Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?

Runciman in his review links this story with Washington politics, and the question of what constitutes politics, raising an interesting beginning observation/question which is worth pursuing much more deeply.

Taken from a recent issue of the London Review of Books. (The Shaxson book is slightly retitled for US publication: Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens.)

No related posts.

This is the question which Joshua Mostafa approaches in the following essay (originally appearing on the Overland blog in three parts, here, here, and here), finally relating it to a philosophical need. The themes here are closely related to the purposes of this site,and I invite discussion.

Return of the real

by Joshua Mostafa

I. “Enlightened false consciousness”

In the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status quo; equal and opposite political will is required to effect the radical change needed. Climate change deniers have no serious arguments against the overwhelming consensus among climatologists, but all they need to do is to muddy the waters sufficiently to undermine public trust in the science, and thus sap that necessary political will. For any less politicised topic, they would be rightly ignored as cranks and green-inkers. The fact that they are not, and routinely given access to the media in the interests of ‘impartiality’ represents something not only disheartening but deeply unsettling. Clive Hamilton, writing in Overland last year, describes the problem:

While the politicisation of the ABC over the Iraq War, multiculturalism, Aboriginal policy and so on was lamentable, the ABCs’ contribution to the erosion of public confidence in climate science had another dimension, an epistemological one. It reflected a decision to relativise science itself.

Such decisions are dangerously radical. They reflect a disrespect for truth, not in some transcendent or ultimate sense, but the practical, workaday respect we have for reality that prevents us from embracing wishful thinking and fantasy as a guide to action. The direct cause – ‘strong pressure from senior management’, as Hamilton puts it – itself requires explanation in terms of both interests and the intellectual climate. Under what circumstances do we blind ourselves to inconvenient facts of the highest stakes possible: species survival?

As far as interests go, it’s a no-brainer: those of corporations dependent for their profits on the massive rate of carbon emissions continuing without restriction. But we on the Left should not get too comfortable pointing the finger. When we consider the epistemological conditions – the kinds of thoughts we have about knowledge itself, the way we discuss it, and our understanding of the bases on which we acquire and validate it – in which such a move is possible, we cannot entirely absolve ourselves from blame. It may be the Right carrying out the attack, but, as Bruno Latour wrote in 2004, ‘like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons nonetheless. In spite of all the deformations, it is easy to recognise, still burnt in the steel, our trademark: Made in Criticalland’. These weapons are ideology critique, anti-fetishism, theories of the social construction of knowledge, discourse analysis. It is only in retrospect, as the American Tea Party act out their miserable parody of protest, that we can see the tragic trajectory of the first iteration by the darkly farcical aspect of the second.

Again, we can attempt to disavow our implication in the slippery slope to relativism by finding easy targets: deconstruction, postmodernism, bourgeois degeneracy. But it was Marx who rehabilitated and legitimised the use of ad hominem arguments in theorising false consciousness, and the critique of bourgeois ideology; Adorno and Gramsci who turned the scorching flame of critique to the cultural sphere. Critical theory has challenged conventional thinking by hollowing out the ground from under it. But it has also eroded the common ground on which we all stand. In a case like ours today, Latour observes:

the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.

Latour is not, of course, suggesting that the big bad world revealed by critical theory is too much for us, or that we should take comfort in the old illusions. He argues that, like generals fighting the last war instead of the one facing them, we have failed to evaluate, strategically, the efficacy and consequences of our modes of operation, our tactics, and our methods. Iconoclasm produces only Pyrrhic victory: ‘the Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert.’

How have we arrived, then, at this impasse? Peter Sloterdijk, in his book Critique of Cynical Reason, describes the route we have taken. It is almost three centuries since the Enlightenment began its assault on certainties of all kinds – theological, political, social, psychological – but its promise of emancipation has been realised only patchily. In different ways, liberalism, social democracy and communism have all disappointed. The disposition of the modern mind, if it does not retreat into wilful stupidity and reactionary conservatism, tends to melancholy and cynicism. Sloterdijk names this condition ‘enlightened false consciousness’; the name itself implies a certain cynicism in its self-contradiction.

Before the destructive machinations of power and capital, we find ourselves impotent, and compromised by our own complicity in the system. Our days are numbered, and we have lost our faith in medicine. Revolution, the most powerful remedy available, has been known to kill the patient altogether; reform is merely palliative care. It is hard not to feel trapped and helpless. In order to live our lives and feed ourselves we must buy goods whose production is contributing to environmental destruction, pay tax that goes towards buying bombs, and perform some kind of senseless job whose real function – whatever its ostensible one – is to generate surplus value for shareholders we’re never likely even to meet. The capitalo-parliamentary system precludes meaningful political diversity except at the margins, in minor parties with no power, an exercise in tokenism, a sideshow that allows the mainstream to claim that the full spectrum is present while ensuring that the parties representing different aspects of moneyed elite interest continue taking their turns at the levers of power.

So what are we left with? Critique is a way of retreating and retrenching, to maintain a degree of distance both from the world we inhabit and the life we lead. We are, each of us, so compromised by our involvement in a deeply cynical society, that critique becomes more a matter of psychic self-defence than an instrument of political change. One can pick over the old bones of ideology, pull apart this or that piece of discourse, and take a dismal pleasure in our own cleverness and freedom from illusion; but it is an empty cleverness and a bitter freedom without agency.

Practical critique is protest, dissent, resistance. Against injustice, and a trend across the industrialised world to roll back hard-won liberties, to dismantle and marketise public services, resistance is worthwhile and necessary. But it is also reactive, and as such, uninspiring: if people do not rally en masse to the cause of damage limitation, we cannot be entirely surprised. The global financial crisis has shown neoliberalism to be bankrupt morally, intellectually and economically. Yet there was no rush to the Left, just a cynical shrug of the shoulders. ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of the 2008 crisis so far,’ Susan Watkins wrote last year, ‘has been its combination of economic turmoil and political stasis’. This is what Sloterdijk means by ‘enlightened false consciousness’ – we know the system is breaking under its own contradictions, that it is driving us toward destruction, yet we act as if we do not know this, as if we are willing participants in the system: working and shopping, shopping and working. In a state of enlightened false consciousness, we need something other than critique to escape the duality of external bad faith (we live as if we are happy to be mere worker-consumers) and of inner detachment – because critique only deepens the ironic distance between our minds and our lives.

II. “Keeping ‘em honest”

In yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse?

Sloterdijk proposes that ideology critique is the heir to a rich satirical tradition dating back to Diogenes, which he calls kynicism, to differentiate from modern cynicism. Kynicism is a form of critique that ‘goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it’. Rather than constructing counter-arguments to Platonic idealism, Diogenes would respond with lewd physicality, smearing faeces and masturbating in public. His answer to Socrates’ definition of humans as ‘featherless bipeds’ was to bring a plucked chicken to the academy and announce it as a man.

It is this ‘lost cheekiness’, Sloterdijk suggests, that is missing in today’s critique. Like kynicism and satire, ideology critique succeeds by unmasking, by stripping away illusions. But in its attempt to be serious, in dispensing with laughter, something vital was lost: ‘it has given up its life as satire, in order to win its position in books as “theory”.’

Perhaps, then, the rumbustious energy of satire can catch the popular imagination in ways that critique, that dry voice in the wilderness of academia, cannot? One cannot help thinking of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, a satirical cable TV news revue. Stewart skewers not only the obvious Republican targets, but also the craven Democrats and their habit of pre-emptively ceding ground to their opponents. Last year, after mounting a quasi-political rally that stretched the boundaries of satire, he gave an unusually serious interview on MSNBC, and discussed his attitude to the media’s role in political life:

Maybe there is a way to not engage in the idea—not to accept the premise…that we are all on the axis of left / right. Maybe there’s a different premise. And I don’t mean that in the way of partisanship, I mean it in the way of—they cover politics, politics is a Democratic and Republican and game. It is left / right. But then you begin to confuse everything [sic] through that same conflict. I think the conflict that would be more appropriate for a news channel, is corruption / non-corruption… [Anderson Cooper]’s got a bit on his show called ‘Keeping em honest’. Which is just so funny to me, because…it’d be like if I had a new segment called ‘Telling jokes to an audience.’ It just felt…like, isn’t that what this whole thing is?

For now, let’s bracket the obvious rejoinders (there is no leftwing party in the money-saturated American political system, the axis runs from centre-right to rabid; he conflates partisan conflict with ideological conflict; a proper critique of corruption is necessarily political). The most significant limitation to Stewart’s position is precisely what gives his show its impact: the act of unmasking. In this respect, it is no different from ideology critique – it’s just funnier.

This is a limitation in two ways. First, while such unmasking can damage the powerful by exposing their hypocrisy, it does not build anything up. In fact, it can itself act as a pressure valve that helps people’s frustrations dissipate. As satirical TV writer Armando Iannuchi put it in an interview on the BBC: ‘Because we have such a strong satirical tradition in the UK, we don’t have one of protest. Which is why, when we see students chucking fire extinguishers around, we’re quite shocked. We throw flour and water and eggs at politicians instead of bricks.’

Second, satire also has a more serious problem that makes it far less radical than critique: it focuses on the folly or knavery of individuals. While there is no shortage of malign and cretinous politicians, to frame the situation in terms of integrity or corruption, by its very apoliticality elides more serious and endemic problems at the level of economy, polity and social relations. But it is hard to imagine political satire that goes beyond sending up hypocrisy, stupidity or pomposity, and still manages to be funny. World-systems analysis doesn’t usually come with a good punchline.

So Sloterdijk’s critique of Critique is devastating, but the kynicism he advocates does not move us forward. Perhaps there is something common to both that is at fault. In a recent debate in Eurozine, Benedict Seymour makes a point about negation in Marxism that could be applied to Sloterdijk’s kynicism, but also (and more significantly) to critical theory in general:

I think one of the key things in Marxism is the emphasis on negativity. You can see how bogus the Stalinist-Communist model is in its tendency to fall back on the bourgeois habit of projecting utopias and then trying to approximate to them. Which, strangely enough, is parallel to the average working life of the exploited proletarian. You must meet the target, you must fulfil the five year plan—always a utopia. I think Marxism is anti-utopian in that respect; we start with what we’ve got and we negate it. Having said that, you can imagine a few basic negations: value, the market, exchange, production for exchange; all of these things are obsolete and a check on human social reproduction. That’s one way of putting it. The world just cannot take much more of this, the environment cannot take more of this; that is again the negative argument.

Seymour approves of this emphasis on negativity, but we need only consider Walter Benjamin’s maxim ‘every fascism is an index of a failed revolution’ to see the problem. Disaffection with the neoliberal mainstream need not draw people to the Left. To make a negative argument without positing a viable alternative is corrosive; just as likely to benefit the far Right, and make their latest venomous cocktail seem more palatable, whatever the toxicity of its ingredients: crude economic populism, scapegoating, conspiracy theory. The critical apparatus is of course vital, but on its own it constitutes a wilfully fractured reason, self-lobotomised and, in its unwillingness to put its own cards on the table, excessively cautious to the point of intellectual cowardice. In the shadow of history, especially after the stagnation and collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat to critique and the shunning of so-called ‘master narratives’ as inherently oppressive are understandable. But we cannot go on breaking things down forever without building anything of our own. This is Latour’s point:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.

This emphasis on iconoclasm and critique makes sense only if we put the cart of ideas before the horse of reality. By insisting on the mutual dependence of perception and reality, we have neutered the radicalism of Marx’s ‘the point is not to describe the world, but to change it’. If the world is the way it is because of ideology, it makes sense to concentrate one’s efforts on dismantling the ideology that props the world up: one can change the world by changing the way we think about it. (Marx himself, a committed materialist, would have disapproved of such wishful thinking, unmoored from economics; but the way his and Engels’ The German Ideology demolished the naïve thinking of their peers has a relish and venom that prefigures the efforts of later critical theory; a neat separation of Marx from his followers is not entirely tenable here.) Decades of critical theory later, we have applied a plethora of critiques everywhere we look. We have problematised, subverted, deconstructed and deterritorialised the banal illusions of common sense until we no longer know which way is up; but the reality of power and capital grind on unabated.

One despondent reaction is that our mistake was to underestimate capitalism’s capacity to co-opt everything – to sell Che t-shirts and ‘green’ product lines, to mutate with the circumstances, to depend on the entrepreneurial self-interest of its human agents as an endless supply of ingenuity. But this is merely to buy into the hype. The economic crisis was a reminder that there is nothing infallible in the ‘invisible hand’ that economists like to misquote from Adam Smith. Infinite growth will come a cropper at some point on a finite planet. It is a matter of how, and when. It is hard to exaggerate the stakes of this question: whether the correction to our current ecologically suicidal course occurs by myopic selfishness and the resulting global disaster, or if by action based on collective self-interest, backed up by a healthy respect for facts, we can walk back from the brink.

III.  The Speculative Turn

Renewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that we need to move beyond our obsessions with language and semantics, and the critique of ideas. For this to happen we need a radical change in intellectual climate; a change that may, at last, be underway.

The anthology The Speculative Turn (available in paperback or for free download) brings together essays from many different and sometimes opposing materialist and realist positions, that nonetheless reject what speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed the dominant paradigm of the twentieth century, ‘correlationism’, in which reality appears, as the introduction puts it, ‘only as the correlate of human thought’. That such philosophy is ill-equipped to understand science may be a problem only for philosophers; that it enables the erosion of public confidence in the very real and dangerous facts that threaten our existence, and undermines the arguments for emancipatory politics and ecological sustainability, is a problem that affects us all:

In the face of the looming ecological catastrophe, and the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies), it is not clear that the anti-realist position is equipped to face up to these developments. The danger is that the dominant anti-realist strain of continental philosophy has not only reached a point of decreasing returns, but that it now actively limits the capacities of philosophy in our time…. This general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our historical thrownness. We might also point to the lack of genuine and effective political action in continental philosophy—arguably a result of the ‘cultural’ turn taken by Marxism, and the increased focus on textual and ideological critique at the expense of the economic realm.

For a non-philosopher like myself, it is sometimes hard going to follow these fast-moving currents, but something new is opening up in the field of contemporary thought. After decades of critical engagement with sign, text, discourse and culture, the shift of focus to the real is like switching morphine for adrenaline.

One of the most important distinctions between the ‘correlationist’ mainstream standpoint and speculative realism is the restoration of ontology (the study of what is) to a central position, rather than privileging epistemology (the study of knowledge). Successive schools of thought have emphasised epistemology, while metaphysical speculation came to be seen as naive, confused and irrelevant (as in Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘About that which we cannot speak, we must be silent’). As epistemology came to be seen to have primacy over ontology, the distinction between things in themselves and things as they are for us is collapsed: a process that began with Kant but has become increasingly solipsistic over time. As the sciences opened our understanding to a universe whose vastness we struggle to comprehend, the humanities locked us back into the narrow confines of discourse, the subject, and the sign. Peter Hallward puts it in The Speculative Turn:

Correlationism figures here as a sort of counter-revolution that emerged in philosophy as it tried, with and after Kant, to come to terms with the uncomfortably disruptive implications of Galileo, Descartes and the scientific revolution. Post-Copernican science had opened the door to the ‘great outdoors’: Kant’s own so-called ‘Copernican turn’ should be best understood as a Ptolemaic attempt to slam this door shut.

The political consequences are enormous, and mostly bad. Thinking about the world as a consumer turns it into one huge repository of resources for us, and of significance only in terms of how best they can best be exploited, is what has sent us hurtling towards extinction. To change course, we need to think about the non-human world in a radically different way.

Prioritising knowledge over being has automatically inflated the importance of critique. Timothy Morton describes the syndrome in typically vivid style:

If you’ve ever been in this kind of argument, you’ll know how intense it can get. Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other’s feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It’s the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event of being, that is more real, or better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. In this mode, the egg of potentiality comes before the chicken of the actual.

Restoring ontology to its proper place stops the game of ‘going meta’, of which ideology critique is a symptom, dead in its tracks. Speculative realism turns correlationist thought on its head, exposing the insistence that any discussion of territory is actually a discussion about a map of that territory, as an empty and indefensible game of words. As Meillassoux points out in After Finitude, if we interpret the activity of science as a discourse that is ultimately centred on the human subject, we miss the whole point (see also Ray Brassier’s essay in Collapse), and fall into the ‘epistemic fallacy’ that Roy Bhaskar describes in A Realist Theory of Science: ‘it is not the character of science that imposes a determinate pattern or order on the world; but the order of the world that … makes possible the cluster of activities we call “science”.’

The relevance of this move to political issues, we can see in a post like this from Larval Subjects, in which Levi Bryant (one of The Speculative Turn’s editors) draws the distinction between the actual state of things, and our experience of them, in relation to class:

The question, then, of how we experience or are conscious of class is distinct from the question of how class exists…. Class can exist and function just fine without anyone identifying with a class or being aware that they are caught up within the mechanisms of class. How else could so many act contrary to their class interests, going so far as to even deny that class exists, if this weren’t the case?… Here the issue is similar to the one Morton raises with respect to climate as a hyperobject. Part of the problem with climate is precisely because, as withdrawn, we aren’t even aware of its existence and therefore are unable to act on it. We are aware of weather without being aware of climate. Climate requires a sort of leap and a detective work that ferrets out all sorts of traces. So too in the case of class.

By now, I hope it is obvious that, while grounded in philosophy, the move away from correlationism has profound consequences for political thought. I’ll quote once more from The Speculative Turn, this time from the essay by Isabelle Stengers, writing about the imperialist implications of vulgar scientistic dogmatism à la Dawkins:

It would be a catastrophic mistake, I believe, to recognize the importance of Vandana Shiva’s struggle against capitalism while associating her protest against the paradigm of contemporary biology with words like holistic, traditional or romantic. Hers is a call not for ‘an other science’, but for a relevant science, a science that would actively take into account the knowledge associated with those agricultural practices that are in the process of being destroyed in the name of progress…. The thesis I am defending—that materialism should be divorced from (academic) eliminativism in order to connect with struggle—does not deny that elimination may have been utterly relevant, when it entailed struggling against the allied powers of state and church, for instance. Today, however, the situation has changed. Elimination has become the very tool of power. It is not only a tool for capitalism, but also for what I would call, together with Hilary Rose, ‘bad science’.

One does not have to subscribe to any particular school of realist or materialist thought to see that our current circumstances urgently call for new ways of thinking the real; to broaden the scope of analysis from discourse and ideology to the actors – human and non-human, individual and collective – in our world and its becoming; to go beyond critique, and begin to build. The Speculative Turn is an important step on that journey. It’s free: go download.

Mentioned in this essay (in order of appearance):

Latour, Bruno 2004, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248.

