that clothes on balconies lower the tone,

we slung them indoors,

next the far window.

Water gathered along their pliant rims.

The shutters grew spots.

Dehumidifier, knee-steep, squat and dusty.

You quivered to life,

took litres from the air each day.

We ran you at night,

watched digits on your display,

rise and subside.

In his WhatsApp photo, the landlord’s yacht skims

a creamy wake off the surface of a sea.

Too wide and turquoise to be local, I think,

but look how it opens and bestows.

When we offered up our wages as loot

I lied about being on the dole.

He asked me how the lecturing was going.

‘It’s great’, I told him. ‘It’s what I always wanted to do’.

91 - Present, % rental stock has doubled, and more.

War and slums once taught

that struts need compounds

to take heat.

Those who have forgotten must again learn.

The educated will inform the ignorant.

Those being told will again tell.

When I say that Seamus Deane and his contemporaries — Nell McCafferty, Seamus Heaney, Bernadette Devlin, Eamon McCann, Martin McGuinness — were the nation’s conscience I’m not making either a ethno-nationalist or a liberal point. The diversity of perspectives which each of them articulated — social democratic, feminist, socialist, republican — diagnosed correctly the social and political malaise which partition had inflicted on the two Irish statelets; it is not until unity (and probably communism) is achieved in Ireland that we will have some sense of the time and effort which could have been spared were conditions more favourable to these critiques taking on broader social force at the time. Their presence in this particular place furthermore indicate the fundamental connection that abides between works of significant cultural value and situations which pertain in revolutionary or proto-revolutionary settings. Since then there are far less opportunities for oppositional viewpoints to even be presented as anything other than spectacle let alone considered or rebuffed; the capitalist class have marginalised the critical intelligentsia in their struggle for total control over knowledge-production.

When we compare Deane’s body of work to that of his most direct non-Irish analogue Raymond Williams, one thing we note is that Deane never produced a summative theoretical text. This has its disadvantages — we are all the worse off for being deprived of an Irish equivalent of Marxism and Literature — but this can also be enabling. When you decided to be a thoroughbred Marxist literary critic back then were certain questions you had to address. Having dismissed base and superstructure as too functionalist, in what manner will you propose reconfiguring it (often while basically preserving its essence)? Are we going to seek to redeem the unvarnished but fatalistic representations of the working class in one part of the canon, or venerate the utopian impulse in works which effectively ignore them? Is the kind of cultural policy available under social democracy a betrayal? Invaluable work has come out of attempts to litigate these and other questions, Perry Anderson’s response to Marshall Berman comes to mind, but I would describe Deane’s method as more historical-appreciative. The topos isn’t pre-determined to be filled out with instances, rather it is accumulated from judgements which can only be made by someone who knows the material very very well. From friends who have heard him speak his most ready-to-hand reference-points were Hegel, Lukács, Arendt, Burke (his doctoral research investigated the ambivalent set of responses manifested by English intellectuals to the French Revolution) and this set of names will be enough to signal that Deane wasn’t trying to assert a normative political standard. (Some readers of Williams might be surprised at the implication, I have his comments on Yeats in discussion with Edward Said in mind here).

Deane’s work was more infrastructural. In Field Day there’s a curatorial impulse, an attention to ways the civic or social sphere that might be able to get out from under the reactionary misconceptions regarding nationality and nationhood operative in an Irish context where, as says, the national question was the social and the democratic question. The bafflement, censure and abuse his work drew down both during his life and after — the London Review of Books, a publication with a decent few priors on distorting the Irish context should really be ashamed to have commissioned such a mediocre thinker to rebut Deane’s project from a unionist perspective shortly after his death — demonstrates how correct he was in asserting that the nation had failed to produce a modern intellectual or creative culture that could propagate and secure a civic Republican identity capable of transcending the social and cultural inheritance of imperialism. Of the two faces of Irish nationalism, Enlightenment-based citizenship on the one hand, ancestrally governed and essentialist modes of identification on the other, it was instead the latter that won out.

This is how we would go about explaining the precipitous drop-off in the quality of literary production after Joyce died and Beckett left. In a remark that does not seem unrelated Deane notes that it would be possible to read a lot of twentieth century Irish literature and not be aware of fascism or communism, noting that this generation was far more detained by issues of personal identity and morality, the smothering of one’s impulses by respectability and convention. The censure and restrictions to which sex was subject within Catholic social teaching, from the point of view of an intelligentsia which in many respects justifiably felt itself to be benighted, rendered it the deepest form of liberation against respectability and convention. We see this in the characteristic Irish short story when buried emotions are recognised but not acted upon, as if the morbid symptoms of a provincial literature consistently failing to situate itself were being neurotically staged and re-staged. Ulysses may be dense, constituted by and through recondite theoretical scaffolding, but is still a search for human connection, a consideration of the place of the individual within one’s society relative to tradition, which grants primacy to the idea of human solidarity and the secular life of the modern city. The Dead as Doornails generation were enabled by their impulse to nettle but also constrained by it, as works attracted attention to the degree that they broached taboo subjects rather than for any interesting formal interventions. (This also had the effect of hindering influence of Beckett Joyce might otherwise have had). The availability of an the American audience clearly didn’t help the likes of Frank O’Connor, and Joyce also had the benefit of writing when the potentialities of the Irish Revolution were still in motion in a way they wouldn’t be again for some time. One point on which we have the benefit of hindsight arises when Deane discusses John Banville, who at the time of publication must have seemed like a very interesting and serious artist capable of yoking together multiple genres and historical-ideological threads in a manner that would seem purpose-built for a critic like Deane; little did we know this would be the beginning of a one-note career of world-historical proportions.

This isn’t a failure that’s in any sense limited to authors or the activist left (it’s noteworthy that this is probably the period in which these two cohorts overlapped to the greatest extent historically, hopefully there are other reasons why the results for both were so uneven). Ireland’s primary intellectual export from the late twentieth century has to be the school of Irish historiography known as revisionism, as practiced most notably by Moody, Edwards and Foster, characterised as it is by a scepticism regarding the validity of applying categories such as imperialism, colonialism or genocide to the Irish context, preferring instead to harp on the backwardness of the indigenous population relative to an alternately benevolent, disinterestedly modernising or well-intentioned but sometimes incompetent colonial administration. These historians tended to shun Irish sources, in large part didn't bother to learn the language, and gravitated instead towards colonial legal documents, so their histories were top-down, fussy and shot through with class and racial preconceptions.

This might have remained an eccentric or minority outlook if the government of the statelet in the north hadn't beaten Catholics seeking civil rights off the streets in the sixties. One side of the armed conflict the Royal Ulster Constabulary provoked represented itself as continuing a revolutionary process initiated by a political organisation from which the two largest parties in the 26 counties derived their origins. Serious work had to be performed by intellectuals in politics and the media to contest the legitimacy of the Provisional IRA’s war against the British state in the name of this same founding myth in the face of what was clearly significant popular support; Lyons states very clearly in one of his lectures that historians have a case to answer here.

'the reaction to Easter 1916 is part of the reaction to the Provisional IRA. The lamentations about that organisations use of violence in the furtherance of political ends come most loudly from those who have a well-established notoriety for that practice themselves - the British and the Unionists. They are not opposed to violence as such; they are opposed to violence against them’.

Novelists, playwrights journalists, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, politicians, you name it, many made their careers by praising the openness, cosmopolitanism and constitutionalism of your Daniel O'Connells, Arthur Griffiths or John Redmonds as against the malcontent sectarian Cornerboys Wolfe Tone or James Connolly to the extent that Dev, one of the few heads of state in Europe in the 30s *not* implicated in any mass killing events, is spoken about in some quarters like he's Franco.

There’s certainly no contemporary equivalent for the donnish affect of high Revisionism. Irish fascism has its thinkers in some pockets, but they’re delusional if they think there’s to be any place for them in the formulation of a programme; the strength is in these petty criminals’ inflated online followings and the free reign they have from the state to assault people. The ‘we all partied line’ on the famine held by Eoghan Harris or dreary Fine Gael novelist Colm Tóibín has gone by the board, even aspiring David McWilliamses refer to underdevelopment in accounting for e.g. shortages of hospital beds. Reflecting trends underway among the politically conscious in the United States and England — for better and for worse — there is a growing consensus regarding the legacies of Anglo-American imperialism, one that CMAT and Kneecap’s success give further witness to. (That Sinn Féin seem to have missed their chance to make something of any of this should be better understood). The prospect of the direction of travel viz. unification in the service of a civic Republicanism or socialism seem remote, but as with any time here over the past 250 years, if there is a way forward, that’s still it.

The antagonism classical Marxism would encourage us to see between capitalist and worker are now operative between residents of western core nations and the colonial or neo-colonial periphery. Under conditions of monopoly, capital accumulation does not reduce, but increases incomes in the global north. The internationalism of the western working class is curtailed; Europeans and USians fall in line with national chauvinism and cheer on their capitalist class in crushing labour overseas. In this way and others (wars, coups, bombing campaigns) former colonies have been systematically prevented from protecting and developing their industries. Something like this school of thought was at its peak in the 60s and 70s during the era of decolonisation — Vietnam, Cuba, NAM, Bandung etc. — and neoliberalism would here be figured as a strategy to re-subordinate the global majority to global imperialist interests, manufacturing a coalition out of the middle class / labour aristocrats in the west and the comprador export-oriented oligarchy in global majority nations.

Unlike a lot of the people whose work he draws from Cope does have to grant that industrialisation and value-added production does not permanently block development — production has an R&D of its own — but the point stands: western capitalists secure additional profits via their industrial / technological / financial / military monopolies and the western working class get a cut through cheapened consumer commodities. (Cope cites research to the effect the minimum global value transfer is worth 4k dollars to the average metropolitan household p.a., meaning they collectively gain more than their own capitalist class, though this of course assumes that all Americans are equal stakeholders). This point is hardest to land on China. John Smith, an important predecessor here, had China as an exploited nation when Imperialism was published in 2016. Cope has it as a smaller imperialist nation exploiting its Asian satellites but fundamentally ‘peripheral’, weighed down by unequal terms of trade with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of depending on secondary frameworks devised to ground import substitution and selective association as political strategies and not checking out how things have developed since. Arguments about the distinct ways productive processes are or aren't automated in global majority contexts come from Amin books from the 70s and 80s rather than anything more recent and before coalitions which were fundamental to the post-war Keynesian consensus went completely on the defensive. There’s not a lot of detail or place names, information on what sectors what countries at all really.

Is all this just nerd shit? We know northern businesses dominate the FT 500 Index, that companies in global majority nations aren’t as diversified or present in aerospace, chemical, electronics, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and tech in comparison to the US Japan Germany France and the UK. Even if I don’t think rent is the best way of thinking about this (and that even if it, and military force, were preponderant modes of exploitation that it would amount to semi-feudalism) there is an imbalance and enormous gaps across almost every measure of well-being. The political independence of African Asian and American states have been circumscribed by integration into global markets; their politics have often been violently re-shaped according to metropolitan requirements.

If we are going to attribute FDI prime mover status here though it would still be good to get the quants right. Cope depends on illicit financial flows, which defines all trade value discrepancies as illicit, without controlling for measurement errors and insurance. There is also this weighing of real market prices against a supposed natural price, deviations from which amount to distortions extracted via monopoly rents, while using PPP, which seems to draw from a neo-classical rather than a Marxist framework.

There is also the problem that the political vision which dominates the second half of the book is, to put it plainly, moronic, working by the Losurdo method of disconnected sequences of block quotes, ad hominem attacks, over-statement and weasel phrasing. Example:

Although there are some exceptions, the absolute impossibility of the construction of socialism in one country for any sustained time period is a central shibboleth of Trotskyism, as is hostility to national liberation struggle.

Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development is here being equated with i) the bad-faith critique of dialectical materialism that Said’s Orientalism went in on as a model of universal convergence ii) permanent revolution (as against socialism in one country) and iii) Trotsky’s supposed belief that the Russian working class must skip historical stages to take power in Russia and crush the peasantry. ii) and iii) are instances of distorting the long history of many distinct debates within the Bolsheviks to support a polemic. i) and ii) are supported by a quote from The Third International After Lenin which follows:

Capitalism finds various sections of mankind at different stages of development, each with its profound internal contradictions. The extreme diversity in the levels attained, and the extraordinary unevenness in the rate of development of the different sections of mankind during the various epochs, serve as the starting point of capitalism. Capitalism gains mastery only gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process, it would be impossible to conceive of the relative leveling out, first, of Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great Britain, and all the consequences arising from the enumerated processes upon which is based not only the program of the Communist International but also its very existence.

If you go to the trouble of actually reading The Third International After Lenin though, you find that right after the quoted paragraph which emphasises how the dynamics of capitalism should also be understood as centripetal:

By drawing the countries economically closer to one another and leveling out their stages of development, capitalism, however, operates by methods of its own, that is to say, by anarchistic methods which constantly undermine its own work, set one country against another, and one branch of industry against another, developing some parts of world economy while hampering and throwing back the development of others. Only the correlation of these two fundamental tendencies – both of which arise from the nature of capitalism – explains to us the living texture of the historical process.

Imperialism, thanks to the universality, penetrability, and mobility and the break-neck speed of the formation of finance capital as the driving force of imperialism, lends vigor to both these tendencies.

I don't think you can explain 1848 - present without considering relative privilege within the working class (even if it's harder to make that case when those privileges are eroding with no countervailing tendency on the scene). But you do need an account of the contradictory and selective distribution of those benefits, a way of understanding the conflictual dynamics within both western as well southern societies and I think the work-floor, the productive process. Primary documents, not just World Bank Data and a game of Dead Russians. Dependency theory today should be more than that.

A lot of people on the left won’t have a lot of time for this book on the basis that one of the co-authors i) called out people for leaving the Labour Party after Corbynism was purged and ii) grants an unwarranted centrality to a fraction called the soft-left (Seymour coins it in the ‘drip left’ in a recent dispatch) in the current balance of forces. But I personally found this book very helpful in rendering a lot of strands in conversations I’ve been having with like-minded people for many years more coherent than I’ve seen them in a good wee while, so I hope to make the broad outlines available. I furthermore recommend listening to and supporting the associated podcast.

The object of this book is to account for the erosion of the postwar Keynesian consensus by neoliberalism. The former is defined as a general commitment, shared to varying extents by left and right governments in Europe and the United States from 1945 - 75, that full employment would be maintained, that wages, leisure time and social insurance would rise continuously. The upshot here was that the generation growing up after the second world war was the first in recorded history in which it could be said that a majority came to adulthood with no direct experience of scarcity. Despite the fact that this dispensation was in part sustained by a compact between the political / capitalist class and the leadership of the organised labour movement that political demands would never escalate to the point of threatening capitalist social relations or undermine support for the so-called Cold War against the Soviet bloc, the working-class was not in the driver’s seat. There was never clear widespread support for a post-capitalist society. The social formation overall tended to enrich capital and encourage governments to regard citizens as consumers. This is why our world is presently characterised by precarity, debt, greater levels of exploitation, reductions in overall taxation, legal restrictions on trade union organising, reductions in spending on core public services which are increasingly subject to market competition.

Neoliberalism is not characterised by the same levels of consensus which sustained the previous regime of accumulation. It and its consequences are universally reviled, but consent need not take the form of straightforward enthusiastic endorsement, rather it is often passive. A term we use to understand how social reality is made to conform to neoliberal assumptions to the extent that it seems inevitable or desirable, is ideology, a means of designating systematic sets of ideas promoted and deployed by elites to legitimise their power and encouraging behaviours in others likely to maintain or enhance this power. We think about this in order to figure out how decisive numbers of the population can be encouraged to join a political project to challenge it, but this is not just a matter of telling people they’re wrong. Marxism has been elaborated as a recognisable doctrine for over 150 years but has failed to make a dent in the capitalist social order. Instead material circumstances and organisational capacities must be changed simultaneously. This, we hope, can be accomplished by engaging the many beliefs people do hold, identifying the ones we like and offer incentives for them to be developed and entrenched while diminishing the force of the ones we don’t like. One of the reasons why some people on the left don’t have a huge amount of time for one of the authors of this book is a position he outlined on Politics Theory Other to the effect that anti-imperialism is the highest stage of consciousness. An angry reply I sent to him at the time expressed the fact that in Ireland the situation is reversed. The fact that anti-imperialism is at the root of politics and culture is something the far-right have since internalised very well and deployed to more success than the left.

Aspects of social scientific theories devised by Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Althusser, Laclau, Mouffe and DeLanda are all deployed to derive Gilbert and Williams’ underlying theory of material interest. First: interests have an objective reality, regardless of the subjective conceptions of the individuals and groups to whom they pertain. This is asserted to distinguish between: i) interests are real and ii) relevant subjects are fully and consciously expressing them as demands. Not only is this field of interests infinite, it is infinitely inflected as they might or might not be actualised according to the unfolding specificities of the relevant place and time. This allows us to say historical subjects have complex, contradictory and competing sets of interests rather than buying into a vanguardist approach which we might be familiar with from Trotskyist sects or dissident Republican groups (which is not to say that within certain places or times they can’t do good work or don’t have a role in whatever envisioned revolutionary project), in which the objective interests of historical actors represent a singular essential truth derived from whatever analysis. Within this model the leadership claim to know the nature of those they sought to lead in ways that the led do not understand.

The member of the working class who buys an iPhone or throws a firework at an IPAS centre is pursuing a set of plausibly reliable interests, as someone who feels violence, debtorship, consumption as their only meaningful forms of agency. The communist intuition would be that this guy would have other interests over a longer and more ambitious time-scale because the interests of all are best-served by forming relations of solidarity in opposition to capitalist ones, allowing the maximum possible potential of as many human beings as possible to be collectively achieved. The aim then is to move along the decision tree in a way that we get past the ideology-mesh which ensures only a restricted set of interests are thinkable (which is not to assert that it won’t be demoralising or dangerous to begin the work with one-to-one conversations with mobilised fascists).

The only practical guidance which can be taken as an absolute is to carefully analyse the conjuncture with a view to identifying class fractions most likely to be radicalised most easily and organise them into a coherent force before mobilising other groups. But ultimately, and I think this is an underrated point: sheer material circumstances will do most of the work of persuasion. The major preoccupation of most human beings for most of their adult lives will be ensuring their and their childrens’ survival. Under circumstances in which this is difficult but achievable its attainment will secure most of their attention and energy and they are unlikely to devote their attention to political organisation or agitation. When it becomes unachievable, poverty and desperation will drive them to agitate.

So what has the post-structuralist detour brought us if we’ve ended up at a classical Gramscian / Leninist strategy, and had the truth-claims we’re supposed to have escaped back in via the different types of horizon, whether communist, social democratic or liberal. Perhaps a better diagnosis of how opaque interest has become in a way it wasn’t in 1917? If this book was a century older it would be History and Class Consciousness when ‘proletariat as messianic force’ was plausible because it was in front of your eyes. Lenin has to be still with us, but in a milieu with a different signal to noise ratio.

Post-script: historical sweep a bit broad

Comrades the form of the new plays

Is new. But why

Fear what is new? Is it hard to do?

But why fear what is new and what is hard to do?

For the exploited, the always disappointed

Life too is always an experiment

Earning a few cents

An uncertain undertaking that no one teaches.

Why fear the new, rather than the old? And even if

Your spectators, the workers, should hesitate, then you must

Not run along behind, but go before them

Swiftly, with bold steps, unconditionally trusting in

Their ultimate vigour.

Vivek Chibber’s notion of capitalism is that it runs along a single axis. The exploiters are on one end, and they secure their wealth by extracting labour from the exploited on the other. Wage labourers exist under a form of social domination which is constitutively unjust, forcing them to subordinate their material well-being to that of a firm which, because it exists in a competitive relationship with other firms, has an objective interest in extracting from the worker more time and energy. As individual efforts to seek relief come up against the employer’s social power, leverage must be obtained in collective slowdown or stoppage actions.

Chibber’s is not a model which admits much in the way of history. Capitalism and its predicates - class, capital, working-class agency - are structures, not processes, facilitating the separation of this schema, what Chibber refers to as the economic, from what he refers to as the political. The ultimate aim of socialists, in seeking to challenge or overturn this, is to generalise a ‘decent shot at happiness’, ‘justice’, and ‘fairness’. Concretely, this means enough food, basic healthcare and housing for everyone. When Chibber published The Class Matrix, his first book on the subject of socialist strategy and its prospects, he seemed open to the idea of a ‘ruptural break with capitalism’ but positioned it as a long-term prospect on the basis that the Left had not yet figured out how to organise in a situation when large concentrated factories are no longer the norm.

Over recent years, and as his primary platform has shifted to the Confronting Capitalism podcast, transcripts from which are posted on the website of the most widely read left-wing magazine in the Anglosphere, Chibber’s position has hardened and he seems irritated at the suggestion that the economic and political are inter-related or that the necessary conditions for the transformation of economic life along socialist lines do not reduce to a strong labour movement and a political party securing increased representation in parliaments towards a Nordic-style social safety net. In what follows I hope to prove that he is resultantly led to distort the tradition he claims.

