3545. An Interview with Louis Proyect

By Johna Walters and Louis Proyect, Jacobin, August 28, 2021

Louis Proyect, a lifelong socialist and influential online commentator known for his acerbic polemics, died this week at the age of seventy-six.

Proyect joined the Socialist Workers Party in New York City in 1967. He left the organization a decade later, rejecting what he saw as its sectarianism. During the 1980s, he found a new political home in the Central America solidarity movement, eventually becoming a key leader of the organization Technical Aid for Nicaragua, or TecNica.

TecNica’s mission was to organize delegations of skilled workers — especially computer programmers — who would travel from the United States to Nicaragua to provide technical assistance to the revolutionary state.

In addition to being a committed socialist, Proyect was also an accomplished computer programmer, having begun working in the field in 1968, during the early days of mainframe computing. He soon assumed a leadership position in TecNica and in other solidarity movement organizations, recruiting hundreds of skilled workers to the project and even establishing connections with revolutionary movements beyond Nicaragua — including in Cuba, South Africa, and Namibia.

Proyect left the solidarity movement in 1991 and became a pioneer in internet self-publishing, establishing an influential mailing list and moderated forum (MarxMail) which attracted an audience of thousands of Marxists all over the world.

As a writer, Proyect earned a reputation as being both caustic and prolific — a combination that sometimes alienated him from others on the Left. He was reflexively skeptical of writers who, he felt, indulged the frivolous or self-aggrandizing conventions of the liberal left, and was insistent in his calls for a coherent and pragmatic revolutionary strategy in the twenty-first century.

I contacted Louis in September 2019, when I was working on a PhD dissertation about international solidarity and the Nicaraguan revolution. Four years earlier, he had published an incredulous polemic responding to an article of mine in Jacobin (“What the fuck is [Walters] talking about?” he wrote), and so I was surprised when he responded immediately and graciously volunteered to talk.

I arranged to meet Louis in Washington Square Park a few weeks later. We sat on a bench for almost an hour, discussing TecNica, international solidarity, and Louis’s life on the Left. When he rose to leave, he handed me a folder containing hundreds of pages of old solidarity movement newsletters. “I think these will be very helpful for your research,” he told me. (He was right.)

Below is a transcript of our conversation together.

JW: How did you become involved with TecNica?

LP: In 1981 or so, I connected with a guy named Peter Camejo. He had been a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States. But while on a delegation to Nicaragua he came to the conclusion that the SWP was a sectarian cult.

I also remember reading an article by Leslie Gelb on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He said the United States was on a collision course with Central American guerrillas, that it could be another Vietnam. And then I would read the Militant [a newsweekly published by the SWP], and there would be nothing about Central America except empty bombast about how countries had to follow the Cuban model.

I joined CISPES [Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador], which was a pretty vibrant organization at the time. I was active there for about four or five years. Then, in 1986, the Guardian (not the British newspaper, but the old radical weekly in the United States) announced that they were organizing a tour to see the Nicaraguan election. I went down there with them, and what I saw was incredible.

The major lesson I learned was that Sandinista supporters came from many different directions politically. It was nothing like the SWP: it was a mass revolutionary movement. This confirmed to me what Peter [Camejo] had said. He was trying to build a current in the United States that could adopt the lessons of the Central American revolutions — by putting aside the hammer and sickle, for example, and using the language and the iconography of the United States.

While in Nicaragua, I was riding on a bus, going to different farming cooperatives, seeing the various changes that had taken place there. And a high-school kid, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, approached me and handed me a leaflet. It said, “Technical Aid to Nicaragua” or “Computer Programmers Needed in Nicaragua,” something like that. I looked at it and thought, Wow.

At the time I was working as a database administrator at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. I had been working on mainframes since 1968. So I started talking to this kid, who told me when I got back to New York I should contact the offices of a group called TecNica in Berkeley.

JW: What was TecNica like back then?

LP: When I first called them up, the guy who answered was Michael Urmann, the founder of the organization. He was an economist. He went to Nicaragua in 1983 or 1984, and he recognized that there had been a huge exodus of people with technical skills from the country.

When I first called them up, the guy who answered was Michael Urmann, the founder of the organization. He was an economist. He went to Nicaragua in 1983 or 1984, and he recognized that there had been a huge exodus of people with technical skills from the country.

