In lieu of more substantive matter which I'm busy working on, and because I have so much else to do, I'm just posting up these possibly interesting reflections on ideology which I threw together this morning in a fit of ennui.

Where do you get those ideas from? There is an extremely high chance that most of them were produced by others for you, that you came by them in schools, your family, from the mass media, maybe a religious institution, from a political party, a trade union, the academia, think-tanks, PR firms or any one of a network of institutions or apparatuses which make it their business to produce ideas for you. (Yes, you - this is interpellation we are talking about here.)  This is how Goran Therborn in one of his early works, The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power, visualises the process:

I know this isn't a shock. You didn't really think you came up with those thoughts all by yourself. You are Marxists, and you know very well that ideologies (and sciences for that matter) are produced collectively, even if not in a collectivist mode.  Or, if you prefer, they are historically, socially produced.

But what do those who aren't Marxists think? Aren't they often inclined to believe that somehow their ideas are spontaneous, natural, or arise from a process of open-ended personal reflection? I was going to say it was a particularly petty bourgeois illusion, but it seems to be implicit in ideology as such, the belief that ideas are the result of some inner spark or inspiration: in theoretical language, that agents, rather than being constituted as subjects by ideology, are the constituting subjects of ideology.  "I decide what I think," the subject of ideology says, "I mean, yes, there are all sorts of ideas being presented to me every day, but as soon as I obtain adulthood I am in a position to critically evaluate those ideas.  I choose my ideology; it doesn't choose me."  In this sense, the concept of interpellation is an affront to common sense, for it says that ideology 'chooses' its subject, that it addresses the subject with who she really is, enabling her to become the 'bearer' (Trager) of the role assigned to her by the structure.

We won't spend too long inspecting the structure of this interpellation.  Althusser sets up a primordial 'scene' of interpellation, a fable in which the agent is 'hailed' by the law ("hey you!"), stops, turns, and in the act of turning is subjectivated, accepts that she really is the "you" addressed by law.  Crucially, this submission to ideology involves misrecognition: as with Lacan's 'mirror stage', the resulting identity is a false totalization of the fragments of experience.

Following Judith Butler, we could problematize this concept along the following lines.  Althusser relies on a complex set of theological figures to set up his notion of 'hailing'.  The very act of 'turning' and thus accepting subjectivation implies an act of conscience, an appropriation of guilt.  For Althusser, ideology is centred around an imaginary 'Absolute Subject' - redolent of Lacan's 'Big Other', the guarantor of the symbolic order - which is experienced by the subject as the source of 'law', guaranteeing that (so long as you are a good subject and 'behave') everything is just as it seems and will continue to be for eternity, and will be okay.  Religious ideology is thus treated as exemplary of ideology as such, the 'naming' in religious ritual typical of subjectivation.  There is no mystery about this - Althusser practised Catholicism long after he became a marxist, and seems never to have got out of the habit of performing some of its rituals.  But this process requires an addressee already predisposed to receiving such a message, already implicated in its terms; that is, it requires a subjection that already presupposes a subject. 

At first it seems as if we're saying that the narrative of the 'scene' of interpellation cannot be 'true'.  But, of course, as Butler also notes, this concept of interpellation is allegorical.  It stages a 'hailing' that never actually literally happens in this way; it narrativises a process or set of processes that is said to be resistant to narrativization.  As Butler has it, "the 'call' arrives severally and in implicit and unspoken ways", which a too literal reading of 'interpellation' might overlook.  There is a long process in which each agent in the division of labour is equipped with, for example, the sorts of linguistic skills appropriate to her location, which will enable her to carry out the tasks assigned to her by the structure: a boss learns to 'speak properly' (ie authoritatively, persuasively, dominatively) to her employees; a worker learns to 'speak properly' (ie deferentially, respectfully, warily) back.  Over time, the agent becomes a subject by internalising the rules and attitudes, materialised in actions, inserted into practices, governed by rituals, which constitute the subject.  The agent, just as she is mastering these skills, submits to the dominant ideology: is 'hailed', 'turns' to face the law, and is subjectivated. The fabular character of 'interpellation' is one reason why the many pointed criticisms of the 'scene' depicted by Althusser - for example, that it is is too dyadic, or is phallocentric - are thoroughly well-founded, yet far from adequate to finish off the concept of interpellation.  The scene could be re-staged in multiple thoughtful and creative ways without losing what is essential.

However, Butler's case is more complex.  It is not simply that the 'scene' belies the reality of ideology in many ways.  The problem lies in the prehistory of the subject alluded to above; the preconditions necessary for the reproduction of the dominant ideology.  'Interpellation' appears to require an anxious, knowing, 'guilty' agent anxious to acquit herself by conscientiously mastering the skills that will make her a subject.  Doesn't this, as Lacanian critics approvingly suggest, require another dimension to the subject, a materia prima, or rather an immateria prima, a psychic dimension that is radically distinct from any possible incarnation in material practices?  Doesn't it require the resuscitation of the Cartesian subject?  Doesn't Althusser's repudiation of the ontological dualism of the material and the ideal simply collapse into another dualism?  Butler's rejoinder to the Lacanians (in the person of Mladen Dolar) is that: i) it mistakes a grammatical requirement for a pre-existing subject, or psychic remainder, in the context of exposition for a logical requirement; and ii) its rejection of materialist monism relies on a reduction of the material to the phenomenal, or empirically given, so that the absences that punctuate a ritual can be seen as governed by a non-material symbolic order - in counterpoint, Butler deploys the althusserian materialism of articulation, in which these absences are not 'ideal' but are bound to the phenomenon as "its constitutive and absent necessity".

Nonetheless, the terms of Althusser's formulation, the theological figures deployed and particularly the restrictive role of conscience in subject-formation, leave unresolved the question of the failure of interpellation.  In Althusser's terms it is difficult to think how a 'bad subject' could exist, since the very condition of being a subject involves mastering the skills that subject one to the dominant ideology and make one therefore a 'good' subject.  

Now, Butler doesn't do any more than signpost possible ways out of this dilemma: hinting at forms of de-subjectivation which might allow one to oppose the 'law' without denying one's complicity in it.  But it's clear that without resolving this, the danger is either that one collapses into a mechanistic, functionalist account of ideology, or a voluntarism or decisionism predicated implicitly or explicitly on this theological remainder.  Althusser didn't solve this problem.  As Jameson points out, the ISA essay was "programmatic", a manifesto of sorts, an "agenda, still incompletely fulfilled".  And I will have occasion to talk about the politics of this in a future post.  However, I would say that this psychic remainder, this kernel of interiority irreducible to the social and material world, constantly recurs in marxist accounts of ideology, either explicitly or in the form of ambiguities or silences.

