‘A world which is not yet’: Peasants, civil society and the state

Abstract

Historically, the construction of democracy and ‘civil society’ has been linked by both the political left and right to struggles over property, the market and the State. What conservatives and neoliberals feared, and socialists hoped for, was that‘pure democracy’ would enable peasants and workers to capture the State, and thus use the latter to transform existing property and exchange relations. Having relied on the strong State to maintain its socio-economic privileges, the political right first opposed and then endorsed (representative) democracy, thereby combining a populist‘from above’ attempt to generate the support of workers and peasants with the idea of a strong capitalist State. Positioning‘civil society’ within the capitalist system, modernization theory sought the incorporation of peasants and workers into the bourgeois polity without, however, challenging existing traditional rural culture. The latter was the identity subsequently mobilized by‘new’ populist postmodernism to construct a concept of a locally-based agrarian‘civil society’ outside and against the capitalist State. Resisting – but no longer attempting to capture or control – the State, this form of ‘civil society’ seeks merely to establish or re-establish local and systemically non-specific forms of democracy. This, it is argued here, replicates the historical project not of the left but of conservatism and neoliberalism, and as such is politically disempowering for peasants and workers.

Notes

1 The words are those of Fred Bramley (1874–1925), cited by Winifred Horrabin in a review, published in the Daily Worker, of the book Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed 1926.

2 The photo is reproduced in Womack 1968: 206ff.] and Casasola 1985: 60].

3 Part of the ‘cultural turn’ that has bedevilled development studies over the past quarter of a century, the still fashionable ‘new’ populist postmodernism condemns the universals associated with history/progress and Enlightenment discourse as ‘foundational’, is anti-rationalist, anti-development, anti-science, and espouses nationalism. Its analytical framework conjures up nothing so much as the description by Samuel Butler in Erewhon of ‘The Colleges of Unreason’. Not only did the latter institutions possess ‘professorships of Inconsistency and Evasion’, where one of the objects of study was ‘the Completer Obliteration of the Past’, but ‘[o]ne man was refused a degree for being too often and too seriously in the right, while a few days before I came, a whole batch had been plucked for insufficient distrust of the printed matter’[Butler, 1932: 131–32, 133, 134]. Something akin to postmodern aporia is hinted at: ‘I ventured feebly to say that I did not see how progress could be made in any art or science, or indeed in anything at all, without more or less self-seeking, and hence unamiability. “Of course it cannot,” said the Professor, “and therefore we object to progress.” After which there was no more to be said.’

4 The theme of ideological consistency – the adherence to an underlying set of principles consistent with a given political philosophy – is one held by those on both right and left. Hence the following observation by the influential right-wing political theorist, Julius Evola 2002: 115]: ‘For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area… Tradition, in its essence, is something simultaneously meta-historical and dynamic: it is an overall ordering force, in the service of principles that have the chrism of superior legitimacy (we may even call them “principles from above”). This force acts through the generations, in continuity of spirit and inspiration, through institutions, laws and social orders that may even display a remarkable variety and diversity.’ From the other end of the political spectrum, the importance of adhering to underlying principles was confirmed by Trotsky 1936: 141, original emphasis]: ‘It was not flexibility that served (nor should it serve today) as the basic trait of Bolshevism but rather granite hardness. It was precisely of this quality, for which its enemies and opponents reproached it, that Bolshevism was always justly proud.’ Agreeing about the importance of principle does not, of course, mean agreement as to what those principles advocate.

5 An exception concerns the conditions justifying the expropriation of a landlord class. Such a policy was advocated by neoliberals at the end of the nineteenth century and modernization theorists mid-way through the twentieth on the grounds that national economic development (= capitalism) required this. It is important to note that the object of expropriation was in these situations limited to unproductive landlords – that is to say, taking land from large proprietors who did not (or would not) cultivate it and handing it over to peasants who would. This approach, in which one set of individual property rights gives way to another set of the same, must be distinguished politically from a Marxist programme, where all land (not just unproductive holdings) is confiscated by the State, which then becomes its sole owner. The object is the furtherance not of capitalism but of socialism. Similarly, property thus acquired is then made available not to enhance individual units of what are instances of peasant economy, but rather collective enterprises owned/controlled by the State.

6 Denying the relevance any longer of a left/right political distinction was a mantra uttered by many academic supporters of Tony Blair and New Labour. An influential example is Giddens 1994, for whom the rejection of this difference gave rise to his espousal of a ‘Third Way’ that transcended political distinctions between left and right. What he forgets, or – more probably – does not know, is that the ‘Third Way’ concept has long been an emplacement of reactionary discourse. For those on the political right, therefore, the notion of a third way – one that is neither capitalist nor socialist – has been a mobilizing ideology informing nationalist opposition not just to international socialism but also to international capitalism. The latter is held as much to blame as the former for undermining the traditional components of a specifically national culture valued and defended by the political right. That this is still the case is evident from mid-1970s Italy, where according to Rao 2006: 267] the slogan of Italian neofascists was ‘Né destra, né sinistra, Terza Posizione’. That is, ‘neither right, nor left, but a Third Way’, which is precisely what Giddens himself currently advocates. This is not to say that Giddens is a fellow-traveller of the political right – rather obviously he is not. It is to say, however, that he has unwittingly reproduced what is in fact a central tenet of rightwing discourse (for evidence of which, see Fiore and Adinolfi 2006), not least because – appearances to the contrary notwithstanding – the history of political theory is for him a closed book.

7 Hence the reference in the title to ‘a world which is not yet’. The latter expression is taken from comments made by Jack Common 1992: 3, 5] during the 1930s: ‘The socialist has the special problem of holding onto his vision of a world which is not yet, while maintaining himself in an environment which makes vision a handicap and tempts him to abandon it. What is behind the socialist parties and what assures their final victory is this vision of a new world; what ruins them all is that they must prove practical utility in the present capitalist day if they are to live at all. … Hence we have in this country a nominal Left which is incapable of supplying ideas of a revolutionising character, Marxist and revolutionary though it is in its literature and in a literary way’.

8 This is clear from the view expressed by Evola 2002: 127] that the ‘gap between the political idea of the State and the physical idea of “society” is found … in the opposition that exists between State and nation. The notions of nation, fatherland, and people …essentially belong to the naturalistic and biological plane and not the political one’. In much the same vein, a member of the French right [Barrès, 1970b: 193] argued at the beginning of the twentieth century that ‘[n]o Frenchman would ever intend to meddle with the State. But the State that has suffered from the lack of a national consciousness would be mad to neglect that sense of its own identity which every one of our regions has preserved.’ For a similar interpretation of the State/nation link held by another influential right-wing theorist, Carl Schmitt, see below.

9 In contrast to ‘representative democracy’, where voters in effect lose the capacity to control the person mandated the minute the vote is cast, the concept ‘pure democracy’ broadly speaking refers to a continuing ability on the part of those who mandate to exercise direct control over policy and political programmes. Unlike the mass of voters, individuals elected to represent them in a capitalist system can be and are either bought off or co-opted. This is especially true of the leadership of peasant movements, political parties that espouse parliamentary socialism or social democracy, and trade unions.

10 The concept of the nation as prefiguring the State, the latter taking its legal legitimacy from the former, underwrote much of the Catholic/nationalist/conservative theory developed during the 1920s and 1930s by Carl Schmitt about the political necessity of a strong State. Formulated as a reaction to working class mobilization during the 1919 German revolution, his view was that in law sovereignty derives ultimately not from what is written in the constitution but from whoever invokes a state of emergency – termed by him ‘the state of exception’– when government is itself challenged ‘from below’[Bendersky, 1983: 37]. The argument that ‘[n]orms or laws cannot be sovereign because they cannot decide when a state of exception exists, nor how to counteract it’ amounted to a legal justification of a rightwing coup d’état (‘who rules is right’) by a ‘sovereign’– the monarch, president or a strong leader – to restore stability/order in the name of ‘the people’ and (thus) in the interests of the nation [Bendersky, 1983: 25, 58, 122, 224]. Supported by a matrix of high-sounding but (when depoliticized) sociologically meaningless concepts – such as the ‘friend–enemy’ polarity (freund und feind) and the ‘enemy within’ (staatsfeind) – Schmitt conferred ideological legitimacy on the capture of State power in Germany during 1933 by the Nazi regime [Bendersky, 1983: 88, 90]. Not only did Schmitt declare ‘the one-party state to be the state of the twentieth century and … a step toward achieving the unity of the German people’, therefore, but he also ‘asserted that the Führer had the right, in moments of extreme danger to the nation, to act as the supreme judge, distinguish friend from enemy, and take appropriate measures' [Bendersky, 1983: 204, 216]. Significantly, all the legal arguments deployed by Schmitt to justify a coup d’état resulting in a strong State constitute a defence of what Trotsky 1975: 451ff.] categorized as ‘Bonapartism’.

11 On this point Furniss 1965: 3–4] notes that ‘there is another side to Mercantilism; underlying its international doctrines is a vast body of theory and policy dealing with the domestic economy of the nation and designed as a basis upon which to erect the outstanding structure of foreign policy. This phase of Mercantilism [1660–1775] is of interest because it illustrates the reaction of nationalism upon the class relationships and the life conditions of the people within the nation. It deals primarily with the position of the labourer in the economic organization of the country: with the formation of his rights and duties; with a statement of principles which should govern his standard of living; and, to a smaller extent, with a discussion of how much his wages will, or ought to, be.’

12 For details of this, see Furniss 1965: 75ff., 96ff.] and Rubin 1979: 35ff.].

13 ‘[D]uring the eighteenth century,’ observes Furniss 1965: 151–2], ‘the Justice of the Peace began more and more to assume the position of local autocrat … Decrees frequently partook of the nature of ordinances or laws appertaining to matters of minor importance in the Justice's district. This assumption of legislative function by the Justices made it possible for them to interfere in the social life of the labouring classes, by decreeing that amusements of various kinds would be punished by them as nuisances. Behind these decrees is frequently to be seen the class opinions we have been examining: the belief, namely, that the poor of the country should be obliged to live a life of toil. The fair, the gathering at the alehouse, were denoted as nuisances and suppressed as such, not alone, nor principally, because they bred riot and disturbance but also because they appeared most obviously to relax the industry of the labouring body and entice the workingman away from the “drudgery to which he was born”.’ On primitive accumulation in England, see Marx 1976: 873ff.].

14 For the concept ‘pure democracy’, see Canning 1820: 21–22], who objected because it would ‘sweep away every other branch of the constitution that might attempt to oppose or control it.’ It is also clear that what he understood by ‘the constitution’ was not an accepted form of and set of precepts for government but rather the existing ruling class – the monarchy, church, and aristocratic landowners [Canning, 1820: 21, 32]. Invoking the precedent whereby a popular assembly –‘when once that House of Commons should become a direct deputation, speaking the people's will, and that will the rule of Government’– abolished the monarchy during the 1640s Civil War, Canning 1820: 23–24] warned that ‘pure democracy’ would make it impossible for those with property to resist expropriation by those without (‘But to presume to reject an act of the deputies of the whole nation! – by what assumption of right could three or four hundred great proprietors set themselves against the national will?).

15 Hence the fears listed by Canning 1820: 6–7] as those felt by the ‘respectable’ elements following the protests that culminated in the 1819 Peterloo massacre, when ‘there was not a man of property who did not tremble for his possessions … there was not a man of retired and peaceable habits, who did not tremble for the tranquillity and security of his home … there was not a man of orderly and religious principles, who did not fear that these principles were about to be cut from under the feet of succeeding generations’.

16 That ‘pure democracy’ would eventually lead to an attack on existing property rights, a situation that would result in their transformation, was a connection explicitly made by Canning at that conjuncture. ‘I hold it frantic to suppose, that from the election of members of Parliament you can altogether exclude, by any contrivance, even if it were desirable to do so, the influence of property, rank, talents, family, connection, and whatever else in the Radical Language of the day is considered as intimidation or corruption,’ he [Canning, 1820: 28] accepted, ‘unless you have found some expedient for disarming property of influence, without (what I hope we are not yet ripe for) the abolition of property itself’.

17 Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822–88) was a conservative historian of jurisprudence, and Albert Schäffle (1831–1903) a political economist and conservative politician. Both were politically influential in their respective contexts. Although notionally supportive of ‘popular government’, the success of democracy in America was nevertheless attributed by Maine 1885: xi] to ‘have arisen rather from skilfully applying the curb to popular impulses than from giving them the rein.’ The United States is extolled much rather for its laissez faire and Social Darwinist policies [Maine, 1885: 50–52]: ‘The United States have justly been called the home of the disinherited of the earth … There could be no grosser delusion than to suppose this result to have been attained by democratic legislation. It has really been obtained through the sifting out of the strongest by natural selection … All this beneficent prosperity is the fruit of recognising the principle of population, and the one remedy for its excess in perpetual emigration. It all reposes on the sacredness of contract and the stability of private property, the first the implement, and the last the reward, of success in the universal competition. These however, are all the principles and institutions which the British friends of the “artisan” and “agricultural labourer” seem not a little inclined to treat as their ancestors did agricultural and industrial machinery. The American are still of opinion that more is to be got for human happiness by private energy than by public legislation’. Complaining that ‘Social Democracy owes its political influence to the introduction of universal suffrage, to the now possible procession of the myriad battalions of labour to the ballot box’, Schäffle 1892: xiii–xiv] warned that German socialism was ‘working zealously to win for itself still greater power by the weapon of universal suffrage: it is carrying on a campaign now in the country districts, and has declared war more fiercely than ever against its chief competitor for power by universal suffrage, namely, the Catholic Church.’ He continued [Schäffle, 1892: 126–27]: ‘I have desired to see a share of political life given to all adult and honest males. But I am also convinced that the political will of a nation needs yet other agents, and must be supplied with counter-poises; that a complete State-Organism can never result from the fluctuating decisions of the majority expressed through universal suffrage alone, and without being associated with any such efficient counterpoise; that the inevitable issue of disregarding this would be that most terrible and desolating of all despotisms, I mean mob-rule.’

18 According to Maine 1885: 24], in France ‘[t]he mob, which in 1848 overturned the government of the younger Bourbons … had also a leaning to Socialism; and the frightful popular insurrection of June 1848 was entirely Socialistic.’ The ‘mob’ is further characterized [Maine, 1885: 24] as politically ‘irreconcileable’, in the sense of being composed of plebeians who ‘refuse to submit their opinions to the arbitration of any government’, which licenses in turn the categorization of such agency as beyond the law (=‘illegal’). Violent suppression by the military, at the behest of the State, of the ‘mob’ that is ‘entirely Socialistic’ is thus deemed legitimate. That fear of a ‘from below’ challenge to existing property relations, as a result of being able to rule via the State, was at the root of the conservative objection to ‘popular government’ is clear from the following: ‘What is to be the nature of the legislation,’ asks Maine 1885: 44–45], ‘by which the lot of the artisan and of the agricultural labourer is to be not merely altered for the better, but exchanged for whatever station and fortune they may think it possible to confer on themselves by their own supreme authority?’. He answers his own question thus [Maine, 1885: 45]: ‘the belief that government can indefinitely increase human happiness, undoubtedly suggests the opinion, that the stock of good things in the world is practically unlimited in quantity, that it is (so to speak) contained in a vast storehouse or granary, and that out of this it is now doled out in unequal shares and unfair portions… Yet nothing is more certain, than that the mental picture which enchains the enthusiasts for benevolent democratic government is altogether false, and that, if the mass of mankind were to make an attempt at redividing the common stock of good things, they would resemble, not a number of claimants insisting on the fair division of a fund, but a mutinous crew’. His conclusion [Maine, 1885: 49] demonstrates a willingness – similar to that of neo-liberals currently – to countenance the use of coercion to drive ‘a mutinous crew’– artisans and agricultural labourers who dare challenge existing patterns of wealth, division of labour, and political authority – back to work: ‘No later than the end of the last century, large portions of the French peasantry ceased to cultivate their land, and large numbers of French artisans declined to work, in despair at the vast requisitions of the Revolutionary Government during the Reign of Terror; and, as might be expected, the penal law had to be called in to compel their return to their ordinary occupations.’

