"Theses of Resistance"

Daniel Bensaïd, Viento Sur

We are faced with a double responsibility: the transmission of a tradition
threatened by conformism, and the exploration of the uncertain contours of
the future.

In the course of the last decade (since the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and German unification), something came to an end. But what? Was it
the “Short 20th Century” of which Eric Hobsbawm and other historians speak,
beginning with World War I and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Or is it the short period that followed World War II, marked by the twin
superpowers of the Cold War, and characterized in the imperialist centres by
sustained capital accumulation and “Fordist” regulation?

Or again, is it the great cycle in the history of capitalism and the
workers’ movement, opened by the capitalist development of the 1880s,
subsequent colonial expansion and the blossoming of the modern labour
movement, symbolized by the formation of the Second International?The great strategic analyses of the workers movement date to a large extent
from this period of formation, before World War I: for example the analyses
of imperialism (Hilferding, Bauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Parvus, Trotsky,
Bukharin); the national question (Rosa Luxemburg again, Lenin, Bauer, Ber
Borokov, Pannekoek, Strasser); party-trade union relations and
parliamentarism (Rosa Luxemburg, Sorel, Jaurès, Nieuwenhuis, Lenin);
strategy and the road to power (Bernstein, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin,
Trotsky).

These controversies constitute our history as much as those of the
conflicting dynamics between revolution and counterrevolution inaugurated by
the world war and the Russian Revolution.

Beyond the often intense differences over orientation and options, the
workers’ movement of that time displayed a relative unity and shared a
common culture. What remains of this inheritance today?

In a very unclear editorial in the first issue of the relaunched New Left
Review, Perry Anderson estimated that the world has not been so lacking in
alternatives to the dominant order since the Reformation. Charles-André Udry
is more definite, arguing that one of the characteristics of the present
situation is the “disappearance” of an independent international workers’
movement.

We are then in the middle of an uncertain transition, where the old is dying
without being abolished, and where the new is making an effort to emerge,
caught between a past which has not been transcended and the increasingly
urgent necessity of an autonomous research project, which would allow us to
orientate ourselves to the new world opening before our eyes. Because of the
weakening of the traditions of the old workers’ movement there is a danger
that, given the theoretical mediocrity of social democracy and other
opponents to our right, we could resign ourselves to just defending old
theoretical conquests, which today are of limited value. Certainly theory
lives off debate and confrontation: we are always to a certain extent
dependent on the debates with our adversaries. But this dependency is
relative.

It is easy to say that the great political forces of what is called in
France the “plural left”, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the
Greens, are not very stimulating in their approach to fundamental problems.
But also it is necessary to remember that, in spite of their naiveté and
sometimes their youthful excesses, the debates of the far left of the 1970s
were much more productive and enriching than they are today.

We have then begun the dangerous transition from one epoch to another and we
are in midstream. We must simultaneously transmit and defend our theoretical
tradition, even if it is threatened by conformism, while at the same time
boldly analysing these new times. At the risk of appearing shocking, I would
like to face this test with a spirit I would describe as “open dogmatism”.
“Dogmatism”, because, if that word gets a bad press (according to the
media’s common sense, it is always better to be open than closed, light than
heavy, flexible than rigid), in all matters of theory, resistance to voguish
ideas has its virtues. The challenge of versatile impressions and the
effects of fashion demands that serious refutations are made before a
paradigm is changed). “Open”, because we should not religiously conserve a
doctrinaire discourse, but rather enrich and transform a world view by
testing it against new realities.

I would propose then five theses of resistance; their form deliberately
emphasizes the necessary work of refusal.

1 Imperialism has not been dissolved in commodity globalization.

2 Communism has not been dissolved in the fall of Stalinism.

3 The class struggle cannot be reduced to the politics of community
identities.

4 Conflictual differences are not dissolved in ambivalent diversity.

5 Politics cannot be dissolved into ethics or aesthetics.

I think these theses are demonstrable propositions. The explanatory notes
explain some of their consequences.

THESIS 1: IMPERIALISM HAS NOT BEEN DISSOLVED IN COMMODITY GLOBALIZATION

Imperialism is the political form of the domination that corresponds to the
combined and unequal development of capitalist accumulation. This modern
imperialism has changed its appearance. It has not disappeared. In the
course of recent centuries, it has undergone three great stages: a) that of
colonial conquest and territorial occupation (the British and French
colonial empires); b) that of the domination of financial capital or the
“highest stage of capitalism” analyzed by Hilferding and Lenin (fusion of
industrial and banking capital, export of capital, import of raw materials);
c) after World War II, that of the domination of the world shared between
several imperialist powers, formal independence of former colonies and
dominated development.(1)

The sequence opened by the Russian Revolution has come to an end. A new
phase of imperial globalization which resembles financial domination as it
appeared before 1914, is what we have moved into. Imperial hegemony is now
exerted in multiple ways: by financial and monetary domination (allowing
control of credit mechanisms), by scientific and technical domination (a
quasi-monopoly on patents), by the control of natural resources (energy
supplies, control of trade routes, patenting of living organisms), by the
exercise of cultural hegemony (reinforced by the huge power of the mass
media) and, in the last instance, by the exercise of military supremacy
(obvious in the Balkans and two Gulf Wars).(2)

Within this new configuration of globalized imperialism, the direct
subordination of territories is secondary to the control of markets. From
this results a very unequal and very badly combined development, new
relations of sovereignty (disciplinary mechanisms like the debt, energy,
food and health dependency, military pacts), and a new international
division of labour.

Countries that seemed to be on the path of economic development until twenty
or thirty years ago are again caught in the spiral of underdevelopment.

For example, Argentina is again mainly an exporter of raw materials (Soya
has become its main export product). Egypt, which when ruled by Nasser’s
Arab nationalism in the 1950s boasted of its recovered sovereignty
(symbolized by nationalisation of the Suez Canal), its successes in literacy
(providing engineers and doctors for the countries of the Middle East) and
the beginnings of industrialization (like Algeria under Boumedienne) is
today becoming simply a paradise for tourist operators. After the two debt
crises (1982 and 1994) and integration into NAFTA, Mexico appears, more than
ever, as the dominated backyard of the “Northern colossus”.

The metamorphosis of the relations of dependency and domination is reflected
in particular through the geo-strategic and technological transformation of
war.

