of the us in the field of industrial robotics. Indeed, the robots used in Tesla’s largely automated car factory in California were made by a German robotics company.39 German and Japanese firms deploy about Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Second Machine Age, pp. 43–5. See Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth, ‘us Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014; Daron Acemoglu et al, ‘Return of the Solow Paradox? it, Productivity, and Employment in us Manufacturing’, American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 5, 2014; and Susan Houseman, ‘Understanding the Decline of us Manufacturing Employment’, Upjohn Institute Working Paper 18–287, 2018. 38 Baily and Bosworth, ‘us Manufacturing’, p. 9. Computers and electronics count for 10–15 per cent of us manufacturing output. 39 Daniel Michaels, ‘Foreign Robots Invade American Factory Floors’, wsj, 26 March 2017. 36 37

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60 per cent more industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, compared to the us.40 Yet deindustrialization continues to take place in all these countries, despite lacklustre manufacturing-productivity growth rates: that is, it is taking place as the automation theorists expect, but not for the reasons they offer. To explore the causes of deindustrialization in more detail, I use the following accounting identity. For any given industry, the rate of growth of output (ΔO) minus the rate of growth of labour productivity (ΔP) equals the rate of growth of employment (ΔE). Thus, ΔO – ΔP = ΔE.41 So, for example, if the output of automobiles grows by 3 per cent per year, and productivity in the automobile industry grows by 2 per cent per year, then employment in that industry must necessarily rise by one per cent per year (3 – 2 = 1). Contrariwise, if output grows by 3 per cent per year and productivity grows by 4 per cent per year, employment will contract by 1 per cent per year (3 – 4 = -1). Disaggregating manufacturing-output growth rates in France provides us with a sense of the typical pattern playing out across the high-income countries (Figure 3).42 During the so-called Golden Age of postwar capitalism, productivity growth rates in French manufacturing were much higher than they are today—5.2 per cent per year, on average, between 1950 and 1973—but output growth rates were even higher than that— 5.9 per cent per year—as a result of a steady increase in employment of 0.7 per cent per year. Since 1973, both output and productivity rates have declined, but output rates fell much more sharply than productivity rates. By the early years of the 21st century, productivity growth rates— although much slower, at 2.7 per cent per year—were now faster than their corresponding output growth rates—at 0.9 per cent—as manufacturing employment contracted rapidly, by 1.7 per cent per year. 40 The countries with the highest levels of installed industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees in 2016 included South Korea (631), Singapore (488), Germany (309) and Japan (303), as compared to the United States (189) and China (68), according to the International Federation of Robotics, ‘Robot Density Rises Globally’, ifr Press Releases, 7 Feb 2018. 41 This equation excludes the so-called small term, ΔPΔE, as insignificant. Note that because this equation is true according to the very definition of labour productivity (O/E), it cannot be used to establish relations of causality among the three terms, E, O and P. 42 It is worth noting, however, that job loss has been somewhat more severe in France compared to other European countries.

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This disaggregation helps explain why automation theorists falsely perceive productivity to be growing at a rapid pace in manufacturing: in fact, productivity growth has been rapid only relative to extremely sluggish output growth. The same pattern can be seen in the statistics of other countries: no absolute decline in levels of manufacturing production has taken place, but there has been a decline in the output growth rate, with the result that output is growing more slowly than productivity (Table 1, overleaf). The simultaneity of limited technological dynamism and worsening economic stagnation combines to generate a progressive decline in industrial employment levels. As such, ‘output-led’ deindustrialization is impossible to explain in purely technological terms.43 In searching for alternative perspectives, Figure 3: French Manufacturing Sector, 1950–2017 % 6

Real output Productivity Employment

Average Annual Growth Rate

4

3

1.5

0

-1.5

-3

1950–73

1974–2000

2001–17

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

José Gabriel Palma, ‘Four Sources of “Deindustrialization” and a New Concept of the “Dutch Disease”’, in José Antonio Ocampo, ed., Beyond Reforms: Structural Dynamics and Macroeconomic Vulnerability, New York 2005, pp. 79–81. See Rowthorn and Ramaswamy, ‘Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications’, p. 6, as well as Dani Rodrik, ‘Premature Deindustrialization’, Journal of Economic Growth, vol. 21, no. 1, 2016, p. 7. 43

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economists have mostly preferred to describe it as a harmless evolutionary feature of advanced economies. However, that perspective is itself at a loss in explaining extreme variations in the gdp per capita levels at which this supposedly evolutionary economic shift has taken place. Deindustrialization unfolded first in high-income countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the tail-end of a period in which levels of income per person had converged across the us, Europe and Japan. In the decades that followed, deindustrialization then spread ‘prematurely’ to middle- and low-income countries, with larger variations in incomes per capita (Figure 4).44 In the late 1970s, deindustrialization arrived in southern Europe; much of Latin America, parts of East and Southeast Table 1: Manufacturing Growth Rates, 1950–2017 Output 4.4%

Employment

3.1%

1.2%

1974–2000

3.1%

3.3%

-0.2%

2001–17

1.2%

3.2%

-1.8%

7.6%

5.7%

1.8%

1.3%

2.5%

-1.1%

2001–17

2.0%

2.2%

-0.2%

Germany

1950–73 1974–2000

Japan

usa

1950–73

Productivity

1950–73

14.9%

10.1%

4.3%

1974–2000

2.8%

3.4%

-0.6%

2001–17

1.7%

2.7%

-1.1%

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

For example, deindustrialization—as measured by the fall in the manufacturing share of employment—started in Brazil in 1986, when the country’s gdp per capita was $12,100 (measured in 2017 us dollars at purchasing power parity), that is, a little more than half of the gdp per capita level of France at the time it began to deindustrialize, in 1973. South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt had even lower income levels at the time when their economies began to deindustrialize. See also Sukti Dasgupta and Ajit Singh, ‘Manufacturing, Services and Premature Deindustrialization in Developing Countries: A Kaldorian Analysis’, in George Mavrotas and Anthony Shorrocks, eds, Advancing Development: Studies in Development Economics and Policy, London 2007; and Tregenna, ‘Characterizing Deindustrialization’. 44

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Asia, and southern Africa followed in the 1980s and 1990s. Peak industrialization levels in many poorer countries were so low that it may be more accurate to say that they never industrialized in the first place.45 By the end of the 20th century, it was possible to describe deindustrialization as a kind of global epidemic: worldwide manufacturing employment rose in absolute terms by 0.4 per cent per year between 1991 and 2016, but that was much slower than the overall growth of the global labour force, with the result that the manufacturing share of total employment declined by 3 percentage points over the same period.46 China is a key exception, but only a partial one (Figure 5, overleaf). In the mid 1990s, Chinese state-owned enterprises shed large numbers of workers, sending manufacturing-employment shares on Figure 4: Global Waves of Deindustrialization, 1950–2010

Share of Manufacturing in Total Employment

% 35 United Kingdom 31

Italy

South Korea

27 23 19

South Africa

15 Brazil 11 7 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

Source: Groningen Growth and Development Centre, 10-Sector Database, January 2015 edition.

���������������������������������������������������������������������������� Fiona Tregenna describes this process as ‘���������������������������������� pre-industrialization deindustrialization’ in ‘Deindustrialization, Structural Change and Sustainable Economic Growth’, unido/unu-merit background paper 32, 2015. 46 unido, Industrial Development Report 2018, Vienna 2017, p. 166. unido suggests that the global manufacturing share fell from 14.4 per cent to 11.1 per cent in the 25 years from 1991 to 2016. However, other sources put the current share closer to 17 per cent. The unido numbers appear to be lower than other sources because of the stricter way they count employment in China’s manufacturing sector. 45

Figure 5: Deindustrialization in China, India and Mexico, 1980–2017 %

Share of Manufacturing in Total Employment

27 Italy

23

19

Mexico

China

15

11

7 1980

India

1986

1992

1998

2004

2010

2016

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

a steady downward trajectory.47 China re-industrialized, starting in the early 2000s, but then began to deindustrialize once again in the mid 2010s: its manufacturing-employment share has since dropped from 19.3 per cent in 2013 to 17.5 per cent in 2017, with further falls likely. If deindustrialization cannot be explained by either automation or the internal evolution of advanced economies, what could be its source?

3. blight of manufacturing overcapacity What the economists’ accounts fail to register in explaining deindustrialization is also what is missing from the automation theorists’ accounts. The truth is that rates of output growth in manufacturing have tended to decline, not only in this or that country, but worldwide (Figure 6).48 In the 1950s and 60s, global manufacturing production expanded at an average annual rate of 7.1 per cent per year, in real terms. That rate fell progressively to 4.8 per cent in the 1970s, and to 3.0 per cent between 1980 and 2007. Since the 2008 crisis and up to 2014, manufacturing Between 1993 and 2004, employment in state-owned enterprises declined by 40 per cent, due to economic restructuring. See Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, Cambridge ma 2007, p. 105. 48 wto, International Trade Statistics 2015. 47

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output expanded at just 1.6 per cent per year, on a world scale—that is, at less than a quarter of the pace achieved during the so-called postwar Golden Age.49 It is worth noting that these figures include the dramatic expansion of manufacturing productive capacity in China. Again, it is the incredible degree of slowdown or even stagnation in manufacturing-output growth, visible on the world scale, that explains why manufacturing-productivity growth appears to be advancing at a rapid clip, even though it is actually much slower than before. More and more is produced with fewer workers, as the automation theorists claim, but not because technological change is giving rise to high rates of productivity growth. On the contrary, productivity growth in manufacturing appears rapid today only because the yardstick of output growth, against which it is measured, is shrinking. Figure 6: World Manufacturing and Agricultural Production, 1950–2014 % 8

Manufacturing

Average Annual Growth Rate

Agriculture 6

4

2

0

1950–59

1960–69

1970–79

1980–90

1991–2000

2001–07

2008–14

Source: World Trade Organization, International Trade Statistics 2015, Table A1a, World Merchandise Exports, Production and gdp, 1950–2014.

The World Bank has noted that, since the global financial crisis, ‘trade has been growing more slowly not only because economic growth has become less tradeintensive, but also because global growth is slower.’ See Mary Hallward-Driemeier and Gaurav Nayyar, Trouble in the Making? The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development, Washington dc 2018, p. 81. 49

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Seen from this perspective, the global wave of deindustrialization can be said to find its origins not in runaway technical change but rather in worsening overcapacity in world markets for manufactured goods. The rise in overcapacity developed stepwise after World War Two. In the immediate postwar period, the us hosted the most dynamic economy in the world, with the most advanced technologies.50 Under the threat of communist expansion within Europe, as well as in East and Southeast Asia, the us proved willing to share its technological largesse with its former imperial competitors Germany and Japan, as well as other ‘frontline’ countries, in order to bring them all under the us security umbrella.51 In the first few decades of the post-wwii era, these technology transfers were a major boost to economic growth in Europe and Japan, opening up opportunities for export-led expansion. This strategy was also supported by the devaluation of European and Japanese currencies against the dollar.52 However, as Robert Brenner has argued, rising manufacturing capacity across the globe quickly generated overcapacity, issuing in a ‘long downturn’ in manufacturing output growth rates.53 What mattered here was not only the later building out of manufacturing capacity in the global South, but the earlier creation of such capacity in countries like Germany, Italy and Japan, which hosted the first lowcost producers in the postwar era who succeeded in taking shares in 50 In 1950, output per hour worked in the overall us economy was, on average, 127 per cent higher than output per hour in European countries. See Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945, Oxford 2007, p. 18. 51 On us reorientation in the context of the Cold War, see Robert Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, pp. 47–50; Eichengreen, The European Economy, pp. 54–8; Yutaka Kosai, The Era of High-Speed Growth, Tokyo 1986, pp. 53–68, Herbert Giersch et al, The Fading Miracle: Four Decades of Market Economy in Germany, Cambridge 1992, pp. 17–26. 52 See Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 67–93. Eichengreen also describes ‘Europe after World War ii’ as a ‘classic example of export-led growth’. See The European Economy, p. 38; and on the role of technology transfers in particular, see pp. 24–6. On the role of the 1949 devaluations, see pp. 77–9, and Kosai, The Era of High-Speed Growth, pp. 67–8. 53 Robert Brenner has made this argument in Economics of Global Turbulence, as well as in more recent works. Here, I am extending his account in order to explain labour deindustrialization. See also the related literature on the ‘fallacy of composition’ in global trade, for example, Robert Blecker, ‘The Diminishing Returns to Export-Led Growth’, a paper from the Project on Development, Trade and International Finance, New York 2000.

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global markets for industrial goods, and then invading the previously impenetrable us domestic market. That competition caused rates of industrial-output growth in the us to decline in the late 1960s, issuing in deindustrialization in employment terms. As the us responded to heightened import penetration in the 1970s by breaking up the Bretton Woods order and devaluing the dollar, these same problems spread from the highest wage countries in North America and northern Europe to Japan and the rest of Europe.54 Thereafter, as more and more countries built up manufacturing capacity, adopted export-led growth strategies and entered global markets for manufactured goods, falling rates of manufacturing-output growth and consequent labour deindustrialization also spread to Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, as well as to the global economy taken as a whole.55 Deindustrialization is not only a matter of technological advance, but also of a global redundancy of technological capacities, creating more crowded markets in which rapid rates of industrial-output expansion become more difficult to achieve.56 The mechanism transmitting this problem across the globe was severely depressed prices in global markets for manufactured goods.57 That led to falling income-per-unit capital ratios, then to falling rates of profit, then to lower rates of investment, See Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 50–1, 122–42. Deindustrialization spread to the global South in the aftermath of the 1982 Third World debt crisis, amid the imposition of imf-led structural adjustment programmes. As trade liberalization opened the borders of poorer countries to imports, while financial liberalization brought hot money flowing into ‘emerging markets’—causing their currencies to revalue—manufacturing competitiveness declined precipitously. See unctad, Trade and Development Report 2006, Geneva 2006, pp. 42–50; Kiminori Matsuyama, ‘Structural Change in an Interdependent World: A Global View of Manufacturing Decline’, Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 7, no. 2–3, 2009, pp. 478–86. 56 For a helpful summary of this argument, see Robert Brenner interviewed by Jeong Seong-jin, ‘Overproduction Not Financial Collapse is the Heart of the Crisis: The us, East Asia and the World’, Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 7, issue 6, no. 5, 2009. 57 See Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 108–14. For a graphical representation, see unido, Industrial Development Report 2018, p. 172. Rodrik also notes that ‘developing countries “imported” deindustrialization from the advanced countries’ insofar as they ‘became exposed to the relative price trends originating from advanced economies’. See Rodrik, ‘Premature Deindustrialization’, p. 4. It is important to note that differences between manufacturing and non-manufacturing price trends can also be explained to some extent by Baumol’s cost disease. 54 55

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and hence lower rates of output growth.58 In this environment, firms have faced heightened competition for market share: as overall growth rates slow, the only way to grow quickly is to steal market shares from other firms. Each firm has to do everything it can to keep up with its competitors.59 Overcapacity explains why, since the early 1970s, productivity-growth rates have fallen less severely than output-growth rates: firms have continued to raise their productivity levels as best they can despite falling rates of output growth (or else have gone under, disappearing from statistical averages). As manufacturing-output growth rates slipped below productivity-growth rates in one country after another, deindustrialization spread worldwide.

Driving globalization Explaining global waves of deindustrialization in terms of global overcapacity rather than industrial automation allows us to understand a number of features of this phenomenon that otherwise appear paradoxical. For example, rising overcapacity explains why deindustrialization has been accompanied not only by ongoing efforts to develop new laboursaving technologies, but also by the building out of gigantic, labour-using supply chains—usually with a more damaging environmental impact.60 A key turning point in that story came in the 1960s, when low-cost Japanese and German products invaded the us domestic market, sending the us industrial-import penetration ratio soaring from less than 7 per cent in the mid-60s to 16 per cent in the early 1970s.61 From that point forward, it became clear that high levels of labour productivity would no longer serve as a shield against competition from lower-wage See Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 37–40. The decline in the demand for investment goods in turn depressed overall demand. The result was that what looked like worsening overproduction from one perspective appeared as worsening underinvestment and hence under-demand from another perspective, resulting in slower rates of market growth and fiercer competition. 59 All firms, regardless of whether they use advanced technologies, must consistently upgrade their capacities. See Sanjaya Lall, ‘The Technological Structure and Performance of Developing Country Manufactured Exports, 1985–98’, Oxford Development Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2000, pp. 337–69. 60 See Gary Gereffi, ‘The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How us Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks’, in Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewics, eds, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, London 1994. For a more recent account, see William Milberg and Deborah Winkler, Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development, London 2013. 61 Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, p. 113. 58

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countries. The us firms that did best in this context were the ones that responded by globalizing production. Facing competition on prices, us multinational firms built international supply chains, shifting the more labour-intensive components of their production processes abroad and playing suppliers off against one another to achieve the best prices.62 In the mid-60s the first export-processing zones opened in Taiwan and South Korea. Even Silicon Valley, which formerly produced its computer chips locally in the San Jose area, shifted its production to low-wage areas, using lower grades of technology (and also benefitting from laxer laws around pollution and workers’ safety).63 mncs in Germany and Japan adopted similar strategies, which were everywhere supported by new infrastructures of transportation and communication technologies. The globalization of production allowed the world’s wealthiest economies to retain manufacturing capacity, but it did not reverse the overall trend towards labour deindustrialization. As supply chains were built out across the world, firms in more and more countries were pulled into the swirl of world-market competition. In some countries, this move was accompanied by shifts in the location of new plants: rustbelts oriented towards production for domestic markets went into decline, while sunbelts integrated into global supply networks expanded dramatically. Chattanooga grew at the expense of Detroit, Ciudad Juárez at the expense of Mexico City, Guangdong at the expense of Dongbei.64 Yet given the overall slowdown in rates of world manufacturing-market expansion, this re-orientation towards the world market could only result in lacklustre outcomes: the rise of sunbelts failed to balance out the decline of rustbelts, resulting in global deindustrialization. At the same time, global manufacturing overcapacity explains why the countries that have succeeded in attaining a high degree of robotization 62 For an early account of this process, see G. K. Helleiner, ‘Manufacturing Exports From Less-Developed Countries and Multinational Firms’, Economic Journal, vol. 83, no. 329, 1973, p. 28 ff. Between 1966 and 1980, us imports of goods produced in that country but then assembled abroad rose in value from $953 million to almost $14 billion, an increase of more than 1,300 per cent in 15 years. See Imports Under Items 806.30 and 807.00 of the Tariff Schedules of the United States, 1984–87, Washington, dc 1988. 63 Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat, p. 71. 64 For an account of China’s rustbelt in a global comparative context, see Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labour Struggles in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, Berkeley 2007, especially pp. 242–58.

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are not those that have seen the worst degree of deindustrialization. In the context of intense global competition, high degrees of robotization have given firms competitive advantages, allowing them to take market share from firms in other countries. Thus Germany, Japan and South Korea have some of the highest levels of robotization; they also have the largest trade surpluses in the world. Workers in European and East Asian firms know that automation helps preserve their jobs.65 China is also a top-four country in terms of trade surpluses, providing its manufacturing sector with a gigantic boost in terms of both output and employment growth. China has advanced on this front not due to high levels of robotization, but rather due to a mix of low wages, moderate to advanced technologies, and strong infrastructural capacities. Yet the result was the same: in spite of system-wide overcapacity and slow growth rates, the prc has industrialized rapidly because Chinese firms have been able to take market share away from other firms—not only in the us, but also in countries like Mexico and Brazil—which lost market share as Chinese firms expanded. It could not have been otherwise, since in an environment where average growth rates are low, firms can only achieve high rates of growth by taking market share from their competitors. Whether China will be able to retain its competitive position as its wage levels rise remains an open question; Chinese firms are now racing to robotize in order to head off this possibility.

4. beyond manufacturing The evidence I have cited so far to explain job loss in the manufacturing sector through worsening overcapacity may appear to have little purchase on the larger, economy-wide patterns—of stagnant wages, falling labour shares of income, declining labour-force participation rates and jobless recoveries after recessions—that the automation theorists have sought to explain by growing technological dynamism. Automation may therefore still seem a good explanation for the decline in demand for labour across the service sectors of each country’s economy, and so across the world economy as a whole. Yet this broader problem of declining labour demand also turns out to be better explained by the worsening industrial stagnation I have described than by widespread technological dynamism. Peter Goodman, ‘The Robots Are Coming and Sweden Is Fine’, nyt, 27 December 2017; Yuri Kageyama, ‘Reverence for Robots: Japanese Workers Treasure Automation’, Associated Press News, 16 August 2017.

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This is because, as rates of manufacturing-output growth stagnated in one country after another from the 1970s onward, no other sector appeared on the scene to replace industry as a major economic-growth engine. Instead, the slowdown in manufacturing-output growth rates was accompanied by a slowdown in overall growth rates. This trend is visible in the economic statistics of high-income countries. France is again a striking example (Figure 7). In France, real manufacturing value added (mva) rose at 5.9 per cent per year between 1950 and 1973, while real value added in the total economy (gdp) rose at 5.1 per cent per year.66 Since 1973, both growth measures have declined significantly: by the 2001–17 period, mva was rising at only 0.9 per cent per year, while gdp was rising at a faster but still sluggish pace of 1.2 per cent per year. Note that during the 1950s and 60s, mva growth generally led the overall economy: manufacturing served as the major engine of overall growth. Since 1973, mva growth rates have trailed overall economic growth. Similar patterns can be seen in other high-income countries (Table 2, overleaf). Their export-led growth engines sputtered and slowed to a crawl; and as they did so, overall rates of economic growth slowed considerably.67 Figure 7: French Manufacturing and Total Output Growth, 1950–2017 %

Average Annual Growth Rate

6

Manufacturing

5

Total output

4 3 2 1 0

1950–73

1974–2000

2001–17

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

Unless otherwise noted, mva and gdp growth rates will be cited in real, inflation adjusted terms, rather than in nominal terms. Measures of gdp growth come from the Conference Board, ‘Total Economy Database’. 67 In Germany, mva and gdp growth rates have fallen since 1973, but mva is still growing at a faster pace than gdp. Meanwhile, in Italy, the economy has completely stagnated. 66

Japan

Germany

usa

Table 2: Manufacturing and gdp Growth Rates, 1950–2017 mva

gdp

1950–73

4.4%

4.0%

1974–00

3.1%

3.2%

2001–17

1.2%

1.9%

1950–73

7.6%

5.7%

1974–00

1.3%

1.9%

2001–17

2.0%

1.4%

1950–73

14.9%

9.3%

1974–00

2.8%

3.2%

2001–17

1.7%

1.9%

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

Economists studying deindustrialization often point out that while manufacturing has declined as a share of nominal gdp, it has maintained, until recently, a more or less steady share of real gdp, which is to say that, between 1973 and 2000, real mva grew at approximately the same pace as real gdp.68 What that has meant in practice is that, as manufacturing has become less dynamic, so has the overall economy. There was no significant shift in demand from industry to services. Instead, as capital accumulation slowed down in manufacturing, the expansion of aggregate output also slowed significantly across the economy as a whole. This tendency to economy-wide stagnation, associated with the decline in manufacturing dynamism, then explains the system-wide decline in the demand for labour, and so also the problems that the automation theorists cite: stagnant real wages, falling labour shares of income and See William Baumol, ‘Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis’, in American Economic Review, vol. 57, no. 3, June 1967, pp. 415–26; Rowthorn and Ramaswamy, ‘Deindustrialization: Causes and Implications’, pp. 9–11; Rodrik, ‘Premature Deindustrialization’, p. 16.

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so on.69 This economy-wide pattern of declining labour demand is not the result of rising productivity-growth rates, associated with automation in the service sector. On the contrary, productivity is growing even more slowly outside of the manufacturing sector than inside of it: in France, for example, while productivity in the manufacturing sector was rising at an average annual rate of 2.7 per cent per year between 2001–17, productivity in the service sector was rising at just 0.6 per cent per year.70 Similar gaps exist in other countries. Once again, the mistake of the automation theorists is to focus on rising productivity growth rather than falling output growth. The environment of slower economic growth explains the low demand for labour all by itself. Workers, and especially workers who are not protected by powerful unions or labour laws, find it difficult to pressure employers to raise their wages when there is so much slack in the labour market. These trends are as visible in the world economy—including China—as they are in the high-income countries (Figure 8, overleaf). In the 1950s and 60s, global mva growth and gdp growth were expanding at rapid clips of 7.1 per cent and 5.0 per cent respectively, with mva growth leading gdp growth by a significant margin. From the 1970s onward, as global mva growth slowed, so did global gdp growth. In most of the decades that followed, global mva growth continued to lead gdp growth but by a much smaller margin. Since 2008, both rates have been growing at the exceptionally slow pace of 1.6 per cent per year. Again, the implication is that, as manufacturing growth rates declined, nothing emerged to replace industry as a growth engine. Not all regions of the world economy are experiencing this slowdown in the same way or to the same extent, but even countries like China that have grown quickly have to contend with this global slowdown and its consequences. Since the 2008 crisis, China’s economic growth rate has slowed considerably; its economy is deindustrializing. Some economists have attempted to theorize tendential economic stagnation and its relationship to rising inequality. See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, ma 2014; Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth; and the essays collected around Lawrence Summers’s hypothesis in Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures, London 2014. 70 Statistics taken from the oecd main indicators database, 2018 edition. Note that productivity is measured here in terms of output per person employed, rather than output per hour, for the sake of consistency. 69

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The clear conclusion is that manufacturing turned out to be a unique engine of overall economic growth.71 Industrial production tends to be amenable to incremental increases in productivity, achieved via technologies that can be repurposed across numerous lines. Industry also benefits from static and dynamic economies of scale. Meanwhile, there is no necessary boundary to industrial expansion: industry consists of all economic activities that are capable of being rendered via an industrial process. The reallocation of workers from low-productivity jobs in agriculture, domestic industry and domestic services to high-productivity jobs in factories raises levels of income per worker and hence overall economic growth rates. The countries that have caught up with the West Figure 8: World Manufacturing and Total Production, 1950–2014 % 8

Manufacturing

Average Annual Annual Rate Average RateofofGrowth Growth

gdp 6

4

2

0

1950 –59

1960–69

1970–79

1980–90

1990–2000

2001–07

2008–14

Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

For the original account of this phenomenon, see Nicholas Kaldor, Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth in the United Kingdom, Cambridge 1966. For an extended discussion, see also Hallward-Driemeier and Nayyar, Trouble in the Making?, pp. 9–37. 71

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in terms of income—such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—mostly did so by industrializing: they exploited opportunities to produce for the world market, at increasing scale and using advanced technologies, allowing them to grow at speeds that would have been unachievable had they depended on domestic-market demand alone.72 When the growth engine of industrialization sputters—due to the replication of technical capacities, international redundancy and fierce competition for markets—there has been no replacement for it as a source of rapid growth. Instead of workers reallocating from low-productivity jobs to high-productivity ones, the reverse of this process takes place, as workers pool increasingly in low-productivity jobs in the service sector. As countries have deindustrialized, they have also seen a massive buildup of financialized capital, chasing returns to the ownership of relatively liquid assets, rather than investment in new fixed capital.73 In spite of the high degree of overcapacity in industry, there is nowhere more profitable in the real economy for capital to invest itself. Indeed, if there had been, we would have evidence of it in higher rates of investment and hence higher gdp growth rates. This helps explain why firms have reacted to over-accumulation by trying to make their existing manufacturing capacity more flexible and efficient, rather than ceding territory to lower-cost, higher-productivity firms from other countries.74 The lack of an alternative growth engine also explains why governments in poorer countries have encouraged domestic producers to try to break into already oversupplied international markets for manufactures.75 Nothing has replaced those markets as a major source of globally accessible demand. Overcapacity exists in agriculture, too, and is even worse there than in industry; meanwhile services, which are mostly 72 See Adam Szirmai, ‘Industrialization as an Engine of Growth in Developing Countries, 1950–2005’, in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, vol. 23, issue 4, 2012, pp. 406–20. See also Adam Szirmai and Bart Verspagen, ‘Manufacturing and Economic Growth in Developing Countries, 1950–2005’, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, vol. 34, September 2015, pp. 46–59. 73 See Robert Brenner, ‘What’s Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America’, prologue to the Spanish translation of Economics of Global Turbulence, published by Akal in 2009. For an alternative account, see Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the Master, London 2010. 74 Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 153–7. 75 Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 153–7.

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non-tradable, make up only a tiny share of global exports.76 If countries are to retain any dependable link to the international market under these conditions, they must find some way to insert themselves into industrial lines, however oversupplied. System-wide overcapacity and the generalized slowdown in economic growth have therefore been devastating for most poorer countries: the amount of foreign exchange they have captured through liberalization has been pitiful; so, too, has been the number of jobs created.77 Indeed, global economic downshifts have been particularly devastating for low- and middle-income countries, not only because they are poorer, but also because those downshifts have taken place in an era of rapid labour-force expansion: between 1980 and the present, the world’s waged workforce grew by about 75 per cent, adding more than 1.5 billion people to the world’s labour markets.78 These labour market entrants, living mostly in poorer countries, had the misfortune of growing up and looking for work at a time when global industrial overcapacity began to shape patterns of economic growth in post-colonial countries: declining rates of manufactured export growth into the us and Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s ignited the 1982 debt crisis, followed by imf-led structural adjustment, which pushed countries to deepen their imbrications in global markets at a time of ever slower global growth and rising competition from China. In spite of shocks to the demand for labour generated by slowing global growth rates and rising economic turmoil, huge numbers of workers were still forced to seek employment in order to live.79 76 Manufactures account for 70 per cent of global trade; primary commodities, including agricultural goods, fuel and minerals, account for 25 per cent; services account for just 5 per cent. wto, World Trade Statistical Review 2018, Geneva 2018, p. 11. On overproduction in agriculture, see un Food and Agriculture, State of Food and Agriculture 2000, Rome 2000. 77 Raphael Kaplinsky, ‘Export Processing Zones in the Dominican Republic: Transforming Manufactures into Commodities’, World Development, vol. 21, no. 11, 1993, pp. 1851–65. See also William Milberg and Matthew Amengual, ‘Economic Development and Working Conditions in Export Processing Zones: A Survey of Trends’, ilo Working Paper, Geneva 2008; Milberg and Winkler, Outsourcing Economics. 78 Conference Board, ‘Total Economy Database’. See also Richard Freeman, ‘The Great Doubling: The Challenge of the New Global Labour Market’, in J. Edwards, et al, eds, Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream, New York 2007. 79 See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London and New York 2006. See also Aaron Benanav, ‘Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950–2000’, Social Science History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2019.

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Some may respond that the present low rates of global growth are in fact nothing out of the ordinary, if only we shift our baseline from the exceptional postwar ‘Golden Age’ to previous periods, such as the prewwi era. But a global perspective on the decline in the demand for labour provides the answer to this objection. It is true that, during the Belle Epoque, average rates of economic growth were more comparable to growth rates today.80 However, in that period, large sections of the population still lived in the countryside and produced much of what they needed to live.81 European empires still overran the globe, not only limiting the diffusion of new manufacturing technologies to a few regions, but also actively deindustrializing the rest of the world economy.82 Yet in spite of the much more limited sphere in which labour markets were active—and in which industrialization took place—the pre-wwi era, as also the inter-war period, was marked by a persistently low demand for labour, making for employment insecurity, rising inequality and tumultuous social movements aimed at transforming economic relations.83 In this respect, the world of today does look like the world of the Belle Epoque.84 The difference is that today, a much larger share of the world’s population depends on finding work in labour markets in order to live. What automation theorists describe as the result of rising technological dynamism is actually the consequence of worsening economic stagnation: productivity-growth rates appear to rise when, in reality, output-growth rates are falling. This mistake is not without reason. The For example, from 1870 to 1913, gdp grew at an average annual rate of 1.9 per cent per year in the uk (as compared to 1.6 per cent per year for 2001–17), 1.6 per cent per year in France (as compared to 1.2 per cent per year), and 2.9 per cent per year in Germany (as compared to 1.4 per cent per year). See Stephen Broadberry and Kevin O’Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Volume 2: 1870 to the Present, Cambridge 2010, p. 36. 81 In 1913, 47 per cent of Europe’s population was still working in agriculture. Broadberry and O’Rourke, Cambridge Economic History, p. 61. 82 See Paul Bairoch, ‘International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980’, Journal of European Economic History, vol. 11, no. 2, Fall 1982. See also Jeffrey Williamson, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind, London 2011. 83 See for example Alexander Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachussetts, Cambridge 1986; Christian Topalov, Naissance du chômeur, 1880– 1919, Paris 1994. 84 Kristin Ross draws an evocative parallel between the experiences of the workers who entered Occupy Oakland on the one hand and the Paris Commune on the other in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, London and New York 2015, p. 3. 80

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demand for labour is determined by the gap between productivity and output growth rates. Reading the shrinking of this gap the wrong way around—that is, as due to rising productivity rather than falling output rates—is what generates the upside-down world of the automation discourse. Proponents of this discourse then search for the technological evidence that supports their view of the causes for the declining demand for labour. In making this leap, the automation theorists miss the true story of overcrowded markets and economic slowdown that actually explains the decline in labour demand. Yet even if automation is not itself the primary cause of a low demand for labour, it is nevertheless the case that, in a slow-growing world economy, technological changes within a near-future horizon may still threaten large numbers of jobs with destruction, in a context of economic stagnation and slower rates of job creation. Technological change then acts as a secondary cause of a low labour demand, operating within the context of the first. The concluding section of this essay in nlr 120 will address these technological dynamics, as well as the socio-political problems— and opportunities—generated by a persistently low demand for labour in late-capitalist societies.

