In the Marxian Workshops

Producing Subjects

Sandro Mezzadra

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786603609
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

Theorists have often returned to the work of Marx, to interpret and better understand the global developments and current political and economic crisis. This book combines an attempt to develop a specific reading of Marx with a set of interventions on crucial topics at stake in contemporary critical debates. The book is divided into two parts, with the first offers a reading of Marx on the “production of subjectivity”, as a crucial test for a critical assessment of some of the most important Marxian concepts and of their potentiality for grasping the present from the point of view of its radical transformation.

Chapter 1

Marx Beyond Marxism

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetimes of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their deaths attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to hallow their names.

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)¹

You would be quite mistaken in fancying that I am ‘fond’ of books, Marx wrote to his daughter Laura in 1868. Rather, he continued, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour them and, then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’ (MECW, 43: 9–10). The reading of Marx recently presented in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s ponderous book (2012) unfolds from this image. Marx is outlining here a singular metabolism: books, authors and theories grinded by a reading-machine which tosses them, ‘in a changed form’, on the ground of history to make it more fertile. In other words, this metabolism entails a continuum of variations and repetitions of themes inherited from history, which produce by themselves those innovations that must bounce back to history. Evidently, it is important not to overstate the significance of Marx’s private ‘confession’ to his daughter in the year of her marriage with Paul Lafargue, and yet it offers a clue worth following in order to reread his work, today. Since Engels’s preface to the second volume of Capital [1885], Marxism has constructed a very different image of Marx, the image of an absolute innovator who ‘provided the key to the understanding of the whole of capitalist production – for the person who knew how to use it, that is’ (C, II: 98). Marx’s thought started being considered as a solid system built on the basis of a series of ‘discoveries’ (of class struggle, of labour power, of surplus value, of laws) and of a set of radical ‘breaks’ with everything that preceded him, including his three fundamental sources: German philosophy, political economy and French socialism. In 1913, Lenin remarked that Marx’s doctrine ‘is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression’ (1963: 63).

It is this Marx, Marxism’s Marx, that we must leave behind. We have often repeated the sentence which Marx, according to Engels, had pronounced towards the end of the 1870s: ‘Ce qu’il il y a de certain c’est que muoi, je ne suis pas Marxiste’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist] (MECW 46: 356). However, these days it is not a matter of posing once again a version of Marx as a ‘critic of Marxism’. In the terms deployed in his harsh anti-Soviet polemics by Maximilien Rubel (an important scholar of Marx’s work and implacable critic of Marxism), one could say that ‘Marxism’ is no longer, if not only marginally, an ‘instrument of power’ (Rubel 1981: 8). That which presents itself as ‘Marxism’, in the universities as well as in the action of political forces, which in many parts of the world keep invoking it, is a heterogeneous set of theoretical elaborations and political languages rarely capable of becoming hegemonic from an ‘ideological’ point of view (a further issue concerning Rubel). Today’s ‘Marxists’, those who take care to present themselves as such, often reproduce the tones already encountered in the passage from Lenin quoted above, yet what were once weapons to change the world, in major struggles and significant historical movements, today appear as mere caricatures. Indeed, the most interesting and creative readings and uses of Marx – interesting and creative from the perspective of what was Marx’s matter of concern, namely, the critique of the ‘present state of things’ (GI: 49) – are frequently to be found outside ‘Marxism’. Personally, I doubt aiming at refounding Marxism would have any sense nowadays, if with this term one means a system of thought capable of providing an overall explanation of the world starting from Marx’s concepts and lexicon. I also doubt that it is possible to advance a ‘communist idea’, as in Alan Badiou’s formulation (2010), if not by going back to Marx’s texts and appropriating them creatively. The reading of Marx beyond Marxism, which I propose in this short book, finds its origin in this twofold doubt.

It is worth reminding the reader that ‘Marxism’ was originally the ‘stigma’, the polemical definition, the invective used by Bakunin and other anarchists against Marx’s followers during the disputes within the First International (see Haupt 1982: 272ff). At a later time, in keeping with processes well known to sociologists, this stigma became an ‘emblem’ particularly after Karl Kautsky founded the Neue Zeit (the ‘Marxist’ journal of the German Social Democracy) in 1883. What we call Marxism was a tremendous thought-edifice, historically constructed on the basis of Engels’s work on the manuscripts for the second and third volumes of Capital, consolidated in the polemics around ‘revisionism’ at the end of that century (with the birth of different ‘Marxisms’), and then settled after the October Revolution and the division of the workers’ movement. Marxism, ‘both a method of interpreting and of changing [the world]’ (Hobsbawm 1982: vii–viii), it was experienced in struggles, dreams and insurrections of the masses, actions of political movements, parties and regimes. Thus, it was not only a thought-edifice, but also a material force contributing to the construction of the world we inhabit. Marxism was a triangulation between the three concomitant poles of philosophy, science and politics, with sides of variable lengths depending on the varied ‘currents’ and historical contingencies, so as to result in infinite variations for the geometrical figure of the triangle (Therborn 2008: 116ff). As Göran Therborn remarked, however, currently ‘the classical Marxist triangle has been broken and is most unlikely to be restored’ (180).

