P. 28 During the 20th century we became accustomed to victories and defeats as military clashes; revolutions cornered power with weapons, defeats took the form of military coups and fascist dictatorships. The defeat we suffered at the turn of the 21st century, however, must be measured by different criteria. Capitalism has won because it has succeeded in shaping our lives and our mental habitus, because it has succeeded in imposing itself as an anthropological model, a ‘way of life’. The most powerful armies are not invincible. The peasants of Vietnam, one of the poorest countries in the world a century ago, succeeded, through a struggle that can justly be defined as heroic, in defeating, first, Japanese and French colonialism, and then, despite the napalm attacks, American imperialism. What we have not managed to stop, however, is the ongoing process of universal commodity deification that, like an octopus, is enveloping the entire planet. Capitalism took its revenge through the current Vietnamese economic boom.
P. 44
Railways also offered a metaphor for both the circulation of capital and its cyclical crises. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has brilliantly shown, the concept of circulation, previously related to the lexicon of biology and physiology, in the 19thcentury enlarged its scope and was quickly metaphorized to express systems of communication and the unification of the social body. Circulation meant a healthy body, whereas any static element appeared as an obstacle or a symptom of disease. Cities, territories and nations began to be viewed as living bodies, the objects of what Foucault would later call modern bio politics. Schivelbusch quotes a popular book by Maxine du Camp, published at the time of Huassmann’s reshaping of the French capital under the Second Empire, which was significantly titled Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions, as vie. The wide boulevards that replaced the old labyrinth of small streets and redesigned the structure of the city along modern, rational lines, mean “a double system of circulation and respiration”. The social concept of “traffic” joined the physiological concept of circulation. According to Marx, circulation is, alongside production, a crucial moment of capital’s life, and the link between them is time. The three volumes of Capital depict a conceptual totality: the linear, homogenous time of production in the first volume; the cyclical time of circulation in the second, where Marx analyses the process of rotation and enlarged reproduction of capital; and the organic time of capital in the third, where he reconsistitutes the entire process as a unity of the time of production and the time of circulation”
P. 52 Machines are motors that replace the muscular energy of workers and animals… radically modify the old metabolic pathways between human beings and nature… introduce an anthropological break between ‘labor’ and ‘labour power’ which Agne Heller has depicted as the transition from a ‘paradigm of work to a ‘paradigm of production’ Now, socialism meant liberation from Labour rather than rough labour … .. This conception contains the premises of a socialist utopia grounded on an idea of total freedom and human liberation from any material constraint, and t the same time a dangerous idealisation of technology that announces the controversial relationship between socialism and ecology in the 20th century. In fact, Marx’s entire ouvre is shaped by an unresolved tension between the two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, a positivist attempt – so typical of the time – to discover the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production and, beyond capitalism of history, which resulted in the evolutionary scheme of the succession of social formations described in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ON the other hand, a dialectical vision of history as an open process, made of unpredictable turns and bifurcations, with a predetermined direction and whose final result depends on human agency. In this second conception, the development of productive forces – science, technology, motors, machines etc – was a premise for both socialism and a negative dialectic that reinforced exploitation and destroyed nature itself. This tension between a ‘determinist’ and a ‘constructivist’ Marx, that never found a satisfactory resolution in his work, makes sterile the antipodal portraits of him either as a ‘Promethean’ advocate of productivity or the forerunner of modern political ecology.
P. 96 It was Walter Benjamin, a heterodox Marxist, who turned Marx’s metaphor upside-down. He proposed a radically anti-positivist historical materialism that would have ‘annihilated in itself the idea of progress’….famous theses on the concept of history contain the following sentence: ‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely the human race – to activate the emergency brake.” … Marx celebrated the ‘demonic energy’ of industrial capitalism and the rising workers’ movement. Benjamin wrote in 1940, when it was ‘midnight in the century’. Today railways evoke Aushwitz sooner than glorious revolutions.
P. 79
At the end of 1918, when he was Commissar for the Arts in Vitebsk, Marc Chagall painted Forward, Forward, a canvas which he described as a study for the anniversary of the October Revolution…portrays the Revolution as it was perceived by its actors, a jump towards the future and a feeling of weightlessness. This feeling can very well coexist with the worst material conditions – the ravages of war, food shortages, penury – and arises from the deep conviction that everything is changing, that the old world is finishing and a new one is coming, brought about by a transformation from below.Building a new society is a difficult task, a titanic ambition that requires enormous sacrifices and whose outcome still remains uncertain, but the present is shaped by this gravity, a sensation that affects bodies like an electric pulse and energises them. Revolution is also a corporeal experience.”