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alain supiot

A N A R T I S T O F T H E L AW

K

afka was a lawyer by training. At the age of 25, two years after getting his law degree, he began work at the Kingdom of Bohemia’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he devoted himself to the implementation of the law on statutory occupational insurance, adopted by Austro-Hungary in 1887— three years behind Germany and eleven years ahead of France.1 Kafka specialists are divided as to whether his legal career hindered or helped his literary work. His diaries and letters offer evidence to support both views, which should not be surprising, since there is barely a single affirmation from his pen that is not immediately reconsidered from another point of view. Thus he famously wrote that his legal studies involved living on sawdust, already chewed over by thousands of mouths—but promptly added that, ‘in a certain sense’, this was exactly to his taste.2 This way of turning over the cards, not stopping at the first meaning of a fact or symbol but always examining them from the reverse perspective, is the hallmark of the legal mind—or, more precisely, of the art of the trial, which is entirely governed by the rule of audi alteram partem: hear the other party. This first rule of the art of law is known today as the adversarial principle—in French, the principe du contradictoire. It is an ambiguous term, since consideration of the opposite point of view doesn’t annul the first viewpoint but puts it to the test of truth, allowing the party defending it to rebut in turn the arguments made against it. In other words, the principle is valid only to the extent that it is at the service of the law of non-contradiction: that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. In the course of legal proceedings, the play of these successive ‘speaking againsts’ thus takes place on a terrain of rules that cannot themselves be contradicted and which are based in law. The parties have to submit to the same law for the trial to proceed; new left review 119 sept oct 2019

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it is this common submission that allows them to exchange words, rather than blows. The law—Gesetz in German, meaning that which is set down—thus gives human life its institutional foundation. When it is trodden underfoot, we sink into the depths of unreason. So it was for the high mountain bridge, the protagonist and narrator of its namesake story, when a foolish traveller, imagining he is testing the bridge’s solidity, ‘jumps hard with both feet together on the small of its back’. The bridge, put to this test, turns over to see what is happening. ‘I had not fully turned around’— the bridge itself is speaking—‘when I fell, falling to pieces, broken and impaled on the sharp rocks which until then had always looked up at me so peacefully from the raging waters.’3 Where it affects the generational order that underpins the structure of the law, this ‘turning over’ produces those infanticidal parents who figure so frequently in myth and religion. According to that order, sons should bury their fathers. But here it is fathers who seek to bury their sons, projecting their own death drive onto their offspring. This type of parent is also encountered in daily life, not least in the academic world, where they don’t assassinate their descendants but condemn them to oblivion in order to affirm their own omnipotence and to escape the generational chain. Such is the case with the father of Georg Bendemann, the central character in Kafka’s story, ‘The Judgement’, when he issues his condemnation: ‘At bottom you were an innocent being, but beneath that you were a diabolical one! . . . And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!’ Georg immediately carries out the order, going to—where else?—a bridge, whose function of carrying human life he turns into a discreet instrument for his own death.4 Our institutional foundation can also be undermined in another way, when the law is not overturned but unknowable. ‘It is a torture’, Kafka wrote, ‘to be governed by laws of which one is ignorant’, for one who doesn’t know the laws is abandoned to the arbitrary reign of power and For further detail, see Supiot, ‘Grandeur and Misery of the Social State’, nlr 82, July–Aug 2013. 2 ‘Letter to His Father’, in Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories, London 1978, p. 63. 3 ‘The Bridge’, in Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London 1999, p. 412. Translation modified. 4 ‘The Judgement’, in The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, p. 87. Translation modified.

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its representatives, real or supposed.5 One could legitimately ask oneself if these laws really exist or whether they merely express the whim of those in office. This is the experience of totalitarian systems, whose resources Kafka’s work unveils. In a state of law, even in an empire like Austro-Hungary, it is still possible to call on the support of the law to limit the obliteration of the weak by the strong. Kafka thus dedicated his professional life to drafting legal documents to make the best possible protective use of the Austro-Hungarian law on industrial accidents. All known law that leaves itself open to interpretation is thereby a source of liberty. Kafka extends this freedom of interpretation to his readers like a lifebuoy to keep reason afloat in the universe of his stories. Every reader can find a new meaning in them, but none can claim to exhaust their sense. This profusion is foreign to the totalitarian order, which aims to empty out the sources of interpretation, to prevent anyone from appealing to the law in order to affirm their own subjecthood. Such a regime plunges its citizens into a world of unreason, where their survival depends upon the shifting allegiances of the authorities to whom they look for protection while exposing themselves to manipulation. Kafka makes us live this plunge, while at the same time mobilizing our freedom as readerinterpreters. He gives us the poison and its antidote simultaneously, reminding us of the irreducible aspect of humanity which in each of us resists determinism. Thus in ‘The Penal Colony’, the law is applied by an ‘apparatus’ which, over the course of twelve hours, engraves the text of the unknown law into the flesh of the condemned, who experiences the ecstasy of deciphering its meaning in the final hours of his torture. The judge, who is also the officer and executioner, ends up taking the victim’s place, hoping to convince the educated foreigner (a lawyer?) of the perfection of the machine—and, perhaps, to rejoice in at last understanding the law himself. But the apparatus frustrates his will, runs amok and kills him, without allowing him that illumination. The reader finds in this story not only the material for numerous interpretations, but the resources for critical thinking that can be applied to multiple questions. Critique of the collapse of legality in the murderous onslaught of the industrial powers, if we recall that the text was written two months after the start 5 ‘The Problem of Our Laws’, in The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, p. 437. Translation modified.

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of the First World War. Critique of the inscription of religious law in the flesh of those who know nothing of it, if—setting the story alongside certain pages of Kafka’s diary—we read it as a metaphor for circumcision. Critique of the law itself, if we see in the steel tip that penetrates the forehead of the officer a reminder of the ‘horns’ of Moses as he returned, laden with the tablets of the law, having—as Kafka wrote elsewhere— ‘learned nothing about the decisive things’. Or again, critique of the ‘scientific management’ of labour, which sets workers under the deadly sway of machines, if one thinks of Kafka’s professional experience which confronted him with the death and mutilation of factory employees on a daily basis. As so often, the work of art anticipated ideas that would not be realized in society until many years later. When the machine of the Penal Colony goes haywire, it comes off the cog-toothed wheels so similar to those that would later entrap Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936); and it is equally designed to feed the condemned, without delaying the execution . . . Better, it can be programmed, using a coded language that cannot be read by ordinary mortals but that can carve their flesh and pierce their minds. Kafka thus made visible in the early years of the twentieth century the supplementary step in dehumanization that today authorizes ‘artificial intelligence’, by which the machine is made the seat of thought and humans are treated as programmable objects. Having joined with these few lines the innumerable crowd of Kafka glossators, I have taken my turn to chew what a thousand mouths have chewed before me and tried to communicate the taste of that diet, well known to those in law. Expressions of a sovereign liberty, Kafka’s writings have the sort of authority that seems to call for glosses. In the final pages of The Trial, the priest tells Joseph K.: ‘The Writing is immutable and the interpretations are often simply the expression of the despair the commentators feel.’ Reading Kafka’s work prompts one to uphold the contrary opinion: only their interpretation allows us to rise above the despair that informs them and to share the determination of their author to denounce all forms of injustice.

First published as ‘Un artiste de la loi’, Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire, no. 14, February 2019. Translated with kind permission.

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S I T U AT I O N I S M À L’ E N V E R S ?

I

n his thoughtful consideration of Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Cédric Durand salutes the magnitude of Tooze’s achievement—a ‘landmark account’ of the mechanisms precipitating the economic disaster that started to engulf the West in 2008 and of the remedies and ruins that followed. Particularly impressive, he remarks, is the way the book illuminates ‘the technical workings of financial markets and assetbacked commercial paper without losing sight of the political dynamics at stake’: As Tooze writes: ‘Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across the narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant “systems” and “machines” and apparatuses of financial engineering.’ Crashed is, indeed, a highly political book.1

At the same time, Durand observes, its narrative is no simple—or rather in this case, of course, highly complex and intricate—empirical tracking of the crisis and its outcomes. It possesses definite ‘conceptual underpinnings’, suggested by Tooze himself in acknowledging his debt to Wynne Godley’s use of ‘stock-flow consistency’ modelling of the financial interactions between public, private and foreign sectors. This in Durand’s view supplies ‘the unstated backbone’ of Tooze’s general argument.2 Both judgements appear sound. But in Durand’s exposition a paradox attaches to each of them, since by the end of his review, somewhat different notes are struck. For Godley, one of the key advantages of the stock-flow consistency approach was that it integrated the financial with the real economy, as alternative models did not. Durand, however, remarks that Crashed ‘does not discuss the concrete intertwining of new left review 119 sept oct 2019

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the financial and productive sectors in the global economy at all’, and so ‘fails to set the financial crisis in the context of the structural crisis tendencies within contemporary capitalist economies.’ This observation in turn generates another, which might seem to put in question Durand’s overall tribute to the book. For there he writes of ‘Tooze’s unwillingness to investigate the relations between the political and the economic’, a reluctance that ‘ultimately undermines his account of the crisis decade.’ Logically, the question then arises: do these two apparent contradictions lie in Tooze’s work, or in Durand’s review of it? Or can both be coherent in their own terms?

1. conceptualizing finance Perhaps the best way of approaching this question is to turn to Durand’s own work on the metastases of contemporary capitalism. With a reticence that does him honour—all but unheard of in an Anglosphere where even bibliographies so often become mere catalogues of selfpromotion—he makes no reference to Le Capital fictif, which appeared in France in 2014 (its English edition Fictitious Capital in 2017), though its bearing on the concerns of Crashed is plain. A succinct, luminous study, it displays a combination rare in the literature on the economic landscape of the new century: in a bare 150 pages, a driving conceptual energy joined to a controlling empirical grasp of statistical data across all the major capitalist states. Organized around the growth in the object of its title—a term coined by the first Earl of Liverpool, Secretary for War in North’s administration under George iii, received by Ricardo, theorized in differing ways by Marx and Hayek alike, whose history it traces—Fictitious Capital sets out to show the character and logic of the financial system that brought the world to crisis in 2008, and has only continued to burgeon since. What are the leading themes of the book? At the root of the instability that has triggered successive crises in the last forty years, first in the ‘In the Crisis Cockpit’, nlr 116/117, March–June 2019, pp. 201–2, 212. Crashed was received with virtually unanimous applause in the periodical press—New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Guardian, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books etc.—but, if only for reasons of space, little or no engagement in depth. 2 ‘In the Crisis Cockpit’, p. 208. 1

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periphery and then in the core of the global capitalist economy, lies the peculiarity that distinguishes financial markets from markets in goods and services. Whereas in normal times rising prices weaken demand in the real economy, the opposite is generally true of financial securities: the more prices increase, the more these securities are in demand. The same applies the other way round: during a crisis, the fall in prices engenders fire sales, which translate into the acceleration of the price collapse. This peculiarity of financial products derives from the fact that their purchase—dissociated from any use-value—corresponds to a purely speculative rationale; the objective is to obtain surplus-value by reselling them at a higher price at some later point.

On the way up, ‘the self-sustaining price rise fuelled by agents’ expectations is further exaggerated by credit. Indebtedness increases prices, and since the securities can serve as the counterpart to fresh loans, their increasing value allows agents to take on more debt.’ On the way down, as asset bubbles start to burst, ‘economic agents trying to meet the deadlines on their debt repayments are forced to sell at discounted prices’, unleashing ‘a self-sustaining movement towards depression, which only state intervention can interrupt’.3 Since the deregulation of capital flows in the eighties, this general mechanism has been turbo-charged by the huge expansion of financial markets within the global economic system, with not only vastly larger forms and magnitudes of private credit, public bonds and equities—the three forms of fictitious capital designated by Marx—but the development of new kinds of transaction still further removed from processes of production, as shadow banking and financial innovations twist and lengthen the chains of indebtedness. ‘Contract swaps, structured products and option contracts are multiplying and combining among themselves. They are limited by nothing other than the imaginations of the financial actors.’ High-volume speculation ceases to be an outgrowth of booms: thanks to the flexibility of derivatives, ‘it becomes an activity independent of the business cycle’.4 The result is a radical transformation of the relations between financial and commercial transactions, and a vertiginous rise in the weight of finance in the world economy. By Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital, London and New York 2017, pp. 28–9. Henceforward fc. 4 fc, pp. 66, 69. 3

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2007, the total (notional) value of derivatives was some ten times that of global gdp. By 2013 the value of purely financial transactions outclassed those of trade and investment combined by a hundred to one.5 That such an inverted pyramid should in one way or another topple into crises is no surprise, each time requiring central banks to act as unlimited lender of last resort, and governments to sustain demand by letting deficits soar, to save the system—the crash of 2008 being the latest and most spectacular case to date. But as Durand observes, the very success of such rescue operations breeds the conditions for the next crisis. If ‘economic policies have undeniably succeeded in their effort to keep the collapse under control: all the post-war financial crises have been contained’, the subsequent return of confidence in due course undoes itself, as financial operators become increasingly willing to take new chances in the knowledge that central banks ‘will do everything to prevent systemic risk becoming a reality’. Such is the paradox of government intervention. ‘As capacities for crisis-management improve and financial actors as well as regulators become more optimistic’, financial innovation revives and regulation relaxes, leading to yet more complex and sophisticated products, expanding credit at the cost of the quality of the assets acquired. ‘This, in turn, leads to small crises which are rapidly overcome thanks to the improved capacity to handle them. This cumulative dynamic produces a financial super-cycle through which the accumulated risks become increasingly large—that is, the relative weight of speculative finance and Ponzi schemes constantly increases’, and with it the scale and cost of state intervention to contain the crisis. According to imf calculations, between the autumn of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, the total support extended to the financial sector by states and central banks of the advanced capitalist countries was equivalent to 50.4 per cent of world gdp.6

Profits without accumulation? The swollen size of the financial sector in the economies of the West has meant, as is well known, that its share of total profits has increased too. For Durand, this raises the question, which has puzzled others working in a more or less Marxist tradition, of where these profits come from. But here, as he notes, there is a larger problem. Since the eighties, the rate of investment in the core zone of capitalism has steadily fallen, and with 5

fc, pp. 69–71.



6

fc, pp. 31–2, 39.

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it rates of growth, decade by decade. Yet in the same period, profits have remained high. Indeed, as David Kotz has shown in these pages, in the United States the years between 2010 and 2017 saw a rate of accumulation lower, yet a rate of profit higher, than in any decade since the time of Reagan.7 So where are these profits in general coming from? Durand’s answer is that they represent an updated version of Hobson’s vision of the future at the start of the twentieth century: namely the extraction of high levels of profit from investment in production in zones of cheap labour on the periphery of the system, above all in Asia. If this is so, the ‘enigma of profits without accumulation’ would dissolve, because firms are indeed investing; not in their domestic economies, where growth, employment and wages stagnate, but in overseas locations, where they have secured very high rates of return. Prima facie there are two difficulties with this argument. The first is where in principle the boundary of ‘fictitious’ capital—if defined as capital which ‘circulates without production having yet been realized, representing a claim on a future real valorization process’8—lies, since formally speaking virtually all investment meets this criterion, as capital laid out in anticipation of profitable returns.9 The second is how in practice the significance of purely financial payments, as distinct from straightforward profits from productive operations, is to be estimated in the flow of fdi to cheap labour markets.10 In taking dividends from foreign assets as a proxy for these—he cites research from the us and France—it is David Kotz, ‘End of the Neoliberal Era? Crisis and Restructuring in American Capitalism’, nlr 113, Sept–Oct 2018, p. 45. 8 fc, p. 55. 9 See on this Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London and New York 2013, pp. 28–9, who defines Marx’s concept of fictitious capital, distinguishing it from loan or other interest-bearing forms of capital, as ‘a technical idea amounting to net present value accounting—that is, to ideal sums of money that result via discounting streams of future payments attached to financial assets. These ideal sums correspond to financial prices that could fluctuate independently of the money capital originally expended to purchase the financial asset in question.’ Put in other terms, capital is ‘fictitious’ if expended not on anticipated future returns from production or physical assets, but on values generated at one or more—today, infinitely many—removes from these, which can diverge very sharply from them. 10 Suggesting a hesitancy in his exposition, Durand speaks both of the financialization of non-financial firms, and of the paradox of profits without accumulation, as ‘partly’ an illusion or an artifice, without further specification: Fictitious Capital, pp. 145, 149. 7

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unclear how far Durand is simply re-tabling the first difficulty. That a ‘knot between financialization and globalization’, as he puts it, exists, is not in doubt. But how analytically it is tied remains elusive. No such ambiguity attaches to the conclusion of his book. Contrary to received wisdom, though financial instability has ‘negative externalities that affect all actors’, it does not follow that its absence is therefore a blessing for all. Financial stability is not in itself ‘a public good from which everyone benefits’. It is enough to see the pay-offs of the operations to restore it in 2008–09. A year later the share of us government bonds held by the richest 1 per cent of the population had climbed to over 40 per cent. Durand’s verdict is trenchant: The hegemony of finance—the most fetishized form of wealth—is only maintained by the public authorities’ unconditional support. Left to itself, fictitious capital would collapse; and yet would pull down the whole of our economies in its wake. In truth, finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the body of society to feed its own profits.11

ii. a staggered trilogy Enough has been said to indicate why Durand could, for all his admiration of Crashed, conclude that ultimately it falls short of the promise of its postulates. In itself, however, such a limiting judgement offers no specification of what might explain the gap perceived between the two. What kind of method permits bracketing of the real economy in a diagnostic of the vicissitudes of finance? What sort of politics informs the architecture of the ensuing work? Initial clues to these questions can be found in two passages from Tooze’s writing. In the first, a review of Geoff Mann’s In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017), he defines the distinctive virtue of Keynes’s outlook as a ‘situational and tactical awareness’ of the problems for liberal democracy inherent in the operations of the business cycle in a capitalist economy, requiring pragmatic crisis management in the form of punctual adjustments without illusion of permanency.12 In the second, from the Introduction to Crashed, he puts his political cards on the table. ‘The 11

fc, pp. 155, 100.

12

Tooze, ‘Tempestuous Seasons’, London Review of Books, 13 September 2018, p. 20.

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tenth anniversary of 2008’, he writes, ‘is not a comfortable vantage-point for a left-liberal historian whose personal loyalties are divided among England, Germany, the “island of Manhattan” and the eu.’13 To see how these remarks bear on the issues raised by Durand, it is best to consider Crashed as the third volume of a trilogy, preceded by Tooze’s two previous works, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (2014) and The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006), a set which has arguably made Tooze the outstanding modern economic historian of his cohort.14 As a public voice, he is more than this, ranging across the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, Guardian and more, as well as radio and television. The trio of books that now defines his career does not trace a continuous narrative, and its composition does not follow a chronological sequence—the first book deals with the years 1933 to 1945, the second 1916 to 1931, the third 2006 to 2018—nor possess a uniform focus. But that it displays a governing thematic unity is plain.

Hitler’s war A massive work of detailed historical scholarship, Wages of Destruction unfolds a commanding account of the German economy that Hitler inherited on coming to power in the depths of the Depression, the rapid recovery that the Nazi regime engineered with a high-speed rearmament programme, the resource constraints it had hit by the end of the thirties, its ensuing military conquests to overcome these, their over-reaching in the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the desperate ratcheting up of production, with an intensified resort to slave labour, as defeat loomed in the east and the Allies closed in from the west. If Tooze overstates the comparative backwardness of the German economy, dragged down by its ailing small-peasant and archaic-landlord agriculture, and underrates the rise in popular consumption under the Third Reich so long as Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, London 2018, p. 21. Niall Ferguson, an obvious alternative candidate, after a trio of impressive works in the nineties, culminating in The Pity of War (1998), altered course in the new century, a turn described in a later volume: ‘Like four of my last five books, Civilization was from its earliest inception a television series as well as a book’: Civilization: The West and the Rest, London 2011, p. xviii. Tooze, a close contemporary of Ferguson, grew up partly in West Germany—he is bilingual—and has held positions successively at Cambridge, Yale and Columbia. 13

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it remained at peace,15 such questions of emphasis scarcely affect the scale of his achievement, above all as his account moves into high gear, plotting the interplay between economic and military decisions in the Second World War itself. Framing this narrative, however, is a thesis whose connexion with it is disconcertingly forced: a claim essentially supererogatory, tenuously stitched around the story it tells of the ‘making and breaking’ of the Nazi economy. Contrary to common belief, Tooze argues, in Hitler’s mind the supreme enemy against which his mobilization of the Third Reich for continental war took aim lay not in the steppes to the east, but across the ocean to the far west. Not the bacillus of Bolshevism but the might of the United States, headquarters of world Jewry, was the existential threat to Germany that obsessed him, and governed his ambitions of aggression. The destruction of Communism and conquest of Russia was just a means, not an end, Operation Barbarossa no more than a way-station— the acquisition of a territorial and resource platform capable of rivalling the vast open spaces of the American colossus, in the battle for world domination. Historically, then, ‘America should provide the pivot for our understanding of the Third Reich’. Projects of eastern expansionism, along with rabid anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, were generic features of the German right after 1918. What distinguished Hitler, defining ‘the peculiarity and motivating dynamic’ of his regime, was the centrality of America in his world-view as ‘the global hegemon in the making’, and ‘fulcrum of a world Jewish conspiracy for the ruination of Germany and the rest of Europe’.16 On what evidence did Tooze base this construction? Principally, Hitler’s so-called ‘Second Book’, an unfinished and unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, probably composed in 1928; and a scattering of obiter dicta during the War. But neither his words nor deeds provide any coherent support for it. Like any European of his time, Hitler knew how large was America’s population and domestic market, but in the 900 pages of Mein Kampf, where the ‘infamous mental terror’ of socialism and the Jewish features of the ‘grinning, ugly face of Marxism’ have pride For these criticisms, see Robert Gordon, ‘Did Economics Cause World War Two?’, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 14560, December 2008; and Harold James, review of Wages of Destruction in Central European History, vol. 40, no. 2, June 2007, pp. 366–71. 16 The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, New York 2007, pp. xxiv, 657, 284. 15

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of place from the start, the United States is accorded not so much as a single page, even paragraph; while the occasional mentions it earns are not especially hostile. In his ‘Second Book’, Hitler did talk of the future threat to Europe from America, given the size of its population and wealth of its market, its lower production costs and stream of inventions, which could give it predominance over the Old World. But neither the substance nor the salience of the ensuing thoughts correspond to Tooze’s characterization of them. For Hitler went on to explain that the key advantage of America lay in its ethnic composition. Nordic emigration to the New World had created in the United States a ‘new national community of the highest racial quality’, a ‘young, racially select people’, filtering immigration to extract the ‘Nordic element’ from all the nations of Europe, while barring the door to Japanese and Chinese. Russia might have a comparable landsurface, but its population was of such poor quality that it could pose no economic or political threat to the freedom of the world, merely flood it with disease. Pan-European schemes to counter the rise of America, hoping to cobble races of every sort together into some sort of union, were a delusion of Jews and half-breeds. If Germany continued to allow its best blood-lines to emigrate to the us, it was bound to deteriorate into a people of no value; only a state that could ‘raise the racial value of its people into the most practical national form’ could compete with America. In the future, conflict between Europe and America might not always be peacefully economic in nature, but the nation that would be most in danger from the us was not Germany but England.17 In other words, when Hitler turned his mind to America, in his only real disquisition on the country, it was in admiration rather than denunciation of the us, not merely as economically more advanced, but essentially and explicitly as more Aryan than Germany itself was in danger of becoming. How large did these thoughts loom in 1928? Attention to America lasts for a dozen pages—just 5 per cent of the manuscript of his Second Book. South Tyrol commands double the space. Nor is there evidence of any continuing preoccupation with the us in the succeeding years. Far from being central to his world-view, in the thirties America faded from Hitler’s horizon, as he decided that it was not, after all, a stronghold of manly Nordic virtues, but a sink-hole of mongrels and degenerates, in which at best only half—at other times they became a 17

Hitler’s Zweites Buch, Stuttgart 1961, pp. 123–32, 173.

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sixth—of the population were of decent stock, and with Jews uppermost: a state of weaklings, wracked with unemployment and enfeebled by neutrality laws, which could be discounted as a force in Weltpolitik.18 Once entrenched in power, Hitler laid out the international tasks of the Third Reich as he saw them in his ‘Four Year Plan’ memorandum of August–September 1936. It contains not a line about America. After explaining that ‘politics was the leadership and conduct of the historical struggles for life of peoples’, whose intensification since the French Revolution had found its most extreme expression in Bolshevism—bent on ‘eliminating the traditional elites of humanity and replacing them with world-wide Jewry’—and declaring that no state could withdraw or keep its distance from the ensuing confrontation, he announced in italics: ‘Since Marxism has by its victory in Russia converted one of the largest empires in the world into its base of further operations, this question has become critical. An ideologically founded, closed authoritarian will to aggression has entered the ideologically tattered democratic world.’ The democratic states were incapable of waging a successful war against Soviet Russia, leaving Germany—‘as always the ignition point of the Western world against Bolshevik attacks’—the duty of securing its own existence against impending catastrophe with every means at its disposal. ‘For the victory of Bolshevism over Germany would not end in another Versailles, but the final destruction, in fact extermination of the German people.’ The scale of such a disaster was incalculable. ‘In face of the need to defend us against this danger all other considerations recede as completely irrelevant’. Expanded rearmament, at top speed, was required to ready the German army and nation for war in four years.19 ‘Oscillating between admiration and contempt, Hitler’s conceptions of America possessed neither any realistic nor stable content’: Detlef Junker, Kampf um die Weltmacht: Die usa und das Dritte Reich 1933–1945, Dusseldorf 1988, p. 24, much the best treatment of Hitler’s attitudes to the us. Tooze singles out Philipp Gassert’s Amerika im Dritten Reich for praise, as a study superseding all others, but in fact it has little to say about Hitler’s strategic relationship to America. Noting that up to the early thirties, ‘power-political’ considerations played ‘virtually no role at all’ in his thinking about the us, and even after coming to power, ‘gaps in Hitler’s image of America’ have to be filled in by recourse to the ‘cultural environment’ in which his foreign-policy decisions were taken, rather than any pronouncements by the Führer himself, Gassert’s book is actually a ‘broad reception history’ of German attitudes to America under the Third Reich, rather than a study of Hitler’s own intermittent mish-mash of these: Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, Stuttgart 1997, pp. 87–8. 19 ‘Denkschrift Hitlers über die Aufgaben eines Vierjahresplans’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, April 1955, pp. 204–5, 210. Italics in original. 18

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Here the abiding phobias of Mein Kampf, in its fusion of antiCommunism and anti-Semitism, had become state doctrine; the fight against Bolshevism, in Ian Kershaw’s words, ‘the lodestar of Hitler’s thinking on foreign policy’.20 The future of German expansion lay in the east, not in the west. When in 1939 his invasion of Poland led, contrary to his calculations, to British and French declarations of war with Germany, and he defeated France in short order, he expected Britain to come to terms with him, as a long-time admirer of its empire, which he had no wish to break up. Baffled by its refusal to do so, and unable to invade it by sea, as early as July 1940 he decided instead to attack Russia—in defiance of any rational strategic calculus, re-creating the war on two fronts he had always maintained was the overriding reason for German defeat in 1914–18. Military common sense would have directed the Wehrmacht south rather than east, forcing Spain—where Franco’s regime, little more than a year in the saddle, was in no position to resist an ultimatum to fall into line—into war with Britain and, with control of both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar, closing the Mediterranean, seizing Egypt and the Iraqi oilfields: a saunter compared with Operation Barbarossa.21 But the ideological premium lay where it had always been: wiping out Bolshevism and colonizing the east, in a war of extermination without counterpart in the west. Nor, in the expected aftermath of its success, was there any talk of a conquered Russia providing a platform for taking on America. Hitler’s Directive No. 32, ‘Preparations for the Period after Barbarossa’, drafted eleven days before the Russian campaign began, was free of any thought of Washington, projecting instead a sweep of the Wehrmacht around the Mediterranean, closing in on the Suez Canal—just what he had fatally foregone.

Orphaned Europe Where America did feature in Hitler’s outlook was in the Far East, where he hoped Japan would pin down the us, preventing it from helping Britain in Europe, and incited Tokyo to launch an attack on it already in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis, London 2000, p. 12. It is sometimes argued that Hitler did not proceed because of the conflict between the French possession of Morocco and Spanish designs on it, not wishing to antagonize Pétain’s regime by granting expansion to Franco’s, both ideologically aligned with his own. This can scarcely have been an insuperable problem: in a similar conflict, he had little difficulty imposing the second Vienna Award, dividing Transylvania between Romania and Hungary, with a view to brigading both states for what became Barbarossa.

20 21

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April 1941, before Japan was either resolved or ready to do so. In itself a rational enough calculation, Hitler rendered it lunatic by promising that Germany would declare war on America as soon as Japan did, and being as good as his word in December, bringing down on him the world’s greatest power without having any possibility of so much as reaching it by land, sea or air.22 Tooze correctly observes that this ‘sealed the fate of Germany’,23 without registering how fatal it also is to his construction of the centrality of America to Hitler’s world-view. For what the Führer’s gratuitous gift to Roosevelt (who would have had great difficulty in declaring war on Germany in the wake of Pearl Harbor, when national outrage and demand for retribution were focused on Japan) revealed was Hitler’s staggering level of inconsequence and ignorance where anything to do with the United States was actually concerned. In a respectful but wide-ranging critique of Wages of Destruction, the most substantial engagement with it to date, Dylan Riley cites Adorno’s cool verdict: ‘The German ruling clique drove towards war because they were excluded from a position of imperial power. But in their exclusion lay the reason for the blind and clumsy provincialism that made Hitler’s and Ribbentrop’s policies uncompetitive and their war a gamble.’24 From 1942 onwards Hitler would, in his rambling monologues to intimates, have more to say about the us, increasingly vituperated in Nazi pronouncements as—an inherently mobile location—the headquarters of world Jewry, but never rising above know-nothing bluster and dilettantism. His world-view comprised a limited number of idées fixes— anti-Communism, anti-Semitism, a racialized social Darwinism—to which passing moods or fancies could add a wide variety of temporary hobby-horses and inconsistent opinions, vague and self-contradictory ideas about America among them. In framing Wages of Destruction by Hitler’s relationship to America, however, Tooze was not making an arbitrary decision. For the starting-point of In January 1942 Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, reported to Tokyo: ‘The Führer is of the view that England can be destroyed. How the usa can be defeated, he doesn’t yet know’; see Junker, Kampf um die Weltmacht, who makes short work of the notion that Hitler ever had a serious plan for the conquest of America: pp. 25, 31–2. 23 Wages of Destruction, p. 668. 24 Dylan Riley, ‘The Third Reich as Rogue Regime: Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction’, Historical Materialism, vol. 22, nos 3–4, 2014, p. 346. The quotation is from Minima Moralia, London and New York 2005, p. 106. 22

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his narrative is not the backdrop that might be expected of a study of the Nazi economy, the Great Depression. More devastating in its effects in Germany than in any other industrial society, the slump is taken as given, without causal explanation. What takes centre stage is the tragic failure of the German elites to hold fast to the wisdom of Stresemann, the leading statesman of the twenties, in seeing that the path to recovery after defeat in the First World War lay not in futile rebellion against the settlement at Versailles but in signalling Germany’s willingness to pay reparations, and thereby opening the door to ‘a special relationship with the United States’ as the ‘dominant force in world affairs, both economically and as a future military superpower’, with the aim of positioning Germany as a key ally of Washington in a transatlantic partnership.25 But after the Dawes and Young Plans, hopeful steps in the right direction, Stresemann died and Wall Street crashed. The result was ‘the collapse of American hegemony in Europe’, leaving the continent ‘orphaned as it had not been since World War I’, and Germany at the mercy of Hitler’s demonic ambitions. Happily, with the defeat of the Third Reich, Adenauer could realize Stresemann’s vision, at last sheltering a German parliamentary democracy in the safe harbour of America, orphanage over.26

iii. wilsonian peace? Published eight years later, The Deluge supplies the prequel to Wages. Its theme is the emergence out of the Great War of 1914–18 of a new world order, led by America, which outlasted the demise of its architect and gave way only under the strain of the Great Depression. The narrative opens with the military deadlock in Europe in 1916, and Wilson’s decision to enter the War in support of the Entente in the spring of 1917, making of the struggle ‘something far more morally and politically charged’ than a mere great-power conflict—‘a crusading victory’, an American president in the lead, ‘fought and won to uphold the rule of international law and to put down autocracy and militarism’. With the defeat of Germany and the dissolution of Austro-Hungary, the us—already a super-state towering above all others in economic might—became the master power of the succeeding peace. Its post-war hegemony, however, would be no mere replacement of what had once been the Pax Britannica. It was a paradigm shift in international relations, a deliberate attempt to construct a global 25 26

Wages of Destruction, pp. 5, 25, 33. Wages of Destruction, pp. 657–8.

