A Review of 'The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes' by Maurizio Lazzarato

By Felix Diefenhardt

Republished from Marx & Philosophy.

Maurizio Lazzarato’s last book in 2021, Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism of Revolution, ended with a call to put revolution back at the center of left theory and practice and a promise that readers could expect a sequel to his 2016 collaboration with Éric Alliez, Wars and Capital. In this second volume, the authors would provide a counter-history of revolutionary struggle as well as theoretical weapons for revolutionaries in the present. Whether or not this book is still to materialize is anyone’s guess. However, Lazzarato’s latest addition to the Semiotext(e) interventions series, The Intolerable Present, The Urgency of Revolution, reads very much like a single-authored attempt to fulfill that promise. The resulting book sits awkwardly between a polemical call to arms, like Capital Hates Everyone and a dense theoretical treatise in the style of Wars and Capital. As such, it contains some provocative sketches of a counter-history of the present that emphasizes strategic confrontations between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces, as well as the foundations of what one might call a theory of revolutionary intersectionality. However, a lack of historical detail and some conceptual fuzziness prevent the book from making the concise contribution to revolutionary theory and strategy that readers were promised.

Conveniently, Lazzarato formulates the problem he is trying to tackle alongside the basic points of his argument in ten hypotheses provided in the introduction. His basic proposition is as follows: ‘For better or worse, what the world is now, we owe it to revolutions.’ (404) Yet, after the last flare-up of revolutionary struggle in the second half of the twentieth century and the neoliberal counter-revolution, the only force ‘capable of planning a long-term strategy and of organizing victorious attacks’ (286) is capital. In the absence of revolutionary ruptures, the left has lost its capacity for strategic initiative, since even the most minute reforms of capitalism are only successful under the threat of revolution. This has left it completely at the mercy of capitalist initiative, forced into the position of passive witness to the erosion of its gains. The only way to reverse this trend, according to Lazzarato, is to rekindle revolutionary struggle. He is careful not to propose any concrete strategies and practices to revolutionaries, instead setting out to analyze the historical role of revolutions, why they disappeared and what the current conditions are for their reinvigoration.

In a sense, this project can be seen to (re-)embrace a classic premise of Italian Operaismo: a political analysis of capitalist society in which 1.) capitalist development is subordinated to working class initiative, its mediation by the state and the response of capital, and 2.) this class struggle is premised in the working class’ potential for effecting a non-dialectical ‘frontal clash’ between opposing forces (workers and capital). However, Lazzarato augments this premise on two important ways.

First, he qualifies the historical significance of working class initiative, arguing that it is only possible when revolutionary rupture is on the table. ‘Without revolution’, he argues, ‘workers are simply a component of capital.’ (158) Second, he decenters working class struggle from his framework, arguing instead for ‘plural struggles of classes’ (14), including struggles of women of racialized and colonized subjects. For Lazzarato, these struggles cannot be subsumed to one hegemonic struggle and he blames the failure of past revolutionary movements to transversally connect these struggles in no small part for the failure of revolution in the twentieth century. This insistence on the multiplicity of class (struggles) must be understood in terms of Lazzarato’s political analysis of capitalism and the short revolutionary history he provides on that basis. He understands capital not as an economic process of valorization through the exploitation of abstract labor. Instead, he proposes a ‘capital seen as a political-economic process with a strategy that composes and decomposes the different modes of production […] relationships of power.’ (424) For Lazzarato, while capital appropriates the surplus value produced by formally free workers, it also appropriates the free reproductive labor of women and the hyper-exploited and sometimes even unpaid labor of workers in the periphery. Without these heterogeneous modes of appropriation in patriarchal societies and along supply chains, profits would surely collapse. Importantly, for Lazzarato, these different modes of appropriation correspond to different modes of domination. While workers are subject to an abstract economic domination, the domination of women and racialized subjects in the periphery are, for Lazzarato, much more direct and personal, and, therefore, appear as archaisms in orthodox Marxist theory.