Sloterdijk, Peter 1987, Critique of Cynical Reason, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Watkins, Susan 2010, ‘Shifting Sands’, New Left Review 61, pp. 5–27

Pehe, Jirí, and Benedict Seymour 2010, ‘The critical divide. Marxism: Radical alternative or totalitarian relic?’, Eurozine.

Bhaskar, Roy 2008, A Realist Theory of Science 3rd edn, Verso, London.

Brassier, Ray 2007, ‘The Enigma of Realism: On Quentin Meillassoux’s “After Finitude”’, Collapse II, pp. 15–45.

Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds 2011, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re:press, Melbourne.

Meillassoux, Quentin 2008, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Continuum, London.

No related posts.

There are signs this may be changing, at least on the academic side, one sign being Rebecca Karl’s recent book, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, which is reviewed below in a piece originally appearing in New Left Review. I think there are shortcomings in the book (as well as in the review), but what struck me in reading Karl’s book was simply a fresh (and, not unimportantly, generally pro-revolutionary) attitude and a leaving-behind of the old anticommunist framework. The book is short (184 pages) and does not explore many salient questions in depth, but seems aimed at an undergraduate and general audience.

ON MAO’S CONTRADICTIONS

Tariq Ali

The emergence of China as the world’s economic powerhouse has shifted the centre of the global market eastwards. [1] The prc’s growth rates are the envy of elites everywhere, its commodities circulating even in the tiniest Andean street markets, its leaders courted by governments strong and weak. These developments have ignited endless discussion on the country and its future. The mainstream media are essentially concerned with the extent to which Beijing is catering to the economic needs of Washington, while think-tankers worry that China will sooner or later mount a systematic challenge to the political wisdom of the West. Academic debate, meanwhile, usually concentrates on the exact nature and the mechanics of contemporary capitalism in China. The optimists of the intellect argue that its essence is determined by the ccp’s continued grip on power, seeing China’s pro-market turn as a version of the Bolsheviks’ New Economic Policy; in more delirious moments, they argue that China’s leaders will use their new economic strength to build a socialism purer than anything previously attempted, based on proper development of the productive forces and not the tin-pot communes of the past. Others, by contrast, hold that a more accurate name for the ruling party would not even require a change of initials—Communist is easily replaced with Capitalist. A third view insists that the Chinese future is simply not foreseeable; it is too soon to predict it with any certainty.

Meanwhile debates also rage about the country’s revolutionary past.

China has not been exempt from the wider trend that accompanied the global victory of the American system, in which histories were re-written, monarchism and religion seen once more in a positive light, and any idea of radical change was trashed. Mao Zedong has been central to this process. In the prc itself, trashy memoirs of the tabloid school have appeared, supplied by Mao’s doctor, secretaries, etc.; all very much in the Chinese tradition of ‘wild history’, otherwise known as gossip. In the West, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday—the former a Red Guard whose Communist parents suffered during the Cultural Revolution, the latter a one-time uncritical defender of Kim Il Sung Thought—joined the fray five years ago with Mao: the Unknown Story. This focused on Mao’s conspicuous imperfections (political and sexual), exaggerating them to fantastical heights and advancing moral criteria for political leaders that they would never apply to a Roosevelt or a Kennedy. The result of ten years’ research, funded by a huge advance from Bertelsmann’s Anglo-American operation, this tendentious and in parts fabricated account was presented as unmatched scholarship by publishing and media conglomerates all over the world—the Guardian hyping it as ‘The Book That Shook the World’. Portraying the Great Helmsman as a monster worse than Hitler, Stalin or anyone else, it was designed to finish Mao off once and for all.

Scholars, however, were generally dismissive of the Chang–Halliday soap-opera script. Some of what it contained had been written about at least two decades earlier, and many of the ‘unknown’ revelations, where not totally dependent on tittle-tattle, were neither sourced nor proven. Much material was lifted from the archives of Mao’s factional opponents in Taiwan and Moscow, and therefore hard to take seriously. Likewise the use of celebrity interviewees whose knowledge of Mao, leave alone China, was limited—Lech Wałe¸sa being one of many. The sensationalist, denunciatory style was, ironically, reminiscent of the language Mao himself deployed against his opponents during the Cultural Revolution. Further contributions to the demonization literature have followed, including Mao’s Great Famine (2010) by Frank Dikötter. The best antidote to date is a collection edited by Gregor Benton and Lin Chun, Was Mao Really a Monster? (2010), which gathers measured responses by distinguished scholars in the us, uk and China.

And Mao himself? His images are for sale, popular in China and not just with tourists, his ideas on protracted war used frequently for ‘guerrilla marketing’. His fate, like that of Che, seems now to be that of a treasured commodity—all that is missing is a Chinese equivalent of the Motorcycle Diaries. (Perhaps, unbeknownst to us, Zhang Yimou is working on The Thoughtful Swimmer.) Rebecca Karl’s important new biography seeks to contextualize Mao within the history of his time, aiming to restore a degree of sanity in discussing his life and role, warts and all, as the father of modern China; and simultaneously to rescue the history of the Chinese Revolution from its detractors in the West and at home. Her model: Lukács’s compressed 1924 intellectual biography of Lenin as theoretician and practitioner. Karl’s scholarly and readable account is far from uncritical, but she insists that the rise of Mao, Maoism and ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ cannot be understood without considering the 20th-century world in which these emerged, and taking account of the role played by the imperialisms that presided over China’s destiny during the first half of the century. To present Mao as a rootless monster or an amoral country bumpkin is a grotesque distortion of Chinese history. Karl charts the triumph of Maoism and discusses its aftermath with a steely clarity, based on meticulous research and the stubbornness of facts. No amount of re-writing history will make them disappear.

Mao Zedong was born to a well-off peasant farmer in Hunan province, subsequently the site of his celebrated investigation of the local peasant movement. Mao and his two younger brothers were given a taste of peasant life as they transported manure to fertilize their father’s paddy fields. The father was a semi-literate boor, neither liked nor respected by Mao from an early age. His mother, very different in character, was a strong-minded woman who instilled in all three sons the idea of improving the world through action. Mao alone was sent to school, where he imbibed the Confucian classics by memorizing them, a style of education common in many parts of Asia then and even now. But it was not until he moved to the provincial capital, Changsha, in mid-1911 that his provincial world-view began to change.

The revolution of October 1911 toppled the Manchu dynasty, and Sun Yatsen declared China a republic. But the country remained fragmented; outside the large cities, warlords dominated the landscape. An attempt in late 1916 by Yuan Shikai to enthrone himself and disband the Republic was defeated. The effect on the intelligentsia and students was electric, radicalizing many, Mao among them. It was at the Fourth Provincial School, a teacher-training institute, that he first encountered thinkers who were engaging with Western political philosophies. The New People’s Study Society expanded his intellectual universe and his circle of friends, many of whom would later become ccp militants. Already widely read in the Chinese classics, especially novels and poetry, Mao now moved on towards liberalism via Western philosophy. He was greatly inspired by his favourite teacher, Yang Changji, a philosophy graduate from Edinburgh who had subsequently studied Kant at Heidelberg. By the time Mao graduated in 1918, Yang had been offered a chair in philosophy at Beida (Beijing University). He took Mao with him. The intellectual ferment that had gripped the country since 1911 had shown few signs of abating; disputes between different philosophical currents dominated cultural life in the cities. Cai Hesen, a close friend of Mao’s, had ended up in Paris from where he wrote lengthy letters describing the impact of the Russian Revolution on Europe and underlining the links between theory and practice—accounts which helped to radicalize Mao.

Mao secured a job in the library at Beida. Here he met Professors Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, the editors of New Youth, a widely read radical, literary-philosophical journal that defended science, democracy and internationalism while systematically subjecting Confucian ideas and the servility they encouraged to a sharp critique. The two men had translated some of Lenin’s and Kautsky’s writings into Chinese, and were clearly moving in a radical direction. The journal defended the Bolsheviks and compared them favourably to some of the local Republican revolutionaries of 1911. It was here that Mao published his first text, on the importance of physical education, in 1917—and it was through Chen’s and Li’s study circles that he became a communist. Despite Mao’s efforts to impress them, according to Karl, ‘the only person on whom he made a deep impression was Professor Yang’s daughter, Yang Kaihui, who later became his first wife and mother of several of his children.’ It was here too that Mao developed his distinctive writing style, often concise and sharp, sometimes lyrical, that was to have a deep impact on the struggles that lay ahead. Though far more poetic than Lenin, Mao’s talents as an essayist and pamphleteer were similar to those of the Bolshevik leader.

Mao was no longer in Beijing when the May 4th movement began in 1919. Earlier that year his mother had become seriously ill, and he had moved back to Changsha. Here he was employed as a school-teacher and set up the Xiang River Review, unmistakeably modelled on New Youth. Its tone was strongly anti-imperialist. It was critical of the country’s spineless leaders and its sharply worded polemics often hit the mark, resulting in the magazine’s suppression by the provincial strongman. Karl points out that the most striking commentaries he wrote in the Review were related to the suicide of a local woman, Miss Zhao, in protest against a forced marriage. Mao described the condition of women in society as one of ‘daily rape’, defended women’s emancipation and argued that it could only take place after a complete overhaul of Chinese society—a view echoed by Lu Xun who, responding to the storm aroused by a Chinese production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Shanghai, posed the question: if a Chinese Nora were to leave home, where might she find refuge?

In July 1921, unknown to all except those involved, the Chinese Communist Party was created in Shanghai, a merger of cells that existed in different parts of the country; 12 delegates represented 57 communists. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao couldn’t make it, but were named as co-founders. Mao represented the tiny cell in Hunan that included his wife. The man from the Comintern who observed and advised them was Maring, a dedicated Dutch Communist (real name: Henk Sneevliet) who had played an important and inspiring role in organizing trade unions in Holland, and had in 1912 moved to the Dutch East Indies, assisting in the creation of what would later become the Indonesian Communist Party. The ccp’s founding moment in Shanghai had little immediate impact, but the comrades returned to their homes determined to recruit workers and intellectuals to the new party. Mao now regarded himself as a professional revolutionary, a foot soldier in the service of the Party and the revolution.

He spent the next year and a half unionizing coal miners and railway and printing-press workers in Hunan, before being summoned to Shanghai to join the Party’s Central Committee. In 1924, the Comintern instructed the ccp—over-ruling the Party’s own leadership—to merge with Sun Yatsen’s gmd. Mao was despatched to Canton to work with the Nationalists, leaving his wife and two young children in Changsha. Her pleadings were of no avail. Mao left his wife a letter in verse:

Waving farewell, I embark on my journey.
The desolate glances we exchange make things worse . . .
From henceforth everywhere I go I’m alone.
I beg you to sever the tangled ties of emotion.
I am now a rootless wanderer.
And have nothing more to do with the whispering of lovers.

Karl is insightful on the disjuncture between Communist theory and practice on the question of women. While the ccp’s programme defended the liberation of women, once inside the Party they were confined largely to menial and maternal duties. For many the Party became the substitute for a family. Yang’s family was radical, but most women who joined the ccp ‘were formally disinherited by their families’. This made their inner-party disappointments more acute. China was not unique in this regard: a similar situation existed in Europe and elsewhere.

In 1925, the outbreak of small peasant uprisings and a large urban strike-wave presented China’s Communists with a fundamental choice: to fight alone, to offer a credible political leadership to the new wave of struggles or to tame them by continuing to work within and under the ‘left wing’ of the gmd? Up to this stage the Comintern had insisted that the Communists subordinate narrow class interests in favour of a united front with the gmd against warlordism and banditry, and in defence of bourgeois democracy. Borodin, a senior Comintern agent (whose character was well drawn in André Malraux’s The Conquerors) had half-jokingly told the ccp leaders to see themselves as ‘coolies’ in the service of the national bourgeoisie. Moscow poured in money and established military links with the Nationalists—a course that was to prove disastrously mistaken when the gmd turned against their Communist allies in 1927.

In agreeing to the Comintern strategy Chen Duxiu, the Party’s General-Secretary, went against his own political instincts. He did not have the self-confidence or the political strength to resist Moscow, later writing of his own weaknesses: ‘I, who had no decisiveness of character, could not insistently maintain my proposal. I respected international discipline and the majority of the Central Committee.’ Might another leader have acted differently? It was the tragedy of the infant ccp that it was never given the time needed to develop its own policies, at a critical moment in the country’s history. Even before the Third International—created in Moscow in 1919, against the advice of the far-sighted Rosa Luxemburg—had been transformed into a crude instrument of Soviet foreign policy, it was heavily dominated by the victorious Bolsheviks. The international prestige they enjoyed amongst the oppressed could not substitute for their superficial knowledge of Asia. Sadly, much of what they wrote and said was treated with scriptural deference, regardless of the concrete situation in different countries.

Later, and in relation to the 1927 Chinese debacle, Trotsky would describe the Third International as the ‘first bureaucracy of the revolution raising itself above the insurgent people and conducting its own “revolutionary” policy instead of the policy of the revolution.’ Whether the 1925–27 Chinese revolution would have succeeded without Comintern interference remains an intriguing counterfactual. Had it done so, the country would have been united against Japanese imperialism, which would have made the occupation difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. This would have had far-reaching consequences, and not only for the Far East.

The Shanghai massacres of 1927, instigated by the gmd’s new paramount leader Chiang Kai-shek, led to the virtual liquidation of local Communists and allied trade unions in the city. Politically and militarily disarmed by the Comintern and its own weaknesses, the ccp was now pushed into a sudden change of gear by Moscow, anxious to salvage the situation—partially for internal reasons, as the Chinese question had become embroiled in factional disputes between Stalin/Bukharin and Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Stalin desperately needed a victory, but the insurrections that followed in Canton and Changsha were easily crushed by a united gmd; indeed, the horrific brutalities in the Hunanese capital were carried out by the Nationalists’ ‘left wing’. The rout of the ccp was now complete. Moscow ordered another change of leadership. Chen Duxiu had already been removed. His successor Li Lisan was dumped in favour of a Moscow stooge, Wang Ming. He lasted four years. The cumulative result of Comintern policies from 1922 onwards is clear: from 1927–32, as Liu Shaoqi reported to the Party Congress in 1945, the revolutionaries had lost over ninety per cent of their membership.

As Karl observes, ‘from the very bleak view of 1927, all seemed lost’. How did the ccp, whipped by successive defeats and on the verge of extinction, succeed in liberating the entire country, unifying it for the first time in a century and a half, and transforming its social and economic structure, within little more than twenty years? The Communist victory of 1949 was the result of military and social policies that were set into motion after the defeats of the 1920s, and which marked a sharp break with past practice. Karl describes the flight of Communist cadres from Chiang’s White Terror in 1927, and Mao’s experiences thereafter in fending off gmd armies through guerrilla warfare. In 1930, after months of hard travelling and fighting, the embryonic Red Army set up base in Jiangxi, establishing what came to be called the Jiangxi Soviet. Here the ccp carried out literacy campaigns among the peasants and encouraged them to reorganize their village and redistribute land themselves. Party policies were to be rooted in ‘meticulous analysis of the rhythms and structures of everyday peasant life’, in the words Karl uses to describe Mao’s ‘Xunwu Report’ of 1930.

Besieged by gmd forces, the ccp decided to abandon Jiangxi in 1934, starting the famous Long March to Yan’an. It was during the Long March, at the 1935 Zunyi Conference, that Mao’s grouping took total power inside the ccp. He would now play a critical role in re-organizing the Party. The new leadership took two key decisions: a move to the countryside to rebuild and recuperate and, in effect, to ignore Moscow in practice while paying lip service in theory. An early test had come before Zunyi when the Comintern, embarking on its Third Period ultra-leftism, proclaimed that a new ‘revolutionary high tide’ was on its way. The Russian word pod’em denoted ‘upsurge’ or ‘advance’. After a great deal of thought and discussion, Zhou Enlai translated it into Chinese as gao-chao or ‘rising tide’. Mao, in poetic mode, responded in January 1930 with a pamphlet, A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire, in which he interpreted the Comintern phrase as follows:

It is like a ship far out at sea whose masthead can already be seen from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother’s womb.

The message was obvious. Nothing was going to happen immediately, but passivity in the face of defeat was not an option either. The poor peasants would henceforth replenish the Party, and from their ranks three mighty branches of the Red Army would be created. Apart from the fact that there was no other solution, this long gestation enabled Mao and his comrades to develop support mechanisms in the countryside that would remain for a long time to come. As has already been argued in these pages, these links explain and differentiate the trajectory of Chinese Communism from that of its Russian counterpart.

A unified China had been the big prize awaiting the nationalists and their friends abroad, but the Japanese invasion of 1937 and ensuing brutal occupation had exposed the weaknesses of orthodox Nationalism. A corrupt and collaborationist gmd had discredited itself, Chiang famously comparing the Japanese occupiers favourably to the Communists: the former were a curable disease, the latter a cancer that had to be destroyed. After 1941, the Nationalist armies began to haemorrhage soldiers and officers to the advancing Communist armies and partisans, under the joint political-military command of Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Peng Dehuai. The strategy Mao had laid out in such texts as ‘On Guerrilla Warfare’ (1937) and ‘On Protracted War’ (1938) was reaping rewards. From 1946 onwards, Chiang Kai-shek and the hard core of his demoralized army were pushed southwards, until they fled to Taiwan in late 1949—with the country’s reserves and numerous other treasures they had looted from museums and the vaults of the Forbidden City. After two decades in the countryside, the Communists returned to the cities to be greeted as liberators by huge crowds in Beijing, Shanghai and Canton.

As Karl observes, the country the ccp inherited had first been wrecked by the Japanese and later by the civil war: commerce had been destroyed, the national currency was now worthless, a barter economy was taking root. ‘Portions of the urban intelligentsia and technologically proficient elites had fled with the gmd, leaving cities without administration and institutions without management.’ The decay and defeat of the old order had left behind a desolate countryside, and there was massive unemployment in the cities. The tasks facing Mao and his comrades were enormous. No theory, however sophisticated, can offer a catechism of solutions to deal with such a crisis. The Party–army built by Mao and the cluster around him played a huge part in restoring a semblance of order in the early 1950s. Help from elsewhere was limited: the ussr was itself in ruins, though aid and technicians were grudgingly provided after Mao’s first visit to Moscow in 1949–50.