19 According to William Graham Sumner [Fine, 1956: 86], therefore, ‘a democratic state is in more danger of … interfering with property rights than any other type of state because it is so sure of itself and so ready to undertake anything. Rights, especially property rights, are safe only when protected against the exercise of all arbitrary power.’

20 W.H. Mallock (1849–1923), Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) and Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) were all writers who gave voice to conservative views. For the objection to ‘pure democracy’, see Mallock 1924, and on his importance for conservative ideology, see O'Sullivan 1975: 116–18] and Eccleshall, Geoghegan, Jay, and Wilford 1986: 103–4]. In a similar vein, Lippmann 1955: 34, 41] summarizes his earlier argument [Lippmann, 1922 thus: ‘The Western liberal democracies are a declining power in human affairs. I argue that this is due to a derangement of the functions of their governments which disables them in coping with the mounting disorder. … The conundrum springs from the fact that while The People as a corporate body are the true owners of the sovereign power, The people, as an aggregate of voters, have diverse, conflicting self-centred interests and opinions. A plurality of them cannot be counted upon to represent the corporate nation.’ Described as ‘one of the founders of the renaissance of the political right in America [who provided] a grounding for later developments in conservatism and libertarianism,’ Albert Jay Nock 1991: xxiii, 272] lamented that the ‘State was organized in this country [the USA] with power to do all kinds of things for the people, and the people in their short-sighted stupidity, have been adding to that power ever since’ (original emphasis).

21 As the example of Seldon 1990 indicates, Marxism remained a target of laissez faire conservative discourse even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

22 See Nock 1991: 228]. Invoking not just the Physiocrats but also Marx, he [Nock, 1991: 222ff.] characterizes every known historical form of the State as an institution simply for ‘economic exploitation’. ‘There is no State of which we have a record,’ he [Nock, 1991: 223] maintains, ‘that does not present the phenomenon of two distinct economic classes which have interests directly opposed; a relatively small, owning and exploiting class which lives by appropriating without compensation the labour-products of a relatively large, propertyless and dependent class.’

23 The chief architect of this conservative shift, embodied in the philosophy of ‘one nation’, was Benjamin Disraeli. His populist concept of Tory democracy emerged during 1835 in Vindication of the English Constitution, where it took the following form [Buck, 1975: 68–69]: ‘The English nation, to obtain the convenience of monarchy, have established a popular throne, and, to enjoy the security of aristocracy, have invested certain orders of their fellow-subjects with legislative functions: but these estates, however highly privileged, are invested with no quality of exclusion; and the Peers and the Commons of England are the trustees of the nation, not its masters.’ The same populist notion of trusteeship –‘we rule, but we rule for you’ (like Canning, a rejection of ‘pure democracy’) – underwrote British imperialism, for which peasants and workers ‘abroad’ were no different from agricultural labourers and industrial workers ‘at home’: not excluded politically, all nevertheless had to be represented by the ‘highly privileged’ whose sole function was – so Disraeli proclaimed – merely a disinterestedly legislative one. Like the Tories, the Whigs – Gladstonian liberals who supported advocated laissez faire policies – also sought to recruit grassroots support by stressing not just free trade but also the necessity of working class enfranchisement and the importance of an egalitarian politics (= freedom of opportunity). The attempt by bourgeois advocates of laissez faire policy to enlist the support of workers arose from what was perceived by liberals as a twofold challenge: from the Tories, and from organized labour.

24 Publications in the Cobden and Free Trade series designed specifically to secure plebeian backing for laissez faire included Cobden Unwin 1904, a compilation of oral histories by agricultural workers the object of which was to persuade rural labour how much worse off it had been prior to the repeal of the Corn Laws. By ending protection and opening up the domestic market to capitalist competition and thus cheaper foreign grain imports, so the argument ran, the price of bread declined, leaving agricultural workers with more disposable income. Making this connection between laissez faire and higher standards of living in the countryside, advocates of free trade attributed low wages, starvation and poverty simply to a wish by landlords and gentry to prevent competition so as to maintain high prices for their agricultural commodities. That it was industrial capitalists who sought to increase the demand for their own output as a result of this populist appeal for plebeian support is clear [Cobden Unwin, 1904: 265, 273–4, original emphasis]: ‘[F]rom the beginning of the French War until the repeal of the Corn Laws, a period of sixty years, this country was in a state of semi-siege. During the whole of that time an underfed people had to buy every article of clothing at the cost of further severe privation in feeding. Everything was bought at the expense of a hard sacrifice elsewhere. It is no wonder, then that the manufacturers of Manchester and Leeds found the home market inelastic, and that when, through improved machinery, they had cheapened the price of textiles, they were not recouped by increased sales. … The letters here published, numerous as they are, have been written by a very small portion of English men and women who remember the days of dear bread. To them … the ordinary feeling we associate with all age is reversed. They do not look back on their youth as a day of delight which they recall with vain regret, but as an Egyptian bondage from which they have been delivered. And just such people are in every village in the land.’

25 The wish to expand the number of landholders – by converting agricultural labourers into tenants – without expropriation of existing property or State intervention emerges clearly in 1890s laissez-faire policy on smallholdings [Bear, 1893: 87]: ‘It is doubtful whether cheap land, either for sale or for letting, will ever be available under the Small Holdings Act, and people, in these times, are not disposed to pay high prices. Land desired by a County Council would be likely to go up in price suddenly, and the authority has no power of compulsory purchase at a valuation – very properly not, in my opinion. For my own part, I fail to see why men should be set up in business as landed proprietors with public funds, and at the risk of the ratepayers. It is highly desirable that small holdings should be available to industrious and thrifty farm-labourers, as stepping stones to a career which would satisfy their reasonable ambition, and thus check an excessive drain of the rural population towards the towns. But, as a rule, the chances of advancement are much greater for men of this class from hiring a holding of moderate size than from purchasing a smaller one.’ The same text [Bear, 1893: 93] concludes by formulating policy recommendations along the same lines: ‘That the coddling system of manufacturing peasant-proprietors by means of State Funds, and at risk of the ratepayers, is calculated to do a great deal more harm than good, besides being unfair to the ratepayers and to farmers who will be dispossessed of some of their land to make room for new comers.’ In other words, by all means provide agricultural labourers with smallholdings, but not acquired on their behalf and paid for by the State.

26 Hence the remedies for the impact on agriculture of trade depression suggested by one exponent of laissez faire[Medley, 1885: 31–32] took the following form: ‘What is wanted in land is Free Trade. The laws and customs which govern the tenure, devolution, and occupation of land in Great Britain have favoured and stimulated its accumulation in few hands, have conferred on ownership privileges, and exemptions, and powers by way of entail and settlement, which are inimicable to good cultivation, and opposed to the public interest … The community is interested in having the land cultivated so as to give the largest possible return to the capital and labour bestowed upon it; and one of the first steps to be taken is the passing of a measure which shall facilitate the breaking up of encumbered estates, and thus promote the establishment of cultivating ownership.’

27 Universal suffrage was introduced throughout the twentieth century, especially after the wars of 1914–18 (Canada, USSR, Germany, Hungary, the UK and the USA) and 1939–45 (Italy, Japan, India).

28 The most obvious example being the fascist regimes that came to power in Europe and Asia during the 1920s and 1930s. Even after the defeat of fascism, many on the political right continued to justify their support for it in terms of a bulwark offered by a strong State against the ‘chaos’ of socialism or a democracy where the proletariat reigned supreme. A case in point is George Santayana, who – like Mallock and Lippmann (see above) – opposed ‘pure democracy’ on the grounds that ‘democracy is power exercised by the proletariat for its own benefit,’ adding [Santayana, 1952: 348–9] that ‘“Proletariat” is an ugly modern word for an ugly thing [,a] vast crowd of exiles in their own country whom the lure of industrial wages and town amusements has uprooted from their villages’. During 1950 he justified his support for Italian fascism in the following words [Cory, 1955: 405]: ‘Of course, I was never a Fascist in the sense of belonging to that Italian party, or to any nationalistic or religious party. But considered … a product of the generative order of society, a nationalist or religious institution will probably have its good sides, and be better perhaps than the alternative that presents itself at some moment in some place. That is what I thought, and still think, Mussolini's dictatorship was for Italy in its home government. Compare with the disorderly socialism that preceded or the impotent party chaos that followed it … Dictatorships are surgical operations, but some diseases require them’. It should be emphasized, however, that political theory justifying a strong State is neither specifically Prussian nor confined to the 1920s and 1930s, as confirmed by the following observation by a late nineteenth century English theorist [Maine, 1885: 20–21]: ‘I have now given shortly the actual history of popular government … I state the facts, as a matter neither for congratulation nor for lamentation, but simply as materials for opinion. It is manifest that, so far as they go, they do little to support the assumption that popular government has an indefinitely long future before it. Experience rather tends to show that it is characterised by great fragility … The convinced partisans of democracy care little for instances which show democratic government to be unstable. These are merely isolated triumphs of the principle of evil. But the conclusion of the sober student of history will not be of this kind. He will rather note it as a fact, to be considered in the most serious spirit, that since the century during which the Roman Emperors were at the mercy of the Praetorian soldiery, there has been no such insecurity of government as the world has seen since rulers became delegates of the community’ (emphasis added).

29 These two forms – strong State and populism – are not of course mutually exclusive; indeed, as fascism attests, a populist discourse can generate the desire for and thus legitimize the imposition of a strong State. A strategic need for those on the political right to construct a populist discourse that does not engage with either class or economic issues has long been recognized by conservatives themselves. A case in point is Julius Evola (1898–1974), a fellow-traveller of Italian fascism whose reactionary views – denouncing modernity and advocating a return to ancient ‘spiritual values’ and hierarchy – have influenced the Italian ‘new’ right. In order to avoid criticisms from the left, therefore, Evola 2002: 114–15] maintained that it was necessary for those on the right – like himself – to adopt a ‘general view of life and of the State that, being based on higher values and interests, definitely transcends the economic plane, and thus everything that can be defined in terms of economic classes’. He added that if ‘things were set up in this way, by absolutely refusing to set foot in the field where the Left trains its aim on the “faux target”, its polemics would be rendered totally ineffective.’ The significance of his concluding words [Evola, 2002: 231, original emphasis] on this subject is unambiguous: ‘In the contemporary era it is absolutely important that the struggle against a degenerate and arrogant Capitalism be waged from above– in other words, that the State will be the one to assume the initiative of mercilessly fighting this phenomenon and restoring normal conditions, rather than leaving to the Left alone the right of accusation and protest (which then are used to justify subversive actions).’

30 The popular texts in question were by Marcet 1833 and About 1872, each of which consisted of tracts about political economy aimed at rural workers, designed both to assuage them about laissez faire policies and to undermine support for a socialist programme. In the Radical Liberal programme of the 1880s, reprinted from The Fortnightly Review– which advocated ‘Free Church, Free Schools, Free Land and Free Labour’– Chamberlain 1885: 9] observed that ‘in some purely rural districts, where the condition of the agricultural labourers is worst, it will not be found impossible to run a working man's candidate, who ex hypothesi, will be hostile to the vested interests and privileges of landlordism, and, it is plain that even in the counties the chances of the Liberal party will have greatly improved.’ The same text went on to note [Chamberlain, 1885: 54, original emphasis]: ‘It is well that, before relations between the owners and the occupiers of the soil, between proprietor and peasant, are fundamentally readjusted, arrears should be wiped off, but even thus we shall only have arrived at the threshhold of the land question. The object of all land reform must be the multiplication of landowners … it may not be amiss to remind those who object to the multiplication of landowners as a revolutionary step, that its tendencies are distinctly Conservative. The greater the number of those who have an interest in the soil, the deeper will be the popular attachment to it. The conflict of interests will disappear; and our land system, instead of being, as it is now, the symbol of strife – the embodiment of the privileges of the few as opposed to the rights and aspirations of the many – will become a guarantee of class concord and harmony.’

31 This form of conditional access – having a voice in a bourgeois democracy – is recognized in terms such as the ‘engineering of consent’, and ‘manufacturing consent’; or, in Marxist theory, as generating ‘false consciousness. The shift in conservative thinking – a coming to terms with the inevitability of ‘popular government’, but at the same time a desire to place limits on its exercise by ‘those below’– is evident, for example, from an initial fear of populist rhetoric (‘the Wire-puller’), associated with the power of the ‘mob in the streets’. Its potential impact is described by Maine 1885: 30, 32–33] in the following words: ‘There is no doubt that, in popular governments resting on a wide suffrage … the leader, whether or not he be cunning, or eloquent, or well provided with commonplaces, will be the Wire-puller. … It is through this great natural tendency to take sides that the Wire-puller works. Without it he would be powerless. His business is to fan its flame; to keep it constantly acting upon the man who has once declared himself a partisan; to make escape from it difficult and distasteful … extensions of suffrage, though no longer believed to be good in themselves, have now a permanent place in the armoury of parties, and are sure to be a favourite weapon of the Wire-puller.’ Subsequently, however, conservatives saw no reason why they should not themselves take on the role of ‘Wire-puller’ and utilize this in order to generate plebeian support for their own discourse (nationalism, ‘popular’ capitalism).

32 The term ‘cultural reaffirmation’ is preferred to the more usual designation of ‘cultural renewal’. The latter involves merely the ideological privileging of cultural identity and discourse in the self-perception of the nation, whereas the former by contrast stipulates that this culture shall be of a specific kind: emblematic of a traditional and long-standing form of ethnic or national selfhood.

33 Hence the observation [Harris, 1978a: 223]: ‘There is much misunderstanding … of the classical conception of laissez-faire. It may therefore require emphasis that the theory and practice of liberal market economy always envisaged an indispensable role for government.’

34 A bourgeois economist whose defence of capitalism was based on the claim that accumulation was the outcome of ‘abstinence’ and not surplus extraction, Nassau Senior was much criticized by Marxists. See, for example, Marx 1971: 30, 353, 506; 1976: 333–34, 613–14, 744ff.], who described him as ‘a mere apologist of the existing order … who opposes the shortening of the working day’. Also Rubin 1979: 320–25], for whom Nassau Senior was ‘what one might call the economic barrister of the English factory owners, who found him a faithful assistant in their bitter fight against factory legislation.’ Writing in 1842, Nassau Senior 1863: 90] dismissed the opinion that ‘the duty of government [is] to regulate production, and promote an equivalent consumption [and that] the minister of commerce ought to direct, by perpetual course of regulations founded on accurate statistical facts, all the proceedings of agriculture and manufactures.’ Such views, he concluded approvingly [Senior, 1863: 92], ‘explain Bonaparte's contempt’.

35 His words [Senior, 1863: 7] are as follows: ‘there was no standard of value. To use, or even possess, metallic money, was a capital crime, and the only legal tender, the assignat, sank to about one four-hundredth part of its nominal value. The seller of a commodity was no longer allowed to fix its price: the price was to be determined by a committee, with reference solely to the ability of purchasers, whether the dealer could afford to sell at that price or not. To discontinue, or even to diminish, any accustomed trade, was to incur the crime of being “suspected”; and to be suspected was to be imprisoned; to be imprisoned was at one period to be massacred, and at another to be guillotined.’

36 For evidence of this fear, see Senior 1863: 131, 150]: ‘The Parisian populace had the love of tumult and the hatred of authority which belongs to the lowest classes in all great capitals, and the indifference to human life, the readiness to take it and risk it, which is peculiar to the mob of Paris.’ Hence the dismissal of the mass support for Robespierre [Senior, 1863: 38, 48]: ‘His desire of immediate applause led him to flatter the self-love of the Parisian mob, by an adulation of which no man with self-respect could have been guilty; to encourage all their most mischievous prejudices, and to stimulate all their worst passions. In any ordinary State of society such conduct would have been fatal to his prospects as a Statesman; but in a revolution, it gave him unbounded popularity, and popularity was power. … Experience has proved the mischiefs and the dangers, both to rulers and to subjects, of what has been called revolutionary government; that is to say, government by a single assembly representing the omnipotence of the people, and exercising or delegating to its own instruments all legislative and executive powers.’

