Historical Materialism 19.1 - Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 3–36 brill.
nl/hima
Debord, Time and History
Tom Bunyard
Goldsmiths, University of London
cup01tb@gold.ac.uk
Abstract
This essay reads Guy Debord’s theoretical work through its primary philosophical and theoretical
influences, and in doing so draws attention to his concerns with time and history. These concerns
are used as a means of clarifying Debord’s theory of ‘spectacle’ and of highlighting its virtues and
failings. The essay uses Debord’s remarks on subjectivity and temporality to pursue the theoretical
dimensions of his interest in strategy, and thereby addresses his Hegelian Marxism via his
comments on the relation between strategy, history and dialectics. His concerns with temporality
are, however, also shown to pertain to the theory of spectacle’s shortcomings as an account of
capitalist society. The essay thus attempts to draw out some of the more-neglected foundational
material upon which the theory of spectacle rests, contending that the former may be of greater
contemporary interest than the latter.
Keywords
Debord, dialectics, Hegel, history, Marx, situationist, spectacle, strategy, time
In 1979, seven years after the Situationist International’s (SI) dissolution, Guy
Debord claimed that ‘the SI is like radioactivity: one speaks little of it, but one
detects traces of it almost everywhere, and it lasts a long time’.1 Today, however,
the group and its practices are spoken of a great deal, and perhaps to the
detriment of their corruptive aspirations. Their anti-art stance has been
canonised into the pantheon of art-history, and both ‘psychogeography’ and
détournement – that ‘fluid language of anti-ideology’2 – have become tropes of
popular culture. In 1966 the judge presiding over the closure of Strasbourg
student-union felt compelled to describe situationist ideas as ‘eminently
noxious’, and warned that their ‘diffusion’ constituted a genuine ‘threat’;3
today, by contrast, they are actively taught within the university-environment.
Outside the lecture-hall, their popularity has led to the French state’s purchase
1. Debord 1979a.
2. Debord 1995, p. 146; Debord 2006, p. 854.
3. Quoted in Dark Star 2001, p. 9.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X564635
4 T. Bunyard / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 3–36
of Debord’s archives4 and to the use of situationist texts in the promotion of

French culture.5
One is thus tempted to ask whether this material was ever truly ‘noxious’ or
‘radioactive’ in the first place; a question to which I will respond here in
relation to Debord’s much-adopted, yet much misunderstood, theory of
‘spectacle’.6 I will address this theory by way of Debord’s concerns with time,
history and subjectivity, which, I will contend, underlie his œuvre. I will show
that temporality – by way of its relation to subjectivity and historical agency –
is not only foundational for Debord’s theoretical work, but also central to the
SI’s broader ambitions. In consequence, I will suggest that these themes can be
used not only to clarify the meaning of Debord’s theory, but also to highlight
its failings and virtues; and through doing so, I shall argue that, if any aspect
of this material can be classed as ‘noxious’, then it is perhaps not the theory of
spectacle itself.
I will suggest that Debord’s theory can be seen to base its critique of capital’s
‘appearances’ on those appearances, occluding the social relations from which
they arise and thus perpetuating the fetishism that it sought to attack. Yet, if
one addresses the theory through its concerns with time and history, one can
perhaps access something that may be rather more interesting, and perhaps
also rather more pertinent: for these issues can also be used to address Debord’s
often-noted, yet largely unexplored, concerns with strategy and chance.
Furthermore, if the themes of time, history and strategy are taken together,
one may be able to go some way towards reconstructing and evaluating the
salient aspects of Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. I will show that the latter’s
emphasis on praxis, autonomy and anti-dogmatism drives this material’s
militancy, and thus perhaps also prompts its contemporary interest.
Consequently, and as opposed to those who would claim that Debord’s
relevance lies in the homologies between his theory of spectacle and more
recent notions of ‘subsumption’,7 ‘real abstraction’8 or ‘semio-capitalism’,9
4. Gallix 2009.
5. The most recent English translation of The Real Split in the International was ‘supported by
the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ (Situationist International 2003, p. v) and the Institut
français du Royaume Uni.
6. See also my ‘Capitalism and Spectacle: The Retort Collective’s Afflicted Powers’, written in
collaboration with the Aufheben group (Aufheben 2009, pp. 47–58; see also Aufheben 1997,
pp. 43–8).
7. For Hardt and Negri, for example, The Society of the Spectacle ‘is perhaps the best
articulation, in its own delirious way, of the contemporary consciousness of the triumph of
capital’ (Hardt and Negri 2001, p. 48, n. 7).
8. Jappe 1999, p. 16 and passim.
9. Berardi 2004.
T. Bunyard / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 3–36 5
I will contend that the ideas that found that theory may be of greater
significance. I shall also advance the contention that these more foundational
concepts actively invite the supersession of the theory of spectacle; and,
towards the end of the paper, I will also propose that they can in fact be seen
to stand in contradiction to it.
The importance of time and history to this material can perhaps be
illustrated by way of the following initial clarification of Debord’s concept
of spectacle. Contrary to what seems at times to be popular belief, The Society
of the Spectacle is not a diatribe about the ‘mass-media’: Debord himself
describes the latter as the spectacle’s ‘most stultifyingly [écrasante] superficial
manifestation’,10 and states that the spectacle ‘cannot be understood as a
product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images’.11 The reading
that will be advanced here will address Debord’s claims that the spectacle is a
‘paralysed history’: an ‘abandonment of any history founded in historical
time’, and thus ‘in effect a false consciousness of time’.12
In short, the spectacle denotes a relationship with history, or, more precisely,
an alienated relation to the construction of history. Debord’s famous opening
détournement of Marx13 corresponds to his contention that capital’s reversal of
subject and object had been ‘perfected [achevée]’:14 for, where Marx had
claimed that individual subjects had been reduced to the status of objects,
acted upon by an economy composed of their own alienated activity, Debord
held that, so ‘perfect’ and ubiquitous was this state of affairs, that these same
individuals had effectively become ‘spectators’ of their own lives. One is thus
separated from autonomous control over one’s own life, and thus from history;
a separation that the situationist project sought to rectify.
This interpretation will be developed during the course of this essay, and
I shall begin by introducing the connection between Debord’s views on history
and his concerns with strategy. To that end, we might now look briefly at the
‘strategic conception of writing’15 employed in his Comments on the Society of
the Spectacle (1988).
10. Debord 1995, p. 19; Debord 2006, p. 772.

11. Debord 1995, pp. 12–13; Debord 2006, p. 767.
12. All quotations from Debord 1995, p. 114; Debord 2006, p. 834.
13. ‘The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles’ (Debord 1995, p. 12; Debord 2006,
p. 766).
14. Debord 1995, p. 11; Debord 2006, p. 766.
15. Kaufmann 2006, p. 211.
Strategy and history

Debord’s Comments have been described as exemplifying the melancholic
perspective said to characterise his later years. Hussey, for example, writes that
by 1988 – the year in which the book appeared – ‘there was clearly a sense of
defeat in Debord’s thought and demeanour’.16 Merrifield notes the Comments’
‘dark undertow’,17 and Crary describes it as ‘deeply pessimistic’;18 ‘as pessimistic’,
according to Plant, ‘as the age in which it arises’.19 However, I think it can be
suggested that the book’s diagnosis is by no means as straightforward as might
be imagined, and that it is certainly less resigned than some have claimed.
The first thing to note here is the import of history to the Comments’
analysis. Debord states in this text that ‘people who lack all historical sense can
readily be manipulated’,20 and adds that ‘with consummate skill the spectacle
organises ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards,
the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood’.21 Within this
‘eternity of noisy insignificance’22 nothing, in his view, has been ‘so thoroughly
coated in obedient lies’23 as the events of May 1968; events that he and the SI
had claimed in 1969 indicated ‘the reappearance of history’.24 The disappearance
of history is thus linked to the deprivation of self-conscious agency, and to the
denigration of a critical, independent standpoint. Yet Debord also adds the
following, enigmatic claim: ‘to the list of the triumphs of power we should,
however, add one result that has proved negative: once the running of a state
involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that
society can no longer be led strategically.’25
I shall return to this statement towards the end of this essay, after having
first addressed the theory of spectacle and the ideas that inform it. I will show
that those ideas might clarify Debord’s linkage of the strategic and the
historical, and, on that basis, offer a re-interpretation of the Comments in
which I suggest that it is perhaps not quite as bleak a text as it might seem.
First, however, I shall aim to introduce the possible import of this discussion;
16. Hussey 2002, p. 353.

17. Merrifield 2005, p. 123.
18. Crary 2004, p. 462.
19. Plant 2000, p. 153. Plant is however careful to note that ‘the picture [the book] paints is
by no means closed and hopeless’ (ibid.).
20. Debord 1998, p. 25, translation altered; Debord 2006, p. 1607.
21. Debord 1998, p. 14; Debord 2006, p. 1601.
22. Debord 1998, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 1062.
23. Debord 1998, p. 14; Debord 2006 p. 1061.
24. Situationist International 2006, p. 292; Situationist International 1997, p. 575.
25. Debord 1998, p. 20; Debord 2006, p. 1605.
and this might be attempted by noting the Comments’ complex unification of

form and content.
Such unification was Debord’s principal response to the problem of
articulating a critique of spectacle within spectacular discourse. The Society of
the Spectacle, for example, makes extensive use of détournement, and thus, in a
sense, actualises its critique through its very enunciation. Many further
examples can be found throughout his œuvre,26 but the Comments is rendered
particularly interesting in this respect by virtue of its account of the spectacle’s
‘integration’ into society.27 This latter has often been said to echo Baudrillard’s
account of ‘hyperreality’,28 yet I would argue that the ideas which drive it
remain as essentially Hegelian as those advanced in The Society of the Spectacle:
for, where that earlier text described the spectacle’s immanent negation, the
Comments describes the emergence of the spectacle within that negation.29
Debord’s task, therefore, was not only to give voice to the negation of the
spectacle, as he had done through détournement in the past: in addition, he
was to do so in a manner that highlighted and negated the spectacle at work
within that opposition.
Attendant to this was Debord’s concern that his work could be studied and
used30 by those ‘who devote themselves to maintaining the system of spectacular
domination’;31 an issue that led him to believe that he must ‘take care not to
give too much information to just anybody’.32 In consequence, when explaining
this latter exigency at the outset of the Comments, he presented the book as
a kind of puzzle:33 ‘readers’, he warned, ‘will encounter certain lures, like the
26. Debord’s cinematic works are similarly composed of détourné films; Debord’s
autobiography, Panegyric (1989), is intended to show, through its ‘subjective extravagance’, the
‘non-value of current society’ (Debord 2008, p. 228).
27. ‘For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this – that it has integrated itself into
reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was
describing it. As a result, reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien.’
(Debord 1998, p. 9; Debord 2006, p. 1598.)
28. See, for example, Plant 2000 and Best and Kellner 2000.
29. ‘For the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is . . . that secret agents become
revolutionaries, and revolutionaries become secret agents’ (Debord 1998, p. 11, translation
altered; Debord 2006, p. 1599). See also Debord’s comments on the demise of the SI in
Situationist International 2003.
30. This is of course easily dismissed, but see Eyal Weizman’s work on the Israeli Defence
Force’s use of Debord, Deleuze and other such writers as means of re-conceiving urban combat
(Weizman 2006).
32. Debord 1998, p. 1; Debord 2006, p. 1593.
33. Compare Debord’s comments on the explanatory diagrams to his ‘Game of War’: ‘before
they went to the printers the figures looked like a truly daunting puzzle awaiting solution, just
like the times in which we live’ (Becker-Ho and Debord 2007, p. 9).
very hallmark of the era’; ‘some elements will be intentionally omitted, and the
plan will have to remain rather unclear’.34 He maintained, however, that ‘as
long as certain pages are interpolated here and there the overall meaning may
appear’.35
This ‘puzzle’ is often noted in the literature on Debord, but it remains
unsolved. Plant, for example, observes that ‘there is a great deal more to the
Comments than sits on the page’,36 but falls short of saying quite what is
missing; Brown is also left asking what ‘the missing ingredient’37 might be.
Kaufmann even goes so far as to claim that, ‘in order to describe a society in
the grip of a multiplicity of secret services’, Debord became ‘a kind of ironic
Hercule Poirot’,38 but he gives no indication as to quite what the great detective
has hidden. I would, however, suggest that one can begin to resolve this
problem by noting that Debord’s original wording indicates that the book’s
‘lures’ might lie in its plan or structure, and that the ‘hallmark of the era’
might be an ‘encounter’ with them:39 a ‘hallmark’ that would then reflect the
reader’s own susceptibility to such deceit. This can be qualified by the following
statement, taken from a letter of 1989 to a reader of the Comments:
One can call ‘lure’ anything that misleads rapid reading or computers. In any
case, there isn’t a single inexact or deceptive piece of information [in my book].
I suggest another hypothesis to you: what if, in this book – for a reader capable of
understanding dialectical, strategic thought (Machiavelli or Clausewitz) – there
are in fact no lures? What if the only lure is the very evocation of the possibility
of there being lures?40
A very similar point is made in Debord’s ‘Cette mauvaise reputation . . .’ (1993),41

and again in a letter to a Spanish translator of the Comments.42 Yet what is
perhaps most important here is the relation between the ‘dialectical, strategic

35. Debord 1998, p. 2; Debord 2006, p. 1594.
36. Plant 2000, pp. 152–3.
37. Brown 1991.
38. Kaufmann 2006, p. 264.
39. ‘On pourra y rencontrer, comme la signature même de l’époque, quelques leurres’ (Debord
2006, p. 1594). Imrie’s translation of the second sentence (‘readers will encounter certain decoys,
like the very hallmark of the era’; Debord 1998, p. 2) renders Debord’s indefinite ‘one will be
able to’ as an inevitable ‘will’, and loses the sense in which those ‘decoys’ may lie in the book’s
plan or structure.
40. Debord 2008, p. 78.
41. ‘Perhaps [the suggestion of lures] is a lure? Perhaps the only one?’ (Debord 1993, p. 33).
42. ‘I do not believe’, Debord writes, ‘that one must translate “lures”, originally a term used
by hunters and that evokes a lost trail, by the brutal trampa [trap] (there is no false information,
which might make the reader “fall into error”, in my book)’ (Debord 2008, p. 93).
thought’ that Debord requires of his readers and the lack of strategic capability
that he attributed to the spectacle itself (as noted above), for this has two
implications: firstly, that a failure to decipher the Comments exemplifies the
symptoms of the spectacle’s eradication of history; and secondly, that the skills
required to thread one’s way through the book would seem to pertain to those
needed to traverse the integrated spectacle itself.
In a suitably dialectical manoeuvre, the Comments thus uses the spectacle’s
own nature against it:43 the book’s critique presents itself as containing ‘lures’
and hidden meanings, thus evoking the confused and illusory nature of the
spectacle; it thereby expresses the spectacle’s integration into its own opposition;
through doing so, it guards its own content with the same gesture that mirrors
the true nature of its object.
There are, of course, any number of objections that one might want to
make here, not least because this runs entirely counter to any notion of popular
appeal or intelligibility (Debord was never one to make concessions to his
audience).44 Yet, however problematic it may be, it is perhaps of broader
interest than its status as a hermeneutic peculiarity: for what comes to the fore
here is the sense in which Debord’s association of history, strategy and dialectics
offered, in his view, some sort of critical purchase on contemporary
capitalism.
It is worth noting here that an increasing number of commentators have
taken to making similar claims. Giorgio Agamben once wrote that Debord’s
books ‘should be used . . . as manuals, as instruments of resistance or exodus’,45
and, with the English publication of Debord’s Game of War in 2007, others
have made similar claims (the Class War Games group, for example, contends
that the Game of War allows ‘revolutionary activists to learn how to fight and
win against the oppressors of spectacular society’).46 Yet, in the absence of an
engagement with the material that founds Debord’s theory, such statements
can remain no more than mere assertions. I will attempt to rectify this to some
extent, but not by presenting Debord’s books as esoteric field-manuals: rather,
I shall show that the philosophical influences that inform Debord’s work can
provide a means of relating his interest in strategy to his theoretical concerns
and Hegelian Marxism; and, through doing so, aim to clarify the correlation
43. Sun Tzu is particularly apposite in this respect because of the similarity between the Taoist
and Hegelian focus on interrelated opposites. See, for example, Sun Tzu’s recommendation that
one should ‘use the enemy to defeat the enemy’ (Sun Tzu 1988, p. 64). Sun Tzu in fact provides
the epigraph to the Comments, and was said by Debord to be similar to Machiavelli and
Clausewitz by virtue of the purportedly dialectical aspects of his work (Debord 2008, p. 204).
44. See Kaufmann 2006, pp. 232–8 and passim for comments on this tendency.
45. Agamben 1990.
46. Class War Games 2010.
of historical and strategic thought signalled above. I thus hope to shed some
light on the mode of thought spoken of in the following passage, taken from
a letter of 1974:
The principal work that, it appears to me, one must engage in – as the
complementary contrary to The Society of the Spectacle, which described frozen
alienation (and the negation that is implicit in it) – is the theory of historical action.
One must advance strategic theory in its moment, which has come. At this stage
and to speak schematically, the basic theoreticians to retrieve and develop are no
longer Hegel, Marx and Lautréamont, but Thucydides, Machiavelli and
Clausewitz.47
Time and subjectivity

I will begin by looking at Debord’s concerns with temporality, starting with
The Society of the Spectacle’s claim (made by way of a quotation from Hegel)
that ‘man – that “negative being who is to the extent that he abolishes being” – is
one [identique] with time’.48 I would argue that the spectacle’s purported
‘falsity’ stems from the denial of that unity with time, and I draw attention to
that here as it entails dismissing the assumption that the theory of spectacle is
based around the loss of an Arcadian or ‘authentic’ past (for example,
Kaufmann’s erroneous claim that Debord ‘postulates a golden age, a humanity
originally transparent to itself ’),49 or, indeed, on the future realisation or
re-institution of an a priori human nature.50
The fifth chapter of The Society of the Spectacle ‘treats’, as Debord later
explained, ‘historical time (and the time of historical consciousness) as the
47. Debord 1974.

48. Debord 1995, p. 92; Debord 2006, p. 820. In 1973 Debord made a list of the citations
and détournements employed in The Society of the Spectacle in order to assist its translation
(Debord 2006, pp. 862–72). However, the phrase employed in the lines quoted above – “l’être
négatif qui est uniquement de la mesure ou il supprime l’être” – is left unattributed there. Brown,
who has translated Debord’s list of détournements on his website (Brown 2007), traces it – albeit
without signalling his interpolation – to Kostas Papaioannou’s preface to a French edition of
Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history that first appeared in 1955 (Hegel 2009).
Unfortunately, Papaioannou doesn’t reference the source of the quotation either (which perhaps
informs its absence from Debord’s own list). I have as yet been unable to trace it further, but it
may be a corruption of the Phenomenology’s “l’essence négative qui est seulement dans la mesure ou
elle supprime l’être” (Hegel 2006, p. 301; for the English translation, see Hegel 1977, p. 194).
49. Kaufmann 2006, p. 222.
50. Jappe: ‘There was no such thing, in [the SI’s] view, as some original human nature,
complete with its desires and its imaginary register, that a bad society had later perverted’ ( Jappe
1999, p. 131).
milieu and goal of the proletarian revolution’.51 Rather than presenting

Kaufmann’s ‘humanity originally transparent to itself ’, this section of the book
traces the link between forms of temporality and modes of production by
describing the alienation engendered by the latter in terms of the former.
During the development and evolution of these modes of social organisation
the power to shape history is said to grow as it becomes increasingly separated
from its producers, culminating in the ‘perfected’ separation of the spectacle.52
The latter is presented as a dialectical juncture at which the two extremes
can re-unite.
The book thus contends that modern society (or, rather, the society of 1967)
offers a new and previously unrealisable capacity for free self-determination: a
capacity that stems from the conclusion of a tendency towards a potential self-
consciousness of historical action. For the SI, labour could be superseded
through technological automation,53 and it was in this sense that the goal of
the situationist revolution was not the possession of the means of material
production per se, but, rather, of the means of producing one’s own life: the
means of attaining the ‘free consumption of [one’s] own time’.54 This was also
informed by the SI’s desire to ‘realise’ art; an ambition that deliberately echoed
Marx’s young-Hegelian concerns with the ‘realisation’ of philosophy.55 Where
Sartre and the existentialists had ‘only interpreted situations’, the SI would
now ‘transform them’,56 and, in doing so, they would unite art and life through
the creative, self-determined construction of subjective experience. ‘The point’,
Debord claimed in The Society of the Spectacle, was ‘to take effective possession
of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the
works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented ’.57
These aspirations, together with the notion that society might be located at
a grand-historical juncture, relate to the SI’s response to the then-prevalent
question of the absence of a nineteenth-century proletariat. The latter, as
Vaneigem put it, had seemingly ‘disappeared forever beneath an avalanche of
sound systems, T.V.’s, small cars and planned communities’.58 Yet, for Debord
and the SI, a ‘new poverty’ and a ‘new proletariat’59 had emerged: a ‘higher’
51. Debord 1969.

52. Crary is thus quite wrong when he writes that ‘a striking feature of Debord’s book was the
absence of any kind of historical genealogy of the spectacle’ (Crary 2004, p. 456).
53. See Jorn in Situationist International 2006, pp. 55–8; Situationist International 1997,
pp. 22–5. See also Debord 1998, p. 40; Debord 2006, p. 1616.
54. Debord 2003, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 472.
55. Situationist International 2006, p. 429
57. Debord 1995, p. 133, emphasis in the original; Debord 2006, p. 846.
58. Vaneigem 2003, p. 68.
form of poverty that revealed the true, implicit nature of its predecessor. The
deprivation of the means of subsistence necessarily entails the deprivation of
the power to freely shape one’s existence; thus, whilst the ‘wealth’ of commodity-
society had remedied the former problematic, the ennui that this ‘wealth’ had
engendered rendered the latter explicit. Consequently, the SI felt able to claim
that ‘in the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may
consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social
space-time that society allots to them’.60
I shall return to the implications of that reformulation below, when
discussing the failings of the spectacle as an account of the operation of capital.
Here, I simply want to indicate the almost existential notion of poverty and
authenticity that it involves: for, despite his stated antipathy to the chief
proponents of existentialism,61 the manner in which Debord and the SI cast
the human subject as the product of its own experiences and actions owes
much to existentialism’s legacy and ambience, as indeed does his focus on
temporality (although I would also add that his interest in time is also inflected
by French Hegelianism’s interest in Hegel’s association of consciousness, time
and dialectics).62 This is by no means to deny that these notions of self-
determination and self-constitution can be discerned in the more obvious
influences of Hegel,63 Marx,64 Lukács65 and Lefebvre;66 rather, it is to suggest
that the French milieu of the 1950s and 1960s furthered an emphasis on those
aspects of Hegelian Marxism. The principal issue, however, is that Debord
effectively founds the existential view that ‘“one is” what one does’67 upon a
Hegelian-Marxist model of dialectical interaction between subject and object.68

61. See, for example, the Situationist International’s article ‘Interview with an Imbecile’,
Situationist International 2006, pp. 233–5; Situationist International 1997, pp. 487–8.
62. This association is brought to the fore in the work of Wahl, Koyré, Kojève and Hyppolite.
I would also suggest that Kojève’s infamous interpretation of Hegel’s ‘end of history’ provided
one of the principal templates for Debord’s theory.
63. ‘An individual cannot know what he is until he has made himself a reality through action’
(Hegel 1977, p. 240).
64. ‘Objective man . . . [is] the outcome of man’s own labour’ (Marx 1988, p. 149). ‘Labour
is . . . a process between man and nature. . . . Through this movement he acts upon external nature
and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.’ (Marx 1990,
p. 283.)
65. ‘To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself – that is reality’ (Lukács 1971, p. 15).
66. ‘An individual can imagine himself to be a nebula (a cloud) of virtualities (possibilities). . . .
The processes of his practical life consist of a sort of constellation of actions and powers
(capacities)’ (Lefebvre 2008b, p. 112).
67. Heidegger 2008, p. 283, SZ 239.
68. For example, ‘in the working-up of the objective world. . . . nature appears [to the acting
subject] as his work and his reality . . . for . . . he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness,
This will be developed below when I turn to Debord’s views on Marx’s

‘inversion’ of Hegel, but here we can note that it underlies his claim that the
subject is both ‘negative’ and ‘one with time’: for, as that subject abolishes
what exists by creating itself and its world anew through its own actions, and
insofar as it comes to know itself through that process, both the subject and its
world – qua their continual differentiation – are cast as inherently historical.69
The corollary of this view is that a denial of self-determination – brought
about through the restriction of such options and the imposition of set,
predetermined experiences – would constitute not only a denial of the self, but
also a separation from one’s own time: for, if one is and knows oneself through
what one does, then abdicating autonomy gives rise to a separation from one’s
own objective activity, and thus to an absence of self-consciousness.70
Whilst this owes a great deal to Marx’s early discussions of alienated labour,
it also exhibits (as Jappe has stressed)71 the influence of Lukács’s History and
Class Consciousness (1923). According to Lukács, the alienation of the subject
from his or her own activity entails an increasingly ‘contemplative’72 attitude
towards the latter; an attitude that had, as a result of society’s domination by
the commodity-form, begun to spread beyond the factory-walls. Debord
adopts and expands this position, claiming that all social activity now takes
place in accordance with the demands of the economy.73 His contention is
thus that the dialectical relation of mutual constitution between self and world
has been subverted, resulting in a passive subject acted upon by an alien world;
albeit a world composed, qua commodification, of that subject’s own alienated
power and activity.74
To sum up: the claim that the human subject has been separated from his
or her own time unites the Marxist idea of separation from one’s own activity
intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore contemplates himself in a world that he
has created’ (Marx 1988, p. 77).
69. Lefebvre: ‘The human being is historical and its historicity is inherent to it: it produces
and is produced, it creates its world and creates itself.’ (Lefebvre 2008b, p. 20.)
70. Just as Hegel wrote that ‘the slave knows not his essence . . . and not to know himself is
not to think himself ’ (Hegel 2005, p. xlii), Debord held that ‘the more [the spectator]
contemplates . . . his own unthinking activity . . . the less he understands his own existence and his
own desires’ (Debord 1995, p. 23; Debord 2006, p. 774).
71. Jappe 1999, pp. 19–31 and passim.
72. ‘. . . activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative’ (Lukács 1971,
p. 89, emphasis in the original).
73. ‘The spectacle subjects [soumet] living men to its will to the extent that the economy has
totally subjugated [soumis] them’ (Debord 1995, p. 16, translation altered; Debord 2006,
p. 769), as the whole of modern life now takes place in ‘uneasy and worshipful subjection to
production’s needs and results’ (Debord 1995, p. 21; Debord 2006, p. 773).
74. ‘Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves’
(Debord 1995, p. 23; Debord 2006, p. 774).
with a desire to supersede the separation of art and life, insofar as both were to
be overcome through the revolutionary institution of free self-determination
(this was originally to be achieved through the construction of situations, but,
as the SI developed, it became increasingly associated with libertarian council-
communism). It is in this respect that the concept of spectacle is intended to
articulate, not only the inadequacy of contemporary capitalism, but also the
possibilities of a post-revolutionary future.
Image and representation

Before expanding on these themes, I will offer some brief notes as to the extent
to which their disavowal has furthered a reductively literal reading of Debord’s
visual terminology. This is largely due to the academic trends that have
characterised Debord and the SI’s appropriation, and which have resulted in
the theory’s separation from its Hegelian roots.75 Jappe’s Guy Debord (1993 in
Italian; 1999 in English) remains the sole text to approach Debord’s Hegelian
Marxism in detail, and, given this solitary status, it is interesting to note that
Debord himself described it as ‘the best-informed book about me’.76 Yet,
although Jappe’s book certainly brought this dimension of Debord’s theory to
the fore, it does so largely uncritically (Debord also noted the book’s
‘comprehensive sympathy’).77 Jappe addresses Debord’s Hegelianism largely
by way of the influence of Lukács; and, although he recognises Debord’s
interests in time and strategy, he offers little discussion of the manner in which
they cohere, or, indeed, how they might relate to his Hegelianism or to the rest
of his work. Furthermore, although the appearance of Jappe’s book has entailed
that most writers now at least mention Debord’s Hegelianism,78 few seem
75. Although the group’s connection to the radical Left was never entirely forgotten or
abandoned, they came to be adopted by a more cultural and artistic milieu from the late 1970s
onwards. The exhibition of situationist work in the late 1980s laid the basis for the art-historical
and visual-cultural readings that would later proliferate (for example, Beller 2006, Crary 2001,
Jay 1994, Mitchell 1994). This encouraged the assumption that Debord’s use of the terms ‘image’
and ‘representation’ should be read in a simplistically visual register, i.e. as denoting pictures,
adverts and the mass-media, which fostered both the theory’s appropriation by media-studies
and its supposed connection to ‘postmodern’ notions of ‘simulacra’ and ‘hyperreality’ (e.g. Best
and Kellner 2000 and Plant 2000). The result of this line of development is thus a denigration
of the Hegelian ideas that make Debord’s theory fully comprehensible.
76. Debord 2008, p. 453.
77. Debord 2008, p. 441.
78. For example, Hussey acknowledges that the theory’s ‘first influence was Hegel’ (Hussey
2002, p. 216), and Bracken writes that ‘Hegel is . . . central to Debord’s thought’ (Bracken 1997,
p. 83).
to engage with it. Debord’s own observation that that ‘one cannot fully
comprehend’ The Society of the Spectacle ‘without Marx, and especially Hegel’79
thus continues to ring true.
In their absence, The Society of the Spectacle can indeed be opaque: Kaufmann,
for example, who admits that ‘the enthusiasm shown . . . for Debord the
theoretician often leaves me . . . sceptical’,80 informs us on a page that contains
no less than nine rhetorical questions (‘Do we know exactly what Debord
means by spectacle? Can we know?’, etc.),81 that the book is ‘an enigma’.82 Yet
by far the most prevalent error – as widespread as its following formulation is
crude – is that encapsulated by a frustrated Jean-Pierre Voyer: he ‘used to go
to bed late, hoping to find an idea in Guy Debord’s book’; he discovered that
‘there are none’, and he concludes from this that ‘when Debord pompously
writes “everything that was directly lived has withdrawn into a representation”,
the prick is simply saying that we see posters of naked women pushing brands
of cigarettes’.83 Traces of this reading can be discerned throughout much of
the literature on Debord. Beller, for example, is close to the mark when he tells
us that the theory ‘is merely a reformulation in visual terms of Lukács’ analysis
of commodity reification’,84 but he conflates ‘visual terms’ with visual
phenomena;85 and, just as Beller only half-grasps the spectacle’s connection to
the commodity, so too does Hussey fall short of its connection to alienation:
he correctly notes that Debord is doing something ‘rather more nuanced’ than
‘simply attack[ing] the obvious visual manifestations of modern society’, but
he believes this to be describing those visual forms as uniting ‘the fragmented
aspects of modern life’.86
Such readings go astray because of their inability to decipher Debord’s
visual terminology. This can perhaps be clarified by way of its largely-
overlooked87 basis in Hegel’s notion of Vorstellung (often translated as ‘picture-
thought’ in English, and significantly as ‘representation’ in French). The
79. Debord 2004, p. 454.

80. Kaufmann 2006, p. xi.
81. Kaufmann 2006, p. 73.
82. Ibid.
83. Voyer 1998.
84. Beller 2006, p. 241.
85. This pertains to Beller’s peculiar notion of an ‘attention-economy’, in which things accrue
value via the attention paid to them. His account makes extensive use of The Society of the
Spectacle in making this claim, as he contends that ‘the visual’ for Debord is ‘the paramount field
of capital exploitation’ (Beller 2006, p. 278).
86. Hussey 2002, p. 217.
87. Bracken mentions the phrase ‘picture-thinking’ once when signalling the influence of
Hegel’s aesthetics (Bracken 1997, pp. 82–3), but he does not analyse the concept or establish its
connection to alienation, praxis or spectacle.
Vorstellung is a mere ‘image’ – in the sense of a conceptual representation that

remains separate from its object – of the ‘life pulse’88 of the Begriff (‘Concept’),
and is thus a mode of thought that remains estranged from its own true
nature.89 Debord’s claim is that the unity of subject and object afforded by
self-determined action has been denied by the spectacle, and that, in separating
the subject from his or her own activity, spectacular society becomes a
representation of that unity.
This might be explained by way of a few words on the derivation of this
connection between alienation and representation, which stems, in part, from
Feuerbach’s presentation of religion as a Vorstellung of human ‘species-being’:
‘Man’, he claimed, ‘first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he
finds it in himself ’,90 as ‘God’ is no more than ‘the mirror of man’91 (a view
echoed by the early Marx).92 Debord’s spectacle and its representations also
involve a notion of reflection93 and speculum;94 yet being the ‘material
reconstruction of the religious illusion’,95 these images are not merely
ideological, but rather involve social practice itself.96 Their ‘inverted’ nature
stems from Marx’s depiction of a humanity in thrall to its own alienated
activity,97 which pertains to the notion of falsity outlined above. It is important
to note, however, that Debord’s ‘images’ are not Vorstellungen of an original
88. Hegel 1998, p. 37.

89. For example: religion for Hegel is the ‘inmost region of Spirit’; yet even its highest form,
the ‘revealed religion’ (Hegel 1977, p. 453) of Christianity, remains a mere Vorstellung of the
Absolute identity of identity and difference accessed by grasping the Begriff through Hegelian
philosophy. Crucially, such a representation is not false qua its absolute distinction from the
Concept: rather, the Concept is its own true alienated nature, which it has yet to be united with
(hence Hegel’s claim that the Christian religion’s ‘actual self-consciousness is not the object of its
consciousness’, despite which he contends that ‘the content of this picture-thinking is absolute
Spirit’ (Hegel 1977, p. 479)).
90. Feuerbach 1989, p. 13.
91. Feuerbach 1989, p. 63.
92. See, for example, his comments in his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right’: ‘Man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only
the reflection of his own self ’ (Marx 2005, p. 71).
93. The spectacle is ‘the faithful [fidèle] reflection of the production of things, and a distorting
[infidèle] objectification of the producers’ (Debord 1995, p. 16; Debord 2006, p. 769).
94. ‘In French, “spectacle” has the merit of being linked to the Latin speculum and thus to
mirror, to the inverted image, to the concept of speculation, etc.’ (Debord 1980).
95. Debord 1995, pp. 17–18; Debord 2006, pp. 770–1.
96. ‘. . . the spectacle cannot be set in abstract opposition to concrete social activity’ (Debord
1995, p. 14; Debord 2006, p. 768).
97. ‘Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist
production, is he governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx 1990, p. 772). Compare
Debord’s claim that ‘Our era accumulates powers and imagines itself as rational. But no one
recognizes these powers as their own.’ (Debord 2003, p. 30; Debord 2006, p. 543.)
essence, but, rather, of the capacity for self-determination via subject-object

unity (a point to which I will return below).
As noted above, the concept of spectacle was not only intended to define its
age but also the latter’s capacity for historical change; an intention that stems
from Debord’s goal of capturing society as a historical totality, which echoes
Lukács’s own attempt to understand society under the general rubric of the
commodity.98 The difference is that, for Debord, the commodity’s dominance
had necessitated a new totalising concept, able to express the changes wrought
by this ubiquity. ‘Spectacle’ thus combines a ‘perfected’ alienation, the need to
overcome art’s representation of life, but also – and here we come to the media
and visual aspects of the theory – a sense in which the separation of subject
and object had reached such an extreme that it was now made manifest in a
society saturated with visual imagery extolling capital’s virtues (hence, the
spectacle is ‘a negation of life that has become visible’).99 Lukács’ ‘contemplative
attitude’ had thus truly come to define modern society. These contentions
also informed Debord’s interest in the cinema, which was said to be ‘the
best representation of an epoch’100 (see also Lefebvre: ‘someone sitting in front
of a cinema screen offers an example and a common model of [modern]
passivity’).101
The media-centric reading of spectacle is thus not wrong per se: rather, it
focuses on the spectacle’s most ‘stultifyingly superficial’ aspects, and fails to see
their connection to the broader themes of history, time and self-determination.
As Debord put it in his correspondence: ‘behind the phenomenal appearances
of the spectacle (for example, television, advertising, the discourse of the State,
etc.), that is to say, particular mendacious forms, one can find the general
reality of the spectacle itself (as a moment in the mode of production)’.102
This, however, leads us to the problems inherent within his theorisation of
that mode of production. Having outlined these difficulties, I will then return
to the issue of time, and thereby to the themes of strategy and history signalled
above.
98. According to Lukács, ‘The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence
when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole’ (Lukács 1971, p. 86). Debord
quotes this very same passage as the epigraph to the second chapter of The Society of the
Spectacle.
100. Situationist International 1997, p. 8.
101. Lefebvre 2008a, p. 32.
102. Debord 1973.
Spectacle and capital

I will suggest here that the theory of spectacle’s inadequacy as an account of
the operation of capital stems from Debord’s choice of totalising concept: for,
despite encompassing the issues indicated above, the notion of ‘spectacle’
stresses the subjective alienation of consciousness over the objective alienation
of activity (i.e. the sale of labour within the capital-relation). Theorising society
as a totality under the rubric of contemplation subsumes the specificity and
diversity of activity under the ubiquity of alienated consciousness, and thus
casts production, circulation, work, leisure, etc. as effectively homogeneous.
Or, as Dauvé (writing under the pseudonym Jean Barrot) puts it: Debord and
the SI ‘criticized the commodity, not capital – or rather . . . criticized capital as
commodity, and not as a system of valuation which includes production as
well as exchange’.103 In short, Debord’s theory attempts to understand social
production on the basis of consumption, remaining within the ‘sphere of
circulation’ without entering ‘the hidden abode of production’;104 and, as a
result, its critique of appearances is itself founded in part on appearance.
That claim can be introduced by enquiring as to whether Debord fell prey
to the idealism that Lukács later identified within his History and Class
Consciousness. ‘Man’, he claimed in 1923, ‘must become conscious of himself
as a social being, as simultaneously the subject and object of the socio-historical
process.’105 This entailed that ‘society becomes the reality for man’,106 and that
‘nature’ becomes a ‘social category’.107 However, in his long and self-effacing
Preface to the book’s 1967 edition, Lukács wrote that its presentation of nature
as a social construct had effaced the independence of the real, objective world.
History and Class Consciousness, he claimed, had made the mistake of equating
the ‘otherness’ of the world and the objective actions performed within it to
the alienation engendered by capital: to use Marx’s terms from the 1844
Manuscripts (the reading of which led Lukács to recognise his own overly-
subjective errors),108 Entäusserung (the subject externalising itself through its
own activity) was thus blurred with Entfremdung (estrangement from that
activity), as all instances of the former were viewed in terms of the latter.
103. Barrot 1979.

104. Marx 1990, p. 279.
105. Lukács 1971, p. 19.
106. Ibid.
107. Lukács 1971, p. 234. In other words, ‘whatever is held to be natural at any given stage
of social development’ is ‘socially conditioned’ (ibid.).
108. ‘In the process of reading the Marx manuscript [the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 ] all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to
one side’ (Lukács 1971, p. xxxvi).
Consequently, according to the Lukács of 1967, ‘labour, the mediator of

the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing [from the
book]’.109 His critique of contemplation had fallen back into the ‘idealistic
contemplation’110 of capital’s subjective effects: ‘the proletariat seen as the
identical subject-object of history’ was thus ‘an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel’,
and ‘an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality’.111
Debord avoids this problem by way of his concern with time, but fails to do
so in an entirely satisfactory manner. ‘Time’, he writes, is ‘a necessary alienation’,112
being ‘the medium in which the subject realises himself while losing himself,
becomes other in order to become truly himself [pour devenir la vérité de lui-
même]’.113 The object with which this subject was to unite was thus its own
action, not nature per se, and a degree of ‘necessary’ otherness and externalisation
was thus retained within that unity. However, Debord’s theory does not
entirely escape the charge of subjectivism, for, although it presents capital as
the result of alienated social activity, it offers little purchase on the social
relations from which capital arises. The theory of spectacle presents all social
activity as being effectively homogeneous, because the extension of reification
and rationalisation beyond the factory-walls gives rise to a society in which
‘time’ (to borrow Lukács’ phrasing) ‘sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing
nature’, and is thereby ‘transformed into abstract, exactly measurable’114 space.
Yet, just as this time had become abstract and generalised across social
experience, so too had Debord’s proletariat: as we have seen, the latter had
‘not been eliminated’ by the ‘wealth’ of commodity-capitalism, but, rather,
remained ‘irreducibly present . . . in the shape of the vast mass of workers who
have lost all power over the use of their own lives’;115 a ‘vast mass’ that crossed
the class-boundaries of traditional Marxist analysis, being formed, as we saw
above, of ‘all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time
that society allots to them’, ‘regardless of variations in their degrees of
affluence’.116
Debord’s effectively existential notion of poverty was thus linked to the
nature of ‘spectacular time’: a time that ‘manifests nothing in its effective
reality aside from its exchangeability’,117 as all social experience and activity had
109. Lukács 1971, p. xvii.

110. Lukács 1971, p. xviii.
111. Lukács 1971, p. xxiii.
112. Debord 1995, p. 115; Debord 2006, p. 835.
114. Lukács 1971, p. 90.
115. Debord 1995, p. 84; Debord 2006, p. 816.
been broken down into abstractly-equivalent, functional chunks. Different

forms of social activity were thus equated to one another (furthered by the
trope of a disconnected spectator, for whom all life is equally separate), thus
denigrating the importance of wage-labour vis-à-vis the analysis of capital and
informing the SI’s shift in focus away from production towards the ‘everyday’
(remembering here their contention that labour was to be abolished by
automation). In short, capital’s basis in the objective activity of production
was neglected as a result of the emphasis that Debord and the SI placed on its
subjective effects.
Yet, despite the sense in which the revolutionary project was presented as
having effectively outgrown any preordained focus on surplus-value,118 the
theory of spectacle does nonetheless rely on Marx’s notions of fetish and
appearance; concepts that were intimately linked to the latter’s account of the
wage-relation.119 Debord was thus obliged to expand that relation in a manner
that would allow him to talk of the alienation of life-as-a-whole rather than
labour per se. This, however, renders that relation so abstract that it effectively
becomes a binary opposition rather than a dialectical interaction: within the
spectacle, ‘the entirety of labour sold ’, i.e. the total activity of society, becomes
‘the total commodity’,120 i.e. spectacular life, which is then returned in fragments
to its fragmented producers. The social, interpersonal antagonism of the wage-
relation thus becomes the opposition of ‘humanity’-as-a-whole to ‘capital’, or
rather of ‘life’ to its denial. Thus, although the theory of spectacle relies on
traditional Marxist concepts, it removes their bases; hence the contention that
its account of appearances is itself founded on appearance, insofar as its use of
the concept of fetish could in fact be said to exemplify the fetish, as it occludes
the social relations from which capital arises.
This, of course, stems from the SI’s desire to open up a ‘Northwest Passage’
through and beyond nineteenth-century analyses and the models of struggle
and organisation associated with them.121 Debord and the SI’s rejection of any
118. Debord in fact wrote that Marx had been ‘drawn onto the terrain of the dominant forms
of thought’ in that he took up ‘the fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy’
(Debord 1995, p. 55, translation altered; Debord 2006, p. 797); he seems to have viewed this as
being tantamount to ‘economism’, and thus to the perpetuation of the abdication of historical
agency to ‘the products of men’s hands’ (Marx 1990, p. 165).
119. ‘The wage-form . . . extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into
necessary labour and surplus labour[.] . . . All labour appears as paid labour. . . . All the notions of
justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode
of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom . . . have as their basis [this] form of
appearance . . . which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the
precise opposite of that relation’ (Marx 1990, p. 680).
120. Debord 1995, p. 29; Debord 2006, p. 779.
121. Situationist International 2006, p. 147; Situationist International 1997, pp. 323–4.
sense in which labour might be liberated rather than abolished also recalls
aspects of Postone’s work,122 and, for some, such as Jappe and the Principia
Dialectica group,123 Debord’s move away from a focus on labour is one of his
chief virtues. Whilst making reference to Lukács’s 1967 Preface to History and
Class Consciousness, Jappe contends that the latter book’s corrected presentation
of labour as a constitutive force ‘turn[ed] a characteristic of capitalism into an
eternal ontological necessity’.124 For Jappe, such a fixation on the primacy of
labour and class denigrates their historical mutability and thus their potential
supersession.125 Yet neither Lukács nor the Marx of the Manuscripts equate all
constitutive activity to contemporary-capitalist labour, and there remains a
marked difference between recognising the characteristics of present
circumstances and casting them as absolutes. Consequently, and as opposed to
those who would hold that the relevance of Debord’s theory lies in its resonance
with contemporary issues of real abstraction, I would contend that the theory
is itself simply too abstract.
Having made these claims, I will now return to my earlier proposal that
Debord’s concerns with temporality may offer more than a means of correcting
the interpretation of Debord’s spectacle and of highlighting its shortcomings.
In the sections below, I will suggest that it can also be seen to indicate some of
the more interesting aspects of his Hegelian Marxism, particularly vis-à-vis the
latter’s connection to his connection of historical and strategic thought.
Time and contingency

As noted above, the publication of Debord’s A Game of War in 2007 has
furthered interest in his status as a ‘strategist’. An awareness of this dimension
of his thought and work has also been encouraged by the flurry of intellectual
biographies that appeared over the last decade. Yet, in the absence of the
themes of time and subjectivity that I have drawn attention to above, this
interest can appear to be a mere idiosyncrasy, and thus a means by which an
author might add a degree of shade to his portrait. Merrifield, for example,
enjoys picturing a melancholy philosopher-poet given to ‘ruminate’ on ‘quiet,
lonely summer days’ over classics of military theory;126 Hussey presents a
122. For Postone, ‘the working class is integral to capitalism rather than the embodiment of
its negation’ (Postone 1993, p. 17, Postone’s italics).
123. For the Principia Dialectica group, Debord did not move far enough from a concern
with production. See the group’s website at: <www.principiadialectica.co.uk>.
124. Jappe 1999, p. 151.
125. Ibid.
126. Merrifield 2005, p. 11.
self-consciously Machiavellian figure, and Bracken127 similarly describes a

‘player of human chess’.128 Although other writers have attempted more detail,129
the theoretical dimensions of Debord’s interest in strategy and its connection
to the more existential aspects of his account remain largely ignored.
However, if, as a result of its identity with time, the subject is located in
perpetual opposition to its present – even to the reality that it has itself created,
and, by extension, to its own extant self – then that subject is inherently
transitory, and characterised by finitude. Particular forms of consciousness
would then be bound to particular moments and contexts, precluding any
absolute, trans-historical viewpoint. Actions would thus have to be based
upon limited knowledge of the factors in play, and this, in turn, means that
the dialectical relation between subject and world described above must
inevitably involve chance (Debord: ‘all progress, all creation, is the organisation
of new conditions of chance’).130 In other words, the construction of history
becomes a strategic enterprise: or, as Debord put it whilst quoting Clausewitz,
‘one must become accustomed to acting in accordance with general
probabilities; it is an illusion to wait for a time when one will be completely
aware of everything’.131
This homology between existential and strategic concerns132 pertains to
the SI’s goal of transforming life into a game,133 and, as I shall show in a
127. Bracken’s book does contain some genuine insight: ‘for Debord [the] apprehension of
time was coloured [by a] Hegelian preoccupation with the self-conscious creation of history with
acts of negation’. (Bracken 1997, p. 105.)
128. Bracken 1997, p. viii.
129. Jappe proposes that Debord’s interest in strategy ‘could be interpreted as a desire to
remain moored to a world still essentially intelligible . . . and to a high degree predictable’ ( Jappe
1999, p. 114). Strategic thought is, however, an attempt to think with chance, not against it, and
it is of interest to Debord because time renders the world inherently unpredictable. Kaufmann
(Kaufmann 2006, p. 209) reads Debord under the rubric of poetic melancholia, and thus turns
a concern with actualising the negativity of time into the tragic acceptance of a time that simply
happens to us: Debord was concerned with ‘war and loss’, he claims, because ‘they are two faces
of the same hunger for the irrevocable, for experiences that are lost forever’. More interestingly,
Wark (Wark 2008, p. 28) has suggested that Debord’s Game of War is ‘really a diagram of the
strategic possibilities of spectacular time’, but he leaves this claim undeveloped.
130. Debord 2006, p. 296. Debord 2010.
131. Debord 2003, p. 180; Debord 2006, p. 1388.
132. The sense in which Debord’s subject is always located within a given context, is
characterised by limited knowledge, and shapes itself through actualising projects clearly echoes
aspects of Sartre’s account in Being and Nothingness. One can, however, also detect further
homologies: for example, ‘we must decide upon the opportuneness of an act and attempt to
measure its effectiveness without knowing all the factors that are present’ (De Beauvoir 1976,
p. 123); ‘the only situation a commander can know is his own’ (Clausewitz 1993, p. 95), as ‘war
is the realm of uncertainty’ (Clausewitz 1993, p. 117).
133. ‘In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards’
moment, it also becomes particularly significant in relation to Debord’s views

on Marx’s ‘inversion’ of Hegel. First, however, and in order to introduce the
‘openness’ of Debord’s Hegelian view of history, I shall offer some comments
on the manner in which these issues entail that ‘truth’ – as opposed to the
spectacle’s ‘falsity’ – corresponds to historical action and to the contextuality
of praxis.
As we have seen, the subject’s identity with time necessitates autonomy and
self-determination, and thereby precludes political representation134 (as the SI
put it: ‘We will only organize the detonation: the free explosion must escape us
and any other control forever’).135 This is not, however, to suggest that Debord
and the SI were in favour of ‘sub-anarchist spontaneism’: according to the SI,
anyone who associated them with the latter would show that they ‘simply
don’t know how to read’.136 Their interpretation of councilism does, however,
differ sharply from Lenin’s own disavowal of ‘spontaneity’: for, where Lenin
held that the latter would constitute ‘nothing more nor less than consciousness
in an embryonic form’,137 Debord maintained that the knowledge required to
deal with an insurrectionary situation could never be ‘imputed’ by external,
intellectual managers,138 but must develop immanently through praxis.139 This
could not take place through the imposition of an identity or a ‘correct’
ideological perspective, but only through the expression of a shared
circumstance or problematic. Hence Debord’s claim that ‘we did not “put our
ideas into everybody’s heads”140 by the exercise of some outside influence or
other’, but rather ‘gave voice to ideas that were necessarily already present in
(Clausewitz 1993, p. 97); Compare Debord’s call for a ‘ludic model of time’ (Debord 1995,
p. 116, translation altered; Debord 2006, p. 836), and his observation that ‘one fights also by
playing’ (Debord 1998, p. 81, translation altered; Debord 2006, p. 1641).
134. ‘We shall never begin to understand Debord’s hostility to the concept “representation,”
for instance, unless we realize that for him the word always carried a Leninist aftertaste. The
spectacle is repugnant because it threatens to generalize, as it were, the Party’s claim to be the
representative of the working class.’ (Clark and Nicholson-Smith 2004, p. 479.)
137. Lenin 1988, p. 97.
138. ‘The task of directing the proletariat from without, by means of a disciplined clandestine
party under the control of intellectuals who had become “professional revolutionaries”, gave rise
to a genuine profession . . . of total social management’ (Debord 1995, p. 68, emphasis in the
original; Debord 2006, p. 805).
139. See Theses 123 and 203 of The Society of the Spectacle (Debord 1995, pp. 89 and 143;
Debord 2006, pp. 819 and 829).
140. An unattributed quotation from the SI’s article ‘New Forms of Action against Politics
and Art’, first published in Internationale Situationniste, Issue 11 (Situationist International
2006, p. 275; Situationist International 1997, p. 529).
these proletarian heads’.141 Consequently, whilst Debord certainly employs a

Hegelian notion of recognition – both in terms of the acceptance of theory,
but also notably within the councils themselves142 – this does not involve
giving voice to a stable ontological truth, but, rather, to the acknowledgement
of a temporary exigency; and as validity stems from an ability to diagnose and
affect an existing historical tendency, the recognition and adoption of theory
on the part of those who are to actualise it serves as the measure of its truth.143
Hence Debord’s claim that Marx’s Capital is ‘obviously true and false:
essentially, it is true, because the proletariat recognised it, although quite badly
(and thus also let its errors pass)’;144 hence also his own and the SI’s view that
the events of May 1968 demonstrated the truth of their own arguments.145
The subject’s identity with time thus casts historical action as a strategic
enterprise. Yet in doing so, it entails that theoretical truth must itself be
contingent, or at least historically contextual.146 Consequently, the existential
aspects of Debord’s account and its opposition to representation entail that
theory can only provide the articulation and clarification of a given moment,
and this, as I shall now suggest, connects to the anti-dogmatism that
characterises his Hegelianism.
History and Hegelian Marxism

Debord’s view of the relation between Marx and Hegel can be introduced by
looking at the manner in which Debord held Marx to have ‘demolish[ed]
Hegel’s detached stance with respect to what occurs’.147 Having rejected any
species-being, essence or telos that might require full historical expression,
Debord claimed that after Marx ‘theory thenceforward had nothing to know
141. Situationist International 2003, p. 9, emphasis in the original, translation altered;

Debord 2006, p. 1089.
142. ‘The power of workers’ councils . . . aspires to be recognised – and to recognise itself – in
a world of its own design’ (Debord 1995, p. 127, emphasis in the original; Debord 2006,
p. 842).
143. A view that perhaps owes much to Marx’s claim in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that ‘Man
must prove the truth . . . in practice’ (Marx 2005, p. 171).
144. Debord 2004, p. 457.
145. See the SI’s 1969 essay ‘The Beginning of an Era’ (Situationist International 2006,
pp. 288–325; Situationist International 1997, pp. 571–602).
146. For Debord, a theory ‘can indeed be relatively “false” – and thus “true” for historical
thought – in that it is only “the maximum of possible consciousness” at this moment in society,
which one will explain much better after one has left it behind or when one will be more
advanced in the endeavour to leave it’ (Debord 2004, p. 456).
beyond what it itself did’.148 This can be clarified by noting Debord’s admiration
for Cieszkowski’s Prolegomena for a Historiosophy; a work that he did not
discover until ‘after 1972’149 (and which he published through Champ Libre
the following year), but which echoes many of the themes presented in 1967’s
The Society of the Spectacle. Cieszkowski’s significance, in Debord’s view, was to
have laid – ‘five years before the young Marx, and one hundred and twenty
years before the Situationists’ – the ‘primary basis’ upon which ‘the modern
project of the social revolution is constituted’.150 Debord writes as follows:
Cieszkowski annihilates the central aporia of the [Hegelian] system, simply by

recalling that time had not ended. Hegel had concluded history, in the form of
thought, because he finally accepted the idea of glorifying the present result. In a
single movement, Cieszkowski reversed the system, by putting the present in
contact with the ‘moment’ of the future, because he recognized in the thought of
history – the supersession of philosophy – the power to transform the world.151
Cieszkowski’s actual objection is in fact slightly different: he contends that

Hegel, in limiting his focus to the past, failed to think history as a totality,152
although he does maintain that philosophy is to be realised as praxis.153 The
salient point here, however, is the degree to which the statement above
illuminates Debord’s own view of the relation between Marx and Hegel. It
certainly chimes with the account presented in The Society of the Spectacle:
there, Debord claimed that the crux of Marx’s famous ‘inversion’ was not the
‘trivial substitution’154 of unfolding categories for developing social relations,
but, rather, a more ‘horizontal’ shift in perspective; for, where Hegel cast the
present as the conclusion of the past, Marx is viewed as having rendered every
present moment the genesis of an open future. After Marx, Debord writes,
‘history, once it becomes real, no longer has an end ’.155 There is thus no grand
cosmological truth or human telos, but only that which is created through
collective action: for doing away with any notion of an intrinsic human essence
in favour of an identity with time entails an inherently ‘open’ historical
dialectic.
148. Debord 1995, p. 51; Debord 2006, p. 795.

149. Debord 2008, p. 84.
150. Debord 1983.
151. Ibid.
152. ‘The totality of history must consist of the past and of the future, of the road already
travelled as well as the road yet to be travelled’ (Cieszkowski 2009, p. 51).
153. ‘The future of philosophy in general is to be practical philosophy or, to put it better, the
philosophy of praxis.’ (Cieszkowski 2009, p. 77, emphasis in the original.)
154. Debord 1995, p. 51; Debord 2006, p. 794.
155. Debord 1995, p. 51; Debord 2006, p. 795.
However, I would suggest that this is not a dialectic without resolution per
se. Rather than a goal located at the apex of history (i.e. as an epiphany or a
particular state of affairs within history), Debord seems to cast subject-object
unity as the circular self-perpetuating ground of an open-ended process: for
history ‘has no goal [n’a pas d’objet] aside from whatever effects it works upon
itself ’.156 The same is true on the individual level: life was to become ‘a journey
containing its whole meaning within itself ’.157
This can be clarified by distinguishing it from Lefebvre’s historical goal of
a ‘total’ or ‘“de-alienated” man’.158 A ‘living subject-object’159 said to arise
immanently from the privations and demands of everyday life, the ‘total man’
constituted a reaction to the purportedly a-political relativism of existential
freedom,160 but did so by functioning more as a perpetually-receding directional
beacon than as an attainable status.161 Lefebvre’s own deliberately anti-
dogmatic dialectic can be seen to maintain its ‘openness’ through the constant
deferral of that final synthesis. Debord – who is perhaps closer to Hegel in
this regard than he may have realised – on the other hand, founds his own
‘open’ dialectic upon the establishment of the subject-object unity that
Lefebvre defers.
Casting subject-object unity as the condition for the full flourishing of
historical agency, Debord would seem to put Debord close to Lukács once
again. Yet for Lukács, ‘no path leads from the individual to the totality’,162 as
‘the form taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat is the Party’.163
Insofar as the party alone constitutes the historical self-consciousness of
the proletariat, it remains necessary insofar as that historical agency persists:
the conditions for a permanently open history are thus the conditions for the
permanence of the party-form, and thus, in Debord’s view, for the perpetuation
156. Debord 1995, p. 48; Debord 2006, p. 792.

157. Debord 1995, p. 126; Debord 2006, p. 842.
158. Lefebvre 1968, p. 162.
159. Ibid.
160. ‘Existentialism is the philosophy . . . of abstract freedom . . . the reactionary side of
existentialism’s present influence is here concealed’ (Lukács 1973). For Lefebvre, by contrast,
‘only the notion or idea of the absolute [i.e. the total man] gives a sense (in other words both a
meaning and a direction) to historically acquired knowledge’ (Lefebvre 2008a, p. 67).
161. The total man is presented as ‘a figure on a distant horizon beyond our present vision’
(Lefebvre 2008a, p. 66), and described as a ‘mathematical limit’ to which ‘we are forever drawing
nearer but have never reached’ (Lefebvre 1968, p. 109). His theory of ‘moments’ (which was
close in many respects to the SI’s ‘situations’) describes fleeting contact with this goal, whilst
maintaining its status as ‘an ever-sought and ever-inaccessible absolute’ (Lefebvre 2008b,
p. 355).
162. Lukács 1971, p. 28.
163. Lukács 1971, p. 41, emphasis in the original.
of an ‘external [extérieure]’164 power tasked with ‘directing the proletariat from

without [la direction extérieure du prolétariat]’.165 This is, of course, untenable
for Debord. Abstract though his own and the SI’s redefinition of the proletariat
may be, its implications can be seen to offer a clarification or rectification of
Lukács’s views on historical self-consciousness: for, if subject-object unity is, in
essence, an agency that is at the same time a self-determining process, Debord’s
emphasis on direct, collective self-determination in workers’ councils is,
arguably, more coherent in this regard than Lukács’s insistence on party-
mediation (Debord: ‘once embodied in the power of workers’ councils . . . the
proletarian movement becomes its own product; this product is the producer
himself, and in his own eyes the producer has himself as his goal’).166
I would suggest that subject-object unity becomes an entirely self-
determining ground of action in Debord’s account: a form of dialectical
resolution, but one that nonetheless remains perpetually ‘open’ insofar as it
continually reformulates its own grounds. If this is so, Debord could perhaps
be viewed as presenting something similar to Raya Dunayevskaya’s own
Hegelian Marxism, which was not modelled upon any particular stage along
the paths towards Hegel’s ‘Absolute’ (for example, the unhappy consciousness
or the lord and bondsman, both of which inflect Debord’s concerns with time
and negativity via their import within French Hegelianism), but rather upon
the Absolute itself: for, according to Hegel, the latter perpetually recreates itself
and generates differentiation from itself by virtue of its own, self-determining
and self-perpetuating necessity. The subject-object unity presented within
Debord’s work can thus be seen to render the ‘life-pulse’167 of the Concept
[Begriff ] as a continual interplay between subject and object, driven by the
‘universal blood’168 of the negativity and difference of time. One could even go
so far as to suggest that what Debord offers here is something close to a notion
of general will,169 albeit one without a ‘sovereign’ (regardless of Rousseau’s
claim that the latter ‘cannot be represented’);170 it is thus perhaps worth noting
that, for T.J. Clark, ‘the Debord-Rousseau comparison is inescapable’.171
164. Debord 1995, p. 81; Debord 2006, p. 814.

165. Debord 1995, p. 68; Debord 2006, p. 805.
166. Debord 1995, p. 87; Debord 2006, p. 818.
167. Hegel 1998, p. 37.
168. Hegel 1977, p. 100.
169. Compare Hallward’s considerations of a form of general will that would ‘make the way
by walking it’ (Hallward 2009, p. 17).
170. ‘Sovereignty cannot be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated; its
essence is the general will, and will cannot be represented’ (Rousseau 2004, p. 112).
171. See Clark’s Foreword in Jappe 1999, p. viii.
We might now begin to return to the linkage of historical and strategic

thought that I signalled at the outset. I have emphasised the sense in which
strategy can be seen to relate to the subjective, historical projects that Debord
associated with the authentic temporality denied by spectatorship. I have also
suggested that this connection between strategy and history stems from
Debord’s incorporation of an almost Sartrean notion of situational, limited
and future-oriented consciousness into a form of Hegelian Marxism. This can
now be clarified by noting that it results from his presentation of Marx’s
‘realisation’ of Hegelian philosophy as a form of (Hegelian) development: i.e.
as having rendered explicit that which was implicit within Hegel’s philosophy.
Marx is viewed as showing the latter to imply not Hegel’s own retrospective-
historical self-consciousness of a history that had already happened, but rather
the self-consciousness of a history that was to be made via proactive praxis.
History becomes agency, and a quasi-existential concern with situational,
contextual consciousness and self-determination is thus inserted into that
Hegelian schema, thereby entailing a concern with strategy. In consequence,
historical and strategic thought become one, producing a mode of thought
that ‘allow[s] one’ (as Debord put it when describing his own ‘strategic
capabilities’) to ‘see where one is truly going’,172 but which relies upon the
identity and critical capabilities that stem from knowing where one has been.
With that in mind, we might now return to Debord’s contention that
spectacular society ‘can no longer be led strategically’.
Strategy and tactics in Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

So why might the spectacular state be unable to function strategically, and
how might that pertain to the nature of the spectacle? In order to answer, we
should begin by looking at Debord’s account of the ‘integrated’ spectacle,
which he presented in the Comments as a unification of the ‘diffuse’ (commodity-
capitalism) and ‘concentrated’ (fascism, state-bureaucracy) forms described in
The Society of the Spectacle, but which also, as noted above, was said to have
‘integrated itself into reality’.173
Debord describes the spectacle’s advances since 1967 in terms of an
encroaching military force,174 and claims that it has given rise to an increased
denigration of historical thought. As history is the ‘measure of genuine
172. Debord 2008, p. 371.

173. Debord 1998, p. 9; Debord 2006, p. 1598.
174. Debord 1998, p. 4; Debord 2006, p. 1595.
novelty’,175 he claims that its erasure aids falsification and furthers the
propagation of ‘unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations
and untenable reasoning’.176 As a result, there is ‘no room for any reply’177 to
spectacular discourse, resulting in the subordination of dialogue to the
spectacle’s ‘enormous positivity’.178 This gives rise to a ‘dissolution of logic’,179
furthered by the media’s imposition of a kind of generalised immediacy.180 The
continuity and development of thought and subjectivity through opposition
is thus stifled, denigrating ‘even . . . the dialectical logic of conflicts’;181 and, in
the consequent absence of any coherent opposition, the spectacle focuses upon
itself and its own imagined enemies. ‘Surveillance and intervention’182 thus
become increasingly important, and ‘operate on the very terrain of this threat
in order to combat it in advance’.183
This last point is alluded to again in the book’s somewhat cryptic penultimate
section. Debord quotes Clausewitz’s classical definition of strategy and tactics
(‘tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use
of engagements for the object of the war’),184 and following a long discussion
of the manner in which the introduction of new weaponry in the Napoleonic
era gave rise to new tactics, Debord indicates that the spectacle’s development
and ‘integration’ will give rise to similar revelations on the part of its rulers;185
a point that pertains to his view that conflicts are possessed of a ‘dialectical
logic’ that engender development on both sides. Yet whilst doing so, he also
draws attention to Napoleon’s ‘strategy . . . of using victories in advance’.186 The
spectacle’s manipulation of its own opposition would thus seem to be linked
to Napoleon’s skill at dictating the actions of his enemies. It might also be
noted that Debord’s comments on Napoleon’s ability to use victories ‘as if
175. Debord 1998, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 1602.

176. Debord 1998, p. 16; Debord 2006, p. 1602.
177. Debord 1998, p. 29; Debord 2006, p. 1610.
178. Debord 1998, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 769.
179. Debord 1998, p. 27; Debord 2006, p. 1609.
180. ‘When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to what will be
immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be
seen that the uses of the media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance’ (Debord
1998, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 1602).
181. Debord 1998, p. 31; Debord 2006, p. 1611.
182. Debord 1998, p. 84; Debord 2006, p. 1643.
184. Clausewitz 1993, p. 146; Debord 1998, p. 85; Debord 2006, p. 1644.
185. ‘Similarly, the establishment of spectacular domination is such a profound social
transformation that it has radically altered the art of government . . . those who serve the interests
of domination . . . [will] clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are
capable.’ (Debord 1998, pp. 87–8; Debord 2006, pp. 1645–6.)
acquired on credit’187 seems to stem from Clausewitz’s analysis; the latter

claimed that ‘Bonaparte could ruthlessly cut through all his enemies’ strategic
plans in search of battle, because he seldom doubted the battle’s outcome’.188
As strategy is influenced by tactical events, tactical superiority (in terms of the
manoeuvre to battle) and successes (in terms of its victory) can sabotage the
enemy’s strategy; and as Clausewitz stresses, Napoleon’s success stemmed from
allowing tactical events to shape his own unfolding strategy and to confound
that of his opponents.
Debord would seem to be implying that the symptoms of the spectacle’s
‘integration’ into society – and thus of its eradication of history – constitute a
similar ability to ‘ruthlessly cut through’ an enemy’s strategy (which, as we
have seen, is connected to historical consciousness); hence his connection of
Napoleonic ‘changes in the art of war’189 to spectacular ‘changes in the art of
government’.190 Yet he also maintains that history’s eradication has resulted in
a lack of coherent organisation and continuity. It would thus seem that
although the spectacle is able to organise its own opposition ‘in advance’, its
‘strategy’ is dictated purely by the momentum of its own tactical victories; a
momentum that military historians have described as both the strength and
the weakness of Napoleon’s approach: according to Handel, for example, its
danger is that ‘instead of becoming the driving force in war, strategy becomes
a mere by-product or afterthought’.191
For Debord, ‘an all-powerful economy’ has become ‘mad’ (this, he claims,
is ‘precisely what defines these spectacular times’),192 and now ploughs on towards
self-destructive situations; whilst discussing ecological issues, Debord remarks
that it ‘has now come to declare open war against humans; not only against
their possibilities for life, but against their chances of survival’.193 It is perhaps
also significant that Clausewitz’s own comments about Napoleon’s approach
to strategy are made during a discussion of the art of defending against enemy-
invasion: referencing Napoleon’s Russian debacle of 1812,194 Clausewitz
187. Ibid.
188. Clausewitz 1993, p. 462.
189. Debord 1998, p. 85; Debord 2006, p. 1644.
190. Debord 1998, p. 87; Debord 2006, p. 1645.
191. Handel 2006, p. 354.
193. Ibid. (translation altered).
194. ‘In 1812 the Grande Armée advanced into Russia. Alexander’s forces retreated, and
employed a scorched earth policy as they did so. When the exhausted and starving French finally
reached Moscow Napoleon was able to claim the city. However, as three quarters of it had been
burned, and as the Tsar would not come to terms, Napoleon had no choice but to abandon
Moscow and retreat back to Poland. During the course of this retreat he was forced to fight again
stresses, in suitably dialectical fashion, that the further an attack progresses the
weaker it becomes; and it would seem that, for Debord, the spectacle’s absence
of strategic guidance entails that it too is to advance beyond what Clausewitz
refers to as its ‘culminating point’.195
In his later years, Debord maintains his 1967 contention that the increasing
abundance of spectacular commodities is inversely proportional to their ability
to satisfy; a position that he maintains into the 1990s.196 He also seems to hold
that the spectacle’s progress from concentration through diffusion to integration
has caused the spectacle to wear increasingly thin: ‘the same question’, he wrote
in 1992, ‘is about to be posed again everywhere: how can the poor be made to
work once their illusions have been shattered, and once force has been
defeated?’197 I would thus contend, and as opposed to the writers mentioned
above who would present the Comments as overtly ‘pessimistic’, that Debord
is still maintaining the merits and possibility of mass-political action (in a
letter referring to his work on the book, he himself joked that ‘the work of
revolutionary critique is assuredly not to lead people to believe that the
revolution has become impossible!’).198
The problem, however, is the manner in which this opposition was to arise.
This notion of weakening illusions was coupled to an alleged increase in the
quasi-existential poverty described above, and in consequence Debord’s later
writings bring the problematic aspects of his earlier account to the fore. ‘Each
person’, Debord complains in 1985, ‘no longer has an individual history in
and through which he discovers and forms his own tastes’.199 Such ‘individual
history’ was to emerge from the classless ennui of spectacular consumption,
rather than from the oppositional relations and antagonistic experiences of
capital;200 and in dismissing ‘the immense efforts that have been made by the
at Beresina. When the returning army finally entered Poland its original force of 420,000 had
been cut down to 10,000’ (Handel 2006, p. 194).
195. ‘Beyond that point the scale turns and the reaction follows with a force that is usually
much stronger than that of the original attack. This is what we mean by the culminating point
of the attack’ (Clausewitz 1993, p. 639).
196. In a letter of 1990, Debord predicts that increasingly reasonable demands (for example,
water ‘that does not send one to the hospital’ (Debord 2008, p. 233)) will become increasingly
revolutionary, and that the spectacle’s promises will become ever-more insubstantial.
197. This quotation is from Debord’s 1992 Preface to the third French edition of The Society
of the Spectacle (Debord 1995, p. 10; Debord 2006, p. 1794).
198. Debord 1986.
199. Debord 1985; Debord 2006, p. 1583.
200. This results in some alarmingly parochial views. We are told, Debord complains, that
‘the planet produces enough cereal that no one should suffer hunger, but what troubles this idyll
is that the “rich countries” abusively consume half the world’s cereals in feeding their cattle. But
when one has known the disastrous taste of butchered meat which was thus fattened on cereal,
“practical men” of our era to manage to not understand what is most important’,
Debord concludes that ‘it is only necessary to know how to love’.201
Conclusion
That rather banal assertion can be seen to stand in contradiction to the
implications of Debord’s Hegelian Marxism: firstly, insofar as the notion that
the spectacle will continue to advance beyond its ‘culminating point’ echoes
the passivity that Debord attributed to economic determinism, thus
contradicting his focus on pro-active, constitutive action within time; and
secondly, to the degree that the abstract subjectivism of the concept of
spectacle, which this assertion reflects, can be seen to contradict the need to
study a historical context in sufficient depth to be able to affect and move
beyond it. This can be elaborated by noting that the anti-dogmatism and drive
towards action and reformulation that characterises Debord’s Hegelian
Marxism casts theoretical works as being akin to tactical interventions: they
are only as valid as their ability to define or affect a given context, and are thus
specific to that context. As Debord himself put it:
Theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military units, they must
be sent into battle at the right moment; and whatever their merits or insufficiencies,
they can only be used if they are on hand when they are needed. But they have to
be replaced because they are constantly being rendered obsolete – by their decisive
victories even more than by their partial defeats.202
However, Debord’s own views on his theory would seem to depart from this.
In 1979 he declared that he had ‘no doubt that the confirmation all my theses
encounter’ would ‘last right until the end of the century and even beyond’;203
according to Prigent’s anecdote, Debord thought this period of validity would
extend as far as 2030.204
I have attempted to show that both this assumption and the drive towards
reformulation that it would seem to contradict stem from Debord’s concerns
with time. On the one hand, that concern furthers his focus on praxis and
can one speak of “rich countries”? It’s not to make us live like Sybarites that part of the planet is
dying of famine; it’s to make us live in the mud’ (Debord 1985; Debord 2006, p. 1585).
201. Debord 2008, p. 284.
203. Debord 1979a; Debord 2006, p. 1465.
204. ‘Around 1982, [Debord] told me that his 1967 La Société du Spectacle would be valid for
the next fifty years. I told him: “Are you sure?” His answer was categorical, his book would last
for that period of time’ (Prigent 2009).
anti-dogmatism. Yet, on the other, it also informs his overly subjective

perspective; a perspective that engendered disconnection from the changing
realities of historical struggle through its abstraction and romanticisation of
the latter. I would contend, therefore, that one can discern an internal
contradiction within Debord’s work: a contradiction between the theory of
spectacle and the ideas that found it, insofar as the latter would seem to imply
the contextuality and thus the consequent supersession of the former. The
implication is that this more foundational material points beyond the theory
that rests upon it.
I opened this essay by discussing the degree to which the SI had been
‘recuperated’ by art, culture and academia, and suggested that the ease with
which this assimilation had been achieved might indicate that their output
was perhaps not quite as ‘noxious’ as some might like to believe. Through the
discussions above I have attempted to show how this might be seen to connect
not only to the theory of spectacle’s somewhat opaque visual terminology, but
also to its replacement of social antagonism with a dichotomy between ‘life’
and its denial. I have addressed this by way of Debord’s linkage of historical
and strategic thought, pursued through Debord’s concerns with time and
history, and I hope that, in doing so, I have succeeded in opening up some of
the more interesting and relevant aspects of his Hegelian Marxism. This, I
would argue, is a version of Hegelian Marxism that avoids any notion of final
telos or original essence, and which is opposed to party-representation: it
presents subject-object unity as the ground of collective self-determination
rather than as an ineffable goal, and is inherently opposed to any stratification
into dogma. And, given that it would seem to actively invite the theory of
spectacle’s supersession, I would propose that Debord’s views on time, history
and dialectics may be of potentially greater contemporary interest than that of
their ability to clarify his work.
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Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 37–46 brill.nl/hima
Editorial Introduction
Symposium on Chris Wickham’s
Framing the Early Middle Ages
Paul Blackledge
Leeds Metropolitan University
p.blackledge@leedsmet.ac.uk
Abstract
Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages is a towering comparative overview of Rome’s
successor-states in the four centuries after its collapse in the West. Not only does it bring together
evidence from across the continent in a way that will inform all subsequent serious discussions
of the period, it also conceptualises an important, peasant-mode of production. Notwithstanding
these strengths, Framing has been criticised for its structuralist, static characterisation of
feudalism. The debates surveyed in this essay suggest that, while Wickham’s book will act as a
milestone in the history of Europe, it should also act as a spur to further research and critical
reflection on the period. Moreover, in the light of recent criticisms of Marxist historiography,
Wickham’s book and the debate surrounding it point to the continued vibrancy of historical
materialism.
Keywords
Middle Ages, Wickham, Marxism, historical materialism, forces of production, relations of
production
Chris Wickham is one of a small number of world-class historians who have

stood out against a general trend away from Marxism in particular, and class-
analysis in general, in the decades since the heyday of social history in the
1960s and 1970s.1 To a certain degree, this unfashionable stance has been
made easier by the fact that, in his area of specialism, medieval economic and
social history, Marx’s voice has become somewhat normalised. As Wickham
notes of this field, Marx has become just one of a number of ‘major social
theorists of the past whose ideas can be drawn on’.2 While this normalisation
1. Eley and Nield 2007, p. 25; Dworkin 2007, p. 76.

2. Wickham 2007, p. 35.
38 P. Blackledge / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 37–46
of Marx is infinitely preferable to the usual ignorance of, or caricatured

sectarianism towards, his work, it nonetheless comes at a cost. Wickham
points out that, within medieval history, as elsewhere, there has been a
tendency towards a ‘flattening of the ideological charge of debate in the last
two decades’. If this retreat from politics has typically involved a break with
Marx, even in those areas where he continues to be read, Marx’s social theory
has tended to be neutered by being unpicked from his revolutionary politics.
Wickham suggests that this context is best understood against the backdrop
of four developments. First, in the wake of neoliberal assaults in the 1980s,
‘the fight drained out of the academy’. Second, even though only the most
‘religious versions of Marxism’ indulged serious illusions concerning Stalinism,
the collapse of the Soviet Union created a situation in which Marxism became
increasingly unfashionable. Third, the linguistic turn meant that social and
economic history came to be viewed as somewhat old hat. Finally, this
conjuncture opened the door to a much more eclectic approach to historical
explanation.3 In the wake of these developments, history tended both to lose
its critical, political edge, while simultaneously retreating from the totalising
ambitions of earlier forms of social history. If Edward Thompson’s influence
means that the likes of Joanna Southcott and her deluded followers are now
studied alongside the more usual king-lists, few contemporary practitioners
would uncritically accept Christopher Hill’s claim that history from below
opened the door to a more complete explanation of history as a totality. And
fewer still would follow Lukács’s argument that Marxism allows us to
conceptualise the ‘the present as a historical problem’.4
It is against this depoliticised backdrop that the explicitly-political orientation
of Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages is so appealing.5 On the one hand,
the symposium on this book is unusual in Historical Materialism for including
discussions of, as Wickham signals in the reply to his critics, seemingly ‘arcane’
empirical issues on whose validity non-specialist readers of the journal will have
little or no hope of adjudicating. On the other hand, however, this difficulty
should not deter potential readers. For, by highlighting the sharp contrast
between the early middle ages and our own epoch, the exchange below
illuminates at least some of the political implications of serious historical
research. Whatever disagreements the contributors to this debate might have,
by denaturalising our modern way of life they provide a foundation upon
which challenges can be mounted to that old canard, ‘there is no alternative’.
More specifically, Wickham’s concept of a peasant-mode of production
3. Wickham 2007, pp. 32–5.

4. Lukács 1971, pp. 157–8.
5. Wickham 2007, p. 32.
P. Blackledge / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 37–46 39
undermines attempts, either to universalise capitalist rationality, or to suggest,

more basically, that greed and inequality are general characteristics of human
existence.
Wickham insists that Marx’s concept of relations of production allows us to
challenge these common nonsenses of our age, while pointing beyond the
limitations of the weaker, teleological, aspects of his own system. Deploying
Polanyian language, Wickham comments that Marx’s most significant
contribution to the study of history was his ‘substantivism’: the insistence that
‘economic choices are [not] identical in all socio-economic systems’.6 If this
approach helps immunise the historian against anachronistic tendencies,
Wickham suggests that its logic contradicts Marx’s tendency to privilege ‘as
worthy of study only those elements that would lead to the supersession of the
pre-capitalist socio-economic system, the feudal mode of production’.7
Whether or not this criticism of Marx’s teleology hits its target – and recent
work by Kevin Anderson suggests it does not8 – Wickham’s more positive
point is that historians should ditch any residual teleological leanings and
interrogate primary sources in their own terms.9
At one level, this critique of teleology is unremarkable amongst modern
historians. Nonetheless, as Kelvin Knight argues, Wickham’s discussion of the
concept of teleology is not unproblematic. Knight claims that, by ignoring
Aristotle’s discussion of this concept as goal-directed behaviour, Wickham’s
otherwise-authoritative analysis of peasant-life is weakened. For although, in
practice, he escapes what Knight sees as a typical Marxist blindness towards
peasant-protagonism or praxis, because he tends to conflate all forms of
teleology with an Hegelian History (with a capital ‘H’), he fails to highlight
the teleological character of the peasant-praxis that he otherwise describes so
powerfully. Knight aims at a potential resolution of this problem by suggesting
Wickham engage, not only with Aristotle, but also with Alasdair MacIntyre’s
recent Aristotelian conceptualisation of practice.
One reason why Wickham is so open to Knight’s correction to his analysis
of peasant-life is that, as Knight is well aware, it actually reinforces Framing’s
core-thesis. Indeed, Wickham’s focus on what Knight reminds us is the
teleological character of peasant-practice is merely the flipside of his rejection
of a reified quasi-religious teleological conception of ‘History’.
Specifically, Wickham’s rejection of historical teleology takes the form of a
critique of Marxist claims about the directionality of history. He thus conceives
6. Wickham 2007, p. 45.

7. Wickham 2007, p. 37.
8. Anderson 2010.
9. Wickham 2007, p. 45; Wickham 2009, p. 11.
feudalism, not as a necessarily transitional mode of production, but as an

‘equilibrium-system’.10 In different ways, the essays by Carlos Astarita, Jairus
Banaji, Neil Davidson, Chris Harman, John Haldon and John Moreland
all engage with this aspect of Wickham’s thesis. They contest the claim that the
early middle ages can adequately be conceptualised as an essentially static
system, and this criticism informs their more-or-less explicit re-engagements
with Marx’s concept of the development of the forces of production. Like
Wickham, they recognise that, in practice, Marx’s historical writings escape
the limitations of the teleological model often ascribed to the 1859 Preface,11
but develop this argument to ask if it is not better to interpret the 1859
Preface in light of Marx’s historical writings, rather than dismiss it by contrast
with them.
With respect to the period 400–800 CE in Europe and the Mediterranean,
they ask if Wickham’s contribution to our understanding of the period is not
partially weakened by a tendency in his work towards something he himself
warns historians away from: ‘extreme substantivism’ – the view that differences
between various modes of production are so profound as to suggest that there
are no universal economic ‘laws’.12 At one level, Wickham’s approach to this
problem is admirably undogmatic. Against those Althusserians who ascribed
primacy to the relations of production and those more orthodox Marxists who
ascribed primacy to the forces of production, he suggests that historians should
‘suppose that different modes are different as an initial starting point, and
discover structural similarities later’.13
At another level, however, what he, in the reply to his critics, calls Framing’s
‘theory-light’ structure conceals what Banaji claims is a structuralist bias.
Insofar as Wickham gestures towards the theoretical model underpinning
Framing, he refers to two justly-celebrated essays from the mid-1980s: ‘The
Other Transition’ and ‘The Uniqueness of the East’.14 In these essays, Wickham
distinguished two modes of production, feudal and tributary. Whereas, in the
feudal mode, the exploitation of peasant-surpluses was carried out through the
medium of rent controlled by landlords, in the tributary mode, the state taxed
both peasants and landowners. These divergent structures entailed divergent
social dynamics: the tributary ruling class was less close to the point of
production than were the feudal lords, and were therefore less likely to directly
intervene to increase productivity; while, the private interests of the landowners
10. Wickham 2007, p. 44; Wickham 2010.

11. Wickham 2008, pp. 6–7; Marx 1970, pp. 21–2.
12. Wickham 2008, p. 5.
13. Wickham 2008, p. 6.
14. Republished as Chapters 1 and 2 of Wickham 1994.
in the tributary mode, were, as opposed to their position under feudalism, ‘in
contradiction with their interests as rulers and clients of the state’.15 In light of
subsequent contributions to the ‘feudalism-debate’ by Halil Berktay and John
Haldon, Wickham came to accept that, because these tax- and rent-systems
were built upon similar relations of surplus-extraction, they did not constitute
two distinct modes of production.16 Nevertheless, he did not reject the
importance of this distinction, but, rather, reconceptualised feudalism as a
sub-type of the tributary mode. Because the distinction between tax and rent
is a distinction between the forms of surplus-extraction, it leads directly to a
focus on state-power, and, unsurprisingly, this is therefore one of the major
themes of Framing.17
It is also one of the major themes of the criticisms that have been made of
Wickham’s book. Because, as Wickham notes, the state was that arena ‘which
saw most change’ during the period under study whilst production saw most
continuity,18 by focusing on the state rather than on the process of production19
his approach tends to be closer to that suggested by the Althusserians than it
does to more orthodox interpretations of historical materialism. Effectively,
Framing tends to focus on what Mészáros calls humanity’s second-order
mediation with nature at the expense of an analysis of its first-order mediation.
The first-order mediations by which we create and recreate ourselves through
history are, according to Mészáros, the production-process involving culturally-
inherited skills and technologies: the forces of production. The relations of
effective control over these productive forces, relations of production, are our
second-order mediations with nature.20 If this latter concept is the key to
Marx’s periodisation of history, and, following Marx, to Wickham’s historical
substantivism, for Marx the historical development of the productive forces
acts to cut across these different historical epochs in a way that points to the
unity of human history. This perspective allows Marx, in a way that parallels
what he wrote of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, to inflict a
‘mortal blow’ upon historical teleology whilst simultaneously explaining
teleology’s ‘rational meaning’.21 From this perspective, whilst communism is
in no sense history’s telos, history can nevertheless be conceived as a totality
from the standpoint of the proletariat’s struggles for freedom.
15. Wickham 1994, p. 19.

