isidro lpez & emmanuel rodrguez

THE SPANISH MODEL

P
rior to the debacle of 2008, Spains economy had been
an object of particular admiration for Western commentators.1
To reproduce the colourful metaphors of the financial press,
in the 1990s and early 2000s the Spanish bull performed
much better than the moping lions of Old Europe. In the decade fol-
lowing 1995, 7 million jobs were created and the economy grew at a
rate of nearly 4 per cent; between 1995 and 2007, the nominal wealth
of households increased threefold. Spains historic specialization in sec-
tors such as tourism and property development seemed perfectly suited
to the age of globalization, which in turn seemed to smile on the coun-
try. Construction boomed as house prices soared, rising by 220 per cent
between 1997 and 2007, while the housing stock expanded by 30 per
cent, or 7 million units. All feeling of being merely the biggest country
of the continents periphery was dispelled by a new image of modernity,
which did not just catch up with but in some ways surpassed standard
European expectationsat least when Spains dynamism was compared
to the rigidities of the Eurozones core. Add to this the 2004 return
to power of the Socialist Party, under a youthful Jos Luis Rodrguez
Zapatero, and the effect of such quintessentially modernizing laws as
those on same-sex marriage, and the mixture acquired the bouquet of a
young red wine: extremely robust on the palate.

In stark contrast, the financial crisis has given the country a completely
different image of itself, with effects on Europe that remain to be cal-
culated. Over the past year, Spain has on several occasions hovered on
the brink of classification as a case for Eurozone bail-out, following
Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Its construction industry, which in 2007
contributed nearly a tenth of the countrys gdp, has suffered a massive
blow-out, leaving an over-build of unsold housing worse than Irelands,
and the semi-public savings-and-loans sector waterlogged with debt. The
effects of the housing-market collapse have reverberated throughout

new left review 69 may jun 2011 5

 6 nlr 69

the economy: unemployment is running at over 20 per cent, and more

than double that rate among the under-25s. A deep recession has been
compounded by draconian austerity measures, supposedly aimed at
reducing a deficit currently standing at over 10 per cent of gdp to 3
per cent by 2013. The political fall-out of the crisis is putting additional
strain on Spains decentralized governmental structures, in which the
seventeen Autonomous Communities administer a large proportion of
public spending; in Catalonia and elsewhere, the ac budgets are also
running deficits. The Spanish bulls prostration also carries implica-
tions for the Eurozone as a whole. At over 45 million, the population of
Spain is almost twice as large as those of Greece, Ireland and Portugal
put together; its economy is the fourth largest in the Eurozone, with a
gdp of $1,409bn, compared to $305bn for Greece, $204bn for Ireland
and $229bn for Portugal. The scale of a Spanish bail-out, were Madrid
to run into difficulty in financing its debts, would be likely to capsize
the Eurozones current tactics for dealing with its indebted periphery
heavily conditional imfecb loans, so far made available to Greece,
Ireland and Portugal with the aim of tiding them over, while safeguard-
ing the exposed positions of big German, French and British banks. So
far, the wager has been that, after a dose of austerity and labour-market
reform, Spains pre-crisis economic model can be resuscitated in leaner,
fitter form. Is this a viable proposition?

Phalangist architects

The genealogy of the Spanish macro-economic model has been com-

plex; one might even say, ironic. Its origins lie in the modernization
programme of the Franco dictatorship from the late 1950s, premised on
the development of mass-market tourism from northern Europe and the
radical expansion of private home-ownership. This solution to Spanish
industrys eternal competitive weakness was a notable anomaly in the
context of the manufacturing growth that marked the post-war boom else-
where in Europe. But as Francos Minister for Housing, the Phalangist
Jos Luis Arrese, put it in 1957: Queremos un pas de propietarios, no de
proletarioswe want a country of proprietors, not proletarians. This
Thatcherism avant la lettre transformed the Spanish housing market:

1
This article summarizes the main findings of the research and activist group,
Madrid Metropolitan Observatory, published as Fin de ciclo. Financiarizacin, ter-
ritorio y sociedad de propietarios en la onda larga del capitalismo hispano (19592010),
Madrid 2010. The authors would like to thank Brian Anglo for his translation.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 7

Figure 1. Private home-ownership rates, Spain and England, 19602007

%

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20
1950/53 1960/61 1970/71 1981 1991 2001 2007

Spain England

Source: ine (National Institute of Statistics) and Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Infrastructures);
and uk National Statistics.

during the 1950s, rented accommodation was still the norm; by 1970,
private ownership accounted for over 60 per cent of housing, 10 points
above the uk level (see Figure 1).

The legacy of the Franco dictatorship and the enormous shortcoming

of the countrys industrial structure did not augur well in a scenario
characterized by increasing competition in international markets. The
recessionary crisis beginning in 1973 was more severe in Spain than
in most European countries, overlapping with the political transition
that followed Francos death in 1975. But the advent of parliamentary
democracy brought no change in macro-economic policy. The Partido
Socialista Obrero Espaol (psoe), in power continuously under Felipe
Gonzlez from 198296, had no alternative model to propose. Indeed,
the strategy for relaunching the economy in the 1980s was based on
deepening Spains existing specializations in tourism, property devel-
opment and construction, as competitive advantages neatly adapted to
 8 nlr 69

the new approaches of the emerging global economy, i.e. high capital
mobility and growing competition to capture financial incomes.

This approach was effectively sanctioned by the other European powers

in the negotiations that preceded Spains accession to the eec. In these
pacts, which effectively constituted a strategic agenda for the country, the
Gonzlez government accepted its partial de-industrialization in exchange
for extremely generous subsidies, which would account for an annual
average of 1 per cent of Spains gdp between 1986 and 2004. As we shall
see, these funds would play a key role in building the infrastructure
transport, energy, etc.underlying the later construction boom, which
consumed more than half the total subsidies. The run-up to integration
into the European Community on 1 January 1986 saw a frenzy of invest-
ment, as European capital recognized the market opportunity opened up
by the Iberian countries entry into the eec. German, French and Italian
multinationals took up key positions within Spains production structure,
buying up most of the big food-industry companies and the public-sector
firms that were being privatized, taking over much of the supermarket
sector and acquiring what remained of the major industrial companies.
Only the banks, construction firms and the state-owned electricity and
telecommunications monopolies remained immune to the buying frenzy
for Spanish assets.

The upshot of this wave of investmentwhich brought the first period

of sustained growth since 1973was a rapid overheating of the mar-
kets. The Madrid Stock Exchange saw increases of 200 per cent between
1986 and 1989, while the capitals property market became one of the
most profitable on the planet. In parallel with Reaganism in the us and
Thatcherism in Britain, the economic cycle in Spain under Gonzlez
from 1985 to 1991 was the first attempt in continental Europe at growth
by means of a financial and property asset-price bubble that would have
a positive knock-on effect on domestic consumption and demand with-
out any significant support from industrial expansion.2 The euphoria did
not last long, however; the growing external deficit and the lack of a solid
foundation for growth ended up unleashing speculative attacks against
the Spanish peseta, whose value the government was pledged to main-
tain at any cost. A massive publicity campaign around the pomp and

2
See Jos Manuel Naredo, La burbuja inmobiliario-financiera en la coyuntura
econmica reciente (19851995), Madrid 1996.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 9

ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Seville Universal

Exhibition in 1992 proved unable to prevent the crash of the markets
followed, eventually, by a series of aggressive currency devaluations. By
the early 1990s, the Spanish economy was once again faced with the
problem of finding a path to growth.

Euro-boost

Henceforward, however, Spanish macro-economic policy would be

increasingly determined at European level, structured within the frame-
work of the convergence criteria set for monetary union and the neoliberal
doxa consolidated in the Maastricht Treaty and its successors, to which
both psoe and pp governments gave their full support. The reduction
of public spending, inflation-targeting and the deregulation of labour
markets laid down by Maastricht enabled a recovery of financial profits,
but generated new problems of stimulating demand in Europes rather
slack economies. The pace of the Spanish economys post-95 recovery
accelerating from 1997 onwards to grow by an average 5 per cent per year
between 1998 and 2000cannot be explained, therefore, by the local
implementation of neoliberal prescriptions. It lay rather in the capacity
of the new rounds of property development and financial engineering to
resolve, if only temporarily, a number of contradictions inherent in the
chaotic articulation of the neoliberal recipes themselves.

Four factors proved decisive here. First, low interest rates, as Maastricht
and the control of public deficitsas well as the demands of the big
financial companies, more interested in touting their new products
(such as pension and investment funds) than in strengthening the posi-
tions of the typical creditors of the 1980sled to a continual fall in the
price of credit. Spain thus began a long journey that would take it from
a position of boasting the highest interest rates in Europe to becom-
ing the country with the highest levels of internal indebtedness on the
Continent. Second, monetary union and definitive incorporation into
the Eurozone in 19992002 guaranteed the Spanish economy an inter-
national umbrella, endowing it with strong purchasing capacity abroad
and marginalizing the importance of its external deficit in the context
of the European Unions relative surplus. Third, the eu liberalization
policy set the seal on the privatization of publicly owned companies in
strategic sectors such as electricity and telecommunications. Lastly, the
privatization of the equivalent public-sector companies in Latin America,
 10 nlr 69

often imposed on those countries by the imfs adjustment plans,

opened up significant opportunities for the internationalization of lead-
ing Spanish firms. With the aid of the Euros purchasing power, Spains
grande bourgeoisie went global, recolonizing the Latin American markets
stricken by the 19982001 crisis and snapping up local companies at bar-
gain prices. The two major Spanish banks, bbva and Banco Santander,
became the biggest in Ibero-America, just as Telefnica and the Madrid-
based electricity companies became the biggest in their sectors in that
region. In other words, the framework established by Maastricht and
the Euro opened the door to the financial repositioning of the Spanish
economy within the international division of labour and also to what was
to become its central element: the property-development cycle.

From an analytical viewpoint, the mechanisms that enabled the property

bubble to become the domestic motor of economic expansion in that
period, obviating the problems of demand formation in a context gov-
erned by neoliberal austerity policies, lie beyond the grasp of orthodox
economics. Asset-price Keynesianism, to borrow a suggestive concept
from Robert Brenners analysis of the American economy between
1995 and 2006, offers a more fruitful perspective.3 Indeed, asset-price
Keynesianism, together with the mechanisms linking increased value
of private assets to the growth of internal private consumption, enables
us to explain the relative success of the Spanish economy during this
period. Its motor lay precisely in the so-called wealth effects generated
by growth in the value of households financial and property assets. So
long as this continued to increase, it could sustain a double virtuous
circle of rising aggregate demand and financial profits, without raising
wages or public spending.

In this respect, the Spanish case can be regarded as an international labora-

tory. Unlike the early trials of the financialization of household economies
elsewhere, the novelty of the Spanish experiment was the scale of its model,
which was based from the outset on the very extensive nature of home-
ownership. By 2007, the figure for private home-ownership stood at 87 per
cent. By contrast, in the us and uk the proportion of home-ownership never
rose above 70 per cent. In addition, some 7 million Spanish households
the 35 per cent that comprise the real middle classowned two homes
or more. The sustained appreciation of house prices, rising at an average

3
Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London 2006, pp. 2934,
31523.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 11

Figure 2. Real house prices & growth rate of nominal credit relative to GDP
Per cent change in
real house prices
(200106)

80
Spain

rr
Ireland
70 New Zealand

r
60 France

r
UK

rr
Denmark
50 r Belgium

Sweden
40 Canada r
r

Australia Finland

r
30
Greece

r
r

USA
20

10 Netherlands
Portugal
r
r

Switzerland
r

0
Austria
r

-10
Germany
r

-20 Japan
r

-30
-4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Average per cent growth rate of nominal credit relative to GDP (200206)

Source: Prakash Kannan et al., Macroeconomic Patterns and Monetary Policy in the Run-Up to Asset
Price Busts, imf Working Paper, November 2009, p. 31.

of 12 per cent per year throughout the 19972007 boom decade, and
a record-breaking expansion of credit, supported a historic increase in
household consumption among the property-owning strata which, in
Spains case, constituted the vast majority (see Figure 2).4

To put it synthetically, deficit spending in the years 19972007 was deci-

sively transferred from the Spanish state to private households, which,
in the final years of the cycle, became net demanders of financing. (This
position of negative savings, coupled with high investment in housing
and infrastructure, again strains the interpretative framework of ortho-
dox economics.) Parallel to this, nominal wealth in the hands of private

4
Between 2003 and 2006, house prices in Spain rose by an astonishing annual
average of 30 per cent. Source: ine (National Statistics Institute).
 12 nlr 69

households grew more than threefold on the back of the spectacular rise
in house prices, the expansion of credit and the rapid growth of the hous-
ing stock.5 According to the imf, the Spanish wealth effect translated
into an annual average increase of 7 per cent in private consumption
between 2000 and 2007, compared to 4.9 per cent in the uk, 4 per cent
in France, 3.5 per cent in Italy and 1.8 per cent in Germany. Meanwhile
employment, driven by both construction and consumption, recorded
an accumulated growth rate of 36 per cent, higher than in any other
historical period and well above the rates of other eu countries. And all
this against the backdrop of a 10 per cent fall in average real wages, such
that the entry of 7 million new workers into the labour market produced
an increase of only 30 per cent in the total wage bill.

The Spanish economy appeared to be adapting itself advantageously to

the new context of international financial deregulation. The relative stag-
nation of productivity throughout the whole 19972007 decade and the
eternal lack of international competitiveness of its industry were no obsta-
cles to growth. On the contrary, in so far as the lions share of economic
development took place in sectors whose goods are non-transferable,
such as property-development products and personal services, productiv-
ity and competitiveness became practically irrelevant variables. It might
be said that Spains success was founded on a practical reversal of the
classical Schumpeterian strategy of income from innovation. At the same
time, the formula growth of profits without investment6which some
have used to summarize the financialization of the central economies
is less applicable to the Spanish model, in which what David Harvey
calls secondary-circuit accumulation played a key role.7 Indeed, the
Spanish miracle can only be understood as a combination of a restora-
tion of profitand also of demandthrough financial avenues, with the

5
Property assets, which play a central role in highly financialized economies, are still
not considered a priority for statistics in most oecd countries national accounts.
In the case of Spain, use has to be made of the estimates by independent research-
ers such as Jos Manuel Naredo, scar Carpintero and Carmen Marcos, Patrimonio
inmobiliario y balance nacional de la economa espaola 19952007, Madrid 2008.
6
The formula is used by Michel Husson, Un pur capitalisme, Lausanne 2008.
7
According to Harvey, when problems of over-accumulation appear in the accu-
mulation process, capitals switch from the primary accumulation circuitthe
production of surplus value in expanded reproduction schemesto the secondary
accumulation circuit: the circulation of capital in the built environment. The ter-
ritorial forms this shift can take range from major public works to house building.
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, London 1999, pp. 2358.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 13

generous involvement of accumulation mechanisms operating through

the built environment and residential production.

Within the Eurozone, meanwhile, Spains role during the bubble years
was to provide record returns for northern European capital, above all
from Germany, France and Britain. Between 200106, foreign capitals
invested an average of 7 billion a year in Spanish property assets, or
the equivalent of nearly 1 per cent of Spains gdp, much of it in second
homes or investments for British and German nationals. High levels
of domestic demand, boosted by asset-price Keynesianism, also offered
important markets for German exports. Along with Italy, Greece, Portugal
and Ireland, Spain experienced a growing balance of payments deficit,
reaching over 9 per cent of gdp between 2006 and 2008, most of it
due to European imports.8 Hence the paradoxical effects of the overvalua-
tion of the Euro from 2003, whichwhile it undermined the Eurozones
capacity to export beyond its bordersactually ensured the internal pur-
chasing power of its peripheral and southern countries, not least Spain.
According to Eurostat, reckoned in terms of purchasing power parity,
Spains per capita income was higher than Italys, almost the same as
Frances and just 10 points lower than those of Germany and Britain. On
a scale minuscule compared to the monetary circulation between China
and the United States, a symbiosis was established within the Eurozone
between surplus and deficit poles of European capitalism. In this case,
imports by the southern countries, mainly from Germany, were partially
financed by northern purchases of property and financial assets in those
countries, particularly Spain. In this context, it is not surprising that the
general perception in Spain was of having left peripheral status behind,
once and for all. For the young generations, it was enough to travel
around Europe to realize that the differences had become marginal and
that prosperity and modernity, if they existed at all, were to be found as
much on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees as beyond.

State backing

State intervention played a crucial role in lubricating the different parts

of the property circuit to maintain a permanently increasing housing
supply. The 1998 Land Act, more commonly known as the build

8
The one Eurozone country whose balance of payments swung conclusively in the
other direction was, of course, Germany, which went from a moderate deficit in the
late 1990s to a surplus equivalent to over 7 per cent of gdp by 2007.
 14 nlr 69

anywhere law, enormously speeded up the procedures for obtaining

building permits and made available a huge amount of land for con-
struction. Similarly, policies of reducing the public-housing stock,
marginalizing renting and providing tax relief for home-buying had
become the central planks of government housing policy during the
previous 25 years. Successive reforms of the mortgage market and the
legal framework also facilitated the expansion of securitization, a field in
which Spain is second in Europe only to the uk. The huge investment
in transport infrastructure, which has given Spain proportionately more
miles of motorways and high-speed railway networks than any country
in Europe, has played an important role in opening up large areas of
urbanizable land that were previously lacking in real market value. If to
this is added a lax environmental policy, little inclined to put obstacles
in the way of urbanization, and subsidies for squandering energy and
water on inefficient property developments, the circle is closed, with the
state guaranteeing and regulating the smooth running of the financial-
property development circuit.

The dependence of economic growth on the property asset-price bubble

has had a major effect on the countrys social-geographical divisions (see
Figure 3). In the context of Spains highly decentralized administrative
structure, in which the regional Autonomous Communities and munici-
pal governments have wide-ranging powers over urban development, the
environment and transport, local units have typically operated as growth
machines in competition with each other. Indeed, local governments have
become boosters of their localities, the main advertisers of the miraculous
benefits, for both the populations and the entire class of investors, flow-
ing from often disproportionate or poorly planned growth. In illustration
of the numerous cases that have combined irrational inflation of invest-
ment with unrealistic future projections, suffice it to mention the plans
(still going ahead) to build a casino megacomplex, after the manner of
Las Vegas, in an arid inland area of the Ebro valley; or the development
of eight super-ports, with their respective logistical centres, on a coastline
that has at most room for two facilities of this type.

The environmental costs of this growth model are incalculable. The

effects of mass housing construction in the traditional tourist regions
the coasts and the two archipelagos: Canaries and Balearicshave
generated strips of continuous urban fabric along the coastline, between
two and five kilometres wide, and stretching uninterruptedly for 100
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 15

Figure 3. Spanish Regional gdp per capita and Newly Built Homes

BASQUE COUNTRY
ASTURIAS
TA B RIA
CAN
GALICIA NAVARRE

LA RIOJA

CATALONIA
CASTILE AND LEN ARAGON

MADRID LES
IS
C
RI

IA
A
E

NC
L
A
CASTILE-LA MANCHA B

LE
EXTREMADURA
VA

MURCIA

ANDALUSIA

CANARY ISLANDS
(shown at half-scale)

0 100 miles

key
gdp per capita, 2009 Newly built homes, 200007

Up to 18,000
500,000
18,000 to 23,000

100,000
23,000 to 28,000

10,000
More than 28,000

Source: ine (National Institute of Statistics) and Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Infrastructures).
 16 nlr 69

kilometres or more along the Costa del Sol and the Alicante coast. Even
in relatively marginal areas, the construction of second homes and
green-tourism complexes has ravaged areas of great ecological value,
such as the foothills of the Pyrenees and the inland mountain ranges. In
terms of land consumption, so-called artificial surfaces expanded by 60
per cent between 1986 and 2006.9

Politics of the bubble

The boom years also served to exacerbate long-standing territorial frac-

tures and imbalances within the always-difficult Spanish jigsaw-puzzle.
One feature of the property bubble has been a renewed population drain
to the coasts and the big cities, while nearly 75 per cent of the inland terri-
tory continued to lose inhabitants. Existing urban hierarchies have been
strengthened: Madrid, the city most favoured by the growth years, is now
the centre of a metropolitan region with more than 6 million inhabitants
and has become the third largest European city in demographic and eco-
nomic terms. In addition to Madrids central position in the secondary
circuit of Spanish financial accumulation, it is home to the headquarters
of most of the big Spanish multinationals operating in Latin America
and Europe, an emerging global city. By contrast, most of the other big
cities in Spain have been relegated to secondary positions, putting their
energies into different strategies of urban entrepreneurialism, aimed
at capturing locational rents from international tourism.10 Barcelona has
become a global example of this strategy: its policies before and after the
1992 Olympics have been exported to Latin America, in particular, as the
great model of urban regeneration, and reduplicated, with contradictory
results, in Medelln and Valparaso; but Barcelonas relative success on
this front is still a Pyrrhic victory when set alongside its long-term decline
as Spains leading industrial centre.11

Politically, too, the effect has been to exacerbate territorial rivalries

and inflame the particularist claims of peripheral nationalisms over

9
Data from corine (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land
Cover programme, available from the European Environment Agency website.
10
See David Harvey, From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism, Geografiska
Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, vol. 71, no. 1, 1989, pp. 317.
11
So insistent has this type of propaganda become that a leading satirical periodical
in Buenos Aires has dubbed itself Barcelona. Una solucin europea a los problemas de
los argentinosBarcelona: a European solution for Argentinians problems.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 17

questions such as taxes, transport, regional configuration and water,

in short supply across two-thirds of the country. At the same time, a
complete consensus prevailed across the mainstream parties on the
merits of the countrys economic model. The Spanish political class has
historically exhibited an extraordinary complacency on this question;
encouraging the rise in property values was considered a matter of state,
pursued by both psoe governments (198296; 2004 to the present) and
the pp under Aznar (19962004). At regional level, the Socialist-run
Autonomous Community of Andalusia was just as deeply implicated in
handing out loans and construction permits to property developers as
were the hard-line pp administrations in Murcia and Valencia, or the
big-business Catalan nationalists of the Convergence and Union party
in Catalonia. When the CiU was replaced, from 200310, by a coali-
tion of the Catalan Socialists and two smaller parties, the Republican
Left and the environmentalist Initiative for CataloniaGreens, property-
development practices continued unchanged.

The main mortgage lenders were the countrys 45 cajas de ahorros, semi-
public savings-and-loans banks administered by depositors, employees
and local political representatives. Regional and district councils could
earn important revenues by re-zoning green-field sites for urban develop-
ment and selling the land to a property developer, who would pay for it
with a loan from a caja run by the same councillors or their friends. With
house prices rising at an average 12 per cent per year, it seemed a good
deal all round. The bi-partisan nature of the process was illustrated in
Valencia, where the pp administration deployed extremely aggressive leg-
islation to expropriate small landowners, in order to put together the large
packages of land that a big developer required. The legislation had been
drafted by the psoe federal government and was used in several other
Autonomous Communities under psoe control. Corruption and nepo-
tism were given full rein: friends and family of the pp in Valencia and of
the psoe in Andalusia were among the most notorious beneficiaries.12

12
The construction craze did not go unopposed. In some of the worst-affected
areas, environmentalist groups, denouncing both the disproportionate despoliation
of the landscape and the corruption of local officials involved, succeeded in bring-
ing down local governments and even Autonomous Community administrations
(Aragon in 2003; the Balearic Islands in 2007). Between 2005 and 2007, the main
Spanish cities were shaken by an imaginative cycle of protests against rising house
prices, mobilizing around slogans such as V de Vivienda, on the model of V for
Vendetta (vivienda being the Spanish word for housing) and mounting demon-
strations of tens of thousands of people.
 18 nlr 69

But if both the major parties, the psoe and the pp, are implicated in
Spains asset-price Keynesian model, it is the talante (approach, way
of going about things) of Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero that has espe-
cially marked first the high boom years and then the crash. Spain is the
only European country in which mass mobilizations against the 2003
usukSpanish invasion of Iraq hadbelatedlyan impact at govern-
ment level. For the following year, Aznars attempt to blame the 11 March
Islamist bomb attacks, which killed 192 people in Madrids central train
station, on the Basque group eta provoked a huge social mobilization,
directly linked to those of the previous year against Spains participation
in the Iraq war and the Aznar governments narcissistic authoritarian-
ism. The effect was to reverse the two parties standings in the opinion
polls and sweep Zapatero into power. The mobilization expressed the rise
of professional sectors that had grown thanks to the countrys acceler-
ated modernization and, especially, of a younger generation, affected to
a greater or lesser degree by job insecurity, generally more educated and
secular than its parents.

The progre image13 of Zapateros Spain was fostered by policies such as

dialogue with the trade unions, a token wage for carers, a same-sex
marriage law and initial gestures towards a truce with eta. Abroad,
Zapatero carried through his pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq,
but compensated by sending them to Afghanistan. He fell foul of the
powerful prisa media group, howeverEl Pas, Digital+, Cadena ser
which had hitherto always backed the Socialists, and depended instead
on support from a new paper, Pblico, and the tv channel La Sexta.
From the first, Zapateros success had a lot to do with the conscious
use of political marketing strategies; the new governments talante was
essentially cosmetic. Social expenditure was very slightly increased,
but not so as to jeopardize financial profits, or the income of the super-
salaried executives of the multinationals based in Spain. No alternative
was developed to the federal-state model, hobbled by tensions between
peripheral nationalisms and a centralizing Spanish nationalism, in an
interplay that was becoming increasingly fraught yet still functioned
as far as local property-development machines were concerned. Nor
was there any attempt to control the increasingly over-heated housing

13
Progre is a half-pleasant, half-sardonic diminutive of progresista, or progressive.
It denotes the communication style and rhetoric of the middle-class, institutional
centre left, based on an essentially uncritical, do-gooder social liberalism.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 19

marketlet alone to construct an alternative model. In the 2008 elec-

tion psoe slightly increased its share of the vote, winning 43.6 per cent,
compared to 42.6 per cent in 2004though this may have come mainly
from the leftist Izquierda Unida, whose vote fell from 5 per cent in 2004
to 3.8 per cent in 2008, while the pp vote rose from 37.7 per cent in 2004
to 40.1 per cent in 2008.

Insecurities

As long as credit flowed and house prices continued to be borne up by

the bubble, it seemed little matter that social expenditure was extremely
low, that wages had stagnated or even fallen, or that the Spanish labour
market had one of the highest rates of temporary contracts in Europe.
(Spains chronically high unemployment ratesbetween 8 and 12 per
cent for most of the early 2000sin fact reflect high rates of temporary
work, affecting more than a third of the labour force, and the high partic-
ipation in seasonal sectors, such as tourism; in other words, fast rotation
through insecure employment, rather than structural unemployment as
such.) Rising property values came to supplement an under-funded pen-
sion system as a guarantee of income in old age. Young people, often
forced to delay leaving their parents home, might nevertheless hope to
benefit from the increasing value of family assets, either by way of inher-
itance, family investment or parental help in getting a mortgage.

The problem of providing care, in the absence of decent social provi-

sion, was eased by the arrival in Spain of a gigantic army, several million
strong, of transnational domestic workers. These women, mostly
without residence permits, took over looking after children, the elderly
and the disabled, and did the domestic chores in several million middle-
class homes. By 2010 there were nearly 6 million foreigners in Spain,
the countrys population increasing in just ten years from 39.5 million
to almost 47 million, a jump of more than 18 per cent. Of the incomers,
2.67 million were eu citizens, in large part from new member states:
nearly 800,000 from Romania alone; 2 million from Latin America,
principally Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia; a million from Africa and
the Maghreb, including 650,000 Moroccans. What better token of the
fact that Spain had left behind its traditional peripheral status than the
arrival of its first wave of mass immigration? As expected, the migrants
largely occupied low-paid jobs in construction, agriculture, domestic
work and also sexual services. A complex system of residency permits,
 20 nlr 69

job quotas, European and internal borders skilfully subordinated these

workers to the needs of an expanding economy, creating long, some-
times lifelong, periods of exclusion from citizenship that left them
defenceless in the labour market.14

Nevertheless, as they gradually established themselves and their fami-

lies from the early 2000s, the migrants too were invited to join in the
property bonanza. Together with the young people born in the 1970s
the post-Franco baby boomersthey stimulated and sustained the final
years of the cycle: Spanish subprimes consisted in granting at least
a million mortgages to vulnerable segments of society between 2003
and 2007. Naturally, a widespread increase in indebtedness was one of
the side-effects of Spains assets euphoriathe ratio of indebtedness
to available income rising, by 2007, to the highest level of any oecd
countrythough the risks were heavily concentrated in households
with lower incomes and fewer assets. As in the United States, the magic
of refinancing through the sustained increase in housing prices was
regarded as sufficient security for the risks in credit. Unlike the United
States, however, Spanish law does not consider the asset underlying the
mortgagei.e., the dwellingto be sufficient guarantee in the event
of default by the borrower. This means that the guarantees securing
loans might include the homes of the mortgagees relatives and friends.
This would result in alarming chain reactions of repossessions after the
property bubble burst.

The crash

The first to notice that the bubble was coming to an end were the
property developers. After nearly 900,000 housing starts in 2006
exceeding those of France, Germany and Italy put togethersales
began to fall away. Mediterranean coastal developments were espe-
cially hard hit by the bursting of the uk housing bubble in mid-2007,
leading to problems for British second-home owners. Re-zoned land
awaiting development, bought at the height of the bubble with loans
from the cajas, started to be seen as a bad investment. By the end of
2008 there were a million unsold homes on the market, while Spanish

The years 200001 and 200405 saw a series of mobilizations by undocumented

14

migrants, including sit-ins in churches and official buildings, as well as strikes by

migrant workers in the agro-industrial districts of the south-east.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 21

household indebtedness had risen to 84 per cent of gdp. Collapsing

property developers began landing the cajas with massive bad loans: in
July 2008 the MartinsaFadesa construction company filed for bank-
ruptcy with debts of over 5bn.

The Zapatero governments initial response was to try to pass the crisis
off as a global phenomenon, only marginally affecting Spain, in com-
parison to thefar largerdebacle of the subprime-related market in
the United States. At most, Madrid acknowledged that it would be neces-
sary to give some help to the cajasthe possibility of a 50bn bail-out
fund was floated in October 2008and to expand short-term deficit
spending, in tandem with the rest of the g20. However, these predic-
tions were quickly shown to be hopelessly optimistic as unemployment
doubled, pushing the jobless rate up to nearly 20 per cent by the end of
2009. The destruction of jobs was not confined to construction, but also
affected the consumer-goods industry and market services. The virtu-
ous circle of asset-price Keynesianism had gone into reverse, generating
a severe poverty effect which, together with the contraction of credit,
drastically reduced private consumption. Owing to the high propor-
tion of employees on short-term and temporary contracts, businesses
were able to reduce their workforces quickly and at very little cost in
response to falling demand, which was then in turn further depressed
by rising unemployment, reaching over 40 per cent among under-25s.
Government revenues plummeted, as gdp contracted by 7.7 points,
peak to trough, and the 2006 fiscal surplus of 2 per cent of gdp turned
into a 2009 deficit of over 11 per cent.

Like its European counterparts, the Zapatero government focused on

a policy of socializing the losses of the countrys oligarchic blocs. This
very much included the major Spanish construction companies, some
of themacs, fcc and Ferrovialnow global players, having been
generously fattened up by more than 25 years of expansive infrastructure
budgets, and who now demanded that their public-works contracts be
maintained, whatever the cost. The large private banksSantander and
bbva are the biggestappeared to be better provisioned than some of
their British and us competitors, having captured the deposits of the mid-
dle classes of Latin America. In fact they now went on a spending spree,
Santander in particular adding British building societies and American
savings banks to its already extensive Latin American and Asian interests,
creating a behemoth too big to failand perhaps too big to save.
 22 nlr 69

For their part, the cajas remain saturated with debt. Estimates of their
total capital shortfall vary from 15bn (the Bank of Spains figure) to
around 100bn, which would be approaching 10 per cent of gdp; in
March 2009 the Caja CastillaLa Mancha alone was bailed out to the
tune of 9bn.15 In June 2009, Zapatero announced plans for a 99bn
rescue fund, the frob, and a merger programme that would reduce the
45 cajas to 17; they were also instructed to raise their core-capital levels
to 10 per cent by September 2011, which would require an extra 20bn
50bn in cash. Sidestepping this, the cajas have also been encouraged,
through the Bank of Spain, to swap property developers debts for real
estate, land and houses, valued somewhat fictitiously at 10 per cent below
their peak price, in order to flatter their balance-sheets and avoid tech-
nical bankruptcy. As in Ireland, however, losses have tended to exceed
initial estimates: in March 2011 revelations of bigger-than-anticipated
problems at the Alicante-based Caja de Ahorros Mediterrneo, Spains
fourth-largest caja, scotched the merger plan in which it was involved.
After their record-breaking rise, Spanish house prices have so far fallen
back by little more than 10 per cent (see Figure 4).

By mid-2009, the pressure at eu and, more specifically, Eurozone level

swiftly shifted from bank-rescue packagesthe total pledged may have
come to 2.5 trillion from the eu as a wholeto the austerity measures
necessitated by the transfer of finance capitals losses onto the nation-states
books. From early 2010, budget cuts, wage freezes and the dismantling
of social programmes were introduced in one country after another. The
crisis was explicitly seen as an opportunity for state-by-state structural
adjustments according to the well-known prescriptions. The role of the
eus summit institutions in the crisis could not have been more closely
linked to financial interests. In this sequence of events, the sovereign-debt
crises, especially the episodes involving Greece and Ireland, must be seen
as providing an enormous business opportunity for the big European
German, French and Britishbanks, the main holders of the European
countries sovereign bonds. Aided by the rating agencies, the announce-
ments of the insolvency or financial fragility of the Eurozones deficit
membersGreece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italyenabled them
to amass enormous profits based on debt-bond interest rates, artificially

15
The Economist has proposed a doomsday scenario figure of 270bn which, it
points out, would be smaller than the Irish banks shortfall, relative to gdp: Under
siege, 13 January 2011.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 23

Figure 4. House-price rises, 200106, and subsequent falls

Spain

Ireland

France

UK

Denmark

Sweden

Finland

Italy

USA

Greece

Netherlands

Portugal

30 20 10 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Per cent change in housing prices, 200106

Per cent change from recent peak

Source: Prakash Kannan et al., Macroeconomic Patterns and Monetary Policy in the Run-Up to Asset
Price Busts, imf Working Paper, November 2009, p. 29.
 24 nlr 69

blown up at a time when it was impossible for financial profits in the pri-
vate and household sectors to return to their pre-crisis levels.

Zapateros volte-face

In April 2010, as the Greek debt crisis unfolded, Zapatero came under
increasing pressure from Berlin, Brussels and the ecb to impose auster-
ity measures and labour-market restructuringeffectively launching an
offensive against the state-sector employees who still had long-term con-
tracts and wage-bargaining rights. Unwilling to assault key sections of
his base, yet incapable of mobilizing it towards any alternative solution,
Zapatero procrastinated. Finally on 12 May, apparently after further arm-
twisting from the Obama White House, he announced a drastic austerity
programme: public-sector wages slashed by 5 per cent, benefits and
pensions cut, investment projects cancelled, the retirement age raised,
wage bargaining restricted, sackings made simpler. The result was an
immediate plunge in the polls: from level-pegging with the pp, the psoe
dropped to 7 points behind, then carried on falling. Trade-union leaders
were trapped between the pressure from theirrank and file and their
anxieties about precipitating the fall of the psoe government. A general
strike on 29 September 2010 was the main focus for social opposition
to the Zapatero measures, but the leadership prevented some of the
best-organized sectors, such as transport workers, from coming out, and
failed to mobilize the huge mass of short-contract workers in services
and retail. The union leadership then promptly signed an agreement on
cutbacks in pension provision and a rise in the retirement age.

The mask of a modern progressive republicanism has fallen as the Socialist

Party government lined up unambiguously with the hegemonic financial
bloc. Following the script that has characterized the current phase of the
crisis, the extra burdens on Spanish public-debt issue have led to meas-
ures in line with the most orthodox structural adjustment policies. In the
final analysis, this means that public expenditure is subject to the politi-
cal oversight of the financial agents. The result has been the desertion of
a large part of the psoe electorate, the Party now at an all-time low in the
polls. On 2 April 2011, with unemployment soaring (see Figure 5) and the
Socialists trailing by 16 points, Zapatero announced that he would not
be running as the psoe leader in the March 2012 general election. The
main pressures for him to resign came from within the party, particularly
from Socialist candidates in the May 2011 regional elections who wanted
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 25

Figure 5. Selected Eurozone unemployment rates, 200611 (%)

20
Spain

15
Ireland

Greece

Portugal
10
France
Italy

Germany
5

0
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Source: World Economic Outlook Database, April 2011.

to distance themselves from his political legacy. The front-runner to suc-

ceed him is Alfredo Prez Rubalcaba, a veteran of the psoe right whose
political career began under Felipe Gonzlez. Rubalcaba has been at the
Interior Ministry since 2006 and is notorious for having formulated an
even tougher, war on terror response to the Basque separatist movement
eta than the pp. As a result of this strong-man stance, he was rewarded
with two other high positions in the Zapatero government: vice-president
and spokesman of the government. As a man of the felipista old guard,
Rubalcaba is favoured by the mighty prisa group and its chief mouth-
piece, El Pas. The leading candidate of the psoes zapaterista wing and
the Mediapro group, Defence Minister Carme Chacn, withdrew when
she saw which way the wind was blowing.