During World War II, it was no longer possible to speak of war in the
singular and of a single line of fronts, but of several wars overlapping
with others.(3) From the end of the Cold War, the nature of the conflicts
prevents any approach in terms treating the sides simply good and bad. All
recent conflicts, with their unique combinations and multiple
contradictions, show the impossibility of a simplistic response.

At the time of the Falklands War, opposition to the imperial expedition of
Thatcher’s Britain in no way forced Argentine revolutionaries to support the
military dictators. In the conflict between Iran and Iraq, revolutionary
defeatism in both countries was justified in face of two forms of despotism.
In the Gulf War, international opposition to operation “Desert Storm” did
not imply any support for the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein.

Globalization also has consequences in the structure of conflicts. We are no
longer in the era of wars of liberation and relatively simple oppositions
between dominator and dominated. From this results an intertwining of
interests and a rapid reversibility of positions. It is an obvious reason to
make a detailed balance sheet and to draw some lessons from the doubts, the
errors (sometimes), and the difficulties that we could locate within the
conflicts of recent years.

Reducing conflicts to an opposition between the simply “good” and the simply
“bad” underlies much of the discourse of “human rights imperialism” which
justified NATO’s intervention in ex- Yugoslavia.

COROLLARY 1.1: INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE DEMOCRATIC SOVEIGNTY OF NATIONS
CANNOT BE DISSOLVED IN HUMANITARIAN ETHICS

Even though the function of the nation-state as it was constituted in the
19th century has undoubtedly been transformed and weakened, the era of
interstate international law has nevertheless not arrived. Paradoxically,
Europe has in the last 10 years seen more than 10 new formally sovereign
states with more than 15,000 kilometres of new borders emerge. The
vindication of the right to self-determination for the Bosnians, Kosovars or
Chechnyans, is obviously, a vindication of sovereignty. It is this
contradiction that is obscured by the pejorative notion of “sovereignism”
under which nauseous nationalisms and chauvinisms are confused with
legitimate democratic aspirations to a political sovereignty that offers
resistance to the pure competition of all against all.

International law is still called upon to articulate two legitimacies: that,
emergent, of the universal rights of human beings and citizens (of which
certain institutions like the International Criminal Court constitute
partial crystallizations); and that of interstate relations (whose principle
goes back to the Kantian discourse about “perpetual peace”), on which
institutions such as the United Nations rest. Without attributing to the UN
virtues that it does not have (and without forgetting the disastrous balance
sheet of its performance in Bosnia, Somalia or Rwanda), it is necessary to
state that one of the aims pursued by the powers involved in operation
Allied Force was to modify the architecture of the new imperial order in
favour of new pillars, namely NATO (whose mission was redefined and extended
during its 50th anniversary summit in Washington) and the World Trade
Organization.

Emerging from the relationship of forces that emerged after World War II,
the UN must undoubtedly be reformed and democratized (antiparliamentarianism
does not prevent us supporting democratic reforms of the mode of scrutiny
like proportionality and feminization), to the benefit of the General
Assembly and against the closed club of the Permanent Security Council. Not
in order to confer on it an international legislative legitimacy, but to
ensure that a certainly imperfect representation of the “international
community” reflects the diversity of interests and viewpoints. In the same
way, we urgently need to develop a reflection around the European political
institutions and the international judicial institutions like the Hague
Tribunal, the emergency criminal tribunals and the future International
Criminal Court.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 1: To update the notion of imperialism, not only from the
point of view of the relations of economic domination (obvious), but as
global system of domination (technological, ecological, military,
geo-strategic, institutional) is of capital importance, precisely when
seemingly intelligent people consider that this category became obsolete
with the collapse of its bureaucratic foe in the East, and that the world is
now organized around an opposition between democracies without adjectives
(putting it another way, Western) and barbarism.

Mary Kaldor, who was, in the early 1980s, together with EP Thompson, one of
the leaders of the campaign for nuclear disarmament against “exterminism”
and the deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe, now says that
“the characteristic distinction of the Westphalian era between internal
peace and foreign war, ordered domestic law and international anarchy, ended
with the Cold War.” We have now entered, it is argued, an era of “regular
progress towards a global legal regime”. It is what some call, without fear
of the contradiction in terms, an “ethical imperialism”, what Mary Kaldor
calls “a benign imperialism”.

THESES 2: COMMUNISM WAS NOT DISSOLVED IN THE FALL OF STALINISM

The ideology of neoliberal counter-reform, as well as trying to dissolve
imperialism into the loyal competition of commodity globalization, tries to
dissolve Communism into Stalinism. Bureaucratic despotism would then be the
simple logical development of revolutionary adventure, and Stalin the
legitimate son of Lenin or Marx. According to this genealogy of the concept,
the idea leads to the world. The historical development and the dark
disaster of Stalinism are potentially there already in the notions of the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” or the “vanguard party”.

In reality, of course, a social theory is never more than a critical
interpretation of an epoch. If we should seek gaps and weaknesses that make
it lose its force in the face of the evidence and of history, that theory
cannot be judged according to the criteria of another epoch. In this way,
the contradictions of democracy, inherited from the French Revolution, a
confusion of people, party and state, the decreed fusion of the social and
the political, blindness in the face of the bureaucratic danger
(underestimated in relation to the main danger of capitalist restoration),
were propitious to the bureaucratic counterrevolution in 1930s Russia.

There are in the Russian Thermidorian process elements of continuity and
discontinuity. The difficulty in accurately dating the triumph of the
bureaucratic reaction relates to the asymmetry between revolution and
counterrevolution. The counterrevolution is indeed not the reverse fact or
the inverted image of the revolution, a sort of revolution in reverse. As
Joseph de Maistre put it very well with regard to the Thermidor of the
French Revolution, the counter-revolution is not a revolution in the
opposite sense, but the opposite of a revolution. It depends on its own
timescales, where ruptures are accumulated and complement each other.

If Trotsky dated the beginning of the Thermidorian reaction to the death of
Lenin, he says that the counter-revolution was not completed until the
beginning of the 1930s, with the victory of Nazism in Germany, the Moscow
trials, the great purges and the terrible year of 1937. In her analysis “The
Origins of Totalitarianism”, Hannah Arendt establishes an apparent
chronology that dates the coming of bureaucratic totalitarianism proper to
1933 or 1934. In Russia, USSR, Russia, Moshe Lewin brings to light the
quantitative explosion of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state from the
end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, the repression against the popular movement
changed in scale. It is not the simple prolongation of what was prefigured
by the practices of the Cheka (the political police) or the political jails,
but a qualitative leap in which the state bureaucracy destroyed and devoured
the party that believed it was able to control it.