The ambiguity, or unresolved tension, in historical materialist approaches to ideology is basically this: is ideology materially determined, or is it a material substance in itself?  This is an ambiguity which persists in one of the greatest marxist writers on ideology, Volosinov who, asserting that his approach is monistic, nonetheless makes this statement: "Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow of reality, but is also a material segment of that very reality."  Not only, but also.  Not just shadow, but material too.  Does this seem like a detail?  Well, I can't be the only one to have encountered this sort of ambivalence repeatedly.  Goran Therborn, arguing from a post-althusserian perspective, tended to speak of the material determination of ideas, leaving the question of ideology's ideal or material status unresolved.  

Or one encounters more directly formulations which tell us that "mind is developed upon the basis of matter", but that "the human mind cannot simply be reduced to matter". And is this not simply a straightforward exposition of Marx's approach in The German Ideology?  For on the one hand, Marx says that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life", while on the other these manifestations are "phantoms formed in the human brain ... sublimates of their material life-process ... bound to material premises".  And so, the ambiguity seems to be resolved on the side of the material determination of ideas, which are but "phantoms".

If in fact the ambiguity is to be resolved in this way, that is if we accept that there is an order of reality that is separate from matter (a subjective reality, a 'consciousness' that is linked to the material world but not directly or wholly of it), then it is surely at the expense of monism.  To say that this is a consequence of such a stance is not necessarily to disprove it.  And it is clear why it is attractive: precisely because of the need to found emancipatory politics on the self-activity of the masses, and therefore the need to explain the bases of resistance.  Somehow, the working class is capable of being an agent of revolutionary change, despite the effects of the dominant ideology.

So when Althusser argued that ideology has no "ideal or spiritual existence" but only a material existence, that it exists only "in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" - gamesomely suggesting that readers entertain the notion sympathetically on the grounds of materialism - surely he was expressing a conception that was deeply controversial to the majority of marxists.  At least, particularly  for those of a Lukacsian persuasion, such a conception must appear to be complicit in the objectification that is characteristic of ideology as such.  For if ideas themselves are material, then its bearers might well be nothing but objects; nothing but effects of a structure, bearers (Trager) of a role assigned to them by the structure.  There would seem to be no space for will or intention ('consciousness') in such a process.  So, it is this potentially mechanistic consequence of theoretical anti-humanism that is objectionable.

But, returning to Marx's formulation in The German Ideology, if ideas are "only manifestations of actual life", in what sense are they manifest?  To whom and in what they do they manifest themselves, if not in fact in the material practices and apparatuses?  In what sense are ideas other than "actual life"?  Is it not at least arguable that in such moments, Marx was using an old conception (the ideal-material dichotomy) to express an emerging one (the different levels of determination in a complex social whole, the relative autonomy and specific effectivity of ideology)?  Elsewhere in The German Ideology Marx says, in what I think is a satirical moment, that "thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence" only when a certain division of labour creates agents who produce thoughts and ideas independently.  In other words, the ideological conception of thoughts and ideas having an ideal existence is an illusion that arises from the social practices of petty bourgeois producers of ideology.

Approaching this from another point of view, part of the argument hinges on the base-superstructure metaphor and how it is deployed.  It is difficult to miss the way in which, when some theorists talk about the 'material', they refer to the realm of production, productive relations, commodity circulation - indeed, all that which appears as 'the economy'.  The issue that is being addressed in the language of the 'material determination of ideology' is nothing other than the determination of ideology by productive relations, class struggle and all of the various attributes of the social formation apart from its ideologies.  And a very important reason why people don't want to 'reduce' ideology to matter is precisely because of the need to recognise the specific effectivity of ideology, its peculiar forms and instantiations.  

After all, the question of 'reduction' shouldn't really arise otherwise: it is not a question of saying that ideology is 'reducible' to matter; merely that it is itself a material process.  'Reduction' only comes into it because the ontological problem of the status of ideology (as matter, or ideal substance) has been interjected into the epistemological problem posed by the base-superstructure metaphor (of the relationship between economy, politics and ideology in marxist theory).  And if I'm right in suggesting this, then surely the ISAs essay opened up a potentially fruitful terrain of investigation in solving this latter problem, drawing attention to the various mediating levels particular to ideology (actions, practices, rituals, apparatuses), but also opening up the field of the specific institutional preconditions of ideology.  Not only that, but this demarche is conducted within a sophisticated and potentially dynamic account of the determination and overdetermination of ideologies by the whole complex structure which it is articulated to; that is, it allows us to shift the terms of the problem from the 'material determination of ideology' to that of the complex and mediated determination of ideology by the sub-structures with which it is articulated.  I just suggest we consider it - in the name of materialism, say.

But that still leaves us with the other dilemma.  So, we hypothesise that ideology has only a material and no spiritual or ideal existence; that the relationship between ideology and 'politics' or 'the economy' is not that between matter and the ideal.  Doesn't it still seem that, for the masses to be capable of conducting a revolutionary self-emancipation, we need some notion of resistant interiority, some equivalent to Chomsky's (obviously deliberately simplified) notion of an 'instinct for freedom'?  That is, a conception of 'human nature' as an active constituent in the process of subject-formation?  It will not be sufficient to clarify, as Marta Harnecker exhaustively does, what theoretical anti-humanism does and does not entail for the self-emancipation of the working class.  The point is that the problem is raised about how to understand the basis for resistance, including resistance to the dominant ideology.  And, as we have said, that problem wasn't satisfactorily dealt with in the terms of Althusser's original formulations.  

I don't propose, in this post, to articulate the solution that evaded both Althusser and Butler.  I merely want to reiterate that we can't fall back on any conception of 'interiority', which risks reifying socially, ideologically produced divisions (the interior-exterior division is nothing other than the mind-body problem in another idiom anyway).  Still less can we find salvation in 'human nature'.  Insofar as it goes beyond a simple description of biological needs (for food, warmth, sociality, orgasm) or needs derivative of those (eg, the need to appropriate knowledge which meets those primary needs), which by itself would be neither 'interior' nor an adequate explanation for social resistance, and proceeds into a theology of some 'natural' state of unity with our 'species-being', alienated since the Fall, it restores idealism.  What theories of 'human nature' must invariably do is eternize contingent and historically produced relations and situations.  Such solutions are worse than the problem they address.  If a theory of subjects capable of explaining resistance is available, it must be on the terms of the materialist approach to ideology; that is, of ideology's purely material and not spiritual or ideal existence.

