Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The global coffee economy and the production of genocide in Rwanda

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01436590701192975

1360-2241

Isaac Kamola,

Political Conflict and Governance

Abstract Most academic work on the genocide in Rwanda uses either a methodologically social scientific or historical approach to explain the genocide's root causes. These causal stories most often focus on ethnicity and, in doing so, understate how structured economic-material relations made the conditions for genocide possible. Turning to Louis Althusser's concept of structural causality, I form an alternative method for narrating the genocide which treats the genocide as the result of highly complex and over-determined social relations. The paper then re-examines the structural causality of the genocide, focusing on how the coffee economy intersected with the economic, cultural, state, and ideological registers at which the genocide was produced. Representing the genocide in terms of structural causality addresses how over-determined exploitative relationships—between Hutu, Tutsi, coloniser, colonised, rich, poor, farmer, évolué, northerner, southerner, coffee producer, coffee consumer, etc—produced the genocide. Notes I would like to thank Asli Çalkivik, Lisa Disch, Kevin Dunn, Bud Duvall, Stefan Kamola, Serena Laws, Govind Nayak, David Newbury, Kartik Raj, Michele Wagner, Amentahru Wahlrab, an anonymous TWQ reviewer, my co-panelists at the 2006 Western Political Science 2006 Illinois State University Graduate Student Conference Association and 2006 International Studies Association, as well as all my friends and colleagues in the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium for their kind comments and support. 1 Mamdani argues that both academic and popular accounts are ‘silent’ about the genocide's external causes. However, while Mamdani portrays the genocide as regional, I narrate it as produced at many overlapping locations including the sub-national, national, regional and international registers. To avoid constituting the genocide as a ‘local’ event, I use the phrase ‘genocide in Rwanda’ as opposed to ‘Rwandan genocide’. M Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p 8. 2 The Christian Science Monitor, for example, reported that ‘tribal bloodshed’ and ‘savage killing’ was ‘lurking around corners among muddy trains and behind thick undergrowth’, that ‘ethnic slaughter’ was erupting from ‘latent rivalries between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes’. The New York Times claimed that Habyarimana's assassination ‘reignited the centuries-old hatred’ between Hutu and Tutsi. The Washington Post referred to the violence as ‘tribal bloodletting’ and feared that Rwanda was ‘plung[ing] deep, deep into the heart of darkness … There is no ideology or religious zeal at work—just raw hatred.’ S Peterson, ‘Bloody hills of Kigali’, Courier-Mail, 13 April 1994; Peterson, ‘A Rwandan church becomes a fortress’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 April 1994, p 7; Peterson, ‘Rwanda's tragedy plays out in war-torn capital’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 April 1994, p 6; D Lorch, ‘Rwandan refugees describe horrors after a bloody trek’, New York Times, 23 April 1994, p 1; K Richburg, Rwandan leaders struggle to rebuild nation, UN report on revenge killings by Tutsis sets back attempts to bring refugees home’, Washington Post, 24 September 1994, A39; and J Parmelee, ‘Fade to blood: why the international answer to the Rwandan atrocities is indifference’, Washington Post, 24 April 1994, C3. 3 J Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 204, 4. 4 C Newbury, ‘Ethnicity and the politics of history in Rwanda’, Africa Today, 45 (1), 1998, p 19. 5 Mamdani, for example, argues that class is not useful when examining the genocide because ‘postcolonial political violence’ appears to cut ‘across social classes rather than between them’ (emphasis in original). I reintroduce an explicitly Marxist account to the study of ‘ethnic conflict’ by using Althusser's concept of ‘structured causality’ to think past the economistic determinist approaches Mamdani rightly criticises. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 19. See also Mamdani, ‘African state, citizenship and war: a case-study’, International Affairs, 78 (3), 2002, p 498. 6 R Omaar & A de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance, London: African Rights, August 1995, p 14. See also L Melvers, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, London: Verso, 2004; P Uvin, ‘Prejudice, crisis, and genocide in Rwanda’, African Studies Review, 40 (2), 1997, pp 91 – 115. 7 Bhavnani and Backer use spiral and in-group policing equilibria to track how messaging and interactions change during different ‘episodes of violence’. de Figueiredo and Weingast employ a rational choice approach to explain why ‘citizens whose primary interest is in peace choose to support bloody ethnic conflict’. Collier and Hoeffler argue that wars in Rwanda resulted from low income levels, the presence of natural resources, and high population densities. R Bhavnani & D Backer, ‘Localized ethnic conflict and genocide: accounting for differences in Rwanda and Burundi’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (3), 2000, pp 283 – 306; R de Figueiredo Jr & B Weingast, ‘The rationality of fear: political opportunism and ethnic conflict’, in B Walter & J Snyder (eds), Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp 261 – 302; and P Collier & A Hoeffler, ‘On economic causes of civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers, 50, 1998, pp 563 – 573. 8 Snyder uses the genocide to support his claim that democratisation creates instability when hijacked by nationalist elites. Valentino draws from the Rwandan case to prove that ‘mass killing’ is a strategic policy forged by elites and executed by a small group of ‘true believers’ and psychopaths. For Snyder and Jervis the genocide shows how the security dilemma explains the cause of civil wars. Gurr assembles data on 116 nations with ‘disadvantaged and politically active minorities’ (size of the minority, total population, government type, etc) to compute which variables, if present, lead to violence. J Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York: WW Norton, 2000, pp 296 – 306; B Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, pp 178 – 188; J Snyder & R Jervis, ‘Civil war and the security dilemma’, in Walter & Snyder, Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, pp 15 – 37; and T Gurr, Peoples Versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, Washington, DC: United Stated Instituted of Peace Press, 2000. 