Capital and Class, 2006 spring, No 88

Capital & Class #88

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Notes for contributors Capital & Class welcomes all contributions within the scope of the CSE. The journal is normally divided into three sections: Behind-the-News items (maximum 3,000 words), which provide critical background analysis and reference to current events and issues; main articles (between 6,000 and 10,000 words maximum, including endnotes, references and bibliography), which should make reference to other critical work in the field; and book reviews (usual maximum 1,000 words), where Capital & Class would welcome overseas contributions that introduce debates and publications in other languages to an English-language audience. In addition, Capital & Class pUblishes review articles or longer book reviews where the subject-maner merits it, occasional Survey articles, which offer a Marxist overview of particular fields, and Polemics-shorter, controversial pieces with a maximum length of 3,000 words. Please send one electronic copy as an email attachment, preferably in Microsoft Word format, to [email protected]. Also send two typewritten copies of submissions to the CSE office. We only accept submissions once we have the email attachment and the two printed copies. Include a cover sheet with your name, address and telephone number, a wordcount, and a couple of lines describing your area of work! research. Also indicate on the cover sheet whether the submission is a main article, BTN or a Polemic. Please present the article clearly, using double line-spacing (including quotations) and wide margins. Single quotation marks should be used, and double marks for quotations within quotations. Capital & Class Style: If we want socialist ideas to become the common sense of our age we must write accessibly-form, too, is political. Authors should avoid sexist formulations. An article should make clear, at the beginning, why it is worth reading, summarising the argument and explaining its political significance. The Editorial Committee reserves the right to sub-edit articles in order to improve readability. Authors may be asked to rewrite parts or the whole of an article. Contributors are asked to provide the raw data where Graphs are used so that, if necessary, they may be redrawn to fit the page. illustrations & Photographs, not subject to copyright restrictions, are welcome. Notes: Capital & Class articles do not have notes at

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Editorial Committee

Corresponding Editors

Andreas Bieler, Jane Harrington, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Jo McBride, Andrew McCulloch, Adam Morton, Kate Mulholland, Peter Nicholls, Peter North, Nick Pons, Peter Shirl ow, James Shorthose, Paul Stewart, John Stirling, Gerard Strange, Martin Upchurch, Owen Worth Vania Lomonaco Bastos and Frederico Jayme Katz (Brazil), Josef Esser (Germany), John Holloway (Mexico), Kamal Chenoy (India), Riccardo Bellofiore (Italy), Makoto Itoh aapan), Henk Overbeek and Geert Reuten (Netherlands), Basher Vally (South Africa), Peter Meyer (USA).

Managing Editor Dr. Gerard Strange Membership rates See current subscription form at the back Capital & Class is typeset by Lithoprint, 26 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ and printed by Russell Press, Nottingham. UK bookshop distribution by Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN. US bookshop distribution by Ubiquity, 607 Degraw St, Brooklyn, NY 11217.

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Contributors to this issue Alexander Anievas is a Ph.D. student at the Centre ofInternational Studies, University of Cambridge. Mhinder Bhopal is a senior lecturer in employment relations at London Metropolitan University. His research interests include human resource management in multinational corporations, ethnicity and labour markets, and representation. Simon Blackburn is an associate lecturer with the Open University, teaching social policy and criminology. His current area of interest is the role and purpose of policing, and he is in the process of writing a book which, from a Poulantzasian perspective, considers the police as a 'social relation' embodying the balance of forces within wider society. Dorothee Bohle is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Her research areas include international and comparative political economy, and she is especially interested in developing a critical understanding of the political economy of the eastward enlargement of the EU and of the transformations in eastern Europe. Neil Curry teaches sociology in the School ofApplied Social Sciences at St Martin's College, Lancaster.

Robert Fine is a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Warwick University. His books include Democracy and the Rule of Law, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx,Arendt, and Beyond Apartheid: Labour and Liberation in South Africa. He is currently engaged in research on cosmopolitan social theory. Alan Freeman is a visiting professor of economics at the University of Greenwich. He is coeditor, with Andrew Kliman and Julian Wells, of The New Uzlue Controversy in Economics; of Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics with Guglielmo Carchedi; and of Marx, Ricardo and Sraffa with Ernest Mandel. He also recently co-edited, with Boris Kagarlitsky, The Politics of Empire and the Crisis of Globalisation. David Gent is a graduate student at the University of York. David Harvie 'belabours the heads' of students at the University of Leicester's Management Centre, amongst other activities. Jonathan Joseph teaches international relations at the University of Kent. He is the author of a number of books, including H egemony:A RealistA nalysis, Social Theory: Conflict, Cohesion and Consent, and Social Theory:A Reader. His most recent book is Marxism and Social Theory. He is a former member of the Capital & Class editorial board. Andrew Kliman is a professor of economics at Pace University in NewYork, and a founder of the New School for Pluralistic Anti-Capitalist Education (New SPACE). Co-editor of the 2004 collection The New Uzlue Controversy and the Foundations of Economics, he regularly publishes on value theory, economic crisis and Marxian thought in this and other journals, and has recently completed a book that reclaims Marx's Capital from the myth of internal inconsistency.

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David Layfield is making the final changes to his Ph.D. thesis on Marxism and environmental political theory for the University of Nottingham. He now lives in Okinawa, in the far south of}apan, and continues to work on problems in left/green political theory. George Liodakis is a professor of political economy in the Department of Sciences at the Technical University of Crete, Greece. His work includes writings on the political economy of agrarian change, international relations and development, and technology and environment. Christopher May is co-editor of the International Political Economy Yearbook series, and has published widely on the subject of intellectual property rights. The content of his work has ranged from AIDS patents and the use of intellectual property in the workplace, to wider issues regarding the (so-called) information society and the global governance of intellectual property rights. Sara Motta teaches Latin American and comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and researches the political economy of neoliberalism, alternatives to neoliberalism, and the politics of resistance in Latin America. Mark Neocleous is a professor of the critique of political economy at Brunei University. His most recent book is The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective. Luis M. Pozo studied history at the Universidad Aut6noma de Madrid, where he specialised in modern and contemporary history. Gonso Pozo-Martin is a Ph.D. student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of Cambridge. Chris Rowley is the inaugural professor of human resource management at Cass Business School, City University, London. He is editor of the Asia Pacific Business Review, and founding editor of the Asian Studies series of books. His research interests include international and comparative human resource management, and Asia Pacific management and business, especially in Korea. He has written over a hundred articles, eighty book chapters and entries, and twenty books. Jeffery R. Webber is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University ofToronto.

value production and struggle in the classroom

Value production and struggle in the classroom: Teachers within, against and beyond capital David Harvie To the extent that their labour produces value and surplus value, teachers are productive labourers. This paper discusses teachers' labour in relation to the production of new labour power, explores the extent to which it is alienated, and explains how it produces surplus value. But the classroom is also a site of struggle. The paper explores some of the ways in which teachers and students may both refuse capitalist work and create space in order to pursue alternative projects that better meet their own needs. To this extent, teachers and students are productive, not of value, but of struggle.

Introduction rxists have long recognised that educators playa key role in the reproduction of capitalist relations f production in general, and of that special commodity, labour power, in particular. Bowles and Gintis, for example, in their Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), set out to demonstrate the education system's role in socialising young people for the workplace, while David Yaffe agrees that 'Those who are engaged with training productive workers are involved with changing the special commodity labour power itself' (1976: 12). But for most classical Marxists, educators do not labour within that 'hidden abode of production' in which value and surplus value are produced, in which 'capital is itself produced' (Marx, 1976a: 279-80). Rather, educators have been considered to be unproductive labourers and, perhaps, part of the 'middle class'. For instance, Kevin Harris has argued that 'Economically, teachers are positioned between the capitalists

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and the working class, and bear features common to both. They belong to a middle class, positioned between the global function of capital and the function of collective labourer, sharing both functions' (1982: 128). For Althusser (e.g. 1972), teachers and the education system form part of the 'ideological state apparatus', whose role it is to generate and install in individuals the dominant system of values and ideas. I propose here an alternative perspective to that of classical Marxism, suggesting (in Section I) that we should, in fact, understand teachers as productive labourers: that is, as producers of value and surplus value. (This is not to say that educators produce value and surplus value instead of (re)producing 'ideology' and capitalist social relations. Rather, the production of commodities-value-is inseparable from the reproduction of the capital relation.) I argue, first, that teachers are in fact producers (or rather, coproducers) of the commodity labour power. Through their shaping of this special commodity they also produce surplus value, although this is realised only through the exploitation of the new labour power. Second, I suggest that we should understand teachers' labour as directly value-producing, since there is a tendency for this labour to take the form of alienated and abstract labour, where abstract labour is the substance of value. Part of this second argument hinges on the question of commensurability: I suggest that the imposition of metrics is part of capital's strategy to make diverse teaching (and other) activities commensurable. Many of the issues are not new. Schools and universities have always been of central importance to the reproduction of variable capital and hence to the accumulation of capital, as theorists of the 'social factory' recognised early on (see, e.g. Tronti, 1973, or Cleveland Modern Times Group, 1976). In particular, my argument here extends and adapts that of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (197~) and other participants in the domestic labour debate of the 1970s, who argued that housework is productive of value for capital. And in Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the development of 'educational space', which, from the eighteenth century onwards, comes to 'function ... also as a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding' (1977: 147)· But education has undergone widespread restructuring since the 1970s, largely in response to the crises and struggles

Uzlue production and struggle in the classroom

of that decade,' and it is therefore useful to revisit these issues. 'Warwick University Ltd' (Thompson, 1970) was a forerunner in consciously attempting to align itself with the needs of capital; but education systems and institutions globally have now become a terrain for marketisation agendas (Levidow, 2002; Rikowski, 2001). Ovetz (1996) and the contributors to Steal This University Gohnson et al., 2003), for instance, chart the 'entrepreneurialisation of the universities' and the 'rise of the corporate university' in the United States. 'What is new about today's university is not only that it serves the corporation-for it always has done that-but that it emulates it' Gohnson et al., 2003: 13). Universities themselves 'are becoming businesses' (Ovetz, 1996: 113). In the United Kingdom, many neoliberal trends are articulated in the government's White Paper on The Future of Higher Education (OfES, 2003). Critiquing this document, and state education reforms more generally, Robinson and Tormey (2003) suggest that a 'once "independent" public service [is being reduced] to a wing of capital. ... [T]he penetration of neoliberal assumptions goes well beyond the formal status of the higher education sector, it permeates every assumption about the rationale of education itself'. While the situations in the UK and the us are not identical, there are many common themes, also shared by education systems in other developed states. These include the growth of ,for-profit' education institutions; the invasive intervention of both private-sector corporations and government in the day-to-day running of 'public' universities; the increasing importance of market relations; management's use of 'performance indicators', 'performance management' and various forms of 'performance-related pay' (or 'merit pay'); the rhetoric of' efficiency' and' global competitiveness'; and the 'proletarianisation' of academics. In the global South, higher education has been a casualty of the more general imposition of neoliberal policies, as indebted governments have been forced by the IMF and World Bank to implement structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) (Levidow, 2002). African universities have been hit particularly hard. SAP 'conditionalities' have included the removal of student subsidies, currency devaluation-which has inflated the cost of educational materials-and cuts in government funding for education. While the Bank argues that SAPS present African governments with 'a golden opportunity to "increase the efficiency of resource use"', and

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has itself promoted various restructuring packages, teachers and students who have protested against these policies, and against SAPS more generally, have frequently faced repression (Caffentzis, 2000: 5-8). The neoliberal agenda for education means that teachers' role in capital's reproduction and development is now unambiguous. Moreover, the neoliberal project's obsession with 'performance', 'efficiency', external controls and measure (metrics) has the effect of deepening the alienated-andabstract-labour characteristics of concrete teaching activities. Teaching labour thus becomes directly value-producing and, inasmuch as they are productive of value, educators exist within capital. But this is only one side of the story. Educators (and students) also struggle: against the capitalist imposition of work; against neoliberalism as it manifests itself on- and off-campus; against their own function as producers oflabour power; and for their own needs. Globally, education is contested terraIn. Sometimes teachers' struggles are collective and very visible. Other times, they are both more individualised and hidden. Often, the latter forms of struggle are not even recognised as such, and we can only detect their existence through observing capital's response. Struggles around education, whether collective or individual, are rarely consciously anticapitalist. Even so, struggles against manifestations of neoliberalism nevertheless impede capitalist development, and hence are against capital. Frequently, struggles are ambiguous: they may, for instance, impose work on others, or drive capital's development in alternative directions. But struggles may also-again, this is rarely conscious-posit a transcendence of the capital relation. To the extent that educators struggle, I suggest (in Section 2) that we should understand them as unproductive of value for capital and as existing againstand-beyond capital. This understanding of productive and unproductive labour clearly differs from that of classical Marxism, including Marx's own explicit writings on the distinction.' I do not seek to demonstrate logically that the classical Marxist distinction between productive and unproductive labour is somehow wrong or incorrect. Such a demonstration may not even be possible. But I do believe that the perspective suggested in this paper is more useful in helping us to understand the ways in which teachers produce and reproduce

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capitalist social relations, and hence to appreciate teachers' potential power to rupture this (re)production. In fact, this understanding can help us to recognise the ways in which teachers' existing practices already rupture, and even go beyond or transcend, the capital relation: that is, are productive of struggles. As Brian Massumi suggests in his translator's foreword to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1988): 'The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?'

I. Producing value in the classroom; or Educators within capital

Classical Marxism and unproductive labour Marx explicitly excluded labour whose function consists of reproducing labour power from being considered productive: 'Hence the former class [productive labourers] will produce immediate, material wealth consisting of commodities, all commodities except those which consist of labour-power itself. . .. In so far therefore as we leave labour-power itself out of account, productive labour is labour which produces commodities' (Marx, 1969: 161 & 172; my emphasis). Classical Marxists have tended to follow Marx's lead on this issue. For example, Simon Mohun suggests that

1.1

Labour-power is not a produced commodity; it is a commodified aspect of human beings, and human beings are not produced in any valorisation process. It might be suggestive for some purposes to consider that labour process which (re)produces people, but the relations involved are not class ones, there is no private property in the means of (re)production from which non-possessors can be excluded, the labour involved is not wage labour, and (re)production is neither production for sale nor production for profit. (Mohun, 1994: 401) Activities such as the 'daily and generational reproduction oflabor-power' do not produce value, because there is no social mechanism for commensurating different labor activities, and so there is no way in which the time taken in such activities can be regarded as 'socially necessary'. . .. Such labor is non-productive; indeed, in value theory terms it does not count quantitatively at all. (Mohun, 1996: 38)

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Harris is also explicit in his view that (most) teachers are unproductive because they 'are employed by the State and they are paid out of revenue' (1982: 57). According to Savran and Tonak, although education (and health) workers produce use-values, 'the national education system or the national health service of a capitalist country cannot be regarded as capitalist enterprises. Consequently, the workers they employ cannot be classified as productive labourers' (1999: 139). The labour of (re)producing labour power is thus not productive of value because: (i) labour power is not actually a produced commodity; (ii) there is no 'process of adding value'; and (iii) 'there is no social mechanism for commensurating different labor activities'. Aside from educators employed by private, profit-making institutions, whom Marx did regard as productive (Marx, 1976a: 744), all three points seem to apply to the labour of teachers and academics. Finally, teachers are not productive since they are (for the most part) employed by the state, rather than by private capital. We will consider each of these points in turn. 1.2 Teachers reproducing labour power and producing surplus value

First, teachers' labour, along with that of many others in capitalist society, does in fact produce that 'other great class of commodities' (Rikowski, 2oo2/2oo3)-that is, labour power. 3 Reproductive labour has a number of aspects, which can be distinguished on the basis of whether it is, first, concerned with (re)producing human beings as Homo sapiens or with (re)producing human beings as the commodity labour power (its function); and, second, whether this labour is waged or unwaged (its form). This two-dimensional typology is illustrated in Table I. The work of teachers tends to fall into cell [2.2], in that it is usually waged, and is concerned with producing humans as labour power. It is certainly true, as Mohun suggests, that labour power is a commodified aspect of human beings. But this aspectthis 'capacity' or 'potentiality'-must be shaped and developed. In general, labour power-the capacity to labour-does not simply mean the ability to perform physical or mental work. It means, in addition, the willingness to do so under another's control, regardless of whether this control is direct or indirect, and whether it is exercised by a private capital or by social capital.

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Table

I.

Typology of reproductive labour Function

Form Unwaged

Waged

(Re)production of humans qua humans

(Re)production of humans as labour power

[I.I] 'Natural' biological reproduction; aspects of obtaining and preparing food; within family and community healing [2.1] 'Artificial' biological reproduction; aspects of state and private health services

[1.2] Many aspects of parenting, e.g. basic rules of capitalist society: 'don't steal'. [2.2] Education services; judicial system; many aspects of 'capitalist culture'

It means the willingness, even if reluctant and 'unwilling', to submit to capital's discipline. When Marx was writing, capital made far more use of overt force in order to coerce people to submit to its discipline. More recently, particularly in post-war, 'developed' countries, it has tended to use far more subtle methods of ensuring compliance. But this compliance must be produced, and a key figure in this process of production is the teacher (along with parents and, of course, new labour power itself-a teacher can only teach: the student must also be willing to learn and to submit). Foucault (1977) argued, for example, that the school system's regime of 'hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance', makes it an integral part of 'disciplinary society'. And Maurice Brinton, promoting a Reichean thesis, suggested that 'The purpose of education-both East and West-is the mass production of robots ... who have so internalised social constraints that they submit to them automatically' (1975: 29)· The different abilities that distinguish one form of concrete labour power from another must also be shaped. These tend to vary across historical periods, geographical locations and strata of workers. For most labour powers in advanced capitalist economies, a certain degree of literacy and numeracy are desirable aspects; but this has not always been the case, and it is still not the case everywhere. Some labour powers require the ability to think creatively and to solve

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problems; others, the ability to follow instructions without question. In some labour powers, the ability to kill other human beings efficiently is a desirable characteristic, while others call for tenderness and caring qualities. Although all of these characteristics have always existed in human beings, one cannot say that capital has simply appropriated certain of them without changing and developing them. We can think of this process of capital's development and shaping oflabour power, as opposed to the mere appropriation of it, as part of the real, as opposed to merely formal, subsumption oflabour under capital (Marx, 1976b). Really, it is impossible to disentangle any 'natural', human 'essence' of people from their existence as labour power within capital. Finally, it is not sufficient that new labour power is educated, in both the general sense of compliance and the particular sense of specific abilities and skills. New labour power must also be categorised and ordered into a hierarchy that reflects the extent to which individual subjects have been educated in these ways. 'This student has good leadership skills and would make an excellent manager'; 'that student was gifted but lacks motivation'. 'She lacks imagination but is diligent and a hard worker'; 'he is practically unemployable'. Everett Reimer has argued vigorously that this process of the 'sorting of the young into the social slots they will occupy in adult life is a central function of formal education ... The school system has thus amazingly become, in less than a century, the major mechanism for distributing values of all kinds among all peoples of the world' (1971: 25 & 26-7)· Second, teaching labour produces surplus value, i.e. 'adds value', and valorises capital. Here, we can extend Leopoldina Fortunati's (1995) argument concerning the productive nature of housework. F ortunati argues that the labour of a (usually female) houseworker that reproduces the labour power of the male wage-worker thereby increases the value of that male worker's labour power. Moreover, when put to work by capital, the male worker's labour power has enhanced use value because it is more productive: a well-fed worker, one whose emotional needs have been met, is likely to be more productive. But the houseworker's labour has some special characteristics. It is (a) unwaged; (b) largely not recognised as labour, being considered rather as a 'natural' activity and perhaps performed 'for love'; and (c) doesn't appear to be organised capitalistically. Finally, (d) her

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'product' is inseparable from a commodity-the male's labour power-which must be owned by someone else-the male himself. Because of these characteristics, which largely concern the hidden nature of the houseworker's labour, capital is able to systematically pay the male worker a wage below the value of his labour power. That is, the wage reflects the costs of reproduction of the wage-worker and his family: this wage is sufficient to pay the houseworker for her necessary labour, but not for the surplus labour she also performs. Thus, cap,ital exploits two workers with one wage; both workers produce value and surplus value and hence valorise capital. Teachers' labour is waged, but it does share the other aspects, (b), (c) and (d). At least historically, teaching has appeared less like labour than other forms of labour. Many teachers have seen themselves, and been seen, as engaged in a vocation, with their activity a 'natural' part of themselves. This is particularly true for university lecturers and certainly, until the present restructuring, universities have not appeared to have been organised in a capitalistic manner. Finally, like housework, the 'product' of teachers' labour cannot be separated from a commodity-labour power-owned by someone else. Given these characteristics of teaching labour, the exchange value of school, college or university graduates' labour power (i.e. the wage they can command) may reflect the cost of their education; that is, the value of their educators' labour power, rather than the value produced by their educators and embodied in the graduates. Yet graduates are, at least potentially, more productive by virtue of their education: by employing these graduates, capital is thereby able to appropriate not only the surplus value produced by them, but also that produced by their teachers.

1.3 Abstract labour and alienated labour in the classroom By this point, the classical Marxist will already have objected that a teacher's labour (like that of a 'housewife') does not add value to the labour power it (re)produces because this labour is not in itself value-creating. So I will here consider teaching labour in relation to the substance of value: abstract labour. This discussion also underpins the question of the

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commensurability of different concrete labours, which I address in Section 1.4. Value is embodied labour that is also abstract labour. That is, abstract labour is the substance of value. Then, since productive labour is that labour which produces value (and surplus value), we can say that any labour in capitalist society that has a two-fold nature, being a unity of abstract labour as well as concrete labour, is also productive labour. Now, for Marx, abstract labour is 'human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure'. Like labour, like result: 'All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished.' (Marx, 1976a: 128). Abstract labour is labour that is 'alienated, imposed, and boundless in character' (De Angelis, 1995:III13). Labour is alienated because the work activity appears to the worker as an external power, outside his or her direct control: it is not 'the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself' (Marx, 1975: 326). Since alienated labour appears as an external power, such labour is 'not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour', i.e. it is imposed (ibid: 326). And since abstract labour by definition abstracts from concrete labour and from the useful character of concrete labour, it cannot be limited by a set of needs. It is thus boundless-'production for production's sake' (De Angelis, 1995: III-773) Our understanding of abstract labour-and thus valuehere is of a tangible reality, the 'sensuous-less' reality of alienated, imposed and boundless activity (see De Angelis, 1996). And this tangible reality is as applicable to the labour performed in capital's reproductive circuit, LP-MC(MS) .•. P•.. LP* (see Cleaver, 2000: 123), as it is to that performed in its industrial circuit, M-C{LP, MP} ... P... C'-M'. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx (1975) distinguishes four aspects of alienation. Under the capitalist mode of production, workers become alienated from (i) the act of production, i.e. from their activity; (ii) the product of their labour; (iii) their own species being; and (iv) their fellow workers. Each of these aspects of alienated labour is increasingly applicable to the labour of teaching (and that of studying). Moreover, much teaching (and studying) labour appears as imposed and boundless. We can characteristic teaching labour as becoming-alienated. First, teaching labour is increasingly an activity that is alien-an activity that does not belong to the teacher. The very separation of knowledge into more-or-less well-defined

Uzlue production and struggle in the classroom

and discrete 'disciplines' or 'subjects' constrains the majority of teachers within 'their' subject's boundaries. Such constraints become more rigid as soon as students are required to sit examinations: material taught then becomes largely determined by examination syllabi-particular novels, specific historical periods, or designated branches of mathematics. This imposition by external power of curriculum content, as well as of teaching methods, has accelerated in the current period of education reform. In the UK, for instance, the so-called 'national curriculum' dictates what is taught in schools; and there has been a proliferation of testing and school inspections, performed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), which are used to ensure teachers' compliance with particular educational methods. The state's close control of content can be understood as part of an attempt to define 'desirable labour power attributes' (Rikowski, 200212003), which of course relates back to educators as producers of this commodity. And as teachers (and, of course, students) become increasingly forced to subsume their own interests to those of capital, their activity becomes forced labour. On the face of it, academics retain far more control over the content of their teaching than do schoolteachers. Although university curricula in the UK are now required to conform to so-called 'subject benchmarks', these benchmarks are themselves relatively permissive. 4 However, while academics may still enjoy relative freedom to design their own curricula within a particular discipline, many disciplines are themselves under attack, and have been forced to reinvent themselves as a response to market pressures. In many universities, arts, humanities and social science degree programmes have contracted or even closed down altogether. Others have refashioned themselves as branches of business or management studies. s Again, what results is the imposition of activity on academics by an alien power-in this case, 'market forces'. Of course, besides teaching students, both schoolteachers and university lecturers are required to grade them and to write references. This labour of hierarchising and categorising is also alien and imposed. As well as the external forces acting on work content, teachers' workloads have expanded sharply as student numbers have grown and as the quantity oftests and 'quality assurance'-related administration work has proliferated. Anyone who has completed the paperwork associated with

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Ofsted inspections or Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) 'audits' will have no doubt as to the alienated, imposed and boundless nature of this activity. Here, the classical Marxist may well object that my use of 'alienated', 'imposed' and 'boundless' is too flippant, and that I have misunderstood the true meaning of Marx's terms: that inconvenient administrative tasks performed by teachers, although tedious; cannot really be compared with the daily toil of, say, factory workers; that the growth of bureaucratic tasks (paperwork) is nothing like capital's unquenchable thirst for surplus value and the endless circuit M-M'-M"-M'" ... (however mediated). I would counter that it is more useful to focus on value-whose substance is abstract labour-as a lived experience, rather than on one of its common forms of appearance, money; and that we should understand the capitalist mode of production as a specific social form of imposing work, rather than as simply a system geared towards profit-making. And, in fact, the more vernacular meanings of many or'Marx's terms may be appropriate. The growing number of tests in schools and universities is a source of considerable stress to teachers, not to mention the students who have to sit them. The phrase 'testing for testing's sake' expresses well the boundless nature of this system of assessment. The second aspect of alienation concerns the alienation of workers from the product of their labour. Now the 'product' of a teacher is the school or university graduate who, as a result of his or her education, is now supposedly the bearer of a range of knowledge, skills and attributes. But as control over curricula is increasingly determined by the needs of capital (whether mediated by the state or the market), this knowledge and these skills and attributes will increasingly correspond to 'desirable labour power attributes'. Teachers (co-)produce new labour power. But this new labour power-new workers-will in tum be employed to produce value and surplus value, i.e. to produce and reproduce capital, the very social relation that exploits human beings, including teachers. Thus, the 'product' of teachers' labour is turned against them: they become alienated from the product of their labour. Third, the becoming-alienated labour of teaching includes the alienation of teachers from their own species-being. In all human societies, there have been mechanisms, customs and social codes to regulate the passing-on of knowledge,

Ullue production and struggle in the classroom

skills and culture from one generation to the next. In fact, it is the existence of culture, understood in its broadest sense, that distinguishes humans from (most) other animals. Clearly 'education', in its broadest sense, is part of the cultural transmission mechanism. However, when 'education' becomes simply a means by which particular, externally prescribed subjects are taught in a particular context, then teachers-who are employed to teach these subjects-become estranged or alienated from their human species-being, i.e. their natural propensity to impart knowledge and to nurture thinking in others. Fourth, resulting from teachers' alienation from their activity, from the product of their labour and from their own species-being, they also become alienated from their fellow workers. The workers with whom teachers most closely associate are, of course, their students. But the relationship between teacher and student is mediated by their mutual imposition of work. On the one hand, the teacher imposes work on students and possibly grades them-the hierarchical nature of the relationship here is clear. On the other hand, the student may impose work on the teacher, seeking extra help or pressurising teachers to do additional work to make tedious material more interesting. Thus the relationship between teacher and student can become antagonistic and alienated. Teachers also become alienated from their fellows as external pressures (powers) increasingly mediate their mutual relationships. Such pressures or powers can take the form both of bureaucratic structures and of 'market forces'. As an example of the former, a teacher's peers (organised into some committee) may force him or her to justify how a new teaching arrangement conforms to a particular set of guidelines. An example of the latter is the competition, within and between institutions, to attract students to particular courses, schools or universities. And although not the main focus of this paper, it is also the case that student will become alienated from student, since students are essentially competing with one another: for the student seeking 'employability', the most important goal is not to become good at something; it is to become better than one's peers. A first-class degree is meaningless if everyone gets one! Antagonism may also arise between students who simply want to be taught only whatever is necessary in order to obtain a good grade, and those who wish to spend class time

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exploring issues of interest to them that lie outside the examined curriculum. Thus the work of schoolteachers and university lecturers (along with that of students) is increasingly taking on all the characteristics of alienated labour: teachers' labour is becoming-alienated. This labour is increasingly imposed and, moreover, is boundless, without limit. As Glen Rikowski (2000) suggests, 'school improvement' is a concrete expression of capital's 'social drive to enhance the quality of human labour power [which] like all of capital's social drives is infinite'. (Of course, capital attempts simultaneously to drive down the cost of this 'enhancement', through cutting back funding for education.) Teaching labour, then, increasingly takes on a two-fold nature, becoming a contradictory unity of concrete labour and abstract labour, which is the substance of value.

1.4 Commensurability and measure The discussion of the abstract and alienated nature of teaching labour brings us to the question of the commensurability of different concrete labours and socially necessary labour time (SNLT). (This is the third reason for teachers' labour being unproductive, outlined in Section I.I, above.) In the previous section, I discussed some of the tendencies that are forcing teaching labour to assume the qualities of abstract labour. Many of these tendencies and processes also facilitate the establishment of SNLT for various teaching activities. This, in turn, allows first, the commensuration of teaching labour vis-a-vis other teaching labour and completely different concrete labour; and second, the driving-down of these socially necessary labour times. Other important tactics include the construction of league tables and the fostering of cultures of 'best practice' and 'efficiency'. League tables facilitate quantitative comparisons of schools, universities and/or departments and, coupled with their use in determining funding decisions, become a key tool in capital's strategy of marketis ation, while SNLT is driven down as individual 'units' strive to become 'more efficient'. Many structures employed to impose content are also used to enforce quantities-to define, for instance, how much a student should know in order to be awarded a particular qualification. Across the university sector, the role of external

value production and struggle in the classroom

examiners, now augmented by the QAA, is to ensure comparability across institutions. Within universities, elaborate systems involving committees and 'quality managers' are used to ensure this commensurability. Such systems function to monitor the course content, modes of assessment, and the location and dispersion of grades awarded. 6 Formalising further what Paolo Freire (1972) criticised as 'banking education', in which students become 'receptacles to be filled by the teacher', the acquisition of knowledge and the development of critical faculties are thus broken up into discrete steps as 'learning outcomes' are codified across 'levels' of a degree programme. There is a clear tendency here towards rigid definition of the quantity of work (number of hours) required of a student of 'average ability' in order to achieve a certain qualification and grade; that is, to define socially necessary labour time for the labour of studying. There exist parallel tendencies towards the definition of SNLT for teaching labour. If class contact hours and assessment methods are standardised across courses for students, then this standardisation frames workload calculations for teachers too (the other key variable is the number of students taught). Managers can (and do) construct workload models on this basis, from which emerges a 'norm' for the 'average' number of hours required to teach a course unit or module to a certain number of students. It is easy to ridicule such norms, and the workload models through which they are constituted, as 'made-up' or 'abstract'. Of course, they are ridiculous, but they are also real: 'inefficient' teachers-those unable to meet or beat the 'norm'-are usually required to justify their need for additional time and may be pressurised to reduce it or else work in their 'own time'. Thus, a consequence of standardisation and the use of workload models is the emergence of definitions for socially necessary labour time. A series of so-called 'transparency reviews', imposed on English and Welsh universities by the UK Treasury and implemented by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC), constitute a set of overarching calculations specific to university academics' teaching workloads. The aim here is to discover how much time academics spend on various defined activities such as 'teaching', 'teaching-related', 'administration', 'research' and so on. This is yet another metric, which can then be used to make commensurable different types of teaching activity and other aspects of teachers' work. And metrics developed within the education

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sector do not stand apart from wider capitalist society. A fast-growing body of economics literature is concerned with estimating the 'returns to schooling', both to the economy and to the individual. Using such studies, and experimenting with alternative funding models, capital can attempt to link education labour to the wider economy. For capital, the ideal is to make commensurable the concrete labour of any individual university lecturer or schoolteacher with that of any other social subject. In such a model teacher, remuneration is tied to 'productivity' and 'performance', and we can already see examples of this strengthened link between teaching work and income in the proposals for 'advanced skills' or 'super-teachers' and teachers' 'discretionary payments' (see, e.g. Boxley, 2003), and in 'leading' universities' demands for the freedom to tear up national bargaining agreements in order to set 'market rates' for academics' pay. My argument concerning commensurability is different to that of classical Marxists. Mohun, for instance, argues that commensuration of diverse labours can only take place through the market, and that the aspects of 'marketisation' in education are only 'quasi-market' criteria (1996: 47). In contrast, I would argue that the market is simply one tool by which capital can attempt to make diverse labours commensurable. Taking value and abstract labour as our starting point, instead of 'the market', we can investigate other tools-such as the metrics discussed here-that capital may use to make commensurable different concrete labours, and thus to command that labour. Finally, the cultures of 'best practice' embody many of the tendencies described above. First, the requirement to conform to 'best practice' imposes work. Second, this labour is alien, since 'best practice' is defined by an external power. Third, since 'best practice' is usually defined in 'generic' terms, it also facilitates the comparison to the performance of teachers across subject areas and across institutions. We can also note the frequency with which 'best practice' is actually the creativity of teachers themselves, appropriated and turned against them. Given a specific task which needs to be accomplished, an individual teacher or group of teachers may invent a new, better or more efficient way of performing it-a way which is simply quicker or preferable for them, perhaps. However, in time, managers may define this new method as 'best practice'-for which, read: 'minimum

Villue production and struggle in the classroom

acceptable practice'. This has the effect of imposing more work on teachers in general, and/or of driving down socially necessary labour times. 'The best practice always hints at a better one, even as it winks at the question of "Better for what?'" (Martin, 2003: xi)

1.5 Educators within capital, contradiction, and the development of the school-as-factory

l I

We have argued that teaching labour has, or is tending towards having, the following characteristics: (i) it is (becoming-)abstract labour, where abstract labour is the substance of value; (ii) it produces a commodity, namely the special commodity labour power; (iii) it is becoming commensurable with other teaching labours and other labours in general, facilitated through processes associated with the 'marketisation' of education; and (iv) it produces surplus value and valorises capital, but capital appropriates this surplus value only through exploiting the labour power of school or university graduates. Inasmuch as teaching labour has these characteristics, we can say that teachers are productive labourers-productive of value for capital, that is-who labour within the school-as-factory and exist within capital. Some of these characteristics would seem to apply, to a lesser or greater extent, to many forms of education within capitalist societies, from the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury French elementary school described by Foucault to the contemporary university. Indeed, the education system's value-productive function of producing, classifying and hierarchising new labour power does appear to be a constant feature of the capitalist mode of production. However, there have also been important developments in the school-asfactory-linked, of course, to the development of wider capitalist society. Space limitations preclude a full discussion of these changes here, but we can make a few remarks. First, and most obviously, schooling's scope has extended considerably over the past two centuries. Far more young people attend school, from an earlier age, and an increasing proportion of the population remains in school well into adulthood. In the global North, many people will spend almost two decades of their lives working in the school-as:;~. And in th, UK, fo' ,xamp\', th, go.,,"m,nt, with i"

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rhetoric of 'lifelong learning', is even encouraging adults to return to school. This instance can be understood as an attempt by capital to formalise the point made above-see footnote 3-that labour power is never finally produced. Here we can also mention again the proliferation of testing and trends towards 'continuous assessment', and attempts to establish cultures of ' best practice' (read: ceaseless bettering). These would all appear to be suggestive of a shift from disciplinary society to society of control: 'Just as businesses are replacing factories, school is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into a business' (Deleuze, 1995: 179). Second, wider society has undergone many transformations. Of particular interest is the shift from 'Fordism' to 'post-Fordism' (and from disciplinary to control society) over the course of the post-war period. This shift has been characterised by a number of factors: the rise of immaterial or affective labour; the increasing importance to production of decentred, rhizomatic cooperation, the collective intelligence and virtuosos; the replacement of discipline by biopower; and the generalisation of precarity (see, for example, Greenpepper, 2004; Hardt & Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996; Mute, 2005; Virno, 2004). Clearly, such a shift in the nature of production requires a shift in the nature of labour power, which is reflected in the type of education that schools are charged with providing. For example, and as alluded to above, schools and universities are now required to emphasise the importance to 'employability' of communication skills, the ability to cooperate, flexibility, imagination and critical thinking. Third, with the related shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, education systems themselves have come under increasing pressure to restructure: to become more 'efficient' and to provide 'value-for-money'. These pressures have driven the marketisation of schooling, the corporatisation of schools and universities, and the many and various attempts to design and impose metrics across this sector. And, as a result of this shift, teachers' labour is becoming more abstract-like, more directly productive of value. These three remarks, in turn, provoke two further, related observations. First, the fact that teaching labour seems to have become more productive with the shift from Keynesian to a neoliberal regime does not mean that it was not productive under the

Ullue production and struggle in the classroom

earlier regime. Attempting to conceive of the state in blackand-white terms-as a fully functional and productive part of Fordist capitalism (the structuralist approach); or as a socialist island within the market economy; or even as somehow class neutral-is not a useful approach. Rather, it seems more helpful to theorise the state as a dynamic moment in the class struggle, as a set of relations-whose form and content are determined by this struggle-rather than as a thing. (See, for example, Bonefeld & Holloway, 1991; Clarke, 1991.) With this understanding, we can see that many elements of teaching were productive of value for capital: teachers produced, categorised and hierarchised new labour power, and thus produced. At the same time, the relatively permissive conditions under which schoolteachers and, especially, university academics laboured frequently allowed them time and space to explore other interests (their own and those of students; and possibly interests antithetical to capital's). So in this sense, they were not productive-we explore these questions in more detail in Section 2, below. But for all teachers (and students) there was a tension between the productive and non-productive elements of their labour: while the state provided (often 'generous') resources with which teachers could meet their needs-to share knowledge, to engage in scholarship and so on-it also involved them in relationships they'd rather do without, mediated through examinations, hierarchies, externally-imposed subject boundaries, etc. (See, for example, London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1980.) Second, the current neoliberal restructuring of schooling, and its effects on classroom activity, may actually make schooling less functional-and therefore less productivefor capital than in the Fordist era. One would imagine the relatively unconstrained environment of the 1960s university to be more conducive to engendering imaginative social subjects able to communicate and to cooperate-that is, immaterial labourers. The existence of such spaces, which appear (at least) to be partially outside of the capital relation, and upon which capital can draw, may be necessary for capital's development. Indeed, many capitalists prefer employees with 'traditional' degrees and A levels to those with 'vocational' qualifications, while the Confederation of British Industry opposed the abolition of student grants and the introduction of fees. 7 On the other hand, schooling's regime of 'continuous control' and its systems of measuring

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success-it rewards those who can (i) cooperate yet appropriate to themselves cooperation's effects; and (ii) pass off as original work that may have been 'plagiarised' -in fact mirror the structures of society in general. As such, schooling may be an effective way of sorting new labour power in order to meet social capital's needs. It becomes apparent, then, that teachers' labour contains both productive and unproductive elements. In part, teachers' labour may be unproductive because the tendencies described in the sections 1.2-1.4, above, are just that-tendencies, which are incomplete and contested. And, given the immaterial nature of education labour and the degree to which education and socialisation are social processes, involving the cooperation of numerous subjects, how could the Gontribution of an individual teacher ever be measured? In this way, then, Hardt and Negri's suggestion that the production of value now takes place 'outside measure', where this 'refers to the impossibility of power's calculating and ordering production at a global level', can be applied to educators' labour (2000: 357). And in part, as discussed briefly in this section, teachers' labour may also be unproductive because some of the neoliberal reforms-such as the imposition of metrics, which seem to make this labour more . productive-may actually make schooling less functional for capital-in-general. But, most importantly, teachers' labour becomes unproductive as a result of the struggles of teachers themselves: against neoliberalism; to resist measure; to create alternative educational practices and relationships. That is, struggles to exist against-and-beyond capital. In the next section, we will discuss some of the ways in which teachers may (produce) struggle.

