Rereading Marx: A Critique of Recent Criticisms

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Rereading Marx: A Critique of Recent CriticismsAuthor(s): Randy MartinSource: Science & Society, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1998/1999), pp. 513-536Published by: Guilford PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40403745 .

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Science & Society, Vol. 62, No. 4, Winter 1998-1999, 513-536

Rereading Marx: A Critique of Recent Criticisms*

RANDY MARTIN

ABSTRACT: One way of keeping Marxism alive and lively is for it to be constantly reread, retaught and relearned as an oppositional response to any criticisms of it and socialism that are made (sometimes in Marx's own name). These criticisms, made most persistently under the heading of radical democracy, focus on three problems: totality, the idea of a universal subject, and teleology. What links these criticisms to Marx is that the latter is accused of distorting these issues by reducing each to a simplistic formula. It is the resistance to each of these reductions that gives Marx- ism the complexity it requires to continue being serviceable in the present. Reading Marx supplements the imagination of political activity so that a rather dispersed left, expanding the very terrain of the social, can recognize its socialism.

PLACE DOES READING MARX have in left politics today? For some the question of Marx's relevance may seem obvious. For others it has become unnecessary. The case

must always be made for reading Marx precisely because the value of his work comes to us neither already guaranteed, nor already surpassed. Its meaning must be produced, and often in regard to criticisms which treat that work as a fixed set of propositions. Therefore, reading Marx in the light of what his critics attribute to Marxism clari- fies the conditions under which socialism can be envisioned and socialist politics be reasserted. In what follows I want to articulate an

* This article has benefitted from the insights of many readers, including Michael Brown, John Hammond, and Bertell Oilman.

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activist version of Marx that seems more appropriate for our times. One way of keeping Marxism alive and lively is for it to be constantly reread, retaught and relearned, as an oppositional response to any criticisms of it, and of socialism, that are made (sometimes in Marx's own name).

These criticisms, made most persistently under the heading of radical democracy, focus on three problems: totality, the idea of a universal subject, and teleology. What links them to Marx is that he is accused of distorting these issues by reducing each to a simplistic formula. I refer to this as the accusation of reductionism. Ironically, however, it is the simplification or reduction of his thought by his critics that so often yields the problems identified as fatal to Marxist theory. I begin with this problem of the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which Marx is said to stand for a specific idea or conclusion and is then shown to be guilty of exactly that over-simplification.

Reduction

While we may return to the same critical texts time and again, we do it with different questions in mind. Above all, the Marx we find should be both the one we were looking for and one as relevant to the new questions as to the old. Unfortunately, a great deal of the contemporary criticism of Marxism assumes that no more needs to be said about Marx's critique of capital than had already been said, or than is already evident in historical or existing instances of socialism. In that case, reading Marx is merely recitation, and what is properly read confirms what was already known. And, as always, this approach to reading not only confirms; it progressively simplifies understanding. To that extent, the criticism distorts the left's own incessantly exploratory history and presents the engagement with Marx as having been settled for all practical matters. A particular expression of these complex and in many ways ambiguous texts is treated as both the theory and the measure of it. Typically, the critique of capital is displaced by a set of fixed categories and propositions amounting not only to the displacement of critical work, but also to a reduction of the texts to one or another interpretation and summary of them. I am concerned in this essay with both problems: the displacement of active critique and the reduction. Certainly some degree of consolidation and reduction is unavoidable at the point of political decision.



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Perhaps anyone focused exclusively on politics is bound either to take theory for granted as a fixed idea or dismiss its relevance precisely because it seems in that form to be irrelevant to the problem at hand. The challenge in reading theory, however, is to avoid the logical implication from reading solely in the light of politics that all is politics and nothing is theory. In that case, politics looks more like impulse than deliberative action for reasons which can be justified. In order that this not be the case, it is necessary to redeem the reading of Marx, not as a recitation but as a continual engagement.

A common line of criticism holds that Marx sees economics as the essence of society, politics and culture; that he reduces the complexity of life to a single factor or force; and that his economics is, in any case, wrong. To see Marx as an economic reductionist is to consider him foolish and therefore not worth reading at all. It is also to have pared down his texts to a handful of aphorisms and citations so that they do little more than confirm his own reductionism. Hence, he lacks a sense of the complexity of society, and his economics is, as Joan Robinson (1962, 37-38) noted, simplistic and metaphysical. One response, to improve on the economics, begs the questions of the relationship between politics and economy by assuming that better theory leads to better politics. Another response, to focus on complexity, can only do so by assuming sources of knowledge - existing disciplines or sheer insight - the limits of which had already been well established in the history of critical thought: namely, that the division of knowledge by specialty and the burdens of ideology pre- vent any synthesis adequate to the complexity of society as a whole. On the other hand, the attempt to improve upon the economics, usually by eliminating the labor theory of value (simplified as the idea that labor time is somehow embodied in the product) , may be com- patible with an expanded notion of political economy, but not with the idea of societal complexity. In that case, the criticism is as reductionist as the Marx which it had criticized.

