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The effect of branding, whereby culture becomes ‘little more than a

collection of brand extensions’ (Klein, p. 72), is part of what Weber identified
as the market’s operation ‘without regard for persons’ (p. 84). Smart provides
excellent treatments of both Hayek’s and Friedman’s praises of the market
and its benefits; and he contests those assertions with criticisms of negative
liberty, showing how the market undermines rather than promotes the auton-
omous character necessary for real choice. He also spends some time arguing
for the moral limits to markets – these limits clear in the issue of the com-
modification of human organs.
This market utopianism also, argues Smart, threatens to issue in what
Galbraith called ‘private opulence and public squalor’ (p. 137). The short-
sightedness of the current animus against the public sphere and the growth
of a ‘culture of contentment’, where the main concerns for voters centre
around protecting their current position and securing future prospects,
means a ‘loss of civitas’ (Bell) and a lack of interest in the vagabond poor.
Smart’s great synthetic effort seeks, then, to identify this retreat from
the economic and to combat the disconnection between economics and
human well-being. In this, the analytic responses of Castells and Bourdieu
are championed. The task for sociologists, that is, is ‘to provide a rigorous,
relevant and accurate account of the world’, to ‘develop the tools necessary
to expose the myths and deconstruct the doctrines and policies that have
acquired the status of self-evidence and, in turn, to reinterpret and promote
understanding of the world we live in’ (p. 173).
Smart’s identification of the tasks ahead, and the approaches taken in
the three other books under review, can perhaps be read as part of what
Gregor McLennan has called the ‘new positivity’ in the social sciences. That
is, these accounts are animated by the desire to really say something substan-
tial about the world we are living in, without relinquishing for a moment an
insistence on the inescapable importance of theory. The mode here is
engaged and reflexive, intellectually generous and non-dogmatic, wide-
ranging and poised, all signalling the apparent good health of contemporary
social theory.

Reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
email: chamsy.el-ojeili@vuw.ac.nz

Chamsy el-Ojeili, From Left Communism to Post-Modernism: Recon-

sidering Emancipatory Discourse (University Press of America, 2003)

It’s always refreshing to read a book of political theory that makes no

qualms about the practical purposes for which it has been written. As this
text’s final sentence makes clear, el-Ojeili has chosen to address the legacy
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110 Thesis Eleven (Number 81 2005)

