Beyond Post-Socialism

Dialogues with the Far-Left

C. el-Ojeili

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137474520
• eBook ISBN: 9781137474537
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

The return of interest in socialism and the critique of capitalism make Beyond Post-Socialism a timely work. The book explores the critical-theoretical and utopian contribution of a number of far-Left socialist currents, including anarchism, situationism and post-Marxism and thinkers, such as Castoriadis, Wallerstein, and Badiou.

1

Post-Marxist Trajectories:
Diagnosis, Criticism, Utopia

Introduction

For over a century, Marxism and socialism have been intimately joined. Therefore, the idea of ‘post-Marxism’ is a vital one for any contemporary re-thinking of emancipation. But post-Marxism is a troublesome notion. Might it not be a pretentious codeword for ex- or non-Marxism (Geras, 1987; 1988), merely another moment in ‘the weak thought’ of ‘the end of Modernity’ (Said, 1994: 399), ‘a dull and meaningless term … [that] makes sense only in an autobiographical context’ (Heller and Feher, 1991: 4)? Such scepticism and irritation were to the fore in an earlier phase of ‘furious’ post-modernism and anti-post-modernism (Beilharz, 1994), where Marxist critics were likely to read post-Marxism as a signal of the ‘advanced stage of an intellectual malady’ (Geras, 1987: 43), of a European Left moving rightwards or becoming ever more spectatorial, culturalist and theoreticist.¹

Even after a more appreciative, or at least cautious, next wave of commentary,² it can’t be said that the term is entirely clear, that it is attached to an instantly recognizable canon of works, an obvious set of theoretical and political co-ordinates, or uncontroversially identifiable adepts. One solution, here, would be to limit the label to self-identified post-Marxists (Howarth, 1998) – most prominently Laclau and Mouffe and their followers. Yet, this seems insufficient, given an obvious confluence of concerns and emphases that bring Laclau and Mouffe’s work close to a number of other thinkers. In this respect, the collection of intellectuals surveyed in three more recent works – Stuart Sim’s (1998; 2000) Post-Marxism: A Reader and Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History, and Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend’s (2006) Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to Post-Marxism – looks about right: Laclau and Mouffe, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Bauman, Habermas, Castoriadis, Heller and Hartmann, for instance. However, when we consider the diversity here, when such lists are expanded to include the full range of plausibly post-Marxist figures – such as Jameson, Harvey, Žižek, Badiou, Rancière, Baudrillard, Offe, Castells, Balibar, Honneth and Gorz – the difficulties involved in thinking of post-Marxism as anything like a coherent intellectual formation are clear.

In his earlier work, Stuart Sim (1998: 2) summarized post-Marxism as ‘a series of hostile and/or revisionary responses to classical Marxism from the post-structuralist/post-modernist/feminist direction, by figures who at one time in their lives would have considered themselves as Marxists, or whose thought processes had been significantly shaped by the classical Marxist tradition’. Here, Sim’s (1998: 7–8) solution to the problem of post-Marxism’s variety was to distinguish post-Marxism from post-Marxism, arguing, though, that both shared an ‘element of nostalgia’ and that, for both, ‘the post- side … drives the theoretical enterprise’. More interested in post-Marxism, Sim’s introductory remarks are, on the whole, deflationary³ – post-Marxism, most importantly, as an emotional rather than substantive matter: ‘What remains in post-Marxism is not so much Marxism, I would contend, as a series of somewhat empty gestures whose content is emotional rather than theoretical’ (Sim, 1998: 7). This emotion is, first and foremost, a nostalgia that marks an implicit or explicit recognition of defeat – the spectre of the totalitarianism, the deadness of socialist language today – alongside a reluctance to properly let go; and, in the end, Sim insists on the impossibility of any real conversation between an inherently monistic paradigm (Marxism) and an inherently pluralizing one (post-modernism).

