1. Klaus Deininger and Derek Byerlee, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can It Yield Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2010), xiv.
2. Saturnino Borras, Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford, “Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction,” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2011): 209–16, 209. For an insightful exploration of these issues, see Onur Ulas Ince, “Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention,” Rural Sociology 79.1 (2014): 104–31.
3. For a sample of historical work on the English commons, see R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1912); J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1977); J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2014). The Midnight Notes Collective has had a shifting membership over the years but has included prominent intellectuals such as George Caffentzis, Peter Linebaugh, and Silvia Federici. Some representative publications include Strange Victories (1979), No Future Notes (1979), The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse (1980) and, most pertinently, The New Enclosures (1990). For a survey and links to online publications, see https://godsandradicals.org/2015/08/21/revolution-at-the-witching-hour/.
4. Biographical and historical material on this period of Marx’s life is gleaned from Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (New York: Allen Lane, 2016), chapter 4, especially 104–21; Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (New York: Verso, 2018), especially 78–105; David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973), chapter 1, especially Part III, 36–49; Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1935), 58–85; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), chapter 3, 71–107; Francis Whelen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), chapter 2, especially 34–48.
5. Marx returned to these themes in the articles of May 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 19, 1842. He likewise makes repeated reference to the concern with censorship, and his eventual battles to keep the Rheinische Zeitung open, in his correspondence from that period. See Karl Marx, The Letters of Karl Marx, Selected and Translated with Explanatory Notes and an Introduction by Saul K. Padover (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 16–23.
6. For Marx’s evaluation of Rutenberg, see, for instance, his letter to Arnold Ruge from November 30, 1842. There, he complains that the “monstrous stupidity” of the Prussian censors had labeled Rutenberg a danger, even though “he was dangerous to nobody except the Rheinische Zeitung and himself” (ibid., 20).
7. Jones, Karl Marx, 108.
8. For some of the commentary in English, see Heinz Lubasz, “Marx’s Initial Problematic: The Problem of Poverty,” Political Studies 24.1 (March 1976): 24–42; Arthur McGovern, “Marx’s First Political Writings: The Rheinische Zeitung 1842–43,” in F. J. Adelmann, ed., Demythologising Marxism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969); David McLellan, Marx before Marxism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), chapter 4; Erica Sherover-Marcuse, Emancipation and Consciousness: Dogmatic and Dialectical Perspectives in the Early Marx (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986), chapter 1.
9. Karl Marx, “Preface,” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. J. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1911), 10.
10. Quoted in McLellan, Karl Marx, 45–46.
11. “That crises are one of the most powerful levers of political upheaval has already been pointed out in the Communist Manifesto and was expounded in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung up to and including 1848” (Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Bernstein,” January 25, 1882, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 46 [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965]).
12. “Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 [New York: Penguin, 1990], 283).
13. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 33.
14. Daniel Bensaïd, Part I, “‘Rural Pauperism’ and ‘Forest Malfeasance.’”
15. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (1969) was reviewed by Nicos Poulantzas in New Left Review, which sparked a debate across the channel between the two major figures of Marxist theory. Poulantzas would later publish his own “structuralist” account in L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme (1978). The debate was republished in Robin Blackburn, ed., Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1972), chapter 11, 238–62.
16. The most systematic analysis of the Rhineland articles in French (cited extensively by Bensaïd) is by Pierre Lascoumes and Hartwig Zander in Marx, du «vol de bois» à la critique du droit (Paris: PUF, 1982). For other useful works, see Paul Sereni, Marx: La personne et la chose (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), and Mikhail Xifaras, “Marx, justice et jurisprudence: une lecture des ‘Vols de bois,’” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 15 (2002): 63–112.
17. For an examination of similar themes relative to finance capital today, see Ivan Ascher, The Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Cambridge: Zone/MIT Press, 2016).
18. See Guy Standing, The Precariate: A New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011) and, e.g., Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Critique of Black Reason (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
19. There has been some discussion of “the multitude” as a potential twenty-first-century inheritor to the proletariat. However, it seems to me that this remains a vague promise largely lacking an account of the political-economic conditions that could effectively knit these groups together such that they might work effectively as a revolutionary force.
20. Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).
21. Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, (London: Verso, 2013), 152.
22. Daniel Bensaïd, La discordance des temps: essais sur les crises, les classes, l’histoire (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1995). An English translation of one essay from this collection can be found as Daniel Bensaïd, “The Time of Crises (and Cherries),” Historical Materialism 24.4 (2016): 9–35. As the editors of that special edition (Cinzia Arruzza and Patrick King) note, the title is a pun (crises rhymes with cerises in French) that references a song associated with the Paris Commune (“Le Temps des cerises”). See Cinzia Arruzza and Patrick King, “Introduction,” Historical Materialism 24.4 (2016): 3–8.
23. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings, edited and introduced by Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 277–300.
24. For his writings on these themes, see especially Bensaïd, La discordance des temps.
25. Enzo Traverso, “Synchronic Times: Walter Benjamin and Daniel Bensaïd,” in Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 229.
26. Daniel Bensaïd, Walter Benjamin: sentinelle messianique, à la gauche du possible (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2010).
27. For a collection of critical essays that treat Bensaïd in this “untimely” manner, see François Sabado, ed., Daniel Bensaïd, l’intempestif (Paris: La Découverte, 2012).
28. For some popular and academic uses of “kleptocracy” as a framework of analysis, see Daron Acemoglu, Thierry Verdier, and James Robinson, “Kleptocracy and Divide-and-Rule: A Mode of Personal Rule,” Journal of the European Economic Association 2.2–3 (April–May 2004): 162–92; Franklin Foer, “Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating American,” Atlantic (March 2019); National Endowment for Democracy, “The Big Question: What Is the Relationship between Kleoptocracy and Authoritarianism?” (https://www.ned.org/the-big-question-what-is-the-relationship-between-kleptocracy-and-authoritarianism/), published November 16, 2017.
29. In this way, the discussion here dovetails with recent work on neoliberal rationality, particularly that of Wendy Brown. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
30. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 12.
31. Ibid., 65.
32. Ideologically, the JCR was informed by the Trotskyism of, for instance, Pierre Frank and Ernest Mandel. Its main rival was, for many years, the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste, which was more easily co-opted into Mitterrand’s vision for the Socialist Party (hence the eventual success of Lionel Jospin).
33. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 46.
34. Ibid., 49.
35. Ibid., 76.
36. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
37. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 101.
38. See Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007), 182–92.
39. René Schérer, Guy Hocquenghem: La révolte (1946–1988) (Paris: Éditions de sextant, 2015), 25.
40. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 277.
41. On the complex relationship between “French Theory” and the American left more generally, see François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
42. As Bensaïd put it, “Latin America was a kind of twin continent in our political imaginary” (Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 95).
43. Ibid., 141.
44. Ibid., 146. Bensaïd noticed the rise of language related to “terrorism,” as well as the political productivity of the elasticity of the term as far back as the 1980s (and thus well before the acceleration and proliferation of these trends after September 11, 2001). Reflecting on this later, he wrote: “Every society develops a specific culture of violence. The age of capital and colonial conquests saw what Marx and Engels perceived right away, in relation to the civil war in the United States, as an ‘industry of massacre’. Prefiguring what today are called ‘humanitarian catastrophes’, the colonial genocides and Victorian holocaust were the shadow side of modernity” (ibid., 150)
45. The PRT was founded in 1976 through the merger of two Trotskyist groups (the International Communist League and the Mexican Morenists), later joined by the Marxist Workers’ League in 1977. During the 1980s, it was the largest far-left party to challenge the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), until it was eventually eclipsed by the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). It dissolved in 1996.
46. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 69.
47. Ibid., 210.
48. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), chapter 7 (“Synchronic Times: Walter Benjamin and Daniel Bensaïd”), 204–34, 214.
49. Cinzia Arruzza and Patrick King, “Introduction,” Historical Materialism 24.4 (2016): 3–8, 3.
50. Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, 11.
1. Karl Marx, “Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publications of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates,” Rheinische Zeitung, no. 132, May 12, 1842, Supplement (154–64), specific quotation on 161–62, in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 1 (1835–1843), trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1975).
2. Karl Marx, “Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel,” Rheinische Zeitung, no. 15, January 15, 1843, 333, in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 1 (1835–1843). [Note that although Bensaïd references an article from 1842 in the original French text, the correct citation is January 15, 1843.—Trans.]
3. Karl Marx, “Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel,” Rheinische Zeitung, no. 19, January 19, 1843, 349 in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 1 (1835–1843).
4. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859),” in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 29 (1857–1861), trans. Yuri Sdobnikov (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 261–62 [emphasis in original].
5. This presentation of the 1842 articles is inspired by Pierre Lascoumes and Hartwig Zander’s book Marx: du “vol de bois” à la critique du droit (Paris: PUF, 1984), which constitutes an irreplaceable document. On the philosophical turn of 1843–44, see in particular Stathis Kouvélakis, Philosophie et révolution (Paris: PUF, 2004) [Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (New York: Verso, 2003)], and Daniel Bensaïd, “Présentation commentaire critique de Sur la Question juive” (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2006).