When he got back to the United States, he started building a movement to recruit Americans that could help Nicaraguans make use of technology — including technologies they already had from the [prerevolutionary] Somoza era, as well as new developments like microcomputers.

I returned to Nicaragua as part of TecNica less than a year after I got back to New York. I even resigned from my position at Memorial Sloan Kettering with the intention of working in Nicaragua. When I got there, I gave classes in structured systems design to a group of people working in their Federal Reserve [Banco Nacional de Nicaragua], where they had the largest mainframe in the country. And then I went to the Ministry of Construction, where they wanted me to work full-time.

But I discussed it with Michael, and he told me I’d be of greater use if I went back to New York and focused on recruiting other people. So I did that instead, because I had experience as an organizer from my time in the SWP.

JW: How did you recruit people to make the trip to Nicaragua?

LP: I put ads in the Nation magazine and organized meetings at a loft on Mercer Street in Manhattan. Sometimes as many as eighty people would show up. I had a slideshow I would do; I’d give a pitch, and usually five or six people from the meeting would decide to go.

At one point I got so psyched about the project that I went to an IBM PC-users group in a big auditorium, maybe at New York University. There were like three hundred people in the crowd, and after the speaker gave his remarks he opened up the floor for Q&A. Usually at that point people would ask questions like, “What kind of modem would work best with an IBM AT whatever-the-fuck.” But I raised my hand, stood up, and said, “I just got back from Nicaragua, and there’s a tremendous development taking place there. Computers for the first time ever are being used to promote health and education.”

People started laughing at me. But the guy chairing the meeting called me down to the front and I continued speaking. I said, “This is your chance to use your skills to help change the world for the better.” And at least two or three people from that meeting ended up going down to Nicaragua.

By 1990 or so, we ended up sending about eight hundred people to Nicaragua (including the physicist Alan Sokal, who was a DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] member). For a while, delegations of twelve to fifteen people went every month. And every time a delegation would go down, they would bring about five or six personal computers. For a country that was desperately trying not to waste any money or time or human resources, having a PC, even just to do things like run payroll, made a significant difference.

We started off just organizing programmers, but we quickly diversified to include engineers and machinists of different kinds. This developed into our skilled trades subproject, which involved welders, heavy-duty mechanics, people like that. We raised money to buy parts that were desperately needed in Nicaraguan factories. Then we would send skilled delegations down to train the Nicaraguan workers on how to use the equipment, how to install it, how to repair it themselves.

Let me tell you something: We had every political tendency on the Left going down to Nicaragua in those delegations. They never once fought each other. There was a real “roll up your sleeves and get things done” kind of attitude. We had Workers World, Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party, Maoists, DSA, everybody. They all understood that what was happening in Nicaragua was bigger than their own narrow organizational goals.

JW: That’s a pretty unique experience on the Left. How did TecNica fit into the broader Central America solidarity movement in the United States?

LP: TecNica provided a way for people who wanted to provide technical support to the Nicaraguan revolution to do that. But then those volunteers would come back to the United States and begin talking to other people about Nicaragua. So recruitment was only part of my work.

I also worked to make returned TecNICA volunteers part of that broader solidarity movement. I was on the TecNica executive committee, and I was a member of the New York–Nicaragua Solidarity Network steering committee. We would have weekly meetings and plan out joint events and tablings and so forth.

TecNica provided a way for people who wanted to provide technical support to the Nicaraguan revolution to do that. But then those volunteers would come back to the United States and begin talking to other people about Nicaragua. So recruitment was only part of my work.

I also worked to make returned TecNICA volunteers part of that broader solidarity movement. I was on the TecNica executive committee, and I was a member of the New York–Nicaragua Solidarity Network steering committee. We would have weekly meetings and plan out joint events and tablings and so forth.We worked closely with the Nicaragua Medical Aid Committee (NicMAC), which was a coalition of doctors and nurses. We made connections with construction brigades and sister-city projects. We even organized dances to raise money.

There was a lot of collaboration. For example, Ben Linder didn’t go to Nicaragua through TecNICA; he went down on his own. But we raised money to send him the things he needed to complete the small-scale dam, or weir, he was building. And after he was killed, a small group of TecNica volunteers went out to finish the rural electrification project he started there [in El Cuá, a small town on the Nicaragua-Honduras border].