Perhaps Sim is on to something, here, but there is more to post-Marxism, I think, than defeat and impasse, and there must be a coherence that runs beyond simple nostalgia. In this chapter, I want to think about this ‘something more’, to try and plot the ‘co-ordinates of unity’ (Anderson, 1976) of post-Marxism as a ‘series of gestures’ (Said, 2001: 160) that respond to ‘reality problems’ (Alexander, 1995) faced by Marxism and socialism, to the so-called ‘crisis of the Marxist imaginary’. There is certainly, within post-Marxism, no ‘elegant coherence’ (Spivak, 1990: 15), we have, here, a field that is ‘highly varied and contradictory in nature’ (Beilharz, 2007), but I think there is an important unity to this moment, found in the engagement between, on the one hand, what Therborn (2008) describes as the Marxist triangle of historical social science, a philosophy of contradictions and socialist politics and, on the other, more recent, post-foundationalist currents in social theory. The best attempt to understand this unity, in my opinion, is provided by Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend (2006). In particular, the six problems these authors view post-Marxists as posing to Marx and Marxism allow us to track a certain coherence among otherwise very diverse thinkers: the problem of history, the problem of revolutionary subjectivities, the problem of ethics, the problem of positivism, the problem of vanguardism and the problem of democracy. In the second part of this chapter, I will follow Tormey and Townshend in very selectively surveying post-Marxist analyses of, and responses to, these problems.

It seems to me that we can read the post-Marxist moment, after Jameson (1996: 1), as emerging at a time ‘in which capitalism itself undergoes a structural metamorphosis’, a Marxian engagement, to be crude, that responds to, and wrestles with, the arrival of what world-systems thinkers refer to as an ‘age of transition’ (Wallerstein, 2000b) or ‘systemic chaos’ (Arrighi, 2010). In this vein, in the first part of this chapter, I will suggest that a cluster of systemic transformations post-1968 provide the crucial backdrop to the development of post-Marxism and that, together, these changes are implicated in the so-called ‘crisis of the Marxist imaginary’ to which post-Marxism responds. And I will contend that the uncertainty issuing from these transformations can be read along two intimately related axes, axes crucial to social theory as a whole – diagnosis and utopia: that is, first, questions of mapping and understanding the social; and, second, questions of ‘utopian reference’ (Alexander, 2001), the expressions of the desire for a better way of being (Levitas, 1990; 2013).

Overall, I think it is hard today not to feel somewhat torn about post-Marxism. Perhaps Beilharz (2007) is right in maintaining that, ‘In the long run, postmarxism will surely be known as Marxism’. In that case, post-Marxism’s pluralism might be viewed as a welcome, truly Marxian effort to be as radical as our times, renewing a complex and still important tradition, in contrast to a Marxist orthodoxy that appears unsustainably necessitarian and hopelessly out of touch with the institutional and imaginative peculiarities of our modernity. Given these peculiarities, given the decidedly pluralist moment we are in, obdurate, closed Marxism clearly doesn’t do the trick in answering fundamental problems posed to Marxism, and there is plenty of interest contained in the moments of post-Marxist inventiveness – variously, philosophical, political, theoretical. Nevertheless – against many of the stronger post-Marxist gestures – I think it is hard to escape a sense that, having passed through and beyond phases of ‘post-modern conjuncturalism’ (McLennan, 2006) and ‘happy globalization’ (Stephen Holmes in Outhwaite and Ray 2005: 19), we are as easily reminded of our proximity to Marx and Marxism as of our distance from them, that, at worst, post-Marxism simply lets go of the powerful socialist resources of critique (class, totality, production as social, the questioning of the prioritization of economic emphases, of value, of profit, and of self-interest, say) and institutional alternatives, and comes to occupy an analytical space behind and short of Marxism.

Reading post-Marxism: the crisis of the Marxist imaginary

A good place to start, I think, is Jameson’s (1996: 1) contention that ‘“Postmarxisms” regularly emerge at those moments in which capitalism itself undergoes a structural metamorphosis’. Historically, we might think of Bernstein’s ‘revisionism’ or the emergence of Western Marxism as examples. For Jameson, the shape that this metamorphosis takes today is conditioned by the transformation captured by the phrase ‘multinational capitalism’.

This idea is worth exploring. And, objectionable as some might find reading post-Marxism through a basically Marxist interpretative framework, I think that the world-systems analysis contention about our entry into an ‘age of transition’ from the late 1960s to the early 1970s is the most convincing way to understand the important factors in the emergence of post-Marxism: that is, post-Marxism as a set of responses to transformations in economic organization, political formations, structures of knowledge, social movements and cultural repertoires. These changes appear immediately relevant, in that the majority of those thinkers that could reasonably be designated ‘post-Marxist’ were born between the early 1920s and the early 1940s,⁴ making such transformations plausibly central in their political and intellectual formation or re-orientation. Laclau (1990: 97), for instance, strenuously places his own post-Marxism within the context of the following kinds of social reconfigurations:

