Marx 2020

After the Crisis

Ronaldo Munck

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783608089
• eBook ISBN: 9781783608096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2008 financial crisis revitalised the question of whether capitalism was working and how it might be overturned. More recently, the growth of new social movements across the globe are posing a threat to the economic and political status quo, with Marxist ideas rejuvenated for the 21st century. In this provocative and critically engaged introduction, Ronaldo Munck applies Marx's theories to the most pressing issues of our times: the environmental crisis, austerity, international development, religion, nationhood, the role of women and LGBTQ+ communities. Crucially, he shows the far-reaching contribution Marx can make to both contemporary debate and political action. Accessible and wide-ranging, Marx 2020 is essential reading for anyone interested in the state of the modern world and the ideas needed for effective change.

1 | BEYOND THE LABYRINTH: MARXISM AND HISTORY

Jacques Derrida, a champion of the postmodern, post-Marxist era, once declared: ‘There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx’ (1994: 13). It is not a simple question of saying ‘Marxism is dead, long live Marx!’ But there is now – more than thirty years since the collapse of the state socialist regimes – a more sober reappraisal of the Marxist heritage than was previously possible. This chapter traces some of the high (and low) points of the complex Marxist trajectories from their origins in Marx, through the social-democratic and communist traditions, to Marxism’s difficult engagement with postmodernism in recent times. I have inevitably simplified the complex labyrinth of the Marxist discourse and the socialist communist movements. Sometimes, though, it would seem that the labyrinth – with its walls, dead-ends and Borgesian logic – is one that some Marxists/socialists/communists created for themselves or, more often, their followers.

Marx in his era

At first glance we would have read as counter-intuitive Étienne Balibar’s confident prediction in 1995 that: ‘Marx will still be read in the twenty-first century, not only as a movement of the past, but as a contemporary author’ (1995: 1). But just as we thought that Marx had become a ‘dead dog’ (as Hegel before him), he now seems to spring back to life. The Marxist project did not emerge fully developed one summer day from the head of Karl Marx. The genealogy of Marxism shows a complex, sometimes contradictory, development of the discourse we now know as Marxism. Nor can this be reduced to the ‘young Marx’ versus the ‘mature Marx’ or artificial distinctions between Marx as economist, philosopher or politician. It is even a simplification to argue, as Kautsky and Lenin both did, that Marxism as a world-view has three clear sources: German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy. This type of totalization, which is intrinsically and inevitably Europe­bound, will not do for a critical or ‘live’ Marx for today. Instead, we must delve into the real world of Marx and examine the shifts, retreats and advances he carried out in his bid to put revolutionary theory on a scientific standing against all the ‘utopian socialists’ of his day.

With the Communist Manifesto, written with Engels in 1847, Marx’s political vision was made explicit. While often read for its dramatic images of a dynamic bourgeoisie, the Manifesto is also marked by a strong belief in an imminent and general crisis of capitalism. This would create the conditions for the proletariat to lead all the dominated classes towards a radical democracy, which, in turn, would create the conditions for a classless, communist society. This was the era of permanent revolution. The proletariat is seen as the universal class of history. This, as Balibar notes, ‘allows Marx to read off from the present the imminence of the communist revolution’ (1995: 40). The themes of modernism and romanticism seem rolled into one. Marx’s dialectic of modernity creates a politics of redemption, of universal fulfilment. The image of perpetual progress and the inevitable advance of history is a bold one. From a postmodern perspective we can also see the dark side of these images. Marshal Berman, admirer of Marx-the-Modernist, can write of the Manifesto

We can see, too, how communism, in order to hold itself together, might stifle the active, dynamic and developmental forces that have brought it into being, might betray many of the hopes that have made it worth fighting for, might reproduce the inequities and contradictions of bourgeois society under a new name. (1983: 105)