It is necessary to say that Marx entertains factors other than the economic, or that his epistemology disallows linear causality. For instance, in the Grundrisse he says, "the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of multiple determinations." Yes, many forces give a phenomenon its specific characteristics, although they are never separable as discrete causal factors or determinations so that one resultant could be political and another economic. Hence, the




more difficult idea in need of clarification is that of "concentration." For presumably there is a process with its own internal complexity and differentiation that allows the multiple determinations to be manifest in the concrete instance. In simpler terms, how what is taken as the "whole" appears in what is treated as a "part" is itself far from invariant.

This is how I would understand the term overdetermination, as the principle of concentration or combination of multiplicity, the productivity of social processes captured by the term mode of production. Althusser, who adopts overdetermination from Freud, says that different practices all have the "structure of a production." Among these diverse practices, it is their "degree of independence and their type of 'relative' autonomy, which are themselves fixed by their type ofde- pendencevnth respect to the practice which is 'determinant in the last instance': economic practice" (Althusser and Balibar, 1970, 58). The point is not that eventually the many are reduced to one, but that the general capacity to make society is what ultimately allows each instance of human social practice to appear in its concrete form. The economic arrives late, because it can never show up alone. At the same time, a particular practice is never unescorted by the more general productivity that concentrates the diversity which composes society. In the face of such abstract formulations, it is important to recall the context in which Althusser's epistemological claims come up, namely in the course of Reading Capital. In Capital, Marx proceeds by won- dering how capital can be at once a quality and quantity, a concrete appearance of something and a generalized principle for the organization of society. Capital is not only the name for wealth, money used to make more money, but also for what orients the relation between people and things. It is thus in relation to capital's domi- nance that we might begin to distinguish what operates under the sign of economy, polity, culture, and not the other way around.

Politically speaking, reducing Marx to an economist tends to cast the object of his theory as social inequality remedied by redistribution of wealth. Seen more radically, his is an account of society's expansion- ary dynamic, that provides the basis for (but does not guarantee) political transformation. The critique of capital aims to show how the "ism" or process of expansion (here of profit-taking) , rests upon another "ism" that capitalism battles to negate, namely that of the social. In the simplest and most general terms, socialism is the implicit, internal



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condition of capitalism. This internal contradiction means that the economic can never appear as such, unsullied by the political problem of assuring its conditions of reproduction. The conditions for accumulating capital are both dependent upon and antagonistic toward the conditions for reproducing society, in Marx's meaning of the material entanglements of associated producers, or what is made in the most general terms, of the relations between people and things.

The now familiar formula that capitalism, as contrasted to feu- dalism, separates the political and the economic in order to free the accumulation process to pursue its own ends, should not be read lit- erally or absolutely. Instead, a different principle of relation holds in how surplus value is produced and appropriated (Wood, 1995, 21 ). Free wage labor as contrasted with serfdom is hardly something that working people can apply to their own experience. Historically speaking, once people have been freed from certain feudal juridical and political forms they are not free from the laws of private property which define conditions of subsistence. Nor are they free from the strictures of the state, which, mediated through citizenship, enforces all manner of disciplinary obligation.

The struggle over the use made of surplus value in the constitu- tion of society is more than a battle over who controls social wealth. For it is not as if direct producers could somehow realize their interests by a shift in title of ownership, or as if a society organized on be- half of the producers as a whole could result from decisions made at the point of production. Here a socialist ethos would seem too closely tied to the desire for the workplace to serve as a substitute for face-to- face community, this last standing in for the complexities of a world- scale society. Rather than personifying class in what proves to be ultimately individualistic terms, with the question "who controls surplus," a more comprehensive idea of socialism is linked to the question, "What is to be the design of society?" This discussion in the history of socialism has been complicated by the fact that the contest over the design of society has a dialectical relation to the societal units established by capitalism, i.e., nation-states, parties, citizenship, and the like. The history of socialism needs to be appraised in its most general tendency, beyond its success or deficiency in resolving the problems inherent in those particular social forms.

At the same time, simply reasserting the critique of capital does not resolve the matter of Marx's contemporary critical reception. The




conditions for the critique of Marx cannot be dismissed out of hand by even the most devoted readers of his work. For this critique con- stitutes the actual conditions through which Marxism itself is reproduced. To invoke a Marxist tradition entails allying oneself with the history of addressing Marx to the critical issues of the day. This does not mean that that history bears no continuities, or that each moment brings into being some absolutely different rendering of Marx. Clearly, there are overarching continuities both in the machinations of capital and in the means through which Marx is understood. Rather, it is the action taken in the face of that tradition that moves history and makes Marxism contemporary. But that tradition is itself not unitary. It is full of arrivals and departures. Since Marxism is not a pre-packaged bundle of insights that can be passed along from generation to generation, its own specificity emerges in relation to the very attempts to disavow it, diffusely from the right, but most point- edly from the left.