P. 82 The events of Hune 1848 revealed the birth of a new political body: the constitution of the oppressed and the labouring classes into a historical subject. In his recollections Tocqueville mentions some individual figures, and even describes the barricades, bit it is only when speaking of his own class that he distinguishes its members (‘landlords, lawyers, doctors’) Describing the popular classes of Paris, he paints them as a single body that acts by moving its different organs.. This people acted as a conscious body, what Marc, in the same years, called ‘a class for itself’. .. IN My Life (1929) Leon Trotsky devotes similarly striking pages to portraying the effervescence of Petrograd in 1917 and the awakening of its proletarian classes. He did not write as an external observer but as a leader of the revolution , and so it was from inside the people itself that he experienced the molecular process through which it moved to the centre of the political stage. This meant, n his words, ‘the inspired frenzy of history’ This frenzied inspiration was eminently creative…Trotsky explained the way in which he himself, a leader, had been absorbed by a people who ‘suggested’ the words of his speeches to him and transformed them into the wilful expression of an unconscious collective process”
P. 126 Some pages of Literature and Revolution sketch an impressive image of a future nature completely reshaped by technology and leading to a redefinition of human life itself. .. In a socialist future, men ‘will be accustomed to look at the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life’. .. According to the principles of functionalism, art will be ‘formative’ rather than ‘ornamental’ and will achieve a new a harmonic relationship with nature, not in a Rousseauiam sense – a romantic return to the primal and idyllic ‘state of nature’ but rather thought the complete submission of the planet to the needs of a superior civilisation. This would bring significant changes in distribution of mountains and rivers, forests and seashores…. In his anthropocentric view, the relationship between human beings and nature had to be hierarchical… socialism would reshape human life itself by accomplishing a bio political plan that would ultimately take a eugenic form’.
P. 146 Antonio Gramsci elaborated an impressive theory of socialism as redemptive of (rather than liberation from) labour… Whereas Taylorism transformed workers into ‘trained gorillas’ by breaking the ‘pschyo-physical nexus of qualified professional work’ socialism would re-establish such a nexus on a superior level, by creating a ‘new type’ of conscious worker, able to control and manage the labour process in which he was involved. This superior kind of producer and human being, Gramsci stressed, was the outcome of an almost eugenic plan: “A forced selection will ineluctably take place; a part of the old working class will be pitilessly eliminated from the world of labour, and perhaps from the world tout court.” This regenerated ‘superior’ specimen would possess some corporeal and ascetic habits forged by his role as producer. … Proletarian power, he explained, meant ‘self-coercion and self-discipline (like Algiers trying himself to the chair)”… this biopolitical reshaping of human beings as productive and disciplined bodies fetishised both the homo faber and the development of productive forces. The advent of the New Man as an ascetic producer was incompatible with the hedonism of the socialist ‘winged Eros’.
P. 148-9
“The Atlantic Revolutions of the last quarter of the 18th century – a cycle of uprisings that swept from America to France to Saint-Domingue (Haiti), establishing the ideological and political bases of our modernity – are deposited in essentially national memories. They were obviously correlated n the consciousness of their actors, but their entanglement did not produce supranational memories: whereas the American and French revolutions are frequently opposed as two antipodal paradigms, the Black Jacobins have been silenced for a century and half and therefore excluded from an essentially Western revolutionary canon. .. At once an omnipresent heritage and an ungraspable memorial object, revolutions have today again become, to use Edmund Burke’s famous phrase exhumed by Marx and Engles, ‘spectres haunting Europe’. They speak to us of the past but perhaps they are still announcing the future. Their universal legacy is, first of all, a concept. If the world ‘revolution’ is old, it is only after 1789 that it takes on, in all languages, its modern significance. Borrowed from astronomy, it was previously used to designate a ‘rotation’, meaning the re-establishment of stable institutions after a period of troubles. This is how the British defined their ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688… while the upheaval led by Cromwell in the 1640s was considered a ‘Civil War’. .. [US] their rebellion was a ‘War of Independence’ and one would have to wait two decades for it to become the ‘American Revolution’.