The crisis has brought Spain face to face with the fragility of the economic
structures underpinning its long decade of prosperity, and the psoe with
the aporias that were the foundation of its politics. Financial engineer-
ing perpetuated the fiction that an expanded home-owning middle-class
 26 nlr 69

majority had achieved permanent levels of prosperity. The collapse of the

property bubble has torn the veil from a highly polarized social order,
with a large proportion of the population deep in debt, many out of
work and dependent on public services doubly hit by spending cuts and
privatization. If to this we add that the worst hit are the youngfacing
starkly diminished prospects compared to their eldersand foreign-born
workers, then the lines projecting the cost of the crisis onto the most vul-
nerable groups become clear. Spain has long been the most Europhiliac
of eu member states; Europeanism was deeply associated in peoples
imaginations with the post-Franco democratization and modernization
of the country, and the Spanish electorate has historically been almost
completely uncritical of the eu. Such complacency has now disappeared.

On 15 May, in the run up to the 22 May regional electionsand exactly a

year after Zapatero had announced his swingeing cutsa huge wave of
social protest swept across the country. Tens of thousands of young dem-
onstrators took to the streets, then set up camp in the central squares of a
score of Spanish cities, including Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona and Puerta
del Sol in Madrid: students, workers, employed and unemployed, staking
a claim to public space, with a salute to the young Arab demonstrators
of Pearl Roundabout and Tahrir Square (see page 29). In Puerta del Sol
the occupation established a permanent popular assembly, voting daily
on all decisions. Among the slogans of the 15M movement: For a transi-
tion to democracy!We are not commodities in the hands of politicians
and bankersppsoe: psoe and pp, both the same crapReal democ-
racy now! The 20 May Manifesto approved by the Sols popular assembly
assailed political corruption, the closed-list electoral system (in which
only the names of the party and its leader appear on the ballot paper),
the power of the ecbimf and the injustice of the ruling-class response
to the crisis. At the time of writing, the campers have been holding the
squares for nearly two weeksduring which period the psoe has had
the worst drubbing in its history, losing control of Barcelona, Seville and
four acs, as well as town halls across its stronghold of Andalusia.16 But if
Mariano Rahoys pp takes power in the general election, due in less than
a year, it will confront the forces of the 15M movement, the indignados and
youth without a future: No house, no job, no pensionno fear!

16
The psoe won only 28 per cent of the vote in the 22 May regional elections, a 7
point drop; but the pp was only 2 points up, at 38 per cent. Meanwhile Izquierda
Unida polled 6.3 per cent, up from 5.5 in 2007, butpunished in part for local
coalitions with psoetaking only 210,000 of the 1.5m votes the Socialists had lost.
 lpez & rodrguez: Spain 27

Figure 6. Claims to Eurozone periphery domestic banks and public sector

Claims as per cent of equity of banks with foreign exposures, 2010 Q3

Germany

France

UK

0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Claims as per cent of total bank equity, 2010 Q3

Germany

France

UK

0 20 40 60

Claims on Greece, Ireland and Portugal Claims on Spain

Source: imf, Regional Economic Outlook: Europe, May 2011, p. 13.

The outlook for economic recovery in Spain remains bleak. The scale
of the housing bubble; the centrality of asset-price Keynesianism to
growth since the 1990s; the depth of the post-bust recession, exacerbated
by truly draconian austerity measures; the strength of the Euro (thanks
in part to quantitative easing from the us Federal Reserve), which hits
non-Eurozone tourism; and a tightening of credit by the ecball this
suggests that any return to growth in Spain is a very long way off indeed.
The immediate prospect is almost certain to be further retrenchment
and therefore an increase in Spains deficit. This poses severe dilemmas
for the Eurozones attempts to pretend that the crisis is just a tempo-
rary liquidity problem which can be managed by funnelling ecbimf
bridging loans to the countries in question during the time it takes to
grow their way out of debt. In fact, the crisis is that of the major German,
French and British banks, hugely exposed by the bursting of the periph-
erys property bubbles (see Figure 6). Rather than face the trauma of a
 28 nlr 69

full-blown banking crisis at home, Berlin, Paris and London have been
running what one central banker has described as a public-sector Ponzi
scheme, only sustainable as long as additional amounts of money are
available to continue the pretence:

Some of the original bondholders are being paid with the official loans that
also finance the remaining primary deficits. When it turns out that coun-
tries cannot meet the austerity and structural conditions imposed on them,
and therefore cannot return to the voluntary market, these loans will even-
tually be rolled over and enhanced by Eurozone members and international
organizations . . . European governments are finding it more convenient
to postpone the day of reckoning and continue throwing money into the
peripheral countries, rather than face domestic financial disruption.17

The collapse of the Spanish model threatens this pyramid scheme

from several directions: first, German and French banks exposure is
far greater in Spain than in Greece and Ireland; second, the scale of
the cajas problems has yet to be fathomed; third, the social problema
population that has grown by 18 per cent in the past decade, largely by
immigration; nearly one in two of the younger generation unemployed
is potentially more explosive, as social and welfare spending shrinks still
further, from levels already low compared to those in central Europe. A
Spanish debt crisis could finally capsize the eu3s attempt to make the
peripheral populations bail out the stricken banks, which are reaping
usurious, artificially inflated rates on government bonds to compensate
for the lack of financial profits in the private sector. For that reason, every
effort will no doubt be made to avoid one.

17
Mario Blejer, Europe is running a giant Ponzi scheme, ft, 5 May 2011.
 from puerta del sol

Yes, We Question this Democracy

Response from an indignada in Puerta del Sol to a TV presenter who
told protesters not to question democracy:
Yes, we question this democracy. We question this democracy because
it fails to support popular sovereignty: the markets impose decisions for
their own benefit and the parties in Parliament are not standing up to
this global fact. Neither in our country nor in the European Parliament
are they fighting to put an end to financial speculation, whether in cur-
rency or in sovereign debt.
We question this democracy because the parties in power do not
look out for the collective good, but for the good of the rich. Because
they understand growth as the growth of businessmens profits, not the
growth of social justice, redistribution, public services, access to hous-
ing and other necessities. Because the parties in power are concerned
only for their own continuation in office, making deals to stay in power
and leaving their electoral programme unfulfilled. Because no politi-
cian has to live with what they legislate for their subjects: insecurity,
mortgage debt and uncertainty. We question this democracy because
it colludes in corruption, allowing politicians to hold a private post at
the same time as public office, to profit from privileged information, to
step into jobs as business advisors after leaving office, making it very
profitable to be a politician.
We question this democracy because it consists in an absolute
delegation of decision-making into the hands of politicians that are
nominated in closed lists and to whom we have no access of any kind.
Nor is there any proportionality between votes and seats. We question
this democracy because it is absurd that the only way to punish a party
is to vote for another one with which one does not agree. We question
this democracy because the parties in power do not even comply with
the social provisions of the Constitution: justice is not applied equally,
there are no decent jobs nor housing for all, foreign-born workers are
not treated as citizens. Excuses are not good enough for us. We do not
want to choose between really existing democracy and the dictatorships
of the past. We want a different life. Real democracy now!

Beatriz Garca
 introduction to platonov

The year 1934, his thirty-fifth, was a significant watershed in the life of Andrei
Platonov. He had already written The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, the novels
for which he is today best known, but neither had been published in full. Soviet
readers knew him mainly for a few short stories and, above all, his semi-satirical
account of collectivization, For Future Use, which had been met by a storm of
official criticism when it appeared in 1931. For the next three years, Platonov was
unable to publish anything. But in the spring of 1934, he was included in a brigade
of writers sent to Turkmenistan to report on the progress of Sovietization, and the
same year was asked to contribute to a series of almanachs. Under Gorkys gener-
al editorship, these were to celebrate the completion of the second Five-Year Plan
in 1937; but they never appeared. The text reproduced here was written for one
of these, titled Notebooks; it arrived on Gorkys desk in early January 1935a
month after the assassination of Kirov, an event which unleashed a wave of purges
that presaged the terror to come. Within a few days Gorky had rejected Platonovs
text as unsuitable and pessimistic; in early March the organizing secretary of
the Writers Union publicly denounced the unpublished article as reactionary,
reflecting the philosophy of elements hostile to socialism.
The text was probably written in the first half of 1934, after Platonovs return
from Central Asia; a notebook entry from mid-Aprildialectic of nature in the
Karakum desertmakes clear he was already considering its key themes there.
Many of these relate directly to the concerns of Happy Moscow, the novel he
was then writing; certain details would also be re-used in the screenplay Father
Mother (see nlr 53). The text is, among other things, a riposte to Gorkys own
views on nature: our earth is ever more generously revealing to us its countless
treasures, intoned one article from 1932. Platonov, a hydrological expert in his
native Voronezh region during the droughts of the early 1920s, had an altogether
different conception, combining faith in technology with knowledge of the harsh-
ness of the environment on which mankind depended. On the First Socialist
Tragedy occupies an unusual place in Platonovs oeuvre. In generic terms, it be-
longs among his many journalistic writings. But those from his Voronezh period
(192126) are more agitational in character, while his literary criticism (1937 on-
wards) focuses above all on aesthetic questions. Philosophical texts, as such, are
very much a raritythough it is possible more may emerge from an archive that
is still, sixty years after his death, not fully catalogued. The manuscript of this text
was first published in Russian in 1991; a second, typescript version appeared in
1993. The latter, which is what Gorky would have read, places much greater em-
phasis on the problems facing the ussrs engineers of the soul. The translation
that appears here is based on Platonovs original manuscriptterse and prescient
in equal measure.
 andrei platonov

On the First Socialist Tragedy

One should keep ones head down and not revel in life: our time is better
and more serious than blissful enjoyment. Anyone who revels in it will cer-
tainly be caught and perish, like a mouse that has crawled into a mousetrap
to revel in a piece of lard on the bait pedal. Around us there is a lot of lard,
but every piece is bait. One should stand with the ordinary people in their
patient socialist work, and thats all.
This mood and consciousness correspond to the way nature is con-
structed. Nature is not great, it is not abundant. Or it is so harshly arranged
that it has never bestowed its abundance and greatness on anyone. This is
a good thing, otherwisein historical timeall of nature would have been
plundered, wasted, eaten up, people would have revelled in it down to its
very bones; there would always have been appetite enough. If the physical
world had not had its one lawin fact, the basic law: that of the dialectic
people would have been able to destroy the world completely in a few
short centuries. More: even without people, nature would have destroyed
itself into pieces of its own accord. The dialectic is probably an expression
of miserliness, of the daunting harshness of natures construction, and it is
only thanks to this that the historical development of humankind became
possible. Otherwise everything on earth would long since have ended, as
when a child plays with sweets that have melted in his hands before he has
even had time to eat them.
Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie? Of course,
it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not on the
whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading.
The truth, in my view, lies in the fact that technology . . . decides ev-
erything. Technology is, indeed, the subject of the contemporary historical
tragedy, if by technology we understand not only the complex of man-made
instruments of production, but also the organization of society, solidly found-
ed on the technology of production, and even ideology. Ideology, incidentally,
is located not in the superstructure, not on high, but within, in the middle of
societys sense of itself. To be precise, one needs to include in technology the
technician himselfthe personso that one does not obtain an iron-hard
understanding of the question.
The situation between technology and nature is a tragic one. The aim of
technology is: give me a place to stand and I will move the world. But the
construction of nature is such that it does not like to be beaten: one can move
the world by taking up the lever with the required moment, but one must lose

new left review 69 may jun 2011 31

 32 nlr 69

so much along the way and while the long lever is turning that, in practice,
the victory is useless. This is an elementary episode of dialectics. Let us take
a contemporary fact: the splitting of the atom. The same thing. The world-
wide moment will arrive when, having expended a quantity of energy n on the
destruction of the atom, we will obtain n + 1 as a result, and will be so happy
with this wretched addition, because this absolute gain was obtained as a
result of a seemingly artificial alteration of the very principle of nature; that
is, the dialectic. Nature keeps itself to itself, it can only function by exchang-
ing like for like, or even with something added in its favour; but technology
strains to have it the other way around. The external world is protected from
us by the dialectic. Therefore, though it seems like a paradox: the dialectic of
nature is the greatest resistance to technology and the enemy of humankind.
Technology is intended for and works towards the overturning or softening
of the dialectic. So far it has only modestly succeeded, and so the world still
cannot be kind to us.
At the same time, the dialectic alone is our sole instructor and resource
against an early, senseless demise in childish enjoyment. Just as it was the
force that created all technology.
In sociology, in love, in the depths of man the dialectic functions just as
invariably. A man who had a ten-year-old son left him with the boys mother,
and married a beauty. The child began to miss his father, and patiently, clum-
sily hanged himself. A gram of enjoyment at one end was counterbalanced
by a tonne of grave soil at the other. The father removed the rope from the
childs neck and soon followed in his wake, into the grave. He wanted to revel
in the innocent beauty, he wanted to bear his love not as a duty shared with
one woman, but as a pleasure. Do not revelor die.
Some naive people might object: the present crisis of production refutes
such a point of view. Nothing refutes it. Imagine the highly complex armature
of society in contemporary imperialism and fascism, giving off starvation and
destruction for mankind in those parts, and it becomes clear at what cost the
increase in productive forces was attained. Self-destruction in fascism and
war between states are both losses of high-level production and vengeance
for it. The tragic knot is cut without being resolved. The result is not even a
tragedy in a classical sense. A world without the ussr would undoubtedly
destroy itself of its own accord within the course of the next century.
The tragedy of man, armed with machinery and a heart, and with the
dialectic of nature, must be resolved in our country by means of socialism.
But it must be understood that this is a very serious task. The ancient life
on the surface of nature could still obtain what it needed from the waste
and excretions of elemental forces and substances. But we are making our
way inside the world, and in response it is pressing down upon us with
equivalent force.
 john grahl

A C A P I TA L I S T C O N T R A R I A N

Diagnoses and Prescriptions of Jean-Luc Grau

N
early four years after the onset of the worst financial
crisis since 1929, a remarkable unanimity as to what is to
be done appears to prevail among mainstream Anglophone
economists. Emergency liquidity supplies to the banks,
to keep credit flowing while balance sheets are corrected; a stiff dose
of Keynesian public spending, to mitigate the world recession; then a
return to deficit-cutting austeritycombined, if possible, with taking
advantage of the crisis to push through any desirable structural reforms
in pensions, retirement age, social provision. The arguments, noisy
enough, have been almost entirely tactical, centred on quantities and
timings. The strategy itself, aiming to return to business as usual as
quickly as possible, has hardly been questioned, despite the fact that the
specified measures have shown little sign of working to dateand in
sharp contrast to the clash of ideas that followed 1929.

But if mainstream economics has become a depressingly uniform field

in the us and uk, across the Channel the landscape remains more var-
iegated. France has a well-deserved reputation for critical economic
thought; from the left, there have been important contributions from
neo-Marxist and post-Keynesian analysts, as well as the rich and diverse
literature produced by the Regulation School. More unusually, there exist
powerful critics of neoliberalism on the centre right. Jean-Luc Grau,
a long-time economic advisor at the French employers association, is
one of the few economists both to have predicted the crisis and to have
proposed an alternative set of solutions to those espoused by the G8.
Grau was born in Hadjout, then Marengo, in French Algeria in 1943,
and studied economics in Montpellier from 1962. He joined the Conseil

new left review 69 may jun 2011 35

 36 nlr 69

National du Patronat Franais, as it then was, in 1969the cnpf would

be rebranded as the Mouvement des Entreprises de France, or medef,
in 1998retiring from a senior post in 2004. Grau has described him-
self as a mixture of a Keynesian and a Schumpeterian who recognizes
his debts to Marx and, above all, to Adam Smith. Difficult to classify.1
A frequent contributor to Le Dbat, his published work takes the form
of extended discussion of the general questions of political economy at
stake, rather than analytical number-crunching as such.

Graus most recent book, La Trahison des conomistes (the treason of the
economists) is a scathing attack on the intellectual apologists for neolib-
eralism. Published in 2008, it has become a best seller in France since
the fall of Lehman Brothers. But La Trahison builds on two previous
works that were published well before the crisis: Le Capitalisme malade
de sa finance (capitalism laid low by its financeor, more literally, made
ill by its finance) appeared in 1998. As its title suggests, it concentrates
on the economic malfunctions associated with the transformation of the
Western financial system since the 1970s. LAvenir du capitalisme (the
future of capitalism), published in 2005, extends and deepens the origi-
nal critique, looking not just at financial change but at the process of
globalization as a whole.2

Although there must now be a wide gap between Grau and his former
employersmedef itself has embraced many neoliberal positions
and although Grau seeks interlocutors across the political spectrum,
his remains a voice of the centre right. Grau wants to restore capital-
ism, not to replace it. His critique embraces not only the contemporary
functioning of the financial markets but also the expenditure-driven
state. He has suggested that government spending becomes unproduc-
tive when it exceeds a third of gdpa limit that would imply massive
retrenchment in most European countries.3 Nonetheless, his is a voice
worth listening to, for the clear and thorough analysis he articulates and
the trenchant critique he offers of the course taken by capitalist develop-
ment since the late seventies.

1
Interview with El Pais, 2 October 2008.
2
Jean-Luc Grau, Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance, Gallimard: Paris 1998, 383
pp.; LAvenir du capitalisme, Gallimard: Paris 2005, 299 pp.; La Trahison des cono-
mistes, Gallimard: Paris 2008, 245 pp.
3
Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance, p. 360; henceforth cmf.
 grahl: Grau 37

Non-productive finance

Published in the midst of the 199798 Asian crisis, and on the eve of
European monetary union, Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance kicks off
with a simple yet scandalous question. If the financial markets really
do rule the world, as the mass media suggest, then how and when did
they come to assume such a powerful position? What are the limits of
their power, and what instruments do the public authorities retain to
inflect the advanced economies? As often in critical economic studies,
the analysis starts from an account of the long post-war boom, the thirty
glorious years of Fourastialthough Grau thinks that twenty-five
is a more accurate figure. He argues that there was nothing out of the
ordinary about this period: The post-war expansion was not the fruit
of exceptional circumstances.4 Externally, the international monetary
order of the Bretton Woods era stabilized exchange rates but allowed
devaluations to correct major imbalances, thus supporting the monetary
sovereignty of Western states, which also included control over capital
flows. (Grau perhaps underestimates here the role of international
organizations in shielding individual states from foreign-exchange pres-
sures: the European Payments Union, in particular, managed the supply
of dollars to European countries throughout the 1950s.) Internally, it
was not Keynesian fiscal policy but an accommodating monetary policy
and, crucially, an elastic supply of bank credit for industry that were the
essential conditions for the economic successes of the glorious quarter-
century. They permitted a sustained period of growth and innovation,
which Grau regards as the normal outcome of capitalism, provided that
competition among industrial enterprises is not impaired.

What went wrong? The foundations of the system were shaken exter-
nally, by the fragility of the official exchange-rate system; and internally,
by an increasingly lax management of both the private and the public
sectors, under the influence of the Keynesian theories that had become
dominant.5 It is above all in the external factors, however, that Grau
detects the germs of disorder. Bretton Woods was a system of fixed
exchange rates against the dollar, and different analysts have attributed
its demise to each of these termsgrowing problems in maintaining
fixed exchange rates, or the increasing instability of the dollarin the
context of an increasing liberalization of international capital flows.

4
cmf, p. 383. 5
cmf, p. 115.
 38 nlr 69

Grau follows Robert Triffin by arguing that dollar weakness was the key
factor, leading to the final abandonment of their exchange-rate pegs by
most European countries in the spring of 1973.

After the breakdown of the fixed exchange-rate system, the narrative of

Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance emphasizes the role of rising state
indebtedness in propelling the financial transformation. For Grau, the
policies adopted to deal with 1970s stagflation first in the us, with the
dramatic monetary tightening of the 1979 Volcker shock, and then
across the advanced economies, threw the baby out with the bath water.
Central banks hardened their policies, using their control over interest
rates to deter inflation rather than to promote investment. This destroyed
the measured but elastic credit system that had supported growth. The
switch in monetary policy made bank credits both more expensive and
less secure, leading both firms and governments to place greater reli-
ance on the security markets. An important role was also played by the
huge institutional investors, who reinforced the demand for securities
and accelerated the retreat of the banks from the direct provision of credit
to firms. During the post-war expansion, financial markets had followed
a straight path of development: the credit market, the money market and
the bond market formed a coherent whole. The new bond-market system
destroyed both continuity and coherence.6

One consequence of the Volcker shock was the debt crisis in develop-
ing countries. These had borrowed extensively in the 1970s but now
found three factors working against them: real interest rates on their
dollar loans were much higher; the dollar itself appreciated rapidly,
raising the burden of indebtedness; and their export markets in the us
and in Western Europe were stagnant or in recession. The Third World
debt crisis rebounded on the big Western banks that had made the
loans; one of the banks responses was to sell the loans at a discount
to other investors. Grau suggests that this securitization of impaired
bank claims on developing countries was an important early example of
the shift from banks as intermediaries to their increasing involvement
in the security markets. In successive chapters on the old and new
equity, foreign-exchange and bond markets, Grau underlines the fact
that the transformation of the financial system has involved not only
much greater interdependence between them, but also deep changes
in the nature of the financial markets themselves. One of the most

6
cmf, p. 253.
 grahl: Grau 39

fundamental changes is, precisely, this switch from the banks function
as intermediary between the suppliers and users of funds, to an increas-
ing reliance on marketable securities, where the realization of financial
claims depends not on the solidity of a deposit-taking bank but on the
liquidity of the markets in which such claims are traded.

With financial transformation, according to Grau, capital separated

itself from enterprise. It now inhabits the financial sphere.7 This hap-
pened, firstly, because of the switch from classical bank credit to the
issue of marketable securities as the dominant mode of corporate
finance; and, secondly, because, within the securities markets them-
selves, the primary marketswhere securities are issued by the actual
users of capitalwere increasingly subordinated to the secondary mar-
kets, where existing securities are bought and sold on what has become a
staggering scale. Grau argues, with some exaggeration, that the tail did
not wag the dog in this way in the past. The secondary market for bonds
used to be a second-hand marketit offered investors the possibility
of liquidating their positions should the need arise. Today, however, the
leading role of the secondary market cuts off the link which could relate
the determination of interest rates to the availability of savings.

The same thing applies to corporate equities, where the secondary

market is in any case strongly influenced by events in the bond mar-
kets. Large corporations are no longer shielded from capital-market
pressures by the presence of stable long-term majority stakeholders.
Today the institutional investors do not necessarily hold more than 2
or 3 per cent of a companys shares, but they are able to exercise a
determining influence over its top management.8 Corporate leader-
ships were less concerned with fluctuations in their share price when a
controlling block of shares was closely held by long-term investors with
a strategic interest in the enterprise. Pension funds and investment
companies today trade their share-holdings intensively and are usually
open to the bids that would permit a takeover. To the extent that they
intervene in company policy it is in order to maintain the value of the
securities in their portfolios, not primarily to strengthen the enterprise.
The upshot is a process of pseudo-rational financial accumulation, in
which institutional investors buy at high prices in order to increase the
worth of their existing holdings. Graus critique of shareholder power
will be familiar:

7
cmf, p. 210. 8
cmf, p. 208.
 40 nlr 69

During the twenty-five glorious years, company leaderships had to concern

themselves above all with their customers, their workers and their competi-
tors, only to a limited extent with their shareholders. In the aftermath of the
financial revolution, they had to give all their attention to the shareholders,
especially those privileged shareholders who are the pension funds. They
still have to respond to the wishes of their customers and to the initiatives
of their competitors, but only to a very limited extent to the aspirations of
their workers.9

The biggest possible reduction in the number of employees and in the

wage bill is one way to meet the demands of the shareholders. Of course,
employers were always concerned to reduce wage costs; in the past, how-
ever, this goal was balanced by the attempt to increase market share and
expand their enterprises. Shareholder pressures now tended to subordi-
nate expansion to profitability. The upshot was wage stagnation, leading
to depressed demand. Increasingly, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon
economies, Grau argues, household indebtedness became the princi-
pal motor for expanding demand. Since much household debt was set
at variable rates, the effects of central banks adjustment of interest rates
now had hugely amplified effects. By the mid-90s, Grau argues, the
policies that had been set in place to contain 70s stagflation risked pro-
ducing a new monstrosity: stag-deflation.

It is noteworthy that Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance puts much more

emphasis on the spread of securitization than on financial globalization
as such. Indeed, Grau claims that the transformation of the financial
markets has not, despite proclamations to the contrary, led to their uni-
fication. They are still tied to specific financial sectors. Though open to
global investors, the bond markets remain within the orbit of national
economies, their logic dictated by internal inflation prospects and
monetary-policy decisions.10 Grau gives some examples of divergence
across securities markets, such as the Japanese stock-market bubble in
the late 1980s. But the main securities markets are surely increasingly
closely interlinked in terms of correlated price movements, with the
same institutional investors present in all of them; a trend reinforced
through vast transnational mergers, such as that between Euronext and
the nyse. However, the assertion that national financial systems were
still autonomous allowed Grau to argue, in his closing chapter, that
effective solutions still existed at the level of the European Union and
even, to some extent, the individual country.

9
cmf, p. 210. 10
cmf, pp. 201, 3045.
 grahl: Grau 41

The alternative to neoliberal stag-deflation, Grau suggests, is to prioritize

productive laboureconomic, financial, social and moral reasons all point
to the same conclusion. To rely on household debt alone to drive demand
is clearly imprudent. The mal-distribution of income away from productive
activity should be corrected, not by imposing direct controls over the finan-
cial sphere, but by re-linking wages to productivity. All employees, regardless
of rank, should share in profits.11 Grau concedes that globalization
in the form of wage-dumpingposes a problem of competitiveness.
Nevertheless, he thinks that with a minimal protectionist shield at eu level,
together with the development of continental-scale industries, remunera-
tion could be re-linked to productivity, as during the glorious twenty-five.
Macro-economic policy should become more expansionary, with the fight
against inflation becoming curative rather than preventative.12

In this context, Grau is particularly scathing about French adherence in

the 1990s to the Bundesbanks conditions for European monetary union:
sustaining the over-valuation of the French currency in an effort to keep
the franc in the orbit of the deutschmark had cost the country a million jobs
and a huge public debt. Astonishingly, the French authorities appeared to
think that German manufacturing had conquered new markets because of
the strong deutschmark, not in spite of it. But the German strategy of cost-
cutting and subcontracting through organic extension into ex-Communist
central Europea growing part of German value-added comes from
goods and services realized in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary and Sloveniawas not open to France.13 Graus critique of the
economic basis of European monetary union in Le Capitalisme malade de
sa finance deservedly won him a reputation for prescience:

The new currency will not be viable unless and until the underlying econo-
mies have become so interlinked as to form a single economic entity, or
unless a supranational mechanism for redistribution makes it possible to
buffer at least some of the shocks which a unified monetary policy will not
be able to avoid . . . To a completely wrong conception of the European
project must be added the specific constraints resulting from the adoption
of the German model of monetary management: serious difficulties can
be foreseen and, perhaps, a catastrophic failure of monetary unification.14

The work ends with equally prescient warnings of coming instability.

The American economy also has an Achilles heel:

11
cmf, p. 342. 12
cmf, pp. 357, 361.
13
cmf, p. 354. 14
cmf, p. 362.
 42 nlr 69

American households are once again over-indebted. The American expan-

sion will end when households are no longer willing or able to roll over
their debts . . . The moment is unforeseeable, but the brake on us domestic
demand will affect Asian exports and share portfolios . . . A us slowdown
could be the factor which triggers a new fall of the dollar with totally desta-
bilizing consequences.15

Globalizations discontents

In 2005, Graus LAvenir du capitalisme offered a more wide-ranging

assessment of the structural and institutional changes in contemporary
capitalist systems, embracing not only financial processes but changes
in the international division of labour and in relations among the
main economies. The first chapter recalls Schumpeters judgement
in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracythat, although materially
capable of surmounting its crises, capitalism faced moral and social
defeat from within, disavowed by the intellectuals, while bureaucrats
defeated its entrepreneurs. By contrast, Grau notes, the 21st century
has seen the victory of the entrepreneur on every continent and the twi-
light of class struggle: And yet, the triumph of the system coincides
in a strange way with multiple and massive anomalies in its function-
ing.16 Emergent economies had been subject to repeated crisesin the
decade before LAvenir du capitalisme was published, these had rocked
Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, Brazil, Argentina.
The super-competitive, exporting economies of Germany and Japan had
failed to maintain employment. The American patient had been suffer-
ing from economic slowdown since the high-tech crisis in 2000; worse,
the us Treasury and the Federal Reserve had adopted expansionary pol-
icies at a time when household indebtedness and the external deficit
would normally have called for restriction, with economists cheering
on what looked like a flight forward into uncontrollable debts and defi-
cits. The American authorities, as though they had become hostages
of the financial markets, turned to a massive stimulus of just the kind
that encourages the behaviour leading to bubbles.17 The us economy
was threatened, it seemed, by risk of a genuine depressionnot least
due to the risks that had accumulated within its financial and real-estate
markets: American pensions are invested in the stock market; the

15
cmf, p. 382.
16
LAvenir du capitalisme, p. 18; henceforth, ac.
17
ac, p. 23.
 grahl: Grau 43

real-estate market has mutated into a speculative market, parallel to the

stock exchange: collapse in these two markets would be synonymous
with the ruin of pensioners and the insolvency of home-owners.18

The fragility at the heart of the American model was threatening the
world economy as a whole. Japan and Germany were the most depend-
ent on the situation in the usthe creditors have been captured by
the debtor.19 The American deficit was the symptom not only of huge
quantitative imbalances but of a deliberately instituted qualitative dis
equilibrium: the displacement of productive activities to China and other
emergent economies amounted to deflation on a world scaledriven in
this case not by a collapse of demand but by cost reductions. The us
stock market, and the other financial markets operating on similar lines,
drove these processes forward; the stock markets no longer reinforcing
the capital base of the quoted enterprises but methodically eroding it.20
Grau welcomes the corporate scandals at Enron and elsewhere that fol-
lowed the bursting of the high-tech bubble:

That the investors blessed by the law of shareholder value were on these
occasions looted and robbed is, for us, not a source of concern but grounds
for celebration and this for two reasons: firstly the satisfaction of seeing
that aberrant systems which are based on injustice destroy themselves from
within; secondly the pedagogic value of an experiment which shows that, in
principle, the relations between capital and the enterprise cannot be those
of a proprietor to a piece of property.21

Grau sees the us economy as central to the general economic disor-

der. In this restatement of his position, he once again identifies the
dangers of a reliance on household indebtedness to sustain economic
activity. In the us, pressure to correct this internal imbalance is limited,
because the reserve role of the dollar makes it possible to finance a wid-
ening current-account deficit, as economists increasingly recognized.
But the profession usually ignored the role of the us deficit in driving
down the cost of labour on a world scale, a reduction directed along the
rails of global free trade.22 In LAvenir du capitalisme it is the deflation
of wages that is the central malfunction of the globalized economy (as
distinct from classical deflation, which follows a collapse of demand).
The ultra-low interest rates maintained by the Fed after the high-tech
crashand closely imitated by the ecb and the Bank of Englandkept

18
ac, p. 23. 19
ac, p. 31. 20
ac, p. 37.
21
ac, pp. 456. 22
ac, p. 73.
 44 nlr 69

classical deflation at bay by permitting over-indebted agents to refinance

themselves very cheaply. But the us growth model based on household
borrowing continued to undermine wages and employment conditions
in the West, gradually creating a structural under-payment of labour.23

Grau sees the rapid growth of Chinese and Indian exports as disastrous
for workers in the West: China offers to the enterprises of the world the
immense reserve army which Marx thought he saw forming in the first
industrial countries in Europe. There is practically no manufactured good
whose production cannot be displaced to China, nor any intellectual
service activity that cannot be entrusted to India, which offers a second
reserve army in the field of services that require a high level of technical
and scientific competence. The migration of complex service functions to
India reveals the emptiness of that apologia for globalization that would
see it recasting the international division of labour, so that the advanced
capitalist countries export high-value services in exchange for Chinese
manufactures. The adjustment for the West does not take the form of
changing specializations but of unemployment, under-employment and
falling wages. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Partys renunciation
of its dogma is insignificant compared to the renunciation of American
and European labour by its traditional employers.24

The arguments for global free trade are demolished one by one. It does
not promote competition: most of the exports from China to the West
are produced under the aegis of Western companies. Protection of
Western economies would not necessarily reduce competition, provided
outside companies were still free to invest and produce within them.
Nor does free trade promote the development of the poorest, primary-
producing countries; it would rather keep them in the undeclared
status of colonies, producing cheap cotton to be turned into garments by
Chinese or Indonesian helots.25 The emergent economies do not need
exports to the developed ones to finance their importation of capital
goodsthey are able to acquire modern producer goods from inward
fdi. Cheap, imported consumer goods are not an effective alternative
for wage increases in supporting the standard of living of Western work-
ers, because the price reductions are at the same time deflating the
value added by the workers themselves. China worries me, Madame
de Guermantes remarks with a serious air, in la recherche du temps

23
ac, p. 87. 24
ac, p. 1013. 25
ac, p. 116.
 grahl: Grau 45

perdu. Gently mocking in its original context, the remark today encap-
sulates one of the most crucial questions about the economic future
of the world.26

Western corporations abandonment of their home workforce is seen as

part of a broader strategic shift, driven by the financial markets and the
us state:

The free-trade project resulted from a collective decision by the ruling elites
of the developed countries, taken under the pressure from the financial
markets, the big retail chains and the most powerful multinational groups,
as well as at the political instigation of an America which included this
trivial project for the exploitation of human resources in a wider and per-
haps more candid project to bring backward populations into conformity
with American economic and cultural norms.27

The globalization project cannot be dissociated from the assumption of

power by the financial markets, Grau concludes.28 The moral vacuity of
the strategy is revealed in the vision of the enterprise without workers:
with outsourcing taken to the limit, managers sole function will be as
an interface between the market and the products suppliers. The enter-
prise without workers will remain a fiction, but the fantasy itself reveals
an underlying will to separate the firm from labour.29

Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance had already described the 1997

Asian debacle as a classic over-investment crisis. LAvenir du capital-
isme also stresses the malfunctions brought about by the emergence of
untrammelled global finance: Latin American countries becoming debt
tributaries; the East Asian economies brought down by capital inflows of
which they had no need: The Asian crisis demonstrates in retrospect a
mindless international finance, carried away by unreasonable hopes for
capital gains.30 But Grau denies the need for supranational regulatory
measures, such as a Tobin tax:

Let us be careful not to see, in the proposal for general taxation of capital
flows, anything other than one of the slogans displayed on an anti-capitalist
demonstration. Of course, it feeds the imagination of the opponents of the
global economy, but in so doing it gives support to the illusion of global reg-
ulation at just the point where it is surely necessary to reaffirm the principle

26
ac, p. 97. 27
ac, p. 101. 28
ac, p. 111.
29
ac, p. 113. 30
ac, p. 149.
 46 nlr 69

of the responsibility of nations and the principle, indissolubly linked to it,

of national sovereignty.31

Grau sharply distinguishes his critique from that of the alter-

globalization movement, which he describes as a mediatized, ersatz
form of the workers movement of the pastas devoid of theoretical
and practical thinking as the political movement behind global free trade
is itself devoid of intellectual or moral objectives. His own programme,
by contrast, is for a rationalization of capitalism which would permit
the enterprise and competition to work in a more just and more efficient
way. Above all, he argues, there is no example of successful develop-
ment that is not based on a national will and a national vision.32

The attempt to specify a reform programme that will rescue capitalism

from the cul-de-sac of globalization begins with the question: what good
do stock markets now do? Their classical role was to provide capital for
quoted corporations; but with the new practice of share buy-backs, the
flow of capital is often in the opposite direction. In an era when most
investors were individuals, dispersed ownership of corporations was less
of a problem; the rise of institutional investors, however, undermines
the autonomy of the enterprise. It was under pressure from these fund
managers, paradoxically both powerful and prisoners of the market,
that the American stock exchange began to display the pathological
symptoms of a closed system. This goes beyond the practical interests
of managers, accountants, analysts and bankers in seeing their forecasts
converge to sustain a climate of optimism, favourable to their personal
fortunes. It lies in the more general character of the stock market itself,
which does not operate according to the laws of equilibrium: the sup-
ply of investment, represented by the purchase of securities, and the
demand for investment represented by the issuance of securities, are
disconnected. A shares value essentially lies in the hopes nourished for
it by the psychology of the investors. In practice, it is the buyer, not the
seller, who sets its priceand who does so in hopes that it will rise.

The in-built risks of a bull market have been vastly amplified since the
bourses fell into the hands of the big investment funds. In contrast to
individual shareholders who can enter or leave the market as they please,
institutional investors are literally trapped inside it. Their objective

31
ac, pp. 1534. 32
ac, pp. 17, 41, 154.
 grahl: Grau 47

dependence on the market pushes them to strive for ever-higher prices.

To take account of negative information would be to saw off the branch
on which they are sitting. LAvenir du capitalisme concludes: The big
institutional investors make the market because they are the market. It is
this closed system, impatient to achieve its target rates of return and, at
bottom, rather indifferent to the economy itself, that is the true image of
the stock market today.33 Under its pressure, the strategies of the major
corporations have become increasingly dysfunctional, as demonstrated
by the exorbitant remuneration levels of their senior executives.

Grau argues for a reconciliation, although not a reintegration, of own-

ership and control for large corporations, so they may fulfil their social
functions in a rational, continuous manner.34 Profits should be seen
as the income of the firm, not of capital. The Anglo-Saxon view that
corporations are simply the property of the shareholdersdisplacing
the stakeholder orientation, previously seen in Japan and continental
Europeeliminates the key distinction between purely opportunistic
shareholders and those with ongoing links to the enterprise. Institutional
investors, who demand a say over corporate strategy but have no con-
tinuing connection to the corporation, represent a form of absentee
ownership. The penetration of Anglo-Saxon institutional investors into
other economies has destabilized previously existing relations between
the firm and a dominant fraction of its capital, whether that took the
form of ownership by a family, by a bank, by other industrial enterprises
or by the management. The true role of the shareholder is to safeguard
the independence of the enterprise: What makes the shareholders nec-
essary is not the risks they run but the risk against which they protect.
In the absence of stable shareholders, the enterprise becomes the hos-
tage of its partnersof its creditors, its employees, its suppliers or its
customers.35 But though Grau speaks of the enterprise as having a mis-
sion or an objective in the public interest, he does not make clear how
this would be determined or altered.