16. Wickham 1994, p. 75. More generally, see Blackledge 2006, pp. 110–19.
17. Wickham 2005, pp. 56–150.
18. For his comments on historical continuities, see Wickham 2005, pp. 11–12.
19. Wickham 2008, p. 4.
20. Mészáros 2010.
21. Marx 1985, p. 247.
As to the concrete content of Wickham’s disagreements with Harman on

this issue, in an earlier exchange he registered that, though this process had in
fact occurred in feudal Europe and elsewhere, the actual mechanism through
which it operated did not easily fit Marx’s schema. Contra Marx, he suggests
that aristocratic exploitation of the peasantry underpinned increases in the
productivity of labour in feudal Europe by increasing the rate of exploitation.
Consequently, these relations of production are best understood as the primary
driver of the development of the productive forces in this period. Moreover,
far from the productive forces tending to burst forth through their fetters in a
revolutionary overthrow of the old system, feudal relations of production
easily absorbed these increases in labour-productivity without themselves
becoming destabilised.22
Interestingly, as Wickham notes, this argument does not contradict the
detail of Harman’s more classical interpretation of historical materialism:
‘I would agree with many of his more detailed formulations’.23 For instance,
Harman neither denied that feudal relations of production fostered the
development of the forces of production,24 nor argued that the development
of the forces of production mechanically contradicted feudal social relations.
Rather, he suggested that feudal society’s long-term dynamic tendency to
increase labour-productivity provided the basis for the growth of production
for the market which, in turn, underpinned the slow re-emergence and
expansion of towns across Europe after the tenth century.25 Once towns
emerged, they could act as alternative revolutionary poles of attraction to the
old ruling order after European feudalism entered a period of ‘demographic’
crisis from the fourteenth century. Thus, while these urban centres grew
organically within and were tied to the feudal system, once the system went
into crisis, they were also able to offer a potential alternative, capitalist, exit
from feudal crises that were not possible in those areas where towns were
weaker.26 All the same, nothing was inevitable about the triumph of capitalism.
Harman points out that Polisensky’s analysis of the Thirty-Years’ War showed
that even the most economically and culturally advanced areas of Europe –
Bohemia in the early-seventeenth century – could be crushed by feudal
reaction in the struggle between emergent-capitalist and entrenched-feudal
interests.27
22. Wickham 2008, p. 14.

23. Wickham 2008, p. 6.
24. Harman 1998, p. 76.
25. Harman 1998, p. 81.
26. Harman 1998, pp. 94, 96.
27. Harman 1998, pp. 103–5.
This open-ended model points to the way that, as Engels argued, Marx’s
conception of the development of the forces of production can be understood
as deepening, rather than contradicting, the humanist perspective. By
providing an account of the historical substance of human agency, the
development of the forces of production frames the parameters of possible
political alternatives in specific periods.28 The strength of something like this
dynamic model informs Astarita’s critique of Wickham’s deployment of
Weber’s ideal-type methodology in his discussion of the state-form.29
Astarita notes that, whereas this method can make sense of moments when
class-relations are relatively simple, as when the ruling élite directly controls
the state, it is less helpful in periods when the predominance of private property
entails a division between the propertied élite and the state-bureaucracy.
Astarita thus adds substance to what numerous Marxist critics of Weber have
argued over the last century: because his ideal types are ‘purely abstract and
conventional’, they do not evolve over time, and therefore do ‘not produce a
line of development, but only a juxtaposition of ideal types selected and
arranged casuistically’.30 Thus conceived, ideal types can be deployed to
identify difference over time, but not continuity in change. By contrast, Marx’s
concept of the forces of production, and their tendency to develop through
history, underpins his internally-dynamic conception of modes-of-production.
This, in turn, allows him to theorise change in a way that is not possible for
Weber or the Weberians, who tend towards empiricism when moving from
theory to empirical investigations.31 From this perspective, a potential weakness
with Wickham’s rich description of the early middle ages is that it one-sidedly
stresses change against continuity through history.
This is the substance of both Moreland’s and Harman’s criticisms of
Wickham’s book. In essence, they argue that the power and originality of
Wickham’s concept of a peasant-mode of production are somewhat weakened
by his failure to adequately conceptualise, as Moreland makes clear, the
‘dynamics of these social relationships’ – indeed, Harman suggests that
Wickham would do well to integrate into his analysis of the peasant-mode
Moreland’s insights into the way that changes in production underpinned
longer-term transformation of the mode of production itself. Similarly,
Davidson gravitates towards a discussion of the potential pitfalls of Wickham’s
method when analysing the shift from the peasant-mode to feudalism. He
suggests that Wickham’s description of the transformation of the peasant-mode
28. Engels 1968, pp. 563, 583, 587.

29. Wickham 2005, pp. 57, 59, 303.
30. Lucio Colletti, quoted in Blackledge 2006, p. 146.
31. Outhwaite 1987, p. 104.
is suspect for reasons similar to the weaknesses with Robert Brenner’s analysis
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism: both models attempt to account
for a dynamic process on the basis of unintended consequences of the actions
of a peasant-class that is conceived in essentially unchanging terms.
Likewise, in a commentary on Marx’s detailed discussion of the capitalist
mode of production, Banaji points out that, while the wage-labour relationship
lies at the core of this mode of production, capitalism is characterised, not
simply by this structure, but also by other elements that together generate its
internal dynamic. Developing these insights, Banaji insists that relations of
production are best understood more broadly than Wickham admits. Indeed,
he argues that Wickham, in characterising precapitalist modes simply as modes
of surplus-extraction, effectively retreats from Marx’s insights towards a static,
structuralist model of modes of production. Concretely, this leads him to
ignore what Banaji takes to be of the most important changes in the period
under discussion – the shift from tax-in-kind towards the monetarisation of
taxation. A similar point is made by Haldon, and both of these authors suggest
that, had this transformation received more careful consideration, then
Wickham would have come closer to adequately conceptualising the dynamic
of the period under discussion.
These debates are important to Marxists because, by pointing to the unity
of history while simultaneously helping to periodise it, they allow us to make
socialist political practice historically self-aware. As Wickham argued elsewhere,
‘we try to categorize world history in Marxist terms’ so as to ‘understand the
world better . . . so that we can change it’.32 While this goal may seem far
removed from the day-to-day concerns of historians of antiquity and the
middle ages, the real need felt by all historians to adequately periodise history
can help inform, at the very least, the socialist critique of ahistorical and
ideological attempts to naturalise patterns of behaviour that are, in fact,
specific to capitalism. Additionally, Wickham’s concept of a peasant-mode
challenges more basic postulates about the necessity of human greed. If, as his
interlocutors claim, his relative silence about productive forces weakens both
his history and the political extrapolations that can be drawn from it, the very
fact that his magnificent overview of the early middle ages opens a debate on
this issue marks a welcome return to some of the themes that invigorated
historical research in the 1960s and 1970s.
32. Wickham 1994, p. 44.

Addendum: Chris Harman

Chris Harman’s contribution to this symposium was written before his
untimely death on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday in November 2009.
The arguments of this essay have roots going back at least as far as the early
1980s, when he penned an important Marxist treatment of the issue of
women’s oppression. Discussions opened by this essay informed subsequent
contributions to debates on base and superstructure, the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, and Engels’s, Origins of the Family, Private Property,
and the State. These theoretical essays, in turn, informed his magisterial A
People’s History of the World.33 In his reply to his critics, Chris Wickham writes
that ‘Chris Harman died while this article was in press; I would like to record
my huge respect for him as a theorist, political actor and human being, and
my great sorrow at his death’. Historical Materialism shares these sentiments
and dedicates this symposium to his memory.
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13, 1: 1–21.
Framing the Early Middle Ages
John Haldon
Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University
jhaldon@princeton.edu
Abstract
Chris Wickham’s important intervention in debates about the transformation of the Roman
world from the fifth century onwards presents a vast array of evidence about the nature of social
relations, the economy and the late-Roman and early-medieval state across the Mediterranean
and Western-European world. Wickham is successful in taking into account both the high level
of regional variation and differentiation across the Roman world and, at the same time, the
various key unifying elements which bound these regions together. But, in arguing that the
nature of the fiscal apparatus and structures of extraction, redistribution and consumption of
surpluses of the late-Roman state were formative in the structure and appearance of the late-
Roman élites in East and West as well as in the evolution of their early-medieval successors, a
number of structural tensions in the model become apparent. This discussion highlights some of
the issues at stake, while, at the same time, affirming the critical importance of the book, more
especially its emphasis on the structural force of late-Roman institutions and social relations for
the successor-states of the early-medieval West.
Keywords
Chris Wickham, Marxism, antiquity, fiscality, taxation, state, aristocracy, peasantry, exchange
This substantial work – in all senses of the word ‘substantial’ – is the result of
many years working on the structure and dynamic of medieval societies in
Western Europe as well as on comparisons between such societies, their origins
in the later-Roman period and, perhaps most importantly, on the dynamics of
change and transformation across the late-Roman and early-medieval world.
Wickham has dealt, not only with Europe, of course, but has compared
European with other social-economic and cultural areas, most notably with
China and Iran, and has worked from within a broadly historical-materialist
framework, in particular attempting to elucidate the causal relationships
between the structures of late-ancient and medieval societies and their political
histories. So he is as well qualified as any, and probably better qualified than
most, to take on the challenge represented by the present volume. For ‘framing

48 J. Haldon / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 47–72
the early middle ages’ is just what he has done, presenting the reader, not
simply with a vast wealth of material from both the archaeological as well as
the written record about each of the areas he takes as his focus, but offering a
context for understanding, and an interpretation of that context, within which
a coherent and holistic explanation of why change happened, as well as how it
happened, can be generated.1 The period between 400 and 800 CE has proved
to be especially intractable because the evidence is so complex and fragmentary,
permitting such a variety of interpretations from so many different perspectives
that a common understanding or agreement on the basic shape of change has
been almost impossible to arrive at. By adopting a regionally-comparative
approach, by focusing on a series of specific themes for each region, from
Ireland to Egypt and from Anatolia to Mauretania, and by assessing the
archaeological and written evidence for each, Wickham has been able to
establish a framework, a solid foundation for analysis and for understanding
the social and economic structures of the social formations which succeeded
the Roman world. The theoretical assumptions about the causal relationships
between economic, cultural and social-political fields of praxis and discourse
remain largely implicit, however, perhaps understandably so in light of the
length of the book and the vast amount of material the author has to present
and consider in detail, and perhaps also in light of the well-established dislike
of ‘theorising’ which informs most practical historical research and writing,
especially in the fields of medieval history. The present reviewer would have
liked to read something more on these issues, especially as regards the
theorisation of ‘the state’, and of the causal priorities assumed to underpin
social relations of production – this becomes a significant absence insofar as
there is no discussion of the ideological imperatives which impacted upon
social praxis, so that one key-element in the totality of relationships from
which newly-emergent practices are generated is missing. The nature and
range of possibilities for premodern state-formation are surely a key
constraining element when it comes to any consideration of relations between
those who control resources in produce, labour-power and skills and those
who do not, and between different degrees of such access or control, and, in
particular, in respect of the tension between various types of state-formation
and the possibilities for institutional reproduction open to them – or not. The
omission of a more detailed and penetrating discussion on this and related
theoretical or conceptual issues lurks throughout the book.
1. For some idea of the direction Wickham’s work was to take in this respect, see Wickham
1994b and 1994c. I thank Brent Shaw for a very useful discussion of the book (although he does
not necessarily agree with my argument).
J. Haldon / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 47–72 49
Leaving this to one side, however, the benefits of Wickham’s comparative

approach are pretty clear: quite simply to reveal the patterns, continuities and
discontinuities in the different regions, and thus to highlight what changed
and what did not. The result is a book of immense learning and erudition,
displaying an impressive familiarity with, and critical insight into, areas outside
his own specialism, both linguistically and culturally, and demonstrating an
enviable ability to synthesise without losing sight of specificities and variations
across time and place. But it is always easy to pick at the arguments made by
a non-specialist on the basis of one’s own areas of specialist knowledge, and it
is a pleasure to acknowledge in a book of such breadth as well as depth that the
author is only very rarely to be caught out in this way. Indeed, I will eschew
any criticism at all of this nature, since that is not to the point: Wickham’s
enterprise, even if it were flawed, would still be worth praise, if only because
the study of the early-medieval world has, for many years, urgently needed a
historian’s treatment of social change and transformation across the whole
territory of the late-Roman world. While one may disagree with, or at least
have some questions about, specific points of interpretation, as we will see
below, this hardly detracts from the value of the exercise – quite the reverse.
It is not easy to summarise the basic lines of the argument without losing
some of the sophistication built into the treatment of the evidence, so I will
necessarily restrict myself to comment on the basic structure of the book and
a few key-issues it raises. In brief, the picture that emerges can be summarised
as follows. Four issues are taken as focal points for discussion: the form of the
state (especially its fiscal apparatus); the aristocracy or élite; the peasantry; and,
finally, networks of exchange, to include both urbanism and the economy
more broadly. These four major sections, each of which addresses a particular
set of themes across which Wickham intends to draw connections and
associations of a causal nature, are then further broken down by specific
topics – his aim is to show both the differentness and variation between and
within regions and sub-regions, and, at the same time, to show that certain
types of key-relationship generated specific sorts of results or phenomena.
The volume commences with a general introduction and a résumé of the
historiography of the debate from Dopsch and Pirenne onwards, together
with a brief discussion of the sources (Chapter 1). The scene is set in Part I,
‘States’, in which the relationship between geography and political structures
(Chapter 2), on the one hand, and between these and the nature of state-forms
is presented (Chapter 3); in Part II, ‘Aristocratic power structures’ hold centre-
stage, treated under three separate headings: Chapter 4, ‘Aristocracies’, Chapter 5,
‘Managing the land’ and Chapter 6, ‘Political breakdown and state-building
in the North’. Part III, entitled ‘Peasantries’, looks in three chapters (7–9) at
the nature of peasant-production, village-structures, means of exploiting the

land, peasant social hierarchies and power-relationships, and the relationship
between peasants of all types and the non-peasant hierarchies which surrounded
them but also depended upon them, economically and thus, indirectly,
politically – states, local and supra-local élites and aristocracies, and so forth.
Part IV is entitled ‘Networks’, and deals with systems of international, regional
and local exchange, markets and the nature of urban economies and their
evolution. The volume closes with a short concluding summary of the main
argument.
This is not a totalising history, covering everything – social, economic,
cultural, political and ideological – as the author makes quite clear in the
Introduction. Rather, it is an attempt to pinpoint variations and different rates
of change in both the social and economic structures that determined the
processes of transformation which the political history of the late-Roman
world and early-medieval periods reflects, and in the forms which such change
took in the different cultural and social-economic regions or zones that are
picked out for detailed treatment. Neither is the book a history of the different
regions of the late-Roman world in its entirety – understandably, Wickham
has not felt able to deal with every single area of interest, but, rather, to take
those where it is possible, whether as an outsider or not, to gain some familiarity
with both the sources and the modern literature, and then compare them both
against one another within the framework set by the late-Roman political and
economic system, as well as against areas which were never Roman – in this
case, Denmark and Ireland. To some extent, this was necessarily an arbitrary
choice; and it may be regretted, for example, that the Balkans were not
included, since, in many respects, the history, or histories, of that region, both
in respect of urbanism, local élites and immigrant-populations, as well as the
issues of method and material – the complex relationship between archaeological
and written evidence – are not dissimilar to those of the western provinces of
the Empire, and, where they are different, are so different as to offer valuable
comparanda. By the same token, Armenia is not drawn into the net – Wickham
suggests2 that this is because its development ‘ran along such genuinely
different lines’, although, in fact, one could make a case that the eastern
provinces of the Empire and Armenia had a great deal more in common in
terms of élite-culture, for example, than is often recognised (and hence would
have served as a useful corrective to the tendency, found in many ‘mainstream’
histories of the Empire, to assume such differentness). Yet this can only be a
minor criticism – the vast breadth of the socio-economic landscapes Wickham
2. Wickham 2005, pp. 5–6.

does treat, and the even-handedness and balance of his approach, is not
seriously jeopardised by this selection.
There are several key-themes running through the whole – states and
taxation, or lack of it; élites and their ability to dominate and control the
distribution and consumption, if not necessarily the production, of resources;
local, regional and international exchange-networks; the transformation in
many areas, and changing emphases and forms in others, of urbanism and of
‘towns’, their relationship to their hinterlands, both near and far, and to the
élites of their region. And, finally, the change from a more-or-less politically
and economically unified world and its peripheral cultures, still obvious at the
end of the sixth century in many respects, even if challenged and stressed in
the western half of the Roman world, to a highly-regionalised patchwork of
economic sub-systems. No area was typical, and many need to be placed in
comparative context in order to grasp the whole picture and to understand
how the process of re-integration – in terms of both state-structures as well as
exchange and élite-formation – could evolve at the end of the period under
review. The impressive geographical coverage is, thus, an essential precondition
for any analysis of this sort – the British Isles (except for Scotland) and
Denmark are taken as examples of the non-Roman or thinly-Romanised areas,
while northern and southern Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and
Italy are presented as examples of what happens in the Western Empire. Egypt,
greater Syria, and the Byzantine territories in Anatolia and the Aegean region
are taken as representative of the former-Roman lands in the east. In his own
words, when the political and economic unity of the Roman Empire was
shattered, it fragmented, and ‘each piece took the surviving elements of Roman
social, economic, and political structures and developed them in its own way’.3
The main developments that the detailed region-by-region analysis of the
evidence reveals are summarised in the short (perhaps too short, in some
respects) concluding section.
One obvious change was a retreat of taxation, centrally-administered
resource-management, regardless of its forms, and a simplification of fiscal
structures across the board, except for particular reasons in particular regions –
notably the rump of the Eastern Empire, and the new Islamic state which
swallowed up the eastern provinces. In Wickham’s account, late-Imperial
taxation was managed and extracted at local and regional level, but, in many
cases, then redistributed over considerable distances to support Rome and
Constantinople, or to support the military. In the course of the fifth century
in the West, taxation-systems became localised, before often breaking down
3. Wickham 2005, p. 10.

completely to be replaced by new forms of surplus-extraction and redistribution,

modes that reflected changed power-relationships between political centres
and élites or aristocracies. In the east, where fiscal structures survived, there
was nevertheless a regionalisation of taxation-arrangements, in both the
surviving Byzantine state as well as in the Caliphate, with centrally-managed
collection but highly-regionalised distribution or consumption. This had a
direct impact on patterns of exchange, since it was on the back of fiscal
structures that international and inter-regional exchange-networks had been
able to flourish. In many areas, it was thus the residual aristocratic demand
which provided henceforth the main motor of longer-distance commerce and
exchange.
The retreat of fiscality is seen, in consequence, as a crucial mechanism for
the transformation of such patterns. A further concomitant of this was,
according to Wickham, a relative weakness of élites, referred to as aristocracies
(and justified as such in a short terminological discussion,4 although I find
‘élite[s]’, topically defined in time and space, a handier and less potentially-
misleading term), precisely because such aristocracies had derived much of
their wealth-generating potential from their position within a highly-fiscalised
late-Roman system.
A consequence of this, although highly-regionally nuanced, and less obvious
in Francia (and the Levant, according to Wickham, although this seems to me
arguable) was a global retreat in aristocratic landowning, an increase in peasant
economic independence, a reduction in aristocratic purchasing power and
demand, and a corresponding reduction in exchange. With the exception of
those in France and Syria, post-Roman élites appear to have been poorer than
their imperial predecessors. Their holdings were more-locally focused and
peasants could easily escape their control. Given the nature of the largely
de-centralised states that evolved in the West, for example, along with the
greater emphasis placed on maintaining power and social and political position
by force, the élites became increasingly militarised, and, in the West, in
particular, warfare and fighting became the defining characteristic and cultural
identifier of aristocracies (and this also applies to the Byzantine world, certainly
in its war-zones along the eastern frontiers).
The forms of self-representation of these élites was thus transformed, as
political change, warfare and ethnic and linguistic transformations also affected
the established patterns, with a reduction in emphasis on ancestry, for example,
although, again, differently expressed from one cultural zone to another. At
these points, Wickham makes the association between structure and agency
4. Wickham 2005, pp. 153ff.

explicit, useful guides to what might in a different context become a micro-

social study of the ways in which élite-behaviours responded to and having
further impact on shifting social, political and geographical environments, or
the ways in which such changed environments affected peasant-economic
praxis.
Regional divergence is a key-element of the process of transformation which
Wickham traces, a result both of the disappearance of the unifying political-
ideological system of the late-Roman Empire as well as of all the tendencies
noted already. In this context, Wickham notes an apparently greater degree of
fluidity or flexibility in social identities, status and power-relationships, with
access to and the ability to control the distribution and consumption of wealth
becoming the single most obvious focus for social distinction, although, of
course, rarely the only one. In contrast, the weakening of systematic taxation
and the localisation of surplus-extractive mechanisms meant that peasants did
relatively well out of the changes, achieving, in many areas, a degree of social
and economic autonomy – only towards the end of the period under
consideration were élites able fully to re-establish their power to coerce and
extract. Wickham shows clearly that there were a number of ways in which
peasant-society was structured, and that no single area offers a universal
paradigm, at least at micro-organisational level – in particular, the pattern
which emerges from the documentation for the Ile de France, where the élite
remained powerful enough to coerce, should not be taken as normative.
The implications of some of these shifts become apparent when Wickham
turns to the subject of networks and generalised exchange, including the
discussion of cities and the economy. Here, the central rôle in the late-Roman
period of bulk-exchange of ceramics and grain over long distances is stressed,
and he argues that these are a key-indication of the concentration of wealth
and of how effectively élites could extract wealth from peasants. The wealthier and
more effective élites were at extracting resources, the greater the potential for
long-distance bulk-commerce, and the greater the potential for the less-wealthy
to benefit from this fact. As élites lost their ability to extract resources on
the scale that had been possible under the late-Roman fiscal régime, so the
peasantries benefited and improved their position vis-à-vis their élites, and the
élites of those areas with wealthier or more-autonomous peasantries might
well rely on humbler domestic or local production, just as their peasantries
did.5 And, in looking at areas which had never been under Roman control, he
shows that – to judge from the amount of gold found in sites such as Gudme
on Fyn (Denmark) – there is evidence that some aristocrats in the area certainly
5. See the summary at Wickham 2005, pp. 706ff.

benefited from the end of the Imperial presence in the West, acquiring Roman
wealth either as gifts or booty.
In arriving at these broad conclusions, Wickham has taken the reader
through a massive amount of data and has shown just how complex and
ramified the debates around many of his key-themes have been. This serves
also to demonstrate how often scholars have been so immersed in their own
particular area of study that they have missed important indicators of a wider
pattern which may have assisted them in understanding the more-circumscribed
phenomena in which they were interested, and how this may be overcome by
a work of synthesis of this sort. A comparative study of these regions allows
him to move away from simplistic conclusions, while still providing an
appropriate heuristic framework for understanding the whole period. In spite
of showing the degree of discontinuity in many areas, both economic and
socio-political, there remains a fairly strong element of continuity in Wickham’s
analysis, rather than of catastrophe, although this is never an issue that
dominates or intrudes on the discussion. Thus, in Egypt, neither the state nor
economic prosperity waned, in spite of Arab conquest, while the East-Roman
imperial centre, Constantinople, remained the pre-eminent city in Europe.
After a period of crisis lasting through the later seventh and into the eighth
century, successfully overcome through the maintenance of an effective fiscal
apparatus, the Eastern Empire was able to re-establish itself as a major political
and cultural factor in the east Mediterranean and Balkan region.
In contrast, ‘catastrophe’ seems appropriate for what occurred in formerly-
Roman Britain, particularly in the south-east, where the Roman cultural
model of villas and cities had been dominant. The value and power of
Wickham’s comparative approach is particularly clear in this case, because, in
suggesting, on the basis of both the problematic written evidence as well as
the archaeology, that the patchwork of tiny principalities and kingdoms
long pre-dated the Anglo-Saxon invasions, he draws a parallel with (Berber)
North Africa: the small-scale familial and tribal structures which functioned
alongside the Roman state in those regions eventually succeeded it by virtue of
their functional potential to politically and economically manage affairs in a
way that made state-structures redundant. Non-Roman traditions had always
been more central to political life there than in Britain, so the process was not
as traumatic as in Britain, but the similarities between the two areas are greater
than their differences. In Britain, the withdrawal of the Roman state meant
the total abandonment of its fiscal-management system, and, with it, the
breakdown of the power and authority of the established lowland-landowning
élites. This contrasts greatly with Britain’s nearest neighbour in geographical
terms, northern Gaul, because here a strong and militarised aristocracy
provided the means to allow many local structures of political power to

continue. The comparison is striking, and it permits an analysis of the British
context which no longer needs to depend upon the survival of a Romanised
aristocracy, or the decisive impact of new settlers or invaders, in order to
explain dramatic political transformation. Instead, Wickham shows that
societies could become ‘tribalised’ in such a way and by degrees that the
universal façade of Roman institutions and vocabulary conceals the actual
realities of social and political practice, whereby the ‘official’ structures of the
fisc, of the law, of all aspects of regulatory management often assumed to
belong to a superior political authority are actually entirely subverted by
kinship- and devotional structures and relationships which carry out all the
same functions but at a different level of social praxis. Useful parallels to such
developments, well outside the geographical sphere which the book considers,
can be found in other social-cultural formations, of course: if we assume that
states provide both centralised authority and, more importantly, normative
rules for legal, social and economic relationships, then it becomes clear that,
in the Hindu context, these characteristics of state-organisation are already
present in, and can be replaced by, the internal order of religious and social
life – the lineage-structures and caste-attributions alone provide for much of
this.6 By the same token, given the permeative strength of Shari’a as a guide to
day-to-day patterns of behaviour down to the humblest levels of household,
existence, a similar case could, in fact, be made for certain varieties of Islam,
although the two cases have rarely been compared; while, in a few cases within
Christianity – more especially, in certain post-Reformation movements – one
could draw similar conclusions about the interface between state-structures
(and their functions), law and normative social behaviour, and the generation
of socio-political sub-systems almost entirely autonomous of the state-forms
with which they co-exist.
The ground is thus prepared for an analysis of the emergence of post-
Roman states in Northern Europe on the edge of the Roman Empire. In the
case of Britain, for example, Wickham argues that such small-scale ‘tribal’
states slowly evolved into the kingdoms of the early-seventh century,7 and that
the obligations outlined around the year 700 by the West-Saxon laws of Ine
represent, in effect, a codification of the token-authority kings had over the
territories of which they were rulers, taking resources – produce – from
followers who themselves had rights in the land, so that what they passed on
6. See, in particular, Stein 1985, pp. 74ff., and, in general, Saraswati 1977. For a detailed
discussion of these points, with further literature, see Haldon 1993, pp. 242ff.
7. Wickham 2005, pp. 313–14.
to the kings represented a combination or elision of rent, tribute, and tax.

Using an interesting modern parallel, Wickham invokes the way the Mafia
operates in Palermo, involving a combination of ‘military’ functionaries and a
wider network of patrons and clients, the loyal and the protected as well as the
exploited, through which it can operate effectively and through which its élites
derive their wealth, status and power. In the context of a supposed absence or
withdrawal of both the Italian state and its police and fiscal functionaries as
well as the city-council, then, the nearest parallel to the Mafia-operation is just
such an early-medieval ‘tribal’ state. The hypothesis is then that the fifth- and
sixth-century ruler of such a petty-kingdom built loyalties from the attachments
of kin, geography, and religion, but that the granting of material concessions
to a whole hierarchy of different individuals in order to maintain an effective
loyalty and to create a collective identity across the territory he ‘ruled’ would
have meant that he was comparatively the poorer, with all the consequences
for the decline of any market-infrastructure that would then follow.8
In fact, of course, one could extend this argument to all state-formations,
since even the most politically-centralised, ‘public’ politics is always underwritten
and shadowed by less public sets of relationships – of kinship, patronage, local-
regulatory semi-official or customary ‘law’, systems of notarial management of
resources, and so forth. Indeed, the state, while it provides a framework for the
development of certain social and economic relationships, through its need to
establish and then maintain a regular and predictable structure for extracting
revenues and resources, also enables or facilitates the evolution of new practices
and relationships. This is clear from the way in which the East-Roman/
Byzantine state transferred the focus of its attention in fiscal matters away
from urban centres to village-communities during the course of the seventh
and eighth centuries, thereby radically altering the ways in which social
relationships between landlords and tenants, on the one hand, and between
peasant-producers, the state and towns, on the other, functioned.9 States also
created spaces in which new developments could take place – the rôle of tax-
farmers, for example, both as extractors of revenue and as potential stimulants
to changed patterns of investment or consumption of wealth, to changed
structures of money-use on the part of both producers and state-administrations,
and so on. In some cases, the existence of a central fiscal administration may
have given hitherto-unimportant local leaders – village-headmen, small-scale
local landlords – a more significant rôle in the process of fiscal extraction and
accumulation, leading to shifts in the political order of power at the local level
8. Wickham 2005, pp. 330–1.

9. See Haldon 1997, especially pp. 132ff.
and ultimately reacting back on the state itself. The rôle of village-élites and
rank-attributions can have a significant influence on the ways the state was or
was not able to intervene in landlord-tenant relations, for example, just as the
existence of centralised state-apparatuses and their demands for revenue in
turn affected the ways in which these local relationships worked, shaping the
social space within which they could evolve.10 In all these respects, Wickham
has opened up fertile ground for the examination of social-economic micro-
structures concealed beneath or within larger political systems. He does not
pursue them here, and it would perhaps have strengthened his case to show
how such relationships are not simply generated by the break-down of pre-
existing structures, but themselves emerge from within the interstices of more-
formal political-institutional structures as the latter begin to loosen under the
sorts of pressures he describes so well.
But the book also has a very particular theme running through it, which
deserves a little more attention at this point. This theme is that of fiscal
structures and taxation. To oversimplify a little, but I hope not unfairly,
taxation is presented as the key to many of the evolutionary processes sketched
out in such detail across the book’s eleven main chapters. Taxation supported
and bolstered the strong central authority of the late-Roman state, assisted
through the annona as well as other fiscal mechanisms in bringing together
widely-dispersed markets and production-centres, and through its vast
geographical spread enabled the élites of the Empire both at the centre and
from the provinces to deepen their economic and political reach within, and
to extend it well beyond, their own province. When taxation was weakened
and when integrative-fiscal mechanisms broke down or were suborned by
local élites, then fragmentation of both the Empire-wide economy and its élite
was a necessary result.
To privilege the late-Roman fiscal system in this way seems to me to be
fundamentally correct, even if one might wish to shift the emphases within
the model. Essentially, Wickham is suggesting that it was fiscal mechanisms
and their history, within the parameters set by a range of other factors, each
operating under their own causal logic but dialectically bound up with tax and
resources, that set the framework for what happens when the late-Roman
state-system breaks down in the West or is replaced by a rump successor-state
in Byzantium or an Islamic successor-state further east. Of course, there is
no intention of making a monocausal argument here – fiscal arrangements
are given priority, but not primacy, in Wickham’s explanatory model, although
10. See on these issues, albeit for the Indian context, the excellent discussion of Perlin 1993,
especially pp. 36ff., 51–74.
it is also the case that this is not always made clear. Indeed, there are points
where Wickham himself seems to doubt the relevance of his fiscal
interpretation. Thus the eastern provinces taken by Islam from the 630s
demonstrate ‘that the lasting strength of urban civilization was not, in this
corner of the Mediterranean, dependent on the survival of the political and
fiscal structures of the Roman empire’,11 and in fact suggests a range of
economic relationships which were much broader than ‘just the state
infrastructure’.12
Is there a reluctance here to admit the presence of a more traditional model
of economic relationships, in which the motor is the relationship between
demand and production and in which fiscality and, more centrally for
Wickham’s argument, the financial clout of the aristocracy, while representing
important inflecting elements, are only one part of the picture? This may be
the case, since it seems that in both the northern lands of the Franks as well as
some south-Italian territories relatively wealthy aristocracies appear to have
been pretty stable, whether they were newly-formed (Francia) or traditional
(Italy), and with sufficient wealth to ‘compensate for the end of the fiscal
system’.13 In support of such a view, and from the other side of the Empire, is
the recognition of the specialisation and commercialisation of particular crops
and the establishment of a large-scale commercially-orientated production –
for example, in respect of olive-oil in the limestone-hills of north Syria.14 This
seems to have been a response both to local and then regional demand in the
fourth- and fifth-to-sixth centuries in particular, and was facilitated by the
existence of a sufficiently monetised economy as well as the availability from
other regional producers of products not otherwise accessible locally. The
importance of this commerce in Syrian olive-oil remains at issue: Tchalenko
argued that the export of oil was crucial to the wealth of the villages he
surveyed, and that it continued into the seventh century;15 in contrast, it has
more recently been argued that local demand in north and central Syria was
sufficient to account for the apparent increase in production; that local
production was by no means as monocultural and market-orientated as
Tchalenko suggested; and that, once the level of demand fell, beginning from
the second half of the sixth century and culminating during the later-seventh,
as the markets of the great urban centres of its hinterland declined, so the
prosperity of the region and its olive-oil production went into decline.16
11. Wickham 2005, p. 625.

12. Wickham 2005, p. 713.
13. Wickham 2005, p. 804.
14. See Wickham 2005, pp. 446–9, 625.
15. Tchalenko 1953, pp. 435–7; Decker 2001.
16. Liebeschuetz 2001, p. 71; Morrisson and Sodini 2002, p. 196; Foss 1995, pp. 219–20;
in general, see Tate 1992; for the later dating of this decline see Magness 2003.
While the extent of the trade remains disputed (with Wickham supporting
the notion that the oil-export went much farther afield, and for far longer – on
the basis of the numismatic evidence, into the later-seventh and eighth
centuries), it was an essential element of the late-Roman economy and must
not necessarily be tied into fiscal exchange-mechanisms. More importantly, it
challenges the idea that it was the wealth and disposable incomes of élites
alone, whether partially supported by the fiscal apparatus and the state-
managed movement of bulk goods or not, which drove the international
commerce.
From further to the east, in lands not included in Wickham’s survey, is the
pretty clear evidence for vast quantities of monetised wealth moving around
the Sasanian economy, offering a useful comparison: a substantial commerce
existed via the major routes which traverse northern Mesopotamia, and
Sasanian rulers had invested in the construction of caravanserais to facilitate
this activity, and the profits accruing to Persia from trade were noted by Roman
commentators.17 Trade in silks and other luxury-items was important and
profitable.18 Trade eastwards, across the northern route and through Khurasan,
or via the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, was well-established,19 and it is
clear that the Sasanian kings actively encouraged certain commercial links, in
particular the silk-route and the Indian-Ocean trade. Sasanian political
intervention in South Arabia and the establishment of permanent military
and commercial bases in the south and east of the peninsula attest to the
importance ascribed to the region.
A chain of small fortresses and strongholds has been tentatively identified
stretching from the Gulf as far as the mouth of the Indus, for example,
reasonably interpreted as intended to protect the coastal trade and the major
entrepôts.20 The advantages held by the Sasanians in this respect were
considerable since, although the northern silk-trade was liable to disruption
from the steppes, there were no serious political hindrances in the Gulf and
Indian Ocean to long-distance trade,21 and the investment by the kings in
port-facilities suggests that it was seen as a significant element in the royal
economy. Indeed, the ceramic evidence would argue that the intensity of
this trade was hardly surpassed in the later middle ages, and that there was a
17. Wiesehöfer 1996, pp. 192–7.

18. Raschke 1978, pp. 606–50; 821 (for caravanserais); in general, see Miller 1969.
19. Thierry 1993, pp. 121–32; Piacentini 1985.
20. Kervran 1994, especially pp. 331–8; Whitehouse and Williamson 1973, pp. 43–5;
although the dating remains problematic, and the interpretation has been challenged: see Kennet
2007.
21. Loewe 1971; Thierry 1993.
near-monopoly operated by Sasanian merchants supported by the state.22

There is also good evidence of a revival in trade overland with China – a
highly-monetised trade – in the last forty or so years of Sasanian rule, as
political conditions in China stabilised and as Sasanian power and influence
in the regions beyond Khurasan were strengthened. Sasanian commercial
activity in a wide range of luxury-goods, both from west to east and vice versa
was influential, and also played an important rôle in the economies of those
regions of central Asia as well as of China with which it was associated.23
No-one has yet suggested that Sasanian aristocratic wealth or medium- and
long-distance exchange are connected with the Sasanian fiscal apparatus and
its demands, especially for the army, although in fact, that there was a
relationship of some sort is not unlikely, and the Sasanian élite, as well as many
others, may have done well out of it; nor that it was the Sasanian élite alone
which drove commerce and long-distance bulk-exchange of goods. Indeed,
the (admittedly still very limited) ceramic evidence from some rural sites near
major cities would suggest that market-demand at much lower levels of society
could be both substantial and highly monetised.24 And Wickham is quite
aware of the market-driven nature of much of the demand within the late-
Roman world that he discusses. He is also aware of the high levels of
monetisation of the late-Roman world, since he cites, among others, Sarris
and Banaji, both of whom have demonstrated the extraordinary amounts of
monetised wealth in the hands of the élite.25 But Wickham does not really take
this issue into account, whether in respect of the velocity of circulation of
coinage or the amount of bullion that was actually coined, in his discussion of
aristocratic wealth.
This is where a tension in Wickham’s argument becomes evident. He prefers
the fiscal infrastructure and demands of the state, in particular of the army and
the major cities that had to be supported, such as Rome and Constantinople
(among others), as a major causal element in both the monetisation of
exchange-relationships and the structure of demand,26 characterising his
position as on the ‘substantivist’ in contrast to the ‘market-forces’ side of
the debate about the nature of exchange.27 Now, I am fully sympathetic with
this position, yet, at the same time, it also creates problems, unless one takes
much more explicit account of the independence from the fiscal sector of an
22. Frye 1972, pp. 265–9; Colless 1969; Whitehouse and Williamson 1973, pp. 45ff.;
Kervran 1994, pp. 338–9; there is a summary of evidence in Banaji 2006, pp. 285–90.
23. Thierry 1993, pp. 134–9; and especially Skaff 1998. See also de la Vaissière 2000.
24. For example, Altaweel 2006; cf. Adams 1970.
25. Banaji 2006; Sarris 2004; Sarris 2005.
26. See, for example, Wickham 2005, pp. 62ff., 708ff.
27. Wickham 2005, pp. 694–5.
enormous amount of exchange-activity using gold, for example, a point which

can otherwise be used as the basis for a clear challenge to his fiscally-nuanced
model. The question therefore becomes, to what extent do fiscal arrangements
determine the form and possibilities for exchange, and to what extent do they
merely channel and constrain them, and under what conditions? This is a
question to which Wickham does offer some answers, although they remain to
a degree implicit, because he is quite rightly keen to avoid, it seems, any
aprioristic reasoning about ‘prime movers’. The real answers to the question
appear at the end of the volume, and are expressed through an argument for
contingency, for the ways in which the four key-elements combine and
recombine with different results according to regionally-determined factors
(geographic, demographic, socio-political, cultural) in a non-deterministic
and anti-teleological model.
This works, but only if one is actually looking to read the argument
sympathetically. And it does deprive the fiscal model of some of its assumed
power, because it is basically an admission that fiscal systems affect, inflect and
sometimes direct other aspects of social and economic life, but are only under
very particular circumstances determining. It can certainly mean, and
Wickham shows this quite clearly, I believe, that fiscal arrangements absolutely
benefited aristocracies or élites across the Roman world, and that fiscal systems
which were highly monetised did this to an even greater degree, offering
incentives for investment and expenditures. But can it be shown that the
commercial exchanges across the length and breadth of the Roman world were
themselves dependent on fiscally-determined paths and networks? I do not
think it can. In fact, although I suspect that Wickham may well be seen as
arguing this case, I do not think he is: what he is suggesting is the crucial
importance of tax as inflecting all other aspects of economic life, even if the
degree to which this actually happens varied enormously from region to region
and across time.28 This is what his painstaking presentation of the regions he
selects for his analysis and discussion actually shows, and this, it seems to me,
is what his conclusion makes pretty clear: the breakdown of fiscal structures
had an impact upon both commercial exchange as well as wealth-generation,
because it had both enhanced and also channelled pre-existing commercial
arrangements and opportunities. But it had not necessarily caused them.
Indeed, a glance at the trajectory of Mediterranean-economic development
from well before the Principate would suggest that many other forces were at
work.
28. See, for example, Wickham 2005, p. 718: ‘commerce was not, anywhere, simply an
epiphenomenon of the tax network’ (Wickham’s emphasis).
Hopkins and de Calataÿ demonstrated that sea-borne commerce and trade

massively expanded from the later-third century BCE and began to fall off
during the later-second and into the third century – a pattern that can bear no
relation to the Roman state’s fiscal demands. Late-Republican and early-
Imperial levels of pollution generated by metal-extraction and working (as
evidenced in Greenland ice-cores) reached a peak not to be attained until the
modern period, falling off rapidly after the second century. Patterns of
building activity based on accurately-dated wood-remains from parts of
Germany show a peak in the first and early-second centuries CE with a
dramatic decline thereafter, and a limited recovery in the fourth century;29
evidence for diet, and, in particular, the wider access to meat which skeletal
and other material seems to suggest for the western provinces during the
period of the early Principate in Western- and North-Western Europe, suggests
again a very dramatic improvement in standards of living and diet followed by
an equally dramatic reduction in the later-second century, with a minor
recovery in the fourth century. Whether the Antonine plague can be made
responsible for some or all of these changes at this time is not an issue which
we can pursue here. What is apparent is that mechanisms entirely independent
of the fiscal structures of the Roman state, and certainly of the period from the
fourth century, were at work here, mechanisms which can be much more
readily understood in the context of an expansion and contraction of
commercialised production and exchange, in which state-fiscality is secondary
and in which levels of coinage-production reflects levels of demand.30
Now, none of this meshes with Wickham’s fiscal model, because the cycle of
growth and decline predates the period of economic and commercial vitality
and decline with which his discussion is concerned. Indeed, it might seem to
disprove his proposition that a shared Imperial-fiscal system was the necessary
requirement for regional economies to have more than marginal links with
one another,31 since this was clearly not the case between ca. 200 BCE and 170
CE. But if we accept that fiscal structures could impact upon the ways in
which wealth was extracted and redistributed, and, if we give Wickham the
benefit of the doubt, to the effect that his fiscally driven model represents only
one potential mechanism, one which is period-specific rather than a causal
universal, then Wickham’s argument can be rehabilitated, indeed might better
account for the recovery of the Empire at the end of the third century. With
29. See de Calataÿ 2005, following the well-known and provocative article by Hopkins 1980,
both following Parker 1992; Also Jongman 2003, pp. 181–96; Schmidt and Gruhle 2003.
30. Kron 2002; Bakels and Jacomet 2003.
31. Wickham 2005, p. 820.
the re-establishment of a stable monetary system under Constantine, an

effective and more-centralised fiscal apparatus, the closer tying-in of regional
élites to the Imperial system at all levels, and the stability coupled with
state-demands which led to a recovery of trans-Mediterranean commerce,
one could argue that it was now the state and its fiscal apparatus which acted
as the ‘framing’ element in facilitating the economic recovery which the
archaeological and written evidence demonstrates. While it was thus not the
state alone that generated the vast and highly commercialised market-system
of late antiquity, it did act as the key stabilising agent which made possible the
recovery of commerce and production for a large, Empire-wide market of
consumers at all social levels. And, as this system evolved, so it became
progressively independent of the conditions which had originally stimulated
it. One is therefore left with a model in which fiscal mechanisms are crucial at
a certain point, and remain key inflecting factors with specific consequences.
When they do eventually break down or were weakened or suborned by local
élites, fragmentation of the Empire-wide economy and its élite was indeed a
necessary result, but only down to a certain level. For, as Wickham himself
notes, in many regions the survival of strong élites, local and regionalised
exchange, and the use of money on a grand scale remained the norm, and this
cannot just be a reflection of the fiscal system.
The absence of any discussion of these alternatives is certainly a weakness in
the book, and leaves Wickham open to criticism on the sort of grounds
described above. The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that key-issues about,
say, aristocratic wealth and the way that impacted on society below and around
élite-expenditures remain under-discussed for the late-Roman period (but
not, interestingly, for the post-Roman societies that are discussed). The high
levels of monetised exchange that both textual and numismatic evidence
suggests for the sixth century are referred to, but largely within the context of
the fiscal arrangements through which some of them appear. The issue of the
amount of wealth circulating at any given time in coined form, but outside of
the tax-system, is not really discussed, although, in fact, some useful work on
this could have been brought in at this point. So, while the general lines of
development of each of the chosen areas can be closely related to taxation and
the forms of the state, as well as to certain other key-factors, this particular
issue is rather neglected, and it would be interesting to find out how it is
understood to have fitted into the broader picture. One assumes, in fact, that
we must conceive of a ‘compromised’ market-demand model, in which the
availability of coin, through government-recognition of the rôle of coinage in
facilitating all forms of exchange, is a key-element; but in which the need for
the state to move substantial amounts of produce in bulk for the army, for
example, sets up certain more advantageous contexts for both investment and
production as well as inflecting the production and distribution of coin at
certain levels and in certain regions, or even opens up new market-possibilities
as, for example, along the Danube limes or the Rhine. There seems little doubt,
for example, that, in the later-seventh and early-eighth century, the crisis-
ridden Byzantine state’s fiscal needs absolutely determined coin-production,
distribution and use – there are several situations where this can be shown to
have been the case, but it is particularly nicely demonstrated by numismatic
evidence which shows that in the period 619/620–641 a very considerable
quantity of older bronze-coins were countermarked with new values by the
mint in Constantinople and despatched to Sicily as recompense to the estate-
owners who supplied the grain for a dramatically increased Constantinopolitan
demand following the loss of Egypt to the Persians.32
In the neighbouring Caliphate, in contrast, this seems not to have been the
case at all, indeed what appears to be the deliberate consigning of substantial
amounts of Byzantine bronze up to the later 650s, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the vast number of imitative-Byzantine coins struck in numerous
local mints throughout the newly conquered provinces of Syria, Palestine and
Arabia between the early 660s and the 670s, testifies to a need for money
which seems far to surpass the requirements of local military units, but which,
in any case, must reflect more than simply the demands of a monetised
taxation.33 These patterns reflect to a degree pre-existing conditions and
relationships. Thus, with Wickham, we can appreciate the high level of
regionalisation which existed within the late-Roman world and which
determined to a degree the later evolution of those regions after the Roman-
imperial state ceased to be of relevance. If, as Wickham insists, there simply
was not enough commercial activity within the provinces of the Empire to
enable the mass of the ordinary population to exchange goods for gold, or any
form of cash, with which to pay taxes in money,34 then the explanation that
the state put this money into circulation chiefly through transactions designed
to serve its own ends would seem to be the best. This certainly works for
certain periods and in specific circumstances, as he shows, or in particular
localities, for particular reasons.
But can it be accepted as a generalised means of explaining the redistribution
of social wealth? It would not work for Sasanian Iraq, for example, and it
is hard to imagine that the Roman world was so utterly different from its
32. Prigent 2006, pp. 273–89; 294–5.

33. Walmsley 2000, pp. 332–9; Domascewica and Bates 2002; Foss 1999; Phillips and
Goodwin 1997.
34. Wickham 2005, pp. 74ff.
near-neighbour. Was the fiscal apparatus really the major means of converting
produce into cash as well as of moving goods around the Empire, which
Wickham seems to be suggesting? It is clear, from both the numismatic
evidence as well as written sources, even in the hard-pressed Byzantine state
of the eighth century, that the state continued to mint very considerable
amounts of gold in order to reward, not just its soldiers (who were paid
through a combination of means, including coin, supplies, equipment,
exemptions from extraordinary fiscal obligations), but the members of its
fiscal and military apparatus; and that a good proportion of this coin was
released into circulation through commercial exchange, probably far more
than the limited archaeological and numismatic evidence allows us to see. This
is an area in which much work remains to be done; but it does suggest that too
one-sided a model of fiscal mechanisms can miss some key-variables. One
issue is the relationship between the extractive power of the state and the
producers, of whatever level. Wickham opts for a relatively high overall level
of taxation – as much as 25–30% of the product in some cases35 – in contrast
to other, much lower, estimates. This is obviously a major problem, not just
because the documentation is both regionally nuanced and problematic, but
because of its implications for Wickham’s understanding of the impact of
taxation on both élites and on the amount of disposable wealth remaining to
taxpayers after the state had taken its share. Later-Byzantine practice, insofar
as we understand it, would suggest a lower level than this, estimated at
something between 15–23%, thus somewhere between Wickham’s very high
estimates and the very low estimates – apparently generally accepted now – for
the Roman Empire before the third century proposed by Hopkins – as little as
5–7% of the gross product. That there took place an increase in the effectiveness
of tax-collection between the late-second and later-fourth centuries is generally
admitted, of course, but even so, the very high levels of tax from the examples
Wickham cites seem on the face of it more likely to be exceptional than
normative.36
In the late-Roman context, we do not know enough about how much
access ordinary people – peasants, urban artisans, craftsmen of one sort or
another – had to the regular use of gold; we do not know how widespread the
use of instruments of credit were, although Peter Sarris has suggested that it
was much wider than usually assumed; and we can only guess at the extent of
market-activity on the part of primary producers not related to the tax-system
and the need to convert produce to money. Numismatic and ceramic evidence
35. Wickham 2005, pp. 64–6.

36. See Hopkins 1995/6; Morrisson and Cheynet 2002, pp. 821ff.
would, however, suggest that it was substantial. So, while I have no doubt that
the volume of transactions carried out by agents of the state using gold put
huge quantities of coin into circulation, I also have some difficulty in accepting
that, at least outside periods of serious financial and political crisis, there did
not at the same time exist an extensive and much greater volume of purely-
commercial activity. This was unconnected with the state, and is a sphere
which is to some extent invisible in the sources, reflecting not just the vast
fortunes of many members of the late-Roman élite (whom Wickham sees as a
key-element in the creation of both demand and hence exchange and
production),37 but the presence of very substantial amounts of cash at lower
levels of society, cash which oiled the wheels of exchange at every level between
town and countryside and between one region and another, whether near or
far. Incidental references in a whole range of texts from the fifth and sixth
centuries show that there were vast reserves of coined money at times in the
Imperial treasury, that thousands of pounds’ weight in coined gold was
disbursed by the state on a range of enterprises. It seems on the face of it highly
improbable that the state controlled more than a fraction of the available
money put into circulation.
It is in the context of the economic revival of the ninth and tenth centuries
that the absence of any discussion of the Balkans becomes particularly obvious.
Economic regeneration in the east in particular is ascribed to the ‘growing
revival and recentralization of state structures’.38 But this is, to some extent, to
underplay the economic rôle of the Bulgars and Slavs, and the growing
commercial dynamism of Byzantine-provincial centres such as Thessalonika
or Amastris or Trebizond, where the caravan-routes from Iran ended. A similar
point might be made regarding the Byzantine outpost at Cherson in the
Crimea, an entrepôt for traders from all the neighbouring regions, including
the steppe, and from which a substantial kommerkion or trade-tax had come to
be levied by the earlier-ninth century. The point is that these developments
appear to be independent of (even) the Byzantine state.
Tax- and fiscal systems are one major current running through the book,
but there are many others. The structure and pace of rural economies and the
changing nature of rural habitation is one; the forms taken by urbanism in
response to the major transformations of the fifth to seventh centuries in
different parts of the formerly Roman world is another; and the ways in which
these relate to one another and to the evolution of local and supra-local élites
is a third, and to each of them, as well as to several other themes, Wickham
37. Wickham 2005, pp. 819ff.

38. Wickham 2005, p. 791.
brings new insights, suggests new and fruitful ways of looking at problems,
and proposes in many respects alternative models or explanations of the
development and transformation of a series of key early-medieval institutions
and structures from those currently accepted. Of course, his interpretation of
some of the evidence, in particular, the vast body of archaeological material,
can on occasion be questioned – a particular assemblage in a particular location
is subject to more than one plausible contextualised interpretation – and this
can, in turn, lead to challenges to elements in the broader picture. He eschews
some of the more catastrophist approaches to the stimuli for major changes –
the plague of the mid-sixth century, on the one hand, and the great ‘dust-veil’
event of the late 530s, on the other.39 Quite rightly so, although we still do not
know enough about the effects of the plague and its regional incidence to be
quite sure that it was not as insignificant as Wickham is suggesting, even if he
is right that it clearly cannot have been the cause of the slow and regionalised
demographic downturn that he documents. Definitive evidence from DNA-
analysis has shown, for example, that the Justinianic pandemic was caused by
an exceptionally virulent and exceptionally lethal biovar of Yersinia pestis, the
bubonic plague. As far as the evidence suggests, this is significantly different
from that which caused the plague narrated by Thucydides, for example,
indeed from any known biovar of this category. This version of Yersinia Pestis
was thus an entirely new pathogen for the populations of the Empire in 541,
which as a result lacked any acquired immunity at all, and this would have
rendered the pathogen exceptionally virulent. The same biovar reappeared as
the agent of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, by which time those
human populations most affected by it had acquired a degree of resistance.40 If
one bears this in mind, therefore, it is in fact likely that the sixth-century
plague actually had a much more dramatic impact on populations than is
currently generally thought, even if Wickham is surely correct to emphasise
that the archaeology does indeed suggest a highly regionalised pattern. More
work needs to be done in this respect, but Wickham does not perhaps devote
as much attention to the issue as he might, even if I would agree that his
general account would still not be substantially changed by the result.
At the same time, the absence of any consideration of belief-systems as
elements in the configuration and articulation of patterns of demand and
exchange is perhaps a weakness, even though one absolutely sympathises with
the need to draw the line somewhere in terms of just how much a single
volume can take on board. But the Church, whether on the northern margins
39. Wickham 2005, pp. 548–9.

40. Little 2006; Wiechmann and Grupe 2005.
of the Roman world, in Wales or the lowlands of Scotland, or in the middle of

Italy or Anatolia, was a consumer and an expropriator of wealth, and religious
habits and understanding did directly affect choices in patterns of consumption,
of building, of the disposal and investment of wealth, often on a large scale,
and this needs to be taken into account somehow, especially when we consider
a key-aspect of Wickham’s analysis, namely the patterns of investment of
wealth of élites – indeed, it seems quite apparent that the transformation of
urban spaces and the use of as well as the design of buildings in and around
late-Roman towns was fundamentally affected by shifts in patterns of
investment determined by changes in patterns of belief and the sort of activities
that bring social status and respect to an individual. A good deal of the
disposable income of the wealthy appears thus to have gone into religious
buildings or related objects, and it is important that we bear in mind the fact
that this was as much a new and evolving pattern of investment as it was a
‘decline’, reflected also in the changing use of public and private space and the
disposition of buildings within towns which accompanied the gradual
Christianisation of late-antique urban topography.41 In respect of social praxis,
the distribution of wealth, the forms through which wealth and patterns of
investment of disposable income can be tracked and detected, this is surely an
important aspect which cannot be neglected.
None of this detracts from the achievement of this book. Crucially,
Wickham is able to join up and consider as parts of a whole a vast range of
social, economic and political-historical developments. He is also able to
show that the inclusion of Denmark, North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria,
and Anatolia is not simply a reflection of his own personal intellectual
preferences or of the extent and penetrative depth of Roman-imperial culture,
but an integral part of the historical story – it should henceforth be impossible
to discuss any region of the late-Roman world in isolation, because, even at
the level of local structures, Wickham underlines what we already take for
granted about the modern world (regardless of theories of globalisation): that
nowhere exists for itself alone and that interdependence is the norm, not the
exception.
Where Wickham has no final answer then the answer lies, as he observes in
his Introduction and in the concluding section, in further work and research,
the collation and integration of more and different types of evidence, and
constant questioning of current explanations along the lines set out here.
Regardless of any issues left unresolved, however, this is without a doubt one
41. See especially Spieser 1989, pp. 103ff.; Wataghin 2003; Lavan 2003; Gauthier 1999.
of the most important books for the late-ancient and early-medieval historian
to have appeared in decades. It is immensely thoughtful, rich in detail,
painstakingly researched, and yet successful in combining the huge amount of
material dealt with into a coherent and plausible explanation of a period of
dramatic and often rapid change. The different levels of analysis are closely
articulated and integrated into a comprehensive and comprehensible whole,
which forces us to radically rethink how we approach the history of the early-
medieval world and to re-frame the sorts of questions we have been asking.
Wickham thus draws a line under many older debates and sets the whole
discussion about the structure and dynamic of early-medieval societies on a
new footing. Crucially, and in spite of the vast amount of evidence reviewed,
he is able to articulate the material in a way that allows us to see the wood for
the trees, to draw out some fundamental causal relationships, and to show
how a series of complex, intertwining strands generated the varied and
apparently quite different trajectories of different parts of the medieval world.
The book also serves as a challenge to historians of the Western-medieval
world in particular to look well beyond their own horizons.
In the end, this is as persuasive a demonstration as one could ask for of the
impossibility of arriving at meaningful conclusions about individual regions
without also setting them in their broader trans-regional context. However
one judges the argument for prioritising the fiscal instance in the causal
relationships which generated the early ‘middle ages’, this book sets an entirely
new standard for historians to aspire to and will undoubtedly remain the
standard narrative-analysis of the process of transformation from Roman to
post-Roman society and economy for many years to come.
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Centuries of Transition
Neil Davidson
School of Applied Social Science, University of Strathclyde
neil.davidson@strath.ac.uk
Abstract
This review of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages situates the book within the
context of his earlier writings on the transition to feudalism, and contrasts his explanation for
and dating of the process with those of the two main opposing positions set out in Perry
Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Guy Bois’s The Transformation of the
Year One Thousand (1989). Although Framing modifies some of Wickham’s earlier positions, it
largely sidesteps explicit theoretical discussion for a compellingly detailed empirical study which
extends to almost the entire territorial extent of the former Roman Empire. The review focuses
on three main themes raised by Wickham’s important work: the existence or otherwise of a
‘peasant’-mode of production and its relationship to the ‘Asiatic’ mode; the nature of state-
formation and the question of when a state can be said to have come into existence; and the rôle
of different types of class-struggle – slave-rebellions, tax-revolts and peasant-uprisings – in
establishing the feudal system.
Keywords
Marxism, Chris Wickham, Perry Anderson, Guy Bois, peasant-mode of production, state, class-
struggle
Why should readers of Historical Materialism consider reading a book by a

specialist in early-Italian history, containing 831 pages of text and dealing
with Europe and the Mediterranean world between the fifth and ninth
centuries AD? Framing the Early Middle Ages was awarded the Deutscher
Memorial-Prize for 2006, which suggests that it may interest a wider audience
than the fellow-medievalists Chris Wickham addresses in his Introduction.
There, ‘you the reader’, is assumed to belong to a group of ‘experts’ who
‘often . . . know far more than I about a given set of materials’.1 In the case of
this reviewer, Wickham need have no such concerns, since my area of expertise
lies in a historical period which opens nearly 900 years after his closes and with
1. Wickham 2005, p. 9.
74 N. Davidson / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 73–97
a country (Scotland) which he specifically excludes from discussion.2 My

purpose here will therefore not be to dispute with Wickham over, for example,
his explanation for why there are greater similarities between Syro-Palestinian
and Italian ceramics than between either of these and ceramics of Egyptian
origin.3 Instead, I approach the book in the same way as most other non-
specialist readers of this journal: as a Marxist interested in what a fellow-
Marxist has to say about a crucial, but deeply obscure turning-point in human
history and what implications his work has for Marxist theory. As we shall see,
his work is full of interest in both respects.
Wickham and the debate on the first transition

There have been recurrent debates over the transition from feudalism to
capitalism. There have even been extended discussions over the transition
from capitalism to socialism – an event which, as we are all too painfully
aware, has not yet successfully taken place. As a result, we have some idea of
the relationship between economic transition and social revolution in both
cases. By contrast, the emergence of feudalism has been relatively neglected by
all the major intellectual traditions which seek to explain long-term socio-
economic development, including Marxism.4 In the first volume of Mann’s
The Sources of Social Power, for example, his conclusions concerning the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire are followed by an extended discussion of
Christianity and rival religions, before beginning a survey of twelfth-century
Europe, considered solely in so far as it provides the setting for capitalist
development.5 Mann can at least argue that, as a non-Marxist, he does not
find the concept of feudalism useful, but even a work as firmly situated within
the classical-Marxist tradition as Harman’s A People’s History of the World deals
with the subject in a summary-fashion which is noticeably different from the
later treatment of the transition to capitalism.6
2. Wickham 2005, p. 6, n. 6.
3. Wickham 2005, pp. 728–41, 759–80.
4. For some preliminary comparisons and contrasts between three great transitions-
revolutions, see Davidson 2005b, pp. 36–47, although the purpose of the discussion is to identify
the specificity of the bourgeois revolution, rather than that of its predecessor.
5. Mann 1986, pp. 295–8, 371–6. In a review-article, Wickham criticised Mann’s assumption
that capitalism was already implicit in developments within medieval Europe, but does not
broach his failure to discuss the emergence of feudalism in the first place. See Wickham 1988,
pp. 73–5.
6. Compare Harman 1999, pp. 85–6, 104–5 (the transition to feudalism), and pp. 161–374
(the transition to capitalism).
N. Davidson / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 73–97 75
In one sense, this is unsurprising, since the Marxist classics are relatively
silent on the subject. The most famous discussion, by Engels in The Origins of
the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), summarises over four-hundred
years of history in around twelve pages. For Engels, the pressures caused by
imperial taxation had already set in motion the economic crisis of the Empire,
as a result of which the declining profitability of slavery, in both the great
estates and artisanal workshops, led to landlords settling former slaves as
hereditary tenants.7 There is nothing uniquely Marxist about this explanation,
except perhaps the stress Engels places on the Germanic invasions in embedding
the ‘barbarian’ gentile-constitution which supposedly gave peasant-society a
community-structure and an institutional means of emancipation from
servitude. Important essays by Weber (1896) and Bloch (written between the
World-Wars, but published posthumously in 1947) also privileged the
changing position of the slaves, although with different emphases. For Weber,
the decisive point was when the territorial limits of the Empire were reached,
leading to difficulties in acquiring new slaves with which to replace the existing
workforce, since actual reproduction – breeding slaves rather than capturing
or buying them – would have required massive levels of investment that
landlords were unwilling to make.8 Bloch is, in some ways, closer to Engels,
but adds an additional component in claiming that the new class of serfs arose,
not only from a loosening of the conditions of absolute servitude hitherto
imposed on the slaves, but a tightening of the relative liberty previously
enjoyed by free peasants.9 None of these contributions referred to revolution
as such. Those that did tended to be non-Marxist, and focussed on a much
later period. Southern famously wrote of the period between 970 and 1215:
‘The slow emergence of a knightly aristocracy which set the social tone of
Europe for hundreds of years contains no dramatic events or clearly decisive
moments such as those which have marked the course of the other great social
revolutions.’ It was the almost-imperceptible quality of the transformation
that led him to describe it as the ‘silent revolution of these centuries’.10
Serious Marxist discussion of the subject took place over a relatively
short period towards the end of the last century, culminating in a series of
exchanges in Past and Present across 1996–7. Since Wickham made several
important contributions to that discussion, it may be worth recapitulating
the key-positions, including his own, to contextualise his latest book. Two
works, Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Bois’s The
7. Engels 1990, pp. 245–56.

8. Weber 1976, pp. 397–408.
9. Bloch 1975, pp. 1–31.
10. Southern 1953, p. 15.
Transformation of the Year One Thousand (1989), conveniently set out the main
opposing explanations and timescales for the emergence of feudalism.
For Anderson, there is a period of socio-economic transition which begins
with the barbarian-settlement within the Roman Empire in the West, but is
concluded only several centuries after its collapse: ‘The catastrophic collision
of two mutually dissolving anterior modes of production – primitive and
ancient – eventually produced the feudal order which spread throughout
medieval Europe.’11 Given that the pre-existing modes were embedded in
social formations occupying geographically separate areas of Europe, feudalism
was initially marked by spatial unevenness:
In effect, the core region of European feudalism was that in which a ‘balanced
synthesis’ of Roman and Germanic elements occurred: essentially, Northern
France and zones contiguous to it, the homeland of the Carolingian Empire. To
the South of this area, in Provence, Italy or Spain, the dissolution and
recombination of barbarian and ancient modes of production occurred under the
dominant legacy of Antiquity. To the North and East of it, in Germany,
Scandinavia and England, where Roman rule had never reached or had taken
only shallow root, there was conversely a slow transition towards feudalism,
under the indigenous dominance of the barbarian heritage.12
The prolonged period during which fusion took place meant that the pre-
existing modes were not transformed immediately, but, for Anderson, there is
no suggestion that they continued to exist anywhere as dominant after the
sixth century, although examples could, of course, be found of free-peasant
communities on the one hand, and of slaves on the other.
Anderson could draw on some passing suggestions by Marx himself in the
Grundrisse, where the notion of ‘synthesis’ was first deployed, as his authority.13
The main support for this position came, however, from Russian and Eastern-
European academics such as Elena Mikhailovna Shtaerman, although it was
by no means universally accepted by all their colleagues.14 Anderson refuses to
contemplate the existence of feudalism prior to the fall of the Roman Empire
and he is, of course, scarcely alone in taking this position. As Finley once
wrote, ‘On any account chattel slavery ceased to be dominant even in Italy by
the fourth or fifth century whereas it is improper to speak of feudalism before
the time of Charlemagne, leaving a “transition” lasting three or four hundred
11. Anderson 1974a, p. 128.

12. Anderson 1974b, pp. 154–5.
13. Marx 1973, pp. 97–8.
14. Haldon 1989, p. 7; Haldon 1993, pp. 73–4. Anderson expresses disagreement with
Shtaerman in several contexts, but does refer to her work in relation to the transition itself. See
Anderson 1974a, p. 61, n. 9; Anderson 1974a, p. 83, n. 43; and Anderson 1974a, p. 85, n. 48.
years.’15 Why Finley finds it is improper is not clear, but the same position was
also taken by his great opponent, Ste Croix. Whilst the latter was prepared to
acknowledge the existence of serfdom as one of the three forms of unfree
labour in the ancient world (along with chattel-slavery and debt-bondage), he
opposed the idea that this demonstrated the existence of feudal relations of
production, describing this as a ‘groundless connection’. Again, the grounds of
his objection are not entirely clear, other than that this would involve the
discovery of feudalism across the Greek world prior to the Hellenistic period,
although he recognises that there are ‘closely related (though not identical)
forms in Graceo-Roman antiquity and in the Middle Ages’.16 Ste Croix’s
unwillingness to recognise the existence of feudalism may signal his adherence
to a Social-Democratic or Stalinist notion of successive stages of social
development. In the case of Anderson, the reason is different. He is committed
to the view that capitalism emerged as an indigenous system only in Western
Europe. Although he sees feudalism as having a slightly-wider territorial extent
(it also includes Japan), the conditions for the emergence of capitalism are
only present in Western Europe because the genesis of feudalism there took a
peculiarly ‘synthetic’ form, allowing what Anderson sees as the distinctive
element – the cultural and juridical heritage of classical antiquity – to be
transmitted into the new system.17 As this suggests, Anderson’s definition of
feudalism is based on its superstructural characteristics – a necessity, in his
view, since all pre-capitalist class-societies other than slavery are based on the
exploitation of a peasantry by landlords.18 Feudalism, therefore, cannot have
existed during the lifetime of the Roman Empire, as these characteristics were
absent. It is, of course, quite possible to explain the priority of capitalism in
Western Europe without recourse to idealist speculations about the heritage of
classical antiquity. The key-point in the context of this discussion, however, is
Anderson’s chronology: the end of the Empire in the West during the fifth
century sets in train a process which led to the emergence of feudalism.
Bois would agree that feudalism did not predate the end of the Roman
Empire, but, in every other respect, his account is the opposite of Anderson’s.
Far from slavery beginning a long transformation virtually from the moment
the social organisation of the barbarian-tribes began to interpenetrate with
that of the Romans, Bois claims that it remained the dominant mode until the
tenth century, notably in the areas where Charlemagne had attempted to
preserve the political form of the Western Empire. Accordingly, Bois emphasises
15. Finley 1983, p. 180.

16. Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 136, 138, 267–9.
17. Anderson 1974b, pp. 420–9.
18. Anderson 1974b, pp. 403–10. His definition of feudalism can be found on p. 407.
not the process of transition, but a moment of revolution around 1000, which
he describes as a ‘European phenomenon’.19 Drawing on events in the village
of Lournard in Cluny to support his thesis, he describes a situation of ‘dual
power’ between the monks of the monastery of Cluny, bearers of the new
feudal order, and the existing masters, the Carolingian defenders of slavery:
The driving force behind this movement was a faction within the aristocracy, or,
to be more precise, within the high aristocracy in its monastic dimension. This
was done almost despite itself. The sole concern of the first Cluniacs was to assure
their independence with regard to the lay powers and to reform monasticism.
However, this concern led them to develop close ties with the peasantry. There
was thus an identity of interest (the peasantry feeling themselves threatened by
the local grandees) and even an ideological rapprochement, to the extent that
monastic spirituality coincided with the moral needs of the peasantry. From this
moment on the old order was threatened. As often happens in such cases, the
signal for hostilities was given by the champions of the past, by that local
aristocracy, warrior and slave-owning, which formed the social base of the
Carolingian system, but which saw its position being eroded. By unleashing
violence, it plunged society into anarchy, thus compelling the monks to assume
responsibilities in the social sphere and define a new order: the first draft of feudal
society.20
Bois was the last in a series of French historians, beginning with George Duby,
who had introduced the notion of a feudal revolution by way of an analogy
with the bourgeois revolution.21 (Although, by the time Bois’ book appeared
in France, Duby had rejected both the term and the notion.)22 There are two
main objections to Bois’s, account of the process. The first is empirical. His
material is too narrowly based on one small area of France and cannot be
generalised across the whole of Europe: slaves existed in estates east of the
Rhine where Roman influence was minimal, and labour-services were
innovations in Italy during the eighth and ninth centuries, not a legacy from
antiquity.23 The second is theoretical. His definition of a slave is too fixated on
the legal category and not enough on the actual relationship of the direct
producers so categorised to the means of production. In other words, many of
these slaves were, in fact, nearer to the free peasants – notably in their interest
in raising output – than the slaves who laboured in the fields, mines or
19. Bois 1992, p. 135.

20. Bois 1992, p. 152.
21. Duby 1980, pp. 147–66; Bonnassie 1991, pp. 104–31. Although the term is not used,
the same concept and chronology can also be found in Poly and Bournazel 1991, pp. 2–3,
118–40, 351–7 and Dockès 1982, pp. 105–10.
22. Duby 1991.
23. Verhulst 1991, pp. 200–2.
households of antiquity.24 Nevertheless, a diluted version of the ‘feudal-

revolution’ thesis has now been mainstreamed, shorn of the Marxism-
framework to which Bois at least had subscribed, to the extent that the term
‘revolution’ can be used to describe changes around the first millennium
without specifying the transition to any particular mode of production, as in
Moore’s The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215.25
Where did Wickham stand in this debate? In two important articles, ‘The
Other Transition’ (1984) and ‘The Uniqueness of the East’ (1985), he
established his own distinct position. Against Anderson, he claimed that
feudalism already existed in 300 AD, so that it could not have been the result
of a synthesis of German barbarism and Roman slavery. Indeed, as Wickham
points out, ‘in so far as the German invaders had such things as a landed
aristocracy, these largely resulted from Roman influence’.26 Against the French
tradition of ‘feudal revolution’, which was shortly to culminate in Bois’s, work,
he claimed that this pre-existing feudal mode of production had become
the dominant mode by 700 AD, by which time ‘the balance shifted’ from
the hitherto dominant ancient mode.27 The transition from slave to serf,
through the mechanism of labour-service, was, he claimed, ‘marginal’ to the
transition – indeed, he sees the peasantry as major beneficiaries of the entire
process. He does note that increased surplus-extraction from peasants was
occurring during the ninth and especially tenth centuries, but this is
characteristic of the end of the first phase of feudal development, not the
transition to feudalism itself. Whatever happened around 1000 AD could
scarcely have been a revolution then, since the fundamental change had already
been completed 300 years earlier.
Wickham began by identifying a contradiction within the Roman ruling
class, which was heightened from the beginning of the fifth century. The
acquisition of land made individual members liable for tax, which they
tried with increasing success to evade, this reducing the resources available to
them collectively as state-managers. The main recipient of state-funding was
the army, engaged in increasingly futile attempts to repel the Germanic
invasions – attempts whose lack of success provided an even greater incentive
24. Bois himself admits that he might be ‘reproached for an excessive legalism’, but claims
that: ‘The social condition of the slave changed without slavery disappearing, just as workers’
conditions have changed since the nineteenth century without it therefore being possible to
assume the definitive disappearance of this class.’ (Bois 1992, pp. 17, 18.)
25. Moore is clearly unhappy about the Marxist connotations of term ‘revolution’, but
nevertheless argues that a ‘new social order’, dominated by ‘the clerici who became the power
elite of the new Europe’ and who ‘constituted a class in all but name’ (Moore 2000, p. 6).
26. Wickham 1994b, p. 29.
27. Wickham 1994b, p. 26.
to tax-evasion. Meanwhile, the German invaders began to appear an attractive

alternative to supporting a declining but acquisitive state-apparatus. As
Wickham stresses, however, ‘tax-evading aristocrats’, although important,
were not the only social actors involved in achieving the transition.28 Peasants
played a far greater rôle but, despite several important risings from early in the
fifth century, not principally as participants in open class-struggle. Instead,
they hastened the internal disintegration of the Empire by placing themselves
under the protection of landowners, effectively renouncing their independence
on the assumption that not only would their new status as tenants not carry
tax-liabilities, but their new lords would be capable of avoiding such
responsibilities themselves, and, consequently, would not pass them on. In
effect, both the landowners and the peasants had reasons to choose what
would later become known as feudal social relations.
These pressures also applied in the East, but the outcomes were different,
mainly because, in the West, the crisis of taxation coincided with an additional
factor: the Germanic invasions. The triumph of the barbarians did not
immediately lead to total transformation: ‘The new Germanic states were
not yet feudal.’29 Taxation continued, but without the need for a centralised
army – since the new states raised armies from their own landowners and
retainers – the main purpose for raising taxation no longer existed. Taxation
became increasingly fragmented: inessential for supporting monarchs, whose
wealth derived from their own estates, it became principally used for securing
support through gifts or bribes. Previously, members of the ruling class had
sought to acquire land in order to gain access to control of the state-apparatus,
but now it became an end in itself: ‘Private landowning was henceforth no
longer the means to the obtaining of power; it was itself power.’30 The scene
was by no means uniform: in some areas, such as the British Isles, some areas
reverted to pre-class agrarian societies; in others, such as the German Lands,
pre-class societies co-existed with feudal relations in a subordinate position;
but in terms of the state, ‘all were feudal, for they were based on the politics
and economics of landowning, expressed in different ways’.31
Why, then, the difference with the East? Wickham argued that, in addition
to the slave-mode, the Roman Empire had at different times also involved the
feudal and the tributary modes, based respectively on rent and tax. Wickham
originally argued that these two modes emerged as dominant from the fifth
century, effectively maintaining different aspects of the later Roman Empire;
28. Wickham 1994b, p. 20.

29. Wickham 1994b, p. 23.
30. Wickham 1994b, p. 28.
31. Wickham 1994b, p. 33.
feudalism in the West and the tributary mode in Byzantium. And, while
Wickham was clear that the tributary mode was not simply a re-labelling of
the ‘Asiatic’ mode, which he rightly dismisses, he also emphasised that it did
exist in other regions, above all in the Chinese Empire.32 The distinction
between feudal and tributary modes drew far more response than his account
of the transition. In particular, Berktay and Haldon pointed out that, in terms
of the central exploitative relationship with the peasantry, there was no
difference between these; the difference lay in the extent and nature of state-
power, but Marxists do not distinguish between modes on superstructural
grounds – that would be to fall into precisely the error which all contributors
to the debate criticised Anderson.33 Wickham accepted this criticism, as he
pointed out on the republication of his early essays in Land and Power:
The basic economic division inside class societies thus becomes simply that
between societies based on taking surpluses from peasants (or, for that matter,
household-based artisans) and those based on withholding surplus from wage
labourers. . . . It does not mean that the Chinese or Roman empires, the Frankish
kingdoms, and the feudal world of the eleventh century were exactly the same,
for an essential structural difference remains between the first two, and tax-raising
state systems (with aristocracies subject to them), and the second two, polities
dominated by aristocratic rent-taking and Marc Bloch’s politics of land.34
Like the positions to which he was opposed, Wickham could find support for
his alternatives in respect of both chronology and modes of production in
Marx’s own writings, specifically in the Grundrisse, that most ambiguous of his
major works. As Hobsbawm wrote in an important early commentary:
‘Feudalism appears to be an alternative evolution out of primitive communalism,
under conditions in which no cities develop, because the density of population
over a large region is low.’35 Similarly, although Wickham derived his use of
the tributary mode from Amin, the concept, if not the actual term, can also be
found in the pages of Marx’s notebooks: ‘In the case of the slave relationship,
the serf relationship, and the relationship of tribute (where the primitive
community is under consideration), it is the slaveowner, the feudal lord or the
state receiving tribute that is the owner of the product and therefore its seller.’36
Wickham therefore had at least as much reason to claim a relationship to the
Marxist classics as his opponents.
32. Wickham 1994b, pp. 36–40; Wickham 1994c, pp. 43–50, 73–4.
33. Berktay 1987, pp. 301–10; Haldon 1989, pp. 9–15; Haldon 1993, pp. 63–9, 87–109.
34. Wickham 1994c, p. 75.
35. Hobsbawm 1965, p. 28. See also p. 32.
36. Marx 1973, p. 443. See also Amin 1976, pp. 15–16.
Themes, theories, absences

After a professional career as a historian principally of the Tuscan region of
Italy, Wickham has now returned to the subject of the post-Roman world as a
whole. During the debate on the feudal revolution, Wickham commented on
Bisson’s dating of that process to between 850 and 1100, noting that ‘250
years is a long time for a revolution’, and argued that it was preferable to see
the period as one of consolidation or formalisation of a feudal system which
had already been established: ‘Like the Industrial Revolution, or the varying
moments of middle-class political assertion in Europe that began with the
French Revolution, this major shift could be fast or slow, (relatively) peaceful
or sharply violent, and the variations themselves shed light on the structural
differences between one region and another.’37 In effect, Framing the Early
Middle Ages is a massive depiction of the prior process of feudal emergence,
empirically substantiating the picture which he sketched out over twenty years
ago, taking into account his changed position on the modes-of-production
debate. This is no mere coda to the earlier debate on the transition to feudalism,
but a re-engagement with the issue’s greater significance than any of the
original contributions.
Starting from the dissolution of the political unity and relative economic
homogeneity of the Roman Empire, he traces how the constituent regions
diverged from each other as successor-societies adopted particular aspects of
the imperial experience. As we should expect from his previous work, Wickham
is particularly interested in the notion of the fiscal régime, which he sees as
simplifying and, in some places, disappearing altogether, with obvious
implications for whether society was dominated by a feudal politics of land or
tributary extraction by the state. Central to the book is the fate of the two
great classes: the peasantry and the aristocracy, sometimes antagonistic,
sometimes co-existent. The former achieved greater autonomy and, in some
areas, freedom from exploitation altogether; indeed, in some respects, Wickham
describes a golden age for peasants, compared to the oppression from which
they had been released, or the oppression to which they would eventually be
subjected. A condition of peasant-freedom was the weakening power of the
aristocracy, the character of which also changed, becoming more narrowly
focussed on its military rôle and abandoning the literary culture which had
been important to the Romans. This, too, was only a temporary condition,
before the reassertion of their dominance by the end of the period. Throughout
it, however, Wickham is clear that the aristocrats are, in most respects, the key
social actors. Large-scale production at the regional level, let alone inter-
37. Wickham 1997, pp. 207–8.

regional long-distance exchange, was structured by ‘élite-consumption’, in the

absence of mass peasant-demand: the wealthier the aristocracy, the greater the
demand. But that wealth was, in turn, determined by two of the elements
Wickham sees as constitutive of the transitional economy: the extent, reach
and effectiveness of the tax-system, and the level of exploitation of the peasantry
by the lords. To these must be added two more elements, one contingent and
the other deeply structural: the retarding effect of war and the extent to which
a region continued to be integrated into the post-imperial Mediterranean
world-system.
The scope of this survey, and the command which Wickham presents it to
the reader means that Framing will inevitably and rightly be compared to the
other great Deutscher Prize-winning work of premodern history, Geoffrey de
Ste Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. That work famously
begins with a lengthy consideration of the theoretical concepts which Ste
Croix then uses to structure his argument.38 Wickham does not adopt this
strategy. Although there is, of course, a theoretical apparatus at work behind
the scenes, Wickham draws back the curtain to reveal it only in tantalisingly
short passages, usually where some sort of definition is required. Typically, this
was also the approach taken by the earlier generation of British-Marxist
historians such as Rodney Hilton – to pick one specifically identified as an
influence by Wickham – at least in their substantive works.39 This approach
has much to recommend it, especially when compared to the endless theoretical
preliminaries that were typical of, for example Hindess and Hirst, at the time
Wickham began to publish; but, here, the very richness of empirical detail
means that underlying theoretical positions have sometimes to be inferred.
This lack of explicit discussion creates a barrier for the reader, not to checking
Wickham’s conformity to some Marxist orthodoxy or other, but to assessing
how his assumptions have shaped his use of the material. On one methodological
issue, however, Wickham is explicit: his rejection of teleological explanations
of capitalist development, particularly, ‘the metanarrative of medieval economic
history which seeks to explain the secular economic triumph of north-west
Europe’. Instead, he emphasises ‘the variegated patterns of social development’
and argues that ‘social change is overwhelmingly the result of internal factors,
not external influences’.40 By external influences, Wickham seems to mean the
view (which he identifies with Pirenne, although it can be traced back to
Smith) that feudalism arose as a result of outside pressures.41 Wickham argues
38. Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 19–98.

39. Wickham 1994d, p. 1.
40. Wickham 2005, p. 822; and see, more recently, Wickham 2007, p. 20.
41. In Brenner’s recent summary: ‘Feudalism had emerged, as they saw it, as a result of
exogenous shocks, when a series of invasions – by the so-called barbarians, then the Muslims,
that the roots of feudalism have rather to be discerned in the internal

development of the regions he discusses.
These regions extend from the Irish edge of Western Europe to the present-
day Middle East. The geographical compass of the book is set by the subject,
the after-world of the united Empire, and Wickham does full justice to the
range of different societies this involves, focusing as much on Egypt and Syria
as on Denmark and England. The book is not completely exhaustive: Scotland
and (for the most part) Saxony are excluded without greatly affecting his
argument, since similar societies to these are included, although the exclusion
of the Balkans for area-study perhaps passes up an opportunity to compare
tributary formations in Europe with those in North Africa and Asia. But these
are minor issues, far more important than absolute comprehensiveness is the
fact that the parallels and similarities he draws to our attention help undermine
another form of teleology. In this case, it is not the Western origins of capitalism
so much as the broader narrative which distinguishes Europe, or sometimes
simply ‘the West’, from the rest of the world on the basis of the ‘Judeo-
Christian’ heritage, or similar inventions, which supposedly date back to this
period.
For example, the societies which showed the most sign of agricultural
intensification during the period lay, not only at opposite extremes of the tax-/
rent-continuum, but also at opposite extremes of the territorial limits of the
Empire: Francia on the one hand, and Egypt and the Levant on the other.
These two regions, respectively involving ‘a rich aristocracy in the Carolingian
world, a powerful state in that of the Umayyads and the Abbasids’ were ‘the
regions with the most potential for exchange, and thus the most stimulus for
agricultural intensification’42 But the same types of parallel are also apparent in
less-complex forms of society, where the Roman state collapsed: Mauretania,
in the Berber lands of North Africa, had a pattern of ‘social development’
which Wickham claims ‘resembles Britain’, although ‘its closest British
analogues would be with more traditional highland Wales’ rather than lowland-
England. Mauretania retained its own political traditions under the Empire,
while Britain wholeheartedly embraced those of Rome; yet the results were
similar, not least in terms of social simplification and economic retrogression.43
This would suggest that, whatever the origins of the differences between West
and finally the Vikings – disrupted the great trans-Mediterranean trade routes that had long
nourished the European economy going back to Roman and Greek times.’ (Brenner 2007,
p. 49.)
42. Wickham 2005, p. 302. See also p. 819, where Northern Francia and Syria and Palestine
are taken as examples of a ‘complex regional economy based on aristocratic wealth’.
43. Wickham 2005, p. 339.
and East, they are clearly not intrinsic to the societies involved and have to be
traced instead in subsequent historical developments.
Wickham’s account would also suggest that religious differences between
Christianity and Islam are less important in determining the regional character
than the material conditions upon which he focuses, but this has to be inferred
since ideological issues are nowhere discussed, except briefly in relation to
aristocratic hegemony. To be fair, Wickham makes clear from the outset that,
because of the already-great length of the book, his focus will be on the social
and the economic. Take, as a comparison, Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, in many ways a model of this kind
of large-scale history. It begins with a part on the physical geography of the
region where change is ‘almost imperceptible’ and ends with one on the
political events of the fifty-year period from 1550 where change occurs in
‘brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations’. Between is a part dealing with ‘social
history’ where change is ‘slow’ but, nevertheless, has ‘perceptible rhythms’.44
Wickham’s book deals with similar themes to this middle-range part of
Braudel’s book (‘Collective Destinies and General Trends’).45 Political
developments are only discussed to provide essential background to the regions
under discussion, and culture is excluded completely – although not cultural
artefacts; potsherds appear with great regularity, but only as traces of economic
activity.46 But ‘politics’, here, has to understood primarily as what we would
now call ‘geopolitics’ – or more simply, war – since the state, the political
institution par excellence, is certainly of paramount importance to Wickham,
not least because its form was ‘the arena that saw most change’.47 Indeed,
following a brief survey of geopolitical developments, he privileges the state as
the first area of discussion, before analysing the position of the two main
classes, aristocrats and peasants. This is not because he sees the state as the
‘prime mover’ in social change, ‘with the form of the state somehow determining
every other aspect of society and the economy, in a statist version of a very
traditional Marxist analysis’.48 Wickham is not proposing to substitute a
superstructural determinism for one which privileges the base, but the
structural focus of the book does mean that the actual moments of change –
above all the moments of peasant-expropriation – tend to be subsumed within
discussions the main focus of which is on other aspects of the period.
44. Braudel 1975a, pp. 20–1.

