Historical Materialism Historical Materialism Volume 24 Issue 3 2016 1

Historical Materialism 24.
3 (2016) 3–29
brill.com/hima
Idle No More
An Introduction to the Symposium on Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin,
White Masks
Jeffery R. Webber
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary,
University of London
j.r.webber@qmul.ac.uk
Abstract
This article introduces the symposium on Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks.
It begins by situating the book’s publication in the wake of the extensive mobilisations
of the Idle No More movement in Canada in 2012–13. Coulthard’s strategic hypotheses
on the horizons of Indigenous liberation in the book are intimately linked to his partic-
ipation in these recent struggles. The article then locates Red Skin, White Masks within
a wider renaissance of Indigenous Studies in the North American context in recent
years, highlighting Coulthard’s unique and sympathetic extension of Marx’s critique
of capitalism, particularly through his use of the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’.
Next, the article outlines the long arc of the argument in Red Skin, White Masks and
the organisation of the book’s constituent parts, providing a backdrop to the critical
engagements that follow from Peter Kulchyski, Geoff Mann, George Ciccariello-Maher,
and Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz. The article closes with reflections on Coulthard’s engage-
ment with Fanon, who, besides Marx, is the most important polestar in Red Skin,
White Masks.
Keywords
Indigenous – decolonial – anticolonial – Marxism – Canada
Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks ends with a set of strategic hypotheses
on the horizons of Indigenous struggle in Canada, linked closely to the lessons
of Idle No More, the Indigenous movement that erupted in late autumn and
early winter of 2012–13, and which constituted perhaps the most sustained
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341481

4 Webber
and far-reaching grassroots Indigenous mobilisation in the country since the

contestation of the assimilationist White Paper of 1969. Omnibus Bill C-45, or
the Jobs and Growth Act, was the spark. Issued by the Conservative govern-
ment of Stephen Harper in December 2012, the wide-ranging bill promised
to alter key components of the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian
Environmental Assessment Act, and the Navigable Water Act, among other
pieces of federal legislation, threatening further expansion of the interests of
capital – above all in the natural-resource sectors of mining, oil and gas – into
Indigenous territories.
But if Bill C-45 was the proximate catalyst of the movement, it represented
only the visible topsoil of grievance, resting on vast sedimentary foundations of
settler-colonialism beneath. ‘The impetus for the recent Idle No More events’,
a collective statement of the movement’s leadership reads, ‘lies in a centuries-
old resistance as Indigenous nations and their lands suffered the impacts of
exploration, invasion, and colonization.’ In a recovery of this popular culture
of opposition, Idle No More emerged to once again ‘assert Indigenous inher-
ent rights to sovereignty and reinstitute traditional laws and Nation to Nation
Treaties by protecting the lands and waters from corporate destruction. Each
day that Indigenous rights are not honoured or fulfilled, inequality between
Indigenous peoples and the settler society grows.’1
Idle No More began as a small, women-led education campaign across the
prairie provinces regarding the negative implications of the bill, but quickly
expanded when, ‘on December 4, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat
Cree Nation announced that she would begin a hunger strike on December 11
to bring attention to the deplorable housing conditions on her reserve in north-
ern Ontario, to raise awareness about the impacts of Bill C-45, and to dem-
onstrate her support for the emerging Idle No More movement.’2 A national
‘day of action’ was called for December 10, and protests reverberated across the
major cities. The occupation of public spaces – from major street intersections
to shopping malls – dominated early tactics, with ‘round-dancing and drum-
ming’ paired with ‘community-led conferences, teach-ins, and public panels’.3
Tactics grew increasingly militant by the end of December and early
January – including road blockades and train and traffic stoppages – but the
Harper government quickly countered with a move to separate authorised
from unauthorised Indians, as the anthropologist Charles R. Hale has described
1 Idle No More n.d.

2 Coulthard 2014, p. 160. See also, The Kino-nda-niimi Collective (ed.) 2014.
3 Coulthard 2014, p. 161.
Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

Idle No More 5
similar efforts at co-optation in the Latin American context.4 Harper set a meet-
ing with the leadership of the Assembly of First Nations – the body recognised
by the Canadian state as the representative institution of Indigenous peoples –
for January 11, while unauthorised Indians organised another national day of
action for January 16, ‘this time focusing on more assertive forms of Indigenous
protest’, Coulthard points out. ‘Actions including rallies, railway blockades,
and traffic stoppages swept across the country, including railway barricades
erected in Manitoba, Ontario, and British Columbia; highway and bridge stop-
pages in British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta; as well as
the now regular display of marches, flash-mob round-dances, drumming, and
prayer circles’.5
The most visible signals of Idle No More’s presence on Canada’s highways
and rail lines, as well as in the public spaces of its major cities, have since
receded, but Coulthard insists that the turmoil they expressed has merely
shifted for the time being to a subterranean fomentation, and we should not
therefore see in the temporary decline of above-ground mobilisation ‘a dete-
rioration of the movement’s spirit and resolve’.6
Using the relative downtime of the subterranean period, Coulthard has
reflected on his experience as a militant in Idle No More’s activities in British
Columbia, drawing up a set of critical theses on Indigenous resurgence
and decolonisation, in the mode of what the late French Marxist Daniel
Bensaïd called ‘strategic hypotheses’. ‘Our insistence is not on a “model”,’
Bensaïd argued,
4 See Hale 2002, 2004, 2006. Hale’s notion of the indio permitido, or ‘authorised Indian’, refers
to the way in which neoliberal states in Latin America in the 1990s adopted a language of
cultural recognition of Indigenous people and even enacted modest reforms in the area
of Indigenous rights. At the same time, these states set strict limits on the extent of reform.
Neoliberal multiculturalism, in this way, played the role of dividing and domesticating
Indigenous movements through selective co-optation. The ‘unauthorised’ Indigenous
movements that refused to accept the parameters of neoliberal multiculturalism were fre-
quently targeted and repressed by these ‘multicultural’ states. In particular, the era of the
indio permitido has meant that cultural rights are to be enjoyed on the implicit condition
that Indigenous movements will not challenge foundational neoliberal economic policies
and their accompanying forms of capitalist class power. Indigenous movements that have
submitted more or less to the framework of neoliberal multiculturalism fall into Hale’s socio-
political category indio permitido, or ‘authorised Indian’.

6 Webber
but on what we have called ‘strategic hypotheses’. Models are some-

thing to be copied; they are instructions for use. A hypothesis is a guide
to action that starts from past experience but is open and can be modi-
fied in the light of new experience or unexpected circumstances. Our
concern therefore is not to speculate but to see what we can take from
past experience, the only material at our disposal. But we always have to
recognize that it is necessarily poorer than the present and the future if
revolutionaries are to avoid the risk of doing what the generals are said to
do – always fight the last war.7
Coulthard’s first thesis pivots on disruption, the necessity of direct action, a

plea for the unauthorised Indigenous route to rebellion, an insistence that
legitimate struggle is not confined to ‘official’ representatives of the Indigenous
people, the channels of formal negotiation, and the parameters of the ‘rule of
law’.8 One reason is efficacy. ‘I would venture to suggest’, Coulthard writes, ‘that
all negotiations over the scope and content of Aboriginal peoples’ rights in the
last forty years have piggybacked off the assertive direct actions – including
escalated use of blockades – spearheaded by Indigenous women and other
grassroots elements of our communities.’9 Another cluster of reasons to defend
this assertive dynamic has to do with self-emancipation:
first, the practices are directly undertaken by the subjects of colonial

oppression themselves and seek to produce an immediate power effect;
second, they are undertaken in a way that indicates a loosening of inter-
nalized colonialism, which is itself a precondition for any meaningful
change; and third, they are prefigurative in the sense that they build the
skills and social relationships (including those with the land) that are
required within and among Indigenous communities to construct alter-
natives to the colonial relationship in the long run.10
The drivers here are self-emancipation of the oppressed, the partial overcom-
ing of internalised colonialism in the subjectivity of Indigenous participants
through struggle, and the prefiguration of radical alternatives to colonial rule
in contemporary Canada.
7 Bensaïd 2006.
10 Coulthard 2014, p. 166.

Idle No More 7
This parallels, in a particular sense, Marx’s notion of ‘revolutionary practice’,

in which there is a ‘coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity or self-change’.11 For Coulthard, as for Marx, in their struggle
to satisfy their needs, the oppressed come increasingly to recognise their com-
mon interests and become conscious of their own social power; through their
self-activity they come to see themselves as subjects capable of altering the
structures of society as well as changing themselves in the process through
self-organisation and self-activity from below.12 While the connection to Marx
in this regard is not made by Coulthard, he does draw explicit parallels with
Frantz Fanon. Coulthard’s first thesis on Indigenous resurgence and decoloni-
sation draws on Fanon’s engagement with Nietzsche at the close of Black Skin,
White Masks, in which humanity is understood simultaneously as an affirma-
tion and a negation.13 ‘Through these actions’, Coulthard contends, ‘we physi-
cally say “no” to the degradation of our communities and to exploitation of
the lands upon which we depend. But they also have ingrained within them
a resounding “yes”: they are the affirmative enactment of another modality of
being, a different way of relating to and with the world’.14
Ensuring that anti-capitalism is at the core of Indigenous resurgence is the
basis of Coulthard’s second thesis. ‘For Indigenous nations to live,’ he con-
cludes, ‘capitalism must die.’15 Coulthard sees in recent Indigenous tactics like
traffic- and train blockading an anti-capitalist impulse, rooted in the disrup-
tion of the sphere of circulation. Such actions ‘seek to impede or block the flow
of resources currently being transported to international markets from oil and
gas fields, refineries, lumber mills, mining operations, and hydroelectric facili-
ties located on the dispossessed lands of Indigenous nations’.16 Such actions
are consciously built to intensify their ‘negative impact on the economic
infrastructure that is core to the colonial accumulation of capital in settler-
political economies like Canada’s’.17 Although Coulthard does not highlight
the connection, this strategic orientation resonates in many ways with what
might be labelled the turn to circulation in much of contemporary Marxist and
11 Marx 1845.
12 For a discussion of Marx’s notion of ‘revolutionary practice’ see Webber 2012, p. 224;
Lebowitz 2006, pp. 19–20; and McNally 2006, p. 375.
13 Fanon 2008.
14 Coulthard 2014, p. 169.
15 Coulthard 2014, p. 173.
16 Coulthard 2014, p. 170.
17 Ibid.

8 Webber
anarchist strategic theory, particularly in the domain of historical-materialist

geography.18
Another urgent concern of Coulthard’s anti-capitalist thesis is again one of
socio-geography: ‘how might we begin to scale up these often localized, resur-
gent land-based direct actions to produce a more general transformation in
the colonial economy?’19 He recognises that short of a ‘massive transforma-
tion in the political economy of contemporary settler-colonialism, any efforts
to rebuild [Indigenous] nations will remain parasitic on capitalism, and thus
on the perpetual exploitation of our lands and labour’.20 A project of trans-
formation at this level inevitably requires networks of solidarity beyond the
Indigenous movement:
This reality demands that we continue to remain open to, if not actively
seek out and establish, relations of solidarity and networks of trade and
mutual aid with national and transnational communities and organiza-
tions that are also struggling against the imposed effects of globalized
capital, including other Indigenous nations and national confederacies;
urban Indigenous people and organizations; the labour, women’s,
GBLTQ2S (gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans, queer, and two-spirit), and envi-
ronmental movements; and, of course, those racial and ethnic communi-
ties that find themselves subject to their own distinct forms of economic,
social, and cultural marginalization.21
An anti-capitalist strategy of Indigenous liberation, then, requires broad net-

works of solidarity and purposeful linkages between local battles and wider
scales of conflict.
A third thesis stems from the reality that in Canada today a majority of
Aboriginal people lives in cities.22 While rural land and territory remain inte-
gral to the project of Indigenous sovereignty in the Canadian state, Coulthard
18 One expression of this general trend is Deborah Cowen’s recent work on logistics. See
Cowen 2014a, 2014b. See also Karatani Kōjin’s recently translated The Structure of World
History, in which modes of exchange take precedence over modes of production (Kōjin
2014). For a critique of the latter, see Lange 2015. These issues are also discussed in Toscano
2011 and Clover 2012a, 2012b. A variant of the circulationist thesis appears in a Venezuelan
context in George Ciccariello-Maher’s work on that country in the era of Hugo Chávez.
See Ciccariello-Maher 2013. For the limitations of this perspective, see Webber 2015.
19 Coulthard 2014, p. 170.
20 Coulthard 2014, p. 171.
21 Coulthard 2014, p. 173.
22 See Lawrence 2004.

Idle No More 9
insists that the ‘analytical frame of settler-colonialism’ can also act as an

‘important lens through which to interrogate the power relations that shape
Indigenous people’s experiences in the city, especially those disproportion-
ately inhabiting low-income areas’.23 Drawing on the pioneering work of Neil
Smith, among others, Coulthard sees the gentrification of urban space as
‘yet another “frontier” of dispossession central the accumulation of capital’.24
Racialised Indigenous spaces in the city ‘are now being treated as urbs nullius’,
empty urban space, characterised by the ‘waste’ of land and property devoted
to institutions like social housing and shelters. Gentrification is the process of
their ‘improvement’ through the displacement of racialised working-class and
poor communities and the introduction of what is characterised by developers
as ‘socially and economically productive’ private capital.25 In such a scenario, a
successful strategy of Indigenous resurgence depends on ‘its ability to address
the interrelated systems of dispossession that shape Indigenous peoples’ expe-
riences in both urban and land-based settings’.26
The third thesis hinges on the integral incorporation of gender justice into
the political project of Indigenous resurgence and decolonisation. Especially
important in this regard is the imperative to respond to the interlocking sys-
temic and symbolic violence faced by Indigenous women in contemporary
Canada.
It is systemic in the sense that it has been structured, indeed institution-

alized, into a relatively secure and resistant set of oppressive material
relations that render Indigenous women more likely than their non-
Indigenous counterparts to suffer severe economic and social privation,
including disproportionately high rates of poverty and unemployment,
incarceration, addiction, homelessness, chronic and/or life-threatening
health problems, overcrowded and substandard housing, and lack of
access to clean water, as well as face discrimination and sexual violence
in their homes, communities, and workplaces. . . . Just as importantly,
however, the violence that Indigenous women face is also ‘symbolic’. . . .
Symbolic violence . . . is the subjectifying form of violence that renders
23 Coulthard 2014, p. 174.

24 Coulthard 2014, p. 176. See, especially, Smith 1996.
25 Coulthard 2014, p. 175.
26 Coulthard 2014, p. 176.

10 Webber
the crushing materiality of systemic violence invisible, appear natural,

acceptable.27
Any meaningful politics of Indigenous resurgence will therefore require that

‘society, including Indigenous society and particularly Indigenous men, stop
collectively conducting ourselves in a manner that denigrates, degrades, and
devalues the lives and worth of Indigenous women in such a way that epi-
demic levels of violence are the norm in too many of their lives.’28 The gen-
dered politics of Indigenous liberation are also taken up at length in Chapter 3,
in which Coulthard focuses a critical lens on the work of Seyla Benhabib,
and in particular her justifiable concern that in colonised societies tradition-
alist claims for cultural preservation can be mobilised to condone practices
of gender oppression.29 For Coulthard, Benhabib ‘fails to adequately address
the colonial context in which these practices have come to flourish’.30 He
roots his criticisms of Benhabib empirically through a historical investiga-
tion of ‘Indigenous women’s struggle against sexist provisions of the Indian
Act and an examination of the ways in which this history of struggle informed
an Indigenous feminist critique of the gendered dynamics underwriting the
decade-long (1982–1992) effort of mainstream Aboriginal organizations to
secure a constitutional right to self-government in Canada’.31
Coulthard’s final thesis involves a strategic orientation that moves beyond
the state and a reliance on its legal apparatus and institutions of negotiation.
‘In our efforts to interpolate the legal and political discourses of the state to
secure recognition of our rights to land and self-determination’, Coulthard
argues, ‘we have too often found ourselves interpellated as subjects of settler-
colonial rule’.32 While this does not signify a Hollowayan scream of refusal33 –
present conditions, for Coulthard, necessitate ‘that we continue to engage with
27 Coulthard 2014, p. 177. The extraordinary numbers of missing and murdered Aboriginal
women in Canada in the last three decades has led the United Nations Committee on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women to call on the Canadian government to
establish a national inquiry. See The Canadian Press 2015; Guardian 2015.
28 Coulthard 2014, p. 178.
29 Benhabib 2002.
31 Ibid. In his contribution to this symposium, Peter Kulchyski offers a critique of the
Foucauldian aspects of Coulthard’s discussion of gender in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, pre-
ferring instead an analysis rooted in modes of production. Coulthard responds to this
criticism in his rejoinder that concludes this symposium.
32 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.
33 Holloway 2010a, 2010b.

Idle No More 11
the state’s legal and political system’ – it does mean ‘that we begin to approach
our engagements with the settler-legal apparatus with a degree of critical
self-reflection, skepticism, and caution that has to date been largely absent in
our efforts’.34
Situating Red Skin, White Masks
Red Skin, White Masks is Coulthard’s first book. It appeared on the scene as
part of a much wider renaissance of Indigenous Studies in the North American
context.35 But Coulthard’s book stands out in this literature, in part because
of its sympathetic engagement with aspects of Marx’s critique of capitalism.36
In the past several decades, such potent cross-fertilisation between Indigenous-
liberation traditions and unorthodox Marxism has occurred only at the margins
of both schools in North America; the apex of Indigenous-Marxist collabora-
tion in thought and praxis was no doubt the Red Power movement of the 1960s
and 1970s, although the alliance was also fraught with limitations.37 In Latin
America, by contrast, the theoretical and practical comingling of Marxism
and Indigenous liberation has a much more profound history, albeit one that
34 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.

35 Simpson and Smith (eds.) 2014; Smith 2015; Simpson 2014; Goldstein (ed.) 2014; Hinton,
Woolford and Benvenuto (eds.) 2014; Johnson and Graybill 2010; and Simpson and Ladner
(eds.) 2010.
36 In the North American context, for a selection of those engaged in a dialogue between
Indigenous Studies and Marx/Marxism, see Pasternak 2014, 2015, 2016; Kulchyski 2006,
2013; Dunbar-Ortiz 1984, 2006, 2007, 2015, (ed.) 1978; Simmons 1995, 2006; and Gordon
2006, 2010. Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard claim to be writing in the Marxist
tradition in their recent book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, but the fact that this clas-
sically assimilationist text is endorsed by neo-conservative University of Calgary Political
Science professor and former advisor to Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, is a better indica-
tion of its pedigree. See Widdowson and Howard 2008; and Flanagan 2008. For a critique
of Widdowson and Howard, see Kulchyski 2009 and Simmons 2010. Kulchyski’s contribu-
tion to this symposium also extends this critique.
37 On the history of relations between the Marxist left and Indigenous movements in
Canada, see Bedford and Irving-Stephens 2001. For evidence of the engagement with
Marxism during the Red Power era, see Dunbar-Ortiz’s contribution to this symposium.
Howard Adams was perhaps the most important theorist of the Red Power period in the
Canadian context. See Adams 1975. For negative personal accounts of Indigenous expe-
riences with the paternalism of the Canadian far-left during the era of Red Power, see
Maracle 1990; Harper 1979; and Armstrong 2002.

12 Webber
historically has also by no means been free of tension and contradiction.38 In

South Asia, too, Maoist insurgencies have brought to life debates around the
relationship between class struggle, Marxism, and indigeneity.39
Published in the wake of Idle No More, and in the context of the outbreak
of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, the resonance of
Red Skin, White Masks in the current North American scenario quickly became
apparent.40 Hundreds have gathered to engage Coulthard in discussion and
debate at each of the dozens of public community forums and academic con-
ferences he has attended across North America since the launch of his book.
No text in the recent history of Indigenous struggle and study in the context
of the Canadian state has been received with parallel levels of anticipation.
It is against this wider backdrop that Historical Materialism is pleased to host
this symposium, taking up the principal themes of Red Skin, White Masks and
breaking them open for further reflection, interrogation, and expansion.
Architecture
Red Skin, White Masks takes as its principal theoretical objective a critique
of the politics of recognition, with the relevant work of philosopher Charles
Taylor standing in as the principal antagonist in this regard.41 Elements of Marx
and Fanon constitute the core arsenal of Coulthard’s assault on this tradition.
The scope of the task is to ‘challenge the increasingly commonplace idea
that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian
38 The most influential theoretical encounter occurs in the work of Jose Carlos Mariátegui.
See, especially, Mariátegui 2011; Vanden and Becker (eds.) 2011; and Webber forthcoming.
The work of Bolivian Marxist and current Vice-President, Álvaro García Linera, has also
been important in this regard – although his writings of the late 1990s and early 2000s
are far superior to his output since he assumed office in 2006. See the relevant sections
of García Linera 2008. The historiography of the relationship between Indigenous move-
ments and the left in Latin America is rich. For a selection, see Grandin 2004; Becker 2008;
Hylton and Thomson 2007; Gould 1990, 1998; and Webber 2011.
39 For a recent discussion of these issues in the context of Nepal and India, see Ismail and
Shah 2015.
40 In his contribution to this symposium, George Ciccariello-Maher notes the context of the
Black Lives Matter movement and links Coulthard’s Fanonian threads in Red Skin, White
Masks with the Black radical tradition in the United States.
41 Above all, Taylor 1994. But for the wider politics of the politics of recognition within the
tradition of liberal pluralism, see also Kymlicka 1995, 1998, 2001.

Idle No More 13
state can be adequately transformed via such a politics of recognition’.42

Coulthard traces the militant forms of Indigenous anticolonial nationalism in
the Canadian context in the 1960s and 1970s, from the Red Power movement to
the Dene struggles of the north (the latter is the subject of an extended his-
torical investigation in Chapter 2), and argues that these forms of militancy
forced a modification of the form assumed by colonial relations in Canada in
recent decades. While colonialism in Canada historically involved a structure
‘primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies explicitly oriented
around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double’, movements of anticolo-
nial nationalism in the late twentieth century transformed this ‘[in]to one that
is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and
institutional practices that emphasize our recognition and accommodation.’43
‘[I]nstead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded in the ideal
of reciprocity or mutual recognition,’ however, ‘the politics of recognition in its
contemporary liberal form promises to reproduce the very configurations of
colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands
for recognition have historically sought to transcend’.44
Marx
In an effort to escape this cul de sac, Coulthard’s first move is to Marx, and spe-
cifically the concept of primitive accumulation. But there is some preliminary
ground to clear. Coulthard notes that the relationship between Indigenous
Studies and Marxism has sometimes been ‘hostile and polarizing’. On the
one hand, he detects a ‘premature rejection of Marx and Marxism by some
Indigenous studies scholars’, and, on the other, ‘belligerent, often ignorant,
and sometimes racist dismissal of Indigenous peoples’ contributions to radical
thought and politics by Marxists’.45 At its worst, this dynamic has characterised
the relationship. ‘At their nondogmatic best, however,’ Coulthard argues that,
the conversations that continue to occur within and between these two
diverse fields of critical inquiry (especially when placed in dialogue with
feminist, anarchist, queer, and post-colonial traditions) have the poten-
tial to shed much insight into the cycles of colonial domination and

14 Webber
resistance that characterize the relationship between white settler states

and Indigenous peoples.46
In one of the critical passages in Capital Marx writes:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement

and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning
of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the
chief momenta of primitive accumulation.47
In this specific passage, and throughout chapters 25 to 32 of Capital, Coulthard

discovers novel ways of understanding ‘colonialism as a form of structured
dispossession’.48 These are the moments in Capital where ‘Marx most thor-
oughly links the totalizing power of capital with that of colonialism by way
of his theory of “primitive accumulation”.’49 Of course, Coulthard’s observa-
tions on the contemporary relevance of primitive accumulation build from
and contribute to a wider renewal of its study in a variety of Marxist circles,
but perhaps most famously in David Harvey’s formulation of ‘accumulation by
dispossession’.50 In Coulthard’s specific summation, the ‘historical process of
primitive accumulation . . . refers to the violent transformation of noncapital-
ist forms of life into capitalist ones’.51
Although Marx’s reading of primitive accumulation is at the centre of
Red Skin, White Masks, Coulthard’s engagement with Marx is unstained by
churchly devotion.52 In his view, Marx needs to be rendered applicable to the
46 Ibid.
47 Marx 1976, p. 915.
49 Ibid.
50 Harvey 2003.
52 This is not a fashionable dig at ‘Marxology’. As Derek Sayer pointed out some time ago,
it is odd that ‘some circles . . . decry “Marxology”,’ because we ‘do not speak in the same
tones of “Kantology” or “Weberology”, though studies of Kant and Weber abound’. Still,
Sayer continues, ‘there is, none the less, a particular problem with writing about Marx. . . .
However disinterested one’s scholarly motives, conclusions often become part of other
people’s politics. The study of Marx can be a coded form of social criticism (in East and
West alike), it can be snivelling apologetics, but it can hardly be politically innocent.’ See
Sayer 1987, pp. vii–viii. Coulthard’s encounter is neither snivelling nor innocent.

Idle No More 15
context of settler-colonialism through a transformative encounter with critical

Indigenous theory and practice. As an initial step in this direction, Coulthard
proposes three areas in Marx’s thinking that need to be abandoned from the
outset. First, is Marx’s ‘rigidly temporal framing of the phenomenon’ of primi-
tive accumulation. Here Coulthard follows much extant literature on the con-
tinuous as opposed to originary character of primitive accumulation within
capitalist development. Second, Coulthard sees ‘normative developmentalism’
as a constitutive feature of Marx’s original formulation of primitive accumu-
lation. However, he follows in the footsteps of scholars like Kevin Anderson
(with acknowledgment) and Teodor Shanin (without), who suggest that Marx
overcame this ‘teleological aspect of his thought in the last decade of his life’,
and that ‘this reformulation has important implications with respect to how
we ought to conceptualize the struggles of non-Western societies against the
violence that has defined our encounter with colonial modernity’.53 A third
area of necessary innovation in Marx’s primitive accumulation has to do with
the ways in which it is enacted in twenty-first century settler-colonial contexts
like Canada, more through the politics of recognition than perpetual violence:
‘in the Canadian context, colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced
primarily through overtly coercive means, but rather through the asymmetri-
cal exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation’.54
By some distance the most original reinterpretation of Marx, through a
dynamic stretching of his thought to better fit the settler-colonial Canadian
present, is Coulthard’s move to ‘contextually [shift] our investigation from an
emphasis on the capital relation to the colonial relation’.55 Such a reorienta-
tion should allow us, first, he argues, to posit ‘the inherent injustice of colonial
rule . . . on its own terms’, rather than merely in its contribution to capitalist
development historically.56 Secondly, focusing on the colonial-relation allows
us to see the importance of land, territory, and resources in the dispossession
of Indigenous peoples in Canada as capitalism expanded, rather than only,
or primarily, their conversion into propertyless labourers. ‘It is now generally
acknowledged among historians and political economists that following the
waves of colonial settlement that marked the transition between mercantile
and industrial capitalism (roughly spanning the years 1860–1914, but with sig-
nificant variation between geographical regions)’, Couthard points out, ‘Native
labour became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the
53 Couthard 2014, p. 9. See Anderson 2010; Shanin 1983.


16 Webber
political and economic development of the Canadian state’.57 The centrality of

land in Indigenous dispossession in Canada has had important implications
for the shape of resistance:
Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism,

including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle pri-
marily inspired by and orientated around the question of land – a struggle
not only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what
the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us
about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in
nondominating and nonexploitative terms – and less around our emer-
gent status as ‘rightless proletarians’. I call this place-based foundation
of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice grounded normativity, by
which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and
longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethi-
cal engagements with the world and our relationships with human and
nonhuman others over time.58
For Coulthard the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from land and terri-
tory has been the primary form that primitive accumulation has assumed in
the Canadian context. This has affected the character of anticolonial contesta-
tion, through the defence of land, understood in all of its multifaceted com-
plexity. Anticolonial praxis in this setting has in turn formed the contours of
Indigenous radical thought, especially its sense of grounded normativity.59
A third component of the contextual shift to the colonial-relation is an
opportunity to better incorporate ecology into our understanding of capitalist
development, principally by being attentive to the ways in which Indigenous
struggle for land and territory has consistently raised these issues. Fourthly,
Coulthard follows many critics in charging Marx with economic reduction-
ism. ‘Although it is beyond question’, he writes, ‘that the predatory nature of
57 Coulthard 2014, p. 12. For a seminal study on Indigenous labour, see Knight 1978.
59 Although he does not make them, there are many parallels here with the social histo-
ries of E.P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh of early capitalist development in England
and the enclosure of the commons. See Thompson 1966, 1993, 2013; Hay, Linebaugh, Rule,
Thompson and Winslow 2011; Linebaugh 1976. For an extraordinary combination of such
a social-historical approach with environmental history, see Thomas Miller Klubock’s
study of the dispossession of Mapuche Indigenous communities in the southern frontier
of Chile, seen through the lens of the forestry industry (Miller Klubock 2014).

Idle No More 17
capitalism continues to play a vital role in facilitating the ongoing disposses-

sion of Indigenous peoples in Canada, it is necessary to recognize that it only
does so in relation to or in concert with axes of exploitation and domination con-
figured along racial, gender, and state lines’.60 A shift to the colonial-relation,
Coulthard argues, ‘is one way to facilitate this form of radical intersectional
analysis’. At the same time, he insists, ‘shifting our position to highlight the
ongoing effects of colonial dispossession in no way displaces questions of
distributive justice or class struggle; rather, it simply situates these questions
more firmly alongside and in relation to the other sites and relations of power
that inform our settler-colonial present.’61
The Interlocutors
Several of the contributions to this symposium focus on Coulthard’s engage-

ment with Marx and Marxism. In Peter Kulchyski’s intervention, for example,
the central criticism of Red Skin, White Masks is its failure to fully appreciate
Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’, and therefore its relative neglect of
the way that ostensibly ‘economic’ modes of production shape apparently
‘separate’ spheres, such as culture. For Kulchyski, Coulthard treats ‘mode of
production as a secondary or contingent theoretical formulation rather than
as the central organising category it deserves to be’. ‘A historical-materialist
approach to the concept of culture’, Kulchyski contends, ‘must begin with
mode of production: culture as the manner in which values and ways of seeing
the self, the other, the world are shaped by distinct modes of production.’ It is
through the use of mode-of-production analysis, according to Kulchyski, that
‘Marxist or materialist-oriented anthropologists in Canada have made some of
the stronger contributions to aboriginal struggles’. Rather than turn to Foucault
and discourse analysis, as Coulthard does in Chapter 3 of Red Skin, White Masks,
Kulchyski urges that we view the social relations of gender through the lens
of mode of production, and link the history of gender egalitarianism among
Indigenous peoples of northern Canada precisely to their gathering and hunt-
ing mode of production. The debate between ‘essentialists’ and ‘constructivists’
on gender and its relationship to Indigenous liberation, and likewise the
theoretical contestation between recognition and redistribution – both with
feature-roles in Coulthard’s book – fade into irrelevance, from Kulchyski’s
vantage point, once the appropriate historical-materialist approach to mode

61 Coulthard 2014, pp. 14–15.

18 Webber
of production is considered fully, with all of its implications, and its novel win-
dow into the totalising power of capital.
If mode of production is what allows Kulchyski to understand land and
Indigenous peoples’ relationship to it in the Canadian north, as well as to
conceive their culture as having an internal relation with the hunting, gather-
ing, and harvesting that they conduct on that land and territory, Geoff Mann
also begins with land in his contribution to this symposium, but then takes
us away from mode-of-production controversies and toward sovereignty and
possession.62 Here we find a creative and far-reaching challenge to Coulthard’s
explicit and implicit understandings of these concepts in Red Skin, White
Masks. Specifically, what concerns Mann is Coulthard’s notion of ‘grounded
normativity’, which takes the land to be ‘a mode of reciprocal relationship’.63 If
the logic of grounded normativity were followed consistently by Coulthard, to
its depths, it would become clear that the concept is antithetical to any notion
of sovereignty, which is ‘at root, all about rule’, not reciprocity. But Coulthard
wavers, and according to this critique presents contradictory understandings
of sovereignty at different points in the text. Mann is convinced that what
Indigenous struggles are actually about, and a better way of describing
what Coulthard captures in his historical narrative of these struggles, is the
notion of ‘countersovereignty’:
what is at issue is not captured by the idea of sovereignty, and a dynamic

construction of countersovereignty – in contradistinction to a struggle
over who will be sovereign – must be understood as an attempt to come
to grips with what it means to claim ‘the right to be responsible’, indi-
vidually and collectively: to have power, to have meaning, to understand
oneself, one’s communities, and one’s histories as not only inseparable
but also ineliminable from the land. This is not land that individuals or
peoples or nations ‘own’ in the liberal sense, but land of which one is a
fundamental part.
More hesitantly, Mann shifts from here to the related concept of possession,
through an engagement with Coulthard’s contextual reorientation from the
capital-relation to the colonial-relation vis-à-vis dominant Marxist understand-
ings of primitive accumulation, and more recently accumulation by disposses-
sion. Mann finds the emphasis on dispossession rather than accumulation in
62 In his discussion of sovereignty, Mann’s critique builds in part on Alfred 2005a, 2005b.

Idle No More 19
this dynamic attractive, at least at first glance. But what is being dispossessed?
‘It seems to me that there is a very real, material, and in some senses political-
economically prior way in which it is the lands themselves who are also unjustly
dispossessed’, he writes; ‘that from the perspective of an Indigenous political
economy, the crimes of colonialism lie at least partly in stripping the land of
one of its essential elements, its people and the modes of life that nourish a
reciprocal, mutual flourishing’. The understanding of land embedded in the
framework of grounded normativity is not amenable to the idea of it having
been ‘possessed’, in the liberal sense, by Indigenous peoples historically. Land
as a mode of reciprocity is necessarily cancelled out in such a conception, as
it is in the notion of sovereignty. ‘If the concept of countersovereignty can do
the work it must’, Mann thus concludes, ‘I cannot think of a better term for this
than “counterpossession”.’
The shift from the capital-relation to the colonial-relation in Coulthard’s
text is George Ciccariello-Maher’s first access-point in his contribution to this
symposium. Unlike Kulchyski and Mann, Ciccariello-Maher endorses without
qualms Coulthard’s re-reading of primitive accumulation, and takes as his task
rather its extension to the context of the United States and a historico-political
comparison of Black Americans and Indigenous peoples in North America.
In Canadian history, Ciccariello-Maher accepts, dispossession of Indigenous
peoples has been principally rooted in the expropriation of their land and ter-
ritory rather than their labour-power, and consequently the form that struggle
has assumed is likewise one centred mainly on land rather than wage-labour.
‘By contrast,’ Ciccariello-Maher argues,
slavery in the United States and elsewhere was clearly an institu-

tion whose raison d’être was the extraction of labour, but notably, this
extraction similarly occurred outside the tight Marxian circuit of
dispossession-enclosure-proletarianisation that Coulthard calls into

question. But if this meant that struggles were often implicitly about
labour – struggles in a sense to become proletarian – in the aftermath of
abolition much has changed: the spatial enclosure of slaves themselves
as fixed unfree labour gave way to a nominally mobile labour force that,
in the anxiety it provoked, revealed the degree to which slavery was never
only about labour extraction, and as a result, spawned policing as a new
form of control.
What is more, Ciccariello-Maher contends, the twentieth century witnessed a

subsequent shift of Black Americans to a surplus labour force, heavily policed

20 Webber
in the cities and over-represented in the prisons.64 ‘While this transition from
unfree to free to surplus labour was not strictly speaking a question of the eco-
nomic need for land,’ he writes, ‘it had everything to do with the reconfigu-
ration of space’. These historical-structural characteristics of Black American
life, for Ciccariello-Maher, suggest political possibilities and potential alli-
ances. ‘In other words, despite persistent socio-economic and political differ-
ences, the late twentieth century has seen something of a convergence of Black
Americans with Indigenous peoples in their territorial relation to the state and
capital. . . . Coulthard’s analysis begs us to share this optimism of the will to
ask what new alliances and territorial struggles this shared positionality might
make possible.’
Marxism, rather than Marx per se, is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s primary con-
cern in her study of Red Skin, White Masks, featured in this symposium. She
provides a rich contextualisation of engagement with Marxism by Indigenous
thinkers and movements in the recent past, and broadens the scope of the
discussion onto a global terrain, positioning Coulthard’s contribution within
a broader milieu than perhaps he himself is able to recognise. Drawing paral-
lels between the Red Power movement in Canada and the United States in the
1960s and 1970s, Dunbar-Ortiz explains this movement’s engagement with rad-
ical dependency theory in Latin America, and the theoretician-practitioners of
radical nationalism in the decolonial struggles of Africa, particularly Amilcar
Cabral.65 She recounts her time in a San Francisco sister study-group to that
of the Maoist-inflected Red Power movement in Vancouver, British Columbia,
and draws fascinating parallels between investigations into various currents of
anticolonial Marxism by the Navajo in the southwestern United States and the
Dene in Canada’s north. She points to the deeper entwinement of Marxism
and Indigenous-liberation struggles in Latin American history, and points to
precursors of Coulthard’s attempt to understand Indigenous dispossession
through the lens of primitive accumulation, including her own study of land
tenure in New Mexico in the early 1980s.66
At a theoretical level, Dunbar-Ortiz raises two important issues. One of her
disputes with Red Skin, White Masks is its neglect of the ‘national question’.
In contradistinction to Mann, she continues to see struggles for Indigenous
sovereignty as unavoidably central to Indigenous conceptions of nationhood,
but suggests that the conceptualisation of nation and nationalism is relatively
64 Here he follows Wacquant 2002.

65 Cabral 1973.
66 Dunbar-Ortiz 2007.

Idle No More 21
underdeveloped in Coulthard’s work. For Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Skin, White Masks

would have been enriched in this domain through the incorporation of Lenin.
In neglecting Lenin on the national question, ‘[i]t seems that a valuable theo-
retical tool is abandoned by not dealing with the dialectic of the workers or
masses of citizens in the colonial state and their potential for revolution and
the Indigenous peoples and other nationalities that are colonised by that state’.
A second mode of critique is developed through another lacuna in
Coulthard’s text – the international context. The global context, for Dunbar-
Ortiz, provides clues to ‘how Indigenous nations’ self-determination move-
ments were turned into domestic quests for recognition’. Indigenous militancy
in North America in the 1960s and 1970s is only understandable in the con-
text of decolonisation struggles in Asia and Africa, and the fragmentation and
domestication of Indigenous militancy since also corresponds to international
defeats of the socialist left and other radical projects in newly-independent
Asian and African states within the context of a world-historic rise of neolib-
eralism. Finally, the international question also looms large in terms of strug-
gle. Specifically, the complicated imbrication of the international Indigenous
movement with the contradictions of international law and the United
Nations are central components to understanding contemporary Indigenous
movements anywhere in the world, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, but are notably
absent in Coulthard’s study of the Canadian context.
Fanon
If a modified version of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation is, therefore,

Coulthard’s entry-point into his study of dispossession, Fanon is his alternate
pathway into the politics of recognition. In particular, according to Coulthard,
Fanon’s 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks ‘provides a strikingly perceptive
answer’ to situations of colonial rule such as the type currently subjugating
Indigenous peoples in Canada:
in situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise
of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice
Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the
profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either
imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society . . . but
also over time slave populations (the colonized) tend to develop what he
called ‘psycho-affective’ attachments to these master-sanctioned forms

22 Webber
of recognition, and that this attachment is essential in maintaining the

economic and political structure of master/slave (colonizer/colonized)
relations themselves.67
The danger here is both subjective and objective, the internal attachment
of the colonised to structurally asymmetrical relations of recognition:
‘Fanon argued that it was the interplay between the structural/objective and
recognitive/subjective features of colonialism that ensured its hegemony over
time’.68 Breaking subjectively and objectively with the structured domination
of colonial rule involves conflict and mobilisation. Linking back to our earlier
discussion of Marx’s ‘revolutionary practice’ – the simultaneous changing of
selves and circumstances through struggle – for Fanon, ‘it is through struggle
and conflict (and for the later Fanon, violent struggle and conflict) that impe-
rial subjects come to be rid of the “arsenal of complexes” driven into the core
of their being through the colonial process’.69 In the absence of ‘conflict and
struggle the terms of recognition tend [pace Charles Taylor] to remain in the
possession of those in power to bestow on their inferiors in ways that they
deem appropriate’.70
It is also through Fanon that Coulthard argues in defence of the politi-
cal utility of resentment and anger, emotions that tend to be pathologised
in the liberal pluralism of recognition. He contends that ‘these negative
emotions . . . mark an important turning point in the individual and collec-
tive coming-to-consciousness of the colonized’. Anger and resentment, in this
political sense,
represent the externalization of that which was previously internalized: a

purging, if you will, of the so-called ‘inferiority complex’ of the colonized
subject. In the context of internalized colonialism, the material condi-
tions of poverty and violence that condition the colonial situation appear
muted to the colonized because they are understood to be the product
of one’s own cultural deficiencies. In such a context, the formation of a
colonial ‘enemy’ – that is, a source external to ourselves that we come to
associate with ‘our misfortunes’ – signifies a collapse of this internalized
colonial psychic structure.71
67 Coulthard 2014, pp. 25–6.

71 Coulthard 2014, p. 114.

Idle No More 23
There are parallels with this line of argumentation evident elsewhere in the
few radical currents of contemporary social-movement studies, not least in
Jane Mansbridge’s notion of ‘oppositional consciousness’. For Mansbridge, this
sort of consciousness ‘is an empowering mental state that prepares members
of an oppressed group to act to undermine, reform, or overthrow a system of
domination’.72 Not merely a consequence of cold calculation, oppositional
consciousness ‘is usually fuelled by righteous anger over injustices done to
the group and prompted by personal indignities and harms suffered through
one’s group membership’.73 ‘In the context of internalized colonialism,’
Coulthard asserts, ‘it would appear that the emergence of reactive emotions
like anger and resentment can indicate a breakdown of colonial subjection
and thus open up the possibility of developing alternative subjectivities and
anticolonial practices’.74
The one area of Fanon’s thought which Coulthard explicitly lets go – Fanon’s
reading of the negritude movement of his era – Ciccariello-Maher holds on
to, but for different reasons. For Coulthard, Fanon had an instrumental rela-
tionship to negritude’s attachment to precolonial tradition, insofar as Fanon’s
assessment of the movement’s
potential hinged . . . entirely on [its] ability to transcend what Fanon saw

as its retrograde orientation towards a subjective affirmation of a precolo-
nial past by grounding itself in the peoples’ struggle against the material
structure of colonial rule in the present . . . he was decidedly less willing
to explore the role that these forms and practices might play in the con-
struction of alternatives to the oppressive social relations that produce
colonized subjects in the first place. . . . In this specific sense . . . it will be
shown that Fanon clearly shared Sartre’s view that negritude’s emphasis
on cultural self-affirmation constituted an important ‘means’ but ‘not an
ultimate end’ of anticolonial struggle, even though both authors arrived
at this analogous conclusion via different paths.75
Because cultural self-affirmation is crucial to Coulthard’s understanding of

the critical revival of aspects of Indigenous traditions in the contemporary
Canadian context, he distances himself from Fanon on this score. According
to Ciccariello-Maher, Coulthard misreads Fanon on this set of issues, and in
72 Mansbridge 2001, pp. 4–5.

73 Mansbridge 2001, p. 5.
74 Coulthard 2014, p. 115.
75 Coulthard 2014, pp. 132–3.

24 Webber
so doing exaggerates the proximity between Sartre and Fanon, and the gap
between Fanon and Coulthard’s later formulation, via the work of Taiaiake
Alfred and Leanne Simpson: Indigenous ‘[r]esurgence, in this view, draws criti-
cally on the past with an eye to radically transform the colonial power rela-
tions that have come to dominate our present.’76 In other words, according to
Ciccariello-Maher, Fanon would agree entirely with this position.
Drawing on Marx, Fanon, and Dene elders, Coulthard has produced a sear-
ing indictment of the politics of recognition in contemporary Canada. In Idle
No More he locates a prefigurative form that effective decolonial mobilisa-
tion might increasingly assume. In the symposium that follows, Coulthard’s
seminal text is taken apart and reconfigured many times over. It is put into
dialogue with other traditions and regions of the world. Coulthard concludes
the symposium, following the expositions and critiques made by Kulchyski,
Mann, Dunbar-Ortiz, and Ciccariello-Maher, with a new set of answers, ques-
tions, and synthesis.
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Idle No More 29
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brill.com/hima
Hunting Theories: Totalisation and Indigenous

Resistances in Canada
Peter Kulchyski
University of Manitoba
peter.kulchyski@umanitoba.ca
Abstract
Indigenous peoples are, in the current historical conjuncture, leading the opposition
to the capitalist state in Canada. The specific features of Indigenous cultures, history
and struggles demand of historical materialism a regional theory that deploys exist-
ing concepts and categories in reinvigorated and sometimes different ways. Glen
Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes a critically important contribution to this
project by offering a creative, materialist-leaning reading of Frantz Fanon as a lever to
criticise those prominent liberal arguments of Indigenous conflict that are based on
notions of recognition. While Coulthard’s argument and project would be significantly
advanced by raising Marx’s concept of ‘mode of production’ from the secondary sta-
tus it enjoys in the work to a more foundational role, in part because this moves the
problem of totalisation to the core of strategies of resistance, he nevertheless in his
affirmative project rightly centres returning to aboriginal cultural forms as a critical
feature of decolonisation.
Keywords
mode of production – primitive accumulation – recognition – redistribution –

totalisation – Indigenous politics – cultural materialism
. . .
By ignoring or downplaying the injustice of colonial dispossession, criti-
cal theory and left political strategy not only risks becoming complicit in
the very structures and processes of domination that it ought to oppose,
but it also risks overlooking what could prove to be invaluable glimpses

Hunting Theories: Totalisation and Indigenous Resistances 31
into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction
of a more just and sustainable world order.1
— Glen Coulthard
∵
The publication of Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks represents noth-
ing less than an event in the current historical conjuncture in Canada. Those
fighting in the trenches of Indigenous2 resistance to the Canadian state
well know that Christians of conscience and even the Canadian courts have
played as large or arguably a larger role as allies of Indigenous decolonisa-
tion as the Canadian left. This state of affairs is deeply unfortunate, as Marxist
theory and left-organisational mobilisation have much to offer Indigenous
struggles and conversely Indigenous struggles have much to offer socialist the-
ory and practice. Coulthard’s work represents a breakthrough: on the one hand,
as an Indigenous scholar he will be read by Indigenous activists and schol-
ars who through him will come to see the value of certain Marx and Fanon-
inspired categories, formulations, tactics and approaches. Materialists will also
find his work more directly familiar while it reveals to them the role materialist
understandings and capacities can play in specific Indigenous struggles, on the
one hand, and it provides a taste of the kinds of inspiration and knowledge to
be found in this specific political dynamic, on the other.
That this theoretical work should need doing is in no small measure a
product of a specific theoretical failing of significant portions of the left-
intelligentsia in Canada. A strain of materialist thinking in Canada insists that
Indigenous peoples, especially because of their poverty, need to be thought of
as a segment of the working class or the lumpen proletariat. Coulthard, cor-
rectly in my view, is pointedly critical of this theoretical tendency, writing of its
latest proponents for example:
Widdowson and Howard make the absurdly reductionist claim that inso-
far as the politics of recognition ‘encourages the native population to

2 The words ‘Indigenous’ and ‘aboriginal’ are here used interchangeably to describe Metis,
First Nation and Inuit peoples of Canada, whether or not they have official state-endorsed
‘status’. ‘Indigenous’ is used by the United Nations and ‘aboriginal’ is the language of Canada’s
constitution.

32 Kulchyski
identify in terms of ethnicity instead of socioeconomic class’ it must be

discarded as inherently ‘divisive and reactionary.’ The authors then go on
to tritely conclude that it is only by ‘eliminating this fundamental “differ-
ence” [namely, class difference] that we can become a global tribe and
the “world can live as one”.’3
Widdowson and Howard are, of course, only nominally Marxists and their
work does not really meet basic academic standards, never mind provide the
historical-materialist analysis that they pretend to achieve (their audiences
and networks in Canada are almost entirely on the political far-right, though
Widdowson’s doctoral thesis was endorsed by leading Marxist scholars).4
However, the strain of orthodox, ossified ‘thought’ they represent has been
pernicious in the Canadian left.
To be clear, it is not that aboriginal people in Canada have not contributed
labour to the development of capital: aboriginal peoples’ labour through the
historic fur industry was the foundation for the development of the nation. And
aboriginal people have been important participants in the trade-union move-
ment, particularly on the west coast.5 However, Indigenous people’s struggles are
centred on land and are, as Coulthard emphasises, in resistance to what Marxists
know of as primitive accumulation (his view of this concept will be discussed
more extensively below). Encouraging Indigenous peoples to see themselves as
workers in this context is roughly the same as telling those European peasants
who fought against enclosures and privatisation of land that they should give
up the fight before beginning it. A theoretical path other than the naïve ‘Indians
should join the class struggle as workers’ approach is urgently needed. The class-
struggle based argument has meant a left largely severed from a critical anti-cap-
italist struggle, at least in the Canadian context but perhaps elsewhere as well.
Shouting the same slogans at higher decibels is a dead-end street. Coulthard’s
critical thought provides a strong path through this labyrinth.
For this reason the publication of this book is an event. It will appeal to two
intelligentsias, those associated with the strong emerging Indigenous-activist
movement, and those associated with ecological, feminist, queer and socialist
critical thinking and practice. What follows will more clearly enunciate the
contribution of Coulthard’s work, will provide an important theoretical correc-
tive around the positioning of the concept ‘mode of production’ as deployed by
3 Coulthard 2014, pp. 51–2.

4 My own quite sharp criticisms of their work can be found in the magazine Canadian
Dimension, March/April 2009; it can also be found online, with a response and fairly
extensive debate, at <http://Canadiandimension.com/articles/1710/>.
5 See among a few other sources, Knight 1978.

Coulthard, and will illustrate the degree to which, in spite of these problems,
Coulthard’s affirmative project is in many respects the same as that which a
critical historical materialism must urgently recover.
Coulthard’s Three Critical Contributions
Coulthard makes three invaluable contributions to a historical-materialist

theory of Indigenous struggle. Firstly, he draws on the reinvigorated concept
of primitive accumulation as the central foundation of Indigenous conflict.
As this issue is of particular relevance to historical materialists it will be given
special prominence here, though Coulthard’s own discussion is less elaborate
than in the other two areas. Second, he offers a careful exegesis of Fanon that
shows how Fanon’s earlier work, Black Skin, White Masks, is a critical lever from
which to interrogate Indigenous identity issues. Third, through reference to
both of these he develops a strong critique of the liberal-oriented recognition-
theory approach to Indigenous politics advanced, and perhaps dominant in
the discipline of politics, by thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, and
James Tully among others.
The concept of primitive accumulation is the centrepiece of Coulthard’s
Introduction and frames his overall understanding of Indigenous politics.
Although he deals with it comparatively briefly, by positioning it at the out-
set he gives his critique of the concept an appropriate prominence. A few
quotes will serve to show the main lines of his argument, and while they may
not be dramatically new to readers who follow Marxist theory, their value to
Indigenous readers who have not encountered Marx can barely be overstated.
For example, Coulthard writes:
Marx’s historical excavation of the birth of the capitalist mode of produc-

tion identifies a host of colonial-like state practices that served to violently
strip – through ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder’ – noncapitalist
producers, communities, and societies from their means of production
and subsistence. In Capital these formative acts of violent dispossession
set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the repro-
duction of capitalist relations of production by tearing indigenous societ-
ies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers
from the source of their livelihood – the Land.6
6 Coulthard 2014, p. 7 (emphasis in original); although the idea that primitive accumulation
is a continuing process is often associated with Harvey 2003 I feel obliged to note that I was

34 Kulchyski
It is clear that Coulthard here is trying to contribute to a ‘conversation within

and between these two diverse fields of critical inquiry’ – namely Indigenous
Studies and Marxist political economy – by calling attention to the value of the
concept of primitive accumulation to Indigenous peoples’ struggles. Unstated
by Coulthard, but worth noting, is that within the field of Indigenous Studies
attention is given to the pernicious effects of colonialism and to the value of
Indigenous culture, though there is rarely a strong explanation of why colo-
nialism takes place and took place, apart from naïve notions related to the
essential ‘badness’ of Europeans or their modes of thinking. Within the field of
Indigenous Studies, then, Coulthard draws attention to the structural dimen-
sions that underlie colonialism by reference to Marx’s theory of capital accu-
mulation and the specific variant associated with primitive accumulation.
Hence, though Coulthard emphasises that ‘for Indigenous peoples to reject
or ignore the insights of Marx would be a mistake, especially if this amounts
to a refusal on our part to critically engage his important critique of capitalist
exploitation and his extensive writings on the entangled relationship between
capitalism and colonialism’,7 he also notes that ‘rendering Marx’s theoretical
frame relevant to a comprehensive understanding of settler-colonialism and
Indigenous resistance requires that it be transformed in conversation with the
critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples themselves’.8 This leads
him to make three criticisms of the concept ‘primitive accumulation’ as it is
found in Marx: that the ‘temporal framing’ of the notion as a phenomenon
exclusive to the early history of capitalism is misguided (a critique whose
forebears he lists),9 that the ‘normative developmentalism’ found in Marx
(and for example in Widdowson and Howard) is both ethnocentric and teleo-
logical (and again he recognises Marx’s own intellectual development on this
issue),10 and that ‘colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced pri-
marily through overtly coercive means, but rather through the asymmetrical
exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation’.11 This
latter insight may be seen as the foundation of Coulthard’s project, so that in
this book rather than examine the mechanics of primitive accumulation
in northern Canada – the mines, clear cuts, energy projects and the attendant
already arguing for its use in understanding Indigenous politics in Canada a decade
earlier (Kulchyski 1992).
8 Ibid.
9 Coulthard 2014, pp. 11–12.
10 Coulthard 2014, pp. 12–14.

rationalisations of them and struggles against them, which are to some degree
discussed in the book but are not its central focus – he turns to Fanon as a the-
oretical fountain of insight into the problems attendant on recognition-based
political projects.
Coulthard’s reading of Fanon is therefore directed by a political project.
In effect he examines why primitive accumulation on Indigenous lands is no
longer a project involving ‘blood and fire’ but rather a process that appears to
involve greater levels of consent (in essence, alongside Gramsci noting that
the coercion/consent balance used to achieve hegemony has been more suc-
cessful through emphasis on the consent side). Coulthard expresses the idea
as follows:
Fanon’s analysis suggests that in contexts where colonial rule is not repro-
duced through force alone, the maintenance of settler-state hegemony
requires the production of what he liked to call ‘colonized subjects’:
namely, the production of the specific modes of colonial thought, desire,
and behavior that implicitly or explicitly commit the colonized to the
types of practices and subject positions that are required for their contin-
ued domination. However, unlike the liberalized appropriation of Hegel
that continues to inform many contemporary proponents of identity
politics, in Fanon recognition is not posited as a source of freedom and
dignity for the colonized, but rather as the field of power through which
colonial relations are produced and maintained. This is the ‘form of rec-
ognition,’ Fanon suggests, ‘that Hegel never described’. Subsequently, this
is also the form of recognition that I set out to interrogate in Red Skin,
White Masks.12
Rather than a reading of Fanon that centres on the discussion of violence

emphasised in The Wretched of the Earth, Coulthard’s emphasis on Black Skin,
White Masks and the production of colonised subjects helps bring Fanon back
to the discussion of decolonisation in Canada in a renewed and vital fashion.
Coulthard then uses this reading of Fanon – both Hegel and Sartre have
prominent places in the discussion as well – as a standpoint from which to
question the main lines of ‘recognition theory’ as an approach to Indigenous
struggles, which is perhaps the overarching theme of the book and certainly
one of its major contributions: ‘the liberal recognition-based approach to
Indigenous self-determination in Canada that began to consolidate itself
after the demise of the 1969 White Paper has not only failed, but now serves
12 Coulthard 2014, pp. 16–17.

36 Kulchyski
to reproduce the very forms of colonial power which our original demands
for recognition sought to transcend.’13 This is a welcome, materialist-oriented
evisceration of what is arguably the dominant paradigm in political studies
of Indigenous politics, a paradigm often uncritically adopted by Indigenous
scholars themselves.
The Final Horizon of Interpretation: Mode of Production
It is now more than thirty years since Fredric Jameson, in the essay
‘On Interpretation’ which begins his The Political Unconscious, persuasively
argued that there were three concentric ‘horizons’ of historical interpretation:
first a narrow, linear chronology of events; second an understanding of how
struggles, especially class struggle, provide a structural context for those events;
and the third, final and highest horizon of interpretation was to see history
through the lens of modes of production, the seismic shifts or interactions
within a way of life and between different ways of life.14 Coulthard certainly
sees value in the concept mode of production – he could hardly discuss primi-
tive accumulation without it – but strangely treats it as a secondary concept.
This is deeply unfortunate and important because many of the problems he
discusses later in the book, around the questions of gender, recognition versus
distributive justice, and the value of tradition and self-recognition, are much
easier to resolve through the lens that the concept of mode of production
provides.
Coulthard deploys the concept of mode of production most consistently
and vigorously in his second chapter, ‘For the Land’, which uses the Dene strug-
gle for self-determination as a site of interrogation. Coulthard himself is Dene
so it is a particularly relevant site for his critical approach, and I have myself
been involved for three decades with Dene communities. In the chapter he
advances a strong and clear formulation of the concept:
I want to highlight one [concept] that remains particularly salient to this

day: the Marxist concept ‘mode of production.’ In its broadest articula-
tion, ‘mode of production’ can be said to encompass two interrelated
social processes: the resources, technologies, and labor that a people
deploy to produce what they need to materially sustain themselves over
time, and the forms of thought, behavior, and social relationships that
13 Coulthard 2014, pp. 23–4.

14 See Jameson 1981, pp. 75–102.

both condition and are themselves conditioned by these productive

forces. As the sum of these two interrelated processes, a ‘mode of produc-
tion’ can be interpreted, as Marx himself often did, as analogous to a way
or ‘mode of life.’ A ‘mode of production must not be considered simply
as being the production of the physical existence of individuals,’ write
Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. ‘Rather it is a definite form of
activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a defi-
nite mode of life on their part.’ I suggest that this broad understanding of
mode of production as a mode of life accurately reflects what constituted
‘culture’ in the sense that the Dene deployed the term, and which our
claims for cultural recognition sought to secure through the negotiation
of a land claim.15
This is well-stated and critically important. Coulthard’s problem is that while

he makes the concept work for him as a theoretical frame for Dene land-based
struggles, he does not seem to appreciate the degree to which it also cuts
through the heavily knotted series of other issues he explores in the book.
A historical-materialist approach to the concept of culture must begin with
mode of production: culture as the manner in which values and ways of see-
ing the self, the other, the world are shaped by distinct modes of production.
Cultural difference within the same mode of production is confined to variet-
ies of expressive culture: how Japanese capitalism differs from American capi-
talism, or how Dene hunters and Inuit hunters take different approaches to
skinning a caribou. Across the boundary of different modes of production, all
certainties become questionable, all assumptions put in play: within capital-
ism desire for objects is so assumed that it is naturalised, but for nomadic hunt-
ers every object is also a burden, weight, and must be viewed with something
like suspicion. Hence across the boundary mode of production a person’s very
way of viewing an object shifts. Indigenous peoples of Canada belong to what
was once called a gathering and hunting mode of production, though the term
‘hunting cultures’ can be appropriately used in this context.16 The hunting
mode of production required, enabled, presumed and instantiated egalitarian
15 Coulthard 2014, p. 65. He acknowledges myself, Kulchyski 2005, and Asch 1982 as ‘particu-
lar’ sources of his understanding.
16 Marx and Engels used the term ‘primitive communist’ to describe this mode of pro-
duction, while contemporary anthropologists use terms such as ‘nomadic foragers’ and
‘hunter/gatherers’; the term ‘bush people’ and Coulthard’s own ‘bush mode of production’
seem to me preferable. In recent decades theorists of hybridity have rejected this theo-
retical apparatus; my critique of that can be found in Kulchyski 2005, pp. 52–4.