Yet the critiques of the stock market and of Anglo-Saxon finance are
preliminary to that of the world-trade system that finance has promoted,
and which LAvenir du capitalisme sums up in the phrase: globalization
crushes employment. The policy proposals that Grau now advances
centre on the creation of large-scaleregional or continentalcommon

33
ac, pp. 1789. 34
ac, p. 193. 35
ac, p. 195.
 48 nlr 69

markets, shielded by a novel form of protectionism. Under the aegis

of a World Competition Organization, which would replace the wto,
enterprises would be free to establish production facilities in other
countries, in order to encourage competition on the basis of efficiency,
product quality and innovation, but not to export into those countries,
simply on the basis of cheap labour. This is a very unusual position:
most advocates of trade protection would also favour rigorous controls
over flows of foreign direct investment, on the grounds that it is much
more intrusive to establish production facilities or to purchase a com-
pany in another country than to export goods to it. fdi leads to a much
closer involvement in local employment systems, regulatory practices
and tax structures than is implied by cross-border trade. But the original-
ity of Graus position does not make it illogical. He wants to protect the
wages and conditions of employees, without protecting their employers
from competition stemming from greater efficiency or higher product
quality. His proposal amounts to a very strong labour clause, restricting
the scope of free trade. The actual competitive superiority of an enter-
prise is to be tested by its ability to employ and remunerate the workers
which its competition displaces.

Other proposals are less original. Grau calls for a decentralization of the
international monetary system which would conform to both a reduction
of inter-continental trade and a brake on the Americanization of financial
systemsa kite first flown in Le Capitalisme malade de sa finance. At the
level of the corporation, he argues for the removal of voting rights from
those shares that are frequently traded. However, he gives some consid-
eration to private equity as a means for stabilizing company strategies,
which would seem incompatible with his overall vision. Private-equity
investors certainly eliminate dispersed ownership, but the unified con-
trol they exercise is completely under the sign of the financial markets:
the goal is to bring about, as rapidly as possible, an increase in the mar-
ket value of the company that has been purchased. During the recent
financial bubble, the vast sums poured into private-equity funds in pur-
suit of leverage finally undermined the financial structure as a whole.

LAvenir du capitalisme opened with Schumpeter; it closes with Polanyi

and Braudel, setting the recent transformation of the world capitalist
economy in a longer-term perspective. Rejecting a globalization process
that would call the role of nation-states into question, Grau returns to
the historical roots of the capitalist economy, which he locates, firstly, in
 grahl: Grau 49

a transformation of relations between northern European cities and their

contiguous rural areas, tending towards relations based on exchange
rather than the cities predatory power. The next step, decisively inau-
gurating the capitalist era, was the formation of national markets within
nation-states. This vision leads to a critique of Braudel, who emphasized
the role of long-distance trade:

One cannot imagine a clearer logical opposition than that between the
choice of productivity which implies, for the economic agents who strive
for it, the hope of seeing their efficiency freely recognized by their custom-
ers, and the choice of predation, which amounts to imposing an unjustified
advantage, resulting from a position of strength, within economic rela-
tions. Yet [the confusion of the two] is the tour de force achieved by Fernand
Braudel, whose writings have unfortunately contributed to a persistent mis-
understanding of the true nature of capitalism and, more unhappily still, to
a distortion of the decisive step in the economic transformation of Europe
which the formation of national markets represents.36

The same emphasis on the role of the nation-state informs Graus

condemnation of the discourse of globalization, which would subordi-
nate national development programmes to a new pseudo-model in the
shape of contemporary America. He recognizes many strengths in the
us economy, not least certain social conditions favourable to expansion
and employment: nowhere else does the launch of a new project receive
as favourable a spontaneous reception or such active support from the
economic environment. 37 Other aspects are more debatable, including
the unconditional support for financial markets by the public authori-
ties and the growing contrast between the wealthy strata and the mass
of indebted Americans. LAvenir du capitalisme concludes:

Although the future belongs to capitalism, on condition that it overcomes

the material contradictions which threaten its equilibrium, it belongs also
to all those nations which have adopted its essential principles. No nation
has the right to impose its future on capitalism.38

Treachery on high

Graus most recent work, La Trahison des conomistes, has a narrower

focus, being a critique of neoliberal economics, especially in France; but
it is particularly useful in that it was written after the outbreak of the
sub-prime crisis and therefore summarizes his responses to that event.

36
ac, p. 282. 37
ac, p. 291. 38
ac, p. 299.
 50 nlr 69

The allusion to Julien Bendas great work is justified by the scandalous

abandonment of critical responsibilities that Grau finds among the apol-
ogists for neoliberal positions; but his reproach is slightly different to
Bendas. La Trahison des clercs accused French intellectuals of betraying
their clerical function, defined positively as the service of objective truth.
Grau here accuses the economists and economic commentators of con-
stituting a clergya priesthood, in the service of the neoliberal project.

It may seem surprising that it is French economists who are accused

of a slavish adhesion to neoliberal orthodoxy. Grau acknowledges the
presence of heterodox positions in the universities: old-style liberals,
unrepentant Keynesians, original research projects undertaken in the
spirit of Schumpeter or Marx. But an undeclared ostracism denies them
access to the media and, in consequence, to the microcosm of political
decision-makers, because the selection of the best minds depends on the
media.39 Repeated protests from economists in France attest to the real-
ity of this exclusion. There have been recent movements against autistic
economics and the dominance of an economic pense unique. A 70-page
manifesto by dismayed economists has been a major success.40 Yet as
Grau says, only neoliberal economists have the privilege of declaring
essential truths to the French political class, transfixedmduseby
the accomplishments of the new globalized economy.41 His examples of
issues effectively blocked from debate by the priesthood will be familiar to
Anglosphere readers. Thus: all responsibility for the financial debacle is
attributed to individual misdeedsin new-age capitalism, certain actors
may be fraudulent but the markets themselves are innocent. Despite the
increasing dependence on borrowing by heavily indebted households in
the us, no general problem of aggregate demand in the world economy is
recognized; and commentators continue to assert the mutual benefits of
the new international division of labour, in spite of its predatory effects.42

La Trahison des conomistes consists of five chapters, each identifying

a neoliberal position, putting forward a critique and drawing policy
conclusions. How to be attractive and competitive? asserts Graus cen-
tral protectionist position: competition from low-wage economies is now

39
La Trahison des conomistes, p. 6; henceforth, te.
40
Philippe Askenazy, Thomas Coutrot, Andr Orlan, Henri Sterdyniak et al,
Manifeste dconomistes atterrs. Crises et dettes en Europe: 10 fausses vidences, 22
mesures en dbat pour sortier de limpasse, Paris 2010.
41
te, p. 7. 42
te, p. 11.
 grahl: Grau 51

so fierce and embraces such a wide range of products that there is no

effective way of maintaining the competitiveness of European economies:

The comparative advantage that the developed countries acquired by being

the first in history to carry out scientific and economic development is a
thing of the past, or is rapidly becoming so. The new economic world pre-
sents itself as a world of competition across all goods and services that can
be traded internationally. Alas, it is also a world where competition is more
and more unequal in that, on the one hand, the former beneficiaries of
development are burdened by costs of production and of state activity that
cannot be drastically reduced without depressing domestic demand and
breaking social cohesion; and on the other, the efficiency gains of the newly
promoted economies are not balanced, nor about to be, by a comparable
advance in the living standards of their populations.43

Grau again advocates a form of protection that would permit any

enterprise to contest European markets via fdi; this would exclude com-
petition on the basis of low wages, while encouraging it when based on
genuinely higher productivity. At the same time financial protection for
French and European enterprises should be based on the issue of non-
voting shares to institutional investors, which would limit shareholder
pressure on corporate strategypressure which, in Graus view, has
encouraged the relocation of Western manufacturing to China.

The complacency with which neoliberal orthodoxy regards the decline

of manufacturing in Western economies is challenged in the next chap-
ter, Post-industrial or hyper-industrial society?. Although industrial
production today provides less direct employment, it remains central
to technological advance and is closely tied to many high-value service
activities, threatened by its emigration to the emerging economies.
The growth of services represents not a bifurcation of the competitive
economic system, but rather a deepening of industrial society, a devel-
opment that Grau associates with increasingly active and autonomous
consumers.44 La Trahison des conomistes then turns to the Hexagon: Is
France ruined? The destabilization of French public finance is traced
primarily to the preparations for monetary union in the 1990s, involv-
ing a long period of currency overvaluation. However, the French public
debt is held primarily within France, which remains a net creditor in
international terms; there is thus still scope for autonomous policies
to correct the situation. Nevertheless, we have begun to pay a veritable

43
te, p. 61. 44
te, p. 110.
 52 nlr 69

economic tribute to globalization which will expose us to a national

bankruptcy, properly so called, if it is aggravated by the failure to estab-
lish a commercial policy to protect the whole European economy.45

In a stylized presentation of his analysis, Grau postulates three eco-

nomic spheres: the first is the productive economy; the second consists
of primary finance, closely tied to the first; the third consists essentially
of secondary markets for securities and is a world of speculation. The
third sphere has expanded relentlessly with the disintermediation and
securitization of bank credits: The most left-wing mayor of London will
not utter a word against the effervescent activities that occupy the popu-
lation of the Square Mile. The City of London and its region, perhaps
even the whole of England, have become economic tributaries of the
third sphere.46 Central banks themselves have been taken hostage by
the securities markets, not daring to limit the growth of speculation for
fear of provoking crisis and collapse. A prescient section, Rebirth of cap-
ital or triumph of credit?, describes the transformation of us real-estate
finance into a field of security-market speculation. As in LAvenir du capi-
talisme, Grau sees some possibility that private equity, closely involved
in company management, can counteract the influence of absentee
shareholders. But here the discussion is more nuanced: private equity
can only play a positive role when it engages with productive strategies
and avoids burdening its target enterprises with debt.

Finally, a reflection on capitalist competition attempts to present a more

concrete and realistic account of the process than that found in econom-
ics text-books. A critical account of electricity deregulation in the us
suggests that the upshot was not so much effective competition as a
series of captive markets. The competition that Grau sees as essential is
between enterprises, whose continual struggle for market share implies
the permanent rationalization and reorganization of the production
process, under the sanction of autonomous consumers. Chamberlins
monopolistic competition and Schumpeters account of innovation are
better guides than the price competition of standard theory.

La Trahison des conomistes closes with a call to put an end to neoliberal-

ism, given the exhaustion of the Anglo-American model. Politicians and
financiers had intended to put the economy back onto a healthy basis

45
te, p. 134. 46
te, p. 153.
 grahl: Grau 53

of capital and risk. In reality, the system they established depended on

the subordination of monetary and credit policies to the requirements
of deregulated finance: The monstrous originality of the new capitalist
world lies in its being given over to a neoliberal experiment, shaped by a
traditional ideology, with the instruments inherited from the Keynesian
period.47 In spite of his distaste for high levels of public expenditure,
Grau praises the Swedish exception: the Swedes have shielded their
enterprises from shareholder pressure and the country trades more with
its traditional partners than with the emerging economies. Swedish
banks have avoided disintermediation and, above all, the Swedes have
stayed out of the Eurozone.

Grau argues for a programme at eu level to define a new path of

economic development. He recognizes that the present European
Commission is hardly in a position to undertake this task:

European institutions have been invaded by the representatives and disci-

ples of the Anglo-American model to the point that some eu functionaries
have been trying to outbid the Americans and the English in ideological
terms. We have to recognize that the main obstacle to be surmounted lies
in this implicit denial by Europe of its own character, its economic and
financial traditions and, above all, its political will.48

But Grau suggests that this situation is due to a kind of abdication by

the member states, rather than their usurpation by the Commission
and the Court of Justice. It remains possible for member states to
define a common political project that would have priority over the
rules of competition through which, at present, neoliberal strategies
are enforced. The programme he invokes is as much social and cul-
tural as economic. Its first principle is demographicpolicies aimed at
lifting the suicidal threat posed by low levels of fertility in the context
of increased life expectancy. The second would be to end the subordi-
nation of education to employment. A protectionist commercial policy
is the third principle; the promotion of exchange-rate stability, espe-
cially vis--vis major currencies such as the dollar, the fourth. Next
comes a reassertion of the rights of the enterprise against those of
the shareholders, with lower taxes on stable long-run shareholdings
than those that are frequently traded. The security and autonomy of
Europes food and energy supplies is the sixth proposal and, finally, a

47
te, p. 2223. 48
te, p. 253.
 54 nlr 69

rigorous ecological policy, including carbon and other pollution taxes

to help finance common projects.49

Assessment

Grau makes a powerful presentation of his case. Two aspects of his

political position should be taken into account. There is firstly his com-
mitment to capitalist competition between enterprises as the source of
economic progress: he has nevertheless moved a long way since he was
economist to the French employers association. Secondly, there is his
rejection of supranational authorities: like many in France, including
economists well to his left such as Jacques Sapir, he is a souveraintiste
and sees the form of the nation state as of primary economic impor-
tance. Here too, however, his views are not simplistic. He dismisses for
example, De Gaulles attempts to restore the gold standard as completely
contrary to the need for an elastic credit supply both in France itself and
more generally. Again, although he rejects the supranational preten-
sions of the eu, his political programme is laid out, as has been seen, in
European rather than narrowly French terms. Apart from a few sallies
at the expense of ultracritical opponents of global capitalism, this is in
no way a tendentious work. In many respects it coincides with accounts
of financialization and globalization from Marxist and other heterodox
economists. For this reason the critical remarks which follow are directed
not only at Grau but at certain positions found very widely in current
debates. They concern the impact of globalization on Western workforces
and the role of finance in current economic developments.

Grau is surely correct to identify a process of wage deflation in the

advanced economies, but he ties this too closely to the emergence of
China and other low-wage producers onto world markets. This raises
problems of timing: the assault on wages, working conditions and
social protection in Western economies had already begun before Deng
Xiaopings reforms could have any effect. The assault had many dimen-
sions but, as Dani Rodrik has argued, one of the most important was
simply the new mobility of productive capital. This put workforces into
competition with each other even in the absence of big relocations to
developing countries. One of the earliest and most destructive capital
migrations took place within the us itself: the move to the Sun Belt,

49
te, p. 2405.
 grahl: Grau 55

which had devastating consequences for the industrial economies of the

Midwest and the Northeast seaboard.

This point of detail relates to one of analysis. Grau wants to argue that the
initiatives leading to globalized economic relations were discontinuous
with accumulation processes within Western economies during the
glorious post-war decades. The counter-example of capital migra-
tion within the us itself suggests that the two phases share a common
economic logic. The same is true in Western Europe (where the rapid
growth of productivity associated with a catch-up, after decades in which
war, depression and instability had held back investment, also needs to
be considered). Both the post-war expansion in Northern Europe and
the economic restructuring which followed its exhaustion overstepped
national boundaries. The expansion was dependent on urbanization
processes; by the late 1950s these had become international, as labour
was drawn from the Mediterranean, North Africa and further afield.

The drive to contain labour costs that began to dominate German invest-
ment patterns from the 1970s had both domestic and international
aspects: the rapid automation of many production processes and a
move up-market to more specialized industrial products at home were
accompanied by the multinationalization of German corporations, with
investment flowing first towards its Northern European neighbours,
then to Southern Europe and finally on an intercontinental scale. All
of these moves, not just the last, posed problems for German workers.
In effect, the post-war expansion in Europe depended on an elastic sup-
ply of labour. The tightening of labour markets in the late 1960s and
into the 70s, and the decline in profitability to which it was linked, trig-
gered a vast, and increasingly radical, restructuring process that worked
to undermine the established position of labour. This is not to deny the
normative importance of many features of the post-war period, nor the
dysfunctional character of many of the so-called reforms which fol-
lowed. But the stagflation of the 1970s signalled deeper problems than
a disordered exchange-rate system or laxity in public finances. The vast
over-accumulation that brought the expansion to an end, and the deep
restructuring it provoked, can themselves be seen as processes typical of
capitalist dynamics, rather than as departures from its normal pattern of
development. As to foreign investment, even today the majority of fdi
flows are from one advanced economy to another. The consequences for
labour can still be severe, simply because of the freedom of manoeuvre
 56 nlr 69

that this mobility confers on capital. This is not to deny the very sharp
problems posed by imports from low-wage countries; but one limitation
of Graus argument for protection is that he considers only the defence
of Western employment relations and does not discuss how the interests
of Chinese or Indian workers could be secured in such a context.

Like Grau, many critics of globalization regard the process as the out-
come of a conscious political, or political-financial project. Of course,
any major economic development today has political preconditions
and requires negotiation between legislators and interest groups, the
installation of new regulatory structures, the redefinition of property
rights and so on. But this very visible political accompaniment does not
mean that the processes involved have no economic logic. Globalization
is surely, among many other things, a new phase in the socialization
of production. One can very reasonably object that this is a very anti-
social socializationbut when was that not the case? There is every
justification for Graus critique of finance, which converges with that
of many other commentators.50 The predation, speculation, deception
and irrationality that he depicts are real and have been confirmed, in
the most destructive ways, by the sub-prime debacle and its aftermath.
But it seems exaggerated to suggest that it was largely pressure from
the financial markets that promoted the vast shift of industrial produc-
tion towards emerging economies: the big Western corporations were
heavily involved in international relocations prior to the financial trans-
formations of the last twenty-five years.

Two analytical points will be linked to this observation. The first con-
cerns the distinction between bank credit and security-based finance.
Many critical observers of contemporary financecritical of its hyper-
trophy, its parasitism, its instabilityspeak as though the central failure
of the financial system relates to the substitution of marketable securi-
ties for bank loans in forms of credit provision. They frequently contrast
the supposedly patient support for their industrial customers from
German Hausbanken with the excessive demands and short-term preoc-
cupations of the shareholding funds that scrutinize the quarterly reports
of us or British corporations. Too much weight should not be placed

50
See, for example, the dramatic account by Robert Fitch of the impact of financiali-
zation on New York, Explaining New York Citys Aberrant Economy, nlr i/207,
SeptemberOctober 1994.
 grahl: Grau 57

on this distinction, which concerns, at bottom, two forms of maturity

transformationtwo types of exit from a financial relationship. If the
user of funds wants them for a long period, but the supplier may require
them back sooner, then the gap can be closed either by reliance on a
strong institutiona bankwhich aggregates its credits and deposits,
so as to preserve the liquidity of the latter; or by making the investors
claim marketable, so that another investor can take it over and provide
an early return of the funds committed.

These two forms have co-existed, in close symbiosis, since the begin-
nings of industrial capitalism. Early forms of credit were very closely
tied to exchange: late payment for a transaction represented a credit
from the seller to the buyer, prepayment the reverse. As finance became
a separate social function, both modern forms developed simultane-
ously: trade credits were made negotiable and thus took the form of
marketable securities; what became the banks were originally merely
the strongest participants in that market. Both forms of credit may work
in a stable and efficient way. Both can fail, misallocating investment
resources within individual credit transactions or provoking wide-
spread crises. Since banks have always been major players on securities
markets, it is hard to argue that a narrower role for the latter and a wider
use of classical bank credit would itself make for more stability and
rationality in the financial sphere. In the case of the us sub-prime mort-
gage fiasco, for example, the possibility of issuing marketable securities
backed by the mortgages was certainly central to the whole process. But
the crisis itself was greatly aggravated by the banks failure in practice to
sell these securities on a large enough scale across the financial system;
they often stayed with the issuing banks, trapped in the conduits, and
therefore immediately compromising the banks when their value was
called into question.

The development of an international financial system in recent dec-

ades has involved a great deal of disintermediation and securitization.
(These terms are roughly synonymous but, strictly speaking, the first
denotes the general replacement of bank credit by security markets;
the second, the transformation of a specific set of bank credits into
securities.) Many see this as representing in itself a kind of decadence
in financial relations, but it is also possible to interpret it in terms of
scale: whereas banks may be more effective than security markets in
the detailed monitoring of specific credit relationships, the markets are
 58 nlr 69

better able to draw funds from dispersed investors on a continental or

global scale and to transmit them to different enterprises, sectors and
national economies. Security markets were always more important in
the us than in individual European countries, in part due to the conti-
nental scale of the us economy.

There is hardly any doubt that one consequence of the recent finan-
cial crash will be to accelerate the growth of securities marketsnot at
the expense of the banks, which will remain the main actors in these
markets, but at the expense of classical bank intermediation. Even the
limited moves so far agreed to restrain and re-regulate the banksfor
example, by requiring them to raise more equity capital or to declare
more of their assets on their balance sheetswill tend to make bank
credit more expensive relative to security-based finance, which can there-
fore be expected to continue its growth within a global financial system
which, pace Grau and many others, is becoming more integrated and
interdependent as a consequence of the crisis.

The second analytical point concerns the nature of finance. Obviously,

finance is an interest, or a closely coherent set of interests. As such it is
extremely powerful and dangerous. But finance is also a function. Indeed
from the point of view of heterodox economic traditions, whether
Keynesian or Marxist, it is an indispensable function. Heterodox
economists recognize that markets do not clear. The normal working
of commodity exchange distributes surpluses and deficits across the
economy in a complex and largely unpredictable way. Only the ceaseless
recycling of monetary resources then permits the deficit units to survive,
and thus the capitalist economy to continue. Those mainstream econo-
mists who believe in the spontaneous equilibration of the market may
regard the financial system as merely a lubricant of market exchange;
those without this Panglossian assurance have to regard finance as the
markets condition of existence.

A highly internationalized and interdependent economy requires a com-

plex international financial system. Long before the neoliberal agenda
was promulgated, the first was giving rise to the second: the emergence
and development of the Eurodollar banking and security-trading system,
the embryo of todays global finance, were essentially consequences
of the multinational activities of the big us corporations. The density
of the interconnections among financial systems today is still often
 grahl: Grau 59

underestimated. For example, the Eurozone and us money markets

form an integrated whole, in which liquidity flows smoothly across the
two currency zones.

The malfunctions of the global financial system and the injustice with
which it distributes its massive revenues pose very acute problems of
social control, both over financial interest groupsif they are to be sub-
ordinated to general, democratically determined interestsand over the
financial function, if it is to help fulfil social and environmental priori-
ties. The struggle for such control faces an acute dilemma: the aim must
be a deep reform of international structures, but the only feasible start-
ing points seem to be from within national polities, themselves tightly
constrained in their external relations. Graus more recent writings
show increasing awareness of the dilemma. Beyond its analytical inter-
est, the importance of his work lies, precisely, in combining a radical
critique of contemporary capitalism with a radical reform agenda. He
continues to see political initiatives in France as the necessary starting
point, but formulates his programme in European terms. Speaking of
his proposals for banking reform he asks:

But on what territory can one envisage the implementation of such meas-
ures? The whole world, the Western world, the European Union, the
nation? Since I cannot imagine the Chinese or Indian leaderships, nor
Barack Obama, nor the British prime minister, present or future, adopting
such proposals, because of the nationalism of the first two and the subor-
dination of the second two to their banking sectors; and since the banks
operating in France relate firstly to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt,
it seems to be the territory of the Eurozone which must be the base of the
new organization. But we are subjected to the Treaty of Maastricht, based
on a doctrinaire vision of money and banking completely opposed to the
one we have advocated . . . To overcome these illusions and build a different
banking system will require a revolution in the heads of the political leaders
of the Old Continent. A vast programme.51

With Graus last sentence, one can only concur.

Jean-Luc Grau, Pour un nouveau systme bancaire, Le Dbat, November

51

December 2009.
 chin-tao wu

S C A R S A N D F AU LT L I N E S

The Art of Doris Salcedo

A
s in any public square in a Western European city on a
sunny day, people casually gather and stroll around the Plaza
de Bolvar, the central square of Colombias capital, Bogot.1
The imposing faades of the grandiose colonial buildings
that flank the square add to its monumentality and tranquillity. One
could easily mistake it for St Marks in Venice. But the Plaza de Bolvar
is no urban arcadia: it is under constant surveillance and policed by
an alarming number of soldiers armed with submachine guns. Their
presence not only reflects the continuing militarization of the coun-
trys civic life, but also recalls the Plazas specific role in its troubled
history. In November 1985, the Palace of Justice on its northern side
was the scene of one of the most notorious confrontations between the
Colombian Army and the countrys leftist insurgents. On November
6th, with negotiations fraying between the Betancur government and
the guerrillasfarc, M-19, elnamid rising Army and paramilitary
violence, 35 M-19 guerrillas seized the Supreme Court in the name of
peace and social justice, demanding that Betancur come and negotiate
with them. The Army took charge and, ignoring pleas from hostages,
launched an all-out assault, firing heavy artillery at the building. When a
conflagration broke out, the military forbade the firefighters to tackle the
blaze. By the next morning the Palace of Justice was in ruins, the bodies
of guerrillas and civilians alike often charred beyond recognition. Over a
hundred people had died.

Exactly seventeen years after the guerrillas had first entered the building
at precisely 11.25am on November 6th, 2002an empty wooden chair
appeared on top of the now rebuilt Palace of Justice and began slowly

new left review 69 may jun 2011 61

 62 nlr 69

making its way down the high stone faade. It was followed by another
chair, then another; before too long, a dozen chairs were descending;
then several dozen more. Over the course of November 6th and 7th,
some 280 chairs made the descent, ending at the exact time that the
Army had finally taken the ruined building. The simple wooden chairs
were all used ones, many aged with the imprint of the passing years.
Everyday objects, they evoked the absence of those no longer sitting
on them, and their slow-motion cascade down the side of the building
prompted images of people hoping to escape to safety.

This uncanny commemoration was, in fact, a work by the Colombian

artist Doris Salcedo, who has consistently sought to keep events such
as the Palace siegeevents that the West, as well as many in Colombia,
would be happier to ignore, if not to forgetalive in peoples memories
and the public consciousness. As an artist whose work has, since the
1990s, rarely been exhibited in her home country, Salcedos representa-
tion of the victims of Colombias undeclared civil wars raises important
questions about its reception and consumption in the West: not only in
public art museums but also in the commercial markets that trade in,
and on, her art. Although it is not usual for art criticism to engage with
the market side of artistic output, it is nevertheless important to see that
art and commerce are in an intricate, and often opaque, symbiotic rela-
tionship. The friction generated by this conflict of interest is particularly
acute for an artist whose work is politically orientated, and which articu-
lates human violence and suffering.

The bipartite nature of this essay is intended to highlight both the con-
tradictory nature of todays art industry and the sorts of dilemma that a
politically engaged artist living in both the artistic and the commercial
worlds might have to face, in order to function within them. Taking as
examples those of Salcedos works directly inspired by the 1985 assault on
the Palace of Justice, I will investigate how the reception of her art in the
us and Europe might be typical of the way in which the Western art world
habitually consumes and appropriates works from the Third World.
ShibbolethSalcedos renowned crack in the floor of the prestigious
Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2007further illuminates the ways in

1
I would like to express my gratitude to all those who were kind and co-operative
enough to speak to me, but the requirements of anonymity prevent me from
acknowledging their contribution more explicitly.
 wu: Salcedo 63

Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7, Bogot, Colombia, 2002. The artist, courtesy White Cube.
 64 nlr 69

which Third World artists can be accommodated and consumed within

a predominantly Western cultural discourse. This is not, of course, to
argue that Salcedo is typical: no Latin American artist has achieved what
she has so far achieved in so short a time in such high-powered Western
art institutions, public as well as commercial.2 Nevertheless, her interac-
tion with Western art institutions provides an illuminating example of
how it is possible for an artist operating between two worlds to negotiate
and successfully secure for herself a position of cultural prominence.
The intricate networking and social-relationship mechanisms within the
contemporary art world are not easily mapped; but it may be possible
to sketch out some significant historical junctures at which certain key
players or institutions have helped shape an artists career.

Trajectory

One of many Third World artists who go to us or European centres

of contemporary art for training, Salcedo completed her postgraduate
studies in New Yorkan experience which not only provides graduates
with opportunities for further professional development, but frequently
also facilitates personal networking and access to Western art institu-
tions in general. Having finished her Masters degree in sculpture at
nyu in 1984, Salcedo returned to Colombia, and mainly exhibited in
Bogot for the next eight years.3 Her dbut in a Western art institution
came with the group show Currents 92: The Absent Body at the Institute
of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1992. The following year Salcedo
appeared in a group show at one of the foremost New York commercial
art galleries, Brooke Alexander, and also featured in a special section
of the 45th Venice Biennalearguably the largest gathering of art spe-
cialists anywherewhich placed her work on the world art stage for
the first time.

It did not take long for Salcedo to be awarded her first solo show, La
Casa Viuda (The Widowed House), at the Brooke Alexander Gallery in

2
Other prominent Latin American artists either achieved success later in their
careersfor example, the Brazilian Cildo Meireles was ten years older than Salcedo
by the time of his 2008 Tate exhibitionor have yet to match commercial suc-
cess with institutional recognition: the Mexican Teresa Margolles, though she has
exhibited in many important venues, has yet to make it into any major Western
art museum.
3
Biographical data from Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo and Andreas Huyssen,
Doris Salcedo, London 2000.
 wu: Salcedo 65

New York in 1994; this was to be followed by another solo show at White
Cube in London in 1995, Doris Salcedo: La Casa Viuda VI. These suc-
cessive exhibitions in New York and London indicate that Salcedo had
secured a solid bridgehead in the commercial art world. Further expo-
sure on the international scene came with the Carnegie International in
1995, the So Paulo Biennial in 1998, and the first Liverpool Biennial the
following year. The late 1990s then brought three solo shows at some
of the most prominent Western art museums: Unland/Doris Salcedo at
the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1998, travelling
to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999; and Art Now 18:
Doris Salcedo at the then Tate Gallery in London in 1999. Despite occu-
pying a small and somewhat remote space within the gallery, the Art
Now series, devoted exclusively to younger and emerging artists, rep-
resents an important venue to showcase new talent. Entering the Tate
collection must have been a turning point in Salcedos career, especially
given the strong support of its director, Sir Nicholas Serota. Within the
space of a few years, she was to be selected by Serota and his colleagues
for the 2007 Turbine Hall commission. By the end of the 1990s, then,
Salcedo was already well established in the Western art world, both on
the commercial market and within the public art sector, moving back
and forth between the two with ease.

Despite working in the us, uk and Europe, Salcedo has, notably, chosen
to continue living in her home city. This is in stark contrast to many other
contemporary artists born outside Western Europe and North America,
who have chosen to emigrate to one of these two areas in order to further
their careers.4 In this sense, Salcedos career is untypical as far as Third
World artists are concerned. She is also unique in the way in which she
has so far chosen to work: in comparison with the majority of artists of
her generation, she has produced very little in terms of quantity. Each of
her works is a unique piece, and it is not her habit to work in editions.
Since 2000, there has been a significant shift in her working methods:
she has mainly done site-specific, public projects which in practical
terms may not be saleable. Moreover, though it is usual practice, in such
circumstances, for artists to put their working drawings or sketches on
the market, Salcedo has not so far sold any sketches.5 Given that a large

4
See my Biennials sans frontires, nlr 57, MayJune 2009.
5
When asked if Salcedo would sell her working drawings, her New York agent
replied: Actually she doesnt do drawings. She sketches in some notebooks, but
she doesnt do drawings. Its just not part of her work. Interview with Carolyn
Alexander, 18 October 2010.
 66 nlr 69

number of her works from the 1990s have entered public collections,
there are very few pieces left to circulate in the marketleaving demand
for her work high and constantly unsatisfied. How this situation is likely
to develop is something to which we shall later return. But first we must
take a closer look at Salcedos output, the better to understand why her
work is so sought after, and what makes her specific contribution to con-
temporary art so original.

Memorials

Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Salcedo based all of her
work on first-hand evidence she collected during many field trips into
the countryside of her native land, to abandoned villages and sites of
mass graves and wholesale slaughter. Although the civil war as such
has never been officially declared in Colombia, the country has been
constantly torn by violence from an array of armed actors: the Army,
paramilitaries, drug barons and guerrillas. Employing, indeed recycling,
personal domestic objects used by the victims of the conflict themselves,
Salcedo makes these scraps and fragments from everyday life speak
for the absent body and the missing person, as well as communicating
the pain and sorrow that absence brings with it.6 In one of her most
famous installations, Atrabiliarios (199196)from the Latin for black
bile, connoting the melancholy of mourningworn shoes, mostly
from female victims, are placed in box-like niches inserted directly into
walls. The niches fronts are sealed with translucent animal fibre, tightly
stretched and stitched with surgical thread. The used shoes, standing
in a synecdochic relationship to their absent owners, are the sewn-up
memories that the survivors must carry around with them.

In La Casa Viuda (The Widowed House), a series of five works made

between 1992 and 1995, used doors and other domestic furniture such
as bed frames and stools have bones, zippers and fragments of clothes
inserted into them. The title of the work already evokes the image of a
bereaved woman alone with her grief. The insertion of human traces
into the furniture further works to strengthen the visual complexity
of the objectthe intimacy of the zippers and fragments of personal

6
Salcedo has said that some 20 to 30 per cent of the objects she has used in her
work were collected from the victims. Interview with the author, Istanbul, 20
September 2003.
 wu: Salcedo 67

clothing, interwoven with the domesticity of used objects, inevitably

invites association with their absent owners. But in Salcedos work,
such emotional associations are always carefully controlled; indeed, the
potency lies in the ambiguity and understatement of the representation.

In these works, Salcedo set out to identify with, and substitute herself
for, the victims. As she herself stated:

I try to learn absolutely everything about their lives, their trajectories, as if

I were a detective piecing together the scene of a crime. I become aware
of all the details in their lives. I cant really describe what happens to me
because its not rational: in a way, I become that person; there is a process
of substitution.7

In cases where objects are, as it were, imprinted with their previous

owners, the metonymic substitution might be easier to imagine and to
sustain. But for the works related to the events at the Palace of Justice in
1985, Salcedo was forced to abandon her previous practice of employing
objects actually owned and used by the victims. Forced, that is, both by
practical considerationsthe government refused to allow her to use
any object preserved from the building8and by the need to ensure the
survival of the collective memory of the tragic events that had shaken an
already traumatized country. In her own eloquent essay on Noviembre 6
y 7, she writes: There is an overriding necessity for us to understand our
pastindeed, the fundamental activity of an artist in periods of crisis is
to elaborate images that make it possible to articulate a cultural memory
based in collective knowledge of the past. To this end, Salcedo evokes
the concept of active memory:

An active memory presupposes two operations: recalling and narrat-

ing. To recall is to make a deliberate effort of memory, but . . . if we limit
remembering to this, without the capacity to narrate, we make it an isolated
experience: the traumatized victim remembers in solitude. When mem-
ory becomes a narrative act, it seeks out an interlocutor and in this way
transforms itself into social or collective memory. Active remembering is,
therefore, above all a narration. The artist is an agent of memory, a narrator
who invokes difficult historical moments that the country tries to forget.9

7
Carlos Basualdo in conversation with Doris Salcedo, in Princenthal, Doris
Salcedo, p. 14.
8
Interview with the author, 18 February 2003, Bogot.
9
Doris Salcedo, Un Acto de Memoria, dc, December 2002, no. 9; with thanks to
Tim Girven for the translation.
 68 nlr 69

So far Salcedo has produced two major works about the assault on the
Palace of Justice. The first, Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985, was exhibited for
the first time at the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2001, and then
in Documenta 11 at Kassel in 2002. As with Noviembre 6 y 7, chairs sup-
plied the central metaphor. In Tenebraeliterally, shadowsan entire
room is blocked off with elongated rods and upturned metal chairs.
Closer inspection reveals that what appear to be metal studs, preventing
visitors from approaching the work, are in fact chair legs. The ambi-
guity of the relationship between the chairs, their legs and the space
thus defined and blocked off is a function of the (post-)minimal sculp-
tural language that Salcedo chooses to use. Abstract though the work
is, some sense of violence does in fact emanate from it; this effect is
confirmed, or perhaps even strengthened, by several pieces of crushed
chairs placed outside the room (Noviembre 6), an installation which was
further expanded in the Documenta exhibition. Like those inside the
room, these chairs are made of stainless steel, lead, wood and resin, but
they have been violently crushed together by some unspecified force.
Some of them are, like a battered body, heavily disfigured and barely
recognizable as chairs.

Although the brutality inflicted on the chairs is clear, to what extent

can the minimal abstraction of the pieces represent the specific con-
tent implied by their dated titles? How far can these chairs be made
to relate to the experience of the Colombian people, especially in the
eyes of a Western audience? Over the past decade, despite her growing
international reputation, Salcedo has seldom exhibited inside Colombia.
With the important exception of the 2002 Palace of Justice installation,
Salcedos workseven if not deliberately designed for exhibition and
consumption in the Westhave so far mostly been seen only outside
the social context that actually inspired them. Given this decontextual-
ization, it is striking that interpretations of Salcedos work in the West,
critical or otherwise, are always coloured by an emphasis on the fact that
she is from Colombia and that her work deals with the situation in that
countryan emphasis, it must be said, partly of Salcedos own making
and of which she herself is very much aware.10

Viewing these works in a Western art-gallery space raises, therefore,

some particular problems. Encountering the works without any prior

10
Interview with the author, 18 February 2003, Bogot.
 wu: Salcedo 69

knowledge of the artist or her past compositions is an entirely differ-

ent experience from that of someone who knows something of her
Colombian background. Complicating matters further are differences
in the actual viewing contexts. One need only, for instance, compare the
divergent responses elicited by the shows at the Camden Arts Centre
and at Kassel. Visitors to the former tend to be regular gallery-goers
and are perhaps more likely to possess prior knowledge of Salcedo and
her work. In this white cube gallery environment the works occupied
the whole space, giving the visitor a more concentrated, if not con-
trolled, atmosphere for contemplation. In contrast, at the Fridericianum
Museum at Kassel, Salcedos work was shown in a huge room which it
shared with the works of Leon Golub. The magnitude of the space made
Tenebrae and its accompanying installation look quite lost. The nature of
Documentaan art spectacle showing hundreds of works by hundreds
of different artists, with thousands of visitors crowding into the exhibi-
tion spaceprevented any specifically Colombian reading of Salcedos
work (something, incidentally, that appalled the artist herself).