In Washington, Truman and, later, the Dulles brothers thoughtlessly assumed that Mao’s victory had strengthened the Communist monolith, and that henceforth China would be little more than Stalin’s satrapy. But before the realization of their error dawned, they attempted a costly and risky containment. With UN cover, General MacArthur moved to prevent the Korean Communists from taking power over the whole peninsula, which had been liberated from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. The Communists were driven to the North, and thousands of civilians were massacred in the process. When full-scale war began in 1950, Chinese leaders went to aid the besieged North Koreans. Their help was decisive. Commanded by Peng Dehuai, a brilliant military strategist, the Chinese expeditionary force drove the Americans back to the South, securing the prc’s borders. us military bases, however, remained in South Korea to protect clients, while North Korea survived, mutating slowly into a kind of Stalinist Ruritania.

Karl gives admirably succinct accounts of the main tensions and debates that ran through the Maoist period—the opposition between bureaucracy and revolution, disagreements over developmental paths, relations between Party, army and masses. Political thought is always at the centre of the discussion. Maoist theory, where it differed completely from Stalinist orthodoxy, could be summarized thus: mass revolutionary consciousness plus mass activity equals self-emancipation and social transformation. It was derived from daily contact with the people during the protracted war against Japan and the gmd. The ‘mass line’ as argued by Mao privileged ‘the masses’ in helping to both refine and define theory. The implication was that the masses could overcome all obstacles. This was fine in relation to war—though even here the gmd’s defeat would have been unthinkable without the Japanese invasion—but was such a practice possible in peacetime? Can mass activity override the problems posed by material socio-economic structures such as a weak industrial base? Karl rejects the charge of ‘voluntarism’ that many critics—friendly and otherwise—have levelled against Maoism, preferring to stress the way in which Mao’s thought ‘reversed the determinations’ of orthodox Marxism. But here her case is at its weakest, as the subsequent evolution of China was to reveal.

The Great Leap Forward that led to the 1959–61 famine and the death of at least 15–20 million peasants was certainly the result of voluntarism. In a push for self-reliance, rural areas were partially industrialized in uncoordinated, uneven fashion, while Mao’s exhortation to overtake the us and uk in steel production brought forth a rash of backyard furnaces, which withdrew huge quantities of labour from the fields. The awful consequences were unintended, unlike the famines in British colonial times in Ireland and Bengal; but this was no consolation for the families of those who perished. Mao was shaken when he finally heard of the scale of the disaster, but it was too late to do anything by then. How was it that Mao and his colleagues were so easily deceived by fake statistics despatched by pliant Party bureaucrats in the countryside to show that the Great Leap was going well? Karl writes that ‘Maoism gone horridly awry was at the root of the problems’, but the process through which this took place remains underexplored.

One of the tragedies of world communism was that most of the parties it spawned came of age and became mass organizations during the 1930s and 40s. By this time the early traditions of dissent and debate within the Bolshevik Party had been suppressed and most of their participants—including 90 per cent of those who served Lenin’s Central Committee—brutally exterminated. The model that new Communists imbibed was the one they encountered in Moscow: a social dictatorship of the Party/bureaucracy that was master of all public life and sustained by institutionalized networks of repression. This was the system put in place when they came to power or even within parties active in the capitalist and colonial worlds. The stifling of debate weakened both Party and state. Karl documents instances of this within the ccp even before it had taken power, such as the Party Rectification campaign of 1941–42, which she sees as the ‘beginnings of the Mao cult’. In the 1950s, there were repeated attempts to root out ‘counter-revolutionaries’, most notably in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58. However, the post-revolutionary Chinese leadership largely avoided Stalin-style purges and mass killings of their own cadres and members. As Karl observes, ‘unlike the Stalinist purges, where a knock at the door after midnight heralded doom, in Maoist China, doom came through words, in newspapers and wall posters.’ One reason for the difference was that most of the slavish pro-Comintern leaders had already been removed—the last of them defeated by a clash of arms prior to the Long March.

Mao’s version of the Stalinist structure was supposedly based on the collective popular will, aroused by the revolution. But how long can such structures survive without mediations—representative institutions through which different interpretations of the popular will can be discussed and voted upon? This has nothing to do with mimicking the West, but is actually the most efficient and painless method of putting the people in touch with their rulers via elected representatives who are permanently accountable and can be recalled by the electors at any time. Had such a system existed, the famine would not have taken place and the backyard furnaces might have been dismantled soon after the experiment began. What might the ‘popular will’ have said about the mountains of corpses that decorated the countryside after the mass famine?

When the Party leaders eventually gathered at Lushan in late 1959 to discuss the ongoing tragedy, they were in self-critical mode, including Mao. But it was his old comrade from Hunan, Peng Dehuai, who confronted Mao and his commandist methods, which had isolated the Party from the people. For this he was removed from all his posts and exiled; Lin Biao replaced him as Defence Minister. Nonetheless, one important outcome of the calamity—soon exacerbated by the Sino-Soviet split—was that the party leadership effectively sidelined Mao. His revenge came in 1966 when, in characteristic style, he appealed to the country’s youth to ‘bombard the Party headquarters’ with criticisms, to ‘create great disorder under the heavens’ so as to ‘restore order’. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a striking demonstration of the ‘mass line’. Mao became the god-emperor of the movement, with Lin Biao as his loyal deputy; the Little Red Book became the movement’s only catechism.

The principal aim was to take back power—though Karl also highlights the anti-bureaucratic impulse behind it, as well as the ‘attempt to seize politics—the power of culture and mass speech for revolution.’ Mao had discarded his responsibility for securing an enduring political structure for China and allowed his judgement to be superseded by the passions, emergencies and triumphs of the power struggle. In the process he and his followers dehumanized their opponents: senior Party leaders, except for Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao, were denounced as ‘capitalist-roaders’; Liu Shaoqi was mistreated; Peng Zhen, the once-powerful Mayor of Beijing, and numerous others were publicly denigrated in front of large crowds; Deng Xiaoping was sent to repair tractors in rural Jiangxi. Hysterical children confronted their parents and denounced them as traitors; teachers and professors were humiliated, universities closed down, ancient treasures publicly destroyed; and Mao was back at the helm.

Examples of the mindless militancy and fanaticism of the gpcr are too numerous to recount, but its contradictory aspects are usually underplayed. When I interviewed some ex-Red Guards in Hong Kong, they described how they had felt liberated and had soon moved on from the Little Red Book and read, written and circulated critical texts that challenged Mao and found his works insufficient. Sending urban dwellers to the countryside undoubtedly gave this generation an idea of how ordinary people there lived and worked. Karl emphasizes the exhilarating effect of this new-found mobility on many thousands of young people. Much of this made a deep impact, as films and novels subsequently revealed.

But in the summer of 1967, Mao called in the army to restore order, performing an about-face when the revolutionary upsurge began to pose a threat to the ccp itself. Mao’s final years were marked by a series of developments signalling a turn in favour of the ‘capitalist-roaders’ at home and the ‘paper tigers’ abroad: rapprochement with Washington and Nixon’s visit in 1972, followed by the return of Deng Xiaoping—the cat with many lives—to political office in 1974. These paved the way for the great transformation that was to follow after Mao’s death. Karl concludes by exploring the fate of Mao’s legacies, hailed in Party ideology but reversed in political and economic practice. She observes that ‘only in repudiating Maoism and everything Mao stood for is it possible for the current Communist Party leaders to retain Mao as their fig leaf of legitimacy.’ One of the merits of Karl’s book is that it permits a serious discussion of all these issues. It will be interesting to see how it is received in China, where the official view is that Mao’s achievements far outweigh his mistakes—by a ratio of 70:30, according to the official Central Committee report of 1981. As Chinese capitalism proceeds further, creating even more social and economic disparities, perhaps some of Mao’s ideas might be deployed by the insurgent masses as they seek to storm the heavens once again.

[1] Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World, Duke University Press: Durham, nc 2010, $21.95, paperback 216 pp, 978 0 8223 4795 8

Related posts:

1. The Cultural Revolution in China: what was its meaning?
2. What do we recognize a revolution?

How Much Is Too Much?

Benjamin Kunkel

The Enigma of Capital, And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’ by David Harvey

The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted a shallow revival of Marxism. During the panicky period between the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the official end of the American recession in the summer of 2009, several mainstream journals, displaying a less than sincere mixture of broadmindedness and chagrin, hailed Marx as a neglected seer of capitalist crisis. The trendspotting Foreign Policy led the way, with a cover story on Marx for its Next Big Thing issue, enticing readers with a promise of star treatment: ‘Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.’

Though written by a socialist, Leo Panitch, the piece was typical of the general approach to Marx and Marxism. It bowed at a distance to the prophet of capitalism’s ever ‘more extensive and exhaustive crises’, and restated several basic articles of his thought: capitalism is inherently unstable; political activism is indispensable; and revolution offers the ultimate prize. This can’t have done much more than jog memories of the Communist Manifesto, the only one of Marx’s works cited by Panitch. The Manifesto remains an incandescent pamphlet, but the elements of a Marxian crisis theory, one never fully articulated by Marx himself, lie elsewhere, scattered throughout Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse and above all the posthumous second and third volumes of Capital. Marx’s brilliant and somewhat contradictory comments on the subject bring to mind Cioran’s remark: ‘Works die; fragments, not having lived, can no longer die.’ Such shards sowed one of the most fertile fields in Marxist economics. Over recent decades, the landmarks of Marxian economic thinking include Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded practitioners of what might be called the bourgeois theorisation of the current crisis.

The term bourgeois will seem apt enough if we note that a recent and distinguished addition to the long shelf of books on the crisis, Nouriel Roubini’s Crisis Economics, summons as its audience not only ‘financial professionals’, ‘corporate executives’ and ‘students in business, economics and finance’, but also – exhausting the list – ‘ordinary investors’.[1] No one, in other words, who is unmotivated by gain. Maybe it’s to be expected, then, that the Marx celebrated by Roubini and his coauthor Stephen Mihm, in a résumé of earlier theorists of crisis, appears as a mere herald of continual disruption rather than as an economist who located at the heart of such crises the existence of bourgeois society as such, or the social cleavage between profit-seekers (financial professionals etc) and wage-earners: the fatal schism, in other words, between capital and labour. Roubini goes no further than to quote the same ringing lines of the Manifesto that appear in Foreign Policy. Here again is the resemblance of capitalism to ‘the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’. Credited with the alarming but vague insight that ‘Capitalism is crisis,’ Marx then departs the scene.

To date, a revived Keynesianism has formed a left boundary of economic debate in the press at large. Only specialised socialist journals have undertaken to diagnose capitalism’s latest distemper in explicitly or implicitly Marxian terms. As for books on the crisis, until recently the jostling crowd of titles included no Marxist study, the exception to this rule, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s Great Financial Crisis, having been bolted together out of editorials from one of those socialist journals, the American Monthly Review.[2] Not until now, with David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital, have we had a book-length example of Marxian crisis theory addressed to the current situation.

Few writers could be better qualified than Harvey to test the continuing validity of a Marxian approach to crisis, a situation he helpfully defines – dictionaries of economics tend to lack any entry for the word – as ‘surplus capital and surplus labour existing side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together’. (This is at once reminiscent of Keynes’s ‘underemployment equilibrium’ and of the news in the daily papers: in the US, corporations are sitting on almost two trillion dollars in cash while unemployment hovers just below 10 per cent.) Harvey, who was born in Kent, is the author of the monumental Limits to Capital – a thoroughgoing critique, synthesis and extension of the several varieties of crisis theory underwritten by Marx’s thought – and has been teaching courses on Marx, mainly in the US, for nearly four decades. His lectures on Volume I of Capital, available online, have become part of the self-education of many young leftists, and now supply the framework for his useful Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’. (I sat in on his lectures at the City University of New York in the fall of 2007; a good Marxist, Harvey made no effort to find out whether any of us – too many for the available chairs – had registered and paid for the class.)

Since the publication of The Limits to Capital in the second year of the Reagan administration and at the dawn of what has come to be known as the financialisation of the world economy, the dual movement of Harvey’s career has been to return time and again to Marx as a teacher, and to extend his own ideas into new and more empirical territory. The most substantial of his recent books, Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003), described the city’s forcible modernisation by Baron Haussmann as a solution to structural crisis – ‘The problem in 1851 was to absorb the surpluses of capital and labour power’ – and situated this urban transformation within the renovation of Parisian humanity it induced. Harvey’s other post-millennial volumes, The New Imperialism (also 2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) and now The Enigma of Capital, amount to a trilogy of self-popularisation and historical illustration, taking current events as a proving ground for what Harvey has called, referring to The Limits to Capital, ‘a reasonably good approximation to a general theory of capital accumulation in space and time’.

The mention of space is considered. Harvey received his doctorate in geography rather than economics or history – his first, non-Marxist book was taken up with differing representations of space – and the whole thrust of his subsequent work, alert to the unevenness of capitalist development across neighbourhoods, regions and nation-states, has been to give a more variegated spatial texture to the historical materialism he would prefer to call ‘historical-geographical materialism’. In a sense, the emphasis confirms Harvey’s classicism. Marx himself somewhat curiously concluded the first volume of Capital – a book otherwise essentially concerned with local transactions between capital and labour, illustrated mostly from the English experience – with a chapter on the ‘primitive accumulation’ of land and mineral wealth attendant on the European sacking of the Americas. In the same way, Rosa Luxemburg, Marx’s first great legatee in the theory of crisis, insisted in the Accumulation of Capital (1913) that imperial expansion across space must accompany capital accumulation over time. Without the prising open of new markets in the colonies, she argued, metropolitan capitalism would be unable to dispose profitably of its glut of commodities, and crises of overproduction doom the system.

It’s not, however, until the last third of The Limits to Capital that the spatial implications of Harvey’s project loom into view. The book starts as a patient philological reconstruction, from Marx’s stray comments, of a Marxian theory of crisis. The method is fittingly cumulative as, from chapter to chapter, in lucid, mostly unadorned prose, Harvey adds new features to a simple model of the ‘overaccumulation of capital’. And overaccumulation remains in his later work – including The Enigma of Capital – the fount of all crisis. The term may seem paradoxical: what could it mean for capital to overaccumulate, when the entire spirit of the system is, as Marx wrote, ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’? How could capitalism acquire too much of what it regards as the sole good thing?

Overaccumulation of capital

Overaccumulated capital can be defined as capital unable to realise the expected rate of profit. Whether in the form of money, physical plant, commodities for sale or labour power (the latter being, in Marx’s terms, mere ‘variable capital’), it can only be invested, utilised, sold or hired, as the case may be, with reduced profitability or at a loss. Overaccumulation will then be variously reflected in money hoarded or gambled rather than invested; in underused factories or vacant storefronts; in half-finished goods or unsold inventories; and in idle workers, even as the need for all these things goes unmet. In such cases, the most basic of the contradictions Marx discovered in capitalism – between use value and exchange value – reasserts itself. For at times of crisis, it’s not that too much wealth exists to make use of – in fact, ‘too little is produced to decently and humanely satisfy the wants of the great mass’ – but that ‘too many means of labour and necessities of life are produced’ to serve ‘as means for the exploitation of labourers at a certain rate of profit’. A portion of the overaccumulated capital will then be devalued, until what survives can seek a satisfactory profitability again. Thus asset prices plunge, firms go bankrupt, physical inventories languish and wages are reduced, though this devaluation is no more equally divided among the respective social groups (rentiers, industrialists, merchants, labourers) than prosperity was during the good times.

On Harvey’s account, standard in this respect, the risk of overaccumulation is intrinsic to the capitalist pursuit of ‘surplus value’. The temptation is to say that surplus value is merely Marx’s name for profit, but this would be to assume success where there is only speculation: surplus value (in commodities) can be realised as a profit (in money) only in the event of a sale, and this is the rub. A capitalist, in order to produce, must purchase both means of production (Marx’s ‘constant capital’) and wage-labour (or ‘variable capital’). After this outlay – C+V in Marx’s formulation – the capitalist naturally hopes to possess a commodity capable of being sold for more than was spent on its production. The difference between cost of production and price at sale permits the realisation of surplus value. The production of any commodity, as well as the ‘expanded reproduction’ of the system itself, can thus be described by the further formula C+V+S: to a quantity of constant capital, or means of production, has been added a quantity of variable capital, or labour power, with a bonus of surplus value contained in the finished commodity.

The trouble is already there to see. Imagine an economy consisting of a single firm which has bought means of production and labour power for a total of $100, in order to produce a mass of commodities it intends to sell for $110, i.e. at a profit of 10 per cent. The problem is that the firm’s suppliers of constant and variable capital are also its only potential customers. Even if the would-be buyers pool their funds, they have only their $100 to spend, and no more. Production of the total supply of commodities exceeds the monetarily effective demand in the system. As Harvey explains in The Limits to Capital, effective demand ‘is at any one point equal to C+V, whereas the value of the total output is C+V+S. Under conditions of equilibrium, this still leaves us with the problem of where the demand for S, the surplus value produced but not yet realised through exchange, comes from.’ An extra $10 in value must be found somewhere, to be exchanged with the firm if it is to realise its desired profit.

In this stylised scheme, with the entire capitalist economy figured as a single firm, the supplementary value can be produced only by the same firm and only in the future. The full cash value of today’s product can therefore be realised only with the assistance of money advanced against commodity values yet to be produced. ‘The surplus value created at one point requires the creation of surplus value at another point,’ as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. How are these points, separated in space and time, to be linked? In a word, through the credit system, which involves ‘the creation of what Marx calls “fictitious capital” – money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity’. Money values backed by tomorrow’s as yet unproduced goods and services, to be exchanged against those already produced today: this is credit or bank money, an anticipation of future value without which the creation of present value stalls. Realisation (or the transformation of surplus value into its money equivalent, as profit) thus depends on the ‘fictitious’.

Harvey is not adding to Marx here: his achievement is to piece a heap of fragments into a coherent mosaic. And for his reconstructed Marx, the end of capitalism – or at least its latest stage, of globally integrated finance – lies in its beginning. What is sometimes called the system’s GOD imperative, for Grow Or Die, entails from the outset the development of finance as the earnest of future production. Finance and production, production and finance, can then chase each other’s tail until together they have covered the entire world (or exhausted the tolerance of the working class). Marx proposed that ‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself,’ and Harvey glosses the idea: ‘The necessary geographical expansion of capitalism is … to be interpreted as capital in search for surplus value. The penetration of capitalist relations into all sectors of the economy, the mobilisation of various “latent” sources of labour power (women and children, for example), have a similar basis.’ Hence both the involution and the imperialism of capital, commodifying the most intimate of formerly uncommodified practices (education, food preparation, courtship) as well as sweeping formerly non-capitalist regions (China and Eastern Europe) into the global market.