Ends and Means in History
Chibber’s primary case study in advocating for his two-fold model is the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), with its membership or broad network of affiliation extending to over two million people, seats in both the Reichstag and local government. Space is also afforded to the Bolsheviks, but when Chibber emphasises its internal culture of debate and cadre representation in the factories he clearly has their pre-October character in mind. Lenin, for his part, moved between participation or boycott to elected bodies (he was suspicious of the soviets when they first emerged) in response to the changing situation and prevailing trends within his own paxrty, versus using them as a platform for extending the reach of revolutionary propaganda beyond the limits imposed by clandestine work, an aim to which parliamentary participation in itself was subordinate. Due to its more federal character, the SPD is arguably more complicated, yet Chibber smooths the record when he argues that revolutionary and reformist wings disagreed only on the means as opposed to the goal. Rosa Luxemburg’s view that the means of achieving the goal was the goal itself led to the suppression of her writings, a personal break from the trade union bureaucrats and Reichstag deputies, who could rely on Kautsky as the ideological wing of the inter-party struggle against worker power qua power. The SPD furthermore regarded the Bolsheviks with suspicion, pressuring the party to reunite on Menshevik terms; Eduard Bernstein’s presentation of ‘evolutionary socialism’ led the Russians to consider motioning for his expulsion.

However, scant mention is made of what was most decisive about the conditions faced by the Spartacists as opposed to the Bolsheviks, that the German General Staff and middle class were sufficiently aligned to enact a revolution from above, forcing absolutism out and staving off any possibility of a German October. Any modicum of democracy, or an end to the war in Russia, was not available either from Tsarist absolutism or the timorous set of middle-class representatives who filled the post-abdication vacuum. This lack of consideration for the reasons why one party largely avoided conceding to national chauvinism and succeeded while the other did not suggests that the actuality of the high watermark for working-class power in Europe is being compressed to fit the requirements of Chibber’s worldview. Chibber prefers to present us with the voluntarist critique only, wherein all participants were traitors or insufficiently Marxist. Whatever about the merits of playing alternate history in 1918 Berlin, would we say that Ebert and his ilk, who levied the cost of an imperialist war on the class they were supposed to represent, directed machine gun fire and artillery on revolutionary workers and soldiers, collaborated with the Freikorps in winding down the councils and murdering Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were loyal to socialism?

Chibber’s apparent disinterest in moving this story beyond Europe, to consider some of the attempts to build something present in Marx or Luxemburg’s writings, is symptomatic of how analytical formalism leads to further conceptual and political problems. Chibber’s definition of internationalism is limited to the idea that people of all ethnicities are motivated by the same economic concerns: ‘it isn’t just white people…but anyone who is in the same position or class structure – white or black, brown or yellow, Hindu or Muslim, Christian or Jewish’. This is not quite right. Insofar as skin colour, racial or confessional allegiances were present within debates regarding internationalism within the Second International they were very much subordinate to the idea that some nations benefit from the exploitation of others. Chibber however, argues imperialism is distinct from capitalism. When capital from a firm based in one country mobilises the labour-power of a worker located in another, this is an economic relationship. Imperialism is the ruling class of one nation limiting or constraining the sovereignty of another. The consistent wage gap between workers in the West and the Global South has no broader significance. The line is clear: these are separate phenomena.

It is therefore of particular importance for Chibber to refute the concept of labour aristocracy, the idea that there are wage-earners in the west whose privilege relative to those in the Global South will orient them more towards reformism, or conciliation with their own ruling class, than workers from other parts of the world. Chibber makes the point that in the eighties, the domestic American working class was enduring its longest period of wage stagnation in its history, while the exploiting class was significantly increasing the scale of its investments abroad. Chibber is completely correct here and furthermore that wage growth depends significantly on the intensity of class struggle. As to whether productivity is important: it is certainly one measure one could use in measuring the gap between workers’ gains and those of the capitalist class but I would contend there is one, less straightforwardly measured but of more direct relevance — even within Chibber’s own model — and this is the rate of exploitation. Arguing that large European firms, whose value chains are international and recorded in ways which allow them to benefit from unevenly distributed regulatory requirements or tax avoidance anyway, are more productive almost provides an alibi for exploitation of cheaper, less densely unionised labour in Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan; we should not be in the business of justifying piece-work by another name. This is not just a question of capitalists bribing or handing out cash either. The high profitability of firms in imperial countries allows capital to secure social peace by facilitating domestic wage demands or funding welfare states via taxation without significantly undermining its rate of profit or, in one of the most noteworthy transformations of capitalist society over the past half-century, generate a large domestic market built on high consumption and debt. Labour aristocracy is therefore best understood as a social wage, as less vulnerability to genocide, the effects of climate change, the draining of state capacity by petty corruption indulged in by comprador regimes or military invasion. Unfortunately Chibber does not provide us with the where hows and whens of the greater degree of radicalism among better-off workers, and its necessary correlate, reformism among the immiserated, but the question is not whether workers in imperialist countries go on strikes or advocate for their interests. Obviously they do. What must be considered is their track record on international solidarity and opposition to their ruling class’ overseas ventures. In May 1974 leading trade unionists in shipyards across Ireland’s occupied six counties organised a general strike to force the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement, which would have afforded the oppressed Catholic population some representation within the herrenvolk democracy. 33 civilians were killed in bombings organised by the paramilitary proxies of the British government during this strike in Dublin in Monaghan. In 1973 the AFL-CIO backed a bill which would make undocumented migrants illegal. It was not until the year 2000 that they began to oppose the imposition of sanctions on employers, finding that these were used as a pretext to clamp down on their organising efforts. French unions have a history of refusing to admit Algerian workers, but the most grotesque example is probably the role the Histadrut played in constructing the settler state; they of course do not admit Palestinian members. The picture is clear, with honourable exceptions - Dunnes Stores workers refusing to handle goods from apartheid South Africa or Canada’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union - the most organised sections of the western working class exhibit a tendency toward pro-war, pro-empire and anti-immigrant politics. Even if this was not a phenomenon unevenly distributed across sectors, or beyond a form characterised by high union density - one thinks of Andreas Malm’s description of fossil fuel consumption, which underwrites the median lifestyle in higher emission nations as ‘projectiles fired indiscriminately into humanity, primarily the part of it living in the global South’ - I do not think Chibber would be interested in any of this. It is essential to his view not to grasp that the economic and the political are wholly intertwined than when it comes to opposition to imperialism.

Capitalism as Pristine
This preference for grappling with a mangled interpretation of his antagonist’s arguments is something of a tic in Chibber’s writing. Chibber reduces the explanation provided by Quinn Slobodian (who he does not name) as to how a political logic associated with social liberalism, shrinking the state’s disciplinary mechanisms and letting the thing loose has, in its later stages, become more visibly associated with militarisation, genocidal border regimes and a far-right syncretising scientific racism, libertarianism and even monarchism, to: the ideas of Milton Friedman, Hayek etc. were implemented because of their ‘sophistication’ and ‘validity’. Chibber also manufactures for Slobodian’s benefit a strategic upshot; if you think intellectuals and their ideas are so fundamental to capitalism’s operations, your response would be to pour your resources into opinion-editorials about social democracy and seek meetings with the president of the United States to try and win them over. Whatever our assessment of Slobodian’s what is to be done might be - contesting globalisation for the left via a consideration of the alter-globalisation movement of the early oughts - Chibber should provide an ingenuous account of it.

One problem with seeing things in such mechanical terms is that there is no role for mutually constitutive, or even second-order, causes. Slobodian’s argument that frameworks promoted by well-connected individuals within the culture industry and academia exerted an influence over particular strata in possession of social power depends on the implicit assumption that class factions are in possession of relative autonomy, which is to say that the wage relation does not allow us to lay out in advance what they will do and there was nothing fore-ordained about how they understood the causes of / solutions to stagnating rates of profit. For Chibber, since the probability of ideas causally superseding what Chibber has decided in advance is the distilled essence of capitalism – exploitation within the wage relation – is zero, Slobodian is de facto incorrect. Chibber is of course accurate in his account of the outcomes - cheap wages and flexibilisation of the workforce, the initiation of the process by which the welfare state was wound down - but if, as Chibber himself argues, there is no such thing as a free market, that flexibilisation, marketised forms of exchange or distribution and demand suppression are all forms of market engineering, that ‘the consensus’ was that corporate profits were being dragged down from excess costs arising from the welfare state, what was the conceptual apparatus which led the capitalist class to this set of conclusions? What was it that taught them the solution was to seek to pull the set of levers that they did? There is no straight line between their interests and market mechanisms because capitalism is not transparent. Chibber might respond that capitalists do not have to think very deeply or organise themselves, as they have the structural advantage. There is a lot of truth in this, but what is at issue, beyond his deliberate clouding of other writers’ work or his glibness in rejecting this as squabbles between academics, is the crucial question of how class power recognises, responds and adjusts to crises.

The Neoliberal Left
One coming to Chibber’s work with the understanding that he is the editor / editor emeritus of left-wing magazines might be surprised by how often the Left, rather than the capitalist class, is the object of his critique. Regardless of how central his position on the importance of class struggle as conveyed may be, this account is as vague, undifferentiated and hostile as that offered by the average rightist. To compile more or less verbatim the terms, both descriptive and abusive he uses, the left is figured as a shrill, moralistic, apolitical middle-class dilettantish cultural élite with no connection to the working class, installed in social science departments, magazines, television production and study groups debating body language, deconstructing Bollywood movies, romanticising violent confrontations with the state even as they denigrate the masses as racist, misogynistic, unworthy, driving them into the arms of right-wing parties.

There is a broader and more convincingly grounded set of accounts in explaining how class lost the far more visible traction it once had in contesting the existing order in western societies. Deindustrialisation, the changing nature of work, home ownership, increased domestic consumption, opportunities for self-employment or freelance contracting, increased state capacity, political stability following from the lack of any large-scale conflicts, movements for LGBTQ liberation in response to pressures felt beyond the limits of the workplace alone, the entry of immigrants into agriculture, food processing, construction and care industries, the very presence of whom is of course a consequence of the relative preponderance of western nations in the global economy. In making the case that all of these provide broader scope for the managing or displacement of class conflict, and that it is self-defeating to write this off as irrelevant due to their extension beyond the wage relation, I want to restore some perspective not least because Chibber’s Left can be a bit of a moving target.

When Chibber refers to, for example, ‘the neoliberal, identitarian, intersectional left’ I note the tension between some of these terms. While it is of course possible for someone to lament the wage gap between women and men in certain professional contexts, in a way which would most assuredly not lead them to anti-capitalist conclusions, would the extent to which neoliberalism has worked against migrants and social welfare programmes not clear them of the appellation ‘left’ and classify them more accurately as liberals? This is to say sometimes he seems to be conjuring with a caricature of a heckler at a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting or a censorious graduate student. At others, when for example referring to the ‘liberal or radical’ argument that the Iraqis were to blame for the collapse of their society in the aftermath of the US invasion, he seems to be talking about the various hacks in the upper stratum of the Democratic Party apparatus or any other Pasokified social-democratic party. If Chibber’s use of the term ‘the Left’ has a capacity to pull in both the morbid symptoms of an historical moment in which the revolutionary left is more a subculture than a social force, committed activists (because these people do exist) and some of the richest and most well-connected people on earth - who in a very real sense are up to their elbows in the blood of the oppressed - it may be time for Chibber to wise up and start making distinctions. As references to ‘certain theorists’, ‘leftists’, ‘critical theorists’, ‘left commentators’, ‘today’s leftists’, ’left journalists’, ‘many radical sophisticates’ and The Left The Left The Left The Left accumulate across Chibber’s writings I find myself desperate to respond: Who? Where? What parties? What organisations, publications and in what cities? What does Chibber think of those who, out of their revolutionary commitments, decide to sabotage ICE vehicles or protest police violence? Are these people romantic moralists? Would Chibber ever consider directing his fire on the much-vaunted left wing of the Democratic Party, the confusion and word-mincing into which it fell into on the cops, the border regime, Biden’s attempts to squeeze China or annihilate Gaza?

Materialism
Another fixture of Chibber’s writing is his critique of the failings of Marxist intellectuals such as those associated with the Frankfurt School or the New Left for not grappling sufficiently with the ‘base’, if we could be allowed deploy the abstraction which conventionally refers to social relations more purely engaged with production and the real economy. This point, previously made by Perry Anderson in Considerations of Western Marxism, has a lot of merit to it; an intellectual tradition which had more Leon Trotskys and Ernest Mandels might well have been a stronger one and every day I wish that Marxists were better represented than post-Keynesians in fora where the Volker shock, increased throughput, central banking, industrial capacity and financial instruments are discussed, though it should be said with the bulk of his own output concentrating on the cultural mores of radical social scientists this is a challenge Chibber has been himself free to take up and has not.

Chibber argues culture has taken the place of materialism among the repertoire of critical theorists. To adopt Chibber’s definitions, materialism amounts to the idea that reality exists independently of our impressions of it and in a more sociological sense, agents act in their objective material interest. In The Class Matrix Chibber writes that works of history or analysis written with a view to understanding what it is that turned the working class from revolution were valuable, but he now sees E.P. Thompson’s understanding of class as something in motion as the source of a dangerous relativism, from which it follows that i) socialists have no idea where to organise because we are forced to believe that classes exist independently of class consciousness ii) those who are not acting in their interests are mentally defective or brainwashed. Though neither of these claims follow, Chibber is right that introducing what he seeks to bracket off as mere ‘culture’ into one’s understanding of class introduces significant amounts of indeterminacy. However, if we are of the view that class does not in fact generate predictable and stable outcomes, ambiguity is unavoidable. The terrain of struggle is not always clear.

Chibber’s answer to the Gramscian problematic, the reasons why, despite the structure, workers vote for political parties with policies deleterious to their interests is that individuals pursuing their material interests are often unsuccessful in doing so due to the difference between judgements derived from direct experience versus external information. Political life is increasingly managed by thought and community leaders with interests of their own, who defend them by convincing workers to vote for someone whose policies will in fact be harmful to them. To say working-class voters are not behaving irrationally, but are rather misinformed is nothing but a more functionalist version of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, with the more substantial difference being that it is hopelessly thin, replacing the creativity and intuition of the masses coming up against privately-owned institutions of news media or communications, the state bureaucracy or civil society with Chibber’s twin of history; an individual pursuing their rational interest and a conniving member of the intelligentsia. We might be able to redeem Chibber’s accidental insight that under capitalism, the rational can appear as irrational, even down to the level of how we obtain and interpret information. But we are left with the question of what rationality could be possible within capitalism’s terms?

Lenin once wrote that Marx’s thought brought together French utopian socialism, German idealism and English political economy, and I would add a fourth input: his experience of class formation in action. Denying there is sufficient evidence in Marx’s writings of a tendency towards determinism, or a belief that capitalism would simplify social relations by drawing everyone into one of two antagonistic camps, would require re-running a set of worn out and pedantic distinctions between the young / mature Marx or Marx / Engels. In the heat of 1848, when both men saw labourers and squeezed small manufacturers form democratic assemblies against the feudal estates and an increasingly rickety-looking absolutism they forecast the overthrow of the European ancien regime and the installation of liberal bourgeois, followed by proletarian democracy based on a structural argument, but this is one they came to revise in favour of the elucidation of the working classes’ rolling wave of self-defence. I laughed out loud when I read Chibber’s line, ‘We can point and say, “There’s the working class; there’s the bourgeoisie.” If only it was that easy.

An examination of the use of the term ‘materialism’ materialismus across the three volumes of Capital reveals that it appears only as an accomplished fact within one of Engels’ prefaces. Marx does not use it. Instead, he writes the more processual materialising, labour materialisiert sich within commodities. One will have noticed that value is absent from Chibber’s theory of wages, that his definition of exploitation is static rather than immanent. This is a significant revision of Marx’s theory of wages. If you hold with the labour theory of value you know that everything in our lived environment is a product of labour exerted across time and space communally, but privately expropriated by a class with the power to dispose of capital. If there is an idea of normative justice to be extracted from Marxism it must be these social goods, this value, returning to its commonwealth of producers. Marx’s materialism exists be in motion. It is expressed and sought in action and inquiry rather than being determinable from an outside perspective, or upholstered to fit a schema because it seeks the possibilities of moving from class-in-itself to for-itself. It is not just interests but the conditions which form, shape and facilitate their transcendence. It is a praxis-oriented philosophy. Chibber does not follow us here.

Consulting Marx’s polemics against his contemporaries in the labour movement, consistent grounds for dismissal is that their programmes were reactionary. This is not in the sense that they were right-wing or anti-socialist necessarily, but that they failed to grasp the social processes around them as being in motion. Rather, they cleaved to benefits and protections which were non-viable or expected guarantees where there were none. I do not want to overstate this point, none of us can predict the future or know what we need to do, but my prognosis runs as follows. Globalisation has put an end to the material base of the mid-twentieth century class compromise. China’s parity or lead in high-value sectors — and Western imperial aggression — is a strong headwind for those who might wish to rebuild it. The SPD proves that the supposed assets offered by the patient building of institutional power can also represent an obstacle in decisive moments. What Chibber presents as realism is nostalgia. I do not know where the universal subject is in the present, but when I try to think of leverage, of those whose emancipation would be the emancipation of us all, I think of migrant labourers, for whom the inseparability of politics and economics is manifest.

At the conclusion of The Class Matrix Chibber states that the Nordic social state may be the best we can do. Even if the plan is to get the ruling class around the table to broker another settlement, to prevent them from launching nuclear weapons perhaps, I wouldn’t begin negotiations with the compromise.

The National Question

Gavin Walker reminds us that Marx and Engels correctly identified the importance of Poland or Ireland’s national questions to the cause of building socialism in Austria, Russia and England, arguing that there was no possibility of bypassing the national question in these contexts by trying to get the social content out in front. However Walker is not quite right when he argues they never made any concessions to oppressor nations. Marx and Engels wrote on the Danes, Czechs and non-Russian Slavic peoples in derogatory terms, regarding them as essentially unworthy in relation to Germany. I would contend there’s material produced throughout the 1848 period which amounts to straightforward German nationalism. Engels also wrote positively about yanks taking Mexican land on the basis that settlers would make better use of it. We can run down the importance of these comments by looking at the aggregate of their writings, in which they present the struggle for self-determination as attempts to find leverage in the present and get the parochial trade unions of the time to see the working classes of other nations as equals, but I think it’s worth considering as an indicator of how notions of historical necessity can lead a conjunctural analysis astray. One point Walker introduces which I’ll be reflecting on for a while after reading this is that, whether knowingly or not, effectively every Marxist tendency holds to Stalin’s position on the nation, specifically in the paranoia that behind every struggle for national independence is a retreat into national essence or separatism. I think there’s something to this. At the same time though, there are many Marxist organisations back in the history who couldn’t keep true to their social programme without the confounding variable of a stance on the nationalities being in the picture. On this basis I think it’s worth keeping any idea of some pristine socialist consciousness at arm’s length.

The State

Marx was alive during the very early stages of what we could refer to as a social insurance system and he writes fairly scathingly about what we would see as reform movements such as one seeking a reduction in the length of the working day, on the basis that it is a ruling-class concession which does not decisively confront the balance of class forces. It is obviously a good thing when the state alleviates the social consequences of capital accumulation, but it is worth considering that even as housing, health, education and food are de-commodified, it is to the end of commodification elsewhere, preventing capitalism from eating too deeply into its reserves, and disciplining a labour force relative to an international average of competitiveness. With a state that is less inclined to facilitate or provide care for its citizens after a decades-long neoliberal assault, not just on the required mechanisms but their very legitimacy, these arguments are easier to advance and manifest themselves in starkly racialised terms. In the US the achievements of the civil rights movement have been rolled back in a wave of mass incarceration. In The Alabama Solution (2025) we learn that $450 million in goods and services are produced by prisoners for the benefit of the state every year. These prisoners are leased out to KFC, McDonalds and local government sanitation, to be paid around 2 dollars a day. Alabama’s system is an outlier in terms of how egregious it is but other southern states facilitate these programmes. In Europe people fleeing conditions in countries the US have shaped according to their requirements for decades are imprisoned in camps and detention centres along militarised borders. In instances where citizenship or accommodation can be obtained governments seem uninterested in protecting them from pogroms.

Some of the strongest material in the handbook come through from Nicholas De Genova, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s work on how one’s relationship to the state’s regime of citizenship and susceptibility to deportation is a means through one can be confined within low-wage sectors of the labour market. We are obviously well into the point where this power the state and the exploiters collectively engage in is beginning to trouble citizenship itself. Racialisation has historically represented significant stumbling blocks for the labour movements as when USian unions either excluded black workers or refused to accept lynching and segregation as unique conditions of struggle, creating a grotesque situation in which the workers’ movement — with honourable exceptions — became an arm of white supremacy, holding a stratum of the labour force under the floor, more exposed to workplace injuries and unemployment arising out of automation. All these new and old forms make shit of analyses of capitalism grounded in the juridically free and mobile worker who enters into a voluntary contracts with the owner of the means of production. The line that capitalism is conceivable without racial division is liberal in the purest sense and furthermore indicative of the tautological core of Brennerism, where there is a pure capitalism we can imagine and we don’t have to answer for what we have decided is not capitalist in advance.