P. 159 “Roman Law, Agamben argues, distinguished between auctoritas and potetas: the first embodied by a personal, physical, one could say ‘biopolitical’ authority; the second by a juridical and representative body. The state of exception was the junction of auctoritas and potestas, ‘Two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements’, in the figure of the dictator”. This distinction is the source of two opposed currents in the history of juridical thought: o the one hand, the thinkers of political sovereignty and, on the other, those of juridical positivism: decisionism versus normativism, the two traditions in embodied in the 20th century by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsey. Schmitt thinks of the state as forged and shaped by an existential and political will (Nomos); Kelsen, on the contrary, as a structure of formalised norms. The former posit is the priority of power; the later that of law. For decisionism, I is power that determines the norm, as the original source of any juridical system; for normativisim, on the contrary, it is the law that determines power, which exists only thanks to a system of rules that structure it. In fact, power is usually the resul of a combination of force and law… That is why Weber did not which to dissociate force (Macht) from legitimacy (Herrschaft).
P. 162
“In the 1790s, the philosophical background of counterrevolution was irrationalism, which considered the idea of a world regulated by reason as downright nonsensical. Created by God, the world of Legitimism was organised by Providence, not reason… Burke, however, represented the ‘moderate’ current of counter-revolution; he was attached to the juridical framework of the British monarchy, had approved of American independence and looked positively on the development of market society. In continental Europe, counterrevolution was far more radical and sometimes took on an almost apocalyptic favour. It thinkers considered social and political inequalities to be just s natural as the vocation of human beings to obey their superiors. Contemptible and descpicable, mankind deserved only to be chastised. History was a torrent of blood, a perpetual massacre, a slaughter in which human beings were punished for their sins. Authority, hierarchy, discipline, tradition, submission and honour; these were the values of counterrevolution.”
P. 167
“In the 1920s the profile of counterrevolution also changed.The collapse of the European dynastic order fixed by the Congress of Vienna.- what Karl Polanyi defined as “The Hundred Years Peace” – had rendered obsolete that philosophy which, for a century, had inspired the partisans of order and found its pillars in Catholicism, anti-republicanism and conservatism… the right became ‘revolutionary’ and conquered a mass support that it did not have, except for very short periods, in the previous century. .. Nationalism acquired symbols and rituals borrowed from a Jacobin model – the people in arms – previously abhorred. It’s leader, often of plebeian origins, had discovered politics in street fights and the revolutionary lexicon suited them better than parliamentary rhetoric.”
P. 184
“For Ernst Bloch, the author of The Principle of Hope (1954-9), the dreams of a better world arise from the tensions of a ‘non-synchonic’ world, in which different and sometimes antipodal temporalities, belonging to different eras, coexist in the same social space. In his view, this heterogenous structure of historical time – he called it Ungleichzeitigkeit – is the source of utopian thinking and imagination, in which the past and the future merge to invent a new aesthetic and intellectual configurations. Thus, his work consisted primarily in excavating the past as an inexhaustible reservoir of experiences, ideas and objects that hear witness to the search for a liberated future: imprints, vestiges, traces (Spuren) of collective dreams, the images that portray a desired community of free and equal human beings. The principle of Hope, a three volume book like an impressive encyclopaedia of utopias, is paradoxically devoid of any prediction of a future world. It is rather a historical investigation of ‘future pasts’, a critical inventory of the innumerable ways in which people have gained or ‘anticipated’ the future down the ages… Bloch is a kind of archaeologist who, with incredible erudition, patiently unearths and recomposes the ‘daydreams’ of our ancestors : exhibitions, circuses, dancing, travel, songs, movies and more. Bloch analyses utopias inscribed into the entire spectrum of human knowledge, from medicine to architecture, via aesthetics and technology.. on the one hand there is the ‘cold stream’ of utopias prefiguring a hierarchical, authoritarian and oppressive order like Plato’s Republic, Saint-Simon’s New Industrial Order, and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria… on the other hand, the ‘warm stream’ of libertarian and communist utopias well represented by Thomas more, Charles Fourier and Karl Marx… in the 20th century, the apocalyptic age of wars and revolutions, utopias had become both concrete and possible, abandoning their previous character of abstract fantasy.”
P. 226 “In France and Western Europe, the word ‘intellectual’ is usually related to the Dreyfus affair, the political crisis that deeply shook the Third Republic. .. Before that the word existed and was used – infrequently – to designate certain new actors or modernity: scholars, writers, journalists, clerks, lawyers, in short people living by the pen. Th word often took a negative meaning. Unlike ‘intellect’, a noble human faculty – the ‘intellectual’ was cast as a modern, ‘cerebral’ agent, divorced from nature, condemned to sterile and uncreating thinking, shut inside an artificial world made of abstract values.”