2. Producing struggle: Teachers against and beyond capital

Visible and collective struggles The most visible struggles to oppose capital's neoliberal project within education-and hence capital-are the collective ones organised through various teachers' and students' unions. In the UK, for instance, lecturers' unionsAUT and NATFHE-have been at the forefront of campaigns against the 'modernisation' of university pay structures. Employers desire the freedom to set academics' pay and

2. I

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conditions locally, and to 'reward' academics on a differential basis-for example, to pay scientists more than humanities lecturers-both important elements of marketisation. University managers have thus attempted to overturn national collective bargaining agreements and, in 2004, lecturers reluctantly accepted a so-called 'national framework agreement' which, with a 51-point pay spine, allows for considerable local yariation. Academics organised through unions have, however, won some concessions that limit employers' freedom under the agreement. Following strike action, for instance, the AUT negotiated a 'memorandum of understanding' that gives some protection to existing 'old university' employees. B Given this agreement, AUT and NATFHE activists have turned their attention to its implementation at the local level. At the University of Nottingham, for example, the AUT responded to managers' attempts to introduce performance-related pay-again, another key component in marketisation-with strike action and a call, in September 2004, for a global boycott ('greylisting') of the university. The boycott was suspended in December following an 'interim agreement'.9 At London Metropolitan University (LMU), NATFHE activists are involved in an ongoing struggle against that university'S attempt to impose new contracts on academic staff. Since the dispute began, in April 2004, lecturers have taken industrial action, and have called for a boycott of the university. And they responded to the vice-chancellor's order to destroy all copies of a history of the university by burning their own new contracts. 10 In addition to these issues, the AUT and NATFHE have both been involved in campaigns to support research and teaching staff on short-term contracts, and against casualisation and flexibilisation more generally-again, other important elements in marketisation. They have also expressed concern at the likely re-emergence of a tiered higher education sector, with research concentrated in a handful of the 'top' institutions while many others are designated 'teaching-only', as institutions are 'encouraged' to specialise. Given the importance to the neoliberal project of all these reforms, the academic unions' opposition to them is de facto opposition to neoliberalism. The academic unions have, however, been more ambivalent about other aspects of the neoliberal project. Neither has been particularly keen to question the imposition

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of work on students, the 'function' of the education system in itself, or the general role of the Quality Assurance Agency and performance indicators in themselves. In contrast, the largest schoolteachers' trade union, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), recently balloted its members on a possible boycott of so-called SATS ('standard assessment tasks') for seven- and eleven-year-old children. Schoolteachers have been joined by parents in their hostility to testing, with the launch of a 'Stop the SATS' campaign. And all the teaching unions have been quite vocal in their opposition to the increasing burden of bureaucracy faced by teachersbureaucracy that, of course, enables the measurement of teachers' labour. In American colleges and universities, a high and increasing proportion of teaching is performed by casual labour-graduate students and 'adjuncts'. 12 These workers are in the forefront of a growing academic labour movement, leading unionisation drives, challenging the 'apprenticeship' model used by administrators in ·order to continue graduate student exploitation, and demanding collective bargaining Gohnson et aI., 2003). Besides 'basic' issues like pay and job security, activists are also taking on such issues as freedom of expression and the whole concept of 'academic citizenship'. In Africa, students and teachers have engaged in countless struggles-student strikes, teacher strikes, exam boycotts, demonstrations, road blockades, occupations of school and university buildings-against the structural adjustment programmes adopted by their governments and education institutions. In country after country, demonstration after demonstration, in its slogans, flyers, and position papers the Mrican student movement has shown a remarkable homogeneity of demands. 'NO to starving and studying', 'NO to tuition fees', NO to cuts in books and stationary', 'NO to Structural Adjustment, to corrupt leaders, and to the recolonization of Africa' are slogans which have unified African students in the SAP era to a degree unprecedented since the anti-colonial struggle. (Federici & Caffentzis, 2000: II5) For the 'corporate university' chasing 'global competitiveness', low labour costs and 'market responsiveness' are key requirements. Hence its need for a casualised, flexible labour force. For global capital more generally, reducing social spending, including spending on education-that is, shifting the costs of reproduction back onto labour power itself-is [I

lillue production and struggle in the classroom

essential to the success of its neoliberal project to restore capitalist profitability following the crises of the 1970s. Capital must also strengthen the link between money and work. In other words, it must make more labour productive. Thus we can understand all of these organised strugglesagainst structural adjustments, against funding cuts, against limitations on academic freedom, against casualisation; in Europe, North America, Africa and elsewhere-as directly anticapitalist, and as struggles against the becomingproductive of the labour of teaching and studying. Sabotage and subterfuge: Individual and invisible struggle Collective struggles are clearly important, but there are many ways-more varied and less obvious-in which education workers, acting outside of any formal organisations, refuse capitalist work. In the language of Deleuze and Guattari (1988), we can understand such actions as lines offlight: ways of fleeing capital's attempts to rigidify or codify working practices and to impose labour, to flip over from one abstract machine (that of capital) to another. 'Good teachers' are enthusiastic about their subject. They deliver stimulating, original lectures or lessons, tailoring their classes to meet students' interests and needs. They set stimulating tasks, welcome questions and discussion, and are always available to provide additional help. Moreover, they remember all their students' names. However, this takes considerable time and energy, and is particularly difficult when teaching activity must be subordinated to the external requirements of curriculum, assessment and high workload. Many teachers thus adopt the obvious work-reduction tactic of simply teaching from the textbook and/or constantly recycling old material. Although this may make life easier, and probably duller, for the teacher, it will almost certainly make classes far more tedious for students: it therefore increases the amount of labour they will have to expend in order to achieve a certain grade. Teachers may also severely limit their availability for answering student queries and be purposively unhelpfulwhich may include being condescending, arrogant or aggressive-whenever they are tracked down. Again, this individual work-refusal tactic shifts labour from teacher onto student. Lecturers or schoolteachers may reduce their own burden of marking or grading work by setting multiple-choice2.2

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question (MCQ) test and examination papers, which can be marked by computer. Besides reducing teacher work, this can also make life easier for students, many of whom prefer MCQ-type tests. Teachers may therefore adopt this tactic as a means of freeing-up class time in order to pursue their own and/or their students' interests. But since managers may perceive such work-reduction tactics as 'efficiency gains'using them as a way of driving down (socially necessary) labour times-there is a strong incentive for individual teachers to conceal their full effects. Another individual work-refusal tactic is that of refusing the labour of writing comprehensive and reliable student references, i.e. shirking the hierarchising and categorising function. Many school and university teachers simply have too many students to know any of them very well. Rather than performing the laborious task of consulting files and colleagues, and then attempting to compose an accurate portrait, it is far easier to simply continually reuse a few standard, frequently glowing, reference letters. An alternative tactic, which certainly produces more personalised references but which just as surely undermines the recruitment system, is that of essentially allowing students to write their own references, which the 'referee' then simply edits. Within schools, many are refusing teaching labour by refusing to become or remain teachers, particularly in subjects such as mathematics, science and IT. Others are refusing much of the labour 'normally' required of teachersadministrative tasks, writing of student reports and references, attendance at parents' evenings-by working mainly as 'supply' teachers. 13 Students, too, adopt a variety of collective and individual tactics in order to reduce their own labour, some of which are considered to be good 'study skills', and others, 'cheating'. These include: cooperating in order to share work; plagiarism or copying of others' work (whether that of other students, of textbooks or academic articles, or downloading essays from commercial or free internet sites); studying only certain topics; and smuggling notes into examinations. A cohort of students in fact constitutes an i.nformal work group, and may resist work on this basis by tacitly agreeing effort levels: 'if none of us do it .. .', 'she can't fail us all ... '. Such considerations are a material foundation for the ostracising of the 'swot'. Many educationalists, teachers and others consider plagiarism to be a growing problem, exacerbated

Uzlue production and struggle in the classroom

by the proliferation of material available to students electronically, and education institutions are devoting increasing resources to fighting it, themselves drawing upon new technology to do so. However, teachers may alternatively take a far more relaxed attitude, either by simply refusing the labour of attempting to detect or track down plagiarism, or by turning a blind eye to it and other forms of 'cheating': they may simply accept, for example, that their students might well have better things to do wi~ their time. Some teachers may themselves give students 'hints' regarding examination questions; they may make their courses easier; or they may systematically 'mark-up'. These are all examples of educators refusing the labour of imposing labour (on their students). More generally, teachers' and students' work-refusal activities are reflected in concerns regarding 'grade inflation' and 'falling standards'. More concretely, we can observe their effect in the response of employers. Many, concerned about the 'value' of university degrees, are taking into account job applicants' A level grades. Others have resorted to increasingly sophisticated procedures for recruiting employees. These include multiple-stage recruitment processes; extended two-day assessments, in which applicants may be required to carry out a number of tasks both individually and in groups, as well as 'traditional' interviews, and in which they are under constant observation; and psychometric testing. Clearly, these protracted recruitment procedures impose considerable labour on students/applicants, but we should understand them as part of capital's response to educators' refusal and/or inability to provide reliable information on job candidates' intellectual and character attributes. In effect, teachers' and university lecturers' (more-or-Iess individual) struggles are pushing the costs of screening, ranking and categorising new labour power back onto capital. Besides actions, individual and collective, against capital, teachers may struggle to go beyond capital. This activity may be consciously anticapitalist, but more likely it is not. Many schoolteachers and university lecturers constantly seek, frequently successfully, the time and space to teach material that lies outside or beyond externally imposed curricula. Indeed, some of this material may be implicitly or explicitly critical of capitalist social relations. In universities, lecturers may even be able to offer whole courses in Marxist or other critical theory. Teachers may seek to explain the power relationships that divide them from their students as a first

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step towards dissolving them, albeit partially. And it may also be possible for teachers to adopt various tactics in order to weaken the link between labour performed in the classroom and the grade awarded. For example, it is sometimes possible to design courses such that students receive credit for activity they would choose to do anyway. 14

Conclusion Within the capitalist mode Of production, the education system performs a key function for the (re)production of that special commodity, labour power. I have suggested that: first, the labour of those who work in schools, colleges and universities-teachers, lecturers, students and others-has a two-fold nature, containing both abstract and concrete labour; that, second, this labour is alienated; and third, that it produces value and surplus value for capital. As such, we can think of those who labour in the schoolas-factory as productive labourers, and to the extent that these workers are productive of value and surplus value, they exist within capital. However, the school, college or university is also a site of struggle. I have suggested some of the varied ways in which teachers and students may struggle, either collectively or individually, against the imposition of work in the school-as-factory andfor activity and relationships that transcend capitalist social relations. To the extent that teachers and students struggle against imposed labour and for other ways of being, they are unproductive labourers, they are productive of struggle, and they exist against-andbeyond capital. I have treated these two antagonistic moments-on the one hand, that of producing value, of existing within capital; and on the other hand, that of producing struggle, of existing against-and-beyond capital-separately. This is for ease of exposition only. In fact"it may be hard to disentangle the two moments. Capital develops in response to struggle and, in tum, new forms of struggle emerge in response to capital. Capital's response to the problem of plagiarism, for instance, is to invent detection software and 'best practice' procedures for dealing with it.ls Capital's response to teachers' refusal (or inability) to perform categorising and hierarchising tasks adequate to its needs is to extend its own labour power recruitment processes. Teachers have employed various forms

Uzlue production and struggle in the classroom

of subterfuge in response to the imposition of workload models and bureaucratic structures. But many teaching practices may be ambiguous, simultaneously combining within-capital elements with against-and-beyond elements. One such example is provided by radical academics who offer courses in Marxism or other critical theory, yet take pride in their strictness as graders. They essentially use radical theory as a means of imposing additional work! It is for this reason that a clear understanding of the ways in which teachers produce value, on the one hand, and produce struggle, on the other, is useful. For the Marxist who believes that the function of education is purely 'ideological', being strict may be necessary in order to ensure that students learn the 'correct' ideology, even the 'lazy' ones. The idea that education is somehow outside of 'normal' capitalist social relationships can also lead to radical or progressive teachers choosing to cross picket lines; and there have even been instances of progressive professors turning in striking students to the university administration. 16 It is also important to recognise that 'education' is a collective activity, involving the cooperation of many subjectivities: the teacher works with administrators, other teachers and, most importantly, with students. Just as no education system can guarantee the production of human beings with 'desirable labour power attributes', neither can radical teachers 'produce revolutionaries'. It is quite possible to draw on Marx's insights, say, and human skills in critical, imaginative thinking, and harness them in the interests of capital. IndeeQ, capital needs such thinkers. Clarke and Mearman, for instance, in arguing that 'Marxist economics should be taught', suggest that 'students [might] become more creative, better problem-solvers, which can raise their productivity'! (2003: 69). Teachers, like all other human beings, exist within-againstand-beyond capital. Their labour is both productive and unproductive of value; or rather, their activity is both productive of value and productive of struggle. In this paper, I have attempted to analyse and illustrate the ways in which teachers exist within capital on the one hand-the ways in which they (re)produce (the) capital (relation); that is, produce value-and on the other hand, the already-existing ways in which they undermine and rupture this reproduction; that is, struggle against-and-beyond capital. This knowledge

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can be an important tool both in our struggle against the former form of activity, and in our struggle to expand spaces for the latter.

Notes I.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Caffentzis (1975) discusses 'the universities in [that] crisis' . See Harvie (2005) for a more general reformulation of the productive-unproductive labour distinction. Unlike most commodities within the 'general class', labour power is never 'finally' produced. Rather, it is constantly reproduced (or not) within each human being. 'Subject benchmark statements' are produced and policed by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Educationsee . Marginson (2002) discusses this in the context ofAustralian universities, and presents quantitative evidence. The mean mark measures the average quantity of work the lecturer imposes, while the standard deviation of marks measures his or her relative contribution to the hierarchising of students. The CBI has also opposed the expansion of higher education on the grounds that many workers are 'overeducated'. Thus, in some sense, capital's 'infinite social drive to enhance the quality of human labour power', noted above, may not be functional to its needs in other sectors. In 1992, the so-called 'binary divide' of Britain's higher education system was formally abolished, as polytechnics were allowed to call themselves universities. 'Old universities' are thus the pre-1992 universities, while 'new universities' are the former polytechnics. The AUT has traditionally represented old-university academics, while new-university staff are typically members of NATFHE. The two unions are likely to merge in the near future. For more information on union activities see their websites: and . See Nottingham local AUT website for more details. See NATFHE (2004).

value production and struggle in the classroom

II.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

On the other hand, the leader of the second-largest teachers' union, NASUW, was quick to condemn suggestions that school students skip school in order to take part in demonstrations against the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles. Some estimates suggest that such workers teach more than 50 per cent of undergraduate courses Oohnson, 2 00 3). In the UK, supply teachers are employed on a daily, weekly or termly basis to provide cover for absent staff. Pro-rata pay rates are equivalent to those applicable to teachers permanently employed. See Harvie (2004) for a more extensive discussion of the communities that may exist in universities, including classroom communities, and the ways in which they seek to transcend capitalist education. In fact, capital profits from both 'sides' of plagiarism. So-called 'paper mill' websites, which provide essays, and plagiarism-detection software are both becoming big business. David Brion Davis, a scholar of the history of slavery, and Sara Suleri, a postcolonialism theorist, both reported their teaching assistants to Yale administrators for participating in a graduate students' strike (Nelson, 2 00 3).

References Althusser, L. (1972) 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays (Monthly Review Press). Bonefeld, W. & J. Holloway (1991) (eds.) Post-Fordism and Social Form:A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State (Macmillan). Boxley, S. (2003) 'Performativity and capital in schools' in Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol. I, no. I; online at . Bowles, S. & H. Gintis (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (Routledge and Kegan Paul). Brinton, M. (1975) The Irrational in Politics (Solidarity). Caffentzis, G. (1975) 'Throwing away the ladder: The universities in the crisis' in Zerowork, vol. I, pp. 128-142. Also online at
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357LZWlcaffentzis.htm> . - - - (2000) 'The World Bank and education in Africa' in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis & O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Africa World Press) pp. 3-18. Clarke, P. & A. Mearman (2003) 'Why Marxist economics should be taught but probably won't be!' in Capital & Class, no. 79, pp. 55-77· Clarke, S. (1991) (ed.) The State Debate (Macmillan). Cleaver, H. (2000) Reading Capital Politically (AntifTheses and AK Press). Cleveland Modern Times Group (1976) 'The social factory' in Falling Wall Review (Falling Wall Press) pp. 2-7. Dalla Costa, M. & S. James (1972) The Power ofWVmen and (the) Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press). De Angelis, M. (1995) 'Beyond the technological and social paradigms: A political reading of abstract labour as the substance of value' in Capital & Class, no. 57, pp. 107-134. - - - (1996) 'Social relations, commodity-fetishism and Marx's critique of political economy' in Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 28, pp. 1-29. Deleuze, G. (1995) 'Post script on the societies of control' in G. Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (Colombia University Press) pp. 177-182. Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Athlone). Department for Education and Skills (2003) The Future of Higher Education (The Stationary Office). Online at . Federici, S. & G. Caffentzis (2000) 'Chronology of African students' struggles: 1985-1998', in S. Federici, G. Caffentzis & O. Alidou (eds.) A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Africa World Press) pp. 115-150. Fortunati, L. (1995) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (Autonomedia). Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the P.rison (Allen Lane). Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin). Greenpepper (2004)-special issue on 'precarity'. Hardt, M. & A. Negri (2000) Empire (Harvard University Press) . Harvie, D. (2004) 'Commons and communities in the university: Some notes and some examples' in The Commoner, no. 8, online at . - - - (2005) 'All labour produces value for capital and we all struggle against value' in The Commoner, no. 10, online at .

lizlue production and struggle in the classroom

Harris, K. (1982) Teachers and Classes: A Marxist Analysis (Routledge and Kegan Paul). Johnson, B. (2003) 'The Drain-O of higher education: Casual labor and university teaching' in B. Johnson, P. Kavanagh & K. Mattson (eds.) Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (Routledge) pp. 61-80. Johnson, B., P. Kavanagh & K. Mattson (2003) (eds.) Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (Routledge). Lazzarato, M. (1996) 'Immaterial labor' in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (University of Minnesota Press). Levidow, L. (2002) 'Marketising higher education: Neoliberal strategies and counter-strategies' in The Commoner, no. 3, online at . London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group (1980) In and Against the State (Pluto Press). Marginson, S. (2002) 'Towards a politics of the enterprise university' in S. Cooper, J. Hinkson & G. Sharp (eds.) Scholars and Entrepreneurs: The Universities in Crisis (Arena Publications) pp. 109-136. Martin, R. (2003) 'Foreword' to M. Bousquet, T. Scott & L. Parasondola (eds.) Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University (Southern Illinois University Press) pp. ix-xi. Marx, K. (1862 [1969)) Theories of Surplus lizlue, Part I (Lawrence and Wishart). - - - (1844 [1975)) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings (Penguin) pp. 279-400. - - - (1867 [1976a)) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (Penguin). - - - (1867 [1976b]) 'Results of the immediate process of production', published as an appendix to Capital, Volume I (Penguin). Mohun, S. (1994) 'A re(in)statement of the labour theory of value' in Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 18, pp. 3914 12 . - - - (1996) 'Productive and unproductive labor in the labor theory of value' in Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 30-54· Mute (2005) 'The Precarious Issue', no. 29. NATFHE (2004) 'Lecturers burn letters threatening dismissal: "Glimmer of light" emerges in dispute', press release, I September, online at . Nelson, C. (2003) 'Moving river barges: Labor activism and academic organizations' in B. Johnson, P. Kavanagh & K.

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Mattson (eds.) Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (Routledge) pp. 189-206. Ovetz, R. (1996) 'Turning resistance into rebellion: Student struggles and the entrepreneurialization of the universities' in Capital & Class, no. 58, pp. 113-152. Reimer, E. (1971) School is Dead: An Essay on Alternatives in Education (Penguin). Rikowski, G. (2000) 'Messing with the explosive commodity: School improvement, educational research and labourpower in the era of global capitalism', paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference, Cardiff University, 7-10 September. Online at . ___ (2001) The Battle in Seattle: Its Significance for Education (Tufnell Press). ___ (200212003) 'That other great class of commodities: Labour-power as spark for Marxist educational theory', paper presented at the Education Research Centre, Research Seminar Series, University of Brighton, 6 November; and at Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues II, University of London, Institute of Education, 1 May 2003. Robinson, A. & S. Tormey (2003) 'New Labour's neoliberal Gleichschaltung: The case of higher education' in The Commoner, no. 7; online at . Savran, S. & E. A. Tonak (1999) 'Productive and unproductive labour: An attempt at clarification and classification' ·in Capital & Class, no. 68, pp. 113-152. Thompson, E. P. (1970) (ed.) warwick University Ltd: Industry, Management and the Universities (Penguin). Tronti, M. (1973) 'Social Capital' in Telos, no. 17, pp. 98-12I. Also at . Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e)). Yaffe, D. (1976) The State and the Capitalist Crisis (ReG Publications). Also online at .

The denial of history

The denial of history: Reification, intellectual property rights and the lessons of the past Christopher May In this article, I examine the impact of the reification of intellectual property rights (IPRS) on the global political economy of information and knowledge. I begin by establishing the central functions that IPRS perform in the global political economy, and then review reification as an analytical tool for the examination of social phenomena. The interrogation of IPRS using the concept of reification raises the issue of the role of anxiety in the politics of knowledge. There are two dimensions of anxiety that need to be accorded some analytical weight in any general discussion of the political problem of IPRS: anxiety about personal welfare, and anxiety about control. Both of these can be readily identified in discussions and disputes about the scope, applicability and costs of IPRS in the global system. This is to say that the reification of intellectual property contributes to the continuing discourse of depoliticisation and technocratic policy-making in this area. Thus, I argue that the reification of intellectual property must be resisted if we are to establish a meaningful global politics of information and knowledge.

W

e are often told that we have entered a new age and a new society: the 'information society'. Such claims have prompted a widened interest in and concern about intellectual property rights (IPRS). Indeed, intellectual property is the legal form through which many key resources of this 'new' society are commodified: through the recognition of IPRS, ideas, information and knowledge are made into property-like goods that can be exchanged in

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markets. Although intellectual property has a long history, recent interest and commentary has mostly been prompted by the inclusion, in 1995, of intellectual property in the remit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the form of the first global legal settlement for intellectual property: the 'trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights' (TRIPS) agreement (May, 2000; Sell, 2003). The previous international regime for the governance of IPRS, overseen by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), was strengthened and expanded by the TRIPS agreement, not least in that it made disputes over IPRS subject to the WTO'S dispute-settlement mechanism. Considerable interest and concern has been expressed in policy-making, activist and academic circles regarding the role and effect of IPRS in the contemporary global system. However, this article takes a more general look at one central issue related to IPRS: reification. The purpose of this is to establish the status of IPRS as a political economic issue, not an arcane technical issue only for legal specialists. This article sets out the functions that IPRs perform and then briefly reviews reification as an analytical tool for the examination of social phenomena, before applying it to the institutionalisation of IPRS. This suggests that anxiety is a factor that needs to be accorded some analytical weight in any general discussion of the political problem of IPRS. Moreover, the reification of intellectual property contributes to the continuing discourse of depoliticisation and technocratic policy-making in this area. Therefore, reification must be resisted if a meaningful global politics of information and knowledge is to be established: it is only by understanding the reification behind the discourses that stress protection for IPRS that a principled political response to the effects of the commodification of information and knowledge can be constructed. Although capital is, of course, segmented and fractional, encompassing varying 'models of capitalism', there remain some clear 'laws of capitalism' (Wood, 2003). Perhaps the most important aspect of these laws is the necessity of private property rights for capitalist social relations. As Samuel Oddi has noted, the widespread use of a natural rights discourse in the political debates over IPRS (most obviously at the WTO and the WIPO) tries to establish that 'these rights are so important that individual [WTO] member welfare should not stand in the way of their being protected as an entitlement

The denial of history of the creators. This invokes a counter-instrumentalist policy that members, regardless of their state of industrialisation, should sacrifice their national interests in favour of the posited higher order of international trade' (Oddi, 1996: 440). This naturalisation has profound effects on the manner in which we conceive of the 'problem' of intellectual property. Indeed, the realm in which property itself is exchanged has also been naturalised. Markets just are, and any notion that they need to be set up seems to be largely absent from popular discourse; rather, they merely need to be unleashed. Thus the issues explored in this article are part of the more general problem of the rule of law, the construction of markets in capitalist social relations, and the role of reification in naturalising these contemporary structures of capitalism. Reification obscures certain avenues of reform and trajectories of socio-economic development by naturalising the contemporary legal settlement that frames specific political economic issues. In particular, reification obscures the historical specificity of intellectual property. Although the history of various forms of IPRS can be traced back at least five hundred years, the current manifestation of intellectual property as 'rights', rather than as the limited monopolies that patterned the earlier history of 'owning' ideas, is linked with the emergence of modern capitalism. The 'right' to exploit ideas and knowledge as commercial assets was founded as capitalism started to accelerate in the eighteenth century. Entrepreneurs (such as James Watt and later Thomas Edison) sought to establish and maintain market advantage by denying their competitors access to the inventions on which their businesses were built. The reification of IPRS into natural rights of individual innovators and creators denies this historical shift, and obscures the interests served by the protection and enforcement of patents, copyrights, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property.

The general functions of intellectual property When knowledge and/or information becomes subject to ownership, intellectual property rights conventionally express ownership's legal benefits: the ability to charge rent for use,

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to receive compensation for loss, and to demand payment for transfer. Intellectual property rights are subdivided into a number of groups, two of which generate most discussion: industrial intellectual property (patents), and literary or artistic intellectual property (copyrights). The difference between patents and copyrights is conventionally presented as the difference between a patent's protection of the idea itself, and copyright's protection of its expression. However, in recent decades, this simple distinction has started to break down as the scope of IPRS has been widened to encompass new technologies and new forms of knowledge and/or information. Many political disputes about IPRS are concerned with the possibility, or morality, of rendering certain knowledge or information as property: for instance, the question of whether scientific data about the human genome should be owned or free to all. However, the key function of intellectual property (as with any form of commodification) is to bring resources (of whatever form) into the market by establishing ownership rights over them. This function is not 'natural', but rather a reified social process. Laws of intellectual property attempt to balance supporting the rights of individuals over their creative endeavours with the public benefit of the diffusion of innovation in a manner relatively unlimited by cost. The establishment of property rights is claimed to foster and support innovation and progress by encouraging individuals' endeavour with the promise of rewards: i.e. property rights in the results of their efforts. Furthermore, by organising the ownership, transfer and use of knowledge and information through markets, efficient use is promoted. Thus IPRS support the social need for innovation and advance. However, legislators through the many centuries of intellectual property's legal history have also recognised that knowledge and information are significant social goods, which need to be circulated as widely as possible. Indeed, in its early history, (prototypical) intellectual property was structured not as property rights but rather as limited monopolies, with duties of dissemination attached (May & Sell, 2005: ch. 3). And while this notion of monopoly has faded, it remains influential in the continuing recognition of the need to balance private rights with the public benefit/social good aspects of any grant of intellectual property.

The denial of history This important balance between private reward and public interest is at the heart of all contemporary intellectual property legislation, and is most explicitly expressed through the imposition of time limits on IPRS. Unlike property rights in material things, IPRs are formally temporary: once their term has expired, they return to the public realm where no price can be exacted (May, 2000: 65). Thus, depending on the assessment of the public benefit of free dissemination (which is to say, non-marketised availability), time limits on the rights accorded to intellectual property owners vary. Rights over important knowledge for economic development (industrial property or patents) last for twenty years, while copyrights over (only) specific expressions of ideas last for much longer-the life of the author plus at least fifty years. Informational marks (trademarks, geographical indicators) can be protected in perpetuity (under certain conditions), as their social utility lies in the accuracy of the information they carry. Thus the commodification of knowledge and information is, for the most part, temporary, and circumscribed by limits on the scope of commodification (through the criteria for patenting, for instance). Most importantly, IPRS formally construct scarcity of use where none necessarily exists. Knowledge and information, unlike material things, are not necessarily rivalrous, in that their use by more than one person or body at the same time seldom detracts from their utility. Most of the time, knowledge (before it is made property) does not exhibit the characteristics of material things. Take the example of a hammer (as material property): if I own a hammer and we would both like to use it, our utility is compromised by sharing use. I cannot use the hammer while you are using it; you cannot use it while I am, and thus our intended use is rival. For you to also use my hammer, either you have to accept a compromised utility (relying on my goodwill to allow you to use it when I am not), or you must buy another hammer. The hammer is scarce. However, the idea of building something with hammer and nails is not scarce. If I instruct you in the art of simple construction, then once that knowledge has been imparted, your use of that information has no effect on my own ability to use the knowledge at the same time: there is no compromise to my utility. We may be fighting over whose tum it is to use the hammer, but we do not have to argue over whose tum it is to use the idea of hammering a nail

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into a joint: our use of the idea of cabinet construction is non-rival. Ideas, knowledge and information are generally non-rivalrous. To be sure, if you arrd I were both cabinet makers, then my instructing you in cabinet construction might lead you to compete for my customers, possibly reducing my income. But we might say that any secrecy regarding my skills was anti-competitive. There are other cases-'information asymmetries'-in which knowledge may produce advantages for the holder by enabling a better price to be extracted, or by allowing a market advantage to be gained. Here, information and knowledge is rivalrous, and wider availability of this knowledge would cause market advantage to be compromised. However, rivalrousness is not necessarily of any wider social benefit: competition is often beneficial to customers, while information asymmetries produce market choices that are not fully informed and which, therefore, can be harmful. When information is 'naturally' rivalrous, the social good may be best served by ensuring that it is shared and not hoarded. For instance, many problems experienced by buyers in the second-hand car market could be ameliorated if car dealers were required to reveal everything they knew about the cars they were selling. This would be likely to reduce the price they could obtain for much of their stock; but it would enhance the general satisfaction (and even safety) of second-hand-car buyers. Conversely, if trademarks offer useful information regarding the origin, reputation and quality of goods and services, then allowing just anyone to use specific marks reduces their social utility. Here, the imposed scarcity does serve a wider social purpose while also benefiting the owner of the mark, who can treat it as a commercial asset (well-known trademarks are often accorded significant monetary value by companies and their shareholders). To sum up: it is difficult to extract a price for the use of non-rival (knowledge) goods, so a legal form of scarcity (IPRS) is introduced in order to ensure that a price can be obtained for use. Material property is 'naturally' scarce, and therefore is already rivalrous in potential use, whereas knowledge in most cases is non-rivalrous prior to its becoming intellectual property. Therefore, as Arnold Plant stressed seventy years ago, unlike 'real' property rights, patents (and other IPRS) are not a consequence of scarcity.

The denial of history

They are the deliberate creation of statute law; and, whereas in general the institution of private property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, tending (as we might somewhat loosely say) to lead us 'to make the most of them', property rights in patents and copyright make possible the creation of scarcity of the products appropriated which could not otherwise be maintained. Whereas we might expect the public action concerning private property would normally be directed at the prevention of the raising of prices, in these cases the object of the legislation is to confer the power of raising prices by enabling the creation of scarcity. (Plant, 1934: 3 1) The protection of rights for the express purpose of raising prices is, of course, the central issue that the politics of intellectual property has to deal with.