45. Braudel 1975a, pp. 355–642; Braudel 1975b, pp. 657–900.
46. Wickham promised, to take a more inclusive approach in what was then his forthcoming
contribution to the Penguin History of Europe. See Wickham 2005, p. 7. He has now done so.
See, for example, Wickham 2009, pp. 50–75, 232–51, 405–26.
47. Wickham 2005, p. 12.
48. Wickham 2005, p. 145.
Structure: social classes, modes of production and states

Wickham argues that neither slavery nor (less controversially) wage-labour
was of any great significance to the economy of the early middle ages:
Throughout our period the slave mode was only a minor survival, everywhere
marginal to the basic economic structure, the landlord peasant relationship
(where there were landlords at all). . . . The marginality of the slave mode in our
period is matched by the relative unimportance of wage labour, at least outside
Egypt; essentially, throughout our period, agriculture on estates was above all
performed by peasant, tenant, cultivators.49
Slavery and unfreedom more generally had a different significance depending

on the extent of peasant-autonomy within the locality. Where a lord had
superiority over an entire area, as in the Ile de France, it could be a status-
distinction, with the possibility of mobility between the free and unfree.
Ironically, it was where peasants were most free of lords, as in England before
700 AD, that the distinction had greatest significance, indicating a potentially
exploitative relationship within the household-economy.50 Potentially,
Wickham argues, because the position of the unfree within the peasant-
household would only involve ‘class-exploitation’ in circumstances where ‘the
members of the free family all stopped working, and simply lived off the labour
of the unfree’.51 I am not sure whether this argument is sustainable. Exploitation
still takes place in situations where small commodity-producers supplement
the labour-work of themselves and their families with wage-labour, since
wage-labourers produce a surplus over and above what they receive. Why
would the situation be different in the case of a peasant-family supplementing
their labour with that of slaves or otherwise unfree workers? If anything, the
surplus would be greater in the second case. This does not affect Wickham’s
argument about the irrelevance of slavery, but it does raise a question about his
treatment of the one mode of production which he sees as seriously posing an
alternative to feudalism: the peasant-mode.
Wickham argues that feudalism had become a universal system across
Europe, North Africa and the Middle East by the ninth century, but what
does he mean by feudalism? As I noted earlier, Wickham rejected his earlier
distinction between rent and taxation as the basis for distinguishing between
the feudal and tributary modes of production, and he retains that position
49. Wickham 2005, pp. 260–1, 262, 264. In Egypt, wage-labour was mainly employed for
harvest-work. For more on the absence of slaves in Italy after c. 300 AD, see pp. 276–7.
50. Wickham 2005, pp. 435–6.
51. Wickham 2005, p. 543.
here. He has not, however, abandoned the tributary mode itself.52 Indeed,
following Haldon, he writes: ‘it now seems to me that both [feudalism and the
tributary mode] are sub-types of the same mode of production, in that both
are based on agrarian surplus extracted, by force if necessary, from the peasant
majority’.53 The process of exploitation is the same in each case, but the
mechanism for rent- or tax-collection is different and, as Wickham stresses,
this leads to corresponding differences in the state, above all in two respects.
With the important exception of Merovingian and Carolingian Francia, ‘tax-
based states were . . . richer and more powerful than rent-based, land-based,
states’. More important even than wealth, however, was stability, which
Wickham illustrates with the Byzantine example:
Even at the weakest point of the eastern empire, roughly 650–750, Byzantine
political structures were more coherent than those of even the best-organised
land-based states, such as Lombard Italy in the same period; tax-based structures
had more staying-power, and the risk of decentralisation, a feature of all land-
based states, was less great. If taxation disappeared as the basis of any given state,
then, no matter how much cultural, ideological, or legislative continuity there
was . . . it would not prevent fundamental changes in political resources,
infrastructure and practice.54
Nevertheless, both variants stand at a far greater distance from the peasant-
mode of production, involving ‘an economic and political system dominated
by peasants, in a ranked society’ than they do from each other.55
Societies based on the peasant-mode involve ‘clear status differences . . . but
they are not necessarily stable or heavily marked, except for the distinction,
always present, between free and unfree’.56 According to Wickham, there were
many varieties of the peasant-mode, but the essential features for him are that
the productive unit is the household and that each household works land that
it directly controls. Relations between households are governed by reciprocal
exchange, partly to consolidate community-relations, partly to acquire goods
to which individual households would not otherwise have access. Since
communities based on the peasant-mode do not have to produce a surplus for
an exploiting class, the main impulse behind production is to allow maximum-
leisure compatible with satisfaction of physical needs and cultural norms;
indeed, there are strong social pressures on individual households not to
52. Contrary to what is suggested in Harman 2006, pp. 189–90.

53. Wickham 2008, p. 60.
54. Wickham 2005, p. 145.
55. Wickham 2005, pp. 60, 61.
56. Wickham 2005, p. 304.
increase production beyond certain limits, since the output will either be given
away to other, less-productive neighbours or, if retained, lead to the household
being ostracised by the rest of the community. Society under the peasant-
mode should not, of course, be regarded as ‘primitive-communist’, since, in
addition to the use of unfree labour, it is inegalitarian in respect to both
gender-relations and the act of giving itself, which confers high status or rank
to those who can give the most. The latter relationship is not, however, fixed,
in that positions within the status-group can change. During the period, the
peasant-mode would have existed in two forms, either in a dominant ‘tribal’
form, as in large parts of Northern Europe, but also Spain and North Africa,
where a relatively small external tribute might have to be paid to a local lord;
or scattered like islands (Wickham writes about ‘leopard-spots’) among
territories otherwise dominated by the feudal mode of production, as in
Francia and Italy.57
Wickham assembles an impressive array of evidence to demonstrate the
existence of the peasant-mode, and his historiographical achievement also
supports an important socialist argument. The existence of an original classless
society, ‘primitive communism’, is regularly denied by supporters of capitalism,
for whom it is an enormously dangerous idea, suggesting as it does that
inequality and exploitation are not, as it were, natural conditions. Wickham
rejects both the term and, as we have seen, the implication that it involved
complete equality in relation to this period; but, if he is right, then it means
that, in some regions at least, the collapse of class-societies in their slave- and
tributary forms did not lead to the ‘war of all against all’, but, rather, to a
situation in which cooperation was the dominant characteristic. Although the
situation is scarcely likely to be repeated should capitalism collapse, it is
nevertheless an important historical contribution to the debates over human
nature. But, is the peasant-mode effectively the same as the ‘Asiatic’ mode,
where the latter is taken to be a general term for mode dominant in transitions
between classless and class-societies?58 In other words, although the peasant-
mode seems to be the ‘fall-back’ position for peasants where precapitalist class-
society collapses, is it also a dynamic mode which would in time produce a
new or revived form of class-society? I will return to these issues below.
57. Wickham 2005, pp. 538–41.

58. See, for example, Godelier 1978, p. 241. In my view, this is the only way in which the
notion of the Asiatic mode can be sensibly applied. Nevertheless, Wickham’s notion of a peasant-
mode is preferable, not only because it is free from the other connotations surrounding the
‘Asiatic’, but also – and, more importantly – because it foregrounds the class involved in the
production-process.
The absence of classes, or, at any rate, the absence of classes relating to each
other as exploiter and exploited, also suggests the absence of a state, and
Wickham accordingly argues that this was the case where the peasant-mode
was dominant. He defines the state as an institution combining a series of key-
elements: a centralised public authority apparently distinct from the public
itself; ‘the centralisation of legitimately enforceable authority (justice and the
army); the specialisation of governmental rôles, with an official hierarchy
which outlasted the people who held official position at any one time; the
concept of a public power, that is, of a ruling system ideologically separable
from the ruled population and from the individual rulers themselves;
independent and stable resources for the rulers; and a class-based system for
surplus-extraction and stratification’. On this basis, he identifies three types of
state: ‘strong’, as in the Roman, Byzantine and Arabic empires; ‘weak’, as in
Romano-Germanic kingdoms of southern Europe like Gaul, Italy and Spain;
and non-existent (‘pre-state’), as in the non-Roman kingdoms of north-
western Europe like Ireland, England and Denmark – in other words, where
the peasant-mode was strongest. As Wickham rightly remarks, the point of a
definition is its usefulness: how useful is this one?59
It is useful in so far as it helps us to remember that state-formation is a
lengthy process, which, if captured by the historian before the end, will reveal an
institution that is not yet a state, but is (to use Draper’s terminology), a ‘proto-
government’ exercising ‘proto-political’ power. States take as long as classes to
form, but this indicates my first difficulty with Wickham’s definition, namely
that he places too much emphasis on region-wide formal attributes. If classes
do exist, and Wickham accepts that lords tended to co-exist with peasants even
under the peasant-mode, then the imposition of coercion and control is no
longer exercised entirely by the community as a whole, but by a part with
separate juridical powers.60 In this context, aristocrats and landowners more
generally can act as a ‘state’, can embody state-functions, at quite local levels.
A further theoretical problem is suggested by the relationship between the
fourth and fifth characteristics of a state in Wickham’s definition (independent
and stable resources for the rulers; and a class-based system for surplus-
extraction and stratification): ‘It is worth distinguishing between the resources
of rulers and those of the ruling class, because one can often, even though not
always, draw a distinction between the two (e.g. tax versus rent).’ Wickham
acknowledges that, where taxation was the overwhelmingly dominant method
of surplus-extraction, it could be subsumed into the provision of resources for
59. Wickham 2005, pp. 56–7, and n. 2. See also pp. 303–4.
60. Draper 1978, pp. 239–45.
rulers ‘and the ruling class were simply public employees’: ‘In practice, however,
dominant classes have almost always been distinguishable from state-
institutions; they are independently wealthy, although they characteristically
seek wealth as well as power from official positions in public hierarchies.’ And,
in landed societies where rent is the dominant method of surplus-extraction,
the subsumption operates in reverse, with ‘the resources of kings [becoming]
nearly identical with [those] of the ruling class as a whole’.61 The distinction
between ‘rulers’ and ‘ruling classes’ here seems to be unnecessary to Wickham’s
argument. In the analysis of contemporary capitalism, there are usually some
differences of interest between those who manage the state and those who own
or control capital, although these always overlap, are currently decreasing and,
in any case, tend to be overridden by joint class-membership of the bourgeoisie.
To the extent that these differences do exist, they are a reflection of the (much
exaggerated) ‘separation of the economic and the political under capitalism’.62
But, under feudalism, or any other precapitalist mode of production, the
separation does not exist. Consequently, until the emergence of the absolutist
state from the late-fifteenth century, the possibility of a clash of interests
between what one might call the political and economic wings of the ruling
class does not arise. The resistance of Roman aristocrats to being taxed by the
Imperial state, to which Wickham gave a central explanatory rôle in his initial
account of the transition, might be cited as an example which supports the
rulers/ruling-class distinction (indeed, it lent plausibility to the claim that the
feudal and tributary modes were distinct); but, precisely because it occurred at
an exceptional moment of systemic breakdown, it scarcely reflects the ‘normal’
operation of class-society. It is not clear what behaviours are explained by this
distinction which would not otherwise be so. Indeed, to maintain it would
seem to suggest that both groups operated with potentially different ‘logics’,
which undermines Wickham’s – in my view, correct – argument about the
fundamental unity of the feudal and tributary modes.
Agency: social revolution, socio-economic transition and the class-struggle

Who were the agents behind the transition to feudalism, where it did not
emerge directly from the end of the slave-mode? Although Wickham broadly
endorses what he calls the historiographical ‘cliché’ of serfdom emerging as a
combination of tightened constraints on formerly free tenants and loosened
constraints on the formerly unfree, his own emphasis on the relative
61. Wickham 2005, p. 304.

62. See Davidson 2010, pp. 82–3.
unimportance of slavery suggests that the former was of considerably greater

importance.63 The fate of the free peasantry is central issue; the question is the
extent to which it was undermined from within, by the emergence of class-
divisions, or overthrown from without, by submission to an existing class of
aristocrats and landowners.
Wickham points to an inconsistency in Marx’s own approach over the
‘prime mover’ behind changes from one mode to another, contrasting the
more abstract formulations such as the 1859 ‘Preface’ which privilege
the development of the forces of production, and actual historical analysis
such as Capital, Volume I, where he shows that changes to the relations of
production take priority. For this reason, Wickham supports the position
taken by Robert Brenner, which follows the latter aspect of Marx’s own work.64
The problem for Wickham, as for Brenner, is what drives changes to the
relations of production? Wickham repeats the oft-expressed claim that, for
Brenner, it is the class-struggle.65 However, as I argued in the 2004 Deutscher
lecture, Brenner is actually far less interested in the class-struggle than is
generally supposed. Since he believes that there is no impulse for the forces of
production to develop, class-struggle acts instead, for him, as a mechanism for
producing (or failing to produce) a set of ‘unintended consequences’, which in
turn lay the initial conditions for the formation of capitalist social relations of
production.66 As presented by Wickham, the peasant-mode before the
consolidation of feudalism bears a close resemblance to the description of the
peasantry under feudalism presented by Brenner, prior to the emergence of
capitalism, particularly in relation to its internal stability and the lack of
motivation to develop technology or increase productivity beyond a certain
point.67
Leaving aside the question of whether both can be right, Wickham is more
open to the possibility of feudalism emerging from internal developments
within the peasant-mode than Brenner is of capitalism emerging from internal
developments within the feudal mode. Wickham allows, for example, that a
‘feudal-economic logic’ may be set in train when peasants with high status
begin to require others to provide them with goods in return for more-
specialised, but less-material services, of which he specifies military protection
(although, presumably, religious functions would also be relevant here).68 He
63. Wickham 2005, p. 563.

64. Wickham 2008, pp. 6–7, 11.
65. Wickham 2007, pp. 42–3.
66. Davidson 2005a, p. 16.
67. Brenner 1986, p. 53; Brenner 1997, p. 23; Brenner 2007, pp. 88–9.
68. Wickham 2005, p. 539.
also notes that peasants can acquire sufficient land to be able to lease it out to
tenants, thus elevating themselves into the landowning class, with the potential
to ultimately join the aristocracy.69 But these are mainly presented as
hypothetical cases, rather than a process which can actually be traced. Of the
two examples which he offers, one is from the actual Danish village of Vorbasse
and the other from his invented archetypal village of ‘Malling’. It is clear that
evidence is lacking, and Wickham explains his reliance on models of change
‘for we can so seldom see them happening in our sources’.70 Consequently,
when Wickham discusses the shift to feudal relations of production, he
generally does so in contexts where they are introduced by an agency from
outside the peasant-community, namely existing landowners and aristocrats.
But it is not clear whether this was the main path to the establishment of a
‘feudal-economic logic’, or simply the most visible at this distance in time. The
extent to which feudalism was a ‘bottom-up’ in addition to a ‘top-down’ affair
remains an area which still requires further research.
There are three types of class-struggle ‘from below’ recorded by Wickham,
none of which would necessarily contribute to the rise of feudalism. The first
are slave-revolts. Wickham gives only one example, a tantalising reference
what he calls the ‘famous’ Zanj slave-revolt in southern Iraq during the 870s.71
This event may enjoy fame among scholars of the medieval Middle East, but
it might have received greater consideration for the benefit of non-specialists,
particularly given the emphasis Wickham places on the relative unimportance
of slavery during his period.
The second are tax-revolts. The examples to which Wickham devotes most
attention took place in Umayyad, then Abbasid Egypt between 726 and 832
AD. These were not the actions of a particular class, like slaves, but overlapping
risings, first by a pre-existing religious community (the Christian-Coptic sect),
then by Arab settlers, and, finally, by an alliance of the two. Wickham argues
that these were provoked, not by higher levels of taxation than under the
Empire, but rather because it tended to be more arbitrary and, above all, ‘more
stringently enforced, and more aggressively policed’. The reasons lie in the fact
that the Arab rulers did not transform the societies they occupied, but
established themselves as a ‘state-class’ maintained solely by taxation, ‘with no
structural social links to taxpayers’, meaning that patronage of client-groups as
a channel for allowing the latter to mitigate or avoid tax was not an option.72
Peasants also rebelled against taxation, in some cases supported after the fact
69. Wickham 2005, p. 386.

70. Wickham 2005, pp. 572–3.
71. Wickham 2005, p. 141.
72. Wickham 2005, pp. 140–3, 532.
by local religious figures: Wickham records one episode in Eukraoi in West

Galatia (modern-day Turkey), where the local bishop and ‘holy man’, Theodore
of Skyeon, dismissed the local aristocratic administrator and tax-collector after
a rising by the villagers.73 This was not, however, the main focus of peasant-
action.
The third are peasant-revolts, but these are different from predecessors
under the Roman Empire and successors under the consolidated feudal régime.
Earlier peasant-revolts, above all that of the Bagaudae against the Roman
Empire in Gaul, were essentially directed against taxation and injustice at a
time when the state was weakened and therefore the possibility of change
beneficial to the peasantry became possible. Later peasant-revolts, too, were
conducted against the state in relation to ‘military service, laws on status and,
above all, taxation’.74 In this period, revolts have a different impetus. Wickham
notes that: ‘A detailed knowledge of peasant states of mind is largely closed to
us before the fourteenth century.’ He nevertheless speculates that aristocratic
hegemony did function in certain areas where the peasants had to rely
on aristocrats for external support, as in eighth-century Lucchesia (in
modern Italy), although this did not, of course exclude ‘small-scale signs of
disobedience’, but these are compatible with overall acceptance of ruling
values. At the other end of the spectrum, as in eighth-century Paris, the
aristocrats dominated through ‘overwhelming physical force’ and did not
require peasant-acceptance of their rule, which they, in any case, did not
receive. Between these lies a third type of area, such as sixth-century Galatia,
where neither situation prevailed; that is, where aristocrats could rely neither
on ideology nor violence to secure compliance. As Wickham notes, the latter
situation is where revolts are most likely to take place, but: ‘The absence of
hegemony is only one reason why peasants revolt, of course; they have to have
something concrete to oppose as well.’75 In this case, peasant-revolts are signs
of resistance to attempts by the emergent ruling class to impose serfdom.
England is exceptional in its lack of peasant-revolt, which seems to have two
causes. First, because initially both the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruling class’ (to use
Wickham’s distinction) has less control over the peasantry than in any other
part of Europe, while, at the same time, they exercised superiority over
exceptionally large territories. Second, in that, when the lords did move to
subject or expropriate peasant-communities, they did so slowly and in
piecemeal fashion, attacking the weakest whilst leaving the strongest and
wealthiest untouched until the basis of possible collective resistance was
73. Wickham 2005, p. 408.

74. Wickham 2005, pp. 529–33.
75. Wickham 2005, p. 441.
eroded.76 Elsewhere, the gradual encroachments of the emergent feudal state

led to what Wickham calls ‘frequent small scale resistance’, which erupted
into one the great risings of the period: the Stellinga revolt in Saxony of
AD 841–2, a revolt which took the opportunity of a civil war among the local
Saxon ruling class to launch a programme for the return to the pre-aristocratic
social order.77
Could war be treated as the functional equivalent of revolution, in the sense
of the revolutions from outside and above conducted by the Cromwellian and
Napoleonic armies a thousand years later? One of Wickham’s critics has
certainly accused him ignoring the impact of war; indeed, of being in thrall to
an ‘Austro-German model of explaining great transitions in human history’, a
model with ‘little or no theorisation of war or violence’.78 The ‘Austro-German
model’ evidently includes Marxism, and Wickham himself has made a similar
point about it in the past; but it is untrue.79 More to the point, in this case, it
is also irrelevant: war can be important as an agent of social change, but it is
scarcely autonomous. It is difficult to see how war could be the source of a new
form of society, since all the societies involved were based on variations of the
same mode of production and the most ideologically innovative – the Arab
invaders of the later-seventh century – tended to allow the continuation of
existing social structures in the territories they conquered. The most significant
social impact of war was, in fact, an inadvertent consequence of the Vandal
invasions of North Africa, of which Wickham writes: ‘Geiseric’s conquest of
Carthage in 439 is arguably the turning point in the “fall” of the western
empire.’ The significance of the conquest being that it ‘broke the tax spine’
connecting the Roman world-economy.80 But elsewhere, the impact was
muted: as Wickham notes, ‘only Italy in the sixth century and Anatolia in the
seventh saw wars that really devastated economies and societies on the regional
level for more than short periods’.81
In short, class-struggle clearly occurred in different forms throughout the
period, but revolutionary movements for the transformation of society, or
plausible surrogates, are absent – except, of course, in the form of the piecemeal
revolution from above imposed by the lords to either abolish the economic
76. Wickham 2005, pp. 350–1.

77. Wickham 2005, pp. 578–88.
78. Shaw 2008, p. 106. The charge gains some traction when Wickham, who, at one point,
included war as one of the four elements of the economic dynamic, subsequently reduces them
to three: ‘fiscal demand, private demand, [and] prior dependence on the Roman world-system’
(Wickham 2005, p. 821). Compare Wickham 2005, p. 719.
79. Wickham 1988, p. 77. For Marxist analysis of war and military competition more
generally, see Callinicos 1995, pp. 116–25.
80. Wickham 2005, pp. 87, 711.
81. Wickham 2005, p. 827.
logic of the peasant-mode or erode the autonomy of peasants where the feudal
mode already existed. Wickham has argued that the interaction between the
forces and relations of production, and between them and the superstructure,
may vary from one mode of production to another. Be that as it may, what
he makes unmistakably clear in this work, among many other things of value
to historical materialists, is that the nature of the transitions from one mode
to another are certainly distinct, and that we proceed by analogy with later
ones at our peril. Whatever questions Framing the Middle Ages still leaves
unanswered – and many of those we are only able to ask because of Wickham’s
achievement – we should be grateful that we now have an account of the
transition to feudalism to rival those on the transition to capitalism which
have for so long been the staples of Marxist historiography.
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Lane.
Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages
Chris Harman
Abstract
While recognising the power and fundamental importance of Wickham’s Framing the Early
Middle Ages, this essay explores some of the problems associated with the relative silence within
the text about the issue of the forces of production and their development. By contrast, Harman
suggests that Wickham’s most important contribution to our understanding of the period, his
concept of a peasant-mode of production, is best understood against the backdrop of prior
developments of the forces of production. Moreover, the peasant-mode’s temporality is itself best
understood against the background of further developments of the forces of production.
Keywords
Marxism, Chris Wickham, peasant-mode of production, forces of production
Chris Wickham has written a book of enormous scholarship which not only
challenges many long-established views about the early-medieval period, but
which also is destined to be the subject of numerous interpretations and
reinterpretations for many years ahead – both from professional historians of
the period and from those of us historical materialists who are concerned with
how the different parts of human history fit together.
His material on slavery in both the late-Roman and the early-medieval
periods challenges both those interpretations of the ‘fall of the Roman Empire’
which explain it in terms of the decline of a ‘slave-mode of production’ after
the third or fourth century,1 and more recent explanations of the rise of
feudalism through a ‘Revolution of the Year 1000’.2 As against the view that
medieval feudalism emerged as a fully-formed system out of the villas of the
Roman Empire as aristocrats settled peasants on their land as ‘coloni’ under
their control, he shows that, although the ‘coloni’ existed, in many regions
1. This was essentially the position put forward by Weber (see, for instance, the summary of
his position in Allen 2004, pp. 119–21). Arguments with some similarities are to be found in
Anderson 1974, pp. 76–82, and Harman 2008, pp. 84, 86.
2. Bois 1992; Harman 1994a.
C. Harman / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 98–108 99
they were a minority among the free ‘allodial’ peasants. It was not until half a
millennium after the collapse of the Empire that feudal exploitation became
so widespread as to be near-universal. There was no simple feudal continuity
between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. But neither was there a
continuation of a slave-mode of production right through until the eleventh
century.
He argues that, although slavery persisted as a category that denied people
a range of legal rights, in practice, slaves were, in the great majority of cases,
exploited in the same way as other sections of dependent peasants, even if to a
greater extent. They were settled on plots of their own or working in the
households of others who were settled on such plots. ‘Plantation-slavery’, a
completely different way of organising exploitation in which the toilers were
compelled to work by the overseer’s whip, had, he argues, virtually died out in
the early centuries of the Empire.
Though he insists that his aim is not to explain ‘the decline and fall’ of
Rome, his work does illuminate this problem. He has been persuaded by the
arguments of the Turkish Marxist Halil Berktay that the differences in the
superstructural relations between different states cannot be equated with
differences in the mode of production.3 The mode of production, Wickham
now argues, depends on the way the direct producers are exploited. And there
are only three forms this can take – the exploitation of slaves, the exploitation
of waged (‘free’) workers, and the exploitation of dependent peasants forced to
hand over a portion of their produce to their exploiters. In passing, it should
be said that the empirical material he provides shows that the post-Empire
aristocracies depended on taxes and rents to varying degrees in different places
and at different times. To say, as he once did, that tax- and rent-systems were
different modes of production implies a continual swinging, over relatively
short periods of time, from one mode of production to the other and back
again. He therefore suggests that a version of feudalism was already predominant
in the later centuries of the Roman Empire. The essential change that gave rise
to the ‘decline and fall’ happened when flows of surplus from Egypt and North
Africa to Italy stopped with the conquests of already Romanised invaders from
beyond the frontiers of the Empire.
The effects of the fragmentation of the Empire were not confined to the
centre. It also reduced trade between the former provinces. Trade in bulky
goods (grain or pottery, for instance), Wickham argues, had only ever been
profitable when it could use the state-subsidised transport conveying the
3. See the debate, with contributions on the question by Wickham and Berktay, in Mukhia
(ed.) 1999.
100 C. Harman / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 98–108
Imperial tribute. Once the tribute stopped, the commerce declined. At the
same time, the fragmentation of the Empire meant warfare between the former
constituents – and further threats from outside the borders. There was a
militarisation of the aristocracy and a gradual erosion of its old cultural
values.
The impact of these changes, Wickham explains, varied enormously from
region to region. The Frankish kingdom (‘Francia’), briefly established over
present-day France and southern Germany, split into segments. In Spain, a
central Visigothic monarchy based in Toledo only managed to maintain a weak
hold over a regionally fragmented aristocracy through a combination of military
threats and patronage. The component-parts of the old Western Empire were
thrown back on their own resources, often leading to further internal
fragmentation. Although the exact configuration varied enormously from region
to region, this eventually left a ‘leopard-spot’ pattern of domination in Europe.
Areas in which individual military aristocrats ruled and exploited a dependent
peasantry were interspersed with areas populated by independent peasant-
societies which were free of systematic exploitation – and this was the near-
universal pattern in parts of northern Europe such as England and Wales.
One corollary of this picture was that the idea that ruralisation (‘barbarism’
in the technical sense used by Morgan, Engels and Gordon Childe) involved
a deterioration in everybody’s lives was wrong. The breakdown of the old
centralised Empire meant a reduction or ending of the flow from peasants to
the aristocracy – and an ending of the flow of tribute from the provinces to the
centre. He paints a pictures of the independent peasantry living in societies
like the early-agricultural societies described by some anthropologists, in
which there was no pressure on people to produce a surplus, and in which
some highly-esteemed individuals (what anthropologists tend to call ‘chieftains’
or ‘big men’) play a certain coordinating rôle, concentrating the surplus in
their hands, not to consume it themselves as exploiters, but rather to redistribute
it from the peasant-household who have greater luck in the harvest to those
with less luck or greater needs.
Wickham’s approach also leads him to challenge the traditional picture of
what followed the Vandal conquest of North Africa. Far from dismantling
Roman civilisation, the Latinised Germans set out to perpetuate it, with
themselves ruling over the old Roman aristocracy. A Rome-derived civilisation
flourished in most of North Africa for another three centuries after its collapse
in Western Europe, first under the Vandals and then the Umayyad-Islamic
Empire.
The eastern wing of the old Empire (Byzantium) based in Constantinople
remained virtually unchanged, continuing to provide for itself with grain from
the immensely fertile Nile Valley. It was only with the loss of the southern
provinces of Syria and Egypt, first to the Persian Empire and then to Islamic
armies from the Arabian Peninsula, that the rump-Eastern Empire suffered a
decay of urban life. And towns and cities continued to flourish in the regions
conquered by the Islamic armies, with the old ruling classes, like those of
North Africa, continuing their old lifestyles for another century, until the
replacement of the Umayyad dynasty by the Abbasids shifted the centre of the
Islamic Empire from Syria to Iraq and encouraged the conversion of the old
élites to Islam across the whole region.
One important implication can be drawn from this. Fusing elements from
Roman civilisation with those from the Sassanid civilisation of Iran, the new
Islamic empires (and their descendents in Asia Minor and the Indian
subcontinent) were just as much inheritors of the ‘Graeco-Roman’ tradition as
were those states that developed in Europe.
Meanwhile, in Europe, after an interregnum of hundreds of years, Wickham
argues, there was the convergence of different regions’ exploiting classes,
crystallised out of the ‘peasant’-societies, creating new feudal exploiters
alongside the old. In this, they were influenced by the impact of contact with
the successor-states – and with the network of Christian-religious institutions
that increasingly provided the rulers of Western Europe with their administrative
personnel and a single ideological framework. By the eighth century, the
wealth of these rulers laid the basis of a new long-distance trade in luxury-
items and the growth of new trading-towns, ‘emporia’, alongside the depleted
administrative cities left over from the old Empire.
I find much of Wickham’s account convincing. But there are a few areas
which raise new questions. First, there is the issue of the ‘peasant’-societies that
were so important in parts of Europe. Anthropologists were able to study
societies of peasant-producers without classes in the nineteenth and in the first
half of the twentieth century – most already ‘contaminated’ by their contact
with capitalism, but a few still in a nearly-pure state (the horticulturalists of
highland New Guinea were not ‘discovered’ until the 1930s). As the radical
anthropologist of hunter-gatherer societies, Richard Lee, writes, ‘a large
number of pastoral and horticultural societies in the third world share the
same traits’ of ‘communal property concepts’ as hunter-gatherer societies. ‘In
numerous chiefdoms described by anthropologists in Africa, Oceania and
lowland South America one notes, for instance, that the surplus that the chief
receives is redistributed to subjects and the chief ’s power is subject to checks
and balances by the forces of public opinion and institutions.’4 It would also
4. Lee 1988, p. 262.

seem that ‘peasant-societies’ similar to those Wickham identifies in Europe

have often come into existence after the collapse of the class-based states. For
instance, the societies of Central America encountered by the Spanish
conquistadors as they travelled south from the region of Aztec dominance
were products of the collapse of the Mayan states centuries before.5
Some anthropologists and archaeologists have attempted to define such
societies in terms of a mode of production. Wickham refers to Marshall
Sahlins, who refers to a ‘domestic mode of production’.6 Karen Sacks uses the
more-precise term, ‘corporate mode of production’, to bring out the rôle of
lineage, referred to her as the ‘corporate kin’, in delimiting relations between
people.7 Her analysis also attempts to elucidate the internal dynamics of such
societies. She suggests that, once shifting agriculture has been replaced by the
cultivation of plots of lands associated with particular households – a tendency
that reaches its full development with the transition to heavy agriculture –
there is a contradiction within the mode of production, between its lineage-
based ‘relations of production’, and ‘forces of production’ mainly dependent
on individual households.8
This provides a way of providing a materialist understanding of how
egalitarian societies, in which competitiveness and a desire for power are not
conceived reductively as part of ‘human nature’,9 can contain within them the
seeds that, in the right conditions, can grow into aspirations to class-power. As
I summarised the evidence some years ago:
[The] communal, egalitarian values often face the beginnings of a challenge, with
households trying to evade their wider obligations in a way that does not happen
among hunter-gatherers. Hidden beneath the egalitarian, communal ideology are
found incipient tendencies to place the needs of the household above the needs
of the community. . . . This contradictory behaviour is . . . a result of a contradiction
built into the productive system. Production does not rely on the co-operation of
the whole group, as in hunter-gatherer societies, but is based, by and large, on the
care of crops and animals by the individual household. . . . The survival of society
depends both on the individual concerns of households which sustain production
and the cooperative, altruistic sharing within the group which ensures
5. Lévi-Strauss 1968, pp. 101–17.

6. See Sahlins 1974, pp. 41–148.
7. Sacks 1983, pp. 116–17.
8. There is only room here to point to a few of the many attempts in recent years to explain
the rise of particular class-societies. For a comprehensive survey of the literature, see Patterson
2004, pp. 91–149; see also Thapar 2002; Cohen and Service (eds.) 1978; McAdams 1966.
9. As Christine Gailey has pointed out, Engels falls into the trap of seeming to put the blame
on human nature in passages in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State; see
Gailey 1987.
reproduction. And this means the household can put up resistance to its
obligations to the wider society if its own survival is at stake. It is a question . . . of
one element in the mode of production clashing with other elements. Usually the
household succeeds in reconciling the contradictory pressures and the system
does not break down. But it is not difficult to see how internal changes (new
productive techniques) or external pressures (natural catastrophes, exhaustion of
the land, the impact of other societies) could create conditions of acute crisis in
which the old order would no longer be able to continue, leading some leading
households or lineages to break completely with their old obligations. What has
been wealth to be given away to others in return for prestige then becomes wealth
to consume while others suffer.10
As Marshall Sahlins writes:
In advanced forms of chieftanships . . . what begins with the would-be headman

putting his production to others’ benefit ends, so some degree, with others
putting their production to the chief ’s benefit.11
Christine Ward Gailey, in a study of the history of the island of Tonga from
1100 to 1400 AD, points to the rôle of warfare – endemic in agricultural as
opposed to foraging-societies – as a factor leading to class-formation. She
argues that it was victory in battle over the inhabitants of other islands that
allowed Tonga’s highest-ranking group of chiefs to cut themselves off from
their obligations to lower-ranking people – that is, to attempt to turn
themselves into a ruling class.12 Others have attempted to trace similar
developments of class- from non-class-societies by focusing on the logic of the
developing forces of production. So, for instance, D.R. Harris, in studying
tropical agriculture in Africa and South-East Asia, argues that certain advances
in agriculture were not possible without ‘units of labour greater than the
family’ and ‘a more complex level of social organisation’ which is achieved
‘through the medium of ranked chiefdoms and highly stratified groups with a
dependent peasantry’.13 Some of the societies that resulted from such
developments clearly fitted into Chris Wickham’s definition of ‘feudal’.14
10. Harman 1994b.

11. Sahlins 1974, p. 140.
12. Gailey 1987, p. 67.
13. Harris 1973, pp. 398–9; see also Renfrew 1973, pp. 421, 424; Maisels 1993, p. 297.
14. There is evidence that, in some cases, there was a different mode of production in which
cultivators who still tilled the land collectively handed over their produce to a ruling class who
appropriated it collectively. This would fit into Marx’s otherwise confusing ‘Asiatic mode of
production’. But, in most cases, further changes then gave rise to new classes based on household-
production and private as well as collective exploitation of the masses. See my discussion on this
in Harman 1994b, p. 125.
In fact, the ‘peasant-societies’ of early-medieval Europe were already based

on techniques of considerable intensity (the use of the plough on heavy clay-
soils rather than the hoe and the digging stick, the use of draught-animals,
knowledge of metallurgy, etc.), which put them closer to the societies studied
by D.R. Harris than to the horticultural societies central to Sahlins’s study. As
Wickham points out, ‘the early medieval peasantry . . . generally maintained
relatively intensive agricultural practices unlike some peasant mode societies
elsewhere, and the material conditions for class stratification were never
absent.’15
Warfare – or the threat of it from relatively-nearby military aristocracies –
would clearly have been a factor encouraging class-formation in such peasant-
societies. High-status groups could justify the gathering of as much surplus as
possible into their own hands without subsequent redistribution as a necessity
preparation in advance of possible military action – either as defence against
others or as pre-emptive action to forestall being attacked.
Were developments in the forces of production also a factor? My reading of
a wide range of historical studies has made me very suspicious of accounts of
societies which see no improvement in the techniques by which human beings
made a livelihood. This is one of my criticisms of the approach to later-
medieval history of Robert Brenner.16 Small changes in productive techniques
can occur which are hard for historians to observe after a thousand years or
more, but which can have cumulative effect in shifting the relations between
groups in a society; until, at a certain point, these relations clash with other
relations and pressures grow for widespread social change. And some such
pressures seem to have developed across Europe toward the end of Wickham’s
period. He himself points to the development of new trade-networks. I cannot
help suspecting that, beneath these, not easily visible for historians, were small
advances in agricultural technique which laid the basis for the sudden spread
outwards of the ‘islands’ of feudal relations of production that existed for most
of the half-millennium. John Moreland has argued (in a book co-edited by
Wickham) that the exchange-networks were underpinned by changes in
production in the towns around which they were built.17 And historians like
Georges Duby have seen the ninth century onwards as a period of substantial
advance in agricultural techniques, preparing the way for the flourishing urban
life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
15. Wickham 2005, pp. 357–8.

16. See Harman 1989 (republished as Chapter 2 of Harman 1998); Brenner and Harman
2006.
17. Moreland 2000, pp. 69–75.
In some cases outside Europe, the collapse of great empires had the effect of
relieving rural society, at least temporarily, of some of the burden that
discouraged the advance, however slowly, of agricultural techniques. This
probably played a rôle in creating the possibility for more sophisticated empires
to emerge and an interregnum of centuries (the T’ang and Sung Empires
in China, the states of late-medieval India). Could not the weakening of
the burden on the direct producers have had the same effect in Europe,
creating a rural society receptive to techniques known, but not applied since
Roman times, or brought westward by migrating tribes and conquering
armies that had been in contact with the civilisations of China, India and the
Middle East?
There is always the chicken-and-egg question in the interaction of forces
and relations of production. Are new relations of production necessary for the
forces of production to advance? Or, does the advance of the forces of
production lead to changes in the relations of production? I think this can
only be answered by saying that few, if any, relations of production prevent
any advances in productive techniques, however limited. There is always some
incentive for the direct producers to be able to work less or eat more. And any
such change leads to micro-shifts in social relations that, eventually, have a
cumulative effect (even if the effect is only to produce direct action by the old
ruling classes to stamp them out).
It is, of course, a matter of empirical fact whether such changes occurred in
Wickham’s ‘peasant-societies’ to push them in the direction of feudalism. But
it must be a factor to be considered, particularly when it comes to explaining
the spread and flourishing of feudal-aristocratic rule after centuries of relative
weakness.
This may be connected with something else. Wickham quite rightly argues
that the existence of household-slaves in the early-medieval period is not the
same as the existence of a slave-mode of production. Slavery is a juridical, not
an economic category.18 The use of slaves en masse to cultivate plantations or
work mines is something quite distinct from peasant-production. It can
provide a way of getting a surplus greater than that which can be achieved
from a dependent peasantry. But only so long as the reproduction of the slave-
workforce is cheap – and this especially if new supplies of slaves can obtained
by warfare or kidnapping without the need to worry about the cost of bringing
up the next generation. By contrast, the keeping of individual slaves to cater
for the additional labour-needs of a peasant-household is not a particularly
efficient means of getting a surplus, especially when gaining them through
18. See Bois 1992 and Harman 1994a.

warfare is neither easy nor cheap. Not only do the slaves have to be fed and
clothed, but so do their offspring if the workforce is to reproduce itself – and,
on top of that, there has to be expenditure set aside for preventing the slaves
from running away. In practice, the household is likely to respond by providing
certain incentives to the slaves to stay and to provide attention to the work
they do – in other words, to treat them more like servants than slaves. Many
of the same considerations apply on the aristocratic estate. The logic for it is
for the slaves to become serfs – just as the logic is to reduce the free peasant-
population to a similar condition.
This does not rule out attempts by rulers at various points to turn to old-
style slavery – particularly when warfare briefly provided supplies of cheap
slaves, or the continued relevancy of an ideology and legal terminology that
justified doing so. As I put it in reviewing Guy Bois’s The Transformation of the
Year 1000:
Elements of the old mode of production existed alongside the new. And what
Marxists often call the ‘political and ideological superstructures’ lagged behind
the economic ‘base’, although they too had begun to change centuries before.
‘The transformation of the year one thousand’ was the final adjustment of the
superstructure to the base, the final setting up of political and ideological ‘systems
that were in harmony with the new forms of production and exploitation’. But
this is not the same as saying, as Bois does, that this was when the transition from
antiquity to feudalism took place.19
Those who have written of a ‘feudal revolution’ may be right to locate a point
at which ruling classes finally and definitively grasped that serfdom was more
productive than slavery – the point at which feudalism began to show its own
dynamic, with its spread to encompass many of the allodial lands within
Europe and its first push outwards with the crusades. But this was a case of
ruling-class theory lagging centuries behind much ruling-class practice.
Finally, Wickham’s work raises a question about the collapse of the Roman
Empire in the West. Why have historians felt the need for a special theory,
based on the dynamic of slave-production, to explain it? It was not the first
great civilisation to collapse, and it was not the last. Its decline, in fact, roughly
coincided with the decline of the Han Empire in China and of Gupta rule in
India, while half a millennium later, just as European feudalism was beginning
to expand geographically, there was the decline of the Abbasid Empire in
Mesopotamia, and, a little later, the Sung Empire in China – and, for that
19. Harman 1994a, p. 95.

matter, of the Maya civilisation in Mesoamerica. There are explanations for

the decline or collapse of these empires which do not rely on the failings of a
special mode of production. Crudely, the superstructures of ruling-class power
and luxury-consumption grew too great for the productive base of society – the
labour of the mass of people – to sustain. The only thing that could have
created more resources was advances in the forces of production, but this was
the very thing that the burden on the immediate producers (especially the
peasantry) prevented. An account of the collapse of the Maya civilisation tells us:
A growing upper class, together with its various retainers and other members of the
incipient ‘middle class’ would have increased economic strain on the total society. . . .
Yet the upper class continued to grow, to expand its demand for luxury and funerary
splendour, and to strive to compete with rival centres and aristocracies. . . . The
priestly leaders of the great centres, in their efforts to outdo each other, to draw more
wealth and prestige to themselves, and to bring more worshippers and tax payers
into their particular orbits, must have diverted all possible labour and capital to their
aggrandizement . . . yet expansion of agriculture would have reduced average
productivity. As a result, malnutrition and disease burdens increased among the
commoner population and further decreased its work capacity. . . . Despite these
internal stresses, the Maya of the Late Classic period apparently made no technological
or social adaptive innovations. . . . In fact, the Maya elite persisted in its traditional
direction up to the point of collapse.20
This description, in its broad outline, applies to the collapse of all the great
precapitalist empires. There therefore does not need to be any special
explanation for Rome – notwithstanding certain Eurocentric notions that
Rome must somehow have been different. This does not mean that slavery was
never important in Roman history. The massive slave-population described,
for instance, in Peter Brunt’s Italian Manpower 225 BC–AD 14, clearly played
a rôle in generating the surplus that enabled Rome to conquer the whole
Mediterranean region and southern Europe. But conquest once achieved, the
tribute that flowed in to keep the Empire intact did not come mainly from
slavery, which, for instance, was never central in producing the surplus from
the massively fertile Nile valley.21 If this is so, it was the oppression of peasants,
not of slaves, that brought about the disintegration and collapse.
No brief review of Wickham’s book can do more than take up a few of the
many points raised by it. It will dominate Marxist – and not only Marxist –
thinking on the period for a long time ahead.
20. See, for instance, the discussions in Culbert (ed.) 1973, pp. 484; 490–1.
21. For an account of the non-slave organisation of production in the later Roman Empire,
see Banaji 2007.
References
Allen, Kieran 2004, Max Weber: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.
Anderson, Perry 1974, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London: New Left Books.
Banaji, Jairus 2007 [2002], Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic
Dominance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bois, Guy 1992 [1989], The Transformation of the Year One Thousand, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Brenner, Robert and Chris Harman 2006, ‘The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’,
International Socialism, II, 111: 127–62.
Brunt, Peter Astbury 1971, Italian Manpower 225 B.C.–A.D. 14, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cohen, Ronald and Elman R. Service (eds.) 1978, The Origins of the State: the Anthropology of
Political Evolution, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
Culbert, T. Patrick (ed.) 1973, The Classic Maya Collapse, Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press.
Gailey, Christine Ward 1987, From Kingship to Kinship, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Harman, Chris 1989, ‘From Feudalism to Capitalism’, International Socialism, II, 45: 35–87.
—— 1994a ‘Change at the First Millennium’, International Socialism, II, 62: 91–6.
—— 1994b, ‘Engels and the Origin of Human Society’, International Socialism, II, 65: 83–142,
183–94.
—— 1998, Marxism and History: Two Essays, London: Bookmarks.
—— 2008 [1999], A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium,
London: Verso.
Harris, David R. 1973, ‘The Prehistory of Tropical Agriculture: an Ethnoecological Model’, in
Renfrew (ed.) 1973.
Lee, Richard 1988, ‘Reflections on Primitive Communism’, in Hunters and Gatherers, Volume 1,
edited by Tim Ingold, David Riches and James Woodburn, Oxford: Berg.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1968 [1958], Structural Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Maisels, Charles Keith 1993 [1990], The Emergence of Civilisation: from Hunting and Gathering
to Agriculture in the Near East, London: Routledge.
McAdams, Robert 1966, The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico,
Chicago: Aldine.
Moreland, John 2000, ‘The Significance of Production in Eighth Century England’, in The Long
Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand, edited by Inge Lyse Hansen and Chris
Wickham, Leiden: Brill.
Mukhia, Harbans (ed.) 1999, The Feudalism Debate, New Delhi: Manohar.
Patterson, Thomas C. 2004, Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists, Oxford: Berg.
Renfrew, Colin 1973, ‘The Emergence of Civilisation’, in Renfrew (ed.) 1973.
—— (ed.) 1973, The Explanation of Cultural Change, London: Duckworth.
Sahlins, Marshall 1974 [1972], Stone Age Economics, London: Tavistock.
Sacks, Karen 1983, Sisters and Wives: the Past and Future of Sexual Equality, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Thapar, Romila 2002, From Lineage to State, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wickham, Chris 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800,
Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages:

What Kind of Transition?
Jairus Banaji
Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
jairus_b@rediffmail.com
Abstract
The stereotype of slave-run latifundia being turned into serf-worked estates is no longer credible
as a model of the transition from antiquity to the middle ages, but Chris Wickham’s anomalous
characterisation of the Roman Empire as ‘feudal’ is scarcely a viable alternative to that. If a fully-
articulated feudal economy only emerged in the later middle ages, what do we make of the
preceding centuries? By postulating a ‘general dominance of tenant production’ throughout the
period covered by his book, Wickham fails to offer any basis for a closer characterisation of
the post-Roman rural labour-force and exaggerates the degree of control that peasants enjoyed
in the late Empire and post-Roman world. A substantial part of the rural labour-force of the
sixth to eighth centuries comprised groups who, like Rosamond Faith’s inland-workers in Anglo-
Saxon England, were more proletarian than peasant-like. The paper suggests the likely ways in
which that situation reflected Roman traditions of direct management and the subordination of
labour, and outlines what a Marxist theory of the so-called colonate might look like. After
discussing Wickham’s handling of the colonate and slavery, and looking briefly at the nature of
estates and the fate of the Roman aristocracy, I conclude by criticising the way Wickham uses the
category of ‘mode of production’.
Keywords
Marxism, Chris Wickham, antiquity, feudalism, colonate, slavery
Introduction: Marxist uncertainties

A Marxist characterisation of late antiquity and the early middle ages (the
whole period from 300 to 800, grosso modo) involves at least two sets of issues.
First, what would a coherent Marxist characterisation of the economic
structure of late antiquity look like? In sharp contrast to Stalin’s theory of the
final extinction of classical slavery in a ‘slave-revolution’, slavery was widespread
and entrenched in the post-Roman West. It had certainly not disintegrated
under the hammer-blows of a revolution, much less one carried through by

110 J. Banaji / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 109–144
slaves. But does the persistence or revival of slavery mean that a slave-mode of
production dominated the class-relationships of this period? Something like
this was argued by Pierre Bonnassie in his seminal work on Catalonia.
Bonnassie suggested that ‘Catalan society in the ninth and tenth centuries was
still a slave society’.1 Serfdom emerged from the violent and dramatic rupture,
the crisis of public authority, that characterised the eleventh century, and in
this classic, late-feudal, sense it was not a feature of the early middle ages.2 On
the contrary, ‘The persistence of a slave economy constitutes one of the chief
features of Visigothic Spain’.3 However, no Marxist historians have gone as far
as this, and if anything they have done the opposite, projecting either serfdom
or feudalism back into late antiquity. Thus, A. Barbero and M. Vigil refer to
the ‘feudalisation’ of Spain under the Visigoths, arguing this at length,4 and,
among British Marxists, Geoffrey de Ste Croix could even suggest that serfdom
was the ‘predominant mode of production [sic.]’ in the later Roman Empire.5
This bears some resemblance to Rodney Hilton’s view that late antiquity had
seen large landowners ‘creating the production relations characteristic of feudal
society’.6 ‘From at least as early as the crisis of the third century town life had
been contracting, and self-sufficient serf-worked estates had begun to dominate
the social structure of the Empire’.7 Hilton was clearly referring to the institution
known to Roman historians as the colonate, but, at a deeper level, his views
reflected a tradition of late-Roman historiography shaped, less by anything
Marx himself had written, than by Max Weber’s famous lecture of 1896.8 The
paradigm, which Weber himself did more to define than most, was one of
widespread economic recession and a ruralisation of the life of the Empire.
The identification of the colonate with serfdom (common to most historians
of the early twentieth century; Ste Croix was its last great representative) was
clearly what underpinned the half-baked conception of late antiquity as a
precursor of feudalism.
1. Bonnassie 1991, p. 108.

2. See the excellent survey in Freedman 1996.
3. Bonnassie 1991, p. 71.
4. Barbero and Vigil 1978.
5. Ste Croix 1983, p. 155.
6. Hilton 1976, p. 112.
7. Hilton 1976, p. 110. Compare Hilton 1973, p. 91, referring to the ‘replacement of slavery
by serfdom, which was characteristic of the late Roman economy . . .’. Contrast this with Marc
Bloch, who was emphatic that serfdom was a ‘strictly personal bondage’ which had nothing to do
with ‘attachment to the soil’. ‘Definitions of serfdom arrived at by courts or jurists have survived
in some quantity: none before the fourteenth century include “attachment to the soil” among its
characteristics in any shape or form’ (Bloch 1973, p. 86). Bloch called serfdom ‘the most specifically
medieval of all existing institutions’ (Bloch 1973, p. 105).
8. Weber 1924.
J. Banaji / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 109–144 111
Today, almost no serious scholar accepts this view, if only because feudalism
itself is still so contested.9 So where does this leave us in terms of a general
characterisation of the late-antique world? A more solid Marxist characterisation
can surely only come from the conjunction of new perspectives within the
historiography itself and simultaneous attempts to map out the conceptual
landscape in new ways (for example, John Haldon, Manuel Acién and Eduardo
Manzano).10
The second set of issues relates to our notions of feudalism and of the
transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages. How well does the
theory of modes of production work for this transition? Do Marxists have a
coherent understanding of the feudal mode of production?11 If a fully
articulated feudal economy only emerged in the central or even later middle
ages, what do we make of the early middle ages? What do we mean by
‘serfdom’ and when did it evolve? There is scarcely an integrated Marxist
position on these issues. For example, Ste Croix implied that there was no
integral link between serfdom and feudalism12 and seemed to think that
serfdom could form a mode of production sui generis (since it was, as he said,
the ‘predominant mode of production’ in late antiquity). In contrast, Hilton,
with more sense of historical specificity, had always seen serfdom as central to
feudalism. But Hilton also believed that serfdom should not be defined by
labour-services alone, whereas Marx himself had done precisely that, claiming
in one passage that ‘Serf labour . . . has this in common with wage-labour, in
respect of rent, that the latter is paid in labour, not in products, still less in
money’.13 Not only was serfdom, for Marx, the ‘broad basis of social production’
in the middle ages,14 but its pure form involved the exaction of labour-
services, a position that is clearly at odds with Hilton’s view that ‘labour rent
was not an essential element in the feudal relations of production’.15 In even
9. Reynolds 1994.
10. Acién is a Spanish Marxist historian whose major contribution was a study of the Andalusi
rebel ʿUmar ibn Ḥ afṣūn (Acién Almansa 1997). Manzano writes within a broadly left-wing
tradition (cf. Manzano Moreno 1998b) and recently published an excellent synthesis on
al-Andalus (Manzano Moreno 2006).
11. From a passage in the Grundrisse, it is arguable that Marx himself saw feudalism emerging
as a ‘synthesis’ of the ‘concentration of landed property’ characteristic of the later Roman Empire
and the bondage peculiar to the Germanic peoples (Marx 1973, pp. 97–8).
12. Ste Croix 1983, p. 136: ‘there is evidently in some people’s minds a groundless connection
between serfdom and “feudalism” ’(!).
13. Marx 1971, p. 401.
14. Marx 1981, p. 970; and of course the terms in which Marx criticised Kovalesky, see Marx
1975, p. 67 (as translated in Krader 1975, p. 383), with Krader 1975, pp. 201ff.; Anderson
1974a, p. 406.
15. Hilton 1976, p. 15.
greater contrast (to Marx), in Wickham’s recent book the lord’s lack of control
of the labour-process is (almost?) built into his definition of feudalism,16 which
emerges here in the more abstract structuralist guise of any system of ‘coercive
rent-taking’ that pits landlords on one side against peasants on the other.17 It
was this kind of abstractionism, depleted of historical content, that Anderson
had blasted in some of the best pages of Lineages,18 even if his own conception
of the feudal mode was a haphazard conglomeration of features that failed to
have any significant impact on the historiography.19 The best work by
medievalists working in a left-wing tradition has been decidedly discontinuist,
underlining the novelty of the middle ages.20 The paradox of Wickham’s
conceptual choices is that, however one sees that novelty, it is not definable at
the level of the mode of production, since his notion of the feudal mode is
construed so loosely that it covers both the Roman Empire and (probably) the
whole medieval world and much else besides! The tendency to dehistoricise
categories such as ‘serfdom’ (Ste Croix) and ‘feudalism’ (Wickham, Haldon) in
order to be able to extend their application to antiquity is surely a retrograde
one. It stems as much from the lack of a more sophisticated Marxist theory of
the feudal mode as it does from any conception of late antiquity as a precursor
16. So too in Wickham 2000, p. 33, where limited landowner-control over production is
stated to be part of the ‘economic logic’ of feudalism: ‘landowners could only influence
production by indirect methods [potevano solo influenzare la produzione con metodi indiretti]’.
This has been a long-standing belief of Wickham’s and one which almost certainly stems from
Hindess and Hirst. With characteristic disregard for the actual complexity of history, they
believed it was a universal feature of precapitalist forms of agricultural production that ‘direct
producers’ had ‘effective possession of the means of reproduction of their own labour-power’
(Hindess and Hirst 1975, p. 189). One of the strangest passages in Pre-Capitalist Modes of
Production is the one where, after quoting Kosminsky to the effect that feudalism as a mode of
production presumed ‘a class of basic producers with a special connection with the land – which
remained, however, the property of the ruling class of feudal lords’ (Kosminsky 1956, p. vi), Hindess
and Hirst conclude that feudalism presumes ‘direct producers who own the means of reproduction
of their labour-power’ (Hindess and Hirst 1975, p. 191)!
17. Contrast Anderson 1974a, p. 409, referring to the nobility’s ‘organizing role in production
itself, whose typical form in Europe was the manor’.
18. Anderson 1974a, pp. 407ff., a strong defence of the ‘specificity’ of feudalism that starts
with Marx’s critique of Kovalevsky.
19. Anderson 1974b, especially pp. 147ff. Anderson himself called this a ‘synthesis of
elements’ whose key-markers included natural economy and the dispersal of political sovereignty.
But surely neither is central to feudalism. If the former is scarcely credible today (for example,
Wickham 2005, pp. 291–2, 796–805), the latter fails to explain how a ‘recharged apparatus of
feudal domination’ (absolutism) could emerge within a mode of production defined by its
dispersion of sovereignty.
20. For example, Karol Modzelewski, Bruno Andreolli and Massimo Montanari, Manuel
Acién Almansa and Paul Freedman.
of feudalism. But Chris Wickham’s book is certainly the best starting point for
a discussion of these issues.
Background to the late Empire

In Roman history, the ‘late Empire’ refers in general to the period between the
fourth and the seventh centuries, the fourth and early-fifth if the focus is
western, since the western Empire fell apart in the fifth, and the sixth and
early-seventh as well if we look at the East. The fourth century is thus the
watershed that divides Roman from late-Roman history. Yet the basic elements
of the fourth-century Empire were established in the third, with the sweeping
reorganisation of the army and the emergence of a new command-structure,
on one side, and, on the other, the sustained expansion, throughout the late-
second and third centuries, of a network of provincial, mainly African, families
who would later form the core of the western aristocracy under Constantine
(306–37). Reform of the army excluded senators from military command and
signified a major break in the traditional pattern of upper-class dominance. If
this was a democratisation of the Roman army, as Lopuszański suggested in a
seminal paper, it certainly paved the way for the evolution of a professionalised
officer-corps and the consolidation of an esprit de corps in the higher ranks that
dominated much of the political history of the late Empire.21 By the fourth
century, senators were marginal to the composition of the army-leadership,
which came, increasingly, to incorporate a strong Germanic component.
The key-result of all this was that, from the main part of the third
century, emperors were drawn overwhelmingly from non-senatorial/military
backgrounds. The politically-relevant élite was not the senatorial class but a
military élite whose upward mobility found renewed resonance in the civilian
side of the administration, as bureaucracies were expanded and professionalised
and a new value set on legal and related forms of expertise. The social fluidity
of the late Empire was the key to its sudden effervescence. The senate itself was
transformed and expanded early in the fourth century and the equestrian
order subsumed wholesale into the senatorial class, infusing administrative-
and business-skills. The consolidation of the Western aristocracy meant,
crucially, an adjustment with the state, the ability to manoeuvre and, as far as
possible, dominate. By contrast, in the East, state and aristocracy were much-
more closely integrated, since the aristocracy was itself of bureaucratic origin
and the bedrock of the state’s apparatus. These differences would become a
major part of the story of why the Empire survived so spectacularly in the East
21. Lopuszański 1938.

when it fell to pieces in the West. The key-innovation of the late Empire that
broke with centuries of tradition was Constantine’s monetary reform. Just as
the military revolution of the third century was decisive in defining the ‘style’
of the late Empire, vesting state-power in the hands of the military, Constantine’s
creation of a new gold-currency provided the pivotal foundation that sustained
the expansion of the governing class as a whole (both senators, new and old,
and bureaucracy). As one contemporary commented, the aristocratic élites of
the fourth century accumulated vast quantities of gold, so that ‘the houses of
the powerful were crammed full of it’. In the West, the countryside scaled new
peaks of activity as the owners of these vast hoards of money-capital expanded
productive capacities and upgraded their fixed-capital investments – a process
which is best documented, archaeologically, for the Spanish countryside, most
spectacularly in the very rich fourth-century villas of the northern Meseta. To
ensure efficiency, the state intervened to pin labour down to the large estates,
contriving new definitions that were antithetical to the purism of classical law.
In short, the fourth century dramatically reconfigured law, society and
economy in ways that were a disaster for the lower classes. For the Italian
historian Santo Mazzarino, all this was a major part of the crisis of the western
Empire, in the sense that ‘the peasant masses felt themselves crushed under the
weight of the new economy’22 and sought protection with the aristocracy
against the state. ‘The small peasant-proprietors turned themselves into
dediticii of the rich, or as it was called in Celtic vassi’. ‘These’, Mazzarino
claimed, ‘are the first hints of the economic system of vassalage which marks
the Middle Ages’. To offset the crisis, the government unleashed a prolonged
deflation which ‘in conditions of insufficient productivity brought the society
nearer to a natural economy’. ‘Thus’, that is, with ‘vassalage’ on one side and
natural economy on the other, both rooted in the conditions of the late
Empire, ‘they set off toward the Middle Ages’.
This framing of the ‘transition’, of the resilience of an empire undermined
by social crisis, is conspicuously absent in Wickham’s book. Indeed, it will
be striking to his colleagues in Italy that there is no reference to their great
mentor Mazzarino, not even in the bibliography! Wickham charts a very
different course, abandoning the speculative-looking constructions of the
1950s and its textual tools in favour of a wider range of sources and considerable
emphasis on the archaeological work, late-Roman and medieval, of the last
two decades. For Mazzarino’s uncomplicated trajectory from late-antique
patrocinium to medieval vassalage, a model of almost appealing simplicity,
Wickham substitutes a more involved and densely textured history – of
22. Mazzarino 1966, p. 154.

landscapes, exchange-networks, aristocracies and urbanism, and of the fragile

autonomy of the peasantry, all moving in complex and uneven ways in a
fragmenting world whose sinews were being remorselessly severed throughout
this period. The collapse of the state and the fragmentation that flowed from it
are the structuring principles of Wickham’s discussion of these diverse
trajectories. Unlike Pirenne, who saw the disintegration of the western Empire
as a ‘political fact’ with minimal implications for the continuity of ‘Romania’,
postponing the great catastrophe that ended it to the Islamic expansion of the
later-seventh century,23 Wickham ascribes momentous significance to the crisis
of the state. In particular, the breakdown of taxation, by which he means
taxation-in-kind, had major long-term impacts in the West: a crisis of the
urban traditions of antiquity, with major changes in the scale and quality of
urbanism, a general weakening and impoverishment of the aristocracy, and
the slow-but-inexorable disintegration of the Mediterranean world-system.
All of this happened unevenly, of course, and Wickham tracks the changes
with a strong sense of their local peculiarities, mapping their real or hypothetical
evolution by region and sub-region, and constructing a transition-model of
considerable complexity.
I have dealt elsewhere with what I regard as the major analytical weakness
of the model, namely, its failure to integrate money into an overall account of
the transformation, so, here, I shall deal with a different set of issues.24 It is a
tribute to the profoundly stimulating character of Wickham’s book that it
throws up a whole lot of issues which are still largely unresolved.
Unresolved issues
Chief among these unresolved issues are the following: Firstly, how do we
characterise the dynamic of the late Empire? Wickham has clearly moved away
from the model of ‘The Other Transition’, where state and aristocracy were
seen as distinct and rival claimants to the ‘surplus’ and the system as a whole
was driven by the state, so that the break-up of the western Empire was a victory
for the aristocracy. In Framing, the aristocracy is a major casualty of the
dissolution of the Empire,25 and aristocracy and state no longer embody rival
modes of production. Yet the new picture is no less problematic. At least the
model of ‘The Other Transition’ drew attention to an internal conflict – the
aristocracy sabotaged the state, abandoned or deserted it and left the western
23. Pirenne 1968.

24. Banaji 2007, Appendix 5.
25. Wickham 2005, pp. 255, 534.
Empire to its fate (numerous historians have argued this, from Sundwall to
Peter Brown). In Framing, the model lacks any internal dynamic. The decline
of taxation, triggered by the invasions and the break-up of the Empire, unfolds
like a huge tidal wave that drags the senatorial élites along, shattering the
structures of their dominance – inter-regional networks, urban prosperity, the
economic unity of the Mediterranean, and so on. Second, why use the imagery
of modes of production to characterise the transition from the late Empire to
the middle ages, if, as Wickham claims, the feudal mode of production was
the ‘normal economic system of the ancient and medieval periods’?26 The
timelessness of this image contrasts sharply with the momentous changes that
transformed the ancient world into a medieval one.
Secondly, how widespread was slavery in late antiquity? A concentration of
slave-labour in mass-producing workshops based on an intensive rationalisation
of labour-processes had sustained massive exports of Italian fine wares down
to the Augustan age.27 This was a type of Roman industrial slavery with striking
resemblance to more recent forms of work-organisation (repetitive work-
cycles, job-simplification and tight control over labour). With the rapid
expansion of rural estates (‘villas’) following the bloody civil wars of the early-
first century BC, an agrarian version of this ‘slave-mode of production’ came
to underwrite Italy’s domination of related Mediterranean markets for wine
and olive-oil.28 It would make more sense to call these economic régimes
‘slave-capitalism’, following Max Weber and Otto Hintze,29 than anything as
vague as a ‘slave-mode of production’, since it is far from obvious that there is
a commonly-agreed definition of the latter. In any case, this régime had more-
or-less ended by the second century, whereas slavery continued and was even
widespread in late antiquity. Wickham discounts its significance, however,
because for him the ‘numerous slaves of the late Empire or the period following
it . . . were [not] for the most part anything other than tenants’.30 This, I shall
argue, vastly simplifies the actual transition from Roman to medieval relations
of production (‘slavery to serfdom’ in the conventional metanarrative), which
it would be more accurate to describe as involving a mutation of slavery than
its outright supersession.
26. Wickham 2005, p. 535; my emphasis.

27. Morel 1990, pp. 404ff.
28. Rathbone 1977; Giardina 2004, p. 233ff.
29. For example, Hintze 1975, p. 434, argued that Max Weber has demonstrated ‘how the
unlimited economic exploitation of slave labour on plantations and in mines corresponded to
the merciless political oppression of conquered peoples. Victory in the wars of the Greek city-
states and the Roman Republic regularly led to a plundering of men and land, thus giving slave
capitalism constant new nourishment . . .’.
30. Wickham 1988, p. 188.
A third issue relates to our characterisation of the rural labour-force in the

post-Roman West. Wickham wants to see the early middle ages as a low-point
in the general curve of aristocratic dominance. Whether that translates into
reduced domination of the peasantry in the earliest middle ages, as he wants
to argue,31 is less certain. Surely this will depend on how we characterise the
labour-force at the base of the rural economy in the post-Roman world and
whether we see the slaves and freedpeople provided with plots of land as
workers, as Rosamond Faith has argued,32 convincingly in my view, or as
peasants, as Wickham would want. One of Wickham’s most insistent leitmotifs
is the triumph of the realities of tenure over legal distinctions.33 The point can
be accepted, but it certainly does not rule out other models of greater complexity,
such as Faith has constructed for the ‘inland’ labour-organisation of Anglo-
Saxon England.
Finally, and, for Marxists, most fundamentally, is the schema of ‘modes of
production’ helpful in characterising the major transformations of the period
Wickham deals with? If so, how would we have to formulate the transition,
given that serfdom did not replace slavery in any obvious way? And does
Wickham’s own handling of historical-materialist concepts such as ‘mode
of production’ help or hinder a materialist analysis of this? In what follows,
I shall suggest that the legacies of the Roman world and of late antiquity were
more subtle than any straightforward debate about continuity makes them
out to be, and that key among these were i) the pervasive influence of Roman
law in defining the condition of the medieval peasantry,34 and ii) the tradition
of direct management which the Merovingian aristocracy, in particular,
inherited from their late-Roman counterparts. On the other hand, the
aristocracy itself and the organisation of estates show major changes that mark
a break with antiquity. The relations of production of the early middle ages were
thus shaped by a complex set of influences that owe as much to subliminal
legacies (law, management-traditions) as to the ‘will’ of the Frankish sovereign
and his magnates in developing a new kind of rural enterprise.35
The reshaping of relations of production

What the post-Roman world inherited from the massive legal edifice of the
late-Roman state was a legacy of oppression. In other words, central to any
31. For example, Wickham 2005, p. 570.

32. Faith 1997, p. 69.
33. Wickham 2005, p. 563.
34. This argument has been most forcefully developed by Wulf Eckart Voß in a much-
neglected paper cited below.
35. ‘“Will” of the Frankish sovereign’ from Devroey 2001, p. 120.
characterisation of the form of Roman society that emerged in the fourth

century must be the increasingly repressive legislation of the late Empire,
which eroded the rights of farm-workers in particular. In the words of Moses
Finley, ‘there was a gradual erosion in the capacity of the lower classes to resist
working for the benefit of others under conditions of less than full “freedom
of contract” ’.36 It is this that explains the paradox of why, despite the
disintegration of the western Empire and the dissolution of its aristocracy,
there was no visible change in the economic position of most or many rural
inhabitants. Indeed, the post-Roman labour-force was, in one respect at least,
worse off, in the sense that the sharp division between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ that was
intrinsic to classical law was progressively abandoned, in practice anyway, as a
uniformly servile tenantry evolved by the early part of the sixth century. This,
I suggest, is why we need to take the colonate more seriously than Wickham
does. It is next to impossible to account for the transition from the relatively
open labour-markets of the third century37 to the mixed-servile labour-forces
of the sixth and seventh centuries and later, without the decisive historical
mediation of the colonate.38 The key-assumption behind the system was that
resident workers were part of the ‘capital assets of the estate on which they
lived and worked’,39 hence part of the estate’s tax-liability. A rapid turnover of
labour would undermine the stability of the system, and to ensure such
stability both government and landowners concurred in tying workers to
estates. The lawyers who drafted the legislation of the late Empire rationalised
this peculiar subordination of free labour with the legal fiction that tied
labourers [coloni] were ‘slaves of the land to which they were born’,40 in other
words, attached to estates and not landowners, but, of course, in practice the
colonate simply reinforced the power of employers over labour. That it did so
explains why, in the Roman-controlled parts of the Mediterranean, this
agrarian system survived down to the end of the sixth century,41 if not later,
and certainly long after its fiscal origins and function had been forgotten.
36. Ibid.
37. Rathbone 1991; Banaji 1997.
38. Compare Davies 1996, p. 234, ‘Tying the agricultural labour force to the land is one of
the keys to the establishment of the condition of the later medieval peasantry’.
39. Rosamond Faith’s expression in The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship, Faith
1997, p. 84.
40. CJ xi.52.1 (392–5), ‘servi terrae ipsius cui nati sunt aestimentur’, after (and despite!) the
qualification that coloni were, legally, free-born persons (cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929).
41. For example, Gregory, Ep. 4.21 (594), which even refers to a ‘ius colonarium’! (cf. Gregory
the Great 1891–9).
The legacy of the colonate

Wickham’s handling of the colonate is the least satisfying part of his superb
book. The successor-states inherited a labour-force that included large numbers
of former coloni, many of whom were or were still regarded as unfree workers/
tenants. Did these groups fare differently in the different kingdoms or did they
share an essentially similar fate? And if they did, what fate was that? In other
words, what difference did the dissolution of Roman power make to the
condition of these workers or peasants? There are scarcely any references to
‘the’ colonate in a post-Roman context, and it seems likely that the system had
disintegrated in its classic late-Roman form.42 But what became of the coloni
themselves? Some historians argue that the distinction between the main
groups of the labour-force simply disappeared, as late-Roman coloni were
absorbed en masse into a more-or-less undifferentiated post-Roman servile
class and, from now on, treated no differently from slaves.43 For example,
Finley asked, ‘Were the servi of the Germanic codes all chattel slaves? The
Visigothic laws, for example, ignore coloni, yet we know that they certainly
existed, and were important in the Visigothic kingdom’.44 This is not a position
Wickham would want to identify with, in part because he thinks that legal,
hence also servile status, mattered less and less as one moved into the middle
ages, and partly because he sees the independent peasantry expanding as the
western Empire disintegrated. It is possible that there is room for both positions,
depending on how things played out in the post-Roman West, but it would
certainly have helped to have started with a clear conception of what the
colonatus itself was, something Wickham does not do, both because he is
(I think unduly) sceptical about the value of legal sources and because of his at
least tacit support for Jean-Michel Carrié’s own iconoclasm on this subject.
To take just two examples from the legal evidence, one late-fourth-century
constitution confers on estate-owners the authority to control their workers
‘with the care of patrons and the power of masters’.45 The ‘power of masters’
was, of course, the power masters exercised over slaves. Another, earlier one,
stipulates that workers [coloni] who run away from estates should be dragged
back in chains.46 On any straightforward reading of this sort of evidence most
historians would conclude, and many still do, that government massively
reinforced the power of large landowners over rural workers and did so in
sweeping ways. But the point is one Wickham is (for a Marxist, curiously!)
42. So too Bloch 1963b, p. 232; De Martino 1986, p. 37.

43. King 1972, pp. 160–1; Nehlsen 1972, p. 167; Cortázar 1988, p. 11.
44. Finley 1980, p. 124.
45. CJ xi.52.1 (392–5) (cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929).
46. CTh 5.17.1 (332) (cf. Mommsen and Krueger (eds.) 1905).
unwilling to concede. The reasoning seems to be something like this: the coloni
were not serfs but tenants. If coercion was applied to them, this was largely
from the standpoint of the state and its need to ensure the regular payment of
taxes, hence stable labour-forces. How far government succeeded in tying
down these workforces must have varied enormously in practice. The laws
may not have been effective. In any case, the colonate had more to do with
the technicalities of taxation than the realities of exploitation and control
of labour.
By way of a response, let us begin with the first proposition, about coloni
not being serfs. In some influential work from the 1980, Carrié mounted a
strong attack on the back-projection of feudal characteristics onto the late-
Roman period – not just ‘serfdom’, but labour-services and manors as well.
None of these were handed down to the middle ages from late Rome, especially
not serfdom. A medieval reading of late-Roman institutions is profoundly
misleading. This part of Carrié’s critique is, of course, unproblematic and few
historians would disagree with it today. It stems, in fact, from the positions of
Marc Bloch, except that Bloch saw things in the reverse perspective. He had
denounced the assimilation of the serf to the colonus as a contrived anachronism,
tracing its roots to the late-thirteenth/early-fourteenth century when it
emerged under the influence of the kind of legal erudition that had led the
way in the reception of Roman law in Europe.47 But the colonate itself raised no
issues for Bloch; it was, as the law-codes said it was, an institution that tied the
peasantry to the soil and even invented a special vocabulary to express that.
Indeed, in the chapter Bloch wrote for the Cambridge Economic History of
Europe, he took the colonatus sufficiently seriously to call it ‘the fundamental
institution of the late Empire’!48 Carrié’s argument moves in a very different
direction. He suggests that the conventional view of the colonate as a coercive
labour-system lacks any foundation in the sources, in other words, that it
stems solely from the false assimilation that Bloch was the first to expose. A
careful reading of the Roman legal sources shows that considerations of fiscality
were the only ones paramount in the late-Roman discussion about coloni.
There was no institution like ‘the’ colonate, if by that we mean that the
legislation of the late Empire created a special status between slavery and
freedom and imposed this on a large, if indeterminate part, of the rural
population. The Roman law of persons recognised only two categories, free
and slave, and that division remained axiomatic even later. It was never
breached by the creation of a third category such as ‘half-free’. True, the
47. See Bloch 1921, republished in Bloch 1963a, pp. 356–73.

48. Bloch 1963b, p. 229.
legislation of the fourth and fifth centuries refers repeatedly to servitude,

comparing the tied tenantry [coloni] to slaves [servi, mancipia], calling them
‘slaves of the land’, and prescribing slave-like treatment for those who fled
their estates, but Carrié suggests that these references were purely metaphorical,49
and that the laws themselves had no intrinsic connection with labour or with
labour-regulation, only with the registration of tax-payers on the tax-rolls. If
rural workers ended up being ‘tied’ to estates, this was part of a wider fiscal
subjection that affected all sorts of groups and tied all of them equally to their
places of origin or professions. The adscripticii whom the Emperor Justinian
could not help comparing to slaves50 were never actually reduced to a state of
‘semi-slavery’,51 at least not in the fourth and fifth centuries (or so Carrié
argues more recently),52 since no such condition could exist in Roman law.
Now, the view that the laws on the colonate had ‘largely fiscal aims’ is
scarcely controversial. A.H.M. Jones argued for it convincingly back in the
1950s, suggesting that it was ‘primarily a fiscal measure’53 when it was first
introduced. Jones made it plain that he was referring to the origin of the
measure that first led to the tying of labour to the land, and not characterising
the institution as it worked, collusively no doubt, over some two or three
centuries. Thus, he repeatedly emphasised the considerable stake that
substantial landowners had in the working of the colonate. ‘If the tying of the
agricultural population was in origin a measure dictated by public policy, it
proved a great boon to landlords’.54 ‘It was at the demand of landlords that the
system was maintained and extended ’.55 And, of course, the system itself had
drastic implications for the position of a large part of the labour-force. Between
this view, which has no problem with a fiscal origin for the colonate but
attaches equal importance to its actual historical function (for example, Bloch’s
description of it as ‘class legislation’)56 and Carrié’s lecture iconoclaste, Wickham,
as I said, inclines to the latter. Thus he refers to the laws on coloni as a set of
‘laws about free taxpayers’,57 undeterred by the nebulousness of this conception.
And he prefers to think that, even as a set of legal arrangements, the laws about
it may have had little practical significance, that is, in the way things worked
on the ground. Law is a dimension of reality, not a picture of it, and there is
49. Carrié 1983, pp. 207, 220, 224.

50. CJ xi.48.21.1 (530) (cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929); compare Ste Croix 1983, p. 252.
51. Carrié 1983, p. 213.
52. Carrié 1997, p. 124.
53. Jones 1958, p. 4; Jones 1974, p. 298.
54. Jones 1958, p. 5; Jones 1974, p. 299.
55. Jones 1964, p. 817; emphasis mine.
56. Bloch 1963b, p. 230.
57. Wickham 2005, p. 526.
no reason to suppose either that people were fully aware of what the laws
actually were (Augustine’s hesitations about the way landowners treated their
labourers is a good example)58 or even that they were ever widely enforced.
Wickham does not deny that the laws prescribed the tying of labour to the
land. Indeed, both he and Carrié seem to think that the whole rural population
was tied in this way, including the free peasants, something for which there is,
in fact, much less evidence, as Jones realised. But given that the tying of labour
is not denied, at least as legal intent, there are two debates here: first, did the
laws make any material difference to the position (status, civil rights, etc.) of
the free working population? Did they entail a worsening of status for those
sections, a Statusverschlechterung, as the German legal historians call it? And,
second, were the late-Roman coloni simply tenants in Wickham’s sense, that is,
rent-paying peasants in control of their own labour-process? (At times,
Wickham seems to identify the colonate with tenancy per se: for example, he
refers to ‘the sea of the “colonate” ’,59 meaning simply the prevalence of rent-
paying tenancies.)
It is abundantly clear that the laws treat tied labourers (workers described
by Pope Gregory as ex condicione ligati, ‘bound by their legal position’)60 as not
fully in control of their own lives. Not only were they attached to estates by
law, but when they fled and worked elsewhere as sharecroppers or wage-
labourers, they were regarded as behaving quasi sui arbitrii ac liberi, ‘as if they
can make their own decisions and are free’.61 The least this implies is that as
coloni, workers bound to estates, they were not so regarded. Again, it was
commonplace to describe such workers as being ‘owned’ by their employers or
in their possession.62 Although not formally incorporated into the law of
persons, there is no doubt that the legal traditions of late antiquity did
eventually acknowledge diminished degrees of freedom broadly approximating
an intermediate status like ‘half-free’. References like ‘a kind of servitude’63
were not metaphors, but attempts to reconcile a new social reality with the
unyielding framework of classical law.64 This is strikingly obvious in the
58. Augustine, Ep. 24*.1, where he asks a lawyer-friend whether landowners could simply
transform their coloni and coloni’s children into slaves (cf. Lancel 1987).
59. Wickham 2005, p. 272.
60. Gregory, Ep. 9.129 (599) (cf. Gregory the Great 1891–99).
61. CJ xi.48.8.1 (cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929).
62. For example, Nov. Val. xxvii.6 (449) (cf. Mommsen (ed.) 1905); CJ i.3.36 praef. (484)
(cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929); Nov. Just. 156 pr.; 157.1 (542) (cf. Schoell and Kroll 1928); Nov. Tib.
xii.2 (578–82) (cf. Schoell and Kroll 1928).
63. CJ xi.1.2.pr. (396) (cf. Krueger (ed.) 1929).
64. So too Lepelley 1983, p. 335, who refers to ‘une inadaptation des catégories classiques à
cette réalité nouvelle’.
legislation on ‘mixed’ marriages. These were marriages between persons of

different class-backgrounds and the late-Roman laws about them (about which
unions were ‘valid’ and which were not, and what consequences that had for
the legal status or condicio of spouses and children) were destined to have a
profound influence on the conditions of the peasantry in medieval Europe, indeed
down to the final abolition of serfdom in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. For the ‘general rule’, the transmission of status through the mother,
cf. Codex Theodosianus 14.7.1 (397), ‘When the marriage is between persons
of unequal status [ubi non est aequale coniugium], the children shall follow the
mother [matrem sequatur agnatio]’. In other words, estate-owners had
automatic rights of control over the progeny of female labourers even if their
husbands were free persons. But what if male workers [coloni] married women
who were free? According to the general rule, the children born of these unions
were technically free, and landowners stood to lose a younger labour-force if
they could not have the law amended to stop such individuals from pursuing
their freedom, that is, migrating from estates that would otherwise hold them
down as tied labourers. Hence repeated complaints, in the sixth century, that
Justinian’s legislation was depleting estates of their workers, and the conundrum
Justinian himself faced in trying to reconcile established legal principles with
the labour-needs of the aristocracy. (Interestingly, the key-references here are
to landowners in Africa and the Balkans.)65 All of this has been discussed in
detail in a very substantial paper by Wulf Eckart Voß which Wickham,
inexplicably, ignores.66 The general point to make here is that the post-Roman
West was strongly influenced by these late-Roman legal traditions, and that they
came to form a decisive link between late antiquity and the middle ages.67
Were the coloni simply ‘tenants’? That the supply of labour was seen as their
chief social function is clear from the legal evidence: for example, Codex
Iustinianus xi.53.1 (371) about landowners who take in fugitive coloni having
to compensate previous owners for the loss in labour-power or services [in
redhibitione operarum et damni, quod locis quae deseruerant factum est]; Codex
Theodosianus 5.6.3 (409), assignment of Sciri captives as a tied but non-servile
labour-force: ‘opera autem eorum terrarum domini libera [utantur] . . .’; Codex
Iustinianus i.12.6.9 (466), which refers to obsequia, ‘services’.68 In fact, the
only explicit definition of terminology that we have comes from the sixth
65. See Jones 1958, p. 10; Jones 1974, pp. 305–6; Voß 1985, pp. 160ff.
66. Voß 1985.
67. See Voß 1985, pp. 166ff.
68. Cf. Glare 1968–82, p. 1221, s.v. ‘obsequium’, 2.
century, when Justinian tells us in so many words that the term colonus refers
to ‘those who live on estates and work as rural labourers’.69
To sum up, even if ‘imperial laws were concerned with tax-paying, not
labour relations’, as Wickham claims,70 there is certainly enough evidence,
both in the legal sources and elsewhere, to suggest that late-antique large
estates depended on a tied labour-force. Certainly, serfdom was not a
replication, much less a survival of the colonate, but it does not follow that the
colonatus was not itself a form of bondage. What distinguished late-Roman
forms of bondage from their medieval counterparts was that they, crucially,
were buttressed and mediated by the state. We can, in this sense, speak of the
construction of the colonate as opposed to its organic or spontaneous evolution.
Marxists can surely generate more specificity than Geoffrey de Ste Croix
managed to do by defining the colonate as a form of exploitation of labour
built on the legal fiction that the worker [colonus] was attached to the estate and
not the landowner.71 This was, obviously, a fiction since no-one can, literally, be
the slave of an object. Even though this restricted the flexibility of owners in
the sense that they could not transfer labour between enterprises or sell land
without the workforce,72 in practice everyone understood that tying workers
to the soil meant attaching them to their employers. For example, Codex
Iustinianus xi.51.1 (386) states straightforwardly that rural workers in the
provinces of Palestine be bound to their landlords [domino fundi teneatur].
When even that restriction (workers tied to estates and not landowners) was
abolished, as it was under Theoderic, the ground was cleared for a model of
bondage closer to servage.73
Slavery and the post-Roman labour-force

Wickham works, indeed has always worked, with a stark opposition between
the slave-mode and tenant-labour, ignoring the intermediate agrarian
organisations that are more likely to have characterised the general (‘epochal’)
transition from slavery to serfdom.
69. Nov. Just. 162.2 (539) (cf. Schoell and Kroll 1928), cited in Banaji 2007, p. 182.
70. Wickham 2005, p. 526.
71. Bloch 1963b, p. 229, ‘But a sturdy fiction made him slave of a thing . . .’. Ste Croix simply
equated the colonate with serfdom, rejecting what he described as the ‘groundless connection
between serfdom and “feudalism” ’; also Ste Croix 1983, p. 162, ‘[W]e must not take the use of
the words “serf ” and “serfdom” to imply any necessary connection with feudalism, even if we
regard feudalism as necessarily involving forms of serfdom’. The irony here is that this completely
explodes what Susan Reynolds calls ‘Marxist feudalism’, a model which, by the way, she is
sympathetic to! See Reynolds 1994.
72. CTh 13.10.3 (357) (cf. Mommsen and Krueger (eds.) 1905).
73. Cf. Bloch 1965, p. 257, citing LRV 5.10.1 on coloni being returned to their masters.
What makes the slave mode special . . . is the systematic subjection of slaves to the
control of their masters in the process of production and reproduction; put them
on a family plot as a servus quasi colonus . . . and they organize their own farming
practices and family structures. . . . The combination between a greater autonomy
for what can now be called peasants . . . and the end of effective intervention by
landlords in the procedures of production, transform[s] the whole logic of the
economic system, or, as Marx called it, the mode of production.74
He adds, ‘When the Romans abandoned the slave mode, they went straight
over to rent-paying tenants’.75 But Bloch was surely more correct in viewing
the slave’s holding as a form of salary and slave-tenancies as labour-tenancies.
In his famous essay ‘How and Why Ancient Slavery Came to an End’, he
suggested that estates needed reserves of labour-power, and that the land
granted to slaves ‘was like their salary’.76
The most incisive formulation of the distinction implied here comes in
Rosamond Faith’s account of the labour-organisation of the ‘inland’ in Anglo-
Saxon England. She argues that freed slaves were more like workers and serfs
more like peasants. Because of its importance, the passage is worth quoting
in full:
It was probably common to provide slaves and freed people with small plots of
land when they were housed. . . . This process, for which French provides the
useful term alotissement, has often been seen as the main agent which transformed
the slavery of the ancient world into the serfdom of the medieval. However, it is
important to make some distinctions here. The housing of slaves brought into
being a class of smallholders who were completely dependent on, and tied to, the
inland. . . . But the category of peasants who came to be called serfs in post-
Conquest England mostly came into being by quite a different route. The essential
distinction is between worker and peasant. The freed slave was a worker who in
return for selling his labour as a commodity received a ‘wage in land’ from the
lord, who was his employer and sole purchaser of that labour. The lord, in his
capacity as employer, was essential to him. By contrast, the serf was a peasant with
a holding, which, however small, supported him and his family and provided a
surplus which was transferred to the lord in rent paid in cash, kind or labour (or
in all these). This transfer of the serf ’s surplus was only made possible because the
lord had control of the land: the lord was not as economically essential to his
existence as he was to that of the slave.77
74. Wickham 1988, p. 187.