Fictitious capital

Marxist economic writing at its best praises the system it comes to bury in more dazzling terms than more apologetic accounts ever achieve, and Harvey’s sardonic paean to ‘the immense potential power that resides within the credit system’ finds him at his most eloquent. For if it at first appeared from a logical point of view that capitalism must immediately founder in a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption it now appears that this problem enjoys a solution. Consider, Harvey suggests, ‘the relation between production and consumption’:

A proper allocation of credit can ensure a quantitative balance between them. The gap between purchases and sales … can be bridged, and production can be harmonised with consumption to ensure balanced accumulation. Any increase in the flow of credit to housing construction, for example, is of little avail today without a parallel increase in the flow of mortgage finance to facilitate housing purchases. Credit can be used to accelerate production and consumption simultaneously.

In the aftermath of the greatest housing bust in history, from Phoenix to Dublin to Dubai, that should sound an ominous note. Harvey goes on: ‘All links in the realisation process bar one can be brought under the control of the credit system. The single exception is of the greatest importance.’ Credit can co-ordinate the flow of economic value, but can’t create it ex nihilo: ‘There is no substitute for the actual transformation of nature through the concrete production of use values.’

In the case of real estate, it might happen – as it has – that more building and selling of houses has been financed than can actually be paid for with income deriving, in the last instance, from production. So the credit system that had seemed to insure against one kind of overaccumulation (of commodity capital) by advancing money against future production, now seems to have fostered another kind of overaccumulation (of fictitious capital) by promising more production than has occurred. More housing has been created than builders can sell at a profit; more mortgage debt has been issued than can be repaid, through wage income, to ensure the lenders’ profit; homeowners who took out loans against the rising value of their property find that prices are instead plummeting; and with the collapse of the housing sector more money capital now lies in the hands of its owners than they can see a way to invest profitably.

‘The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital,’ Harvey writes, and everyone knows what happens next. The flow of credit, at one moment lavished to all comers on the flimsiest pretext of repayment, at the next more or less dries up. In the resulting conditions of uncertainty, those without ready cash, forced to cough it up anyway, can be pushed into fire-sales of their assets, while those who do have cash prefer to save rather than spend it, so that the economy as a whole sinks toward stagnation. So far, so familiar. But what explains the special liability of capitalism to crises of disappointed speculation? And why should real estate so often be their privileged object?

‘Such speculative fevers are not necessarily to be interpreted as direct manifestations of disequilibrium in production,’ Harvey says: ‘They can and do occur on their own account.’ Yet ‘overaccumulation creates conditions ripe for such speculative fevers so that a concatenation of the latter almost invariably signals the existence of the former.’ If capital has been overaccumulated, this means by definition that it can’t easily find a profitable outlet in increased production. The resulting temptation, Harvey suggests, with his emphasis on finance, will be for capital to sidestep production altogether and attempt to increase itself through the multiplication of paper (or digital) assets alone. The question that goes all but unasked in the more respectable literature on the crisis, is why the opportunities for profitable investment looked so scarce in the first place.

Three underlying conditions

If capitalist crises are crises of profitability, Marxian theory ascribes diminished opportunities for profit to one of three underlying conditions. First, a profit squeeze may be induced by the excessive wage bill of the working class, so that capitalists lack enough income to invest in new production on a scale compatible with growth. This line of thought takes inspiration from Marx’s remark that wages are never higher than on the eve of a crash, and enjoyed a heyday of plausibility in the early 1970s, a bygone era of labour militancy, near full employment and high inflation, allegedly spurred by the so-called wage-price spiral. Robert Brenner disputes, however, that a profit squeeze imposed by labour truly afflicted the early 1970s, and doubts whether, given the superior mobility of capital over labour, such a profit squeeze could ever take hold over the long run; capital would simply relocate to more docile markets. At any rate, what Brenner calls the Full Employment Profit Squeeze thesis hardly appears to caption the current picture of high unemployment and stagnant real wages across the developed world.

A second condition is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a result of the ‘rising organic composition of capital’, or in other words the penchant, given increased technological and organisational efficiency, for using relatively less labour than capital in production. Since profitability reflects the ‘rate of exploitation’ – or the ratio of the surplus value produced by the worker to the wages he receives – using less labour relative to capital diminishes profitability, unless capital goods become cheaper or exploitation is ramped up. This problem too can be solved, at least in principle: the capital/ labour ratio can simply be rejigged by deploying more labour relative to capital. Indeed, something like this has occurred on the grandest scale in recent decades, through the rough doubling of the amount of labour available to capital with the proletarianisation of huge populations in Eastern Europe and Asia. The effect, on one estimate, has been to reduce the global capital/labour ratio by 55-60 per cent.

Finally, and most plausibly today, theories of ‘underconsumption’ argue that capitalism lends itself to crisis because, by resisting wage growth, it deprives itself of the market, expanded by wage growth, it would need in order profitably to employ its swelling quantities of capital. Marx, in Volume II of Capital, is to the point: ‘Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production: the labourers as buyers of commodities are important for the market. But as sellers of their own commodity – labour power – capitalist society tends to keep them down to the minimum price.’ Of course ‘a sufficient prodigality of the capitalist class’, as Marx called it, could in principle maintain effective demand at a level consistent with the steady expansion of the system, by substituting luxury consumption for the satisfaction of the population at large.[3] But this solution was never likely, for as Keynes observed, ‘when our income increases our consumption increases also, but not by so much. The key to our practical problem is to be found in this psychological law.’ The worldwide defeat of labour since the 1980s, leading the wage share of GDP to fall throughout the capitalist core, along with the persistent inability of the higher reaches of the capitalist class, in spite of their best efforts, to attain a level of expenditure proportionate to their wealth, makes an underconsumptionist analysis of the current crisis an appealing one, and suggests a possible convergence of Keynesian and Marxian views.

Marxists tend to battle each other, often in the heroic footnotes native to the tradition, over the merits or defects of these differing explanations of crisis. Harvey’s own approach is catholic, all-encompassing. For him, the various strands of crisis theory represent, but don’t exhaust, possible departures from a path of balanced growth in finance and production. What unites the strands is the fundamental antagonism between capital and labour, with their opposing pursuits of profits and wages. If there exists a theoretical possibility of attaining an ideal proportion, from the standpoint of balanced growth, between the amount of total social income to be reinvested in production and the amount to be spent on consumption, and if at the same time the credit system could serve to maintain this ratio of profits to wages in perpetuity, the antagonistic nature of class society nevertheless prevents such a balance from being struck except occasionally and by accident, to be immediately upset by any advantage gained by labour or more likely by capital.

So, as The Limits to Capital implies without quite stating, the special allure and danger of an elaborate credit system lie in its relationship to class society. If more capital has been accumulated than can be realised as a profit through exchange, owing perhaps to ‘the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses’ that Marx at one point declared ‘the ultimate reason for all real crises’, this condition can be temporarily concealed, and its consequences postponed, by the confection of fictitious values in excess of any real values on the verge of production. In this way, growth and profitability in the financial system can substitute for the impaired growth and profitability of the class-ridden system of actual production. By adding over-financialisation, as it were, to his model of overaccumulation, Harvey means to show how an initial contradiction between production and realisation later ‘becomes, via the agency of the credit system, an outright antagonism’ between the financial system of fictitious values and its monetary base, founded on commodity values. This antagonism then ‘forms the rock on which accumulation ultimately founders’. In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation.

A geographical dimension

The real originality of The Limits to Capital, however, is to add a new geographical dimension to crisis formation. Harvey goes about this via a theory of rent. One effect of the approach is to suggest why property speculation – with its value ultimately tied up in potential rental income – should be such a familiar capitalist perversion (in the psychoanalytic sense of overinvestment in one kind of object). Another is to convert an apparent embarrassment for Marxian theory into a show of strength. The would-be embarrassment lies in the evident difficulty of reconciling a labour theory of value with the price of unimproved land, given that land is obviously not a product of human labour. Harvey’s bold and ingenious solution is to propose that, under capitalism, ground rent – or the proportion of property value attributable to mere location, rather than to anything built or cultivated on the land – becomes a ‘pure financial asset’. Ground rent, in other words, is a form of fictitious capital, or value created in anticipation of future commodity production: ‘Like all such forms of fictitious capital, what is traded is a claim on future revenues, which means a claim on future profits from the use of the land or, more directly, a claim on future labour.’

From the need to realise ground rent stems capitalism’s whole geography of anxious anticipation. Capital overaccumulated in one place can flow to another which appears to boast better ultimate prospects of profit. Rising land values will shunt capital to new locations, at the same time that the resulting increase in rental costs compels a matching expansion of production, with its accompanying physical and social infrastructure. The relationship between credit and commodities is in this way translated into spatial terms as an uneasy rapport between one kind of capital, highly mobile or liquid, and another kind – ‘fixed capital embedded in the land’ – defined by its inertness. Here, in the latent conflict between migratory finance capital and helplessly stationary complexes of fixed capital, including not only factories and office buildings but roads, houses, schools and so on, Harvey has found a contradiction of capitalism overlooked by Marx and his heirs.

The contradiction may look at first like a brilliant solution to the problem of overaccumulation. Overaccumulated capital, whether originating as income from production or as the bank overdrafts that unleash fictitious values, can postpone any immediate crisis of profitability by being drawn off into long-term infrastructural projects, in an operation Harvey calls a ‘spatio-temporal fix’. Examples on a grand scale would be the British boom in railway construction of the 1820s, the Second Empire modernisation of Paris, the suburbanisation of the US after World War Two, and the recent international pullulation of commercial and residential towers. In each case, a vast quantity of capital, faced with the question of profitability, could as it were postpone the answer to a remote date, since investments in infrastructure promise such delayed returns. Meanwhile, transformed spatial arrangements swap old trades for new ones – Harvey notes that Haussmann’s Paris witnessed the extinction of the water-carrier and the advent of the electrician – or rejuvenate existing industries, like the postwar car manufacturers in the US.

Inevitably, the risk is that a given territory, as a complex of fixed capital, comes to prosper thanks to a stream of finance that one day flows elsewhere. A devaluation of the abandoned land along with its ‘overaccumulated’ workers, industries and infrastructure will ensue. This harsh sequel to the spatial fix Harvey calls a ‘switching crisis’, and in something like the climax of The Limits to Capital, he writes:

The more the forces of geographical inertia prevail, the deeper will the aggregate crises of capitalism become and the more savage will switching crises have to be to restore the disturbed equilibrium. Local alliances will have to be dramatically reorganised (the rise of Fascism being the most horrible example), technological mixes suddenly altered (incurring massive devaluation of old plant), physical and social infrastructures totally reconstituted (often through a crisis in state expenditures) and the space economy of capitalist production, distribution and consumption totally transformed. The cost of devaluation to both individual capitalists and labourers becomes substantial. Capitalism reaps the savage harvest of its own internal contradictions.

In The Enigma of Capital Harvey observes these contradictions sharpening over time, as finance capital becomes ever more mobile while beds of infrastructure grow increasingly Procrustean: ‘The disjunction of the quest for hypermobility and an increasingly sclerotic built environment (think of the huge amount of fixed capital embedded in Tokyo or New York City) becomes ever more dramatic.’

So what then are the ‘limits to capital’? Harvey’s answer, disappointing as it is honest, is that a system bent on overaccumulation will not collapse of its own top-heaviness. Should the world market fail to generate the ever increasing surpluses that form its only rationale, it can always enlarge its borders and appropriate new wealth through what Marx called primitive accumulation and what Harvey proposes to call ‘accumulation by dispossession’, given that the process hardly ceased when the English peasantry was cleared off the land or the Inca Empire looted for its silver. The incorporation into the capitalist domain of non-capitalist territories and populations, the privatisation of public or commonly owned assets, including land, and so on, down to the commodification of indigenous art-forms and the patenting of seeds, offer instances of the accumulation by dispossession that has accompanied capitalism since its inception. This field for gain would be exhausted only with universal commodification, when ‘every person in every nook and cranny of the world is caught within the orbit of capital.’ Even then, the continuous ‘restructuring of the space economy of capitalism on a global scale still holds out the prospect for a restoration of equilibrium through a reorganisation of the regional parts’. Spatial fixes and switching crises might succeed one another endlessly, in great floods and droughts of capital. Devaluation, being ‘always on a particular route or at a particular place’, might serially scourge the earth even as capital in general, loyal to no country, remained free to pursue its own advantage.

The Enigma of Capital

The real test of Harvey’s 1982 theory of crisis is how well it serves in the face of the thing itself. The Enigma of Capital can be read as an effort to meet the challenge. Naturally, its success or failure depends on whether it can offer a more comprehensive and persuasive account than rival theories. On the score of comprehensiveness there can be little doubt that Harvey’s work and that of other Marxists goes beyond the alternatives. ‘The idea that the crisis had systemic origins is scarcely mooted in the mainstream media,’ Harvey writes, and that might be extended to include even the trenchant work of the neo-Keynesians. The crisis, after all, is that of a capitalist system, and no account of it, however searching, can be truly systematic if it neglects to consider property relations: that is, the preponderant ownership of capital by one class, and of little or nothing but its labour power by another.

Paul Krugman, discussing Roubini’s book in the New York Review of Books, agreed with him that what Ben Bernanke called the ‘global savings glut’ lay at the heart of the crisis, behind the proximate follies of deregulation, mortgage-securitisation, excessive leverage and so on. Originating in the current account surpluses of net-exporting countries such as Germany, Japan and China, this great tide of money flooded markets in the US and Western Europe, and floated property and asset values unsustainably. Why was so much capital so badly misallocated? In the LRB of 22 April 2010, Joseph Stiglitz observed that the savings glut ‘could equally well be described as an “investment dearth”’, reflecting a scarcity of attractive investment opportunities. Stiglitz suggests that global warming mitigation or poverty reduction offers new ‘opportunities for investments with high social returns’.

The neo-Keynesians’ ‘savings glut’ can readily be seen as a case of what a more radical tradition calls overaccumulated capital. But it is the broader and more systematic Marxist perspective that ultimately and properly contains Keynesianism within it, and a crude Marxist catechism may be in order. Where does an excess of savings come from? From unpaid labour – for example, that of Chinese or German workers. And why would such funds inflate asset bubbles rather than create useful investment? Because capital pursues not ‘high social returns’, but high private returns. And why should these have proved difficult to achieve, except by financial shell-games? Keynesians complain of an insufficiency of aggregate demand, restraining investment. The Marxist will simply add that this bespeaks inadequate wages, in the index of a class struggle going the way of owners rather than workers.

In The Enigma of Capital, Harvey coincides with other Marxists in locating the origins of the present crisis in the troubles of the 1970s, when the so-called Golden Age of capitalism following the Second World War – blessed with high rates of profitability, productivity, wage growth and expansion of output – gave way to what Brenner named ‘the long downturn’ after 1973. Brenner argued in The Economics of Global Turbulence that this long downturn, with deeper recessions and weaker expansions across every business cycle, reflects chronic overcapacity – another variety of overaccumulation – in international manufacturing, a condition brought about by the maturation of Japanese and German industry by the end of the 1960s, and later compounded by the industrialisation of East Asia. As competition to supply export markets increased faster than those markets expanded, the price of international tradeables naturally fell, reducing both the profits of manufacturers and the wages paid to workers. Such impaired profitability moreover discouraged further investment in production, so that finance capital turned increasingly to speculation in asset values. Yet this view, however formidably presented, doesn’t appear to have won general assent. Harvey, content to follow Brenner elsewhere, inclines towards a more conventional profit-squeeze explanation of the crisis of the early 1970s.

About the sequel to that crisis there is less dispute. Whether or not high wages had undermined profitability, a subsequent effort to curb wages, carried out at gunpoint in the Southern Cone in the mid-1970s, and achieved by ballot under Thatcher and Reagan before spreading to other wealthy countries, eventually resulted in a systemic shortage of demand. In this way, capital’s victory over labour set the stage for a later reversal. In The Enigma of Capital, Harvey charts the dialectical switch in the blunt style he now favours:

Labour availability is no problem now for capital, and it has not been for the last 25 years. But disempowered labour means low wages, and impoverished workers do not constitute a vibrant market. Persistent wage repression therefore poses the problem of lack of demand for the expanding output of capitalist corporations. One barrier to capital accumulation – the labour question – is overcome at the expense of creating another – lack of a market. So how could this second barrier be circumvented?

The lack of demand was of course appeased by recourse to fictitious capital: ‘The gap between what labour was earning and what it could spend was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness.’ It was not only consumers who indentured themselves. As Bellamy Foster and Magdoff point out in The Great Financial Crisis, total US debt, owed by government, corporations and individuals, equalled approximately 125% of American GDP during the 1970s. By the mid-1980s the proportion had increased to two to one, and by 2005 stood at almost three and a half to one. Much of the cheap credit, originating in East Asia and flowing through the Federal Reserve, came to promote a property bubble of historic dimensions. ‘The demand problem,’ Harvey writes, ‘was temporarily bridged with respect to housing by debt-financing the developers as well as the buyers. The financial institutions collectively controlled both the supply of, and demand for, housing!’

It can’t be said that Harvey comes late to recognising the housing bubble’s absurdity. In The New Imperialism, from 2003, he recapitulated his theory of the spatial fix, and warned that while some spatial fixes ultimately relieve crises through the elaboration of new physical and social infrastructure, others merely postpone them. After listing several of the more spectacular property-market collapses of the long downturn (worldwide in 1973-75; Japanese in 1990; Thai and Indonesian in 1997), Harvey added that

the most important prop to the US and British economies after the onset of general recession in all other sectors from mid-2001 onwards was the continued speculative vigour in the property and housing markets and construction. In a curious backwash effect, we find that some 20 per cent of GDP growth in the United States in 2002 was attributable to consumers refinancing their mortgage debt on the inflated values of their housing and using the extra money they gained for immediate consumption (in effect, mopping up overaccumulating capital in the primary circuit). British consumers borrowed $19 billion in the third quarter of 2002 alone against the value of their mortgages to finance consumption. What happens if and when this property bubble bursts is a matter for serious concern.

Not only Americans and Britons but the Irish, Spanish and Emiratis live today among the ruins of a broken spatial fix.

What next?

What, if any, switching crisis does this presage? To keep things simple, imagine the world economy of recent years as consisting of two capitalist countries – represented by the US and China – in both of which the working class, employed or unemployed, received too little of the total product for capital not to overaccumulate and risk massive devaluation. Chinese workers, deprived by wage repression and social insecurity (such as lack of health insurance) of the opportunity to consume much of their own output, saw the wealth accumulated through their labour go, in the form of their own savings and the income of their bosses, towards the construction of new productive capacity in their own country and a property boom in the other country. Both the new factories at home, turning out exports for the US, and the deliriously appreciating houses abroad rested on the premise of continuously rising American incomes. But among Americans, wage growth had ceased and household incomes could no longer be supplemented by the mass entry of women into the workforce, something already accomplished. The issuance and securitisation of debt alone could substitute for present income. But in the end so much fictitious capital could not be redeemed. Whatever the destination of future Chinese savings gluts, they can no longer sponsor American consumption in the same way.