Some remarks on reification Although there are phenomenological analyses that could be deployed in order to consider the processes ofreification, the advantage of building on the analysis of reification from the (still-) persuasive account of capitalism originally developed by Karl Marx is that it makes a clear link between the process and the capitalist political economy. Thus any critical consideration of reification within capitalist social relations should start with Marx's brief but suggestive comments. In notebook VI of the Grundrisse, Marx argued that 'The crude materialism of the economists who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production amongst people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations ... imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them' (Marx, 1973: 687, second emphasis added). Earlier in the notebooks, Marx had noted that the 'economists' put considerable effort into this 'forgetting': the wilful depiction of socially-contrived relations as if they were natural occurrences (Marx, 1973: 85). Indeed, the aim of such depictions was to present production 'as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded' (Marx, 1973: 87). Reification, then, is the

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abstracting of a particular set of relations into an ahistorical, naturalised (and hence non-political) set of occurrences. Marx moved on from regarding this process as merely 'forgetting' in his subsequent writing: in Capital, reification and fetishisation had become 'magic and necromancy' (Marx, 1887 [1974]: 80). He was clear that 'the existence of things qua commodities and the value-relation between the products oflabour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom' (Marx, 1887 [1974]: 77)·

Thus, since the relations between producers (which is to say, workers) are only established by the trade in things, labour relations 'appear, not as direct social relations between individuals, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things' (Marx, 1887 [1974]: 78). The 'reality' of exchange obscures the social relations of production: social actions are presented as the actions of things and hence are externalised-rendered as natural occurrences rather than as the interaction of social beings. As Marx went on to point out in the third volume of Capital, such a depiction of the role of commodities as naturally occurring things 'corresponds to the interests of the ruling classes by proclaiming the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue and elevating them to a dogma' (Marx, 1894 [1959]: 830). The commodification of things into forms of property removes them from the sphere of social interactions, and places them in the realm of marketised interactions where they can be bought and sold with little reference to their production (or the interests of their direct producers). Bertell OIlman argues that this is the most important example in Marx's work of 'reciprocal effect' (OIlman, 1976: 200), as the dialectical relationship between reified subject and object is maintained analytically by Marx, who resists a reduction to either 'vulgar determination' or 'vulgar free-will'. The process of reification can never be total; rather, it reflects an ongoing attempt to dominate-and to distort-relations between people into relations between things. Although Marx's rather scattered remarks on reification were developed into the study of fetishism by many Marxists, more focused work on the idea of reification itself was only prompted by Georg Lukacs's study, History and Class

41

The denial of history Consciousness (see, for example, Petrovic, 1991). Furthermore, the wider exploration of the notion of reification stemmed not so much from the original publication of that work in 1923, but from its appearance in French in 1960, and subsequently in an English translation in 1971 (Berman, 1985 [1999]). At the centre of Lukacs's book is a long chapter, split into three, on 'Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat' (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 83-222). For the purposes of this article, it is only necessary to briefly explore some issues from the first part, 'The phenomenon of reification', since this contains the analytical discussion that will be used below. The problem that Lukacs identifies with other treatments of reification is that previous analysts (particularly Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money) have tried to present reification itself as a timeless or ahistorical problem, rather than linking it to the capitalist organisation of society (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 95). In such analyses, he suggests, the process of reification itself has been reified; it has been removed from history and rendered as a psychological process that occurs through the natural interaction of humans in society. Lukacs wishes to resist such an analysis: the problem of reification is that it presents the contemporary world as 'the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world, vouchsafed to us humans' (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 110). But this world is not outside time; rather, it is the world built by capitalism, and must be understood as such. Lukacs suggests that there are two sides to reification under capitalism: Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their movements on the mOarket). The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power .... Subjectively-where the market has been fully developed-a man's activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article. (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 87) Thus there is reification into naturalised market structures, causing their dependence on social interaction to be hidden, °

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to a large extent; and reification (linked to the more formal legal alienation of products of labour) that sees the product of labour reduced to the commodity form for exchange. Lukacs sees reification as a (potentially) universal mode of social organisation; but even in its incomplete form, 'Consumer articles no longer appear as the products of an organic process within a community.... They now appear, on the one hand, as abstract members of a species identical by definition with its other members and, on the other hand, as isolated objects the possession or non-possession of which depends on rational calculation ... [although] this isolation andJragmentation is only apparent' (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 91, emphasis added). Therefore, for Lukacs (as for Marx) it is this necessary illusion of natural laws and naturalised market relations that supports the commodification of social life, and allows the continuing expansion of capitalist property relations by presenting the process of commodification as a depoliticised, natural occurrence. Mirroring the self-reinforcing expansion of capitalist social relations, Lukacs suggests that the process of reification, likewise, 'progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more defiantly into the consciousness of man' (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 93). Andrew Arato glosses this aspect of Lukacs's analysis as indicating that 'everywhere is passivity and isolation in face of a world that is only seen in fragments: a world that appears fundamentally unchangeable' (Arato, 1972: 37).The recognition and use ofreified practices and structures makes them seem increasingly natural and un-produced; reified practices and structures are consolidated and reinforced through their everyday use. Lukacs's totalising notion of a 'veil of reification' (Lukacs, 1923 [1971]: 86) unfortunately lapses into determinism (Arato, 1972: 53 ff.). The complex process of society's reification is not an undifferentiated process that can be presented singularly; rather, it is a mosaic of segmented processes. Nevertheless, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann point out, 'the basic "recipe" for the reification of institutions is to bestow on them an ontological status independent of human activity and signification [and] specific reifications are variations on this general theme' (Berger & Luckmann, 1971: 107). Thus, while the process ofreification may be a recognisable and generalised social occurrence, its actuality may differ from specific instance to specific instance; the analysis of relfication must examine actual pro-

The denial of history cesses within social interactions, not presume a universal and undifferentiated programme of reification. Lukacs allows for the possibility that reification's imposition can be challenged through the 'minimal consciousness of alienation' that is manifest among workers; reification may be recognised within the realm of reification itself, although this possibility may continually be under-mined by the subject's class position (Arato, 1972: 59-61). Therefore the concept of reification is neither a social totality, which opens an analytical space in order to understand the revelation of the process itself; nor is it a process without an agent. As regards reification's totality, Timothy Bewes recently pointed out, reflecting on Lukacs's analysis: 'Immanent in the "total reification" thesis is its own immediate repudiation-so hard on its heels as to be almost simultaneous with it. Reification is a self-reflexive, or dialectical concept; one invariably finds that the concept itself has played a part in any objection to it-yet, at the same time, the concept is always on the brink of succumbing to the very process it denotes' (Bewes, 2002: 89). Unless the social agents of reification are identified, the process itself is in danger of becoming naturalised, and this does little to further the critical analysis of capitalism. Matthew Kramer identifies the clear danger of circularity in this process: 'a reified commodity system will have to presuppose itself; it can finally become established only on the condition that it has already become established' (Kramer, 1991: 214). Reification reveals capitalism's self-fulfilling prophecy: a 'naturalised' structure that has had its politicolegal history removed. As regards agency, it is of central importance to the unmasking of reification to recognise that 'Even while apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it. That is, man is capable paradoxically of producing a reality that denies him' (Berger & Luckmann, 1971: 107). Thus the practices that conform to, and thus confirm, reified structures are themselves the practices that establish and maintain the very structures seen as 'other'. Peter Gabel has made perhaps the strongest statement of this 'agency' position as regards the process of reification: 'we participate in an unconscious conspiracy with others whereby everyone knows of the fallacy, and yet denies the fallacy exists ... reification is not simply a form of distortion, but also a form of unconscious coercion which, on the one hand, separates the communicated or socially apparent reality

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from the reality of experience and, on the other hand, denies this separation is taking place' (Gabel, 1980: 26). We are complicit in the processes of reification. However, this also opens up the space for a critique of the process and, importantly, (re)establishes the possibility of political action as regards any specific reified institution or set of institutions. In Bewes's view, cultural critics' fear of reification has, unfortunately, often reified the process itself (Bewes, 2002: 173). Bewes argues (drawing some intellectual sustenance from Kierkegaard's ethics) that 'all anxiety is about reification, because all anxiety suffers from reification' (Bewes, 2002: 245). It is fear that lacks a firm object, that seeks (through reification) an object that can be feared. Furthermore, as Bewes stresses, 'the object of anxiety is always a nothing-a gap, a space, an absence' (Bewes, 2002: 247). Hence the dialectical process of reification reflects anxiety in both directions: anxiety about the forms of relations into which we enter, stimulating our reification of them; while at the same time, and conversely, our anxiety regarding this reification (our unease at this 'unconscious conspiracy') requires us to hide such reification by reifying it into a natural process. Specifically in terms of intellectual property, anxiety related to the forms of relations (fears regarding theft, piracy and profitability of productive relations grounded on knowledge or informational resources) has prompted a vigorous political campaign to establish (and perpetuate) IPRS, culminating in the TRIPS agreement. This anxiety reifies a subject for these fears to regard as threatened; intellectual property. The discourse of 'piracy' and 'theft' dominates the discussion of copyright in the global political economy (Halbert, 1999). However, the difficulty of establishing the extent of counterfeiting and the scale of the losses from such activities itself prompts industry leaders' anxiety: what can they do about an 'enemy' that is so diffused, and whose impact is difficult if not impossible to quantify? How can losses to sales of CDS be quantified when it is impossible to count sales that never happened? Given the strength of the content industries as industrial lobbyists in the developed world (most obviously in the us), it is unsurprising that new copyright legislation (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the us, and the EU Copyright Directive) seeks to establish much

The denial of history

firmer legal mechanisms to underpin new technological solutions to the 'problem' of intellectual property theft. Anxiety about loss drives the (forced) consolidation of IPRS, building on a reification of naturalised rights and their protection. Related to anxiety regarding the process of reijied commodijication, naturalised narratives of justification are widely utilised in order to underpin and legitimise this process of making knowledge and information into property: copyrights and patents reflect the natural rights of creators to benefit from their efforts and to control the products of their own ingenuity. Anxiety regarding the troublesome metaphorical linkage between material property rights and IPRS is subsumed by the reification of these (new) rights as natural rights. Recognising the potential (and actual) criticisms of the commodification that lies at the centre of the content industries' business models, reification itself becomes the solution to the anxiety that it has prompted through the assumption of a naturalised commodification. Here, the constant recourse to questions about the future of the content industries-if there is no way of offering incentives to creative practitioners, how will creative endeavour continue?presents IPRS as 'natural rights', conveniently forgetting a long, pre-industrial history of human intellectual and creative endeavour. When the law (of IPRS) is reified, and therefore accorded a natural status, criticism must be unnatural, must be destabilising in a way that can be presented as dangerous by those who have carried forward the process of reification in their (or, more generally, capital's) interests (Kramer, 1991: 237). Furthermore, when conditions are deemed natural, they are regarded as unchanging and impervious to change: reification serves a clear, conservative purpose of maintaining the status quo. Indeed, human control over the reified world is denied; it has been dehumanised (Berger & Luckmann, 1971: 106). However, the reification process for intellectual property, as for all segments of capitalist social relations, is both contestable and driven by a specific set of (capitalist) actors. By unmasking the reification at the centre of the politics of intellectual property, the political possibilities of alternative approaches to the contemporary global governance of knowledge and information can be revealed.

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Reification and

IPRS

When intellectual property is eulogised, it is usually on the basis of the protection of the creator, the owner of the knowledge that is made property. The creator's rights are protected so as to act as a general spur to innovation and to socially useful activity. Arguments about 'just deserts' and theft are allied to the need for social efficiency in the allocation of resources (May, 2000: 16-29). However, as Jeremy Waldron notes, all this talk of property 'sounds a lot less pleasant if ... we turn the matter around and say we are imposing duties, restricting freedom and inflicting burdens on certain individuals for the sake of the greater social good' (Waldron, 1993: 862). This is to say that IPRS limit the actions of others regarding knowledge vis-ii-vis the owners of intellectual property and that, as such, prospective users are forced to sacrifice their particular wants or needs on the altar of social necessity. Non-owners' 'rights' are constrained because these rights are regarded as less important than the support of the social good of innovation by IPRs. In the realm of copyright, the limitation on activities (unauthorised copying or plagiarism) is hardly life-threatening-but what about areas in which intellectual property limits the use ofless ephemeral knowledge? The very real consequences of the distribution and control of IPRs lead to a more critical conclusion regarding the social good served by their general protection in areas ranging from AIDS medicines and 'biopiracy' to issues around the availability of databases of scientific information or meteorological records, and the constrictions put on development by the non-working of technology patents in Africa. Nevertheless, IPRS are often defended on the basis of their support for the maximisation of economic utility. By assuming that the market is the best method of allocation (in most, if not all circumstances), IPRS are justified on the basis that rendering knowledge and information as property serves this social good. This also encompasses the argument that in order to introduce the market into the products of the mind, an artificial scarcity (property-ness) must be constructed: without scarcity, pricing becomes difficult, if not actually impossible. However, the argument that the market is the most efficient method of allocation of resources requires a certain world-view to be adopted-one that is neither natural nor self-evident for the results of intellectual

The denial of history

activity. But once such an assumption has been made, a certain agenda of choices for dealing with knowledge or information is established. In order to take advantage of markets, knowledge must be constructed as property (rights). It is only the view that intellectual property itself is plausible in the first place that allows the arguments for efficiency/ utility to support specific IPR regimes. Thus, and crucially, the process of reification maintains a circular argument: efficiency depends on markets, which requires knowledge to be treated as property, which ensures that it is efficiently utilised (Nance, 1990). The agenda of choices from which plausible and acceptable arguments regarding the valuing (and use) of knowledge can be developed is strictly limited to those that draw explicitly on established property 'and market efficiency themes. The possibility that these two conceptual elements might be mutually interdependent is obscured by reification. Or, to utilise Kramer's terms: the institution of intellectual property can become 'established only on the condition that it has already become established' (Kramer, 1991: 214). Reification produces the depiction of an atemporal process of commodification, a realm in which individuals 'rights' are naturalised, and hence the problems of intellectual property are reduced to issues regarding the implementation of mechanisms to control and shape this natural process of making property from knowledge. This circularity reveals the continuing process of reification. The justifications utilised in order to legitimise IPRs involve stories intended to establish claims regarding the reward for effort, and the protection of one's ideas from misappropriation, alongside arguments about market efficiency (May, 2000: 22-29; May, 2004). Crucially, the drive to establish IPRS was mainly led, in its early history, by governments wishing to secure the importation of strategic knowledge and technologies, and latterly (in the last three centuries) by the industries whose knowledge would be protected. The individuals who appear so prominently in the stories of reward for effort and the sanctity of creative endeavour have seldom been particularly active in the campaigns for the establishment of legislation. From the Stationers' Guild in seventeenth-century Britain to the global pharmaceutical industry today, it has not been the innovators or authors who have been pressurising legislators to expand and consolidate the rights that can be claimed by the 'owners' of knowledge; rather, it has been

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the industries whose business models depend on the exploitation and reproduction of knowledge, from selling CDS to selling medicines, and from high fashion to computer software. This is not to say that individuals have been absent from such political campaigns: Victor Hugo was prominent in the campaign to establish an international copyright regime in the second half of the nineteenth century, and recently the music industry has deployed a number of wellknown musicians to argue for the protection of copyrights in music (although, as Courtney Love and Chuck D have demonstrated, this argument is not accepted by all musicians). However, in the long history of IPRS, it has mainly been companies and their representatives that have demanded the commodification of knowledge and information. This reflects their location in the capitalist mode of production, and the requirements of the systemic 'logic' of their position (Wood, 2003). One of the key functions of IPRs is to construct a scarcity when none necessarily (nor naturally) exists, in order to support price-making and the subjection of knowledge to capitalist economic relations. However, without clear legalised (and legitimated) protections, the mobilisation and utilisation of knowledge and information becomes problematic, and leads to anxiety as regards the continuity of profitable practices. Where the deployment of such resources is developed as a business model (for instance, in the printing/publishing industry or in engineering), the theft and unauthorised duplication of content is always a problem. If information and knowledge are not necessarily rival, then the duplication of an idea (a technological solution) or a particular expression (a piece of writing) is considerably less difficult to do than its initial development. Indeed, the expense of initial effort is a central aspect of the justification for IPRS. However, once an intellectual property has been commodified, one of the key threats to profitability is the unauthorised (and, therefore, unpaid) duplication of content or use of idea. But this threat is no longer amorphous and difficult to substantiate; rather, the threat has been reified into a threat against property. For IPRS, the role of anxiety is therefore clear in the initial reification into property rights itself, and in the forgetting of such socialised construction. Capitalists' anxiety about theft or piracy leads them to seek the establishment of protection, and hence the discourses of 'theft' and 'piracy'

The denial of history

are extensively utilised. The moment in which the 'objects' threatened are made into property is forgotten or obscured; rather, the fact of intellectual property is the normality that is threatened. The music industry decries the stealing of tracks by digital downloaders, although the making of these musical performances qua property is not natural, nor an unavoidable part of their social production. However, the reified copyrighted object is treated as a normal property whose owners rightfully expect to profit from it. Likewise, in the realm of pharmaceutical patents, the patented knowledge is presented as a discrete object that is threatened by compulsory licensing, or by generic (and unlicensed) production. The making of the specific medical knowledge into a property is regarded as natural and justified, while any compromises obtained through (for instance) compulsory licensing (May, 2002) are treated as abnormal and thus limited to special circumstances, and are often the subject of long, hard negotiations. To be absolutely clear: reification is not the technical construction of the legal mechanisms of IPRS, but rather the socialised construction (reification) of these legal structures as natural, and threatened by the unacceptable actions of others. The protection of intellectual property is reified into a structure that reflects claims about natural (and timeless) rights. Regarding the recent history of the governance of IPRS, the most significant element of a natural-rights-based justification of IPRS is its universality (Oddi, 1996: 429-430): if IPRs are natural rights, then they should also be universally recognised and protected. Indeed, recent anxieties about 'piracy' of music and films, the utilisation of 'generic' pharmaceuticals in developing countries, and the seemingly uncontrollable duplication of content across the internet, have been at the centre of the political thrust to establish the globalisation of intellectual property regimes through the WTO. This involves a political project to firmly establish unauthorised use as theft. The anxiety about the 'thieving other'-the foreigner who does not respect the rights that are only natural-underlies the shift to the global governance of IPRS. The very clear anxiety among knowledge 'owners' regarding the continued construction of the scarcity required for their profitable activities has prompted the reification of the structures required to maintain such scarcity. TRIPS is depicted as reflecting a set of natural rights, not the special interests of the industries (the segments of capital) that have

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been prominent in the establishment of a globalised governance structure Gawara & Kwa, 2003: 36-39; Sell, 2003: ch. 5). Within the current economic organisation of global society, commercial operators have certain justified interests in maintaining the means for their profitable activities. Additionally, new information and communications technologies, especially the internet, may have greatly expanded (although by no means universalised) the possibilities outside the modes of commodification favoured or required by corporations. However, the reification of a class-privileging mechanism as a naturalised institution (IPRS) obscures the social costs, and downplays the real-world effects of continuing to protect the interests of one set of social actors. Furthermore, the contested history of IPRS is forgotten. The process of reification, although generalised, is also driven by the abilities of certain segments of capital-those that depend on IPRS most centrally (the content industries, and the software and pharmaceutical sectors)-to capture the mechanisms of regulation. Indeed, the reification of their interests as 'natural' rights also leads to the downgrading and obscuring of others' interests and the 'rights' they might seek to claim. Other rights-the right to life, the right to access socially useful (or vital) information, the right to enjoy economic and technological advances-are secondary (and 'political') rights compared to the 'natural' rights of the IPRowner. Hence, despite considerable social costs as regards access to life-saving medicines, new technologies or educational information, these costs are presented as unfortunate by-products that may be ameliorated but should not detract from the need to protect IPRS. However, the subliminal recognition that these costs might not be accidental, but rather are a central part of the 'problem' of IPRS, prompts a second mode of anxiety (also globalised), which has led to the reification of the very process of reification itself: a collective act of forgetting.

Forgetting reification

Until recently, this 'forgetting' had largely gone unchallenged, leaving political debates around TRIPS moribund: disputes were often limited to technical issues such as periods allowed for implementation, or the interpretation of specific articles of the TRIPS agreement. Reification depoliticised these issues.

The denial of history

However, recently the history of IPRS has been remembered, prompting resistance to the reification of IPRS by recalling their processes of institutionalisation. Until the last few years, legal historical work has been treated as historical and of little contemporary political importance; the history of IPRS was presented as a teleological tale of progress towards the final global settlement of TRIPS. However, as the social costs of instituting a globalised regime of IPRS have become more obvious (and harsher), the origins of this regime have been questioned. Since the process of reification can never be complete, a critical opening has always been available, if seldom utilised; but now the further expansion of owners' rights has prompted a re-examination of global social costs. This re-examination requires an appreciation of the historical processes that have led to the contemporary institution. This historicisation of the debate immediately challenges the forms of reification, and hence the supporters of IPRS have fervently denied the relevance of history. Corporations and their allies have mobilised considerable political resources in order to establish that whatever happened in the past, the protection of IPRS clearly serves global developmental goals. Conversely, those less convinced of the social value of widening the scope of protection for IPRS, from NGOS to developing countries' negotiators, have started to focus on the historical record. This has led to well-founded claims that the rich countries instrumental in the establishment of TRIPS are suggesting that developing countries 'do as we say, not as we did'. It has become a common observation that the us publishing industry thrived in the nineteenth century by publishing the 'unauthorised' work of European authors, only recognising the rights of non-uS authors in 1891. But, perhaps less often noted, us industrialisation proceeded apace with technologies that were patented abroad but freely available (essentially through 'piracy') to entrepreneurs in America, especially in the petro-chemical sector (May & Sell, 2005: ch. 5). Trade interests in IPR-protection have now almost drowned out any development-related concerns around the costs of protecting IPRS. Development concerns have often disappeared behind an atemporal (reified) account of IPRS that suggests that global productivity and efficiency must be maximised through the commodification of knowledge for trade.

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For many developing countries, these issues are secondary to the more pressing need to access information and knowledge that will support their further economic development. In a very real sense, the two sides are talking past one another (Bawa, 1997: 96). The reified character of the institution of intellectual property precludes a clear understanding of the critics' position by those whom the system benefits. The experience of the newly industrialised countries (NICS) of east Asia clearly reveals the tension between trade and development issues. The reliance on weak (or nonexistent) IPR protection in the early stages of development benefited the NICs quite extensively. Surveying a number of studies, Nagesh Kumar concludes that 'the east Asian countries, viz. Japan, Korea and Taiwan have absorbed substantial amount[s] of technologicalleaming under weak IPR protection regime [s] during the early phases [of economic development] . These patent regimes facilitated the absorption of innovation and knowledge generated abroad by their indigenous firms. They have also encouraged minor adaptations and incremental innovations on the foreign inventions by domestic enterprises' (Kumar, 2003: 216). National laws (only recognising national invention or creation) supported the appropriation of foreign knowledge and information, as it did when the us, and before that Britain, were 'developing countries' . However, as local industries themselves started to innovate, a stronger regime of protection was established, but only then. Once their own anxiety about 'theft' and control emerged, company managers began to recognise the 'natural rights' of information and knowledge 'owners'. As Dru Brenner-Beck's extensive study of countries that had utilised the non-recognition of IPRS as a development strategy established, 'former pirate activities strongly contributed to the development of the infrastructure and technical capacity necessary to ensure that the touted advantages of intellectual property protection actually materialise' (Brenner-Beck, 1992: II5). The protection OfIPRS only makes policy sense once a certain level of technological momentum has been achieved through ('pirated') imitation, and certain levels of (economic) anxiety start to manifest themselves. Given the current debates regarding pharmaceutical patents, it is as well also to note that France, Germany, Japan

The denial of history and Switzerland, among others, only extended patent protection into this sector in the 1960s and 1970s, by which time their industries had matured. Ironically, having reached the heights of economic development, the governments of the most developed countries now argue that the protection that they ignored in their years of speedy expansion will actually aid and support the economic development of other countries. These rights are not 'natural', however, but are rather the result of politico-legal developments related to key sectors of (now-) developed countries' economies. The reification of the process of legal institutionalisation serves to substantiate a negotiating position that is ahistorical. But the social bargain of IPRS is not ahistorical; rather, it reflects the extent of nationally generated innovation and technoeconomic development. The bargain on which IPRS are built is historically contingent, not a reflection of natural rights.

Concluding remarks Although the discourse of natural rights remains powerful, recognition of the social costs of the globalised construction of (knowledge) scarcity has risen up the global political agenda. However, the justification of IPRS on the basis of naturalised rights has considerable political tenacity-these rights, at certain levels of protection and for a certain limited scope of commodification, may be broadly acceptable even among groups criticising the overall regime of governance. Thus, reification is an unseen but powerful structure of modern capitalism that shapes the understanding of the world; this understanding is then mobilised to apprehend its social relations and also to criticise them. Global governance has ·become a social good that criticism must not be allowed to fundamentally undermine. Hence, reification presents global governance (encapsulated here in the TRIPS agreement) as progressive and natural, and (re)makes criticism into attempts to ameliorate its marginal effects, or to modify its 'normality' (the 'normality' of the commodification of knowledge and information, in this case). Criticism that questions the historical development of political naturalisation-criticism that unmasks reificationis sidelined or ignored. The recognition of reification as a process that obscures relations of exploitation should perhaps lead us to reject the

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whole notion of intellectual property as merely the manifestation of class advantage and power. By discussing the ownership of knowledge and ideas (even in critical terms), the possibility of IPRS is maintained unless that ownership is forthrightly rejected. On one hand, reformism may be a capitulation to the forces of capital and a rejection of the critical project of Marxism. However, if few of us now believe that the final crisis of capitalism is either imminent or even likely in our lifetimes, we must think about ways in which plausible reforms to the systems and structures of capitalist power can at least ameliorate the most serious problems that they cause in the contemporary world. The key strategy must be to return the discussion of IPRS to the (global) political realm, where a more wide-ranging and historically contextualised debate about policy can be conducted. The processes of reification are not transitory, nor easily disposed of (if disposal is even possible). Thus, when reification is forgotten it remains a continuing barrier to the political requirement to embed the governance of IPRs in its historical and globalised social context. The positing of political alternatives needs to be based on the revealing of the reified structures of governance for what they are: a system for benefiting certain segments of capital, constituted through political bargaining. Establishing the role of reification is a major element in that political project, as is recognising that reification itself is not a process outside the structures of capitalism, but rather is a central element of the reproduction of the system in which the political economy of IPRS is manifest. The critique of reification encourages the historicisation of IPRS and the recognition that this is a political economic history, not a teleological tale of improvement and progress. Revealing reification is a significant element in constructing a new global politics of intellectual property.

Acknowledgement

Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2003 at the University of Sussex and at the University of Birmingham, and in 2004 at the International Studies Association annual conference in Montreal. I thank the participants for their comments and suggestions, especially Andreas Bieler and

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Adam Morton; but, of course, any remaining failings are mine alone.

References Arato, A. (1972) 'Lukacs's theory of reification' in Telos no. II, 25-66. Bawa, R. (1997) 'The North-South debate over the protection of intellectual property' in Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies, no. 6, pp. 77-II9. Berger, P. L. & T. Luckmann (1971) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Penguin). Berman, M. (1985 [1999)) 'George Lukac's cosmic chutzpah' in the Village HJice Literary Supplement Guly) [reprinted in Adventures in Marxism (Verso)]. Bewes, T. (2002) Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso). Brenner-Beck, D. (1992) 'Do as I say, not as I did' in UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal, no. II, pp. 84-II8. Gabel, P. (1980) 'Reification in legal reasoning' in S. Spitzer (ed.) Research in Law and Sociology Volume III GAl Press). Halbert, D. J. (1999) Intellectual Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Ownership Rights (Quorrum Books). Jawara, F. & A. Kwa (2003) Behind the Scenes at the : The Real WOrld of International Trade Negotiations (Zed Books). Kramer, M. H. (1991) Legal Theory, Political Theory and Deconstruction: Against Rhadamanthus (Indiana University Press) . Kumar, N. (2003) 'Intellectual property rights, technology and economic development' in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 3 (18 January) pp. 209-225. Online at [accessed 23 January 2003]. Lukacs, G. (1923 [1971)) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press). Marx, K. (1887 [1974)) Capital.· A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production Volume I (ed. Frederick Engels) (Lawrence and Wishart). ___ (1894 [1959] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume III (ed. Frederick Engels) (Lawrence and Wishart). ___ (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) trans. and foreword by Martin Nicolaus (Penguin BookslNew Left Review). May, C. (2000) A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property

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Rights: The New Enclosures? (Routledge). ___ (2002) 'Unacceptable costs: The consequences of making knowledge property in a global society' in Global Society, vol. 16, no. 2 (April) pp. 123-144. ___ (2004) 'Cosmopolitan legalism meets "thin community": Problems in the global governance of intellectual property' in Government and Opposition, vol. 39, no. 3 (Summer) pp. 393-422. May, C. & S. Sell (2005) Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (Lynne Rienner Publishers). Nance, D. A. (1990) 'Owning ideas' in Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 757-73· Oddi, A. S. (1996) 'TRIPs-natural rights and a "Polite Form of Economic Imperialism'" in VanderbiltJournalofTransnational Law, vol. 29, pp. 415-470. Ollman, B. (1976) Alienation: Marx's Conception ofMan in Capitalist Society (2nd edition) (Cambridge University Press). Petrovic, G. (1991) 'Reification' in T. Bottomore (ed.) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (2nd edition) (Basil Blackwell). Plant, A. (1934) 'The economic theory concerning patents for inventions' in Economica, no. I (February) pp. 30-51. Sell, S. K. (2003) Private Power, Public Law: The Globalisation of Intellectual Property Rights (Cambridge University Press). Waldron, J. (1993) 'From authors to copiers: Individual rights and social values in intellectual property' in Chicago-Kent Law Review, vol. 68, pp. 841-887. Wood, E. M. (2003) Empire of Capital (Verso).

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Neoliberal hegemony, transnational capital and the terms of the EU's eastward expansion Dorothee Bohle Infonned by a neo-Gramscian framework of analysis, this paper investigates the nature of neoliberal hegemony in the EU, and its consequences for the tenns of enlargement. It will argue that both the deepening and enlargement of the EU are promoted by a historical bloc that seeks to establish the hegemony of transnational capital. In western Europe, socialdemocratic political forces, organised labour and the political forces of the peripheral countries have been incorporated into the historical bloc, albeit in a subordinated position. As a result, a precarious hegemonic constellation of 'embedded neoliberalism' has emerged. In contrast, the EU has exported a more 'market-radical' variant of neoliberalism to its new member states. This best serves the interests of transnational capital, and helps to preserve the order of'embedded neoliberalism' within the old EU. Eastern European societies have not been in a position to question the unequal terms of enlargement. This can be explained by their specific legacies, which have led to their incorporation into the transnational historical bloc through passive revolution.

Introduction s of May 200 4, ten new countries have entered the European Union (EU), eight of them from eastern Europe. I Thus, after more than a decade, the period of hesitation, insecurities and drawbacks so characteristic of the relations between the EU and its eastern neighbours drew to a close. However, even following enlargement, the signals

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being given to the new members remain mixed. Most importantly, it has become clear that the EU is not prepared to grant the new members equal social and economic rights in the near future. The transition period with regard to the free movement of labour denies the nationals of the new member states a crucial aspect of EU citizenship; and the financial arrangements leave them with significantly fewer resources per capita than the old members. These concrete terms of enlargement invite a more general assessment of the relationship between the EU and the central and eastern European countries (CEECS). How to explain the unequal treatment of the new members? Is it likely to be transitory, or are we witnessing the emergence of a durable, second-class membership? Why have the new member states accepted the conditions of enlargement? These are the questions that inform this essay. Mainstream approaches to eastward enlargement are not well-equipped to answer these questions. This article seeks to advance a critical understanding of the new European constellation based on neo-Gramscian perspectives of European integration. My main proposition is that the concrete form and problematic outcome of the EU'S eastward expansion can be explained by the composition of a new, transnational historical bloc, which emerged in the EU in the mid-I980s and spread towards the CEECS shortly after. In what follows, I will first briefly introduce the mainstream understanding of the eastern enlargement of the EU. Second, I will present the concepts that form the building blocks of a neo-Gramscian theory of international hegemony; and third, present recent insights into the new, neoliberal path of European integration provided by neo-Gramscian approaches. It will be argued that the relaunch of European integration could develop into a precarious hegemonic constellation. In contrast to the 'embedded neo-liberalism' (van Appeldoorn, 2002) shaping the deepening of the EU, the mode of incorporating eastern Europe, up to now, has resulted in the export of a much more 'market-radical' variant of neoliberalism. The fourth part of the paper will expand the neo-Gramscian analysis to the pattern of the EU'S eastward expansion, and explain the reasons for the somewhat selective nature of the CEECS' integration. The last part of the paper asks why central and eastern European (CEE) actors have been rushing for inclusion despite the unequal terms.

Neoliberal hegemony

Enlarging the European Union eastwards: Mainstream debates Studies of the EU'S eastward enlargement are not wellequipped to address the unequal pattern in which social and economic rights are distributed in a united Europe. The theoretical discussion has mostly focused on the question of whether EU enlargement policies and decisions can better be explained by rationalist or constructivist approaches. The question that has dominated the debate is that of why the EU decided to open enlargement negotiations. Constructivists argue that this decision does not confirm rationalist expectations, since for a number of member states, the costs of enlargement are higher than the benefits; and enlargement seems, in many ways, a less advantageous solution than alternative strategies like association agreements (e.g. Schimmelfennig, 2001). The decision to enlarge, therefore, points to the significance of norms and collective identities that allow the EU to accommodate the preferences of the CEECS (Sedelmeier, 2001; Schimmelfennig, 2001; Sjursen, 2002). Constructivist research on distinct policy areas and the major policy decisions taken in the second half of the 1990S in the context of enlargement has largely confirmed that, despite clear material interests expressed by EU member states or interest groups, norms, identities, or principles have been equally important in explaining the policy outcome, and have generally led to a stronger accommodation of CEEC'S interests than a purely rationalist account would predict (Sedelmeier, 2002). Given that the tendency of this kind of research is to focus on the accommodation OfCEEC'S interests, rather than on their violation, the question of unequal treatment of the new member states has not been at centrestage in the inquiry. Rationalist approaches, on the other hand, argue that both the enlargement decision and the result of the entry negotiations can be explained by national interests and the differences in state power (Moravcsik & Vachudova, 2003). According to these authors, EU members promote the current accessions-just as they did the previous ones-because they perceive them as being in their long-term geopolitical and economic interests. The applicant countries accept the unfavourable conditions of enlargement because of the tremendous advantages of membership. The disproportionate concessions they make in order to become members can be

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explained on the basis of bargaining theory: those countries that gain most through international cooperation have the most intense preference for agreement, and therefore are willing to compromise the most (Moravcsik & Vachudova, 2003: 44). Moravcsik and Vachudova explicitly acknowledge the costs of enlargement for the applicant countries, which stem from the huge task of 'transposing' the acquis communautaire [the body OfEU law], the humiliation of having to go through evaluation procedures, the EU interference and double standards in core policy areas, and the fact that resources are oriented away from social policy and towards economic goals. They argue, however, that these costs will be more than outweighed by the long-term benefits of membership, such as access to major markets and to foreign direct investment, the stabilisation of the new democracies and the strengthening of their administrative capacities. Although rationalist research on EU eastern enlargement is better eqipped than its constructivist counterpart to address the divergence of socio-economic rights in the united Europe, it relies on a number of problematic assumptions and concepts. My first major objection relates to the basic assumption that the expected costs and benefits determine the applicant's and member state's enlargement preferences. Underlying this assumption is the understanding that costs and benefits, as well as national interests, can be determined in a quasi-scientific, objective manner. It is, however, by no means self-evident as to why and by whom certain consequences of enlargement are perceived as costs or benefits. Perceptions of costs and benefits are linked to the position of actors in the social, economic and political fields, and a common understanding of 'national interests' at the state level is the outcome of political struggles and choices. Thus, rather than taking for granted that 'The applicants are forced into concessions precisely because the basic benefit offered to them-membership-is of such great value' (Moravcsik & Vachudova, 2003: 49), critical inquiry would have to address the question of how this preference for membership came about in the first place. A second problem with this approach is that it considers states as the most relevant actors in international relations, and thus neglects the role of trans- and supranational actors in shaping the enlargement process. Recent research on European integration and enlargement has shown, however, that these actors play an important role (van Apeldoorn, 2002;

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Sedelmeier & Wallace, 2000). Thirdly, this approach concentrates uniquely on the form of international relations, and ignores the social content or purpose of enlargement (van Apeldoorn, 2002: 11-13). This allows the authors to stress the similarities between the current enlargement negotiations and the earlier ones: both have been characterised by asymmetrical interdependence, and consequently by concessions on the part of the applicant countries. Important differences-linked to changes in the social purpose of European integration-between earlier and the current round of enlargement are, however, ignored. All in all, mainstream analyses of eastward enlargement tend to either neglect the consequences of enlargement for the new member states, or to provide an apologetic, panglossian account according to which everybody will be better off in the end-with the best off being those who initially lost the most. This article seeks to advance an alternative understanding of eastern enlargement by addressing the questions of how the EU'S and CEEC'S preferences came about and what role transnational actors have played in this; and by linking the unequal pattern of the new Europe to a shift in the social purpose of European integration. Ultimately, the aim is to advance a critical understanding, based on a neo-Gramscian framework of analysis, of the new European constellation.

Neo-Gramscian analysis of international hegemony A critical account of the new European constellation that draws on the work of the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971), and Robert Cox's (1981, 1983) interpretation of that work, takes as its main problematique the changing nature of global hegemony. In contrast with conventional analysis of hegemony, which equals it with dominance based on military and economic capabilities, neoGramscian analysis puts forward a broader concept. According to Cox, International hegemony is not merely an order among states. It is an order within a world economy with a dominant mode of production which penetrates into all countries and links into other subordinate modes of productions. It is also a complex of international social relationships which connect the social classes of the

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different countries. World hegemony is describable as a social structure, an economic structure, and a political structure. And it cannot be simply one of the things but must be all three. World hegemony, furthermore, is expressed in universal norms, institutions and mechanisms which lay down general rules of behaviour for states and for those forces of civil society that act across national boundaries-rules which support the dominant mode of production. (Cox, 1983: 172) International hegemony thus has to be analysed on several interlinked levels. The first, fundamental level is that of the material sphere of production. 'Production' is understood in an encompassing sense, including the production of physical goods as well as of knowledge and social relations (Cox, 1989: 39). Different modes of production engender various forms of social relations by giving rise to different constellations of social forces. The latter are of crucial importance for the neo-Gramscian analysis of hegemony, since they constitute the power base within and across states. States form an institutionalised arena of class struggles and compromises (Cox, 1987: 19). Crucial for the relative stability of a certain configuration of class rule that underlies state power is the creation of a 'historical bloc'. This refers to the way in which a leading class builds 'organic' alliances with subordinated classes within a specific national context. Class rule exercised through a historical bloc will not appear as particularistic. Its institutions and ideologies will extend to subordinate groups without, however, undermining the vital interests of the hegemonic class (Cox, 1983: 169). Although the concept is linked to specific national contexts, it can be internationalised: an international historical bloc refers to the relatively stable alliances of ruling classes that support the existing international order (Jacobitz, 1991: II). Also crucial for international hegemony are values, norms and ideas that are shared by ruling and subordinated classes. Similar to constructivist approaches, neo-Gramscian analysis stresses the role of ideas in shaping institutions and actions. In a Gramscian understanding, ideas and material conditions are, however, always bound together. In order for ideas to become meaningful, they must be articulated within a hegemonic project, i.e. a project that stems from the economic sphere, but which is broad enough to incorporate diverse and even partly ~ntagonistic ideas. In the formulation of

Neoliberal hegemony

such hegemonic projects, intellectuals linked to the ruling classes playa major role (Cox, 1983: 168). Values, norms and ideas are crucial for integrating subordinated social classes into hegemonic projects. In addition, values, norms and ideas enable the interests of transnational hegemonic forces to penetrate those societies in which a dominant class has not been able to establish hegemony in the encompassing Gramscian sense. In these societies, new hegemonic projects spread in the form of 'passive revolution', i.e. a revolution where The impetus to change does not arise out of a 'vast local economic development ... but is instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery'. The group which is the bearer of the new ideas, in such circumstances, is not an indigenous social group which is actively engaged in building a new economic base with a new structure of social relations. It is an intellectual stratum which picks up ideas originating from a prior foreign economic and social revolution. (Cox ,1983: 170; see also Gramsci,' 1971: 116) The ultimate aim of a neo-Gramscian analysis of international hegemony is to unearth the contradictions of existing power relations, and to look for ways of overcoming them. As a critical theory, it does not seek to provide an alternative description of the existing hegemonic order but, rather, to ask how this order came about, whose interests are served by it and what its major contradictions are, and thus to contribute to the development of counter-hegemonial projects (Cox, 1981: 129-30). Cox developed his analytical framework in order to contribute to a critical understanding of the processes of international changes related to the erosion of the postSecond World War order and the emergence of globalisation. More recently, a number of authors have applied and further developed Cox's approach in order to analyse European integration in the context of global structural changes (van Apeldoorn, 2002; Bieler, 2000; Bieler & Morton, 2001; Bie1ing & Steinhilber, 2000b; Cafruny & Ryner, 2003; Gill, 1992; Rottger, 1997). Despite slightly diverse theoretical perspectives on European integration, these approaches have demonstrated that a qualitatively new, transnational neoliberal constellation has emerged over the last twenty

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years. In the following section, I will summarise the findings of neo-Gramscian analysis of European integration.