To be honest, the Central America solidarity movement was the last real radical movement in the United States, as far as I can tell. Actually, I take that back: we’re seeing a new wave of movements now, like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street. But in the 1980s, before these newer movements, the solidarity movement stood alone.

JW: Tell me about TecNica’s work outside of Nicaragua.

At a certain point, Michael Urmann and I started meeting with some people at the Cuban embassy to discuss starting a project for Cuba.

Our contact at the embassy was a member of the Cuban intelligence agency who was living out on Long Island. He would call me in the morning to say [imitating Cuban accent], “Luis, meet me. Fifty-sixth street and second avenue. Two o’clock.” He would get in his car and drive away from New York City, then take a sharp turn to come back.

Somehow the FBI found out that we were meeting with him. It all happened in a few days. They [FBI agents] started going to places like Bell Labs, really top-of-the-line companies [that employed computer programmers]. They would go into the personnel office and say, “Are you aware your employees may be working with an espionage network?” They accused TecNica of transferring “high technologies” to the Soviet Union through Cuba.

It became a huge story. Nightline with Ted Koppel even ran a whole thirty-minute episode about the allegations — but the focus of the story was a TecNica volunteer who was just going around repairing electrical pylons that supplied electricity to Managua. The media coverage was such a repudiation of the FBI that they ultimately just dropped their case against us.

Around this time, we also started working in Africa. In the late 1980s I went on a needs assessment trip to the headquarters of the African National Congress (ANC) in exile, where I met with Thabo Mbeki and his wife, Zanele Dlamini Mbeki. It just so happened that she was working on Oliver Tambo’s speech for a major ANC conference at the time. And she couldn’t save it! So I bailed her out and I showed her how to save the file [laughs].

After Nelson Mandela got out of prison [in 1990], we had people working in South Africa, in Angola, in Zimbabwe. We sent somebody over to Namibia to train SWAPO [South West Africa People’s Organisation] how to use desktop publishing to run their propaganda campaigns.

JW: Why did TecNica’s work wind down?

LP: After [anti-Sandinista president] Violeta Chamorro was elected [in 1990], it became a lot harder to raise money. During the 1980s, TecNica had a donor base that included some wealthy people. But after 1990, because Nicaragua sort of disappeared as a galvanizing force, the money dried up.

The only project that continued was the skilled trades subproject, because the people working on it had been around the Communist Party and knew how to get things done. They continued to stay in touch with blue collar workers in Nicaragua, helping them out. But other than that, it just dissipated. It all

JW: How did your experience with TecNica affect the way you think about socialist politics and the international left?

LP: When you’ve seen a place like Nicaragua it’s not hard to understand why these countries are so vulnerable. We’re talking about a country that’s the size of Brooklyn with a GDP that’s equal to what Americans spend on blue jeans each year! This is one of the reasons I really hate people like Reagan and Trump.

I went to work at Columbia University after I left TecNica in 1991. I retired about four or five years ago. What I do now, mostly, is write about the need to unite the Left. I’m trying to share some of the strategic orientation I learned from Camejo, who learned it from the Sandinistas, who learned it from the Cuban revolutionaries, from Mariátegui, and from the Latin American left.

In Latin America, the Left has had to deal with real questions of survival and revolutionary strategy. When you have a class struggle that’s so sharply posed, you can’t think in terms of bullshit sectarian schemas. Because you have people who are being killed! In Nicaragua, under Somoza, they were throwing people out of helicopters.

When I left the SWP, I enrolled in a writers’ workshop at NYU and told myself I was putting politics behind me. Fuck that shit, I thought. But then I would open up the Times in the morning and read about El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the pull was just too strong.I find I always identify with the people who are at the bottom trying to change things. It’s quixotic.

3482. We Need to Rescue Rosa Luxemburg From the Soap Opera Treatment

By Daniel Finn, Jacobin, March 5, 2021

Rosa Luxemburg

Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.

The twentieth century liked to place great revolutionaries on a pedestal, or even in a garish mausoleum. Our own age prefers to see them as the kind of people with whom you could go for a drink. It’s progress of a sort.

Everyone knows the story of Karl Marx going on a bender around the streets of London, pursued by the cops for strictly unpolitical hooliganism — there’s even a display about Marx and Engels in the Wetherspoons on Charing Cross Road. New biographies of Trotsky combine an account of his struggle against Stalin with the more colorful details of his affair with Frida Kahlo.