6. Hans Stein, “Karl Marx und der rheinische Pauperismus des Vormärz,” in Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins, no. 14, 1932, 132. [The precise terms of this citation do not appear in the given reference and may be erroneous.—Trans.]
7. [In this section, Bensaïd uses the term “les ayants-droit,” a technical term that has no direct equivalent in English. It refers to rights holders who gain their claim on the basis of long-standing use or personal connection, and is variously translated as “beneficiary,” “entitlement claimant,” etc.—Trans.]
8. Lascoumes and Zander, Marx, 104.
9. Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung, no. 298, October 25, 1842.
10. Ibid.
11. E. P. Thompson, “Mode de domination et révolution en Angleterre,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, nos. 2–3, 1976, 133–51.
12. Lascoumes and Zander, Marx, 108.
13. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 3, 1843–1844, trans. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 146–74.
14. Lascoumes and Zander, Marx, 242.
15. Frédéric Zenati, Essai critique sur la nature juridique de la propriété (Lyon). [Unpublished material quoted by Lascoumes and Zander.—Trans.]
16. Ernst Bloch, Droit Naturel et dignité humaine (Paris: Payot, 1976). [Bensaïd does not provide a precise citation for the passage he is referencing here. However, in the context of a chapter on the “Origin of the State,” Bloch does write the following: “The primitive commune of hunter tribes did not need to be attacked by herding tribes in order to become a society of classes. Quite the contrary, the progressive, immanent division of labor itself formed the dominant class, which was ultimately made into something formidable by the state; all progress in the division of labor entailed the transformation of the state into an instrument of domination, but this process was not in the least imposed from without. Inequality in the ownership of the means of production, and nothing else, led, in an economically immanent way, to the destruction of tribal solidarity and to the formation of a political class violence” (Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt [Cambridge-London: MIT Press, 1986], 270).—Trans.]
17. Karl Polanyi, La grande transformation. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 115. English edition: The Great Transformation, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1957]), 82.
18. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 86–87.
19. Christine Fauré, La Déclaration des droits de l’homme de 1789 (Paris: Payot, 1988), 110.
20. [Maximilien de Robespierre, Recueil des Œuvres de Max. J. Robespierre (Paris: Revueillis, 1819), vol. II, 398.—Trans.]
21. Outline of the Declaration of Human Rights of April 1793, in Robespierre, Pour le bonheur et pour la liberté (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2000), 231. [Article 12 of this draft stipulates: “Society is compelled to provide for the sustenance of all its members, either by providing them work, or by providing the means of existence to those who are unable to work.” The French Constitution of October 27, 1946, establishes and defends similar rights. For instance, “Everyone shall have the obligation to work and the right to obtain employment. No one may suffer in his work or his employment because of his origin, his opinions or his beliefs . . . The Nation shall guarantee to all, and particularly to the child, the mother, and the aged worker, protection of health, material security, rest, and leisure. Any individual who, because of his or her age, his or her physical or mental condition, or because of the economic situation, shall find himself or herself unable to work, shall have the right to obtain from the community the means for a decent existence” (Preface to the Constitution of the French Republic [1946], trans. French Embassy, Press and Information Division, 610 Fifth Avenue, New York)—Trans.]
22. Daniel Guérin, La lutte des classes sous la 1e République (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). English version: Class Struggle in the First French Republic: Bourgeois and Bras Nus 1793–1795, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Pluto, 1977).
23. Florence Gauthier and Guy-Robert Ikni, “De Mably à Robespierre,” in La guerre du blé au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1988). [This collection of articles contains an important essay by E. P. Thompson: “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” originally published in the review Past & Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 76–136.—Trans.]
24. Gauthier and Ikni, “De Mably à Roberpierre,” 19.
25. Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (Paris: Folio–Gallimard, 1978), 48. English version: The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 13; new edition: Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, ed. Oliver Zunz, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).
26. Marx, Rheinische Zeitung, no. 298, October 25, 1842. Marx later adds in the same article published in the Rheinische Zeitung, no. 300, dated October 27, 1842: “In these customs of the poor class, therefore, there is an instinctive sense of right; their roots are positive and legitimate, and the form of customary right here conforms all the more to nature because up to now the existence of the poor class itself has been a mere custom of civil society, a custom that has not found an appropriate place in the conscious organization of the state.”
27. The label Levellers appeared during the agrarian revolts in 1607. It then designated the radical egalitarian wing of the English revolution of 1647–53. The Levellers found their main support among artisans, shopkeepers, simple soldiers, and independent workers. In the nineteenth century, the word served to stigmatize “communists, reds, sharers.”
28. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 139–40 and 276–77.