If the specific political context of Salcedos work might thus some-

times be lost on its Western audience, quite the opposite is true in her
homeland. In her Palace of Justice installation, Noviembre 6 y 7, Salcedo
chose the time and actual location to make her act of remembrance.11 In
Tenebrae the distortion of the chairs, upturned and with their grotesquely
extended limbs, served as an additional reminder of the torture under-
gone by those who might have sat on them. In Noviembre 6 y 7, the empty
chairs descending the faade of the Palace of Justice starkly conveyed
the absence of the people who should have been sitting on them, rather
than the traumatic experience itself. By hanging these banal yet intimate
domestic objects against an outside wall, Salcedo was effectively turn-
ing the building inside out, adding a further unsettling note. The work

11
To date, Salcedo has undertaken two other public commemorative acts. First,
when the political satirist and peace activist Jaime Garznwho famously negoti-
ated hostage releases with the farcwas killed by paramilitaries in 1999, Salcedo,
together with other artists, placed 5,000 red roses along a 150-metre-long wall near
where he lived. However, Salcedo stated that she never thought of this as an art
work; see Carlos Basualdo in conversation with Doris Salcedo, p. 33. In July 2007,
just before her Tate commission opened, she organized another installation, plac-
ing 25,000 candles on the Plaza de Bolvar after 11 regional mps abducted five
years earlier were killed; see Csar Paredes, Chvere que fuera una mentira y ellos
estuvieran vivos, Semana, 4 July 2007.
 70 nlr 69

presented the absurdity of an empty chair dangling in front of the faade

of a buildingsomething normally found inside, on the exterior. I am
interested in the external, in showing that where there is violence, interi-
ority is not possible, she has said.

Salcedos ephemeral art event was intended to prompt passers-by to re-

live their own memories of the tragic events, as well as to show solidarity
with the victims families and survivors. No less important is the fact that
the Palace of Justice is located in Colombias principal symbolic space.
The very publicness of the Plaza de Bolvar, in the nations capital, gives
any private act committed in it an immediate political significance that
is inevitably collective. By appropriating it, Salcedo staged a silent pro-
test in full public view, in contrast to the Uribe governments complicit
silence and that of the Betancur administration, whose bungling inhu-
manity had brought about the initial tragedy.

Passwords

Viewing Salcedos work outside its national boundaries, however, poses

a number of problems and dilemmas for Western eyes: to what extent
does the viewer become a complicit onlooker, content to nod in sympa-
thy without assuming any responsibility for active political solidarity?
And how fardare one askis Salcedos critical success in the West a
function of the art establishments need to embellish its own liberal con-
science? This question has become even more relevant since the 2007
announcement of her commission to produce the 8th Unilever instal-
lation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Salcedo was the first artist
from Latin America to be invited to fill such a prestigious space, and only
the third female artist to be so honoured. Tate Modern being, arguably,
among the most prestigious contemporary art museums in the world, on
a par with moma in New York, Salcedos presence in a space of such high
visibility undoubtedly marked her ascent to a position of considerable
prominence.

Shibboleth consisted of a 167-metre fissure that ran the length of the

vast Turbine Hall. To those entering the museum, the crack was at first
barely visible. It then zigzagged across the floor, growing progressively
wider and deeper as it forked towards the centre of the Hall, creating
a rift nearly a foot across and over three feet deep. Thereafter the cut
gradually narrowed, until it finally disappeared at the far end of the Hall.
 wu: Salcedo 71

The interior of what appeared to be an earthquake fault line was cast to

resemble solid rock, but embedded within it was chain-link fencing, rem-
iniscent of prisons or concentration camps. The Biblical title in fact refers
to a process of social differentiation: in the Book of Judges, shibboleth
was the password used by the Gileadites to distinguish their enemies,
the Ephraimites, who were unable to pronounce the first syllable. At Tate
Modern, however, the work was more popularly known as the crack.

To create a crack of these proportions was, of course, no easy task. At

one level, Shibboleth was a direct intervention into the structure of the
architectural space of Tate Modernsome might even say an attack on
the buildings very integrity. Salcedo has not been reticent about telling
her public exactly what she considers the meaning of her work to be:
Shibboleth addresses the w(hole) in history that marks the bottomless
difference that separates whites from non-whites. The w(hole) in history
that I am referring to is the history of racism, which runs parallel to the
history of modernity, and is its untold dark side. She further stated that:

This piece is inopportune . . . Its appearance disturbs the Turbine Hall in

the same way the appearance of immigrants disturbs the consensus and
homogeneity of European societies. In high Western tradition the inop-
portune that interrupts development, progress, is the immigrant, the one
who does not share the identity of the identical and has nothing in common
with the community.12

The crack in Shibboleth clearly represents a separation, a fault line run-

ning through the ensemble of our social, political and cultural forms.
What appears to be solid is in fact undermined by a basic and structural
fault. Whether or not it represents racism as defined by Salcedo is, how-
ever, open to question. Like any significant work, the meaning of the crack
is open to a wide range of readings. Yet for all its inherent ambiguity, it is
clear that the work carries out an unprecedented physical assault on the
very fabric of its host institution. No other art work has left a permanent
scar on the floor space. As one critic put it: Tate Modern, a triumphalist
monument to our modern Western culture, is quite literally riven in two
by an artwork that provokes us to question the very foundations of our
ways of thought.13

12
Doris Salcedo, Proposal for a project for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern,
London, 2007, in Achim Borchardt-Hume et al., Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, London
2007, p. 65.
13
Rachel Campbell-Johnson, The jagged edge of art, The Times, 9 October 2007.
 72 nlr 69

For Shibboleth, as with all her public installations, Salcedo provided an

explanatory statement of exactly what she had in mind at the start of
the project. In this way, she was able from the outset to direct, to a
certain extent, the critical discourse to which her work gave rise. The
racism discourse is no exception: in todays climate of art-world politi-
cal correctness, this interpretation of the work was not only tolerated
but willingly embraced. The Tates director, Nicholas Serota, declared
at the press conference inaugurating the work: There is a crack. There
is a line and eventually there will be a scar. That is something that we
and other artists will have to live with.14 In contrast to the missing
Colombians whose traces were being erased by the Uribe government,
but restored by Salcedo, the scar that the artist has left at Tate Modern
is not only inerasable but, it would seem, actually welcomed by the
Western art establishment.

Indeed, the way in which Tate Modern went out of its way to accom
modate the artist was little short of extraordinary. The actual politics
of the production of Shibboleth have been sealed off from any public
scrutiny, just as the Turbine Hall itself was screened off for six weeks
while the work was being carried out.15 It might be understandable
though not necessarily acceptableif details of the actual financing
of the commission were kept secret. But even straightforward techni-
cal questions such as how the piece was constructed, and how deep the
crack actually was, remained resolutely unanswered. At the Shibboleth
commission press conference, the Tates director, the curator and the
artist pointedly avoided responding to such questions from increasingly
frustrated journalists. On-site staff were apparently also instructed not
to disclose any details of the construction of the work itself, even though
some felt proud enough to confide: Of course, I know how it was made.
This intriguing lack of transparency turns out, on investigation, to be a
condition imposed by the artist herself. Talking about how art is actually
created has been an integral part of artistic discourse; yet Tate Modern
felt able to turn a blind eye to its public-education remit and complied
with Salcedos request. That it was willing to go to such lengths is inter-
esting testimony to the relationship between the self-proclaimed Third
World artist and her First World art institution. Even Salcedo herself
expressed surprise at Tate Moderns unqualified approval: Its quite

14
Latest Tate modern installation is a yawning chasm, Reuters, 8 October 2007.
15
This was not the case, for example, with Olafur Eliassons The Weather Project
in 2003.
 wu: Salcedo 73

extraordinary that the Tate would accept this workthere are not many
museums in the world that would dare.16

After-effects

The Tate commission undeniably launched Salcedo into a stage of her

career where she could command the same sort of global attention
as any comparable Western artist. Although she had long benefited
from the support of art-world insidersmuseum directors, critics and
curatorsmedia coverage and critical appreciation of her work had
remained surprisingly limited. This had nothing directly to do with the
quality of her work, but more with the economic and cultural dominance
of the Western art world. The scope and scale of the art market, the
number and standing of the curators and critics, the importance of art
magazines, journals and books are all far more developed than any that
a Third World country could possibly sustain. The work of British art-
ists such as Rachel Whiteread, an approximate contemporary of Salcedo,
immediately generates scores of notices and reviews, both locally and
internationallysomething that had not been the case for Salcedo. With
the Turbine Hall commission, however, she suddenly became a house-
hold name in the Western art world; her success reverberated in the
Third World, in particular her home country.17

The Western art establishment that extended such a warm welcome

to Salcedo is not of course exclusively composed of public institutions
such as Tate Modern. In anticipation of the high-profile installation at
Tate Modern, her agent in London, White Cube, opened a solo show
of Salcedos work on 15 September 2007, three weeks ahead of the
opening of Shibboleth. The timing could not have been more strategi-
cally chosen or more commercially oriented: given the upcoming Tate
exposure, it was only reasonable to assume that Salcedos reputation
would rise significantly and so, naturally, would her market value.
Eight medium-to-large furniture pieces as well as a number of smaller
cemented chairs were crowded into the modestly sized Hoxton Square

16
Ossian Ward, Into the Breach, Time Out London supplement, October 2007, p. 5.
17
Though she has rarely exhibited in Colombia in the last two decades, Salcedo is
well known and respected in her home country. Semana magazine has described
her several times as the most important Colombian artist in the world, noting the
favourable comments and the frequent news of her successful exhibitions at the
main museums around the world. See El enigma de Doris Salcedo, Semana, 13
October 2002 and Doris Tate, Semana, 14 April 2007.
 74 nlr 69

premises. Rarely had the gallery displayed works so crammed together.

In terms of quantity and quality, what could easily have been a museum
exhibition in fact turned out to be a sales opportunity, given the fact
that the supply of Salcedos earlier furniture pieces was so limited and
demand for it consequently so high. The fact that White Cube had
bought five of the older pieces back from private collectors could there-
fore be seen as a strategy designed to secure a market monopoly. As
one critic remarked of the gallery owner Jay Jopling: Hes now the one
who owns everything; he can give you any price for any piece. The three
new furniture pieces presumably produced specifically for the sale raise
further questions. Although Salcedo has never drawn any sort of line
under the 1990s furniture pieces, it was something of a surprise to see
the project resurrected, as it were, and reappearing on the market after
a break of ten or so years.18 In 2008, Salcedo produced two further new
pieces for her New York gallery, Alexander and Bonin. With each piece
potentially worth half a million dollars, if not more, it is easy to see what
was at stake.

Corporate funding?

The issues raised by Salcedos parallel shows at the Tate Modern and
White Cube can perhaps most usefully be viewed in the context of the
problematic relationship between public art and commercial enter-
prise under neo-liberal capitalism. In Britain, the present-day pattern
was established by the Thatcher government, which sought to ensure
that public institutions could no longer function properly without
relying heavily on private and corporate funding. Although Salcedos
commission came under the banner of the Unilever Series, the cor-
porations sponsorship money, some quarter of a million pounds each
year, is unlikely on its own to have met the full production costs.19

18
In 2004 Salcedo had explained: Originally I planned to do many more pieces . . .
but it demanded too much energy, and I felt I had already achieved what I was look-
ing for. See Conversation between Doris Salcedo and Hans-Michael Herzog, in
Cantos/Cuentos Colombianos: Arte Colombiano, Zurich 2005, p. 152.
19
The Unilever Series, inaugurated in 2000, was a sponsorship deal between
Unilever and Tate Modern worth 1.25 million for commissioning works in the
Turbine Hall over five years. It was renewed in 2005 for a further three years for 1
million (Salcedos commission fell under this tranche), and again, this time to the
tune of 2.1 million, for the next five years between 2008 and 2012; see Tate press
releases of 13 May 1999, 6 April 2007 and 18 July 2007.
 wu: Salcedo 75

To quote Achim Borchardt-Hume, the Tate curator who coordinated

the commission:

Its not the sponsor who pays for a project, nor did Unilever pay for the
whole Turbine Hall commission. Its rather that Unilever made the com-
mitment to pay a certain amount of money in support of the project, but
then the project budget is something else . . . Obviously Doriss work has
super-high production costs. Its not a low-budget production from the
outset. There can only be certain galleries, and certain mechanisms of pro-
duction, that could make that possible.20

Precisely what these certain mechanisms of production were is, how-

ever, destined to remain a mystery. Who contributed, and how much,
toward the cost of producing Salcedos work? Despite being a model
of helpfulness in other respects, Borchardt-Hume resolutely declined
to reveal any figures on the actual cost of Salcedos commission or any
sponsorship deals involved in it. Nor was my question on the same topic,
filed with the Freedom of Information Office Group in the Directors
Office at Tate Modern, any more revealing. Not only did the Tate refuse
to disclose the total budget, but they also declined to give any details of
other additional funding, stating that: Tate cannot disclose the amount
of budget for individual installations:

The amount of the budget for Shibboleth has been withheld under section
43(2) of the Freedom of Information Act . . . as we believe it would prejudice
Tates commercial interests to release this . . . The additional support: the
foi group considers that to supply this information would prejudice the
commercial interests of Tate in relation to those sources, and that the public
interest in releasing this is outweighed by the public interest of Tates con-
tinued ability to work with these sources.21

Tate Moderns non-reply is a model of non-information under the so-

called Freedom of Information Act.

It is not impossible to imagine that the Shibboleth commission, having

been first produced and fabricated in Bogot by many staff over several
months, and then shipped to London to be installed on site, over a matter
of six or so weeks, by Salcedo and a Colombian and local crew consisting

20
Interview with the author, 30 November 2010, London.
21
Ruth Findlay, Senior Press Officer at Tate, in email correspondence with the
author, 11 February 2011.
 76 nlr 69

of scores of people working in teams, could have incurred costs that

would easily overshoot the 1 million mark.22 No private collector could
be expected to support a project so obviously designed to redound to the
glory of Tate Modern; in any case, Salcedos large furniture pieces are
mostly in public, not private, collections. What is more, as the commis-
sion already had a commercial sponsor in Unilever, any additional donor
would inevitably have had to remain more or less anonymous. It seems
likely that Salcedos own commercial agents in New York and London
provided the only possible mechanism whereby the commission could
secure the extra finance. If this were the case, it would come as no sur-
prise to see these galleries agents taking a direct interest in enhancing
the reputation and market price of such an artist. It is no secret in the
inner circles of the art world that commercial galleries often play a role
in funding artists appearances at international biennials.

The lack of transparency surrounding the production of Shibboleth

brings to the fore the problematic nature of public and commercial
co-operationthe symbiosis between Tate Modern, in essence a public
institution, and commercial enterprise in the shape of the White Cube
gallery. Is it a happy marriage based on a common interest in producing
a landmark work of art for the public whom Tate Modern presumably
exists to serve? Or is it perhaps more a private enterprise in disguise,
one that advances the commercial interests of White Cube, if not those
of the artist herself?

While as a Third World artist, Salcedo has produced work that car-
ries with it a critical agenda vis--vis the power structures of Western
art institutions, it is also unavoidably implicated in the very structures
she wishes to criticize. This paradox is perhaps inevitable as long as the
status quo remains unchanged, with the hierarchy of the contemporary
art world still dominated by Western institutions. After all, Salcedos
universal visibility in terms of global reach can only be achieved if she

22
Salcedo stated in an interview: There are around 100 people working in teams.
See Ossian Ward, Into the Breach, p. 5. In some press reports, Shibboleth was
described as a new 300,000 work of art; see Nigel Reynolds, Tate Modern reveals
giant crack in civilization, Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2007. Informed sources, how-
ever, do not endorse this figure. According to a tabloid, shipping the work from
Colombia to London cost 23,410, and a 3,000 commission fee was paid to the
artist; see Revealed: How the Tate Moderns crack in the ground cost the taxpay-
ers 23,000, Daily Mail, 24 February 2008.
 wu: Salcedo 77

works and exhibits with powerful Western galleries, and if her critique
of existing structures continues to be sanctioned by institutions such as
Tate Modern. In negotiating her way between the two worlds of Colombia
and North America/Western Europe, Doris Salcedo has forged a reward-
ing career both in terms of aesthetic achievement and worldly success.
Yet works of art and practices that seek to question existing power rela-
tions cannot necessarily be accommodated to capitalist market interests
without their legitimacy being called into question to some degree. What
does it mean if works, painstakingly conceived and produced to com-
memorate the appalling social reality of Colombias missing, are later
reproduced under the commercial imperatives of a West-run system
that condonesindeed, supports with military aidthe existing power
structures and social inequalities in Colombia? Where this sort of work
becomes the servant of commercial manipulation, the art itself risks
being neutralized.
 allan sekula & nol burch

The Forgotten Space

Notes for a Film

The subject of the film is globalization and the sea, the forgotten
space of our modernity. Its premise is that the oceans remain the cru-
cial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence
and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest. But this
truth is not self-evident and must be approached as a puzzle, or mys-
tery; a problem to be solved. Sea trade is an integral component of the
world-industrial system, but we are distracted from the full implications
of this insight by two powerful myths. The first is that the sea is noth-
ing more than a residual mercantilist space: a reservoir of cultural and
economic anachronisms, relics of an older and obsolete economya
world of decrepitude, rust and creaking cables, of the slow movement
of heavy things. The second is that we live in a post-industrial society,
that cybernetic systems and the service economy have radically margin-
alized the old economy of heavy material fabrication and processing.
Thus the fiction of obsolescence mobilizes reserves of sentimental
longing for things which are not really dead.
As ships become more like buildingsthe giant, floating ware-
houses of the just-in-time system of distributionfactories begin to
resemble ships, stealing away stealthily in the night, restlessly searching
for ever cheaper labour. A garment factory in Los Angeles or Hong Kong
closes; the work benches and sewing machines reappear in the suburbs
of Guangzhou or Dacca. In the automobile industry, for example, the
function of the ship is akin to that of conveyor systems within the old
integrated car factory: parts span the world on their journey to the final
assembly line. Today, over 90 per cent of the worlds cargo moves by
sea. Without a revolution in ocean-going cargo-handling technology,
the global factory would not exist, nor the phenomenon of globalization
itself. What began in the mid-1950s as a modest American improve-
ment in cargo logistics has now taken on world-historic importance.
The cargo containera standardized metal box, easily transferred from
ship to truck to trainhas radically transformed the space and time of
port cities and ocean passages. There have been enormous increases
in economies of scale. Older transport links, such as the Panama Canal,
risk sliding into obsolescence as ships become more gargantuan.
 The film moves between four port cities: Rotterdam, Los Angeles,
Hong Kong and Bilbao. It visits the industrial hinterland in southern
China and the transport hinterland in the heart of Holland. The first
three can be classed as super-ports, the largest in the world. In Bilbao,
a fading port with a brave maritime history, functional atrophy coexists
with the symbolic hypertrophy of the Gehry Guggenheim, a delirium
of neo-baroque maritime nostalgia wedded to the equally delirious
promise of the new economy. Super-ports, pushed to the periphery
of the metropolitan centre, require vast tracts of land for the contain-
ers sorting and storage. The old, sheltering deep-water port, with its
steep hillsides and panoramic vistas, is less suited to these new spatial
demands than low-lying delta plains, which nonetheless require con-
tinual dredging for the ever-deeper draft of the new super-ships. The old
waterfront culture of sailor bars, flophouses, brothels and ship chan-
dlers gives way either to a depopulated terrain vague orblessed with
the energies of real-estate speculatorsto a new artificial maritime
space of theme restaurants, aestheticized nautical relics and expensive
ocean-view condominiums.
As the class character of the port cities changes, the memory of
mutiny and rebellion by dockers, seafarers, fishermen and shipyard
workersstruggles that were fundamental to the formation of the
institutions of social democracy and free trade-unionismfades from
public awareness. What tourist in todays Amsterdam is drawn to the
old monument commemorating dock-workers heroic but futile strike
to prevent the Nazi deportation of the Dutch Jews? Todays seafaring
crews are drawn from the old and new Third Worlds: Filipinos, Chinese,
Indonesians, Ukrainians, Russians. The conditions they endure are not
unlike those experienced by the lascars of the 18th century. The legal
instrument underwriting their exploitation is the flag of convenience
system, which allows ships owned in rich countries to be registered in
poor ones. Here again, American capital was in the lead, seeking to
break powerful maritime unions in the wake of the Second World War:
the flag of convenience was created to obscure legal responsibility for
safety and fair labour practices.
The cargo containers are everywhere, mobile and anonymous:
coffins of remote labour-power, carrying goods manufactured by
invisible workers on the other side of the globe. For apologists of glo-
balization, this flow is indispensable for the continued prosperity of
the West and for the deferred prosperity of those who labour, so far
away. But perhaps this is a case for Pandoraor for her more clairvoy-
ant sister, Cassandra.

The Forgotten Space will be screening in selected cinemas from May 2011.
 benno teschke

THE FETISH OF GEOPOLITICS

Reply to Gopal Balakrishnan

G
opal balakrishnan is one of the foremost experts in the
Anglo-American world on the life and work of Carl Schmitt,
and I am grateful for his response in nlr 68, The Geopolitics
of Separation, to my essay on the thinker, Decisions and
Indecisions, in nlr 67.1 Balakrishnans intellectual biography of
Schmitt, The Enemy, remains, according to one eminent voice in the
field, the best English-language study on the subject.2 For a critical
American scholar, the attraction of exploring and validating Schmitt as
a radical and insightful critic of American imperialism and its liberal-
cosmopolitan apologists would seem unobjectionable. Schmitt deployed
a remorseless and uncompromising vocabulary to dissect the crisis of
the legal form in the inter-war period, analysing the pathologies of liberal
international law and the relations between constitutionalism, democ-
racy and emergency powers, in order systematically to deconstruct the
practice and ideology of the liberal-capitalist zone of peaceand with
it, the incipient neutralization of inter-state relations.

Within this context, Balakrishnan not only regards Schmitt as a neces-

sary complement to Marx, but clearly as a superior analytical voice and
point of reference in fully understanding the legal-political controversies
and geopolitics that marked the crisis-ridden transition from the ius pub-
licum europaeumthe classical European inter-state order, regulated by
international lawto an apparently de-politicized legal-moral universal-
ism, codified in the Versailles Peace Treaty and institutionalized in the
League of Nations. Schmitt, Balakrishnan suggests, identified a politico-
jurisprudential problematicand developed a corresponding categorial
registerthat Marx, in his own time, had never fully addressed or

new left review 69 may jun 2011 81

 82 nlr 69

conceptualized. The systematic exploration of this register constitutes

the strength of Balakrishnans outstanding study.

Yet, given Balakrishnans Marxist credentials and background, the remit

and objective of what is, after all, an intellectual portrait, remain curi-
ously restricted. The introduction to The Enemy frames his approach
from the angle of a diachronic contextualization and intertextual recon-
struction of Schmitts work, resulting in a provisional framework for
the comprehensive and critical evaluation of his thought. The first aim
conveys the nature of the work better than the second. For this promise
of critiquealready toned down by Balakrishnans prefatory warning
that adopting the role of either prosecutor or defence attorney in dis-
cussing Schmitt presents a false choiceremains unfulfilled.3 Critique
in The Enemy hardly ever reaches beyond occasional and rhetorical ref-
erences to Schmitt as a deeply disturbing figure. In the process, the
studys emphasis on textual exposition and reconstruction relegates any
systematic critique of the intellectual architecture, analytical purchase
and political legacy of Schmitts thought to the sidelines, rendering the
work primarily a philological, exegetic and informational exercisewith
greetings from Germany to the us. In fact, Schmittian categories now
seem to form the strategic centre of Balakrishnans broader reflections
on the grand contours of the post-Cold War international scene, encap-
sulated in the master-idea of neutralizations.4

More than a decade after The Enemys date of publication, such professed
equidistance and equanimity, turning in the interim into embrace rather
than critique, can no longer be afforded (if it ever could). The growing
recognition and celebration of Schmitt in the wider social sciences
and, specifically, in the field of International Relations, the actuality of

1
Gopal Balakrishnan, The Geopolitics of Separation: Response to Teschkes
Decisions and Indecisions, nlr 68, MarchApril 2011; and Benno Teschke,
Decisions and Indecisions: Political and Intellectual Receptions of Carl Schmitt,
nlr 67, JanuaryFebruary 2011. I would like to thank Frdrick Guillaume Dufour,
Kees van der Pijl, Justin Rosenberg, Sam Knafo, Kamran Matin, Steffan Wyn-Jones
and the members of the Sussex pm Research Group for comments.
2
Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London
and New York 2000. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise
and Fall of International Law 18701960, Cambridge 2001, p. 423.
3
Balakrishnan, The Enemy, pp. 3, 1.
4
Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, London and
New York 2009, pp. iivxiv.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 83

Schmittian tropes in 21st-century American foreign-policy circles and

the current contestation of dictatorial states of exception across the
Middle East, from Tunisia and Egypt via Syria to Bahrain, have sharply
re-politicized his significance, reception and legacy.

Restating the argument

In this context, my intervention in nlr 67 was formally organized

around five axes of inquiry. The first part provided an exposition of
Schmitts grand historical-conceptual narrative of the spatial revolutions
that punctuate the history of international law and order, from the New
World Discoveries to Hitlers Groraumpolitik; followed by an outline
of current neo-Schmittian attempts to comprehend an altered con-
temporary geopolitical constellation in comparable terms. The second
section, drawing on Reinhard Mehrings recent biography of Schmitt,
set out a compressed diachronic contextualization of his intellectual
and political trajectory.5 It concluded that Schmitts thought, far from
constituting the ad hoc, disconnected and conjunctural interventions of
an intellectual bricoleur and footloose adventurist, can be better under-
stood as revolving around an organic and consistent set of intellectual
and political preoccupations, expressed in a recognizable problematic:
the crisis of legal determinacy, the value of the state executive, German
autonomy, political and geopolitical order in times of extremes. In face
of these, Schmitt developed a series of ever more radicalized solutions:
from his proto-decisionist writings of the late Kaiserreich and defence
of the legality of Imperial Germanys war during the 1920s, via the
conception of the political in terms of the agonal friendenemy binary
in the late 1920s and advocacy of presidential emergency powers dur-
ing the crisis of the Weimar Republic (his definition of sovereignty), to
the full-throated embrace of the total state, the Fhrer-principle and
insistence on territorial conquests as the fons et origo of all international
law, as the Wehrmacht marched towards Moscow. Though his natural
intellectual maturation and political opportunism afforded conceptual
adjustments and theoretical shifts that need to be registered, it is this
underlying Leitmotivrather than any unifying fascist logicthat
forms Schmitts basso continuo, which any de-totalization of his thought
is likely to render invisible.

5
Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall, Eine Biographie, Munich 2009.
 84 nlr 69

The third and central part of my essay performed two tasks: first, it
mounted an immanent critique of the gap between Schmitts core
theoretical axiomsdecisionism, concept of the political, concrete-
order-thinking, and their substantive analogues: state of emergency,
friendenemy distinction, nomosand the historical narrative con-
structed on their premises, outlining deficiencies in both. It was my
thesis that this triple axiomatic consistently suppressed social relations
as a relevant category of analysis for the history of international law,
while elevating the abstraction of antagonistic power, the fetish of the
political (and geopolitical), to the neuralgic centre of Schmitts thought.
This theoretical orientation is actively consonant with the political
Schmitt as a counter-revolutionary tatist and, later, fascist thinker.
Furtherand against Schmitts own advice6the section probed
whether it was possible to extricate Schmitts conceptual apparatus as
a generic analytic to illuminate past and present geopolitical transfor-
mations and configurations, as the neo-Schmittian literature seems to
suggest, answering in the negative. The essay then examined Schmitts
notion of Groraum, as the territorial unit for a new planetary region-
alism and the central juridical category of the Nazi new international
order, along with his ex post attempts to sanitize this categorys political
complicity with Hitlers Groraumpolitik.

The final section returned to Schmitts intellectual and political legacy,

indicatingcontra Mehrings thesis of his role as a quantit ngligeable
in the Federal Republic of Germany and beyondSchmitts profound
impact within (West) German social sciences, his influential role in
the American disciplines of politics and International Relations and,
more specifically, in American neo-conservative thought, which pro-
vided the ideological backdrop to the foreign policy of the Bush ii
presidency. Moral aversion was reserved for the epilogue; no aprior-
istic ideological condemnations should foreclose the analytical view
on Schmitts thought.

Case for the defence?

Balakrishnans response declines to engage with the formal com-

position of my essay, which delineated precisely the relationship

6
All political concepts, images and terms have a polemical meaning. They are
focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation. Carl Schmitt,
The Concept of the Political [1927], Chicago 1996, p. 30.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 85

between theoretical assumptions, ideological limitations and political

alignments that he demands. Instead, he couches his response in
terms of an overriding and, ultimately, banal summary judgement: my
intervention was tarnished by an ideological dismissal of Schmitt that
blocked a careful unscrambling of what is alive and what is dead in
his thoughta task that can only be performed by (yet another) sober
diachronic contextualization and a critically informed interrogation of
his entire oeuvre.

From this core message derive several relevant, but secondary charges:
that I misrepresent Schmitts awareness of the socio-economic pre-
conditions of emergency powers; conflate Schmitts writings of the
Weimar and Nazi periods; misread Schmitts wider history of inter-
national law and order; and overlook an inconvenient and possibly
embarrassing similarity between Schmitts fascist epic of the rise and
fall of the Westphalian System and my own interpretation of Europes
long-term trajectory, leading to the objection that my conception of
capitalist geopoliticsthe alleged geopolitics of separationlooks
one-dimensional compared to Schmitts dialectical reading of the rela-
tion between geopolitics, statehood and capitalist development. The
response concludes with a nonchalant dismissal of the significance of
Schmitts influence on neo-conservative foreign policy, suggested to be
in line with the structural continuity of Americas role in the world.
Throughout his response, Balakrishnan attempts to diffuse my cri-
tique of Schmitt by composing a florilegium of citations gleaned from
the ephemera of Schmitts writings, rather than directly confronting his
central theoretical propositions, developed in the texts that dominate
the Schmitt reception and discussion.

In the following, I will argue that any theoretical, rather than biographi-
cal, reading will disclose that a Schmittian sociology of sovereignty
or emergency is a contradiction in terms. I will further clarify why
Schmitts history of international law and order, especially as outlined
in The Nomos, has to be understood in context-specific ideological terms,
which render it deeply problematic on theoretical, logical and empirical
grounds. By contrast, I will remind Balakrishnan how my own attempts
to rethink this history from the angle of Political Marxism lead to a
fundamentally different historical narrative, which Balakrishnan mis-
represents. Rather than implying that Schmitt and Marx can be read
as mutually supplementary critics of liberalism and capitalism, I will
 86 nlr 69

suggest that the ontological, epistemological and theoretical premises of

Marxism are diametrically opposed to Schmitts, forcing us to renew our
efforts to rethink the history of geopolitics in genuinely Marxian terms.
I will conclude by arguing that, rather than conceive of Schmitts theo-
retical apparatus as complementary to Marxs, there is more evidence
to suggest that Schmitt understood his own intellectual production in
terms of an anti-Marx for his own times.7

Sociology of the emergency?

According to Balakrishnan, my account missed Schmitts many attempts

to frame the problem of emergency powers in socio-political terms.8
Drawing a line from Schmitts recognition of the rise of the proletariat
to the financial crisis of the Weimar state, set in train by the Versailles
reparations, Balakrishnan implies a deep awareness on Schmitts part
of the socio-economic determinants that produced the instrument of
the state of emergency. But this is not tantamount to the much more
demandingand implausibleproposition that Schmitt articulated
or understood his own history and theory of sovereignty in terms of a
historical sociology of constitutional developments. Balakrishnan fails
to distinguish between historical references and theoretical concepts.
For no amount of localized commentary and exemplary illustration
can validate the suggestion that Schmitt systematically incorporated
the sociological as the strategic point of reference for a reformulated
approach to the history of constitutional developments. Social relations
remained theoretically exterior to, and systematically excluded from,
his conception of sovereignty, as formalized in political decisionism.
Sovereign is he who decides over the state of exceptionan absolute
decision created out of nothingness.9 This definitional narrowingin
fact: erasureof the net of determinations of the decision to an unmedi-
ated subjective act is the essence of Schmitts idea of sovereignty. Quis
iudicabit? Who will decide?

7
Charge twoBalakrishnans suggestion (nlr 68, pp. 634) that I conflated
Schmitts Weimar and Nazi writingsseems disingenuous: see Decisions and
Indecisions, pp. 707. If there was one decisive theoretical caesura, but not a hia-
tus, in Schmitts writings, I would locate it in The Three Types of Juristic Thought
(1934). Schmitts deep-seated and, at times, histrionic anti-Semitism is discussed
in Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The Jewish Question, the Holocaust and
German Legal Theory, Madison, wi 2007.
8
Balakrishnan, Geopolitics of Separation, p. 61.
9
Schmitt, Political Theology [1922], Cambridge, ma 1985, p. 66.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 87

Social forces do not enter Schmitts definition of the extra-normative

declaration of the state of emergency, which remained analytically a
supra-sociological, extra-constitutional (as well as ideologically anti-
social) devicea liminal conceptfor the restoration of order. In this
context, it should be recalled that Schmitts decision to define sover-
eignty in terms of the exception was not the result of a dispassionate
and scholarly enquiry into the ultimate locus of power, but a politicized
and normative intervention into the jurisprudential debates on the
interpretation of the Weimar Constitutions Article 48, on the scope of
presidential emergency powers and executive government by decree.
For Schmitt, sovereignty should reside in the authoritative decision,
rendering it a non-relational concept, outside society and even outside
politicsanalogous to the miracle in theology. Balakrishnan surely
knows that Schmitt explicitly related his notion of the exception to politi-
cal theology, rather than a historical sociology of public law.

While Schmitts The Dictatorship advances a much richer history of state

theory and constitutional lawfrom the classical Roman institution of
the dictator to Weimars Article 48than his Political Theology, social
relations remain empirically acknowledged, but theoretically undi-
gested.10 Schmitt is not known or read as a theoretician of the inter-war
economic downturn, revolutions and civil wars; and no neo-Schmittian
writer, as far as I am aware, has actually reformulated Schmitts ultra-
narrow definition of the exception to develop a theoretical perspective on
sovereignty that would enlarge its scope to incorporate the historicity of
differential social relations of power. Schmitt developed a legal-political
register, unsupported by sociological or political-economic analogues.
This does not per se invalidate this register, but leaves it suspended in
mid-air. Schmitt constructed legal-political concepts against the crisis of
the Weimar state, rather than concepts of the crisis. That a historical
sociology of the exception remains a distinct possibilityand an ongo-
ing research desideratumfrom an alternative Marxist perspective can
be learned from the writings of Schmitts disciples, Franz Neumann and
Otto Kirchheimer, on the nexus between capitalist crisis, the dissolution of

10
Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfngen des Modernen Souvernittsgedanken bis
zum Proletarischen Klassenkampf [1921], 7th edn, Berlin 2006. For a brief statistical
survey that relates the declaration of states of emergency to strikes and class conflict
(rather than to martial law) see Mark Neocleous, The Problem with Normality:
Taking Exception to Permanent Emergency, Alternatives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006,
pp. 191213.
 88 nlr 69

the rule of law and the legal structure of Nazism.11 A distinctly Schmittian
sociology of power remains, however, a contradiction in terms.

Towards a Marxist geopolitics

Balakrishnan further suggests that Schmitts work and my own share

common theoretical orientations, as what Schmitt wrote often seems
to touch on the conceptual centre of [Teschkes] Marxist understanding
of modern statehood and geopolitics, which hinges on the historical
process of the separation of the political from the economic, of coer-
cion from the conditions of surplus appropriation.12 From this premise,
three consecutive moves follow for Balakrishnan. First, that in my
reading this separation, once established, never becomes problem-
atic in the subsequent history of capitalismthe alleged geopolitics
of separation. In contrast, Schmitts reading of the multi-level crisis
entailed by the collapse of the distinction between state and economy,
or inter-state system and capitalist world-market, generated a much
more dialectical interpretation. Second, that Schmitts historiography
of the rise and fall of the Westphalian inter-state system, as set out in
The Nomos of the Earth (1950), constitutes a similar, if in toto superior,
narrative to my Myth of 1648; and, third, that Schmitts history demon-
strates greater affinities and parallels with Marxs original categories
than I would allow.