These disavowals are the grounds for the assertion of Marxism, the place where it meets its accusers. To restate these accusations rather synoptically, three presumed deficiencies can be named: totality; universal subject; teleology. The first reads Marx as a philoso- pher of societal being, where the object of his theory is to assert the consummative whole of human relations. The second sees in Marx a political theorist who, by anointing the lone protagonist of social struggle, has severely circumscribed what may count as significant political activity and who can count as doing it. The third identifies him as an historian who imbues history with a determinate means and ends, a direction and a point of arrival. Needless to say, these partitions fit nicely into the way in which academic disciplines are carved up institutionally within the university so as to fragment not only Marx, but the thrust and scope of their own critical impulse. It is the resistance to each of these reductions that gives Marxism the complexity it requires to continue being serviceable in the present.

Totality

Conventionally, when Marx is accused of the sin of totality, his account of society is presented by his critics as a clearly bounded system where each part relates functionally to the given requisites of the whole. As such, a consistent logic can permeate every social relation,



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fixing its significance in advance. The idea of capitalism as a system conjures up an image at once organic and mechanical in which the beast can be consumed and felled by a pathology of its own making (economism), or the machine broken with a swift blow to its weak- est link (voluntarism). In the architecture of system, capital's own permutations become difficult to account for. Marxism is putatively faced with the embarrassment of capitalism's persistence rather than being the most potent conceptual orientation to grasp that very phenomenon.

The system metaphor is most at home in the positivism and struc- tural functionalism of mainstream social science (although Marxism has not been immune to this environment, nor Marx free of entangle- ment with its historical conditions of development) . From this perspective, dialectics is merely a mystifying obstacle to predicting the true actions of individuals constrained by their social environment (Elster, 1985). Yet if one sees in dialectics the study of societal relations already in motion, then Marx's work can be seen as struggling mightily with the whole hypostatized edifice of totality as system. In this self-constituting historical movement generated by forces in opposition, the design of society is the grandest effect. Marx engages in a polemic with Feuerbach in The German Ideology where he insists that the task of materialism is to conceive of the "sensuous world" as "the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it" (Marx and Engels, 1 976a, 41 ). The foundation of this world or society is this "unceasing sensuous labor and creation, this production . . ." (Marx and Engels 1976a, 40). Of course, this world-making total activity is not merely generic nor is it a pure process, but it takes on historical specificity as a mode of production in which labor produces itself and becomes for people "a definite form of expressing their life" (Marx and Engels, 1976a, 31).

The aversion to totality is justifiable if this term indicates an ide- alist holism or a static and homogeneous organization of human af- fairs (Cullenberg, 1996). Yet Marx's contributions to the critique of these notions are seldom recognized in recent accounts, nor are those Marxisms that would emphasize the ongoing means through which social relations are brought together or assembled (Jay, 1984) . Among these, Sartre's notion of totalization as "developing activity" in con- trast with the inertial totality which is a "vestige of past action" is perhaps the most suggestive and neglected avenue for continuing this



520 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

critique (Sartre, 1976, 45-46). However, once Marx is stuck with totality as a sort of black box "sutured" shut that contains society, his critics have proceeded with a whole series of efforts to stanch the simple reflection or translation of an effect from one domain of society to all others.

It should be pointed out that the language of domain, sphere, space, already tips the balance toward that static quality associated with the architectural imagery of structuralism. Further, this spatial imagery risks merely breaking up the single system into many of equal determinative importance. In their most subtle formulation, these subsystems, determinations, or processes refuse any mechanistic reduction and allow for considerable variation and contingency. Yet even in these most compelling accounts, the parts still somehow return to a "decente red totality" as a "set of processes," without explain- ing how or why they become something so fixed as a set or what clus- ters the distinct processes beyond "expository ease" (Resnick and Wolff, 1987, 17 and 87). In less nuanced formulations, the most seri- ous consequence for Marxism is that politics, economics, and culture or social reproduction are segregated from one another, physically, functionally and conceptually. The elements of this triptych are thereby assigned a distinct logic and domain, ultimately limiting the scope of societal transformation.

For Marx, again, society is at once differentiated and uneven, but it is only as a conceptual separation that relations of production, power and experience can be coherently distinguished in any given site or practical instance. It could be said that the whole point of Marx's political economy is that the accumulation of capital is a de- structive process that interrupts itself and is therefore in need of constant intervention. Constant political intervention of myriad types and agencies is needed not only to keep capital in circulation, but to ameliorate the effects of its fleeing the very social base upon which it depends. The self-functioning of the economic is the stuff of invis- ible hands and other "metaphysical niceties." That capital's mobility depends upon a political project only defines its broad opposition to what it socializes. How this contradiction plays is what determines actual politics. Hence political economy speaks of the ineluctable amalgamation of the political and the economic, and, at the same time their unabated fission as the movement of capital collides with its own conditions of possibility, namely socialized labor.