The emergence of neoliberal hegemony in the EU

As argued above, international hegemony has to be analysed on several interlinked levels: that of the dominant mode of production, that of social relations, and that of politicoideological relations. Major transformations at all three levels have, over the last decades, shifted hegemony in the EU towards a specific neoliberal form. Basic characteristics of neoliberal hegemony The mode of production has been characterised by the dissolution of Fordism. In its place, a new mode is emerging, centred on knowledge-based information and communication technologies. The emergence of the new mode of production is largely dependent on us capital, technologies and companies, and has not penetrated Europe as deeply as it has the us. European production is still characterised by traditional industrial sectors to a much larger extent than is us production (Beck et al., 2002: 25-75; Liithje et al., 2002: 25-102). European integration since the mid-1980s has aimed at reducing its dependence and backwardness, and at restoring Europe's global competitiveness. 'Negative integration-the elimination of national constraints on trade and competition-the transnationalisation of production, and the cross-border centralisation and concentration of economic power have led to an increasingly transnationally integrated European economic space (Ziltener, 2004: 962-4). At the level of social relations, this process has engendered a truly transnational historical bloc, which seeks to create the conditions for the hegemony of transnational capital.' A major forum of the bloc's leading class is the European Round Table ofIndustrialists (ERT) (van Apeldoorn, 2002: 183-190). The ERT was founded in 1983, on the initiative of Pehr Gyllenhammar, the chief executive ofVolvo, with the support of Etienne Davignon, then a European Commissioner. Today, the ERT consists of forty-five CEOS and chairmen from Europe's largest and most transnational corporations. Through intense lobbying activity at national and supranationalleve!s, regular official meetings with the highest representatives of the EU,

Neoliberal hegemony

and strategic reports on the burning issues of European integration, the ERT has developed privileged influence on European policy-:-making (van Apeldoorn, 2002; Holman & van der Pijl, 2003). Whereas nationally based, export-oriented capital has frequently allied itself with transnational capital, the influence of domestic-oriented and import-competing capital in the new European constellation has largely diminished. Forces of labour have also been pushed onto the defensive. Trade unions are integrated in a subordinate position in the neoliberal bloc. Through the institutions of 'competitive corporatism' (Rhodes, 1998), trade unions participate in neoliberal restructuring by accepting wage restraint, reform of the welfare states and the increasing flexibilisation of labour markets (Bieling, 2001: 107-8). Bieler (2005) argues that even if labour as a whole is in a defensive situation compared to that of the post-war constellation, it cannot be conceptualised as a homogenous force. Rather, labour in export-oriented and transnational sectors is more likely to develop supranational activities and to support some of the policy initiatives at the European level. In contrast, labour in sheltered sectors is more likely to take a defensive stance towards neoliberalism and European integration. The shift in the mode of production and the emergence of a new, transnational historical bloc has led to the institutionalisation of a new form of relations between European and national institutions. Since the 1980s, the European mode of integration has aimed at enhancing competitiveness at all levels of European societies. Partly through directly taking over and 'Europeanising' certain state functions (e.g. monetary policy), and partly through significantly reshaping the framework in which nation states operate, the EU has developed into an interface that enhances regime competition between different national systems of governance. Most of the burden of the adaptation process to this new competitive environment rests upon the nation state and national institutions (Ziltener, 2000: 88-96). States have transformed from Keynesian welfare states into 'national competition states' (Hirsch, 1995; see also Jessop, 2002), whose main function is to mobilise society in the aim of competitiveness. At the level of economic ideas, a major shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism has taken place. Neoliberalism has

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to be understood as both an economic and a political programme. As an economic programme, it aims at reducing state intervention in the economy and 'freeing market forces'. As a political programme, neoliberalism is most clearly defined by its opposition to state socialism and to the Keynesian welfare state (von Hayek, 1990, 1991). In terms of its 'positive' political programme, neoliberalism may be combined either with authoritarian, right-wing political forces or with centrist ones, be they conservative, liberal or new social-democratic. Think tanks and networks of experts actively popularised the main ideas legitimising neoliberalism (Plehwe & Walpen, 1999; Cockett, 1995).

Political projects of European integration

The above elements constitute, in a nutshell, the basic traits of the new, neoliberal European constellation. It is a matter of debate as to whether neoliberalism has become hegemonic. Gill (1995: 400, 402, 412), for instance, argues that the transnational bloc has a position of supremacy rather than of hegemony. While it cannot organise consent, it nevertheless rules over a fragmented opposition. Bieling and Steinhilber (2000a, 2002) opt for a more nuanced approach to the question of neoliberal hegemony in the EU. Rather than offering a 'grand narrative', they prefer to focus on concrete political projects of European integration. This perspective stresses the different phases, concrete steps and partly contradictory strategies of the neoliberal restructuring of the EU. Bieling and Steinhilber are particularly interested in the interplay of material interests and discursive interactions in the different projects. Only if these two dimensions reinforce each other can the project be considered as hegemonic. These authors identify three particular projects that have resulted in neoliberal hegemony in western Europe: the European monetary system (EMS), the internal market, and economic and monetary union (EMU).3 The EMS proved to be the starting signal for neoliberal restructuring, as it forced the member states to impose budgetary discipline and restrictive monetary policy (Bieling & Steinhilber, 2000a: II2). The project was promoted in an extremely technocratic manner, which allowed the public, by and large, to ignore it.

Neoliberal hegemony

This changed, however, with the second project of neoliberal restructuring-the internal market. This project emerged against a background of economic stagnation and the perceived loss of European competitiveness vis-a.-vis the US and Japan. A transnational coalition of actors, forged under the leadership of the European Commission and transnational capital, supported the project (Sandholtz & Zysman, 1989: 114-8). Despite its economic character, it became a broadly popularised symbol of the relaunch of European integration. This was due, on the one hand, to a publicity campaign about the advantages of the internal market, which sought to legitimise the project through the expected economic success. On the other hand, Jacques Delors, the then-president of the European Commission, linked the internal market with a far-reaching vision of integration progress in the monetary, technological and social fields. This vision spoke to a number of social forces, including more defensive, internal-market-oriented business groups; and trade unions, which became actively engaged in the construction of 'social Europe' (Ross, 1995: 43-45, 1503; van Apeldoorn, 2002: 115-58, 169-84). EMU, the third central project, initially still profited from the 'Europhoria' triggered by the internal market. A number of actors considered the core functions of EMUstrengthening the EU in the global currency competition, reducing transaction costs, and strengthening the culture of stability-as a logical consequence of previous integration steps. EMU received additional legitimacy because it promised to tie the united Germany into European structures and to break the dictate of the Bundesbank (Bieling & Steinhilber, 2000a: 115). The consensus over EMU did not hold, however. As argued by Gill (1998), EMU displays-much more than does the internal market-the disciplinary character of European neoliberalism. The convergence criteria of Maastricht and the stability and growth pact 'depoliticise' central policy fields, leaving little room for manoeuvre for generous wages and social policies. At the same time, the reinforced stability culture offers no solution to Europe's burning problems of high unemployment and slow growth. As a result, European integration has become increasingly contested. It has triggered waves of social protest, especially in France but also in other European countries. At a panEuropean level, resistance is being articulated at the European Social Forums, where intellectuals, trade unions

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and new social movements interact (Bieling & Steinhilber, 2000a: 122-8). Whether these movements and coalitions are giving rise to counter-hegemonic projects is still in question. For the time being at least, Bieling and Steinhilber do not see major challenges to neoliberal hegemony in Europe. They argue that, despite continuous and even growing socio-economic problems and sporadic political protest, European integration is consolidating along neoliberallines (Bieling & Steinhilber, 2000a: 120). Through the 1990s, the ruling classes were flexible enough, moreover, to incorporate the demands of other social forces into their projects. This is reflected in a number of policies and initiatives-in the upgrading of structural and social funds, in elements of social regulation on the European level, and in the European employment policy. Thus we may speak of a precarious hegemony of embedded neoliberalism that has emerged in the EU. According to van Apeldoorn (2002), who coined the term, this 'embeddedness' addresses the concerns of European labour and social democracy, but 'this incorporation is done in such a way that these concerns are, in the end, subordinated to the overriding objective of neoliberal competitiveness' (ibid: 181). It is against this background that eastward enlargement has to be analysed.

The political project of eastward enlargement The neoliberal nature of the enlargement project After EMU, the EU did not delve into a new deepening project during the 1990s. Rather, it was the issue of enlargement that became the engine for further development (Bieler, 2002: 575). The first enlargement, which brought in Sweden, Finland and Austria, has not constituted a major source of conflict. Eastward enlargement is different. It has been much more contested because of the large number of countries, their specific legacies, and their comparatively poor and backward economies. This is reflected in EU policy towards its eastern neighbours. Although EU actors have repeatedly stressed their solidarity with eastern Europe and their commitment towards enlargement, the concrete terms evolved only gradually and hesitantly over the 1990s. The decision for enlargement was only taken in 1993. Even after this, the EU was very reluctant to announce an accession date, and

Neoliberal hegemony

postponed crucial agricultural, structural and institutional reforms that were initially considered central to enlargement. 4 Despite the fact that the commitment to, and the framework for, enlargement evolved only gradually from the early 1990S onwards, relations with the eastern countries have, however, been in line with the neoliberal integration projects discussed above. This becomes evident if the policy requirements for the candidate countries are considered. The EU clearly uses its influence in the region in order to export the core of its deregulatory programme. Ever since the Europe Agreements S and the Single Market White Paper (1995), the main thrust ofEu policy was to secure the liberalisation and deregulation of CEEC'S political economies. Already, in this early phase of accession, the EU could establish a far-reaching influence on the emerging 'models' of capitalism, and especially on the competition and sectoral policies and industrial standards. With the 'accession partnerships' that were concluded with the candidate countries from 1997 onwards, EU requirements became central engines for domestic reforms. The 'accession partnerships' were very all-encompassing, affecting, amongst other things, macroeconomic, budgetary and monetary policies, and administrative, regional, industrial and welfare reforms (Grabbe, 1998: 12-8). Furthermore, in contrast with the southern enlargement, where the new member states were required to 'liberalize domestic markets at the moment of entering the EU, in many cases with temporary exemptions ... [t]he associated countries are being required to open their markets before membership, without any linkage between liberalization and membership' (Inotai, 1999: 7). At the same time, the EU has been very reluctant to extend the policy areas that would make CEEC'S transition and adaptation easier-like substantial financial aid, free movement of labour, or liberalisation of agricultural trade. The earliest example of this attitude is the selective protectionism incorporated in the trade agreements in the Europe Agreements, where the EU conceived of a battery of protectionist instruments targeting exactly those sectors in which CEE had a competitive advantage: steel, textile, apparel, chemicals and agricultural products (Gowan, 1995: 25-8). Similarly, in the 'pre-accession strategy', which 'is primarily concerned with liberalisation of external economic relations and creating the conditions for free movement of industrial goods, services and, to some extent capital' (Grabbe, 1998:

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II), labour and also agricultural policy were excluded from liberalisation. Finally, in terms of financial aid, the EU has supported its own members much more strongly than it has its poor eastern neighbours. For a long time, the assumption was widely held that these asymmetries would disappear with full membership. However, the negotiation agreements reached in Copenhagen in December 2002 indicate that, at least in the near future, the new members will be relegated to a second-class membership. Most old member states have restricted the rights of the east European workers to move freely within the EU for up to seven years. The free movement of persons implies not only an economic dimension but also constitutes an essential part of EU citizenship rights, which are thus withheld from the nationals of the new member states (Maas, 2002). In financial terms, the transfers per capita for the eastern European newcomers will be significantly lower than those for the old member states, despite (or because of) the fact that these countries are comparatively poor and backward (Mayhew, 2003: 16-30; Debbaut, 2003). The struggle over the new EU budget, which started in July 2005, reveals once more that the old member state~ are not ready to grant the east European newcomers equal financial support. All in all, through a mixture of power and conditionality and the promise of 'membership perspectives', the EU managed, during the 1990s, to push the CEECS towards adopting a specific, neoliberal reform model. In its consequences, this model is more radical than the western European one. Not only are the regulatory reforms of the internal market at its centre, but additional reform requirements have been presented that are not part of the acquis. At the same time, the EU has been very reluctant to ex~end towards CEECS all the policy areas that would make their transition easier, and has severely limited its financial transfers to those countries. These requirements have been presented as beiIig self-evident, and there is little debate within the EU (or CEE for that matter) as to whether they are appropriate for economically backward countries with huge restructuring problems. How can this result, which prescribes a more marketradical variant of neoliberalism to the CEECS, be explained? My main argument is that it is the composition of the new

Neoliberal hegemony

transnational historical bloc that can explain both the expansion of the EU to the east, and its selective features.

Transnational capital and the project of enlargement At first glance, transnational capital's preferences seem to confirm the constructivist argument that the decision to offer the membership perspective that was taken in 1993 cannot easily be traced to the material interests of central EU actors. The prospect of membership, once offered, had to be sustained and eventually realised, however. A major shortcoming of constructivist analysis is that it does not take into account the way the material interests of central EU actors-and thus their interests in enlargement-changed during the 1990s. Taking the position of the ERT (European Round Table of Industrialists) as an indicator for the politics of transnational capital within the EU, it is true that it stated as early as 1991 that the EU should take 'immediate action' in response to the 'new challenge' and 'the window of opportunity' offered by 'the astonishing developments in Eastern Europe' (ERT, cited in Holman, 2001: 174). It took several years, however, for the ERT to concretise its position on enlargement. 6 Since 1997, it has actively lobbied for the speeding-up of enlargement. In a message to the heads of the states of the EU in 1997, it invited the EU to reform its institutional structure in order to facilitate enlargement, and urged it to start closer cooperation with the applicant countries. In 1999, the ERT published its first report dealing exclusively with enlargement. It stressed that 'enlargement offers a golden opportunity to improve the competitiveness and prosperity of the whole European economy (existing EU members and new candidates alike)' (ERT, 1999: 5). This report also reveals the significant degree to which individual members of the ERT have been engaged in CEE. In its most recent report, the ERT stresses once more that 'of the crucial issues that have dominated the ERT'S agenda since its formation in 1983, eastwards enlargement is on a par with the creation of the single market in the 1980s, and the single currency in the 1990s' (ERT, 2001: 4). The growing interest of transnational corporations in enlargement can be explained by their shifting patterns of involvement in CEE. Initially, transnational corporations organised sub-contracting relations with eastern European

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firms rather than investing directly. Moreover, they engaged mostly in sectors that allowed for an easy exit option (apparel, furniture, textiles) (Bohle, 2002: 165-176). This type offoreign-Ied activity does not need a stable institutional framework-the provisions offered in the association agreements were sufficient. However, since the mid-1990s, direct investment in more heavy industries has taken off,? and foreign investors exert increasing control over strategic sectors of the CEE economies. In most accession countries, the leading export sectors are operated almost exclusively by foreign firms. Moreover, strategic services like finance and telecommunications are predominantly in foreign hands. Transnational corporations have increasingly used eastern European production facilities and their comparatively cheap and skilled labour as an opportunity to reorganise their production chains, and thus increase their competitiveness in the European and global markets (Faust et aI., 2004). As a consequence, a new pan-European division of labour is emerging in which the east specialises in the lower end of transnational production chains (Bohle & Greskovits, 2006). With this involvement, questions of politico-institutional stability and the regulatory alignment of CEECS hav,? become more salient. Transnational capital has come to see enlargement as a guarantee for its investment projects, and expects a significant reinforcement of the business opportunities after accession (ERT, 2001: 10). In addition, neoliberal restructuring within the EU has led to a change in the relation of forces by changing the dominant orientation of import-sensitive industries. The steel industry is an example. For a long time, steel was one of the EU'S most import-sensitive and protectionist sectors. Neoliberal restructuring however, which started in the 1980s, changed the politics of the industry. The western European steel industry, as a whole, has not turned into an active supporter of trade liberalisation with the east, or of enlargement; and it took until 1996 to liberalise the steel trade between east and west (Sedelmeier, 2002: 637-639; Jacobson, 1997: 7). The process of neoliberal restructuring, however, can explain the decreasing opposition to, and even partial support of, enlargement among the western European steel producers. Privatisation, a significant economic concentration process, a major reduction in employment levels and growing specialisation in high-tech steel products led to the emergence of a few powerful and highly competitive

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actors. For these actors, eastern European steel production, typically specialising in basic steel, does not constitute serious competition. Rather, they profit from the CEEC'S increasing demand for high-quality steel, and from relocation possibilities (Schabbel & Wolter, 2004: 23-24). These actors actually came to support the neoliberal policy paradigm (Schabbel & Wolter, 2004: 22-24; Dudley & Richardson, 1999: 236-44).8 Thus, all in all, while we cannot attribute a causal relationship to transnational capital's preferences and the initial decision to offer membership perspectives to CEECS, the fact that the Eu-despite many conflicts-stayed on course after that decision reflects the priorities of transnational capital. At the same time, transnational capital has not lobbied equally strongly for the extension of the more inclusionist features of the EU system. For those forces of capital that are actively engaged in CEE, exploring the differences in terms of wages, fiscal, social and environmental standards is a significant incentive for investment. Other producers that rely on trade relations with the east, like the steel industry, are more concerned with ensuring fair competition in a united Europe, and thus with a harmonisation of basic standards (EUROFER, no year given). While these different interests may constitute a source of conflict, both factions of the transnational bloc are, however, united in their lack of support for a more solidaristic expansion of the EU.

The lack of support for extending embedded neoliberalism eastwards

If transnational capital is not lobbying for the extension of the more inclusionist features of the EU polity, what about other EU actors? The weaker actors-the elites of the peripheral EU states, the social-democratic forces and trade unions-have not offered the strongest support for enlargement. Thus, the southern EU states have repeatedly stressed that they are not ready to foot the bill for enlargement. Tradeunion support has been at best lukewarm, and at both the EU and the national level, labour has lobbied strongly against the free movement of people-a position that has been embraced by several social-democratic governments, and which has become official EU policy (Bohle & Husz, 2005).

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Labour's reaction to enlargement demonstrates the difficulties of transnational solidarity under the competitive environment of neoliberalism. Enlargement is seen as threatening to undermine the compromise of embedded neoliberalism in western Europe, and to weaken labour's bargaining power. Against this threat, labour tries to defend its achieved rights. This position sometimes even turns labour into a close ally of nationalistic and xenophobic forces. The Austrian trade-union confederation 6GB, for instance, proposed an income criterion as a condition of free labour migration: CEE average wages were to reach 80 per cent of the Austrian average before labour migration should be considered. Even if the 6GB has meanwhile abandoned this extremist proposal, Jorg Haider later picked it up (Bohle & Husz, 2005:103). Thus, whereas the aim of integrating eastern Europe is shared by a limited but rather powerful number of actors, who are mainly interested in exploring CEE'S economic potential, the idea of an equal inclusion of the CEECS and of genuine (financial) solidarity enjoys virtually no support. On the contrary, labour and political forces from the peripheral EU countries, unable to prevent the neoliberal enlargement, used their power in a defensive way by protecting their own interests against the newcomers. What are the consequences for CEECS, and why have these countries accepted the unfavourable terms of enlargement?

CEECS'

incorporation in the transnational historical

bloc The CEECS' 'return to Europe' has become a much more ambiguous experience than had been expected. Not only do these countries face the prospect of second-class membership-even if it is only transitory-but in addition, integration has so far not produced the desired economic gains. Rather, the CEECS have developed the characteristics of a semi-periphery: dualistic economic structures, high unemployment and precarious growth perspectives. 9 Nevertheless, until very recently, no CEEC government has challenged the strategic goal of EU membership or the requirements it had to meet. On the contrary, E·U membership has enjoyed broad support among policy-makers, major

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social forces and the wider public. In order to understand the uncontested nature of the CEECS return to Europe, the form of their incorporation in the transnational historical bloc through passive revolution has to be analysed. (0

J?assive revolution in

CEE

As argued above, passive revolution denotes a situation of radical change pushed by elites whose ideas do not stem from the domestic context, but rather reflect international developments. Gramsci argues further that 'The concept of "passive revolution" must be rigorously derived from the two fundamental principles of political science: I) that no social formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed in it still find room for further forward movement; 2) that a society does not set itself tasks for whose solution the necessary conditions have not already been incubated' (Gramsci, 1971: 106). Gramsci's concept of passive revolution is indeed helpful for analysing eastern European transformations. The breakdown of state socialism was of crucial importance for making CEE societies particularly receptive to western ideas and projects. After the crisis of Fordism in the West and the end of import-substituting industrialisation in the South, eastern state socialism was the last attempt to organise and sustain a development project within the framework of the nation state, which ultimately failed. Whereas the West underwent restructuring on a large scale and finally replaced the old Fordist model of development with a new, transnationally organised neoliberal one, eastern Europe stagnated over the 1980s, and experienced the total breakdown of its system. It is partly due to this uneven timing of crisis and restructuring that western forces could extend their ideas, rules, norms and institutions, and thus their interests, to the CEECS. Economic liberalism as an ideology became very attractive for these societies because it constituted the most radical alternative to the existing socialist system (Szacki, 1995). However, neoliberalism could neither be based on established societal groups, nor based around a specific national hegemonic project. The revolutions in eastern Europe, as often stated, were bourgeois revolutions without a bourgeoisie. Instead of powerful economic groups, it was intellectuals and elites within the state who became respons-

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ible for the neoliberal reforms (Eyal et al., 1998; Bohle, 2002; Shields, 2003). The weak societal embeddedness of the reform elites and the equally weak transformation states are two of the reasons why eastern European reformers were eager to secure external assistance early on. Initially, the IMF and the World Bank were of crucial importance (Greskovits, 1998: 19-68). EU membership, which emerged only later as an option, serves a~ a further external anchoring of neoliberal reforms in the region. Moreover, the EU represents exactly what the eastern European societies have not reached over the last decades: economic wealth, stable democracies, and a form of international integration that seems to rely on the equal participation of all member states. The 'return to Europe', therefore, not only helped the reform elites to strengthen their project, but it was at the same time the ideology for the mobilisation of the eastern societies, which helped in enduring the hardship of transformation (Greskovits & Bohle, 2001: 16-17).

Societal consequences of the neoliberal refonns The passive revolution was the condition for the gradual incorporation of CEE actors into the transnational historical bloc. Transnational class formation in CEE started initially with the reform elites (Bohle, 2002: 83-124; Shields, 2003: 228-37)· Later, as a result of the neoliberal reforms and the rapprochement with the EU, domestic social relations were restructured and have created a new social base for the Europeanisation project. One important result of the reform process in the CEECS is-at least in the case of the most 'advanced' countries-a very high degree of foreign penetration in important segments of the economy, which compensates for the lack of a domestic bourgeoisie. Otto Holman argues that It is foreign capital-and the quasi-state structures and cadres at the supranational level organically related to it-which plays an essential role in the process of transnational class formation in CEE. The ownership and control of economically-relevant assets, and the income generating nature of it, are increasingly transnational phenomena, while the growing inequality in the

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distribution of these assets is defended-that is, presented as the 'general interest'-by the 'new power elites'. (Holman 2001: 177) The importance of foreign investors in the region does not manifest itself only in their control and ownership of economic assets, but also in their political influence on government positions. Foreign investors have been involved directly, on a bilateral basis and via their lobby organisations, in the governments' reforms of social and labour laws, tax and competition policies, and the preparations for EU accession. They have successfully watered down Slovakian labour protection, introduced a competitive race to the bottom in the CEEC'S tax regimes, and lobbied for generous tax exemption schemes in these countries (AmCham Slovakia, 2002, 2004; Bohle & Husz, 200 5: 87-96). Simultaneously, neoliberal restructuring and the return to Europe have 'contributed to the deterioration of the collective action capacities of its losers and opponentsmainly labor, labor unions, leftist parties' (Greskovits, 1997= 206). Labour weakened tremendously during the 1990s. Unionisation levels have fallen dramatically, and the mobilisation capacities both at the national and the workplace level have been seriously undermined. The newly emerging private sector is almost union-free (Crowley, 2004; Bohle & Greskovits, 2004). Ideologically, labour has not managed to define a counter-position to the dominant project of Europeanisation and neoliberal restructuring. According to David Ost, as a legacy of both communism and anti-communism, 'East European workers and unionists eschew class identities. They do not think of themselves as a separate class requiring separate organisations to defend their interests. Rather, they embrace the neoliberal project in the hope that "the market" will ultimately serve their interests as well' (Ost, 2000: 520). Thus, at least for the time being, the only forces in the east that offer resistance to the current path of western integration are nationalist and xenophobic forces. In the Polish elections of September 2001, for the first time two outspoken nationalist, xenophobic and anti-Eu-parties, Samoobrona ('self defence') and the League of Polish Families entered parliament (Szczerbiak, 2002). In the parliamentary elections of September 2005, an outspoken

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Eurosceptic party, Law and Justice, came out as the strongest party, and Samoobrona slightly improved its result from 2001. The league of Polish Families retained its position. Their support comes to a large degree from among the losers in the transformation in agriculture, traditional heavy industry and, partly, the public sector. Poland is not the only country in which nationalism and xenophobia represent a challenge to the chosen path of Europeanisation. The strength of these discourses reflects the inability of the dominant forces to offer solutions to burning social problems: high unemployment, societal polarisation and continuous restructuring requirements that threaten to widen the gap within the societies further.

Conclusions This contribution was aimed at investigating the nature of neoliberal hegemony in western Europe, and its consequences for CEE'S return to Europe. Informed by a neoGramscian framework of analysis, I have argued that the political projects that have advanced European integration and enlargement are promoted by a historical bloc that seeks to establish the hegemony of transnational capital. In western Europe, social-democratic political forces, organised labour and political forces of the peripheral countries have been incorporated into the historical bloc, albeit in a subordinated position. As a result, a precarious hegemonic constellation of 'embedded neoliberalism' has emerged. In contrast, the EU has exported a more market-radical variant of neoliberalism to its new member states. This is the result of struggles and compromises within the historical bloc: exporting the core of the EU'S deregulatory programme serves the interests of transnational capital, whereas not extending the redistributive acquis and blocking labour mobility protects the existing bloc's weaker forces. Eastern European societies have not been in a position to question the unequal terms of enlargement. This can be explained by their specific legacies, which resulted in their incorporation into the transnational historical bloc through passive revolution. In contrast to others'-western, northern and southern European countries-their 'return to Europe' could not be based on established societal groups and around a specific hegemonic project at the national level. Lacking a

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domestic bourgeoisie, weakly embedded intellectuals and state elites became responsible for the rapprochement with the EU, the latter serving as the external anchor for neoliberal reforms. The lack of a domestic bourgeoisie also explains the very high degree of transnational penetration of eEE's propertied classes. If my analysis is correct, then the ties that most strongly unite eastern and western Europe are heavily dependent on the agenda of transnational capital. These ties are unlikely to be strong enough to sustain a stable and hegemonic constellation. The EMU project has already reduced the consensual nature of neoliberal hegemony. It has triggered social protest, and relies more on discipline than did earlier integration projects. Eastern enlargement opens a new line of conflict in Europe. It allows transnational capital to increase its room for manoeuvre. At the same time, the weaker forces of the western historical bloc are pitted against the east European newcomers. This constellation is unlikely to give rise to an encompassing counter-hegemonic project. Rather, it resembles a situation of neoliberal supremacy, in which the tran~national bloc cannot organise consent but, nevertheless, rules over a fragmented opposition.

Acknowledgement An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 'Enlargement and European governance' workshop at the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Session Workshops, Turin, 22-27 March 2002. I am grateful to the panel chairs and participants in the workshop for their comments. Moreover, I am thankful for extensive comments from Ondrej Cisar, Gergana Dimitrova, Bela Greskovits, Dora Husz, Nicole Lindstrom, Dora Piroska, Stuart Shields, and the referees of this journal.

Notes I. 2.

These are the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The emergence of a transnational historical bloc was first conceptualised by Stephen Gill (1990: 89-100).

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3.

More recently, Bieling and Steinhilber have identified the creation of an integrated financial market as a new political project (Bieling & Steinhilber, 2002). 4. For an overview of enlargement policy, see Sedelmeier and Wallace (2000). 5. The Europe Agreements were special association agreements with the CEECS. The first Europe Agreements were concluded with Poland and Hungary in 1991. Other CEECS followed over the course of the 1990s. 6. Keith Richardson, the general secretary of the ERT from 198 8- 1999, acknowledged in retrospect that this delay was a mistake: 'EU enlargement was also a weak point. Reshaping Europe marshalled powerful arguments in favour of rapid integration leading to full membership just as soon as the candidate countries were ready. But the topic was not followed up and there was no specific ERT paper on enlargement until 1999 ... Perhaps we all underestimated how slowly the negotiations would move. Looking back it seems clear that the ERT could and should have done more to push and prod' (Richardson, 2000: 27). 7. The stock of inward foreign direct investment as a percentage of GOP for the eight new EU members was 11.6 per cent in 1995 and 40 per cent in 2001, compared with 10.3 per cent and 22.5 per cent respectively for the world (UNCTAD, 2003: 61). 8. Gerhard Cromme from Thyssen Krupp, for instance, is the current chairman of the ERT. 9. In 2003, four of the CEECS had not yet or just barely reached the level of their GOP of 1989. Several countries repeatedly experienced economic recessions over the 1990S (EBRO, 2004: 38), and real wages in 2000 were lower than in 1989 in seven out of eight countries. Unemployment has increased significantly over the past decade (Bohle & Greskovits, 2006: 27)· 10. The following draws on my empirical investigation of Poland's 'Europeanisation' and its comparisons with the Hungarian development path (Bohle, 2002; Bohle & Neunhoffer, 2005; Greskovits & Bohle, 2001). Shields (2003, 2004) develops very similar arguments.

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The ethnic factor in state-labour relations

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations: The case of Malaysia Chris Rowley and Mhinder Bhopal

Given the ethnic dimension of much conflict, it is time to acknowledge the ethnic factor in the field of employment, and the manner in which material conflicts can be articulated in identity terms. Identifications that transcend class, for example, in emphasising the commonality of ethnic identity, can serve not only to obscure intra-group class divisions under the veil of cultural closure, but also to foreclose the potential for inter-group class identification. Indeed, studies of employee relations in Europe often make little mention of ethnic diversity, despite the ethnic diversity within various countries. Studies of Asia, on the other hand, mainly focus on the relatively culturally homogeneous societies of South Korea and Japan. In most of these studies, the state (and capital) has often been seen as overly uniform and monolithic, rather than as shifting, transient and fragmented. Furthermore, the establishment and growth of firstand subsequent-generation citizens implies that a more nuanced analysis will be required of not only labour, but of the state (and capital) as well. 1. Introduction he events unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by the subsequent opening-up of the former command economies together with the rapid extension of the neoliberal economic agenda, have resulted in significant change in many spheres of analysis. Accompanying such changes we have seen not the end of the politics of identity, but a refashioning of its terrain: the (re)assertion or (re)emergence of 'old' identities in an era

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characterised by the clash of capitalisms and the clash of civilizations and cultures (Wade, 1999; Huntingdon, 1996). These factors have given rise to a greater focus on process and its relationship to emerging structural conditions. Such trends have contributed to the broadening, to some extent, of the traditional structural focus of employment analysis that drew from economic theories of various political complexions, into one that focuses on issues such as gender. This trend has succeeded in bringing into the mainstream what was previously marginal. However, despite the fact that many countries are multi-ethnic-and that in many countries, the largest ethnic group does not even constitute the majority population-analysis of ethnicity continues to be underplayed. This is despite the fact that, as some authors argue, 'as we enter the new millennium, the resources and repertoires of racism, ethnicism and nationalism have never been so diverse, so ramified, so conflated and so versatile in their articulation' (Cohen, 1999: 9). Given the ethnic dimension of much conflict, it is time to acknowledge the ethnic factor in employment, and the manner in which material conflicts can be articulated in identity terms. Identifications that transcend class, for example, in emphasising the commonality of ethnic identity, can serve not only to obscure intra-group class divisions under the veil of cultural closure, but also to foreclose the potential for inter-group class identification. These tendencies have the potential not only to fragment labour locally, but also to add additional complexity to the development of regional and global responses. Indeed, studies of employee relations in Europe often make little mention of ethnic diversity despite the fact that there are large numbers of people of Turkish origin and descent in Germany; of North African in France; and of Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin or descent in Britain. Studies of Asia, on the other hand, have mainly focused on the relatively culturally homogeneous societies of South Korea and Japan (Ferner & Hyman, 1998; Van Ruysseveldt & Visser, 1996; Bamber et aI., 2000), and have ignored the widespread ethnic diversity that prevails elsewhere in Asia. As a consequence, the impact of ethnicity on capital, state and labour has tended to be overlooked. While such neglect may indicate partiality, it is problematic at the level of analysis and does not assist in the development of policy or practice. This is not to imply that the study of ethnicity in social formations is straightforward.

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations There are different types of multi-ethnic societies, ranging from plural post-colonial societies characterised by relatively independent, strong and large groups to post-slavery societies (Fenton, 1999). One can expect that state and labour in these different types of societies will reflect the social formation of which they are part. If a coordinated labour solidarity is to be achieved in order to counter the tendencies of globalising capital, then not only do local fragmenting tendencies need to be overcome, but these divisions need to be recognised in developing solidaristic strategies. Many developing countries tend to be multi-ethnic. Yet the relationship between state and labour has been, a priori, assumed to be 'despotic', with states either incorporating or suppressing independent labour due to the economic imperatives of the 'developmental' or 'dependent' state (Deyo, 1989). Such explanations have privileged economic structure and implied an unconstrained and unitary state with a lack of political diversity and competition; and they have, in general, neglected socio-cultural contexts within which economic developments evolve (Granovetter, 1985). Indeed, pressures as a consequence of events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or democratisation in South Korean-or the underlying tensions in many parts of Asia during the 1997 financial crisis-come to the fore and create significant pressure on politicalleaderships Gomo, 1998). This provides the potential for regime-opening in general, and for tradeunion organisation and mobilisation in particular (see Fermont, 1998; Bhopal, 2002). However, in both Indonesia and Malaysia, the crisis discourse was not necessarily one of class but one of nepotism, cronyism and corruption, with an underpinning of ethnic competition. The class aspects of state, capital and labour relations cannot be read as a formula, not least where non-class identities and political structures are a significant feature of the social formation. In advancing our case, we use the example of a plural, post-colonial society where the largest ethnic group has re-emerged relatively recently as the majority group since being displaced as such by colonial development in the early twentieth century. This is also of particular interest because while the current phase of globalisation has contributed to the leveraging of ethnic differences as a political resource in many parts of the world, ethnic and cultural plurality had been an explicit feature of the sociopolitical landscape of Malaysia even prior to colonialism. Nevertheless, the leveraged structuring of

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ethnicity to enhance control, efficiency and profitability that has been evident since colonial times has created a different legacy than did the 'permeable ethnicity' prevailing before that (Hua Wu Yin, 1983; Zawawi, 2004). The rest of the paper, following on from this introduction, is divided into four main -sections that deal with the role of ethnicity, the case of Malaysia, labour and state intra-ethnic tensions, and a discussion and conclusion section.

2. The role of ethnicity: Labour strategies and subjectivity

2.1. Labour strategies In current globalisation debates-as in earlier dependency theory debates-it is argued that the search by multinational companies for, inter alia, lower labour costs and weak regulation gives rise to the suppression of trade unionism, owing to 'competitive down-bidding'. However, an appreciation of the nature of trade unions and of their development, function and role needs to take account not only of the normal contingent economic and technological factors (see Kuruvilla, 1995), but also of the political context in which they arise. This includes the need to understand their relationships with political parties as well as the nature-or, more precisely, the basis-of political competition (Valenzuela, 1992: 53). This equally applies to dependent states in which political considerations have been largely ignored. The full or partial absence of the characteristics of liberal pluralist democracies does not mean that political considerations are absent. Valenzuela (1992) recognises that authoritarian states are not homogeneous, and suggests that they are more complex than often assumed, with three possible variations on pro-capital labour strategies. Valenzuela suggests that authoritarian states' strategies towards labour reflect the relationship of the labour movement to the political regime, rather than just to the economic develop-ment strategy. However, as with the state strategies found in liberal pluralist democracies, none are without potential problems due to the pressures necessitated by the position of labour within capitalism, which can provide opportunities for action, and which acts as the motor of change.

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations

The first of the three possible labour strategies adopted by states recognises the desirability of a cooperative and populist labour movement, not least in providing the potential for state legitimacy. However, such a strategy requires growth in order to ensure returns to labour, and may become unstable where concession-making is undermined and the contradictions between capital, labour and the state come to the fore and cannot be masked. These tensions are everpresent in the context of international competition for global market share, or in regime competition for inward investment. Distinct, but not unrelated, is the second state labour strategy. States may try to incorporate peak labour movements in order to control autonomous labour action by decentralised and locally organised units of labour organisation. Peak-level passivity may raise questions of union legitimacy and give rise to challenges to official labour movements by independent components-or the whole legitimacy of the labour movement may be brought into question. The latter situation may lead to the channelling of discontent into non-union forums such as political parties, NGOS and other aspects of civil society. Such spaces are becoming increasingly difficult to close owing to the growth of electronic communications in the form of the internet, together with the discourse of democratisation that, at the rhetorical level at least, is part of the neoliberal modernising project. The third state labour strategy is one in which the state cannot incorporate or control through the peak organs of labour but attempts to fragment, divide, decentralise and legislatively constrain, if not outlaw, labour movements, and to expose them to the discipline of the market mechanism. This would particularly be the case where unbridgeable differences between political parties and labour movements exist. The aim with this strategy is not only to prevent labour movements from exerting economic pressure, but also to prevent them from becoming a platform for political opposition to regimes. Yet this very suppression may serve to politicise the labour movement and to raise questions over the efficacy of the political process, thereby creating a cadre of militant activists with possible links to emerging social movements that link the social, political and economic. These state labour strategies are not always sequential over time, nor mutually exclusive. Many labour movements

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have a variety of actual and potential factions in competition for control. Thus the third strategy can emerge first, and so on. For instance, attempts at market fragmentation, giving rise to the development of radical elements, may result in the state attempting to sponsor moderate elements; and these elements may attempt to utilise populist non-class sentiments in order to consolidate their position whilst attempting to marginalise their opponents. As a consequence, the actual dynamics within labour movements can only be discerned at the empirical level. The above analysis highlights the varied and problematic nature of state control over labour movements, and the potential for action and reaction, accommodation and conflict that exists within labour movements and between them and the state. While the trajectories of such relationships are not deterministic or consistent over time, but conditional upon the opportunities inherent in the prevailing political, technological and economic context, Valenzuela (1992) does not quite develop the significance of the socio-cultural context within which the political field is constructed. Not insignificant in this are the ideologies and identities that constrain, direct and give meaning to action/inaction, offence/ defence, etc. (Southall, 1988).