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This decidedly messy portrayal of capitalism is provocative because leaves aside the orthodox mode of Marxist analysis – trying to lay bare the abstract logic behind the appearances in capitalist society – and is instead developed from an acute sensitivity of and engagement with concrete struggles. Lazzarato emphasizes the constitutive role of colonization, racist and sexist domination in capitalism precisely because, historically those subjected to these archaisms waged the most effective struggles in the twentieth century. ‘Throughout the twentieth century’, he writes, the ‘underdeveloped’ periphery ‘would be successful in its revolutions, while after 1968, the most significant innovations in theory would come from the different feminist movements.’ (13) From this premise, Lazzarato continues to assemble a literature of intersectional revolutionary struggle in the central chapters of the book. His analysis of the struggle of the colonized draws on decolonial classics by Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. To theorize revolutionary feminist struggles he provides an extensive reread of so-called materialist feminism. Lazzarato does not really add that much to these strains of literature, but provides a comprehensive overview over their main proponents and a convincing plea for their significance. What makes these thinkers so relevant for Lazzarato’s project is their insistence on a non-dialectical struggle that seeks not to sublate but to abolish the antagonistic duality between oppressor and oppressed in the here and now.

Lazzarato pits this presentist understanding of revolutionary rupture against whiggish theories of revolution that presuppose a certain level of development or urge for a rectifying development after political revolution, postponing a social revolution. Accordingly the history of capitalist development he sketches out in the first leg of the book is not one of stagist development but rather one of ruptures and strategic antagonisms. This history starts with the Paris Commune. In response to this revolutionary rupture, he argues, capital developed a three-pronged strategy of financialization, globalization (imperialism) and monopolization, which figures as somewhat of a constant in Lazzarato’s retelling. In effect through these three strategies capital and the state were able to consolidate power over workers and prop up profit rates. Importantly, financialization and globalization allowed for the inclusion through exclusion of large swaths of the global population that are included in capital’s valorization process precisely because they are excluded from formalities of abstract labor. Lazzarato includes in this category hyper-exploited sweatshop workers in China, micro-financially indebted farmers in Kenya and slum dwellers working in the informal sector all over the world. We will return to the heterogeneity of those included in this category later. Thus, this tripartite strategy operated through the very heterogeneities of appropriation and domination, intensifying them and reconfiguring the terrain for revolutionary struggle. This terrain gives rise to the revolutionary dynamic encapsulated by Lazzarato: successful revolutions (decolonial, anti-capitalist, etc.) in the periphery and social and labor unrest in the core. Accordingly, when the neoliberal counterrevolution seized the capitalist core, it had first re-subjugated the periphery by financial and military means (Chile being the paradigmatic case). For Lazzarato, the world revolution failed because capital adopted a global strategy while revolutionaries were unable to connect decolonial, feminist and class struggles on a global scale.

Post neoliberalism, the present conditions present themselves to Lazzarato as follows: revolution no longer plays a role in politics. Instead, we have witnessed a series of popular revolts, most of which have ended with the state and reactionary forces regaining strength. At the same time however, core and periphery have lost their geographical specificity. Instead, nation-states in the global north and south now contain internal cores and internal peripheries. Because this leads to zones of included exclusion co-existing with economic centers in nation-states, Lazzarato diagnoses an ‘internal colonization’. Recent events like the George Floyd uprisings are therefore increasingly led by lumpenized subjects in the global north. Lazzarato’s implicit hope seems to be that this geographical proximity between formal workers and internally colonized subjects might enable the kind of transversal coordination that was not possible in the twentieth century.

Lazzarato’s theorization of contemporary potentials for rupture thus depends to a considerable extent on the validity of this historical sketch. For this reason, it is rather problematic that he omits any historical detail and contextualization of his claims. Readers will be hard pressed to find concrete examples of the tripartite strategy Lazzarato identifies in action. This gives rise to the impression that he seems to be assuming a level of convergence and coordination between the respective fractions of the capitalist class (finance capital, industrial capital, etc.) that is rather unrealistic. Moreover, his claim that twentieth century revolutionaries did not attempt to link struggles in the periphery and the core is simply not true. However, the most explicit attempts to bring the decolonial war home to the capitalist core took the form of the terrorist violence of the Red Army Fraction or the Red Brigades. By omitting this part of revolutionary history, Lazzarato saves himself the trouble of explaining how his theory can be distinguished from – and thus prevented from falling back into – the crude Third Worldism of these groups.