37 On this Senior 1863: 63] observes: ‘Some branches of the legal profession may flourish under a despot … An army or a mob may give power to its chief; but that power cannot be safe until it is supported by legal forms, enforced by legal authorities.’

38 In ideological terms, this discourse licenses a relay in statement whereby all aspects of bourgeois rule are declared ‘natural’ (bourgeois State + bourgeois economic theory = political and economic wellbeing). On this point see Senior 1863: 49, 52], who observes that in France the 1795 constitution ‘provided against the most obvious of the disorders under which the previous governments had fallen. It provided against the dangers of universal suffrage by establishing indirect election… In a country in which the law had been powerless for nearly two years – in which property had been a ground for proscription – in which legal currency had been in a course of daily depreciation, while death was the punishment of those who ventured to refuse it, or even to take it at less than nominal value … the relations of individuals towards one another, and towards the property which had escaped confiscation, required to be ascertained.’ For Senior 1863: 53], therefore, the State controlled by plebeians and representing their interests necessarily corresponds to ‘a community unsupported by religion, delicacy or morality – in which virtues had so often been declared to be criminal, and crimes to be virtuous, that public opinion had been destroyed … in short, all the misery is exhibited of a society in which mere law is the only restraint.’

39 Hence the view [Senior, 1863: 58, 60] that ‘[t]he revolution which placed Bonaparte on the consular throne was unquestionably beneficial. The despotism which seems to be the inevitable result of military rule, was more tolerable than that of factions which owed to treason their rise and fall. Even the tyranny of the empire was as great an improvement on the intrigues and violence of the Directory, as the Directory was on the anarchy of the Convention.’ The reference to treason in the latter quote is most significant, in that it demonstrates how the nation and nationalist sentiments are mobilized against those who challenge property rights.

40 In his theory tracing the emergence of the State, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli 1885: Ch, XIV] maintained that the transformation of ‘being’ into ‘belonging’ corresponded also to a process whereby a ‘people’ became a nation and acquired equated ‘citizenship’. The characteristics associated with ‘citizenship’–‘the citizen body is felt to be a united and homogeneous class … the guardian of civic freedom, and of the equality of all before the law’– developed historically in the medieval town (‘young and pushing societies of free citizens’), but significantly these were also available to ‘free cultivators’ or ‘free peasants’ who had escaped servitude or never been unfree. Although this late nineteenth century interpretation of ‘being’/‘belonging’ derived from and was applied by Bluntschli to European (and principally German) history, it has influenced rightwing concepts of nationhood in Germany and India during the twentieth.

41 A symptomatic utterance in this regard is that made by a member of the British ruling class [Roberts, 1912: viii–ix, 14–15] just before the start of the 1914–18 war: ‘It is also for my countrymen to decide upon a far mightier issue; for this self-governed, free, and democratic State of England is for all its citizens to assert whether, in this matter of war and preparedness for war… I appeal above all to the young men of this nation, to our young men of every rank and social status, to young men of every trade and profession and calling of any kind… It is they, in a word, who now are England. … Much has been said recently of the rights and the power of the workers of this nation. We all, I hope, belong to that class – workers – but the artisan class of the nation has been urged – and to you, the working men of Manchester, I now specifically address myself – you have been urged, I say, to refuse to do your duties in war until your rights in peace are granted. Gentlemen, I say to you, that is not the policy either of Britishers or of men. I will go further: I say to you that it is not by declining or shirking duty that you will extend your rights. He who diminishes the power and vital resources of Great Britain diminishes the power and vital resources of every Britisher. How can you most easily and most securely better yourselves as Britishers – as working men? By making England better, by making it better worth your while to be a citizen of, and a worker in that nation! … I say to you, therefore, assert your rights as Britishers by demanding the greatest, the highest of all civic and of all national rights – the right to be taught to defend your country – the right, that is, to defend your own honour as Britons and your liberties as citizens of this Empire. Thus, and thus only, shall you be worthy of that Empire's great past and of the dignity which that past confers upon every man of you, whatever your position in life may be.’

42 This is evident, for example, from the way in which the same Lord Roberts appealed to working class patriotism and invoked the views of socialists when urging the adoption of measures to counter German military strength during 1912. He cites [Roberts, 1912: 4–5, note 1] with approval the chauvinistic words of H.M. Hyndman (‘Are the English people mere children thus to be fed on the pap of fatuous pacificism [sic] … at one of the most serious crises in the history of our race.’). The impact of this trend at that conjuncture, and especially the way in which nation and State were fused ideologically, was described by another socialist, Belfort Bax 1967: 195–6]: ‘One of the most striking phenomena of social change in the present generation, the counterpart of the rise and domination of Imperialism in politics, is the installation of imperialistic or patriotic sentiment … This was noticeable enough before the war, but the war, of course, has thrown it into strongest possible relief. In how many thousands of those who have volunteered for the front do we not find the ideal object for which they are prepared to sacrifice themselves to be England or the British Empire. And yet how many of those who profess, and sincerely profess, attachment to England as their ideal object, if they thought a little, would not have to admit that there is much in England, politically, socially, and morally, of which they disapprove! Yet this does not prevent the ideal of nationality from dominating their whole emotional being. … For the religion of Patriotism, the national or Imperial State is the ultima ratio. It does not recognize any organism or collectivity as object of conduct higher than the State. Humanity is for it a mere phrase. The solidarity, moreover, of those scattered through many existing States, holding like views and like aspirations, never suggests itself to it as perhaps an intrinsically higher object of conduct than any existing State … The only alternative to this erection of imperialistic jingo sentiment, under the name of Patriotism, into a religion, is Socialism.’

43 On ‘peasant nations within the nation’, see Brass 2007c.

44 This was the sentiment deployed by Lord Roberts 1912: 39–40] in his reply to the internationalism of his socialist critics. Democracy, he claimed, meant that plebeian elements had replaced the landowning class as rulers of the nation, and as such must now shoulder the traditional historical obligation of defending their country. In his words, ‘[t]he assertion advanced by Mr Blatchford in criticizing my Manchester speech, that the working men of Great Britain will never hear of compulsory [military] service because they distrust the ruling classes, rests upon a misconception … I shall only observe in this place that in a democratic nation the working classes are themselves the ruling classes, and that the interests of England and of the Empire are their interests … In former times, when the ruling classes of this nation consisted in the very deed of the men of birth and property, that class considered it as its sacred right and inalienable privilege to serve the nation in war. Now, in the twentieth century, when the working men of this country have by the gradual extension of the franchise succeeded to the political influence and supremacy of the old aristocratic class, is it too much to hope that, as their condition of life improves, they will seek in the same spirit to secure that right and the inalienable privilege – service in war? For such service is the only mark of the true and perfect citizenship.’

45 Hence the following view [Fine, 1956: 60] advanced by laissez faire theorists in the United States: ‘The idea that the worker should be paid a living wage, rather than the market wage as determined by the laws of the universe, is pure and simple communism’.

46 This was a trend highlighted in titles such as The Servile State, The Road to Serfdom and 1985 – An Escape from Orwell's 1985: A Conservative Path to Freedom, books by, respectively, Belloc 1913, Hayek 1944 and Boyson 1975.

47 See von Mises 1945 and the debate between the contributors to Dickinson, Acton, Smith, Polanyi and Worswick 1948.

48 For an expression of this conservative fear, see Hutton 1960: 99], who complains: ‘Too much State activity, too rapidly, means too much State spending. Too much State spending too fast means a rapid multiplication of State controls to stop private spending: that is, restrictions on production and consumption plus higher taxes’ (original emphasis). The same source continues [Hutton, 1960: 101]: ‘In the mythology of the [European] Left … inflation as a policy is treated as a way of expropriating “the capitalists”, as well as a way of securing perpetual “full employment” and economic growth by forced savings. Higher taxation of these same capitalists (mainly companies) is then made to yield – among other things – enough to recompense pensioners and other “reputable” receivers of fixed money incomes (e.g., small savers) for the inevitable loss of their purchasing power year by year.’ The same point had been made a decade earlier, by Hayek 1967: 270ff.].

49 Since concern about the future of capitalism in the post-war world centred on the advance of socialism, the latter became the target of this neoliberal counter-attack [Hartwell, 1995: 10, 15]. This was effected by means of right-wing think-tanks like the Mont Pelerin Society, which included Hayek and Röpke amongst its membership. Founded in the late 1940s, its task was specifically one of ‘discrediting socialism’[Hartwell, 1995: xii, xv]. Opposed not just to socialism but also to planning and State intervention, its official history [Hartwell, 1995: xiv] boasts that ‘[i]t was thirty years before the intellectual tide turned against socialism, and in that period the [Mont Pelerin] Society played an important role in eroding its intellectual foundations.’

50 de Jouvenel 1951, Röpke 1960 and Hutton 1960– exponents of laissez faire linked to neoliberal organizations such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Mont Pelerin Society – all attacked the role of the State in fostering income redistribution through taxation and inflation. This was attributed [Hutton, 1960: 51] in turn to the privileged access to the State on the part of organized labour, a result of which was that ‘[t]herewith came acute bitterness, a sense of inequity and injustice, envy, and much hostility. Therewith, too, came the arbitrary altering of rewards, “differentials” of different trade unions and their members, and social and industrial unrest.’ The conclusion was unmistakable: ‘Thus within British democracy social tensions and political fissures were developed by inflation akin to those created in the ancient world and in other modern countries: tensions and fissures capable of undoing democratic society itself.’

51 Hence the admission [Hutton, 1960: 132] that ‘the modern world in any case does not seem to have much time or much room for democracy, representative government or a free society.’ This implicit threat was repeated subsequently by Hayek 1973, Salomon 1983, and the contributors to Harris 1978b.

52 See below for a consideration of how unfree labour related to ‘citizenship’ is conceptualized by cliometric historiography, the semi-feudal thesis, and the subaltern studies project.

53 For details and discussion of these instances, see Brass 1999; 2004, Assies 2003, Bedoya Garland and Bedoya Silva-Santisteban 2005a; 2005b. Interesting overviews of recent debate about free and unfree labour can be found in Ortiz 2002 and Rau 2006.

54 Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that the Reserve Bank of India now proposes – in all seriousness, one has to presume – that rural moneylenders should become part of the official banking system, and as ‘accredited loan providers’ should be in charge of passing on the loans made available to small peasant cultivators by the commercial banks. See ‘Moneylenders as Agents of Development?’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 31, 4 August 2007, pp. 3187–88. As the latter source points out, ‘[t]he increase in the share of moneylenders in the outstanding debt of rural households [in India], from 17.5 per cent in 1991 to 29.6 per cent in 2002, is not a case for promoting the moneylending class as an agency that would solve the credit problems of the poor.’ Not only does this proposal ignore the long history of the negative impact of moneylending on rural economic development, but it also overlooks the degree to which indebtedness enhances – not diminishes – rural poverty. This it does, in time-honoured fashion, by separating cultivators from their means of production and then forcing down the wages they receive as agricultural workers.

55 This was the position taken by William Graham Sumner, the principal exponent of laissez faire in the period following the American Civil War, of whom Fine 1956: 88] notes that ‘in actuality the only type of [State] interference he approved was that designed to undo the work of past reformers and to throw man back upon nature’.

56 The view was that of Cowling 1978: 9], expressed in a collection of essays marking the rise to power on the UK political right of Margaret Thatcher.

57 It is clear that enthusiasts of laissez faire policy see ‘civil society’ as both outside the State and simultaneously an alternative to it, in terms of a ‘natural’ form of ‘voluntary’ resource provision that is ‘non-political’. Advocating a return to the kinds of ‘assistance’ extended to the poor in the nineteenth century, neoliberals such as Gray 1992 and Green 1993; 1996 identify ‘civil society’ as a desirable source of ‘welfare without politics’, a concept associated with the dubious rubric of ‘non-political community’. In this way, not only can individuals in a local community be said to be exercising ‘choice’ about whether or not to provide less well-off members with subsistence provision, but also – and more significantly from the view of a laissez faire approach – how much. The latter can thus be achieved without drawing on State revenues, thereby avoiding the necessity of either taxing or expropriating property belonging to the rich.

58 For critiques of the ‘cultural turn’ by Marxists who did not join the headlong rush into the postmodern camp, see Brass 2000a, Petras 1990, and Veltmeyer 1997. It is difficult to convey the extent to which the idea of state intervention and planning in so-called Third World countries was discarded as a result of this twin onslaught (postmodernism, neoliberalism). Perhaps the best way of illustrating the full measure of this epistemological (and political) shift is to cite the words of Doreen Warriner, an earlier and non-Marxist development theorist who made extensive studies of the peasantry. About the link between rural poverty, property relations and culture in the Middle East after the 1939–45 war era, she wrote [Warriner, 1948: 1] as follows: ‘Near starvation, pestilence, high death rates, soil erosion, economic exploitation – this is the pattern of life for the mass of the rural population in the Middle East. It is a poverty which has no parallel in Europe, since even clean water is a luxury. Money incomes are low –£5 to £7 per head per year – but money comparisons alone do not convey the filth and disease, the mud-huts shared with animals, the dried fuel dung fuel. There is no standard of living in the European sense – mere existence is accepted as standard. This poverty has become a familiar background in recent years, and as a result of the war in the Middle East area the question of how to raise the standard of living has emerged. In the past students of the Arab world have treated this poverty reverently as a “way of life”, as part of an Arab mystique, and accepted it as fatalistically as its victims do. By these experts it is believed that to talk of raising living standards is to use criteria which do not apply, and which vitiate the real values of Arab society. This is a natural attitude for those who have found in the Arab world some social values which Western civilization fails to provide, and who are concerned to preserve them. But to emphasize the squalor of life in the Middle East is not necessarily to deny that it has other qualities as well; and if we urge the need of raising the material standard of living, that does not mean that we also urge the general application of the other standards of the West. It is simply to recognize the fact that poverty is an evil in this world as in ours, and that it must be overcome, in order to realize any way of life, as distinct from a sordid struggle for existence’. A decade later, this battle appeared to be won, and in the Preface to a subsequent book Warriner 1957: vii] felt able to note that although ‘[t]he poverty is not out of date … the perspective has changed. There has been development, far more than seemed possible ten years ago. Then it seemed necessary to justify the belief that poverty was a matter which should concern the Arab countries and the West. Today [= 1956] such justification is no longer needed. It now seems more important to stress the dynamics of change, as they affect the poor, rather than to study underdevelopment as a static condition, the only approach to the region which seemed possible in 1947’. What her comments would have been on current approaches to development, influenced by a postmodern rejection of the concept itself as ‘Eurocentric’, ‘foundational’ and ‘orientalist’, one can only guess. She would most certainly have identified them as a reversion to those very paradigms –‘experts [who] believed that to talk of raising living standards is to use criteria which do not apply’– criticized by her sixty years earlier.

59 This theme – about the centrality of property relations to the discussion by the Army Council of future representative government – is ably summed up by Brailsford 1961: 267ff.] and by Foot 2005: 3–44], while the full text of the Putney Debates is contained in Woodhouse 1938. The fear on the part of those who owned – and might lose – property was expressed by Ireton thus [Brailsford, 1961: 276]: ‘All the main thing that I speak for is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come to contend for victory – but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take away all by that.’ Uttered by Colonel Thomas Rainborough on 29 October 1647, the memorable words that encapsulate the radical politics of the Putney Debates are as follows [Woodhouse, 1938: 53]: ‘For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under’. However, as Foot 2005: 35] points out, ‘Rainsborough's “right to live”, which he claimed for the “poorest he”, referred to political rights, not to economic rights. The Levellers were very much for liberty and fraternity. But they were not at all sure about equality. They shrank from the conclusions of their contemporary Gerald Winstanley, who campaigned for a world in which property was held in common. The earth, predicted Winstanley in a 1949 pamphlet … would one day become a “common treasury”. Winstanley, by far the most advanced political thinker of the English Revolution, developed his communistic theories into a full-blown political philosophy. He argued that true liberty was impossible while property was unequally distributed, and called on the common people to take action to create a new egalitarian world.’