The point of departure of my wider work was to develop a research

programme that would incorporate the problematic of geopolitics,
theoretically and historically, into a revised Marxist framework. The rela-
tive absence of geopolitics in Marxs and Engelss own works, and the
hitherto insufficient attempts to resolve this challenge from within the
Marxist tradition, formed the reference point for my critique, informed
by the premises of Political Marxism.13 The Myth of 1648 built on and
further problematized the pathbreaking work by Robert Brenner, Ellen

11
Wolfgang Luthard, ed., Von der Weimarer Republik zum Faschismus: Die Auflsung
der Demokratischen Rechtsordnung, Frankfurt 1976; Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The
Structure and Practice of National Socialism, New York 1944; William Scheuerman,
Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law,
Cambridge, ma 1994; Scheuerman, ed., The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays
of Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, Berkeley 1996.
12
Balakrishnan, Geopolitics of Separation, p. 62.
13
For a critical survey on Marxism and International Relations see Teschke,
Marxism, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, eds, The Oxford Handbook
of International Relations, Oxford 2008, pp. 16387.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 89

Wood and George Comninel on the class conflicts driving the transi-
tion towards agrarian-capitalist social property relations in late medieval
and early modern England.14 One of its aims was to show how the con-
ceptual assumption of a differentiation between the economic and the
political in capitalism translates into a historical account of the contested
construction of a new form of English 17th-century sovereignty, culmi-
nating in the 1688 formula of the King-in-Parliament: a parliamentary,
constitutional monarchy that institutionalized, though in non-linear
ways, the formal separation between a public, de-personalized state
and a privatized economic sphere. Post-1688 England also started to
develop new foreign-policy techniques, encapsulated in balancing
within the context of a pre-capitalist and predominantly absolutist
European inter-state system.

If capitalism is conceived not as a de-politicized and de-subjectified mar-

ket economy, governed by economic laws, but as a set of socio-politically
contested social relations, the implications of its rise cannot be conceived
in terms of abstract logical derivations, but demand a radical historiciza-
tion of its further, inter-state development. For the separation-argument
is not conceived as an absolute, once-and-for-all insulation of spheres,
but as an internal relation between states and markets whose degrees
of de-politicization and re-politicization depend on historically concrete
praxes. Capitalism is a relation of power. This also implies that capitalist
social relationsonce established in one countrydo not automatically
and transnationally replicate themselves across the components of the
international system. The articulation of their international effects and
implications requires a sharp move away from teleology, from a uni-
versalizing structural economism and a geopolitical functionalism; it
demands a geopolitics as process, rather than superstructure.

These elementary ideas resulted in a novel research prospectus, explicitly

opposed to the Communist Manifestos cosmopolitan universalism
the expansion of a capitalist world-market as the mega-subject of

14
Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International
Relations, London and New York 2003. See also T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin,
eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge 1985; Ellen Wood, Democracy against Capitalism:
Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge 1995; George Comninel, Rethinking
the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London and New York
1987. See also Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the
Bourgeois State [1990], Leiden 2007.
 90 nlr 69

world history; curiously echoed in Schmitts long-term prognostics

of a spaceless universalism. The new geopolitical Marxism not only
demands a re-politicization of capitalist development, as a contested
and regionally differentiated institutionalization of social relations, but
also a radical geopoliticization of its historical course, initially refracted
through the drive of pre-capitalist absolutist territorial polities towards
geopolitical accumulation. Contra Marx and Engels, The Myth of 1648
argued that the expansion of capitalism was a political and, a fortiori,
a geopolitical process, in which pre-capitalist ruling classes had to
design counter-strategies of reproduction to defend their position in an
international environment that put them at an economic and coercive
disadvantage:

More often than not, it was heavy artillery that battered down pre-capitalist
walls, and the construction and reconstruction of these walls required new
state strategies of modernization. These . . . ranged from the intensification
of domestic relations of exploitation and the build-up of an increasingly
repressive state apparatus for military and fiscal mobilization, via enlight-
ened policies of neo-mercantilism and imperialism, to the adoption of
liberal economic policies.

While the initial impetus towards modernization and capitalist transfor-

mation was geopolitical, state responses to this pressure were refracted
through respective class relations in national contexts, including class
resistance. In this sense, the alignment of the provinces generated
nothing but national Sonderwege (special paths):

If Britain showed its neighbours the image of their future, it did so in a

highly distorted way. Conversely, Britain never developed a pristine culture
of capitalism, since she was from the first dragged into an international
environment that inflected her domestic politics and long-term develop-
ment. The distortions were mutual. The transposition of capitalism to the
Continent and the rest of the world was riddled with social conflicts, civil
and international wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions.15

This perspective prompted my ongoing reconceptualization of politi-

cal Marxism into geopolitical Marxism, to problematize the orthodox
Marxist notion of bourgeois revolution.16 The historical substantia-
tion of these programmatic notes and the extension of the story of The

15
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, pp. 2656.
16
Teschke, Bourgeois Revolution, State-Formation and the Absence of the
International, Historical Materialism, vol. 13, no. 2, 2005, pp. 212.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 91

Myth of 1648 into the nineteenth century and beyond are yet to come.
However, the idea that, once established, two logicsthe geopolitics
of the inter-state system and the transnationalizing economics of a
capitalist world-marketcan travel unproblematically and in unison
side by side is the exact opposite of my argument.17 Balakrishnans
ascription of a geopolitics of separation to my work thus represents a
substantial misreading.

Aporias of concrete-order thought

Does Schmitt provide a geopolitics of non-separation, possibly even a

dialectical one, which keeps geopolitics and geo-economics internally
related? To ascertain this, Schmitts substantive writings on law and
history would need to be re-anchored in the reformulated theoretical
premises announced in his 1934 paradigm shift from decisionism to
concrete-order-thinking. He first deployed this to replace the liberal
and universalist idea of the rule of lawand its increasingly threat-
ened principles of generality and predictabilityby a situation-bound
de-formalization of law, upheld by and encased in different nationally
homogeneous legal cultures.18 As Schmitts preoccupations moved from
constitutional to international law during the mid-1930s, he realized
that political decisionism was insufficient to capture the politics and
geopolitics of land-appropriations and spatial revolution, which he now
privileged as foundational, constitutive acts of world-ordering, so as to
write the history of international law as an anti-liberal, anti-normative
tract. The subsequent shift to concrete-order-thinking was meant to rem-
edy this explanatory vacuum. It is premised on a single and axiomatic
thesis: that all legal orders are concrete, territorial orders, founded by an
original, constitutive act of land-capture. This establishes a primary and
radical title to land: a nomosa unity of space, power and law.19

Given this turn to the concrete, how could Schmitt theoretically account
for his otherwise perceptive remarks on the separation of the economic

17
This argument is further developed in Teschke, Debating The Myth of 1648:
State-Formation, the Interstate System and the Rise of CapitalismA Rejoinder,
International Politics, vol. 43, no. 5, 2006, pp. 53173; and Teschke and Hannes
Lacher, The Many Logics of Capitalist Competition, Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, vol. 20, no. 4, 2007, pp. 56580.
18
Schmitt, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, Westport, ct 2004.
19
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Ius Publicum
Europaeum, New York 2003, pp. 447.
 92 nlr 69

and political, the world market and inter-state system, which formed the
historical condition of possibility for a transnationalizing us imperial-
ism, without negating his axiomatics? Even to begin to grasp this double
separation, Schmitt had to have recourse to the Hegelian-Marxist figure
of thought of the separation between society and the state, which he duly
acknowledged in a footnote. Balakrishnan might be right that the multi-
level crisis of this constitutive difference is, in fact, the central problem
cutting across nearly all of Schmitts writings on the inter-war disorder.20
But Schmitts turn to international political economy imperilled the core
of his geopolitical axiomatic: a retraction from concrete-order-thinking
and a move towards a transnational economism, reserved for Anglo-
American liberal imperialism but bracketed for inter-war Germany.

For Schmitts theoretical excursion into the field of international politi-

cal economy forced him to change theoretical registersa volte face not
licensed by his method of concrete-order-thinking. Where Schmitt exca-
vates the roots of the new universal order, he is pressed into an analysis
of the international political economy of American rulean analysis that
contradicts his premise that every international legal order is grounded
in an original and constitutive act of land appropriation. For Wilhelmine
Germany was not invaded, occupied or annexed. Capitalisms border-
cancelling tendency also cancels the core thesis of his fascist period.
What ultimately emerges is less a dialectical reading of geopolitics and
geo-economics, but rather the fetishization of a German formal empire
against an informal us imperialism, insulated from any enquiry into the
domestic political economy of fascist imperialism. The former arises
like a deus ex machina from the purely political invocation of the friend
enemy distinction to counter the abstract Western notion of a spaceless
universalism with the German concrete-order, a fascist Groraum.21

A Nomos for Das Kapital?

Having suggested that my text gives scant consideration to Schmitts

Weimar writings, i.e. the texts for which he is best known and form
the basis of almost all of the contemporary reception of his work,
Balakrishnan finally turns to Schmitts fascist literature, The Leviathan

20
Balakrishnan, Geopolitics of Separation, p. 62.
21
For the policy-impact and widespread circulation of the terms Groraum and
Groraumwirtschaft in 193345, see the documents collected in Reinhard Opitz, ed.,
Europastrategien des Deutschen Kapitals, 19001945, Cologne 1977, parts iii and iv.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 93

in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938), Land and Sea (1942) and
The Nomos of the Earththe central text for the current Schmittophilia
in the discipline of International Relationswhile ignoring Schmitts
Vlkerrechtliche Groraumordnung (1939): the intellectual blueprint for
his conception of the new fascist greater territorial order. According
to Balakrishnan, The Nomos was a piece of saturnine melancholia,
written when the contours of German defeat in the East were already
visible after Stalingrad. This is a misrepresentation of its conception
and intention, though its execution had to square the divergence of
unfolding historical reality with its core thesis: land-appropriations.
Rather than a coda and lamenta conservative retrospect on the ori-
gins of an inter-state civilization that had arisen out of the fiery chaos
of war and primitive appropriations, which now seemed to be return-
ing to it, as Balakrishnan suggestsThe Nomos was designed as the
official celebration and justification of Hitlers Groraumpolitik, which
Schmitt reconnected with pre-liberal nomos-constituting acts of land-
appropriations, legitimizing both.22 What had come to an end was not
the inter-state civilization of the ius publicum europaeum (terminated at
Versailles, 1919), but rather the new Germanic vision of intra-regional
law and order, revolving around a pluriverse of co-existing pan-regions,
that was Schmitts counter-programme to liberal capitalisms spaceless
universalism. The Red Army had not only put an end to the Wehrmacht,
it had also decapitated the cap-stone of The Nomosthe unfinished final
chapter and the missing Conclusionforcing it into an abrupt and
speculative ending. This was evidenced by the absence of the three cor-
ollaries which were added to the 2003 English translation, written by
Schmitt in the 1950s, from the German original.

Balakrishnans attempt to dissociate The Nomos, as a post-fascist after-

thought, from Schmitts pro-fascist writings is ultimately grounded in
his inattention to concrete-order-thinking as the unifying theoretical per-
spective in Schmitts writings in and for the Third Reich.23 This unity of

22
For the genesis of The Nomos see Peter Haggenmachers introduction to the
French edition. Schmitt, Le Nomos de la Terre dans le Droit des Gens du Jus Publicum
Europaeum, Paris 2001, pp. 144.
23
The concepts of Groraum and nomos were floated in 1928 and remained cen-
tral organizing terms thereafter. Carl Schmitt, Vlkerrechtliche Probleme im
Rheingebiet, in Positionen und Begriffe im Kampf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles, 1923
1939 [1940], Berlin 1988, pp. 97108. See also Schmitt, Staat, Groraum, Nomos:
Arbeiten aus den Jahren 19161969, ed. Gnther Maschke, Berlin 1995.
 94 nlr 69

Schmitts Nazi texts, theoretically secured by The Three Types of Juristic

Thought, is expressed in the trilogy of The Order of Greater Spaces, Land
and Sea and The Nomos, each illuminating the idea of land-appropriations
through a different registerthe legal structure of Nazi inter-regional
law, the geo-mythology of the elementary distinction between land and
sea, and the history of international law from the New World Discoveries
onwards. How could The Nomos of the Earth, written between 1942 and
1945, and Land and Sea, published in 1942, not have been conceived
as long historico-legal detours to accumulate the intellectual resources
and arguments to legitimize Hitlers Raumrevolutiona re-writing of
history by one of the leading intellectuals of the ascendant Axis power?
In a passage on the legal innovations and conceptual neologisms that
accompany modern American imperialism, Schmitt notes that he
who has real power is also capable of determining concepts and words;
Caesar dominus est supra grammaticam: Caesar is lord over grammar.24
A German legal-political counter-vocabulary was required to regain exis-
tential autonomy in the geopolitical struggle for survival. This was the
task of Schmitts fascist writings on international law.

Land grabs

But ideological purpose need not nullify their message. Balakrishnan

finds much to admire in The Nomos, detecting an analogy between
Marxs account of the primitive accumulation of capital in great land
grabs and colonial conquests and Schmitts account of the Westphalian
order, premised on the division between the civilized denizens of the
Old World and the uncivilized barbarians of the New. This opposition
expressed a world-historical expropriation of non-European peoples and
territories. But this quasi-equation of the Marxist category of primitive
accumulation with Schmitts notion of land appropriation leads astray,
as the former depicts a qualitative transformation of social property rela-
tions, antithetical to a quantitative, territorial notion of land grabs. Not
every form of conquest, booty and plunder can be vaguely associated
with the idea of the dispossession of direct producers from their means
of reproduction and their transformation into abstract labour. The
Discoveries did not introduce capitalism to the New World; nor were the
gains from plunder overseas, which greased the wheels of mercantile

24
Schmitt, Vlkerrechtliche Formen des Modernen Imperialismus, in Positionen
und Begriffe, p. 202.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 95

and colonial commerce, of importance for the rise of capitalism in the

Luso-Hispanic parts of Europe, or a sufficient precondition for the ori-
gins of agrarian capitalism in England.

Balakrishnan claims that the nomos arising out of early-modern state-

formation and overseas conquests divided the world into two zones, with
two laws of war and appropriation, concurring with Schmitts account
of the early-modern inter-state system, and the notion of bracketed
warfare within the civilized zone. But any closer reading of The Nomos
shows that Schmitt was not only deeply ambivalent in his explanation
of the European systemvacillating between the Conquista (1492), the
rise of the Absolutist state (1648) and English balancing (1713) as the
formative momentbut that he explicitly excluded the conquests of the
Americas from the constitution of early-modern Europe. His discussion
of the rationalizationjurisprudential and materialof the colonization
process by Spain and Portugal reveals, paradoxically, that the Conquests
did not precipitate the spatial revolution and the subsequent rise of the
new European inter-state nomos that he generically associated with the
enclosure processes overseas.

This is most clearly expressed in his differentiation between the rayas and
the amity-lines. The first repartition of the oceans after the Discoveries in
the form of the rayas (divisional lines) was laid down in the 1494 Treaty
of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, establishing a dividing line
a hundred miles west of the Azores and Cape Verde: all the land west
of the line should go to Spain; all the land east of it to Portugal.25 This
meant the conditional territorialization of both the seas and the newly
discovered lands, as required by feudal land-holding patterns and social-
property relations.26 The Americas, the Atlantic and the Pacific remained
firmly within the reach of the late-medieval law-governed cosmos of the
res publica Christiana, including the papal-missionary mandate and the
just-war doctrine against non-Christians. The later antithesis of firm
land and free sea, decisive for spatial ordering in international law
from 17131939, was completely foreign to these divisional lines.27 All
land and sea remained jurisprudentially firm. At least formally, the
Vatican was still the central supra-territorial source of adjudication in

25
Schmitt, Land and Sea, Washington, dc 1997, p. 41; Nomos of the Earth, pp. 889.
26
See Teschke, Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and
Theory, International Organization, vol. 52, no. 2, 1998, pp. 32558.
27
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 89.
 96 nlr 69

Catholic Europe. Against Schmitts express purposethe centrality of

land-appropriations for the constitution of the law-governed European
inter-state civilizationhe himself shows that this line was much more
crooked than Balakrishnan assumes.

The quantum leap to the ius inter gentes is not precipitated by the
Salamanca School, but by Dutch and English secular jurisprudence,
notably Grotius and Selden, in the SpanishDutch/English debate on
mare clausum versus mare liberum. The initial post-Conquest partition
of the world between the Catholic powers along the rayas was only chal-
lenged by the SpanishFrench Treaty of Cateau-Cambrsis (1559) and
the subsequent seventeenth-century Anglo-French and Anglo-Spanish
treaties that fixed the amity-lines, dividing the world into a civilized
law-governedzone within these lines and an anarchic zone, a state
of nature, beyond the line. This designated not only the land but also
the sea beyond the line as free and lawless.28 Res nullius is also res
omniumup for grabs by the strongest taker. Schmitt therefore locates
the decisive break from medieval-Christian to early-modern practices of
spatial ordering not in the fact of the Discoveries per se, but in the tran-
sition from the SpanishPortuguese rayas-system to the Anglo-centric
amity-lines. This initiated Americas re-definition from an integrated
appendix of the Euro-centric Old World to a distinct New World to be
re-appropriated and divided in a morally neutral agonal contest accord-
ing to the law of the stronger.

Flaws of the Westphalian system

Of the famous Westphalian peace treaties, Schmitt hardly says any-

thing.29 Absolutism for him referred to a state strong enough to

28
It should be understood that the arguments for mare liberum had nothing to do
with free capitalist competition, as Schmitt obscured the distinction between free
and open seas. The notion of free sea simply referred to its non-law-governed sta-
tus and implied permanent military rivalry over the control of trading and shipping
routes, as states tried unilaterally to territorialize the seas, rather than declaring them
multilaterally open. Free trade across open seas had to wait until the 19th century.
29
Three passing references can be found in Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p.
145; Raum und Groraum im Vlkerrecht [1940], in Schmitt, Staat, Groraum,
Nomos, p. 241; Vlkerrechtliche Groraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot fr
Raumfremde Mchte, in Staat, Groraum, Nomos, p. 311. Throughout the course
of The Nomos, Schmitt progressively shortens the duration of the ius publicum,
describing it as lasting for 400 years, for 300 years, and finally for more than
two centuries. The Nomos of the Earth, pp. 49, 140, 181.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 97

de-politicize and neutralize civil wars domestically. Its historical achieve-

ment was to have carried through and institutionalized the separation
between the privatethe world of clashing ultimate validity-claims
and the public, the sphere of a morally neutered raison dtat, whose
overriding interest resided in the security of the state itself, the right to
make war and peace. Since the Absolutist state was pre-representational
or pre-parliamentarian, conceiving of itself as legibus solutus, it provided
the ideal-type for Schmitts theory of the modern state, encapsulated in
its decisionist nature, absolved from law. Correlatively, as the domestic
sphere was rationalized, its international flipside led to the rationalization
of inter-state conflict by means of a non-discriminatory concept of war.
The rise of the ius publicum was premised on the concrete order of this
state-centric spatio-political revolution.

I have already expressed my disagreement with this story. Balakrishnan is

nevertheless right tosuggest that casualty figures in early-modern wars do
not by themselves discredit thecategory of bracketed warfare. That, how-
ever, was only one partof my argument. Since Schmitt articulates only a
legal category, he is unable to decipher the social sources of the frequency,
magnitude, intensity and duration of old-regime warfare, powered by the
requirements of pre-capitalist geopolitical accumulation. Equally, military
praxes render Schmitts claim of its civilized, rationalized and human-
ized character implausible, given the non-compliance with the nominal
conventions of war (ius in bello), the customs of recruitment, the lack of a
distinction between combatants and non-combatants, and the problems
of provisioning.30 It remains to be clarified how the notion of limited war
can be squared with the standard historical argument that old-regime
permanent-war states succumbed to their military expenses, leading to
fiscal crises, bankruptcies and state collapse. And I am still in search of
an answer as to how Schmitts generic legal anti-positivism can be recon-
ciled with his celebration of the efficacy and civilizing mission of the ius
publicum europaeum, while Absolutist states, according to Schmitts own
reasoning, were simultaneously absolved from lawdecisionist poli-
ties. The idea of non-discriminatory warfare regulated by the ius publicum
remains a fiction, designed to promote the early-modern epoch as the
paragon of civilized warfare against which the subsequent descent to the
liberal era of total war can only appear as a de-civilizing perversion.

30
Bernhard Kroener, The Modern State and Military Society in the Eighteenth
Century, in Philippe Contamine, War and Competition between States, Oxford
2000, pp. 195220.
 98 nlr 69

Does Balakrishnans tentative endorsement of Schmitts protocols of

land war and their alleged neutralization of the religious and civil wars
stand up to historical scrutiny? Since early-modern states were not
rationalized public apparatuses, but confessional dynastic-composite
constructs claiming a sacralized form of sovereignty, public power was
not de-theologized and neutralized. While the age of Absolutism did
break with the trans-territorial theological absolutism of the Vatican, it
simultaneously fragmented the unitary confessional papal claims and
re-assembled them across the spectrum of a pluriverse of creedal mini-
absolutisms, after 1555 and again after 1648. The Westphalian formula,
cuius regio, eius religio, did not endorse religious toleration for private sub-
jects, but sanctioned the right of regional rulers to determine and enforce
the faith of the land. In the French case, the nascent Absolutist state did
not simply guard over the de-politicized and neutral character of domes-
tic politics and religion, but actively established during the Reformation
and the Wars of Religion (156298) its Catholic Absolutism in violent,
directly politicized, century-long campaigns, culminating in the repres-
sion and expulsion of the Huguenots with the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes (1685). Absolutism did not rise above the warring civil parties,
but repressed one of them, giving rise to mono-confessionalized, even
sacralized states. Balakrishnans acceptance of the Schmittian idea that
the separation of sovereign power from the promotion of partisan reli-
gious causes led to a rationalization-neutralization of public order and,
concomitantly, a religiously and morally neutered form of civilized war,
remains within the Schmittian world. Schmitts whole account of the
Westphalian system is deeply flawed, empirically and theoretically.

Balakrishnan concludes that my historical sociology replicates the

exact form of Schmitts fascist epic, underscoring the futility of [my]
attempted demolition.31 Setting aside the distinction between theoreti-
cally informed explanation and quasi-mythical narrationwhich seems
to play a subordinate role in Balakrishnans viewthis is not even mini-
mally true on a straightforward empirical level. As sketched, my account
of the rise, nature and fall of the continental system of Old Regimes
pre-modern, personalized, confessionalized, non-rationalized and
constantly at war with each otheris diametrically opposed to Schmitts.
We do converge, however, in the specificity of England. But where
Schmitt senses intuitively Britains uniqueness, this is entirely reduced
to geo-elemental categories.

31
Balakrishnan, Geopolitics of Separation, p. 11.
 teschke: Reply to Balakrishnan 99

England alone took the step from a medieval feudal and terrestrial exist-
ence to a purely maritime existence that balanced the whole terrestrial
world . . . England thereby became the representative of the universal
maritime sphere of a Eurocentric global order, the guardian of the other
side of the ius publicum europaeum, the sovereign of the balance of land
and seaof an equilibrium comprising the spatially ordered thinking
of international law.32

How was that possible? England turned her collective existence sea-
wards and centred it on the sea element, turning into a big fisha
leviathan.33 The problem with Schmitts fascist epic is precisely thatit
is fascist and it is an epic.

Reification of the geopolitical

Schmitt concludes The Nomos of the Earthin its English editionby

returning to his opening philosophical question: what is the nomos?
The Greek etymological derivation of the meaning of the term produces
a tripartite distinction: to take, to divide, to pastureappropriation,
distribution, production (cultivation). It is their interrelation that struc-
tures any concrete historical nomos. The question for Schmitt is how
they should be ordered: Their sequence and evaluation have followed
changes in historical situations and world history as a whole, but all
known and famous appropriations in history, all great conquests
wars and occupations, colonizations, migrations and discoverieshave
evidenced the fundamental precedence of appropriation before distribu-
tion and production, establishing radical title to land.34 Appropriation,
whether vertical or horizontal, is timeless and primary. This held,
Schmitt qualifies, until the Industrial Revolution. Thereafter, liberalism
and socialism attempted to reverse this sequence by assigning primacy
to production. Liberalism claimed to transcend appropriation by the
promise of the production of plenty, constructing a utopia of production
and consumption cruelly deflated by world history. Socialism grounded
re-distribution in a revolutionary act of re-appropriation: the expropria-
tion of the appropriators at home and abroad.

Schmitt concludes that the horizontal relations of land-appropriations

geopoliticsprecede the vertical relations of production and

32
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 173.
33
Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 28.
34
Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, p. 3278.
 100 nlr 69

distributionpolitical economy. In close syntactical analogy to Marx and

Engelss famous dictum that the history of all hitherto existing society
is the history of class struggles, Schmitt argues that world history is
the history of the wars waged by maritime powers against land or con-
tinental powers, and by land powers against sea or maritime powers.35
History is conceived as a lateral field of geopolitical appropriations, un-
reconciled to the vertical dynamics of surplus appropriation. Schmitts
international history is a deliberately anti-sociological project, seeking to
validate the autonomy of political and geopolitical order over and against
social conflicts and dislocations. Schmitts mythologically essentialized
ontology overwhelms his historicism and regresses into the reification
of geopolitics as such.

In the end, Schmitt failed to answer his own research-organizing ques-

tion: what processes drive land-appropriationwhat establishes a
nomos? The answer does not reside in a simple reversal of Schmitts
sequence of appropriation, distribution and production, but in a hist
orical examination of the politically constituted and contested property
relations that generate differential constellations of authority, sover-
eignty and geopolitics. If the concluding section of The Nomos reveals
Schmitts ulterior reference point and motivation, an anti-Marx for his
times, then the future does not consist in a facile turning of the tables:
an anti-Schmitt for our times. Rather, it forces us to meet the Schmittian
challenge and to develop a theoretical programme that pursues a radical
historicization and socialization of geopoliticstheoretically outside of,
but empirically incorporating, that mega-abstraction of concrete-order-
thinking: land-appropriation.

35
Schmitt, Land and Sea, p. 5.
 andrew bacevich

TA I L O R S T O T H E E M P E R O R

P
resident kennedy was categorical on the subject. Speaking
at American University in Washington, dc on June 10, 1963,
he put it this way: The United States, as the world knows,
will never start a war. Twenty years later, President Reagan
concurred. The defence policy of the United States, he told Americans
on March 23, 1983, is based on a simple premise: the United States does
not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. Given such authorita-
tive (and bipartisan) assurances, how then can we explain the George W.
Bush administrations promulgation of a doctrine of preventive war at
the start of the 21st century? The simple answer, of course, is that 9/11
changed everything. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage articu-
lated a feeling that was widespread among Americans after the events
of September 11: History starts today.1 All bets were off. So too were
the gloves. Deterrence and defence no longer sufficed. As President
Bush himself put it, the doctrine of containment just doesnt hold
water. Self-protection was not good enough. In Secretary of Defense
Rumsfelds typically crisp formulation, the best, and in some cases, the
only defence, is a good offence.2 This was one of those cases. In order
to prevent another 9/11or something even more nightmarishthe
United States had no choice but to go permanently on the offensive.
With the Bush Doctrine, Washington granted itself the authority to do
just that. End of story.

But the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Bush Doctrine possesses a
considerable provenance. Its gestation period coincided with the Age of
Overkillthe years when authorities in Washington made nuclear-strike
capacity the cornerstone of us national security policy and then, more
or less as an afterthought, assessed the implications of having done so.
The effort to wrestle with those implications, which turned out to be
vast and troublesome, gave birth to a new tradition of strategic thought.

new left review 69 may jun 2011 101

 102 nlr 69

Acknowledging the influence of its chief midwife, Albert Wohlstetter,

that tradition can rightly be called the Wohlstetter School.

A filmmaker attempting a behind-the-scenes portrayal of us strat-

egy in the nuclear age would surely give Albert Wohlstetter a place of
prominencealthough that place would likely be a bland faculty lounge
instead of the Pentagons bells-and-whistles War Room. Wohlstetter
was the quintessential defence intellectual. From the 1950s through the
1990s, he wielded outsized influence in policy circles, without himself
ever shouldering the burdens of personal responsibilityan outsider
enjoying privileged inside access. Born in New York in 1913, he was a
mathematician by training, who rose to prominence while an analyst
at rand, which he joined in 1951. (rand also employed his wife, the
historian Roberta Wohlstetter.) In 1964, Wohlstetter joined the politi-
cal science faculty at the University of Chicago. There he remained for
the rest of his career, training acolytes (among them Paul Wolfowitz)
and mentoring protgs (among them Richard Perle), while engaging in
classified research, advising government agencies and serving on blue-
ribbon commissionsin general leaving his fingerprints all over the
intellectual framework of us national-security strategy.

Paul thinks the way Albert thinks, Perle once remarked, referring to his
friend Wolfowitz.3 This comment applied equally to more than a few oth-
ers who rose to positions of prominence in Washington during the latter
half of the twentieth century. In national security circles, Alberts way of
thinking became pervasive. So too did the abiding theme of his work: the
existing situation is bad; absent drastic action today, it is almost sure to
get worse still tomorrow. To those who learned from, collaborated with,
or drew inspiration from Albert Wohlstetter, therefore, any defensive
posture by definition is either inadequate or soon will be. The defender
forfeits the initiative, a defensive orientation too easily translating into
passivity, inertia and even fatalism. In an age in which survival required
constant alertness and continuing exertion to improve existing capabili-
ties and devise new ones, to rely on defence alone as a basis for strategy
was to incur great risk.

1
James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bushs War Cabinet, New York 2004.
2
Quoted in Michael Dobbs, For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized, Washington
Post, 7 April 2003; Donald Rumsfeld, Speech at the National Defense University,
31 January 2002.
3
Neil Swidey, The Analyst, Boston Globe, 18 May 2003.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 103

For members of the Wohlstetter School, the advent of the Bush Doctrine
represented the culmination of a project that they had pursued over
the course of decades. Long before the events of September 2001,
ideas they had developed set the stage for the United States to embrace
preventive war. For Wohlstetters adherents, the proactive elimination
of threatsthereby transcending concepts such as containment and
deterrencehad long since acquired a tantalizing allure all of its own.
Well before 9/11 they had persuaded themselves that preventive war was
not only desirable but also feasible. All that was needed was an oppor-
tunity to put their theories into practice. On September 11, 2001, that
opportunity presented itself.

Taking the offensive

Commencement ceremonies for the graduating cadets at West Point on

June 1, 2002 provided the occasion for Bush to unveil his doctrine of
preventive war. Bush began by paying tribute to Presidents Kennedy and
Reagan. Rather than recalling their assurances that the United States
would never start a war, however, he praised them for refusing to gloss
over the brutality of tyrants and giving hope to prisoners and dissidents
and exiles. In a difficult time, they had held high the torch of freedom.
In some respects, the challenges now confronting the United States mir-
rored those that his Cold War predecessors had faced. Now, as then,
Bush declared, our enemies are totalitarians . . . Now, as then, they seek
to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life. Yet in
other crucial respects, the present situation was entirely new and fraught
with unprecedented danger. Bush located the nexus of that danger at the
perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology. Against such a threat,
Cold War strategies no longer sufficed. Containment is not possible,
the President continued, when unbalanced dictators with weapons of
mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly pro-
vide them to terrorist allies.

In such circumstances, defence alone was inadequate to provide secu-

rity. Passivity was tantamount to courting suicide. If we wait for threats
to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. New conditions had
rendered the promises of Kennedy and Reagan null and void. We must
take the battle to the enemy, Bush continued, disrupt his plans, and
confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have
entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation
 104 nlr 69

will act. Action necessarily implied military action, and the President
emphasized the imperative of transforming the armed forces to create
a military ready to strike at a moments notice in any dark corner of the
world and prepared for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend
our liberty and to defend our lives. Military forces in action would
eliminate the terrorist threat; military might in itself would guarantee
the peace: America has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond
challenge . . . thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.

Lending this happy prospect a modicum of plausibility were newly

emergent methods of waging warprecise, agile, flexible and
discriminatingwhich Bush thought would endow us forces with hith-
erto unimagined levels of effectiveness. Released from the paralysing
effects of Hiroshima, warundertaken by Americans for enlightened
purposeswould acquire a new lease of life, the United States seizing
the moment, in Bushs words, to extend a just peace, by replacing pov-
erty, repression and resentment around the world. The Bush Doctrine
promised both to unharness American power and to invest it with
renewed moral purpose. However unwittingly, Bush had thereby sum-
marized and endorsed the several principles of the Wohlstetter School.
The implementation of the Bush Doctrine in the months and years that
followed put those principles to the test.

Peril and surprise

Four essential precepts define the Wohlstetter tradition. The theme

of the first is looming peril. According to its adherents, Americas
enemies, strong and getting stronger, are implacably hostile and will,
if given the chance, exploit any perceived us vulnerability; to make
matters worse, us officials responsible for evaluating the threats bear-
ing down on the country routinely underestimate the actual danger,
lulling the American people into a false sense of security. In reality,
crisis is a permanent condition, the threats facing the United States
imminent and existential. The theme of the second precept is surprise,
which greatly complicates the problem of how to gauge the danger. The
prospect of the unforeseen is omnipresent and can never be entirely
eliminated. Although efforts to guard against being caught unawares
are essential, to assume that those efforts are succeeding is to invite
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 105

disaster. Only those defences that will work in the absence of warning
can be deemed sufficient.

Minimizing the impact of surprise demands sustained and intensive

attention to risk management: this is the Wohlstetter Schools third
precept. Conjuring up vulnerabilities that adversaries might exploit,
crediting them with the ability and intent to do so, devising remedies to
prevent or reduce any resulting damage, thereby maintaining the ability
to strike back and raising the risks that adversaries will incur if choos-
ing to attack: this for Wohlstetters followers defines the very essence of
strategy. Effective risk management entails activism. To remain inert
in the face of peril is to forfeit the initiative, thereby exacerbating the
threat. To see some momentary advantage as a guarantee of safety,
therefore, is to misapprehend the reality of strategic competition, which
involves continuous interaction on ever-shifting terms.

In other words, the first precept of looming peril necessitates an antici-

patory approach to self-defence. Yet the second precept of surprise
means that an anticipatory self-defence that is strictly defensive in its
orientation can never be fully satisfactory. Miscalculate just oncefail to
see what lurks around the corner or over the horizonand catastrophic
failure ensues. The fourth precept looks beyond mere risk management
to radical risk reductionthe Holy Grail of the Wohlstetter School. It
posits the existence of capabilities that will confer upon the United
States the ability not only to dispose of the perils it faces, but to cre-
ate a better world for all. To achieve this sort of risk reduction requires
an offensively oriented approach. Rather than simply parrying, the
us should thrust.

For a brief moment after 1945, some observers believed that the
American nuclear monopoly had put the United States in a position
to do just that. The founding members of the Wohlstetter School were
among the first to recognize that this was a delusion and to see that
far from enhancing us freedom of action, the advent of nuclear weap-
ons created daunting complications and imposed constraints. Yet this
insight, important in itself, did not dissuade them from seeking escape
from those constraints. By the 1990s, leading Wohlstetterites believed
they had discovered the means to do so.
 106 nlr 69

nsc-68 and after

Just as McCarthyism predated Senator Joe McCarthy, so too ideas
of the Wohlstetter School made their appearance even before Albert
Wohlstetter signed on with rand in 1951 to analyse nuclear strategy.
Drafted early in 1950, National Security Council Report 68 remains a
classic expression of the looming-threat precept. Emphasizing that the
end of the nuclear monopoly had plunged the United States into deep-
est peril, with all of humanity now facing the ever-present possibility
of annihilation, freedom itself mortally challenged, and the very sur-
vival not only of this Republic but of civilization itself hanging in the
balance, nsc-68 may strike present-day readers as overwrought, if not
altogether hysterical. With the Soviet Union having long since ceased
to exist, the United States today finds itself more or less perpetually
entangled in foreign wars, all the while professing a yearning for peace.
Viewed from this perspective, nsc-68s attempted contrast between
the fanatic faith inspiring the Kremlins efforts to impose its absolute
authority over the rest of the world and the essential tolerance of our
world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence
of covetousness in our international relations might seem overdrawn.4
Yet Paul Nitze, director of State Department policy planning and nsc-
68s principal authorsoon to emerge as a charter member of the
Wohlstetter Schoolbelieved otherwise. By his own account, Nitze was
simply looking facts in the face. A self-described hard-nosed pragmatist,
he addressed questions of policy with clear and rigorous logic, based
upon a cold and unemotional assessment of the objective evidence.5 If
Nitze cried wolf, it was because a wolf (or perhaps a bear) was pawing at
the door, even if others remained blind to the danger.

With a little help from the Korean War, nsc-68 demonstrated that in
Cold War Washington crying wolf worked: Nitze won approval for his
recommendation of a large-scale build-up of American military power,
conventional as well as nuclear. At regular intervals thereafter, groups
some quasi-official, others unofficial, many including Nitze himself as a
prominent participantsought to replicate this achievement. Every couple
of decades, the Committee on the Present Danger appeared on the scene,
version 1.0 sounding the alarm in 1950, with 2.0 following in 1976 and
3.0 in 2004. Otherwise, even as the names varied, the refrain remained

4
nsc-68, us Objectives and Programs for National Security, 14 April 1950.
5
Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, New York 1989, p. ix.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 107

constant. The Gaither Committee (1957), the Committee to Maintain a

Prudent Defense Policy (1969), Team B (1976), the Commission on
Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1988), and the Rumsfeld Commission
(1998) all subscribed to a common set of propositions: ignored or dis-
counted by us intelligence agencies, the United States was falling behind
and Americas enemies were gaining an edge; absent prompt action to
close the resulting capabilities gap, catastrophe beckoned.

An accommodating press routinely amplified the ominous warnings

issued by the Wohlstetter School. When the classified findings of the
Gaither Committee found their way into the hands of a Washington Post
reporter, for example, the resulting story, appearing on December 20,
1958, carried the headline: Secret Report Sees us in Great Peril. Team
B concluded its work as President Ford was preparing to leave office. In
its January 10, 1977 issue, Newsweeks coverage featured an essay called
The Russian Bear Redux? The text of the article removed the ques-
tion mark, describing the Team B report as the most alarming forecast
in years. Similarly, on July 17, 1998, the Newark Star-Ledger summa-
rized the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission: Experts See Missiles
Shadows Darkening Skies over us Cities.