Finally, referring to his framework of capital as a strategic integration of different modes of appropriation in which one cannot be privileged over the other, Lazzarato repeatedly refers to subjects in the (internal) periphery as ‘unpaid and underpaid workers’. In this rather fuzzy category Lazzarato lumps together hyper-exploited and unpaid workers, that is, enslaved, alongside those who are not even exploited but eke out a living in the informal economy. Even from Lazzarato’s own perspective, this should be problematic, since the mode of domination to which a precarious hyper-exploited worker is subjected is arguably completely different from that of an enslaved subject. This becomes even more problematic when Lazzarato turns to his hypothesis of internal colonization, insofar as he seems to imply that the increasing precarization and impoverishment of the white working class in the global north moves these subjects away from the category of abstract labor toward the state of internally colonized subjects. As he writes, ‘[t]he George Floyd uprising demonstrated that internal colonization not only affects Blacks as always, but also a large majority of whites.’ (405) Lazzarato does not give a clear account of what exactly the internal colonization of white subjects looks like. And it seems as if it would be a difficult argument to make, since he has equated the position of colonized and racialized subjects with direct and personal appropriation and domination and that of the worker with abstract domination and the appropriation of surplus value. The deterioration of the working conditions and softening the legal protection of the latter does not change anything with regards to this mode of domination. It just makes it less bearable. Since a lot of Lazzarato’s hopes for a viability of revolutionary movements today hinges on this hypothesis of internal colonization and an underdeveloped history, his latest intervention is provocative and urgent, but rather limited as a theoretical framework for political action and analysis. Readers might get the most out of The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution by reading it in conjunction with 2016’s Wars and Capital, where both the historical and theoretical work has more depth and breadth.

How Ordinary People Become Nazis: A Review of Robert Gellately's 'Hitler's True Believers'

By Charles Wofford

Imagine a political speech so venomous, so hate filled, so threatening, that at times it is impossible to understand the speaker. He rages against enemies foreign and domestic, against capitalism, against communism, against ethnic and political minorities, against disabled people, and insists on the superiority of his own nation. Thousands of torch-bearing zealots respond with orgasmic delirium. Is it not obvious who this image is supposed to evoke?

The image of German fascism as an overwhelming, cult-like madness is common and is re enforced by the Hollywoodization of the Nazis. In popular media Nazis might as well be demons who merely appear as human. As a result the protagonist may kill them without any guilty conscience. Ironically, this same mechanism of spectacle-induced failure of conscience found extensive use in German fascism. The radical Othering of the Nazis is comforting; it ensures us that it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen to us, because the Nazis are not us, they are the radical Other.

In Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Robert Gellately shows that the German fascists were far more rational and normal than we often imagine. This is not his endorsement, of course. Gellately’s real accomplishment is in showing how normal the Nazis were without “normalizing” them, showing how rational they were without “rationalizing” their atrocities. The Nazis were not the radical Other; most of them were not very different from us. They went to work, followed the law, and loved their families. The lesson is how easily it all happened to the German people, how every step along the way made sense at the time, and by implication how easily the same thing could happen to us. Perhaps it already has.

The German people were aware of the regime’s crimes; indeed, they were in many cases active participants. If it were not for mass grassroots initiative the Nazis would not have been as successful as they were. Gellately writes of racial persecution, “It was all so public and impossible to overlook. […] The public did more than stand idly by, because numerous individuals cooperated in the enforcement of racial policy, before and after the milestone reached with the Nuremburg Laws in 1935” (263).

The most difficult lesson for those of us on the Left is recognizing that the “socialism” in “National Socialism” is not just a moniker but had real content. German fascism was a broth of nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism. The nationalist angle put it in opposition to the international socialism of Marxism, and the socialism positioned it as a foe to the bourgeois democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. Though the Nazis were hostile to the idea of abolishing all private property, they did seriously attempt to abolish finance capital (which, of course, they linked with Jewish influence), and they did attempt to nationalize several industries to wield them in the name of the German people. The antisemitic conspiracy mongering enabled the fusion, as the German fascists cast their capitalist foes and their Marxist foes as two sides of the same Jewish-led effort at world domination. The negative manifestation of this worldview culminated in the Holocaust. The positive vision was the Volksgemeinschaft.