2.2. Subjectivities In the context of globalisation, in which states are ceding or losing control of economic activity, domestic political competition is increasingly based on the ability to define a political and cultural space that can serve as a sufficient distinguishing principle for electoral competition. Analysis of plural, multi-ethnic societies in which political and social spheres are articulated and expressed in ethnic terms indicate that there can be strong feelings of ethnic identity in some social formations (Fenton, 1999; Hall, 1997), which can overshadow and obscure intra-ethnic class differences Gesudason, 1989). Ethnic identity cannot be written off merely as 'false consciousness' and diversionary to analysis based on the labour process (Mohapatra, 1997). Rather, ethnic identity is part of the terrain of labour-capital conflict and cooperation, and can be used as a resource for boundary definition that both enables and disables political mobilisation. In the inter-ethnic case, the power and unifying potential of ethnicity among the ethnic 'we' can be a source of power and order. In the intra-ethnic case, myth and

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tradition may be utilised in order to legitimate factional competition. These issues point to uncertainties in any fixed notions of ethnicity, making the study of such phenomena significant. If we relate these arguments back to the framework developed by Valenzuela (1992), we can conclude that the relationship between and within the state and the labour movement in plural ethnic societies needs to be contextually sensitive, and cannot be read off from economic conditions. We use the case of Malaysia in order to advance our case that ethnicity is vitally important, and that the political configuration and ethnic composition of the working class have a complex interrelationship that constrains and creates opportunities for both labour and the state. We do this by looking at the labour movement and state policy over three periods-the early period of Chinese dominance under a colonial state; the 'mid' period of Indian dominance in the dusk of a colonial state and at the emergence of an independent, multi-ethnic state; and the late period of the growing Malay dominance in the context of a more assertive Malay political class. 2.4. Propositions The above leads us to a set of three, interrelated propositions: I) That states, even dependent ones, have choices in labour strategies that are not simply determined by economics, but rather are affected and constrained by political, social, technological and cultural factors. 2) That labour is not insignificant given that labour leaders not only represent the single largest group in societythe workers-and articulate their 'voice', but also have the potential to be involved in the political arena itself. 3) That 'subjectivity' is significant, and cannot be ignored as a resource providing both opportunity and constraint for meaningful action and viable analysis.

3. The case of Malaysia 3.1. Methodology This paper is part of an ongoing project resulting from a variety of research projects conducted in Malaysia over the last decade, and it draws from a range and variety of sources. These include interviews, personal communications, colonial

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Labour Department reports and other secondary sources. Interviews were conducted in the periods 1993-1994 and 1999-2000, and in 2004, with members of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) including the women's officer, the research officer, the general secretary and the president. Interviews and data were also gathered at the Malaysian Labour Organisation (MLO), Harris Solid State Workers' Union (HSSWU), and Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM) [Malaysian People's Party]. Secondary sources include a review of the MTUC newspaper and historical document archive, Malaysian Labour Department reports, and numerous other texts.

3.2. Background Demography and politics There are three major ethnic groupings in Malaysia. Of a total population of 23.27 million (2000 census), Malays comprised 65.1 per cent, Chinese 26 per cent and Indians 7.7 per cent (Department of Statistics, 2001). Each of the groups is diverse within itself (see Smith, 2002). While Malaysia has maintained a multi-party political system with periodic free elections since independence in 1957, the partypolitical structure developed from-and has retainedethnicity as the prime focus of organisation, and the question . of ethnicity remains central to the political discourse. Oppositional parties are also largely associated with the major ethnic groupings. In the light of elections and the existence of competitive politics, in combination with use of the Internal Security Act (a colonial relic), control of the media and interference with the judiciary, Malaysia is better described as a 'semi. democracy' than as either a dictatorship or a fully-fledged democratic state (Case, 1993). The main party in the Barisan Nasional ('BN'-the ruling multi-ethnic coalition) is the United Malay National Organisation (UMNO), representing Malays, while the Chinese and Indians are represented by the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC). The opposition includes the Islamic PAS, the largely Chinese Democratic Action Party (nAP) and, more recently, the mainly Malay-based Keadilan. The BN replaced the Alliance [Parti Perikatan] after the 1969 'race riots'(see

The ethnic Jactor in state-labour relations below), reflecting a more assertive Malay stance in politics (Means, 1991). The UMNO, formed in 1946 in response to British plans that would have abolished the traditional power of Malay rulers, came to represent the embodiment of Malay interests. Membership is limited to Malays, and its organisation permeates Malay society. Its organisational structure has 17,000 branches and 2.8 million members (out of a Malay population of about 12 million). The UMNO defines itself as a party that strives to achieve national aspirations for the benefit of the people, religion and country. In this context, parties purporting to be 'multi-racial', given the political constituencies to which they direct themselves, are perceived to be ethnically dominated, resulting in the deJacto ethnicisation and reinforcement of such a political discourse.

The Malay agenda-state-led positive discrimination In the years between independence in 1957 and 1970, the proportion of the Malay population in urban areas increased from 1I.2 per cent to 14.9 per cent, while the Chinese remained the predominant group in the higher-earning metropolitan areas (Ooi Jin-Bee, 1976). The 1969 'race riots', fuelled by a discourse of ethnic wealth and income disparities and sparked by opposition party gains, resulted in the 'new economic policy' (NEP).l Malay income and wealth inequality was to be addressed through economic growth enabled by the foreign-direct-investment-based 'export-orientated industrialisation strategy', and an import-substitution industrialisation strategy in heavy manufacturing sectors such as steel and automobiles, rather than by redistribution. Such a policy coincided with the outward march of us manufacturing capital and its search for cheaper and more controllable labour. Malaysia can be categorised as a developmental state, with an affirmative-action orientation driving a variety of policies and programmes designed to bolster the economic status of the Malay and indigenous communities. When a company is established, for example, it must have 30 per cent ownership by bumiputera ('sons of the soil', used to refer to Malays), and a quota system extends to the employment of workers in every company.2 Malaysia continues to build its manufacturing base with a heavy emphasis on component and consumer electronics, which

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accounted for 33 per cent of State, 2001).

GDP

in 2000 (Department of

Dilemmas of economic growth Between 1957 and 1990, the agricultural share of Malay employment fell from three-quarters (74.6 per cent) to about a third (36.7 per cent), while employment in manufacturing, commerce and private and public services rose to over half (53 per cent). These trends were reflected in the composition of the labour movement, such that by 1988, Malays accounted for 59 per cent of all trade unionists and 54 per cent of wage workers (Labour and Manpower Report, 1988/89). By 1999, over 70 per cent of union leaders and members, and 60 per cent of the MTUC general council, were Malay (interview, MTUC, 1999). Industrialisation also created a Malay bourgeoisie and government-sponsored rentier class (Gomez, 1991; Munro-Kua, 1996). Not only was the notion of Malay control of the political and cultural sphere and Chinese control of the economic dissolving, but the interpenetration of political and economic interests created a new dynamic in Malaysia's political economy (Bowie, 1994), not least of which was the growth of intra-Malay economic inequality. Malaysia in economic crisis Economic growth recovered rapidly after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The minus-7.4 per cent GDP in 1998 transformed into a positive 6.1 per cent in 1999 and 8.3 per cent in 2000, giving a per-capita GDP ofuS$3,834, a currentaccount surplus ofus$8.4 billion, and a 1.6 per-cent inflation rate (WTO, 2001). From 1996 to 1998, unemployment increased from 2.6 per cent to 4.9 per cent, but then fell to 3.1 per cent by 2000 (Malaysian Department of Statistics, 2002). By 2002, GDP was estimated at US$95. 7 billion-some US$3,290 per head-growing at 5 per cent, with unemployment at 3 per cent and inflation at 1.7 per cent (Financial Times, 2002). The robust employment performance was partly due to employers' reluctance to dismiss permanent local workers, preferring instead to resort to terminating fixed-term contracts, temporary lay-offs and voluntary severance (Peetz and Todd, 2000), and-since they anticipated a relatively quick upturn-other flexibility measures that fell short of redundancy. Most significantly, the estimated legal and illegal migrant labour force of 3 to 3.5 million (HRW, 1998; Bhopal,

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations 2000) provided the numerical flexibility for rapid adjustment, and enabled Malaysia to escape the dislocations of unemployment and potential inter-ethnic antagonism (which was witnessed in neighbouring Indonesia). Paradoxically, many of Malaysia's problems are also attributed to its multiethnic population (Gomez & Jomo, 1997), although the discourse of ethnicity may serve to obscure the more fundamental structures of class domination and inter-ethnic elite accommodation (Hua Wu Yin, 1983; Yun Hing Ai, 1990; Gomez, 1999). The question of whether ethnicity is a problem per se, or one that is utilised in order to maintain political dominance, retains a fulcrum position for analysis.

3.3. Political regimes and trade union development The role of intra-ethnic tensions can be seen in the evolution of Malaysian state-labour relations, which date back to Malaysia's position as a colony, initially producing tin and subsequently rubber. Malays largely remained in peasant agriculture, producing rice for the increasing numbers of Chinese workers staffing the tin mines, and Indians in rubber plantations. 3.3.1. Contestory unionism In the 1920S, the Chinese dominated the general union; and by 1926, the Nanyang Federation of Labour (NFL), which adopted an anti-British, anti-colonial stance, was organised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite Chinese dominance, solidarity with Indian labour was further undermined by wage practices whereby the practice oflocally negotiated piece rates by Chinese labour resulted in Chinese workers earnings amounting to almost twice the level of the centrally determined wages ofIndian workers. 3 This, together with the managerial control mechanisms inherent in the intra-ethnic division of Indian labour, whereby lower-caste south-Indian labour wa.s managed by higher castes and/or northern Indians, plus their relative isolation in the plantation sector, and language barriers, contributed to Chinese dominance of the labour movement (Stenson, 1980; Hua Wu Yin, 1983; Ramasamy, 1994). This segmentation reinforced the association of unionism with the Chinese, and contributed to a perception of Chinese dominance and militancy among the working class. The depression of the 1930S witnessed the NFL's reorganisation into the Malayan General Labour Union,

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which aimed to maximise recruitment across ethnic lines and enhance class solidarity (Wad, 1988). Economic recovery, in the context of migration restrictions, enhanced the bargaining power of workers in the periods 1935-38 and 1940-41. This assisted the increasing union militancy led by the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) in the earlier period, and by Indian plantation labour in the latter. While largely driven by issues of terms and conditions, developments were underpinned by the growing anti-colonial struggles in China and India (Stenson, 1980; Jomo & Todd, 1994; Hua Wu Yin, 1983), and also reflected the internal divisions within these countries. Nevertheless, it would appear that Chinese labour was the stronger-and indeed, when Nehru visited Malaya in 1937, he commented on the apathy of the Indian social conscience, while he saw the need to organise plantation labour. Despite this, control of Indian 'voice' by the middle. classes largely excluded the Indian labouring classes, leading them into the CPM after the Second World War (Arasaratnam, 1964). In this context, the union movement posed a political challenge that continued after the British resumed control in 1946, and which saw continued growth and militancy on the part of the reorganised Pan-Malayan Federation ofTrade Unions (PMFTU). At its peak in 1947, with over 250,000 members, it represented more than 50 per cent of unionised waged workers (Deery, 2002), and 80 per cent of unions in Malaya. The PMFTU continued to be Chinese-dominated, although Indian' trade unions were increasingly organized, and by 1946, most had affiliated to the movement. By 1947, the MCP controlled 214 out of a total of 277 trade unions through the PMFTU (Deery, 2002). Until early 1947, the CPM was relatively acquiescent and eschewed open confrontation and conflict-a situation owing to the fact that the general secretary of the CPM, who had taken over from Ho Chi Ming in 1939, was a triple agent working for the French and British intelligence services. In 1947, he absconded with CPM funds leaving the movement in disarray, although control soon fell into more militant hands, led by Chin Peng, and by 1948 the CPM had called for mass struggle. While the union movement became an integral part of a cross-racial alliance forged on the issues of citizenship rights and opposition to colonialism, many unions remained ethnically concentrated, reflecting the ethnic division of

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labour. Ethnicity was also used to create division. For instance, in the context of falling world commodity prices, a rejection by labourers of the pre-war paternalism and the shattering of imperial invincibility contributed to strikes against pay cuts in 1947-48. Such dissent from below was met by increasingly organised employers' associations, which dismissed strikers and utilised Malays as 'strike-busters' in their strategy to contain the new militancy (Deery, 2002). Such was the employers' resolve that Indian demands for pay comparability with Chinese labour resulted in reductions in Chinese wages Gomo & Todd, 1994). Such strategies had the potential to divide labour solidarity on ethnic grounds, and were reminiscent of earlier employers' appreciation of the way labour control could be achieved through ethnic division, as exemplified in the following, 1895 quotation from the plantation owners' Selangor Journal: To secure your independence work with Javanese and Tamils, and, if you have sufficient experience, also with Malays and Chinese; you can then always play the one against the other ... In case of a strike, you will never be left without labour, and the coolies of one nationality will think twice before they make their terms, if they know you are in a position that you can do without them. (quoted in Caldwell & Amin, 1977) The increasing assertiveness of the state and employers culminated in requirements for union registration, aimed at disassociating the political coordination of the labour movement. This contributed to the conflict that culminated in the use of troops and the eventual declaration of an emergency, and the Malaysian 'red purge'. As a result, the CPM was outlawed, unions in the PMFTU were deregistered, and their leaders either went underground or were arrestedand some were executed. This era, then, was characterised by a political and economic challenge from the labour movement; and the state can be seen to have adopted a policy of fragment-ation, division and legislative constraint towards a labour movement seen as oppositional and contestatory. Nevertheless, mechanisms for collective regulation were seen as necessary in order to ensure that the dollar-earning capacity of the colony would not be upset. In 1947, a third of the exports of Malaya and Singapore were dollar-earning exports, and

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represented the most important source of dollars for the UK treasury. Half of all rubber and 98 per cent of the US's tin imports came from Malaya (Deery, 2002).

3.3.2. Unionism within moderate collective bargaining The British authorities recognised the need for a channel for the articulation of aspirations, in order to assist in regime legitimacy in the context of growing opposition. To this end, British trade-union bureaucrats and the colonial state wanted an 'independent, responsible, autonomous' pressure-grouptype union movement. The pluralism modeled on British trade unionism was to be achieved through anti-communist, middle-class, English-educated Indians. The organisation efforts were initially focused on the Indian-dominated plantation sector. Here, with the backing of the non-communist, American-controlled International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and with the further assistance of employers, the Labour and Public Relations Departments and Special Branch, mergers were instituted, membership drives were promulgated and oppositional elements and factions neutered (Zaidi, 1975; Trade Union Advisors' Report, 1950; Ramasamy, 2001).These efforts led to the establishment of the moderate Malayan Trades Union Council in 1950, formed out of the non-banned unions, and which eventually became the MTUC in 1963. In contrast to earlier Chinese dominance, the postindependence period saw Indian moderates from the relatively isolated plantation sector control the peak union movement. The association of ethnicity and trade unionism was reversed, such that Indians accounted for 71 per cent of all union members in 1951, remained the majority up to 1963, and retained control of the MTUC until recently. Indian domination of the labour movement, given their relatively small population and consequent political impotence, allowed union issues to be marginal in the political processes driving the state. The association of ethnicity with organised labour hindered the development of class-based politics, while the postindependence ethnic accommodation, whereby the Malay sphere of political influence would not be challenged while the Chinese could pursue their economic activities, reinforced ethnic divisions. The absence of powerful, representative party involvement in the political sphere carried dangers of incorporation, given the almost-complete

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control of the inter-ethnic elite accommodation within the controlling Alliance Coalition (a coalition of the main ethnic parties). In this context, support for opposition parties could lead to suppression and the possible accusation of being politically, and thus ethnically, partisan-a situation arising from the absence of Malay waged labour, and the growing national ethnic discourse emanating from the debates over the political landscape inherent in British plans for the eventual independence of Malaya, which led to the formation of UMNO in I946. Despite its moderate stance, such an emerging situation exposed the labour movement to accusations of advancing the economistic interests of its ethnically concentrated membership at the expense of wider ethnic political and economic disparities. Such a situation not only undermined the horizontal (class) organising principles of trade unionism, but also had the potential to bring the new labour movement into conflict with its potential future membership. As a consequence, the early recognition by the MTUC that it should not align itself with the then-existing Labour Party, and that it should adopt an apolitical stance (Zaidi, I975), left the movement confined to the 'market mechanism' and marginal to the political arena. Thus, the oppositional movement of the earlier period was ~eplaced by a largely neutered union movement based on a pressure-group-type approach, with little hope for state largesse in light of its essentially narrow concentration among the weakest and least influential electoral constituency, located in the foreign-currency-earning, labour-intensive plantation sector. In this era, rather than divide and fragment, the state 'sponsored' and attempted to incorporate the weak but 'responsible' moderate union movement. This was through a model premised on liberal collectivism, providing a veneer of legitimacy to capital-labour relations at the workplace level through a system of responsible collective bargaining (itself constrained by the economic context), whilst deflecting potential political challenges to the colonial state. The attempt by the state to sponsor moderate unions in order to fill the vacuum created by the suppression of radical and oppositional movements reflects the first of Valenzuela's typologies, in which the state recognises the necessity and desirability of a cooperative and populist labour movement, not least in providing the potential for state legitimacy. This,

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of course, needs to be seen in the light of the political context of the colonial power, where a Labour government was in power, yet unwilling to cede independence owing to the dollar revenues generated by this particular colony.

3.4.3. Development, marginalisation and incorporation While the Malays were largely absent from organised waged labour, with the -radical element marginalised and control of the labour movement vested in moderate Indians in a context of the ethnicisation of politics, there was little scope for developing 'labour voice'. However, over time, the strategies developed to enhance the economic status of Malays created new opportunities and constraints for labour. The state response to the 1969 'race riots' brought to centre-stage a nationalist discourse that emphasised the need to address the economic and cultural weakness of Malays. The ethno-developmentalism of the state attributed tradeunion issues of distribution as secondary, if not potentially detrimental, to the developmental process. In these circumstances, union involvement with opposition political parties, particularly non-Malay, carried the risk of a potential accusation of ethnic political association and a lack of commitment to the policy of Malay advancement and nationbuilding. Trade-union acquiescence in a formally corporatist/ tripartite structure came under pressure owing to a shift in political personalities, and the imperatives of a low-Iabourcost development strategy Gomo & Todd, 1994). Opposition to state policy, in the context of the ethnic configuration of the working class and the wider basis of political competition, left recalcitrant labour 'voices' vulnerable to overt state suppression, vilification and the accusation of being politically, and thus ethnically, partisan. Incorporation via state sponsorship was sustainable only while there were no fundamental conflicts of interest, and while this came under pressure as contradictions appeared, the ability of the labour movement to act in such a situation was constrained by the ethnic configuration of the labour movement and the wider population. Union opposition to the state's labour policy was exposed in the Malaysian Airlines dispute of 1980. The dispute was multi-racial, with heavy activism on the part of Malays, and supported by solidaristic international and domestic secondary action. In light of this, the state felt compelled to

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break the class basis of the confrontation at the outset (Munro-Kua, 1996). This led to arrests and dismissals of union activists, deregistration and a new wave of labour repression. Union deregistration led to part-replacement by in-house unions, and set the state's agenda for future labour policy. Such policy promoted decentralized, in-house unions, in which the market mechanism driven by the changing vagaries of the labour market would be replaced by the discipline of product-market competition, and the economic performance of the firm as the prime driver of labour-management relations. This structure, it was hoped, would create a less combative and more cooperative union movement, in a project of enterprise partnership and a micro-corporatism that would advance Malay and Malaysian economic development. Premised on the 'Asian model' of development, based on the Japanese productionist model and underpinned by the notion of 'Asian values', the Malaysian 'Look East' policy was promulgated in order to deal with the need for international competitiveness in attracting foreign direct investment, whilst ensuring the incorporation of the emerging Malay working class into the superordinate goal of Malaysian development and thereby meeting the potential 'challenge from below' arising from the growth of a Malay working class (Wad & Jomo, 1994; Kuruvilla & Arudsothy, 1995; Bhopal & Rowley, 2002). This, in short, represented an ideological and structural strategy aimed at incorporating the Malay working class into the state capital interest, but at a local level with a national focus-a micro-corporatism encouraging productivity coalitions without political 'voice'. Such features also resonated with the value system of Malay village society, which emphasised gotong royong (cooperation), usaha (labour) and conformity (Kaur, 1999). At a macro-level, the state invoked notions of 'national interest' in order to undermine a 'confrontational' union leadership that supported opposition parties and policies. Labour leaders were accused of being anti-nation, antidemocratic and, therefore, anti-Malay, in a debate centred around not only identifying the guardians of the Malay interests, but also defining what those interests were. In an increasing differentiation between 'East' and 'West' in the context of the debate about Asian democracy and

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development, the minister for Human Resources warned [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] members to be 'watchful' of Western unions attempting to extend influence in Asian labour movements in order to 'destabilise' employee relations and 'impose' labour practices that were 'unsuitable' in the Asian contc;;xt (Star, 1992). This 'EastWest' discourse was reflected in a New Straits Times (1993) editorial: ASEAN

Trade union leaders no longer listen to voices [of workers] ... pay no heed to their need for leadership ... These leaders ... warble and yodel on international platforms [a reference to ILO] to besmirch the government '" [they turn] ... a blind eye to the nation's achievement in protecting the labour force. Yet it has been a trend in developed countries for unionists to hammer the ruling party ... In such countries the 'workers versus vampirelike ruling elite' mind set was responsible for the conversion of the labour movement into political parties. But surely such a trend has no legitimacy in a political and socio-economic climate that protects and promotes workers' rights and well being. As a consequence, the state was instrumental in an attempt to fragment the labour movement through, for instance, the 1988 sponsorship of an alternative trade union centre-the Malaysian Labour Organisation (MLO), which supported inhouse unions. The MLO justified its strategy on the grounds that the MTUC, amongst others, was criticising government policy without positive suggestions, and that its leadership was motivated by oppositional politics and parties, while the public perception of trade unions was as troublemakers (source: undated MLO booklet). As a consequence, the state increasingly bypassed the MTUC in favour of the MLO. The need for a more pliable labour movement needs to be seen in the context of growing and wider dissension. For instance, the state development strategy has produced a Malay business class embedded in networks of different political factions. As a consequence, intra-Malay, inter-class economic inequality grew and, by the mid-1990s, led to explicit concern over 'political business', particularly from the emergent Malay professional middle class (Gomez, 1991; Munro-Kua, 1996). This era, in which the moderate union of the colonial period was increasingly seen as

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations oppositional by the post-colonial state, fits with the third and first ofValuenzela's (1992) typologies. The state found it increasingly difficult to incorporate or control the dilemmas posed by dependent development. Attempts at fragmentation, division, decentralisation and legislative constraint were failing in light of domestic, political competition and international scrutiny. In order to ensure domestic and international legitimacy, the state attempted to sponsor an alternative, more moderate centre. This development indicates a move to the first of the typologies, whereby it recognised the desirability of a cooperative and populist labour movement, not least in providing the potential for state legitimacy for its industrialisation and economic development strategy.

3.4.4. Factionalism and opposition? Changing ethnic composition meant that the state could not continue to ignore the labour movement by playing the ethnic card in order to marginalise opposition. The state's recognition of this is seen in the minister for Human Resources' advising the MLO to dissolve itself and join the MTUC in 1996-97 (interview notes, MTUC, 1999). This was prompted not only by the failure of the MLO to undermine the MTUC, but also by potential internal reconfiguration of the balance of forces within the MTUC itself. In 1994, the position of the Malay MTUC's president was under threat from more oppositional and leftist activists. He resigned from Semangat 46 (,Spirit of '46'-a nowdefunct political party) and was wooed by Anwar Ibrahim (who was, at that time, prime-minister-in-waiting) to join the UMNO. The re-entry of the MLO consolidated and enhanced the president's support, and enabled him to retain control of the MTUC and advance his developing vision for the Malaysian labour movement, which increasingly veered towards the incorporationist strategy of the Singaporean developmental state. The above analysis indicates that individual union activists and leaders tend to be party activists with diverse affiliations to various, but essentially ethnically based, parties that do not necessarily pursue a labour agenda; but this has not fundamentally undermined a cross-ethnic trade union identity and a commitment to the labour interest on the parts of those activists. As a consequence, the MTUC proudly claims to be the only mass multiracial organisation in Malaysia.

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Nevertheless, the 'pulling' integrative forces of a labour identity come into conflict, at times with the 'push' forces arising from identities implicated through the attachment to ethnically based political agendas, parties and their shifting cross-ethnic affiliations. This complexity reflects the significance of ethno-political discourse and identity in a class-differentiated society. This complexity also represents, more than anything, a recognition of the failure of the earlier state strategy to set up a more moderate alternative centre. The new strategy most approximates the second of Valenzuela's (1992) typologies, whereby the state attempts to incorporate the oppositional peak labour movement(s) by co-opting parts of the leadership, while simultaneously bolstering its support base by reintegrating the peak labour organisations, thereby deflecting the emerging relationship between the peak organisation and new oppositional political parties, NGOs and other aspects of civil society.

4. Labour and state intra-ethnic tensions

While the MTUC'S Malay president asserts a commitment to 'worker advancement', in the context of Malay proletarianisation this has increasingly become Malay worker advancement, indicated by his 1996 UMNO application (personally handled by Anwar Ibrahim, and passed to the ex-prime minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad). And with Zainal Rampak's membership of the UMNO, his senatorship (recommended by Anwar Ibrahim), and his appointment to the national economic advisory committee, there was increasing concern within MTUC ranks over its possible 'incorporation' into the government. This was particularly pertinent given Rampak's previous and longstanding attachment to the opposition, and his personification as the union voice of Malaysian workers. In response, it may be argued that, since 1996-97, some believe there is a possibility of gaining concessions through incorporation. Such incorporation within the context of factionalism enables the utilisation of a large, Malay working-class base as a bargaining counter when internal fractures open up, and provides scope for political compromises. However, within the MTUC it is felt that such thinking was a way of

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations marginalising opponents, as attempts are made to fill the and the union movement with new and upcoming but moderate Malay trade unionists. As one union activist reported, the Indian general secretary 'is the last remnant of Indian influence in the movement' (interviews, MTUC: 2000). In the last MTUC elections, it was felt that the president 'wanted to push away all the Indians ... [however] he needed [the general secretary] because he was able to bring a lot of the Indian delegates into Zainal's camp, but the Indians are feeling very much pushed out'(interviews, MTUC: 2000). However, such a position, while opening access directly to the prime minister, seems to have resulted only in concessions from the labour movement. For instance, the MTUC agreed to reverse its opposition to in-house unions (New Straits Times, 1997), and decided against issuing a labour manifesto in the 1999 elections-the result of behindthe-scenes mobilisation by Zainal Rampak. As one trade unionist said, 'The outcome was orchestrated by Zainal. He mobilised his supporters to .,. block the manifesto. More than eighty members were present, double than we normally have ... some who have never attended a meeting before' (interviews, MTUC, 1999). Yet some seventeen unions independently issued a manifesto indicating division within the movement over the best tactics to use in order to advance the labour and political interests of Malaysian workers. Indeed, de-facto political involvement is exemplified by a number of trade unions which, in 1999, presented joint demands to the opposition as a condition of their support, resulting in the inclusion of a number of them. The internal divisions created by a moderate stance that provided few returns possibly led to the MTUC'S losing an opportunity to exert leverage over the labour question in order to advance labour interests-which, in the case of Malaysia, go beyond distribution, and arguably to issues of democracy and social justice. As a consequence, in late 2004, control of the leadership of the MTUC fell to radical elements who had been leading players in the oppositional parties that developed in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. This has given rise to the possibility of a more oppositional stance with symbiotic links to the emerging civic and political opposition (personal communication, 2005). MTUC

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5. Discussion and conclusion

The case of Malaysia shows that states, even dependent ones, have choices in labour strategies; and that these are not deterministic, but contingent on the interplay and perceived priorities in the order of the political, economic and social configuration. Valenzuela (1992) asserts that states could adopt at least three strategies, reflecting labour and political considerations. Each strategy gives rise to its own particular tensions, which provide potential opportunities for 'action'. In the case of Malaysia, each has been shown in this paper to have existed over time, and to have coexisted, as predicted, at particular times. We have also shown that, economics aside, a significant driving force of the strategies is the need for the retention of state legitimacy or political support in a political structure dominated by an ethnic discourse, which itself is constructed as fundamental to the construction of regime legitimacy. This paper is intended to indicate that, while frameworks like that of Deyo (1989) are limited, and developments such as Valenzuela's (1992) are to be welcomed, there remains a need to operationalise them in specific contexts in order to unpack the forces of change and order. We contend that ethnicity is a significant factor in those societies where ethnicity is an implicit or explicit part of the political and cultural discourse. While states can sponsor and incorporate labour movements in attempts to create cooperative and populist movements accepted by workers, such a strategy is only possible where there is ethnic harmony or coincidence, or the absence of a differentiating ethnic political or cultural discourse. Even in these circumstances, such a strategy may become unstable where concession-making is undermined by the contradictions between capital, labour and the state. However, there would also be difficulties in cases in which any of these contradictions could be interpreted as having a differential ethnic impact. Labour strategies are not just driven by capital: labour has a role not only as a 'voice', but potentially as a political actor itself-although this can be undermined when the organising principle of politics and its framing discourse elevates non-class issues such as ethnicity above class issues. However, changing structures and opportunities for ethnic groups can give rise to a potentially new 'politics of labour' . Here, potentially, unable to accommodate unions, the state

The ethnic factor in state-labour relations

may attempt to incorporate peak labour movements in order to control autonomous action. This may only be possible if the following elements are present: first, coincidence of ethnicity among the peak of the labour movement, its members and the state. Second, that the union leadership should have sufficient power to stop autonomous action by subordinate levels in the labour movement and in the labour movement hierarchy, which, due to the ethnic segmentation of labour, will contain significant pockets of ethnic 'others' or ethnic 'we's' who may invoke other aspects of their identity. In the former case, questions of union legitimacy and representativeness may give rise to challenges to 'official' labour movements; and in the latter case, they may give rise to union fragmentation on ethnic and other identity grounds. The Malaysian case indicates the significance of ethnic 'subjectivities' in state-labour relations. For instance, where unbridgeable differences between political parties and labour movements exist, policies of control based on fragmentation· and decentralisation have been used. This is to employ ethnic identity as a means of controlling trade unions in a negative way -i.e. unions as the ethnic 'other'-or, from the state's point of view, is an attempt to deem unions as antithetical to the ethno-development project. Such attempts to expose union movements to the 'market mechanism' are associated with attempts to weaken market power by constraining and limiting the ability to organise and mobilise via restrictive legislation, decentralisation and structures of mediation (i.e. forms of media). In this case, it is clear that the aim is not only to prevent labour movements from exerting economic pressure, but also to restrain them from becoming a platform for political opposition to the regime. In sum, we have demonstrated that in the case of Malaysia, labour has been subject to several strategies that have changed over time as the context (political, economic and social) has evolved. The different actors have utilised a variety of resources, from the legislative to the symbolic; and there are not necessarily any hard-and-fast, determinate rules governing the decisions that actors make about the content and their position towards the preferred order of things. What is clear, however, is the need to recognise the significance of ethnicity as a factor in state-labour relations. It is an enduring phenomenon that is visible in multi-ethnic societies; and possibly invisible, but no less salient, in perceived 'mono-ethnic' societies.

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Acknowledgement We acknowledge the support of the Southeast Asian Studies committee at the British Academy for a grant supporting part of this work. We would like to thank Wendy Smith for her perceptive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Needless to say, all remaining infelicities remain ours.

Notes The NEP was a series of five-year development plans from 1971, following the 1969 'race riots' that were the result of perceived differences in economic status of the ethnic communities. The NEP was a major policy instrument and it politicised ethnic identities. Its aims were to eliminate the identification of economic function with specific racial groups, e.g. through an affirmative action approach focusing on Malays, which was aimed at increasing their equity holdings via economic growth, . and via some redistribution from 'foreign' holdings. 2. The 1974 Industrial Coordination Act meant that ethnic groups' population levels needed to be represented at all levels of the organisation. 3. In 1929, Chinese plantation workers received around 85-9 0C per day in comparison with the 50-55c earned by Indians, although Chinese earnings declined to 30 -40C in the Depression year of 1931 (Ramasamy, 1994)·

I.

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Valenzuela, Jaime (1992) 'Labour movements and political systems: Some variations' in M. Regini (ed.) The Future 0/ Labour Movements (Sage). Wad, Peter (1988) 'The Japanisation of the Malaysian trade union movement' in Southall, R. (ed.) Trade Unions and the New Internationalisation o/the Third World (Zed Books). Wad, Peter & Sundaram Jomo (1994) 'In-house unions: Looking East for industrial relations' in S. Jomo (ed.) Japan and Malaysian Development (Routledge). Wade, Robert (1999) 'A clash of capitalisms' in Brown Economic Review, Spring, online at [accessed April 2004]. WTO (2001) 'Malaysia: December 2001', online at [accessed November 2005]. Yun Hing Ai (1990) 'Capital transformation and labour relations in Malaysia' in Labour and Industry, vol. '3, no. I, PP·7 6-92. Zaidi, S. (1975) History o/the MTUC (MTUC). Zawawi, Ibrahim (2004) 'Globalization and national identity: Managing ethnicity and cultural pluralism in Malaysia' in Yoichiro Sato (ed.) Growth and Governance in Asia (AsiaPacific Center for Security Studies). Online at

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Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun

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Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun Andrew Kliman & Alan Freeman

'Arbitrary' stands in opposition to 'Natural' only if one is attempting to designate the manner in which signs have been established. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Introduction liman (2001) showed that 'simultaneist' inter pretations-which hold that Marx valued inputs and outputs simultaneously-contradict Marx's exploitation theory of profit, while the temporal singlesystem interpretation.(TssI) conforms to it. Mohun (2003) calls these demonstrations into question; this note defends them.' Mohun's is the first critique of the TSSI to address the interpretive controversy in a serious, methodical way. He accepts that the relative adequacy of exegetical interpretations, such as the temporalist and simultaneist accounts, can be evaluated only on the basis of a clear 'criterion of decidability'.2 He employs what he calls the 'criterion of replication': 'An accurate textual interpretation is one which can, on the basis of (an interpretation of) the text's premises, derive (and hence replicate) its theoretical conclusions' (pp. 96-97)· This clear, rigorous test of interpretive adequacy follows from the standard hermeneutic tenet that interpretations need to understand the text as a coherent whole. Proposed by George Stigler, the test has been embraced by other leading historians of economic thought and by proponents of the TSSI (see Kliman, 2002). Yet the value-theory controversy has remained unresolved for decades because the TSSI'S critics refuse to embrace the test. Mohun's contribution shows that there is a way out of this impasse.

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Mohun's defence of simultaneist interpretations Kliman (2001) proved that Marx's profit theory is contradicted by all simultaneist interpretations-namely the standard (Bortkiewiczian) interpretation, the 'new interpretation' (NI), and the simultaneous single-system interpretations (SSSI). Employing their definitions of surplus labour and profit, he exhibited logically possible cases in which (I) profit is positive though surplus labour is not, which shows that surplus labour is not necessary for profit; (2) surplus labour is positive though profit is not, which shows that surplus labour is not sufficient for profit. These results directly contradict three decades of claims that the so-called 'fundamental Marxian theorem' (FMT) proved that the standard interpretation implies that surplus labour is both necessary and sufficient for profit. Mohun's challenge to Kliman's results is fatally incomplete. He merely questions whether the aggregate money price of the net product (PNP) can be negative. This has nothing to do with the question of necessity. Kliman proved-without assuming a negative PNP-that all simultaneist interpretations imply that surplus labour is unnecessary for profit. By failing to address these proofs, Mohun concedes point (I): that surplus labour is unnecessary for profit under all simultaneist interpretations. Kliman also proved, again without assuming a negative PNP, that surplus labour is insufficient for profit under the standard interpretation. The negativity of the PNP is therefore relevant only to point (2)-sufficiency-and only with respect to the NI and SSSI. The only thing that Mohun actually defends, then, is the claim that surplus labour is sufficient for profit under the NI and SSSI. We now turn to that claim. 3 The NI and SSSI imply that surplus labour and profit must have the same sign when the PNP is positive. Assume for the moment that it is indeed always positive. Does this make surplus labour sufficient for profit? No. It is insufficient, because positive profit requires something more than surplus labour-namely a positive PNP. If the net products of all goods were always positive, as most versions of the FMT assume, then the PNP, too, would always be positive. Crucially, Mohun concedes that this assumption is false: 'That there are some negative net products is undeniable' (p. 98). But whenever some net

Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun

products are negative, there exist logically possible sets of prices that result in a negative PNP, and thus negative profit despite positive surplus labour. Hence, Mohun implicitly concedes that surplus labour is insufficient for profit. Since negative net products exist, as we all agree, the sign of the PNP depends upon the sizes of material inputoutput coefficients and the extent to which prices deviate from a hypothetical equilibrium. If·either the input-output coefficients or the deviations were sufficiently large, then the PNP would be negative. This could occur even if the HawkinsSimon conditions were satisfied, i.e. even if continual physical reproduction and growth of the economy were possible (see Kliman, 2001: 103-05). Given sufficiently small input-output coefficients, however, the PNP will remain positive even in the face of sizeable deviations from equilibrium. 4 Seizing upon this last fact, Mohun rejects Kliman's refutation of the insufficiency theorem. It was not 'shown conclusively,' he claims, that a negative PNP is 'economically possible in the sense of arising out of economic behaviour' (p. 98). This objection is utterly irrelevant. We repeat: surplus labour would be insufficient for profit even if the PNP were always positive, because positive profit requires something more than surplus labour. It requires small input-output coefficients and relatively modest deviations from a hypothetical equilibrium-the factors that make the PNP positive. If the coefficients and deviations were large enough, then profit would be negative despite the existence of surplus labour. Hence the NI and SSSI clearly contradict Marx's (1894 [1981]: 270, emphasis added) conclusion that surplus labour is 'the exclusive source of profit'. Certain economic behaviours can perhaps ensure that the PNP is positive, but they cannot make surplus labour sufficient for profit. The very fact that profit depends upon something more than surplus labour-'proper' economic behaviourmeans that surplus labour is insufficient. Mohun's appeal to behaviour therefore proves exactly the opposite of what he intended. It is a tacit admission of insufficiency. He seems to suggest, however, that Kliman's proof of insufficiency was an illegitimate trick, since it employed 'arbitrary' prices (p. 98). But those prices were perfectly legitimate. The FMT of Okishio and Morishima considered the relationship between surplus labour and profit under all positive prices. Kliman did the same thing. He found cases

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in which surplus labour is positive while profit is negative. This disproved sufficiency-full stop. A crucial matter of logic is at stake here: a sufficiency theorem is true only if it holds universally, i.e. only if no logically possible exceptions exist. (Whether the exceptions are 'economically possible' i~ irrelevant. After all, most sufficiency theorems have nothing to do with economics.) A single counterexample refutes a theorem that is said to hold universally. The ball is therefore in Mohun's court, not ours. He must either show that Kliman's counterexample is logically impossible, or concede that the sufficiency theorem has been disproved. To suggest that the theorem does hold true once one ignores the inconvenient ('arbitrary') exceptions is to commit a grave offence against logic. s A properly formulated mathematical theorem is not a pair of designer punk jeans. It is not a ragbag of random exceptions and restrictions assembled for display. It is a coherent sequence of deductions from a definite set of premises, stated before, not after, exceptions have been identified. If Mohun wants to restrict the FMT to 'nonarbitrary' and 'economically possible' cases, there is a proper way to do so. He first needs to concede that the theorem as currently stated is false. Then he can formulate a revised theorem, beginning with a clear definition of 'non-arbitrary' and 'economically possible' circumstances, and ending with a proof that the PNP must be positive under those circumstances. There are strong reasons to doubt that such a theorem is possible. Two examples in Kliman (2003) derive a negative PNP in precisely the manner that Mohun (p. 98) insists upon, and thereby demonstrate that a negative PNP is indeed 'economically possible' in his sense. But even if such a theorem were possible, it would not prove sufficiency nor negate the fact that the NI and SSSI contradict Marx's theory. It would simply clarify their implications.