38 Kulchyski
gender and social relations, and to that extent models the kind of society that
socialists would like to generalise. Coulthard appreciates that modern hunt-
ers, using contemporary technologies, are, as hunters, an important element
of Indigenous politics. But he leaves the issue there, as an important way of
framing Dene land-based struggles. This is a shame because the concept offers
purchase to every political dynamic he describes, and is part of the reason why
Marxist or materialist-oriented anthropologists in Canada have made some of
the stronger contributions to aboriginal struggles.
An example of the value of a mode of production-based critique can
be adduced through reference to the question of gender, the subject of
Coulthard’s third chapter. In that part of the book, he spends a good deal
of time discussing the terms of debate set by ‘constructivists’ as opposed
to ‘essentialists’ around the issue of traditional gender-egalitarianism and
historical development of patriarchal dominance in Indigenous communi-
ties. He is forced to turn to Foucault and the notion of discourse to square a
circle of his own making (he does not want to advocate essentialism but sees
the value of a traditional egalitarianism argument). It is not only possible,
but critical to argue rather that gender egalitarianism among Indigenous
peoples, still reflected in their traditions and land-based life-ways, was and
is actually a construct of the gathering and hunting mode of production.
Eleanor Leacock remains a vitally important figure in anthropological femi-
nism as the strongest proponent of this view. She once wrote: ‘today, native
peoples all across Canada are fighting for rights to their own lands, to their
own governments, and to their own cultures. The historical record is impor-
tant, for it makes clear that women’s fight for their rights as women is not at
odds with such struggles, as is sometimes asserted, but is an intrinsic part of
them’.17 Leacock argued repeatedly and consistently that gender egalitarian-
ism was a foundational feature of the gathering and hunting mode of pro-
duction, not an ‘essentialist’ aspect of Indigenous cultural difference. In this
she followed a tradition of thought established by Engels, work on which
can be found through to, for example, Cruikshank, Wachowich or Povinelli.18
The struggle to assert aboriginal rights and culture is always also a struggle
to remake or acknowledge the gender egalitarianism that the state has spent
decades attempting with mixed success to undermine. From the purchase
17 Leacock 2008, p. 32.

18 See Cruikshank 1991, Wachowich 2001, and Povinelli 1994; while these texts do not
specifically subscribe to a gender-egalitarianism thesis, their detailed discussions of
women’s social position, work-roles and narratives provide much evidence to support
the argument.

of an argument grounded in the concept of mode of production, there is

no essentialist element to the Indigenous-egalitarianism thesis advanced by
many Indigenous activists. This example is a schematic argument, deployed
here simply to show that Coulthard could use his own approach to Marxist
terms to better or more far-reaching purpose.
Another key dichotomy that Coulthard, and to be fair many other contem-
porary political thinkers, grapples with again falls away when approached
through the lens of mode of production: the difference between recognition
and redistributive visions of justice. At least, it can be suggested that a rec-
ognition of the degree of difference that Indigenous difference involves –
a difference that crosses the boundary mode of production – or more specifi-
cally in this context a recognition of Indigenous people as contemporary hunt-
ers who justly deserve to maintain their way of life as long as they so desire,
would have significant redistributive implications. The treaties in Canada, for
example, inasmuch as they consistently acknowledge the desire of Treaty First
Nations to their way of life, would have to be respected at a whole new level.
Recognition of the legitimacy, viability, and specific character of hunting cul-
tures could force a whole new regime of land management in the Canadian
context. The lack of such recognition means that more land is set aside for
national parks or for the military than for Indigenous peoples. The lack of such
recognition means that universities have become training grounds for non-
Native conservation officers whose job is to police Indigenous hunters, rather
than having Indigenous hunters as the stewards of their own specific lands. Of
course, the capitalist mode of production and the logic of capital accumula-
tion demand that aboriginal lands remain available for resource exploitation:
such a degree of recognition is impossible within the structural logic of the
established order. While with regard to both this issue and the previous one
Coulthard has a lot of value to say, elaborating a critical perspective on both
Indigenous women’s struggle and on the recognition/redistribution dichot-
omy, he does appear to have fallen into the depths of debates that a historical
materialism which takes the concept mode of production seriously can easily
move beyond.
Coulthard’s discussion of Fanon’s fraught relation with ‘tradition’ again
involves a lot of subtle reading and questioning for a problem that falls away
when placed in relation to the mode-of-production argument. Coulthard is
interested in projects of ‘self-affirmative recognition’, which in the Canadian
Indigenous context means Indigenous cultural revitalisation. While Fanon
saw the value of such projects (the equivalent version being the ‘negritude’
movement of his time), for Fanon this was at most a transitional project, hence
Coulthard writes: ‘like Sartre before him, Fanon portrays the identity politics of

40 Kulchyski
negritude as an important means to achieving anticolonial struggle, but not an

end to the struggle itself’.19 Coulthard nowhere discusses or mentions that the
North African pre-colonial culture that Fanon had reference to, while it clearly
enjoyed many sources of ‘civilisational pride’ worth drawing upon, was a cul-
ture associated with an agricultural or tithe mode of production, which itself
involved a whole set of gender and social inequalities. A return to Islam, for all
its value, cannot be a final resting place for socialist practice. However, a return
to the egalitarianism of Indigenous hunting peoples wherever they are found
in the world is indeed something socialists could draw unqualified inspiration
from. The very words ‘traditional’, ‘pre-capitalist’, ‘pre-contact’ (not to mention
Indigenous!) elide this difference.
The arguments made above are all schematic, offered to buttress a claim
that Coulthard deploys mode of production as a secondary or contingent theo-
retical formulation rather than as the central organising category it deserves to
be. They offer a very rough outline to the terms of an argument around three
important issues Coulthard takes up in order to show both a simpler line of
attack and one which avoids a good deal of unnecessary obfuscation (enter-
ing the ideological snake-pit of bourgeois confusion by taking them on their
own terms). There is another critical category associated with the mode-of-
production argument that deserves separate treatment and to which this
analysis now turns.
The Problem of Totalisation
It is interesting to review Coulthard’s use of the notion of ‘totalising’ tendencies

through the course of Red Skin, White Masks. Near the beginning of the text he
suggests of the latter chapters of Marx’s Capital that ‘it is there that Marx most
thoroughly links the totalizing power of capital with that of colonialism by way
of his theory of “primitive accumulation”.’20 The ‘totalizing power of capital’ is
a suggestive phrase worth unpacking. It does not get unpacked. A few pages
later, Coulthard writes, evocatively,
I argue that any strategy geared toward authentic decolonization must

directly confront more than mere economic relations; they have to
account for the multifarious ways in which capitalism, patriarchy, white
supremacy, and the totalizing character of state power interact with one
19 Coulthard 2014, p. 144.


another to form the constellation of power relations that sustain colonial

patterns of behavior, structures, and relationships.21
Again, the ‘totalizing character of state power’ points strongly towards a notion
of the capitalist state peculiarly attuned to the specific struggle of Indigenous
peoples. But this is the single and only place in the text where the phrase is
deployed. There are a couple of places where Coulthard refers to the totalising
power of colonialism, as well as places where a theoretical view is lampooned
as totalising, and in one passage he uses the term both ways: ‘resistance to
this totalizing power is often portrayed as an inherently reactionary, zero-sum
project. To the degree that Fanon can be implicated in espousing such a totaliz-
ing view of colonial power, it has been suggested that he was unable to escape
the Manichean logic so essential in propping up relations of colonial domina-
tion to begin with’.22
An understanding of Indigenous struggles centred on the notion of mode
of production, in my view, leads directly to an understanding of the manner in
which the capitalist mode of production is totalising. Primitive accumulation
is but one facet and element in its totalising arsenal. As Coulthard writes, ‘the
historical process of primitive accumulation thus refers to the violent transfor-
mation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones’.23 A critical element
of the capitalist mode of production is the transformation of the world into a
set of forms conducive to the accumulation of capital. Hence the accumula-
tion of capital is the driving force behind totalisation and in itself a totalising
power. The expansion of the commodity form, or processes called commodifi-
cation (sometimes the ugly, awkward and unnecessary commoditisation), are
a related but distinct totalising power. These two capitalist totalisations were
explored and theorised by Marx.
What Marx did not directly theorise was the role of the state as a third, dis-
tinct totalising power. The state assumes the role of ensuring that the organ-
isation of space, the logic governing temporality, the ordering principles of
subjectivity, and the construction of socialities, are all homogenous, inter-
linked, and conducive to the accumulation of capital, though resistances and
contradictions ensure that these processes proceed unevenly and not in lock-
step. This is the facet of the capitalist state that Indigenous people are often
specifically up against, when they are not facing its brutal, repressive side. It is
the seemingly benign, welfare-oriented arm of the capitalist state that draws

22 Coulthard 2014, pp. 42–3.

42 Kulchyski
Indigenous individuals into a sanctioned way of being, implying a lived tem-

porality, spaciality, sociality and subjectivity that contradict Indigenous life-
ways. Coulthard is absolutely correct in his suspicion of the accommodations
and recognitions afforded Indigenous people by the capitalist state, but his
argument could go a step further: the capitalist state is structurally incapable
of finding a way to operationalise or ‘recognise’ any form of difference that
contradicts the core logic of capitalist totalisation.
Coulthard engages in a very interesting discussion of Sartre’s Anti-Semite
and Jew, comparing it to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. One wonders what
he would do with the chapter on colonialism in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical
Reason, and the notion there of original violence, or with Sartre’s theory, almost
forgotten but revived in part by Jameson, of totality and totalisation.24
And yet . . .
And yet, more often than not, Coulthard’s affirmative political project is vir-
tually the same as that which a more ‘mode of production’ based argument
would suggest. This is what Coulthard says in conclusion:
What our present condition does demand, however, is that we begin to

approach our engagements with the settler-state legal apparatus with a
degree of critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution that has to date
been largely absent in our efforts. It also demands that we begin to shift
our attention away from the largely rights-based/recognition orientation
that has emerged as hegemonic over the last four decades, to a resur-
gent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-
emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures
of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the
best of Indigenous legal and political traditions. It is only by privileging
and grounding ourselves in these normative lifeways and resurgent prac-
tices that we have a hope of surviving our strategic engagements with the
colonial state with integrity and as Indigenous peoples.25
24 See Sartre 1978, especially pp. 45–7. Jameson consistently deploys and defends the con-
cept; see for example Jameson 1981, pp. 52–4.
25 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.

Earlier in the chapter he refers approvingly to ‘revitalization of a bush mode of

production’26 as part of his politics of self-recognition, the turn towards assert-
ing Indigenous practices that is the core of his affirmative political project:
obviously we are on the same track. Such an approach, as Coulthard notes,
does not exclude an urban Indigenous political project, but is critical to it. And
Coulthard, very importantly, does not mince words about what such a project
implies: ‘For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die.’27
Historical materialists, especially senior ones, are not very good at listening.
Given a key to unlock the doors of historical understanding, too often they
are satisfied to repeat the same formulations and look only for evidence that
confirms their pre-existing opinions. Indigenous peoples have much knowl-
edge, both implicit social knowledge of how egalitarian societies can oper-
ate in practice and explicit, reflective knowledge of the struggle to embody
egalitarian values in contemporary contexts. Social-justice activists, if they
are to have any success in this critical area of struggle, must resist the temp-
tation to endlessly pontificate and hand-deliver their pre-wrought solutions.
Forging alliances with Indigenous communities begins with a first critical step:
listening. Coulthard’s work is an excellent place to start.
To be clear, my criticism is that, absent a strong notion of mode of produc-
tion, the Indigenous cultural turn becomes based on an essentialised ‘ethnic’
difference. A stronger use of the Indigenous practice and anthropological
theory that pertains to hunting cultures throughout the range of arguments
that are confronted would strengthen the overall theory. Given the ‘land-based’
dimensions of Coulthard’s approach and the degree to which he deploys the
concept of mode of production, he certainly avoids essentialisation of ethnic-
ity. And one must temper one’s ruthless criticism with the admiration which a
historic text of this kind and quality deserves. Coulthard’s reading of Fanon is
much stronger than my own; his working-through the issue of resentment in
the context of Canadian ‘reconciliation’ projects is a worthy contribution in its
own right and, as should be clear from much of what has been reviewed here,
the main lines of his argument are invaluable. This is an important contribu-
tion to historical-materialist theory and practice which must not lie untouched
but must be hunted through thoroughly and idiosyncratically so nuances and
nuggets may be gathered, so that insight may inform action, so that the change
we will give the name justice will echo in our lives as much as in our theories.
26 Coulthard 2014, p. 171, a term I intend to deploy myself in future in preference to the more
awkward ‘gatherer and hunter mode of production’ or even ‘hunting mode’.
27 Coulthard 2014, p. 173.

44 Kulchyski
References
Asch, Michael 1982, ‘Dene Self-Determination and the Study of Hunter-Gatherers

in the Modern World’, in Politics and History in Band Societies, edited by Eleanor
Leacock and Richard Lee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coulthard, Glen 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recogni-
tion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cruikshank, Julie 1991, Life Lived Like a Story, Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press.
Fanon, Frantz 1967, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press.
Harvey, David 2003, The New Imperialism, New York: Oxford University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Knight, Rolf 1978, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Labour in British
Columbia, 1858–1930, Vancouver: New Star Books.
Kulchyski, Peter 1992, ‘Primitive Subversions: Totalization and Resistance in Native
Canadian Politics’, Cultural Critique, 21: 171–95.
Kulchyski, Peter 2005, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denen-
deh and Nunavut, Winnipeg, MB.: University of Manitoba Press.
Leacock, Eleanor Burke 2008 [1981], Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on
Women Cross-Culturally, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Povinelli, Elizabeth 1994, Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal
Action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1978 [1960], Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensem-
bles, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée, London: NLB.
Wachowich, Nancy 2001, Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women, Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.

brill.com/hima
From Countersovereignty to Counterpossession?

Geoff Mann
Centre for Global Political Economy
Simon Fraser University
Abstract
Although neither sovereignty nor possession are explicit themes of Glen Coulthard’s
Red Skin, White Masks, both concepts are essential to his critique of ‘recognition’ and
the ongoing dynamics of Canadian colonialism. In this response, I offer a critical exam-
ination of the status of these liberal concepts in Coulthard’s work, and suggest that
he has in fact given us a powerful theory of ‘countersovereignty’. Countersovereignty
forces us to consider the meanings of possession and dispossession that animate the
book, which in turn allow us to grasp the radical significance of Coulthard’s emphasis
on the reciprocity at the heart of Indigenous relations with the land.
Keywords
sovereignty – dispossession – Fanon – Coulthard – First Nations – Canada
In the part of the world where Glen Coulthard and I live, it is common
to open gatherings of a left or broadly ‘progressive’ bent with spoken acknowl-
edgement that the event is taking place on ‘the unceded territories of the
Coast Salish peoples’, and an expression of gratitude for the hospitality of
the Musqueam (xʷməθkwəy̓əm), Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), Stó:lō and Tsleil-
Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) nations, on whose lands Vancouver lies.1
As one might expect, this testimony can sometimes serve as an empty genu-
flection, if for no other reason than even in the mouths of those who really
Thanks to Jessica Dempsey, Shiri Pasternak, Glen Coulthard, Mike Krebs, Jeff Webber and the
editors and three anonymous reviewers for much help with this piece.
1 See, for example, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association’s Territorial Acknowl
edgement, at <https://bccla.org/about/territorial-acknowledgement/>.

46 Mann
mean it, it rarely imposes more on us (settlers) than a moment of guilt-tinged

self-congratulation for being so culturally sensitive. But the statement, even
when only a gesture, still matters, as it not only links our gatherings across the
time and space of this place, but also demands a realisation of the relationship
in more than just words.
The (to my knowledge) distinctive nature of this practice among urban
settlers – I have not encountered it in other parts of North America myself –
lies at least partly in the distinctive nature of the colonial history of what is
now British Columbia (BC). In contrast to much of the rest of modern Canada’s
national territory, which was ‘formally’ ceded by Indigenous peoples to the
British and then Canadian states via a series of nation-to-nation treaties in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of BC was never contractually
annexed through treaty.
Consequently, even by the standards of colonial jurisprudence, the prov-
ince is ‘stolen land’, a condition that has caused the state and capital no end
of trouble over the last forty years. In combination with the geography and
resource-intensivity of BC’s settler-colonial political economy, the question of
legal title has put the struggles of the territory’s aboriginal peoples at the centre
of regional and, increasingly, national politics. Thanks to tireless Indigenous
resistance that forced the courts’ hands, Canadian legal precedent is now lit-
tered with a series of decisions that vastly increase the complexity of capitalist
and state incursions on Indigenous lands. It would certainly be naïve to under-
stand these decisions as constituting some clear-cut ‘victory’ in First Nations’
struggles, but they undoubtedly render expropriation a far more daunting
project than in the past. One of Glen Coulthard’s more important arguments
is that the contemporary recognition-paradigm in Canada is the ‘field of power
through which colonial relations are produced and maintained’, which is to say
merely the most recent, and ideologically sophisticated, attempt to overcome
these obstacles.2
The reality of stolen land, and the lens through which it is acknowledged,
i.e. as ‘unceded’, clearly puts at least two closely related ideas front and centre,
explicitly and implicitly: sovereignty and possession. I want to use the histori-
cal, material, and discursive status of the fact-concept ‘unceded’ as an open-
ing to a critical examination of the status of sovereignty and possession in
Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks.
As far as I can tell, ‘unceded’ is a geographically-specific term (my spell-
checker does not recognise it, and you will not find it in the OED), constructed
on the historically- and geographically-specific political terrain of modern
2 Coulthard 2014, p. 17 (emphasis in original).

From Countersovereignty to Counterpossession ? 47
Canada, a product of conflicting claims concerning the original and on-going

colonial elimination of Indigenous peoples and lands.3 It is a categorial
attempt (necessary, perhaps) to grapple with the injustice of colonialism on its
own terms. Just as the treaties of the past have been important to Indigenous
struggles because they can stand as proof that First Nations were historically
understood as independent, self-governing nations, so the lack of treaty is cru-
cial (if not sufficient on its own) to the effort to convince the Canadian state
(the Crown) of the injustice of expropriation and displacement.4
Yet, precisely because the adjective ‘unceded’ emphasises the formal illegiti-
macy of settler domination in the region – since what is now British Columbia
was never legally acquired by the British or Canadian states – it cannot help
but simultaneously suggest that the state’s claims over the immense lands that
were acquired via treaty are not so illegitimate, or at least not illegitimate in
the same way. That this is not the political purpose of the ‘unceded’ modi-
fier is beyond doubt. The ethical indefensibility of Canadian colonialism in
Vancouver or British Columbia would in no way be undone had its lands been
obtained via the ‘nation-to-nation’ treaties by which Indigenous communities
across the land were effectively robbed. While in particular moments these
agreements have certainly played a crucial role in Indigenous efforts to defend
their lands and ways of life – handholds the Crown constructed unintention-
ally in the colonial legal structure – no-one who studies the history of the
treaty process in Canada could grant more than a sliver of it any legal, let alone
ethical, legitimacy. It was largely a series of lies, misinformation, unfulfilled
promises, and outright violence and extortion, coded in a capitalist political-
economic contractual framework which was, even if it had been ‘neutral’, struc-
tured entirely in settlers’ interests.5 Even if the treaties that ‘ceded’ the lands
mark some official recognition of past possession, neither southern Vancouver
Island (Douglas treaties of 1850–4), nor northern Ontario (Treaty 9 of 1929),
nor what is now the tarsands of northern Alberta and the liquid natural gas
fields of northeastern BC (Treaty 8 of 1899) was wilfully or fairly ‘ceded’ in any
meaningful sense of the term.
Consequently, what I want to focus on is less the bounded moment of con-
sensual cession represented by an X on some brittle treaty carefully archived
as ‘proof’ by the Canadian state, than the relations that ‘ceded’ and ‘unceded’
presume or impose upon the on-going colonial moment. This is what I mean
3 On the ‘eliminatory logic’ of settler-colonialism, beyond Red Skin, White Masks, see also Wolfe
2006; Simpson 2014.
4 Borrows 1992.
5 Egan 2011, p. 213.

48 Mann
in saying that the relevance of the unceded status of Coast Salish peoples’
land arises primarily in the attempt to grapple with the injustice of colonial-
ism on its own terms, colonial terms. If it matters that Vancouver lies not just
on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, but rather on lands
never ceded to Canada, then it matters almost entirely on terms colonialism
chooses – even if those terms are occasionally wielded fruitfully by the Coast
Salish nations.6
In this case, at least, these terms are ‘sovereignty’ and ‘possession’. They are,
at least in their hegemonic legal and political senses, fundamentally liberal
concepts. Even in their collective form (land held in common, collective self-
government or determination), they are fully commensurable with the three
essentially liberal assumptions upon which the treaties that assembled much
of the rest of Canada rely: first, on signatories’ status as equal nations; second,
on signatories’ right to represent their constituencies in the treaty process; and
third and equally important, on the meaning or content of the rights and pow-
ers alienated or acquired with the land via treaty.
Like the fact-concept ‘unceded’ itself, parsing out these assumptions like
this, in the mode of ‘logic’ that modulates liberal theoretical and juridical rea-
son, is to engage with the problem on terms entirely commensurable with
(and increasingly essential to) colonialism. Even if this analysis and discourse
is mobilised in opposition, that discursive commensurability is undiminished.
Indeed, framing it like this makes me feel like G.A. Cohen or Will Kymlicka,
left-liberals who have struggled – unsuccessfully, it must be said – to describe a
non-liberal justice on purely liberal terms.7 This is the work ‘unceded’ also does.
For implicit in the emphasis on the ‘unceded’ qualifier is an assertion that the
treaty-form is (at least in principle) legitimate; that, if properly undertaken,
those who treat enjoy some property or power allowing them to rightfully
alienate and acquire territory and exercise exclusive sovereign distributional
and allocative powers regarding the land. It is a claim to sovereignty, and to the
sovereign right to cede or refuse to cede. In the inescapably colonial context of
modern Canadian liberal capitalism, this is a powerful stance, and it is entirely
unsurprising that assertions of sovereignty have become crucial to Indigenous
struggles (and not just in Canada).8
6 Alfred 2001.
7 See, for example, Cohen 1995 or Kymlicka 1995. I am aware that Cohen considered himself
a Marxist. As is also the case with the other members of the short-lived school of ‘analytic’
Marxism (e.g. Jon Elster, Adam Przeworski, John Roemer) – virtually all of whom eventually
became vociferous liberals – this seems to me a perfect instance of false consciousness.
8 Barker 2005; Barker (ed.) 2005; Simpson 2011.

But it is nonetheless true that, in the words of Taiaiake Alfred, ‘the actual
history of our [settlers’ and indigenous peoples’] plural existence has been
erased by the narrow fictions of a single sovereignty’. Indeed, he argues,
‘sovereignty’ has become a big part of the problem: it has ‘limited the ways
[Indigenous peoples] are able to think, suggesting always a conceptual and
definitional problem centered on the accommodation of indigenous peoples
within a “legitimate” framework of settler state governance. . . . “[S]overeignty”
is inappropriate as a political objective for indigenous peoples’.9
Indigenous Sovereignty and Countersovereignty
Excluding the notes and references, the words ‘sovereign’ and ‘sovereignty’
appear fifty-eight times in Red Skin, White Masks (yes, I counted). I mention
this not because it seems like a lot, but because it is definitely not a little.
In several instances, the terms are paired with the word ‘state’ in a way that
points to a critique that resonates with Alfred’s, i.e. that the one term implies
the other. In other words, although he does not say so explicitly, Coulthard
often clearly suggests that sovereignty is a category inseparable from the state.
Since his (like Alfred’s) account involves a consistent and forceful rejection
of an equivalence between Indigenous nationhood and liberal statehood –
both use the term ‘statist’ pejoratively – the reader might take it as given that
for Coulthard, ‘sovereignty’ per se is ‘inappropriate as a political objective for
indigenous peoples’.10
Red Skin, White Masks does in some moments seem to endorse a much
more orthodox, even Westphalian, ‘sovereign’ character to Indigenous rights
and title. At one point, for example, Coulthard writes that before colonialism,
Indigenous nations were ‘diverse, sovereign, and self-governing’. At others, he
emphasises the settler-state’s ‘sovereignty usurpation’, describes recent resis-
tance movements like Idle No More as a ‘full-blown defense of Indigenous
land and sovereignty’, and urges Indigenous communities to assert a ‘sover-
eign presence on our territories’.11 I would suggest, however, that these latter
instances are in fact better understood in light of Coulthard’s layered and more
subtle approach to the problem constructed over the course of the full text.
From this perspective, his arguments for a ‘critically self-affirmative and
self-transformative ethics of desubjectification’ are perhaps closer to those of
9 Alfred 2005, pp. 34–5, 38.

10 For example Coulthard 2014, pp. 6, 36, 92, 118, 124, 159.
11 For example Coulthard 2014, pp. 71, 100, 157, 161, 171.

50 Mann
the Mohawk legal theorist Patricia Monture, who once defined sovereignty as
‘my right to be responsible’: ‘the Aboriginal request to have our sovereignty
respected is really a request to be responsible’.12 Coulthard’s efforts are, of
course, embedded in centuries of resistance that have shaped the assertion
of Indigenous sovereignty in the liberal-jurisprudential sense as well, i.e. as
‘concrete rights to self-government, territorial integrity, and cultural auton-
omy under international customary law’.13 As Audra Simpson puts it (as did
Monture by refusing to swear loyalty to the Crown when she became a lawyer),
however ‘compromised’ the term might be by colonial exclusion, ‘Indian sov-
ereignty is real; it is not a moral language game or a matter to be debated in
ahistorical terms. It is what they have’.14
My point here is not to maintain Indigenous sovereignty’s status as ‘the
uncitable thing’, a liberal wish to erase ‘the violence of Western political
organization’.15 I want to acknowledge that risk, however, while nonetheless
maintaining, rather, that Coulthard’s argument against recognition, and for the
material and irreducible place of land at the foundation of Indigenous modes
of life (‘geopolitics’ as much as ‘biopolitics’) is also an argument that, if it does
not undo, it at the very least forcefully challenges all conceptions of sovereignty
as such.16 The fundamental form and content of his approach is, I believe, best
captured in the following remarks concerning widespread Indigenous block-
ading in the late 1980s, which culminated (in the eyes of many) at Kanehsatà:ke
and Kahnewà:ke (the ‘Oka Crisis’) in the Summer of 1990:
If settler-state stability and authority is required to ensure ‘certainty’ over

Indigenous lands and resources to create an investment climate friendly
for expanded capital accumulation, then the barrage of Indigenous prac-
tices of disruptive countersovereignty that emerged with increased fre-
quency in the 1980s was an embarrassing demonstration that Canada
no longer had its shit together with respect to managing the so-called
‘Indian Problem’.17
I believe it is not sovereignty but ‘countersovereignty’ that is essential to the

potential Coulthard sees in a resurgent Indigenous struggle for things that a
12 Coulthard 2014, p. 48; Monture-Angus 1999, p. 36.

13 Barker 2005, p. 18.
14 Gray 1989; Simpson 2011, p. 211, cf. Cattelino 2010, p. 239.
15 Simpson 2011, p. 209.
16 Rifkin 2009, p. 94.
17 Coulthard 2014, p. 118 (emphasis added).

colonial frame tends to associate first and foremost with the common sense
of liberal ‘sovereignty’: land, autonomy, authority, rights and title, and self-
determination/government (as variously invoked throughout the text).18 If I
am right, then the interesting question is how a countersovereignty can artic-
ulate (in both the ‘voice’ and ‘connect’ senses) the struggles for what on the
surface appear standard liberal ‘goods’, or even ‘hypergoods’ à la Charles Taylor.19
How can the fight for self-determination – for the material ‘fact’ of land itself –
escape the clutches of sovereign governmentality?
What exactly does Coulthard mean by ‘countersovereignty’? This is
the term’s sole appearance in Red Skin, White Masks, so we cannot triangu-
late across a series of arguments. We can only work it out by investigating
the ways in which his analysis of Indigenous struggles describes a material
territorial and political relation, in particular to and with the land. To do so
is to understand the ways in which sovereignty is absolutely incapable of
capturing that relation, part but not all of which is contained in the idea of
‘grounded normativity’:
Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood

as struggles oriented around the question of land – struggles not only
for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of recip-
rocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and
associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives
in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, non-
dominating and nonexploitative way. The ethical framework provided by
these place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge is what I
call ‘grounded normativity’.20
The principal obstacle to an orthodox conception of sovereignty in that

relation – indeed, the dynamic that gives it a ‘countering’ sense of active resis-
tance or reversal – is the centrality of reciprocity. Within any given territory,
sovereignty is by definition a non-reciprocal relation. Whether one under-
stands it as constituted in the Schmittian ‘decider’ who arrogates the power
of exception, or in the adoption of subjection by the many before the body of
the one, or even in a more collective-democratic mode, sovereignty is, at root,
all about rule.
18 For example Coulthard 2014, p. 122.

19 Taylor 1989.

52 Mann
Against this, take as exemplary the following arguments: ‘we are as much
a part of the land as any other element’; Dene are ‘an inseparable part of an
expansive system of interdependent relations covering the land and animals,
past and future generations, as well as other people and communities’; or, as
Coulthard quotes Dene leader Philip Blake, ‘We have been satisfied to see our
wealth as ourselves and the land we live with’.21 Alfred puts it beautifully,
One of the main obstacles to achieving peaceful coexistence is of

course the uncritical acceptance of the classic notion of sovereignty
as the framework for discussions of political relations between peoples.
The discourse of sovereignty has effectively stilled any potential resolu-
tion of the issue that respects indigenous values and perspectives. Even
‘traditional’ indigenous nationhood is commonly defined relationally, in
contrast to the dominant formulation of the state: there is no absolute
authority, no coercive enforcement of decisions, no hierarchy, and no
separate ruling entity.22
To the extent that Red Skin, White Masks endorses a vehement rejection of that
formulation, in defence of (to take only one instance of many) ‘a place-based
ethics that fundamentally challenged the assumed legitimacy of colonial sov-
ereignty over and capitalist social relations on Dene territories’, it is a chal-
lenge not only to specifically colonial forms of sovereignty, but to any and all
forms of sovereignty that can be logically or historically paired with the modi-
fier ‘colonial’.23 Which is to say, again, that Coulthard’s position is perhaps very
much like that of Monture: that Indigenous sovereignty is about the ‘right to be
responsible’: it ‘is really a question of identity (both individual and collective)
more than it is a question of an individualized property right’, and ‘identity
requires a relationship with territory (and not a relationship based on the con-
trol of that territory)’.24
Indeed, if in ‘the last thirty years we have witnessed a gradual erosion of
this radical imaginary [transformative redistribution] within the mainstream
Dene recognition and self-determination movement, which in the context of
land claims and economic development has resulted in significant decoupling
21 Coulthard 2014, pp. 61–3.

22 Alfred 2005, pp. 41–2.
23 The place of what Audra Simpson (2014) calls ‘nested sovereignties’ remains uncertain
to me in the face of (my reading of) Coulthard’s ‘countersovereignty’, as does Kevin
Bruyneel’s (2007) liminal ‘third space of sovereignty’.
24 Monture-Angus 1999, p. 36.

of Indigenous “cultural” claims from the transformative visions of social, politi-

cal, and economic change that once constituted them’, then might we even say
that Indigenous claims to a variation on colonial sovereignty have emerged as
a last resort or ‘default’ claim.25
With the violent narrowing of the discursive field, is it possible that more
radical, countersovereignty claims have been hobbled by a recognition appa-
ratus that has enforced a political regress to sovereignty? For the Dene, faced
with a succession of pipeline proposals, and given that ‘no channels existed
for the articulation of [Indigenous] concerns’, sovereignty has become the
‘default’ assert-able claim with universally acknowledged legitimacy.26 This is
part of what I understand Coulthard to be saying when he writes,
[T]he land-claims process itself has also served to subtly shape how
Indigenous peoples now think and act in relation to the land. . . . I would
suggest that one of the negative effects of this power-laden process of
discursive transformation has been a reorientation of the meaning
of self-determination for many (but not all) Indigenous people in the
North; a reorientation of Indigenous struggle from one that was once
deeply informed by the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obli-
gations (grounded normativity), which in turn informed our critique of
capitalism, . . . to a struggle that is now increasingly for land, understood
now as material resource to be exploited in the capital accumulation
process.27
Again: what is at issue is not captured by the idea of sovereignty, and a dynamic
construction of countersovereignty – in contradistinction to a struggle over
who will be sovereign – must be understood as an attempt to come to grips
with what it means to claim ‘the right to be responsible’, individually and
collectively: to have power, to have meaning, to understand oneself, one’s com-
munities, and one’s histories as not only inseparable but also ineliminable from
the land. This is not land that individuals or peoples or nations ‘own’ in the
liberal sense, but land of which one is a fundamental part. And yet to try to
describe such dynamics, especially as a settler, feels potentially counterpro-
ductive. I know that Indigenous assertions of sovereignty can (as a friend of
mine put it) be an extraordinarily useful ‘pain in the ass’ for the colonial state.
I also know that merely to have posited them as I have here, these ideas and


54 Mann
terms are themselves fraught. Persistent colonial ideologies too easily trans-
late these claims as mere elaborations on the idea that Indigenous peoples are
‘one’ with nature, the so-called ‘ecological Indian’, which is not really all that far
from the self-serving reasons ‘settler authorities felt justified in claiming North
America legally vacant, or terra nullius, and sovereignty was acquired by the
mere act of settlement’.28
However, this formulation can perhaps illuminate a genetic link between
sovereignty and settlement. In the landmark 1997 decision in Delgamuukw v.
British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada maintained that ‘Aboriginal
title crystallized at the time sovereignty was asserted’, a kind of legal
antimatter.29 First Nations’ pre-colonial ‘occupation’ of British Columbia is
deemed eo ipso ‘pre-sovereignty’, and sovereignty as such is explicitly defined
as an event or moment in (past) time: ‘if, at the time of sovereignty, an aborigi-
nal society had laws in relation to land, those laws would be relevant to estab-
lishing the occupation of lands which are the subject of a claim for aboriginal
title’.30 Perhaps we might thus say that in the act of settlement, sovereignty is
taken to be ‘crystallized’. If so, then because Indigenous modes of life are not
about ‘settling’ the land, but rather about the continuity of living in and with it,
this is further evidence of the poverty of the concept of sovereignty, a concept
(in Rifkin’s words) that ‘designates less a content that can be replaced . . . than a
process of compulsory relation, one predicated on the supposedly unquestion-
able fact of national territorial boundaries’.31
Among the most difficult discursive challenges Coulthard faces, then, is the
construction of a set of ideas, even a language of political reason, that sub-
stantiates the claim to countersovereignty as violently opposed to both the
persistent colonial power that animates the noble savage, terra nullius argu-
ment (which still saturates much progressive politics, perhaps especially in the
mainstream environmental movement) and to the idea ‘that what indigenous
peoples are seeking in recognition of their nationhood is at its core the same as
that which countries like Canada and the United States possess now’.32
28 Coulthard 2014, p. 100.

29 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia [1997] 3 S. C. R. 1010, at 1017: ‘Aboriginal title is a bur-
den on the Crown’s underlying title. The Crown, however, did not gain this title until it
asserted sovereignty and it makes no sense to speak of a burden on the underlying title
before that title existed. Aboriginal title crystallized at the time sovereignty was asserted.’
30 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia [1997] 3 S. C. R. 1010, at 1101–2; cf. McNeil 1999, pp. 777–9.
31 Rifkin 2009, p. 105.
32 Alfred 2005, p. 42.

Countersovereignty and Counterpossession
I am thus entirely convinced by Alfred’s argument that ‘sovereignty’ cannot

adequately describe the relation to the land and territory, the irreducible and
necessary material foundation of Indigenous cultures (indeed all cultures),
elaborated in Red Skin, White Masks. Sovereignty is not up to the task.
This much, I am hoping, Coulthard might willingly grant me. I am less cer-
tain about the next and final step in my argument, which is that not only is
sovereignty inadequate, but so too is ‘possession’. The reason I am much less
confident in this next move is that to problematise possession is not only to
risk being seen to endorse a terra nullius-like rationale (i.e. they did not ‘own’ it
so it was settlers’ for the taking), it is clearly also to problematise dispossession,
an absolutely central category in Coulthard’s analysis of colonialism, which he
defines as a ‘a structure of domination predicated on dispossession’.33 Indeed,
it is perhaps colonialism’s essential dynamic in his account, a key reason he
leads us to rethink the Marxian ‘primitive accumulation’ thesis as predicated,
‘in perpetuity’, on dispossession.
This is not to say that Coulthard’s general critique of the ‘accumulation by
dispossession’ thesis is not compelling. His argument on that front, for which
he draws on Fanon to demonstrate the ways in which ‘the contextual shift advo-
cated here . . . takes as its analytical frame the subject position of the colonized
vis-à-vis the effects of colonial dispossession, rather than from the primary
position of “the waged male proletariat [in] the process of commodity produc-
tion” ’, is absolutely convincing.34 As he says, the imposition of the ‘primitive
accumulation’ lens, in its more recent ‘accumulation by dispossession’ render-
ing, tends as it always has to put the downbeat on accumulation. But in the
context of on-going Indigenous struggle, while accumulation matters, it does
so no more, and perhaps less, than dispossession. Just as Marx exposed the
fantasy that capitalism might rescue capital’s victims, Coulthard says, ‘Fanon’s
position challenges colonized peoples to transcend the fantasy that the settler-
state apparatus – as a structure of domination predicated on our ongoing dis-
possession – is somehow capable of producing liberatory effects’.35
And yet it seems to me that to foreground dispossession is to emphasise
the undoing of a relation to land that is refused by much of Red Skin, White
Masks. To say that ‘we are as much a part of the land as any other element’,
33 Coulthard 2014, pp. 15, 23; cf. pp. 7, 9, 11, 157. He is clearly not alone in making this argu-
ment. See, for example, Barker 2005, Simpson 2014.

56 Mann
‘an inseparable part of an expansive system of interdependent relations’ is not

to describe a relation of possession, but something as qualitatively other or
differentiated from its colonial connotations as sovereignty is from Coulthard’s
countersovereignty. Recall, once more, Philip Blake’s comment: ‘We have been
satisfied to see our wealth as ourselves and the land we live with’. Speaking as
a settler, I must honestly say I cannot tell you how foreign it sounds to me to
regard ourselves, and the territories of my home, in such a manner – to regard
our wealth as ourselves and the land we live with.36 The very idea of wealth as
I have learned to understand it (i.e. as a settler) is turned upside down in this
statement.
So, when Coulthard writes of ‘the lands that are core to who we are as
Indigenous peoples’, the relation to those lands seems to me to be substantially
misdescribed by ‘possession’. Rather, it seems to suggest a radical conceptual
reversal (at least from the colonial purview) at the heart of the interdepen-
dence and reciprocity emphasised in the text. Indeed – and this in particular is
where I fear some slippage into terra nullius, ‘ecological Indian’ talk – it is not
entirely fanciful to say that when Coulthard writes of the ‘dispossessed lands
of Indigenous peoples’, one might read ‘lands’ as both object and subject of the
phrase.37 It seems to me that there is a very real, material, and in some senses
political-economically prior way in which it is the lands themselves who are
also unjustly dispossessed; that from the perspective of an Indigenous political
economy, the crimes of colonialism lie at least partly in stripping the land of
one of its essential elements, its people and the modes of life that nourish a
reciprocal, mutual flourishing.38
Certainly to speak of land ‘dispossessed’ of its peoples risks much. Partly,
of course, because while a critique of ‘possession’ not only rejects settler-state
claims to sovereign property, it also cannot help but undermine, if only at a
conceptual level, the (quasi-Lockean?) nature of a priori claims to posses-
sion based on first-ness or prior occupancy.39 Such categorial reflection must
be weighed against the possibility that critique in this vein can underwrite
the maintenance of injustices that far outweigh the good in even the most
36 One finds a similar framing in the brilliant work of Audra Simpson, who writes of Mohawk
resistance to ‘the structure of settlement that strangles their political form and tries to
take their land and their selves from them’ (Simpson 2014, p. 3).
37 Coulthard 2014, p. 170.
38 Coulthard 2014, p. 169.
39 For example Coulthard 2014, p. 13: ‘in liberal settler states such as Canada, the “commons”
not only belong to somebody – the First Peoples of this land’ (emphasis in original).

well-intentioned exegesis. As Fanon himself once remarked in a devastating

attack on the politics of ‘mutual recognition’:
During some moments of détente, in certain moments of free debate,

the colonised individual frankly acknowledges what positive there is
in the actions of the coloniser. But this good faith is immediately leaped
upon and transformed by the occupier to justify occupation. When
the Indigenous person, after terrible struggle to turn toward the truth,
via a confrontation with what seem like insurmountable differences,
says, ‘This is good. I say this to you because it is what I think’, the col-
oniser transforms and translates it as: ‘Don’t leave. What would we do
without you?’40
This threat looms large in destabilising concepts that have become central to
the resistance to injustice.
But the conception of land at the heart of Red Skin, White Masks seems to
point directly to a fundamental rethinking of possession, indeed to the very
idea of ‘occupation’, and we must follow it there. In Coulthard’s claim that the
lands ‘deeply inform and sustain Indigenous modes of thought and behaviour
that harbour profound insights into the maintenance of relationships within
and between human beings and the natural world built on principles of reci-
procity, nonexploitation, and peaceful coexistence’, he is talking about a des-
perately necessary reconstruction of the way we understand and live with the
world.41 If the concept of countersovereignty can do the work it must, then I
cannot think of a better term for this than ‘counterpossession’.
If this is in fact a just reading of the book, then it brings into view even
more radical potentials in Coulthard’s argument. He writes, for instance, that
‘[l]and has been stolen, and significant amounts of it must be returned. Power
and authority have been unjustly appropriated, and much of it will have to
be reinstated’.42 Somewhat appropriately, the subject of these crimes is not
40 ‘Dans certaines périodes de détente, dans certaines confrontations libres, l’individu colo-
nisé reconnaît franchement ce qu’il y a de positif dans l’action du dominateur. Mais cette
bonne foi est immédiatement reprise par l’occupant et transformée, en justification de
l’occupation. Quand l’indigène, après un gros effort en direction de la verité, parce que
supposant les differences surmontées, dit: « Cela c’est bien. Je vous le dis parce que je le
pense », le colonisateur transforme et traduit: « Ne partez pas, car que ferions-nous sans
vous? »’ (Fanon 1959, p. 356).
42 Coulthard 2014, p. 168.

58 Mann
named. It is perhaps ‘obvious’ that it is Indigenous peoples, but it is just as true

to the text, it seems to me, to understand these processes as crimes against the
land itself. If a resurgent Indigenous struggle demands a ‘critical desubjecti-
fication’ on the part of its participants, it would also seem to demand just as
urgently a critical desubjectification of the land.
Back to Fanon
Coulthard’s most sustained theoretical interlocutor is Frantz Fanon, and

the other participants in this forum address that conversation more closely.
But there is a way in which Fanon animates Red Skin, White Masks in a more
holistic manner, for Fanon too was concerned not only to critique, but also to
illuminate something like a path, or at least a space from which we might set
out. And like Coulthard, he could not help but see this as something of a ‘new
beginning’ – the very idea of ‘resurgence’ communicates that sensibility.43 As
Coulthard shows, Fanon had perhaps too little time for culture and even less
for tradition, but both writers are nonetheless led to a conception of a radically
different possibility for future modes of life.
In L’an V de la révolution algérienne (written in 1959 and translated under
the less evocative title A Dying Colonialism), Fanon wrote the following (in
fact, he italicised it for emphasis), but for some reason it was excised from the
English translation: ‘la mort du colonialisme est à la fois mort du colonisé et mort
du colonisateur’ – the death of colonialism is at the same time the death of
the colonised and the death of the coloniser.44 This is not far from Coulthard’s
vision. And like Fanon, and all who take on the responsibility of engaging the
world in so fundamental a manner, he must struggle to conceive and then
describe a non- and anti-colonial afterlife.
Fanon, Alfred and Coulthard all briefly flirt with a vague conception of an
alternative Indigenous ‘popular sovereignty’, but ultimately find themselves
fighting to find a way to talk about power, history and authority that refuses
43 Macey 2000, p. 394.

44 Fanon 1959, p. 269. The original French title, which translates as Year V of the Algerian
Revolution, recalls the French Revolution itself and its revolutionary calendar. The
untranslated phrase in question troubled the original French publisher (Maspero) as well,
who chose to exclude not just this two-line paragraph, but the entire preface from which
it is drawn. In the event, the book’s effect was drastically reduced when it was banned
within three months of publication (Macey 2000, pp. 395–6).

sovereignty.45 Coulthard must do so in the context of a capitalism that reduces

all power to a form of market-based property-relation validated by violence,
thus rendering the relation to the land infinitely and instantaneously radically
alterable, as if all of the other and original relations can be instantly erased.
He struggles – and we should be enormously grateful for his efforts – to
describe a relation to the material bases of our lives that fixes – critically,
respectfully, reciprocally – peoples and their modes of life to the land in an
ineradicable way.
What that relation will look like, I cannot claim to know, for it is not based in
experiences to which I have yet had access. That said, it seems to me to begin
with a very ‘Fanonian’ categorical refusal of colonialist histories, and thus of
colonialist Truth. The assertion of a ‘right to be responsible’ might take such
a form. For it is not an Indigenous ‘request’ for recognition qua acknowledge-
ment that is at issue, as Coulthard shows so forcefully. On the contrary, it is an
Indigenous claim that despite centuries of theft and genocide, the reciprocity
of the partnership in the relation with the land endures, and indeed cannot be
undone by time, space, law or money. It is ineliminable, and any responsible
conception of justice makes it so. This, I believe, is part of what Aimé Césaire
meant when he wrote ‘Europe is indefensible’.46
Thus, to assert a ‘right to be responsible’ is not a right for self-determination
or territory precisely, or not only. It is the taking-up of a position in which
responsibility, not only for and to oneself and one’s communities, but for and
to the very possibility of a mode of life in and with the world around us. That
relation cannot be sovereign, it cannot require or impute possession, and it
cannot matter a whit if it is ‘ceded’ or ‘unceded’. It is a relation in which justice
is not just ‘served’, but is unavoidable. What words will suffice? At present, per-
haps, we lack them. But Red Skin, White Masks is among the first, if tentative,
dictionaries for a new world.
45 Fanon 1959, pp. 319–20; Alfred 2005, p. 42; Coulthard 2014, p. 68.
46 Césaire 1955, p. 1 (emphasis in original): ‘Le fait est que la civilisation dite « européenne »,
la civilisation « occidentale », telle que l’ont façonnée deux siècles de régime bourgeois,
est incapable de résoudre les deux problèmes majeurs auxquels son existence a donné
naissance: le problème de la prolétariat et le problème colonial; que, déférée à la barre de
la « raison » comme à la barre de la « conscience », cette Europe-là est impuissante à se
justifier; et que, de plus en plus, elle se réfugie dans un hypocrisie d’autant plus odieuse
qu’elle a de moins en moins chance de tromper. L’Europe est indéfendable.’

60 Mann
References
Alfred, Taiaiake 2001, ‘Deconstructing the British Columbia Treaty Process’, in Rattray
and Mustonen (eds.) 2001.
Alfred, Taiaiake 2005, ‘Sovereignty’, in Barker (ed.) 2005.
Baldwin, Andrew, Laura Cameron and Audrey Kobayashi (eds.) 2011, Rethinking the
Great White North: Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Can-
ada, Vancouver, BC.: UBC Press.
Barker, Joanne 2005, ‘For Whom Sovereignty Matters’, in Barker (ed.) 2005.
Barker, Joanne (ed.) 2005, Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility
in Indigenous Struggles for Self-determination, Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska
Press.
Borrows, John 1992, ‘A Genealogy of Law: Inherent Sovereignty and First Nations Self-
Government’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 30, 2: 291–353.
Bruyneel, Kevin 2007, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.
Indigenous Relations, Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press.
Cattelino, Jessica 2008, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty, Durham,
NC.: Duke University Press.
Cattelino, Jessica 2010, ‘The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty’,
Cultural Anthropology, 25, 2: 235–62.
Césaire, Aimé 1955, Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris: Éditions Présence Africaine.
Cohen, Gerald Allan 1995, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Coulthard, Glen Sean 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition, Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press.
Egan, Brian 2011, ‘Resolving “the Indian Land Question”? Racial Rule and Reconcilia-
tion in British Columbia’, in Baldwin, Cameron and Kobayashi (eds.) 2011.
Fanon, Frantz 1959, L’an V de la révolution algérienne, in Fanon 2011.
Fanon, Frantz 2011, Oeuvres, Paris: La Découverte.
Gray, Cynthia 1989, ‘A Question of Sovereignty: Patricia Monture v. the Queen’, Cana-
dian Women’s Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme, 10, 2/3: 146–8.
Kymlicka, Will 1995, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macey, David 2000, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, London: Verso.
McNeil, Kent 1999, ‘The Onus of Proof of Aboriginal Title’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal,
37, 4: 775–803.
Monture-Angus, Patricia 1999, Journeying Forward: Dreaming First Nations’ Indepen-
dence, Halifax, NS.: Fernwood Press.
Rattray, Curtis and Tero Mustonen (eds.) 2001, Dispatches from the Cold Seas: Indige-
nous Views on Self-Governance, Ecology and Identity, Tampere: Tampere Polytechnic.

Rifkin, Mark 2009, ‘Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the

“Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples’, Cultural Critique, 73: 88–124.
Simpson, Audra 2011, ‘Settlement’s Secret’, Cultural Anthropology, 26, 2: 205–17.
Simpson, Audra 2014, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler
Taylor, Charles 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge:
Wolfe, Patrick 2006, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of
Genocide Research, 8, 4: 387–409.

brill.com/hima
Dispossession without Labour: Bridging Abolition

and Decolonisation
George Ciccariello-Maher
Drexel University
gjc43@drexel.edu
Abstract
Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes two decisive interventions. First, it
shifts our lens from the capital relation to the colonial relation, disarticulating the pro-
cess of primitive accumulation to emphasise its component parts: dispossession and
proletarianisation. To do so is to both liberate the concept from its European origins
by centring those contexts in which dispossession is not followed by proletarianisa-
tion, and to pose the political unity of different forms of dispossession: of land (as in
settler-colonialism) as well as labour (as in chattel slavery). Second, Coulthard draws
convincingly upon Frantz Fanon, whose work is essential for grasping both colonial-
ism and white supremacy, but crucially their complex interrelation.
Keywords
Coulthard – Fanon – decolonisation – abolition – race – Indigenous politics –

recognition
When W.E.B. Du Bois reformulated his early emphasis on the colour line
in The Souls of Black Folk to render central the question of labour in Black
Reconstruction, he was not naïve about the separability of the two. If in 1903 he
had declared that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color-line’, Du Bois would soon shift his lens toward a Marxist framework that
foregrounded categories of class.1 But in turning to labour, he did not simply
embrace the Marxist orthodoxy of the time, but instead sought to stretch and
1 Du Bois 1989, p. 13.

Dispossession without Labour 63
resignify class categories by specifying just which labour he was talking about:
the ‘ultimately exploited’, that ‘dark and vast sea of human labor’ who, by virtue
of their position, could truly live up to Marx’s description of a universal class
with no interest of their own and ‘neither wish nor power’ to exploit others.
Here is the real modern labor problem . . . out of the exploitation of the

dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts
which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and
conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the
emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers
who are yellow, brown and black.2
. . . and red?
This absent question lies at the centre of Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White
Masks.3 To insist as many of us do that the urgent task for the present is to
deepen and press forward the ‘unfinished project of decolonisation’ is not in
any way to disregard the centrality of labour – forced or ‘free’.4 Recent debates
have seen a resurgence of class-centric arguments emerging to counter the
simplistic caricatures so often dismissed as ‘identity politics’, but these have
also deepened divisions between those approaches that centre race and black-
ness and those that centre colonialism, threatening to drive a wedge between
decolonisation and abolition.5
In this context, Red Skin, White Masks is a welcome contribution, one that
deploys Frantz Fanon as a theoretical resource to bridge between struggles
against white supremacy and the legacies of colonialism, to deepen those move-
ments and debates, to sharpen those concepts and weapons capable of engaging
in what Coulthard calls the ‘nondogmatic’ process of rolling back the colonial
legacy in all its capitalist, white-supremacist, and hetero-patriarchal aspects. As
I pen these words, the United States celebrates a genocidal holiday of thanks
while occupied Ferguson burns, and the question presses upon us: what mate-
rial force, what political unity, can be crafted toward this most urgent of tasks?
2 Du Bois 1992, pp. 15–16.

3 Coulthard 2014.
4 Maldonado-Torres 2008, p. 235.
5 On one extreme we could note a tendency in Afro-pessimist literature to dismiss the poten-
tial of indigenous and decolonial struggles, whether it be in Frank Wilderson’s recent com-
ments on Palestinian struggles or Jared Sexton’s ‘The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of
the Unsovereign’ (Sexton 2016). On the other extreme are those arguments that continue to
suggest, inexplicably, that slaves were settlers too.

64 Ciccariello-Maher
Red Skin, White Masks is a masterful text, and I choose that term for its counter-
intuitive peculiarity, its expressive weight, and its slyly subversive irony given
Coulthard’s effort to reformulate a politics of recognition beyond the conspic-
uous limits of G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage, master and
slave. To be masterful in this sense is neither to brandish repressive power-
over nor to resign oneself to slothful indolence, and nor is it simply to invert
the colonial relation with the last becoming first in the most literal of senses.
It is instead to appropriate the mastery of self-activation, turning away from
the recognition of a historic master and – to borrow a phrase, ‘idle no more’ –
losing oneself in a labour that is both in and on the world, what Fanon saw as
the ‘only work’ of liberation.6
Beyond Red Skin, White Masks’ broader contribution to the task of unset-
tling and theorising Native Studies, crucial as this task is, here I want to
emphasise two major theoretical contributions that Coulthard makes, the
first in his general framing of his project and the second in his rich critical
appropriation of Fanon, before concluding with one concern about the latter.7
As to the first, I want to emphasise Coulthard’s radically understated proposal
for ‘contextually shifting our investigation from an emphasis on the capital rela-
tion to the colonial relation’.8 This turn appears in the text quite modestly, as
a minor methodological correction to both the observed European content
that fills Marx’s categories and his broader linear-developmentalist tenden-
cies, but it is nevertheless a fundamental element in a theoretical turn that I
would describe as Copernican were the term not so laden with spatial-colonial
overtones.
In the Marxian account, capitalism finds its origins in the brutal disposses-
sion of populations and the enclosure of what is dispossessed: the land. But
for Marx, this process of dispossession and enclosure quickly gives way to a
phenomenon that, due to his historical context, he binds too tightly to it: pro-
letarianisation, or the forcible creation of a new labouring class. This much-
debated process of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ stands at the centre of
any attempt to deploy a Marxist analysis toward grasping the legacies of colo-
nialism, and Coulthard positions his work at the very heart of these ‘hostile
and polarising’ debates, between embracing Marxism as-is and rejecting it out
6 Fanon 2004, p. 50. For Coulthard’s intervention surrounding the Idle No More mobilisa-
tions, see Coulthard 2012.
7 For important recent contributions to rethinking contemporary Native Studies, see espe-
cially Simpson and Smith (eds.) 2014.

of hand.9 Coulthard instead shows how Marx both implicitly universalises the
European experience by binding the constituent elements of primitive accu-
mulation together into a single unit, and explicitly locates this process as a
necessary and even beneficial stage in a broader dialectical progression.10
Seen in this light, the radical and distinctive nature of Coulthard’s proposal
becomes clear: to shift from the capital relation to the colonial relation is to
break dispossession out of the specific context to which Marx bound it, and
to open our eyes to other forms of dispossession – ‘colonial dispossession’ in
particular.11 But to do so is to broaden our vista in still more radical ways,
because Marx’s binding of dispossession to proletarianisation was part and
parcel of the political project – by Marx but especially by those later working
under his name – of centring wage-labour as a process and wage-workers as a
revolutionary subject. This was to universalise a particular historical experi-
ence, and Coulthard drives toward the hard kernel of this process, cleaving it in
two and liberating dispossession as an analytic focus independent of proletari-
anisation: ‘the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization,
has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the his-
torical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state’.12
This shift has implications not only for Coulthard’s own context and analy-
sis, but also far beyond it. In Red Skin, White Masks, it provides the framework
for a reconceptualisation of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and
movements and the state apparatus, and in particular a complete dismantling
of the presuppositions upholding the predominant form of recognition poli-
tics in contemporary Canada. It provides, furthermore, the basis for a reformu-
lation of what a ‘resurgent politics of recognition’ – one more concerned with
revolutionary self-activity and prefigurative community – might look like.13
10 The debates swirling historically around this question are too extensive to name com-
pletely, but include intra-Marxist debates around the status of primitive accumulation
from Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital to more contemporary work by,
for example, David Harvey. To these we could add the foundational attempts to stretch
Marxist categories to account for colonialism and slavery in the work of Du Bois and
C.L.R. James in particular, and recent interventions seeking to rethink primitive accu-
mulation from the perspective of slavery, colonialism and gender, including Saidiya
Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (Hartman 2007), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Roots of Resistance
(Dunbar-Ortiz 2007), Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (Federici 2004), and
Frank Wilderson’s Red, White & Black (Wilderson 2010).