The discontinuity demonstrated by this bureaucratic counter-revolution is
central from a triple point of view. In relation to the past: the
intelligibility of history that is not a delirious story told by a crazy
person, but the result of social phenomena, conflicts of interests of
uncertain outcomes and decisive events. With respect to the present: the
consequences of the Stalinist counter-revolution contaminated a whole epoch
and perverted the international workers’ movement for a long time. Many
paradoxes and impasses of the present (beginning with the recurrent crises
in the Balkans) are not understandable without a historical understanding of
Stalinism.

Finally, with respect to the future: the consequences of this
counter-revolution, where the bureaucratic danger is revealed in its
unexpected dimension, will still weigh for a long time on the new
generations. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “one cannot understand the history of
the short 20th century without the Russian Revolution and its direct and
indirect effects”.

COROLLARY 2.1: SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY CANNOT BE SUBSUMED IN DEMOCRATIC STATISM

To portray the Stalinist counter-revolution as a result of the original
vices of “Leninism” (a notion forged by Zinoviev at the 5th Congress of the
Communist International, after the death of Lenin, to legitimise the new
orthodoxy of reasons of state) is not only historically erroneous, it is
also dangerous for the future. It would be then sufficient to have
understood and to have corrected the errors to prevent the “professional
dangers of power” and to guarantee a transparent society.

If the mirage of abundance is renounced this is the necessary lesson of this
disastrous experience that would excuse society from choices and
arbitrations (if necessity is historical, the notion of abundance is
strongly relative); if we abandon the hypothesis of an absolute democratic
transparency, founded on the homogeneity of the people (or of the liberated
proletariat) and the rapid abolition of the State; if, finally, we remove
all consequences of the “discordance of time scales” (economic, ecological,
legal choices, customs, mentalities, art identify different temporalities;
the contradictions of gender and generation are not resolved in the same way
and at the same rhythm as class contradictions), then we should conclude
that the hypothesis of the weakening of the state and of law, as separated
spheres, does not mean their decreed abolition, unless the result is to be
the statization of society and not the socialization of power.

Thus bureaucracy is not the annoying consequence of a false idea, but a
social phenomenon. It certainly had a particular form within primitive
accumulation in Russia or China, but it has its roots in scarcity and the
division of labour. It manifests itself in diverse forms and different
degrees of a universal manner.

This terrible historical lesson must lead to the deepening of the
programmatic consequences drawn from 1979 onwards with the document of the
Fourth International, “Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat”, that specifically talks about political pluralism as a
principle, the independence and autonomy of the social movements with
respect to the state and to the parties, the culture of law and the
separation of powers. The notion of “dictatorship of the proletariat”
evoked, within the political vocabulary of the 19th century, a legal
institution: the temporary emergency powers designated to the Roman Senate
in opposition to tyranny, which was then the name given to arbitrary
power.(4) Nevertheless it is too loaded with initial ambiguities and
associated with too many bitter historical experiences to be still used.
This note can nevertheless give us the chance to reframe the question of
majority democracy, the relation between the social and the political, the
conditions for the weakening of domination to which the dictatorship of the
proletariat seemed under the form “finally discovered” of the Paris Commune,
to have given an answer.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 2.1: The idea that Stalinism represents a bureaucratic
counter-revolution, and not a simple more or less irreversible evolution of
the regime arising from October, is far from meeting a general consensus.
The opposite is true: liberal reformers and repentant Stalinists agree in
seeing Stalinist reaction as the legitimate extension of the Bolshevik
revolution. It is in effect the conclusion at which the “renovators” coming
out of the orthodox Communist tradition arrive when they persist in thinking
of Stalinism mainly as a “theoretical deviation” and not as a formidable
social reaction.
Eric Hobsbawm

Louis Althusser, in his “Reply to John Lewis”, characterised Stalinism as an
“economistic deviation”. Many other theorists put the emphasis on
theoretical error or deviation. This suggests it would be sufficient to
correct this error to avoid the danger of bureaucratism.(5) The method of
the “theoretical deviation”, in perpetuating the parenthesis in the
political analysis of the bureaucratic counterrevolution, is committed to a
search for the original theoretical sin and not only leads to a recurrent
liquidation of “Leninism”, but, to a great extent, of revolutionary Marxism
or the inheritance of the Enlightenment: from blaming Lenin, we quickly pass
to blaming Marx... or Rousseau! If, as Martelli writes, Stalinism is
primarily the fruit of “ignorance”, a greater theoretical lucidity would be
sufficient to prevent the professional dangers of power.(6) It’s excessively
simple.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 2.2: The French publication of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of
Extremes was welcomed by the left as a work displaying intellectual health,
a retort to historiography in the manner of Furet and historical
judicialization in the style of Stéphane Courtois. This well-merited
reception nevertheless runs the risk of leaving unclarified the extremely
problematic aspect of the work.

Hobsbawm certainly does not deny the responsibility of the Thermidorian
gravediggers: but he diminishes it, as if what happened, had to happen, by
virtue of the objective laws of history. He hardly glimpses what could have
been different.

And thus Hobsbawm arrives at what he considers the paradox of this strange
century: “the most lasting result of the October Revolution was to save its
adversary in war as in peace, inciting it to reform itself.(7) As if it was
a natural development of the revolution and not the result of formidable
social and political conflicts, of which the Stalinist counterrevolution is
not the least! This “objectivization” of history reaches the logical
conclusion that, in 1920, “the Bolsheviks committed an error, that seen
retrospectively, seems capital: the division of the international workers’
movement” [between Communism and social democracy — ed].(8)

If the circumstances in which the 21 Conditions for joining the Communist
International were adopted and applied demand a critical examination, we can
nevertheless better understand the division of the international workers’
movement not as a result of ideological will or a doctrinaire error, but of
the original shock of the revolution and to the watershed between those who
assumed its defence (critical, like Rosa Luxemburg) and those who opposed it
and were associated with the holy imperialist alliance.
Rosa Luxemburg

If the inter-war period means for Hobsbawm an “ideological civil war on an
international scale”, he is not talking about the fundamental classes,
capital and the social revolution, but: progress and reaction, anti-fascism
and fascism. Consequently he talks of regrouping “an extraordinary spectrum
of forces”. Within this perspective there is little space for a critical
balance sheet of the German revolution, the Chinese revolution of 1926/27,
the Spanish civil war and the popular fronts.