Mohun's critique of the

TSSI

Mohun (pp. 98-99) claims that the TSSI fails to replicate Marx's profit theory (and for precisely the same reason that the NI and SSSI fail). This claim is founded on a mathematical error. Whenever the PNP is negative, he contends, the temporalist monetary expression of labour time (MELT) must also be

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Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun

negative and, consequently, surplus labour and real profit must have opposite signs. This is incorrect. Mohun has simply misinterpreted the left-hand side (LHS) of his own equation (26):

't(t + 1) pet + 1) ---CCt) = 't(t+ 1)· L(t) 't(t)

(26)

where p is the aggregate price of output, 't is the temporalist MELT, C denotes monetary expenditures on used-up constant capital, and L is living labour. Now Mohun claims that the LHS is the PNP. If that were true, then 't(t + 1) would indeed be negative whenever the PNP is negative (since L is positive). However, the LHS and the PNP are not the same. The LHS equals the temporalist MELT times L, whilst the PNP equals the simultaneist MELT times L. The following example shows that the two MELTs differ and, more importantly, disproves Mohun's claim that the temporalist MELT must be negative whenever the PNP is negative. A single good is produced. Its price p is constant, as are gross output XJ the non-labour input a, and L. Assume that p =x =L = 1, and that a > 1. The PNP is p(x - a) and the simultaneist. MELT is p(x - a)/L . Both equal 1 - a; they are always negative. Yet since px = 1 and c =pa = aJ for all t, (26) becomes

't(t+l») - ( 1) 1----a-'tt+ ( 't(t)

p

=

(26')

Isolating 't(t + 1) on the LHS, we obtain

't(t + 1) = ( 't(t) ) 't(t) + a

, (26")

which shows clearly that if the initial condition 'teO) is positive, then all subsequent values of't must also be positive. Surplus labour and real profit consequently have the same sign. This conclusion holds generally. Kliman (2001: 106-8) proved the following theorem: if PJCJL, and't(O) are positive and finite, then 't must always be positive. 6 It follows that

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surplus labour and real profit, as understood by the TSSI, must always have the same sign. Mohun (p. 99) acknowledges that this theorem is true. Because he misinterprets equation (26), however, he denies that the theorem applies to negativePNP cases. The above example shows that it does apply. Yet Kliman's theorem has also been challenged for another reason. Veneziani (2004: 6, 15) forcefully objects to its premises, claiming that the MELT is 'undefined' and therefore that the positivity of "C(O) is an 'arbitrary assumption'. He even objects to the 'assumption' (without which p and c might be negative) that some prices are positive and none are negative. Mohun, too, calls the premises 'sign restrictions' and 'assumptions' (p. 99) and claims that the MELT is 'undefined' (p. 101) In order to dispose of these objections once and for all, we now prove that the challenged 'sign restrictions' must hold true. Note first that the temporalist MELT is not 'undefined'. As Mohun (p. 94) acknowledges (before contradicting himse1f), it is 'the ratio of total price to total value'. Thus the MELT exists only when value is produced, i.e. only under commodity production. Our first proof therefore presupposes the existence of commodity production. Proof that p > 0, C ~ 0 under commodity production: Commodity production is incompatible with cases in which all prices are zero. Negative prices 'exist' in economic theory only by virtue of a definitional quirk. The statement that trash has a negative price, for example, really means that its 'buyer' is the seller of a positively priced trash collection service. Thus any price that has wrongly been designated 'negative' can be made positive by reinstating the buyer and seller in their correct positions. Hence no prices are negative, and some are positive under commodity production. And since inputs and gross outputs cannot be negative, and some outputs must be positive under commodity production, it follows that p > 0 and c ~ o. Proof that the temporalist MELT is initially positive and finite: By definition, the price of any item-whether commodity or other asset-equals "C times the amount of labour the item commands in exchange. Also by definition, the 'price' of a unit of money equals 1. On any date arbitrarily selected as the 'initial' one, a unit of money commanded a positive and finite amount of labour-one could buy a finite amount of

Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun products of labour with it. Hence t was initially positive and finite as well. It might be argued that money did not initially command any labour that counted as value, since the products in existence at the start of commodity production were not produced as commodities. Under this interpretation of Marx's theory, the inputs employed at the start of commodity production did not transfer value to the products produced. Hence the total value of commodities (in terms of labour time) was at first just the living labour extracted, a positive quantity. As demonstrated above, total price was also positive. Hence the initial MELT, the ratio oftotal price to total value, was positive as well.

Conclusion: Once again on replication

In his conclusion, Mohun states that the TSSI is no better than simultaneist interpretations at replicating Marx's theoretical conclusions (p. 100). This note has demonstrated, on the contrary, that the TSSI succeeds in replicating Marx's profit theory whilst the simultaneist interpretations fail. There are many other cases like this, and none in which a simultaneist interpretation replicates Marx whilst the TSSI fails. Two points remain to be addressed, both of which pertain to Mohun's inconsistent application of the criterion of replication. His embrace of the criterion is a crucial step that opens the way to a constructive dialogue. Consistent application of the criterion would clear still more debris from the path thus opened. First, Mohun seems to suggest that one may legitimately reject the TSSI in favour of other exegetical interpretations, even though it replicates Marx's conclusions but they do not. He implies that the TSSI is unacceptable because it understands Marx's concept of value 'differently from how it is conventionally understood' (p. 93, emphasis in original)as if conformance to conventional wisdom, not an interpretation's ability to deduce the author's theoretical conclusions, were the test of its adequacy. For instance, when Mohun notes that the TSSI'S critics will not be convinced by the proof that it conforms to Marx's profit theory because they would not accept its 'definition of value' (p. 98), he seems to see nothing wrong with that attitude. 7 But what

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would he think of Einstein's critics, who refused to be convinced by the general theory of relativity because they rejected its 'definition of time'? Did this constitute a refutation of his theory? It is unscientific and dogmatic to demand that an interpretation or theory convince its critics. All new interpretations and theories challenge received definitions. The only way to prevent those who control the journals-and, behind them, those who fund the graduate schools-from dictating what is 'true' and 'false', 'natural' and 'arbitrary', is to accept and consistently apply a clear, evidence-based criterion of decidability. Secondly, having incorrectly concluded that the criterion of replication yields indecisive results, Mohun argues that the decisive issue is which of the different 'variants of Marxism' (p. 101) offer a 'coherent theory for today's world' (p. 100). The TSSI is not among them, since 'it is only an interpretation', not a theory in its own right (p. 100). But this comparison ignores the most important variant of Marxism-the Marxism of Marx. When interpreted in accordance with the TS~I, Marx's own theory is logically coherent, and an alternative to the simultaneist revisions of his theory. Consequently, 'One may now in good conscience turn directly to Capital, unencumbered by others' "corrections" of its alleged errors, in order to help analyze and understand the world in which we live' (Kliman, 2001: IIO). This is not, we repeat for the nth time, a claim that Marx is necessarily right. It is, however, a disproof of the false allegation that has stymied progress throughout economics for most of the last century-that Marx is necessarily wrong. The real issue, which Mohun simply ignores, is whether the explanatory power of Capital is surpassed or even rivalled by any variant of simultaneist Marxism. Dozens of simultaneist authors have incorrectly claimed that their models replicate Marx's profit theory, and that they have proved his work to be internally inconsistent in other respects. The TSSI has shown that they are simply wrong. The inconsistencies lie not in Marx, but in their own work. Thus the real issue is, and remains, that economics, including Marxist economics above all, will never evolve a 'coherent theory for today's world' as long as it persistently, wilfully and theologically rules out of court, against all the

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Replicating Marx: A reply to Mohun

evidence, the most coherent theory so far available to itthat of Karl Marx.

Acknowledgement We have benefited greatly, in the preparation of this paper, from discussions with Aldo Fabian Balardini, Andy Brown, and Simon Mohun.

Notes I. Space limitations prevent us from responding to all of Mohun's errors, especially his misunderstandings of the TSSI.

Mohun (2003: 97). Hereafter, we reference this paper by page number only. 3. In the remainder of this section, 'surplus labour' and 'profit' refer exclusively to the NI-SSSI definitions of these terms unless otherwise indicated. 4. It is far less likely that the aggregate price of the physical surplus-the PNP minus wages-will be positive. If it is negative, then so is profit as defined by the standard interpretation, even when surplus labour is positive. 5. The TSSI'S critics used the same tactic when attempting to dismiss our refutations of the Okishio theorem (see Freeman & Kliman, 2000: 245-47). 6. The proof also goes through when c O. Note also that any time can be chosen as time O. Thus if the MELT is positive at any time, it must be positive forever after. 7. Mohun also complains that Kliman succeeded in proving that the TSSI replicates Marx's profit theory only because he made use of two 'assumptions' (p. 2). Yet the 'assumptions'-that values and prices are determined temporally and as a single system-are the TSSI. The complaint that Kliman proved that the TSSI replicates Marx's profit theory only because he made use of the TSSI is, therefore, tautological. 2.

=

References Freeman, A. & A. K1iman (2000) 'Two concepts of value, two rates of profit, two laws of motion' in Research in Political Economy, no. 18. K1iman, A. (2001) 'Simultaneous valuation vs. the exploitation

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theory of profit' in Capital & Class, no. 73, Spring. Kliman, A. (2002) 'Stigler and Barkai on Ricardo's profit rate theory: Some methodological considerations thirty-five years later', presented at the Eastern Economic Association meetings, Boston, 15 March. Kliman, A. 2003 'Deriving a negative PNP', online at . Marx, K. (1894 [1981]) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III (Penguin). • Mohun, S. (2003) 'On the TSSI and the exploitation theory of profit' in Capital & Class, no. 81, Autumn, pp. 85- 102 . Veneziani, R. (2004) 'The temporal single-system interpretation of Marx's economics: A critical evaluation' in Metroeconomica vol. 55, no. I, PP·96-II4·

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Book Reviews

BOOKS Daniele Archibugi (ed.)

Debating Cosmopolitics Verso, 2003, 288 pp. ISBN

1-859-84437-5 (pbk) £14

ISBN

1-859-84505-3 (hbk) £40

A Polemic by Robert Fine

Cosmopolitanism has its faults, but it is far superior to anti-cosmopolitanism. That would be my formulation of the message conveyed by this collection, edited by Daniele Archibugi, who is one of the most imaginative and radical proponents of the new cosmopolitanism. Archibugi sets the scene with a paper on 'cosmopolitical democracy', which first appeared in 2000 in New Left Review. Here he makes the case that, while democracy has achieved substantial gains within states, it has made no such gains between states in the international arena. Rejecting attempts within international relations theory to justify the absence of democracy in the international field, he calls for the extension and application of principles of democracy internationally. It is this essentially normative project that Archibugi calls 'cosmopolitical democracy'. Archibugi makes a brief stab here at giving content to this idea. It does not mean that existing states must be

dissolved, or that a world government must be established. It does not mean exporting democracy by force. Its principle is that democracy needs to be realised outside as well as within states, and that institutional mechanisms should be established in order to involve world citizens in opinion-formation and decision-making on matters of universal interest. In practical terms, this might include the internationalisation of political parties and social movements; the formation of a world parliament and assemblies of civil society associations; the consolidation of international courts, including the International Criminal Court; the extension of human rights legislation; and the re1ativising of state sovereignty in international law. It also includes the elaboration of coherent, cosmopolitan principles on the use of military force for humanitarian purposes, such as for the prevention of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity.

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Archibugi's paper is only a few pages long and functions, as it were, to advertise a position elaborated at much greater length in a series of works on cosmopolitan democracy written with David Held and other collaborators. This shorter paper was enough, however, to have provoked a number of critical responses in New Left Review, which have been collected in this volume. The volume also contains other critical pieces on the limits of cosmopolitanism, as well as papers defending the overall project. There is a genuine sense of debate in the book, and most of the papers are short and well worthy of inclusion. For reasons of economy I shall focus, in this review, on what I call the standpoint or outlook of 'anticosmopolitanism' that this collection, in part, contains. Geoffrey Hawthorne is one of several writers who emphasise the naivete of the cosmopolitan vision. He focuses on Archibugi's conception of a parallel series of democratic institutions, such as a people's assembly or a forum of civil society associations, designed to enable the voices of individuals to be heard in global affairs irrespective of their resonance at home. Hawthorne expresses astonishment that in his conception of cosmopolitan order, Archibugi still finds a place for political parties ('machines which cannot do without discipline'), and he derides his cosmopolitical agenda either for its toothlessness (assemblies may ask but none need listen) or for 'its power-hunger (a world state in everything but name, against which there would be no countervailing authority). These objections are unconvincing. The instant disparagement of political parties does no more than express the failure of contemporary political philosophy to have anything serious to say about this

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major mediating institution' of modern democracy. And we do not have to be protagonists of deliberative democracy to see that this 'either-or' rendition of popular assemblies evaporates civil society as a sphere of communication, opinion-formation and influence between the individual and the state. The more positive case I find in Hawthorne has to do with the continued relevance of state formation in some parts of the modern world. Today, he argues, many states are barely able to exercise control over their own territory or ensure the security of their own citizens, and it is this collapse of statehood that poses the most fundamental of contemporary political problems. For Hawthorne, the key question is: how are failed and failing states to be re-formed? His negative article of faith is that states cannot be repaired through military interventions. He is particularly sceptical about liberals who claim the right to use force in the name of humanity. Preferring to avoid all talk of power, they speak instead of ethics, and forget that power is the most basic condition of state formation. Hawthorne concedes that there is no sure answer to the questions he raises; but he, in turn, seems to forget that responsibility is attached to power-a responsibility, for instance, to use or at least consider using force in order to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity. A case can be made that the historical condition of state formation has often been that of killing or expelling unwanted groups but, of course, inaction in the face of such atrocity cannot be justified in the name of state formation. On the other hand, is it always and necessarily true-as he claims-that military force cannot be a catalyst for state formation? There are plenty of examples of unsuccessful

Book Reviews

attempts to impose a modern state by force: the failed Russian effort in Afghanistan comes to mind, and one can only wonder at the current American effort to do the same. There is surely an argument, however, that the military occupations ofjapan and West Germany after the Second World War succeeded in forming or re-forming modern states after the catastrophic decline of these nations into totalitarianism. The question needs further investigation. Hawthorne is in favour of bilateral institutions in which governments talk rather than go to war. He is in favour of international courts, even though he does not see them as institutions for democracy. He is in favour of NGOS like Amnesty International, Oxfam, Greenpeace and Medecins Sans Frontieres, even though he says they represent nobody but themselves. He is in favour of resistance to the erosion of political life in nominally democratic nation states, even if he does not think that cosmopolitan democracy offers a way of so doing. All said and done, he and Archibugi are, in practice, not so far apart. I am not so sure that this is true of David Chandler. He speaks with the confident voice of an established Left tradition. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, he declares, was a clear breach of international law. The limitation of sovereignty for some states (Yugoslavia and Iraq) is the right to intervene at will for others (the us and its coalition partners). The new interventionism is his target. He argues that it is a throwback to a time when state sovereignty was the privilege of the few, and that it indicates the right of powerful states to use force against the less powerful. For Chandler, it is an attack on the principle of sovereign equality, which was introduced after 1945 thanks

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to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power, the spread of nationalliberation struggles, and inter-imperialist rivalries between the old European empires and the us. Chandler's argument rests on the view that the post-war international settlement represented an acceptance by the great powers, however hypocritically, of a law-bound international system whose abiding principle was that of non-intervention. It is interesting to note what this surprisingly rose-tinted view of the past does not address: for example, whether it permitted the us and the USSR the licence to mistreat subjects as they pleased within their own 'spheres of influence'; or whether it encouraged new rulers of ex-colonial countries to reject criticism of their mistreatment of minorities as unwarranted interference in their internal affairs. In any event, it would seem that the main function of Chandler's reconstruction of the post-war settlement is to serve as a counterpoint to the new interventionism. The 'before' of sovereign equality is there as a backdrop to the 'ferocious attack' he now sees launched against even this mild form of international regulation, and which he associates with cosmopolitanism. Chandler launches his own attack on the appeal to human rights in order to justify humanitarian military intervention, and reserves his severest criticism for the doctrine that there can be a duty of intervention even without the formal authorisation of the UN. He sees the appeal to 'international justice' in this instance as the official umbrella under which an attack on international law is being launched by big powers, and holds Archibugi and his fellow-spirits to account for helping to weaken the legal principle of state sovereignty. Yet

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Chandler does not engage with the problems to which cosmopolitical democracy is a response. The right or duty of humanitarian military intervention is raised by cosmopolitans in the context of serious violations of humanitarian law; that is, when other people are being slaughtered or expelled by their own rulers. Cosmopolitans argue that there ought to be some mechanism in international law for deciding when military interventions are justified in order to prevent such slaughters, who has the right to authorise them, and what means of warfare they have a right to use. Within this general framework, there is plenty of room for disagreement. Some argue above all for procedural regularity at the level of the UN. Others maintain that in the absence of effective international law, there is a responsibility on those with power to stop genocides, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, notwithstanding a failure of the UN to act. The failure of the UN to intervene in order to stop the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda or crimes against humanity in Bosnia is a classic case in point. These are tricky issues to resolve, and necessarily involve a good sense of judgement in and of particular situations; but Chandler simply fails to mention the circumstances that lead cosmopolitans to consider the ethics of intervention, and thereby to question the principle of absolute state sovereignty. Chandler sees cosmopolitical democracy as an ideology of power, and not as a resistance to the abuse of power. His point of reference is the power of the US, rather than the fate of people who live in weaker despotic states. This reflex is most apparent in his attack on the Hague tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. He declares that the

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impartiality of the tribunal is a farce because it prosecutes Milosevic and other ethnic commanders from the former Yugoslavia, but not the NATO commanders who made military targets of civilian institutions. This is a similar criticism to that which has often been made of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after 1945 (which excluded in principle any crimes committed by the victorious allies). But in neither case can we say that the prosecution in a court of law of state officials and officers accused of authorising or conducting terrible atrocities is tantamount, as Chandler puts it, to the ore-legitimation of the right of the great powers to practice what violence they please', or to 'a return to the Westphalian system of open great power domination over states which are too weak to prevent external claims against them'. Notwithstanding the immunity of the victors from prosecution, the whole point of such tribunals is that military victory is tempered by a visible sense of legal justice. Tim Brennan, a leading voice in critical cultural studies in the US, follows suit by splitting internationalism from cosmopolitanism. They are not just incompatible, he writes: they are opposites. Internationalism expresses global relations of respect and cooperation based on acceptance of differences in polity as well as culture. It suppons national sovereignty since under modem conditions, there is no other way to secure respect for weaker societies. It is the ideology of the domestically restricted, the provisionally exiled, and' the temporarily weak. Cosmopolitanism may be 'well intentioned', but its ideal of an allencompassing global structure expresses the comfonable culture of middle-class travellers, intellectuals and business-

Book Reviews

men. It offers a euphoric vision of a world federation based on peaceful rivalry of trade, but its content is neoliberal. Brennan invokes the names of Simmel and Gramsci in order to underwrite his conviction that cosmopolitanism is an imperial ideology embraced by middle-class intellectuals as an idealist detour from internationalism. The splitting of internationalism and cosmopolitanism is a device to put all that is good and critical on one side, and all that is bad and uncritical on the other; but these conceptual shenanigans do little to address the real history of either internationalism or cosmopolitanism. Let us not forget that in its official incarnation, internationalism often meant little more than the demand that communists worldwide follow Soviet foreign policy through all its abrupt twists and turns. Nor let us forget that official communists were prone to use 'cosmopolitanism' as a term of abuse, as in the phrase 'rootless, cosmopolitan Jew'. Of course, Brennan would not go down this road; but he identifies cosmopolitanism with Pax Americana dressed up in the cloth of international law. He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over crimes against humanity, and cosmopolitan designs to establish a better legal framework for prosecuting perpetrators, by referring to them merely as 'fear-mongering cameos of "tribal" blood-letting in barbaric backlands' (p. 46). He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over the subordination of the nation state to globalising market forces when he refers to cosmopolitan prescriptions merely as an agenda for surveillance, repression and control. He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over the absolutism of national sovereignty when he refers to them as an attack on the capacity of 'indigenous peoples to

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draw a boundary between what is theirs and what lies beyond'. Such dialectical acrobatics serve to translate cosmopolitics from a form of radicalism to an intonation of power; but it indicates how easily the act of 'splitting' can hinder genuine understanding of the phenomenon in question. One of Brennan's key arguments is that cosmopolitan democracy only gives succour to those who would replace many states with a world state which, though it may not be explicitly built in the name of an existing power, would factually serve its interests. This theme is taken up by Peter Gowan, who argues that the formation of a supra-state authority, far from exercising jurisdiction over the us, would become its lightly disguised instrument. Gowan includes in this category the United Nations and the UN war crimes tribunal, as well as the IMF, the WTO and possibly even the EU. In every case, he argues, there is an asymmetrical relation between the uses ,of law as an instrument of us policy and the claimed exemption of the us from the jurisdiction of law. In this 'empire of civil society', sovereign states may well remain the cornerstone of the world order; but their political role now becomes that of maintaining political control over their populations while opening their domestic economies to us interests. Thus the more established liberal democracies follow a broadly neoliberal agenda of privatisation, removal of state regulation, decontrol of financial flows, conversion of political demands into rights-claims, the sacralisation of property rights, the downsizing of public administration, the discrediting of politicians in favour of entrepreneurs, etc.; while in the periphery, murderous social tensions erupt under the weight of the contradictions

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to which governments are subjected. For Gowan, the cosmopolitan dream of uniting humanity on the basis of global citizenry and universal human rights is a self-deception, since no scheme for universal harmony can work if it fails to confront the social relations of actually existing capitalism. Gowan traces the new cosmopolitanism back to the old Anglo-American tradition ofliberal internationalism, with its vision of a human race peacefully united by free trade and common legal norms. He argues that what is new is that national sovereignty is re-conceived as a 'conditional licence, granted by the "international community", which can be withdrawn should any state fail to meet the domestic or foreign standards laid down by the requirements of liberal governance' (p. 52). Where necessary, the right of military intervention may be invoked in order to impose the order of empire. For Gowan, this represents a sea change in international relations-not from power politics to world peace, but rather to the formation of aggressive military alliances based on the global dominance of the us. He condemns what he reads as the cosmopolitan apologia for the American-led war in Yugoslavia-that it was a disinterested rescue mission for human rights, free of any power-political consideration-and argues that it is inferior to realist accounts, even that advanced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, which extol the scope and pervasiveness of American global power. For Gowan, the proof lies in the exception: in strategic backwaters in which no strategic interests are at stake, as in Rwanda, genocide can be countenanced; where key strategic interests are at stake, as in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia, the most brutal

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regimes are protected from humanrights pressures. Gowan's argument brings to the fore the relation between cosmopolitanism and state policy. It was a disgrace that the western powers did not act to prevent genocide in Rwanda, but cosmopolitans have been relentless critics of this inaction, galvanised by disgust at the vast gap between the values the West professes and its own inactions. The strategic support, by the us, of certain states has certainly served to insulate them from human-rights pressures; but cosmopolitans have stood for the universal application of human rights notwithstanding strategic alliances. Even liberal cosmopolitanism stands in opposition to many of the policies pursued by western powers. The more substantial question, though, is whether inconsistency in the application of universal norms necessarily invalidates their application in any particular instance. Without prejudging the claim advanced by many on the Left that the Americans ought to be prosecuted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, does the fact that the us government refuses to allow Americans to be prosecuted under international criminal law mean that the prosecution of Serbian and Croatian criminals is illegitimate? To put the matter another way, does the fact that one alleged murderer gains exemption from prosecution mean that another ought not to be prosecuted? There is every need for a critique of international criminal tribunals on the grounds of their inconsistency; but to infer that this invalidates these tribunals leaves no way forward. All law is a form of power. All law presupposes the power to make law, interpret law and enforce law. Let us take

Book Reviews

it as read that the military intervention in Yugoslavia was not a disinterested rescue mission for human rights, free of any power-political consideration. Let us take it as read that amongst its various functions was the assertion of us military might. The question still remains: does this invalidate cosmopolitan justifications for military intervention in this instance? The answer to that question hangs on whether this military intervention was required in order to prevent ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity; whether it was a last resort; whether the criterion of effectiveness was met, and so forth. Of course, the facts of the case are contended; but it would be a strange expression of international solidarity if one were to leave the victims of ethnic cleansers to their fate on the grounds that the first and only duty of antiimperialism is to oppose the exercise of us power, come what may. Nadia Urbinati offers, to my mind, an intelligent consideration of these issues. She is at pains to give the cosmopolitan idea its due. She acknowledges that it expresses an aspiration for global justice and the universalisation of human rights; that it offers a political response to globalisation; and that it represents a refusal of politics to capitulate in the face of global economic forces. She characterises the principle of Kant's perpetual peace as the containment of political power. The aspiration it expresses is to transform political power from might to right by establishing certain international judicial institutions, and by recognising certain pre-political civil rights beyond which no nation state can exercise its sovereignty. She maintains that this was a project of liberty, and that the legal integration of states was

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conceIved as a long-term project based first and foremost on the transformation of individual states into republics. In its specifically European incarnation, she argues that the new cosmopolitanism elaborated by Jiirgen Habermas under the title 'postnational constellation' takes up the mantle of the cosmopolitan outlook of 1945: that the defeat of Nazism could not be total if it was only military, and that it had also to seek justice and install the rule of law if it was to achieve legitimacy. Habermas's perspective is that of consolidating a multi-layered, postnational Europe, and though he has energetically opposed the war in Iraq, he supported-with qualifications-the military intervention in Yugoslavia. Urbinati's criticisms are more focused. Under the title 'Can cosmopolitical democracy be democratic?' she questions the cogency and desirability of making the cosmos into a democratic political space, and argues that the cosmopolitan vision as developed by Held and Archibugi is misconceived. As do other critics, she sees it as a centralising and unifying project based on the formation of a supranational political body endowed with powers of legislation, adjudication, administration and coercion/enforcement. She maintains that its commitment is to world citizenship independent of the mediation of states, to a world parliament, to a world executive organ (a reformed UN Security Council), to world courts (like the International Criminal Court), and to a world police and military force empowered to compel members to comply with basic human rights norms. For Urbiriati, 'cosmopolitical democracy' is a commitment to a world state in all but name, and is deaf to Kant's warnings about the despotic potential of world government. Its critique of the

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sovereign nation state bypasses' those revolutions in which states were transformed first into constitutional democracies and then into welfare states. It buys the myth of sovereignty as all-powerful and absolute, when in fact it has always been inseparable from the grammar of inter-national norms and from the presence of other states, which limit state sovereignty. It imports into its idea of a cosmopolitan order all the vices that have long plagued the modern state, and legitimates the formation of a singular, powerful and distant political elite. I would reserve judgement on the view that 'cosmopolitical democracy' is a prescription for a world state that won't speak its name. This may be one of its possible readings, but it is explicitly opposed by Held and Archibugi, and contrary to their stated intentions. In any event, unlike many critics of cosmopolitanism, Urbinati does not speak in the name of a restored realism, a Leftist version of Schmittian neorealism or an ethically stripped antiimperialism. She speaks of a decentralised global network of associations, interest groups and international institutions, which together comprise a system of governance rather than government, and are based on coordinated policies and activities rather than on a binding decision-making structure. The strength of this perspective lies in its recognition that civil society can bring issues of public concern to the top of the

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international agenda, and influence otherwise resistant representative bodies by turning to international support and transnational advocacy networks. Yet civil society associations arise out of the same political economy as other inter-national institutions, they are subject to the same pressures of cooptation by powerful interests, and their own policy-making structures are often just as remote from the deliberations of representative bodies. Within nation states, democratic legitimacy normally comprises two moments; formal processes of democratic will-formation in representative bodies, and informal processes of opinion-formation within civil society. If formal procedures are not to become detached from public life, there must be scope for creative inter-action between the two spheres. Civil society takes on quite another meaning if it is converted from being one element of a two-track theory of democracy into being a single track. So to sum up: the lesson I would take from the various contributions collected in this book is not to reject cosmopolitanism, but to relocate it as a multifaceted research project in need of further elaboration. There is much more to be said; but I hope I have written enough to show that this volume lives up to its title of Debating Cosmopolitics, and that it raises the problem of anticosmopolitanism as sharply as it raises that of cosmopolitanism itself.

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Book Reviews

John Michael Roberts

The Aesthetics of Free Speech: Rethinking the Public Sphere Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 288 pp. ISBN

1-403-90566-5 (hbk) £52.50

Reviewed by Mark Neocleous This is a book about people speaking to one another in public spaces. In particular, it is about the ways in which people speak to one another politically: how they speak about rights, liberties and freedoms. The book therefore isolates one form of freedom, namely free speech, as one of the determining moments of the capitalist public sphere. At the same time, however, the book also aims to identify and examine a judgemental aesthetic about what counts as 'good' or 'reasonable' discussion, therefore appropriate for expression in the public sphere. In doing so, the book contains an engaging reading of several key thinkers who have grappled with questions of free speech; offers a Marxist argument concerning the public sphere and free speech; and suggests ways in which we might go about thinking through the idea of a proletarian public sphere. Roberts seeks to abstract the capitalist form of free speech and the public sphere. This amounts to a critical interrogation of several related themes and tendencies, which merge into one another. The argument is that the public sphere under capitalism assumes a particular ideological form unique to capitalism. In so doing, the public sphere internalises both the identity of the reproduction of capitalism-by refracting the reproduction of capitalism-and the contradictions of capitalism, in its

own unique way. The contradictions of the capitalist public sphere reproduce themselves at various levels of abstraction, one of which is the alienated form of free speech that it generates. Finally, attached to the contradictions internalised by free speech and the public sphere is an 'aesthetic' of what counts as reasonable discussion. In part, Roberts's counter-example is historical: he has in mind the kind of public sphere invoked by many of the Levellers, in which one of the main objects for discussion was a radical reconceptualisation of the state form. In other words, it was a conception of a public sphere founded on an inclusive democracy, and thus a democratisation of state power. Thus the Putney Debates tell us something about the conflicting demands of liberty found within both proletarian and bourgeois public spheres. This conflict takes up the bulk of the book. As is well known, the classic ploy in liberal theory is to denigrate popular arguments for an extension of democratic rights, and Roberts explores the way that this denigration functions as an integral ideological form of the bourgeois public sphere. He does so via a critique of liberal political thinking on the public sphere, in the writings of Kant, Mill and Habermas. Each of these writers, although in different ways, contributes to the defence of a certain aesthetic form of

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the public sphere-a defence that both explicitly and implicitly suggests that only those who have a 'cultivated', 'competent' and 'educated' grasp of the issues up for discussion should have the freedom to be heard. Certain 'accents' cannot be heard; certain voices must remain silent; the mob needs to be quelled. Thus Roberts examines the way in which liberal theory simultaneously argues for the inclusion of each person into the public sphere, and yet pushes for the exclusion of certain people from that same sphere. Kant does this at an abstract level, declaring that those who engage in the lawless use of reason will forfeit their freedom of thought, and thereby encouraging an outlook that denigrates and humiliates everyday popular sensibility. Mill does this at a concrete level, extending Kant's exclusionary tactics into a defence of the regulatory form of the liberal capitalist state. And Habermas manages to synthesise both through an abstract and concrete discussion of the 'cultivated personality'. Each of these discussions is interesting; and through the discussions, Roberts builds a convincing critique of the liberal aesthetics of free speech. There are some peculiarities of the critique with which one might quibble-indeed, working through these peculiarities might have made the critique even more successful. For example, Roberts claims that Mill is not interested in setting out an argument for democracy per se, but rather is interested in setting out the prerequisites for a robust liberal democracy. But Roberts might have made his argument stronger by arguing that Mill is not engaged in a defence of any kind of democracy-even a liberal one. On a number of grounds, Mill is clearly an

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anti-democrat: on the grounds that the liberty of individuals overrides the demands of the majority; on the grounds that the poor should have things regulated for them but not by them; through his argument that a system of plural voting is necessary in order to ensure that the cultivated elite retains power; and through his argument for representative government rather than representative democracy. All told, however, Roberts convincingly draws out and challenges the liberal aesthetics of free speech. The argument might perhaps have been more convincing with more concrete applications. The book takes interesting turns here and there, for example in the discussion of publicprivate partnerships, but these are few and far between. 1 also have the sense that, for strategic reasons, the Bakhtinian mode of analysis should perhaps have been played mezzo rather than/orte. The extended discussions of Bakhtin in the earlier chapters might well have the effect of turning away some of the nonMarxists who really could do with reading this book; and the ammunition taken from Bakhtin might have been more effective had it been introduced gradually and more subtly. (There's almost a sense in which Roberts's use of Bakhtin seeks to replicate the openness of the bourgeois public sphere, in a kind of 'I must be open and honest about where this argument is coming from'. It might have been more fun-both to write and to read-if Bakhtin had been made to perform more of an underground role, underpinning the argument and appearing on a few rare but telling occasions.) 1 also found some aspects of the final chapter, in which the distinction between the proletarian public sphere

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Book Reviews

and the bourgeois public sphere is argued for at length, rather unconvincing. In an interesting argu-ment, Roberts seeks to derive the capitalist form of free speech from the commodity form. All well and good. But his argument concerning the proletarian public sphere turns into an account of the 'proletarian-personality'. The proletarian public sphere seems to rest

on this proletarian-personality, and is a sphere that reaches out to a 'communist-personality'. But this argument really isn't fleshed out in a convincing way and, perhaps surprisingly, rests on a decidedly uncritical appropriation of the term 'personality'. I doubt whether the proletarian public sphere really needs to be founded on an idea that is so central to bourgeois law and ideology.

Beniamin Shepard & Ronald Hayduk (eds.)

From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalisation Verso, 2002, xii +429 pp. ISBN: 1-859-84356-5 (pbk) £15 ISBN: 1-859-84653-X (hbk) £45

Reviewed by David Layfield This fascinating collection of short essays guides the reader through the growth of urban protest in 1990S USA. It spans the period from the emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987 to the 'Battle of Seattle' in December 1999. In the foreword, Eric Rofes describes his need for a new resource with which to teach a New Social Movements university course and, he explains, this wealth of accounts and analyses of the new activism was the result. It fulfils its role admirably, and, as such, would make ideal reading for any teachers and students studying new social movements and the contemporary anti-globalisation/anticapitalist/global justice movement. The volume is in five sections, with introductory and concluding essays by the editors. Part I is concerned with

'Global proclivities and the new social movements', linking labour, migrant and human-rights struggles, and exploring ties between local problems and global power relations. Part II is about 'Sex, social justice and the new queer community organising', which is described as a battle for sexual selfdetermination. Part III, entitled 'Public versus private spaces, battlegrounds and movements', describes the privatisation and commodification of urban public space. In Part IV, 'Media and the new social movements', the focus is on activists' use of media old and new, from attention-grabbing stunts to filming police activity. The last part is 'Race, poverty and world making', exploring new alliances between ethnicminority and working-class struggles. Each section comprises an introduction

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Book Reviews

and the bourgeois public sphere is argued for at length, rather unconvincing. In an interesting argu-ment, Roberts seeks to derive the capitalist form of free speech from the commodity form. All well and good. But his argument concerning the proletarian public sphere turns into an account of the 'proletarian-personality'. The proletarian public sphere seems to rest

on this proletarian-personality, and is a sphere that reaches out to a 'communist-personality'. But this argument really isn't fleshed out in a convincing way and, perhaps surprisingly, rests on a decidedly uncritical appropriation of the term 'personality'. I doubt whether the proletarian public sphere really needs to be founded on an idea that is so central to bourgeois law and ideology.

Beniamin Shepard & Ronald Hayduk (eds.)

From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalisation Verso, 2002, xii +429 pp. ISBN: 1-859-84356-5 (pbk) £15 ISBN: 1-859-84653-X (hbk) £45

Reviewed by David Layfield This fascinating collection of short essays guides the reader through the growth of urban protest in 1990S USA. It spans the period from the emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987 to the 'Battle of Seattle' in December 1999. In the foreword, Eric Rofes describes his need for a new resource with which to teach a New Social Movements university course and, he explains, this wealth of accounts and analyses of the new activism was the result. It fulfils its role admirably, and, as such, would make ideal reading for any teachers and students studying new social movements and the contemporary anti-globalisation/anticapitalist/global justice movement. The volume is in five sections, with introductory and concluding essays by the editors. Part I is concerned with

'Global proclivities and the new social movements', linking labour, migrant and human-rights struggles, and exploring ties between local problems and global power relations. Part II is about 'Sex, social justice and the new queer community organising', which is described as a battle for sexual selfdetermination. Part III, entitled 'Public versus private spaces, battlegrounds and movements', describes the privatisation and commodification of urban public space. In Part IV, 'Media and the new social movements', the focus is on activists' use of media old and new, from attention-grabbing stunts to filming police activity. The last part is 'Race, poverty and world making', exploring new alliances between ethnicminority and working-class struggles. Each section comprises an introduction

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followed by short essays by aCtlVlsts describing activities, protests and tactics, and by others discussing the theoretical background to, and wider understanding of, these activities. The essays by organisers and activists offer accounts of personal motivation, of experience, of organisation and alliance-building, and of repertoires of action developed through experience, experiment and intention. They also offer eyewitness accounts of legal challenges and police responses to demonstrations and activities. As well as this, they reproduce many of the flyers and posters used by activists, and include photographs of events. The more contextual, theoretical and analytical essays range across a wide variety of traditions, from new social movement theories through to queer theory, socialism, anarchism and contemporary ideas of global justice. If the book has a weakness, then this is probably it: what the reader gains is an all-too-brief survey of these theories, alongside a similarly all-too-brief discussion of their social context. Given the book's stated role and target readership, this is not, however, a serious flaw. Furthermore, common themes are easy to fmd with which to link apparently diverse movements together, and the editors readily suggest the themes they take to be important. In their introduction, for example, the editors claim that 'the new activism grows from and responds to four key factors-globalisation, shifting boundaries between public and private space, demographic change, and income inequality-all of which have transformed the landscape in which the new social movements operate' (p. 2). This transformed landscape is one of increasing mobility of capital, the con-

Capital & Class #88

centration of wealth, and the transfer of wealth from public to private hands through privatisation. Another theme that emerges from reading the collection is that of the dilemmas faced by many movements concerning their role, and the question of whether they are inside or outside the system. In the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) movement, Liz Highleyman argues that some see their movement as a single-issue lobby, while others see it as part of a wider, anticapitalist struggle (pp. 106-121). This dilemma also exists for community activism, discussed in the final part of the collection. In the us context, Randy Stoecker highlights a tension between 'community development corporations' and traditional, grassroots, often radical, community organising. The former pursue econo-mic development by integrating communities into the mainstream economy, while the latter tries to build grassroots social movements with the objective of gaining more radical transformation in social conditions. Tensions arise as 'people's need for a transformed economy providing a wealth of good jobs becomes replaced with training programs for people to compete within an extremely limited good-job pool' (p. 381). Another theme that emerges concerns the ways in which personal experience helps to make wider connections between individual concerns and the global economy. The activists often take the reader on a personal journey, highlighting, for example, the way becoming HIV positive raised awareness of social justice, corporate power and the relations between First and Third worlds. Eric Sawyer, for example, begins

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Book Reviews

his contribution by saying that 'I have been living with HIV for a very long time. Twenty years have passed since ... I developed shingles, my first HIV related symptom' (p. 88). Sawyer describes his role in founding ACT UP, and how the search for treatment brought him face-to-face with pharmaceutical corporations. His experience with drug comp-anies also brought him face-to-face with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the fact that patent protection and current licensing mean many in the Third world are denied access to effective treatment for HIV. As a result of activities like this, Sawyer thinks, 'the issue of drug pricing and access has become a world-class moral cause, and large numbers of people have come to agree that sen-

tencing poor people to death to protect drug patents is not acceptable' (p. 100). Similar stories and connections emerge in other contexts too. Concerned students, for example, traced out the supply routes and networks of subcontractors supplying college-logo clothing. Student organisations made visits to sweatshops in east Asia in order to see conditions for themselves. Such activities proved educational, as they 'refuted the claim that there is no alternative to market-disciplined low wages, drawing attention to both the tiny share of the retail price that goes to workers' wages and the high salaries of corporate executives' (pp. 74-81). This is an important and useful collection, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in new social movements and new forms of protest.

Steven Kettell

The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy· Making: From the Gold Standard to the Euro Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 248 pp. ISBN

1-403-92071-0 (hbk) £47

Reviewed by David Gent The first page of this book argues that the study of exchange-rate policymaking is essential to our understanding of how nation states are integrated into the global economy. It is a task that Open Marxism has particularly warmed to, with important works published by the likes of Peter Burnham and Werner Bonefeld. To these ranks we can now add Steven Kettell, who has produced a thought-provoking analysis that

manages to make an often-soporific subject engaging. The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy-Making covers three case studies: the return to the gold standard in 1925; Britain's membership of the exchange rate mechimism (ERM) in 1990-2; and Britain's proposed entry into the euro. Kettell argues that these are examples of exchange-rate policy-making designed to contain class struggle, favour

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Book Reviews

his contribution by saying that 'I have been living with HIV for a very long time. Twenty years have passed since ... I developed shingles, my first HIV related symptom' (p. 88). Sawyer describes his role in founding ACT UP, and how the search for treatment brought him face-to-face with pharmaceutical corporations. His experience with drug comp-anies also brought him face-to-face with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the fact that patent protection and current licensing mean many in the Third world are denied access to effective treatment for HIV. As a result of activities like this, Sawyer thinks, 'the issue of drug pricing and access has become a world-class moral cause, and large numbers of people have come to agree that sen-

tencing poor people to death to protect drug patents is not acceptable' (p. 100). Similar stories and connections emerge in other contexts too. Concerned students, for example, traced out the supply routes and networks of subcontractors supplying college-logo clothing. Student organisations made visits to sweatshops in east Asia in order to see conditions for themselves. Such activities proved educational, as they 'refuted the claim that there is no alternative to market-disciplined low wages, drawing attention to both the tiny share of the retail price that goes to workers' wages and the high salaries of corporate executives' (pp. 74-81). This is an important and useful collection, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in new social movements and new forms of protest.

Steven Kettell

The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy· Making: From the Gold Standard to the Euro Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 248 pp. ISBN

1-403-92071-0 (hbk) £47

Reviewed by David Gent The first page of this book argues that the study of exchange-rate policymaking is essential to our understanding of how nation states are integrated into the global economy. It is a task that Open Marxism has particularly warmed to, with important works published by the likes of Peter Burnham and Werner Bonefeld. To these ranks we can now add Steven Kettell, who has produced a thought-provoking analysis that

manages to make an often-soporific subject engaging. The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy-Making covers three case studies: the return to the gold standard in 1925; Britain's membership of the exchange rate mechimism (ERM) in 1990-2; and Britain's proposed entry into the euro. Kettell argues that these are examples of exchange-rate policy-making designed to contain class struggle, favour

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capital accumulation, and provide much more political freedom through a depoliticisation of economic policy. Following the Open Marxist tradition, Kettell's aim is to show how important policy developments reflect the limitations imposed on the state by the form of capitalist society. As such, the book argues against conventional approaches to exchange-rate policy analysis that have focused upon the rational choice of actors, the power of interest groups and the structural characteristics of a country's economy. Kettell relates the problems with such approaches to their division of society into public and private spheres, and argues instead for an approach based on a critical analysis of social form. These theoretical themes are brought out in the introductory chapters, although the lay reader will have to take the existence of what Kettell calls the 'conventional narrative' largely on trust. Unfortunately, despite a thoughtful description of the way the capitalist state is constrained by the need to regulate class struggle and ensure the convertibility of its currency, the author covers the crucial issue of how this affects the subjective actions of state managers in just one page. This lets down an otherwise excellent discussion of how a governing strategy of depoliticisation can help state managers achieve their aims. Happily, the book is redeemed somewhat by the historical chapters, which usefully combine theoretical analysis with evidence from primary sources. Like the thesis on which it is based, the book is primarily concerned with the return to the gold standard. This has traditionally been seen as a disastrous attempt to return to a preFirst World War golden age, chiefly

Capital & Class #88

motivated by the liberalism of key policymakers and the power of the City. In contrast, the author positions himself with the revisionists who see the gold standard as a sensible policy designed to resolve the long-term difficulties of the British state. Kettell argues that the gold standard was a strategy designed to provide political and economic discipline and freedom for officials troubled by the politicisation of the economy and by labour radicalism. The history of the return to gold is comprehensively detailed over four chapters. These cover the failure of the initial attempt to impose the gold standard through deflation (which Kettell relates to the government's fear of provoking social unrest); its replacement by a strategy of waiting for us inflation; the return to gold and its depoliticisation of policy-making; and the collapse of the strategy in 1931. The analysis derives merit from drawing attention to the role of class struggle in the return to gold. This enables Kettell both to take account of important preFirstWorldWar developments in political motivations, and to productively explain the often-neglected postponement of the return to gold between 1918 and 19 2 5. The most ambitious (and controversial) claim in the book is that the gold standard was relatively successful in its aims, particularly in terms of depoliticising monetary policy and containing class unrest. This may take revisionist history a little too far: sceptics could plausibly point to increasing demands for changes in tariff, fiscal and social policy that threatened to indirectly undermine monetary policy. Furthermore, the author does not pay sufficient attention to the role that the failure of the General Strike played in

Book Reviews

preventing further class unrest. Nevertheless, the book persuasively draws attention to the political benefits contemporaries derived from the gold standard. The author extends his Open Marxist analysis to Britain's membership of the ERM, arguing that this policy was designed to impose inflationary discipline while also displacing criticism through the strategy of depoliticisation. Again, the author revises assessments of the ERM by suggesting that the policy succeeded in these aims. While this analysis is convincing and suggestive, it is slightly hampered by a lack of the archival evidence that made the author's earlier treatment of the gold standard so rewarding. It is, therefore, all the more puzzling that the author should have included the UK'S potential entry into the euro as one of his case studies. Kettell suggests that the euro's depoliticising aspects would benefit New Labour by imposing antiinflationary discipline and enabling the government to disclaim responsibility for unpopular effects. While this highlights the depoliticised nature of the euro, and provides a useful link between past policy and current affairs, the analysis cannot proceed very far beyond the idea that euro-sceptic British voters will spoil the party by preventing entry. I couldn't help but feel that the author's argument would have been better served by

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selecting an alternative and betterdocumented case. On the whole, however, the book provides a useful development of depoliticisation theory. If! were to make one criticism, it would be of the book's assumption that the primary motivations for policy-making are the provision of favourable conditions for capital accumulation and the containment of class unrest. While this focus yields some valuable insights, it also has a tendency to simplify a complex ideological, political and economic process. The result is that important historical developments potentially consistent with Kettell's theory are ignored. For example, the fear that a mass electorate would enable a socialist government to institute unsound policies, itself partly responsible for the 1931 political and financial crisis, is barely mentioned despite providing the authorities with good grounds for depoliticisation. Disappointingly, despite the focus on class struggle, the author offers no theoretical discussion of how changes in state-labour relations affected the prospects of depoliticisation. Nevertheless, by analysing the limitations imposed on policy-making by the capitalist social form, without abandoning detailed historical research, Kettell offers a blueprint for more extensive studies. This is perhaps the book's greatest strength.

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Aditya Mukheriee

Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, 1920-1947 Sage, 2002, 461 pp.

ISBN: 0-761-99564-1 (hbk) £45

Reviewed by Luis M. Pozo 'This work describes and analyzes the process of the emergence and evolution of the Indian capitalist class and its relationship with imperialism and nationalism, providing simultaneously a comprehensive economic history of colonial India in the first half of the twentieth century' (p. 14). As these (Mukherjee's own) words in the preface attest, the hero in this history is the Indian capitalist class as a 'mature, politically conscious, all-India class' (ibid.). And it is no less than a hero, as we will see below. As a description of a process of class formation, for the variety of sources consulted and the richness of penetrating detail, the book is quite successful, and I doubt that any future intervention on such matters will face the risk of ignoring this work. It is not, however, a 'comprehensive economic history' of the period studied. Except for some interspersed comments, it lacks the usual discussion of structural factors, the weight and evolution of different economic sectors, the path to industrialisation, capital-labour relations, and so on. Besides this, unfortunately, it is unlikely that a casual reader not specifically interested in economic history will find the entire book easily palatable. As an analysis, the work is rather more difficult to assess. Mukherjee's objective is to show how· the Indian capitalist class emerged in the

context of struggles against other classes, 'and (in the context of colonial domination being the central contradiction in Indian society) particularly against the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the colonial state' (p. 19). (In fact, although these conflicts are highlighted throughout the book, and those with foreign capital especially in Chapter 10, struggles with other classes-or what we would properly call class struggles-are not studied.) The consideration of colonialism as the 'central contradiction' of Indian society (pp. 19, 63, 71) sets the tone for the discussion. The author seeks to save the capitalists from the accusations levelled at them by what he calls 'ultra leftists', of being 'subservient', 'dependent' or 'pro-imperialist'; or of being divided into 'national' and 'comprador' factions, thus being too weak and traitorous to be of any help in the task of achieving national liberation. Nothing of the sort happened, Mukherjee contends. He proceeds to show how, through a process of economic and political struggle, the Indian capitalists took advantage of the crisis faced by British imperialism during the two world wars and the Depression in order to increase their hold over the Indian economy, which put them in a much stronger position than other colonial bourgeoisies facing imminent independence. The Indian bourgeoisie,

Book Reviews

showing 'remarkable maturity' (an often-repeated phrase-see pp. 79, 127, 149) was able to set up solid and effective class organisations, especially the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which has existed since 1927. It fought against imperial interests in most sectors of the economy, with big business wresting control from imperial capital in sectors such as shipping, automobiles, locomotives, chemicals and banking, in a process of economic concentration which was an instrument of struggle against imperialism ('big', Mukherjee blissfully comments, 'could also be beautiful', p. 44). He describes the mechanisms by which the colonial authorities sought to secure the exploitation of India through monetary and financial manipulations; the creation of a reserve bank to safeguard British interests (the remittances on account of home charges, the servicing of foreign loans, etc.); tariffs and industrial policy (or rather the lack of it); and the responses of Indian capitalists to all these issues. In all of these responses, it is argued, Indian capital was decidedly anti-socialist, but not pro-imperialis~, as most of the Indian Left has always claimed. Its particularly 'reformist' strategy for overthrowing imperialism was meant to secure the maintenance of capitalism. In order to achieve this, the Indian bourgeoisie consciously adopted the ideology of an 'industrial national bourgeoisie', relied on nationalist leaders to voice their concerns (and it is remarkable in how much they coincided), and hegemonised the national movement, ensuring that the National Congress remained within the parameters of bourgeois ideological hegemony. They ultimately succeeded

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because the Left did not understand that in colonial India, capital was an ally in a common struggle, and there was 'up to a point' (which is never specified) 'a genuine unity of interests between the national bourgeoisie and the rest of society as all of them were oppressed by imperialism' (p. 72). The Left, resorting to crude class reductionism, myopically expected the bourgeoisie to betray the national movement and so was easily cast aside in the fight for hegemony over the masses. 'What the Left needed to do', is the tough verdict, 'was to identify and recognize all the socially positive aspects of the Indian bourgeoisie, and then undertake the difficult and real task of demonstrating why, despite these positive aspects, the bourgeois class perspective was inhibiting or preventing social progress along the most desirable lines' (p. 74). A difficult task indeed! There seems to be here a sort of 'cry wolf' trap. There are quite obvious dangers in letting the masses be assured that the oppressors and exploiters are not that bad-that they have 'positive aspects' (in contrast, the Left-here called 'Stalin-Marxist'-with its characteristic disdain for 'democracy', appears to have none: pp. 415, 438). If the identity of interests between the bourgeoisie and the masses jointly forming 'the nation', is indeed real, if it is not an ideological sham (and Mukherjee is somewhat ambiguous regarding this), one could begin to ask some questions. In what moment does that identity of interests cease to exist, and become a hideous oppression that must be fiercely opposed? Perhaps at the moment of political independence, as if dictated by decree; or maybe it continues forever, as long as the nation exists? How can the Left recognise and salute the heroic achievements of the

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Capital & Class #88

capitalists in their struggle for the common good without risking being discredited for eternity? Is the quarrel between metropolitan and colonial bourgeoisies as socially and historically fundamental as the struggle between exploiters and direct producers? On all of this hinges the question of the 'central contradiction' in colonial societies and its theoretical and empirical status. We may see the use of labour legislation as a case in point. Mukherjee mentions that the colonial authorities sought to hamper Indian industrialisation by enacting labour legislation, thus inhibiting the comparative advantage of lower labour costs. He notes bitterly that labour protection was 'of course' the last thing that was likely to aid India in its industrialisation; and he concedes, in a footnote, that nationalists since the nineteenth century, like capitalists in the twentieth, had opposed such legislation (pp. 175-

6). The Left, ultra- or otherwise, should support protective legislation to better the work conditions of the workers. To avoid denouncing this 'negative' aspect of capitalists/nationalists, at least until the nation has achieved statehood or has attained industrialisation, or has become competitive in the world market, etc., seems a rather selfdefeating strategy. To conclude, Mukherjee has demonstrated that the Indian bourgeoisie's behaviour cannot be described simply as 'pro-imperialist'; but I remain unconvinced that this was so because of an identity of interests of bourgeoisie and other classes, as opposed to simply being due to pure class interest on the part of the bourgeoisie. And the recipe for the Left strikes me as implausible. Empirically, this book remains a rich source of information on very important issues. Analytically, its claims are highly debatable and not very convincing.

Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds.)

Historical Materialism and Globalization Routledge, 2002, 320 pp. ISBN

0-415-26371-9 (pbk) £23

ISBN

0-415-26370-0 (hbk) £75

Reviewed by Gonso Po:r:o-Martin and Alexander Anievas Not too long ago, someone said that we should be grateful to G. W. Bush for silencing all the hoo-ha so typical of the globalisation-frantic 1990s. There is a lot of truth in this. Since this important collection, Historical Materialism and Globalization, was published, capitalism's most powerful state has discarded most of its rhetorical garments, and has

appeared before us as naked imperialism busily at work in Mghanistan and Iraq. These new tragedies flipped the debates on globalisation, and very quickly it became clear that Marxism had much more to offer in the analysis of international relations than was allowed by the practitioners of globalisation studies. From a Marxist perspective, the

144

Capital & Class #88

capitalists in their struggle for the common good without risking being discredited for eternity? Is the quarrel between metropolitan and colonial bourgeoisies as socially and historically fundamental as the struggle between exploiters and direct producers? On all of this hinges the question of the 'central contradiction' in colonial societies and its theoretical and empirical status. We may see the use of labour legislation as a case in point. Mukherjee mentions that the colonial authorities sought to hamper Indian industrialisation by enacting labour legislation, thus inhibiting the comparative advantage of lower labour costs. He notes bitterly that labour protection was 'of course' the last thing that was likely to aid India in its industrialisation; and he concedes, in a footnote, that nationalists since the nineteenth century, like capitalists in the twentieth, had opposed such legislation (pp. 175-

6). The Left, ultra- or otherwise, should support protective legislation to better the work conditions of the workers. To avoid denouncing this 'negative' aspect of capitalists/nationalists, at least until the nation has achieved statehood or has attained industrialisation, or has become competitive in the world market, etc., seems a rather selfdefeating strategy. To conclude, Mukherjee has demonstrated that the Indian bourgeoisie's behaviour cannot be described simply as 'pro-imperialist'; but I remain unconvinced that this was so because of an identity of interests of bourgeoisie and other classes, as opposed to simply being due to pure class interest on the part of the bourgeoisie. And the recipe for the Left strikes me as implausible. Empirically, this book remains a rich source of information on very important issues. Analytically, its claims are highly debatable and not very convincing.

Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith (eds.)

Historical Materialism and Globalization Routledge, 2002, 320 pp. ISBN

0-415-26371-9 (pbk) £23

ISBN

0-415-26370-0 (hbk) £75

Reviewed by Gonso Po:r:o-Martin and Alexander Anievas Not too long ago, someone said that we should be grateful to G. W. Bush for silencing all the hoo-ha so typical of the globalisation-frantic 1990s. There is a lot of truth in this. Since this important collection, Historical Materialism and Globalization, was published, capitalism's most powerful state has discarded most of its rhetorical garments, and has

appeared before us as naked imperialism busily at work in Mghanistan and Iraq. These new tragedies flipped the debates on globalisation, and very quickly it became clear that Marxism had much more to offer in the analysis of international relations than was allowed by the practitioners of globalisation studies. From a Marxist perspective, the

Book Reviews

contributors to this collection have sought to answer the following questions: is the nation-state withering away in the face of an ever-increasing, all-encompassing global economy? How central is the nation-state to the development of capitalism? Could capitalism exist without the nation-state? And underlying all these questions is the issue of which historical materialist approach to take? In answering these questions, many of the contributors revisit the famous Marxist 'statederivation' debate of the 1970s. In their contributions, both Ellen Meiksins Wood and Hannes Lacher, drawing on the historical works of Robert Brenner, conceptualise the origins of capitalist sovereignty as a complex product of the enduring territorial character of the absolutist state and the rise of the capital relation within the specific domestic environment of Britain. Where Wood's and Lacher's opinions diverge can be seen in the way they answer the following question: if the territorially bounded state form predates capitalism, does capitalism necessitate the nation state? Wood answers this question in the affirmative, claiming that once the capital relation appears, it becomes inherently linked with the nation-state. According to Lacher, Marxist theory provides proof of the necessity of statehood in the development of capitalism, but lacks a demonstration of why it is that particular brand of statehood, the 'nationstate', that is the central political formation for the development of capitalism. After all, Lacher argues, if the 'interstate-ness of capitalist political space cannot be derived from the capital relation' and must instead be 'regarded as the "historical legacy" from precapitalist development'(p. 161), then

145

there is no reason why it-that is, capitalist political space-should not surpass a capitalism structured politically along national territorial borders. Therefore, as Lacher concludes, 'certain institutions should be theorized as internalized' (p. 162) by capitalism. If the nexus between the capital relation and the nation-state is not inextricable, it is quite possible that capitalism could indeed transcend the nation-state system and replace it with an alternative mode of statehood. This is exactly what William Robinson has in mind when analysing the contemporary process of economic globalisation. As he argues, the rise of 'ttansnational capital' acts in the supersession of the 'nation-state system as the organizing principle of capitalist development', thus engendering the emergence of a 'transnational state apparatus (TNS)' coordinated through various international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO (p. 2II). Robinson, Lacher and Wood all emphasise the way capitalism exacerbates the contradictions between the globally expansive nature of capitalism and the territorially national boundedness of the capital relation. The playingout of these contradictions is where their analyses greatly diverge. While Lacher concludes that it is an open question as to whether the nationstate will persevere as the predominate form of political community, Robinson argues that nation-states have already been transformed into 'neo-liberal national states', making up a larger TNS. In contradistinction, Wood claims that politically, capitalism is best served by the nation-state and indeed, she writes, 'The forces tending to prolong the historic connection between capitalism and the nation-state are very powerful,

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indeed, rooted in the very nature of capitalism' (p. 29). Wood readily admits that the gap between the global reach of the economic sphere and the national reach of the political sphere is growing. However, she believes that this entails the contradictions inherent to capitalism becoming more poignant and that, if anything, it signifies 'a growing space for opposition', the main arena of which remains the nation-state (p. 37). Hence, while one might concur with Lacher's analysis of the state emanating from the 'historical legacy' of pre-capitalism, we would, like Wood, nevertheless question the conclusion that something like a 'transnational' or 'global' state has emerged or is emerging with the onset of 'globalisation'. This is for two key reasons. First, such a conclusion would be economically reductionist in observing the evolution of political relations as a mechanistic product of changes in the economy. Instead, one must also account for the militaristic aspects of the state. In doing so, an obvious question arises when postulating the connections between the processes of internationalising state and capital: where is the international military apparatus securing a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence? At this time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is the only international organisation that could conceivably fulfil this role in the near future. However, given the resurgence of us unilateralism in the wake of the 'war on terror', recent trends hardly point in this direction. Instead, it seems more likely that NATO will be effectively abandoned by the us as a global military institution. Secondly, and more problematically, such a hypothesis would suggest that once the nation-state has been 'internalised' by

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capitalism, the latter could simply dispense with the former. This interpretation seems highly suspect given that once the nation-state was internalised by capitalism, it became a vital function of capital accumulation, as Lacher admits (pp. 160-1). This further demonstrates Wood's crucial point: it is precisely because of the myriad organic functions that it performs in assisting capitalist accumulation that the nation-state is likely to prove more stubborn in adapting to consequent waves of capital internationalisation than Lacher would allow. That the nation-state came to be the 'preferred' political form of capitalism by, to put it very grossly, historical contingencies, does not in any case render it contingent today. Hence we will probably need to see more profound changes than the 'globalisation' of the 1990S before capitalism transcends it. From this perspective, the separation between the economic and political spheres in world politics becomes untenable. Moreover, since the nature of capital accumulation,is inherently competitive, thus spawning inter-state rivalries, it greatly diminishes the chances of anything like a worldwide capitalist state emerging. Therefore, it would seem that even if one considers contemporary capitalism to have been fundamentally altered by the 'forces of globalization', this does not mean that global capital is rendering the state obsolete but instead that, if anything, 'It is ... the very nature of capitalism to intensify the contradiction between its expansionist imperatives and the territorial divisions of its original political (and economic) form' (Wood, p. 30). This raises the issue of globalisation's supposed novelty, bringing us to Sutcliffe and Halliday'S critique of the concept of globalisation.

Book Reviews

As Sutcliffe shows, globalisation theories rest on various dubious claims-which, we believe, he successfully empirically undermines. To begin with, Sutcliffe reminds us that the current level of international trade relative to value of production is not much greater than that of the early preFirst World War era. Moreover, foreign direct investment-as international trade-has indeed been on the increase, but it has only regained the relative levels of 1913, and not at any unprecedented heights. Sutcliffe also shows how the rising importance of foreign production relative to exports is a misleading statistical result, derived from the inclusion of the value of sales by foreign subsidiaries. Finally, like Wood, he rejects the 'end of the nation state' thesis. On this point, Teschke and Heine also provide a particularly interesting analysis. They claim that 'capitalist state power has not undergone a quantifiable reduction, but a qualitative shift in purpose, which may be broadly defined as a shift from the welfare state to the competition state (Wettbewerbsstaat), (p. 176). Moreover, they conclude that if anything is indeed eroding in contemporary world politics, it is not the state but its

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democratic legitimacy. This analysis, as well as Sutcliffe's andWood',s, is certainly correct. Hence for these reasons, 'globalisation' is hardly anything new. While Sutcliffe does well in destabilising the economic empirical claims of globalisation theory, Halliday succeeds in undermining globalisation's ideological claims. For Halliday, at the locus of globalisation theories lies an ideologically driven incapacity to utter the two words, 'capitalism' and 'imperialism' . Paraphrasing Horkheimer, Halliday reminds us that 'those who do not want to speak about capitalism should not speak about IR or globalization' (p. 77). Thus, for Halliday, the Marxist theory of imperialism has more utility, given its analytical purchase, than any theories of 'globalisation', because those theories are abstract and ideological. Overall, Historical Materialism and Globalization is a much-needed contribution to the globalisation debate and to Marxist theory. It demonstrates the very rich and informed critiques that Marxism is capable of launching at any thread of ruling ideology-a critique largely vindicated by the frightening, and predominately nation-state driven turns our world has taken since it was published.

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Capital & Class #88

Richard Westra and Alan Zuege (eds.)

Value and the World Economy Today: Production, Finance and Globalization Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, xiii + 246 pp. ISBN 1-403-90002-7

(hbk) £60

Reviewed by George Liodakis This collective volume is divided into four parts and includes, apart from an introduction by the editors, twelve essays by well-known Marxist scholars reflecting a variety of different approaches to value theory and political economy. As noted in the introduction, 'The aim of this collection is to advance and encourage cross-fertilization between two literatures: the conceptual debate over the foundations of political economy and concrete research on the world economy today' (p. x). Dealing with the relation between value theory and the study of contemporary capitalism, in the first essay, Ben Fine starts from a comparison between the Marxian and the Smithian and Ricardian theories of value. He stresses the following distinguishing features of Marx's value theory: (I) it is based on a dialectics <;:orresponding to the reality under study; (2) it implies a particular understanding of class associated with the conflict between capital and labour; (3) it is attached to a particular understanding of structures; (4) it specifies the socioeconomic processes leading to the reproduction and transformation of structures; and (5) it refers in a historically specific way to the conditions prevailing under capitalist production. Under contemporary conditions, Fine suggests that 'the increasing complexity of capitalism simultaneously strengthens the case for

the labor theory of value, to uncover underlying determinants, and strengthens the resolution of opponents in view of the apparent inconsistency of value with those complex outcomes' (p. 20). In his contribution, S. Clarke analyses 'the rationality and irrationality of money', and concludes that this 'rationality' cannot be divorced from the specific rationality of the market and the underlying capitalist relations of production. He points out that, in contemporary conditions, the close integration of national economies implies their restriction within certain limits, and explains the reasons for the state's direct subordination to the expanded reproduction of capital. S. de Brunhoff examines the relationship between 'value, finance and social classes', by moving historically from gold as the 'general equivalent' to contemporary forms of money and finance. Regarding the class tension between capital and labour, she points out that wage moderation, through access to finance, may function as an element relaxing this tension. In a very interesting essay-perhaps the most innovative in the book, and closely related to the book's title-Dick Bryan tackles the relation between value theory and international finance. Based on Palloix's spatial development of the circuit of capital, the author adds the dimension of time in order to consider

Book Reviews

globally integrated finance. As he points out, 'Global integration both transcends and at the same time reproduces (national) difference' (p. 60). So the author poses the crucial question: 'how is this "difference" crossed concretely, such that we can talk about capital (and class) as a global phenomenon despite the reproduction of spatial (and temporal) difference?' (p. 62). Although the sources of discontinuity between different sorts of money and commodities, and hence in the value of capital, cannot be eradicated, it is argued that it is mainly through the transactions of various forms of financial derivatives that these discontinuities are continually bridged. So 'For Marxian analysis, derivatives secure commensuration of value across time and space' (p. 67). Amongst other things, this mechanism serves to 're-focus the process of competition on all capital (and the circuit of capital) rather than just on transnational corporations' (p. 68). The merit of this type of analysis is also that 'The focus on profit-making thereby reverts squarely to the appropriation of surplus value from labor, only now the focus on surplus value appropriation is made within a global calculation' (ibid.). Three of the contributions to this volume-those by R. Westra, T. Sekine and R. Albritton-follow Uno's approach to political economy, which can be considered as a kind of equilibrium economic approach. On the other hand, the essays contributed by A. Freeman and A. Kliman follow a temporal (dis-equilibrium) analysis in their approach to value production and crisis. Freeman's intention is to show that 'an alternative, Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx's value theory offers a coherent explanation of the major observable

149

manifestations of market breakdown' (p. 93). He also refers to 'long waves' and the current process of restructuring, and attempts to identify the preconditions and the features of a potential new accumulation upturn. A. Kliman scrutinises underconsumption theories of crisis and 'physicalist' theories, which imply that productivity increases raise the rate of profit. On the contrary, he demonstrates that capitalist crises are rooted in capitalism's production of value as an end in itself. G. Dumenil and D. Levy suggest a dual theory of value regarding production and management, which corresponds to the familiar distinction between productive and unproductive labour. However, their 'physicalist' interpretation both of the theory of value and crisis, as well as of the real subsumption under capital, is rather untenable. They consider the expansion of managerial labour, which they characterise as 'profit rate maximizing labor', as the main countertendency to the falling rate of profit, but have great difficulty in giving an adequate explanation of the efficiency of this labour, and thus in explaining the upswing and downswing of accumulation in the post-war period. Fred Moseley, on the contrary, following a more orthodox Marxian approach, argues that a faster increase of unproductive labour (not producing profit) than productive labour will cause a profit-rate decline, and this is what happened in the post-war us economy. That profit-rate decline was due to an increase in the capital invested per worker, as well as to an increase in the ratio of unproductive labour to productive labour. Moseley also stresses that the 'globalisation' of capital in recent decades is mainly the result of a search

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for lower wages in order to increase the rate of profit, and that another period of capitalist expansion will require a prior prolonged period of depression. Adopting a critical stance and a debatable Sraffian approach regarding the labour theory of value, Ajit Sinha argues that, after Sraffa's (1960) contribution, 'any search for an ultimate cause of value is futile. Prices are simply implicated in a given structure of production and distribution and nothing is hidden behind them' (p. 184-85). Regarding the Unoist approach followed by three of the contributors to this volume (Westra, Sekine and Albritton) it must be said that, although it contains some useful insights, the present reviewer at least is not convinced of its overall tenability. Amongst other things, this approach implies a rather unsatisfactory periodisation of capitalism associated with the provisioning of certain basic goods. Westra's work, in particular, starts to fill a lacuna, in terms of political economy research, in the globalisation literature. His task, however, is rather inadequately attained insofar as the proposed Unoist conception of a theory of a pure capitalist system (TPCS) is overtly and artificially abstract. This implies, on the one hand, an abstraction from specific power relations and the state, and a combined articulation with other modes of production. On the other hand, and because of the uneven and non-universal development of world capitalism, it leads

Capital & Class #88

Westra to an unclear, 'transformationis!' and rather sceptical approach to the issue of globalisation. Based on the same approach and a developed TPCS, T. Sekine stresses the de-commodification of money and labour, especially through state regulation and the social-democratic welfare state, as well as the elimination of the decennial Guglar) cycles, in order to end up with the debatable conclusion that 'the present world economy is in the process of ex-capitalist transition' (p. 195); and that 'the mechanism of the law of value, which constituted the lifeblood of capitalism, has definitely ceased to operate in the contemporary economy' (p. 202). R. Albritton finally attempts to theorise subjectivity, within the same context of a TPCS and the stage of capitalism (the post-war period) characterised as 'consumerism'. Apart from any methodological disagreements, it must be noted that Albritton presents some highly interestirig insights regarding the indifference of value production to use-value, the increasing speeding-up of production, consumption and life (the 'treadmill effect'), and the parallel trends of integrationhomogenisation and qualitative differentiation-redivision of world capitalism. Overall, and apart from any methodological differences, the present volume constitutes a useful guide to the present state of affairs in the theory of value and political economy in general, as well as to relevant studies of dynamically restructuring world capitalism.

Book Reviews

151

Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas and Jonathan Pincus (eds.)

Development Policy in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus Routledge, 2001, 240 pp. ISBN:

0-415-30618-3 (pbk) £28

ISBN:

0-415-22822-0 (hbk) £95

Reviewed by Sara MoHa This anthology offers a critical political determine not only the economics but economy of the World Bank's develop- also the politics of southern states. ment agenda, as found in the Washington However, the anthology fails to engage consensus and in the post-Washington with debates regarding the legitimacy of consensus. First, it disentangles the the World Bank in its interventions in empirical and theoretical flaws of the the South. This is arguably one of its neoliberal economics of the Washington most serious shortcomings, as it could consensus. It then exposes the way the act to re-legitimise the current interfocus on institutions and 'good gover- national institutional and political framenance' of the post-Washington consen- work. The anthology is in an ambiguous sus is, in many ways, an extension of the assumptions and analysis of the Washing- relationship with developmentalism and ton consensus into the realm of politics the World Bank. It fluctuates between, on the one hand, openly supporting a and social theory. While tackling different elements of return to national develop mentalism the post-Washington consensus, from its and the possibility of reforming theoretical underpinnings in new institutions like the World Bank; and on institutional economics to its central the other, refraining from 9ffering concepts such as those of human and prescriptions for development, or any social capital, the contributors to this comment about the potential for reform volume are united in their attempt to in international financial institutions show the weaknesses, flaws and dangers (IFIS). Fine, Lapavitsas and Khan of this agenda for the South. The authors develop a critique of the post-Washingconvincingly explain how the founda- ton consensus without addressing the tions of the post-Washington consensus, questions of how, or even if, it is possible and the analysis of its intellectual to make the market work in a progressive architect, Joseph Stiglitz, are based on way. Bayliss and Cramer, Deraniyagala the methodological indivi-dualism, and Die Lo, on the other hand, critique ahistoricism, economism and apoliticism the World Bank's development agenda of the Washington consensus. The post- by attempting to show how to make the Washington consensus can be analysed market work better and more fairly for as the further encroachment of developing nations. international institutions, dominated by The contributions that develop a the G8 powers and with the United critique of the post-Washington States at the forefront, to intervene and consensus disentangle the methodolo-

152

gical, theoretical and empirical assumptions on which the consensus is based. They explain how this agenda mystifies the development process with its focus on new informational economics, which takes (a narrow) economic theory to the study of politics and society, without taking social theory to the study of economics. The impoverishment of development studies that follows, the authors argue, ignores the power relationships and class struggle that help us to explain develop-ment or its lack, reduces human rationality to that of capitalist man, and omits any notion of tension between human emancipation and capital accumulation. Capital accumulation, as the authors continually stress, is embedded in the social and political relationships to be found in concrete historical settings. Those in the second category of analysis that is to be found in this edition-that of making the market work in developing nations-attempt to highlight the problems of the economic theory contained in the post-Washington consensus. Their empirical referent is South-East Asia. The theoretical assumptions underlying the counterexample that they offer to the freemarket economics of the post-Washington consensus are based on state developmentalism. Conveniently overlooked, in their analysis of economic policy, is the relationship of the popular classes of the South-East Asian 'tigers' with their respective states. This relationship has been characterised by the ability of state elites to de-class and discipline the working class. The problem in this approach is that the state as a site of domination and struggle, embedded in international relations of inequality, is

Capital & Class #88

missed. Instead it is posited that if governments in the South were allowed to pursue a specific set of neo-structuralist policies, then economic development would follow. This underestimates and under-theorises the relationship between core and periphery nations, and the changing role of developing nations in the international political economy of neoliberalism. It leaves unaddressed the issue of the tendency to crisis and declining rate of profit in capitalist accumulation, and assumes a cumulative relationship between economic growth and redistribution. The de-classing of the state in this analysis assumes that the state and its policy-making process is the potentially autonomous site of economic development. The weaknesses in this approach help to highlight elements of continuity between the post-Washington consensus and some of the edition's contributions. The post-Washington consensus is ahistorical in its analysis of the conditions of economic develop-ment, equating them with access to, or lack of, correct information. It focuses on the role of the state and its failure to create the conditions for levelling-out information blockages and enabling successful development. The statist focus found in the edition's contributions, while arguing for different economic policies and working within a different methodological framework to that of the World Bank, does not critically interrogate the state as a form of capitalist social relations and as a site of domination. Rather, like the post-Washington consensus, the state is seen as the cornerstone in enabling economic development. In the making of such a theoretical assumption, the develop-

Book Reviews

ment process is equated with a specific set of conditions to be found post-1945. This turns a concrete historical experience into an abstract and ahistorical theory of development, creating a thread of methodological unity between the post-Washington consensus and some of its critics in this edition. The anthology's rationale is a critique of the terms, and at times implicitly the authority, of international financial institutions such as the World Bank in defining the development agenda. However, within the edition there is a tension that remains unresolvedbetween those who aim to influence the World Bank in order to improve its

153

analysis, and those who would question the basis of the World Bank's right to intervene in a developing nation's affairs. While this works well on a theoretical level, as it presents the readers with a complex and nuanced criti9ue of the post-Washington consen-sus, it is less motivating and more ambiguous on a political level. Nevertheless, the complexity and diversity of analysis, the authors' ability to link theory with empirical analysis, and the methodological unity of the pieces make this book an essential read for those concerned with international financial institutions such as the World Bank and their role in the theory and practice of development.

