Reconstruction 10.4 (2010)


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"Rectification of Human Names”: E.P. Thompson and Contemporary Debates on Historical and Epistemological Discourse / Manuel Yang

Abstract: E.P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major themes of his work.  Such rectification has both political and scholarly ramifications that extend to poststructuralist debates over historical discourse (Ranajit Guha’s meditation on the method of Subaltern Studies, Hayden White’s theory of rhetorical universalism); organic relationship between working-class gesture, linguistic philosophy, and political economy (as exemplified in Piero Sraffa's renowned contribution to the "epistemological break" between the early and late Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy); and the universality of class struggle in defining the crucial intellectual breakthroughs of the 1970s, from the works of Michel Foucault and Yoshimoto Takaaki to those of autonomist Marxism and history from below.  As is clear in Thompson’s revealing but also limited polemic against Louis Althusser, every act of rectification is necessarily incomplete and requires endless revision, both individually and collectively.

Keywords: Keywords: E.P. Thompson, Marxism, Philosophy

<1> In 1980 Edward Palmer Thompson traveled to the People’s Republic of China. As it was his custom to do so at critical junctures in his life, he crystallized the experience of his visit in a series of poems, “Powers and Names,” struggling to come to grips with a culture that was alien to his peculiarly British temperament.[1] He pays particular homage in these poems to the foundational figure of Chinese – indeed global – historiography, Szuma-Chien (Szuma-Chien’s Records of a Historian stands comparison to Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War as the first classical text of ancient historiography). We can read Thompson’s poetic tribute as a gesture toward the making of a new historical imagination that rewrites subversively the Kiplingnesque imperialist maxim in “The Ballad of East and West” as: “East is West, and West is East, and always the twain were one” (Thompson carried this understanding viscerally through his family tree, with Edward Thompson senior’s active support of the Indian independence movement and friendship with such figures as Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru). In the penultimate, culminating poem, “The Rectification of Names,” Thompson proclaims in the concluding stanzas:

Plato thought nature plagiarises spirit:
Being determines consciousness determined Marx:
But in the contradictions of the Way
The human dialectic osculates and arcs
And quarrels to insert
Some transient motive in the motiveless inert.

By getting right the proper names of things
Confucius said that order would commence,
And Taoism taught all would be kind
If they forgot about ‘benevolence’:
Cut down the props, the skies above
Will still hold up upon the menial rites of love

Whose needs are the material habitus
From which the goddesses and dragons came,
Whose archers will shoot down the nuclear fire,
Whose nameless pillars are imagination’s flames,
Whose arcane oracles proclaim
The rectification of the human name (Persons and Polemics 358-359).

<2> It would not be an exaggeration to interpret this passage, indeed the poem itself, as a metaphorically self-reflective précis of Thompson’s entire work. The first stanza sums up the nature of Thompson’s contribution to history, both as scholar and activist, in affirming the power of agency in historical determination (“The human dialectic osculates and arcs/And quarrels to insert/Some transient motive in the motiveless inert”): Thompson sees that the English working class had a crucial hand in their own historical formation (The Making of the English Working Class) and that an individual such as himself could actively join in an international movement to fight fascism (in World War II he was a tank commander in the Battle of Cassino), struggle for democracy in Communism (he edited the journal Reasoner which was a journal of democratic opposition in the Communist Party of Great Britain and which became, after Thompson’s resignation from the Party in the wake of the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution, The New Reasoner, one of the direct progenitors of the British New Left) and oppose the impending threat of nuclear destruction during the Second Cold War (the European antinuclear movement, in which Thompson was starting to engage himself fully as he was writing these very lines: “archers will shoot down the nuclear fire”). This notion of agency is also at the heart of Thompson’s humanist understanding of Marx (“Being determines consciousness determined Marx”) and its application in his historical writings, which served as the theoretical basis for his impassioned screed against Louis Althusser.

<3> After the dialectical turn in the second stanza, where Confucian and Taoist traditions are posed as necessary complements, Thompson strikes the dominant chord of his later work – the sympathetic exploration of traditional popular customs, rituals, notions of justice, and collective resources (“material habitus”) he had elsewhere condensed in the twin terms of “moral economy” and “commons” – and declares it as a source of free political, historical imagination in reordering the future on truly human terms (“the material habitus/From which the goddesses and dragons came… /Whose nameless pillars are imagination’s flames,/Whose arcane oracles proclaim/The rectification of the human name”). Using this eminently Confucian trope – “rectification of the human name” – Thompson sums up in a single breath the totality of the generous impulses and distinctive historical understandings that shot through his life, from socialist humanism to the radical cultural tradition of the English working class and plebeians.

<4> Indeed the term “moral economy” – which he revived in his celebrated 1971 essay on “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” – is itself a “rectification of the human name” against the industrial economic logic of the modernizers, which goes under the name of “political economy.” In the preface to Customs in Common Thompson states the contemporary relevance of eighteenth-century English plebeians’ struggle against the political economy of their day:

Yet we know also that global expectations are rising like Noah’s flood, and that the readiness of the human species to define its needs and satisfaction in material market terms – and to throw all the globe’s resources onto the market – may threaten the species itself (both South and North) with ecological catastrophe. The engineer of this catastrophe will be economic man, whether in classically avaricious capitalist form or in the form of the rebellious economic man of the orthodox Marxist tradition.

As capitalism (or “the market”) made over human nature and human need, so political economy and its revolutionary antagonist came to suppose that this economic man was for all time. We stand at the end of a century when this must be called in doubt. We shall not ever return to pre-capitalist human nature, yet a reminder of its alternative needs, expectations and codes may renew our sense of our nature’s range of possibilities (14-15).

<5> In “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd” Thompson attempts to radically reconceptualize the eighteenth-century English commoners’ class struggle – what he will call eight years later “class struggle without class” – on terms antithetical to the assumptions of political economy and modernization, that is, against the language of either capitalist or orthodox Marxist Homo Economicus. He suggests the pre-modern, pre-capitalist (indeed pre-socialist) past as a critical, positive antidote, or a model of “rectification,” to the developmentalist ravages of late-twentieth-century present and future. This same sensibility informs Thompson’s defense of the jury system in the name of the rights of “the free-born Englishman”; fundamental affinity for William Morris whose socialist vision was entrenched in medieval artisan craftsmanship; love of Romantic poetry, particularly that of William Blake whom he considered an antinomian artisan descending from the seventeenth-century Muggeltonian sect (Thompson jokingly dubbed himself a “Muggeltonian Marxist” in his book on Blake); and historical argument concerning the origin of the modern English working class, which he found transmitted from the same matrix of religious and political traditions that produced Blake (e.g., linkage between the democratic struggle for universal male suffrage in the seventeenth-century Putney Debates among New Model Army soldiers and for the same in the 1790s among members of the London Correspondence Society, the first ostensible organization of the English working class).

<6> Apart from the difference in cultural garb, it is then not surprising that Thompson would invoke one of the most traditional Confucian concepts as the central metaphor in his poem. In fact, there is no doubt that he saw important continuities between English and Chinese moral economy in his own scholarship:

China provides an example of successful bureaucratic management of food supplies, during the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century. The Chinese state undertook far-reaching measures to feed the people during times of scarcity; these included public granaries, the provision of loans, discouragement of hoarders, encouragement of circulation by canals and roads. This was supported by a “Confucian” value-system which endorsed the imperative of “benevolence,” and by the popular belief that any regime which presided over disasters such as famine and flood had “lost the mandate of heaven”. Hence everything to do with the distribution of food in time of scarcity was of highly-sensitive political import. The Chinese peasant did not beg for charity, he demanded relief and saw the bureaucracy as bound by its office to provide this, and the rich as bound by duty. Many actions of Chinese food rioters closely resembled European riots – blockading transport, attacking hoarders, lobbying bureaucrats and the rich – and riot was a recognised way of putting the state measures of relief in motion (Customs 293).

Although Thompson had to rely on secondary English-language sources for information on the Chinese peasants and their moral economy, such keywords as “mandate of heaven” could very well be a Chinese stand-in for the “free-born Englishman” and his point about how Chinese food rioters “demanded relief and saw the bureaucracy as bound by its office to provide this” – precisely the customary subsistent imperative embodied in “moral economy” – mirrors the actions of the English plebs and peasants demanding “just price” for bread in the emergent capitalist period when market liberalization of basic necessities was beginning to be practiced as a matter of economic modernization. As in the poem “Rectification of Names,” Thompson is proposing the invention of a new universal historical discourse of class struggle, in which the specific cultural and linguistic “material habitus” of the participants are not assimilated to an Orientalist, modernizing, or ethnocentric teleological meta-narrative but their universalizing force to rectify names and change history is appreciated fully.

<7> This is not to say that Thompson’s historical analysis of the traditional English past is automatically substitutable to Chinese historical and cultural conditions, that his notion of “moral economy” is transferrable without qualification from one order of society to another. Marx himself demurred at the notion of applying his theory in Capital universally to contexts outside of English, particularly European, history (a caution unheeded by orthodox Marxism) [2]. In fact, Thompson would have had problems with such a suggestion as well, as he writes: “we are always in danger of confusing the historical evidence with the terms of interpretation which we have ourselves introduced…Yet if we were to find ways of interrogating the cognitive structure of food rioters, we might find certain essential premises, whether expressed in the simplest biblical terms of ‘love’ and ‘charity’, or whether in terms of notions of what humans ‘owe’ to each other in time of need, notions which may have little to do with any Christian instruction but which arise from the elementary exchanges of material life” (Customs 350). Despite the need for empirical investigation to avoid “confusing the historical evidence with the terms of interpretation” and to properly distinguish particular Christian terms from particular Confucian ones, this does not mean we are doomed to reenact the myth of Babel in the form of dogmatically poststructuralist anti-essentialism and extreme historicist anti-presentism. Historians often invoke the latter with a nod to L.P. Hartley’s proverbial “The past is a foreign country” even as they fail to understand that the original quote referred to the divide of English class experience and that an idea such as “foreign country” is a recent conceptual invention presupposing the universality of the nation-state. According to Thompson, it is the task of theoretical and historical “rectification of names” to reconstruct the “essential premises” of mutuality and solidarity found in the “cognitive structure of food rioters” – even if divided by geography or chronology – and give them names in our analysis.

<8> If the “rectification of human names” (in such vocabulary as “moral economy” and “elementary exchanges of material life”) is premised on an unending process of “closing the gap” between these new “terms of interpretation” and what human beings actually do and think within the material realm of everyday subsistence, then its energy must come from below, from the class struggle over everyday subsistence. The original Confucian formulation of “rectification of names” appears in Book 13 of The Analects:

Zilu asked, “If the Duke of Wei were to employ you to serve in the government of his state, what would be your first priority?”

The Master answered, “It would, of course, be the rectification of names.”

Zilu said, “Could you, Master, really be so far off the mark? Why worry about rectifying names?”

The Master replied, “How boorish you are, Zilu! When it comes to matters that he does not understand, the gentleman should remain silent. If names are not rectified, speech will not accord with reality; when speech does not accord with reality, things will not be successfully accomplished, ritual practice and music will fail to flourish; when ritual and music fail to flourish, punishments and penalties will miss the mark. And when punishments and penalties miss the mark, the common people will be at a loss as to what to do with themselves. This is why the gentleman only applies names that can be properly spoken and assures that what he says can be properly put into action. The gentleman simply guards against arbitrariness in his speech. That is all there is to it” (139).

“Rectification of names” here can be misread as a Machiavellian admonition for a ruler to rectify names in the manner of ideological engineering to establish consent among the “common people.” But Confucius’s assumption is rather that of philosophical realism, that names ought to be rectified to “accord with reality,” which is expressed in culture (“ritual and music”) and law (“punishments and penalties”). Unlike Thompson’s study of traditional popular culture and law, Confucius does not view reality from the perspective of the “common people” but from the prerogative of an ideal benevolent ruler (which, of course, means nothing more than the need to reconstitute Confucius in the same way Marx proposed doing with Hegel). However, the critical point concerning the importance of recovering reality (class struggle or “casualties of history,” to use Thompson’s phrase in The Making) through the work of “rectification of names” remains paramount. Radical intellectual work of such nominal rectifications is sometimes falsely opposed as secondary interpretation to the primary activist transformation of reality in the manner of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Confucian realism reminds us that the two – interpretation and transformative action – are inseparable ontologically and that, turning Confucius right side up, theoretical and interpretive rectification derives from absorbing the energy and experience of class struggle into our analysis.

<9> By definition, such rectifications can never be definitive or complete so as to result in the disappearance of all the gaps between “terms of interpretation” and “historical evidence” in a perfect, transcendental correspondence. On the side of evidence, historical actors captured in the evidence and their successors change over time through their struggle under new, even if similar, conditions, including in the longer, less readily discernible scheme of biological evolution (Thompson was adamant in citing Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as a formative influence in breaking the “conceptual trap” of teleological vocabulary in Marx toward the empirical method of Capital). On the side of interpretation, words and meanings never match up with perfect precision in actual usage, even for a single individual.

<10> There are of course elementary epistemological questions directly relevant to historical investigation which naturally arise from such “rectification of names” as, for example: what if the evidence is partial and distorted by its author or compiler, as in fact it always necessarily is? Or, even more problematic still, what if there is no evidence at all for the historical figures you are studying, because they were either illiterate or too busy to produce documents expressing their views and experiences? The latter was in fact Thompson’s conundrum because the object of his study were English workers, plebs, and peasants whose “discourse,” he said, were “almost beneath the level of articulacy, appealing to solidarities so deeply assumed that they were almost nameless, and only occasionally finding expression in the (very imperfect) record which we have” (Customs 350). Not given to long, and often impractical and reified, theoretical disquisition on procedural questions on how he practiced history, Thompson only states en passant and very briefly what his solutions might be: to make “comparative enquiry into what is ‘the moral’ (whether as a norm or as a cognitive structure)” and, employing an antinomian term from the tradition of English religious dissent, to decipher extant elite “literature” on the said subaltern discourse in “a Satanic light and read [it] backwards if we are to perceive what the ‘Jolly Tar’ or the apprentice or the Sandgate lass thought about Authority or Methodist preachers” (Making 58).

