Marxism Beyond Marxism

Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, Rebecca Karl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136046148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare nell'arte

These essays critically rethink Marxism in the light of the disintegration of communist regimes Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Containing essays from a group of internationally distinguished writers and intellectuals, this collection addresses Marxism as a cultural-political problematic. Contending that Marxism is deeply embedded in specific cultural practices, the contributors illuminate Marxism's contribution to discussions of labour in post-industrial capitalism, to controversies surrounding compulsory heterosexuality and queer theory, and to debates about the institutionalization and academicization of the "New" Left. In examining Marxism's relationship to cultural practices, the contributors make a case for Marxism's continued relevance. By combining a diversity of perspectives, these essays demonstrate that Marxism addresses urgent needs that are often forsaken by other political and ideological practices. They show how - now more than ever - Marxism's reaffirmation can serve as a sophisticated and cunning response to the latest global developments - and travesties.

1

Actually Existing Marxism

Fredric Jameson

—In memory of Bill Pomerance

THE END OF THE SOVIET STATE has been the occasion for celebrations of the “death of Marxism” in quarters not particularly scrupulous about distinguishing Marxism itself as a mode of thought and analysis, socialism as a political and societal aim and vision, and Communism as a historical movement. The event has clearly enough left its mark on all three of these dimensions, and it can also be agreed that the disappearance of the state power associated with a given idea is likely enough to have an adverse effect on its intellectual prestige. Thus, we are told that enrollment in French courses dropped sharply when General de Gaulle resigned his presidency in 1970; but it would presumably take a more intricate argument to link this decline in intellectual fashion with any more objective deterioration in the “validity” of French itself.

In any case, the Left in the West, and Marxism in particular, was in trouble long before the wall came down or the CPUSSR was dissolved, owing to three distinct types of critique: first, a distancing from the political traditions of Marxism-Leninism at least as old as the secession of Maoism in the late 1950s; then, a philosophical “post-Marxism” dating from the late 1960s, in which an emergent new feminism joins forces with a variety of post-structuralisms in the stigmatization of such classical Marxian themes as totality and totalization, telos, the referent, production, and so forth; finally, an intellectual Right, slowly emerging in the course of the 1980s, which seizes on the dissolution of Eastern European communism to affirm the bankruptcy of socialism as such as the definitive primacy of the market.

What is more paradoxical is the way in which a remarkable form of mourning—what, alongside that well-known affect called wishful thinking, I am tempted to characterize as “wishful regret”—seized on even the least likely suspects, and stole over those currently attempting to squeeze dry the lemon of their hostility to a fantasmatic communism fully as much as over those who always claimed the Soviet Union had nothing whatsoever to do with what they fantasized as genuine socialism in the first place. It was as though, despite assurances to the contrary, in their heart of hearts they still believed that the Soviet Union was capable of evolving into genuine socialism (in hindsight, the last moment for which this seems plausible was the aborted Khrushchev experiment). It is a different kind of wishful regret from the one that saw in the existence and the structure of the communist parties themselves (particularly in the West) a flawed political instrument without which we would, however, be poorer (and at best merely in a position to evolve more rapidly into the classic two-party system of the Western liberal states).

Nor are the various national situations often given much attention in this context. The end of socialism (for we have now slipped insensibly into that version of received opinion) always seems to exclude China: perhaps the fact that it still has the highest economic growth rate in the world has led Westerners to imagine (incorrectly) that it is already capitalist. The informed will reserve an expression of real pathos for the disappearance of East Germany, which seemed for the briefest of moments to offer a chance at a radically different kind of social experiment. As for Cuba, one can only feel rage at the prospect of the systematic undermining and destruction of one of the great successful and creative revolutionary projects; but then, it is not over yet, and if Cuba offers the lesson, on the one hand, of the intensified dilemmas of “socialism in one country” within the new global system, if not, indeed, the impossibility of autonomy for any national or regional area (socialist or not), it also raises the question of social democracy, or of a mixed economy, in a backhand way by forcing us to wonder what you are supposed to call something that is supposed to have ceased being socialist, without for all that having developed into anything structurally classifiable as capitalist (the political dimension, and the qualification of parliamentary democracy, are complete red herrings here). But the new market doxa now shuts off the substantive task of theorizing the possibility of a “mixed economy,” since the latter is now most often seen negatively as the tenacious survival of older forms of governmental involvement, rather than as a specific and positive form of economic organization in its own right. But this effectively excludes the possibility of social democracy itself as an original solution, and as anything more than an impartial administrator of capital in the interests of all of its fractions (Aronowitz). In any case in recent years no social democratic governments have come to power anywhere that did not capitulate to doctrines of fiscal responsibility and budget austerity.

Nonetheless, whatever identifies itself as a purer or more authentic left than the socialist parties should also find time to mourn the end of social democracy as well. Social democracy has a historic function, and its victories should be welcomed for more fundamental reasons than the achievements of some Scandinavian countries, along with the relief most people feel when after long conservative administration its parties finally come to power (although that is itself no small thing). The social democratic program has a pedagogical value which emerges from its very failures when these are able to be perceived as structurally necessary and inevitable within the system: it thus shows what the system is incapable of achieving and confirms the principle of totality to be outlined below. That politically educative value is, to be sure, considerably diminished when social democracy capitulates of its own free will; something that should, rather, provide the demonstration that even minimal demands for economic justice cannot be achieved within the market framework by committed and “liberal,” let alone “socialist,” people and movements.

What is certain is that the collapse of the Eastern European party states (while confirming Wallerstein’s prescient assessment of them as anti-systemic, rather than as constituting the nucleus of some new world system in their own right) has been everywhere accompanied by what Christopher Hill calls “the experience of defeat.” This mood is worth generalizing well out beyond the despair that people have felt before at other moments of some palpable and absolute “end of history”; and it is also to be distinguished from the astonishing spectacle of the opportunism of so many left intellectuals, for whom the matter seems to have boiled down to the question of whether socialism works or not, like a car, so that your main concern is what to replace it with if it does not work (ecology? religion? old-style scholarly research?). Anyone who thought the dialectic was a lesson in historical patience, as well as those few remaining Utopian idealists who may still harbor the conviction that what is unrealized is better than what is real or even than what is possible, will have been too astonished to be depressed by the rush of Marxist intellectuals for the door; and no doubt surprised at themselves as well for having assumed that left intellectuals were leftists first and foremost rather than intellectuals.

But Marxism has always been distinguished from other forms of radicalism and populism by the absence of anti-intellectualism; so it is necessary to specify that the situation of the intellectual is always difficult and problematic in the absence of mass movements (something American leftists have had to confront far more often than their counterparts elsewhere); and that this kind of left opportunism is better explained by the more pervasive atmosphere of immediate returns generated by present-day society. The demands thereby encouraged are difficult to square with one of the fundamental peculiarities of human history, namely that human time, individual time, is out of synch with socioeconomic time, and in particular with the rhythms or cycles—the so-called Kondratiev waves—of the capitalist mode of production itself, with its brief windows of opportunity that open onto collective praxis, and its incomprehensible inhuman periods of fatality and insurmountable misery. One does not have to believe in the mechanical alternations of progressive and reactionary periods (although the market cycles do justify such alterations to a certain degree) to understand that, as biological organisms of a certain life span, we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing only this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the all-too-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgment of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamics of collective history and production is capable of generating some new ethic, whereby we deduce the absent totality that makes a mockery of us, without relinquishing the fragile value of our own personal experience; capable, as well, of generating new kinds of political attitudes, new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.

Meanwhile, it was not merely Wallerstein who was right about the failure of the Bolshevik and the Stalinist experiments to develop into the enclave from which a whole new global system would develop; it was a certain Marx as well (the Marx of the Grundrisse, perhaps, more than of the more triumphalist passages of Capital), who tirelessly insisted on the significance of the world market as the ultimate horizon of capitalism, and thereby on the principle, not merely that socialist revolution would be a matter of high productivity and of the most advanced development, rather than of rudimentary modernization, but also that it would have to be worldwide. The end of national autonomy, in the world system of late capitalism, seems far more radically to exclude episodic social experiments than did the modern period (where they survived, after all, for a considerable number of years). To be sure, conceptions of national autonomy and autarchy are very unpopular today indeed, and are energetically discredited by the media, who tend to associate them with the late Kim il Sung and his doctrine of ju-che. This is perhaps reassuring for countries intent, like India or Brazil, on abandoning their national autonomy; but we must not give up the attempt to imagine what the consequences of trying to secede from the world market could be and what kind of politics would be necessary to do so. For there is also the question of what secures such an implacable integration of the new world market, and this is a question whose answer, above and beyond the development of a dependence on imports and the destruction of local production, must surely today be largely cultural, as we shall see later on. This longing to be integrated into the world market is clearly enough perpetuated by world information circuits and exported entertainment (mainly from Hollywood and American television), which not only reinforce just such international consumerist styles but even more importantly block the formation of autonomous and alternative cultures based on different values or principles (or else, as in the case of the socialist countries, undermine whatever possibilities for the emergence of such an autonomous culture might have hitherto existed).

This clearly enough makes culture (and commodity reification theory) into a far more central political issue than it ever was in previous moments of capitalism; at the same time, while suggesting a relative redistribution of the significance of ideology under other more influential cultural practices, it confirms Stuart Hall’s idea of “discursive struggle” as the primary mode in which ideologies are legitimated and delegitimated today. The saturation with a culture of consumerism was accompanied by the systematic delegitimation of slogans and concepts ranging from nationalization and welfare all the way to economic rights and socialism itself, once thought to be not merely possible but also desirable, yet today universally held to be chimerical by an omnipresent cynical reason. Whether cause or effect, this delegitimation of the very language and conceptuality of socialism (and its replacement by a nauseatingly complacent market rhetoric) has clearly played a fundamental role in the current “end of history.”

But the experience of defeat, which includes all these things but transcends them all, has even more to do with the well-nigh universal feeling of powerlessness that has dawned on an immense range of social strata around the globe since the end of the 1960s, a deeper conviction as to the fundamental impossibility of any form of real systemic change in our societies. This is often expressed as a perplexity in the identification of agencies of change, of whatever type; and it takes the form of a sense of the massive permanent and non- or post-human immutability of our immeasurably complex institutions (despite their own ceaseless metamorphoses), which are most often imagined in high-or late-technological terms. The result is an instinctive belief in the futility of all forms of action or praxis, and a millennial discouragement which can account for the passionate adherence to a variety of other substitutes and alternative solutions: most notably to religious fundamentalism and nationalism, but also to the whole range of passionate involvements in local initiatives and actions (and single-issue politics), as well as the consent to the inevitable implied by the hysterical euphoria in visions of some delirious pluralism of late capitalism with its alleged authorization of social difference and “multiculturalism.” What seems important to stress here is the gap between technology and economics (just as we will observe Marxism elsewhere to insist on the distance between the political and the economic or the social). Technology is indeed something like the cultural logo or preferred code of the third stage of capitalism: in other words, it is late capitalism’s own preferred mode of self-representation, the way it would like us to think about itself. And this mode of presentation secures the mirage of autonomization and the feeling of powerlessness already described: in much the same way in which old-fashioned mechanics no longer have anything to say about automobile motors organized around computer programs. It is, however, crucial to distinguish between this technological appearance, which is of course equally a cultural phenomenon, and the socioeconomic structure of late capitalism that still corresponds to Marx’s analyses.

In saying so, however, I anticipate the substance of the present essay, which will recapitulate the relevance of Marxism for our current situation, and will thereby need to deal with the following topics: 1) what is Marxism then exactly, if the media and the various right-wing blowhards have it all wrong? 2) what is socialism in that case, and what might it be (or be thought of being) in the future? and, above all, 3) what can the relationship of both be to that supremely stigmatized traditional concept called revolution? 4) what then was communism, and what happened to it? 5) and lastly, and as a logical conclusion to all of the above, what is late capitalism and what does Marxism imply for any of the new politics that can be expected to accompany it? what new theoretical tasks does late capitalism set for the new or third-stage Marxism that has begun to emerge along with it?

I

What is Marxism? Or if you prefer, what is Marxism not? It is not, in particular, a nineteenth-century philosophy, as some people (from Foucault to Kolakowski) have suggested, although it certainly emerged from nineteenth-century philosophy (but you could just as easily argue that the dialectic is itself an unfinished project, which anticipates modes of thought and reality that have not yet come into existence even today).

In part, this answer can be justified by the assertion that Marxism is not in that sense a philosophy at all; it designates itself, with characteristic cumbersomeness, as a “unity-of-theory-and-practice” (and if you knew what that was, it would be clear that it shares this peculiar structure with Freudianism). But it may be clearest to say that it can best be thought of as a problematic: that is to say, it can be identified, not by specific positions (whether of a political, economic or philosophical type), but rather by the allegiance to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and in historic rearrangement and restructuration, along with their object of study (capitalism itself). One can therefore just as easily say that what is productive in the Marxian problematic is its capacity to generate new problems (as we will observe it to do in the most recent encounter, with late capitalism); nor can the various dogmatisms historically associated with it be traced to any particular fatal flaw in that problem-field, although it is clear that Marxists have not been any freer of the effects of intellectual reification than anyone else, and have, for example, consistently thought that base-and-superstructure was a solution and a concept, rather than a problem and a dilemma, just as they have persistently assumed that something called “materialism” was a philosophical or ontological position, rather than the general sign for an operation which we might term de-idealization, an operation both interminable in Freud’s classic sense and also unrealizable on any permanent basis and for any durable length of time (inasmuch as it is idealism which is the most comfortable assumption for everyday human thought).

The initial problematic of Marxism developed around the specificities—the structural and historical peculiarities—of the production of value in industrial capitalism: it took as its central conceptual space that phenomenon of surplus value, which offered the signal advantage of being able to be multiply transcoded. That is to say, that the problem of surplus value could be translated into a number of seemingly distinct problems and areas which corresponded to specialized languages and disciplines, many of which did not yet exist at the time in their current academic form. Surplus value could be approached, for example, through the phenomenon of commodity production, leading on into the social psychology of commodities and consumerism (or what Marx called “commodity fetishism”). It could also be tracked out into the area of money theory (banks, inflation, speculation, the stock market, not to speak of what Simmel calls the “philosophy” of money). It transforms itself, in the most astonishing of mythological mutations, into the living and breathing presence of the social classes themselves. It leads a second or shadow life under legal forms and juridical categories (and in particular in the various historical, traditional and modern forms of property relationships). Its very existence calls forth the central dilemmas of modern historiography (as the narrative of its own emergence and its various destinies).

Surplus value has most often been thought of—a thought which we might therefore have some interest in resisting or postponing—as a matter of economics, which has, for Marxism, most often taken the form of an investigation of crisis and of the falling rate of profit, and of the implications and consequences of the fundamental mechanism of capital accumulation (the economics of possible or feasible socialisms also belongs here). Last but not least, the concept would seem to authorize—but also to require—any number of theories of ideology and of culture, and to take as its ultimate horizon the world market (as the outer limit of its structural tendency to accumulate), including the dynamics of imperialism and its later equivalents (neo-colonialism, hyper-imperialism, the world system). The transmutation of the notion of surplus value into these very different disciplinary languages or fields of specialization constitutes the problematic of Marxism as an articulated conceptual space (which one could map), and can also account for the variability of any number of specifically Marxist ideologies and political programs or strategies.

The crises in the Marxian paradigm, then, have always come punctually at those moments in which its fundamental object of study—capitalism as a system—has seemed to change its spots, or to undergo unforeseen and unpredictable mutations. Since the old articulation of the problematic no longer corresponds to this new configuration of realities, the temptation is strong to conclude that the paradigm itself—after the Kuhnian fashion of the sciences—has been overtaken and outmoded (with the implication that a new one needs to be devised, if it is not already taking shape).

This is what happened in 1898, when Eduard Bernstein’s The Presuppositions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy proposed radically to “revise” Marxism in the light of its alleged failure to do justice to the complexity of the modern social classes as well as to the adaptability of contemporary capitalism. Bernstein advised the abandonment of the Hegel-derived dialectic along with the notion of revolution itself, and the consequent reorganization of Second International politics around mass democracy and the electoral process. It is very precisely these features of the first “post-Marxism” that reappeared in the 1970s of our own era, when more sophisticated versions of that diagnosis and its prescription alike begin to reappear in ever greater numbers (no single pronouncement marks this cyclical reappearance of post-Marxism as dramatically as Bernstein’s, but Hindess and Hirst’s 1977 book on Capital may be taken as a first swallow, while Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy of 1985 shows the migration in full course across the sky).

The emphases of these various post-Marxisms (whether they still attempt to cling to the named tradition or rather call for its outright liquidation) vary according to the way they stage the fate of the object it was the vocation of Marxism to analyze in the first place, namely capitalism itself. They may for example argue that classical capitalism no longer exists, and has given way to this or that “post-capitalism” (Daniel Bell’s idea of a “post-industrial society” is one of the most influential versions of this strategy), in which the features enumerated by Marx—but most particularly the dynamic of antagonistic social classes and the primacy of the economic (or of the “base” or “infrastructure”)—no longer exist (Bell’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction
• 1. Fredric Jameson, Actually Existing Marxism
• 2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marx After Marxism: History, Subalternity, and Difference
• 3. Peter Hitchcock, Workers of the World ——— !
• 4. Kathi Weeks, Subject for a Feminist Standpoint
• 5. Arif Dirlik, Mao Zedong and “Chinese Marxism”
• 6. Antonio Negri, Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today
• 7. Kenneth Surin, “The Continued Relevance of Marxism” as a Question: Some Propositions
• 8. Rosemary Hennessy, Queer Theory, Left Politics
• 9. Maurizio Viano and Vincenzo Binetti, What Is to Be Done?: Marxism and Academia
• 10. Maivân Clech Lâm, A Resistance Role for Marxism in the Belly of the Beast
• 11. Paolo Virno, Notes on the “General Intellect”
• Contributors
• Index