In his final book, Adam Smith in Beijing (2007), the late Giovanni Arrighi expanded on Harvey’s concepts of the spatial fix and the switching crisis to survey half a millennium of capitalist development and to peer into a new, probably Chinese century. In Arrighi’s scheme of capitalist history, there had been four ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’, each lasting roughly a century and each organised on a larger scale than the one before, with a new polity at the centre: a Genoese-Iberian cycle; a Dutch cycle; a British cycle; and an American one. A systemic cycle’s first phase, of material expansion, came to an end when the central power had accumulated more capital than established trade and production could absorb. This was followed by a second, financial phase of expansion in which capital overaccumulated at the centre of the system promoted a new nucleus of growth. Ultimately the rising centre came to finance the expenditures, often on war, that the old and now declining centre could no longer cover out of its mere income.

It fits Arrighi’s scheme that the US, having (along with the Chinese diaspora) once led international capital onto the Asian mainland, had now become dependent on Chinese credit. For him, this announced the greatest switching crisis of all time, as China prepared to assume the hegemonic role being reluctantly relinquished by the US, and to inaugurate a new cycle of accumulation. Such a succession might ideally yield a new commonwealth of civilisations, in which capitalism as we know it gave way to what Arrighi somewhat hazily envisaged as a non-capitalist market economy recuperating old Chinese traditions of self-centred development. One condition of this happy scenario was that the US abandon its armed imperialism and China remain committed to its ‘peaceful rise’; another, that the Chinese pioneer a green mode of growth distinct from ‘the Western, capital intensive, energy consuming path’. Otherwise inter-imperial war, the ultimate means of competitive devaluation in The Limits to Capital, loomed once more.

In the recently published Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, John Bellamy Foster and his Marxist co-authors refer to the identification by a group of scientists, including the leading American climatologist James Hansen, of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ that civilisation transgresses at its peril.[4] Already three – concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, loss of nitrogen from the soil and the extinction of other species – have been exceeded. These are impediments to endless capital accumulation that future crisis theories will have to reckon with. Harvey’s intuition of the ultimate demise of capitalism has also taken on an ecological colouring. ‘Compound growth for ever’ – historically, for capitalism at about 3 per cent a year – ‘is not possible,’ he declares in The Enigma of Capital, without much elaboration. The classical economists long ago foresaw that an economy defined by constant expansion would one day give way to what John Stuart Mill called the ‘stationary state’. The idea has gained a new currency in Marxist writing of recent years, and in its contemporary version tends to locate the limits to growth in the depletion of natural resources or in the exhaustion of productivity gains as the share of manufacturing in the world economy shrinks and that of services expands. Of course, peak oil or soil exhaustion might easily coincide with faltering productivity. Harvey doesn’t spell out why growth must have a stop, and the outlines of an ecologically stable and politically democratic future socialism remain as blurry in his later work as they do almost everywhere else. At the moment Marxism seems better prepared to interpret the world than to change it. But the first achievement is at least due wider recognition, which with the next crisis, or subsequent spasm of the present one, it may begin to receive.

Related posts:

1. What is Marx’s theory of crisis?
2. Capitalist crisis and left response
3. The crisis now, and possible futures

Khukuri features several essays by Bill Martin, and he is a participant in the Kasama Project, with which both this site and Kasama are associated. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rack, 1968-1978, and (with Bob Avakian) Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics, as well as others.

This is the second engagement with Ethical Marxism to appear on this site. The first, by Vern Gray can be found here.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21^st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.

This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.

As will become clear, I think the theory sketched in Ethical Marxism is seriously flawed, and I will often be sharply critical. But I want to salute at the outset Martin’s attempt at the great and necessary task undertaken here, the refiguration of Marxism in the light of past impasses and present needs. I hope I’ll succeed in making clear the ways and extent to which I believe that the questions and problems which Martin is attempting to solve by means of this approach are very real and unresolved problems for all revolutionaries in this era.

I

The principal and overall thesis of Ethical Marxism (EM) is that ethics and politics need each other, that neither by itself is sufficient – sufficient for a just society, for revolution, for the emancipation of humanity, for the redemption of the world. On the one hand “ethics does not have, by itself, what it takes to be ethical” (25; numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in EM). That is, ethics in itself does not have the power to make effective its own insights and conclusions, cannot of itself bring the good and the right into being in the world: “to make these things a real force in the world, we also need something like Marxism” (26). On the other hand, neither does politics (or history or economics) have what it takes to be other than realpolitik, another way of regulating or taking part in the scramble among human beings and groups in pursuit of self-interest.

Martin argues that there is a “kind of vision that is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and yet is underdetermined by systematic study of the ‘social evidence.’ In terms of modalities, the vision is necessary for the transformation, but the vision does not represent the necessity of the transformation itself.” (x) This vision springs, Martin believes, from what he calls “the religious perspective.

Since the vision of the future does not spring directly or necessarily from a study of the present, but yet this vision does not represent or imply its own necessity, there is still a gap, which Martin proposes to bridge through ethics: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos [end or goal] might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps.” (49)

Martin relates these three aspects or moments – scientific description/explanation, ethical prescription, and future-oriented vision – to the three questions, which Kant thought encompassed the concerns of reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? He also seems to relate them, as Kant did, to what he sees as three discontinuous discourses: science, ethics, and religion. (Although at one point Martin makes ethics central, as well, to vision: “…the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of ethical relation at its core” [160]. In general the emphasis throughout is on the discontinuity of science from both ethics and “the religious dimension,” with little or no theorization of differences between the latter two.

Thus “this book is about how the ethical point, or what I sometimes call the ‘ethical moment’, is indeed needed, and along with it intentionality and responsibility (and agency) and even a discourse that partakes of transcendence and theology.” (4) Such a perspective, he argues, is vitally needed in order to strengthen Marxism to enable it to “become a more powerful instrument for guiding humanity in going from an unjust and unsustainable world to a global community of mutual flourishing.” (4)

On the one hand this is posed as an external critique, in that it is grounded outside of Marxism as such, in both religious and ethical perspectives. (In the latter case Martin takes Kant to be the definatory figure.) But on the other hand Martin believes he is pointing to something that is present but unacknowledged and untheorized, both in Marx (“Marx’s work is permeated with moral concepts” – 2) and in the life of revolutionary movements. In pointing to the need for “the ethical moment” he is reaching for “a conception that is at work in actual revolutionary processes, and that would play an even greater role in human emancipation and critical emancipatory theory if it were clarified and embraced for what it is.” (14)

Although at one point describing the project of the book as one of making explicit and fleshing out what is already implicit or taken for granted in Marx (230), generally and on the whole Martin seems to be working from the conception of a Marx and Marxism which has no place for ethics (or intentionality either), but only for the description and projection of material forces.

Martin’s most basic thesis, then, is that Marxism and revolutionary theory generally, on the one hand, and ethics and the religious dimension, on the other, need each other in order to fulfill their own most basic aims and functions. The aspect that receives by far the most attention in this book is the need that Marxism has for ethics. This is a work addressed chiefly to those who see themselves as within or deriving from the Marxist tradition, arguing for the necessity of “the ethical moment.”

(Although the religious perspective would appear to be equally important to Martin’s overall conception, this aspect receives little sustained focus here, although it does make a reappearance in the book’s Conclusion, where religious narratives are described as “stories that people themselves tell in the living of their lives under specific conditions, but under the twin imperatives of mortality and the possibility of redemption,” a sort of story and language which is “both near and far from Marx.” [397])

Argument

The argument for Ethical Marxism in a nutshell is that the creation of a ‘social society’ has to issue both from a political-economic analysis and a moral recognition of what is morally wrong about the antisocial form of society. (179)

This is one of Martin’s most succinct statements of what he aims to show (it’s not actually an argument). In the process of attempting to show this, the principal argument of the book is that Marxism has not and cannot in itself generate the ought which is necessary for a process which is truly revolutionary and emancipatory, and that Marxism’s attempted theorization of a revolutionary imperative in terms of interests is radically insufficient and must be supplemented by a separately-based ethical imperative.

Obviously this depends on the supposition that Marxism posits a purely interest-based motivation and imperative for revolution. We’ll return to this important question, which is related to Martin’s conception of a Marxism which positions itself as a positivistic science. But first let’s look at how the argument of Ethical Marxism develops.

At one point Martin lays it out along the following lines:

The most pressing ethical concern is the hardest thing not only to accomplish, but even to thematize, even to begin to get people to grapple with….Certainly there are ways in which power and ‘things’ work, and…even while these workings have to be studied and understood and grappled with from a strategic perspective, it is precisely the reduction to causal ‘thingness’ that is the essence of economism, or, to put the point the other way around, it is the complete setting aside of any consideration of the thing that ought to be done in some matrix of pure causality and interest that is the essence of economism. Lenin saw this, in his critique of economism, and yet, out of the orthodox Marxist refusal of the ethical, did not thematize the point this way….This refusal has had consequences, indeed dire consequences [and] overcoming this limitation is absolutely essential for any future Marxist project. (189)

(The “dire consequences” here would seem to refer to events in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s ascendancy, and indeed Martin later points to the Stalin period as “probably the main reason why there has to be a way of articulating the ethical with Marxism – or else it would probably be better not to have Marxism any more.” [302])1

Martin’s analysis is that Marxism, conceived simply as a science which describes and explains the dynamics of capitalism and projects an historical sequence, offers at best the sort of interest-based politics which follows from its explanation of history in terms of class struggle, and that such a politics will be equivalent to a realpolitik power-politics and can easily (or perhaps is bound to) issue in the perversions of the revolutionary process seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For Marx, he holds, “it is only a happy by-product that socialism and ultimately communism would be good for humanity…; instead, these social forms are inevitable… these forms are simply what will occur in the objective unfolding of the material dialectic of history.” (392)

Just the realization that more is needed, or the merely implicit exemplification of this realization (as seen, Martin believes, in the example of Lenin’s polemic against economism in What Is To Be Done) – this is quite insufficient. The only remedy is the explicit “thematization of the ethical” and the bringing of the ethical into politics, for “…a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

Materialism

One concern in pursuing this thesis (which takes Martin in many directions) is to maintain a philosophically materialist outlook:

The aspect of the struggle to overcome capitalism that has to do with justice and the aim of creating a good society remains subordinate and epiphenomenal [in Marx]. My argument in this book is that, if there are not at least key moments when these terms are not explicitly thematized and pursued in their own right, then this struggle cannot be carried through. The question remains how this thematization and motivation can be understood within an historical materialist framework, but my hope is that it can…. (155)

Obviously the concern here – what Martin at times calls “the ethico-ontological problem” (220), is to ground ethics immanently, that is, in this world, as opposed to an other, transcendent, world. Martin, it seems clear, wants to remain on the materialist ground of Marxism; but he wants to expand the meaning of that materialism. But although this is clearly his desire, it can’t be said that he is able to resolve the ethico-ontological problem, how to explain the genesis and status of the ethical within a general materialist ontological framework. At best he expresses a hope (as above), or points to a need, as in the following passage:

…there ought to be an argument for the material role that the ethical, and the discourse of the good, needs to play in creating a good society. In other words, if economics, politics and history cannot do what they were supposed to do, then we had better consider the materiality of the ethical – which means grappling with the materiality of evil. (48)

He does, though, point to indications that there must be some sort of materiality of the ethical, or indications that he thinks imply this. He points to what he believes to be gaps, gaps which can only be bridged by the ethical: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps” (49), and “…there are gaps in Marx’s analysis that can only be addressed in irreducibly normative terms” (103).

Gaps

Over the course of the book, Martin describes several gaps of different character, in each case only bridgeable, he believes, by the ethical. These gaps could be grouped under the following headings:

Most obviously, there is the gap between description and prescription, the gap between description/explanation and normative prescription which is demonstrated, he says, by “the irreducibility of vocabularies (the causal and the value-driven)” (403).

This is clearly the underlying thread of the book: that no amount or depth of description and explanation of the workings and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Marx and Marxism gives us, will generate the sort of moral imperative, the “ought,” which is necessary both to overthrow this system and to go beyond a “reaction formation” to build a genuinely different society. Further, that this gap is made larger and more pressing by the phenomena of colonialism, and in the 20^th century (and the 21^st) by imperialism. (See 102 – 155 or so, within the section of the book on “Imperialism as the Ethical Problem of Our Time”; “reaction formation” is introduced on 121.)

There is also the gap between necessity and possibility, between what must happen and what may potentially be brought into existence. This is the argument that historical necessity would obviate human freedom and particularity. But, given that the necessity of Marx’s historical template is questionable today in any case, we face the question (present in any case but brought home by the failure of Marxist inevitabilism) of how to understand the generation and actualization of possibilities. (At one point Martin describes his aim as “a ‘postinevitablist’ Marxism that is reconfigured in terms of ethical themes” – 191.) Such an understanding, he believes, must centrally involve the ethical.

His argument runs along the following lines:

Such a scheme presented as inevitability is either theology or strategic audacity; it is only in such a scheme presented as possibility, however, that the history and possible future of humanity actually matters….We are back into the problem of theodicy…in which case ‘redemption’ is not really redemption, this life is not a ‘real fight’ (James), there are no actual people who actually matter involved in history, but only the god of historical inevitability…. (158)

Rather than laws necessarily generating certain results, the laws of history “ought to be understood instead as ‘laws of possibility’, ways of theorizing where the openings might occur in the existing society that would allow for something different and better to arise,” thus introducing “an irreducible element of normativity.” (160, 268)

In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

The question of vision is also conceived by Martin as invoking “the religious dimension.” and it’s worth pausing a moment to ask how he conceives the relation of ethical and religious. At one point he speaks of a confidence that is needed which “holds central faith in the principles that exploitation, domination, and oppression are wrong, that we are ethically compelled to struggle against every form that these things take, and that another world is possible.” (409) He believes such a confidence is not only ethical but also religious in the sense that it is a faith both in these ethical principles and in the possibility of a different world.

The “vision thing” also brings us to the gap between destruction and construction. Revolutions involve both, but there is a danger of a construction which is merely a “reaction-formation,” a new which will not be qualitatively different or better because it is simply built through a negation of or reaction to the old. Only ethics, once again, can bridge the gap between revolutionary negation and destruction, and the vision of a redeemed future (a vision whose source he finds in “the religious dimension” of human existence).

The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (380)

Now these gaps are supposed to show, not only the necessity of the ethical, but to imply its materiality (see above). The argument for this would be along the following lines (this is strongly implied, I think, in Martin’s account, although not quite stated as suchⁱⁱ): If there are lacunae and gaps in Marx’s schema of explanation and projection, such that the gaps can only be bridged normatively, then (a) there is a need for the normative in order to make Marx’s account complete or coherent, and (b) if Marx’s account is overall materialist, then whatever it takes to fill these gaps must have some material status.

Presuming that I’ve correctly captured Martin’s argument, it’s a troublesome one logically, and I don’t think it really goes through very well. For one thing, although it’s asserted that this is so, it is never really demonstrated that only the ethical or normative can bridge these gaps. Why cannot there be some other way of filling these gaps? (In fact I believe there are other ways, as I’ll try to indicate below.)

Even more bothersome from a logical point of view is the status of (b): from the fact that there are gaps in a materialist account, it’s hard to see why it would necessarily follow that whatever is needed to fill the gaps must also be material. Take, as a rather highly charged parallel, the anti-evolutionist argument that there are irreducible gaps in the Darwinist (materialist) theory of evolution, which can only be bridged by a divine creative force. Suppose we granted that argument, would it follow that this “divine force” is therefore material? Of course the creationists and others who put this forward believe, on the contrary, that the “argument from gaps” shows the incompleteness of a materialist explanation, which must therefore be supplemented by an independent spiritual reality. But if materialism is ones axiomatic basis then presumably the argument would simply mean that the “divine force” is actually material: if there is an explanatory gap in a theory, then the presumption would be that whatever is necessary to bridge that gap will have a material status. But if materialism is already presupposed, it’s hard to see how the “argument from gaps” can be an argument for the materiality of ethics.

Sometimes Martin takes a different tack, which, at least as I see it, is more promising as a way of finding a basis for an ethics in human social materiality. Proposing “flourishment” as a translation of the Greek eudaimonia (an important term in Aristotle’s ethical discussions), Martin says that “even if flourishment might be understood in different ways in different times or places, or even if it is barely understood at all, we humans are good at recognizing what is not flourishment, and in knowing we need something else,” and that even if this sense may be little more than a bare feeling or reaction, “it is from this feeling that normative social theory develops.” (59) The overall human project, in which human good is based, would then be “to create possibilities for human flourishment.” (64: he calls it “the Aristotelian answer,” but it seems clear, at least during these pages, that it is also Martin’s answer.) Although these ideals of flourishment would differ historically, the notion would provide a common (formal) criterion of the good, with evil occurring “when possibilities for flourishment are cut off through the efforts of some human agency….” (63)

This seems, as I say, more promising, both with regard to the material rooting of morality and as a conception which can be integrated with Marxism, or which it might be argued is something presupposed by Marx. But although this line of thought is taken up by Martin over the course of ten pages or so at one point, it is not pursued systematically in the book.

II

In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.

There are also some matters of detail relating to Ethical Marxism which have their own importance, and which will also consume much of the space in what lies below. My concern is with several characteristic ways of arguing and framing things that Martin makes use of, which I believe are unfruitful or worse, and will not take us very far in terms of the discussion we need to be having. (These will be the subject of Part III of this essay.)

The movement from Is to Ought

Martin often tends to pose issues in terms of dichotomies (science/ethics, interest-based vs. ethical motivation, etc.); one of the most pervasive and basic in his thinking is the contradiction he proposes between a politics based on what at one point he calls “real ethics,” and a politics based “mere utilitarianism and calculation based on interests.” (211-12) Now one could question the adequacy of this and others of the dichotomous contrasts Martin sets up (and I’ll touch on this below), but for the moment I want to explore some of the tensions and problems that arise in Martin’s argument from it.

I’ll start from the following passage:

In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests. Interests are experienced differently in different strata of society…; for there to be a larger change in society, however, there has to be a more general crisis, indeed a crisis felt by all sectors of society. In Lenin’s memorable description, the crisis has to be such that people cannot any longer live in the ways in which they have been living, and the ruling class cannot any longer rule in the ways in which it has been ruling. The Marxist perspective is that, short of an actual deep crisis in the social system, people do not (again – generally, broadly, deeply) go into motion against the existing order. People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order. (187)

On the one hand it seems that Martin accepts that this is the case. Although he does not say so directly, contextual indications are that Martin believes this to be so – that people generally do not go up against the established order in ordinary circumstances (in “times of ‘normal functioning’,” as he puts it), even though it is an unjust order. (And how would it be possible not to believe this? It seems quite clear that it’s the case.)