Volksgemeinschaft is the National Socialist utopia; a futuristic vision of a society living in harmony with nature. “Nature” here is conceptualized in terms of a bogus blood-and-soil theory, but that was not an invention of the Nazis. Similar forms of racism were widely entertained throughout the global scientific community. “Volk” literally means “people,” but refers to a racialized concept of it as in the Völkisch Movement of late 19th century Germany. “Gemeinschaft” may be translated as “community,” but refers more to tight-knit communities of people who know each other personally (contrast Gesellschaft, a more rationalist conception of society as defined through social contracts, rational self-interest, etc.) Volksgemeinschaft is what emerged from the blending of nationalism and socialism. Its racism makes it repugnant to an internationalist or humanist perspective championed by the Left, while its community-oriented nature is repellant to today’s neoliberal individualism. The point here is that the Nazis were anti-humanist and reactionary, but they were also futurist and modern. They were not conservative.

But that recognition puts us in a difficult spot. Today’s popular left discourse has committed itself to an outright denial of any authentically socialist character to German fascism. So acknowledging that National Socialism is one of the infinite conceivable varieties of socialism leaves the Left rhetorically exposed. One of the foundational premises of socialism is that society is what we make it. We can therefore arrange society however we wish. But our time and place is so hyper capitalistic, and its ideology so individualist, that any and all socialisms are seen as equivalent. Yet the figures who became major Nazi leaders had, in Gellately’s words, “an obsession about socialism. Indeed, thanks to the creation of a welfare state from 1881 onward, reinforced by the social impact of the war, a degree of socialism engrained itself in German society and was enshrined in the Weimar Republic’s constitution” (41).

The place of socialism in the Nazi vision was not unambiguous, and there were internal debates. Gellately relates a debate between the Nazi Left represented by Gregor Strasser and the Nazi Right represented by Alfred Rosenberg.

If Gregor Strasser bowed to Hitler’s authority or at least his political abilities, he still advocated a more socialistic line. As might be expected, Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the party’s self-styled ideological experts and a die-hard anti-Bolshevist, pushed back in a newspaper article in early 1927. Nationalism in its purest form, he said, united with socialism and, if stripped of any internationalism, represented the nation’s spirit of liberation. Hence, emphasizing the socialism in the Party’s name (as Strasser and his comrades wanted) was wrong, because the main point of their activity was to rescue the nation. Strasser replied quickly that socialism meant more than merely using the state to protect the people from capitalist greed, as Rosenberg would have it. Instead, it aimed to create another form of economic life and implied the participation of workers in ownership, profit, and management. This socialism accepted that private property was the basis of all culture and because capitalism was an immoral system that stole the nation’s goods, the state had to step in to restore fairness (77).

These debates abated as the Right wing of the party took greater control. Eventually the Strassers were marginalized, and the working class elements of the party leadership liquidated in a series of purges. But their socialist contributions were still a part of Nazi doctrine, and if they did not represent a powerful wing of the party there would have been no need to purge them in the first place.

Another difficult lesson: many devoted Nazis in the 1930s had been equally devoted communists and socialists in the 1920s. The Nazis did not come to power primarily through violence; they persuaded the vast majority of Germans (and Austrians, and many others across Europe) that they really were the way forward. A big part of that was refuting of the Treaty of Versailles. The humiliations it imposed on Germany were despised by the entire population, so that anything done to escape its terms was met with enormous praise, and even foreigners were in admiration of Germany’s unwillingness to stay down.

