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Dispossession and Totality

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10418385-10428014

1938-8020

Christopher Geary,

Political Economy and Marxism

In the early 1840s a group of peasants warily gathers wood in a forest in western Germany. Hushed and hurried, they take care not to cut any living growth, only collecting the fallen twigs and branches from the forest floor. But soon above their rustling comes the beating sound of hooves—distant, approaching, suddenly thundering—and the peasants scream and flee as they are clubbed, hacked, and trampled by a mounted gang of forest wardens. Throughout this scene—the opening of Raoul Peck’s 2017 film The Young Karl Marx—the eponymous protagonist reads in voice-over from some of his earliest published writings criticizing new laws that criminalized such customary practices of wood gathering, while in the next scene the young Marx and his fellow newspaper editors at the Rheinische Zeitung are besieged and arrested by the police because of his polemical reporting on those very laws. Peck’s decision to offer these two scenes as the inciting incidents of Marx’s revolutionary career chimes with Marx’s own later acknowledgment that reporting on the Rhineland Diet’s debates on wood theft in 1842 put him for the first time “in the embarrassing position of having to discuss material interests” and forced him to begin grappling with questions of political economy.1 In this respect, both Peck and Marx foreground the centrality of mass dispossession to the emergence of critical theory and anticapitalist struggle.Two recently published books have also brought renewed theoretical attention to dispossession, each in large part by reexamining the early development of Marxist critical theory and each with a sense of dispossession’s increasing centrality in our current conjuncture. Originally published in France in 2007 and newly translated into English by Robert Nichols, Daniel Bensaïd’s The Dispossessed returns, as Peck does, to Marx’s early writings on forest enclosure with the gambit that they still bear vital insights for our present era, which in his view has witnessed “the development of a logic of global enclosure” (TD, 39). Robert Nichols’s own study, Theft Is Property!, offers a much broader and deeper historical survey of different theorizations of dispossession, seeking to “reconstruct dispossession as a category of critical theory” that “may serve to mediate between critiques of capitalism and colonialism” among contemporary scholars and activists (TIP, 4).However, as the history of critical theory testifies, a theoretical focus on dispossession comes with a certain risk. Much of the rest of The Young Karl Marx follows the maturing radical’s formative encounter and break with the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. With the famous slogan “Property is theft!” Proudhon had attacked contemporary legitimations of the yawning inequality of modern European society, claiming that this inequality was the result not of any personal labor or primordial arrangement but of the massive dispossession of direct producers. Yet, as Marx came to argue in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), such lumpen concepts of “property” and “theft” unwittingly presuppose the very bourgeois form of property against which they are mobilized. As Marx later reflected in an 1865 obituary of Proudhon: What Proudhon was actually dealing with was modern bourgeois property as it exists today. The question of what this is could have only been answered by a critical analysis of “political economy,” embracing the totality of these property relations, considering not their legal aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as relations of production. But . . . Proudhon entangled the whole of these economic relations in the general legal concept of “property.” . . . The upshot is at best that the bourgeois legal conceptions of “theft” apply equally well to the “honest” gains of the bourgeois himself. On the other hand, since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property.2Marx’s foundational critique of Proudhon has since framed a persistent tension within radical social theory between the critical embrace of totality and attention to dispossession. This tension has often been grasped in terms of the well-worn antinomies of structure and event, logic and history, and even core and periphery. One obviously cannot ignore historical, resurgent, and new forms of expropriation that appear anterior or extraneous to capitalist production proper, but the danger remains that, in failing to grasp such processes of dispossession as moments of capitalism’s totality, one can at best offer shallow moral condemnations of them and at worst become entangled in capitalism’s very own fantasies, naturalizing its historically specific social relations, including those it represents as anterior and extraneous. At the same time, certain forms of dispossession do point to the anterior and external limits of capitalism as a social totality, particularly insofar as they testify to its contingent, uneven, and brutally unnatural emergence, and are thus the key to grasping that totality as historically specific. One could reframe the critical tension between dispossession and totality, then, in terms of the theoretical necessity