On the other hand, at several points throughout the book Martin advances the thesis that without ethical/moral motivation and intention, a better world cannot come to be: that moral motivation is necessary to a revolution which is not merely a ‘reaction formation’. And as noted above, Martin believes that “…the Kantian thesis is right: a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

So it almost seems that Martin has, on the one hand, set up a problem which he believes must be solved, in order for any revolution to be truly a step in the actual liberation of humanity: The revolution must be made out of a moral motivation. But at the same time he also seems to believe that this is not (is never?) the case: “People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order.” So he has set a problem for any revolution, it seems, which must be solved but which has not been solved and perhaps cannot be solved.

I do not mean to give an argument simply based on this contradiction of phrases. But I do want to ask what it indicates. It is very much as if Martin’s position is that although people broadly do not make revolution out of moral motivation, they ought to do so. Clearly this reproduces the is/ought gap at a higher level (the meta-level): why should we be moral? But when it is posed this way it is clear, I think, that Martin does not provide a way of bridging this gap.

Why should we be moral?

Martin proposes that, in addition to the Marxist description of the structure of the present world, only ethics can bridge the gap between the wretched present and what he sometimes calls the “redeemed world” of a possible future. Suppose we accept that ethics can perform this function. There would still remain the problem of: why take up this ethical stance? Ethics can’t itself provide the reason, or the motive, to be ethical, or to take the ethical bridge to the future. We might answer that it’s necessary to begin from “the ethical moment” because that’s the only way to reach “the redeemed world.” But that would presuppose that we already have the impetus toward that redeemed world – yet it was precisely this impetus which ethics was supposed to be necessary in order to provide in the first place.

I don’t want to seem unnecessarily paradoxical or logic-chopping here. The problem that Martin runs into, as I see it, can be described more simply from another angle. He has written a book which is addressed, in the main, to Marxists and to those who believe in the great desirability or necessity of gaining or moving toward the “redeemed future.” And he is arguing that Marxism does not provide the resources for reaching this possible future, but that a revamped theory, with ethics at its core, an Ethical Marxism, is necessary if such a future is to be reached. Martin believes, moreover, that moral feeling is the actual basis of people’s entering into revolutionary practice or oppositional political engagement in the first place, and his claim is that this “ethical moment” has not been theorized, and must be. (That, at least, is one of the lines of thinking in this book.) In this context the “why be moral?” question does not arise, given the assumption that those addressed already operate, in their basic political outlook, from a moral motivation.

But Martin also believes that, not only must this moral basis be realized and made explicit within the consciously revolutionary ranks, but it must also form the basis, very broadly among the people, in a mass revolutionary upsurge. “Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” (155)

I think it actually is true that a problem has been set which cannot be solved within the terms in which it is posed. But perhaps the quandary stems from these terms as they are understood in Ethical Marxism. I want to pursue this thought by exploring briefly some of the central concepts or markers which Martin deploys – ethics/morality – politics – Marxism and Marx’s thinking – all of which I believe should be understood or taken (along with their interrelations) differently than he does.

Ethics and politics

This is a large and important topic, in my view, and there’s far more to be said about it than I can possibly say here, or that I’m capable of saying generally. This should be a topic of discussion among all who work for human liberation, or want to. But I think I can say enough to make clear why I believe that Martin’s approach to the question will not lead very far.

Let’s begin from the following passage in Ethical Marxism:

Yes, the new society has to be against the ancien regime, but even more it has to be for the future and future possibilities…. It could be said that the dialectic of negativity is essential, but it is also in danger of becoming purely reactive without the notion of an underdetermined, redeemed future…. The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (379-80)

Let us accept (as I do) that we need both of these dialectics, as Martin describes them, that we will be lost unless the necessary negation is interwoven with a striving toward the open redeemed future. The question is whether ethics is necessary to provide a link or bridge between the two, and whether ethics is adequate or sufficient to link them. (The question is not, it should be clear, whether “Marxism is ready, in a new synthesis, to accept that ethical questions are real questions” [256]; to deny that ethics is necessary for the “bridging” function is not to deny that ethical questions are real.)

Early in the book Martin talks about “the call of the future,” which he links with the concern expressed by Kant for “the most distant future generations,” and which he characterizes as an ethical demand. “In some sense,” he goes on to say, “my only argument in this book is the concern itself is the ground of the ‘science’, of systematic theorizing. That is the essence of Ethical Marxism.” (27)

Here the ethical demand embodied in a concern for the future is seen as both motive-force and ground for the sort of theorizing that Marx gave us. Sometimes this “call of the future” is characterized in terms of vision. In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

Unless this sort of ethically-motivated vision motivates and frames the intentions of those who are involved in making a new future, Martin believes, a “redeemed future” will not come about. (“Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” – 155)

Ethics-based vs. interest-based?

It’s true, I think, that without a vision of the future, no popular uprising or revolutionary upsurge will change the social fundamentals of class society. Both a vision of communism (in a general way) and the conviction that it is possible are necessary to a coming about of a communist future. But why must this vision be founded, independently from the social and historical process, and even independently of a communist political project, in an ethics or morality? Martin’s predominant line of thinking, as I understand it, is that this sort of independent ethical basis is necessary if a would-be revolutionary politics is not to become an interest-based realpolitik. But his argument for it crucially depends on a series of dichotomous bifurcations: fact/value, history/morality, interest-based and ethically-based actions (as well as on a strictly Kantian-derived definition of the ethical), as in the following passages:

Either I take the core of moral theory to be the treatment of the other as an end-in-herself or -himself, or I simply take it as realpolitik that I find myself in the midst of a war of all against all…. (69)

It can…be argued that, without an “ethical grounding”…, “politics” can only mean a set of tactical considerations concerning the machinations and mechanisms of power, and not a “thinking of the polis,” particularly a thinking of the just polis…. (391)

The hold of these sorts of bifurcations on Martin’s thinking can be seen in his claim that Lenin’s internationalism should be seen as ethically-based. Why? Because “it goes against the grain of the existing society, and it does this on the basis of principle,” a principle “not based on a narrow conception of interest.” (164)

Do these alternative bases for a politics, interest-based and ethically-based, exhaust the field? To see how this may not be the case (and I don’t think it is), I want to look at a couple of observations by Mao Zedong, whom Martin characterizes as having “restitched” the ethical into Marxism. (391).

Mao said, speaking of his youth, “First we were revolutionaries, and as a result we became Marxists.” That captures very well what I am trying to capture with the idea of Ethical Marxism: first we see that there is something very wrong about the way that society is set up, and as a result we look for a systematic understanding of society that will allow us to move forward and try to make things right.”\ (340-41)

Martin takes it that becoming a revolutionary, that is, one who becomes dedicated to the systematic restructuring of social relations, must be based upon a primary insight which is ethical in character, and which provides guidance in the enterprise and a linkage to the “redeemed future” in this intial insight that “something is very wrong.”

There are a couple of things to be said initially about this schema. First, note how this passage brings out again the dual function which Martin depends upon the ethical to perform: both beginning and bridge, providing both the initial impetus which brings the actor into revolutionary practice, and the linkage to the redeemed future (the vision of which is to be provided by the basically untheorized religious dimension).

At the same time, it is clear here why Martin needs the “bridging” function. For there is no reason why an initial perception that “something is very wrong” will not go in a sort of revenge direction, or toward what Martin calls a reaction-formation. But if this is true, what justifies calling the initial perception ethical? We seem to be in the same position, whether we say that the initial impetus to revolutionary politics is ethical insight or an interest-based motivation. In either case we need (on Martin’s set-up) a more fully-fledged ethics to act as “bridge.”

The role of practice

We seem to be consistently drawn into conceptual and logical tangles as we trace the implications of what’s said in Ethical Marxism. I think this should be taken as a marker of some basic inconsistencies or jumbles in the theory advanced in this book. I hope to point to some possibilities in the way of emerging from this thicket. I want to proceed by way of one more quotation, both from Martin and from Mao.

…many of [Mao’s] popular formulations have a distinctively “categorical imperative” ring to them – probably most of all the famous statement, “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing: It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”  (194)

Let’s start from a fuller quotation of Mao’s famous statement in its original context:

The immense complexity of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: ‘It is justifiable to rebel’ For centuries people have been saying: ‘It is justifiable to oppress or to exploit people, but it is wrong to rebel’. Marxism turned this thesis upside down. That is a great contribution, a thesis established by Marx from the struggle of the proletariat. Basing their action on this thesis, people have shown defiance, struggled, and worked for socialism.³

In making an interpretation here, a lot turns on a question of priority. Should the Marxism put forward by Mao in this passage be understood as beginning from a primordial ethical judgment (rebellion is right, justified)? Or should rebellion be seen as the primary action, generating a for-or-against field, with Marxism beginning from affirmation of the rebellion, putting oneself on the side of those who rebel? In the latter case, which I’d argue for, the justifiability is not an abstract (or an a priori) judgment, but a practical one which is simultaneous with ranging oneself with those who rebel.

Putting this together with the “first revolutionaries, then Marxists” statement, we can see how (as I see it) the basic movement is from rebel or revolutionary practice to Marxism as the affirmation and comprehension of that practice within a larger, deeper context, and then movement forward from there. This primacy of practice is essential for Mao, as for Marx and a revolutionary Marxism. Ethics in this conception is formed upon and around a basic practical orientation. (The movement here is similar to Badiou’s sequence of event, subject and truth-process, where it is the recognition of the event which founds both subject and truth-process, with an ethics following out of this nexus.⁴)

What is primary is the movement in the world, practice, and it’s this which generates the need which is not only what has led, historically, to taking up Marx, but which is also necessary in order to come at Marx in such a way as to see his theory as an understanding of the present which shows a different future as possible. At that point, in coming to grips with the revolutionary political vista thus opened up, there are many problems to be solved, including ethically. None of this movement from practice to theory guarantees anything, of course, and certainly not a good or fruitful understanding of Marx. The point is not a sure-fire method of getting everything right, but a conceptual relationship and construal of what’s going on.

The point in all this is not, of course, justification through quotations from Mao or l’explication du texte. But it is significant that these statements can (and I think should) be understood differently than they are taken by Martin.

But as well, I do believe that something along the lines of the above is how we need to understand the relation, not only between ethics and Marxism, but ethics and an emancipatory politics, and between each of these and a primary social stirring in the world.

Let us sketch the differences by way of a few questions. Are we, principally, Marxists because we are revolutionaries, or revolutionaries because we are Marxists? I think it is clear that the primacy must go to the first: Marxists because revolutionaries.  But how about the question with a closer relevance to Martin’s argument: Are we revolutionaries due to our ethical principles (ethical stance, an ethical insight or vision), or is there an ethics which crucially follows upon the taking up of the revolutionary project, which stems from an emancipatory political project? I believe the latter is true.  And finally, is politics an autonomous field of human social practice (or of truth-processes, as Badiou argues), or does it require to be founded upon a religio-ethical vision, as Martin believes? Here my own answer is less certain (I am not sure whether, or to what extent, the political field should be seen as autonomous), but I would not see it as needing to be founded in ethics or religious vision.

Thus I am arguing that both our taking up Marxism (and the sort of Marxism we take up), and our ethics (and the character of this ethics) follow upon and stem from our primary step in practice, which must be understood politically. There is no automaticity here, that is, it is not the case that anyone who takes up a revolutionary project thereby takes it up in the best way or draws the right conclusions. There is plenty of scope, and necessity, for thinking, argument, and investigation. And the whole matter is far more complex than the schemata I’ve offered might seem to indicate. On the one hand there are many ways and even degrees of “being a revolutionary”; and on the other, there are many types and aspects of ethics, for ethics are associated with overarching projects (understood in the Sartrean manner), and there is more than one project in any human life.

Without going into these complications, though, I hope to have said enough to indicate a different way of coming at the questions of ethics, politics, and Marxism.

III

In this final section I want to work through a number of topics, including the adequacy of Martin’s take on Marx’s thought, and some characteristic moves and modes of thinking in Ethical Marxism. I will be critical here, because I think these are matters that are important to get right.

Marx

Let’s go back to the opening sentence of a passage quoted above: “In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests.” This doesn’t ring true, to my ears. Where does Marx talk about what leads or motivates people to question their circumstances broadly/deeply? And when does he talk about motivation on a broad scale by “material interests”? This is quite alien, it seems to me, to the way in which Marx approaches the question, and his conception of the relation between human activity and the materiality of their circumstances. He says, for example, in a wellknown passage, that history only poses problems for which there are solutions (“mankind…sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”) meaning that problems are revelatory of social contradictions which contain their own supercession, that solutions are immanent within the problems themselves. Now whether we believe that this Hegelian-derived view of history and social contradictions is on the right track or not, the relation of materiality to human practice and its possibilities is very different from the view that it is only material interests which motivate people, which I believe is really a mischaracterization of Marx.

This is an example of a view and portrayal of Marx in this book which is rather remote from the thinking of Karl Marx, to my understanding. Now I do not hold that our problems as revolutionaries would be solved or solvable if we just understood Marx or Marxism correctly. Far from it. On the other hand, it is of high importance from the standpoint of the emancipatory project to understand Marx aright, and it often looks to me that Martin does not.

A basic aspect of Martin’s delineation of Marx with which I take strong issue is his characterization of Marx as a positivist, as in the following passages.

As with the positivists, for Marx a ‘scientific’ theory of society and history would be purely descriptive, not normative…. Marx aimed to be scientific, not normative. It might even be said that Marx aimed to be scientific as opposed to normative. (34, 103)

Marx aimed to add the processes of human social and cultural development to a universal science of all material processes. The algorithms that represent (or govern) material processes that occur in different domains of the material world (the different fields of scientific investigation) are themselves related through algorithms: this is reductionism…. (411)

An algorithm is a process which will always produce the same result of a certain sort whenever it runs. (The easiest example is a set of rules for solving a problem which will invariably give the correct answer if followed precisely. Thus the process of solving a problem in long division which we all learned in grade school is an algorithm: you have simply to follow the sequence of rules, and the correct answer will be generated.) Martin represents Marx as believing that history works through an algorithmic process, and that he had discovered the algorithm of history (that is, the invariable rules governing the process, such that a certain outcome is predictable). (411, 429, 432, 479)

This is coupled (as it would have to be) with a portrayal of Marx’s view of historical processes as completely deterministic, so that the general future course of things would be determined with a great degree of inevitability. Thus Marx is described by Martin as simply talking “about the way the capitalist system works and that this systemic working would lead to things working out by and by [that is, leading to communism].” (104)

Is this Marx?

Is this a fair account of Marx’s thinking, or of Marxism? Yes, perhaps of some forms of Marxism, often dominant ones; but no, not of Marx’s thinking, and not of all Marxisms. On the one hand the sort of positivistic, utilitarian and even Hobbesian Marxism which is the object of Martin’s critique has certainly been a strand, even a prominent strand (especially within “actually existing” socialisms). But there is far more to Marx (and to the more vibrant strands of Marxism) than this, and some of Martin’s characterizations border on caricature.

So I think there is a basic inaccuracy here, a great deal of one-sidedness and misunderstanding of Marx. I’ll reiterate that Marx’s being right or wrong is in itself of not much moment. The importance of the question lies in the context of developing an adequate revolutionary thinking and theory. What is crucial is whether we have a theory or theories adequate to comprehend and bear fruit in the process of human liberation and the transformation of our social being. But then, Marx’s usefulness to this great enterprise will depend on what his thinking is, so let’s pursue that question for a moment. And here we need to make some basic distinctions.

First, there’s a differentiation to be made between the explicit statements of a theoretical program and historical schema which Marx sometimes makes (that in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy being the most obvious and wellknown⁵), and the actual theoretical and historical work which he carries out. Thus while of course Marx does make several grand programmatic announcements, many have noted that when it comes to concrete historical studies (notably The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Civil War in France), although he is certainly understanding historical events from within the theoretical framework he has developed, he does not reason from a schema, but through (in Lenin’s phrase) a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, which in turn represent complications in, and often problems for, his general program.

It’s really impossible to see how this procedure, which is entirely characteristic of Marx (including in Capital), is accurately captured by either description, or algorithm, or positivistic notions of science. These do not describe what “science” is for Marx, and they are very far from capturing the analyses that Marx actually carried out.

The adequacy of this sort of conception of Marx’s thinking is made even more implausible when we take into consideration the various phases of his thought. Marx, in company with most great thinkers, goes through several discernible stages in his thought. Everyone is familiar with the distinction between early and mature Marx (the 1844 MS, on the one hand, and Capital on the other, say). But there are differences here too; for example The German Ideology, usually cited as if it were an instance of Marx’s later thinking, expresses a rather crude and somewhat positivistic programmatic standpoint, which is almost completely absent from Capital. (Martin at one point says that Marx has an affinity with John Stuart Mill on the basis that “both claimed that their work could proceed on a ‘purely empirical basis’,” [362-3] drawing these words from The German Ideology but also claiming that Marx repeats the claim elsewhere, which I do not believe is the case (at least not in works later than German Ideology).⁶)

It is true that while the theory and program of Capital are certainly not positivistic, there is an expression in several places of a rather deterministic historical scheme. But this too becomes no longer characteristic given the changes that occur in Marx’s thinking in the 1870s, as he came to grips with the three phenomena of the Paris Commune; the growth of the workers’ movement in Germany and its associated Marxism (of which Marx was very critical); and the increasing study of Marx in radical Russian circles, and the questions raised for the application of Marx’s schema in this situation. All of these raised questions as to the projections which could be drawn from Capital (not to mention the earlier programmatic statements of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), and Marx’s responses to these newly arisen occasions (Class Struggles in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme, and his reply – and its various drafts – to Vera Zasulich) sketch a much more open and undeterministic stance and theory than is to be found earlier. (Martin does mention the correspondence with Zasulich [275-77], but only to criticize Marx’s failure to raise “the question of place.”)

There is far more that could be said in relation to this question – about the explanatory structure underlying Capital (which bears no relation to a descriptive positivistic idea of science), about Marx’s explanations of contemporary history, etc., and quite a bit has been written on these topics – but what I’ve said is probably enough to make my point.

