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Cataclysm 1914 The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics Edited by Alexander Anievas 2016 Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Contributors x The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics 1 Alexander Anievas Part 1 Kladderadatsch! Capitalism, Empire, and Imperialism in the Making and Aftermath of World War i 1 Germany, the Fischer Controversy, and the Context of War: Rethinking German Imperialism, 1880–1914 23 Geoff Eley 2 War, Defeat, and the Urgency of Lebensraum: German Imperialism from the Second Empire to the Third Reich 47 Shelley Baranowski 3 Capitalist Peace or Capitalist War? The July Crisis Revisited 66 Adam Tooze 4 Marxist Theory and the Origins of the First World War 96 Alexander Anievas 5 The Expansion of the Japanese Empire and the Rise of the Global Agrarian Question after the First World War 144 Wendy Matsumura 6 War and Social Revolution: World War I and the ‘Great Transformation’ 174 Sandra Halperin viii contents Part 2 Reconfigurations: Revolution and Culture after 1914 7 European Intellectuals and the First World War: Trauma and New Cleavages 201 Enzo Traverso 8 Art after War: Experience, Poverty and the Crystal Utopia 216 Esther Leslie 9 ‘America’s Belgium’: W.E.B. Du Bois on Race, Class, and the Origins of World War I 236 Alberto Toscano 10 World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East 258 Domenico Losurdo 11 Uneven Developments, Combined: The First World War and Marxist Theories of Revolution 280 Peter D. Thomas 12 The First World War, Classical Marxism and the End of the Bourgeois Revolution in Europe 302 Neil Davidson 13 ‘The New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky, Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I 366 Lars T. Lih Bibliography 413 Index 460 List of Contributors Alexander Anievas is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914–1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and editor of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2010). He is currently working on a manuscript (with Kerem Nisancioglu) rethinking the intersocietal origins of capitalism and the ‘rise of the West’ entitled How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015, forthcoming). He is a member of the editorial collective, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Shelley Baranowski is Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at the University of Akron (USA). She is the author of four books, the most recent of which are Nazi Empire: German Imperialism and Colonialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011) and Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004). She is currently working on a comparative and transnational study of Axis empires. Neil Davidson lectures in Sociology with the School of Political and Social Science at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000), Discovering the Scottish Revolution (2003), for which he was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012) and Holding Fast to an Image of the Past (2014). Davidson has also co-edited and contributed to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Neoliberal Scotland (2010) and The Longue Durée of the Far Right (2014). Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan. He works on modern German and European history, fascism, film and history, and historiography. His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and The Peculiarities of German History (1980, 1984) with David Blackbourn. More recent books include Forging Democracy (2002), list of contributors xi A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005), and (with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in History (2007). He is co-editor of German Colonialism in a Global Age (2014). Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945 appeared in 2013. He is writing a general history of Europe in the twentieth century and a new study of the German Right, Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in Germany, 1860–1945. Sandra Halperin is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Centre for Global and Transnational Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on global development, the historical sociology of global relations, the causes and conditions of war and peace, and Middle East politics. Her publications include: In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe, Cornell University Press, 1997; Global Civil Society and Its Limits (co-edited with Gordon Laxer), Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003; War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The Great Transformation Revisited, Cambridge University Press, 2004; Re-Envisioning Global Development, Routledge, 2013; and articles on contemporary Middle East politics, Islam, nationalism, ethnic conflict, state-building, historical sociology, and globalisation. Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also authored a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art, Nature and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), investigated the industrial manufacture of colour and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage explores the imbrication of war with the theory and practice of interwar German Marxists and avant gardists (Unkant, 2013). Her current research is on the aesthetics and politics of liquid crystals. She runs a website together with Ben Watson, www.militantesthetix.co.uk Lars T. Lih lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, but writes on Russian and socialist history on his own time. His publications include Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (1990), Lenin Rediscovered (2006), and Lenin (2011). xii list of contributors Domenico Losurdo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Urbino, Italy. He is the author of many books in Italian, German, French and Spanish. His English language book publications include Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), Heidegger and the Ideology of War (New York, NY: Humanity Books, 2004), Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011) and the forthcoming War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2014). Moreover, a lengthy volume, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, is currently being translated by Brill. Wendy Matsumura is Assistant Professor of History at Furman University where she teaches modern Japanese history. Her manuscript, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor and Theorizations of Okinawan Community is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently investigating the reconfiguration of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s by tracing flows of migrant labour between colonial and metropolitan spaces. Peter D. Thomas lectures in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), and co-editor of Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2012), and In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Leiden: Brill, 2013). He serves on the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. Adam Tooze is the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History at Yale, where he also directs International Security Studies. He is the author of Statistics and the German State 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: CUP 2001), Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin, 2006) and The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916–1931 (London: Penguin, 2014). New projects include books on ‘War in Germany from the Thirty Years War to the War on Terror’, ‘The Great Recession as History’ and a transnational account of the peasant question in the mid-twentieth century. list of contributors xiii Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, The Theatre of Production, and, with Jeff Kinkle, of Cartographies of the Absolute. He sits on the editorial board of Historical Materialism and edits The Italian List for Seagull Books. Enzo Traverso was born in Italy in 1957. He obtained his PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris in 1989 and taught political science at the University of Picardy, France, for almost twenty years. Since 2013, he is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of a dozen books, among which include Understanding the Nazi Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 1999), The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York, NY: The New Press, 2003) and Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (London: Verso, forthcoming 2015). The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics Alexander Anievas Introduction The centenary anniversary of the First World War provides a unique oppor- tunity to reconsider this critical juncture in the (re)construction of modern world politics as a space of imperial conflict, empire building and revolution- ary contestation. It offers a moment of pedagogical reflection for the left on the successes and failures of revolutionary strategies and tactics (in thought and action), the conditions that produced them, and the reactionary politics that sought to counter them.

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