… structural transformations of capitalism have led to the decline of the classical working class in the post-industrial countries; the increasingly profound penetration of capitalist relations of production in areas of social life, whose dislocating effects – concurrent with those deriving from the forms of bureaucratisation which have characterised the welfare state – have generated new forms of social protest; the emergence of mass mobilisations in Third World countries which do not follow the classical pattern of class struggle; the crisis and discrediting of the model of society put into effect in the countries of so-called ‘actually existing socialism’, including the exposure of new forms of domination established in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is, of course, something of a consensus around the reality of multidimensional social change post-’68, and a variety of attempts at characterization of such shifts – post-modernism, post-Fordism, informationalization, risk society, detraditionalization, reflexive modernity, globalization, for instance. What I would like to do is fairly loosely draw from the world-systems’ framing of these transformations insofar as they might be seen as fundamentally reconfiguring the terrain on which Left intellectuals operate, both in terms of the horizon of the descriptive and explanatory tasks of social theory and in terms of utopian horizons. Interestingly, in these terms – theory, utopia – within commentary on post-1960s social transformation, we find two related narratives of decline: a decline of utopia narrative, and a demise of critical social theory and their intellectual carriers narrative, which can be translated into the world-systems language about a post-1970s ‘crisis of the movements’ and a simultaneous ‘crisis of the ideologies/structures of knowledge’ (Wallerstein, 1991b).

To begin chronologically, I will start with what Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein (1989) have called ‘the world revolution of 1968’. This revolution is crucial in the transformations we have seen subsequently. The argument runs that the 1848 rebellions across Central and Western Europe, and elsewhere, announce the arrival of the ‘antisystemic movements’, a family of movements with three principal variants – social democracy, communism and national liberation. Over time, these antisystemic movements became institutionalized features of the political landscape, and all three variants were, on one level, extraordinarily successful in coming to power and dominating the landscape of progressive thought and social change in the period 1945–1968.

These movements, Wallerstein (2002a) argues, shared some essential features – most prominently, increasingly wedded to a two-step strategy of social change, involving the capture of state power, followed by progressive social transformation. Despite their success, more and more these movements had a number of fundamental sets of complaints levelled at them, complaints that crystallize in the world revolution of 1968: that certain people had been left out, that they hadn’t changed the world as promised, that they had been co-opted, and that they were repressive and exploitative and did not rule on behalf of the people (Wallerstein, 1991b). For Wallerstein (1991b; 2002a), the crucial upshots of this revolution are a loss of faith both in these movements and in the state.

We might isolate four pressing sets of consequences of the revolution of ’68 – three connected to the movements themselves, one a more general political consideration. First, the so-called ‘social democratic consensus’ and the related consensus around the notion of ‘development’, central in the period 1945–1970, are replaced by a period of neo-liberal commonsense and the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ (Wallerstein, 2005b). Here, we witness the electoral and membership misfortunes of social democratic parties, and the capitulation of a good number of these parties to the neo-liberal agenda.

A second consequence is the end of the Bandung period of Southern unity and assertiveness, and of ‘third worldism’. We have, here, the devastating impact on much of the periphery and semi-periphery of world-wide economic downturn, the debt crisis, and structural adjustment. In the face of this, the remnants of the national liberation movements still in power in the semi-periphery look ever more unlikely to regain any momentum and widespread support (Wallerstein, 1991b).

The third (arguably partial) consequence is the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’. The events of 1989–1991 were, of course, immensely disorienting for many Left intellectuals, even those long critical of the Soviet alternative. In the world of theory, as Alexander (1995) points out, we witnessed a post-communist return to modernization and convergence themes; we see, likewise, ‘capitalism’ replaced by ‘modernity’ as starting point for social theory (Jameson, 2002); we see Left intellectuals wrestling with Fukuyama’s end of history thesis and the equation ‘end of socialism equals end of utopia equals end of history’ (Kumar, 1993); and we see a burgeoning ‘ethical turn’ in social theory, one part of which obsessively concerns itself with the threat of ‘totalitarianism’, frequently located in the modern imaginary, and deployed as a moral brake on the utopian enterprise.