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Suffice it to say that this reading of Marx has not been the one preferred by his recent critics. For example, some radical democratic politics resurrect the tripartite view of society in order to avoid the reductionistic logic of a functional totality that carries a singular agent toward predetermined historical ends. The recent attention given to the idea of civil society is indicative of the search to define an emergent arena of political possibility, that is said to come after the conditions for a Marxist-inspired politics have been surpassed. The re- naissance of interest in civil society is itself an intriguing phenomenon, given that the term has become central to political thinking among reactionaries, liberals and radicals. The most comprehensive exposi- tion of the politics of civil society from a left perspective can be found in the work of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato.

Politically, they take their inspiration from the "self-limiting" civil disobedience of Eastern European movements that displaced communist governance, particularly Poland's Solidarity. It is far too easy to say that the intervening few years since their book was published (1992) may have dimmed the enthusiasm a left might have for precisely the governmental consequences of these movements and called into question the whole model of national autonomy upon which their conception of civil society is based. Rather, the problem of self- limitation is instructive for any progressive politics to consider. For Cohen and Arato, this is a matter of recognizing that a frontal assault or grab for total control can doom a movement to being utterly smashed, as in the cases of Hungary or Czechoslovakia (yet not, in their reading, Poland) . The success in effecting governmental change through an indirect means, the expansion of civil society, indicates the success of this approach. Holding aside for a moment the imme- diate questions of sociological accuracy their account raises, particularly with regard to extra-national factors (from foreign debt to the Catholic Church) , one might turn the question around and ask when a political movement is not self-limiting precisely with respect to its own aspirations.

For Cohen and Arato, civil society, which they take to be the domain outside of both state and market, is relatively free of the instrumentalities of administrative rationality and coercion. It therefore provides a realm where Utopian projections can flourish without crashing on the rocks of implementation, and where rights can be expanded as they are articulated by diverse new social movements.




In their view, civil society itself is not undifferentiated; it is possessed of both a public and private aspect, a sphere of generally recognized norms of communication for arriving at consensus and sustaining disagreement, as well as an arena of intimacy, where needs and de- sires can form. Since neither profit nor policy reigns in civil society, room is opened up for Utopian projections through "unconstrained forms of solidarity produced and reproduced through free voluntary interaction" (Cohen and Arato, 1992, 452). Hence democracy (here participation in dialog and argument to discover a "common identity" as opposed to a general interest) can go farther in the domain of civil society than in that of either the political or the economic. This is because of the priority of the substantive reason that under- writes a communicative ethics which serves as the prevailing coordi- nation mechanism among diverse constituencies.

If people are allowed to participate in dialog that transpires in movements and voluntary associations, the elitism of a governing bureaucracy, which characterized the party-state of socialist countries, is avoided. The expanded conceptions of justice are incorporated in new government policies. On the one hand, this incorporation of demands also leaves a Utopian excess of unfulfilled aspiration. Par- tial incorporation without total subsumption probably describes the history of all social movements - including that of the Communists (not an inclusion that Cohen and Arato would be willing to cede). On the other hand, this account of civil society must be read for the histories that it means to exclude. The histories excluded from con- sideration most explicitly are those of socialist revolutions, whether second or third world in location, and of colonialism, imperialism and present forms of the impact of global capital's penetration of national polities. In effect, for civil society to remain between state and market, it must reside exclusively within national turf.

Marx, of The German Ideology, is well worth reading on this matter. In his words:

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage, and, insofar, transcends the state and the nation, though on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its external relations as nationality and internally must organize itself as state (Marx, 1976a, 89).



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Without negating the appearance of the nation as a particular social and historical formation, Marx clearly argues that it cannot stand alone as a delimiting field for the organization of civil society. Fur- ther, the partitioning of national markets and states occurs within a (global) civil society under the historical conditions that Marx ob- serves. Since the time of his writing, these conditions of development have only become further compromised or more transcendent of the state and the nation.

More profound, however, is the question of whether the project of a social economy is really excluded from even Cohen and Arato's own understanding of civil society. For it is telling that in this domain of "free voluntary interaction" there is a necessary institutionaliza- tion to assure that progressive gains are made. By means of this in- stitutionalization, the very linkages of state and market, e.g., in non- profits and non-governmental organizations, are re-established within civil society. The question of socialism is therefore opened all over again insofar as political economy is integral to the extension of the democratizing means of communication that the emergent institu- tions of civil society present. The point is not that every politics must begin with socialism, but that sooner or later even the attempts to avoid it wind up re-instating the social and historical conditions of its possibility. Given the tinniness with which rightist clarions of triumph now sound, it is tempting to say that the greater the aversion, the stronger the prospects of re-instatement (a claim perhaps itself best made in the lower register to avoid confusing Democratic electoral prospects with those of the left, or the Communists of late with those of old) .

Universal Subject

The unwillingness to make the linkages between culture and political economy, democracy and socialism, is certainly not shared by all who profess an allegiance to the principle of radical democracy (Aronowitz, 1994, 1996). But there does seem to be a common conceptual disposition that keeps these otherwise inextricably bound dimensions of society and critical analysis apart. This is reflected in the reluctance to give pride of place to labor, when so much political activity seems to be organized along lines of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, ecology, and the like. It would be easy enough, as many




radical democrats do, to add labor to this list, but from a Marxist perspective, that would constitute a kind of category error. For labor is not the description of a type of person, an identity category, but rather an activity that confronts its own conditions of production. "Labor produces not only commodities: it produces itself" (Marx 1975,272).