Having said this Brenner does give us one way of understanding what led the capitalist class to break with what is summed up in the wholly inaccurate phrase ‘Keynesian postwar consensus’. Brenner’s idea of the long downturn arises from actions taken by the capitalist class in the US in response to falling profit rates brought about by increasing competition from industrialised nations abroad such as Germany and Japan. This made it necessary to further automate production, particularly in the petrochemical, steel, automobile and household good sectors, limiting workers who kept their jobs in any attempts they might make to demand higher wages. It doesn’t necessarily follow from automation that there will be an absolute reduction in demand for labour. New machinery might facilitate increased employment in less industrialised sectors as cheaper output from capital-intensive industries rise, but as Jason E Smith notes in his essay on Marx’s writings on automation the general tendency in terms of unemployment and wage suppression is clear. The operative point is: there is no mechanism which assigned industrial workers into the now preponderant services sector.

The changing ratio of machines to labour power created further problems for profitability and overproduction, leading capitalists to seek the faster realisation times available in finance. Marx’s formulation of ‘fictitious capital’ is obviously influential here, generating the idea that there’s a more parasitic relationship in finance relative to productive capital proper which empowers rentiers and larger less competitive monopolistic capitals, Jim Kicaid writes on this. But these accounts fall victim to Brenner’s usual methodological oversights, defining capitalism as though it falls along national lines and a restricted set of national lines at that. It is not the case that financialisation goes away while the good industrialisation is going on and then comes in later to cannibalise. Finance is crucial in lowering costs of production, elevating profits by abbreviating turnover times and allocating investment efficiently. It played an essential role in bringing profitability back up by facilitating the movement of industries outside the west, pushing production facilities to other countries where labour costs were lower. I think Brenner also misses the politics. There’s a big difference between US competition from Germany and Japan — and in the context of for example semi-conductors this latter relationships was far more contentious — and for example, present-day China. US intervention in Latin America, both through structural adjustment programmes as well as more overt forms of coercion come together in forcing these states to compete for foreign direct investment by removing barriers to the free mobility of capital and facilitating export / import processing zones beyond the reaches of their tax administrations. This counter-revolution in capitalism’s operations internationally has facilitated the growth of consumption practices which are crucial in fostering consent to the existing social order and securing the exploitation of labour essential to keeping the treats cheap, even as wages are suppressed, as Charmaine Chua demonstrates.

One of the more well-known debates in this field was one between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband, with the latter holding to a functionalist understanding of it as an instrument wielded by the bourgeoisie — hence forcing hard limits on any social democratic reforms — and Poulantzas’ idea of the state as semi-autonomous. I incline more towards Poulantzas, agreeing with Heide Gerstenberger that the state as a ‘condensation’ of class relations is vague, but unlike them don’t see this as a liability. I like the image of the vapour of social friction boiling off and inspecting it in the embedded moment it hangs off the hard surface. Better to be thinking about changing states rather than The State.

History and Modes of Production

The handbook begins with Jairus Banaji’s account of merchant’s capital, a category which encompasses capitalists working in money-dealing, or the import export trades, including the colonies. Anticipating criticisms along the lines of: these fields of activity are largely marginal within Marx’s considerations of the capitalist mode of production, Banaji describes the centrality Marx grants to industrial capital as a methodological choice rather than an essential difference. In any case, if we are writing economic history, the evidence is clear that merchants transported goods, invested in productive activities such as mining enterprises, lent money to governments, organised managed and insured voyages and plantations.

Marxist historians have effectively ceded this terrain to those working outside their tradition. Braudel’s demonstration that modern industry develops out of the putting-out system, which was well established in the textile, metalworking, leather, wood, jewellery, ceramics and craft-based luxury trades is mentioned here as well as Lefebvre’s work on the number of peasants in eighteenth-century France employed by city merchants.

Antwerp was Europe’s leading money market towards the end of the sixteenth century. It lent vast sums to the Spanish, Portuguese and English monarchies. In England governments relied on London merchants for money. By the nineteenth century these discount houses became the basis of London’s dominance as the international money-market with a greater share of global transactions denominated in sterling. British merchant banks were emblematic of a whole structure of commercial activity and were buttressed by the expansion of international trade in the middle decades of the nineteenth century which Banaji argues sustained British capitalism to a greater extent than any leading role in industry, real or imagined. Britain’s commercial capitalism consolidated the interests of bill brokers and discount houses, merchant banks, importers, brokers, cargo agents, shipping companies, London plantation companies and the northern manufacturers who depended on all of the above, emerging as a major power in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century on the backs of powerful forces of commercial capitalism. But no amount of commercial skill, merchant shipping or national prosperity could secure the domination of trade routes or protection of bases and colonies, which required troops, a navy, money and proper organisation. The triumph of European commercial capitalism needed the backing of the state, a crown-company partnership. This, in England’s case, extends back to the Elizabethan commercial expansion that was bound up, as Brenner showed, with the newer trades to the south and east (that is, the Mediterranean and Asia). The European empires were a legacy of this alliance between state and commercial capital. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries naval power and the use of force were systematically integrated into competitive struggles between major blocs of capital. This is not an antediluvian but a modern form characterised by the use of monopolies, knowledge of markets and vertical integration to mobilise their resources flexibly. This can be seen in Carlo Poni’s work on Lyons silk merchants in the seventeenth century, who were among the first to use annual product differentiation as a strategic weapon, capturing important shares of the market by outmanoeuvring firms in competition with them. They also laid down standards for the assembly of looms to a high standard at speed.

In making this point Banaji is challenging the reticence Marxist historians exhibit in their willingness to grant the category the historic legitimacy it deserves. In Lineages of the Absolute State (1974) Perry Anderson mentions mercantile capitalism. Brenner is prepared to characterise merchants operating in the developing colonial trade as capitalist entrepreneurs, but neither address the issue of merchant or commercial capitalism as such. Banaji attributes this to the hostile reception the Stalinist apparatus meted out to the historian Pokrovsky’s claim that merchant capital was the ‘revolutionary force of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’. I found this surprising given what I understand to have been the New Left Review editorial committee’s orientation towards Trotskyism via Mandel, but I suppose I could see the Stalinist strain coming in via Althusser.

John Haldon’s essay on modes of production is aligned in its hermeneutic ethic with Banaji’s in its attempt to suture Marx’s factual oversights towards an historical method more aligned with the best possible interpretation of his intentions, looking at the historical evidence to grasp the contradictory and conflictual dynamics within fundamental economic relationships which generate social change. This is necessary because Marx’s discussions of non or pre-capitalist modes are a bit sketchy. We can let him off the hook given he was attempting to theorise the pre-conditions for capitalism rather than the origins of those pre-conditions. He was also limited by the standards of the historical writing available to him at the time.

Kin and lineage-based modes of production are described by Marx and Engels under ‘primitive communal’ or ‘tribal’ social relations. They exhibit only a limited degree of internal economic, but still kin-based differentiation. Their transformation into social forms based clearly on class exploitation invariably involves the loosening of these ties of kinship and dissolution of the associated forms of social praxis. This does not have to mean that localised or regional bonds of kinship and lineage do not continue to play a role in production and distribution, but they no longer dominate the scene. The increasing complexity of the division of labour and the domination of a producing population by a social and economic elite promote the rapid evolution of institutional means of maintaining and reproducing this evolving class domination, whatever the culturally determined form these relationships actually assume. The concomitant extension of networks of coercive political and economic power across a wider social and geographical space than kinship ties can adequately handle, then leads in the longer term to the development of states or proto-states. This is how Marx envisaged the ‘ancient’ mode of production, as a variant of primitive communalism.

The exploitation of citizens by other citizens and by the state takes place initially through the collective appropriation of surpluses for common ends, for example during warfare. But as slavery arises, along with other forms of social and economic stratification among the community’s members, so the division of labour becomes more complex and class antagonisms between social groups in connection to their different relations to the means of production evolve. The state then becomes the legislative-executive arm of the ruling class of citizens, which can exploit it thereafter to maintain, promote their own class interests and the extraction of surplus. This process of state formation, was therefore very gradual.

The state was also important in what Marx and Engels referred to as the Asiatic mode of production, a catch-all concept for the empires of China, India, Mesopotamia, Iran all representing a distinct form of social organisation between the primitive communal societies and those characterised by the ancient mode. Societies which can be characterised in this way were seen as the first class societies, where a small group, the ruling class, generally a semi-theocratic elite, extracted a social surplus via their monopolies over land, public works such as irrigation as well as political and military power, often legitimated through attributions of spiritual authority.

Leonardo Marques notes that at times Marx highlighted slavery and capitalism’s differences to illuminate what was distinct about the latter. In other contexts he identified features they held in common, as in the context of original accumulation. Marx also refers to agrarian plantation owners as capitalists, the category error viz. wage labour notwithstanding. As far as antiquity goes Haldon tells us that slavery in the ancient world is now regarded as having had a limited chronological and geographical dominance, as a volatile, contingency-bound mode of surplus appropriation; a form of exploitation rather than the basis of a mode of production. Intensive plantation slavery in the Caribbean by contrast, was stimulated by considerable profits available across extensive markets. Historians have increasingly emphasised the industrial character of the plantation system and how important the antebellum south was in facilitating the expansion of the system as a whole, even as free wage labour only encompassed a marginal portion of the populations incorporated into the capitalist world market. Slave plantations in the American south were fundamental to the wealth and power of the southern elite; their plantations and commercial enterprises were fully integrated into the international commercial network dependent on capitalist productive relations and it was on this basis that slavery as a means of exploiting labour could survive. The economic dynamism of the southern states in the nineteenth century was underpinned by the slave plantations. After abolition sharecropping combined capitalism — expressed in the contract between tenant and landowner — with slave relations under new conditions in the guise of Jim Crow, Klan terror and debt peonage. However as its ability to use coercion to increase productivity declined agriculture was mechanised, dispossessing black sharecroppers and forcing them north.

Imperialism

It will already be clear that there is a lot in this book which can feed into analyses of imperialism and the unevenly developed character of a planet-spanning mode of production dominated for much of the last century by Europe and North America, but on the subject of imperialism proper there’s a lot that could have been done better. Salar Mohandesi takes a sceptical view of many ways in which anti-imperialist politics have expressed themselves on the Marxist left, citing David Harvey to the effect that it can be a blocker to seeing things clearly. Mohandesi is correct when he notes that Marx’s positions on the subject were contradictory and how at an earlier stage in his life he seemed to present it as a necessary stage to the development of capitalist production both domestically and overseas; we have already noted his impatience with certain ethnicities.

Hobson’s study of the subject has been hugely influential on how the economics of imperialism have been written about since. Lenin used it to theorise the coming together of banking and industrial capital in a new monopoly stage wherein the capitalist class invest their surplus abroad. Lenin sought to demonstrate that this financial oligarchy would divide the world among the largest capitalist powers, the only solution to which was revolution. Mohandesi has a point when he says Lenin over-emphasised the importance of monopolies but he is wrong when he says Lenin has generated confusion by his conjoined analysis of politics and economics.

Whether or not Lenin was factually accurate in every respect Imperialism obviously had explanatory traction. Mohandesi is absolutely right when he refers the conjunctural character of Lenin’s analysis, addressed as it was to the burgeoning forces of the European working class dying in their thousands for their rulers. In the same way the Leninist critique of what we would today call foreign direct investment helped the revolutionary leadership of newly independent states account for the difficulties they were experiencing as they set about making their economies viable as relative latecomers on the world market. Theotônio dos Santos definition of dependency as ‘a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected’ gives you the idea. The poverty of colonies, former and current, was not independent from the relative richness of wealthy capitalist countries. Those on the periphery were being actively underdeveloped by the core as part of the same process; a world-market stacked against new entrants forcibly extracting surplus. This was a zero-sum relationship and the only way out was for states to de-link from the capitalist world system.

Andrew Curley notes that dependency theory was not a single unified doctrine. It is a blanket term that encompasses attempts to account for uneven terms of exchange, why commodity-exporting nations were mired in relative penury, critique the linear assumptions of a western-led theory of development, recommend selective integration into the global market. In doing so it drew from Keynes, Marx, the New Left, Stalinist theories of development, and even modernisation theory itself, this is why a certain type of Euro-marxist never tires of pointing out where Fernando Herique Cardoso wound up. We get this along with a lot of the relevant names: Andre Gunder Frank introduced some of these ideas to the Anglophone world in a 1966 Monthly Review essay, we also have Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi listed across a few different chapters, we hear about how their work took some of Marx’s ideas around class, the state and importance of dependent forms of agriculture in the colonies - India and Egypt’s cotton driving textile manufacturing in the UK - to facilitate European development but there’s not much detail on what differentiated them and accounts of the historical moments they operated in. The basic narrative of the non-aligned movement is limited to summary texts from Chomsky and Prashad (not that The Darker Nations isn’t worth reading).

This school of thought was enormously important and influential to the anti-imperialist movements and some post-colonial governments in the global south but American and English tenureds weren’t as enthusiastic. Robert Brenner and Colin Leys argued that theorists of underdevelopment had an eclectic and non-Marxist conception of capitalism and a vague understanding of how it related to imperialism, leaving it unable to differentiate nineteenth century from twentieth century capitalism. More convincingly there was also the historical challenge made by the development of countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, India, China and Thailand.

Within this is Mohandesi’s accusation that many anti-imperialist commentators or critics put forward reductionist theories which claim imperialism exists to realise capitalist interests, opting for an instrumentalist theory of why states invade other states as though they do it at capital’s bidding. They therefore fail to account for the many other factor behind imperialist policies, such as a desire for national prestige, the security of military outposts, the re-direction of social discontent, ‘civilising missions’ or keeping colonies from falling into the hands of rivals. The example offered here is the British Empire. Mohandesi concedes that while the Brits did terrorise the globe in pursuit of resources, markets and investment opportunities, they also sought to control certain territories for reasons apart from their economic value such as, important territories along the route to India. Mohandesi is touching on something real here, British control over Egypt, modern-day Iran, Afghanistan were geared more towards the end of keeping people off their routes (Cape Town was the original one) but what complicates this is how these relations developed over time once it became clear that natural resources were in play, or that the Egyptians might, in the course of their project of independence leverage their own geographic advantage. I also think bracketing out control over a route to a colony of economic importance as non-economic is incoherent. Are the maintenance of supply chains separate from warfare? Phrases Mohandesi uses such as ‘some figures’, ‘others’ and ‘still others’ rather than the names and titles of publications produced by some of the authors and revolutionaries we’ve covered above indicates to me some dependence on anonymising phrases to avoid being held to specific misreadings.

If we want to understand imperialism, Mohandesi tells us, we should focus on the state, rather than allowing capitalism into the picture. When a European firm invests in a West African country, we are told, this is not imperialism, it is ‘simply capitalism’. It becomes imperialism when one state becomes aggressive against another, by sanctioning, adjusting monetary policy, enacting a coup or invading. I was very interested to see the collection of phrases ‘European country’ ‘west Africa’ and ‘monetary policy’ without ‘Franc Zone’, which presumably has nothing to do with Bolloré’s logistic empire, or Niger’s uranium.

So what options might be available for those Marxists who are invested in the house of self-determination? Prospects aren’t great. Especially since ‘most people’ associate North America and western Europe with exploitative relations in the Global South to such an extent they ignore other types of asymmetric relationships. By way of example Mohandesi offers what Japan did in conquered Asian territories. This is laughable. If there are people in the underdevelopment literature who cite Japan as a member of the Global South let’s hear them. I am not against the idea that imperialism is not a sole attribute of powerful western states, but if there’s a story to be told from the other side we should get the historical balance right and Mohandesi doesn’t provide. Instead we get the rote critique of campism and the argument that the aim of the left should be the abolition of both US and Iranian imperialism. Military theocracy wouldn’t represent any template I’d recognise for social emancipation, and I wouldn’t be mad about the Islamic Republic either, but you’d have to take a very absolutist view to be talking about Iranian imperialism these days. I am wondering if this would encompass bombing the entity. Finally Mohandesi mentions the Khmer Rouge as an example of an anti-imperialist regime which committed atrocities. Though he is making a point about received opinion it would’ve been good to get the clarifier in there that they were a US-backed proxy against the Vietnamese.

Though I would recommend this book some of this is perhaps indicative of issues around the particular type of inclusivity that’s being practiced. There are multiple chapters which cover the wages for housework movement / debates around whether domestic labour made surplus value or not. Some of the best stuff in the book relates to migrants and borders, but the word ‘Eurocentric’ appears more often than China, Palestine, Angola, and Algeria combined. When Palestine is mentioned it is to critique the social conservatism of Palestinian and Lebanese liberation movements (Castro and Guevara receive a beating at this point and don’t come up again, before or after), which I understand to be a swipe of the Islamism of Hamas and Hezbollah. Bit more eyes on the ball needed.

An article written by the sociology professor Vivek Chibber came up in my feed towards the end of last year entitled ‘Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism’. What Chibber has in mind when he uses the words ‘plunder’ are the precious metals that the Spanish and the Portuguese siphoned off from the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so ostensibly the argument is gold and silver do not in and of themselves start capitalism.

This is a bit sweeping. We know how important a plentiful supply of precious metals are to the development of money, to a circulating medium that allows commodities to move around, we know that it is partly because of the consistent drain of gold and silver east across the Mediterranean throughout this period — Europeans liked the spices Asian merchants were selling — is what motivated them to head west in the first place, but there is merit to the argument that the Spanish and the Portuguese didn’t have the domestic capacity, politically or productively, to do much with all the wealth they had acquired. Much of that gold and silver was used to fit out elaborate luxury goods for the aristocracy, jewellery, relics, churches, these are all forms of consumption limited to the upper tiers of society and certainly didn’t represent preponderant forms of economic activity.

The thing is, Chibber is trying to use that quite reasonable argument about the origins of capitalism to discredit a slightly different one which runs: even if the plunder of gold and silver is not the whole story it’s indicative of what Europeans got up to in Asia, Africa and the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which was central in getting capitalism started. The process by which people were abducted and sold along the coast of modern-day Angola, transported to expropriated land in the Caribbean or the United States remains with us in terms of how the world is divided between rich and poor. Unequal exchange, financial arbitrage, punitive debt relations, cash crops, resource extraction, unevenly distributed exposure to the consequences of climate change are all downstream from processes which were initiated three or four hundred years ago; Chibber thinks this is all a bit too woke and doesn’t reckon it as amounting to much in terms of his story of how capitalism got started.

So what does Chibber think capitalism is? Chibber thinks capitalism is something you get in the English countryside. It begins there in the fifteenth century, it’s done and dusted well before the English civil war starts, it just grows when it makes its way into other places. You know its present when the market dictates production and consumption from end to end; when people have to buy their food rather than growing it. You have to find someone to rent land from on the market rather than paying or working on a manor you can’t leave. Under capitalism you have to find an employer to sell your labour to so you can get wages and if you can’t, you can die by the side of the road. If you’re a serf, this schema goes, you’re not in capitalism because your labour isn’t on the market. If you’re a slave you’re not living under capitalism because you don’t sell your labour for wages, your labour is owned.

So even though slavery was highly profitable, became more rather than less intensive as we move closer and then into industrial capitalism, required significant fixed capital investments — warehouses, ports, ships — regimes of labour discipline, rationalisation within the productive process, the sale / consumption of its outputs (tobacco, sugar, cotton, coffee) were not just limited to the aristocracy or the upper middle class, but were part of the growing European consumer market, that this all developed with the assistance of very complex and what might seem to us to be a very modern set of financial mechanisms — clearing houses, joint-stock companies, insurance, and a specialised class of people who could manage it — no free waged labour, no capitalism. I take the contrary view. Robin Blackburn, otherwise a very good historian of slavery, is someone else who wants to maintain this idea that the Caribbean was not capitalist at the height of the slave trade because of the persistence of what he refers to as the natural economy; slaves growing their own food on their own plots. This seems to me to be, in the grand scheme of things, beside the point.

We’ve all read James Connolly, we’re used to thinking of imperialism and capitalism together and perhaps on that basis you’ve had the experience of reading a book on politics or history written by an American where your radar is set off in coming across the position whether expressed or implicit that: England is all you need to know about this subject. My response to that is: if this thing starts in England how is it that the actions of the most powerful people in English society of the time; landlords, crown officials, merchants with investments and capitalised landholdings, in the Caribbean or Ireland are irrelevant? The extent of the physical distance between England and the Atlantic colonies offers an alibi in one respect, but Ireland is right there, and capitalist social relations are expanded and accelerated is introduced in a manner that, like most parts of the world, was very much accompanied by not just by the mute compulsion of the market but also military force. The state consistently presents itself against those attempting to pull off some form of resistance in a manner which aligns quite closely with the colonial logics we see the Brits engaging in Palestine or India and the yanks in Central America.

II.