Avoiding any social analysis of the Stalinist counter-revolution, Hobsbawm
is content with stating that, starting from the 1920s, “when the dust of the
battles settled, the old orthodox empire of the Tsars resurged intact, in
its essentials, but under the authority of the Bolsheviks.” For him, on the
contrary, it is only in 1956, with the crushing of the Hungarian revolution,
that “the tradition of the social revolution exhausted itself“ and that “the
disintegration of the international movement that was faithful to it”
constituted the “extinction of the worldwide revolution” like a .re that is
extinguished alone. In short, “it is above all by organization that the
Bolshevism of Lenin changed the world”. With this funereal phrase a serious
critique of bureaucracy is avoided; it is simply considered as transitory,
an “inconvenience” of the planned economy founded on social property, as if
this property was really social and as if the bureaucracy was a small and
lamentable expense rather than a counter-revolutionary political danger!

Hobsbawm’s work has more the perspective of a “historian’s history”, than
that of a critical or strategic history capable of discovering the possible
options in the great turning points of events.

In Trotski Vivant, Pierre Naville strongly emphasizes the reach of this
methodological slant: “The defenders of the accomplished fact, whoever they
are, have a much shorter vision than political actors. Active and militant
Marxism is predisposed to an optic which is often contrary to that of
history.”

What Trotsky called “prognosis”, says Naville, is more comparable to
prophetic anticipation than to prediction or forecast. The same historians
who find the sense of the event natural when the revolutionary movement has
the wind in its sails, look for disadvantages in it when things are
complicated and it becomes necessary to know how to swim against the
current. It is hard for them to conceive the political imperative of
“outlining history in the wrong direction” (in Walter Benjamin’s formula).
Naville says that this gives history the possibility of unfolding its
retrospective wisdom, enumerating and cataloguing the facts, the omissions,
and the errors. But, lamentably, these historians abstain from indicating
the correct route that would have allowed a moderate to lead a revolutionary
victory, or, on the contrary, to indicate a reasonable and victorious
revolutionary policy within a Thermidorian period.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 2.3: It would be useful to do something that our movement
has neglected: to take a deeper discussion about the notion of
totalitarianism in general (and its relations with the epoch of modern
imperialism), and on bureaucratic totalitarianism in particular. Trotsky
frequently used this term in his book Stalin, without giving precision to
its theoretical status. The concept could be considered very useful in
approaching simultaneously certain contemporary tendencies (pulverization of
the classes in masses, ethnicization and tendencial deterioration of
politics) analyzed by Hannah Arendt in her trilogy on the origins of
totalitarianism, and the particular form that they could take in the case of
the bureaucratic totalitarianism. This would also allow that a vulgar and
over-flexible employment of this useful notion serves ideologically to
legitimize the opposition between democracy (without qualification or
adjectives, consequently bourgeois, actually existing) and totalitarianism
as the only pertinent cause of our time.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 2.4: To insist on the notion of bureaucratic
counterrevolution does not imply in any way closing off a more detailed
debate on the balance sheet of the revolutions in the century. On the
contrary, we need to reappropriate it from a renewed perspective thanks to a
better critical reframing.(9)

The different attempts at theoretical elucidation (theory of state
capitalism, from Mattick to Tony Cliff, the new exploiting class, Rizzi to
Burnham or Castoriadis, or the degenerated workers’ state from Trotsky to
Mandel), while they could have important consequences in terms of practical
direction, are all compatible, through corrections, with the diagnosis of a
Stalinist counterrevolution.

Hannah Arendt

If Catherine Samary now proposes the idea that the fight against the
nomenclature in power demanded a new social revolution and not only a
political revolution, this is however not a simple terminological
modification. According to Trotsky’s thesis, enriched by Mandel, the main
contradiction of the transitional society was between the socialized form of
the planned economy and the bourgeois norms of distribution at the origin of
bureaucratic parasitism and privileges. The “political revolution” consisted
then in bringing the political superstructure into conformity with the
acquired social infrastructure. Antoine Artous says that this forgets who
“in the post-capitalist societies (not only in those societies that would be
better not to describe as “post”, as if they came chronologically after
capitalism, when, in fact, they are determined by the contradictions of
world-wide capitalist accumulation), the state is an integral part in the
sense that it plays a determining role in the structuring of the relations
of production; and it is by this slant that, beyond the common wage form,
the bureaucracy, social group of the state, can be situated inside the
relations of exploitation with the direct producers”.

The continuation of this debate would have to call attention to the
theoretical confusion related to the characterization of political phenomena
in directly sociological terms, to the detriment of the specificity of the
field and the political categories. Many ambiguities attributed to the
category of “workers’ state” arise from this. It is probably also the case
with the notion of “workers’ party”, which tends to relate the function of a
political force to a game of oppositions and alliances, to a deep social
“nature”.

THESIS 3: THE CLASS STRUGGLE IS NOT DISSOLVED IN COMMUNITY IDENTITIES

For too long a time, socalled “orthodox” Marxism attributed to the
proletariat a mission according to which its consciousness would eventually
meet with its essence, thus becoming the redeemer of all humanity. The
disappointments of the following day are, for many, proportional to the
illusions of the day before: by not having transformed itself into an
“everything”, this proletariat is then reduced to nothing.

We should begin by remembering that Marx’s conception of the class struggle
does not have much to do with university sociology. If in practice he does
not have a statistical approach to the question, this is not mainly because
of the embryonic state of the discipline then (the First International
Congress of Statistical Data was in 1854), but for a more fundamental
theoretical reason: the class struggle is a conflict inherent to the
relation of exploitation between capital and labour that governs capitalist
accumulation and the result of the separation between producers and means of
production. We do not thus see in Marx any reductive, normative or
classificatory definition of classes, but a dynamic conception of their
structural antagonism, at the level of production, circulation and
reproduction of capital: classes are never defined only at the level of the
production process (the face off between workers and employers in the
enterprise), but determined by the reproduction of the whole when the
struggle for wages, the division of labour, relations with the state
apparatuses and the world market enter into play. (From this it is clear
that the productive character of labour that appears notably in Volume 2 of
Capital, with respect to the circulation process, does not define the
proletariat. In their central aspects, these questions were dealt with and
discussed widely in the 1970s, in clear opposition to the theses defended
both by the Communist Party in its treatise on State Monopoly Capitalism,
and inversely by Poulantzas, Baudelot and Establer.)(10)
Nicos Poulantzas

Marx speaks generally of proletarians. In general, in the 19th century,
people spoke of the working classes in the plural. The terms in German,
“Arbeiterklasse”, and English, “working class”, stayed general enough,
whereas the term “classe ouvriere”, current in French political vocabulary,
entails a restrictive sociological connotation prone to ambiguity: it
relates to the modern industrial proletariat, excluding employees in the
services and commerce, although these undergo analogous conditions of
exploitation, from the point of view of their relation to private ownership
of the means of production, location in the division of labour or still more
in terms of their status as wage-earners and the amount of their
remuneration.