The world-making total activity discussed in the previous sec- tion is what Marx later calls alternately the "revolutionary combination, due to association" (Marx and Engels, 1976b, 496) or "social combination" (Marx, 1967, Vol. Ill, 79) or socialization of labor. The socialization of labor moves across the various categories by which people identify themselves. Concrete labor bears the mark of these differences internally, and makes of them an external cal- culus in the form of the commodification of labor power. Identi- ties not only help differentiate the price of labor power, but also help to form the use values or cultural commodities that come to the market. This is not to say that the politics or analysis of race or gender is exhausted or even established by commodification, but that the latter is insinuated in the former so as to form part of their own historical condition that offers social reproduction its practical embodiment and differentiation.

To reduce social labor to its productive moment as work or its individuated element, the worker, is to set up the division between productive capacity and its product - labor living and dead - that Marx called the fetishism of commodities. Yet labor is a sensuous activity that feels itself, knows itself in relation to the environment it must face in order to be labor. There is no labor as such without means of production, but so too there is nothing produced without an activity that must reflect on its world. It is, under capitalism, the principal form of what Marx calls "practical-critical activity" (Marx, 1976, 6; cf. Postone, 1993). Labor cannot be derived from nature in some unmediated fashion, as much as it is an action performed in an environment that is momentarily taken as natural, in the sense of the historical condition of human needs generated at that moment. All this is to say that labor cannot be read in Marx as an unreflective activity, as a mere transfer of energy from living to inert matter. To do so would postulate time spent on the job as absolutely exceptional to all human temporality as we know it. This is a claim that keeps the wizard omniscient behind his curtain, as much as it renders the pub-



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lie stupefied before the spectacular screen of power, an image invoked for couch potatoes and industrial workers alike.

Yet this is precisely the reading given to the category labor by Jürgen Habermas in his critique of what he terms "the production paradigm." Habermas is particularly significant in this context because of his development of discourse ethics, which is invoked by many radical democrats. These amount to a set of rules for communication that allow arguments to take place so that norms can be reached. The rules are merely procedural and presumably content- free, so as to allow common understanding to be a practical outcome of verbal interaction. The commitment to recognizing shared rules is termed normativity, or the "binding practical orientation" that modern rational subjects share. Rationality itself is defined as an "orientation toward reaching understanding" (Habermas, 1993, 81). Understanding is central to Habermas' very conception of sociality, and stems from what he calls the "lifeworld" where primary social attachments are formed. It is guaranteed through access to the public sphere where critical judgement on the direction of social life can be exercised. The key here is that people can engage each other with different views and reach "convergence between our perspective and theirs, rather than conversion" (Habermas, 1993, 105). The ethical dimension to discursive practices demands not only a shared orientation, but an acknowledgement of what is lost through critical exchange, so that morality serves as a "protective compensation for vulnerability to social life" (Habermas, 1993, 109).

Habermas' confidence in the powers of reason in general and communication in particular to guide us toward an ethical universe not only privileges a different world-making activity than does Marx, but offers a different take on the world as we have known it over the past few hundred years. Lurking behind Habermas' model is perhaps less the academic faculty meeting per se, than an ideal of society as face-to-face community, where rationality is grounded in the romantic cadences of the lifeworld. Surely cultural differences are malleable and interdependent so as to be enriched through discursive exchange, but societal divisions may not be as yielding. While naming exploita- tion does allow it to be engaged, engaging it in name has not proven adequate to command the design of society. Hence it is not only the belief that social divisions might be overcome discursively that serves as a guide to the history of communications, but also an unthought



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aversion to the immensity of modern society that Habermas offers in the service of political theory.

Habermas asserts that a production paradigm with labor as its central category does not provide a means through which people might arrive at a normative conception of their own interests and aims, that is, "to discover practically what the members of a society in any given situation might want and what they should do in their common interest" (Habermas, 1987, 82). The production paradigm cannot establish "an internal relation between practice and rationality" (Habermas, 1987, 76). Labor, here reduced to the "making of prod- ucts" (Habermas, 1987, 79) (without also making itself in the process), is a technical and utilitarian practice related to the transformation of nature and lacking in the normative content that would allow it to affect self-understanding. It is, therefore, too narrow a basis of human activity to allow for reflection, which requires a form of understanding that is not subordinated to the physical activity of concrete production. Finally, "the production paradigm gives the concept of practice such a clear empirical meaning that the question arises of whether it loses its plausibility with the historically foreseeable end of a society based upon labor" (Habermas, 1987, 79) . Habermas does not dwell on this objection, but it is clear that for him, in certain respects, that end has already arrived. What he is attacking more directly is the assumption, according to certain conceptions of socialism, that increased growth and complexity are sufficiently reflective criteria to promote "autonomy and self-realization" or "improve quality of life together in society" (Habermas, 1987, 81). Whatever these criteria turn out to be, they lend themselves more to measures of personal satisfaction than to the context in which people might achieve this. Yet emphasis on the context for achieving satisfaction suggests that one should push Marx's ideas of societal transformation beyond the reductive terms of material and technical expansion. And yet clearly Habermas himself has not jettisoned a developmen- tal logic either in his calls for improvement or in the promotion of his ethical procedures. While complexity is no less quantitative a conception than increase in material wealth, and Habermas' critique must give pause to socialist visions of growth and development, every "emancipatory" project presumably rests upon having more of something, and is therefore dependent upon some ideal of historical progress. For Marx, socialization of labor produces, above all, the