Lenin doesn’t really lend himself to the human-interest angle, but the many photos of the Soviet leader petting cats do at least give him a foothold in the latest Internet trends. Irish people delight in the claim that he spoke English with a posh Dublin accent, supposedly acquired from a tutor in London.

There’s no better example of this tendency at work than the popular image of Rosa Luxemburg. Latter-day writing about Luxemburg tends to focus on her personal letters and romantic relationships, pushing her views about capitalism and the way to end it into the background, or depicting them as an offshoot of her emotional life.

To some extent, this tendency is understandable and well-intentioned, and it certainly responds to market demand. It’s hardly surprising that the new edition of Luxemburg’s letters published by Verso attracted reviews in the Guardian and the Nation, the New Republic and the London Review of Books, while her more forbidding economic writings did not.

If this approach encourages a few people to read Luxemburg’s work and study the time in which she lived, it will have been worthwhile. But taken too far, it has the effect of trivializing rather than humanizing her legacy. There’s no point liberating revolutionary icons from the mausoleum only to confine them to a neatly manicured flower garden.

Private Affairs

It all starts with the name. It’s hard to imagine anyone talking about “Vladimir,” “Leon,” or “Nikolai” when they discuss the October Revolution. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever referred to Rudolf Hilferding as “Red Rudi,” or given his private correspondence more weight than theoretical tomes like Finance Capital. Luxemburg, on the other hand, frequently appears in the guise of “Rosa” — a small but telling detail of how she is perceived.

Of course, this superficial familiarity, with its unmistakably gendered thrust, is hardly unique to the world of politics. Another Polish woman of genius, born in the tsarist empire just a few years before Luxemburg, has recently inspired a graphic novel called Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (now adapted as a movie). As the publisher’s blurb has it:

They fell in love. They took their honeymoon on bicycles. They expanded the periodic table…

No male scientist of comparable importance would be likely to receive the same treatment: for better or worse, it is what it is. Luxemburg wasn’t just a great socialist thinker and activist: she led an interesting life, and her writings were often lyrical as well as theoretically sharp. If an author uses that side of her story to draw people in, it would be churlish to complain. It’s more of a problem if they also use her personality as a kind of master key for her political thought.

That perspective frequently intrudes on one important aspect of Luxemburg’s theoretical legacy: her critique of Bolshevism. Discussions of this critique often give you the impression that Luxemburg was more democratic than Lenin or Trotsky because she was softer and more compassionate, with a rich inner life that the Russian Marxists lacked. Reviewing her translated letters, Vivian Gornick and Jacqueline Rose leaned heavily upon this stereotype, implying that Luxemburg’s disagreements with the Bolshevik leader were the extension, on a world-historic stage, of her tempestuous, ill-fated relationship with Leo Jogiches.

This version of events has tremendous literary appeal, but that doesn’t make it good history or politics. There’s no reason to think that Lenin acted in the way that he did after 1917 because he was a callous individual with a taste for violence or the exercise of power for its own sake. Lenin’s successor at the helm of the Soviet state did possess all those vices — or at least acquired them along the way — but that still won’t suffice as an explanation of Stalinism.

If Luxemburg was right and Lenin was wrong — and there’s good reason to think that she was, though not about everything — it wasn’t because she was a nicer person than him. For what it’s worth, Luxemburg and Lenin seem to have had a good personal relationship, and even a shared love of cats. Their polemical exchanges show that Lenin had no monopoly on invective, but they respected each other all the same.

Her judgement rested on a superior understanding of some basic political questions that should be at the heart of the socialist project. That’s ultimately more important than whether we find Luxemburg to be a more attractive and engaging figure than Lenin.

Democracy and Socialism

Luxemburg’s pamphlet on the Russian revolution and the early days of Soviet rule comes with a lot of baggage that’s piled up since her death. An influential English-language edition, published in the 1960s by the University of Michigan Press, combined the 1918 essay with an earlier critique of Lenin that bore the snappy title “Leninism or Marxism?” But Luxemburg herself had given it a much less exciting name, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” and never claimed that it held the secret to her later issues with Bolshevism.