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economic and political order, as conceived by Wilson—a system of a new kind: ‘by common agreement, the new order had three major facets— moral authority backed by military power and economic supremacy’.27 True, though the agreement was common, it was not quite universal. By the time Wilson had taken America into the War, the February Revolution had broken out in Russia. ‘First and foremost a patriotic event’, this spelt no defection from the ranks of the Entente, whose leaders were justifiably confident that ‘Russia’s democratic revolution would re-energize the war effort, not end it’. ‘Kerensky, Tsereteli and their colleagues set themselves frantically to rebuilding the army as a fighting force’, and in the early summer of 1917 troops ‘under the dynamic command of the young war hero, Lavr Kornilov’ were making headway against the Habsburg forces in front of them.28 But to the north, Bolshevik subversion led to mutiny, and the Russian front collapsed. As peasant soldiers ‘abandoned the cause en masse’, and radicalized units around Petrograd marched on the city, the Provisional Government—‘despite its profound commitment to democratic freedom’—‘had no option but to order the mass arrest of the Bolshevik leadership’, but made the fatal mistake of failing ‘to decapitate it’ as the circumstances required, a taboo on the death penalty inhibiting the necessary executions. Three months later, Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace and nascent Russian democracy was extinguished. In power, the Bolshevik dictatorship repudiated Russia’s foreign debts—an action amounting to a rejection of ‘the very foundations of international law’, severing any possibility of an understanding with the Entente—and, signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, exited the War. The Allied interventions in Russia which followed this capitulation were not motivated by any counter-revolutionary intent, but simply by the aim of ousting a regime that had become, objectively speaking, a ward of German militarism. Lenin was only saved from the political bankruptcy of his collusion with Berlin by the collapse of the Second Reich in the autumn, which took the wind out of the need for these.29 The self-exclusion of Russia from the new world order in the making in 1919 did not materially affect its birth at Versailles. Treatment of Wilson and Lenin as if they were equivalent figures, ranged against each other, is a retrospective illusion, so dramatic was the implosion of Russian power 27 The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, London 2014, pp. 8, 14–5. 28 Deluge, pp. 70, 81–2. 29 Deluge, pp. 82–3, 129, 156–7, 170.

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at the end of the war, and so pitifully weak the emergent Bolshevik regime. The year 1919, Tooze observes, had nothing in common with 1945, when the United States and the Soviet Union squared off against each other in a bi-polar international system. Rather, it ‘resembled the unipolar moment of 1989’, when ‘the idea of reordering the world around a single power bloc and a common set of liberal, “Western” values seemed like a radical historical departure’, but in fact it was a reprise of the dramatic outcome of World War One.30 Much arguing and bargaining marked the negotiations at Versailles, but the victors stuck together in a moderate settlement, the fruit of compromise, that allowed for the eventual reintegration of Germany into the comity of leading powers under the aegis of Wilson’s brain-child, a League of Nations whose covenant was signed by all in advance of negotiations over the Treaty itself. Tragically, however, on his return to the us, Wilson was unable to secure ratification of American membership of the League from the Senate, a ‘heartbreaking fiasco’ that was certainly in part due to his personal rigidity, and by then physical frailty.31 But the deeper roots of this disaster lay in the paradox that America, the advance guard of economic and cultural modernity in the world at large, had yet to modernize its own political order at home. Despite the Progressivist vision of leaders like the first Roosevelt and Wilson, the us state remained crabbed and confined within its eighteenth-century constitutional matrix. The archaic prerogatives of the Senate, requiring a two-thirds vote for approval of any international treaty, without equivalent anywhere else in the world, were one expression of this lag, the most direct obstruction to Wilson’s hopes. The fiscal underdevelopment of the Federal state, still essentially dependent on customs-and-excise revenues, was another. The War had been financed essentially by monetary loosening, bank credits that doubled prices. In lieu of an income tax, this was in effect an inflation tax, which when abruptly reversed by the Treasury in 1920 plunged the country into deflation and mass unemployment, putting a Republican back into the White House with the largest electoral majority of the century. For Tooze, underlying the rhetoric of Wilson and his domestic opponents alike, and culprit for the failure of the us to rise to the challenges of the hour, was the quite recent ideology of American exceptionalism, essentially a higher form of nationalism at odds with the internationalist requirements of global leadership. Yet he detects a kernel of Burkean 30

Deluge, p. 10.

31

Deluge, pp. 18, 336, 338.

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wisdom in this outlook, a sense of the need to preserve the continuity of the country’s history after the trauma of the Civil War. Nor did it in practice mean any decisive retreat from the tasks of building a new world order. Contrary to legend, Harding’s Administration presided over a demonstration of it more successful than Versailles: the Washington Conference of 1921–22, which saw Wilson’s defeated Republican rival of 1916, Charles Evans Hughes, pull off a triumph of internationalist diplomacy in persuading Britain and Japan to cede naval ascent gracefully to the United States, in the manner of Gorbachev yielding to Bush seventy years later. Thereafter, successive presidents and their envoys, public or private, laboured to stabilize Europe in the wake of the tensions left by the reparations clauses of Versailles, with constructive proposals for easing financial difficulties in Germany like the Dawes and Young Plans, and eventually even a moratorium offered by Hoover on the war debts of France and Britain to the us itself. Nor were these efforts at pacification of international relations without admirable European, and for that matter Asian, counterparts. In England Austen Chamberlain, in France Aristide Briand, in Germany Gustav Stresemann—every one a Nobelist—were all convinced Atlanticists, looking to the us as their indispensable partner in the pursuit of peace; so too a resolute Ramsay MacDonald and the courageous Taisho reformers in Japan. Why then was the progressive liberal project of these forward-looking statesmen in the end derailed? Its flaw lay in the limitation of the American hegemony that it required and embodied. For common to Wilson and his successors was a refusal, not of enlightened engagement with the affairs of the rest of the world, but of the ultimate responsibility of leading an international coalition of powers to preserve free trade and collective security. Instead, their basic impulse was ‘to use America’s position of privileged detachment, and the dependence on it of the other major powers, to frame a transformation of world affairs’, the ‘better to uphold their ideal of America’s destiny’—a radical vision abroad, tied to a conservative attachment at home.32 For a decade, the combination yielded impressive achievements. But when the tragic test of the Great Depression came, it was not enough. International cooperation collapsed, and revolt against the once-hopeful moderation of the twenties erupted in the fanaticisms of the thirties, anticipated in their different ways by Hitler and Trotsky. But the very extremity of such reactions was evidence of the strength of the emergent order they sought to overthrow. 32

Deluge, p. 516.

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The spectacular escalation of violence unleashed in the 1930s and 1940s was a testament to the kind of force that the insurgents believed themselves to be up against. It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action.33

Yet the visions of statesmen like Briand were not in vain. For the ‘restless search for a new way of securing order and peace was the expression not of a deluded idealism, but of a higher form of realism’, which understood that only international coalition and cooperation could secure peace and prosperity on earth. ‘These were the calculations of a new type of liberalism, a Realpolitik of progress’.34 That came to fruition under the second Roosevelt. It is still much needed. Striking without hesitation a contemporary note, Tooze asked: ‘Why does “the West” not play its winning hands better? Where is the capacity for management and leadership? Given the rise of China, these questions have an obvious force’.35

A Chatham House version Clearer answers to the two questions raised by Durand—what method is implied in Tooze’s work, and what politics inform it?—start to come into view once The Deluge and Wages of Destruction are read together as instalments of a common project. In each, a ‘situational and tactical’ approach to the subject in hand determines entry to it in medias res, dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins: in Wages, the Depression, in Deluge, the First World War. In both, the overarching theme is the dynamism of American power as skeleton key to the twentieth century. In both, the political standpoint is, as self-described, that of a left-liberalism. Each of the terms around the hyphen is liable, however, to a range of meanings, and the compound has often, perhaps typically, proved unstable, one or other of its elements acquiring greater valence. Wages, as a study of the Nazi economy, offers less scope for considering the balance between them. Viewed in historical context, its central claim that Hitler’s real antagonist, the enemy that mattered, was America, not Russia, of course fitted well with axiomatic assumptions of the Cold War. If the Nazi war machine was ultimately directed against the United States, the ‘Once the extremists were given their chance, it was precisely the sense that they faced mighty opponents that animated the violence and lethal energy of their assault on the post-war order’: Deluge, pp. 7, 18. 34 35 Deluge, pp. 517–18. Deluge, p. 19. 33

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binary struggle between democracy and totalitarianism was preserved— the Soviet Union, rather than being the principal target of Hitler’s regime and the overwhelming agent of its downfall, as in historical fact it was, becoming the even greater totalitarian danger further east, to be dealt with in due course. But gratifying though such a deduction might be to American and West German audiences, Tooze never suggests it, and the salience of the Red Army in the narrative of Wages discounts it.36 The Deluge, composed after Tooze’s move from Cambridge to Yale, is politically more outspoken, a full-throated endorsement of the victors’ self-understanding of the First World War and the abiding vision that, for all their differences, inspired their efforts to build a progressive peace after it. Historiographically it can be described, with apologies to Elie Kedourie, as a distinctive exercise in the Chatham House version of the 36 See by contrast Brendan Simms, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough, London 2019, a mammoth inflation of the claim that a battle with ‘Anglo-America’—above all the United States—was Hitler’s over-riding obsession. Simms, an Irish neoconservative, founder of the Henry Jackson Society, depicts a Führer consumed less by anti-Semitism or anti-Communism than by a rabid anti-capitalism. His hostility to Anglo-Saxon capitalism was ‘crucially, anterior’ to his anti-Semitism, and ‘dwarfed his fear of Communism’—in his eyes simply an inferior ‘instrument of international capitalism’. ‘Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union or Bolshevism’: (pp. 22, 87–8, 53, xviii). Geo-politically, it was ‘the immense American industrial potential’, which had been ‘a staple of his thinking in the 1920s, and had dominated his strategy since the late 1930s’, that motivated his invasion of Russia in 1941. Operation Barbarossa was ‘ultimately directed against the Western Allies’, and ‘the push on Stalingrad, like the entire war, was primarily driven by the contest against Anglo-America’: (pp. 457, 408, 471). Mining his sources single-mindedly in pursuit of this case, Simms not only ignores evidence making a mockery of it—he can cite Hitler’s Four Year Plan without letting drop it ever mentions the ussr (pp. 260–1)—but himself contradicts it with admissions that demolish it. Far from planning any world-historical show-down with America, as promised by the book’s subtitle (‘Only the World’), in 1933 ‘Hitler envisaged a future peaceful relationship between the new Reich and the United States, based on a common set of so-called racial values’; in 1938 ‘would have greatly preferred to remain at peace’ with the British Empire and United States; in 1941 ‘sought not world domination, but world power status’ and ‘had no strategy for defeating the United States, because there obviously wasn’t one’: (pp. 164, 328–9, 450). The upshot is a construction not much less incoherent than Hitler’s own confusions of the time. But the ideological purpose of a consecration a contrario is transparent enough: if what Hitler really hated above all else was global capitalism and its stronghold in America, how could these be other than quintessentially good? That he never laid a significant finger on capitalism within the Third Reich hardly matters.

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period. By starting his narrative in 1916, Tooze avoids any reckoning with the question of what determined the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, and so of the nature of the War itself, simply asserting without further ado that American entry, provoked by German aggression, converted it into a battle for democracy and international law. Imperialism, in this accounting, was a very recent phenomenon, global competition just a few decades old—the Seven Years’ War and conquest of India might never have happened—and once the War had come to a successful end, the world was confronted with the problem of how it was to be peacefully ordered ‘after imperialism’.37 The narrative is constructed, in other words, by taking for granted the Entente apologetics in contemporary usage, a literature now so abundant that Tooze may have felt it unnecessary to spell out its truths once again, although they have little or nothing to do with a serious understanding of the conflict. ‘The structural reality’, as Alexander Zevin has written in these pages, ‘is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires and between empires’.38 For the extent of this bed-rock fact it is enough to consult the survey of the combatants in a recent comprehensive account, Empires at War, which covers all of them, down to the Portuguese wing of the East African theatre of hostilities, where the British imperial death-toll exceeded the total of American dead in Europe.39 It was the uneven distribution of planetary spoils that precipitated the Great War: in a system where every state took for granted the connexion between power and possessions, Germany, the largest and most rapidly expanding industrial economy, surrounded by the three largest territorial powers of the continent, had no commensurate share of the plunder, while Britain had such a hugely disproportionate empire, compared with any other, that no stable international equilibrium was possible, as Lenin saw at the time and as more critical historians have pointed out since.40 The sponge that palaeo-Entente justifications pass over the First World War, taken as read by Tooze, permits an enormity to follow. Deluge, p. 20. Alexander Zevin, ‘The Snuffer of Lamps’, nlr 94, July–August 2015, p. 139. 39 See Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds, Empires at War 1911–1923, Oxford 2014, p. 143. To prevail in the struggle, Britain mobilized some two and a half million, France half a million troops, from their overseas empires. 40 See inter alia David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered, Cambridge 1978, pp. 4–5, 24–5, 83–4, 158–9. 37

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The inter-imperialist slaughter that cost some 10 million lives on the battlefield, and 40 million casualties of one kind or another, is exonerated from any responsibility for the violence that followed it, attributed instead to an extremist rebellion against the pacific strength of the postwar settlement—Hitler and Trotsky twinned for the purpose. No word even refers to the scale of the killing unleashed by the liberal civilization of the Belle Époque, let alone to its socio-psychological consequences in hardening the world to more of the same, with scarcely a break after 1918. In treating of the Russian Revolution, Tooze even regrets there was not more of it during the War: had only a few more tens of thousands of peasant soldiers been able to hold on under commanders like Kornilov, without Bolshevik sedition sapping their patriotism, the solidarity of the Entente would have been saved, and the Central Powers held at bay in the East, instead of acquiring Lenin, foolishly spared the firing-squad by the Provisional Government, as their pawn. In Ireland, where ‘extreme Irish nationalists launched a suicidal assault on British power’ in 1916, damaging the responsible backing of Redmond and his party for the war effort, and the guerrilla war for independence of 1919–21 took ‘a terrible toll’, compounded by a civil war provoked by Sinn Fein’s ‘apocalyptic radicalism’, the upshot of all this mayhem ‘stored up violence for the rest of the century’.41 Some 1,400 lives were lost in the war for independence; perhaps 2,000 in the civil war. Whereas 30,000 Irishmen died in the trenches of France, the Balkans and the Middle East. Non-violently? Missing in Deluge is any sense of Henry James’s reaction to the war: The intense unthinkability of anything so blank and infamous in an age we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were a high refinement of civilization—in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it meant all the while, is like suddenly having to recognize in one’s family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains—it’s just such a similar shock.42

If the War ended as a victory for democracy and the rule of law, what of the peace that followed it? Did it embody these? Tooze finds no Deluge, pp. 180, 376–7. Letter to Claude Phillips, first Keeper of the Wallace Collection, three days before the outbreak of the War. Though soon an adoptive English patriot, James confessed a ‘terrible sense that the people of this country’ might with ‘brutal justice’ now have to pay for their ‘grossness and folly and blatancy’, exhibited from ‘so far back’: Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James, London 1920, vol. ii, pp. 389–90. 41

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special fault with the Treaty of Versailles, giving credit to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau—with particular sympathy for the last—for their understandably differing concerns and willingness to compromise between them to impose a satisfactory common settlement on the country they had defeated. Since Germany was the aggressor, the war-guilt clause of the Treaty, the formal ground for extracting openended reparations from it, could be taken as given. What mattered was that Germans, however much they detested it, should—in their own interests—take their medicine. Keynes’s philippic against the Treaty, rhetorical tour de force though it may have been, was an irresponsible piece of mischief-making, not only encouraging reckless German resistance to paying up, but poisoning relations between London and Paris, and handing a propaganda gift to Lenin and Trotsky into the bargain. ‘No single individual did more to undermine the political legitimacy of the Versailles peace’; and no danger of the time exercises Tooze more than the possibility that the new-born German Republic would have the nerve to reject the Allied ultimatum that it must sign the Treaty on the dotted line. Thankfully, the madness of ultras like Max Weber, who called for guerrilla resistance to it, and even such a moderate social democrat as then premier Philipp Scheidemann—who advocated a stance all too reminiscent of Trotsky’s ‘Neither Peace Nor War’ at Brest-Litovsk—was at the last minute overcome, and the Treaty accepted by Germany. There was still much recidivism in Weimar, whose Rapallo Pact with the pariah Soviet state reached by Rathenau three years later—‘a self-indulgent nationalist fantasy’—was not in keeping with the spirit of Versailles; and another high-risk crisis the next year, when France occupied the Rhineland to ensure its portion of reparations was coughed up. But Stresemann, unlike Rathenau, had understood all along that Germany must look to America to improve its situation, and in 1924 the Dawes Plan, supplying funds from Wall Street to ease reparation payments, rescued German democracy by taking the sting from Versailles. Such judgements follow naturally from the premise that the Great War saw a triumph of relative good over evil. Retribution was required, and to rejoin the ranks of respectability the offender must for its own good accept the measure of punishment, by no means excessive, meted out to it. That no stable peace could be built on such a self-serving historical fiction, rejected as dishonest and unjust by the virtual entirety of the nation

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forced to accept it, is a consideration that cannot occur within this mental framework. So too the thought that Germany might have avoided the rise of Hitler had it taken the course advocated by Weber or Scheidemann, refused the diktat of the Allies and let them see what benefit occupation of the country would bring them, in face of all the inevitable resistance, and how long their own populations would have put up with it.43 In the Germany of 1919, such resistance would have united most of the politically active country. By their capitulation, the centrist politicians who feature as the heroes of the hour in Tooze ensured that the banner of a rejection which they themselves knew was perfectly justified, and was bound in due course to prevail, would pass to the radical Right alone. The foundations of the edifice erected at Versailles were rotten from the start, foreordained to collapse.

Stripling hegemon? The fate of Germany—so hopeful as long as Stresemann was at the helm—forms the central thread of Tooze’s narrative of the new world order that emerged after 1918. But the panoramic scope is wide, a notable strength of the book, encompassing China, Japan, India, Egypt, South Africa, even a slide inserted from Patagonia. What balance-sheet of American hegemony, as postulated by Tooze, emerges from it? If the conceptual setting of Deluge situates it at a point along the political spectrum where liberalism ceases to have any particular implication with the left—its account of the Russian Revolution is of pure-bred Cold War stock44—the subsequent story it tells is much more ambiguous. Tooze does not venture full-scale portraits of any of his protagonists, but much of what he reports of Wilson is plainly incompatible with the role initially assigned him of prophet and principal architect of a world made safe for peace and democracy. ‘Thrilled’ by America’s victorious war with Spain and seizure of her Caribbean and Pacific colonies, Tooze dismisses this prospect, which the French High Command was ready to jump at, contending that the Allies would instead simply have lopped off big chunks of Germany and waited for the starving residue to come to its senses, in a kind of Morgenthau Plan ante diem, no less fanciful or more likely to have been adopted than the Treasury Secretary’s ruminations in 1944: Deluge, p. 315. 44 Coinciding with his move to Yale, Tooze could report that he now enjoyed ‘entrée to a new world of American policy debate’ at confabulations with the National Intelligence Council: Deluge, p. xxiii. 43

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‘more aggressive than any of his predecessors’ in dispatching troops to the Caribbean and Mexico, devoted to the preservation of—in his own words—‘white supremacy on this planet’, Wilson made no mention of self-determination in his Fourteen Points, vetoed discussion of Ireland at Versailles, and had no truck with Japan’s call for a commitment to racial equality in the Covenant of the League, enthroning instead the Monroe Doctrine as one of its founding principles.45 In 1919, having cut off financial aid to Italy to oblige it to scrap the treaty with Britain and France which awarded its entry into the War on their side with gains in Tyrol and the Adriatic, within days Wilson was telling China it must abide by the treaty extorted from it according Japan gains in Shandong and Manchuria, because ‘the sacredness of treaties’ was one of the principles for which the War had been fought.46 At home, the world champion of democracy presided over the greatest single wave of political repression in modern American history, replete with a pogrom against immigrants of the wrong ethnic background. All this can be found in Deluge. But it is never aggregated, and the mass arrests of 1919 are tacitly deflected to Wilson’s Attorney-General. Beyond the person, the larger question is whether Tooze’s picture of global American dominance already in the inter-war period—over allies, effectual up to the Depression; in the imaginary of opponents, throughout—is accurate. Certainly, the signal merit of Deluge is its demonstration of the continuing leverage enjoyed by the us over the leading European states by the loop between the war debts to it of Britain, France and Italy, and the reparations owed France and Britain by Germany, leaving Washington in a position to adjust the two as suited its interests. The gist of Tooze’s exposition of this financial chokehold is that it was generally, though not invariably, put to benign purpose, seeking to temper the sharp edge of the arrangements at Versailles and restore Germany to what today would be called ‘the international community’. Underplayed, however, are two features of the transatlantic relationship: the implacability of the avarice of the American state—entitled, one might argue, to the later sobriquet of vulture capitalism—in extracting compensation for Deluge, pp. 44, 60, 120, 193, 326, 269. To credit Wilson with a gift for hypocrisy in cases like these is unnecessary: vanity and self-deception sufficed. 45

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its support of the Entente regardless of the relative burdens of the War; and the unsleeping fear of revolution that led the us to back political reaction wherever required to crush any threat of it, nurturing excellent relations with Mussolini from the start.47 To the financial arsenal of us power, the Washington Conference added naval gains. But how far did these two assets—money and warships—permit an American hegemony, the term persistently used by Tooze to describe the us role in the world from 1919 to 1932? This was a period when the size of the American army, under 200,000, was smaller than that of Portugal; when the us Foreign Service, dating only from 1924, was still pupal;48 when it had no embassy in Moscow; when its presence in China could not compare with that of Britain, effectively in charge of the country’s fiscal system; when in Europe it was a bystander to the sequel to Versailles at Locarno. What was the initiative for which it was best known? The Kellog–Briand ‘Peace Pact’ of 1928, a wish-list of feel-good futility, leaving scarcely a trace in the history of the thirties. All this followed from the reality to which Tooze himself draws attention in describing the fiasco of Wilson’s project when he got back to America in 1919: the stunted, only half-modern character of the Federal state machine itself. But after arguing and illustrating that While it set the tone for hyperbolic narratives of ‘us pre-eminence’ permeating interbellum Europe with ‘an impressive display of economic, political and moral power’ (even, many contemporaries would have been surprised to learn, ‘from Switzerland to the Soviet Union, Europeans acknowledged America’s cultural leadership’), Frank Costigliola’s study Awkward Dominion (1984), the first of several precursors to Deluge, was less euphoric in outlook. Conceding that us determination to ‘preserve the economic benefits of the international gold standard, the war debt settlements, the foreign investments, and the trade surplus’ for itself ‘assigned most of the adjustment burdens to Europe’, Costigliola also noted that in the hope of ‘containing revolutionary upheaval’, Washington consistently ‘favoured reactionaries’ where necessary, State Department analysts optimistically comparing the Nazis in 1933 to ‘the Italian Fascists with whom the United States had worked so closely’: Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933, Ithaca, ny 1984, pp. 263, 217, 178, 164, 139, 260. 48 Martin Weil opens his study of the narrow composition of the service: ‘This is the story of a small group of Christian gentlemen who founded the profession of diplomacy on a permanent basis in America’: A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the us Foreign Service, New York 1978, p. 9. 47

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with force, he fails to remember it when otherwise writing throughout of American hegemony—even of European orphanage once it faded, as if kindly parental guidance by Washington had alone kept the Old World safe till the slump. The claim is jumping the gun. The world of 1919 was in no sense unipolar. us hegemony would, of course, come in due course. But backdating it to the time of Harding and Coolidge is an anachronism, answering to an authorial hobby-horse rather than the historical record.

iv. financial crisis With Crashed, Tooze’s problematic finally enters into its own. Durand has provided so full an account of the very great achievement of the book that there is little need to recapitulate it here. It is enough to recall its main case. The financial crisis that broke out in 2008 was the product of a sudden paralysis of the interlocking matrix of corporate balancesheets, as the interbank lending on which it depended seized up in the us and eu in the wake of the Lehman default; its global fall-out was a dramatic demonstration that the central axis of world finance was not, as often imagined, American-Asian, but American-European. As the danger of a second Great Depression loomed, it was the United States alone that averted it, with emergency measures taken by the Fed and the Treasury in a set of bold innovations—central bank swaps, quantitative easing, macroprudential regulation—stabilizing the system. European response, by contrast, was not only laggard but counterproductive, until Draghi repositioned the ecb four years later. Out of the crisis, us hegemony was reasserted, and the dollar emerged more dominant than ever in the global financial system. But a pragmatic managerialism that bailed out bankers and stock-holders left society as unequal and even more divided than before, detonating populist revolts that have destabilized both America and Europe in a mutation of the crisis that has yet to end. In spatial sweep, narrative brio and striking detail, no other work on the crash comes near Tooze’s account of it. Where does his conclusion of the trilogy leave Durand’s two queries, of politics and method? In keeping with its predecessors, Crashed takes the hypertrophy of finance that is the heuristic object of Durand’s study as a situational given, without structural explanation. In that sense, it

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too starts in medias res. The conditions that generated the crisis of 2008 are reduced to the demise of Bretton Woods—attributed to pressure from ‘the struggle for income shares in an increasingly affluent society’ and ‘the liberalization of offshore dollar trading in London’, as if the war in Vietnam was a cost irrelevant to Nixon’s decision to cut the painter to gold—and the ensuing need for neoliberal discipline to halt inflation: three trifling sentences in a work of six hundred pages. It is as if the decade-by-decade decline in growth of the real economy, across advanced capitalism—the long down-turn that arrived in the seventies— had occurred on another planet. If that structural framework, determining a system-wide displacement of productive capital into bloated global finance, is missing, the American response to the crisis suffers in this telling from a similar blankness of background, if more paradoxically. For at the outset, after stating that the us alone proved able to master the challenge posed by the crisis, Tooze writes: ‘that capacity is an effect of structure—the United States is the only state that can generate dollars’, then immediately adding ‘but it is also a matter of action, of policy choices—positive in the American case, disastrously negative in the European case’. The work that follows, however, brackets the structural capacity completely—it is not mentioned once thereafter—delivering instead an encomium of the policy choices taken by the Fed and the Treasury under Bernanke and Geithner as saving the world from disaster, albeit at the cost of some unhappy side-effects. What this edifying story omits is the simple, central fact of the unique leeway the us enjoyed in the prerogatives of the dollar, as the world’s premier reserve currency and store of value. A historical comparison is enough to show why the Obama Administ­ ration could avert a depression as the Hoover Administration could not. When the Kreditanstalt collapsed in Austria in 1931—the real trigger, rather than the Wall Street crash of 1929, for the onset of the slump— Hoover, less rigid than his legend, passed the most expansionary budget of the decade, with a deficit of over half Federal expenditure. So strong, however, was domestic and foreign disapproval of such license that he back-tracked with tax increases the following year. For so long as the us was tethered to the gold standard, it could not afford significant fiscal or monetary loosening without risking a run on the dollar, which its

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authorities were not prepared to incur.49 Eight decades later, by contrast, the us could run a huge trade deficit and print money as it wished without fearing retribution from foreign bond-holders or investors, typically all the keener on T-bills and Wall Street stocks the more anxious economic conditions at large became. So the Obama Administration could run up the biggest peacetime fiscal deficit in us history—it jumped from 2.7 per cent of gdp in 2007 to 13 per cent in 2009—with impunity. No Eurozone country could do anything like this. There, the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997–99 in principle banned any deficit above 3 per cent, a rule cemented by the Fiscal Compact of 2013, even written into the constitutions of Italy and Spain. This enormous structural difference disappears in Crashed, where the institutional framework of the Treaty of Maastricht and the monetary union it created do not rate so much as an entry in the index. The divergent responses to the crisis of America and Europe were not just a question of policy options: they were the product of two radically contrasted—one enabling, the other inhibiting—structures.

The missing piece Those who enjoyed the imperial latitude of the dollar have boasted not just of the success of the actions they took, but of their valour in taking them. The ghost-assisted memoirs of Bernanke and Geithner, entitled respectively The Courage to Act and Stress Test, present their time in office as a nerve-racking ordeal, bravely confronted and boldly surmounted, saving the nation with measures of unprecedented novelty as it teetered on the edge of an abyss. Crashed criticizes the implication that they themselves had no responsibility for the dangers they battled 49 Hoover ‘shared with many contemporary economists the view that fiscal and monetary policies must be directed to support gold rather than directly to promote domestic economic expansion or bank stability’: Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon, ‘Lessons from the 1930s Great Depression’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 26, no. 3, 2010, pp. 285–317, which also disposes of the opposite legend that the New Deal was based in large measure on fiscal stimulus. For the classic demonstration that failure to loosen monetary policy—for Friedman and Schwartz, the principal cause of the Depression—was essentially determined by a rational fear under the gold standard of an exchange-rate crisis and devaluation of the dollar, see Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, New York 1992, pp. 295 ff.