29. [“The Putney Debates,” in Sir William Clarke, Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, selected and edited with an Introduction by A. S. P. Woodhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 69.—Trans.]
30. [Ibid., 71.—Trans.]
31. Concerning the Levellers, see Olivier Lutaud’s Les Niveleurs, Cromwell et la République (Paris:, Archives Julliard, 1967), and Christopher Hill, La Révolution anglaise 1640 (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1993). [Christopher Hill, The English Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1959).] [This section contains a number of quotes, which appear to be paraphrases from various sections from Lutaud and Hill. No precise page numbers are given by Bensaïd.—Trans.]
32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Paris: Folio–Gallimard, 2000 [1651]), 297, 383, 482. See also Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 119, 164, 215.
33. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §127 and 128. One can find in French law a resonance to this right of necessity under the label of “necessity-right” (droit de nécessité).
34. Ibid., §100. This paragraph makes explicit reference to §75: “The nature of the state has just as little to do with the relationship of contract, whether it is assumed that the state is a contract of all with all, or a contract of all with the sovereign and the government.—The intrusion of this relationship, and of relationships concerning private property in general, into political relationships has created the greatest confusion in constitutional law [Staatsrecht] and in actuality. Just as in earlier times political rights and duties were regarded as, and declared to be, the immediate private property of particular individuals in opposition to the right of the sovereign and the state, so also in more recent times have the rights of the sovereign and the state been regarded as objects of contract and based on a contract, as the result merely of a common will and proceeding from the arbitrary will of those who have combined to form a state.—However different these two points of view may be in one respect, they do have this in common: they have transferred the determinations of private property to a sphere of a totally different and higher nature.”
35. [Bensaïd is quoting from Marx’s article from November 1, 1842, Rheinische Zeitung, no. 305.—Trans.]
36. A new, posthumous essay by Proudhon appeared in 1866, The Theory of Property, in which he exposes an irreconcilable opposition between communal right and private property from a study of the Slavic, Germanic, and Arab societies.
37. [The sans-culottes were lower-class radicals who composed the majority of revolutionary army (so named for their poor clothing, specifically, their lack of knee breeches (culottes) favored by the upper classes).—Trans.]
38. [Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French politician and historian. He was the second elected president of France and first president of the Third Republic.—Trans.]
39. [Named for the eleventh month of the French Republican calendar (Thermidor), the Thermidorians were a political faction in revolutionary France. Led by Paul Barras, Jean-Lambert Tallien, and Jospeh Fouché, they deposed Robespierre and Saint-Just in 1794 and ruled France until 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte removed them from power via the coup of the 18 Brumaire.—Trans.]
40. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1971), 220; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992), 44–45.
41. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 225; Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 62.
42. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966), 120, 265. English translation: What Is Property?, trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66, 178.
43. John Locke, Traité du gouvernement civil (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1984), 195–96. Quotation taken from the original English text: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287–88.
44. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 129; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 69. [Bensaïd’s citations are in fact a collage of different passages found in these sections of Proudhon’s text.—Trans.]
45. Proudhon, What Is Property?, 43 and 140.
46. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 148; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 85.
47. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 141; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 79.
48. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 149; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 86.
49. Paul Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 43 and 60.
50. In a letter dated January 24, 1865, addressed to J. B. von Schweitzer and edited by the Sozial-Demokrat, Marx maintains his initial eulogistic judgment on What Is Property? This work by Proudhon is “undoubtedly his best. It is epoch-making, if not because of the novelty of its content, at least because of the new and audacious way of expressing old ideas.” The style of the essay is its great achievement: “a deep and genuine feeling of indignation at the infamy of the existing order, a revolutionary earnestness—all these electrified the readers of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? and provided a strong stimulus on its first appearance” (Karl Marx, “On Proudhon” [Letter to J. B. von Schweitzer], London, January 24, 1865, Sozial-Demokrat, no. 16, February 1, 1865, in Marx & Engels, Collected Works. Volume 20, 1864–1868 [New York: International Publishers, 1985], 26–27).
51. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophie de la misère (Paris: Union générale d’éditions [UGE], 10–18, 1964), 217; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Misery, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (Benj. R. Tucker: Boston, 1888, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972). [This passage is taken from one of the two last chapters of Proudhon’s essay titled “Huitième époque—La propriété” that is absent from any English translation I have found in a published form or that I could consult online. Even the most recent English publication of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty (2015) does not include the three last chapters of the French original edition.—Trans.]
52. Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie (Paris: UGE, 10–18, 1964), 304; Karl Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 6 (1845–1848) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 134. [Translation modified.—Trans.]