That edition also carried an introduction from Bertram Wolfe, a former Communist who had become a Cold War liberal, working in the orbit of the State Department and the Hoover Institution. Luxemburg referred disdainfully in the pamphlet to German “government-Socialists” who had enthusiastically supported the war effort (and her own imprisonment for opposing it). It’s easy to imagine what she might have had to say about US “government-Liberals” trying to recruit her spirit for their camp.

A stained glass view of Luxemburg does no justice to her or the Bolshevik leaders she was criticizing. On some important points — land reform, the non-Russian nationalities — her positions were impractical and would have required more centralized coercion rather than less to put them into effect. On the question of national self-determination, Lenin was always far more perceptive than Luxemburg, belying his image as a highly dogmatic Marxist by escaping the traps of class reductionism and economic determinism.

However, Luxemburg put forward a brilliant, penetrating argument about the necessary link between socialism and democracy that can still electrify the reader today. The most famous line from the pamphlet — “freedom is always only freedom for those who think differently” — often appears in isolation, as a kind of boilerplate liberal sentiment — worthy to be sure, but scarcely indistinguishable from the views of John Stuart Mill. It should be read in its original context, as part of a tightly reasoned case against the idea of a tutelary dictatorship that could lay the foundations of a socialist economy.

For Luxemburg, the very nature of socialism made this impossible:

Far from being an aggregation of ready-made prescriptions that have merely to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and legal system is something that lies in the mists of the future. What we possess in our program amounts to no more than a few major signposts that indicate the general direction in which to identify the measures that are to be taken, and these indications are predominantly of a negative character at that.

For the creative work of building a socialist system, political freedom was the essential lubricant:

Experience alone is capable of making corrections and opening up new paths. Uninhibited, effervescent life alone fashions a thousand new forms and improvisations, contains creative power, and corrects all mistakes. The public life of states where freedom is restricted is so meager, so miserable, so schematic and so sterile precisely because by excluding democracy, it occludes the living source of all intellectual wealth and progress.

After a century’s experience of monolithic post-revolutionary states, communist or otherwise, nobody can seriously dispute how right Luxemburg was about their development path:

Public life gradually falls into a slumber, a few dozen party leaders with inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and govern; among the latter, a dozen outstanding minds are in reality the ones that lead, and an elite from within the working class is occasionally mustered in order to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to show unanimous approval for the resolutions drafted by them.

There’s only one qualification to add here: over time, the “few dozen party leaders” also tend to fall into a slumber themselves, as anyone who lived through the Brezhnev years in the Soviet Union will attest.

The Prophet Outcast

Vivian Gornick suggests that Luxemburg was “one of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history,” and “knew instinctively that if socialists closed down inside, they’d become the kind of people who, devoid of fellow feeling, would make police-state socialism.” Maybe she was and maybe she did, but it sells her short if we leave the discussion there.

By any conventional standard, Luxemburg lived a life of intense political commitment and struggle, making huge personal sacrifices for the cause she believed in, just as much as any Bolshevik leader. Lenin and Trotsky, for their part, were deeply cultured men, with a feel for art and literature as well as politics. If Luxemburg saw further than them, it wasn’t simply because she was more empathic. It was also because, in some crucial respects, she was smarter, more perceptive, and more imaginative.

Luxemburg went out of her way to be fair to the Bolsheviks, suggesting that it would have been “superhuman” to conjure up a thriving socialist democracy under the dire circumstances in Russia at the time:

Through their resolute revolutionary stance, their exemplary drive and the force of their action, and their unswerving loyalty to international socialism, they have genuinely achieved all that was possible under such devilishly difficult conditions. The danger begins only where they make a virtue out of necessity by establishing a theory that sets in stone every detail of the tactics imposed upon them by such fatal conditions, and where they attempt to recommend to the international proletariat that it should emulate these as the paradigm of socialist tactics per se.

This was after a year of Bolshevik rule. It’s a matter for speculation how much further she would have gone if she had lived to the point when Paul Levi first published her pamphlet in 1922, by which time the Soviet leadership had fully institutionalized a one-party state. When it comes to later developments, there’s no reason to question the judgement of Stalin himself: he posthumously denounced Luxemburg as an ideological heretic, instinctively recognizing that she would have been a bitter foe of his.