60 Accepting that ‘[c]ivil government supposes a certain subordination’, Adam Smith 1812: 74–5] gives as one of the reasons for this ‘the superiority of fortune’. He elaborates thus [Smith, 1812: 73–4]: ‘Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.’ In a similar vein, McCulloch 1830: 84–5, 88, 288] upholds the principle of laissez faire (=‘non-interference’) while arguing that the main role of government is to guarantee property relations: ‘The finest soil, the finest climate, and the finest intellectual powers, can prevent no people from becoming barbarous, poor, and miserable, if they have the misfortune to be subjected to a government which does not respect and maintain the right of property. This is the greatest of all calamities. … let us not, therefore, deceive ourselves by supposing that it is possible for any people to emerge from barbarism or to become wealthy, prosperous, and civilized, without the security of property. … It cannot, however, be too strongly or too often impressed upon those in authority, that non-interference ought to be the leading principle of their policy, and interference the exception only; that in all ordinary cases individuals should be left to shape their conduct according to their own judgment and discretion … The maxim pas trop gouverner should never be absent from the recollection of legislators and ministers.’

61 In a programmatic analysis that in many ways anticipates the position taken by Chayanov, the conservative politician and political economist Schäffle 1892: 275–77] argued as follows: ‘Propertied labour, at any rate in Germany and Austria, still forms by far the largest portion of the whole of productive labour. It includes the peasantry and the artisans, with almost all their families and belongings. Towards these the State has merely a positive protective task to fulfil, in furthering the private and associated organization of credit … The Social question par excellence is the question of the retention of the peasant-class. Popular collective production, as opposed to peasant proprietorship, is open to the very gravest doubts as to whether it would work better industrially, that is, more productively, and, by cheapening the necessities of life, more advantageously for the masses of the people, at the same time securing to each producer and his family the whole result of his labour. It is highly probable … that democratic collective production would be rather less productive than peasant industry, wherever it is free from a load of unproductive debt. With the latter important proviso, of keeping free from unproductive debt, the peasant-class has not been and cannot be chained or impoverished by capital. The peasant with his family is proprietor and labourer in one person, and himself draws the whole of the results of his labour: property does therefore secure the very thing which Socialism promises but cannot safely guarantee. We are therefore far from having proved that the destruction of the union of property and labour in the peasant-class is inevitable’ (original emphases).

62 For this debate over whether or not socialists ought to attempt to seek the support of peasant proprietors, see Salvadori 1979 and Hussain and Tribe 1984. As is clear from the arguments currently advanced by Unger (see the contribution to this volume by Petras and Veltmeyer), this debate continues to be relevant.

63 The most complete account of the 1920s debate in Russia between agrarian populists and Marxists is to be found in Solomon 1977, an important source that has influenced much of the subsequent discussion on the subject. Centrally about the transformation of social relations in the countryside and the resulting impact on economic growth, this discussion about the socio-economic differentiation of rural community goes back to debates between populists (Engel'gardt, Uspenskii, Vorontsov, Chayanov) and Marxists (Plekhanov, Lenin) in Russia and elsewhere from the 1860s onwards. Then the debate concerned the future political and economic role of peasants following serf emancipation, and was answered differently by populists and Marxists.

64 The best known of these was the Russian neo-populist Chayanov 1966.

65 Examples of this kind of argument can be found in Shinn 1987 and contributions to the volumes edited by Eklof and Frank 1990 and Kingston-Mann and Mixter 1991.

66 The classic Statement of the Bolshevik argument about the socio-economic differentiation of petty commodity production by capitalism is Lenin 1964.

67 His own social background in Pakistan gave Alavi a unique insight into the significance of educated middle class in post-colonial societies, and in particular its crucial political role.

68 For the details of this, see Alavi 1975.

69 He identified three competing propertied classes struggling for control over the state in Pakistan: an indigenous (= domestic) bourgeoisie, a neo-colonial (= foreign) bourgeoisie, and indigenous landowning class, frequently (and in his view, wrongly) labelled ‘feudal’ or ‘semi-feudal’.

70 On this, see Alavi 1982b.

71 This was linked in turn to his view [Alavi, 1965; 1973a; 1973b about the revolutionary role of peasants in post-colonial societies. Since no opposition to imperialism could be expected either from an indigenous bourgeoisie or a landowning class, any struggle against capitalism and for socialism in so-called Third World societies would of necessity have to be led by the rural masses in general, and the peasantry in particular. On the basis of his study of agrarian mobilizations in pre-revolutionary Russia, in mid-1920s China (the Hunan movement), and in India during the mid-1940s (the Telegana and Tebhaga movements), Alavi maintained that middle peasants were ‘the most militant element of the peasantry’. This theory not only anticipated the ‘middle peasant’ thesis applied subsequently by Eric Wolf 1971 to peasant movements in other contexts (Mexico, Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba), but also departed from the classic Marxist argument that in the countryside of so-called Third World societies it was the poor peasant who was the main revolutionary subject.

72 Although the view that ‘feudal’ structures were no obstacle to the growth of capitalist farming has been vindicated, some of his other arguments were challenged by subsequent developments. This was the case with the specificity attached to what was identified as the colonial mode of production. Similarly, the view [Alavi, 1964 that the object of neo-colonialism, or the new imperialism, was not the export of capital to exploit cheap labour in the Third World has difficulties when confronted by what came to be seen as the new international division of labour. What is not open to dispute, however, is the influence of these ideas on those writing at the time about the peasantry and peasant movements. This is especially true of a series of important articles published from the mid-1960s onwards [Alavi, 1964, 1965, 1971, 1975. Their impact during the decade that followed is evident both from the anthologization and translations of his work [Alavi, 1976; 1988a; 1988b, and from its critical application to non-Asian contexts [Saul, 1974.

73 Russian oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich (worth £10.8 billion in 2007) made their huge fortunes as a result of the privatization of valuable State assets (oil, industry) during the early 1990s.

74 It is estimated that Carlos Slim, who purchased the State-owned Mexican telecommunications company in 1990, is worth as a result in excess of US$60 billion. See ‘Mexican monopolist's fortune leads the world’, Financial Times (London), 6 July 2007.

75 On this, and in particular the role of senior army officers as the ‘new land barons’, see Siddiqa 2007.

76 Modernization theorists [Verba, 1989: 399] described ‘civic culture’ thus: ‘[It] focused on those political attitudes that would be supportive of a democratic political system. The assumption was that a number of forces led to the development of such attitudes – education; the democratization of nongovernmental authority systems in the family, the school, and the workplace; general trust in one's fellow citizens.’ This ‘civic culture’, observed Almond 1989: 16], was a ‘rationalist-activist model of democratic citizenship … conceived in the aftermath of World War II. The events of the 1920s and the 1930s and the reflections of social theorists on those events informed their political theory. The tragic collapse of Italian and particularly German democracy and their subversion into participant-destructive manias … were the powerful historical experiences contributing to this more complex theory of the relationship between political culture and democratic stability.’ The irony here is unmissable: the construction of ‘civil society’ that wished to avoid the fascist mobilizations of the pre-war era nevertheless failed to challenge the very discourse – the enduring cultural link between peasant/nation/Nature – which underwrote those reactionary politics.

77 In his lengthy and hugely over-optimistic account of democratic ‘stability’ in India following decolonization, therefore, Weiner 1967: 482ff.] commends the Indian National Congress for its capacity not to transform but to ‘adapt’ to existing cultural practices. In his words [Weiner, 1967: 15]: ‘In its efforts to win, Congress adapts itself to the local power structures. It recruits from among those who have local power and influence. It trains its cadres to perform political roles similar to those performed in the traditional society before there was party politics. It manipulates factional, caste, and linguistic disputes … It utilizes traditional methods of dispute settlement to maintain cohesion within the party.’

78 Modernization theory is associated with the work of mainly US political scientists, the most influential of whom – Gabriel Almond, Edward Shils and Samuel Huntingdon – were anti-communist cold warriors intent on formulating an alternative to socialist politics in the Third World [Leys, 1996: 9–11]. It assumed a positive correlation between democracy and economic growth: either the former made the latter possible, or economic growth facilitated a ‘deepening’ of democracy. In what was a political equivalent of the ‘trickle down’ theory, the supposition was that economic development would automatically reinforce political democracy, since national ‘elites’ who delivered higher living standards to the masses would no longer have anything to fear from them in terms of their political parties, the franchise and the secret ballot. In such circumstances, an economically successful ‘elite’ might expect to remain in power, through its control of the state apparatus, since participatory decision-making would present no threat to capitalist property relations. Among those who have studied the peasantry in Third World countries using this kind of approach are Mair 1963, Rogers 1969, and Huizer 1970.

79 In the Third World where ‘villagers are becoming dissatisfied with eating the cake of custom’[Rogers, 1969: 2], (bourgeois) political consciousness formed by (a bourgeois) mass media was perceived as a ‘positive good’. Hence catalytic role of mass media and knowledge about politics in the causal link (mass media exposure → greater political participation → national citizen → political modernization) structuring the analysis by Rogers 1969 of the way in which Colombian peasants underwent a transition from tradition to modernity. In his view [Rogers, 1969: 56, 111], ‘such political awareness probably indicates … a distinct feeling of being a part of a nation's citizenry, and at least a minimal degree of political modernization… Mass media exposure is positively related to political knowledge … in less developed countries the mass media are powerful transmitters of political news, creators of meaningful citizen interest and participation in politics, and developers of nationalistic spirit. Present findings suggest this belief in the role of the mass media in political modernization may well be justified.’

80 This epistemology underwrote the development model of Lerner 1958, a modernization theorist who influenced the analysis by another such [Rogers, 1969: 44–46] of the Colombian peasantry.

81 That fear of a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, and its replacement with socialism, was uppermost in the minds of modernization theorists during the 1960s is evident from a concern with what was termed ‘revolution and political instability’ in rural areas of the Third World. Hence the following observation by one such [Rogers, 1969: 23]: ‘The political stability of national governments in less developed countries depends in part upon the public opinion of their peasantry … [p]easant attitudes toward government must change in order for the national governments of less developed countries to attain a relative degree of political stability’.

82 This is a lesson that the US is currently being taught yet again in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Characterized as ‘blowback’, it entails the recognition of the fact that traditional social forces and ideologies mobilized against socialism – armed, financed and supported politically by the US itself – frequently include in their condemnation of modernity (for eroding the cultural ‘otherness’ specific to a particular ethnicity or nationalism) not just socialism but also neoliberalism and bourgeois democracy.

83 Some modernization theorists were aware of a potential contradiction, but failed to consider the implications of this, let alone give it political importance. Thus, for example, Rogers accepts that regarding nationalism as a positive aspect of modernity may indeed trigger a return to pre-modern ideology. In his view [Rogers, 1969: 378], it ‘is possible that nationalism may motivate certain expressions of neo-traditionalization, the process by which individuals change from a modern way of life to a more traditional style of life.’

84 Hence the break with Marxist categories by social scientists in Yugoslavia from the 1950s onwards was praised by Halpern and Hammel 1969: 24] as ‘pragmatic eclecticism’, in particular the role of intellectuals in recuperating ethnic categories (folk = people = peasant) deployed in the construction of an independent Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference after the end of the 1914–18 war. Despite noting that [Halpern and Hammel, 1969: 18]‘the nation-state sought its ultimate rationalization not so much in literate urban traditions … but in native (folk) institutions and traditions which had survived invasion and foreign political dominance,’ the populist lineage of this discourse and its reactionary political history are deemed unproblematic. Much the same observations were made subsequently regarding Soviet ethnographic literature, similarly commended by Dunn 1975: 69] as a ‘new departure’, where ‘on the theoretical level, even though the Marxist terminology remains largely intact, important conceptual shifts have taken place … in terms of ideological “culture” and self-awareness and in the recognition that per se it is independent of political or economic factors, or even of the type of social order prevailing in a certain place at a given time’.

85 As the Pan-Africanism of Padmore 1953; 1956 underlines, what passed for ‘African Socialism’ in the pre-colonial era was invariably nothing more than petty bourgeois nationalism which was strongly antagonistic to Marxist theory and socialist politics. For a discussion of ‘African Socialism’ at that conjuncture, see the contributions in the volume edited by Friedland and Rosberg 1964. The unwarranted optimism of modernization theory is evident from the observation [Friedland, 1964: 29] that ‘[o]ne index is the hostility of modern political leaders toward tribes and tribalism. While political leaders emphasize traditionalism in certain contexts, they are intensely anti-tribal. Tribalism is, of course, an outmoded form of social cohesion, but it remains an important attachment for large numbers of rural Africans unaccustomed to pluralism. Because attachments to traditional institutions impede the attachment of individuals to the new nation-state (via the party), modern political leaders are almost invariably hostile to tribalism. The consequence of their anti-tribalism is to make individuals increasingly dependent upon the single, central focal institution and to undermine the integrity of competing institutions.’ A more realistic political assessment was that of Saul 1976: 98], who commented as follows: ‘For “tribalism” (the politicization of ethnicity which is all too characteristic a pathology of dependent Africa) does not spring primarily from the bare fact of the existence of cultural differences between people. Rather, it has been teased into life, first by the divide-and-rule tactics of colonialism and by uneven development in the economic sphere that colonialism also facilitates and, second, by the ruling petty-bourgeoisie of the post-colonial period. The latter, too, seek to divide and rule – better from their point of view that peasants should conceive the national pie as being divided, comparatively between regions and tribes, rather than (as is in fact much more clearly the case) between classes.’

86 In this connection it is important to differentiate modernity in terms of when, systemically, it can be said to have been accomplished. For this reason, bourgeois modernization theory must be distinguished from an endorsement of a specifically Marxist concept of modernity. The former halts at a capitalist form of modernity, signalled by ‘choice’ as expressed via the market or the ballot box (= democracy), and does not seek to go beyond this. Marxism, by contrast, argues that it is necessary to transcend the latter since – in terms of working class empowerment – a politically meaningful kind of modernity can only be achieved under socialism.

87 That some on the political left were just as culpable as modernization theorists of signing up to anti-socialist theoretical positions is evident from the case of Hobsbawm. Not only did he [Hobsbawm, 1981 advance the same argument as postmodernists – about the decline of the working class as the subject of history – but in an essay written in 1966, he confidently made a prognosis about Yugoslavia that was spectacularly wrong. In the latter text, therefore, one encounters the following [Hobsbawm, 1973: 71] confident prediction: ‘Belgian capitalism or Yugoslav socialism may well change, perhaps fundamentally; but both are obviously far less likely to collapse at slight provocation than the complex ad hoc administrative formulae for ensuring the coexistence of Flemings and Walloons, or of various mutually suspicious Balkan nationalities.’ One wonders whether these episodes and opinions are among the things Hobsbawm had in mind when observing recently [Snowman, 2007: 40] that he ‘worries about the incursions of postmodernism into the writing of history, the moral and even factual relativism of some historical writing … [t]he business of the historian … is to remember what others forget’. Others do indeed remember what Hobsbawm seems to have forgotten: his complicity with 1980s anti-foundational views that were in step with the then-emerging postmodernism that he now condemns.