53. Proudhon, Philosophie de la misère, 304. [See explanatory note re: missing passages in the standard English translation at footnote 51.—Trans.]
54. Marx, Misère de la philosophie, 361, 369, 401; Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” 137, 143, 159.
55. [Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” 132.—Trans.]
56. Proudhon, Philosophie de la misère, 430.
57. [Marx, “The Poverty of Philosophy,” 211.—Trans.]
58. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondance, vol. 7 (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1979), 12–13; English version: Karl Marx, “On Proudhon” [Letter to J. B. von Schweitzer], London, January 24, 1865, Sozial-Demokrat, nos. 16, 17, and 18 in February 1, 3, and 5, 1865. In Marx & Engels, Collected Works. Volume 20, 1864–1868, 27, 28, 29.
59. Paul Sereni asks how Marx can talk about theft and looting without referring to a normative theory of justice. If the law is intrinsically bourgeois, as The Critique of the Gotha Program asserts, would there be a metalegal norm, or the only prospect of the decline of the law?
60. Jean Peyrelevade, Le capitalisme total (Paris: Seuil, “La République des Idées,” 2005), 42. Forbes magazine’s annual rankings list 415 billionaires (in dollars) in 2006. Less than a thousand people hold $3,500 billion, double the gross domestic product of France. Between 1966 and 2001, the income of the richest 10 percent increased by 58 percent, the income of the richest 1 percent by 236 percent, and that of the richest 0.01 percent by 617 percent. Two percent of the world’s population owns half of the financial assets, while 50 percent of the poorest share 1 percent. In one year, the wealth of the four hundred richest Americans has grown by $120 billion. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has cashed in one million dollars per hour since 2004. The average American earning the median salary is expected to work twenty-nine thousand years to join the Forbes ranking. In the late 1990s, a UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) report found that some one hundred companies are “redrawing the world.” They alone held $1,800 billion abroad, employed six million workers worldwide, and had annual sales of $2,100 billion. By way of comparison, UN experts estimate that twenty-five billion dollars over ten years will be needed to provide drinking water for the 1.5 billion people who lack it, and about ten billion dollars for the budget needed for the fight against AIDS in Africa.
61. The General Agreement on Trade and Services covers thirteen sectors subdivided into 163 subsectors concerning finance, recreation, sports, education, environment, distribution, communication, and “others.”
62. Daniel Cohen, Trois leçons sur la société postindustrielle (Paris: Seuil, “La République des Idées,” 2006), 69; English edition: Three Lectures on Postindustrial Society, trans. William McCuaig (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). [Exact English equivalent not found.—Trans.]
63. Ibid.
64. Dominique Pestre, “À propos du nouveau régime de production, d’appropriation et de régulation des savoirs,” Contretemps, no. 14 (Paris: Textuel, September 2005).
65. See Alain Sokal, “Science et marché des savoirs,” Contretemps, no. 14. When the Sarkozyist minister of universities, Valérie Pécresse, sums up the spirit of her reform by announcing “the idea of giving French universities a setup better adapted to the world in which we live,” this is also what it is all about. And because this world of forced commodification has its own logic, it is necessary “that universities can freely manage their real estate, freely recruit the teachers they want, manage their credits as they see fit” (Journal du dimanche, May 27, 2007). This is quite simply a declaration of the opening of the educational market to competition.
66. Grégoire Chamayou, “Le débat américain sur liberté, innovation, domaine public,” Contretemps, no. 5 (Paris: Textuel, 2002). This article presents an excellent critical synthesis of the controversy on intellectual property and its philosophical presuppositions.
67. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 28 (1857–1861), 509; trans. Ernst Wangerman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, digital edition, 2010); and Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 29 (1857–1861), 90–91, trans. Viktor Schnittke (New York: International Publishers, 1987).
68. “Would it not be criminal, asks Proudhon, if some islanders were to repulse, in the name of property, the unfortunate victims of a shipwreck trying to reach the shore?” (What Is Property?, trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 47.) Nowadays, this has nevertheless become a daily part of the world’s miseries, in Ceuta and Melilla, on the Italian coasts, or on the border of the Rio Grande.
69. Article 5, Directive 98/44/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of July 6, 1998, on the Legal Protection of biotechnological inventions.
70. Illustrating the emergence of a g-business (g as gene), no less than twenty-eight biotechnology companies went public in the summer of 2000, including nine in Europe.
71. [These are categories used by Marx. For instance, most famously in chapter 10 of Capital, vol. 1, Marx defines Capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Capital, vol. 1 [New York: Penguin, 1990]).—Trans.]