But it also creates a potential bridge to reconcile historically and theoretically

what has often been a deep and intractable political challenge, in the gulf nom-
inally separating slavery from colonisation, abolition from decolonisation, and
in some cases political movements in the United States from their Canadian
counterparts.
According to Coulthard, in the early twentieth century, ‘Native labor
became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the
political and economic development of the Canadian state’ and increasingly,
‘Canadian state-formation and colonial-capitalist development required first
and foremost land, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap,
Indigenous labor’.14 The impact on anti-colonial indigenous organising has
been direct: struggles were consequently struggles not for wages but for land,
but this reciprocal response to the coloniser’s strategy of dispossession con-
tained a reciprocality of its own, outside and beyond merely responding to the
enemy:
[ . . .] Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primar-

ily inspired by and oriented around the question of land – a struggle not
only for land in the material sense, but also deeply informed by what the
land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about
living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in non-
dominating and nonexploitative terms.15
This positivity that exceeds mere negativity, that is rooted in the land but also
exceeds it, is what Coulthard calls ‘grounded normativity’, and which he consid-
ers a ‘place-based foundation of Indigenous decolonial thought and practice’.16
This grounded normativity, as we will see in his second major contribution,
provides a basis for real ethics and reciprocity that in some senses replaces the
absent or unstable ground upholding the Hegelian dialectic.
By contrast, slavery in the United States and elsewhere was clearly an
institution whose raison d’être was the extraction of labour, but nota-
bly, this extraction similarly occurred outside the tight Marxian circuit of
dispossession-enclosure-proletarianisation that Coulthard calls into question.
But if this meant that struggles were often implicitly about labour – struggles in
a sense to become proletarian – in the aftermath of abolition much has changed:
the spatial enclosure of slaves themselves as fixed unfree labour gave way to a

16 Ibid.

nominally mobile labour force that, in the anxiety it provoked, revealed the
degree to which slavery was never only about labour extraction, and as a result,
spawned policing as a new form of control.17 Even more dramatically, how-
ever, as the twentieth century wore on, urban de-industrialisation meant that
‘large segments of the workforce contained in the “Black Belts” of the Northern
metropolis were simply no longer needed.’18
While this transition from unfree to free to surplus labour was not strictly
speaking a question of the economic need for land, it had everything to do
with the reconfiguration of space: from the Black codes as a limitation of
mobility, to the push-and-pull of the reconquest of inner-cities by gentrifica-
tion, and the new form of containing ‘dangerous’ populations in prisons. As
in Coulthard’s account, this dual process does not fit the traditional Marxist
narrative in which dispossession is but the first step toward proletarianisation
(and thereby surplus-value). It is instead one meant to contain ‘precarious and
deproletarianized fractions of the black working class’ and reclaim territory –
which Coulthard insists is the hallmark of settler-colonialism.19 In other
words, despite persistent socio-economic and political differences, the late
twentieth century has seen something of a convergence of Black Americans
with Indigenous peoples in their territorial relation to the state and capital.
This shift poses a not insignificant challenge to movements and thinkers
alike: for Du Bois, slaves were effective in the general strike that ended formal
slavery in the United States largely due to their position vis-à-vis the produc-
tion process: as he put it, ‘The position of the Negro was strategic.’20 A century
after the Civil War, Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton struggled with
the shifting strategic position of Black Americans, insisting as late as 1967 that
they were both the ‘oil’ without which the US war machine ‘cannot function’
and the ‘driving shaft’ of that same machinery: ‘we are in such a strategic posi-
tion in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of
the remainder of the machinery breaks down.’ As with Du Bois, this domestic
struggle was simultaneously a global struggle against imperialisms, as Black
Americans could ‘because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the
engine that is enslaving the world.’21
But just four years later, Newton would document a growing distance
between these former slaves and the ‘machinery’ of the US economy: ‘blacks
17 Williams 2007.
18 Wacquant 2002, pp. 48–9.
19 Wacquant 2002, p. 53.
20 Du Bois 1992, p. 79.
21 Newton 2002a, p. 135.

and third-world people’, he argued, had become displaced from their cen-
tral economic function, and were increasingly rendered what he called ‘the
unemployables’.22 For Newton, however, it was not a question of announcing
the historical obsolescence of a decadent class, but instead of rethinking the
question of who the revolutionary subject of historical change might be under
very different economic conditions. When he did so, he saw these doubly-
dispossessed ‘unemployables’ – and even the lumpen – as playing a potentially
powerful role, and I believe that in some ways Coulthard’s analysis begs us to
share this optimism of the will to ask what new alliances and territorial strug-
gles this shared positionality might make possible.
Coulthard’s first major theoretical contribution – his analytic turn from the
capital relation to the colonial relation, and the concomitant decolonial possi-
bilities it opens up – is both made possible by and borne out in his deployment
of a Fanonian decolonial framework. In this sense, these are not two discrete
theoretical contributions, but in reality a single one, but the task of bringing
Fanon to bear on contemporary processes of decolonisation is a necessary,
albeit a complex, one.
In many senses, Fanon is a pre-eminent theorist of both white supremacy
and decolonisation, but his insights about both are often either misrepre-
sented or mis-mapped in ways that make him seem irrelevant to the present.
For starters, Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, is more about race than
colonialism, and some would consider it irrelevant both to a post-1965 era and
certainly to the specificities of Canadian settler-colonialism. More complex
still, where Fanon confronts colonialism more directly – in The Wretched of
the Earth – he does so by famously describing colonialism as a relation of pure
force, the Manichaean division of the world upheld ‘by rifle butts and napalm’,
raising questions about his usefulness in contexts marked by neither former
colonial regimes nor brute force.23
Coulthard confronts this challenge head-on in his own context by openly
foregrounding the fact that the Fanonian lens might not be the most obvi-
ous for contemporary Canada, where ‘state violence no longer constitutes
the norm governing the process’ having undergone a ‘transition from a more-
or-less unconcealed structure of domination to a mode of colonial governmen-
tality that works through the limited freedoms afforded by state recognition and
accommodation’.24 This shift toward a more subtle and insidious deactivation
22 Newton 2002b, p. 192.

23 Fanon 2004, p. 4.
24 Coulthard 2014, pp. 15–16.

and disarming of First Nations’ militancy in Canada does not, however, mean
that Fanon’s analysis of colonialism has lost its relevance and must be aban-
doned tout court, but instead provides an occasion for supplementing Fanon’s
concrete analysis of the Algerian context in The Wretched of the Earth with the
more nuanced analysis of ideological and hegemonic mechanisms present in
Black Skin, White Masks.25
In a painstaking counterposition of Fanon to Charles Taylor’s Hegelian rec-
ognition framework in reference to Canadian politics, and to a lesser degree
Nancy Fraser’s economic pushback against recognition studies, Coulthard
shows the ways in which the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks both prefigured
and exceeded many of the terms of such debates, doing so in part through a
decolonial methodological turn that arguably parallels his own. Fanon’s effec-
tive decolonisation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic – arguably the centrepiece
of his œuvre as a whole – kicks the legs out from under the table of recognition,
demonstrating that since Hegel’s assumptions do not hold in contexts marked
by actual slavery, historical structures of domination, and the internalisation
of that domination by the enslaved-colonised, the dialectic itself needs to be
radically regrounded.
For Coulthard, moreover, contexts such as contemporary Canada see a sort
of doubling of this asymmetry, which rather than being identified and con-
fronted becomes itself the source of an internalised affective identification:
in situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise
of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice
Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the
profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either
imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society.26
Taylor’s revived Hegelianism, in Coulthard’s view, suffers from many of the

same blindspots as Hegel’s original formulation, and so the Fanonian deco-
lonial imperative retains its weight, and while Taylor himself draws upon
Fanon, the latter ‘anticipated this failure over fifty years ago’.27 Whereas Fanon
posed colonialism as operating through a ‘dual structure’, i.e. objective and
25 In the aftermath of the mid-century wave of anti-colonial struggles, and especially in
those regions where formal independence was acquired early (as in Latin America) or
where colonial continuity has assumed more disguised forms, the relevance of Black Skin,
White Masks as an anti-colonial text in its own right is only increasing.

subjective.28 Taylor, like Hegel, remains from this perspective an idealist, thus
the counterposition to Fraser, whom Coulthard sees Fanon as anticipating
and in fact surpassing in his refusal to bend the stick too far toward the socio-
economic at the expense of the psycho-affective.
Secondly, Fanon is more Hegelian than even Taylor in his insistence on both
the need for struggle and the dangers of pre-emptive recognition absent that
struggle. Without struggle, not only do objective structures remain intact, but
so too the subjective deformations colonialism implants in the colonised: the
racialised-colonised subject is ‘acted upon’, passively receiving the magnanim-
ity of the still-master, and the still-slave shifts from ‘one way of life to another,
but not from one life to another.’29 Finally, Taylor upholds the cardinal sin of
the Hegelian dialectic by presuming that the basis for reciprocity exists in con-
temporary Canada, and that deep-down, the master needs this recognition.
As Orlando Patterson and others have shown, real masters often have other
sources for recognition – centrally, one another – and as Fanon puts it bluntly:
‘what he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.’30 In Taylor’s for-
mulation, as a result, the slave still looks longingly toward the master – the
settler-state – for recognition and welfare, just as Fanon’s slave turned away
from labour in the world to futilely seek admission into whiteness. Absent self-
activity, Indigenous peoples are once again ‘acted upon’.
Against this, Coulthard emphasises the Fanonian impulse to turn away from
the master and back to the work in and on the world that is self-actualisation
and liberation. In an effort to overcome the insufficiency of the Hegelian dia-
lectic under colonial conditions – and above all the fundamental asymmetry
of those conditions, which short-circuits the reciprocal movement of the
dialectic – Coulthard emphasises Fanon’s turn toward the positivity of a ‘quasi-
Nietzschean form of personal and collective self-affirmation’.31 This positive
source – which Coulthard will connect to his own ‘grounded normativity’ – is
also the unspoken ingredient that later surfaces in The Wretched of the Earth
in the spontaneous resistance and ‘atmospheric’ violence that begins the shift
from Manichaean opposition to dialectical motion.32
But here, Coulthard identifies a hesitation on Fanon’s part. If Fanon’s turn
away from the master, the central practical implication of his decolonisa-
tion of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, constituted a resort instead to

29 Fanon 2008, pp. 194–5.
30 Patterson 1982, pp. 98–100; Fanon 2008, p. 195, n. 10.
32 Fanon 2004, p. 30.

self-affirmation, Coulthard finds Fanon to be ambiguous with regard to the

source and the weight of this self. Despite his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre,
Coulthard argues that Fanon ‘shared Sartre’s unwillingness to acknowledge the
transformative role that critically revived Indigenous cultural practices might
play in the construction of alternatives to the colonial project.’ He viewed the
relationship between culture and decolonisation in an ‘overly instrumental’
way that makes his approach ill-suited to the idea that cultural practices might
constitute ‘permanent features of our decolonial political projects, not transi-
tional ones’.33
Here Coulthard rejects both the reading of Fanon as increasingly critical
of the negritude movement and as increasingly sympathetic, posing instead a
‘third reading’ in which Fanon’s critical sympathy toward negritude remained
essentially constant. He does so not simply to embrace this position, however,
but instead to press beyond it by calling into question the very criterion that
Fanon uses to distinguish good negritude from bad, revolutionary from reac-
tionary: the relationship to the past and to tradition. For Coulthard, Fanon
views Indigenous or pre-colonial cultural elements as potentially useful for
anti-colonial resistance in the present, but ‘he was decidedly less willing to
explore the role that these forms and practices might play in the construction
of alternatives to the oppressive social relations that produce colonised sub-
jects in the first place’.34
According to this view, Fanon followed Sartre in seeing Black identity as
a means rather than an end-in-itself. However, I find that close attention
to the nuances of Fanon’s argument allows us to widen the gap between
Fanon and Sartre – in particular through Fanon’s severe critique of Black
Orpheus – and to simultaneously narrow the gap between Fanon’s understand-
ing and Coulthard’s approach to Indigenous politics in Canada, in part through
Fanon’s under-recognised sympathy for pre-contact tradition in The Wretched
of the Earth.
When Sartre embraced negritude in Black Orpheus he did so as part of a
backhanded critique that was as condescending as it was Eurocentric: Black
identity, while important, was but a turn in the dialectic, a particular that
would eventually give way to the universal of class. As should be clear from
Coulthard’s dissection of Marx’s primitive accumulation, the mere suggestion
that class categories are somehow universal reeks of the most crudely univer-
salised particulars. Fanon indeed critiques his erstwhile comrade for his errors,
but according to Coulthard, ‘When Fanon reprimands Sartre for characterising

34 Coulthard 2014, p. 132.

the self-affirmative reconstruction of black subjectivity as a phase in the

unfolding dialectic of anticolonial class struggle, he is challenging Sartre’s
deterministic understanding of the dialectic, not his claim that this process
represents “a stage” in a broader struggle for freedom and equality’.35
It is worth returning to what Fanon writes, however:
For once this friend, this born Hegelian, had forgotten that conscious-
ness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for
attaining self-consciousness. To counter rationalism he recalled the nega-
tive side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its value from a virtu-
ally substantial absoluity . . . black consciousness claims to be an absolute
density, full of itself, a stage preexistent to any opening, to any abolition of
the self by desire . . . The dialectic that introduces necessity as a support
for my freedom expels me from myself. It shatters my impulsive position.
Still regarding consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in itself.
I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am. I do not have
to look for the universal. There’s no room for probability inside me. My
black consciousness does not claim to be a loss. It is.36
I quote Fanon at length here to underscore the severity of his critique of Sartre,
the terms on which he makes it, and as a result, both the weight that this cri-
tique should be granted in his argument as a whole and the way that it is more
than simply a critique of Sartre’s dialectic (although it is certainly that). Fanon
critiques the Sartrean dialectic not simply for its Eurocentric parameters (i.e.
class as universal) nor the need to ‘get lost in the night of the absolute’ in an
abstract sense. When he ironically calls Sartre a ‘born Hegelian’ he is saying
that any dialectic requires a blind leap into the unknown – a moment of iden-
titarian opposition – but he goes on to specify that his Black leap is one of
‘virtually substantial absoluity . . . immanent in itself’. This critique, then, I
would argue, is not distinguishable from Black identity as a source not reduc-
ible to its oppositional position.
Secondly, for Coulthard, the sharpness of Fanon’s critique of Sartre is then
blunted by Fanon’s turn back toward the future universal in his conclusion.
This turn is unmistakable, but it is not fully clear what it means to Fanon. Since
much of Black Skin, White Masks is preoccupied with the subjective process
of embracing Black identity in order to shed colonially-implanted inferiority
complexes, and to disabuse relatively privileged colonised subjects of their
35 Coulthard 2014, p. 144.

36 Frantz 2008, pp. 112–14.

dreams of escaping race, we could argue that by the conclusion, Fanon had
phenomenologically passed through negritude and had ‘nothing in common’
with the Black subject who ‘wants to be white’.37 Or if it was not he who had
moved, perhaps it was the world, since between Black Skin and Wretched,
Fanon would come to view the representatives of negritude as increasingly
historically obsolete vis-à-vis the revolutionary leadership of the decolonial
nations.
Finally, while Coulthard is right to centre Black Skin, White Masks in order
to confront the colonial politics of recognition, I believe a return to Wretched
can help us to narrow the gap further. In the Algerian context, Fanon clearly
emphasises the radical mutability in revolutionary situations when ‘tradition
changes meaning’ (indeed this was the central thread of A Dying Colonialism).38
He also undeniably distinguishes good tradition from bad, embracing some
elements while discarding others, often on the basis of their relation to the
colonial order itself: some traditional leaders serve that order and render
themselves irrelevant; some traditions are embraced by the coloniser and
become inert and lifeless. But there is also something more there, the ‘old gran-
ite foundation that is the national heritage’, which consists of elements not so
easily reducible to the anti-colonial cause: indigenous organs of popular democ-
racy, communal anti-individualism, and practices of self-criticism.39 Such
practices far exceed the struggle for formal liberation, and if anything become
more urgently necessary as Fanon is writing and he perceives the coming ‘post’-
colonial disillusionment. As a result it is difficult to say that they are merely
means to an ultimate end because, in a sense, they themselves dissolve the
distance between the two and point toward an understanding of decolonisa-
tion as a substantive process in which the distance between means and ends
dissipates.
This is not to deny that the negative charge of Fanon’s thought – in some
ways inherited from existentialism – is often more devastatingly obvious than
what little he says about the positive exteriority of the pre-colonial culture.
But between Fanon and Sartre there lay a great distance on this very ques-
tion, or at least on the absoluity we grant the decolonising negative, and this
negativity remains arguably one of the most potent motors of Fanon’s thought
and his continued relevance. Coulthard himself does not advocate the uncriti-
cal resuscitation of any and all pre-colonial tradition, and much less would
he naïvely neglect the attempts by the still-colonial capitalist state to co-opt
37 Fanon 2008, p. xvii.

38 Fanon 2004, p. 160.
39 Fanon 2004, p. 65.

elements of that tradition to buttress a colonial politics of recognition. Rather,

the goal is precisely to ‘acknowledge the transformative role that critically
revived Indigenous cultural practices might play in the construction of alter-
natives to the colonial project’, and toward that end which is always a means,
we agree that Fanon’s contributions have been and continue to be decisive.
References
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24 December, available at: <https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/
idlenomore-in-historical-context/>.
Coulthard, Glen Sean 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Rec-
ognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 1989 [1903], The Souls of Black Folk, Harmond-
sworth: Penguin.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 1992 [1935], Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–
1880, New York: The Free Press.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne 2007 [1980], Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in
New Mexico, Norman, OK.: University of Oklahoma Press.
Fanon, Frantz 2004 [1961], The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox,
New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz 2008 [1952], Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox: Grove
Press.
Federici, Silvia 2004, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumula-
tion, New York: Autonomedia.
Hartman, Saidiya 2008, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hilliard, David and Donald Weise (eds.) 2002, The Huey P. Newton Reader, New York:
Seven Stories Press.
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Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
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(eds.) 2002.
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MA.: Harvard University Press.

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Sociology, 42, 4/5: 583–97.
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Wacquant, Loïc 2002, ‘From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the “Race
Question” in the U.S.’, New Left Review, II, 13: 41–60.
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nisms, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
Williams, Kristian 2007, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, First Edition,
Boston: South End Press.

brill.com/hima
The Relationship between Marxism and Indigenous

Struggles and Implications of the Theoretical
Framework for International Indigenous Struggles
Roxanne Amanda Dunbar-Ortiz
California State University, East Bay
rdunbaro@pacbell.net
Abstract
Glen Coulthard’s masterly work, Red Skin, White Masks, raises the theoretical work of
Indigenous scholarship in North America to a new level, bringing Marxism into the
mix in looking at the political-economic effects of settler-colonialism on Indigenous
peoples in North America. He charts a way forward for Indigenous activism outside the
state, eschewing the politics of recognition. In addition to assessing Coulthard’s per-
spective on Marxism, this paper poses questions about privileging Indigenous social
movements without addressing the national question and without including the role
of the robust international Indigenous movement that has entered its fortieth year.
Keywords
Marxism – nation – nation-state – colonialism – decolonisation – settler-state –

human rights – Indigenous cultures – United Nations – International Law – Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
. . .
For Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die.
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks1
∵

The Relationship between Marxism and Indigenous Struggles 77
In his Foreword to Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, Gerald Taiaiake
Alfred rightly observes: ‘To have rescued Karl Marx from his nineteenth-
century hostage chamber in that room in the British Library and to expose
him to the full breadth of history and the light of the human landscape was
enough to make this a great work of political theory.’ But, as Alfred goes on to note,
Coulthard goes much further in bringing ‘Marx and Sartre and Fanon together
with his Dene Elders and me and you, Reader, to show us all how our psycho-
affective attachments to colonialism are blocking the achievement of a just
society. As such, this book is a profound critique of contemporary colonialism,
a clear vision of Indigenous resurgence, and a serious contribution to the lit-
erature of freedom.’2
Coulthard’s work is not focused primarily on Marxism and nor does he
employ a Marxist analysis per se, but his observations and suggestions regard-
ing Marxism and potential Marxian analysis of Indigenous peoples’ histories
and relations to capitalism serve as a breath of fresh air in Indigenous scholar-
ship. As he notes, ‘Within and between the fields of Indigenous studies and
Marxist political economy, these debates have at times been hostile and polar-
izing. At its worst, this hostility has led to the premature rejection of Marx and
Marxism by some Indigenous studies scholars on the one side, and to the bel-
ligerent, often ignorant, and sometimes racist dismissal of Indigenous peoples’
contributions to radical thought and politics by Marxists on the other . . . . for
Indigenous peoples to reject or ignore the insights of Marx would be a mis-
take, especially if this amounts to a refusal on our part to critically engage his
important critique of capitalist exploitation and his extensive writings on the
entangled relationship between capitalism and colonialism.’3
Shifting the framework of Marxism to colonial relations, Coulthard suggests,
allows for challenging settler-state dispossession moves that are proposed as
egalitarian and which attract even progressives, for instance, in their call for a
‘return of the commons’. Of course the ‘commons’ to which they refer in North
America (and Latin America) belong to Indigenous nations, lands that were
illegally annexed by settler states. He states: ‘By ignoring or downplaying the
injustice of colonial dispossession, critical theory and left political strategy not
only risks becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domina-
tion that it ought to oppose, but it also risks overlooking what could prove to be
invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for
the construction of a more just and sustainable world order.’4
2 Coulthard 2014, p. xi.

3 Coulthard 2014, pp. 8–9.

78 Dunbar-Ortiz
Another result in the contextual shift relates to Native labour: while cru-
cial in some periods, such as the early fur trade in the north and Navajo and
Pueblo labour on the railroads, it decreased in importance as immigrants were
brought in for industrial work.5 Native peoples did and still do work with high
rates of unemployment, but they were not and are not crucial to the overall
labour force. Yet, they have often demonstrated a distinct class-consciousness.6
Indigenous nations primarily were subjected to dispossession of their lands
often under the expressed complaint by authorities in Canada and the United
States that the traditional holding of land in common by the Indigenous con-
stituted ‘communism’. In North America, half the Indigenous population live
in cities and work, although they remain closely tied to their traditional lands,
as well as moving back and forth. So, many Native people are in fact also part
of the working class, employed or unemployed, but cannot be reduced to that
identity solely or even primarily, not even in the Andean region and in Central
America where Indigenous people comprise the majority of the work force.
Coulthard sees the Marxian focus on exploitation of labour as neglecting
the capitalist exploitation of land, and thereby of nature. Returning the colo-
nial relation as foundational to capitalist accumulation triggers an ecological
angle that is in fact crucial to survival, in the short term, of Native peoples, but
also, in the longer term, to human survival itself. But, perhaps most impor-
tantly, Coulthard sees the contextual shift as throwing into question the eco-
nomic reductionism that plagues Marxist strategies and practices historically
and currently.7
If Native activists and intellectuals take up the study and re-interpretation
of Marx and apply it to the development of capitalism in their communities
and nations, as Coulthard seems to be suggesting, there is scant work such as
this to build on, but it does exist. During the late 1960s through the 1970s, the
decolonisation movement that was unfolding on the world-stage influenced
Native activists in North America, including in the halls of the United Nations.
This led to the extraordinary development of the International Indigenous
Movement, discussed below.
Some Marxists concerned with Indigenous peoples saw parallels with
the concept of underdevelopment (that Europe had ‘underdeveloped’ the
5 This observation applies to North America, but in much of Spanish-colonised America, the
massive exploitation of Native labour in the mines and fields and service-work has domi-
nated the reality of Indigenous peoples, continuing into the present. This surely accounts for
the fact that Marxism has been incorporated far more into Indigenous resistance strategies
there than in North America.
6 See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (ed.) 1978; Ortiz 1980.
7 Coulthard 2014, pp. 14–15.

societies they colonised), embracing development theory8 and also embrac-

ing the c oncept of ‘internal colonies’, theorised by Mexican leftist sociologists
and leading dependency theorists, Pablo González Casanova and Rodolfo
Stavenhagen,9 to characterise Indigenous communities. In North America,
Howard Adams was a Native Marxist who adapted development theory to the
study of the colonisation of Indigenous peoples and mentored many Native
students. A Metis from Saskatchewan, he obtained a doctorate from the
University of California and became a professor and a leader in Metis politics.
In his 1975 classic Prison of Grass,10 Adams dissected the effects of colonial-
ism on the individual psyche as well as on the very existence of the people.
In the US Southwest, non-Indigenous Marxist development economist Phil
Reno influenced a generation of young Navajo students and politicians. Reno
had been blacklisted during the second Red Scare in the United States in the
1950s. Fired from his tenured professorship in economics at the University
of Colorado, he moved to Guyana where he worked with the future Marxist
president Cheddi Jagan in developing the project of CARECOM, the Caribbean
Economic Community. He returned to the United States and took residence at
Taos Indian Pueblo in New Mexico, later working for many years at the Navajo
Community College in Shiprock. When Navajo nationalist firebrand Peter
McDonald was elected Chairman of the Navajo Nation in 1970, declaring for
economic self-determination, he invited Reno to create a development plan.11
Although the Navajo Council endorsed the plan for integrated economic
development based on traditional Navajo socioeconomic pursuits, McDonald
moved increasingly to mineral-resource export, founding the Council of
Indian Resource Tribes (CERT). Reno continued to work with Navajo young
people, many of them part of the coalition that elected Peterson Zah to head
the Navajo Nation in 1982. He also co-founded a training programme for reser-
vation economic planners established by the Department of Native American
Studies at the University of New Mexico in 1978.12 For Indigenous theorists and
activists, the 1970s development perspective has been largely discredited,13 but
the Indigenous struggle against the continued, even accelerated, exploitation
8 Gunder Frank 1967.

9 Stavenhagen was appointed by the UN as the first Special Rapporteur on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples in 2001, when the position was established. His six-year term ended
in 2008, and subsequent appointments have gone to Indigenous persons.
10 Adams 1989.
11 Reno 1980.
12 I was director of the programme. Out of the project a book of research articles, with a case
study of the Navajo Nation, was published: Dunbar-Ortiz (ed.) 1978.
13 See Saldaña-Portillo 2003. Saldaña-Portillo focuses on Central American nationalist revo-
lutions and their development schemes for Indigenous peoples.

80 Dunbar-Ortiz
of their resources and the wreckage of the land and ecology, often in complic-
ity with recognised tribal governments, remains a primary issue. Official tribal
governments remain in economic-development mode.
Some Red Power activists, most of whom remain committed to Indigenous
peoples’ liberation, also took up the Marxist perspective during the 1970s. In
1971, the Native Study Group was founded by Ray Bobb, Lee (Bobb) Maracle,
and other Native young people in Vancouver, BC, and, in 1975, spawned a sis-
ter study-group in San Francisco, of which this author was a member.14 The
Marxism of the two groups was Maoist in orientation in privileging rural move-
ments, but mainly inspired by revolutionary national-liberation movements
taking place in Africa, particularly the African National Congress in South
Africa and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde
(PAIGC), led by Amilcar Cabral, trained in agronomy and also a Marxist. Cabral,
unlike any other national-liberation thinker, privileged culture as the source of
liberation, calling on the people to ‘return to the source’, where autonomous
history left off under European colonialism, and to find the threads upon
which the newly liberated society could be built.15
At the same time in Latin America, Marxism was far more widespread.
The roots of Indigenous socialism in the Andes go back to the days of com-
munist parties’ ascendency in the Americas.16 In Bolivia, Aymara intellectual
and activist Ramiro Reinaga, son of Fausto Reinaga, who founded the influ-
ential Indian Party of Bolivia, wrote extensively on Marxism, criticising Latin
American Marxists for what he deemed to be distortions of Marx. Ramiro
Reinaga argues that despite the fact that the majority of workers in Latin
America are Indians and Blacks, class struggle alone cannot destroy national
oppression. He points out that communist parties which formed in the 1920s
to 1940s in the Americas fell apart in the 1950s and 1960s because they failed to
engender Indian involvement and leadership. Reinaga called for ‘nationalising’
Marxism, meaning Indigenising Marxism, abandoning the European vision
and accepting the Indigenous American reality. He envisages the Marxist-
Indian Revolution as something new, new in the sense of authenticity that
could transform all of Latin America.17
14 See Dunbar-Ortiz 2005, pp. 32–3; Bobb 2012.

15 See Manji and Fletcher (eds.) 2013 and Cabral 1973.
16 See Becker 2008; Dunbar-Ortiz 2009. A number of Native individuals were also active in
communist parties in Canada and the United States, although there is little documentation.
One interesting article: Balthaser 2014.
17 Bonfil Batalla (ed.) 1981, p. 58; see also Reinaga 1972.

Two other Marxist texts attempt what Coulthard suggests in studying

primary18 capitalist accumulation under colonialism in Indigenous territo-
ries. One is my own study of the history of land tenure in New Mexico, first
published in 1980 and in a new and revised edition in 2007.19 The Spanish
New Mexico settler-colony occupied several Native nations that had specific
relationships to the land, the 98 city-states (reduced to 19) that the Spanish
called ‘Pueblos’ being the most numerous, and also having long practised
irrigation agriculture. The Pueblos were surrounded by and in sometimes-
conflictive relationships with the Athabascan (Apaches and the Navajo/Diné)
hunting and trading groups that had migrated from the north before Spanish
colonisation. By focusing on land tenure, several primitive accumulations of
capital are identified, culminating in mercantile and full-blown capitalisa-
tion under the United States following its annexation of the northern half of
Mexico in 1848. This historical-materialist approach could be useful for a num-
ber of peoples who were subjected to multiple settler-colonialisms in North
America, the Arctic, and the Caribbean (French, British, Dutch, Russian, US,
Canada), as well as studying the precolonial interrelationships of neighbour-
ing peoples with diverse cultures and economies. Marx’s concept of the mode
of production is useful for analysis, but also demands accurate historical/
archaeological information. For instance, Indigenous land tenure and mode-
of-production of the city-states along the Río Grande river in New Mexico, in
which irrigation was used for intensive hydraulic agriculture: Marx, having no
knowledge of Indigenous agriculturalists of the Americas, theorised that such
a mode of production produced hierarchy, authoritarianism, slave labour, and
patriarchal social orders (‘Oriental Despotism’). However, this was not the case
in New Mexico, where a radically egalitarian and matrilineal order, reliant on
ritual and ceremony, prevailed for millennia and survived Spanish, Mexican,
and United States colonialisms. Before making sweeping assumptions about
Indigenous social orders of the past, it is essential for each Indigenous commu-
nity and nation to research and study its own historical source. Marxism will
be a useful tool in that endeavour, but it also has its limitations as Coulthard
also demonstrates.
Another relevant study of capitalism and an Indigenous people is Lawrence
David Weiss’s 1984 book, The Development of Capitalism in the Navajo Nation:
A Political-Economic History.20 Weiss employs the methodology developed
by Lenin in his 1899 Marxian study of primitive accumulation in Russia,
18 I use the term ‘primary’ rather than ‘primitive’ accumulation.

19 Dunbar-Ortiz 2007a.
20 Weiss 1984.

82 Dunbar-Ortiz
The Development of Capitalism in Russia.21 Weiss uses Lenin’s study as ‘a theo-

retical guide and appropriate, suggestive methodology . . . . Lenin’s work pro-
vides a different historical case which is useful as a heuristic device to better
understand the particular development in the Navajo case . . . as a Marxist
historical analysis of the development of a home market, and more generally
capitalism, in a state making the historical transition from a natural economy
to a predominately capitalist economy.’22 Weiss is concerned centrally with
a specific form of expropriation, that is, a capitalist/colonialist state’s use of
mercantile capital to drain the resources of the country it has occupied or colo-
nised. Since this was the case in most of North America, it provides a valuable
model for better understanding how capitalism/colonialism works.
Weiss’s study does not take up that which Lenin is best known for, ‘the
national question’. Of course, Lenin had not yet developed the national ques-
tion in 1899, but the absence of it in Weiss’s study of the Navajo nation leaves a
gap, particularly regarding how the Navajo people have survived the onslaught
of capitalism by forming themselves as a nation. The Navajo Nation struggle
to maintain a land/territorial base and a nation status has acted as a barrier to
its being completely expropriated, with the people being absorbed into the
sea of settlers. This gap also exists in Coulthard’s text. He deals with the mat-
ter obliquely as a question of identity and identity politics, brilliantly prob-
ing Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, as well as the quest for recognition by
the colonising state. However, raising the national question implies a discus-
sion of the nation and nation-state. As Andrea Smith has observed, ‘In these
“postcolonial” times, terms such as “sovereignty” and “nation” have gone out
of fashion within the context of cultural studies, postcolonial theory, political
theory, feminist theory, etc. Nationalism and sovereignty, it is suggested, inevi-
tably lead to xenophobia, intolerance, factionalism, and violence.’23 Although
in Chapter 2, Coulthard discusses Dene and Indigenous nationalism, he does
not take up ‘the national question’, Lenin’s contribution to extending Marxist
theory to revolutionary application. It seems that a valuable theoretical tool is
abandoned by not dealing with the dialectic of the workers or masses of citi-
zens in the colonial state and their potential for revolution and the Indigenous
peoples and other nationalities that are colonised by that state.
In the section of Chapter 2 subtitled ‘The Dene Declaration: Understanding
Indigenous Nationalism’, Coulthard brilliantly presents the flaw inherent in the
21 Lenin 1977.

22 Weiss 1984, p. 13.
23 Smith 2011.

‘politics of recognition’ that led to ‘the domestication of Dene nationhood’.24

The 1975 Dene Declaration was the product of an intense resurgence of activ-
ism in the Northwest Territory and among Indigenous peoples all over North
America: ‘On July 19, 1975, at the second annual Joint General Assembly of the
Indian Brotherhood of the NWT and the Metis and Non-Status Association of
the NWT, more than three hundred Indigenous delegates unanimously voted
to adopt what quickly became known as the Dene Declaration – a political
manifesto demanding the full “recognition” of the Dene as a “self-determining”
nation “within the country of Canada.” ’25 However, in discrediting the politics
of recognition, it is questionable to abandon the nationhood issue, since it is
fundamental for so many Indigenous nations in North America.
The global political-economic context can provide insights into how
Indigenous nations’ self-determination movements were turned into domestic
quests for recognition. Native resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s took place in
the context of decolonisation and radically new thinking and experiments
in organising newly-established nations. Subsequently, the process of domes-
tication and quest for recognition during the 1980s that Coulthard traces took
place in a global setting, in which the Western colonising states retreated from
commitments to decolonisation and self-determination and turned to breaking
down national barriers to ‘free trade’. The political classes of Africa, Asia, Latin
America, the Caribbean, and the Native nations of North America ‘adapted’ to
this new order, as those that did not, such as Cuba, Jamaica, Angola, and others
were severely punished; other regimes were simply overthrown and replaced
with pliable elements.26 By the time of the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, disil-
lusionment with the nation-state was already a reality, and with Marxism and
dialectical materialism having lost considerable credibility post-colonial
and subaltern studies flourished in intellectual and academic circles. The con-
clusion: ‘The State’ was obsolete, ‘civil society’ the salvation. The latter was also
a result of the rebirth of anarchism and anarchist theory filling the space left
by abandonment of socialist projects. In the new century, a new generation of
Native scholars in North America, critically employing the theory and method-
ologies of post-colonialism and subaltern studies, has come to similar conclu-
sions about nation, nation-state, and The State.
John Beverly’s recent theorising concerning how this transpired, and partic-
ularly the foundational disillusionment that fuelled the turn in Latin America,
is useful in looking at the parallel thinking in North America, particularly

26 See Prashad 2007.

84 Dunbar-Ortiz
regarding Indigenous nations. Beverly writes: ‘the privileging in postmodern-

ist social theory of the concept of civil society is founded on a disillusion with
the capacity of the state to organize society. . . . It follows that what Dipesh
Chakrabarty calls the “politics of despair” of the subaltern may be driven by
a resistance to or skepticism not only about the official nation-state but also
about what constitutes civil society.’27
Latin American scholar José Rabasa expresses the view of many post-
colonial intellectuals in arguing that ‘it makes little sense to beg the question
of a new kind of state (kind, benevolent, democratic) when the state cannot
be conceived outside its role of protecting and administering capital, whether
in the mode of safeguarding international finance or in the mode of a socialist
administration of capital.’28 John Beverly deems this view a form of essential-
ism, that is, to hold that the idea of the nation-state as such is limited to only
one form of class rule.29
Privileging social movements – even one as powerful and inspiring as Idle
No More – as an alternative to political work and Indigenous nation-building
reflects the disillusionment of the post-heroic era of national liberation, includ-
ing Native nations’ liberation movements. Coulthard’s meticulous analysis of
the process that led to domestication of Indigenous sovereignty in Canada is
impressive and a particularly creative and sound use of Marxist theory, namely
the Marxist concept of ‘mode of production’.30 In both Canada and the United
States, Native leaders settled for ‘recognition’ and bogus ‘nation to nation’ rela-
tionships with the colonial states.
On Winter Solstice 2010, the United Nations General Assembly approved by

consensus a resolution31 in which countries agreed to hold a special High
Level Meeting of the General Assembly, to be known as a ‘World Conference
on Indigenous Peoples’ on 22–3 September, 2014.32 The Conference was
scheduled to mark the end of the Second International Decade of the World’s
Indigenous People (2005–14), with the intention of exchanging criteria for the
fulfilment of the objectives of the historic United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,33 which the General Assembly approved in
27 Beverly 2011, p. 37; Chakrabarty 2000, p. 95.

28 Rabasa 2010, p. 251.
29 Beverly 2011, pp. 41–2.
31 A/RES/65/198.
32 See the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples website at <http://wcip2014.org>.
33 United Nations 2008.

2007. Some Indigenous representatives were outraged that the member-states

of the United Nations called for the 2014 meeting without consulting them.
But, it was President Evo Morales of Bolivia who had proposed the conference
from the podium of the 2010 General Assembly. It was an odd moment, when,
in fact, an Indigenous person, brought to the presidency of a country by a mass
Indigenous movement, was in the position of making such a dramatic pro-
posal. For the first time, the issue of Indigenous peoples was brought from the
human-rights arena into the political centre of the United Nations.
The Indigenous Peoples’ United Nations project was inaugurated when more
than a hundred Indigenous representatives from the Western hemisphere gath-
ered at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on 21–3 September 1977,
for the officially-titled ‘International NGO Conference on Discrimination
against Indigenous Populations in the Americas – 1977’. 1974 marked the found-
ing of both the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) – stemming from the
American Indian Movement-led occupation of part of the privatised segment
of their own traditional lands at the iconic killing field of Wounded Knee – and
the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) – an initiative of the National
Indian Brotherhood (later renamed Assembly of First Nations) of Canada.
The two organisations were mutually distrustful. The American Indian
Movement (AIM) eschewed any governmental funding and the very existence
of the tribal governments established under the 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act. WCIP, on the other hand, from its inception, was funded by the Canadian,
Norwegian, and United States governments, the latter through the National
Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which is a federally-funded federation
of federally-recognised tribal governments. The 1977 Geneva conference was
organised by the IITC, the Haudenosaunee, and the South American Indian
Council (CISA), based in La Paz. And, although a few members of the WCIP
attended, they were not official delegates. But, a follow-up conference on the
land was organised by the same organisations four years later, and the WCIP
was fully involved.34
These two conferences were sponsored by human-rights non-governmental
organisations, led by the World Peace Council and the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom, with strong support from national-liberation
movements that held UN observer status – the African National Congress
(ANC), the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), and the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The conferences created a momen-
tum that led to the establishment in 1981 of the Working Group on Indigenous
Populations (WGIP), as a part of the Sub-Commission on Racism and Racial
34 See Dunbar-Ortiz 1984, pp. 27–72; Willensem-Díaz 2009, pp. 10–16.

86 Dunbar-Ortiz
Discrimination, composed of a group of independent experts, itself a subsidiary

body of the UN Commission on Human Rights (reconstituted and renamed in
2006, the UN Human Rights Council). The first meeting of the WGIP took
place in 1982, with only a handful of Indigenous peoples’ representatives,
although one was notably Rigoberta Menchu Tún reporting on genocide
by the Guatemalan military dictatorship against the Mayan communities.
The WGIP grew every year to become the largest single body meeting regu-
larly at the United Nations. In the late 1980s, the Working Group focused on
drafting a declaration, and in 1993, submitted a draft to the Sub-Commission,
and that year was declared the UN International Year of Indigenous Peoples.
The following year, it was approved by the Sub-Commission and sent on to the
Commission on Human Rights, which, rather than approving it, established a
working group to negotiate the final text. Thirteen arduous years of Indigenous
peoples’ insistence on maintaining the core elements of the declaration, nota-
bly self-determination, ensued before it was approved by the Commission and
a year later by the General Assembly.35
International Law is inherent in the Indigenous international project, which
also includes participation in the Organization of American States (OAS) with
its establishment of a Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, as well as the
International Labour Organization and its treaty on Indigenous and tribal
peoples, and many other international bodies. The liberatory politics involved
in the use of international law is questioned by many in current social move-
ments and by leading leftist intellectuals, including Indigenous intellectuals.36
Although Coulthard does not discuss the international Indigenous project, in
itself truly a social movement, it seems it must be considered in tandem with
questions of sovereignty and self-determination and ultimate decolonisation.
Indeed, the politics of the international Indigenous project is not in con-
tradiction to what Coulthard calls for. Two interlocking matters are at play
here, one is regarding the capitalist/colonial states of Canada and the United
States, and the other is the aspiration of Native communities and nations. The
capitalist state is not immutable. Indigenous movements over the past four
decades have affected the state (various colonial/capitalist states), but, with-
out mass movements for structural transformation of the colonial/capitalist
state, Indigenous self-determination cannot be realised. In Canada (more so
35 Note: The Working Group on Indigenous Peoples ceased to exist with the demise of the
Commission on Human Rights, but an ‘Expert Mechanism’ on Indigenous Peoples was
established within the new Human Rights Council. The text of the Declaration can be
found in United Nations 2008. See Eide 2009, pp. 32–48; Daes 2009, pp. 48–76.
36 See Erakat 2014. See also Anaya 2009, pp. 184–99; and Graham and Wiessner 2011.

than in the United States), Indigenous politics have become hegemonic in the
social movements, particularly those of immigrant and environmental groups,
and to some extent the labour movement, looking for direction and leader-
ship from Indigenous peoples. Idle No More demonstrated that widespread
solidarity. But, the more radical and committed of those social movements
have also suffered from disillusionment regarding the future of the Canadian
state. Indigenous peoples have a powerful voice in determining that future.
Alfred writes:
In fact, it is one of the strongest themes within Native American cultures

that the modern colonial state could not only build a framework for coex-
istence but cure many of its own ills by understanding and respecting
traditional Native teachings. Pre-contact indigenous societies developed
regimes of conscience and justice that promoted harmonious coexis-
tence of humans and nature for hundreds of generations. As we move
into a post-imperial age, the values central to those traditional cultures
are the indigenous contributions to the reconstruction of a just and har-
monious world.37
Articles 11 through 15 of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples validates

Alfred’s call to traditional values, including ‘cultural traditions and customs’
(Article 11), ‘the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiri-
tual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies’ (Article 12), ‘the right
to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories,
languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures’
(Article 13), ‘the right to establish and control their educational systems and
institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appro-
priate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning’ (Article 14), and ‘the
right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories and aspi-
rations which shall be appropriately reflected in education and public infor-
mation’ (Article 15).38
Coulthard identifies Indigenous resurgence as ‘at its core a prefigurative
politics – the methods of decolonization prefigure its aims’.39 By this he means
local projects as well as the truly exemplary continent-wide Idle No More mass
movement, as well as ‘blockades like the one erected by the Anishinaabe peo-
ple of Grassy Narrows in northwest Ontario, which has been in existence since

38 See Schulte-Tenckhoff 2012, p. 65. See also Alfonso Martínez 1999.
39 Coulthard 2014, p. 159.

88 Dunbar-Ortiz
2002, they become a way of life, another form of community. They embody
through praxis our ancestral obligations to protect the lands that are core to
who we are as Indigenous peoples.’40 But, he also speaks of looking ‘beyond
the nation-state’. He makes clear that he does not mean abandoning necessary
negotiations with the colonial-state, rather that: ‘It is only by privileging and
grounding ourselves in these normative life-ways and resurgent practices that
we have a hope of surviving our strategic engagements with the colonial state
with integrity and as Indigenous peoples.’41
Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson in her study of Mohawk
nationalism recommends the politics of refusal, which the Haudenosaunee
practise:
What does it mean to refuse a passport – what some consider to be a gift

or a right, the freedom of mobility and residency? What does it mean to
say no to these things, or to wait until your terms have been met for agree-
ment, for a reversal of recognition, or a conferral of rights? What happens
when we refuse what all (presumably) ‘sensible’ people perceive as good
things? What does this refusal do to politics, to sense, to reason? When
we add Indigenous peoples to this question, the assumptions and the
histories that structure what is perceived to be ‘good’ (and utilitarian
goods themselves) shift and stand in stark relief . . . The Mohawks of
Kahnawake are nationals of a precontact Indigenous polity that simply
refuse to stop being themselves.42
Inuvialuit/Inupiat scholar Gordon Christie asks a question about dealing with

the colonial/capitalist states, five of which the Arctic Indigenous peoples must
deal with: ‘How would decisions about how the Arctic will be “opened up” be
made if the Arctic states realized that their claims to legitimacy were provin-
cial and that they had to sit with Indigenous peoples at a table not as decision
makers inviting input but as storytellers meeting storytellers?’43 This is what
Indigenous peoples have been involved in for the past forty years of developing
the international movement.
‘Return to the source’, Amilcar Cabral advised, pick up the threads where his-
tory left off for the colonised, interrupted, but carrying the memory and prac-
tices of life-ways, creating new memories of fierce resistance, and beyond all,
40 Coulthard 2014, p. 166.

41 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.
42 Simpson 2014, pp. 1–2.
43 Christie 2011, p. 344.

surviving, or practising survivance, as Gerald Vizenor puts it: ‘Native survivance

is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination and oblivion; surviv-
ance is the continuance of stories, not mere reaction, however pertinent.’44 This
raises a question, requiring imagination, and research: What might the Dene,
the Haudenosaunee, Acoma, the Anishanaabe be today without their history
having been interrupted? Where were they headed? They would not have fro-
zen in place. How might they have changed? No Indigenous community was
isolated prior to colonialism; they built vast networks of roads and used water-
ways that brought peoples in contact with each other through exchanges of
goods and ceremonies and celebrations. There were territorial boundaries, and
there was conflict, and there was superb diplomacy, the Haudenosaunee being
a prime example of bringing disparate nations into confederation based on a
constitution that endures today. Perhaps employing historical materialism can
lead to thinking big, Indigenous peoples as actors on the world-stage, as lead-
ers towards a better future.
This is the essence of Red Skin, White Masks: Coulthard makes us think big.
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brill.com/hima
Response
Glen Sean Coulthard
University of British Columbia
glen.coulthard@ubc.ca
Abstract
In the following article Glen Coulthard responds to four critical engagements with his
book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014). The article responds to critiques by George
Ciccariello-Maher, Peter Kulchyski, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Geoff Mann.
Keywords
Red Skin, White Masks – settler-colonialism – Frantz Fanon – Indigenous peoples –

primitive accumulation – Marxism
Before I begin I would like to thank the reviewers assembled here to discuss
my book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
(hereinafter, RSWM). The thoughtful comments offered by Peter Kulchyski,
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Geoff Mann have pro-
vided me with a much-appreciated opportunity to clarify and expand on some
of the ideas that I lay out in RSWM. I would also like to thank my comrade Jeff
Webber and the good people at Historical Materialism for organising this won-
derful exchange. In solidarity and mahsi cho (thank you).
Peter Kulchyski’s contribution to this symposium raises a number of impor-
tant questions about my work, and for this I am grateful given how much I
have learned from his own scholarship on the self-determination struggles of
the Dene people. Considering the breadth of Kulchyski’s intervention, I have
chosen to focus my response on what I understand to be the core concern ani-
mating his comments, namely, what he sees as my constrained application
of ‘mode of production’ as a critical framework to interrogate not only colo-
nial dispossession but also the breadth of its attendant violences. ‘Coulthard’s

Response 93
problem is that while he makes the concept [mode of production] work for
him as a theoretical frame for Dene land-based struggles,’ Kulchyski writes,
‘he does not seem to appreciate the degree to which it also cuts through the
heavily knotted series of other issues he explores in the book’. What are these
‘other issues’ that a mode-of-production lens would have better illuminated?
The most crucial issue for me is the role he assigns a rejuvenated bush mode
of production to the collective struggles of Indigenous women against the vio-
lence of settler-colonial patriarchy. Drawing on the work of Marxist-feminist
anthropologists like Eleanor Leacock, Kulchyski suggests that given such a
mode of production ‘required, enabled, presumed and instantiated egalitarian
gender and social relations’ it ought to inform more centrally my thoughts on
what decolonisation might look like in practice.
I have two things I would like to say about Kulchyski’s suggestion here. The
first is that this type of argumentation, while convincing in some contexts, has
been well-scrutinised by Indigenous women scholars and activists working
from an explicitly Indigenous-feminist frame. The concern among these cru-
cially important voices is that while Indigenous societies may have historically
enabled egalitarian gender relations, the fact is that today they have been radi-
cally undermined through processes of gendered dispossession, displacement
and disappearance1 – processes that warrant not only their own analyses but
also solutions that do not try and cram everything through a framework that
is still largely geared toward the struggles of Indigenous peoples in land-based
contexts. This is not to say that a ‘return’ to the gender-egalitarianism of a bush
mode of production cannot speak to social relations and material conditions
outside of explicitly land-based situations (for instance, as an inspiration for
the construction of decolonial alternatives in urban spaces, which I advocate
in the conclusion of my book), but the work here still needs to be done and
cannot just be stated, either by me or Kulchyski.
My second concern is that Kulchyski’s recourse to a revitalised bush mode of
production as both an analytical frame and structural solution to the problem
of settler-colonial gender violence sounds too much like the ‘sovereignty-first’
language that Indigenous women challenged so thoroughly during the consti-
tutional struggles of the 1980s and 1990s, which I discuss at length in RSWM.
This male-dominated position advocated for a ‘return’ to culture and tradition
in a way that Indigenous women challenged because of the corrosive influ-
ence that colonially-imposed patriarchy has had on the meaning of ‘culture’
and ‘tradition’ itself. Under conditions of internalised colonial patriarchy any
alternative to settler-colonial gender violence – especially those that call for a
1 For a powerfully poetic expression of this sentiment, see Maracle 2015.

94 Coulthard
‘return to . . . [fill in the blank]’ – ought to be interrogated from an Indigenous-

feminist standpoint. Such analyses require that the specificity of colonial gen-
der violence be addressed on its own terms, attentive to the material realities
of the women that it affects, and which takes its cues from the languages of
expression and analysis of Indigenous women themselves – women who, in this
case, are usually not white Marxist anthropologists. This is why I drew upon
the scholarship of comrades like Dory Nason, Leanne Simpson, Sarah Hunt,
Bonita Lawrence, Patricia Monture, and activists within organisations such as
the Native Women’s Association of Canada, instead of academics like Eleanor
Leacock, as important as her work may be.
This second point leads to a methodological commitment that I prob-
ably could have been more up-front about in writing the book, one which I
think might also shed light on the difference between my interpretation of
Fanon’s cultural politics and the one offered by George Ciccariello-Maher in
his thought-provoking contribution. While Ciccariello-Maher and I agree on
many things Fanon, we do part paths slightly on what I refer to as Fanon’s
‘overly instrumental’ interpretation of culture’s role in Fanon’s dialectic of
decolonisation. I base this claim largely on textual evidence but also have
biographical suspicions to support it. In a nutshell, I argue that while Fanon
clearly views cultural practices of self-affirmation as a crucial moment in
the transformation of colonial subjectivities into decolonised ones, he is less
clear as to what role these practices might play in the substantive reconstruc-
tion of the colonised world. I claim that this leads Fanon to view ‘culture’ in a
manner inappropriately analogous to how Marxists view ‘class’: namely,
as a transitional form of identification that colonised subjects must tran-
scend as soon as it is identifiable as a distinct form of identification. On this
point, Ciccariello-Maher suggests that my analysis focuses too much on
the existentially-generated negative moments in Fanon’s work, instead of
narrowing-in on the few places where he genuinely seems to affirm the gen-
erative exteriority that pre-colonial cultures bring to liberation struggles. Here
I have to concede. There are of course moments where Fanon can be read as
a slightly stronger advocate of the resurgent cultural politics than I defend in
RSWM; especially, as Ciccariello-Maher suggests, in texts other than Black Skin,
White Masks. In his 1956 essay ‘Racism and Culture’, for instance, Fanon claims
that ‘in order to achieve liberation’ the colonised must draw critically from
all of the resources available to him or her, ‘the old and the new, his own and
those of the occupant’.2 And, of course, in the concluding chapter of The
Wretched of the Earth Fanon infamously declares Europe as having nothing to
offer the world other than the pile of corpses left in its wake, and thus demands
2 Fanon 1967, p. 43.

Response 95
that we chart our own paths, enact our own futures, presumably of our own
cultural and intellectual making.3
It is the methodological importance of ‘turning away’ (to borrow Fanon’s
own language)4 – not only from Europe but also from Fanon himself – that I
take seriously in RSWM, and my commitment to this form of collective theo-
retical self-affirmation is what informed the conclusion to my book. The same
methodological commitment underwrites my response to Kulchyski’s mode-
of-production critique, especially when he applies the conceptual apparatus of
mode of production to the context of Indigenous women’s struggles for gender
justice within a settler-colonial structure of dispossession. To reiterate, I am
not saying that the critical revitalisation of a bush mode of production has
nothing to offer Indigenous decolonisation efforts outside of those land-based
contexts where Indigenous peoples’ knowledge-bases are still informed by
such practices. What I am saying is that the resurgent approach to theory and
praxis that I advocate in the text demands that we meet these communities
where they are at, drawing on the expressions of critique and analysis of com-
munity members themselves. In the case of Indigenous women’s struggles, this
demanded that I purposefully privilege their own voices and intellectual tradi-
tions over others, because it is Indigenous women, and them alone, who are
in the best position to gauge the crushing material reality in which they live
and the means by which they will eventually emancipate themselves from it.5
To a certain extent my methodological commitment to engage the politi-
cal on the terms and in the languages of the people most affected by it also
cuts to the core of Geoff Mann’s carefully crafted comments offered above. His
intervention forces the question: what is at stake when we frame our struggles
in the conceptually loaded, or, perhaps more importantly, discursively hege-
monic language of sovereignty and land-rights? In what ways does our stra-
tegic recourse to this liberal-speak threaten to interpellate our anti-colonial
struggles within a neo-colonial framework of authoritarian jurisdiction and ter-
ritorial control and domination? In answering these questions I have to admit
that the risks are great, and they occur on at least two fronts. First, as Taiaiake
Alfred’s work demonstrates, settler-colonialism operates as a form of govern-
mentality, by which I mean it reproduces itself, in part, through a relatively dif-
fuse set of governing relations that discursively co-opt Indigenous people into
becoming instruments of our own servitude (read: sovereigns) and disposses-
sion (read: land-owners). Stated bluntly, framing our struggles in the language
3 Fanon 2005, p. 263.

4 Fanon 2008, p. 195, n. 10.
5 This point is hammered home again and again in the crucial work of Sarah Hunt, especially
‘Decolonizing Sex Work: Developing an Intersectional Indigenous Approach’ (Hunt 2013).

96 Coulthard
of land and sovereignty threatens to make ourselves over in the image of state
and capital, a prospect that I surely would hate to see happen. So why employ
this language at all, then? Simply because we must. As James Tully’s vast schol-
arship on the affirmative relationship between settler-colonialism and the lan-
guages of Western political thought has shown, since at least the time of John
Locke Indigenous peoples’ self-determining capacities have been ideologically
attacked and undermined vis-à-vis two concepts: land and sovereignty. Within
this civilisational set of racist discourses Indigenous peoples are said to have
neither because of our supposed lack of sophisticated governing structures
and land-tenure systems, thus rendering our homelands terra nullius and ripe
for the taking. In choosing to use the language of land and sovereignty, then,
I not only aim to acknowledge that this is the language through which our
struggles are most commonly articulated in our communities, but in doing so
also register what Audra Simpson would refer to as my refusal to surrender this
common language of contestation and resistance over to our enemies.6
The second threat is one of misinterpretation. Unfortunately, not all of our
interlocutors are as careful and perceptive readers as Mann. For example,
the concern with Indigenous claims to self-determination grounded in and
informed by our attachments to land and sovereignty has also been raised
recently among radical scholars and activists in disciplines that one would
think might be sensitive to the justice-claims being advanced by Indigenous
people. In particular, I am thinking of the recent critiques levelled at the field
of Indigenous studies by Jared Sexton and Nandita Sharma.7 Both Sharma and
Sexton are committed anti-racists. Sharma’s writings on the implication of
capitalism and the state-form in the perpetual displacement of and violence
perpetrated against migrants are crucial and we ignore them at our peril. The
same goes for Sexton’s vitally important interventions highlighting the speci-
ficity of anti-Blackness and its relationship to state-formation and capitalist
accumulation in North America and elsewhere. However, that being said, both
advance lines of argument that are perhaps unwittingly infected with their
own brand of anti-Indigenousness insofar as they demand that Indigenous
peoples separate their justice-claims from the allegedly anti-migrant and
anti-Black character of our commitments to the land and jurisdictions – what
I refer to as ‘grounded normativity’ – that inform our identities as well as our
ethical relationships with others, non-humans included.
In her contribution to this symposium, esteemed scholar/activist
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz productively situates my engagement with Marx and
6 Simpson 2014. Also see Tully 2009.

7 Sharma 2015; Sexton 2016. For outstanding critical engagements with the work of Sharma and
Sexton that have influenced our perspective here, see Dhamoon 2015 and Day 2015.

Response 97
contemporary Indigenous anti-capitalism in Canada within a larger historical

and geographical frame, linking insights from RSWM to those offered by global
Indigenous-rights struggles from the postwar period to the present. While I am
not entirely convinced by Dunbar-Ortiz’s suggestion that I should add Lenin’s
important writings on the ‘national question’ to the roster of theorists I take up
in the text – I actually think Marx’s late writings cover this ground well enough –
I would like to accept her invitation to speak more to the international realm
of Indigenous peoples’ struggle, both because it links back to my own use of
Fanon but also because it is quite simply an interesting story to tell.
When I first began to conduct research on the Dene Nation’s struggle for
self-determination over a decade ago it became immediately clear to me that
our leaders saw our decolonisation efforts as necessarily linked to the struggles
of colonised peoples elsewhere, both domestic and international. Indeed, the
Dene Nation was explicit about these connections. Consider the following
statement written into the first draft of the Dene Declaration of 1975. It states,
unequivocally, that there
are many lessons for the Dene to learn from the development of the Third
World countries. As colonies of the imperial powers, they everywhere
failed to develop. Their prospects necessarily improved to the extent
that they were successful in gaining independence. But even after for-
mal political independence, many have had trouble developing because
the power of the so-called multinational corporations, with their base
in a small number of highly developed industrial societies, has denied
their genuine economic independence. Only with tremendous effort
from the people can an economy independent from outside control be
built. . . . Our situation in the north is the same as that of the peoples
of the Third World who were until recently subjugated.8
The draft of the declaration ends with two appendices, one outlining a
‘declaration on development’ proposing an alternative ‘mixed’ economy privi-
leging a contemporary bush mode of production, on the one hand, and in cases
where the nation forays into industrial activity, worker-owned and operated
enterprises and a ban on private property, on the other. In other documents
this proposed economy is posited as more in sync with the collective orienta-
tion of Dene values. The second appendix is about strategy and includes rec-
ognition that the Dene face enemies from ‘without’ and ‘within’, the latter a
result of the internalised colonialism that has caused us to ‘turn against our
8 Dene Nation, ‘Draft of the Dene Declaration’ (Yellowknife: Unpublished document on file
with the author, 1995), no page number.