Reverse implication to origins

Continuing for a moment the discussion of Martin’s picture of the figure of Karl Marx and his thinking, let me cite what I find to be some quite astonishing statements:

One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that Marx by himself is not so interesting or exciting…. (360)

For Stalin, but perhaps even for Marx, Engels, and Lenin, intellectual ferment was not a good thing. (352)

…for Marx, all you need to know about agriculture is that it represents an outmoded form of production. (274)

I term these statements astonishing in that I find it difficult to believe that these judgments, peppered through the book on a diverse array of subjects, could come from a straightforward reading of Marx and an attempt to understand his thinking. Perhaps we simply differ in what we find in Marx. But my guess is that glosses on Marx like these arise from a bent towards reading Marx through the history of Marxism, and in particular reading Marx (and Engels and Lenin) through Stalin – or rather, through a fear of Stalinism. This becomes clear, I think, in a passage like that on 189-90, where Martin argues for a strong link between “Marxism’s resistance to the ethical ‘as such’, and Marxism’s tendency, an inherent tendency I would argue, toward economism.” This passage continues,

Indeed,…the difficulty is that Marxism (or simply the thought of Karl Marx, to be direct about this) entails a critique of reification, and yet Marxism, especially when it becomes only a structural “science” of the causality of things and interests…seems itself to reify. In practice, especially in the practice of Stalin in the Soviet Union, but not only there, this orientation has had, again, dire consequences. (190)

This reasoning, along the lines of holding that the seeds of Stalin were planted by Marx, is an example of an all-too-common mode of argument in Ethical Marxism, one of “reverse implication” from the characteristics of a phenomenon back to the attribution of those characteristics to its origins.

The sort of move I mean is exemplified in some of Martin’s arguments concerning human meat consumption, as well as with reference to 20^th century or contemporary imperialism, where he will begin by pointing to modern industrial meat production, or to imperialism. Having taken it as clear that this is obviously wrong (“the immense cruelty done to animals in the current food-production system and through human participation on that system is a great wrong that calls us to ethical action” [213], for example), he will generalize or hypostasize the basis in either case: carnivorism as the basis of industrial food production, or commodity-production as the basis of capitalist imperialism. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that, given that the final form (industrial food production, imperialism) is clearly wrong or evil, this basis must be ethically wrong.

The argumentative move, in other words, begins from the wrongness (evil) of a phenomenon, X; the basis of X is then generalized; this generalized or hypostasized basis (carnivorism, commodity production) is then projected back to a beginning or seed of X, which is then itself presumed to be wrong or evil.

This beginning is often characterized by Martin as the crossing of a boundary or threshold by human beings, a step that brought them into the territory of evil. If this sounds a lot like myths of the fall of man and the original sin, he has no problem with such similarities: “My own view…is that myths of a human fall point to a time when humans first began to eat inhuman animals on a regular basis.” (87) And “the fall into alienation is the emergence of the commodity form and the process of commodification” (266). On a different subject: “a threshold had to be crossed which allowed one half of a population (male) to understand the other half of the population (female) as objects of domination.” (236)

To draw this out a little more: The argument is that commodity-production, with its concomitant reduction (Martin believes) of everything to a “mere thing,” marks the threshold after which “all bets are off” ethically: “If you will do this, what will you not do? If you will cross this line, what line will you not cross?” (245)

There is a similar line of reasoning in relation to the animal question, and in this case Martin holds that the step into carnivorism was also the threshold of commodity production as well:

At some point in this transition, there must have been a moment when a fundamental distinction between animals and humans began to be made, as regards cruelty and some sort of basic standing in the world, and here we can see the roots of reification…. We can see the beginnings of commodity production. (260)

The projection backward presumes, for its argumentative legitimacy, a causal process leading from this threshold beginning to the present form. And Martin clearly believes this to be the case:

The first forms of commodity production initiate humanity into a world of things. The emergence of capitalism places the reification of humanity on a purely calculative basis, and from there all human relationships are brought under the brutal cash nexus. (250)

Bad reasoning

There are many aspects of this form of reasoning which are both untenable and disturbing. It is also, we should note parenthetically, not very congruent with Martin’s opposition to “inevitablism.” For here he appears to presuppose a deterministic unfolding from that beginning point, indeed a sort of teleological determinism – the end (industrial meat production, imperialism) is presumed to be in the beginning (the “fall” into carnivorism, commodity-production).

The form of Martin’s reasoning here also has a disturbingly close similarity to that which is often used by opponents of abortion, who project backward, beginning from the wrongness of killing a person, to the threshold whose crossing results in a complete human being (the moment of conception is the obvious line-crossing boundary), and conclude that wrongness can also be imputed to any deliberate ending of life following the crossing of that threshold.

And in fact the form of reasoning employed in this sort of reverse implication to origins (as I’m terming it), has nothing to recommend it.

It certainly does not generally follow, from the fact that a certain characteristic is true of the end result of a process, that the same characteristic can be attributed to the origin or beginning of that process. If this were the case, then the properties of a fully grown oak tree would be true of the acorn which was its seed — a very unsound inference. To reason in this way is to ignore real changes which occur in the development of any phenomenon, and the emergence of new and unique characteristics at new levels of development.

In Ethical Marxism, the idea of a threshold, a fall, the original evil of commodity production and an increasing evil with capitalism, involves a great deal of romanticization of pre-capitalist societies (see 102, 130, 149). Agricultural society “keeps people sane,” Martin says, while industrialization and mechanization “destroys human sanity” (55)

The ‘cell-form’ in Marx

The idea of a boundary or threshold is also related by Martin to another concept, that of the “cell-form” of a phenomenon, drawing this term from Marx:

The cell-form of a world that is upside-down is the commodity.…we might draw a line between [that is, connecting] the present functioning of systems and the cell-form of which Marx wrote. (250, 256)

In the Preface to the first German edition of Capital (Vol. 1), Marx analogizes the role of the commodity in capitalism to that of the cell of an organism, and terms the commodity-form the “economic cell-form.” (This is his only use of the term, to my knowledge.) He makes this analogy by way of explaining both why he begins with analysis of the commodity-form (although “to the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae”) and why previous investigators have not done likewise (“because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body”).

Martin, however, identifies this term with his own idea of the seed from which the present system grows, and attributes this to Marx and Engels:

One could argue that, for both Marx and Engels, part of what it means for there to be a given social system is that there is a prefiguration of the present in a “cell-form,” and that this cell-form can be seen in a threshold that is crossed by humankind. (239)

He then goes on to identify the “cell-form,” not only with his notion of a threshold, but with the irremediable fall of humanity:

…there is with Marx’s conception of the “cell-form” the notion that the first forms of commodity production let the cat out of the bag and there is little or no chance of putting the cat back in the bag. …there was a conjuncture, in prehistory, where the seeds of patriarchy, private property, commodity production, and even the state…and eventually capitalism were planted, in a single go. (243, 239)

It should be clear that the uses Martin makes of it have nothing to do with Marx’s use of this phrase. Indeed, looking to the analogy drawn in this metaphor to the cells of an organism, it’s clear that the cells of an organism only exist within the context of the whole organism; likewise with the relation of the commodity to the “organism” of capitalist society, from which Marx’s analysis proceeds by abstraction. (Continuing the comparison to the analysis of organic cells, Marx says, “In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both.”)

This point is important not chiefly because it represents a misreading of Marx, but principally for the light it sheds on the character of the difference between Marx (and Marxism) and the manner in which Martin proceeds and the theory which he builds. For Marx the commodity is reached and known through abstraction from the whole of capitalism, and this “cell-form” in turn serves as a means of understanding the working of the whole at the most basic level of analysis. It is out of the sort of understanding of the present illustrated here that Marx draws his historical remarks (the path to the present) and – most importantly – his vision of future possibilities.

For Marx, communism is an inherent possibility of the present configuration of human society, of its contradictory social dynamic; his analysis points to this possibility. Communism is not for Marx, as it is for Martin (often), an ethico-religious vision, derived in some sense prior to any social analysis. And for Marx, I would argue, the ethical judgment on (that is, against) capitalism derives from the reality of this possibility or possibilities, not from an absolutist and logically prior judgment of capitalism or commodity-production as evil.

Obviously to say that Marx’s thinking differs in this way from Martin’s is not to decide the issue, but the way in which it differs does complicate both the picture drawn of Marx in Ethical Marxism and the use to which Martin often wants to put Marx’s “science.” For if Marx is to be simply used instrumentally for the achievement of a prior ethical project, then what is used will not really be Marx. Further, if we read Marx in this way, many of the sharp dichotomies set up by Martin – between fact and value, history and morality, etc. — fall away, at least within the ambit of Marx’s thinking.

One more thing

On the very first page Martin gives his approval to the thesis (pioneered in a neo-Aristotelean vein by G.E.M. Anscombe) “that there are basic ethical questions about which nothing can be said, and that it would be a violation of ethics to presume to give an ‘explanation’ as to why it is wrong to do certain things…that the violation occurs even in the idea that certain situations might become questions, brought into the discursive realm.” (1) At several points in the book, Martin’s judgment concerning a phenomenon is a simple “it is evil” or “it is wrong” (see for example 27, 43, 44, 353), and at one point he describes his aim as being “to establish the place of evil in social theory.” (33)

There are several problems, as I see it, with this way of proceeding. Most obviously, this sort of thesis would seem to lend itself all too easily to the confirmation of parochial prejudices of a particular time, place, or culture. But more broadly, such a stance seems to pose itself, as a matter of principle, against investigation and discussion of certain issues, to say in effect, “This is obviously wrong; end of discussion.”

This is not to say that it’s  sometimes not be appropriate to make this sort of simple judgment (“it is wrong”); but this is a matter of context, not of principle. And what makes this principle particularly problematic in the circumstances of this book, is the way in which it can interrelate to the “reverse implication” method described above. For here the end-phenomenon, from which the “reverse implication” begins, is first made the subject of a categorical judgment. The beginning “cell form” or boundary point is then also supposed to be subject to the same judgment. (“This is evil.”) But if the initial judgment is not itself supposed to be liable to any further discussion, then the reverse-implication procedure becomes even more dangerous.

In conclusion

To recapitulate the general thesis of Ethical Marxism in a very simplified form (and which I hope is not a caricature), Martin’s stance is that a moral impulse is needed as the beginning point of the revolutionary project, and that a more fully developed ethics is needed as both continuing impetus and guide toward a possible future “redeemed world,” the vision of which stems from “the religious perspective.” The role of Marxism is to provide a description of the lineaments of the present and to help map out the means toward this future (means which must themselves be evaluated ethically). If this is a fair, albeit extremely bare-bones, account, then there is a strong similarity here to a very familiar picture of a dichotomy of fact and value, of description and prescription, in this case with Marxism describing the facts and ethics supplying the values. Such a bifurcation seriously under-represents the role of explanation, which is certainly not strictly factual or descriptive, and the ways in which all of these – describing, explaining, valuing – interrelate and interpenetrate as aspects (moments, if you will) of an overall process which Marx terms (human) practice.

In fact I think we have to begin at least from this point, from a picture of human life and social activity in which thinking, evaluating, projecting, theorizing, and acting are aspects of a continuous social process, in which all social life is understood as essentially practical, and “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice.” (Thesis 8)

This may seem too much like the “work from what exists in the world and everything will work out bye and bye” stance which Martin criticizes strongly in Marx. But where else can we begin than from the existing world, understood not in a flat, descriptive, positivistic way, but in its dynamic motion, self-cleavages, differentiating processes, and the idealizing and idea- and truth-processes which human practice (praxis) creates – and of course with no guarantee or promise that it will all work out?

If I end here on what is in a sense all-too-familiar ground — an evocation of praxis, and of a particular strain of Marxism⁷ – this is surely an indication of the limitations in my own attempts to rethink the revolutionary project. I certainly hold by the above sketch as a minimal orientation, but, as may be obvious, the critical examination of Ethical Marxism put forward here has not been carried out from the vantage point of any worked out solution to the problems which Martin has attempted to solve.

*******

This is a strong aspect of wandering, even meandering, in the development of themes and topics in Ethical Marxism, and the book’s order is generally associative and train-of-thought rather than by topic and development or logical deployment of argumentation. Themes are dropped and then picked up later but in a different key, arguments are left undeveloped, and emotive expression sometimes seems to overwhelm the cognitive development of content. As anyone knows who’s read his work, this is Martin’s style, and it has its strengths and its charms; but it’s not a style of writing and intellectual construction which make it easy to be certain that one has, in a paraphrase or account such as I’ve attempted, captured exactly what he intends. If I haven’t captured his meaning, though, I trust that others will set me right.

More importantly, the question at issue in this book and in my engagement with it, is the shape of the communist project in the present era. Bill Martin has been striving (here and in previous and subsequent writings) to explore and put forward a view of what that project must encompass. I’ve indicated the ways in which I think the approach he wants to take is seriously flawed. But I’m conscious, too, of how incomplete are my own views and how pressing is the necessity of collective work on this urgent political and intellectual and practical task.

Notes

Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3

Another book by Badiou just out in Engish, this one on a surprising topic. Richard Wagner is not someone about whom I have much knowledge, either artistically or politically, aside from the usual background that he’s often been classed as a racist and reactionary. This is a verdict against which Badiou argues in Five Lessons on Wagner (translated by Susan Spitzer, with an afterword by Slavoj Žižek).

Characterizing Badiou as a “radical philosopher and keen Wagner enthusiast,” publisher Verso says the book “offers a detailed reading of the critical responses to the composer’s work, which include Adorno’s writings on the composer and Wagner’s recuperation by Nazism as well as more recent readings by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and others.”

Louis Proyect on marxmail, who mentions with reference to this book that “I suppose I am going to have to find the time to read Badiou one of these days since he is such a fave over on the Kasama Project,” also references George Bernard Shaw’s earlier defense of Wagner from a left perspective. The following, concerning Wagner’s Das Rheingold from the Ring cycle, is taken from Shaw’s book-length essay The Perfect Wagnerite, and republished here from the Literature Network.

Wagner as Revolutionist

George Bernard Shaw

Before leaving this explanation of The Rhine Gold, I must have a word or two about it with the reader. It is the least popular of the sections of The Ring. The reason is that its dramatic moments lie quite outside the consciousness of people whose joys and sorrows are all domestic and personal, and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemmas from which the world is shrinking today.

At Bayreuth I have seen a party of English tourists, after enduring agonies of boredom from Alberic, rise in the middle of the third scene, and almost force their way out of the dark theatre into the sunlit pine-wood without. And I have seen people who were deeply affected by the scene driven almost beside themselves by this disturbance. But it was a very natural thing for the unfortunate tourists to do, since in this Rhine Gold prologue there is no interval between the acts for escape. Roughly speaking, people who have no general ideas, no touch of the concern of the philosopher and statesman for the race, cannot enjoy The Rhine Gold as a drama. They may find compensations in some exceedingly pretty music, at times even grand and glorious, which will enable them to escape occasionally from the struggle between Alberic and Wotan; but if their capacity for music should be as limited as their comprehension of the world, they had better stay away.

And now, attentive Reader, we have reached the point at which some foolish person is sure to interrupt us by declaring that The Rhine Gold is what they call “a work of art” pure and simple, and that Wagner never dreamt of shareholders, tall hats, whitelead factories, and industrial and political questions looked at from the socialistic and humanitarian points of view. We need not discuss these impertinences: it is easier to silence them with the facts of Wagner’s life. In 1843 he obtained the position of conductor of the Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed rebellion, which reached Dresden in 1849. Had Wagner been the mere musical epicure and political mugwump that the term “artist” seems to suggest to so many critics and amateurs–that is, a creature in their own lazy likeness–he need have taken no more part in the political struggles of his day than Bishop took in the English Reform agitation of 1832, or Sterndale Bennett in the Chartist or Free Trade movements.What he did do was first to make a desperate appeal to the King to cast off his bonds and answer the need of the time by taking true Kingship on himself and leading his people to the redress of their intolerable wrongs (fancy the poor monarch’s feelings!), and then, when the crash came, to take his side with the right and the poor against the rich and the wrong.

When the insurrection was defeated, three leaders of it were especially marked down for vengeance: August Roeckel, an old friend of Wagner’s to whom he wrote a well-known series of letters; Michael Bakoonin, afterwards a famous apostle of revolutionary Anarchism; and Wagner himself. Wagner escaped to Switzerland: Roeckel and Bakoonin suffered long terms of imprisonment. Wagner was of course utterly ruined, pecuniarily and socially (to his own intense relief and satisfaction); and his exile lasted twelve years. His first idea was to get his Tannhauser produced in Paris. With the notion of explaining himself to the Parisians he wrote a pamphlet entitled Art and Revolution, a glance through which  will show how thoroughly the socialistic side of the revolution had his sympathy, and how completely he had got free from the influence of the established Churches of his day. For three years he kept pouring forth pamphlets–some of them elaborate treatises in size and intellectual rank, but still essentially the pamphlets and manifestoes of a born agitator–on social evolution, religion, life, art and the influence of riches. In 1853 the poem of The Ring was privately printed; and in 1854, five years after the Dresden insurrection, The Rhine Gold score was completed to the last drum tap.

These facts are on official record in Germany, where the proclamation summing up Wagner as “a politically dangerous person” may be consulted to this day. The pamphlets are now accessible to English readers in the translation of Mr. Ashton Ellis. This being so, any person who, having perhaps heard that I am a Socialist, attempts to persuade you that my interpretation of The Rhine Gold is only “my socialism” read into the works of a dilettantist who borrowed an idle tale from an old saga to make an opera book with, may safely be dismissed from your consideration as an ignoramus.

If you are now satisfied that The Rhine Gold is an allegory, do not forget that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable. There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea, yet none the less a human being with all the human impulses which make him akin and therefore interesting to us. Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man. Just so, though I have shown that Wotan is Godhead and Kingship, and Loki Logic and Imagination without living Will (Brain without Heart, to put it vulgarly); yet in the drama Wotan is a religiously moral man, and Loki a witty, ingenious, imaginative and cynical one. As to Fricka, who stands for State Law, she does not assume her allegorical character in The Rhine Gold at all, but is simply Wotan’s wife and Freia’s sister: nay, she contradicts her allegorical self by conniving at all Wotan’s rogueries. That, of course, is just what State Law would do; but we must not save the credit of the allegory by a quip. Not until she reappears in the next play (The Valkyries) does her function in the allegorical scheme become plain.

One preconception will bewilder the spectator hopelessly unless he has been warned against it or is naturally free from it. In the old-fashioned orders of creation, the supernatural personages are invariably conceived as greater than man, for good or evil. In the modern humanitarian order as adopted by Wagner, Man is the highest. In The Rhine Gold, it is pretended that there are as yet no men on the earth. There are dwarfs, giants, and gods. The danger is that you will jump to the conclusion that the gods, at least, are a higher order than the human order. On the contrary, the world is waiting for Man to redeem it from the lame and cramped government of the gods. Once grasp that; and the allegory becomes simple enough. Really, of course, the dwarfs, giants, and gods are dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches. History shows us only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heroes.