What follows, then, is one attempt to navigate beyond this impasse.  I hasten to say that this is intended as the beginning of an argument, since I can't claim to have resolved every tension or lacuna in my position.  I will also say upfront that it tries to solve the problem in a largely formal way with only incidental references, by way of examples, to the kinds of historical data that will stand up the argument presented here.  That is mainly to keep the argument under some sort of control.  Doing the subject historical and historiographical justice would require a book, and I don't know how to write one of those.

There are those on the Left who adopt a version the law-violence dichotomy.   E P Thompson, as I mentioned in a previous post, was one of those.  In a concluding discussion in his book, Whigs and Hunters: Origin of the Black Act, Thompson acknowledges the structural selectivity of law, asserting not merely that it has been used as an 'instrument' by the ruling class, but that its very form has been such that it tends to produce outcomes favourable to the reproduction of class domination.  Nonetheless, he reaches this striking conclusion in defence of the 'rule of law':   

In assessing this, I think we have to take into account the related contexts of Thompson's theoretical commitments and his politics of socialist humanism.  In his famed attack on Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, one of the points he made was that law did not politely keep to one level, but could be found busily constituting and mediating conflicts at every level of society.  He thus rejected the base-superstructure metaphor, and particularly the althusserian version which held that the different levels of this structure were 'relatively autonomous'.  The same argument can be found in Whigs and Hunters, which draws out what is intended to be an implication of this: law is not merely a superstructural imposition 'from above', but a medium through which the oppressed and exploited conducted their struggles.  Thus the ideology of the 'freeborn Englishman' could be estimated an excellent one, the 'notion' of the rule of law and its supposed equity an unqualified human good.  The challenge was to compel the law to live up to its promise, and the ultimate condition for its fulfilment was the abolition of the class systems which perverted and distorted the law.

Politically, this commitment was related to Thompson's rejection of Stalinism.  It requires no great stretch of the imagination to see why a certain radical English liberalism would be a comfort in the face of 'totalitarian' Eastern tyranny: the gap between 'arbitrary power' and 'the rule of law' seems quite obvious when separated by an iron curtain.  (I don't suggest that Stalinism was actually characterised by an absence of the 'rule of law', but I think that's implicit in Thompson's view, just as it is explicit in many marxist accounts of Nazi rule).  Of at least equal import, though, is his political disappointment, his retirement from activism by the late 1960s, and his complete befuddlement and hostility in the face of the second New Left.  Thompson's weary impatience with young marxists bemoaning 'the fuzz' is of a piece with his disdain for May 1968 as "a rich kid's revolutionary farce", his wariness about Third World revolution, trendy Parisian philosophers and all of the concerns of the New Left which struck him as either modish or politically immature.  To this extent, 'Stalinism' could function as a polemical convenience, enfolding within its compass a range of political and theoretical positions which were disagreeable to the English idiom and romantic moralism that he unapologetically deployed.  In this sense, I think Thompson bears out Althusser's claim that the post-1956 turn to humanism among formerly Stalinized marxists represented a 'right-wing' de-Stalinization; the introduction of feeble bourgeois ideologies of 'liberty' and 'humanity' into marxism was but the mood music for a rapprochement with liberalism.  Still, there are stronger grounds on which one might criticise Thompson's account here, chief among which is that his anti-theoreticist and empiricist tendencies, leave him without the theoretical means to fully break with the 'instrumentalist' account of the law that he is criticising.  I'll come back to this.

Another example of a leftist defence of the law, from a left-reformist perspective, would be Ian Taylor's arguments which were influential on the Labour Left in the early 1980s.  In his article 'Against Crime and For Socialism', Taylor sought to define a leftist defence of law in the context of growing social turmoil and dislocation arising from capitalist crisis and Thatcherite austerity.  The idea was that the left had failed to produce a convincing answer to popular anxieties about crime, largely because it was stuck in two irrelevant analytical modes: either revolutionary anti-statism, or social democratic authoritarianism.  Any analysis which began with a monolithic view of the state, as an instrument for class domination or an uncontested terrain dominated by a single class interest, was intellectually simplistic and strategically barren.  Taylor's argument suggested that law and the state were contested terrains, and he championed the 'community' response to crime favoured by the Bennite Left, organizing local campaigns while imposing democratic and accountable structures on the police so far as possible.  The obverse of this 'community' based politics was a reproach to criminality as anti-social behaviour.  Crime, he argued, was an ideological category which worked on real social material to produce the phenomenon of 'underclass' or 'lower class' criminality.  Thus, the left had to challenge the ideology by displacing the real content from its rightist-populist articulations.  The argument that criminality derived from despair, worklessness, inequality and poverty would not do.  Rather, criminal behaviour was really a kind of self-interested enterprise, distributed across classes in different ways, and a product largely of capitalist individualism.  Among the 'lower class' elements, crime arose from the breakdown of solidaristic communities, or from layers that had never been part of a cohesive, 'respectable' working class.  Social order was worth defending against this sort of predation; policing was an absolute necessity; but it had to be conducted on a popular socialist basis which simultaneously deployed policies to rebuild and stabilise afflicted communities.

This was a very common argument on sections of the Left, especially in the context of E P Thompson's intervention.  Stripped of its more radical prescriptions, the basic analysis of crime as anti-social individualism became the basis for a new authoritarianism within the Labour Party, eventually grounding Tony Blair's 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' campaign and New Labour's punitive campaigns against anti-social behaviour.  Of course, this idea of crime as a form of self-interested enterprise was also offered as an explanation for last summer's riots.  It is vapid: capitalist individualism is everywhere, but crime is not.  Nor is crime necessarily conducted on the basis of 'rational self-interest'.  For all the frankly idiotic commentary freaking out about the theft of consumer goods during the riots, one thing that stood out was the frequency with which those involved acted without reference to material self-aggrandisement, often placing themselves in harm's way in order to conduct sometimes successful but ultimately futile fights with the law.  Altruism, group solidarity and a desire for collective adventure and liberation were salient features of the riots.  Part of the problem here is polysemy: that is, it can mean so many things to say, as Taylor does, that law is ideology.  Quite what that means in practice depends on your conception of ideology and its scope.  I would argue that Taylor, influenced by certain Gramscian motifs, treated 'crime' as an ideological category only inasmuch as it was manipulated by the Right, not inasmuch as it was produced by the ideological action of the law itself.  But again, this I will return to.