The point here is not to contest the accuracy of these forecaststhough

allegations of a bomber gap and later of a missile gap during the
1950s proved utterly fancifulbut to note their remarkable consist-
ency. In this regard, the findings reported by Team Bconvened by cia
director George H. W. Bush in response to charges by Wohlstetter (and
others) that official estimates were understating the Soviet threatare
representative. As an exercise in intellectual inquiry, Team Bs inves-
tigation was the equivalent of asking a group of senior academics to
evaluate the pros and cons of tenure: the outcome was foreordained.
Consisting of hardliners vociferously opposed to SovietAmerican
dtente (Nitze and Wohlstetter protg Paul Wolfowitz among them),
Team B reached precisely the conclusions it would be expected to reach:
us intelligence agencies had substantially misperceived the motives
behind Soviet strategic programmes, and thereby tended consistently
to underestimate their intensity, scope and implicit threat. With all
the evidence point[ing] to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what
is euphemistically called the worldwide triumph of socialism but in
fact connotes global Soviet hegemony, the Kremlin had no interest in
settling for strategic equivalence. It was engaged in a single-minded
 108 nlr 69

pursuit of strategic supremacy. Soviet leaders are first and foremost

offensively rather than defensively minded, Team B reported. That state-
ment applied in spades to Soviet thinking about nuclear weapons. The
Soviets did not view nuclear conflict as tantamount to mutual suicide.
Instead, they were expanding their arsenal in order to achieve a war-
fighting and war-winning capability. For the United States, the outlook
was grim indeed.6

Wohlstetter himself drafted the most beguiling and comprehensive artic-

ulation of the looming-peril hypothesis. Written under Federal contract
for rand in 1958 and subsequently appearing in revised form in Foreign
Affairs, The Delicate Balance of Terror qualifies in the estimation of
one admirer as probably the single most important article in the his-
tory of American strategic thought.7 In late 1957 the ussr had launched
Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. As Wohlstetter noted,
the shock resulting from this demonstration of Soviet missile capabili-
ties had almost dissipated, however. American concern, momentarily
bordering on panic, had subsided, with the prevailing assumption that
a general thermonuclear war was extremely unlikely restored.
Wohlstetter set out to demolish that assumption, dispelling the nearly
universal optimism about the stability of deterrence. The requirements
for thwarting a Soviet nuclear attack, which in his view were stringent,
made such optimism entirely unwarranted. To assume that the Kremlin
leadership was bumbling or, better, cooperativeadhering to what he
derisively referred to as Western-preferred Soviet strategieswas sheer
folly. In fact, advances in Soviet strike capabilities had created prospects
of an essentially warningless attack that the United States may not
have the power to deter.8

What followed was, in effect, a riff on Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet

strategies. Elaborating on the difficulties of maintaining a viable second-
strike capability, Wohlstetter found no reason to doubt that Soviet
leaders possessed the cunning and ruthlessness to exploit those diffi-
culties to their own advantage. The possibility of nuclear war causing
considerable damage to the Soviet Union itself would not, in his view,

6
Report of Team B, Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis:
Soviet Strategic Objectives, An Alternate View, undated.
7
Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, Princeton 1991, p. 20.
8
Albert Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance of Terror, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected
Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Carlisle, pa 2009, pp. 177212.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 109

dissuade the Kremlin from acting. After all, although World War ii had
killed more than 20 million Russians, the Soviet Union had recovered
extremely well. Under several quite plausible circumstances, he sur-
mised, the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage
to considerably less than this number, in which event, striking first, by
surprise, would be the sensible choice for them. In short, to imagine
that a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost effort-
lessly, with Americans thereby resuming their deep pre-Sputnik sleep,
was a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, shoring up the us deterrent
required urgent, ongoing and intensive effort: ensuring the survivability
of retaliatory forces, thickening air defences, protecting civilians, improv-
ing conventional capabilities and exploring innovative non-nuclear
modes of warfare, hitherto financed by pitifully small budgets. Yet in
outlining the minimum requirements for avoiding nuclear war in the
1960swhich he viewed as an iffy prospect at bestWohlstetter was
also describing a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent dan-
ger. Responding to Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies would oblige
Americans to make hard choices entailing sacrifice and uncertainty. It
also implied being kept in the dark about matters said to determine their
chances of survival, while placing their fate in the hands of those claim-
ing mastery of such matterspeople like Albert Wohlstetter.

Anticipating Pearl Harbour

A treatise written by Roberta Wohlstetter has long served as the

Wohlstetter Schools ur-text on the issue of surprise. Pearl Harbour:
Warning and Decision, prepared under the auspices of rand and pub-
lished in 1962, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history; but this
was history narrowly focused to serveand privilegea specific agenda.
Pearl Harbour was written in order to answer the question: why was the
United States surprised on December 7, 1941? In retrospect, indica-
tors of an impending Japanese attack seemed blindingly obvious. How
could Americans at all echelons of commandcivilian and military
alike, both in Washington and in Hawaiihave overlooked so many
clues? Wohlstetters answer emphasized the difficulty of distinguish-
ing between the clues that mattered and those that did not: we failed
to anticipate Pearl Harbour not for want of the relevant materials, but
because of the plethora of irrelevant ones.9 What Roberta Wohlstetter

9
Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour: Warning and Decision, Stanford 1962, p. 387.
 110 nlr 69

described as noisefalse or misleading informationobscured the sig-

nals that foretold an attack.

In The Delicate Balance of Terror, her husband had identified six hur-
dles that the United States needed to overcome in order to achieve the
assured second-strike capability required for effective deterrence, so as
to demonstrate the enormous challenges involved.10 In Pearl Harbour,
Roberta Wohlstetter likewise identified six hurdles, factors increasing a
nations susceptibility to surprise attack: false alarms; alertness dulled by
continuous tension; enemy efforts to conceal their true intent; spoofs:
enemy-generated noise designed to mislead; changes in the character
of relevant intelligence, caused, for example, by technological advances;
and bureaucratic barriers obstructing the sharing of relevant informa-
tion.11 Roberta Wohlstetters point reinforced her husbands: avoiding
surprise, like creating an effective deterrent, was a very difficult propo-
sition indeed. The one major practical lesson of her study was that we
cannot count on strategic warning. In the two decades that had elapsed
since Pearl Harbour, she concluded, the balance of advantage had clearly
shifted in favour of a surprise attacker. The benefits to be expected from
achieving surprise have increased enormously and the penalties for los-
ing the initiative in an all-out war have grown correspondingly. As a
consequence, the United States needed to acknowledge the likelihood
of being surprised. We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn
to live with it. Rather than expecting advance notice of an enemy attack,
defences must be designed to function without it.12

Events of 1962, the very year in which her book appeared, seemingly
confirmed Roberta Wohlstetters analysis. Soviet efforts to position a
nuclear-strike force in Cuba caught the Kennedy administration com-
pletely unawares. Writing in Foreign Affairs three years after the fact,
she described it as a case of dj vu. Once again, in October 1962 as in
December 1941, there had been plenty of signals, but also an abundance
of noise. Thanks to advances in aerial photography, notably from the U-2
spy plane, and the nuanced response of President Kennedy, the United

10
These were: attainment of a stable, steady-state peacetime operation; surviving an
enemy first-strike; making and disseminating a decision to retaliate; reaching enemy
territory with fuel enough to complete the mission; overcoming enemy defences;
and destroying assigned targets; A. Wohlstetter, Delicate Balance, pp. 1857.
11
R. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour, pp. 3934.
12
R. Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbour, pp. 399401.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 111

States managed to recover from its initial surprise and avoid World War
iii. She found it comforting to know that we do learn from one cri-
sis to the next. Muting that comfort was her conviction that the future
doubtless holds many more shocks and attempts at surprise, with no
reason to assume that next time the United States would be so lucky.13

Strategy precluded

Wohlstetters analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis mirrors her analysis of

the attack on Pearl Harbour in this additional respect: in both cases, she
imputed strategic significance to actions that occur in the realm of tactics.
Among adherents to the Wohlstetter School, this tendency is pervasive:
a preoccupation with tactical mattersrelabelled strategic to reflect
the involvement of nuclear weapons or long-range delivery systems
supplants serious strategic analysis. So Wohlstetter begins her account
of the Cuban Missile Crisis on August 31, 1962, when Senator Kenneth
Keating of New York charged that the Soviets were installing missiles
in Cuba, thereby posing a threat to the United States. (The Kennedy
administration dismissed Keatings charge.) She evinces no interest
in events occurring prior to that date. In her account, therefore, cia-
engineered efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, collapsing the year before
at the Bay of Pigs, go unmentioned. So too does the Cuban Revolution,
its origins and purposes.

Implicitly, for Wohlstetter, the Cuban Missile Crisis came out of

nowhere, making it unnecessary for her to ask if ill-advised us policies
prior to 1962 might have laid the basis for the surprise that Castro and
his allies in the Kremlin sprung in the autumn of that year. By exten-
sion, that same presumption foreclosed any need to consider whether
Washingtons vulnerability to surprise might stem less from lapses in us
intelligence than from misguided us behaviour toward Cuba. In fram-
ing the problem as a failure to distinguish between signals and noise,
Wohlstetter disregarded the possibility that the problem might be one
that the United States had brought upon itselfdecades of meddling
and manipulation producing unhappy consequences to which policy-
makers remained wilfully blind. In short, for her, strategy as suchhow
Washington had defined us interests in Cuba and the prerogatives it had
claimed in pursuing those interestsevaded serious scrutiny.

13
R. Wohlstetter, Cuba and Pearl Harbour: Hindsight and Foresight, Foreign
Affairs, July 1965.
 112 nlr 69

Much the same applies to her account of Pearl Harbour. Preoccupied

with explaining the origins of the Japanese attack on December 7,
Wohlstetter evinces no interest in assessing the origins of the Pacific
War. She pays no attention whatsoever to developments prior to June 17,
1940, while focusing in detail only on events that occurred in November
and December 1941. Again, strategy as suchhow Washington defined
its interests in the Asia-Pacific and the policies that put the United States
on a collision course with Japan, beginning with the promulgation of
the Open Door Notes in 18991900 and culminating in the summer
of 1940 with the imposition of economic sanctions to punish Japan
simply does not qualify as relevant.14

To characterize the Pearl Harbour attack as a strategic failurewhether

of warning or decision, to cite the subtitle of Wohlstetters bookis to
abuse and misconstrue the word strategy. Washingtons actual strategic
failure, its inability to persuade Japan to accept Americas requirements
for an Asian-Pacific order by means short of war, had become evident
long before the first bombs fell on Oahu. When open hostilities finally
erupted, the particulars of time and place may have come as a surprise;
that the United States was already engaged in a winner-takes-all contest
with the Japanese did not. To impute strategic significance to the events
of December 7, 1941, therefore, serves no purpose other than to insulate
basic us policy from critical attention. This members of the Wohlstetter
School consistently do. Whether the issue at hand is the origins of the
Pacific War, the Cold War or the War on Terror, their fixation with the
perils lying just ahead obviates any need to consider whether the United
States itself may have had a hand in creating those dangers.

Rooting out risk

The Wohlstetter Schools preoccupation with risk management derives

in part from the conviction that passivity in the face of a building and

14
A partial list of the events creating the conditions for the Pacific War would
necessarily include the following: us involvement in negotiating the treaty end-
ing the Russo-Japanese War; blatant and widespread American discrimination
against Japanese immigrants; Woodrow Wilsons rejection of a Japanese-proposed
endorsement of racial equality in the Versailles Treaty; the 1922 Washington
Naval Conference; us condemnation of Japans invasion of Manchuria in 1931;
the Stimson Doctrine refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Japanese conquests;
us support for China in its war against Japan; and the 1940 Export Control Act,
blocking the shipment to Japan of aircraft parts, machine tools, scrap iron and steel.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 113

evolving threat almost inevitably increases vulnerability, whereas well-

conceived action can reduce it. The problem of deterring a major power,
wrote Albert Wohlstetter in 1961, requires a continuing effort because
the requirements for deterrence will change with the counter-measures
taken by the major power.15 The imperative is to keep one step ahead in
order to avoid falling a potentially fatal half-step behind. Staying ahead
necessarily entails intensive, ongoing exertions, anticipating the adver-
sarys next moves, and devising methods and capabilities from which to
formulate a counter.

Action undertaken to reduce risk necessarily entails a further element of

risk, which is difficult to forecast (and easy to exaggerate). Yet members
of the Wohlstetter School do not shrink from action, convinced that the
risk of inaction could well be greater still. Persuading a skeptical public
and skittish politicians to buy into this proposition can pose challenges.
Writing in Life magazine in 1960, Albert Wohlstetter saw no reason to
believe that Americans would not make a greater effort for the major
purposes which they share, if they understood that the risks of not mak-
ing such an effort were large and the rewards for effort great. Americans
seemed to think that by trying to stay that step ahead, they could for-
feit all the benefits accruing from the countrys advantageous postwar
position; I think this is wrong, Wohlstetter wrote. They are threatened
by the risks involved in failing to make an effort.16 Viewed from this
perspective, the strategists task is twofold: creating policy options to
facilitate action, while nurturing a political environment conducive to
the actual exercise of choice. Analysis was about the invention of new
solutions, wrote one admirer, describing Wohlstetters modus operandi:
out of analysis emerged new choices.17 Yet just as the absence of options
could inhibit activism, so too could public unwillingness to defer to
those at the centre of power. Avoiding strategic paralysis required not
only a rich menu of policy choices but also public willingness to let
decision-makers choose.

With these twin tasks in mind, members of the Wohlstetter School

have long specialized in concocting scenarios purporting to expose
existing us defences as grotesquely inadequateaccording to Nitze,

15
A. Wohlstetter, Nuclear Sharing: nato and the n+1 Country, Foreign Affairs,
April 1961.
16
A. Wohlstetter, No Highway to High Purpose, Life, 20 June 1960.
17
Alain Enthoven, Commentary: On Nuclear Deterence, Nuclear Heuristics, p. 167.
 114 nlr 69

for example, the Gaither Committee calculated that 90 per cent of

our bomber force could be knocked out on the ground by a surprise
Soviet bomber attackand then proposing ways to fix whatever prob-
lem they had conjured up.18 Almost invariably, making things right
imposes considerable demands on the us Treasury. But as Wohlstetter
put it, the initiation fee is merely a down payment on the expense
of membership in the nuclear club.19 So during the Cold War, adopt-
ing Wohlstetter School recommendations on whether to disperse us
bomber forces, harden missile launch sites, improve air defences, or
field new weaponsthe list goes onprovided a continuing ration-
ale for high levels of military spending, with implications not lost on
the officer corps, members of Congress, corporate chieftains or union
bosses. Simply put, ideas generated by the Wohlstetter School produced
lubricants that kept the wheels of the national-security state turning,
while also helping to fuel the militaryindustrial complex.

When it came to spotting (or inventing) flaws in us defences, Albert

Wohlstetter himself possessed a rare talent. His approach to framing
and addressing problems was empirical, comprehensive and uncom-
promising. Never content with generalities, Wohlstetter insisted that
actual detailsmissile accuracies, reliabilities and payloads, bomb
yields, bomber ranges, and the like mattered, indeed, were of central
importance.20 Sloppy or lazy thinkingfor example, expectations that
the horrors implicit in thermonuclear war might suffice to preclude
its occurrencedrew his particular ire. Relentless questioning of
everything and everyone was Richard Perles description. Wohlstetter
demanded rigour and precision. He tested assumptions. He chal-
lenged conventional wisdom wherever he found it. All this is familiar,
he would say, when preparing to demolish the latest bit of comfort-
ing nonsense to which Washington had succumbed, but is it true?21
In the eyes of his admirers, Wohlstetter was above all a disinterested
seeker of truth.

In reality, Wohlstetters reputed penchant for relentless probing extended

only so far. For starters, he left untouched key assumptions undergirding

18
Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, p. 167.
19
A. Wohlstetter, Nuclear Sharing, p. 276.
20
Enthoven, Commentary, p. 167.
21
Richard Perle, Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competitions Reality,
Nuclear Heuristics, pp. 384, 381.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 115

Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies. To Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union

was a black box. While categorizing the Soviet regime as totalitarian, he
never bothered to evaluate either the validity of that label nor to ques-
tion whether any such abbreviated characterization could provide an
adequate basis for gauging state behaviour. Furthermore, neither he nor
any other member of the Wohlstetter School ever paused to wonder what
it was that made the United States itself tick. The relentless questioning
so evident when probing contradictions in the us nuclear posture has
never extended to us policy more broadly. Accepting at face value the
prevailing American self-image of a nation whose purposes are benign
and intentions peaceful, the Wohlstetter School does not trouble itself
over how the United States got enmeshed in whatever predicament it
happens to be facing.

Thus, while promoting stratagems to navigate through the perils of the

moment, members of the Wohlstetter School remain oblivious to the role
that ill-conceived us policies may have played in creating those dangers.
As a consequence, an approach to strategy purporting to expand choice
actually serves to circumscribe it, reducing strategy itself to a stylized
process that Wohlstetter termed opposed-systems analysis.22 Attributing
supreme importance to matters such as payloads, bomb yields and
bomber ranges obviates the need to examine the near-term benefits and
long-term consequences of, say, plotting to overthrow the legitimately
elected government of Iran; obstructing the non-violent unification of
a divided Vietnam; or refusing to allow Cubans to determine their own
destiny. Actually existing strategypower expended in accordance with
a discernible patterndisappears behind a cloud of obfuscation.

Discriminate deterrence?

The search for a Holy Grail derives its allure not simply from the value
of the object sought, but from the challenges inherent in the quest. For
the Wohlstetter School, the Holy Grail of radical risk reduction in lieu
of mere risk management has proven elusive, with the pursuit itself not
without disappointment. Early efforts to implement this fourth precept
of the Wohlstetter School foundered in Indochina. There, variants of
opposed-systems analysis found expression in us attempts to coerce

22
Wohlstetter, Theory and Opposed-Systems Design (1968), Nuclear Heuristics,
p. 157.
 116 nlr 69

the North Vietnamese into accepting the permanent division of their

country. Active us participation in the Vietnam War, beginning in the
1950s and ending in the 1970s, spanned five presidential administra-
tions. None of the five attempted to win the war outright. Rather the
United States relied on indirect means or calibrated violence, expect-
ing Hanoi, either worn down or brought to its senses, eventually to
concede the point. At issue was more than simply the fate of South
Vietnam. Success in Vietnam would demonstrate that the United States
possessed the ability to nip problems in the bud without exorbitant
expenditures and without breaching the nuclear threshold. Such an
outcome would notably enhance American power. To put it mildly, how-
ever, success was not forthcoming. For a time, Vietnam seemed, in the
words of one keen observer, to be the Waterloo for the entire enterprise
of strategic analysis.23

Albert Wohlstetter, for one, refused to accept this verdict. Of all the dis-
asters of Vietnam, he warned in 1968, the worst may be the lessons
that well draw from it. In his estimation, the worst lesson of all would
be one persuading Americans that we are better off reducing the choices
available to us rather than devising new ways to use our power dis-
criminately and for worthy ends.24 The reference to the discriminate use
of power should be noted. So too should the reference to worthy ends.
Among the various signatures of the Vietnam Warfree-fire zones,
napalm, Agent Orange and carpet bombing by B-52 Stratofortresses
none were suggestive of power used discriminately or, indeed, worthily.
Yet in that war Wohlstetter glimpsed the inkling of a vision for invest-
ing force with unprecedented efficacy, thereby reducing both moral and
political inhibitions to its use.

The first generation of what we today call precision-guided munitions

made their appearance on the battlefield during the latter stages of
the Vietnam War. For the American military, the implications of this
advance in weaponry were tacticalmaking possible, for example, the
assured destruction of one North Vietnamese bridge by a single aircraft
employing a single bomb, rather than numerous aircraft unleashing a
hail of bombs with uncertain result. In Wohlstetters eyes, the potential

23
Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York 1983, p. 336.
24
A. Wohlstetter, On Vietnam and Bureaucracy, rand, 17 July 1968.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 117

implications of precision weapons appeared much larger. In his view,

advanced technology could expand the utility of force across a range of
contingencies, even while reducing both risks and moral hazards. If
Hiroshima had transformed the sword of military might into a sledge-
hammer possessing limited utility, Wohlstetter now saw the possibility of
converting the sledgehammer into a scalpel with multiple applications.
Here lay the possibility of escaping from the frustrations and uncer-
tainties of deterrent strategies relying on nuclear weapons. To put it
another way, it was an opportunity to impart to anticipatory self-defence
an offensive orientation.25 During the 1970s and 1980s, Wohlstetter
and like-minded figures such as Defense Department officials Andrew
Marshall and Fred Ikl, along with Harvards Samuel Huntington,
closed in on their Holy Grail, now described as discriminate deterrence.
The central idea was this: by enabling the United States to make highly
effective attacks with low collateral damage, the advent of near zero-miss
non-nuclear weapons promised to provide policymakers with a variety
of strategic-response options as alternatives to massive nuclear destruc-
tion. By eliminating the unintended killing of non-combatants and the
excessive physical destruction that made nuclear weapons essentially
unusable, improvements in accuracy promised to make possible the
strategic use of non-nuclear weapons.26

As members of the Wohlstetter School explored the prospects of dis-

criminate deterrence to check a Soviet Union that they described as
on the march, the actually existing Soviet Union was entering its death
spiral. Even before revolutionary technologies could supersede nuclear
weapons, revolutionary change in the realm of politics brought the Cold
War to an abrupt end, rendering discriminate deterrence obsolete
even before it reached maturity. Yet in this moment of sudden techno-
logical and political change, the shackles hitherto limiting American
freedom of action fell away. No sooner had discriminate deterrence
become pass than discriminate attack began to emerge as an idea
whose time had come. Back in 1958, Albert Wohlstetter had speculated
about a situation in which the risks of not striking might at some junc-
ture appear very great to the Soviets, creating circumstances in which

25
A. Wohlstetter, Strength, Interest, and New Technologies (1968), Nuclear
Heuristics, pp. 52450.
26
Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence [1988:
extract], Nuclear Heuristics, p. 607.
 118 nlr 69

striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them, and
from their point of view the smaller risk.27 With the end of the Cold War
and the advent of precision weapons, this might describe the situation
facing the United States. For members of the Wohlstetter School, the
appeal of striking firstfixing problems, rather than merely coping with
themglittered.

Targeting the Balkans

George W. Bush would refer, in his second Inaugural Address, to the

interval between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War
on Terror as years of repose, years of sabbatical. Some repose, some
sabbatical. The 1990s opened with war in the Persian Gulf, which,
despite the putative success of Operation Desert Storm, dragged on for
years. A policy of coercive containment directed against the Saddam
Hussein regime found expression in a never-ending sequence of feints,
demonstrations and punitive air strikes, reinforcements for draconian
economic sanctions. The decade also included a host of lesser inter-
ventions, beginning in 1992 with Somalia and culminating in 1999
with Kosovo, all euphemistically referred to as military operations
other than war.

Meanwhile, Big Thinkers vied with one another to divine the implica-
tions of the Cold Wars passing. They announced the end of history,
proclaimed the arrival of a unipolar moment, worried about the com-
ing anarchy, warned of a clash of civilizations and found hope in the
prospects of globalization creating a fast, flat, wide-open and wealth-
generating world. In Washington, consensus reigned on one point only:
having gained unprecedented and unquestioned military supremacy,
the United States needed to preserve it. How best to maximize the
benefits of us military pre-eminence became a point of considerable
disagreement. One view, found in a 1992 draft of the Defense Planning
Guidance, advocated unambiguous and unapologetic us global domin-
ion. A second view, styled as assertive multilateralism or humanitarian
interventionism, sought to put American military might to work on
behalf of others. In effect, the Wohlstetter School fashioned a third posi-
tion bridging the differences between the two: activism on behalf of
others to legitimate and sustain us global hegemony.

27
A. Wohlstetter, The Delicate Balance, p. 188.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 119

The long Balkan crisis, unfolding in fits and starts throughout the 1990s,
provided the occasion for members of the Wohlstetter School to refine
this third view. Here, it seemed, was a made-to-order chance to employ
American power discriminately and for worthy ends. No one made
the case for doing so with greater conviction and passion than Albert
Wohlstetter himself. In the final years of his life, he published a string
of scathing opinion pieces denouncing the Wests fumbling reaction to
horrific ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Europeans against Europeans
in the former Yugoslavia. For decades, Wohlstetter had mocked any-
one not sharing his view that nuclear deterrence was a complicated and
problematic business. Now he mocked anyone who worried that using
high-tech weapons might prove complicated and problematic.

The stakes, Wohlstetter insisted, could hardly be higher. The collapse

of Communism had not eased the threats facing the United States; it
had heightened them. To find reassurance in the fact that the canonical
attacka Warsaw Pact assault on nato, escalating into all-out nuclear
warfarewas not going to happen reflected a fundamental misunder-
standing of what the Cold War had been about in the first place. That
apocalyptic dangerif it ever existedhad dwindled to a negligible
likelihood more than three decades ago, Wohlstetter now announced.
At the very moment when his Delicate Balance was winning acclaim as
the latest in cutting-edge thinking, threatening an unrestrained nuclear
war against populations had already become plainly a loony alternative.
The real concern even in the 1960s, it now turned out, had never been
a nuclear holocaust; it was the prospect of disorder in places like the
flanks of Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the trans-Caucasus,
and Central and Northern Asia. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia,
disorder was now in full flood, signifying in Wohlstetters estimation
the total collapse of us policy in the critical Gulf region.28

The us and European response to the Balkan crisiswhich Wohlstetter

described as craven, shameless, a bloody farce, a grim farce, a
grim charade, gyrating indecisions and political apologetics for doing
nothinghad the effect of spreading pan-nationalism and genocide,
thereby allowing brutal dictatorships [to] hide plans and programmes
for mass terror against countries near and far. Overall, Wohlstetter
fulminated, it amounted to the worst performance of the democracies

A. Wohlstetter, The Cold War Is Over and Over and . . . , Wall Street Journal, 1
28

October 1996.
 120 nlr 69

since World War Two, even exceed[ing] the nightmares of Vietnam.29

Furthermore, Washingtons hand-wringing and hesitation were
completely unnecessary since the United States had readily at hand the
means required to settle the Balkan crisis forthwithand, by extension,
to dispatch any other neer-do-wells. Throughout history, war had been
costly, hard and fraught with uncertainty. No more. At the end of a career
spent poking holes in erstwhile simple solutions, Albert Wohlstetter had
latched onto his own simple solution: war remadeindeed perfected
by advanced information technology.

Legacies

By the time of Albert Wohlstetters death in 1997, precepts he had pro-

moted for decades permeated the ranks of the American national-security
establishment. Above all, his enthusiasm for precise, discriminate force
as the basis of a new American way of war, imparting an expanded offen-
sive potential to us defence policy, had come to enjoy wide circulation. Yet
opening the ranks of the Wohlstetter School to include the riff-raffthe
functionaries, elected and unelected, military and civilian, who translate
theory into practicecame at a cost. Wohlstetters ideas enjoyed wide
dissemination but in a corrupt or vulgar form. The term that populariz-
ers coined to describe this new way of war, touted as a sure-fire recipe for
security, was Revolution in Military Affairs. During its brief heyday, the
rma gave birth to various offspring, almost all of them illegitimate. Two
of these deserve attention here, since they played a significant role in
creating the immediate climate from which the Bush Doctrine emerged.
Both were products of the Clinton era. The first was full-spectrum dom-
inance, a concept unveiled in Joint Vision 2010, a Pentagon document
drafted in the mid-1990s. Joint Vision 2010 stands in relation to the rma
as Tom Friedmans The Lexus and the Olive Tree stands in relation to
globalization: it is an infomercialmarketing disguised as elucidation.
To read jv 2010 is to learn how dominant battlespace awareness will
enable us commanders to sense dangers sooner and make better deci-
sions more rapidly, while employing weapons possessing an order of

29
A. Wohlstetter, Genocide by Embargo, wsj, 9 May 1994; Creating a Greater
Serbia, New Republic, 1 August 1994, p. 22; Relentless Diplomacy and Mass
Murder, wsj, 5 September 1995; Why Were In ItStill, wsj, 1 July 1993; Chiracs
Challenge on Bosnia, wsj, 20 July 1995; Inferior un or Superior Coalition Force?
wsj, 3 May 1995; The Cold War Is Over; The Balkan Quagmire: The Way Out,
wsj, 2 July 1993.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 121

magnitude improvement in lethality, all of this making us forces per-

suasive in peace, decisive in war, pre-eminent in any form of conflict.30

Full-spectrum dominance was not some wild notion concocted by a

technology-besotted general staff. It bore the imprimatur of official pol-
icy and won the full approval of senior civilian leaders. The information
revolution, a confident Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared
in 1997, is creating a revolution in military affairs that will fundamen-
tally change the way us forces fight. We must exploit these and other
technologies to dominate in battle. Our template for seizing on these
technologies and ensuring military dominance is Joint Vision 2010. The
rma, wrote Secretary Cohen, was providing us forces with superior
battlespace awareness, permitting them to dramatically reduce the fog
of war.31 Or as the 1999 edition of the Clinton administrations national
security strategy put it, Exploiting the revolution in military affairs is
fundamental if us forces are to retain their dominance in an uncertain
world. Leveraging the rmas technological, doctrinal, operational and
organizational innovations promised to give us forces greater capabili-
ties and flexibility.32 Implicit in all of these references to dominance was
an assumption about risk, that perennial bugaboo of the Wohlstetter
School: the application of information technology to war was drastically
curtailing it. As technology produced clarity, barriers to action were fall-
ing away; available options were increasing.

To what use would these dominant capabilities be put? Here we come

to the rmas second bastard child, captured in a single seemingly
innocuous word: shaping. Put simply, the rma created expectations of
sculpting the international order to suit American preferences. Shape,
respond, prepare: this was the slogan devised by the Clinton White
House to describe the essence of post-Cold War us strategy. By limit-
ing the actionable options available to would-be adversaries, American
military pre-eminence would leave them with little alternative except to
conform to Washingtons wishes. If nothing else, shaping promised
institutional relevance. In 1998, with major land wars nowhere to be
seen, the us military was climbing aboard the bandwagon. In support
of our National Security Strategy, the Secretary of the Army wrote in

30
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010.
31
William S. Cohen, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Joint Forces
Quarterly, Summer 1997, pp. 9, 11.
32
White House, A National Security Strategy for a New Century, December 1999, p. 21.
 122 nlr 69

his annual report, Americas Army shapes the international environ-

ment in ways favourable for our nation. By promoting democracy and
stability around the world, the Army reduces threats the nation could
face in the next century.33

This concept found favour even among neoconservatives, who other

wise disdained Clintons approach to policy. In its founding statement of
principles, the soon-to-be-famous Project for a New American Century
put it this way: The history of the 20th century should have taught us
that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to
meet threats before they become dire.34 Nor were civilians alone sus-
ceptible to these expectations. Senior military officers quickly bought in.
Shaping means creating a security setting such that it is unnecessary
to fight to protect ones interests, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained approvingly in a 1997 address at Harvard.
We shape the strategic environment, wrote General John Shalikashvili,
another jcs chairman, with forward presence, combined exercises,
security assistance, and a host of other programmes, thereby helping
to defuse potential conflict.35 Just as any cheap knock-off pays tribute to
the original, Washingtons enthusiasm for full-spectrum dominance and
shaping in the interval between the Cold War and the War on Terror
represented a sort of unacknowledgedperhaps even unconscious
homage to the Wohlstetter School during the Clinton era. Shaping
offered a soft-power approach to anticipatory action specifically intended
to reduce risk. If implying the exercise of quasi-imperial prerogatives, it
also promised to avoid, or at least minimize, the unseemliness of bombs
and bloodshed. After all, given the existence of full-spectrum domi-
nance, resistance to Washingtons dictates and desires would qualify as
foolhardy in the extreme.

Yet during the 1990s us efforts to shape the Middle East yielded
results other than those intended. Rather than reducing risk, forward
presence, combined exercises, security assistance and the related pro-
grammes touted by General Shalikashvili enflamed anti-Americanism
and played into the hands of those intent on waging violent jihad against

33
Report of the Secretary of the Army, Annual Report to the President and the
Congress, Department of Defense 1998.
34
Project for a New American Century, Statement of Principles, 3 June 1997.
35
A Word from the Chairman, Joint Force Quarterly, Summer 1997, p. 4.
 bacevich: Wohlstetter 123

the United States. A series of attacks on us forces and installations,

targeting the us barracks at Khobar Towers in 1996, us embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the destroyer uss Cole in 2000, told
the tale. Even before 9/11, the changing of the guard in Washington had
brought to power men fully imbued with the tenets of the Wohlstetter
School and persuaded that the Clinton approach to shaping had been
too tentative and diffident. For Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz the
events of September 11, showing that the United States was as vulner-
able to surprise as it had been back in December 1941, elicited not
second thoughts but a determination to up the ante.36 The exercise of
imperial prerogatives was going to entail bombs and bloodshed after
allprecise, discriminate force actually employed, rather than merely
held in reserve; Washington seizing opportunities to eradicate danger,
rather than merely trying to manage it, and surprising others, rather
than passively waiting to be surprised. In one form or another, these
ideas had been circulating for decades. George W. Bush now invested
them with the force of policy.

The sorry tale of all that subsequently ensued need not be retold here.
Bush and his advisers wasted little time in identifying Saddam Husseins
Iraq as the venue in which to give Americas new doctrine of preventive
war a trial run. Those making the case for war did so by resurrecting
old chestnuts lifted from the Wohlstetter tradition. The nation was once
again in deepest peril, Saddam posing a threat that was both global and
existential. Contemplating Americas plight, the President and mem-
bers of his inner circle assessed the risk of action to be smaller than
the risk of inaction, Wolfowitz explained.37 Benefiting from the close
supervision of Donald Rumsfeld, planning for the invasion of Iraq put
a premium on the use of precision force. Here was an occasion to use
American power discriminately and for worthy ends.

The Iraq War began with high hopes of shock and awe, as journalists
and some enthusiastic analysts called it, producing an easy victory. Here,
Richard Perle declared, was the first war thats been fought in a way
that would recognize Alberts vision of future wars. Operation Iraqi

36
In explaining how the United States had been caught unawares on September
11, 2001, the 9/11 Commission made favourable allusions to Roberta Wohlstetters
book on Pearl Harbor. Once again, past us policies escaped examination.
37
Paul Wolfowitz, Remarks at the International Institute for Strategic Studies,
2 December 2002.
 124 nlr 69

Freedom reflected an implementation of his strategy and his vision.38

In many respects, the wars opening phases seemed to validate all that
the Wohlstetter School as a whole stood for. Yet only briefly: the real Iraq
Warthe conflict that began when Baghdad fellleft the Wohlstetter
vision in tatters. An admirer once described Albert Wohlstetter as the
tailor who sought to clothe the emperor.39 In a case of history mimick-
ing fable, the raiment adorning the Emperor Bush turned out to be a
figment of imagination. Still, there remained this: the prior assurances
of Kennedy and Reagan notwithstanding, starting wars now formed the
very cornerstone of us policy.

38
Quoted in Swidey, The Mind of the Administration, Boston Globe, 18 May 2003;
Perle dedicated his 2004 manifesto An End to Evil: How To Win the War on Terror
To the memory of my friend and mentor Albert Wohlstetter and the many dedi-
cated officials and thinkers he encouraged and inspired.
39
Stephen Lukasik, Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence, Nuclear
Heuristics, p. 514.
REVIEWS

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

Belknap: London and Cambridge, MA 2010, $27.95, hardback
352 pp, 978 0 674 04872 0

Robin Blackburn

RECLAIMING HUMAN RIGHTS

The discourse of human rights has become hegemonic in recent decades

and it is hardly surprising that a new field of scholarship has appeared,
dedicated to exploring how this happened. The history of human rights
has now generated a vast literature, identifying pioneers and theorists, trac-
ing influences and anatomizing legal practices. A central question here is
to determine the relation between Enlightenment doctrines of the Rights
of Manor, indeed, earlier conceptions of human universalism, from the
Stoics to the authors of the New Testamentand contemporary notions of
human rights: continuity or rupture? A further problem is historical: how
to explain the emergence and extraordinary predominance of human-rights
discourse in the second half of the 20th century? Samuel Moyns The Last
Utopia represents a trenchant intervention in these debates. Moyn stresses
the very recent emergence of human-rights discourse, disputing attempts
to root it in the early post-war world, let alone the 18th century. In his view,
the contemporary historiography of human rights has been compromised
by its celebratory attitude, a tendency to offer uplifting back stories and to
recast world history as raw material for the progressive ascent of interna-
tional human rights. The quest for ancestors has resulted in a teleological
approach such that any emancipatory movement in history is interpreted as
an anticipation of, and step towards, the discourse of human rights, much
as church history famously treated Judaism as a proto-Christian movement
simply confused about its true destiny. For Moyn, the history of human

126 new left review 69 may jun 2011

 blackburn: Human Rights 127

rights has been loth to acknowledge that the discourse is only one appealing
ideology among others.

review
The Last Utopia is particularly scathing about attempts to recruit the
Rights of Man proclaimed by American and French revolutionaries as
precursors of human rights: the former were aimed at state construction,
while the specifically modern discourse of human rights is a critique of
state repressionanother conception altogether. As Moyn puts it: Of all
the glaring confusions in the search for precursors of human rights, one
must have pride of place. Far from being sources of appeal that transcended
state and nation, the rights asserted in early-modern revolutions and cham-
pioned thereafter were central to the construction of state and nation, and
led nowhere beyond until very recently. It is anachronistic, he argues, to
attribute modern notions of human rights to anyone in the 18th century,
even when we find the termwhich is not that often. The more common
expression was rights of man or occasionally rights of humanity (the latter
notably occurs in the opening pages of Lawrence Sternes Tristram Shandy).
In the case of the American Declaration of Independence, for example, the
claim is for the right to self-determination of a whole people and not for
individual rights, except in so far as the latter arose in the context of found-
ing a new state. (This helps to explain both how slaveholders could appeal to
unalienable rights and why there were such modest anti-slavery results
and such blatant disregard for the native peoplesfrom the leaders of the
Independence struggle.)
Moyn also pours cold water on what might be called the Ignatieff School,
which sees human rights as an old ideal that finally came into its own as a
response to the Holocaustthe most universally repeated myth about their
origins. This is the view that has underwritten the ideological ascendancy of
human rights since the 1990s:

It became commonplace to assume that, ever since their birth in a moment

of post-Holocaust wisdom, human rights embedded themselves slowly but
steadily in human consciousness in what amounted to a revolution of moral
concern. In a euphoric mood, many people believed that secure moral guid-
ance, born out of shock about the Holocaust and nearly incontestable in its
premises, was on the verge of displacing interest and power as the founda-
tion of international society.