75. Wickham 1984, p. 31.
76. Bloch 1975, pp. 5–6.
77. Faith 1997, pp. 69–70; italics mine. Postan 1954 is the classic essay on the transition
from demesne slave to manorial labourer, and makes the more general point that, ‘At all times in
the history of agriculture in Western Europe and elsewhere “tied cottages” or smallholdings
attached to labourers’ dwellings have been similarly used by landlords and farmers as a safeguard
In short, ‘slavery did not simply fade away but had a longer life than was
previously supposed. . . . Nor was serfdom, at least the serfdom of the tenth
century its natural successor’.78 There was a more complex set of relationships
between slavery and serfdom than a simple ‘transition’, if, by this, we mean
that one was simply substituted for the other. Even less credible is the model
of a dramatic and compacted transition between them such as that posited by
Bonnassie79 and Bois80 for parts of Europe around the ‘year 1000’. Wickham,
of course, does not subscribe either to a linear transition (the famous
metanarrative of vulgar Marxism) or to a compacted one. His favourite image
is the conversion of slaves into self-managing peasants, which is really
equivalent to the thesis that Roman landowners abandoned direct management.
Thus, in Framing, he endorses the very substantial position that ‘Most servi/
mancipia in our period . . . were tenants who controlled their own holding and
could keep its fruits after rents were paid’.81 This is highly unlikely. Mancipia
included former coloni, bound tenants, and servi were still slaves in Francia,
Visigothic Spain, etc., and it is doubtful if these groups in particular were ever
thought to ‘control their own holdings’, whatever other groups may actually
have done so. A substantial part of the rural labour-force of the sixth to eighth,
or even ninth, centuries comprised groups who, like Faith’s inland-workers or
worker-tenants,82 were more proletarian than peasant-like, and often unmarried.
In the Middle-Rhine region studied by Franz Staab, these groups were still
called mancipia in the eighth century, this in contrast to the servi who, like
Wickham’s self-managing tenants or Faith’s serfs, were a better model of the
peasantry, that is, autonomous even if subaltern.83 Staab suggests that this
‘special sense of servus already goes back to the Merovingian period’,84 but
terminology evolved in different ways in different parts of Europe. The
Domesday servus was a slave;85 so too in Catalonia, where the ‘lawyers never
used the word servus except to deny that attached peasants were servi, a word
used only for slaves’.86 Finally, in Italy, the word used to describe slaves who
against the shortage or “turnover” of agricultural labour’ (p. 26). For examples of this kind of
worker, see Bloch 1965, p. 269 (on the German Tageschalken) and Faith 1997, pp. 209–10 (on
the cottars).
78. Faith 1997, p. 60.
79. For example, Davies 1996, p. 230.
80. See Verhulst 1991, pp. 195ff.
81. Wickham 2005, p. 560. Cf. Wickham 1984, p. 9, ‘those slaves had been turned into
tenants, and thus controlled the land and their own work process’; my italics.
82. Faith 1997, p. 60.
83. Staab 1975, pp. 332, 342ff.
84. Staab 1975, p. 342.
85. Maitland 1960, p. 52.
86. Freedman 1986, p. 296.
‘had no habitation in which to lead a separate family life but who were lodged
in outhouses in the courtyard’87 was praebendarii, from praebere, ‘to provide’,
which underscores their dependence on the doles provided by the employer.
Thus, Wickham’s reiterated thesis of the ‘general dominance of tenant-
production’ throughout the period that he covers is too much of an abstraction
to give us any sense of the subtle ways in which relations of production
changed.88 Slavery was widespread in late antiquity and continued to be so in
the kingdoms that followed the Empire. What we have to try and reconstruct
are the estate-structures that used the labour of both slaves and coloni in a legal
and economic context where the differences between those groups became
increasingly irrelevant. Wickham does not confront the issue of late-antique/
early-medieval slavery in any serious way beyond the formal acknowledgement
that it survived as a legal condition. The implied conclusion is that the survival
of slavery in this more abstract sense had no implications for the way
landowners used labour or organised production. It is hard to believe that,
when the Spanish Church fought to retain control over manumitted slaves
(mancipia who had been freed by a previous bishop, for example), it was
seeking to retain control of tenants who, on manumission, were likely to
migrate elsewhere! Why would tenants in control of their own holdings and
work-process wish to leave in the first place? A closer reading of the conciliar
legislation shows that what these mancipia or servi owed the Church, before
and after manumission, were obsequia, that is, ‘services’, in other words, their
labour-power.89 Toledo IV, can. 73 (633) is especially revealing because it
shows that lay landowners used the same mechanisms to retain control over
the labour of freed people. The Council ruled that slaves who were freed by
masters who chose not to retain control of their services [obsequium] were free
to become clerics, but those who were still bound to employment [servitude
obnoxii] even after manumission because employers chose to ‘retain control of
their services’ could not be admitted.90 Throughout the sixth century, in fact,
the term mancipium was progressively extended to include former coloni.91
One upshot of this was that the word lost its strictly classical meaning
87. Duby 1968, p. 38.

88. Wickham 2005, p. 286.
89. Vives 1963, pp. 127, 151, 214ff., 303, 339–40.
90. Vives 1963, p. 216.
91. Lex Burgundionum 54 (501–16), about the seizure of mancipia and lands in the
Burgundian kingdom of Gaul; cf. Goffart 1980, pp. 127ff., translating mancipia by ‘bondsmen’
and arguing, correctly in my view, that they ‘can hardly be thought not to have numbered a
sizable proportion of coloni’ (p. 136); Ed. Theod. 142 (cf. Bluhme (ed.) 1875), which refers to
rustica utriusque sexus mancipia, etiamsi originaria sint, proof that the term covered coloni as well,
cf. Nehlsen 1972, pp. 125ff.; Test. Aredii, in Pardessus 1969, pp. 136ff. at 139, mancipia quae
(chattel-slave; in fact, the most reified expression for a slave) to function as a

generic description for a labour-force characterised by looser forms of bondage.
That the mancipia are consistently associated with domus (houses or dwellings)
in the seventh-century Merovingian charters92 suggests that this increasingly
undifferentiated labour-force was provided with allotments which, as Faith
remarks, ‘were of a size well calculated to prevent them becoming self-sufficient’.93
In the will of Aridius (late-sixth century) these allotments are called peculiaria
(from pecūlium, the assets managed by a slave) and what is interesting is that
these small plots of land cannot be sold or gifted away by their occupants.94
Thus, the labour-force of the early middle ages is probably best characterised
in the expression Faith uses for the late Anglo-Saxon inland, viz., a mixed-
servile labour-force.95 Wickham exaggerates the degree of control that peasants
had, either in the Roman countryside or in the early middle ages. To equate
the colonate with tenancy96 when we know that, for Wickham, ‘an agrarian
system based on tenancy is also one whose basic productive processes are under
peasant, not landlord, control’97 is to leave the reader with a strangely anodyne
picture of the late-Roman world. Who would dream of proposing a similar
argument for the Anglo-Saxon gebur or the Castilian collazos, both close
medieval counterparts of the late-Roman coloni, even if not actually descended
from them?98 Again, to describe the Visigothic servi as ‘unfree tenants’99 elides
the strictly Roman, classical-law meaning that servus retained in the barbarian
colonaria appellantur, ‘the mancipia who are called coloni’, from the will of Aridius of Limoges,
dated 572 or 591.
92. For example, Weidemann 1986; Pardessus 1969, No. 241; Busson and Ledru 1901,
pp. 158ff.; Chart. Lat. Ant. xiii–xiv, passim.
93. Faith 1997, p. 70.
94. Pardessus 1969, p. 138, which states that the mancipia just listed should be free to enjoy
possession of their peculiaria ‘on condition that they do not presume to sell or alienate them [ea
vero conditione ut nec vendere nec alienare praesumant]’.
95. Faith 1997, p. 252.
96. Wickham 2005, p. 272.
97. Wickham 2005, p. 264.
98. Faith 1997, pp. 76–84, especially pp. 80–1, on the gebur; Guglielmi 1967, especially
pp. 100ff. on the collazos. Aston 1958 (reprinted with a ‘Postscript’ in Aston, Coss, Dyer and
Thirsk (eds.) 1983) took Ine 67 (‘If a man takes a yard of land or more, at a fixed rent, and
ploughs it, [and] if the lord requires service as well as rent, he [the tenant] need not take the land
if the lord does not give him a dwelling . . .’ (Attenborough 1922, p. 59)) as evidence for the
existence of the manorial system in seventh-century Wessex. By contrast, Faith considers it ‘vital
and early evidence of the status of the inland population’. ‘The peasant with a yardland who is
housed and tied to the estate corresponds in several respects to the gebur’ (Faith 1997, p. 76). The
geburs were semi-free or bound tenants who formed part of the estate’s labour-force. Interestingly,
Anglo-Saxon legal works took them to be their nearest equivalent of the late-Roman colonus; this
was a recreation of forms, since no actual ancestry was implied here.
99. Wickham 2005, pp. 231 and 526–7, n. 17.
law-codes with the more purely medieval sense which the word acquired only
later, in the eighth century.100 Post-classical slavery was not a purely legal
determination. Leges Visigothorum ix.2.9 refers to estates being cultivated by
servorum multitudines (‘masses of servi’), an odd expression if all these servi was
a scatter of autonomous tenancies.101 It is much more likely that the servi were
‘simple farm-labourers on a home farm’, as P.D. King suggested,102 Visigothic
equivalents of Faith’s ‘farm servants huddled on the inland’. Under the
Ostrogoths, the Italian (coloni) originarii were reclassified as mancipia, and
their masters were now free to transfer them between estates,103 again suggesting
that if these were simply peasant-families, they certainly had little control over
their working lives. Of course, it does not follow that the typical post-Roman
large estate was organised in terms of gang-slavery, as Anderson supposes.104
What it does imply is that the post-Roman élites in Francia and Spain inherited
a tradition of direct management of the land which they saw no compelling
reason to abandon. This, arguably, was Rome’s most substantial economic
legacy, next to the vibrant monetary economy that the Umayyads inherited in
the eastern provinces.
The legacy of direct management

The direct management of the early middle ages105 was certainly a Roman
legacy.106 The contrary view, viz. that Roman landowners gave up direct
management when they abandoned the slave-mode (Wickham himself and,
for example, Pasquali),107 stems chiefly from Domenico Vera, but it is crucial
to note that Vera’s reconstructions lack any documentary-base even vaguely
comparable to the papyrological archives, Merovingian charters or Carolingian
inventories. (Reconstructing estate-management from a collection of letters,
even those of an aristocrat, is a bit like trying to grasp the structure of the
labour-process in a large manufacturing-firm from the correspondence of its
shareholders.)
100. For example, Goetz 1993, p. 35.

101. Zeumer 1902, p. 374.
102. King 1972, p. 169.
103. Nehlsen 1972, pp. 125ff.
104. Anderson 1974, p. 110.
105. Duby 1973, pp. 50, 100.
106. Cf. Modzelewski’s repeated insistence on this; the extinction of the Roman aristocracy
did not entail the dissolution of its estates, Modzelewski 1978, p. 41; also pp. 42–3, 50.
107. Pasquali 2002, p. 10, ‘Quasi del tutto assente sarebbe la gestione diretta, in vario modo
esercitata (con schiavi, con manodopera salariato, con lavoro coatto)’; and this about the
organisation of estates in late antiquity!
Having said this, it is, of course, equally clear that the stereotype of slave-
run latifundia being turned into serf-worked estates108 is no longer credible. As
the preceding pages suggest, and much of Wickham’s own argument shows,
the ‘transition’ was obviously much less straightforward. The continuity in
traditions of direct management did not imply a continuity of estate-structures.
The manor was a Frankish innovation, as were labour-services.109 Yet, the
serfdom of the central middle ages was shaped by and evolved out of the ‘long
continuities’ that were bound up with late-Roman traditions of labour-
management110 – the drive to create a tied labour-force, the increasing
stigmatisation of those workers, the peculiarly repressive laws regulating ‘valid’
marriages and the transmission of status, the more-or-less rapid emergence of
a servile labour-force where workers who were technically free (under Roman
law) were simply reclassified as servi/mancipia, something close to slaves, in
the barbarian law-codes. All of this flowed, with other, later developments (the
expansion of peasant-tenures which began in the seventh century, the evolution
of labour-services in the eighth, as well as the huge political changes of the
tenth and eleventh centuries) into creating the historically specific kind of
servitude known as ‘serfdom’. Equally important here was the retrieval of
Roman law in the twelfth century and the rôle it played in constructing,
‘encouraging the definition of ’, serfdom, both ideologically and legally,111 one
product of which was the late-Roman colonus as an abstract prototype of the
medieval serf. (This ‘autonomous’ history of law is a superb example of what
Marx described, with a sense of wonder, as the problem, the ‘really difficult
point’, of ‘how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations’.)112
None of this suggests that serfdom ‘descended’ from the colonate,113 and
acknowledging these manifold and converging trajectories is not equivalent to
writing a linear history. Given this framework, of the subtle interplay of
subliminal legacies, long continuities, historical innovation and political
rupture, it should be possible to go back to strands of a less complex continuist
history, such as that written by Pirenne for the ‘Merovingian epoch’, and
108. Notably Hilton 1976, p. 113, ‘the Roman nobility have been undergoing the process of
transformation into feudal nobles since the third century. Their slave-run latifundia have been
turned into serf-worked estates . . .’; about aristocrats in Italy and parts of Gaul.
109. Cf. the seminal Verhulst 1966, Rouche 1990, Rösener 1989, and Andreolli and
Montanari 1983.
110. I am indebted to Davies 1996, p. 238, for this expression.
111. Freedman 1991 and 1986.
112. Marx 1973, p. 109.
113. Cf. Shaw 1998, p. 40, stating that most recent scholarship is ‘even more dismissive than
he [Finley] was of any continuity between the “tied coloni” of the later Roman empire and the
“serfs” of western European feudal labour regimes’.
weave those strands into a history that is more densely textured à la Wickham.
Pirenne saw the survival of the large estate as a decisive link between the post-
Roman world and the middle ages proper. ‘Thanks to the domain, the economic
basis of the feudal system already existed ’.114 Here, Pirenne identifies the element
of continuity with the survival of Roman traditions of estate-management,
suggesting that they formed the ‘basis’ of the system that emerged later. Now,
in the period covered by Wickham’s study (400–800), most aristocratic estates
were organised on three basic models – villae, massae, and manors. (The East
had its own forms and is not considered here.) Of these, the manor was a
specifically medieval creation, so that Roman traditions of direct management
were chiefly embodied in the types called villae and massae. Massae were
substantial blocks of land, ‘consolidated estates’115 that were usually leased to
conductores, who are best described as ‘entrepreneur[s] engaged in short-term
financial speculation who assumed the management of the estate’ for the
period of the lease,116 and whose ranks might include members of the
aristocracy.117 They were more dominant in southern Italy and the islands than
anywhere else. A late-fifth-century massa that we know about contained the
standard ‘mixed-servile labour-force’ that I have argued was typical of the
post-Roman West, in this case, inquilini (here, simply another name for coloni)
and servi.118
The villae were the crucial transmission-belts of agrarian continuity. The
substantial Merovingian estates of the seventh century were called villae
because they were built on essentially Roman traditions of landholding and
management. Bishop Bertram of Le Mans owned over 74 ‘villae’, approximately
57 of these in undivided ownership.119 From the general description of their
features it is clear that these were physically compact or integrated estates, not
dispersed properties interspersed with the estates of others; for example, the
expression cum termino suo occurs repeatedly, referring to the outer boundaries
of the villa. As consolidated spaces, villae were susceptible to division
114. Pirenne 1968, p. 79; italics mine.

115. Finley 1975, p. 112.
116. Taken from Snowden 1986, p. 14, describing the massaro of early-twentieth century
Apulia.
117. The clarissimus John was willing to pay 10,000 solidi to lease Crown estates [ praedia] in
Apulia in the 520s, Cassiodorus, Var., 5.6 in Mommsen (ed.) 1894, p. 147.
118. P.Ital. 10–11, iv.1 (p. 292) (489). For inquilinatus = colonatus, cf. Sidonius Apollinaris,
Ep., 5. 19 (Loyen (ed.) 1960–70, t.2, p. 207). The inquilinus was otherwise a labour-tenant, cf.
Krause 1987, p. 272, and viewed as a kind of wage-labourer, Paulinus, Ep. 24.3 (cf. Hartel (ed.)
1894).
119. Weidemann 1986, p. 102.
(fragmentation) but also reconsolidation.120 Adriaan Verhulst describes this

typically Merovingian form as an ‘estate . . . directly cultivated by slaves, who
had no holding and lived on or near the centre of the estate. We may call it a
“demesne-centred” estate (Germ. Gutsbetrieb)’.121 My only quarrel with this
would be to prefer ‘slave and ex-slave farm servants’,122 since manumission was
widespread by the seventh century and employers often retained control of
their freed people.123 The main point, however, is that the typical Merovingian
estate exploited a landless workforce.124 In England, the counterpart of this
estate-structure, the inland, was only finally superseded in the twelfth century,
in a late and brutal development of the manorial system. By contrast, the villa-
form was distinctly archaic by the ninth century in large parts of the Continent125
and probably disappeared earliest in the core-regions of Frankish control
between the Loire and the Rhine, where the manor came to embody a new
form of labour-organisation, better resourced, bigger and more efficient.
That the Merovingian estates of the late sixth and seventh centuries were
not structural innovations but rooted in the cultural and economic continuities
of the successor-states would, in turn, have to be argued by constructing a
model of the late-Roman villa-estate. Like the Merovingian estate, the late-
Roman villa was sufficiently physically coherent or compact to have a name126
and, if it was substantial enough, to appear on maps or similar documents.127
Both textual and archaeological evidence for the grouping of workers in
settlements within the estate shows that these enterprises were based on a
resident labour-force.128 These settlements were called vici or casas; for example
the Anicii, destined to be one of the richest families of the fourth-century
aristocracy, owned several estates [villae] in the olive-growing regions along
the Libyan coast already by the third century, one of these called Casas villa
Aniciorum.129 This was a region characterised by massive flows of migrant-
labour, much of which may have been tribal. Large African estates retained
‘squads’ of seasonal workers for the harvest.130 Estates that handled their own
120. Ibid.
121. Verhulst 2002, pp. 34–5.
122. Faith 1997, p. 209.
123. For example, Finberg 1972, p. 435.
124. Sprandel 1968, p. 41; Verhulst 1966, p. 146.
125. Verhulst 1991, p. 202.
126. Lancel 1972–5a, p. 822ff., referring to the dozens of named estates in North Africa as
villae vel fundi.
127. Itin. Ant. 59–63 (in Cuntz (ed.) 1929), where six estates are named.
128. For example, CTh 9.42.8, listing mancipia, casarii, coloni (cf. Mommsen and Krueger
(eds.) 1905). The casarii were probably freed slaves who were given land as wages.
129. Itin. Ant., 61.2 (in Cuntz (ed.) 1929, p. 9).
130. Lancel 1972–5b, p. 978, where they are called turbae.
harvest were obviously ‘directly managed’. And it is clear from the archaeology
of the Spanish villas (villas, here, in an architectural and archaeological sense)
both that much of the labour-force was housed within the estate131 and that,
in Spain at least, there was a ‘substantial continuity’ in the organisation of
estates between the late-Roman and Visigothic periods.132
A major part of Wickham’s argument relates to the crisis of the villas,
meaning their progressive disappearance throughout the former provinces of
the western Empire. Villas, in this archaeological sense – of the actual structures
identified on the ground – disappear soonest in the northern parts of the
Empire and last of all in the core-Mediterranean regions that remained under
Roman control. In Italy, the fifth/sixth century is the period of the ‘definitive
dissolution of the villa system’,133 part of a much larger and complex
transformation of the landscape that happened between the third or fourth
and seventh centuries. Wickham downplays the catastrophist potential of this
image of the withering away of the villas, proposing a cultural explanation for
their demise. In another discussion of his book, I have suggested that all it
reflected was the crisis of the Western aristocracy, the progressive loss of control
of the countryside and its overall disintegration as a unified imperial class.134
Villas survived best where the established late-Roman aristocracy also survived,
for example Sicily, and simply disappeared elsewhere. But, clearly, the
emergence of new élites also had a cultural context and the two explanations
are easily complementary.
This raises a final issue, one which is central to Wickham’s analysis and the
most solid part of his book, viz. the considerable evidence for a crisis of the
aristocracy as a major part of the transition to the early middle ages. This, too,
should really come under the ‘reshaping of relations of production’, so that is
where I shall discuss it, briefly this time.
What happened to the aristocracy?

In Wickham’s reconstruction of the evidence, one major trend that runs across
the whole period from the fifth to the seventh centuries is the erosion of the
aristocracy. The late-Roman aristocracy survived longer in some places than in
others, but the late-sixth/early-seventh century was a watershed in most places
as the remnants of the senatorial class were finally absorbed, exterminated, or
dispersed, and a new kind of aristocracy stabilised (as in Francia) or began its
131. Chavarría 2004, p. 70.

132. Chavarría 2005, p. 280.
133. Francovich 2002, p. 150.
134. Banaji 2007, p. 261.
gradual – in England very gradual – emergence after 600. The best case of this
hiatus is Italy itself, for, as Wickham notes elsewhere, ‘even if it is possible to
track senatorial families down to the time of Gregory the Great, this is no
longer so in the seventh century, not even in Rome’.135 In other words, the
Italian aristocracy suffered large-scale disruption in the sixth century. This is
one model of what happened to the late-Roman aristocracy, but there are at
least three or four others, which shows how uneven the transition was and why
Wickham’s approach, grounded in an acute sense of local peculiarities, is
fundamental. This is a case where some degree of schematism may actually be
helpful.
Model (i): large-scale disruption is best attested by the fate of Italy’s aristocracy,
partially exterminated and otherwise destroyed by war and fragmentation at
various times throughout the sixth century. The Gothic war, started by
Justinian, was a disaster for the landed aristocracy.
Model (ii): aristocratic mutation, the emergence of a new kind of aristocracy,
more ‘medieval’ than late-antique. Francia is by far the best example, because
it is so well documented, not so much in Gregory of Tours’s sixth-century
narrative as in Book Four of the Chronicle of Fredegar, where the focus is the
early part of the seventh century and the intrigues of powerful factions of
the new Frankish ruling class.136 These precocious medieval nobilities (of the
subkingdoms or Teilreiche) were in place by 600,137 the products largely of
royal benefactions and of the considerable circulation of estates [villae] within
the ruling establishment (the Church included). Especially striking here is the
sheer mobility of landed property, related to the rapid reversal of political
fortunes in a landscape where rival kings fought to expand control and
consolidate support, but the result also of an intense competition for land and
a resilient land-market. The Lombards and Visigoths have their own (weaker)
counterparts of these processes, except that we know much less about them.
Tom Brown’s work shows that the same model can almost certainly be extended
to the Byzantine-controlled parts of peninsular Italy. Here, the Church
remained the only element of continuity, as an administration dominated by
military officials spawned new landed groups drawn from the military class; a
new kind of élite, in other words, whatever we choose to call it.138
Model (iii): survival. Sicily and Sardinia are the pure examples of this
pattern, microcosms of a late-Roman world frozen in time, the remnants of a
‘Western’ aristocracy basking in the protective gaze of the Eastern Empire.
135. Migliario and Wickham 1998, p. 680.

136. Wallace-Hadrill 1960.
137. James 1982, pp. 135–7; Sprandel 1961, p. 43; Lebecq 1990, pp. 138ff.
138. Brown 1984.
Here, probably well into the seventh century, all the basic institutions of late-
Roman civilian life – the colonate, money-taxes, the substantial circulation of
a gold-currency, and villas in the architectural late-Roman sense – continued
with no discernible break; a model that would, in modified form, apply to
North Africa as well, I think.139
Finally, model (iv): flight. A dispersion of the aristocracy which is best
exemplified by the fate of the families who had dominated the East
Mediterranean down to the Sasanian and Arab invasions of the seventh century
(roughly, 610–42). For example, emigration was a widespread response of the
Greek-speaking upper classes of the coastal towns of Syria.140 Or, again, on the
eve of the Arab invasion of Alexandria, several thousand of the wealthiest
families are reported to have fled by sea. When Carthage was besieged by
Ḥ assān b. al-Nuʿmān al-Ġ assānī in 695, the last late-Roman aristocracy of the
Mediterranean again fled, some to Sicily, others to Spain.141 Thus Model (iv)
is best reflected in the Byzantine-controlled parts of the Mediterranean that
fell to the Arabs, that is, the east and the south.
These are the broad patterns, then, at least outside the core-regions of the
Empire that did survive, though it is still hard to say what happened in England
in the fifth century. Wickham’s impression of a dramatic pullout seems likely,
though on one reading of the Welsh evidence that seems to have been much
less true of south-east Wales, where Roman legacies (massive estates and
charter-writing) may have suffered less dilution.142 On balance, I would be
less continuist than Wickham is for the East Mediterranean (he downplays
the flight of the aristocracy,143 as well as the massive disruption it suffered in
the Arab invasions) and less fixated on aristocratic impoverishment; after
all, the Umayyad élite was fabulously wealthy, North-African landowners
could pay substantial sums to buy off the Arabs in 647, decades after the
economic involution of Tunisia is supposed to have begun, and the top échelon
of the late-Roman aristocracy had in any case comprised a tiny fraction even
of the governing class.
139. Agnellus, Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis, 111 (in Holder-Egger (ed.) 1978, p. 350)
and Orsi 1910, pp. 64–5 (money); Gregory, Ep. 9.129 (599) (colonate); Gregory Ep. 4.23 (594)
(aristocracy) (cf. Gregory the Great 1891–99); Molinari 1995, pp. 224–5 (sites).
140. Caetani 1905–26, vol. 3, pp. 803ff.; Balty 1984, p. 500; Balty 1989, pp. 94–95.
141. Ibn al-Athīr 1898, p. 28; Ibn Khaldūn 1968–9, p. 213; with the date in Ṭāha 1989,
pp. 69–70.
142. Davies 1978a, Chapter 3, and 1978b.
143. For example, Wickham 2005, p. 241.
Final comments: Wickham and modes of production

A key-issue is how we characterise the dynamic of the late Empire. For
Wickham, the fiscal motor is central to this characterisation. Moreover, this
was a fiscality where taxation in money was less important than taxes in kind.
The coherence of the wider economy thus depended crucially on the transport
of bulk goods for fiscal needs and the infrastructures this threw up. On its
own, this fails to explain how it was possible for the Mediterranean to see such
a substantial growth in the money-supply in late antiquity. Since Wickham
has no obvious explanation for this, he tends to ignore it as well as the whole
tradition of historiography that made the monetisation of taxes central to the
conflicts of the fourth century. The accumulation of vast sums of gold in
private hands suggests a more complex set of relationships between the
aristocracy and the state, one where the neat division between them is less
obvious. Tension, clearly (the state was not reducible to the aristocracy and
their interests were often in collision), but also control and collusion, of which
the colonate serves as an excellent example: see, for instance, Peter Brown’s
perceptive query about the extent to which the bureaucracy’s ‘regulations on
the colonate colluded with the needs of the great landowners’.144 My own
analysis highlights other features of aristocratic dominance: huge monetary
expansion and a tax-system less dominated by payments-in-kind than Marx
believed or Wickham supposes;145 a widespread use of free labour coupled
with more rigorous forms of subordination that gave the aristocracy well-nigh
absolute control over the lives of their employees; and the fact that government
was defeated on the crucial issue of patrocinium.
Much of the analysis in ‘The Other Transition’, Wickham’s first mapping of
these issues, breaks down if we see state and aristocracy as integrated with each
other, and not as distinct groups in competition; in other words, if we see the
late-Roman state as essentially an aristocratic form of state, staffed and
controlled by an imperial aristocracy and the site of recurrent struggles between
different factions of the ruling class (rather than a ‘dominate’, ‘monarchy’, etc.,
the ideological representations it had of itself ). Consider the rôle played by the
state in encouraging the expansion of aristocratic properties and the emergence
of new élites; and consider the integration of functions like ‘tax’ and ‘rent’
through institutions such as the the domus divina (the state as landholder) and
144. Brown 1967, p. 337; Brown 2007, p. 62 (from Peter Brown’s review of Jones).
145. Marx 1973, p. 103, ‘in the Roman empire, at its highest point of development, the
foundation remained taxes and payments in kind. The money system actually completely
developed there only in the army’; yet he also states, correctly, that ‘the full development of
money, which is presupposed in modern bourgeois society, appears only in the period of their
dissolution’, referring to the Hellenistic monarchies and later-Roman Empire.
the pagarchy (the aristocracy as tax-collector), and the drive to tie labour to
estates. None of this suggests the kind of gap (in class-terms) that rival modes
of production would presume, which may be why both tax and rent are now
seen as ‘sub-types of the same mode of production’.146
Wickham’s characterisation of the feudal mode is unrepentantly structuralist.
There is no perceptible change in the stand taken in ‘The Other Transition’:
‘Hindess and Hirst . . . show, rightly in my view, that feudal relations are
represented simply by tenants paying rent to (or doing labour service for) a
monopolistic landowner class’.147 One disconcerting upshot of this is that
much of Roman history is brought under the ‘feudal mode’. It was, as he says
in Framing, ‘the normal economic system of the ancient and medieval periods’.148
The ‘economic shift from the slave to the feudal mode’ occurs ‘well before 400,
in particular in the second and third centuries’.149 Here, the feudal mode refers
simply to the expansion of tenancy; in this perspective, it would make no
sense to talk of a transition between modes of production, since the ‘feudal
mode’ is seen as expanding in a gradual, piecemeal fashion.
The trouble with Wickham’s use of these categories is that they lack any
sense of historical dynamism. There is nothing in the way they are constructed
that accounts for historical change. For Wickham, ‘mode of production’ can
have any of three distinct senses – i) as a form of exploitation (slaves/tenants/
wage-labourers), ii) as a form of organisation of labour (labour-service/slave-
plantations), and iii) as an economic system. At p. 284 of his book, ‘cultivated
by the slave-mode’ simply means cultivated by slaves, so too with ‘slave mode
exploitation’ at p. 301. At p. 273, ‘modes of production’ are equivalent to
‘labour relations’, and refer clearly to forms of organisation of labour, different
ways of organising the demesne.
For the feudal mode of production, Wickham prefers sense i), for the slave-
mode sense ii); this enables him to stretch the feudal mode as widely as
possible, on p. 535, or in his paper ‘El fin del Imperio Carolingio’, and
conversely to restrict the slave-mode of production to a specific time and place,
for example on p. 276 of Framing. Slaves ‘do not have to be organised according
to the slave mode’150 but Wickham prefers to avoid calling them ‘slaves’ if and
when they are not!
The form of exploitation seems to have the capacity to generate an entire
economic system through the kind of ‘economic logic’ embodied in it, for
146. Wickham 2005, p. 60.

147. Wickham 1984, p. 6.
148. Wickham 2005, p. 535.
149. Wickham 2005, p. 262.
150. Wickham 2005, p. 261.
example in his essay on the end of the Carolingian Empire,151 which is why
Wickham can equate modes of production with relations of exploitation, as in
the passage just cited where ‘estas distintas relaciones de explotación representan
distintos modos de producción’.
It would be foolish to deny that Marx’s handling of these categories was far
from finished. He never left us with a developed or mature theory of modes of
production, and a whole strand of his thinking on these issues can easily be
mobilised to support the sort of equations that Wickham works with. But
Marx also had a profoundly historical vision of what the different epochs or
periods or modes of production were, which is, of course, best demonstrated
in his analysis of capitalism. It is this second strand in his work that should
form the point of departure for us. Clearly, by the capitalist mode of production,
Marx meant more than the domination or widespread use of wage-labour, he
meant the laws of motion that are summed up in the accumulation and
competition of capitals. Since most of Capital was left unfinished, we do not
have a proper or complete description of the interaction of ‘many capitals’, the
most dynamic part of the system, and we tend to reduce the model to his
description of individual capital in Volume One, which is one of its most
abstract moments! In other words, ‘relations of production’, in Marx’s sense at
least, are just not reducible to the relations of exploitation depicted in Volume
One. They would have to include competition, credit, share-capital, moments
that each had an Abschnitt in the 1857 plan, as well as the ‘world-market’ and
‘crises’ to which he planned to devote the final book, all of which were concrete
determinations that Marx must, presumably, have lumped together in the
general heading ‘shapes of the total process’ that was the proposed subject-
matter of ‘Book Three’ in the 1865/6 plan.152 The point here is that, by
‘capitalist relations of production’, Marx clearly meant all of this and not just the
general form of exploitation described with such lucidity in Volume One.
151. Wickham 1995, p. 18, in a passage that resonates with the imagery of different modes
of production or forms of exploitation (for Wickham, the same thing) co-existing in competition:
for example, in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, exaction of the peasant-surplus by landlords
(‘feudal exploitation’) was supplemented by, and partly in competition with, fiscal exactions
from both landowners and peasants alike. ‘In another paper, I have suggested that these distinct
relations of exploitation represent distinct modes of production, insofar as each is defined by a
different economic logic . . . [En otro estudio he propuesto que estas distintas relaciones de
explotación representan distintos modos de producción, por cuanto tienen una lógica económica
diferente . . .]’; emphasis mine.
152. Rosdolsky 1974, pp. 24ff.
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Agency and Ethics, Past and Present
Kelvin Knight
London Metropolitan University
K.Knight@londonmet.ac.uk
Abstract
Chris Wickham’s work appears to be motivated by an implicit ethic of ‘protagonism’ or praxis.
This essay attempts to explicate that ethic. It argues that his work indicates why and how
historical materialism, having abandoned historical teleology, should be combined with a
teleological ethics.*
Keywords
Chris Wickham, Alasdair MacIntyre, practices, ethics, peasantry, teleology
A great work of social and economic history cannot but have ethical
implications. This is the case with Rodney Hilton’s studies of the late-medieval
English peasantry, Christopher Hill’s work on the seventeenth-century ‘English
Revolution’, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World, and, most transparently, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English
Working Class. Each of these issued from a British tradition of Marxist
historiography that felt the tension within a ‘science/ethics’-polarity and
honed an ‘ethical edge’ in evoking ‘lost rights’1 and in writing ‘history from
below’. This edge was sharpest in Thompson’s concern with ‘agency’. ‘Readers
of William Morris or The Making of the English Working Class will be aware that
this is the key organizing theme of Thompson’s entire work’, observed Perry
Anderson.2 What Thompson intended by ‘agency’ includes class-struggle, but
also much more besides. It refers to the human capacity for self-directed
action. As a historian, his task was to illustrate when and how agency had been
exercised by ordinary workers. Agency involves effectiveness, power. The
effectiveness with which he was concerned is exercised less over others than
* Thanks to Paul Blackledge and Brian Boyd.

1. Schwarz 1982, pp. 71, 75, 69.
2. Anderson 1980, p. 16.
146 K. Knight / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 145–174
over oneself, as a process of individual and collective self-making. Such agency

requires freedom from, and resistance against, domination by others, as a
condition of exercising one’s capacity to change one’s self. In writing of the
‘moral realism’ of William Morris, who combined Marxism’s critique of
capitalism with ‘the Romantic critique . . . grounded in an appeal to pre-
capitalist values’, he adopted the expression ‘the education of desire’3 to describe
the same kind of activity of self-making that he described in a more collective
and historical way in The Making of the English Working Class.
Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (henceforth, ‘Framing’) is
now the greatest single work of scholarly synthesis within this tradition of
Marxist historiography. That its author stands within the tradition is evident
from his editorship of its organ, Past and Present,4 and from his membership of
‘the Birmingham school of Hilton and his pupils’.5 That the book stands within
this tradition is evident from its central concern with recounting ‘history from
below’, and, like Hilton, from the perspective of a peasantry who exercised
‘agency’ and ‘self-assertiveness’ ‘as actors in their own lives’, and who were
capable of ‘flourish[ing] independently’.6 Wickham’s previous monographs
have written this perspective back into the history of the land of urban
renaissance. Framing, in contrast, looks not only wider but also earlier,7 and
more theoretically. Wickham here explicates concerns that appear to predate
and inform, but which are nonetheless largely silent, in his many other empirical
and scholarly publications. I will say more of these motivating and political
concerns below, and will suggest something of their ethical nature and potential.
First, I will explore Framing’s theorisation of the early-medieval peasantry.
Wickham’s framing of peasant-protagonism

Where Thompson spoke of workers’ ‘agency’, Wickham often writes in
Framing of ‘peasant protagonism, of autonomous peasant initiatives’.8 In so
3. Thompson 1976, pp. 717, 783, 791; Thompson’s emphasis.

4. The journal’s title echoes the romanticism of Thomas Carlyle, whose own Past and Present
was described by Thompson as ‘a blistering Old Testament attack on the morality of industrial
capitalism, contrasted with an idealized picture of life in the monastery of St. Edmundsbury in
the twelfth century . . . with occasional gleams of the profoundest revolutionary insight’ and a
‘constant emphasis on the value of work [as] the root of life’ (Thompson 1976, pp. 29, 32).
5. Wickham 2007a, pp. 37–8. He calls Hilton his ‘colleague and friend’, to whom he ‘owes
more . . . intellectually than to anyone else in his career’ (Wickham 2007b, p. 328).
6. Wickham 2002, p. 7.
7. In Wickham 1988a, his earlier study of the ‘Early Middle Ages’, he denoted by this the
period 700–1200.
8. Wickham 2005, p. 435.
K. Knight / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 145–174 147
doing, he resists the academic prejudice that ‘peasantries undergo history, rather
than acting in it, and that even when peasants take on political positions they
do not really understand them’.9 He also often writes of peasant-‘action’, relating
this to ‘choice’. But his concern is almost always with action that is undertaken
in pursuit of some collective goal or cause. This is the implication of the term
‘protagonism’, even when he once refers to ‘female peasant protagonists’,10 and
even when he writes of the ‘protagonism’ of peasants’ aristocratic antagonists.
In short, the language of protagonism suggests a class-perspective and, moreover,
the perspective not merely of a class-in-itself but, also, of the intentionality of
a class acting for itself, in resistance to its opponents.
For Wickham, there is nothing at all mysterious about this. Apart from the
light cast by Marxist theory, it may not be at all obvious to either a slave or a
wage-worker that a surplus is extracted from their labour by those who direct
their labour and own the material means of their production. However,
Wickham proposes, the reality of surplus-extraction is immediately apparent
to a peasant. What most distinguishes peasants from both slaves and
proletarians (and, come to that, from salaried service-workers) is that they
direct their own labour and that they either own or, at least, control the means
of their production. It is therefore all too obvious to peasants or tenant-farmers
when a surplus is appropriated from them by landowners or states in the form
of rent (in money, labour, or agricultural produce) or tax. Therefore, in a
reversal of what is traditionally assumed by most Marxists in the metropole,
Wickham proposes that peasants more often understand themselves as a class
with a shared interest in opposition to their exploiters than do proletarians.
That this is so is hidden by peasant-illiteracy, whilst the effective scope
of peasant-protagonism is often limited geographically to the protagonists’
own village. In the early middle ages, it was almost always limited to their
own locality. Nonetheless, Wickham is happy to talk of ‘peasant political
protagonism’.11
‘The clearest sign of protagonism’ is ‘revolt’, says Wickham,12 whilst
conceding that large-scale peasant-revolts are hard to detect in the early middle
ages in Europe (although notable in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East).13
In this, his period differs from the later middle ages and early modernity in
9. Fentress and Wickham 1992, pp. 101–2.

10. Wickham 2005, p. 556. He does refer to ‘individual peasants confronting landlords in
court’ and to individual ‘violence’ at pp. 578–9, but nowhere to individual ‘protagonism’.
11. Wickham 2005, pp. 533, 580 (‘protagonists’) and 828; emphasis added. See also
Wickham 2007c, p. 310.
12. Wickham 2005, p. 440.
13. Wickham 2005, pp. 140–3; Wickham 2003a, pp. 574–5.
Western Europe – when ‘Rodney [Hilton]’s peasants were joined by his urban
artisans, as makers, sellers, and, again, fighters’14 in revolts associated with the
names of Wat Tyler and Thomas Müntzer – and from the first three-quarters
of the twentieth century elsewhere. Wickham explains this in arguing that
‘large-scale revolt’ occurs in ‘resistance to states’ that have become ‘powerful
and interfering’.15 To illustrate this in Framing (in concluding his consideration
of ‘peasantries’), he looks a little beyond the titular end of his period – 800, the
seminal year of Charlemagne’s coronation as the new Roman emperor – to the
Stellinga-revolt of Saxon peasants against Carolingian oppression. He credits
this ‘large-scale’ revolt with ‘a clear and even practical programme’ of ‘rolling
back the social changes of the last two generations’ and with posing ‘a real
danger to feudal power’. What this demonstrates is that ‘peasants were
conscious of increases in aristocratic power, and were opposed to them’. More
than this, ‘peasants knew’ that ‘pressure on land, on rents, and on status’ were
‘the markers of the advance of the feudal mode’ of production, ‘and resisted it
where they could’.16
Peasant-protagonism is, then, the collective agency of peasants exercised in
a common cause. This cause is that of the defence and extension of their
shared interests, communities and, as Wickham often puts it, ‘autonomy’.
Sometimes, autonomy is to be understood literally, as when he describes
‘peasant cultural autonomy from urban/aristocratic values’ in terms of peasants
running ‘their lives by their own rules’,17 but more often ‘autonomy’ is intended
as something less nomological. Even before Framing, he was recognised as
‘exceptional in making clear the distinction between community (as a matter
of collective identities and social relations) and formal, institutional autonomy’.18
In an earlier monograph, he had protested against legal historians’ supposition
‘that early medieval society, like contemporary society . . . was a world of
institutions’. Instead, he argued that ‘villages had networks of explicitly
characterized cooperative relationships [which] depended less on developed
rules than on relationships between people’, and that these villages therefore
‘consisted of sets of consciously regulated interactions between members of a
social group, rather than being clear-cut institutions that existed independently
14. Wickham 2002, p. 7.

15. Wickham 2005, p. 529. This is corroborated by, for example, Bercé 1990.
16. Wickham 2005, p. 587. For a slight qualification of this high estimation of peasant class-
consciousness, see Wickham 1998a, p. 22, where he proposes that late-medieval peasants more-
readily understood their oppression by the state than by local landlords. On later revolts, see
Wickham 2003a, pp. 568–72.
17. Wickham 2005, p. 462.
18. Reynolds 1997, p. xxxvii, reciprocating Wickham’s commendation of her analysis of
‘changing patterns of collective activity’; Wickham 1994a.
of them’.19 Still earlier, he protested that historians too-readily reconstruct

rules ‘from isolated examples of practices’ in the mistaken belief that there was
some ‘set of fixed rules, which everyone normally followed. It cannot have
been like that.’ Although ‘rules are . . . easier to compare than practices . . . . we
have to confront the harder task of comparing, not rules, but the sets of local
practices that constituted whole societies’.20 Here, he draws on the work of
numerous others, including W.G. Runciman’s comparativist application of a
concept of ‘practices – functionally defined units of reciprocal action informed
by the mutually recognized intentions and beliefs of designated persons about
their respective capacity to influence each other’s behaviour by virtue of their
roles’,21 and he similarly applies such a concept in Framing, ‘aiming . . .
throughout this book’ at comparison ‘between patterns of social relationships
and practices rather than abstract rules’.22 Broadly, we might say that Framing
presents a historically-‘continuist’ account of practices but a discontinuist
account of nomological institutions in the early middle ages.23
Wickham’s distinction between social practices and formal institutions
might be hampered by traditional ‘Marxist reasoning’. The thought here is
that ‘Marxist reasoning’ holds ‘that peasant communities . . . would have been
formed when heavier seigniorial pressure created a new class solidarity’,24 and
this thought resonates with what Wickham says of peasant-protagonism.
However, Wickham’s Marxism embraces not only class-agency but also a more
structural dimension, which concerns what Thompson called the ‘conditioning’
of consciousness and agency.25 One aspect of this relates to what he says of
those ‘village societies’ that he identifies precisely as peasant-communities. He
does not say that ‘the common village identity’ with its ‘collective collaboration’
was formed in reaction to seigniorial pressure, but nor does he say that it was
‘made’, in a Thompsonian sense, by peasants. On the contrary, he argues (with
regard to ‘the West’) ‘that the end of [aristocratic] villas . . . invented the village
for them’, and that this is what led them to consciously ‘construct territorial
forms of co-operation’.26 Here his identification of peasant-communities
19. Wickham 1998b, pp. 2, 5–6.

20. Wickham 1994b, p. 207.
21. Runciman 1989, p. 41; Runciman’s emphasis. Compare Wickham 1991, especially
pp. 192 and 200.
22. Wickham 2005, p. 384.
23. See, for example, Wickham 2005, p. 12. On the eventual re-establishment of what
Wickham regards as formal, political institutions, in place of more informal and clientelistic
relationships, see especially Wickham 1998b, pp. 233–8.
24. Reynolds 1997, p. xxxvii.
25. Thompson 1968, p. 9.
26. Wickham 2005, pp. 514–15.
differs from much Marxist reasoning as well as from such clearly non-Marxist
reasoning as that of Werner Rösener, who dates ‘the spatial dimensions within
which the medieval roots of the European peasantry took hold . . . back mainly
to the Frankish Empire’.27
A crucial aspect of Wickham’s Marxist and structural reasoning in Framing
is his specification of a ‘peasant mode of production’.28 So pervasive does he
here consider this mode to have been in early-medieval northern Europe that
he writes also of entire ‘peasant mode societies’, or ‘tribal societies’, that were
‘ranked’ by ‘status differences’ but not by class.29 Previously, he had dismissed
‘the vogue among Marxists for a Chayanovian “peasant mode of production” ’.30
He can still now claim that ‘tax- and rent-taking from the peasantr[y is]
ultimately the crucial structuring element for all medieval economic systems’,31
and this had been his justification for rejecting the claims made by the likes of
Harbans Mukhia for the extent and significance of peasants’ control over their
own labour.32 At that time, his case for the singular significance of feudalism
contrasted with an ‘endless’ plurality of those ‘non-exploitative modes’ that
‘underlie exploitative modes’.33 Now, he subsumes local differences within the
singular ideal-type of a peasant-mode (whilst also, which is not the concern of
this paper, broadening feudalism conceptually, geographically and temporally
to include what he previously differentiated as surplus-extraction from peasants
through tax or tribute). In Framing, although still not turning to Chayanov’s
account of the rationality of peasant-economy, he refers to Pierre Bourdieu,
27. Rösener 1994, p. 30.

28. Wickham 2005, pp. 261, 535–47.
29. Wickham 2005, pp. 304ff.
30. Wickham 1994c, p. 17. In this, he was consistent with Paul Hirst; see below, and Ennew,
Hirst and Tribe 1977, and Cutler, Hindess, Hirst and Hussain 1977, pp. 283–4. Hilton found
Chayanov ‘interesting’ and ‘suggestive’, dismissing only any implication of a ‘view of history
which effectively merges all pre-industrial societies together’; Hilton 1975, pp. 7–8. This was an
objection that he raised, pointedly, in a paper originally published in the first volume of The
Journal of Peasant Studies; Hilton 1990a. It was an objection that he also raised against other
theoretical approaches that similarly presented ‘the medieval family and community as though
they were isolated and self-regulating social groups’, and that therefore failed to identify any
‘prime mover’ of medieval society toward capitalism; Hilton 1976, pp. 28–9. Nonetheless, his
own concern for historical specificity is itself strongly suggestive of a peasant-mode of production,
given that he was happy to ‘emphasize . . . the self-managed peasant holding and the co-operative
element between these self-managed units’ and to conjoin this emphasis with the claim that
‘peasant communities in possession of their holdings pre-dated the feudal lords who established
power over them’ (Hilton 1990b, p. 5; at p. 1, Hilton acknowledges Chris Wickham for his
comments on this paper, which was first published in 1983).
31. Wickham 2004, p. 174.
32. Wickham 1994d; cf. Mukhia 1985.
33. Wickham 1994d, p. 45.
Marshall Sahlins, Claude Meillassoux, Maurice Godelier and others in support

of the proposition that there are economic rationalities or ‘logics’ apart from
the accumulative logics of capitalism and, more generally, of class-exploitation.
Nor does he refer only to ‘economic’ logic and accumulation; he adds that
there are what we might call political or social logics in feudalism and the
state, in which what is accumulated is not only wealth, but also coercive and
military power.
Another significant aspect of Wickham’s structuralist reasoning might be
his use of the concept of articulation. ‘Articulation’ is a word that he uses
liberally in Framing, and with a wide variety of senses. Nowhere does he offer
a definition of the term, but its focal meaning concerns the synchronic relation
between different modes of production within a concrete society or ‘social
formation’. Here, those are the feudal mode (the origins of which he identifies
long before the Empire’s demise) and the peasant-mode. Although he says that
under feudalism peasants retain a relative autonomy in their ‘control’ of both
their land and, more crucially and clearly, their own labour (and although, in
subsequent reference to Framing, he has indicated that ‘peasants dominated
the basic structures of production [even where] lords dominated the basic
structures of exchange’),’34 he expressly argues that even where tenanted
peasantries enjoy such ‘de facto economic autonomy’ this occurs only as an
aspect of ‘the feudal mode’ of production.35 Feudalism is ‘a whole economic
system’ ‘based on agrarian surplus extracted . . . . from the peasant majority’,36
and in conceptualising it – albeit as an ‘ideal-type’, as he frequently insists – he
draws on a Spanish historiography that contrasts it with peasant-society.37 His
view is therefore not that the two modes coexist in the sense that the articulation
of different modes has sometimes been posited of modern Africa, Asia or Latin
America, whereby the process of production is understood in terms of one
mode but the process of expropriation in terms of another. Rather, the two
modes appear, on his account, to be articulated only in the sense that one
exists in what he calls geographical ‘leopard-spots’ within a wider countryside
dominated by the other (cities being the residences of the aristocracy, in this
pre-castle period). It seems that the issue of whether a given social formation
should be understood in terms of the peasant- or feudal mode turns on whether
or not a surplus sufficient to support an aristocracy and state is expropriated
34. Wickham 2007a, p. 47.

35. See Wickham 2005, pp. 260–2.
36. Wickham 2005, pp. 60–1.
37. Wickham 2005, pp. 7, 41, 99, 231. For a survey in English of that Spanish historiography,
see Cortázar and Sopena 2007. Spain is an area that yields exceptional archaeological and other
evidence for autonomous peasant-communities through much of the early middle ages.
in an institutionalised or ‘systematic way’,38 irrespective of whether it is

extracted in the legal form of tax or of rent. Therefore, the idea of articulation
would seem to have far less significance than Wickham’s frequent usage of the
term might suggest.
What turns out to be more important is class, and class-struggle. Peasants
either live in a classless peasant-society, in which they are autonomous, or in
feudal society, in which they are exploited. In England, the transition from the
one to the other was so gradual that it was seldom perceived or, therefore,
opposed by peasants. Elsewhere, they were often far more aware of what was
at issue. There and then, class-interest and consciousness led to peasant-
protagonism; where possible, revolt, where not, smaller acts of disruption or
resistance. On Wickham’s account, a clear contrast of peasant- and feudal
logics is likely to lead, not to their structural articulation, but to conflict.
Wickham refers to James Scott,39 especially, when describing how their own
economic rationality motivates peasants to acts of resistance and sabotage
against political oppression and economic exploitation. However, whereas
Scott writes of ‘the moral economy of the peasant’,40 Wickham treats ‘moral’
as a pejorative term. For example, elsewhere he commends those who avoid
morality to ‘focus on explanation’ and criticises presentation of the ‘hard
frontiersman’ or ‘peasant as hero’, not merely in the sense of ‘individual
heroism’, but also in any claim that peasant-‘practices are heroic’.41 Nonetheless,
it is perhaps revealing that when he embarked on the systematic task of
‘find[ing] early medieval peasants’ and theorising ‘how a “peasant-based”
socio-economic system can actually be conceived of as working’42 he had
himself focussed upon the Iceland retrospectively recorded by Snorri Sturluson43
(and beloved of Morris),44 which has often been described as a ‘heroic society’45
(and was clearly a ‘frontier’ one). Certainly, early-medieval Iceland was a
relatively egalitarian society in which there was little cause for ‘resistance’.46 He
described this society through explicit engagement, not with Marxist theorists
38. See Wickham 2005, p. 261.

39. Wickham 2005, pp. 440, 530, 585. He also cites Scott when specifying kinds of peasant-
resistance in other works, especially Wickham 1998a, pp. 14–15, 18ff.
40. Scott 1976.
41. Wickham 1994a, pp. 133, 141–3; Wickham’s emphases.
42. Wickham 1994b, pp. 215–16.
43. Wickham 1994b, pp. 217–20.
44. See Thompson 1976, pp. 176–91.
45. Most relevantly (see below) by Alasdair MacIntyre, in MacIntyre 2007, pp. 121ff. It
should be immediately added that MacIntyre has always been fundamentally opposed to any
kind of völkisch romanticism as has Wickham (see, for example, MacIntyre 1998a, p. 241).
46. Wickham 1998a, p. 8.
of a peasant-mode of production, but with ‘romantic’ theorists of free peasant-

communities, and warned against any historiographically-inspired fear of
falling ‘back into Romanticism if one identifies free peasants’.47 He has never
gone so far as to commend Otto von Gierke, but he has commended Frederic
Maitland, having ‘not seen anyone successfully refute him.48 In Framing, he is
more critical of both Maitland and ‘the Gemeinfreie theory’49 but, even so, he
now employs Denmark (and, more speculatively, ‘Malling’)50 ‘as a model for a
“free” social system’51 and describes villages as ‘the physical carriers of a more
organic form of peasant co-operation’.52
Even if he resists talk of ‘moral economy’, Wickham’s ‘acceptance of the
principle that different modes of production have different economic logics’
leads him toward Karl Polanyi’s ‘ “substantivist” ’ position.53 We have already
seen him write of ‘peasant cultural autonomy from urban/aristocratic values’,
which implies that peasant-cultures and economies have their own ‘values’. We
could infer that ‘where peasant choices determined the economic system’,54
these values would be socially effective. As he says elsewhere, citing Bourdieu,
‘unless people are aware of social structures . . . they do not happen’; that is,
there is no ‘re-creation of the structures’.55 So, what are these values? Wickham
tells us that ‘in the ideal-type peasant mode . . . exchange is reciprocal, embedded
in the network of social relationships, and also based on need’. Although
‘peasant mode societies are not necessarily egalitarian’, social sanctions prevent
‘both wealth and power from accumulating’ and economic surpluses ‘are
generally given away’, whilst ‘village level economic decision-making [is] the
crucial element’. We might suspect that such an ideal type is not only heuristic
47. Wickham 1994b, p. 204. For a broad, if questionable, overview of the ideological and
political conflict between Marxist and ‘romantic’ conceptions of the peasantry, see Mitrany
1961.
48. Wickham 1994b, p. 215.
49. Wickham 2005, pp. 322–3; see also pp. 551, 570.
50. Wickham 2005, pp. 428–33.
51. Wickham 2005, p. 54; he still includes numerous references to Iceland, even though this
is not one of the regions which he compares systematically.
52. Wickham 2005, p. 515; emphasis added. This emphasis on village-cooperation departs
from much Gemeinfreie theory insofar as this (like Marx, in the Grundrisse, and like Engels, in
‘The Mark’ and elsewhere) emphasises the freedom of the isolated farmstead.
53. Wickham 2005, p. 695. See also, especially, Wickham 2004, pp. 162, 170. At Wickham
2007a, p. 45, he compares ‘Marx’s implicit substantivism’ with the explicit substantivism of
Polanyi, in contrast to ‘Marx’s teleology’. Scott cites Polanyi as the greatest inspiration for his
own work; Scott 1976, p. 5.
54. Wickham 2005, p. 539.
55. Wickham 1998a, p. 23; Wickham’s emphases. In his careful study of practices, including
the manipulation of laws, in Wickham 2003b, he again fully acknowledges Bourdieu’s theoretical
authority on the subject.
but also normative or moral, and such a suspicion might deepen when we hear
Wickham defend these characteristics against their interpretation ‘as markers
of the failure, the inferiority, of the early middle ages; I would prefer to see
them as functional . . . and as signs of a peasant . . . economic logic’.56 Where
this logic is prevalent, peasants work by their own rules, engage in their own
practices, and make their own lives. Even if Wickham’s account of the peasantry
is free of the kind of ‘moral exemplification, class-based hostility and contempt’57
that was famously ridiculed by Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, there
is no hiding that he regards peasant-protagonism, peasant-autonomy and the
peasant-mode of production as three thoroughly ‘good things’.
Reframing protagonism, ethically and teleologically

I have so far located Wickham’s work within a tradition of Marxist
historiography of which I have portrayed Thompson as the greatest exemplar.
I shall now problematise that account. At the outset, I repeated the claim that
this tradition felt the tension within a ‘science/ethics’-polarity and honed an
‘ethical edge’. Wickham, too, says that ‘history is better if it has . . . an
uncomfortable edge, a critical edge’, but the ‘subversive edge’58 he wishes to
hone is one that cuts values off from facts, ethics from explanations.
Wickham’s resistance to the terminology of ‘moral economy’ here becomes
significant, because the term is one that Scott took from The Making of the
English Working Class59 and, also, from Thompson’s widely influential ‘The
Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’.60 Like
Making, and, like Framing, the latter essay aimed to controvert the view that
‘the common people can scarcely be taken as historical agents’, as ‘self-
activating’61 protagonists. They could, Thompson observed, resist by direct
action, rioting. But Thompson’s point was much more than a record of popular
protest. It was that such protest was informed by a coherent and consistently-
held ethic, and that popular agency was economically and politically effective
in long maintaining that traditional ethic. That ethic embedded commerce in
wider social relations and in the intentional meeting of material needs, but
56. Wickham 2005, pp. 537–40; Wickham’s emphasis.

57. Wickham 2005, p. 383.
58. Wickham 2007a, p. 36.
59. Thompson 1968, p. 68.
60. Thompson 1991a. It was originally published in Past and Present in 1971. Scott 1976
only makes a couple of direct references to Thompson’s essay (although also referring to Hilton,
Hill and Hobsbawm). He acknowledges his debt to Thompson more fully in Scott 2000.
61. Thompson 1991a, p. 185.
was eventually overcome by the rival economic rationality propounded by

Adam Smith. Before that, the price of bread was ethically constrained not by
the laws of the free market but by state-law and local custom, often enforced
by popular action. Or, rather, ‘the market’, the agora, was not abstracted
theoretically from the local place where people met, talked, interacted and,
‘because they were numerous, felt for a moment that they were strong’.62
Later, in ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, Thompson took issue with such
critics as those who, from the perspective of ‘Cambridge political thought’,
dismissed his ‘ “antinomy” ’63 of a traditionalist-moral economy and a new
political economy, and who instead contextualised Smith himself within a
tradition of natural jurisprudence.64 Thompson did not indict their own
history of philosophy, but he did defend his antinomy of Smith’s abstractions
and, on the other hand, a kind of agency that may have found intellectual
legitimation in a ‘paternalist model’ but had more-immediate moral
justification in ways that ‘will not pass by King’s College, Cambridge’.65 Such
ways are analysed and explained by Scott, and Thompson commends his
‘transportation into peasant studies’ of the term moral economy in basing
‘ “peasant conceptions of social justice” . . . in peasant culture universally’, in
showing how defence of peasant-society has ‘provoked the peasantry to
participation in revolutionary movements’, and in showing ‘how hegemony
is . . . articulated in the everyday intercourse of a community’.66 Wickham
need not disagree with any of this, but he provokes the question of whether his
Marxist and structuralist reasoning might hamper him from answering
Thompson’s call ‘for forward research’ and ‘comparative enquiry into what is
“the moral” ’ of moral economy.67
Having been ‘young enough to be influenced by the structuralist debate’,68
Wickham gave a critical edge to his first publications by drawing on the
most-radically structuralist kind of Marxist historiography around, which was
that of Paul Hirst. Retrospectively, he notes that he did so ‘unfashionably
late’, when others ‘began to read Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu’ following ‘the
sudden death’ of Poulantzas and ‘eclipse’ of Althusser ‘as structuralist gurus in
1980–1’.69 Unlike Hirst, who could ‘not hide [his] sorrow and distress at these
62. Thompson 1991a, pp. 256–7.

63. Thompson 1991b, p. 274, quoting Hont and Ignatieff 1984, p. 15.
64. Hont and Ignatieff 1984, pp. 26ff.
65. Thompson 1991a, p. 208; Thompson 1991b, p. 350.
66. Thompson 1991b, pp. 345, 341, 342, 344–5, quoting Scott 1976.
67. Thompson 1991b, p. 351.
68. Wickham 1988b, p. 78.
69. Wickham 2007a, pp. 33–4.
events’,70 Wickham made no direct reference to the work of Althusser and, as

‘a practising historian’ who prefers his ‘theory as intermingled as possible with
historical example’,71 he might have been thought ill-suited to Hirst’s
radicalisation of Althusser’s theoretical practice. Despite this, and despite
having ‘started with [Anderson’s] analysis’ in his own account of ‘the fall of the
Roman empire in the West in Marxist terms’,72 Wickham came to agree ‘almost
totally’ with Hirst’s thoroughgoing critique of Anderson in ‘The Uniqueness
of the West’. Although Hirst here denounced Anderson’s comparativist
methodology as a ‘speculative empiricism’ that ‘displaces Marxism’,73 we need
not presume that Wickham agreed with this critique. What he certainly did
agree with was Hirst’s critique of the ‘teleology’ implicit in Anderson’s
metanarrative of European development. Along with this, he appears to have
taken from Hirst the Althusserian idea that it is a methodological virtue to
exclude any ethical concern from one’s positing of science.
There was a political point to Wickham’s turn to Hirst, just as there was a
political point to the theorising of Hirst and Althusser, and Wickham now
complains that his ‘two articles about the fall of the western Roman empire’
were, unfortunately, read ‘as neutral pieces of structural analysis’ rather than
‘in political terms’.74 In his own ‘The Uniqueness of the East’, he proposed
that ‘socialist relations can ensue’ where protagonism succeeds and peasants
‘win’, as in ‘twentieth-century Albania or China or Cuba’.75 Here, unlike as in
the early middle ages, peasant-armies, motivated (as he has said more recently)
by the ‘ideal’ of ‘full-scale land reform’ propounded by ‘socialist movements’76
and informed by the Marxism of organic intellectuals, had overthrown states
70. Hirst 1985a, p. ix. I am one of many who felt similarly after Paul’s own premature death.
71. Wickham 1988b, p. 64.
72. Wickham 1994d, p. 43. In Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Anderson proposes that
‘the survival of communal village lands and peasant allods from pre-feudal modes of production’
allowed significant ‘peasant autonomy and resistance’, and that the ‘coexistence’ of property-
forms ‘was constitutive of the feudal mode of production in Western Europe’ (Anderson 1974,
pp. 148, 150). A note may be added here on Wickham’s often-uncritical use of non-Marxist
historical terminology. At Wickham 1994d, p. 43, Wickham says that to not admit his debt to
Anderson would be ‘churlish’. Similarly uncritically, he adopts the Aristotelian expression
‘aristocracy’ from its revival by late-medieval ideological legitimators of feudalism’s ruling class.
Such usages highlight ways in which Wickham’s otherwise-exemplary methodology could be
supplemented by greater attention to the history of ideas, not least as reasons for action.
73. Hirst 1985b, pp. 96, 124.
74. Wickham 2007a, p. 33.
75. Wickham 1994d, p. 71.
76. Wickham 1998a, p. 22.
and established ones of a new type, in what he may still now be tempted to
regard as the peasantry’s revenge for historic defeats.77
The idea that peasants might create socialism was thoroughly alien to the
Marxism of the Second, Third and, even, Fourth Internationals. On their
account, the task of social revolution belonged to the proletariat, and any idea
that socialism could be created before capitalism had performed its historic
task of developing the technological forces of production was necessarily
utopian and wrong. Their idea was that the historical prerequisite of socialism
is the development of technology to a point at which material superabundance
can be effected and therefore distributive conflict ended, and that when and
only when humans are fully conscious that this condition exists in potentia can
and will they successfully act to bring it into being. To deny causal and
historical primacy to the forces of production, and to accord theoretical
primacy instead to production’s social and class-relations (let alone to any
more-‘superstructural’ parts of a social formation, or to modes of dominance
and expropriation describable in terms of ‘tax’ or ‘tribute’), was doctrinal
heresy, but it was a heresy committed by Mao and, then, by numerous Western
Marxists, including Althusser, Hirst and, then and now,78 Wickham. Hirst was
the most extreme iconoclast, and in Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production
(co-authored with Barry Hindess) and elsewhere he attempted to expunge
from Marxism any trace of a historical teleology.
‘Teleology’, like ‘morality’, remains a highly pejorative term in Wickham’s
theoretical lexicon. ‘We must avoid teleology’, he asserts, because ‘teleology
77. Here, Wickham even allows that medieval peasants could win definitive victories, as in
Switzerland, although he maintains traces of an essentialist philosophy of history in insisting that
in such a case ‘success resulted in a partial return to pre-class, not post-class, relations of
production’; Wickham 1994d, p. 71; Wickham’s emphases. Andorra, the one other European
state that Wickham identifies as having been ‘founded’ by peasants (Wickham 1992, p. 398), is
best accounted for in less martial terms than Switzerland, as is made clear in another account of
its exemplification of ‘peasant-agency’ (Freedman 1999, pp. 185–99). Insofar as I am aware,
Wickham has never written any more extensively on mid-twentieth-century peasant-revolutions,
although he often refers to intermediate peasant-revolts; see, especially, Fentress and Wickham
1992, pp. 92–110. Within the anglophone academy, comparative theorisation of the peasantry’s
rôle in twentieth-century revolutions has been undertaken less by Marxists than by non-Marxists,
such as Barrington Moore and Theda Skocpol, although an exception is Eric Wolf ’s Peasant Wars
of the Twentieth Century (Wolf 1999). An unprecedentedly ambitious account of peasant-‘escape’
from domination will be presented in Scott’s forthcoming history of the vast, academically-
named Zomia region of highland south-eastern Asia (Scott 2009).
78. Significantly, Wickham’s justification of this theoretical position within Framing is made
amidst his justification of the peasant-mode of production (Wickham 2005, p. 261). Elsewhere
in the book, he explains that where the potter’s wheel, and even the kiln, went out of use, this
was due to the decline of aristocracy and the consequent fall in demand for expensive ceramics.
lends itself to historical moralization too easily’.79 He never uses the term in
any positive sense. My contention is that this is because he never uses it in its
original, non-historicist and Aristotelian sense. In Aristotelian metaphysics,
being is identified with agency (energeia). In Aristotelian ethics, action ( praxis)
is orientated towards the actor’s good, which is the actor’s telos or self-motivating
and self-making cause. Political action is undertaken protagonistically, for the
sake (i.e. because) of the common good.80
Wickham’s critique of historical teleology is, primarily,81 a critique of
bourgeois, capitalist triumphalism, of Western exceptionalism, and of
Eurocentrism. It is, by implication, a critique of Hegel’s historicising logic
and, also, of Marx, whose ‘view of the [medieval] period . . . was frankly
teleological’.82 Wickham revised his own historiography of surplus-extraction
when it was pointed out how his position still implied the exceptionalism of
Europe’s ‘privatised’, rent-based feudalism.83 This is where he departs most
clearly from the position of Hilton. Although he shares Hilton’s concern with
writing peasant-protagonism back into history, he does not share Hilton’s
preoccupation with the transition from feudalism to capitalism or, therefore,
with ‘the knowledge that peasant élites, in England and elsewhere [in Western
Europe], would in the end buy up their neighbours . . . and move in the
direction of [primitive capital-accumulation, commodity-production and]
agrarian capitalism’.84
Similarly, Wickham’s critique of teleology in Framing is a critique of any
understanding of the early middle ages in terms of a transition – ‘the other
transition’, as he once called it – from the slave- to the feudal mode of
production according to some necessary, evolutionary logic. An internal ‘logic’
is an attribute of all modes of production, but not of any necessary historical
transition from one mode to another. The idea that there is such a developmental
logic to historical change entails the notion of ‘the inferiority . . . of the early
middle ages’, which we have seen Wickham resist in the name of a ‘peasant
79. Wickham 2007c, p. 314. Similarly, in Framing, he complains that ‘we are attuned to
seeing economic complexity in teleological, even moral, terms’ (Wickham 2005, p. 706).
80. Knight 2007. Central to my argument there is a critique of the traditional-Aristotelian
isolation of self-making from productive making, an isolation that MacIntyre ends in his
reworking of Aristotelian ethics in terms of acknowledged dependency and shared practices.
81. Framing also identifies numerous other ‘teleologies’, including the fall of the Roman
Empire, the rise of the modern state, and even the rise of ‘Charlemagne’s world . . . as the end-
point of the historical development of the early middle ages’ (Wickham 2005, p. 47; Wickham’s
emphasis).
82. Wickham 2007a, p. 37.
83. In Berktay 1987.
84. Wickham 2007c, p. 305.
economic logic’. This logic rivals that of feudalism, and of capitalism. It is

what motivates, and is defended by, ‘peasant protagonism’.
Here, we have a paradox; because Wickham’s theoretical framing of the
early middle ages would appear to oppose one teleological idea in order to
defend another. Wickham’s idea of protagonism, like Thompson’s idea of self-
making, is teleological. It is not teleological in the sense given to the term by
Hegel, in his innovative and hyper-theoretical framing of the totality of world-
history as a single goal-directed process. Rather, it is teleological in the
Aristotelian sense that it explains what is done by ordinary human actors as
being done for the sake of some goal, cause, or telos.
For Wickham, as for Thompson, this can be a shared, collective goal, a
common good – the defence and enhancement of a shared logic, a shared way
of life. As Thompson says of handloom-weavers, what they defended was
‘a whole pattern of family and community life’ in which their activity was
‘self-motivated’ rather than disciplined, directed and managed by others.85 The
activity of factory-machinists was effected, or efficiently caused, by their
managers; the activity of handloom-weavers was teleological, self-caused.
Wickham’s concern with peasant-protagonism is a thoroughly and
fundamentally teleological concern, so long as teleology is understood in its
original and not its historicist sense. Indeed, his critique of any historicist
‘teleology’ is, I would contend, itself both properly teleological and ethical. He
opposes ‘teleology’ because of its ‘historical moralisation’, its condescension
toward the past, and because of its warranting of pseudo-scientific claims that
only the imminent agency of present actors could ever have truly liberatory
effects. Any claim that history is law-governed denies actors responsibility for
the effects of their actions, and any claim that history has its own goals denies
the significance and effectivity of actors’ own reasons, hopes, and goals. The
‘critical edge’ of Wickham’s history may not be expressly ‘moral’, but it is,
nonethless, profoundly ethical.
For Thompson, what is revealed by doing history from below is not a matter
of logic or ‘ “reason” . . . since the conflict is between two cultural modes or
ways of life’.86 Here we might see a point in the commonplace-criticism of
Thompson that, in reacting against the antihumanist ‘theory’ of Althusserian
structuralism, he often drew an excessive distinction between theory and
practice, reason and experience. The point is that different cultures and ways
of life embody rival rationalities and logics. This is a fundamental point and
pervasive aspect of Wickham’s theoretical ‘framing’ of economic and cultural
85. Thompson 1968, pp. 338–9.

86. Thompson 1968, p. 337.
difference and conflict, even if it is one that remains largely implicit. It is

evident, for example, in Wickham’s frequent reference to past ideas, not only
as ‘ideologies’,87 but also as ‘social theories’;88 ‘theory’ being a term normally
reserved by contemporary academics to privilege their own reasoning over the
reasoning of those whose actions they purport to explain.
Wickham opposes such epistemological arrogance, as did Thompson, but it
is an opposition that now attracts Wickham to Bourdieu’s explicit critique.
Having been ‘unfashionably late’ in embracing structuralism, he is now
catching up with poststructuralist fashion. What I wish to argue is that
Wickham should look elsewhere than to the likes of Bourdieu for ways in
which to advance his historical account of social ‘practice’. Rather, he should
look to a contemporary Aristotelian concern with human agency, with shared
practice, and with political protagonism.
Getting beyond arguments within English Marxism

Even at his most Hirstian, Wickham sided with ‘historians’ in finding Hirst’s
radically anti-empiricist, anti-correspondence and purely coherentist ‘theory
of knowledge . . . unacceptable’.89 Therefore, even if he sided explicitly with
Hirst against Anderson, he nonetheless refused to comment on Hirst’s direct
attack on Thompson’s anti-Althusserianism in ‘The Necessity of Theory’ or,
for that matter, on Anderson’s critique of Thompson in Arguments within
English Marxism. Thompson, the champion of ‘socialist humanism’, associated
Althusser’s critique of empiricism and humanism with Stalinism and dismissed
the position of Hirst as ‘a scholasticism parasitic upon a scholasticism’.90 In
87. He notes (in referring to the expression by insurgent ‘peasant protagonists’ of their case in
terms even of ‘mainstream Christianity, with its message of egalitarianism’) that ‘the word
“ideology” . . . has recently broken down in Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s styles of analysis . . . while
still being happy to use the word’ himself; Wickham 2007c, p. 311.
88. For example, Wickham 2007a, pp. 51, 357, 384.
89. Wickham 1994d, p. 46. That rejection may not now be as great as it once was, given that
Wickham has since reported having tried and failed ‘to get around Jacques Derrida’ and welcomed
‘literary analysis . . . properly deconstructing early medievalists’ (Wickham 1998a, p. 24;
Wickham 1994b, p. 203). Even so, Wickham would appear to have been saved by his scepticism
from participating in the rapid move from an antihumanist and anti-essentialist account of
agency to a thoroughly reformist pluralism that was made by Hirst and his associates. Defining
an agent as ‘a locus of decision within a social relation’, and separating ‘decision’ from
‘consciousness’, they denied the status of agency as ‘collective actors’ to classes but attributed it
to such organisations as ‘joint-stock corporations’. The initial rationale of that move is best
explained in Cutler, Hindess, Hirst and Hussain 1977, Part 3 (especially Chapter 11), and, for
its later stage (in which Hirst participated), Hindess 1988, Chapters 4–6.
90. Thompson 1978a, p. 392.
this, he was defending his vocation against the structuralist charge that ‘the
study of history is not only scientifically but also politically valueless’.91 It is
another commonplace-criticism of Thompson that he missed his mark in
accusing Althusser of precluding any space for human agency, but perhaps this
commonplace is itself misdirected because Thompson’s concern was not quite
with agency for agency’s sake. Rather, his concern was with action as expressive
and defensive of a way of life, an ethos. As a Marxist, his ethical concern was
that Marxism ‘regain a language of moral choice’.92 Even though the form of
life of handloom-weavers was lost, Thompson celebrated it as an example of
what social life can be. Similar forms of life have existed throughout history,
and need not be confined to some historical telos.
Hirst did not miss his own mark in criticising Thompson. He recognised
Thompson’s critique of Althusserian ‘theoretical practice’ as the defence of
a plurality of independent practices or ways of life, each with its own
experientially grounded and untheoreticised claims to knowledge, as much
including those specific to sailors and weavers as to historians.93 More
affirmatively, he acknowledged that Thompson’s own practice of history was
guilty of neither historicising teleology nor ‘antiquarian irrelevance’, that it
was political, and that it had ‘pertinence’ to the present in its ‘mediation of
tradition’ because it ‘expresses the values of the working class and participates
in the continual re-making of [working-class] culture’.94 In elaborating
Thompson’s ‘unarticulated philosophy’, he quotes Thompson’s claim (in ‘An
Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’) that such an historically and class-
informed politics represents ‘ “an alternative, socialist logic” ’. Such an
antinomian conception of history and politics in terms of rival logics was as
alien to Hirst as it is to Quentin Skinner and his Cambridge school of political
thought; it is, I would suggest, far-less alien to Wickham’s conception of
history, and perhaps also to Wickham’s politics.95 Hirst characterised
Thompson’s politics ‘as action-in-tradition, as the continuing expression and
development of the values of the collectivity’. What he agreed with was
Thompson’s refusal to ‘aggregate the working class into a supra-subjective
agent’, but he considered this refusal incompatible with Thompson’s socialist
humanism. This is because ‘men can only be the “subjects of history” if they
act in concert to achieve the actualisation of values’, and such goal-orientated,
91. Hindess and Hirst 1975, p. 312.

92. Thompson 1958, p. 103.
93. Hirst 1985c, pp. 65, 76–81, 72–3.
94. Hirst 1985c, pp. 80–2.
95. I contrast the historiography and politics of MacIntyre with that of the Cambridge school
in Knight 2011a.
value-informed and concerted action is only possible through some ‘supra-

subjective’ and non-humanist kind of agency.96 For all his opposition to
Hegelian essentialism and teleology, Hirst’s conception of agency or effectivity
as ‘supra-subjective’ therefore shared much with Hegel. Collective agency, he
claimed, is impossible apart from some single locus of decision-making
and execution, whether in the sovereign-state as conceptualised by Schmitt,
the freely but determinately constituted church championed by Figgis, the
democratic-centralist party conceived and constructed by Lenin, or the
capitalist enterprise as incorporated in law.97
Hirst’s objection to teleology extended far-beyond Hegelian historicism,
and his anti-historicist conceptualisation of any ‘current conjuncture’ opposed
also any claim for the political significance of economic or ‘cultural modes or
ways of life’. His radical antihumanism opposed any normal understanding of
human agency. He sided against historians, and with functionalist and
structuralist sociologists, in pressing the argument that ‘teleological explanations
of social facts are wrong because individual wills are insufficient to bring social
facts into being to fulfil the ends they suppose’.98 In this, Hirst’s conception of
agency differs from that accorded by Thompson to weavers and by Wickham
to peasants, who, controlling their instruments of production, were able to
collectively make their own form of life.
Thompson’s political ethics are evident in the first edition of William Morris.
This was published in 1955, the year before the Soviet invasion of Hungary,
and in his Postscript to the second, 1976 edition, Thompson referred back to
such disasters as attributable to the ‘lack of moral self-consciousness [in] the
major Marxist tradition’.99 Having written at length of ‘necessity and desire’ in
the first edition, it is only in the 1976 Postscript that Thompson writes of
‘the education of desire’. This expression he takes from Miguel Abensour, and
he quotes Abensour in defining its meaning: ‘to “teach desire to desire, to
desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way” ’. He
admits that this sums up ‘the insight which, at a submerged level, structured
this book when it was first written, but which [he] finally failed to articulate’
because of his ‘piety towards politics-as-text’ or Marxist tradition.100
96. Hirst 1985c, pp. 80–3, quoting Thompson 1978b, p. 147; Hirst’s emphasis.
97. On the corporation, see Hirst 1979 and many of his subsequent writings. On the
absence of collective agency, see Hirst 1981 on the family and the incisive writings of Hindess
on class.
98. Hirst 1975, p. 149.
99. Thompson 1976, p. 786.
100. Thompson 1976, pp. 791–2; Thompson’s emphasis.
Anderson alleged that Thompson here stumbled into gross error. Ignoring
Thompson’s claim that the idea of the education of desire expresses an argument
that had been implicit in William Morris from the book’s inception, Anderson
viewed Abensour as the sole ‘authority’ for Thompson’s use of the expression.
Therefore, ‘what has insinuated itself in Thompson’s blameless text here is a
fashionable philosophy of Parisian irrationalism’ that ‘can lead with the greatest
facility to hoary superstition and reaction’.101 Can this be right? We have seen
Thompson suggest that conflict between ‘ways of life’ may be beyond ‘reason’,
and many would counter that this places him at the top of a slippery slope that
leads to reason’s deconstruction. But can it really be true that Thompson, of all
people, meant by ‘desire’ what is intended by Parisian psychoanalysts?
Anderson’s error of omission here has been pointed out by Paul Blackledge,
in observing that Thompson’s ‘An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’
underpinned ‘his strategic thought with theoretical foundations borrowed
from Alasdair MacIntyre’s deployment of “desire” ’ in essays that Thompson
considered ‘ “of the first importance” ’ to historians.102 Thompson’s own,
rational desire was ‘that MacIntyre could complete his own thought’ about
‘emergent socialist consciousness within capitalist society’, a consciousness
that Thompson perceived in the ‘ways in which men and women seem to be
more “realized” as rational or moral agents, when acting collectively in
conscious rebellion (or resistance) against capitalist process’.103 MacIntyre may
not yet have completed that thought, but such completion is the intellectual
telos toward which he has continued to work ever since. The thought is that
the objects of desire need not be dictated by Humean passions, by Freudian
drives, or by the structural requirements of capital-accumulation. Rather,
ends, and not just means, are susceptible to human reason. Further, such
rational goals or goods may be located within shared practices, forms of life,
and traditions of practical rationality. We may therefore suppose that it is in
MacIntyre’s later work that we will find the most profound and politically
important elaboration of that ‘alternative, socialist logic’ and of that politics of
‘action-in-tradition’ which so exasperated Hirst.104
In terms of the education of desire, MacIntyre’s explicitly teleological
argument is that it is through participation in productive and other social
101. Anderson 1980, p. 161.

102. Blackledge 2006, pp. 179, 197, quoting Thompson 1978b, p. 191. Compare the rather
silly imputation of ‘rightism’ to MacIntyre in Anderson 1980, p. 108. The principal essay to
which both Thompson and Blackledge refer is MacIntyre 1998b.
103. Thompson 1978b, p. 151. This is the starting-point of my 1996 exploration of the
continuity of MacIntyre’s work with that of Thompson, reprinted as Knight 2011b, in which I
explain the political significance of what MacIntyre says of practices and institutions.
104. That this is so I argue elsewhere, especially in Knight 2007.
practices that individuals learn to desire common goods.105 In illustrating this

historically, he refers to Thompson’s weavers. ‘What made the practice of the
hand-loom weavers revolutionary’ was their own ‘mode of life’, which gave
them a conception ‘of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of
resistance’ to capitalism, to ‘proletarianization’, and to all of the alienation,
exploitation and demoralisation that this entails. They were able to ‘transform
themselves and educate themselves through their own self transformative
activity’, and their militant defence of this shared practice in resistance to the
pressures of capitalist social relations was such that it was ‘entitled to be called
“revolutionary” ’.106 Such protagonism is motivated by the logic of a mode of
life, and of productive practice, that MacIntyre contrasts with its capitalist
rival, in which activity is motivated by a desire that is uneducated by
participation in any such shared practice or community.107
MacIntyre makes such an argument by reference to peasant-community.
He hypothesises ‘a group of peasant villagers [who] have inherited what they
take to be an obligation to surrender part of their harvest every year to a
landlord’, and that someone
argues that the good or goods to be achieved by rejecting this norm outweigh the
goods or goods to be achieved by continuing to comply with it. The goods of
rejection include not only . . . greater material prosperity, but the abandonment of
bad attitudes of subservience. Learning to defend themselves will be an education
in the virtues as well as in the martial arts.
On MacIntyre’s account, judgement about whether these goods outweigh the

risks involved exemplifies what it is to deliberate ‘not from the standpoint of
this individual or that household, but from the standpoint of their common
good’.108
MacIntyre’s conception of the relation between city and countryside
sometimes has less in common with that of Wickham than that of Ellen
Meiksins Wood,109 as when he speaks of ‘a polis or . . . city . . . including that
surrounding farming countryside for which its urban center provides
architectural space for political activity’.110 He argues that ‘even in the modern
world . . . the possibilities of [such] a rational local politics are recurrently
105. For example, MacIntyre 2007, pp. 52–3.