of totalizing dispossession and dispossession’s detotalizing effect as an historical concept. How, in other words, does one avoid retrojecting existing capitalist social forms while retrospectively analyzing their emergence and imposition? Of the two books under review here, Nichols’s Theft Is Property! ultimately strives to defuse this tension between dispossession and totality, but Bensaïd’s Dispossessed unfortunately remains quietly riven by it.Both books join—in Bensaïd’s case, rejoins—a burgeoning critical discourse centered on dispossession that has taken shape particularly over the last two decades, drawing together theorists of neoliberalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.3 Much of what has been dubbed the “new history of capitalism” is indebted to this discourse, as have been landmark public education initiatives such as The 1619 Project and Peck’s own 2021 series, Exterminate All the Brutes. Reworking Marx’s critical account of the historic dispossessions at the root of the capitalist mode of production, the contemporary discourse on dispossession particularly emphasizes that the forms of forceful expropriation that he describes as processes of “primitive accumulation” persist beyond the transition to capitalism. A related line of argument is also often advanced—drawn on here by Bensaïd in his claims of a new “logic of global enclosure”—that these violent processes have intensified with the long-term crisis of capitalist production since the early 1970s, so that neoliberal privatization and neocolonial extraction should be understood as “new enclosures.” A key touchstone both for Bensaïd and this discourse more generally is David Harvey’s theory of “accumulation by dispossession,” which Harvey claims has become the primary form of capital accumulation in our period.4 Indeed, some theorists of “techno-feudalism” have pushed Harvey’s claim even farther to argue that we are already in a postcapitalist mode of production, a new yet regressive social totality now dominated by expropriation and rent rather than exploitation and profit.5One might say that in reckoning with the decomposition of capitalism’s traditional gravediggers—the industrial proletariat of the global North—the proponents of technofeudalism have taken it upon themselves to go ahead with the funeral in theory.6 Bensaïd doesn’t go so far in fetishizing dispossession and the digital, but there is an undeniable loosening of his critical embrace of capitalist totality. This is, in part, an unfortunate effect of his book’s formal structure, which, as Nichols notes, is self-consciously one of “asynchronic juxtaposition,” modeled on Walter Benjamin’s “constellations” and intended to provoke the reader to seek out “formal and functional analogies rather than substantive homologies” (TD, xxiv). In addition to Nichols’s substantial introduction, The Dispossessed presents Bensaïd’s relatively short essay alongside reprints of the five newspaper articles Marx wrote on forest enclosure in the Rhineland. Bensaïd’s commentary offers a close reading of these articles, situating them with respect to the development of the critique of property within European political philosophy, and then counterposing this with a discussion of intellectual property and the contemporary “offensive” of neoliberal privatization (TD, 48). The overall result, however, is a rather unsystematic allusiveness.For instance, this latter discussion of intellectual property, focused on the example of patenting genetic material as a new and paradoxical threshold for such privatization, should feel newly urgent in a moment where the ongoing obscenity of vaccine apartheid during the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed not only how intellectual property regimes appropriate vital public goods such as mRNA technology, but how this privatization reinforces capitalism’s imperialist political-economic order. Yet the formal analogy conjured between twenty-first-century gene patenting and nineteenth-century Westphalian forest enclosure tells us little in itself, and Bensaïd doesn’t add much more, particularly as the Marx on offer here has yet to discover the fundamental logic of the two cases’ substantive homology. Marx’s articles themselves are certainly worth reading, but Hegel is still very much on his feet here, and Proudhon is, as it were, arm in arm with him. Accordingly, the young Marx is still focused on the bourgeois antinomy of state and civil society rather than on grasping, let alone abolishing, the capitalist mode of production as a totality. What the book’s structure and style suggest, more than anything, is the functional analogy between Bensaïd’s condemnations of rapacious neoliberal privatization and Proudhon’s foreshortened critique of property as theft.What remains rather puzzling is that Bensaïd is obviously aware of the theoretical limitations of such rhetoric, in particular how it invokes the violent immediacy of dispossession to discursively short-circuit the mediation of capitalist totality. Bensaïd is best known in English for his in-depth study Marx for Our Times—in effect, a communist Specters of Marx—and for his memoir, An Impatient Life. Having been a leader of the May ’68 rebellion as a young student at the École Normale Supérieure, Bensaïd remained an influential radical Left organizer and Marxist thinker both in France and in Latin America until his death in 2010, committed to participating in and theorizing from active political struggles. Undoubtedly, one reason he was drawn to Marx’s early articles is that they witness Marx’s first emergence as the kind of public intellectual that Bensaïd himself exemplified. Yet he is also clearly drawn by the apparent synchronicity of the untotalized critique of property found in Proudhon and the early Marx with the detotalized discourse of the “new enclosures,” noting that “certain passages from Proudhon have a strange contemporary resonance” (TD, 33). Despite spending several pages analyzing Marx’s subsequent critique of Proudhon, it is instead this precritical resonance that he primarily amplifies: Through the debates on the theft of wood, Marx debarked in 1842 on the steep path toward the “critique of political economy,” which led him to the heart of the mysteries and wonders of capital. From the customary right of the poor, passing through the principle of a “public domain” to the common heritage of humanity, the subject matter has changed but the question endures. Who will prevail: self-interested calculation or solidarity and common interest, property and [sic] an enforceable right to existence? Our lives are worth more than their profits: “Rise up, dispossessed of the world!” (TD, 57)Bensaïd’s ambiguity here—which subject matter is now outmoded: the theft of wood or the critique of political economy?—is symptomatic of the book’s deeper fuzziness, as is the ou mistranslated as “and,” which muffles his clarion call to “the dispossessed” multitude as a new political subject by unwittingly implying that their right to exist is inseparable from that of property. This minor error thus precisely echoes Proudhon’s more profound one in presupposing property, and it ironically gives voice to the background Proudhonism within both the book and the broader critical discourse of dispossession.It could therefore be said that Nichols, Bensaïd’s otherwise masterful translator, brings his trademark conceptual precision even to a mistranslation. His introduction to The Dispossessed is by far its most valuable part, and the shortcomings of the rest of the book help clarify the stakes of Nichols’s own theoretical work. Nichols is clear-eyed about those shortcomings, noting that “there is little sense given [in Bensaïd] of how to relate different temporal-spatial conjunctures of capital and empire” and little real regard “to the agency of the ‘dispossessed’ themselves” (TD, xix–xx). Tuned in, too, to the neo-Proudhonism in much of the discourse of dispossession, Nichols even suggests that it is mimetic of contemporary privatization: “What does it say about the pervasiveness of neoliberal economic rationality that it has become difficult (if not impossible) to critique these processes in a language that is not already ‘indebted’ to them?” (TD, xxv). These problems are precisely those Nichols takes up in his own book, Theft Is Property!, and which he seeks to resolve through a critical “disaggregation” of the concept of dispossession.Proudhon’s error seems to inhere in the very term dispossession. As Nichols notes, dispossession intuitively means “a normatively objectionable loss of possession.” However, this consequently appears “parasitic upon a background system of law” in which such theft is normatively recognizable, as well as “appended to a proprietary and commoditized model of social relations” (TIP, 6). The danger here, again, is not just that critical theorists can become unwitting acolytes of Proudhon but that organizing politically around the term is potentially self-defeating. Indeed, this conceptual trap is precisely why “Indigenous peoples have often been accused of putting forward a contradictory set of claims, namely, that they are the original and natural owners of the land that has been stolen from them, and that the earth is not something in which any one person or group of people can have exclusive proprietary rights” (TIP, 6). Such charges are not merely the preserve of right-wing politicians in settler colonies seeking to rhetorically undermine native claims to land and sovereignty. A version of this conception of dispossession has been central to the development of Afro-pessimist thought, which views the possession predicated in Indigenous dispossession as parasitic on Black abjection.7 Marxists have historically also been somewhat queasy about the notion of any “original” or “natural” claim to territory when set alongside anticapitalist commitments to demystifying and abolishing property relations and the state. While this dilemma, then, does not always entail opposition to the claims of the dispossessed per se, it does pose a genuine theoretical problem, and insofar as anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles increasingly articulate themselves through the language of dispossession—from opposition to neoliberal austerity, to Indigenous and Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism, to Black-led mobilizations against the carceral state—this problem has real ideological and political stakes.The formal solution Nichols delineates is to reconceive dispossession as a “recursive” process in which “new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation.” This means, in essence, that “the dispossessed come to ‘have’ something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another” (TIP, 