Its depletion was not only sanctioned by the end of existing socialism, which Rita di Leo (2012) has recently defined ‘the profane experiment’, but also, by the end of the workers’ movement, understood as a historical form and a political force. From the second half of the last century, different social movements and political struggles constituted themselves beyond Marxism. In philosophy, ‘science’ or politics, as well as in anticolonial uprisings, on the barricades in May 1968 in France and in FIAT’s Mirafiori factory in Italy, in women’s demands and ‘minorities’ taking the floor, this series of movements and struggles pass through it problematically at first, then contribute to its explosion. At the end of the 1950s, Sartre argued that Marxism is the insuperable horizon of our time.² This is no longer the case. It thus becomes necessary to reread Marx outside Marxism, to immerge him in the materiality of a course of history proceeding beyond it, to position him in conversation with theoretical developments, which Marxism failed to contain in itself, to interrogate Marx’s texts through the lens of existing problematics and struggles.

We just mentioned that from the second half of the twentieth century a series of theoretical developments and social movements accelerated the crisis of Marxism – and one should also add that the theme of a ‘crisis’ has been part of the development of Marxism since its ‘revision’ at the end of the nineteenth century. This occurs particularly when it comes to the way Marxism has constructed and interpreted the subjectivity of ‘labour’. In his analysis of the Solidarność experience in Poland and proletarian struggles in apartheid South Africa, Giovanni Arrighi lucidly showed how Marxism had adopted – at least in its hegemonic forms – an idea already present in Marx, namely, that to capital’s tendency to exploit labour power ‘as an undifferentiated mass with no individuality other than a differential capability to augment the value of capital’, corresponded a ‘predisposition of labour to relinquish natural and historical differences as means of affirming, individually and collectively, a distinctive social identity’ (Arrighi 1990: 63). The global development of capitalism and of workers and proletarian struggles in the twentieth century, Arrighi continued, did not confirm this idea in any way. Such historical development exposed the incapacity of Marxism to offer incisive theoretical instruments to counter the diffusion of patriarchy, racism and nationalism within the workers’ movement, both in its communist and socialist components. Assuming the production of subjectivity as the guiding thread of the analysis of some of Marx’s texts involves, I think, keeping these issues in mind.

More generally, Marxism could be considered a ‘system of thought’, in the sense ascribed to this formula by Michel Foucault in his inaugural lecture at Collège the France in 1970. Indeed, even in Marxism, ‘the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures’ (Foucault 1982a: 52). The point is not of being reminded of Foucault’s earlier statement that ‘Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else’ (2003: 285). This affirmation actually reveals its paradoxically internal (though liminal) position within the ‘discursive field’ of Marxism, as it could be argued that, in the 1960s, Foucault relegated Marx to the flotsam and jetsam of the nineteenth century pressed by the need of distancing himself from such a discursive field, from its procedures and the logics organizing it. Rather, Foucault helps us grasp the definition of this discursive field. Studying in particular the three ‘foundational’ moments mentioned earlier, I think it would be possible to cartographically map Marxism’s rules of enunciation (a certain way of using quotations from Marx) and problematic (the relationship between base and superstructure, just to limit ourselves to one issue). These quite steadily governed the production and reproduction of Marxism as a ‘system of thought’, combining the functions Foucault defined in terms of ‘remanence’, ‘additivity’ and ‘recurrence’ (2002a: 139ff). Even within a system of thought so understood, ‘“Anyone . . . speaks”, but what he says is not said from anywhere’ (122). On the contrary, what is said is necessarily involved with the procedures that constitute and delimit the discursive field of ‘Marxism’.