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with, and that the upshot of their efforts was of undivided benefit to all. But it doesn’t seriously question the self-serving pathos of power heroically exercised.50 That is in part because there is a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of global finance that Tooze otherwise puts together with such skill. Japan, the third largest economy in the world, is scarcely to be found in Crashed. That is certainly not due to any lack of competence or interest on Tooze’s part; Deluge pays due attention to the country and its economy in the inter-war period. Rather, its omission is a requirement of the narrative, on which its inclusion would have cast a different light. For virtually all of the daring innovations with which Tooze credits the us authorities for stopping the crisis of 2008—and more—had been pioneered by their Japanese counterparts, most of them well beforehand, starting in the nineties, and in wider and ampler measure, without resort to chest-thumping. Not only qe—central bank purchase of bonds to inject cash into the financial system—and forward guidance, but pko—‘pricekeeping operations’ (ironically so-named after the un euphemism) to support stock values, and qqe—central bank purchase of corporate bonds and equity. Not only zirp—zero interest rate policy—but the first use of negative interest rates, and of yield-curve control. All this on a scale making American use of heterodox tools look modest. The excess reserves created by the Bank of Japan’s use of qe have been larger than ‘The terror of those days . . . the overwhelming burden of responsibility combined with the paralysing fear of catastrophic failure . . . the loneliness and the numbness’—Geithner’s ghost-writer, on loan from Time, in top gear: Stress Test, p. 200. Tooze: ‘There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these professions. It was a fearful situation’: Crashed, p. 164. Since then, in a lecture for the London Review of Books this year, he has gone further, recounting an interview—‘the conversation went extremely well’—with the former Treasury Secretary, now banker for Warburg Pincus, in which he describes the ‘formidable charisma and energy that Geithner exudes to an extraordinary extent—he is a truly Napoleonic figure’, and repeats a phrase of Geithner’s that above all impressed him: ‘Since the nineties, we’ve been defying gravity’. Tooze continues: ‘That really shocked me’. Why? Because ‘for somebody of my disposition, America isn’t subject to gravity; America is gravity: America is the gravitational force that organizes global power in the twentieth century.’ There was no occasion to be surprised. The same trope was already on display in Stress Test: p. 105. At work is a not-so-subliminal image of the us from the popcorn culture of the speaker, to be read in the opposite register: America cruising aloft, Superman in his cape. 50

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those created by the Fed, in an economy a quarter the size of the us.51 As a percentage of gdp, the boj’s balance-sheet is nearly four times bigger than the Fed’s. This enormous injection of liquidity into the economy was possible not only because, unlike the United States, Japan has posted a trade surplus for most of the past forty years, but also because 95 per cent of its public debt, denominated in its own currency, is held by domestic institutions and households, making it virtually as proof against loss of foreign confidence as the supremacy of the dollar renders America’s, if not more so, even though the debt is double in size. So too, the most important innovation of all in ‘the completely new range of policy tools’, as Durand summarizes Tooze, ‘macro-prudential supervision’ of the financial system: in 1998–99 the Japanese Ministry of Finance’s resolution of eleven ‘city banks’ into just three ‘mega-banks’ and a domestic-operations-only fourth, not to speak of the Bank of Japan’s grip on a stock market where it is owner of 75 per cent of the exchange-traded fund market and a top ten share-holder in 40 per cent of Japanese companies,52 puts Geithner’s squeamish tinkering with Citigroup and the rest, and its enfeebled issue in Dodd–Frank, in the shade. More radical in all these ways than the Treasury, so too was the Ministry of Finance in the more traditional area of fiscal policy, unleashing ‘the largest single peace-time government expenditure in history’,53 amid successive stimulus packages in the nineties totalling some $1.3 trillion—nearly twice the size of Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.54 In doing so, it could draw on historical precedent. Pre-war, Japan led the world in recovering from the Depression with its coordination of monetary expansion and full-throttle Fed: $2.1 trillion; boj: $2.87 trillion [¥305 trillion}: see Richard Koo, The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization, Chichester 2018, p. 131. 52 Financial Times, 27–28 July 2019. 53 See R. Taggart Murphy, Japan and the Shackles of the Past, New York 2014, p. 190, whose analysis of the institutions and vicissitudes of the post-war Japanese economy is in a class by itself. The bail-out package of October 1998 came to ¥72 trillion. (In absolute size, the prc package of 2009 was double that of Japan’s in 1998, though on a per capita basis five times lesser). 54 Sean Ross, ‘The Diminishing Effect of Japan’s Quantitative Easing’, Investopedia, 25 June 2019. Taking alarm at the potential cost of the ensuing deficits should interest rates rise, the mof would periodically lame expansion by increasing the sales tax, each time to negative effect, as emphasized by Murphy. 51

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fiscal stimulus—something never attempted by the New Deal—under Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo.55 When the crisis of 2008 broke, manufacturing was hard hit: Japanese exports plunged by half and the country suffered a fall in gdp, something it had never known since the mid-seventies, even when the property bubble burst in 1989. But the financial system was little shaken by the Lehman shock:56 tribute to the fact that Japanese banks, unlike European ones, were not entangled in such a fatal nexus with their American counterparts. If the boj drew on dollar swaps from the Fed to lend to them, it was never obliged to do so, since the foreign-exchange reserves in Tokyo were over seven times larger than such loans, ‘so it could be said that Japan did not need its swap line’57—and so has no place in Tooze’s narrative of the crash. Yet few stock images of the period are so familiar as the awful fate of Japan, dutifully conjured up for White House consumption by Geithner: years of persistent stagnation since 1989, compared with buoyant American growth before 2008 and rebound since. Don’t they make its recent history an object lesson in what to avoid? Certainly, the Japanese variant has not escaped the common blights of advanced capitalism in this era—increased poverty, precarity, inequality; declining unions, See inter alia Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession and the Uses—and Misuses—of History, Oxford 2015, pp. 256–7: ‘This, then, was an aggressively reflationary monetary policy made credible by fiscal expansion. In other words, it was precisely the policy claimed, erroneously, to have been followed in the United States under fdr. But in Japan, unlike the United States, the fiscal expansion was real.’ 56 See Mitsuhiko Nakano, Financial Crisis and Bank Management in Japan (1997 to 2016), London 2016, p. 94. The plight of the manufacturing sector, of course, affected banks as creditors to firms that fell into difficulty, a conventional pressure altogether distinct from a freeze-up of interbank lending. 57 William Allen, International Liquidity and the Financial Crisis, Cambridge 2013, p. 136; peak use of swaps by the boj was $127.6 billion; foreign-exchange reserves stood at $971.6 billion: p. 129. Why did the boj have recourse to swaps at all? Formally speaking, Japan’s reserves—held in a Foreign Exchange Special Account— are controlled by the Ministry of Finance. But though since 1998 the boj has been technically independent of the mof, and in outlook the two are not always at one, the mof is a ‘sovereign’ administration, as the boj—55 per cent state-owned—is not, and can dispose of its reserves as it wishes; so this was scarcely an insurmountable difficulty. See Akio Mikuni and R. Taggart Murphy, Japan’s Policy Trap: Dollars, Deflation and the Crisis of Japanese Finance, Washington, dc 2002, pp. 48–9, 115. The Fed, however, was anxious that dollar holdings held by foreign Treasuries not be cashed out, for fear of causing panic, and probably the Japanese authorities complied to appease it, the boj applying for swap lines in a spirit of solidarity—also status as a member of the club of major central banks—rather than necessity. 55

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arrested wages, rising profits. Yet its growth rate per capita has been not that much worse than America’s, as even Bernanke concedes;58 unemployment has never risen as high, there is less polarization of opulence and misery, the health, education, safety and life expectancy of its citizens are all superior. Behind a veil of Rawlsian ignorance, who would prefer existence in the Land of the Free?

Intensifying competition More largely, if the underlying nature of the Great Recession, and what it might portend for the future, is never really addressed by Tooze, it is in part because here too the exclusion of Japan from his compass exacts a significant cost. In the nearly 2,000 footnote references of Crashed, there is none to the remarkable Taiwanese economist at Nomura Research, Richard Koo, one of the most original minds in the field,59 whose Balance-Sheet Recession of 2003 first explained the reasons why, after the collapse of Japanese asset prices in the nineties, ultra-low interest rates and massive injections of liquidity into the economy by the boj failed to overcome stagnation: essentially because companies had switched from the normal imperatives of profit maximization to debt minimization, ceasing to borrow—and invest—no matter how cheap or abundant the funds available to them. But why then was there insufficient demand to induce firms to invest? Fifteen years later, in The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization, Koo went on to offer an answer. Historically, paths of growth could be divided into three periods: an era before the Lewis turning-point, when an abundant supply of surplus labour from the countryside allowed industrialization based on cheap wages and Ben Bernanke, ‘Some Reflections on Japanese Monetary Policy’, Brookings 2017, p. 4. Bernanke has consistently preened himself on his foresight in criticizing shortcomings of Japan’s management of its economic affairs, and failure to exhibit ‘Rooseveltian resolve’ of the sort he would embody: see his ‘Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis?’, 1999, and subsequent purring (‘much of what I wrote about Japan in the decade before the global financial crisis has held up reasonably well’). In The Courage to Act, he informs the reader with Pooteresque self-satisfaction that ‘the Bank of Japan adopted my suggestions fourteen years later’; even better, the Tokyo press now expected incoming boj governor Kuroda to ‘adopt more “Bernanke-like tactics”’: pp. 41, 552. 59 Son of a leading opponent of the Guomindang take-over of the island who after 1947 went into exile in Japan, where Koo was born and grew up; later working for a time under Volcker at the New York Fed, before moving back to Tokyo. 58

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widening inequality to take off; a ‘golden age’ when the ltp was reached, as urbanization became standard, labour markets tightened, employers had to raise wages and productivity, and inequality contracted, powering mass consumption and much faster growth; finally a ‘pursued’ stage, post-ltp, when competitors enjoying pre-ltp wage-levels yet modern technologies invade the markets of those who are henceforward chased, shrinking their opportunities for domestic investment, and driving firms to export capital to cheap-wage locations abroad, depressing growth rates and increasing inequality at home. Workers, ‘exploited’ in the first phase, ‘pacified’ in the second, are ‘on their own’ in the third, deserted by employers and left on their uppers. The United States was the first to suffer from pursuit, by Japan and Germany in the sixties and seventies; Japan in turn was pursued by South Korea and Taiwan in the eighties, and now China was the pursuer of all of these. Characteristic of the contemporary period, Koo argues, is the quickening arrival and shortening life of the golden ages enjoyed by newcomers, as more and more countries join the global bandwagon.60 It can immediately be seen how the upshot of this comparative historical schema converges with Durand’s hypothesis of the vent of financialization in the ‘pursued’ economies; as too with Robert Brenner’s explanation of the long downturn that set in across them from the seventies onwards.61 Without taking note of Koo’s work, Lawrence Summers has recently offered a scenario that fits it in striking fashion from another angle. What if the standard recipes of the hour for avoiding another crisis—monetary flexibility, fiscal expansion, macro-prudential regulation—became inadequate? Then extreme measures might prove necessary. ‘Think of what Japanese macroeconomic policy has had to resort to in order to sustain demand and maintain 1 per cent annual growth over the last twenty years: interest rates, both short and long, close to zero, large fiscal deficits leading to a very large increase in public debt, massive central bank purchases, and recourse to external demand in the form of a current account surplus’—the last, crucially, ‘an option that would not be available to other countries if the same weakness were to affect all of them. Were Japan to be a template of things to come for the rest of the advanced countries, what would be needed would indeed be a macroeconomic policy revolution’. Was this a realistic prospect? ‘If the United States or Europe were to go into recession in the next couple of years, in all likelihood their situation would look much like that of 60 61

Koo, The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization, pp. 54–77. Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, passim.

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Japan, with zero rates, large fiscal deficits, below-target inflation, and inadequate growth. We may be one cyclical downturn away from the need for a revolution’.62 Cutting the temerities of the Fed drily down to size, this from the embodiment of neoliberal swagger at Clinton’s side in the confident nineties.

Roots of the Eurocrisis In the crisis, one monetary innovation which the Fed did claim as its own were its swap lines supplying dollar liquidity to European banks, on which Tooze lays legitimate emphasis as an unadvertised transgression of its domestic mandate.63 Yet the very interlocking of American and European financial systems that forms the central theme of his book makes it clear that, once embarked on bailing out us banks and insurance companies, the Fed had no option but to follow suit with European counterparts, so intertwined were the two—the latter indeed dominating the market in the riskiest layer of securitized mortgages in America. There is no call to make heroism out of such necessity. On the other side of the swaps, it seems fairly clear that European central banks, rather than being startled and overwhelmed by the generosity of us largesse, counted on it in advance. As one of Tooze’s anonymous central bankers—perhaps Mervyn King—told him: ‘Given our long history of relations with the Fed, we didn’t expect to have any difficulty getting hold of dollars’. Why this should be described as ‘an astonishingly audacious assumption’, rather than its comfortable opposite, is obscure.64 Without even so much as a need to mention the $17 trillion worth of negativeyielding debt—up from $8.3 trillion just nine months ago—currently weighing on the global economy. Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Stabilization Policy: Evolution or Revolution?’, in Evolution or Revolution? Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy after the Great Recession, Cambridge, ma 2019, pp. xxxviii–ix; a volume containing contributions from the crème de la crème of the central banking world and the areopagus of scholarly reflection: Bernanke, Draghi, Haldane, Coeuré, Rubin, Gopinath, Rodrik, Rajan, Eichengreen, Reinhart, etc. 63 In their joint self-congratulation for popular consumption, Bernanke, Geithner and Paulson allocate just four discreet sentences to swaps: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and its Lessons, New York 2019, pp. 42–3. In historical reality, as distinct from current legend, central bank swaps were not a brain-wave of 2008. They date from the sixties, when the Fed chairman of that period, William McChesney Martin, instituted them to defend the dollar from speculative attack and halt the drain of gold from us reserves during the Vietnam War. For particulars, see ‘The Fed’s Novel Idea’, in Daniel McDowell, Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the imf and the International Lender of Last Resort, New York 2017, pp. 54–63. 64 Crashed, p. 90. 62

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Nevertheless, Tooze’s mastery of the North Atlantic nexus within the landscape of global finance yields a striking picture of its European wing, puncturing complacent self-images of the Old World. The notion that ‘social Europe’ differed in any significant way from the logic of financial capitalism in America he exposes as an illusion. In reality, Europe was far more heavily over-banked than the us. In size of assets, the three biggest banks in the world in 2007 were European, while the liabilities of the banking system in every member state of the Eurozone, measured against their gdp, were at least three times larger than those of America.65 It was no accident that the first tremors of the earthquake to come originated not in the us but in the eu, with the crisis of bnp Paribas and collapse of Northern Rock in August–September 2007. Entanglement with America to the west; predation in Europe itself to the east, where Tooze shows the extent of the financial appropriation of local assets in the former Communist countries by Dutch, Austrian and Scandinavian capital. Nor, of course, has he anything but scorn for the role of the ecb and the turn to austerity once the crisis broke. There, in one of the many gripping set-pieces of the book, Tooze delivers a damning verdict on the treatment of Greece by the Commission, the ecb and the imf, and subsequently the European Council, which presided over its fate from 2010 onwards. The crushing of Syriza’s attempt to negotiate less draconian terms for its society and economy is not only vividly portrayed, but set in the wider context of the thwarting of governments of the left in these years by the external imposition of ‘political and financial discipline’ on them. No one could doubt on which side Tooze’s sympathies lie in this exercise of brute power. But just where did this discipline come from, and how far did it extend? At this crux, his account takes leave of absence. At its centre lies the nature of the European Union, and the position of Germany within it. Evasive on the first and inconsistent on the second, Crashed offers no coherent account of the relationship between them, for it is too protective of each. Decisive in this regard is the book’s abstraction of the decisions taken by policy-makers from the structures in which they were working. What was the matrix of the monetary union created at Maastricht? In Crashed, Tooze vouchsafes barely a word on the Treaty, though elsewhere he has spoken of its aims as creating a ‘European society by stealth’, and ‘binding 65

Crashed, p. 110.

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Germany to Europe’.66 Ignored is the carefully crafted ordo-liberal design of a single currency managed by a supranational bank, elevated clear of any democratic electorate, insulating market forces from a popular will inherently destructive of them—advocated by Hayek already before the War, and realized by his Freiburg disciples after it; the intellectual world of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists. The sole mandate of the ecb would be price stability, to which a fiscal straitjacket was added in the nineties. The authors of each were German: Karl-Otto Pöhl and Theo Waigel. The provisions of the latter were soon flouted by Germany itself, penalties unenforced; of the former with more difficulty, since they prohibited the central bank from purchase of government bonds. But in due course that rule too was circumvented when need arose.67 qe started under Trichet at the ecb, if far too meagrely for Tooze.

Reorganizing Europe Dismissing the idea that any inescapable conflict between markets and peoples, capitalism and democracy had much to do with pressures on Greece and weaker members of the Eurozone in the crisis, Tooze blames instead the refusal of the ecb to buy bonds in the required quantity. Once it did so under Draghi, however, the squeeze on Greece did not abate, but continued, as he himself notes.68 His account of the role of Germany in these years contradicts itself no less freely. On the one hand, he insists that its history forbade any ‘strategies of domination or even overly assertive leadership’, acquitting its political class of any such temptation. On the other, he is obliged to report that when Papandreou and Berlusconi were ousted as premiers of Greece and Italy in 2011, senior officials in Berlin could be heard boasting: ‘We do regime change better than the Americans’; and to admit that the Fiscal Compact of 2013 was a straightforward imposition of the German ‘debt brake’ on the rest of the Eurozone. Even Habermas could speak with dismay of Germany openly claiming hegemony in Europe.69 Tooze, ‘A General Logic of Crisis’, London Review of Books, 5 January 2017, p. 7. Of its economic intent, he merely remarks antiseptically that it sought ‘to install a permanent disinflationary regime’. 67 ‘The whole concept of getting around European rules and doing qe without call­ ing it qe was extremely clever’, Lucrezia Reichlin—former head of research at the ecb—told the Financial Times on 8 February 2012, adding that it was Trichet’s idea. 68 Compare Crashed, pp. 397 and 532. 69 Compare Crashed, pp. 113–14 with 412, 417–18, 534. 66

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The reality is that the European Union, as it came to be constructed at Maastricht, half-way between confederal and federal principles, was an institutionally complex, sui generis structure whose logic, as its membership expanded, virtually required a leading state or bloc of states to give it direction. By reason not only of the size of its economy and population, but also the local ideology and experience of its political class, Germany was the natural candidate for this role, as itself at once a federal union, architect of the central bank that would guide the monetary union of Europe, and source of the legal culture behind it. Perceptive German minds, contrary to Tooze, had no difficulty explaining their country’s role as the hegemonic power within the eu of the new century, as necessary to its coherence as Prussia had been to the Second Reich, another federal structure, under Bismarck.70 At inter-state level, of course, as Hayek had shown, popular sovereignty was excluded. At national level it remained, if now properly qualified. Regrettably, however, direct expression of the popular will, unacceptable in the Federal Republic, persisted in not a few member states. A referendum in France had nearly undone Maastricht itself, one in Denmark had excluded the country from the single currency, another in Ireland had threatened the same to the Treaty of Nice, and worst of all—truly dismaying—a European Constitution laying down the free market as a core value of the Union was overwhelmingly rejected, not only by the famously fickle French but even the staunch Dutch in the referendums of 2005. What was to be done? Germany lost no time. Merkel swiftly confected a facsimile of the charter as a treaty for signature by governments, who could be relied on to do their duty, as opposed to voters who could not, and at Lisbon the requisite document was adopted nem con. How do these events feature in Crashed? ‘Left-wing hostility to the promarket character of the eu and nationalist hostility to Brussels’ united to deliver a profound shock to Europe’s elite. ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of the constitution, popular democracy had asserted itself’. For the space of a sentence, one might say. Imperturbably, Tooze continues: Given the reality of increasingly close economic and financial integration and the extension of the eu to Eastern Europe, the project of reorganizing Europe could not be simply abandoned. A substitute had to be found. If a true constitution was no longer a viable proposition, Europe would have to proceed by the tried-and-tested formula of intergovernmental treaty. 70

For two leading cases, see The H-Word, London and New York 2017, pp. 169–76.

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This gave a key role to Germany and from November 2005 that meant Chancellor Angela Merkel.71

In other words, the vital task of ‘reorganizing Europe’ had nothing to do with democracy—quite the contrary, and the appointed leader in neutering it was—not a word of explanation is even required: who else?—the Chancellor of Germany. Its ‘key role’ was simply ‘given’. Not that the nested structures of an ordo-liberal confederation and hegemony of Berlin within it have ever been a complete fit, or that the operationalization of the first invariably requires the second. Elsewhere, Tooze can be blunter about the activities of the ecb, German-designed but whose head has never so far been a German, describing the demand by Trichet and Draghi that the Spanish and Italian governments cut spending and increase taxes—in Italy, if necessary by invoking emergency Cold War powers, on pain of being denied purchase of local bonds—as a ‘blatant attempt to shift the balance of social and political power by means of monetary policy’.72 But neither episodes like this, nor the subsequent imposition of the Fiscal Compact—not by coincidence, grotesquely rammed into the constitutions of Spain and Italy—nor even the racking of Greece, not to speak of the still harsher fate of Cyprus (punished with a ruthless expropriation of local depositors, while eu financial institutions lost not a cent), which is passed over in silence, ever yield a critical overall reflection on the Union responsible for them. Of its own accord, a situational-tactical narrative excludes this. Behind it, however, in this instance plainly lies a parti pris. The single currency is the ark of a covenant that is not to be questioned. Tooze does not enter into the particulars of its untouchability, depositing allusion to these into a footnote supported by a couple of technical say-so’s declaring doubts irreceivable. But an extreme susceptibility on the issue is plain from treatment of arguments at variance with this core value as little better than regression to tropes of national socialism.73 Evidence of Crashed, p. 113. 72 Crashed, pp. 398–9. Insinuation in ‘A General Logic of Crisis’ that Wolfgang Streeck, a leading critic of the eu since Maastricht, must be infected with anti-Semitism belongs in the sottisier of a Euro-dovecote prone to being flustered into such flights of imagination, alongside Habermas’s warning to French voters that if they rejected the European Constitution of 2005 they would be inviting a second Auschwitz. In Tooze’s case, it should be said, this was a rare lapse: in debate he has usually been even-tempered and generous. 71

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the economic benefits of the euro, hard to come by, is not required.74 Explaining his pledge to do whatever it took to save it, Draghi did not waste time trying to demonstrate these. He simply told his listeners, in words Tooze might echo, that they should not underestimate ‘the amount of political capital that is being invested in the euro’. Political capital: what is that? The investment of the political class in its own immunity from popular jurisdiction within the zone franche of the single currency. Yet though it is taken as granted in Crashed that the Union of Maastricht is a public good, its performance after 2008 offers Tooze few grounds for satisfaction. If at the end of the day the eurozone remained intact, it was not of its own doing. So utterly inadequate was its response to the crisis that by 2010, ‘European affairs could no longer be safely left to the Europeans’.75 Only American leadership and example, once the ecb had learnt to follow the Fed, could extricate it from floundering—‘the Eurozone was saved by its belated Americanization’. But that was in keeping with the origins of European integration, and the early, heady vision of its future that could now be envisaged once again: ‘America had reasserted a new version of liberal hegemony. Europe resumed the forward march to a United States of Europe it had begun under American guidance in 1947.’76

Feet of clay What then of the United States itself? There, paradoxically, Trump’s victory in 2016, a more drastic reversal than any development in Europe, leads to a verdict on Obama’s record more caustic and consolidated than Writing on the eve of the crisis in 2008, Andrea Boltho and Barry Eichengreen, both supporters of European integration, concluded that the Common Market may have increased gdp by 3–4 per cent from the late fifties to the mid-seventies; that the impact of the ems was negligible; that the Single European Act may have added perhaps another 1 per cent; and that it was unlikely that the Monetary Union had had ‘more than a very small effect on the area’s growth rate or even level of output’. For these judgements, see ‘The Economic Impact of European Integration’, Discussion Paper No 6820, Centre for Economic Policy Research, May 2008. None of the writers—Martin Sandbu, Waltraud Schelkle, Erik Jones—cited by Tooze as concurring with his attachment to the euro (Crashed, p. 619) offer a single figure in support of the notion that it has promoted growth. 75 Crashed, p. 398. 76 Crashed, p. 444. After attributing this prospect to unnamed academic optimists, Tooze ratifies it as ‘a reasonable assessment’, even if the stabilization of 2012, and ‘the important phase of state building’ it involved, would come at a steep political price. 74

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can be found in Tooze’s treatment of either the institutions or leading states of the eu. Due homage is paid to those who averted Armageddon. But they did so with technocratic fixes and ‘spectacularly lopsided bailouts’ that made American capitalism even more concentrated and oligopolistic than before, yielding a ‘dismal recovery’—one so inequitable that 95 per cent of what growth it generated was annexed by the top 1 per cent of Americans, the remainder seeing virtually no improvement in their income after the crisis. Obama’s much touted health-care reform, the Affordable Care Act, even if it had created its own constituency, was by any larger measure ‘deeply disappointing’. Little or no support was forthcoming to distressed mortgage-holders: unlike the bankers and fund managers among whom Bernanke and Geithner would slide into luxurious berths after departing government service, ‘they were the powerless ones’. Centrist liberalism might seem to have triumphed, but its complacency was unwarranted. In 2014 the Democratic electoral rout should have been warning enough. Trump a few months away, Obama was telling people to ignore dark talk about society, and just take a walk in the sun, watch their kids playing and hear the birds chirping, to remind themselves what normal American life was like.77 Abroad, his administration had rescued Europe from financial breakdown and institutionalized the swap lines between the six principal central banks of the oecd. Even as the political scene was deteriorating at home, ‘the global dollar system was being given a new and unprecedentedly expansive foundation’.78 Yet however technically effective, this was an extension of the reach of American power without public authorization, comparable in its way to the electronic surveillance system of the nsa—each in their fashion offering a security blanket for the us and its allies. This pairing, unsettling for any patriot, is followed by the least conventional chapter of the book, a spirited critique of Western policy towards Russia and intervention in Ukraine, in which the us and eu share the odium of arrogance and blundering. Already unexpectedly laudatory of Putin’s response to the financial crisis of 2008, ‘one of the largest in the world’, a package of measures ‘dwarfing those undertaken by West European governments’,79 Tooze leaves no doubt of his view about where primary blame lay in the descent of Ukraine into civil war five years later. When the arrival of a client regime 77 78

Crashed, pp. 454–60; 581, 321; 565. 79 Crashed, p. 483. Crashed, p. 225.

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mentored by us proconsuls in Kiev met retaliation from Moscow with a Russian take-over of the Crimea, the Obama Administration reached for its weapon of choice with states recalcitrant to the American will, and imposed sanctions—their first and only appearance in Crashed, though from the beginning of its story they were the inseparable, geopolitical face of the global dollar system whose expansion it records. Steadily ratcheted up by Washington, complemented with follow-my-leader steps from Brussels, and compounded by a steep fall in oil prices, the result was a worse economic crisis in Russia than in 2009, hitting the population much harder. The Treasury’s war, as an exultant practitioner has termed it, had racked up another benchmark as Obama exited: a new Cold War with Russia.80 Crashed ends with a chapter, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, on China. Is that where the epic of American leadership of the world, in the trilogy Tooze has devoted to it, finally encounters its limits, terrain beyond its inspiration or control? By no means was the prc immune to the crisis of 2008, exports tumbling and unemployment rising. The ccp’s response was a ‘gigantic surge in stimulus spending’, amounting to over 19 per cent of gdp, that commands Tooze’s unstinting admiration. This was the largest Keynesian operation in history, a mobilization of resources on a scale Western economies had only ever achieved under the pressure of war. Its global impact was decisive. ‘In 2009, for the first time in the modern era, it was the movement of the Chinese economy that carried the entire world economy’. Relieved at the outcome though Washington might be, could it be altogether reassuring? For what it now faced, ‘for the first time since the rise of Nazi Germany’, was ‘a power that was, at one and the same time, a potential geopolitical competitor, a hostile regime type and a capitalist economic success story’. Integrated into the global economy though the prc might be, ‘deeply shared economic interests of the kind that legitimated the Fed’s swap lines to Europe’ would ‘be far harder to develop’. Not that all was necessarily lost. The descent of the Shanghai stock market and flight of wealth overseas in 2015 revealed not only the inexperience of the Chinese authorities in handling capital markets, but their dependence in managing the crisis on a helpful decision by the Fed not to raise interest rates. There, solidarity of financial purpose held See Juan Zarate, Treasury’s War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare, New York 2013; the author, an official of Cuban background, worked for the Bush Administration. For a gratified follow-up from the Obama regime in the shape of a manual of how to apply the lessons of successfully bringing Iran to its knees, see Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions, New York 2018. 80

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good. But the Obama administration was not letting down its guard: its campaign for tpp was clearly designed to contain the prc. For the fact remains that ‘the victory of the West in the Cold War was far from complete. China’s triumph is a triumph for the Communist Party. This is still the fundamental reason for doubting the possibility of truly deep cooperation with China in global economic governance. Unlike South Korea, Japan or Europe, China is not a subordinate part of the American global network’. The concluding anxious concatenation says everything. What is ‘truly deep cooperation’? Subordination. What is ‘global economic governance’? One more cloying euphemism for us control. Tooze neither assumes the syllogisms as his own, nor repudiates them.

v. liberalism’s faultlines Enough has been said to bring home the virtues of Tooze’s trilogy, an enterprise of formidable energy, ambition and imagination, vaulting in scope, absorbing in detail. What light then does a reading of it cast on the paradox of Durand’s judgement of its concluding volume? Methodologically, Tooze’s ‘situational and tactical approach’ plunges the reader immediately into the stream of events; structural features emerge only from the point of view of actors attempting to deal with them. Thus the inter-imperialist War, the Great Depression, and the hypertrophy of finance are taken as givens, as are in different ways the world-views of Wilson, Hitler or Geithner. The method makes for compelling historical narrative, but it is premised on repressing structural explanation. Politics and economics are indeed interrelated, as Durand observes, but restrictively: treating the latter simply as the pragmatic field within which the heroes and villains of the story make their policy decisions. Thematically, the trilogy is unified by a single, highly individual optic: it is star-struck by America. Not uncritical of it; but, as it were, mesmerized. Tooze’s background in the Bonn Republic, where a long-lasting strand in post-war culture mingled wide-eyed excitement with studious reverence for the usa—a cross, one might say, between the fandom of a Wenders and the pupillage of a Habermas—clearly accounts for much of this. ‘Perhaps particularly as one who grew up in West Germany in the seventies and eighties, as I did’, Tooze explained to his lrb audience, ‘America is gravity’. That belief is the kink in the arc of his work. It is not an ideological vow, like Habermas’s ‘unconditional orientation to the West’, but something closer to a personal—or, as he would have it, generational—quirk. Some

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political consequences, of course, ensue. Domestically, Tooze has no difficulty finding fault with institutions, policies or persons in the us. Internationally, on the other hand, the us always looms too large in the balance of things—extravagantly in Wages, conspicuously in Deluge, still perceptibly in Crashed; and—not invariably, but too often—from Wilson and Dawes to Bernanke and Geithner, in the role of salvator mundi. The stripe of a particular exaggeration runs through the work. The politics of a left-liberalism require no special reference to America, and if this is set aside, need to be considered in their own right. The compound, as noted, tends to be unstable. Tooze’s version is no exception, swerving from a marked inflexion to the right in Deluge to a critical turn to the left in Crashed. If a single token were to be picked of the change, it would be the disappearance in the latter of the Manichean establishment binary, dividing the world into ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’, pervasive in the former. A radicalization is unmistakeable. But it is uneven. Certain of its limits can be seen if Crashed is compared with two earlier works covering the crisis of 2008–09 and its resolution, Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s 13 Bankers (2011) and Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks (2014).81 Neither Johnson, former chief economist at the imf, nor Wolf, columnist and leader-writer for the Financial Times, would think of themselves as connected to a left, however liberal. Yet their treatment of Bernanke and Geithner is more stringent, and their conclusions harder-hitting, than anything to be found in Crashed. Opening his book with Bernanke’s vainglorious speech of 2004 on the Great Moderation—hymning, in his words, ‘a world of outstanding stability and superlative monetary policy’—Wolf terms it, with polite contempt, ‘quaint’.82 It was the Panglossian confidence of economists like these that, absent exogenous shocks, crises were impossible, which four years later generated the crisis. For Johnson: Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner and Summers chose the blank cheque option, over and over again. They did the opposite of what the United States had pressed upon emerging market governments of the 1990s. They did not take harsh measures to shut down or clean up sick banks. They did not cut major financial institutions off from the public dole. They did not touch the channels of political influence that the banks had used so adeptly to secure decades of deregulatory policies. They did not force out a single ceo of a Subtitled, respectively: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown and What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis. 82 Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks, London 2014, p. 2. 81

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major commercial or investment bank . . . The total cost of all those blank cheques is virtually incalculable.83