98 Coulthard
own’. Now, I just recently came across this draft of the declaration and when
looked at through a contemporary lens, it makes sense to me: ‘formal inde-
pendence’ occurring simultaneously with ‘economic subjugation’ . . . enemies
from ‘within’ and ‘without’ . . . all of these concepts were drawn from the ‘Third
World’ theorising of the likes of Albert Memmi, Kwame Nkrumah, and, of
course, Frantz Fanon. In turning to these theorists we were not, as critics of the
day suggested, being brainwashed by our left-wing White consultants, rather
we were critically engaging in a global anti-imperialist conversation that had
well-established roots among radicals of all stripes in Canada during the 1960s
and ’70s. Fanon in particular was a central figure in the conversations.
Fanon’s impact in North America, especially in the United States, has been
well-noted by scholars such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall.9 In particular,
Fanon’s writings on colonial racism and national liberation indelibly shaped
the more militant arm of the civil-rights movement, as well as both the Black
and Red Power movements in the 1960s. One can read both explicit and
implicit traces of Fanon’s thought, for example, in the writings of Dennis Banks
of the American Indian Movement; of the great black militant Malcolm X, of
Huey Newton and Bobby Seal of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and
in the writings of ex-Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who was once famously quoted
as saying that in the heyday of the Black Power movement ‘every Brother on
a rooftop [could] quote Fanon’.10 The profound mark that Fanon left on 1960s
and ’70s anti-colonial radicalism led Stuart Hall to declare The Wretched of the
Earth as nothing less than ‘the bible of decolonization’.11
Interestingly, however, Fanon’s influence is perhaps even more pro-
nounced (although decidedly less discussed) in Canada. For instance, in the
1960s, Quebec sovereigntists often borrowed the language of Fanonian anti-
colonialism in their struggles for national recognition, while largely ignor-
ing Fanon’s insights into the problem of recognition in colonial contexts and
Quebec’s problematic status as a White settler-society actively complicit in the
violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the province.
Fanon’s influence on Quebec nationalism is particularly evident in the writ-
ings of Pierre Vallières, especially his infamously-titled book, White Niggers
of America, written from prison and published in 1968.12 While Vallières does
not discuss Fanon explicitly, he nonetheless refers to himself as one of the
9 See Homi Bhabha’s 2005 Foreword to The Wretched of the Earth and Isaac Julian’s film
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995).
10 Shatz 2001.
11 Stuart Hall quoted in Isaac Julian’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995).
12 ‘White Niggers of America’, in Vallières 1971.

Response 99
‘wretched of the earth’, providing testament to the subtle influence of Fanon’s

work in relation to Quebec’s contradictory standing as both colonised and
coloniser. Indeed, to many within the Quebec-sovereignty movement of the
1960s Vallières was considered an intellectual hero of the Front de libération
du Québec, or FLQ – the armed faction of the Quebec separatist movement –
although he eventually distanced himself from the organisation after its high-
profile abduction and murder of Quebec’s vice-premier Pierre Laporte in
1970. The point to note here, as David Austin reminds us, is that ‘while anti-
colonial ideas found fertile ground in Montreal, none took root as firmly as those
of Fanon.’13
The questionable appropriation of Fanonian insights applied to the
Canadian context did not stop with the Quebec separatists. Indeed, none
other than the prime minister himself, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, invokes Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth in a 1964 article that challenges the independence claims
of the Québécois on the grounds that they theoretically defend these
claims by cherry-picking Fanon’s views on violence while ignoring his critique
of the national bourgeoisie. He writes:
Some of the counter-revolutionaries deceive themselves by dressing up

in a Marxist-Leninist disguise as has already been done by those African
chieftains whom, indeed, they take as models. But all this masquerade
has been admirably described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the
Earth which nevertheless our counter-revolutionaries say is the book
they keep beside their beds.
This makes me think that they read no more in bed than elsewhere; so I
shall do them a favor and quote at length [from Fanon’s text] published
in 1961, and of which they have perhaps only leafed through the chapter
on violence.
Given that Trudeau’s theoretical use of Fanon is used to defend the territorial
integrity of a colonial state founded on genocide, I think we can safely presume
that Fanon would be rolling in his grave regarding the interjection of his work
into the largely White colonial melodrama that constituted the back-and-forth
bickering between Canadian federalists like Trudeau and Quebec sovereign-
tists like Vallières.
More on the mark, however, has been Fanon’s stamp on the intellectual out-
put of Indigenous scholars and activists in Canada. Out of all Red Power-era
13 Austin 2013.

100 Coulthard
voices, Fanon’s influence was most influential on the work of the late Métis his-
torian Howard Adams. According to Adams’s own account, he was first intro-
duced to the literature of the Black Power movement (Malcolm X and Eldridge
Cleaver) and the writings of Third World anti-colonialists (Nkrumah, Memmi
and Fanon) while a graduate student at Berkeley during the turbulent decade
of 1960s radical student activism. This experience would significantly shape the
theoretical and historical analyses Adams develops in his two major political
works: his 1975 text Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View and his
1995 follow-up, A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonization. In both of these
texts, Adams applies Fanon’s insights into the nature of internalised violence
to show how colonialism is able to secure its dominance over Native lands and
bodies by warping the behaviour and self-image of colonised subjects in ways
that make our dispossession and political subjugation appear as an appropri-
ate response to our perceived cultural ‘inferiority’ and ‘backwardness’.14
If the influence of so-called ‘Third World’ theory arrived in 1960s Montreal
via Fanon and Martinique and transferred onto the Canadian prairies via
Howard Adams and Berkeley, I suggest that it arrived in the North through
the Dene Nation’s working relationship with Shuswap leader George Manuel.
There is ample evidence to support this claim. First, Manuel was a strong sup-
porter of the Dene Nation’s land struggle and worked closely with its leadership
to promote our bid for self-determination, as demonstrated in the pages of tes-
timony he gave in Yellowknife at the public hearings of the Mackenzie Valley
Pipeline Inquiry in 1976. As stated in that testimony, Manuel saw the Dene as
part of what he would come to champion as the ‘Fourth World’ – a phrase he
first came across at an international gathering of diplomats from Tanzania and
a number of other African countries in the early 1970s. Manuel’s African ties
were extensive. In 1974, he travelled to Tanzania as part of a Canadian delega-
tion of diplomats invited to attend the commemoration of Tanzania’s ten-year
anniversary since independence and, as the story goes, was mistaken by local
politicians, including President Julius Nyerere, as Canada’s head representative.
The elite access that this miscommunication enabled provided Manuel with
an opportunity to engage in lengthy conversations with President Nyerere and
other key government ministers about their respective colonial experiences
and what a genuinely postcolonial form of economic and social development
might look like, one that did not, as Fanon insisted, take its cues from mimick-
ing European models.15 As Manuel states in his foundational The Fourth World:
An Indian Reality: ‘Of all the models of economic and social development
14 Adams 1989.
15 Hall 2003, p. 238.

Response 101
I have seen, Tanzania is the closest example to my understanding of the way

that Indian people want to develop. . . . Tanzania is such a good example of the
difference between the Third World and Fourth World because neither
the people nor their leaders have been content to produce a new society that is
merely a darker imitation of the world of their colonial masters.’16
When the Dene Declaration was made public in 1975 the predominant
response was hostile. As I discuss in the book, then Minister of Indian Affairs
Judd Buchanan dismissed the Dene Declaration as ‘gobbledegook that a grade
ten student could have written in fifteen minutes’.17 Even respected Cree leader
Harold Cardinal condemned the Declaration as an ‘intrusion of left-wing think-
ing that is perhaps much closer to the academic community in Toronto than
it is to the Dene.’18 Much of the criticism levelled at the Dene Nation during
this period expressed a similar sentiment, namely, that Dene leadership had
been manipulated by southern White radicals and was therefore not acting in
the interests of its own people. This assumption extended to the writing of the
Declaration itself, which at the time was believed by most non-Natives to have
been drafted by one of the Dene Nation’s non-Native consultants, Peter Puxely,
based on his adaptation of Tanzania’s Arusha Declaration of 1969.19 The thrust
of the argument here again being that these cross-fertilisations could not have
been grounded on Dene values and interests, but had to come from the ideo-
logical influence of settler-society.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As demonstrated in an April 14,
1975 letter between a representative of the Caughnawaga Sub-Office of the
Indians of Quebec Association and then Vice President of the Dene Nation,
Richard Nerysoo, detailed plans were in the works to send Dene ‘field w orkers’
(essentially community-based activist-researchers) to Tanzania to ‘learn
from their experience in development’ for a ‘period of two to three months’.20
The letter was included as part of an information package compiled in 1977
by the NWT Legislative Assembly to generate public concern over the ‘radical’
nature of the Dene self-determination movement. Also included in the
package was a list of reading materials that then Dene Nation Community
Development Program Director, Georges Erasmus, suggested might be useful
in constructing a ‘development philosophy’ for the Dene Nation. The list of
16 George Manuel, quoted in Hall 2003, p. 239.

17 Judd Buchanan, quoted in O’Malley 1976, p. 98.
18 Cardinal 1977, p. 15.
19 Hamilton 1994.
20 Letter on file with author and can be found in the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage
Centre, Yellowknife NWT.

102 Coulthard
readings included, among others, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Paulo
Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the
Colonized, and Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? Also included in
the materials were books on Tanzania specifically, including Nyerere’s col-
lections of speeches Freedom and Socialism, Freedom and Unity, Nyerere on
Socialism and Ujaama: Essays on Socialism. According to Erasmus, these
‘alternative’ sources on development were meant to supplement not replace
research and perspectives drawn from the communities: ‘Many alternatives
must be looked at,’ wrote Erasmus in a memo addressed to Dene fieldworkers,
‘especially the example of our culture, the approach to development and dis-
tribution of material and ownership that our forefathers took. We may wish to
keep some aspects of the old way in this industrial era.’21
The point of all this is that the resurgent politics that I explore is necessarily,
as Dunbar-Ortiz suggests, an international movement of decolonisation that
is grounded in the normativities of culture and place but not straightjacketed
by them. Unfortunately, however, it is the radically expansive politics of this
grounded normativity that the relatively recent politics of recognition is slowly
undermining, and we must be vigilant in our efforts to fight its logic of contain-
ment and elimination.
References
Adams, Howard 1989, Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, Second Edi-
tion, Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers.
Austin, David 2013, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal,
Halifax, NS.: Between the Lines.
Bhabha, Homi 2005, ‘Foreword’, in Fanon 2005.
Cardinal, Harold 1977, The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians, Edmonton, AB.: Hurtig.
Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Day, Iyko 2015, ‘Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial
Critique’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1, 2: 102–21.
Dhamoon, Rita Kaur 2015, ‘A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-racism:
Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism’, Feral Femi-
nisms, 4, available at: <http://feralfeminisms.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/
ff_A-Feminist-Approach-to-Decolonizing-Anti-Racism_issue4.pdf>.
21 Information package on file with author and can be found in the Prince of Wales Northern
Heritage Centre, Yellowknife NWT.

Response 103
Fanon, Frantz 1967, ‘Racism and Culture’, in Toward the African Revolution: Political
Essays, translated by Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz 2005, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington,
Fanon, Frantz 2008, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann,
Hall, Anthony J. 2003, The American Empire and the Fourth World, Kingston, ON.:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Hamilton, John David 1994, Arctic Revolution: Social Change in the Northwest Territories,
1935–1994, Toronto: Dundurn Group Ltd.
Hunt, Sarah 2013, ‘Decolonizing Sex Work: Developing an Intersectional Indigenous
Approach’, in Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Can-
ada, edited by Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin and Victoria Love, Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press.
Maracle, Lee 2015, Memory Serves, Edmonton, AB.: NeWest Press.
O’Malley, Martin 1976, The Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry into
the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited.
Sexton, Jared 2016, ‘The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign’, Critical
Sociology, 42, 4/5: 583–97.
Sharma, Nandita 2015, ‘Postcolonial Sovereignty’, in Native Studies Keywords, edited
by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith and Michelle Raheja, Tucson, AZ.:
University of Arizona Press.
Shatz, Adam 2001, ‘“Frantz Fanon”: The Doctor Prescribed Violence’, The New
York Times, 2 September, available at: <www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/books/
review/02SHATZTW.html>.
Simpson, Audra 2014, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler
Tully, James 2009, Public Philosophy in a New Key, two volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Vallières, Pierre 1971, White Niggers of America, translated by Joan Pinkham, Toronto/
Montreal: McClelland and Stewart.

brill.com/hima
Marx after Minsky: Capital Surplus and the

Current Crisis
Jim Kincaid
Independent Researcher
jimkincaid@btconnect.com
Abstract
Minsky’s theory of financial instability helps clarify how Marxist theory can explain
the highly financialised capitalism of today, and the crisis which started in 2008. The
advanced economies currently have high realised profits in the productive sector and
lagging rates of investment. Shareholder pressures encourage corporate strategies which
focus on stock-market ratings and M&A operations, less on productive investment. Tax
evasion and the build-up of reserve cash piles by corporations have contributed to a
global surplus of what Marx called loanable capital. This surplus has been augmented
by the increasing inequality of personal wealth ownership and, in the international
economy by, large current-account surpluses. The results include: huge profits for
the financial system; low interest rates; recurrent boom and bust in asset markets; the
fuelling of huge increases in household and government debt; and the combination of
instability and stagnation which results from an excess supply of loanable capital.
Keywords
Marxist political economy – Minsky – financialisation – loanable capital – risk –

profits – investment – 2008 crisis
Introduction
In the debate about the causes of the severe crisis of 2008 Hyman Minsky’s
account of financial instability has often been invoked. Minsky, who died in
1995, was a radical Keynesian whose thought is fundamentally at odds with
Marxism. But in his writings – and in more recent work within the theoretical
tradition he established – there are many perceptive insights about the

2 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
mode of operation of a financialised capitalism, and its vulnerability to

crisis. Minsky’s distinctive angle-of-vision can help us clarify how Marx’s
analysis of the relationship between the financial and the productive sectors
in the mid-nineteenthth century may be extended and developed to explain
financialisation today, and the underlying causes of the debacle of 2008.1
Many Marxist analysts believe that it is a long-term decline in the rate
of profit which explains both financialisation and the 2008 crisis. They
argue that companies have found that they can get a higher rate of profit
by financial speculation than by increasing investment in productive capacity.
As financial markets boom, the rate of productive investment lags, and the
resulting fall in profitability acts as a further drag on investment. Marxist
research and debate about this question has focused especially on the United
States and has relied heavily on the data about profitability to be found in the
National Accounts for the US [NIPA].
Although this type of falling-rate-of-profit explanation still has some strong
advocates there are cogent reasons why it should be questioned.
(Percentage)
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1947 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2013
Figure 1 Annual Rate of Profit. USA Non-Financial Companies. 1947–2013.2
1 For discussion and encouragement, thanks to: Riccardo Bellofiore, Dick Bryan, Matthew
Caygill, Demet Dinler, Pete Green, Costas Lapavitsas, and Mary Robertson. Anna Charlton
helped with spreadsheet advice. Some elements of my argument in this article took shape in
controversy with the late Chris Harman. Like so many others, I am sad that Chris is no longer
here to continue work and debate on these questions.
2 After-tax profits. Source: BEA NIPA 1.14 line 29; Fixed Assets 6.1 line 4.

Marx after Minsky | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 3
The pattern of profitability in Figure 1 is typical of what has been found in

most recent studies using NIPA data.3 It is clear why the question of whether
profits have risen or fallen cannot be settled by a simple appeal to empirical
facts. It depends on which year (or group of years) one selects as the starting
point. Average rates of profit in the 2000s have been somewhat lower that in
the 1950s. But, since the 1980s, the rate of profit has tended to rise, though
with cyclical downturns around 1990, 2001, and in 2008–9. Official data such
as NIPA can provide useful information for Marxist analysis, but have to be
used with caution. It is well-established that, especially in the period since
2000, NIPA seriously underestimates US profits. The tax on corporate profits
in the US is unusually high at 35 per cent. To avoid paying it, US companies
have routinely, and increasingly, made highly inflated claims for depreciation
allowances. These are counted in NIPA as a cost of production, not as disguised
profits, which is what they actually are. An even larger loophole has the result
that NIPA data have only limited coverage of the profits which US companies
make from their overseas operations. To evade taxation, US multinationals do
not repatriate large amounts of profits made abroad, but accumulate these
as reserves which are held in their networks of foreign subsidiaries. Forensic
accountancy studies of company balance-sheets have concluded that the
current total of these cash piles must be at least $2.5 trillion.4 By comparison,
total after-tax corporate profits for 2013, as reported by NIPA, were just over
$0.8 trillion – which implies a huge underestimate in the NIPA data in recent
years. Defenders of the falling-rate-of-profit thesis are generally silent about
rising levels of tax evasion – made ever easier as US corporations extend their
international operations.5
3 See for example the similar pattern found in careful studies by Basu and Vasudevan 2011,
and Smith and Butovsky 2012. Both of these articles have useful summaries of Marxist
controversies about profitability trends in the US. See also Shaikh 2010, Duménil and Lévy
2011, and Kliman 2012.
4 See the reports of the Tax Justice Network and similar campaigning organisations.
5 For example Andrew Kliman, in his 2012 book, relies almost exclusively on US official
statistics taken at face value, as published. He does not discuss corporate tax evasion, not
even in the brief section (pp. 78–80) in which he argues that the profitability of US foreign
investment fell by more than that of domestic investment between 1981 and 2001 (a 37 per
cent fall, Kliman claims, as compared with 25 per cent, p. 79). This finding is implausible: it
has surely not been because of lower profits from foreign vis-à-vis domestic operations that
US corporations have hugely increased their level of foreign investment in recent decades.
But since Kliman has convinced himself that US overseas investment has been less profitable
he feels justified in basing his analysis of US profit rates on domestic operations alone –
‘my analysis of declining profitability elsewhere in this book relies on data for domestic
corporations only’ (p. 80). He does not comment on the fact that, in a footnote, his list of the

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Marx was correct to identify a long-term and fundamental tendency

for profit rates to decline as productivity advances. But he held that actual
realised profit-rates could rise in periods when countertendencies operated
with sufficient force. Which is just what has happened since 1980. The ruthless
implementation of neoliberal political and industrial strategies over the
past three decades has achieved a large increase in the rate of exploitation.
Real wages in the advanced economies have been compressed, and global
industrial production reweighted towards the low-wage countries. Profit levels
have also been prevented from falling by a huge rise in the rate of turnover
of capital (containerisation, air transport, just-in-time computerised stock-
control, etc.). The relative price of means of production has fallen under the
impact of technical progress. The cost of capital to industry has been reduced
as the world-wide real interest-rate fell, in a series of stages, from the mid-1990s
onwards.
In Marxist debate the concept of profit rate has too often been used in a way
which is mechanistic and abstract. The development of a highly financialised
capitalist economy means that we have to analyse both the causes and
the effects of rate-of-profit variation within a wider context of capitalist
calculation. This involves, above all, close attention to corporate and national
balance-sheets. The balance-sheet is the fundamental instrument on which
the calculations and strategies of capital are based.6 I believe that Minsky’s
approach to the analysis of instability in a financialised economy can help us
clarify how a balance-sheet concept is implicit in – and crucial to – Marx’s
analysis of the circuit of capital and the driving role of profit rates.
More broadly, we need to construct Marxist equivalents of two sets of
themes which have been central in the work of Minsky and his theoretical
successors: (1) their account of financial instability, its impact on corporate
balance-sheets, and thus on the investment strategies of industrial companies;
(2) their analysis of securitisation, risk, and the distortions which arise from
the power of what Minsky called the money managers – the mega-banks and
investment funds which control the allocation of a large proportion of money-
capital in the modern global economy.
20 countries who were in receipt of the largest amounts of US foreign investment (ranked
by the size of their share of such investment) does not include China – but does include tax
havens such as Bermuda (ranked 5th), Switzerland (6th), as well as the UK Caribbean Islands,
Panama and Luxembourg (p. 215).
6 Balance-sheet analysis is central in modern business-school training.

Summary of the Argument

In Section 1, I comment on how Marx uses a balance-sheet approach to explain
financial instability and crises of liquidity. He stresses the risk and uncertainty
inherent in capitalist calculation and thus in corporate decision-making
about whether profits are to be reinvested in productive capacity, or used in
other ways.
In Section 2 I argue that we should follow Marx’s example and analyse
the mass of profit as well as the rate of profit. I review evidence that, in the
US industrial sector, especially in the period since 2000, there has been a
rapidly widening gap between the rising mass of profits and the amount of
investment in new productive capacity. Investment levels are not determined
solely by the rate of profit, as Marxists often assume. Not just in the US, but in
other major zones of the world economy there has recently been a widening
gap between profit and investment levels. Part of the explanation for this lag
in investment is that in many sectors there has been a fall in the real price
of means of production. But in explaining the relative fall in investment in
productive capacity, we must also consider how financialisation has affected
capital allocation within the industrial sector.
Section 3 considers some of the strategies which industrial companies have
developed in their on-going battle with a rapacious financial system. They
need the services of the financial sector, but also try to protect themselves
against the predatory claws of banks, hedge funds, investment funds and
private equity funds. Industry also seeks to exploit the profit-making
opportunities which are offered by the financial system. The accumulation of
large cash piles in recent years is in part an attempt by corporate industry to
reduce dependence on finance for its capital requirements. Also, to provide
a cushion of insurance against future uncertainties and hazards. Moreover,
in a financialised capitalism, the market in corporate control via mergers
and acquisitions is a crucial terrain of competition. Here a large war-chest
of available cash is vital in both aggressive and defensive operations. The
pressures of shareholder value, and the generous stock options with which
corporate executives reward themselves, mean that the maintenance of a high
share price has become a central concern of large companies. To achieve this,
dividend payments are kept high, and much capital is used to buy back shares
and so increase the price of those still outstanding. In addition, huge amounts
of surplus-value have been realised in the form of soaring executive salaries.
Section 4 argues that Minsky’s account of the growth of money-manager
capitalism is useful in the construction of a Marxist analysis of the competitive
power-struggle between industry and finance. I review evidence which shows
how, with increasing speed between 2000 and 2007, industrial corporations

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became net suppliers of money-capital to the rest of the economy on an

enormous scale, both in the US and other major countries. This surge in
money-capital was transferred into the financial system via a rise in average
corporate reserves. This increase in the global total of what Marx called
loanable capital has been amplified by flows from two other sources. (1) A
huge increase in wealth inequality which has put the financial system under
intensifying pressure to find ways of investing the accumulated fortunes of
the rich safely and with an acceptable rate of return. (2) The rapid growth in
the size of international trade surpluses, especially in the years preceding 2008.
To stop their currencies rising against the dollar, governments in the surplus
countries have invested their surpluses in US financial markets. Marx argued
that when the supply of loanable capital is greater than demand for it, interest
rates will fall. Since the mid-1990s, in stages, there has been an extraordinary
fall in interest rates around the world.
From about 2001 onwards extreme pressures developed, especially in the US
banking system, to find ways of on-lending large quantities of extra money-
capital. The financial crisis which unfolded from 2007 onwards was caused –
in an immediate sense – by US banks which, in a spate of aggressive lending,
had off-loaded more than $1 trillion in dangerous subprime mortgage loans.
This had been followed by the creation of large quantities of securities based
on these mortgages and their sale (on highly profitable terms) to banks and
investment funds in Europe as well as the US. The global surplus of money-
capital was the underlying driver of a crisis of unpayable subprime debt which
in 2008 ended by threatening the solvency of some of the biggest banks in the
world. As the international banking system began to seize up, the freezing of
trade credit spread recession throughout the global industrial sector.
In Section 5 I consider some of the more recent dimensions of this crisis of
surplus capital absorption, and how its consequences have been analysed by
Marxist and other radical economists.
1 Minsky and Marx on Financial Instability
Central in Minsky’s work is his financial-instability hypothesis. Simply

summarised, this aims to explain why cyclical crises are endemic in capitalism.
In periods of prosperity, debt levels tend to rise throughout the economy. In the
industrial sector, for example, companies find it profitable to borrow extra
capital in order to increase investment, expand the scale of their operations,
and extend more credit to their customers. There is a general rise in leverage and
gearing – operating with borrowed capital rather than equity, and especially by

taking on more short-term debt. Firms move into a potentially risky situation.
Should they be hit by a large downturn in their income flow, the inflexible
pressures of debt interest and repayment may start to suck them into deeper
trouble. Minsky suggests that companies at any given time can be seen as
located on a spectrum of risk, running from quite safe to highly dangerous.
The crucial determinant of their position on the spectrum is the size and the
reliability of their future income flows compared with the extent and timing
of the debt and interest payments which they will have to make in the period
ahead. The same concept of risk can be applied to the entire productive sector.
If enough companies, especially the large and influential ones, are operating
with generous safety margins, then the corporate sector is in a robust condition.
The reverse is what Minsky calls financial fragility. Here, large numbers of
companies are carrying a burden of debt obligations which is high relative to
their prospective income flows and profits.
The concept of financial fragility can be applied even more directly to banks
and other financial companies. A bank’s assets are its core equity capital, its
cash reserves, and the loans it has made; its liabilities are the deposits made
by its customers, and any capital it has borrowed on the money markets. The
situation of a bank becomes fragile if there is a large increase in the amount of
bad debt it is carrying on its books, or if it has become too dependent on being
able to secure further roll-over loans from the short-term money markets to
meet liabilities as they become due.
Minsky develops his analysis mainly in relation to industrial companies –
not banks or households. Thus in a direct sense the 2008 crisis was not the sort
he had predicted since it was triggered by mortgage default in the US housing
sector, and the undermining of banks which had purchased large quantities
of securities based on subprime mortgages. But Minsky’s financial-instability
hypothesis makes a crucial point (one often overlooked by Marxists) that the
adequacy of a given rate of profit has to be assessed against the relevant liability
structure – i.e. the size and timing of future debt-payment obligations. A lower
rate of profit may pose fewer problems for a company (or a national economy)
carrying limited levels of debt, than a combination of high profits and high
debt. The overall balance-sheet position is always a crucial consideration.
Marx also has a theory of financial fragility. Like Minsky he emphasises
the build-up of debt and borrowed capital and thus the role of the financial
system in enabling the system to operate at a high tempo in periods of cyclical
upswing:
With the development of labour productivity and hence of production

on a large scale, markets expand and become further removed from

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the point of production. Credit must consequently be prolonged . . . the

maximum of credit is the same thing here as the fullest employment of
industrial capital.7
But the maximum of credit leads to what Marx calls over-sensitivity – the term
he uses for debt overstretch and potential financial instability.
It is precisely the development of the credit and banking system which,

on the one hand, seeks to press all money capital into the service of
production (or what comes to the same thing, to transform all money
income into capital) while, on the other hand, it reduces the metal
reserve in a given phase of the cycle to a minimum, at which it can no
longer perform the functions ascribed to it – it is this elaborate credit and
banking system that makes the entire organism over-sensitive [das diese
Überempfindlichkeit des ganzen Organismus erzeugt].8
Marx’s account of financial fragility, like Minsky’s, focuses on the commodity-

producing industrial sector. But here there is of course a profound theoretical
gulf between Marx and radical Keynesians such as Minsky. As James Crotty
has noted:
There is a major problem with Minsky’s theory of capitalist instability as

evaluated from a Marxian perspective: there are no real-sector sources
of instability in his model. . . . the Kalecki model upon which Minsky
bases his profit determination theory is a superequilibriating model
where aggregate demand and supply are never out of balance. The
assumed constancy of the mark-up and profit share guarantees that
the rate of profit on investment is likewise constant, no matter what the
level of investment. Minsky’s work emphasises financial aspects of crisis
generation but adds little to our understanding of the determinants of
instability in the real sector.9
There is in Minsky, as in Marx, a strong and central conception of the circulation

of capital. But in Marx a fundamental distinction is drawn between productive
capital and forms of fictitious capital (such as shares or bonds) which act as a
claim on surplus-value. In Minsky, as in Keynes, an asset can be either means of
7 Marx 1981, pp. 612–13.

8 Marx 1981, p. 706.
9 Crotty 1986, pp. 300, 306.

production or a financial claim, and the line of demarcation is often indistinct.

According to Minsky,
a capitalist economy is characterised by two sets of relative prices, one of

current output and the other of capital assets . . . prices of capital assets
depend upon future profit (quasi-rents) flows and the current subjective
value placed upon the insurance against uncertainty embodied in money
or quick cash.10
Minsky thus sidesteps questions of exploitation, surplus value, and productivity.

For Marx the decisive sources of instability stem from the real economy of
capital investment and surplus-value extraction from labour. But, late in his
working life, Marx has what is close to a Minsky moment when he recognises
that the financial sector can act as an independent source of instability. This
is Marx’s theory of the monetary crisis, which comes, he says, in two variants.
The monetary crisis . . . as a particular phase of every general industrial

and commercial crisis, must be clearly distinguished from the special sort
of crisis, also called a monetary crisis, which may appear independently
of the rest and only affects industry and commerce by its backwash. The
pivot of these crises is to be found in money capital, and their immediate
sphere of impact is therefore banking, the stock exchange and finance.11
Thus there can be a type of crisis which is financial in its origins, but which
is more likely to spread to the productive sector if that sector has become
financially fragile.
Whenever there is a general disturbance of the [debt settlement]

mechanism, no matter what its cause, money immediately changes over
from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane
10 Minsky 1978, p. 4.

11 Marx 1976, p. 236. Itoh and Lapavitsas note that these two sentences were added by Marx
to the text of the third German edition of Capital Volume 1, published in 1883. In the
Penguin edition the translator wrongly states that it was Engels who added this passage to
the third edition. Marx’s comment reflects the fact that, after the major crisis of 1857, there
had been a number of financial crises in the 1860s and 1870s in Europe and the United
States which had only a limited impact on the industrial sector. For further exploration
of Marx’s analysis of monetary crisis, see Itoh and Lapavitsas 1999, pp. 123–5 and 166–8.
Their comment on this rare lapse by the Penguin translator is on p. 270.

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commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities

becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form
of value.12
In times of prosperity money seems to be no more than a token or symbol,

a convenient facilitator of commodity exchange. Thus what is acceptable as
money (i.e. as general equivalent) varies with the state of the trade cycle. In
phases of cyclical upswing, Marx writes:
The bourgeois drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself,

has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. ‘Commodities
alone are money’ he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the
markets of the world: only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after
fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.13 In a crisis,
the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is
raised to the level of an absolute contradiction. Hence money’s form of
appearance is here also a matter of indifference. The monetary famine
[die Gelthungersnot] remains whether payments have to be made in gold
or in credit-money such as bank-notes.14
The evaporation of liquidity in a monetary crisis is aptly captured by Marx in

the panting hart image. In 2008 it was in the interbank market that the
drying-up of liquidity posed the most severe threat to the international
banking system.
Like Minsky, Marx stresses the speed and unexpectedness with which crisis
can strike. ‘This sudden transformation of the credit system into a monetary
system adds theoretical dismay to the actually existing panic, and the agents of
the circulation process are overawed by the impenetrable mystery surrounding
12 Marx 1976, p. 236.

13 The allusion is to the Bible, Psalms 42 verse 1. ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God’. In
the Luther translation of the Bible which Marx was familiar with, the text reads: ‘Wie
der Hirsch lechzt nach frischen Wasser, so schreit meine Seele, Gott, Zu Dir. Meine Seele
dürstet nach Gott, nach den lebendigen Gott’. Marx’s version is: ‘Wie der Hirsch schreit
nach frischem Wasser, so schreit seine Seels nach Geld, dem einzigen Reichtum’. Marx
often uses theological metaphors and references when talking about money (‘the God
among commodities’). For further examples see Kincaid 2005, pp. 92–100.
14 Marx 1976, p. 236. Marx’s term bank-notes is approximately equivalent to modern bank
cheques.

their own relations’.15 The flourishing of swindles and scams in the final phase
of a credit boom ensures that, ‘the appearance of very solid business with brisk
returns can merrily persist even when returns have in actual fact long since
been made only at the cost of swindled money-lenders and swindled producers.
This is why business always seems almost exaggeratedly healthy immediately
before a collapse’.16 There are many accounts of the swindles which were rife
in subprime mortgage lending prior to the 2007 collapse.17 Since then banks
in the US and Europe have been subject to massive fines for scams in their
operations in e.g. the foreign-exchange markets, the personal sector, and in
operations such as the determination of base interest rates via LIBOR.
2 Mass of Profits and Productive Investment in Marx
When Marx’s treatment of balance-sheets and risk is considered, the question

of the mass of profits moves to the centre of attention. He emphasises that a
tendency for the rate of profit to fall as the productivity of labour rises would
also simultaneously generate a rise in the absolute mass of profits. The reason
for what Marx calls ‘this apparent contradiction’ is that productivity advance
involves a rise in the scale of the means of production deployed and this
would raise the mass of profits. As productivity grows, there is, Marx wrote,
‘a progressive increase in the total labour power applied and in the progressive
growth in the absolute mass of surplus-value and therefore in profit’.18 Although
in this chapter Marx focuses mainly on labour productivity as a source of a
rising mass of profits, he mentions that some of countertendencies to profit-
decline would also tend to amplify the mass of profits:
with a given working population, if the rate of surplus-value grows,

whether by prolongation or intensification of the working day or by
reductions in the value of wages as a result of the developing productivity
of labour, then the mass of surplus-value and hence the absolute mass
of profitability must also grow, despite the relative lessening of variable
capital in relation to constant.19
15 Marx and Engels 1987, p. 379.

16 Marx 1981, p. 615.
17 See Dymski 2009 and other useful articles in this issue of the International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research.
18 Marx 1981, pp. 326–7.
19 Marx 1981, p. 326.

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He argues that an increase in the mass of profit because of a rise in labour

exploitation would be more visible at the ‘social’ (i.e. national) level of analysis.
Thus he points to, ‘the growth in the absolute mass of the surplus-value and
profit appropriated by the social capital (i.e. by the totality of capitalists)’.20
Today, this analysis has to be rephrased in global terms. In the past twenty
years the labour force available to world capital has approximately doubled.
Whatever the consequences for the rate of profit, it is clear that, for this reason
alone, a large rise in the mass of profits is to be expected. In what follows
I consider the mass of profits in recent years, first in the US, and later in some
other sectors of the global economy.
0
88 90 92 94 96 98 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 13
Figure 2 Mass of Profits as Percentage of GDP. USA. 1988–2013.21
Figure 2 traces the trend in the mass of profits in the US non-financial sector as
a percentage of GDP. The mass of profits rose steeply after the brief recession
of 1990, and fell sharply during the 2000–1 dotcom crisis. There was a rapid and
large recovery from 2002 through to 2007. What is astonishing is the limited
impact which the severe financial crisis of 2008–9 had on non-financial profits
(much less than in the dotcom episode). By 2011 the share of profits in GDP
was back above 5 per cent. In money terms the mass of profit, after falling to
$550bn in 2009, by 2012 had risen to $900bn, and was about the same in the
following year.
20 Marx 1981, p. 327.

21 Non-Financial Companies. Profits after-tax. Source: GDP NIPA 1.1.5 line 1; Profits NIPA 1.14
line 29.

Profits and Investment

What has the US corporate sector been doing with its profits over the past
15 years? As is clear in Figure 3, the gap between profits and net investment
widened sharply over this period.
1998 = 100
250
Profits
200
150
100
Net
investment
50
0
1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2013
Figure 3 Profits and Net Investment. USA. 1998–2013.22
As profits began to rise steeply after 2001, net investment lagged. The disconnect
between profits and their reinvestment became a great deal larger after the
deep collapse of investment in 2008–9. The sharp acceleration of profits after
2009 was accompanied by a more limited recovery in net investment. By 2013
investment was relatively lower than in 1998 though the mass of profits had
more than doubled. The effect is that very large amounts of surplus profits
have been realised each year in the period since 2002 – meaning by ‘surplus’
the profits available to companies after they have covered depreciation and
financed net investment in new productive capacity. For example, the surplus
in 2013 was nearly $650bn (out of a US GDP of less than $17,000bn). Remember
too that these estimates are based on official US government data. If the tax-
evasion cash piles could be included, the actual level of surplus profits will
have been considerably higher in the past fifteen years.
22 Corporate non-financial companies. After-tax profits. Source: Profits BEA NIPA 1.14
line 14; Net investment BEA Fixed Assets NIPA 1.14 line 18 and BEA Fixed Assets 6.7 line 4.

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There are some influential Marxist analysts who hold that investment levels
are directly determined by the rate of profit. For example, Michael Roberts in
his widely-read blog has frequently argued that:
There cannot be a closer connection in the capitalist system of production

and exchange than that between profits and investment. The rise and fall
in profits and profitability drive the rise and fall in investment.23
As we have seen, in the recent period, in the United States, this is just plain
wrong. In fact over the whole period since World War II there has been
considerable variation in the relation between profitability and investment.
This is clear from a recent study of US official statistics by Andrew Kliman and
Shannon Williams.24 They look at net investment in each year as a proportion
of after-tax profit two years earlier, and find that after about 1970, there was a
huge rise in the ratio of investment to profit. But after reaching a peak around
1981 the ratio of investment to profit fell steeply through the 1980s, stabilised
in the 1990s and fell again in the 2000s. Their data series ends in 2007, in which
year net investment as a ratio of profit is only 80 per cent of the average in
1949–71.25 Evidence of this kind of variation had already been provided in an
23 Roberts 2011, p. 10. In support of his position Roberts has sometimes cited an econometric
study, Granados 2013. This is a careful study of the theoretical debate about the relationship
between profits and investment, and draws on US data to test empirical hypotheses.
Roberts is not accurate in reporting its conclusions and they do not provide the decisive
confirmation which he claims. Tapia Granados tests whether Keynes and Kalecki are
right in arguing that investment has a strong influence on profits as against Marx
and Wesley Mitchell who claim the reverse. Granados found that profits accounted for
44 per cent of the variation in subsequent investment, but investment did not correlate
with later profits (p. 251). Thus Marx-Mitchell were vindicated against the opposition.
But a finding that profit-levels on earlier investment accounted for only 44 per cent
of variation in later investment, leaves a great deal of scope for the remaining 56 per cent
to be determined by other factors – and this is what is denied in Roberts’s mechanistic
formulation. Figure 1 (p. 249) in Granados shows a marked post-2001 divergence between
profits and investment – and it does not cover the period after 2009 when the difference
widened even more.
24 Kliman and Williams 2014.
25 See Kliman and Williams 2014, Figure 10. In Table 3 they show that the share of net
investment in after-tax profit for US corporations averaged 106 per cent in 1981–6, 59 per
cent in 1986–2001, and only 34 per cent in 2001–7. Strangely, they conclude that because the
ratio was quite low (52 per cent) between 1949 and 1971, the long decline in this ratio since
the early 1980s cannot be due to the effects of neoliberalism or financialisation. Rather,
they argue, the cause of this fall in the rate of accumulation must be a fall in the rate of

important article by James Crotty published in 1993. Crotty showed that US

firms did not react to the collapse of profitability in the 1970s by cutting net
investment. In the 1980s they reversed the decline in profits by declaring class
war on their workers and, by savage wage-cuts and sackings, forced up the
rate of surplus-value. Certainly there was disinvestment as older plants were
closed. But Crotty argues that competition imposed a pattern of what he calls
coerced investment on a huge scale. ‘In this invest-or-die environment firms
substantially increased expenditures on capital-deepening, labour-saving,
cost-cutting investment goods’. At this point however Crotty’s argument goes
astray: ‘by investing in the face of battered profits (and, later, engaging in debt-
financed stock buy-backs) managers pushed their firms into an unprecedented
degree of financial fragility’.26 Crotty, writing in the early 1990s, could not
have anticipated that it was precisely their success in increasing in surplus
value extraction, and the resulting recovery in profitability, which allowed US
industry to reverse the financial fragility which he had expected to develop.
In dealing with the investment of profits Marx stresses the moment of
agency: ‘the individual capitalist . . . has the choice between lending his
capital out as interest-bearing capital or valorising it himself as productive
capital’.27 Marx certainly did not see a simple linear relationship of cause and
effect between profit and accumulation. Note, for example, his comment on a
book by the Rev. Richard Jones (in Marx’s view, the least stupid of the trio of
economist parsons whom he studied). ‘Jones is right to stress that despite the
falling rate of profit, the “inducements and faculties to accumulate” increase’.
Here Marx quotes and endorses the comment by Jones that:
A low rate of profit is ordinarily accompanied by a rapid rate of accumu-

lation, relatively to the numbers of the people, as in England . . . a high
rate of profit by a lower rate of accumulation, relatively to the numbers
of the people. Examples: Poland, Russia, India etc.28
profit. They write: ‘The entire [sic] fall in US corporations’ rate of accumulation between
1948 and 2007 is attributable to a fall in their rate of profit rather than to a diversion
of profit from investment’ (p. 22 of 26). ‘This finding’, they insist, ‘is not particularly
surprising. That the rate of profit is a key determinant of the rate of accumulation is a
staple of much economic thought, and indeed the relationship between them is perhaps
the main reason the rate of profit is of economic importance’ (p. 22 of 26). They thus
reach a conclusion which is directly at variance with their empirical data.
26 Crotty 1993, p. 20.
27 Marx 1981, p. 501.
28 Marx 1981, p. 374. The other parsons were Thomas Malthus and Thomas Chalmers.

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Balance-Sheet Marxism
Marxists often treat the rate-of-profit section in Capital Volume 3 in isolation
from the careful analysis of circulation processes in Capital Volume 2. The
circuit of capital, and associated patterns of financial instability, are strongly
emphasised in recent work in the Minsky tradition and should encourage
reconsideration of Marx’s treatment, which was deeply influenced by the path-
breaking work of Quesnay in eighteenth-century France. Marx’s concept of the
circulation of capital implies a series of accounting identities. In a perceptive
article Dirk Bezemer lists Marx as one of the pioneers of the balance-sheet/
circulation paradigm which in the twentieth century became central in the
work of Minsky and his successors.29
It is crucial to stress, as does Bezemer, that an accountancy approach
in no way assumes a tendency to equilibrium. Accounting identities are
useful for the very reason that they expose emerging situations of fragility
and unsustainability.30 Bezemer argues that balance-sheet models can both
29 Bezemer 2010, p. 679. As other pioneers, Bezemer lists Say, Schumpeter and Kalecki. The
classical political economy of Adam Smith and Ricardo was organised round a concept
of circulation, but much less rigorously specified than the balance-sheet accountancy
which Quesnay, Say and Marx developed. Marx criticised Say for arguing that supply
creates its own demand, thus eliminating the possibility of general as opposed to sectoral
crises. What Say had overlooked was that money from the sale of commodities could be
hoarded rather than spent. But Marx accepted the balance-sheet implication that every
sale implies a purchase; every debt implies a lender. These may seem no more than
tautological – but such identities are the foundation of double-entry book keeping which
is at the heart of capitalist calculation. As Bezemer notes (p. 682), there are analogies
here with the conservation of energy in physics. In Marx’s value theory the tracking of
quantities of value through a series of different forms and transformations is central. See
Mirowski 1989, pp. 178–85, for an interesting discussion of Marx’s value theory in relation
to nineteenth-century advances in thermodynamics – though here Mirowski wrongly
presents Marx as a Ricardian.
30 Bezemer 2010, p. 679. Bezemer has a list of the small number of people who made a
correct call on the onset of the subprime crisis in the US. He notes that most of them were
using a balance-sheet approach. For example Wynne Godley, who from about 2000 was
warning of the build-up of an unsustainable debt situation in the US housing market. In
this period Godley was working at the Levy Institute, then, as still today, the main centre
in the US for Minsky-influenced research. Bezemer could also have mentioned the small
band of contrarian hedge-fund investors who made many billions of dollars by placing
large bets that a deep crisis in US housing finance was approaching. Their adventures are
vividly recounted in two entertaining and instructive books, Lewis 2010 and Zukerman
2010.

represent and help explain the non-linearity and abrupt transitions that
characterise financial instability.31
Advocates of a thesis of relative stagnation in the post-1980s period (or
at best only a limited recovery) usually base their case on a historical cost
definition of profitability. Andrew Kliman, for example, acknowledges that, on
a current cost definition, the profit rate in the US rose after 1980.32 Thus there
has been much debate about whether profits should be estimated at historical
or at current cost. The answer is that both matter, but in different ways. Of
course capitalists need to know the rate of profit which has been realised on
capital advanced in the past. But it is vital to distinguish between the size
of the sum of money-capital advanced at a particular point in time, and the
valuation of the machines and other means of production which were bought
by the capital advanced. The size of the amount of money-capital advanced
remains fixed, and a historical cost-calculation is appropriate. But the value
of the means of production which were purchased changes over time and is
influenced by many factors. These include: the amount of profit being realised
by the use of those means of production; rates of depreciation; technological
advances; and changes in the value of money. Here current prices and costs are
what determine the successive changes in the value of means of production –
and the rates of profit derived over time from the employment of those means
of production. Current investment decisions are based on a forward-looking
estimation of future profits. Such decisions may well be influenced, but are not
mechanically determined, by the profitability of past investment. In assessing
any given level of profitability close attention must be given to temporality.
Capitalists operate in a flow of moments. Company balance-sheets register
the evolving valuation of the means of production owned and operated by a
company. It is essential in Marxist analysis of investment strategies to preserve
the dimensions of risk and uncertainty. To stress the moment of investment
decision is not to relapse into methodological individualism. Nor does it mean
accepting psychologistic explanations à la Keynes, based on animal spirits and
euphoria in board-rooms. Capitalists make their own investment decisions,
but in circumstances which corporate finance accountancy attempts to
measure objectively, and with consequences determined by competition, the
law of value, and interventions by the state. We must make a clear distinction
31 Bezemer 2011. Thus he suggests that a balance-sheet accountancy approach does not
conflict with agent-based explanations which stress herd behaviour in financial markets.
Variants of such explanations – and associated themes of non-linear amplification – can,
and should be, built into Marxist accounts of financial instability.
32 Kliman 2012, pp. 102–22.

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between profits realised on past investment and the level of profits expected
from current new investment. This is essential if we are to register the temporal
dimension of the production-circulation process – and not to elide the phase
of decision-making about capital allocation which is a moment in that real
time sequence. Our analysis must reflect the actual situation of agents who
face risk and uncertainty in implementing their investment decisions.33
The Balance-Sheet Crisis of 2008

When a balance-sheet approach is used to explore the wider background to
the 2008 crisis, a striking fact becomes evident. In both the US and Europe
financial fragility had developed in the household and in the banking sectors
but not, to any great extent, in the productive sector of the economy. On both
sides of the Atlantic, by 2007, the non-financial commodity-producing sector
had moved into a remarkably robust condition. There was, as always, enormous
unevenness between weaker and stronger sectors in different branches of
industry and regions. But the industrial sector as a whole had built up huge
cash reserves and was actually (and unusually) a net lender to other sectors
of the economy. This has deeply affected the character and trajectory of the
crisis. As I write at the start of 2015, the impact of the crisis on industrial capital
has still been surprisingly limited – though not on the many workers whom
the corporations have sacked to preserve profitability. The small-company
sector has been badly hit in Europe and the US, but among large companies
there has not been a tide of bankruptcies. The Obama administration had to
rescue Chrysler and GM in 2009 but by the following year both had returned
to profitability and much of the state aid had been repaid. The general level of
industrial profits has (so far) been effectively sustained, in part by central-bank
demand stimulus. It is in the financial sector, not in industry, that state rescues
of collapsing enterprises have been required. The crisis has been, and remains,
one of exceptional severity. But its impact has been concentrated on the banks,
on state finances, and on the communities, jobs, housing situation and living
standards of millions of workers in the Western economies and elsewhere in
the world.34
33 Thus we need an ex ante analysis, not the atemporal ex post method used by historical
cost advocates such as Kliman.
34 In the US alone, 8 million jobs were lost between 2007 and 2009, and 4 million houses
were foreclosed. If it had not been for the recession which resulted, the income of the
average American household could have been higher by $17,000 a year in 2012. See Mian
and Sufi 2014, p. 2. This outstanding book challenges the widespread view that it was the
contagion-effect of a fall in bank lending to business which was decisive in spreading

In an important study of what US corporations were doing with their profits,

Bakir and Campbell show that, in the 30 years up to 1990, the non-financial
sector was doing just as Minsky expected it would. Corporate indebtedness was
slowly but persistently increasing. The ratio of net liabilities (i.e., money owed)
to capital stock rose steadily from 10 per cent in 1960 to reach a peak of 20 per
cent in 1990. But after 1990 there was a startling change – a continuous and
steep fall in the debt levels of the industrial companies which was sustained
through till 2008. During this 18-year period in the US, the corporate sector was
repaying debt at an astonishing rate. By 2000 the sector as a whole had not
only eliminated the former debt overhang, but was a substantial and growing
net lender to other sectors of the US economy.35 A huge shift to Minskian
robustness.
So far I have focused on the US. But similar patterns were apparent in other
major economies. In most of the other advanced economies, profits, after a
setback in the dotcom crisis of around 2000, had resumed the generally upward
trend of the 1990s. Researchers at Goldman Sachs found that,
using a new cross-cycle data base of returns to physical capital across the
10 largest economies in the world and covering more than 75 per cent
of global GDP we show that the global return on physical capital rose
through the 2000s and, reaching a record high in 2006, and that, even in
the midst of the credit crunch [2009] remains relatively high.36
As in the US, in many other countries profits had been further enhanced by
reductions in corporate taxation. There had also been a steep fall in worldwide
interest rates and thus in the cost of capital to industry. Here a self-feeding
mechanism was clearly at work since one of the factors lowering interest rates
was the large size of the flows of money-capital being fed into the financial
system by the corporate sector.
unemployment on this huge scale. Their book is an unrelenting indictment of the

concentration of government rescue finance on saving the shareholders and creditors
of the banks. Almost no government money was made available to help over-indebted
households threatened with the loss of their homes. The authors make a well-argued case
that it was the tide of foreclosures, the decline in house prices, and erosion of the housing
wealth of the working population in the US which underlay the steep fall in consumer
demand and which thus operated as the decisive transmission mechanism leading to
massive redundancies and job losses throughout the economy.
35 Bakir and Campbell 2010, Figure 4, p. 332.
36 Goldman Sachs 2009, p. 2. The main exception was Germany in which a post-1980s profits
rise was derailed by the impact of reunification in 1989.

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The increasing strength of corporate balance-sheets, not just in the US but

in other major OECD countries, was noted at the time. In its biannual report
of April 2006 the IMF has a chapter entitled ‘Awash with Cash: Why Are
Corporate Savings So High?’ This points out that in 2003–4 the non-financial
corporate sector in the G7 countries had been paying off debt and piling
up cash reserves on an enormous scale. ‘In these two years alone undistributed
profits minus capital expenditure amounted to $1.3 trillion. This equalled
2.5 per cent of the combined GDP in the G7 countries’.37
These IMF estimates were confirmed in a report published in 2006 by the
investment bank JPMorgan which concluded that there had developed what it
called ‘a world-wide savings glut’. Increased household savings in the emerging
economies, plus rising international reserves held by the state in China and
other countries running trade surpluses, had played an important role in the
build-up of stocks of surplus money-capital. But the JPMorgan researchers
concluded that it was the accumulation of corporate reserves which was
playing the decisive role.
Over the past four years the increase in G6 corporate saving has been
about five times greater [than in household saving and current-account
surpluses]. Between 2000 and 2004 the switch from corporate borrowing
to net saving across the G6 economies amounted to $1,091 billion – no
less than 2.7 per cent of global GDP.38
This is an extraordinary finding. In these years, companies were paying

back borrowed capital and building up cash reserves on an enormous and
unprecedented scale. For example, ‘in the US the corporate sector’s financial
surplus has averaged 1.7 per cent of GDP since the beginning of 2002, compared
37 I MF 2006, p. 136. The findings reported here by the IMF were based on their Worldscope
database which covered 10,000 non-financial corporations in the G7 countries. The IMF
found ‘a sharp increase in undistributed profits as a share of revenues from sales and a rise
in cash accumulation as a share of undistributed profits over the recent past, particularly
in the US, Canada, and the UK’ (IMF 2006, p. 147).
38 JPMorgan Research 2006, pp. 1 and 3. The G6, as defined here, includes the US, Canada,
the Euro area, the UK, Japan and Australia. The phrase global savings glut was also used
by Ben Bernanke in a widely-discussed lecture in March 2005. His conclusion was that the
US was performing a valuable service to the rest of the world in running huge current-
account deficits, and providing the world with a safe haven for the international reserves
of China and other surplus countries by issuing huge volumes of Treasury bonds for them
to buy as a way of holding their reserves. This consoling view of the beneficent role of the
US was rewarded in 2006 when Bush appointed Bernanke as Chairman of the Fed.

with an average financial deficit of 1.2 per cent in the prior 40 years’.39 The IMF
explained that the immediate source of this huge increase in the cash reserves
of G7 industrial companies was a decline in investment. ‘Simply put’, said the
IMF, ‘firms have been investing a smaller share of their profits in upgrading
and expanding their capital stock’.40
Why Did Investment Fall?

The standard explanation by many Marxists is that when investment is low it
is because profits are low. But the evidence shows a rise in US profit rates after
2002, and continuing after a temporary turndown in 2007–9. If realised profits
were high, what then explains the lag in investment? We have firstly to note
that the real (use-value) level of investment in new capacity is not captured
by estimates stated in money terms. That the amount of money being invested
in means of production was not rising as fast as profits is partly explained by
a fall in the unit prices of means of production. For example, in explaining the
fall in the nominal amount of money which G7 firms were spending on real
investment, the IMF says,
there has been a longer-term downward trend in the relative price of

capital goods. Firms now have to invest less in nominal terms to achieve
a given investment rate . . . For the G7 as a whole, about one-half of the
decline in the nominal investment ratio is due to the decline in the
relative prices of capital goods.41
Marx argued that one of the factors which would offset the tendency for the
rate of profit to decline would be an increase in productivity in the capital-
goods industries. This would lower both the value and price of what Marx
called the elements of constant capital. The effect would be to slow down (or
even reverse) the rise in the organic composition of capital which Marx saw
as a key process underlying a tendency for profit rates to fall. Exactly such a
process is observed by the IMF.
Of course the decline in the nominal investment ratios over time partly
reflects the fact that capital goods have become relatively less expensive –
mainly owing to extensive progress in information technology, capital
39 JPMorgan Research 2006, p. 4. Even in Japan ‘the surplus averaged 6.2 per cent of GDP in
2002–4 compared with an average deficit of 1.7 per cent in the preceding 22 years’.
40 IMF 2006, p. 147.
41 IMF 2006, p. 142.

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deepening, and productivity growth in the capital-goods producing

sectors.42
An OECD report makes the same point when it notes
a well-documented fall in the relative price of investment goods, which

can be partly explained by the growing importance of computers,
semiconductors and software in combination with their rapidly falling
prices starting in the 1980s. The implication is that firms over this period
were able to increase real investment with lower nominal outlays.43
The Bank for International Settlements reported that in 2002–5:
Record profits, high cash levels [in companies] and low interest rates
have not prompted record corporate investment. . . . Indeed corporate
investment as a share of GDP remained low in the G3 economies by past
standards. . . . That nominal investment/GDP ratios are still low in most
advanced economies remains a puzzle. Part of the explanation could be
the fall in the relative price of business fixed investment. For instance,
in Japan and the US the price of capital goods has declined by between
25 and 40 per cent since 1980.44
There is a second reason why investment by G7 companies became cheaper.

This was the increasing tendency to invest in productive capacities in the
lower-cost emerging economies. For example in China, wage rates in this
period were one-twentieth of the US or European level. Other costs of
production were much lower as well – rent, transport, administration etc. The
OECD found that ‘foreign direct investment became a substitute for domestic
fixed capital formation’.45 This was examined in a detailed study by researchers
at the Banque de France. They concluded that in the recovery after the 2001
downturn,
US firms quickly managed to record high levels of profitability, thanks

to aggressive action on labour costs . . . firms were thus in a strong
42 IMF 2005, p. 94. However the IMF also notes that the shift to IT capital has also increased
the average depreciation rate.
43 OECD 2007, p. 10.
44 Bank for International Settlements 2006, p. 24.
45 OECD 2007, p. 11.

financial position . . . however it appears that a large part of these unusual

financing capacities were used to fund direct investment abroad. [There
was] a recovery in US FDI outflows from 1 per cent of GDP in at the end
of 2002, to 2 per cent of GDP in 2004, twice the long-term average.46
Marx has a perceptive discussion of the effect of changes in the price of means
of production. Here we must register his alert use of accounting identities. He
notes what he calls the release of capital w hich occurs when the price of means
of production falls – that is when there is a cheapening of the elements of
constant capital. What is released in this way is capital in the money form,
‘enabling the reproduction process to be expanded with the same monetary
means’.47 Or if the fall in the prices of means of production is large enough,
allowing production to be expanded with a lower investment of money-capital.
A fall in interest rates also has the effect of releasing capital previously tied up
in the payment of interest-rate obligations by industry, and it should be noted
that average world interest rates continued to fall in the post-2002 period.
Thus, in summary, in the period before the 2008 crash, the cash flow of
industrial corporations in the G7 economies was being increased in five ways:
(1) rising profits; (2) a fall in interest rates and thus in the cost of capital; (3) a
fall in the relative price of investment goods; (4) in some countries a reduction
in corporate taxation; (5) the lower cost of investment in low-wage economies
in the global South.
3 Capital Surplus and the War Machines of Finance
The fall in the relative price of means-of-production goods is only part of the
explanation for the lag in investment levels in the recent period. There has been,
since the 1980s, a profound shift in the strategies used by industrial companies
to enhance their competitive strength. Though investment in new productive
46 Moëc and Frey 2006, pp. 6–7. See also Ivanova 2012, pp. 9–10.
47 Marx 1981, p. 638. In this section, Marx is dealing with the accumulation of money-capital
as independent from the accumulation of industrial capital. See also Chapter 6 in Marx
1981, which deals with the effect of price changes on the revaluation and devaluation of
capital – and associated patterns of release and tying-up of capital. Here, as an example,
Marx traces in vivid detail the consequences of fluctuations in the price of raw cotton
between 1845 and 1865. For Marx’s more extended account of the cheapening of the
elements of constant capital as an offset to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
see Chapters 13 and 14 of Marx 1981.