Hitler’s True Believers belongs to a genre of “How the Nazis Came to Power.” It is not a strictly historical genre, and it includes such varied titles as Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason and William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. No matter the angle, the point is generally the same: this movement of German National Socialism, which culminated in mass murder on an industrial scale and the self-immolation of European civilization, emerged from beliefs and social structures that had been present in Europe for centuries, and every step of its development made sense at the time. National Socialism was not an aberration or explosion of barbarism in the midst of an otherwise civilized world. It was the culmination of particular processes of civilization which contained these murderous possibilities from early on. The hideous racism of the Nazis was well-supported by the scientific establishments of the time. Hitler’s survival-of-the-fittest mentality was derived from theories in the natural sciences (particularly Darwin) applied to the social realm. The Nazis saw Bolshevism as the death of civilization and the Western democracies as its decay. Thus they were (in their own minds) the sentinels of civilization, driven by science, united in their desire for progress toward a newly unified society, the Volksgemeinschaft.

One clear parallel to our own predicament is in the rhetoric employed to defend American military presence around the world. Neuroscientist and public commentator Sam Harris, for instance, is known for arguing that American-committed atrocities just aren’t as morally bad as those committed by official enemies, since we are “well-intentioned,” while they are not. But that merely brings us back to the issue of a failure of conscience. For the Nazis it was that they were Das Herrenrasse (the master race) while their victims were Die Untermenschen (sub-humans). For the French it was the cultural appeal: they were “civilized” and on a “civilizing mission” (Mission Civilisatrice), while the colonized were primitive. Whether we appeal to the Nazi blood theory, the French cultural theory, or Harris’s intention theory, the end is to facilitate that same failure of recognition, that same failure of conscience, which we also inflict on ourselves through our representations of the Nazis in popular media.

Hitler’s True Believers will remind leftists of the importance of internationalism. Yet even this concept is too limiting. In an era of mass anthropogenic environmental destruction and mass extinction, not even humanism is sufficiently broad. After National Socialism there is no excuse for blindly trusting humanism, enlightenment, science, rationality, technology, “the People,” “the Proletariat,” or any other idealized construct to save us from ourselves. These ideas must be engaged critically, their limits registered, and their employment must be razor-sharp. If we fail this challenge, then we may already have one foot in the jackboot.

My copy of Hitler’s True Believers shows on its cover a crowd of bright-eyed Germans giving the Roman salute, presumably to their Führer off camera. The focus of the photo is a young woman, flanked by several soldiers and many children. The exuberance on their faces is beautiful. It is hard to see anything political inspiring such admiration in 21st century America. Consider how defeated, how humiliated, how despairing many Germans were after World War I; is it so hard to understand why they would want to believe in something that could inspire that sort of joy? Our contemporary situation is also marked by widespread depression, anxiety, and despair about the future. How easy would it be for a Hitleresque figure to bring us all, by dint of our own reason, to the brink?

Charles Wofford is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology and critical theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

A Marxist Argument for Stupidity: A Review of Derek R. Ford's 'Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy'

[“Kansas City Library” by calebdzahnd is licensed under CC BY 2.0]

By Bradley J. Porfilio

The most provocative books are those that don’t seek subversive theses for the sake of shock, but in order to reveal that which is most taken for granted and, in the process of questioning these underlying assumptions, reveal just how limiting they are. The most useful books for the communist tradition, in turn, are those that don’t only denounce or critique the present but actually imagine, develop, and propose alternatives as a result. Derek R. Ford’s latest book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy accomplishes each of these tasks. What’s more, it deals with more academic theories in an accessible way, refusing the opposition between designating them as totally useless to the struggle or as the key insights we’ve been missing.

The book’s primary object of intervention is the “knowledge economy,” a term he uses reluctantly for a few reasons. One is that it’s popular parlance, but the second, and more substantive reason, is that doing so helps him identify what he calls a “troubling consensus” on the right and the left. The consensus is certainty not political, as the right and left wings differ greatly on their conception of knowledge, the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, and the political ends that should guide it. He doesn’t dismiss these and acknowledges that “how we understand capital’s relation to knowledge and the potential of the knowledge economy will matter a great deal in the political, social, and economic struggles ahead” (p. 57). Instead, the consensus amongst the most neoliberal and radical groupings is an unremarked pedagogy, which he calls the pedagogy of learning, realization, and grasping. In the introduction, he shows how these reinforce colonialist, ableist, and capitalist social relations.