9 R Cox, ‘Social forces, states and world order: beyond International Relations theory’, in R Keohane (ed), Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp 204 – 254. 10 A Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p 7. 11 C Newbury & D Newbury, ‘A Catholic mass in Kigali: contested views of the genocide and ethnicity in Rwanda’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 33 (2 – 3), 1999, pp 294, 296, 316. For other examples of good historical contingent accounts, see A Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’: Genocide in Rwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999; J-P Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans Scott Straus, New York: Zone Books, 2003; G Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995; D Newbury, ‘Understanding genocide’, African Studies Review, 41 (1), April 1998, pp 73 – 97; and P Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998. 12 See, for example, K Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and M Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Stanford, CA: Stanford, 1999. 13 I use the term ‘threshold’ in much the same way Althusser uses ‘ruptural unity’. For Althusser a ‘ruptural unity’ is a ‘vast accumulation of contradictions’ coming at the moment of radical restructuring and revolution (as in his example of the Russian Revolution). The threshold is also a particular playing out of human activity whereby over-determined relationships fail so completely that they become fundamentally reordered. However, unlike the ‘ruptural unity’ which describes a revolutionary moment, I introduce the term threshold to mean those moments when over-determined contradictions reorder the mode of production through the mass destruction of human life. L Althusser, For Marx, trans Ben Brewster, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, pp 99 – 100. 14 R Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992, p 47. 15 Note that here the term ‘linear’ does not necessarily mean a straight line, because the ‘causal’ variables can have interactive and ‘non-linear’ effects. However, the emphasis on determinant causality nonetheless remains the same. 16 L Althusser & É Balibar, Reading Capital, Ben Brewster, trans., London & New York: Verso, 1999, pp 188 – 189, 184 (emphasis in original). 17 C Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860 – 1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, pp 11, 53; and Omaar & de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance, pp 2 – 7. 18 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 35. 19 J Kieran, ‘The origins of commercial arabica coffee production in East Africa’, African Historical Studies, 2 (1), 1969, p 52; and J de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, Wageningen: Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1986, p 209. 20 B Dinham & C Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, London: Earth Resource Research, 1983, pp 52 – 53. 21 During the postwar boom African countries grew an increasingly large portion of the world's coffee. In the 1940s countries outside Central and South America—mostly in Africa—grew 14% of the world's coffee, 19% by the early 1950s and 30% by the late 1960s. During the 1950s coffee production accelerated in Burundi and Rwanda (jointly administered) reaching 600 000 60-kg bags in 1959. RL Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee: From Juan Valdez to Yank's Diner, New York: Praeger, 1988, pp 31 – 33; and P Rourk, Coffee Production in Africa, Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, September 1975, p 21. 22 de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, pp 209 – 210. 23 Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, pp 141 – 46; and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp 93 – 98. 24 C Newbury, ‘Colonialism, ethnicity, and rural political protest: Rwanda and Zanzibar in comparative perspective’, Comparative Politics, 15 (3), 1983, p 263. 25 D Newbury & C Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, American Historical Review, 105 (3), June 2000, p 868. 26 The Hamitic Myth is not a coherent ideology but changed over time to justify different modes of labour extraction. The story of Ham was first used by Europeans to argue that Africans were subhuman and therefore could be enslaved. John Hanning Speke's version of the myth, widely disseminated throughout Rwanda, was produced a half century later to explain how Africans could be both subhuman and capable of developing the complex political structures that were then being ‘discovered’ throughout Africa. In this rendition some Africans are Hamitic (half European) and therefore superior to other ‘Negroid’ Africans. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp 79 – 87; Omaar & de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance, pp 7 – 10; and E Sanders, ‘The Hamitic hypothesis: its origin and functions in time perspective’, Journal of African History, 10 (4), 1969, pp 521 – 532. 27 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 36 – 37; and Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa, p 273. 28 By the late 1930s the older European leadership within the Rwandan Catholic Church was dying off. While figures like Fathers Classe and Hirth—‘upper class men with rather conservative political ideas’—had been highly influential in supporting the early policies of Tutsi superiority, the new generation consisted of Flemish clergy from primarily working class backgrounds. Coincidentally the Catholic Church in Rwanda became increasingly sympathetic to the Hutu cause. H Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 37 (2), 1999, p 254; Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 44; and S Hoyweghen, ‘The disintegration of the Catholic Church of Rwanda: a study of the fragmentation of political and religious authority’, African Affairs, 95, 1996, pp 380 – 381. 