Moyn shows, however, that though the 1948 un Declaration of Human

Rights was undoubtedly an important document, it did not in itself enshrine
the discourse as a hegemonic ideology: In real history, human rights were
peripheral to both wartime rhetoric and post-war reconstruction, not cen-
tral to their outcome. Contrary to conventional assumptions, there was no
widespread Holocaust consciousness in the post-war era, so human rights
 128 nlr 69

could not have been a response to it. Moyn argues that few directly cited the
1948 un Declaration in the subsequent couple of decades. Indeed the New
review

York Times barely mentioned the term human rights. The un itself arose
as a concert of great powers and a staunch defender of state sovereignty.
The struggles of the anti-colonial and Third World liberation movements
of the 1950s and 60s, he suggests, were for the self-determination of peo-
ples rather than for individual human rights, while the 68ers criticized
the Soviet bloc in the name of a better, purer communism. Campaigns
for human rights were largely restricted to Christian efforts on behalf of
co-religionists, especially in the Communist worldoutmoded, wordy
and hypocritical.
The Last Utopia makes a strong case for seeing 1977 as the breakthrough
year for human rights discourse. Ideologically, the doctrine served as a
replacement for those whose God had failed, whether that of socialism or
of Third World liberation in the era of the crisis of indebted post-colonial
states. The evidence here is largely French: Andr Glucksmanns The Master
Thinkers and Bernard-Henri Lvis Barbarism with a Human Face both
appeared in 1977. Organizationally, Amnesty International already offered a
model of local chapters campaigning for individual victims of persecution by
lighting candles and writing letters to governments to plead for their release.
Amnestys founders came from a Christian humanitarian background and
its first prisoners of conscience were fellow-believers in the Communist
bloc, but in the 1970s it began to take up the cases of torture victims in Latin
America. It opened a Washington office in 1976 and was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1977. But for Moyn the crucial catalyst is Carters champion-
ing of human rights as the basis for a new, anti-dtente us foreign policy in
his 1977 Inaugural Address: Our commitment to human rights must be
absolute. He demonstrates how the doctrine could unite both left and right
wings of the Democratic Party, yoking Carters born-again moralism to a
post-Watergate ethical renewal. Strategically, at the same time, it served to
launch a new ideological offensive against the Soviet Unioninternationally
isolated by the success of the NixonKissinger China policythat presaged
the start of what Fred Halliday would term the Second Cold War. Moyn
argues that it was the discourses combined function as substitute utopia
and superpower strategy that launched its hegemonic ascendancy.
It is the utopian element that Moyn appears to object to most: In and
through their emergence as the last utopia, after predecessors and rivals col-
lapsed . . . human rights were forced to take on the grand political mission
of providing a global framework for the achievement of freedom, identity
and prosperity. Moyn is wary of the increasingly ambitious agenda of rights.
He believes that: Instead of turning to history to monumentalize human
rights by rooting them deep in the past it is much better to acknowledge how
 blackburn: Human Rights 129

recent and contingent they really are. These reflections lead to a suggestion
that human rights have lost their way. Moyn believes that there may still be

review
time to get back on the right track: it may not be too late to wonder whether
the concept of human rights, and the movement around it, should restrict
themselves to offering minimal constraints on representative politics, not
a new form of maximal politics of their own. A more restricted role for
human-rights interventionsconfined simply to preventing catastrophes,
perhapswould make room for the contest of genuinely political visions
for the future.
The Last Utopia supplies a detailed, subtle and in many ways convincing
account of the human-rights surge. Moyns case for a 1970s turning-
point is a strong one and occupies the best chapters in the book. He rightly
warns that human-rights discourse can de-politicize and oversimplify.
In this respect his criticisms echo a famous argument made by Marcel
Gauchets 1980 essay, Les droits de lhomme ne sont pas une politique.
Moyns previous work has focused on French intellectual history: he has
written on Levinass ethics (Origins of the Other, 2005) and on Holocaust
awareness in France, and is the English-language editor and translator of
Pierre Rosanvallons Democracy Past and Future (2007). (Still in his thirties,
Moyn currently teaches European intellectual history at Columbia.) French
liberalism famously split over the function of human-rights discourse some
decades ago, when a more sober factionFranois Furet, Pierre Nora,
Rosanvallon, Gauchetdistanced itself from the ultra-liberalism of Bernard-
Henri Lvy and Daniel Lindenberg: not anti-state liberalism but a liberal
state was required. To some extent The Last Utopia may be seen as reprising,
for a post-Iraq era, moves made thirty years ago in Paris. Moyn would like to
see representative politics adopt radical measures aimed at overcoming the
yawning abyss in life chances, since massive inequalities will not vanish at
the waving of the wand of human rights. However, he does not give much
idea as to what politics might reasonably do to challenge global injustices
and global dangers.
There are important intellectual lacunae in Moyns account. He provides
a brisk account of the treatment of human rights in international law, but
has barely two lines on Myres McDougal, the militant Cold Warrior who
was a towering figure in the field, and scarcely a mention of Hans Kelsen,
universally acknowledged to be the global doyen of the discipline. More
importantly, the large philosophical literature discussing the intellectual
foundations of human rights is completely ignored. Bafflingly, Moyn offers
no assessment of what Carters human-rights policy actually consisted of,
confessing only that it may have been selective. Indeed: while Soviet dis-
sidents were lauded, there was no question of calling the Shah, Suharto,
Turkish generals or Saudi monarchs to account, and within short order the
 130 nlr 69

Carter Doctrine had dispatched the Rapid Deployment Force to the Persian
Gulf. But perhaps the most glaring absence of all is any discussion of the
review

history of the doctrine since the end of the Cold War or of its deployment,
from Clinton and Blair onwards, as a fig-leaf for Western war-mongering in
the name of humanitarian intervention.
This is a curious and damaging omission. During the 1990s, by any
reckoning the West presided over a human-rights disaster in former
Yugoslavianotwithstanding the fact that it had an enormously strong hand
to play, if its goal had been simply that of fostering democracy, safeguard-
ing the rights of minorities and harmonizing the aspirations of the different
republics and peoples of the Yugoslav federation. Despite its talk, the stra-
tegic goal of the Clinton White House was the expansion of nato and not
human rights. If accepted as a partner, the Russian government was patheti-
cally anxious to be of help, as I argued in these pages at the time. Determined
to exploit Moscows weakness to the hilt, it treated the csce and the Treaty of
Paris as mere scraps of paper. If the Russians had denied oil and munitions
to the Serbian forces, and if funds had been available to the federal Yugoslav
authorities, Milosevic could have been first halted and then removed by
domestic opponentsas eventually happened, but only after hundreds
of thousands of deaths and the ethnic cleansing of millions. There is, of
course, room for argument over details but the key point is that the West,
notwithstanding its clamour about human rights, did not seriously attempt
the peaceful regulation of the Yugoslav break-up by means of the established
treaty. Moyns iconoclastic challenge to pious myths in the early chapters is
abandoned when he comes to the sorry latter-day adventures of hrd.
But the abuse of human rights for great-power ends need not necessarily
disqualify them as emancipatory tools. Here Moyns minimal programme
of preventing, say, physical harm, would leave unchecked the global forces
making for huge inequality and a planet of slumsforces which stunt the
lives of hundreds of millions of the wretched of the earth. A different sort
of problem is raised by The Last Utopias hostility to precursors. Moyn cites
Marc Blochs warning to historians about idolizing originsbelieving that
the trickle of melted snow must be the only source for the downstream flood
of the mighty river, which may depend on new, unseen sources, joining the
river where it swells. But his insistent denial of any and all antecedents is
exaggerated and wrong. (As for Bloch, his own intense interest in Feudal
Society in the waning of medieval slavery, and its bearing on later liberties,
surely proves that he was far from proscribing all interest in antecedents.)
The historical record simply does not bear out Moyns claim that 18th-century
appeals to natural rights led nowhere. The process by which, for example,
some abolitionists and slave rebels came to make such appeals was highly
complex and contingent but no less momentous for that. Abolitionists drew
 blackburn: Human Rights 131

on slave witness and a few reached out to slave rebels. Together they inspired
social movements of great illocutionary power and momentous acts of slave

review
emancipation. There were certainly close links between state formation and
nationalism, on the one hand, and slave emancipation on the other. But
if abolitionism was often aligned with state interests it also enjoyed some
autonomy as a social movement. In Britain in the 1780s or 1830s, or the
United States in the 1830s and after, or in France in the 1840s, radical aboli-
tionism sought to challenge and change the state. In a famous phrase William
Lloyd Garrison, the anti-slavery veteran, denounced the us Constitution as
a Pact with the Devil and Covenant with Hell. The international scope of
abolitionism also pointed to the emergence of new mentalities.
We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the
first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second
is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunts Inventing
Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective rights as a product of
the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifica-
tions encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and
sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with human
rights as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments
of the philosopherswith Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on
both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty,
the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in
the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized
oppression. The golden ruledo unto others as you would have them do
to youacquired new dimensions in the realm of print culture, autobiog-
raphy as well as novels. The reader could be invited to identify with those
unlike themselves. The very modesty of Laurence Sternes poor negro girl
in Tristram Shandy, who brushes aside flies with a feather rather than kill
them, takes the reader off guard. The Corporal asks (doubtingly) if the
negro has a soul? to which Uncle Toby replies: I am not much versed in
things of that kind; but I suppose God would not leave him without one,
any more than thee or me.It would be putting one sadly ahead of another,
quoth the Corporal. The Corporal then asks whether a black wench is to be
used worse than a white one? When Uncle Toby says he can see no reason
why, the Corporal replies that she had no one to stand up for her. Uncle
Toby responds: Tis that very thing . . . that recommends her to protection
and her brethren with her: tis the fortune of war which has put the whip
into our hands nowwhere it may be hereafter who knows.
Moyn is right to criticize modern rights-centred accounts which encour-
age church history and a search for saints, but these are not the only
ways to plot influences and contrasts. It was not necessarily easy to control
and segregate the talk of rights in the Age of Revolution. Those who went
 132 nlr 69

beyond the rhetoric of liberty to challenge racial enslavement, for example,

could not help coming into conflict with states enriched by Atlantic com-
review

merce. Thus the first writer to issue an unequivocal denunciation of slavery

was George Wallace in a chapter devoted to the question in his book A
System of the Principles of the Laws of Scotland in 1760. It is worth quoting as
it clearly affirms an individual right. Wallace bluntly asserted that men and
their liberty are not in commercio. He insisted:

For these reasons every one of those unfortunate men who are pretended
to be slaves, has a right to be declared free for he never lost his liberty, he
could not lose it, his prince had no power to dispose of him. Of course the
sale was ipso jure void. This right he carries around with him and is entitled
everywhere to get it declared. As soon, therefore, as he comes into a country
where the judges are not forgetful of their own humanity it is their duty to
remember that he is a man and to declare him free.

I suggest that this is the first clear statement that Atlantic slavery was incom-
patible with what could surely be described as a human right, or of what
Ted Honderich calls the principle of humanity. Wallace explicitly elaborates
that it is intolerable to abuse mankind that our pockets may be filled with
money or our mouths with delicates. He declares private property to be the
bane of human felicity. His chapter on slavery achieved wide currency. It
was reprinted in several editions in a collection published by the Quaker and
abolitionist pioneer Anthony Benezet. It also served as the basis for the entry
under slavery in the French Encyclopdie.
The abolitionist case also required an ability to foster a sense of respon-
sibility amongst its hearers and readers for actions taking place out of sight,
indeed thousands of miles away. Then as now complex commercial relations
obscured such responsibility, or distributed it so broadly as to counsel resig-
nation and passivity. Abolitionists had to make a case that such an apparently
innocent and peaceful act as shopping was laden with moral implications
and linked to the violence of the slave traffic, and the remorseless driving of
the slave gangs. These linesby the seventeen-year-old Mary Birkettare
from a 1792 poem addressed to her own sex, which asks Shall for us the
sable sufferers sigh? / Say, shall for us so many victims die?:

Say not that smalls the sphere in which we move,

And our attempts would vain and fruitless prove;
Not sowe hold a most important share,
In all the evilsall the wrong they bear.

Moyn denies that the Haitian revolutionaries were animated by a concern

for human rights, and tries to buttress his claim by drawing on what he takes
to be the more hard-headed approach of C. L. R. James in his Black Jacobins:
 blackburn: Human Rights 133

James did not think of presenting Toussaint LOuverture and his confeder-
ates as human-rights activists before their time. A Trotskyist, James view

review
of droits de lhomme, instead, seems to have been as the wordy promises of
eloquent phrase makers who, driven by the true economic motor of history
to perorate, were in the end only willing to give up the aristocracy of the skin
at the point of the gun.

James was certainly scathing about those who prated about the rights
of man while upholding a vicious slave system. But he was neither a cynic
nor a reductionist, wedded to the true economic motor of history. James
acknowledged the power of revolutionary ideals and noted that Toussaint
invoked liberty and equality in his declaration of 29 August, 1793. Likewise
James stressed the huge importance of the moral factor. It was the colonial
question which demoralized the Constituent Assembly, James insisted. To
avoid giving the Mulattoes the Rights of Man they had to descend to low
dodges and crooked negotiations that destroyed their revolutionary integrity.
We should recall that Toussaint LOuverture won his most important victories
over Britain, Spain and the French royalists as a Republican general.
Charting the changes in slave mentalities at a time of revolution is very
difficult. We have to dig beneath ready-made notionswhether of purely
heroic rebels or of implacable caste hatredsto bring to light the forging
of new identities and new ideals. The Haitian Revolution appealed power-
fully to the Romantic imagination, but understanding it is not helped by
the seductive and romantic notion that slaves were bound to rebel, bound
to champion a general emancipation and bound to triumph (or to fail). It is
important to note that the slave community had a reality, notwithstanding
the hierarchy and heterogeneity within it between Creoles and the African-
born, or between different African nations. The racialized structure of
exploitation fostered a countervailing solidarity, since only those of African
descent were enslaved. The Kryole saying tou moun se moun, everyone is a
person, perhaps echoed the African notion of ubuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
a person is a person through other people. This was a connection reiterated
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected President of Haiti over-
thrown by a Franco-American coup in 2004, in his introduction to a new
collection of Toussaint LOuvertures writings, The Haitian Revolution.
I readily grant that modern human-rights doctrines belong to a different
world to that inhabited by the revolutionaries of the 1790s; but putting it the
other way round, considering anti-slaverys impact on modern political cul-
ture, and the diverse attempts to appropriate the abolitionist legacy, is another
matter. Claims for rights were often distorted. But they were also sometimes
radicalized in the course of the struggle and as a consequence of their bid to
capture the popular wave. Not infrequently the claimants themselves came
up with improved formulations and more precise and relevant demands.
 134 nlr 69

In the 1860s, African American congresses in New York, South Carolina

and Louisiana issued Declarations of Rights and Wrongs and demands
review

for public rightsequal access to public transportation and accommoda-

tion. There is a living tradition here that cannot be artificially arrested at
some privileged moment. The problem with Moyns re-reading is that it
overstresses one important conjuncturethe 1970sand plays down any
sense of a longer history of rights, both before and after his magic moment.
Thus Moyn argues that few directly cited the 1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in the twenty years that followed its adoption by the un;
during this period, the New York Times barely mentioned human rights. Yet
the Non-Aligned Movement formally adopted the Universal Declaration at
its meetings in Bandung and Lusaka.
The Declaration had far-reaching significance because it defined the
meaning of the defeat of fascism and, by incorporating significant social
and economic rights, summarized the results of nearly a century of labour
struggles. Anti-racist movements in South Africa and the United States also
rightly claimed its mantle. The framers of the un Declaration in the late
1940s were certainly aware of the terrible carnage that had wiped out some
seventy million human beings; they were offering a response to the wide-
spread aspiration for a world without the terrible ravages that had just been
experienced, and without the distempers and depression that had produced
the War in the first place. Roosevelts Four Freedoms included freedom
from fear, one with a particular relevance to African-Americans living
in the Southern Jim Crow regime. Many of the social rights in the 1948
Declaration echoed the Soviet Constitution of 1936drafted, it should be
noted, by Bukharin, not Stalin, as a widespread myth has it. The Declaration
reflected, rather than created, the longing for an attainable utopia. One of
the impulses that led to its drafting was an Appeal to the World from the
us National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (naacp),
written in part by W. E. B. DuBois, and whichas Moyn is obliged to note
presented African American subordination as a human-rights violation.
(Carol Andersons outstanding book, Eyes Off the Prize, helps to fill out this
narrative.) The Appeal to the World was formally submitted to the un in
October 1947; Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the naacp, was apparently
alarmed at the possibility that the Soviet delegation would use it against
the us government.
DuBois saw the anti-colonial agenda and the demand for African-
American equality and freedom as allied and mutually supportive:
African-Americans would step up their support for decolonization and the
appearance of new African and Asian states wouldin the climate of incipi-
ent Cold War rivalryincrease pressure on the us government to guarantee
African-Americans the enjoyment of rights they had been so long denied.
 blackburn: Human Rights 135

Though DuBois himself would be driven out of the naacp by a right-wing

campaign, the implicit alignment between movements to end white rule in

review
Africa and movements to end Jim Crow in the us was clear enough. The
human rights idea was taken up in different ways by the South African
Freedom Charter, Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr, the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the 1968 Olympic Project for
Human Rights. Moyn apparently does not regard the anti-racialist compo-
nent of much anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism as a dimension of the
human rights packagewrongly, in my view. The struggle against apart-
heid South Africa was an icon of the anti-imperialist movement and surely
had an absolute claim to the banner of human rights.
Moyns scanty coveragebarely a paragraphof the internationalist
left in the 1960s and 70s is equally cloth-eared. He writes of the Bertrand
Russell War Crimes Tribunals, these versions of internationalism were a
world away from the human-rights movement soon to form. Quite why
the Russell Tribunal could be denied any concern with human rights is not
clear. One of its members, Jean-Paul Sartre, declared in this journal that its
deliberations were animated by a certain idea of human life. Its initial aim
was to apply the Nuremberg and Geneva norms to us conduct in Indochina
and to publicize the associated crimes against humanity. At the initiative of
some Latin American leftists, a further Russell Tribunal was established in
the 1970s to investigate and document violations by dictatorships in Latin
America, with its death squads and disappeared ones. While many involved
in the Tribunal had anti-capitalist commitments not shared by many later
human-rights movements, their abhorrence of arbitrary state repression,
wherever found, was not a world away.
For Moyn, the 1960s and early 70s were an age prior to human rights, in
which the romance of third-world revolution and, where necessary, guerrilla
warfare provides the starkest counterpoint to later human-rights activism.
In fact, that period witnessed a proliferation of movements that helped
dramatically to widen notions of human rights: womens liberation, gay
liberation, the hopes for socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia,
the overthrow of dictatorship in Portugal and Spain, the European surge
of trade-union mobilizations. Rgis Debrays pamphlet Revolution in the
Revolution, to which Moyn refers, was not breathlessly consumed but criti-
cally debated. A striking passage in one of Debrays essays insisted that the
death of an enemy soldier was no less a human tragedy than the loss of a
revolutionary fighter, for the tragedy is that we do not kill objects, num-
bers, abstract or interchangeable instruments, but, precisely, on both sides,
irreplaceable individuals, essentially innocent, unique for those who have
loved them, bred, esteemed themIt is not individuals who are placed
face-to-face in the battles, but class interests and ideas. Yet those who fall in
 136 nlr 69

them, those who die, are men, are persons. We cannot avoid this contradic-
tion, escape this pain.
review

The Latin American leftist guerrillas were suppressed with great brutal-
ity in one country after another from the mid-60s onwards. From Kennedy
to Carter, Washington turned a blind eye to death squads, or even connived
at their activities. Within the guerrilla movements an internal critique
emerged, to which Debray contributed with his 1974 Critique des armes.
The memoir of an indigenous Guatemalan woman, I, Rigoberta Menchu,
edited by Elizabeth Burgos Debray, exposed the horrendous slaughter and
showed that the defence of human rights was a critical terrain if the leftist
movements were to regain the initiative against a string of Latin American
dictatorships. The book helped to inspire a momentous reorientation and
resurgence. This would not be news to Moyn, who has a disconcerting ten-
dency to modify his argument as it proceeds. After consigning the Russell
Tribunals Southern Cone war hearings, with their crucial Latin American
participation, to another world from that of human rights, he calmly
announces: It was the decision of a sector of the Latin American left to
resist the regional repression in human-rights terms that helped to make
the fortune of the concept in that region and beyond.
I have already noted Moyns evasion of the problem posed by the latter-day
militarist and imperialist instrumentalization of human-rights discourse by
Washington and its alliesthose who would impose freedom and democ-
racy from 30,000 feet. Yet for an internationalist left, this remains a central
question. I would argue that human rights cannot be written off just for
that reason. Just as the rights of man or abolitionist demands were some-
times misappropriated in past centuries, so humanitarianism has all too
often been adopted as cover for post-Cold War militarism in recent times.
It is necessary to disentangle the different uses of human rightsand to
register that cynical attempts to exploit its language are likely to backfire.
If the discourse of human rights had never been more than diplomatic jar-
gon, it would not have become hegemonic; and if it does end up being no
more than such a jargon, it will have lost its hegemony. In practice, the
language of rights is used to attract and maintain a following. Those who
wage imperial wars in its name are adopting a risky strategy that can blow
up in their faces. Equally obviously, movements of protest against torture,
arbitrary arrest, imprisonment are desperately needed in many parts of the
world. Those attacking the us or British governments for rendition and the
torture of suspects, or those claiming labour rights in China, find succour
in human-rights language even if they would also need to reach beyond it.
We need to deepen our notion of human injury so that it can regis-
ter, for example, the myriad of tiny, innocent decisions or actions which
reproduce global deprivation and environmental degradation. We need to
 blackburn: Human Rights 137

recall the human-rights implications of Western governments brisk sales

of devastating weaponry to repressive regimes. What counts as a human

review
right is not completely malleable but must prove itself, not just at one
time and in one place but across a range of different contexts; this being
an important reason why the evidence of history matters. Social and eco-
nomic demands with a progressive characterthe right to work, pensions,
basic income, minimum wages, shorter working week, universal heathcare
etc.can sometimes be advanced using the language of rights, even if over
the past twenty years hrd has more often been tethered to the liberal-
imperial masthead. Conditions could change, and efforts to bring out the
anti-militarist and socially egalitarian potential of respect for human rights,
without quote marks or abbreviation, deserve support.
Marxism has sometimes been seen as exalting the workers and toil-
ers, and thus rejecting any humanist claptrap. But Marxs adherence to the
necessity of class struggle did not prevent him from arguing that capitalism
was frustrating the full development of humanitys species being. Without
essentializing or idealizing the human, he and Engels concluded the
Communist Manifesto by declaring that their goal was an association in which
the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all. This lucid and innovatory goal evokes an as yet unattained standard. The
Manifesto insisted that it was necessary first to win the battle for democracy,
rights of organization, public debate and representation; points reiterated in
the International Workingmens Association addresses, as drafted by Marx.
Pointing this out does not mean that Marx always gave as much attention as
ideally he should have to the specific situation of women, farmers, shanty-
town dwellers, the wageless or the low waged precariat. But it does suggest
that there is conceptual room within the Marxist schema of social relations
for categories that refer to the human species as a whole. The requirements
of human flourishing have certain material and ideal components and these
furnish an anthropological basis for the notion of human rights and popu-
lar recognition of this fact helps to give rights claims their traction. What
does, or might, constitute the truly human is not already given but is a
work in progress and will be shaped by the sort of dialogue that led to slave
emancipation and the post-emancipation struggles. Thus feminists have felt
the need to insist that womens rights are human rights. And in some situ-
ations even the denunciations of human rights may contribute to a clearer
view of human progress.
The legacy of past struggles remains itself a resource in combating new
oppressions and destructions. It should not be approached in the spirit of
church history nor with the goal of monumentalizing the past. And the
ambition must be neither maximalist nor minimalist but rather adequate
to the scope of the problems humanity faces. Human rights can serve
 138 nlr 69

as a valuable watchword and measure. But because inequality and injus-

tice are structural, constituted by multiple intersecting planes of capitalist
review

accumulation and realization, more needs to be saidespecially in relation

to financial and corporate power and how these might be curbed and social-
ized. The plight of billions can be represented as a lack of effective rights,
but it is the property questionthe fact that the world is owned by a tiny
elite of expropriatorsthat is constitutive of that plight. The slogan of rights
takes us some way along the path; but it alone cannot pose the property
question relevant to the 21st century.
 review
Franois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
Columbia University Press: New York 2010, 26, hardback
651 pp, 978 0 231 14560 2

Peter Osborne

GUATTAREUZE?

Philosophy invites and repels biography in equal measure. On the one

hand, it is identified with its most famous names in a way that would seem
anachronistic in other disciplines; on the other, the lives of philosophers
most often seem beside the point when it comes to understanding the
individuality of their thought. If social histories of philosophy tend towards
over-generalizing abstractions, personalizing ones are in danger of failing to
illuminate the work at all. Hence the somewhat perverse character of the fas-
cination with the lives of philosophers: the banality of the everyday acquires
an added poignancy when the narrated life so consistently disappoints
the search for the secret of the thought. This applies as much to engaged
philosophers (Heidegger, for examplea subject of intense biographical
scrutiny, for obvious political reasons) as it does to less engaged ones (Kant,
whose lifes charm resides, famously, in its metronomic uneventfulness). It
is hard, though, to dispel the intuition that there is some important connec-
tion between the life and the thought.
Nonetheless, attempts to use biography reflexively, in a philosophical
rather than a fictional manner, are hard to find. Apart from Wilhelm Diltheys
turn-of-the-century experiments in philosophical biography, seeking out the
spiritual core of a lifeThe Life of Schleiermacher, The Story of the Young
Hegelwhich shaped Heideggers early hermeneutics of facticity, Sartres
mid-twentieth-century tussles with existential biography (Baudelaire, Genet,
Flaubert) are more or less all we have. Of late, the thirst for philosophical
biography has had to make do with the cultural history of ideas: a life
reduced to a chronological succession of events, suitably contextualized,
interspersed with summaries of texts and quotations from correspondence

new left review 69 may jun 2011 139

 140 nlr 69

and interviews. The contextualization is necessarily collective, of course, and

it is there that the fabric of the story is woven. Philosophers who were active
review

on broader intellectual, cultural and political scenes obviously make better

conventional biographical subjects than the recluses that popular imagina-
tion prefers them to be.
The better-known French philosophers since the 1960s fit the bill well.
And in the wake of Yann Moulier-Boutangs life of Althusser (published in
the same year, 1992, as his subjects tortured and idiosyncratic autobiogra-
phy), several successful instances of the genre appeared: notably, Elisabeth
Roudinescos Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System
of Thought (1993; translation 1997) and the two Foucault biographies by
James Miller and David Macey (The Passion of Michel Foucault and The Lives
of Michel Foucault, respectively, both also 1993). Each displays a level of theo-
retical sophistication in the presentation of philosophical ideas one would
be unlikely to find in the biography of an Anglophone thinker. Recently, the
more collective standpoints of intellectual context and reception have come
to the fore, in Roudinescos Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre,
Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida (2005; translation 2008) and Franois
Cussets French Theory (the English expression is the title of the French edi-
tion): How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of
the United States (2003; translation 2008).
Franois Dosseauthor of the new crossed biography of the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his sometime co-author, the psychiatrist
and activist Flix Guattariwas a pioneer in this field with his two-volume
The History of Structuralism (199192; translation 1997). Dosse wrote about
structuralism some time after its decline. (In the French edition, the second
volume, 1967 the present, is subtitled Le chant du cygne, the swansong
punning on the first volumes Le champ du signe, the field of the sign, as
if the fall was predestined.) And he wrote about it with a knowing retro-
spection, facility and eye to the market that understandably irritated some
of those involved in the project. (In a 1995 paper, tienne Balibar dubbed
the book, truth be told, extremely mediocre.) Nonetheless, its combination
of journalistic method (interview), narrative (racy) and prose (limpid) was
highly effective as a means for the wider transmission of sometimes opaque
debatesthe hyper-formalism of the journal Cahiers pour lanalyse, in par-
ticular. In taking on Deleuze and Guattari, however, at what is probably the
peak of their influence internationally, Dosse is entering a different arena.
One British academic publisher (Edinburgh University Press) alone lists 33
books with Deleuze in the title in its Philosophy catalogue for 2011.
Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari: Intersecting Lives proceeds unencumbered
by any problems of reflexivity posed by writing the overlapping life-stories of
two thinkers whose work is so closely associated with the post-structuralist
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 141

dissolution of the concept of the subject, and who came increasingly to

focus on the concepts of life and subjectivation (the process of production

review
of a subject), respectively. This was no doubt a commercial decision, but it is
no less unsatisfactory for that. Dosse is not philosophically unknowingas
the high level of the prcis of Deleuzes major works demonstrates. The
decision is, however, indicative of the industrial manner in which he pre-
sents the results of some impressively bulging filing systems, containing
a huge amount of interview material, a significant amount of it borrowed.
(The 49 interviews conducted by the documentary-maker Virginie Linhart
for her aborted biography of Guattari contain the core of what is new in
the book.) Material is processed in a manner more impressive for its work
ethic than its literary effect; although this is itself a literary effect of sorts: the
simple reproduction of a genre, suspended between journalism and history.
This operation has not been improved by an uneven, occasionally comi-
cally awkward translation into English, and a chaotically incompetent job
of copy-editing. At what should surely be a narrative climax in the textthe
death of Deleuzewe are informed in a truly Pythonesque manner that he
had just defenestrated himself; where the French simply reads il vient de
se jeter par la fentre. In four of the chapters (2, 6, 7, 13), the endnote refer-
ences lose their moorings in the main text. Nonetheless, there is sufficient
material here, of a sufficiently interesting kind, sufficiently competently
processed, to make the book a significant point of reference. It mainly con-
cerns Guattari. If Intersecting Lives has an effect upon the field, it is likely
to be in its contribution to the emergent, second stage in the reception of
Deleuze-and-Guattari: Guattari studies, or what the philosopher ric Alliez
has called the GuattariDeleuze effect.
Following a brief overview of the relations between its protagonists, the
book is organized into three parts: Parallel Biographies, Intersecting Lives
and Surplices. Part I takes us swiftly through the two lives to the point
at which they first meet, in June 1969. Part II covers the main period of
their friendship and joint authorship, 196980, up to the publication of
A Thousand Plateaus. Surplices narrates the growing separation, the late
works, the final years and the posthumous explosion in its subjects inter-
national academic reception, up until 2007, the year Dosses book was
published in French. The material on Guattari culled from Linharts inter-
views is by some distance the most interesting. This is not only because his
work, in its independence from the joint authorship, is less well known and
still largely unexplored, but because, as an activist in a range of struggles,
Guattari was so much more connected to the events of his day than was
Deleuze. Indeed, it is hard to avoid reading Deleuzes account of the mys-
tery of a philosophers life, in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970; trans.
1980), as anything other than an autobiographical aspiration.
 142 nlr 69

Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery

of a philosophers life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues
review

humility, poverty, chastityand makes them serve ends completely his own,
extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact. He makes them the
expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious
means to another life, but rather the effects of philosophy itself. For there is
absolutely no other life for the philosopher.

However one judges the shifting balance in the influence upon Deleuze
of particular philosophers (Bergson and Spinoza, in particular), in his work
with Guattari, there is no doubt of the abiding centrality of Nietzsche to his
thought. From his 1962 book, Nietzsche and Philosophywhich prefigured
and in part precipitated the Nietzschean turn in French thought in the
late 1960sthis was the thinker to whom Deleuze stayed closest. Guattari,
one might say, gave him the connection to his times that he needed in
order to put his Nietzschean asceticism to full not very ascetic effect. For
his part, Deleuze gave Guattari the opportunity to participate, fleetingly, in
the mysteriousand, for Guattari, by no means unequivocally desirable
life of philosophy.
Born five years apart, Deleuze in 1925 and Guattari in 1930, the pair
were the precocious, reactive products of different kinds of conservative
petit-bourgeois family. Deleuzes father, Louis, was an engineer and sympa-
thizer of the far-right league of First World War veterans, the Croix-de-Feu.
He had his own small company in Paris (with a single employee), which
was forced to close during the 1930s, at which point he went to work for
another company making airplane fuselages. Dosse presents Gilless fam-
ily life as lived in the shadow of his elder brother Georges, upon whom his
parents doted. Studying at Saint-Cyr military school at the outbreak of the
War, Georges joined the Resistance, was captured and died en route to a
concentration camp. Georges was the hero; Gilles, parked for the early years
of the War in a boarding school in Brittany, the second child, the mediocre
son. Subsequently, Deleuze tirelessly denounced family ties and found the
mere mention of his childhood unbearable. In his senior lyce years, back in
Paris after the Armistice, Deleuzes intellectual brilliance was already recog-
nized, and by 194344, he was attending elite salons frequented by Bataille,
Caillois, Hyppolite, Klossowski, Kojve and Sartre. Deleuze studied philos-
ophy at the Sorbonne, and taught at a string of lycesAmiens, Orlans,
Louis-le-Grand in Parisbefore returning to the Sorbonne as a lecturer in
1957. He moved to the Universit de Lyon in 1964.
Guattarin Pierre-Flix, or little Pierre as he was called at home
was the third of three brothers in a family that moved around from Paris to
Monte Carlo, Epinay, the Orne, the Oise and back to Paris: first, in search
of sea air (Flixs father had been gassed in the Great War) and the casino
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 143

(he loved to gamble), then in pursuit of a succession of small businesses,

each of which failed in turn. Pierre-Flix was born among the angora rabbits

review
of Villeneuve-les-Sablons in Picardy. But the modernization of the textile
industry quickly led to the collapse of the traditional angora industry, and
the Guattaris were forced to eat their rabbits. Flixs father was Italian, from
Bologna; a member of Croix-de-Feu in the 1930s and a Gaullist during the
war. His motherto whom he later confessed to feeling constantly both
too close and too farwas Corsican. Guattaris precociousness was not
academic, but political. At the time of the Liberation, barely fourteen, he
started attending Communist Party meetings, and soon became a member,
even though temperamentally he was more of an anarchist. He found a
life outside the familyand discovered girlsin the network of post-war
youth hostels that were set up to organize student vacations. He also recon-
nected there with Fernand Oury, who was briefly his school teacher during
the War, and had been put in charge of recreational activities in the Student
Hostel organization. It was Fernands brother, Jean, the psychiatristwhom
Guattari first met at this timewho in 1953 founded the clinic at La Borde,
in the Loire Valley, with which Guattari would become most notoriously
associated; he would move there in 1955. It was also Jean Oury who per-
suaded Guattari to read Lacan, as early as 1951, when he was suffering from
the stultifying boredom of his studies in pharmacology.
Guattaris life is primarily a history of relationships, groups and events.
Deleuzes life is narrated as a series of texts, rendered by Dosse in conven-
tional academic summaries. And while the lives are lines, metaphorically
speaking, the intersections are points, or at best small areas, altogether more
difficult simply to narrate. Dosse deals with the problem, not reflectively,
but by overriding the biographical details he provides with stock narrative
tropes. The pattern is established at the outset, in a beginning that review-
ers have felt compelled simply to repeat (generally, unacknowledged) as if
it contained the truth of everything to follow. It goes like this: Deleuze, the
recognized philosopher, and Guattari, the militant psychoanalyst and
social scientist, inhabited such very different worlds that there was lit-
tle chance that they would ever meet. Their unlikely encounter thus had
something special about it, some magic connected to its contingency, out
of which an epic consequence was born. This is the theory of Deleuze
Guattari the surrealist object, akin to Lautramonts famous chance
encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an autopsy table (the
autopsy table of structuralism, perhaps). Except that the meetingwhich
took place in June 1969was not a chance one at all, but was brokered by a
mutual friend, Jean-Pierre Muyard, who happenedwonder of wonders
to cross these two supposedly separate worlds. Furthermore, we learn on
turning the page, this allegedly most unlikely of encounters had in fact been
 144 nlr 69

prepared by an exchange of letters between its two protagonists, over several

months, initiated by Guattari sending Deleuze some of his articles on Lacan;
review

having been inspired by Deleuzes 1969 book, The Logic of Sense. Deleuze
responded and the exchange continued, until by May Deleuze could write:
I also feel that weve become friends before meeting one another. So much
for the chance encounter.
This disparity between the imposition of a stock narrative and the con-
tent of the narrated materialthe latter directly contradicting the formeris
a relatively frequent occurrence. One effect is to scramble the chronology
of Dosses account, in order for it to appear in thematically self-contained
packages, making it at times extremely hard to reconstruct the sequence
of events. It is as if he has an established story to tell and a pile of often-
fascinating information to process and impart, and these are treated as two
quite separate tasks, to be performed without mediation. Indeed, it is one of
Dosses skills to more or less disappear from his text, as if he were a transpar-
ent medium for the expression of documentation and interview materials.
This has some advantagesthose of a modernist impersonalismbut it is
ultimately a dissembling device. For not only does the opening two-worlds
theory of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis in Paris in
the 1960s fall down flat, empirically, on page two, but it is the intrinsic entan-
glement of philosophy and psychoanalysis, and its political implications,
that the DeleuzeGuattari joint authorship was all about; as demonstrated
by the material Dosse himself presents.
Most people familiar only with the popular image of Guattari as a wild
(anti-)psychiatrist of the liberated positivity of desire will be surprised to
learn that prior to his encounter with Deleuze, Guattari had not merely read
but was a disciple of Lacan; indeed, he was the first person without medical
training to be permitted to take Lacans seminar, from late 1954 onwards.
Dosse relates the intriguing fact that Guattari was a disciple of Lacan as one
among myriad others; but almost everything revolves around it. Lacan is the
hinge of this story. One might even go so far as to say that Lacan is the and
in Deleuze and Guattari. And as readers of Deleuze will know, the and was
an important philosophical concept for Deleuze at precisely the moment of
his first encounter with Guattari, in The Logic of Sense, a book organized not
into chapters but series. At once conjunctive and a mark of disjunction (a
conjunctive disjunction), the and provides the syntax of the series. It is in
the meta-serial Sixth Series, On Serialization, that Lacans work first crops
up in The Logic of Sense. We find there a compelling account, first, of the idea
that the serial form is necessarily realized in the simultaneity of at least two
series, and second, of the idea that such series communicate by means of
an entity that is always in excess in relation to one series, and lacking in
relation to the other. In fact, Deleuze writes, there is no stranger element
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 145

than this double-headed thing, with two unequal or uneven halves, which
makes series possible. (This is something like a structural, ahistorical and

review
anti-dialectical version of Adornos famous torn halves of an integral free-
dom to which they do not add up.)
Deleuzes model for this analysis of the double-headed thing is Lacans
reading of Edgar Allan Poes The Purloined Letter, in which the missing let-
ter, hidden in plain sight, functions as the communicating element between
the two episodes in the story. (Deleuze is here reprising an analysis first
put forward in the Serial section of his 1967 essay How Do We Recognize
Structuralism?, itself not published until 1972.) Deleuze-and-Guattari, we
might say, is just such a strange double-headed thing: both lacking and in
excess on every occasion, in convergent series, in uneven measure. Dosse
cites the remarks Deleuze makes about the and in his 1976 Cahiers du
Cinma article on Godards Six Times Two at both the outset and the end of
Intersecting Lives, but he fails to make the connection to Lacan.
The role of Lacan in the Sixth Series of The Logic of Sense is sympto-
matic not only of the passing importance of Lacan to Deleuze, but of the
philosophical rationale of Deleuzes and Guattaris mutual interest in his
thought: its position at the limits of structuralism. Dosse rightly presents
Guattari as a motivating force behind the movement of Deleuzes thought
away from the ambivalent structuralism of The Logic of Sense. Guattaris idea
of a machine replaced the idea of structure and provided Deleuze with a pos-
sible way out of structuralism, something that he has already explored in The
Logic of Sense. Indeed, for Dosse, this is the crux of Guattaris importance
to Deleuze. However, he neglects the significance of Deleuzes 1967 essay,
in establishing the conditions for Deleuzes reception of Guattaris writings.
Oddly, while Dosses summary of the essay follows its division into a series
of formal criteria of recognition of structuralism, it unaccountably omits
the crucial seventh section, Final Criteria: From the Subject to Practice,
which narrates an immanent passage of structuralism beyond itself. These
are, Deleuze writes, the criteria of the future.
Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but
one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the iden-
tity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an
always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of
singularities, but pre-individual ones . . . Structuralism is not only insepara-
ble from the works that it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the
products that it interprets. Whether this practice is therapeutic or political, it
designates a point of permanent revolution, or of permanent transfer.