The difference is palpable, too, when it comes to prescription. What, postcrisis, is to be done? Johnson, after a blistering attack on the ‘American Oligarchy’ of half a dozen mega-banks, says the only remedy is to break them up, confining any financial institution to a hard cap of 4 per cent of gdp, and investment banks to 2 per cent. Wolf is willing to go much further, urging renewed consideration of Irving Fisher’s plan to abolish the ability of private banks to create money altogether, by obliging them to hold 100 per cent reserves against their deposits, and giving the state the exclusive right to issue money. No comparable proposals of any kind can be found in Crashed. Tooze can legitimately reply they would be out of place in the work of a historian. But as a prolific topical commentator in a wide variety of publications, the same does not apply. There too, however, abstention would seem to be the rule. Liberalism has always contained different shades, and its dominant version has varied across countries and periods. In the capitalist world, going back to the eighties, the line of division separating a liberal politics from a politics of the left is their respective attitudes to the existing order of things: does it require structural change or situational adjustment?84 The degree envisaged of each defines relative locations on either side of the dividing-line. To see where Tooze’s position might lie requires a sense of the dominant liberalism of the period. That comes in two inter-related packages. Between states, the ‘liberal international order’ has for thirty years been the touchstone of geopolitical reason: free markets, free 13 Bankers, p. 173. Reviewing Crashed, Johnson noted that Tooze ‘treads gently’ where us deregulation is concerned: ‘The people who get off lightest are senior officials at the Federal Reserve, including Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Fed during the go-go years’, whose self-serving claims Tooze accepts with unwarranted credulity: Washington Post, 11 October 2018. For Geithner’s cramming of his Treasury team with Wall Street operatives—his chief of staff was a former top lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, others came from Citigroup, Blackstone, Merrill Lynch—and constant communing—over eighty times in his first seven months in office—with the heads of Goldman, jp Morgan and Citigroup, see 13 Bankers, pp. 186–7. A major theme of Johnson’s book, scarcely broached at all in Crashed, is the political corruption of Washington by the country’s financial institutions. 84 Matters differed in the Communist world: there, of course, liberalism did mean commitment to structural change, and in an exceptional figure like Dmitri Furman could produce a liberalism of the left of a purity and power unlike anything to be found in the West in the same period: for a description, see London Review of Books, 30 July and 27 August 2015. 83

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trade, free movement of capital and other human rights, policed by the most powerful nation on earth with help from its allies, in accordance with its rules and its sanctions, its rewards and its retributions. Within states, ‘neoliberalism’: privatization of goods and services, deregulation of industries and of finance, fiscal retrenchment, de-unionization, weakening of labour, strengthening of capital—compensated by recognition of gender and multicultural claims. The first has reigned far more unchallenged than the second. Very few liberals have seriously contested the principles of free trade, the primacy of the United States, or the rule of international law as enshrined in a United Nations whose decisions the us has for the most part been able to determine at will. The liberal international order remains a precious icon. Many, on the other hand, have questioned or resisted the full application of neoliberal measures within their own societies, nowhere implemented in their entirety. The extent to which the first shapes the intellectual universe of contemporary liberalism can be judged by the adaptation of leading minds once on liberalism’s left to its requirements: thinkers like Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio all furnishing apologetic glosses on us wars of intervention against states declared outlaws by Washington, with or without the affidavit of the Security Council.85 Tooze has never compromised himself in this way. But the language of ‘global economic governance’, cleansed of any reference to its most prominent innovation, the proliferation of sanctions to strangle or bludgeon recalcitrant countries into line—‘war by other means’, as Ambassador Blackwill candidly describes it—offers a route to much the same.86 What of the national plane of politics? Tooze has written with all due trenchancy: ‘Under modern conditions, neoliberalism is, de facto, an anti-democratic politics, which resolves the tension between capitalism and democracy either by limiting the range of democratic discretion or by interfering directly in the democratic process’.87 He has attacked the See ‘Arms and Rights’, nlr 31, January–February 2005, pp. 5–40. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Cambridge, ma 2016. The liberal consensus around sanctions exceeds even that in favour of its cousin, humanitarian intervention. In Congress, there were just five votes in the House and the Senate against caatsa—Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. Four were Republican, the fifth was Sanders, who—unlike the others—explained that he was, of course, in favour of sanctions against Russia. Every single Democrat in the two chambers voted for the bill. 87 ‘Tempestuous Seasons’, p. 19. 85

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escalation of economic inequalities under the neoliberal regimen with no less vigour, and criticized Pollyanna solutions to it. Piketty’s well-meaning proposal of a global wealth tax, he writes in Crashed, ‘wasn’t wrong’: It just sidestepped the reason it was needed in the first place, the brutal struggle for privilege and power, which for decades had enabled those at the top to accumulate huge wealth, untroubled by any serious effort at redistribution. The answer, if there was one, was clearly not technical. It was political in the most comprehensive sense. Power had to be met with power.88

When writing in this vein, Tooze has certainly earned his place on the left of liberalism. But the compound is labile. Elsewhere in Crashed, he can write without demur of Obama’s failure to deliver ‘a concerted drive to unify American society around a sustained programme of investmentdriven growth and comprehensive modernization’.89 Unify American society—or, power against power—cleave it? If there is no clear-cut resolution of these tensions in Crashed, it is in part because so much rhetorical emphasis falls on the technical complexity of the ‘giant “systems” and “machines” of financial engineering’, and the vital role of a pragmatic managerialism in keeping them running. Central banks, Tooze has insisted, far from being stoppers of democracy, have often been flywheels of progress. After all, without the good sense of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, could the Entente have won the First World War, or the Allies the Second? Without helpful counteractions by Carney and Draghi, could the fall-out of unfortunate developments like the victory of Brexit in one referendum, or the defeat of Renzi in another, have been contained? ‘It would be a grave theoretical error and missed practical opportunity if technocratic structures were held to be a diminution of politics’. They can enhance them. Think of the ‘astounding flair for the situation’—magic term!—of someone like Mario Draghi.90 When he writes in this mode, rather than looking to possible avenues of democratic control over them, Tooze explains that ‘there are good reasons to defend technocratic government against the unreasoning passions of Crashed, p. 462. 89 Crashed, p. 454. ‘Für eine Politik der Geldpolitik: Habermas, Streeck und Draghi’, co-authored with Danilo Scholz, Merkur, May 2017, pp. 19–21, which extends Tooze’s criticisms of Streeck, and takes Habermas’s conversion to the president of the ecb as a measure of its wisdom. 88

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mass democracy. It is all too obvious today how important it is to be able to identify matters of potential technical agreement beyond politics.’ Sanity and lunacy so distributed, how can irrational masses be brought to accept rational decisions taken by the Bernankes and the Draghis? There, essential is that ‘coalitions be assembled for unpopular but essential actions’—not just as a conjunctural, but as a permanent necessity: ‘building such ad hoc and lopsided political coalitions is what the governance of capitalism under democratic conditions entails’.91 Unpopular but essential actions: Tooze’s indictment of the eu brutalization of Greece is searing enough. But does he have anything to say about Tsipras’s shredding of a referendum to comply with it? Nothing. A silent sigh of relief can be deduced. For wasn’t such surrender the responsible course of action, as Stresemann showed? It is enough to recall Durand’s verdict in Fictitious Capital on the overall tale Tooze’s book tells to see the difference between the two writers: ‘Finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the body of society to feed its own profits.’ That note is missing in Crashed. There, blackmail—not called as such—is regrettable, but acceptable. Ad hoc and lopsided coalitions: to date, the most specific illustration Tooze has offered comes in a recent piece on Germany, his European land of reference, in the lrb. In it, he argues for the creation of a Red– Red–Green alliance of the spd, Die Linke and the Greens, in place of the current Black–Red coalition of the cdu–csu–spd that has ruled the country since 2013, as previously from 2005 to 2009. Within the alternative bloc of his hopes, his preference plainly goes to the spd, hailed as ‘no ordinary political party’, but one that for 150 years, from the time of Bismarck to that of Merkel, has ‘stood for a vision of a better, more democratic and socially just Germany’—as if these were adjectives that could encompass the vote for war credits in 1914, the use of the Freikorps to dispatch Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the McCarthyism of the Radikalenerlass in the seventies, and the practice of renditions in this century: not the whole record, but an indelible part of it. Today, obstructing the prospect of a Red–Red–Green alliance is ‘Die Linke’s ingrained hostility to nato’.92 The good sense of the spd’s Kaisertreu fealty to it goes without saying. 91 92

‘Tempestuous Seasons’, pp. 20–1; Crashed, pp. 615, 613. Tooze, ‘Which Is Worse?’, London Review of Books, 18 July 2019, pp. 19, 21.

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Such questions aside, what should be the programme of a future Red– Red–Green government? Formally speaking, Tooze’s article is a review of four recent books on Germany, to which he adds three others as he proceeds, though as often in the lrb reference to them is cursory, none accorded the dignity of an actual review. Much of the substance of the piece is devoted to the social consequences of Hartz iv, Schröder’s ‘tough new system of welfare and labour-market regulation’, imposed in 2005. Though he prefers a more to a less lenient view of its neoliberal agenda, and complains that the spd gets no credit for ‘earnest efforts to rebalance’ its consequences—a minimum-wage law has since belatedly ended a situation in which Germany was one of the last countries in Europe without one93—Tooze leaves no doubt that the condition of the country is far from ideal: inequality has soared, precarity has spread, and with it social and political unrest. To remedy such ills, what agenda of social repair does he outline for a Red–Red–Green coalition? Answer: Germany needs ‘a more pro-European government’, one capable of responding to the ‘bold vision of Europe’s future’ offered by a ‘charismatic’ Emmanuel Macron94—a leader famously capable of constructing a transverse, if lopsided coalition and taking unpopular, but essential decisions. Nothing else. ‘Europe can ill afford further delay’. That empty signifier is all. It would be wrong to make too much of this. Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place. That’s often the price of a growing reputation—la primadonna é mobile—and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the West from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron, and no one can accuse Crashed of lacking a social sensibility in keeping with this tradition. Yet in today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds—indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds? ‘Power must be met with power’. Truly?

A minimum wage was repeatedly proposed to the spd by Die Linke and declined by it, at a time when the two parties had sufficient votes to pass one in the Bundestag. 94 ‘Which Is Worse?’, pp. 19, 22; for ‘bold vision’ and Macron, see Crashed, pp. 595, 562. 93

Glasgow School of Art Library

Ralph Burnett © The Glasgow School of Art

johnny rodger

T H E VA N I S H I N G L I B R A R Y

In 2014 the library at Glasgow School of Art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh was destroyed by fire. It was almost completely rebuilt by June 2018 when the whole building was in turn destroyed by a second fire.

T

he library at Glasgow School of Art has—or had—special status for connoisseurs of the work of architect-artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Its ineffably graceful timbers garnered a totemic value as a symbol of the workaday genius of their creator. It was said that this exquisite room could be created by any competent craftsman under instruction from the architect’s drawings; no special craft skills were needed. Indeed in the aftermath of the fires that destroyed Mackintosh’s masterwork and all its contents in 2014, and again in 2018, the School authorities claimed, evidently by way of reassuring those connoisseurs and others, that the Library would be rebuilt ‘as Mackintosh designed it, to the millimetre’—‘It is absolutely coming back.’1

The implicit suggestion—and indeed often the explicit claim at the time—was thus that Mackintosh’s conceptions, or in other words, his models in the form of architectural drawings, are the real art, and the physical manifestation of that graphical genius in the timbers of the Library can be recreated by any joiner the School cares to appoint. We might then begin to wonder about that relationship between the drawings and the materially constructed Library, whereby Mackintosh’s very plans seem to operate like some type of magical incantation, and take possession of the hands of a dayjobbing tradesman to conjure them into the execution of a work of supreme artistic merit. This might in turn bring us to ask if, in the post-fires era of destruction, the Library does, in fact, still exist? The actual timbers of the room are gone, but those plans, the original prime movers in the creation of the space, and the formulae new left review 119 sept oct 2019

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that will be used to put the material version back into place—they still exist. So what is the relative ontological status of these two components, which both have some evident claim to be Mackintosh’s Library? Can the Library still exist after it has been destroyed by fire? Does its putative totemic status indeed entail something of a magical, or fantasy, ideal or utopic quality, something beyond those everyday material qualities already annihilated twice in the fires? Perhaps it is best to address that question of the Library’s existence after its physical material has been annihilated by establishing first what apparently it is not—a mere material artefact. The locus classicus for modes of existence of things is of course Aristotle, particularly in the Metaphysics. In his work to shift philosophy away from mathematics and abstract universal substance and towards the physical sciences, and the concrete individual substance, Aristotle’s principle that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time plays a central role.2 So can a thing be annihilated by a conflagration and still exist? It depends on what you mean by ‘thing’ and what kind of existence it has. As hinted above, some intellectual insight into a special type of existence, exhibited by this Mackintosh work, might then be gained by viewing it in terms of typology—an abstracted universal which can be asserted of the substance of works of architecture. The typology is said, in the case of Mackintosh’s two-storey, timber, galleried room, to be a library. Libraries are of course one of the few remaining types of sequestered space in the heart of our cities where a free engagement in cultural, political and intellectual life can be pursued, both at a social and an individual level, apparently at no cost. Is that range of possible operations itself sufficiently idyllic to define it as a working utopia? Or are there other more fundamental properties necessary for a place to have such a privileged ontological status? As a member of staff at Glasgow School of Art, I had often taught in the Mackintosh Library (pre-2014), read in it, led tours around it. I had written about it in several publications and been filmed there by crews from around the world. In one piece for Architectural Research Quarterly I ‘The Mackintosh Building will be Rebuilt’, Herald, 16 September 2018. Quotation from Muriel Gray, chairperson of the gsa Board of Governors. 2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by John McMahon, New York 2007, p. 69. 1

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described the Library as ‘one of the most delicate and evocative spaces in Western architecture’.3 Two days after the 2014 fire, I was able to inspect the damaged Mackintosh building. Working with a team of colleagues, under the direction of the Fire Brigade and gsa’s architects, I helped to retrieve some half-burnt and charred artefacts from the less-damaged rooms. The collective sense of heartbreak was palpable as we worked in those blackened, gloomy ruins in an air thick with acrid stench from the fire. You might imagine then my joy when, nearly four years later, in midApril 2018, I entered the almost completely rebuilt Mackintosh Library. Some of the materials needed to reconstruct the room in accordance with the early twentieth-century ‘original’ had been difficult to find. The timber, for example—a now rare tulipwood—had been sourced from an old sawmill building in Massachusetts that was being demolished. Yet actual material, and age and source of the material, notwithstanding, the feel of the place was substantially the same as I had remembered experiencing in the original up until 2014. My delight on entering the recreated Library was doubled by seeing it mirrored in my companion’s face. George Cairns, who in the early nineties had completed his doctorate on the Mac, and had produced some of the most detailed drawings of this place, was on a visit from Australia.4 This tour had been arranged specially for him. His appreciation of the building was especially poignant because Cairns had raised his voice—early on after the 2014 fire—as one of those Ruskinian modernists in favour of a completely new library, and he was absolutely against the attempt to recreate the old one from Mackintosh’s ‘original’ designs.5 The qualities or even the very existence of the reproduction—if it were thus—evidently seemed to elicit joy even in those who had been flatly 3 Johnny Rodger, ‘Putting Holl and Mackintosh in Multi-Perspective: The New Building at the Glasgow School of Art’, Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, 2013, pp. 2–14. 4 George Cairns, ‘Glasgow School of Art: An Architectural Totality’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Glasgow School of Art, 1992. 5 George Cairns, ‘Restoring Glasgow School of Art to its Original Design Will Be Impossible’, The Conversation, 25 May 2014. Ruskin advocated a moral approach to restoration which involved honesty in the use of materials and celebration of the layers of history in a building, rather than what he regarded as a deceitful restoration, using interventions and technologies to ‘complete’ a building that may never have existed in the original.

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against any form of reproduction taking place. Was that delight in Cairns’s face testimony of a triumph of sensual stimulation from physical reality over the intellectual satisfaction afforded by presenting oneself as a model of ideological or moral purity? It’s difficult to say, for my own delight, redoubled by its reflection in my guest’s eyes, was further complicated and compromised by a set of more complex reactions which I simultaneously underwent. These reactions might be compared to those described by Freud in his short article ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’.6 Freud, who had studied Classics as a boy attending the Gymnasium in Vienna, visited Athens for the first time as a tourist with his brother when he was 48 years old. Where he had expected that he would experience only pleasure on visiting the Acropolis, he discovered that his delight was tempered by a sort of astonishment that the monument actually existed. It was as though he had always doubted the real existence of the Ancient Greek site, and it was only now, under the impact of unequivocal observation, that he realized, first of all, that it really did exist, and secondly, that he had been unaware that its real existence, of which he had heard so much as a schoolboy, had ever been an object of doubt. There I stood, in a similar twist of emotions in the almost-completed recreation of the Mackintosh Library, amazed that the physical construct actually existed. As for that ‘feel’ of the space: the timbers reproduced the same room; there was a bodily memory of orientation in space, in relation to forms and objects, in the quality and direction of light—an imprinting of spatial configurations, an understanding of perceptions and possible movements and their consequences. Notwithstanding the absence of aging patina and colour on the timbers, and a number of missing final details, like the chamfered balusters, this was undeniably the Mackintosh Library and would be to anyone who had ever experienced the ‘original’. Yet like Freud on the Acropolis, my delight—and indeed, redoubled delight—was mixed with an awkward feeling of astonishment at the reality of this physical recreation. I realized that, alongside my celebration and delight at this achievement, I must have doubted all along that it would ever have been possible to convert the ruined and hollowed-out stone shell of 2014 back into that ‘delicate and 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, London 1984, pp. 443–56.

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evocative’ timber room. But had I actually ‘doubted’, and if so, why had I not been aware that I was doubting, during the four years that the rebuild was in process only yards from my own office? Freud refers to this feeling as one of ‘derealization’, whereby the ego, to protect itself from a great joy which it feels it does not deserve, disavows the historical reality. Accordingly, ‘derealization’ is counterposed by Freud to the phenomenon of déjà vu: the latter seeks to incorporate something other and alien as if it were already a part of the ego; derealization seeks to deny something ever belonged to the ego, to disavow or cast doubt upon it. If that analysis of Freud’s is to be taken literally, however, then relief was close at hand. For the ego, which was beset with an overwhelming, unbearable and, in the Freudian schema, undeserved joy, was to be saved by a second disaster: the fire of June 2018. Just as the Library had almost miraculously reappeared, four years after its reduction to a pile of black ash, so in that 2018 fire, two months after its epiphany in timber, it was sublimated completely in the flames. The Library, which had existed first as a set of drawings in the 1890s, and then as a physical entity in timber and other materials, disappeared in the fire of 2014, to exist once more only in ink and paper; had then been reproduced in material again by 2018; and finally, once more disappeared in flames to leave only a set of charts with markings in pencil and coloured inks.

Measured Space The disappearance of the library again in 2018 may have been shockingly unexpected, but the ‘derealization’ of its forms by an embodied visitor, as Freud might term it, is not of course a new way of viewing the world; nor are such doubts about the form of existence of the sensible world something originally encountered in Freud. The history of Western thought, as everyone knows, is riven with such a dualism— arguably most acutely expressed in the method of Cartesian doubt, where all one’s sensory experience of the real world is to be treated with scepticism until any aspect of it is proved certain. But if, for Descartes, we can only be certain of that physical world through the measurement and calculation of its extension, its modelling in complex analytical geometry and algebra, mapping every place in the universe back to the zero point of the subject—Cartesian geometry, in other words—then Mackintosh’s Library, designed as an intricate network of upright and horizontal timbers, dividing space, framing views and precisely parcelling out and

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directing qualities of light and shade, performs a similar orienting and centring of the subject in calculated and measured space. From that point of view, it might be fruitful to understand the operation of the library—as equally Descartes’s mathematics—as a type of apparatus, that is, as a formation which seeks to support and to determine or orientate certain behaviours, gestures, opinions or discourses; and which is therefore fundamentally involved in the process of subjectification. Agamben defines an ‘apparatus’ in terms of three important aspects: as a network between elements—which may be linguistic, physical, legal, juridical or conceptual—that has a strategic function and stands at the intersection of power and knowledge.7 Since its original appearance around 5,000 years ago, the typology of ‘the library’ has been a key device in the apparatus of human subjectification, inasmuch as it encourages certain relations with knowledge, and imposes, via its structures, certain dispositions in approaches to and uses of that knowledge. Mackintosh refined the structure of the library as a physical network so that the criss-crossing of verticals (uprights, hanging lamps, pendants and furniture legs) and horizontals (beams, balconies, surfaces of tables and chairs) frames every single point of the room with specific spatial qualities and a unique play of light. Accordingly the visitor, the reader, the student—in other words the subject—enters into a space saturated with order and identity and is predisposed to certain attitudes and understandings of the place; and, as noted, the recreation of these forms in early 2018 was ‘undeniably’ as particular as the original in its presentation of possible and special perceptions and bodily orientations. The particular identity of the Library is indeed often analogized to a natural phenomenon. Like his younger contemporary, James Joyce (1882–1941), Mackintosh (1868–1928) is said to have created his masterwork in the form of a Gaelic forest.8 The architect Thomas Howarth, Mackintosh’s biographer, was the first to make this explicit, likening the Library to ‘silent brooding pinewoods of the Trossachs’. Yet there is more Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, Stanford 2009. Andrew MacMillan, James Macaulay and William Buchanan, ‘A Tour of The School’, in William Buchanan, ed., Mackintosh’s Masterwork: The Glasgow School of Art, Edinburgh 1989, p. 114. Thomas Howarth, Mackintosh and the Modern Movement, London 1952, p. 89. 7

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to it than a throwaway qualitative comparison of atmosphere and light. In Mackintosh’s case, the form is specifically appropriate for a library full of the written word, as each of the eighteen letters of the Gaelic alphabet corresponds to the name of a tree: A, B, C are ailm, beith, coll—in turn, the elm, the birch and the hazel. Hence the library is in Gaelic culture literally a forest. Joyce’s creation of the city as a forest in Ulysses is a linguistic model.9 Likewise Mackintosh’s creation of the library as a forest exists as a linguistic model in the form of architectural drawings, essentially ink on paper like Joyce’s model; it has also existed between 1909–2014 and for a few months in early 2018, as an actual place. The appearance and disappearance of the Library heightens the tension of the relationship between the linguistic model and the material reality that we already see in Joyce’s Ulysses. For some understanding of that relationship, we can turn again to Descartes and his example of the kiliagon, the thousand-sided figure of which we can construct a mathematical model, and make accurate calculations of its properties in terms of number of sides, lengths, size of angles, etc., even though the figure has no concrete reality for us.10 Perhaps an even more vivid exposition of the model–reality relationship is to be found, however, in Foucault’s discussion of the mirror.11 The images in the mirror have a peculiar ontological status; they present us with apparent and calculable spatial relations in terms of lengths, depth and breadth, orientation and relationships between objects, colour, movement, speed and so on, as studied in the field of optics. Yet, of course, all this information is presented on one silvered surface; there is no actual space there—or as Foucault puts it, it is a place with no real place. The image in the mirror and Descartes’s theoretical figure of the kiliagon thus confound Aristotle’s principle that something cannot at the same time both be and not be. It is no coincidence that Foucault’s assessment of the ontological status of the images in the mirror chimes Guy Davenport, ‘Joyce’s Forest of Symbols’, The Iowa Review, vol. 6, no. 1, Winter 1975, pp. 79–91 passim. Davenport demonstrates how amongst the myriad layerings of structural form in Ulysses, Joyce themes each one of his eighteen chapters on the qualities of the tree of that letter in the Gaelic alphabet. 10 René Descartes, ‘Meditations’, in Discourse on Method and Meditations, London 1972, pp. 150–1. 11 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, trans. by Jay Miskowiec, in Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 22–7. Originally published as ‘Des Espaces Autres’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5, October 1984, pp. 46–9. 9

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almost perfectly with the tension introduced in Thomas More’s erstwhile neologism of 1517 for his book Utopia, the playful name of which incorporates in its Greek etymology both ‘a good place’ and ‘no place’: utopia is somewhere which both exists and does not exist at the same time. Indeed, Foucault himself categorizes the ‘space’ in the mirror as a ‘utopia’. The serial appearance and disappearance of the Mackintosh Library as a material place allows us to see it more certainly and specifically in the tradition of the Gaelic utopia. The pastiche Hollywood version of this tradition as ‘Brigadoon’, the elusively ‘perfect’ Scottish village that makes an actual appearance once every hundred years before disappearing again into the mists of time, is well known. The vicissitudes of Mackintosh’s library bring it closer, however, to the original saga or orature model of the deep-sleeping Fenian warriors and heroes and their return from below the earth every few centuries to save the Gaelic race and civilization. The doubt—in real time—about the relationship between the model and an actual place remains unresolved. How many times can the physical Mackintosh Library re-appear to perform its role as an apparatus in organizing relationships to knowledge at Glasgow School of Art? And if all apparatuses, from the library to the products of the Hollywood film industry—and indeed, to language itself—ultimately fail to secure certain knowledge of the real, and vacillate in a most un-Aristotelianly dubious way between being and non-being, then is not their default mode by definition utopian? Or as Agamben puts it, ‘At the root of each apparatus lies an all too human desire for happiness.’12

12

Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?, p. 17.

Axonometric of the west end of Glasgow School of Art

George Cairns, 1992 © The Glasgow School of Art

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BRAZIL APART 1964–2019

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lola seaton

THE ENDS OF CRITICISM A Reply to Joseph North

‘W

hat is literary criticism for?’ This is the inviting and perhaps exasperated question with which Joseph North began his essay, ‘Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams’, which recently appeared in the pages of this journal. The essay was a response to Francis Mulhern’s review of North’s book, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017), which could be described as an extended diagnosis of the contemporary state of Anglophone academic literary criticism arguing that it has lost its capacity to answer his essay’s opening question.1 ‘Lost’, because this is a capacity, North insists, the discipline once had. Previously, literary critics had ‘detailed and intellectually rigorous methods both for analysing the culture and for taking action to change it’, but since what North calls ‘the turn to scholarship’ in the 1970s and 80s, and the ensuing ascendancy of the ‘historicist/contextualist paradigm’, cultural analysis—producing ‘politically inert forms of professionalized knowledge’ about culture—has superseded the earlier accompanying emphasis on intervening in culture.2

Today’s scholars have not only surrendered the cultural relevance and political agency literary criticism once sought to have—and so forgotten what it is for—the discipline has also lost sight of whom it is for. One of the refrains of North’s book is that the methods of close reading and practical criticism pioneered by I. A. Richards were originally a means of cultivating our ‘aesthetic capabilities’, while texts were prized according to their ‘value to readers’, as ‘instruments of aesthetic education’; but that—thanks largely to the influence of the New Critics and their deforming translation of Richards’s techniques—this initial pedagogical new left review 119 sept oct 2019

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preoccupation with ‘better ordering our minds’ was displaced by an unhealthy fixation on ranking texts into final hierarchies. These losses of what North regards as criticism’s founding and signature emphases— on cultural intervention and individual enrichment—are related, since the two worked in concert, the one via the other: criticism was once ‘a programmatic commitment to using works of literature for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, with the goal of more general cultural and political change’.3 Roughly the first half of Literary Criticism is taken up with telling the history of this double loss; in the second half of the book (which consists of a single chapter, ‘The Critical Unconscious’, plus a conclusion, which canvasses alternative 21st-century outcomes), North turns his attention to questions of recovery. He surveys various movements and developments in contemporary or near-contemporary criticism, in particular Queer and Affect Theory, and the works of Lauren Berlant and D. A. Miller, in search of signs of discontent with the prevailing scholarly mode—signs which he reads as the inchoate stirrings of an alternative paradigm that will revive criticism’s original objectives. In his recent essay for nlr, North acknowledges that he ‘didn’t say very much’ in his book about what this alternative paradigm would look like in practice. Taking up a suggestion in Mulhern’s review that Raymond Williams might ‘serve as a fitting emblem’ for it, North endeavours to ‘sketch’ its details by turning to ‘two paragraphs’ in Williams’s work— one from Politics and Letters (1979), the book-length interview with Williams conducted by nlr editors, and another from The Country and the City (1973), raised by the interviewers in the course of a discussion about evaluation, Williams’s rejection of ‘the aesthetic’, and the question of how to make authoritative critical judgements without resorting to the idealist subject-position of the ‘trained’, ‘informed’, ‘cultivated’ reader. For Williams, one way of avoiding this was by what he called a ‘movement towards declaration of situation’, through ‘tracing back our 1

Joseph North, ‘Two Paragraphs in Raymond Williams: A Reply to Francis Mulhern’,

nlr 116/117, March–June 2019; Francis Mulhern, ‘Critical Revolutions’, nlr 110, March–April 2018. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, Cambridge ma and London 2017, p. 12; hereafter lc; and North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, p. 177. 3 lc, p. 3. This accords with North’s claim that ‘the [political] struggle is being fought, must be fought, on the terrain of sensibility’: lc, p. xi. 2

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own social and historical conditions of response’. This was ‘necessarily personal, a declaration of interest, and therefore completely variable since everyone is initially in a different situation’—yet it ‘does not have to lead to relativism’ because the valuations that emerged from the process ‘would not be connected with those elements of one’s own situation which are really just biographical idiosyncrasies that issue into personal preferences’: They would instead be related to those which associated one with others in certain more general acts of valuation. In other words, one should be able to distinguish kinds of valuation which are crucial to communicate to others, and preferences of style which one expresses all the time but are not of real importance to anyone else.4

Williams seems to suggest that criticism has something to do with establishing—both coming to know and setting down—the limits of community, or the reach of sociality. His interviewers, pressing him on the possibility of contradictions between ‘a socially communicable valuation’ and ‘other potential sorts of valuation’, light upon the paragraph from The Country and the City excerpted by North, in which Williams contrasts England’s great country houses to the modest cottages and farmsteads beside them, and the productive fields and woods in which they sit.5 North gives a perceptive and sensitive reading of the passage from The Country and the City, skilfully using Williams’s remarks in Politics and Letters to illuminate it; yet he doesn’t quite deliver on his promise to delineate a practice. That would involve not simply interpreting what Williams is ostensibly saying in the passage, but giving an account of what he is doing in it. In what follows—putting aside my own somewhat mixed feelings about Williams’s writing, and fortified by comments assembled from elsewhere in his oeuvre—I try to refine North’s ‘sketch’ of Williams’s practice, and to identify the methods he is using, if any. I’ll then go on to venture some speculations on what critical strategies might be at work in The Country and the City as a whole, before opening the discussion out to explore—since methods are often the most Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London and New York 2015 [1979], pp. 342–3. 5 Politics and Letters, p. 345. Since North quotes the passage twice in nlr 116/117 (see pp. 169–70, 180), I won’t repeat it in its entirety here. The original can be found in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London 1973, pp. 105–6. 4

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powerful and durable of pedagogical legacies—what echoes of this practice might be detectable in the work of one of the most compelling cultural critics of the present era, the late Mark Fisher. What can contemporary critics learn from Williams’s (and Fisher’s) critical writing? What are its lessons?