88 The mode of production debate – on which see especially Thorner 1982– addressed the crucial issue of whether or not capitalism was present in the countryside of Third World nations, and if not, why not. From this central argument there were problematic attempts to construct theories about modes of production that were specific in terms of area [Cardoso, 1975; Coquery-Vidrovich, 1975 or colonialism [Alavi, 1975; 1982a. After the ‘development decade’ of the 1960s, the Marxist approach to African rural society was in the hands of French anthropologists [Terray, 1972, 1975; Rey, 1975, many of whom adhered to the same kind of dualism as neoclassical economists. Thus an indigenous peasantry was said to be part of a lineage mode of production, linked to (=‘articulated with’) a wider capitalism, but not actually reproduced by the latter. Others – notably Meillassoux 1981: Part II]– argued that what were taken to be traditional organizational forms at the village level were in fact reproduced by the wider capitalism for its own purposes: as an industrial reserve army of labour, in other words. This view was supported by those who were not anthropologists [Illife, 1983; Stichter, 1985; Swindell, 1985; Sender and Smith, 1986, who argued that a capitalist labour market did indeed emerge in Africa over the twentieth century.

89 As has been argued elsewhere [Brass, 2007b with regard to 1970s Peru, members of agrarian cooperatives who struggled against the State were usually the better-off peasants, and what they resisted was not the imposition of capitalism – which was already present – but much rather the attempt by the State to regulate the accumulation process. Instead of the strong-State/weak-peasant dichotomy that informed – and continues to inform – much development theory, what the Peruvian case study suggests is the opposite: that is to say, at the rural grassroots it is ironically the better-off peasantry which successfully resists attempts by reformist bureaucrats to prevent both privatization of co-owned means of production and the continued employment of bonded labour.

90 Examples of those who mistook populism for Marxism during the 1970s and 1980s include a rather large number of those writing about the peasantry in Africa [Williams, 1970; 1976; 1977; Bernstein, 1977; 1981; Watts, 1983. A case in point is Williams 1976: 139], for whom the main socio-economic contradiction occurred between State and peasant, a view encapsulated in the following observation: ‘It has been assumed that the major source of rural social differentiation is the spread of commodity relations and the emergence of rural capitalists and proletarians out of the peasantry. This ignores the major class divisions between the peasants on the one hand and the state and its beneficiaries on the other.’ Another is Bernstein, whose analyses of petty commodity production were not just unambiguously populist then [Gibbon and Neocosmos, 1985 but remain informed by this same theoretical approach – albeit slightly modified – even today [Brass, 2007a. Yet another is Watts 1983; 1984, who initially drew an idealized picture of self-sufficient African rural communities based on the ethos of ‘moral economy’ that was unambiguously populist. Of late, however, he has become a critic of the ‘new’ postmodern populism that pervades development theory. Now he argues [Watts, 2007 that ‘Saro-Wiwa's political vision invoked Ogoni culture and tradition … demanding a sort of restitution of Ogonia culture based on a quasi-mythic invocation of the past’, and that ‘[f]orms of identity that mattered were irreducibly local [and] social movements from below’. That Watts – like Bernstein – is still confused about quite how populism differs from Marxism is clear from the fact that elsewhere [Watts, 2004 he still manages to support the political virtues of grassroots ‘peasant resistance’, not realizing the link between this process and the ‘quasi-mythic invocation of the past’ he now criticizes.

91 Hence the following view [Williams, 1958: 79–80]: ‘There is an English bourgeois culture, with its powerful educational, literary and social institutions, in close contact with the actual centres of power. To say that most working people are excluded from these is self-evident … But to go on to say that working people are excluded from English culture is nonsense; they have their own growing institutions, and much of the strictly bourgeois culture they would in any case not want… The leisure which the bourgeoisie attained has given us much of cultural value. But this is not to say that contemporary culture is bourgeois culture: a mistake that everyone, from Conservatives to Marxists, seems to make. There is a distinct working-class way of life, which I for one value – not only because I was bred in it, for I now, in certain respects, live differently… So, when Marxists say that we live in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them, as I asked them then, where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see.’

92 A refusal to characterize political consciousness as false, combined with a concept of an undifferentiated peasantry, has (among other things) led to the exculpation of reactionary political regimes in 1920s and 1930s Europe. Hence the critique by Abse 1996 of revisionist accounts of Italian fascism – many of which are based on oral histories collected long after the events addressed – which attempt to argue that it was acceptable to the urban working class. The inference is that, because for them fascism was not disempowering, workers eschewed class struggle. Against this, Abse 1996: 48, 54–55] makes two points. First, that throughout northern and central Italy agency consistent with class struggle (strikes) did continue during the fascist era. And second, that where this kind of struggle was absent, it was because new entrants to the urban working class were recruited from among peasant smallholders, where collective political identities and trade unionization had not existed previously. A case in point was Porto Marghera, in the factories of which no strikes took place throughout the 1920–45 period. This was because the new workforce drawn from the Venetian terra firma consisted of part-time workers who were also politically conservative peasant proprietors with no history of agrarian struggles.

93 That it is easy to present an idealized image of pre-industrial agrarian society is evident from the description by one late nineteenth century economic historian [Toynbee, 1902: 190] of the 1790s as a period when ‘the old warm attachments, born of ancient, local contiguity and personal intercourse, vanished in the fierce contest for wealth among thousands who had never seen each other's faces before.’

94 The ‘new’ postmodern populism covers a variety of currently still fashionable theoretical frameworks, including the subaltern studies project, everyday forms of resistance, new social movements, ecofeminism, and post-development. A characteristic of such theory is that it not only endorses petty commodity production and the ensemble of cultural forms linked to such peasant identity, but then counterposes this to the class identity of the rural subject. Ethnicity is perceived by postmodernism as part of peasant identity, and vice-versa. Barrès 1970a: 1970b would no doubt have been heartened to learn that over fifty years after his death academics (not intellectuals) in France and elsewhere did indeed fulfil their duty as he thought they should, and – having embraced postmodern theory – privileged relativism over universality, advocated cultural ‘difference’, and supported nationalism any/everywhere.

95 Marxism confers political legitimacy only on revolutionary struggles for political power undertaken by class categories (a nascent bourgeoisie in the case of a dominant feudalism, a proletariat in the case of a dominant capitalism). Accordingly, Marxists argue that the peasantry is not homogeneous, and that consequently resistance by rich, middle and poor peasants has a different class basis, meaning and objective. It is the exponents of postmodernism who maintain the fiction of a homogeneous peasantry confronting a non-class specific state (a binary opposition which structures the discourse not of Marxism but of populism, the ‘other’ of Marxism).

96 The reason for this fusion between the subaltern/resistance framework on the one hand and the ‘new’ populist right on the other is not difficult to discern. In the epistemology shared by the latter, any/every form of resistance is declared to be legitimate (landlords as well as tenants, the rich as well as the poor). The difficulty with concepts such as ‘resistance’ and ‘power’ as deployed by the subaltern framework, therefore, is not so much its ubiquity as its politics. By eschewing a politics, resistance theory not only makes no distinction between resistance (by socialists) against fascism and (by fascists) against socialism but also – with typical postmodern aporia – denies the necessity any longer to have to make such a distinction.

97 See Evola 1994 for an endorsement of the pre-modern views, the transcendental philosophy and traditional conservatism expressed by Guenon in books such as La crise de monde moderne (Paris, 1927), which the former translated into Italian. ‘According to Guenon,’ states Evola 1994: 20–21], ‘the sense of tradition has progressively become dim, both in the East and in the modern West … This takes place in the context of an absolute lack of true principles, of a social and ideological chaos, and of a contaminating mystique of becoming which sets a hurried pace for the people to follow. From Europe this cancer spreads elsewhere, as a new form of barbarism; anti-tradition penetrates everywhere, “modernizing” those civilizations, which, as in the case of India, China or Islam, still preserve to a certain degree values and rules of life of a different order.’ For yet more supportive references to the anti-modern views of Guenon, see Evola 2003: 142, 209, 210, 215].

98 For the ultra-reactionary Italian aristocrat Julius Evola 1995, therefore, 1930s fascism represented the possibility of restoring his ideal of a ‘natural’ pre-capitalist social order, where an equally ‘natural’ landed elite composed of those like him exercised power. Like most of those on the political right at that conjuncture, he opposed modernity and progress on the grounds that such processes entailed what for him were undesirable political developments. On the one hand, he was antagonistic to the rise of ‘the masses’ and a concomitant advance of materialism and socialism. On the other, he objected to the accompanying decline of spirituality, mysticism and religious belief, a loss he characterized as an ‘unnatural’ desacralization.

99 The following sentiments are ones with which no ‘new’ postmodern populist could disagree, not least because they accurately echo his/her own views: ‘The speculative intelligence can envisage a situation of such hatred of the capitalist system that, on the day after the revolution, some kind of standardized collectivism, based on the model appropriate to the most powerful region, would be forced on the whole [nation], not to mention the whole of [the region]. But soon the varied influences of race, custom and climate would come again into their own, and real differences would assert themselves. It is essential that these aspects of human development should be given free reign, so that humanity can affirm the life-giving nature of diversity, of variety, of difference. No single one contains the truth. Only the total diversity approaches that truth.’ The nation in question is France and the region is Europe, the year is 1894 and the words are those of Maurice Barrès 1970b: 156], a scion of the French political right.

100 His words were as follows [Burke, 1935: 93]: ‘I believe the symbol of “the people” makes more naturally for such propaganda by inclusion than does the strictly proletarian symbol (which makes naturally for a propaganda by exclusion, a tendency to eliminate from one's work all that does not deal specifically with the realities of the workers' oppression …)’. Burke 1935: 93] then accepts, with a disarming honesty now rarely encountered, that ‘I recognize that my suggestion bears the telltale stamp of my class, the petty bourgeoisie.’

101 Not the least problematic aspect of this attempted shift is that it signals a move onto an epistemological terrain where the political right has long exercised ideological dominance: anti-intellectualism. The inference is that, since discourse about class is ‘too complex’, a broader and more acceptable populist category of ‘the people’ will make it easier to recruit political support. By simplifying issues/oppositions/opponents, therefore, the discourse of the political left will cross over into the populist domain of ‘commonsense’, and become – in Gramscian terms – hegemonic. The difficulty with this is that ‘commonsense’– composed precisely of all those discursive elements which the left has to challenge and supplant, not endorse and appropriate – is invariably owned by the political right. The latter asserts that – by arguing for abstract and/or universal concepts that are not in the interests of the specific identity (= national) of ‘the people’– intellectuals despise the ‘ordinary citizen’. Claiming that ‘[i]n this as in every other case our wisdom is in agreement with popular opinion which says to those in libraries and laboratories “Let everyone stick to his own skill and the sheep will be well cared for”’, Barrès 1970b: 175, 177ff.] complains that intellectuals attempt ‘to lay down a rule for man as an abstract universal entity. [They do] not consider individual differences … yet what we need are men who are strictly rooted in our soil, in our history and in the national consciousness; men who are fitted to the immediate requirements of the country. The philosophy that at present instructs the state is responsible more than anything else for the belief that the intellectual despises the ordinary citizen and makes intelligence operate at a level of pure abstraction, beyond the plain of real things. [The intellectual] becomes an enemy of society [and is] an agent in the process of uprooting; he belongs to a higher order among those who have no roots.’ Accordingly, the anti-intellectualism of the political right serves two purposes: to deprivilege reason (which attacks its own myths) and to reprivilege ‘commonsense’ (which attracts the support of the plebeian masses). By encroaching on this epistemological territory, with the object of taking it over, socialists risk becoming no different from the political right, which is the dilemma faced by many ‘new’ populist postmodern theorists.

102 For the debate, see Hart 1935: 165ff.]. Opposing the suggestion made by Kenneth Burke, Friedrich Wolf made the following point [Hart, 1935: 167–68]: ‘A great danger reposes in this formulation of “the people.” Hitler and Rosenberg used it. They said, let us not talk any more about the workers, let us talk about the people. In 1918 it was precisely this very same thing that the German reformist leaders utilized. Scheideman and Ebert said we must have a policy that will cover the worker and the small merchant and the middle bourgeoisie. Hitlerism is the continuation of this policy. Hitler knew enough to use this ideological device as a supplement to his blackjacks and machine guns. Utilization of the myth of ‘das Volk,’ the people, is an essential part of the reformist approach.’

103 See, for example, Dahlberg, 1935: 29, 30, 31], who condemns fascism as ‘primitivism, a return to medieval culture … the agrarian anti-machine [winning over] intellectual medievalists and agrarians’.

104 Examples of current historical analyses written by those who regard bourgeois democracy per se as some sort of achievement, the realization or retention of which in Latin America or India is a cause for celebration, include López Alvez 2000 and Guha 2007.

105 The texts in question are by Chatterjee 1984 and Pandey 2006. The postmodern epistemology structuring views about the ‘autonomous’ grassroots agency undertaken by ‘the subaltern’ skirts over sociology and politics, and assumes that from-below empowerment is essentially a question of marginal people deciding/defining their own needs. Would that it were this simple! As many analyses of peasant movements bear out, these can contain within their ranks (under the banner of ‘we-are-just-peasants’) not just poor peasants with a few acres but also much more substantial producers, possessing large amounts of land, capital and political influence. A case in point is the ‘new’ farmers' movements in India, led by rich producers in Maharashtra, Punjab and UP. Their aim is not to reproduce peasant economy – they are agrarian capitalist producers not family farmers – but to curtail competition from agribusiness enterprises elsewhere. This they do by deploying the old and powerful discourse, to the effect that ‘we are all peasants, and as such the backbone of the Indian nation’. Like so many other farmer organizations, what they want is a better deal within the existing capitalist system, not social justice that would empower the landless workers many of them employ.

106 The notion of an undifferentiated peasantry as constitutive both of subaltern and national identity can be traced back most easily to Gandhian discourse. The influence of the latter on Indian nationalism is evident from comments by Jawaharlal Nehru 1938: 476–77] about peasant agency shortly before Independence: ‘Mr. Gandhi's contribution to the [Indian National] Congress, his essential contribution about 20 years ago, was to bring the peasantry into the Congress. The whole centre of gravity of the Congress changed. More and more we began to go to the peasants, first of all as persons who thought that they had nothing to learn from the peasants, but to teach them and tell them what to do. But inevitably we found that we had much to learn. We became interested in the peasant problem, which was no part of the nationalist movement. It might almost be said that we wanted to use the peasants in the cause of nationalism. We had started thinking in terms of developing strength to meet British imperialism, but unless the masses supported the cause of nationalism we had no effective strength. Inevitably, therefore, we had to go to the peasants. We organized them on nationalist lines, but the peasant question became more and more an important one to consider. Indeed, the peasant, when he heard talk in terms of “swaraj” or “freedom” or “independence,” interpreted it in terms of getting rid of his own burdens. Independence had no other special meaning for him. It was on these lines that the peasantry began to get organized and to become politically conscious, and on the other hand the Congress began to grow peasant-conscious … The workers' problems, therefore, came before the Congress, but it was the peasant problem that essentially occupied it.’

107 That Gandhi regarded not only modernity, democracy, industrialization, secularism, progress, and science but also (and therefore) ‘civil society’ as impositions on village India of a ‘foreign’/Western ‘other’, to all of which he was as a consequence opposed, is outlined approvingly by Chatterjee 1984: 156ff., 162ff., 170].

108 See Chatterjee 1984: 173ff., 177]. Hence the acceptance by Chatterjee 1984: 173] that ‘in the theoretical sense Gandhian ideology would still be “reactionary”, since, as Lenin pointed out in the case of the Russian populists, not only is there simply a romantic longing for a return to an idealized medieval world of security and contentment, there is also “the attempt to measure the new society with the old patriarchal yardstick, the desire to find a model in the old order and traditions, which are totally unsuited to the changed economic institutions”’ (original emphasis).

109 ‘In its critique of civil society’, claims Chatterjee 1984: 176–77], ‘Gandhism adopted a standpoint that lay entirely outside the thematic of post-enlightenment thought, and hence of nationalist thought as well. In its formulation of the problem of town-country economic exchanges, of the cultural domination of the new urban educated classes, and above all of the legitimacy of resistance to an oppressive state, it was able to encapsulate perfectly the specific political demands as well as the modalities of thought of a peasant-communal consciousness.’