It was precisely this structuralist subject, and its relations to the permanent
transfers of a therapeutic and political structuralist practice, that Deleuze
needed Guattari to help him explore. The concept of the unconscious as a
 146 nlr 69

machine, from which their collaboration took offtaken by Guattari from

passing remarks in Lacans seminar of 195354was not simply an anti-
review

structuralist theoretical device; it carried with it the hopes of a practice of

permanent therapeutic and political revolution. Deleuze developed the idea
of such a practice via Guattari; Guattari was its problematic embodiment, as
well as co-author.
A militant political activist and a psychoanalyst just so happen to
meet in the same person, and instead of each minding his own business,
they ceaselessly communicate, interfere with one another, and get mixed
upeach mistaking himself for the other. So begins Deleuzes Preface to
Guattaris 1972 collection of essays Psychoanalyse et transversalit. This is
certainly more surprising than the meeting of a philosopher and a psy-
choanalyst from which Dosses narrative sets out. It provided the motor of
Guattaris thought, and also of its philosophical effects in his joint author-
ship with Deleuze. It was Guattaris political militancy that determined his
institutional practice, institutional psychotherapy, which in turn raised
a series of novel philosophical problems about subjectivity, desire and
the social. Arguably, it was Deleuzes distance from the sources of these
problemsthe screenwriter Alain Aptekman is quoted as claiming that
Deleuze couldnt bear the sight of crazy peoplehis philosophical appro-
priation of the ascetic virtues, that allowed him to elaborate them with
the clarity and theoretical radicality that he did, transforming Guattaris
designs or even diagrams into concepts. (The description is Deleuzes
own.). The working practice of the composition of Anti-Oedipus, between
August 1969 and August 1971, was that Deleuze obliged Guattari to write
each day, mailing him the results after four oclock, for Deleuze to rework.
They would then meet on Tuesday afternoons. This initial collaborative pro-
cedure has fed the myth of Guattari the idiot savant, which is far from the
truth, although he did suffer from a kind of writers block.
The intriguing tale of Guattaris psychopolitical itinerary, 19301964 is
essentially the story of his relations to successive forms of groupspolitical,
psychotherapeutic, intellectual and ultimately politico-psychotherapeutic:
from the French Communist Party to the Fourth International to the
Left Opposition; back-and-forth between the institutional analysis of the
psychiatric clinic, La Borde, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and on to his
own creations, the Federation of Institutional Study Groups and Research
(fgeri, 1965) and the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Training
(cerfi, 1967). Philosophically, up to the point of the encounter with Deleuze,
this was largely a journey from Sartre to Lacan, in which the concept of
the group-subject was formed, transformed and experimentally tested.
Guattari was notorious for continually forming and breaking up groups.
The direct application of Lacanian ideas in radical political organizations
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 147

had predictably unstable results. In cerfi, for example, we are told by one
participant, in the name of the refusal of the separation of public and private

review
lives and in line with the tenets of Lacanianism, you had to take responsibil-
ity for your desire by asking for the salary that you thought you could justify.
Experimental practices of collective reflexivitythat is, endless meetings
took up much of the time and energy of these groups.
If there is a discernible psycho-biographical narrative to Guattaris life, it
is that of a maternal fixation, the acknowledged fear of loving his mother, dis-
placed and dispersed onto multiple objects, in a sexual practice at one time
compulsorily generalized within the community at La Borde on the basis of
an egalitarian political rationalizationleaving behind a string of emotional
casualties. (At La Borde, Jean-Claude Polack is reported as taking on the self-
appointed task of breaking up monogamous relationships lasting more than
a week; before entering one himself and departing, with wife and child.) The
goal was a radical equality of rolespsychologists doing the dishes and por-
ters doing therapybut the method was militant centralism, in Guattaris
self-description. Guattaris charismatic authoritarianism in instituting these
practices of radical equality is a recurrent theme of Dosses narrative. The
attempt to abolish the division between mental and manual labour within a
psychiatric institution, in the present, took a heavy toll on everyone, but had
some dramatic therapeutic effects. It also had an important conceptual pro-
ductivity. The concept of transversality, a term coined by Ginette Michaud,
was the second theoretical innovation of Guattaris early work, along with
his notion of machine. It emerged in 1964 as an attempt to go beyond the
opposition between group-subjects and subjected-groups. Designed to
replace the notion of institutional transferthe institutional-therapeutic
version of Freudian transferenceand to designate the structure of a group
unconscious, transversality subsequently acquired a broader theoretical
meaning, in its application to the relations between disciplinary practices.
It structured the working methods of both fgeri and cerfi, with the latter
providing something like an experimental model of transdisciplinarity in the
humanities and social sciences. At its most successful, in the early 1970s,
cerfi was awarded several substantial government research contracts, in
the fields of urban planning, health and community development. By 1973
it had seventy-five full-time employees. (There is an interesting comparison
to be made here with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.) It also
enjoyed considerable publishing success. It was not uncommon for its jour-
nal, Recherches, to sell over 10,000 copies; the success of its books could be
measured in the hundreds of thousands. The material on cerfi is some of
the most interesting in Dosses book.
A second psycho-biographical narrative implicit in Dosses material
concerns Guattaris clearly Oedipal relation to Lacan, which was broken
 148 nlr 69

only by the relationship with Deleuze. Lacan appears in the now-familiar

guise of an abusive monster, behaving outrageously towards patients, as a
review

part of a deliberate, thinly rationalized analytical strategy. Guattari appears

as a complicit agent of Lacans mystique, making it a condition of working
at La Borde for some monitors that they enter into analysis with Lacan.
On the weekly train from the clinic to Lacans seminar and to his couch,
they practically filled an entire car. In Guattaris case, we are told, Lacan
would sometimes prolong the sessions (often only three or four minutes
long) by allowing Guattari to drive him home, pronouncing Thats part
of the analysis. More destructively, learning during therapy that Barthes
had asked Guattari to submit his paper Machine and Structure to the
journal Communications, Lacan insisted that he submit it instead to his
own journal, Scilicet. Guattari withdrew it from Communications, only
for Lacan to take it but never publish it. By this time, 1969, Lacan had
turned to his Maoist son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, as his anointed suc-
cessor, leaving Guattari, who had aspired to such a role, out in the cold.
This seems to have been the condition for Guattaris turn to Deleuze, some
of whose categories from Difference and Repetition (1968) he had used in
Machine and Structure.
Deleuzes own encounter with Lacan, while teaching in Lyon in 1967,
prefigured his later meeting with the painter Francis Bacon. Deleuze greatly
admired the work of both men, but the meetings are studies in passive-
aggressive deadlock. In Lyon, Deleuze invited Lacan for a cocktail at his
home. On arrival, Lacan refused all alcohol. Ten minutes later, he said he
wanted to rest and was taken back to his hotel. At dinner, Lacan ordered a
bottle of vodka and downed half of it. Deleuze flattered him, declaring his
visit to Lyon a great day. After a moment, Lacan answered churlishly, saying
something rather enigmatic: not like that. So Deleuze didnt say another
word. After the lecture, Lacan then announced that he wanted to end the
evening at Deleuzes house, where he launched into paranoid recrimina-
tions against everyone wanting to steal his ideas.
Compare the meeting with Bacon, fourteen years later, shortly after the
publication of Deleuzes 1981 book, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. What
was supposed to be a great meeting, Dosse recounts, turned into a disaster.
Joachim Vital, Deleuzes editor, who had arranged the meeting, described it
as follows:

The meal was awful, as awful as their discussion . . . They smiled at each
other, complimented each other, and smiled again. We were flabbergasted by
their platitudes. We tried to salvage the discussion, mentioning [numerous
artistic references] . . . [But] each one tried to take the ball and run with it
alone, ignoring the other one.
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 149

There is no reason that philosophers and artists should have much to say
to one another, just because they admire each others work; especially such

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men of the 1950s as these two. But this goes deeper, I think. The image of
rivalrouseven sadisticself-sufficiency is apposite. Afterwards, describ-
ing the meeting, Deleuzes compliment is distinctly aggressive: You can
feel his power and violence, he wrote of Bacon, but hes also quite charm-
ing. After sitting for an hour, he starts twisting in all directions, like real
bacon. An unconscious desire to reduce the artist to a figure in one of his
own paintingsdesubjectified sensation, a piece of meatcannot be dis-
guised. In this case, of course, the underhand rivalry is predictable precisely
because of the depth of Deleuzes philosophical identification with Bacons
practice. For Deleuze, Bacon had become the vehicle of actualization for his
late Nietzschean conception of art as the domain of forces, percepts and
affects. In this respect, Deleuze was in direct competition with Bacon over
Bacons art. And perhaps Bacon knew, at least inchoately, that it was in his
interest to let the philosopher think that he owned it. After all, Bacon owed
a great deal to Deleuze with respect to the surprising, hyperbolic growth of
his reputation from the 1980s onwards, in France in particular. In fact, in
the growing identification of Deleuzes philosophy with Bacons art, there
is a kind of ironic revenge of Bacon upon Deleuze for appropriating his
painting. In identifying itself with Bacons practice, Deleuzes philosophy
gives the lie to the idea that it is a contemporary philosophy in any sense
analogous to the expression contemporary art. Its Nietzschean claim to the
newso central to its philosophical and cultural self-imageis cast into
fundamental doubt.
In the meantime, Deleuze had left Lyon to take up a position at the new
experimental university at Vincennes, the University of Paris 8, the estab-
lishment of which, in autumn 1969, was a more-or-less direct outcome
of the student activism of May 68. Deleuze played no part in the protests,
spending the summer at the family property in Limousin working on his
doctoral thesis, where he was diagnosed with the return of his tubercu-
losis, which would lead to him losing a lung early the next year. He was
convalescing when he first met Guattari. Deleuze took up a post in the
Philosophy Department at Vincennes in autumn 1970. Foucault was Head
of Department and had recruited followers of Althusser and Lacan, includ-
ing Alain Badiou, tienne Balibar, Jacques Rancire and Franois Regnault,
one of the editors of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Dosses account of the early
years of this Maoist department, in which making sure that theoretical
Marxism-Leninism dominated among the student masses was the official
departmental policy, is mind-boggling. And it was not just the students who
were under political surveillance. Alain Badiou and Judith Miller even cre-
ated a course together just to monitor the political content of other classes in
 150 nlr 69

the philosophy department. Deleuze was a particular target of the brigade,

which throws an interesting light on the Preface to Badious later, self-serving
review

book on Deleuze, published after his death. The department at Vincennes

appears in many ways as a more extreme multi-disciplinary philosophical
equivalent to Guattaris experiments in group-analysisauthoritarian and
radically libertarian in equal measureand in permanent crisis (which
is not quite the same thing as permanent revolution, of course). Deleuze
appears to have loved it. The university moved to Saint-Denis in 1978, and
Deleuze stayed there until his retirement in 1987.
In the midst of all this, Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus
(1980)from which Rhizome (1976) was published first as a separate
bookand Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975). These were spectacularly
successful, highly original, theoretical works that pursue the question of the
place and functioning of desire within the social, raised by the movements
of May 68, in radical new directions, both philosophically and politically, to
the point of at once founding and exhausting their own genre. If it is true
that, as Deleuze and Guattari went on to argue in What is Philosophy? (1991),
philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts, then
these are pre-eminently philosophical texts. The string of concepts con-
structed in Anti-Oedipus is dazzling: from the desiring-production and
body without organs of the desiring-machines in Part One; through the
fundamental critique of the Oedipal mystification and the familialism of
psychoanalysis, and deterritorialization, in Part Two: via the problem of the
socius as the coding of the flows of desire in Part Three, incorporating both
a new, stagist, ethnological history of state forms and a semiotic account of
value and the money-form; to schizoanalysis, the molecular unconscious
and the molar in Part Four. The freeing of the concept of desire from its
basis in lack and its restriction to the individual psyche, and the opening up
of the problematic of the libidinal investment of the social field, are funda-
mental philosophicalyet also transdisciplinarymoves. They redistribute
the purportedly philosophical object domain across the field of the social
as a whole.
Similarly, but theoretically more radical stillalbeit problematically
the more avowedly pragmatist A Thousand Plateaus is a serial montage of
wildly diverse, singular concept-constructions: from the famous rhizome
(anti-dialectical equivalent of the negative-dialectical constellation), via
segmentarity, the abstract machine, faciality, the different forms of
becoming, the minoritarian, the refrain and the war machine to the
smooth and striated spaces so loved by the recent architectural avant-
garde. As Brian Massumis translators Foreword put it: The question is
not: is it true? But: does it work? Work for what, though? The circuit of
 osborne: Deleuze/Guattari 151

truth and practice is not so easily broken as the wishful devotees would have
it. Much like Rhizome, the Kafka book is an outtake, elaborating a particu-

review
lar concept, the minor, out of a particular contextKafkas writingsin
multiple relations to other purported conceptual singularities: connectors,
assemblage/ agencement.
In many ways, these books remain to be adequately received, despite
the millions of words of introductory summaries and secondary exposi-
tion to which they have been subjected by the middle tier of an academic
publishing industry that is tending increasingly towards its real subsump-
tion to capital via authorial branding. That is, they have yet to become the
enabling conditions of theoretically significant new productions. There is
no post-Deleuze-and-Guattarianism, in the way that there are thriving fields
of post-Foucauldian study, for example. There is, largely, simply fetishistic
terminological repetition. One reason for thisapart from the degeneration
of the conditions of reception and productionis the continuing obscurity
of Guattaris own work. Dosses chapters on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaus make no attempt at philosophical readings of these texts, in contrast
to the dull but accurate prcis of Deleuzes books. However, largely thanks
to Virginie Linharts interviews, Intersecting Lives does offer us enough of
an intellectual sketch of Guattari to indicate how much more we need to
know about his thought, the theoretical dynamics of which (like all thought)
transcend the historical conditions of their production. Perhaps people
should stop looking for some mystical Delariauthorial unity of Deleuze
and Deleuze-and-Guattariand start looking for what the illustrator Grard
Lauzier dubbed Guattareuze.
review

Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

Allen Lane: London and New York 2011, 30, hardback
592 pp, 978 0 713 99895 5

Tariq Ali

LEAVING SHABAZZ

The rich repertoire of songs and music that African-Americans have pro-
duced over the last century has to a large extent been recorded. Its value is
recognized all over the world. The same cannot be said for black oratory,
which shared the same roots and reflected similar emotions: slavery, segre-
gation and imprisonment produced resistance, anger, bitterness and, often,
resignation. Very few speeches were written, leave alone recorded, until the
mid-20th century; and yet they had a huge cultural and historical impact.
W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey were amongst the greatest orators dur-
ing the early twentieth century. A generation later, Adam Clayton Powell, the
independent Congressman elected from Harlem, could electrify an audience.
This is the tradition within which the 1960s activist Malcolm X should be
situated. It was his ability to articulate political ideas instinctively that won
him an audience far beyond the ranks of the converted. First and foremost,
he was one of the greatest orators that North America has ever produced.
Malcolm X embodied all the strengths and many of the contradictions of
the black political condition in mid 20th-century America. Towards the end
of his tragically short life he understood, better than most, that it was struc-
tural and systemic barriers that had kept the majority of African-Americans
below the poverty line and denied them political and racial equality, a hun-
dred years after a civil war supposedly fought to liberate their ancestors
from slavery. In a speech of April 1964, he pointed out that if Lincoln
sardonically: that great shining liberalhad freed the Afro-American, we
wouldnt need civil-rights legislation today. Malcolm Xs political philosophy
and approach, as well as his religious beliefs, were in transition over the last
five years of a life cut short, in February 1965, by assassins from the Nation

152 new left review 69 may jun 2011

 ali: Malcolm X 153

of Islam. They had acted on the orders of their Prophet and the National
Secretary who was, in all likelihood, an fbi plant.

review
Manning Marables new, deconstructive biography demonstrates all this
in vivid detail. Marable, a social-democratic essayist and historian who died
in April this year, a few days before the book was published, was a much-
respected voice within the African-American intelligentsia and later within
the academy as a whole. In his earlier books and essays on black liberation,
especially in the sharply analytical How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black
America (1983), he deployed many a weapon from the Marxist armoury. The
tone is somewhat different in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. From an early
age, Marable writes, Malcolm Little had constructed multiple masks that
distanced his inner self from the outside world . . . He acquired the subtle
tools of an ethnographer, crafting his language to fit the cultural contexts of
his diverse audiences. Noting the various identities he adopted during his
lifetimefrom Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-ShabazzMarable asserts that
no single personality ever captured him fully. In this sense his narrative is a
brilliant series of reinventions, Malcolm X being just the best known.
Marable is not, of course, the first to chronicle the life of Malcolm X. The
latters autobiography, co-written with Alex Haley, came out in late 1965,
only months after its subjects death. Since then there have been half a
dozen biographies, not to mention a film by Spike Lee. But Marables is the
first account to benefit from access to the personal correspondence, photo
graphs and texts of speeches held by Malcolm Xs estate. Marable worked
on the book for almost two decades, and was only able to complete it, as
he generously acknowledges, with help from his partner Leith Mullings, a
scholar in anthropology; a project manager, coincidentally a Muslim; and a
team of dedicated researchers and post-graduate students at Columbia. The
end product is sprawling and under-edited, but much of the information
it collates has not previously appeared in book form. Some of it is, frankly,
extraneous; but some of it sheds new light on the killing as well as pro-
viding details of Malcolms personal life that he carefully omitted from his
own autobiography, and which were also absent from Lees movie based
on that work.
The basic facts of Malcolms life are by now well known. He was born in
Omaha, Nebraska in May 1925, but spent most of his childhood in Lansing,
Michigan. At the age of six he lost his father, Earl Little Srkilled in a street-
car accident that many at the time found suspicious, and which Marable
suggests may have been the work of local white supremacists. Malcolms
mixed-race Grenadian mother struggled to feed and clothe her seven chil-
dren; in 1939, she had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric
hospital, where she spent the next quarter-century. Malcolm and his sib-
lings were forced to depend on each other. In 1941, after being expelled
 154 nlr 69

from school, he moved to Boston to live with his half-sister. He spent the
war years shuttling between Boston and Harlem, alternating between a
review

series of menial jobs and a zoot-suited life peddling drugs, thieving and
pimping. Unsurprisingly, he ended up in prison, receiving an eight-year
sentence for a string of burglaries. He spent the years from 1946 to 52 in
the Massachusetts penal system. It was here, in 1948, that he discovered the
true faith as espoused by a politico-religious sect, the Nation of Islam. This
changed his life-style in many ways: it meant farewell to pork and alcohol,
drugs and cigarettes. Moreover, as Marable explains, the Nation of Islam
required converts to reject their slave surnames, replacing them with the
letter X. An autodidact, Malcolm acquired the reading habit in prison and
it never left him. His choices were eclectic: the Koran became an important
reference point, but he also dipped into Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant, as well as
the history of his people and of the Africa whence they had originally come.
It would be wrong, however, to assume that his road to politics started in
prison. In later years he recalled snatches of conversation he had overheard at
home, and when he accompanied his father to political gatherings. Earl Little
Sr was born in Georgia in 1890; memories of the Civil War, and of what had
been promised but never given, remained strong in African-American com-
munities in the South. Moreover, as Marable points out, the 1920s and 30s
were a period of resurgence for white supremacism. Originally consisting of
little more than violent gangs of embittered vigilantes, the Ku Klux Klan was
reborn after the First World War amid rising unemployment and waves of
xenophobia directed against not only blacks but also non-European immi-
grants, Catholics, Jews, anarchists and communists. By 1923 the re-invented
Klan had a membership of at least two and a half million, with millions
more sympathizers and a base in both Republican and Democratic Parties.
Many black citizens, observing these developments with trepidation,
were drawn to black separatist and nationalist movements. Others preferred
to work with the gradualist National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (naacp), a staunchly integrationist organization led by the
conservative Booker T. Washington. Offered these choices, Earl Little Sr
opted for separatism, joining Marcus Garveys Back to Africa movement.
Garvey, a Jamaican, had migrated to the United States, witnessed the racism
and the Jim Crow laws and decided to fight back by creating the Universal
Negro Improvement Association (unia) and the African Communities
League. He espoused an inventive theology, and proclaimed himself provi-
sional president of Africa, bestowing ludicrous titles on his acolytes: Dukes
of Uganda, Knights of the Nile and so on. According to Marable, central to
Garveys success was his enthusiastic embrace of capitalism and free enter-
prise. The problem was that material success had been reserved for whites,
which was why black Americans should return to their own continent and
 ali: Malcolm X 155

create their version of the white American dream; to facilitate the process,
Garvey created a shipping company, Black Star Line. On the political front

review
he held that, since the kkk was the invisible government of the United
States and represented the real views of white America, the unia should
open direct negotiations with themafter all, both were opposed to social
and sexual intercourse between blacks and whites (a tradition that would be
continued by the Nation of Islam). The summit between Garvey and Grand
Wizard Clarke enraged some of his own supporters, many of whom left
the organization. Garveys security apparatchiks tracked down and killed the
leader of the dissidents.
Malcolms parents, who had met through Garveyist circles in Montreal,
remained loyal, moving from Omaha to Milwaukee and then Lansing to
organize unia chapters. They suffered for their activism: in 1929, when
Malcolm was four, the family house was firebombed. The fire department
refused to come to their aid and the house was burnt to the ground. By this
time Garveyism was in decline: in 1927 its leader had left the States not for
Africa but Jamaica, before later moving to Britain, where he died in 1940. In
his obituary C. L. R. James, who loathed Garveys politics, sought to explain
his appeal to the black masses:

So deep was the sense of wrong and humiliation among the Negroes and so
high did he lift them up that they gave him all that they did, year after year,
expecting Garvey to perform some miracle. No revolution is ever made except
when the masses have reached this pitch of exaltation, when they see a vision
of a new society. That is what Garvey gave them.

James stressed Garveys qualities as a speaker, judging him one of the great
orators of his time: ill-educated, but with the rhythms of Shakespeare and
the Bible in his head, he was a master of rhetoric and invective, capable of
great emotional appeals and dramatic intensity. James continued:

Every two-cent revolutionary who has talked to Negroes in cafeterias and

therefore knows the Negro question points out Garveys errors and absurdi-
ties and thinks that thereby a contribution has been made to knowledge.
More than in all the theses of the Comintern, a basis for the building of a
real mass movement among the Negroes lies in a thorough study of this first
great eruption of the Negro people.

With the collapse of Garveyism, many within the movement changed

tack. Some became labour organizers, socialists and communists. Others
shifted to the naacp, which had itself moved in a more radical direction
since Washingtons death. The more religious amongst Garveys followers
drifted towards the Muslim sects that were becoming active in the country
and winning recruits by arguing that Christianity was the religion of
 156 nlr 69

slave-owners. The fact that most of the churches were segregated under-
scored their message.
review

When Malcolm first encountered the Nation of Islam in prison, then,

much of what he discovered was familiar territory. The theology was,
however, even more inventive than Garveys. Marables account of the
Muslim sects and their impact on the African-American community is the
most comprehensive to date, allotted almost 250 pages here. The history of
the Nation of Islam, so vital to the formation of Malcolm, can be summa-
rized as follows. The inspirer of the movement was an eccentric fantasist
named Wallace D. Fardhe later added Muhammad to his namewho
revealed himself to audiences as a prophet in the late 1920s. The founding
myth he supplied for the cult is risible, but deadly serious in its purpose:
to encourage black pride. In the Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam and
other texts, Fard asserted that African-Americans belonged to the lost tribe
of Shabazz, which had been sold into slavery by Meccan traders in the
seventeenth century. They should therefore recover their original Muslim
religion, learn Arabic and so on. The white race, meanwhile, were devils,
the product of a chemical experiment conducted by the imaginary Shabazz
scientist Yacub. Centuries ago these white devils escaped Yacubs control
and conquered the world; the Asiatic blacks had gone into a deep sleep, but
the Nation of Islam would awaken them and restore their pride. The fact
that such tales could be taken at all seriously by intelligent human beings
underlines the desperate straits in which African-Americans found them-
selves at the time. In August 1931 Fard gave a lecture in Detroit. Attending
it was Elijah Poole, a brick-kiln labourer from Georgia. Mesmerized by the
preachers performance, Poole went up to him and expressed his apprecia-
tion: I know who you are, youre God himself. Thats right, was the modest
response, but dont tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known. This
was the real founding moment of the Nation of Islam. After Fard mysteri-
ously disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad became his Prophet, and after
a few inevitable splits found himself the unchallenged leader of the sect.
After his release from prison, Malcolms dynamism and natural gifts as
an orator propelled him rapidly to the top of the organization; within a year,
he had his own ministry in Harlem. He became Elijahs leading lieuten-
ant and was widely viewed as his successor. Malcolms organizational skills
matched his oratory, and the Nation of Islam expanded from a small sect to a
proper movement with branches in most of the major cities. In 1947, accord-
ing to Marable, it had no more than 400 members, and less than 1,000 in
1953; but it could claim 6,000 adherents by the mid-50s, and by 1961, in a
huge leap, as many as 75,000. However, it could never match the naacp,
which by 1939 had grown to a mass organization with a quarter of a million
members; by 1943 it had half a million, and double that by 1947, when the
 ali: Malcolm X 157

black population as a whole numbered 15 million. This growth reflected the

social ferment of a period that witnessed the largest working-class mobi-

review
lizations in us history. The rise of the Nation of Islam, by contrast, took
place during the 1950sa period of affluence, near full-employment but
also of defeat for African-Americans, who remained socially and politically
deprived. A conservative white-separatist political order created the condi-
tions for a conservative black separatism from below. Like Garvey before
him, Elijah Mohammed encouraged black capitalism to create a black com-
mercial realm, and also, of course, profits for his organization and his family.
As he grew and travelled, Malcolms views began to change. Harlem
was the most cosmopolitan of Americas black enclaves, and people there
were deeply sceptical of the mumbo-jumbo that constituted the Nation of
Islams explanation of the world. Increasingly embarrassed about it himself,
Malcolm became aware that Islam itself is a universalist religion; any version
of it that excluded anybody on the basis of colour existed only in the fevered
imaginations of Nation of Islam converts. Malcolm was developing his own
explanations for divisions within the African-American community; these
appealed to the poor, who were tired of seeing their more traditional leaders
kow-tow to the White House. In January 1963, he made a devastating speech
to over a thousand students at Michigan State University in which he drew a
distinction between the house Negro and the field Negro:

The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master.
He wore his masters second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on
the table . . . When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified him-
self so much with the master, hed say, Whats the matter, boss, we sick? . . .
The house Negro was in a minority. The field Negroes were the masses. They
were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that hed die. If his
house caught on fire, theyd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

As Marable points out, this was an important speech in many respects,

marking a public break with the nonsense of the lost tribe of Shabazz
and the Arab origins of African-Americans. The Negro, Malcolm now
asserted, was an African, pure and simple. This speech laid the basis for
the pan-Africanism that was to become more and more prominent over the
remaining years of his life.
He was turning away from the Nation of Islam, yet still he remained
loyal to Elijah, even though the latters sycophants fumed at the liberties
Malcolm was permitted. The Kennedy assassination was the occasion of the
first public breach. At a public meeting in New York, Malcolm spoke of the
killings the us administration had organized, including those of its own
allies in South Vietnam. Kennedys shooting, he explained to a cheering
audience, was the chickens coming home to roost, adding: Being an old
 158 nlr 69

farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad.
Theyve always made me glad. At Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago,
review

Elijah and John Ali, the fbi plant who was the National Secretary, issued a
public retraction, expressed their grief and shock at Kennedys death, and
temporarily suspended Malcolm from the organization. He would never
be let back in. While angered by the suspension, he must also have been
relieved: he was finding it difficult to justify Nation of Islam policies while
debating other militant black leaders. It was one thing to denounce open col-
laborationists as Uncle Toms, but the Nation of Islams refusal to participate
in the civil-rights movement and its denunciations of Martin Luther King
and other activists were indefensible.
In March 1964, Malcolm announced his break with the Nation of Islam,
and his intention to set up his own organization. In fact, he set up two:
Muslim Mosque Inc.a direct alternative to the Nation of Islamand then,
in June, a second body with a wider remit called the Organization of Afro-
American Unity. The choice of name for the latter was clearly influenced by
the month-long trip to Africa and the Middle East Malcolm had made that
spring. In April he had completed the hajj; according to Marable, the egali-
tarianism among pilgrims of all colours brought an epiphany, suggesting
black separatism was not the only solution to the problems of race. What
Malcolm had witnessed in Africa, meanwhile, gave more substance to his
changing political views. Soon after his return, he gave a speech drawing
parallels between European colonial rule and institutionalized racism in the
us: the police in Harlem were like the French in Algeria, like an occupying
army. As Marable notes, for the first time he publicly made the connection
between racial oppression and capitalism. African-Americans should, he
said, emulate the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, also observing that all of
the countries that are emerging today from under colonialism are turning
towards socialism. I dont think its an accident.
Malcolm made a second, longer African trip from July to November
1964, visiting a string of countries where he met a range of intellectuals and
political figures. In Egypt, he spoke at the oau conference and talked with
Nasser; in Ghana, he met Shirley DuBois and Maya Angelou; in Tanzania,
Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and Julius Nyerere; in Kenya, Oginga Odinga
and Jomo Kenyatta. The international dimension was crucial to his thinking
in the final months. In mid-December, he invited Che Guevarain New
York for the celebrated un General Assembly speechto address an oaau
rally; Guevara did not attend, but sent a message of solidarity. Were living
in a revolutionary world and in a revolutionary age, Malcolm told the audi-
ence. He continued:
 ali: Malcolm X 159

I, for one, would like to impress, especially upon those who call themselves
leaders, the importance of realizing the direct connection between the

review
struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people
all over the world. As long as we thinkas one of my good brothers men-
tioned out of the side of his mouth here a couple of Sundays agothat we
should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo,
youll never get Mississippi straightened out.

The fact that many of the initial recruits to the oaau had come from the
Nation of Islam was used by Elijah Mohammed and Malcolms numerous
enemies within the Nation of Islam to depict him as a traitor. They decided
to execute him, as he knew they would. In December 1964 he came to speak
at Oxford. Afterwards, I walked him back to the Randolph Hotel, where we
sat and spoke for over an hour. On parting I expressed the hope that we
would meet again. He shook his head: I dont think we will. Why? I think
theyll kill me very soon, he said calmly. Who will kill you? Here he had
no doubts: it would be the Nation of Islam or the fbi, or both together. He
explained how his break with separatism and moves to build alliances with
progressive white groups made him a dangerous figure. In February 1965,
three assassins from the Nation of Islam gunned him down at an oaau meet-
ing in New York. Three years later, Martin Luther King, too, was killed soon
after he broke with the Democrats and decided to stand as an independent
Presidential candidate. And in the years that followed the fbi systematically
organized the assassinations of Black Panther leaders and activists.
The strength of Marables account is the huge amount of information
he provides. Everything is in here, but it comes at a cost, often disrupting
the narrative. Details of Malcolms personal lifehis unhappy marriage, his
male lovers in prisoncrowd what is essentially a political biography. The
emphasis on the Nation of Islam is not totally misplaced, but it is accorded
far too much space, at the expense of any discussion of the overall social and
political contexts, both us and global, within which Malcolm operated. The
result is seriously unbalanced: the events that shaped his continuing intel-
lectual evolutionthe killing of Lumumba and the ensuing crisis in Congo;
the Vietnam War; the rise of a new generation of black and white activists in
the us, of which Marable was oneare mentioned only in passing. This is
a great pity, because in historical terms their significance far outweighs that
of the audience sizes of various Nation of Islam meetings or the sectarian
infighting which Marable discusses at length. Marable also makes some non-
sensical comparisons between the Nation of Islam and Shia Muslims as well
as other clumsy references to Islam that it might have been better to exclude.
Conversely, the book might have benefited from a comparative survey of
the different sects, black and white, that proliferated in the us in the inter-
war years; the Nation of Islam were not the only game in townMormons,
 160 nlr 69

Scientologists, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovahs Witnesses all gained

large followings at the time, and remain influential now.
review

In an Epilogue, Marable sums up Malcolms legacy, seeking to coun-

ter revisionist ideas that in his final years he had been evolving into an
integrationist, liberal reformer. Correctly he argues that Malcolm would
have had nothing to do with affirmative actionwhat he sought was a fun-
damental restructuring of wealth and power in the United States. He always
demanded that middle-class blacks be accountable to the masses of poor and
working-class African Americans. Marable contrasts the posthumous fates
of Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr: the latter sanctified by the politi-
cal establishment as a martyr to a colour-blind America, celebrated by an
official annual holiday, while Malcolm was pilloried and stereotyped by the
mass media, albeit as an icon of black encouragement to African American
youth. Marable then tries to elide King with Obama, differentiating Malcolm
from both of them. This is both sad and grotesque. King was killed for his
opposition to the Vietnam War. He never turned his back on the plight of
African-Americans. The reason why he broke from the Democratic Party
was to unite blacks and whites against war and for social justice. Obamas
record speaks for itself. Malcolm would have lambasted him for escalating
the war in Afghanistan and extending it to Pakistan, where thousands of
civilians have been killed by targeted drone attacks. He would have pil-
loried Obamas role as Wall Streets handmaiden, even as working-class
America, black and white, suffers from rising levels of unemployment and
social deprivation. His words at Michigan State University in 1963 are all too
applicable today, as many are coming to realize.
Marable suggests that Obamas election means that Malcolms vision
would have to be radically redefined, for a political environment that
appears to be post-racial. In that case, Malcolm might have asked, why is
it that in 2011 the number of African-Americans incarcerated in us prisons
is the same as the slave population in 1860? And why, despite the ascent
of such figures as Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and
Obama, do blacks remain on the lowest rung of the social ladder? Malcolm
was not such a prisoner of the American dream as to think that getting
a dark-skinned man in the White House need necessarily do anything to
change the fundamental structures of wealth, race and power.