It is easy at this point to anticipate some objections: did not extraordinary ‘heresies’ stem from Marxism? Should we perhaps confuse ‘Marxism-Leninism’ with black Marxism and Italian workerism, Stalin with Trotsky, ‘Western Marxism’ with ‘Oriental despotism’? Let’s be serious. The end of Marxism, in contrast, allows us to reopen the Marxist archive and appreciate afresh the polyphony and the abundance of alternatives. It also provides the chance to reread a whole series of classics besides those that a long history has indeed labeled as ‘heretics’. In other words, formulations and problematics could be rediscovered even at the kernel of Marxist’s ‘orthodoxy’. Yet it is of essence to assert a methodological principle: the productive rediscovery of the Marxist archive rests upon the condition of suspension and deactivation of the rules of enunciation and of procedures regulating its formation. In view of providing a first and modest contribution to this (necessarily collective) endeavour, I will have a series of ‘Marxist’ quotations reverberate at the beginning of every chapter of this book, in the form of epigraphs and without comment.

Let us then start with the epigraph opening this chapter, and let us exceptionally and very briefly comment on it. Just before the October Insurrection, referring to the transformation of Marx into a ‘harmless icon’, Lenin posited a problem we can relate to in times when Marx appears on the covers of The Economist as the visionary prophet of globalization (and ultimately as an apologist of capitalism). Even Marxism, however, the very Marxism-Leninism developing after State and Revolution, transformed Marx into an ‘icon’ – often, although not always, ‘harmless’, but still an ‘icon’. Did this not happen to Lenin as well? It would be enough to reread the opening lines of the (all too easily prophetic) poem written by Mayakovsky just after Lenin’s death in 1924: ‘the very idea – I abhor it, / that such a halo, poetry-bred / should hide Lenin’s real, huge, human forehead. / I’m anxious lest rituals, mausoleums, and processions, / the honeyed incense of homage and publicity / should obscure Lenin’s essential / simplicity’ (Mayakovsky 1986: 176). But let us focus on Marx. Marxism, patristic literature, constituted itself through the commentary on his texts, and whose specific image was built primarily by forging a corpus of work which emphasized its systemic and scientific characters. In this regard, Engels’s work on the second and third volumes of Capital is exemplary. Let me state quite clearly that this is not to depict the umpteenth contraposition between Marx and Engels, between the brilliance of the former and the pedantry of the latter. Engels’s work is extraordinary, combining fraternal dedication, philological precision and ‘party’ militant spirit. But he imposed unity and sistematicity to something that, after the publication of the first volume of Capital [1867], moved towards complex and often contradictory ramifications without ever being capable of settling in a synthesis. The publication of the new critical edition of Marx’s manuscripts (MEGA²) allows us to appreciate the extent to which his thought was fragmentary yet rich, and offers new entry points to something that could be named, quite precisely, the Marxian workshops.

It is important to stress markedly that I am not claiming the author of Capital was a thinker who loved to write textual fragments or aphorisms. The systemic and scientific traits – which belong to one of the three sides of the Marxist triangle as in Therborn’s formulation – are part of Marx’s work since his formative years. However, what is worth emphasizing and critically interrogating is the constant collision between these traits and the materiality of history, of politics as well as the development of his very analysis and theoretical investigation. If I were to take the liberty of evoking, somehow ironically, the title of one of Martin Heidegger’s books, I would argue that the Marxian workshops permit a great deal of roaming ‘off the beaten track’. Whereas the MEGA² contributed to update the image of Marx and established new grounds from which his works could be studied, it did so not so much by the addition of unpublished materials but by showing the enormous disproportion between what Marx wrote and what he actually published – a disparity very difficult to find in another ‘classic’. This has in effect offered some basis for the arguments of those, such as Dardot and Laval, who value the usefulness of the metaphor of the ‘machine’ with which we opened this chapter. Reading Marx beyond Marxism, in the sense just outlined, gives us the chance to appreciate once more the fragmentary character of Marx’s oeuvre and, as we said, to explore its workshops on the basis of the recent struggles’ achievements and theoretical developments. This is not what happened within Marxism, whose development has been periodically characterized by the release of previously unpublished works which, in turn, generated fiery polemics about whether notebooks and fragments of theory could be considered as stand-alone texts. This happened with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 and The German Ideology, it did – although in dissimilar modalities and conditions – with the Grundrisse, as Marcello Musto shows in a recent edited volume (2011). Here also it is of necessity to suspend and deactivate the rules of enunciation and problematic regulating the reading of Marx during that very twentieth century Arrighi (1990) defines as being also a ‘Marxist century’.

Let us thus cross the threshold of the Marxian workshops. Let us reread Marx’s texts, keeping in mind that they are not only ingrained in the history of theories, but also in the history of both struggles and clashes on the streets, of the violence of domination and exploitation, of the arduous material construction of freedom and equality undertaken by the exploited. This is a history experienced under the uncertain (yet never doused) l...