110 On this point, see Chatterjee 1984: 178, 193–4].

111 For the ideological link between nationalism, the agrarian myth, the foundation myth, and smallholding agriculture, see Brass 2000b. The ease with which a combination of the foundation and agrarian myths has been deployed by those on the political right is evident from the way in which it structured nationalist discourse in early twentieth century France. Contemplating the graves of French soldiers who died fighting the Germans in 1870, the ultra-reactionary conservative Barrès 1970b: 189–93] stressed the covenant those living had with the dead, noting ‘[it] poses a moral unity on all. This voice of our ancestors, this lesson of the soil that [these graves] know so well how to make us understand, is worth more than anything in forming the consciousness of a people. The soil gives us the discipline we need: we are the extension in time of our dead. This is the concept of reality upon which to base our existence. In order to allow the consciousness of a country such as France to free itself, each person must be rooted in the soil and in the earth … the voice of his blood and the instincts of the earth’. He continues: ‘It is only by drawing your attention to the resources of French soil, the efforts it demands of us, the conditions, in short, in which our race of foresters, farmers and winegrowers has developed, that you will come to understand our national traditions as realities and not mere words.’ As used by Barrès, therefore, a potent relay-in-statement evokes the following connections: nation = nature = soil = peasant =people = ancestors. The latter, moreover, are martyrs for the national cause, buried in the soil of the nation they died defending. All this, according to Barrès, is the essence of national identity and the dynamic informing nationalism: a fusion of the agrarian and the foundation myths, in other words.

112 Hence the claim [Pandey, 2006: 4737] that ‘[t]he fact of citizenship, statutory, anticipated or feared, is in my view written into the condition of subalternity.’ This claim is itself part of what might be termed a wider project, borne out of desperation. Having seen the political right in India garner electoral advantage from the same kinds of arguments as those made by ‘new’ postmodern populists such as himself, Pandey is engaged in an attempt to recuperate these arguments/concepts for liberal bourgeois democracy. Hence his futile attempt [Pandey, 1994: 69] to wrest nationhood and nationalism from the BJP and RSS: ‘Somewhere along the way [since the 1950s], the question of cultural identity and pride – who “we” are, what it means to be “Indian”, what constitutes India's history and culture – is lost, until it re-emerges in the hands of obscurantists and once politically marginal elements. It is as if the entire domain of discourse on culture has been handed over to these groups on a platter… The failure to engage in a continuing debate on the character of the “national” history and culture constitutes one of the great failures of left and democratic forces in India since Independence.’ Like Said (see above), Pandey forgets his own role in this process: there has indeed been a debate and a critique of nationalism, but one in which the Subaltern Studies project – of which he was a part – unknowingly defended the arguments/concepts about the innateness of culture and peasant society that historically have been no different from those made by the political right.

113 See Pandey 2006: 4736, 4737]. He goes so far as to reproduce – almost verbatim – the Marxist critique of the subaltern studies approach, when making the following observation about his colleagues who subscribe to the same project [Pandey, 2006: 4736]: ‘Looking back at our attempts to rewrite the subaltern experience, and with it the whole colonial construction of history, one might suggest that we have had to contend with an insufficiently acknowledged obstacle. This has to do with a subterranean faith that persists, perhaps even in the writings of many subalternist scholars, in the lack of fit between the peasantry and industrial bourgeois society, in the “incipience” of peasant political (hence, historical and cultural) consciousness, and the belief that peasants need to advance – towards modernity and full cultural and political citizenship of the modern worlds.’ Having in effect declared a volte face, he [Pandey, 2006: 4736] nevertheless backtracks, and attempts to rescue the project by maintaining incorrectly that ‘the task of subaltern historiography was to recover this underdeveloped figure for history, to restore the agency of the yokel, recognize that the peasant mass was contemporaneous with the modern, part of modernity, and establish the peasant as the maker of his/her own destiny.’ That the object of the project was to privilege the agency of petty commodity producers is undeniable; that it also entailed claiming such a subject, identity and agency for modernity is quite simply wrong. Much rather the opposite: the object was to show that precisely in the disjuncture between ‘peasant’ and ‘modernity’ lay its very ‘authenticity’ as an unheard rural voice.

114 This is conceded obliquely, when Pandey 2006: 4739] notes in passing that the category of subaltern in the Southern US – coincident with the black population there – was transected as a result of an emerging ‘black middle class’.

115 See Pandey 2006: 4740]. ‘There is another difficulty,’ he accepts [Pandey, 2006: 4736]: ‘Many … modern peasants and agricultural labourers do not wish to remain peasants or agricultural labourers’, adding [Pandey, 2006: 4741, note 6] that ‘[i]t goes without saying that modern capitalist farmers may not only desire these [urban] facilities and comforts, but often enjoy them in full measure, adding the joys of fancy country homes to the resources of the city.’ Although no acknowledgement is made of this fact, Pandey thereby takes on board the Marxist criticism made of the subaltern project in 1990 [Brass, 2000a: 153, note 7]: ‘From the Marxist viewpoint, one of the main objections to the “moral economy”[and subaltern] argument is that it denies the active striving of the different components of the rural population as class subjects: that is, either by rich peasants to become small agrarian capitalists or by poor peasants and agricultural labourers to improve their position as workers' (original emphasis).

116 For these essentially meaningless observations, see Pandey 2006: 4740].

117 Because he is confused about the claims made by populists, Pandey 2006: 4740] mistakenly argues that even the political right is now asserting a universal form of ‘sameness’. This is incorrect, since what the populist right asserts is not a universal form but rather a national or ethnic form of ‘sameness’. Hence the claim that in France or India the fact of ‘being’ a French or Indian national overrides other socio-economic identities, such as the fact of being a worker or poor peasant in these same contexts. As has been pointed out elsewhere [Brass, 2000b, not only are these not calls for a universal identity but for the universalization of ‘difference’, but they are no different from the essentialisms that are central to those of subaltern identity.

118 Among those who have done this are ‘Marxist’ exponents of the semi-feudal thesis and self-proclaimed ‘Trotskyists’. For a critique of both these approaches, see Brass 2002; 2003; 2007a.

119 This decoupling in absolute terms of capitalism and unfree labour cannot explain, for example, what happened in the Congo between the 1880s and the 1920s [Hochschild, 1999, when huge profits (up to 700%) from rubber production were reinvested in Belgium and elsewhere. If the argument is that, in some sense, the use of African forced labour in the course of production during the colonial era (10 million died in the Congo) precludes the label ‘capitalist’, then the same is true of plantation agriculture in the Southern US, despite the fact that it contributed to accumulation elsewhere – in the Northern US and Britain. The point is that surpluses can be extracted and redistributed throughout global circuits of capital, where lower food prices in turn permit the bundle of wage goods that register as costs of industrial accumulation in other contexts to be lower, thereby contributing to the process of capitalist development elsewhere.

120 These revisionist currents have given rise to what is now a familiar problem in development theory. Many of those who initially signed up uncritically to a nationalist/populist/postmodern critique of neoliberalism were unaware of its reactionary roots, and the fact that the political right also has an anti-capitalist discourse. Some of them have tried to rectify this earlier mistake by adopting the critique of populist/postmodern anti-capitalism made by others subsequently, albeit without acknowledging either this change of mind or its source. The same is true of the debate about labour regimes and agrarian transition, where some of those who earlier insisted that unfree labour was a non-capitalist relation incompatible with accumulation have seen the error of their ways, and also changed their minds. This, too, they have done without signalling this fact or acknowledging the influence of others who have argued all along that bonded labour was indeed acceptable to agrarian capitalists.

121 The argument about deproletarianization [Brass, 1999 confronted the semi-feudal thesis head-on, since it maintained that unfree labour was in many cases the relation of choice where agrarian capitalists were concerned, because it gave them a competitive edge over rival producers who employed workers who were free (and thus more expensive and better organized). This contrasted absolutely with the semi-feudal thesis, exponents of which continued (and continue) to insist that unfreedom is a pre-capitalist relation, indicative of economic backwardness, and one which ‘progressive’ rural producers always strove to eradicate. The politics of this particular view were, and are always going to be, class collaborationist.

122 Two interrelated reasons for the academic popularity of the ‘semi-feudal’ thesis are not fully acknowledged, even today. The first is that, insofar as it argued for the necessity not of socialism but of capitalism, the ‘semi-feudal’ thesis was compatible with the prevailing nationalist politics during the development decade. It was also compatible with bourgeois development economics, the object of which was to establish capitalist (not socialist) development throughout the Third World. The second is that the semi-feudal thesis absolved its academic exponents from the discomforts of Marxist practice. An advocate of the semi-feudal thesis encountered in Punjab during the early 1980s told me – in all seriousness – that as capitalism was still absent from the Punjabi countryside, it was necessary for Marxists like himself to join forces with the (‘progressive’ bourgeois) business community to ensure that capitalism penetrated agriculture. Nothing was said about workers' organization or rights. Those holding this kind of view (in Punjab and elsewhere) are not going to be woken at three in the morning by police knocking down their door, nor are they going to be denied entry into academic institutions.

123 See Gunder Frank 1967 and Petras 1970.

124 Unfortunately, this kind of revisionism has a long and symptomatic history, and not just in the Third World. Writing about Germany just before the outbreak of the 1914–18 war, Serge 1972: 321] made the following apposite points: ‘Upon this shifting terrain, complex struggles unfolded between the different tendencies of Socialism: in these it was opportunism that always finally carried the day, backed as it was by all the forces of capitalist society. In these battles of ideas … the invariable outcome was a further deception of the workers’ consciousness, a new vocabulary with which to trick the masses, while continuing to employ a revolutionary language that had lost its basic meanings. Little by little, class collaboration was substituted for the class struggle; the theory of the peaceful conquest of Socialism through parliamentary democracy consigned to oblivion the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as proclaimed by Marx; a phrasemongering and lying patriotism draped the party congresses with the national flag, side by side with the red banner of the workers' International. Erudite theorists even proposed to revise the basic principles of Socialism in the light of progress made by German capitalism. And these men, even as Empire poured its metal into cannons, devoted their energies to demonstrating that the journey to the city of Socialism was now afoot, along the path of peaceful reforms.’

125 In the case of the Caribbean, the equation of slave society with a form of local grassroots ‘civil society’ has a long history. Noting the importance for slave loyalty of small plots of land cultivated on the plantation system in the West Indies, the Bishop of London [Porteus, 1812: 196, original emphasis] went on to stress the significance of what is clearly a form of ‘civil society’ as this operated within slave society in 1784: ‘But it is of still more importance to give them a property in their own families; to attach their wives and children to one and the same plantation, and not allow them to be torn asunder from each other, as they too often are, and disposed of into different and distant estates, and even different islands. By putting a stop to this cruel and unnatural kind of divorce, and allowing them to entertain the soothing idea of being inseparably united to the plantations, and to each other, their social affections will be strengthened and improved; they will have something to be careful and anxious about; and begin to taste the comforts and pleasure of domestic life; will feel themselves rising into importance, and becoming as it were members of the civil community in which they live.’

126 For many on the political left and centre, the rescue of the plantation slave from what Thompson 1963: 12] famously called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ was effected principally by highlighting the resilience of slave culture and society. This took many forms. During the 1930s, for example, C.L.R. James 1938 showed how at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth Caribbean slaves led by Toussaint L'Ouverture defeated the armies of most powerful European nations. In the following decade Tannenbaum 1992 maintained with regard to Latin America that, because of the benign influence of church and monarch in the colonizing nation, the rights of planters over their slaves were not absolute, leaving intact the space in which a slave culture might fruitfully develop. This theme was explored further during the 1970s and 1980s, when the family life, music, religion and folklore of plantation slaves were the subject of analyses by Blassinghame 1972, Gutman 1976 and Stuckey 1987.

127 In what amounted to a defence of plantation slavery, Fogel and Engerman 1974 maintained that the slave family did well not just in economic terms (income, food, clothing, medical care and housing), but also in social terms. The latter, in their view, meant that planters neither broke up the slave family through sale of its individual members nor used it as a breeding unit. In short, the de facto boundary around this form of ‘civil society’ within the plantation system was respected by its owner. This internal social space is contrasted by Fogel and Engerman to the power of the State, suggesting that that do indeed regard it as a form of ‘civil society’. Hence the view [Fogel and Engerman, 1974: 129] that for ‘most slaves it was the law of the plantation, not of the state, that was relevant … Their daily lives were governed by plantation law. Consequently, the emphasis put on the sanctity of the slave family by many planters, and the legal status given to the slave family under plantation law, cannot be lightly dismissed.’

128 This is the view advanced by another neoclassical economic historian [Schwartz, 1992, where it is argued that resistance by slaves in Brazil more or less undermined this relational form, which as consequence could not have been as horrific as depicted. In this redrawn picture, slaves are able to do pretty much as they liked, including establishing themselves as peasant farmers. Much the same point is made with regard to the antebellum plantation by Fogel and Engerman 1974: 127]: ‘By permitting families to have de facto ownership of houses, furniture, clothing, garden plots, and small livestock, planters created an economic stake for slaves in the system.’

129 According to Fogel 1989: 392], his own confidence in the view of slavery as oppressive was undermined by the research of cultural historians, who ‘found more scope for … culture than convention dictated. Mistreatment was not excluded from the new histories of slave culture, but its rôle was considerably diminished’. Focussing on the empowering rôle of slave culture and downgrading the element of coercion cannot but generate a perception of the plantation as a labour regime based on ‘consent’, notwithstanding the fact that democracy – one of the constitutive elements of ‘civil society’– was rather obviously missing from this agrarian system.

130 Emancipation from unfree working arrangements has always been central to liberal bourgeois concepts of ‘civil society’ and ‘citizenship’. Hence the observation by Marshall 1950: 18] that: ‘In the towns [of seventeenth century England] the terms “freedom” and “citizenship” were interchangeable. When freedom became universal, freedom grew from a local to a national institution.’

131 For an example of this view, see Elena Garcia 2005.

132 See, for example, the text by Knight, Chigudu and Tandon 2002.

133 Details about this are outlined in Brass 1999: Chapter 2].

134 Hence the observation by an indigenous leader [Lucas, 2000: 105] that ‘[f]or the indigenous world, power, ushay, means perfecting living conditions, it is a collective concept. It is the capacity to develop collectively, with each making his or her own distinct contribution, as happens in the minga, in which children, women and old people have a role.’ In keeping with this view, the ethnic consciousness that has emerged among Aymara and Quechua peasants in Peru and Bolivia over the latter part of the twentieth century is categorized endorsingly by Rivera-Cusicanqui 1994 as a specifically postmodern development, one that she also equates with the realization of an authentic form of ‘citizenship’/‘civil society’ at the Andean rural grassroots.

135 For different political interpretations structuring the general term ‘community’, see Gusfield 1975, Kamenka 1982a, Mosse 1982, and Etzioni 2001. An attempt has been made by Anheier 2004 to construct an index revealing the extent to which particular contexts can be said to constitute a ‘civil society’.

136 For examples of the current application of ‘community’ to virtually all/every kind(s) of global social identity, see Spellman 2002 and the contributions to the volume edited by Herbrechter and Higgins 2006. As an earlier commentator [Marshall, 1950: 21] on ‘citizenship’ pointed out, ‘[t]he original source of social rights was membership of local communities’.

137 An obvious exception is Gramsci, who – as in the case of many non-Marxist theorists – not only perceived ‘civil society’ as being present in social formations other than socialism but also adopted the familiar ‘civil society’/State dichotomy. In his opinion [Gramsci, 1971: 12], therefore, ‘we can … fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “political society” or “the State”. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government.’ Although he subsequently downplays the extent of the distinctiveness between ‘civil society’ and the State, Gramsci 1971: 262–3] nevertheless infers that – as a result of the exercise of ‘hegemony’ by subaltern intellectuals – the State is in some sense absorbed by ‘civil society’. Unsurprisingly, this reformist interpretation – whereby the bourgeois system is persuaded democratically by a gradual and non-antagonistic process of cultural incorporation (=‘hegemony’) – is one that currently informs not Marxist but ‘new’ populist postmodern approaches to the State.