29 Prunier writes that, after the Second World War, ‘Social relationships became grimmer and more full of conflict at a time when, paradoxically, the neo-traditionalist forms of clientship … had become less and less a way of making money. The War had brought with it a vast expansion of the cash economy in which the Hutu had shared. The old clientship system, which was basically part of the non-monetary economy, was accordingly becoming increasingly obsolete … the old oppressive forms were perceived … more harshly as they lost their real power and as their cultural legitimacy waned.’ Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 42. 30 See I Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, Oxford: Manchester University Press, 1977, pp 239, 258; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 118; Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, pp 184 – 191; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 45. 31 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp 117, 121 – 125; and Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, pp 188, 192 – 193. 32 Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, p 239. 33 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 38. 34 Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 20. 35 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 39; and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 103 – 131. 36 Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 20 – 21. 37 de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, p 211. 38 Because Rwanda is landlocked and must transport potential cash crops to Mombasa or Dar es Salaam for export, coffee—being non-perishable—is a particularly attractive crop. However, because green coffee lasts for years in storage, large coffee growing nations like Brazil stockpile green coffee as a way to regulate coffee prices. As a result, even as African coffee production grew in terms of market share between the 1950s and 1960s, this success was largely dependent on free-riding on Brazil's policy of maintaining prices by withholding its large stockpiles from the market. By 1962 Brazil held stocks of coffee which equalled 208% of its annual production. H Laurens van der Laan, ‘Boosting agricultural exports? A “marketing channel” perspective on an African dilemma’, African Affairs, 92 (367), 1993, pp 176 – 177; and Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 118 – 120. 39 During the 1940s and early 1950s the high international price of coffee drove many governments to encourage coffee production as a source of earning foreign currency. However, because coffee trees take between four and seven years to mature, by the mid-1950s there was severe, and largely unforeseen, over-production, which caused the price of coffee to fall from $0.79/pound to $0.34/pound between 1955 and 1962. Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 118 – 120. 40 The international coffee market is bifurcated between two commercially grown species—arabica and robusta. Arabica, grown in Brazil and Colombia, is of high quality but requires considerable inputs and can only grow at certain altitudes. Robusta coffee is more durable, pest-resistant, and suitable to the low altitudes and humid conditions found in Indonesia, Vietnam and much of Africa. Robusta requires fewer inputs and less labour to produce larger, lower-valued yields. Robusta coffee, used primarily in instant coffee, became increasingly valuable during the 1950s and 1960s when demand for instant coffee peaked. Rwanda grows Arabica coffee. See SJ Carr, ‘Improving cash crops in Africa: factors influencing the productivity of cotton, coffee, and tea grown by smallholders’, World Bank, Washington, DC, 31 August 1993, p 24, 32; Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 118 – 120; and Dinham & Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, pp 52, 54. 41 The US government became interested in regulating coffee prices when Kennedy came to power. Unlike Eisenhower, who saw such an agreement as a ‘sin against free enterprise’, Kennedy advocated a coffee treaty as part of his ‘Alliance for Progress’ approach to Latin America. He also feared that the economic destabilisation in Latin America caused by low coffee prices would be exploited by Cuba. Kennedy was also swayed by the requests made by newly independent African countries to stabilise the commodity market as a path to national development. The National Coffee Association, the US coffee roasting trade group, also supported the ica, fearing that potential political instability resulting from low prices would threaten the coffee supply. Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 122 – 126. 42 ‘International Coffee Agreement’, 18 March 1968 (renegotiation of 1962 agreement), found at Australian Treaty Series #21, Australian Government Publishing Service, at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1968/21.html. 43 RH Bates, Open Economy Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p 25. 44 B Dinham & C Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, London: Earth Resources Research, 1983, p 57. 45 J Pottier, ‘Taking stock: food marketing reform in Rwanda, 1982 – 98’, African Affairs, 92 (366), 1993, p 11; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 58. 46 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 140. 47 Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, p 872. 48 Uvin, Aiding Violence; and P Verwimp, ‘Development ideology, the peasantry and genocide: Rwanda represented in Habyarimana's speeches’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2 (3), 2000, pp 325 – 361. 49 Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 112 – 113. 50 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 45; Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, pp 873 – 874; Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 112 – 113, 116; Verwimp, ‘Development ideology, the peasantry and genocide’, pp 328 – 333; and E Toussaint, ‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’, Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, 12 April 2004, at http://www.cadtm.org/imprimer.php3?id_article=611. 