I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest. On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy. On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate. Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim […]
Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? . . . [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle! —Dostoevsky One of the most powerful insights of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, and the reason we return to it, is that he, almost alone among all the people who set out to answer the Jewish Question in the early 1840s, saw that the question itself was not really about the Jews at all but about […]
In The Holy Family, Marx returns to his critique of Bruno Bauer, which he first mooted in his article “On the Jewish Question.” As he did in the earlier essay, Marx again accuses Bauer of a residual idealism, which he traces back to the essential Christianity (and Hegelianism) of Bauer’s thinking. In the following passage, however, Marx breaks new ground, in ways that seem relevant to the left today. It’s a long passage and more than a little confusing, but bear with me (and it). Yet Absolute Criticism [i.e., Bauer-style thinking] has learnt from Hegel’s Phänomenologie at least the art of converting real objective chains that exist outside me into merely ideal, merely subjective chains, existing merely in me and […]
In Capital and Black Reconstruction in America, respectively, Marx and Du Bois devote several passages to the fraught conceptions of ownership over labor in post-emancipation societies, whether the laborer is the Black freedman in the American South or the wage laborer in Western Europe. Though many people know that after emancipation, Black people in the South endured another hundred years of slavery by another name, that whites perceived Blacks as still belonging to some entity, we’re less familiar with a version of that story in Western Europe. Pairing these two passages raises delicate issues of comparison, but there’s no doubt that a similar dynamic is at play in both societies. In both societies, the employers of labor wrestle with the […]
There’s a moment in chapter 12 of Capital where Marx describes a critical phase of glassmaking in a manufacturing workshop. Five workers gather at “the hole” of the furnace, each focused on an individual task that, taken together, will produce a bottle. “These five specialized workers represent the individual organs of a working organism that can function only as a unit.” Those five workers can only function as a unit “when all the workers are directly cooperating with one another.” That need for working cooperatively gives each and every one of those workers a tremendous amount of power: “When one member is missing, the whole body is paralyzed.” If just one worker withdraws their cooperation, the working organism ceases to […]
In chapter 8 of Capital, Marx wrote: The working day does have a maximum limit…Not only do purely physical needs limit the extension of the workday; moral limits play a role here, too. A worker requires time to satisfy his intellectual and social needs, which are determined…by the general state of the culture. Curious what the general state of the culture has to say about workers’ intellectual needs, I turned to the news, and stumbled on this report. One could say a lot more about all this, but beyond the simple and obvious point, I’d point out that discussions of culture in this country are often removed from discussions of the economy. There’s one conversation about the assault on the […]
Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state. The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state. The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state. But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in […]
One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems. In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics. That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it. Marx saw immediately how such a system, […]
A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, Repression, The Right, The State
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Tags Alexander Hamilton, Die Hard, Du Bois, fear, Marx, To the Lighthouse, Tocqueville, Virginia Woolf, Wall Street
One of Marx’s most persistent points, from On the Jewish Question forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state—the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion—we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and […]
Three items that might be of interest. First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post: While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, […]
I’m in The New Yorker this morning, writing about Richard Evans’s new biography of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, explaining how the failures of Evans the biographer reveal the greatness of Hobsbawm the historian: Hobsbawm’s biographer, Richard Evans, is one of Britain’s foremost historians and the author of a commanding trilogy on Nazi Germany. He knew Hobsbawm for many years, though “not intimately,” and was given unparalleled access to his public and private papers. It has not served either man well. More data dump than biography, “Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History” is overwhelmed by trivia, such as the itineraries of Hobsbawm’s travels, extending back to his teen-age years, narrated to every last detail. The book is also undermined by errors: […]
I have a long piece up at The Chronicle Review on public intellectuals. It’s an adaptation of the keynote address I gave last fall at the Society of US Intellectual History. Here are some excerpts… What is a public intellectual? As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions. On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to […]
Northwestern University political scientist Daniel Galvin has an eye-opening post in The Washington Post about wage theft, a topic I’ve written about before. Based on extensive research, he’s made the following findings (my summary here is abbreviated; for the fuller findings, read Galvin’s excellent piece): 1. Percentage of low-wage workers who have suffered wage theft: 16%. (Other studies report higher percentages.) 2. Average percentage of a worker’s wages lost to wage theft: 26%. 3. Where wage theft tends to happen: private homes, nail salons, food service industries. 4. Whom it tends to happen to: women, people of color, people under 30, non-citizens, non-union members, people who didn’t finish high school or who live in the South. 5. How it happens: “employers often commit […]
My column in Salon this morning is about left v. right and why time—history, tradition, past, present, and future—is not what divides left from right. With the help of two new books by Steve Fraser and Kristin Ross, I discuss the bloody civil wars of the Gilded Age, the Paris Commune, Marx’s archaism, and how the memory of pre-capitalist society can fire the anticipation of a post-capitalist society. Ever since Edmund Burke, founder of the conservative tradition, declared, “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror,” pundits and scholars have divided the political world along the axis of time. The left is the party of the future; the right, the […]
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Categories
Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Burke, Gilded Age, history, Kristin Ross, Kropotkin, Marx, Paris Commune, Steve Fraser
The New York Times reports on a complicated Supreme Court case involving the First Amendment rights of a public employee in Alabama (h/t Mark Ames). The case boils down to this: Edward Lane, a state employee, was subpoenaed to testify at a federal trial about the corruption of another state employee. As a result of his testimony, Lane was fired by his boss. Lane claims that his First Amendment rights were violated; the lower courts have ruled against him. Now the Supreme Court is considering the case. But this in the Times report is what caught my eye: The federal appeals court in Atlanta said it was unnecessary to decide who was right because public employees have no First Amendment protections […]
Ever since the 19th century, one of the points of convergence between the free-market right and the socialist left has been that the most important freedom under capitalism is the freedom of contract. Whatever its other problems, the market is the one sphere where the rights of man obtain. As Marx put it in Volume 1 of Capital: This sphere [of the market] that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract […]
Bruce Bartlett was a senior policy adviser in the Reagan White House and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under George H.W. Bush. He’s worked with and around conservatives—from Jack Kemp and Gary Bauer to Ron Paul and the Cato Institute—for decades. In recent years, he’s become a major critic of the Republican Party and the right, joining the ranks of Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, and other conservative apostates. He is, to cite a t-shirt my three-year-old daughter likes to wear, “kind of a big deal.” So I was more than pleased when he decided to respond, in the comments section, to my most recent post on the utopianism of Sullivan’s brand of conservatism. Given Bartlett’s stature, and my hope […]