106. MacIntyre 1998c, pp. 231–2.
107. See, especially, MacIntyre 1998a.
108. MacIntyre 2003, pp. 63–4.
109. Wood 1988.
110. MacIntyre 1994, p. 37.
reopened’, and refers as historical precedents to some ‘small scale medieval

kingdoms – including the Irish nuath’.111 Wickham renders the term nuath as
‘tribe’, taking it to signify the kind of ‘peasant-mode, ranked, society’ in which
peasants enjoyed cultural and economic autonomy.112 Moreover, ‘Irish peasants
got to keep more of their surplus than their equivalents elsewhere’.113 Although
he adds that ‘peasant political autonomy was [here] virtually impossible’, he
regards it as ‘significant’ that, conversely, there was little ‘accumulation of
political power’ or ‘economic differentiation’ and ‘as yet [in the early middle
ages] no tendency for them to increase’.114 What differentiation existed was
less regulated by formal law-codes115 than by practices that he often calls
‘customary’, but which MacIntyre would in many cases describe as rationally
directed to some shared conception of a good. For MacIntyre, this rationality
is that of a modal and traditional logic which rivals the logic that legitimates
the accumulation, by class and state, of wealth and power. In this idea of
practical rationality, MacIntyre attempts to inform reason with experience,
social and historical theory with quotidian practice.
MacIntyre concurs with Wickham’s rejection of any kind of historical
teleology, in part because he concurs with Althusser in rejecting the
‘misconception . . . of Marx as a Hegelian humanist’116 – even though he denies
that the thoroughgoing-epistemological break from Hegel which Althusser
claims to identify was ever really made in Marx’s historical materialism.117 Like
Wickham, MacIntyre is alert to the possibilities in activity from below, both
in the present and in the historical past. ‘Lenin urged us not to bow down
before the tyranny of the established fact, before established conventional
opinions about what is possible and what is not’.118 The current conjuncture
always affords possibilities for a protagonism that MacIntyre – in defiance of
social-scientific convention – partisanly and expressly regards as political.
Where he seems more-clearly to go beyond Wickham is in also describing
such agency in terms that are expressly ethical.
What MacIntyre has always credited to Marx is the conception of a kind of
rational, goal-orientated ‘self-activity’ that is based more in shared practice
than in the kind of formal institution that finds its paradigmatic philosophical
111. MacIntyre 1994, p. 52.

112. Wickham 2007a, pp. 51, 362.
113. Wickham 2007a, p. 816.
114. Wickham 2007a, pp. 362–3; emphasis added.
115. Wickham 2007a, pp. 559, 359–60.
116. MacIntyre 1991, p. 603.
117. MacIntyre 1998c.
118. MacIntyre 2011.
expression in Hegel’s account of the modern state.119 Such a theory of practice

MacIntyre has always understood to be expressed in the third of Marx’s theses
on Feuerbach. It is not the kind of universalist ‘theory divorced from practice’
that is ‘characteristic of civil society’, but a particularistic conception of social
practices; that is, of ‘practice informed by a particular kind of theory rooted in
that same practice’.120 This is what MacIntyre regards as practical, ethical and
(at least potentially) political rationality. It is a rationality from below; the
kind of rationality that the Marxist tradition has often tried to express in terms
of ‘praxis’.
MacIntyre has always tried to relate moral theory to social practice, and his
‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ does this by elaborating the teleological theory
of action into a social theory of shared practices. He agrees with Bourdieu
and Wickham (see above) that, ‘unless people are aware of social structures’,
there is no ‘re-creation of the structures’. Here he disagrees with Hirst, with
Anderson – for whom ‘the problem of social order is irresoluble so long as the
answer to it is sought at the level of intention (or valuation)’121 – and with
Althusser, even whilst agreeing with Althusser that ‘capitalism . . . inescapably
functions in and through modes of dissimulation’122 that cause people to
bow down before established facts. Such dissimulation also causes people to
deny their own human potential, in a way that non-Althusserian Marxists
describe in terms of alienation. Classical-political economists and neoclassical
economists – who make a methodological (and supposedly morally value-free)
virtue of separating the intentionality of actors from their own structural
explanation, human cause from social and ‘economic’ consequence – ascribe
an arcane logic to capitalism, but it is also possible to perceive a logic that
accords with the intentions of a ruling class and was opposed by Thompson’s
proponents of moral economy. In this latter sense, different cultures and ways
of life can be understood historically as embodying rival logics. As MacIntyre
argues, rival ‘forms of social structure’ correspond to rival ‘practical
rationalities’.123 This is to say that structure conditions consciousness, but also
that conscious action – including, but not only, productive action – structures
social conditions. In one form of structure and rationality, workers are
dominated and exploited by corporate and state-institutions. In its rival,
119. For an excellent reconstruction and support of Hegel’s ‘institutional rationality’, see now
Pippin 2008, pp. 210–72.
120. MacIntyre 1998c, pp. 225, 230.
121. Anderson 1980, p. 55; Anderson’s emphasis.
122. MacIntyre 1991, p. 604.
123. MacIntyre 1998d.
ordinary actors attempt to keep institutions at a scale at which they can be

constituted and controlled by those actors.
Such an understanding of history in terms of ordinary actors’ ideas and
intentions might be thought to combine the historiographical strengths of the
Cambridge school with those of Hilton’s Birmingham school, of intellectual
history with socio-economic history. Nonetheless, and despite his previous
association with Thompson, MacIntyre is as yet more likely to be associated
with the likes of Skinner than of Wickham. This reflects a theoretical and
political problem that MacIntyre wishes to remedy. He has previously said
that ‘a compelling history of those [medieval] episodes’ in which attempts
were made ‘to reproduce the structure of . . . small-scale community’ within
the ‘type of centralized state power, which by its subordination [of ] all other
authorities to it, became a precursor of the modern state’, ‘would be a necessary
counterpart to the central [political] thesis which I am asserting’.124 He now
calls for ‘empirical studies of past and present relationships . . . of practices and
institutions to each other and to the human good’, ‘histories of those
experiences from which . . . we need to learn’ as our ‘projects that challenge the
limitations of the existing order move forward’ in bringing ‘into being types of
community through which we are liberated . . . from distorted desires [and]
inequalities’.125 A part of his hope for such a history is that it might demonstrate
something of the logic of a ‘justice which aspires to move from the maxim
“From each according to her or his ability, to each according to her or his
contribution” to “From each according to her or his ability, to each according
to her or his needs” ’.126 Such a distributive logic would oppose those exemplified
by capitalism or feudalism. For MacIntyre, as for Thompson, what such rival
logics constitute is less social-scientifically neutral ideal types than ethical and
political rationalities (or ‘social theories’, in Wickham’s sense) which can
motivate real agents and cause real conflict. On MacIntyre’s account, collective
protagonism from below is exercised in defence of the logic of extant practices
and their internal goods, whilst its antagonists are exploitative and oppressive
institutions acting in accordance with a rival logic that is theorised and
legitimated by a rival tradition. Here, MacIntyre’s theory of practice could
both inform elaboration of what Wickham writes of peasant-protagonism and
itself benefit from Wickham’s historical scholarship.
Wickham clearly prefers what he perceives as the rigour of a Bourdieu to
the romanticism of a Morris, and it is likely that he would be tempted to
dismiss MacIntyre as another Morris. If so, I would urge him to think again.
124. MacIntyre 1994, pp. 50–1.

126. MacIntyre 2006, p. 154.
If history really is to inform effective political protagonism, then what

MacIntyre says of tradition and practice points to how this might best be
achieved. Moreover, what MacIntyre says of the structural conflict between
self-managed practices and alien-class managed institutions is entirely
consistent with what Wickham says of peasant-protagonism.
Conclusion
Wickham’s aim in writing of peasant-protagonism is that famously described
by Thompson: to reveal ‘the agency of working people’ from beneath ‘the
enormous condescension of posterity’.127 In writing of such protagonism in
the early middle ages, he refers to an agency of which we have precious little
evidence apart from shards of pottery and traces of settlements and field-systems.
Although his own attempt to reconstruct ‘the logic of peasant economies in
the early middle ages’128 is therefore conjectural, his hope is clearly to reconstruct
something of the ‘mentalities’, ethe and motivations of the actors themselves.
The ‘logics’ of which he writes are therefore not those of any impersonal
economic laws but those of normal, goal-orientated action. That goals and
norms differ from society to society, he evidently accepts. Here, he concurs
with Bourdieu, Scott, Polanyi, and MacIntyre, and, by implication, opposes
the kind of rational-choice account propounded by the likes of Samuel L.
Popkin129 and controverted by MacIntyre in his hypothesised account of
peasant-rationality.130 Wickham’s concern with reconstructing the logic of
peasant-economies is an exercise in neither positivism nor hermeneutics,
neither behaviourism nor conventionalism, nor yet in ‘neutral . . . structural
analysis’. It is a concern with communities of independent producers, free of
alien-management of their labour – even if they may be subjected to coercively-
backed demands for payment in kind or money. What mattered most to these
actors was perhaps not legal ownership but actual control. Their communities
were not so large as cities or kingdoms, both of which were dominated by the
alien-power of aristocracy. Rather, they were villages, even households. Such
communities, Wickham argues, could be sites of autonomous production,
practice, and protagonism.
We have seen Wickham appeal recently for his early work to be read ‘in
political terms’, and, presumably, the same goes for what he writes now of
127. Thompson 1968, p. 13.

128. Wickham 2005, p. 535.
129. See, especially, Popkin 1979.
130. MacIntyre 2003, pp. 63–75.
‘peasant political protagonism’. The political message in his early work appears
to have been that support should be given to revolutionary peasants and to the
states they established. The same message can be detected in his and Hirst’s
objection to any idea of a Eurocentric, historical teleology. To abandon
historical teleology, and to embrace peasant-protagonism, presumably entails
abandoning what Engels called the scientific case for socialism. If there is no
necessary potential for socialism within the development of capitalism, then
the case for socialism has to be made – if it is to be made at all – in some other
way. The case can be made in terms of ‘interests’, even though this idea implies
a kind of humanistic essentialism to which Wickham, following Hirst, might
still be suspicious. This idea has, in recent decades, often been elaborated into
what is sometimes called an Aristotelian interpretation of Marx, whereby the
fundamental objection to capitalism is that it denies workers the material and
social conditions necessary to develop their innate, natural potentials. This is
the kind of objection expressed by MacIntyre, who commends the arguments
of, amongst others, Carol Gould131 and James Daly.132 Although this kind of
argument is teleological, and although it is not advanced by Wickham, it
remains innocent of the kind of specifically-historical teleology that he
expressly rejects.
The kind of political argument that persists in Wickham’s writings, and
nowhere more so than in Framing, is that there are rival economic and social
logics and rival causes (in the veritably teleological sense of essential goods and
goals) of protagonism. There is no necessary path of development inscribed in
history, and there is therefore no inevitability in the victory of aristocrats over
peasants, or of either capitalists over workers or workers over capitalists. A
socialist case that was based in the spurious claim that history is on our side
has here been replaced by the more defensive proposition that neither history
nor human nature preclude socialism as a possibility. What remains to be
established is why one possibility should be pursued rather than another, and
why goals and interests should be understood as common rather than
individual.
Possibilities can be understood in either of two ways. One is the way of
existentialism (of Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault), according to which possibilities
are unconstrained, freely constructible, and objects of choice. The other way is
to understand possibilities as socially and historically constrained, and to
understand individual-human actors as already conditioned by upbringing
and situation. The latter way of perceiving possibilities is that which is more
131. MacIntyre 1998c, p. 225.

familiar to Marxists, and is apparently implied by what Wickham says of

rival logics. On this account, choices are always constrained, not only by
material need and intellectual culture, but also, as Wickham emphasises, by
institutionalised social relations. To understand possibilities as limited in this
way is to give point and structure to the study of history, as in Wickham’s
subtle framing of the early middle ages in terms of rival modes of production.
One of those modes was systemically exploitative, including highly formalised
relations of surplus-extraction and of personal dependence, power, control,
and management. This is the classical feudalism about which so much has
long been written and argued. The other mode is that which Wickham tries
hard to reconstruct, on the basis of little evidence and of a tentative theory
about what its ‘parameters ought to have been’.133
Social science, including history, conventionally excludes any express ethical
or political partisanship. Framing has been rightly praised for both the breadth
and the methodological scrupulousness of its scholarship. Nonetheless,
historical scholarship need not always exclude explicit partisanship, as is
evidenced by that far-more controversial work, The Making of the English
Working Class, and by what Thompson said there and elsewhere of free agency
and moral economy. In contrast, as we have noted, ‘moral’ always seems to
denote something reprehensible in Wickham’s usage. Therefore, even though
he commends the way in which ‘Rodney [Hilton] cared massively about
injustice’, Wickham himself resists making any explicit argument about
justice or morality. Whereas even Engels treated Thomas Müntzer and his
associates as moral exemplars, it seems that Wickham would resist any
temptation to do the same to William Tell, to Wat Tyler, or to their earlier,
anonymous peasant-predecessors, warning, at the outset of his discussion of
‘peasantries’, against any such writing of history in terms of ‘nostalgia’ or
‘moral exemplification’.134
My argument is that Wickham here undermines the political force of his
own argument. I would agree with Wickham insofar as he might argue that,
although ethics may be exemplified in individual heroism and occasional
revolts, it is grounded, etymologically and sociologically, in shared practices
and, crucially, in shared modes of production. When workers are institutionally
exploited, directly controlled by others, and alienated from their activity and
creative powers, they are denied the conditions for rational and moral agency
and for developing their potentials as human beings. Therefore, there is a
practical and ethical point, and not just a structural or sociological one, to
133. Wickham 2005, p. 535, Wickham’s emphasis.

134. Wickham 2005, p. 383.
concentrating upon ordinary social relations rather than upon extraordinary

actions. Nonetheless, this ethical point will never be adequately communicated
if its constant deferral is asserted as a methodological virtue, and this is where
Wickham errs.
In contrast, MacIntyre grounds his ethics in precisely such a conflict
between self-managed practices and class-managed institutions. ‘In this [latter]
context the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without
justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting
power of institutions.’135
It might be thought that, in the absence of an historical teleology, any
attempt to reconstruct long-past modes of production, distribution and
exchange can have no significance for present-day agents. I have argued that
this is not the case. What Wickham writes of the early-medieval peasantry
demonstrates that there is no necessity to systematic exploitation, and that
there is an alternative. Even when a surplus is systematically extracted (as
through taxation), it may be possible for direct producers to control their own
labour and their own communities. This possibility is always rationally
desirable, and desire can be politically educated. What should be inferred is no
nostalgia for past impoverishment but the ethical necessity of supporting
struggles to defend or establish collective self-management in the present.
What I therefore argue against Wickham is that he should go far further in
rejecting what he has called the ‘neutrality’ of purely ‘structural analysis’, and
that if he wishes his work to be read ‘in political terms’ he would do well to
recombine politics with ethics. Marxists have too-often thought that they
could dispense with ethics, because they believed that they had discovered in
the historical process an end that required only the assertion of objective
interests for its actualisation. Unfortunately, as Wickham argues, there is no
such telos inscribed in history. What this entails is that, if there is to be any
hope of building socialism in the future, people have to be persuaded that it
would be good and right to act to do so. In this sense, politics must be based
in ethics. This is the revolutionary sense of MacIntyre’s revision of
Aristotelianism, the Thompsonian sense of politics ‘as action-in-tradition, as
the continuing expression and development of the values of the collectivity’.
Were Wickham to rework what he says of protagonism in terms of such an
ethic, then that work could and should be reread politically. In that case, the
study of past history – even of early-medieval history – could once again
inform and inspire the causal actions of present protagonists.
135. MacIntyre 2007, p. 194.

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Land and Power from Roman Britain

to Anglo-Saxon England?
John Moreland
Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield
j.moreland@sheffield.ac.uk
Abstract
Archaeology, and in particular the study of ceramics, lies at the heart of the interpretive schemes
that underpin Framing the Early Middle Ages. While this is to be welcomed, it is proposed that
even more extensive use of archaeological evidence – especially that generated through the
excavation of prehistoric burial-mounds and rural settlements, as well as the study of early
medieval coins – would have produced a rather more dynamic and nuanced picture of the
transformations in social and political structures that marked the passage from late Roman
Britain to Anglo-Saxon England.
Keywords
Archaeology, England, ceramics, coins, sources of social power
No-one who has admired Chris Wickham and his work over the last twenty-
five years will have been surprised by the scholarship, vision, and intellectual
commitment displayed in Framing the Early Middle Ages (FEMA). He is
probably the only historian alive who could have written such a masterly
overview – one guided by a coherent theoretical position and grounded in the
mass of detail that makes up the historical and archaeological records.
Importantly, while written sources inform the bulk of his book, archaeological
evidence lies at its heart. Wickham tells us that Chapter 11, ‘Systems of
Exchange’, is ‘in many ways the core of the book’ – and it is based almost
entirely on archaeological evidence.1 Given the tendency of historians to
minimise the value of archaeology for generating new knowledge about the
past, its centrality here requires some explanation.
1. Wickham 2005, p. 693; also pp. 9–10.

176 J. Moreland / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 175–193
Wickham’s engagement with archaeology was gained literally in the

trenches,2 and there is clearly something in the nature of archaeological
evidence that places it at the heart of his endeavour. Some archaeologists have
emphasised the ‘democratic’ nature of ‘things’, and Wickham has characterised
archaeology as ‘the only type of source we have that does not privilege the
aristocratic or clerical gaze’.3 However, I believe that the real explanation for
his privileging of archaeological evidence can be found in his understanding of
the forces that generated change in these early-historic societies.
The end of Imperial unity

The end of Roman-imperial unity is the great ‘shade’ that permeates FEMA.4
For Wickham, there were no inherent instabilities in the late-fourth-century
Imperial structure that might have hinted at the coming fall, but the Vandal
conquest of Carthage in 439 was a turning-point.5 North Africa had supplied
the Imperial core with grain and oil as part of the annona. The extraction of
these bulk-commodities, and their movement from Africa to Rome, was a
very significant element in a tax-system which unified the Empire.6 In addition,
he argues, this fiscal network supported the distribution of other African bulk-
commodities (such as the Red-Slip wares that dominate Mediterranean-
ceramic assemblages) – which rode ‘piggy-back on the state grain and oil
supply’.7 Here, the fiscal system underpinned the inter-regional distribution of
bulk commodities. With the Vandal conquest, the tax-resources that had
formerly gone to Rome now stayed in Africa. The problem was exacerbated by
the tax-evasion that (inevitably) increased in tandem with the burden of
taxation, and by the loss of large parts of the Western Empire to ‘barbarian’
successor-states.8 From the middle of the fifth century, there are signs that the
Western Empire was ‘seriously short of resources’.9
Élites in the Roman Empire depended on the state. They benefited from the
positions and salaries it offered, and from the Imperial structures that allowed
2. Contra Hills 2007, p. 197. I have very fond memories of Chris Wickham’s active
involvement in the excavations at San Vincenzo al Volturno in Molise, Italy in the 1980s.
3. Wickham 2005, pp. 385, 544. For discussion, see Moreland 2001, pp. 103–5.
4. Wickham 2005, p. 830; also p. 55.
5. Wickham 2005, pp. 80, 87, 147.
6. Wickham 2005, pp. 72, 709.
7. Wickham 2005, p. 711; Wickham 1988, p. 191.
8. Wickham 2005, pp. 63, 113–14.
9. Wickham 2005, pp. 711, 88.
J. Moreland / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 175–193 177
landholding on a huge scale and economic activities over vast areas.10 With the
demise of the state, they became poorer and more localised,11 and, in response
to the insecurities of the age, and in emulation of the new power-brokers of
the post-Roman world, the old literary culture was abandoned (to be carried
into the future by the Church) in a shift towards ‘the militarisation of
aristocratic identity’.12
Central to Wickham’s argument is the proposal that the impoverishment of
élites meant a ‘slow involution of demand, concurrent localisation of economic
structures, and economic simplification even at the regional and microregional
level’.13 In parts of Western Europe it was only in the eighth century (at the
earliest) that this process was reversed.
The significance of bulk-commodities

Aristocracies in strong states, Wickham argues, were wealthier and, he
maintains, it was their wealth that stimulated the production and regional-
level distribution of bulk-commodities. Only the landowning aristocracy had
the wealth to buy commodities in sufficient quantities to create the economies
of scale which meant that ‘peasantries and the urban poor . . . would be able to
find good quality products at accessible prices’. Élite-demand was ‘the basic
underpinning of regional economic sophistication’,14 and regional-level
production and distribution was the bedrock, the essence, of the Roman
economy – ‘most exchange, and the most important bulk exchange, took place
inside rather than between regions’.15
The impoverished élites of the early middle ages generated less demand,
and, as a consequence, bulk-exchange and productive complexity atrophied.16
The result was a period of ‘relative material simplicity’, and an impoverishment
of the archaeological record, in some places only reversed in the eighth
century.17
10. Wickham 2005, p. 161; see also Sarris 2006, p. 402.

11. Northern Francia seems to be an exception. Here, Wickham argues, we have continuity
of large-scale landholding through to the early middle ages. The consequent aristocratic demand
was, he suggests, sufficient ‘to compensate for the end of the fiscal system’, and is manifest in
regional-level distribution of coarse-ware ceramics (Wickham 2005, p. 804).
12. Wickham 2005, pp. 255–8.
13. Wickham 2005, p. 820.
14. Wickham 2005, pp. 706, 718, 819.
15. Wickham 2005, p. 707.
16. Wickham 2005, pp. 706–7.
17. Wickham 2005, pp. 707, 819.
The analytical focus of FEMA is clearly on the regional-level distribution of

bulk-commodities, which are regarded as the real measure of economic (and
social) complexity. Bulk-commodities included both foodstuffs (grain, wine,
olive-oil, and animals) and artisanal goods (especially cloth, iron, and
ceramics).18 Written sources do not tell us much about them. By and large,
texts are concerned with long-distance trade and with luxuries which,
Wickham argues, are marginal to the structure and logic of the economy –
‘luxuries only represent prestige; the real economic system derives from how
the wealth underpinning that prestige was built up’.19
Some of these commodities do not generally survive in the archaeological
record (and iron is not very diagnostic). Ceramics, by contrast, are commonplace
on archaeological sites, and analyses of their form and fabric provides detailed
information about ‘the organisation of production . . . [and] the distance
moved by the products. These are precisely the things we most need to know
to understand an economic system, and ceramic analysis is therefore easily our
best guide to them.’20 Archaeology is central to FEMA because it provides a
means of putting a scale on regional-level patterns of production and
distribution. However, I would argue that had Wickham added other categories
of archaeological evidence to his outstanding studies of ceramics then he might
have been forced to modify some of FEMA’s key-arguments – certainly as
regards England.
In many respects, Wickham’s depiction of the transition from late-Roman
to Anglo-Saxon England is very traditional. The end of the Roman province is
cataclysmic, the fifth and sixth centuries are a heroic Dark Age, and historical
processes only re-emerge (with texts) in the eighth and ninth centuries. In
what follows, I will suggest that archaeology allows us to paint a more nuanced
and dynamic picture. This is one in which the transformation of Roman
Britain was neither as sudden nor as absolute as Wickham suggests (though
no-one could deny that fall there was). In addition, I will argue that, while
land (whether conceptualised in terms of use-rights or owned outright)
remained an important resource and basis for power throughout the period, in
18. Wickham 2005, pp. 699–700.

19. Wickham 2005, pp. 696–7; also p. 800. This is a key-point (long-distance trade, so often
seen as the motor of early-medieval history, is regarded here as epiphenomenal) and can be
related to one of FEMA’s underlying premises – that ‘social change is overwhelmingly the result
of internal factors, not external influences’ (Wickham 2005, p. 831; also pp. 819, 822). See also
Wallerstein 1974, pp. 41–2: ‘In the long run, staples account for more of men’s economic thrusts
than luxuries’.
20. Wickham 2005, p. 702. Rosamond Faith argues that focus on ceramics acts as a bias
against appreciating the rôle of peasants in these historical processes – ‘most peasant products
have a very slim chance of survival in the archaeological record’ (Faith 2009, p. 34).
their pursuit of social dominance élites sought to command other resources –

particularly those relating to origins and ancestry. Finally (and perhaps
conversely), I will pick up on the curious absence of any serious consideration
of the rôle of the Church in the transformations that created the early middle
ages. This neglect of one of the spiritual, cultural and political forces of the
period is lamentable for all sorts of reasons, but, given FEMA’s focus on
landholding, it is even more surprising for, as Marios Costambeys tells us, ‘this
was precisely the period in which the Church rose to be easily the most
significant landowner in Europe’.21
The fall of Roman Britain

Unlike almost any of the other regions covered in FEMA, in Britain the end of
the Roman Empire seems to have been truly catastrophic.22 As in the rest of
the Empire, in the fourth century there were few signs of what was to come;
there are even indications that it was more prosperous than adjacent regions.23
By the middle of the fifth century, however, its cities and villas had been
abandoned – the few signs of life only serving to highlight the extent of the
fall. Significantly for Wickham’s argument, ‘in the early fifth century industrial
ceramic production . . . ended . . . and no other large-scale artisanal production
can be traced’.24
In line with his general thesis, Wickham ties this collapse in bulk-production/
distribution to the demise of aristocratic demand/wealth, and links this directly
to the ending of the Roman fiscal system and the withdrawal of the state.25 In
Britain, he argues, the demise of landed power was so total that Roman
traditions of private landowning disappeared entirely and would not be
re-established before the eighth century (at the earliest).26 Control of the ‘tiny
tribes’ which Wickham sees as the largest socio-political unit encountered by
Anglo-Saxon migrants in the second half of the fifth century was more likely,
21. Costambeys 2006, p. 419. See also Moore 2006; Roach 2007; Wood 2007, pp. 235–7.
Of course, the Church is not entirely neglected – even as an agent of economic transformation
(see, for example, Wickham 2005, p. 297).
22. Wickham 2005, pp. 307–9; also p. 48. The other exceptions are Berber Africa and parts
of coastal Spain (Wickham 2005, pp. 333–9).
23. Wickham 2005, pp. 306–7. See also Esmonde Cleary 2004, p. 416; Mattingly 2006,
p. 374.
24. Wickham 2005, p. 307. In northern Gaul, by contrast, regional-level distribution (and
production) of ceramics ‘survived the fifth century rather well’, as did a ‘landowning aristocracy,
capable of operating on a substantial scale’ (Wickham 2005, pp. 307, 310; pp. 181–2).
25. Wickham 2005, pp. 309, 337.
26. Wickham 2005, p. 330; also pp. 347–8.
therefore, to be based on kinship, common geographical identity, or religion

(or all three) than on property-rights.27
According to FEMA, Britain remained in this rather primitive state of
development for some time. There is little evidence of settlement-hierarchy
until the middle of the seventh century, and, Wickham argues, no sign of
bulk-exchange before the eighth.28 For Wickham, these are tribal, peasant-
mode societies, defined (to some extent) by the absence of landowning – ‘a
ruler, or local lord, is less the owner of land than the leader of a free people’.29
In some ways, this is a reasonable assessment of the transition from Roman
Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. Few would dispute the scale of the material
collapse.30 However, I am not so sure that this is a true measure of the degree
of social change, nor that the transformation was as sudden as Wickham
suggests. In addition, I think that British élites may have played a more active
part in it (even if the consequences of their actions were graver than they could
have imagined).31
Equally, while Wickham’s emphasis on the importance of bonds of mutual
obligation, the rôle of feasting, and so on might capture something of the
period from the fifth to the eighth century, it is rather flat and, ultimately,
ahistorical. After a cataclysmic early-fifth century, not very much happens in
Britain before the eighth. In fact, archaeology allows us to paint a much more
dynamic picture of social development in the transition from the Roman to
the Anglo-Saxon world.
The archaeology of cities in third- and fourth-century Britain reveals them
to have been dynamic places, already changing in ways that would have made
them unrecognisable as Roman to their early-Imperial founders. Drastic
changes to the forum/basilica-complex are especially significant. In London,
parts of the forum were abandoned in the late-third century, before the whole
of the complex was razed to the ground in the early-fourth.32 The forum/
basilica-complex was central to the activities (including tax-raising) of the
curia (the city-council) – its demise (in some cases, its active destruction) must
be a sign of the end of this most-significant Roman institution, and of changes
in élite-identity long before the withdrawal of the Roman state.
27. Wickham 2005, pp. 47, 331, 313.

28. Wickham 2005, pp. 313, 320, 807–10.
29. Wickham 2005, pp. 305, 321. See also Blair 2005, p. 252.
30. Esmonde Cleary 2004, pp. 424–5; Faith 2009, pp. 23–5; Mattingly 2006, pp. 529–39;
Millett 1990, pp. 212–30.
31. ‘The unintended result of much local aristocratic action was that the empire did indeed
break up’ (Wickham 2005, p. 161).
32. Bateman 1998, p. 51. For similar transformations in other cities, see Mattingly 2006,
p. 336.
In the rest of the Empire (where the evidence is later) this kind of destruction
is seen as marking the emerging ‘dominance of informal city nobles’.33 Why
should this not also have been the case in Britain? Simon Esmonde Cleary has
argued that the concomitant development of large town-houses in British
cities represents ‘the transfer of the display of power from the relatively open
public building [forum/basilica] to the more controlled theatre of the private
residence, thus symbolising the rise of the power of the individual at the
expense of the state’.34 Again, this privatisation of power significantly pre-dates
the cataclysmic fifth century. The place of British aristocracies vis-à-vis the
late-Roman state had already been re-negotiated.
Elsewhere in the Empire, such renegotiation involved militarisation of
élites, but Wickham excludes the British from this process because, he says,
‘threats had been fewer, aristocratic society was much more civilian, much less
prepared for the dangers and opportunities of local autonomy’.35 But is this
entirely true? Fourth-century Britain can be seen as a continuous frontier,
assaulted from the east by Germanic forces and from Ireland and western
Scotland by the Attacotti and Scotti.36 As elsewhere, these barbarian-forces
could have provided a rationale, and a model, for transformations in aristocratic
identities – the cemetery-evidence throws significant light on this issue.
In the middle of the fourth century, a new burial-rite appeared in England –
some males were now buried with ‘the fittings for an official-issue belt . . . a
crossbow brooch at the shoulder, and an offering by the right foot’.37
Significantly, both the crossbow-brooch and the belt-fittings were late-Roman
symbols of authority. Guy Halsall argues that similar burials in northern Gaul
should be situated in the context of challenges to Roman power, but made
within ‘the accepted idioms of [that] authority’.38 Why should the burials in
Britain not be interpreted in the same way? They might, in fact, point to the
militarisation of the élite we have just been discussing – and, in a country that
produced numerous usurpers to the Imperial throne, one cannot assume their
loyalty to the Roman Empire.39
33. Wickham 2005, pp. 598, 637, 669.

34. Esmonde Cleary 2004, p. 419; Millett 1990, pp. 221–3; Wickham 1984. Parallel changes
were taking place in the early-fourth-century countryside, with élite-investment in ostentatious
display in villas, some with lavish reception-rooms where the owner received guests as well as
tenants – here, too, the emphasis is on individual power and authority. See Ellis 1988; Esmonde
Cleary 2004, p. 416; Mattingly 2006, p. 374.
35. Wickham 2005, pp. 331–2; see also p. 595.
36. Mattingly 2006, pp. 238–47.
37. Esmonde Cleary 1989, p. 55.
38. Halsall 1992, pp. 204–5; Hinton 2005, p. 8; Janes 1996; Moreland 2000a, pp. 31–2.
39. ‘[E]ven the most disloyal aristocrats . . . re-erected the empire locally or tried to convince
So, rather than seeing Roman Britain collapsing in a cataclysmic half-

century just before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, its fall has to be understood
as the product of longer-term transformations in the social and political
structures of the province, and in the identities of those who wielded effective
power. And, here, I am not sure why we need to envisage a total collapse in
landownership. With the long-term fracturing of public power and the
emergence of individual authority, it seems more likely that élites embedded
themselves ever-deeper in their localities and in their landholdings.40 While we
cannot trace such landholdings into the fifth or sixth centuries, we can
demonstrate continuity of the pattern of the Roman landscape into the early
middle ages.41 Clearly, continuity of land-use does not necessarily mean
continuity of landholding, but I would suggest that it is more likely to mean
just this if we think of late-Roman élites localising themselves within their
lands and communities.42
Wickham emphasises the absence of artisanal production as evidence for
discontinuities in landholding and élite-wealth. While it is true that
production-centres go out of use and Roman-style ceramics disappear, this
does not mean that there were no ceramics in late-fifth-century Britain. The
earliest Anglo-Saxon cemeteries contain plenty of cremation-urns which, as
Catherine Hills has pointed out, were produced by skilled craftsmen.43 In
addition, a range of intricately carved brooches were made and distributed
throughout the eastern half of England. Most were produced at the ‘household
level’, but there are signs of more intensive operations at, for example, Spong
Hill (North Elmham, Norfolk). In addition, a distinctive craft-production
zone ‘which could have been supplying manufactured goods to a wide area’
has been identified at West Heslerton (near Malton, North Yorkshire).44 It is
also important to emphasise that, by the time we get into the sixth century, we
can again identify the kind of regional ceramic networks so central to
Wickham’s main argument. Pottery produced in the Charnwood Forest area
of Leicestershire has been found over much of the East Midlands and eastern
England – ‘only regular and routine exchange can have distributed [it] so
themselves that they were doing so’ (Wickham 2005, p. 161). Writing in c.414, St Jerome
described Britain as ‘fertile in usurpers’ (Mattingly 2006, p. 529; also pp. 230–8). See Faulkner
2000.
40. Moreland 2000a, p. 32.
41. Wickham 2005, pp. 48, 308–9.
42. ‘Continuity of the pattern of the countryside could have been associated with the
continuity of local institutions’ (Campbell 2000, p. 7).
43. Hills 2007, p. 196.
44. Hinton 2005, pp. 21–8, 35–6; Powlesland 1999; Powlesland 2000.
widely’.45 In Wickham’s terms, these networks must represent some quickening

of aristocratic demand (and wealth), and they thus provide us with signs of
increasing social complexity in an era which he continues to portray as
essentially unchanging and devoid of historical process.
I want to make one final point about the nature of the ‘things’ produced
and circulated in early Anglo-Saxon England. In this world, artisanal
production is particularly apparent in spheres of ritual and identity (cremation-
urns, brooches etc.). The contrast with the Roman world is stark – and, in
other parts of the Empire, Wickham has read such radical disjunctures as
evidence for cultural change, wherein people came to believe that (for example)
moveable decorations, clothing, or private armies were more appropriate
vehicles for the expression of identities than (say) villa-architecture. In other
parts of the Empire, Wickham sees the end of the villa ‘as a marker . . . of the
militarisation of aristocratic lifestyles, rather than of crisis’.46 Given my earlier
arguments for the militarisation of élites in fourth-century Britain, might not
its archaeological disjuncture also be seen as a product of cultural choice,
rather than crisis?
Anthropologists have recently stressed the significance of ‘ancestral origins’
in the construction of group-identity.47 The Anglo-Saxons placed their
beginnings across the North Sea, and the brooches and funerary urns that
dominate the material residue of their lives are adorned with symbols
emphasising that connection.48 Utilitarian judgements about quality (or
quantity!) are no guide to the ‘value’ of these objects. They may have been as
much markers of, and resources for, élite-power as the bulk-commodities of
the late-Roman world. In a society where status and position may have derived
as much from (real or fictitious) ethnic origins as from land (though the two
must have been connected), control over the manufacture and distribution of
these objects would have been a source of social power – delivering increased
control over people and their production.49
45. Williams and Vince 1997, p. 219; Hinton 2005, pp. 29, 811. Wickham refers to some of
these patterns (for example, Wickham 2005, p. 811), but does not make enough of them.
46. Wickham 2005, pp. 201–2; also pp. 174–7.
47. Godelier 1999, p. 121; Helms 1993, p. 192; Moreland 2003.
48. Hinton 2005, p. 26; Moreland 2003; Williams 2001.
49. Moreland 2000a. See Thomas, Stumpf and Härke 2006 and Woolf 2007 for the argument
that, in Anglo-Saxon England, ethnic differences translated into economic and legal
discrimination. I wonder if one can link this with the different levels of ‘tribute’ required from
the free and unfree peasants on particular land-units (Wickham 2005, pp. 321–3).
Power from the past

FEMA’s rather static picture of social development in England from the fifth
to the eighth centuries is momentarily enlivened by a consideration of the
cemetery-evidence, which shows that differences in wealth become clear only
in the later-sixth century, and that ‘status-differences’ had stabilised only at the
beginning of the seventh.50 This was an important moment in English history.
The king buried at Sutton Hoo (near Woodbridge, Suffolk), in a ship laden
with treasures from across the Western world, was significantly more powerful
than his sixth-century predecessors but, in the absence of landownership, what
underpinned his power? As we have seen, Wickham suggests that kings might
draw on kinship, religion or common geographical identity to construct a
‘tribe’,51 but these resources never seem deep enough, or potent enough, to
contribute to the construction of the kind of hierarchies manifest at Sutton
Hoo. In fact, it seems that such kings drew upon, and came to control, sources
of social power which make no appearance in FEMA – among the most
important of which was the past itself.52 The result was increased control over
people, their labour, and the produce of their labour.
Recent archaeology has demonstrated that some Anglo-Saxon lineages
chose to bury their dead within ancient monuments, especially round barrows
constructed in the Bronze Age.53 Textual evidence suggests that such mounds
were regarded as the ‘dwellings of supernatural beings, ancient or ancestral
peoples’. Their re-use might thus have created a connection between the
deceased’s lineage and the world of the ancestors.54 In the late-sixth and seventh
centuries, however, the conditions for monument-reuse changed. There was
now a focus on single, very rich, burials as élites appropriated the tradition to
their own ends – they now claimed ‘exclusive links to divine ancestry and
supernatural power’.55
We know that the past was also activated in the structuring of élite-
settlements. At Yeavering (on the edge of the Cheviot Hills, Northumbria) the
50. Wickham 2005, p. 341.

51. Wickham 2005, p. 331.
52. I would argue that ‘objects from afar’ were another such resource. See Moreland 2003;
Theuws 2004; also Wickham 2005, pp. 809–10. Rosamond Faith, in her argument for the
increasing significance of pastoralism and discussion of how such societies might have operated,
does add flesh to Wickham’s sketch of this period – but she does not address the fundamental
question of the sources of social power, despite her references to the importance of ‘real or
supposed kinship’ in the construction of tribal groups (Faith 2009, p. 30).
53. Williams 1997, pp. 4, 6, 14, 26; Williams 1998, p. 92.
54. Williams 1998, pp. 102–3; Williams 1997, p. 25.
55. Williams 1998, p. 103.
layout of the seventh-century royal palace on the low hill overlooking the
Milfield-basin was based on the pattern of prehistoric monuments there. In
the basin itself, a row of neolithic henge-monuments was ‘enhanced by a
double-ditched “avenue” linking three of the sites and leading into the royal
centre at Milfield’.56 Here again, seventh-century kings were grounding their
present in the prehistoric past, naturalising existing social relations and
legitimising ‘controls over land, resources and other social groups’.57 For these
seventh-century kings – in East Anglia, Northumbria and, doubtless, other
part of Anglo-Saxon England – origins, ancestry and the past were sources of
power, and control over them (and the rights and resources which flowed from
this) might provide us with the historical dynamic which is absent from
Wickham’s rather ‘flat’ account of Dark-Age England.
The uniqueness of . . . East Anglia?

As noted at the outset, for Wickham the circulation of bulk-commodities is a
key-measure of social complexity. These, he argues, reappear in England in the
early-eighth century in East Anglia in the form of ‘Ipswich-ware’, a type of
ceramic produced in the trading settlement (wic or emporium) there from
c.720. Wickham argues that its ‘blanket distribution’ across the kingdom of
East Anglia was a product of ‘the existence of commercial networks . . .
involving bulk exchange’.58 Ipswich-ware, he argues, is a material measure of
East Anglia’s difference, and, developing the contrast with other eighth-century
kingdoms, he argues that there, ‘market exchange . . . seems to have been
generalised by the eighth century. . . . [T]his implies that the elites of East
Anglia were also the first to be properly established as landowners, with a
secure control over substantial agricultural returns from peasants, and thus a
stable source of wealth and demand, a century earlier than elsewhere in
England.’59 I am not sure, however, that the uniqueness of East Anglia is as
clear in the archaeological record. In fact, I would suggest that there is good
evidence for an intensification of production, and for regional and long-
distance exchange-networks, across much of (at least) eastern England from
the late-seventh century.60
56. Bradley 1987; Bradley 1993, pp. 118–19.

57. Williams 1997, p. 26.
58. Wickham 2005, p. 811. See also Blinkhorn 1999.
59. Wickham 2005, pp. 812–13.
60. Moreland 2000b. Here, I will focus on the evidence from outside East Anglia to
demonstrate that the processes were not limited to that kingdom.
The (probable) monastic site at Flixborough (near Scunthorpe, North

Lincolnshire) was involved in distribution-networks that brought in Ipswich-
wares, ceramics from the Low Countries, and wares with a distribution across
the East Midlands, Lincolnshire and Humberside.61 Wharram Percy (near
Malton, North Yorkshire) also had a significant religious presence from the
beginning of the eighth century, and here too, Ipswich-wares, northern-French
wares, as well as a regional type noted at York have been uncovered.62 Further
evidence for these regional/pan-regional exchange-networks comes in the
form of small silver pennies [sceattas] found at each of these sites – as well as at
others lower down the social scale, such as Cottam in the Yorkshire Wolds near
Driffield.63
Many of these sites also demonstrate an increased emphasis on production –
of both foodstuffs and artisanal goods. At Flixborough, cloth was being
produced on ‘an industrial scale’.64 There was a smithy at Wharram, and the
landscape around the site was being bounded and enclosed, suggesting a
concern with the management of land – and its products.65 A measure of the
scale of the phenomenon is provided by the fact that the excavated site at
Cottam is one of dozens dotted across this part of the Yorkshire Wolds.66 The
occupation of marginal landscapes are another such measure – the mid-
seventh- to eighth-century settlement of Simy Folds, with extensive evidence
for iron-smelting and smithing, is located in a remote part of Upper Teesdale,
County Durham.67
Signs of a quickening of economic activity in the late-seventh and early-
eighth century are not restricted to eastern England. There was a specialised
iron-production centre at Ramsbury (near Marlborough, Wiltshire), a
watermill was probably employed in iron-making at Worgret (west of
Wareham, Dorset), and there were facilities for the centralised processing of
grain at Gillingham (near Shaftesbury, Dorset).68 In addition, we have evidence
for the construction, in the early-eighth century, of a bridge over the River
61. Blinkhorn 1999, p. 9; Loveluck 1998, pp. 154, 157; Loveluck 2001, pp. 94–100.
62. Stamper and Croft 2000, p. 199.
63. Leahy 1999; Loveluck 1998, Loveluck 2001, Loveluck 2007; Richards 1999a; Stamper
and Croft 2000.
64. Leahy 1999, p. 91; Loveluck 2001, pp. 94–6; Richards 1999a, p. 46. David Hinton
points to the ubiquity of evidence for cloth-production – ‘textile equipment continues to be
found virtually everywhere that there is occupation evidence’ (Hinton 2005, p. 74).
65. Hinton 2005, p. 93; Richards 1999a, p. 51; Richards 1999b, p. 76; Stamper and Croft
2000, pp. 196–9.
66. Richards 1999a, p. 46; Richards 1999b, pp. 71, 74–5; Richards 2003, pp. 158–60.
67. Coggins, Fairless and Batey 1983.
68. Moreland 2000b, pp. 98–100. See also below for salt-production at Droitwich.
Trent (at Cromwell, Nottinghamshire) – the development of a communications-

infrastructure being of some significance in economic intensification.69
The late-seventh- and early-eighth-century coin-evidence throws some
interesting light on these developments. While the general pattern, with its
bias towards the eastern and southern counties, apparently reinforces the
argument that economic development was focused in this area,70 closer analysis
reveals a more complex, and a more interesting, picture. So, coins produced in
Hamwic (the wic or emporium at Southampton) tend to be found ‘in the
hinterland westwards but not northwards or eastwards’.71 In other words,
there was an eastwards-flow of goods into wic. A similar pattern emerges from
the study of continental-European coins deposited in England. Very high
concentrations of these were found at Oxford and at Bidford-on-Avon
(between Stratford and Evesham), and Michael Metcalf speculates that these
might be connected with ‘sheep on chalk uplands’ and shipments of wool
eastwards along the Thames.72 In addition, London sceattas are found in
significant numbers in western England, and salt from the enhanced
production-facilities at Droitwich (North Worcestershire) was carried to
London via a series of salt-routes linking up with the Thames.73 The Thames
was clearly of some significance in articulating West and East.74
So, even if economic activity was more intense in eastern England, it was
not confined to East Anglia, and the west did not stagnate. In fact, one might
see the evident eastern (including overseas-) demand for western goods and
commodities as a stimulus to economic development in the latter region – and
one can see bulk production and exchange in both parts of England (salt at
Droitwich and cloth at Flixborough).75
I want to make one more point about the coins.76 Wickham has argued that
market-exchange, landowning and increased exactions on peasants developed
a century earlier in East Anglia than elsewhere in England. Such market-
exchange must have been mediated through the sceatta-coinage – no other
medium existed.77 But why should these coins not have fulfilled the same
69. Salisbury 1995; Faith 2009, p. 24.

70. Blackburn 2003, p. 20.
71. Metcalf 2003, p. 41.
72. Metcalf 2003, p. 43.
73. Maddicott 2005. See also Brooks 2003; Wickham 2005, p. 700.
74. Michael Metcalf calls it the ‘long arm of international trade’ (Metcalf 2003, p. 45).
75. See Maddicott 2002, p. 60; also Hinton 2005, p. 92.
76. Wickham does not discuss the numismatic evidence in any detail, a point noted by
Campbell 2007; Wood 2007, p. 231. See Wickham 2005, p. 702.
77. It now seems that this silver coinage could have been used for low-level transactions – see
Hinton 2005, p. 85.
function in (at least) the other kingdoms in which they were produced? In
fact, I would suggest that there, and in those regions in which they
were distributed, they are a sign of the quickening of economic activity and,
by implication, of increased demands on the labour and resources of the
peasantry. Mark Blackburn has argued that the ‘proliferation of coinage in the
early-eighth century is one of the most remarkable features of the economy
of early medieval England’, with many more coins attributed to this period
than any other before the fourteenth century.78 These objects, like the
settlements, the production-facilities, the communications-infrastructure, and
the distribution-networks, are a marker of the remarkable transformation in
the English economy (both East and West) in the late-seventh- and early-
eighth centuries – significantly, before Wickham’s date for the re-emergence
of landownership.79
Finally, we should consider the rôle of the Church in these processes – it
plays little part in FEMA.80 Several of the sites already discussed have
ecclesiastical connections – Flixborough was a monastery (though perhaps
only in its later phases), there was a significant ecclesiastical presence at
Wharram, and the bishops of Worcester were involved in the production and
distribution of salt from Droitwich. Kings granted remission of toll on ships
owned by religious communities, confirming their involvement in regional
and long-distance trade.81
At a time when kings were peripatetic, churches constituted stable, focal
points in the landscape.82 The great minsters owned large tracts of land and
could call upon their ‘considerable manpower’. They had the capacity to
reorganise their holdings (through the amalgamation of scattered properties)
and to monitor and control production (through the use of texts).83 They were
centres of mass-consumption and of craft-production.84 Provisioning the
subsistence-, liturgical, textual and artistic needs of these large institutions
would have stimulated production and exchange at both the regional and
long-distance levels.85 The Church, John Maddicott concludes, ‘was promoting
economic growth’.86
78. Blackburn 2003, pp. 31–2.

79. Wickham 2005, pp. 347–9.
80. Though see, for example, Wickham 2005, pp. 202, 346.
81. Loveluck 2007; Middleton 2005; Kelly 1992.
82. Blair 2005, p. 252; also Maddicott 2002, p. 59.
83. Blair 2005, pp. 254–5; Moreland 2001.
84. Blair 2005, pp. 253, 258–9; Faith 2009, pp. 33–4.
85. Campbell 2003, pp. 17–18.
86. Maddicott 2005, p. 31.
We should perhaps also consider the implications of the fact that, following
the militarisation of the secular aristocracy, the Church was the inheritor of
the ‘literary culture’ and of the accumulated knowledge of Roman antiquity.87
We are not yet in a position to evaluate the significance of this knowledge for
the ‘commercial transformation of England’, but the Church does seem to be
associated with the introduction of ‘new kinds of infrastructure and equipment’,
especially the watermill.88 And, finally, we should consider the possibility that
some of these transformations were influenced by different attitudes to labour
associated with Christianity.89 John Blair concludes that monastic sites were
central to ‘the most extensive system for regional and local distribution of
commodities that can be perceived in non-Atlantic Britain since the Roman
period’.90 As with the aristocracy, one does not have to like the Church to
recognise its importance!91
Conclusion
An important analytical distinction between feudal and peasant-mode societies
lies at the heart of Framing the Early Middle Ages. The relationship between
land and power is central to feudal societies and (as one would expect)
discussions of land, land-ownership, and land-transactions dominate the
volume. In tribal societies (a version of the peasant-mode), by contrast, land-
ownership is replaced by personal social relationships, reinforced by gift-
exchange and ‘elaborate hospitality and feasting’, as the basis for élite-power.92
However, as we have seen, the details and dynamics of these social relationships
are not worked through, and we are left with a rather ghostly image of how
these kind of societies actually worked – perhaps explaining the resort to
‘faction’ in the description of peasant-society in late-seventh-century lowland
England.93
The problem here is not that the evidence for northern village-societies has
‘to be invented’94 – it does not! Rather, the activities through which their social
relationships were created and reproduced are not commonly recorded in
87. Wickham 2005, pp. 159, 174.

88. Brunner 1995; Butzer 1993; James 1993; Stevens 1985; White Jr. 1980; Blair 2005,
pp. 249, 256; McErlean and Crothers 2007.
89. Foot 2006, pp. 211–15; Le Goff 1980, pp. 71–86; Ovitt 1994.
90. Blair 2005, p. 261.
91. Wickham 2005, p. 824.
92. Wickham 2005, p. 305; pp. 536–41.
93. Wickham 2005, pp. 428–34.
94. Wickham 2005, p. 428.
texts. One of the reasons for this is that many of the documents that were
produced during the early middle ages were actually implicated in the business
of land-transaction (charters, estate-management documents and so on). As
texts, they were active in the historical process – in this case, in the emergence
of feudal societies. It is, therefore, no coincidence that they (and other signs of
literacy) begin to proliferate at the same time as we get evidence for ‘the
intensification of landlordly control over agrarian production’ that was central
to the feudal mode.95
The implication of this is that the kind of texts that are central to FEMA
cannot speak about the reality of ‘tribal societies’ – the kind of societies that
covered large parts of north-western Europe in much of the period covered by
the volume.96 Wickham acknowledges this – ‘the best guide to the empirical
presence of the peasant mode must be archaeology’. However, it could also be
argued that his real characterisation of this mode is in terms of an absence
from the archaeological record – the absence of ‘utilitarian artisanal goods’.97
To that extent, one could say that these tribal societies are described more in
terms of what they were not than in terms of their own social and political
dynamic. I would suggest that, if we want to understand them in their own
terms, then we have to turn to those elements of the archaeological record in
which the activities and beliefs central to their social and political practice do
find expression. Such evidence (the reuse of monuments or the stylistic analysis
of the decoration on brooches and burial-urns) might fall beyond the remit of
a ‘fairly classic social and economic history’,98 but it would bring us closer to
the realities of the historical past and would reinforce the case already made in
Framing the Early Middle Ages for the power of archaeology to enhance our
understanding of the historical process.
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Peasant-Based Societies in Chris Wickham’s Thought
Carlos Astarita
University of La Plata-University of Buenos Aires
carlos.astarita@gmail.com
Abstract
This engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic
kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal
members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that
kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in
the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling
class. In consequence, popular revolts against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that
the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term,
thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an
indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities
multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham
contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this
concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence
allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical
basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale.
Keywords
Marxism, peasantry, Chris Wickham, peasant-mode of production, feudalism
Taking issues
Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages ranks alongside the great works
both of medievalism and of British-Marxist historiography. This positioning
sheds light on its qualities. A thousand pages of comparative analysis with an
extensive bibliography and sources that range from Denmark to the Near East
and Africa to Gaul, Italy and Spain, is a very impressive feat. No less notable is
the explanation of the categories used, which draw both on classical (Marx and
Weber) and modern social theory. In short, the book straddles description and
theory with amazing erudition, intelligent reading of sources and a clear
conception of method: it marks a turning-point in historiography.1
1. Similar to what Marc Bloch’s La société féodale signified.

C. Astarita / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 194–220 195
More than that, Wickham has outlined a concept of a peasant-mode of

production that, or so I shall argue, provides him not only a powerful grammar
by which to decipher the nature of the period after the fall of Rome in the
West, but which can also be pushed further than Wickham himself does.
Paradoxically enough, my extension of Wickham’s concept of a peasant-mode
is inspired by his earlier theoretical contributions to these debates.2
For the purposes of my argument, I shall compare Europe in the period
discussed by Wickham with later periods. This manoeuvre is due less to a
professional inclination than to a methodological disposition: a concern with
recognising the development of social forms. This premise must not be
regarded as a teleological standpoint (the idealistic determinism Wickham
warns us against). Rather, it arises from a materialist exercise by which we are
able to conceive historical evolution and to establish the connection between
genesis and structure.
Framing the early Middle Ages holds a clear position among Marxist studies
on the subject of the late-Roman/early-medieval watershed. Apart from some
shrewd but unsystematic suggestions by Engels, and some other more empirical
elaborations, this problem only began to be considered by Marxists around
1970. There were two predominant explanations. One stressed the crisis of
the third century, when the slave-system was supposed to have collapsed for
causes (class-struggle, fall in the rate of profit, non-reproduction of slaves) as
diverse as the debaters, to be replaced by Roman and Germanic proto-
feudalism.3 In the second explanation, free peasants (subject to fiscal taxes)
and slaves coexisted until around the year 1000. At the beginnings of the new
millennium, the seigneurie banale replaced ancient society by means of a
sociopolitical mutation. In this thesis, analysis of the mode of production was
downplayed for a focus on the socio-economic formation, including its
political organisation.4
Wickham examines all these issues. From the fifth century onwards, he
claims, the Roman fiscal system fell, mainly, due to the settlement of Germanic
armies on the land and the transformation of Germanic aristocrats into
landowners which, along with simpler state-structures and a more restricted
civil administration, reduced the need for tax. The new aristocracy received
lands, rents appeared and power became more localised, weakening the state
in the process. In this context, free peasants appeared, although they were not
completely free from aristocratic control. The relationship between the latter
2. I express my intellectual debt, especially to a seminar given by Wickham at the University

of Buenos Aires in 1995.
3. Schtajerman 1975; Anderson 1979a; de Ste Croix 1981.
4. Bonnassie 1975–6; Bois 1989.
196 C. Astarita / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 194–220
and the peasantry brought about a great regional variety, ranging from areas in
which aristocratic domination was intense to northern Europe, where peasants
were predominant. In any case, even where the logic of the feudal mode of
production was predominant, as in the region of Paris by 700, enclaves of free
peasants could still be found. The image Wickham uses here is that of the
spots on the skin of a leopard: in general terms, aristocrats extended their
lands and political activities thanks to their position as landowners. Far from
claiming immutability of structures until the eleventh century as the
mutationists have argued, Wickham establishes change, the movement of
structures by social action. If, by 750, the feudal mode of production was
already established in certain areas, others would go that same direction after
800. The basis of his thesis lies in the nature of Germanic settlement. This is a
controversial issue. According to Walter Goffart, the Germanic peoples were
given not shares in the land but shares in the tax-system. Wickham rejects this
view, observing that not a single text clearly backs up Goffart’s theory.5
Germanic settlement
The absence of explicit writings does not, however, preclude our partial
subscription to the Goffart-hypothesis on tax-distribution, if we perceive the
problem as one that should be addressed from the perspective of social
differentiation. Let us examine the problem in its historical development.
When Germanic kings conquered portions of the Empire, they settled as
political authorities on fiscal lands, surrounding themselves with warrior-
entourages that lived in the king’s palatium.6 By virtue of a theoretical right of
property over what was conquered (which did not imply its full possession)
and as the highest authorities of an ideally patrimonial state, they granted
districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage to exercise power
over (ad imperandum). This is how counts appeared, at first urban residents
(comes civitatis), with some of them originally being humble servants of the
royal household.7 These revocable concessions were granted as a consequence
of their political function. In Visigothic Spain, for example, this is shown by
their strategic location outside the area of greatest Gothic settlement-
concentration, the Tierra de Campos in the Duero valley.
5. Goffart 1980; Wolfram 1990. Barnish 1986 opposes this view.

6. Sánchez Albornoz 1942; Sánchez Albornoz 1943, pp. 35ff.; Dopsch 1986, pp. 252, 270.
7. Arndt and Krusch 1885, V, 48.
The numerous confiscations carried out by kings indicate that this landed
aristocracy was not really landowning.8 This squared with their objective of
seizing power in the state; that is why high officials aspired to acquire ‘honores’,
that is to say, political and military authority.9 Their status itself was determined
by holding power (mundium, bannus) as a personal attribute. This explains
why, for instance, there is ‘little secure evidence of widespread appropriation
of Roman landed property; although there must have been some . . . there were
certainly Roman aristocratic families continuing’ when the Lombards invaded
Italy in 568–9.10
But, besides these sites, there was another form of settlement by peasant-
colonisation, that was reflected in Spain in places such as Godin, Gotones,
Revillagodos, etc.11 Toponymy indicates that villages such as Sort, Suertes,
Tercias or Consortes arose from distribution of portions of land for production.
Visigothic laws envisaged the right to seize uncultivated lands in full property,
a practice carried out by peasants in the Duero valley later in the ninth and
tenth centuries, and the notion that only individual ploughing meant actual
property persisted for a long time.12 Free peasants were thus constituted,
though they were subject to some obligations, such as war-service, which
accounts for the difficulties faced by the Visigoths in recruiting those who
resisted, abandoning their lands.13 Similarly, in Francia, frontier-Merovingian
coloni-soldiers ( franci homines) had hereditary lands in exchange for war-
services under the direction of a chieftain.14 Lombard armies were also formed
by small and medium landowners.15 It must be therefore admitted that a
significant non-noble stratum was frequent in Germanic military organisation.16
This was how the decline in Roman supplies for the army was compensated
for, and it explains why counts, who did not receive significant tribute (for
reasons we shall soon explore), did not have large armed entourages.17
8. Vives 1963, pp. 415–16; Arndt and Krusch 1885, IV, 39; Arndt and Krusch 1885, V, 47,
48; Arndt and Krusch 1885, VII, 22; Kerneis 1998, p. 49.
9. Werner 1998, pp. 34, 175–86, 234–5; Kerneis 1998, p. 83; Arndt and Krusch 1885, III, 23,
king’s assets.
10. Wickham 2005, p. 210.
11. Sánchez Albornoz 1970, pp. 14–15; Menéndez Pidal 1957, pp. 188–9. Alans and Sueves
also left their traces in toponymy.
12. Zeumer 1902, I, X, 2, 4, pp. 392–3; Domínguez Guilarte 1933.
13. Zeumer 1902, IX, 2, 8; Zeumer 1902, IX, 2, 9; Jones 1964, p. 256.
14. Werner 1998, pp. 164, 212; Werner 1980.
15. Wickham 2005, pp. 214–15; Gasparri 2005, pp. 159–60; Azzara and Moro 1998, Nº 10,
Volume 2, Year 801; Azzara and Moro 1998, Nº 11, tit. 13, Years 806–10.
16. Heather 1999; Poly 1998, pp. 187–8.
17. Pactus legis Salicae, Echardt 1962, p. 163.
This system continued in the Asturian kingdom that was born in the north
of Spain after the Arab invasion of 711. Its first kings may have been Visigothic
district-chieftains who refused to subordinate themselves to the Muslims.18
Asturian counts (lay or ecclesiastical), held offices granted by the kings, who
could claim them back or confiscate their ad imperandum lands; and until
circa 1000 there were still aristocrats who had not consolidated their property.19
Their armies were formed by free peasants, subject to general obligations
derived from the primitive public nature of land (although, already by the
early-ninth century, these districts were becoming seigneurial property), a
situation not very different from what Frankish sources indicate.20 In
correspondence with this form of the army, and also with the limited
importance of agrarian rents until the ninth or sometimes even the tenth or
eleventh centuries, these small entourages surrounding counts persisted for a
long time. In Spain, some members of the entourage were called jueces, merinos
or sayones, and they were in charge of surveillance and tax-raising.21
In short, had landed property been a quality relevant for aristocratic status,
this would have been reflected in the documentation after 800. What can be
found, however, both in Asturian and Frankish writings, are chieftains
exercising political power over direct producers. This must have derived from
socially differentiated forms of ‘settlement’.
Taxation and collapse of the state

This relates to the fact that kings preserved public taxation and sought the
support of the tax-collecting agents they found in the curiales, medium-scale
landowners with urban residence (although there were marked differences
between them). But that system had already deteriorated: references to deserted
lands (agri deserti) began to appear in the fourth century to denote areas where
taxes could not be raised, and this coincided with a growing inefficiency of the
curiales.22 By punishing the curialis with seizure of his assets if he failed in his
task, the state threatened his reproduction as private owner, and with this
18. Montenegro and del Castillo 1992; Pastor Díaz de Garayo 1996, pp. 119ff.
19. Sáez 1987, Document 51, Year 920; Del Ser Quijano 1994, Document 76, Year 1015. These
chieftains led rebellions in Muslim Spain; see Acién Almansa 1997.
20. Fernández del Pozo 1984, Document X, p. 248. Feudal chivalry partially arose from the
peasantry; see, Muñoz y Romero 1847, p. 31; Chandler 2002, pp. 25, 28; Boretius (ed.) 1883,
Nº 48, Year 807; Boretius (ed.) 1883, Nº 50, Year 808; Boretius (ed.) 1883, Nº 73, Year 811.
21. See Del Ser Quijano 1994.
22. Heather 2005, pp. 111, 114; Jones 1964, pp. 737ff.
undermined him as a civil servant. This found expression in the curiales’ refusal
to support an organism that ruined them; that they may have even joined the
bagaudae cannot be ruled out.23 The political centre responded by stressing the
need for tax, to provide for the army that defended Roman society against
external threat, and by trying to hold curiales in their offices. Despite this, the
system underwent involution and finally disintegrated in the sixth century.
This degradation was reflected in the recruitment of individuals lacking in
capacity to secure authority. Bastards and clerics dismissed from office for
dissolute behaviour were successively incorporated as curiales and compulsorily
attached to their office.24 The lack of prestige of these civil servants can be
represented in the regulation that allowed judges to punish them physically.25
In the early-seventh century, the institution had disappeared even in the areas
where it had been firmly established.26 It is therefore understandable why, in
683, the Visigothic king Ervig, faced with a delay in tax-collecting, decreed a
pardon for those who had not paid until the first year of his rule.27 This decree
also shows that kings wanted to use this system, but could not maintain it.
Aristocrats or agents of the monarchy answered personally for what was raised,
a pretention that measures the long survival of state-ideology devoid of
practical effect. An illustration of the deterioration of the fiscal system is that
the Arabs had to work hard to reconstruct it when they arrived in Spain and
they did so by using aristocrats of the Asturian kingdom as tax-gathering
agents.28
Wickham has considered the disintegration of the Roman state a ‘major
turning-point’, although he does not ascribe this fall to a structural crisis but
to a slower process of substitution in the means of aristocratic maintenance,
particularly in that of the armies. An ideal-type definition of state taken from
Henri Claessen and W.G. Runciman underlies his thesis.29 His parameters are
23. Drinkwater 1992.

24. Lex Romana Visigothorum, Constitutio Theodosii et Valentiniani, XI, 1, Interpretatio; on clerics,
Lex Romana Visigothorum, Constitutio Theodosii et Valentiniani, XVI, 1, 5. They had obstacles placed
to prevent them from selling their assets, Lex Romana Visigothorum Novellarum Maioriani, I,
Interpretatio. If they moved to another city, they had to serve both: Lex Romana Visigothorum, XII,
1, 2 (Codex Theod., XII, 1, 12), Interpretatio. Laws quoted and analysed in Sánchez Albornoz 1943,
p. 29, Nº 56 and Nº 58; p. 39, Nº 105 and Nº 106.
25. Lex Romana Visigothorum, XII, 1, 5 (Cod. Theod., 1, 47), Interpretatio, quoted in Sánchez
Albornoz 1943, p. 35, N° 90.
26. Circulation-taxes remained unchanged. As an example among the Franks, see Boretius (ed.)
1883, N° 90, Year 781?; Isla Frez 1992, pp. 151ff.
27. Vives 1963, pp. 413, 419; Zeumer 1902, pp. 479–80.
28. See the pact with Theodomir, in Lèvi-Provençal 1938, p. 78. Among the Merovingians, it
was the counts who collected tax in the cities, see Arndt and Krusch 1885, VI, 22.
29. Wickham 2005, p. 57.
the centralisation of legitimate authority, specialisation in government-rôles,

the concept of public power, stable and independent resources for those in
power and a class-system of surplus-extraction.
The critical aspect of this definition lies in the fact that it underestimates the
mechanisms of bureaucratic reproduction and the way in which bureaucracy
articulates with the dominant class. This is not a general, but a specific problem.
In the precapitalist East, for instance, the élite (family, superior community)
which dominated landed property also held that property from the state.
Marx’s elaborations on this situation, in which tax is confused with rent, are
still valid.30 In these systems, civil servants were dominated by the proprietor/
monarch, and, when he granted concessions, these rarely escaped his control.31
The ideal type used by Wickham corresponds with this situation, one in which
there is a direct and relatively simple relationship between the owner of the
means of production and coercion and his civil servants (which does not
exclude other critical issues such as the articulation between the state and a
clan-society in the economic base). On the contrary, when economic activity
is based on private property as in the late Empire, or under developed feudalism
or capitalism, the link between private interest and bureaucracy is delicate and
essential. In the ideal-type construct, such specific traits as these are usually
not perceived.
This implies that a fiscal taxation derived from the transformation of a
slave-society had to ensure that there was room for the reproduction of the
private economies on which its civil servants were sustained. This was achieved,
under different conditions, by the monarchies of the late middle ages. After
circa 1250, the state, by now based on a commercial bourgeoisie or on rich
peasant-patriciates, guaranteed the reproduction of these non-feudal social
classes whose members acted in the reproduction of feudal relations of
production32 as agents and rent-collectors for central power. Differences can
be seen in comparison with the system of the failed Roman-Germanic
kingdoms. Whilst, in the late middle ages, each moment of reproduction of
the state was a moment of reproduction of the patriciate (and of the economic
system from which it derived its private profit), between the fourth and sixth
centuries, each moment of the reproduction of the state was a step toward the
weakening of its bureaucratic stratum, toward the deterioration of its political
vertex. It may also be possible that the fourth-century increase in production
(on which there is now consensus) may have implied the growth of private
economies, establishing a situation that hastened the contradiction between
30. Marx 1977, p. 799.

31. Ibn al-Kardabus 1993, pp. 85–7; Ibn ‘Idari 1993, p. 15; Cahen 1963.
32. Astarita 2005, pp. 85ff.
the interest of urban élites as economic subjects and their lack of interest as
political ones. Social differentiation within the group was an inevitable side-
effect. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the
ruling class related to bureaucratic non-reproduction. In consequence, popular
revolts against taxation ensued.33
Power-crisis and social rebellion

These revolts are a first indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of
domination was not replaced by another, either immediately or in the short
term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. This created different conditions
for the existence of servi.
One cannot but agree with Wickham in that these servi were mainly peasants
subject to rent (serfs), although there may have also been ancient-type slaves
among them.34 In terms of an analysis of them as a class with status [ständische
Klasse]35 they could be referred to as enslaved serfs, an expression that privileges
the material relations of existence of an economically and politically
dependent peasant without disregarding his legal qualities – which reveal the
slowness of the transformation. This peasant, just like traditional slaves
(mancipia) were, was part of a workforce at the service of kings, bishops or lay
aristocrats. But he was subject to feeble exploitation.
A reference in the XVI Council of Toledo of 693 shows that, in Spain, the
labour of ten mancipia corresponded to an extremely poor church; and that, if
any, could not summon even that labour-force, it could not keep a priest and
was to be incorporated under another church.36 How should we interpret this
relationship between the number of workers and the feebleness in accumulation?
We have reasons to think that the servi of the Visigothic period were an unruly
workforce, inclined to show ill-will towards compulsory labour and to defy
the system with daily sabotage.37 In the same way that fiscal uprisings reflect a
social situation not controlled by dominant groups, the fugitive slaves or serfs
described in the Visigothic laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction.38
Servi escaped compulsory labour, sometimes encouraged by others, a statement
33. Rouche 1988, p. 89; Arndt and Krusch 1885, III, 36; Arndt and Krusch 1885, V, 28; Arndt
and Krusch 1885, VII, 15.
34. Zeumer 1886, 8, 9; Lehmann 1888, 1, XII.
35. Kuchenbuch and Michael 1977.
36. Vives 1963, pp. 484, 502.
37. Beyerle and Buchner 1954, Chapters 30 and 31; Boretius (ed.) 1883, Nº 3, pp. 3–6.
38. Zeumer 1902, IX, pp. 351ff.
that reveals a network of complicities. Rewards were offered for their capture.39
In the early-eighth century, the Visigothic king Egica claimed that there barely
existed places without runaway slaves and that they hid, aided by those who
took them in.40 The text reflects collective flights and commands that, wherever
they went, all the population should chase them. Burgundian laws bear witness
to the same phenomenon of slaves or serfs who fled and were aided by free
men or others of their same condition.41 The situation was similar in Italy.42
Here, seventh-century servi, besides having popular support and probably
thanks to it, organised themselves to attack manors and liberate slaves, in a
movement that consolidated further in the following century.43 From Italy,
fugitives covered great distances and, by 782, it was necessary to search for
them in very distant places, such as northern Gaul.44 Western roads were
peopled with a prowling mass that found in social banditry an option for
survival and for resisting persecutions.45 As Moses Finley argued, the reiteration
of fugitive serfs suggests that the law was regularly violated.46
Other references back up this feebleness in controls. The councils of 506
and 517 in Spain forbade the liberation of slaves. This was the usual practice
(at least it was aimed to withhold dependence of the manumitted).47 But the
significance lies in the fact that it was claimed to be unfair that monks should
work in rural tasks while slaves were liberated.48 The monastic labour reflected
in these dispositions was, by no means, a way to combat idleness: Isidore’s rule
expects monks to work in vegetable-gardens and in the kitchen, although it
states that construction-building and farming the land were occupations for
servi.49 This anxiety to limit slave- or servile emancipation corresponds with an
anxiety to preserve the available workforce.50 In 619, a norm of the Council of
Seville that represses fugitives makes further reference to clerics that worked
39. Zeumer 1902, IX, 1, 5; Zeumer 1902, IX, 1, 6; Zeumer 1902, IX, 1, 9, 14.
40. Zeumer 1902, IX, 1, 21.
41. De Salis 1892, Liber Constitutionum, VI.
42. Azzara and Gasparri 2004, Edict of Rothari, tit. 267, 269, 270, 271, 273, 276. In the
early-eighth century; Azzara and Gasparri 2004, Laws of Liutprand, 44, 88. Azzara and Moro
1998, Nº 10, Volume 8, Year 801; Nº 12, t. 20, Years 806–10.
43. Bonnassie 1992, p. 64. Doehaerd 1974, pp. 122–3. Azzara and Gasparri 2004, Edict of
Rothari, t. 279, 280.
44. Azzara and Moro 1998, Chapter 5.
45. Zeumer 1902, IX, 1, 19; De Salis 1892, XX, p. 59; García Moreno 1989, pp. 248–9.
46. Finley 1982, p. 163.
47. Vives 1963, Concilios, Years 589 and 633, c. LXVII and LXIX.
48. De la Cruz Martínez 1987, p. 122, Nº 266; Maassen 1893, c. VIII, p. 21.
49. Campos and Roca Melia 1971, Regla de San Isidoro, c. V, c. IV.
50. Vives 1963, XI, Year 675, c. VI.
the lands of the Church.51 Another piece of evidence from sixth-century Gaul
uncovers monks labouring with hand-mills. The dispositions of the 572
Council of Braga forbid diocesan clerics from serving the bishop as slaves. The
636 Council of Toledo prevents bishops from reducing monks to servitude.
All these speak of a shortage of subordinate labour.52 Information of this nature
on the lack of agrarian labour is frequent for the whole period, and it is possible
that it led to intensification in the capture of slaves.53
Records of social resistance by freedmen also exist.54 The 666 Council of
Mérida complains that, upon the death of the bishop who manumitted them,
his beneficiaries hid the charters of liberation and claimed total emancipation.55
This reiteration in councils that freedmen should continue in the service of the
church would indicate that here lay an issue that was not easy to settle in the
ecclesiastical interest.56 The 619 Council of Seville gives evidence of a freed
slave who tried to poison the bishop.57 The same canon refers to the manumitted
who must be enslaved again in order to be reduced to obedience.
This antagonism included disapproving gossip against a dead bishop.58 The
state of mind of landowners is palpable when we see presbyters, who had fallen
ill, torturing their slaves for having cast a spell on them.59 Given all this, we
can assert that when Visigothic laws established that a freedman could be
charged with slander, beating or accusing his master, they make reference to a
dangerous and conflictual relationship, and not a hypothetical case.60 In the
second half of the eighth century, we find a projection of these battles for
freedom in the rebellion of serfs or freedmen in the Asturian kingdom.61
Under these conditions, free peasant-communities multiplied; some
adopted the form of monasteries and were condemned by the Church.62 On
the other hand, Visigothic kings had to carry out repeated campaigns against
51. Vives 1963, c. III.

52. Gregorio de Tours, Vita patrum, Chapter 18, quoted by Latouche 1957, p. 79. Vives 1963,
III Council of Toledo, c. XX. IV Council of Toledo, c. LI. II Council of Braga, c. II.
53. Doehaerd 1974, pp. 32–5.
54. Vives 1963, IX Council of Toledo, c. XIII.
55. Vives 1963, c. XX.
56. Vives 1963, I Council of Sevilla, c. I. IV Council of Toledo, c. LXVIII, LXX.
57. Vives 1963, c. VIII.
58. Vives 1963, Council of Mérida, Year 666, c. XV.
59. Vives 1963, Council of Mérida, c. XV. The crime of casting a spell appears in all Germanic
laws.
60. Zeumer 1902, V, 7, 10.
61. Bonnaz 1987, Chronicle of Alfonso III, 10.
62. Campos and Roca Meliá 1971, Regla Común, c. I.
free peoples such as the Asturians, Cantabrians and Basques.63 The latter, who
were used to roaming freely in the mountains, responded with offensive raids.64
In 572, the Visigothic king Liuvigild occupied during the night the long-
rebellious city of Córdoba, reinstating under his control many cities and
fortifications after killing a large number of peasants (rustici). The same king
shortly after, in 577, entered (probably) the Sierra Morena and incorporated
the region after defeating the local peasants in revolt.65 There is archaeological
evidence for peasant-societies on the coast from Alicante to Murcia, and in
inland Spain from the seventh to the ninth centuries.66 In the historical
Extremadura, south of the Duero, free communities persisted until the end of
the eleventh century.67 Independent enclaves are also verified outside of the
Iberian Peninsula.68
In short, between circa 500 and 700, we witness a heterogeneous social
movement of oppressed and threatened free peasants, joining their predecessors,
the bagaudae, who between the third and mid-fifth centuries destroyed many
large estates.69 The passage from villae to villages, the new peasant-habitat that
was established with this ‘social liberation’, can be included in this context.
Peasant-mode societies
These events point towards the concept of peasant-mode societies which Chris
Wickham contributes for the analysis of the period. Despite the importance
he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; in not all regions, he claims,
did peasant-logic prevail.
On the contrary, however, the cited evidence allows us to extend the scope
of the concept, and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction
of the feudal system on a European scale. If, in England, the centrality of the
peasant-mode was the result of early Roman withdrawal, and, in Denmark,
the consequence of internal evolution; in Spain, Italy and France it was the
product of a multiform social struggle in a context of weakening political
power. These factors are, in my view, underestimated by Wickham, even
63. Bonnaz 1987, Chronicle of Albelda, 24, 25, 31; Bonnaz 1987, Chronicle of Alfonso III;
Lemici 1893a, Year 574, p. 213; Lemici 1893b, c. 59. Also see, against the Franks, Arndt and
Krusch 1885, IX, 7.
64. Lemici 1893b, c. 63, p. 292.
65. Lemici 1893a, p. 215.
66. Wickham 2005, pp. 230, 488–93, 749–50; Gutiérrez Lloret 1998.
67. Astarita 1993.
68. Reflected in Beyerle and Buchner 1954; Echardt 1962.
69. Thompson 1981; Bonnassie 1992, pp. 62–6.
though he gives stress both to the decline of peasant-exploitation and free

peasants.
The most solid example provided by Wickham to argue against the extension
of the scope of this concept is that of Neustria. It is evident that the feudal
mode of production appeared in the Ile-de-France earlier than in other regions.
Despite this, its precocity should not be overestimated. In the early-sixth
century, the peasant-base of social organisation is reflected in the Pactus legis
Salicae, written in Neustria, as Wickham observes. The image of destruction
and pillage given by Gregory of Tours for the second half of that century is also
known. These circumstances would not be favourable for the regular
exploitation of labour. Fractures appear within the manorial system.
In this context, scholars have asserted that the Merovingian manor, with its
many uncultivated lands and forests, and with scattered and small human
settlements, had less cultivated land than the Carolingian one.70 Archaeological
findings uncover new settlements not accounted for in written sources, in the
same way that they reveal continuity and not collapse in the population (as
was previously believed). Something similar has been established for Castile:
Muslim sources, too, make reference to villages not mentioned in Christian
ones.71 These silences are eloquent, since they indicate areas not controlled by
the aristocracy. This squares with the feebleness of relations of exploitation. A
572 charter of the bishop of Le Mans also reflects this feebleness; it describes
the villa (manor) of Tresson: very large but uncultivated, laboured by only ten
slaves and servants lodged in the landowner’s household.72
This evidence cautions us against the danger of reading the nominal
possession of a territory as the actual enforcement of relations of exploitation.
Furthermore, the scale of wealth established by archaeology (especially in the
study of ceramics) that is part of the evidence for Wickham’s proposed
geographical restriction for peasant-based societies is a significant but imperfect
track of the constitution of the feudal class.73 Wealth could have originated
from pillage, especially when kings went to war for their treasure, and their
appropriation was seen as equivalent to the conquest of a people.74 This
70. Devroey 2001, p. 117; Fourquin 1975, pp. 317ff; Le Jan 1995, pp. 101–2. Gregory of
Tours 1974: ‘Chilperic . . . went off to his manor of Chelles, which is about a dozen miles from
Paris. There he spent his time hunting’ (p. 379).
71. Pastor Díaz de Garayo 1996.
72. Fourquin 1975, p. 319; Latouche 1957, pp. 55ff.
73. On the limits of archaeology, see Gutiérrez Lloret 1998, p. 163.
74. Duby 1976, pp. 61ff.; Gasparri 2004, pp. 50ff.; La Rocca, p. 129. Arndt and Krusch 1885,
II, 39, 42; Arndt and Krusch 1885, III, 10. This coincides with aristocratic types of wealth: gold,
silver, cattle, silk-robes; see Arndt and Krusch 1885, V, 1; Arndt and Krusch 1885, VI, 10; Arndt
and Krusch 1885, VII, 22, 40.
‘external exploitation’ was present even in the first revival of exchange:

Carolingian trade originated in the slave-trade of the eighth and ninth
centuries.75
Pillage was not insignificant either for Merovingians or for their successors,
but these expeditions do not tell us whether peasant-subjection in the core-
Frankish territories went beyond isolated corvées. In fact, towards 800, the
adscription of coloni to land (as it was known in the fourth century) had lost
momentum due a lack of the means for the state or landowners to enforce its
practice.76 In the ninth century and even later, lords continued to take over
free allods, and only in the tenth century would they manage to break free
from the monarchy.77 The chronology of the growth of the productive forces
in the manorial system corresponds with this. If that growth depends, as
Wickham shows, on the mobilisation of peasant-labour, a regular level of
labour-exploitation was not reached in the manors until after 750 or perhaps
800. By 850, ‘peasants complained that they were subject to new impositions
where there were none before and that they were subjected to heavier
impositions than had been customary.’78 An expert on the subject, Pierre
Toubert, places the beginnings of the ‘take-off ’ in the eighth century, but his
data on windmills, the reduction of demesne to the benefit of tenant-plots
(a rationalisation that led to higher productivity) and market-revival belong to
the ninth and tenth centuries.79 His evidence is consistent with the chronology
of the emblematic texts of the Carolingian manor: the Capitulare de Villis was
written between 770 and 800 or 794 and 813, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés
polyptych between 806 and 829. Neither would the absence of Merovingian
accounting documents be a casual coincidence; those of Saint-Martin de
Tours are an exception.
As a consequence, Merovingian wealth, even if it was superior to that of
other kingdoms, must have remained at a moderate level, and that would
explain the material absence of the palatia, kingly residences, that sources
75. Lindkvist 1991; McCormick 2001, pp. 758ff.

76. Boutruche 1973, p. 123. Also, Shoichi 1998.
77. Wickham 2005, pp. 197–9, claims that the Merovingian aristocracy did not attempt
independence before because it chose to support the monarchy; political fragmentation would have
threatened its power. On the one hand, I do not believe that the aristocracy had global-strategic
thinking; on the other, there is a lot of evidence to show that it tried to keep taxes and other
traditional remnants of power. The correlation of power had not yet tipped in its favour. Significantly,
the first counts to gain independence were on the frontiers of the Empire. See Chandler 2002,
pp. 23ff.
78. Davies 1996, pp. 234–5.
79. Toubert 1990, pp. 69, 83–5.
refer to. Wickham states they have not been found.80 That is significant in
itself, and would correspond to the fact that the palace was a symbolic rather
than a monumental place. This is what comparative analysis suggests. In
Castile in 1076 it was established that when the king or count went to the
peasant-community of Sepulveda (on the frontier) he should eat with the
judge of the place in palatio.81 This ceremonial reciprocity-meal was carried
out in a place that can only be construed as an ideal space of superior power,
devoid of real physical sophistication. Palatium has a figurative sense in
Carolingian capitularies as well.82 Other features of Frankish documentation
that we will look at in a moment allow for the unification of the specific traits
of their society with that of the West as a whole. This supports a single
chronology for Western Europe:
a) Between 400/450 and 750/800, a peasant-based-society logic dominated.

Relationships of different degrees of subordination between aristocracies
and peasants were established, including some taxes on exchange (direct
land-taxes disappeared with the curiales in the seventh century).
b) Between 750/800 and 1000/1050, the feudal-mode-of-production logic
began to prevail, slowly but surely. The free peasants who survived in those
years found themselves increasingly subordinated to feudal lords who had
turned rent into their means of livelihood. This was subject to many local
variations, but by circa 1050 feudal logic prevailed.
c) Between 1050/1100 and 1250/1300, we witness the spatial reproduction
of the feudal mode of production, a growth in which peasant-communities
played a major rôle. This phase culminated in the predominance of this
mode of production in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and England. The
basic unit of production was founded on rent. The free peasants that then
remained constituted small local aristocracies, legally included in the
reproduction of dominant relations and not hiding their desire for ascent
into the nobility and for the accumulation of assets and money.
Social and economic attributes of the period

The concept of peasant-based society allows us to address common issues in
different areas of the Western early middle ages, for instance, the conditions of
social existence. The archaeological revision that Wickham presents leaves no
80. Wickham 2005, p. 506.

81. Sáez 1953, t. 25; García de Cortázar 1989, p. 290.
82. Azzara and Moro 1998, Nº 7, Years 787–8, t. 5.
doubt about the simplicity of material culture. His explanations for this
impoverishment alternate/oscillate between feebleness of exploitation and
cultural choices.83
Faced with this dilemma, only written sources allow us to take a position.
When we learn about ecclesiastics of the Iberian Peninsula who, forced by
need, eat the bread that should be offered at the altar, and of centres of worship
in ruins with such scarce rents that they could barely survive, this simplicity
forces us to recognise that this was an unwanted situation for a poor dominant
class.84 This evidence can be compared with archaeological findings in Spanish
rural churches which, because of their small size (and their funerary use), have
generated the hypothesis of private aristocratic use.85 The latter is possible, but
does not rule out the possibility that these constructions speak of a state of
hardship and not of a cultural choice. No less significant is the fact that in a
violent period, Merovingian aristocracy lacked fortifications (they were feeble
and only urban).86 What is more, this coincides with the anthropological point
of view Wickham adopts in relation to classless societies which fail to produce
surplus because they lack the social reasons to do so. The centrality of peasant-
based formations for our understanding of this aspect is evident. The change
in the situation, after 800, corresponds with the reconstruction of relations of
exploitation and the rise of a feudal logic, that is to say, a logic of surplus-
production and of private accumulation.
Exchange fits with the same system. On this matter, Wickham also oscillates
in his explanations. At some points, it seems that it was exchange-opportunities
between regions that were the economic motor, which allowed lords to choose
between several alternatives to intensify labour-control; surplus was generated
as a result. Circulation is thus presented as the key that constituted the social
relations of each region.87 At other times, he places causal priority on internal
factors, that is to say, on taxation, relations of exploitation and on aristocratic
demand.88 In one case, he prioritises the cost-benefit equation; in the other, he
returns to a British-Marxist historiography which has opposed the market as
an economic demiurge. This description is, at the same time, made more
complex by another issue. Wickham divides the types of exchange into two:
that for which profit is the objective, and that which has a non-commercial
83. Wickham 2005, pp. 201, 481, 486.