In the late fifteenth century the crown’s control was limited to an area between Dundalk and Bray, moving inland to in and around Naas, known as the Pale. The central economic unit here was the manor, the estate, which leased land to tenants who in turn leased to cottiers or subtenants who actually did the work. Outside of Dublin, Drogheda and Dundalk there were no urbanised areas really, Ireland’s population centres were only at the level of provincial English ones, though Waterford was a bit more vibrant and commercial as a consequence of its trade links with Bristol. Although sheep were raised for wool and there were some linen exports there was a growing tendency towards the cultivation of crops like corn and oats rather than livestock, historically the traditional farming method in Ireland. These crops were increasingly commercialised, they weren’t just being grown for subsistence purposes, there was a surplus being produced which was sold on the market. Despite the fact that the Pale was where the central administration was located — Dublin Castle had been built by King John after the Norman conquest — we shouldn’t get the idea that this was a world apart from the rest of the island; every peasant, the majority of the population, dressed spoke and lived according to Irish custom.

The Old English were the descendants of these Norman invaders. They were independent lords and though a couple of revolts against Elizabeth Tudor originated in the Old English community, on the basis that she was illegitimate because the pope had excommunicated her, they were overwhelmingly loyal to the crown, regarded themselves as English and were proud to do so. From the Brits’ point of view though they were Gaelicised; they had gone native in terms of their Catholicism and their use of the language.

Under Henry Tudor Irish lords were invited to hold their land under English feudal law. This was called surrender and regrant and within it the Irish would drop their traditional titles, give up their lands and receive them back immediately under English auspices. Nevertheless the crown’s remit didn’t extend into these territories. Nearly all of Ulster was controlled by Irish lords. There was no Old English population there and one crown official described it as being as remote as Virginia. Ulster, along with North Connacht, south-west Munster, Wicklow and the northern part of Wexford had their own legal system. Irish chieftanships were often disputed, through violence, between various members of a ruling family. Unlike lords in England and the Pale who lived on their rents, the Irish lords extracted levies in kind in the form of cattle, butter, bread, oats, beer or labour obligations such as ploughing, reaping, cutting timber and building towers from the smaller landholding families under them. They levied merchants passing through their estates very heavily and households on their demesne were obliged to feed and put up their retainers.

Crown officials and the urban elite in the Pale disapproved of these practices, seeing them as a set of old privileges which were a hindrance to more efficient and more civilised market-based forms of exchange. It was particularly galling to them because Ireland was an outlier in comparison with the rest of Western Europe, where lords had ceded a lot of their power to increasingly centralised monarchies.

One point that’s worth noting here is that there was a propagandistic element to all this. The English had an interest in representing Irish lords as poor stewards or backwards to strengthen the case for more competent Englishmen, such as themselves, to take over and cultivate more virtuous forms of stewardship and improvement. It also fed into the idea that Ireland must contain vast untapped resources such as mineral wealth because the Irish are too backwards to fully exploit their natural resources.

III.

In 1579 James FitzMaurice of the Munster FitzGeralds, resenting the growing pressure from the court to adopt the reformed faith, persuaded Pope Gregory XIII to fund an expedition of Italian and Spanish soldiers to assist in an uprising. They landed on the Dingle peninsula and soon after they were reinforced soldiers under the Lord Deputy Leonard Grey closed in, writing to Elizabeth Tudor subsequently that he oversaw the execution of 600 men. It took another two years for the rebellion to be fully put down, leaving large tracts of land in ruins.

Up until that point in her reign Elizabeth Tudor had vacillated between conciliation and a military solution. The former initially prevailed because adventures in Ireland represented a significant drain on the royal finances. As crown circles came to be populated by more zealous Protestants such as Sidney, Raleigh or Walsingham, a programme of colonisation was mooted in earnest, which would force Ireland to submit to the crown, accept English law and the reformed religion. Ireland would then become a useful destination for England’s rising population — which might otherwise become a source of social instability — and England could begin to catch up with the Spanish and the Portuguese who were ahead of them on overseas conquests. Within this there was the concern that Ireland might become a back-door for these forces of the Counter-Reformation, so sort of a Cuban Missile Crisis kind of situation. The FitzMaurice rebellion bolstered the hawkish argument and as a consequence became a prelude for the Munster plantation.

The responsibility for attracting settlers fell on the plantation’s undertakers, or its tenants-in-chief. There were certain quotas to be met for the introduction of craftsmen, and proprietors were to be levied the cost of installing soldiers and garrisons. Their tenants couldn’t be Irish because the objective was to re-create English society in miniature, though there were servitors, mainly ex-army officers, who received a portion of the land they had assisted in conquering, they were allowed to take Irish tenants on their estates.

In the event the undertakers were not prepared for the extent of the dilapidation and ruin that had been visited on the land during its expropriation. The list of undertakers fell as well as the number of available English tenants, many of whom could find better terms going to an Irish lord whose lands had been depopulated during the war. Other indicators that the higher principles of the venture were being neglected in pursuit of speedier gains are the increasingly militarised and coercive nature of the settlement. Rather than the envisioned formalised system of rent-taking and religious conversion the plantation was characterised by racketeering and extortion; planters began to move beyond their assigned holdings onto lands still in the possession of Irish lords. These were all contributing factors to its overthrow in 1598 by Irish people who wanted their land back. What was particularly demoralising was how quickly the plantation had been swept away and how worse it would have been if some Irish lords in Munster hadn’t remained loyal. Not that they were thanked for it. When the banished settlers returned to England they decried Irish society in toto, its barbaric popery, fuelling exaggerated reports of mass sectarian slaughter when in reality no more than a few hundred settlers were killed.

IV.

I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail on the military side of this period but it will suffice to say that the Nine Years War was waged on the Irish side by an alliance of Hugh Roe O’Donnell of Tyrconnell and Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone against the Lord Deputy Mountjoy’s incursions into Ulster. Even though O’Neill does do more than was customary at the time to raise an army from his own holdings, conscript his peasantry, provide them with modern weaponry and training and achieving the successes he did through a sort of asymmetric doctrine, this was not an anti-imperialist war as such; O’Neill was seeking to become a legitimate ruler of Ulster in the eyes of the English monarch. But the campaign flounders when O’Neill follows disastrous advice from the Spanish to face Mountjoy’s forces in open battle. This allowed Mountjoy and Chichester, the governor of Carrickfergus, to push O’Neill west and as they did so they devastated the lands. This involved seizing cattle, destroying corn and people’s dwellings to impose a famine on the population in pursuit of an unconditional surrender. The rationale here is to inflict huge amounts of economic damage. If O’Neill’s freeholders are starving and they don’t have shelter they can’t work, they can’t put up his retainers, they can’t stable his horses. There’s enormous pressure on the lords to surrender because the longer the campaign goes on the harder it will be for them to restore their lands to their original condition and the further they’ll fall into debt; this dynamic was an important one in driving dispossession through market discipline. This particular offensive was an instance of the tail wagging the dog because in addition to soldiers’ wages costing so much money that the currency had to be devalued Elizabeth Tudor was dying and the policy to be adopted by her successor James Stuart with regard to the Irish lords in Ulster was unclear. On meeting O’Neill Mountjoy kept the information about Elizabeth Tudor’s death quiet, allowed O’Neill to declare himself a loyal subject pledge never again to seek the help of a foreign power before granting him pardon and allowing him to retain his earldom, this was the Treaty of Mellifont.

Despite the compact the English continued to consolidate their position in the province. A network of forts was constructed in Ireland during and after the war; seventeen out of the forty strongholds were located in Ulster to the extent that every part of the province was within a few hours of a garrison, each of them manned by an English captain with at least forty and sometimes up to a hundred men under him. In the first year of James Stuart’s reign the Dublin government installed twenty new commissioners of martial law; county sheriffs were given extensive powers such as the capacity to disarm, summarily execute and seize a third of the moveable goods of those they did kill. The degree to which scrupulous inventories and valuations of a given victim’s possessions were carried out and the legally mandated third handed over was fairly limited so there was an enormous incentive for these men to kill people or to establish protection rackets and they had significant scope to do so.

In undermining Mellifont to get O’Neill out of the picture, Chichester sought help from the Solicitor General John Davies who was conducting extensive amounts of research in building the legal argument that Irish lords were trespassers on lands which the crown had title to going back to the Norman invasion centuries before. This put the Irish lords in a very invidious position. They had been militarily defeated, they were faced with the loss of their rent, forms of tribute and their most profitable lands — some of these were being transferred into the reformed church — there was a new legal regime they didn’t really understand, martial law was being imposed arbitrarily to the extent that sheriffs and other crown officials were just shaking them down. Convinced the crown was about to move on them to a definitive end, the most powerful figures of the Irish aristocracy fled to the continent in what became known as the Flight of the Earls. This cleared the path for the plantation of Ulster. James Stuart declared the flight treasonous and offered their confiscated territory in perpetuity to any Englishman or Scot so long as they would agree to bring in a specified number of people to work the land, build a certain number of agreed buildings or fortifications, pledge loyalty to the crown, educate any children in the Protestant faith, not sublease any lands to the Irish or adopt any Irish landholding practices but rather introduce English methods of agriculture, which were to be stringently defined. Throughout this period there were a series of surveys carried out by crown agents to monitor levels of compliance, so we have a good understanding of how these enterprises developed over the years.

V.

The idea that the Old English should be excluded from any say in how Ireland was to be governed did not have currency during Elizabeth Tudor’s reign; one ideological resource which was significant in bringing it into broader acceptance were the writings of Edmund Spenser, who had come to Ireland in 1580 to serve as secretary to Grey, receiving an estate in the Munster plantation. His A View of the Present State of Ireland was written in the early stages of the Nine Years’ War and it was a direct appeal to crown policy makers in the form of a dialogue between an Englishman with some experience of Irish affairs, and an interlocutor with a far greater weight of evidence, seeking to bring the official around to a more hawkish line by positioning the English as the Athenians or Romans facing down the Irish Gauls and Scythians, bywords for barbarism and pagan backwardness in the classical sources. Spenser recommended the Old English be excluded from the running of the country as their proximity to the Irish had brought about their degeneration. The social structure in Ireland had to be razed with ten thousand soldiers and a thousand cavalry destroying natives’ sources of food until the Irish ‘shall have no…ability to endure his wretchedness’. For those carrying this task out there was to be ‘no remorse nor drawing back’. The Irish, once subdued, would be taxed to fund a martial government which would establish English colonies on the confiscated property of defeated rebels. They would be resettled in towns close to military garrisons or on the estates of English colonists. Spenser then envisioned the Irish being instructed in superior methods of farming and technical skills, taking English names associated with their new trades, given an English education and then converted to Protestantism, this stage had to come last due to the sheer force of Irish ignorance on religious matters.

Spenser’s works were not influential in his lifetime. He was turned off his estate by the Earl of Tyrone’s allies and died in penury in London, but A View circulated in manuscript among many who were involved in planning the plantation of Ulster such as Chichester, Davies, Bacon and Carew, we also know Oliver Cromwell was a fan. The historian Nicholas Canny argues that Spenser was here elaborating prejudices which were already widespread among powerful Englishmen involved in Irish affairs but that it provided additional justification for policies which previously would not have been admitted on moral grounds, most potently that Ireland would only ever be brought into good order after conquest and plantation. So there’s a dialectic between the growing capacity the British state has to exert itself beyond its frontiers and the literature this felt capacity generates, which justifies further expansion via increasingly brutal methods.

VI.

The undertakers were responsible for planting 10 families or 24 adult males for every 1000 acres. These were to be planted in villages near the strongholds the landlords were obliged to build. Every section of English society was represented among the personnel composing the plantation. There were younger sons of gentlemen, Scottish nobles, men the crown owed money to, London merchants, Protestant clergy, relatives neighbours or dependents of all of these, farmers evicted from the Scottish lowlands, horse thieves, fugitives or captains who had fought the Spanish in Cadiz and the Caribbean. The so-called deserving Irish, who had remained loyal during Ulster’s rebellions, were to be given ~20% of the confiscated territory but these holdings couldn’t be inherited, they were to pass on to an English lord when the holders died. These surviving Irish proprietors lacked the connections the English or Scots had with prospective tenants or merchants in Glasgow and the north of England, which prevented them from exporting any agricultural surplus or finished products their tenants produced. The capacity of Irish landholders to develop were therefore impaired by the exclusion from a growing overseas trade economy. Prospective tenants were in a strong position to negotiate more favourable terms for themselves, depressing the Irish landholders’ intake further. The only proprietors who survived were those who emulated the management practices of the English and since there were many who couldn’t, this became a means of further dispossession; commercialised estates edged out those ones who couldn’t keep pace. So what the planters achieved in Ulster by way of development and prosperity came at the expense of their Irish neighbours; here we’re seeing the extension or embedding of capitalist social relations at first through law, ideology and military conquest — and of course the continued threat of force never goes away — with its more day-to-day functions working through social, religious, ethnic or national means.

James Stuart became concerned about what he regarded as a lack of men of substance within the Ulster plantation. He was particularly focused on Coleraine, where the largest number of swordsmen who had evaded Chichester were holding out, making it the most dangerous area to colonise and defend. So he enlisted the London merchant companies to plant both Coleraine and Derry. In this period Europe’s economic centre of gravity was moving from the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic and London was in a very strong position to begin challenging Amsterdam as a leading centre of finance, with medieval guilds of craftsmen becoming livery companies, headed by men looking for good outlets for their excess capital. These companies were vital to the conquest of Ireland. In addition to serving as a useful means of recruiting men, the crown borrowed from them and merchants received valuable contracts to supply munitions and equip their armies in turn.

In order to overcome merchant concerns that building new towns which could be defended from land and sea — walled settlements had died out in the rest of Europe — would be expensive and fruitless James Stuart came with very favourable terms. The merchants were granted the whole territory within the Foyle, the sea and the Bann, all the fishing up to Lough Neagh, tonnage poundage and customs as well as woodland to be used for shipbuilding and all at a very reasonable level of rent.

Despite disputes with workmen tasked with constructing the fortifications this aspect of the project was significantly easier than getting Protestant tenants; undertakers could only attract English settlers if they offered good terms and it made more sense from a capitalist perspective to rent to the people who were already there, particularly since they were happier than the freshly arrived Tans to pay higher rents or offer labour services. This meant the Irish were not moved on, and that even in densely settled areas there was parity between the number of Irish versus non-Irish tenants. The Fishmongers was one company that refused to eject their Irish tenants despite being threatened directly by the Lord Deputy, saying that if they did they would be operating at a loss. Some even took on Catholic priests because they were more reliable in paying their rent and this is a good example of how, even though the ideological and political project of dispossessing the natives was the means through which capitalism was introduced, its effects were contradictory; landholders were stratified and the plantation paradoxically brought about a decline in arable farming because the Irish correctly felt their leases to be more precarious. It made less sense to plough the land if there was a possibility it would be taken, tending livestock was more rational. Those ideologists of plantation who were strongly influenced by the classical sources had argued that dispersed settlements should be avoided and tenants should dwell instead in villages and corporate towns around manor houses and this was another instance in which the practice was at a remove from the theory; settlers tended to move to better land closer to markets where they faced less danger of being attacked, such as fertile valleys and navigable rivers.

Forms of manufacturing within the Ulster plantation included linen, iron-smelting and leather-tanning but despite these crafts Ulster was not particularly wealthy or diversified. Inland connections were poor and though Ulster had a coastline it lacked an established network of developed ports. We know tillage was not extensive because iron ploughs are not abundant in lists of lost property obtained by English investigators in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion. Part of this was the cultural background of the settlers – Munster had settlers from the Netherlands and southern England while Ulster had Scots and northern Tans – part of it was ecological; Scots farmed in upland societies where the soil was similarly poor, which tended to favour hardier crops like oats or rye which were important parts of their diet. The bulk of the profit from their labour in the fields also went in rent and service to their landlords. The Ulster plantation was also newer; Belfast required the development of trade connections with the Caribbean to develop, which came later on in the century. Whatever its precise cause the forms of production which developed in Ulster were more personalised; the requirements of the more immediate kin-groups were prioritised over manufacturing for export.

One of the reasons transplanting tradesmen such as weavers, cutlers and people with experience in fishing, timber and iron trades was prioritised in the terms of settlement was the prevailing view that building communities capable of producing and selling materials more cheaply than they were available in England or elsewhere could render the project more durable. Munster formed a stark contrast with Ulster from this point of view, being positioned in an expansive trade network. The East India Company felled timber and engaged in iron-smelting and shipbuilding; Thomas Smith, one of London’s leading merchants, put in for the felling of sixty trees in Clonakilty in association with Lionel Cranfield. Ulster was covered in mature dense forest and large quantities of this timber was used for construction and exported for barrels; colonists were able to make quick profits by smelting iron and exporting lathes and ship timber. John Rowley, first mayor of Derry and chief agent for the umbrella organisation which collectively represented and organised the London companies planting Derry, developed a very lucrative business with the first earl of Cork Richard Boyle, who had significant landed interests in Munster and Connacht, supplying draperies, cutting pipe and barrel staves from the natural forests, fishing and curing sardines for export. The success of these ventures drew the attention of other merchants; pipe staves manufactured in Youghal went to London, Rotterdam, Bordeaux, Lisbon and the Canaries. Dutch traders were very prominent in these businesses as were pirates, who were active along Ireland’s southern coastline. Pack-horses were used to facilitate inland trade, these could carry tobacco, salt, linen, wool, tallow hides and other rural goods. About 40 individuals in the depositions describe themselves as clothiers, effectively merchant manufacturers, selling broadcloths to Dutch merchants, one of whom records an income of £400 p.a. The manufacturing of some of these textiles was facilitated in Tallow by William Page, who employed more than 150 people. Certain forms of labour struggle come through the records too; I’ve already mentioned disputes with workmen hired to build fortifications in Derry. Boyle and his agents complain at the unwillingness of pipestave makers and squarers to be satisfied with mere promises of payment and their resort to mutiny when they weren’t paid. There is also evidence that settlers attempted to convey live cattle and agricultural provisions from Munster to tobacco planters in Virginia; it is worth noting at this point that 35% of the merchants putting capital into Irish plantations between 1586 and 1620 also had investments in overseas companies, most notably the Virginia Company.

There was also significant amounts of moneylending, enormous quantities of debt are cited as losses in the depositions. Henry Turner of Bandonbridge claimed to have lost £774, whether because he had lent money to rebels — many of them were heavily indebted, the extent of the financial pressure the plantations put them under was a significant motivation to rebel in the first instance — or because fellow planters, merchants, tenants they had lent to were killed we don’t know. Some of this credit was probably doled out in the form of consumer goods which would have turned a profit when they were sold on, all of which is indicative of how these merchant manufacturers were conscientious in diversifying their interests. Sir Philip Percival is an example of a landowner and tenant-in-chief to the Earl of Cork, he was clerk and registrar to Court of Wards and Liveries and much of his land had come into his hands through mortgage dealing, indicating how a Dublin-based official could over a short period of time build an extensive estate by investing the profits of his office by extending loans to a series of native proprietors. Even though they principally identify as traders rather than gentlemen they were also investing in land, urban property and money lending. As with any other capitalist this would have been important because of the risks associated with depending on just the one income stream; a ship could be lost that would take out revenue from your whole inventory.

VII.

When the English are beginning their first colonial ventures there would seem to be a tension between the more immediate drive towards plunder versus the construction of sustainable infrastructures of domination which depend to a greater extent on settlement, improvement, agreement and accommodation, however temporary or partial, with the native population rather than short-term military engagements for short-term gains. In an immediate sense adventuring and privateering can have disastrous effects, in Ireland it provoked rebellion, but over a longer time-frame the two approaches converged. In the Caribbean capital was accumulated and expertise was developed which led to the creation of an ocean-going merchant marine force with a knowledge of, capacity to navigate the islands as well as the eastern coasts of North America where some of the individuals involved in the plantations in Ireland also made an attempt at organising settlements, such as Raleigh and Smythe. Though Davis and Chichester did not live long enough, their doctrines and tactics endured and this is without considering the Scottish settler population. Mountjoy’s military doctrine, the destruction of food sources, the felling of woods to build a network of roads and star-shaped garrisons roads which then became planned towns, making territory permeable to markets and armies, was as much a feature of the Anglo-Powhatan wars as it was the pre-history of the Ulster plantation.

These are some of the mutually reinforcing alliances between the embryonic form of the modern British state — the landed gentry, the crown and its agents who require taxes or shipping revenues — and overseas merchants who need state capacity to enforce their monopolies because the costs of trade were exceptionally high. For merchants the overheads were enormous, goods were carried in large and expensive ships, which tied their capital up for long periods of time. Sales of certain commodities could also be interrupted by war, the ship carrying your goods might sink, another merchant’s ship with a very similar set of goods could have gotten to the port before yours did leaving the market glutted; merchants needed governments to mobilise the resources to insulate them from these externalities and this was where funds arising from privateering or plunder could play a very productive role. This alliance would come to its full fruition with the dominance the British Empire exerts over the sea with its navy and consolidated commercial interests. State ships committed to defence of trade take this role over from merchants and navies became increasingly professional. They are supplied and crewed by admirals and captains who are also merchants, ship-builders and naval contractors. Building this navy required new fiscal resources which arose from: levies on merchants. It is estimated that the proportion of national wealth that could be mobilised by the English government more than doubles in the 1640s and doubles again in the 1690s. With the assistance of these new revenues governments can do more; by the 1650s England can mobilise land forces in the tens of thousands. This is a transformative development, ensuring continuity of wages for troops, very important if you want them to stick around.

Despite the revolts that this programme of dispossession would periodically birth, the fact that farming techniques in Ulster had not significantly advanced, the social structure was changing. Lands were managed more intensively than before, output had improved and by 1641 the settler population was around 40 - 45k, with around two-thirds of these being Scots. One-third of the land had passed into settler ownership. The success of undertakers and servitors in acquiring and developing land, stripping their holdings of natural assets while increasing their income was registered first through a remarkable increase in customs revenue, especially from imported goods and later from the subsidies paid by Catholic landowners. Ulster was a source of government taxation and the Tan government met their own costs. The English system of law and reformation was implemented. Undertakers and servitors had pursued pragmatic solutions in getting to this point. as they recognised the impracticality of more extensive and draconian programmes of separation and transportation of the Irish west.

The extent of the attention I’ve just given to the artisan and trading elements as well as the merchants shouldn’t allow us to forget that most settlers in Munster and the other provinces were farmers, but I emphasise it in bringing us back to the Chibber question, who derives much of his theory on what capitalism is and how we get to it from feudalism from the work of the historian Robert Brenner and his study of the English civil war Merchants and Revolution (1993), a book consisting primarily of very granular detail on the activities of London magnates, aristocrats and the New Model Army. In the book’s afterword Brenner lays out his stance on the historiography and how he positions his research relative to two different schools within it. The first, a traditional Marxist one, tends to perceive the English Civil War through the lens of a similarly vulgarised image of the French Revolution, namely the victory of a merchant bourgeois professional class in seizing state power from the absolutist monarchy and their tribute-taking vassals; Brenner correctly repudiates this interpretation of the English civil war and restoration on the basis that England was already substantially capitalist. The second school Brenner disputes takes a revisionist approach to the other extreme, regarding all interests and classes at play in the historical moment as contingent and what played out basically as a random set of events.

I can’t speak to how accurate his account of each school is but a problem I see in M&R is a tendency to introduce quite clean dividing lines between classes and social strata. Brenner uses words like merchants, gentry, aristocracy, stratified variations of each to introduce wholly distinct sets of motives and commitments and I would rather emphasise the diversified character of these interests to underline that, certainly when we’re considering the interests of those Brits who were active in Irish affairs which Brenner doesn’t discuss, though they made indeed have been sectoral, were not decisively distinct. It is not very easy to say what was contingent and what was determined here. The experience of the Old English in Ireland as a significant and capitalised landholding class who were regarded as completely illegitimate on the basis of their cultural or national degeneracy is a total outlier in early modern Europe. There was no sense that they were stakeholders in the decrees issued by English officials implemented by sheriffs, provosts martial and their assistants who could in the final instance depend on soldiers. In this way the military became a normal part of the civil administration and perhaps even a replacement for it. It was also a good source of tenants for settlers because the pay that went to those officers and pensioners then went to improvement of plantation land. The construction of forts leased to officer landowners is effectively state-funding scheme for the creation a new landed military aristocracy which bound officials and the army together. Land ownership was almost universal among those holding civil or military office in Ireland during the first half of the seventeenth century. There was widespread and obvious corruption among senior legal officers dealing with land in the local and provincial courts. There would have been some expectation or pressure on Lord Deputies to reign some of this behaviour in but at the same time these officials were complicit, and in Protestant circles it was seen as their objective interest to reduce Catholic landholding and draw spoils to themselves and the crown. Whatever means were used to achieve that were justifiable. Marriage ties begin to develop between these two cohorts, this is the origin of the Protestant ascendancy, the particular class coalition that plays an enormous role in Ireland’s governance centuries on.

We therefore merchant-debtors, merchant-planters, farmer-adventurers, crown-planters, interests overlapped with whatever Old English or indigenous Irish lords were willing to be useful at a given place or time as well as a corrupt judiciary and lawyers working to advance the frontier of crown lands, in and around the same time their English counterparts were reforming the domestic legal and taxation system to render it less prone to clientelism of this kind. Collective security was provided by men-at-arms who, as have seen, could also be servitors or just accumulate a fortune through theft. So we would have to be careful before we completely dismiss historical studies which play up what was contingent because we’re certain that we have the structures down in advance. The Cromwellian settlement which I am about to describe is at once a long-term process, an outgrowth of continental wars of religion, and a consequence of a sequence of revolutionary events particular to the mid-seventeenth century, it is difficult to envision it taking place without the specific set of circumstances which arise in the three-kingdom war.

VIII.

As I said the Old English in general never regarded themselves as being under threat from the English in the same way the Irish were, but this began to change when some of the lawfare measures began to be directed against their titles and when it became clear that James Stuart was not going to facilitate any kind of religious tolerance; in response to a petition drawn up by the lords of the Pale on toleration, he said that he would fight to his knees in blood rather than grant it. Chichester launched a programme of religious persecution, the petitioners were put under house arrest or imprisoned in Dublin Castle and Catholics were fined a shilling for every Sunday they failed to attend a Protestant service. Letters were delivered to leading Catholic men in Dublin, fining them a hundred pounds each and unpaid fines could be collected in kind, through the seizure of possessions or other goods. Chichester personally forced men into church, here’s a quote:

‘[Chichester] told him, blandly at first, and then savagely, to go in, and seeing he could not prevail on him, struck him a cruel blow on the head with his stick. Then the macebearer attacked him so savagely that he fell to the ground like a dead man, and the viceroy had him dragged into church, where he lay insensible and gasping all the time of the sermon, and no one dared to approach him. Some of his friends afterwards took him home, where he gave his blessed soul to God in two hours’.

In 1634 Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth called a parliament declaring a new crackdown on recusancy, rolling back encouraging signs Charles Stuart, James Stuart’s successor, had made regarding toleration, and promises to grant secure legal titles to estates. Instead, a Commission for Defective Titles embarked on a set of worrying investigations.

In 1637, Scottish Presbyterians, outraged by Charles Stuart’s attempts to impose Laudian religious rites revolted, seized control of Edinburgh and gathered a large army of covenanters. Wentworth recruited Irish Catholics into the rank-and-file of a new army of 10,000 men, intended to be deployed in support of the crown against the Scottish, but before Wentworth could deploy his force Charles Stuart signed a treaty with the Scots. Wentworth, promoted to Earl of Strafford, left Ireland for the court. Protestants from the Derry plantation successfully lobbied allies at parliament to get Wentworth beheaded, a foreshadowing of Charles Stuart’s isolation and his weakened grip on power.

Irish émigré veterans recruited by Wentworth from overseas to train his royalist army began to consider moving against the crown; their rebellious orientation was helped along by the fact that they were put on half-pay before being disbanded, effectively put out of work. At the same time in the Spanish Netherlands acknowledged leader of the Irish in exile and veteran commander in Philip IV’s armies Eoghan Roe O’Neill, nephew of the Earl of Tyrone (who had died in Rome in 1616) was having similar thoughts. Another important figure here is Phelim O’Neill who otherwise manifested every outward sign of being a member of the loyal deserving Irish. His father Turlough Óg had fought for the English during the Nine Years War and was killed while trying to suppress a subsequent rebellion in 1608. In recognition of his father’s services Phelim O’Neill had received estates in the Ulster plantation. He was raised as a ward of the court in the Protestant faith, attended Lincoln’s Inn in London, and then returned to Ireland in the 1620s. He purchased a knighthood for himself but his reversion to Catholicism on return to Ireland exposed him to religious persecution. Like many of the Irish lords he was unable to manage his lands in the modern commercial style and was caught between an accruing number of levies and customary feudal practices, particularly after the disastrous harvests of 1638 - 9. All these men, the class they represented, and the Old English had seen the success that the Scots had achieved in their extra-parliamentary revolt and had begun to think action along similar lines — possibly the first instance of ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ — might provide a means of changing the situation. At the same time the success of the covenanters was concerning; they were even more stridently anti-Catholic than the crown Protestants they were accustomed to. Again, it’s plausible to call this an anti-imperialist war in the sense that it was a challenge to colonialism, the fact that the leading conspirators belonged to the landed elite wouldn’t necessarily be out of line with the class composition of later national liberaion movements, but it is important to recall that residual orientation among many of the leaders who saw themselves as loyal to and acting in defense of the colonial administration. Putting together an army in pursuit of that goal was not undertaken with a view to liberation, but as a means of communicating greivances to the king.

The Ulster Irish planned an assault on two fronts. Phelim would target key points in South Ulster to prevent Protestant settlers from linking up with forces from the capital. At the same time Conor Maguire’s men would storm Dublin castle, paralyse the government and get access to a vast quantity of weaponry. Phelim’s plan was successful, he rallied thousands of followers to his banner, especially among landed labourers and small tenant farmers, but in Dublin a companion of Lord Maguire alerted the authorities in advance. The conspirators were rounded up, including Maguire, who was executed in London, but unrest was still provoked in north Leinster and Munster, partly encouraged by a forged commission from Charles Stuart put together by O’Neill to the effect that the King had given the Irish a commission to seize the goods and estates of all English Protestants. The Old English army, initially responding to Dublin’s call to assist in putting down the disloyal Catholics, instead joined the rebellion.

Local Catholic landowners assumed command in their areas but they found it difficult to control the rank-and-file, who increasingly attacked Protestant settlers. These attacks became quite extreme in some cases and provoked hysteria, with unlicensed publications in England reporting 150,000 Protestant deaths which far exceeded the total settler population. As refugees from the rebellion came into Dublin witness depositions were collected, the bulk of them from between 1642 - 3, but a Commission for Despoiled Protestants continued its work until September 1647, producing more than 30 manuscript volumes filled with sworn statements from survivors. Many recognised the propaganda value of these testimonies of savage massacres of Protestant settlers by cruel papists towards building support for massive confiscations of Catholic land. Much of the material is therefore highly exaggerated and incorporates rumours and hearsay. Nevertheless, the findings were presented to Westminster and an MP named Oliver Cromwell was one of those charged with organising relief efforts, he donated £600 of his own money he sat on a number of parliamentary committees dealing with the rebellion.

After significant successes in Ulster, with two-thirds of the province taken, the rebels were on the defensive by early 1642. Phelim failed to capture Drogheda; the irregular rebel forces were poorly armed and lacked military training. The Lords Justices, buoyed by reinforcements from England and the promise of a Scottish intervention, adopted an increasingly aggressive strategy, declaring any commander could execute any rebel or traitor, inviting attacks on civilians. This offensive was stalled by outbreaks of flux, death of the most energetic colonial commanders as well as the beginnings of the War of the Three Kingdoms in August with forces of the British parliament marching against Charles Stuart’s cavaliers and dividing the loyalties of the 37,000 Protestants on the island.

In an attempt to regain the initiative, consolidate their position and secure the support of the Catholic church, the Old English and native Irish convened a Confederation in rebel-controlled Kilkenny where a legislative general assembly assumed responsibility for the functions of government: appointing generals, minting a new coinage, establishing diplomatic relations with courts overseas, re-establishing the rule of law and collecting subsidies. Provincial and county councils extended their authority throughout the localities while standing provincial armies replaced the irregular levies. Both sides made significant efforts to preserve ethnic harmony, with the assembly committing itself to an inclusive vision of national identity, calling on Charles Stuart to treat all Irish subjects equally before the law with place of birth rather than blood being the essential criterion for membership of an Irish nation, with no distinction to be made between old or new English or Irish.

There were two main blocs at Kilkenny. There was a faction of landowners which obviously favoured preservation of their estates, but also wanted access to public office and guarantees of religious toleration. Separately there was a clerical faction demanding full restoration of the Catholic church. This latter cohort was supported by Owen Roe O’Neill, who wanted full Irish independence. Had these factions succeeded in unifying themselves they could have seized control of the island and driven the Brits into the sea but the Old English, still loyal to Charles Stuart and convinced that he was more likely to grant religious freedom than the parliament, engaged in fruitless negotiations which dragged out for years. Tensions increased with the arrival of a papal nuncio, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini who was an absolutist on confessional questions and opposed negotiations with the exiled monarch. These factional disputes distracted O’Neill from military affairs and left the rebels unprepared for Cromwell’s religious crusade.

In the early stages of the war sieges typically failed to achieve their objectives because besiegers lacked either the artillery necessary for taking defended positions or the means to transport big guns into the interior. They therefore resorted to scorched earth tactics towards forcing a surrender. The Cromwellian campaign intensified these trends, with the difference that they were in possession of modern weaponry such as siege guns, which were used to breach Drogheda’s walls in opening up the way to Ulster while the New Model Army marched to Kilkenny. Cromwell could also draw on a continuous stream of reinforcements; he possessed a good understanding of modern organisational tactics and ensured his men were consistently paid.

Cromwell justified the massacre at Drogheda the basis that it was a judgement of God on the barbarous Irish. There are certain historians or commentators who justify it on the basis that slaughter on this scale was not uncommon within the context of the Thirty Years War but Cromwell’s doctrine of no quarter did render it exceptional and shocking to public opinion even at the time. There were no attempts, as was customary, to pursue ransom; this was a pure act of extermination. When calculated in terms of the ratio of casualties to captured prisoners, Cromwell far exceeds the continental norm as well as the worst royalist defeats in England.

Cromwell imposed further punishment with the 1652 Act of Settlement which held out five categories of individuals who would be exempted from pardon for life or estate. Under it, no fewer than 80,000 adult males were liable to be executed. After two years only 200 had been killed through a special high court of justice but for the vast majority the most consequential aspects of this act related to land. Only those who could prove their loyalty to the parliamentarian’s cause could keep their estates which was of course very difficult to do. Protestant landowners who failed this test were to give up a fifth of their estates, though later these sentences were commuted to fines, most of which were never paid. Catholics were to have their estates confiscated entirely and receive alternate ones, two-thirds the size in Connacht, a punishment which fell particularly heavily to Irish of high social position and their immediate dependants. Evidence was drawn from the depositions at court hearings in Loughrea; there was some bribery of court officials to get title to what little land was afforded in Connacht. William Petty’s survey shows Cromwell confiscated eleven million acres, more than half of the island’s landmass. Thousands were transported to the Caribbean or other colonies, others went to the continent to enlist in the armies of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.

In lieu of back pay 33k soldiers received pieces of paper entitling them to Irish land. Only 12k of them chose to stay, the remainder sold their debentures at a loss to colonisers who were already in place, who now had the opportunity to augment, consolidate and improve their estates via a fresh influx of Tans and Scots eager to become tenants. In this way Cromwell’s military victories and draconian legislation reinvigorated the colonisation of Ulster. This served to push the Irish onto poor and less accessible land.

Twenty years on the economy had recovered from war and the population began to rise again. For some decades after plantation farming in Ulster reverted to agricultural practices which had been in place when the Irish lords were in control, more intensive agriculture only arrived with a new influx of Scots in the second half of the seventeenth century.

IX.

Why have I been talking about any of this apart from it throwing up issues of historical interest. Well I don’t need to emphasise that the nature of Irish capitalism, that two of the state or supra-state apparatuses on the island today owe a huge amount to processes the British crown initiated over four hundred years ago. The ethnic and religious supremacy at the core of this dispensation kept Irish people out of local government, prevented them from holding weapons, obtaining property or an education; it systematically underdeveloped the capacities of the population. Ireland was prevented from trading directly with Europe, was forced into the production of commodities which were important to England’s pursuit of maritime supremacy; it became a barracks for more troops than imperial India, the extent of England’s capacity to apply military and policing coercion here was the envy of the Prussians.

Industry was concentrated in the north, where the largest Protestant population was and everywhere else life within the state for the majority can be characterised as consisting of a rack-rented cottier class with no capital other than their seed potatoes. Land struggles after An Gorta Mór created a propertied peasantry, while an underdeveloped working class existed in small pockets in the cities, unable to win sufficient space for the assertion of its own interests between a big tent nationalist movement or a party of the upper class. The two greatest labour leaders this country has produced — James Connolly and Jim Larkin — struggled against the sectarian divide which had been inculcated in the Belfast shipyards, but the strength of that division, and continued British interference to frustrate the aspirations of Home Rule, were too strong to be overcome. The particularities of Irish capitalism were such that the environment was not favourable for the development of a classical working class party or radical social democratic movement, with its attendant institutions or organisations such as those which developed in Germany, Sweden, France or England. When the systematically under-employed Catholics in the north had the temerity to seek their civil rights the British state shot them dead in the street.

In certain respects the economic situation on either side of the border has been reversed. By adopting a tax regime taken on by many other British dependencies and plugging itself into Californian tech, the USian administrative state and European subsidies the twenty-six counties has become more wealthy while the so-called peace dividend in the six hasn’t even generated a functioning parliament. The extent of the Saorstát’s dependence on multi-nationals has created a high-consumption economy and brought in a party system in belated conformity with an abstract European model but this has not confronted the legacies of an underdeveloped welfare state. The spirit of the plantations endure in the fact that some of the most immiserated parts of the six counties are the most fertile ground for far-right politics. It is not just a coincidence that this is the population most capable of being bought off with a libidinal investment in the politics of racial supremacy and British nationalism. As the perennial feature of the political landscape in the twenty-six counties, a big tent nationalist party with a contradictory social programme once again vacillates in the fact of the contradictions its attempting t manage, a more contemporary iteration is drawing on the symbolism on the term to eat into parts of Dublin where you once had a mass movement in support of the demands of the hunger strikers.

This is not to argue that the plantations or the origins of capitalism represent a live issue in the present necessarily, but what I hope to have proven is that capitalism is not something that just happens when you get markets. It is a structure of power engineered and distributed across multiple levels: ideological, cultural, national, ecological, religious. It is particular to a given context and change, evolution, movement is fundamental. The way bourgeois economists talk about inflation, central banking and interest rates it is as though they’re forces of nature but we know these are instruments for crushing the power of labour in the seventies because the working class in parts of western Europe had gone as far as they could in achieving equality without beginning the process of expropriating the expropriators. Ethno-nationalism, militarism and state coercion in the present represents the evolution of strategy in response to crisis and it is on these levels, rather than just through trade union politics, mere cost of living questions, that the thing has to be contested, with the recognition and understanding that this is enormously difficult, that where reforms have been extracted they fail to endure. That when it is overthrown it doesn’t seem to stay dead.

The revolutionary horizon to which sections of the left I’ve tended to gravitate around are oriented towards conditions which pertained in Petrograd in 1917. Here, a highly disciplined historical miracle of a mass movement lost its illusions in the conciliationists and liquidationists, until only a disciplined cadre, who did not just maintain or explain their principles but demonstrated them in the workplaces, in the streets, on the field of war, amidst the maelstrom of a decade-long crisis, remained credible. I’m going to conclude by suggesting that the situation now requires us to leave that image, to place it at some point long into the future and think through one more in line with the Confederation of Kilkenny, where, despite much ground held in common, shared values, broad commitment to principles of co-existence and collaboration was facing a catastrophe for which it was totally unprepared. Each faction had a long list of missed opportunities at its back, enormous potential if only the available resources could be adequately directed and a significant part of the coalition had one eye on a separate peace in the hope that old certainties might hold. The revolutionary position which articulated the historical hinge-point was present there, but ungrounded, given that for the large numbers of people outside the legislature, the discussion as conducted seemed irrelevant.

Further Reading

Agnew, Jean. Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century. Four Courts Press, 1996.

Banaji, Jairus. A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Pluto Press, 2020.

Bardon, Jonathan. The British Colonisation of the North of Ireland in the 17th Century. Gill & McMillan, 2011.

Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Verso, 1993.

Canny, Nicholas. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565-76. Harvester Press, 1976.

—. From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland 1534 - 1660. Helicon, 1987.

—. Making Ireland British, 1580-1650. Oxford University Press, 2003.

— (Ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Chibber, Vivek. ‘Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism’. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy

Hilton, Rodney (Ed.). The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. Verso, 1987.

Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman. Penguin, 2019.

O’Neill, Timothy. Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland. Irish Academic Press, 1987.

Ó Síocrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland.

Radburn, Nicholas. Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Yale University Press, 2023.

Spufford, Peter. Power and Profit: the Merchant in Medieval Europe. Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Tilly, Charles. Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992. Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. Penguin, 2021.

I am interested in pulling at the evidence that the protestors, contrary to some online commentary, may have enjoyed significant support from the Irish population and large majorities in the left and soft-left parties. (Depending on a poll in the Independent could be a dodgy proposition here, I hold this up as a hostage to fortune). Rather than calling for a touch-me-not attitude, we could take seriously the idea that Paul Murphy, Roderic O'Gorman and Sinn Féin, are in touch with the anti-government convictions of their constituents. 

The cohort which turned out seems to fit a pattern we have seen in Europe over the past decade; self-employed, beneficiaries of subsidies, in or related to the agricultural logistics sector signalling their hostility to decarbonisation and demanding insulation from higher costs arising from geopolitically-driven supply shocks. In an Irish context though this is distinct; the extent of our imports render us immediately vulnerable to rising fuel costs. There are a number of indicators that this crisis will be uniquely severe, its duration is indeterminate and the twenty-six counties are already a high-cost economy with an infrastructure underdeveloped relative to headline figures regarding wealth and wages, a distortion which has only become more pronounced since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since 2022 food prices have gone up ~25%. Energy and housing utilities are up 37%, insurance ~22%. (As per the CSO) 30% of households are estimated to be in energy poverty, ~320k (~1 in 7 electricity customers) are in arrears at the end of last year and up to 26% of gas customers. (Stories from the Irish Examiner, Threshold and the Journal). The majority of these arrears are long-term, signalling a deepening crisis of inability to pay, which is of course skewed towards the unemployed and those who are suffering from illnesses keeping them out of work. Wages have risen ~11 - 12% but these increases are concentrated in IT and professional services, pulling the average up. (Again, CSO). Those working in accommodation and retail are also coming from a lower level, meaning their disposable income is hit first, and harder. None of this will be news to those with experience of Ireland's k-shaped economy in which aggregates conceal the divergence. 

Vincent Bevins would tell us that under present circumstances — an effectively leaderless campaign with inchoate objectives organised around social media, a weak left — we should prepare for this to rebound to the benefit of a populist right. The danger is even greater than in those case studies Bevins offers, given the radicalistion which the right has undergone in the past decade and the concentrated character of hybrid warfare waged by American tech oligarchs and their algorithms. This seems to me to be the likely outcome, but I do not think it is inevitable and the crucial question to answer is why PBP's years old cost of living campaign has failed to resonate in the same way. 

It is great to see so many expressing their position on the protests via a commitment to Marx's writings, but his most important concept in an applied analysis is contradiction; the non-identity of social forces and the means they adopt to pursue what they collectively intuit to be their interests. That support for a movement which opposes a carbon tax movement pulls in 50% of the Green Party might tell us there are serious and growing numbers of people squeezed to the extent that they will accept to short to medium term discomfort such is the strength of their anti-FFG sentiment.

This is all of interest to me as someone who thinks about social change and beyond that how new political coalitions might begin to emerge and articulate a concentrated opposition to the very wealthy having such a determining role in terms of how our society is organised. As far as politics goes this is of particular interest to the radical left, who need a social third term to strengthen their position. One of the reasons for a recent split within the Irish left between the largest – but still of course very small – revolutionary left party, People Before Profit, and one of the three organised factions within it, Red Network, was on the question of the constituencies towards which organisational efforts within the party should be directed. Both sides of this disagreement represent themselves as being oriented towards the working class as you'd expect, but RN accuse PBP of gravitating more towards a student layer in practice; historically these have certainly represented the core of their volunteer cadre. RN’s preferred approach is contained in the slogan ‘pivot to the estates’, those parts of the Dublin outside the immediate city centre built up from the 30s onwards such as Cabra Ballymun or Crumlin, as part of Dublin Corporation efforts to clear the tenements and inner city slums.

This is far from a policy paper or an attempt to adjudicate sets of political or personal disagreements with data but since the material is there to be visualised I thought it could be an interesting case to consider.

Methods

I began by pulling the relevant .csv down from the CSO website and taking it into R. I dropped any ‘Other’, ‘Not Stated’ and ‘Total’ columns and, on an iterative basis, any non-illustrative others which were interfering with the results down the line. I dropped any columns with a standard deviation of 0 and any highly-correlating pairs, though I made sure I was always keeping the class coded variables in there.

Occupations

Some of the stuff we’re interested in here are elementary occupations, managers, directors and senior officials, the skilled trades (the upper tier of the working class) the self-employed, farmers and agricultural workers. I aggregated professional and managerial technical workers into a Professional Managerial Class column, and grouped a working-class precariat compound variable by summing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers. I also summed long-term unemployment and permanent disability arising from poor health into a single variable.

Education

People with a third-level education and over, those with a primary-only education or school leavers.

Housing

Social housing is very important here obviously, whether being rented from a local authority or a co-operative, as well as private rentals and owned properties (mortgaged or owned-outright). Having no internet internet access or a high room density (which we estimate by a weighted room count) could also be telling us important stuff.

Transport

Transportation by rail as compared to a van could be informative, as well as having no access to a car, which can be a symptom of deprivation in places off railway lines.

One health warning I’d signal about this is that these days points are self-identified; poorer areas skew higher for ‘Other’ and ‘Not Stated’ returns, so I think this is decent grounds for saying collecting data through statutory forms doesn’t work as effectively as you move down the social scale. Rich people love being interpolated.

Analysis

Principal Components Analysis is one of the more straightforward methods we can use to simplify large, complicated datasets for exploratory analysis, think of it as holding the spreadsheet up and looking at it from different angles. Out of simplified and normalised correlations it draws out new variables which are optimised for explaining the patterns of covariance, and this will allow us to differentiate every small area into one of a selection of ideal-types or categories.

Finding the right number of categories – are we just interested about rural versus urban or are there distinctions within the two? – can be a matter of interpretation, so I went with a number which did the most to reduce the sum of the squared difference between each data point and each cluster’s mean. Simply put: what number gave us the most in-group coherence. The number obtained here was 5.

Taking this number we then applied a new clustering method to the data, k-means, but this time we tell the algorithm: there are five ideal types here, bin every Small Area into one of these five bins.

Results

Just before getting into these cohorts I just want to signal: you can’t call these classes as such I don't think. What they do represent are models for understanding parts of the twenty-six counties which are reasonably coherent from a demographic and social point of view. The classed nature of space isn’t my forte, but I’m sure David Harvey or Lefebvre have stuff on it.

Urban Professional Renters (~473k)

The defining feature in these areas is the 56.3% private rental rate, which is the highest in any cluster. Combined with high levels of professional employment (37.7%), degree-level education (38.5%), work-from-home rates (37.3%), no car (34.8%), and high residential density (0.69 people per room), this is the young urban graduate class in the cores of all Irish cities.

The high level of education polarisation tells us there is a significant unskilled workforce in hospitality and delivery; these cohorts might co-exist in unevenly gentrified areas but are economically distinct. There’s also a residual legacy of public housing at 8.2%.

Some examples here would be the Dublin Docklands, inner city apartments, Cork and Galway city centres.

Deprived Working Class / Socially Excluded (~1.09M)

This is the most disadvantaged cluster across nearly every indicator, with the highest levels of social housing (25.9%), long-term unemployment (4.4%), disability affecting work (8.2%), early school leaving (18.9%) poor health (3.1%) smoking (18.9%), no internet access (13%) and lowest numbers for attainment of s third-level education (12.8%). The educational polarisation is low here because there it is homogenously low-educated. Some levels of van commuting and skilled trades (11.9%) suggest some population of manual or construction workers but these are outnumbered by those outside the labour market.

Some of the most populous areas I see coming through here are Poppintree, Darndale, Mullhuddart and Jobstown, so any revolutionary left organisation should probably measure its strength by its presence in these places. More seriously, whatever concrete differences in tactics might be, I think this probably bears out RNs analysis, with the proviso that halting sites represent a confounding variable; long-term labour market exclusion can represent a bit of a blocker for a workerist (non-pejorative) politics.

Settled Rural and Provincial Mainstream (~1.77M)

53.3% own their houses, 30.4% have a mortgage, we’re talking about a level of owner-occupation of 84%. The employment pattern is more balanced than places we’ve seen so far with significant skilled trades (20.6%) and professionals (41.5%). There is a substantial farming presence, 9.3% farmers, 2.8% agricultural workers. Low rail commuting and high van use as we’d expect at 0.4% and 11.2% respective. Only 4.8% don’t have a car.

This is rural Ireland, provincial towns and suburban communities outside the commuter belt like Ennis, Mullingar, Tullamore, rural Cork Galway or Mayo.

Suburban Mortgage Belt / Aspirational Middle Class (~1.03M population)

This is where people have made the transition from private rentals to home ownership and are living in the new expanding commuter-belt estates experiencing rapid, but of course still insufficient, housing development. There is lower deprivation than in Cluster 2, but they’re under more pressure than 3 or 5.

There is high professional employment (41%) and moderately high Level 8+ attainment (28.3%). There is a significant private rental market at (23.6%) and high education polarisation (2.09) reflecting a mixed community of graduates and non-graduates. Moderate levels of working from home (29.8%), low numbers of people with no car (7.6%) or internet (3.7%).

Some examples here would be Naas, Balbrigaan, Cork or Limerick commuter zones.

Cluster 5 — Established Affluent Professional Class (924k)

This is the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy across almost every positive indicator, with > 50% in professional occupations, 1 in 10 working as managers or directors, over 40% with a Level 8 or over, almost 50% own their house outright. The level of poor health and long-term unemployment is at an unbelievable 1% and only 1 in 10 smoke. That 50% level of working from home indicates the importance of the knowledge-economy in this employment base, I think. Worth noting the high level of educational polarisation, clearly there’s a domestic, hospitality and care workforce on hand in these areas. Think of Dublins 4 6 14, Killiney, Foxrock, Blackrock, Salthill, Montenotte, real belly of the beast areas.

Once I can suss out the existence of an equivalent dataset for the six counties I'll run all this again and see if I can skew any categories.

My perspectives on this are complicated. Ending partition would be the righting of an historical injustice, but one of its less important facets. I am ashamed of how badly citizens of the twenty-six counties have performed in making a state for which people have given and taken life. There has been significant economic and social advancement from the state’s foundation, a creditable record of cultural achievement, neutrality and international co-operation, but this is a record which is being undone by extremes of wealth inequality, a NATO or Atlanticist alignment; further evidence if any were needed of a regnant visionlessness given such affiliations are in their autumn years. A depressing index of the direction of travel can be seen in the results of a 2023 ARINS poll, which notes that lower-earners in the twenty-six counties increasingly align with loyalists in their racist views, a constituency which until a few years, I would have thought was confined to the cultures of imperial or ex-imperial nation states.

My personal preference would be for a socialist republic. By ‘socialist’ I mean an economy subject to democratic control, towards the moderation or abolition of class differences and the universal provision of socialised goods such as education, housing and childcare. It would be militarily neutral and advocate for peace and the rights of oppressed peoples in international bodies. By republic I mean something more symbolic. A secular state, a constitutional commitment to anti-sectarianism and asylum for those fleeing persecution or hardship. I regard this as having more pertinence for a growing (but still relatively small) immigrant population rather than just Protestant or unionist - a finding I found amusing in that poll I mentioned above arose from EU or non-EU participants who asked why there shouldn’t be reserved ministerial or veto powers for them - because I see the state having a leadership role to play in undermining rather than encourage the efforts of unionists who would seek to undermine or sabotage the functioning of the state.

Though this is the sole vision for a United Ireland I would be excited by its prospects are remote. The closest thing to this model is something like Cuba during the Cold War, which existed under a highly specific set of circumstances, attested to by the lack of other exemplars. There is also the chance that Castro was history in fatigues and doesn’t come along only once in a century, but I digress; in the advanced industrial capitalist societies of the type that exist on both states on the island, there are no present models for a successful movement for universal rights. No currently existing organisation has a convincing map for doing it in the absence of a landless peasantry, let alone with the combined presence of a petty-bourgeois property owning class and a not entirely separate population of wage earners too internally differentiated to enforce their interests, whether they have any in common or not.

Until recently the momentum seemed to be behind a post-historical demographic drift, which would follow the trajectory of Sinn Féin’s moderation into a responsible party of government and capitalise on the twenty-six county state’s status as a low-regulation / high consumption economy, highly integrated with European and USian markets. We saw this in SF’s unexpectedly high showing in the 2020 General Election, seemingly driven by a generalised frustration with FFG’s failures on resolving the many systemic issues besetting the state, foremost among which is the shortage of available housing. COVID was the first of the number of crises which have set this agenda back by knocking SF into its current pattern of confusion and vacillation, as anti-social elements were catalysed against lockdown and immigrants, encouraged both directly and indirectly by USian tech oligarchs and a partitionist D4-centric media innately hostile to those who seek to transform the nature of the state or state institutions, however modestly. The result is plain to see: climate denialists in office and SF’s disgraceful and self-defeating capitulation to anti-trans and anti-immigrant positions.

I hold two contradictory ideas in my head at the same time here. If SF do decide to get their act together I am confident a broad coalition supportive of a decommodifying and anti-anti-immigration politics is there for them to win - a constituency to which the Catholic nationalist working class in the north would be fundamental. But this is not solely a dynamic of betrayal at the top, but a symptom of contemporary political parties’ relative thinness. Professionalisation and PR-driven politics rooted in participation in state institutions foment an establishment Weltanschauung in the leadership. I agree SF are betraying what I and I imagine a good proportion of their membership would regard as what is valuable in their organisations’ history, but I don’t think they’re capable of the required mobilisation from above, I think there needs to be that projection from below, which tend to only emerge in an extraordinary situation.

My prediction is that inter-capitalist competition and instability arising out of the decline of the US, disorganisation at a European level, the rise of China will shape even the most economistic demands; cost of living crises further stoked by anti-immigrant politics, rising food prices. Decarbonisation opening issues of sourcing from a China which plans to move on Taiwan. This will create opportunities, but as anyone who lives in the six will tell you it can also generate fatalism; debates about Jesus Christ taking the place of concrete actions to fill potholes for example.

That unforeseen circumstances arising out of turbulence and crisis is what shapes geo-political boundaries can be seen firstly in how dated Brexit has become as O’Leary’s most significant macro referent and secondly in the choice of case studies or examples. Germany, Korea, Cyprus, the unity of Syria and Egypt, lack applicability to the present context. However O’Leary can’t be faulted for not seeing the future, or rooting policy discussion in potential ruptures. His work has continued within ARINS and the central lesson he seeks to extract from his account is the importance of preparation, detail and consultation. Well-taken points. But I’m struggling to find the space is for policy and contemporary governance sa lá atá inniu ann. I think we have Facebook brain from below and ‘anything we can do, we can do’ at the top. The problem isn’t state architecture, policy design or messaging but breaking the monopoly a managerial centrism has on this issue.

I remember the strangeness of first encountering people from Dublin’s southside in Irish and French-language summer camps. They had completely different accents, uniformly dyed-blond hair, their skin was orange, they were jacked to an extent that went way beyond the lads who played sport in my year. With the exception of those who were funny or insightful on an individual basis I didn’t have a lot to do with them, choosing to follow around the goths or weed-smokers from Kilkenny or Waterford. I went to a public school, but in the most affluent northside suburb, a parent had to engage in legalism to get them to accept me in a way that underlined her connections with the area, as we had only recently moved into the catchment. This is nothing like the extent of the social engineering these schools go in for, mandating applicants live south of the Liffey, kowtowing to psychotic anxieties parents and teachers have over class / race mixing, or that admission rights hinging on birth might be withdrawn.

None of this is examined much in Irish culture. The historical high-point of political engagement in modern Literary Fiction, which I tend to date to the seventies, was more detained by the self-mythologising travails of the shabby Protestant aristocrat or a fatalistic naturalism in rural Ireland than the very real set of social developments which integration into the post-war world market were driving. As for today, forget about it. What Richard Did, a really good film, is the sole exception I can think of (of course the director comes from this whole milieu) and one thing it absolutely nails is the subtle anti-Irishness, or rather the impulse these people have to regard their position as more of a function of England or United States. From Seamus Deane:

if Ireland could afford pluralism, it would not be for the Ireland we know. What we have instead is a dilapidated version of pluralism, media-led, centred in Dublin 4, a mini-metropolis that regards the rest of Ireland as the hinterland of its benighted past.

Turn on the radio. Read a newspaper. Don’t actually do either of these things, because you will immediately be confronted by that severe loyalty to an unreflective Atlanticism and its attendant lack of interest in reading or knowledge beyond the borders of partisanship. The author negatively evaluates this narrowness relative to French intellectual life, which is up for debate I think — what forms of knowledge were venerated and why? — but whatever it was its twilight is definitely announced by the elevation of e.g. Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Left me wondering about how many theories of the ruling class emphasise their failures to develop certain forces or capacities according to models established elsewhere, their rootedness in superseded philosophical frameworks, a banality that has not in any way interfered with their record of non-stop winning.

The Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation founded a few decades earlier with the aim of preserving the core values of Islam, rejecting what it saw as the decadent modernising ideas coming from the west, was initially supportive, until Nasser suppressed all political parties as divisive agents of colonialism. The Palestinian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood therefore operated primarily in the Jordanian-administered West Bank, under headquarters in Amman. Unlike most political parties the Brotherhood did not seek to implement structural change through direct action or political processes, but rather worked towards individual salvation through recitations of the Quran or discussions of religious texts. They were given a relatively free hand by authorities, as they were seen as a useful means of sapping the energies of the other political currents (communists / Ba’athists / Nasserists) and crucially did not engage in violence against Israeli targets, though they did occasionally co-operate with these nationalist parties in the context of resistance campaigns or mobilisations. Their status was formalised in 1973 with the establishing of the Islamic Complex welfare network in which doctors, dentists, pharmacists and engineers educated abroad provided charitable medical and educational services. At the same time they waged campaigns against other Palestinians, attacking cinemas, cafés, libraries and individuals whose behaviour did not align with their ideological standards. A particularly acrimonious feud with the PFLP was downstream from these ideological disagreements.

1967 marked the beginning of a phase of defeats for the Arab nationalist movements: the Six-Day War, Black September, the PLA’s defeat in Gaza, the crushing of the DFLP in Jordan. It was in this context that the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine (PIJ) was founded, fusing Islamist ideology and Palestinian nationalism with anti-colonial thought. These secular tendencies gave it a more materialist character than the Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolution in 1979 seemed to strengthen their view that Islam rather than mainstream Arab nationalism, or indeed socialism, was a promising vehicle for political transformation.

PIJ’s disagreements with the Muslim Brotherhood arose from their greater degree of liberalism on social issues — PIJ was more focused on violent resistance to the Israelis than unmarried couples holding hands — but there were also organisational and generational questions here; they criticised the Islamic Complex for its passivity and the Brotherhood became anxious about a younger generation of Islamists with a desire for a more confrontational policy. This is the context in which Hamas is founded. Contrary to the meme, it was not a creation of Israeli intelligence.

Hamas’ 1988 charter was unambiguously anti-Semitic and seemed to attribute responsibility for the French and Russian Revolutions to the Jews. This was revised in 2017 to recognise the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, to adopt human rights or international law as a moral and political baseline rather than religion and to signal a willingness to compromise on the legitimacy of the Israeli state in the context of a two-state solution.

The more recent gains these organisations made after years of obscurity derives from the increasing disillusionment with the so-called peace process and the worsening of conditions for the Palestinians following the imposition of the Oslo Accords. Settlers confiscated 51k additional acres between 1993 and 2000, fragmenting the Occupied Territories into enclaves. Everyone entering or leaving Gaza, or even certain neighbourhoods had to go through fortified checkpoints while politicians in the PLO or PA were granted VIP passes.

Hamas and PIJ’s tactics included the organisation of protests, demonstrations, but they also pioneered suicide bombing as a means of demoralising the Israeli population and thwarting the peace process by weakening Arafat as a representative. The Israeli response was one of extreme brutality; fifty Palestinians were killed and more than 1k injured in the first five days of the Second Intifada, which constrained the capacity of the leadership to call for moderation; this was a godsend to Hamas and the PIJ. Both organisations began to collaborate more often either with each other or brigades within the PFLP, subject to factional strength and geography. Suicide bombing as a means of wearing Israeli civilians down was a failure. The international environment post 9/11 was less favourable to terrorism as a political tactic and the bombings seemed to steel Israeli resolve, making targeted assassinations of the leadership more popular. This is a large part of the reason why they have fallen off as a tactic in the years since.

In order to prevent the kind of crackdowns which would have destroyed the leadership Hamas is divided into political, military and social / welfare service wings. Within each of these is the usual contradiction between the indigenous leadership and those in the diaspora. Over time these have fed into a greater disconnect between the moderates abroad — who might be oriented towards a ceasefire in pursuit of greater legitimacy or popularity — and hardliners grappling with a military enemy in a far more immediate sense — who may be, for example, planning an insurgency with an anti-Shiite character. This is a matter of material conditions rather than just personality; Mahmoud al-Zahar was viewed in the 90s as a dove — he received death threats from the Qassam Brigades for discussing a peace agreement with Israel — but in 2003 Israel tried to assassinate him by dropping explosives on his house. His son was killed and his daughter was maimed, which has moved him to a far less conciliatory position.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad boycotted the presidential election of 2005 as they had earlier PA elections in line with their rejection of the Oslo Process and the Palestinian Authority, but in 2006 Hamas contested them, downplaying their conservative message and its advocacy of armed resistance in favour of a reform and change agenda, seeking to take the PA from Fatah to strengthen the resistance. They took 74 seats to Fatah’s 45 in a 132 member assembly, on 44% of the vote. As confrontations between Fatah and Hamas began to escalate, a prisoners' group from many different resistance organisations called for a unified front. However Fatah cracked under pressure exerted by Israel, the US and attempted a coup. Hamas carried out its own counter-coup, taking power in Gaza. Israel imposed a siege, reduced the amount of goods and fuel entering the strip to a minimum, ceased exports and turned the area into an open air prison. The EU and US boycotted the Gazan government.

Hamas struggled to govern according to the requirements or desires of their constituents while satisfying their rank-and-file’s impatience for resistance. The military brigades complained at being reduced to the status of a border control force, arresting militants attempting to carry out attacks as a means of keeping the peace against Israel represents one of their own points of leverage. An increasing perception that negotiations are useless facilitated the increasing popularity of the PIJ. Hamas has also been unlucky in its attempts to negotiate the changing situation in the region after the Arab Spring. Its bet that events in Syria and Egypt would go a different direction than they did let to a cut in funding coming from Iran. The PIJ succeeded in keepin the Republic on board by maintaining a studied neutrality on the potential for democratisation. These diplomatic failures, for which the outside leadership was largely responsible, allowed for the strengthening of the Qassam brigades, who developed additional breathing room through revenue generated from what’s referred to as the tunnel economy. Qassam also preserved ties to Iran and over time increased their presence on Hamas’ political bureau.

Sinwar was initially perceived as a hardliner but made clear his support for peaceful popular resistance and that another war was not in Hamas’ interests. He sought negotiations towards a long-term truce with Israel and reconciliation with Abbas and the PA. A turning point came with the Great March of Return in 2018, an attempt to revive the peaceful march as a tactic of mass resistance. Palestinians of all ages, genders, political and social groups committed to the cause of peace marched to the border. Despite the fact that it was primarily a cultural mobilisation, with field clinics, culture live music dancing, poetry and weddings, in an optimistic atmosphere, Israeli snipers shot and killed civilians and medical staff. At the end of the protests at least 10k people were injured including 2k children. This, along with the ongoing normalisation of relations with Israel across the region, made clear that Hamas had not gained much by taking administrative control of Gaza. October 7 arises out of this bleak scenario.

Skare is sceptical that PIJ and Hamas’ prominence point to a sharp religious turn in the Palestinian resistance movement, describing the extent of Fatah’s religiosity — Arafat’s use of the Quran and oral teachings from the Hadith, separation of boys and girls in the youth organisation, Arafat’s dismissal of the DFLP’s idea of a secular democratic state, Fatah’s founders being Brotherhood members — to make the case that the secular tendencies of the left-wing or Marxist groups can be overstated. The PIJ and Hamas are also working in a different international context, after the decline of communism and developmentalist decolonisation as an international force. In actuality this is not that much of a stark leap from one motor of history to another. If you, like me, are of the totally unbiased point of view that James Connolly is the most interesting figure in the history of Marxist internationalism you will find a lot that is of interest in these arguments, given Connolly was a devout Catholic — more than once being denounced from the pulpit of his own church as one of his daughters recalled — while also being a one-man Zimmerwald left completely isolated from the Second International.

In some reviews of this book coming from an Ordotrotskyist position there is some snobbery about social conservatism within revolutionary movements, which I can comprehend, but at the risk of making excuses — organisations have to answer for their positions — it is not the case that the history of putatively secular or internationalist labour movements have in practice always chosen class over chauvinism, of whatever type. I get the sense that at times these are not being weighed according to the same standards. This is all complicated by how contemporary political parties lay claim to the past, e.g. culture wars over Seán South’s anti-communism or the intentions behind Jimmy Steele’s 1969 speech.

This book is hugely informative and I would recommend it without reservation. If I had one criticism to make I would say there’s a few weeks more editing in this, with a fair amount of repeated information across chapters. Introduction features a critique of something called 'postmodern historians' via Mieksins Wood, Hiroo Onoda vibes.

In its abstract form the distinction Brenner draws here is not a synthetic one between internal and external markets — though when applied to actual historical instances, it can very easily go that way — rather it attempts to clarify the switch, the moment when markets become the required means of surviving and reproducing as a class. This is no longer choice. This is the first time that, in order to continue to exist tenant farmers, faced with higher than average costs from backward production methods, have to specialise and provide for enclosure or farm buildings to prevent falling back on their rent. This is the first time a ruling class has to act according to the maximisation of surplus and the development of productive force. Its agency is no longer a factor, its brain has been switched out with competition.

Historians, economists, Marxists such as Arrighi, Wallerstein, Banaji, Frank — hereafter referred to by the blunt shorthand of World-Systems Theorists (WSTs) — are open to seeing capitalism arising out of the commercial networks beginning in the Italian city states / north-western Europe in early modernity, to incorporate the Mediterranean, the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa and plantations in the Americas. According to WSTs, any part of this interdependent system of exchange is capitalist, whatever its means of controlling and rewarding labourers; free labour is just one aspect, wage labour is not specifically capitalist, rather the self-expansion of capital is. This is a quantitative rather than a qualitative model. Looking to WST to isolate causes or restricted timeframes is misconceived because the real transition is not feudalism to capitalism as such but how anarchic medieval systems of power, coalesced to into concentrated capitalist power, how these uniquely* fused in Europe, facilitating territorial conquest and the creation of a world-economy. The history of capitalism (The Venetians -> the Dutch -> the English -> the Americans) is the formation of political structures endowed with more extensive and complex organisational capabilities than those previous. Relations of production as a whole moves us beyond Brenner’s short-circuit within the single separable unit, in which labour subject to any form of coercion is de facto feudal, and a world system containing it de facto pre-capitalist.

There is plenty of material in Marx’s works which supports Brenner’s labour-power exceptionalism, but it is fair to say that Marx is trying to make a specific argument about the mechanics of a pure or abstracted capitalism, and how it figures in an industrialised form in early to mid-nineteenth century England; this is the milieu in which the vast majority of his non-literary sources are dealing. Brenner is highly invested in justifying his transition hypothesis relative to Marx, but I think we shouldn’t be too worried about litigating ourselves relative to him all the time; the way capitalism continues to develop will continue to shape our understanding of the historical documents. WST comes out of a moment in which the most advanced anti-capitalist struggles were taking place in Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia. The fact that Marx’s arguments about convergence in the global economy did not stand up to the uneven, contradictory and coercive features of capitalism in these places required answers. Similarly, Brenner’s resurgent Eurocentrism corresponds in time to the relative eclipse of these struggles in the west and the ascent of a form of capitalism characterised by greater mobility or autonomy from state control. I think the rise of China, the genocide in Gaza, climate change, all point to capitalism’s more overtly political character since the GFC and have contributed to how the history of neoliberalism is being written (see: Slobodian). I would predict that over the coming years capitalist historiography will continue to bring greater degrees of attention to the history of market engineering and ruling class agency. This is all to say that, rightly or wrongly, we* are far more used to seeing capitalism in parasitic, destructive and conservative rather than improving terms; I think of sections of Capital which describe how in some branches of industry wages fall below the value of labour-power, dis-incentivising the adoption of machinery.

Anyway, Brenner argues neither specialisation of labour nor accumulation of wealth arising out of trade can account for the rise of a system characterised by a compulsion to revolutionise technical processes of labour and social composition. Profit arising out of exchange only has force when labour has been separated from ownership over the means of production and labourers have been emancipated from slavery or serfdom. In support of this Brenner argues that certain methods of agricultural improvement such as convertible husbandry, or certain forms of rotation, would have elevated output were they introduced when they were first developed in the medieval epoch. However in order to apply these new methods the lord would have had to increase their outlay on manorial supervision or find some means of rewarding the serf to a particular standard. Since labour applied to the lord’s demesne constituted a direct forcible deduction from what was applicable to the peasants’ plot, no such incentive existed and it made more sense to squeeze tenants. Feudalism therefore hindered the development of commercialised agriculture, as squeezing exhausted the soil, fuelling cyclical demographic crises. When new methods of cultivation became widespread in late sixteenth / early seventeenth century England, it was on the basis of a partnership between landlords and richer peasants. In other words, the lords were only increasing their income by relative surplus labour when they were no longer serf lords.

Underdevelopment was one way WST sought to understand why capitalism’s peripheral satellites — what we now to a large extent refer to as the Global South — were forced into becoming export-dependent cash crop economies, the economic surplus expropriated to facilitate the concentration of greater levels of skill and capitalisation in the core. Brenner’s explanation is that it is only in certain countries that labour power can become a commodity and what happened in the Carribean or Latin America ensured there was nothing that could be done to more profitably stimulate investment or productive capacity.

There is a hydraulic character to these arguments.When Brenner challenges Wallerstein’s description of serfdom declining due to changing land-labour ratios putting serfs in a better bargaining position, Brenner says bargaining assumes serfs have already gained their freedom. I think this is indicative of the way Brenner is after formal definitions and would exclude any conception of bargaining-towards-freedom, seeing this as a process rather than something that can only happen when its accomplished. Capitalists could improve because they had to and it is their impulse towards improvement that makes them capitalists. Serfdom is the absence of bargaining; it can’t be serfdom if there is bargaining. Capitalism’s rise cannot be attribute to ‘money’, ‘trade’, ‘the production of commodities’ or ‘merchant capital’ as these all depend on a class structure which precedes them. Under this functionalist model it is impossible to see the emergence of different but equally capitalist systems of labour control, or understand its constructed or agentic character. I hope at this stage it’s clear that Brenner’s model is not one that can accommodate dialectics, we know that as soon as he insists on the closed character of national economies, particularly in an early modern period. Not seeing social processes in motion in general is like talking to someone from the moon for me, whenever I read Althusser I feel like I’m hearing someone talk through a wall, but the idea that concentration of land in England has nothing to do with the expropriation of Ireland in the context of the Plantations is dead wrong, dead dead wrong. Hope to write on this question specifically soon.

All criticism is self-criticism and there are these moments in his profiles of slightly off-piste intellectuals when I think it would be plausible to see him as talking about himself, and given his age this gets harder and harder to do because deep intellectual history, as he plays it, can't really be done his way anymore. Younger generations of critics don’t cognitively map in the same slightly Donnish manner. This is all to say that I think he's lost interest in what a younger generation he would have been aligned with politically in the past (or not, a lot of them are currently being won over by social democrats who will let them down) and is gravitating more towards national conservativism.

This is suggested firstly in a recent LRB piece in which he gave ground to the idea that immigrants were taking the jobs of domestic or indigenous workers in the west and lamented that this latter cohort wasn't consulted in any meaningful way about it. Tariq Ali's recent set of memoirs alerted me to the many ways in which the NLR editorial board is a factionalised entity and the Mandelite wing into which the most recognisable set of contributors would go were - in the late 80s early 90s anyway - in a subordinate position, both to Mieksins Wood and an alliance of what Ali describes as Croation nationalists, though he doesn't name names sadly. I may be wrong therefore in seeing his hand behind some similarly right-wing tendencies manifesting there lately. Either way I am baffled by whatever chain of decisions led to the publication of an interview with a Catholic fundamentalist New York Times columnist conducted by by the social media guy for a lobby group funded by a litany of super-exploitative MNCs with a bloody history of backing the overthrow of leftist governments in Latin America.

I say all this because Anderson introduces this book by a proud American conservative who saw nothing in Vietnam Chile Nicaragua El Salvador Guatemala Cuba Palestine Panama Indonesia and so on which would challenge his view that the United States is not an essentially benign force, or better than any available alternative.

Anderson lauds Schroder all the same for his command over European diplomatic history and his prescience in diagnosing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a moment of imperial overreach. The essays are in chronological order and track Schroder's growing loss of faith in a party he has always supported, as it becomes more and more obstructionist, spectacle-driven and vacuous. I found myself reading a lot of it and shrugging. The left is coming down with detail-oriented accounts of Bush's imperial ventures and or the progressive derangement of the American electorate, many of which are attentive to the motivations or interests of the agents involved (rather than how elected leaders jam up the nations' institutions in uncouth ways) and also capable of seeing the long thread going from here back to Korea.

I think the bleakness of the present moment has a lot of people who might have known better flirting with stupid shit, like a twice-as-farce of the 30s, not just New York rich kids but also relatively autonomous intellectuals. One of the people blurbed on the cover once approvingly cited an article published in American Conservative to the effect that what the Belgians did in the Congo wasn't as bad as everyone says. That lack of a positive horizon for a lot of people, like the way analytical Marxism is born in a counter-revolutionary atmosphere, either brings you here, one of these 'know your enemy' frauds, or a mush of official communist iconography stretched over a thin realist geo-politics.

But I'm not impressed by conservatives who use the word hegemony. This is a cut above John Gray, but not much else. There's repetition of particular phrases close to each other, and clever syntactical adjustments to make the shunting away of more complicated discussion look elegant. Palestine all too often bracketed off as part of an undifferentiated bloc of the 'Arab states'. The final essay chides Republicans, Republicans (!) for their failures in dealing with inequality and recommends Democrats support the GOP in becoming a sane party of opposition for the good of the American political system (not that this wasn't the position of the gerontocratic leadership). What the fuck is this shit?

When we seek to define ‘fictitious capital’ there are three main varieties we can point to. Credit — the lending of money in the expectation that it will be paid later along with a bonus or dividend according to the rate of interest — is one example. Stocks and securities — titles to a share of future profits — is another and debt issued by nation states — effectively claims on tax receipts — yet another.

Money capitalists making use of these instruments do not strictly speaking contribute to productive investment. Rather than working within circuits which yield value over longer periods, they would rather exploit price differentials between markets by selling claims which inflate or deflate independently of the actual performance of the productive activities in question. They prefer to keep their money in a liquid form and gravitate towards ‘hot’ cashflows. These operators allow far more money to circulate in the economy than can be derived from actual value creation and after the intensive liberalisation projects to which capitalist economies have been subject for the past half century, have become a preponderant source of economic activity, means of capital accumulation — if employers could only invest their real savings, it would be prohibitively expensive to do so at all — but also state capture. With its attenuated regulatory order, the USian state apparatus is largely captured by the power of finance and we are all now having fun finding out how relatively autonomous a state apparatus is when the morbid symptoms of this order is propelled into the cockpit.

This all has enormous consequences for how our societies are currently organised. Ferdinand Braudel’s reading of financialisation as an autumnal phase of capitalist development is legible everywhere in growing indebtedness, inequality and declining in investment / productivity, even as higher profits are levied from the Global South. We know from any number of economists and historians that understood abstractly capitalism tends towards monopoly and that it is highly anarchic. Large companies of systemic importance to the operation of global markets depend on financing that rests on profitability and vice versa at different times and to different extents. If these are not in the same place at the same time, the music stops.

Bretton-Woods, the international monetary system envisioned by John Maynard Keynes in the aftermath of World War II, would rest on a rules-based order that could not be manipulated by larger states. Gold would be retained as the anchor of the system against which the dollar would have its price fixed. Every other nation state would then fix their currency against the dollar and any changes would be determined co-operatively via the supra-national International Monetary Fund (IMF), if it was needed to correct a fundamental disequilibrium in the state’s current account, ensuring economic operators benefited from stability in the prices of the main currencies.

As the twentieth century continued US imperial strategy began to chafe within this dispensation. The Vietnam War brought the US into a structural deficit, further stretched by the US’ dominance in western European markets. The US could have stabilised the dollar by winding down its death-drive - withdrawing from the affairs of other countries or reducing its imports - but the Nixon administration instead destroyed Bretton-Woods by raising interest rates, pressuring Gulf states to raise the price of oil, putting European and Japanese economies into trade deficit and creating a new system of private international lending that would dwarf the IMF and the World Bank. Over time The Brits, the Germans, the French, the Italians were all forced to wind their capital controls down. This strengthened not only the capitalist class, which embarked on an offensive against organised labour in the seventies and eighties, but also the American state itself, now liberated from the same balance of payments restraints to which other nations are subject. If a state is heavily in deficit questions may arise as to whether they will be able to pay off their loans. They may need to sell their foreign exchange reserves, appeal to the IMF or cut back their purchases from abroad, which will have a depressive effect. There is no room for co-operation here in the final instance. According to rules set by the stronger nations, currency stability depends on a state’s creditworthiness, which means integration into American markets.

Writing on subjects like this, which are just that little bit beyond my understanding at present, and therefore compiled to a large extent from notes I’m taking from a few different sources, is spurred by my wish to begin to understand the mechanics of capitalism today. For better and for worse, the people most interested in doing the work in the data mines are Keynesians or post-Keynesians, whose heuristics are short to medium-term in scope and pragmatic in nature: a more federal Europe to facilitate more robust investment strategies, dovishness on inflation / allowing public debt to roll, clarifying or potentially democratising the role of central banks. From what I can gather, and this is a hostage to future reading, this amounts to ‘leaning in’ to historical developments already underway. We know banks are central to the metabolism of the global economy. This requires governments, particularly those whose investments and currencies are relatively preponderant in global markets, to interfere in their operations, even though the regnant ideological position — perhaps until very recently — has been one of laissez-faire, out of a wish to avoid raising expectations among the public that large-scale fiscal intervention may be undertaken for the purposes of downward, as opposed to upward, wealth re-distribution. In short, it suits the capitalist class to present the operation of banking as beyond the reach of politics but as the world becomes less stable this becomes an increasingly difficult fetish to maintain.

The Keynesian solution is to re-distribute systemic risk at a higher level of complexity, rather than abolishing or neutralising the central antagonism of value creation for the public good value versus the baroque universe of finance capitalism I’ve been trying to outline here. I do not like coming back a fundamental antagonism when there’s no social agent at the far end, but I keep looking over my shoulder in the hope it will will show up.

So if you’re interested in receiving a copy reach out and let me know. Warning: it won’t be anything special, it will be a5, on printer paper and bound in those plastic spines they use for theses.

Victor Serge

I am starting up a reading group around the works of the revolutionary and second greatest novelist of the last century Victor Serge. This will be in-person and held on a monthly basis in Dublin, so if you live there you’re very welcome, reach out for details. If you don’t I encourage you to start your own. If you have other responsibilities or work or happen to be passing through the city at any stage over the next year get in touch anyway, since finishing my PhD I find I have less day-to-day conversations about books and history and I think we could all do with more of it.

Cradle Song

When I was carrying you in my womb,
things were not going well for us at all
and I often said: the one I am carrying
is coming into a bad world.
And I said to myself, You must see to it
That he at least makes no mistake,
The boy I’m carrying must see to it,
That the world is a better place.
And I saw mountains of coal with a fence around them.
I said: don’t be miserable! The one I am carrying
will make sure that this coal warms him.
And I saw bread behind windows
and it was denied to the hungry.
The one I am carrying, I said, will make sure
that this bread feeds him.
When I was carrying you in my womb, I often said quietly to myself:
“You, the one I am carrying in my womb,
you must be unstoppable.”

Second Poem

When years ago, studying the goings-on on the Chicago wheat exchange
I suddenly understood how the world’s wheat was administered.
Yet, at the same time, failed to understand – and put down the book,
I saw at once:
You’ve hit upon something bad…

There was no bitterness in me, nor was I terrified
By the injustice – only I thought and I thought –
That’s not the way. No, not the way they’re doing it…

These people, I saw, lived from the harm
They do to others, instead of the good.
A situation that can only continue to exist
Through crime; bad for most human beings.
So every achievement of reason,
Invention and discovery
Must lead to ever greater misery.

Such and the like were my thoughts at that moment,
Far removed from anger or lamentation,
As I put down the book describing
The wheat market and the exchanges of Chicago…
Great pain and discontent were in store for me.

Third Poem

Recently I found my spectator.
On a dusty street
He held a power-drill in his fist.
For a brief moment he looked up. And I quickly
Pitched my theatre between the houses. He
looked up expectantly.
In the bar
I found him again. He stood at the counter
Sweat-stained; he was drinking, in his hand
A sandwich. Quickly I pitched my theatre. He
Looked up amazed.
Today
Luck was with me again.
In front of the railway depot
I saw him jostled by rifle-butts
Amid drum-beats – being hustled into war.
Right there, in the middle of the crowd,
I pitched my theatre. Over his shoulder
He looked back towards me:
And nodded.

German Satire

The chiefs of state
Have gathered in a room.
Man in the street:
Give up all hope.

The governments
Write non-aggression pacts.
Little man:
Write your testament.

Fourth Poem

I am sitting by the roadside,
the driver is changing the wheel.
I do not like it where I have come from.
I do not like it where I am going.
Why do I watch the wheel change
With impatience?

These essays are not strong as arguments. There are a lot of phrases which move us along quickly (‘Most critics would agree’, ‘few address themselves’) or summing up centuries of critical habits (‘since the Renaissance’) by going Plato → Philo → Freud / Marx and the discussions of each are very fundamentally wrong. The Marxist and psychoanalytic critical toolkits are, contra a set of highly reductive examples, open and eclectic, so again Sontag is not looking to settle terms really. This is a polemic that enacts the method it advocates, it is a seduction of the reader into an alliance against philistine moralisers and historicists, terms she uses in a very uninspired and censorious essay on Lukács.

I think we can grasp the appeal of this position in the present moment when there is absolutely a profusion of literalising critiques, e.g. Marty Supreme is bad because the main character is not likeable, Killers of the Flower Moon shouldn’t have been about Leonardo DiCaprio or David Foster Wallace is bad because he supposedly has a demographic (it’s a fact that 70% of Substack is this piece), but Sontag is moving beyond the quite correct point that this is reductive, saying that criticism must reject levels or structure for transparency. It is aesthetic where smaller is beautiful, never totalising, never a world-view or an argument, always a little guy. It must also be sex, this is a point that is made a number of times.

Where is the sinew here? I think: Sontag’s commas and delicate handling of big words. In referring to the ‘Superior kinds of energy, vitality expressiveness incarnated’ in Paradise Lost. Descriptions of ‘excitation, phenomenon of commitment, judgement in a state of thralldom or captivation…an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgement) in itself’. The assonance in ‘sensuous surface of art’. The balance between the technical and woozy in the phrase ‘sublime neutrality’. How far this goes with you will depend on your personal preferences. I personally find it gauzy. Citing Homer and Shakespeare as neutral is to take a willfully amnesiac position on their concerns just because they happen to be removed from our own, requiring a working knowledge of the Reformation, war, city-states, absolutism. She’s also introducing sensuousness to the thing-in-itself, an ironic lapse given Sontag’s concern with the dangers totalising criticism poses to the particular clearly shares a family resemblance with Adorno’s critique of identity. What does it mean to be on the surface of Thomas Mann or Come and See?

Style has a definitive concrete existence. It is encountered and compiled in the course of the encounter a reader has with it. It exists simultaneously in abstraction from that encounter, being constituted and reconstituted out of the irreducible set of events which takes place between viewer and text: inspecting the material, identifying affinities across the personal archive one cultivates as an appreciator of such things and rendering them commensurate with others. This image is consolidated out of any number of conscious and unconscious moments inflected by institutional formations inculcating habits of reading and shaping the frameworks at the basis of these socially produced interpretations. I see plenty of freedom here, but it is a relative freedom. I am capable of enjoying fiction at the level of the sentence, but I probably favour ones about thwarted revolutionary hopes (Peter Weiss, Victor Serge, Seán Ó Faoláin). I can appreciate a novel’s architecture, but disproportionately when it addresses the transformation of a social order (Wolf Hall, Gravity’s Rainbow). So the ways human beings make sense of their environments relative to the struggle for universal emancipation is my Absolute, Sontag’s is the ride, and fair play to her.

I’ll look to the Moor in finishing and saying Sontag’s injunction to enjoy enjoy enjoy speaks to the ideology of the ruling class in a given epoch, namely that of American consumerism. It would be too easy to finish off with how many of her examples of great artists discussed at some length are Nazis or Nazi sympathisers - Riefenstahl, Genet, Bergman, Griffiths, if she didn’t have the hubris to dismiss Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

I came across Chibber’s article on how colonial plunder did not lead to capitalist development the other day and rather than finding something better to do with my time I decided to write about why it grapples with a strawman.

The headline argument that treasure =/= capitalism, is beside the point. No-one’s arguing this. Nevertheless Chibber dimisses of the work of an array of economic historians or Marxists — Wallerstein, Arrighi, Emmanuel, Braudel, Banaji — who emphasise the importance of extra-national factors to the origins of capitalism such as: trade, slavery, conquest and plunder by disputing this one claim out of a preference for a model which sees capitalism as self-sufficient in England, continuing, in effect, a polemic dispute initiated by his former mentor Robert Brenner regardless of what they said or wrote, which he does not lay out.

Chibber’s story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is simplistic. The more I read on this stuff the less convinced I am of the idea of modes of production can be separated from the organisational state or ideological regime. I think the policy and cultural mutations of neoliberalism since, say, Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, as well as the character of China’s rise both speak to this. Feudalism -> capitalism is not a thrown switch where capital behaved one way under the former, and another way under the latter. From the article: ‘a change in the social structure of feudalism, so that you move from a feudal class structure to a capitalist class structure’ is a pure tautologism.

Marx wrote a lot of stuff and litigating debates about history via a book and a set of disconnected, often contradictory writings produced by one or two guys almost two centuries ago is for me the real example of the degeneration of debate on the left, but Chibber’s decided he’s the only one who understands Marx, so our counter-argument to some extent has to be that he doesn’t (imo: he’s pretending not to to get attention).

Marx doesn’t draw a hard distinction between capital working qua capital under capitalism versus feudalism. In the Grundrisse Marx says surplus value extraction can be found at any point in history when a particular section of society possesses a monopoly over the means of production, he goes as far back as the Normans. You have capital as such in feudalism with merchants lending, investing or using capitalism’s methods and techniques — rationalisation, subsumption, concentration — in manufacturing. Chibber is absolutely correct to point out there are constraints here: industrialisation doesn’t happen because the countryside is organised along manorial lines rather than being characterised by free labour, he talks about price fixing among the guilds. Another significant blocker is that money has not yet become generalised as a universal equivalent, pace Chibber, silver and other precious metals from the Americas helps here. Whatever constraints there were, they certainly weren’t geographic.

Chibber refers a number of times to a scholarly or academic consensus, but never mentions any names other than his friends who he’s getting all this stuff from: Brenner and Wood. Not incidentally I don’t think the consensus is actually with him on the absolute stagnation and non-capitalist nature of economic life when it was organised around towns, countryside and trade. Domestic markets were small, sure, the bulk of profit rates were derived from a capital-intensive international trade in luxury commodities. If you’re willing, like me, to take a view of capitalism which is not rooted in the highly specific social configuration of England and the Netherlands you could say capitalism emerges first overseas, or it makes no sense to differentiate because they’re related. This is where the slipperiness of dating capitalist construction to 1400 - 1500s comes in. This is two centuries, and it allows a reader to come away with the idea that: ‘oh sure it got bigger but the fundamentals were done and dusted in 1400s, you didn’t need Ireland or the Carribean at all’. Chibber doesn’t expand, he doesn’t offer any detail, no definitions other than class differentiation that arises between property holders and landless labourers, but you have this in Ancient Sumeria.

If we have to insist on a transition, we’ll say when capitalism becomes the dominant activity, just not internationally but domestically and one’s freedoms to invest and to organise are more facilitated than they are restricted by the state, which up until that point operated trade via monopolies, we might ask Chibber where these joint-stock companies were going to and what they were taking back.

Marx dates this moment to the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. He presents England as the hegemonic vehicle, under the tutelage of the Dutch and Chibber might tell me what those two countries had in common. Land seizures, plunder and the deployment of force to get indigenous populations in the West Indies and the Philippines onto plantations producing larger quantities of luxury articles to feed a domestic market and supply domestic industry with raw materials are explicitly mentioned as the means through which large landowners begin accumulating and turn people working their land into waged labourers, i.e. how the manor is eclipsed as a unit of social and political organisation. These enterprises engage in speculative activities — backed by the Dutch state’s innovations in banking and other financial technologies — which facilitates accumulation by dispossession. Chibber doesn’t mention slavery but Marx talks about how ‘the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc’ and its status as a source of surplus value rises in proportion to cotton’s export. Luxemburg writes on capitalism’s rise amidst enduring forms of slavery and serfdom, if she was alive today would Chibber would say her and Marx are the trendy left?

Finally Chibber’s points on Spain’s stagnation don’t stack up. Growth Spanish agriculture and cities was significant and in some cases exceeded England’s; its domestic market for agricultural produce stimulated a process of expansion identical to the processes Chibber derives from Brenner. Over time though, Spain’s silver began to die off; Spain is not a feudal counterfactual, but England if there was no colony.

Chibber’s definition is the ‘historically unprecedented rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in Northwestern Europe’ but it cannot be emphasised enough how this growth is absolutely dwarfed by what’s achieved in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This is capitalism’s quantum leap in terms of yield ratios, population density, urbanisation, technological and communicational development, productivity, warfare, state capacity, you name it, this is what Brenner’s is trying to explain in the first instance, but at the same time I wouldn’t put it past Chibber to say this had nothing to do with imperialism either.

Taking the most generous interpretation of Chibber’s argument: he is correct that 300 years before England became a regnant industrial power for a century, their countryside can be characterised by a proletarianised peasantry. If we decide this is the characteristic of capitalism, that economic, social and political structures obediently fall along contemporary national boundaries, because they didn’t apply then, sure, this is where it starts. But if we’re honest about these being the disclaimers, there is nothing here of substance.

TLDR: Vivek Chibber walks into a bar. Bartender asks him what brings him to Cootehill. ‘I walked’ he replies. ‘All the way from NYU?’ says the bartender. ‘Would you not fly?’ ‘I did faith’, Chibber answers, ‘but the decisive force is in the relations internal to my legs and feet’.

Conclusions

Where do the politics of this lead us? This is centuries ago we’re talking about, England is in decline, isn’t this just a debate to allow academics like Chibber to pose as radicals with all the answers against other cohorts of radical academics with all the answers?

In the second part of the interview Chibber provides a history [sic] of anti-imperialist liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but without naming names, figures, dates or countries. This contestation is framed as boiling down to two statements rather than a set of material relationships, the white man’s burden line coming from the metropole: ‘this is for your own good / economic development’ and the response: ‘no, your presence and activities here are not altruistic but self-interested’. However the Congolese, the Irish, the Haitians take all this a bit too far and say: ‘all your wealth was taken from us’. Seriously, read the piece it’s that simplistic. This is not the argument made by any anti-imperialist or dependency theorist of which I am aware and this is probably why Chibber doesn’t cite any. What the exploited masses of the Global South have failed to take account of is the Brenner hypothesis, the efficiency and improving impulses of western wage labourers and frankly they should apologise.

Chibber tells us Marxists from the Global South (no names) disproved this idea decades ago but it has come back in two manifestations, firstly with the idea that the Global North as a collective exploits the Global South. That this can, as Chibber claims, be empirically and theoretically disproven remains to be seen, no figures no sources to follow up on, but again, the question as to whether or not the Global South is collectively exploited by the North America and Western Europe does not hinge on whether or not feudal lords would switch to capitalism because they have treasure.

Secondly the race reductionism and the idea of a ‘global white supremacy’, meaning that too many leftists now read capitalism as racial. Again, no examples or sources of where these bad arguments are so I can’t engage, but I see far more kicking of a hugely overstated spectre of black nationalist and white genocide arguments on the left than I do actual instances. On the other hand Chibber’s interviewer Melissa Naschek makes the point that Chinese people aren’t white, which is not only funny but insightful too, it’s both funny and insightful.

What Chibber is trying to do is get away from the idea that workers in the west constitute a labour aristocracy, a phrase used by trendy academic idpol leftists Engels and Lenin to describe how certain workers have more in common with their bosses than other workers. What is on people like Chibber who take this point of view to explain is, if their interests are indeed aligned, why is it that the western working class have not made common cause with workers in low-wage countries making their clothes, electronics, toys and the rest of the cheap consumer catchpennies constituting the crude parody of a collective social life that we all live in.

Books written by Emmanuel and Cope (who died last year RIP) are on my to-read shelf, but from Smith and Amin I have to say I think the case that: oppression of workers in poorer countries is of direct economic benefit for those of us fortunate enough to be born in the west is pretty clear. The tech workers and stockholders of companies like Palantir creating a strata of genocide rentiers. Cheap tourism which allows us to offset the costs of our consumption to parts of the world even less equipped to deal with what’s coming than we are. Dangerous migration routes draining former colonies of their younger generations so they can bring us takeaways and clean us in our old age. Is it worth noting that Hamas have done the most to array the entirety of the western political class against an external threat more than any organisation proceeding solely on the basis of class has in my lifetime? It’s something to think about. Merry Christmas all.

The final volume in Peter Weiss’ trilogy about anti-fascism and the relationship between art and freedom appeared in English this year, so I am now in a position to verify that it is definitively the greatest novel of all time. I cannot recommend the experience of reading it slowly while patching up one’s knowledge gaps in the period as you go enough. Wrote it up here.

I was put onto Henry Williamson’s novel Tarka the Otter (1927) by Barra Ó Seaghdha’s wonderful essay on same in the Dublin Review of Books. The first thing I’ll emphasise the language. The descriptions are perfect and of that vowel-dense, affording of proper names type that will remind most people coming to this today of Heaney, albeit in an even more modal register. At about one and a half points the author, in really subtle and affecting ways, suggests that everything is everything, which is not to say that there’s any protection against violent death. This could chime with the fact that the author was a fan of Hitler and a friend of Oswald Mosley. Relatedly it reminded me of the contradictions latent within the work of so many English writers poets and musicians who have their heads turned by some idea of The Land and its historic makeup (Sinclair, Moore, Ackroyd, neo-folk, folk horror, Kingsnorth, Hughes etc. etc.). No figures here, human or animal (if it is within the spirit of the work to draw the distinction) are granted any inner life and this documentary approach means that no-one possesses any ability to understand the nature of their experience. their suffering is inexplicable, impersonal and generalised, like so much suffering is.

In The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) CLR James provides an account of the Haitian Revolution and the brutal slave plantation system / processes of racialisation which motivated it. It owes a lot to Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930), both in its style, as well as its rendering of distinct social layers with their contradictory interests and impulses, how these are realised in leaders of different capabilities or strengths whose fortunes rise and decline within an over-determined situation. Don’t know if an historical moment has ever been rendered on the page as well, if you only take one recommendation on here it’s this one.

When I first read Capital my understanding was shaped to a large extent by David Harvey; his lectures were to hand and the book is difficult, I needed the help. Since going a bit deeper into Marxology I’ve come to grasp how his reading derives from his interest in spatio-temporal relations, the city and a very immediate perspective on neoliberalism. As he once said in a talk launching one of the ten books he produces every year ‘we’re in a volume two story now’, he’s here referring to financialisation, tourism and services, the realisation-driven imperative to attenuate the duration between purchase and consumption by the division of labour as well as the development of transport and communications technology.

John Smith is one of Harvey’s critics and he goes after him because Volume II is the only place he allows for imperialism to enter the picture. Smith sez Harvey misses that the defining feature of capitalism today is not the shrinking of the state, or something called the knowledge economy, but the uneven functioning of the law of value; monopoly rents allow capitalists to exploit labour in the third-world at a rate far more advantageous to themselves than they can (on average) get away with in Europe or the United States. Imperialism is not a remnant, happening in the guise of a retrograde or rent-seeking coercion, but is on its cutting-edge the wage relation. The point here is to assert the existence of a labour aristocracy against Eurocentric Marxists who say the regime the western working class lives under is either the same as the one oppressing textile workers in Bangladesh, or is in fact worse, because European and North American workers are more productive, ergo, more exploited.

Smith’s work has only become more relevant as the ruling class’ successes in activating portions of the petty-bourgeoisie and working class as the vanguard of genocidal warfare amidst climate breakdown continue to accumulate, but two developments I would hope Smith would work out if Monthly Review were to put out a new edition (rather than more paranoid nonsense about the Frankfurt School) would firstly be to move China up out of the victim of imperialism category and secondly introduce those workers existing in a less straightforward relation to the nation state, a category that Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) and Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021) helped me think through.

Even though I’d always been sceptical of certain left formations tactically limiting the struggle for working-class gains within the terrain of (let’s call it what it is or would amount to) a white Volk in a position of relative advantage, I did fall for it when certain Irish Republican organisations - whose cadres do tend to be more working class than those of larger and more open radical left groups - were going to protests in e.g. East Wall, because i) I assumed they were there to try and break people off from the fascist agitators, ii) because I still do agree with Lukács that we shouldn’t expect virtue or good instincts from the exploited iii) I was in the grip of some idea that getting rights and entitlements for refugees was a necessary step rather than the objective in itself. I came away from Walia knowing that I haven’t left the twentieth century in my thinking at all and I need to read a lot more before I have. Melinda Cooper’s Family Values (2017) is one that was recommended by one of the heads in a similar vein and I hope to get to it next year.

Victor Serge was born into a Narodnik family in exile from Tsarist repression. He moved around radical political circles in Europe (check out the first half of Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951) for more on this), was imprisoned for his membership of an anarchist organisation (Men in Prison (1930)) and moved back to Russia after 1917 to assist in building the Soviet order. Reading Serge takes me back to having those first transporting experiences with poetry and prose which, for me anyway, were derived from works which by my own standards now were far too rich in sentiment and yearning and glorifications of nature. Tempering this mode with the language of officialdom and deprivation - material, cultural, psychological, whatever - is the winning artistic formula for me:

But of what matter now the rhythm of that bygone language. The precision and ardour of that thought, bound to events in order to force them, ceaselessly invoking history in order to make it? The old text lives because it expresses a fidelity, a necessity. It is necessary that someone not betray. Many may weaken, retract, fail themselves, betray. Nothing is lost if one man remains erect. Everything is saved if he is the greatest. This man has never yielded, will never yield, either to intrigue or fear, to admiration or to slander, even to fatigue. Nothing will separate him from the revolution - victorious or defeated, covering crowds with songs and red flags, heaping its dead in common graves to the sound of funeral hymns, or preserved in the hearts of a handful of men in snow-covered prisons. And if after that he is wrong, if he is intractable and imperious, it hardly matters. The essential thing is to remain true.

Conquered City (1932) is just one of the 3 perfect novels he wrote which move between, around, through a cast of ~30+ connected characters in Russia mourning the loss of October’s utopian aspirations.

I was chatting to a group of lads from Derry at a wedding once and they were telling a story about getting into trouble with the PSNI on a night out. Not only were unbelievably good storytellers - only digressing when it served a purpose, providing exactly the right amount of background detail to serve the payoff - they were also exceptional collaborators, each one would regularly come in to round off or flesh out some point of detail. Mike Leigh’s Four Days in July (1984), which represents two new families one on each side of the sectarian divide during marching season, has several scenes which represent exactly what it was like watching that long anecdote unfold. Most realistic appraisal of everyday conversation I’ve ever seen on film.

I think Sergei Loznitsa is the greatest living director and A Gentle Creature (2017) is as good as Donbass (2018) in providing an absurdist, bleak, bleak, bleak reflection on Russian interference in Ukraine. I lack a lot of the background knowledge that would make the subtleties clear to me, but perhaps that’s the wrong word to use where we see a Western-backed NGO put a portrait of Stalin up next to a pride flag.

A World Not Ours (2012) is a documentary set in Ein El Hilweh, one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The portrait of the camp’s three generations of inhabitants gives us resilience, the sense of community, some hope but also the despair and the psychological damage inflicted by the dispossession inflicted by the Zionist state. I’d recommend all of Mahdi Fleifel’s films, especially his shorts which are on docalliance.

I’ve cooled a bit on Shifty (2025) since I wrote it up here, partly off quite correct critiques Hatherley and Gilbert have put forward, but mostly off Curtis’ interview with failing Ari Aster, who he effusively praises for giving a sympathetic appraisal of paranoid anti-mask, anti-BLM, politics. Like fuck off actually. His endless refrain that nothing's changed, that everything that seems different is just a nostalgic rerun of the last century, is just him admitting he doesn’t know what’s happening now and doesn’t care to find out. There are moments in A Grin Without a Cat (1977) which make his exceptional editorial skills look clumsy and remind us that our problems are in many respects perennial and that lions used to walk the earth.

Tunes

<iframe data-testid=”embed-iframe” style=”border-radius:12px” src=/__u/aonchiallach.substack.com/&#8221;%3C/p>

width=”100%” height=”352” frameBorder=”0” allowfullscreen=”“ allow=”autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture” loading=”lazy”></iframe>

Mid Stuff

‘The Shoah After Gaza’ is a really brilliant piece of writing but the book annoyed me for its more extensive subsumption of the genocide to European intellectual history; I get frustrated that this ends up facilitating the wheelhouse of already-existing intellectuals rather than encouraging them to go off for a more adequate lens. I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book a bit prone to carry on like he was the first person to see the situation for what it was, although at the same time perhaps in his liberal American magazine circles that’s true.

Bad Stuff

I quite like Band of Brothers (2001) but it looks even more like Amerikkkan exceptionalist Spielberg schmaltz guff next to The Pacific (2010) which is just fucking great televisions and one of the most convincing pictures of war and PTSD that I’m aware of. I therefore presume Spielberg and Hanks were more involved in the unwatchable Masters of the Air (2024) in which 3 - 5 baby-faced young men of the moment endlessly mug, jabber and slap each other on the back. It has that cold de-saturated shiny glaze that I first started to see in cheap BBC docudramas ten years ago and has become completely ubiquitous. In Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) one-trick pony Erroll Morris sits down with Tom O’Neil who might know more about the subject than anyone else to focus on the most mundane and established aspects - who stabbed who where, Manson’s kooky mannerisms - equates his meticulously researched work with one that it completely discredits and sums it all up as an instance of the usual midwit take on matters of public record such as JFK, COINTELPRO et al., namely ‘oh well have you considered that reality is actually complicated?’ Finally X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) is worst thing I’ve ever seen.