Latter-day social democrats often contrast the two systems established in Germany during the Cold War, presenting the greater freedom and prosperity in the western zone as a retrospective vindication of the reformist tendency in European socialism. There are any number of problems with this argument, but the most striking one is this: by calling in proto-fascist death squads to repress the Spartacus League in 1919, the leaders of German Social Democracy eliminated the revolutionary thinker with the most implacable commitment to democratic rights as a necessary part of a socialist system. As such, they bear a large share of responsibility for the evolution of German Communism in the years before it eventually took power in Berlin after the Second World War.

“Ruthless Revolutionary Energy”

Luxemburg’s critique of authoritarian socialism was all the more important because it came from within the revolutionary camp. There’s sometimes a tendency to downplay this aspect of her thought, by stressing her principled aversion to unnecessary bloodshed — captured in her famous remark, uttered a few weeks before her murder, that anyone who stepped on a “poor earthworm” without cause on the road to socialism was guilty of a crime. That was a fine sentiment, and much preferable to macho rhetoric about the need to break eggs if we want to make an omelette.

However, when Luxemburg spoke in the same speech about the need to combine “ruthless revolutionary energy and tender humanity,” she meant every word of it, including the ruthlessness. The idea of a peaceful road to socialism seemed entirely implausible to her:

It is sheer insanity to believe that capitalists would goodhumoredly obey the socialist verdict of a parliament or of a national assembly, that they would calmly renounce property, profit, the right to exploit. All ruling classes fought to the end, with tenacious energy, to preserve their privileges … they all shed streams of blood, they all marched over corpses, murder, and arson, instigated civil war and treason, in order to defend their privileges and their power. The imperialist capitalist class, as last offspring of the caste of exploiters, outdoes all its predecessors in brutality, in open cynicism and treachery.

In order to see off this challenge, she insisted, “the violence of the bourgeois counterrevolution must be confronted with the revolutionary violence of the proletariat.” For today’s political consensus, such views are enough to put Luxemburg beyond the pale. Conventional wisdom stigmatizes revolutionary violence of all kinds as “terrorism” — even when a stateless people deploys it against a brutish occupying army, as in the cases of Palestine and Kurdistan — while depicting support for interstate violence as the essence of responsible politics.

It bears repeating that it took thirty years of war, revolution, and counterrevolution to establish liberal democracy as the dominant political system in Western Europe, let alone socialism. Luxemburg would no doubt have modified her views in some respects if she had lived to see the consolidation of capitalist democracy in large parts of the world — a development that she considered inconceivable in the early twentieth century. That doesn’t mean she would have become a pacifist or forgotten her warning about the lengths to which ruling classes will go when their privileges are at stake.

The Forbidden List

We can find echoes of Luxemburg in the most surprising places. In the 1970s, the British political philosopher Norman Geras published a fine book, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, that played its part in the recovery of her thought. Geras later wrote an essay about the ethics of revolutionary violence, “Our Morals,” that was very much in the spirit of Luxemburg, stressing the need to exclude noncombatants from the list of “legitimate targets,” no matter how justified a struggle might be.

In 2018, officials at the University of Reading flagged up “Our Morals” as a dangerous text in the light of the British government’s counterterrorism program, Prevent. As the Guardian reported:

Third-year politics undergraduates have been warned not to access it on personal devices, to read it only in a secure setting, and not to leave it lying around where it might be spotted “inadvertently or otherwise, by those who are not prepared to view it.”

Stephen De Wijze, who had worked with Geras at the University of Manchester, said that he found it “hard to imagine what sensible criteria could have been used to make this initial negative assessment,” since the arguments made by Geras were “the very opposite of the hate-filled ideologies that Prevent is seeking to confront.” In fact, the officials at Reading had inadvertently grasped the true spirt of programs like Prevent, which conflate indiscriminate terrorism with other forms of armed resistance and even nonviolent civil disobedience.

A manual issued by counterterrorism police in 2020 listed climate change activists alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists under the heading of “extremism,” urging cops and teachers to keep tabs on anyone who spoke in “strong or emotive terms about environmental issues like climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution.” Within months, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel had threatened to classify Extinction Rebellion as an organized crime group.

It’s safe to assume that Luxemburg would be speaking in “strong or emotive terms” about the threat of ecological breakdown if she were alive today. In her own time, she argued that capitalism would hit a brick wall when it ran out of noncapitalist spaces on which to encroach, so the capacity of the system to expand in purely economic terms would have surprised her. But that capacity for seemingly limitless growth is now running up against the natural limits of the Earth system, giving Luxemburg’s famous slogan “socialism or barbarism” renewed currency.