As it turned out, history took a turn showing it would not always advance by its good side. The European revolution of 1848–49 could have seen the implementation of the Manifesto but, instead, had relegated it by 1850 into a seeming non-runner. The collapse of capitalism and the proletariat as universal class had been proven to be either a mirage or wishful thinking. The notion of permanent revolution went out the window and Marx was forced to grapple with the power of nationalism and religious ideas. There was to be no smooth move towards a classless society. Marx turned, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napolean, to seek strategies to confront the counter-revolution and to bridge the gap between what he began to call ‘class in itself’ and ‘class for itself’. Capitalism would not magically unite the working class, this unity would have to be constructed politically. Marx also (re)turned to his ambitious research programme into capitalism, the critique of political economy, which would bear fruit with the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in 1867. Capitalism’s failure to oblige through a simple collapse and general crisis led Marx, thus, to uncover the hidden secrets of this mode of production, the sources of its dynamism and the nature of its contradictions.

The complex architecture of Marx’s Capital, in its three volumes and the ‘fourth’ volume of the Theories of Surplus Value is, of course, his most enduring and systematic legacy. Yet at this level only, read as an economist, Marx could conceivably be dismissed, as he has been by some commentators as a ‘minor post-Ricardian’. This perception changes if we move on to read Capital politically, as Harry Cleaver advised: ‘it is a reading which eschews all detached interpretation and abstract theorizing in favour of grasping concepts only within that concrete totality of struggle whose determinations they designate’ (1979: 11). With the rule of capitalism having been secured (almost) across the globe, it would seem opportune to return to Capital. Of course many of the problems which have exercised Marxist economics over the years – for example the so-called ‘transformation problem’ of finding a general rule by which to transform the ‘values’ of commodities determined by the labour theory of value into the ‘prices’ of the marketplace – seem, and probably are, arcane today. However, a strategic reading of Capital can still be a useful aid towards developing a deeper conceptual understanding of capitalism today. With capitalism triumphant, Marx may still provide, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘a thoroughly critical utopia, exposing the historical relativity of capitalist values, laying bare their historical limitation and thereby preventing them from freezing into an horizon-less commonsense’ (1976: 99). In developing a new common sense for our new times, Marx still has something to say, if read critically.

The events of 1870–71 were, as those of 1848–49, also to have a mixed effect on the development of the Marxian system. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the great but tragic Paris Commune, set back even further the optimistic view of history. While Marx may have hailed the Commune as the first ‘working-class government’ in history, he was still shocked that the revolution had not broken out in the most developed capitalist country, namely England. Then, the merciless crushing of the Parisian working classes brought home the real, material military power of the ruling classes. There would be no simple, organic path to communism. Real politics came smashing into the developing Marxian paradigm. Again history was not developing on the ‘good side’, as testified by the dissolution of the First International in 1872. After 1871, as Balibar writes, Marx ‘did not stop working, but from that moment on he was certain that he could no longer “finish” his work, that he could not come to a “conclusion”. There would be no conclusion’ (1995: 103). The Marxian discourse became more open, less necessitarian and more ‘political’. In Marx it led to the notion of ‘transition’ seen as a phase before communism when the proletariat would have to dismantle the state apparatus. This ‘rectification’ of Marx’s would have serious effects on the later history of socialism.

After the shock of 1871, Marx again interrupted his research programme, this time to learn Russian among other things, and to rectify his theory of social evolution. The inexorable progress of capitalism towards communism with its evolutionary image had been shattered. It was a simple question, yet one that was inordinately difficult for Marx to answer, which prompted this epistemological rupture. The early Russian socialists, known as ‘populists’, sought Marx’s opinion in 1888 on whether the rural commune could be the germ of a non-capitalist development prefiguring communism. In the 1867 Preface to the first edition of Capital Marx had argued famously: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1976: 91). In 1881, Marx was able to articulate in his letter to Vera Zasulich that Capital’s law-like theory of capitalist accumulation did not apply regardless of historical circumstance....

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1 Beyond the labyrinth: Marxism and history
• 2 Red and green: Marxism and nature
• 3 Soviets plus electrification: Marxism and development
• 4 The gravediggers: Marxism and workers
• 5 Unhappy marriage: Marxism and women
• 6 The return of the superstructure: Marxism and culture
• 7 Difficult dialogue: Marxism and nation
• 8 ‘Opium of the people’: Marxism and religion
• 9 After the crisis: Marxism and the future
• Index