Illusions of Post-Linguistic-Turn Meta-Theory

<11> The poststructuralist turn in discussions on the “rectification of names” (the innovation of new theoretical vocabularies), however, seems to have muddled up the issue. In his celebrated essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” published three years after Thompson’s visit to China, Ranajit Guha, the eminence grise of Subaltern Studies, lambasted the historical evidence of Indian peasant rebellions under the Raj as irreparably distorted for being written from the British colonialist perspective (official colonial documents Guha named “primary discourse”) while the historiographical interpretations whether in the liberal (“secondary discourse”) or radical (“tertiary discourse”) mode were no less damaged by their respective ideological assumptions, which explained these rebellions as mindless, spontaneous outbreaks or as passive responses to oppression, heedless of the insurgents’ actual, religious consciousness. Apart from the otiose theoretical language (primary-secondary-tertiary discourses), this argument is quite reasonable and we may even recognize the imprint of Thompson’s historiography on it. Consider, for example, the following two passages. The first is from Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class:

In selecting these themes [in the book] I have been conscious, at times, of writing against the weight of prevailing orthodoxies. There is the Fabian orthodoxy, in which the great majority of working people are seen as passive victims of laissez faire, with the exception of a handful of far-sighted organisers (notably, Francis Place). There is the orthodoxy of the empirical, economic historians, in which working people are seen as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series. There is the “Pilgrim’s Progress” orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners – pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth, or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations. Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge. My quarrel with the first and second is that they tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious effort, to the making of history. My quarrel with the third is that it reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as in fact it occurred. Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten (13).

And now Guha:

Yet this consciousness [of the rural masses] seems to have received little notice in the literature on the subject. Historiography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion. The omission is indeed dyed into most narratives by metaphors assimilating peasant revolts to natural phenomena: they break out like thunder storms [sic], heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, infect like epidemics. In other words, when the proverbial clod of earth turns, this is a matter to be explained in terms of natural history. Even when this historiography is pushed to the point of producing an explanation in rather more human terms it will do so by assuming an identity of nature and culture, a hall-mark, presumably of a very low state of civilization and exemplified in ‘those periodical outbursts of crime and lawlessness to which all wild tribes are subject’, as the first historian of the Chuar rebellion put it. Alternatively, an explanation will be sought in an enumeration of causes – of, say, factors of economic and political deprivation which do not relate to the peasant’s consciousness or do so negatively – triggering off rebellion as a sort of reflex action, that is, as an instinctive and almost mindless response to physical suffering of one kind or another (e.g. hunger, torture, forced labour, etc.) or as a passive reaction to some initiative of his superordinate enemy. Either way insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness (46-47).

In the main, what the two men say has more in common with each other than not and, in each way, is an elegant statement about historiographical distortions that plague the study of subaltern and working-class consciousness. However, a few theoretically convoluted elements appear in Guha’s passage, and this is important because Guha is insistent on the would-be subaltern scholar to be crucially vigilant about metaphors and discourse, that is to say, the nature of “rectifying names.” Thus, such a baffling line as “(h)istoriography has been content to deal with the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class, but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion” only invites confusion. It surely begs the question that if we ought to stop treating the peasant rebel “merely as an empirical person,” there will be no way for us to treat him or her at all, except as a “theoretical or abstract person,” such as “an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion.” An individual and, yes, “empirical” peasant rebel is far more complicated than being merely concerned with “praxis called rebellion”; on other occasions or at the same time the rebel may uphold traditional caste hierarchy or fall into collusion with the Raj, just as a colonial officer could serve as a functionary of the British Empire while harboring visceral, even revolutionary, hatred for it. The Japanese New Left thinker Yoshimoto Takaaki – who in many ways parallels the role Thompson has played in the British New Left – calls this sort of actually existing contradictory modes of consciousness and being, whereby a proletarian can be simultaneously a capitalist landlord or act in defense of the status quo that exploits him or her, “absoluteness of relations” [3]. In Guha’s unqualified declarations, the insurgents maintain some sort of pure, unrevealed subaltern consciousness while colonial officers, along with liberal and radical historians, are all lumped together in one grab bag of bad dominant consciousness, only with varying degrees of ideological complicity with domination to distinguish them. Contrast this with Thompson’s evenhanded gesture to the historiographical orthodoxies he criticizes (“Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge”).

<12> Then there is Guha’s statement that “(e)ither way insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness.” But, when Guha dismisses sweepingly the “Cause” of “hunger, torture, forced labour, etc.” as “a phantom surrogate for Reason” in need of exorcism at all cost (why are “Cause” and “Reason” suddenly capitalized here as if they represent false Gods who alienate and externalize subaltern consciousness?), is he not erring a little too much on the side of pure subjectivity? For real historical consciousness of the subalterns – just as Guha’s or my consciousness – never exists in pure form but in some complex relationship to such causes as “hunger, torture, forced labour, etc.” and they would be felt and expressed differently by each member of the subalterns, with his or her own set of experiences, religious beliefs, existential awareness, and so on, yielding the kind of result that another Subaltern Studies scholar Gautam Bhadra observes:

During the Rangpur rebellion of 1783, peasants raised slogans against Devi Singh, saying “Dine zalim kutha asht” (the religion of the oppressor is short). The religious message that teaches submission also forms the basis of rebellion. Again, at the very moment of insurrection, peasants are quite capable of accepting a theory of kingship, such as rajdharma, while rebelling against a particular king. Thus collaboration and resistance, the two elements in the mentality of subalternity, merge and coalesce to make up a complex and contradictory consciousness (95).

I will not quibble here with an idealist trace in Bhadra’s conclusion, which presupposes tacitly an ideal form of “rebellion” against kingship to be one premised on opposition to all kingships (is this not a familiar point made by Marx himself: “The tradition of the dead generation weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living?”), for I think it is generally sound. But, in Guha’s essay, we search in vain for the concrete description of the pristine subaltern consciousness so reviled and misunderstood by the aforementioned triple discourses or an insight into their actual working as Bhadra adduces (and as Guha has also shown elsewhere in his more empirically grounded, historical analysis).

<13> What Guha proceeds to undertake is an abstruse dissection of the triple discourses, followed by a close reading of a couple of colonial documents. This climaxes in a formula he borrows from the structuralist schema of the French thinker Roland Barthes:

C == (a + b)
II
  == (a’+a’’) + (b’ + b’’) II
  == (a1+a2) + a’’ + b’ + (b1+b2+b3) III

The capital “C” stands for the document under scrutiny (“Calcutta Council Acts”), each Roman numeral stands apparently for a particular sequence of “micro-sequence” (in brackets) of actions: “alarm (a) and intervention (b), each of which is made up of a pair of segments – the former of insurrection breaks out (a’) and information received (a’’) and the latter of decision to call up army (b’) and order issued (b’’), one of the constituents in each pair being represented in its turn by yet another linked series – (a1) by atrocities committed and authority defied (a2), and (b’’) by infantry to proceed (b1), artillery to support (b2) and magistrate to co-operate (b3).” Guha reassures us that all these fragmented pieces of a document reassembled in algebraic formulas are not in the least comprehensive but provides some profound discursive insight about “uncertainty” and the sequential propulsion of its “narrative”: “In so far as functional units of the lowest denomination like these are what a narrative has as its syntagmatic relata its course can never be smooth. The hiatus between the loosely cobbled segments is necessarily charged with uncertainty, with ‘moments of risk’ and every micro-sequence terminates by opening up alternative possibilities only one of which is picked up by the next sequence as it carries on with the story” (55). In fact, the only thing here that is “charged with uncertainty” is Guha’s intention to engage in such pretentious, anachronistic exercise.

<14> I do not know if Guha means us to take this as a parody of structuralist “Maoist” analysis. I do not know because, a few pages after alluding to Barthes’s analysis of a James Bond story – from which this formula is apparently taken – he decodes the keywords of such documents in terms of “TERRIBLE” and “FINE,” which he calls “a binary representation made famous by Mao Tse-tung” (e.g., “Insurgents” and “daring and wanton atrocities on the Inhabitants” under the column of “TERRIBLE” and “peasants” and “resistance to oppression” under “FINE”). I wonder if it would be humorless incomprehension on my part to point out that “thriller” is a popular fictional narrative often involving descriptions of crime, well-plotted action, and gripping, if sometimes simplistic and unrealistic, characterizations and that, as much as I may enjoy perusing a Jim Thompson or John Le Carré novel, I fail to see the historiographical merit in drawing an equivalence between such radically different species of writing as an Ian Fleming thriller and a British colonial document of the 1850s, unless Guha intends to indicate some broad British imperialist ideological continuity between the two, separated by more than a century. But the latter does not seem to be the case, as there is no word to that effect, only bloodlessly functionalist description of the aforementioned type. The only reference in justifying this generic confusion between “thriller” and “historical document” is what he says he feels about historical discourse: “because history as the verbal representation by man of his own past is by its very verisimilitude of sharply differentiated choices, that it never ceases to excite. The historical discourse is the world’s oldest thriller.” Were we to take him at his words, we can similarly argue that “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” is the world’s latest intellectual Ouija board, for it fetishizes an abstract theoretical model as the skeleton key in universally decoding ideological biases in historical documents. Guha leaves us circling in the sea of names whose veracity can never be trusted and the project of rectification is all but abandoned.

<15> As for the Maoist “binary representation,” the very fact that such opposing terms as “TERRIBLE” and “FINE” – alongside of “Bourgeois” and “Proletarian,” “the Enemy” and “the People” – were used by Chairman Mao and his successors as a means of state propaganda to mobilize the Chinese population against perceived ideological rivals or for expropriation and exploitation in the interest of the state makes Guha’s appropriation of them confusing, if not downright nonsensical (indeed such a campaign was afoot in post-Maoist China in 1983, the publication year of “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” under the name of “Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign”). Such terms belong precisely to the same domain of ideological assumptions that characterize Indian “elitist historiography of the nationalist or neo-nationalist type” – no less than the “elitist historiography of the colonialist or neo-colonialist type” – that it is the aim of Subaltern Studies of supposedly combating (37).

<16> What is at issue is not that “texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgment and opinion” or that the subaltern consciousness of Indian peasants in revolt against the Raj is active, in possession of its own particular theoretical dimension, and worth retrieving. It is to ask if the way Guha is going about this very critical project of “rectifying human names” (to displace elite historiographical discourses with those of the subaltern or at least their fair and accurate representations) is cluttered in places with unnecessarily complex abstract formulations which do not appear to yield any greater insight than the truism that colonial documents lie and demonize the insurgents. Putting such overweening emphasis on the “prose of counter-insurgency” and the theoretical difficulty of representing subaltern consciousness, as opposed to getting down to the empirical business of reconstructing the “voices of insurgency,” has encouraged in reaction the kind of extreme position found in Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – in which theoretical obsession with rooting out privileged “positionality of investigating subjects” among intellectuals, backed up with excessively abstract, reified “critique of positivism and the defetishization of the concrete,” has led to the paralyzing conclusion that the “subaltern cannot speak” and any intellectual endeavor to give voice to the voiceless is deemed epistemologically and morally suspect (92; 91; 104). When truisms (we should critically unravel the ideological distortions of “elite discourse” and we should be careful about superimposing our hidden privileged assumptions) are stretched beyond their reasonable application into theoretical dogma, then the “name” takes leave of reality and starts behaving autonomously, as a fetishized notion (including, in Spivak’s case, of “defetishization”).

<17> I do not raise these objections against postcolonial history and theory because I share Thompson’s antipathy to contemporary French theorizing, which exploded in his polemic against Althusser when the latter’s ideas were taking root in some segments of the British New Left (as I shall indicate below, I also take a qualified exception to Thompson’s manner of arguing with Althusser, which, if useful in revealing Thompson’s own theoretical predispositions, was not particularly illuminating about Althusser’s ideas in the way he was about, say, Muggeltonian themes in his analysis of Blake). Indeed, there is much of value in the works of Guha and the Subaltern Studies. For example, Guha discusses eloquently Tagore as a critic of statist historiography and as an exponent of “historicality of what is humble and habitual,” observing how Tagore’s call for recovering everyday poetics in history parallels what Henri Lefebvre found in Marc Bloch’s French agrarian history (History at the Limit 94). In contrast to his Barthesian convolution twenty years earlier, here he weaves Indian and European ideas organically as strands in the conception of history that rectifies names in terms of the poetically quotidian experience of labor. But some of the more excessively poststructuralist theoreticism that Guha and particularly Spivak express bear some responsibility for an intellectual trend in which Theory (method of “interpretation”) trumps the actual Practice of interpreting “evidence,” or, in other words, more time is spent on talking about the perils and truisms of interpretation than actually doing it, as if theory of historical discourse could ever be treated apart from its practice in any meaningful way – as with any other discourse or activity – except for the most limited, heuristic purpose. If you cannot swim, you may gain something from reading a manual on swimming instruction, but this will have no bearing on your developing the skill of aquatic mobility unless you enter into the water and actually practice. And certainly you will not pay attention to instructors who have never swum themselves – which, I am quick to add, is not the case with Guha and many of his Subaltern Studies colleagues, who are in the main practicing historians with deep understanding of the empirical method in historical analysis. But it is the case with Hayden White, perhaps the most articulate, learned exponent of treating theoretical discourse in isolation from empirical evidence.

<18> In his “Introduction” to Tropics of Discourse, White disputes a supposed claim of Thompson’s – namely being “concerned quintessentially with ‘concrete historical reality’ rather than with ‘methodology’“ – and characterizes The Making of the English Working Class as a work that many scholars praise, among other things, for its “explicit rejection of methodology and abstract theory” (15). Note the subtle shift between what Thompson is supposed to have claimed to what his scholarly supporters allegedly note as the merit of his work. But this supposed claim turns out to be not quite true because Thompson nowhere rejects “methodology and abstract theory” and, in fact, says explicitly the opposite, that “I know them [Marx and Engels’s texts] as an apprentice and as a practitioner of historical materialism, have employed them in my practice for many years, have tested them, have been indebted to them,” attributing to Giambattista Vico the “the concept of the process of history with a subject” that was “able, in a remarkable way, to hold in simultaneous suspension, without manifest contradiction, a Hegelian, a Marxist, and a structuralist (Levi-Straussian variant) heuristic” (Poverty 217, 277). Where is the hostility for “methodology and abstract theory” that White describes? As White has devoted separate essays on both Marx and Vico, Thompson’s attenuated historical materialism or appropriation of Vico’s methodological principle should surely meet White’s criterion of “theory” in his book. Perhaps White does not consider Thompson’s treatment of these theorists as sufficiently theoretical for some reason, but then that is not a matter of Thompson being one of “the opponents of methodology and abstract theorizing, especially of the down-to-earth, British variety.” No, then that is a matter of difference in the linguistic definition of the terms “theory” and “methodology,” a quandary that the analytical philosophers of “down-to-earth, British variety” may have been more helpful for White to consult (cf. White’s statement “every discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter” and the logical positivists’ verficationist principle of seeking the meaning of a statement in its empirical verifiability).

<19> How does White go about demolishing the straw man of the anti-theoretical bent in The Making of the English Working Class with his discursive theory? He proceeds to tell us how the divisions of the book, far from not being a “consecutive narrative” but only a “group of studies, on related themes” as Thompson claims, in fact make up a consecutive narrative in the four tropological phases of metaphor, metonym, synedoche, and irony:

Part I, entitled “The Liberty Tree,” with its concentration on “popular traditions,” obviously has to do with only a vaguely apprehended class existence; it is working-class consciousness awakening to itself, as the Hegelian would say, but grasping its particularity only in general terms, the kind of consciousness we would call metaphorical, in which working people apprehend their differences from the wealthy and sense their similarity to one another, but are unable to organize themselves except in terms of the general desire for an elusive “liberty.” Part II, entitled “The Curse of Adam,” is a long discourse, in which the different forms of working-class existence, determined by the variety of kinds of work in the industrial landscape, crystallize into distinctive kinds, the whole having nothing more than the elements of a series. The mode of class consciousness described in this section is metonymic…

Part III, entitled “The Working Class Presence,” marks a new stage in the growth of class consciousness, the actual crystallization of a distinctively “working-class” spirit among the laborers…the workers achieved a new sense of unity or identity of the parts with the whole – what we would call synecdochic consciousness…

The account of the fourth phase is shot through with melancholy, product of a perception of an ironic situation, since it marks not only the ascent of class consciousness to self-consciousness but also and at the same time the fatal fracturing of the working-class movement itself. We may call this stage that of irony, for what is involved here was the simultaneous emergence and debilitation of the two ideals which might have given the working-class movement a radical future: internationalism, on one hand, and industrial syndicalism, on the other (Tropic 17-18).

And we might call White’s tropological scheme presented here the “Idea of Meta-Theoretical Megalomania.” For it is not only Thompson’s book that fits these four phases but also Piaget’s theory of child development and Freud’s dream analysis, to say nothing of Nietzsche, Croce, Hegel, Tocqueville, Vico, Burckhardt, Foucault, etc., etc. In White’s view, Thompson’s historical discourse is not so much wrong as right despite himself (that is, despite the already-noted false notion that Thompson is against theory and methodology) because “he has divined or reinvented this theory in the composition of his own discourse” – that is, divined or reinvented White’s theory of tropes. Indeed, the truth of tropological theory is proven precisely by showing up in such disparate discourses as that of Thompson, Freud, and Piaget: “the fact that these three analogous structures appear in the work of thinkers so different in the way they construe the problems of representation and analysis, the aims they set for their discourses, and their consciously held conceptions of the structure of consciousness itself – this fact seems to constitute sufficient reason for treating theory of tropology as a valuable model of discourse, if not of consciousness in general” (Tropic 19).

<20> But White’s logic here is discursively circuitous and solipsistic. What White calls here “analogous structures” is not a “structure” in any meaningful sense, that is, based on a universal, verifiable structure of human cognition. The only reason they – the above-cited “four master tropes” – could function as “meta-historical” categories is because White says so, or, rather, the literary tradition of rhetorical figures White is amplifying in contemporary terms says so. But why should we consider the literary language of rhetorical tradition – moreover, Western rhetorical tradition – the “meta-language” to unveil “analogical structures” in different disciplines? This is something that requires an argument beyond the tautological, as the one he is presenting. For one can argue the same for Confucian tropes of Jen (benevolence), Li (order), Yi (righteousness), Hsiao (reverence), and Chih (moral wisdom) as the “five master tropes” that could decipher the “analogical structures” of all discourses and, as they have done for millennia and continue to do so today – if to a more diminished extent – for more than half of the Earth’s population. That Thompson’s narrative about the English working class features the Jen of their struggles to ameliorate the conditions of capitalist disorder brought upon the tradition of their artisan crafts, fueled by the vision of Li found in their moral economy and the writings of Tom Paine, practicing the Yi of open and egalitarian membership in the London Correspondence Society, showing Hsiao to their venerable tradition of the “free-born Englishman,” and drawing from the Chih of Christian values that disputed the narrow, self-serving class interests of the Established Church. Such a “theory” may be an interesting exercise in adapting Confucian language and rethinking its principles in domains heretofore considered alien to it, but it will be as tautological as White’s own rhetorical tropes.

<21> To avoid misunderstanding, let me add: I am not issuing here an eviction notice against tautologies. In many respects, tautology is part and parcel of language use; in fact, one could very well argue that it constitutes its very essence: a name is a “tautology” of its referent, a metaphor is a “tautology” of what it seeks to describe, an analytical exposition is a “tautology” of the phenomena it is explaining, and rich, sometimes fascinating, often tedious, debates in theology, politics, philosophy, etc., are fought over rectifying the quality or limits of these tautologies. But what I object to is for any discursive tradition to claim tautologically that it has the best ware on offer, that it could resolve the discrepancies among all branches of human knowledge and thought as long as they bow down before their set of master tropes, be it White’s rhetorical tropes, Confucianism, Marxism, or logical positivism. That is the intellectual equivalent of building the Tower of Babel and, although there will be no deity to punish and disperse such builders to the ends of the earth, they already suffer effectively from such a consequence, namely to suffer isolation in the prison of their own theoretical naming and to entertain the delusion that these names possess some omniscient explanatory power.

<22> White has written that “the tropolgical theory of discourse could provide us with a way of classifying different kinds of discourses by reference to the linguistic modes that predominate in them rather than by reference to supposed ‘content’ which are always identified differently by different interpreters” (Tropic 21). This unquestionably erudite, grandiloquent project of Adamic classification (“rectification of all names”) is impossible. For the notion of such “tropological theory,” no more than any other discourse, as a transcendental “master discourse” is, like the theoretical physics’ dream for a theory of everything, just that, a dream, that is, in White’s case, the “private language” of rhetorical tropes passing itself off as a universal language that connects all languages. It is a rhetorical equivalent of a Linnaean taxonomy and circumvents the obvious problem: such figures of speech as “metaphor,” “metonymy,” “synecdoche,” and “irony” can never be defined in any rigorous sense and, applied broadly in White’s loosely capacious sense, become virtually meaningless (or themselves “metaphors” of a metaphor in a general sense). Moreover, no practicing historian, psychoanalyst, or child educator, for example, could obtain anything of practical value from White’s theory because knowing that they can describe and classify what they are doing under the file name “metonymy” or “irony” adds nothing to actually analyzing a historical document, treating a mentally ill patient, or raising children.

<23> This does not mean that knowledge must be immediately instrumentalist in producing practical results in its respective field or the type of analogical discourse in which White excels is without any value. That is not the case. White’s work (in many ways analogous to that of Kenneth Burke) is perhaps the most successful contemporary attempt in resuscitating the tradition of classical Western humanist education, in ways that the so-called stalwart defenders of the Western canon in the Culture Wars can rarely hope to match. The very fact that White can read ably across the classics in disciplines of the humanities, from Marx and Vico to Freud and Foucault, and reconfigure them coherently with nothing more than the tools of rhetorical tropes in his saddle is highly impressive, at times even edifying. However, what I object to is false advertisement, the Babelian claim of rhetoric as a universal theory of discourse. As humanizing an effect as White’s work may exert and as rightly hesitant as he should be “in suggesting that they [tropes] are the key to the understanding of the problem of interpretation in such proto-scientific field as history,” to then embolden himself in discarding such hesitation and present it as the master key to historical discourse on the strength of nothing more than the examples of Kenneth Burke and Vico is, again, circuitous and unconvincing. Burke and Vico did say many interesting things about rhetoric and philology, even supplying in Vico’s case a theoretical orientation to such practicing historians as Marx and Thompson, but they did not write history. This does not mean that historians have something particularly illuminating to say about the theory of what they practice; they may very well speak a lot of nonsense about how they are free of value or are producing an objective interpretation of a document (indeed I disagree with White’s characterization of history as a “proto-science,” although it is a field that requires a certain degree of empirical verification as well as creative speculations). But it does mean that the only place to learn theory of doing something is in its very practice and, if you want to produce better history, you study the work of good historians and write history yourself. As Thompson himself puts it:

For it [dialectics] was not a method but a practice, and a practice learned through practising. So that, in this sense, dialectics can never be set down, nor learned by rote. They may be learned only by critical apprenticeship within the same practice (Poverty 306).

The separation of theory and practice is therefore an ideological, discursive illusion, just as the mind-body problem arguably has been in the real “proto-scientific” literature that lies in developmental proximity to the natural sciences [4].

The Political Economy of Sraffa’s Neapolitan Gesture

<24> Earlier I have indicated a rough analogy between the self-consciousness about rhetorical language in Hayden White’s tropological theory and analytical philosophy’s preoccupation with how language articulates meaning in an empirically verifiable manner. This self-conscious concern on the part of analytical philosophy corresponds historically with the stylistic self-consciousness of modernist literature, from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett and William Faulkner, whose narratives are as much about what they are describing – which often deal with self-reflexive themes such as the consciousness of the artist or of the regional geography from whence the author hails – as about how that narrative is constructed. The postmodern metaficitonal novels of William Gaddis and Gilbert Sorrentino in many ways press forward such discursive self-consciousness (and, in a self-conscious fashion, as Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew pays explicit homage to Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds, which also impressed Joyce) to a fragmentary breaking point. It was as if modernist literature’s new experimental forms that held a dazzling possibility for new cohesive aesthetic totality (what was Ulysses if not an ambitious attempt at aesthetically totalizing Joyce’s Dublin and the modern Irish historical experience in the microcosm of a single day?) fell on hard times and realized that the most it could do was to be content with the fragment, hazards of memory, even if risking the necessity of incoherence in its description (I would include here as well the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and other writers of the so-called Nouveau Roman).

<25> I am not pointing out this stylistic shift in twentieth-century literature in order to rehash all the old familiar chestnuts about literary discourse’s movement from the possibility of totality to the resignation with the fragment, from the slender affirmation of the author to its untimely demise, and how such a shift follows the historical shift in the possibility of social revolutions that threatened to transcend capitalism and imperialism altogether in various, intermittent moments of the twentieth century to their overall defeats and closures more recently, punctured only by a subversive jolt here and an insurgent blow there. That is a ground covered ably, for example, in Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or a Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism or, more polemically and irreverently, in Terry Eagleton’s Illusions of Postmodernism. I am pointing rather to how this declension from the high narrative hopes of high modernism to the modest, sometimes excessively incursive uncertainty of avant-garde postmodernism mirrors the fate of analytical philosophy, from its halcyon, “revolutionary” days of claiming to do away with all the problems of philosophy by cutting off all inquiries other than language as metaphysical nonsense (emblematized by the early Wittgenstein’s oracular statement that ends Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”) to its later sober, more modest recognition of the impossibility of such a sweeping analytical ambition (where the focus is on determining the limits of empirical verification, the extent of necessary uncertainty that creeps invariably into linguistic meaning).

<26> Antonio Negri, after the late Althusser, claims that the “‘linguistic turn’ that philosophy has proposed with Wittgenstein and after Wittgenstein…is a historical turn; it shows the passage of the dominants of the productive structure from material production to immaterial production” (“Later Althusser” 63). Although Negri’s argument about the epochal transition from material to immaterial production is highly doubtful (as Yoshimoto argues in What Is Beauty for Language, linguistic expression has its own historically autonomous logic that has no one-to-one correspondence with the realm of material production), at the more general level of philosophical discourse his point about “a historical turn” is most likely true. However, in order to gain some hints on the proper way to “rectify names,” it might be helpful to look at not so much the nature of this “historical turn” but at how the recent philosophical debate over names (really an ongoing debate between nominalism and realism since Plato and Aristotle and the medieval Islamic and European theologians) played out in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and Thompson’s polemic with Althusser.

<27> A.J. Ayer, the leading British analytical philosopher, took his theoretical cue from Bertrand Russell and sat at the foot of the Vienna Circle that was chiefly responsible for the breakthrough in logical positivism [5]. His intellectual and political milieu overlapped with E.P. Thompson’s. Ayer was a lifelong democratic socialist who sought to revive the political legacy of Tom Paine, viewing Paine’s Agrarian Justice as “a remarkable anticipation of the humane principles of the Welfare State” (Thomas Paine 9) and whose most influential text Language, Truth and Logic was published by Victor Gollancz, who also published The Making of the English Working Class and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. And Thompson’s 1960 insurgent New Left essay “Outside the Whale,” which lambasted the political apathy and collusion of the 1950s erstwhile leftwing intellectuals, begins with a bristling attack on a journalist’s demeaning account of Bertrand Russell’s 1955 speech at a Labor Party meeting (Poverty 1-2).

<28> Ayer reminisces in his autobiography that, although the Vienna Circle was apolitical as a whole, its rejection of metaphysics offended the dominant Catholic establishment in Austria and, in one instance (Otto Neurath, who reminded Ayer of a humorously charming, attractive “marshmallow”), led to the practice of revolutionary socialist activity, including holding public office in the short-lived revolutionary Spartacist government in Munich (Part of My Life 130-131). Wittgenstein’s interest in joining the Communists – and deciding against it on grounds of their dogmatism – has often been acknowledged, but equally well-known is how the catalyst for the radical change or “epistemological rupture” between the early and late Wittgenstein was prompted by an informal discussion with a radical, neo-Ricardian economist.

<29> The economist was Piero Sraffa, a friend of Antonio Gramsci (Sraffa supplied the books Gramsci needed in prison for his notebooks), and Wittgenstein considered the weekly talks with Sraffa an urgent necessity, an uncharacteristic attitude for a temperamentally volatile figure who held virtually all of his philosophical colleagues at one time or another in contempt. His major English biographer suspects that Wittgenstein’s attachment to Sraffa derived from, besides the latter’s genial intelligence, his lack of interest in talking philosophy or mathematics. Sraffa was the man Wittgenstein entrusted enough to ask for advice about his desire to go back to Austria, motivated by his concern for his family after the German annexation of the country and Wittgenstein followed Sraffa’s advice by not returning and instead seeking a teaching position at Cambridge (Monk 260-261).

<30> During one of their weekly meetings, Wittgenstein was holding forth excitedly that the proposition and its description must have the same “logical form.” In reply, Sraffa “made a Neapolitan gesture for brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: ‘What is the logical form of that?’” – which gave a great jolt to Wittgenstein, forcing him to rethink his conceptual framework (Monk 392-395). This incident led Wittgenstein to rethink of “language” as a “tool” whose activity took place in a living context (“stream of life”) and to view philosophy’s function as one of helping to clarify the connections between different language uses, and he acknowledged how much this anthropological paradigm-shift in Philosophical Investigations owed to his conversations with Sraffa: “I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book” (Philosophical Investigations vi).

<31> This Sraffian gesture worked primarily because Wittgenstein was receptive to its significance in relation to what he had been wrestling with on the philosophical terrain. It is not only the gesture as such but also the exchange of which it was a constitutive part that gives it significance. A moody, proud, and eccentrically temperamental philosopher – whom many in the field considered a veritable personification of “genius” – hectors obtusely as if he is the Creator of Language: “the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solutions of the problems”; “Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are false but nonsensical...[They] arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language” (Tractatus 5, 37). Indeed, this is how Tractatus is written, with its opening lines that resemble a stylistically Spartan version of the story of origination and multiplication of life found at the beginning of Genesis:

The world is all that is the case.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

The facts in logical space are the world.

The world divides into facts (7).

To which an Italian émigré economist, fed up with the philosopher’s annoying harangue about his meta-theoretical delusions of grandeur, gives him the finger in the brusque manner of a stick-striking Zen master: “Understand the logic of this!” The absurd irreconcilability of the encounter forces the philosopher to develop a more down-to-earth (relational) concept of language: “Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, – but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language’” (Philosophical Investigations 31). In fact, it even induces the philosopher to express himself differently, from the early work’s cold, sparse statements, punctuated by formulations of mathematical logic and devoid of any asides, let alone sense of humor, to the late work’s more conversational, digressive style that shifts in the first few pages from Augustine’s Confessions to Lewis Carroll, with even a child-like sketch of a “duck-rabbit” and smiley face to illustrate different meanings of the word “seeing.” Obviously, Wittgenstein’s trust in Sraffa as a sympathetic, intelligent interlocutor and openness to rethink his own assumptions allowed him to apprehend the encounter as a genuine living exchange (instead of, for instance, taking offense and storming out of the room, as he was wont to do on other occasions with different people), and this was what helped him to so radically rectify his ideas about language (science and art of naming).

<32> But there is more to it than the simple issue of intellectual trust here. Sraffa’s gesture is quite literally a vocabulary of the Neapolitan working class. In 1832 Andrea De Jorio, an eminent Italian archaeologist, antiquarian, and curator of what is today the Naples National Archaeological Museum, published his classic ethnography of gestures, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (The mime of the ancients investigated through Neapolitan gestures) and, in La mimica, the gesture that most closely resembles the one Sraffa exhibited to Wittgenstein is what he calls “Negativa”:

Extremities of the fingers under the chin. Wishing to express “I, no,” before point the external extremities of the fingers under the chin (see Negativa No. 6), one just touches the fontanelle of the neck in order to denote ‘I’ (see the title Me, a me) and, in continuation, the gesture indicated is accomplished, in order to express the negative. In the same manner one can instantaneously couple the gesture denoting tu (‘you’) or quello (‘that fellow’) in order to say “You, no,” or “That fellow, no” (399).

De Jorio intended his book to demonstrate to “those superficial writers who too often like to impute ignorance to our low people” that “if ever they maintain that our low people are lacking in natural philosophy, in talent, in spirit they are in error” (10). For De Jorio, the gestures of the Neapolitan commoners are a living depository of natural philosophy, talent, and spirit inherited from ancient customs. He criticizes those Bambocciate – “paintings of scenes of popular life, especially rustic and grotesque” – which expressed “tedious monotony” in representing these gestures, capturing “none of that vivacity or spirit that is so characteristic of our street-vendors or the others that converse with them,” and aimed to “portray the lively and vivid incidents that accompany such characters” as “the water-seller, the fruit-seller, the fish-vendor, the Cantatore di Rinaldo [‘public storyteller or balladeer who, on the waterfront or in the piazzas of Naples, recited the deeds of Rinaldo and other great heroes from the Chanson du Roland, Ariostos’s Orlando Furioso, and others’]” (6).

<33> De Jorio’s notion of Neapolitan gestures as the “natural philosophy” of the “low people” is similar to Gramsci’s theory of “spontaneous philosophy” that Thompson discusses in the Introduction to Customs in Common, though Gramsci developed it more fully as the fund of critical ideas and values of class antagonism. Spontaneous philosophy expresses itself in either language, common sense, or popular folklore and religion, and, among the three, Thompson especially underscores “‘common sense’ or praxis” which “derived from shared experiences in labour and in social relations…with fellow workers and with neighbours of exploitation, hardship and repression, which continually exposes the text of the paternalist theater to ironic criticism and (less frequently) to revolt” (10-11). What shocked Wittgenstein out of his philosophical slumber was then working-class spontaneous philosophy as materialized in the Neapolitan gesture of negation, forcing a major rectification in his reified theory of linguistic meaning toward the everyday, concrete, and gestural recognized as philosophical expressions in their own right.

<34> Sraffa’s own intellectual contribution lies in rectifying the language of economics, and a leading Sraffian scholar sees his economic method as analogous to that of the late Wittgenstein’s work [6]. Sraffa’s most important book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (published just as Thompson was slinging his arrows against the Cold War ideology in “Outside the Whale”), seeks to do this by arguing against the neoclassical theory of aggregate capital in favor of a classical theory of value based on the falling rate of profit and machinery as dated labor. The ensuing Cambridge capital controversy, pitting Sraffa and Joan Robinson’s “neo-Ricardian” side at Cambridge against the neoclassical orthodoxy of Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow at MIT, appears retrospectively limited by the shared assumption that a more accurate economic modeling (“rectification of names”) could be achieved by way of either neoclassical or refurbished classical theory. What was most productive in Sraffa’s work is the insertion of a critical wedge into the neoclassical marginal theory of utility by pointing out its circular logic in which rate of profit was treated straightforwardly as a product of the quantity of capital and by showing how the rate of profit in fact plays a determining role in the quantity of capital. This reversal, or “reswitching” as is known in the technical literature, smashed the neoclassical assumption that profit and capital-intensive technology were necessarily connected, helped dethrone the unquestioned supremacy of private capital in generating profit, and opened the way to raise critical questions concerning the distribution of wealth from a purely economic perspective. As an economist opines, “By demolishing the theoretical credibility (if not the ideological credibility) of the marginal productivity theory of distribution, neo-Ricardian theory has severed the link between the productive contribution of capital goods and the pecuniary return to the owners of capital” but “this attack is on the ownership of capital rather than on the relation of capital itself” (Lebowitz 28).

<35> Were we to take the subtitle of Sraffa’s book – “prelude to the critique of economic theory” – at its face value and relate it to the subtitle of Marx’s magnum opus (“Critique of Political Economy”), we register both the former’s theoretical modesty (“prelude” as opposed to critique proper) and tacit political retreat: Sraffa’s objective is not to do away with neoclassical “economic theory” as the last remaining ideological vestige of political economy but to repair its shortcomings in order to complete political economy. Such an objective is not Sraffa’s alone but shared by many so-called radical economists: when you get caught up in the “transformation problem” (i.e., how to “transform” value into prices) and exclude labor-power as the defining commodity within capitalism, as Sraffa did, or when you incorporate Taylorist scientific management in a nominally “socialist” state, as Lenin proposed doing in 1918 [7], you are still defining questions and imposing alienated labor through the fetishistic prism of capitalist presuppositions:

…the nature of a theory such as that of Sraffa, which clinging to use-value, observes only a world of commodities (but not labour-power as a commodity); which incorporates past labour, science and nature within technique (and separates this from living labour); and which attributes production of a surplus not to social labour and the specific social relationship within which it is performed but to technique itself (to nature, science and technology). Such a theory is simply a theory of alienated economics

…Neo-Ricardian economics describes a world in which the development of productive forces has separated scientific labour and the technological application of science from direct labour, a bewitched world in which science and technology are viewed as independent and alien powers. It is a theory which does not go beyond the way matters appear to the participants in capitalist production (Lebowitz 27).

In other words, Sraffa’s economic theory reproduces the reified assumptions in both classical and neoclassical economics, in which capital and technology appear to operate autonomously outside of historically dynamic social relations. It needs a Neapolitan gesture of proletarian negativa in its turn, as a reminder that the logical structure of political economy must be seen and smashed from the perspective of the class struggle.

Universal Discourse of Class Struggle

<36> Piero Sraffa collaborated with the Marxian economist Maurice Dobb in editing David Ricardo’s works and correspondence, which were published in 1951-55, immediately prior to the composition of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Eric Hobsbawm points to Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism as “the major historical work which was to influence us [the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, in which the Thompsons, Dorothy and Edward, were also involved] crucially…and which formulated our main and central problem” (“The Historians’ Group” 23). Thompson seems to endorse this view when he writes that Studies in the Development of Capitalism “re-examined” Marx’s “suggestive final chapter of Volume One on ‘Primitive Accumulation’” and was an important part of the British Marxist historians’ “critical apprenticeship” to the “‘historical’ chapters of Capital” which “have inevitably had a stronger formative influence upon the British tradition of Marxist historiography than that of any other country” (Poverty 390 n. 72). However, the postcolonial historian Bill Schwarz has justifiably wondered if “Dobb’s insistence on the centrality of abstraction to marxist history, as exemplified in Marx’s own unique political economy in Capital” is not “at odds with Thompson’s dismissal of the mature Marx” (50). Perhaps the most balanced view on the matter is to see the historical hypotheses in Studies in the Development of Capitalism as having had the strongest impact on Thompson and the British Marxist historians in framing their problematic, not Dobb and Sraffa’s project of reconstructing the abstract economic categories of political economy [8].

<37> Given his outright rejection of interpreting Marx as a political economist, Thompson would have most likely agreed with the critical assessment of Sraffa as a neo-Ricardian rebuilder of political economy. In his 200-plus-pg. diatribe (“The Poverty of Theory”) against Althusser, he criticizes Grundrisse on this very ground:

Marx, at the time of the Grundrisse, did not so much remain within the structure of “Political Economy” as develop an anti-structure, but within its same premises. The postulates ceased to be the self-interest of men and became the logic and forms of capital, to which men were subordinated; capital was disclosed, not as the benign donor of benefits, but as the appropriator of surplus labour; factional “interests” were disclosed as antagonistic classes; and contradiction displaced the sum progress. But what we have at the end, is not the overthrow of “Political Economy” but another “Political Economy” (252).

At the time Marx’s sprawling economic manuscripts of 1857-61 were gaining attention as a new source of rethinking Marx – as his Economic and Philosophic Mss. of 1844 had done for an earlier period – but Thompson seems unaware of the possibility of reading this document as a work of revolutionary agency and working-class antagonism hurled at the very structure of capital, i.e. that of Political Economy, as for example Antonio Negri was doing at the time in a seminar hosted by Althusser at the École Normale Superieuré:

[Grundrisse] is also a political text that conjugates an appreciation of the revolutionary possibilities created by the “imminent crisis” together with the theoretical will to adequately synthesize the communist actions of the working class faced with this crisis: the Grundrisse is a dynamics of this relationship…The objectification of categories in Capital blocks action by revolutionary subjectivity. Is it not the case...that the Grundrisse is a text dedicated to revolutionary subjectivity? Does it not reconstruct what the Marxist tradition has too often torn apart, that is to say the unity of the constitution and the strategic project of working class subjectivity? (8)

What is interesting is the extent to which Negri’s assessment of Capital (“The objectification of categories in Capital blocks action by revolutionary subjectivity”) is on the same wavelength as the conclusion Thompson draws about the book: “Capital was not an exercise of a different order to that of mature bourgeois Political Economy, but a total confrontation within that order. As such, it is both the highest achievement of ‘political economy’, and it signals the need for its supersession by historical materialism”; “the structure of Capital remains marked by the categories of his antagonist, notably economy itself” (257). Both Thompson and Negri share a criticism of Roman Rosdolsky’s reconstruction of Capital. Furthermore, Thompson is not entirely dismissive of the insights found in the Grundrisse, quoting one of its passages as a useful metaphorical antidote in reconstituting class struggle against the base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism:

I am therefore employing a terminology of class conflict while resisting the attribution of identity to a class…it seems to me that the metaphor of field-of-force can co-exist fruitfully with Marx’s comment in the Grundrisse, that:

In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign every other production and its relations their rank and influence. It is a general illumination in which all other colours are plunged and which modifies their specific tonalities. It is a special ether which defines the specific gravity of everything found in it.

What Marx describes in metaphors of ‘rank and influence’, ‘general illuminations’ and ‘tonalities’ would today be offered in more systematic structuralist language: terms sometimes so hard and objective-seeming (as with Althusser’s ‘repressive’ and ‘ideological state apparatuses’) that they disguise the fact that they are still metaphors which offer to congeal a fluent social process. I prefer Marx’s metaphor; and I prefer it, for many purposes, to his subsequent metaphors of ‘basis’ and ‘superstructure’ (“Eighteenth-Century English Society” 151-2).

Thompson is in effect saying here that Marx’s chromatic metaphor in the Grundrisse broke the bounds of “objective-seeming” reified categories of class and economic determinism, as it made the class struggle the real grundrisse (“foundation”) from which we must rebuild our theoretical vocabulary. Although differing in their analytical accents, Negri and Thompson are both redefining the language of Marxism to not “congeal a fluent social process” but to reinvigorate its fluency to a point that class as a separate category can disintegrate, as it does in the actuality of experience.