Perhaps the term “proletariat” is theoretically preferable to that of
“working class”. In the developed societies it represents indeed between two
thirds and four fifths of the active population. The interesting question is
not its predicted disappearance, but its social transformations and its
political representation, taking it as understood that the strictly
industrial proletariat, even though it has undergone an effective reduction
in the course of the last 20 years (from 35% to 26% more or less of the
active population), is still far from the extinction.(11)

The real situation of the proletariat is revealed from an international
perspective. Then what Michel Cohén calls “the proletarianization of the
world” becomes evident. Whereas in 1900, wage-earning workers were around 50
million of a global population of 1,000 million, nowadays they are around
2,000 out of 6,000 million.

The question is then of a theoretical, cultural and specifically political
order rather than strictly sociological. The notion of classes is in itself
the result of a process of formation (see the introduction to EP Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class), of struggles and of organization, in
the course of which the consciousness of a theoretical concept and a
self-determination born out of struggle is constituted: the sentiment of
belonging to a class is as much the result of a political process of
formation as of a sociological determination. Does the weakening of this
consciousness, then, mean the disappearance of classes and their struggles?
Is this weakening conjunctural (linked to the ebbs and flows of the
struggle) or structural (the result of new procedures of domination, not
only social but also cultural and ideological, what Michel Surya calls
“absolute capitalism”), with the discourse of post-modernity representing
its ideological expression? In other words, if the effectiveness of the
class struggle is widely verified in everyday life, do post-modern
fragmentation and individualism allow us to conceive the renewal of shared
collectivities? Given the generalization of commodity fetishism and
consumerism, the frenzy for the ephemeral and immediate, can durable
political and social projects appear again, beyond moments of intense fusion
without future?

One of the high-priority theoretical tasks has to be not only related then
to the sociological transformations of the wage-earner, but to the
transformations underway in the wage relation in terms of regime of
accumulation, as much from the perspective of the organization of work as of
the legal political regulations and what Frederic Jameson calls “the
cultural logic of late capitalism”.

The critique of ultra-liberalism, in reaction to the counter-reform of the
Thatcher-Reagan years runs the risk of being mistaken in its goal if,
obsessed by the image of a commodity jungle after unrestrained deregulation,
it does not measure the reorganizations and the attempts at re-regulation
taking place. The domination of capital, as Boltanski and Chiapello note,
could not last under the naked form of an exploitation and oppression
without legitimacy or justification (there is no lasting imposition without
hegemony, said Gramsci).

EXPLANATORY NOTE 3.1: What is on the agenda then is the redefinition of a
global structure, a territorial organization, legal relations, based on the
present productive forces (new technologies), the general conditions of
accumulation of capital and social reproduction. It is in this framework
that we see crises of transformation of the traditional political forces,
Christian democracy, the British Conservatives, the French right, and the
questioning of the function that they fulfilled since the war within the
framework of the national state; and it is also in that framework that the
transformation takes place of the Social-Democratic parties, whose elites,
through the privatization of the public sector and the fusion of the private
elites with the state elite, are increasingly organically integrated with
the ruling strata of the bourgeoisie.

Given the weakness of the traditional bourgeois formations in the midst of
reconversion, social democratic parties are often called often to assume
temporary responsibility for the modernization of capital, dragging into
their orbit the post-Stalinist parties without a project and most of the
Green parties who lack the doctrinal wherewithal to resist accelerated
institutionalization.

What it is outlined then, whether in the manifesto for a third way from
Blair-Schröder, the projects for a social Europe of minimums, debated at the
European summit in Lisbon, or the manoeuvres of the French employer’s
association on the subject of “social refoundation”, is not a liberalism
without rules, but a new wage relation in a framework of a previously
unheard-of form of liberal-corporatism and liberal-populism. It would be
dangerously short sighted to think that the only possible form of populism
in the future will be the kind of backward-looking sovereignism of people
like Pasqua and Villiers in France.

The crusade for wage-earning shareholders, private pension funds (to the
detriment of solidarity), and the “refeudalization” of the social link
(denounced by Alain Supiot) through the legal primacy of the individual
contract (often synonymous with personal subordination in strongly unequal
societies) over the impersonal relation with the law; all this outlines a
new capital-labour corporative association, in which a small coterie of
winners exist to the detriment of the mass of victims of globalization. In
certain situations, this tendency is perfectly compatible with convulsive
forms of national-liberalism in the manner of Russia’s Putin or Austria’s
right populist leader Jörg Haider.

On the other hand, it is inoperative and possibly deceptive, to deal with
the Haider case by analogy with the fascist movements of the 1930s, instead
of linking it to the contemporary and probably unprecedented forms of the
rightist danger. If it is right to participate in the mobilizations against
Haider (without forgetting, nevertheless, the complacency of some of his
affluent detractors towards Berlusconi, Fini, Millon, Blanc and others) we
should not forget that Haider is firstly also a product of thirteen years of
coalition between conservatives and Social Democrats, the lack of democracy
in the EU and austerity policies that allowed him to arrive where he is.
George Lukacs

It is important to consider the singular forms that reactionary threats can
assume in today’s world, the role of regionalisms in European
reconfiguration, and the marriages between nationalism and neoliberalism. In
his way, Haider is not lacking in black humour when he says “Blair and I
against the forces of conservatism”.(12) Our two parties “want to escape the
rigidities of the beneficent State without creating social injustice “. Both
want “law and order”. Both consider that “the market economy, on condition
that it is made flexible, can create new opportunities for wage-earners and
companies.” The Labour Party as well as the FPÓ has then a non-dogmatic
approach “to that world transformation in which we live”, where “the old
categories of left and right have become irrelevant”: “Are Blair and Labour
right to accept the Schengen agreements and strict legislation about
immigration?” Haider asks. And he responds, “If Blair is not an extremist,
then Haider isn’t either”.

We should add that the regional populist Haider is as much in favour of NATO
as Blair, and even more partisan than he in relation to the Euro!