What I want to stress is that these kinds of arguments, correctly attempting to oppose a simple theory of law as an expression of class domination, miss what is central to law.  It isn't adequate to say that law mediates the actions of the powerful, and that such mediation is an improvement on unmediated power.  There is no such thing as unmediated power: no way that power could not be materialized in a particular medium.  And what is the medium here?  What accounts for the 'lawness' of law?  Wherein resides the specific aspect that makes legality what it is?  I will develop an argument about this, but the first clue is the constant presence of violence.  If law is a scene of contestation, what decides is violence.  If law has an imperative character, what gives it compulsory force is violence.  To the extent that law is operative at all, it is nothing other than "congealed violence".  Law is, in this aspect, nothing other than a particular organization of violence.

An example from history.  In a previous post, I discussed the 'Massive Resistance' mounted by Southern states in the wake of Brown vs. the Board of Education.  A series of Supreme Court rulings, from Smith vs. Allwright to Brown vs. the Board of Education, and then subsequent fast-track endorsement of the federal government's right to impose Voting Rights, challenged the white supremacist system in various of its aspects.  There was no claim here that the Court was interested in immediate reform.  The approach was to phrase such decisions in such a way as to grant maximum leverage to Southern states in the timing, scale and manner in which they de-segregated.

Importantly, much of the relevant scholarship is explicit in stating that the outcome of these arguments was determined less by the juridical arguments, deduction-from-precedent and so on, than by politics. It was the more centralized, 'interventionist' state arising from the 'New Deal', and a judiciary reconfigured by FDR, that made the difference in a very short space of time between a pro-segregation Supreme Court and one that was imposing reform. Later, the Truman administration's amicus curiae on the international ramifications of segregation made all the difference in Brown vs. the Board of Education. Putting a marxist gloss on this, I argued that underlying this development was i) the rise of monopoly capital and inter-regional firms requiring a further centralization and rationalization of the state of a kind that had begun in the 1910s, and having a different relationship to racial formations than plantation or textile capital, ii) the strategic shift in the Democratic Party's base in response to the emergence of an immigrant working class vote in the North, union insurgency and the growth of the African American vote outside of the South, and iii) the delayed emergence of a civil rights movement effectively deploying disruptive power to force the question and lever open divisions within the ruling class.

At any rate, this process - a Second Reconstruction by many accounts - necessitated the re-organization of state violence in the constitution of class relations. This was manifested quite literally in the federalization of national guards, the use of 101st Airborne, and so on, to physically coerce local state authorities into complying and dropping the various city ordinances, state laws, policing and parapolitical operations comprising 'Massive Resistance'. Between the state of Kentucky and the central state, force (not 'sovereignty', 'states' rights', the constitution, etc.) decided.  Law revealed itself to be, in a sense, nothing but congealed violence.

'Equality before the law' is a cardinal principle of liberal-democratic ideology, and it is one that historians like E P Thompson, and sympathetic theorists, have taken very seriously.  Thompson's critique of the inequities of law, of unjust law, took as its standard the principle of legal equity itself: of the civil and political rights of the 'freeborn Englishman'.  A certain type of marxist critique of this notion holds that it is a purely formal equality which conceals or conveys a content of inequality.  Such, as we will see, is the position of Evgeny Pashukanis.  This is not to say that such a critique must deny the efficacy of formal equality - on the contrary, Pashukanis' work is an attempt to comprehend this formal equality as part of the fundamental, cellular structure of law.  But it involves a different emphasis.  It is not that the law poses a standard of equality which it doesn't realise in practice, but rather that the legal relationship between abstract, formally equal individuals is just the form that class domination takes in a capitalist society characterised by generalised commodity exchange.

Against both interpretations, which actually converge in some of their fundamental assumptions, I want to suggest that the law does not give us formal equality.  Agents are assigned a bundle of rights and obligations depending on their location within the relations of production, such that their formal legal position with respect to one another, irrespective of how these rights and obligations are realised or elaborated in the process of jurisprudence, is not one of equality.  At the most simple level, a capitalist is not equal with a worker, even at the 'formal' legal level.  It will surely be objected that this refers to the substantive content of law, not its form.  Such a reproach is related to schools which treat the legal form as a foundational grammar of abstract legal subjects derived from certain aspects of the capitalist mode of production - most notably, as mentioned, the Pashukanis school which treats the legal form as a derivative of or homologous with the commodity form.  But I don't think the 'form' of law is restricted to its most abstract expression, even if one accepts the grammar of the commodity-law homology.  There are different levels of abstraction at which 'form' makes itself known.  Putting it like this entails that, if the form-content dichotomy is to be useful, it must be revised.  In its current articulation, it seems as if form is something settled at the highest level of abstraction, and content is settled at the highest level of concreteness.  Arguably, however, one finds 'form' and a corresponding 'content' from the first abstraction to the last concrete-in-thought.

As importantly, I am inclined to doubt that the commodity form theory explains what it is supposed to.  Let me reiterate the problem briefly.  The question of the 'legalness' of law comes up for a number of reasons.  First, because in order to truly understand the iniquitous 'content' of law it must be stated why that 'content' - class power, racism, patriarchy, etc - takes the 'form' that it does.  Second, because it is not possible to understand what law does in capitalism specifically, and in particular social formations, without understanding what makes it law in the first place.  That is, what is definitive of law across historical epochs and modes of production, and what is specific to this mode of production.  The Pashukanisian argument is that the legal form is the commodity form; that legal relations first appear in the exchange of commodities between formally free and equal subjects. The commodity relation depends on the items for sale being exchanged between formally equal subjects, who each enter the transaction as voluntary participants, as bearers of rights, particularly property rights.  And it is through this relationship that the legal form is "congealed violence".  For in such transactions, inescapably, there is the potential for one party to alienate the property of the other without consent, which must not happen if it is to be a true commodity relationship.  In the real process of such transactions, of course, coercion almost always intervenes in some way and at some level.  Either it structures the contract of exchange itself, or it calls into question the interpretation of the contract, thus producing a process of legal argument that can ultimately only be terminated through superior violence.  So it is that the grammar of abstract, formally equal legal subjects 'congeals' violence and domination, and the main forms of violence are of course class violence.  It is not that law's promise of equality simply can't be realised in the capitalist mode of production, but rather that this formal equality is the language that class domination under capitalism must speak in.