<38> In the summer of 1978 the American Marxist economist Harry Cleaver – later co-translator of Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx – traveled to Europe and met Negri in Italy. He handed Negri a draft of the introduction to Reading Capital Politically and learned about the latter’s reinterpretation of Grundrisse. Upon reading Marx Beyond Marx, Cleaver “discovered that there were certain parallels in our interpretations, along with many differences” (13). One major difference involved, contra Negri and Thompson, the possibility of reading the categories in Capital against the capitalist structure of political economy [9]:

…it is too easy to interpret Marx as accepting as natural fact the relations he is laying out. To do so involves an error, often repeated by Marxist political economists, of seeing Marx’s analysis of the commodity-form as different from that of classical political economy only by its correctness…He is showing the ideal structure that capital tries to impose and the way it at once achieves and camouflages this imposition through the mediation of commodities – a camouflage which is reproduced fetishistically in the economic theory of the invisible hand.

Our problem is different than Marx’s one of exposition. To understand the theory of value in Chapter One is to see how to do what Marx tells us we must do: integrate the discussion of the commodity-form into our understanding of the class relations which he developed further on in Capital and which we are today extending even further. To do this we must bring to bear on a reading of this first chapter all our knowledge and interpretations of the rest of Capital and of the class struggle it analyzes [emphasis in the original] (79).

Cleaver calls this interpretive approach to Marx “a strategic reading” because “it seeks in Marx’s thought only weapons for use in class war” (29). This was an approach that grew out of his work with the Zerowork Collective, which brought to the United States in the mid-1970s the kind of autonomist Marxist analysis that Negri and his comrades in the Italian New Left were developing. It was not only Cleaver who was thinking about class struggle along this strategic line.

<39> In his conversation with Yoshimoto Takaaki, also in 1978, Michel Foucault – whom Thompson dismisses as Althusser’s “former pupil, who…gives us history as a subject-less structure, and one in which men and women are obliterated by ideologies” (“Poverty” 387 n.34) – suggested a need for producing a strategic theory of class struggle:

…even though Marx has certainly spoken of it, there is a term that is today accepted virtually as obsolete. That is the term “class struggle,” and perhaps, if we stand on the perspective such as the one I just mentioned, does it not become possible to rethink afresh this term? For example, Marx has certainly said that the motor of history is the class struggle, and, subsequently, many people have repeated these words. Indeed that is an unmistakable fact, and sociologists have brought up ad nauseam the debates concerning what a class is and what person belongs in that class. But heretofore there has been no one who has examined and investigated what struggle is. What is a struggle when we say “class struggle”? In the form of struggle that is conflict or war, how is that battle developed, how is it played with what objectives and with what means? On what rational claim is the battle based? What I want to discuss, with Marx as a starting point, is not such problems as those of the sociology of class but the strategic methods concerning struggle. That is the interest I show in Marx and that is the point from which I want to propose my problems.

And struggle occurs and develops around me everywhere. For example, the problem of Narita, and the struggle Mr. Yoshimoto had waged in the public square in front of the Diet over the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Treaty in 1960, France also has its struggles, and there are struggles in Italy as well. To the extent that these are battles, they come within the field of vision in my thinking. For example, the Communist Party, when thinking about this problem of the struggle, only asks questions such as which class do you belong to, are you undertaking this struggle as a representative of the proletarian class, and not about the struggle itself, its strategic dimension such as what the struggle is never becomes a problem. The concern for me is rather the nature of the event that is the relations of the struggle themselves. On the point of who has gone into the struggle with whom and with what means, also why is there a struggle, and what does that struggle make its basis? [emphasis added] (Yoshimoto Sekai-ninshiki 26-27)

Foucault refers to two specific Japanese struggles, in reverse chronology: farmers’ struggle against the construction of the Narita Airport (initiated in 1966, with intense confrontations with the riot police in 1971, continuing to this day) and the mass anti-U.S.-Japan-Mutual-Security-Agreement (Anpo) demonstration against the Diet in 1960. The anti-Anpo struggle catapulted Yoshimoto as a leading intellectual supporting the Bunto (Bund), the major ecumenical current of the national Japanese student organization Zengakuren that mobilized the protest through direct action and ushered in the New Left as a movement. The anti-Anpo protest was aimed at the substantively undemocratic political nature of the state while the anti-Narita struggle (popularly known as “Sanrizuka struggle” because the construction site in Narita directly affected those in the city’s Sanrizuka and Shibayama sections) was against the developmentalist logic of capital as embodied by the state. Taken together, they signified the reconstitution of the class struggle, both in terms of its objectives (politics and economics as an indissoluble terrain of struggle) and composition (Revolutionary Marxist Faction, a sectarian Trotskyist group that came out of the anti-Anpo struggle, was expelled from the Sanrizuka movement for denigrating it as an expression of “petty-bourgeois farmers’ self-preservation” as they applied dogmatically the obsolescent, vanguardist industrial notion of the “class struggle”). In 1978 New Left activists involved in the Sanrizuka conflict organized a series of sabotages: occupying the air traffic control tower and setting ablaze the Keisei Electric Railway’s Skyliner train. The occupation and the ensuing clash with the riot police at the airport delayed the opening of the Narita Airport by two months.

<40> Foucault also alludes more generally to the movements of the Italian and French New Left: May 1968 and its Maoist militants with whom he engaged in direct action at the University of Vincennes, the Italian extra-parliamentary-left movement that inspired Negri and his comrades to reconceptualize Marx as a theorist of revolutionary subjectivity and class composition. For Foucault, however, the “decisive” political experience was not May ’68 but the far riskier, lesser known struggle that the Tunisian student militants waged through boycotts and strikes, against which the state responded with violence and imprisonment:

In Tunisia, on the contrary, everyone was drawn into Marxism with radical violence and intensity and with a staggeringly powerful thrust. For those young people, Marxism did not represent merely a way of analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied. And I felt disillusioned and full of bitterness to think of how much of a difference there was between the way the Tunisian students were Marxists and what I knew of the workings of Marxism in Europe (France, Poland, etc.). So, Tunisia, for me, represented in some ways the chance to reinsert myself in the political debate. It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68 in a third-world country (Remarks on Marx 135-6).

One of Foucault’s most important acts of political reinsertion in this period was his participation in the prisoners’ movement, as he helped organize and run the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), whose major objective was to document the “intolerable” conditions and experiences of prisoners in their own words. Although the project never materialized, he also proposed drawing up a similar “history from below” for a new radical paper Libération, a series of columns entitled “Chronicle of the Workers’ Memory”:

Workers have in their heads fundamental experiences, the results of great struggles: the Popular Front, the Resistance. But the newspapers, books, and unions keep only what suits them, when they don’t just forget about it altogether. Because of all this forgetting, it is impossible to profit from the knowledge and experience of the working class. It would be interesting to use the newspaper to collect all these memories, to recount them, and above all to make them the basis for defining potential instruments of struggle (quoted in Eribon 252-253).

Foucault is adamant that an intellectual’s role is “not to form the workers’ consciousness, since that already exists, but to allow this consciousness, this workers’ knowledge, to enter the information system and be circulated” in order to “help other workers, and other people who are not workers, to become aware of what is happening.” He offers a formulation on history and experience that Thompson would have approved of: “We can say this: the intellectual’s knowledge is always partial in relation to the worker’s knowledge. What we know about the history of French society is entirely partial in relation to all the vast experience that the working class has” (Eribon 253). Although Foucault did not write Discipline and Punish in the way he was thinking about the “Chronicle of the Workers’ Memory,” [10] it emerged directly out of such political experiences that expressed new forms of class struggle. He intended his readership to go beyond an academic, intellectual one that usually greeted his work: “I know that people concerned with the prisons, lawyers, educators, prison visitors, not to mention the prisoners themselves, have read it; and it was precisely such people I was addressing to begin with” (Politics 101). Although the book deals largely with the discursive and institutional power of incarceration in an analytical framework reminiscent of the Frankfurt School (Foucault once said, “if I encountered the Frankfurt School while young, I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life but the job of commenting on them”), at the end it cites the utopian socialist La Phalange’s analysis of the prison system and describes its “echo” in the anarchist criticism of the latter half of the nineteenth century as one that “posed the political problem of delinquency…thought to recognize in it the most militant rejection of law…tried not so much to heroize the revolt of the delinquents as to disentangle delinquency from the bourgeois legality and illegality that had colonized it…wished to re-establish or constitute the political unity of popular illegalities” (Remarks 119-120; Discipline 292). Far from endorsing an omniscient conception of power from above, Foucault concludes emphatically: “ultimately what presides over all these [“carceral”] mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy” and “in this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for discourses that are themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle” (308). In the 1970s, through GIP and other political actions, Foucault joined fellow militants in making this “distant roar of battle” immediate, to articulate the strategy of class struggle in action.

<41> Yoshimoto’s initial reaction to Foucault’s work was to place it critically within the category of structuralism but his rereading of The Order of Things convinced him otherwise. He saw it express a “universal method” of tremendous “binding force” that could combine organically the analysis of grammar, natural history, and economics, deeming it a revolutionary document analogous to the first volume of Capital:

Although there are philosophers before and after Foucault, this is a book completely of a different order from theirs, a book that I think could be a kind of a Bible. If we were talking about Marx, it would be one that corresponds with the first volume of Capital. If somebody assumes this method and crafted something like Lenin’s State and Revolution, just by doing that I think State and Revolution will turn upside down. I think it’s a book of such significance (Yoshimoto Takaaki kenkyu-kai 36).

In 1968, without recourse to The Order of Things (which was published two years earlier) and working from a radical rethinking of Marx and Japanese ethnology, Yoshimoto crafted in his own right a powerful work that turned the world of the state upside down. This was Communal Illusion, which smashed the structure and ideology of the Japanese state through the analysis of laws, rituals, customs, taboos, shamanism, and legends that arose out of the Japanese commons – many of the militants in the Japanese student movements treated it as their “Bible” as they clashed with the riot police and occupied the university buildings. Yoshimoto approached the question of Marxist politics in a somewhat circuitous fashion in 1976 when he published Last Shinran, a radical reinterpretation of a seminal thirteenth-century Buddhist priest who, according to Yoshimoto, effectively dissolved Buddhism as a religion. Yoshimoto was a consistent opponent of the Japanese Communist Party and sectarian permutations of the New Left, formulating a notion he termed taishū no genzō (“original image of the people/multitude”) against the idealized conception of the politically conscious working class or the revolutionary vanguard. Taishū no genzō sought to capture the movement of the speechless subalterns, the “silent majority,” people completely subsumed in the work of subsistence. Last Shinran advances this argument further, that in the face of the struggles of the taishū, religion (which is a form that radical intellectual discourse assumed in medieval Japan) must dissolve itself. In other words, it is everyday experience and struggle that matter most and revolutionary theory is only meaningful to the extent that it is able to literally disintegrate itself autonomously within them.

<42> Thompson, who in many ways played Yoshimoto’s analogous role for the British New Left, published “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without ‘Class?’” in the same year that Yoshimoto and Foucault had met. In this essay Thompson refers to Peter Linebaugh’s “The Tyburn Riots against the Surgeons” in Albion’s Fatal Tree, a collective work of the Warwick school of social history spearheaded by Thompson: “Linebaugh shows us the rioter as being motivated by solidarity with the sufferer, respect for the sufferer’s kin, and notions of the respect due to the integrity of the corpse and to the ritual of burial which are part of the beliefs about death widely dispersed in the society” in opposition to the representation of the “rioter as an archaic figure, motivated by the ‘debris’ of older patterns of thought…with a reference to death-superstitions and le rois thaumaturges” (157). In other words, as with the reified structure of political economy, mainstream historical studies suppressed working-class agency and antagonism by way of idealist theorizing about “death-superstitions and le rois thaumaturges” and it is the task of radical history to break this ideological spell by bringing class struggle to the forefront of the analysis. For Thompson, the very language of class is brought forth by the class struggle: “Class, as it eventuated within nineteenth-century industrial capitalist societies, and as it then left its imprint upon the heuristic category of class, has in fact no claim to universality. Class in that sense is no more than a special case of the historical formations which arise out of class struggle”; “In my view, far too much theoretical attention (much of it plainly a-historical) has been paid to ‘class’, and far too little to ‘class struggle’. Indeed, class-struggle is the prior, as well as the more universal, concept” (150; 149).

<43> Sixteen years later, as the Zapatistas initiated their rebellion against NAFTA as a regime of neoliberal capitalism, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt designated “the English tradition that centered around the work of E.P. Thompson with its methodological focus on the self-making of the working class” as responsible for making the “problem of the constitution” “become part of the Marxist discussion” (288). Harry Cleaver, who has contributed greatly in documenting and disseminating the Zapaista struggle, coined the term “Zapatista Effect” to refer to the power of the indigenous revolutionary movement in Chiapas to give impetus “to previously disparate groups to mobilize around the rejection of current policies, to rethink institutions and governance, and to develop alternatives to the status quo” (“Zapatista Effect”). One such “Zapatista Effect” was the emergence of the so-called “anti-globalization movement” (so-called because they were calling for a different kind of globalization as ordered by neoliberalism and, in fact, embodied the social process of globalization from below) which brought worldwide protesters belonging to “previously disparate groups” from anarchists and environmentalists to labor activists and various radicals to oppose global capitalist institutions such as the WTO and the IMF. A year after the Battle of Seattle, in his preface to the second edition of Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver pointed to the “recent mobilizations against the World Trade Organization that brought thousands into the streets, first in Geneva and then in Seattle” as “excellent examples” of how “the Internet is playing an ever more important role in the weaving of an international fabric of resistance and alternatives” and recognized the seminal contribution made by Thompson and his colleagues in bringing an autonomist, strategic reading of Marx into the United States: “a thread that ran from the first generation of ‘bottom-up’ British Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill through a second generation that includes Peter Linebaugh and the other authors of Albion’s Fatal Tree” (20; 13).