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capacity of people to make society together and in their own image (Brown, 1986).

In the end, the effort to separate communication and production accepts too neat a divide between the domain of subjects and the world of objects and winds up diminishing the understanding of both. Habermas, as has been pointed out by feminist critics like Nancy Fraser (who wants to salvage some version of discourse ethics), bases his appraisal of the limits of labor on a division between the material and the symbolic that is mapped onto the otherwise gendered divide between public and private spheres. Not only is the symbolic activity of communication seen as non-material; it must also be protected from "colonization" by what resembles a Victorian patriarchal con- cern with the moral purity of the private.

In Marxist terms this realm of unpaid labor is none the less a type of labor, and consciousness, communication, and argument are no less materially inscribed processes than the manufacture of metallic objects. The caricature of labor as a white man in greasy overalls (who recedes from view only if his - or increasingly her - significance in the global division of labor is avoided), here betrays more bias about who is capable of critical thought and what it would look like, than the encoded anxiety about the "narrowness" of the labor category. Curiously, but consistent with other foundations of radical democratic thought, Habermas reads his claims for the obsolescence of the production paradigm, not by reading Marx directly, but through the words of certain 20th-century Marxists (e.g., Gyorgy Markus). He avoids (while naming) those philosophical variants of Marxism, Sartre's conception of totalization in particular, that address directly the sense in which labor must be treated as a reflective activity. Habermas is clearly correct that identifying workers does not suffice to ground a progressive politics. But if Marx believed that this is all there is to imagining a politics that would be capable of socializing capital, he would not have written so much about it. Paradoxically, we move from rejecting labor as the universal subject, to viewing it as the sole human activity that lacks the means for self-conscious agency.

Here it may be worth heeding the advice of those who recom- mend keeping the concepts of subject and agent apart (Spivak, 1995; Smith, 1988). The subject pertains to how a given activity is situated, and the agent to what transformative forces are enacted as a critical presence is mobilized or formalized as a social movement. To get from




subject to agency it is necessary to move from the general to the concrete; to see all that is concentrated in a particular mobilization. It seems difficult to argue with the tendency of a globalizing capital to universalize laboring subjects. But the accusation of labor as universal subject typically means something else, namely, that the general condition of socialized labor determines the particular idiom through which self-understanding is expressed, as well as the form and content of political organization. Imputed deficiencies in consciousness or organization are then taken to disallow the characteristics of laboring subjects. To assert that labor is a reflective activity that produces itself as a subject, however, does not mean that workers' movements or organizations are the form that historical agency must take. The cautiousness with which Marx generates programmatic pronouncements, even when commissioned to do so by an explicitly identified worker's movement, underscores his care in avoiding a conflation of the distinction between worker as subject and as agent. For to do so would prescribe or predict a politics on the basis of imputing some objectively derived interest or form of expression to socialized labor (Callinicos, 1988). That socialization brings people together without dictating what they do with their togetherness, and suggests why socialism might appear under so many different guises without being named as such.

Teleology

The perspective being advanced here is that socialism is imma- nent in or an intrinsic feature of capitalism by virtue of the self- expanding socialization of labor. From this view, the question is raised as to whether Marx's is a teleological theory which assures an end to history. The myriad pronouncements of a fall, failure, collapse, or end of socialism in the aftermath of the Soviet break-up gave occa- sion for many on the left with different intellectual orientations to pin a teleological orientation to history on Marx (Blackburn, 1991; Mandel, 1989; Dirlik, 1994; Derber, 1995; Boggs, 1995) . With respect to how historical tendencies are discussed, Marx selects his metaphors carefully. For example, even in a polemical treatise like The Commu- nist Manifesto, workers are named as "gravediggers" but not the exe- cutioners of capital, whose rise along with capital's fall is hedged as "equally inevitable." This suggests more that the fates of classes are



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tied than that the outcome of history is secure. As a booster for a particular cause, Marx plays oddsmaker, without giving the odds, only asserting that the numbers are the same. Yet it must also be main- tained that however famous this passage is, it is not one of the more analytic ones in Marx's work.