8). Dispossession is therefore “a form of property-generating theft” (TIP, 9). The book’s inversion of Proudhon’s slogan in its title marks this recursive logic in which theft precedes and produces property rather than presupposing it. This is why “those targeted by the process appear, contradictorily, to be demanding the return of a stolen object that is not property at all” (TIP, 114). Yet as logically compelling as this conceptual disaggregation is in itself, Nichols’s larger project is to analyze how this formal solution to the dilemma of dispossession has been developed through and within historical struggles against such dispossession. Like Bensaïd at his best, Nichols is committed not only to deriving his questions from active struggles for liberation but to the theoretical generativity of those struggles themselves.Theft Is Property! is an ambitious book, written with a rare combination of density and clarity, and Nichols proceeds with a series of further conceptual disaggregations across its chapters. First, he disentangles two “genealogies of dispossession” to trace the emergence of the concept through different struggles: on the one hand, Western European struggles against feudalism amid the emergence of capitalism; and on the other, Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, particularly Anglo-American colonization. From these different struggles emerged distinct critical traditions: the European radical tradition, out of which Marxism developed, and what Nichols terms “Indigenous structural critique.” However, given its critical embrace of capitalism as a totalizing social form, there is, in Nichols’s view, a persistent presumption within the former tradition that the settler colony is a mere extension of its own context, with the assumption that no distinct critique could emerge through Indigenous struggles against settler-colonial dispossession. Rather, such struggles are often represented as merely spiritual or melancholic, lacking any theoretical dimension. A core aim of Nichols’s book is therefore to facilitate the “conceptual translation of the terms of Indigenous critique” into the language of more canonical critical theory while avoiding its straightforward subsumption by that tradition (TIP, 12).Nichols undertakes the bulk of this work of “conceptual translation” in the book’s third chapter, which focuses on the recursive conception of dispossession and the political practices of counterdispossession developed through Indigenous structural critique in relation to colonization and land. After an extended theoretical discussion of the elements of “structural critique” and how settler-colonial dispossession combines processes of impersonal domination and intersubjective antagonism, Nichols argues that Indigenous resistance should be understood as “an enacted and embodied mode of structural critique” in dialectical opposition to those processes (TIP, 85). Specifically, he identifies and examines the two forms of such critique that developed through antisettler resistance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: an immanent form articulating the contradictions of settler rhetoric and practice, and an external form rejecting the settler form of life as a totality, increasingly from the perspective of the syncretic category of “Indigeneity.” Rendered legible in this way, the Indigenous theory and practice of counterdispossession is not an uncritical analogue or adjunct of Western critical theory. As Nichols put its rather polemically, “If dispossession is already a negation, then Indigenous critique is the negation of that negation” (TIP, 115).The definite article here is perhaps too hasty, as the fourth chapter also seeks to frame the Black radical tradition as a determinate negation of dispossession, albeit one that works through “another grammar of dispossession” centered on bodily expropriation and natal alienation (TIP, 118). In the wake of chattel slavery, Black radicals have developed their own critical conceptions of such dispossession, emphasizing continuing negations of Black personhood and the consequent incommensurability of Black subjectivity with the liberal ideal of self-ownership. Afro-pessimism has been particularly critical of this ideal and offers a powerful corrective, for example, to the rancid debates in liberal political philosophy on the “right” to self-enslavement surveyed here by Nichols. Yet, as Nichols notes, many Afro-pessimists also problematically construe the negation of Black personhood in metaphysical terms which structure an antagonism toward Indigenous critique. In counterpoint, Nichols retrieves the Black feminist concept of “antiwill,” developed particularly by Patricia Williams, as a potential “conceptual bridge” between Black and Indigenous critiques of, and struggles against, dispossession (TIP, 139). For Williams, “rituals of antiwill” are the legal, political, and rhetorical forms through which “rights to personhood and possession” are extended to racialized and colonized subjects in such a way that these rights are “fully realizable only in and through their extinguishment” (TIP, 118). Like the Indigenous dilemma of dispossession articulated by Vine Deloria Jr. as “the right only to sell,” Black antiwill thus critically describes a recursive form of dispossession in which the recognition of Black