Derek R. Ford’s Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (Palgrave, 2021)

He begins by assessing the different “takes” on the knowledge economy, accessibly and innovatively reading international policy documents from the OECD and WBI, their popular expressions in Richard Florida, as well as social democratic responses (like Andy Merrifield and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) and marxist critiques and responses, particularly those of the Italian marxist tradition (like Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and others). This leads him into a deeper discussion of the role of the general intellect in the transition to post-Fordism and the knowledge economy.

Here, Ford not only synthesizes these transitions but, importantly, emphasizes how they were part of a struggle to define and participate in the general intellect of society—or part of the global class war. The general story concerns the limits to Fordist accumulation and the rebellions in the imperial core. But Ford highlights how “in the formerly colonized world, movements (some of which now had state power) linked the epistemological and political as they fought against imperialist economic and political domination,” (p. 45), citing Thomas Sankara’s praxis of fighting imperialist development alongside imperialist knowledge regimes as a paradigmatic example. Post-Fordism not only incorporated the demands of the imperial core but also absorbed the oppositional knowledges from the liberatory struggles of the world.

The educational consensus

He finds that the right wing pays the most explicit attention to education and the pedagogy of learning, which he links with the colonial grasping drive that positions every opacity as new potential knowledge to animate the accumulation of capital. Documenting the oppressive results of such a drive—including the perpetuation of ableism and colonialism—he shows that left projects ultimately rest upon the same pedagogical logic. He shows how contemporary marxist theorists naturalize learning and even locate it as an innate feature of “human nature,” such as in the conception of cognitive capitalism, which exploits the “desire… for learning.”

Yet whereas the right wants to control knowledge production to harness it to capital accumulation, the left wants to utilize knowledge to institute a new mode of production. “In this way,” he writes, “the left one-ups the right: ‘You want to tap into the infinite reserve of knowledge, but your small-minded thinking prevents you from understanding just how we can do that!” (p. 64). Capital is, simply, a fetter on knowledge production, one that actually inhibits the “natural” drive to learn. Thus, the Marxists end up reinforcing capital’s desire for knowledge and, as a result, the oppressive realities that follow from it. As one example, he turns to disability studies and, in particular autism. Citing Anne McGuire’s research on the flexible categories of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he shows that the manual keeps getting more flexible and lengthier.

While the move away from the normal/abnormal binary might be progressive in some senses, it ends up reproduces the endless spiral of the knowledge economy. Ford links this with the workerist thesis of the primacy of labor over capital. Reading Mario Tronti, for example, “Even as it demystifies capital’s command and power, the workerist thesis, by privileging labor over capital, celebrates the limitless (and naturalized) productivism of labor and thus of learning” (p. 72). Ford’s book is the first to challenge the assumption that we should always be learning and that we should never stop learning. It poses the question: what if resistance and revolution demand an immersion in stupor?

An alternative pedagogy for an alternative mode of production

The most innovative and surprising proposal is to develop an alternative pedagogical logic that resists realization and the grasping drive. For Ford, this is the pedagogy of stupidity. He distinguishes stupidity from ignorance, in that ignorance can be addressed through learning whereas stupidity is intractable. He also distinguishes it from arrogance in that arrogance always has an answer, even if it’s wrong or faculty. “Stupidity, by contrast,” he writes, “never has an answer precisely because it undermines the question asked. When we’re in a state of stupor, we’re not even sure what the reference points for any discussion are” (p. 81). Ignorance and arrogance can produce knowledge for capital to enclose and expropriate, but stupidity, as he writes, is an anti-value, one that is infinitely unproductive.

Not content to remain at this level of abstraction, he provides different educational practices of stupid reading. He does so not to privilege stupidity at the expense of knowledge, but rather to introduce a necessary dialectical logic to learning. “The stupid life is a place for thought that endures without transforming into tacit or codified knowledge, or thinking the limits of thought” (p. 101). The concluding chapter presents an example of blocking these disparate yet related pedagogies together through an examination of Althusser and Negri’s marxism, which he argues are not so far apart once we consider the neglected pedagogical dimension to their different readings of Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. In an unorthodox move, he presents this dialectic through the lens of Lyotard’s “general line,” arguing that we have to maintain a line between both pedagogies, and defend stupor from learnings attempts to annihilate it. Stefano Harney concludes his brilliant preface to the book with a quote that encapsulates the uncomfortable yet necessary argument advanced: “as Derek Ford sums it up perfectly: “there is always the noise from which knowledge emerges and to which it returns” (x).