A Kantian conundrum North’s conception of what literary study should (and shouldn’t) be bears a striking resemblance to the ‘negative formulation’ put forward in F. R. Leavis’s ‘Sketch for an “English School”’: There is no more futile study than that which ends with mere knowledge about literature. If literature is worth study, then the test of its having been so will be the ability to read literature intelligently . . . The study of a literary text about which the student cannot say . . . as a matter of first-hand perception and judgement—of intelligent realization—why it should be worth study is a self-stultifying occupation.6

‘An approach [to works of literature] is personal or it is nothing’, Leavis also wrote, ‘nothing’ gently equivocating between meaning worthless or impossible (i.e., not an approach at all). The student or critic of literature thus doesn’t need ‘anything in the nature of a laboratory-method’ since they ‘can have the poem only by an inner kind of possession’. Readers are to rely solely on ‘the sensitive and scrupulous use of intelligence’, unaided by ‘technical procedures’, ‘apparatus’ or ‘laboratory technique’.7 Leavis’s hyperbolically scientific idiom seems designed to convey the inappropriateness, even absurdity, of applying something as impersonal, or more exactly, transpersonal, as a method to something as ‘inner’ and ‘personal’ as reading. The upshot of this studiedly unmethodical F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’, 2nd ed., Cambridge 1979 [1948], pp. 67–8. 7 Leavis, Education and the University, pp. 68, 70, 71–2. Leavis’s hostility to methods is matched by I. A. Richards’s enthusiasm for them. His Practical Criticism aimed ‘to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry (and cognate matters) and why they should like or dislike it’, and ‘to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.’ Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, London 1929, p. 3. Far from believing that technique precluded an authentic response to literature, Richards’s introductory remarks suggest that we need technique to activate and realize such response. 6

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approach is that ‘in criticism . . . nothing can be proved; there can, in the nature of the case, be no laboratory-demonstration or anything like it.’ ‘Nevertheless’, Leavis continues, ‘one can very often, putting a finger on something in the text, make an observation that is irresistible and final.’8 The echo of the idiomatic expression—‘I can’t put my finger on it’—places literary study firmly in the realm of elusive impressions and intuitions, and far from the hard certainties of science, whilst ‘irresistible’ suggests it trades in seduction and persuasion, rather than the presentation of ‘irrefutable’ evidence. Though he is in some sense the anti-hero of North’s tendentious history, at fault for giving ‘aesthetics’ and criticism their bad reputation (via an alleged association with a reactionary idealism, such that the turn away from criticism and towards scholarship was largely inaugurated by the left), one can imagine Leavis reading North’s book with pleasure and approval. Until, that is, he came across a significant claim in North’s final chapter: the ‘search for a more personal method of reading . . . is, really, in a buried way, a search for a new paradigm for criticism proper’.9 Given Leavis’s allergic reaction to ‘laboratory-technique’ and his associated advocacy of an intuitive and supra-methodical approach to literature—more a matter of ‘knack’ or (natural) flair, than the diligent acquisition of teachable techniques—the notion of a ‘personal method’ would presumably have had the jarring, if intriguing, sound of an oxymoron. There is indeed something paradoxical about the phrase. Traditionally, a method is something that makes an experiment repeatable and its results reproducible. This definitive characteristic is precisely predicated on its capacity to transcend—to manifest an indifference to—the person who happens to be using it. North’s paradoxical demand marks a mysterious moment in Literary Criticism, his word ‘buried’ suggesting—as if it were his book’s secret—that a return to criticism’s original aims is simply a matter of (re-)discovering more personal approaches to reading. There is then a slippage from North’s Leavis, Education and the University, p. 74. lc, p. 168. This claim is the culmination of a trend in which North elides the words ‘critical’ and ‘personal’ (and a chain of associated terms: ‘affective’, ‘intimate’, ‘inward’, ‘idiosyncratic’), presenting them as virtual equivalents: ‘[Eve] Sedgwick and [D. A.] Miller both point us toward a more positive, more personal, ultimately more critical relationship to the text’, p. 173; my emphasis. But see also lc, pp. 167, 169, 170, 179. 8

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opening question about what literary criticism is for, to a connected, if subsidiary one: how to do it? To see what problem North’s paradoxical demand for a ‘personal method’ is being called upon to solve, it is worth noting the way North articulates his dissatisfaction with the prevailing condition of literary criticism on the following page: Today the discipline at large possesses no systematic way to articulate to itself the means by which a personal and affective intimacy with the text can be made a primary site of intellectual value—not through contextualizing or theorization, but through the force of its own inwardness—not, that is to say, by staking its claims to intellectual rigour on its perceptiveness or utility as cultural analysis, but by staking them instead on the power and subtlety of its attempt to cultivate our common capabilities. In such a context, any work that would stake its claims on a ‘merely’ personal intimacy with the text must run the risk of being revealed as mere impressionism or belletrism, such as cannot be taken seriously by the strictest scholarly standards.10

North’s complaint seems to be that the scholarly paradigm currently dominating the discipline denies, trivializes or simply can’t adequately metabolize the personal (and ‘affective’ or ‘intimate’) elements of one’s experience of literature—for which read: the significant elements. (One could even say: professionalized literary study can’t quite handle the fact that one’s experience of literature is, unavoidably, an experience, and one from which criticism must begin.) Without wishing to dehistoricize North’s complaint or downplay its specific application to contemporary literary study, it may be helpful to see it as continuous with, or at least analogous to, one of the longstanding questions dogging criticism—a question almost constitutive of the discipline—which has to do with how critical judgements acquire authority, since they can’t, as Leavis reminds us, be proven in the way of experimental science. In requiring criticism to be both personal and methodical—a transposition of Kant’s terms ‘subjective’ and ‘universal’—North is asking that it both proceed from an idiosyncratic experience and yet be shareable. The question that the demand for a ‘personal method’ is intended to settle, in other words, is how a critic can secure the general relevance of their personal observations and 10

lc, p. 169.

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subjective impressions (including all the incidental extra-literary experience that informs them); that is, how to prevent their impressions degenerating into ‘impressionism’, and their judgements seeming relativistic and perhaps irrelevant. North’s dissatisfaction with the contemporary modus operandi of the discipline can be seen as pivoting on an objection to its standard way of resolving this problem, which is to demand that critics systematically suppress their subjectivity and assume the pseudo-objective stance of a disembodied, impersonal subject, whose pristine reception of a work of literature will therefore achieve the epistemic, or perhaps merely social, authority amenable to the ‘strictest scholarly standards’.11 This false resolution of the problem—the demand that critical judgements spuriously lay claim to the prestige of knowledge—precludes a more interesting approach, which would recognize that ‘the [real] problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount their subjectivity, but to include it’.12 A sufficiently personal yet adequately methodical critical practice would thus steer a course between twin dangers: solipsism and pseudo-objectivism, between taking one’s experience too seriously—uncritically elevating one’s first-hand response to the status There is a particularly vivid example of this complaint—in terms that strikingly echo North’s—in an essay by Simon Jarvis: ‘Suppose I am to write about one of the poems . . . I of course wish to begin from the experience which I believe I have had. If not to bore any possible readers with the detritus of my own life, I am to delete from this experience everything that is merely personal: not merely that which is obviously so . . . but also anything that cannot also be proven to be an experience that all right readers of these lines should have. So I must replace the lines in their context . . . and so on . . . Now I have done all this, and I may think that I have made knowledge, of a kind. This making has depended upon the deletion of everything idiosyncratic about my experience and, with it, upon the deletion of everything that makes that experience an experience. In its place sits . . . the reader: the placeholder for my self-disowning, my idea of what “they” will allow to be what “everyone” must feel.’ Simon Jarvis, ‘An Undeleter for Criticism’, Diacritics, vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–6. Perhaps another way of putting the complaint is that the way the discipline mandates professional critics must write about literature has become increasingly divorced from the experience of, and (ordinary, personal) reasons for, reading it in the first place. 12 And ‘not to overcome [their subjectivity] in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways. Then [the critic’s] work outlasts the fashions and arguments of a particular age.’ Stanley Cavell, ‘Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy’, in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays, Cambridge 2002 [1969], p. 87. 11

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of an ‘impersonal judgement’—and not taking it seriously enough— disowning that response altogether.

Statements in stone Turning to the much-bruited paragraph from The Country and the City in pursuit of this ‘inward’ yet ‘intellectually rigorous’ practice, perhaps the first thing to note about the excerpt is that it is not obviously suitable for North’s purposes: we are seeking a model for literary criticism, yet here Williams is discussing country houses—not, for example, country-house poems. In order to think through how Williams’s critical activity in this passage might be relevant to contemporary literary critics, it is worth turning to an earlier essay entitled ‘Communications and Community’, collected in Resources of Hope. There, Williams writes: Every society has communication systems, and these can be of a kind which at first we don’t think of as communication systems at all. One very good example is of some prominent feature in the place where we live. Think how much of our sense of where we live can be expressed in some prominent building, some hill, some feature, natural or man-made. This we feel somehow expresses the meaning of what it is to live in that place, and around that building, around that feature . . . The building of course was specially created: it was put there, often, to express the community’s sense of itself, some value it held in common . . . there the things are, built right into the structure of what it feels like to belong to a group, to belong to a community, to belong to society.13

Read in conjunction with this passage, it becomes clear that when Williams refers to country houses as ‘statements in stone’ on the page following North’s excerpt, and later, as an ‘explicit social declaration’, he is not speaking metaphorically. ‘Prominent features in the place where we live’, including ‘prominent buildings’ (like outsized manors), are ‘communication systems’—indeed, ‘very good examples’ of such systems. ‘After these of course there are the more formal communication systems’, Williams continues.14 ‘After’ suggests he thinks of the features of the places where we live as perhaps our primary experiences of communication—as the occasions of our original ‘aesthetic’ experiences Raymond Williams, ‘Communications and Community’ [1961], in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London and New York 1989, p. 22. 14 As ‘more formal systems of communication’, Williams lists ‘the language of the group, and all the institutions—religious institutions, institutions of information . . . institutions of entertainment, institutions of art’: ‘Communications and Community’, p. 22. 13

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(to retain a term Williams rejects)—and so profoundly formative, since, as he writes elsewhere, ‘we begin to think where we live’, and the ‘landscape in which we first lived’ is where we ‘learned to see’.15 But there is a sense, too, in which Williams regards the places where we live as not only the sites of our first exposure to culture, but also as paradigmatic of cultural experience since the experience is manifestly social: the building is ‘built right into the structure of what it feels like to belong to a group, to belong to a community, to belong to society’. Williams uses the word ‘criticism’ twice in ‘Communications and Community’. In the course of explaining that communication is not ‘the news after the event’, ‘secondary’ or ‘marginal’, but constitutive of experience and reality, he writes: What we have to try to see, first, is that deeply involved in our minds and in the shape of our society are certain communication patterns, only some of which we are conscious of. These communication patterns are not something inevitable; they are man-made, subject to change, and subject all the time to criticism.

These ‘communication patterns’ have a strangely doubled ontological status: they are simultaneously outside us—in our society—and ‘deeply’ internalized; both public and profoundly inner. This means that ‘criticism’—the process by which these ‘communication patterns’ are examined and where necessary amended or rejected—is a correspondingly Janus-faced activity: criticizing and changing parts of the culture that surrounds us might entail a form of self-criticism, and involve challenging or repudiating aspects of our own consciousness (or even unconsciousness). Williams mentions ‘criticism’ a second time when explaining how All of us, as individuals, grow up within a society, within the rules of a society, and these rules cut very deep, and include certain ways of seeing the world . . . But then—and this also is fundamental—we are able, as we develop, to compare one rule with another, to compare the result of one thing seen with another. We are capable of independent criticism. We are also—and this is one of the most difficult but most interesting things— capable of new seeing . . . We could not begin this process unless we had first been given a very large part of our mental equipment by the training of our society. But that vital last bit, when we can as individuals go over the thing again, try to see the world in new ways . . . is equally important.16 Raymond Williams, ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ [1968], in Resources of Hope, p. 32; The Country and the City, p. 84. 16 Williams, ‘Communications and Community’, pp. 21–2. Italics mine. 15

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As with the ‘communication patterns’ which are both out there and ‘deeply involved’ in us, these ‘rules’—which come from outside us and precede us—also ‘cut very deep’, enveloping and penetrating our minds. This means that ‘independent criticism’ is, again, not simply a matter of reflecting on what we see, but a much more strenuous and potentially unsettling process of questioning and overhauling the deep-seated habits of perception—the ‘ways of seeing the world’—that we may have forgotten were learned.

Kinds of comparison In this latter passage, ‘comparison’ emerges as a significant—if not the quintessential—critical technique. Williams discusses comparison elsewhere in his writing, and often in contexts where, though he does not mention ‘criticism’ by name, he is discussing cases when learned rules of seeing have come to seem inadequate or problematic—often associated with the presence of some ‘tension’ or crisis. In The Long Revolution (1961), published in the same year as the essay on ‘Communications and Community’ was written, Williams writes: While it is right that we should hold ourselves open to learn . . . In some cases we will be literally unable to receive what is offered; we simply cannot see the world, cannot respond to experience, in that way. Often, again, the power of the work will move us, yet still, later, we will reject it. For the experience has to be fitted into our whole organization, and in some cases, after a process of comparison that may be prolonged over years, acceptance will not be possible.17

In this passage, comparison is the process by which an ‘experience’ of a cultural object and the way of seeing that it entails, undergo protracted examination and eventual rejection. Comparison crops up in Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977), too, and again, when a prevailing or proposed way of seeing or ‘interpreting’ is coming under scrutiny: ‘There is frequent tension between the received interpretation and the practical experience . . . the tension is often an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency: the moment of conscious comparison not yet come, often not even coming.’18 There are many illuminating clues in these passages about what criticism involves, or the conditions in which it can occur—it requires a 17 18

Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Cardigan 2011 [1961], p. 55. Italics mine. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977, p. 130.

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provisional withdrawal from the social and has a structure of recursiveness (‘when we can, as individuals, go over the thing again’) and a certain duration (‘prolonged over years’)—but I want to isolate and linger on comparison—‘by no means the only process’, but nevertheless a ‘powerful and important’ one—because The Country and the City passage that North discusses is suffused with it.19 In a rudimentary sense Williams is enjoining his readers to compare the country houses with the ancient farms, to look from one to the other and back again, to notice the difference in size and to contemplate its meaning. But Williams is also exhorting us to attempt a more complex and ambitious comparison: to juxtapose not just different features of the landscape, but different ways of seeing it. Telling us to stand still and look up, Williams is encouraging us to weigh the vision of the landscape inscribed in our guidebooks— which we might think of as society’s ‘official’ way of seeing—with our own experience of the landscape, with what we actually see before our eyes. This last kind of comparison relies on a quasi-metaphorical interpretation of the passage—the guidebook serving as a symbol of a society’s established rules of seeing (or of not seeing, as the case may be).20 Indeed, the book as a whole has a submerged allegorical quality which periodically surfaces, as if its pedagogical substance were stored and offered more in the way of a parable or a fable (and thus might resemble a moral more than a method). Saturated with imperatives, this passage tells us what to do, but there is a sense in which The Country and the City is also intent on showing us something—something it might not be easy to tell us—which might be a way of parsing North’s claim that Williams’s practice ‘knows’ something that he couldn’t articulate in theory.21 Before bringing this allegorical quality into relief, I want to note an obvious, and therefore easily missed, explanation of what drew North, like the Politics and Letters interviewers before him, to the country-house Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 130. Country houses do seem particularly susceptible to taking on this wider symbolic valence in Williams’s writing. Discussing Clive Bell’s Civilization, for example, Williams writes: ‘What kind of life can it be, I wonder, to produce this extraordinary fussiness, this extraordinary decision to call certain things culture and then separate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary people and ordinary work?’ ‘Culture Is Ordinary’ [1958], in Resources of Hope, p. 5; my emphasis. Williams also criticizes George Eliot for her ‘re-creation . . . of a country-house England, a class England in which only certain histories matter’: The Country and the City, p. 180. Country houses are here a kind of shorthand for exclusionary cultural elitism. 21 North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, pp. 169, 182. 19

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passage: it stands out from the surrounding text. There is a sense in which the paragraph offers itself for excerption, as if ripe for it: it is conspicuously memorable. Williams’s interviewers refer to it as ‘one of the most powerful single paragraphs in The Country and the City’ and as ‘extraordinarily moving’, and note that it ‘is brought home with tremendous force’.22 What is the source of its power and pathos? In an immediate sense, the former derives from the imperatives that inaugurate each sentence, which not only give the piece its feeling of momentum, but also involve, even implicate, the reader, by directly addressing them—we are not onlookers, but potentially culpable: ‘But stand’, ‘Look’, ‘Think’, ‘See’, ‘And then turn and look’. The directness of the imperatives is reinforced by the immediacy of the deictic ‘that land’, ‘those fields, those streams, those woods’, ‘that many houses’. This rhetorical device in particular is crucial to the logic of the passage: by verbally pointing to the ‘land’, ‘fields’, ‘streams’, as it were, ‘over there’, as if the landscape were before our eyes, we are being asked—ordered, in fact—to imagine that they are: to ‘see’ what isn’t literally visible to us. Once prompted to make this initial effort of ‘seeing’—of making present—what is invisible, it is only a further intensification of this imaginative activity when Williams then enjoins us to see what is also not literally visible within the invisible scene we have made visible through imagining. For we are not simply being asked to notice the landscape, but to see what it produces, and what produced it; to extrapolate the invisible history of what we have brought before our eyes—to ‘see’ the labour, and what the isolated farm has ‘managed to become’. We are thus being instructed to overcome a double invisibility: or rather, the initial goad to imagine prepares us for the second imaginative act, which is precisely about conjuring into view a different, perhaps fuller picture of the land than the ‘landscaped’ version furnished by the ‘guidebook’. An alternative way of describing and accounting for the ‘moving’ and memorable effect of the passage is to characterize it as highly declamatory. The language comes over as in certain respects excessive—it seems designed to produce supplementary effects in excess of its habitual and dominant function of conveying sense, or imparting information. One can see this even from the most literal and rudimentary case of 22

Williams, Politics and Letters, pp. 345–6.

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redundancy—repetition: ‘village to village’ to ‘see the next and yet the next example’, an enactment of the monotony of the obedient daytrippers mindlessly filing through the English countryside to ‘admire’, rather than really ‘see’ the grand houses. But more importantly, the repetition also expresses the monotony of witnessing such a monotonous way of encountering landscape, and thus conveys—dramatizes, even— Williams’s own exasperation. Williams’s tendency to double phrases in the passage is similarly excessive—and expressive: ‘these other “families”, these systematic owners’; ‘that degree of disparity, that barbarous proportion of scale’. The second phrase of each pair is a kind of grandiloquent (‘barbarous’) repetition or expansion of the first, as if Williams is luxuriating in, and deliberately escalating, his contempt. One senses Williams is letting his emotional temper rise in this passage, and this, too, contributes to its distinctiveness: such unconcealed emotion about one’s subject matter is unexpected in an intellectual work of this kind—all of which gives the passage the aura of an outbreak, the taking of an unofficial opportunity to discharge a long pent-up grievance. Indeed, the passage is poignant in part because it is palpably impassioned: country houses—or the kind of submissive reverence they elicit—were manifestly not of sheerly academic interest to Williams, but something about which he had personal feelings. Williams hints at this just before the excerpted passage: ‘It has always seemed to me, from some relevant family experience, that the distance or absence of one of those “great houses” of the landlords can be a critical factor in the survival of a traditional kind of community: that of tolerant neighbourliness.’23 Then perhaps one ought to posit a relation between these different kinds of excess—between what one is tempted to call the passage’s lyricism or literariness and one’s sense that Williams has particular and strong feelings about his subject (as if he is taking it personally), which he is here allowing to come through.

At his desk This is not the only moment in which the presence of Williams’s person can be felt in the affective textures of his prose. Indeed, Williams’s letting show the personal convictions and investments, and above all, the personal experiences motivating and shaping his writing, is a constant 23

The Country and the City, p. 105. Italics mine.

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and systematic feature of his work. Snippets of autobiography turn up in even the most unexpected of places—such as in one of Williams’s driest and most abstruse books, Marxism and Literature. One would think a work of such a purely theoretical kind would be of necessity impersonal, and so inhospitable to confession or anecdote; yet Williams introduces it by giving an autobiographical history of his own intellectual development in relation to both ‘Marxism’ and ‘literature’, as if the book were about the confluence of two of his enduring preoccupations, rather than the abstract work of theory it is.24 But the tendency is particularly pronounced and pervasive in The Country and the City, which raises the question of what kind of book it is—a question whose answer, or answers, are not obvious. The book is difficult to place on account of its hybridity: described as a ‘social, intellectual and literary history’ in its introductory chapter, this already composite history is then laced with fragments and episodes of another kind of history—personal history, or autobiography. But this fusion of modes in The Country and the City does not entirely account for the impression the book leaves that it is not just unconventional—more personal or memoiristic than ‘history’ tends to be—but that it is sui generis. The sense that the book is one-of-a-kind—that there is nothing to compare it to, and perhaps that no-one else could have written it—derives from its being autobiographical in a more complex and involved sense than that implied by the periodic emergence of a few stray personal memories. Indeed, one could describe The Country and the City as constitutionally self-involved: alongside the official chronology of the book—the history of English writing about the country and the city—there is an alternative chronology—the history of Williams’s efforts to come to terms with this history, and to grasp it in relation to his own, including not only his own encounters with such literature, but his own direct, extra-literary experiences of the rural world and the urban environment that such literature represents, or misrepresents. The anecdotal incursions are thus not ‘stray’ or incidental at all—though they may sometimes be presented as digressions—since we are not truly reading a straightforward or neutral history of the ways in which ideas about the country and the city have 24 ‘One way of making clear my sense of the situation from which this book begins is to describe, briefly, the development of my own position, in relation to Marxism and to literature . . . That individual history may be of some significance in relation to the development of Marxism and thinking about Marxism in Britain during that period’: Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 1, 5. Though note that Williams also insists that his ‘book is not a separated work of theory’ but ‘an argument based on what I have learned from all [my] previous work’: p. 6.

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developed and changed, but a history of Williams’s working through of these ideas—and a constant assessment of them in terms of whether they express or betray his experience, ever Williams’s touchstone. And since for Williams the process of writing is itself a way of working through or metabolizing this general, shared history, The Country and the City also contains the history of its own writing. This meta-history is most obvious in the way the book is framed. The introduction ends with a striking description of Williams at his desk: This then is where I am, and as I settle to work I find I have to resolve, step by slow step, experiences and questions that once moved like light . . . A dog is barking—that chained bark—behind the asbestos barn. It is now and then: here and many places. When there are questions to put, I have to push back my chair, look down at my papers, and feel the change.

And then note Williams’s reversion to this present tense at the very end of the book: This change of basic ideas and questions, especially in the socialist and revolutionary movements, has been for me the connection which I have been seeking for so long, through the local forms of a particular and personal crisis, and through the extended inquiry which has taken many forms but which has come through as this inquiry into the country and the city. They are the many questions that were a single question, that once moved like light: a personal experience, for the reasons I described, but now also a social experience, which connects me, increasingly, with so many others. This is the position, the sense of shape, for which I have worked.25

This closing sense of achievement—of the book recording Williams’s journey from a ‘particular and personal crisis’ through to some kind of resolution, in which such ‘personal experience’ has been alchemized into ‘social experience’—returns us to the opening uncertainty, and to Williams’s pensive, agitated state as he prepares to work. The resumption of the opening’s unusual present tense—‘This is where I am’ becoming ‘This is the position’—paradoxically establishes a temporal separation between Williams’s ‘present’ at the book’s beginning, and the new ‘present’ he has reached by its ending, producing the sense that in reading the book, one is following Williams’s progress, and witnessing some kind of personal evolution or transformation.26 The Country and the City, pp. 7–8, 305. Williams’s insistence on the length of time—‘for so long’—and on the associated slowness of the effort emphasizes this sense of his progress through the book, and of its documenting, even constituting, an intellectual and personal journey.

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In one sense, Williams’s present tense installs us in his compositional present; but there is another sense in which he is also positioning himself in our reading present, insofar as his questioning, pre-compositional pose mirrors the situation of the reader, who, not having yet read the book, is naturally in a state of ignorance and expectation, too. This is a rhetorical manoeuvre of course, and one borrowed from fiction. Indeed, Williams is lightly fictionalizing his writing process, since the opening present tense involves a kind of pretence: Williams writes as if he hasn’t already written the book and doesn’t know how it will end—as if it were happening ‘live’, rather than what is in effect an edited recording. This mild fictitiousness is perhaps why, as in the country-house passage North excerpted, Williams’s prose marks itself out by its felt proximity to imaginative writing (e.g., in the atmospheric symbolism of the image of the chained dog), and seems to forgo the standard objectives of communicative efficiency and clarity in the pursuit of the oblique significance and extra-semantic linguistic effects one more readily associates with fiction.27

Bildungskritik In its opening pages, Williams gives a kind of pre-history of The Country and the City: The English experience and interpretation of the country and the city . . . will have to be assessed, as a general problem. But it is as well to say at the outset that this has been for me a personal issue, for as long as I remember. It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside . . . Before I had read any descriptions and interpretations of the changes and variations of settlements and ways of life, I saw them on the ground, and working, in unforgettable clarity. In the course of education I moved to another city, built round a university, and since then . . . I have come to . . . look forward and back, in space and time, knowing and seeking to know this relationship, as an experience and as a problem. I have written about it in other ways but also I have been slowly collecting the evidence to write about it explicitly, as a matter of social, literary and intellectual history. This book is the result, but though it often and necessarily follows impersonal procedures, in description and analysis, there is behind it, all the time, this personal pressure and commitment.28 Note also the fact that Williams’s announcements—‘This is where I am’ and ‘This is the position’—are almost literal instances of the ‘declaration of situation’ for which he called in Politics and Letters, as a way of fending off both relativism and pseudo-objectivism. 28 The Country and the City, pp. 2–3. 27

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Note how Williams makes a point of saying that his first-hand encounters with rural and urban life—‘on the ground, and working’—preceded his extended reading about them, i.e., his formal education. The book is thus in part an attempt to test what he has been taught about the country and the city against his experience of them, through relentlessly asking whether the former adequately and authentically lives up to the latter. It is in this sense the story, and vehicle, of Williams’s unlearning of parts of his education, or his repudiation of aspects of the official culture to which it initiated him. ‘The making of a mind’, Williams wrote in an essay entitled ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, ‘is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings’; ‘second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings.’ This is where the allegorical aspect of The Country and the City becomes visible, because if one’s personal development—one’s initiation into a culture, one’s becoming ‘cultivated’—involves both learning and testing, then one needs both to be ‘trained’ to the ‘known meanings’, and also, paradoxically, schooled in challenging them. In other words, one needs to learn how to unlearn or ‘refuse to learn’ certain rules.29 Presumably, one does not learn to disobey or discard rules in the same way that one learns those rules; the capacity to question what one is taught is not necessarily contained in what one is taught. This indicates that the ability to criticize one’s official education and culture, and its ways of seeing, might be difficult to teach. To read The Country and the City is thus to witness Williams demonstrating, by dramatizing, the (selective) undoing of his education, which is also, of course, a continuation of it, in part conducted through writing, and the way that involves remaking himself in the process. The ‘particular and personal crisis’ Williams alludes to at the end of The Country and the City evidently had something to do with the influence of Leavis, and his dire diagnosis of the modern condition, which Williams discusses in ‘Culture Is Ordinary’: ‘I was deeply impressed by [Leavis’s diagnosis]; deeply enough for my ultimate rejection of it to be a personal crisis lasting several years. For, obviously, it seemed to fit a good deal of my experience.’30 The Country and the City disentangles ‘true and false ideas, true and false histories’ of the country and the city; but the 29 30

Raymond Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’ [1958], in Resources of Hope, p. 4. Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, p. 9.

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particular ‘false idea’ from which it receives its real impetus—the central illusion it aims to dispel—is Leavis’s form of cultural nostalgia: That very powerful myth of modern England in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering and disorder. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this myth, in modern social thought. It is a main source for the structure of feeling which we began by examining: the perpetual retrospect to an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society. But it is also a main source for that last protecting illusion in the crisis of our own time: that it is not capitalism which is injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident system of urban industrialism.31

As we saw, Williams was ‘deeply impressed’ by elements of this myth. Thus The Country and the City is not just a project of general demystification—a disinterested refutation of an idea that Williams believed to be manifestly wrong (and harmful, because distracting)— but an effort of self-enlightenment, an examination into this myth’s hold over his own mind, in order to ultimately loosen its grip. This returns us to the equivocal ontology of ‘communication patterns’ or ‘rules of seeing’: at once external—the ‘rules of society’—and imbricated in the innermost structures of our consciousness, the process of questioning and rejecting them involves not simply an investigation into our shared culture, but an ‘extended inquiry’ into ourselves. One way of parsing the moral of this practice is to say, not that one must induce a personal crisis in order to produce authentic intellectual work, or to advocate self-exposure as the guarantor of all serious thought, but perhaps that you should in general avoid expending energy on debunking ideas by which you remain wholly unseduced—instead, like Williams, aspiring to argue against the Leavis in oneself. This is a way of guaranteeing not anything as unfashionable as intellectual authenticity but that the issues are live for you, that you care to say what you are saying, and think it worth saying. One of Williams’s central claims—one he makes throughout his work, but which is put forward most systematically in Marxism and Literature— is that culture is social (hence the fact that, as North explains in his essay, we cannot separate our perception of the formal features of country houses from ‘the history of exploitation that produced them’).32 We do not encounter culture in a vacuum: the world does not fall away—the 31 32

The Country and the City, p. 96. North, ‘Two Paragraphs’, p. 170.

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way, admiring a grand country house, we dissolve the labourers into the landscape. This is not to deny that certain kinds of cultural production and cultural experience (and criticism) require a degree of solitude; nor that cultural encounters can be deeply personal. Rather (and this seems to me to be precisely the point of his critique of ‘the aesthetic’), Williams objects to the way certain kinds of significant personal experiences are taken to be private, i.e., unshareable, and often also ineffable—the fact that they are beyond communication, beyond language, and so perhaps beyond criticism, attesting to their transcendence. Another way of putting this—and this is one of the salient lessons of Williams’s Bildungskritik, of his allowing personal experiences to perpetually intrude in his writing— is that all culture includes irreducibly common elements. He shows us this by treating culture as if it belongs to him (though never to him alone of course), which means claiming the right to evaluate it according to the degree to which it finds forms adequate to present experience, and to reject it if it fails to—since to truly possess something is to have the power to disown it.

Then and now In his critical survey of Williams’s achievement, Terry Eagleton wrote of Williams ‘resolutely offering his own experience as historically representative’, and claimed that his ‘discourse rests on a rare, courageously simple belief—Wordsworth and Yeats come to mind as confrères—that the deepest personal experience can be offered, without arrogance or appropriation, as socially “typical”’.33 I’ve been trying to unravel the methodological import and pedagogical force of such offering; but Eagleton’s way of putting it raises the question of its cause or rationale— the question of what gives Williams such ‘courage’ and resolution (as well as the secondary question of why Williams’s conviction that he is ‘socially typical’, i.e., ordinary, should be ‘rare’, and so in some sense Terry Eagleton, ‘Criticism and Politics: The Work of Raymond Williams’, nlr i/95, Jan–Feb 1976, p. 9. Eagleton later related this paradox—Williams as simulta33

neously ‘ordinary and exceptional’—to his ‘curious ability to look on himself from the outside’. See Eagleton, ‘Resources for a Journey of Hope: The Significance of Raymond Williams’, nlr i/168, Mar–Apr 1988, pp. 10–11. See also Stanley Cavell’s aperçu in The Claim of Reason: ‘those capable of the deepest personal confession (Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Freud) were most convinced they were speaking from the most hidden knowledge of others. Perhaps that is the sense which makes confession possible.’ The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford and New York 1970, p. 109.