Etienne Balibar

Politics and the Other Scene Verso, 2002, 160 pp. ISBN

1-859-84267-4 (pbk) £15

ISBN

1-859-84725-0 (hbk) £40

Reviewed by Jonathan Joseph This book is a collection of Balibar's recent essays. Although they range across a number of issues, they are united by a focus on the themes of universalism and difference, politics and identity. Some of the ideas are expressed through issues like European identity, nationalism and ethnicity. However, I will concentrate mainly on Balibar's preface and on the first essay 'Three concepts of politics', which set out some of the theoretical parameters. The 'other scene' of politics could mean what post-structuralists refer to when they talk of the scene of the other.

But Balibar is also keen to stress the more Marxist view that urges us to 'tum away from the "apparent scene" of politics, structured by discourses and ideas/ideals and unveil the "real scene" of economic processes, the development of capitalism and class struggle' (p. xiii). It is this concern that guides his discussion of European developments in the other essays collected here, and it is this concern that keeps the discussion of post-structuralist themes within the Marxist camp. However, Balibar is still keen to question Marxism, inverting the pattern

Book Reviews

ment process is equated with a specific set of conditions to be found post-1945. This turns a concrete historical experience into an abstract and ahistorical theory of development, creating a thread of methodological unity between the post-Washington consensus and some of its critics in this edition. The anthology's rationale is a critique of the terms, and at times implicitly the authority, of international financial institutions such as the World Bank in defining the development agenda. However, within the edition there is a tension that remains unresolvedbetween those who aim to influence the World Bank in order to improve its

153

analysis, and those who would question the basis of the World Bank's right to intervene in a developing nation's affairs. While this works well on a theoretical level, as it presents the readers with a complex and nuanced criti9ue of the post-Washington consen-sus, it is less motivating and more ambiguous on a political level. Nevertheless, the complexity and diversity of analysis, the authors' ability to link theory with empirical analysis, and the methodological unity of the pieces make this book an essential read for those concerned with international financial institutions such as the World Bank and their role in the theory and practice of development.

Etienne Balibar

Politics and the Other Scene Verso, 2002, 160 pp. ISBN

1-859-84267-4 (pbk) £15

ISBN

1-859-84725-0 (hbk) £40

Reviewed by Jonathan Joseph This book is a collection of Balibar's recent essays. Although they range across a number of issues, they are united by a focus on the themes of universalism and difference, politics and identity. Some of the ideas are expressed through issues like European identity, nationalism and ethnicity. However, I will concentrate mainly on Balibar's preface and on the first essay 'Three concepts of politics', which set out some of the theoretical parameters. The 'other scene' of politics could mean what post-structuralists refer to when they talk of the scene of the other.

But Balibar is also keen to stress the more Marxist view that urges us to 'tum away from the "apparent scene" of politics, structured by discourses and ideas/ideals and unveil the "real scene" of economic processes, the development of capitalism and class struggle' (p. xiii). It is this concern that guides his discussion of European developments in the other essays collected here, and it is this concern that keeps the discussion of post-structuralist themes within the Marxist camp. However, Balibar is still keen to question Marxism, inverting the pattern

154

of real imd ideal not to show that ideas drive history, but to show that '''material'' processes are themselves (over-) and (under-) determined by the processes of the imaginary which have their own very effective materiality and need to be unveiled' (p. xiii). The imaginary is described as 'the infrastructure of the infrastructure'. All forces that interact at the economicopolitical are groupings that consequently possess an imaginary identity. The moment when politics becomes manifest is not rational, but it is not irrational either. In attempting to maintain a Marxist position, Balibar argues that 'recognition of the other scene is theoretically associated with the rejection, not of class antagonisms and the structure of capitalism, but of an absolute "last instance", and with the adoption of a broad (hence heterogeneous) concept of materiality' (p. xiii). The other scene is where the effects of the autonomy and heteronomy of politics are engineered. Balibar is concerned with the relation between emancipation, transformation and the politics that cannot be reduced to either emancipation or transformation, which he calls the 'ethical horizon of civility'. He raises the question of a politics of equal liberty and the unfolding of the self-determination of people. Citizenship is inconceivable without the autonomy of its subject. Autonomy becomes a politics when a part of society is excluded from the universal right to politics. This part then becomes a party, the party of the universal-which is to say, for the abolition of particularities and classes. This is a more general way of understanding the argument of Marx and Engels when they write that the proletariat becomes the universal class.

Capital & Class #88

One of the interesting aspects of this work is the way Balibar brings together Marx and Foucault. For Marx, history always takes place under determinate conditions. Social relations have a history explained by the process of production. However, this need not lead to a deterministic position. It is more a case of politics being explained from the inside, through the role of productive forces and social consciousness. Again, we see how Balibar is trying to weave together the material and the ideal. Ideas are expressed through social consciousness. Consequently, every concept of politics implies a subject. This goes against the latest post-structuralism, not to mention a certain theoretical collaborator of Balibar's: 'Nothing, then, is more absurd ... than to believe such a politics to be "subjectless" (it is history which is without a subject)' (p. 12). It is not entirely clear whether the bracketed section is intended to rescue Althusser or condemn him. Politics, then, is a 'journey of subjectivation' binding together different modalities of practice and the effects of different structural conditions. If Marx gives us the big picture of production, then Foucault brings in conditions like the microphysics of power, governmentality, and the disciplinary society. The problem, for Balibar, is that in Foucault, the difference between these conditions of power and the process of trans-formation is reduced to a minimum, and they become contemporaneous in an ontological, ethical and political present. This makes the issue of autonomy problematic. When Foucault argues that practices of liberty are not so much the precondition for liberation as a necessary emerging after the event, we are led in the direction of technologies

Book Reviews

of the self. This raises further questions about how individuals' relationships to themselves develop. In the essay 'Is there such a thing as European racism?' Balibar argues that current problems go back deep into our history-that racism in Europe today is the result of insoluble contradictions at a deeper level. We need a long march towards a public space of European citizenshipsomething that can only be achieved if different communities march together. European citizenship entails a new notion of citizenship itself, more democratic than the old national-social form. Unless it includes all communities living in Europe, it will necessarily be against the universalist principles that European states claim to promote. The problem today, as is raised in the essay 'What is a border?' is that the Schengen Convention is moving Europe in the direction not of citizenship, but of anticitizenship. A theme in a number of essays is that all identity is fundamentally ambiguous, and that no identity is self-identical. In fact, there is no given identity, only identification-an uneven process and a precarious construction. Balibar argues that no identity can be given or acquired for once and for all. It is the product of an uneven, unfinished, hazardous construction. Identity is overdeter-

155

mined, fulfilling several functions at once, in transit between several symbolic references (p. 28). Identification comes from others and operates within historical institutions that reduce the multiplicity and complexity of identifications. Because of this, identity is linked to a hierarchy of communal references and belonging. If identity is ambiguous, then so too is universality. For Balibar, there are three instances of universality: as reality, fiction, and as symbol or ideal. Real universality can be seen as global economic expansion (the age-old process of capitalist expansion) and political expansion of transnational strategies. Fictive universality involves the construction of social hegemonies based on state institutions or fictive ethnicity. Ideal universality is the subversive element of negativity posing the infinite question of equality and liberty together. This raises the impossibility of achieving freedom without equality, or equality without liberty. This is the radical thread running through the book. The engagement with Foucault and post-structuralism is made worthwhile because it refuses to abandon Marxist concerns. No concept of politics is ever complete. There can be no emancipation without transformation or civility, and no civility without transformation or emancipation.

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Capital & Class #88

John Clarke

Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy Sage, 2004, 208 pp. ISBN: 0-761-94203-3 (pbk) £19 ISBN: 0-761-94202-5 (hbk) £60

Reviewed by Simon Blackburn John Clarke's Changing Welfare, Changing States is a highly stimulating and weUwritten piece of work that reflects the author's status as one of the most original contemporary social-policy thinkers. Yet while fully recommending this book, it is also necessary to stress that at its centre lies an unresolved tension-between materialism on the one hand, and idealism on the other. For all of its merits, of which there are many-most notably a series of excellent critiques on matters such as 'New' Labour's multiculturalism, recent globalisation discourses, and the fabrication of the 'citizen-consumer' in welfare arrangements-the book is located in a contradictory problematic for which there is no solution. Clarke's central objective is to develop a constructionist position dealing with the problem of 'what's been happening to welfare states'; yet, with this goal in mind, the author takes as his point of departure Gramsci's thesis of the state as a continuous process offormation and superseding of unstable equilibria. Therein lays the fundamental contradiction: the premise of the work is clearly Marxist-or, more precisely stated, Gramscian-and yet the main argument is overtly anti-Marxist. This tension manifests itself throughout the book. . From the start, Clarke makes it clear that he is not concerned with the welfare

state in a materialist sense, as a concretereal object. Instead, the reader is informed that the book deals with 'ideas', 'thoughts', 'concepts' and 'stories' of welfare; that is, Clarke is interested in 'how we think about welfare states' (p. I). The immediate problem that arises from this schema is that the idea of welfare is exclusively considered in terms of the state, yet nowhere does Clarke attempt a systematic or comprehensive examination of the state as subject. This amounts to a glaring omission, inasmuch as the book is not genuinely oriented around 'changing states', as its title suggests, but is solely directed towards 'changing welfare'which, by implication, defines the state as constituted through, and centred around, welfare. This reductionism only serves to testify to Clarke's aversion to the complex material relations of the phenomenon under examination-a matter further demonstrated by the fact that the author firmly places himself in the realm of postmodernism. Specifically, he suggests that 'we should "think again" about welfare states' (p. 2), and in this regard, the book advances the notion of a 'cultural turn' in analytic thinking, by which Clarke means that welfare states exist only as social constructs (p. 147)· The idea of welfare states as 'constructs' is, for Clarke, the point of

Book Reviews

entry into his cultural turn (p. 18). On this basis, the notion of welfare is treated as forever 'unstable, flexible and mobile', and consequently nowhere does the author attempt to refine the meaning of the welfare state, but instead welcomes and encourages 'the absence of rigorous definition' (p. 19). In response to this approach, one must ask 'why?' Contrary to Clarke's supposition, I suggest that it is necessary to attach precise definitions to social-science concepts, and that where an adequate definition is lacking, so one must be sought. Only by proceeding in this way may we engage in the task of understanding the 'social', and thereby avoid arbitrary theorising that detracts from genuine scientific endeavour. Clarke, however, seems to place aside the mantle of social science, openly admitting that his book is not concerned with an exposition of evidence (pp. 3, 12), or with presenting a theorisation of welfare (p. 4); nor is he even willing to advance a logical examination (p. 3). Yet if not logical, empirical or theoretical, what method of articulation is left? At once, an answer presents itself: Clarke enters into social constructionism, journeying into the idealist realm of pure abstraction and fantasy. The reason for this, Clarke says, is that it constitutes a liberating experience (p. 4). Indeed it does, insofar as Clarke liberates himself from the problems of material reality. The book is not simply opposed to the terrain of the real, but is openly dismissive of the material conditions of welfare, and the social relations on which these conditions rest. Clarke defends his position by proposing that it is necessary to move away from the 'thin social landscapes' of 'old' modes of analysis, by which he is referring to economic relations and class divisions

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(pp. 1-4). He contends that the study of welfare should address concerns such as 'race', 'gender', '(dis)ability', and 'sexuality' . In response to this conjecture, it should be acknowledged that any study that reduces all aspects of welfare to economic or class relations is necessarily dismissive of wider societal aspects; but to entirely disregard these relations is to produce a work both sterile and redundant. In addition, it must be stressed that a focus on a specified agenda-on ethnicity, gender or sexuality, for instance-that takes such areas of analysis to be mere 'constructs' treats those aspects of welfare as somehow unreal, thereby causing them a crucial disservice. Thus, Clarke advances a most odd and perplexing position, for it is the case that he conceives of these problems as purely imagined-existing only as ideas, images and stories. Even more strangely, having already rejected material reality in the first few pages of the book, Clarke proceeds to turn this position on its head, as it were, and sporadically accepts the importance of the real. He points out, for instance, that welfare states require examination because they 'make a difference to how lives are lived', and that they 'shape the conditions in which people make a living: the material conditions that they support (and deny)' (p. 10). It is here, in terms of demonstrating interest in the reality of welfare, that Clarke's exposition comes into its own. Commanding a comprehensive knowledge of social-policy literature, Clarke engages in an informed critique, addressing the changes and continuities of welfare states during the past twenty years. It is precisely this discussion on the reality of welfare-state transfor-

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mati on that makes the book a timely and inventive contribution. Given this occasional materialist stance, the immediate question is: why does Clarke reject at the outset the parameters of the real? The answer may be found in Clarke's belief that a materialist approach 'misses important dimensions and dynamics of welfare states' (p. 2). The logic of this position is simple: any perspective that considers the problems of welfare as 'real' must necessarily be dismissive of the various schools of constructionism. Since Clarke's purpose is to advocate a constructionist stance, so materialism must be rejected. An attempt is made to legitimise this practice of rejecting analyses that focus on the concrete reality of welfare by characterising such studies as unfashionable, obsolete and fatally flawed. In this way, Marxism-as a primary example of a materialist perspective-is considered outmoded and superfluous and, accordingly, Clarke treats both 'economic' and 'class' analyses as narrow and obscuring (p. 52). This approach to the study of social relations constitutes, for Clarke, a remarkable shift in personal outlook: some rwenty years ago, he was declaring the relationships between classes to be of central importance in understanding society (Clarke 1981, p. 104). The most crucial problem with respect to this shift in outlook is that, for all his talk of dismissing Marxism and adopting constructionism, Clarke nonetheless takes as his foundation a Marxist-i.e. materialist-theory of the state, and is very much influenced by Marxist thinking. The 'guiding metaphor' of his book is Gramsci's state theory: 'I have long been fascinated', he declares, 'by

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Gramsci's (1971) observation that "the life of the state can be conceived as a series of unstable equilibria" because it captures this oscillation between settlement and destabilisation' (p. 25). Accordingly, Clarke may be considered a 'neo\..Gramscian' (in the book, Gramsci is referred to on at least seven separate occasions). Yet Clarke fails to grasp Gramsci's thesis as class analysis, and as materialist in orientation. Gramsci's notion of "unstable equilibria" corresponds specifically to relations 'between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups'; it refers to the state as a site of interaction between opposing classes (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). Gramsci's formula is a Marxist premise, and has been taken and developed by other Marxist thinkers-most notably Poulantzas (1973; 2000). Clarke's dismissal of· Marxism illustrates the contradictory elements of his position-not least because, while he views Marxism as obscuring and narrow, a host of Marxist thinkers, from E. P. Thompson to Stuart Hall to Bob Jessop, are given space in the text. An adequate reading of Marxist literature on the welfare state informs us of the genuine meaning of Gramsci's thesis, and in turn goes to show that, once adopted as a 'guiding metaphor', any notion of constructionism is an absurdity. We must therefore take as ludicrous Clarke's claim that 'we are all constructionists now', and especially the idea that this suggestion 'falls within Gramsci's view of common sense' (p. 135). The fact is, Gramsci considered the social world as real, not a construct: 'there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led'; this is a 'primordial fact' (Gramsci, 1973: 144)·

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Book Reviews

Irrespective of its faults, Clarke's book is a brave and original contribution to the annals of contemporary socialpolicy literature, written in an engaging manner that serves to draw the reader in to the subject of welfare-state transformation. Whatever disagreements I have with the book, it is nonetheless wholeheartedly recommended. The dynamics of welfare are an important area of analysis-especially the tensions between the erosion of welfare on the one hand, and the fact that welfarism is now a generic part of the existing order of things on the other. The most significant lacuna in this regard is that social science has yet to comprehensively explain the 'welfare state' by examining the material relations that serve as its causes and conditions of existence. To that end, I suggest; that adherents to construction-ism think again about their outlook and perspective on social life. Without recourse to concrete social conditions, which lies at the root of

Marxist analyses of the welfare state, any attempt to explore actually existing problems will reveal itself as a contradiction in terms-as Clarke's position does. Any understanding of welfare must accept the importance of material reality. Unless this is so, we will learn very little.

References Clarke, J. (1981) 'Introduction: The problem of social divisions' in D. Potter et al. (eds.) Society and the Social Sciences (Routledge). Clarke, J. (2004) Changing welfare, Changing States (Sage). Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart). Poulantzas, N. (2000) State, Power, Socialism (Verso Classics Edition). Poulantzas, N. (1973) Political Power and Social Classes (New Left Books).

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Filling the void: Post-Marxism? Stuart Sim

Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History Routledge, 2000, 208 pp. ISBN

0-415-21814-4 (hbk) £70

Stuart Sim (ed.)

Post-Marxism: A Reader Edinburgh University Press, 1998, 192 pp. ISBN

0-748-61044-8 (pbk) £13

ISBN

0-748-61043-X (hbk) £55

Reviewed by Neil Curry Fredric Jameson sums up the key dilemma that underpins any discussion of post-Marxism when he rather wryly points out that 'the post-Marxists did not bother to wait for the family's permission'; and that it is one thing to drop something altogether, but quite another matter to find a more adequate replacement. This rather uncomfortable situation is at best only tentatively approached by post-Marxism. It is certainly the case that one is hard pushed to find even what might be described as a minimal working definition of something like postMarxism within the relevant literature. Perhaps this is what being a post-Marxist entails? Post-Marxism has been difficult to pin down so far, and therefore it is perhaps still problematic to instigate a discussion on the conceptual status and future political possibilities of something so notoriously vague. However, Stuart Sim has attempted to give such an elusive

definition, and to present a much fuller picture of what post-Marxism is, why it came about, and what its future prospects are likely to be. Sim, building upon an earlier essay, suggests that postMarxism needs to be viewed as a series of characteristic preferences in relation to a series of characteristic dislikes located within Marxism. The postMarxists and their precursors tend to dislike control, party apparatus, totalising theory, systems and orthodoxy, all of which are arguably central aspects of Marxism. Instead, they tend to favour pluralism, difference, scepticism and spontaneous political action. By challenging Marxism on all of these supposed central concerns, they are in a position to say, in effect, 'No more excuses, no more tinkering from within, enough is enough! Let's play on the disillusionment and see if we can begin to express some political optimism out of the disenchantment.' Sim then explains that what he is going on to

Book Reviews

present is not a history of Marxism, but rather a history of disenchanted Marxists. However, Sim, in his attempt to define what it means to be postMarxist, places in serious doubt the continuing relevance of the Marxist tradition. According to Sim, postMarxism can be traced back to Marxism itself, and has only taken on a life of its own relatively recently. Sim begins his analysis by suggesting that post-Marxists are in a historically unique position to reject, revitalise or renegotiate the terms of their intellectual contract with Marxism. Sim then goes on to locate the inevitable emergence of post-Marxism in the pivotal work of Lyotard, Lukacs, Adorno and Marcuse. This list is not exhaustive; but nevertheless, in their own way, each of these thinkers prefigured post-Marxism and challenged the theoretical status of classical Marxism. Lyotard's primary contribution centres around what he sees as the unsystematicity of Marx's work (despite classical Marxism's insistence to the contrary), especially in his failure to finish writing Capital. The second precursor to post-Marxism can be located in Lukacs's emphasis (certainly in his earlier work) on method over doctrine, coupled with the insistence that the method in question is, in principle at least, susceptible to modification and dependent on context. This, Sim argues, seems to invite postMarxist experimentation. According to Sim, Adorno acts as the next destabilising influence, and is pivotal because his work represents a precursor to the deconstructive approach of Derrida and the subsequent work of Laclau and Mouffe, which was carried out specifically in relation to Marxism. In this particular reading of Adorno, Sim

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is alluding to what he deems to be an anti-totalising philosophy, which opens up dialectical materialism and, inevitably, can only end in postMarxism. Therefore, if we follow Sim's logic here, it would seem to indicate that Adorno and Horkheimer's criticism of the 'Enlightenment project'-with its tendency towards fascism as much as towards universal emancipation-can be mapped directly onto Marx as ifhe were 'the' spokesperson for the Enlightenment. This movement would be deemed deeply problematic by most people writing both within and from outside the Marxist tradition anyway. Do we really need post-Marxism to tell us this? According to Sim, 'Negative Dialectics seems to herald the birth of post-Marxism'. The critique put forward by Adorno aims at the heart of dialectics, for Sim the cornerstone of all Marxism, and thus negative dialectics is the most crucial moment in the emergence of post-Marxism, and rightly takes on a pivotal role. The first aspect of Sim's argument thus revolves around Adorno's critique of the notion of unity, by which we are ushered into the world of non-identity thinking. Dialectics will be freed from its association with the achievement of something positive by means of negation; immanent contradictions that can't be got rid of persist because concepts do not exhaust the things conceived. At which point the dialectic lacks any guarantees and loses its lawlike nature-which, accordingly, places in doubt definitive/certain Marxist pronouncements on cultural and historical processes. This is the way contingency removes teleology from the dialectical equation installing unknowability between subject and object.

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The concept of totality-and, by extension, Marxism's pretensions to sometime total control and predictability-is the next casualty of Adorno's critique, according to Sim. For if what is considered a totality always has a missing element, then clearly complete control becomes an illusion. Sim's unambiguous conclusion underscores the contingent, ludic and . aleatory nature of things: 'other sociopolitical theories might be able to live with this state of affairs, but not Marxism, which has traditionally made a fetish of totality-as well as its ability to exert control over the destiny of the social totality by its understanding of the nature of the dialectic underpinning it'. It is precisely this issue that takes Adorno's thinking well past Marxism into a more radical vision, both philosophically and politically. Classical Marxism cannot allow for such contingent aspects; it must prepare for all eventualities in advance, and must eradicate all differences in the name of bureaucracy: all teleologies try to do this. Any dialectical resolution of a Marxist kind has thus been shown to be a manipulative cover; this is what Adorno's non-identity thinking stringently insists upon. Sim, following this line of argument through the work of Adorno, is therefore forced to conclude that Adorno destroys most of the philosophical basis for Marxism, replacing it with a scepticism calculated to annoy political activists trained to think in terms of the good of the collective. Negative dialectics is steeped in a disenchantment that holds out little immediate hope for human liberation. The fourth destabilising moment for Sim is one that can be traced back to the work of Marcuse, for Marcuse redefines the notion of working class beyond the

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traditional Marxist category. According to him, the cultural landscape of postwar capitalism no longer seems to conform to that envisaged by Marx(ism). There is a need to recast Marxism in order for it to remain culturally relevant. For Sim, once Marcuse set off down this path there was little, if any, chance of return. He suggests that Marcuse succeeded in expanding the possibilities of Marxism, and that the success of this manoeuvre has meant that the days of classical Marxism are well and truly numbered. Out of these four destabilising moments, Sim then identifies two strands that emerged out of the dilapidation of Marxism. First is the strand of post-Marxism that he defines as made up of those Marxists who have lost 'the faith', and who subscribe neither to the Marxist 'world view' nor to the efficacy of its analytical methods. The two most vehement critics of the Marxist canon supposed to inhabit this position are, for Sim, Lyotard and Baudrillard. The second version of postMarxism, according to Sim, is an accommodating form of Marxism that is sensitive to the insights of other theoretical developments such as poststructuralism, postmodernism and feminism. However, Sim is sceptical about the possibility of this current in post-Marxist thought remammg Marxist-what we are left with is a misplaced emotional attachment that has little if any theoretical credibility, but which retains its appeal, for postMarxists, because of its nostalgic gesture towards a utopian ideal that today seems rather quaint to them. Sim, in what must cause an astonishing sense of deja vu for any prospective post-Marxist, is offering up

Book Reviews

here a rather traditional, stringently orthodox approach to post-Marxism. Since post-Marxism is ruled out as a genuine alternative, once again postMarxism becomes, and can only ever be, ex-Marxism. If Marxism conforms to Sim's view of it as doctrinal, authoritarian, monistic and idealistic, operating within an all-or-nothing logical schema and also beyond revision, then who would dispute the need to discredit it completely? However, Sim offers no evidence to back up his caricature. In fact, he offers both minimal evidence and little by way of viable argument to sustain his view on any of these issues. Marxism, it would seem in essence, is all of the worst nightmares to afflict humanity and more! We can therefore conclude that Sim has banished Marxism to the dustbin of history and well and truly buried it without trace (never mind waiting for the family's consent). PostMarxism operates by instilling a strict either/or logic, and reduces Marxism to one single theory. Instead of taking the opportunity to explore a Marxist tradition that encompasses different and often clashing theories, it is merely rejected outright. It would seem that Sim is asserting, in an uncompromising way, that Marxism is a fixed historical referent that can be defined by the establishment of certain strict limits necessary in order to operate as a Marxist; and that these limits are fixed transhistorically. Yet this closure which Sim is attempting to place over Marxism is in fact cruder than most of the worst types of stringent orthodoxy that he persistently describes as being carried out in the name of Marxism. The question most acutely called for here is that of whether Marxism can live with the contingencies and instabilities mentioned earlier. And if these

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concerns can indeed be taken on board, then why take the next step into postMarxism as a movement beyond Marxism? That next step reproduces all the aspects of Marxism it attempts to undermine, by assuming that Marxism is a fixed historical referent which it is possible to move beyond. Is there anything more orthodox (in its worst formulations) than this? What becomes very clear in the postMarxist stance, then, is that there is little if any room for ma.noeuvre within Marxism. This is predicated on the reductivist readings of Marxism: 'Little is made of difference between Marx's work and Marxism as a tradition. Hence, rejecting Marxism on whatever grounds usually functions to reject Marx too. Conflating Marx and Marxism is a hallmark of post-marxism; it is also the basis for a critique of post-marxism.' Althusser offers a way out of this predicament but, unfortunately, scant attention is paid to his work in these books. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe's reading of Althusser goes largely unchallenged. Yet since Althusser, we know that it is possible to carry out just such a movement within Marxism 'for Marx'. This movement seems to be an option that post-Marxism is unwilling to even consider. Stuart Sim must be credited with the production of a clear and articulate intellectual survey that encapsulates the contested and difficult nature of the emergence of post-Marxism. Hopefully this clarification will aid in any future discussion surrounding the Marxism/ post-Marxism divide, and move the debate beyond some of the more discordant exchanges. However, any debate surrounding post-Marxism has to, by definition, entail a discussion concerning what constitutes Marxism-

164

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the 'post-'prefix demands it! It would seem that post-Marxism is clearly centred around an attack on any kind of Marxism operating with an essentialist logic. Why can't we reconfigure Marxism around overdetermination or non-essentialism? Why (again) throw the baby out with the bathwater? Jameson suggests that the post-Marxists have buried the body before being sure that Marxism is

completely dead. So we might conclude that Marxism is buried alive, such that the task today is to resurrect the body and restore to life what life is left. Perhaps it is time to think about this crucial movement by revisiting Althusser's contribution to Marxist theory, thereby challenging the way post-Marxism has attempted to fill the void since the rapid and premature decline of Athusser's influence.

John Crabtree

PaHerns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia Latin America Bureau, 2005, x ISBN 1-899-36571-0

+

118

pp.

(pbk) £9

Reviewed by JeHery R. Webber

The Cochabamba 'water war' of 2000 hydrocarbons (oil and gas). This most projected Bolivia-South America's recent wave of protests reached its poorest country-into the international zenith in May-June 2005 with the spotlight, if only for a moment. The 'second gas war', which forced the popular mobilisation that defeated the resignation of Mesa, the second privatisation of water and threw out a president to be thrown out in two years. Some important studies of the multinational corporation became an inspiration within the poorly labelled Cochabamba water war have appeared, 'anti-globalisation' movement. Then in but the whole spectrum of contentious September-October 2003, the 'gas war', popular politics in Bolivia from 2000 to with its epicentre in the shantytown city 2005 has mainly been subjected only to of El Alto, saw more than 500,000 conjunctural, journalistic analysis. This people in the streets, scores of unarmed is especially true of the literature protesters killed, and finally the forced available in English. John Crabtree's resignation of the hated neoliberal Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social president Gonzalo (Goni) Sanchez de Movements in Bolivia is one of the first Lozada. Bolivia briefly re-entered the' preliminary efforts to paint a broader spotlight. The year 2005 witnessed a picture, to uncover patterns and to steady increase in mobilisation against reveal the deeper, underlying economic Goni's replacement, Carlos Mesa, with and political structures that help to various popular-indigenous sectors explain the causes and dynamics of the demanding the nationalisation of various waves of contemporary Bolivian

164

Capital & Class #88

the 'post-'prefix demands it! It would seem that post-Marxism is clearly centred around an attack on any kind of Marxism operating with an essentialist logic. Why can't we reconfigure Marxism around overdetermination or non-essentialism? Why (again) throw the baby out with the bathwater? Jameson suggests that the post-Marxists have buried the body before being sure that Marxism is

completely dead. So we might conclude that Marxism is buried alive, such that the task today is to resurrect the body and restore to life what life is left. Perhaps it is time to think about this crucial movement by revisiting Althusser's contribution to Marxist theory, thereby challenging the way post-Marxism has attempted to fill the void since the rapid and premature decline of Athusser's influence.

John Crabtree

PaHerns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia Latin America Bureau, 2005, x ISBN 1-899-36571-0

+

118

pp.

(pbk) £9

Reviewed by JeHery R. Webber

The Cochabamba 'water war' of 2000 hydrocarbons (oil and gas). This most projected Bolivia-South America's recent wave of protests reached its poorest country-into the international zenith in May-June 2005 with the spotlight, if only for a moment. The 'second gas war', which forced the popular mobilisation that defeated the resignation of Mesa, the second privatisation of water and threw out a president to be thrown out in two years. Some important studies of the multinational corporation became an inspiration within the poorly labelled Cochabamba water war have appeared, 'anti-globalisation' movement. Then in but the whole spectrum of contentious September-October 2003, the 'gas war', popular politics in Bolivia from 2000 to with its epicentre in the shantytown city 2005 has mainly been subjected only to of El Alto, saw more than 500,000 conjunctural, journalistic analysis. This people in the streets, scores of unarmed is especially true of the literature protesters killed, and finally the forced available in English. John Crabtree's resignation of the hated neoliberal Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social president Gonzalo (Goni) Sanchez de Movements in Bolivia is one of the first Lozada. Bolivia briefly re-entered the' preliminary efforts to paint a broader spotlight. The year 2005 witnessed a picture, to uncover patterns and to steady increase in mobilisation against reveal the deeper, underlying economic Goni's replacement, Carlos Mesa, with and political structures that help to various popular-indigenous sectors explain the causes and dynamics of the demanding the nationalisation of various waves of contemporary Bolivian

Book Reviews

social movements and the actors involved. This short book is clear and well written and, surprisingly, conveys a good deal of the complexity of the situation in a small space. Patterns of Protest is free of academic jargon, focusing instead on serious description, empirical detail and textured, multilayered analysis. Crabtree utilises his quite extensive knowledge of Bolivia to highlight the local particularities of each movement investigated, while always placing those particularities in the wider socio-political context of the country as a whole and, still more broadly, within the international setting that determines no small part of Bolivia's internal politics. The purpose of the book is to understand the dynamics and causes of social movement protests in Bolivia, starting with the Cochabamba water war and ending with the El Alto gas war. As Crabtree argues, 'these bouts of confrontation have rational explanations which need to be understood. They are rooted in a sense of inequality, exclusion and discrimination, and in a political system that-despite some of the reforms passed-still had strong barriers (formal and informal) to genuine participation and negotiation' (p. 109). The deceptively simple idea that resistance to the neoliberal political and economic system could be rational is an important corrective to the celebration of the Bolivian model over the last twenty years by international financial institutions and mainstream academics. Crabtree highlights the important Bolivian tradition of radical protest, which had been led, to a large extent, by the miners of the Bolivian Workers' Confederation following the 1952 revolution. This came apart with the

165

imposition of neoliberalism in 1985, the privatisation of the mines, and the firing of tens of thousands of miners. After that, effective protest faded away for roughly fifteen years, and civil society became more heterogeneous. Nonetheless, ex-miners migrated to various parts of the country and became key actors in what would become new forms of popular protest. Patterns of Protest is largely an attempt to understand popular resistance in the neoliberal period, after the miners lost their vanguard role. Poverty, inequality, injustice and racism are described in broad terms in order to set the context. The lack of ideological variation within political parties during the neoliberal period, as well as the near-total distrust of political parties on the part of the Bolivian population, is also portrayed as a key contextual factor to understanding contemporary movements. The undemocratic role of external actors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the United States embassy and the Inter-American Development Bank, among others, are also indicated as key factors in the widespread disillusionment in Bolivia with formal liberal democracy. Chapter 1 examines the Cochabamba water war. Crabtree avoids any romanticisation of the situation following the water war in Cocha-bamba, explaining the technical difficulties with water access that persist. At the same time, he does not lose sight of the broader political impact of the water war: 'Beyond the still unresolved local problems of water supply management, the importance of the Cochabamba water war lies in how it showed that it is possible to resist the tide of privatization' (p. 31). Chapter 2 provides an important overview of the cocaleros' (coca

166

growers') movement in the Chapare and Yungas regions. The us 'drug war' is subjected to substantial critique, and the way in which peasant leader Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party arose from this context is also effectively conveyed. Chapter 3 is one of the most important sections of the book. It highlights the political and social dynamics of the richest department of the country, Santa Cruz. The politics of far-Right lobby groups, the historic weakness of the Left in Santa Cruz, elite demands for 'autonomy', racism, the rise of the landless and indigenous movements, and the ongoing problems with land concentration and vigilante landowners' justice are all introduced. Chapter 4 concentrates on the problem of pensions in Bolivia, and the movement-spearheaded by ex-miners-to guarantee a basic living pension. There are especially insightful comments, in this chapter, on the gendered aspects of poverty in old age. Chapter 5 tackles the rise of Aymara nationalism, and the issue of land in the altiplano (high plateau) region of the country. The chapter seeks to understand the material and economic basis of the political-ethnic situation, in addition to applying cultural analysis. The fascinating ways in which tradition and modernity overlap in the Aymara world are discussed. Finally, the gas war of 2003 is attended to in Chapter 6, which is followed by a conduding chapter that seeks to underline the particulari ties and commonalities between these multifaceted and complex movements. Let me point out two shortcomings in this important book. First, in the concluding chapter Crabtree points to

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four limitations of the popular movements: their episodic nature, their disunity, their failure to build strategic bases of broader sympathy and support and, finally, their reactive nature. The key related issues of relations between Leftist social movements and political parties, and the question of vying for state power, are not taken up. These issues are being widely debated within the Latin American Left, and their absence from the text is surprising. Second, Crabtree's own ideological preference for a 'social compact' of sorts, in order to build consensus and trust between competing interests in Bolivia, seems a far cry from what social movements are actually demanding. In a country where racial and class stratification is so profound, contemporary radical social movements are looking to fundamentally destroy the foundations of the current order through street insurrection, while the few who enjoy the privileges of the current order are highly unlikely to ever engage in a trusting and consensual process that will lead to the demise of their privilege. Furthermore, there can be little moral foundation for a 'social compact' which fails to undermine that privilege thoroughly. Patterns of Protest is an important introduction to Bolivia's contentious popular politics in the neoliberal era. It will be an especially useful tool for undergraduate students. Given its length, and the breadth of subject matter that is included, this book could not be anything more than an introduction to the dynamics of the social movements in question. However, as an introduction, it manages to encompass an unexpectedly wide swathe of the important issues.

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Book Reviews

Books available for review If any reader would like to review any of the books listed below, please contact one of the book review editors, Andrew McCulloch or John Stirling, by email: or <[email protected]>. Please note Andrew McCulloch's new email address, which has changed because of his retirement in January 2006. Anderson, S. & J. Cavanagh, with T. Lee (2005) Field Guide to the Global Economy (The New Press).

Moseley, F. (ed.) (2005) Marx's Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals (Palgrave).

Gall, G. (2005) The Political Economy of Scotland: Red Scotland? Radical Scotland? (University of Wales Press).

Philp, B. (2005) Reduction, Rationality and Game Theory in Marxian Economics (Routledge).

Gouverneur, J. (2005) The Foundations of Capitalist Economy: An Introduction to the Marxist Economic Analysis of Contemporary Capitalism (Diffusion Universitaire Ciaco and
Seifert, R. & T. Sibley (2005) United They Stood: The Story of the UK Firefighters' Dispute 2002-2004 (Lawrence and Wishart).

Gruber, H. (2005) The Economics of Mobile Telecommunications (Cambridge). Harley, B., J. Hyman & P. Thompson (eds.) (2005) Participation and Democracy at WOrn (Palgrave). Henwood, D. (2005) After the New Economy (The New Press). Joseph, J, (ed.) (2005) Social Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press). Lippit, V. D. (Routledge).

(2005)

Capitalism

Stanford, J. & L. Vosko (eds.) Challenging the Market: The Struggle to Regulate Wbrk and Income (McGill-Queen's University Press). Wetherly, P. (2005) Marxism and the State (Pal grave) . Worth, O. (2005) Hegemony, International Political Economy and Post-Communist Russia (Ashgate). Varian, H.,J, Farrell & C. Shapiro (2004) The Economics ofInformation Technology: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press).