138 That Trotsky 1972: 45, original emphasis] associated the realization of ‘citizenship’ only with the process of permanent revolution – a transition to socialism, in other words – is evident from the following: ‘The expression “permanent revolution” is an expression of Marx which he applied to the revolution of 1848. In Marxist, naturally not in revisionist but in revolutionary Marxist literature, this term has always had citizenship rights. Franz Mehring employed it for the revolution of 1905–07. The permanent revolution, in an exact translation, is the continuous revolution, the uninterrupted revolution … [that] does not come to an end after this or that political conquest, after this or that social reform, but that continues to develop further and its only boundary is the socialist society.’ Much the same is true of Rosa Lexemburg. In her 1899 critique of the reformism of Eduard Bernstein, she [Luxemburg, 1937: 50, emphasis added] makes the following comment: ‘as it is used by [Eduard] Bernstein, the word “bourgeois” itself is not a class expression but a general social notion. Logical to the end he has exchanged, together with his science, politics, morals and mode of thinking, the historic language of the proletariat for that of the bourgeoisie. When he uses, without distinction, the term “citizen” in reference to the bourgeois as well as to the proletarian, intending, thereby, to refer to man in general, he identifies man in general with the bourgeois, and human society with bourgeois society.’

139 This is the description by T.H. Marshall 1950: 8] of the view about ‘citizenship’ held by the influential liberal economist Alfred Marshall (1842–1924). For the latter, therefore, ‘the claim of all to enjoy these conditions [= culture] is a claim to be admitted to a share of the social heritage, which in turn means a claim to be accepted as full members of society, that is, as citizens.’

140 At this conjuncture the central questions were [Marshall, 1950: 9]: ‘Is it still true that basic equality, when enriched in substance and embodied in the formal rights of citizenship, is consistent with the inequalities of social class? … Is it still true that the basic equality can be created and preserved without invading the freedom of the competitive market? Obviously it is not true.’ This was a period when Keynesian economic policies based on State intervention were applied in the UK, with the object of eradicating what Beveridge 1943; 1944; 1945 labelled the five giant evils (want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness) generated by mass unemployment during the 1930s. Significantly, even this reformist programme was attacked by champions of laissez faire theory, such as de Jouvenel 1947.

141 As outlined by Arendt 1958: 22ff.], the analytical duality between the-State-as-public-domain and ‘civil society’-as-private-domain has a very long theoretical genealogy.

142 The concept ‘new’ social movements has become ubiquitous in the study of development, particularly where the focus is on agrarian transformation and the rural agency to which this gives rise. See for example Foweraker and Craig 1990, Foweraker 1995, and Foweraker, Landman and Harvey 2003. Marx himself made explicit his objections to depoliticized and ahistorical notions of ‘civil society’ in his well-known 1859 preface to the critique of political economy. There he [Marx, 1904: 11–12] wrote as follows: ‘I was led by my studies to the conclusion that legal relations as well as forms of the state could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life, which are summed up by Hegel after the fashion of the English and French of the eighteenth century under the name “civic society”; the anatomy of that civic society is to be sought in political economy. … In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will … The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.’

143 For the interrelationship between ‘new’ social movements, democracy and ‘civil society’, see especially Keane 1988a; 1988b and Melucci 1988. Accepting that ‘[t]he concept of civil society … has become quite fashionable today’, Cohen and Arato 1992: vii, 2] maintain that ‘[t]he current “discourse of civil society” … focuses precisely on new, generally non-class-based forms of collective action oriented and linked to the legal, associational, and public institutions of society … Although we cannot leave the state and the economy out of consideration if we are to understand the dramatic changes occurring in Latin America and eastern Europe in particular, the concept of civil society is indispensable if we are to understand the stakes of these “transitions to democracy’.

144 It is not necessary to search far in order to come across ex-Marxists who now embrace a rights-based politics as the only possible form of progress. Having endorsed liberalism, therefore, the ex-Marxist Halliday 2003: 309] directs our gaze to ‘an issue that is widely present in contemporary academic and political discussion, but that writers on revolution tend to avoid, namely the question of rights. The language of rights was long denounced by the left, and its revolutionary part, as a bourgeois myth … Yet the programme of rights embodied in national, regional and international codes is, as much as any flamboyant radicalism, both a critique and a programme that confronts the contemporary world’. The ‘disdain for rights’, he concludes, ‘should be questioned’. He forgets that what is simply and wrongly categorized as ‘rights’ is a system of law (= civil code) that is present in socialist societies as well as capitalist ones. Halliday is actually talking about enforcement of legislative ordinances, and overlooks the fact that non-enforcement of laws is as much a problem under capitalism as under other systemic forms. To invoke the presence of ‘rights’ as in some sense unique to capitalism – a positive aspect of a benign capitalist system conferred uniformly on all its ‘citizens’ regardless of wealth and power – is thus not only misplaced (the financial ability to go to law is, like everything else, an effect of class) but also an idealization. For examples of the advocacy of a rights-based development agenda linked to ‘civil society’, citizenship and democracy, see Edwards and Gaventa 2001, Gaventa, Shankland and Howard 2002, Molyneux and Lazar 2003, Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley 2003, Clark 2003a; 2003b, Gready 2004, Tripp and te Velde 2006, and Newell and Wheeler 2006. For the retrospective application of much the same kind of framework– at the centre of which is the concept ‘citizenship’ and the empowering political participation by ‘subaltern groups’– to eighteenth- and nineteenth century Latin America, see Serulnikov 2003, Sanders 2004, Guardino 2005 and Méndez 2005.

145 Agency based on class is dismissed by one advocate of ‘civil society’[Keane, 1988a: 135] in the following manner: ‘No less problematic is … “classism”[whose] proponents seem to suppose that they are living in the late nineteenth century. They believe, or hope, that there currently exists a large “objectively homogeneous” and growing workers' movement … [Those on the political left] would preserve intact the ultimate (classical Marxian) goal of abolishing, in the name of socialism, the separation between civil society and the state – with all its probable [sic] despotic consequences.’ This accurately captures the expressed wish on the part of ‘new’ postmodern populists to banish class and class struggle from the political agenda.

146 Among the many recantations by those on the left of political views held previously about class and revolution, the following is both symptomatic and one of the most craven [Halliday, 2003: 303]: ‘Here it is worth noting how a significant part of the left formed in the 1960s, in both Europe and North America, has remained stuck in a rejectionist project that is, aesthetic intricacies aside, barren: one can indeed distinguish between those of the 1968 generation who have matured, and those who have not. Thundering denunciations of “reformism” and “betrayal” by unreconstructed radical thinkers and journals, stirring as they may occasionally be, are not bases on which to denounce all alternative critiques of, and proposed solutions to, the present world. A discussion of revolution that fails to address the demand for realism, and that dismisses radical and sustained non-revolutionary alternatives, may be sectarian. Of all the vocabulary of revolution and cold war that we are well rid of, my prime candidate is the word “correct”.’ As well as being wrong about the politics of 1968 – these were insufficiently Marxist, not too Marxist (=‘unreal’) – Halliday also endorses the currently fashionable aporia of postmodernism in eschewing the labelling of theory as ‘correct’. Of additional interest is how many patronizing statements of political surrender emanate from ex-Marxists just as they lower themselves into comfortable personal chairs in the academy. Having become part of the university establishment, they understandably feel threatened by the very idea of a revolutionary challenge to the existing structures of society.

147 A variant of this approach was – and is – one that privileges both grassroots knowledge and political participation/‘governance’ as empowering. This, it is argued by its many adherents [Sillitoe, et al., 2002; Shivakumar, 2005, derives from the failure of the State to tap the deep wells of ‘farmer knowledge’ or local organizational forms available at the rural grassroots. An idealized belief in the efficacy of ‘local practice’– either political or economic – as a future solution to many of the problems of underdevelopment is not merely simplistic, but also overlooks two facts. First, that in a capitalist context what is incorrectly perceived merely as ‘local practice’ cannot be separated from wider systemic processes and determinants. And second that – because farmers are themselves differentiated in terms of class – what are wrongly interpreted as value-neutral views or organizational modalities actually project or are informed by (and thus correspond to) class-specific ideology. All endorse grassroots self-empowerment without either capturing the State or abolishing class.

148 Just how empty a general (= apolitical/ahistorical/non-systemic) concept of ‘civil society’ is emerges clearly from the following vapid description by Václav Havel 1988: 396–7]: ‘I favour “anti-political politics”: that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.’ A better illustration of motherhood-and-apple-pie sentiment is hard to imagine.

149 Some conservatives in the UK openly deride the futility of this kind of grassroots agency, correctly drawing attention to its rather obvious limitations where the exercise of political power is concerned. Thus, for example, a rich Tory landowner [Clark, 1993: 284] in the Thatcher government accurately criticized one small opposition party for pursuing just such a strategy: ‘The Liberal technique is to force people to lower their sights, teeny little provincial problems about bus timetables, and street lighting and the grant for a new community hall. They compensate by giving the electorate uplift with constant plugging of an identity concept – no matter how miniscule – to which they attach a confrontational flavour: “Newton Ferrers Mums outface Whitehall”.’ The same critique could be made of ‘everyday-forms-of-resistance’ hailed by ‘new’ postmodern populists as significant political victories, which – since they leave the class system and its State intact – are therefore better understood as ‘victories’.

150 Historically, Marxism has always been suspicious about the benefits of devolving political or economic power, not least when neoliberals or conservatives – for example, Pirie 1988– recommend this. It is clear that, in the case of Italy during the mid-1970s, the purpose of decentralizing the capitalist labour process was to hinder the development of a class consciousness based on labour solidarity generated on the factory floor, and thus to counter or pre-empt worker agency. According to a Marxist analysis at that conjuncture [Red Notes, 1978: 44, original emphasis], therefore, ‘[i]n Emilia the decentralisation of production has structural characteristics. It is an organic function in part substituting the need for investment. Emilia's model of development offers hints for the future restructuring of Italian industry as a whole – the disciplinary use of the labour market, the way workers mobility is used by employers to break up any new levels of organization. At the same time, we are seeing a growth of out-work in the home; part-time work; seasonal work; and a huge influx of women into the vast network of the service sector. All this gives Emilia a higher percentage of “economically-active population” than almost anywhere in Europe. Very many people are involved actively in the process of capital accumulation. And this dispersal is seen as a broad-ranging alternative to factory work, as such. So, in the Emilian model, the whole geographical area becomes a productive unit, instead of just the “factory”. This takes place through a dispersal of the labour process'. The same analysis makes clear the disempowering object for this decentralization [Red Notes, 1978: 123, original emphasis]: ‘The tendency of the working class is to create unity between workers, through struggle. Capital lives in mortal fear of this unity, and does everything to break it up – to “decompose” the working class [which] has a constant struggle to recompose itself against capital's attempts at division.’

151 Gathered in a variety of (usually) smallscale non-government organizations (NGOs), the rubric ‘civil society’ includes single-issue interest groups, grassroots institutions and/or social movements, the membership of which is in class terms heterogenous and based on religion, gender, or ethnicity. Emphasizing ‘self-help’ that is ‘non-political’, and agency designed to persuade or ameliorate problems, the object of NGOs concerned with eradicating poverty, gender or ethnic oppression is to achieve such ends without either challenging the legitimacy of or seeking to transcend the existing class structure and its State.

152 Both these arguments –the desirability of agency guided by religious NGOs as a progressive form of grassroots resistance designed to bring about an empowering ‘redemocratization’– are encountered in the populist epistemology of Christian Base Communities (basismo). According to an enthusiastic supporter of the latter [Lehmann, 1990: 185–6], therefore, ‘under the influence of the informal Church, of post-marxism and of Liberation Theology, the idea of self-management has been applied with greater emphasis outside the factory gates in pursuit of a broader and more deeply rooted project of democratization of institutions and social relationships … [basismo] is an attempt to refashion socialist thinking by “listening to the poor”’. The political difficulties posed by this kind of non-secular authority structure emerge clearly in a discussion between Frei Betto and Fidel Castro, notwithstanding their attempt to find common ground between religion and socialism [Frei Betto, 1987: 237ff.].

153 See, for example, the texts by Bhagwati 2004, Burnell 2006 and Bebbington and McCourt 2007, all of which contain Panglossian accounts equating development ‘success’ with bourgeois democracy.

154 The literature about this is vast; for the case of Latin America, and the early cultural and ideological role of the Roman Catholic Church in its imperial conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese, see among others Boxer 1978. Advocates of laissez faire in the USA after the Civil War opposed State intervention (=‘welfarism’) on the grounds that this amounted to a form of meddling with Nature. They insisted that socio-economic inequalities consequent on the distribution of wealth were due to ‘unequal talents’: hence the unequal relations between capital and labour, ordained as they were – like everything else – by Nature, were based on ‘natural law’, and thus could not be changed [Fine, 1956: 44]. From this, conservatives and neoliberals drew a parallel between laissez-faire, natural law and Divine law [Fine, 1956: 52ff., 66ff.].

155 Noting the strong support from the Protestant Church for the business philosophy of laissez faire in the United States over the latter part of the nineteenth century, Fine 1956: 118–25] observes that in general terms ‘[t]he Protestant Minister, like the businessman, gave his support to laissez faire and the status quo. He provided religious sanction for the businessman's views with respect to property, inequality, stewardship, state aid, and labor. Property was defended by churchmen as an exclusive right. The general well-being and progress of society were declared to be in proportion to the freedom of the individual to acquire property and to be secure in its possession … Like the businessmen, the churchman accepted inequalities among men as inevitable and desirable and maintained that those who had risen to the top were men of ability whereas those who failed had only themselves to blame … The majority of Protestant churchmen, like the businessmen, took a completely negative view of social reform and state action … Even giving aid to the poor was criticized by some clergymen as an unwarranted exercise of state authority and as a task that was more properly entrusted to private charity.’ On the subject of relations between capital and labour [Fine, 1956: 122], the ‘advice offered to the laborer by clergymen was to remain passive. The Reverend W.D. Wilson told the workingman that Jesus’ advice was that he be content with his wages … Other clergymen also found laissez faire to be the proper nostrum for the ills of labor, and they therefore condemned all of labor's weapons: trade unions, strikes and labor legislation. Trade unions, they alleged, served … to introduce class lines into American society.’ Links between religion and neoliberalism, conservatives/neo-conservatives and the far right in the United States during the late twentieth century are outlined in Bruce 1992; for the justification of US imperialism in the name of religion, see Huntington 1996.

156 This kind of populist approach informed the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, dealing with the ‘Condition of Labour’, issued by Pope Leo XIII 1938 in 1891. The main enemy [Leo XIII, 1938: 13, 15] were socialists, on the grounds that ‘the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own … Nature accordingly must have given to man a source that is stable and remaining always with him from which he might look to draw continual supplies. And this stable condition of things he finds solely in the earth and its fruits. There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body … private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature.’ Not only is socialism wrong for advocating the abolition of private property, therefore, but humanity and land, the means of subsistence provision, were both created by God, thus each is immutable. Since Nature is not just divinely ordained, but precedes the State, the latter cannot therefore seek to alter what is ‘natural’.

157 Decrying the rise of nationalism in 1930s Europe, and linking this to the modern spread of materialism, the Catholic writer Christopher Dawson 1932 offered as a solution an internationalism of the spirit: that is, the construction of a culture based on a common system of Christian religious belief. ‘We must abandon the vain attempt to disregard spiritual unity and to look for a basis of social construction in material and external things’, he wrote [Dawson, 1932: 104–5], adding that the ‘acceptance of spiritual reality must be the basic element in the culture of the future, for it is spirit that is the principle of unity and matter that is the principle of division.’ The epistemological connection between the ‘national particularism’ criticized and religious ideology advocated was not an issue he addressed.