The fourth, more general, consequence is a widely commented upon generalized loss of faith in the state, and an accompanying transformation of politics. It is frequently said, of course, that, over the past three decades or so, we have seen growing scepticism towards the state, party machines and representative democracy. In the optimistic readings of such changes, we have, here, an expansion of the political, a bottom-up, reflexive, cosmopolitan politics, which stretches beyond the older hierarchies, channels and limitations of formal political involvement (Beck, 1997; 1999; Giddens, 1991). In the pessimistic readings, we have a series of crises – of the state, of democracy, of legitimacy, of the public sphere – and a post-democratic or post-political condition: where politics becomes increasingly empty and mediatized, more and more eaten up by economics; where political options converge around minor variants on the neo-liberal theme; where citizens withdraw from parties and electoral contests, and parties withdraw from citizens; where state sovereignty and a potentially expanded conception of citizenship are increasingly under strain (Bauman, 1999; Castells, 2000; Crouch, 2004; Mair, 2006; Martin and Schumann, 1998; Zolo, 2001).

Second, we have economic crisis and transformation. The revolution of ’68, the US loss in Vietnam, a B phase of economic stagnation, the shrinking productivity gap between America and other economic powers – together these bring us, world-systems thinkers insist, into a period of hegemonic transition, the effects of which we are still living with. This analysis has important resonances with many of the interpretations of the emergence of a new capitalism post-1970: a post-industrial age (Bell, 1999); post-Fordism/disorganized capitalism (Offe, 1985; Lash and Urry, 1987); the knowledge or information society (Webster, 2002); multinational capitalism (Jameson, 1984a; 1996; Harvey, 1989); fast capitalism (Agger, 2004); flexible capitalism (Sennett, 1998; 2006); the aesthetic economy (Bohme, 2003); a new third spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005); informationalism (Castells, 1997; 1998). Such characterizations have attempted to capture new or emerging axiomatic features of ultra-contemporary capitalist organization: for instance – information as a new, directly productive force; a new emphasis on flexibility in production and in labour; changes in patterns of production and consumption; neo-liberal restructuring; changes in class composition and a weakening of organized labour against capital; a reconfiguration of the international division of labour and a new, intensive, and highly competitive phase of global networking; changes to corporate structures; financialization.

Clearly, these sorts of shifts have had important implications for the ways intellectuals have mapped the world and for the societal and institutional alternatives connected to such theorizing. For instance, by 1970 the size and power of the industrial working class in the West had reached its peak (Therborn, 2001), and the neo-liberal assault (made possible, in part, by the crisis of the antisystemic movements already referred to), deindustrialization and growing internationalization arguably combined to transform labour, undermining the solidarity and power of that working class. One obvious consequence of this was to cast further doubt on the notion of this class as the primary agent of social transformation, as well as on the traditionally conceived-of direction of such transformation. More generally, neo-liberalism, for some, has shifted ‘the parameters of commonsense’ (Hall, 1988: 188), from equality, solidarity and justice towards liberty, competition and individualism, deflating utopian aspirations before the hidden hand (Fuller, 2005) and necessitarian rhetoric (‘there is no alternative’). And, in a related vein, restructuring pressures within the university, and accompanying professionalization and commodification of knowledge, have been viewed as posing severe challenges to the historic tradition of critical intellectual life.

Such challenges are often seen as intimately linked, too, to cultural transformations. One of the consequences of the world revolution of ’68 was the rise of the ‘new social movements’. These movements are an important condition of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in both social life and in social and political theory – for instance, in shifting what Nancy Fraser (2003) describes as the grammar of political claims-making towards emphases on identity, difference, cultural domination and recognition. We can link these movements (as well as the process of ‘de-ruralization’), too, with what Therborn (2001) calls ‘the erosion of traditional deference’ (or what others have called ‘detraditionalization’), which, in turn, is connected to a growing ‘pluralization of lifeworlds’ (Boggs, 1993) and individualization across social orders. For some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Post-Marxist Trajectories: Diagnosis, Criticism, Utopia
• 2 ‘No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism’: Castoriadis, Lefort and Psychoanalytic Leninism
• 3 Forget Debord?
• 4 ‘Many Flowers, Little Fruit’? The Dilemmas of Workerism
• 5 ‘Communism … Is the Affirmation of a New Community’: Notes on Jacques Camatte
• 6 Anarchism as the Contemporary Spirit of Anti-Capitalism?: A Critical Survey of Recent Debates
• 7 Reflections on Wallerstein: The Modern World-System Four Decades On
• 8 Narrating Socialism – Four Voices
• 9 Concluding Comments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index