<44> In the mid-1980s Thompson argued that for British radical history the “breakthrough” came in 1940 as he “sat down to write for the sixth form history society a paper on the Marxist interpretation of history and the English civil war, leafing through Christopher’s work, and Bernstein, and Petagorsky, and Winstanley’s pamphlets and such Leveller tracts as I could get, and some Marx, Engels and Plekhanov” and that “we are still exploiting the terrain that was opened up with that breakthrough” (Persons 361). I argue that a no less important breakthrough for the analysis of class struggle took place in 1978. Alongside of Thompson and his colleagues at the Warwick School, Negri and his comrades in the Autonomia movement, Cleaver and the work of the Midnight Notes Collective with which he and Linebaugh were associated (the first Midnight Notes pamphlet Strange Victories, which brought to bear the autonomist class struggle analysis upon the European and U.S. anti-nuclear movement, appeared in 1979), Foucault and Yoshimoto’s exchange, this was also the historical moment in which liberation theology – a major rectification of naming and discoursing on God according to the class struggle of the poor – was reaching a decisive moment with the publication of the Salvadoran Jesuit Catholic priest Jon Sobrino’s Christology at the Crossroads and the liberation theologians’ confrontation with the newly installed conservative hierarchy at the 1979 Latin American Episcopal Conference in Puebla, Mexico.

<45> Not least significantly, the American historian Howard Zinn, who called Thompson “one of the most extraordinary of contemporary historians…a model of a scholar-activist” (Future 142) and studied The Making of the English Working Class with considerable care [11], had just returned from his second teaching stint in Paris at the University of Vincennes, whose philosophy department Foucault had organized into a hotbed of militant radicalism in 1969-70; he was writing what would become the most widely read radical history of the United States. Taking its title from A.L. Morton’s classic 1938 text A People’s History of England (whose new edition launched the Communist Party Historians’ Group), A People’s History of the United States represents a synthesis of historical scholarship that emerged from the cauldron of the very movements in which Zinn participated directly, labor, civil rights, and antiwar struggles. Its original last chapter on the 1970s pointed to three new sources of class struggle: the women’s movement (labor of reproduction), prison rebellion (the incarcerated proletariat), and American Indian Movement (indigenous struggle against the 500-year-long “primitive accumulation”). Three of its central chapters (13-15) are connected by the figure of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The example of the IWW also had a decisive influence on the Italian New Left, as can be seen in Sergio Bologna’s “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party” (1972), Gisela Bock and others’ contributions in La formazione dell’operaio massa negli USA 1898/1922 (1976), and as late as 2000 in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which called the Wobblies “the great Augustinian project of modern times” (207). In this context, even the rhetorically determinist arguments of Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse, published in 1978, appear as a theoretical struggle, albeit a wrongheaded one, to achieve a new universal discourse of humanity which recognized how Thompson’s “high degree of discursive self-consciousness…found the patterns of development in the ‘making’ of the consciousness of the English working class…operative in his own ‘making’ of his discourse” – in other words, how the historian’s “rectification of names” is bound up with the historical rectification of the class struggle (19). Three years earlier White was the sole plaintiff in a historic California Supreme Court case against the Los Angeles Police Department’s covert surveillance of politically suspect UCLA courses, a program headed under the viciously gay-harassing police chief Edward M. Davis, and White’s victory in White v. Davis set an important legal limit to the state’s repressive intrusion into political activity. If the “Zapatista Effect” denotes the immediate aftereffect of an emblematic anti-capitalist struggle in the late capitalist era of neoliberal globalization, then we may speak of the “Class Struggle Effect” in relation to the international circuit of intellectual and theoretical breakthroughs in the analysis of class struggle that took place in 1978-9.

Althusser’s Nominalist Fallacy

<46> “Poverty of Theory” is a polemic that certainly ranks as one of the most virtuoso verbal performances in Anglophone intellectual discourse in the last quarter of the twentieth century, which also, no less predictably, failed to persuade the British New Left academics to whom it was directed. Thompson’s take on Althusser was crystallized in an epigram he chose from Marx, yet another masterful but characteristically unsympathetic polemicist: “To leave error unrefuted is to encourage intellectual immorality.” Realistically gauging the impact of this extended rant on the Althusserians of his day, we could turn this epigram on its head and say of “The Poverty of Theory”: “To raise the refutation of error to the level of a moral issue results invariably in a condescending, zealously judgmental discourse that convinces no one.” In short, it was a waste of time insofar as Thompson’s purpose for its composition was concerned [12]. Eric Hobsbawm even told Thompson exactly this, for he thought the Althusserian trend would eventually pass of its own accord [13].

<47> A junior social historian who was in general alignment with the tradition of the Historians’ Group and who viewed “The Poverty of Theory” as an “effective demolition of structuralist claims” was witness to Thompson’s “famous debate with his structuralist opponents during a History Workshop conference in Oxford.” The event “took place in the interior of a church” in 1979 and was “packed out, and many attending perched themselves on the scaffolding, no doubt in blatant contravention of health and safety regulations”:

The thought struck me that this was what it must have looked like in Byzantine churches when the citizens gathered to debate the nature of the trinity and the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity – with equivalent outcomes, for the debate was a dialogue of the deaf: Thompson taking a wholly intransigent stand, citing Marx’s aphorism that to leave error unconfuted [sic] amounted to intellectual immorality, with his antagonists responding in similar style (Willie Thompson viii-ix).

There is something more to this analogy of theological disputation than meets the eye, for Thompson himself couches his argument with Althusser in terms of the nominalist fallacy – which was a matter hotly debated by the likes of medieval friars such as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham:

A nominalist, if he were sufficiently strict, would have to describe the copyhold entry and the bill-of-exchange as passages of writing upon vellum or paper: and he would be at a loss even to describe writing independently of the concept of language. It is the children of yesterday’s nominalists who are now the pupils of Althusser (Poverty 306).

Thompson’s method of attacking Althusserian nominalism – which he sees raising “theory” over and above historical reality and material class struggle (Althusser noted famously that theory is “class struggle by other means”) – is one of slashing away at its extraneous, unnecessarily complicated mechanisms and obscure logical procedures with his highly polished Ockham’s razor. But the matter does not end so simply. Apart from the fact that Ockham did not use the metaphor of a razor (its coinage is attributed to the Scottish metaphysician William Hamilton), he was something of a nominalist himself, or rather, as some would prefer to call it, “conceputalist” or “terminist” (meaning that he viewed names as nominal substitution for the mind’s internal representation and reflective process). Furthermore, it is easy to surmise that Oakham’s statement that came under the name of “Okham’s razor” – Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate – was related closely to his judgment that the Pope John XXII was guilty of heresy for condemning the Franciscan Spirituals, who practiced the Apostolic vow of poverty in their most uncompromisingly communist form of rejecting private property in toto (in other words, those who rejected the unnecessary multiplication of property) – a judgment, I may add, for which Friar Oakham was duly excommunicated.

<48> Of course, this is not the sense in which Thompson says “the pupils of Althusser” are “yesterday’s nominalists.” But I believe there is some justification for this analogy, despite the fact that William of Oakham showed far more fortitude in defying papal authority than Althusser did to the authority of the French Communist Party. For the general effect of Althusserian thought in the France of the 1960s was – alongside that of Sartre, Mao, Marcuse, etc. – the questioning of the Party’s Marxist orthodoxy.

Without a doubt, I ‘opened up’ a new perspective to many young people at the time. It enabled them to think within the framework of my new presentation of Marx without in any way having to abandon the demands of coherence and intelligibility…

In addition, by basing my argument on Marx, who was after all the founding father of the Communist Party and their official source of inspiration, I acquired a peculiar position of strength. This made me difficult to attack within the Party when I challenged the official interpretation of Marx which they used to justify their positions, in other words what was effectively the Party line. What I did in fact was simply to appeal to Marx’s thought against various aberrant interpretations, and especially the Soviet ones which served as a source of inspiration to the Party (222).

We shall leave aside Althusser’s self-satisfied, questionable claim that his reading of Marx offers “coherence and intelligibility,” for under close scrutiny his epistemology shows that it is full of internal contradictions and, over the stretch of his life as a philosopher, incoherent. But the statement does suggest that this was due in no small measure to his Party membership, which forced him to resort to self-contorting theoretical acrobatics to produce an internal philosophical opposition to the Soviet “Party line” while still remaining within the Party’s disciplinary constraints (“objectively, no form of political intervention was possible within the Party other than a purely theoretical one”) [emphasis in the original] (196). Some time earlier Thompson and his comrades had also undertaken such an internal opposition to the British Communist Party but in a more explicitly political, democratic manner (The Reasoner), which led them to their inevitable break with the Party and reconfiguration of their opposition as an independent force of socialist humanist opinion (The New Reasoner).

<49> No less significantly (which is most likely related to his notion of the Party as a “womb” and his solitary, autodidactic love of philosophy), Althusser was afflicted with severe manic-depression, which manifested eventually in the tragic strangulation of his wife. By his own admission, he did not read much of Marx and it was his immediate students who had to step in to finish the composition of Reading Capital during his mental breakdowns (most likely Thompson may not have known these facts at the time of his writing) [14]. What is extraordinary then is, despite Althusser’s lifelong struggle with mental illness, emotional dependency on the Party, and lack of formal philosophical education, his sometime proto-Maoist sympathies and manic philosophical ambitions to rescue the Party’s vulgarization of Marxist philosophy as a mechanical handmaiden of its policies did have the effect of questioning awkwardly the Party’s ideological stranglehold by engaging philosophical developments outside French orthodox Marxism and inspiring young New Left students in France to follow suit. It is a testament to Althusser’s real prowess as a thinker and teacher that some of his pupils – from Michel Foucault to Jacques Rancière to Alain Badiou – sooner or later broke with the master to become seminal, radical thinkers in their own right. He also had lucid moments of self-critical awareness as when he said “I thought (and I realise it was largely a megalomaniac idea) I would be able to prove, at least in a formal sense, that oppositional action within the Party on a serious political and theoretical basis was possible, and thus that the Party itself could be transformed in the long term” or when he said his wife Hélène was “quite right” when she “asked me what the hell I was doing in a Party which had ‘ betrayed’ the working class in ‘68” (235).

<50> So Althusser’s opposition to Stalinism is finally self-defeating and wrought in irremediable epistemological errors, so it displays – in Thompson’s words – “many of the attributes of theology” against which “defence of reason” is paramount. But is it not Thompson himself who reminds us graphically that we should not treat with “condescension of posterity” (and surely this applies to our contemporaries as well) “even the deluded follower of Johanna Southcott,” showing by the example of his historical account of orthodox and primitive Methodism the creative class tensions that were present even in a generally repressive religious movement in times of counterrevolutionary defeat [15]? The issue is moreover complicated by the variety of interpretations Althusser’s writings are amenable to. For example, on the basis of Althusser’s writings in 1985-6, especially on Machiavelli, Negri reads the “later Althusser” as a seminal “philosopher of aleatory materialism” (one of the “new IWW agitators, who take the revolution where the train of being leads them”), who finds in Latin American liberation theology “a materialism of Christian origin, materialist practice of religious ascendency, more than a materialistic theology” and “a definition of poverty as the subject that reveals the urgency of action” (“The Later Althusser” 66; 64). Hence, despite Althusser’s political timidity and intellectual confusions, I find it hard to dismiss at a single stroke of a rational, empiricist pen (even if the wielder is as formidable a thinker as Thompson) a man who expresses such sentiments as:

I went on to claim that ‘oases of communism’ already exist, in the ‘interstices’ of our society (interstices was the word Marx used to describe the early groups of merchants in the ancient world, copying Epicurus’s ideas of gods on the earth), where relationships based on the market do not prevail. I believe the only possible definition of communism – if one day it were to exist in the world – is the absence of relationships based on the market, that is to say of exploitative class relations and the domination of the State. In saying this I believe I am being true to Marx’s own thought. What is more, I am sure that there already exist in the world today very many groups of people whose human relationships are not based at all on market forces…Certainly when you look around the world you see mass movements developing which were unknown and not envisaged by Marx (in Latin America, for example, and even within a traditionally reactionary Church in the form of liberation theology, or with the Greens in Germany, or in Holland where they refused to welcome the Pope as he might have wished). But these movements risk coming under the control of organisations which they cannot do without but which appear not yet to have worked out an adequate form of coordination which avoids hierarchical domination, trapped as they are in a tradition which relies on existing Marxist-socialist models. In this respect I am not optimistic, but I cling to this statement of Marx: at all events, ‘history is more imaginative than we are’, and anyway we are reduced to ‘thinking for ourselves’…I believe, rather, in intellectual lucidity and in the superiority of the mass movements over the intellect. On this basis, and since it is not of supreme importance, the intellect can follow the lead set by mass movements, prevent them above all from becoming the victims of past errors and help them to discover truly effective and democratic forms of organization [emphasis in the original] (225-226).

I aver that Althusser was something like the “Johanna Southcott” of our times and, if anybody could have given us a critically sympathetic, historically illuminating treatment of the man and his ideas in the context of the European socialist, communist, and anti-systemic movements, it would have been Edward Thompson. Of course, the difficulty, if not impossibility, of such a task is self-evident: the history of Althusserian thought, to say nothing of the figure himself, had not yet run its course, and, most crucially, Thompson too was a product of his own history, which made him unbreakably loyal to the rectified name of “socialist humanism” (a rectification in which he played a signal role). But the term “socialist humanism” had a hold on Thompson that at times came dangerously close to a notation with little too strict a dose of philosophical realism, as he readily identified universal values in it that could have been expressed in other terms, even “anti-humanism” [16]. In other words, if Thompson would have taken Althusser’s “theological” offense to reason as Wittgenstein took Sraffa’s Neapolitan gesture, we may have had a more edifying “rectification of human names” than the one Thompson advances in “The Poverty of Theory.”