of what he calls ‘left communism’ precisely because he believes that it can

offer some important pointers as to how ‘to leave the old world and to create
a freer and more democratic society’. In the process of making his case,
el-Ojeili provides a wide-ranging survey of anti-statist outlooks of the 20th
century. These are organized around thematic chapters that address in turn
the following questions: the apparent demise of socialist politics; the political
engagement of intellectuals; anti-statist critiques of socialist societies past and
present; the nature of revolutionary processes; and finally, the significance
of culture for radical political change.
In times like these, as el-Ojeili points out in the book’s opening pages,
the likelihood of a better way of life somehow beyond capitalism can seem
at best implausible. Already undermined in the West by the reverses of the
1980s, confidence in a brighter socialist future would be profoundly shaken
as the 1990s unfolded. While some within the self-defined anti-capitalist
camp greeted the collapse of the Soviet bloc with champagne, as Negri put
it not so long ago, others have remained disoriented by the flow of events
over the past decade and a half. For what it’s worth – which may not be
much – left academic circles have also been recast over the same period,
with a more self-doubting and hesitant stance coming to prevail over the
optimism that characterized much of the 1960s and 1970s. From Left Com-
munism to Post-Modernism is intriguing in that it does not berate the advo-
cates of what it calls ‘post-modernist leftism’ (p. 3), as is common amongst
Western Leninists (or at least amongst those Western Leninists who can still be
found). Instead, el-Ojeili sees an opening here for a fruitful encounter between
contemporary ‘left-progressive thinkers’ and those anti-statist currents long
marginalized within the Western left. Indeed, as el-Ojeili states bluntly in his
introduction, ‘the central argument of this book is that an engagement
between post-modern leftism and left communism might prove productive’.
Historically, left communism as a term has referred to a number of
heresies within the communist movement, all with their origins in the turbu-
lence that surrounded the October Revolution. In the strict sense of that term,
left communism has had a profound impact upon a small minority of militants
formed in the wake of 1968. Frequently refugees from more orthodox leftist
groups, they would find in left communism a politics that seemed decidedly
more rigorous and radical than that of Cliff, Hansen or Healy. But as one of
that generation later recalled, they would also often replicate some of the
worst dogmatisms of the Leninist sects from which many of them had fled.
Such groups continue to this day. No less than the Trotskyists and
Stalinists whom they despise, these militants have fallen prey to a zombie
politics. If that was all to tell, the story here would be a short one. But as
will be seen, the ‘left communism’ of this book’s title denotes many of the
leading strands of left libertarian politics. Within the great rebellions of the
1960s and 1970s, some of the anti-statist outlooks that el-Ojeili labels ‘left
communist’ played an important role that extended far beyond their formal
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adherents. As Primo Moroni would often point out in the Italian case, many
tendencies of left libertarian politics at that time provided an important bridge
between narrowly political enterprises and the broader world of (primarily
youth) anti-establishment counterculture(s) (as they do again today in certain
parts of the First World). Of all such groupings in the West’s 1968, the Situ-
ationists appeared particularly adept at reinventing an anti-statist politics that
both drew upon past revolutionary traditions (for example, the German
council movement) while trying to grapple with the social relations of the
present. On the other hand, while often hamstrung in their practice by absurd
vanguard pretensions, the Italian operaisti of the 1960s and 1970s similarly
developed keen insights into the changing nature of class structures and
struggles.
Let’s look at each of the book’s chapters in turn, before addressing
some of the implications that arise from el-Ojeili’s central argument. After a
brief first chapter that lays out the book’s structure, the second chapter
reviews the current disarray within the mainstream Western left. Things of
late have been especially difficult for exponents of orthodox Marxism,
Leninist or otherwise. The working class (typically understood in a reduc-
tionist manner as the ensemble of male industrial workers) no longer has
the numerical weight – nor, for that matter, the agency – within society which
had once allowed it to bring down governments (and even more signifi-
cantly, to upset established social compacts). Then there is the defeat of the
Soviet bloc, an entity which some had seen as a kind of advance over capi-
talism, however much it might have degenerated since 1917. Then again,
social democracy is hardly faring much better. In an international environ-
ment that leaves little space for Keynesian projects (unless these be military
Keynesianisms), social democratic and labour parties have struggled to differ-
entiate themselves from their traditional conservative opponents. Taking all
this into account, it’s hardly surprising that those of a progressive bent have
often looked for guidance to certain post-modernist sensibilities. After all,
the latter seem far more sensitive to the complexities of the past 25 years
(starting with the emergence of the so-called ‘new’ social movements) than
do either orthodox Marxism or social democracy. It is at this point that el-
Ojeili inserts his case for a reconsideration of left communism: ‘post-modern
leftism’, he argues, is impressive in many ways, but too often lacks the
courage of its convictions:
Fear of the dangers of totalitarianism has made leftist post-modernism reluctant
to develop its own utopian tendencies and unwilling to closely specify the
concrete possibilities for progressive social change. This fear has left post-
Marxism dominated too much by project-less pragmatics, with a far too thin
utopian dimension. (p. 31)

On the other hand, he continues, perhaps an encounter with ‘left

communism’ is exactly what such a politics needs in order to acquire some
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112 Thesis Eleven (Number 81 2005)

backbone and direction, along with some of the tools needed to construct
that ‘emancipatory discourse’ so badly needed in the early 21st century.
El-Ojeili’s definition of left communism may well be the most contro-
versial aspect of the book (something to which I will return). Here, he
uses it to bring together a number of anti-statist traditions within Marxism
and anarchism (specifically, council communism, Bordigism, anarcho-
communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Western Marxism, impossibilism and
primitivism). In his words, their common thread can be defined both nega-
tively, in critiques of the statist practice and aspirations of both Leninism and
social democracy, and conversely in ‘the commitment to popular sovereignty.
I believe that it is such a commitment, extended to the greatest degree in
political, economic, and social terms, that positively specifies the left commu-
nist tradition.’ Amongst other things, el-Ojeili suggests, these commonalities
force us to rethink the traditional divide drawn between anarchism and
Marxism, both of which are seen to contain ‘authoritarian and passé
elements’, as well as threads necessary for a contemporary anti-statist politics.
The third chapter begins with a discussion of the uncertain role of left
intellectuals in the current climate, alongside the widespread scepticism
concerning past arguments that privileged the role of political parties as
agents of social change (and, typically, the role of intellectuals within such
bodies). El-Ojeili provides a helpful overview of the sort of arguments that
many on the libertarian left, both anarchist and Marxist, have offered in the
face of claims (by Leninist and social democrat alike) that their organizations
hold some a priori claim to leadership in the realm of class politics. All this
sets the scene for a consideration of the political purpose and effectiveness
of theoretical efforts in general. El-Ojeili’s conclusions on this score – that a
‘post-Marxist but not anti-Marxian’ approach to theory, such as sketched out
by Castoriadis, is the most fruitful path to take – is thoughtful, and worthy
of further discussion (although which Castoriadis is being evoked here is not
always clear).
The fourth chapter looks at notions of community (and community
bonds) as espoused by various left libertarians. Beginning with a critique of
liberal and communitarian approaches to these questions, el-Ojeili explores
the ways in which thinkers from Kropotkin to Barrot (Dauve) have addressed
the social glue of a ‘good’ society. Once again the book’s survey of view-
points makes it a handy starting point from which to interrogate directly texts
that, once only published in small pamphlet runs (not Kropotkin, obviously,
but certainly Dauve), are now easily accessible through the World Wide Web.
The fifth chapter introduces a range of critiques of Eastern bloc
societies – in most cases underpinned by some notion of state capitalism –
followed by the various ways in which ‘left communists’ have conceived of
a classless society. Of necessity, this chapter also reviews some of the
literature around the nature of the October Revolution, and the role of Lenin
and the Bolsheviks in its downfall. Here el-Ojeili argues that many of the
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critiques of the Soviet Union and similar societies set out by their more
radical critics are
an analytical improvement on a strong post-modernism that uses the too blunt
theoretical instrument of anti-Modernity to examine ‘really existing socialism’
and that, though it is committed to democracy, has made little of the challeng-
ing idea of economic democracy. (p. 157)

The arguments in the sixth chapter are a logical consequence of those

in the fifth, addressing ‘The State, Revolution, and Socialist Democracy’. After
some broadsides against the statism of Leninism and social democracy, el-
Ojeili once again explores the common threads, as well as some of the
tensions, within the anti-statist tendencies under investigation. If he is critical
of the latter here, it is less for their advocacy of some post-revolutionary
administration based upon direct democracy, than for their vagueness when
pressed for details:
. . . whilst they have advanced on social democracy and Eurocommunism,
positions that avoid speaking of the content of socialist democracy, left commu-
nists have tended to avoid giving detailed accounts of the future social order.
The mere invocation of a councils system cannot be sufficient as proof of a
higher democratic commitment or a guarantee of the practicality of such a
scheme. (p. 203)

The book concludes with an overview of debates around culture, and

its place in efforts to undermine capitalism. This final chapter takes the same
form as its predecessors, with a critique of mainstream leftist thought
segueing into an account of left libertarian alternatives. As in certain other
parts of the book, the very different ways in which those dubbed left commu-
nists choose to tackle this problem is as striking as the resonances that spark
between them.
El-Ojeili writes clearly and with passion, and his reassertion of an anti-
statist class politics is admirable and timely. It is to the author’s credit that
he vividly conveys the dignity and integrity that connects the otherwise often-
disparate points of view gathered together here as ‘left communism’. That
such thinkers – thinkers who in many cases were also decisive political actors
– deserve to be rescued ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (E. P.
Thompson) is without question. Having said that, some important points
remain for further clarification. The three that interest me the most are the
nature of the ‘left communist’ tag as used in this book; the tenability of the
dichotomy offered there between anti-statist politics and ‘post-modern
leftism’; and finally, the degree to which the ideas presented favourably in
From Left Communism to Post-Modernism can provide more than inspiration
for future efforts to throw over both capital and the state.
As stated earlier, one of the most contentious aspects of the book is
the manner in which it brings together its various alternatives to Leninism
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114 Thesis Eleven (Number 81 2005)

and social democracy under the heading of ‘left communism’. It’s not just
that this label appears forced at times: for example, when the author refers
to ‘left communist “primitivism”’, a notion that will infuriate left communists
and primitivists alike. What emerges most strongly from el-Ojeili’s account –
as he himself acknowledges – is the often profound disagreements that
separate the various anti-statist outlooks presented here as variations upon
a broader theme. Chapter 3, for example, indicates that important fissures
separate some of those labelled left communists, with the followers of
Amadeo Bordiga singled out for their distinctive understanding of party
politics. And as the book shows, the history of Socialisme ou Barbarie is
another important case in point, with fundamentally different understandings
of revolutionary politics coming to separate the likes of Simon, Castoriadis,
and Lyotard. El-Ojeili does not try to hide these fissures, but neither does he
draw out all the implications which might proceed from these conflicts (not
all of which have stemmed from the clash of egos, or from the challenges
that face big fishes trapped inside small ponds).
There are also times when this reader at least felt rather sceptical
about another of the dichotomies that el-Ojeili seeks to establish. How
homogeneous are the ways of seeing often brought together under the
rubric of ‘post-modernism’? Or is it possible that these outlooks are much
more diffuse than their critics would allow? More to the point, might it be
possible that aspects of ‘post-modernism’ already converge with ‘left
communism’? A case in point is Felix Guattari, long hailed as one of the
central figures of post-structuralism, and an active militant of a decidedly
anti-statist bent. On a related point, From Left Communism to Post-
Modernism is in many ways a pre-Seattle book, despite its publication date
of 2003. Of course, parts of the left – above all the Leninists, many of whom
see the events of 1999–2001 as a chance to rebrand their merchandise –
have overstated the significance of the Seattle blockade while underplaying
its precursors (including the Zapatista encuentros). Still, the mass actions of
late 1999 deserve recognition as an important moment of popular challenge
to corporate and state common sense within the USA and similar countries.
They were also important in that, however briefly, they brought anti-statist
politics back into the public eye, above all in the form of anarchism (and
not only the Black Bloc). Reading this book, you wouldn’t necessarily
realize that many people (often, but by no means only, younger university-
educated people) have begun to work through and experiment with their
own blends of what el-Ojeili calls ‘post-modern leftism’ and ‘left commu-
nism’. This has even left its mark on the publishing world, with the sales
success of tomes like No Logo and Empire (the latter penned by authors
who, like their friend Guattari, happily straddle the divide between post-
modern and anti-statist, even if their own suggestions for political program
sound increasingly tepid).
In conclusion, el-Ojeili’s book is extremely useful for reminding us that
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alternatives have existed in the past to Leninism and social democracy, and
that the crisis of the latter does not in itself mean that no escape from capital’s
sway is possible. At the same time, I was left wondering whether the past
experiences of council communism and the like can offer practical guidance
for those who hope to succeed where the likes of Pannekoek or Landauer
failed. To what extent do the various tendencies discussed by el-Ojeili
provide tools honed enough to help us understand the distinctive nature of
class relations in the here and now? How, in other words, might a practical
anti-statist politics find traction within contemporary society? From Left
Communism to Post-Modernism doesn’t pretend to offer any neat solutions,
but it is required reading for anyone who takes such questions seriously.

Reviewed by Steve Wright

School of Information Management & Systems, Monash University
email: steven.wright@sims.monash.edu.au

Eyal Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the
Entrapment Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2004)

Although the phrase is never used, this subtle and knowledgeable book
is a discussion of the central question of critical theory. Chowers wants to
understand how it is that modernity, which upheld the principle of the
human making of the human world, nevertheless led to the most profound
sense that the world had separated from human action to such an extent that
men and women could experience themselves as nothing other than prison-
ers. The entrapment imagination ‘is characterized by a spirit of realism,
suggesting that social institutions are too powerful, complex, pervasive, and
fragmented for any collective action to successfully transform them’. It takes
the form of a concern with ‘mass organizations such as bureaucracies and
corporations, the nuclear family with its bourgeois mores, human and social
sciences and the institutions supported by them, and so forth. These modern
phenomena, according to entrapment theories, ingrain destructive patterns
of thinking and acting that were absent in other epochs’ (p. 3).
Chowers’ book is a study of how this peculiarly modern entrapment
imagination is played out in the work of a range of social thinkers. The book
is not a sociological study of praxis in the conditions of modernity, and it is
specifically focused on a relatively tight range of theorists and thinkers. He
identifies as ‘proto-entrapment’ theorists those who maintained that, despite
the emergence of an imprisoning world, human action could still change the
order of things. On the one hand the likes of Herder and Nietzsche point to
the transformation of the entrapping world through the cultivation of indi-
vidual authenticity and difference. On the other hand, the likes of Rousseau,
Kant, Hegel and Marx ‘believed that selves should step outward, so to speak,