This seems to answer a number of problems.  First of all, it offers an apparently smooth transition between the determinant structure, the commodity form, and the resulting superstructure, law.  Second, it seems to allow us to pinpoint both the historical continuity of law and its discontinuity: the commodity form may explain the legal form in general, but it is only with the generalization of commodity circulation under capitalism that law expands from localised instances of contract to a universal structure.  Third, it seems to show the precise moment at which violence and consent are mutually articulated in the legal form.  It is so elegant a solution, and absolutely consistent with certain lines of Marx's thought.  But still, I don't think it does quite what it seems to.  First, the smoothness of the transition here is only apparent - unless the homology is reduced to sheer coincidence, unless the legal form just is the commodity form.  The latter is, I think, China Mieville's position.  In what appears to be a deft theoretical innovation, he argues that the law is split between the legal form, which is the commodity form and is proper to the base, and the practice of law, which is a superstructural phenomenon.  Thus, the legal form is but a particular juridical iteration of the commodity form, which is activated and materialized at a different (superstructural, political-ideological) level. 

Again, this is an attractive solution, but I will stick to my position.  I think this conception is inseparable from a set of positions on the base-superstructure controversy which are perfectly arguable but which I suggest we reject. First, China, following Pashukanis, rejects the analysis of law as ideology on the grounds that it reduces law to a set of ideas in people's heads.  Yes, there are all sorts of ideological aspects to, and ramifications of, the law; but, per Pashukanis, we must seek the "objective reality" of law "in the outside world", as opposed to merely the "subjective reality".  This desire to find the specific materiality of the law is part of the reason why Pashukanis tries to trace the legal form to the base, into which he subsumes commodity circulation.  As I will argue in a moment, however, this rests on an unnecessarily reductive conception of ideology.  In fact, it is an idealist conception of ideology which is at fault here, not the suggestion that law is ideology.  Althusser's argument that ideology consists of  "material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals" strikes me as the beginning of a superior approach.

Second, relatedly, the argument seems to me to rest on the idea that the superstructure stands in a purely external relationship to the base.  Thus, if the legal form just is the commodity form in a juridical iteration, it must belong to the base, forming part of the foundational structure that will then give rise to a superstructure in which the class-determined 'content' of law will be elaborated.  If, however, you don't assume this relationship of exteriority, it makes sense to see the different levels of the structure as being imbricated, mutually articulated.  Ideology, politics, law, etc., are constantly iterating different aspects of productive relations in their own idiom, constantly intervening, constantly constituting and being constituted by those relations.  And I would say that the fact that there is a juridical iteration indicates that it is already a superstructural phenomenon.  In itself, accepting this way of looking at it doesn't have to pose a problem for the Pashukanis school.  It is quite possible for this juridical iteration of the commodity form to be a superstructural form and still comprise the cellular structure of law.  However, this does allow us to displace the problem.  With Pashukanis, we're trying to locate the materiality of the law in a property of the infrastructure.  Instead, we can now think about ways in which the mutual articulation of infrastructural and superstructural levels determines both the form and content of law.  And that means, we can allow that the form of law is determined by more than one property of the infrastructure, by more than commodity circulation - we can introduce, at different levels of abstraction, productive relations, the social and technical division of labour, the geo-economic unity of a social formation, class struggle and so on.

Moreover, it enables us to think the continuity and discontinuity of law in a far more specific way.  In the Pashukanisian scheme, the emergence and persistence of law is coterminous with the emergence and persistence of markets and commodity trade.  What persists is the basic legal form. Similarly, the change taking place between pre-capitalist and capitalist legality is seen mainly at a quantitative level: ie, in a shift from localised instantiations of the legal form to its universalization.  I think something more than a quantitative shift takes place.  Even at the level of the commodity form itself, there is a qualitative transformation.  In precapitalist, 'simple' circulation, the relationship of commodities to the social division of labour, and thus the commodity relation itself, is completely different.  Many of the inputs of existing commodities have not themselves been commodified; labour has not been generally waged.  The transaction is much more directly determined by political force, or rather by traditional rules, by notions of a 'fair price' arising from religious and political intervention appropriate to feudal social relations, and so it is not necessarily an exchange of equivalents.  In fact, unequal exchange in buying and selling must be considered the norm in pre-capitalist commodity circulation.  The relation of equivalency only seems to operate where the law of value operates; that is, where exchange value understood as the amount of socially necessary labour time embodied in a commodity, is operative.  That is, the commodity form only assumes the form of the exchange of equivalents, requiring the abstract legal subjects which we are invited to see as the universal grammar of law, under capitalism.  It is not that certain formal aspects of the exchange - the act of production for exchange, the use of an exchange medium, the juridical iteration of the exchange relationship - don't stay the same.  It is that the formal aspect which is supposed to ground the legal form changes entirely.

This makes it, I maintain, the wrong axis of continuity.  I maintain instead that we must have an account of law that can incorporate pre-capitalist legal forms: theological jurisprudence such as Shari'a, law that is derivative of religious ritual such as Roman law, different forms of customary law, the Hammurabi Code, etc etc.  That is, an account of law that can comprehend forms which are not predicated on an abstract formally equal legal subjects, whose subjects are explicitly hierarchically differentiated, and which are associated with imposition (thesmos) as much as contract (nomos).  It must allow us to encompass the dense networks of legal relations which in precapitalist as in capitalist societies extend well beyond the sphere of commodity circulation and are decidely not equitable relations.  Such an approach will of necessity not permit the conclusion that bourgeois standards of equality are embedded in the legal form itself at its most abstract level, in its 'timeless structures'.  The legal relation is only infrequently in history one between equal subjects or between equal rights, and then only in a certain abstract manner relating to certain social classifications (citizenship).  Far more pervasively, it is a relation between unequal subjects - not just unequal individuals but corporate subjects, states, and so on - unequally endowed with rights and obligations. 