EXPLANATORY NOTE 3.2: The recent appearance of an unpublished text of Lukacs
from 1926, in defence of History and Class Consciousness, invalidates to a
certain point the ultra-Hegelian interpretations of Lukacs according to
which the Party is the form finally discovered of the absolute Spirit.(13)
Attacked for “subjectivism” by Rudas and Déborine during the 5th Congress of
the Communist International, that of Zinovievist Bolshevization, Lukacs
rejects the argument of Rudas, according to which the proletariat is
condemned to act according to its “being” and the task of the party is
reduced “to anticipating that development”. For Lukacs, the specific
(political) role of the party arises from the fact that the formation of
class consciousness constantly clashes with the phenomenon of fetishism and
reification. As Slavo Zizek says in his epilogue, the party plays for him
the role of middle term in the syllogism between history (the universal) and
the proletariat (the particular), whereas for social democracy, the
proletariat is the middle term between history and science (incarnated by
the educating party) and in Stalinism, the party uses the sense of history
to legitimize its domination over the proletariat.

THESIS 4: CONFLICTUAL DIFFERENCE IS NOT DISSOLVED IN AMBIVALENT DIVERSITY

As a reaction against a reductionist representation of social conflict to
class conflict, now — according to postmodernism and similar theories — is
the hour of plurality of spaces and contradictions. In their specific and
irreducible singularity, each individual is an original combination of
multiple properties. Most of the discourses of post-modernity, like certain
tendencies in analytical Marxism, take this anti-dogmatic critique as far as
the dissolution of class relations in the murky waters of methodological
individualism. Not only class oppositions, but more generally conflictual
differences, are diluted then in what Hegel had already called “a diversity
without difference”: a constellation of indifferent singularities.
Slavo Zizek

Certainly what passes for a defence of difference often comes down to a
permissive liberal tolerance that is the consumerist reverse of commodity
homogenization. As opposed to these manoeuvres of difference and
individualism without individuality, vindications of identity on the
contrary tend to freeze and naturalize differences of race or gender. It is
not the notion of difference that is problematic (it allows the construction
of structuring oppositions), but its biological naturalization or its
identitarian absolutization. Thus, whereas difference is mediation in the
construction of the universal, extreme dispersion resigns itself to this
construction. When one renounces the universal, says Alain Badiou, what
prevails is universal horror.

This dialectic of difference and universality is at the heart of the
difficulties that we frequently encounter, as illustrated by the discussions
and the lack of understanding about equality or the role of the homosexual
movement. Unlike the queer movement that proclaims the abolition of
differences in gender to the benefit of nonexclusive sexual practices, up to
the point of rejecting all logically reductionist lasting collective
affirmation, Jacques Bunker, in his “Adieu aux norms”, outlines a dialectic
of affirmed difference to constitute a relationship of force faced with
oppression and its desired weakening in a horizon of concrete universality.

Queer discourse proclaims, on the contrary, the immediate elimination of
difference. Its rhetoric of desire, in which the logic of social necessity
is lost, advances a compulsive desire of consummation. The queer subject,
living in the moment a succession of identities without history, is no
longer the homosexual militant, but the changing individual, not
specifically sexed or defined by race, but the simple broken mirror of his
sensations and desires. It is not in the least surprising that this
discourse has received a warm welcome from the US cultural industry, since
the fluidity vindicated by the queer subject is perfectly adapted to the
incessant flow of interchanges and fashions. At the same time, the
transgression that represented a challenge to the norms and announced the
conquest of new democratic rights is banalized as a constituent playful
moment of consumerist subjectivity.

Parallel to this, certain currents oppose the social category of gender with
the “more concrete, specific and corporal” category of sex. They claim to
transcend the “feminism of gender” in favour of a “sexual pluralism”. It is
not surprising that such a movement implies a simultaneous rejection of
Marxism and critical feminism. Marxist categories would have provided an
effective tool for approaching questions of gender directly related to
relations of class and the social division of labour, but to understand
“sexual power” and found an economy of desire different from that of
necessity, it would be necessary to invent an independent theory (inspired
by “Foucaultian” bio-politics).

At the same time, the new commodity tolerance of capital towards the gay
market leads to the attenuation of the idea of its organic hostility towards
unproductive sexual orientations. This idea of an irreducible antagonism
between the moral order of capital and homosexuality allowed one to believe
in a spontaneous subversion of the social order by means of the simple
affirmation of difference: it was sufficient that homosexuals proclaimed
themselves as such to be against it. The critique of homophobic domination
can then end in the challenge of self-affirmation and the sterile
naturalization of identity. If, on the contrary, the characteristics of
hetero and homosexuality are historical and social categories, their
conflicting relation with the norm implies a dialectic of difference and its
overcoming, demanded by Jacques Bunker.

This problematic, evidently fertile when it deals with relations of gender
or linguistic and cultural communication, is not without consequences when
it concerns the representation of class conflicts. Ulrich Beck sees in
contemporary capitalism the paradox of a “capitalism without class”. Lucien
Séve says that, “if there is certainly a class at one pole of the
construction, the amazing fact is that there is no class at the other”. The
proletariat has seemingly dissolved in the generalized alignment; we are now
obliged “to fight a class battle not in the name of a class but that of
humanity”.

Either, in the Marxist tradition, this is a banal reminder that the struggle
for the emancipation of the proletariat constitutes, under capitalism, the
concrete mediation of the struggle for the universal emancipation of
humanity. Or, we have a theoretical innovation heavy with strategic
consequences, for the rest of the book by Lucien Séve: the question of
social appropriation is no longer essential in his eyes (it is logical,
consequently, that exploitation becomes secondary with respect to universal
alienation); social transformation is reduced to “transformations [of
“disalienation”], no longer sudden, but permanent and gradual “; the
question of the state disappears in that of the conquest of powers (the
title, formerly, of a book by Gilles Martinet), “the progressive formation
of a hegemony leading sooner or later to power in conditions of majority
consent”, without decisive confrontations (from Germany to Portugal via
Spain, Chile or Indonesia, this “majority consent” nevertheless has never
been verified so far! We find the same tone in Roger Martelli, for whom “the
essential is no longer to prepare the transfer of power from one group to
another, but to begin to give to each individual the possibility of taking
control of the individual and social conditions of their life”. The very
legitimate anti-totalitarian theme of individual liberation ends then in
solitary pleasure in which social emancipation is diluted.