72. Daniel Cohen, “La propriété intellectuelle, c’est le vol” [Intellectual property is theft], Le Monde, April 8, 2001: http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2001/04/08/la-propriete-intellectuelle-c-est-le-vol_4175020_1819218.html?xtmc=&xtcr=1.>.
73. Joseph Stiglitz, “Le libre accès au savoir tient du bien public mondial” [Free access to knowledge is global public good], interview with Christian Lansson, Libération, September 13, 2006: http://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2006/09/13/le-libre-acces-au-savoir-tient-du-bien-public-mondial_51119>.
74. On Christmas Eve 2005, an almost empty French parliament voted by a two-vote majority to amend legislation on all types of downloading. A step seemed to have been taken toward “the global license.” The law of March 2006 on copyright and related rights in the information society (DADVSI) imposes penalties on illegal downloading on the Internet and prohibits copies for private use. Yet it is the absence of patents that allowed the initial rise of the Internet and the proliferation of creativity that followed. Intellectual property is indeed shaking up new technologies that are themselves the fruit of highly socialized work. If software is “information that deals with information,” it is the product of interactive collective creation.
75. James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66.33 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University School of Law, winter/spring 2003): 50: “Once a new intellectual property right has been created over some informational good, the only way to ensure efficient allocation of that good is to give the rights holder still greater control over the user or consumer in the aftermarket so as to allow for price discrimination, since the only efficient monopoly is a monopoly with perfect price discrimination.” On these issues, also see the review Contretemps, no. 5 (September 2002): “Propriété et Pouvoir.”
76. Between 1993 and 2005, IBM filed more patents than any other company in the United States (twenty-six thousand in the United States and more than forty thousand worldwide).
77. Olivier Ezratty, quoted in “Une arme à double tranchant pour les entreprises,” Le Monde Interactif, November 15, 2000, 111.
78. One of the concerns with these forms of social appropriation of culture and knowledge pertains to the remuneration of researchers or authors. In the terms of competitive ideology and the race for profit, the question confuses the legitimate right to a guaranteed income with a right to private property and rent. In fact, the right to income poses the general problem of its increased socialization, in relation to the socialization of work itself, in other words an extension of wages at work in today’s social protection systems.
79. [L’Assemblée Mondiale des Élus et Citoyens pour l’Eau (AMECE) was a conference of dozens of national and international organizations that took place at the European Parliament in Brussels in 2007. It was a continuation of the first Forum Alternatif Mondial de l’Eau (FAME), which was held in 2003 in Florence.—Trans.]
80. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 130; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 70–71.
81. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
82. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, 157, 176, 228; Proudhon, What Is Property?, 94, 111, 113, 114, 150.
83. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 45.
84. [A phrase associated with the work of Hannah Arendt. For recent analysis and commentary, see Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, Samuel Moyn, and Astra Taylor, The Right to Have Rights (New York: Verso, 2018).—Trans.]
85. [On this topic, see my Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).—Trans.]
86. [E.g., “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.—Trans.]
87. “(1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. (2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (3) Abolition of all right of inheritance. (4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. (5) Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. (6) Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. (7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan” (Karl Marx—Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx—Friedrich Engels Collected Works—Volume 6 (1845–1848), 505).
88. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, chapter 32: “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation” (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 929.
89. [The term for public land under Roman law.—Trans.]
90. Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill, Éléments d’économie politique,” in Karl Marx—Frederick Engels Collected Works—Volume 3 (1843–1844), 227–28.
91. Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose, 209 and 219. Sereni disputes Engels’s reading, too narrow in his opinion, that Marx’s text would suggest only a distinction between the social ownership of the means of production versus individual ownership of products and objects of consumption. In Homo aequalis (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), Louis Dumont develops an interpretation of Marx as a consistent egalitarian liberal that goes in a similar direction.
92. This is notably the subject of Antoine Artous’s book Le Fétichisme chez Marx (Paris: Syllepse, 2006), and his critical reviews by Stavros Tombazos in Contretemps, nos. 20 and 21, 5
93. Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose. [No precise citation found.—Trans.]
94. See Jean Sylvestre, “Les progiciels de la micro-informatique comme modèle de rente” [The computer software package as an annuity model], Contretemps, no. 5 (Paris: Textuel, 2002).
95. Rifkin, false prophet that he is, noted in 2000 that thirty million Americans were already living in areas of Common Interest Development (CID), that is, in residential compounds for wealthy people who confiscated public space: “Since CIDs have no ‘public space,’ they do not have to open their communities to the public.” It’s difficult to see in this privatization of the street and space a decline of private property rather than its extension to the city and to life! [See Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: Putnam, 2000), 122.]