It’s a necessary book for our moment, as organizers increasingly recognize the importance of educational processes to revolutionary transformation. In this sense, Ford’s book is a crucial offering to these movements.

Bradley Profilio, Professor and Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University, is a transformative scholar who brings insights from several intellectual disciplines, such as history, sociology, leadership studies, and social studies education, to examine the sociocultural and historical forces behind unjust educational outcomes and institutional forms of oppression. His intellectual work also unearths what policies, pedagogies, practices, and social movements hold the potential to humanize educational institutions, to eliminate educational disparities and to build an equalitarian society. As a result, his research has a broad appeal to scholars, leaders, and educators. As a leading scholar in critical pedagogy, he’s published dozens of books and articles about liberatory education. Most recently co-directed a documentary titled, We’re Still Here: Indigenous Hip Hop and Canada, which you can see here.

Imperial Roots of the Global Food System: A Review of Chris Otter's 'Diet For A Large Planet'

By Amy Leather

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

Why do we eat what we do? This is the question Chris Otter seeks to answer in Diet for a Large Planet. It is very timely. In recent years there has been growing anger and horror at a food system that delivers both unhealthy and environmentally destructive diets. Food has become deeply politicized.

In 2019 the medical journal The Lancet published what it called a “planetary health diet.” Their conclusion was that “the world’s diets must change dramatically” to save the planet and ourselves. They argued that a Great Food Transformation is required — a move away from what is often called the Western Diet, high in red meat, refined grains, saturated fat and sugar, to a more plant based diet.

This is not in fact a new argument. Otter’s title deliberately echoes Diet for a Small Planet, first published 50 years ago, in which Frances Moore Lappe blamed a diet rich in meat and refined carbohydrates for environmental and health problems.

But when looking at today’s food systems most commentators tend to focus on the post war period, and in particular the role of the US in driving a model of industrialized food production and agriculture. This is a model epitomized by the ascendancy of processed foods, the growth of the fast food giants and supermarkets, and the scale and dominance of agribusiness.

However, Otter argues that “in order to understand the deeper history of today’s global food situation, it is necessary to explore post-1800 Britain.” He argues that “Britain laid the foundations for contemporary food systems. It was the nineteenth century’s dominant world power, controlling immense global resources, and creating long distance food chains to supply vast quantities of meat, wheat and sugar.” This is a good starting point. Locating our current food systems in a wider political and historical context, very much bound up with the development of capitalism and colonialism.

What stands out in the book is just how early the internationalization of food production developed for Britain. Britain was sourcing foods from round the globe in vast quantities from the mid 1800s, importing grain, meat and dairy products.

Otter shows this with a vast array of statistics. He outlines how “the volume of British food imports rose almost eightfold between 1850-52 and 1910-12, by which time they represented around two fifths of all British imports by value. Over four fifths of bread consumed in Britain came from imported grain by 1909.”

Initially Ireland had contributed much of Britain’s imports of grain, meat, butter and livestock but Britain soon became the world’s richest single consumer market for food and raw materials. In 1860 Britain received 49% of total Asian, African, and Latin American food exports. In 1930 with just under 3% of the world’s population Britain imported 99% of world’s exports of ham and bacon, 63% of its butter, 62% of its eggs, 59% of its beef, 46% of cheese, and 28% of its wheat and wheat flour.

Otter looks in detail at how Britain came to import so much meat, grain and sugar. For example, during the 1800s farmers in Britain had experimented with selective breeding to produce the cows and other animals ideal for meat production, such as short horn cows and Herefords. It soon became more profitable to ship these types of livestock out to new areas of the globe, such as the United States and Argentina, to be bred and reared on their huge pastures and their meat imported back to Britain.

Such outsourcing, as Otter calls it, meant a vast infrastructure was built in these areas. As he outlines “there were nearly 70 million cattle in the US by the early 1930s. This heavily capitalized industry with its vast ranches and industrialized meat packing, operated on a much larger scale than Britain’s.” It’s not hard to see how this paved the way for the great acceleration of meat production after 1945 in the US.