The general invitation in the Manifesto needs to be coupled with the very different tone through which Marx follows the fate of particular movements. In order to account for the rise of proto-fascist Bonapartism in a tragic-farcical conception of history, his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte recounts classes in decline that "cannot represent themselves, they must be represented" (Marx, 1976, 187). Here historical movement is not forward so much as suspended between apparent repetition and substitution or difference. This is seen, for example, in the assertion that proletarian revolutions "interrupt themselves continually in their own course" and, after their opponents "rise again, more gigantic" are left only with the imperative to "jump" here and now, to show what they've got. But in this leap, there are no guarantees (Marx, 1976, 107). Hardly the stuff of triumphalist inevitability, as if this were Marx's own problematic and not that of his accusers, faced with their own doubts as to the prospects for change, inventing some preposterous conception of history to which theirs is the more reasonable alternative (cf. Geras, 1990). The rejection of inevitability paves the way for impossibility.

Similar problems come up in attributing to Marx a stage theory of history, as if societies marched along in evolutionary step, breaking down only to resurrect themselves as something else. Here too we see the slippage in many conventional readings of Marx, between historical and analytic categories. Division of labor, mode of production, society all assume equivalent levels of abstraction and are aligned accordingly. In The German Ideology, for example, Marx does speak of a "determinate stage" of the division of labor. But this stage is not an empirical moment in an historical progression, but an analytic assess- ment of the logical consequences of socializing labor, namely mutual association and interdependence. The abstraction is made precisely to avoid a simple translation between some configuration of social relations and a political expression.

We see similar distinctions made in the initial passage of Capital, which Marx begins by saying, "the wealth of those societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails . . ." (Marx, 1967, 35). The dis-




tinction between a society in its historical specificity and a mode of production, as an organizing principle that can appear with varying degrees of prevalence, signals a certain analytic opening. Here we can see the non-identity between the formation that actually results from a historical process and the analytic use of a metaphor of discrete historical stages that makes it possible to recognize certain social relations.

This lively tension in Marx between what in conventional social science would be distinguished as structure and process recasts the meaning of the stage metaphor, and finds expression as well in his conception of civil society, which interweaves political economy with reflective activity. Within The German Ideology, Marx offers two defini- tional phrases for civil society: the "theater of all history" and the "whole material intercourse" (Marx and Engels, 1976a, 50 and 89). Read in relation to one another, Marx's civil society has a dynamic spatio-temporal aspect. The theatrical allusion of the first phrase returns the stage or spatial metaphor to its role as a structuring arena where social change is enacted, while "whole material intercourse" suggests a summative process embracing the activities of production, circulation, and reproduction.

Rejecting the idea that there is some prescribed path for historical change, too much contemporary theory confuses external movement with internal motion. Linear conceptions of historical progress as forward moving time are properlyjettisoned but in favor of a tropics of space that is configured differently across distinct time periods (Harvey, 1989; Soja, 1989;Jameson, 1991). This conception of space can be doubly static. First, in the imagery of a sphere, domain or arena, whose bounded presence contains a certain interest, will, rule or norm. Second, in what is contained within this social space, namely the group. The idea of group was always a difficult sociological concept, given its attributes of discreteness from other groups, and as- signment of determinate roles or identities. Applied to the politics of social movements, the topos of group becomes even less helpful, for it introduces unsustainable separations and homogenizations between the likes of race, gender, sexuality, nationality. If this problem is resolved simply by saying that people belong to many groups, then the coherence of the concept for specifying politics is lost to an untheorizable multiplicity. Further, group membership appears to be given prior to actual mobilization, rather than seeing collective space as a consequence of political activity. The presupposition of



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bounded, static, discrete entities, with clearly defined insides and outsides, bespeaks a certain methodological individualism - the doctrine that all social phenomena can be reduced to the proper- ties, goals, beliefs and actions, of individuals - now applied to the collective unit (Elster, 1985, 5).

It is interesting that even in theorists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, who marshall considerable philosophical sophisti- cation against precisely such orientations, an individualizing logic returns through their very conception of radical democracy. After insisting that the contemporary political subject is irreducibly plural and that there is an ever-expanding space for the political, a social surplus that doubles or shadows surplus value, they backtrack con- siderably when it comes to defining their own political project. Radi- cal democracy rests upon a model of decision-making that winds up separating socialism and democracy. Instead of accounting for how the social surplus is generated through relations of expropriation or appropriation, they focus on what they take to be more general relations of subordination, oppression and domination.

The first of these is the most general and entails situations where "one agent is subject to the decisions of another" (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 153). Suddenly, agency is placed in the syntax of the individual, propinquity appears as the highest ordering principle of politics, and cognitive models of decision-making gain priority over all other means of human association. Laclau and Mouffe's intent is to make socialism one of the internal features of radical democracy; yet their brack- eting of it as one interest in change among many separates the moment of decision from what gives people something to decide over. Their discussion also is lacking an account (here implicit and no less tendentially teleological and universalistic - the rise of the society of decision) of what brings people into conditions of mutual influ- ence. Hence one set of universalizing terms and teleological tendencies is replaced by another. Yet since this replacement is disavowed, radical democratic theories that claim to have surpassed Marx on exactly these counts tend not to grasp the significance and implica- tions of their own reliance on these concepts.