84. Vives 1963, pp. 503, 484, 485, 502.
85. Chavarría Arnau 2004a, pp. 21ff.
86. Samson 1987, pp. 290–5, 302ff.
87. Wickham 2005, pp. 265, 271, 273, 277, 280, 285, 289, 458, 699.
88. Wickham 2005, pp. 691, 730, 739, 813, 819.
origin.89 These interpretations can, however, give rise to a commentary which

expands on Wickham’s consideration of the problem and thus arrives at a
partial reformulation.
As Wickham claims, aristocratic rents allowed for a rise in demand and of
the level of exchange. This is, in my view, a brilliant starting-point that
neoclassical conceptions only darken. Let us examine the problem in a brief
synopsis.
In precapitalist systems, circulation is not the objective of production; it
appears as a result of a surplus after consumption, not as an economic objective.
Its objective is the production of use-values which, under certain labour-
conditions, is achieved through the mediation of the market. Here is where
the problem of the general dichotomy between profit and use-value unfolds.
However, following in Sombart’s footsteps,90 Wickham presents the two as
single blocks. Analytical reasoning helps to shed light on the issue.
a) The feudal lord, insofar as he has larger rents at his disposal, assigns part of
his surplus to the market in order to obtain other use-values.
b) When independent merchants (as in the case of some mentioned in
Carolingian texts) intervene in this transfer, two concurrent and
contradictory logics are presented.91 On the one hand, that of the lord,
interested in a use-value; on the other, that of the merchant, who seeks a
monetary profit. Here is where the logics of the lord as producer and
consumer (Commodity-Money-Commodity) and that of the capitalist
(Money-Commodity-Money) meet. This means that, as the lord generates
exchange to demand use-values, he creates the conditions for the
accumulation of money-capital. A marginal but essential note to
understanding these considerations lies in the fact that this money-capital
is increased by an exchange of non-equivalents (due to the imperfect
functioning of market-value law), that is to say, through the alienation of
value in the circulation-process.92 Exploitation is thus disguised by formal
exchange.
After the decline in the Mediterranean exchange of the Roman world in the
early middle ages, socially hierarchical long-distance exchange was marginal
when compared to that of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This reveals
89. Wickham 2005, p. 694.

90. Sombart 1919.
91. For what comes next, including a comparison with the late middle ages, see Astarita 1992.
92. The feebleness of trade in the sixth century was reflected in the feebleness of commercial
capital; see Lebecq 1998, p. 188.
the differences between a society based on a peasant-logic and that based on a

feudal one. It was the conditions of the period in which this new dominant
class was built that led luxury-trade to be economically exiguous, not its own
nature. Towards the late-thirteenth century, however, a multiple economic
activity revolved around the cloth-trade. This quantitative aspect was due to
the fact that cloth was consumed by the whole of the dominant class, from its
‘internal’ strata to its ‘external’ connections, from the king to his esquires on
the one hand, and his servants on the other. These prestige-goods are, therefore,
not characterised by their scarcity, but by their abundant and socially-restricted
consumption. This aspect relates to another dimension that stresses the
economic importance of this exchange from a qualitative point of view: it
contributed to one of the many non-verbal discourses that, by making power
explicit and delimitating hierarchies, underpinned the conditions of the
reproduction of the dominant class.
Nor is the concept of peasant-based society unlike that of ‘class-struggle
without classes’ in this period, to use an expression of British Marxism. A
mixture of slaves, dependent freedmen, serfs, fugitives with no social context,
and free peasants opposed the state-apparatus and the aristocracy. Only when
peasant-subordination to the lord became more stable did this manifold social
struggle begin to die out. The contradiction between peasants and lords over
rent-raising will have had, as from around the tenth century onwards, silent
daily forms that are hard to trace, with the exception of very localised
movements directed by community-élites. A prolonged phase of feebleness for
class-struggle was at its beginnings. It would last until the fourteenth century,
and it was a presupposition for the systematic surplus-extraction of the central
middle ages and the spatial reproduction of the feudal mode of production in
the same period.
Peasant-based societies and genesis of the feudal system

Wickham describes Northern-European society in this way: free peasants with
military obligations, feeble and intermittent taxation, reciprocity with
chieftains out of a recognition of their function, regular assemblies and limited
subjection of the labour-force or tenants. These concessions, typical of a status-
society, aristocracies were obliged to make, because surplus-redistribution
among free men weakened the accumulation of wealth. In my opinion, these
practices can also be detected, though in a less visible way, in Spain, Italy and
France.
The élite of the late-Roman Empire tried ways of constructing relationships
in which coercion was not paramount. This was a consequence of necessity.
Senators, affected by the invasions, looked to episcopal offices to recover their

political influence.93 Faced with a divergence between their status and their
class, they resorted to evergetism, a practice related to reciprocity, which
constituted the first large-scale attempt of a strategy that provided them with
a way out of their social predicament in the fifth and sixth centuries.94 They
carried out an organisational rôle in moments of shortage, and protected the
population from the abuses of political officials.95 The precept by which the
increase of ecclesiastical patrimony should not threaten the donor’s minimum
physiological level of reproduction may have fitted this same rationale.96 Thus,
adequate moral and physical propriety was envisaged as necessary for the
choice of bishop, besides the consent of the urban population.97 The contrast
with the curiales, many of which were recruited from socially undignified
sectors, can be seen in these new requirements. Allusions to visits by lay or
ecclesiastical officials to local communities, which included banquets and
gifts, have survived in Visigothic and later documentation.98 These practices
confirm the importance of centres ruled by counts in the construction of the
feudal mode of production.
For a long time, the centre that coordinated and directed activities exceeding
the possibilities of individual peasant-families (such as offensive war or defence)
corresponded with the collective interest of protection of the area, and
consequently observed a principle of reciprocity and social function. The
chieftain had to reinforce his social networks through personal commitment,
becoming an authority by his actions rather than by arbitrary power. He had
to build local relationships with his own skill on each occasion, as can be seen
in the kings of the Asturias after 711. Physical handicap disqualified, as in the
case of Sancho the Fat, the same way as failure meant irretrievable discredit, as
in Vermudo I’s military defeat. This reveals that chieftains constructed their
social networks on the basis of concrete functionality. A similar impression
can be derived from the road- and bridge-services organised by counts.99
Taxation of the circulation of goods could also be related to the royal protection
93. Pietri 1986; Arndt and Krusch 1885, I, 44; II, 11, 13, 21, 26; III, 17; V, 45; VI, 7; VI, 39;
VIII, 39.
94. Arndt and Krusch 1885, IV, 35.
95. Vives 1963, IV Council of Toledo, c. XXXII; Arndt and Krusch 1885, II, 24; III, 34; IV, 11;
V, 42; VII, 1.
96. Vives 1963, IV Council of Toledo, c. XXXVIII.
97. Vives 1963, IV Council of Toledo, c. XIX; Arndt and Krusch 1885, II, 13; IV, 7, 11, 15; V,
14; VII, 16.
98. VII Council of Toledo, c. IV. Bonnaz 1987, Chronicle of Albelda 22. Sáez 1953, Year
1076, tit. 25 and 34. Also, Arndt and Krusch 1885, VIII, 1.
99. González 1830, t. V., p. 26, Year 1085. Rodríguez Fernández 1990, Document 4, tit. 3.
of local transactions.100 The king’s services gave the system a distributive

quality.
A series of Spanish texts from the ninth century onwards show how, from
these political centres, and from a slow transformation in social practices due
to an imbalance in power-relations, rent was imposed on an originally-free
peasantry. The foundation-charter for the settlement of the population of
Brañosera (Palencia) of 824 (though this date has been contested) granted by
a count to five peasant-families can be taken as an example.101 It delimited an
area of settlement and exempted peasants from guard-services, forcing them
instead to give tribute and rent. This document expresses a sequence: the
passage from military obligations to agrarian rents, in labour or kind, which in
many areas included intermediate forms such as building fortifications. No
less significant is the use of the words ‘tribute and rent [tributum et infurtione]’,
an expression in which the slow passage of fiscal land into patrimonial seigneurie
is contained. In Italy, counts also demanded agrarian labour in the early-ninth
century.102 Another aspect of this issue was reflected in a Carolingian capitulary
that denounced bishops, abbots and counts for exempting peasants from
war-services in exchange for transferring them their assets.103 In an 844
capitulary of Charles the Bald addressed to the county of Barcelona, the king
declared that if somebody gave assets as gifts to the count this could not be
regarded as tribute or census, nor were the count or his successors allowed to
turn it into custom.104 The priority of political power in peasant-subjection
is unquestionable.105 This manifold process, turning district-chieftains into
lords, had begun with the private appropriations carried out by counts since
the beginnings of the Roman-Germanic kingdoms.106
The logic of a peasant-based society was contained in the concrete ways in
which small domestic units of production were absorbed. The count, already
acting as a lord towards the year 1000, did not impose himself only through
violence. Drawing on principles of social functionality already present in his
ancient rôle as district-chieftain, he imposed himself as an authority that
regulated peasant-relationships, repressing conflicts or punishing violations of
100. Del Ser Quijano 1981, Document 9, Year 916. Rodríguez Fernández 1981, León, Year
1017, tit. 28.
101. Muñoz y Romero 1847, pp. 16–18.
102. Azzara and Moro 1998, Nº 16, t. 6, Year 813.
103. Boretius (ed.) 1883, Nº 73, Year 811.
104. Boretius and Krause 1890, Nº 256, p. 260.
105. Boretius (ed.) 1883, Year 811, Nº 73; Nº 78, Year 813; Nº 76, Year 812. Azzara and Moro
1998, Nº 7, t. 13, Year 787–8; Nº 13, Year 806–10.
106. Zeumer 1902, Law of Reccared, XII, 1, 2; Krusch 1902, I, 17; Sánchez Albornoz 1943,
p. 57; Dopsch 1986, pp. 256, 270, 271.
peaceful coexistence. He thus plunged into a peasant social logic in order to

transform the society from within. This is shown, among other instances,
when he acted as the ‘tribal banker’ to preserve the survival of a family, while
absorbing pieces of land due to the debtors’ difficulties in returning loans.
Social functionality and distributive conduct were ancient practices that
the lord did not make up; he inherited them and gave them a new significance
in the feudal context. From 1100 onwards, these practices would be carried
out by peasant-communities, which, by then, were organising themselves
institutionally, and from then onwards the lord’s struggle for status would
concentrate on his relationships with the other members of the nobility.
Wickham takes a different stand. In free communities, he claims, there
existed economic differences, especially in quantity of land, which would give
way to structural bonds of dependence between rich and poor peasants.107
In this respect, it is possible to argue that peasant social differentiation, a
universal phenomenon, does not explain the specifically feudal form that
social relations adopted. This form can be perceived in Spanish documents
of the late-tenth and early-eleventh centuries. Among the peasants who
owned a horse, who, in this period, began to hold political and military
functions for the lord in exchange for fiefs (milites), landownership did not
decide upward-mobility.108 The basis for the latter lay in the subject’s function
within the system of political subordination, and this corresponded to a
general situation. Comparative study reveals that, in classless societies,
economic differentiation was just one among many factors of status-distinction
(caballeros and peones, alcaldes or jueces and vecinos, freemen and slaves). When
feudal logic became dominant, this status-differentiation was superseded by
economic differentiation. As seigneurial juridical homogeneity constituted a
single legal class of dependants, economic aspects became predominant, as
would be shown by the case of the rich peasants who established a structural
subordination over poorer sectors of local society by means of wage-labour.
Yet, even in the late middle ages, the above criteria would still stand. After
1200, the stratum of the lower nobility could be filled with milites who,
originally, were landowners of local importance, but, for them to obtain
concessions of village-fiefs in vassalage, service to a powerful lord, often the
king, was still decisive.109
107. Wickham 2005, pp. 558–9.

108. They could own small estates, as can be seen in Menéndez Pidal 1956, pp. 35ff. They
could even be non-proprietors of land and provide special services to the lord since they owned
a horse, see Rodríguez Fernández 1981, Fuero de León, c. XXVI. Also, see Muñoz y Romero
1847, pp. 37–8. For comparison, see Sáez 1953.
109. De Moxó 1981, pp. 421ff.; Moreno Núñez 1992, pp. 73ff.; Asenjo González 1986,
pp. 266ff., 349ff., 356ff.
A peasant-based society also allows us to understand that the seigneural

property was conditioned. Had the lords been large landowners since primitive
times, this quality would be incomprehensible. Absolute property was only
legally consecrated in the late middle ages when, as Marx said, the lord no
longer inherited land; it was the land that inherited the lord.
It also explains the slowness of transformations from reciprocity to rent by
a gradual change in social customs. In conclusion, this common base explains
the chronological consistencies in these transformations, even though we can
only state them if we make an abstraction of local differences. In Italy, the
aristocracy began to increase its landed property in the ninth century, and
managed to subordinate the peasantry even later than this; there was a similar
process in England, and, as has been said, in Spain.110 The situation would not
be that different in Germany, taking into account that polyptychs only appear
there from 1024–5.111 The precocity of Gaul is not enough to constitute
an exception. The feudal system began to have a single dynamic that would
be ratified by the great expansion of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries
onwards.
A very long mutation

This construction of power allows us to assess the importance that the fall of
Roman state-domination had, as a requisite for the new mode of production.
The passage from senators to bishops and from Germanic chieftains to counts,
and of all of them into feudal lords, was not a peaceful transformation of
cultural practices, nor can it be reduced to élite-discontinuity. It was a structural
change. There was a profound difference between the tributary mode of
production, which tried to establish itself from the fourth century, and the
feudal mode, which would develop from 800 onwards. They were not two
sub-types of a single mode of production.112 Feudalism meant a reformulation
of the totality of social relations (that is to say, of essence in the traditional
Hegelian-Marxist sense). Even when surplus continued to be raised by non-
economic coercion, due to the concession of fiefs, it had turned into the
private appropriation of the product of labour and this, in turn, determined
private property over land. As Perry Anderson argued, in feudalism the political
factor penetrates social relations of production; it constitutes the mode of
110. Wickham 2005, pp. 203, 204, 215, 330, 342–9. Also, Feller 2000, p. 526.
111. Rösener 1990.
112. Wickham 2005, p. 60. Coincides with Berktay 1987 and Haldon 1993.
production.113 That is why its genesis was not the result of a change in strategy
of the dominant class but, instead, of the collapse of the state and of a whole
social organisation. In that collapse lay the condition of possibility for the
development of private political domination over the peasantry in a systematic
and not a contingent way. This crisis of the state constitutes a Western
peculiarity. To give an example of the opposite, in al-Andalus, the crisis of the
state in the early-eleventh century resulted in the formation of small states that
reproduced the same principle as the caliphate; but private sovereignties, fiefs,
did not appear.114 That is why scholars who defend the concept of feudal
mutation are right, not only when they prioritise the political factor when
explaining how the new society was organised, but also when they argue for
the concept of a deep rupture. Their mistake lies in conceiving a sudden
change of what was, until the year 1000, an immobile structure.
The proposition of a ‘rupture’ is opposed to the now-prevailing theses
which, drawing on the studies by Peter Brown and Walter Goffart, replaced
words like ‘collapse’ and ‘crisis’ of the Empire for that of ‘transformation’,
derived from a ‘peaceful barbarian accommodation’.115 Economic and political
research thus shifts towards conceptions of immutability (permanence of the
ancient world) or of smooth evolutionism (imperceptible transformation
without really annulling pre-existing structures). Rejecting these currently-
fashionable parameters does not imply falling into catastrophist notions such
as Roman ‘suicide’ or German ‘assassination’ of the Empire, images that evoke
a non-existent accidental collapse. The disintegration of the system of
domination of the Roman Empire was a long process that took place between
the fourth and sixth centuries. It was as long as that of the subsequent
construction of a new power-class. Inland Spanish villa-archaeology confirms
that the decadence of villae had already begun in the fifth century, vanishing
towards the seventh, although they had already by then lost their rôle as
aristocratic residences.116 That long decline of an archetypical Roman
construction of the world accompanies both the crisis of the ancient dominant
class and the points made in this article.
I wish to point out once more that these arguments owe much to the
research Chris Wickham has been carrying out in recent years.
Translated by Marcia Ras
113. Anderson 1979, pp. 407ff.

114. Wasserstein 1985.
115. Brown 1971; Goffart 1980. See Ward-Perkins 2005; Halsall 1999.
116. Chavarría Arnau 2004b, pp. 67ff.
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The Problems of Comparison
Chris Wickham
Chichele Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford
chris.wickham@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
This essay replies to the various criticisms made of Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005). It
concedes a number of points relating to the importance of ideologies, the distinction between
élites and aristocracies, the issue of money, and the question of the importance of the productive
forces. It defends the comparative method and defends the discussions of coloni and of the spatial
limitations of the peasant-mode of production in Framing. It also explores the nature of the state
and aristocracy in this period.
Keywords
comparative method, fiscal system, peasant-mode of production, forces of production, coloni
It is not often that a historian has the opportunity to read a set of intensive –
and generous – critiques of his or her own work, and reading them is a curious,
though salutary, experience. Framing the Early Middle Ages is a large book,
with a wide geographical sweep, so I expected a certain amount of interest in
it, at least from early medievalists. I have had much more than that, however,
including a number of unusually long reviews; and, most importantly, this
engagement has often been on a theoretical level, including, as one would
expect, in these contributions to Historical Materialism. Historians tend to
avoid theorising; it is one of the most characteristic cultural features of the
discipline, in fact. But it is also one of its major weak points, for the attachment
of historians to the empiricist-expository mode only-too-often hides their
theoretical presuppositions, not only from others, but from the writers
themselves. As a result, historians can fall into contradictory arguments, and
risk overall incoherence; entire historical debates have, on occasion, depended
on theoretical presuppositions which were indefensible, and which would
have been immediately seen as such had they been articulated. I have made
mistakes of that kind in the past, and perhaps in Framing too; but the kind of
engagement that this group of articles shows is precisely the test one needs

222 C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231
to face, if one wants to mount a set of arguments that are coherent enough
to last.
Every one of the articles published here is stimulating, and in one way or
another telling. I cannot respond to every point they make, and it would over-
weight this brief reply to try to do so, but I will try to confront some of the
major issues that have arisen from these critiques, taken as a whole. I shall
concede some points briefly, and, equally briefly, maintain my position on
some others. Then I shall discuss, in turn, the peasant-mode of production;
the comparative method and some problems of its application; and, finally,
the fiscal system of the later-Roman Empire and its impact on exchange. I shall
refer, in these discussions, to some of the other reviews I have had as well, in
particular to two very long ones, by Brent Shaw in New Left Review and by
Laura da Graca in Edad media, as well as to an earlier review by Jairus Banaji,
published as an appendix to the second edition of his book Agrarian Change
in Late Antiquity, where he makes different points to those he sets out here.
I must also register an important set of spin-off articles which came out in the
Journal of Agrarian Change last year, edited by Peter Sarris and, once again,
Jairus Banaji.1
First, some immediate concessions. I use the word ‘aristocracy’ very generally
in Framing, to denote the élite-strata of each of the societies discussed in it.
John Haldon thinks I should have just called these aristocracies ‘élite’, as ‘a less
potentially misleading term’ – a parallel point was made by Paolo Delogu in a
debate on the book in Storica2 – and I now think that they are probably right.
Haldon similarly argues that I should not have excluded ideologies, including
patterns of belief, quite as completely as I did, for they can be guides, not just
to cultural representations (which were not in my remit), but to the choices
élites make about how to spend their surplus. This is certainly the case, and,
on occasion in Framing, I did discuss them: the abandonment of rural villas in
the West, and the foundation of urban churches on extramural sites, thus
1. Shaw 2008; da Graca 2008; Banaji 2007, pp. 257–68. For the articles in Journal of Agrarian
Change, see their 2009 special issue, Aristocrats, Peasants and the Transformation of Rural Society,
c. 400–800 (Volume 9, Number 1). I do not so much need to engage with the latter articles here,
for they concentrate less on my book than on new empirical material, which they approach in
ways influenced by an (often critical) reading of Framing. I applaud this. Banaji’s own piece
(Banaji 2009) is the most focussed on the latter book, along lines parallel to those here. In
addition to the Voß article he cites here, which I had simply missed, I would signal that I should
have engaged with Baber Johansen’s important book on Islamic agrarian law ( Johansen 1988:
cf. Banaji 2009, pp. 78–9), even though its empirical focus is on a rather later period.
2. Delogu 2006, p. 160 (in fact, he argues for the use of both terms, with a slight difference
in meaning); a whole section of the same volume, pp. 121–72, is another debate about Framing
with a reply by me.
C. Wickham / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 221–231 223
re-orientating urban structures, are both examples of it. But I could still have
discussed the issue rather more. John Moreland makes the good point here
that early Anglo-Saxon evidence actually tells us more about the patterns of
belief than it tells us about hierarchies of wealth, and that it is therefore only
sensible to use the former as guides to unpick Anglo-Saxon material culture
first, before we get on to what that material culture tells us about social
differentiation. This leads him to argue that I neglect the Church, too, a point
also made by others (most forcefully Marios Costambeys in Economic History
Review).3 I am not really sold on the notion of ‘the Church’ in the early middle
ages; there was always a network of competing churches, not all of them
analytically separable from their lay neighbours as political and socio-economic
actors (as cultural forces they were normally more distinct). But it is,
nonetheless, the case that the transfer of up to a third of the land of continental
Western Europe in pious gift to churches in the period 400–800 is an
important part of any analysis of the economic structures of the regions that
made it up, and that it deserved to be confronted more directly as a
problem.4
Haldon also thinks I should have been more theoretically explicit in this
book, a point made by Neil Davidson as well. I recognise that this point is also
well made. By the standards of historians, Framing is quite clearly theoretically
located, in Marx and Weber above all, and in economic anthropology,
particularly when I discuss the peasant-mode of production. But I set out my
theoretical starting-points fairly briefly in each of my sections, before going
into detailed discussion of empirical material. This was a deliberate choice,
because I wanted to privilege the data: not because they ‘speak for themselves’,
but because, without a critical approach to, and a direct analysis of, the
empirical material, it is impossible to say much about anything in this period
(or, indeed, any other). I would make that choice again, in fact. But insofar as
Framing is an intervention in social theory, which I would indeed want it to
be, I will concede that it is theory-light. When I have subsequently used the
material in more targeted ways (as in a more recent article in Historical
Materialism on productive forces and the feudal mode), I have been a bit more
theoretically elaborate.5
Some other criticisms made of Framing I am less willing to concede. Banaji,
in a highly stimulating critique, seriously disagrees with me over the status of
3. Costambeys 2006, p. 419.

4. Herlihy 1961. Note that Shaw 2008, p. 104, also says that I miss out Islam; but only a
small percentage of the inhabitants of my regions, even of Syria/Palestine, were Muslim before
800.
5. Wickham 2008.
coloni in the late-Roman Empire. Some of the things he criticises me for are,
in my view, not accurate: I do say, for example, that late-Roman legislation
materially worsened the status of the tenant-population of the Empire.6 But
I otherwise argue against his overall position on the laws concerning coloni in
Chapter 9 of my book, and I maintain the position I argued for there. The
same is true for his arguments about tenancy as a category. Banaji, for some
years, has sought to disaggregate the category of tenancy, separating out more
dependent groups of workers who are more subject to the control of landlords,
and whom he wishes to see, rather, as rural proletarians. He makes the same
point here. I am not, however, convinced. I argued at some length, in Chapter 5
of Framing, that it was important to assess the degree to which landlords
sought to control their tenants, in particular concerning the way the latter
exploited the land, and that this correlated with an interest in selling surplus,
as well as, of course, in rural domination for its own sake. There was a very
considerable range of levels of control over tenants in the period discussed in
the book, from the high levels in late-Roman Egypt (whose documents Banaji
knows well) and ninth-century northern Francia, to the much lower levels in
some areas of weaker aristocratic power or involvement in the labour-process,
as in (say) eighth-century Italy. Some peasants indeed ‘had very little control
over their working lives’, in Banaji’s phrase. But they still lived off the land
they worked, and paid rent to lords. The ‘wage in land’ of Banaji and Ros Faith
is a tenant-plot, held on very restrictive terms for sure, but by tenants who
supported themselves from it. (It is a marginal point, but I do not think that
there is any empirical basis for Banaji’s claim that they were ‘often unmarried’.)
The phrase ‘wage in land’ instead hints, in my view unhelpfully, at some form
of salaried (or slave-) labour. There is to me, as Banaji recognises, a clear divide
between peasants, who support themselves, and slaves or proletarians, who are
fed by or have to buy food from others, and this re-naming does not to me
lessen that divide.
I think that Banaji and I have, at times, different views about the validity of
certain types of evidence. He is surprisingly attached to the idea that laws have
in themselves such force that we can use them as guides to real social processes,
not just the minds of legislators. I, of course, recognise that laws are an
important weapon in the hands of – in this case – landlords, in their coercion
of their tenants, or at least in their coercive negotiation with tenants. But the
degree to which they are put into effect depends so much on local situations,
local relations of power, the local force of (and the information available to)
courts, that just to tell us what a Roman emperor or post-Roman king enacted
6. Wickham 2005, pp. 524–5.

tells us very little. Similarly, the laws against marriage between free and unfree
peasants were, indeed, as Banaji says, ‘peculiarly repressive’, but they were also
routinely broken in practice, as was even recorded in legal documents, without
comeback, as Alice Rio has shown;7 this practice, although, of course, regionally
variable,8 is, to me, more important than any law. So I stick to my position
over these issues, without qualm.
Let us now turn to the issue of the peasant-mode of production, which has
interested several of my commentators. First, I have to thank Kelvin Knight
for a remarkable exposition and development of my views on peasant-agency.
I hardly dissent from it at all. I would only say here that perhaps Knight is too
generous in his Aufhebung of the sometimes considerable tension in my work
between an attraction to the abstract clarity of Althusserian thought (and
similar structural systems) and a recognition, as a historian, that agency is the
work of real human beings working in real social (economic, political, cultural)
contexts.9 But it remains the case that I would want to be doing what he says
I am doing. And he is right that my hostility to teleology does not encompass
the ends-driven action of humans; it is our teleologies that I am opposed to,
not theirs.
Davidson and Chris Harman argue that my view of the peasant-mode is
not sufficiently dynamic.10 That is correct; here, I felt constrained by my
sources, for they say so little about the mode at all that I avoided some of the
elaboration I could have engaged in. Davidson comments that my peasant-
mode actors are posited as uninterested in risk and technological development,
much as were the peasants under feudalism described in the 1970s by Robert
Brenner (who, in this respect, followed almost all his predecessors, in a view
now, however, widely and convincingly contested). He notes that I suggest
ways in which feudalism could develop from internal developments in the
peasant-mode, but also that these ways do not appear in practice in my
examples. That is fair; so also are the related suggestions Harman makes, which
are focused on developments in the productive forces. I think he is likely to be
right about the impact on peasant-mode communities of any development in
the productive forces that favours individual members (or families) in such
7. Rio 2006, pp. 16–23.

8. Cf. Wickham 2005, pp. 559–62.
9. Knight remarks that I do not define ‘articulation’ in Framing; I meant it in what one
might call a vulgar-Althusserian sense. But my uses of structuralism and poststructuralism have
always been deliberately eclectic (as well as ‘sceptical’ – cf. Knight’s typical generosity in n. 84).
Note that I was never a pupil of Rodney Hilton; just a younger colleague around 1980, and
enormously influenced by him.
10. Chris Harman died while this article was in press; I would like to record my huge respect
for him as a theorist, political actor and human being, and my great sorrow at his death.
communities, and I would go along with his formulations of how these might
produce a shift from the peasant-mode to feudalism. Harman cites more than
one different version of the peasant-mode in his article, for Sachs and Harris
each set out different possible configurations of autonomous local economies.
We must be careful not to attach our models to too-specific a version of the
mode (if we do so, we will replicate the unhelpful view, though one now less-
widely held than in the past, that the feudal mode is supposedly impossible
without legal serfdom and labour-service); but, rather, we must recognise
explicitly that the peasant-mode has many different forms, and thus many
possible paths of potential change. In that context, it is worth also observing
that the best documented examples I can think of from the early and central
middle ages in Europe of a peasant-mode actually shifting to a feudal one, in
parts of tenth- and eleventh-century northern Spain and in thirteenth-century
Iceland, each seem to have been marked, not by technological change, but by
changes in the relations of production, in which local big-men did indeed
manage to assert themselves at the expense of their neighbours, in the
‘bottom-up’ process characterised by Davidson. I would not wish to exclude
other ways in which this change took place, however.
Carlos Astarita argues that I understate the extent of the peasant-mode in
the early-medieval West; he extends my arguments for Britain and other
northern regions to the Frankish heartland, and to Spain. I think he over-
generalises. I would perhaps inevitably think this, as I argue so often for
regional difference, but I certainly do here. Northern Spain, as I have just said,
does indeed seem to me one region where the peasant-mode was important in
many places from the eighth century onwards, in much the way Astarita says.
I said this in Framing, too,11 but I did not really develop the point, for the
main period for the dominance of that mode postdated that of the book (and,
above all, all the evidence for it is later – there is almost no eighth-century
material for the region at all). Although even this must be nuanced micro-
regionally (lords, I am sure, always dominated in many areas, such as in Galicia
and around Oviedo), it remains a guide for much of the north. In Francia, I
am less convinced by Astarita. The weakness of the Merovingian manor does
not seem to me demonstrated by the Tresson charter; nor am I convinced that
palatia were ‘symbolic rather than . . . monumental’ (the word palatium has a
clear material correlate far more often than it is figurative). We do not know
anything detailed about the materiality of Frankish élite (aristocratic and
royal) residences before Charlemagne’s time, but it is unlikely that royal
residences were so very meagre in the seventh century, given their great
11. Wickham 2005, pp. 227–9, 584.

impressiveness in the late-eighth, at Aachen or Ingelheim. The evidence for

aristocratic wealth in Francia is not perfect. Some indicators I used for it are,
admittedly, labile, particularly in the sixth century; but the scale of landowning
visible in our seventh-century lay and ecclesiastical documents remains huge,
far greater than in any other part of contemporary Europe or the Mediterranean,
and this – plus the geographical scale of some Frankish distribution-networks
for artisanal goods – reinforces my view that the peasant-mode must have
been relatively unimportant in much (although not all) of northern Francia in
particular.
This brings me to some of the implications of the comparative method in
itself. Da Graca remarks that my use of comparison is more useful as a guide
to which explanations do not work than it is as a generator of which actually
do, a process which tends to be more ‘conjectural’. She is right here, and it
seems to be a generalisable (and, if unrecognised, problematic) feature of the
comparative method as a whole. She is also right that the hierarchy of causes
I invoke under these circumstances risks circularity; in the specific Frankish
case I have just mentioned, sometimes I propose that the level of artisanal
exchange reflects aristocratic wealth, but sometimes I drift towards proposing
that the former demonstrates the latter, which is a proposition of a different
order. I raise this issue as a warning: one must be precise and consistent in
one’s claims about what causes what. (Here, I regard élite-wealth as the causal
motor, and land-documents are the real basis for my belief in it.) I have tried
to be consistent, but, of course, we are dealing with the early middle ages,
where so little is certain; one thus has to construct a plausible social picture
out of fragmentary empirical evidence, at the same time as explaining it; so
I may have slipped. Da Graca’s critiques of my views of causation (and also of
the heterogeneity of my ideal types) are here to the point.12
The Gaul/Francia comparison is particularly important for understanding
Britain, which started with a fairly similar social structure to northern Gaul
(in 300, say), but which, already by 450, was radically different. I made some
proposals in Framing as to why that might be,13 based, above all, on the
argument that Britain was more civilian than northern Gaul, so its élites were
less able to react to the total breakdown of the Roman state in this region.
Moreland points out some of the flaws in this argument; as he shows,
aristocratic power was both more privatised and more military in fourth-
century Britain than I claimed. It will clearly be necessary to find more
developed explanations for Britain’s economic meltdown than those I suggested.
12. da Graca 2008, pp. 283–94.

13. Wickham 2005, pp. 331–2.
But Moreland is led by this argument to suggest that British aristocracies, as a

result, also survived better than I had proposed, because they were indeed
more capable of adapting to a post-Roman environment. Here, however, the
Gallic comparison imposes itself as a serious problem. Whatever aristocratic
survival there was in Britain, it was at a far simpler material level than in Gaul.
There is no sharper break, anywhere in my regions, than that between the
archaeology of northern Gaul and that in the British lands just to the other
side of the English Channel by the sixth century. Moreland is led by the logic
of his argument to talk up continuities and survivals, but I think he exaggerates;
the Gallic contrast must be kept in mind – and explained – here, no matter
how many continuities there might have been in Britain. (By contrast, his
argument for a greater degree of exchange in late seventh-century England
than I argued for makes sense; it was still far less large-scale and complex than
in Gaul/Francia, but the signs are there. I underplayed them precisely because
of the Gallic contrast, but it is wrong to talk them away entirely.)
The final issue I would like to reply to concerns the late-Roman state.
Haldon gave most attention to this here, though his arguments also match
with those of Shaw in New Left Review, and those of Banaji in Agrarian Change.
All three criticise my dependence on a fiscal model so as to explain exchange,
and unpick it in interesting ways. Here, it is necessary to reply (as Haldon and
Banaji say they recognise) that I am more interested in an aristocratic (i.e.
élite-) than in a fiscal demand as the basis for complex production and exchange
in my regions. I invoke a fiscal motor14 for inter-regional exchange above all,
which I argue consistently to be less important than exchange internal to
regions. Even then, the fiscal system facilitates that exchange, rather than
generating most of it. Interestingly, Haldon and Shaw both invoke François de
Calataÿ’s 2005 article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology to support the
proposition that, in reality, Mediterranean inter-regional exchange began well
before the Roman Empire and began to ‘decline’ before the late Empire.15 This
short and stimulating article by one of the most active classical numismatists
offers a small set of highly generic proxy-indicators for the global scale of (in
particular) metal-production, but it surely cannot by itself counteract the scale
of archaeological work on all the sites of the late Empire – this is the kind of
article we used before archaeology was available, rather than in the present
environment. But, overall, these three have a tendency to concentrate too
much on what I say about taxation and exchange, and too little on what I say
about élite-demand – some of which is fuelled by the local control of taxation,
14. Wickham 2005, pp. 717–18, 820.

15. de Calataÿ 2005.
of course, but most of which is not. Their own preoccupations have led them
to erect something of a straw-man.
Where Haldon and Banaji hit home is over money. I did not discuss coinage
in Framing. I felt guilty about it even at the time, but I thought that Chapter 11,
which discussed exchange, would get out of hand if I did, as well as feeling
that its importance had been overstated in the past. I still think that; but
Haldon and Banaji – and also Moreland, writing on seventh- and eighth-
century England – certainly show that there are exchange-elements which are
shown up by coin-finds and not by any other evidence at our disposal. It is
also, of course, the case that states depended greatly on precious-metal reserves
(the thesaurus as it was called in Francia; although it was valued in coins in our
narrative-sources, it was not by any means all necessarily in coined money);
but, above all, detailed work on coin-distributions in Sicily, England and
elsewhere shows up economic relationships I did not spot. I still do not think
that we have enough evidence of coin-quantities to show how much money
was in circulation at any one time, or who used it. All the same, I recognise
that I am on the defensive here. Coinage is a substantial evidence-base for this
period, and I should have used it.
There are plenty of other things I could have done in Framing and did not.
I should have discussed al-Andalus, Arab Spain, more; I think now that some
of the elements in its development from the eighth to the eleventh centuries
were much more similar to those in other regions of the West than they were
to the heartlands of the Arab Caliphate. I should also have characterised more
sharply the distinction between an early middle ages in which the exchange-
motor was élite-demand, and a later middle ages, in which a mass-demand
for artisanal products is much more visible in our sources, and the wealth
of the élite becomes less of a discriminator. (Had I tried to do so, however,
I would have run into difficulty, for the twelfth century, my best bet for the
century of the shift, has never been analysed anywhere from this standpoint,
and it would not be at all easy as yet to do so – central-medieval archaeology
is, in general, less well developed than early-medieval archaeology.) Both
would have helped to clarify some of my points about political systems and
about exchange, and about the economic dynamic of my societies, in particular
of the feudal mode, which would have been useful. Both would also have
required me to go substantially beyond my cut-off date of 800, however, and
then I would have had to become enmeshed in the analysis of a further set of
societies, including the Carolingians and the ‘Abbāsids, which I wanted
explicitly to avoid.
What I do want to finish by saying, however, is that I am not repentant
about the focus of Framing. Its interest to readers of Historical Materialism
(and to most other readers who are not early medievalists), and the interest of
the often arcane debates in these pages about the affairs of societies active
some 1500 years ago, lie in the plausibility of the large-scale socio-economic
contrasts which were presented there, as well as in my attempts to compare
and explain them. Whether or not my ambition came off, I am not sorry to
have been ambitious. I wanted to compare regions, to cut through some of the
rubbish that had been written about them by people who only knew about
one area and therefore had no controls for their hypotheses. The regions turned
into the dramatis personae of the book, in a humanisation-process which I
tried to restrain (because I knew it did not make any sense), but which sat at
the back of my mind for all that; but all this seemed worth it, given my interest
in comparison. I also wanted to categorise, to frame. Shaw explicitly doubts
the utility of this (‘whatever the story, it is not susceptible to framing’); he does
not even believe there was an early middle ages to frame, though he does not
give his reasons.16 In my view, categorisation, drawing distinctions, working
out the nature of difference and the reasons for it, is more simply what history-
writing is about, and that if we do not do it, we fail as historians. We also can
and should argue about the categories (and about agency, and the internal
dynamic of systems and processes), as the authors of these critiques have so
ably done here. This is how historical debate moves on, and the authors of
these critiques have moved it on. That is our task, and we learn something real
when we do it properly.
References
Banaji, Jairus 2007, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity, Second Edition, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
—— 2009, ‘Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages’, Journal of
Agrarian Change, 9, 1: 59–91.
Costambeys, Marios 2006, ‘Review of Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages’, The Economic
History Review, 59: 417–19.
da Graca, Laura 2008, ‘Reflexiones metodológicas sobre el estudio comparativo de Chris
Wickham’, Edad media, 9: 265–97.
de Calataÿ, François 2005, ‘The Graeco-Roman Economy in the Super-Long Run’, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 18: 361–72.
Delogu, Paolo 2006, ‘Una discussione con Chris Wickham’, Storica, 34: 152–63.
Herlihy, David 1961, ‘Church Property on the European Continent, 701–1200’, Speculum, 36,
1: 81–105.
16. Shaw 2008, pp. 110–14. On p. 113, he says that if anyone still believes in the early
middle ages after reading Framing, ‘then there is probably very little that the reviewer can add to
change their minds’. Well, yes. He goes on, however, to lambast the subordinated rôle of the
middle ages assumed by every grand narrative of modernity; I am certainly with him there.
Johansen, Baber 1988, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent, London: Croom Helm.
Rio, Alice 2006, ‘Freedom and Unfreedom in Early Medieval Francia: the Evidence of the Legal
Formulae’, Past and Present, 193, 1: 7–40.
Shaw, Brent 2008, ‘After Rome’, New Left Review, II, 51: 89–114.
The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum
Edited and introduced by Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber
Contributors:
George Ciccariello-Maher, Roland Denis, Steve Ellner, Sujatha Fernandes,

Michael A. Lebowitz, Sara Motta and Thomas Purcell
Abstract
The ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez has reignited debate in Latin
America and internationally on the questions of socialism and revolution. This forum brings
together six leading intellectuals from different revolutionary traditions and introduces their
reflections on class-struggle, the state, imperialism, counter-power, revolutionary parties,
community and communes, workplaces, economy, politics, society, culture, race, gender, and
the hopes, contradictions, and prospects of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’ in contemporary
Venezuela.
Keywords
Venezuela, twenty-first-century socialism, revolution, Bolivarian, Hugo Chávez
Introduction
Hugo Chávez assumed the presidential office of Venezuela in February 1999
after a decisive victory in the December 1998 elections. Over a decade into the
Bolivarian process of social and political change, it is incumbent upon the
international Left to step back and reflect on the images and realities of
Chavismo, and to move beyond simplistic analyses that turn on the figure of
Chávez himself.
There is little doubt that Venezuela’s opposition to US-imperialism in Latin
America in recent years, and the government’s declared commitment to
‘twenty-first-century socialism’ since 2005, have captured the imagination of
many activists around the world. The Bolivarian phenomenon has fuelled
debate on what form socialism might take in today’s context, not just in
Venezuela, but in other parts of the world. Whatever the depth and character

234 S. Spronk, J.R. Webber / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 233–270
of the substantive change introduced by the Bolivarian process to the social,

political, and economic landscape of the country, few doubt that it has
contributed to a renewal of strategic and tactical debate around the significance
and possibility of revolution and socialism – words hardly uttered outside
small far-left circles in Latin America during the highpoint of the neoliberal
epoch in the 1980s and 1990s.
Venezuelan political dynamics have thrown up a range of fundamental
questions of import to critical, non-dogmatic Marxism. Which class- and
other social forces exercise hegemony within the composition of the Chavista
movement and government? In the new terrain of social struggles, have
territorially based community-movements outpaced workers’ power at the
point of production? In socio-cultural terms, to what extent have the ruptures
with the old ways of doing politics fostered challenges to longstanding forms
of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia in Venezuela? In the
sphere of economics, few would argue that there has been a revolutionary
transformation of social-property relations and class-structures in Venezuela,
but what might be the transitional moves necessary to lead the process in that
direction? Is the multiclass-coalition at the base of the Chavista project
sustainable or subject to implosion as its internal contradictions rise to the
surface? How have the ongoing mutations of the world-economic crisis had an
impact upon the Venezuelan social formation?
This forum brings together six leading intellectuals, representing a variety of
revolutionary traditions, with different perspectives on the principal social
forces behind the Bolivarian process and its key tensions and synergies. Our
conversation focuses on the dynamics of workplace- and community-struggles,
the characteristics of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista
Unido de Venezuela, PSUV ), the rôle and character of the state, advances and
setbacks in the realm of the economy, and the dynamics of imperialism vis-à-
vis the Bolivarian process. While it is impossible to present the full spectrum
of Marxist debate on such questions, the contributions included here bring to
light some of the crucial insights and controversies of classical interpretations
of Marx’s critique of political economy in the Venezuelan context, autonomist-
Marxist perspectives on social and political transformation, Marxist-feminist
and anti-racist analyses of the conjuncture, opposing views on the rôle of
political leadership, revolutionary subjects, and Marxist conceptualisations of
the state, and, finally, diverse understandings of the revolutionary-socialist
possibilities in Venezuela today.
S. Spronk, J.R. Webber / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 233–270 235
Brief political timeline

1989: Increases in fuel-costs related to the neoliberal austerity-programme
spark social revolt known as the Caracazo in which hundreds, possibly
thousands, of civilians are killed by the military and police.
1992: Chávez leads unsuccessful coup-attempt against Carlos Pérez; spends

two years in prison.
1998: Chávez wins landslide-victory in December’s presidential elections.
1999: Chávez sworn-in as President on the second of February.
1999: On December 15, 72 per cent of voters approve a new constitution

establishing the Fifth Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
2002: Massive street-protests in support of Chávez help to restore him to

office within 48 hours after a CIA-backed coup on April 11.
2002–3: A nine-week strike from mid-December to end of February called by

the opposition labour-federation, the CTV, and business-leaders cripples the
oil-industry, the mainstay of the Venezuelan economy; the strike is defeated by
community-mobilisations, rank-and-file oil-workers, and soldiers.
2004: Chávez wins a referendum on his rule called by the opposition with the
backing of 59 per cent of electorate.
2005: Parties allied to Chávez win all 167 seats in the National Assembly;
elections boycotted by the opposition; Chávez declares the Bolivarian process
to be socialist at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
2007: First electoral defeat of the Chávez government when a referendum to

reform sixty-nine articles of the constitution is rejected narrowly by voters.
2008: The PSUV holds first congress, replacing the Fifth-Republic Movement
(Movimiento V [Quinta] República, MVR).
2009: The second constitutional referendum to abolish presidential term-

limits passes on February 15 with 54 per cent of the votes.
2010: Congressional elections scheduled for September 26.

1. What are the principal social forces driving the Bolivarian process and
its promised transition to a new kind of socialism? More specifically,
what is the relative importance of territorially based community-
struggles and forms of organisation, as compared with traditional
forms of struggle and organisation in the workplaces, at the point of
production?
Thomas Purcell (TP): To my mind, the principal social force, and the defining
characteristic of the Bolivarian Revolution, are the previously marginalised
groups. Their social, political and economic inclusion through communal
councils, cooperatives, and the missions is integral to the dynamism of the
project. Indeed, the manner in which the Bolivarian Revolution seeks to
harness the political and economic power of the state in the interests of
excluded and marginalised Venezuelans is integral to the Chavismo-
phenomenon and the declaration of a so-called twenty-first-century socialism
in 2005. However, it must be recognised that a complex web of groups from
across the country, rural and urban, constitute this process, and their notions
of a new kind of socialism are far from homogenous. In this respect, rather
than socialism being a pre-defined destination or plan, it seems to function
much more as a malleable concept or political point of departure in recognition
of years of neglect and exclusion of the majority of the population.
At the level of agency on the ground, reflecting upon my experiences with
Venezuelan cooperatives, one of the most striking features of the Bolivarian
process is the central rôle played by women. As I found out, this has a twofold
implication. First of all, the government should be lauded for its initiatives to
provide skills, education, opportunities and finance through social initiatives
such as Misión Vuelvan Caras (literally ‘Mission About-Face’) and Banco de la
Mujer [ Women’s Development-Bank]. These have given many women the
opportunity to work in newly formed cooperatives and develop skills for
employment elsewhere. However, this does not account for why many
remaining cooperatives, despite equal numbers of men and women at the start
of the process, are largely female-dominated. This can be explained, in part, by
the way an oil-boom creates internal demand for non-tradables, such as
construction which grew 159.4 per cent from 2003 to 2008. This creates a
demand for informal labour, drawing young men out of the cooperatives into
booming sectors. Wages in cooperatives, especially agricultural ones, are
relatively low compared to work that can found, when available, in the private
sector.
Regarding the second part of this question, an innovation of the endogenous-
development project – Venezuela’s contemporary strategy to invest oil-wealth
in marginalised sectors of the economy such as agriculture – has been the

territorially demarcated areas known as Zones of Endogenous Development
[Núcleos de Desarrollo Endógeno, NDEs]. Described as ‘productive spaces
that take advantage of the potentialities of each region to promote dynamic
local and territorial development’, NDEs can be comprised of numerous local
cooperatives organised on distinct ‘battle-fronts’ to raise the quality of life of
the local population. The principal idea is that within and through NDEs,
cooperatives can integrate activities, adding value through economies of scale,
and thereby produce, distribute, and commercialise goods while avoiding the
traditional problems of intermediary-commercial or usury-capital. This kind
of initiative puts into perspective the applicability of ‘traditional’ forms of
struggle at the point of production, a conceptual category that cannot easily
be transposed to social conditions where marginalisation characterises the
living-conditions and material reproduction of the majority of the population.
Thus new mechanisms and projects have been developed from within
[endógeno] as a necessity.
George Ciccariello-Maher (GC-M): This is a complex question, one which

encompasses the entire character of the Bolivarian process, its constituent
elements, and its dynamics. Put differently, it is not enough to merely
understand which forces represent which tendencies; we must also understand
how they enter into play with one another, and what dynamic alliances or
conflicts they generate. To do this, we must first take a step back and ask: what
are the most important elements of the Bolivarian process? And we must then
ask which of the existing forces either embody these elements or push forward
their development and maturation.
The Bolivarian Revolution is not merely about a strictly-economic transition
toward socialism. If anything, such a strict ‘socialism’ could be understood as
the ‘old’ socialism against which this ‘new kind’ of socialism stands, or what
has been called in the Venezuelan context ‘Twenty-First-Century Socialism’.
What is underway in Venezuela is a far more thoroughgoing process of
decolonisation, or the construction of a decolonial socialism in the vein of
Peruvian communist José Carlos Mariátegui.
Like Mariátegui, we must therefore seek to understand the specific Latin-
American and Venezuelan context of the struggle underway. This means
recognising, firstly, that global structures of economic dependency have
distorted the Venezuelan social structure, giving rise to a massively bloated
state (all the more so due to the prevalence of the oil-economy) and the
corruption, bureaucracy, and urbanisation that this entails. Secondly, it means
recognising that the Venezuelan class-structure is far from what is assumed in
European-Marxist theories: the formal, industrial working class is small, and

exists alongside a considerable (but shrinking) peasant-class, as well as a
massive (and growing) class of informal labourers.
So, already in this question, the suggestion that ‘traditional forms of struggle’
are located at the point of production is one that proves an ill fit for the
Venezuelan context. Rather, our sights must be adjusted to comprehend both
the centrality of the state and the specifics of the Venezuelan class-structure (to
which we must add a more substantive understanding of the relationship
between race and class). Once we do so, we begin to realise that the Bolivarian
process is one which seeks to radically transform the state, and this
transformation is at least as important as transformations occurring on an
economic register.
To do so requires that we think differently about what such a transformation
would look like. It is no longer sufficient (if it ever was) for the state to seize
heavy industry, since it is that state itself which is the object of revolutionary
energies. From an economic question, this becomes a question of power, and
specifically I like to think of this in terms of Lenin’s concept of ‘dual power’,
of generating an alternative power outside the state capable of transforming
and, ultimately, abolishing that state (here, the progression is considerably
different from Lenin’s formulation, but I do not have space to fully delineate
these differences).
From this view follows the relationship between territorial and economic
forms of dual power. As I have said, the point-of-production is not sufficient
in Venezuela (or arguably anywhere, for that matter). What is required is the
unification of workplace- and territorial struggles, among others. So far, the
territorial has come first, with progress in the communal councils progressing
further and faster than in workers’ councils.
Sujatha Fernandes (SF): The answer depends on how you define the Bolivarian
process, or the ‘proceso’, as it is called in Venezuela. I go along with the
definition given by the novelist and community-journalist José Roberto
Duque, who defines the proceso as a parallel and underground movement that
defends the Chávez government, but which has its own trajectory independent
of directives from the central government. In that case, I would see the
principal social forces as the urban and rural community-based organisations,
peasant-movement, community-media groups, occupied factories, land-
committees and so on who are at the heart of the Bolivarian process, although
not always recognised as such. Territorial or place-based struggles, in the barrio
or parish, in the rural community, have come to play a much more important
strategic rôle than traditional trade-unions, which, in many cases, have been
either taken over by the Right or bureaucratised to the point of being ineffective
in channelling demands of their members.
Sara Motta (SM): The question suggests a false dichotomy between struggles
organised around the point of production and those around social reproduction.
This dichotomy has been reproduced in much Marxian critique which
understands the capital-relation as a relationship of production, and therefore
sees as secondary struggles around social reproduction. If we look at the
question from the perspective of overcoming the way capitalism mystifies the
internal connections within these two spheres, then we can begin to understand
the capital-relation as the construction of alienated social relationships in both
spheres which have resulted in a dualism between mind and body, public and
private, and gendered binaries which internally divide the proletarian subject
from itself. Thus, the principal driver of the development of a new kind of
socialism is the popular classes attempting to create forms of self-government
which reunite this subject and therefore overcome the alienation of our creative
capacities in all the spheres we inhabit; the political, the economic, the social
and the subjective. Importantly this involves transcending ‘old’ forms of
politics based on relationships of representation in which people’s intellectual
and political powers are delegated to a minority in a party or the state, and
instead forging processes of mass-intellectuality.
More concretely, both the developmentalist period and the neoliberal
period in Venezuela produced uneven development in which a great mass of
the popular classes were/are in the periphery of informality as opposed to the
formal sectors of the economy. Thus, place-based struggles have been, and are,
key-sites of popular-class struggle and political articulation.
Additionally, Venezuela’s urban masses have a healthy mistrust of representative
forms of politics, formed out of experience, struggle and reflection. For many,
the experience of the Punto-Fijo system (1958–99) was one of political, social
and economic exclusion. This exclusion occurred within a context of a party-
system and a ‘democratic’-representative state and régime. It is from such
experiences that the mistrust of political parties and representative politics
becomes both a rational and logical political response. This political orientation
also stems from the popular classes’ experiences of struggle, throughout the
1980s and 1990s, for rights to health, housing, and sanitation, in which the
rôle of local community-organisation and the influence of liberation-theology
and popular education was marked.
These experiences of exclusion and of political struggle have given a
participatory dynamic to the current political process. The procedures and
practices of this process often develop in ways which place emphasis on direct,
as opposed to representative, democracy, and on territorialised forms of

institutionality in which new cultures, logics and grammars of democratic
practice and subjectivity are emerging.
Steve Ellner (SE): Community-based struggles and programmes have been a

primary component of the Chávez experience during these eleven-and-a-half
years. From the outset, Chávez’s social base of support consisted of the
unorganised sectors of the population, such as those of the informal economy,
rural sectors and employees of small non-unionised firms, not so much the
organised working class. Chávez, both before and after coming to power,
expressed reservations about the vanguard-rôle of the working class.
Chávez achieved greater working-class support after the failed general strike
promoted by the opposition in 2002–3. In 2005, Chávez expropriated several
medium-sized companies and turned them over to the workers at the same
time that the government promoted worker-participation in several big state-
run companies, specifically in the aluminium-company ALCASA. These
efforts, however, were not sustained and the results were mixed.
Since 2009, the government has made renewed efforts to promote worker-
participation in the numerous companies that have been expropriated. At the
level of discourse, Chávez for the first time recognises the lead-rôle of the
working class in the revolutionary process. This change in emphasis, I believe,
is related to the appreciation of the Marxist view of agency, namely that the
proletariat, because of its concentration and productive capacity, has a greater
consciousness-potential than other non-privileged sectors. The change of
emphasis is also related to the fact that the community-based programmes
such as the cooperatives and the community-councils have not been a
resounding success, though they have represented an important learning-
experience and, in the case of the community-councils, many have proved to
be viable. Another reason for the greater emphasis on the working class is the
need to ensure the well-functioning of state-run companies and to avoid the
Soviet experience of a management-worker divide. Some state-companies
have suffered from poor management which has become increasingly evident.
This has been the case with the electricity-sector and has been partly responsible
for serious electricity-shortages in 2009 and 2010, with major political
ramifications.
Michael A. Lebowitz (ML): The first thing to recognise is that poverty, mass-
exclusion and anger have existed in Venezuela for many years. Similarly, many
community- and political organisations attempted to organise people even
after the Caracazo in 1989, but they did not succeed. The detonator of this
explosive process has been Chávez. His starting point was that a third way was
possible, but, in the context of capitalists’ attempts to overthrow him, he has
moved increasingly to articulate a socialist perspective, which has received an
enormous response from the people. In this sense, the relationship between
Chávez and the masses is a dialectical one: you can see the electricity flow in
both directions when Chávez speaks in public to the poor.
The process does not follow the classic picture of Marxist arguments where
the industrial working class rises up and takes the lead, because the working
class in the formal sector is very small. The leading economic sector, the oil-
industry, is not very labour-intensive. As such, the organised working class
largely exists in the public sector and the processing sectors, such as in auto-
assembly, which is dependent on imported parts. This reflects the nature of the
Venezuelan economy, which exports oil and imports almost everything else.
For example, 70 per cent of food is imported. One should also note that the
organised working class has very high incomes relative to the mass of the
population. One of the major struggles within the organised working class is
therefore the struggle against economism. Workers struggling for worker-
management, as in the ALCASA-case under the leadership of Carlos Lanz, for
example, have had to take on the traditional unions which have been oriented
primarily towards gaining increased wages for their members in a context
where these workers are already a privileged group relative to the vast majority
of the population.
In many ways, the community-struggles have been the most significant part
of the process. In Caracas and elsewhere, communities have been established
by migrants from the countryside on public lands and have organised
themselves, a process that is very well described in the book by Iain Bruce, The
Real Venezuela. These communities have their own traditions of organisation,
but they were stimulated by the proposal to establish land-committees put
forward by the Chávez government, largely, I think, thanks to the initiative of
Maria Cristina Iglesias, who was one of the real thinkers behind this process
(and is long-serving minister of labour). The communities built the health-
committees and water-tables alongside these urban land-committees, which
later laid the basis for the formation of the communal councils launched in
2005. These community-struggles have been essential to the process because
of the large informal sector and the high degree of poverty; unorganised
workers are being reached in the communal sector.
Roland Denis (RD): The initial social forces, at the end of the 1980s and
beginning of the 1990s, were basically urban-popular movements of the anti-
neoliberal resistance and the student-movement that pushed forward the
Bolivarian process in its first phase. The labour-movement was extremely

weak, playing almost no rôle in this period. The peasant-movement played a
small part, but was also relatively insignificant.
After the arrival of Chávez in power in 1999, the first nodes of more
coherent social organisations began to take shape. Again, the basis was the
urban-popular movements, but they began to develop much-more coherent
demands. And the rôle played by the labour-, peasant-, fisher-, and indigenous
movements began to pick up as well. They began formulating new sets of
demands, and struggled for the vindication of their basic rights. This was the
second phase of the Bolivarian process which lasted until roughly 2004. The
end of this second phase was the climactic point of the process in terms of
the capacity of the popular classes for mobilisation and self-organisation, capacity
for combat, for the defence of the totality of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Since 2004, there has been a counter-offensive by the state. The government
had defeated the reactionary fascist oligarchy, and a space was therefore opened
up for the advance of a new bureaucracy, which, with each passing day, began
to act ever more in its own interests, rooting itself in the apparatuses of power.
This bureaucracy has encircled the figure of Chávez in the presidency, and
feeds off the cult of personality. In this third phase, the capacity for self-
organisation and mobilisation was diminished.
2. What are the tensions and synergies that emerge in the process in
articulating the forces ‘from above’ and ‘from below’? For example,
what has been the rôle of the state in creating or closing the space(s)
for the exercise of ‘popular power’ in the community and in the
workplace?
ML: Here, we get into the question of what we mean by ‘the state’. The
Venezuelan state is fundamentally a non-functioning, capitalist state – and a
really bad capitalist state at that – that sabotages the projects of the government.
One of the fundamental challenges facing the Chávez government has been
the fact that the state-sector is largely populated by people who were hired in
by the previous governments with ironclad contracts. Due to progression
through the ranks, public servants with twenty years of service are getting a
good wage that they could not possibly earn anywhere else. Many of these
workers are either sabotaging explicitly the projects of the government, or they
are simply incompetent because they were hired on the basis of clientelism.
So, the state fails to deliver. And the problem is not only the oppositionists:
the deep culture of clientelism and corruption infects Chavistas as well. So,
people get enthused about the initiatives that Chávez announces and then are
eventually disappointed by a state that does something entirely different from
what Chávez is calling for. When this happens, it breeds apathy and
cynicism.
For example, in Ciudad Guayana, an industrial centre in Venezuela, workers
were brought together from various sectors (e.g. aluminium-processing, the
steel-industry, etc.) to talk about the process of creating a socialist plan. Work-
tables were established in which workers developed plans that were then
presented in a large meeting in May attended by Chávez and several of his
ministers. The workers presented their demands for worker-management,
including getting rid of the managers opposed to the process and nationalising
a lot of the private suppliers, which they understood to be ripping off the
state-sectors. Chávez sat there with an absolutely straight face, just taking
notes, and then responded that, ‘We accept all those demands’. He listed the
companies to be nationalised and told the workers to come up with a socialist
plan within two months. There were some excellent meetings in ALCASA and
also between different companies.
Workers from different companies would talk to each other about how
they could rationalise their operations. They came up with solutions about
how something in one production-line could be used as an output for another
line, etc., possibilities that had never been explored before. Unfortunately,
these plans were completely stonewalled by the managers. Workers started to
get restless. Chávez called a televised cabinet-meeting in July to talk about
that socialist plan. At one point during this meeting, Chávez said, ‘We have
to proceed on this because what we have is state-capitalism and without
workers’ control you can’t have socialism.’ It is a wonderful statement. Now,
the old directors are out and the workers selected Elio Sayago, an excellent
leader from Marea Socialista, from their own ranks as president of ALCASA.
However, he is now under strong attack by Chavista trade-union people, who
are linked to the governor, a Chavista general who is rumoured to be connected
with the old managers and to the mafias that feed off the state. So, the struggle
continues.
SM: During the Punto-Fijo period (1958–98), there were countless communities
from the urban and rural majority that organised politically, combining
influences from the revolutionary Left, liberation-theology and popular
education. Making this history visible enables us to engage with the complexities
of popular-class political articulation and how this impacts upon the
relationship between the ‘revolution from above’ emanating from the state
and that ‘from below’ within popular-class communities.
Chavismo as a political force within the state is not the engine of a new type
of revolution; rather, this is to be found in communities’ histories and
experiences of struggle. Nevertheless, Chavismo, emanating from the state,
has always contained dynamics which had the potential to both facilitate
processes of popular power by encouraging a decentralisation of power and a
plurality of experiments with territorial self-government, whilst also controlling
these networks through centralising power. However, the balance between the
two logics has increasingly shifted towards the latter. Even when Chávez began
to systematise a series of social, economic and political programmes to
empower the ‘poor’, they contained a contradictory dynamic which, on the
one hand, could work to open spaces of popular politicisation, and, on
the other, act to reinforce the political fragmentation and dependency of the
popular classes. These latent contradictions were manifested in the different
realities of how government-resources, programmes and institutions were
developed. Some of the most innovative forms of self-government, educational
practices and political cultures developed in communities with histories of
autonomous struggle, particularly in relation to education-programmes and
the Urban Land Committees [Comités de Tierra Urbana, CTUs]. Health-
missions, for example, had a tendency to fragment and depoliticise struggles
around health, as their orientation was to provide basic services through the
training of past militants as community-nurses/practitioners. In communities
with little history of political struggle, the old politics of clientelistic and
disempowering relationships was often reproduced.
The growing bureaucratisation of the political elements of Chavismo as
they have become embedded within the logic of the capitalist state has acted
as a break on the development of organic relationships with the ‘people’ and
often meant that the logic of governability and power dominates their actions,
even when many have emerged from these histories of popular struggle. The
productive elements of the relationship between ‘from above’ and ‘from below’
which were present until 2006 have now stagnated as processes of dependency
of communities upon the state, the fragmentation and division of organised
communities, and the logic of bureaucratisation of the political sections of
Chavismo have become dominant. Whilst there are many communities and
individuals who continue to work towards the creation of autonomous spaces
of popular power, the state’s logic, with exceptions, closes the spaces of
possibility for these processes’ consolidation and expansion.
GC-M: Tensions and synergies do not emerge in the process: the process is
nothing more than the ensemble of these creative tensions, central among
which is the tension between the ‘from above’ and the ‘from below’ (and, we
could add, the dynamic tension and conflict between these two and the anti-
Chavista opposition). These three elements constantly interact and generate
the process that we know today.
But even the framework of ‘from above’ and the ‘from below’ is too
simplistic, as is any singular view of the Venezuelan state. What we have seen
instead are certain forces operating in a top-down fashion to foster an alliance
with those forces working for radical change from the bottom-up. Much of
the time, Chávez himself plays this rôle, and this alliance challenges the power
of entrenched bureaucrats, whether they are in the central-government
bureaucracy, state-governors, or local mayors. Between the ‘from above’ and
the ‘from below’ stands this threatening and corrupt middle-sector.
SF: Chávez has always had a strong personal connection with the masses, but
he has been less successful in creating enduring institutions that could articulate
forces from above and from below. The Chávez government attempted to
build links between state and society through the MVR, which proved to be
bureaucratic, hierarchical, and removed from the lives of ordinary people.
Given the failures of the MVR, Chávez tried to promote local units of
participation, such as the Bolivarian Circles [Círculos Bolivarianos, CBs],
Units of Electoral Battle [Unidades de Batalla Electoral, UBE], Units of Social
Battle [Unidades de Batalla Social, UBSs]. But, while these groups originally
facilitated popular participation, they were eventually taken over by political
parties and institutions, and the transfer of power to the local level that some
groups hoped for did not happen.
The state has played a rôle in opening spaces for the exercise of popular
power. With Chávez in office, the platform and resources given to social
movements has allowed them to expand the scope of their activities and build
their mass-membership. But, at the same time, there has been a degree of
demobilisation, as people are encouraged to come out in rallies supporting
Chávez and his initiatives under the overarching banner of Chavismo, with
less emphasis being put on developing movements with ‘their own set of
references’, as one organiser put it.
SE: Mainstream-political analysis of Venezuela consistently played down the

importance of the rank and file, particularly in the labour-movement, and
instead emphasised the hegemony of political parties throughout the modern
period. In doing so, it distorted the past. Under Chávez, the Chavista rank
and file has played a key-rôle as independent actors. The rank and file has
been characterised by ongoing mobilisations which have been essential for the
political survival of the government, participation in social programmes and
critical, independent thinking.
Nevertheless, Venezuela is not Bolivia or Ecuador. The autonomous social
movements in those two nations have no equivalent in Venezuela, where
Chavista popular organisations have been short-lived. In addition, the state
has used oil-derived revenue to jump-start the movement of worker-
cooperatives and community-councils taking in hundreds of thousands of
underprivileged Venezuelans. So, the process of transformation in Venezuela
has had both a bottom-up and top-bottom dynamic.
Ever since the Chávez government defined itself as socialist in 2005, the
Venezuelan Left has intensely debated the character of the state and strategies
of revolutionary transformation. One (or actually several) currents consider
the state-bureaucracy per se as ‘counterrevolutionary’, and invoke Chávez’s
reference to the need for a ‘revolution within the revolution’. Many Chavistas
attribute the diverse problems that the movement faces to the ‘bureaucracy’
and view the dismantlement of the bureaucracy as a panacea. The ‘counter-
revolutionary’ bureaucrats take in most of the ministers, and most, if not all,
of the Chavista governors and mayors.
Few who are familiar with Venezuelan politics would deny that the state-
bureaucracy has held back the process of change and, in many ways, has
contributed to the recent wave of disillusionment among many government-
supporters. In the first place, members of the state-bureaucracy have used their
resources and privileges within the PSUV to block the rank and file’s efforts to
put forth critical positions within the Party, thus dampening the spirits of
many Chavista activists. In the second place, corruption is widespread,
although the government since late 2009 has moved decisively by issuing
arrest-orders against corrupt bankers tied to the state-sector and others accused
of unethical conduct. In the third place, the Chavistas have also failed to check
clientelistic practices which have always been widespread in Venezuela. Given
the aggressiveness of the opposition and much of the anti-Chavista middle
class, clientelism is an understandable government-response. Loyalty becomes
an imperative. But clientelism does much to undermine state-efficiency in
that competence often becomes a secondary consideration.
The debate between those who call for ‘smashing the bourgeois state’ and
those who favour a Gramscian-type ‘war-of-position’ strategy has to take into
consideration subjective conditions. If you talk to people on the ground,
including the poor who have been involved in the cooperative- and community-
council movements, they will tell you that a large number of these formations
(especially the cooperatives) failed, and much money was squandered because
people were not prepared in any sense, including politically. They also often
say that the state should have created greater controls. These observations go
counter to the radical ‘bottom-up’ line which holds the state-bureaucracy
responsible for these failures in that the bureaucrats discourage greater
participation.
There is another telling example of the lag in subjective conditions. The
PSUV-primaries have provided the rank and file with a golden opportunity to
assert itself and check the power of the ‘bureaucrats’, even with the considerable
resources at their disposal. Yet, the slates which the governors and mayors have
pushed in these internal elections have generally, though certainly not always,
triumphed. The discontented members of the rank and file lack organisational
capacity.
I believe that the current state, with all its structural limitations, can achieve
a greater degree of efficiency in this transitional stage. If the Chavistas in office
perform poorly they can be thrown out in upcoming elections, which seem to
be always just months away. This is an important type of accountability, but it
is certainly not enough. The institutions need to be restructured and mechanisms
for both top-down and bottom-up accountability need to be created.
RD: In response to this dynamic, I have used the metaphor of ‘three republics’
vying for hegemony in the Bolivarian process. The context of class-struggle
here in Venezuela is not simply a conflict between labour and capital. Rather,
around this central axis of class-struggle, there is also a struggle of republican
models, which are societal and even civilisational in nature. This wider conflict
has taken on a particular form over the last ten years of the Bolivarian
Revolution.
The first of the republics at play in this period is what I call the bureaucratic-
corporatist republic. This is the model that has defined much of the
methodology, the politics, and vision of the government as such. It is a
paradigmatic-corporatist dynamic of the state, where the body of the state sees
itself as having to decide and to lead what is, in fact, a much more complex
popular movement than it understands. The state exploits the political strength
of the popular processes and sustains itself through them. The state maintains
a radical discourse, while allowing for deep continuity in Venezuelan social
structures.
Counterposed to this bureaucratic-corporatist state, of course, is the old
liberal-oligarchic republic. This old republic, which metaphorically can be
reduced to the anti-Chavista opposition, is not actually reducible to the
domestic right wing. It is related to a worldview, a model of society, a
republican model, which is very much connected to the global ideology of
neoliberalism. In Venezuela, this type of neoliberal right wing traditionally

never really existed. All the traditional parties, like the Democratic Action
[Acción Democrática, AD] and the Social-Christian Party of Venezuela
[Partido Social Cristiano de Venezuela, COPEI], were populist parties, living
off oil-rent, with mild programmes for redistribution and social recognition,
and incorporation of the peasantry, the labour-movement, the middle classes,
and the bourgeoisie. The right wing of today, the liberal-oligarchic republic,
no longer recognises the existence of social classes, or, in any case, the only
class that it recognises as a social subject is the business-class. The rest of the
population, from this perspective, is a hybrid mix of ‘civil society.’
Finally, the revolutionary process has developed a third body. It is much
weaker, obviously, than the other two, and is much less conscious of its own
existence. It has fewer instruments with which to articulate and synthesise its
power. But it, nonetheless, is a body in development, a self-governing, socialist
body which is breaking from the other two forms of power. This third republic
has an entirely different logic, based in self-government of land, social spaces,
and spaces of production. The third republic takes on very particular
characteristics within the indigenous, labour-, and peasant-movements. It
encompasses radical conceptualisations of democracy, and transcends the
parochial view of the Venezuelan nation, looking instead towards what we call
Nuestra América, or ‘Our America’. It moves beyond the conservative
nationalism that the bureaucratic-corporatist state has tried to reintroduce
into the process, a phenomenon Chávez himself has recognised.
Chávez has developed an entire meta-discourse on the communal councils,
the communes, and so on. This is a very radical, revolutionary discourse,
which incorporates, for example, the notion of workers’ councils. But this
discourse has been used, in fact, to manage the popular movement. At the
same time, however, there are also emergent subjects, subjects in struggle
against and in rejection of this bureaucratic control of the state from above.
They are becoming in themselves new forms of resistance, challenging the
bureaucratic institutions and trying to transcend the situation they find
themselves in. They continue deepening their capacities, their resources, with
the idea of developing this third, self-governing republic.
TP: The notion of a dialectic between Chávez’s revolutionary presidency and the
movement of the masses, which mutually reinforce each other and provide the
dynamism of the process, has become a popular conceptual framework for precisely
thinking through ‘above-’ and ‘below-’relations. However, this, I believe, tells us
little about how the relationship actually plays out on the ground, particularly in
the course of state-supported development and interaction with communities.
The prospect of changing society through the winning of state-power is

certainly something that the Venezuelan example has put back on the agenda.
There is no doubt that capturing the power of the state has been a fundamental
and necessary component of the Bolivarian-Revolutionary process. As
important, in this respect, has been the wresting of control of Venezuela’s
state-holding company PDVSA from the previous executives, nicknamed
Generación de Shell (the ‘Shell Generation’ referring to the petroleum-
company). Greater control of production-strategies and an emphasis on the
social obligations of PDVSA has made available important financial resources
for social and development-spending. It is the distribution of this revenue to
the rest of society which gives the state a particularly interventionist character.
The historical development of this feature of Venezuelan society has been
termed ‘rentier-capitalism’ – the basis of which is ground-rent generated by
monopoly-ownership of a non-reproducible natural resource. In this respect,
the new spaces opened up by the Chávez government for the exercise of
‘popular power’, primarily through the transfer of ground-rent, can be seen in
terms of a rentier-socialism. However, the Venezuelan state is still a capitalist
institution (understood as social relations of capital), wracked with the
historical legacy of rent-seeking, career-bureaucrats, and inefficiencies. This
dynamic refers, not only to those within the state who oppose and seek to stall
the process, but also to the behaviour of Chavistas and certain institutions
charged with developmental rôles.
Whilst certainly creating new spaces for alternative forms of economic and
political organisation, this process has also brought new forms of conflict. One
example in this regard is the rôle and organisation of a Social-Production
Enterprise [Empresas Productivas Sociales, EPS] in Barlovento. In this
arrangement the state, represented by the Venezuelan Agrarian Corporation
[Corporación Venezolana Agraria, CVA], has a 51 per cent share. The direct
producers represented by Federation of Multiple Production of the Miranda
State’ [Federación de Cooperativas de Producción Múltiple de Estado Miranda,
Fecoopromulmi]) made up of 28 cooperatives have 49 per cent. The key
government-mechanism exercised through the plant is the above-market precio
justo [just price] of 10.3 Bsf/kg to purchase the cacao of surrounding
cooperatives. Through institutions such as the Ministry of Popular Power for
Agriculture and Land [Ministerio de Poder Popular Agricultura y Tierras,
MMPAT] and the Fund for the Development of Socialist Agriculture [Fondo
para el Desarrollo Agrario Socialista, FONDA], the state periodically finances
the plant’s ability to purchase cacao at the subsidised rate. The formal structure
of ‘socialist’ production, however, belied a process that has been marked by
struggles. The autonomist-socialist vision (one of autogestión, or self-government)
of workers from Fecoopromulmi and local-communal council-leaders clashed

with what was perceived as the imposition of capitalist-state management with
a co-management [cogestión] socialist façade. The state-managers were more
interested in processing cacao and establishing national sales and international
exports of derivate-products, rather than clarifying social objectives. Following
an occupation of the plant by a collective of Fecoopromulmi-cooperatives
and communal-council leaders, some restructuring was achieved in line with
the community’s socialist vision. The upshot of which has been to integrate
the local network of cacao-cooperatives, cacao-producing families, and the
communal councils into the plant’s organisational structure. This, however,
was a compromise, as the Venezuelan Agrarian Corporation [Corporación
Venezuelana Agrario, CVA] threatened to withdraw state-subsidies, and
managed to keep a prominent position on the board of directors.
3. What has been the rôle of the PSUV in articulating or disarticulating

the most radical sectors of the process? How cohesive is the Party? How
democratic are its internal structures? Should we think of the PSUV as
a revolutionary party?
GC-M: Despite its many conflicting elements, the PSUV’s cohesion derives
from the same source as does Chavista identity more broadly: opposition to
the escualidos (the corrupt purveyors of the old system). This is not to simplify
the opposition into a single homogenous bloc, but rather to recognise how its
perception as such contributes to Chavista unity, just as the perception of a
homogeneous whole that is ‘the Chavistas’ contributes to opposition-identity
(although the latter have a series of conflicting interests which repeatedly drive
them apart).
Internally, the PSUV is a battleground, a microcosm of the process as a
whole. In other words, the fight needs to be brought to the PSUV, or it will
become simply another corrupt patronage-machine. From the beginning,
there have been popular victories and popular defeats within the PSUV, but it
is too early to tell whether the battle is one that can be won. But by abandoning
the battlefield altogether, it will certainly be lost.
SM: The formation of the PSUV was a catalytic moment for many movements.
It opened up tensions that had remained implicit over the nature and direction
of the Bolivarian Revolution. The fault-lines that arose over the formation of
the PSUV were in relation to the rôle of political parties in the development
of a new type of socialism and whether or not these were an element of
the ‘old politics’ that needed to be avoided, the question of whether the
creation of a new type of revolution could come from a state-leadership or

needed to be constructed and articulated by organised communities, and how
far loyalty to Chávez meant loyalty to all of his decisions. Thus, debates were
articulated around the axis of whether the revolution should be embedded in
representational politics or whether it should attempt to transcend this form
of political articulation.
For some movements, these discussions led to their dissolution as sections
entered the Party and others to an initial upsurge in interest amongst militants
and community-members. This interest and energy has waned due to Chávez’s
control over the appointments of key-figures in the Party – figures associated
with corruption, cronyism and ‘old politics’ – and an overlapping of the state
and the Party which augments the logic of centralisation within this political
manifestation of state-Chavismo. This logic of centralisation and ‘power-over’
is reproducing alienated political relationships which reinforce a division of
labour in which there are thinkers and doers, leaders and followers, mirroring
the practices of power characteristic of capitalist social relations. This undercuts
and blocks an open and plural process of popular-collective construction
and experimentation based on participatory processes of politicisation that
seek to overcome such divisions of labour and foster a re-invention of popular
politics.
The overall political rôle of the PSUV has therefore been to disrupt the
organic development and consolidation of popular-class autonomy, creativity
and power and instead is paradigmatic of the marked concentration,
bureaucratisation and alienation of political power that is sapping the energies
of popular politics.
SE: The PSUV’s one key-advance in favour of internal democracy is the

implementation of the system of primaries. In holding primaries, the PSUV is
complying with the 1999 Constitution which obliges parties to hold internal
elections to choose authorities and candidates, but which the parties of the
opposition have all but ignored. The PSUV was founded in 2007 and the
following year it held primaries for the selection of gubernatorial and mayoral
candidates. In 2009, primaries chose delegates for the Party’s congress and, in
the following year, chose party-candidates for the elections to the National
Assembly.
That is on the plus side. On the negative side, the PSUV has failed to
establish a relative autonomy vis-à-vis the government. Several of the Party’s
vice-presidents are ministers, and the governors and mayors promote their
own slates in internal elections, even though the practice has been rejected by
Chávez. The Party is thus unable to serve as a check on the abuses committed
by those in power or in cases of bureaucratic inefficiency. Finally, party-cells
[ patrullas] are isolated from one another and even vertically. Perhaps this
deficiency is by design in order to avoid rank-and-file confrontation with the
leadership.
In spite of the PSUV’s limitations, there is an ongoing deepening of the
process of change in Venezuela. Where does the momentum come from?
Unless you believe – which I do not – that one individual, namely Chávez, is
making possible radical transformation, the obvious answer is that pressure
from below accounts for the ongoing radicalisation. Recent radical moves
include the jailing of bankers, the expropriation of their companies, and the
expropriation of numerous other companies in order to check the practice of
outsourcing, and as part of the fight to combat price-speculation. The PSUV,
to its credit, defends these policies in the National Assembly. Certainly party-
‘bureaucrats’ who support a government that is promoting continuous
transformations cannot be placed in the same category as Soviet bureaucrats
in the context of stagnation and in the absence of revolutionary fervour.
The PSUV’s dependent relationship with the government is a major
shortcoming, because the Party is very much needed to serve as a check on the
state. In the current situation of extreme political polarisation, structures that
can be taken over by the opposition and used to launch an offensive against
the Chávez government are not an acceptable source of accountability. That is
why the 1999 Constitution’s creation of ‘Citizen’s Power’, consisting of
independent structures, has not become a reality. Thus it is up to the Party to
monitor and exert pressure in cases of mismanagement and corruption.
Diana Raby argues that there is a dialectical relationship between Chávez
and the general populace in which Chávez formulates positions and then
reformulates them on the basis of expressions from below. Although this
cannot be a substitute for ongoing mechanisms for direct-popular input in
decision-making, what Raby says captures some of what has been taking place
in Venezuela. For example, most of the delegates at the PSUV Extraordinary
Congress in early 2010 favoured the selection of the Party’s candidates for the
September 2010 elections from above, but Chávez, after some hesitation,
announced that candidates would be chosen by the rank and file in the form
of primaries. Chávez has also taken into account the aspirations of the rank
and file by calling on governors and mayors to distance themselves from party-
control, but his words have not been heeded. In any case, PSUV internal
democracy and its semi-autonomous status vis-à-vis the state have to be
institutionalised, rather than dependent on Chávez.
RD: The creation of the PSUV has been the starkest expression of the general
impoverishment of popular capacities that began in 2005. The PSUV has been
a strike against the Bolivarian process in its entirety. The Party is an apparatus
with neither logic nor political efficiency. It is totally lacking in ideological,
organisational, and mobilisational coherence. The Party does not have the
capacity to do anything. It is simply an electoral machine, in which there
are internal battles for access to power within the bureaucratic-corporatist
state.
Chávez, of course, has engaged in steady propaganda about the Party. As a
consequence, the Party has absorbed much of the earlier accumulation of
social forces. A whole variety of formerly-autonomous social spaces, at the
levels of workers, the peasantry, and so on, have become subsumed within the
Party. Between 2004 and today, the consolidation of this bureaucratic-
corporatist state has advanced forcefully, in no small part as a consequence of
the PSUV.
ML: I am more optimistic than I have been in the past about what is happening
in terms of the state, workers’ management, and the encouragement of the
movement of the communal councils into comunas. What I am least optimistic
about is the Party. The Party is a real problem. What do we mean by the Party?
There is a real struggle between the base and the directors of the Party, the
leadership of the Party, who, with some exceptions, are very much oriented
towards top-down decision-making. In many respects, the Party reproduces
the vertical structure of the state. Chávez plays a mixed rôle here. On the one
hand, he has effectively selected the leadership of the Party. Many of them are
ministers or past ministers who want to achieve specific goals quickly, much of
them electoral. And on the other hand, you have the base, which Chávez
encourages, and is oriented towards movements from below. So you get this
tension, and sometimes Chávez comes in very clearly on the side of the base.
One of the best examples was the recent, so-called Extraordinary Congress of
the Party. It started last year in November, and was originally supposed to be
a week long. The top came down with a whole set of proposals of what the
Party would be, how it would be structured, etc. There was disgruntlement
from below. People complained, ‘How can we make any decisions? Everything’s
being packaged to us. Are we just supposed to raise our hands and approve
what has been selected for us?’ Right at the very beginning of the congress,
Chávez announced: ‘Why do we have to have such a short congress? We can
go on until April and meet every weekend!’ That opened up the opportunity
for people from below to connect with each other, to begin to build and have
an input. The party-leadership was probably taken completely by surprise by
Chávez making one of his many instant decisions, which are good, gut-level
decisions. This is class-struggle, and it is difficult to know what is going to
happen; it is going to depend on organisation from below and the important

rôle that Chávez plays in it.
4. Those committed to socialist transformation in Venezuelan society

usually emphasise the necessity of expanding workers’ control
dramatically throughout the economy, including in the so-called
‘strategic sectors’, as well as transforming the communes into a type of
counter-power oriented toward building new forms of democratic
participation that challenge the limits and, ultimately, replace the
institutions of the capitalist state. What are your views on the centrality
of workers’ control and communal power from below to socialist
transformation in Venezuela? How far have these aims advanced and
what obstacles remain in their path?
GC-M: As I said above, what is needed is an alliance between both forms

which constitutes a substantive ‘dual power’ capable of de-structuring and
radically transforming the Venezuelan state. Given Venezuelan realities, it
should come as no surprise that communal power has advanced further and
quicker than workers’ power. But there are other, more political reasons for
this, one of which is the very real conflict between certain visions of autonomous
worker-control and the needs of Venezuela and the Bolivarian process as a
whole. If workers control their factory and its products autonomously, what
relation do they have to their community? To the barrios that surround their
factory? Who has a say in what is produced and how it is distributed? This is a
struggle that has begun and remains underway in Venezuela, and whose
resolution is not yet clear.
RD: Let me speak regarding the question of community-based struggles. The

communal councils are a new expression of old forms of popular organisation
which did not go by that name. These popular forms of organising were really
born in the struggles of the late 1980s and early 1990s, above all in the barrios
of Caracas. They were called barrio-assemblies. It was out of these barrio-
assemblies that the principle of popular power emerged. This was not an idea
that had really been a part of the Venezuelan Left in the past, which had been
focused above all on national liberation. The programmes of the Left had
been, fundamentally, programmes for national liberation and had taken the
form of vanguards which confronted the state, either through reformist or
insurgent strategies. The barrio-assemblies changed this panorama completely.
They began to focus on the construction of another power, against the
dynamics of the existing bourgeois state.
The barrio-assemblies were small instances of popular power that were

rapidly transformed into Chávez’s base when he assumed power. Initially, this
was a moment of constituent-popular power, that is to say a process through
which the people began to construct another power, outside of the bourgeois
state, without confronting that state openly. It was a very tense, antagonistic
dialectic, but without open confrontation with the state. There was more-or-
less a pact with Chávez, which took the name of ‘protagonistic democracy’.
Beginning in 2004, the state began promoting communal councils: they
were legalised, and problems emerged. The two republics – the bureaucratic-
corporatist and self-governing – began to confront each other within the new
spaces of the communal councils. There are now some communal councils
that are merely channels of power created by mayors or governors, councils
which are often extremely corrupt. On the other hand, there are other
communal councils, and even federations of communal councils, that are very
interesting.
TP: As I mentioned in the first question, social marginalisation refers to

the living-conditions and material reproduction of the majority of the
population. In this respect, notions of ‘expanding workers’ control’ will be
hollow epithets unless united with capacities and conditions on the ground.
For their longevity and potential transformative impact, new forms of
workers’ control, whether in cooperatives or cogestión-initiatives in factories,
must be united with communal power from below. It strikes me as a peculiarity
of the communal-council movement, a movement financed by the state as a
quasi-local government-network organised by principles of participatory
democracy and political accountability, that there are no mechanisms to
participate more readily in issues of self-management of local production and
development.
It must be recognised that new development-bodies responsible for
expanding workers’ control in the economy, such as the FONDEN, are
institutions of a capitalist state and are not organs of communal power
controlled from below. Seen from the perspective of the political economy of
expanding workers’ control, this has, at times, been a levelling down of labour-
standards (as has occurred in some cooperatives contracted by state-institutions
for basic services) and mechanisms to contract cheap labour in the name of the
revolution.
Interestingly, the new strategy of Superintendence of Cooperatives
[Superintendencia Nacional de Cooperativas, SUNACOOP] to revive
Venezuelan cooperatives has followed this principle of uniting workers’ control
with communal power. This has emerged in the form of state-cooperative
councils [Consejos Cooperativas Estatales]. Initial problems with the
proliferation of independent cooperatives saw many squander resources without

