Post-Marxism

An Intellectual History

Stuart Sim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415218146
• eBook ISBN: 9781134601684
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right and considers the role played in its development by post-structuralism, postmodernism and second-wave feminism. It examines the history of dissenting tendencies within the Marxist tradition and considers what the future prospects of post-Marxism are likely to be.

1 Marxism in a ‘post-’ world

A ‘grand narrative’ theory such as Marxism has a problematical status in a cultural climate, such as ours, favouring scepticism towards grand narratives in general. To the extent that theories like poststructuralism, postmodernism and second-wave feminism represent direct challenges to traditional notions of intellectual and political authority, we now live in a world that is ‘post-’ most of what modernity stood for as a cultural movement. Marxism’s continuing commitment to material progress and universal solutions to political problems marks it out as a theory still essentially rooted in modernity and the ideals of the ‘Enlightenment project’, thus out of step with the generally sceptical – and often highly pessimistic – tone of recent intellectual enquiry. There is also the considerable problem of Marxism’s political heritage of communism to be taken into account. The excesses committed in the name of communism can be explained away in a variety of ingenious ways – Stalin as non-typical, Eastern bloc communism as a perversion of Marxist theory, communism and Marxism as related, but not identical, entities, etc.; but the possibility has to be faced that the excesses are natural consequences of the totalising imperative that is a defining characteristic of Marxism.¹ Our current intellectual, and political, climate is decidedly inimical to the whole project of totalisation on which Marxism is structured.

Marxism in the West has become progressively more embattled, and the rise of post-Marxism represents an attempt to revitalise the theory in the light of such dislocating cultural events as the break-up of the Soviet empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Post-Marxism might also be seen as a response to one too many ‘false dawns’, as in Perry Anderson’s mid-1970s’ pronouncement that, ‘The chance of a revolutionary circuit reopening between Marxist theory and mass practice, looped through real struggles of the industrial working class, has become steadily greater’.² Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but Anderson was merely the latest in a long line of Marxist commentators to claim that we were on the verge of a breakthrough into real socialism, and for many on the left the hopes of the late 1960s/early 1970s proved one false dawn too many. Since that time the traditional Western left has been on the defensive from a combination of a newly resurgent right and a rise in nationalist sentiment. The remainder of this study is concerned with analysing the likely success of that attempted revitalisation, across the major fields of intellectual enquiry, given its daunting task of rendering an absolutist theory acceptable to a pluralist-conscious world.

One of the things that will have to change is Marxism’s attitude towards pluralism, although it is possible to argue that, de facto, Marxism always has been pluralist – it just has not officially wanted to be. Alvin Gouldner has posited two major schools of Marxist thought, the ‘scientific’ and the ‘critical’; Michael Ryan has put the case for ‘three, four, or even more “marxisms”’.³ What is clear is that most of the participants are unwilling to accept that state of affairs. The history of Marxism has been riven by dispute, with various schools trying to establish a definitive reading of the theory, and little spirit of compromise in evidence in the ensuing debates. As Slavoj Zizek has commented, we note in Stalinism, for example, an

obsessive insistence that whatever the cost we must maintain the appearance: we all know that behind the scenes there are wild factional struggles going on; nevertheless we must keep at any price the appearance of Party unity . . . This appearance is essential: if it were to be destroyed – if somebody were publicly to pronounce the obvious truth that ‘the emperor is naked’ (that nobody takes the ruling ideology seriously ...) – in a sense the whole system would fall apart.⁴

The rise of post-Marxism signals a determination to bring that hidden history of pluralism to the surface; to reveal what lies behind the facade of unity.

It is not just our intellectual and political climate that is inimical to Marxism, a series of radical cultural changes have occurred (most usually grouped under the heading of ‘postmodernism’) that have left Marxism at a loss as to how to respond effectively. One of the most striking features of such a world has been the decline in importance, both socially and politically, of the working class. A series of causal factors can be identified behind this phenomenon: the shift towards a post-industrial society since the post-war period, and the rise of the political right across Western Europe and America between the 1970s and the 1990s – with its clear agenda to diminish trade union power as much as possible – being amongst the most insidious. Various commentators have remarked on the phenomenon, which has obvious implications for the growth of a post-Marxist consciousness, given the critical role that classical Marxism had allotted the working class as the ‘gravediggers of capitalism’. Any decline in the power of that class has to give Marxist theorists serious pause for thought. Some theorists have seen this decline as irreversible and the signal for a realignment of socialist policies, André Gorz being a case in point. Farewell to the Working Class (originally published in France in 1980) ushered in the 1980s – a decade of some considerable trial for the left in Western Europe with right-wing governments such as Margaret Thatcher’s in Britain appearing to have a stranglehold on the political process – with the provocative argument that the working class no longer formed an unequivocal reference point for socialist action. Not only that, but it was unlikely ever again to do so. Gorz claims that the left has no alternative but to face up to some unpalatable facts:

A society based on mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes. It consists of a growing mass of the permanently unemployed on one hand, an aristocracy of tenured workers on the other, and, between them, a proletariat of temporary workers carrying out the least skilled and most unpleasant types of work.⁵

This is a less than congenial scenario for Marxism, but Gorz argues that we can turn the situation to account if we are willing to rethink the theoretical base to our socialism. He puts the case for the emancipatory potential of the abolition of work, seeing the way in which this process (an inevitable one in his opinion, given the new technology at our disposal) is handled as the ground for political struggle in the immediate future: ‘The choice is not between the abolition of work and the re-establishment of well-rounded trades in which everyone can find satisfaction. The choice is: either a socially controlled, emancipatory abolition of work or its oppressive, anti-social abolition.’⁶ The former leads to ‘post-industrial socialism’, or, as Gorz would have it, proper communism. If this is the choice facing us in a postindustrial world, then the left is confronted by an unfamiliar agenda which runs counter to its instincts to defend the right to work and the actions of the trade union movement that backs this up.

For Gorz, the decline of the working class, specifically the industrial proletariat that constituted the focus of Marx’s attention, undermines the basis of Marxism and forces a radical reassessment of the theory’s objectives. Post-industrial society has created a ‘crisis of the proletariat’ in all but wiping out the working class as Marx himself understood the term:

That traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belong to the post-industrial neo-proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment. In the not too distant future, jobs such as these will be largely eliminated by automation.⁷

As Gorz repeatedly points out, classical Marxism really has no answer to such a situation, which lies outside the parameters of its conceptual scheme. The postindustrial neo-proletariat does not even constitute a class, and the extent of its alienation from the world of work is such that it is impervious to all appeals to its class consciousness or sense of solidarity. Given the onward march of post-industrial society, the neo-proletariat is on its way to becoming ‘a non-class of non-workers’: a category that can have no place in any Marxist scheme.⁸ There is no point trying to arrest this process and turn the clock back to a simpler societal model; what we ought to be doing is taking advantage of the opportunities it offers to free ourselves as individuals from an activity which has depersonalised us. Only in a society where work has been reduced to a minimum will real communism occur: to that extent Gorz still has a Marxist objective, although not one to be reached by Marxist means.

Post-industrialism and the decline of the working class lead Gorz to question some of the main assumptions on which Marxism is based; such as the belief that the development of the forces of production will create both the material and social preconditions for the development of socialism. The reality is very different: a neo-proletariat unable to take over the means of production, and possibly even uninterested in doing so. Whereas Marxism has made almost as much of a fetish out of work as capitalism has, Gorz argues that socialist rationality should incline us towards work’s abolition. Work is at best a necessary evil; a part of our lives that should be minimised as much as possible. Post-industrial society provides the means to do so and should be embraced by the left, rather than criticised for bringing about the end of labour as the ‘subject of history’. Not that Gorz believes the proletariat ever really was the subject of history in any meaningful sense. Marx’s belief that it was is no more than an unverifiable philosophical construct leaving his followers in an untenable position: we have only Marx’s word for it – and Marx’s word, significantly enough, as a prophet. The coming of post-industrial society enables us to realise the extent to which Marxism is an eschatology, so that we are wasting our time looking for a theory of the proletariat in Marx’s work.

Given that there is no Marxist theory of the proletariat, various other aspects of Marxist thought can be called into question – such as the belief that there can be a ‘collective appropriation’ of the means of production by that proletariat. This is dismissed as a ‘myth’, and a myth with some unfortunate side effects. Under the Soviet system, for example, it could be assumed that such collective appropriation had taken place, with all proletarians being entirely committed to serving the means of production. Soviet theorists, Gorz points out, effectively separated the proletariat from actual proletarians: a state of affairs which led to considerable abuse in the way it imprisoned individuals within an assumed class character. Gorz is adamant that our working selves do not exhaust our identities, that large areas of human endeavour (‘of an aesthetic, erotic, cultural or emotional sort’⁹) exist outside of the political realm. These ‘existential’ needs have a relative autonomy that should not be subsumed under overarching political imperatives in the manner of totalitarian communism. Militants may be able to achieve this repression, but it is unreasonable to expect all proletarians to force themselves within the character assigned to the proletariat by orthodox Marxism, where ‘Class being was the intolerable and ubiquitous external limit to the activity of each and every class member’.¹⁰ Such a vision is now obsolete. Something in us as individuals escapes the totalising imperative of a theory such as Marxism, to render the notion of an undifferentiated mass of class-conscious proletarians untenable. Put simply, and contentiously to the more militant believer, ‘Contrary to what Marx thought, it is impossible that individuals should totally coincide with their social being.’¹¹ Gorz here extends a point made as far back as the 1930s by Karl Mannheim, who, despite the generally sympathetic treatment accorded Marxism in his study Ideology and Utopia, nevertheless felt moved to assert that,

the investigator who, in the face of the variety of types of thought, attempts to place them correctly can no longer be content with the undifferentiated class concept, but must reckon with the existing social units and factors that condition social position, aside from those of class.¹²

We have now a post-industrial neo-proletariat whose cultural situation precludes the development of class being; as a result of which it can challenge the tyranny of work:

The neo-proletariat is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals whose main aim is not to seize power in order to build a new world, but to regain power over their own lives by disengaging from the marker rationality of productivism.¹³

‘Power over their own lives’ becomes the watchword of Gorz’s argument: that being what old-style communism actively prevents individuals from realising. Gorz refuses to believe that human nature is so homogeneous that it can take on an undifferentiated class being of the kind that classical Marxism demands, or that politics alone can ever circumscribe our lives. We are not mere cogs in a production-oriented machine – as it has been Marxism’s error in the past to insist. Production must be subordinated to human needs; a situation where we make ‘a conscious decision to do more and live better with less’.¹⁴ When we have made that decision we shall be on the way to post-industrial socialism – in Gorz’s scheme of things, real communism. As Laclau and Mouffe will do after him even more forcefully, Gorz puts his faith, not just in the post-industrial neo-proletariat, but in the ‘new social movements’ (feminism, ecology, etc.) that emerge from this discontented constituency.

Farewell to the Working Class represents an argument against Marxism’s excessive rationalism, and its well-documented tendency to force reality to conform to its dictates. In common with the ethos of a post-world, Gorz emphasises the factor of difference:

The beginning of wisdom lies in the recognition that there are contradictions whose permanent tension has to be lived and which one should never try to resolve; that reality is made up of distinct levels which have to be acknowledged in their specificity and never reduced to an ‘average’.¹⁵

To a Marxist this will sound like an admission of defeat (as will Gorz’s enthusiastic espousal of a pluralist politics), but in the post-world it marks a welcome move away from the totalising imperative. The gist of Gorz’s argument is that Marxism no longer has a proletariat on which to build a grand narrative, and that the existence of a Marxist-style proletariat had always been an illusion. It is a typical conclusion to reach in a post- world, where, as we can see from the enquiries of assorted post-structuralists and postmodernists, scepticism, and particularly scepticism about the intellectual certainties of the recent past, is very much in the ascendancy. In such a climate Marxism goes the way of structuralism and patriarchy. We note an erosion of belief in the power of any grand narrative to fulfil its claims, to the point where the Marxist grand narrative of the coming ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ no longer has a receptive audience (certainly not a receptive mass audience), and the political centre shifts. Political theories such as Marxism are addressing the past rather than the present, and, ‘Once abandoned by political parties, the site of the political tends to move elsewhere’.¹⁶ Gorz sees that other site as being inhabited by various ‘new social movements’, and we shall be hearing much more about their significance when we turn to the work of Laclau and Mouffe.

One way of abolishing work is by refusing to do it...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Post-Marxism
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Marxism’s ‘disenchanted’
• 1 Marxism in a ‘post-’ world
• 2 ‘An intellectual malady’? The Laclau–Mouffe affair (I)
• 3 ‘Without apologies’: The Laclau–Mouffe affair (II)
• 4 ‘Marxism is not a “Science of History”’: Testing the boundaries of Marxism
• 5 Post-Marxism before post-Marxism: (I) Luxemburg to the Frankfurt School
• 6 Post-Marxism before post-Marxism: (II) Hybridising Marxism
• 7 Constructing incredulity: (I) Postmodernism
• 8 Constructing incredulity: (II) Feminism
• 9 An open universe? Postmodern science and the Marxist dialectic
• 10 ‘Not show biz’: Pluralist politics and the emancipation of critique
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index