Oddly, this is where the logic of totality (however pluralized) creeps back into the conceptual place vacated by a process-oriented term like totalization. When the social is taken as a space without a process, there can be no self-expanding mobilization of the social and




therefore no socialism. For Marx, at its most general level, socialism is located between the twin processes of the mobility of capital and the socialization of labor. Whatever destruction the former leaves in its wake, the latter is continually being reconstituted, recombined, and reconnected - not toward some final unity, but in a ceaseless expansion of the basis for society. Once again it is fair to say of Marx that he sees in capitalism the creation of socialism, and that it is his aspiration to show that more of this process is possible. But this suggests that socialism, in some aspect, is always already with us - not some brave new world we have yet to enter - "not as it has devel- oped on its own foundations, just as it emerges from capitalist society" (Marx, 1989, 85) . The point is not that Marx is incapable of imagining a future, "a higher phase" (Marx, 1989, 87) but that this is not a pre- diction, a certain outcome, but a demand being made on the present within the present, "since one only demands what one has not yet got" (Marx, 1989, 95) . Marx is writing at a time when the regime of capital is achieving its consolidation, and yet his political and intellectual itin- erary gives testimony that socialism itself is part ofthat process. Depend- ing on what we believe we have, we can continue to demand what we have not yet got. But this places the left in a curious position, for it is difficult to identify a specific problem, site, or issue to which there is not a very concrete left alternative, whether it be in housing or health care, control of the shop floor or of investment, the relation to nature or to identity. This is not to say that in any of these efforts the left version of things predominates, but rather that all of them taken together constitute the stake in redesigning society whose status continues to be emergent. This is precisely why some account of totalization is so important, for taken separately left politics can only look insufficient to their ambition, but taken together the ambition of socialism as the redesign of society itself is revealed. This is also why socialism must be understood in a way that transcends any specific form or societal unit (country, government, party, movement, text) in which it has appeared. As such, socialism enters history but does not come to an end with the conclusion of any particular historical formation.

Socialism without End

For many, the Marx of whom I speak will seem to be something of a chimera, conjured from a handful of citations, and invested with



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an authenticity and omnipotence to slay all of the impostors who have gone by the same name. It is not that Marx's words are invented anew with each engagement, but that the uses to which they are put are the consequence of practical critique. As such, the truth of Marx's texts was not always there waiting to be discovered by some still more clever reader; rather, knowledge of Marx can only be produced through a reading that brings him into the present. By this technique Marx becomes the response to a question posed from outside of his work, what Althusser (1970) called a "symptomatic reading," where the words must be read in relation to some larger presumed pathology.

Needless to say, this is a very different approach from many revi- sionary interpretations of Marx, bent on showing his "strengths and weaknesses," as if there existed some freestanding balance sheet that could substitute for an account of why his work was being read and critiqued. To show that Marx got it wrong in relation to a subsequent historical change or a present understanding informed by further theoretical work idealizes him as some absolute negative - a whole horizon of thought to be avoided. The reader typically pays for this idealization with his or her own self-criticism. For what might be written and subsequently read if it had to first pass the test of being correct at every moment now and in the future? This is a valuing of correctness lacking altogether in the political. For what has just been said about writing and reading must apply to other practices as well. The demand that one get it right first before taking action not only segregates theory and practice, but defers the possibility of either taking place. It should be apparent that the assertion of Marx here in the face of his critics is a move at once political and analytic, but hopefully not hagiographie. The reading of Marx produces not the man in his naked truth, but the grounds for naming what Marxism is today.

The studious activity of searching for a Marx serviceable to the present circumstances allows movements to see how they are articulated within a given conjuncture without having to stop their current activism and first forge a solitary organizational unity. Clearly, reading Marx is no substitute for anything else that people may be engaged in. Rather it supplements the imagination of political activity so that a rather dispersed left, expanding the very terrain of the social, can recognize its socialism. In this regard, socialism does not exhaust what the left is, but speaks to what it does together, and the




study of Marx, beyond issues of content or pedagogy, is a zone of this practical engagement

Putting the question of the place of Marxism in left politics this way is meant to complicate the conventional accounts of its scarcity or insufficiency. Certainly there can always be more socialism, but it is instructive to look toward what might be taken as capital's own reading of the continuing presence of socialism, for - to listen to the anxious warnings against relaxed vigilance - despite all appear- ances, the menace lives on. This threat is borne of capital's own contradiction. It creates a socialized basis that it then flees through the accumulation process. This presents an implicit socialism the spec- ter of which extends far beyond any given historical or organizational manifestation. The guardians of capital's domain, by the very viru- lence of their ongoing anti-socialist maneuvers, seem to understand all too well what the left understandably misses. Every explicit expression of socialism threatens to display the contradiction of capital's own contrary condition. As such, even the most minimal expressions of socialism appear to its enemies as more socialism than they are willing or able to bear.

Department of Social Science and Management Pratt Institute 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn NY 11205

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Rereading Marx: A Critique of Recent Criticisms

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