If there is certainly interaction between the forms of oppression and
domination, and not a direct mechanical effect of one particular form (class
domination) on the others, it remains to determine with more precision the
power of these interactions at a given time and within a determined social
relation. Are we merely dealing with a juxtaposition of spaces and
contradictions that can give rise to conjunctural and variable coalitions of
interests? In which case the only conceivable unification would come from a
pure moral voluntarism. Or else, the universal logic of capital and
commodity fetishism affects all spheres of social life, to the point of
creating the conditions of a relative unification of struggles (without
implying, nevertheless, to be so discordant to social times, the reduction
of contradictions to a dominant contradiction)?

We do not oppose to post-modern restlessness a fetishized abstract totality,
but argue that detotalization (or deconstruction) is indissociable from
concrete totalization, that is not an a priori totality but a becoming of
totality. This totalization in process happens through the articulation of
experience, but the subjective unification of struggles would arise from an
arbitrary will (in other words, an ethical voluntarism) if it did not rest
on a tendencial unification of which capital, understood here under the
perverse form of commodity globalization, is the impersonal agent.

THESIS 5: POLITICS DISSOLVES NEITHER IN ETHICS, NOR IN AESTHETICS

Hannah Arendt feared that politics would finally disappear completely from
the world, not only through the totalitarian abolition of plurality, but
also by the commodity dissolution that is its dark side. This fear is
confirmed by the fact of having entered an era of depoliticization, where
the public space is squeezed by the violent forces that accompany economic
horror and by an abstract moralism. This weakening of politics and its
attributes (project, will, collective action) impregnates the jargon of post
modernity. Beyond the effects of the conjuncture, this tendency translates a
crisis of the conditions of political action under the impact of temporal
space compression. The modern cult of progress means a culture of time and
becoming to the detriment of space, reduced to an accessory and a contingent
role. As Foucault indicated, space becomes the equivalent of death, fixed,
immovable, opposed to the richness and dialectical fecundity of living time.
The diabolical rotations of capital and the planetary widening of its
reproduction overturn the conditions of its valuation. It is this phenomenon
that expresses the feeling, so intense for two decades, of reduction of the
duration of the instant and disappearance of the place in space. If the
aesthetization of politics is an inherent recurrent tendency to crises of
democracy, the admiration for the local, the search for origins, the
ornamental overload and the manoeuvres of authenticity undoubtedly reveal a
distressed vertigo verifying the impotence of politics faced with conditions
that have become uncertain.

That politics is, in a first approximation, conceived as the art of the
shepherd or that of a weaver, implies a scale of space and time, in which
the city (with its public place and the rhythm of elective mandates) is the
form. Citizenship is spoken of much more than the city and the citizen
becomes unavailable in the general disorder of scales and rhythms.
Nevertheless, we live still “in a period where there are cities and where
the problem of politics arises because we belong to this cosmic period
during which the world is delivered to its luck”. Politics remains as the
profane art of duration and space, of drawing up and moving the lines of the
possible in a world without Gods.

COROLLARY 5.1: HISTORY IS NOT DISSOLVED IN A PULVERIZED TIME WITHOUT
TOMORROW

The post-modern rejection of the grand narrative does not imply only a
legitimate critique of the illusions of progress associated with the
despotism of instrumental reason. It also means a deconstruction of
historicity and a cult of the immediate, the ephemeral, the discardable,
where medium term projects no longer have space. In the conjugation of the
misadjusted social times, political temporality is precisely that of the
medium term, between the fugitive moment and the unattainable eternity. It
now demands more a mobile scale of duration and decision.

COROLLARY 5.2: PLACE AND SITE ARE NOT DISSOLVED IN THE FRIGHTFUL SILENCE OF
INFINITE SPACE

The misalignment of the geographic mobility of capital (money and commodity)
with respect to the relative or very conditional mobility of labour appears
as the present form of unequal development that allows transfer of surplus
value in the epoch of absolute imperialism: the unequal development of
temporalities complements and relegates that of spaces. Consequently a
mobile scale of territories, the importance acquired by the control of
flows, the outline of a world order supported by a mosaic of weak, auxiliary
states subalterned to commodity sovereignty.

However, collective action is organized in space: the meeting, the assembly,
the encounter, and the demonstration. Its power is exerted in places and the
very name of the event is related to dates (October, July 14, July 26) and
to places (the Commune, Petrograd, Turin, Barcelona, Hamburg...) as
emphasized by Henri Lefebvre, only the class struggle has the capacity to
produce spatial differences irreducible to the single economic logic.

COROLLARY 5.3: STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY IS NOT DISSOLVED IN ECONOMIC NECESSITY

The political sense of the moment, the opportunity, the bifurcation opened
to hope, constitutes a strategic sense; that of the possible, irreducible to
necessity; not the sense of an arbitrary, abstract, voluntarist possible, of
a possible where everything would be possible; but a possible determined by
an authority, where the propitious moment emerges for the decision adjusted
to a project, an objective to be attained. It is, at the end of the day,
sensed from the conjuncture, the response adapted to a concrete situation.

COROLLARY 5.4: THE OBJECTIVE IS NOT DISSOLVED IN THE MOVEMENT, THE EVENT IN
THE PROCESS

Post-modern jargon willingly conciliates the taste for the event without
history, happening without past or future, and the taste for fluidity
without crisis, continuity without rupture, movement without objective. In
the post- Stalinist slang of resignation, the collapse of the future ends
logically at degree zero of strategy: to live the moment without enjoying,
without ties! The ideologists of the disappointing tomorrow are satisfied,
consequently, with preaching a “Communism that is no more”, conceived as a
“gradual, permanent movement, always unfinished, that includes moments of
clashes and ruptures”.(14) Advocating “ a new concept of revolution” “a
revolutionary process without revolution, a revolutionary evolution”, or
still more “to go further on without delay”, towards an extra temporal
immediacy.(15) Affirming that “the revolution is no longer what it was since
there is no longer a single moment where evolutions crystallize”, “there is
no longer a great leap, a great decline, nor decisive threshold.’(16)

Certainly, there is no longer a single revolutionary moment, a miraculous
epiphany of history, but moments of decision and critical thresholds. But
the dissolution of the rupture in the continuity is the logical counterpart
of a representation of the power possible to obtain with individual
disalienation: “the progressive formation of a hegemony that leads sooner or
later to power within the conditions of majority consent”, says Lucien Sève.
That “sooner or later” that defines a politics outside time seems at least
imprudent in the light of the century and its tests (Spain, Chile,
Indonesia, Portugal). Above all it ignores the vicious circle of fetishism
and commodification, the conditions of reproduction of domination.