Luxemburg was certainly a likable, warmhearted figure in her private life. She was also a dangerous woman, an outlaw who wanted to tear down the established order. She could write affectionate letters to her friends and lacerating polemics against her enemies. In today’s world, she belongs on a wanted list or an index of forbidden books, not in a sepia-tinged photo album. The modern left can learn from her compassion, but it can also draw lessons from her ruthless determination.

2891. Moishe Postone: 1942-2018

By Patrick Murry, Historical Materialism, April 25, 2018

Moishe Postone

Moishe Postone (1942-2018) died in Chicago, Monday, March 19, 2018, after a battle with cancer.  A member of the Historical Materialism Advisory Board, he delivered one of the plenary talks at the Historical Materialism conference in London last November (2017).  He became seriously ill some weeks after returning to Vienna.  He was working there this academic year at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences). 

 A native of Canada, Moishe lived and worked in Frankfurt for over a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, completing a dissertation in 1983 under the direction of Iring Fetscher at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt.  He returned to Chicago, where he had studied at the University of Chicago.  He worked first as a researcher at the University of Chicago Center for Psychosocial Studies before taking several academic positions at the University of Chicago, ultimately becoming the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History at the University and the College, as well as a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.  He was co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and a founding editor of Critical Historical Studies, the journal sponsored by the center.

This year, 2018, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Postone’s most influential work, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  It was the subject of a symposium in Historical Materialism and has been translated into many languages.  It was preceded by a widely discussed essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” which appeared in Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust, Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds.), New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986.  Moishe collaborated with Craig Calhoun and Edward LiPuma in co-editing Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, Chicago and Cambridge: University of Chicago Press and Polity Press, 1993).

Remembering my friend Moishe Postone:

Moishe Postone introduced himself in the lobby of the philosophy building, Dantestrasse 4-6, next to the Institut für Sozialforschung, in Frankfurt in the fall of 1975.  He spotted me carrying an issue of Telos and came over.  That chance meeting changed my life.  It began an enduring and special friendship, as decades of conversations—some beginning after midnight in the Anatevka, an after-hours Frankfurt bar—followed about Marx, critical theory, and the world formed by capital and resistance to it. 

Moishe was a deliberate but not scholastic reader of texts; he thought conceptually and historically in equal measure.  He took the time he needed: his dissertation was ten years in the making, followed by another decade of work before Time, Labor, and Social Domination appeared in 1993.  It was my privilege to be involved in those processes.  Moishe’s intellect was piercing, his mind large.  The horrors of twentieth-century history, colonization and anti-colonial struggles, world wars, hyperinflation and depression, and the genocidal devastation of the Holocaust were never out of mind, but he sought to understand this history’s movements and discover what grounds for hope could be found in them.  Thinking, for Moishe, was taking responsibility for the world. 

Moishe was a thinker of the New Left.  He felt anguish over what Herbert Marcuse called “surplus repression.”  We sense it in Moishe’s most recent essay: “this gap between what is and what could be, allows for a future possibility that, increasingly, has become real historically.  It is this gap that constitutes the basis for a historical critique of what is.”[1] 

Moishe was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during the height of the student and anti-war movements.  In the summer of 1969, SDS, the foremost New Left group in the US, splintered at its convention in Chicago.  By the time that Moishe left Chicago in the early 1970s to teach briefly at Ramapo College in New Jersey before moving to Frankfurt, the New Left was dissolving, with some factions turning toward extralegal actions, others toward Maoism or Old Left communism, and others fading away.  At the same time, feminism was resurgent and other social movements were rising.  Several journals, including Telos and New German Critique, offered a space for New Left thinkers to develop and to engage currents of critical theory imported largely from Europe.  Reading the Grundrisse when it came out in a full English translation in 1973 was, I believe, a defining moment for Moishe.  The idea that capital is its own barrier stuck with him.  Moishe’s 1974-5 essay in Telos with Helmut Reinicke, “On Nicolaus,” gave a first look into his reading of the Grundrisse.[2]