The solution as I see it is to return to the concept of law as ideology; that is, as a particular element in a mode of production that is proper to the ideological superstructure.  Since the different levels and elements are always-already mutually articulated, their specific form and content (including the appearance of the 'relative independence', as per Franz Neumann, of the legal order) will depend on their articulation in a mode of production and the site of its realization, the social formation.  But that still leaves wide open the question of what kind of ideology it is, and why it takes form it does.  I have cited Althusser's claim that ideology comprises "material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals".  If one thinks of the actions of the police officer, the practices of the police bureaucracy, the rituals of the justice system (naturally, my mind gravitates toward HUAC, SISS, and other instances of ritualised repression, but arguably ritual governs the whole field), the action of the law does seem to conform to this characterization.  Of course, for Althusser, the materiality of ideology was inseparably coextensive with the materiality of the state: hence, ideological-state apparatuses.  So, it would seem appropriate to talk about the state.  To be frank, we cannot talk about law any longer without somehow referring it back to the state's constitutive action.

There is a misplaced concreteness that is invested in the state (including by Pashukanis), in which its materiality inheres in a machinery or instrument of domination.  But this spurious institutional determinacy, based on the 'public' kernel of prisons, armed men, etc., will not hold. The state spreads itself over a much wider field than this, and constitutes areas of life that are supposedly 'private' (in part through the very public-private binary that it sustains). The materiality of the state resides in the relations of forces that it condenses in its institutional sites of power and, through its practices, its action at various levels of the social formation.  Part of this action takes the form of symbolic production, moral regulation, the production of social classifications and, as a corollary, the punishment of symbolic and moral trespass, the disruption of its classifications, etc.  This means that violence is immanent to its action, whether or not violence is immediately deployed.  And it is in this sense that I argue that law occupies the position of an ideological relation within the state's strategic field.  It is in this sense that legality appears as both at one and the same time the dominant mode of legitimacy, of consensus, and the mode in which terror and repression is constantly brought to bear in shaping the social body.   

This brings me to my first attempt to say something definitive about law: Law is the dominant form of the dominant ideology concretized in practices which are permanently inscribed with political violence.  In saying this, I do not mean that the dominant ideology or the legitimacy of the law is simply uncontested.  Nor do I mean that the dominant ideology is just the ideology of a single class, and that therefore law is nothing but the execution of the 'will' or interests of that class.  Rather, it is through contestation and class struggle that the dominant ideology reproduces itself, not as a homogenous ideal substance but as a necessarily heterogenous formation comprising elements of popular ideology which have been absorbed and their oppositional character neutralised.  Poulantzas, strongly influenced by Gramsci, incorporated this into his theoretical architecture more successfully than Althusser.  To this extent, following Poulantzas, we can say that law is a juridical condensation of the relations of forces in the social formation that it rules.

But there is a peculiar characteristic of law as ideology, which is its imperative, axiological-deductive character.  Whether the law's application is 'deduced' from a civil code, a constitution, or from a body of 'common law', it takes the form of a chain of juridical logic, the unfolding of a set of determinations from a body of axioms and norms.  This is nothing other than a rationalized, predictable structure of domination and decision-making within the field of the state.  This rationalization is something that emerges from the double freeing of workers from the means of production, the social division of labour arising from this and the operation of the law of value as a homogenizing dynamic.  Its imperative aspect is accounted for by the immanence of political violence to its actualization.  Law in this sense is a mode of disciplinary power, an articulation of the dominant ideology (within a capitalist mode of production) with the political violence which secures its dominance. 

This brings me back to the question of formal equality.  I have said that law is usually not a relation between equal rights.  But the appearance of formal equality is not a bagatelle, not an optical illusion.  Rather, it does appear at different times in the sphere of legality, in certain forms of legal subjectivity.  Citizens are formally equal, even if capitalists and workers are not.  But it seems to me that this arises from the action of the political first and the legal second.  In terms of the formal equality prevalent in bourgeois democracy, it arises from a type of individualization created by the capitalist state.  The Pashukanis school argues that formal equality between empirically different individuals is strictly homologous with the formal equivalence between qualitatively different commodities.  In effect, (meaning, tendentiously put), the formal equality of individuals in law is a kind of exchange value of the subject.  But I think this takes for granted the individualization that it describes, and which forms the basis for the legal relation.

Either one must assume that the individuals thus mentioned are understood as 'biological' individuals (which I certainly think is implicit in Pashukanis, but is problematic because the existence of such individuals can in no way be just assumed), or the process of individualization must be assumed to have taken place through the commodity relationship itself (which I think is problematic because the relation between traders doesn't have to be a relation between individuals), or it must be something that emerges from the freeing of productive agents from territorial-personal bonds and the rupturing of the chains of signification cementing agents within that bondage. If it is the latter, as Poulantzas argues (I think convincingly), then this crucial link in the grammar of law is established by means of an effect of isolation which has roots in the atomization of productive agents in the capitalist division of labour, and is iterated at a juridico-political level by the capitalist state.  Thus, a capitalist type of individuality is produced.  And in the sense that individual subjects thus produced, juridico-political citizens, are all equally subject to the rule of law, formal equality prevails.  This is also simultaneously a totalising mechanism, inasmuch as these are subjects to the extent that they are incorporated within a national body, within the rule of law as such.

With this capitalist division of labour, the double freeing of labour from means of production, the replacement of tribute with the homogenisation of labour processes into abstract labour-time, comes a simultaneous granulation of social space into an imperfectly homogenised grid of locations (sites of production and consumption, as well as extended reproduction) in contrast with land-as-sovereign-body. The organization of production for surplus value entails rationalization, the bureaucratic standardization of units of space-time, the individualization and isolation of agents as competitive producers, the administration of production relations and thus of class antagonisms along scientific-rational and predictable lines. It entails the organization of political violence according to a system of rationalized axioms.  I think this accounts for the main chracteristics of law in its capitalist form.