96. Laurent Fabius in La Revue socialiste, no.1 (spring 1999).
97. From Marx to Blum, through Blanqui, Guesde, and Jaurès, all knew very well that “property is power.” By yielding on this point, liberal socialists paved the way for their future electoral failures. The political scientist Zaki Laïdi even welcomed the fact that Jospin allegedly “privatized more than Juppé.” He even stated jubilantly, “because ownership is no longer essential,” and “the rise of pension funds in the financial regulation is there to emphasize that the hardening of competition is not incompatible with the development of a popular capitalism.” For this triumphant march of markets, public property would instead become a “handicap to the mobilization of resources” and would inevitably “disappear from the regulation of market relations” (Zaki Laïdi, Le Monde, September 1, 1998).
98. Milton Friedman, “La ‘troisième voie’ est sans issue,” Le Monde (July 20, 1999).
99. Sociologist Anthony Giddens has been the ideologue for Blairism and its “Third Way” through the publication of an eponymous book-manifesto. Bodo Hombart played an equivalent role in Germany through Gerhart Schroeder with his New Center theory (Neues Zentrum).
100. [Founded in November 2006, Les Enfants de Don Quichotte [Don Quixote’s Children] is a French social justice organization primarily concerned with combating homelessness and defending the right to habitation. See Patrick Bruneteaux, ed., Les Enfants de Don Quichotte: Sociologie d’une improbable mobilization nationale (Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2013).—Trans.]
101. [Nicolas Hulot (born 1955) is a French politician and environmental activist. He served as French minister of the environment in 2017–18. See Nicolas Hulot, Pour un pacte écologique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2006).—Trans.]
102. [The CAC 40 is a benchmark French stock-market index.—Trans.]
103. See Daniel Tanuro’s articles on europe-solidaire.org and his interview with Jean-Pascal van Ypersele in Inprecor, no. 525 (February–March 2007).
104. This is one of the reasons why research on the capabilities of photovoltaic cells hasn’t been faster. Studies published in 2006, however, state that photovoltaic cells would experimentally achieve 40 percent conversion of solar energy into electrical energy (instead of 20 percent previously).
105. [The Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières et l’Aide aux Citoyens (Attac) is a network of “alter-globalization” organizations originally founded in France in 1999. See https://www.attac.org/en.—Trans.]
106. [“Differentialism” is a far-right political and intellectual movement that asserts the essential and incommensurable differences between social groups, characterized variously in cultural, ethnic, or biological terms. It is associated with the “New Right” (Nouvelle Droite) in France, but especially Alain de Benoist and his Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne.—Trans.]
107. Chamayou, “Le débat américain liberté, innovation, domaine public,” 49.
108. [“Nos vies valent mieux que leurs profits” was the slogan used by Olivier Besancenot, candidate for the French presidency in 2002 for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR). The LCR was a Trotskyist political party and French section of the Fourth International, active from 1974 until 2009, when it was folded into the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPR). In 1966, Bensaïd was a founding member (along with Alain Krivine) of the LCR’s forerunner, the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire. He was considered a major intellectual voice for the JCR, the LCR, and the NPR alike (connected to Henri Weber), often writing in La gauche (Quebec, associated with the Fourth International) and via pamphlets and manifestos of the NPR, such as Penser Agir: pour un gauche anticapitaliste [Think, Act: For an anticapitalist Left] and Prenons parti: pour un socialisme du XXIe siècle [Let’s take part/take advantage: for a twenty-first century socialism] (coauthored with Olivier Besancenot). See “Crisis and Kleptocracy” at beginning of this book for more details.—Trans.]
1. We regret that we have not been able to publish the second article for our readers. Editorial Board of the Rheinische Zeitung.
2. [Genre paintings or genre scenes [Genrebilder] are a form of art concerned with representing ordinary people engaged in everyday activities.—Trans.]
3. [“In fact, it is a draft proposal [proposition de loi] and not a bill [projet de loi]. The draft was prepared within the state apparatus in accordance with its legislative powers. It could be solicited by petitions from cities or provincial assemblies. The bill was subsequently presented to the provincial assemblies by the State Ministry, on the orders of the king.”—D.B.]
4. [In Bensaïd’s appendix, he has added a footnote that the word in the original Rheinische Zeitung article is negokryphisch, but that he has corrected this to apocryphal, “following the suggestion proposed by Mehring.” I have not been able to find the correction to which Bensaïd is referring (presumably by Franz Mehring), but do note that in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, the word is negokryphisch. See Matx–Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band I (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), 199.—Trans.]
5. [As far as I have been able to determine, all quotes on the parliamentary debates are from Sitzungs-Protokolle des sechsten Rheinischen Provinzial-Landtags (Koblenz, 1841).—Trans.]