starting production, neglect their social rôle, and suffer from commercial
isolation. The idea is that each regional state, through communal councils, will
plan and manage the needs of cooperatives to stimulate production-networks,
boost activity in special development-zones (NDE), and address their financial
and administrative needs. Reproduction and expansion, outside of state-
credits and contracts, will be immediate obstacles facing such initiatives.
SM: Workers’ control and communal power which creates institutions to

replace the centralised capitalist state and market-economy are the bedrock of
any socialist transformation from below in Venezuela. However, the fragmented
history of popular politics in Venezuela combined with the increasing
bureaucratisation of state-Chavismo and concurrent formation of a political
leadership have helped to stall the potential for popular power that was
palpable in the 2002–6 period. Some of this is the result of the paradoxical
dynamic of state-Chavismo, which, through decentralised localism, fostered
spaces for innovative discussions and experiments in popular power whilst also
often reproducing the fragmentation of popular-class communities around
demands for particular services.
Additionally, the rapid intensification in the quantity of state-programmes
of popular participation was marked by a speed which fostered the reproduction
of a political culture based on the immediate and the present. This did not
foster the space and time for collective reflection and the construction of new
forms of revolutionary subjectivity and praxis. The process of constructing
such subjectivities and praxis works at a different tempo – it is much slower
and involves a re-thinking of the space and time of politics through a
construction of different political and intellectual relationships. Thus the
rapidity of the process, which gave so much dynamic to popular politics and
possibilities, has become a block to the consolidation of power from below.
This is both cause and consequence of the continued fragmentation of popular-
class politicisation and the increasing co-optation of sectors into the state-
bureaucracy and its logic of centralising and ossifying power.
5. How have social and cultural changes associated with the Bolivarian
process helped to engender new social subjectivities in Venezuela which
challenge racism, sexism, and homophobia? How far has formal- and
informal-political and social change advanced on these fronts?
ML: Well, Venezuela is the leading world-capital of breast enhancement . . . It

is a society that has all of these horrible traditions. There is a struggle against
these forms of oppression, and certainly Chávez is very good at articulating

this. But it is probably the most difficult and longest struggle of all. There is
more and more space for these struggles to be articulated. For example, for
many years everybody said that there is no racism in Venezuela. People now
understand that there is racism and a struggle against it.
SM: Many place-based struggles which aim to collectivise social reproduction

in health, education and housing and create a solidarity-economy are marked
by a feminisation of resistance. Women, often experiencing the most intense
forms of exploitation and alienation, are involved in developing some of the
most complex and nuanced forms of resistance. They attempt to politicise
everyday social relationships and not merely view power as something external
to subjectivity and self. Noticeable in this process is that the methodologies of
collective knowledge-creation and of the formation of collective spaces of
decision-making attempt to re-think public social and political relationships.
This moves away from individualised and privatised forms of social reproduction
and production towards collective and common forms. However, the private
sphere is often left de-politicised, resulting in intense contradictions between
the public and political lives of women and their private lives. A key-challenge
in the construction of popular power is to take these experiences, methodologies
and pedagogies into the private sphere – into the heart of the embodied
experiences of the revolutionary subject.
GC-M: These changes are slow, but are happening. What we must understand,
however, in line with what I have said above, is that such transformations are
not given, but must instead be taken. By this, I mean that the advances made
within the Chavista movement – advances for women, for Afro-Venezuelans,
for indigenous peoples – have occurred in the same way as the victories the
Chavistas have won over the collective enemy: through struggle.
In the case of sectors within the Chavista coalition, movements are forced
to walk a tight line: remaining within the coalition while pushing as hard as
possible for radical recognition through autonomous struggle. For example,
women have not made gains by meekly requesting them: they have fought for
them while fighting for general demands alongside men (this goes back to the
guerrilla-struggle of the past, to which women contributed in fundamental
and often-unrecognised ways). Afro-Venezuelans continue to confront
entrenched racism both within their movement and in the opposition, but
fight autonomously to make the Bolivarian process their process. Homophobia
is, arguably, even more deeply rooted and will take much longer to deal with,
but several vocal Chavista leaders are openly gay and pushing for necessary
protections and a shift in consciousness within the movement.
SF: The struggle over racism, sexism and homophobia is a tough one. The
opposition uses extremely racist, sexist and homophobic language and imagery
in its publications, but so do the Chavistas at times. I remember seeing
caricatures of former US-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the pro-Chávez
dailies ridiculing her African features. During the recall referendum-campaign
in 2004, the pro-Chávez side would use highly sexualised portraits of women
in bikinis to promote their cause. There was even one picture of a very overweight
woman in a g-string that represented the opposition, as compared to a petite
woman as Chavista. These sexualised and racialised images are part of a broader
culture in Venezuela where homophobia, racism and sexism are strong. But
there is also a challenge to these structures, coming particularly from the largely
female-dominated missions. These women, and the men working with them,
are starting to rethink gender-structures and inequalities, and discuss them in
their assemblies. They face quite an uphill battle, but they come from a strong
legacy of women-centred activism in the barrios.
RD: Struggles against homophobia, the women’s movement, and the struggle
against racism, are movements typical of the Global North. In Venezuela, the
women’s movement does not exist. Tendencies exist, an important feminist
current, for example, with journals and magazines that make important
theoretical interventions. However, there is nothing that constitutes a
movement, that recognises itself as such, and that is conscious of the historic
oppression of women. There is nothing approaching a popular women’s
movement.
An expression of this fact occurred when I was in the National Assembly in
the early 2000s. There was an attempt made to introduce a law legalising
abortion, and it was struck down. Among those striking it down were the vast
majority of the women in the assembly. It is impossible to pass such a law in
the contemporary Venezuelan context. What does exist, though, is an intense
participation of women in the Bolivarian process, playing a fundamental
leadership-rôle at the level of the barrios.
Homophobia in Venezuela is extreme. This is a very homophobic culture.
Yet violent aggression against homosexuals has decreased. Open violence
against transgendered people, however, continues unabated.
It is rare to speak of racism in Venezuela. We tend not to recognise it as
such, because the country is above all a country of mestizos. It is obvious that
the ruling class is a white class. And when you look, for example, at the mass-
mobilisations against the coup in April 2002, it was black people in the streets
against the white ruling class. But this was not a consequence of racism. It has
its roots in class. The rich are white and the poor are dark-skinned.
While there has not really been a struggle against racism as such, what has
occurred is the emergence of new social subjectivities, social spaces for the
expression of black and indigenous ethnicities. This is very interesting, and
more accurately reflects what is happening in Venezuela than framing it as a
discussion of racism and anti-racism.
6. Nationalisations and the spread of cooperatives are real dynamics of

the Bolivarian process, but beyond their own internal contradictions it
is also evident that the overwhelming bulk of economic power remains
in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They have been dispossessed of much
of their political leverage within the state, at least for the moment, but
revolutionary transformations of social-property relations and class-
structures had hardly been achieved. What are the immediate and
medium-term transitional moves necessary to dislodge this economic
power of the bourgeoisie and to upset more fundamentally capitalist
social-property and class-relations?
GC-M: One point is necessary from the outset, repeating a bit what I have
said above: political power is power in Venezuela (Gregory Wilpert has
recognised this well). Here we must break from some elements of our
traditional Marxism, which might suggest that economic power in production
is the ‘true’ power, to understand local conditions. It is this fact more than
any other that explains the swift reaction of the former ruling class when
Chávez came to power. When he was still a moderate in substantive terms,
he nevertheless came under attack from the Right for displacing them from
the seat of political power, from which much economic power flows. This
was what Marta Harnecker has termed a ‘counter-revolution without a
revolution’.
As to the question of which way forward, you rightly identify a tension
between, for example, nationalisations and workers’ cooperatives, a tension
loosely captured by the opposition between the ‘from above’ and the ‘from
below’. What is key is to allow the two sides to enter into a dialectical
relationship without fully subsuming one to the other, or, in other words,
without accepting either as an end-in-itself. Nationalisation is not an end-in-
itself because we are looking for something more than state-capitalism or even
state-socialism, and cooperatives are not ends-in-themselves because they must
be integrated both socially (into the needs of the broader community) and
politically (into the broader dynamics of the transformative process). This is
little more than insisting on what is already the case: that nationalisation often
comes in response to pressure ‘from below’, and that cooperative upsurges are
often facilitated by strategic intervention ‘from above’.
SF: We must recognise that during the 1990s, the processes of privatisation,
free trade, and reduction in social spending known as neoliberalism already
brought profound changes to the structure of the dominant classes in
Venezuela, such that the older bourgeoisie has given way to new, often-
transnational élites. In some cases the older élites who had developed under
processes of Import-Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) simply morphed into
the transnational ruling classes of today, but, in other cases, we are talking
about different social forces. This reality of globalisation has important
implications for how we think of the economic power of the bourgeoisie today.
I don’t think it is the case that global capital has been dispossessed of its
political leverage within the state. In my book, Who Can Stop the Drums?,
I characterise the Venezuelan state under Chávez as a hybrid-state that has
pursued an anti-neoliberal policy, but continues to work with sectors of
transnational finance, particularly in crucial areas of communications, mining,
and industry. Dislodging this power requires more than top-down policies
coming from the state; it requires the participation of grassroots-movements
in reshaping the economy, state-institutions, and the structures of exclusion
that have dominated in Venezuelan society over many years.
SE: At this point, the main strategy behind many of the expropriations is not
to displace the private sector, but to create a mixed economy for the purpose
of limiting the options of the large economic groups. Throughout the last
hundred years, counter-revolutionaries have always used their economic power
to limit investments, to hoard goods in order to create shortages, and to drive
prices upward. The Chavista government has carried out expropriations and
centralised-economic control in order to be able to confront the enemy on the
economic front. The executive control of the Central Bank must also be seen
in this light. A major target of government-action is the food-sector under the
slogan of achieving ‘food-sovereignty’. Expropriations, in such areas as dairy-
products, coffee, sardine-processing and food-distribution, have been designed
to combat shortages and price-hikes.
ML: I challenge the premise that the overwhelming bulk of the economic
power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Because what does the
bourgeoisie have? It has real power in the processing sector and the media, and
some power in the banks. But since when were these defined as the commanding
heights of the economy? The commanding heights of the economy are the
oil-sector and basic industry. These sectors command enormous resources that
will only be developed in this process through the state-sector. Even in the
sectors where capital still has a significant rôle, there are growing movements
to take it over. In distribution, for example, there is a growing movement
against the largest distribution-group, Polar. There are more and more media-
outlets in the state-sector, which are challenging the private sector. And, in
terms of banking, I always tell people not to overestimate the rôle of the banks
in Venezuela because the rôle that is traditionally played by a banking sector
internally is played by PDVSA. The state has also created new banks that are
expanding, such as the Bank of Venezuela. So, I would argue that the
commanding heights of the economy are actually in the hands of the state.
The fact that the bourgeoisie has less-and-less power daily is not reflected in
some of the national-income figures. It comes as no surprise that the statistics
demonstrate that the public sector has not expanded relative to the private
sector, because people’s incomes are rising and their spending-power is also
increasing as more goods are available subsidised or free. They consume the
imports that are largely controlled by the outside, by private capital. To the
extent to which the state moves into the distribution-sector, those statistical
observations will in fact less-and-less misrepresent the strength of private
capital. There is a problem with measurement of the strength of these sectors.
GDP is a particularly useless measure since the more free goods are distributed,
the less it shows up in the GDP. This being said, Chávez was a bit over-the-top
when the GDP showed a decline and he said, ‘Aha! Capitalism is declining’,
since a lot of people were losing their jobs.
In my book, The Socialist Alternative, I list a series of proposals, including
the need for transparency. We must open the books of the companies and the
state-sectors. The commons must also be expanded by removing more-and-
more goods from the process of exchange-relations and allocating them for
distribution within communities, which would strengthen the rôle of the
communal councils. Also, if you attack capital directly, capital goes on strike.
In this scenario, you have to be prepared to move in rather than give in, and
run these companies better than the private sector, which, unfortunately, has
not always been the case to date.
SM: To dislodge the power of the bourgeoisie and disrupt capitalist social
relations involves the consolidation and socialisation of forms of autonomous
popular-class articulation in relations of production, social reproduction
and the subjective. Part of this involves the systematisation and sharing of
processes of collective knowledge-production, methodologies of democratic

participation, and cultures of radical education.
There are many ways in which this can be done, but, again, creating ‘our’
own space and time, in which we move to a different tempo from the demands
of power, is essential. This could involve creating spaces in which movements/
groups/individuals that are developing such practices can exchange and share
experiences. It could also be fostered by the creation of schools for training in
radical and popular education-methodologies, creating resources, libraries,
documentaries and booklets.
The building blocks of this are forging movement/community-reflection
upon their practices and political experiences which systematise these
knowledges in written/oral/visual form. There are some fascinating experiments
in developing methodologies that facilitate processes of collective and
participatory decision-making in communities, that build on political and
everyday experience to forge strategic and theoretical analysis and which
engage with power on a multiplicity of levels. However, they often remain
under-systematised and in the hands and memories of a few individuals.
Neoliberal capitalism attempts to wipe away our histories and collective
memory to naturalise the present. Systematisation of these experiences
and this knowledge would help create the conditions for the construction of
‘other’ spaces and times and the re-capturing of history as a tool in the
construction of a different present and future. These are some of the building-
blocks upon which can flourish anticapitalist practices of self-government and
community/self-actualisation that suck the life-blood from the capitalist state
and market.
TP: I would hesitate to frame issues of societal transformation as one of simply

dislodging the economic power of bourgeoisie, thereby rendering it a
sociological issue. It is only from a deeper understanding of the mechanisms
of wealth-appropriation and creation (largely through influence of the oil-
economy and ground-rent) that we should approach this issue. Part of any
changes to the social relations of production in Venezuela is the problem of
the heavily overvalued Bolívar which inhibits manufacturing – private, public,
or cooperative – by making exports particularly expensive, and encouraging
cheap imports. Indeed, due to the heavily overvalued Bolívar, the control of
imports is lucrative. Between 2004 and 2008, imports grew by 190 per cent,
whilst in 2009 non-petroleum exports fell by 44 per cent. The corollary of this
is the restricted scale of the internal market and diminished capacity to pursue
alternatives, whether at the expense of the bourgeoisie or not.
It is clear that Venezuela is still wracked with gross inequality. In 2008, per
capita income reached US$12,785 from a low in 2003 of US$1,700. As with
most quantitative-economic measures, however, these absolute figures of
wealth increasingly belie an unequal picture of relative distribution. The
Venezuelan bourgeoisie dominates the internal market, particularly the area
where economic growth is concentrated – the service-sector. As a result, they
still command a strong position in the process of national social reproduction.
Up until 2008, the private sector’s share of the national economy had grown
faster than the public sector, and according to the Venezuelan Central Bank,
in the same period, the domestic private sector controlled 90 per cent of all
imports and 95 per cent of all domestic manufacturing and was the locus of
the majority of job-growth.
Before I address the main part of this question, it is, first, worthwhile to
question whether anything has actually been nationalised in the full sense of
the term, that is, expropriated as the collective property of the Venezuelan
people. Rather, to my knowledge, there have been a series of transfers of private
capitals, at full market-value, into the hands of the state. This, in the first
instance, is only made possible by a net transfer of oil-rents to acquire new
public assets, which, in time, and depending upon performance in public
hands, will generate income for the state. Thus, as well as targeted encroachments
into the private sector, new public companies such as SIDOR, and existing
ones such as ALCASA, need heavy investment to consolidate both their social
and productive rôle.
The most pressing issue facing transformations to social-property relations
is the form in which ground-rent can be transferred into capital able to actively
participate in the transformation and development of society’s productive
forces – by acting as a normal productive capital. This would require its
concentration on a scale necessary to compete in the world-market: a
transformation that could only take the concrete political form of the
progressive abolition of the private ownership of capital, as the working class
becomes the collective owner of this capital under the political form of state-
capital. Given the immediate difficulty of competing in world-market terms,
the other alternative available, perhaps through the ALBA-initiative, is to
integrate the political action of the Venezuelan working class with that of
other countries’, in order to expand domestic space for capital-accumulation
within which the expanded investment of ground-rent could fit. Understanding
the specific forms under which capital accumulates in Venezuela, and indeed,
Latin America at large, is not a scholastic problem, rather, it is necessary for
any transformative political action.
7. An imperial and right-wing counter-offensive against the Left throughout

Latin America seems to be intensifying. We see, for example, the new
US-bases in Colombia, the Honduran coup, attempted destabilisation
in Bolivia and Ecuador, and the consolidation of right-wing electoral
régimes in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. How would you
characterise the imperialist threat to Venezuela under Obama, and in
what ways is it similar and different from the threat under Bush?
GC-M: Well, the biggest difference is that people still to this day see Obama
as fundamentally different from Bush, both within the US and internationally.
The function of this misconception – one which the Obama-administration
obviously facilitates in its strategic use of the language of change – is to conceal
very real imperial continuities. Thus the iron fist is concealed in a velvet
glove.
The Honduran coup was the first example of such continuities, as despite a
softened rhetoric, in the end, the Obama administration effectively supported
the removal of a popularly and democratically elected leader from power
through a military coup. With this imperialist continuity in mind, the new
US-bases in Colombia – the spearhead of imperialism in the region – become
even more ominously significant.
SE: The strengthening of US-military presence in Latin America forces the

Chávez government to divert resources from social and economic programmes.
This is an old imperialist strategy used against the Soviet Union during the
Cold War. The recent US-military initiatives in Latin America, including the
reactivation of the Fourth Fleet, which had been dismantled over fifty years
ago, allegedly to combat ‘terrorism’, and the seven military bases in Colombia,
put considerable pressure on the Chávez government. Although Lula of Brazil
has objected to the US sabre-rattling, Washington is mainly targeting Venezuela
which is on the front line. The Venezuelan opposition’s dependence on the
US is shown by the fact that it refuses to criticise Washington or Bogotá for
threatening Venezuelan security.
With regard to the differences between Bush and Obama: many US-
progressives point to the friendly, well-publicised encounter at the outset of
the Obama administration between Chávez and Obama in Trinidad. This
allegedly demonstrated Obama’s good intentions which were soon subordinated
to pressure from the Right. I do not agree, because the Democrats always
begin on the left to establish their progressive credentials and then move to the
centre. The pattern is too frequent not to draw the conclusion that it is
premeditated. Of course, what is going on in Obama’s head is irrelevant. The
facts – such as the legitimising of the Honduran coup and the close relations
with Uribe, and now Santos, in Colombia – speak for themselves. The
difference between the Obama and Bush administrations on Latin-American
relations is one of style, not substance.
8. How has the world-economic slump impacted upon the process in

Venezuela?
SE: High oil-prices enabled the government to inject large sums of money
into social programmes as well as company-expropriations for diverse reasons,
ranging from combating price-speculation and hoarding of goods to checking
the practice of outsourcing. But windfall-income is a double-edged sword.
Abundant resources encourage waste, clientelism and corruption. This is an
old problem in Venezuela, even more so than in other Latin-American
countries, going back to the outset of democracy in 1958. It is my opinion
that, even though the state under Chávez is not a ‘revolutionary state’ and
much of the bureaucracy is inherited from the old régime, more can be
expected of it in terms of efficiency and creating mechanisms of accountability
at all levels.
Declining income as a result of lower oil-prices has hardly reached rock-
bottom levels. The inefficiency and resultant discontent in Venezuela is, in my
opinion, as much the result of a lack of institutional controls as it is the world-
economic downturn.
GC-M: I won’t speak directly to the domestic economic situation, as others

can do so much better than I could. Suffice it to say that Venezuela has
weathered this economic storm far better than most countries, and that this
fact results at least in part from the stabilisation-measures taken by the Chávez
administration.
What interest me more, however, are the political dynamics that have been
or could be unleashed by this crisis. As in all situations, tendencies play against
counter-tendencies, making prediction difficult. Thus the crisis could mean
that the US-government and public are less interested in costly adventures
overseas and more interested in their wallets, but, on the other hand, promises
of cheap gasoline could trump ethics in the public arena. Domestically, within
Venezuela, crisis-conditions could force the Chávez government to move more
quickly toward socialist transformation, as has been the case in Bolivia, but,
on the other hand, Venezuela’s more stable position relative to other countries
allows for more breathing room. Finally, the economic crisis will have a direct
impact on the most important and potentially destabilising test the Venezuelan
government will face in coming years: the 2012 re-election campaign, in

which Chávez will likely face a young and energetic opposition-opponent.
RD: The impact has been tremendous. Beginning last year, Venezuela entered
into a period of stagflation – that is, a combination of stagnation and inflation.
This has to do with a totally irrational political-economic strategy adopted by
the Chávez government going back to 2003, which is the subsidisation of an
importing bourgeoisie. This is a bourgeoisie that produces nothing; it simply
imports, and engages in speculation.
This so-called ‘boli-bourgeoisie’ is the former petty bourgeoisie that has
risen up within the state-apparatus and partially replaced the traditional
bourgeoisie. An entire industry of importing has emerged from within the
government, much of it operating clandestinely. This is one of the central
forms of corruption in contemporary Venezuela.
When the global crisis struck, the price of oil fell. World-demand in general
fell. And it has generated a tremendous crisis for the state, because the state
cannot cover its costs. The speculation of the boli-bourgeoisie hasn’t stopped,
and the social conditions of the population are deteriorating. There is rampant
unemployment, consumption is going down, and growth has slowed. So, the
government is faced with a big problem. There is no productive economy and
there is no clear debate on how to build one.
ML: The fall of the oil-prices created serious budgetary problems for the state-
sectors, which led to budget-cuts that impacted upon the central state-
institutions, but also the governors. Without question, there has been a growth
in unemployment. (One of the ironies is that Chavistas were the first to be
laid off because many have come in on contract at salaries higher than the
minimum wage-entry levels.) In addition, cutbacks in oil-production were
agreed to at OPEC in order to try to stem the absolute decline in oil-prices.
These problems were not resolved until devaluation. Some of us have been
arguing for devaluation for a while, not only because of the budgetary problem
in the state-sector, but also because the overvalued Bolivar encourages imports
and discourages exports and local-productive activity, including agricultural
activity. When they finally devalued this year, it meant that every dollar
of oil-revenue now translated into twice as many Bolivars. This meant
the state-budget now suddenly doubled, which has resolved a lot of the
unemployment-problems. To some extent, the cost of devaluation is inflation,
although these figures need to be questioned, since a single price-index means
something only when you have a relatively homogeneous population. But it
means less-and-less when you have 20 per cent of the population importing
cars, etc., and 80 per cent getting subsidised food through the Mercal. In such
a situation, I have argued that there needs to be at least two price-indices. In
any case, devaluation resolved to a very significant extent the problem of the
budgetary crunch in Venezuela. Although they are still suffering, it is not as
much as in the period when state-services were really being cut back.
TP: Venezuela is not Greece, Mark Weisbrot recently remarked. I think this
kind of comparison is useful, in that it throws light upon how Venezuela is
equipped to deal with the post-financial-crisis economic slump. Venezuela’s
debt to GDP ratio is 20 per cent, whereas in Greece this stands at 115 per
cent. With oil-prices buoyant at around US$80, Venezuela has a current-
account surplus and healthy foreign reserves. Yet Venezuela has the highest
rate of inflation (around 30 per cent) in the whole of Latin America, the
economy shrank by 3.3 per cent in 2009 and again by 5.8 per cent in the first
quarter of 2010. This, so the wisdom goes, was a problem of a too-drastic level
of spending cuts dragging the economy into recession. Whilst such an analysis
is useful, it also runs the risk of reducing the issue to one of simple policy-
choices – fiscal stimulus from ample foreign reserves, by a state that can access
foreign loans and is fully in control of its own monetary, fiscal, and exchange-
rate policy will lead Venezuela out of recession.
This overlooks the limits of the form under which capital accumulates in
Venezuela and the structural basis of the present challenge. The crisis has
certainly exacerbated, but by no means created, present problems. The most
recent response to the crisis has been the new devaluation of the Bolívar. As
I have mentioned in some of the preceding questions, Venezuela’s fixed
currency (2.15 per dollar) was heavily overvalued, a problem that had been
made worse year-on-year by rising inflation – as demand grew (especially
during the 2003–8 oil-boom) goods got more expensive and the real exchange-
rate appreciated further. Thus, Venezuela has been hindered, not only by how
expensive its exports are, but also by falling global demand. The new multi-
tiered devaluation, 2.6 for essential and 4.3 for non-essential goods, will
potentially make exports cheaper and more competitive and reduce the level
of cheap imported goods.
Also, and perhaps most significantly for the capacity of the state, the
devaluation of the Bolívar, even the most expensive 2.6-rate, will increase the
value of dollars generated through oil-rents by a considerable magnitude. Thus,
government foreign reserves, and that of PDVSA, will increase automatically,
freeing up much more room in the budget for social/development-spending.
It remains to be seen, however, whether new resources will be used to target
larger-scale strategic sectors, thereby centralising more ground-rent under
workers’ control in productive activities. Or if there will be a further expansion

of social spending and small-scale development-experiments – with likely
inflationary consequences. The benefit of the former strategy, however, would
not be seen immediately and would diminish the state’s broader redistributive
capacity during a politically contentious time with a September election
looming.
9. From the beginning, the Bolivarian process has been based on a

multiclass-coalition. More than a decade into the Chávez government
is it still tenable to sustain the contradictory class-interests of different
components of the coalition, or are fractures starting to emerge? More
specifically, who has the momentum inside Chavismo today: (a) those
attempting to push toward much deeper, anticapitalist transformation
of social, economic and political structures, or, (b) those conservative
and bureaucratic layers who wish to consolidate their own interests in
the current structures of power and prevent any authentic transitional
moves toward socialism.
GC-M: There are several questions here. First, the question of the multiclass-
coalition is one whose terrain is constantly shifting. Chávez was initially
elected largely on the basis of an urban, middle-class vote, in part due to the
collapse of the old political parties. However, in a few short years, this had
shifted, with the wealthier of the middle class moving toward the opposition
and the Chavista coalition garnering an ever-larger portion of the poor vote
(sectors ‘D’ and ‘E’, in Venezuelan parlance). Two questions emerge from this,
and they are tightly inter-related: first, is such a cross-class alliance still tenable?
And, secondly, is such a cross-class alliance still necessary or desirable? In other
words, does Chávez still need to rely on the middle classes to win elections?
Some in his inner-circle clearly think so, and we could point to the strategic
manoeuvres in the run-up to the 2006 election as proof of this, as Chávez
moderated his rhetoric tactically on several occasions. We see this, too, in
everyday issues of governance, in which strategies are chosen and who they
benefit, in short, to whom the government caters. But, as the process moves
forward and radicalises, and as the poorest members of Venezuelan society
become a more dependable voting bloc, there will be the temptation to
abandon the constraints of the middle and push forward forcefully toward
socialism.
Turning to the question of which sector holds sway within the Chavista
coalition, (a) or (b), I would add a third, or rather a complication of the
second: there are two sectors that I would deem conservative within the
Chavista coalition. The first essentially seeks to maintain the status quo, a
continuation of the corrupt and bureaucratic Fourth Republic. This is an
essentially capitalistic element. But there is also, secondly, a sector which seeks
radical transformation, but not necessarily in the direction we would choose:
toward a more bureaucratic socialism in which they themselves (or the Party)
constitute a new ruling élite.
If the question were who holds power in the Chavista coalition today, there
would be little doubt that conservative elements hold power as traditionally
understood in terms of money, weapons, access to media, etc. But the question
of momentum is a more complex one altogether, and as the doctrine of guerrilla-
warfare teaches us, power is not reducible to its concrete and material aspects.
The radically popular and directly democratic sectors of society, arguably, have
more momentum, more energy, and a more irrepressible spirit of radical
transformation, one that, if mobilised and directed, is far more powerful than
any weapon wielded by the conservative sectors. The task is to unleash it.
ML: I would say that, at this moment, the momentum lies in the transformation
of the workplace with worker-councils. One of the important bits of legislation
in the national assembly, and, hopefully, it will move through there, is the
whole question of a new law of labour which would institute workers’ councils
throughout the country. The law would also reduce the workday from eight
hours to six hours. The momentum is going against the conservative-
bureaucratic layers within Chavismo that wish to consolidate their own
interests. These sectors are still strong and they still have significant places
within the process. These are people that basically want to get off the bus now.
They have gone far enough, are happy, and are resisting change. But, at the
moment, they do not have the momentum. Only class-struggle will decide
what is going to happen. On all this, my perspective remains ‘pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will’. We know that there are major obstacles against
the Venezuelan process, starting with imperialism, with the remaining inroads
of domestic capital, but also those obstacles internal to the Chávez process,
and there has to be a struggle against them. There are the elements of struggle,
but so much depends upon the dialectic between Chávez and the base that
I cannot predict the result.
SM: The tensions of embedding the revolutionary process within a capitalist

state are manifesting themselves in the current conjuncture as the logic of
governing over the populace, maintaining economic stability within the
capitalist market, and maintaining institutional power have overtaken a logic
of creating spaces in which the popular classes can construct a revolution from
below that is able to challenge alienated social relationships in the economic,
political, social and subjective realms. This has resulted in a situation of the
continued reproduction of fragmented popular politicisation and a certain
stagnation in many of the more experimental and innovate forms of collective
self-government. However, there remains much energy, creativity, hope and
collective construction, which continues at a slower, less-visible pace. Those
sectors working towards the construction of socialism(s) from below that
radically disrupts capitalist power will face a tough set of decisions over the
next couple of years, particularly over whether, when and how to break with
‘state’-Chavismo.
Review Articles
A la conquista de la clase obrera: Los comunistas y el mundo del trabajo en la Argentina,

1920–1935, Hernán Camarero, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2007
Historia del trotskismo en Argentina y América Latina, Osvaldo Coggiola, Buenos Aires:
Ediciones RyR, 2006
Marx en la Argentina: Sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos, Horacio Tarcus,
Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 2007
Abstract
Argentine historiography in general, and the history of the Argentine Left in particular, does not
receive the attention it deserves in the Anglo-Saxon academic world, due to linguistic and
cultural barriers. In this article, we attempt to review for the English-reading public three recent
contributions to the history of Marxism in Argentina (Horacio Tarcus’s Marx en la Argentina: Sus
primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos, Hernán Camarero’s A la conquista de la clase
obrera: Los comunistas y el mundo del trabajo en la Argentina, 1920–1935 and Osvaldo Coggiola’s
Historia del trotskismo en Argentina y América Latina) covering the entire historical spectrum
from the early history of Argentine socialism to the history of the PCA and, finally, to the history
of local Trotskyism. We attempt to place these works in the context of Argentine historiography
and of the political context in which those books were written.
Keywords
Argentina, communism, socialism, anarchism, Trotskyism
New Research on the History of Marxism in Argentina
Socialism
For many decades, the history of socialism attracted relatively scant attention from
professional historians in Argentina. The main works on the subject were written by
members of the Socialist Party itself, such as Jacinto Oddone, the author of two classic
works on the history of socialism and the trade-unions in the pre-Peronist stage.1 Many
other socialist leaders and intellectuals – such as Américo Ghioldi, Enrique Dickmann,
Manuel Palacín, Martín Casaretto, Dardo Cúneo and Luis Pan – wrote memoirs, historical
assessments and biographies, especially of Juan Bautista Justo (1865–1928), the historic
1. Oddone 1934, 1949.

272 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 271–287
leader of Argentine socialism.2 Most of these works were written during the rise of Peronism,
when socialists saw their influence on the working class suddenly wane. They therefore
described the previous decades as a ‘lost paradise’ where Argentine workers marched behind
socialist and anarchist banners, offering a heavily apologetic interpretation of their parties’
past and failing to address the reasons for their own rapid political collapse. Despite their
value as historical sources, these interpretations tended to ignore the complexities and
strong internal controversies that marked the Socialist Party’s history, providing instead
retrospective support for Justo’s reformist line.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the ascent of Peronism gave birth to a national-populist
historiography on Argentine socialism. Authors like Rodolfo Puiggrós, Juan José Hernández
Arregui, Alberto Belloni and Jorge Abelardo Ramos described Argentine Marxism as an
exotic flower, alien to the ‘real’ national problems and prone to adopt pro-imperialist
positions due to its links with foreign political currents. Though the scholarly standards of
those works were very poor, they had a strong influence on local public opinion for several
decades.
The first scholarly works on the history of the Argentine labour-movement began to
appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s.3 ‘Militant’ historiography continued with works
on the origins of socialism in Argentina inspired by a Maoist split in the local Communist
Party.4 Those contributions had the merit of reproducing the work of German pioneers of
socialism in Argentina, but they focused on an apologetic vindication of the ‘founding
father’ of Argentine socialism, the German mining engineer Germán Avé-Lallemant
(1835–1910), who was depicted as a revolutionary leader, as opposed to Justo’s reformism,
instead of evaluating them both in their historical context. Finally, mention should be
made of syndicalism, which developed in Argentina as a split of the Argentine Socialist
Party in 1905–6 and became a strong current within the local labour-movement until the
rise of Peronism. During the 1960s, Sebastián Marotta wrote the ‘official’ syndicalist history
of the Argentine labour-movement in three volumes.5
From the military coup of 1976 until the return of democracy in Argentina in 1983,
valuable work was done by foreign historians. This included the standard history of the
Argentine Socialist Party in English6 and major histories of anarchism in Argentina,7 which
complemented the pioneering work of Diego Abad de Santillán,8 an historic leader of
anarchism in both Argentina and Spain.9 Within Argentina itself, the history of socialism
remained largely outside the scope of professional historiography during the dictatorship.
After 1983, labour-history ballooned, but research focused on the social rather than on the
political history of the labour-movement. This relative neglect was probably due to the
2. See, for example, Ghioldi 1933 and Cúneo 1956.

3. See, for example, Panettieri 1967 and Spalding 1970, the latter an important compilation
of historical sources.
4. Ratzer 1970 and Paso 1974.
5. Marotta 1960–70.
6. Walter 1977.
7. Oved 1978; Zaragoza Ruvira 1978; Zaragoza Rovira 1996.
8. Abad de Santillán 1930, 1933.
9. For recent contributions to the history of Argentine anarchism, see Suriano 2001, López
Trujillo 2005, and Diz and López Trujillo 2007.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 271–287 273
setbacks experienced by the working class during the 1990s. Nevertheless, there were some
important exceptions: Julio Godio wrote a massive history of the Argentine labour-
movement in four volumes which devoted some attention to the socialist and communist
currents,10 and Víctor García Costa11 and Roberto Reinoso12 edited useful anthologies of
the early-socialist periodicals in Argentina.
In recent years, following the path traced by José María Aricó,13 a number of works on
the origins of Marxism in Argentina have appeared, such as the recent edition of a bilingual
anthology of articles from the German socialist newspaper Vorwärts, published in Buenos
Aires from 1886 to 1901.14 This renewal of political historiography on the Argentine
labour-movement owes much to the Centre of Documentation and Research of Left-Wing
Culture in Argentina (Centro de Documentación e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas
en Argentina – CeDInCI), directed by Horacio Tarcus, which opened to the public in
1998. This is particularly important due to the wretched state of Argentina’s academic
infrastructure, particularly its libraries. Thanks to the CeDInCI, especially its newspaper-
archive, precious sources on the history of Argentina’s Left are being preserved and made
accessible to historians.
Horacio Tarcus, the editor of a biographical dictionary of the Argentine Left,15 is perhaps
the main intellectual historian of Argentine Marxism, which is rather paradoxical given his
outspoken contempt for the local Marxist organisations. His first book, El marxismo
olvidado en la Argentina,16 tried to reconstruct the Marxist traditions linked to the names of
Silvio Frondizi and Milcíades Peña in the 1960s and 1970s by offering an analysis of
Argentina’s class-structure, its agrarian régime, failed process of industrialisation, and,
generally speaking, the peculiarities of Argentina’s capitalist development. Tarcus’s latest
book, Marx en la Argentina, goes back in time to deal with the history of Marxism in
Argentina from the Paris Commune up to 1910, centring on the reception of Marx’s work
by socialists and academicians during the period of the First and Second Internationals. It
focuses on the first Marxist analyses of Argentina’s social formation, which gave birth to a
tradition later elaborated upon by authors analysed in El marxismo olvidado en la Argentina,
such as José Boglich, Liborio Justo, Antonio Gallo, Ernesto Giudici, Rodolfo Puiggrós,
Luis Sommi, Jorge Abelardo Ramos, Milcíades Peña and Silvio Frondizi.
Tarcus argues that there are two ways of approaching Argentina’s social formation: one
which sees Spanish colonisation as predominantly feudal – a thesis upheld by liberal
historians, but also by Communist and populist authors such as Rodolfo Puiggrós – and
another school which argues that Argentina’s settlement had a capitalist character from the
start ( Juan B. Justo, José Boglich, Sergio Bagú, Silvio Frondizi, Milcíades Peña and so on).
A characterisation of Argentina’s social formation as feudal had, as its political corollary,
10. Godio 1987–90.

11. García Costa (ed.) 1985.
12. Reinoso 1985.
13. Aricó 1999. Aricó’s article on Juan B. Justo was originally written in the early 1980s, but
did not appear as a book until 1999, almost a decade after the author’s death.
14. Tarcus, Zeller and Carrera (eds.) 2008.
15. Tarcus (ed.) 2007.
16. Tarcus 1996.
the need for a bourgeois-democratic revolution, while the logical inference from its
characterisation as capitalist was that a socialist revolution was required. In El marxismo
olvidado en la Argentina, Tarcus reconstructed the whole debate, while clearly siding with
the latter line of analysis.
Tarcus, who is a scrupulous and talented historian – according to his own account, his
main intellectual influences are Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Haupt, Robert Paris, Franco
Andreucci, Perry Anderson, and the local historians José María Aricó and Oscar Terán –
unfortunately has a penchant for academic fads, and, therefore, the introductory chapters
of his books, which outline his theoretical framework, are always the hardest to read. Marx
en la Argentina, for instance, criticises Marx and his local followers for their cientificismo (a
word with derogatory connotations suggesting an over-emphasis on scientific ideas) and
begins by summarising Hans Robert Jauss’s ‘reception-theory’, a branch of aesthetics
derived from the ‘hermeneutics’ of Heidegger’s follower Hans-Georg Gadamer. Whatever
the faults of ‘vulgar Marxism’, a materialist approach – which, in this case, would have
meant beginning with an overview of the social, demographic and economic structure of
Argentina in the late-nineteenth century – would have served Tarcus better than Jauss’s
musings on aesthetics.
In Marx en la Argentina, Tarcus offers a periodisation of the early history of Marxism in
Argentina in four stages. He shows that Marxism first entered the country in the 1870s
through the French-speaking exiles of the Paris Commune, particularly the young Belgian
Raymond Wilmart (1850–1937), sent by the International Workingmen’s Association to
Buenos Aires in 1872. Discouraged by the lack of theoretical interest of the local
Communards and their readiness to turn to real-estate speculation, Wilmart eventually
participated in Argentina’s civil wars, married a lady from the aristocracy of Córdoba
Province and died a wealthy lawyer in Buenos Aires. Tarcus locates the first reference to
Marx in La Nación, Argentina’s main bourgeois daily, in an article published in August
1872, where he is referred to as ‘a true Lucifer’. But, on the occasion of Marx’s death eleven
years later, the same newspaper published a laudatory obituary by José Martí, then a Cuban
exile in New York, which Tarcus reproduces in the appendices to his book.
To describe the second stage in the introduction of Marxism in Argentina, Tarcus shifts
his focus from the French-speaking to the German-speaking community, which, in the
1880s, included a high percentage of exiles due to Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws. The main
personality during that period was the mining-engineer Germán (Hermann) Avé-Lallemant
who, after arriving from Germany in 1870, settled in the remote province of San Luis, on
the Chilean border, where he converted to Marxism in 1888. Like another pioneer of
Marxism in America, the German-American Friedrich Sorge, Lallemant operated first and
foremost within the German community. Grouped around the Verein Vorwärts, the German
pioneers of Marxism in Argentina edited in Buenos Aires the weekly Vorwärts and a Spanish
newspaper called El obrero. Lallemant, a correspondent to Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical
journal of German Social Democracy edited by Kautsky, is an important figure because of
pioneering attempts to analyse the reasons for Argentina’s backwardness, even if he did it
from a peculiar perspective (he opposed agrarian reform and, in despair at the incompetence
of the local ruling classes, harboured hopes of the ‘progressive’ influence of pan-
Americanism). Tarcus’s analysis of the Second-International period is not as exhaustive as
the previous or the following ones – indeed, it has already been partially superseded by the
bilingual anthology of the Buenos Aires Vorwärts. Nevertheless, his sections on Lallemant
remain by far the best overview of the activity and ideas of this key-figure in the origins of
Argentine Marxism.
Tarcus locates the beginning of the third period in the history of Argentine socialism at
the publication of the first local edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1893, followed
shortly afterwards by the launch of the newspaper La Vanguardia in 1894, the formation of
the Partido Socialista Obrero Argentino in 1896 and by the Spanish edition of the first
volume of Capital, translated by Justo. Borrowing from Aricó’s work, Tarcus analyses the
works of that key-figure as well as those of his comrades-in-arms, José Ingenieros, Alfredo
L. Palacios and Enrique del Valle Iberlucea. Tarcus points out that Argentine socialism
before the First World-War was marked, politically, by the attempt to wrest control of the
labour-movement from the anarchists, and, intellectually, by the growing influence of
positivism.
The book closes, rather anticlimactically, with an analysis of the reception of Marx’s work
by the Argentine academy of the early-twentieth century, describing the views of now-
forgotten practitioners of the nascent ‘social sciences’, such as Ernesto Quesada, Juan
Agustín García and Carlos Octavio Bunge. Marx en la Argentina is the first in a series of
books Tarcus is planning to write covering the entire history of socialism in Argentina from
the viewpoint of intellectual history.
The recent compilation of articles on the history of Argentina’s Socialist Party (Partido
Socialista: PS), El Partido Socialista en Argentina: Sociedad, política e ideas a través de un siglo,
edited by Hernán Camarero and Carlos Herrera,17 opens with the best overview of the
historiography on the PS, from its foundation in 1896 until its break-up in 1958.18 Fourteen
papers, arranged in chronological order, address different topics in the history of Argentine
socialism. Despite their heterogeneity, the essays can be grouped around three main
thematic loci.19
A first group of articles addresses some aspects of what Aricó called ‘Justo’s hypothesis’ –
i.e. the original, though eclectic and non-Marxist, programme developed by the leader of
early-Argentine socialism. Ricardo Martínez Mazzola examines the relationship between
Socialists and other political forces, focusing on their remarkable reluctance to make
alliances, primarily with Radicalism. A fragment of a larger doctoral dissertation is Patricio
Geli’s article on the Argentine Socialists’ position in the Second International’s debate on
international migrations. Marina Becerra provides a case-study of socialist schools, which
enriches the debate on the tensions between the ‘social’ and ‘national’ questions in the
PS-platform. The crisis of ‘Justo’s hypothesis’, in the context of the First World-War and
the Russian Revolution, is examined in Daniel Campione’s study of the splits leading to the
emergence of the International Socialist Party, which eventually became the Argentine
Communist Party.
Some common concerns can be found in a second group of articles examining the
development of Argentine socialism between the two World-Wars, a period marked by a
17. Camarero and Herrera (eds.) 2005.

18. Camarero and Herrera (eds.) 2005, pp. 9–73.
19. Two articles, one by Dora Barrancos on the attitude of the Socialist Party towards the
female vote and another by Osvaldo Graciano on the university-policy of some socialist leaders
are more difficult to classify because they focus on a particular subject over a longer period
of time.
deepening of the parliamentary reformism of the two previous decades, in a national and
world-context marked by the general crisis of liberalism. Hernán Camarero contributes to
the analysis of these tensions with a paper on the PS’s relationship with the unions, while
Leticia Prislei provides an interesting study tracing the intellectual origins of a group that
split with the PS at the end of the 1920s to create the right-wing Partido Socialista
Independiente. The critical years of the 1930s are discussed in three articles: Nicolás Iñigo
Carrera analyses the PS’s attitudes towards the military government, Juan Carlos Portantiero
discusses how a debate within the ranks of European Social Democracy led a group of
Argentine socialists to abandon the principles of free trade and defend state-interventionism,
and Andrés Bisso deals with the PS’s anti-fascist activity during the Second World-War.
A third and final set of articles addresses the crisis and decline of the PS as a result of the
rise of Peronism. Carlos Herrera traces the evolution of the PS’s interpretations of Perón’s
government, focusing on the articles of Américo Ghioldi, the Party’s main leader at that
time. The book closes with articles by Cecilia Blanco and María Cristina Tortti, analysing
the splits suffered by the PS in the aftermath of the first Peronist era (1945–55) and the
links between Socialists and the Argentine New Left.
Communism
For several decades, the standard-historical works on Argentine Communism were the
‘official histories’ written by the Stalinised Communist Party led by Vittorio Codovilla. The
pioneer work was Esbozo de historia del Partido Comunista de la Argentina,20 in many ways
reminiscent of Stalin’s Short Course, drafted by a party-commission created for that purpose.
In the following decades, other Communist leaders – Benito Marianetti, Orestes Ghioldi,
Oscar Arévalo, Leonardo Paso, Athos Fava – published their own accounts of the Party’s
history. As Hernán Camarero noted, these works had ‘a propaganda style and scarce critical
sense, which hindered thoughtful treatment of important issues’ and even led to
‘misrepresentation of facts and documents’.21 Like Socialist-Party historiography, they were
concerned with legitimising the positions of the party-leadership and failed to provide
readers with a historical analysis of internal controversies and conflicts. There were also
apologetic histories of the Party’s union-activists’ rôle within the trade-union movement.22
Hernán Camarero’s book on the Communists and the ‘world of labour’ in Argentina in
the period 1920–3523 chronologically follows after Tarcus’s book, but deals summarily with
intellectual factors, focusing instead on the social history of the Partido Comunista de la
Argentina (PCA), particularly its organisational endeavours and its rôle in a series of
political, union and cultural struggles. As we have seen, while the Argentine labour-
movement has been staunchly Peronist for more than half a century, it actually had anarchist
and Marxist origins. Based on meticulous research into a vast number of sources, many of
them made available only after the fall of the USSR, Camarero describes how the PCA
became a significant factor in the Argentine labour-movement by waging a successful
struggle against both the capitalist class and its socialist and syndicalist competitors.
20. Partido Comunista de la Argentina 1947.

21. Camarero 2007, p. XLII.
22. For example, Iscaro 1958.
23. Camarero 2007.
Like Tarcus, Camarero owes much to British-Marxist historiography. He draws on

Hobsbawm to analyse Communist political culture and labour-militancy in the interwar-
period. For issues relating to workers’ consciousness, subjectivity and identity, he relies on
E.P. Thompson, and, to discover the ‘languages of class’, on Gareth Stedman Jones. He also
draws on Perry Anderson to stress the singularity of the Communist Parties as unique
sociological and organisational phenomena, because of their determination by an
international organisation. Gramsci’s influence is evident in Camarero’s attempt to write
the history of the PCA as ‘the general history of the country from a monographic point of
view’. His analysis in Chapter 4 of the Communists’ contributions to the development of
a working-class ‘alternative culture’ is again taken from the work of British historians, such
as Richard Hoggart’s on working-class culture in a mass-society and Raphael Samuel’s
studies on British Communism. To analyse the ‘organisational repertoire’ brought by the
Communists in the 1920s, particularly the adoption of the cell-structure, Camarero draws
on historians of French Communism such as Maurice Duverger and Annie Kriegel. As far
as local historiography is concerned, Camarero disagrees with a view prevalent in Argentine
academic circles since the 1980s (from a very distorted right-Thompsonian perspective)
which argues that, in the interwar-period, especially in Buenos Aires, there took place a sort
of dissolution of the working class into a more amorphous category of the ‘urban poor’ that
would later provide the social following for Peronism.
The first three chapters of Camarero’s book describe the PCA’s proletarianisation, its
geographical insertion, its intervention in a large number of industrial struggles, its
contribution to the creation of industrial as opposed to craft-unions among unskilled and
semi-skilled workers, not only in Buenos Aires, but also in Rosario, La Plata and Córdoba,
the formation during the so-called ‘Third Period’ of its own trade-union federation, the
Comité Nacional de Unidad Sindical Clasista (CUSC), and its struggle against the
Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT). Camarero points out that the Communists’
success in the union-field were marred by their failure to wrest control from the hands of
syndicalists and socialists of the transportation- and service-sectors, which included
important sections of the working class like the railway- and maritime workers, and
amounted to a high percentage of the unionised workers.
The final two chapters of Camarero’s book deal with the PCA’s struggles in the cultural
field, from libraries and schools to sports and recreational activities, as well as with the
insertion of its language-sections in the immigrant-communities. The chapter on the
Communists’ attempt to create an alternative ‘workers’ culture’, and indeed a whole space
of socialisation, from childhood to the workplace and leisure time, independent of and
antagonistic towards the dominant cultural norms, includes some interesting descriptions,
such as the Party’s struggle against the professionalisation of football, and its opposition to
carnival as an irrational and atavistic custom. Camarero also deals with the PCA’s fight
against religion and the Catholic Church and its impact on the Argentine intelligentsia.
The chapter on the PCA’s insertion in the immigrant-communities through its language-
sections shows its strength among Yiddish-speaking and Italian workers, but also among
other immigrant-groups, which then constituted a significant section of the Argentine
proletariat, especially in Buenos Aires. The book closes with a description of the PCA’s
struggle against imperialism and war.
Camarero describes the rise of Stalinism and its abrupt changes of line (from the united-
front policy inherited from Lenin to the ultra-left ‘Third Period’ of 1928–35 and the
subsequent opportunist popular-front policy), but argues that those zigzags did not affect
the PCA’s growing influence on the Argentine working class. He attributes this successful
Communist implantation in the labour-movement, despite the brutal repression of the
1930s under the military régimes of Generals José Félix Uriburu and Agustín P. Justo, to
the PCA’s fierce militancy and the organisational practices adopted during the so-called
‘Bolshevisation’-process, especially the adoption of factory-cells which, whenever possible,
issued their own periodicals. The attribution of so much political significance to a particular
organisational form – and, moreover, one developed as a by-product of ‘Bolshevisation’, a
phenomenon originating at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1924 and usually
regarded as a manoeuvre aimed at turning the Communist parties into mirror images of the
Stalinised CPSU, with catastrophic long-term consequences24 – is perhaps the most
questionable argument of Camarero’s book. But he also points out that the PCA’s growth
was made possible by favourable objective conditions in Buenos Aires and other large
Argentine cities, such as a growing number of industrial workers, a strong immigrant-
presence and precarious labour-conditions, particularly during the Great Depression.
Not unlike Tarcus’s book, Camarero’s presupposes a reader acquainted with both
Argentina’s political history and the general international political context in which those
political currents operated. On the positive side, the author adopts a sympathetic but
critical attitude towards his research-subject, trying to shun categorical judgments and
offering instead a balanced, factual description of the PCA’s history. Camarero’s book is the
first part of a longer study that will eventually cover Peronism’s rise to power over the backs
of the anarchist, socialist and Communist pioneers of the Argentine labour-movement, at
a time when the Communist parties of the neighbouring countries (Chile, Uruguay and
Brazil) continued to grow.
Trotskyism
Whereas, in recent years, the historiography on Argentine socialism and Communism has
been enriched by a spate of scholarly works, the same cannot be said of the history of
Trotskyism, which remains poorly explored. The recent republication of two works by
Osvaldo Coggiola on the history of Argentine and Latin-American Trotskyism is therefore
welcome, insofar as it gives readers access to pioneering research conducted in the late
1970s.25 The author, a member of Política Obrera – currently Partido Obrero [Workers’
Party], one of the two main trends in Argentine Trotskyism – and Professor of History at
the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), had to go into exile during the military dictatorship of
1976–83 and carried out his research as part of a doctoral dissertation directed by Madeleine
24. ‘During the months which followed [i.e. after January 1924], the ECCI used the slogan
of Bolshevisation in order to smother all the centres of resistance or criticism, and all possible
support for Trotsky. In France, Souvarine, Monatte and Rosmer were eliminated in this way; in
Poland, Warski, Walecki and Wera Kostrzewa. . . . The result was that there quickly appeared
Communist leaders who were characterised by a combination of a total lack of initiative – and,
often, of political intelligence – and unconditional, blind submission to the directives, even if
they contradicted each other, from Moscow.’ (Broué 2003, p. 832.) ‘Through the process of
“Bolshevisation,” the KPD began to change into a party of a new type, which was soon to be
known as Stalinist.’ (Broué 2003, p. 835.)
25. Coggiola 2006.
Rebérioux in Paris. First published in French26 and serialised in Spanish in the journal
Internacionalismo,27 it had a quite large circulation after the downfall of the military
dictatorship, when the Centro Editor de América Latina published a longer version that
continued the analysis up until the mid-1980s.28 For a decade, it remained the only
historical work on Argentine Trotskyism. An English version of its first part appeared in
the British Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History.29 The following section reviews the new
edition, which reprints the three volumes, adding a final chapter covering the last
two decades.
Coggiola quotes extensively from internal documents containing self-criticisms of the
PO’s positions, even acknowledging the existence of ‘zig-zags’ in its policies,30 but he makes
no bones about the fact that his book is meant as a historical vindication of the Partido
Obrero’s political line, and, for that reason, it has sometimes been criticised as ‘sectarian’.
Readers wishing for an alternative history of Argentine Trotskyism can consult the four
volumes edited by Ernesto González,31 written from the point of view of Nahuel Moreno’s
current, the other main trend of Argentine Trotskyism.
The first Trotskyist groups in Argentina appeared in the early 1930s. Unlike those in
neighbouring countries like Chile or Brazil, they did not amount to more than a few dozen
militants. Despite their numerical weakness, during this early period a number of important
theoretical and strategic discussions took place. Coggiola notes that the first Trotskyist
groups were unclear about the tasks to be performed by the future proletarian revolution,
nor did they have a finished characterisation of Argentina’s social structure. The main bone
of contention was the question of socialist revolutions in backward countries: Coggiola
shows how the first Trotskyist groups, arguing that Argentina was a fully-developed
capitalist country, disregarded the importance of democratic and anti-imperialist task in
the forthcoming revolution. Liborio Justo (1902–2003), who used the pseudonym
Quebracho, criticised that position. An unusual and eccentric figure (his codename in the
correspondence among local Trotskyists was Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad), Justo was in
an exceptional position to observe at close quarters the actual behaviour of Argentina’s
ruling classes, being the son of Argentina’s military president. Coggiola shows that,
regardless of his subsequent political drift towards nationalism, Justo helped enrich the
theoretical approach of Argentine Trotskyism by stressing the importance of national
liberation.32 Despite its theoretical importance, this discussion did not bear fruit. The
Fourth International’s International Executive sent a delegate to Buenos Aires (Terence
26. Coggiola 1983.

27. Coggiola’s work appeared in Issues 3 (August 1981) and 4 ( January–April 1982) of
Internacionalismo, theoretical organ of the Tendencia Cuarta Internacionalista (Fourth
Internationalist Tendency) led by Guillermo Lora’s POR in Bolivia and Jorge Altamira’s PO in
Argentina (see below).
28. Coggiola 1985, 1986.
29. Coggiola 1989.
30. Coggiola 2006, pp. 274–5.
31. González 1995–2006a, 1995–2006b, 1995–2006c, 1995–2006d, 1995–2006e.
32. For Justo’s overview of the early history of Trotskyism in Argentina, see Justo 1941. Justo
later abandoned Trotskyism and developed his ideas on national liberation at length in his five-
volume history of Argentina, called Our Vassal-Fatherland: History of the Argentine Colonial
Régime ( Justo 1968–91a, 1968–91b, 1968–91c, 1968–91d, 1968–91e). Mention should also be
Phelan/Sherry Mangan), who managed to form a unified but ephemeral Trotskyist

organisation called Partido Obrero de la Revolución Socialista (PORS), whose programmatic
ambiguity revealed its precarious state. Inevitably, the new organisation broke up with the
emergence of Peronism.
According to Coggiola, ‘the intervention of the masses in October 1945’ (i.e. the
emergence of Peronism) ‘found the Trotskyists more scattered and disoriented than ever’.
This political confusion regarding the Peronist phenomenon – undoubtedly the most
important political movement in Argentina in the twentieth century – marked the next
generation of Argentine Trotskyists, as they had enormous difficulties finding support
among a working class that had become overwhelmingly Peronist.
The 1953 split in the Fourth International deepened already-existing local divisions: the
Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) of Nahuel Moreno (Hugo Bressano) joined the
International Committee (IC), while J. Posadas (Homero Cristalli), leader of the Grupo
Cuarta Internacional (GCI), and his followers sided with Michel Pablo and the International
Secretariat of the Fourth International (ISFI). Posadas led, for more than a decade, the
Buró Latinoamericano (BLA) of the ISFI, gradually degenerating into an esoteric cult with
theories about UFOs (its journal Voz Proletaria was nicknamed Voz Planetaria), advocacy
of preventive nuclear war by Stalinist states, etc. It should be pointed out, however, that
‘posadismo’ did provide the Latin-American Left with some well-known intellectuals, such
as the historians Adolfo Gilly and Alberto Plá.33
In 1954, Moreno set up the ICFI’s Secretariado Latinoamericano del Trotskismo
Ortodoxo (SLATO), though, according to Coggiola, his ‘orthodoxy’ did not hinder him
from carrying out all kinds of political somersaults, from dismissing Juan Perón as an agent
of British imperialism to ‘deep entryism’ in the Peronist movement, from denouncing the
Cuban Revolution as a pro-American coup to flirtations with Maoism and Castroism, etc.
Criticism of Morenoism is the leitmotif of Coggiola’s work, which sees in the Morenoist
current’s changing names a reflection of its shifting political line: Grupo Obrero Marxista
(GOM: 1944–9), Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR: 1949–53), Federación Bonaerense
del Partido Socialista de la Revolución Nacional (PSRN: 1953–6 – beginning of the turn
to Peronism), Movimiento de Agrupaciones Obreras (MAO: 1956), Palabra Obrera
(1957–64: deep entrism), Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT: 1964–8), PRT
La Verdad (1968–72), Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST: 1972–82), Movimiento
al Socialismo (MAS: 1982–8/1991), which finally split into more than twenty groups.
Coggiola does highlight, however, Morenoism’s positive contributions in the theoretical
field:
It must be said that the POR was perhaps the first group to analyse Argentina’s
socio-economic structure based on the category of ‘combined development.’ For
other groups, for example, there was no doubt that the Argentine agrarian
structure was simply capitalist. . . . The POR demonstrated, statistics in hand, that
made of his history of the Bolivian Revolution, partially translated into English in the journal
Revolutionary History ( Justo 1967, 1992). For Justo’s obituary, see Coggiola 2003b.
33. Gilly is best known in local Trotskyist circles for his book on the Mexican Revolution
(Gilly 1983). Among Plá’s works, mentioned should be made of his book on Argentine
historiography (Plá 1972).
in Argentina’s countryside household production was socially prevalent, though

the large estancia was economically dominant. While household-production is
commercial production, it is not necessarily capitalist production characterised
by the exploitation of wage-labour. For the POR, this demonstrated that the
combination of different stages of economic development was at the base of
Argentina’s agricultural backwardness, expressed in its low productivity vis-à-vis
the developed countries’. Also in relation to industry, the opinion of the GCI
[Posadas], Octubre [ Jorge Abelardo Ramos] and the UOR [Unión Obrera
Revolucionaria, led by Oscar Posse and Mateo Fossa] was unanimous: Argentina
was an industrialised country. . . . Using the same methodology, the POR
[Moreno] demonstrated that Argentine industry was characterised by the
coexistence of a few advanced and concentrated sectors, economically dominant,
with a huge handicraft-base, socially dominant’.34
In another debate on the slogan of the Socialist United States of Latin America, the POR
defended its original meaning, formulating it as a ‘Federation of Workers’ States of Latin
America’.35
Chapter IV of Coggiola’s book opens with an assessment of the two main Argentine-
Trotskyist intellectuals: the historian Milcíades Peña (1933–65) and the lawyer and
professor Silvio Frondizi (1907–74), the brother of President Arturo Frondizi. Coggiola,
whose book focuses on political rather than intellectual history, deals with both authors
cursorily. He detects in Peña’s work ‘a vigour and vitality until then unknown in Marxist
historiography, of which it remains an unsurpassed model and the basis for any future
development’,36 while, at the same time, criticising Peña’s sectarian characterisation of
Peronism as a demagogic, regressive, Bonapartist régime.37 Frondizi also gets praise for his
revolutionary criticism of the Communist Party and rôle in setting up the Praxis-group, but
Coggiola stresses what he regards as Frondizi’s inability to become a real revolutionary
leader and his somewhat erratic political trajectory.
Peña and Frondizi’s works were dealt with in much greater detail by Tarcus in El marxismo
olvidado en la Argentina. Tarcus structures his narrative around Walter Benjamin’s theses in
‘On the Concept of History’, and sees the common denominator between Peña and
Frondizi, not in their Trotskyism, but in their condition as ‘tragic’ figures. This purposely
missing the main point reminds us of another talented historian of Trotskyism, Alan Wald,
who called his book on the US-Trotskyist intellectuals of the 1930s The New York
Intellectuals. As in Wald’s case, readers will find much original and fascinating material in
Tarcus’s book, such as his summary and contextualisation of Frondizi’s work Argentine
Reality,38 widely regarded as one of the best contemporary-Marxist analysis of Peronism,39
34. Coggiola 2006, pp. 135–6.

35. Coggiola 2006, p. 136.
36. Coggiola 2006, p. 178.
37. Compare the analysis of the positions of the three main Trotskyist groups [Octubre ( Jorge
Abelardo Ramos), Frente Proletario – GOM-POR (Nahuel Moreno) and Voz Proletaria – GCI
(Posadas)] on the nature of Peronism, its relationship with the ruling class and imperialism in
Rojo 2002.
38. Frondizi 1955, 1956.
39. Tarcus 1996, pp. 124–41.
and, above all, an exhaustive commentary on Peña’s six-volume History of the Argentine
People,40 originally written in 1955–7 and published posthumously by Peña’s friends, which
remains to this day the best Marxist overview of Argentine history.41 On the other hand,
Tarcus’s polemic against Coggiola and militant historians in general, where he sings the
praises of intellectual snipers unsoiled by political activism and party-affiliation, is difficult
to square with his book’s characters: Peña wrote a pamphlet called Teachers and
Revolutionaries: An Orthodox Trotskyist Responds to Professor Silvio Frondizi,42 and Frondizi
himself was very close in his last years to the PRT-ERP (see below). Moreover, Frondizi’s
commitment to the legal defence of political activists led to his assassination in September
1974 by an Argentine Anticommunist Alliance’s death-squad.43
It was not until the mid-1950s, and especially during the military government that
overthrew Perón in 1955 – when they worked in close alliance with Peronist workers against
state-repression – that Argentine-Trotskyist groups struck deeper roots in the Argentine
working class. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, as the workers’ struggle ebbed after
heavy repressive blows, Argentine Trotskyism faced the end of an era. While Posadas and
his group distanced themselves from the Pabloist direction of the Fourth International –
they proclaimed, in 1962, the creation of a ‘Posadist’ Fourth International – Moreno and
his group put an end to their ‘entry’ into Peronism. A new generation all over the
subcontinent fell under the influence of the Cuban Revolution and its ‘foquist’ strategy.44
As far as international Trotskyism was concerned, the Cuban Revolution led to a
regroupment-process culminating in the creation, in June 1963, of the United Secretariat
of the Fourth International (USFI) which was soon to openly advocate the organisation of
guerrilla-struggles in Africa and Latin America. As part of this process, Moreno’s group
merged in 1965 with a regional grouping of north-western Argentina, led by Mario R.
Santucho, to form the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT: Revolutionary
Workers’ Party), which was recognised as the USFI’s official section in Argentina.
Coggiola points out that the year 1964 saw the emergence of a new Trotskyist group in
Argentina called Política Obrera (Workers’ Politics), originally formed around Silvio
Frondizi’s Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left-Movement, also
known as MIR-Praxis). After the group’s proscription in 1960 and Frondizi’s watering
down of its programme the following year, Política Obrera, whose main figure was Jorge
Altamira ( José Wermus), developed a critique of foquist strategy and launched a drive for
the proletarianisation of its members.
The influence won by the Trotskyist groups during the significant rise of working-class
militancy after the Cordobazo of May 1969 was challenged by the rapid growth of ‘left-
Peronist’ armed groups – particularly Montoneros – and the PRT-ERP. The latter was born
in 1968 when, after a precarious unity lasting only three years, Moreno broke with Mario
Santucho to create the PRT (La Verdad ), refusing to carry out the USFI’s foquist political
40. Peña 1968–73a, 1968–73b, 1968–73c, 1968–73d, 1968–73e, 1968–73f.

41. Tarcus 1996, pp. 161–310.
42. Peña 1956.
43. For Coggiola’s reponse to Tarcus, see Coggiola 1993b.
44. Other groups coming from Trotskyism fully joined the Peronist movement; the most
notable case is that of Jorge Abelardo Ramos. Peña’s devastating criticism of Ramos became a
classic Trotskyist critique of bourgeois nationalism (Peña 1974).
line. After the split, Santucho and his group, called PRT (El Combatiente) shifted more
markedly towards foquismo, being briefly recognised as the USFI’s official section. In June
1973, however, Santucho’s organisation broke with the USFI to become the PRT-ERP
(Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo: People’s Revolutionary Army).45 For a while, Moreno’s
group still called itself PRT (La Verdad ), until in 1972 it switched its name to Partido
Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST), after uniting with the section of the Partido Socialista
Argentino (PSA) led by Juan Carlos Coral.
Coggiola describes Perón’s return to Argentina in 1973 as a manoeuvre on the part of the
bourgeoisie when it became impossible to halt the rise of the labour-movement by repressive
means alone. Argentine Trotskyism entered the 1970s structured around two main groups:
Moreno’s PST, linked to the American SWP, and Política Obrera, which set up an
organisation called Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth
International (OCRFI: 1971–8) together with the Bolivian POR led by Guillermo Lora
and the French OCI led by Pierre Lambert.
Coggiola repeatedly criticises Pabloism and the United Secretariat, which is blamed for
infatuation with guerrillaism at its Ninth Congress in 1969 and then with bourgeois
democracy after its Twelfth Congress in 1985. After the demise of the OCRFI, Lora’s POR
and Política Obrera set up their own international tendency, called the Tendencia Cuarta
Internacionalista, which, in turn, folded in 1988 due to what Coggiola calls ‘Lora’s national
messianism’, i.e. his tendency to see world-revolution as a result of the Latin-American
revolution and the latter as a product of the Bolivian revolution.46 Moreno, in turn, after a
brief flirtation with Lambert in 1979–81, set up his own political current known as the
Liga Internacional de los Trabajadores or International Workers’ League, which was later
marked by the splits that affected its main national section in Argentina.
The original edition of Coggiola’s book closes with a description of the repression under
Argentina’s military dictatorship – the ‘dirty war’ of 1976–83 – and the return of bourgeois
democracy under the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín (1983–9). That period was marked by
the numerical hegemony of Moreno’s MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), by then the largest
Trotskyist party in the world, followed rather distantly by Altamira’s PO (Partido Obrero,
the name adopted by Política Obrera after the fall of the dictatorship). PO’s criticism of
Moreno centred on the historical rôle of democratic counter-revolutions, which provided
ideological and political cover for capital’s neoliberal offensive in Latin America and for the
restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe. According to Coggiola, the current dispersion
of Argentine Trotskyism is mainly a result of the MAS’s dissolution, which took place
shortly after Moreno’s death in 1987.
The new edition of Coggiola’s book includes a final section called ‘De Menem al
Argentinazo’, which does not actually deal with the history of Trotskyism but, rather, with
45. The entry on Santucho in Pierre Frank’s The Fourth International: The Long March of the
Trotskyists reads: ‘Mario Roberto Santucho, leader of the Argentinean PRT/ERP, murdered by
security forces in 1976. A genuine revolutionary internationalist, he joined the Fourth
International in 1967 through fusion of his group with the section; our failure to convince him
of the correctness of the Trotskyist programme, leading to his break with the International in
1973, was a real defeat for our movement.’ (Chapter 10: ‘Those Who Died So That the
International Might Live’.) For a scholarly study of the PRT-ERP, see Pozzi 2001.
46. Coggiola 2006, p. 461.
political developments in Argentina during the last decade. It focuses on the popular
insurrection of December 2001, known as Argentinazo, which brought down the
government of President Fernando de la Rúa, and the development of the piquetero
(‘picketer’ or road-blocking)-movement among unemployed workers, where the Partido
Obrero played a prominent rôle.47 Since 2001, the membership and influence of Argentine
Trotskyism has grown substantially, though the labour-electorate remains overwhelmingly
Peronist. Today, the Partido Obrero is the largest Trotskyist organisation in the country,
followed by a string of smaller splits from the MAS.
Coggiola’s book is supplemented in this new edition by a brief overview of the history of
Trotskyism in Latin America,48 originally published in 1984 as a short book in Portuguese
and later in Spanish.49 Some chapters have been superseded by more recent research, such
as Gary Tennant’s work on Trotskyism in Cuba.50 An expanded version of the section on
Brazil has been translated into English and is available on the Internet at the Encyclopaedia
of Trotskyism Online.51
Reviewed by Daniel Gaido

National Research-Council (Conicet), Argentina
danielgaid@gmail.com
and Lucas Poy

National Research-Council (Conicet), Argentina
lucaspoy@gmail.com
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Marx e Hegel. Contributi a una rilettura, Roberto Fineschi, Rome: Carocci, 2006
Abstract
In Marx e Hegel. Contributi a una rilettura, Roberto Fineschi examines the complex relation
between Marx and Hegel. According to Fineschi, Marx’s relation to Hegel changed over time: in
the early period, Marx understood Hegel to be theorising a self-consciousness that in-itself
generates reality; while, in his maturity, Marx interpreted Hegel as a more rigorous theoretician
of a conceptual Darstellung based on the transition from abstract to concrete. This review-article
discusses Fineschi’s thesis, according to which Marx’s ‘materialistic overturning’ of Hegel involves
two aspects: the narrowing of the scope of the conceptual development, and the idea that the
beginning of Capital is to be understood as being both logical and empirical. We will argue that
the first element was, in some ways, also claimed by Hegel and that the second contradicts other
characteristics of Marxian theoretical discourse, such as the idea that demonstrative sequences
must be governed by necessity and the centrality of the logic of the presupposed-posited.
Keywords
Marx, Hegel, logic, history, capital, self-consciousness
Form and figures of the capitalist mode of production

Anyone who has so much as glanced at the debate about Marx knows that no topic has
been more discussed than the relation between his thought and Hegel’s philosophy. In
some ways, the problem is ‘dramatic’, because it involves the overall sense and particular
expressions of Marx’s theoretical perspective and is intimately entwined with the concrete
political policies of the workers’ movement throughout its history. This connection between
a certain strategy of the workers’ movement and a certain reading of Hegel can already be
seen in Engels; but it has been no less visible and cogent in the most recent grands récits of
Marxism, from Althusser to Colletti. Many have found this alliance between the
philosophical culture of the workers’ movement and its politics so incestuous as to require
vigorous theoretical exorcism. However, this is not the place to investigate the nature of the
question and judge the legitimacy of the reactions it has aroused. Except to say that,
however one judges the link that has formed historically between philosophy and politics
within the workers’ movement, one certainly cannot affirm that the attempt to immediately
politicise the question of the philosophical problematic within Marx and Marxism has
always produced theoretically productive results.
In a sense, Fineschi too seems to share this impulse of reaction at the immediate
politicisation of Marx’s theory and its philosophic origins. Since he belongs to the youngest
set of recruits to Italian Marxist studies, one which grew up after the collapse of the PCI
and of the organisations of the far Left, Fineschi did not feel the need to immediately
anchor the level of his research to determinate political or strategic options – as so often has
been the case in Italy in the past. This is clearly evident in his first important and substantial
book, Ripartire da Marx. Processo storico ed economia politica nella teoria del ‘Capitale’.1 In
this book, Fineschi, following the example of one of his teachers, Alessandro Mazzone,
consistently emphasises the ‘abstract’ character of capitalist social reproduction that Marx
investigates in Capital and the impossibility, for this very reason, of being able to reconstruct
1. Fineschi 2001.
it through the analytical instruments provided by history and sociology. The clear dividing-
line that Fineschi establishes between the theoretical model that Marx develops in Capital
and history and sociology places his interpretations squarely on the side of the ‘logical’
readings of Capital. In this way, he comes to replenish the Italian group of ‘logicians’ of
Capital which, as we know, was never particularly large. In an intellectual atmosphere like
that of postwar Italian Marxism, which was largely dominated by a historicist theoretical
orientation, the work of the ‘logical’ interpreters of Capital, amongst whom we can place
Cesare Luporini,2 Gian Mario Cazzaniga3 as well as Alessandro Mazzone,4 had great
difficulty in making itself heard. But, today, in an atmosphere that appears to have done
with the remains of the historicist experience, works such as those by Fineschi can count on
receiving a very different hearing.
In Marx e Hegel, his second book of exegesis of Marx’s thought, Fineschi energetically
reaffirms, from the opening introductory notes, the necessity to separate Marx’s theory of
the capitalist mode of production from the politics of the workers’ movement. This time,
however, this position rests on an interesting distinction between the concept of ‘form’ and
that of ‘figure’. In his economics-manuscripts, Marx investigated the ‘form’ of the capitalist
mode of production, what we might call its principle of movement, but had left unexamined
the field of the ‘figure’, or rather of the ‘figures’, that is to say, who or what in the course of
a particular span of development of the ‘form’ incorporates its principle of movement. The
permanence of the ‘form’ is, in this way, combined with the succession of different ‘figures’.
Fineschi gives the example of the figure of the ‘mass-worker’, whose appearance does not
contradict at all the ‘form’ of the capitalist mode of production, but is simply a historical
articulation of its mechanism of development. The effect of this is to safeguard both the
validity of Marx’s theory of capitalist ‘form’ and the historically protean nature of capitalism
itself. Here, Fineschi is indebted to Hegel’s distinction between Begriff and Vorstellung,
between ‘concept’ and ‘representation’, between the frame of logical determinations that in
Hegel’s view braces any scientific presentation, and the ‘figures’ (the Gestaltungen, the
‘realisations’, are simply, as Hegel notes in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the
products of the representation) that, being present in general thought or the empirical
sciences, give it reality, historically-determined presence. The fact is, however, that Hegel
has a specific theory of the relation between concept and representation, a fixed feature of
which is the non-scientific nature of the representative moment. We can see it in the main
case of the relation between concept and representation, that between philosophy and
religion. Yes, religion contains logical content, but in ways and forms that are far from those
of ‘concept’, of philosophy. Fineschi does not tell us how we should consider the ‘figures’;
if we should consider them as scientific or purely historical-sociological elements. The
question is already raised in the example given by Fineschi, that of the ‘figure’ of the ‘mass-
worker’. Fineschi regards it as theoretically legitimate. But what kind of legitimacy does it
have: is it a purely empirical finding, or something that can make greater conceptual claims?
The history of Italian ‘workerism’ shows, in my view, that a reply to this question is
imperative, on pain of falling into an empirical sociology laboriously pursuing ever-new
‘figures’ of workers over which the capitalist ‘form’ is supposed to exercise its command.
2. Luporini 1974.
3. Cazzaniga 1981.
4. Mazzone 1987.
One should also observe that the question of the relation between concept and what is
other to it, or, in other words, between logic and empirics, between logic and history, runs
through many of the arguments in the book. In one sense, it is a case of the traditional
question of the critical debate concerning the relationship between Hegel and Marx; and
yet, the way in which Fineschi confronts it and tries to resolve it – with reference to the
Hegelian distinction between Begriff and Vorstellung – is in no way traditional; it is for this
reason that his books deserves serious and attentive consideration. In particular, Fineschi
makes the Begriff/Vorstellung-couple interact with the relation between the logical and the
empirical in the third, and, in my view, most important, part of his book, the one dealing
with the ‘Marx-Hegel relation beyond Marx’s understanding’. As my doubts about the
book are concentrated on this third part, I shall dwell on it longer, but not before indicating
broadly the structure and merits of Fineschi’s argument in the first two parts on how Marx’s
thought develops from Hegel’s.
The two phases of Marx’s relationship to Hegel

First of all, it should be emphasised that Fineschi’s is one of the first works to glance at the
whole changing dynamics of the relation between Marx and Hegel using a reliable textual
basis – that of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). This also allows Fineschi to give a
detailed account of the various phases of Marx’s reflections on Hegel’s teachings. And, by
that, I do not only mean the precise identification of the transitions of Marx’s reading of
Hegel from his early phase to his maturity, but, above all, an analysis of Marx’s attitudes
towards Hegel in the course of the tortuous and complex, mature theoretical elaboration,
in the phase beginning with the manuscripts on economics of 1857–8, the so-called
Grundrisse. In this way, Fineschi advances the Italian debate on Marx decisively, bringing it
to the level reached in recent years by the most advanced international research.
Fineschi’s central thesis seems to be that Marx read Hegel in two ways that cannot easily
be reconciled with each other. The first, cultivated mainly in his early years but never cast
aside in his maturity, was that of Hegel the philosopher of self-consciousness, which,
because it is thinking, ‘creates’ objective reality, deduces it completely from itself. That was
the Hegel of whom the mature Marx of the Afterword to the second edition of Capital
would say needed setting on his feet – an operation that would return the relation between
ideal and real to its correct proportions, by which the ideal construction of reality does not
‘create’ reality, but is rather derived from it. Fineschi brings out well how this Marxist
conception of Hegel is closely akin to the interpretation that the young Hegelians themselves
(Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, etc.) had arrived at. Fineschi, here and elsewhere, shares
the point of view of Roberto Finelli’s recent study of the relations between the young Marx
and Hegel.5 He sees this young-Hegelian reading of Hegel as too ‘Fichtean’, because it
restores that gap between thought and reality that Hegel saw as the distinguishing feature
of ‘philosophies of consciousness’ and of phenomenology in general. This young-Hegelian
transformation of Hegel’s thought is, Fineschi rightly says, the matrix of Marx’s taking up
of the Hegelian concept of ‘alienation’, a move that Fineschi sees as wrong for at least three
reasons – and, here, he is above all writing in the wake of Marcella D’Abbiero’s fundamental
5. Finelli 2004.
study, ‘Alienazione’ in Hegel. Usi e significati di ‘Entäusserung’, ‘Entfremdung’, ‘Veräusserung’.6

First, because it eliminates the differences to be found in Hegel between Entäusserung
[alienation] and Entfremdung [estrangement]; second, because it impoverishes the multiple
meanings of Hegel’s Entäusserung, which is forced to describe only the movement of
reification of self-consciousness; and, last, because it superimposes the movement of
Entäusserung on that of dialectic tout court, failing to see the limited conceptual function
of Entäusserung, which is mainly restricted to the Phenomenology of Spirit. As a result,
objectivity becomes a pure projection of Hegel’s self-consciousness, and can no longer
claim positivity or autonomy of real existence. In short, objectivity and alienation, for the
operations of Hegelian self-consciousness, are identical. The young Marx, nevertheless,
influenced by Feuerbach, distanced himself from any reduction of sensible objectivity to an
appendix of the process of self-conscious thought. There is, thus, an inversion of the relation
between thought and objectivity that Marx sees at work in Hegel: the primum becomes
sensible objectivity. The abstract, rather than generating it, descends from the concrete.
However, and here we cross over into his maturity, the Marx that began work on the
critique of political economy realised it was necessary to prepare a specific form of transition
from the abstract to the concrete, and wrote about it from the 1857 Introduction to the
Grundrisse on. It was that transition from an abstract totality-of-concept to something
more concrete, which is typical of any scientific presentation given in dialectical terms.
Hegel’s idealistic mysticism now consisted, therefore, not in the attempt to reproduce
reality conceptually in the form of a transition from the abstract to the concrete, but, rather,
in the elimination of the moment that had to precede this scientific presentation of reality –
the moment of transition from the concrete of sensible materiality to the abstract of logical
forms. This transition from the concrete to the abstract corresponds to what the mature
Marx called the ‘mode of research’, distinguishing it from the ‘mode of presentation’ of a
science. By ‘mode of research’, he meant the moment of appropriating the multiplicity of
elements, forms of development and ways of linking them together that belongs to a specific
epistemic field. Hegel’s error lays in only half-accepting the circle concrete-abstract-
concrete, in eliminating its first half.
Marx’s later reading of Hegel, then, is not interested in the movements of the dialectic of
self-consciousness, but, rather, in Hegel’s effort to generate a science using methods of
conceptual sequence different from those thriving in the empirical sciences, those that
Hegel himself had called sciences of the ‘intellect’. Here, my opinion is no different from
Fineschi’s: what moved Marx – as we can see from his careful readings of Hegel’s Science of
Logic around the time when the project of Capital was forming – to rediscover an intense
and close relation with Hegel is his fascination with Hegel’s Darstellung, with the forms of
movement that control the course of his logic. And that happens, adds Fineschi, although
Marx’s understanding of his own scientific activity remains a prisoner of old forms,
assimilated from the young Hegelians, of the ‘overturning of Hegel’s idealism’. We will only
properly understand Marx’s ‘method’, Fineschi concludes, against much of Marxist
tradition, to the extent that we free ourselves from Marx’s own conception of the sense of
his relation with Hegel.
Fineschi’s conclusion is, in its way, radical, an invitation not to ‘trust’ the understanding
Marx has given us of his philosophical relation to Hegel. In this sense, one might well say
6. D’Abbiero 1970.
that Fineschi, unlike other interpreters, does not succumb to the fear of falling prey to the
sin of lèse majesté. On the other hand, Fineschi’s operation does not seem something
completely new in Marxist studies. Without going back too far, one might note how
original Althusser’s reading of Capital becomes to the extent that it puts into practice that
ambiguous criterion for reading a text by Marx that Althusser called ‘symptomatic reading’,
by which a reading of Capital should be carefully distinguished from the epistemological
mechanism active in it. Althusser too, that is, invites us to mistrust the philosophical shell
in which Marx explicitly encased the content of his scientific undertaking. An anterior
philosophical consciousness presses against this shell, says Althusser, making it inadequate
to contain the novum unfolded by the science of capital.
Fineschi, then, shares Althusser’s path, although only for some of the way. What distances
him from Althusser is his different attitude towards dialectic: while, for Althusser, it belongs
to the junk of previous philosophical consciousness that Marx takes with him along the iter
of building Capital, for Fineschi, it is Hegel’s positive legacy, the key for defining rigorously
the question of the organisation of scientific presentation. But, on the other hand, it is
Fineschi’s whole interpretative strategy of Marx’s developing dynamic towards Hegel that
seems to resist being presented in the clothes of radical innovation. Theories claiming a
different theoretical outlook in the mature Marx compared with the earlier writings have
always found favour with researchers. Althusser’s theory of the coupure that intervened after
The German Ideology, between the young Marx and the mature Marx is, at bottom, only
one particular, extreme version, which, in any case, Fineschi rightly rejects. On the other
hand, Fineschi himself does not reject, but approves, the substance of Althusser’s suggestion
as to the decisiveness of The German Ideology in Marx’s progress away from essentialist
anthropology. This confirms all the more that Fineschi is consolidating, rather than radically
subverting the most-established interpretive positions on Marx.
However lucid and rigorous it is, Fineschi’s plan is also a little limited. To be clear, one
wonders if the whole sense of the relation between Marx and Hegel can be reduced to its
logical and epistemological aspects. For example, Fineschi only considers the 1843
manuscript, the so-called Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in relation to the question
of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s illegitimate masking of crude empirical elements beneath
logical-philosophical forms. Yet, it is hard not to glimpse in this very early writing by Marx
the centrality of the reckoning with Hegel on the subject of democracy. This Marx may
have a questionable, ‘Feuerbachian’, philosophical basis, but he grasps that democracy is
intrinsic to the proletariat, and so finds a way out of the blind alley in which the state
delineated in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right ended up. Although Hegel’s state is
rooted in the concrete life of the economic and social masses, it shuns the democratic
method of founding and legitimating itself. However, the solidity of this line of thinking
by Marx on democracy, even in his mature phase, in which it is entwined with thoughts on
socialism and communism, should alert us to the importance of this polemic with Hegel in
the development of his thought.
The question of alienation
The second part of the book, as I said, deals with the problem of alienation in Marx and in
some of the most eminent exponents of Marxism (Lukács, Colletti, Althusser, Della Volpe).
In this case too, what guides Fineschi’s analysis is his interest in whether or not certain
themes persisted throughout Marx’s work. He, therefore, wonders if it is legitimate to
speak of the young Marx’s problem of alienation continuing in the various economics
manuscripts of his maturity too. He steers a middle-course in this debate: he certainly
rejects the theory of those who claim that alienation disappears from his mature works; but
nor does he approve the theory of those who see alienation as operating in Capital and
other writings of that period in exactly the same way as in the Manuscripts of 1844. It is in
two areas of Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production that Fineschi sees alienation
reflowering: in the problem of the fetishism of commodity and in the process of subsuming
labour under capital. Now, as we know, according to the idea that Marx sketched out
mainly in his early years, alienation exists to the extent that the essence of man, of mankind
in general, is profoundly distorted and altered by virtue of specific historical and social
conditions. Alienation exists, then, only if we have a conception of what the essence of man
is. But, and it is here that the difficulties start to emerge, the Marx of The German Ideology,
who links the determination of the human essence to the dialectic between productive
forces and relations of production, cannot fail to eliminate the presupposition of the same
human essence at the stage of its alteration. It is the history of the modes of production that
decides the human essence every time. Fineschi identifies the concept of ‘natural labour-
process’ as what the critique of essentialist anthropology overflows into in Capital. His
analyses of the concept of ‘natural labour-process’ are the most subtle in the book, perhaps
its most important theoretical contribution, and so it is worth quoting the part that best
clarifies his argument:
Being a moment in the labour-process is what distinguishes human activities

from those of other living beings; not only at the level of activity, but also in
relation to finality. Nonetheless, with this concept, Marx simply tells us what
elements are part of any form of production and in this way does not speak of any
specific form of production. Also: for production to be possible there have to be
men, in the plural, and the labour-process in general does not tell us either how
this multiplicity is internally related. The naturalness of which Marx speaks
indicates, then, the quality proper to the specific interaction of animal-man with
nature, but he also tells us that as such it never exists, because there are no natural
forms of inter-relation, neither vertical between the elements of the process, nor
horizontal between those that produce it – and so we cannot even speak of the
natural priority of one element over the others. To see a man at work there has to
be a social form of production in which his activity as an individual is placed in
mediated relation with things and other individuals. Marx explicitly states that it
is from the way in which these elements interact that the relations of production
are determined. And so this abstract labour-in-general, like abstract production-
in-general, does not describe, unless partly, the nature or essence of man – that is
to say, in relation to abstract constants that as such never exist, any more than
labour in general; they may exist always and only in the specific concrete forms (of
which the capitalist mode of production is an example) and be fixed ‘in general’
only by abstracting them. (pp. 99–100.)
Thus, the result of The German Ideology is not revoked: it is only thanks to the occurrence
and succession of specific modes of production that we can derive the image of the human
essence, its general and natural relation with the objective and inter-subjective world. And
yet, reasons Fineschi, the dissolution of the human essence as a term for referring to
alienation does not at all mean that there is not another term in Capital by which we can
observe the irruption of alienation. Fineschi thinks that the inversion should be related to
the stage immediately preceding the organisation of the capitalist form of production, to
that stage in which it is still individual labour that imposes both the aim and the way it is
achieved. The capitalist mode of production inverts this specific form of production because
it replaces its characteristic of sociality at every level. In the capitalist mode of production,
not only the aim, the accumulation of capital, is social, but also the way in which it is
achieved, the system of what Marx calls ‘large-scale industry’. If, claims Fineschi, we read
the natural labour-process as the content of man’s essence, then overcoming capitalist
alienation would involve retrieving the individual form of labour. But, concludes Fineschi,
Marx does not think that at all, as he claims that the sociality capitalism has grafted onto
the form of production is a gradual and irreversible acquisition. We should not dream of an
inversion of the inversion, but just complete this sociality transforming ‘external control
into self-control and, through science, produce the conditions by which merely-mechanical
labour is completely automated and man has nothing but the universal labour of science
and the free development of his personal potentials’ (p. 102).
Fineschi himself, advisedly, does not see this suggestion concerning the nature of
communism as entirely satisfactory. And nor do I: if the structure of the inversion is not
overcome in communism, then, clearly, objectivity will continue to prevail over subjectivity.
Here, Fineschi also points to another problem: if communism makes use of one of the basic
acquisitions of the capitalist mode of production, mechanisation, then that division of
labour that is necessarily linked to mechanisation will still be operative in it. But alienation
is necessarily associated with the division of labour. And, so, communism too is ‘branded’
with alienation.
It is surprising how Fineschi does not seem aware of how much Hegel’s lesson here works
in Marx’s concept of ‘natural labour-process’. Because saying that the ‘natural labour-
process’ designates something that has never existed, but is forever set in specific and
concrete forms of production, means that the universal as such does not exist. Well, this is
one of the central theories of Hegel on the nature of the universal. For Hegel, that is, the
universal can only be translated into reality by realising itself in the particular, by providing
itself with all sorts of particular determinations. So, when Fineschi points out how much
Marx’s critique of essentialism and anthropology depends on bringing into focus this
category of ‘natural labour-process’, he fails to notice a fundamental fact: that Marx escapes
essentialism and anthropology partly thanks to recovering a decisive Hegelian theoretical
move. Had he brought this aspect to light, the central thesis of the book – that the mature
Marx’s scientific operation is fed by a profound theoretical relation with Hegel – would
have emerged greatly strengthened.
The ‘materialistic overturning’ of Hegelian dialectic
We are gradually reaching the third, and in my view most stimulating and problematic,
part of the book. Fineschi starts by registering in Marx a sort of opposition, clearly derived
from Hegel, between intellectual knowledge and rational knowledge. Intellectual knowledge
is that represented by the ‘mode of research’; rational knowledge by the Darstellung of

categories, and the development of a dialectic intrinsic to the conceptual ‘thing’. In
particular, in Marx’s ‘mode of research’ there is the same tension as in Hegel between
analytical and synthetic method. Just as in Hegel’s finite knowledge, the analytical method
is distinct from the synthetic method because its identification of abstract elements is
separate from their synthetic connection, in the same way, in Marx’s ‘mode of research’,
that the analysis of a concrete premise is separated from the process in which one passes
from the most subtle abstractions to the synthesis of many determinations. In science,
however, there must not be this separation; as in science, the content must develop in such
a way as to develop the form at the same time. If the concept of capital respects this
immanence of content in form, then we can conclude that capital corresponds to the
requisites of Hegel’s ‘concept’.
If the aim of the ‘mode of research’ is to lead Marx to the point at which he can begin to
write Capital, its heart consists, for Fineschi, in the indication of the contradictions and
inconsistencies in which Marx’s predecessors were mired in using the categories of value,
labour, and division of labour. Emblematically, it is the question of the eternity of the
economic categories among classical economists that is the source of internal contradictions
and inconsistencies. As good disciples of Hegel, Marx and Engels reject this premise,
elaborating a theory of the succession of modes of production. For Fineschi, this means
that Marx argues that the starting-point of Capital is historical, and so conjectural. I cannot
see that: the fact, for both Hegel and Marx, that a particular element has been made possible
by history does not mean that on the conceptual plane we must claim it is conjectural. What
Fineschi claims of the opening of Capital, that ‘it is possible only in history, basing itself on
a particular development of facts and reasonings on them’ (p. 138) might also apply to the
opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the category of ‘being’; but that does not oblige Hegel,
once he has placed himself on the terrain of logic, to go on affirming the conjectural
character of the category of ‘being’.
In any case, and here I agree with Fineschi, the starting point should be able ‘to genetically
develop the whole system of the capitalist mode of production’ (p. 130). Not only that: it
should be a universal, but a concrete universal that circumscribes the perimeter of a specific
mode of production, the capitalist one. This starting point, the original economic cell of
Capital, is the commodity. But by what mechanism does the commodity give rise to the
system of Capital ? By the opposition between use-value and exchange-value, the two poles
that make up the unity of the commodity.
In Hegelian style, the beginning must, however, be the end (in both senses). The premise
of the presentation, the commodity, must, that is, be reproduced by the presentation itself
as a result. It is with the concept of ‘accumulation’, Fineschi rightly says, that the commodities
cease to be a mere presupposition to become something posited. In accumulation, capital
‘stands properly on its own feet’ (p. 140), making its presupposition an ‘immense collection
of commodities’.7 The continuation of the category-development until the third book will
describe this universality of capital in further phases of particularity – where capital will
discover that it is actually many reciprocally-competing capitals – and individuality – where
capital will discover, as credit and fictitious capital, that as specific-existing capital it acts
universally.
7. Marx 1976b, p. 125; Marx 1991, p. 37.