158 There is a discernible pattern here, in terms of the institutional dynamic structuring this process of recasting. Initially, therefore, the forms of grassroots agency (workplace organization, strikes, sabotage, etc.) regarded by those in the academy as progressive were few, and linked politically to the desirability of a transition to socialism. Subsequently, however, as the academic study of development exhausted these particular ore-bearing seams, it became necessary to identify other loci of ‘from below’ resistance. In an important sense, therefore, extending the range of activities and identities that could be presented as empowering/progressive became an intellectual priority. Accordingly, a multiplicity of other identities (national, ethnic, religious, peasant, gender) were recast by a ‘new’ historiography as additional – perhaps even more effective – forms of ‘from below’ cultural agency that, it was argued, were yet more progressive and empowering. One consequence was the essentialization of non-class identities that, historically, have been central to the mobilization not of the left but rather of the political right.

159 Opposition is by no means confined to analyses that are Marxist. For a still useful collection of texts by non-Marxists examining the limits to historical forms of rural grassroots resistance in Brazil and Angola that have been informed by religious belief, see the contributions to the volume edited by Chilcote 1972.

160 In a chapter entitled ‘Violence – the only way?’, Hélder Câmera 1969: 102ff.] indicts the inequity of the land tenure system throughout Latin America in words that would not have been out of place in a Marxist text (see also Hélder Câmera 1968: 185ff.]). Thus, for example [Hélder Câmera, 1969: 102–3]: ‘Economically speaking, it is common knowledge that the underdeveloped countries suffer from internal colonialism. A small group of rich and powerful people in each country maintains its power and wealth at the expense of the misery of millions of the population. The regime is still semi-feudal, with a semblance of a “patriarchal” system, but in reality a total absence of personal rights: the situation is sub-human, the conditions those of slavery. The rural workers, who are nothing more than pariahs, are denied access to the greater part of the land, which lies idle in the hands of rich landowners who are waiting for its value to rise.’ Although today such critical language is rarely heard, even from those on the political left, Hélder Câmera 1969: 108–9] then goes on to rule out violence as a justifiable way of transforming what he (and others) recognized and condemned as an unjust system: ‘If the élites of the Third World haven't the courage to rid themselves of their privileges and to bring justice to the millions living in sub-human conditions; if the governments concerned content themselves with reforms on paper, how can one restrain the youth who are tempted by radical solutions and violence? … Allow me the humble courage to take up a position on this issue. I respect those who feel obliged in conscience to opt for violence – not the all too easy violence of armchair guerrilleros – but those who have proved their sincerity by the sacrifice of their life. In my opinion, the memory of Camilo Torres and of Che Guevara merits as much respect as that of Martin Luther King. I accuse the real authors of violence: all those who, whether on the right or left, weaken justice and prevent peace. My personal vocation is that of a pilgrim of peace, following the example of [Pope] Paul VI: personally, I would prefer a thousand times to be killed than to kill.’

161 That more generally the act of world renunciation – or the displacement of temporal with spiritual empowerment – has been central to religious mobilization in Latin America was recognized earlier, even by non-Marxist analyses. For example, in his pathbreaking investigation of the Pentecostal Movement in Chile during the 1960s – a time when the countryside was in a state of political ferment – Lalive d'Epinay 1969: 128] made the following observation: ‘Thus we can say that Pentecostalism is built up around its condemnation of a world which will not be renewed until the coming of the Lord (which is imminent but impossible to foretell) and around the mission it has assumed of saving souls from this world and offering them temporary refuge in the congregation.’

162 See the contributions to the volume edited by Washbrook 2007, especially that by Moksnes 2007.

163 The conservative nature of Christian Base Communities in Brazil is evident from research conducted by Burdick 1993 and Hewitt 1998. For the reactionary role of religion in the populist discourse (anti-state, anti-urban, anti-science, anti-modern and anti-‘foreign’-capital) of the new farmers' movements that rose to prominence in India during the 1980s, see Brass 1995 and Nanda 2003: 249ff.].

164 Thus, for example, the worldwide erosion of a democratic politics and the rise of religious fundamentalism are condemned by Edward Said. Lamenting the onward march of American imperialism, he [Barsamian and Said, 2003: 189–90] then observes: ‘One reason [for an emboldened imperialism] is the absence of a powerfully organized and consistently mobilized counterforce. I don't think it's enough to say that it's because of the demise of the Soviet Union. I think it's also a failure of the intellectual class, with a few exceptions here and there… One of the reasons for this failure has been what is called postmodernism, in which American pragmatism and linguistic analysis as well as French deconstructionism have played a very important role. The intellectual class has simply turned away from the great narratives of enlightenment and emancipation. Jean Baudrillard tells us those days are over.’ Yet he forgets two things. First, that it was his concept ‘orientalism’[Said, 1978 which played a crucial role in recuperating a concept of an authentic ‘other’ oppressed by and thus innately opposed to the way it was depicted by Enlightenment discourse. And second, this same ‘other’ then became the basis for a pristine and eternal rural cultural identity – including religion – in the Third World that informed claims made by the very self-same postmodern theory, both about the undesirability of progress and economic development, and about the empowering nature of grassroots resistance to these processes. Although he finally recognized the deleterious impact of postmodernism (rather late in the day, after others had pointed this out), Said nevertheless failed to understand his own role in this, and thus to connect the postmodern attack on development with his own earlier endorsement of ‘otherness’.

165 Accumulation within a specific national context – for example, Britain [Mosley, 1932: 27]– required that ‘every interest, whether … industrial, financial, trade union or banking system, is subordinated to the welfare of the community as a whole, and to the over-riding authority of the organized State. No State within the State can be admitted. “All within the State; none outside the State; none against the State”’.

166 On this, see the programmatic statement by Mosley 1932: 28]: ‘Class war will be eliminated by the permanent machinery of government for reconciling the clash of class interests in an equitable distribution of the proceeds of industry. Wage questions will not be left to the dog-fight of class war, but will be settled by the impartial [sic] arbitration of State machinery’. At that same conjuncture, Mussolini 1933: 13] observed similarly that ‘the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is denied… And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society.’

167 Hence the following view [Mosley, 1932: 37–38]: ‘The fascist principle is Liberty in private, Obligation in public, life. In his public capacity a man must behave as befits a citizen and a member of the State; his actions must conform to the interests of the State, which protects and governs him and guarantees his personal freedom. In private he may behave as he likes. Provided he does not interfere with the freedom and enjoyment of others, his conduct is a matter between himself and his own conscience.’ There is an obvious contradiction between a concept of the state as all-powerful, and the exercise of autonomy within a private domain beyond regulation by this all-powerful apparatus. However, Mosley 1932: 38] accepts that if ‘an action does not harm the State, or other citizens of the State … it cannot then be morally wrong. This test over-rides all considerations of religion, prejudice and inherited doctrines’. So, too, does Mussolini 1933: 25]: ‘The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual’.

168 For nineteenth century conservative and neoliberal advocacy of plebeian self-help, see Smiles 1877 and contributions to the volume edited by Mackay 1892.

169 There is now a large literature endorsing the commodity chain approach to the study of development [Gereffi, 1996; Howes, 1996; Goodman and Watts, 1997; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994; Mather, 1999; Gereffi and Kaplinsky, 2001; Ponte, 2002; Hughes and Reimer, 2003; Humphrey, 2006. That a switch by peasant farmers to non-traditional agricultural exports is not a solution to the kinds of economic problems (debt, depeasantization) they face in a neoliberal capitalist context is evident from the research conducted in rural Chile by Murray 2006.

170 One learns without surprise, therefore, that a supermarket chain in England the vegetables for which are picked and packed by migrant workers exploited by a gangmaster who recruited/controlled them is one that has signed up to the Ethical Trading Initiative. According to this report, ‘the [Bulgarian] workers said they had lived “like pigs on scraps”, scavenging vegetables from fields when their Latvian gangmaster withheld their pay for 34 days, and each had to pay £50 a week to be housed in overcrowded caravans.’ See ‘Scraps to eat and £3 a day: misery at the bottom end of the supermarket supply chain’, The Guardian (London), 15 August 2007.

171 One press report outlined how Peruvian workers picking coffee marketed under the Fairtrade label, and sold at a corresponding higher price to ‘ethically concerned consumers’, were being paid less than the minimum wage. See ‘“Ethical-coffee” workers paid below legal minimum’, and ‘Bitter cost of “fair trade” coffee’, Financial Times (London), 9 September 2006. Another notes that ‘while supermarkets are launching new schemes to prove their ethical credentials to UK shoppers, they are locking suppliers – particularly women – into “appallingly” low pay and dangerous conditions abroad.’ See ‘6p a T-shirt. 30p an hour for shelling cashews. Supermarkets accused of exploiting women’, The Guardian (London), 23 April 2007. Yet another investigation reveals the employment of child labour by a multinational corporation committed publicly to ‘ethical and socially responsible manufacturing’ practices. See ‘Child sweatshop shame threatens Gap's ethical image’, The Observer (London), 28 October 2007. And so it goes on.

172 As the case with all single issue movements and organizations, the NGO is destined to fail for two reasons in particular. First, and rather obviously, small lobbying institutions whose sole authority is moral (‘this ought not to happen’, etc.) lack power. And second, a smallscale organization or movement the focus of which is on a single issue fails to address processes/structures beyond its particular remit, despite the fact that these contribute substantially to the existence and reproduction of the latter. Thus, for example, NGOs opposed to the issue of poverty cannot do much about this beyond recommending more aid, not least because they refuse to accept that the issue is incapable of eradication without systemic change.

173 Writing in 1881 about the way in which Master and Servant legislation – which ‘made breach of contract on the part of an employer a civil offence, on the part of the labourer a crime’– constituted an obstacle to the citizenship of rural workers, Toynbee 1902: 186] made the following observation: ‘Now, how was it that the English statute-book was disfigured by laws which robbed the labourer as a wage-earner, and degraded him as a citizen? The explanation, I think, is simple. Except as a member of a mob, the labourer had not a shred of political influence. The power of making laws was concentrated in the hands of landowners, the great merchant princes, and a small knot of capitalist-manufacturers who wielded that power – was it not natural? – in the interests of their class, rather than for the good of the people. And different as the small [masters] were from the classes who were supreme in Parliament, they had this in common with them – they were the masters; and when disputes with their workmen arose, they did not hesitate to appeal to the legislature for support which it was only too ready to give … whenever Parliament attempted to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors were always the masters, unsupported by the facts. It receives lively illustration from the pen of a pamphleteer of the period, who remarks with an air of great naturalness and simplicity that “the gentleman and magistrates ought to aid and encourage the clothier in the reduction of the price of labour, as far as is consistent with the laws of humanity, and necessary for the preservation of foreign trade.”’ Although he was wrong to think that the problem of an absent citizenship would be solved by working class enfranchisement, Toynbee insisted rightly that – where plebeian control over government was non-existent – the State was always going to be an institution that acted on behalf of the capitalist.

174 An example is the approach of Coser 1967: 202–10] to the prospects of democratization in the early 1960s. His analysis was informed by conflict, the presence of which was explained by him [Coser, 1967: 204] in the following manner: ‘The modernizing elites, in their efforts to create new collective symbols and a new source of legitimacy as well as a new economic and social structure, clash with traditional centres of power and prestige. They must attempt to undermine and neutralize traditional modes of behaviour. They must desire to create citizens free from particularistic loyalties to village, communal groupings, family, tribal chief, or traditional aristocracy. They must attempt to legitimize secular power … so as to free the polity from control by traditional powerholders and representatives of the religious order’. Although he was wrong in his belief that ‘modernizing elites’ would oppose traditional discourses – the former do not oppose the latter, as he supposed, but much rather incorporate them into the ‘modernizing’ process – Coser nevertheless recognized the fact that democracy and democratization would be characterized by struggle.

175 See, for example, Dunn 1979; 2000. It is not necessary to share Dunn's politics in order to accept that, when compared with postmodern analyses of democracy, his approach is intellectually far more rigorous. This gulf is particularly apparent in his discussion of the connection between democracy and culture, about which – unlike ‘new’ populist postmodern theorists – Dunn 1990: 100ff.] is anything but celebratory.

176 A case in point is Giddens 1999; 2002; 2006, an influential cheerleader for neoliberal capitalism under the rubric of the ‘Third Way’. The latter is equated by him – and others [Novak, 1998; Etzioni, 2000, 2001– with an efflorescent ‘civil society’ untainted by a capitalist or socialist politics, and its essential meaninglessness is not difficult to discern. ‘To retrieve or defend civic culture’, Giddens 2001: 244] assures us, ‘we must insist upon responsible behaviour from business corporations, whether that be achieved through legal obligation or through moral persuasion’. What this amounts to, it transpires [Giddens, 2001: 246], is that corporate behaviour is to be governed by a charter ‘for the democratic rights of citizens’. The vapidity of this ‘defence’ of civil society is symptomatic, advocating as it does not the expropriation of capitalist enterprises but merely that they should ‘behave themselves’, and be persuaded not to be too naughty (‘responsible behaviour’). Under the New Labour government of Tony Blair – to which Giddens has given his support throughout its time in office – the wealth of the richest 1,000 people in the country has risen by an estimated 260 percent; in 2007, for example, Directors' pay increased by 37 per cent over the figure for the previous year, and executive bonuses rose by 30 per cent to £14 billion. See ‘Super-rich treble wealth in last 10 years’, The Sunday Times (London), 29 April 2007; ‘City bonuses hit record high with 14bn payout’, The Guardian (London), 28 August 2007; and ‘The boardroom bonanza’, The Guardian (London), 29 August 2007. As the capacity of wealthy capitalists and off-shore corporations to avoid regulation/taxation by particular nation states underlines, the efficacy of any attempt to impose – let alone enforce –‘legal obligation’ is non-existent. That such nonsense emanates from what is widely (and wrongly) thought to be cutting edge sociology is itself an indication of the current poverty of theory.

177 The existence of a democratic process is a potent ideological weapon, in that it enables populists to maintain the fiction that through the combination of the franchise and by means of an electoral mandate, ‘the people’ actually do exercise sovereignty. The latter view is held also by those who are unaware either of populist discourse or its political role. Thus, for example, Michelutti 2007 claims implausibly that in India an authentic form of ‘popular sovereignty’ (= democracy) operates at the grassroots as a result of the ‘vernacularization of democratic politics’. Such a claim, innocent of both the fact and the conservative ideological structure of populism, in effect legitimizes any/all grassroots discourse simply because it emanates ‘from below’. By the same token, it would be possible to endorse the ethnic/nationalist idioms not just of the reactionary Hindu chauvinism of the BJP but also their prefiguring counterparts in 1920s and 1930s Europe.

178 Although not substantial, a distinction does exist. The direct form of rule is where populist politicians once in office routinely push through capitalist economic and political agendas. The indirect form operates in contexts where working class representatives still have some political influence, which a capitalist project necessarily must ‘neutralize’: this it does by influencing the shaping of the political agenda through its control of the printed and electronic media.

179 It is hard to disagree with the assessment by one reviewer of a recent book by Giddens 2006– an exponent of ‘redemocratization’– as ‘depressingly superficial, dressed up in fancy words’ (‘A most unhappy union – A leading theorist has no real answers to Europe's problems’, Financial Times, 21/22 October 2006, p. 29). Questioning the assertion that Giddens represents ‘a return to serious debate about the nature and workings of society’, the novelist Malcolm Bradbury 2006: 147–8] comes to a similar conclusion about the parlous state of sociological theory, citing the trajectory of the well-known fictional character (Howard Kirk, the History Man) that he created: ‘Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage would be a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed – even if it was chiefly for his own advantage – in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment project. As for his recent books, The Prospects for the ECU, Or How Europe Got Rich has done well this Christmas, and so has his Brief History of Football.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Brass

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, UK.