6. [A reference to the Criminal Code of Karl V: Die peinliche Halsgerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. Constitutio criminalis Carolina (1532).—Trans.]
7. [This point is made by Bensaïd in Part I, “‘Rural Pauperism’ and ‘Forest Malfeasance.’”—Trans.]
8. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Part I, Book 6, Chapter XII, 86. “Il y a deux genres de corruption,” says Montesquieu, “l’un lorsque le people n’observe point les lois; l’autre lorsqu’il est corrompu par les lois: mal incurable parce qu’il est dans le remède même” (Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, tome premier, livre sixième, chapitre XII. [Marx quotes the original French.—Trans.]
9. [Quoted by Bensaïd in Part I, “‘Rural Pauperism’ and ‘Forest Malfeasance.’”—Trans.]
10. [A pun on the German word Kasten, meaning both “castes” and “boxes.”—Trans.]
11. [Sie werden daher auch nur verlangt als Domänen für die menus plaisirs, damit derselbe Inhalt, der im Gesetz nach seinen vernünftigen Grenzen behandelt ist, in der Gewohnheit einen Spielraum für die Grillen und Anmaßungen wider seine vernünftigen Grenzen finde. “Spielraum für die Grillen”—room for fun? For lofty ideas (i.e., Grillen im Kopt haben)?—Trans.]
12. [The leges barbarorum was a Latin compendium of “barbaric laws”: a collection of the common law of various Germanic tribes from the fifth to the ninth centuries.—Trans.]
13. [“Here the term Vergehen [offense] has been translated well as a contravention. We assume from the lexical context that Marx used this term not in its strict legal sense, but in the more generic sense that also exists in German.”—D.B.]
14. [A pun relating the German words Hühneraugen (corns) and Augen (eyes).—Trans.]
15. [William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1.—Trans.]
16. [“When he is afraid, he is terrible.”—Trans.]
17. [In the Bensaïd appendix, after this point the remainder of the article has been edited out. It is reproduced here in its entirety.—Trans.]
18. [In the Bensaïd appendix, after this point the remainder of the article has been edited out. It is reproduced here in its entirety.—Trans.]
19. [Dodona was a town in Epirus, northern Greece. Oracles were said to interpret the will of the gods there by listening to the rustling of leaves from an oak tree planted at the temple of Zeus.—Trans.]
20. [“Nothing is more terrible than logic carried to absurdity.”—Trans.]
21. [The quote is from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reineke Fuchs, Sechster Gesang. The original lines cited by Marx are “Und es hatte sich Reineke ängstlich und traurig gebärdet, / Daß er manchen gutmütigen Mann zum Mitleid bewegte, / Lampe, der Hase, besonders war sehr bekümmert.” The English translation inserted by Clemens Palme Dutt into his edition is “Reineke had been anxious and sad, / Which excited the pity of many a good-natured man, / Lampe, the hare, especially was very distressed.” Here, I have added the lines directly from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Story of Reynard the Fox, trans. Thomas James Arnold (New York: Heritage Press, 1954), 105.—Trans.]
22. [In the appendix to Bensaïd’s work, Les Dépossédés, this article has been significantly edited for length. The entirety of the original German text is reproduced here.—Trans.]
23. [“What, at a ball, we simple folk call being wallflowers.” A reference to Evariste Parny, “La guerre des dieux anciens et modernes.”—Trans.]
24. [A reference to William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act V, Scene 4: “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”—Trans.]
25. [Feudal or, more precisely, seigniorial right.—Trans.]
26. [In the appendix to Bensaïd’s work, Les Dépossédés, this article has been significantly edited for length. The entirety of the original German text is reproduced here.—Trans.]
27. [“Divide and conquer.”—Trans.]
28. [William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1.—Trans.]
29. [A reference to events during the Spanish siege of Antwerp (1584–85).—Trans.]
30. [A reference to the Nominated Assembly and the Parliament of Saints, also known as the Barebone’s or Little Parliament. Assembled by Oliver Cromwell in 1653, it was the last Parliament to meet before Cromwell was made Lord Protector.—Trans.]
31. [Man sucht das Recht gleichsam durch den Terrorismus und die Akkuratesse, die man ihm gegen den Feind gestattet, zu entschädigen für die schlüpfrige Gewissensweitheit, mit der man es als Garantie des Angeklagten und als selbständigen Gegenstand behandelt.—Trans.]
32. [Tidong is a region in Kalimantan, part of what is now Borneo.—Trans.]
33. [The Bensaïd version begins here.—Trans.]
34. [“Marx is making an allusion here to another debate of the Province Assembly regarding a different draft bill related to hunting offenses.”—D.B.]