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capacity remains fundamental, companies give much greater emphasis to

improving the efficiency with which they use existing capital, for example
speeding up the turnover of capital, reducing overhead costs, and increasing
the rate of extraction of surplus-value from labour. This strategic shift is closely
linked to processes of financialisation which have transformed corporate
modes of operation and the range of profit-making opportunities which they
aim to exploit. However this does not mean, as Marxists too often assume, that
industrial companies are instead devoting large amounts of available capital
to financial speculation. In the giddy days of the 1990s a number of well-
known companies were almost wiped out when large speculative bets (using
derivatives) went badly wrong.48 Having learned the severe damage which
can be caused to industrial companies by speculative adventures, strategies
since then have tended to be more conservative. Large industrial companies
make heavy use of derivatives – but usually as an insurance mechanism and
a means of transferring risk to speculators in the financial sector. Rather
than speculative ventures by industrial companies, what needs emphasis
are the mundane strategies by which industrial companies: (a) try to protect
themselves from the instabilities generated by the financial markets and, via
derivatives, to increase the predictability of future interest and exchange rates,
raw-material prices etc.; and (b) develop techniques of financial engineering
that will widen the range of ways in which they can increase their competitive
capacity and their profitability. A central indicator of the competitive strength
of a company in the financialised capitalism of today is the valuation of its
shares and bonds on financial markets. To see why, and to explain how the
pressures of shareholder value have deeply shaped the current crisis, we have
to look first at recent changes in the financial system. Here we must briefly
consider the major mutation in the structure of capitalism which Minsky
aimed to capture in his concept of money-manager capitalism.
During the last phase of his work, in the decade before his death in 1996,
Minsky focused on what he saw as a major and potentially destabilising
transformation in the structure of capitalism. With accelerating speed there
had been a build-up of massive concentrations of investment capital controlled
by pension funds, insurance companies, investment banks, and mutual funds.
In 1980 the value of global financial assets was roughly equal to annual world
GDP; by the time Minsky died in the mid-1990s this proportion had doubled.
The process has continued since. In 2010 financial assets totalled $212 trillion –
48 See for example the account of the misadventures of Procter & Gamble in Das 2006,
pp. 101–4. For an outstanding Marxist analysis of derivatives and the commodification
of risk, see Bryan and Rafferty 2005.

nearly four times world GDP.49 As Minsky noted, the pace of growth has been
especially rapid for financial markets as compared with banks. In the period
since 1980, the rate of growth of both equities and bonds was twice as fast
as that of bank deposits. By 2006 global bank deposits equalled $45 trillion –
but equities totalled $54 trillion and bonds $69 trillion. Thus there has been
huge growth in securitisation, namely debt which takes the form of IOUs
which are traded on financial markets. Marx called it fictitious capital – the
commodification of debt, based on a contract by the borrower to repay money
borrowed and with interest. Or in the case of shares, to pay dividends. In a
perceptive paper, written in 1987, Minsky suggested two reasons for the much
more rapid growth of lending in the form of marketable debt as compared with
bank loans: (a) the increasing globalisation of finance – bonds and equities
could be traded internationally in ways not directly possible for bank loans;
(b) the requirements imposed by governments on banks, to maintain a
proportion of assets as liquid reserves in safe but less-profitable forms (e.g.
deposits with central banks), meant that banks were unable to offer as high a
rate of interest to depositors and other suppliers of funds than less-regulated
lenders. ‘Banks seem to need a 450 basis-point-margin [nearly 0.5 per cent] if
income from lending is to be the source of profits. This provides a great deal of
profit space for innovative suppliers with lower costs’.50 Increasingly the banks
themselves began to supplement their traditional lending role with fee income
based on servicing the financial markets, and with profits derived from the
creation and trading of securities. Before the 1990s Minsky had believed that
episodes of financial instability were containable by the ability of central banks
to provide emergency liquidity to a banking system. Plus Keynesian increases
in state spending. But central-bank rescue was premised on a concentration of
lending, and therefore of risk, by a banking system which could be subjected
to regulation. Securitisation dispersed risk – as did the explosive growth of
off-shore regulation-light finance. Regulators were wrong-footed by the way
in which banks were able to keep creating securities since these were moved
off bank balance-sheets and either sold on the market – or, if retained by the
banks, were transferred to arms-length, off-shore, unregulated investment
vehicles.51 Minsky ended his working life in a state of dismay about the lack of
49 Data from McKinsey Global Institute 2011, p. 2. Total assets fell briefly from $202 trillion
in 2007 to $175 trillion in 2008 but have since recovered to a new record height of
$212 trillion. If writing today, Minsky would also have stressed the money-manager role of
hedge funds, private equity funds and sovereign-wealth funds.
50 Minsky 2008, p. 3.
51 Ibid.

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mechanisms to counteract and regulate the build-up of extreme levels of debt,

and of leverage on the part of lenders – and about whether governments and
central banks would have the power to limit the severity of subsequent crises.52
This powerful and pessimistic analysis has been amply vindicated in the 2008
crisis and since.
For Marx the term money-manager capitalism would surely have seemed
too bland for the savagery of the competitive processes in which the massive
financial firepower of the big investment funds is deployed to extract profits
and capital gains from firms in the productive sector. Already in his own period
Marx saw that the advent of the joint-stock company meant that the stock
market would operate, not just to trade individual shares – but as a brutal
wholesale market in corporate control.53 He wrote that after the development of
the joint-stock company, ‘since ownership now exists in the form of shares, its
movement and transfer becomes simply the result of stock-exchange dealings
where little fishes are gobbled up by the sharks, and sheep by the stock-
exchange wolves’.54 Here Marxists must not only study Minsky but engage
with broader currents of post-Keynesian research, especially on the theme of
shareholder value – a term which covers the whole ensemble of pressures and
profit extraction in the linkage of financial markets and industrial companies.
The concept of the investment funds as financial war machines seems more
accurate than anodyne talk of them as money managers.55
52 See Minsky 1992. There are useful discussions of Minsky on money-manager capitalism in
Wray 2008 and Dymski 2010.
53 When shares are traded in sufficient numbers to influence the ownership of companies,
the conventional distinction between productive and financial circuits of capital breaks
down. Thus in the wholesale market for company shares, the company itself (and, in
effect, the means of production it owns and operates) becomes a commodity – but a
commodity which is traded on a financial market!
54 Marx 1981, p. 571. Marx’s rhetoric is wonderful. ‘. . . Resultat des Börsenspeils wo die
kleinen Fische von den Haifischen and die Schafe von den Börsenwölfen verschlungen
werden.’ Minsky notes that one of the main early forms of securitisation was the
commercial bill of sale in nineteenth-century Britain. Marx has lengthy discussions of
this form of fictitious capital.
55 The concept of war machine was developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their Mille
Plateaux book, section 12 (pp. 351–423), ‘Treatise on Nomadology’. This chapter is haunted
by the image of Genghis Khan’s mobile onslaught on the settled urban communities of
the territories he conquered. Ertürk, Leaver and Williams 2010 borrow the term and apply
it to hedge funds – an apt analogy since the evasive quicksilver-character of the hedge
fund is a potent recipe for competitive success in finance (as well as exposure to large
losses on the downside). Firms that can evade regulation (e.g. by offshore operations)
are not only able to avoid taxes, but are also able to operate at ultra-high levels of leverage.

4 Financialisation and the Corporate Sector
The power of the investment war machines was deployed to attack the pattern of
managerial priorities and strategies which generally prevailed in the industrial
sector in the period up to the 1980s. A central theme in radical Keynesianism
is how finance dominates industry and imposes priorities of short-term profit
extraction over long-term capital investment. Marxists are rightly sceptical of
any simple thesis that the big industrial companies are the helpless servants
of finance. Large-scale industrial capital has massive economic and political
power. In addition, its direct control over the means of production gives it an
immediate and prior claim on the surplus-value extracted and its conversion
into profits. But from the early 1980s, as increasingly large companies became
targets for take-over, the maintenance of a high share price became a condition
of sheer survival for many industrial companies – in the US and Britain
especially. And to the stick of possible hostile takeover, was added the carrot
of share options which became a major and very lucrative element in the
payment of executives. In an influential article, William Lazonick and Mary
O’Sullivan suggest that the pressures of the financial system and shareholder
value resulted in a deep change in and a major shift in
the strategic orientation of top corporate managers in the allocation

of corporate resources away from ‘retain and invest’ and towards
‘downsize and distribute’. Under the new regime, managers downsize
the corporations they control, with a particular emphasis on cutting the
size of the labour forces they employ, in an attempt to increase the return
on equity.56
Thus before the 1980s there had been a tendency for capital to be used to
build-up company growth over the longer-term rather than to produce a quick
return for shareholders. But increasingly from the 1980s onwards the power of
the investment machines has been used to extract larger and more immediate
rates of return from the ownership of companies. Two kinds of leverage have
Mobile and foot-loose hedge funds can massively undercut banks and other competitors,
though of course by also taking on more risk. The huge competitive advantage enjoyed by
firms that manage to evade regulation makes it highly difficult for governments to control
a capitalist financial system.
56 Lazonick and O’Sullivan 2000, p. 6. See Crotty 1993. Also Froud and Williams 2007,
Froud, Sukhdev, Leaver and Williams 2006, and other publications by the CRESC team at
Manchester University.

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been used. Their control of large blocs of shares gave the funds influence over
the appointment and dismissal of top executives. And to bring executive and
shareholder interests into alignment, the investment machines encouraged the
issue of increasingly large quantities of stock options as a form of managerial
remuneration.
In an outstanding discussion William Milberg comments as follows:
With the shareholder value movement, beginning in the 1980s, efforts

were made to reduce discretion of managers, as pressure rose to return
earnings to shareholders, both through higher dividend pay-outs and
higher share prices. The boosting of CEO compensation with stock
options was intended to better align manager and shareholder interests.
By the mid-1980s, the structure of flow of funds of the non-financial
corporate sector in the US was beginning to change. By the 1990s this
was reflected also in lower rates of investment in plant and equipment
out of total after-tax profits . . . as US corporate profit share has risen,
investment as a share of corporate profits has not risen and by some
measures has fallen . . . investment as a share of GDP has recovered from
its low levels in the early 1990s but is still well below levels achieved in
the 1970s . . . dividend payments and share buybacks have risen steadily
(with cyclical fluctuations) as a share of internal funds in the non-financial
corporate sector, taking off in the early 1980s from a plateau of around
20 per cent and reaching about 90 per cent by 2006.57
Engelbert Stockhammer also argues that the increased power of shareholders

over governance of the firm explains a substantial part of the slow-down in
accumulation. He notes that in the major industrial economies (Germany,
France and the UK, as well as the US) the investment-to-profit ratio shows a
clear declining trend. Stockhammer finds that,
as measured by profit share in the business sector (which compares

profits to capital stock) profitability starts out with high levels in the pre-
1970s Fordist era, falls in the 1970s, and reaches its lowest point in the
first half of the 1980s. Since then it has recovered in the US and the major
countries of Europe and has reached levels higher than in the 1960s in
all countries (except Germany because of a break in the data series due
to reunification).58
57 Milberg 2008, pp. 435 and 437.

58 Stockhammer 2005–6, p. 197.

However,
the ratio of investment to profits shows a declining trend. For example in

Germany in 1970 investment amounted to 80 per cent of profits, whereas
in 2000 this value had fallen to around 60 per cent. All countries show a
similar trend . . . one might call this the Marxian question, because Karl
Marx, as well as other classical economists, took for granted that profits
would be reinvested.59
As I noted earlier, Marx actually did not take this for granted. Part of the
answer to what Stockhammer calls the Marxian question is globalisation. Here
the work of William Milberg is of outstanding value. His view is that ‘the rise of
global value chains has provided the continued capacity of the major industrial
countries to sustain profit growth within the confines of a financialised system’.
He adds that,
a snapshot of industrial US corporations in 2006 suggests that higher

levels of shareholder value are associated with greater reliance on global
value chains, and low wage offshore sourcing. E.g. computer hardware
and software manufacturers and retailers, two sectors that rely heavily
on sophisticated global value chain arrangements, were among those
returning the highest percentage of dividends and share buybacks in
relation to net income.60
The Rise of the Private Equity Funds

Since the 1980s industrial companies have had to cope with the power of
aggressive operators in the market for corporate control. First there was the
barbarians-at-the-gate phase of Wall Street and City of London corporate
raiders in which the techniques of leveraged buyout were refined and directed
against increasingly large targets. The 1990s saw the rise of the even more
virulent private equity funds, backed by huge amounts of money, much of it
derived from the rapid increase in this period of the numbers and net worth
of the extremely wealthy. Henry McVey of Morgan Stanley explains that,
these funds usually plan to own companies for no more than five years and
their main focus is on maximising cash flow to meet interest payments
and to pay down debt. Capital expenditure is a hindrance . . . whereas
59 Ibid. See also Stockhammer 2004.

60 Milberg 2008, p. 439. See also Moëc and Frey 2006.

30 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
in the past firms engaging in leveraged buy-outs actually had to know

something about the business they were buying into, today they can
earn huge returns by merely getting rid of the excess cash on the balance
sheet.61
Apart from wealthy individuals, much of the financing of the private-equity

sharks came from the investment funds. McVey explains that, ‘investors,
particularly pension and insurance fund managers, are only too happy to
accept a bid premium from a private-equity group. The lift such bids give a
portfolio help managers to beat the index, and possibly their competitors,
keeping clients happy for a while’.62
The impact of the private equity funds on the companies they succeeded
in taking over has been to increase their financial fragility by draining them
of cash reserves and loading them up with debt. Thus such companies are
Minskyfied. But the effect on the strategies of potential targets was that they
intensified their efforts to defend themselves against hostile takeover. Crucially
this involved maintaining a high share price via generous dividend pay-outs,
share buybacks, and the building of large cash reserves. Also by spending spare
capital on mergers and acquisitions [M&A] rather than by investment in new
means of production. The rise in M&A was especially steep in the period just
prior to the 2007 crisis. In the first five months of 2007 global M&A transactions
had risen to a total of $2 trillion, almost double the value for the same period in
2006. An increasing proportion of M&A deals was being financed by companies
out of reserves of cash rather than by borrowing. In 2004 all-cash deals were
less than a third of all M&A by value; by 2007 they accounted for half. M&A
activity is strongly driven by financial companies attracted by the large fees
which they can secure by arranging deals. Executives in the companies which
are either initiators of takeovers, or targets, benefit through their stock options
from the short-term boost to share values normally associated with M&A deals.
5 A Crisis of Surplus Money-Capital
Marx saw that banks effect a centralisation in the supply of money-capital

socially generated in any given period. The cash reserves of companies,
individuals, and governments are transferred to the financial sector to
be passed on in loans to borrowers or invested. Marx’s term for the flow of
61 Economist, 6 January 2007, p. 6.

62 Ibid.

money-capital supplied to the financial system was loanable capital. As money

is saved – withdrawn from circulation – and accumulates in individual hoards
these can be transformed into money-capital. Marx wrote that: ‘the credit
system concentrates all these potential capitals in the hands of the banks, etc.
makes them into disposable capital – “loanable capital” – i.e. money capital
no longer passive, and, as it were, a castle in the air, but active, usurious,
proliferating capital’.63 It is the balance between the supply and demand for
loanable capital at any given time which, in his view, determines the level
of interest rates. Marx recognised that we have to allow for the considerable
power which central banks can exercise over interest rates – but that power
is exercised through central-bank influence on the supply and demand for
loanable capital.
In recent years the supply of loanable capital in the large economies has
tended to outrun the demand for money to borrow. I have argued that a major
reason for this surplus of loanable capital was the combination of a rising mass
of profit in the corporate sector of the major economies and a relative lag in
the rate of productive investment. As companies built up reserve cash piles
in banks and money markets, the financial money managers were hard pressed
to find enough safe borrowers for the extra money-capital. In addition this
direct transfer of surplus from the productive sector into the financial system
was supplemented by flows which came via two other channels.
First, the ever-increasing inequality in wealth ownership across the global
economy has put pressure on the available supply of assets in which to store
wealth, and get a return on that investment.64 This increasing concentration of
wealth ownership has been in part a result of the value-extraction mechanisms
of the corporate and financial sectors. Large shareholders benefit directly from
the money paid out by companies in dividends and share buybacks. Also,
as Thomas Piketty and many other researchers have stressed, the so-called
working rich have been one of the most rapidly growing elements in the global
growth of wealth and income inequality. These are the company owners and
executives who have been able to divert soaring quantities of surplus-value
into their own pockets through their direct control of corporate finances. In
63 Marx 1978, p. 569. In Marx’s own words: ‘Geldkapital werden, und zwar night mehr zu
passivem und also Zukunftmusik, sondern zu aktivem, wucherndem (hier wuchern im
Sinn des Wachsens).’ When money-capital is idle, it exists only as ‘music of the future’ –
possible music, not its actuality.
64 On the increase in wealth and income inequality as a factor underlying the 2008 financial
crisis, see the perceptive accounts in Lysandrou 2011, Goda and Lysandrou 2014, and
Stockhammer 2014.

32 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
addition the scope for tax evasion is obviously greater for those with large
fortunes.
Second, the global total of current-account surpluses (and corresponding
deficits) rose at a rapid rate from 1 per cent of global GDP in 2000 and to more
than 2.5 per cent in 2006.65 Though there were a number of high-income
countries with large trade surpluses, notably Germany and Japan, a high
proportion of the surpluses were secured by countries in the global South –
the new industrial powers, led by China, and by producers of commodities,
especially oil. By 2008 China’s current-account surplus had risen to an
astonishing 1.1 per cent of global GDP. The largest deficit country, by far, was
the US – accounting for about 85 per cent of aggregate global deficits in
this period. Governments and central banks in the surplus countries were
able to control the allocation of a large proportion of the dollars and other
international currencies derived from trade surpluses. A major way in which
this money was used was the purchase of financial assets, especially in the US.
In some cases this was simply because their economies could not absorb all of
the surplus profits they secured (e.g. the oil producers). In others the motive
was to prevent or slow-down the rise of their national currency against world
money, especially the dollar. The biggest imbalance was China’s trade surplus
with the US. The Chinese authorities were able to limit the rise in the exchange
rate of the renmimbi by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury
bonds and in quasi-government mortgage lenders like Freddie Mac and Fanny
Mae. In addition, many US industrial companies boosted their profits by out-
sourcing production to China. The recycling of these profits back into the US
financial system was a significant element in the so-called ‘US’ trade deficit
with ‘China’.
International trade imbalances derive from differences in industrial capacity,
productivity and costs. Thus one element in the underlying explanation of the
2008 crisis was the massive displacement of industrial production from the US
and other advanced economies to the low-wage emerging economies, China
especially. This important theme is beginning to get the research attention
which it merits.66
The build-up of a large surplus of money-capital in the global economy
was only one of the two major causes of the 2008 collapse. The other was the
increasing prevalence of high-risk lending by the financial system. This itself
65 Global imbalances were the key element in Bernanke’s thesis of global-savings glut,
and remain a central theme in mainstream explanation of the 2008 crisis. See the lucid
analysis in Wolf 2014, Chapter 5.
66 See Jagannathan, Kapoor and Schaumberg 2009. Also Ivanova 2011 and 2013.

was driven by the large and continuing inflows of loanable capital into the
financial sector. One effect of this surge was that the risk models then in use
by banks were made ineffective in registering the build-up of underlying
instability.67 In addition, there had been a long-term run-down in borrowing
from banks by the corporate sector. The loss of their lucrative blue-chip
borrowers forced the banks to seek new forms of profitable activity.68 The
strategies they adopted deepened instability in the Western financial
system and led directly to the banking crisis of 2007–9, for example banks
using their own capital to trade in highly-speculative financial markets;
massive involvement in the development of derivatives and other forms of
securitisation; the creation of an enormous shadow banking system to escape
supervision by bank regulators; large-scale and increasingly risky lending to
the household sector, much of it backed by the collateral of an unsustainable
boom in house prices generated by this very torrent of mortgage lending by
the banks; and the fateful bonanza of lending by Northern European banks to
peripheral countries in the Eurozone. The financial sector creamed off large
quantities of the money it was recycling – for example, by 2005 in the US profits
in this sector had risen to 40 per cent of total company profits. The financial
press in this period talked incessantly of the markets as awash with liquidity.
Interest rates tumbled: when the US Fed in 2004 decided to increase long-term
interest rates they were unable to manage it – the volume of money flowing
into the financial system was simply too great. As pressure to find creditworthy
borrowers intensified, scams and swindles flourished, and credit standards
deteriorated. And it was in the US subprime mortgage market that a tipping
point was reached and a wider collapse set into motion.
Trends Since 2008

The 2008 crisis effected a major change in the pattern of credit flows, as
governments replaced households as the major borrowers in the global
economy. But in a number of other ways the pre-2008 over-supply of loanable
capital still continues as I write at the start of 2015. There has been a fall in
the aggregate level of current-account surpluses, but not an enormous one –
though the recent fall in the price of oil will result in a further reduction. On the
other hand the numbers of the wealthy, and the average size of their holdings
of wealth, continue to grow rapidly. In the corporate sector the combination of
67 For a fascinating account, see MacKenzie 2006.

68 For a path-breaking analysis of the consequences of the increasing dependence of the
banking system on lending to the household sector, see Lapavitsas 2013. For discussion of
relevant earlier work by Lapavitsas, see Kincaid 2006.

34 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
high profits and inadequate investment persists. In October 2014 the Financial
Times reported that,
Corporations have continued to pile up cash since the end of the

recession. At the end of the second quarter of 2014, the non-financial
business sector in the US held $2.58 trillion in cash and money market
funds according to Fed Reserve data. . . . Investment has been slow to
recover in the wake of the recession. Non-residential fixed investment
is just 5 per cent higher than it was in 2007, making it one of the main
causes of the slow economic recovery, despite high corporate profits.69
One important motive for the cash piles is that mergers and acquisitions
continue to be a major focus of corporate strategy. In the first nine months
of 2014, M&A deals totalled $2.7 trillion worldwide. Despite the large reserves
in the corporate sector, it is also the case that many companies have taken
advantage of the prevailing low interest rates to increase their borrowing. Thus
the US non-financial sector has gone from being a net lender to the rest of the
economy to the tune of nearly $500bn at the peak in 2009 to being a modest
net borrower in the first half of 2014.70 But little of this borrowing is invested
productively. Most of it is handed out to shareholders as dividends, and share
buybacks (in the US, companies spent $400bn buying their own shares in
both 2013 and 2014). Keeping share prices high by reducing the total of shares
outstanding remains a key corporate objective, just as it was in the pre-2008
period. Payments to executives of salaries and stock options continue to soar.
Some Conclusions
This deep crisis, in which the underlying causal mechanism involves a
combination of high profits and lagging investment in the industrial sector,
poses a theoretical challenge both for Marxists and Miniskyites. For the latter,
the robustness of the industrial sector in the past two decades has led to the
emergence of a current of post-Minsky work. Some have suggested that there
is a basic flaw of logic in Minsky’s account of financial fragility. In a period of
upswing in the business cycle it is not necessarily the case that companies will
take on large amounts of extra debt and make themselves financially fragile.
Why not use their current profitability to increase earnings per share by buying
back some of their outstanding equity – rather than, as Minsky expected, by
tying themselves into an inflexible situation by increasing debt levels? This
69 Harding 2014.

70 Plender 2014.

critique of Minsky has helped stimulate interest in approaches which rethink

the character of the circuit of capital in a highly financialised economy.71
For Marxists the sequence of crises that started in 2007 confirms our
fundamental thesis that profitability and rates of accumulation lie at the
heart of major crises. But the relation between profits and investment is not
one of simple linear causation. The specific interplay of profitability and
accumulation has to be reconstructed in given historical situations. It is a
mistake to assume that if accumulation rates are low, it can only be because
rates of realised profit are low – and then to look for ways of massaging the data
to provide confirmation. We have to examine not just profit rates, but also the
profit margins of companies. The size of the mass of profits is crucial both in
balance-sheets and capitalist calculation. The declared profits of companies,
as reported to the tax authorities and registered in national-accounts data, are
not the same as actual underlying profits. A fundamental distinction has to
be made between profits realised by past investment, and the future profits
which capitalists hope to achieve by their current investment decisions. Profit
rates cannot be meaningfully analysed in isolation from the circulation of
capital. Marx’s reproduction schemas in Volume 2 of Capital are too abstract
to be used directly in the explanation of concrete phenomena such as major
crises without the careful development of mediations. And such mediations
should include the liability structures and balance-sheets of the firms, sectors
of production, or national economies under examination.72
My particular focus in this article has been the generation, in the recent
period, of a large gap between surplus-value realised and investment levels
in the industrial sectors of the advanced economies. This process, and its
consequences, are of course being noted by other researchers, though often
too briefly.73 An exception is David Harvey’s book Enigma of Capital, which
focuses at length on what he calls the capital surplus absorption problem and
which he sees as arising from the basic logic of capitalism. Unlike Harvey,
71 For example, innovative work on stock-flow consistent monetary circuits by Riccardo
Bellofiore, Marco Passarella, Paulo dos Santos and others. For a useful review of Marxist
and Italian circuitist paradigms of circulation, see Argitis, Evans, Mitchell and Toporowski
2014.
72 Marx’s way of constructing the deep interconnections between production and circulation
undermines the reductionist treatment of profitability and organic composition of
capital. I have developed this theme in a debate with Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho
published in Historical Materialism. See, for example, Kincaid 2008.
73 The theme of under-investment is covered in only two pages of Duménil and Lévy’s 2011
book (pp. 152–3). See also Husson 2010, and, for a concise mainstream version, Wolf 2014,
pp. 320–4.

36 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
I have not dealt with capital surplus as a general tendency of capitalist

development, but only with excess loanable capital as a particular and severe
form of distortion in the system in the period since about 2002. There are a
variety of strands in Marxist crisis-theory, and their validity – and relative
weight – in specific crises has always to be critically assessed. My story here
has not focused on underconsumption, or a rise in the organic composition of
capital, or a falling rate of profit.74 Rather, what has emerged is a specific form
of disproportionality in the system – an overproduction of interest-bearing
capital relative to the availability of safe ways of investing or lending it. This
is just as profound a dislocation, and just as intractable for capitalist strategies
to deal with, as a 1970s-type crisis of low profits on the already-invested stock
of capital. The crisis today arises from the deepening financialisation of the
system, combined with the success of the strategies implemented by capital as
countertendencies to the low-profit stagflation of the 1970s.
There are, in any case, some difficulties concerning Harvey’s general analysis
of capital surplus and the various fixes – spatial/geographical and temporal/
financial – which he believes have been devised by capitalism to absorb
surpluses. His approach often has a functionalist flavour in that he does not
sufficiently spell out the logics of competition and profit-making (and state
strategies) which allow fixes to emerge. When analysing the present period,
Harvey’s emphasis is on a surplus of productive capital. Given that profits in
the industrial sector remained quite high prior to 2008, I see current levels of
unused capacity as a consequence of the crisis rather than its cause: a result
of the deflation imposed on economies as governments acted to transfer the
costs of the collapse away from capital and on to labour. Harvey argues that
the monetary counterpart of surplus productive capacity was created by the
banking system as it increased leverage in the decades before 2008. He writes:
The turn to financialisation since 1973 was one born of necessity. It

offered a way of dealing with the surplus absorption problem. But where
was the surplus cash, the surplus liquidity, to come from? By the 1990s
the answer was clear: increased leverage [in the banking system] . . . By
2005 the leveraging ratio of banks went as high as 30 to 1. No wonder
the world appeared to be awash with surplus liquidity. Surplus fictitious
capital created within the banking system was absorbing the surplus.75
74 I agree, for example, that the 1970s downturn in the system was essentially due to a fall
in the rate of profit. The mechanical repetition of this thesis to explain the very different
form of crisis in the current period is not only wrong, but makes Marxist crisis-theory look
like a one-trick pony.
75 Harvey 2010, p. 30.

Certainly bank leverage increased vastly and thus the money supply increased.
Prices soared in asset markets. But the general rate of inflation stayed low,
and this would not have been the case if it was the creation of extra money
which had been the cause of the crisis. In any case the money-creation system
has nothing directly to do with the various ways in which a surplus of money-
capital (not money as such) was generated in the pre-crisis period. For example,
countries with a current-account surplus did not achieve it because their banks
had higher leverage and created more money than in deficit countries. Central
banks using techniques such as quantitative easing are often spoken of as
printing money. But in such operations it is not money which is being created,
but extra bank reserves. This only leads to a rise in money in circulation if banks
increase lending in response to the increase in reserves. And it is precisely
the unwillingness of the banking system to lend, and the shortage of demand
for loans from business and households, which has perpetuated recession
and low growth in the period since 2008.76
Though flawed in a number of ways, Harvey’s complex analysis of the crisis
in this and other recent work does merit close attention. To take only one
example, his broad definition of capital surplus poses an important challenge
for Marxist research. As Harvey has emphasised, we have to reconsider
the ways in which themes of surplus are dealt with by Marx. In the early
chapters of Capital Volume 3, Marx carefully works through a series of moves
which trace how the category of surplus-value is transformed into that of
profit. We have to examine again this sequence of concepts, and learn from
the logics involved. Reconstruction of the category of surplus-value and the
many forms it can take, rather than an exclusive and reductionist focus on
the declared profits of companies, is what is required in the analysis of a highly-
financialised global economy.
The term stagnation is increasingly used to characterise the present
situation in the advanced economies. But this is a misleading metaphor if it
suggests the inertness of a stagnant pond. Crisis persists, but it migrates from
one form to another, often rapidly and unexpectedly. Note for example the
marked cyclical variation of the US profit rate which is evident in Figure 1 of
this article. It does not seem possible that the profit rate can stay for too long
at the present fairly-high level, given the low level of new net investment in
the past few years. In the US for example, net investment after depreciation
has been hovering at around only 1.5 per cent of capital stock.77 If profits fall,
the corporate sector may then be forced to try an increase in investment as in
76 See the lucid explanation in Mian and Sufi 2014, pp. 154–82.
77 Plender 2014.

38 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341455 | Kincaid
the 1980s.78 But underlying the differing forms which crisis takes, the stubborn
fact is that the global economy is locked into a deep crisis of deficit demand.
Levels of surplus-value extraction keep rising, as wages lag. This article has
focused on a key dimension of this process – the draining of money out of
the circuits of production, realisation and consumption and its transformation
into more loanable capital than the system can absorb productively.
Clearly much is missed in my broad-brush treatment of the main agencies
of surplus-value extraction and surplus money-capital accumulation – the
corporate and financial sectors of the major economies, individual owners of
wealth, and governments of countries with a current-account surplus. I have
been able to give too little attention to different national and sectoral differences
within these broad categories. There is too much over-generalisation based on
US data. My argument needs to be completed by an account of the dynamics of
profitability and balance-sheet instabilities within the financial sector.
I have not proposed any kind of importation of Minsky into Marx. Both
were acute observers of the instabilities of capitalist finance, but Minsky
did have the advantage of seeing the system at a later stage of evolution. To
explain the nature and consequences of financialisation as a deep mutation
in the system, Marxist analysis needs some changes in angle-of-vision which
are present, but sometimes undeveloped, in Marx. An approach via Minsky
can help clarify these, and I have suggested a number of ways. Risk, and its
commodification, have to be more central themes in Marxist political economy
than is often the case. The immense and still rising weight of debt in economies
today is rightly the focus of much attention in alternative economic theory
and radical politics. But the sources and quantities of the supply of capital
which finances debt need to be examined as well. This is especially vital for
Marxist political economy, given its stress on the production and extraction of
surplus-value.
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The Right to the City in Two Moments: The Bus and

Tram Riots in São Paulo City in 1947 and 2013
Adriano Luiz Duarte

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil
adrianold@uol.com.br
Abstract
At the beginning of 1947 the first elections in fourteen years were held for state gov-
ernors. Adhemar de Barros, elected in São Paulo with large support from the commu-
nists, was an old ally of Vargas who ran his own political party, the Progressive Social
Party (psp), and began to compete with Vargas himself for the working-class vote. His
campaign for the Government of the State of São Paulo had been based on lower-
ing the high cost of living. He promised strict price controls on basic necessities and
an intensive campaign against price rises. Therefore, when the Mayor of São Paulo
announced a rise in transport fares a few months after the election of Adhemar, the
hostile reaction spread through the city like wildfire. Rapid growth and the disregard of
public authorities contributed to a chaotic and profoundly unequal urban landscape,
where the most visible problem was the public transport system. The aim of this article
is to understand the popular reaction to the rise in bus and tram fares which led to the
largest urban riots in the history of the city, at that time already the largest industrial
metropolis in Latin America.
Keywords
working class – public policy – electoral politics – riots
Now that the lack of housing reached what could be taken to be its cli-
max, after protracted studies, the municipal authorities of São Paulo and
Rio de Janeiro arrived at a conclusion: the housing crisis can be solved in
a relatively short time by building wooden houses en masse . . . Everything
could be put right, if it wasn’t for the current state of public transport

148 Duarte
which is considered by many to be the greatest obstacle, and almost

the only factor, blocking the plans of the Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
municipalities.
Introduction
The end of World War II saw significant changes in Brazilian society. The ‘Estado
Novo [New State]’, which for eight years had maintained strict control over the
unions and all autonomous organisations in civil society, ended at the same
time as the war. Since October 1930 the country had been governed by Getúlio
Vargas who had deposed the legally-elected President, Washington Luiz, rep-
resentative of the coffee-producing oligarchies in São Paulo state. Vargas,
who represented the cattle-ranchers in the south of Brazil, headed a move-
ment which became known as the ‘1930 Revolution’. In 1937, just before the
presidential election set for 1938, Getúlio Vargas led a coup in order to remain
in power with the support of the armed forces, which marked the beginning
of the period known as the Estado Novo. Between 1937 and 1942, despite the
fact that factions in the Brazilian government flirted with the ideas of Italian
Fascism and German Nazism, the Government decided to side with the Allies
in the war, which compromised the very existence of the Vargas dictatorship.
With the declaration of a State of War on 31 August 1942, the situation of
workers quickly deteriorated. The war justified the suspension of a number
of legislative provisions for the protection of workers. On the same day, with
regard to public-service companies and those classified as crucial for national
defence, Decree-Law no 4,639 authorised an increase in the normal number of
working hours to ten.1 One month earlier, decree no 4,479 had already trans-
ferred the enforcement of labour-protection legislation, along with all its attri-
butions, from the regional labour offices of the Ministry of Work, Industry and
Trade directly to the Intervenor of each state, namely, the State Departments
of Work, thus restricting the possibilities for legally challenging the measures
1 ‘In the event of a compelling need, the number of working hours may exceed the limits set
by this law, either by reason of force majeure or in order to achieve or conclude unavoid-
able commitments. In public-service companies, or those serving the interests of produc-
tion or national defence, work may continue with the prior consent of the Ministry of Work,
Industry and Trade.’ BMTIC, no 98, outubro de 1942 (my italics). How is a ‘compelling need’
or ‘reason of force majeure’ to be defined except by appealing to the allegations and require-
ments of the management of these companies?

The Right to the City in Two Moments 149
imposed by the war effort.2 Consensus, harmony and obedience were sought
in the name of political unity, the Brazilian family and, most of all, in the name
of a common enemy. The State of War took the principles of the Estado Novo
dictatorship to extremes. Funding requirements, and international restric-
tions on credit and the circulation of goods, put pressure on the cost of living.
Inflation, in addition to restrictions on political, civil and social rights, wors-
ened the already-difficult living conditions of workers.
In 1945 Getúlio Vargas was overthrown. The end of the Estado Novo and the
defeat of Nazism and Fascism bought to the fore a series of political and social
grievances, up to then latent, which unveiled the real situation of Brazilian
workers. Many issues were debated, but the central problems concerned pub-
lic services (hospitals, crèches, schools, health centres, refuse collection, etc.)
and the high expectations of the population as a result of the sacrifices they
had made during the war.
Between 1930 and 1950 Brazil changed radically. Statistics reveal that
in the 1940s structural changes occurred more intensively and at a greater
pace. The country ceased to be a predominately agrarian nation and saw
strong growth in sectors such as mining, civil construction, industrial pro-
cessing, financial institutions and public administration. These years saw the
emergence of a truly national market, integrating the different regions of the
country to the benefit of the most industrialised region, the South-East, in par-
ticular the state of São Paulo. At the same time, transport and communications
systems were streamlined to form a more efficient network, whilst industrial
production at a national level precipitated the demise of artisanal means of
production. While this phenomenon led to unemployment it also resulted in
the availability of a workforce for industry. This accentuated regional socio-
economic differences and increased inequality in all the large urban centres.3
Furthermore, the end of the war marked the start of a new period of electoral
disputes in Brazil. Up to 1934, only a small minority of the population was eli-
gible to vote. For example, in the state of São Paulo, only 299,074 electors voted
in this last election (1934); by the election on 2 December 1945 the electorate
numbered 1,565,248. This increase led to a profound change in the political
make-up of the country and significantly altered local political tendencies and
the way elections were fought. The intense atmosphere surrounding electoral
disputes and the intensity of popular demands widened and refocused the
2 Boletim do Ministério do Trabalho Indústria e Comércio, 1942, 96, agosto.

3 Patarra 2003, p. 18; Bonelli 2003, p. 392. Between 1930 and 1937, Brazil’s GDP (Gross Domestic
Product, the sum of the country’s total economic activity) grew at an average annual rate of
7.5%. Between 1945 and 1964 annual rates were even higher, averaging 9.3%.

150 Duarte
debate concerning the burning urban questions away from parliament and the
political parties towards the unions and neighbourhood associations. From
the working-class standpoint, the concept of redemocratisation was directly
linked to issues such as housing, transport, employment, sanitation, schools,
health, leisure, freedom of organisation, and a low cost of living.
If Brazil had changed a great deal, the city of São Paulo had changed even
more. São Paulo began to be known as the ‘fastest-growing city in the world’ or
as ‘the city that never sleeps’, and there was no exaggeration entailed in these
expressions. The 1920 census specified 579,033 residents in the city, which put
it in second place in Brazil, and third in Latin America. By the end of the 1940s
the population had reached 2,198,096. More than half of these residents were
from other Brazilian states and had arrived in the city recently.4
It is thought that between 1887 and 1930 over five million foreigners arrived
in Brazil.5 It is worth pointing out that immigration, which started to decline
during the 1930s, represented approximately 19% of population growth in
Brazil. However, it was unequally distributed across the country, with a greater
concentration of immigrants in the South and South-East regions, in particular
in the city of São Paulo.6 The 1930s saw the intensification of internal migra-
tion both from rural communities to cities and from the North-East and North
regions to the South-East and South regions. Between 1934 and 1940, the popu-
lation of the state of São Paulo grew by an average of 4% per year. Estimates
point to over 700,000 rural migrants arriving in the city of São Paulo during this
period, overwhelmingly from the North-East region.7 However, the rapid and
intensive growth in population was not associated with an increase in urban
infrastructure such as schools, post offices, public transportation and refuse
collection.
Francisco Prestes Maia, who was an engineer and urban planner, was mayor
of the city of São Paulo between 1938 and 1945. He implemented one of the
most ambitious urban projects for the São Paulo state capital: the so-called
‘avenues plan’.8 Reforms envisaged an overhaul of the city. This ‘urban surgical
operation’ sought to decentralise commerce, stimulating capital accumulation
4 Queiroz 2004, pp. 37–40.

5 Valle Silva and Barbosa 2003, p. 34.
6 Mortara 1951, pp. 50–62.
7 Graham and Hollanda Filho 1971. During the three decades 1940–70, it is thought that over
40 million Brazilians left rural areas for the large cities. São Paulo was their main destination.
See Patarra 2003.
8 Câmara 1990, pp. 18–19.

and the development of the economic system by improving the circulation of

people and goods.9
The ‘avenues plan’ accelerated the separation between working and living
zones.10 This resulted in the increased ‘peripheralisation’ of the city and the
rapid verticalisation of its central area, which became specialised in the ser-
vice sectors, in turn driven by the growth in banks and offices. One of the most
visible outcomes of the ‘avenues plan’ was the significant number of people
displaced from the old working-class districts which surrounded the centre
of the city: Brás 15.5%; Mooca 5.4%; Bom Retiro 16.5%; Santa Efigênia 5.5%;
Sé 8.0%; Bela Vista 3.5%; Liberdade 0.5%. This fall in population is an expres-
sion of the flip-side of urban intervention, generally hidden, that is, thousands
of expropriations, demolitions and evictions. The people living in the central
areas were evicted by ‘progress’. They were expelled from their homes and
forced to move to districts further afield.
Concurrent to the ‘avenues plan’ urban growth occurred concentrically,
where the areas closest to the centre were left unoccupied, ripe for property
speculation, forcing the displaced population to move to the furthest extremes
of the city.11 In this way, these areas were divided into plots and grew in a disor-
derly fashion, lacking planning or services infrastructure. When basic services
reached these areas, it increased the value of land in intermediate zones and
prices rose continuously. Thus, the ‘real’ city grew much faster than the ‘legal’
city. New streets were opened up by residents who built their own houses, in
regions which did not feature on official maps of the city.12 It is worth pointing
out, however, that the ‘illegal’ city was not the hidden face of the ‘legal’ city;
‘illegal’ describes the actual status of these areas.13 All public services such as
water, sewage, schools, hospitals, post offices, telephones and refuse collection
depended primarily on an area’s recognition by the State and the existence of
public roads. A vicious circle was delineated: without the State’s recognition,
roads were not paved and electricity was not supplied; without these facilities
there could be no regular bus or tram lines. This meant that of all the complex
urban problems the working classes faced during the postwar period, possi-
bly the most acute related to transport. Without public transport, there was
no ‘right to the city’.14 A resident of Jardim Independência neatly summed up
9 Fonseca 1989.
10 Câmara 1990, p. 33.
11 Rolnik 1997; Bonduki 1998.
12 Oliveira 1972; Holston 1998.
13 Grostein 1987.
14 I use the expression ‘right to the city’ in accordance with Lefebvre 1991, O direito à cidade.

152 Duarte
the feelings of periphery residents: ‘This district lies outside the world.’15 The
general feeling was that these residents and their districts ‘were not part of
the city’ and, as they were kept outside its real and symbolic limits, they were
also excluded from the world. A resident from the neighbouring district of Vila
Prudente added: ‘we are completely removed from civilisation’.16
Urban expansion was given over to property speculation while growth in
the periphery was the work of the residents themselves. This situation was
further aggravated in 1942 when the federal government decreed the tenancy
legislation, freezing all rents for two years and setting prices at 31 December
1941 levels.17 Rental freezing was renewed in 1944, 1945 and 1946. While the pur-
pose of the rent freeze was to redirect investment from the building of housing
for rent to the industrial sector, it also sought to expand the Vargas govern-
ment’s grassroots support at a time when it became clear that a new world
order had emerged with World War II and there was a need to vie for the elec-
toral support of the working classes. IBGE [Brazilian Institute of Geography
and Statistics] statistics suggest that in 1942, 75% of the São Paulo population
paid rent.18 This meant that during a period of enormous urban expansion and
growth, the amount of rental accommodation decreased, further exacerbat-
ing the peripheralisation of the city.19 For those who insisted on living in the
central areas, or close to their work places, there were the cortiços [tenement
blocks]. The city of foreign immigrants started to receive large numbers of
internal migrants. This rapid growth in population was not accompanied by
planned urban expansion.
At the beginning of 1947 the first elections in fourteen years were held for
state governors. Adhemar de Barros, elected in São Paulo with large support
from the communists, was an old ally of Vargas who ran his own political
party, the Progressive Social Party (PSP), and began to compete with the PTB,
the party created by Vargas via the structure of the Ministry of Work, Trade
15 ‘Cases of typhoid and other diseases have already been recorded because of the way the
local authority neglects our district. No refuse-men or hygiene inspectors have ever come
to our streets. No-one ever cared about the bad smell, the mud, or the floods which occur
in Vila Independência during the rains. . . . We don’t have electricity on our roads, water in
our houses or sewerage for our toilets. . . . our children receive no support . . .’ Hoje, 9 April
1947, p. 6.
16 Hoje, 8 May 1947, p. 6.
17 Bonduki 1998, pp. 111–12.
18 The estimated population of the city of São Paulo in 1940 was 1,337,844. Thus, approxi-
mately 1,003,383 people lived in rented properties. Cf. Berlinck 1975, p. 50.
19 For a discussion of this process, see Duarte 1999, especially Chapter I: ‘Moradia: os signos
da exclusão, uma cidade para poucos’.

and Industry, for the working-class vote. His campaign for the Government of
the State of São Paulo had been based on lowering the high cost of living. He
promised strict price controls on basic necessities and an intensive campaign
against price rises. Therefore, when Cristiano Stockler da Neves, the mayor
of São Paulo (which at the time was still appointed by the Governor; the first
direct elections would only take place in 1953) announced a rise in transport
fares a few months after Adhemar was elected, the hostile reaction spread like
wildfire through the city.
Rapid growth and the public authorities’ negligence contributed to a cha-
otic and profoundly unequal urban landscape, and the most visible problem
was the public transport system. The aim of this article is to understand the
popular reaction to the rise in bus and tram fares which led to the largest
urban riots in the history of the city, at that time already the largest industrial
metropolis in Latin America.
The Riots
In 1947, buses transported about 35% of the population, and the remaining
65% used trams and ‘lotações’20 – privately-hired open-body trucks. Although
trams were still the most important means of transportation in the city, the
neighbourhoods located further from the centre increasingly relied on buses.
In the years leading up to the riots, the trams were poorly maintained due to
growing neglect by Light – the service concessionaire – which made the rise in
fares seem even more unjust. For the users, however, the most serious problem
was the absence of any means of transportation in several neighbourhoods,
which was interpreted by the population as a clear sign of disrespect.21
On August 1st, the city was calm until 11am. ‘The vehicles of CMTC [Municipal
Company of Public Transportation] began to operate charging the new fares,
and, inside the buses, there were occasional complaints, which were made in
a tone of mockery or criticism.’22 It is difficult to be sure where the riots first
20 An informal, ad hoc transport service where individual car or lorry-owners picked up pas-
sengers for fares. This part of the paper is a considerably modified version of an earlier
one. See Duarte 2005.
21 The São Paulo Trainway, Light and Power Company was a Canadian firm which operated
in the state of São Paulo between 1899 and 1979. It was responsible for building a number
of hydroelectric plants, as well as generating and supplying electricity. When CMTC was
established, it ceased to provide public transportation to the city.
22 D OPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-890.

154 Duarte
broke out, possibly in the São Francisco square, but ‘they deeply shook the city,
changing its routine on that day’.23 People carrying sticks and stones began to
destroy and set fire to the buses and trams parked in the vicinity. ‘What is cer-
tain is that the movement quickly spread all over the city.’24 A group that was
dispersed from the São Francisco square walked south, while another group
headed north, setting fire to the buses and trams they came across. In front of
the Palácio da Justiça (the city’s main courthouse) several trams were attacked,
stoned, overturned, and set alight. The situation was aggravated by the fact that
firefighters were unable to put the fires out because the crowd threatened to
lynch them. The destruction and the attacks continued towards the Liberdade
neighbourhood – every bus and tram on the way was set alight and destroyed.
Meanwhile, the insurgents reached Praça da Sé, setting fire to the trams parked
in the area. More and more people gathered around the square, which was
soon packed with cavalrymen. In the Praça do Patriarca, a mob set fire to the
buses and trams and also prevented firefighters from approaching the area to
extinguish the fires. The streets nearby were covered with glass, cushions, cur-
tains, hats, umbrellas, bus-stop posts and wooden benches stripped from the
trams. Any buses or trams which arrived in the city centre during lunch time
that day were attacked, leaving nothing intact.
The crowd invaded the back entrance of the City Hall headquarters and
looted filing cabinets, portraits, tables and chairs, which were dragged to the
middle of the street to become a huge bonfire. A cavalry official was surrounded
by the crowd and knocked off his horse. Frightened by the attack, the cavalry-
men did not dare to confront the crowd and became trapped. Threatened by
the situation, the police cocked their carbines; people panicked and ran, add-
ing to the confusion. All of a sudden, a group of insurgents emerged from the
crowd walking slowly; they opened their shirts and shouted at the soldiers:
‘Shoot! Shoot and kill a Brazilian citizen!’25 The soldiers withdrew, but, to dis-
perse the crowd, they unleashed mortars and bombs.
The temporary headquarters of CMTC were also operating in the City
Hall building, and, though guarded by the police, it was invaded and totally
destroyed. Furniture and documents were dragged on to the streets and fed the
bonfires. Although the police were guarding the different entrances, a crowd
reached the front part of the building, throwing rocks and shattering the glass.
The rocks hit the portraits on the wall of the mayor’s office and knocked the
telephones off his desk. The offices of the head clerk and several assistants
23 O Estado de São Paulo, 2 August 1947, p. 4.

25 Correio Paulistano, 2 August 1947, p. 2.

were also damaged. The Police Major Teles Marcondes was thrown from his
horse and stoned when he attempted to arrest an insurgent. Two official trucks
were overturned and set alight; even Mayor Stokler das Neves’s official car was
stoned and was only saved from being torched because the police succeeded in
rescuing it from the crowd. The City Hall staff were unable to leave the build-
ing, while the police were unable to enter it. The employees were astute and,
as the attack intensified, they flew the Brazilian flag from a balcony in order
to appease the crowd. The Light building was hit by sticks and stones, and all
the glass at the front was shattered. The crowd’s behaviour tended to follow a
pattern: people surrounded the buses and trams and demanded that the con-
ductors and all the passengers get off, and then they destroyed and torched the
vehicles, though without injuring anyone. The crowd broke into a petrol sta-
tion and took enough petrol to set fire to the buses and trams. Yet, the petrol
station was not destroyed or looted.
According to the information published in the O Estado de São Paulo
newspaper, the destruction and attacks perpetrated by the population
spread to other neighbourhoods. Worried by the situation, the officers of
the 2nd military region came on duty immediately. Governor Adhemar de
Barros, alarmed by the extent of the popular uprising, is said to have called
President Dutra at Catete Palace (the presidential palace), arguing that
only the army would be capable of stopping the popular rebellion and re-
establishing order. The president is believed to have refused the request for
army intervention, on the grounds that the matter was the strict responsibil-
ity of the State Government.
It had been drizzling throughout the day and around 4pm a heavy down-
pour helped to put out the fires around the city. At the Legislative Assembly,
August 1st had been hectic. Amidst intense accusations, two commissions
were created: one to discuss the matter with the governor, another to approach
the mayor and propose the immediate suspension of the rise in bus fares.
Neither the governor nor the mayor was to be found that day. On 2 August,
CMTC announced that, of the 600 buses owned by the company, 16 had been
totally destroyed and torched and 78 had been damaged to such an extent that
it would take weeks to fix them. The situation was even worse with the trams:
of the 550 trams, 242 were attacked, 29 tows were damaged, and 5 were entirely
destroyed. All in all, 370 vehicles were damaged. After the riot, only 380 buses
and 200 trams were in working condition. Exceptionally, the ‘lotações’, which
already circulated in the suburbs, were allowed to travel to the city centre.26
26
Diário de São Paulo, 2 and 3 August 1947, p. 8.

156 Duarte
An inquiry was launched, presided by Nelson da Veiga, the Chief of Police

responsible for political order. The inquiry determined that everybody who was
hurt had to present proof of corpus delicti, and the interrogations began imme-
diately. There were in total 65 individuals, and according to the DOPS (Division
of Political and Social Order) report, they ‘were arrested where the inci-
dents took place, and [after] several witnesses had been heard. Nevertheless,
although these individuals were arrested at the incident, all of them denied
committing the offence’.27
At the DOPS headquarters, 34 reports were prepared by inspectors on duty
in different areas of the city in an attempt to make sense of the events that
took place on the 1st. Reports by chiefs of police from 11 of the capital’s districts
were also compiled, each describing how the riots had begun in their area.
The statements are very similar and express, in general, how the revolt caught
everybody by surprise. Most refer to the type of people involved in the event.
‘A large number of people – shoe-shiners, newspaper vendors, most of them
black’ or ‘a huge mass of people, made up of newspaper vendors, tramps and
rioters’. But also, to the surprise of investigators and chiefs of police, it was
common to see ‘people elegantly dressed’.28
On Saturday August 2nd, the city woke up calm. Large-scale patrolling,
never before seen, guaranteed the peace: DOPS investigators, public force cav-
alrymen, civil guards and night guards, a total of 850 men. All were present
from 5am at previously assigned positions. Every square in the city centre and
the most important bus and tram stations were occupied. All 160 civil guards
and 80 night guards, in uniform, travelled on the buses and trams around
the city. That day, every task-force member received two telephone numbers
‘which they should call immediately, if they notice any incidents’.29 However,
on Monday 4th CMTC still insisted on guarantees from the Department of
Public Security in order to allow buses and trams to circulate. FIESP (São Paulo
State Federation of Industries) advised their members to ‘mobilise transport
resources – trucks, vans, buses, cars, etc. – and to assist in operating a provi-
sional schedule’. This mobilisation was justified because, according to FIESP,
27 D OPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-890. The numbers are contradictory: some documents mention
66 being charged. DOPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-315, 316 and 317. The Division of Political and
Social Order, DOPS, was created in 1924 with the objective of finding, identifying, classify-
ing and neutralising the so-called ‘undesirables’, in general left-wing militants: anarchists
and communists, socialists and union militants. It operated continuously until 1982.
28 D OPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-Vol. 6.
29 170 public-order investigators, 440 cavalrymen, 160 civil guards and 80 night guards made
up this force. DOPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-221.

the transport system had been severely impaired by the ‘Saint Bartholomew’s
night rioters, who destroyed our public transport vehicles’.30
On Wednesday 6th, the Secretary of Public Security, ‘with the intention of
bolstering the surveillance of the city’, decided to create the Friends of the City
Police as an experiment. The idea was to select ‘upstanding and capable’ citi-
zens to collaborate with the preventive and repressive work of the police. The
news of the riot reached distant shores. In Washington, the American govern-
ment released a statement with a view to exempting foreign companies from
any liabilities for damage on August 1st. It also took the opportunity to suggest
lowering the fares.31
The Creation of cmtc and the Rise in Fares
Of all the complex urban problems that São Paulo city experienced in the post-
war period, possibly the most serious was public transport. Every neighbour-
hood was affected by the precariousness and absence of transport services.
Countless petitions and letters were addressed to the municipal, state and
federal public powers, to no avail. The deficiencies in services such as paving,
refuse-collection, post offices, hospitals, nursery schools, public telephones
and housing were directly related to the inefficiency of public transport.
Property developers had set aside areas closest to the city centre for future
speculation. For this reason, the city spread to areas located further away with-
out any planning or infrastructure. The creation of regular bus and tram routes
to the peripheral neighbourhoods was directly dependent on paving and other
basic services. Trams, of course, were also dependent on the provision of elec-
tricity. Most new streets were opened up by residents and, consequently, were
not officially acknowledged, which hindered the population’s access to public
services. The actual city was growing much faster than the legal city.
Trucks were generally the only motor vehicles that could circulate in many
peripheral neighbourhoods, especially on rainy days, in addition to being the
only means of transport capable of replacing the ambulances with reasonable
efficiency. To reach the city centre, most residents had to resort to ‘lotações’.
They were precariously protected by a fragile wooden structure connected
to each corner of the truck to which a net of ropes was attached and ‘pas-
sengers’ held on, so as to withstand the jolts of the journey. Unpaved streets,
full of holes and poorly maintained, were very common. Waiting times were
30
Folha da Manhã, 4 August 1947, p. 3.
31
Diário de São Paulo, 3 August 1947, p. 2.

158 Duarte
another serious problem. The situation was even worse in the evening when
the population returned home from work, since they had to wait for ‘two or
three hours’ without any transport. Considering the size of the population of
these neighbourhoods, the number of vehicles was derisory, and the residents
had no alternative but to walk long distances. Their plight was aggravated by
lack of street lighting and by the fact that, in many neighbourhoods, even the
houses had no electricity.
When it rained, even the ‘jalopies’ of the transport companies dared not risk
driving around certain neighbourhoods. Therefore, citizens who were head-
ing downtown could always expect long queues, and seemingly endless waits.
Consequently, both the Democratic and Popular Committees (CDP) and the
Friends of Neighbourhoods Societies (SABs) frequently demanded improve-
ments to public transport. They campaigned for a greater number of buses and
routes, changes in some routes, connections between contiguous neighbour-
hoods and improvements in the maintenance of buses. Nevertheless, the most
common demand was simply the creation of new bus or tram routes.32
In the face of such difficulties and advised by the local CDPs, the residents
frequently wrote petitions and delivered copies to the City Hall and newspaper
headquarters. They demanded changes of routes and bus stops, complained
about the long queues and the packed buses, and about their poor state of
preservation. The Hoje was the newspaper that received the most complaints,
because this publication was part of the strategy of the Brazilian Communist
Party to gain votes, and this was why this newspaper became the unofficial
voice of urban demands in the postwar period. The difficulties with the trans-
port system directly contributed to the increase in the cost of living, and it was
those who faced the greatest difficulties in moving around the city who paid the
highest price.33 Endless delays, packed buses, extremely long routes, shortage
32 The CDPs were neighbourhood organisations founded in 1945, inspired by the newly-
legalised Brazilian Communist Party. The SABS were also neighbourhood organisations
which replaced the CDPs when the Communist Party was made illegal in May 1947. See
Duarte 2002.
33 The Hoje newspaper, official publication of the Communist Party (PCB) in São Paulo, was
the most evident and public reflection of the activities and ambiguities of the party. There
is a self-promotional and partisan flavour to its reporting. Neighbourhood organisations
were possibly portrayed as having more power, influence and structure than they actu-
ally had. It is clear that the open section of Hoje, denouncing neighbourhood problems,
was also a way of attracting support to the PCB. In this sense, the paper’s articles were
carefully researched and prepared, both as exposés and as propaganda. Hence, the paper
should be read with care and some circumspection. Nevertheless, and most importantly,
Hoje was the first newspaper to provide a space which discussed the living-conditions of

of buses, poor maintenance, streets full of potholes, long queues . . . people

pushing and squeezing past each other . . . and many other daily humiliations.
This was the state of the transport system in the city of São Paulo in the imme-
diate postwar period.
In 1945, the city had approximately 220km of tracks, and a third of them
were in terrible condition because, for many years, the service concessionaire
Light and Power had been trying to offload the burden of maintaining the
tracks, forcing the transfer of many of its duties to the Municipal Government.
It was estimated that approximately Cr$1 billion34 was needed just to ensure
the operation of existing services at full capacity – to build substations,
install electric lines, railway sleepers, etc. In June 1941, Decree-Law no 3,366
was passed and Light was no longer compelled to maintain the tram services,
and, as a consequence, investment which had been scarce then dried up com-
pletely. The purpose of the decree was to defuse the constant pressure exerted
by the company, which was always threatening to paralyse services. But the
plan backfired, the quality of the services further deteriorated and the negotia-
tion of the concessionaire’s assets was imminent. However, it was well known
that buying up the company’s remaining assets was far from being the solution
to the city’s transport problems.
The discussion that led to the creation of CMTC addressed several alterna-
tives: public company or private concessionaire, monopoly or private compa-
nies? There was, however, consensus on one issue: that the tram service was
not a viable option for rapid urban growth. Buses, therefore, had to keep up
with the city’s expansion. For most people who used the system, the issue of
transport was obviously related to economic power, and to the consequent
separation of residents into first and second-class citizens. No doctrine, politi-
cal party or political textbook was necessary to reach this conclusion – it was
sufficient to compare the quality of the buses that circulated in different neigh-
bourhoods and how long their journeys took.
It was in this context that on Tuesday, 1 July 1947, CMTC began its activities
as a public company to administer the private concessions which would oper-
ate the public transport system in São Paulo city. Initially, it would manage
the routes that were of no interest to the private companies and establish the
the suburban neighbourhoods in the postwar years. Subsequently, other important news-
papers would do the same.
34 As an illustration, bear in mind that the average nominal salary in the industry, in 1945,
was Cr$ 475.00. But the real salary, i.e., the amount of goods that this salary could buy,
was Cr$ 188.00, owing to the impact of inflation and cost of living during the war period.
Ónody 1960, p. 263.