COROLLARY 5.5: THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE IS NOT DISSOLVED IN THE LOGIC OF THE
SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Zygmunt Bauman

Between the social and political struggles there are neither Chinese walls
nor watertight compartments. Politics arises and is invented inside the
social, in the resistance to oppression, the statement of new rights that
transform victims into active subjects. Nevertheless, the existence of a
state as separate institution, simultaneously false incarnation of the
general interest and guarantor of a public space irreducible to private
appetite, structures a specific political field, a particular relationship
of forces, a language of conflict, where social antagonisms are pronounced
in a game of displacements and condensations, oppositions and alliances.
Consequently, the class struggle is expressed there in a manner that is
mediated under the form of the political struggle between parties.

Everything is political? Doubtless, but only to a certain extent and up to a
certain point. In the “last instance”, if you wish, and in diverse ways.

Between parties and social movements, more than a simple division of labour,
there operates a dialectic, reciprocity, and complementariness. The
subordination of the social movements to the parties would mean a
statization of the social.

Inversely, politics in the service of the social would rapidly lead to
lobbying, corporative, a summary of particular interests without general
will. Since the dialectic of emancipation is not a long and tranquil river:
popular aspirations and expectations are diverse and contradictory, often
divided between the exigency of freedom and the demand for security. The
specific function of politics consists indeed of articulating them and
conjugating them.

EXPLANATORY NOTE 5.5: Commenting on the disappearance of distinctive
authentic political choices and the fact that the confusion of class
alternatives is translated, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in the tendency to
the elaboration of rainbow platforms, conceived as incoherent collages of
slogans that seek to catch all and whose priorities are obtained from the
opinion polls, Zygmunt Bauman examines the capacities of the social
movements to contribute an answer to the crisis of politics.

He emphasizes the way in which social movements undergo the effects of
post-modernity: a limited lifespan, weak continuity, temporary aggregates of
individuals reunited by the contingency of a unique difficulty and dispersed
again as soon as the problem is solved. It is not the fault of programmes
and leaders, says Bauman: this inconsistency and intermittency rather
reflects the neither cumulative nor integrative character of suffering and
shortage in these dissonant times. Social movements have then a poor
capacity to demand great transformations and to pose great questions. They
are poor substitutes for their predecessors, mass political parties. This
impotent fragmentation is the faithful reflection of the loss of sovereignty
of the state, reduced to a police station in the midst of commodity laissez
faire.(18)

Zizek sees in the dispersion of the new social movements the proliferation
of new subjectivities on the background of resignation, a consequence of the
defeats of the century. This return to states, estates and bodies would be
the logical consequence of detotalization and obscuring of class
consciousness. Rejection of politics responds to the political limitation of
the social made by the “political philosophies” of the last decade. However,
the same gesture that tries to draw the limit between politics and
non-politics and, to remove certain areas (beginning with the economy) from
politics is “the political gesture par excellence”.(19)

Ernesto Laclau

For Laclau, emancipation will indefinitely be contaminated by power, so that
its complete realization would mean the total extinction of freedom. The
crisis of the left would be the result of a double end to the
representations of the future, under the form of the bankruptcy of
bureaucratic Communism and the bankruptcy of Keynesian reformism. If a
possible renaissance implies the “reconstruction of a new social
imagination”, the formula remains very vague since Laclau does not face any
radical alternative.

In the controversy that opposes them, Zizek insists, faced with the new
domesticity of the centre left, in “keeping open the utopian space of global
alternative, even if this space must be left empty while it waits for its
content”. In effect, the left must choose between resignation and the
rejection of the liberal blackmail according to which any perspective of
radical change would have to lead to a new totalitarian disaster.

Laclau does not give up on the perspective of unification. He sees, on the
contrary, in the radical dispersion of the movements, that makes unthinkable
their articulation, the same failure of post-modernity.

Leaderless, reticular, decentred movements, forced by defeat to be cornered
in a subaltern internalization of the dominant discourse? But also
redeployment of the social movement in the different scopes of social
reproduction, multiplication of spaces of resistance, affirmation of its
relative autonomy and its own temporality.

All this is not negative if it goes beyond simple fragmentation and thinks
about articulation. If this is not done, there is no another outcome than
dispersed lobbying (the very image of subaltern as effect of domination on
the dominated cf. Kouvelakis) or authoritarian unification by means of the
word of the master, or a scientific vanguard, that would reduce political
universalization to scientific universalization (a new avatar of “scientific
socialism”) or an ethical vanguard that would reduce it to the universality
of the categorical imperative.

Without, in either case, approaching the process of concrete
universalization by means of the extension of the area of the struggle and
its political unification. There is no another way out in this perspective
but to go back to the universalising theme, capital itself, and the multiple
effects of domination produced by commodity reification.

Notes

1 See Alex Callinicos, “Imperialism Today”, in Marxism and the New
Imperialism, Bookmarks, London 1994.

2 See Gilbert Achcar, La Nouvelle guerre froide, PUF, collection Actuel
Mane, Paris 1999.

3 See Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London
1986.

4 See V, Garonne, Les révolutionnaires du XI-Xe siècle, Free Champ, Paris.

5 Lucien Séve, “Commencer par les fins”, La Dispute, Paris l999.

6 Roger Martelli, Le communisme autrement”, Syllepse, Paris 1998.

7 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, Penguin, 1994.

8 Ibid, page 103.

9 See the contributions of Catherine Samary, Michel Lequenne, Antoine Antous
in Critique communiste, number 157, winter 2000.

10 Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, London 1975;
Baudelot and Establet, La Petite bourgeoisie en France, Maspero, Paris
1970. See also the collection of magazines Critique de l” économie
politique, Critique communiste, Cahiers de la Taupe.

11 Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière,
Fayard, Paris 1999.

12 Daily Telegraph, February 22, 2000.

13 Rediscovered recently in Hungary, the Lukacs text has been published in
English under the title Tailism and Dialectic, followed by an epilogue by
Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London, 2000.

14 Pierre Zarka, Un communisme á usage immediate, Plón, Paris 1999.

15 Lucien Séve, Commencer par les fins, op. cit.

16 Rober Martelli, Le communisme autremement, op.cit.

17 Laclau, op.cit, page 66.

18 “Letter from Zigmunt Bauman to Dennis Smith”, in Dennis Smith, Zigmunt
Bauman, Prophet of Post modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge 1999.

19 Zizek, op.cit., page 95.