personhood qua self-ownership occurs “under conditions that demand its simultaneous negation” (TIP, 33, 141).These final two chapters are valuable intellectual histories, and the fourth chapter is especially welcome insofar as it complicates the otherwise overly neat division between Western and Indigenous critical theory. But these chapters are also, in both a standard and more literal sense, proofs of concept. The need to make these distinct critical theories of dispossession legible as such and to translate their terms into mainstream critical theory is shaped by how the more totalizing theorization of dispossession within the European radical tradition tends to make them illegible. The first two chapters of Theft Is Property! are accordingly dedicated to tracing the development of this Western critique of dispossession through to contemporary Marxian critical theory. What Nichols undertakes is at once the now-familiar move of provincializing Marxism and its claims to universality and also something much more profound: to work through the underlying theoretical tension between dispossession and totality.Offering an expansive revision of Bensaïd’s history of the critique of property, Nichols first traces how concepts such as “expropriation,” originally describing a sovereign’s legal rights over his subject’s property, were “inverted and redeployed as a tool of social criticism” by European radicals like Rousseau and Proudhon, discrediting and destabilizing the ruling class’s monopoly of landed wealth and political power by framing it as the result of an arbitrary and ignominious plundering (TIP, 25). With his critique of Proudhon, Marx then became one of the first within the European radical tradition to formally articulate the dilemma of dispossession. Yet, as foundational as this turn was to the development of Marx’s immanent critique of capital, one consequence was that the concept of dispossession became more technical and subordinated to other concepts centered on labor exploitation. Within critical theory thereafter, the question of dispossession has thus largely centered on the formation of the proletariat and the institution of the modern capital relation. By contrast, Nichols argues, “we must understand more precisely how landed property came to function as a tool of colonial domination in such a way as to generate a unique ‘dilemma of dispossession,’ which is not reducible to the one experienced by European radicals” (TIP, 28). Theoretical totalization, in other words, must not short-circuit itself by preempting historically specific mediations.In the book’s second and perhaps richest chapter, Nichols develops this point through an extended analysis of Marx’s own recursive conception of “primitive accumulation” and its critical afterlife. The concept describes the violent formation of the initial conditions for capital accumulation, particularly through the expropriation of the English peasantry and through European colonial expansion into the Americas, India, and Africa. Drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, Nichols disaggregates four key processes: “dispossession, proletarianization, market formation, and the separation of agriculture from urban industry” (TIP, 59). As Marx later clarified, the combination of these different processes in early modern England’s transition to capitalism was more conjunctural than normative, and as observed by many subsequent commentators—an impressive range of whom are surveyed here by Nichols—dispossession and its accompanying violence are not always tied to proletarianization nor are they the preserve of capitalism’s prehistory. Nonproletarianization and genocide have particularly distinguished Indigenous experiences of dispossession, especially in Anglo-American settler colonies.Nichols’s disaggregation of primitive accumulation also yields the valuable distinction between transitional forms of expropriation that produced the immediate conditions for labor exploitation and those enduring forms that are generally nonproletarianizing. With this distinction, Nichols cuts against the tendency to overextend the concept to describe persistent and resurgent forms of dispossession, as in the discourse of “new enclosures.” Though often articulated through a critique of teleological or stadial conceptions of historical development, such overextensions problematically elide the uniqueness of capitalism’s development in western Europe, which “took place in a global context in which no other capitalist societies already existed” (TIP, 69). Hence, Nichols argues, “colonial policy of the nineteenth or twentieth century is not analogous to primitive accumulation in seventeenth-century England. The spatial expansion of capital through empire does not, in fact, represent a return to capitalism’s origins so much as a succession of qualitatively unique spatio-temporal waves, simultaneously linking core and periphery” (TIP, 69–70). Indeed, this more historically specific conception of primitive accumulation is vital if capitalism as a totality is to be grasped as a historically specific mode of production. Without it, as Marx pointed out, one quickly becomes entangled in capitalism’s own fantasies of its immaculate conception and perfect identity with human nature. One irony, then, of certain theorizations of “ongoing” primitive accumulation is that they can make capitalism