160 Duarte
rules for the operation and creation of new routes. Although anxiously antici-
pated, CMTC was created under a cloud of severe criticisms, reservations, and
suspicions. Transport-sector executives criticised the fact that CMTC had been
created as a public monopoly, which would hinder market competition and
private enterprise. The newspapers supported the executives and used the
opportunity to attack the way in which the mayor – at that time still appointed
by the State Governor – had conducted the negotiations. The most important
newspapers emphasised that CMTC had been formed by acquiring the assets
of the old concessionaires – mostly old, outdated or even broken vehicles,
and, frequently, inadequate for use. This was due to the fact that, since the
very beginning of the long discussions to create CMTC, no private company
had invested a single penny on the buses and trams in use. The papers also
added that CMTC had bought a fleet of ‘new’ vehicles from the United States,
most of them out-of-use and too old, and in such a state of disrepair that they
would have to spend several months in the garages. But for the population in
general, the final straw came when CMTC, on its very first day of business as
its first measure, announced a rise in the bus and tram fares. The Municipal
Government had not allowed an increase in fares when transport was in pri-
vate hands, though this had been the subject of much heated discussion. The
increase was of up to 100% for buses, and 150% for trams, although it varied
from route to route. The new company argued that the rise was part of a policy
of fare adjustment, as they were excessively disparate. However, ‘most people
believed that this rise was directly aimed at benefiting the shareholders of
the incorporated companies’.35 In short, with the creation of CMTC, the only
change was an imminent rise in fares.
The news about the increase came as a bombshell, especially after the
recent electoral campaigns during which State Governor Adhemar de Barros
had emphatically promised cuts in the cost of living and, in particular, bus and
tram fares. However, CMTC had paid Cr$ 60 million for the rundown assets
of Light, in addition to having incorporated all its debts. As the newspapers
remarked, given that CMTC started operations in debt, the purpose of the fare
increase was to absorb this debt.36 CMTC’s Board of Directors responded to
these criticisms, first of all by using complex graphs, demonstrating a decrease
in the number of tram users. Secondly, they emphasised the massive expense
of the vehicles. Finally, they alleged that the rise in fares would be lower than
the increase in the cost of living.
35
Correio Paulistano, 12 July 1947, p. 12.
36

At this time, the newspapers were inundated with letters, phone calls and
messages against the increase in fares. To make matters even worse, the cre-
ation of CMTC did not mean that the control of the transport companies would
immediately pass to the public sector. A number of routes would be run by
private companies. On these routes, most vehicles were new and in very good
condition, reflecting ‘the prosperity of the concessionaires. If, on the other
hand, these companies were not profitable, as claimed by the CMTC special-
ists to justify the fare rise, those in charge of these routes would lose interest in
these services and want to rid themselves of a hot potato’.37 It was obvious that
only unprofitable routes were incorporated into CMTC. Many of the companies
that had not been incorporated were able to renew their fleets without chang-
ing their fares, which demonstrated both their profitability and the possibil-
ity for real investment. Furthermore, several companies that were in charge of
more than one route had sold their old vehicles to CMTC, and began to use the
buses in good condition on the routes which had not been incorporated. There
were so many protests against the fare rise, coming from so many sources, that
Adhemar de Barros, after negotiations with Mayor Cristiano Stockler das Neves
and with CMTC directors, decided to postpone it sine die.
On 4 July, to celebrate the promulgation of the new State Constitution,
CMTC announced the replacement of the entire fleet of buses that operated in
the rich Jardim América neighbourhood, including routes 40 and 41. In order
to do this, the company had bought ten new buses, the modern Coach-GM,
which could carry 40 seated passengers and another 30 standing. The old
Jardim América buses would be allocated to serve other neighbourhoods. For
several days, the brand new buses for the Jardim América routes were lined up
on display in Anhangabaú Park. The ceremony to hand over the new buses was
grandiose. At ten o’clock in the morning, on the 9th, there was a ‘modest event’
in which the guests rode in two buses to drive along the routes. The fare for
these routes would be Cr$1.00. Afterwards, all the guests were taken to the
Esplanada Hotel, where the General Motors directors threw a lavish cocktail
party. During his speech, the CMTC superintendent, João Gonçalves da Foz,
justified the new buses for the Jardim América route:
due to the excellent paving of the streets through which the routes
pass . . . The 16 old buses that operated these services, after undergoing
some repairs, will be distributed between several city areas, mainly those
with a greater proportion of working-class residents.38
37
38
O Estado de São Paulo, 15 July 1947, p. 7.

162 Duarte
The operation of the Jardim América route was determined by the excellent
conditions of the paving of one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in
the city and not by the demands of population growth. This was the perfect
expression of an unfortunate vicious circle in which privilege attracted more
privileges, while deprivation engendered further needs.
On 31 July, the Municipal Government decided to announce the controver-
sial rise in fares for the following day. There was an immediate reaction in the
press, partly based on the opposition to Adhemar de Barros: ‘One of the most
unfriendly measures that the public power has ever taken against the people
has just been put into effect, overlooking the views of the assembly, the press,
and the population itself, given that all have manifested their opposition’.39 On
the same day that CMTC announced the rise in fares, they promised that ‘soon’
another 300 new buses would begin to circulate.
The problem of public transport somehow symbolised and aggravated the
core problems in the city, since it was a basic precondition to the solution
of other popular demands. Therefore, a person’s rights as a resident and as a
citizen were profoundly dependent on accessing an efficient public transport
system. During this period, it was impossible to think of São Paulo and its polit-
ical, social, and economic issues without acknowledging the symbolic or real
meaning of the problems involving the public and private transport system.
In the Streets for their Rights
The actions of ordinary people against the buses and trams were interpreted,
at that time, as the result of a long sequence of political and administrative
blunders by both the State and Municipal Governments, which generated
‘disappointment and discredit’, thus causing ‘one of the most serious and
lamentable episodes in the history of São Paulo’.40 The newspaper O Diário
de São Paulo, in its editorial column, explicitly blamed the Getulistas (follow-
ers of Getúlio Vargas), because: ‘a group, wearing handkerchiefs tied to their
heads and trousers rolled up to their knees, appeared suddenly and started
yelling “Getúlio! Getúlio! Getúlio!” while they set fire to vehicles’. It seems clear
that party disputes and political conflicts influenced interpretations of the
revolt. Identifying a culprit for the riot fuelled the political disputes. Colonel
39
Correio Paulistano, 31 July 1947, p. 2 (my emphasis).
40
O Estado de São Paulo, 1 and 3 August 1947, pp. 4–5. The media, in general, followed this
perspective for two reasons: it directly criticised Adhemar de Barros’s government, and
depoliticised the riot, thus reframing the discussion in line with established practices.

Flodoardo Maia, Secretary of Public Security, affirmed in an official statement

that the riot was premeditated, and that the instigators were ‘rogue elements’.
The governor’s official statement, released only five days after the revolt,
blamed, in general terms, ‘political enemies and professional agitators’.41 On
2 August, O Estado de São Paulo published the most elaborate interpretation
made by the press concerning the revolt, which brought together a series of
commonly-held impressions about the events:
. . . At a certain point in time, the tumult lost its character of violent pro-
test against an action that was contrary to the population’s interests, and
became just unrestrained disorder. Thus, the mob lost all human senti-
ments, went beyond all acceptable limits and destroyed lamp posts, trees,
and official automobiles . . .42
What stands out in this analysis is the fact that a tumult, which started for
economic reasons, lost its character of legitimate popular protest when it was
transformed into ‘unrestrained disorder’. In other words, when the actions
of the rioters went beyond what was considered an acceptable economic pro-
test, the actors in the tumult lost their humanity and became a horde. According
to this point of view, the events of August 1st could not be explained simply
by economic, political or social factors, because these factors presupposed a
degree of rationality, and yet the horde was essentially the result of irrational-
ity. Thus, the key to understanding the riot could be found in studying mass
psychology and crowd behaviour from a Gustave Le Bon perspective. This is the
reason why the crowd involved in the riot could only be regarded as irrational,
unstable and destructive, their acts the manifestation of total primitivism and
low intellectual development. Consequently, the actors involved in the riot
were represented as the city scum and scoria, equal to common criminals. On
the following day, the argument was somewhat softened:
Trams and buses are not only a means of transport but are also symbols of
the difficulties of daily life and the general feeling of discontent. The frus-
trations that plague the daily round, the feeling of not being listened to by
superiors, the impression of being exposed to and unprotected from the state
of things, deeply ingrained feelings of revolt and the desire to destroy, the
41
Diário de São Paulo, 2 August 1947, p. 8, editorial, and p. 4, respectively.
42
O Estado de São Paulo, 2 August 1947, p. 4 (my emphasis).

164 Duarte
fascination that fire has always exercised over men; all of those factors
and many others, contributed to spreading the incidents . . .43
Although it acknowledged the existence of a thin thread of rationality in

the collective acts of the revolt, the argument suggested that irrational feel-
ings and impulses were the real causes. Consigning those violent riots to the
realm of ‘mob psychology’ effectively defuses their political implications and
avoids any incisive confrontation with the real conditions of social exclusion
that produced them and the need to find solutions to address these conditions.
After all, it is very difficult to construe public-transport vehicles as ‘symbols of
the difficulties of daily life’, of the neediness, the calamities and total lack
of any social protection proffered by the public authorities, while at the same
time attempting to deny the profoundly political nature of all those factors.
Furthermore, the people experiencing these situations in their daily lives saw
them as direct consequences of not being recognised as citizens by a society
that was supposed to be democratic, but which was actually extremely author-
itarian and hierarchical.
It seems clear that the analyses of events immediately after the riots tended
to locate it within a spasmodic vision of history, as if people’s behaviour had
just been a spasm driven by their stomachs. However, it is possible to observe
that behind every mass-act of burning trams and buses dwells a legitimising
notion in the shape of traditional beliefs, rights and values. We might call these
the ‘moral economy of the poor’.44 In his criticism of the spasmodic vision of
history George Rudé (a central reference for E.P. Thompson’s concept of moral
economy) laid down the main questions this study endeavours to answer in
order to understand the actions of the crowd on August 1st. Although Rudé
establishes a clear distinction between the pre-industrial and industrial masses
and is more concerned with analysing the former, I argue that the questions he
crafted in order to understand uprisings are certainly appropriate for reflecting
on the riots of 1947: What really happened and what was its scope? How did
the crowd act? What were the motives and the ideas behind the action? What
was the purpose? How efficient were the forces of repression? What were the
consequences and what was the historical significance?45
Towards the end of the 1970s, sociologist José Álvaro Moisés visited the
scene of the August events. In doing so he imbued the revolt with an aura
of legitimacy as an object of study and brought it out of the shadows that its
43 O Estado de São Paulo, 23 August 1947, p. 2 (my emphasis).

44 Thompson 2005, pp. 150–202.
45 Rudé 1991.

classification as a phenomenon of ‘mob psychology’ had relegated it to. His

aim at the time was to investigate the ways in which ordinary people partici-
pated in the so-called ‘populist democracy’ and, more particularly, the limits
of such participation. When viewed from that angle, the events of August 1st
revealed the ‘paradoxical nature of Brazilian democracy in the period from
1945 to 1964’. On the one hand, there was the dependence on the State imposed
on the working classes and the unions, while on the other, there was a series
of attempts at political and social participation in the ‘populist democracy’,
conducted by those very same dependent and submissive classes. It seemed
that the end of the war had brought ‘unexpected and spontaneous’ demon-
strations by the common people that both left and right-political forces failed
to understand. Even the protagonists themselves failed to realise what their
actions represented in social and political terms because, at the time, they
were not equipped with the necessary structural capacity to do so. Left to
their own devices, without any effective political leadership, the mass dem-
onstrations were essentially brainless, destined to be at most ‘a spontaneous
eruption of mass anger’ and eventually doomed to failure. It was only much
later, when populist policies materialised in the figures of Jânio, Adhemar and
Vargas, that the actions of the working classes took on any significance or
enjoyed any resonance.46
The two interpretations have one point in common: the August revolts are
portrayed as sudden flashes like bolts of lightning, and, consequently, there is
no evidence put forward of any political motivation behind the mood of the
mobs. In both cases, that of the newspapers referring to ‘the criminal mob psy-
chology’, or in the sociological perspective that points to ‘elementary actions in
defence of lower-class budgets’, there are only references to politics when the
rioting masses identify their opponents by attacking symbols of public author-
ity, or in the way the revolts are put down. Politics only appears briefly at the
end of such accounts as a marginal reference, a kind of deus ex machina.
However, it is possible to analyse the matter in a different way. First, the riot-
ers followed a clear pattern of action: the trams were attacked first and, due to
46 Moisés 1985, p. 58. In this and other works the author’s central theme seems to have been
to square the accounts of the political parties’ inadequate performances, particularly
that of the Brazilian Communist Party – PCB, in their political management of grassroots
organisations in the postwar period. That would explain his emphasis on the aspects of
‘spontaneity’ and ‘political leadership’. In regard to demonstrations among the lower
classes in the 1970s viewed from the same angle, see Martinez-Alier and Moisés 1977.
There is an English-language version of the same text that is worth consulting in which
there are subtle but significant differences in emphasis: Martinez-Alier and Moisés 1980.

166 Duarte
their limited mobility, could be more easily stoned, overturned, destroyed, and
set on fire. Buses were the second target of attacks and, because they were faster,
were less likely to be torched, but could not escape the stones. Apparently, the
attacks were carried out against no route in particular. The official cars of both
the State and Municipal Governments were the third target of attacks. These
vehicles were also overturned and torched wherever they were found. As soon
as the attacks began, businesses closed up in the city centre. But there is no
information about people ransacking stores or even attacking street vendors;
only the fruit and food stands sponsored by the State Government, known as
Tendas do Adhemar, were attacked and set on fire. Newspapers did not report
attacks on private vehicles. For example, at the top of the Prestes Maia gallery
an automobile was being raffled: while buses and trams burned, the car didn’t
receive so much as a scratch. Also, cars were allowed to pass through the dem-
onstrators, provided they were not official cars. This shows that the attacks
were selective and calculated, but not planned.
The riot was a protest ritual whose objective was to seek redress for all the
problems that had been afflicting the population; all in all, it was a reaction
against the disrespect and the absence of rights – including the right to com-
plain – which the population felt. The attack on buses and trams on 1 August
1947 lasted only one afternoon, but it left a profound mark on the city’s life for
over a decade. This urban riot was important because it dramatised crucial
aspects of social relations that were stretched to breaking point; it is as if this
event focused and then amplified the social tensions of the immediate postwar
period. Thus, the riot brought to light a set of expectations and demands, both
for the expansion of the public space for collective action, and for the right to
express these claims. The working classes were not simply acting or voicing the
wishes of a populist leader; they built, by means of collective word and com-
mon action, a public sphere, which was continuously created and recreated,
even if it lasted but a mere ‘blink of an eye’.47
From 1945 to 1947 there was an intense public debate about the city, its
public services and the countless popular expectations, which were regarded
as the corollary of sacrifices undertaken during the war. For over a decade,
the country experienced a political regime in which popular demands were
silenced. Changes to party organisation gave a new dimension to the political
setting. Among the factors that contributed to this new setting were the legali-
sation of the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party), the participation of the PSB
(Brazilian Socialist Party), and the fierce competition between other parties
(PSP, PTB, PSD, and UDN) – not to mention the participation of smaller parties.
47 Arendt 1989.

The intense electoral dispute and the agitation of the popular demands mag-
nified and relocated the debates about social issues from parliament and the
political parties towards the unions and neighbourhood associations. The bus
and tram riots are related to the political, urban, economic and demographic
transformations in the city, and it is as part of these complex changes that we
can better understand this event.
The events of August 1st were a clear challenge to the arrogance, authori-
tarianism and contempt those in power had for popular demands, which had
been apparent since the end of the war and, above all, through the actions of
CMTC. Not only was August 1st a protest against the precarious and deficient
transport system, and the rise in fares, it was also the moment at which social
division was transformed into an open and direct manifestation against one
of the symbols of exclusion. Furthermore, it was a demonstration against
issues such as housing conditions, the inadequate public-health system, lack
of schools, the poor state of public sanitation and the terrible salaries. Indeed,
these basic needs were experienced by the popular classes as a continuum.
This conflict emerged in relation to the issue of public transport because this
was a symbol of the urban demands of a population that felt abandoned by
the public power. The obvious class connotations of this event lie, amongst
other evidence, in the social composition of the rioters – the list containing
the names of the 65 accused included one builder, one lawyer, one member
of the military, one advertising agent, and three public servants; the remain-
ing 58 are manual workers: weavers, printers, stonemasons, mechanics etc.48
This class association was also demonstrated by the calculated selectivity of
their acts, their symbolic and real targets, their attacks, but above all by the
events that preceded the riots and fomented the atmosphere of arrogance and
ostentation surrounding the creation of CMTC.
An anonymous tip-off led DOPS inspectors to the home of Manuel Fernandes
Tomé, a Portuguese bricklayer. They were investigating the disappearance of a
metal box containing money and tickets taken from a tram. When summoned
to make a statement on 8 August, Manuel offered the following testimony:
the (August 1st) movement took place because they wanted Getúlio and
it was promoted by the ‘queremistas’ . . . that there is no question that
President Getúlio has done a lot for our country and he is a very popular
man, and that in the opinion of the witness everything that the government
48 For a complete list of those charged with participating in the riots, including their occu-
pations, addresses and connections with the PCB established by the DOPS, see Duarte
2002, pp. 271–3.

168 Duarte
is doing is wrong, including raising the bus and tram fares . . . that there
was also the fact that the State congress (sic) had promised to look after
the matter of the fare increase and to see that it was not put into effect . . .49
Just like all the other witnesses summoned by the inquiry, Manuel ends his
statement by declaring that he had not taken part in the riots but had taken the
box from the hands of a boy. He declared that he was not an admirer of the PCB
as the investigators tried to suggest but rather of the PTB, and that in his opin-
ion ‘the whole movement was set in motion by out-of-power politicians that
were trying to create problems for the government of the State’. Thus, given
that ‘everything the government is doing is wrong’ and that it was not just a
matter of the increase in fares, the events of August 1st were entirely justified.
The August events also show a clear perception that the government should
act as an agent for social justice. Both the State and Municipal Governments
were perceived as a force to guarantee and extend public services, and main-
tain a minimum level of buying-power and quality of life. The government
had a duty to protect the poor. This ‘protection’, however, was not regarded as
a gift or an act of benevolence, but as an obligation, a restitution for the votes
the government had received. After all, by winning the elections, politicians
contracted a debt that had to be settled through the promotion of well-being
and justice for the poor. This lack of ‘restitution’ triggered the riots. Therefore,
the August episodes also brought to the surface the population’s desire for
dignified, respectful treatment, thus acknowledging the legitimacy of their
voice, the fairness of their demands, and their rights. For this reason, the riots
appear as a kind of condensation of latent conflicts, as a moment of predica-
ment in the profound social contradictions that usually remained hidden, but
which could no longer be stopped by the theatricalities of politics. In this
specific case, the tensions arising from profound social exclusion and from
the absence of ‘moral reciprocity’ found expression in the attack on buses and
trams, and the ransacking of the City Hall headquarters and the desecration
of State Government symbols. Consequently, the violence during the riots
cannot be reduced to the question of how many buses or trams were set on
fire, much less to the number of people wounded. The essential issue is that at
no time was there any uncontrolled violence or anything that could be attrib-
uted to a crazy mob.
What is really striking is the selectivity and the chosen range of the objects
targeted for violent behaviour, which was only possible because the opponent
49 Statement of the bricklayer Manuel Fernandes Tomé. DOPS Archives. Dossier 50-Z-2-
Vol. 6 (my italics).

was clearly defined and identified. In this case, the enactment of violence,
despite all its anomalies, expressed the feelings of the population in relation to
the way politics worked at that time. For this reason, the August riots need to be
considered in two ways: as a demonstration of enormous political disillusion-
ment, due to the fact that the promises of prosperity and justice that the end of
the war brought were not fulfilled, and as a way of demanding the fulfilment
of these promises; that is, as a means by which ‘lower class’ people demanded
respect, recognition, and deference, in a supposedly democratic moment. The
uprising not only undermined the legitimacy of the constituted authorities, but
also that of the political agenda being implemented at the time, which treated
the lower classes as if they were mere spectators. Accordingly, August 1st
articulates and brings together in a complex way a whole range of contradic-
tory political interests, class conflicts and the desires of the common people.
In symbolic terms, the riots mark the end of the hopes that sprang up with the
end of neo-fascism and the overthrow of the dictatorship of the New Republic.
From the point of view of the working classes, the idea of democracy – and
redemocratisation – was directly associated with factors such as housing, trans-
port, work, sanitation, schooling, health, entertainment, freedom of organisa-
tion, and a low cost of living. They were concerned about the terms of the
discussion about these rights, the framework of this debate in the ‘democratic’
period, and its full dimensions. In this context, the fact that some people might
have yelled ‘Getúlio’ during the riots could have been the expression of a feel-
ing of loss, of violated respect, of a denied right. More than the translation of
support, adherence or fidelity to Getúlio, the cries of support suggested the
defence of certain values and ideas embodied by this politician. Therefore,
the actions in these riots also expressed, albeit ambiguously, the search for a
kind of elementary natural justice – possibly circumscribed in a paternalistic
logic – which the Federal, State or Municipal Government did not represent
after 1945.
Generally speaking, debates on populism in Brazilian politics have focused
on the relations between the unions, the state and charismatic leaders (such as
Getúlio Vargas, Jânio Quadros and Adhemar de Barros). However, I believe that
there is a term missing from this debate: neighbourhood associativism, together
with the resulting demands for the ‘right to the city’. This type of associativ-
ism is represented by, for example, the Democratic and Popular Committees
(CDPs) and the Neighbourhood Friends’ Societies (SABs).50 The Committees,
which emerged from the activities of the Communist Party and its members’
involvement with ‘neighbourhood issues’, undoubtedly contributed to the
50 Duarte 2009.

170 Duarte
party’s popularity during the immediate postwar period. The Friends’ Societies
acquired greater popularity once the PCB was made illegal in February 1947.
Some of their strategies and concerns, and often their members, were inher-
ited from the party itself. Explanations concerning populism are incomplete
if we do not take into account neighbourhood associations and their actions.
Furthermore, it is also important to consider the fact that publicising the hard-
ships and the difficulties experienced in the periphery became a powerful tool
for mobilisations ‘in a world more used to silent exploitation’.51 The fight for
‘the right to the city’ and its consequences, such as the 1947 riots, are as essen-
tial for explaining the specificities of populism as trade-union struggles.
In the days following the riots, some police officers told the newspapers that
they were afraid in the face of the powerful impetus of the attacks. However,
both the press and the Legislative Assembly were unanimous in pointing
out that police action had been weak, slow, ineffective, condescending and
seemed to show sympathy for the rioters, thereby contributing to the escala-
tion and spread of the riots. There seemed to be signs that the ‘timid reaction’
of the police may have encouraged the rioters. For instance, in one incident
rioters physically removed a police officer from his post near a bus and only
then set fire to it.52 There are two implications associated with the supposed
unwillingness of the police to act. First, the non-ranking members of the force
actually sympathised with the demonstrators because, after all, they belonged
to the same social stratum as ‘victims’ of public-transport abuses. A second
hypothesis is more likely, however, which is that the State Governor, having
been elected with the votes of the very same demonstrators, the support of the
communists and a huge majority of lower-class votes, could not simply turn
on them and order a violent repression.53 Thus, it is plausible that there may
have been some hesitation on the part of the government and for this reason
the demonstration got out of hand and escalated into a rampaging riot. A year
later, when the PCB had already been declared illegal, the Governor Adhemar
de Barros was to formally accuse the communists of being responsible for the
riots. The hypothesis of a planned communist action is unfounded, however,
because at the time the party was opposed to that kind of intervention and
had adopted a motto of peace and order. Indeed, the PCB itself seems to have
been taken by surprise.54 Furthermore, for electoral purposes the party was
51 Castels 1980, p. 81.

52 Correio Paulistano, 2 August 1947, p. 2.
53 For a discussion of how the ambiguousness of ‘Adhemarists’ may have contributed
towards the occurrence of organised mass demonstrations, see French 1988.
54 Moisés 1985, p. 58.

an actual ally of Governor Adhemar de Barros. None of the 61 police inquiries

revealed any evidence of this connection.
In the following months, DOPS agents investigated the likelihood that the
riots may have been organised and directed by the communists and persis-
tently looked for this connection. The link established between the PCB and
the riots was the ‘evidence’ that since mid-June the communists had initiated
a campaign against the rise in fares, and that this ‘psychological campaign’
paved the way for the hostile reception which the fares increase received.
Curiously enough, the ‘prominent PCB elements in the August events’ came
from another city, Santo André. They were all arrested between 11pm and mid-
night on August 1st, in their respective homes. After being arrested, they were
sent to the DOPS. Seven days after the riots, they were still in jail, though there
was no evidence of their involvement. In the habeas corpus order PCB law-
yers argued that all prisoners had been working on August 1st and evidence
of this fact was provided, namely, punch-cards and employers’ letters. None
had been arrested at the scene of the events. In answer to requests for the
prisoners’ release, the DOPS systematically replied that no-one was being
held in their facilities. The reaction of the police was typical: the usual sus-
pects were arrested.55 It is worth pointing out that during the 1945 elections
in Santo André, Adhemar de Barros’s party obtained only 4% of the votes,
while the PCB and the PTB received 71%. In this election, the congressman
who obtained the largest number of votes was the Metalworkers’ Union presi-
dent, Euclides Savieto. In the elections for State Governor, in January 1947, the
PCB and the PSP made an electoral agreement that gave Adhemar de Barros
79% of the votes in the city; nevertheless, the only state assemblyman elected
in the ABC region56 was a communist furniture-maker from Santo André, with
5,175 votes. In the municipal elections, in November 1947, therefore after the
PCB became illegal, Armando Mazzo was elected mayor with 33% of the votes,
as a representative of the Partido Social Trabalhista – PST (Workers’ Social
Party). The list of candidates for the city council linked to the already-illegal
PCB reached 26% of total votes. The PSP candidate, Antônio Braga, obtained
a mere 6% of the votes, while the list of candidates for the city council of
the PSB received only 19%.57 In other words, the PCB, in Santo André, was an
obstacle and a direct opponent of the PSP, Adhemar de Barros’s political party.
55 D OPS Files, Record n° 85,193.

56 Region known for its large industrial park, formed by the cities of Santo André, São
Bernardo, and São Caetano.
57 French 1995, pp. 202–4. In this election, which took place in January 1947, Carmem Savieto
was the third communist with the largest number of votes, 650.

172 Duarte
At the same time, the management of CMTC used the opportunity to try
to destroy the newly-founded Association of Collective Transport Workers of
São Paulo (ATTUSP), which provided medical, pharmaceutical, and hospital
assistance to the company’s employees, and of which many bus and tram
drivers, conductors, and mechanics were members. The company’s strategy
was to accuse the directors of the Association of having taken part in the
riots. Some of them were dismissed ‘due to the bus riots and to their connec-
tion to the PCB’.58 Nevertheless, in the riots inquiry, only one name was men-
tioned, that of Antônio Aguiar, who was an active member of the democratic
committees and a communist candidate for the PST during the city council
elections in November 1947. Fearing new riots, the DOPS sent some of their
undercover agents to the CMTC garages and, for many years, any accident
involving buses or trams in the capital city was immediately investigated as
‘potential sabotage’.59 During the following years, it was feared that bus, tram
and other types of urban riots could reoccur. Every year, when the discus-
sion about the fare rises started, the DOPS agents prepared several reports in
which they announced the possibility of new and imminent rebellions.60 This
continuous obsession with conspiracy can be taken as proof that the elite
had difficulties in accepting popular action without a need for a ‘cause or
external condition’. However, August 1947 was not an isolated event; it was an
integral part of a movement which had spread throughout Brazil.61 Moreover,
one of its implications was to forewarn the elite to the fact that the working
classes could sometimes act violently, regardless of whether or not they were
organised. However, the riots were not sufficient to put an end to the ‘socially
implanted authoritarianism’ that permeated social and political relations in
58 The number of layoffs seemed to have been reduced with the creation of a ‘committee
of solidarity with the co-workers who had been fired or suspended’, which raised enough
funds to hire a lawyer and prove that the layoffs were motivated by the ‘fight for better
salaries’. On 16 July 1949, Antônio Aguiar became one of the founders of O breque, the
CMTC employees’ newspaper. See DOPS Files, Record n° 57,725.
60 ‘ . . . on the anniversary of the August 1st riots, new attacks against public and private prop-
erty, such as setting fire to banks and public offices, and the destruction of CMTC vehicles
are being prepared in this capital.’ DOPS Files. Brief 50-Z-2-373. For almost a decade, this
type of report was repeated, which possibly safeguarded the agents’ jobs.
61 Several urban riots took place all over Brazil. After the events in São Paulo, there were
riots in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Natal, Uberlândia, and other cities:
‘ . . . the people, threatened by hunger, go into the streets to protest. And the government
carries on, thoughtlessly inactive!’ (Duarte setembro 1952, ‘Aos currais de Augias’, Revista
Anhembi, n° 22, Volume VIII).

Brazilian society. They remained as hierarchical as ever and (the lack of) citi-
zenship rights continued to be closely linked to practices of social exclusion.
June 2013: R$0.20 Again?
The demonstrations appear to have first started in January, with the announce-
ment of a 7% rise in bus and train fares in Porto Alegre (state of Rio Grande do
Sul) which was to take effect from 25 March. On 4 April the Rio Grande do
Sul courts suspended this rise. On 13 May, the movement against bus-fare
increases erupted in Natal (state of Rio Grande do Norte). There was confron-
tation between protesters and the riot police, who made wide use of tear-gas
bombs and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. Still in May, the first demon-
strations in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Goiânia occurred,
where on 28 May, four buses were set on fire and another thirteen were van-
dalised. On 6 June there were new demonstrations in São Paulo. A number
of streets in the city centre were blocked with burning tyres and protesters
throwing homemade bombs; 24 protesters were detained by the police and
on 13 June fare increases were revoked.
In the city of São Paulo, demonstrations erupted with the announcement
of bus (the responsibility of the mayor) and metro (the responsibility of the
State Government) fare increases to come into force on 2 June. Previous
readjustments had occurred in January 2011 and February 2012, respectively.
Meanwhile, in May, the Federal Government (under Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’
Party – PT) had announced a provisional measure,62 making public transport
exempt from federal taxation (PIS and COFINS). The aim was that the read-
justments (expected across the country) would not impact on inflation, whilst
providing local authorities with some leeway to act. The demonstrations insti-
gated by the Movimento Passe Livre [Free Fare Movement] recurred on 6, 10,
11 and 13 June in São Paulo.63 Generally speaking, the press reacted by labelling
62 According to Brazilian legislation, a provisional measure is a decision made by the

President’s Office with immediate legal effect. Its underlying principle is urgency and
importance. The government must eventually put it forward for discussion by the
legislature.
63 The Movimento Passe Livre (MLP) emerged in 2005 at the Fifth World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre as the outcome of movements fighting against fare readjustments in the
cities of Salvador and Florianópolis in 2003 and 2004, respectively. Their argument was
that approximately 37 million people across the country could not afford the daily costs
imposed by the transport system and that a basic condition of the so-called ‘right to the

174 Duarte
the demonstrators vandals and trouble-makers making impossible claims, and

by demanding ‘energetic action’ from the police. The movement’s strategy was
to paralyse the city’s main avenues, forcing the hand of the local authorities,
and, in this way, ensuring fare increases would be dropped. The State Governor
of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin (Social Democratic Party of Brazil – PSDB),
who is linked to Opus Dei and normally endorses violent actions by the police,
raised the stakes with each new demonstration. On Thursday 13 June the mili-
tary police launched a new tactic to constrain the protesters: 232 people were
detained and many suffered the effects of rubber bullets and tear gas. The mili-
tary police ‘acted uncontrolled for hours, hitting out at passers-by and journal-
ists indiscriminately’.64 Participants and observers described policemen ‘going
mad’ and explicit ‘war scenes’,65 in a show of unprecedented violence not
seen since the emergence of the democratic regime. Journalists and passers-
by were attacked indiscriminately, and televised images, which were widely
reproduced by social media, showed students sitting down, pleading for calm,
whilst being hit by rubber bullets at point-blank range.
Instead of quashing the protests, police excesses actually encouraged their
dissemination. To everyone’s surprise, on Monday 17, approximately 70,000
people took to the streets in São Paulo (and almost 300,000 across twelve
other cities in the country). Remarkably, the mass media changed its view of
the demonstrations and started to show them in a positive light. The military
police, who had been criticised for their excessive behaviour on 13 June, practi-
cally disappeared from the streets and the demonstrations occurred without
incident. On 18 June the demonstration split and a small number attacked the
city’s administration offices (the mayor, Fernando Haddad, PT, had taken office
in January). The military police (under the command of the PSDB Governor,
Geraldo Alckmin) took five hours to respond. The protests reached their peak
on 19 June, when approximately 100,000 people took to the streets in São Paulo
(and approximately 1.5 million protested across 120 cities all over the country).
One of the most remarkable facts was that between 13 and 17 June, in addi-
tion to the disappearance of the police from the streets, banners multiplied.
Despite the fact that the reversal of fare increases was still a core issue for the
MPL leadership, the rise in the cost of public transport lost space in an agenda
city’ is the right to come and go. According to news reports, the number of people attend-
ing these demonstrations varied between 2,000 and 5,000.
64 A number of journalists ended up in hospital and many commuters were beaten by the
police. Judensnaider, Piazzon and Ortellado 2013, p. 102.
65 Singer 2013, p. 25.

which now included an almost unlimited number of new demands.66 The

diversity of banners and the lack of focus in the struggle against the rise in
fares coincided with an increase in hostilities towards left-wing demonstra-
tors and all their symbols: red t-shirts and the banners of all left-wing parties
were ripped and those who wore them were intimidated and often expelled
from the demonstrations. Instead of the usual red symbols, the green and
yellow t-shirts of the Brazilian national football team predominated, and the
banners of equality, justice and income distribution were substituted by anti-
corruption cries and the national anthem. The organised left-wing groups
mobilised in order to respond to hostilities. Trade-union centrals, left-wing
parties and social movements gathered together to participate, thus prevent-
ing intimidation by middle-class groups which increasingly predominated the
demonstrations. Among left-wing demands was a regulatory framework for
the internet and the media (there were protests outside the headquarters of
Globo television in São Paulo, the largest private media group in Brazil with TV
and radio broadcasting channels, newspapers, magazines, etc.) and demands
to investigate spying allegations made by Edward Snowden.67
66 The Constitutional Amendment Bill (PEC) no 37 proposed a reduction in the investi-
gatory capacity of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the main Brazilian institution able to
investigate the actions of members of parliament, given that they are protected by spe-
cial jurisdiction. PEC no 33 proposed to restrict the powers of the Supreme Federal Court
(STF) where some STF decisions were to be submitted to the National Congress instead.
‘Gay Cure’: In 1990, the World Health Organization (WHO) determined that homosexual-
ity should be understood as a natural variation of human sexuality, thus it could not be
considered a pathological condition. According to this determination, the 1999 resolution
of the Federal Council of Psychology banned all its professionals from participating in any
therapies to alter sexual orientation. In 2011, the Brazilian Federal Deputy João Campos
(PSDB – GO) registered a Draft Legislative Decree in the Chamber of Deputies to suppress
this resolution in order to enable professionals associated with the Federal Council of
Psychology to practise the ‘gay cure’. A draft bill proposed in the Senate which established
the medical act, in discussion since 2002, rendered access to a number of health services
conditional upon a doctors’ approval. It also set up a formal hierarchy between different
health professionals. Finally, though no less importantly, protesters complained about the
costs of the Confederation Cup and the FIFA World Cup preparations and, in a more gen-
eral way, against corruption.
67 The debate on the regulatory framework of the media has been progressing at a snail’s
pace since the promulgation of the 1988 constitution. It is a known fact that in Brazil con-
trol of the media is heavily concentrated in the hands of only a few. The absence of media
plurality and diversity – in newspapers, radio and television – makes it impossible to
have a serious democratic debate. Law no 12,965, known as the Internet Civil Framework,

176 Duarte
Who went out onto the streets in June? There were many surveys conducted
in different Brazilian states during the protests. According to DataFolha,68 the
demonstrators who attended the 17 June demonstrations were: young (over
80% were between 12 and 35 years old); university-educated (78% stated they
had received a higher education); mainly men (63%); and had participated in
a demonstration for the first time (71%). On 22 June, a survey of demonstra-
tors in Belo Horizonte69 showed similar results: 54.5% were under 25; 65% had
completed or were completing higher education; and 70.7% had a regular job.
Both the Mayor of Belo Horizonte, Márcio Lacerda (PSB – Brazilian Socialist
Party) and the Governor of Minas Gerais, Antônio Anastásia (PSDB) had nega-
tive ratings of over 70%. President Dilma Rousseff (PT) was negatively assessed
by 47% of participants. When asked about the main problems in the coun-
try that had brought them out onto the streets, respondents stated: education
(26.9%); health (26.9%); corruption (15.8%); public security (8.2%); and public
transport (8.0%). When asked about how they had voted in the last presiden-
tial elections the majority claimed to have voted for Dilma Rousseff (40.1%).
With regard to voting intentions for the next presidential elections (set for
October 2014), Joaquim Barbosa (at that time President of the Supreme Federal
Court and the main leader of the so-called mensalão trials) led with 26.4%,
only behind ‘spoilt votes’ (30.8%). In terms of party preferences, demonstra-
tors did not identify themselves with any political party (78%). However, PT
was preferred by 9.3% of respondents and PSDB by 2.0%. Nevertheless, 26.4%
rejected all political parties. Rejection rates were 25.2% for PSDB and 23.7% for
PT, respectively. The DataFolha Institute conducted a second survey to under-
stand how São Paulo city residents viewed the demonstrations:70 66% of inter-
viewees thought protesters should remain on the streets. The level of support
grew in direct relation to income and education level.
In terms of the make-up of the June social movements there are three dif-
ferent interpretations: the first argues that there was a strong presence of the
middle-classes in the demonstrations; the second argues that it counted on
sought to regulate internet use in Brazil by establishing a set of principles, guarantees,

rights and duties for internet users, as well as establishing guidelines for state action.
68 There are no surveys relating to previous demonstrations. Survey carried out on 17 June
with 766 interviews, and a margin of error of +/−4%. <www.datafolha.com.br>, accessed
22 September 2013.
69 Survey conducted by the Innovare Institute in Belo Horizonte during the 22 June dem-
onstrations, with 409 five-minute interviews and a margin of error of +/−5%. <www
.innovaripesquisa.com.br>, accessed 22 July 2013.
70 Survey conducted on 20 June with 551 interviews, and a margin of error +/−4%. <www
.datafolha.com.br>, accessed 22 July 2013.

the strong participation of the so-called precariat: ‘a mass of workers who have
no or few qualifications and move rapidly in and out of the labour market’;
the third interpretation argues that both the middle-classes and the so-called
new working class took part in the demonstrations.71 The first interpretation
recognises that the neo-developmentalist model implemented by the Workers’
Party (PT) led to the creation of 20 million jobs and managed to move 40 mil-
lion people out of poverty. However, in the last ten years, the Workers’ Party
moved away from the traditional middle classes, especially in the 2000s, when
it abandoned its project of creating a welfare state and when, by taking advan-
tage of the commodity boom, it stopped investing in the vitality of Brazilian
industry and, stimulated by the growth in the Chinese market, opted for a pol-
icy of developing the agribusiness sector. The ‘abandoned’ middle classes were
turning against the government. In the second interpretation, it is argued that
growth in formal employment and increases in education levels only resulted
in jobs paying a maximum of 1.5 × minimum salaries. Aggravating factors were
the precarious quality of life in the suburban areas of large cities and police
violence, especially against the young and black populations. In short, the two
Lula governments (2003–10) had not been able to create new social rights and –
despite having extended employment rights to domestic workers – the Dilma
Rousseff government (from 2011 onwards) had not changed this scenario.72 The
third interpretation proposes a convergence between the two previously cited
groups: the middle classes and the new proletariat. On the one hand, there
was a clear acceleration in retail prices during the months preceding the dem-
onstrations which further exacerbated the anger of the middle classes; on the
other hand, there was strong pressure from a growing proletariat for extend-
ing and deepening recent social changes. Demands now went beyond formal
jobs and a way out of poverty to other social areas such as health, education
and transport.
The demonstrations across Brazil had many positive aspects. In practice they
contradicted the generalised idea that Brazilians are an orderly, patient people
who are willing to quietly accept government malpractice. They brought to the
streets a utopian feeling, which claimed that other ways are possible, revealing
a clear and strong desire for change. The protests worked as a sort of educa-
tion of the will, teaching people to desire more, to desire better and differently.
71 First, Boito 2013. Second, Braga 2013, p. 82. Third, Singer 2013.
72 An opinion poll conducted by Plus Marketing Consultancy during the Rio de Janeiro
20 June protests showed that 70.4% of demonstrators were employed and 34.3% received
up to 1.5 × minimum salaries; they were on average 28 years old and had entered the
labour market in the last decade.

178 Duarte
It broke with the acute sense of individualism which has decisively contrib-
uted to reducing political expectations in the past twenty-five years, showing
that the only way towards a better life is through collective action.
However, there were also some deeply worrying aspects which laid open
ambiguities: the demonstrations, more specifically those subsequent to
13 June, were extremely diffuse, that is, many people participated in the mani-
festations as if they were going to a Rock-in-Rio concert or a football game. In
many demonstrations a ‘party spirit’ appeared to prevail. Most participants had
never been to a public demonstration before and there seemed to be nothing
which connected these protests to past events, nor were there any proposals
for future actions, and thus, it gave the impression of being simply a circum-
stantial activity. As a result, there was a strong aspect of volition to demands,
the anti-corruption banner (the trade-mark of the middle classes) expressed
an almost magical wish, as if will alone were enough to change things. Finally,
and more seriously, criticism was strongly rejected: to attribute all the ills of
society abstractly to corruption avoids facing the serious and difficult conse-
quences of class and inequality in Brazilian society.73
The generalised criticism of politics and the political debate was another
worrying aspect. Although the demonstrations’ rejection of the shameful
privileges that the Brazilian legislature enjoys is worthy of praise, it resulted
in a profoundly anti-democratic stance, given it rejected all mediating insti-
tutions which underpin democratic societies such as political parties, trade-
union centrals, organised social movements, as well as parliament. Criticism of
politics coincided with an attempt to invade, not only the São Paulo Mayoral
Offices, but also in Brasília, the Presidential Palace and the National Congress,
and led to the depredation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Itamaraty) and
the Central Bank, as well as three other Ministries and Brasília Cathedral on
20 June.
It is not difficult to understand the dissatisfaction of Brazilian society with
politics. We need only cite three examples which further discredited the politi-
cal system in June: the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Renan Calheiros
(Brazilian Democratic Movement Party – PMDB), had been denounced in 2007
after accusations that a lobbyist linked to civil-construction companies had
paid all his personal expenses and those of a house he kept for his lover and her
daughter. However, in 2010 he was elected senator and nominated President of
the Senate in 2013. Pastor Marcos Feliciano de Souza (Social Christian Party –
PSC) is a neo-Pentecostal evangelist, well-known for his homophobic tenden-
cies. He is being investigated for fraud and is suspected of racism, as well as
73 Chauí 2013, pp. 1–5.

being against any sexual minorities. However, he was appointed head of the
Commission on Human Rights and Minorities in the Federal Chamber, essen-
tially closing off any discussion in favour of minorities. Finally, the trial of the
so-called mensalão, presented by part of the media as the ‘largest corruption
case in the country’s history’ was widely broadcast. It exposed the President’s
party, the PT (accused of buying the support of its allied base in both cham-
bers), whose trajectory had been built under the banner of ethics in politics.
Cases such as these proliferated across the country’s states and municipalities.
Reasons for the enormous lack of trust in the legislature, judiciary and execu-
tive were brought up every day, in all corners of the country.
However, the rejection of politics and political parties has perhaps deeper
roots which conceal a more generalised – and much-repeated in the last
twenty-five years – perception that the state is the root of all evil, an expression
of all corruption, misdemeanours and arbitrariness and, therefore, responsible
for Brazil’s ‘backwardness’. Its opposite is the market, the purported repository
of all public virtues. What underlies this representation which demonises the
state and idolises the market is the profound transformation of urban life in
the past twenty-five years. On the one hand, there is the fragmentation, the
rise in the precariousness and outsourcing of labour (both in the industrial
and service sectors) and the dispersion of the working class which is at risk of
losing its terms of reference around identity and struggle. On the other, there
was a retreat of popular and social movements and their substitution by NGOs.
Meanwhile, there is the emergence of a new heterogeneous, fragmented and
unorganised working class which is generally not visible within the public
space and, therefore, is attracted to individualist ideologies such as the ‘the-
ology of prosperity’ (preached by the new Pentecostalist religions) and the
(middle classes’) ideology of ‘entrepreneurship’, which stimulates competition
and isolation, thus breaking with the traditional forms of compassionate socia-
bility and collective struggle.74
How did the political parties and public managers respond to the protests?
On 23 June, President Dilma Rousseff announced on television that she had
taken note of the demands coming from the streets. On the following day, she
met with the 27 state governors, the 26 mayors of Brazil’s major cities and rep-
resentatives of various social movements to announce a National Pact based on
Five Strategic Points: 1) Fiscal-responsibility measures to guarantee economic
stability and control inflation; 2) the development of a broad-based and deep
political reform, involving an exclusive Constituent Assembly to approve a
plebiscite; 3) the acceleration of investments in hospitals already agreed upon,
74 Ibid.

180 Duarte
as well as incentivising doctors to work in regions far from the large urban
centres and contracting foreign doctors; 4) investments of over R$50 billion
in urban mobility infrastructure; 5) actions in education: full-time schooling,
vocational education, improving the quality of higher education and teach-
ers’ salaries. On 25 June the Chamber of Deputies voted on some of the topics
which emerged from the protests around the country. First, PEC 37 was over-
turned and a new law on the compulsory destination of royalties from pre-
salt oil exploration was approved: 75% would go towards education and 25%
to health. However, in the following months, once the streets were calm, the
Congress undermined the five points proposed by the President. The politi-
cal reform stalled and a Constituent Assembly was summarily rejected by the
more conservative groups in the legislative chambers.
Any average Brazilian citizen living in any small, medium-sized or large city
will agree that the quality of public transport is poor. Buses are overcrowded,
old and uncomfortable, there are only a few metro lines, there is no investment
in urban trains, all public transport suffers from endless delays, and in all cities
it is too expensive in view of the poor quality of services provided. It is never-
theless ironic that the idea of free urban transport was introduced for the first
time in São Paulo, during Luiza Erundina’s mandate as mayor (1989/1993, PT).
At the time, the proposal was to progressively increase the amounts paid in
municipal urban and buildings tax (IPTU) and introduce an additional tax on
second family cars. There were so many criticisms and compromises due to
governability that daring and creative proposals such as these lost momentum.
Once again, crowds did not come out onto the streets for the sake of twenty
cents, but rather for many more reasons which put into question the whole
of the current political system from top to bottom, the type of behaviour that
‘can be seen from the conduct of politicians, parties and those in power, in the
lack of noble ideas to provide a sense of the future to society, in the easy way
that certain individuals can become wealthy and in the dissemination of all
types of illegal activities.’75 From this point of view, it was a cry of indignation
which bypassed all parties, the parliament, unions and the judiciary, indeed,
all the traditional mediators of national politics. This was a cry against the rep-
resentative system as a whole, pointing to its limits and breakdown. A year and
six months later nothing has changed. On the contrary, Dilma Rousseff was
re-elected president in one of the most polarised campaigns since the end of
the dictatorship. Geraldo Alckmin was re-elected governor in the state of São
Paulo. The Federal Chambers and the Senate are more to the right than at any
time in the last twenty-five years. The anti-corruption discourse has not left the
75 Ibid.

agenda of the groups defeated in the October 2014 elections which are yet to
leave their soap boxes and are openly talking of deposing the recently-elected
president: ‘let us exterminate these people. Let’s banish them for at least the
next 30 years’,76 was said in reference to the Workers’ Party. Let’s see who will
survive to see it!
References
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Chauí, Marilena 2013, ‘As manifestações de junho de 2013 na cidade de São Paulo’,
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materias/nacional/manifestacoes-de-junho-de-2013-na-cidade-de-sao-paulo>.
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Brasileira de História, 25, 50: 25–60.
76 Speech given in 2006 by the right-wing parliamentary leader Jorge Bornhausen (Liberal
Front Party, PFL).

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Duarte, Adriano Luiz 2009, ‘Neighborhood Associations, Social Movements, and Popu-
lism in Brazil, 1945–1953’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 89, 1: 111–39.
Duarte, Paulo 1952, ‘Aos currais de Augias’, Revista Anhembi, VIII, 22.
Fonseca, Pedro César 1989, Vargas, o Capitalismo em Construção, São Paulo: Brasiliense.
French, John 1988, ‘Workers and the Rise of Adhemarista Populism in São Paulo, Brazil
1945–1947’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 68, 1: 1–43.
French, John 1995, O ABC dos operários: conflitos e alianças de classe em São Paulo, 1900–
1950, translated by Lólio de Oliveira, São Paulo/São Caetano: Hucitec.
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and Urban Growth, and Development in Brazil: A Selective Analysis of the Historical
Record, 1872–1970, São Paulo: IPE/USP.
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São Paulo, FAU/USP.
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brill.com/hima
Review Articles
∵
All or Nothing: Reading Franco Moretti Reading
A Review of Distant Reading and The Bourgeois: Between History and
Literature by Franco Moretti
Carolyn Lesjak
Simon Fraser University
clesjak@sfu.ca
Abstract
Published in tandem in 2013, Franco Moretti’s two most recent books continue his
on-going project to develop radical new methods of literary history and to propose
new formulations and frameworks for understanding the relationship between form
and history and form and ideology. Bringing together the series of essays through
which he developed his concept of distant reading, his collection of the same name
argues for a ‘falsifiable criticism’ grounded in the data now available through digital
technologies and for the concept of a ‘world literature’ that it is the task of comparat
ists to theorise. His book on the bourgeois – characterised by Moretti as a project of
an entirely different nature – finds in the minutiae of language the construction of a
bourgeois culture in which the figure of the bourgeois himself ultimately disappears.
Contra Moretti, the review contends that these books are deeply interrelated and that
the limits of Moretti’s method are to be found specifically in the issues of scale raised
by reading these two works in dialectical relationship to each other. In particular, while
Moretti importantly forces us to confront in world literature what Fredric Jameson
refers to as the ‘scandal of multiplicity’, his method is unable, in the end, to account for
a reading of the world in literature in which both the empirical fact of a dead history
and the allegorical possibility of another history already in the making can be found.

186 Lesjak
Keywords
literary history – form – ideology – Franco Moretti – utopia – allegory – critique
Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, London: Verso, 2013
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, London: Verso,
2013
In his essay, ‘Utopia as Replication’, Fredric Jameson puts forward what he

himself terms a scandalous proposal: that Wal-Mart is ‘the new institutional
candidate for the function of Utopian allegory’.1 Embodying a dialectical unity
of opposites, Wal-Mart for Jameson functions not unlike monopoly capitalism
for Lenin and its transformation of quantity into quality. Competition, Lenin
explains, leads to monopoly, which in turn results in the very socialisation of
production that sets the stage for the transition from capitalism to socialism.
Significantly, this transformation occurs from within capitalism; size and
monopoly create the conditions for a qualitatively new form of socialisation.2
In Jameson’s version of things, Wal-Mart, in its capacity to ‘[abolish] the market
by means of the market itself’, expresses the dynamic of capitalism today. As
with monopoly, the point however is not to celebrate or castigate Wal-Mart but
rather to show how that which currently carries a negative valence ‘can also
be imagined as positive in that immense changing of the valences which is
the Utopian future’.3 In other words, the case of Wal-Mart, as well as Jameson’s
other, theoretical case-study, Paolo Virno’s notion of the multitude, is meant to
be a thought-experiment in which what he calls the ‘scandal of multiplicity’4
becomes the occasion for clarifying the perverse and illuminating work of the
dialectic and its relation to the Utopian ‘method’.5
1 Jameson 2009, p. 420.

2 Lenin 1939, p. 25.
3 Jameson 2009, p. 423.
4 Jameson 2009, p. 428.
5 As Jameson writes, ‘It is only in postmodernity and globalization, with the world population
explosion, the desertion of the countryside and the growth of the mega-city, global warming
and ecological catastrophe, the proliferation of urban guerrilla warfare, the financial collapse
of the welfare state, the universal emergence of small-group politics of all kinds, that these
phenomena have seemed to fold back into each other around the primary cause (if that is
the right category to use) of the scandal of multiplicity and of what is generally referred to
as overpopulation, or in other words, the definite appearance of the Other in multiple forms
and as sheer quantity or number’ (Jameson 2009, p. 428).

All or Nothing: Reading Franco Moretti Reading 187
For our purposes, two aspects of Jameson’s proposal are especially

important: first is the fact that it is presented in the context of a distinction
Jameson is making between representational Utopias and the Utopian impulse.
Whereas representational Utopias, in one form or the other, always involve
the representation of a Utopian space or totality, a realised Utopian plan of
some sort, the Utopian impulse ‘is not symbolic but allegorical’, ‘deals with
fragments’ rather than the totality, and therefore ‘calls for a hermeneutic: for
the detective work of a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces
in the landscape of the real; a theorization and interpretation of unconscious
Utopian investments in realities large or small, which may in themselves be
far from Utopian in their actuality’.6 In other words, the Utopian impulse can
be found in the least likely of places: be it in blockbuster Hollywood movies
such as Jaws or The Godfather, as Jameson argues in an early essay of his,
‘Reification and Mass Utopia’, or, here, in the possible transvaluation of size
and scale, or sheer quantity, that Wal-Mart and overpopulation (in the case
of Virno) prompt by way of allegory. This emphasis on allegory rather than
actuality, I will suggest, not only constitutes a central aspect of Jameson’s
Marxian interpretative framework but also speaks to what is really at issue in
current debates regarding the so-called death of theory and of hermeneutics,
more specifically – namely, whether we read for what is visibly locatable in the
real or for ‘clues and traces in the landscape of the real’.
Second, Jameson also uses the analogy between Lenin’s defence of monopoly
and Wal-Mart to foreground the question of size and scale and, in particular, the
difficulty we have in ‘thinking quantity positively’.7 In other words, as Jameson
speculates, it is ‘apparently difficult for us to think of an impending future of
size, quantity, overpopulation, and the like, except in dystopian terms’.8 Think
of the ‘return’ to artisanal production, the 100-mile diet, co-ops and small
farms, and the (over-)use of the language of ‘community’, all in the name of the
local versus the global, the qualitative rather than the quantitative, the home-
spun over the mass-produced – with the point being, as Jameson underscores,
not to choose between one or the other, but rather to see how the difficulty
of thinking big, in terms of size and scale, contributes to the ‘obstacles facing
Utopian thought in our own time’.9
What might it mean to think something analogous to scale at the literary
level? This is the question, I think, that Franco Moretti’s recent work most
6 Jameson 2009, p. 415.

7 Jameson 2009, p. 419.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.

188 Lesjak
interestingly prompts us to consider. And the proposal I want to put forward

here is that like Wal-Mart for Jameson, Moretti’s work is the ‘new institutional
candidate for the function of Utopian allegory’ within the field of literary and
cultural criticism. In short, it is an attempt to think the ‘scandal of multiplicity’
that is world literature and literary history more generally. And the analogy
can be extended: just as Wal-Mart forces us, in Jameson’s reading, to forego
an ethical or evaluative stance in favour of a dialectical one, Moretti’s work,
I want to suggest, should do the same. The idea, in other words, of choosing the
local over the global or vice-versa, figured within Moretti’s work as close versus
distant reading, should be resisted. So too – as with Wal-Mart – the temptation
to either celebrate or castigate Moretti’s efforts to shake up the literary world
as we know it should be resisted, despite or rather precisely because of the
uncanny resemblances at times between them, especially when it comes to
the fears Wal-Mart and distant reading raise. It is not too much of a stretch,
for example, to detect in some of the most vehement responses to Moretti’s
new method of reading the fear of job loss and the sense that the humanities
as we know them will be destroyed. Were distant reading to transform literary
criticism in the same fashion that Wal-Mart has supplanted Main Street, many
of us would be left out of work. In fact much of the professoriate already is;
with the percentage of contingent faculty on the rise, and with the increasing
dominance of a corporate culture within the university, academic workers
and Wal-Mart associates have more and more in common. Again, however,
the point will not be to moralise but rather to ‘seize as an opportunity’10 this
new mode of reading the system for its emergent possibilities.11 Finally, like
Jameson’s analysis, mine is a thought-experiment insofar as it is an attempt to
imagine a positive valence for a project about which I have reservations. For
if Moretti’s mode of reading big is not approached dialectically, and indeed if
Moretti himself does not approach it dialectically, as I will argue he does not,
it has the tendency to become akin to a one-sided celebration of Wal-Mart and
as such incapable of mediating scale.12 Just as we should not take Wal-Mart
10 Jameson 2009, p. 423.

11 Jameson explicitly distinguishes his approach from the ‘crude but practical fashion’ of
Lenin’s, clarifying that he will consider Wal-Mart ‘not . . . as an institution from which
(after the revolution) we can “lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent
apparatus,” but rather as what Raymond Williams called the emergent as opposed to the
residual’ (Jameson 2009, p. 423).
12 In a different context, Mark McGurl argues that ‘commitment to one scale of analysis over
another on the part of any given literary critic is usually intense enough that the question
of scale as such never even arises’ (McGurl 2009, p. 401). In his analysis of creative-writing
programmes and postwar fiction, McGurl not only moves adeptly among a variety of

at face value, we should not take Moretti’s method at face value – hence the
necessity of reading scale not only dialectically, as a unity of opposites, but
allegorically, as a figure for something utopian yet to come.
1 Thinking Big
Within the field of literary criticism, the contest over scale has largely taken
place in debates about reading. In recent years multiple new forms of reading
have been proposed, driven by a series of questions that defamiliarises the
very act of reading, including not only how we read, but why and to what end.
New approaches and new methods range from thing theory with its emphasis
on reading objects rather than characters in texts, to surface-reading with its
attentiveness to surfaces rather than depths, and the multifold field of the
digital humanities and its turn, broadly, to quantitative rather than qualitative
reading, data rather than texts. Moretti entered the fray in 2000 with the notion
of ‘distant reading’. Like his iconoclastic work more generally, distant reading
was at once provocative and polarising – just the way Moretti likes it. Quoting
Stendhal’s Julian Sorel in The Red and the Black, he concludes his infamous
essay, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’: ‘ “Don’t delude yourself . . . for you,
there is no middle road.” The same is true for us.’ A recurring refrain throughout
his recent collection Distant Reading – the notion that there is no middle road –
the Stendhal quote comes at the end of ‘Conjectures on World Literature’; here
the provocation is for those who study world literature to be ‘a thorn in the
side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures – especially
the local literature. If comparative literature is not this, it’s nothing. Nothing’.13
It appears again, at the end of ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’: ‘Anarchy.
Not diplomacy, not compromises, not winks at every powerful academic lobby,
not taboos. Anarchy. Or as Arnold Schoenberg once wonderfully put it: the
middle road is the only one that does not lead to Rome’.14
scales in order to highlight literary studies’ ‘elective affinity with perspectivism’ (McGurl
2009, p. 400), but also foregrounds the question of scale. As he queries: ‘We can close-read
or contextualize at various geographical scales; we can consider one text or many; we can
track cultural developments in a certain “historical moment” or across the centuries: given
that the attention span of criticism is highly variable, what might a self-consciousness of
the question of scale bring to our critical practice?’ (McGurl 2009, p. 402).
13 Moretti 2013a, p. 62.
14 Moretti 2013a, p. 89.