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extraordinary). One can see Williams’s ‘simple belief’ at work in The Country and the City, in, for example, how his reflections on the writing of the book continue: And since the relation of country and city is not only an objective problem and history, but has been and still is for many millions of people a direct and intense preoccupation and experience, I feel no need to justify, though it is as well to mention, this personal cause.34

Since Williams knows that his personal experiences of the country and the city are shared by ‘many millions of people’, he can divulge them, since though personal, they are not unique. An empirical explanation for this belief might look to the character of Williams’s personal experience— his profound and ‘positive connection’ to the Black Mountain village where he grew up, his sense of belonging to a community, and his related affiliation with a class.35 But whatever its biographical source, Williams’s confident disclosure of his personal investments—one could instead describe it as an unusually full and meticulous ‘declaration of the situation’ from which he is speaking—also follows from theoretical principles. What can seem from one angle as a digressive exercise in self-indulgence is in fact an acknowledgement of sociality, and of its reach. For if Williams is personalizing a general history—remorselessly viewing it from his own perspective, and testing it against his own experience—he is also ‘sociologizing’ himself, seeing his experience as related to the culture around him. This is the paradox of culture, which ‘is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings.’36 If one’s representativeness, or one’s confidence in one’s representativeness, relies on the continued existence of certain shared experiences, can it withstand the disappearance of the sociological conditions of those experiences? The world that produced Williams and his writing—the immediate milieu of the Anglo-Welsh countryside, the Edwardian railway system, for which his father worked—has largely faded or vanished, The Country and the City, p. 3. ‘When I go back to that country, I feel a recovery of a particular kind of life, which appears, at times, as an inescapable identity, a more positive connection than I have known elsewhere. Many other men feel this, of their own native places . . .’ Note how his personal feeling—his sense of the community and landscape in which he was born giving him ‘an inescapable identity’—immediately sends Williams into a meditation on the way this personal feeling about a specific place is ordinary, and widely shared. The Country and the City, p. 84. 36 Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, p. 4. 34 35

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along with much of the community of the left to and for which he spoke. This is to pose a question of whether Williams is, or continues to be, the emblematic and perhaps exemplary figure North takes him for. Reading Williams’s writing as someone who is part of a generation that was born after Williams’s death, and whose lifespan coincides with the ascendancy and hegemony of neoliberalism—and with no direct experience or memory of social democracy, or its breakdown—it’s difficult to avoid the intermittent sense that I don’t fully understand Williams (or perhaps that he wouldn’t understand me). Admittedly, a sense of Williams’s recurring elusiveness is not confined to people of my generation: between passages of moving and rewarding insight, Williams’s writing, usually in his efforts to avoid simplification, can succumb to an aura—not without its seductions—of mystification. His syntax has a tendency to become waterlogged, forcing one to wade through too many abstract nouns, themselves somehow insular, even idiolectal, as if he has developed his own technical vocabulary. Instead of difficult ideas made simple and clear, we often get complicated expressions of complexity. Yet I do not think my misgivings are just a question of Williams’s style, but of a whole idiom and sensibility that can seem alien and remote. His writing retains its immense power, but aspects of it seem somehow far-off, inspiring the reverence of a relic, rather than the urgent discipleship of a thoroughly contemporary figure speaking to present concerns.

The half-truth of nostalgia Yet, despite my intermittent estrangement from it, Williams’s writing continues to embody a quality worthy of critical interrogation, though one quite difficult to, as Leavis might say, put one’s finger on. In order to try to illuminate it, I want to briefly compare him to a radically contemporary figure, who, though of course extremely different to Williams in numerous ways—sensibility, formation, interests—nevertheless seems to share this elusive quality with him: Mark Fisher. In the last issue of nlr, Simon Hammond drew a more sustained comparison between Fisher and Stuart Hall, the parallels between whom are perhaps more concrete and immediate. The resemblances between Fisher and Williams that I have in mind exist at an, as it were, higher plane of abstraction, and I want to elucidate them by, counter-intuitively, drawing a very local and possibly unpromising-seeming comparison between The Country and the City and Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life.

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Ghosts is a collection rather than a sustained, cumulative project, but despite this compositional difference, I’ve come to regard it as Fisher’s own Bildungskritische opus, provided one understands personal growth and cultural education as including a kind of prolonged mourning of one’s youth—and this mourning as itself a form of demystification (and so of education) insofar as it is a way of not simply letting go of the past, but of letting go of—of refusing—one’s nostalgia for it. This in turn is, paradoxically, a way of allowing what one valued about the past, or what it promised, to return. And as with the influence on Williams of Leavis’s ‘perpetual retrospect’, one senses in Fisher’s work that cultural nostalgia was a real and constant temptation. As Fisher notes in his introduction, his book is about ‘the ghosts of my life’, and it is accordingly replete with personal encounters—most often first or early ones—with the work being discussed (much music, but also literature and film). The eponymous essay of the collection begins: ‘It must have been 1994 when I first saw Rufige Kru’s “Ghosts of My Life” on the shelves of a high street record store.’ Fisher then describes the ‘shiver of exhilaration’ he felt upon realizing that it sampled the voice of Japan’s David Sylvian on the track ‘Ghosts’. This triggers another, earlier memory: ‘In 1982, I taped “Ghosts” from the radio and chain-listened to it: pressing play, rewinding the cassette, repeating.’ A ‘fragment’ of Japan’s song also appears on another track—Tricky’s ‘Aftermath’— fourteen years later. This leads to another memory of a first listening experience: ‘When I first heard Burial a decade later, I would immediately reach for Tricky’s first album Maxinquaye [on which “Aftermath” appears] as a point of comparison.’37 Memory, in Ghosts, is shown to be a very powerful instrument for interacting with cultural objects, since it is a mechanism by which culture assumes personal significance, and vice versa: a means by which personal experience can acquire a wider salience. Mnemonic association is therefore one of Fisher’s indispensable critical tools, particularly in his discussion of music that uses samples. Sampling, an allusive and utterly 37 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester and Washington 2014, pp. 30, 34, 39, 43. Comparison here returns as an essential technique for comprehending culture—though whereas Williams instructed us to use our imaginative faculties (to challenge the ‘landscaped’ vision offered by the guidebook), for Fisher it is memory that seems to be the vital comparative resource.

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modernist practice, is explicitly preoccupied with cultural memory and musical tradition. Fisher’s memoiristic criticism is thus particularly appropriate to it, since samples are in some obvious sense designed to activate the memories of listeners and to reflect on the shared cultural history such activation presupposes.38 Fisher’s recollections thus produce an account that interweaves the sampling history of the song— which is in some sense public, or held in common—with his personal listening history of those successive samples. Indeed, there is a sense in which memory becomes the channel for Fisher’s particularly committed form of cultural engagement—or even cultural entanglement: when Fisher hears Japan’s ‘Ghosts’ on the Rufige Kru record, he feels that one of his ‘earliest pop fixations’ has been ‘vindicated’, and ‘as if a disavowed part of myself—a ghost from another part of my life—was being recovered’.39 Similarly, Fisher’s review of Burial’s self-titled album begins: ‘Burial is the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years; literally.’40 Fisher is so immersed in this music and its environing (counter-)culture that he feels it reaches into his unconscious—into repressed memories and wish-fulfilment dreams; indeed, the ‘lifetime’ (or afterlife in samples) of these songs is so in parallel with Fisher’s own, it is almost as if he could have produced them.41 Memory is crucial to Fisher’s discussion of other art forms, too. See, for example, Fisher’s review of Grant Gee’s film Patience (After Sebald), The functioning of these mnemonic cues also presupposes listeners’ exposure to this history, their familiarity with the music. Incidentally, this supports Francis Mulhern’s claim that criticism to a large extent depends on scholarship—contra North’s advocacy of the former over the latter (and cultural intervention over knowledge-production)—since ‘it is impossible to imagine the critical purpose in isolation from a training in cultural literacy’, and criticism ‘has depended more than its advocates care to admit on the labours of scholarship’. Samples are only audible as samples to the initiated, to those with a certain amount of cultural knowledge— knowledge as the secretion of a lifetime of exposure to certain kinds of music. See Mulhern, ‘Critical Revolutions’, p. 46. 39 Ghosts of My Life, p. 34. Indeed, part of North’s objection to the production of ‘professionalized knowledge’ about culture is that critics seem more like anthrop­ ologists or historians, treating cultural objects as documents of a past or foreign culture, rather than as expressions from the culture in which they also participate. 40 Ghosts of My Life, p. 98. 41 One finds this closeness to the work under discussion in Williams, too, whose literary criticism—say, of the novels in his The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence—seems to come from the sensitive and sympathetic perspective of a fellow novelist. 38

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which opens with a recollection of a different film: ‘The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker—when it was broadcast by Channel 4 in the early 1980s—I was immediately reminded of the Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child.’42 In the preceding essay, a review of Chris Petit’s film Content, Fisher begins with a reflection that moves in the opposite direction: At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I now live—what Petit filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began to wonder if this might not be a doppelgänger container port somewhere else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text describes these ‘blind buildings’ while his camera tracks along them: ‘non-places’, ‘prosaic sheds’, ‘the first buildings of a new age’.43

There is a sense in which these openings are exact complements of each other: both begin with seeing a Suffolk landscape in a film, but whereas the second is a real landscape the adult Fisher knew well, which Petit’s artistry defamiliarizes, turning it into a ‘generic’ and even unreal or, literally, utopian ‘non-place’ that is somehow not Fisher’s Felixstowe, the first is an anonymous, science-fictional site—Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’—which reminds Fisher of a real landscape known so intimately (a place in his childhood memories), that it is almost the antithesis of anonymous. This dialectic between anonymity and intimacy, and between the generic (‘it could be anywhere’) and the absolutely familiar seems somehow to distil Williams’s teaching that culture is the collision of the ‘finest individual meanings’ with the most ‘ordinary common meanings’, the field in which the former opens out onto the latter, and vice versa: where personal experience finds its social foothold, and ‘common meanings’ reveal their sharply Ghosts of My Life, p. 202. This typical opening—involving a declaration of the circumstances in which Fisher encountered the cultural work he is discussing, and an allusion to the conditions of that encounter (Channel 4’s avant-garde broadcasting in the 80s)—seems to have learned from Williams’s counsel to trace back one’s response to its ‘historical and social conditions’. 43 Ghosts of My Life, p. 199. Note also the way Fisher imagines the camera shooting from the domestic privacy of his own family car, as if—as with Burial’s album seeming to issue from his dreams—what he is seeing/hearing could have come out of him. 42

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personal resonances.44 (Bildungs)criticism could then be described as the articulation of this collision, ‘valuations’ which relate ‘elements of one’s own situation’ to ‘those which associate one with others’.45

Structures of feeling In referring to his personal memories and impressions—his Suffolk— Fisher is not demanding that art simply mirror back what he knows, and dismissing it if it fails to.46 (For one thing, Fisher’s approval of these films is partly predicated on the way they prompt him to misrecognize Suffolk—they make it strange, and allow him to see it anew.) But this is where Williams’s difficult concept of a ‘structure of feeling’ becomes useful, because if one is to let oneself be guided by one’s personal experience in evaluating culture, and if one is to insist on the social relevance of such valuations, then one needs a way of conceptualizing the ways in which experience can be shared. In Marxism and Literature, Williams describes a ‘structure of feeling’ as ‘a particular quality of social experience’ that ‘gives the sense of a generation or of a period’. Williams adds that this social experience is ‘still in process’ and so ‘often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating’. ‘Methodologically, then, a “structure of feeling” is a cultural hypothesis’ with ‘a special relevance to art and literature, where the true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind’.47 Interestingly, Williams describes the ‘myth’ associated with Leavis as a ‘structure of feeling’: ‘It is a main source for the structure of feeling These two openings could be seen as skilled negotiations of what I. A. Richards identified as one of ‘the chief difficulties of criticism’: the ‘very pervasive influence of mnemonic irrelevances’—‘misleading effects of the reader’s being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emotional reverberations from a past’. Richards, Practical Criticism, pp. 13, 15. The lesson of Fisher’s practice here is that the point is not to exclude such ‘erratic associations’ and ‘emotional reverberations’ but to in a sense pursue them, to follow them through in the conviction that they may acquire relevance to others, as well as to the object under discussion. 45 Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 342. 46 Indeed, Fisher is repeatedly critical, though never contemptuous, of the way current socio-economic conditions—in which ‘free time’ is ‘convalescence’—create a desire for culture that instantly gratifies and that gives us more of what we already know, encouraging us to turn to music for the same anaemic, if reliable fulfilment we seek from Pret. See Ghosts of My Life, p. 187. 47 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 131–3. 44

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which we began by examining: the perpetual retrospect to an “organic” or “natural” society.’48 If The Country and the City is written in criticism of Leavis’s ‘perpetual retrospect’—although, crucially, written from a perspective which understands its pull—then the ‘structure of feeling’ to which Ghosts of My Life constitutes a reproach is the ‘formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world’. This exists alongside another kind—apt to misrecognize itself—which may ‘best be characterized not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories’, and so as a kind of cultural amnesia.49 Indeed, the two are related since the formal nostalgia is only possible because of this pathological forgetting of past innovations: W. G. Sebald’s ‘formal anachronism’, Fisher argues, is a denial of the history of 2oth-century literary experimentation, while the Black Eyed Peas’s ‘Rave-appropriations’ aren’t ‘so much revivals of Rave as denials that the genre had ever happened’. This oddly forgetful nostalgia, Fisher explains, prevents us from mourning—and longing for—the lost futures promised by the more radical-experimental decades of his youth, since ‘if Rave hasn’t happened, then there is no need to mourn it.’50 Indeed, the remarkable continuity in the cultural criticism collected in Ghosts, as well as much of the power of its analyses, comes from Fisher’s identification of the mood or ‘structure of feeling’ besetting contemporary culture. This is essentially one of sadness, or what Fisher sometimes refers to as the melancholy of ‘hauntology’. Fisher’s explanation of this affective condition is psychoanalytic in structure: our culture is living in the aftermath of a trauma it can’t remember—the destruction of social democracy and the ‘cultural ecology’ it facilitated; unremembered, this trauma can’t be mourned (since we are unable to recognize that there is anything to mourn); incompletely mourned, the trauma returns to haunt us. Oppressed by an elusive discontent we can’t acknowledge and compulsively disavow, cultural expression is temporally stuck, and chronically sad—a masked sadness Fisher hears, for example, in the hollow elation and glassy optimism of transnational club music exhorting us to feel good.51 Fisher’s ability to locate and articulate the disorder afflicting contemporary culture—as if Fisher knew his culture’s secrets (and that The Country and the City, p. 96. Ghosts of My Life, pp. 27, 113. 50 Ghosts of My Life, pp. 202–3, 181. 51 Ghosts of My Life, pp. 178–9. 48

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voicing them could bring relief, not betrayal, except perhaps of capital)— proceeds from a principle he mentions in his introduction to Ghosts. Acknowledging the ‘personal dimension’ to his book, Fisher explains: My take on the old phrase ‘the personal is political’ has been to look for the (cultural, structural, political) conditions of subjectivity. The most productive way of reading the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to be themselves . . . Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.52

One can feel the power of this well-known saying behind Fisher’s diagnosis of culture, since it depends on a counterpart capacity to ‘sociologize’ or ‘externalize’ his own experience, in this case his struggle with depression: Depression is the most malign spectre that has dogged my life . . . Some of these writings were part of the working through of the condition . . . the problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me. It’s clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognized . . . as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.53

The inverse of ‘the personal is impersonal’ also, I think, holds. And this dialectic is nowhere better encapsulated than in the title of Fisher’s book: Ghosts of My Life is, as Fisher says, about the ‘ghosts of my life’ but it is also taken—sampled, even—from a lyric in Japan’s song (or perhaps borrowed from Rufige Kru’s song, or Tricky’s . . . ), and so is in that sense not exclusively his at all—except that the song itself has a deep significance for Fisher, so is personal after all. How to summarize Fisher’s and Williams’s shared capacity to belong to their culture so intently?—a belonging predicated on selecting from it, prizing parts (e.g., for Fisher, certain strands of experimental electronic music), and rejecting others (e.g., Britpop, emphatically). Perhaps, borrowing Mulhern’s characterization of Leavis in The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, we might describe it as a Ghosts of My Life, p. 28. One difference between Fisher and Williams—not unrelated to their generational difference—is that they express the stakes of cultural criticism differently: where Williams speaks of ‘connecting’ and ‘associating’ with others, Fisher, in a distinctly (post)modern inflection, figures such solidarity as a release from selfhood. 53 Ghosts of My Life, pp. 28–9. 52

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kind of cultural (and political) militancy (though carefully distinguishing Fisher’s and Williams’s democratic and radically popular conceptions of culture from Leavis’s minoritarian tastes).54 There is an evenness in the comparative judgements involved in Fisher’s and Williams’s ultimate refusal of their different forms of nostalgia: by resisting both over- and under-estimations of the past, they neither catast­rophize the present, nor trivialize real cause for contemporary gloom. Like Williams, Fisher holds to the knowledge that things were in certain respects better before—the half-truth of nostalgia—as well as the conviction that they are in significant ways better now, and that we have the right to expect them to be better still, which is the ground for any serious hope that they could be, and cause for determination to make them so. ‘Haunting’, a key and ambivalent concept in Ghosts of My Life, captures this careful, even-tempered treatment of cultural nostalgia. Alongside its more sinister and malign valence, haunting is also, Fisher writes, ‘the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.’55 The ghost is not, or not only, there to torment you—to incessantly remind you of what you have lost—but to watch over you, to refuse to let you adjust to the loss and to the lesser new reality, in order that you might continue to expect, and demand, a more satisfying world.56 Fisher’s ghosts thus begin to resemble guardian angels, watching out for our futures by keeping present the derailment of the ‘virtual trajectory’ promised by our past. Perhaps there is a sense, too, in which allowing ourselves to be haunted by Fisher’s and Williams’s modelling of an occasionally intimidating kind of intensive cultural engagement and intellectual seriousness, is a way of ensuring we continue to learn from them—a pointer towards some of the things that criticism could be ‘for’.

‘Genuinely militant writing does not consist in partisanship clamantly asserted (though this may on occasion play a necessary part). Its fundamental precondition is an analysis and a perspective capable of determining the meaning and potential of particular conjunctures and so, the character of the interventions to be made in them.’ Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, London 1979, p. 327. 55 Ghosts of My Life, p. 22. 56 A world, perhaps, ‘in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster.’ Ghosts of My Life, p. 26. 54

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Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality Basic Books: New York, Verso: London 2019, $16.99/£16.99, hardback 288 pp, 978 1 786 63692 8 / 978 1 5416 1739 1

Benjamin Kunkel

RED FLAG OVER THE WHITE HOUSE? Bhaskar Sunkara—editor and, in 2010, while he was still an undergraduate, founder of Jacobin, a socialist quarterly which today boasts more than 35,000 subscribers and attracts many more readers to an indispensable website that posts near daily commentary on American and international politics from an ecumenical crew of left authors; former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization he joined on his eighteenth birthday, the ranks of which have in recent years, as Sunkara notes, multiplied tenfold, to surpass 50,000; occasional columnist for The New York Times and Guardian, and talking head on the cable news channel msnbc: in short, the public face, if there be one, of the much-discussed phenomenon of millennial socialism in the us, with a broad friendly smile in his author’s photo, and an easygoing and generous or, in other words, nonsectarian manner in his many public appearances—was born in Connecticut in 1989, at perhaps the nadir of the left’s historical fortunes. His parents had migrated from Trinidad and Tobago, and in his first book, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, Sunkara is quick to establish his family’s modest class situation: ‘My mother worked nights as a telemarketer, my father, a declassed professional, eventually as a civil servant in New York City.’ Socialism was hardly in the air in the suburban us of the late 90s and early 2000s. In Sunkara’s characteristically breezy telling, it took a lingering oasis of American social democracy, the local public library, to acquaint him

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with socialist literature: ‘By chance, I picked up Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky.’ In a readerly itinerary that tacked between the headings of social democracy and social revolution—a pair of stars that still forms the constellation over Sunkara’s adult career—he soon steered forward in time to Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and backward to ‘the mysterious Karl Marx himself’. The phrase signals friendliness to the neophyte reader to whom The Socialist Manifesto is obviously, but not exclusively, addressed. Sunkara’s foraging for intellectual nourishment in the municipal stacks took place at a time when there was not to be found on the periodicals shelves any publication resembling Jacobin or, for that matter, the other little magazines of the left that have sprung up on the American scene over the past fifteen years: journals firm in their radical commitments but addressed to the general reader as opposed to historical-materialist cognoscenti. Back then, the choice was between genuinely radical journals like Monthly Review or nlr itself that in their different ways took for granted their readers’ prior theoretical formation or political orientation, and social-democratic outlets such as The Nation or Dissent that offered meekly progressive takes on current events, with little evident hope and less concept of any ultimate socialist overhaul of us society. It testifies in no small part to Sunkara’s achievement in Jacobin that left-curious American teenagers today would no longer find themselves as intellectually lonely as he (and, for what it’s worth, I) once did, and that the broad Marxist tradition no longer looks like such an antiquarian or specialist concern. Public intellectual, radical editor, socialist politician—at just thirty years old, Sunkara is already the most prominent such figure in American life since Harrington himself, who died the year that Sunkara was born. More than this, the democratic-socialist current which, in the first decades after Harrington and others founded the dsa in 1982, represented no more than a shivering trickle across the desert of the American ideological landscape is, today, a stream that Sunkara can reasonably hope to see swell into one of the main channels of American politics. Democratic socialism in the us, as incarnate in the burgeoning dsa, already threatens the social neoliberalism of the Democratic Party to its right, and, at the same time, to its left, has sped the demise of the country’s most respectable revolutionary socialist outfit, the International Socialist Organization, which dissolved itself in March. These circumstances alone would confer a certain importance on any book Sunkara might write. And then, too, the printed (or posted) word matters peculiarly for American socialism, as it can’t for as-yet more effective political tendencies: until the advent of socialism in the us is an institutional reality, the phenomenon must exist largely on the page; and, as Sunkara’s

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own case illustrates, it’s in libraries or bookstores, as much as in workplaces or at demonstrations and meetings, that converts are to be won. What kind of addition, then, to the bookshelves of socialism has this good-natured emin­ence of the new American left attempted, and what contribution has he made to current left debates? These questions aren’t simple ones. In spite of the bright fragments of autobiography with which The Socialist Manifesto opens, it’s soon clear that the book belongs to a different and altogether more impersonal genre of writing. (The disappearance after the initial pages of the autobiographical Sunkara—brown-skinned son of working-class immigrants—implicitly rebukes that style of American politics, regnant in the Democratic Party, which would justify and commend one’s political commitments principally on the basis of one’s racial, sexual and class ‘identity’.) Nevertheless, the genre of which the book partakes does not exactly correspond with its title. For this Manifesto delivers no manifesto in the classical sense of a document outlining the moral rationale and material aims of a particular political party or tendency; even Sunkara’s penultimate chapter, ‘How We Win’, with its fourteen points of strategic counsel, rests content with generic observations (e.g., point 4: ‘They’ll do everything to stop us’) and abstract injunctions (point 12: ‘We must take into account American particularities’, but also point 14: ‘Our politics must be universalist’) as opposed to a specific programme. Marx and Engels in their Manifesto of the Communist Party may have essayed an overview of world capitalism, and even a universal theory of history, but did not refrain from ten concrete policy demands. Nor does Sunkara spend much time making the ethical or moral case, promised by his subtitle, for a radical politics. Only his first chapter—‘A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen’, imagining the transformation of the us two decades hence—argues as a matter of principle for a democratic socialism that would make good on America’s traditional ‘rhetoric of democracy and fairness’ by eliminating wage labour as ‘an unacceptable form of exploitation’ and ‘empower[ing] people to control their destinies inside and outside the workplace.’ Such a us would ‘guarantee at least the basics of a good life to all’—presumably, universal access to a high standard of health care and education, as well as the adequate incomes and abundant free time flowing from worker-run enterprises—and thereby enable that ‘radical human flourishing’ whose preconditions capitalism has, through material plenty, created but withheld from the mass of people. Echoing Trotsky’s famous peroration in Literature and Revolution, Sunkara invites us to ‘imagine our future Einsteins and Leonardo da Vincis liberated from grinding poverty and misery’, only to abandon this vista for a humbler prospect: ‘Or forget Einstein and Leonardo—better yet, imagine ordinary people, with ordinary abilities, having time after their 28-hour workweek to explore whatever interests or

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hobbies strike their fancy.’ The resulting flood of ‘bad poetry’ and inferior art, he proposes, ‘will be a sure sign of progress.’ (In its cultural politics, the new American socialism is ostentatiously at ease with mediocrity of expression in writing and art, even when it doesn’t itself exhibit it—Sunkara’s book is, on the whole, an eloquent one—as if to escape the reproach of ‘elitism’ routinely deployed by the right to discourage any alliance between university-educated professionals and workers with high-school diplomas.) Mainly, however, Sunkara takes for granted the rightness of the socialist cause and foregoes explicit proselytizing, perhaps on the sensible assumption that the viciousness of American capitalism today speaks for itself: if the evidence of one’s eyes has not already disclosed a society that flouts any notion of justice in its disbursement of opportunities and income, no mere book is likely to do the trick. The bulk of the Manifesto consists instead of a primer on socialist history, ‘not comprehensive but selective’, for the sake of furnishing ‘lessons, from both the revolutionary and the reformist wings of socialism, for the present day.’ Beyond these separate lessons, Sunkara promises a larger teaching: ‘We can learn from this history that the road to a socialism beyond capitalism goes through the struggle for reforms and social democracy, that it is not a different path altogether.’ The ambitiousness and difficulty of the intended history lesson, promising to square the circle of reform and revolution, are patent in the ambiguous tense of the clause: how can a road that so far does not ‘go through’ from social democracy to full socialism (in the historical present, as grammarians call it, of the past) illustrate that in fact it alone is the road that does ‘go through’ from the former to the latter (in the promissory present tense of the future)? In other words, if in history to date reformist social democracy has not eventuated in socialist revolution, how might this very same history show that, in the future, this is the necessary sequence of events? Bringing off this ambitious and, till now, elusive demonstration is the remit of this deceptively modest work. After his first chapter, Sunkara divides his book into two parts. The first of these, consisting of six chapters, amounts to a more or less chronological series of case studies. Here is socialism as it arose and failed, from the latter nineteenth century to the stub-end of the twentieth, in half a dozen (inter)national situations, from the foundational visions and frustrations of Marx and Engels in British exile; through the arc of Lassalle’s and Kautsky’s spd in Germany between the Gotha Programme and its Weimar debacle; through the Soviet Revolution from its unbaptized birth in 1905 to its triumph in 1917, and its fatal travesty in Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture in 1928 and thereafter; the achievements and atrocities of Communist China between Mao and Deng; the historical acme of social democracy in postwar Sweden, and its arrested leap into the true collective

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ownership of the means of production contemplated under the Meidner plan; and—at last—the stillborn socialism of the us, between the ineffectual Debs and the all-but-invisible Harrington. The Manifesto’s shorter second part (chapters 8–10) trades memory for anticipation, contemplating the chances for socialism in the us of the twenty-first century. It would be easy to query Sunkara’s omissions and assumptions in this brief resumé of ‘the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics.’ Why, it could be asked, among European countries, is only Germany, during the heyday of the spd, treated in detail, when the task everywhere else has always been to adapt German-speaking Marxian socialism as a foreign strain to native soil? Similarly, how can the Chinese Revolution stand for ‘Third World Revolution’, in the chapter bearing this title, when this process was otherwise the exercise of much smaller and weaker countries far more easily subordinated to imperial power? And so on. But Sunkara has already conceded that his history of socialism, both in quest and in exercise of power, is a selective one. And if his set of country studies are more conveniently illustrative than they are ideal-typically representative, this by no means prevents him from serving as a capable and fair-minded popular historian of an impressive diversity of national predicaments. His personal allegiances—to Karl Kautsky, for one example, or, for another, to a politics that emphasizes the injuries of class over those of gender—don’t prevent him from observing, respectively, the gap between Kautsky’s ‘almost apocalyptic vision of capital crisis’ and his ‘comparatively modest immediate demands’, or Swedish social democracy’s arguably greater success in emancipating women than workers. Sunkara’s brief lives, as it were, of socialism in a handful of national contexts are polemically but never tendentiously related, with an eye for details that compromise as well as corroborate the strategic instruction he would extract from them. In spite of shadings of complication, what are the traceable outlines of the story he has to tell? The achievement of Marx was in ‘laying out definitions of capitalism and communism’ (‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’); but the writings of a figure who, at the dawn of a movement, was necessarily ‘more improviser than prophet’, later suffered perversion into unerring gospel: ‘His favourite motto was “Doubt all things”, but under authoritarian regimes, Marxism was turned into a science that allowed no room for doubt.’ The finest tribute that Marx—‘a democrat and a believer that the majority had an interest in its own self-emancipation’—received as a democratic socialist was also the soonest, in the form of the German spd, which considered democracy the precondition for socialism rather than the other way around. Sunkara cites Kautsky: ‘It is the task of the Social Democratic Party to shape the struggle of the working class into a conscious and unified

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one and to point out the inherent necessity of its goals.’ In this concept of the party, Sunkara says, the left ‘prepares for but does not make revolution’: Kautsky ‘thought time was working in social democracy’s favour and wanted to postpone the final conflict until victory was certain.’ Sunkara’s line on Lenin, in Russia, is in essence the Trotskyist one: ‘In underdeveloped Russia . . . after the defeat of the exploiting classes, there would be no material basis for large-scale socialist construction. As a result, the revolution’s goal would have to be furthered by an international revolutionary process.’ When international revolution was not forthcoming—the spd, in particular, having quailed before its task—the Russian Revolution fell into the depressing path of a socialist bureaucracy, imposing and aggrandizing itself (sadistically so, during Stalin’s nightmare premiership) on the basis of an unconsulted working class consisting largely of illiterate peasants. After the war, Sweden—the exemplar to date of social democracy—presented a different and superior approach to the emancipation of the working class: ‘social democrats rejected insurrection and accommodated themselves to the democratic republic’ and thereby established, for a time, ‘the most livable society in history’, satisfying ‘socialist priorities’ by ‘shaping the outcomes of capitalist enterprise, rather than through nationalization.’ Social democratic adoption in 1976 of the plan, by the trade-union economist Rudolf Meidner, for the gentle euthanasia of Swedish capitalism through ‘a collectively owned wage-earner fund’ that would gradually expropriate the bourgeoisie and at length deliver national enterprise into proletarian hands marks the high-water point of democratic socialism. Meidner’s vision foundered on the long downturn of global capitalism— ‘social democracy was always predicated on economic expansion’—and the intransigence of capitalists who rightly perceived his scheme as ‘an existential threat’ and cast it before voters ‘as an attempt by union bureaucrats to concentrate power.’ (Somewhat curiously, Sunkara calls his chapter on the roadblocks barring postwar European social democracy from true socialism ‘The God That Failed’, after the Cold War epitaph on Soviet Communism: an allusion at once unusually awestruck by social democracy—typically regarded even by its adherents not as a world-creating deity but at best as a demiurge with local powers—and, for Sunkara, slighting of socialdemocratic accomplishments.) The role of China in this global story seems to be to bolster the thesis that a socialism worthy of the name can only be established in those countries where capitalism is most, not least, advanced: ‘The Third World’s experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust social democracy requires a self-organized working class.’ (Alluding to Marx’s late letters to his Russian correspondent Vera Zasulich, without explicating

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them, Sunkara concedes that Marx ‘later complicated this prediction’: these letters’ apparent ratification of twentieth-century revolution in economically backward countries goes unaddressed.) As Sunkara explains, ‘attempting to make up for hundreds of years in a “few years” made socialism in the Third World prone to domination by small groups trying to carry out modernization from above.’ In China and elsewhere, this constituted ‘a formula for authoritarianism’. Sunkara’s native us, with its precocious and thoroughgoing capitalism, supplies his final illustration of socialism’s historical career. The American left’s beginnings were promising enough: ‘In the late 1820s, the United States gave birth to the first workers’ parties in the world, in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.’ Empty—or, rather, emptied—American soil was also fertile ground for the utopian socialism of Robert Owen, who founded his New Harmony colony in Indiana in 1827, and assorted Fourierists, including Hawthorne and Emerson at Brooke Farm. Nevertheless, ‘The Civil War’, Sunkara writes, ‘was the true American Revolution’, expropriating ‘$3.5 trillion in “private property” in emancipating the South’s four million slaves.’ Although Sunkara notes that the abolition of chattel slavery ‘inspired battles against what was denounced as “wage slavery”’, he ignores the work of the many Marxist historians, Neil Davidson among the latest, who have interpreted the Civil War not as a harbinger of socialist revolution but as a New World variant of the bourgeois revolutions of Europe—in other words, as an event that, by eradicating plantation slavery, consolidated rather than challenged the prevalence of the wage relation. Sunkara moves on to acknowledge the inspiration that Eugene Debs took from Kautsky, whose writings, Debs testified, ‘were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also the spirit of his socialist utterance.’ He then leads a brisk tour through the ignis fatui of the American left, from Debs’s Socialist Party, through the Wobblies (who amassed immense moral credit and precious few victories in my home region of the Mountain West on those occasions when striking miners and their families were massacred by Pinkerton mercenaries), and the cpusa, which if nothing else fortified the ranks of the civil-rights movement. Sunkara is right to note that ‘the end of Jim Crow transformed the United States and may be the most important and enduring legacy of the American left.’ He does not pause to dwell on the erosion of this achievement since the 1970s, as manifest in the Gulag-level incidence of black Americans currently incarcerated, or the impairment of the African-American vote since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act and left the old states of the Confederacy unsupervised in their administration of the franchise. Sunkara is nevertheless too honest to pretend that the left has counted for much more in American history than moral décor: ‘Socialists

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have managed to play important roles in struggles to make the United States more democratic and humane, but the inequalities that mark American society today are stark reminders of our failures.’ The remainder of The Socialist Manifesto looks forward to a left renaissance in the us, adducing rising inequality as the chief cause for such hopes: ‘You might think that a socialist movement would be inevitable in times like these. You’d be right.’ In chapter 8, he recapitulates the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement of 2011, and the thwarted Sanders campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Together, these events suggest a constituency for some American form of democratic socialism, and, in chapter 9, Sunkara assembles a list of fourteen points that together indicate for American democratic socialists ‘How We Win’. (One is unhappily reminded of Clemenceau’s comment, during the Versailles conference of 1919, on President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for postwar reconstruction: ‘God Himself was content with Ten Commandments.’) There is little to object to in Sunkara’s fourteen points. Some of them would be controversial to party professionals of the Anglophone centreleft, e.g., point 2: ‘Class-struggle social democracy has the potential to win a major national election today’—a proposition that would incite intense opposition among right-wing Labour mps in the uk, or suburbanite-aligned Democratic Party consultants in the us. But most of his points are left-wing bromides: point 9, ‘Socialists must embed themselves in working-class struggles’, or point 14, ‘History matters.’ Missing from the list, in an omission unfortunately typical of dsa politics, is any reckoning with the us’s role as armed defender of worldwide capital. The overall proposition of Sunkara’s programme is for a retrospectively progressive working-class political project that places the trade union, as an institution, and the working class, as a sociological category, at the centre of a universalist politics of radical but piecemeal change in the direction of democratic socialism. Both sensible and plausible, this counsel is well-taken and convincing, as far as it goes. But how far is that? Sunkara says that this chapter ‘offers a road map based on the history of left politics.’ Tellingly, he does not say to what destination his road map leads. It soon emerges that social democracy, not socialism, lies at the far edge of this map. ‘But what about the end goal of socialism—extending democracy radically into our communities and workplaces, ending the exploitation of humans by other humans?’ Sunkara proposes nothing more than to ‘put these more radical questions . . . on the table.’ In other words, the project of this volume—to explain how electoral social democracy not only should but, in the us of the twenty-first century, can eventually produce full socialism—is tacitly abandoned at the eleventh hour.

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Any book labelled a manifesto by its author seeks to rally readers to some cause. How convincing, then, is Sunkara’s brief for democratic socialism? Insofar as his book is pitched to potential recruits rather than accounted enlistees, the question is an awkward one for a reviewer already possessed of like convictions: how to judge the persuasiveness of a ‘case’ of which one is already persuaded? Other readers will furnish better tests of Sunkara as proselytiser. Nevertheless, the persuasiveness of Sunkara’s book can be assessed on socialist grounds. On the one hand, Sunkara’s refusal to conjecture and propose how the us might transform itself from a capitalist country playing host to an incipient socialist movement into a truly socialist nation, moving with all deliberate speed to end the rule of private capital, reflects an admirable humility. Nothing about the future advent of a socialist us can be predicted with assurance except that it’s likely to come about in surprising fashion, if at all. And yet the promise of Sunkara’s story was to show, or at least suggest, how democratic means could procure the result of socialism, not mere social democracy. If the mechanics of such a transformation cannot be known in advance, the process must still be conceivable—that is, both imaginable and plausible—for an argument, like Sunkara’s, that American social democracy would promote and hasten the arrival of socialism rather than prevent or delay it, to convince. The promise remains stillborn. Implicitly, the logic of Sunkara’s argument seems to be that because twentieth-century history exhibits the shortcomings of socialism without democracy, as well as democracy without socialism (not to mention all those cases, still plentiful enough if not ever more numerous, of countries that are neither socialist nor democratic), a truly ‘democratic’ socialism—‘indeed I see the term as synonymous with “socialism”’—must be the destiny of the twenty-first century. Social democracy (in the form of a movement), then, is to be the vehicle, and democratic socialism (in the form of state power) the destination: ‘The democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and’—vaguely enough—‘messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change.’ Two important flaws vitiate this ‘case for radical politics’. First, no actual transition to socialism, though hoped for, is envisaged. The Socialist Manifesto’s opening parable of a worker-run pasta-sauce factory and its concluding list of vague precepts stand in place of any concrete imagining of transition. Second, no emergent historical logic is identified that would permit the establishment of socialism in a wealthy developed country that has heretofore eluded the first-world left. If radical parties and trade unions were not able to bring about socialism in developed countries in the past, when they were far stronger than they are today, what new conditions make

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the twenty-first century more propitious for rich-country socialism than was the nineteenth or twentieth? The purpose of what Marxists used to call historical science was to produce useful forecasts of the future; here the project is dropped. Level-headed as Sunkara’s book is on the whole, his silence on this question of transition gives it a utopian rather than scientific air, in Engels’s terms. Lukács elaborated on the word in his little study of Lenin: ‘Revolutionary utopianism is an attempt to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, to land with one jump in a completely new world, instead of undertaking . . . the dialectical evolution of the new from the old.’ The contemporary left’s abandonment of dialectical expression still leaves intact the dialectical task of imagining how the future emerges by a series of steps, not one magical leap. Sunkara’s neglect of this task means avoiding several obvious questions, leaving them unanswered because unasked. Would it be the success of social democracy in America that would most likely lead to socialism, as popular experience of the former instilled desire for the latter, or would it instead be the frustration of social-democratic demands at the hands of capitalist reaction that convinced an effective mass of citizens that revolution was in order? Assume that, in either case, a majority of American voters might one day be prepared to vote in a referendum, Kautsky-style, to install socialism in the us and dismantle capitalism. Is there any prospect of the capitalist class, and its loyalists, retainers and security guards, complying with the general will? (Lenin reproached Kautsky for his naivety in imagining that capitalism could be abolished by national plebiscite.) If not, what do socialists need to do to enlist soldiers and even police officers into their ranks so that, when the hour comes, democracy can prevail through revolution and, in a situation of dual power, enough armed men and women will obey popular sovereignty, instead of a recalcitrant state? Even then, in the event of successful democratic revolution, what if any repressive measures would be necessary to safeguard the achievement against the efforts of its domestic and perhaps international opponents? The revolutionary left has debated such questions for a long time, positions differing (though perhaps not enough) according to time and place. And the questions do not properly admit of any final or generic answers: they must be met according to local and national circumstance. Even so, it seems coy of Sunkara, in a work of revolutionary strategy, not to pose them at all, or at least to admit that any socialist movement with real aspirations to attaining its object will one day, sooner or later, have to confront them. Sunkara’s failure to convincingly cast social democracy as the midwife of socialist revolution would matter less if it were his alone. The sequence of events that he evidently desires but can’t foresee—from attainment of social-democratic hegemony within the liberal-capitalist state to socialist

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revolution under the impetus of mass mobilization, and then onward to national consolidation of democratic socialism in an international framework undoubtedly more hostile than friendly to the desperate effort—has not, of course, been convincingly anticipated by anyone else possessed of the same desire. Sunkara in his Socialist Manifesto is not able to reconcile the cloudiness of his historical understanding, and the modesty and tentativeness of his political programme, with the extravagance and urgency of his (and our) hopes for a social transformation that, whether with the us leading the way or falling into line behind other states, will, before it’s too late, combine deliverance from capitalism with the ecological rescue of civilization. If I knew any better than him how the trick was to be performed, I would not hesitate to tell my comrade and fellow American how the riddle of history is solved.

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Robin Blackburn

REFORM TO PRESERVE? The troubled aftermath of the great crisis has provoked a flood of books that aim to ‘fix’ the continuing malfunctions of Western capitalism. ‘The way our economic and political systems work must change, or they will perish’, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times has proclaimed. Recommended reading for Martin Wolf’s reform agenda is Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism, a book that also featured on Bill Gates’s list (‘ambitious and thought-provoking’), while George Akerlof called it ‘the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes’. Collier himself, who writes as a candid friend of capitalism, lamenting its deplorable fall from grace, sees his book as updating Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism—offering an ‘intellectual reset’ for a social democracy that may once again become the philosophy of the political centre. The Future of Capitalism claims to offer a new conceptual framework, as well as a range of practical proposals. Does it do so? Collier is better known as a developmental economist than a saviour of the advanced-capitalist world. Born to a working-class family in Sheffield in 1949, in the book he describes his ascent to Oxford, Harvard and Sciences Po. His best-known work, The Bottom Billion (2007), praised the beneficial effects of globalization, which had set the vast majority of the world’s population—five billion, at least—on the road to mass prosperity. That book focused on the remaining billion, many of whom he detected in Africa, caught in the traps of civil war, bad government and resource dependence. Applying the binaries of individual rational-choice theory, driven by ‘greed’ or ‘grievance’—‘will I gain by rebelling against the government?’—Collier arrived at a set of brutally neo-imperialist solutions: globalization could

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Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties Allen Lane: London 2018, £20, hardback 248 pp, 978 0 241 33388 4

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work for Africa, but it would require long-term military occupations by the G8 governments to keep the peace and enforce the expansion of sezs to attract investment flows. The bottom billion was not ready for democracy, he explained in his next book, War, Guns and Votes (2008), as they were too likely to vote on ethnic lines. Collier duly acquired a cbe from Blair in 2008 and a knighthood for ‘services to policy change in Africa’ from Cameron. A decade on and Collier is chastened—his heart ‘seared’—as he addresses the ‘moral bankruptcy’ of his native land. Over the past four decades, we now learn, capitalism’s economic performance has deteriorated; pessimism has been growing; new generations are worse off than their parents. A stark class divide has opened up between the ‘educated’—who meet and mate at university, and have forged themselves into a new ruling class, with a shared social identity in which esteem is based on skill—and the ‘less-well educated’, their jobs hard hit by globalization, who are prone to family breakdown, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence. Damaging ‘ideologies’ have emerged, ‘snake-oil cures’ peddled by demagogues such as the ‘Marxists’ who have taken over the British Labour Party, feeding on the fears and resentment of the ‘less-well educated’. Collier harks back to the social democracy of his youth, based on the ‘practical reciprocity’ of the co-operative movement, rooted in communities, pride in one’s job and national identity, and upheld by political parties of both centre-left and centre-right. Alas, from the eighties on, the parties were captured by know-it-all intellectuals, who ascribed to themselves the moral superiority of Plato’s Guardians: on the one hand, rational-choice economists, who posited an amoral ‘economic man’; on the other, Rawlsian proponents of universal rights, who demanded legal privileges for the most disadvantaged groups. Both the economists and the lawyers discounted the ‘innate moral foundations’—the ‘normal instincts’ of reciprocity and desert, esteem and belonging—on which communitarian social democracy was based. ‘As the destructive side effects of new economic forces hit our societies, the inadequacies of these new ethics have been brutally revealed.’ The new political class had been ‘cavalier about globalization’ and had kept quiet about its costs. Yet it had led to deep socio-geographic divides between booming metropolitan cities, benefiting from cluster effects, and ‘broken’ provincial towns, in turn widening the rift between the prospering ‘educated’ and the despairing ‘less so’. Meanwhile global divisions were sharpened by the elite’s ‘unqualified enthusiasm’ for liberalization and ‘unqualified espousal’ of immigration. Capitalism can be fixed, Collier assures us, but it requires a pragmatism ‘firmly and consistently grounded in moral values’, promoting markets harnessed to ‘a sense of purpose’. The first priority is political reform— ‘breaking the extremes’. Foolishly, the mainstream political parties have

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empowered their rank-and-file members to elect their leaders. The parties need to be ‘driven back to the centre’, either by restricting leadership selection to elected representatives, or opening it to all voters—though that can be a risk—or, perhaps the safest option, introducing a carefully calculated modicum of proportional representation, to cement politicians of the ‘hard centre’ in power. Macron is the prime example of the type required, flanked by Lee Kuan Yew, Trudeau and Kagame (Collier’s claim that Kagame ‘denied his Tutsi team the customary spoils of military victory’ would come as news to the inhabitants of eastern Congo). Collier also hails the ‘remarkable’ Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Danish Social Democrats, for ‘vigorously returning the party to its communitarian origins’. (In fact Frederiksen’s main innovation was to court the far right by embracing its Islamophobic agenda, calling for Muslim schools to be shut down and backing a law that would allow police to confiscate asylum-seekers’ jewellery.) To soothe the anxieties of the ‘less educated’, Collier would combine restricted immigration with affordable housing and flexicurity—benefits to compensate for irregular employment. The ‘ethical family’ would be bolstered by compulsory mentoring for young couples at risk of breaking up, while ngos comprised of volunteer grandparents would shore up the morals of school-age children. The state would be called upon to help generate narratives of patriotic belonging. Turning to the ‘ethical firm’, Collier laments the tax-avoidance skills of the giant banks and global corporations, adept at shifting their hqs and shopping for the jurisdictions with the lowest imposts. He now criticizes the cult of ‘shareholder value’ and the algorithms used by the pension and insurance-fund investors, which oblige firms to focus narrowly on quarterly returns: ‘nobody has much incentive to understand whether the long-run strategy of the management is smart’. He calls for a tough line on corporate malfeasance—dragging a few ceos off the golf course and throwing them in prison would send a strong signal to the rest. Strangely, Collier has nothing on ‘the ethical investor’, though there has been a lot of research on this topic; a number of pension funds now shun investments in arms trading, gambling, tobacco or child labour, and few omit to pay lip-service to esg—environmental, social and governance—criteria. The most radical proposals in The Future of Capitalism target what Collier calls the new ‘educated’ class. Drawing on Anthony Venables’s work on spatial inequality, he sketches the surging growth of ‘global cities’ since the eighties as they gained access to not just national but world markets, reflected in huge increases in the rents and profits of ‘agglomeration’. The term refers not only to urban ‘returns to scale’, but to the rewards of specialization and location accruing to the aggregation of a large population of high earners, who in turn create a market for services to entertain them. Here, Collier does shed some light on aspects of the current capitalist malaise. Following

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Stiglitz, he picks up on Henry George’s insight in Progress and Poverty (1879) that the benefits of agglomeration are a collective achievement, generated by the millions who live and work in the city, yet—with rising urban rents—the gains accrue to the landlords; George therefore called for a heavy progressive tax on urban land values. Collier seconds this: metropolitan landlords have played scant part in generating the agglomeration effect—‘for all they have done, they might as well have been lying on the beach’—and should be subject to an annual land-tax charge, as a percentage of land and property values in the city, which would be redistributed to the ‘broken’ provincial towns. But George needs updating, he argues: not only landlords but high-earning members of the ‘smart metropolitan workforce’ are benefiting from economic rents—that is, payment over and above the price that would have induced them to do the work. They, too, should be hit by a location supplement, on top of their income tax. Drawing on Robert Solow, he points out that heavy taxes on economic rents do no collateral damage to wider economic activity. The Future of Capitalism rejects neo-liberalism, but does not rise above its narrow optic. Indeed the book’s most striking omission is any real analysis of its supposed subject, the ‘future of capitalism’ as such. The rise of China, and consequent intensification of competition for markets and resources, is ignored, as are the effects of climate change. The stubborn debt burdens accumulated by the leading capitalist powers, weighing heavily on economic performance and living standards, go unmentioned. The implications of what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ are not addressed, nor the fundamental issues of social reproduction raised by Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi in their book Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. A proper reading of these entrails can help us to decipher the future of capitalism; but this is a task beyond Collier’s book. It’s striking that, while left attempts to conceptualize an exit from the crisis have sought to base themselves on the most advanced features of contemporary capitalism—repurposing the digital feedback infrastructure for decentralized social planning as Evgeny Morozov has proposed, for example; or the speculative robotics discussed in Peter Frase’s Four Futures or Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism—the liberal-centrist ‘how to fix it’ literature has been remarkably backward-looking. This is a reversal of the position in the eighties and nineties, when the left was on the back foot, attempting to defend the working-class gains of the post-war period against the onslaught of neo-liberalism. Collier’s nostalgia for the communitarianism of the high Cold War in his ‘hard centre’ manifesto chimes with Raghuram Rajan’s proposal in The Third Pillar to revive ‘communities’ by way of ‘inclusive localism’—although Collier’s location and land tax proposals are more radical than Rajan’s neighbourhood ngos. Similarly, Collier’s

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ethical turn is echoed in the Victorian tones of the New Agenda announced this month by the editor of the Financial Times: ‘profit with a purpose’— and, quoting Macauley, ‘reform in order to preserve’. As with Collier, the real fear is not that capitalism has no future but the risk that the wrong people may be elected; the ft’s moral reset has gone hand-in-hand with a sustained assault against Corbyn’s Labour Party. Collier seems in fact anxious that his embrace of Henry George’s land tax may be misunderstood, assuring himself that neither he nor George are ‘Marxists’. A neo-Ricardian journalist and social reformer, George’s ideas won a small but dedicated following in the nineteenth-century labour movement, in his native usa and other English-speaking countries; in the 1880s, he ran as a United Labor Party candidate for Mayor of New York City. Marx and Engels were not unfriendly to him in their writings. As Marx in 1881 wrote to a friend in Hoboken, Friedrich Adolph Sorge, who had sent him a copy of Progress and Poverty, the—necessarily contradictory—transitional measure of a land tax payable to the state had featured over thirty years before in The Communist Manifesto. But George’s ‘cloven hoof (at the same time ass’s hoof)’ was revealed in the claim that a land tax would make all the evils of capitalist society disappear, while leaving the wage-labour system and capitalist production intact. This is Collier’s ass’s hoof, too. As Mark Fisher put it in Capitalist Realism, the values that family life depends upon—obligation, trustworthiness, commitment—are precisely those that are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism, where work relations are characterized by impermanence and unpredictability; they are systematically undermined by the need for two jobs, travel, relocation. Ignoring these realities, Collier’s book offers a grab-bag of moralizing maxims and recycled fiscal projects. But capitalism without the ravages of accumulation is Hamlet without the Prince.

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Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny Oxford University Press: New York, $27.95, hardback 338 pp, 978 0 19 060498 1

Susan Watkins

BEATING THE BEADLES Feminist writing since the crisis has notably targeted the collusion of gender politics with corporate capitalism. Though liberal feminism still commands the mediasphere, new theoretical work has taken a more critical approach—calling for a ‘Goodbye to Boardroom Feminism’, as in Lorna Finlayson’s invigorating Introduction, for a ‘feminism of the 99 per cent’, or for the large-scale social change demanded by the tech-utopian Xenofeminists. By contrast Kate Manne’s Down Girl takes the opposite tack, arguing that the oppression of the most privileged women should be taken as the basis for a more effective philosophical approach. Her book opens with the wrongs suffered by Ivana Trump and the former Mrs Steve Bannon, and ends with an impassioned defence of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trailed in talks at Harvard and Princeton, rehearsed in the New York Times and Huffington Post, Down Girl was hailed in the New Yorker and praised in the London Review for its ‘acuity and precision’, its illuminating and exacting arguments. What is its case? Kicking off from some spectacular expressions of male aggression, Manne asks why patterns of misogynist violence persist in allegedly postpatriarchal societies like the us and her native Australia. But Down Girl is explicitly not a work of cultural sociology, nor of anthropology, history or gender studies. Manne teaches moral philosophy at Cornell and claims that hers is the first treatment of misogyny in the analytical-philosophy tradition, expanding that approach to draw on the meta-ethical foundations of morality in the social order, and combining it with cultural criticism and ‘ideology critique’. Drawing on what she describes as ‘my own (highly privileged)

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social position’, she aims to provide a conceptual skeleton which others are invited to fill in as appropriate for their own class position. Before going on to track its logic, Manne redefines what ‘misogyny’ is: not a deep-seated male loathing for the opposite sex or, as Cold War Freudianism had it, a psycho-pathological revulsion rooted in the experience of an overpowering mother; Manne re-nominates the term ‘gynophobia’ for that phenomenon. Instead, misogyny should be understood as serving a social rather than a psychological function: as a policing mechanism, enforcing the norms of asymmetrical gender entitlement. According to the moral economy of these norms, ‘women owe men’—men are ‘tacitly entitled’ to rely on women in their social orbit for ‘nurturing, comfort and care’, for ‘sexual, emotional and reproductive labour’; if these entitlements are denied, the men may feel aggrieved or disappointed—sometimes murderously so, as in the case of the student who went on a killing spree in Santa Barbara because none of the women at his college would go to bed with him (the ‘Isla Vista’ case). Meanwhile, women who violate the giver-taker roles, or who take male goods (money, protection) without reciprocating in care and concern, or who seek masculine-coded perks and privileges—status, leadership, wealth, power—for themselves, are liable to be targets for misogynist aggression in this policing sense. However, as Manne develops and defends her case, misogyny’s frequency contracts—it is confined to ‘particular kinds of women’, not ‘universally’ experienced by ‘women across the board’; only a small minority of men are serial predators, and it’s not the case that there is ‘a misogynist inside every man’; indeed, across Anglophone societies in general, misogynist aggression may be defined as ‘rare’. At the same time, the potential extent of misogyny expands—its expressions may range from ‘subtle social signs of disapproval’ to life-threatening violence; it may include sexualizing or de-sexualizing, patronizing, infantilizing, disparaging; dismissing, shunning or putting to shame—and its enforcement agents multiply: most people (men, women, non-binaries) are capable of channelling misogynistic forces, or unwittingly policing gendered norms. For Manne, it is a ‘threshold concept’—supposed to open up a new way of thinking—as much as, if not more than, an empirical reality. Although she devotes a good many pages to the gunman of Santa Barbara, it’s the third instance of patriarchal-norm violation—women who seek masculine-coded rewards for themselves—that sparks Manne’s warmest interest. Down Girl’s preface opens with a famous passage from A Room of One’s Own in which Virginia Woolf describes inadvertently striding across the lawn of a Cambridge quad, rapt in her thoughts, when the figure of a man looms before her, horror and indignation on his face: ‘Instinct rather than reason came to my help: he was a Beadle’—a college constable—‘I

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was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.’ Somewhat tangentially, Manne relates Woolf’s ‘misstepping’ on the College grass to the discussion of how one feels if someone steps on one’s hand—accidentally or, on the contrary, with intent—in Peter Strawson’s 1962 essay, ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Strawson’s argument was that the pain would be the same, but that in the second case he would also feel a sense of moral indignation and resentment, which could be mitigated only by an explanation or apology. Manne, however, sets herself in the place of the other agent: what if one is the person who has stepped on his hand, or his toes—or, like Woolf, trespassed on his turf? ‘Those of us with some form of unjust, unmerited privilege are susceptible to these errors’, she explains; privilege is prone to confer ‘an inaccurate sense of one’s own proprietary turf.’ Meanwhile the person in Strawson’s position ‘may experience genuine shock and distress as a result of your violating a norm, or refusing to play your assigned part’— ‘You are misstepping, or overstepping, deviating, or wronging him.’ Today, Manne argues, reactions of resentment or indignation to women treading on what was hitherto men’s turf rarely reveal their causal triggers—that she is aspiring to privileges historically forbidden to her. Instead, they are rationalized as criticisms of her failure as a ‘giver’, according to the logic of misogyny—she seems cold, arrogant, pushy, ruthless; she fails to show the admiration, deference, gratitude, attention, sympathy and concern traditionally required of women towards men in authority over them. This, unremarkably, sets the stage for Manne’s discussion of Hillary Clinton’s failed run for the White House in 2016. To call the voters ‘deplorables’ is just the sort of understandable misstep to which the unwontedly privileged are prone. Those who judged Clinton corrupt were themselves guilty of an excess of ‘moralistic suspicion’. To describe her as ‘robotic’ indicated a misogynistic reaction: she wasn’t being sufficiently giving, caring, attentive. As for the voters: women were just as misogynistic as men in enforcing gender norms, since penalizing successful women serves as an ego-protective function for Mrs Beadles. Millennials were no better than their elders, as their support for Sanders showed. If a majority of white women had sufficiently internalized misogyny to actually vote for Trump, black women and Latinas failed to turn out for Clinton. Given a ‘small but predictable turn-off effect, mediated in large part by gender’, that low turnout would ‘cost her dearly’. While she concedes that not every female public figure is seen as untrustworthy, Manne argues that it was in fact Clinton’s ‘manifest competence’ that triggered this broader misogynistic response. Her basis for this is the ‘status incongruity thesis’ suggested by social-psychology experiments in gender stereo­types. According to these tests—by Laurie Rudman

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at Rutgers, Madeline Heilman at nyu—unconscious bias in favour of maintaining gender hierarchies leads participants to express hostile reactions towards women who compete for high-status positions; agentic or assertive women are perceived as ‘extreme’ in masculine-coded traits like arrogance and aggression—characteristics which, as women, they were not supposed to have in the first place. According to Rudman, the sense of ‘America in decline’—factors cited include economic meltdown, fatigue from fighting protracted wars in the Middle East, general anxiety about global and technological change—leads to a stauncher defence of existing worldviews, including gender hierarchies. By speaking of American decline, Bernie Sanders was therefore responsible for putting Clinton ‘at a further disadvantage’. Likewise, he was wrong to talk of Clinton’s ‘bad judgement’ in supporting the invasion of Iraq. Like the fbi’s charge of ‘extreme carelessness’ in handling State Department communications from her home devices in Chappaqua, this was a typical misogynist move, portraying a woman on the cusp of power as a ‘moral usurper’. In Manne’s view it should have been ‘socially unacceptable’ to describe Clinton as selfish, corrupt, hypocritical or a member of the establishment. Though Down Girl makes only the sketchiest attempt to explain the persistence of gendered norms, Manne essentially relies on a backlash argument: women entering prestigious positions, trespassing on male turf, are being met by a new wave of misogynistic resentment from the Beadles and their wives. Hence the need for all supporters of gender equality to rally to the women of the one per cent and to vote for neoliberal politicians like Clinton and Australia’s Julia Gillard, whose record on austerity and balanced budgets needs no defence. Beyond this, Down Girl’s prescriptions are remarkably modest. Piecemeal reform—‘retail, not wholesale’—and ‘slow moral overhaul’ make up her agenda, though she is also inclined to throw up her hands in despair: ‘What could possibly change any of this?’ Manne’s political affiliations are transparent enough. What of her intellectual case? Though she cites no precedents for it, the critique of a gendered ‘giver-taker’ ideology is hardly novel. Simone de Beauvoir was writing in 1949 about the male myth of the woman who will guarantee the repetition of meals, of sleep: ‘she repairs what his activity has destroyed, tends to him if ill, lights the fire and fills the house with flowers’—and, if she deviates from the myth, will be damned as unfeminine. The work of second-wave socialist feminists was in large part devoted to filling out an understanding of the material and social bases for that ideology, drawing on cultural history, anthropology, psychology, political economy and the social sciences—a project checked by the post-structuralist turn of the eighties and nineties, which came to read the critique of gender ideology as based upon, and thus perpetuating, the gender binary itself. Manne recognizes that she is being

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‘unfashionable’ in returning to this ‘old-fashioned’ problematic. At the same time, her approach is also counter-posed to the radical feminism of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, for whom the inner truth of gender relations lay in the act of coitus, understood as male conquest and female subordination. Sex is almost entirely absent from Down Girl, as is labour, the central term for ‘unified’ theories of patriarchy and capitalism, from the proponents of Wages for Housework to the recent studies of social reproduction, in which capital accumulation is said to depend upon women’s unpaid domestic and affective work. What is gained, and what lost, by Manne’s translation of gender ideology into the terms of moral-analytical philosophy? In socialist-feminist hands, the goal was to challenge and change the material conditions that underpinned gender ideology—not just women’s economic dependence but the entire family set-up and its social foundations: the asymmetrical relations of reproduction and the sexual division of labour. Manne abstracts the ideology from its social relations in the wider world, at the same time shearing it from the history of critical social thought. She repeatedly notes that explanatory social theory is ‘beyond my pay grade as a philosopher’—as if the comingto-consciousness of the oppressed should depend upon getting a salary for it. Since her case is based on the ‘meta-ethical’ foundations of behaviour she can’t altogether dispense with social evidence, however, so imports it in naive-empirical fashion from tabloid journalism—lengthy accounts of mass shootings, rapes and murders by aggrieved and disappointed men— and social-psychology experiments, whose methods and assumptions go entirely unexamined. This impoverished form of social theory is incapable of explaining historical change—a precondition, one might have thought, for any transformative politics. To what extent are gendered ‘giver-taker’ ideologies now merely residual forms, diluted cultural remnants of the near-obsolete malebreadwinner model, undermined by women’s broader entry into waged labour? In what ways are they reproduced, in re-gendered or de-gendered form, in conditions of increasingly competitive market relations, penetrating the home and the psyche? Is consolation sought online more likely to be regressively gendered? What changes have there been on the ‘masculine’ side of the divide, unexamined by Manne, in the ethical sense of the self as good provider or strong father? How do these outcomes vary by class, generation or geo-cultural location—or, indeed, by individual psychology and personal background? These are questions that lie beyond Down Girl’s horizon. Yet women, like men, are also ‘policed’ by a skewed economic system which enforces its imperatives on daily life, and which shapes the operation of gender asymmetries. As social-reproduction theorists have argued, moral qualities of care

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and concern are routinely negated by the violence of everyday exploitation, by the ruthless functioning of a profits system and its military reinforcements, careless of life. On that question, the seventies’ socialist-feminists were right to argue that the gender division of labour will only be equalized if concern for life and limb is socialized; and the boardroom feminists— defending a system that privileges profit over human life, and fighting only to improve their own place within it—may be an obstacle to it. Nor can new forms of misogyny, overwhelmingly found online, be understood outside their historical contexts. Reports by those who have fathomed the digitalized social id that Twitter has brought into being suggest that the violently misogynist voices to be found there— a tiny, if toxic, minority—are characterized not by a new resurgence of patriarchal power but rather by a sense of defeat in face of hegemonic liberal feminism. The sexist detraction of female public figures should of course be fought all along the line. But it’s worth recognizing that the use of virulently misogynist tropes usually results from political anger generated elsewhere, taking up the ‘empty signifiers’ of gender prejudice. Thus hatred of Thatcher or Dilma Rousseff took crudely misogynist form, while mere dislike of May or Lagarde did not. Class hatred—of working-class men for upper-class women—can take poisonous gender forms, which should obviously be combated, on multiple grounds; but to eliminate it requires tackling the injustice of class inequality, a meta-ethical problem punctiliously ignored in Manne’s account. As for Clinton, it hardly needs to be said that there are good reasons to criticize her record that have nothing to do with gender. She lost the 2016 election in areas of the upper Midwest that were facing stark economic decline, to a candidate who ran on a promise of bringing jobs and troops back home. The electorate had barely emerged from the worst recession since the 1930s, with sinking workforce participation and rising mortality rates and ‘deaths of despair’, while ceo pay ratios soared and the stock-market boomed. Trump put on an act of hearing people’s pain; Clinton didn’t bother to hide her $200,000-an-hour fees for talking to Wall Street and $30 million personal fortune. At Obama’s State Department, her first move was to extend support to the military junta in Honduras after it had ousted Manuel Zelaya, putting an end to his tentative programme for constitutional reform and unleashing years of political repression and gang terror—then calling for Central American migrant children to be sent home from the us border to ‘send a message’ to their parents. As Secretary of State she was a hardline hawk by any standards, calling for a 40,000-troop surge in Afghanistan, a permanent us force in Iraq, the bombardment of Libya in disregard of the War Powers Resolution and a menacing military build-up in the Pacific.

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None of this is addressed by Manne, who treats Clinton purely as a victim and never as a political actor in her own right. Liberal feminism’s situation today presents a parallel to that of centrist liberalism itself. After a 25-year reign it remains hegemonic, though its unequal outcomes are now apparent and it can no longer point with any conviction to a brighter future. Its revitalization must take defensive form, against the hostile forces perceived to be besieging it. Yet since it is still in power, its enemies need to be inflated: Trump must be described not as a lumpen real-estate magnate but a veritable fascist; political opposition to Clinton as potentially life-threatening misogyny, just a step away from femicide—the worse, the better. But the upshot is a potent combination, recharging the resources of cultural hegemony with a newly energized cadre; it would be a mistake to underestimate either.

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