appear to have started nowhere and to have always been going on.Yet if neoliberal privatization must therefore be distinguished from primitive accumulation, why does settler colonialism need to be disaggregated from capitalism understood as a totality? Pressure might also be put on further disaggregations, such as Nichols’s schema of the different traditions of critical theory. Is this not at best valid only for anglophone scholarship? Is their genealogical disentangling not also premised on narrowly Eurocentric conceptions of both Marxism and the emergence of capitalism? Indeed, is the theoretical operation of conceptual disaggregation not itself somewhat at odds with the need for an immanent critique of capitalism as a totalizing social form? Nichols offers a satisfying answer to many of these qualms by analyzing the unique form of Anglo-American settler colonialism as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This historical formation and the transition to capitalism are, he affirms, “intertwined and practically co-constituting,” but they must be analytically distinguished for that coconstitutive relationship to be fully grasped (TIP, 51). As he argues, “The structure of property in land that took hold in the Anglo settler world was systematically oriented toward the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in a unique and noncontingent manner” (TIP, 35). Besides its global influence, the uniqueness of Anglo-colonial dispossession over against other colonial regimes consists above all in its legalistic character and its consequent “rituals of antiwill”: “Anglo settler states have historically faced a complicated gesture of simultaneously avowing and disavowing the rule of law, that is, of squaring their reliance on extralegal violence as constitutive to their founding and continued expansion with their self-image as distinctly free societies governed by the rule of law” (TIP, 38). In what are now the United States and Canada, for instance, this necessary appearance of legality primarily took the form of the doctrine of “preemption,” formalizing a homesteading squatter’s right to purchase “improved” land, whereas in New Zealand, the dispossession of the Maori proceeded through a highly manipulated system of individual sales of tribal land. Thus Indigenous dispossession in the Anglo settler world has been the uniform result of what one might call its peculiar dialectic of de facto and de jure. Here Nichols’s account shares many of the insights of Brenna Bhandar’s recent and more extensive work on the “racial regimes of ownership” in settler colonies.8 Indeed, besides their distinct yet intertwined historical contexts, much of the separation and tension between canonical, Indigenous, and Black critical theory in anglophone scholarship may in fact be accounted for by the specific racial regime of Anglo-American settler colonialism.What must therefore be stressed is that the logic of settler colonialism does not straightforwardly supervene on the logic of capital accumulation. Rather, the dynamic and conjunctural relation between these two logics must always be rigorously specified. The demands of totality are not a call to crude functionalism or dogmatic presumption but rather enjoin tracing out the many and multifarious mediations of its moments. To this end, Nichols reconstructs the concept of dispossession, now grasped as a moment of capitalist totality: Dispossession comes to name a distinct logic of capitalist development grounded in the appropriation and monopolization of the productive powers of the natural world in a manner that orders (but does not directly determine) social pathologies related to colonization, dislocation, and class stratification and/or exploitation, while simultaneously converting the planet into a homogeneous and universal means of production. (TIP, 83–84)Far from being at odds with a commitment to immanent critique, then, disaggregation is one of its most necessary steps—indeed, one that is too often hastily skipped and tripped over. If Nichols remains chary of the question of determination, it is because of this commitment to more precisely tracing how capitalism has mediated, and itself been shaped by, different forms of dispossession throughout its history.This remains, to be sure, a vast and open collective project, and Nichols’s disaggregated synthesis of the insights of Marxism and the Indigenous and Black traditions of the Anglosphere will be a vital guide to it, particularly as other scholars necessarily expand its geographic scope. Not that Nichols can be said to be light on bibliography here, but such a project will also undoubtedly benefit from further engagement with long-standing Marxist debates—on subsumption, uneven development, world-systems, imperialism, state derivation, the national question, the land question—as well as with a more global range of Marxisms, which are often more tightly imbricated with Black and Indigenous traditions than in the Anglo settler world. Theft Is Property! is also a salutary reminder that this project has not been and will not be advanced in theory alone but in the real movement of diverse and inevitably disparate struggles to dispossess capital and unmake its totality, moment by moment.I am grateful to Kim Sauberlich and Zachary Hicks for their insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this piece.