190 Lesjak
Moretti’s provocation rests on a simple premise: we already know how

to read, now we need to learn how not to read. And what we know is close
reading, which has left us essentially reading not even 1% of all the literature
ever published. Not a very good statistic, when it comes then to making claims
about the representative nature of the literature being read and the access
it supposedly provides to the larger culture of which it is a part. To have any
hope of getting to the remaining 99%, or what Margaret Cohen terms the ‘great
unread’, something has to change – hence the move to distant reading, which
relies on the gathering of data, in the form – as his 2005 collection announces –
of maps, graphs and (evolutionary) trees. This data involves everything from
mining nineteenth-century novels or Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ for the networks
that exist between different characters within any given text, as in ‘Network
Theory, Plot Analysis’, to counting the words in titles over the course of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as in ‘Style, Inc.’, in order to understand
the change from long descriptive titles to the short abstract or metaphorical
‘title-as-ad’ as a marketing tool.15 Hence, ‘Style, Inc.’ Distant Reading not only
brings together the series of essays that has developed the concept of distant
reading, from the early ‘Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch’16
to ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’,17 but also provides an explicit developmental
narrative in the prefaces to each essay that Moretti offers. These prefaces read
like lab notes, mirroring the experimental approach to reading that is most
succinctly captured in the name of Moretti’s institute at Stanford, the Literary
Lab, and best articulated in the open-endedness of the projects described, and
in Moretti’s willingness to discuss the successes and failures of this project
to date. What emerges is a vision of criticism as incremental and exploratory
rather than sui generis and complete. (Stanley Fish epitomises the latter vision
when he asserts in one of a series of New York Times blog posts against the
digital humanities, ‘In a professional life now going into its 50th year I have
been building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive,
monumental, definitive, and most of all, mine’).18 Key, then, to the method
that will become distant reading – and that galls the likes of Fish, as well as
others – is its changed relation to the very notion of critical authorship, which
shifts from a singular to a collective enterprise: ‘Fantastic opportunity, this
15 Moretti 2013a, pp. 203–4.

16 Originally published as Moretti 1994.
17 Originally published as Moretti 2011.
18 Fish 2012.

uncharted expanse of literature; with room for the most varied approaches,
and for a truly collective effort, like literary history has never seen’.19
With respect to world literature, in particular, distant reading necessitates
a world-systems approach in which scholarly knowledge from around the
globe would be collected and the accumulated data synthesised into a
picture of a truly world literature. In this division of scholarly labour, analysis
outweighs synthesis by far: Moretti references a phrase by Marc Bloch – ‘years
of analysis for a day of synthesis’ – as well as the work of Fernand Braudel
and Immanuel Wallerstein, the latter of which dramatises this new ratio: ‘The
text which is Wallerstein’s, his “day of synthesis”, occupies one-third of a page,
one-quarter, maybe half; the rest are quotations (1,400 in the first volume of
The Modern World-System). Years of analysis; other people’s analysis, which
Wallerstein’s page synthesizes into a system’.20 Giddily, Moretti translates this
social-scientific practice into literary terms: ‘[literary history] will become
“second hand”: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct
textual reading. Still ambitious, and actually even more so than before (world
literature!); but the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from
the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be’.21
Later in the book, in his preface to ‘Style, Inc.’, Moretti attaches the appeal of
analysis to the ‘longue durée of [his] Marxist formation (the work of Della
Volpe and Colletti), whose ferociously anti-dialectical stance urges [him] to
devote all his energies to analysis, and none to synthesis.’ As he wryly adds, he
also just happens to ‘like it’.22
Modelling itself on Wallerstein et al., distant reading inevitably falls prey to
the same kinds of objections levied against world-systems theory: by focussing
on the forest, one necessarily loses some of the trees. The late Giovanni
Arrighi depicts this bind compellingly in an interview with David Harvey in
which he discusses the process by which he came to write The Long Twentieth
Century – an explanation that warrants some space given its applicability to
the relationship of part to whole or concrete to abstract that defines Moretti’s
reading of literature as a world-system. Arrighi explains that his ‘discovery
of financialization as a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism’23 upset his
original plan to include a section on labour in The Long Twentieth Century.
He notes that the original plan was not jettisoned, but simply not possible
19 Moretti 2013a, p. 89.

20 Moretti 2013a, p. 48.
21 Ibid.
22 Moretti 2013a, p. 180.
23 Arrighi 2009, p. 73.

192 Lesjak
within such an overarching longue durée stretching from the fourteenth

century to the present. As he comments, ‘not only is there too much to cover,
but there is also considerable variation over time and space in the relationship
between capital and labour’.24 In his reference to the ‘considerable variation
over time and space’ in this relationship, Arrighi recognises the loss of labour
as a potentially constitutive loss, insofar as labour constitutes an active
rather than only a reserve army in relation to capital. For Arrighi, ‘the worker
struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were a major factor in the
financialization of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the ways in which it evolved’.25
In short, there is a dialectical relation between labour and capital that is
not captured when the focus remains on finance capital – or, alternatively,
labour – alone. Significantly, too, the loss of labour leads to a false picture of
proletarianisation as a uniformly levelling process in which all workers become
equally exploited. While capital is happy to proletarianise its workers in this
manner, workers however ‘will mobilize whatever status difference they can
identify or construct to win a privileged treatment from the capitalists’.26
Moretti, too, gestures toward this trade-off between the macro and
the micro: ‘And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself
disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is
more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept
losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge; reality is
infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this “poverty”
that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is
actually more’.27 But note the difference between his conclusions and Arrighi’s:
whereas Arrighi recognises the loss of labour as consequential, for Moretti
the loss concomitant with distant reading is, in the end, an unequivocal gain
since, in this model of reading, knowledge itself comes at the expense of
reality, of the infinitely rich, in the name of poor concepts and our ability to
‘handle them’. If nothing else, this is an odd set of equivalences to make in a
project motivated by the idea of ‘falsifiable criticism’ – namely, the idea that
criticism should hold itself to a ‘testable’ standard of proof, or, more simply, to
being right.28 In moments like this, the revelatory potential of distant reading
24 Arrighi 2009, p. 74.

25 Arrighi 2009, p. 75.
26 Arrighi 2009, p. 76.
27 Moretti 2013a, p. 49.
28 Moretti takes the freighted term ‘falsifiable’ from Karl Popper, a contentious figure within
Western-Marxist circles. Popper and his followers debated with members of the Frankfurt
School in what was referred to as the Positivism Dispute; and Moretti’s Italian compatriot,

as critique seems to recede precisely because distant reading simply is not

supple enough to capture the complexities of scale where scale is felt and
lived (i.e. not in poor concepts) – and most importantly mediated (in this
example, in texts themselves). In other words, as a total effect, Moretti’s almost
evangelical advocacy of a social-scientific approach to literature risks losing
the real trees at the expense of the evolutionary ones.
In response to a question from Roberto Schwarz (recounted in ‘The End of
the Beginning’) as to whether his literary Darwinianism, while undoubtedly
interesting, still constitutes a ‘form of social critique’, Moretti begins by
briefly tracing his own intellectual development in the context of the ‘crisis of
Marxism’ in Italy in the late 1970s and of Colletti’s critique of dialectical-Marxist
approaches to history specifically. Following Colletti’s view that ‘historical
materialism’ as practised was neither properly historical nor materialistic,
Moretti narrates how he became increasingly occupied with ‘the pursuit of a
sound materialistic method, and of testable knowledge . . . until finally – slowly,
imperceptibly – it ended up overshadowing the more substantive aspects of
my historical work’.29 So what is gained in Moretti’s view? In exchange for
substance, Moretti sees in his graphs, maps and trees the potential ground for
a new form of critique. It is new for Moretti because his quantitative approach
is profoundly estranging – both in terms of how we think about literary history,
and, as we began, in terms of how we read. And it has the potential for critique
because it is a ground-clearing exercise that ‘leaves us free to advance new,
irreverent hypotheses’.30 But, significantly, it is also not a project about which
Colletti, drew on Popper’s theory of falsification and the divide it establishes between
Marxism and science to eventually disavow Marxism as a pseudo-science. Popper is thus
important to the anti-Hegelian strand of Italian Marxism in the postwar period. Moretti’s
use of this term not only situates him within this particular variant of Marxism, but also,
as with his mentors Della Volpe and Colletti, opens him up to the charge of positivism or
empiricism. In this sense, Moretti’s embrace of science can be seen as a repetition of sorts
of the debates within Western Marxism regarding Hegelianism, the science of historical
materialism, and the turn, in Italian Marxism specifically, away from dialectics and its
attentiveness to matters of class consciousness and subjectivity. That said, Moretti’s
intellectual trajectory also differs in important ways from his Italian forebears, most
significantly in terms of the openly dialectical nature of his early work, such as Signs
Taken for Wonders, subtitled ‘Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms’, which includes
a brilliant reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein entitled ‘Dialectic of Fear’. As noted
above, Moretti himself briefly narrates some of this history in the commentary to ‘The
End of the Beginning’ in Distant Reading.
29 Moretti 2013a, p. 155.
30 Moretti 2013a, p. 158.

194 Lesjak
Moretti has any surety, since the only way to find out whether this potential
can be realised as critique in the sense Schwarz means it is to ‘return to the
messy realities of social history’.31
Published at the same time as Distant Reading, The Bourgeois can be read
as that return. In contrast to the essays on distant reading, which, as Moretti
comments in a footnote in ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, left no space for
an analysis of the relationship between form and ideology (as opposed to form
and literary history),32 The Bourgeois looks much more like the Moretti of old –
of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987) and Modern Epic
(1995) – in its attention to the figure of the bourgeois ‘refracted through the
prism of literature’.33 In five chapters that ingeniously chart the disappearance
of his main character, Moretti moves from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
as exemplar of bourgeois literature, to nineteenth-century realism and the
increasing absorption of bourgeois values into the very prose of literature, to
the ‘fog’ of Victorianism and its disavowal of the precision developed by Defoe,
and finally to the ‘chronicle of bourgeois defeats’34 in the semi-periphery –
exemplified by Pérez Galdós’s Torquemada (1889–96) – and the ‘grey area’
that is Ibsen, where the ‘unresolved dissonance of bourgeois life’35 is revealed.
Organising these chapters is a series of keywords – ‘use’, ‘efficiency’, ‘comfort’,
‘serious’, ‘influence’, ‘earnest’, ‘roba’ (property, but also something more like ‘life’
as it functions in Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia (1881)) – that, along with prose
itself, comprise the ‘style’ of bourgeois culture and, as Moretti compellingly
argues, the site where the bourgeois is to be found. Indeed, prose, style and use
come together seamlessly in Defoe, whose major contribution to a bourgeois
culture increasingly defined by instrumental reason is ‘prose, as the style of the
useful’,36 which then turns out to be, as well, the ultimate and ‘only true hero’
of The Bourgeois: ‘Prose, as the bourgeois style, in the broadest sense; a way of
being in the world, not just of representing it’.37 As a result, Moretti attends
throughout to the minutiae of language, which, as he wagers, ‘captures the
slowness of cultural history’, the still ‘incomplete project’ of bourgeois culture.38
In virtuoso readings, ‘fillers’ (descriptions rather than narrative proper) are
31 Ibid.
32 Moretti 2013b, p. 89.
33 Moretti 2013b, p. 4.
34 Moretti 2013b, p. 149.
35 Moretti 2013b, p. 178.
36 Moretti 2013b, p. 39.
37 Moretti 2013b, p. 181.
38 Moretti 2013b, p. 19.

shown not only to slow down the pace of novels literally but to subordinate
the present to the past and hence figuratively retard alternative possibilities
for some future historical change; strings of Victorian adjectives are parsed to
reveal how evaluative judgements are made through them without seeming so,
given the apparent neutrality of their attachments to the nouns they modify;
single adjectives, later in the century, are seen to ‘grate against the noun, like
chalk on a chalkboard’39 and thereby capture the ambiguities of bourgeois
existence, as when Ibsen dramatises the possibility of lawful injustice or unfair
legality, a kind of dissonance, Moretti argues, that the great Victorian realists
such as George Eliot in Middlemarch cannot countenance; and Galdós’s
Torquemada, in a tour de force reading of style, is found to be ‘hypnotized by
nominalizations’,40 the grammatical embodiment of agentless prose beloved
of lawyers and undergraduates alike. His vapidity, which Moretti links to
Jameson’s notion of the ‘deterioration of protagonicity’, buries ‘the hegemonic
ambitions of a whole class . . . in ridicule’.41
In its broad outline, then, The Bourgeois constructs a social history of
bourgeois culture through or in literary prose, a story in which objectivity
gradually eclipses subjectivity, a process that begins with the ever-resourceful
Robinson Crusoe, who, like Hegel’s ‘prosaic mind’, creates a world in which
usefulness is all, everything a means to something else, world without end(s),
amen, to echo Dickens. There is nothing particularly novel in identifying Crusoe
thus (in the influential Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt identifies Crusoe as
homo economicus) but what is new, according to Moretti, is how we can now see
instrumental reason ‘as a practice of language – perfectly articulated, though
completely unnoticed – well before it became a concept’.42 Likewise, in later
chapters, Moretti’s attentiveness to style unearths new signs of a homogenising
world (Flaubert, he notes, sees France as a ‘fully homogenized society’ by the
time of Madame Bovary),43 from the use of free indirect discourse and its ability
to propagate normative and ‘normalising’ judgements that seem to come
from nowhere to the ‘objective impersonality’ Flaubert aspired toward, to the
shift, more generally, from emotional evaluation to ‘analytical presentation’.44
These seemingly neutral, invisible forms of bourgeois socialisation sap the
possibility of subjective resistance of any sort – or of just plain subjectivity,
39 Moretti 2013b, p. 178.

40 Moretti 2013b, p. 163.
41 Moretti 2013b, p. 164.
42 Moretti 2013b, p. 39.
43 Moretti 2013b, p. 100.
44 Moretti 2013b, p. 91.

196 Lesjak
never mind a resistant form of it – and reveal the impotence of the literary
itself, as it and the social become one, a collapse illustrated by Emma Bovary’s
mouthing of romance clichés, the equivalent of idées reçues. In one of his
classic lines, Moretti comments that this is ‘the nightmare of Bouvard and
Pécuchet: no longer knowing how to distinguish a novel about stupidity from
a stupid novel’.45
In the end, along with his putative main character, the bourgeois, Moretti’s
main device, the use of keywords, also disappears. This is one sense of what
he means when he refers to Ibsen’s ‘grey area’, to the fact that Ibsen ‘can look
at bourgeois ambiguity without having to resolve it’.46 The bourgeois values
that previously were located in key terms such as ‘use’, or ‘serious’ or ‘earnest’
now pervade Ibsen’s dramatic universe: ‘But with the grey area, we have the
thing, without the word’.47 This is most like the world we currently live in,
Moretti suggests. It not only describes how capital moves into new spaces,
but also reflects how muddy the values of bourgeois life are; there is a lot of
room between bad or immoral and illegal. Enron and the equivocal actions of
Kenneth Lay are one name for this greyness;48 ‘Acquittal is acquittal’, as Werle
confirms in The Wild Duck, is another.49 The choice is no longer one between
good and bad bourgeois, rather there is a lack of alternatives altogether. Or at
least until the late Ibsen. At that point, there is a twist in the story: ‘prose as
rational polemic’ – Nora’s speech, for example, at the end of A Doll’s House –
gives way to multiplying metaphors and the visionary entrepreneur (Solness as
Hilda’s ‘master-builder’ in Ibsen’s 1892 play of that name) who rejects outright
the language of prose, and takes on, instead, the ‘poetry’ of speculation, of
looking into the future rather than being confirmed by the past. If the former
describes the first bourgeois generation before industrialisation, the latter
defines its ‘ideal-type’ after industrialisation. By taking us here, Ibsen becomes,
for Moretti, the perfect epilogue to The Bourgeois: ‘his plays are the great
“settling of accounts” of the bourgeois century. . . . He is the only writer who
looks the bourgeois in the face, and asks: So, finally what have you brought into
the world?’50 And the answer: ‘This mad bifurcation between a much more
rational and a much more ir-rational rule over society’,51 which also, in the end,
45 Moretti 2013b, p. 100.

46 Moretti 2013b, p. 178.
47 Moretti 2013b, p. 172.
48 Ibid.
49 Moretti 2013b, p. 176.
50 Moretti 2013b, p. 170.
51 Moretti 2013b, p. 186.

signals the end of bourgeois realism. No match for the power and prowess of
creative destruction, it is at once more indispensable and ultimately impotent
‘in the face of capitalist megalomania’.52
So, to borrow from Moretti, how to assess what he has brought into the
world via the two types of criticism that characterise his two recent books:
distant reading and. . .? Interestingly, it is hard to put a simple label on The
Bourgeois’s method. Marxist formalism perhaps? Or a formalism with (ultra-)
close reading in contrast to Jonathan Arac’s description of distant reading as
‘a formalism without close reading’?53 In Distant Reading, in his preface to
‘The End of the Beginning’, Moretti certainly sees these two books engaging
altogether different methods or modes of thought and different objects of
inquiry. Drawing on Marc Bloch’s assertion in The Historian’s Craft that ‘tides
are certainly connected to the phases of the moon, but in order to know it for
sure one had first to independently determine the ones and the others’, Moretti
muses that the paired publication of Distant Reading and The Bourgeois ‘makes
me think that I like studying tides and moon independently of each other.
Whether or not a synthesis will follow, remains to be seen’.54 Likewise, in an
assessment of the digital humanities specifically, he muses that there is at once
too much data and too little ability (yet) to synthesise it without succumbing
to the nondescript average or the boredom of the middle road: ‘Too much
polyphony, and too much monotony: it’s the Scylla and Charybdis of digital
humanities. The day we establish an intelligible relationship between these
two, a new literary landscape will come into being’.55 In both cases, bringing
the large and the small, the concrete and the conceptual together involves some
form of synthesis between two discrete realms or spaces, and two seemingly
discrete methods.
Modes or approaches to reading in this account seem able to be utilised at
will depending on the project or occasion. On the one hand, this is precisely
what Moretti identifies as liberating or ground-clearing about distant reading:
it offers a radically new way of reading, which clearly has been exhilarating
for Moretti and, by extension, for many in the digital humanities who, as
52 Moretti 2013b, p. 187.

53 Arac 2002, p. 38. Moretti quotes Arac’s description in his preface to ‘The Slaughterhouse
of Literature’ favourably as a ‘nice formulation’ for capturing the kind of reading (of
detective stories) he does in ‘Slaughterhouse’, which he doubts is ‘still reading’: ‘I read
“through” those stories looking for clues, and (almost) nothing else; it felt very different
from the reading I used to know’ (Moretti 2013a, p. 65).
54 Moretti 2013a, p. 138.
55 Moretti 2013a, p. 181.

198 Lesjak
the ‘practising partner of distant reading’,56 have embraced in various ways

the new possibilities – both prosaic and utopian – of digital technologies.
In The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, for example, digital humanities are
characterised as ‘[having] a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent
from the counterculture-cyberculture of the ’60s and ’70s. This is why it affirms
the open, the infinite, the expansive [and] the democratization of culture and
scholarship’.57 A bit more restrained in his assessment of digital humanities to
date, Liu holds up Moretti as well as Pascale Casanova as models for the kind of
scholars digital humanists should aspire to be: ‘While digital humanists have
the practical tools and data, they will never be in the same league as Moretti,
Casanova, and others unless they can move seamlessly between text analysis
and cultural analysis’.58 Much ink has been spilled over whether in fact Moretti
escapes the confines of text analysis or the pull of empirical data in and for
itself, a debate that Moretti finds to be the least interesting point of contention
in the furore over distant reading. And I agree. So rather than dwell on whether
distant reading is empiricist or not, it seems instructive instead to return to the
related questions of scale and allegory with which we began, and, in particular,
to think about them in the context of The Bourgeois rather than Distant Reading.
Why? Because it is here that the problem of thinking about scale synthetically
rather than as a unity of opposites becomes clear. The Bourgeois, I will argue,
demonstrates that issues of scale cannot in the end be siloed in the way that
Moretti envisions: we cannot sometimes read distantly, as others read closely,
and then somehow bring the two together, to put it somewhat crudely. Scale as
such is not additive, and modes of reading are not so easily taken on or off, as
it were, as Moretti assumes.59 Rather, to read scale we must read allegorically,
for without allegory texts are reduced to meaning just what they say, to being
read at face value, to recall our opening discussion. Data can seem stable in
that way – it is ‘solid’, ‘impeccable’, clear (Moretti refers at one point to ‘the
clarity of the empirical confirmation’)60 – but texts are never stable in that
way. And the effect of treating them like data is two-fold: 1. It drains the life
out of texts; 2. It drains the life out of the history of texts – not only the literary
56 Liu 2012, p. 493.

57 The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0.
58 Liu 2012, p. 495.
59 Moretti acknowledges something similar about scale in his preface to ‘Planet Hollywood’,
where he reflects on his writing of Atlas of the European Novel and notes that he ‘discovered
the truth of Haldan’s famous dictum that “size is never just size” ’ (Moretti 2013a, p. 91),
but, as I will go on to show, this is not borne out in practice in The Bourgeois.
60 Moretti 2013a, p. 92.

history of which they are a part, but history itself. Ultimately, then, Moretti’s
historical materialism finds its ‘proof’ in the literary rather than the cultural
or historical realm. In his emphasis on the literary in literary theory, the test
of history (those ‘messy realities of social history’), and, with it, a politics, in
essence disappears; in Moretti’s own words, ‘methodology [replaces] critique’.61
2 Reading Scale
Like all of Moretti’s work, The Bourgeois reveals him to be a master stylist.
Whether in one-word sentences (‘Absurd.’,62 ‘Fog.’)63 or concise formulations
(‘If capitalism cannot always be morally good, it must at least be always morally
legible.’),64 his own style is fully part of the argument. In a recent review of
The Bourgeois, Valerie Sanders, for example, describes his ‘habit of halting over
epigrammatic statements such as “Beyond the horizon”, “Fortune, rationalized”,
“The style of the useful”, “A life in the world” and even, sometimes, just one
word: “Comfort” ’, and sees it as a ‘pervasive feature of the book’.65 For Sanders,
these epigrammatic statements cause us to pause and ‘absorb the resonance
of particular words and phrases, rolling them around the tongue, as it were,
to savour their full flavour.’ For her they are as aesthetic as they are useful, at
once ‘[taking] us forward incrementally through the argument’66 and there
to be savoured. But the most notable stylistic technique to my mind is the
construction of declarative, defining sentences that, like Sanders’s description,
61 Moretti 2013a, p. 155. Much in the way that Perry Anderson characterises the theory/
practice split in Western Marxism, it is tempting to see this emphasis on method
as dialectically related to the absence of a vibrant political ‘practice’ in our current
conjuncture. Anderson refers to the ‘obsessive methodologism’ (Anderson 1976, p. 53) of
Western Marxism, citing as exemplary books such as Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution,
Della Volpe’s Logic as a Positive Science, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and Althusser’s
Reading Capital. In his Introduction to Atlas of the European Novel, Moretti states, ‘In this
book, clearly enough, the method is all.’ (Moretti 1998, p. 5.) In a different vein, he admits
that The Bourgeois is an ‘exclusively historical study, with no true links to the present’
(Moretti 2013b, p. 23) and hopes that, as his inscription to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores
d’Arcais is meant to convey, he will ‘one day . . . learn from them to use the intelligence of
the past for the critique of the present’ (Moretti 2013b, p. 24).
62 Moretti 2013b, p. 115.
63 Moretti 2013b, p. 141.
64 Moretti 2013b, p. 178.
65 Sanders 2013.
66 Ibid.

200 Lesjak
make us pause – but in a weightier way than she suggests. Here are some
examples: ‘Grey, not bunt, is the flag that flies over the bourgeois century.’;67
‘Serious, is the bourgeoisie on its way to being the ruling class.’;68 ‘This self-
inflicted blindness, is the foundation of Victorianism.’;69 ‘But autonomy,
was precisely what the Victorian manifesto was written against.’;70 ‘His anti-
Semitism, is the bourgeois turning against himself.’;71 ‘All they do, is a critique
of bourgeois life; all they see, is bourgeois life.’72 In these constructions,
definitions are literally definite; defined in so determinate a fashion that they
are rendered virtually inert. They appear unchangeable because movement
itself has been frozen in the comma that separates the first and the second
part of each of these sentences. Above, the lack of suppleness in Moretti’s
mobilisation of scale made it difficult to see just how we live in and negotiate
multiple horizons simultaneously; here, at the level of the sentence, the
existence of different levels or valuations – and the need therefore for some
means of reading allegorically – is similarly hard to imagine. Contingency is
erased; meaning is made concrete: ‘knowledge without freedom’, as Moretti
names the useful knowledge that is the ‘battle-cry of Victorianism’.73 What is
portrayed is an orderly world; form and content are not so much dialectically
related to one another as collapsed into each other, undifferentiated. To return
to Liu’s language, the move from text analysis to cultural analysis is in effect too
seamless. As a result, the readings here of the bourgeois and bourgeois culture
are not quite as radically other from distant reading with its ‘units of analysis’
as they might initially appear, and, crucially, they share with distant reading an
a- or anti-Utopian orientation, given the insistence on the given – whether in
the locatable adjective, there for the counting, or in the sense, more generally,
that the past is singular and matter-of-fact, locked as it is in static, ontological
definitions, as if the keywords that Moretti identifies do not themselves contain
a history of contradictory uses and potentialities à la Raymond Williams. One
need think only of ‘influence’ and ‘earnest’ and the ways Oscar Wilde recodes
and reinvests them with alternative – some might even say utopian – desires
and meaning to wonder at how singularly they mean in Moretti’s account.
67 Moretti 2013b, p. 6.

68 Moretti 2013b, p. 74.
69 Moretti 2013b, p. 112.
70 Moretti 2013b, p. 140.
71 Moretti 2013b, p. 159.
72 Moretti 2013b, p. 179.
73 Moretti 2013b, p. 137.

Moretti addresses this issue obliquely in his opening discussion of

Victorianism when he begins with The Communist Manifesto and its invocation
of the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, and asks what happens to that
revolutionary stripping-away of the old within nineteenth-century Britain: ‘It’s
the Victorian enigma: contra those paragraphs from the Communist Manifesto,
the most industrialized, urbanized, “advanced” capitalism of the age restores
“fervours” and “sentimentalism” instead of “sweeping them away”.’74 In this
way, Moretti accounts for the absence of the revolutionary or utopian within
nineteenth-century British culture, but even here, in the context of the rousing
Manifesto and its dialectical vision of what the bourgeoisie brings into being,
he stresses only its realism, the fact that the bourgeoisie, by stripping away
religious illusions, etc. ‘is the first realistic class of human history’.75
‘Fog’, the title for Moretti’s chapter on Victorianism, stands in for the process
in which the ‘naked self-interest’ brought to light by the bourgeoisie is veiled
or disavowed rather than faced realistically by the Victorians. One example of
this disavowal is the famous line from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, ‘Nature, red
in tooth and claw’, whose Darwinian impact (avant la lettre) is attenuated,
according to Moretti, by being buried in the middle of a four-stanza long aside,
amidst a series of ‘grammatical wonders’.76 A form of veiling, it shares with
Brontë, and later in the century, Conrad, a logic of disavowal in the face of
unwanted knowledge.
74 Moretti 2013b, p. 108.

75 Moretti 2013b, p. 102. This view of the bourgeoisie reflects Moretti’s reliance on Max
Weber far more than Marx or Lukács throughout The Bourgeois, which may, in turn,
contribute to his non- or anti-utopian vision of (literary) history more generally. Martin
Jay, in Marxism and Totality, distinguishes Lukács from Weber (and Simmel) by his ability
to ‘move beyond [their] stoic pessimism by linking their intellectual dilemmas to the
reified nature of bourgeois life, an explanation that grounded them historically’ (Jay 1984,
pp. 109–10). Interestingly, Moretti also invokes Weber in one of the final essays in Signs
Taken for Wonders, ‘The Moment of Truth’, as a figure from whom we still have much to
learn regarding a realistic ‘culture of the Left’, which would neither recklessly embrace
what he refers to as ‘the moment of crisis’ nor succumb to ‘unending humiliations and
compromises’. Moretti ends the essay by quoting the following lines from a speech
of Weber’s: ‘What is deeply striking and moving . . . is the view of a mature man – it
doesn’t matter whether young or old in years – who, feeling truly and wholly his own
responsibility for consequences, and acting according to the ethic of responsibility, still
of a sudden does say: “I cannot do otherwise: I shall not retreat from here”. Here is a truly
human and moving behaviour, and such a situation must be possible at any moment for
all of us who have not yet lost our inner life’ (Moretti 1983, p. 261).
76 Moretti 2013b, p. 109.

202 Lesjak
But look at the poem as a whole, and matters start to get messier. In an earlier
stanza of In Memoriam Nature is likened to a woman, which at the very least
concerns how we understand Tennyson’s attenuation of the Darwinian view
of nature and its threat to Victorian stability. James Eli Adams, for example,
suggests that although it comes as no surprise that Tennyson’s attitude toward
women – and hence toward Nature personified as woman – was conservative,
the threat Nature/woman represents when seen in this light becomes far more
destabilising than Moretti’s reading allows. ‘If one attends to the details of
the personification, the beast of prey gives way to a more startling and more
complex image. Nature is a woman red in tooth and claw – not a mere female
animal (a lioness, say, could hardly cry out to the anxious poet with such
articulate violence), but a woman in demonic form, a Fury’.77 Consequently,
‘as befits the poet’s anxieties, “Nature” as he envisions her is more “unnatural”
than any beast of prey – and she is so precisely by virtue of being female.’
The very image of Maternal Nature that Darwin too wants to keep intact is
unsettlingly undercut; the figure of the Fury, rather than indifferent, actively
refuses her role as caregiver or nurturer: ‘I care for nothing’, she declares in
section 56. With this renunciation, the line ‘Behind the veil, behind the veil’,
which ends the section, does not so much repress the recognition of Nature’s
‘ravine’, as amplify its social threat, by contravening Victorian gender relations,
and specifically defying male desire. ‘Where Nature figures simply as a beast
of prey’, Adams conjectures, ‘the question would be pointless, since the term
would conjure up mere instinctive ferocity. But woman red in tooth and claw
startles the reader into pondering intentionality. What is “the secret meaning
of her deeds”? Behind the veil, behind the veil: the poet’s quest for solace is
thwarted by that seductive yet disturbing emblem of feminine mystery’.78
Now, my point in going into this much detail about Adams’s analysis is by no
means to ‘prove’ that we have to read Tennyson’s view of Nature his way rather
than Moretti’s. Rather, it is to convey just how impossible – and I would add,
undesirable even – it is to construct a ‘falsifiable criticism’ when it comes to
interpreting the allegorical meaning of a text – or event or cultural or historical
moment – in the world. It simply cannot be a matter of finding ‘impeccable
evidence’79 – as Moretti describes fellow Stanford Literary Lab scholars Ryan
Heuser and Long Le Khac’s findings regarding the decline of ‘moral evaluation’
and its associated semantic fields via the rise in the use of a particular set of
adjectives. Is Adams right about the power of woman red in tooth and claw,
77 Adams 1989, p. 15.

78 Adams 1989, p. 16.
79 Moretti 2013b, p. 128.

or is Moretti correctly reading how attenuated the power of Nature is in this

same phrase? The notion that we could answer such a question as simply a
yes or a no seems, in a word – and to borrow one of bourgeois culture’s key
terms – not very useful. Not only are these sorts of easy decisions the stock-in-
trade of the contemporary neoliberal present, and of the neoliberal university,
more specifically, which reduces more and more of our life-world to simplistic
calculations of instrumental use – whether it is measuring the impact
of research in dollars and cents or determining the learning-outcomes for
students in any given course (and one wishes that Moretti would acknowledge
how enmeshed in the instrumental, scientific language of the day the method
and means of distant reading are) – but they require not so much a conceptual
poverty (as a condition of thought) with respect to the ‘infinitely rich’ as a wilful
blindness. If we think about scale only in terms of sheer size or immensity, we
risk losing the texture of lived experience – or worse, instrumentalising it.80
Once again, the example of Wal-Mart proves instructive here in its powerful
dramatisation of what might be lost in a non-dialectical scalar reading –
namely a lived reality of immense devastation that too easily can become
abstract and forgotten in the clean logic of ‘less is more’. This kind of abstract
scientism – the idea that data or evidence could be ‘impeccable’ – is predicated
on an acceptance of the historically given; such certitude forecloses the
openness of the future and locks Moretti, ironically enough, into something of
an iron system, the very criticism levied against the Hegelian dialectic.81
But also – and as with Wal-Mart – Moretti’s provocation to think about
reading in terms of sheer size and scale forces us to confront the ‘scandal’
of a world literature, which must invariably change the way we read. Were it
not to do so would be equivalent to another form of wilful blindness. Once
literature as a world system has become a knowable reality, there really is no
turning back. This is one way, I think, of isolating what is wrong with current
attempts to recuperate various forms of ‘close’ reading such as normative
80 Or, as Theodor Adorno, responding to the ‘objective tendency’ within the cultural
criticism of his day, writes in the aphorism ‘Baby with the Bathwater’: ‘To emphasize the
material element over the spirit as a lie develops a dubious elective affinity with the very
political economy one criticizes immanently, comparable to the complicity between the
police and the underworld’ (Adorno 2005, p. 44, translation modified).
81 In the context of a politics of labour, specifically, political action against capitalism
will always include an extra-economic moment and the attempt to reduce Marxism
to a science neglects what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge refer to as the ‘political
economy of living labour’, or all those aspects of subjective labour that exceed economic
determination. In this formulation, Negt and Kluge also underscore the fact that the
economic sphere itself is hardly a pure sphere. See Negt and Kluge 2001.

204 Lesjak
New Formalism or surface-reading: in essence, they constitute forms of

wilful blindness in their desire to preserve the localness of literature. In
other words, pace Emily Apter, being against world literature is not a viable
option; as with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s position on globalisation,
the enemy is not the ‘globalization of relationships as such . . . but a specific
regime of global relations’,82 designated in their analysis by the term Empire,
or, in Jameson’s and others’ analyses, as late, finance, or global capitalism.83
World literature! Its positive valence lies in the intimate connection ‘between
project and background’,84 as Moretti describes his work in ‘Conjectures’, and
the relationship more generally between comparative literature and politics.
What emerges from distant reading, then, is the potential for a reading of the
world in literature in which both the empirical fact of a dead history and the
allegorical possibility of another history already in the making can be found.
After all, as Moretti demonstrates so effectively, prose, and reading more
broadly, is a ‘way of being in the world, not just of representing it’. In its current
form, however, Moretti’s model of literary theory ultimately ‘eternalizes its
present condition’85 rather than thinking beyond it.86 In this respect, I think it
is fair to say, in response to Schwarz’s question as to whether Moretti’s method
constitutes a form of social critique: ‘not yet’.
References
Adams, James Eli 1989, ‘Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in
Tennyson and Darwin’, Victorian Studies, 33, 1: 7–27.
Adorno, Theodor 1997, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, 31: 120–33.
Adorno, Theodor 2005, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by
E.F.N. Jephcott, London: Verso.
82 Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 46.

83 As Hardt and Negri elaborate on this point, the ‘Leftist strategy of resistance to
globalization and defense of locality is also damaging because in many cases what
appear as local identities are not autonomous or self-determining but actually feed
into and support the development of the capitalist imperial machine. The globalization
or deterritorialization operated by the imperial machine is not in fact opposed to
localization or reterritorialization, but rather sets in play mobile and modulating circuits
of differentiation and identification. The strategy of local resistance misidentifies and
thus masks the enemy’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 45–6).
84 Moretti 2013a, p. 119.
85 Adorno 1997, p. 120.
86 This description comes from the following quote: ‘Philosophy which presents reality as
such today only veils reality and eternalizes its present condition.’

Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB.

Apter, Emily 2013, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, London:
Verso.
Arac, Jonathan 2002, ‘Anglo-Globalism?’, New Left Review, II, 16: 35–45.
Arrighi, Giovanni 2009, ‘The Winding Paths of Capital: Interview by David Harvey’, New
Left Review, II, 56: 61–94.
Fish, Stanley 2012, ‘The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality’, New
York Times, 9 January, available at: <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/
01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/>.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1990, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, in Signatures of the
Visible, New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric 2009, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso.
Jay, Martin 1984, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to
Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1939, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, A Popular
Outline, New York: International Publishers.
Liu, Alan 2012, ‘Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?’, in Debates in
the Digital Humanities, edited Matthew K. Gold, Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press.
McGurl, Mark 2009, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,
Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Moretti, Franco 1983, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms,
translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller, London: Verso.
Moretti, Franco 1994, ‘Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch’, New Left
Review, I, 206: 86–109.
Moretti, Franco 1998, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900, London: Verso.
Moretti, Franco 2011, ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, New Left Review, II, 68: 80–102.
Moretti, Franco 2013a, Distant Reading, London: Verso.
Moretti, Franco 2013b, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, London: Verso.
Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge 2001, Geschichte und Eigensinn, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Sanders, Valerie 2013, Review of The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, Times
Higher Education, 27 June, available at: <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/
books/the-bourgeois-between-history-and-literature-by-franco-moretti/2005020.
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manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf>.
Watt, Ian 1957, The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Historical Materialism (2016) 1–11
brill.com/hima
Accounting for the Occupation

A Review of The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression
beyond Exploitation by Shir Hever
Paul Kohlbry
Johns Hopkins University
pkohlbr1@jhu.edu
Abstract
Shir Hever’s book examines the underlying economic dynamics of Israel’s occupation.
Hever’s analysis brings out several overlooked mechanisms that function to make the
Occupation profitable to Israeli state and corporate interests, but he also argues that
for Israeli society, the costs of Occupation far outweigh the benefits. Hever is highly
critical of Marxist accounts that, he claims, misunderstand the political economy of
the Occupation, but this review argues that Hever’s critique is mistaken. It attempts
to show how Hever’s analysis of the Occupation and account of Palestinian resistance
would have benefited from a more careful engagement with materialist work on Israel
and Palestine.
Keywords
Palestine – political economy – neoliberalism – class formation
Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression beyond

Exploitation, London: Pluto Press, 2010
Palestine, so the slogan goes, is open for business. Hardly a day passes in
Ramallah without some sort of business-related event, and former investment
bankers and CEOs regularly grace the city’s hotel conference rooms. ‘Economic
development’ in a variety of guises has taken its rightful place next to ‘human
rights’ on the to-do lists of the big NGOs, which now preach the gospel of
entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency. On the governmental level, the
Palestinian Authority continues on the course set by Salam Fayyad, pushing

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forward neoliberal development. Businessmen, not guerrillas, are at the helm.

Palestinian capitalists ally with their Israeli counterparts to ‘break the impasse’
of stalled political negotiations. In the meantime, their luxury real-estate
projects are marketed as an act of sumud [steadfastness]. Class aspirations
seem impervious to crisis, and the collapse of the peace process seems not
to have slowed down the economic projects of NGOs in the West Bank. At
this juncture, when ‘the economy’, ‘development’ and ‘cooperation’ are God
and gospel, the questions raised by Shir Hever in his 2010 book The Political
Economy of Israel’s Occupation are just as critical today.
Hever’s book, as the title suggests, is an account of the economic dynamics
of Israel’s occupation. But more specifically, the text revolves around a key
question: is the Occupation sustainable, and if not, why has it continued?
(pp. 5, 139.) Hever moves along two opposing tracks, tracing who profits
(and how) while also attempting to calculate the overall costs and benefits
of prolonged military occupation for Israeli society as a whole, a move that
requires deconstructing several of the standard economic indicators. A work
of both political economy and critical accounting, Hever’s conclusion, that
the net costs of the Occupation far outweigh the net gains, forms the basis
for his explanation of this ‘seemingly irrational’ (p. 140) state of affairs. The
two chapters on the Palestinian economy – one providing an historical
overview and the other a case-study of the effects of the Separation Wall in
Jerusalem – come off as secondary to his central investigation. Nor are they
the strongest part of Hever’s book: the overview of the Palestinian economy is
helpful, although readers looking for the full account would be better served by
returning to one of Hever’s main sources, Neve Gordon’s Israel’s Occupation.1
The account of the Wall is also informative, but does not go much further than
the NGO reports it is based on. It is the chapters covering the contradictory
economic aspects of the Occupation that are the most insightful and provide
the material from which he offers his ambitious, and I think problematic,
theoretical conclusions.
The Balance-Sheet of Occupation
Despite his reservation that a focus on net gains and losses ‘may be misleading’
(p. 73), Hever’s book is held together by the logic of the balance-sheet. Hever
begins with the gains column, demonstrating how foreign aid and inflation
each contribute to the profitability of the Occupation. Foreign aid, he argues,
1 Gordon 2008.

ACCOUNTING FOR THE OCCUPATION | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341460 3
keeps the broken Palestinian economy afloat, normalises the Occupation and
undermines political struggle, perpetuating the conditions that make it
necessary in the first place (p. 28). However, Hever is less interested in analysing the
political transformations wrought by years of assistance than in exploring
the ways in which Israeli companies and state institutions profit from the
aid economy. In addition to the massive amounts of foreign aid that Israel
receives directly, the Israeli economy also reaps tremendous benefits from
the humanitarian aid that Western NGOs and donors pour into the Occupied
Territories. To cite one important example, international organisations
operating in the West Bank and Gaza frequently buy products and services
from Israeli companies, and Hever calculates that at minimum ‘45 percent
of the aid to the OPT flows back to the Israeli market’ (p. 37). In addition to
bringing ‘jobs to the Israeli market, taxes to the Israeli government, and profit
to Israeli capitalists’ (p. 39), aid given to Palestinians also lifts the burden of
caring for the population (as stipulated under international law) off the Israeli
state (p. 38). Hever ends his discussion on a somewhat ambivalent note, noting
that while NGOs have become ‘agents of a neoliberal agenda’ that can serve as
a depoliticising force, they can also help Palestinians ‘develop . . . a non-violent
campaign of resistance’ (p. 41).
Like aid, inflation is another mechanism that serves to redistribute
‘income in favor of Israelis and to the detriment of Palestinians’ (p. 48). Hever
demonstrates that higher inflation-rates in the Palestinian economy are a
product of Israeli checkpoints, closures and control of Palestinian borders,
resulting in astronomical transportation costs that increase the price of goods
(pp. 45–6). This situation produces local Palestinian monopolies with the
‘mechanisms, connections and influence’ that allow them to bypass, and, in
effect, take advantage of closure to raise the prices of goods at will (p. 46).
While the Israeli authorities have not implemented this system ‘with business
interests in mind’, they have created a system that cheapens Palestinian
labour and allows Israeli companies to take full advantage of price differences
between the Israeli and Palestinian markets (pp. 48–9). As was the case with
foreign aid, Hever shows us how the structural aspects of the Occupation are
transformed into means by which profit can be extracted.
But all these opportunities are not enough to keep the numbers in the black.
Despite the acknowledged difficulties of aggregating the Occupation’s costs
and profits (pp. 56–9), Hever’s calculations suggest that, for Israeli society as
a whole, the former exceed the latter. Careful accounting shows that ‘security
costs far outweigh all the other civilian costs’, thus demonstrating that ‘the main
reason for the occupation’s costliness is Palestinian resistance’ (p. 68). Hever
then moves on to assess the Occupation’s damage to Israeli society, challenging

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claims that economic growth can exist alongside perpetual militarisation. For
Hever, the economist’s tools serve to mask the extent of the damage. GDP
measures falsely equate the spending during war and crisis, with its potential
long-term negative impacts, with economic activities that contribute to more
sustainable growth (p. 83). Reports of falling unemployment rates in Israel are
also deceptive, as they reflect a situation where more and more poorer Israelis,
as a result of government cuts, are forced to work ‘low-paying jobs with fewer
hours just to survive’ (pp. 94–5). Finally, a whole host of non-quantifiable
factors – Israel’s failing educational system, systematic discrimination, and
the possibility of boycotts – all point to an economy that is ‘less stable
and prosperous than the mainstream macroeconomic indicators would appear
to suggest’ (p. 100).
Perhaps we can agree with Hever that, when all is said and done, the costs
are too heavy to bear. But this accounting, by itself, only shows that ‘peace’
may be more beneficial to Israel in the long term. Hever attempts to distance
himself from theory, chalking such discussions up to ‘academic disagreements’
that can be ‘safely skipped’ (p. 4), but in order to read the balance-sheet, to
explain why the Occupation rumbles on despite its clearly deleterious effects,
theory is unavoidable. As such, Hever’s penultimate chapter should not be
read as tangential, but instead as a critical moment that both weaves the
previous threads of his argument together and at the same time opens up (and
forecloses) particular analytical and political trajectories.
Theorising the Occupation
Early on, Hever positions himself against the notion that Israel takes advantage
of its military control to ‘exploit the Palestinian economy, labor, and resources’,
arguing that such an analysis springs more from a ‘pro-Palestinian’ political
orientation than it does from serious engagement with economic data (p. 1).
Instead, we need to confront the ‘seemingly irrational choice by Israelis’: despite
the mounting ‘economic burdens’, the ‘Israeli authorities’ have not changed
course (p. 140). The answer Hever provides is two-tiered: the Occupation is
structured in such a way as to provide ‘symbolic capital’ to ‘lower-class social
groups’ and ‘monetary capital’ to powerful corporate interests that in turn
drive Israeli militarism (p. 187).
Why, despite paying the highest price in the form of cuts to government
services and exposure to bodily harm, do the lower classes support the
Occupation? Hever argues that we should see the Occupation as a complex

apparatus for the redistribution of symbolic capital to Jewish-Israelis that

creates hierarchies between occupier and occupied. The checkpoint, for
example, is a ‘nexus’ for transactions involving the ‘distribution of value in the
form of the right to pass’ by granting said right to Israelis while withholding
it from Palestinians (p. 176). The violent destruction and economic waste of
military invasions (which Hever proposes we see as a form of conspicuous
consumption) are another example: while making little ‘rational’ economic
sense, these acts allow Israelis to acquire prestige and symbolic capital
(pp. 177–8). Aid functions in the opposite way; as a one-way entitlement, it
rewards the Western donor with symbolic capital while simultaneously creat
ing dependence and reducing the symbolic capital of the Palestinians (p. 169).
All of these mechanisms serve to reinforce the hierarchy between Jew/non-Jew
and occupier/occupied, creating a system whose rewards are distributed
quickly (and every day) and thus providing the non-elites with the prospect of
immediate improvement and effectively dampening the development of class
consciousness. The will to engage in long-term class struggle fades out, giving
way to new forms of religious and national identity (pp. 161–2), leading Israelis
to support the Occupation because it has created institutions that maintain
‘a hierarchy [that] awards social capital to Jews over non-Jews’ (p. 187).
But symbolic capital doesn’t pay the bills. While the Occupation does
not provide a greater net benefit to Israeli society as a whole, it does serve
powerful corporate and political interests. Following the work of Nitzan and
Bichler (2002), Hever writes that the consolidation of the Israeli ruling class
has ‘been fuelled by crisis’ and that ‘war and occupation have been used to
garner the support of the population at large for policy moves that centralize
the economy, and to divert the public’s attention away from the efforts of the
big capitalists to increase their dominance over the Israeli economy.’ (p. 181.)
It is ‘powerful interest groups’ that push Israel into ‘policies that appear to be
contrary to its interest’ (p. 185). Hever does not quite connect the dots here.
Are these the banks that take advantage of Palestinian institutional weakness
(p. 49), the Israeli commodity producers for whom the West Bank and Gaza
Strip are captive markets, the military and homeland-security companies
(p. 74), or the broader array of sectors that comprise Nitzan and Bichler’s
‘dominant capital’ (p. 186)? And what economic process, alliances and
ideologies explain the particular processes we witness today? ‘Israel’, he writes,
‘has combined economic neoliberalism with the occupation and colonization
of the OPT.’ (p. 186.) A powerful observation, but one that demands an
exploration of the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism and settler-
colonialism. Here, unfortunately, Hever stops short.

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Repression beyond Exploitation?
Given that we arrive at a relatively materialist explanation of why the

Occupation continues, it is surprising to find that the subtitle of the book –
‘repression beyond exploitation’ – refers to Hever’s critique of ‘Marxists’.2 In
this text, ‘Marxism’ seems to be synonymous with a reduction of the subject to
homo economicus whose political and social practices can be explained solely
in relation to economic exploitation (pp. 148, 162). Building on this notion,
Hever claims Marxist analysis cannot deal with the ‘Israeli anomaly’ (i.e. the
tendency of working-class Israelis to ‘vote against their class interests’ in their
support of state militarism) (pp. 148–52) or the fact that after first Intifada,
‘repression’ (military occupation) no longer enables ‘exploitation [of] the
Palestinian economy’ (Hever’s formulation is not completely clear, but he
seems to be referring primarily to Israeli capital’s exploitation of Palestinian
labour) (p. 152). If military occupation is profitable, why are Marxists unable
to demonstrate how certain companies mould government policy to maintain
profits? And if it is not, why haven’t Israeli capitalists rallied to put a stop to
it? (p. 153.) But this critique only makes sense in a world of rational actors,
busy calculating the aggregate costs and benefits of occupation and acting
accordingly. The problem is Hever’s questions, shaped in part by his interest
in drawing up a balance-sheet (and the sort of rational actor it implies). Were
he to have instead asked (to use his formulation), ‘how does neoliberalism
combine with occupation and colonization’, he could have arrived at a much
more generative engagement with materialist analysis of Israel and Palestine.
On one level, Hever’s critique and dismissal is a missed opportunity to
engage with a mode of thinking that more often than not would only serve
to strengthen his analysis. For one, the settler-colonial project has never been
solely about profit. Early Zionist settlement was made possible because of the
expansion of capitalist property relations, but the ‘separatist method of pure
settlement’ that is central to the Israeli state developed as early Jewish workers
sought ways in which to exclude cheap Palestinian labour from the market.3
Settler-colonialism is not primarily about the extraction of surplus value, but
2 It is always a risky business, usually with rapidly diminishing returns, to name one particular
tendency as what a given intellectual tradition (Marxism, postmodernism, whatever) ‘does’.
In this case, Hever’s representative sample is baffling. While he sets out the object of his
critique by surveying ‘academic Marxist discourse on the Israeli occupation’ (Hever 2010,
p. 146), the majority of the works he includes are neither academic nor Marxist studies.
3 Shafir 1996.

the control of territory. In Patrick Wolfe’s powerful and oft-quoted formulation,

in this form of colonialism ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, a dynamic
process of replacing the native with the settler.4 The occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, the central concern of Hever’s book, is an extension of this
process. The dispossession of Palestinian land resulting from the expansion
of Israel’s settlement project, for example, destroyed particular sectors of the
West Bank and Gaza’s economy, pushing Palestinian workers into jobs created
by the ideological goals and material requirements of settler-colonialism
itself.5 The contemporary moment, when Palestinian labour has been to a
large extent replaced by cheaper labour from Asia and parts of Europe, does
not render materialist analysis irrelevant (p. 153), but instead points to a shift
in the balance of forces within the settler-colonial formation that opens up
questions about the ways in which a violent territorial logic interacts with the
imperatives of capital accumulation.
To explore this dynamic, Hever would need to abandon any attempt to
aggregate costs and balances and explore more fully the contradictory forces
that comprise the Occupation, each of which is driven by its own sets of interests
and constraints.6 For example, the costs to the state of securing settlement
industrial zones or agricultural enterprises are irrelevant to their owners, whose
own profits and fixed investments in machinery or improvements to the soil
will likely cause them to resist any attempts at withdrawal. The contemporary
shift of the Occupation toward securitisation has transformed the West Bank
and Gaza Strip into laboratories for the testing of drones, crowd-control
weapons, pass systems and a whole host of technologies developed by the
private sector and sold globally to dictatorships and democracies alike.7 Not
only does this connect companies and sectors to the Israeli occupation, but it
also produces certain imaginaries about the world that serve to legitimate and
maintain it.8 Hever’s book touches on a few of these points, and what can be
4 Wolfe 1999, p. 2. Also see Wolfe 2006 for a powerful account of the various ways in which
elimination, from physical violence to the formulation of law, accompanies this processual
understanding of invasion.
5 Farsakh 2005.
6 Weizman 2007. His account shows how, for example, the Wall’s path was determined not
only by state planners and military concerns, but also by settlers, various forms of resistance,
real-estate concerns and legal challenges (Weizman 2007, pp. 164–72).
7 There is a growing amount of academic and activist research on this particular topic, but see
Collins 2011.
8 Derek Gregory argues that military technologies and practices also produce space through
the generation of images: the drone cameras and satellite imagery through which Palestinians

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so frustrating is how this account can be overshadowed by an accounting logic

that (necessarily) reifies terms like ‘occupation’, ‘Israel’ and ‘state’, turns the
contradictions of settler-colonialism into ‘irrationality’ and derails systematic
analysis.
The drive to show the costs of occupation for Israeli society also necessarily
shapes the ways in which Palestinians appear in Hever’s narrative. When they
take the stage, it is as a ‘dominated group’ (p. 164) whose resistance pushes up
the cost of occupation (pp. 145–6), which in turn only persists ‘because Israel
still has the means [to] perpetuate it and defeat Palestinian resistance’ (p. 75).
Understanding the Occupation primarily through the lens of domination and
resistance is not particular to Hever, but part of a much broader tendency in
writings about Israel and Palestine. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s critique,
that ‘resistance studies’ in general is fashioned from a dehistoricised, sanitised
portrayal of the oppressed, still largely applies to much of the literature, where
the reduction of the Palestinian to a resisting subject risks stamping out the
contradictions and ambivalence of Palestinian life. While Hever provides
a detailed account of the various mechanisms through which Israeli actors
maintain the Occupation, the centrality of resistance to his narrative does not
permit an equally complex treatment of Palestinians.
Again, Hever’s work would benefit from a deeper engagement with
materialist approaches that dwell on questions of class formation. In his
first chapter, Hever mentions how after 1967 the Israeli military reoriented
the Palestinian economy through a series of military orders governing
everything from crop choices to import and export options. These changes
moulded Palestinian agriculture to fit the needs of the Israeli market, pushing
smallholders off the land and into the Israeli labour market. But it also led to
the rise of a new class of merchants, landowners and subcontractors whose
economic and political interests were aligned with Israeli capital and, at
times, military rule.9 After the First Intifada, the signing of the Oslo Accords
in the 1990s and the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) maintained
Israeli dominance but also opened up the Palestinian economy to foreign
are watched, targeted and exhibited carries out a particularly violent abstraction that
transforms then flattens the landscape and presents Palestinians as threats to be targeted
and eliminated (Gregory 2004, pp. 117–19). The particular tools and techniques of military
occupation are undergirded by a deeper, more pervasive ‘imaginative geography’, a term
Gregory uses to account for the ‘cultural’ processes that serve to delineate the space of self
and other and inscribe both spaces within a series of judgements and valuations, to, in
Gregory’s memorable phrase, ‘fold distance into difference’ (Gregory 2004, p. 17).
9 Samara 1989, pp. 10–13.

capital, setting in motion processes that would restructure class power. Capital
from the Gulf (often through companies operated by Palestinians in the
diaspora) began to flow back into the West Bank and Gaza, creating a powerful
capitalist class and a PA wedded to neoliberalism, and political normalisation
with Israel.10 While capitalists engaged in activities that would generate
quick profits without risky fixed investments, the PA set to reorienting political
and economic practice, collecting ‘political rent’ from donors in exchange.11
Lisa Taraki’s careful study of urban life in Ramallah follows this process on
another level, illustrating how the ‘unravelling of the prevailing hegemonic
culture of resistance’ was concomitant with the rise of a new Palestinian
middle class, with its own particular practices and politics.12 The most
recent wave of capitalist development, generally identified with the rule of
Salam Fayyad and the political shift from a politics of national liberation to
neoliberalism is only the most recent stage of this process.13 The point of this
rather rushed sketch is that Palestinian class formation must be central to any
political economy of Israel’s occupation. Not only does it move us beyond
domination/resistance, but it can allow us to better understand the challenges
and historical struggle over the form, content, trajectory and very possibility of
resistance itself.
Conclusion
Hever is torn between two contradictory approaches. The first is that of the
aggregate balance-sheet. Ultimately a liberal approach, it assumes a singular
entity called ‘Israeli society’ and assumes that once an accounting is carried
out, Israeli society will recognise that it is in its collective interest to end
the Occupation. This logic is one that searches for stability and resembles the
discourse of liberal Zionist organisations who highlight ‘the costs’ to galvanise
public support for military withdrawal and a two-state solution.14 But
there is also the radical Hever who seems to agree that ‘there is no point in
aggregating the benefits or cost to an entire society’ (p. 183). He recognises that
10 Hanieh 2010, pp. 96–101.

11 Samara 2000, p. 25.
12 Taraki 2008, p. 68.
13 Khalidi and Samour 2011.
14 Peace Now’s focus on the ‘economic, social and security’ costs of the settlements, and the
Adva Center’s The Cost of Occupation, which details the costs Israeli society pays, are two
prominent examples.

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the Occupation is jealously protected by certain sections of the political and

business class, that there is no common interest, as the current state of affairs
facilitates capital accumulation in Israel where ‘the occupation, conflict, and
the “war against terror” have all helped obfuscate the redistribution of wealth’
(p. 101).
Hever ends his book with a brief discussion of one- and two-state solutions,
pointing out that the current entanglement of the Israeli and Palestinian
economies makes the latter solution untenable and the former, at least on the
economic level, reasonable. Perhaps. But there are more terrifying prospects.
The Israeli occupation, and the form of apartheid it has instituted, may be able
to contain its contradictions for quite a while longer. And even if it is destroyed,
the exclusions and hierarchies that took shape under settler-colonialism may
continue long after military forces are withdrawn. To confront and understand
these potential futures, we need more of Hever’s radicalism.
References
Collins, John 2011, Global Palestine, London: C. Hurst.