There was a massive increase in the amount of wheat bread consumed in Britain between 1771-1879, and by 1911 wheat bread provided around half the working class calorie intake.

Otter outlines how Britain had been self-sufficient in wheat until about 1850. However, at that point wheat production started to become unprofitable and so grain began to be drawn from different and shifting areas of the globe, including Australia, India, Argentina and North America. By 1909 over 80% of British bread was made with imported grain.

Alongside meat and bread, sugar also became central to the British diet. In a short period of time it went from being a luxury to an essential. Otter makes the point that it became a cheap “fuel food” for the working class in Britain. By the late eighteenth century Britain consumed nearly half of all the sugar reaching Europe, and British consumption levels were over ten times higher than those in the rest of Europe. In 1750, the average Britain received 72 calories daily from sugar, by 1909-13 this figure was 395. Sugar still provides 12-15% of Britain’s calories.

Such cheap calories were a consequence of colonialism and slavery. Portuguese, Spanish, French and British colonial systems created a sugar industry linking Europe to the Caribbean and parts of South America. For Britain Barbados became particularly lucrative, with sugar becoming the island’s most important export by 1650. Jamaica was colonized from 1664, and by 1805, it was the world’s largest sugar exporter. By the 1830s Britain was using some two million overseas acres for sugar production.

Alongside exploring the internationalization of food production, Otter also shows how mass production techniques and food processing are not just a postwar invention. For example, the mass production of bread began in the 1870s. Traditional milling methods in Hungary and the US were replaced by roller milling and then introduced into Britain. It is fascinating to note that factory made American cheese was already cheaper than British cheddar in the 1860s — and arrived in Britain in increasing quantities. Mass production techniques meant that Britain was producing some 300,000 tons of biscuits by 1939 while sweets we know today such as fruit pastilles and fruit gums have been industrially produced since the late 1800s.

However, Otter seems to argue that this internationalization of food production or outsourcing was a consequence of what he terms a “large planet philosophy.” He defines this as “the premise that the entire earth was a potential source of material wealth and capital investments.”

The implication throughout the book is that the idea of sourcing food from across the globe was the driving force behind the developments rather than the dynamics of capitalism. Here the book is at its weakest. While Otter references Marxism in his introduction as a framework he will draw on, there is virtually no discussion of how the development of capitalism turned food into a commodity. There is nothing about how the competitive accumulation and the drive for profit at the heart of capitalism impacted on food production, including its expansion across the globe.

As Martin Empson points out in Land and Labour, “Marx understood how the development of industrial capitalism in one part of the world had the effect of shaping the agricultural economies of the rest of the world.”

In Capital, Marx writes that, “large scale industry, in all countries where it has taken root, spurs on rapid increases in emigration and the colonization of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing raw material of the mother country…. A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”

Diet for a Large Planet often reads almost as a summary of political thought and as though food production was shaped by a battle of ideas. Of course there were competing ideas, for example over free trade, a requirement that underpinned cheap food imports. But these reflected real class interests, as well as divisions within the ruling class themselves. The battle over the Corn Laws of 1815 exemplified this — with the established landowning class wanting to keep grain prices high while the rising class of industrialist capitalists wanted cheaper grain, so they could pay their workers less.

Without such a framework of understanding the dynamic of capitalism, the drive for profit at the heart of it and how different class forces asserted themselves, the central arguments the book seeks to make are weakened.

While Otter makes some interesting points about food, power and racism, he downplays the centrality of slavery to the development of capitalism. And although he explores the Irish and Bengal famines he doesn’t emphasize the fact that food was exported from these countries during those famines.

The book contains a wealth of detail and a vast array of facts and figures, covering everything from imports to the size of working class kitchens, from animal slaughter techniques to historical records of calorific intake and tooth decay, from the working of grain elevators to the specifics of the sugar extraction process and beet production, and much more. This makes the book a useful resource, but at times I felt that the detail drowned out the big picture and obscured explanation and analysis.

Overall, Diet for a Large Planet is a useful, and at times thought provoking, contribution to the discussion of food systems, but I finished it with unanswered questions.