<51> Ironically, such a dialectically balanced “rectification of names” for Althusser comes from a humble Peruvian parish priest, from the very province of theology that Thompson condemned. Seven years before Thompson’s polemic, Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology, placed Althusser’s influence in Latin America in terms of Jose Carlos Mariategui’s undogmatically indigenous approach to historical materialism to produce “a sufficiently broad, rich, and intense revolutionary praxis, with the participation of people of different viewpoints”: “the current vogue of interpreting Marxism according to Althusser has spread the idea of historical materialism as a ‘science of history’ which tries to free itself from all ideological elements” (90; 97 n.40). He also cites Althusser’s 1949 critique of the Catholic Church as an important inducement to form a theology of “preferential option for the poor,” noting that “the unity of the Church is rightly considered by Althusser as a myth which must disappear if the Church is to be ‘recoverted’ to the service of the workers in the class struggle” (277). At the same time Gutierrez’s appreciation is hardly uncritical. While acknowledging that “Althusser has vigorously and correctly indicated that what is proper to Marx is to have created a science of history,” he observes that “the rigidity of this position and the consignment of every utopian element to ideology prevents seeing the profound unity of the work of Marx and consequently duly understanding his capacity for inspiring a radical and permanent revolutionary praxis (249 n. 121). Gutierrez’s criticism dovetails with Thompson’s project of restoring the utopian dimension of Marxism (as he wrote in the 1976 postscript to William Morris) and objections concerning the negation of agency in Althusserian theory but is not disabled by the latter’s dogmatic attachment to the language of humanism.

Agency and Rectification, Take Two

<52> However, the purpose of this essay is not to take Thompson to task for an instance of his misfired rectification. Althusser’s own works are full of such misfires. Indeed it is hard to imagine anyone who did more than Thompson to rectify historical knowledge and close the gap between “the power of names” in analysis and the deracinated conditions of political actuality. He sought to rectify the name of Marxism and socialism (by upholding, as mentioned, “socialist humanism” after the struggles of Hungarian Revolution and its corollary democratic opposition in the Communist Party of Great Britain) and in history as well, in particular the reified name given to the working class, now a sociological name, now a politically utilitarian name, now a quantified name. His own pan-European, Atlanticist antinuclear activism owes to this rectifying impulse as well. He was unwilling to play the fatal language-game of the Cold War, which was rife with psychically numbing naming (such as “nuclear deterrence,” “flexible response,” and “surgical strikes”). Thompson took a global anti-nuclear stance that his Japanese counterpart Yoshimoto Takaaki accused the Japanese antinuclear activists and progressive intellectuals of failing to assume (Han-kaku iron) although his notion of nuclear “exterminism” came under attack among fellow radicals for what was perceived as its military-technological determinism and consequent failure to pay attention to the role of social and working-class agency in the anti-nuclear movement [17]. In Customs in Common, as noted at the beginning, we have another major work of rectification, this one against the name of modernization, whether in the liberal capitalist or state socialist variant. He offers in its stead moral economy (rectifying political economy), commons in the place of Communism, and plebian in lieu of the working class.

<53> This latter empathetic gaze toward the historical tradition of popular customs – a gaze similar to the one Wittgenstein had in seeing Sraffa’s gesture – nurtures the memorably searing images that populated his poems on China, especially “The Rectification of Names” which referred to a primary Confucian principle. In the twentieth century this principle tended to be interpreted as part of a

body of precepts for governing the common people from the viewpoint of the hereditary ruling class, to which he [“Master K’ung,” i.e. Confucius] identified himself. The doctrine of rectification was therefore merely a conservative idea that Master K’ung advanced to reinforce the crumbling feudal structure at a time when it was in imminent danger of being undermined by revolutionary forces from without (Wu-Chi 161).

As Thompson said, whether these “revolutionary forces” takes “the classically avaricious capitalist form” or “the form of the rebellious economic man of the orthodox Marxist tradition,” the consequences were the same: the wholesale destruction of popular customs, laws, and traditions to which the peasants and the subalterns appealed in order to counter expropriation of their lands and proletarianization into the dog-eat-dog labor market. For that is Thompson’s underlying message, that “a conservative idea” in the face of “revolutionary forces” of market or statist accumulation becomes a rebellious idea and culture. We may appreciate this in the historical Confucian context by recalling “one of the most talked-about cases in Chinese history” with the sage:

When Confucius was in She, the governor also shared him a criminal case that had come to his attention or had come under his jurisdiction. In their conversation, the governor mentioned the circumstances of this case but not his opinion of it, so one suspects that he was waiting to hear what Confucius had to say. He told Confucius: “Right here, in my native place, there is a man called Upright Gong. When his father stole a sheep, he bore witness against him.” Confucius replied: “In my native place, those who are considered upright are quite different from this man. Fathers cover up for their sons, and sons cover up for their fathers. Being upright lies therein” (Chin 112).

This is the Chinese moral economy in action: to be upright means for a son to “cover up” for his father’s expropriation of private property and vice versa. The consequence for violating it was dire, for in one version of the story “the local official had Upright Gong put to death because ‘in his attempt to be upright while in the service of his sovereign, this man had wronged his father’” (Chin 112). Thompson also surmises a possible continuity between the popular “rituals of rough music and charivari” and “manifestation of popular retribution in the twentieth century,” which extended “to the rites of public humiliation practised during the Cultural Revolution in China” (Customs 524).

<54> Hence what Thompson suggests in his work of rectification is not an idyllic treatment of popular acts of mutual aid and food riots. It is to remind us that to close the gap between past and present, desire and necessity, through an account (discourse) of imperfect historical actors struggling in their own limited, contingent circumstances, could never be accomplished fully but, despite the imperfections of those we write about and despite our own imperfections in our writing, must be attempted again and again.

Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideas may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in term of their own experience…

Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves (Making 13).

This unceasingly indefatigable attempt to appreciate and rethink aspirations in terms of their own experiences is the lesson of Thompson’s retrieval of collective human agency. It is what energized his poetic notation about rectifying names, which in its context can be read as an attempt to close variously fundamental gaps, from one between Britain and China to one between history and ideology to one between the actual meaning of Marx’s words and the grotesque distortions under Stalinist and Maoist purges, whose target included, at one point in the latter case, Confucianism, a rectification of feudal and reactionary principles pursued under the name of “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” – ironically mirroring what was practiced frequently in China’s long history by precisely new feudal and reactionary imperial dynasties.

<55> Hence we come away with two major conflicting meanings of rectifications. One seeks unceasingly to close the impossible gap – but keep doing it despite knowing this impossibility, for it is the dialectical irreconcilability of philosophical discourse as such, from the Platonic idea and its earthly manifestations to the dual principle of yin and yang to Christian theological notion of God and humanity to the opposition posited between science and religion, in short all the dichotomies that continue to haunt the totality of human endeavors into the twenty-first century. The other posits a false definitive unity between the name and the thing-in-itself, attempting to resolve definitively all Kantian antinomies, a resolute attempt fraught with a hubris that turns quickly into established orthodoxies excommunicating dissenters as heretics, fundamentalists attacking those outside their narrow, rigidly defined compass of faith against any serious ecumenical efforts. Those of us in the liberal and modern capitalist zones of the world should not however rest complacently in thinking that we are free from this latter “bad” version of definitive rectification of names, for such fundamentalism translates easily into the language of secular modernity as well, for example the mathematical manipulation of the financial market which, despite all its sophisticated diagnostic formulations and computerized methodology, has failed to avert, in fact abetted, the recent, greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, according to the International Monetary Fund.

<56> And even those writers who stood against the weight of ideological and political ossification of names, such as George Orwell, who penned the marvelous, rightly influential “Politics and the English Language” against the euphemistic bastardization of the English language according to the prerogatives of military-political power, slipped right before his tubercular death into “naming names” himself, in collusion with the anticommunist propaganda department of the British Foreign Office under the postwar Labor government. His defenders are quick to point out that Orwell’s “betrayal” of his principles did not lead to those named on his list being repressed in any way, let alone sent to the British equivalent of a Gulag or Moscow trials. However, sixty years before this list saw the light of day, Edward Thompson bristled presciently against Orwell’s ungenerous judgments in his public writing, which though honorable – he argued – succored the ember that fed into the 1950s political cynicism toward any values of solidarity against the Behemoth of the Cold War system, which Thompson satirically named “Natopolitan,” and indicated its morally deleterious effect on once committed poets and writers – his primary example was W.H. Auden’s self-bowdlerization of a poem on the Spanish Civil War and its historical parallel to the path of disenchantment and apostasy followed by a generation of English poets after the French Revolution, including William Wordsworth.

<57> There is another figure who drew this historical analogy between the apostates of the Russian Revolution with those of the French Revolution. He is one of the names on Orwell’s list, the independent Marxist writer Isaac Deutscher, famous for his magisterial three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Deutscher had studied the “betrayal of revolution” in the Soviet Union and offered a sober reading of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” as early as 1966:

Mao has been in one person China’s Lenin and Stalin. But at the end of his road he shows more and more similarity to Stalin; and the latest orgy of his personality cult underlines the likeness. It is as if he had outlived himself and is already a relic of the past, an embodiment of China’s backwardness and isolationism. When the reaction against these aspects of Maoism comes, his successor or successors, whoever they are will have to act as its mouthpieces and agents (217).

In another essay Deutscher brought the same perspicaciously detached view to Orwell and went so far as to accuse 1984 as an exercise in “Mysticism of Cruelty,” which was prompted by Orwell’s incapacity to grapple rationally with the terrible historical reality of the Stalinist purges: “1984 is a document of dark disillusionment not only with Stalinism but with every form and shade of socialism,” “in effect not so much a warning as a piercing shriek announcing the advent of the Black Millennium, the millennium of damnation” (66, 71) [18].

<58> None of this of course guarantees that Thompson and Deutscher were on the right side of history and Orwell was not (Deutscher himself was susceptible to harboring nationalist assumptions about the emergent Zionist state before the June 1967 War) [19]. That would be too simplistic, yet another bad rectification of names, or rather reshuffling of labels, which circulated in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, with its triumphant declarations about the “end of history” and kowtowing paeans to the free market, now proven erroneous in the face of the current financial crisis. In 2002 Hayden White affirmed that “Marxism…on the theoretical level, is stronger than ever” in an era when the absurd “capitalist notion that the market economy will solve social problems if you allow the market merely to function” has become the dominant discourse. For one, Marxism enables the understanding of “the fall of the Soviet system” in terms of how “fundamental historical transformations occur, in the same way that a Marxist analysis of the phases of capitalism and the boom and bust and unpredictability of the capitalist system” made them comprehensible in ways that an analysis from a “capitalist viewpoint” could not. For another, “a Marxist conception of ideology is the most profitable one for thinking about not only class consciousness, but race, gender, and ethnic consciousness as well” because – White here echoes Thompson’s preface to The Making – “Marxist view of consciousness sees class consciousness as a relationship, not as a thing, not as an entity, not as an essence, not as a substance. So that you can begin to think about ideology in terms of class fantasy or ethnic community fantasies, which have to do with both identifications with other races, classes, and so forth and fears of these other races, classes, and so forth” (“Hayden White Talks Trash”). In other words, for White, one of the most effective ways of understanding economic structure and social consciousness as an indivisible whole for our post-Communist world was still Marxism, not as an ideology of state capitalist/socialist modernization, vanguardist “democratic centralism” which mirrored liberal capitalist technocracy, irrationally reductive materialist conception of cosmology, but as a critical method that could properly rectify the names of both capitalism and orthodox Marxism as its variation thereof.

<59> Any rectification of names in our historical conjuncture is doomed to theoretical reification if we do not examine and revise our rectification in relation to the class struggle (as White said, “a fundamental characteristic of a Marxist conception of society is contained in the conception of class and class conflict”). This is not so much because we espouse Marxism as an equivalent of a secular faith but because we continue to live in a capitalist society, or, as the Midnight Notes Collective have declared, “The fact is that, regardless of one’s gender, race, sexual preference, or feelings towards the earth, we all move through capitalist space; we live on capitalist soil, we eat capitalist bread, we expend our body’s energy in capitalist work…We experience the unity of capitalism in very different and at times apparently contradictory ways, but nonetheless the unity remains” (xiii). Rectification involves understanding “class struggle” not in a singular sense but necessarily multiple senses in “accord with reality,” grounded in one’s own experiences and unceasing attempt with others to forge a new radical chain of social being. Not least of all, such a process of rectification ought to be an endless one directed at oneself, what goes on in one’s consciousness and experiences, and not against one’s perceived enemies. Here I am in agreement again with White, although with a necessary caveat: “The trope of Irony, then, provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought which is radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterization of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language” (Metahistory 37) [20].

<60> There are no enemies except the ones ever tempted to take the definitively singular road of rectification for the sake of some higher ideal, principle, belief, be it the free market, socialism, or even irony. On this point, my argument shares some resemblance to the statement that the Chinese human rights activist and 2010 Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo issued on the occasion of receiving an 11-year prison term in December 2009. Xiaobo attacks the “enemy mentality” of the state as hindrance to “freedom and democracy” and speaks humanely of his correctional officer Liu Zheng at Beikan Prison, describing Zheng as a “sincere, honest, conscientious, and kind correctional officer” whose “respect and care for detainees could be seen in every detail of his work, permeating his every word and deed, and giving one a warm feeling” (“I Have No Enemies”). Xiaobo justifiably criticizes the state’s absolutist notion of the “class struggle” as being ideologically responsible for China’s repressive statist culture under the Communist Party, referring to the “Reform and Opening Up” policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1978 (yet again the overdetermined year!) as the major force that benefitted “market trend in the economy, the diversification of culture, and the gradual shift in social order toward the rule of law.” However, just as the Maoist notion of “class struggle” was nothing more than a doctrinal myth for suppressing the Chinese workers’ actually existing working-class struggle against alienated labor under the command of the state (i.e., state capitalism), Xiaobo is entertaining here the myth of capitalist economic and political modernization whereby market liberalization and liberal parliamentary democracy are the only path of liberation offered for the 1.3-billion Chinese. As Thompson said in Customs in Common, even if it seems like a futile gesture on a par with whistling into a typhoon, some radically democratic political and economic path beyond such dichotomous logic of “economic man, whether in the classically avaricious capitalist form or in the form of the rebellious economic man of the orthodox Marxist tradition” must be found.

<61> Shen Han, Nanjing University historian who translated Customs in Common into Chinese, observes that the “British Marxist historical school is the most influential and preeminent of the Western historical schools that were presented to Chinese readers following the ideological emancipation movement and the reform and opening policy of the late 1970s” (26). Han makes explicit reference to Edward and Dorothy Thompson’s trip to China in the autumn of 1985 (preceded by Eric Hobsbawm’s visit several months earlier) in the wake of this Chinese intellectual renaissance and says how “their visits and lectures were warmly welcomed by Chinese historians and postgraduate students” (28-29). There is no question then that for the past thirty years Thompson and his colleagues’ works have played and are continuing to play an instrumental role in the “rectification of human names” in China. The question is how their works and ours can channel the new spirit of class struggle emanating now from China and wherever we find ourselves. For those of us taking part in this ongoing, necessarily imperfect collective work on a world scale, Thompsons’s socialist humanism and his work are no more a talisman against bad rectifications than Confucianism is in the face of those forces of state power, propaganda, fundamentalism, and neoliberalism that today stand arrayed against us. We have to simply keep posing critically tough questions to ourselves, in all the registers of experience we can manage, from the epistemological to the political, with no guarantee of answer or solidarity.