Farsakh, Leila 2005, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and
Occupation, London: Routledge.
Gordon, Neve 2008, Israel’s Occupation, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gregory, Derek 2004, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hanieh, Adam 2010, ‘Khaleeji-Capital: Class-Formation and Regional Integration in
the Middle-East Gulf’, Historical Materialism, 18, 2: 35–76.
Hever, Shir 2010, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, London: Pluto Press.
Khalidi, Raja J. and Sobhi Samour 2011, ‘Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood
Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Movement’, Journal of
Palestine Studies, 40, 2: 6–25.
Nitzan, Jonathan and Shimshon Bichler 2002, The Global Political Economy of Israel:
From War Profits to Peace Dividends, London: Pluto Press.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1995, ‘Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37, 1: 173–93.
Samara, Adel 1989, ‘The Political Economy of the West Bank 1967–1987: From
Peripheralization to Development’, in Palestine: Profile of an Occupation, edited by
the Khamsin collective, London: Zed Books.
——— 2000, ‘Globalization, the Palestinian Economy, and the “Peace Process” ’, Journal
of Palestine Studies, 29, 2: 10–34.
Shafir, Gershon 1996, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,
1882–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Taraki, Lisa 2008, ‘Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents
the Palestinian City’, Social Text, 95: 61–81.
Weizman, Eyal 2007, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, First Edition,
London: Verso.
Wolfe, Patrick 1999, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The
Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell.
——— 2006, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of
Genocide Research, 8, 4: 387–409.

brill.com/hima
The Ambiguities of Nationalism

A Review of Comunismo e Nacionalismo em Portugal by José Neves
Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça

Rio de Janeiro State University
crebello@antares.com.br
Abstract
In Communism and Nationalism in Portugal, José Neves is more concerned with

the ideological history of the Portuguese Communist Party, that is to say with what
discursive terms it concerned itself, than with the particular historical issues posed
by its concrete development, and with the party’s actual history. In a nutshell, what
we have in this work is an attempt to grasp the history of a Marxist party in non-
Marxist terms. The whole outlook of the work is therefore concerned with looking at
the intellectual history of Portuguese Communism from the outside, in terms of the
development of a discourse that is not taken as true or false, but as a thing unto itself.
Keywords
Communism – nationalism – Portugal
José Neves, Comunismo e Nacionalismo em Portugal: política, cultura e história

no século XX, Lisbon: Edições Tinta da China, 2008
The work reviewed below must be acknowledged as ground-breaking, in that,

notwithstanding the existence of a long time-honoured tradition of Marxist
Portuguese historiography stretching back to the 1940s and busying itself with
themes of general Portuguese national history, Neves’s work seems a so-far
almost solitary effort to develop a party historiography of the Portuguese
Communist Party, other than by way of memoirs and recollections and other
strictly documentary works.

2 doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341464 | Rebello de Mendonça
In Communism and Nationalism in Portugal, José Neves is more concerned

with the past ideological history of the Portuguese Communist Party – i.e.
with the main tenets that shaped its later development – than with the party’s
history in itself. In a nutshell, what we have in this work is an attempt to grasp
the history of the PCP from the outside, as the author informs us that he began
the research which gave origin to the book as a PCP activist – only to have
quit the party by the time it had ended (p. 34). This affirmation pervades the
whole outlook of the work, as it is concerned with inferring what ambiguities
and contradictions, in the party’s early ideological corpus, could have led to
what the author deems as the party’s eventual political demise from a major
political role into near irrelevance.
The main point of concern to the author is to explain the fact that the PCP,
developing its particular ideological outlook under the paramount influence
of 1930s French Popular Front politics as well as Portuguese liberalism, had
as its main trait a particular conflation of communism and nationalism. The
ideological history of the PCP, in a broad sense, is the history of a process
through which the denial of the national idea in pursuit of a conception of
history as shaped by class struggle was eventually superseded by the upholding
of the same national idea as a bearer of a constellation of ideal values.
As the author acknowledges from the start, in the historical genesis of
Portuguese nationalism, the main distinctive historical trait was the link
between the national ‘values’ and the imperial idea: in early nineteenth-century
Portugal, the perception of the national idea was from the start linked to the
prospective regeneration of backward Portugal, with liberalism considered
as a means for recovering – in actual as well as ideological terms – the lost –
and idealised – imperial past, in the very moment when it actually receded
with the demise of Portuguese rule in Brazil. ‘We must recover [Recuperar
é preciso]!’ – that would be the leitmotiv and distinctive trait of Portuguese
nationalism – as what was to be recovered was precisely actual rule over other
nations. That would be a simple case of what Lenin called ‘nationalism of an
oppressor nation’, were it not for the particular historical fact that nineteenth
and early twentieth-century Portugal – in much the same way as contemporary
Spain – was at the same time a backward southern-European nation under
the hegemony of British finance-capital – and, also at the same time, a former
early-modern imperial state possessing a rump empire – consisting mostly of
African colonies – that would (contrariwise to the Spanish colonial Empire,
which from the early nineteenth century on would follow a course of constant
retraction) actually be expanded during the late nineteenth-century scramble
for Africa, and whose preservation was to be the stubborn goal of the Salazar
regime onwards of the 1960s.

The Ambiguities of Nationalism | doi doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341464 3
Nationalism in Portugal, therefore, was tied in principle to the awareness

of domestic backwardness – an idea that would play a role in the Leninist
synthesis between nationalism and Communism, which supported the
idea that nationalism was a means to the development of a democratic
consciousness amid an oppressed people under colonial rule. However, in the
Portuguese case, this nationalist consciousness, from the very start, suffered
from the peculiarity of being tied by native bourgeois liberalism to an idealised
notion of empire, i.e., of ruling others in the interests of ‘civilisation’. Under the
early Salazar regime, Portuguese Communist intellectuals would develop their
ideological outlook during the 1930s under the twin influences of the domestic
liberal underground, as well as French Popular Front politics, which equated
the struggle against fascism with adherence to the defence of ‘republicanism’,
i.e., an idealised liberal-bourgeois democracy understood as the equally-
idealised legacy of the French Revolution.
In short, the development of Portuguese nationalism, associated as it
was with the historical fact that Portugal remained, until the mid-1970s, a
colonial power, suffered from the same flaw that Marx considered, time and
again, to be the bane of French politics: the tradition of the dead generations
weighing like a nightmare on the mind of the living. Just as the French Left
would conflate socialism with an idealised bourgeois ‘democracy’ of Jacobin
mould, Portuguese Communism came to conflate socialism with a form of
national messianism, inherited from the remembrance of the (idealised) past
as a colonial power, that would hamper its appreciation of the tasks in dealing
with the twentieth-century colonial question as well as, in domestic politics,
the superseding of the Salazar dictatorship. This ideological peculiarity would
be ultimately sustained by the PCP, which, since the 1940s, came to see itself
as the bearer of ‘true’ nationalism as opposed to the fake ‘fascist’ nationalism
of the dictatorship.
The ultimate consequence was the claim that Portuguese nationalism, as it
came to be seen by Portuguese Communist intellectuals, was at the same time
a plea for a nation (not a class) oppressed by both fascism and imperialism – as
well as an appeal for Portugal to be seen as part of the ‘civilised’ West: something
that would eventually lead the PCP away from concrete revolutionary politics,
as it could never overcome an ambiguous stance towards both bourgeois
democracy and Portuguese colonialism. In Neves’s view, Portugal should
be taken as a case-study of how, behind the ideal façade of the PCP’s ‘pure’
Marxism (i.e., its diehard ‘Stalinist’ pro-Soviet outlook, as expressed in its
constant adherence to the CPSU party-line and organisational forms, from late
Stalinism to the early Brezhnev era, as well as in its rejection of both 1970s
Eurocommunism and 1970s Maoism), what eventually developed was a kind

of identity politics in which an ostensibly class-struggle politics eventually

functioned as a – largely unconscious – cover for nationalist power-politics.
In Chapter 1, Neves describes the turn in 1940s PCP politics following
the demise of the Third International and how the party quickly reacted to
it by equating the pursuit of a national road to communism with a kind of
multiculturalism, a hallowing of national traditions and cultures as being
commensurate with socialism. There follows a series of sketches and vignettes
describing how various Portuguese Communist top brass and intellectuals
tried to develop an awareness of the potentialities of Portuguese economic and
cultural development, including the naiveté expressed by the PCP’s perennial
Chairman Cunhal about Portugal as the ‘orchard of the world’, where ‘nowhere
else does the Cork Oak grows as spontaneously’ (p. 76) – an expression of
the attachment of the PCP to peasant values of ‘love of the land’ (p. 63), as
described in detail in Chapter 2.
Thus, another peculiarity of Portuguese Communism: a conflation of
Communism and nationalism that, instead of seeking development by
means of a modernising ideology aimed at achieving industrialisation and
urbanisation, clung by contrast to the idea of preserving a rural society.
This was something that was ultimately to develop into a petit-bourgeois
nationalist utopianism: such an idealisation of the peasant character of
Portuguese society steered the PCP’s views towards an idealisation of national
autarchy – as described on Chapter 3 – tied to the development of natural
resources, as described in Chapter 4. Therefore the technocratic aura assumed
by Portuguese Communism’s brand of Leninism, whereby cadres were
understood as technicians, men of science, ‘engineers of politics’ (p. 95), was
concerned more with future national economic development than with the
class struggle: in 1946, Chairman Cunhal took the view that the struggles of
wage-workers should oppose mainly ‘fascism’, and not capitalist employers
as such (p. 93), as an expression of a broad ‘democratic’ ideology, associated
with the defence of a reformed, ‘advanced’ bourgeois democracy. Such a brand
of nationalism – tied to the notion that socialism exists as a way of ensuring
a common national identity – is described, in Chapter 6, as a throwback to
the views expressed by Stalin himself, who had argued in 1913, in his book
on the national question, that national consciousness, considered as self-
consciousness of the oppressed, should be understood as a means to develop
socialist consciousness. In Chapter 7, this ideological development – in which
the nationalist element ‘catches up’ with and eventually takes the lead over
socialism – is resumed in the ideas of the PCP intellectual Francisco Paula
de Oliveira (a.k.a. Pavel) who under the influence of the Spanish Civil War

developed the idea that, if fascist nationalism eventually betrayed the nation,
Communist nationalism wanted to defend it.
In short, this association of nationalism with socialism – which, in the
context of a backward capitalist society, had nothing especially distinctive
about it – in the Portuguese case became associated with notions of an
idealised peasant egalitarianism, domestic liberalism and memories of empire
transformed into the exalted conceit of an autarkic utopia that explain – as
seen in Chapter 8 – the ambiguities expressed in the stance of the PCP on the
issue of the anti-colonial struggle in Portugal’s African colonies.
Such an ambiguity resided in the fact that Portuguese Communists, during
the 1940s and the early 1950s, tended to favour economic demands from native
populations, but not the demand for national independence, based on what
they saw as the absence of proper national consciousness in the colonies and
their backwardness – Portuguese Communism seems to have partaken of the
notion that Portugal’s colonial rule in Africa could deliver a ‘civilising influence’,
as colonial Africa was excluded, in Chairman Cunhal’s thoroughly Eurocentric
words, from ‘the Wheel of History’ (pp. 142, 143), since pre-colonial African
societies lacked a national state, and, therefore, a national consciousness.
Chapters 9 and 10 describe the PCP’s attempt to link the Portuguese national
consciousness to an anti-imperialist struggle, and Chapter 11 describes in
detail the influence exerted by the French popular-front ideology of ‘popular’
national consciousness on the PCP.
Ensuing chapters offer a detailed description of the efforts of various
intellectuals close to the PCP to develop this national self-awareness. After
general remarks in Chapters 12 and 13, there follows a sequence of biographical
sketches of Communist intellectuals: the musician Fernando Lopes-Graça
(Chapter 14); the pioneering female photojournalist Maria Lamas (Chapter 15),
whose support for the mores of urban and industrial life (especially in terms
of opportunities offered for female emancipation), however, clashed with the
party’s eulogies to ruralism; the writer and ethnographer Alves Redol (Chapter
16). Chapters 17 and 18 deal with the support given by the PCP to sport and
outdoor pursuits (bicycling, swimming, camping) as a means to foster this
supposedly popular and national consciousness.
In general, we are offered a welter of interesting observations which,
however, do not amount to anything approaching a historical, and therefore
political, account – something that in part stems from the methodological
and ideological choices of the author himself, who is more concerned with
describing a Foucauldian ‘discourse’, taken as a thing in itself and unto itself,
as a means of wielding power over a given group, than with describing the

actual development of a concrete praxis. However, this ahistorical feel stems

also from the ideology of the PCP itself, as it was from the start concerned more
with elaborating a mythography of Portuguese nationalism, than with the task
of subordinating this same nationalism to socialist tasks.
The description of this mythography is made in Part IV, which deals with
Communist historiography in Portugal, describing mostly the efforts made by
it to sustain the nineteenth-century liberal-bourgeois myth that late mediaeval
Portugal was already a bourgeois – and therefore democratic – society, whose
history, especially during the 1383 dynastic crisis that eventually led the usurper
John I to the throne (which prevented a dynastic marriage that would have
melded Portugal with neighbouring Castille), was led by the ‘multitude’, in
what, according to Neves, constituted a historical teleology in which the whole
of national history converged towards the affirmation of the working classes.
More than a teleology, such an historiography amounted to an ontology, in
which the history of the Portuguese nation was written in order to ascertain
its original ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ character – something very similar to
French popular-front mythography, that equated French national identity with
the universalism of French Revolution-idealised democracy.
In the general conclusion that follows, Neves tries to explain what this
liberal and petit-bourgeois mythology – developed both by the nineteenth-
century bourgeois political-establishment ideologues and their urban middle-
class reformist critics – amounted to for the authoritarian political culture
and practices of the PCP. The explanation offered is that, in its particular
fusion of Communism and nationalism – and therefore of working-class and
national identity, and ultimately between working-class and national state
power politics – we see a transformation of the historical role ascribed by the
party to the working classes. The proletariat, which was previously seen as
an ‘immanent’ force, wielding a dissolving influence upon class society from
the inside, comes to be seen as a ‘transcendent’ force directing the historical
process from the outside, as it were; the proletarian turns, from a force
withdrawing legitimacy from bourgeois class-rule and the class state, into a
force that lends a transcendental legitimacy to the national state, conceived
in terms of a people’s state: a lay, materialistic version of divine right (p. 403).
Opposing itself to a rightist political culture concerned with the maintenance
of order, that saw in Communism the menace of disorder, the PCP eventually
developed an equally authoritarian culture that saw the party’s main task as
directing the working class in the interests of the national state, which came to
be seem as rooted in the Portuguese traditional culture – thus the upholding
of rural life as opposed to industrialism (p. 411). In Portuguese Communist
culture, therefore, the working classes were state-ised and nationalised: they

became a tool for political legitimacy and power. In Cunhal’s words from 1946,
the PCP ‘reconciled the workers and the Nation’ (p. 407) – with the workers
becoming an object to the state’s, the nation’s (and the party’s) subject.
The hallmark of this authoritarian political culture (Chapter 24) expressed
itself mostly in the ideological portrayal of the rank-and-file Communist
activist, who was seen as a romantic during the 1930s and 1940s, and from the
late 1940s on was increasingly seen as a technician, a technocrat managing
History from the outside in the interest of Party rationality (p. 373). This
rationale upheld the development, through the national State, of a sense of
Portuguese national self-awareness.
As the author says from the start, such a conflation was engendered largely
by equating nationalism with the general democratic idea, understood
as commensurate with both ‘true’ Marxism and civilisation: to affirm the
Portuguese national idea was, at the same time, to claim Portugal as part of
the West. Whence the fact that the PCP was unable to exert a guiding role in
the events leading up to the 1974 Revolution, as it was triggered mostly by a
wholesale spontaneous rejection of the Portuguese colonial endeavour.
However, Neves’s work, most of the time, does not occupy itself with the
concrete role of the party in the events prior to 1974, something that has to do
with the work’s theoretical framework – the party’s ideological development
being taken, in Foucauldian fashion, not as relating to the actual historical
issues, but simply as the outward expression of a Nietzschean ‘will to power’.
That is why recent, post-1974 Portuguese history practically does not appear
in this work – even by way of a contrasting backdrop; what we are treated to
is a history of the national idea as it developed in Portugal, during the 1940s,
mainly in terms of what a group of outstanding Communist intellectuals
thought about it.
In this way, what Neves ultimately has to offer, by way of a conclusion, is simply
a normative nostrum. On the one hand, he describes Portuguese Communist
political culture: the transition from internationalism to nationalism, supra-
class national politics, supra-class ‘democracy’, the valorisation of rural life and
outdoor living as harbinger of the national tradition, the half-hearted support
given to the anti-colonial struggle, and a rationalised, technocratic and
authoritarian party politics, as well as a teleological conception of national
history – in short, the conversion of the libertarian idea in communism into
a form of power-politics based on the management of the working-class
object by the State as subject. On the other hand, what is offered by way of
an ‘alternative’ is simply an ideal: the (moral) necessity of recovering the
libertarian streak in communism, to turn again into a movement what had
become a state, in accordance with the Communist Manifesto motto that ‘the

workers have no Fatherland’ (p. 415). One might wonder how, in present-day
crisis-stricken Portugal, chafing under what is generally perceived as national
oppression under the tutelage of the European Community, could such
‘libertarian’ strictures take root in the objective political soil.
By way of concrete description, what Neves delineates is how, by
equating socialism with the national idea, the PCP created a mix between
its authoritarian Stalinist internal politics and, in terms of ‘external’ politics,
what was ultimately a very tame and parochial variety of social reformism.
However, in the absence of an understanding of the particular circumstances
that created such a political culture, we are left at a loss to understand why, in
different societies and circumstances, this same socialist/nationalist conflation,
based on the same ‘archaeology’ (Stalinism plus bourgeois nationalism)
developed itself in completely different (and far more revolutionary) directions
(e.g. Maoism before and during the Cultural Revolution).
The fact is that Portuguese Communist nationalism developed as it did
shaped by the historical ambiguity of the Portuguese ‘dual’ situation, both as
a backward southern-European bourgeois state and as an African colonial
power: if, since 1957, with the emergence of organised African liberation
movements, the PCP eventually gave unequivocal support to the independence
struggles of the Portuguese colonies (p. 167), it was only after toying with, to wit
by offering credence through some of its intellectuals to, the ‘lusotropicalist’
notion, developed by the Brazilian liberal-conservative Gilberto Freyre, that
Portuguese colonisation had been a kind of promiscuous ‘melting pot’ (p. 169) –
an ideology clearly intended to lend support to the continuing existence of the
Portuguese colonial empire. However, if Freyre’s ideas about miscegenation
could be developed, in the Portuguese context, to legitimise colonialism, in
Freyre’s native Brazil they were appropriated by the Left to an entirely different
purpose: to legitimise the goal of inaugurating ‘advanced’ democracy through
nationalism and the superseding of pre-existing racial hierarchies.
The same ideological mould – in this case, Stalinism and popular-frontism
– generated different varieties of Communist nationalism, and clearly a
historical difference must be admitted here between the nationalism of a USSR
acting as a superpower, or the nationalism of an imperialist nation such as
France, and the nationalism of a backward European nation – something that
could be referred to various classic Marxist debates on the national question,
to which Neves refers but not in a very detailed fashion, only touching on some
statements by Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer and Stalin, and dwelling instead on
detailed description of Jean Bruhat’s and Henri Lefebvre’s works on the issue,
which appear mostly circumstantial, tied to a strictly French vantage-point,
and triggered by the necessity of justifying popular-front policies.

As Neves admits, he is not interested in the study of ‘revolution’ as such, but

rather in the study of the development of a ‘revolutionary figure’ – as discourse
and not as an event (p. 348). However, the fact that this discourse was to be
accepted as objective in preference to others puts into question the issue of
its actuality – that is: its concrete reality as a response to the concrete issues of
the period.
What Neves eventually does is describe the development of a political
ideology – and, by doing so, he offers the reader a trove of valuable information,
much of it intriguing. However, if he describes to us – quite engagingly at
times – what happened, he does not explain why it happened this way. He has
amassed a lot of information, much of it interesting and well-presented, on a
topic of cultural history. What fails to appear is the political history behind it.
If, despite its often unsavoury politics, so many common workers identified
with the PCP, even as objects to an authoritarian episteme, it must be admitted
that this episteme nevertheless responded to some concrete, historically-
generated needs. But then, what Neves avowedly says is that he is searching
in history not for the reasons of a subject who ponders about its being ‘late’
in relation to some actual, objective goal, but for the hidden dispersion
behind this supposed objectivity: in short, it is the Nietzschean/Foucauldian
‘transvaluation of all values’. What disappears behind this, however, is the
notion of causal meaning, the questioning of what exactly, in concrete terms,
made events take a particular turn. We are left, therefore, with a lot of relevant
and interesting information, but we fail to perceive in what precise ways it
relates to a bigger picture that is, for most of the time, absent; however, it must
be admitted that this was not the author’s avowed intention.

brill.com/hima
To Have Done with the Philosophical Cold War

A Review of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea by Alberto Toscano
Rodrigo Nunes
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
rgnunes@yahoo.com
Abstract
How to uphold a politics of universalism, egalitarianism and abstraction without being

tarnished by the accusation of fanaticism? In order to open the space in which the
question can be asked, Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism explores various instantiations of
the trope of ‘fanaticism’ and other associated concepts (totalitarianism, enthusiasm).
Challenging the reliance on simplification, decontextualisation and analogical thinking
behind uses of those terms, the book shows how fanaticism as Other conversely
engenders a mystified idea of the modern West as the negative of the political and
theoretical interdictions associated with them.
Keywords
fanaticism – totalitarianism – Enlightenment – universalism – egalitarianism –

abstraction – emancipatory politics
Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, London: Verso, 2010
After the original ‘Lehman Brothers moment’ in 2008, for a moment it felt
as if the formidable hegemony that neoliberalism has had for three decades
on parliamentary politics, everyday common sense, public debate, and the
‘scientific’ discourse of economics would at last be lifted. It was suddenly not
quaint to quote Marx anymore, and the stock of Keynesian economists was
one of the very few to rise. As contradictions were laid bare, a unique moment
for both critique and social innovation seemed near.
With admirable resilience and staggering cynicism, however, the advocates
of neoliberalism have turned the crisis into an opportunity to push for more of
the same recipe that caused the debacle in the first place. Even as a wave

To Have Done with the Philosophical Cold War 227
of popular protests has spread around the world, a strong interdiction still
subsists against striving towards, imagining or even desiring something other
than what we have. While the properly political knot of the impasse is clearly
financial capital’s rigor mortis-strong grip on the political system, a failure
of imagination is just as evident: public debate and collective action remain
blocked by a diffuse but potent patchwork of classical liberalism, apologetic
historiography, Cold War rhetoric, the post-9/11 politics of fear, nouvelle
philosophie, half-hearted humanism and the tired paranoia of the ‘rentiers of
the Enlightenment’.1 ‘There is no alternative’, it insists, while more or less openly
recognising that what actually exists can only count as desirable if compared
to the horrors that would otherwise ensue. As Alain Badiou acerbically put
it, it seems the only thing to be said in defence of the present is that ‘we’re
lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil’.2 ‘Yes, it’s bad, but at least it’s not
the Khmer Rouge!’ – as if that disjunctive effectively summarised the only two
choices available.
Alberto Toscano’s Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea is thus a timely
intervention, targeting as it does one of the central nodes of this blockage, the
topos of fanaticism, and the ways in which it is used to disqualify and warn
against any project of, or desire for, radical change. A curiously catch-all term
of condemnation, what it censures can be construed as either a lack or an
excess in relation to rationality, history and politics, and it can often justify acts
as extreme as the ones it denounces, as a sort of pre-emptive extremism. These
oscillations should not, closer analysis shows, surprise us: not only is the term
equivocal, its tactical employment is slippery, and one of the ‘most striking
aspects of the uses of fanaticism as a political trope is the reliance on analogy,
simile, homology’ (p. xix).
This is why this is a book on the uses of the idea, tracing the political,
historical and intellectual contexts of its occurrences, but sometimes also
making it appear in unexpected places. It is also what gives it its episodic
nature and admirable breadth: the likes of Agamben, Arendt, Badiou, Bloch,
Burke, Derrida, Fukuyama, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Sloterdijk, Žižek, Müntzer, Lenin
and John Brown all receive scholarly and often illuminating examinations.
The fact that it reads for the most part as a series of relatively independent
engagements with different authors and problems makes the book difficult
both to summarise and to compare to other books as a unified whole. Tracking
a few themes across several different authors and areas rather than intervening
in a clearly defined field, it in a sense ‘creates’ its own literature; there
1 Toscano borrows the expression from Stengers 2009.

2 Badiou 2002.

228 Nunes
(thankfully, perhaps) is no such thing as ‘fanaticism studies’, and its breadth

clearly extends beyond any narrowly-defined ‘Marxist’ literature within which
it could be placed, even if that is also one of the author’s points of support.
If, however, as I suggest, one of its central problems is the blockage imposed
on political imagination by the correlative construction of a certain image of
Western modernity and its ‘fanatic’ Other, Toscano’s can be placed in fruitful
dialogue with other interventions such as Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism:
A Counter-History. At the same time, it also connects to recent debates on the
relation between abstraction and emancipatory politics, and between social
and cognitive abstraction, to be found, for example, in the work of Alain
Badiou, the recent revival of interest in the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and the
concept of ‘real abstraction’, as well as in discussions around communisation
theory and, more lately, accelerationism.3
What has just been said also entails a project that is more negative than
positive, in the sense that much of the work consists in unmaking the apparent
solidity of what is often no more than a loose web of generalisations, prejudices,
clichés, duplicitous apologetics and ‘guilty by association’ reasoning. Rather
than advancing a strong thesis, Toscano invites us to see much more than
usually meets the eye in the comfort zone of received ideas or in the ‘no-go’
areas of anathema. In this sense, the book could be read as the prolegomenon
to a debate that has ‘shake[n] off the effects of philosophy’s long Cold War, that
is to say of anti-totalitarian discourse – which views unconditional conviction
and principled egalitarianism with horror or contempt.’ (p. 250.)
This does not, however, mean that a thread is entirely lacking. Following
Hegel’s definition of the term as ‘enthusiasm for the abstract’,4 and true to the
inspiration he has often found in Alain Badiou’s thought, Toscano’s interest
in fanaticism lies in its equation with conviction and abstraction, and hence
also with universalism and egalitarianism. This choice of focus affords him at
once a good reason to treat the idea as deserving of thought (rather than as
an index of what should be immediately dismissed as irrational, unhistorical,
pre-political or anti-secular), a criterion by which to appraise the instances of
its polemical use, and a way ‘onto a broader reflection on the contemporary
relationship between universal emancipation and abstract universality’ (p. xii).
Rather than accept fanaticism’s in limine expulsion from the tribunal of reason
and good society, the book seeks to build on the intuition that there may
be more connections between the desire for emancipation and ‘a refusal of
3 See, for example, Sohn-Rethel 1977, Badiou and Hallward 2003, Badiou 2010, Toscano 2008
and 2010b, Srnicek and Williams 2013, Brassier 2014.
4 Hegel 1956, p. 358.

compromise and a seemingly boundless drive to the universal’ (p. xii) than
those attributed to the supposedly aberrational visions of the fanatic’s mind.
Arguing for reasonable scepticism toward knee-jerk interdiction is to
risk receiving such in limine treatment too; and it is one of the book’s most
inspired moves to start with an inversion of perspective that juxtaposes
liberalism’s long history of tolerance in regard to slavery and imperial violence
with the condemnation of US abolitionists and movements of resistance to
imperialism as ‘fanatics’. Not only does this reversal succeed in temporarily
suspending judgement, it provides immediate evidence of why the path
chosen by the author is worth pursuing: in the abolitionists, Toscano finds ‘an
ethical rejection of compromise’ alongside ‘a sober estimation of the strategic
weakness of deliberative politics when it came to ending slavery’ (p. 10). The
appeal to the authority of an ideal to which no-one today would publically
object clears the space where one of the book’s key stakes becomes thinkable:
is our present situation – of a profound crisis of representative democracy and
a widely-perceived democratic deficit – not very similar to theirs in terms of
how much can really be changed through institutional channels? And if that
is so, is not a combination of ‘passionate conviction’ and ‘meditated strategy’
(p. 10), rather than heeding the reiterated calls to being ‘reasonable’ and joining
the political games that condemn (or suppress) protest and direct action, what
might be necessary to tip the balance against the hegemonic bloc of financial
and political elites? Whatever the fate of the Egyptian revolution since,
did not Tahrir Square set an example when, offered all sorts of ‘reasonable’
concessions, the people ‘fanatically’ announced they would not move until
President Mubarak was gone?
The second chapter focuses precisely on the way in which the term is used
to indicate a break with ‘political time as a time of order – the repetitive order
of cycles, the static order of stability or the cumulative order of development’
(p. 45). This is done through an engagement with the historical phenomenon
of millenarianism, especially that of one of the key sources of fanaticism-
related tropes, Thomas Müntzer. It was in Martin Luther’s attacks on the
religious leader of the Peasants’ War that the German ‘Schwärmer’ was first
used to denote a ‘fanatic’. The word is interesting not only because of the
philosophical status it would later receive from Kant, but also because of how,
in its association with ‘swarm’, it sets the tone for two further topoi of debates
on fanaticism: individual pathology (a head swarming with abstract ideas)
and the contagion of irrational collective behaviour (the swarming crowds).
The upshot of this double reduction is that it allows the activity of multitudes
to be treated in abstraction from history, as ‘sterile and ultimately identical’
(p. 21) repetitions of the same patterns.

230 Nunes
Yet millenarianism’s relation to time and history is much more problematic,

by dint of both its seeming negation of political and worldly temporality,
and an apparent untimeliness that is nonetheless historically determined:
an anachronistically constructed reaction to the onset of new historical
conditions – namely, in the cases studied here, the emergence or imposition of
capitalist relations. Toscano’s analysis is sensitive to the charge levelled by post-
colonial thinkers like Chakrabarty against the risk of erasing the specificity
of those experiences by inscribing them in a single, totalising narrative, as a
merely ‘pre-political’ (Hobsbawn) moment come both too late and too soon for
its own sake. His proposal that the question be read politically, however, allows
him to salvage Hobsbawn’s position, in the sense that anachronism should
be read not in terms of a ‘fixed standard of development’, but of ‘the ability
of the exploited to find suitable ways, not merely to “interrupt” the historical
hegemony of capitalism but to shape it, and ultimately to undermine it’ (p. 52).
In trying to pose the problem of untimeliness politically, eschewing teleology
and ‘irreducible anti-historicist difference’ (p. 57) and raising the question
of how ‘the organizational capacities of the synchronous’ can be ‘combined
with the wishes and energies of the nonsynchronous’ (p. 56), the author finds
a guide in Ernst Bloch. The picture of millenarianism thus evinced is a much
less ‘irrational’ one: its religion and eschatology are acknowledged as powerful
tools for agitation, integration and alliance-building; its other-worldliness, as
ways of opening space for utopian desires and experiments in the here and
now; its ‘affective content’, following Mannheim, as no less important than its
‘theological form’ (p. 97).
The dismissal of ‘fanatics’ as anachronistic hauntings from our pre-modern
past is given a major blow when the investigation turns to the Enlightenment
and the trajectories of the concepts of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘fanaticism’ – not so
much twins as parts of a continuum whose demarcation was often in the eyes
of the beholder. This echoes the move, made in the first chapter, of taking
the argument into the terrain of liberalism. The book’s main polemical target
thus becomes clear: the ‘streamlined, ready-made’ (p. 99) picture of Western
modernity/the Enlightenment, which reduces it to a given, finalised product
to be defended and erases it as an actual historical process that was far from
being ‘unified and homogeneous, stripped of political tensions, geographical
specificity and philosophical differences’ (pp. 98–9). This erasure of process in
favour of product is what vouchsafes the disqualification of present demands
for radical transformation, by wilfully ignoring how most achievements of our
Western modernity were actually won. It is also what sustains the interdiction
against any attempt to ‘think otherwise’, through the sleight of hand that allows
one to contrast the failure of any ‘really existing’ instance of departure from

its norm with a wholly idealised model of smooth, indefinite perfectibility

that abhors any attempts at questioning the rules of the game. Paraphrasing
Borges, one could say that it judges others according to what they have
done, while expecting to be judged according to its intentions.5 This is, of
course, all the more ironic – or cynical – if one considers that most of the
repertoire with which this interdiction is articulated comes from conservative
reactions to the event that marked both the culmination of the Age of Reason
and the beginning of our liberal modernity: the French Revolution.
The latter presented in its most divisive form an ambivalence that ran
throughout the Enlightenment – one that is encapsulated in the concept of
‘enthusiasm’, whose career in the period was rather tortuous when compared
to the more homogenously negative connotation of ‘fanaticism’. In the
upheaval undergone by accepted political, religious and scientific authorities
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the term went from being used
as a tool for the secular critique of religion (and thus, to some extent, of the
established order) to becoming a way of disqualifying the new challenges
raised against that same order. The positions of ‘enthusiast’ and ‘Enlightener’
were not univocal, but defined polemically; and ‘enthusiasm’ appeared as an
internal other of Enlightenment, a potential harboured and nurtured by the
appeal to reason.
It was Kant, of course, who best recognised the immanent risk of fanaticism in
reason. While the entire critical project was centred on the idea of establishing
the limits that reason cannot cross, he also acknowledged the drive to overstep
these as both inevitable and possessing a certain cognitive and moral usefulness.
One finds the familiar distinctions between regulative and constitutive uses of
reason, negative and positive exhibition, and subjective belief and objective
knowledge behind his demarcation between Enthusiasmus and Schwärmerei.
But it is Kant’s measured defence of the French Revolution and of the rights
of theory, undertaken in the context of the German translation of Edmund
Burke’s counter-revolutionary attack on the enforcement of abstract principles
in practice, that most interests Toscano. Here, he both highlights how this
position earns Kant the epithet of ‘moral fanatic’ from Nietzsche (whose take
on the Revolution was rather close to Burke’s), and attempts to wrestle the
interpretation of Kant from the self-limiting ‘anti-Prometheanism’6 and focus
on the ‘spectator’ that some contemporary theory opposes to partisanship and
5 Cf. Borges 1998, p. 176.

6 The polemical foil here is the ‘Promethean activism’ attacked in Critchley 2007. For a return
to and development of the critique of anti-Prometheanism, cf. Toscano 2011.

232 Nunes
a ‘politics of abstraction’. The enthusiasm aroused in distant and disinterested

spectators by the event of the French Revolution, according to The Contest of
Faculties, is indeed a negative exhibition of a moral predisposition of humanity.
But, Toscano argues – contra Arendt, Lyotard and Rancière – not only is
it the abstract, universal dimension of humanity that matters to Kant, his
enthusiastic spectators, rather than affectively impartial, ‘embody a passionate
yet disinterested partisanship’ (p. 143) that takes sides for the revolution ‘even
at the risk that their partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves’
and if ‘the very utterance of [their] sympathy was fraught with dangers’.7 The
‘repudiation of the sensory delusion of knowledge of the immaterial’ is thus
‘the prelude to the affirmation of the truth of the abstract and the defence of
the rights of theory’ (p. 140). As much as the ideas of reason that would lead
us astray have a key role in guiding rational enquiry, Kant’s conception of the
political – contrary to a standard contemporary picture – would make room
for side-taking and universalistic passions. There is something in enthusiasm
that may not only be incorporated into political life, but also have a pivotal
role in building and sustaining it. In this, in fact, the imperturbable sage from
Königsberg finds perhaps surprising bedfellows in both Hume and Rousseau.
The ‘fear of revolution’ whose origins we find in Burke and Early Romanticism
is not, however, the main arena in which the discourse on fanaticism has
been at stake in the last decade. As its more immediate target disappeared
with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, terrorism and political Islam have taken
centre stage, especially since 9/11. The ‘culturalization and psychologization of
politics under the aegis of fanaticism’ (p. 149) in recent debates is where the
book turns next.
The problem is approached from an oblique angle: the constitution of a
certain Judeo-Christian subjectivity as the normative standard of secularised,
‘reasonable’, ‘historical’, ‘political’ and ‘diverse’ universalism; and how it, by
contrast, entails the parallel constitution of Islam as an Other marked by an
excessive, fanatical universalism that is as internally monolithic as it is
somehow foreign to politics and immune to time. The equation of fanaticism
and Islam was current during the Lumières, but it was Hegel that gave the latter
some philosophical dignity by seeing in it an overcoming of particularism
in favour of universalism – albeit an abstract, destructive form of it, which
‘can only bear a desolating destructive relation to the concrete’.8 Such was,
as is well-known, also his interpretation of revolutionary Terror. The whole
7 Kant 1991, p. 182.

8 Hegel 1956, p. 358.

problem is that, while the latter can be accorded a positive role as one
stage in the development of Spirit, a ‘religion of the One’ or the ‘abstract
Absolute’ in synchronic coexistence with the modern state must appear as
both pathological, as it fails to acknowledge the differentiation of society that
is articulated through secular objective law, and dangerous, as it will forcefully
seek to subsume concrete difference into the abstract One, trespassing the
subordinate limits of religious particularism: ‘a religion of the One cannot but
be a politics of the One’ (p. 157).
Again, the author wishes to stay close to the nominalist spirit of
Enlightenment critique, or what he deems the ‘intransigent reductivism
of eighteenth-century materialism’ (p. 171); it serves him in good stead. His
critique of psychoanalytical pathologisations of Islam – and the correspondent
affirmation of a ‘psychic Sonderweg (special path) that accompanies the
secular Sonderweg of the Christian West’ (p. 162), so that a certain kind of
psychic ‘maturity’ would be tantamount to the embrace of our Western
cultural standard – is wary of culturalisation and Orientalistic generalisations.
Rather than believing that some illusions ‘have an emancipatory potential
that makes them superior to others’ (p. 171), he wishes ‘to defend the idea,
crucial to Freudian psychoanalysis, of secularism as a kind of methodological
atheism – a praxis-centred, materialist and naturalist inquiry into
transindividual behaviour and psychic structures’ (p. 170).
An example of such ‘methodological atheism’ can be found in Marx,
employed in the book as an angle from which to approach the contemporary
resurgence of religion in politics while avoiding the somewhat hysterical
tendency to defend the secular ‘values’ of the Enlightenment without
addressing the underlying causes of present ‘threats’ to them. Marx’s critique
of religion – or rather, his critique of the critique of religion – takes place not
at the level of religious representations, but of their conditions of possibility;
and, as a corollary, identifies the latter as what needs to be transformed if the
former are to disappear. In this, he saw himself as both inheriting the project
of the Enlightenment, and completing it. But his early ‘radical democratic
secularism’ (p. 178), where the ‘momentous importance of the emergence
of the democratic secular state’ afforded the opportunity to move from ‘the
criticism of political theologies to a political criticism of the state-form itself’
(p. 198), gave way to a mature position in which the relations of production,
rather than the state-form, came to represent the ‘secular basis’ to be critiqued
and transformed. Toscano highlights the concept of ‘real abstraction’ as key in
this passage: ‘illusions’ such as God or money are objectively constituted
in and through real social relations reproduced ‘behind people’s backs’; it is

234 Nunes
transforming the latter, rather than critiquing the former (or reforming the
state), that will bring the domination of abstraction to an end.9 In Toscano’s
gloss, for Marx, one must overcome ‘the liberal juxtaposition between the
secular life of civil society and the fanatical propension of religious belief’ in
order to attend to, and transform, ‘the religion of everyday life’ (p. 200).10 In this,
we find a completion of the early Marxian insight that, while a secular state
can bring about political emancipation, it alone does not suffice to produce
human emancipation.
A disquisition on the uses of ‘fanaticism’ as a tool of political disqualification
would not be complete without an examination of that other great trope,
‘totalitarianism’. The equivalence established under its sign between Fascism,
Nazism and Communism is examined in the last chapter, through the notion
of ‘political religion’ – which, ironically, originated with comparisons between
victorious Soviet communism and Islam, whereas the comparison today
seems to go in the opposite direction. Toscano finds the use of both concepts
(totalitarianism, political religion) lacking in attention to ‘actual content, social
composition and explicit doctrine’, as well as ‘detailed causal and conjunctural
analysis’, focusing instead on formal similarities broadly associated with
fanaticism: ‘enthusiasm for abstraction’, ‘some drive to unfettered totality’,
and ‘radical organizational unity’ (p. 208). What enables the facility with
which political religion discourse moves across history without regard to
specificity is a general reliance on an anthropological thesis according
to which religious disposition is an essential, ineliminable human constant; and
some variation on a philosophy of history where the process of secularisation
plays a pivotal role.
The irruption of religion (or of political forms deemed religious) into
the political arena can thus be seen as either anachronistic (the return of
something that history had left behind) or atavistic (mutated manifestations
of fundamental drives and affective structures); whereas the Enlightenment
can be read as either a historical achievement to be defended, or, in more
conservative variants, a secularised religion in its own right. Either way, the
upshot is that ‘the very idea that the world can be changed through human
action, and that abstractions such as equality can be forced into social being,
is a recipe for disaster’ (p. 213); and that, when understood in those terms,
politics amounts to no more than the continuation of religion by other
9 It should be noted, however, that by lumping religion together with money, value and
abstract labour, Toscano is expanding the scope of Sohn-Rethel’s use of ‘real abstraction’
without providing an account that would justify that move. Cf. Sohn-Rethel 1977.
10 The expression is, of course, Marx’s own; cf. Marx 1991, p. 969.

means. In another foray into ‘enemy territory’, Toscano mobilises Hannah

Arendt – the primary source for the discourse on totalitarianism – against this
functionalistic reduction of history, practice and conjuncture in favour of an
abstract meta-historical template that warrants flights of analogical thinking.
Giorgio Agamben’s project of exposing the theological matrix of contemporary
politics, in turn, comes under similar criticism for its Heideggerian reliance on
the underlying continuity of a historical-ontological destiny.
Still, and crucially for the book’s central problem, a commonality between
the religious projects of Christianity or Islam and the political project of the
French Revolution or Marxism can be found: their ‘expansive universality’
(p. 239) predicated on a generic abstraction that addresses itself to all,
irrespective of differences. This levelling egalitarianism, oblivious to both
empirical plurality and an essentially unequal nature, is precisely what critics
such as Burke qualified as fanatical. And here what is at once the central
philosophical and political stake of the book appears: how to have universalism
without fanaticism?
This is more than a rear-guard rhetorical action to be waged against those
who oppose emancipatory projects, however. In the Marxist tradition, and in
the far from felicitous trajectory of its historical instantiations, universalism
was sutured to a strong notion of immanent teleology that provided politics
with a compass and a criterion of validity to the extent that history itself
created the conditions for its overcoming. As a consequence, situated decisions
were systematically translated into the language of the ‘correct’ interpretation
of historical tendencies towards a telos, justifying no end of opportunisms and
horrors as historical necessity. It is precisely the need to address this failing,
abandoning the guarantees of a philosophy of history while retaining the
possibility of overcoming the present, that Toscano sees behind the recent
recuperation of messianic and eschatological figures by the likes of Agamben,
Badiou and Jacques Derrida.
For the latter, the solution consists in abandoning what the political-religion
discourse identified as the religious supplement in Marxism: a contraband
history of salvation in the garb of historical-materialist teleology. This is done,
however, by separating the determinate content of its messianism – the direct
knowledge of the real that can legitimate violence as historically necessary –
from a form of the messianic that is the non-religious hope, without expectation
of fulfilment, for justice and emancipation. In doing so, however, one can
end up with both a neglect for the consideration of the actual conditions in
which political actions take place (for any attempt to grasp it would seem to
risk appealing to a direct presentation of the real again) and an exaggerated
emphasis on failure and impossibility: if the work of thought is circumscribed

236 Nunes
to enacting the constant reminder that trying to make the transcendent

immanent is the ultimate transcendent move, it is easy to slip into a quietism
that refuses to take risks in making assertions about the here and now. Toscano
pins down the problem in a passage worth quoting at length:
If communism is to be understood as a determinate negation of capitalism

and its concrete forms of abstract domination – as concerned with what
Engels called ‘conditions of liberation’ – then some (strategic, partisan,
fallible) knowledge of the real is indispensable. After all, the Marxist
notion of revolution – regardless of its particular historical embodiment –
lies at the intersection between, on the one hand, the presence of a
political capacity or force and, on the other, the idea that from the
partisan perspective of that organized capacity, it is possible to know and
practically anticipate the real tendencies in the world that communism
seeks – determinately and determinedly – to negate. (p. 243.)
The solution favoured by the author (‘strategic, partisan, fallible’) is already

suggested in this section, and is closer to Badiou’s Pascalian wager: a refusal to
claim knowledge of the real need not mean a refusal to claim any knowledge
at all; accepting the fallibility of action is not a rejoinder against action, but
the point from which every action must start. But, he immediately asks, if
‘political universality is not a matter of knowledge, can it still be sustained
as universality’? (p. 245.) The answer can be positive if one stops treating
universality as an immediate given, the property of a belief or prescription,
and temporalises it – a move that allows, again, for a distinction between
universality as a product and as a process: the material, historically-determined,
practical, quintessentially political labour of a universalisation that combines
‘the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles’.11
Stressing the primacy of process over product is not surprising for an author
whose first book was a study of the problem of individuation in modern and
contemporary philosophy.12 Even if in a philosophical register and at a level of
abstraction that are quite different, this is also a key, if not explicit, question for
Fanaticism. One could say that it is, in a way, the positive kernel of its negative
11 Badiou 2003, p. 99. What goes unsaid here is that, to the extent that Badiou refuses any
transitivity between objective conditions and subjective affirmation, one could say that,
from the French philosopher’s formalism, Toscano takes only the form – the material
determination of which would come, one presumes, from a broadly-understood Marxian
analysis.
12 Toscano 2006.

work. As said at the start, rather than advance a thesis, the book directs
remarkable scholarship and analytical effort into complexifying the theoretical
simplifications and the abstractions of historical, social and political context
done under the aegis of terms like ‘fanaticism’ and ‘totalitarianism’. As a
defence of the rights of abstraction, therefore, it is not an unqualified one: the
issue is not whether abstraction is good or bad in itself, but how it is embedded
in social life, and what its political role can be, or how it can be used; and if the
book does not spell out a positive answer, it does go some way in showing how
not to do it.
One should read the two central chapters (on the Enlightenment, on Islam)
as two halves of an argument. In exposing the much more nuanced realities
behind the construction of fanaticism as the Other, what one also exposes
is the extent to which the parallel construction of a certain identity of the
modern, secular, democratic West relies on a reification that hides not only
the materials that went into its formation (such as slavery), but the very
operation of this construction. This reification denies the Other any historicity
because it produces itself as the form of history par excellence, the only sense
of the arrow of time. Yet, it does so by denying history itself, to the extent that,
presenting itself as the accomplished outcome of a rational development, it
covers its own footsteps and divests the present from the means that were
available to those who, in the past, toiled to make it what it is. The intellectual
equivalent of climbing up and throwing away the ladder, it conceals its
contingent making under the guise of necessity, thus denying the present
precisely that which was the condition for its existence – that at some point
in the past men and women decided that their condition was contingent,
and struggled with conviction to transform it; and that, contrary to the rosy,
falsified picture of incremental change through institutions, these struggles
often required going outside and beyond those institutions themselves.
In another spirited intervention in the contemporary debate, The
Persistence of the Negative, Benjamin Noys argues that we should understand
the theoretical turn towards affirmation in recent Continental philosophy
in terms of the ‘new conditions of defeat and dispersion’13 that set in
between the high watermark of anti-systemic struggles in the 1960s and the
global triumph of financial capital in the 1990s. In the face of the defeat of
emancipatory projects, and even the rollback of hard-won victories of the
previous century, philosophy overcompensated by identifying a substrate
of inexhaustible productivity underneath capitalism as the always-already
ontological potential for its overcoming. It is a diagnosis that is hard to
13 Noys 2010, p. x.

238 Nunes
fault, and one that has gained traction even among those who are sympathetic
to some strains of poststructuralist and post-autonomist thought. Yet, as
both Noys and Toscano are aware, the situation that it diagnoses is not
one that stance-taking in theory alone would suffice to change. To simply
invert the theoretical signals, replacing joyful affirmation in the face of an
unfavourable conjuncture with booming axioms or the unilateral affirmation
of a subjective will, does not change the conjuncture itself. One cannot change
objective conditions through sheer subjective willpower or grand gestures
that are radical in rhetoric alone, especially when part of the problem with
objective conditions is the absence of strong enough political subjects (hence
the need to think the possible vectors of composition of new ones).
To defend a politics of principle and conviction is not to engage in the
shrill performance of one, but to produce it in this world, with all its messiness,
limitations, ‘corruption’. Affirming without abstracting may often amount
to little more than turning one’s eyes away from a nefarious ‘big picture’ in
order to rejoice in small-scale resistances that, left alone, are unlikely to alter
it. But if staying too close to the empirical can leave us where we are, so can
the flight forward into its unsituated negation. If abstraction is to be made
valid for practice, one must first know what, when and how to abstract; in the
dialectics between concreteness and abstraction, what matters is the dialectic
itself, that is, the movement between the two poles, rather than a choice of
one over the other. What is needed is sufficiently concrete abstractness (and, by
the same token, sufficiently abstract concreteness), aware of its own abstract
nature, and thus capable of calibrating its own degree of abstraction according
to needs – the continuous, and continuously rectified, effort to produce the
‘union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to
abstract generalisation’ that Whitehead saw, perhaps too optimistically, as
‘the novelty in our present society’.14 Likewise, it is the capacity to make the
‘weapon of criticism’ develop in correlation with ‘the criticism of weapons’15
that is decisive, and for that task, neither abstraction nor concreteness alone
will do.
If Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea is a political book, the reason that
makes it commendable is ultimately a political one: that, even if what it
ostensibly does could be classified as ‘ideology-critique’, its sensitivity to detail
and process strikes the right tone in highlighting that the point is still not one
of merely affirming or interpreting the world, but changing it; that ‘[u]rgency
14 Whitehead 1967, p. 3.

15 Marx 2000, p. 77.

and intransigence must be coupled with patience and strategy, if there is ever
to be a history without fanaticism.’ (p. 253.)
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Brassier, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Badiou, Alain 2010, The Communist Hypothesis, translated by David Macey and Steve
Corcoran, London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain and Peter Hallward 2003, ‘Beyond Formalisation: An Interview’,
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brill.com/hima
Notes on Contributors
George Ciccariello-Maher
is Associate Professor of Politics at Drexel University and author of We Created
Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke, 2013); Building
the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (Jacobin-Verso, 2016); and
Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke, 2017). [gjc43@drexel.edu]
Glen Coulthard
is a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and an associate professor
in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of
Political Science, University of British Columbia. [gsc@interchange.ubc.ca]
Adriano Luiz Duarte

is a Faculty member of the History Department at the Federal University of
Santa Catarina. He teaches courses and advises research on Brazilian history,
theory of history, and contemporary history. He authored the book Cidadania
e Exclusão, Brasil, 1937–1945 (Editora da UFSC, 1999) and co-edited (with
Ricardo Muller) the book E.P. Thompson: política e paixão (Argos, 2012). Some
of his most important journal articles include ‘Neighborhood Associations,
Social Movements, and Populism in Brazil, 1945–1953’ (The Hispanic American
Historical Review, 2009), ‘Space, Culture, and Labour in Santa Catarina, 1900–
1960’ (Moving the Social, 2013) and ‘Asociativismo barrial y cultura política
en la ciudad de San Pablo, 1947–1953’ (Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2013).
[adrianold@uol.com.br]
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Originally from rural Oklahoma, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz completed the
doctorate in History at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1974,
specialising in Western Hemisphere and Indigenous histories. She is Professor
Emerita in Ethnic Studies at California State University East Bay, where she
created and taught the curriculum in Native American Studies and co-founded
the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is author or editor of 12 books, including
The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation; Roots of Resistance:
A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico; Indians of the Americas: Human Rights
and Self-Determination; and the memoir trilogy: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie;

242 Notes on Contributors
Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975; and Blood on the Border:
A Memoir of the Contra War. Her most recent book is An Indigenous Peoples’
History of the United States. [rdunbaro@pacbell.net]
Jim Kincaid
is an independent researcher based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Previously
Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Bradford University, he has been associated
with Historical Materialism since 2002, formerly as a member of the Editorial
Board and now as corresponding editor. He has published articles in Historical
Materialism on topics which include: the political economy of Japan and East
Asia, Marxist value-theory, finance, and the logical construction of Marx’s
Capital.
He currently works on two projects. (1) How political economy is presented as
a literary text in Capital. (2) How Marxist concepts can explain recent dynamics
in the world economy – and in what ways Marx’s categories have to be further
developed to capture the current evolution of the system. Some recent pub-
lications are available at <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim_Kincaid/
contributions>. He blogs at <https://readingsofcapital.com/>. [jimkincaid
@btconnect.com]
Paul Kohlbry
is a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of
Anthropology. He is currently at work on a dissertation about the institution
of private property in the West Bank, focusing on state and private land
registration initiatives carried out under Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian
Authority rule. [pkohlbr1@jhu.edu]
Peter Kulchyski
is Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba and co-director of
the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas. His
research interests include Indigenous rights, conflicts over resource extraction
and contemporary critical theory. His most recent sole-authored books are Like
the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut and
Aboriginal Rights Are Not Human Rights: In Defence of Indigenous Struggles. He
has just submitted a manuscript called Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice:
Begade Shuhtagotine and the Sahtu Treaty. [peter.kulchyski@umanitoba.ca]
Carolyn Lesjak
is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University and is the author
of Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Duke University Press,
2006), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century British literature

Notes on Contributors 243
and culture and Marxist theory. Recent articles include ‘Reading Dialectically’
and ‘1750 to the Present: Acts of Enclosure and Their Afterlife’. She is currently
completing a project on the material basis of character in Victorian literature
and its relationship to notions of the common(s). [clesjak@sfu.ca]
Geoff Mann
teaches political economy and economic geography at Simon Fraser University,
where he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. He is the author of
Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism (AK Press,
2013) and Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the
American West (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In the Long Run We
Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution will appear with
Verso in late 2016. [geoffm@sfu.ca]
Rodrigo Nunes
is a lecturer in modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and at the Parque Lage School of
Visual Arts. He is the author of Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective
Action After Networks (Mute/PML Books, 2014), which proposes the outlines
of a theory of organisation adequate to contemporary social movements, and
has recently edited a dossier on the Brazilian 2013–14 protests for the French
journal Les Temps Modernes. His texts have appeared in Radical Philosophy,
International Journal of Communication, South Atlantic Quarterly, Deleuze
Studies, Rue Descartes and Nueva Sociedad, among others, and he is also a
regular contributor to such outlets as The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Folha de
São Paulo. [rgnunes@yahoo.com]
Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça

is Associate Professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University and is presently
engaged in researching and writing an extended thematic commentary on
the corpus of Trotsky’s writings, that aims at discussing the present relevance
and development of his concept. So far three parts of this commentary have
been published (in Portuguese): Trotsky before Really Existing Socialism (2010),
Trotsky and Interwar Western European Politics (2012) and Trotsky and Permanent
Revolution: History of a Key Concept (2014). A fourth book, on Trotsky and
US politics, has already reached manuscript form. [crebello@antares.com.br]
Jeffery R. Webber
is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at
Queen Mary University of London. He is the author most recently of The Last
Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of

244 Notes on Contributors
the New Latin American Left (Haymarket, 2016), co-author with Todd Gordon
of Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America (Fernwood,
2016), and co-editor with Susan J. Spronk of Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist
Perspectives on Latin America in the Global Political Economy (Haymarket, 2015).
[j.r.webber@qmul.ac.uk]

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Historical Materialism 24.

Indigenous – decolonial – anticolonial – Marxism – Canada

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341481

and far-reaching grassroots Indigenous mobilisation in the country since the

1 Idle No More n.d.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

but on what we have called ‘strategic hypotheses’. Models are some-

Coulthard’s first thesis pivots on disruption, the necessity of direct action, a

first, the practices are directly undertaken by the subjects of colonial

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

This parallels, in a particular sense, Marx’s notion of ‘revolutionary ­practice’,

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

anarchist strategic theory, particularly in the domain of historical-materialist

An anti-capitalist strategy of Indigenous liberation, then, requires broad net-

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

insists that the ‘analytical frame of settler-colonialism’ can also act as an

It is systemic in the sense that it has been structured, indeed institution-

23 Coulthard 2014, p. 174.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

the crushing materiality of systemic violence invisible, appear natural,

Any meaningful politics of Indigenous resurgence will therefore require that

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

Situating Red Skin, White Masks

34 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

historically has also by no means been free of tension and contradiction.38 In

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

state can be adequately transformed via such a politics of recognition’.42

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

resistance that characterize the relationship between white settler states

In one of the critical passages in Capital Marx writes:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement

In this specific passage, and throughout chapters 25 to 32 of Capital, Coulthard

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

context of settler-colonialism through a transformative encounter with critical

53 Couthard 2014, p. 9. See Anderson 2010; Shanin 1983.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

political and economic development of the Canadian state’.57 The centrality of

Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism,

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

capitalism continues to play a vital role in facilitating the ongoing disposses-

Several of the contributions to this symposium focus on Coulthard’s engage-

60 Coulthard 2014, p. 14.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

what is at issue is not captured by the idea of sovereignty, and a dynamic

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

slavery in the United States and elsewhere was clearly an institu-

What is more, Ciccariello-Maher contends, the twentieth century witnessed a

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

64 Here he follows Wacquant 2002.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

underdeveloped in Coulthard’s work. For Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Skin, White Masks

If a modified version of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation is, therefore,

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

of recognition, and that this attachment is essential in maintaining the

represent the externalization of that which was previously internalized: a

67 Coulthard 2014, pp. 25–6.

Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 3–29

potential hinged . . . entirely on [its] ability to transcend what Fanon saw

Because cultural self-affirmation is crucial to Coulthard’s understanding of

72 Mansbridge 2001, pp. 4–5.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341481

1 Idle No More n.d.

This parallels, in a particular sense, Marx’s notion of ‘revolutionary practice’,

23 Coulthard 2014, p. 174.

34 Coulthard 2014, p. 179.

53 Couthard 2014, p. 9. See Anderson 2010; Shanin 1983.

60 Coulthard 2014, p. 14.

64 Here he follows Wacquant 2002.

67 Coulthard 2014, pp. 25–6.

72 Mansbridge 2001, pp. 4–5.

76 Coulthard 2014, p. 157.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341483

1 Coulthard 2014, p. 12.

3 Coulthard 2014, pp. 51–2.

12 Coulthard 2014, pp. 16–17.

13 Coulthard 2014, pp. 23–4.

17 Leacock 2008, p. 32.

19 Coulthard 2014, p. 144.

21 Coulthard 2014, p. 14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341484

2 Coulthard 2014, p. 17 (emphasis in original).

9 Alfred 2005, pp. 34–5, 38.

12 Coulthard 2014, p. 48; Monture-Angus 1999, p. 36.