Book Review: Passion and Patience: Society,History,and Revolutionary Vision

David Laibman’s Passion and Patience is a book you should read with a pen in hand. (And let me underscore—get it?—that from me, this is a very strong compliment.) This book is accessible yet challenging, focused yet wide-ranging. It resonates deeply even as it moves the reader further along. And it not infrequently evokes the most fruitful kind of disagreement. I recommend the pen, in short, because reading Passion and Patience felt, to me, like a continual conversation: with other texts and authors, with varying historical moments, with familiar assumptions, and so on. As we all can’t telephone the author at all hours, we need to underline and make notes in the margins—thereby playing our own role in the continual dialogue. Mikhail Bakhtin would be proud.

Passion and Patience takes its name, Laibman informs the reader, from US Communist leader William Z. Foster’s remark about what a person needs to be a good revolutionary. (It also seems relevant to me that Foster took the words from a chapter of John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress—emphasis here on “progress.”) The book is organized into eleven chapters. They largely consist of thematic groupings of “Editorial Perspectives,” columns Laibman (as Editor) drafted starting in 1994 for each issue of Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, the oldest continuously published American Marxist journal. ¹ In addition to providing a valuable historical overview of Science & Society, Laibman’s collection of small thought-pieces on a wide variety of topics provides a gratifying range of subject matter. He turns his curious and nimble gaze on applications and utility of historical materialism (chapters 1 and 2) and on economics and capitalism (chapters 4 and 5). He emphasizes what he calls “radical envisioning” of socialism and “revolutionary vision” (chapters 6, 8, and 9) and also the methodologies for accomplishing and understanding that vision (chapter 10). He looks back to the past and forward to the future, at nature and culture. And perhaps more importantly, he insists upon the connections among those supposedly discrete subjects.

The book is striking for the usefully portable analytical frameworks the author introduces. Indeed, before I finished reading the book, I found myself using Laibman’s efficient scaffolding to support my own ideas, both political and academic. As a popular music scholar, nothing is more useful than being able to point to what Laibman calls “capitalism’s built-in self-concealment” (57) to interrupt the romantic notion that music springs directly from musicians’ souls because “real” artists just can’t help themselves. Or, when trying to introduce the notion of historiography to undergraduates, to be able to summarize, “When we return to the basics, they change” (56). And the graceful efficiency with which Laibman lays out why economic class is “a defining relation between those performing labor, and those who control the labor process and its outcome” rather than simply another attribute of an individual, as it is often presented in non-Marxist sociology, is going to find its way into many of our classrooms. (Laibman instructively renders this leveling approach as “raceclassgendersexualorientation.”) These useful distillations, which lose none of their potency in the necessarily abbreviated form of Laibman’s book, are an intellectual boon even to someone like me, trained not in Laibman’s field (economics) but rather in history, literature, and popular culture studies.

Because of the range, all readers have a lot to learn here, even those inclined to say—as Michael Lerner put it in his blurb on the back cover—“I’m not a Marxist, but. . .” (Lerner unintentionally, I hope, invokes the much-ridiculed construction, “I’m not gay, but. . .” But can we blame him? I have often wanted to say, “I’m not dead, but I do love Shakespeare!” or “I’m not Jewish, but I do think Albert Einstein is plenty smart!”). As a historian, I was thrilled by the way the organizing principle of the book allowed me to construct a compelling and sometimes revelatory timeline for the journal itself (as well as the subject matter taken up over the years). There is much writing here that I first came to with the trepidation of a nonspecialist. This trepidation soon evolved into enlightenment, in largely thanks to the careful “maps” Laibman provides to guide nonspecialists through his case studies. (That enlightened relief notwithstanding, I admit to being delighted by Laibman’s notation of who is “allowed” to have specialized language and who isn’t, having carried out that very argument fairly steadily over the years as I ask why it’s completely acceptable for a medical journal to have specialized language, but not a historical journal. Some kind of anti-intellectualism is going on in there.) In Laibman’s case, his triumph could perhaps best be encapsulated by noting that he pays attention in this book to the form of the telling—and not just what is being told, as though the two were somehow separable and as though ideology doesn’t fly its flag to some degree every time someone writes or speaks. A particularly vivid example in the book is Laibman’s treatment of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In his reading of what many agree is Marx’s most difficult text, Laibman points out, “To grasp it fully, one must combine the skills of a 19th-century French historian, a Hegel scholar, and a profound student of Greek mythology and Shakespeare, not to mention a solid grounding in political economy” (43). It’s both challenging and comforting to think of the multiple literacies people bring to their understanding of the same text or topic, with the result that there is room for many different readers (marking up different pages) in Laibman’s dextrous approach.