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_____. Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1968.

Wu-Chi, Liu. Confucius, His Life and Time. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.

Yoshimoto, Takaaki. Yoshimoto Taka’aki zenchosakushū [The Complete Writings of Yoshimoto Takaaki]. Vol. 4. Tokyo: Keisō-shobō, 1969.

_____. Han-kaku iron [Dissenting Essay on the Anti-Nuclear Movement]. Tokyo: Shinya-sōsho-sha, 1983.

_____. Sekai-ninshiki no hōhō [Method of Understanding the World]. Tokyo: Chuō-kōron-sha, 1984.

Yoshimoto Takaaki kenkyu-kai. Yoshimoto Takaaki ga sengo 55-nen o kataru 4: Foucault no kangae-kata. Tokyo: Sankō-sha, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History o the United States, 1492-Present. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

_____. The Future of History: Interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.

Notes

[1] “This was written in China in 1980. It is intended not to describe China, but to convey the bewilderment Western historical mind when first encountering that great country” (Persons & Polemics 359).

[2] For instance, in an October 1877 letter in response to an article on Capital, which appeared in a Russian journal Otechetvennye Zapiski [Homeland Notes], Marx wrote:

He must by all means transform my historical sketch of the development of capitalism in Western Europe into a historical-philosophical theory of universal development predetermined by fate for all nations, whatever their historic circumstances in which they find themselves may be, in order finally to achieve that economic formation which with the highest upswing of the productive forces of social work assures mankind its most universal development. But I beg his pardon. (That [view] does me at the same time too much honor and too much insult.)

In many passages in Capital I point out the fate which overtook the plebeians in ancient Rome. Originally they were free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same kind of development, the separation from their means of production and subsistence, took place not only in the formation of large landownership but also in large-scale money capitalism…The Roman proletarians did not become wage workers but an idle mob, even more contemptible than the so-called “poor whites” of the Southern United States, and from them there did not develop a capitalist production system but one based on slave labor. Thus events of a striking analogy, because they took place in a different historic milieu, led to entirely different results. If one studies each of these developments by itself and then compares them with each other, one will easily find the key to each phenomenon, but one would never thereby attain a universal key to a general historical-philosophical theory, whose greatest advantage lies in its being beyond history [emphasis added] (Padover 321-322).

This should serve as an effective refutation of all the Marxist and anti-Marxist epigones who have wasted over a century of our time with their false, intellectually illiterate attribution of “a general historical-philosophical theory” to the author of this epistle.

[3] Yoshimoto’s original phrase was kankei no zettaisei. “Human beings can believe in revolutionary philosophy as they pass cunningly through the system and can loathe revolutionary philosophy as they are forced to defend poverty and irrational laws. This is because free will makes choices. But only absoluteness of relations determines human situations” (Yoshimoto Taka’aki zenchosakushū 106).

[4] “These terms [physical, material] had some sense within the mechanical philosophy, but what do they mean in a world based on Newton’s ‘mysterious force,’ or still more mysterious notions of fields of force, curved space, infinite one-dimensional strings in ten-dimensional space, or whatever science concocts tomorrow? Lacking a concept of ‘matter’ or ‘body’ or ‘the physical,’ we have no coherent way to formulate issues related to the ‘mind-body’ problem.’ These were real problems of science in the days of the mechanical philosophy. Since its demise, the sciences postulate whatever finds a place in intelligible explanatory theory, however offensive that may be to common-sense. Only on unjustified dualistic assumptions can such qualms be raised specifically about the domain of the mental, not the other aspects of the world” (Chomsky 109-110).

[5] Ayer names Russell’s Sceptical Essays, which he read as a student at Eton, as one of the things that set him off on his philosophical vocation (Part of My Life 53-54).

[6] According to Alessandro Roncaglia, “the marginalist theory of general economic equilibrium seems to be founded on philosophical positions much like those of the early Wittgenstein: atomistic base (‘economic subjects’ and ‘commodities’), correspondence between the fact of the world and the elements of theory, and the claim of complete description according to general rules of all that is describable in the world (the general theory)” while Sraffa’s method in Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities was analogous to the one assumed in the Philosophical Investigations, “focusing on a specific problem (fundamental as it may be) and on those variables directly relevant to the problem in question, but without denying the existence of other problems to be addressed with other ‘language games’ and, in particular, without denying the indirect influence of other variables” (58).

[7] In 1918 Lenin wrote on the pages of Pravda:

The more class-conscious vanguard of the Russian proletariat has already set itself the task of raising labour discipline. For example, both the Central Committee of the Metalworkers’ Union and the Central Council of Trade Unions have begun to draft the necessary measures and decrees. This work must be supported and pushed ahead with all speed. We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice; we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount of work done by the railways, the water transport system, etc., etc.

The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is – learn to work. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends” (“The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”).

Lenin’s undisguised contempt for working-class struggle against the imposition of alienated labor (“The Russian is a bad worker...”) and fetishism for capitalist productivity show that he and other progenitors of orthodox Marxism were nothing more than capitalists by another name. The failure on the part of the leading Anglophone contemporary scholars on Soviet history – Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Dmitri Volkogonov – to understand this elementary point jaundices their works irreparably into a continuation of Cold War Sovietology.

[8] Hence the “overriding potential of Dobb’s contribution” which served as the “most fruitful contact between Dobb and the English historians was this stress on the struggle of the common people who were forcibly separated from their customary means of production by the expanding regime of capital” (Schwarz 53). This problem of class struggle in “primitive accumulation” is precisely what Thompson’s Customs in Common deals with.

[9] Another major difference between Cleaver and Negri’s interpretative approaches to Marx concerns the labor theory of value (most likely this also applies to Thompson, for whom labor theory of value appears to be an issue belonging entirely to the ahistorical category of Marx’s “Political Economy”). As Cleaver says in his critique of Negri and Claus Offe:

The problem with this view [in Marx Beyond Marx], however, is that it artificially separates the concepts of labor as producer of wealth and labor as means of domination, associating only the former with value. Marx's concept of value, I argue, has always designated primarily the role of labor as undifferentiated capitalist command rather than its role as producer of wealth. Indeed, the very distinction between use value and value is that between wealth understood as that which labor produces of use to the working class and that which labor produces of use to capital, i.e., command. From this point of view the crisis of value which Negri sees at the heart of the crisis of the Keynesian state must be understood essentially as a crisis of command, and the various ad-hoc strategies capital has tried to use to restore its command as means to the restoration of a dynamically stable labor-based social order. Thus I can agree with Negri's conclusions concerning the centrality of the struggle against work and the potentialities of self-valorization to create a new social order, while disagreeing with his view of the obsolescence of value, and hence of the labor theory of value (“Work, Value and Domination”).

[10] It would be interesting to speculate what the result would have been had Foucault done so. In some ways, Peter Linebaugh, one of Thompson’s students, did just that with London Hanged. In his book Linebaugh used the word “excarceration” – workers’ escape from prison – to “draw attention to the activity of freedom in contrast to its ideological and theoretical expressions” and saw such “activity as a counter-tendency to a recent historiographical trend exemplified by Michel Foucault, who stresses incarceration in ‘the great confinement’ and who makes the rulers of government and society seem all-powerful” (3). Subsequently, upon perusing Foucault’s biographies, he has told me that he has come to perceive Foucault as a “comrade.” According to the Althusserian scholar Warren Montag, Discipline and Punish is a “Marxist text” that can be read as an elaboration of the Volume One of Capital:

Discipline and Punish remains one of the least appreciated of Foucault's books. I believe this can be attributed to the fact that it is really a Marxist text, an expansion of certain chapters from the first volume of Capital which is itself one of the great critiques of the subtle violence and coercion that permeate “civil society” and the “public sphere” those places deemed free because the state allows individuals to interact at will (within certain limits, of course). I believe that it is this analysis, unflinching in its portrayal of “democratic” societies as “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” more than the labor theory of value or mode of production that proves intolerable today to the powers that be, the real “scandal and abomination” of the work of Marx, Althusser and Foucault (“What’s Left after Iraq”).

[11] Ambre Ivol, a French anti-capitalist activist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Zinn, has drawn direct parallels between Zinn and Thompson. Noting that Zinn’s copy of The Making of the English Working Class is in her possession, she adds: “Its first chapter in particular is extensively annotated by Zinn. Though not mentioned in the bibliography of A People’s History, this was certainly an influence on Zinn’s thinking” (n. 110).

[12] However, as noted elsewhere in this essay, I do not think it was a “waste of time” in every sense, for it constituted, in Perry Anderson’s words, “the most sustained exposition of Thompson’s own credo, as a historian and as a socialist” who was “our finest socialist writer today – certainly in England, possibly in Europe” (Anderson 1-3).

[13] “One could not fault a scholar for giving up writing for anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the Althusserian episode had no such justification. I told him at the time that it would be criminal to turn from his potentially epoch-making historical work to controverting a thinker who would be dead as an influence in another ten years’ time. And indeed, Althusser was already getting close to his sell-by date in the French Marxisant milieu even then” (Hobsbawm 215).

[14] “In fact my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I was very familiar with Descartes and Malebranche, knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx which I had studied closely. My way of picking up and then really getting to know philosophy was legendary: I used to enjoy saying it was all done by ‘hearsay’ (the first confused form of knowledge according to Spinoza). I learnt from Jacques Martin, who was cleverer than me, by gleaning certain phrases in passing from my friends, and lastly from the seminar papers and essays of my own students. This distinguished me quite markedly from all my university friends who were much better informed than me, and I used to repeat it by way of paradox and provocation, to arouse astonishment, incredulity, and admiration (!) in other people, to my great embarrassment and pride”(Althusser 165-166).

[15] The Christian theological link is justified too because, apart from his loyal friendship with the heterodox theologian Father Stanislas Breton, Althusser maintained a close relationship with the French Catholic Left, from whence he emerged politically: “it was largely through organisations connected with Catholic Action that I came into contact with the class struggle and therefore Marxism…through exposure to the ‘social question’ and the ‘social politics of the Church’, countless sons of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parents (including peasants in the Young Christian Agricultural Workers Movement) were introduced to the very thing it was feared they would be attracted to: socialism…This is how tens of thousands of militants from various Christian Youth Movements – students, workers, and agricultural workers – made contact with CGT or Party officials, in most cases through the Resistance” [emphasis in the original] (205).

[16] I am not suggesting here that Althusser’s “anti-humanism” was such an expression. It was not. It was, rather, a localized concept endogenous to the internal debates within the French Communist Party in the years after 1960, when the orthodox current in the Party was co-opting the language of “humanism” for its policies (what G. Moshgarian, English translator of Althusser, called “Stalinism with a humanist face”), and it was never intended to have any meaningful provenance outside of this narrow historical and geographic confine: “I certainly was isolated both politically and philosophically. No one, not even the Party which subscribed to a self-satisfied socialist humanism, was willing to recognise that only theoretical antihumanism justified genuine, practical humanism” (185-186). However, I am suggesting that the inherent ambiguity in terms such as “socialist” and “humanism” – ambiguity exacerbated by their constantly ideologically obfuscating usages such as “liberal humanist intervention” and “socialist accumulation” – should make us weary of holding too much realist attachment to them or any other name. Ergo, if we define “humanism” as ipso facto “bourgeois humanism” as Althusser did and, moreover, describe the content of this “humanism” to be the ideology that views only worthwhile, indeed true, human beings to be those with money (as Marx describes sardonically in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which Althusser rejected as an immature, bourgeois document), then being an “anti-humanist” would be quite congruent with being a “socialist humanist” in Thompson’s sense or possibly even with Althusser’s “genuine, practical humanism.”

[17] One such critique came from the Midnight Notes Collective in 1983: “We are therefore surprised to find that Thompson’s analysis of one of the most important institutional complexes in twentieth century capitalism – the nuclear war industry – utterly ignores the fundamental part played by war policy and its enormous economic base in organizing the expropriation and accumulation of surplus value” (“Elegy for E.P. Thompson” 13). This follows a round of critical debate that took place between Thompson and other radical critics over his analysis, collected in New Left Review, ed., Exterminism and Cold War (London: New Left Books, 1982).

[18] Deutscher knew Orwell personally and made a fairly balanced assessment of the man: “What struck me in Orwell was his lack of historical sense and of psychological insight into political life coupled with an acute, though narrow, penetration into some aspects of politics and with an incorruptible firmness of conviction” (70).

[19] “In fact, Deutscher’s reflection on Zionism, although remarkable in their acuteness…are nonetheless marred, at any rate before his scathing denunciations of Israel after the June 1967 war, by typical Zionist and racist apologetics: the kibbutzim were ‘Jewish oases scattered over the former Arabian desert’ (p. 99); prior to Zionist settlement ‘no established society existed in the Palestinian desert’ (p. 100); the Zionist claim that ‘Palestine is and never ceased to be Jewish’ is on a par with the Arab claim that ‘Jews are…invaders and intruders’ (p.116); and so on” (Finkelstein 12n). Finkelstein is quoting from Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).

[20] Apart from the reified capitalization of “irony,” my reservation stems from White’s insistence that “as the basis of a world view, Irony tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions. In its apprehension of the essential folly or absurdity of the human condition, it tends to engender belief in the ‘madness’ of civilization itself and to inspire a Mandarin-like disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art” (Metahistory 38). This is not so much wrong as it is one-sided. Irony could also be an expression of what Thompson calls “Brechtian values – the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies, the tenacity of self-preservation” (Making 59). In short, a fund of ideas and attitudes that may under different historical conditions bring about a negativa against the Mandarins and the Rulers whom they serve: what irony could ever be genuine that ceases to undercut itself and sits in equipoise complacency at the closure of possibility, political or otherwise?

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