Now it is quite clear–though you have perhaps never thought of it–that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order. Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the village curate’s sermons. This is precisely what must happen some day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose, will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso’s criticism of the Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal, academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior power in the clouds, and of making a fetish of self-sacrifice to justify his own cowardice.

Farther on in The Ring we shall see the Hero arrive and make an end of dwarfs, giants, and gods. Meanwhile, let us not forget that godhood means to Wagner infirmity and compromise, and manhood strength and integrity. Above all, we must understand– for it is the key to much that we are to see–that the god, since his desire is toward a higher and fuller life, must long in his inmost soul for the advent of that greater power whose first work, though this he does not see as yet, must be his own undoing.

In the midst of all these far-reaching ideas, it is amusing to find Wagner still full of his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, and on every subsequent occasion when the ring brings death to its holder. This episode must justify itself purely as a piece of stage sensationalism. On deeper ground it is superfluous and confusing, as the ruin to which the pursuit of riches leads needs no curse to explain it; nor is there any sense in investing Alberic with providential powers in the matter.

No related posts.

This book is not only one of the “stages on Badiou’s way,” but an important work in itself. Bruno Bosteels, the translator and author of the introduction to Theory of the Subject, has long been an exponent of the work’s importance and centrality to Badiou’s thinking, and it’s notable some of its themes reappear in Logics of Worlds (see Introduction to Book I of LW, and the notes to it).

Badiou introduces the term ‘scission’ in an original reading of Hegel’s Logic, a reading that seeks to assert the centrality of irresolvable antagonism and ‘force’ in any truly materialist dialectic.  To theorise this antagonism is, for Badiou, to theorise the constitutivity for revolutionary politics of that which is inherently ‘out of place’. Indeed, Badiou makes much in Theory of the Subject of those eccentric elements which cannot be assimilated to a structural or topological mapping, elements that must be sustained for any revolutionary project to succeed.

Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

by Tom Eyers

The reputation of Alain Badiou’s philosophy in Anglophone academia has risen exponentially in the last decade. With the death of most of the leading lights of French structuralism, Badiou’s work has filled the gap, although generationally he can be situated slightly after the heyday of post-War French Left anti-humanism, remaining its fiercest defender during the long years of reaction and non-thought that blighted French philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s.

If, as Peter Hallward enjoins us, we divide the tradition of 20th Century French thought into two broad camps, one defined by the active subject of experience as analysed by phenomenology and existentialism, the other by a turn to formalism and the rejection of phenomenal experience as the basis of any rigorous philosophy, Badiou can be associated very much with the latter, although his work is distinctive enough in its treatment of ontology, and in particular its use of mathematics, for it to suggest a break from the structural tradition as much as a continuity with it.

Unlike a number of his near contemporaries, Badiou stridently rejects the turn to language as the cornerstone of philosophical enquiry, resuscitating a grand, Platonic concept of truth through the equation of ontology with mathematics. The latter ‘discovery’ was announced in what remains Badiou’s masterwork, Being and Event, from 1988. There, Badiou fused a complex ontology of ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ with a new, philosophical account of radical change, the ‘Event’, that, under the four potential conditions of love, art, science or politics, reorders the prevailing situation and produces a universal truth.

It is his uncompromising political radicalism, intially expressed via a fervent Maoism and now manifested in his compelling critique of liberal parliamentarianism, that lifts Badiou far above the level of fame that would normally befall a philosopher with a predilection for Cantorian set theory. His most ferociously political work of philosophy, Theory of the Subject, predates his equation of ontology with mathematics, but it is almost certainly Badiou’s most successful marriage of rigorous philosophical rationalism and political polemic.

It’s a rich, strange, often highly abstract text, delivered in 1978 as a series of seminars, the high oratorical style of which is undoubtedly modelled on one of Badiou’s most important influences, Jacques Lacan. Readers most used to the patient, systematic clarity of Badiou’s later work may be shocked by the tone here, equally allusive and strident, but the rhetorical edge rings in harmony with the text’s sense of theoretical experimentation, and especially with the flinty political resolve that lies behind even the book’s most abstract passages.

Badiou’s aim is to delineate the theoretical basis of a subject of radical post-Marxist politics, through an inventive appropriation and critique of Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifer’. If the Badiou of Being and Event and the recent Logics of Worlds signals a firm distance from a focus on signification as the locus of critical philosophical practise, the model of significatory analysis in this text cleaves to the expanded and singular linguistic materialism that dominated Lacan’s late seminars.

In a broad sense, Theory of the Subject is one of the most important documents of the brief but fruitful collaboration between French post-Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the book stands simultaneously as perhaps the most inventive and convincing philosophical appropriation of what Badiou today calls Lacan’s ‘anti-philosophy’ to date. Commenting on the centrality of an understanding of Lacan for any rigorous theoretical project, Badiou writes: “Like Hegel for Marx, Lacan for us is essential and divisible. The primacy of the structure, which makes of the symbolic the general algebra of the subject … is countered ever more clearly with a topological obsession in which what moves and progresses pertains to the primacy of the real.” (133)

In this short passage, Badiou hints at both his appropriation and critique of Lacanian theory. Lacan, Badiou argues, moves from a static concept of the subject as defined by its constitution in the Symbolic, broadly within the domain of language conceived as the subject’s immovable transcendental horizon, to a topologically derived search for the ‘consistency’ of the subject in its shifting relationship to contingency, to the movement and displacement that characterises the Real. Whilst Badiou endorses the move from the reification of the signifier in Lacan to the complexity of a topological figuration of the subject, such a move remains insufficiently materialist. If Marx stripped Hegel of his idealism, so too must Lacan be purified, and the ‘scission’ proper to the revolutionary subject in its relationship with any prevailing Symbol context must be acknowledged.

Badiou introduces the term ‘scission’ in an original reading of Hegel’s Logic, a reading that seeks to assert the centrality of irresolvable antagonism and ‘force’ in any truly materialist dialectic. “It is a major strength of the dialectic”, Badiou writes, with overtones of Mao, “to grasp how the One of the unity of contraries supports contrariness in its very being.” (9) To theorise this antagonism is, for Badiou, to theorise the constitutivity for revolutionary politics of that which is inherently ‘out of place’. Indeed, Badiou makes much in Theory of the Subject of those eccentric elements which cannot be assimilated to a structural or topological mapping, elements that must be sustained for any revolutionary project to succeed. As Bruno Bosteels notes in his excellent translator’s introduction, Badiou borrows the concept of ‘force’ from Hegel’s Science of Logic to oppose the logic of place or spacing, the ordering of elements that precludes radical change. In turn, the potentially voluntarist associations of subjective forcing will be replaced by the time of the publication of Being and Event with the systematic conceptualisation of the Event, as the breach with the static ‘state of the situation’.

This is by no means the only point of continuity between this ‘early’ work and Badiou’s later, more familiar books. As in his recent Logics of Worlds (2006), Badiou elaborates a number of subjective features common to revolutionary praxis. Anxiety, Badiou writes, “is that inevitable side of subjectivization which, caught in the web of the dead order, makes an appeal to the reinforced sustenance of the law.” (292) The anxious subject appeals to the superego, Freud’s internalised representative of the Law, and the maintenance of a revolutionary moment is threatened. The alternative, if not antithetical, subjective position is courage, persistence in the face of the threat of change that will, in Badiou’s later works, be conceptualised as fidelity to a revolutionary Truth. When courage sustains the irruption of disorder into the placing of elements, the subject reaches its full manifestation, as that which, “subservient to the rule that determines a place … nevertheless punctuates the latter with the interruption of its effect.” (259) If Lacan, by virtue of his concept of the Real as the order that disturbs the consistency of the Symbolic, leaves open the potential for radical change while foreclosing any positive definition of its features, Badiou insists on precisely such a positive elaboration of the subjective agent of change.

Intermingled within Badiou’s innovative readings of Lacan, Hegel, Lenin and Marx are compelling reflections on the status of the revolutionary party, a treatment of Greek ontology through a reading of Sophocles and Aeschlylus, and barbed references to his contemporary opponents on the liberal wing of the French academy and in the French political establishment. The text has the flavour of a bricolage, teeming with potential lines of enquiry that frequently remain unresolved, and there are some frustrating inconsistencies in the overall architecture of the argument. Chief among these is Badiou’s treatment of Lacan, who at the very time of the writing of this text was, in his seminar, questioning the division between an ‘algebraic’ and ‘topological’ treatment of the subject that Badiou insists on throughout the text and that he credits to Lacan. Badiou accuses the so-called ‘early Lacan’ of idealism as a result of his theory of signification, but it is Badiou who makes the idealist error of assuming an irrevocable antimony between an insistence on the primacy of the signifier in subjectivity and the materialist potential for agency and change. Lacan’s seminars in the late 1970s, with their critique of a static model of structural theory and their conjoining of the non-linguistic elements of bodily existence with an exploration of the material, non-signifying elements central to language, are, for all their flaws, more radical in their subversion from within of the structural tradition than Badiou’s efforts here.

That said, Theory of the Subject, impeccably translated by Bruno Bosteels, stands as one of the most successful attempts to integrate a psychoanalytic appreciation of subjectivity with the demands of revolutionary politics, and for that alone, and for its signal importance in the broader sweep of Badiou’s philosophical project, it remains necessary reading.

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But why should, or how can, mathematics possibly play these sorts of roles? Scientists and philosophers have sometimes asked, what accounts (in Eugene Wigner’s words) for the apparently “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.” The question can also be phrased metaphorically in terms of “God,” as in the book reviewed here.

This review of Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio, appeared originally in the Raleigh News & Observer. It is reprinted here from Science Book Reviews.

The magical marriage of math and science

by Phillip Manning

Pick up any high school physics textbook. Turn a page or two and you will find a mathematical equation. College texts have equations on virtually every page. And advanced texts are almost nothing but math, dense with symbols and letters that are as foreign to most of us as Sanskrit. Why are the laws of physics, the laws that govern the universe, written in the language of mathematics?

Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author of several previous books about mathematics and science, tackles this question and others in his oddly named book “Is God a Mathematician?” Some readers will no doubt react to the title the way one of his students did, exclaiming, “Oh God, I hope not!”

Although its aims are philosophical, much of the book is a nicely written romp through the history of mathematics. Beginning with simple counting 1, 2, 3, …, simple arithmetic 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3 and geometry, generations of thinkers have produced more and more sophisticated mathematics. The hairy stuff found in today’s journals, such as the the calculus of variations or matrix algebra, all sprouted from the same root: counting, arithmetic, geometry.

This history reveals that mathematics has not been long wed to science. The elegant math developed by the Greeks was rarely applied to the real world of science. The use of mathematics in physics did not blossom until 1687, when Isaac Newton’s “Principia” was published. The book contained mathematical expressions of his laws of motion and universal gravitation. Until then, Livio writes, “the motions of the planets had been regarded as one of the unmistakable works of God.” Like most others of that era, Newton was a staunch believer in God. He was also convinced that the world was governed by mathematical laws. So, Livio concludes, “to Newton, God was a mathematician.”

Mathematicians and scientists — even doubting ones — have never hesitated to offer opinions on how God arranged the universe. Two of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, had heated philosophical discussions about quantum mechanics. Where is an electron in an atom? There is no definite answer, only a probability that it is here or there. Einstein could not tolerate this uncertainty. He famously told Bohr that “He [God] does not throw dice.” To which, Bohr is supposed to have replied, “Einstein, do not tell God what to do with his dice.”

Mathematicians have had and continue to have similar arguments today about the role of God. Who created mathematics, God or man? Livio quotes partisans on both sides. One distinguished mathematician writes that “man has created mathematics by idealizing and abstracting elements of the physical world.” Nonsense, says Martin Gardner, a prominent writer on subjects mathematical. According to him, mathematics would exist even if we humans did not. He sums up his argument as follows: “If two dinosaurs joined two other dinosaurs in a clearing, there would be four there, even though no humans were around to observe it, and the beasts were too stupid to know it.” Yet a third mathematician straddles the fence. “God created the natural numbers,” he proclaims, “all else is the work of man.”

Although mathematicians argue about the role of God and the source of mathematics, Livio — a scientist — is more interested in a related issue: Why is mathematics is so central to the physical sciences? To him and many other working scientists, mathematics describes the physical world so well it seems magical. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, addressed this extraordinarily tight relationship between science and math in a famous lecture titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” In it, Wigner pointed out “that mathematical concepts turn up in entirely unexpected connections.”

This is absolutely true. One of the most abstract branches of mathematics is number theory. G.H. Hardy, the famous British number theorist, once bragged that no purpose would ever “be served by the theory of numbers.” A few decades later, his work on number theory led to a breakthrough in cryptography. Today, that breakthrough is used to encrypt your credit card number when you send it over the Internet.

Another celebrated case of finding a use for useless mathematics arose when Albert Einstein was searching for a mathematical way to describe the warping of space-time by matter. He needed to develop a new kind of math to complete his theory of relativity. After many frustrating false starts, Einstein was amazed to find that the math already existed, a curious form of geometry developed 50 years earlier by the German Bernhard Riemann.

In other cases, scientists have developed new branches of mathematics to solve a specific problem. Newton, for instance, developed the calculus to solve problems of motion and change. But no matter when the math was developed — before, during or after a scientific advance — it is certainly true that mathematics is necessary to understand and predict how the physical world works. And that brings us back to Wigner’s question: What is behind the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences? Why are physics texts written in the language of mathematics rather than the language of literature?

Contrary to Newton’s belief, the effectiveness of mathematics is likely not due to God being a mathematician. In chasing down the reasons why mathematics is indispensable in science, Livio quotes the distinguished British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah. His opinion is straightforward common sense. ”The brain evolved in order to deal with the physical world, so it should not be too surprising that it has developed a language, mathematics, that is well suited for the purpose.”

Livio then goes a step further. He points out that “mathematical tools were not chosen arbitrarily, but precisely on the basis of their ability to correctly predict the results of … experiments or observations.” In other words, since Newton’s groundbreaking insights, mathematics has evolved to solve real-world scientific problems, as scientists used the math that worked and ignored what did not. So the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is not unreasonable at all. It is exactly the result one would expect, the end product of a process of evolution guided by scientists and mathematicians.

No related posts.

Reading Badiou

Seán Sheehan

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today – time will tell – and his work is gradually reaching English-speaking readers. His magnum opus, Being and  Event, took 17 years to appear in English but its follow-up Logics of Worlds only three and his What is The Meaning of Sarkozy (see the ILR review here) has hit the mark in the UK as well as in France. Badiou’s term Communist Hypothesis has been circulating since The Meaning of Sarkozy appeared, first in a piece he wrote for the New Left Review early in 2008 and then at the On The Idea of Communism conference in London last year.

Along with Žižek and other important voices opposing the pop-politics of postmodernism — the age of ideology is over, its us versus Islamic fascism, the big society, we’re all in this together, save the planet — the conference asked what meaning communism can now have for us. Is it not a discredited term, already in the dustbin of history and waiting for the lid to be firmly closed before being taken off and recycled as pap for academics and dumbed-down scare stories for our grandchildren?

We seem to be at a point of impossibility when it comes to radical change and fidelity to emancipatory politics.  In The Communist Hypothesis Badiou  traces two historical sequences: the first from the French Revolution to the 1871 Paris Commune, the second from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the Cultural Revolution in China. We are now in a limbo, like that between 1871 and 1917, an ‘interval phase dominated by the enemy’ and the challenge is to break through to a third sequence – hence the communist hypothesis. What there cannot be is a belief in some ‘objective’ agent written into the social order and destined to subvert it; nor the concomitant belief in a party organizing this agent of change. What there must be is the belief in, a commitment to, a world not run for private profit.

Without holding on to this, Badiou argues, if post-modern capitalism and parliamentary politics is accepted as the only game in town, then the other possibilities are simply not seen even though they are inherent in the situation.

‘We have to convince ourselves that there is nothing ridiculous or criminal about having a great idea. The world of global and arrogant capitalism in which we live is taking us back to the 1840s and the birth of capitalism …. Too many people now think that there is no alternative to living for oneself, for one’s own interests. Let us have the courage to cut ourselves off from such people.’ (p. 67)

The hypothesis has to be a communist one because otherwise we will find ourselves being persuaded by listening to something very similar coming from the mouths of a Cameron or Obama. It is not that difficult to imagine one of them using a similar form of words to those just quoted in their next election campaign. Communism means not buying into some fatuous ‘vision thing’, subtracting out instead and thinking a new kind of politics based on the dispossessed, not aligned with existing parties and institutions.

Of course the word ‘communist’… has been cheapened and prostituted. But if we allow it to disappear, we surrender to the supporters of order, to the febrile actors in the disaster movie …. a politics reinvented at the grassroots level of the popular real, and the sovereignty of the idea …it will distract us from the disaster movie and remind us of our uprising. (P. 100)

What, though, prevents communism from being unrealizable, visionary, intrinsically unsafe given Stalin, the show trials, the gulags? Badiou’s transformative philosophy, a metapolitics that seems quite improbable given its basis in the mathematics of set theory, is the short answer to this. His central claim that ‘mathematics is ontology’ does not mean that being is mathematical but that mathematics expresses the ontological truth that there is no ‘one’, no ultimate harmony or consistency to being. There is no God, not totality, only what Badiou calls the ‘multiple’. So while a set presents a unified grouping it only does so because multiplicity is counted, as a ‘one’. What this means in practice is that the seemingly impossible, that which is not counted, is possible.

The realm of politics is concerned with the contingencies of every situation, the forms of subjectivity that can arise, and the unpredictability of the new. Revolutionary change is the bringing into the count what was previously excluded, the undoing of the rules, insurrection by the uncounted, and the challenge to the State which operates to stabilize the multiple, to limit the possibilities. Most of  The Communist Hypothesis is about how this happened in May 1968 in France, in China’s Cultural Revolution and in the Paris Commune of 1871 and how a truth, a term of special meaning for Badiou,  emerges from the consequences of these ‘events’. A term that also has a special significance in Badiou, an event is a rupture in the normal order of things that inaugurates possibilities from the seemingly impossible. This abstruse territory is the concern of the last section of The Communist Hypothesis but it is rooted in real life and one realises how the philosophy does give substance to the political. In practice and as consciousness, a blending of ‘facts’ with possibilities is always there, an elusive dimension that connects an ordinary individual with the idea that surprises happen, things could be very different. This is the idea of communism and the name is worth keeping because it connects us with all those who struggled in the past and keeps the possibility of change in the foreground. ‘We can, so we must’ Badiou concludes.

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