As the birthplace of Frankfurt School critical theory, Frankfurt was a home to the New Left.  Exiled from France after May 68, Daniel Cohn-Bendit set up the Karl Marx Bookstore on the edge of Goethe Universität in Frankfurt.  From Frankfurt, it was easier to recognize the New Left as an international phenomenon—always an important point for Moishe.  The Frankfurt SDS had been led by the brilliant activist and thinker Hans Jürgen Krahl, one of several students of Theodor Adorno who were developing “die neue Marx Lektüre.”  On this new reading, Marx was a critic of political economy, not a critical political economist.  Marx’s theory of value was not a radicalized version of the classical, Ricardian one; it was a theory of the social form of labor in capitalism.  Marx’s revolutionary aim was not to redistribute value but to overthrow value as the measure of wealth and surplus-value as the aim of production. 

For Moishe, the important question of the distribution of wealth in capitalism was preceded by the question of the social form and purpose constitutive of wealth and labor in capitalism.  He criticized traditional Marxism for its transhistorical (Ricardian) conception of value as embodied “labor.”  No.  Value is a socially specific form of wealth that gives capitalism its double character and “heteronomous” historical dynamic.  The centerpiece of Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx lies in what he calls the value treadmill.  Because abstract labor forms the substance of value whereas productive power is a concrete feature of labor, increases in the productive power of labor yield more use-values (useful things) per hour but not more value.  In the short run, increasing the productive power of one’s workers gives one a competitive advantage that results in extra surplus value but only until one’s competitors adopt the more productive methods.  If the productive power of labor keeps increasing, value (whose magnitude is labor time) as the measure of wealth becomes increasingly anachronistic and what Moishe called shearing pressures mount.  In “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading” (2017), Moishe focuses on climate change and the “crisis of work” as two manifestations of the shearing pressures created as value (not the theory of value) becomes anachronistic, while the value forms constituting capitalist production keep being reproduced.

Moishe took in earnest Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse that “the exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself … [is] the foundation of bourgeois society”.[3]  

In thinking about class in capitalist society, Moishe was guided by Marx’s observation that “classes are an empty word if I do not know the elements on which they are based.  For example, wage-labor, capital etc.”[4]  That led him to identify “the ‘essential relations’ of capitalism” as “the forms of social mediation expressed by the categories such as commodity, value, capital, and surplus value.”[5]  Classes in capitalism exist and are to be understood in that context.

Moishe was wary of forms of anti-capitalism that did not first come to grips with capital.  That gave urgency to his own efforts to plumb capital’s depths.  Political efforts to overthrow capitalism rooted in traditional Marxist or Ricardian socialist ideas could not bring about the revolutionary transformation away from capital’s domination aimed at by Marx’s critical theory.  Moishe’s essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” from 1986, revealed how destructive a perverse strain of anti-capitalism could be.  

For Moishe, capital gave history a direction that it does not have on its own: capital was the truth of what Hegel called spirit, Geist, in his Phenomenology of Spirit.  Moishe saw idealism as the “rational core” of Hegel’s dialectic in its gesturing to capitalism’s “domination by abstractions.”  History may not be on our side, but, because of its dynamic, contradictory double character, constantly constraining the new by the increasingly anachronistic social forms of value and surplus-value, capital generates precarious possibilities for an end to exploitation and domination.

Though I took Time, Labor, and Social Domination, with its forceful criticisms of Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, to be offering a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory as an alternative to the Frankfurt School, recent scholarship suggests that a reading of Marx as a critic of political economy such as Moishe’s counts as a branch of Frankfurt School critical theory with roots in Adorno, and more particularly, Adorno’s students Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Hans Jürgen Krahl, Helmut Reinicke, and more.[6]

Moishe lived and thought with style, grace, and large purpose.  A visit with Moishe, whether over the phone or in person, was always a special occasion.  It is hard to think now of never picking up the phone to say, “Hello, Moishe, it’s Patrick.”

[1] “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading.” Continental Thought & Theory, Volume 1, Issue 4: 150 years of Capital, 53.

[2] Moishe Postone and Helmut Reinicke, “On Nicolaus’s ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse, Telos22 (Winter 1974-75), 130-48.

[3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 331.

[4] Introduction to the Grundrisse, in Texts on Method, edited by Terrell Carver, 72.

[5] “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value,” 48.

[6] See contributions from Dirk Braunstein, Christian Lotz, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane.