Flight from the Real: Notes on Anthropology of the Name

July 09, 2026

Tibor Szamuely

I

Enthusiastic about what? For one thing, about the fact that a new conception can be opposed to the end of the political and intellectual referents of the great period that extends from the Russian Revolution to today—a period that I divide into different sequences—and for which 1968 was a term; for 1968 may well have been a term, but it simultaneously opened onto the possibility of a beginning.

The revisionist continually fabricates new historical and conceptual ruptures in an attempt to conceal, from themselves and their audience, the immutable character of the referents of political practice in capitalist society. Referents which are given by the economic structure itself – a structure whose “concentration” (Lenin) in political practices determines the content and trajectory of these practices. For example; the union as the organization of the wage dependent to defend their interests as sellers of labor power, and the party as the point where this defense of the interests of labor power makes a qualitative leap into an alternative program for the social whole. based on the assimilation of a scientific analysis of the situation which compels this sale.

The referents which have changed between the time of the October revolution and our own are those related to the relative incompleteness of the bourgeois revolution; the national question, the women question, etc., and first of all the agrarian question. These are secondary and incidental referents for the conceptual structure of Marxism, despite their profound historical significance. Their reduction in significance, with the progress of bourgeois emancipation and proletarianization of the world, has only made the core concepts of Marxist political practice more significant; the party, the dictatorship, the unification of the wage struggle with the struggle for power.

If I were to look for the basis of Anthropology of the Name...I would say that it is constituted in the interlocution with people, which is, in my conception, a ‘certain indistinct’... Let me state right away what I mean by this. My argument, particularly when it comes to the subject of politics, abandons such characteristically Marxist-Leninist terms as ‘working class’ or ‘the people’ (which are henceforth subjectively non-operative)...in favour of the term ‘people’ (gens) which is a more open category. ‘People’ is an indistinct. Nothing is prejudged (this is what makes it ‘indistinct’), except their existence (and this is what makes the term certain). With this new term, nothing is presupposed; and such an attitude involves proceeding by way of inquiry.

Lazerus wants to “refound” politics by negating the concrete forms taken by progressive political subjectivity in capitalist society, forms given by the material structure of the wage relation and the residue of precapitalist relations. He flees from the objective into an unrestrained creativity, where fundamental material-objective categories, from which there is no escape, dissolve into mere mental constructs susceptible to infinite recreation by an unbounded subject. In short he is a practitioner of subjective idealism.

The statement that Politics is of the order of thought is for me the answer, at last identifiable, to the intellectual caesura of May ’68. It is also an attempt to conceive of politics after the end of classism, that is to say, after the end of a thought of conflictuality based on class—a thought that was becoming obsolete at the time. And it is an attempt to envision politics in a space other than that of the State.

For a subjective idealist such as Lazerus, it is self-evident that mass action by the working class, contained by the threat of a military solution imposed by the armed core of the state, marks the “end of classism”, and, at the same time, provides an occasion to reflect on politics in a “space other than that of the State” – an institution whose very definition is the monopoly of control over a given space, imposed by means which would quickly put a stop to the baroque cognitive processes of even the most subjective idealist. People think, but they also die.

Politics, as I think of it, is not given in the space of an object, whether the object is the State or the revolution. The end of classism, with which the categories of the State and of revolution were co-substantial, necessitates positioning politics otherwise. It is in this sense that politics, as it is understood in Anthropology of the Name, will be called a politics in subjectivity, and this politics does not function through the objectalities that I have just mentioned, nor is it constructed through them. This is what I will call a politics in interiority. [emphasis added]

For Lazarus, politics is the self referential thought process of a “subject” untethered from the objects which constitute the real materiality of the social body. Or, as he puts it, a “politics in interiority”. Or, we could more precisely specify – a politics in the “interiority” of one intolerably self-indulgent petty-bourgeois mind.

Let me make myself clear. Politics, in its ascription to the statement People think, gives a politics in subjectivity and in interiority. In its ascription to the historicity or real existence of this singular politics, it is grasped as a relation of a politics to its thought. [emphasis added]

To unilaterally identify politics with “subjectivity and interiority”, and to “grasp” politics in terms of a solipsistic relation to its own “thought”, is not simply to regress below the level of Marx. That should go without saying. It is not even to regress below classical bourgeois thought as exemplified in the works of the French historians of the Restoration. It is to recede even below the level of classical philosophy itself. It is a flight from reason and truth which parallels Heidegger’s virulent nihilism on the terrain of political theory.

As a great admirer of Lenin, as the inventor of modern politics and of a Party subject to conditions (of consciousness antagonistic to the social order and existing politics, which means antagonistic to the State, and of the building of a Party grounded in this consciousness), an admirer then of the man who introduced consciousness and consequently the subjective into politics, I was led to examine the difficulties inherent in an approach in which consciousness is consciousness of and hence consciousness of an object, in this case, the State.

Much as with Tronti’s attempt to identify Lenin as the producer of a rupture equal to the Marxist one, Lazerus here damns Lenin with excessive praise. Neither in bourgeois modernity as a whole, nor in Marxism in particular, was Lenin responsible for the introduction of “consciousness” and the “subjective” into politics. Subjectivity has always constituted politics since Aristotle first identified man as a “political animal”. The logic of this strange statement is to be found in a manipulative attempt to paint Lenin as a forerunner of Lazerus’s attempt to remove the objective from politics. A completely different and much less defensible project then the merely redundant one he purports to have.

The transformation of socialist States into Party-States, invalidating the thesis of the decline of the State that was supposed to culminate in a classless, stateless society called ‘communism’, clearly demonstrates (if we avoid interpreting what has come of the revolutions in terms of trials and errors) that a revolutionary politics that has the State as its object and its objective leads to an impasse. There is no contradiction between the identification of the mode and calling attention to the stumbling block constituted by the category of the Party when it is given in the proletarian State.

For Lazerus, the failure of the revolution in the West, the continuation of the isolated socialist experiment under the dual internal and external encirclement of the peasant small producer economy and imperialism, the harsh imperatives of shock industrialization and militarization this encirclement necessitated, none of this is worthy of centering in an analysis of the workers’ states. The story of their emergence, persistence and collapse is reducible to Lenin’s insistence on “taking the state as an object”. An insistence which resulted in the inevitable “saturation” of their “mode”, a “saturation” we can bypass by articulating another politics, one which does not “take the state as an object”. If only life was really so simple!

The Bolshevik mode restores to Lenin and to other actors of the mode, the categories in thought of politics (mainly the ‘subject to conditions’ where the proletarian capacity is subject to the condition of consciousness, that is to say, to the condition of stating its own conditions, and is not historically and socially determined).

The “proletarian capacity” is indeed subject to the “condition of stating its own conditions”. That is to say, understanding its own specific situation within the process of the development of the whole, grasped as a dynamic unity of the productive forces and the production relations. But these conditions are precisely “historically and socially determined”. This is the difference between an objective materialist understanding of freedom as the recognition of necessity (a necessity read in the scientific analysis of the economic process) and Lazurus’s subjective idealist understanding of the political, which cuts it from its roots in the economic.

All politics separate. Karl Marx, for example, separates his doctrine from philosophy (that of Hegel), and Vladimir Lenin separates politics from history; he gives primacy to consciousness over history—this will be a politics subject to conditions. For my part, I separate politics from history, that is to say, from Marxism and Marxism—Leninism, on the one hand, and from the conception that history has time, on the other. I also separate politics from philosophy and sociology.

From Lazerus’s perspective, Marx and Lenin are “disrupters”, in the best Silicon Valley fashion, who simply “separate” from “philosophy” and “history” in order to offer exciting new products on the intellectual marketplace. If he were to admit that Marx’s system is simply a synthesis of Hegel’s dialectic, classical political economy and Restoration era historiography (to which Marx, after all, gave credit for discovering the principle of the class struggle) and that Lenin’s main “innovation” is the application of this system to zemstvo statistics, he would have to put his own license for conceptual vandalism in question. If, for Hegel, the true was the whole, for Lazerus, the true is a fragment arbitrarily sundered from the whole and thereby assigned magical powers as a kind of fetish object which compensates for the overwhelming disappointment of reality.

Anthropology, therefore, to signify the inscription in a disciplinary horizon that is potentially capable of welcoming, accepting and grasping the subjective. And this unlike the disciplines that I call scientistic or positivist, for which, if the question of thought is, by chance, taken into account, is treated in its relationship to the real (to objective reality), that is to say, in a relation between a subjective (which is always regarded with suspicion) and an objective (which is always certain). Anthropology, to signify that we are taking inquiry as a category of knowledge and treating the subjective.

Anthropology is a proxy here for the insistence on an idealist methodology which departs not from the relation of humans to nature as an object, but from the relation among ideas (produced as a byproduct of the human-nature relation) among themselves. A materialist anthropology considers thought only in its relation to the metabolism of the thinker with nature. It does not consider it in isolated and hence illusory terms. The elementary principle which Marx, and for that matter Epicurus, established, Lazerus demolishes in the interests of reactionary nihilism.

Nomination is denounced because it is a part of the complex whole, because it is bound to be embedded in a totality, and totality is the composition of a diversity and a heterogeneity which postulates an internal unity. The social sciences are premised by definition on the totality, for the social is a complex whole...Therein, to my mind, lies the rub—the subjective is but one component among others, and, in my opinion, what makes matters worse is that it is intelligible only through the other components. This is even the essential discovery of Mauss—that the subjective cannot in any way be thought on its own basis. A totality is that which proposes to co-think the whole, that is to say, to surmount the heterogeneous character of the objective and the subjective. The subjective as such becomes unthinkable in the end.

≴... the composition of a diversity and a heterogeneity which postulates an internal unity≵ correctly describes the actuality of the physical world. The attempt to detach the subjective from its base in the objective is not simply an idealist program, but one of pure hallucinatory fantasy; the creation of a solipsistic hall of mirrors, in which the subject only develops in relation to itself. This attempt is best understood as disorientation produced by the reverberating shock of the historic defeat of the labor movement.

It is at this point that the anthropology—in this case, a worker anthropology—comes into play. Are the factory and the worker figure the places of a mode? To elucidate these points, we must proceed immediately. And we will begin by way of saturation.

They may or not be “places of a mode”, but we can say with absolute certainty that they are the constituent elements of a mode of production, and that as long as this mode of production endures, any mode of political subjectivity has no other “places” from which to choose. We make our own history but under conditions we are never free to determine. In the period which defined the writing of Anthropology of the Name, the workers (steel workers, hospital workers, shop assistants; this is incidental to the essence of the relation within the totality which Lazarus abhors), the wage dependent producers of the social surplus, were defeated in the site of this production; the factory, however “post-industrial” or “diffuse” it may appear to be. And with this defeat, so the possibility of an emancipated and rational society, built on the base of capital’s blind and barbaric development of productive forces, went into eclipse.

Displacing this immutable tragedy into the “saturation” of a contingent and arbitrary “mode” may console those, who saw the shipwreck of their militant commitments in those years, with the hazy, ill-defined hope of a new “modern prince” emerging from who-knows-where. But it fatally mystifies the categorical imperative of reversing its effects in the only “site” which objectively exists; the one in which it occurred.

The class conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which is the organizing principle of Lenin’s thinking and the substance of classism, is obsolete—an obsolescence that is, incidentally, subjectively observable since it has no effectiveness any longer.

For Lazarus, everything is open to a free and arbitrary subjective contestation, except for the “obsolescence” of the “substance of classism”, something decisively confirmed, seemingly beyond any debate, by its lack of contemporary effectiveness. We note here the same phenomena we previously observed in Tronti. Unilateral subjectivism is driven by the dynamic of its structure to an equally unilateral determinist fatalism. We could well ask what might have happened to the “class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeois” if August 1914 had not been followed by October 1917? (A course of events dictated by the organized consciousness of antagonism politically actualized that would otherwise have been its merely latent economic potential.) If a less auspicious encounter of virtue and fortune had in fact come to pass, a much earlier Lazerus could date the “obsolescence” of “classism” to the social-patriotism of the First World War, rather than to the restructuring and implosion of the workers’ states which followed decades later.

Antagonism, and its sites, are given in a certain objective form of latent potentiality, structured and determined by the mode of production itself, but its actualization does occur on the terrain of the subjective decision – the decision of militant intellectuals (intellectuals not in terms of any vulgar sociology, but precisely in Lazerus’s terms as the category of “people who think”) to realize it, to constitute as a force within the “sites” ,which are not products of an incidental, subjective “mode”, but given with the force of law by the economic process.

What Lazerus chooses to see, in mystified idealist terms, as the succession of a series of self-referential, singular modes, each experiencing saturation in its turn, is better understood as the sequence of political manifestations of the development of capitalist production relations. This begins with the completion of the anti-feudal popular revolution of petty producers, given by the nascent development of these relations (1789), continuing through the leadership of the political representation of the wage-dependent proletariat over this revolution (1917, 1949), a leadership which both constitutes social structures which tend beyond the capitalist form and globally transforms the balance of power between labor and capital, and ending with the rollback of the latter compromise, which is simultaneous with the full globalization of capitalist production relations and the technical-scientific revolution of the productive forces. We are not dealing with modes that emerge and disappear only with reference to their own conceptual structure, but with a sequence of eruptions of antagonism into consciousness whose possibility is in every case strictly given by the development of productive forces and the corresponding relations.

To choose to write an explication of these “modes” in a manner which flees the terrain of economic history for free wheeling meditations on the “idea” as a singularity severed from any totality is an irresponsible and indicative choice.

Separated from history, politics no longer has to do with time but, rather, with the prescriptive. The evacuation of time and the removal of time as a category effects the separation of history and politics, thereby breaking with an age-old tradition that saw a given politics as bound up with a given history and a given history as bound up with a given politics.

This is how the defeated, unable to face the objective weight of history which constitutes their present reality, evade it. We cannot, when confronting a definition of politics which can only be read as delusional, shrink from the unpleasant task of pathologizing a trajectory of political thinking. This unilateralism of the subjective, this solipsistic severance of the moment of the political from everything which defines it, is a mania produced by the death of the dreams of a generation. The formulations of a whole array of thinkers can best be understood as the final scream of a man who, attempting to scale a mountain peak, instead slipped and fell into the abyss. We can sympathize with the pathos of his failure, but we must not follow in his footsteps.

II

The proposed thesis concerns, then, the nature of politics. If politics exists, either it is in the space of the State or it is of the order of thought. To say that politics is in the space of the State is a definitional proposition—it is defined by its object—as well as an objectivist one. It indicates that the field of politics is power. To ascribe politics to the State is to ascribe it to a certain number of registers: that of power, to be sure, but also of parties, of efficiency and of results.

Here we face a pretentious tangle. Politics is a social practice, a practice of construction, preservation and destructuration of constitutional orders. For every Marxist (long before Lenin, whose innovations in this area were a matter of emphasis not essence), it is a practice of classes, groups defined by their positions in the property relations which make up the economic base. It is the practice of their struggle against each other for control over the social surplus. A product of the dissolution of the primitive community by the development of the productive forces, one which we can be confident proceeds the state, the original formation of which was perhaps the first great act of political creativity.

Far from being in the space of the state, it is the state that exists within the space of politics, as a relatively stable coalescence of its dynamic trajectory; as an instrument forged by the actors within this space to advance their interests in the economic base. Politics is the art of construction and deconstruction of states. This is the politics of masses in their millions, the politics which transforms production relations and the balance of power within them, instead of clogging the air of a graduate seminar. The politics of Lazarus, on the other hand, is nothing at all, as he proudly admits by declaring that the ascription of politics to the state “ascribes to it” a “certain number of registers”, including “power”, “efficiency” and “results”. Some of us are indeed so wedded to “saturated modes” that we engage in political activity for the purpose of winning power in order to efficiently accomplish results. Lazarus would no doubt both laugh at our simple-mindedness, and, we suspect somewhat disingenuously, insist he has been misunderstood. On the other hand, we are confident that the majority of “people who think” would take our side in this hypothetical debate. And here, for once, the majority would be right.

Thus, the theses ‘Politics is of the order of thought’ and ‘Politics is thinkable’ are equivalent, not in generalizing terms but as part of a problematic of singularity, the ultimate point of which is the characterization of politics as sequential, that is to say, as non—permanent and rare, within, each time, a historical mode of politics.

Here, we see that the unilateral privileging of rupture over continuity, one which is characteristic of a certain kind of “left” subjectivism. There is no continuity of development of the labor movement, within and against capitalist society, extending from the First International up to the workers states and their dissolution, and still existing today in the ongoing reality of the labor movement and its relatively advanced communist elements scattered in various fragmented detachments. There are simply brief non-sequential moments of pure “revolutionary truth”.

This mystifies politics into a magical refuge from the demoralizing challenges of the everyday. Politics, not just politics in general, but the class politics of the proletariat in specific, are a constant in capitalist society. Class politics was occurring when Marx led debates in the League of the Just, it continued to occur even under the most confining Stalinist straitjacket in debates on logic, philosophy and political economy, and it occurs today in mundane union meetings and discussions between and within groups of militants. It is no more “rare” than the air we breath, and even in the depoliticized times in which we live, it subsists as a subterranean presence and latent possibility unfolding and developing in the banality of production and in the margins of intellectual and cultural life.

Two types of concrete processes or real experiences illustrate the ‘thought, practice, organization’ mechanism.

— Such groups as the Trotskyites and the Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France, PCMLF) maintained the principle of affiliation or satellization with respect to the PCF. For them, history is referential and has already taken place. Its terms must be recomposed: worker movement, general strike, international revolution.

— For other groups, the break with the PCF is brought about in an antagonistic way. These groups are emblematic of ideologism. This is the case for the Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Léninistes (Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth, UJCML) and the Comités Vietnam de Base (Vietnam Base Committees, CVB), inspired by the Cultural Revolution and by the war of the Vietnamese people. On the question of organization, their references are Leninist; at the same time, they affirm the need for a new type of Party. These groups combine a loyalty to Leninism with a concern for contemporary historicity, thereby distributing the two components of ideologism: thought and practice.

The above concrete illustration is sufficient to clarify the real terms of the ponderous schema which it concludes. For Lazarus, those who draw the scientific categories which define their political practice from the objective dynamics of the capitalist mode of production itself – the “history” which has “already taken place”, and Lazarus forgets to add the history which will continue to take place until the economic structure which forms the basis for its characteristic features is transformed – are irrelevant.

For Lazarus, those who, despite their limitations are worthy of much more careful study are those who never reach the level of grasping these objective dynamics, preferring to dwell exclusively in the distracting and intoxicating realm of their ever shifting modes of empirical appearance (“contemporary historicity”). Here also, we can easily understand what is meant by loyalty to Leninism when we recall that, for Lazarus, Lenin was not a social scientist who applied Marxist methods to the analysis of Russian reality and drew appropriate conclusions, but some kind of apostle of free subjectivity. In short, Lazarus, true to his own methodology, casts aside those who attempted to apply scientific categories to objective reality in order to formulate an effective political practice, in favor of those who, immersed in the subjective experience of movement, made the refusal to transcend immediacy into a virtue.

Indeed, these people were, at least according to Lazarus, so intellectually astute, that the “category of movement” which “combines practice and organization” was seen by them as a “new dynamic”. One can only recall the “social reproduction theorists” of our day, for whom the banal reality of worker organization outside the workplace is not a historical constant but a “new dynamic” only recently uncovered by a feminist rupture, a rupture just as intoxicating to its devotees and just as empty of concrete content as the Maoist one under discussion here.

According to Lenin—who, on this point, remains a faithful reader of Marx and Engels—the characterization of the transitional phase, in the traditional Marxist sense of the dictatorship of the proletariat, cannot happen without communism and without a classless and hence stateless society. The shift from the transitional phase to communism, from a society with a State to a stateless society, must be identified from within the State—and I proposed here the theory of mediations of the State—but it must take place from outside the State, through the struggle of the masses, since the State cannot take charge of its own collapse...I maintained that the reinforcement of these contradictions went hand in hand with the reinforcement of the State and, thus, were opposed to the process of its decline; and this, in turn, countered the process of communism. This was the Soviet path.

Lazarus, in recalling his 1973 text Eléments pour une théorie de l’Etat socialiste, displays a striking continuity of subjectivism which illustrates the easy transition from the vulgarized neo-Narodnik Marxism which characterized the “Chinese line” of the sixties into pure culturalist idealism which was the fate of so many of its devotees in the neoliberal turn. Nowhere in this exposition is the persistence and strengthening of the state (a necessity recognized equally, albeit within different optics, by both Stalin and Trotsky) associated to its objective economic roots in imperialist encirclement, the imperative for high rates of accumulation and restriction of consumption, predominance of the small producer economy and so on. The persistence of the state is simply a bad idea, one the Soviets have completely succumbed to, and to which the Chinese are fortunately correcting with good ideas. This outlook, although it may not reach the fantasist level of the current work, has already regressed to a non-historical political philosophy where more or less perfect constitutions are contrasted in happy innocence of the constraints set by the level of the productive forces and corresponding relations.

Moreover, the idealist tangent which characterized the Maoist trend of the sixties was premised off a willful misunderstanding of the trajectory of China and of Mao’s thought in relation to this trajectory. He was not attempting to destroy the state. Rather, he had the much more modest objective of a “structural reform” of the state intended to bolster the system of monolithic state ownership. To paraphrase Trotsky, it was an attempt to freeze the Thermadorian slide, not a push towards immediate communism. Such a project can be judged by its results, but it marks its initiator as a statesman, not a fantasist, unlike many of his self appointed interpreters.

Obviously, a given historicity ceases with a given mode, since what will come to be, regardless of the existence of other modes of interiority, is random (precisely because of the doctrine of the rarity of politics)... [our emphasis]

Just as Lazarus, by insisting “people think”, repeats a commonplace of the bourgeois Enlightenment at a time when this commonplace has long ago found its concrete specificity in a necessary amendment – classes think (about how to maintain or transform the prevailing production relations), so here he returns to the classic 18th century view of History as the product of Opinion. In such a chain of thought, it is necessary to “forget” historical materialism as can be seen in the following:

Can a closed historicity only be discussed from the perspective of an active historicity and only as compared with another mode? This is certainly not true, all the more so in that such an approach would necessarily lead to a doctrine of the good State—comparing historicity to historicity de-subjectivates the two historicities, which means that we are no longer identifying a singularly from within itself; hence it depoliticizes both historicities and leads to a formal, abstract and, soon, to a legal problematic of the good State.

This dilemma can only be posed within an idealist framework in which different historical sequences must be compared via the yardstick of a non-historical idea of the “good State”. In reality, the different sequences of political creativity which make up the history of constitutions must be understood as reflections of the economic process; reflections whose modern trajectory do not indicate the static return of the same, which could be observed in the repetitive rise and fall of political orders which formed raw material for the observations of Polybius and Ibn Khaldun.

On the contrary, the two paradigmatic sequences of revolution and restoration which form the content of modern politics express a progressive maturation of bourgeois production relations which forms the qualitative difference in their content. The revolution of 1789-1815 is that of the small producers against feudal property relations, whose partial renewal is the content of the Restoration which follows. The revolution of 1917-89 is the unification of the anti-feudal revolution of the small producers with the anti-capitalist revolution of socialized labor. There is no question of comparing them both against a single ideal standard. Rather, it is a matter of understanding them as qualitatively distinct expressions of different stages in the same linear economic process.

In other words, it is the intellectuality of a mode that gives substance, in the examined sequence, to the terms ‘State’ or ‘classes’ or ‘economics’ or to any other historical concept.

We face Lazarus’s intransigent idealism. For him, it is the “intellectuality” of a “mode” that gives “substance” to historical concepts, not their objective existence rooted in unconscious economic necessity. This procedure of attempting to reinscribe Marxism within an idealist framework fundamentally foreign to its content seems to possess a structural kinship with Niekisch’s similar effort in the interwar period. Where Lazarus converts Marxism into a “mode” in order to detach political agency from its grounding in the economic structure, Niekisch converts it into an “imperial figure” in order to appropriate it for his imperialist goals. In both cases, the gains of science are sacrificed in the interests of subjectivist mystification.

There is a further affinity with the left-Schmittian detachment of the subjective political categories of friend and enemy from their grounding in the economic structure. For the radical counterrevolutionaries of the interwar period, it was necessary to build the premises of a militant political subjectivity detached from the economic process in order to build a “partisan figure” that could operate to reverse the impact of the October Revolution. For the left populists of the post-Soviet period, it became an imperative to reconstruct the emancipatory subject, defeated in reality, on the terrain of fantasy; a fantasy which reconciles them to their role as middle managers of social discontent. In both cases, elementary materialism is sufficient to break the spell and expose the deception and self deception at work.

The Party then emerges as the site of the character subject to condition of revolutionary politics as formulated by Lenin. What do I mean by ‘subject to condition’? That politics is not expressive of social characteristics or of classes in their economic determination. It is not spontaneous, to use the famous expression, nor is it already there—politics is subject to the condition of stating its conditions. [our emphasis]

Lazarus stands in the tradition of left attempts to appropriate Lenin as a weapon against historical materialism, beginning with Gramsci and Sorel, and continuing with the tradition of the attempt in the sixties to resurrect the tradition of “subjective sociology” under the cover of a criticism of the “theory of the productive forces”. He radicalizes it to its highest point; politics is simply a “thought”, which can only be understood from within itself. Indeed, it does not express “classes in their economic determination”, merely a freely decided speech act “the condition of stating...conditions”.

III

There is then no place in the mode-based approach for a problematic of the succession of politics or for a problematic of the progress of history—one of the possible forms of which is the thesis of accumulation. We can see the difficulty of the thesis of rare and sequential politics.

For an idealist, the destruction of the historical conquests of the class, the idea of history as a process with a linear logic is not only put into question, it becomes threatening. Refuge from the end of history is found in challenging the idea of a logic of history itself. For a materialist, the problem is not posed in the same way. The further development of the productive forces, the ongoing scientific-technical revolution and the escalating universalization of capitalist production relations have created qualitatively more favorable conditions for the next wave of proletarian revolution.

No facile short term optimism is required to understand that, far from confronting the “exhaustion” of a “mode”, we live in a time blindly creating the starting point for new, more socially homogeneous revolutions, whose economically given content will necessarily be found in a reaffirmation of the communist program – not the founding of a new “mode”. The basic structure of the capitalist mode of production creates the immutable emancipatory potential of proletarian politics. And the form assumed by the actualization of this potential is again given by the productive structure. It is this which feeds the consistent confidence of the materialist and excludes the vacillation of the idealist who rushes from enthusiasm to disappointment in dependence upon conjunctural shifts.

The considerable subjective mutation that I have evoked means that, from now on, we are dealing with the unicity of meaning. The multiplicity offered by history was that of local, national and global settings that we can readily imagine if we think back to the professional militants of the Third International, circulating from one situation to another on a global scale. This widespread circulation no longer exists; it has been replaced by a limited circulation.

Lazarus admits that, with the defeat of the workers movement on a world scale, the objective base which made it easy for worker militants to grasp the whole as a contradictory unity of multiple determinations has disappeared. His solution is not only to adapt to this regressive tendency towards the localist and the ahistorical which every participant in the movements of the post-1989 period can attest to, it is to embody it and drive it forward. A kind of kamikaze flight into nullity on the ideological front.

Not only in directly revolutionary moments, but in the long periods of relative ascendency of the working class within and alongside the capitalist mode of production, it was easier to think the whole as a differentiated unity. But it is precisely in the period of triumphant reaction that thinking in terms of totality, in terms of the determination of every particular by the network of relations which constitute it within the whole, and the immanence of that whole within every particular, is essential as a barrier against disintegration.

Between history and politics, which the tradition of historical materialism had connected, there is, in fact, a separation. This separation is a complex one.

Lazarus takes the relative division between subjective and objective factors in the historical process, bound to appear in the analysis of any political actor, and makes it into a “Leninist” separation of “history” and “politics”. For Lenin, as for Marx, politics concentrates the economic; the political is simply the terrain in which the actors, through the mediation of ideology, articulate a consciousness of the contradictions in the economic base and resolve them one way or the other through the organized antagonism of class parties. This is the scientific rupture summarized in the 1859 Introduction, which finally made history legible. Lazarus, under the blows of the counterrevolution, wants to regress to a prescientific understanding of history, one in which politics comes and goes as an arbitrary play of subjective decisions. In this way, thinkers like Lazarus serve as a transmission belt of imperialist irrationalism. They repackage the nihilism of the triumphant bourgeoisie into something palatable for progressive intellectuals agonized by the symptoms of regression, leaving them in a state of submission to the prevailing lack of scientific orientation. Without the comprehensive defeat of Lazarus-type thought, the reconstitution of communist politics will remain impossible.

Lenin, as we know, was profoundly proletarian. This prescription is found in his thought through the category of class, a category that is itself divided, as far as workers are concerned, into social class and political class. The objective existence of workers does not suffice to provide a foundation for the political capacity of workers. Politics is not expressive of the social; neither is it expressive of history—the relations between politics and history are more complex.

The delicate logic of the Marxist understanding of the relation between class being and class consciousness is broken by an absolutist severance of categories. The objective existence of workers necessarily founds the potential for their political capacity as a revolutionary class. It does not and cannot ensure the actualization of the same. For Lazarus however, it is too much to understand that the very concept of expression entails a relative separation, that the expression is never simply the thing expressed, but is all the same necessarily founded in it, and as potentiality, inherent in the thing. As always, the subjective irrationalist resorts to a crude immediacy.

What characterizes Marx’s thinking is that the prescriptive and the descriptive (otherwise put, science) are merged. To put it in terms that interest us here, history and politics are merged. The name of this fusion is ‘historical consciousness’. The communist proletarian has a scientific and prescriptive view of history—prescriptive because it is scientific. The fusion will come about on its own, spontaneously, because it is necessary.

The capitalist mode of production did necessarily produce proletarian historical consciousness. This has been confirmed by almost two centuries of history. However, necessity does not equate to unconscious, spontaneous generation. Necessity must come to consciously recognize itself and strive through will and strategy to impose itself against entropy and stagnation. Necessity is the potential for further development inherent in the actuality of the structure. To embrace the iron laws of necessity is a subjective militant decision to master the historical process. To negate them is to turn one's back on the further actualization of freedom and to consign history once more to the realm of the unconscious and the contingent.

History deals with classes, economics and the State. The categories of capital, work, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and even that of antagonism, linked to the communist view of class, are historical not political categories.

History is the inseparable process of development of the totality on economic, political and ideological levels. That is why it is the only science. The categories of capital and wage labor are the categories which constitute the economic terrain upon which the struggle between bourgeois and proletarian politics plays out at the level of contention over state power, which is to say contention over the substance of the social whole. The quantitative economic contradiction between capital and wage labor which plays out in the form of the trade union struggle over the terms of sale of labor power necessarily breaks out into the qualitative political contradiction of the struggle between class parties over the property form itself at the mediated level of the site of state power.

The objective actuality of the contradiction between socialized labor and private appropriation becomes the subjective battle of wills over the length of the working day, which in turn becomes the subjective decision for the expropriation of the expropriators. The implementation of this decision becomes the construction of the new society and the struggle for new norms and against restoration. All of this is given in potentia by the objective economic structure of capitalist society. Its process of actualization is the process whereby necessity becomes aware of itself and willfully struggles to implement its own dictates.

The legacy of revolution simply expresses the necessary results of the development of productive forces in consciousness. The Rights of Man and the Citizen were given by the rising hegemony of the commodity producer and no reparations to the feudal lords could erase the indelible impact of their terroristic affirmation within which we still live. Likewise, the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People is no “exhausted” and contingent “mode”, but an expression of the ever greater objective weight of socialized labor which cannot be consigned to the past by privatization and the religion of the market. Only a catastrophic destruction of productive forces ending modernity as a whole could authentically terminate the inevitable contradictory interplay of socialism and democracy whose continued non-resolution defines the tasks of the present.

If we posit the State as the central category of history, the de-statification of the figure of the worker is conceived in terms of a break with a Party-type problematic that links workers to the State through the conceptual paradigm of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As with all revisionism, the endless conceptual contortions of Lazarus culminate only in a return to bourgeois trade unionism, (“the de-statification of the figure of the worker”) presented as a new and refreshing discovery. For, in material fact, there is no politics beyond the state, thus the “de-statification” of the workers means their re-immersion in the bourgeois state; something confirmed by the historical actuality of anarchism as a Popular Front coalition partner. Lazarus wants to repackage the simplistic commonplaces of anarchism within a dense fog of discursive tangles intended to delight the superficial and fashion-conscious with their vacuous novelty.

We must, therefore, maintain that if politics is a thought, it is thinkable without requiring a process of thought that is above it or that understands it. In other words, it is thinkable without recourse to the State or to economics, which are two distinct notions. The enterprise of conceiving politics from a standpoint other than that of the State or of the economy is an enterprise of freedom and of a field proper to decision. [our emphasis]

Observing the real defeat of the working class, on the terrain of the state with the collapse of the workers’ states and the capitulation of the workers’ parties, and on the terrain of the economy with restructuring and the deployment of the results of the scientific-technical revolution in the interests of imperialism, creates dangerous temptations. Not the least of which is that of a desperate flight from the objective coordinates of political practice into a pure volunteerism, where freedom is no longer the realization of a necessity, which on account of a superficial empiricism, has been misidentified as a hostile force. Rather, it becomes the inherently impotent defiance of necessity. And politics, no longer deduced from a scientific application of the categories of political economy to the class structure of a given social formation, becomes simply a will to act.

The anthropology of the name proposes to leave the field of science for a field of rational, debatable and refutable knowledge, which does not however pertain to the category of science as it appears today in the social sciences which is designated here as scientism. The terms of ‘scientistic thought’ characterize the conception of science at work in sociology, economics and history. The theory that it proposes of science is that of exteriority, law, causality and the universal. I am challenging it because it presents itself as the sole paradigm of knowledge, and calling into question the theory of science that it develops.

Lazarus identifies the theory he proposes to challenge, the one that he insists dominates the “conception of science”, in a sociology, economics and history, which, far from dividing by the class struggle, he unites to a spurious shared positivism, with four defining features; exteriority, law, causality and the universal. Exteriority is the objective world, external to the thinking subject, whose thoughts are correct or incorrect insofar as they correspond or not to the reality of that world. Law is the pattern of development of social and natural processes given by their defining structural characteristics. Causality is the differentiation within the development of social and natural processes, between the primary causative elements and the secondary elements which are produced as effects. The universal is the domain of the defining structural characteristics of processes, the characteristics which in their mutual interaction necessarily constitute the patterns whose repetition constitute law as process. The patterns of these mutual interactions are constituted by cause and effect. To throw away these structures of thought is to exit from the objective reality they necessarily mirror in favor of a world of illusory freedom.

There is no repeatability in the arena of history and society.

This statement is wrong. In history, agriculture and urbanization were repeated many times, philosophy and science emerged multiple times, the emergence of the state repeated many times. And in all cases, the same repeated patterns, dependent upon the universal characteristics of physical reality and its reflection in the mind, can be observed. Chinese philosophy was not fundamentally different from Greek philosophy, the state in Peru was not fundamentally different from the state in the Fertile Crescent. All the states which have been constituted on the ground of bourgeois private property form repetitive variations on a handful of fundamental types, just as all the states founded in collective property grounded in the worker-peasant revolutions of the 20th century present a similarly repetitive panorama. History is made up of periods of repetition interrupted by the discontinuity of qualitative leaps in the development of productive forces which allow for the constitution of new basic patterns.

Until the agricultural revolution, history was the repetitive wanderings of hunter-gather tribes, until the industrial revolution, the equally repetitive rise and fall of orders based in the exploitation of servile agricultural labor. To the extent that modernity appears as a break from this, it is not because of any non-repeatability of human affairs, but rather due to its character as a transitional period characterized by the escalating linear movement from agrarian petty production to industrial labor socialized on a global scale; a transition which remains incomplete to date.

But this transition itself has had its characteristic forms; first of all, dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and secondly, the dictatorship of the proletariat; two types which had already emerged in outline at the end of the 18th century, whose latent contradiction defined the 19th century, whose open antagonism defined the 20th, and which continue to constitute the basic polarity which shapes the political life of the present.

To insist on the non-repeatability of history is to sever it from scientific investigation and make it into an object of imagination. The concept of history is replaced by the image of history. Or more precisely, history is replaced by myth. Because just as the most unilateral subjective freedom always collapses into the most rigid determinism, so the most ardent insistence upon the uniqueness of every singular moment of the historical process inevitably becomes a denial of concrete qualitative transformation. Every absolutely incomparable and singular historical sequence becomes identical to every other. This kind of pre-historical thinking can be found in the naive materialism of early modernity. For Machiavelli, the founders of the most socially dissimilar political orders all appear alike in their singular uniqueness. But for him, unlike Lazarus, the patterns are at least governed by law to an extent that allows the formulation of a primitive science of the political.

In this confrontation what is at issue is not ‘who thinks’; it is not a problematic of the subject or a problematic of class. In the classist problematic and positivist Marxist sociology, although the existence of class thoughts is posited, no one maintains that the group or the class thinks.

This is wrong. The premise of what Lazarus denounces as a “classist problematic” is the uninterrupted reflection and self reflection of the class as a collective constituted by thought. What Lazarus wants to evade is the content of this thought. Class thought is the reflection of the class on how to seize state power as a lever for transforming property relations and how to hold on to this power as a means of continuing this transformation. People in general think, but this and this alone is the object of the thought of revolutionary worker-militants.

In Statement 2, Thought is a relation of the real, the real does not refer to an already existing given or to a constructed object. It is obviously not of the order of the unknowable; and it cannot be said to be the object of scientific knowledge. It is not the first object, or that by which a cognitive approach is identified. Here, the statement To know is to know the real is a false statement. For the question of the real as such, and at this degree of generality, does not identify any approach to knowledge. [emphasis ours]

To begin by positing that “thought is a relation of the real” while insisting that the real is not an “already existing given” or a “constructed object” or an “object of scientific knowledge” and that it “does not identify any approach to knowledge” at all, is to indulge in irrationalist obfuscation. It is to say nothing while insisting to the reader that something has been said. Just as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the victims of the Party were compelled to agree that 2+2=5, so in Lazarus’s post-structuralism, the victims of his prose are compelled to admit the statement “thought is a relation of the real” has a meaningful truth content.

But it is also possible to think without the object of thought being what establishes the thought, and this in opposition to the thesis that maintains that thought exists only to the extent that its object is established.

This is incorrect. Thought emerges on the basis of and in relation to its object. The correctness of thought can only be evaluated by the degree of conformity to its object. Thought without object is a mystical and theistic proposition. Would we be surprised if a character like Lazarus were to find refuge in the bosom of the Church, or Islam? Not at all.

In scientism, the object is connected to the general, to establishing general laws which are laws of the real. The order of the real and of its laws prescribes the order of thought, and the hypothesis of irreducible singularities appears antinomic to the universality of the scientistic conception of the real...The thought of singularity is not a shift with regard to scientistic thought; it is a break in the problematic of intellectuality.

The refusal of law, the refusal of generality, the insistence on irreducible singularity, which is to say singularity that defies analysis, is a refusal of reason tout court. The repeated claims to the contrary find no grounding in the (non-) logic of the discourse itself. This series of refusals and separations lays the groundwork for considering various sequences of political history as free floating complexes of cultural-discursive images; self-referential semiotic systems which constitute the building blocks of various “styles”. This bears the same relation to a scientific understanding of revolutionary politics that Spengler or Toynbee’s civilizations do to the scientific understanding of the succession of modes of production.

IV

At this point the reader is presented with the full schema of four such self referential systems:

The revolutionary mode, which is more particularly at issue here and whose sequence is 1792–94. The classist mode, where history is the category in consciousness of politics. History is understood here as the product of the class struggle and is manifested in the development of the working-class movement. What is at issue here is by no means the objective or descriptive history to which the idea of historical materialism would much later be attached but, rather, a category of political consciousness and hence a prescriptive category. A single categorical register prescribes its present and future. The loci of this mode are working-class movements and historical movements. The sequence of this mode extends from 1848, date of the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, to 1871 with the Paris Commune, when the categories of working-class movements or historical movements were exhausted.

— The Bolshevik mode, which is characterized by the thesis of politics under condition. Here, proletarian political capacity is not spontaneous, historical or socially determined; it is obliged to state its own conditions. There is a gap between a conception in which politics is expressive of the social and one in which it is subject to condition. The protocol of this gap is given by What Is To Be Done? in the category of Party. The sites of the Bolshevik mode are the Party and the soviets. The sequence of the mode stretches from 1902 (when Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? was published) to October 1917. After this date, we witness the statification of the Party. The Party and the soviets, which disappear, are no longer the sites of a mode.

— The dialectical mode, known by the proper name of Mao Zedong, which de-historicizes by subordinating history to the masses, pushing it into the background and foregroundjng such subjective notions as enthusiasm (for) and socialism. However, the relation to the thought of politics is played out in the categories of political laws, which allow for an approach to the conjuncture and to the situation. Thought is ascribed to the development of laws that stem from relating the subjective to the objective. It is this relation that is dialectical, with political knowledge proceeding by accumulation and leaps.

A form of knowledge exists that is exclusively political because such a knowledge is dialectical without being historical. Even if the Party exists, it does not identify the mode. The mode is dialectical materialism as such, confronted with great situations. Great situations cannot renounce the principle of the masses. The dialectical mode relies therefore on human capacity when political capacity is mobilized.

In the dialectical mode, the dialectic is distinct from Marx’s, where history is merged with class, and distinct from the Leninist mechanism, where the Party mediates consciousness and history. It is, in fact, the very thought of politics. The antagonism is conceived as a transformation and as a transition to socialism, which is accomplished not by occupying an empty place—that of the State—or in a shift from the bourgeois State to a proletarian State but by growth, as embodied by the doctrine of liberated regions. Thus it is war, regarded as a factor of growth and transformation, which corresponds to the dialectical mode and that is the privileged site of the dialectic. The loci of the mode are those of the revolutionary war: the Party, the army and the united front. The sequence limits of the mode are 1928, date of the publication of Mao’s Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?, and 1958, which marks the settlement of the Korean War and the moment when the construction of socialism in the modalities of a revolutionary war ceases.

Leaving aside the “revolutionary mode”, which Lazarus will further elaborate on later, we are confronted with an attempt at a unilateral severance of the trajectory of Marxist politics, dividing it into three singular and dissimilar sequences. This substitution of the substantial continuity of the intertwined movement of democracy and socialism, the passage from the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution which constitutes the political expression of the growth of industrial productive forces, for a series of ruptures, has roots not only in bourgeois idealist currents of sympathy for the October Revolution. It is also characteristic of Stalinism.

For Stalin, Leninism was not application of Marxism to Russian conditions and a reaffirmation of principles against the revisionism of right and center but a qualitatively new stage which could be set against the heritage of the Second International en bloc. This served as a weapon for the imposition of the hegemony of the Russian party, as the alleged bearer of the only authentic revolutionary tradition. Likewise for Maoism, as formulated in Peru and elsewhere after 1976, Mao is not a politician applying the lessons of permanent revolution (lessons which go back to the initial Marxist assimilation of the experience of 1848) to China but a bearer of allegedly completely novel concepts like the “mass line” and “people’s war”.

If, in the Stalinist schema, these spurious ruptures are important for justifying the unilateral authority claims of monolithic political centers, for Lazarus they serve to justify a capitulation to the post-Soviet end of history via a sophistic deconstruction of the legacy of modernity itself, transformed from a coherent, cumulative progression, into an arbitrary succession of mutually heterogeneous events. And, in both cases, the governing vendetta is against the universality of proletarian dictatorship. For Stalin, the uneven development of the imperialist phase, as allegedly interpreted by “Leninism”, allows a reconciliation of socialist development in the USSR with the Popular Front and “people’s democracy” on a world scale; that is to say, the evasion of the confrontation with imperialism. For Lazarus, the “exhaustion” of the “Bolshevik mode” justifies the “de-statification” of the working class; that is to say, the degeneration of its subjectivity into bourgeois-democratic populism. An evasion of ideological struggle against the post Soviet consensus.

If Stalinism found its practical implementation in suffocation of socialist aspirations in Spain, Greece, Italy and France in order to placate democratic imperialism, “Lazarusism” finds its own destiny in the preemptive liquidation of any new sequence of socialist politics in favor of subordination to left populism under a program of struggle against the “far right” that repackages Dimitroff in post-structuralism.

Lazarus’s three “modes” are nothing more than a further obfuscation of the Stalinist obfuscation of “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”, and the reality they obscure is a century of continuity from the contradictory unity of democracy and socialism, from Germany in 1848 to China in 1949. And to defend them, he is compelled to resort to a hallucinatory and fraudulent reading of even the most basic textual formulations. Consider the following statement on the alleged gap between the Communist Manifesto and What is to be Done:

For example, the Leninist version of this couple [consciousness-Party] was very different from the version proposed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and the reasons for these differences are to be found in the heterogeneity of the two notions. In Marx,the heterogeneity is given in the absence of the category of politics, that is to say, of a subjective side.

This statement is so self-evidently absurd as to be beneath contempt. In the Communist Manifesto, the Party is constituted as a faction of the class, defined by a particular program, and produced by a conscious synthesis of the historical situation of the proletariat; a particular program which can only assert itself through the struggle against other programs within the class. In this sense, the Communist Manifesto is not only a preface to Bolshevism, but an appendix to the Conspiracy for Equality. All four of Lazarus’s arbitrarily severed “modes” form a singular continuity of political subjectivity, whose potentiality can be read directly in the objective class structure itself.

But the notion of Party had become by the end of the nineteenth century the main support for the question of consciousness. What was at issue was less a question of class consciousness than of Party consciousness.

The Party is the most conscious element of the class. There exists a sign of equality between adherence to the communist program as first formulated in the Manifesto and class consciousness. To counterpose the two is obfuscation.

Classist thought is not simply a thought in terms of class but a thought of operators. It is to be found as much in Carl von Clausewitz as in Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, as much in Jean Jaures as in Durkheim and even in Weber

For Lazarus not only Marxism but bourgeois rationalism is fatally limited; an obstacle to his sweeping subjective nihilism. We could continue to follow him on his flight into the abyss, but such a dismal journey could only exhaust the reader’s patience without generating any further insight.