51 See T Sellström et al, ‘International response to conflict and genocide: lessons from the Rwanda experience’, Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 14 April 1996, at http://www.reliefweb.int/library/nordic/book1/pb020c.html. 52 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, European Journal of Political Economy, 19 (2), 2003, p 172. 53 Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda, p 21. 54 P Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine (1989) in southern Rwanda: a prelude to genocide?’, paper presented at the ‘Frontiers of Development’ economic conference, Economics Department, Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, 30 May 2002, pp 28 – 29, available at http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/eng/ew/discussionpapers/Dps02/Dps0207.pdf. 55 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, p 172. 56 Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine’, pp 23 – 24. 57 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 82. 58 Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine’, pp 22 – 24. 59 Pottier, ‘Taking stock: food marketing reform in Rwanda, 1982 – 98’, pp 21 – 29. 60 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 87 – 88. 61 Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, p 873; and Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 124. 62 M Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, in C Thomas & P Wilkin (eds), Globalization, Human Security and the African Experience, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999, p 122. 63 Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, p 256. 64 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, p 120. 65 Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 58. 66 Brazil believed it could increase its market share by abandoning the quota system and had successfully diversified its economy such that coffee represented only 7% of its exports, as opposed to 50% in 1962. D Blackwell, ‘Bust letter stirs up world coffee market’, Financial Times, 22 September 1989, p 28. The USA criticised the ica for two reasons: quotas limited the supply of increasingly popular arabica coffees in favour of undesirable robusta varietals and the ‘two-tier market’ allowed producers to sell coffee to non-treaty countries at half price. See ‘Why commodity pacts fail’, Financial Times, 4 October 1989, p 22; and R Mooney, ‘Coffee price slides to 9½-month low’, Financial Times, 27 June 1989, p 32. 67 Bates, Open-Economy Politics, p 25. 68 Under the Lomé IV convention—between the EU and 66 African, Caribbean and Pacific (acp) states—Stabex received $1.8 billion for the period 1990 – 94 to help stabilise the revenue of those states exporting agricultural goods to Europe. See ‘EU/acp: Court of Auditors criticizes Stabex system’, European Report, 7 June 1995; and Y Sharma, ‘Commodities: record payout from EEC Export Stabilization Fund’, Inter Press Service, 20 May 1992. 69 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, p 174. 70 Ibid, pp 174 – 75; and Toussaint, ‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’. 71 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, pp 121 – 122; and Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, p 256. 72 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 47, 52 – 53; A Klinghoffer, The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda, New York: New York University Press, 1998, p 20; L Melvern, A people betrayed: the role of the West in Rwanda's genocide, London & New York: Zed Books, 2000, p 38; Newbury, ‘Understanding genocide’, p 89; Newbury & Newbury, ‘A Catholic mass in Kigali’, p 305; and Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 62. 73 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 52 – 53. 74 B Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001, p 29; A Callamard, ‘French policy in Rwanda’, in H Adelman & A Suhrke (eds) The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999, pp 157 – 183; W Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993 – 1999, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, pp 104 – 106; O Otunnu, ‘An historical analysis of the invasion by the Rwanda Patriotic Army (rpa)’, in H Adelman & A Suhrke (eds) The Path of a Genocide, pp 31 – 49; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 100 – 108. 75 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 54 – 57; and M Wagner, ‘All the Bourgmestre's men: making sense of genocide in Rwanda’, Africa Today, 45 (1), 1998, p 32. 76 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 87 – 89. 77 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 113; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 185 – 186. 78 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 182. 79 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 41 – 43, 55 – 56; Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda: The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses in the Rwanda War, Human Rights Watch Arms Project, New York, January 1994, p 27; and Wagner, ‘All the Bourgmestre's men’. 80 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, p 124; Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 127; S Goose & F Smyth, ‘Arming genocide in Rwanda’, Foreign Policy, 75 (5), 1994; Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda, pp 5, 27; Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp 64 – 67; and Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 88. 81 The government was able to conceal its misuse of the loans by manipulating bank records, doctoring invoices, reselling imported gasoline, and diverting development purchases like vehicles, gasoline and other supplies toward the military. See Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp 66 – 67; and Toussaint, ‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’. 82 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 124. 83 Ben Richardson, ‘Coffee buzz lifts wartorn Rwanda’, bbc, 10 March 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3498712.stm. 84 L Althusser, ‘Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon: interview conducted by Maria Antonietta Macciocchi’, in Ben Brewster (trans), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001, p 8.