Overall, in fact, Laibman’s book is productively fluid. And it is productively self-reflective. Early in the book, he points to what is one of the book’s most important strategies. In the first chapter, which is on historical materialism, Laibman refers to the Siberian Science City on Novosibirsk as a “center of learning.” To this reviewer, a looming strength of Laibman’s book is the way it spotlights, discovers, and shapes multiple “centers of learning.” Indeed, the greatest strength of Laibman’s book may well be that he acknowledges that there are, and always will be, multiple “centers of learning” in the first place! Laibman recognizes geographical centers of learning, attending to postwar Germany and Japan, Zuccotti Park, and a slogan on a wall in Madrid, to name a few. But he also attends to temporal centers of learning, comparing Norman and Roman conquests of Britain, invoking the Xia dynasty, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the intimidation of Florida voters in the last presidential election. Finally, he attends to nonphysical centers of learning, extracting meaning from a Star Trek episode, the fiction of Jack London, an apocryphal story about General Motors, and even an old joke about Marxists. Having read Passion and Patience with appreciation for its thematic clusters, I now wish someone would create a timeline to go along with it; the book has great historical sweep, particularly regarding the post-Soviet situation given that the pieces date from 1994 to 2013. It would be striking to have a visual way to see the threads of the various short pieces located in terms of each other. (I am especially intrigued by the idea of seeing cultural work stacked up alongside world events.)

That said, Laibman’s ambitiously wide range very occasionally (and not surprisingly) trips him up. Giving an engaging analysis of an episode of Star Trek, Laibman writes, “Social relations, and especially class conflict, are undertheorized. . . in the sci-fi genre overall” (209). ² This startled me, because, well, social relations, and especially class conflict, are particularly well theorized in science fiction, going back to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1895. Ursula K. Le Guin (who recently garnered a lot of attention for pointing to the dangers of capitalism in an awards speech), Iain Banks, Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Miranda Miller, Frederik Pohl, Samuel R. Delany, and many others all take up class relations and labor issues in central and constitutive ways. (Delany rather charmingly refers to himself as a “boring old Marxist.”) In film, the first feature-length science fiction movie, Metropolis (1927), is about class exploitation, as is the novel on which it is based. More recently, Moon (2009) is about alienated labor. So is Sleep Dealer (2008). Class is central to District 9 (2009) and Snowpiercer (2013) as well. On the small screen, in addition to Star Trek, there are episodes of Doctor Who, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and Alien Nation that center on labor (including enslaved labor) and class relations.

I often joke about the fact that Science & Society is generally abbreviated as S&S, because I frequently drive past a deli in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named S&S. This, I have learned over the years, is a joke about “Es!”—the Yiddish imperative for “Eat!” As it happens, I think that etymology is quite relevant here. Laibman has spread out an intellectual buffet, one with the potential to nourish his readers, with the result that they will be stronger and better able carry what they’ve gained—even if what they have gained is a stronger argument against the author—into their own work in classrooms, scholarship, day-to-day arguments, and beyond. The thinking and note-taking this multiply-engaging book spurs will inspire and assist the reader, in Laibman’s words, to “clear away conceptual cobwebs.”

Rachel RubinAmerican Studies Department, University of Massachusetts BostonE-mail: rachel.rubin@umb.edu