It is here that we start to find an answer to the question as to the sense of the ‘materialistic
overturning’ of Hegel’s dialectic urged by Marx in the Afterword to the second edition of
Capital. The scarecrow consists of a conceptual development that takes place completely
a priori. The conceptual presentation, writes Fineschi, should not
coincide with the historic-real development of capitalist production. Only because

this real development pre-exists is it possible to make a theory out of it. The
theory is constructed following the dialectic of concepts, but the dialectic is not
of pure concepts, but rather concepts determined on the basis of a cell that is
fixed empirically and intellectually, and so presupposes a given, historically-
determined world from which it can be derived. (p. 143.)
In short, there are two parameters of ‘materialist overturning’: a logical-empirical beginning

and the narrowing of the scope of the conceptual development. We have already critically
discussed the former above. But its interpretation becomes even more complex here. On
this view, Hegelian dialectic is, by virtue of its different starting-point, a dialectic of ‘pure
concepts’, while Marx’s was of ‘determinate concepts’. Now, the fact is, and it is unlikely
that Marx did not see this, that the concepts of Hegel’s dialectic, not only in his Science of
Logic but also in his system, have a determination of content that makes them incompatible
with ‘pure concepts’, conceivable by abstraction from the empirical material. Hegel, in fact,
with his Science of Logic founds a conceptual horizon that deliberately does without the
polarity a priori/a posteriori.8
But, in this connection, there is a further argument that is important: given, with
Fineschi, that one must necessarily ‘genetically develop the whole system of the mode of
capitalist production’ from the commodity, then the theoretical determinations that
characterise the beginning should also be extended to all the determinations of the relation
of capital. If, therefore, the opening is logical-empirical, the whole chain of conceptual
mediations leading to the foundation of the relation of capital should be logical-empirical
too. It follows that, not only every conceptual determination, but also every transition
should have not only a logical imprint, but also an empirical one. Well, does this empirical
imprint guarantee the necessity that Marx undoubtedly wanted to assign his conceptual
sequence?9
Nor does the second parameter indicated by Fineschi seem to me able to overturn Hegel
materialistically. Hegel, in fact, always sustained, with varying emphasis and sensibility,
that, without a particular course of events taking place, it would never have been possible
to expound his philosophy. The real pre-exists the thought for Hegel, too. Consider, as
proof, his words in the final lessons of his course on phenomenology in the autumn of
1806 on the ‘new advent of Spirit’10 that makes ‘philosophical speculation’ possible or the
8. Sayers 1994, pp. 68–72, and Smith 1999, pp. 220–1, have grasped this point of the
debate on the Hegel-Marx relationship.
9. The necessity that governs Marx’s conceptual concatenation has been dealt with in the
first place by Smith 1990, p. 37. But Arthur 2002, pp. 71–4, has also recently intervened in this
question. Arthur dwells particularly on the conceptual and non-historical-empirical necessity
leading from commodity to money and then to the position of free labour.
10. Hegel 1936, p. 352.
still-more famous reference to the ‘new era’11 that had determined the appearance of his
Phenomenology of Spirit. However, as is well known, in the Preface to The Philosophy of
Right, using the metaphor of the ‘owl of Minerva’,12 Hegel explicitly theorised the need for
philosophy to arise only after reality had fully completed ‘its formative process’.13 Even
those, like Lukács, who have wanted to see a certain change of tone between Phenomenology
and Elements of the Philosophy of Right in the way this problem is treated, have not failed to
identify in Hegel’s appeal to the genetic priority of historical time over philosophy one of
the clearest and most permanent ‘realistic’ elements in his philosophy.14 That is not all:
Hegel energetically professed both the theory of philosophy as the ‘evening of life’, and the
theory by which the ways in which philosophy re-expounds the real are completely different
from those with which the real itself first manifested itself.
To the two limitations of Hegel’s dialectic indicated so far (production and not only ideal
reproduction of the real, and a lack of transition from the concrete to the abstract as a
moment preceding the descent from the abstract to the concrete), Marx, says Fineschi, adds
a third limitation, which is actually a direct consequence of the first two: the use of the same
philosophical principle to explain the transition from one historical period to another, as
well as the structure of each individual period – in other words, Marx’s critique of Hegel’s
philosophy of history. In his view, the a priori nature of Hegel’s philosophy of history
prevents us from grasping either the manifestation, each time historically determined, of
each specific and qualitatively-different mode of production or the particular forms of
transition from one mode of production to another. Here too, however, Fineschi’s attention
seems too ‘selective’, as analysis of the problems raised by the relation between Marx’s
theory of the succession of modes of production and Hegel’s philosophy of history intercepts
other theoretical dimensions apart from the purely logical-epistemological one.
What emerges from all this, however, is the profile of a Marx intent on carrying out a
coherent programme of ‘reduction of dialectic’.15 Dialectic is adopted, above all, as a
method of conceptual presentation, but we are invited to do without it whenever the aim
is to get our hands on concrete material that we can start assessing. At bottom, this is a
replay of an old critique of the dialectic, by which it works quite well on the level of
conceptual organisation but is completely unusable as ‘discovery-logic’ – to use an expression
from present-day philosophy of science – or as inventio and initial arrangement of the
empirical and concrete material.
Dialectical logic and logic of capital

A little before, we said that it is from the opposition between use-value and exchange-value
that Marx derives the relation of capital. Of course, in itself that is not saying much, because
11. Hegel 1980, p. 14; Hegel 1977, p. 6.

12. Hegel 1973–4, p. 74; Hegel 1991b, p. 23.
13. Ibid.
14. Lukács 1977, pp. 454–56.
15. We use the expression ‘reduction of dialectic’ in a different way from the way the theorist
who advanced the notion in the Marxist ambit uses it (Göhler 1980, p. 24). Whereas Göhler
believes that the dialectic had been progressively ‘reduced’ in Marx’s mature economic manuscripts
on the level of the ‘mode of exposition’, we simply wish to say here that for Marx, as interpreted
by Fineschi, it is completely unserviceable on the plane of the ‘mode of research’.
we need to specify the content of this ‘opposition’ and how it functions. Fineschi – and
I absolutely agree with him – claims that it is the doctrine of essence in Hegel’s Science of
Logic with the whole spectrum of his determinations of reflection (identity, difference,
diversity, opposition, contradiction) that rules the conceptual course from commodity to
capital. In this, he makes good use of the research of a large number of scholars, mostly
from the ex-Federal Republic of Germany and ex-DDR (Backhaus,16 Reichelt,17 Hecker,18
etc.). Except that there arises a by-no-means-trifling question: if Marx frames the transition
from commodity to capital with the categories of the doctrine of essence in Hegel’s Science
of Logic, what happens then to Marx’s need to articulate a ‘specific logic of the specific
object’? Is it not logic ut sic that completely sucks in the logic of commodity and capital?
Fineschi solves the problem by bringing in here too that wavering between the logical
and the empirical that, in his view, connotes Marx’s conceptual development from the start.
What removes Marx’s conceptual movement from Hegel’s pure, logical self-movement is
the intervention of the presupposition of some elements that have not been theoretically
‘deduced’, such as simple circulation, the free labourer and original accumulation. In this
way, writes Fineschi, the logic of capital is to the logic ut sic as the physical sciences are to
pure mathematics, or as Hegel’s ‘real philosophy’ (philosophy of nature and Spirit) is to his
Science of Logic. To be precise, drawing on the way in which Angelica Nuzzo in an important
book, Rappresentazione e concetto nella logica della ‘Filosofia del diritto’ di Hegel, interpreted
the relation in Hegel between logic and ‘real philosophy’,19 Fineschi identifies a scale of
different logical levels in Capital. At the first level is the most abstract logical content, called
Logic I, in which the relation between the premises and results of the presentation is purely
ideal. This level contains, in turn, sub-stages with their own dynamic of development (e.g.
the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of labour under capital, the
transformation of ‘simple cooperation’ into ‘large-scale industry’, etc.). The second level,
called Logic II, shows the process of adapting particular presuppositions for capital into
something posited by Logic I (e.g. the transformation of the labour-process into the
valorisation-process). It is a stage that already discloses a ‘historical’ dimension. But it is a
historicity wholly controlled by the needs of the first level.
At this point, Fineschi needs to clarify the nature of these ‘premises’ that undergo the
process of being adapted to the system of capital. On the one hand, the premises are derived
in a purely logical way: given the relation of simple circulation, one can only observe that
its full deployment in relation to capitalist production is conditioned by the presence of the
separation of the labour-force from the means of production; nevertheless, on the other
hand, continues Fineschi, these premises also have a historical aspect: without the effective
separation of the labour-force from the means of production, the mode of capitalist
production would never have begun. The separation between labour-force and means of
production, concludes Fineschi, belongs to ‘a configuration that precedes the capitalist
one and cannot be known with the analytic categories of the capitalist mode of production’
(p. 158). The premise is like that, then, because inherited from a previous mode of
production.
16. Backhaus 1997.

17. Reichelt 2001.
18. Hecker 1983.
19. Nuzzo 1990.
In my view, this conclusion is unacceptable, and for various reasons. Above all, Fineschi
leaves aside any consideration of the fact, however well known to him, that in the Grundrisse,
in a sort of expository plan of the work, Marx operated in a way similar to him, by examining
the possibility of placing before the treatment of exchange-value and commodity a chapter
concerning the determinations of production in general, belonging to all the modes of
production,20 and that he later rejected this possibility. The chapter on the natural labour-
process in fact comes after the transformation of money into capital in Capital. There are
good dialectical reasons for his refusal to explore this expository possibility in Capital. If the
relation between presupposed and posited must be dialectical, the posited cannot pose a
presupposition that is not congruent with itself. In his chapter on the Idea in the Science of
Logic, Hegel is unequivocal on that: moving from what is entirely posited, the Idea or
method, the presupposed starting-point – being – is only conceivable as an abstract
universality, and so as something that is a partial configuration of the posited:
Hence the beginning has for the method no other determinateness that that of
being simple and universal; this is itself the determinateness by reason of which it
is deficient. Universality is the pure simple Notion, and the method, as
consciousness of the Notion, knows that universality is only a moment and that
in it the Notion is not yet determined in and for itself. But with this consciousness
that would carry the beginning further only for the sake of the method, the
method would be a formal affair, something posited in external reflection. Since
however it is the objective immanent form, the immediate of the beginning must
be in its own self deficient and endowed with the urge to carry itself further. But
in the absolute method the universal has the value not of a mere abstraction but
of the objective universal, that is, the universal that is in itself the concrete
totality.21
After claiming that ‘for the method’ the beginning is the abstract universal, Hegel is anxious
not to give the impression that, in the Science of Logic, it is the ‘point of view’ of the method
that determines the expository development. In this case, the category-development would
be guided by external reflection. So that this development can be considered as immanent,
the beginning must be, says Hegel, an ihm selbst, in its own self, imperfect, in need of
completion. On the other hand, the beginning is not only abstract, but also has its precise
objective content, as it is a concrete totality in itself, whereas the concrete totality for itself is
that of the idea. So, ‘being’ and ‘idea’, if examined from the position of the idea and not
from any other point of the logical presentation, are not categories that cover two
heterogeneous theoretical spaces. Now, returning to Marx: if the system of capital, the
posited, had determined what also belongs to other modes of production as presupposed,
it would have posited something presupposed that is not congruent with itself, something
that cannot be inscribed in the theoretical space of the system of capital itself. Hence, the
correct decision not to begin Capital with the determinations of production in general.
Fineschi seems to make a mistake similar to that of Marx in the Grundrisse: he imagines as
premises elements that belong, like their outcome, to modes of production preceding the
20. Marx 1976a, pp. 218–19, 237; Marx 1973, pp. 298, 320.
21. Hegel 1981, p. 240; Hegel 1969, pp. 828–9.
capitalist one. Of course, one has no objection to make to the claim that, on the historical
plane, a mode of production articulates in new forms elements that have been given to it
from the previous mode of production. But the point is that the theory of the capitalist
mode of production must answer to other conceptual commitments than those involved in
historical analysis.
There is at least one other reason for not accepting Fineschi’s theory: if the logic governing
the transition to capital is that of essence, then we should not forget that one of the main
characteristics of essence is that the relation between the reflexive mechanism and its
determinations is a relation of full possession, so to speak. Right from the beginning of the
doctrine of essence in the Science of Logic, in the ‘essence as reflection in itself ’, we can see
clearly how reflection does not hesitate to declare the Schein (the illusory being), the first
real determinacy of essence as its own: ‘Illusory being is essence itself in the determinateness
of being. Essence has an illusory being because it is determinate within itself and thereby
distinguishes itself from its absolute unity’.22 Let us be clear: essence has the illusory being,
and maintains with it what elsewhere, in the Encyclopaedia, Hegel calls relation of ‘having’.23
By virtue of this, the relation in the doctrine of essence between each category and its
determinacies is not of immediate identity, as it was in the doctrine of being. In fact, when
a determinacy of the doctrine of essence fades, the category that supports it does not
disappear. Hegel, in particular, makes this point explicit, dealing with the relation between
a thing and its properties, where the thing continues to exist even if it loses a property.24
This does not happen in the doctrine of being, where, for example, the ‘something’ ceases
to be when its quality disappears. The sense of all this is that in the doctrine of being the
process of mediation – what is called ‘reflection’ in the doctrine of essence – precisely
because it is immediately one with its determinacies, does not have what we might call a
‘power of disposition’ over them, and so has no right to call them its own. In other words,
there is a flow of determinacies whose connection with the underlying process of mediation
does not appear. Actually, then, the immediate identity between plane of mediation and
plane of immediacies is a sign, in the doctrine of being, of the absence of an organic and
productive relation between them. That is to say, a deep cleavage is still operating between
the plane of mediation and the plane of immediacies. Conversely, the fact that, in the
doctrine of essence, the process of mediation becomes autonomous of the plane of
determinacies is not an index of separation between them, but of a situation in which, for
the first time, the process of mediation posits the determinacies themselves as corresponding
with itself. This means that in the doctrine of essence, unlike the doctrine of being, what is
posited posits what is presupposed as its own. Well, turning to Capital, if Fineschi were
right, then the system of capital, although it is the result of a reflective-logical process,
should give rise to something presupposed that is not its own.
22. Hegel 1978, p. 248; Hegel 1969, p. 398.

23. Hegel 1992, §125, p. 154; Hegel 1991a, p. 195.
24. As well as in the relation between essence and illusory being and thing and property, there
is also a relation of ‘having’ between existent and ground (Hegel 1978, p. 342; Hegel 1969, pp.
500–1), whole and parts (Hegel 1978, p. 355; Hegel 1969, p. 514), substance and accidents
(Hegel 1978, p. 397; Hegel 1969, p. 558), cause and effects (Hegel 1978, p. 398; Hegel 1969,
p. 560). On this, see the reflections of Schmidt 1997, p. 28.
In the remaining pages of the book, Fineschi deals with two other Hegelian conceptual
couples that Marx uses (capital in the process of becoming/capital which has become and
essence/phenomenon) and in an appendix with the remarkable success in Marxism of the
concept of ‘umwälzende Praxis’ (‘overturning praxis’). Fineschi pertinently notes the non-
Marxian origin of this expression and warns against linking the question of the ‘materialistic
overturning’ of Hegel to that of the transforming praxis. For Marx, then, the main task of
the transforming praxis is not to invert speculative philosophy, but to invert those social
structures that give life to speculative philosophy.
Shortly before the conclusion of the book, however, Fineschi takes stock of his position
towards the problem of the relation between the logical and what is not logical, the historical
and empirical. According to Fineschi, the originality of Marx’s solution compared to Hegel’s
lies in the different way in which the empirical is ‘introduced’ into the fabric of the logical.
In Hegel, and, here, Fineschi continues to regard Angelica Nuzzo’s position as valid, the
empirical is accepted by a special logic, that of the Vorstellung, of representation, which,
while not coinciding with that of the concept, is nevertheless complementary to it. In
Marx, by contrast, the empirical performs its functions mainly in choosing the beginning,
identifying as an economic cell of the capitalist system anything that can be presented
either as a logical premise or as a historical-empirical premise. At bottom, then, the mature
Marx’s critique of Hegel is still the same as the one in the 1843 manuscript on Hegel’s
philosophy of right. Hegel was unable to carry out a ‘specific logic of the specific object’,
and, for this reason, was forced to introduce the empirical surreptitiously into a speculative-
logic construct beforehand.
The peculiarity of Fineschi’s approach is, therefore, that the question of the relation
between the logical and the historical-empirical in Marx is resolved determining, in a sense,
the form of the opening of Capital. But, for the reasons I tried to indicate earlier, this
strategy does not seem very convincing. In particular, other paths and other solutions might
have been explored, above all concerning the nature of the opening of Capital. In my view,
for example, it would be more useful to work on the opening as indeterminate totality 25 of
the relation of capital. In this way, the transition from the sphere of circulation to that of
the relation of capital might have been examined as a dialectical transition from an
indeterminate to a determinate totality. But, of course, all this can be discussed only in
another, more suitable place.
Reviewed by Giorgio Cesarale

University of Rome, La Sapienza
giorgiocesarale@yahoo.it
References
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Series, Leiden: Brill.
Backhaus, Hans-Georg 1997 [1969], Dialektik der Wertform. Untersuchungen zur Marxschen
Ökonomiekritik, Freiburg: Ça ira.
25. One can find hints of the articulation of Hegel’s and Marx’s mode of beginning in terms
of indeterminate totality in, for example, Kincaid 2005, pp. 88–9.
Cazzaniga, Gianmario 1981, Funzione e conflitto. Forme e classi nella teoria marxiana dello
sviluppo, Naples: Liguori.
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Historical Materialism; 4, 1: 215–40.
Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle
Ages, Ellen Meiksins Wood, London: Verso, 2008
Abstract
This article seeks to contextualise Ellen Meiksins Wood’s recent survey of classical and medieval
political thought within the context of some of the prevailing approaches to the history of
political thought. After an initial elaboration of Wood’s ‘political-Marxist’ approach to issues of
historical development and contextualisation, I emphasise what is significant about Wood’s
specific contribution to the study of Greek, Roman and medieval political ideas in particular, as
well as to the history of political thought in general.
Keywords
history of political thought, state-formation, property-relations, classical political thought,
medieval political thought
State-formation and social-property relations

With the linguistic turn in the 1960s, intellectual currents within the history of political
thought began to move away from the traditional presumption that the development of
political theory constituted a transhistorical dialogue based on the perennial problems of
politics in order to focus on the significance of historically specific discursive contexts for
understanding the history of political thought.1 The work of Cambridge-school historians
such as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock represented an explicit rejection of both the
teleological studies of the Whig-era and the more philosophically-oriented studies of the
postwar-period that premised their surveys either on the belief that politics – and therefore
political theorising – represented a series of perennial and unchanging problems of the
human condition, or that histories of political thought were organised around a series of
‘stable vocabularies’ that remained constant over time.2 Under the rubric of ‘Cambridge’,
political theory became incorporated into a history of contested political languages that
related political theory to traditions of discourse and the contingent political controversies
of the theorist’s own historical context.3 The purpose was to understand the history of
political thought on its own terms without engaging in the anachronistic exercise of
presuming that the classics had anything to say about our own contemporary problems and
predicaments.
1. The ‘histories’ of political thought produced by Leo Strauss and his acolytes emphasised
the history of esoteric writing that was political philosophy and identified the crisis of modernity
with the betrayal of ancient wisdom (see Strauss 1953 and Strauss and Cropsey (eds.) 1963).
Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial work Politics and Vision was founded on the belief that the history
of political thought – defined as the development of the concept of ‘the political’ – was the most
effective means of ‘exposing the nature of our present predicaments’, which he considered to be
the decline of ‘the political’ resulting from the rise of an individualistic liberalism (see Wolin
2004, p. xxiii).
2. Pocock 1975; Skinner 1978. Also, see Skinner’s extensive incursions into the methodological
debates of the discipline in Skinner 2002.
3. Burns (ed.) 1988; Burns and Goldie (eds.) 1994; Rowe, Schofield, Harrison and Lane
(eds.) 2000; Goldie and Wolker (eds.) 2006.
In her bold and innovative survey of ancient and medieval political theory, Ellen Meiksins
Wood employs a much more radical approach to the question of historical contextualisation
than that of the Cambridge historians. Working within the tradition of historical
materialism, Wood employs what she refers to as a ‘social history’ approach to political
theory, an approach to contextualisation that differs significantly from the dominant
linguistic approaches employed by the Cambridge-school historians, in the sense that it is
the social context of social-property relations and the specific social struggles that emerge
within these contexts that is the starting point of any history of political thought.4
The question of historical context is not simply a matter of sketching out a general socio-
economic backdrop within which political theorists conceive their doctrines and write their
treatises. This approach is implicit even in the works of some of the Cambridge-school
historians who expressly eschew the utility of social contextualisation. In his Machiavellian
Moment, Pocock’s narrative of the persistence of classical republicanism occurs within the
early-modern transition from traditional ‘agrarian’ society to a modern ‘commercial society’.
This important dichotomy runs through much of the civic-humanist inspired republican
revival that has informed Anglo-American historiography. More recently, Brian Nelson, in
The Making of the Modern State, has treated the history of political thought as a grand
narrative, concerned with articulating a theory of the modern state that is the result of the
rise of the bourgeoisie. As the subtitle of his book implies, this tends to be cast as a
teleological development, and the bourgeoisie continues to ‘rise’, yet never seems to arrive.
At the same time, Nelson recognises that the bourgeoisie ‘supported whatever was in their
economic interest’; thus, whether ‘supporting the centralizing monarchs of England and
France, or the city-states of Italy and Germany, the emerging middle classes were able to
assert their independence from the nobility.’5 From Wood’s perspective, portmanteau-
contexts such as the development of ‘commercial society’ or the ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’ do
more to level the significant differences that exist between social contexts than illuminate
our understanding of the works of specific theorists.
But neither is this act of contextualisation the same as treating political thought as merely
a ‘reflection’ of social-property relations; nor is it a matter of reducing political theory to the
‘class-position’ of a particular political theorist, thereby treating classical political theorists
as ideological spokespersons – or ‘prize-fighters’ – for their respective social classes. Such a
critique has consistently been levelled at Marxist interpretations of the history of political
thought – in various different ways – by mainstream-scholars, enabling them to dismiss
Marxism as being more concerned with what political theorists tell us about the society in
which they live, as opposed to engaging in an ‘autonomous’ study of political ideas. In The
History of Political Theory and Other Essays, John Dunn tells us that, while ‘the objects of
[Marxists’] study is plainly the history of political theory, its products are scarcely in
4. The term ‘social history of political theory’ was first used by Neal Wood in Wood 1978 (see
also Wood 2002). Other attempts at a ‘social history’ approach to the history of political thought
have been unsuccessful. For example, J.S. McClelland, in his survey of political thought, states
that his initial intention to examine the history of political thought ‘from the bottom up’ was
unsustainable, thereby rendering the book ‘old fashioned’ and largely text-centred (McClelland
1996, p. ix).
5. Nelson 2006, p. 147.
themselves contributions to understanding that history’.6 Similarly, it is in this regard that

Quentin Skinner argues that Marxists have insisted that the ‘principles professed in political
life are commonly the merest rationalizations of quite different motives and impulses’, and
that ‘it follows from this that such principles have no causal role in political life, and scarcely
even need to figure in consequence in explanations of political behaviour’.7 In a similar
vein, Conal Condren rejects Marxist interpretations of political thought because they
presuppose ‘a prior ideology and set of power relations which are taken to be reflected in
language, mystified and masked by it’.8 Lastly, Pocock claims that, if the historian of
political thought is a Marxist, ‘he declared that “ideas” were a mere reflection of social
reality’.9
Whether or not these critiques are fair is a matter of debate. What is certain, however, is
that they have long been a staple of anti-Marxist scholarship and have been levelled against
Wood. One recent reviewer has written:
Despite avowals to the contrary, there are traces of a tendency to read opinions
off class position, with brilliantly original thinkers such as Augustine coming
perilously close to being labelled as mere apologists for domination, while
Ockham’s thought is considered to reflect English individuality, itself merely a
result of a strong property regime and a strong state.10
Yet, there remains a crucial distinction between reading ‘opinions off class position’ and
relating the meaning of political theory to the specific development of social-property
relations and state-formation in different social contexts. To suggest that Augustine
presented an ideological defence of the Roman Empire is not the same as claiming that,
because Augustine was a member of the dominant class, we can take his political theory to
not only reflect his class-interests, but also represent the class-interests of the Roman
aristocracy as a whole. Nor is relating the individualism of Ockham to the peculiar
development of English individualism (that finds its way into virtually all political theory
by the sixteenth century) an act of class-reductionism.
Wood’s approach to socio-historical contextualisation rests on a particular interpretation
of historical development that differs from a number of influential Marxist approaches to
historical periodisation that characterise European development in terms of a succession of
modes of production: beginning with the ancient slave-mode of production, through the
feudal mode of production and ultimately culminating in the development of capitalism.
In particular, Wood’s historical materialism is defined through a critical engagement with
Perry Anderson’s attempt to explain European development as a succession of slave-, feudal
6. Dunn 1996, p. 24. Dunn is referring to C.B. Macpherson, Christopher Hill and Lucien
Goldmann.
7. Skinner does not cite any Marxist scholarship in this passage, but it is presumed that he
is referring to the work of C.B. Macpherson, whom he references in his bibliography (Skinner
1974, p. 291).
8. Condren 1994, p. 8.
9. Pocock 1971.
10. West 2009, p. 915. West goes on to remark: ‘Specialists will assuredly disapprove of this
book for the most part, and they could be forgiven for ignoring it. After all, it generally ignores
them.’ (West 2009, p. 916.)
and capitalist modes of production.11 Those familiar with Wood’s work will know that hers
is a Marxism that not only rejects this Marxist understanding of European historical
development, but also problematises the more economistic and reductionist Marxist
understanding of a ‘mode of production’ defined in terms of the causal relationship between
the economic base of society and the political ‘superstructure’, as well as the traditional
Marxist emphasis on the contradictions between the forces and relations of production as
the catalyst for social transition.12 They will also be aware that Wood has been a vociferous
critic of traditional Marxist interpretations of capitalist transition that seek to explain
capitalist development in terms of an urban bourgeoisie rising up in opposition to a
parasitic, rural aristocracy.13
Rather, Wood’s approach to historical context emphasises the dynamic interplay between
social-property relations and the historical processes of state-formation. Social-property
relations are characterised not only by the ways in which a surplus is extracted from the
direct producers in society by a class of appropriators, it also comprises the tenuous
relationships within the class of appropriators and their relationship to the development of
‘the state’. Thus, the lines of conflict and contestation that frame the broader social context
of the development of political theory not only pits the ruling class against the threats it
faces ‘from below’, but also the threats it faces from within the ruling class – particularly in
regard to access to lucrative state-offices and/or the potential competition from the state as
an agent of surplus-extraction in its own right. Indeed, Wood argues that the specificity of
the ‘West’ is to be found, not in the development of some form of transhistorical rationality,
but, rather, in a specific differentiation between property and state – a differentiation that
was absent in the more sophisticated civilisations of the East – that sees property become
the specific dominium of a class of private individuals outside the jurisdiction of the
state itself. The development of European societies – and by extension, European political
theory – is distinct from developments in the East, not by virtue of the absence of private
property in the latter, but by virtue of the absence of a similar differentiation of state and
property. In concrete terms, this means that while in the civilisations of the East, the
division between ruler and ruled largely corresponded to the division between appropriators
and producers, no such correspondence existed in the societies that eventually developed in
the West (i.e., Greece and Rome) – and it is this difference that plays an important rôle in
creating the particular dynamic of conflict that frames the context for the rise of political
theory as an intellectual endeavour oriented to interrogating the relationship between ruler
and ruled in a highly sophisticated and analytical manner:
The ambiguous relation between ruling class and state gave Western political
theory certain unique characteristics. Even while propertied classes could never
11. See Anderson 1974a and 1974b. Of course, Anderson’s is merely one (albeit highly
influential) interpretation of one of Marx’s schemata of historical development: compare, for
instance, Wickham 1994. For an insightful discussion of the various approaches to the historical
periodisation of ‘modes of production’, see Blackledge 2006. For a useful discussion on the
conceptual issues at stake in the debates regarding historical materialism, see Rigby 1988.
12. In particular, Wood criticises the technological determinism of Cohen 1978: see Wood
1995. For a critique, see Callinicos 1990.
13. Wood 1991 and 2002.
ignore the threat from below, and even while they depended on the state to
sustain their property and economic power, the tensions in their relations with
the state placed a special premium on their own autonomous powers, their rights
against the state, and also on conceptions of liberty – which were often
indistinguishable from notions of aristocratic privilege asserted against the state.
So challenges to authority could come from two directions: from resistance by
subordinate classes to oppression by their overlords, and from the overlords
themselves as they faced intrusions by the state. This helped to keep alive the
habit of interrogating the most basic principles of authority, legitimacy and the
obligation to obey, even at moments when social and political hierarchies were at
their most rigid. (p. 25.)14
Despite this differentiation between state, class and private property that is specific to ‘the
West’, the ways in which the class of private appropriators exploit the direct producers of
society, and the way in which they relate to the state, and the way in which they maintain
their own cohesion as a class, differs from one social context to the next. Thus, that which
unifies Europe as a coherent social context within which to study the history of political
theory is not enough to understand the specificity of, say, Athenian political theory in
relation to Roman or Renaissance-Italian political theory. Thus, the emphasis on the
specificity of social-property relations is carried over into the study of various societies
within the European context as well – both in the geographical and the historical sense. We
are therefore left with a very sophisticated approach to contextualisation, which at one and
the same time emphasises the specificity of distinctive societies within a larger European
context that is itself differentiated from those of the non-European world.
From polis to republic to empire

From this starting point, Wood takes the reader through a brilliant and bold interpretation
of the invention of political theorising within the context of the Greek polis that is
characterised, not as a manifestation of the slave-mode of production typical of traditional
Marxist renderings of the ancient-Greek context, but rather as a radical – if not
revolutionary – democracy characterised by a political association of direct producers, in
which the peasant-citizen plays a crucial rôle, against an appropriating class of declining
landlords. By characterising the context of Athenian democracy in such a way, Wood is
rejecting conventional Marxist interpretations of ‘antiquity’ as a ‘slave-mode of production’,
in which the predominant line of social conflict revolves around the antagonisms between
a class of slaves – engaged largely in production – and a citizen-body of slave-owners.15
By downplaying the operative rôle of slavery as the dynamic of class-struggle in ancient
Greece, Wood seeks to illuminate the ways in which struggles within the community of
Athenian citizens develop along class-lines. Thus, the primary pole of conflict is that which
pits ‘free producers’ (peasants and artisans) against an increasingly besieged class of landed
aristocrats. The tensions within the democratic community of Athens – a community
14. For an interpretation that downplays the social differences between East and West in
antiquity, and the implications for classical political thought, see Springborg 1992.
15. de Ste. Croix 1981; Anderson 1974b.
where a socially stratified citizenry met as political equals – compelled the philosophical
defenders of the declining aristocratic order to elaborate sophisticated rationalisations of
élite-rule against the ideological defenders of the democracy. To put it another way, with
the development of the polis and the community of citizens it represented, the relationship
between rulers and ruled and between producers and appropriators characteristic of
Mycenaean Greece – not to mention the bureaucratic state-civilisations of the East – broke
down. Anti-democratic and aristocratic political theorists had to accommodate their ideas
to the realities of the polis, thereby resulting in the development of political philosophy as
an extension of the anti-Sophistic natural philosophy of Socrates. Even the more extreme
political theory of Plato, with its abstract construction of a social division between rulers
and ruled that corresponds to a division between those who produce and ‘those who are
fed’, requires the existence of the polis as the primary unit of association. Plato’s radicalism
resides not in his elaboration of some form of early communism (which The Republic clearly
is not), but, rather, in the subversion of the ethos of the polis in the attempt to eradicate
politics and establish the rule of philosophy.16
Readers of Wood’s earlier work on Greece will be familiar with much of the argument
about the polis and the Socratic philosophers.17 To the Greeks, the most significant
conceptual distinction was that between the polis and the oikos. As Aristotle argued in The
Politics, the ‘political’ was confined to the polis, which was a form of human association that
was characterised by relations of equality between equal citizens. Crucial to this definition
is the conception of equality between citizens within the political community. Regardless
of Aristotle’s own aristocratic preferences, such a conception of the polis was ultimately
compatible with the exclusive democracies of Athens and Rhodes. In contrast to this, the
oikos – or household – was comprised by a number of non-political relationships between
unequals: the patriarchal relationship between man and wife, the paternalistic relationship
between father and son, and the despotic relationship between master and slave. Aristotelian
political thought sought ways of accommodating the relationships of inequality inherent in
the oikos with the relationships of equality inherent in the polis by differentiating between
functional rôles that the ‘parts’ and the ‘conditions’ of the body politic play in maintaining
the socio-political order.
Citizens to Lords builds on Wood’s earlier work by delving deeper into pre-Socratic
natural philosophy as well as the development of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy of the
Hellenic period. With the Macedonian invasion, and the subsequent rise of Alexander the
Great, we begin to see a significant shift away from the established boundaries of Athenian
political philosophy. The polis is superseded by the cosmopolis of Alexander. This development
will provide a vital link between Athens and Rome, and lay the foundations for the
development of Roman imperial political thought that substitutes exclusive rights of
citizenship with a universal subjection to imperial authority.18 Herein lie the roots of the
16. This interpretation is radically at odds with those who believe that Platonic philosophy
(and Greek political theory in general) represents the elevation of ‘the political’ over other forms
of association.
17. Wood 1988; Wood and Wood 1978.
18. This is a significantly different interpretation of the implications of Stoic and Christianised-
Roman political thought than that put forward by Patricia Springborg, who argues that it was
through the embrace of Christianity during the imperial era that the foundation for a universal
conflict between imperial universalism and republican particularism – a conflict between

competing ideologies that are united only in their shared contempt for classical
democracy.
Wood’s treatment of Rome is of equal significance to that of Greece for a number of
reasons. First, in most standard histories of political thought published after WWII, Rome
is often either glossed over or neglected, due to the failure of Rome to produce any ‘great’
or ‘innovative’ thinkers.19 Thus, despite the significance of Rome to the history of European
state-formation (not to mention political theorising), its absence from the traditional
histories of political thought needs to be corrected. Secondly, conventional histories of
political thought are often conceptualised around a qualitative break between modernity
and antiquity, in which the latter is comprised of the Greco-Roman world in ways that
downplay the important differences between the two contexts.20 On closer examination, we
begin to see the dramatic differences between Athens and Rome, to the extent that Roman
conceptions of citizenship and liberty, as well as the institutional arrangements of the
Roman constitution, have more in common with later developments of the early-modern
period than with the realities of ancient Greece.21 Thirdly, recent attempts to revisit Rome
and re-integrate it into the broader tradition of Western-European political thought have
done so through the lens of a ‘republicanism’ concerned with excavating notions of ‘neo-
Roman liberty’ that, ironically, do little to engage with the actual history of the Roman-
republican era.22 As such, a more substantive understanding of the nature of Roman society,
conception of individual freedom was developed. ‘It is ironical, but true, that the Hellenistic and
Roman Empires, and not the league of Greek city states or the Roman Republic, were responsible
for the greatest number of democratic foundations, giving to municipalities which had long
lived under autocracy democratic freedoms, which the Romans referred to as “the freedom of the
Greeks”.’ (Springborg 2001, p. 857.)
19. In J.S. McClelland’s survey of Western political thought, pagan Rome is treated in a mere
twenty pages, reserving most of his commentary for Augustine and other Christianised Romans
(McClelland 1996). David Boucher’s edited text skips over pre-Augustinian Rome entirely
(Boucher (ed.) 2009). The general neglect of Rome in the history of political thought is, however,
a relatively current phenomenon. Histories written prior to WWII and the establishment of
‘political theory’ as a sub-discipline in political science tended to cover a wider range of political
thinkers due to the absence of a pro-philosophical bias in determining what constitutes political
‘theory’.
20. Indeed, some surveys of Western political thought (as distinct from surveys of modern
political thought) simply begin with either Machiavelli or Hobbes, implying that Machiavelli’s
alleged ‘discovery’ of the autonomy of the political, and Hobbes’s rejection of antiquity, are key
to understanding ‘modern’ political thought.
21. Early recognition of these differences can be found in Wolin 2004 and Wirszubski
1950.
22. Skinner 1998; Skinner 2008. Skinner is careful to define the tradition that he seeks to
examine as ‘neo-Roman liberty’, which allows him to focus solely on Roman-inspired writers of
the early-modern English period. Philip Pettit, however, is more insistent on the Roman origins
of what he considers to be a progressive notion of liberty that is concerned with ‘non-domination’.
Pettit, however, engages in no significant discussion of the Roman context; nor does he engage
with the work of Roman-republican writers such as Cicero (Pettit 1997). Similarly, Maurizio
Viroli, inspired by both Pettit and Skinner, conveniently omits Rome from his narrative of
Roman law and Roman political thought can provide us with a critical perspective from
which to evaluate the current republican revival in political theory.
The differences between Athens and Rome are important in their own right; yet, they
assume a greater significance when we understand the influence that Rome has had on the
later development of political thought in European history.23 Far from representing an
analogous source of ‘positive liberty’, the case of the Roman Republic represents a highly
dynamic ‘mixed constitution’, combining elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy
into an elaborate façade that masked the concentration of aristocratic power within a
Roman Senate. The significance of the Roman case resides less in the Roman contribution
to political philosophy (which tended to come from Romanised Greeks) than it does in the
creation of Roman law and the republic’s articulation of a form of citizenship that diluted
popular power and acted as an alternative to Athenian democracy.24 Whilst Athenian
citizenship cut across class-lines, thereby creating a political community in which citizens
of unequal socio-economic backgrounds came together as political equals, Roman
citizenship institutionalised the socio-economic inequalities of status and class in ways that
were inspirational to later political theorists. We are familiar with the exclusive basis of
Athenian citizenship: metics, women and slaves were all excluded from membership in the
demos. But, even within a more inclusive conception of ‘the people’, characteristic of Rome,
liberty did not necessarily imply an equality of political rights. For example, Cicero – that
most famous proponent of Roman liberty – could argue for the libertas of the Roman
people while believing that the dignitas of the great requires an unequal distribution of
political and economic rights. In other words, Cicero’s conception of libertas was limited to
a more abstract juridical equality that entitled all Roman citizens, regardless of rank or class,
to an equal access to Roman law; but it did not follow that all citizens enjoyed equal
political rights in terms of an equality of voting rights (and therefore, the power to determine
the content of that law). Thus, a res publica, for Cicero, envisioned a hierarchical society in
which political rights are monopolised by a landed aristocracy, yet this does not prevent
him from championing the libertas of the Roman people as a community.25
The institutionalisation of this inequality could not have occurred without the
development of Roman law. Most significant among these innovations were the distinctions
drawn between a public and private sphere, and the development of a clearly-defined realm
of private property. Wood writes:
The Athenians, as we saw, managed the conflicts between peasants and landlords,
‘mass’ and ‘elite’, largely on the political plane. The effect of their democratic
republicanism (all the while selectively including Cicero when it is convenient), preferring to
begin his history with Machiavelli (Viroli 2001).
23. See Roberts 1994.
24. In The Republic, Cicero clearly states the case for a ‘popular’ government (a res publica) in
contrast to the kind of democracies that existed in Athens and Rhodes.
25. Wood 1988. Janet Coleman writes: ‘This is what Rome discovered, a useful kind of
compromise concerning irreconcilable approaches to status. This is the agreement that defines
the ‘state’ as an association in justice: equality before the law but not to equal things. Scipio
insists that men of the highest and lowest honour must exist in every ‘state’ and hence treating
them equally cannot be fair. But treating everyone equally before the law is the minimum to
which everyone, with his different view of status, can accept.’ (Coleman 1999, p. 279.)
reforms was gradually to dilute legal or status distinctions among free Athenians
in the common identity of citizenship. The Romans to some extent also pursued
the political course, and the citizen body also included both rich and poor; but,
while property increasingly trumped heritage, even status distinctions among
citizens, notably between patricians and plebeians, continued to play a role, with
patricians enjoying privileged status and disproportionate representation in
assemblies. The Romans did, to be sure, devise political institutions and
procedures to regulate relations between different types of citizen – such as the
particularly distinctive office of the tribune. But, while influenced at first by
Greek law, the Romans constructed a much more elaborate legal apparatus,
relying more than the Greeks on the law to manage transactions between mass
and elite, between propertied classes and less prosperous citizens. Social relations
between these groups were in large part played out not in the public domain of
political life but in the sphere of private law – a distinctively Roman category;
and the regulation of property would constitute by far the largest part of Rome’s
civil law. (p. 121.)
This differentiation between public and private spheres, along with the development of the
rights of private property, enabled the ruling class to relegate conflicts between citizens of
different classes to the private sphere through the medium of private law. Such a phenomena
was alien to the Greeks, for whom conflicts between citizens of different classes ultimately
spilled over into the public sphere of the popular assemblies.26 In Rome, by contrast,
substantive inequalities in both spheres coexisted with a limited status of equality embodied
in a hierarchical notion of citizenship. While Rome was no more stable than Athens, the
constitutional and legal infrastructure established by the Roman ruling class, along with the
divisions that existed between Roman peasants and the urban plebeians, enabled them to
retain their oligarchic power in the presence of the popular façade of republican
government.
From Wood’s perspective, if modern liberal democracies owe anything to antiquity for
their development, it is to Rome – not Athens – that we must turn our attention. While
democracy is a Greek invention, it is the Roman case – with its mixed constitution that
masks oligarchic power, its inclusive citizenship that stresses formal legal equality over
substantive social equality, to its differentiation between a public and private sphere, where
class-conflicts are confined to the latter through the development of private law, and to
well-developed relations of private property that clearly differentiate between imperium
(rule) and dominium (ownership) – that is more instructive to understanding the
development of modern liberal democracy.27
26. Indeed, the Greeks did not have a well-developed distinction between a ‘public’ sphere
and a ‘private’ sphere; merely a polis comprised of equality, and an oikos characterised by
inequality.
27. ‘The partnership of dominium and imperium, then, sums up both the distinction between
public and private and the alliance of property and state that was so distinctively Roman.’ (Wood
2008, pp. 124–5.)
Imperial decline and European feudalisms

The imperial crisis of the third century resulted not only in a substantive military-
bureaucratic revolution, but also the conversion of the Empire to Christianity under the
rule of the Emperor Constantine. With this conversion, Christianity underwent its
transformation from a small Jewish sect to an ideology of empire, largely due to the works
of the later Stoics, St Paul, and, finally, Augustine. While the conversion to Christianity
coincided with the Eastward drift of imperial power, the ‘sources of Western Christian
dualism may be found in social and cultural conditions. . . . of the Roman property regime
and the distinctive public/private dichotomy it engendered’ (p. 147). Roman conceptions
of dominium and imperium – property and state – played a crucial rôle in the development
of Western Christianity and its relationship to state-power. Paul’s injunction to ‘render
under Caesar’ represented the acceptance and co-existence of the competing centres of
power and authority that would shape the development of politics and political thought in
the medieval period:
Pauline Christianity, in other words, effected an adaptation of universalism

analogous to the changes in Stoic doctrine, which blunted its egalitarian
implications and its potential challenge to existing authorities, making the
doctrine more congenial to Roman elites. It might be said that, like the Roman
stoics, Paul – who was familiar with and influenced by Stoic philosophy –
achieved this effect by reintroducing a kind of dualism that allowed a separation
between, on the one hand, the moral or spiritual sphere, in which the cosmic
logos dictated a universal equality, and, on the other hand, the material world in
which social inequalities and even slavery prevailed and political authority was
entitled to impose an absolute and universal obedience, just as masters could
compel their slaves. (pp. 150–1.)
Upon the collapse of the imperial state, and the subsequent fragmentation of political
power amongst competing warlords, it was the Church that maintained the imperial
structures, hierarchies and institutions. And it is the collapse of this centralised public
authority and the exacerbation of the competing claims of jurisdiction between the papacy
and the Holy Roman Empire that constitutes the context of medieval political thought.28
This competition, however, is situated within a broader social context of feudalism, which
Wood defines in terms of the ‘parcellisation of sovereignty’, usually in the hands of
competing lords who have managed to appropriate limited public powers in the wake of
the collapse of the Carolingian state.29 In this feudal context, the fusion of public power
with private appropriation is perhaps most apparent, resulting in the interpenetration of
relations of political and juridical status with the powers of exploitation and surplus-
extraction and the eclipse of any well-defined public authority:
28. This is a significantly different position from that presented by Wolin, who argues that it
is the institutionalisation of the Church – rather than its competition with secular authorities –
that rescues the ‘concept of the political’ from extinction during the medieval period (Wolin
2004).
29. The term ‘parcellisation of sovereignty’, was coined by Perry Anderson (Anderson 1974a,
p. 19).
To put it another way, the public or civic sphere completely disappeared. This was
so not only in the sense that the state apparatus effectively disintegrated but also
in the sense that public assemblies in which free men could participate, of a kind
that survived throughout the Carolingian realm, no longer existed. Clear
distinctions between free men and slaves gave way to a complex continuum of
dependent conditions. The category of ‘free’ man effectively disappeared in the
former Frankish empire, where even owners of free land might be subject to
seigneurial jurisdiction and feudal obligations, while the concept of slavery was
overtaken by a spectrum of dependence, in relations between lords and ‘their’
men. (pp. 171–2.)
However, an important point of differentiation is made between Continental and English

feudalisms, with the latter coexisting with a centralised state augmented by the Norman
Conquest. This distinction is significant in both enabling us to understand the differences
between English and Continental medieval political theory, but also for understanding the
significant variations in socio-economic and political development that will be elaborated
upon in the second volume.30 Continental feudalism, including that of France and the
‘quasi-feudalism’ of the autonomous Italian communes, is characterised by a particular
fusion of public power with the power of private appropriation that expressed itself in
overlapping claims to property and legal jurisdiction. From this perspective, the development
of Italian ‘republicanism’ in the late-medieval period did not represent a fundamental
change in the social constitution of political and economic power. While Continental
medieval political thought was primarily concerned with the conflict between competing
claims of the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire to political authority, it was rarely
concerned with addressing the source of factionalism and political disunity – the
parcellisation of sovereignty characteristic of feudal social relations.
Within this context of parcellised sovereignty, medieval political thought developed
largely as an expression of the competing claims of imperium and dominium that took for
granted the dependent status of the producing classes. As such, medieval political thought
was pre-occupied with identifying the locus of political and legal authority. What medieval
political thought did not attempt to do, was to revive the civic relationship that existed
between classes characteristic of the ancient Greek polis.
Medieval political theory involved a particularly complex relation to the legacy of

classical antiquity. It was complicated not only by relations between secular and
ecclesiastical authority but also by the ever-changing scope of secular state power
and ever-present tensions between the processes of state centralization and the
forces of parcellization. The legacy of empire, together with its classical inheritance,
continued to structure the parcellized sovereignty of feudalism, both in practice
and in theory. It survived both in the theological doctrines of Christian
universalism and in the institutional hierarchy of the Church; but these were
always in tension with the particularities of plural kingdoms, lordly jurisdiction
30. This important point of differentiation is absent from Skinner’s two volumes on the
Renaissance and Reformation, and remains perhaps the most important difference between
Wood’s social-history approach and Skinner’s intellectual-history approach.
and autonomous corporations of various kinds. At the same time, political

philosophy had to adapt to the absence of a neatly defined political terrain, not a
civic community such as the polis but a particularly convoluted network of
secular and ecclesiastical institutions, together with the unity of property and
jurisdiction. (p. 200.)
In contrast to republican interpretations that attribute to him the revitalisation of a civic

sphere of politics, Marsilius of Padua does nothing to challenge the feudal parcellisation of
sovereignty characteristic of the Italian city-states, and his conception of communal
autonomy is better suited, not to republican self-government based on active citizenship,
but, rather, on incorporating communal autonomy into imperial rule.31 For Marsilius, the
corporation of citizens is ‘represented and governed by a ruling part ( pars principans), which
may consist of many, few or even one’; and he ‘always qualifies his references to the universal
body of citizens with “or its prevailing part” (valentior pars, sometimes translated as the
“weightier part”), which apparently can be very limited in numbers’. As a result, not only
‘the power to elect (or depose) the ruling or executive part but even the legislative function
and the ultimate power of consent could, then, reside in a very small number’ (pp. 220–1).
The development of English medieval political thought – particularly that of William of
Ockham – reveals a significant point of departure between the processes of Continental
and English state-formation. Whereas Continental medieval political thought started out
from the premises of corporate representation and competing jurisdiction, Ockham’s
political thought is premised on a kind of methodological individualism that corresponds
to the realities of English feudalism: notably development of the status of ‘freeman’ under
the auspices of common law. These differences – corporatism versus individualism – proved
crucial in determining the character of the doctrines of popular sovereignty that emerge in
the early-modern period; they determine whether popular sovereignty resides in the
individual – as in the case of English political thought – or in the colleges and other
corporate bodies characteristic of Continental feudalism.
Wood concludes her study, not with the decline of medieval scholasticism and the rise of
Renaissance-humanism, but, rather, with the onset of the crisis of feudalism that is largely
dated during the last half of the fourteenth century. Given her emphasis on the social – as
opposed to the intellectual – contexts of political theory, it seems appropriate that the second
volume will begin amidst the backdrop of the divergent processes of state-formation that
constitute the early-modern period of European history. For this second volume, we can
anticipate the development of political thought against the background of at least three
distinctive social contexts: the development of English political thought within the context
of an emerging agrarian-capitalist society, constituted by a ‘multitude of free men’, and the
formation of a centralised state taking the form of King, Lords and Commons; the
development of French political thought within a largely feudal society, comprised of
‘colleges and corporate bodies’ and constituted by the contradictions of an absolutist state
defined by the countervailing tendencies of ‘parcellised sovereignty’; and the Renaissance-
31. Coleman 2000. For Marsilius of Padua as a republican theorist contributing to early
democratic political thought, see Held 2006.
revival of antiquity amidst the autonomous, quasi-feudal communal city-states of the Italian
peninsula, each struggling for survival in a new configuration of absolutist geopolitics.
Conclusion
If there is a weakness to Wood’s book, it is both the downplaying of the kind of detailed
textual exegesis that is standard fare in the history of political thought as well as the more
discursive contextualisation that is typical of the Cambridge-school. Wood recognises this,
noting that critics and readers may think that such a social-history approach ‘places too
much emphasis on grand structural themes at the expense of a more exhaustive textual
reading’ of the canon, yet leaves it open for others to engage in the kinds of interpretation
that results in ‘more minute and detailed reading’ (p. 16). On the one hand, this seems
perfectly reasonable, for no interpretive approach can accomplish everything, and Wood’s
intention is to reveal the way a Marxist social history can illuminate our understanding of
the canon. On the other hand, it does nothing to force the proponents of the Cambridge
school to acknowledge the contribution that Wood makes to the history of political
thought. Given the predominance of the Cambridge-school approach to contextualisation,
and the marginalisation of Marxist interpretations on the grounds outlined – rightly or
wrongly – by Dunn at the outset of this essay, and reasserted by West in his hostile review
of Wood’s work, there is a pressing need to meet the Cambridge school on its own terrain.
This will be particularly important in the next volume, due to the fact that both Skinner
and Pocock have done much to re-frame the way in which historians view the intellectual
developments of the early-modern period. In particular, the ‘republican paradigm’, be it in
the form of Skinner’s neo-Roman liberty or Pocock’s Aristotelian-inspired civic humanism,
has supplanted the old bourgeois paradigm as the hegemonic interpretation of the early-
modern period. In terms of the ancient and medieval periods, however, it is hoped that
Wood’s book will provide the groundwork for future research within the Marxist
interpretation of the history of political thought.
Reviewed by Geoff Kennedy

University of Durham
geoff.kennedy@durham.ac.uk
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Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
Electrification production’ (516). The artificial light provided

by electricity – called ‘unnatural light’ by some
A: kahraba. – G: Elektrifizierung. – F: électri- peasants Lenin encountered – would then
fication. – R: ėlektrifikazija. – S: electrifi- come to symbolise, according to Lenin, the
cación. – C: dianqihua 电气化 peasants’ political ‘enlightenment’ (517). In a
wider context, Lenin linked the prospect of
‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electri- electrification to a number of other develop-
fication of the whole country’. This famous ments he hoped to encourage. Foremost on
statement of Lenin’s, made at the Eighth his agenda, as he introduced the theme of elec-
Congress of Soviets on 22 December 1920 trification (513), was the anticipated eclipse of
(LCW 31, 516), has been widely taken to ‘politicians and administrators’ within the
encapsulate the Soviet approach to industriali- Soviets, in favour of ‘engineers and agrono-
sation. Undoubtedly, Lenin’s words were a mists’. The Civil War having been won, politi-
powerful and impressive slogan; the circum- cal problems could now recede, to be replaced
stances of its formulation shed considerable by economic concerns. While Lenin recog-
light on the larger issues of Soviet socialism and nises the severity of the economic situation, he
its project of forced catch-up industrialisation. proposes a response conceived primarily in
technical terms. His language here recalls that
1. The potentially revolutionary implica- of his pre-October projections on the wither-
tions of electricity were already evoked by ing away of the state (in The State and Revolu-
Engels, notably in his remark that it would tion; LCW 25, 425, 473), as well as Engels’s
‘prove the most powerful of levers in eliminat- scenario of ‘the government of persons [being]
ing the antithesis between town and country’ replaced by the administration of things’
and would thereby give ‘the productive (MECW 24). It also echoes Lenin’s frequent
forces . . . a range such that they will, with expressions of preference for competent bour-
increasing rapidity, outstrip the control of the geois engineers over technologically ill-
bourgeoisie’ (MECW 46, 449). informed Communist officials (e.g., LCW 27,
The intellectual and political context of 248; LCW 32, 144).
Lenin’s pronouncement was similar. It fol- Any such evolution away from politics,
lowed immediately upon an allusion to com- however, would depend, in turn, upon the
munism’s ‘internal enemy’, the basis of which eminently political step of institutionalising
he identified in the black market ‘that resides the planning process. The technical ground-
in the heart and behavior of every petty pro- work for this step was laid with the release, at
prietor’ (LCW 31, 515). This market was a the same Eighth Congress (December 1920),
‘foundation of capitalism’, and so long as it of the Plan for Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R.,
existed, there was the possibility ‘that the com- by GOELRO (State Commission for the Elec-
modity owners and capitalists [would] come trification of Russia). Lenin reaffirms his
back to Russia’ (ibid.). Electricity would pro- endorsement of this plan in a February 1921
vide the means to undermine this mentality Pravda article (LCW 32, 137–45), where he
by placing the entire national economy ‘on a pointedly criticises ‘the dabbler and the
new technical basis, that of modern large-scale bureaucrat’ who find fault with the planners’

320 V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 319–323
social origins rather than involving themselves explicitly endorsed the German model of
in any effort at implementation. He advocates state-capitalism (LCW 27, 340). In the sphere
attention to the plan’s practical aspects, given of large-scale machine production, he called
that ‘GOELRO’s is the only integrated eco- for ‘absolute and strict unity of will . . . thou-
nomic plan we can hope to have just now’ sands subordinating their will to the will of
(143). one’ (LCW 27, 268).
What was lacking in revolutionary mobili-
2. The strategic significance of electrifica- sation within the workplace would have to be
tion for Soviet industrialisation is expressed made up for in some other sphere. For indus-
institutionally, in the fact that the State Plan- trialisation as a whole, as for electrification
ning Commission (GOSPLAN) was insti- in particular, the revolutionary component
tuted simultaneously with GOELRO (Bailes would have to be found in the outcome, rather
1978, 416), and that electrification was under- than in the process. Lenin was quite explicit
stood as the infrastructure on which the plan about this in his 1914 discussion of ‘scientific
would be built up (Carr 1952, 369f ). Lenin’s management’ (Taylorism). He gave an unvar-
slogan about electrification thus prefigured nished description of how this technique
the role that would be assigned generally to impaired the scope and freedom of workers’
industrialisation – a link that was also mani- physical motions, but he concluded that a
fested in the poster-art of the period, especially workers’ government could eventually apply
the work of Gustav Klutsis (Gassner 1992, the resulting reduction in labour-time to the
316 and Plate 434). workers’ own benefit (LCW 20, 153). But
Whether referring specifically to electrifica- such accretions of leisure-time were no longer
tion or to overall economic development, on the agenda in 1918; they gave way, in
however, Lenin’s slogan posits a technicist Lenin’s guidelines, to a scenario of unre-
reduction. Comprehending communism as stricted deliberations that workers could
mere addition of Soviet power to electrifica- engage in outside of work time – combined,
tion undermines the practical-communist ele- however, ‘with iron discipline while at work’
ments and driving forces that are necessarily (LCW 27, 271). The clear priority of work-
immanent to this process. place rules, combined with the undiminished
The need to transform the production proc- length of the workday, signalled the dissipation
ess was at the core of the original Marxian of worker-participation schemes (cf. Sirianni
project (see, e.g., Marx’s critical discussion of 1982, 140).
the phenomenon of unskilled labour in Capi-
tal, Volume I (MECW 35, 355, 361, 369). The 3. As traditional – capitalist-authoritarian –
centrality of this concern had declined mark- patterns of work-relations came to be increas-
edly, however, within the Social-Democratic ingly reinforced, Communist activists came
movements of the early twentieth century. In more and more to identify the building of
countries with strong labour-unions, atten- socialism with the implementation of grand
tion shifted from control over the production projects to transform both physical surround-
process to ‘bargaining over labor’s share in the ings and social life. Implicit in both the elec-
product’ (Braverman 1974, 10). The Bolshe- trification-slogan and these other projects was
vik leadership, for its part, despite having the idea that, thanks to Soviet power, unprec-
political power, was no better placed than edented human achievements had become
were the labour-unions to challenge estab- possible (cf. Kopp 1975, Rosenberg 1984).
lished management practices. Its primary con- This was a frequent theme in the art of the
cern was the political survival of the revolution, period, dramatically symbolised by the pro-
under conditions of relative backwardness, jected Tatlin Tower (Lodder 1993, 18). Per-
civil war and foreign military intervention. haps the most extravagant visions were those
Lenin’s approach to industry, consequently, sketched by Trotsky, who imagined ‘peoples’
was to rely on already tested methods. He palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the
V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 319–323 321
bottom of the Atlantic’, and predicted that dations of Leninism (1924), on ‘Styles of
‘the average human type will rise to the heights Work’. Here, he describes Lenin as calling for
of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And a combination of ‘Russian revolutionary
above this ridge new peaks will rise’ (Trotsky sweep’ with ‘American efficiency’. Stalin char-
1925, 254, 256). acterises the latter as ‘that indomitable force
The predisposition towards grand techno- which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles;
logical visions had a long Marxist trajectory, which with its business-like perseverance
extending even to a leader such as Rosa Lux- brushes aside all obstacles; which continues at
emburg, who gave far more priority than did a task once started until it is finished . . .; and
the Bolsheviks to concerns for the direct exer- without which serious constructive work is
cise of power by workers. Referring in 1898 to inconceivable’ (FL, Section IX).
contemporary canal-building projects, she The logic of Stalin’s ‘combination’ – he
had evoked ‘what colossal forces of production does not call it a synthesis – resembles that of
lie slumbering in the womb of our society and Lenin’s electrification-slogan. ‘American effi-
how progress and culture will thrive once we ciency’ is viewed as an instrument, but as one
have cast off the fetters of capitalist enterprise’ that is ready-made for revolutionary applica-
(Luxemburg GW 1/1, 283). tion, with no need to be modified in its char-
In his science-fiction novel The Red Star acter by those who would wield it.
(1908), Alexander Bogdanov gave a specifi-
cally technological dimension to his vision of 4. If the logic of the electrification-slogan
a new society. A factory on Mars knew ‘nei- became the exclusive official approach under
ther fumes nor soot nor stench nor dust . . . Stalin, it did not yet have that status at the
here there was no raw violence of fire and time Lenin first proclaimed it. Alternative
steam; and fine and even more powerful visions still flourished at all levels of the soci-
power of electricity was the soul of this unu- ety, and, to a considerable extent, enjoyed the
sual mechanism’ (70). Unusual and previ- endorsement of Lenin himself. The most
ously unused forms of power could be taken notable expression of this counter-tendency
from their sources and even transported over was the movement to establish zapovedniki or
long distances. The economic and ecological nature-reserves, i.e., territories permanently
conditions and consequences under which protected from any form of economic devel-
they were produced could thus more easily opment. The conflict between the advocates of
be controlled for the sake of the astounding such protection (concentrated in the RSFSR
achievements they enabled – be it in pro- Education-Commissariat) and those (mainly
duction, transport, communication or in in the Agriculture- and Foreign-Trade Com-
the daily activities of individual members of missariats) who favoured unbridled exploita-
society. tion of natural resources was a struggle between
The general Soviet tendency to envisage two radically divergent conceptions of social-
taking over such forces of production without ism. The developmentalists accused the con-
giving much thought to their transformation servationists of advocating ‘science for science’s
was expressed (ironically, in view of official US sake’ and of being hostile to socialist construc-
non-recognition of the Soviet government) in tion. The conservationists, for their part,
a remarkable admiration for ‘America’ as a charged their critics with ignoring the need to
symbol of the future. As US-journalist Dor- understand virgin-nature as a precondition for
othy Thompson wrote, ‘Russia’s adoration of assuring that such construction would be car-
the machine exceeds America’s because the ried out rationally (Weiner 1988, 2).
machine is still very new in Russia and there is Lenin gave steady support to measures for
a romantic glamour about it’ (Thompson setting aside ‘protected areas’. In May 1920,
1928, 165). he signed a law establishing in the Volga delta
The most authoritative expression of this ‘the first protected territory anywhere to be
attitude was Stalin’s disquisition, in The Foun- created by a government exclusively in the
322 V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 319–323
interests of the scientific study of nature’. A Sea. This and countless other cases of environ-
subsequent law, ‘On the Protection of Monu- mental damage paled in significance in rela-
ments of Nature, Gardens, and Parks’ (Sep- tion to the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl
tember 1921), empowered the Education in which the productive force of electricity,
Commissariat (Narkompros) to designate enthusiastically greeted at the beginning of
future zapovedniki (Weiner, 28). Soviet industrialisation, showed its other face
While there is no theoretical incompatibil- as a gigantic destructive force.
ity between promoting electrification and
enforcing, by way of exception, certain nature- 5. The economic objectives of the Soviet
reserves, it remains true that the two policies régime evolved from a position of coexistence
reflect antagonistic sets of priorities. What with other objectives – whether worker-par-
allowed them to coexist during the early Soviet ticipation or nature-conservation, or the larger
years was, in part, a shared commitment to goals of communism – to a position of over-
viewing socialist construction as a project riding and almost exclusive concern. The
grounded in science. For some, this meant ‘Soviet power’ evoked in Lenin’s slogan of
stressing limitless technological possibilities; 1920 thus relinquished much of what had
for others, it meant seeking a new society-wide made it distinctive as a force that could have
level of rationality in economic deliberations. guided the process of electrification (or indus-
Certain visionary leaders – in common, per- trialisation).
haps, with ordinary people – could harbour While Soviet power, in its actual exercise,
both aspirations at once; but bureaucratic conferred notable economic and educational
pressures led to a hardening of positions at the gains upon major sectors of the population, it
intermediate (administrative) levels that were sought to make up for any deficiencies in
decisive for implementation. political support by retaining – for both work-
With the triumph of technological gigant- ers and managers – a characteristically capital-
ism, embodied in Stalin’s assumption of ist emphasis on individual material incentives
power, a dramatic change occurred even in the (cf. Nove 1961, 116, 160).
underlying ‘scientific’ consensus. Where the During the decades of Soviet rule, market
whole Marxist tradition, up through Lenin forces were to some extent side-stepped
and Trotsky, had looked to the natural sci- for many aspects of economic policy-making.
ences to provide a methodological guide for A developmentalist/productivist orientation
their understanding of society, under Stalin, a prevailed, however, from the beginning. Some
curious inversion took place, whereby suppos- of its implications were revolutionary in a
edly natural-scientific investigations now came social sense, but others were more in the tradi-
to be governed by ideology (Löwy 1984, 169). tion – evoked in the Communist Manifesto – of
It was this inversion which permitted, on the capital’s ‘constant revolutionising of produc-
one hand, the dominance of such pseudo-sci- tion, . . . everlasting uncertainty and agitation’.
entific dicta as those of Lysenko, and, on the This aspect of the Soviet project, combined
other, the trampling of any possible restraint with an increasingly depoliticised individual
upon the destruction of the natural environ- psychology (the fruit of sustained political
ment. The attack on ‘science for science’s sake’ repression), assured both an economic and a
thus produced empowered non-knowledge. cultural receptivity to Western slogans of per-
Nature-conservation is not a question of petual innovation and progress. Once Soviet
‘research for research’s sake . . . but rather, in power faltered, it had no basis for mobilising
order to make this possible – if necessary also resistance to the capitalist juggernaut.
against the researcher – nature must first be
protected’ (Schurig 1995). In the USSR, this Bibliography: K.E. Bailes 1978, Technology
insight was neglected, at the price of violent and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the
environmental destruction like the poisoning Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941, Prince-
of Lake Baikal or the drying-up of the Aral ton; A. Bogdanow 1923 [1908], Der rote Stern.
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Ein utopischer Roman, trans. H. zur Mühlen, Ber- Weiner 1988, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conser-
lin; H. Braverman 1974, Labor and Monopoly vation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia,
Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Bloomington.
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vik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 2, London;
H. Gassner 1992, ‘The Constructivists: Mod-
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Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-
Apathy in command-administrative socialism,
Garde, 1915–1932, New York; A. Kopp 1975,
Changer la vie, changer la ville, Paris; Lenin 1970, association, Chernobyl, command-administrative
Collected Works (LCW ), Moscow; C. Lodder system, command-economy, destructive forces,
1993, ‘Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propa- development of productive forces, domination of
ganda’, in M.C. Brown and B. Taylor (eds.), Art nature, ecology, energy, enthusiasm, general line,
of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture industrial revolution, innovation, labour-process
in a One-Party State, 1917–1992, Manchester; debate, lever (material/ideal), Lysenkoism, nature-
M. Löwy 1984, ‘Stalinist Ideology and Science’, conservation, October Revolution, planned econ-
in T. Ali (ed.), The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on omy, primary socialist accumulation, productive
Twentieth-Century World Politics, London; R. forces/relations of production, progress, resources,
Luxemburg 1970–5, Gesammelte Werke (GW ), revolutionary Realpolitik, Soviet society, Stalin-
Berlin/GDR; K. Marx and F. Engels 1975– ism, state-monopoly socialism, Taylorism, valoris-
2005, Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW ), ing quantity over quality.
London; A. Nove 1961, The Soviet Economy: An
Introduction, New York; W.G. Rosenberg (ed.) Apathie im befehlsadministrativen Sozialismus,
1984, Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Arbeitsprozess-Debatte, Assoziation, befehlsadmini-
Revolution in Soviet Russia, Ann Arbor; V. Schu- stratives System, Befehlswirtschaft, Destruktivkräfte,
rig 1995, ‘Ignorabimus. Nichtwissen als höchste
Energie, Enthusiamus, Fortschritt, Generallinie,
Wissensform in den Biowissenschaften am Bei-
Hebel (materielle/ideelle), industrielle Revolution,
spiel des Naturschutzes’, in Ethik und Sozialwis-
Innovation, Lyssenkismus, Naturbeherrschung,
senschaften. Streitforum für Erwägungskultur, 6.
Jg., H. 4, 515–28; C. Sirianni 1982, Workers Naturschutz, Ökologie, Oktoberrevolution, Plan-
Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Expe- wirtschaft, primäre sozialistische Akkumulation,
rience, London; J. Stalin 1924, Foundations of Produktivkräfte/Produktionsverhältnisse, Produk-
Leninism, Moscow; D. Thompson 1928, The tivkraftentwicklung, Ressourcen, revolutionäre
New Russia, New York; L. Trotsky 1925, Litera- Realpolitik, Sowjetische Gesellschaft, staatsmono-
ture and Revolution, New York; Trudy GOELRO: polistischer Sozialismus, Stalinismus, Taylorismus,
Dokumenty i Materialy, Moscow, 1960; D.R. Tschernobyl, Tonnenideologie.
Notes on Contributors
Carlos Astarita teaches at the National University of La Plata-University of Buenos Aires.

He is author of Desarrollo desigual en los orígenes del capitalismo (Universidad de Buenos
Aires, 1992) and Del feudalismo al capitalismo. Cambio social y político en Castilla, 1250–
1520 (Universitat de València, 2005).
carlos.astarita@gmail.com
Jairus Banaji is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS. He is the author of Theory as
History (Brill, 2010) and Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press,
2007).
jairus_b@rediffmail.com
Paul Blackledge teaches politics at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of
Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, forthcoming 2011), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of
History (Manchester University Press, 2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left
(Merlin Press, 2004).
P.Blackledge@leedsmet.ac.uk
Tom Bunyard lives in Brighton, England, and studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He is currently completing a PhD on Guy Debord’s theory of spectacle.
cup01tb@gold.ac.uk
Giorgio Cesarale is Research-Fellow at Sapienza-Università di Roma. He is the author of
La mediazione che sparisce. La società civile in Hegel (Carocci, 2009). He recently co-edited,
with Mario Pianta, a collection of Giovanni Arrighi’s essays entitled Capitalismo e (dis)
ordine mondiale (Manifestolibri, 2010).
giorgiocesarale@yahoo.it
George Ciccariello-Maher is Assistant-Professor of Politics at Drexel University, and
received his PhD in Political Theory from the University of California at Berkeley. His
dispatches from Venezuela have been published by Counterpunch, MRZine and Venezuela
Analysis, and he is currently completing a book-project entitled We Created Him: A People’s
History of the Bolivarian Revolution (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
gjc43@drexel.edu
Neil Davidson is a Senior Research-Fellow with the Faculty of the Humanities and Social
Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish
Nationhood (Pluto Press, 2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (Pluto Press, 2003), for
which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial-Prize and the Fletcher of Saltoun Award,
and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Haymarket Books, 2010).
neil.davidson@strath.ac.uk

326 Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 325–328
Roland Denis is an independent scholar of philosophy in Caracas. He was a militant in the

leftist current Desobediencia Popular [Popular Disobedience] in the 1980s. He has long
been active in Venezuelan popular movements, and is the author of Los Fabricantes de la
Rebelión: Movimiento Popular, Chavismo y Sociedad en los años noventa (Primera Linea,
2001) and Rebelión en proceso: dilemas del movimiento popular luego de la rebelión del 13 de
Abril (Nuestra América, 2005). Between 2002 and 2003, Denis was Vice-Minister of
Planning and Development in the Chávez government, and was later a member of the
organisation Proyecto Nuestra América-Movimiento 13 de Abril [Our America Project –
April 13 Movement].
Steve Ellner has been teaching at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela since 1977 and,
since 2008, in the government’s Misión-Sucre university-programme. He is the author of
Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Conflict and the Chavez Phenomenon (Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 2008) and is a frequent contributor to In These Times.
se2293@columbia.edu
Sujatha Fernandes is an Assistant-Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the
Graduate Centre, City University of New York. She is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban
Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press,
2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke
University Press, 2010).
sujathaf@yahoo.com
Daniel Gaido is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina. He is
the author of The Formative Period of American Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) and is
currently working on the history of German Social Democracy.
danielgaid@gmail.com
John Haldon is Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University.
He is author of The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Byzantium:
a History (Tempus, 2000), Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204
(Routledge, 1999), and The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (Verso, 1993).
jhaldon@princeton.edu
Chris Harman (1942–2009) was up until his death a leading member of the British
Socialist Workers’ Party. For many years, he edited the party’s weekly paper Socialist Worker
and, more recently, its quarterly journal of theory, International Socialism. He was the
author of Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe (Pluto Press, 1974), The Lost
Revolution: Germany 1919 to 1923 (Bookmarks, 1982), Explaining the Crisis (Bookmarks,
1984), The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (Bookmarks, 1988), Marxism and History
(Bookmarks, 1998), A People’s History of the World (Bookmarks, 1999) and Zombie
Capitalism (Bookmarks, 2009).
Geoff Kennedy is a lecturer in politics at the School of Government and International
Affairs at the University of Durham. His research interests include the history of republican-
political thought, social democracy, critical theory and Marxism. He is the author of
Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in 17th Century
England (Lexington Books, 2008).
G.Kennedy@ulster.ac.uk
Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 325–328 327
Kelvin Knight is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics
and Politics, London Metropolitan University. He is author of Aristotelian Philosophy
(Polity Press, 2007).
K.Knight@londonmet.ac.uk
Michael A. Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University
(Canada), works with the Centro Internacional Miranda in Caracas and is the author of
Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (Monthly Review Press, 2006), Following Marx:
Method, Critique and Crisis (Brill, 2009) and The Socialist Alternative: Real Human
Development (Monthly Review Press, 2010).
mlebowit@sfu.ca
John Moreland is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. He is
author of Archaeology, Theory and the Middle Ages (Duckworth, 2010) and Archaeology and
Text (Duckworth, 2001).
J.Moreland@Sheffield.ac.uk
Sara Motta is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice,
University of Nottingham. Her research-focus is the politics of subaltern-anticapitalist
resistance in Latin America. She has developed research-projects in Argentina with
unemployed-movements, Venezuela with the Urban-Land Movement and Brazil with the
Landless Workers’ Movement and Solidarity-Economy Movement. Her recent articles have
appeared in Latin American Perspectives and Latin American Politics and Society.
sara.motta@nottingham.ac.uk
Lucas Poy is a researcher at the National Research Council (Conicet), Argentina.
lucaspoy@gmail.com
Thomas Purcell received his PhD from the University of Manchester. He is currently a
research-associate at the University of Nottingham. His research includes the political
economy of development with a regional focus on Latin America, the international-political
economy of oil, urban-political economy and the potential of socio-economic alternatives
to global neoliberalism.
thomas.purcell@nottingham.ac.uk
Susan Spronk is Assistant Professor of International Development and Global Studies at
the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her work on antiprivatisation-struggles in the Andes
has been published in Latin American Perspectives, Review of Radical Political Economics and
International Labor and Working Class History, among other journals and edited volumes.
susan.spronk@uottawa.ca
Jeffery R. Webber is a Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at
Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Red October: Left-Indigenous
Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill, 2011), From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle,
Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket Books, forthcoming 2011),
and co-editor with Barry Carr of The Resurgence of Latin American Radicalism: Between
Cracks in the Empire and an Izquierda Permitida (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming
328 Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 325–328
2011). He is on the editorial collectives of Historical Materialism and Latin American

Perspectives.
j.r.webber@qmul.ac.uk
Chris Wickham is the Chichele Professor of Medieval History and a Fellow of All Souls
College, Oxford. He is author of The Inheritance of Rome (Allen Lane, 2009), Framing the
Early Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Land and Power: Studies in Italian
and European Social History, 400–1200 in Early Medieval Europe (British School at Rome,
1994).
chris.wickham@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

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Historical Materialism 19.1 (2011) 3–36 brill.

Debord, Time and History

of Debord’s archives4 and to the use of situationist texts in the promotion of

10. Debord 1995, p. 19; Debord 2006, p. 772.

Strategy and history

16. Hussey 2002, p. 353.

and this might be attempted by noting the Comments’ complex unification of

A very similar point is made in Debord’s ‘Cette mauvaise reputation . . .’ (1993),41

34. Debord 1998, p. 2, translation altered; Debord 2006, p. 1594.

Time and subjectivity

47. Debord 1974.

milieu and goal of the proletarian revolution’.51 Rather than presenting

51. Debord 1969.

60. Situationist International 2006, p. 141; Situationist International 1997, p. 141.

This will be developed below when I turn to Debord’s views on Marx’s

Image and representation

79. Debord 2004, p. 454.

Vorstellung is a mere ‘image’ – in the sense of a conceptual representation that

88. Hegel 1998, p. 37.

essence, but, rather, of the capacity for self-determination via subject-object

Spectacle and capital

103. Barrot 1979.

Consequently, according to the Lukács of 1967, ‘labour, the mediator of

109. Lukács 1971, p. xvii.

been broken down into abstractly-equivalent, functional chunks. Different

Time and contingency

self-consciously Machiavellian figure, and Bracken127 similarly describes a

moment, it also becomes particularly significant in relation to Debord’s views

these proletarian heads’.141 Consequently, whilst Debord certainly employs a

History and Hegelian Marxism

141. Situationist International 2003, p. 9, emphasis in the original, translation altered;

Cieszkowski annihilates the central aporia of the [Hegelian] system, simply by

Cieszkowski’s actual objection is in fact slightly different: he contends that

148. Debord 1995, p. 51; Debord 2006, p. 795.

156. Debord 1995, p. 48; Debord 2006, p. 792.

of an ‘external [extérieure]’164 power tasked with ‘directing the proletariat from

164. Debord 1995, p. 81; Debord 2006, p. 814.

We might now begin to return to the linkage of historical and strategic

Strategy and tactics in Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

172. Debord 2008, p. 371.

175. Debord 1998, p. 15; Debord 2006, p. 1602.

acquired on credit’187 seems to stem from Clausewitz’s analysis; the latter

anti-dogmatism. Yet, on the other, it also informs his overly subjective

Chris Wickham is one of a small number of world-class historians who have

1. Eley and Nield 2007, p. 25; Dworkin 2007, p. 76.

of Marx is infinitely preferable to the usual ignorance of, or caricatured

3. Wickham 2007, pp. 32–5.

undermines attempts, either to universalise capitalist rationality, or to suggest,

6. Wickham 2007, p. 45.

feudalism, not as a necessarily transitional mode of production, but as an

10. Wickham 2007, p. 44; Wickham 2010.

15. Wickham 1994, p. 19.

As to the concrete content of Wickham’s disagreements with Harman on

22. Wickham 2008, p. 14.

28. Engels 1968, pp. 563, 583, 587.

32. Wickham 1994, p. 44.

Addendum: Chris Harman

Framing the Early Middle Ages

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X564653

Leaving this to one side, however, the benefits of Wickham’s comparative

the nature of peasant-production, village-structures, means of exploiting the

2. Wickham 2005, pp. 5–6.

3. Wickham 2005, p. 10.

completely to be replaced by new forms of surplus-extraction and redistribution,