This brings me back to the arguments from Thompson and Taylor which I was disputing at the start.  For they both correctly argue that the law is not just an instrument, but is also a field of contestation.  Yet they conclude from this that the law has a legitimate function which is the mediation of power, the suppression of violence, the containment of anti-social actions and so on.  What this misses is that law has this role only inasmuch as it is a mode of class domination: it only mediates class power inasmuch as it reproduces class power through its action; it only suppresses violence inasmuch as it is the organization of violence monopolized by the capitalist state; it only contains anti-social action in as much as the state defines, through the law, what is anti-social.  I said Thompson and Taylor don't fully break with the instrumentalist account of law and the state that they seem to reject, and this is true to the extent that their evaluations imply that the same apparatus can be inhabited and put to use by one or other class in support of any political objective; that any seeming structural selectivity is due to a misuse of the instrument which can be put right by proper use.  They also both greatly over-estimate and misunderstand the role of formal equity in the law.  It is not a promise that law makes, but which goes unrealised due to the distorting role of class power.  Rather, it is a juridico-political form which really does exist and is realised within the capitalist mode of production precisely as a mode in which the political and ideological dominance of the ruling class is secured.  That it is also the form in which this domination is provisionally and partially contested does not change this fundamental relationship.  To do away with class power is not to free law from its shackles and distortions, but to do away with law as such.

I spoke at a packed meeting at the 6 Billion Ways event today, on the subject of class and capitalism and their relevance to politics today. The socialist geographer Dorren Massey was, I think, the crowd favourite, not least for her note perfect impression of Ken Livingstone and her witty and detailed analysis of global capitalism and the effects of financialisation. Anthony Painter was representing for social democracy, I think. Though he accepted that class profoundly shapes people's life chances he is, as he said, more of a Weberian than a Marxist. He was sceptical of the analytical language of socialist critique, which he regarded as alienating, arguing that it was necessary to reach people emotionally. Phil McLeish drew on his experience of Reclaim the Streets and Climate Camp, arguing that it's more effective not to try to talk about capitalism directly, but to isolate processes within capitalism which one can directly mobilise against and have an alternative to. This is the speech which I hastily edited and cut down to a ten or fifteen minutes spiel. Much of it will be familiar to you:

The starting point for this discussion appears to be the question of whether a surfeit of single issue campaigns over specific problems is adequate in itself, or whether these need to be integrated into a broader analytical and practical framework addressed to recognising, opposing and eventually surpassing capitalism. Further, it seems to ask if class can be the concept, or antagonism, around which all of these seemingly distinct struggles can be organised.

First of all, I’ll try to say a bit about what I think class is, and how it relates to capitalism, because I think there’s a real mess of confusing and intimidating conceptions of class out there in the media. These often take class as a kind of status, based on levels of education and the prestige of one’s occupation – this is the version of class that is embedded in ‘social class’ statistics used by most pollsters and market research agencies - or a caste like nobility, or a pseudo-ethnicity, hence the ‘white working class’, a tea-towel memory of the sorts of communities that once exists in some form in the East End and elsewhere. Nor is it improved much by simply talking of class in terms of income distribution. We’re used to the usual shocking statistics concerning income distribution. I’ll cite some here.

In 2009, there were 10 million ‘high net worth individuals’, owning at least $1m in liquid assets – not illiquid assets like housing or cars – which comprises about 0.014% of the population. In the same year, ultra-high net worth individuals, owning at least $30m in liquid wealth comprised 36,000 people, or about 0.0005% of the world’s population. The total wealth held by all high net work individuals was $39 trillion, equivalent to about two thirds of global GDP in the same year. Another way to look at this is that increase in wealth held by this layer between 2008 and 2009 was $6 trillion, equivalent to approximately 10% of world GDP in that year. Now, if we just stopped there, we wouldn’t necessarily have come to an understanding of class. This would tell us about the assets that different actors could bring to bear in the market, and the rewards that they could generate from doing so, but that doesn’t automatically conduce to an argument about class. Perhaps another method will be hinted if I point out that in the UK, between mid-2009 and early 2010, some 89% of all new income produced went to profits – of £27bn produced, £24bn went to profits, and only £2bn went to wages. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, recently estimated that a combination of factors was producing a steep fall in the value of real wages, such that wages in 2011 would be at best no higher than in 2005. This was the first time since the 1920s that real wages had fallen over a six year period. So, that’s telling us something not only about the distribution of wealth, but about the distribution of wealth as a social product – ie as something that we all produce through our labour – as a result of the operations of a capitalist economy. In fact, one could go further: the share of GDP that goes to wages fell between 1974 and 2010 from 64% to 54%, a ten percent reduction.

Amid a revival of Marx in some quarters, I want to outline the approach that Marx offered to understanding how this works. For Marx, class was not best understood in a static way, by looking at hierarchies and income distributions. Rather, to find class, you had to look at the system as a whole and its evolution, or more particularly, its reproduction. And if you start by looking at how different actors contribute to the reproduction of the system, the existing relations of production as it were, you’ll understand the class system. Here’s a schematic way of approaching this. If you’re a wage labourer, you reproduce the system by selling your labour power as a commodity to a capitalist, someone who owns some means of production, and allowing them to extract a surplus from the exchange – a profit. Unless you subscribe to the ‘golden egg’ theory, a form of magical thinking integral to capitalism, the profit can come from nowhere other than your labour. If you’re a capitalist, you reproduce the system by purchasing capital assets, bringing them together with labour which you also purchase, and taking the commodities thereby produced to sell on the market. If you’re a successful capitalist, you’ll realise a greater share of the surplus produced than if you’re not. But if you just take the money you make, decline to invest it in new production, instead spend on having a good time, going bungee jumping and parachuting like some California teenager, you’re no longer a capitalist. You’re only a capitalist for as long as you’re putting your money into circulation as capital, in order to generate a surplus.

The conflict between these two groups, over the precise way in which surplus will be extracted, and the extent of that surplus, as opposed to wages, is the central conflict in capitalism which one might call ‘class struggle’.

But of course there are middling layers who perform various roughly equivalent roles in the reproduction of the system, who collectively comprise the middle class. You have middle and junior managers, professionals, small businessmen and lone traders. Together these comprise perhaps 20% of the total workforce – a controversial claim, perhaps, when we’re constantly told that we’re all middle class now, even though polls indicate that most of us don’t think of ourselves as such. The ‘old middle class’ mainly comprised small producers and professionals, but this has been in decline for some time, partly because of the concentration of capital, and partly because formerly professional occupations have been proletarianised; the ‘new middle class’ that arose in the mid-to-late twentieth century is just that apparatus of supervisors and managers who were basically built up to contain labour militancy and roll out greater discipline and productivity on the shop floor. They wield surrogate authority on behalf of the owners, just as professionals wield a broader authority in society, contributing to the reproduction of its dominant relations of production and divisions of labour. They’re not simply part of the capitalist class, and profits don’t make up the greater share of their income. But nor are their interests identical with workers, so in this sense they’re middle class and thus susceptible to varying alliances. In the past, professionals were overwhelmingly politically conservative; these days the majority are either Liberal or Labour. On the other hand, the lower middle class, small businessmen and so on, are overwhelmingly Conservative – this group formed the backbone of Thatcher’s electoral base in the 1980s, consistently giving her about 70% of their votes.