P. 227 “Unlike in France, where intellectuals were well represented within the institutions of the Third Republic – above all the universities which, including the Sorbonne, were Dreyfusard bastions – in Germany the gulf between scholars (Gelehrte) and intellectuals (Intellektuelle) was almost insuperable and even deepened under the Weimar Republic. There, scholars belonged to state institutions, embodied science and order, and transformed the universities into strongholds of nationalism. Whereas academics educated the superior layers of state bureaucracy and selected the political elites, the real of intellectuals was located in civil society, outside the academy. Temples of tradition, some of the best inverse ties were located in small cities and rural regions. The intellectuals, on the contrary, were at home in the big cities, where they emerged with the rise of a powerful culture industry.”
P. 230 in Russia “they were a minority of outcasts, in a twofold sense: on the one hand, as a group of cultivated people in a nation of illiterate peasants, and on the other, as representatives of literature, journalism and liberal arts in a society with a still embryonic and repressed public sphere. Their clash against absolutism pushed them towards political radicalism, and tsarist despotism pushed them towards political radicalism.”
P. 239 “In contrast to anarchism, which always welcome bohemian artists and writers as its own natural representatives, Marxism looked at the intelligentsia which suspicious, never quite coming to terms with a strange actor that appeared simultaneously attractive and highly repulsive. Insofar as Marxist thinkers were themselves intellectuals – sociologically speaking at least – such paradoxical behaviour clearly revealed a crisis of identity and a reluctant self-definition. This uncanniness began with Marx and Engles …”
P. 245 “a) intellectuals are a bourgeois layer b) they can join the proletariat only by deserting their own class c) the proletariat needs the intellectuals in order to build its socialist ideology d) déclassé intellectuals – lumpen or bohemians – are an unstable and unreliable social stratum that tends to join the political reaction, as in France in 1848. One of the most striking aspects of this debate lay in self-negation: nobody was ready to admit that the overwhelming majority of Marxist leaders, activists and thinks were themselves déclassé intellectuals… Wedded to a teleological vision of history that posited the transition from capitalism to socialism as an ineluctable process bringing the triumph of science, culture, technological progress and a higher development of productive forces, Marxist thinkers could not imagine these colossal accomplishments being carried out by marginal actors.”
P. 246 “Michael Bakunin ,a wandering anarchists coming from the Russian aristocracy, lucidly recognised that the transition from the ruling classes to the radical left implied a willing declassement.”
P. 270 “‘Artists are often outsiders and transgressors,’ writes Michael Lowry, ‘but few of them embody as many boundary-defying qualities as Claude Cajun: lesbian, surrealist, dissident Marxist, non-Jewish Jew, photographer, poet, critic and Resistance activist. Claude Cahun was an heiress, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word, since she had bourgeois origins – her father was an established publisher and her uncle, the literary critic Marcel Schwab”
P. 278 “Whereas the introduction of Marxism in China expressed both the powerful attraction of European modernity and a critical reassessment of Confucian culture, in Dutch Indonesia it reflected a new relationship between nationalism, anti-imperialism and the Islamic tradition amongst a young generation of intellectuals who, like their Chinese comrades, had experienced both Japanese and Western emigration. This was the case of Tan Malala.. introduced to Marxism by Hank Sneevliet, one of the leaders of Dutch socialism and a founder of the Indonesian Community Party. … during the 1920s .. ravelled throughout the east, from China to Thailand, from the Philippines to Singapore, as an agent of the Communist International, being arrested several times.
P. 334 “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘ freedom’ becomes a special privilege.” Rosa Luxembourg, The Russian Revolution.
P. 380 Herbert Marcuse “Freedom is living without toil, without anxiety: the play of human faculties. The realisation of freedom is a problem of time: reducing of the working day to the minimum which turns quantity into quality. A socialist society is a society in which free time, not labour time is the social measure of wealth and the dimension of the individual existence.” (Preface 1957 to Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 Until Today.
P. 446
1920 “the Bolsheviks organised a Congress of the People’s of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Society Socialist Republic which convened almost 2,000 delegates from 29 Asian nationalities … despite their small number among the delegates, women played an important role in the discussions. The chairmanship was equal – two male and two female presidents – and the question of women’s rights was put on the agenda. The Turkish feminist Najiye Hanukkah insisted that there was no national liberation without women’s emancipation and claimed a complete civil and political equality for women in the East. Their struggle, she emphasised, went well beyond “the right to walk in the street without wearing the chador”. … congress prefiguring “what today would be called intersectionality”.
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