Well, the above is just an argument about how we can approach class and its wider relevance to social divisions and thus to politics, but we seem to need something else. Since we’re interested in questions of left-wing political formations, of how our campaigns can win wider support by being plugged into an overarching political framework, we have to find ways to concretely address the issue of how we relate to class antagonisms. There are different ways to operate on these, and you can see contrasting examples in the Labour Party. Phil Woolas, supported by the usual cortege of New Labour ideologues, thought that the best way to do this was to appeal to racism, social authoritarianism – his first election campaign was mounted on the basis of scaremongering about his Liberal opponent’s relaxed stance on drugs – and a politics of resentment, in which he claimed that the main form of racism in Oldham was anti-white racism. What he was trying to do was bring together socially conservative working class votes with economically liberal middle class votes, and build a coalition that way. It’s a microcosm of the New Labour approach which, though it lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, mostly working class and mostly under Blair’s watch, the basic idea of electoral coalition building, mobilise fractions of different classes into a viable electoral constituency, is a basic component of any political strategy.

The basis on which one does so depends, however, on national, regional, local, ethnic and religious contexts. This recalls Marx’s conceptual distinction between the base and the superstructure – the base comprising the aggregate relations of production, and the superstructure comprising, ideological, political and legal relations which give shape to and organise the base. This is rather important – ideologies and identities and so on aren’t merely so much vapour that will be dispelled as soon as the real core of class antagonism asserts itself. Rather, they are formative, they determine to a large extent how class is experienced. I’ll give you an example. The monarchy sits at the apex of a caste of viscounts, military commanders, dames, duchesses, barons, baronesses, knights, clerics and so on. Its relation to the productive system itself is tentative – I mean, the royal family runs successful businesses, but that’s secondary to their role. What the royals do is uphold a caste within the capitalist class, a system based on ‘honour’ – and popular conceptions of ‘honour’ aren’t really important here, we’re talking about gradations within elites, within the ruling class. Now this caste is based to a considerable extent on the history of imperialism, and its relation to today’s Commonwealth, which gives ideological shape to the global position of British capitalism. And it upholds an idea of Britishness that, while a recent invention, has the appearance of longevity and stability. It says, there will be wars and recessions, turmoil and strife, but the firm lives on. Britain lives on. And no good bourgeois wants to go to his grave without having been admitted to that noble caste. Give a CBI member a knighthood, and he will consider himself to have truly lived.

For those of us who work for a living, there are all sorts of other divisions, gradations, and so on, based on occupation, region, religion, ‘race’, gender, sexuality and so on. These differences structure our life chances and our experiences. Now if you take a campaign like Unite Against Fascism, and its sister Love Music Hate Racism. These are single issue campaigns, but they somehow resonate beyond their borders. What they do is operate on a concrete lived experience of multiculture – people who are already living in a hybrid, inter-faith, inter-racial, even inter-national situation, whose life experiences don’t conform to those of a pure white Englishness or Britishness, whose idea of culture is of a dynamic process in which we’re all involved rather than a series of competing blocs. And it seeks to say that this is a far more valuable and vital form of life than the sterile integrationist models of culture in which we’re all supposed to have the same basic values as David Cameron, or Richard Desmond or Her Majesty. In doing so, it’s intervening largely in areas where there has been industrial decay, where there’s a breakdown in employment and trade union organisation and a widespread insecurity that is causing some layers of the population to hark back to a ‘respectable’, stable Britain in which culture seemed uncomplicated and innocent, in which there was public order and discipline in schools, and so on. Such campaigns help the Left by preventing the Right from using racism and insecurity to build a wider hegemonic bloc, preventing them from incorporating new layers of, say, working class voters into their traditional mobilising base. And it also says that there are real issues of social justice and class antagonisms that are being avoided when people talk about race and culture. You can argue about how successful it has been, and I would say it has acted as a retardant, but the point is that this single issue campaign has wider ramifications for where society is going.

So, there are two key ways to relate single issue campaigns to a wider social framework, and that is first to have some sort of analysis of the situation in which you’re working – even if you the campaign isn’t avowedly anticapitalist, it always helps I think to be aware of the ways in which capitalism is shaping the terrain in which these issues arise and often producing them very directly. I don’t think you can talk about the ecological death-trap intelligently without somehow broaching the subject of capitalism, and class. Secondly, one has to be aware of how class and its various lived modalities is shaping receptions of your campaign. Even if you’re not going to say ‘this is a working class campaign’, which in many cases wouldn’t be appropriate, you are trying to work within class divisions to assemble a potentially counter-hegemonic bloc. And you also lastly have to be aware of ruling class capacities. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy or a unified social layer – it’s deeply divided. There are fractions of capital, and within those fractions there will be daily disagreements over proper strategies, as well as conflicting interests. But the ruling class does have some advantages. First of all, it is more cohesive than other classes: the sociologist Michael Useem referred in the 1980s to an ‘interlocking directorate’ – different companies would send upwardly mobile executives to sit on the boards of other companies – which provided the basis for a certain class-wide perspective and for political mobilisation. And business political mobilisation is a huge problem for any left-wing campaign. But it also has the state. The state isn’t just an instrument for the ruling class. Obviously, divisions among the ruling class don’t produce any single use to which such an instrument would be put. But while there are many capitalists, there is only one state, and what the state does is provide a certain amount of unity and cohesion to that class, partly by allowing a segment of capital to acquire hegemony, consensual direction over other fractions of capital, and impregnating the state with its imperatives and motives, and partly by placing statesmen and intellectuals in a position to give ideological direction to the capitalist class. As such, you end up with a state that almost invariably maintains, and furthers, the dominant relations of production, meaning that the state will usually not be on your side if you want to somehow curtail capitalist interests.

Those are some of the ways in which capitalism and class should shape our appreciation of political campaigns.

***

As usual in these events, the discussion afterward was far better than the talks, ranging from Egypt to the cuts, Wisconsin, Ken Livingstone and the Olympics, the politics of climate change, the wage labour relation, and so on.